tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37432164074497780662024-02-22T16:07:51.798+00:00Russian DinosaurA blog mostly about Russian literature and translation issues, as retailed by a small stuffed dinosaur.Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.comBlogger84125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-40344341568043483742022-11-18T19:01:00.005+00:002022-11-21T14:22:15.070+00:00Thank you for the radishes: Edmund Wilson in dialogue with Helen Muchnic<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Xl3E3MfLsoe4TGdc5Rh9XFZBFUnNeH6tzONNLzI84vT9L4bihX7WuMBpq-vMVpsLw1qxzYn9DkwuUWty55iT7HlCIrotYcXNGQWKWx7tx9oq0pTeQojTDHBav5RtTlNyaBAbJ0XGOxSXI7MG5PsUU8FgxDd7pXl7kIFbMJrfg9AfrCdugLYQbdLLxw/s885/Mary%20on%20the%20bus.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="602" data-original-width="885" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Xl3E3MfLsoe4TGdc5Rh9XFZBFUnNeH6tzONNLzI84vT9L4bihX7WuMBpq-vMVpsLw1qxzYn9DkwuUWty55iT7HlCIrotYcXNGQWKWx7tx9oq0pTeQojTDHBav5RtTlNyaBAbJ0XGOxSXI7MG5PsUU8FgxDd7pXl7kIFbMJrfg9AfrCdugLYQbdLLxw/s320/Mary%20on%20the%20bus.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p>In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen emigrated to the US as a child; after an intensely illustrious academic career, she was teaching at the elite Massachusetts women's college, Smith. Wilson did not usually like academics, but he took a shine to Muchnic. They started exchanging letters - about Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev, everything and anything to do with Russian literature - as they would continue to do for the next thirty years, until Wilson's death in 1972 ('Do let us talk about Gogol when I see you. He is certainly a very strange man', Wilson wrote to Muchnic in 1943). </p><p>It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that would outlast many books by each of them, many of Wilson's affairs and at least one of his marriages. They soon progressed from <i>Dear Miss Muchnic </i>to <i>Dear Helen</i>, a level of familiarity that would endure (Wilson never signed off with his nickname 'Bunny', dropping his surname only in the final decade of their correspondence).<i> </i>At the time they met, Wilson was still married to his third wife, the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy. By December 1942, Muchnic was a welcome guest at the Wilson-McCarthy household: on December 22 that year,Wilson sent her a telegram with instructions for reaching their home at Wellfleet, near the tip of Cape Cod, where he famously hid out from the hothouse of New York society. After catching various trains, Helen was to change onto a bus in Yarmouth: 'Mary will be on bus'. The mere idea of hailing a bus on which Mary McCarthy is already seated, to progress to an intimate dinner with the cream of East Coast intelligentsia, baffles my saurian brain. Yet, clearly, Helen Muchnic held her own, and brought vegetables, too. In summer 1943, Wilson followed up another dinner with this note: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> 'I have delayed answering your letter and thanking you for the radishes because I had to go away for a week and got no chance to write any letters. First of all, we were delighted with the radishes. I am especially fond of radishes, and these are the best I have had for years. When I was a child, I used to cut them in little slices and eat them on bread and butter, and I ate a great many of these that way (made the better part of a lunch and a supper on them). Many of the radishes you buy or get in restaurants have been allowed to get too big and coarse, and the taste is too sharp. You seem to have pulled these at just the right time'. </p></blockquote><p>The rest of the letter is about Thomas Hardy, Allen Tate, and <i>Antigone</i>. Later that same year Wilson added: 'We have been having a wonderful time with your vegetables. We have had some wonderful novelties such as Vichysoisse soup made out of sorrel or squash, and slices of squash fried or something in a way that is delicious. They really have been a great treat'. This letter has two added scribbles: a ragged one from Wilson about Dostoevsky's sense of humour, and a neat cursive addendum by Mary McCarthy: 'Edmund has already mentioned the vegetables to you - the lettuce was heavenly and this time came through well, Is the small spear-like one romaine or a new variety of lettuce?' While there have been various accounts of the Wilson-McCarthy marriage and its discontents (including two by their son Reuel), their relationship has surely never been viewed before from the perspective of mutual salad appreciation. </p><p>Several months after the radish and romaine revel, on October 23rd, Wilson invited Muchnic to see a version of Gogol's <i>The Fair at Sorochinsk</i> 'at the Russian ballet'; he asked her to queue for the tickets, but enclosed a cheque to cover the costs. As an apparent afterthought, he scrawled under his signature: 'They have offered me Clifton Fadiman's job reviewing books on the <i>New Yorker</i>, & I've decided to take it for a year, though I doubt whether anything good but money will come of it'. On August 7th, 1944, Wilson wrote to Helen: 'The Nabokovs are here in Wellfleet [...]. Vladimir & I have been giving each other quizzes on our respective languages. Here is one of his more interesting questions. How would you answer it? Put into Russian the following sentence: At the harbor I saw many masts and had many day-dreams (using мечта for day-dream)'. Thus, with a scribble and a pun or two, historic literary relationships were forged.</p><p>By February 1945, when Wilson was finishing a book (presumably <i>Europe Without Baedeker</i>) while managing <i>New Yorker</i> reviews, his tone regarding Mary had changed: '[...] don't take too seriously anything Mary may have said, when you saw her. Her way of seeing herself in a drama doesn't always make connections with reality. Lately she has been acting out a novel when she ought to be writing one'. By October that year, he confided that his teenage daughter 'Rosalind has just moved in with me and we have been having quite a good time together fixing the place up'; Muchnic was already settled in a senior position at Smith, where she had started as an instructor in Russian in 1930, aged 28. The following year, 1946, Wilson was trying to get a divorce so as to marry yet again, to Elena Mumm Thornton, of the Mumm champagne dynasty. Elena was a member of the Struve family and a native Russian speaker; her grandfather had been the Russian ambassador to Japan. In his letters to Muchnic, Wilson fretted that Mary might 'obstruct it' (the wedding) with more fuss 'in court over nothing'. Clearly, Mary was no longer on the bus. In May 1948 Wilson shared the news of his and Elena's new baby, and asked if Muchnic had heard that Vladimir Nabokov would soon start teaching Russian at Cornell ('They are immensely pleased about it , as it means a good salary, & it happens to be one of the only colleges where serious work with butterflies is done'). But by 1955, the friendship with Nabokov was challenged by Wilson's adverse reaction to <i>Lolita</i>: <span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">‘I was disappointed in Volodya Nabokov’s new novel and for that reason I
don’t think I’ll review it [in the </span></span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">New Yorker</i><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">]’. It seems a shame that he couldn't have managed a concise review like that offered by Mr Brundish in Penelope </span>Fitzgerald's tragic novella<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Bookshop </i><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(1978): '</span></span>I have read Lolita, as you requested. It is a good book, and
therefore you should try to sell it'. And of course, by 1963, Wilson and Nabokov were official literary enemies.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimrtEysgSJFubE2pbpdnaYrDc-k78j4g3ZTEC0alBpifaXyuORfxLUjwrtR2V_sBxdCHD8iJ_waxlCCpWI9RBc4tyBogRndX6qM6b3HOSspksMbwPOeE_DuPqevbQZOeh-ObsgePIDen23DTUfhC0WJkOCjEi0GysJoMQHOGgyzO1qnNNCkp8Z1p6Q4Q/s1600/Wilson%20Award%20for%20Best%20Christmas%20Cards.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimrtEysgSJFubE2pbpdnaYrDc-k78j4g3ZTEC0alBpifaXyuORfxLUjwrtR2V_sBxdCHD8iJ_waxlCCpWI9RBc4tyBogRndX6qM6b3HOSspksMbwPOeE_DuPqevbQZOeh-ObsgePIDen23DTUfhC0WJkOCjEi0GysJoMQHOGgyzO1qnNNCkp8Z1p6Q4Q/w208-h277/Wilson%20Award%20for%20Best%20Christmas%20Cards.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><p></p><p><br />Muchnic and Wilson, by contrast, were still good chums; if anything, their friendship grew warmer, with Wilson signing off 'love, Edmund' (love was often sent to Muchnic's partner Dorothy as well); mansplaining to her how to write in the 'terse' style he preferred; and asking her views on exactly what Vronsky was thinking, among other burning Russian literary questions, to the very end. He even awarded her an unofficial prize for best Christmas card in 1956 (perhaps it featured seasonal radishes). Muchnic continued dedicating her books to him, to Wilson's mild disapproval (it meant he couldn't review them personally). In a somewhat enigmatic interlude, the manager of Fort Schuyler - a private gentleman's club in Utica, New York - wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1970 to follow up what he called a '"fender-bending" incident' in October 1969, 'involving your secretary's car and a parked car, [which] has not been resolved. [...] Apparently, through some oversight, Miss Helen Muchnic failed to turn in an accident report to her insurance company [...]. Anything you could do to speed this process up would be greatly appreciated'. Was Muchnic meeting Wilson at his club, and did she prang her car before or after lunch? Why was she described as Wilson's 'secretary', and why were her academic titles neatly elided? Possibly she was driving Wilson, who must have been frail and who would soon afterwards suffer a stroke, to his club. Wilson sent this note from the club manager to Muchnic, but although he scribbled on it, he confined his commentary to thoughts on 'the exiled Sinyavsky', so we remain no wiser about the fender-bender.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p>Wilson did his best to mentor Muchnic's career, suggesting to Yale that they should hire her (and Nabokov) as lecturers 'on special subjects', writing her a reference for Bennington College in Vermont in 1944 when she was evidently contemplating a sideways move (his daughter had studied there). In 1947, he congratulated Muchnic on the appearance of her book: 'Reading you has had the effect of making me want to go back to Russian literature'. This would have been her <i>Introduction to Russian Literature</i>, published by Doubleday in 1947<i>. </i>Later, he would call her 1961 book<i> From Gorky to Pasternak</i>: <i>Six Writers in Soviet Russia </i>'the best book on the subject in any language'. However, Muchnic pursued a robust career at Smith - with cameos at other institutions, including Vassar, her undergraduate college, UCL SSEES in London, Bryn Mawr, where she took her PhD, and Yale (where she briefly taught) - without Wilson's patronage, rising by 1947 to full professor at Smith and becoming chair of Russian there in 1963, a position she held until her retirement in 1969. In fact, the patronage may have worked better the other way round; letters from 1966 seem to indicate that Muchnic may have recommended Wilson and McCarthy's son Reuel for teaching posts at Toronto and elsewhere (he eventually became a professor of Slavic literature at the University of Western Ontario). </p><p>Muchnic must have encountered Sylvia Plath, since the latter studied at Smith between 1950 and 1955 and wrote her thesis on Dostoevsky. Muchnic was certainly friendly, over many years, with Vassar buddy Elizabeth Bishop, as correspondence in their respective archives (held at Smith and Vassar respectively) attests. Muchnic published three more books in the course of her long career (including <i>Dostoevsky's English Reputation</i>, which I have cited in my own work); besides her Wilson-invited reviews in the <i>New Yorker</i>, she also published extensively between 1968 and 1980 on Russian fiction <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/helen-muchnic/" target="_blank">in the iconic <i>New York Review of Books</i> </a>(one 1977 headline reads, 'Was Gogol Gay?'). Muchnic spent most of her life in a relationship with a woman, her Smith colleague Dorothy Walsh; an orientation which very likely protected and prolonged her friendship with the notoriously philandering Wilson. She died in 2000. Predictably, most professional interest in Wilson's correspondence has focused on exchanges with fellow literary lions, like Nabokov (see Simon Karlinsky's <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dear-Bunny-Volodya-Nabokov-Wilson-1940-1971/dp/0520220803" target="_blank">Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971</a></i>) or McCarthy. His long and low-profile friendship with Muchnic, however, offers insights into his lifelong enthusiasm for Russian language and literature, as well as unexpected angles on his career, his literary attachments, his family, and, of course, the radishes.</p><p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj34vSQQcNpzpGEqRIkjwtgSvmTR75QWeqrWoXZEbOWE55UyG-fQQD4K8CGj9e20FCiwXTaXoufdSHx4RC7iOGKi1nTAUkqGGY2CUsWsHr5YPFN-6cRWzx1yGhDwhM4yvQoqcfeZJaaL9xMtFegPbjIbZ4ib-rQkQv-V8DS4PdryAlbFbd8bCeYyVhbYg/s1120/Da%20zdravstvuet.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="1120" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj34vSQQcNpzpGEqRIkjwtgSvmTR75QWeqrWoXZEbOWE55UyG-fQQD4K8CGj9e20FCiwXTaXoufdSHx4RC7iOGKi1nTAUkqGGY2CUsWsHr5YPFN-6cRWzx1yGhDwhM4yvQoqcfeZJaaL9xMtFegPbjIbZ4ib-rQkQv-V8DS4PdryAlbFbd8bCeYyVhbYg/s320/Da%20zdravstvuet.JPG" width="320" /></a></p><p><b>Acknowledgements: I thank Princeton University's Firestone Library for access to their archive of Wilson-Muchnic letters (1941-72, Boxes 1-2). This account may appear one-sided because the Firestone holds only Wilson's side of the correspondence; I am unclear whether Muchnic's letters to him have been preserved.</b></p>Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-20817715985940105882022-10-17T23:37:00.005+01:002022-10-17T23:37:50.307+01:00 Friedrich Schiller's "Dmitry": The Executed Elephant<p>A long time ago on a famous writer's estate far, far away, I opened two attractive Russian hardback books I had just bought in Moscow. One was <i>The Aviator</i> by Evgenii Vodolazkin, a lyrical, elegiac, richly evocative and thoroughly enjoyable novel which would inspire me to write several articles and reviews about its author in the years to come. The other was Yuri Buida's <i>The Fifth Kingdom</i>, which could hardly have been more different - although also a historical novel of sorts, it was told by multiple narrators, set in the early seventeenth century, and bulging at the seams with homunculi, flying demons, and conspiracy theories. It was so exotic, it made Vodolazkin's fairy-tale of Stalinist cryogenics seem downright tame. I was hooked by the searing opening lines: </p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-IE;"><i>They hanged
the child on Monday and the executioner on Thursday; on Saturday, they put the
elephant to death.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-IE;"><i>A snowstorm
was whirling and night was drawing in; thus, when the elephant appeared between
the Serpukhovsky Gates, observers did not understand at once the sort of
monster that was approaching, a vast, dark figure, encircled by riders with
torches and foot soldiers with spears and halberds. When the elephant drew
closer, they could see that its spine and ears were heaped with snow, that
tears had frozen in the folds under its eyes, and that its left tusk was broken
off. Its trunk lay calmly on the shoulder of the Arab who was leading the beast
towards an enclosure built on waste ground, not far from the cemetery where they
buried unknown drunkards.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-IE;">I resolved to translate <i>The Fifth Kingdom</i> if I could, but it took me several years to get around to the task; and just as my publisher and I thought we had secured funding in spring 2022, the main source of grants for literary translation from Russian, the Institut Perevoda, became ethically untouchable because of its status as a Russian government-supported institution. Putin had effectively slammed down the window on translating contemporary Russian novelists, as on so much else.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ-d2bdIZo7Ss-9jSoqKI0QZCYIUPF8FTwwl5B4yk2tAE78SbOC81piX_I4f5uupCB1eqtYH9mjR7gtQm-_SCWSPAmZTxPDE2aLBa3K8HYWVdSOKqycXzlwje0eDsiZbTzfroupNW6py0LO4PI5mu0wH8u7Kva5J6I7JYYKMYdoVdMwAPHWLmTlIq8qw/s3321/Edited%20Dmitry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3321" data-original-width="2387" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ-d2bdIZo7Ss-9jSoqKI0QZCYIUPF8FTwwl5B4yk2tAE78SbOC81piX_I4f5uupCB1eqtYH9mjR7gtQm-_SCWSPAmZTxPDE2aLBa3K8HYWVdSOKqycXzlwje0eDsiZbTzfroupNW6py0LO4PI5mu0wH8u7Kva5J6I7JYYKMYdoVdMwAPHWLmTlIq8qw/s320/Edited%20Dmitry.jpg" width="230" /></a></div><br />I put </span><i style="text-align: left;">The Fifth Kingdom</i><span style="text-align: left;"> aside. But last week in London I found its characters coming to life again in my head, as I watched a performance of Peter Oswald's remarkable re-(co-?)writing of Friedrich Schiller's unfinished play </span><i style="text-align: left;">Dmitry</i><span style="text-align: left;">, or </span><i style="text-align: left;">Demetrius</i><span style="text-align: left;"> (Schiller had barely finished writing the first act when he died in 1805). The play was set two hundred years earlier, during the Time of Troubles when Russia, weakened by famine and near-anarchy, was at the mercy of the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; also a time when, until the Tsar's line of succession was firmly re-established under Mikhail I, the first of the Romanov Tsars, a series of pretenders to the throne known as False Dmitrys kept popping up, with Polish support. Each pretender claimed to be Dmitry Ivanovich, Ivan the Terrible's youngest son. Although the real Dmitry had died at a tender age, possibly murdered by assassins hired by Boris Godunov, more likely of natural causes, this did not stop vast numbers of people from believing that he might have survived in hiding, under a false name, until the time was ripe for him to emerge and claim his throne. Schiller follows the historical storyline closely, and I didn't notice the join with Oswald's reconstruction of the second and final act of the play: Dmitry's rise to the throne, apparently by divine intervention, which is tragically undercut by the loss of "his" mother's support and the subsequent desertion of his Cossack allies (both the historical and the fictional false Dmitry actually occupied the throne of Moscow during 1605-6, until his murder by boyars).</span></div></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">At first, I was inclined to be underwhelmed by the production. The opening scene in the Sejm, where the Polish nobles debate whether or not to support Dmitry's claim to the Russian throne, was lively but unconvincing. Tom Byrne's Dmitry radiated a Zelensky vibe, all heartfelt and determined in army surplus camo. Aurora Dawson-Hunte as the Polish princess Marina Mnishek, daughter of Dmitry's main patron and his future wife, spoke her dullish lines with verve but lacked chemistry with her betrothed. However, the unpronounceable Polish Cardinal (James Garnon) displayed such Machiavellian flair, whether twirling in Satanic-red clerical regalia or reliving his military career in natty fatigues, that I was soon hypnotized by his Jesuitical scheming. And once the dynamic at the heart of the play - the tragic love of a mother for her son - was fully developed, I was lost, sobbing and blowing my trunk in a truly embarrassing way. Ivan IV's widow, Maria Nagaya played by Poppy Miller, mesmerized me with her hesitations and her commitments. Like her historical counterpart, the fictional Maria legitimizes her son by 'recognizing' him: there's a tense scene at the end of Act 1 where Maria meets the adult Dmitry for the first time. He burbles greetings and confessions to her, half-monarch, half-puppydog, entirely terrified of her reaction - since until that point, he genuinely believed himself to <i>be</i> Dmitry. And she doesn't spare him: after a gruelling silence, she says, 'I recognize you. I recognize you... Your name was Yuri. You were Dmitry's little friend'. Before the shattering news has fully sunk in, Maria agrees to recognize the pretender publicly as her son - if only in order to revenge her true child's death (said sprog shown in the 1899 portrait below by Mikhail Nesterov, looking suitably saintly). The circumstances under which this pact disintegrates make up the play's action-packed second half.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXy9kaogaOHGdBqMbucIzFupZwN8grrSj6a6ZPtT-jRqOtCebAhOznP-wT_pKAi8Dx6TGqtfsarlqDp8xQbTROn09WVNpjSw7vZohEYTuSORmFtGPRJH1f7kVyLgjfqqphzK8SHQvdd4SNaG52YcCh1ij6QTuVNY9uZlttrhOZ8GC-GwsJJpK2ouKTqA/s1047/1899._Tzarevich_Dmitry_by_M._Nesterov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1047" data-original-width="904" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXy9kaogaOHGdBqMbucIzFupZwN8grrSj6a6ZPtT-jRqOtCebAhOznP-wT_pKAi8Dx6TGqtfsarlqDp8xQbTROn09WVNpjSw7vZohEYTuSORmFtGPRJH1f7kVyLgjfqqphzK8SHQvdd4SNaG52YcCh1ij6QTuVNY9uZlttrhOZ8GC-GwsJJpK2ouKTqA/w277-h320/1899._Tzarevich_Dmitry_by_M._Nesterov.jpg" title="Nesterov's 1899 portrait of the real Tsarevich Dmitry" width="277" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal">Schiller, and Oswald, made me appreciate the Time of Troubles - and Buida's take on it in <i>The Fifth Kingdom</i> - in a new way. Observing the Cardinal's machinations, noting the growing resentment of the Cossacks and the dowager Queen, I could see how it was possible for the Romanov party to represent the pretenders' minions as an army of monsters and homunculi. I thought I spotted some intertextuality. I also wondered, not very originally, whether Dostoevsky was always anti-Catholic or whether his reading of Schiller made him so - certainly, between <i>Dmitry</i>'s Cardinal and <i>Don Carlos</i>' Grand Inquisitor, Catholic clergy don't get a very good rep in these plays. You don't have to enjoy <i>Dmitry</i> with your historian's hat on, however. You can enjoy it as a melodrama, as a parable of the instability of identity, or as a comment on contemporary Russian political ambition (which is perhaps too obviously played up by the choice of certain uniforms and in the final lines, delivered by Romanov). </p><p class="MsoNormal">You can catch <i>Dmitry</i> <a href="https://www.marylebonetheatre.com/productions/dmitry" target="_blank">until 5 Nov at London's Marylebone Theatre</a> (in the Steiner House, interestingly enough). But first, here's a little more from <i>The Fifth Kingdom</i> on Dmitry, Maria Mnishek, and that poor elephant:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>The sky
darkened, and the gloom sank into people’s hearts, suddenly reminding them that
a whirlwind just like this had struck Moscow when the Pretender Dmitri had
first entered the city last year. It was an evil sign, a malum omen…<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>Then
abruptly, just as suddenly as it had risen, the wind dropped; a silence began,
and in the middle of the deserted street the snow-white elephant appeared.
People could not believe their eyes; they thought they were dreaming. The
elephant might have been borne in on the wind. He reared up on his hind legs,
tossed his trunk in the air and trumpeted and trumpeted, and people took this
as a sign of the eye of God, like a voice summoning them to rejoicing and love.
And then the elephant lowered himself in his stately way onto his knees and
offered Marina Mnishek a cup of wine, using his trunk like a hand to hold it…<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>Slight, flat-chested,
with thin lips and tiny teeth in a greedy, callous, vulpine face set on a
blueish, childish neck, which barely supported the weight of her tall horsehair
coiffure, clenched in a corset of Spanish steel, scared, confused, and
ill-tempered, Marina stared in horror at the snow-white beast. It knelt and
gazed at her with its childlike eyes.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>And beside
her, Tsar Dmitri also paused – a short man, broad-shouldered, beardless and
smooth-cheeked, with two monstrous warts on his face, tiny eyes and no neck,
his hands like the paws of a bear.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>Everyone
waited.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>The silence
stretched.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>And
suddenly Dmitri shook himself, sighed with relief, took the cup from the
elephant and yelled in a high, quivering voice,<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>“Glory!
Glory!”<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>Abruptly a
cannon fired, and then another; horns sounded, a flute cut through the din, the
Turkish drums rumbled, and all of a sudden the elephant began to dance. He
flung his trunk high, curled it into a ring and snorted; he stood on his hind
legs and trumpeted; he shifted from foot to foot and stretched his pig-like maw
wide, as if smiling; he rose on his hind legs and spun, and spun. People
gasped; cheerful again, they began to stir and chatter…<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>“Glory!”
Dmitri yelled once more.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>“Glory!”
one of the archers took up the cry.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>“Glory!”
the crowd shouted joyously. “Glory!”<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal">
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-IE"><i>And once
again the blue of the sky filled with dust, and again the gentle tinkle of
bells sounded, and again Marina was the greatest beauty in the world, rouged
and splendid, like Lady Luck herself, and Dmitri was a giant, a handsome hero,
a mighty ruler, a knight, sovereign and conqueror of tongues and hearts…</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><b>Translation: mine, from Yuri Buida, <i><span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Fifth Kingdom</span></i><span style="line-height: 107%;"> (<i>Piatoe tsarstvo</i>), 2018</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-9212684509291167762022-05-30T00:14:00.004+01:002022-05-30T00:14:34.301+01:00Visiting Vilnius: Pushkin and the Crack'd Mirror<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZsO6YeQHtAAvEgX18vfMo_aqv2e2J3M3a6fQ-6MT--4FTtJtlZzvXlfwaLXLAYKkWdq_rqqKU19uafe3yaELybLPx6W6pjvUPw99tdnbn2h61ABKkB8nptoHqjnShNRsz3zq0Cg0N1GSr89u1nEjg57SHbhpIUjTHZTPU-7mm_32rneNmTeasiXW40A/s4032/Daley%20on%20the%20desktop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZsO6YeQHtAAvEgX18vfMo_aqv2e2J3M3a6fQ-6MT--4FTtJtlZzvXlfwaLXLAYKkWdq_rqqKU19uafe3yaELybLPx6W6pjvUPw99tdnbn2h61ABKkB8nptoHqjnShNRsz3zq0Cg0N1GSr89u1nEjg57SHbhpIUjTHZTPU-7mm_32rneNmTeasiXW40A/s320/Daley%20on%20the%20desktop.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />On the edge of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a lovely forest park called <span style="color: #4d5156;">Marku</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #5f6368; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold;">čiai</span>. It smells excitingly of moss and pine needles: as you wander across its intricate, sloping paths, you discover fishing lakes, a tiny chapel surrounded by a handful of graves, and a museum dedicated to Aleksandr Pushkin. This last might well give the visitor pause. Was Pushkin ever in Vilnius? No, although his celebrated great-grandfather was (see more below). Then why a museum in his name? I went inside to find out. At first sight, the museum appeared to be closed, and the information boards arranged between the house and the park were all in Lithuanian, a beautiful but rather opaque language. After puzzling over the pictures on the boards for a while, I tried the door. It opened, and a small fierce lady with black-button eyes, built rather along the lines of a <i>matrioshka</i> doll, peered at me through a tarnished glass window. In a corridor off to one side, another woman was speaking loudly to tourists in a language I couldn't follow. On my left was a dining room with a polished dark wooden table, surrounded by equally dark, ornate, rather brooding dressers, the knobs on the drawers carved like the heads of friendly gargoyles. Somehow I felt I'd fallen back in time, perhaps into a Dovlatov story. "Do you speak English?" I ventured. "<i>Russkii</i>?"<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx5SXY2BPItUF6K7hOZlQeDmF9f12QHtSOAWVLDiW58Hc9Gv0nDTwwDT3NyrGPb5NsdmpYaZg_EJzBDz6AAQPUX69PmSKUWHFqGvzJ2DZ3QUIIpNT6EJAT52NIwr7GnB4Atsg2r4OnXpViKZUPgUYPs6nw_oH7fcDH0yrlQjM3-wS8GrtKShho9tvSRA/s4032/PXL_20220520_090042937.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx5SXY2BPItUF6K7hOZlQeDmF9f12QHtSOAWVLDiW58Hc9Gv0nDTwwDT3NyrGPb5NsdmpYaZg_EJzBDz6AAQPUX69PmSKUWHFqGvzJ2DZ3QUIIpNT6EJAT52NIwr7GnB4Atsg2r4OnXpViKZUPgUYPs6nw_oH7fcDH0yrlQjM3-wS8GrtKShho9tvSRA/s320/PXL_20220520_090042937.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />As if summoned specially to rescue me, another member of the museum staff appeared - a very kind and encyclopaedically informed lady from St Petersburg, Ellina by name. Ellina generously gave up what must have been an hour to show me the whole museum, from the furniture in the dining room (Pushkin's own, brought from Mikhailovskoe) to the clay golden cockerels and cats made by local children after reading Pushkin's fairy tales. She also explained the mystery of the museum dedicated to Pushkin in a city the poet had never visited: it was not Aleksandr himself, but his younger son Grigorii who had lived in the house. Grigorii married Varvara Melnikova, the daughter of a retired Russian general and the niece of Russia's first Minister for Transport, Pavel Melnikov. The Melnikov brothers were attracted to the <span style="color: #4d5156;">Marku</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #5f6368; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold;">čiai </span>estate by the very factor which deterred other buyers: the construction of a new railway along its edge. Varvara received the estate as her dowry. After she divorced her philandering first husband, she met Grigorii Pushkin in Petersburg, where he held an administrative post and also curated his late father's estate. By the time they married in 1883, Grigorii was nearly fifty; Varvara twenty-eight. It was his first marriage, her second. They had no children together, but by all accounts their wedded life was blissful. For the first fifteen years they lived at Mikhailovskoe; then, after Grigory managed to sell the estate to the Russian Academy of Sciences, they settled at <span style="color: #4d5156;">Marku</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #5f6368; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold;">čiai. </span>Sadly, after only six years in Lithuania, Grigorii died. Varvara remained at the house, except during the war, until her death in 1935; her dearest wish was for her property to continue to honour her extraordinary father-in-law by preserving Grigorii's relics of Mikhailovskoe. And while some items have been lost, many remain. The house is still magical, with the view from the first-floor balcony almost unchanged; Varvara's oils, mostly portraits of grazing cattle, survive on the living-room walls; and many fascinating books and trinkets from both families on display. I was no longer in a short story by Dovlatov, but possibly Chekhov.<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMDc8LFqEAvcIBWZpGydLn7CDEYlRNhbth5CRRLhfKd8MHMVoIevIQ0XmP8LVQqj1hhj4rIgXm-BxXrLGyRikj-B7nmlJJvTv6h89yiSmGdEQl8DPo3-uP9l1eC_-BRN5wZzN5cC5b8A8HTPr881wAbd5ucdFnkHVcLxDfn1cn6ZVbLxAc7m-o6GzA1A/s4032/Mirror%20cracked.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMDc8LFqEAvcIBWZpGydLn7CDEYlRNhbth5CRRLhfKd8MHMVoIevIQ0XmP8LVQqj1hhj4rIgXm-BxXrLGyRikj-B7nmlJJvTv6h89yiSmGdEQl8DPo3-uP9l1eC_-BRN5wZzN5cC5b8A8HTPr881wAbd5ucdFnkHVcLxDfn1cn6ZVbLxAc7m-o6GzA1A/s320/Mirror%20cracked.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />Most of all, I was enchanted by the looking-glass. This is a large swing mirror placed at the end of a narrow corridor; the glass shines within a square mahogany frame, reflecting a distinguished bust of the poet. A large crack festooned with tiny pieces of Scotch tape runs drunkenly across one upper corner, a legacy of over-enthusiastic late Soviet <i>remont</i>. But what almost literally enchanted me about this mirror was Ellina's words: this was Aleksandr Pushkin's mirror, or rather his mother's, brought from Mikhailovskoe with other treasures by the poet's dutiful younger son. Pushkin the child had looked into this mirror; possibly played divination games with it, <i>gadanie</i>, as Tatiana and her girlfriends do in <i>Evgenii Onegin</i>. The young dandy Pushkin had been reflected in this mirror; perhaps he'd stopped in front of it to whisk his cravat impatiently into shape, many times during his two-year exile at his mother's estate, in between penning his first great prose works. I stared into the mirror intently, willing Pushkin to swim up out of the depths. <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Tears sprang involuntarily to my eyes. I was <i>so close </i>to Pushkin. </span>I'd read this story. Hell, I'd <i>translated </i>this story...<p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Some dreadful force was pulling him closer and closer to the mirror's yellowed, lacklustre surface. Suddenly he shuddered... he saw too alien, utterly frenzied eyes fixed on him. At the same instant he felt a sharp jerk. His mirror double had seized his right hand and forcefully tugged it under the surface of the mirror, triggering circles of ripples as if across a pool of mercury... </i>(<b>Aleksandr Chaianov, <i>The Venetian Mirror</i></b>)</p></blockquote><p>Well, maybe not like that, but there are alternatives...</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US"><i>I stepped
forwards and stared greedily into the depths of the mirror. My heart skipped,
as though a powerful hand had gripped it; I cried out. </i></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><i>I ran from Signora Moricci’s house, like one trying
to outrace mortal danger. </i> (<b>Pavel Muratov, <i>The Venetian Mirror</i>)</b></span></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I stretched out my hand and touched the wood... I touched the glass... Ellina had disappeared on an errand, and there was no-one around except me, the mirror, and possibly Pushkin. I gazed hard into the dimness beyond my reflection, but no mercurial fingers rose from the depths to meet mine. If Pushkin was in there, he wasn't coming out to play. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7AWWn0wGw3tLPsTcNyG8swqboQJkuNRqPcwzO7UJPetghtOe7lsmtVku13X10nZihZC5fJdqwFdIkKWdtfoXAkGhwRvAqvRGeIHP1mc0rHrDHloVutAXTNwQ7KqF33sxDNF5R2JfusATHvWDr96-w7ktLfFol0GKtalh-h4tIiTiLMo5EARZc6kUI0A/s4032/Pushkin%20grandfather.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7AWWn0wGw3tLPsTcNyG8swqboQJkuNRqPcwzO7UJPetghtOe7lsmtVku13X10nZihZC5fJdqwFdIkKWdtfoXAkGhwRvAqvRGeIHP1mc0rHrDHloVutAXTNwQ7KqF33sxDNF5R2JfusATHvWDr96-w7ktLfFol0GKtalh-h4tIiTiLMo5EARZc6kUI0A/w150-h200/Pushkin%20grandfather.jpg" width="150" /></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">As I mentioned above, Grigorii was not the first member of the Pushkin clan to be linked with Vilnius. The poet's great-grandfather, Abram Gannibal, a military engineer and translator celebrated as <i><a href="https://www.nyrb.com/products/peter-the-greats-african?variant=39319218028712" target="_blank">Peter the Great's African</a></i> (as in the title of Robert Chandler's new edited collection of Pushkin's prose experiments for NYRB Classics), was baptized at an Orthodox Church in the Old Town. The stele commemorating this event can still be seen on the church exterior.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">And as for me, like Pushkin's Tatiana, I'm still wishing for a magic reflection:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;"><i>Татьяна на широкой двор<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;"><i>В открытом платьице выходит,<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;"><i>На месяц зеркало наводит;<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;"><i>Но в темном зеркале одна<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;"><i>Дрожит печальная луна...</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">**The citations above are from my short story anthologies <i><a href="https://www.europeanbookshop.com/languagebooks/9780946162802/angel-classics-russian-red-spectres-valery-bryusov-sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky-mikhail-bulgakov-mu" target="_blank">Red Spectres</a></i> and <i><a href="https://russianlife.com/shop/books/white-magic/" target="_blank">White Magic</a></i> respectively. You can buy them on Amazon or from the publisher websites via the hyperlinks. As for the final citation, this is from Book Five of <i>Eugene Onegin</i>, translated thus by Charles Johnston (not the best translation but the only one to hand): 'Tatyana in low-cut attire / goes out into the courtyard spaces / and trains a mirror till it faces / the moon; but in the darkened glass / the only face to shake and pass / is sad old moon'. **</p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"></span></p>Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-16245723199172929092022-03-14T13:01:00.000+00:002022-03-14T13:01:16.345+00:00A brave statement from author Anna Starobinets<p> As a translator of Russian literature, I'm used to silence. My work is rarely published, my few readers rarely cite my words, and if they do, they might not credit me: if I've done my job right, they forget I exist. But now, for the first time, I have reason to be silent; to be ashamed, even afraid of admitting what I do. Because of the tragically misguided decision of the current Russian government to invade Ukraine, and the war crimes committed by Vladimir Putin's orders even as I write this, 'Russian' is becoming a pariah word. Now is not the time to talk about Russian literature, some say; and certainly not to publish it, or to support its translation.</p><p>Thankfully, some people cannot be silent. <a href="https://www.veryshortintroductions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198813934.001.0001/actrade-9780198813934-chapter-8" target="_blank">Tolstoy couldn't.</a> Not when he saw injustice in his own country, committed by an unelected government and without a free media to report it. Sound familiar? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Starobinets" target="_blank">Anna Starobinets</a> cannot be silent either. If you haven't heard of Anna before, or read any of her excellent work in the English of Jane Bugaeva, translator of Anna's engaging children's novels; or her fiction for adults translated by Jamie Rann and Hugh Aplin; or <a href="https://katherine-young-poet.com/anna-starobinets/" target="_blank">her heartbreaking memoir of loss</a> translated by Katharine E. Young, read her statement below and see why you've been missing out. </p><h1 style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 26.4px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 39.6px; margin: 10px 0px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background: 0px 0px; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgQZn6q9WQdGe78SQo6vA_eChao2Kt5bhZdhAkUh4pi27mpnwJuJwfi8MEIKo71dQ_4iXlKOVjp3Q-CdeVZUEIKOhBEMTtiD4aEEe7EOas3GQkHYYXbX9ssZxABFBSJIeXj1wqgEoKgHoRai1eALOE2BqGZLYtuCvbhK1nGMCByai0AmlTjO2osgeF96g" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1024" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgQZn6q9WQdGe78SQo6vA_eChao2Kt5bhZdhAkUh4pi27mpnwJuJwfi8MEIKo71dQ_4iXlKOVjp3Q-CdeVZUEIKOhBEMTtiD4aEEe7EOas3GQkHYYXbX9ssZxABFBSJIeXj1wqgEoKgHoRai1eALOE2BqGZLYtuCvbhK1nGMCByai0AmlTjO2osgeF96g" width="320" /></a></div><br />Statement by Anna Starobinets about the war in Ukraine</strong></h1><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background: 0px 0px; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">[This statement was posted in Russian on Facebook on March 11, 2022, and later translated into English by Muireann Maguire]</strong></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“But who needs you, anyway!” say my elderly relatives. “Live quietly in Russia. Just keep your mouth shut.” Of course, they mean something else – that as long as I gag myself with a metaphorical handkerchief, no-one will threaten me – but there’s still truth in their words. I’m not needed any more. Not needed anywhere. Neither “here”, nor “there”. I’m not needed “here”, because I call the war what it is: war. Because I insist that the people of Ukraine are peaceful, not fascists. People who are being bombed by my own homeland, controlled now by a crazy psychopath. I’m not needed “there”, because now I carry the mark of Cain. Of someone who kills his own brother every day. Because I am from Russia.<br /></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What can I do? Stay in Russia, take to the streets every day with those who are brave enough? Get beaten in the face and kidney-punched? Get sent to prison for three years, or twenty years? Probably not twenty, of course. Three is more likely. And for the first offence, just two weeks or so. But I can’t do it. I cannot bear to leave my children. They have no-one in the world but me.<br /></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What can I do? Stay in Russia, and remain silent? Become part of it? No, I can’t do that either.<br /></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What can I do? Go elsewhere, lose everything? Everything except the shreds of my self-respect, and my children. That’s my choice. I’ve made it – and left.<br /></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve come, first, to Sri Lanka. I booked and paid for this trip in the happy days before the war: I wanted to see the jungle animals, because my next <i>Beastly Crimes </i>children’s book is meant to be set in a jungle. Coconuts, apes, elephants, heat – I feel feverish; delirious. The jungles of Sri Lanka symbolize my homelessness. I see an elephant – and I remember I no longer have a home. I see a palm tree – and I remember I’ve given up my beloved apartment in Khamovniki, Moscow. Here I see apes – and there, my friends are packing up my life into cardboard boxes. I see snakes – and I have enough money for three months, at most. Coconuts, ripe to pluck – and I’ve left my parents and my friends. Here’s the new moon, lying on its back; and I have no idea what to do for the rest of my life.<br /></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">From here we’ll move on to Georgia. Then, maybe, to Montenegro. Farther on, I see only fog: thick, like the mist above jungle pools at six in the morning.<br /></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the choice I have made. Silence, for me, is the very worst. The only thing I can do well is string words together in Russian. That’s all I have. I’ll comfort myself that I can still do this when far away. Perhaps I’ll be more useful like this for toppling the regime, than if I shut my mouth or went to prison. Maybe the same children who read my <i>Beastly Crimes</i> will do something when they grow up. Since I couldn’t do it. Since we couldn’t.<br /></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">With these words, I burn my bridges. My sympathy: for Ukraine. My respect: for those who remain, to fight on.<br /></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland.<br />Der Eichenbaum<br />wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft –<br />es war ein Traum.<br />Das küßte mich auf deutsch und sprach auf deutsch<br />(man glaubt es kaum,<br />wie gut es klang) das Wort: “Ich liebe dich” –<br />es war ein Traum.</i></p><p style="background: 0px 0px rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14.6667px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(Heine, 1832)</p><p>Anna, as she tell us, cannot be silent. By speaking out on social media, and by asking me to translate her words into English so that they would reach a wider audience, she has cut off her entire life, her income, her main readership (think how much that hurts a writer), her support networks. Frankly, under the same circumstances, I think I'd shut up. I know other Russian writers who have chosen silence; we cannot judge them. But we can judge our own choices. For too long, Western society has been silent about writing from Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, by failing to read it; by failing to understand it; by over-politicizing it; by under-politicizing it. Readers don't choose Eastern European literature, so commercial publishers in the West rarely fund translation from these languages independently. The end result has been to throw an entire industry sector on the mercy of the Russian government's opaquely filtered funds; funds which are now likely to prove both unavailable and untouchable. Not every political statement can be translated <i>pro bono </i>in a few hours; and the first English translation of Zamyatin's great dystopian novel <i>We </i>didn't sell enough copies even to earn back its production costs). If no replacement grants for Russian literary translation is found, and if readers are not found to fill the gap commercially, then translation will cease to be funded. Yet if translators fall silent in the English-speaking West, so will Russophone writers like Anna, like <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/alisa-ganieva-the-human-right-to-free-speech-is-being-violated-in-russia/av-46436506" target="_blank">Alisa Ganieva</a> (whose husband has been arrested for protesting in Moscow), like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/07/russians-ukrainians-putin-army-freedom-mikhail-shishkin" target="_blank">Mikhail Shishkin</a> (who distanced himself from the Russian government in 2013, a year before the invasion of Crimea), like <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/writer-andrey-kurkov-tells-ukraine-s-story-it-s-my-duty-this-is-my-front-line-1.4822617" target="_blank">Andrei Kurkov</a>, a proud Ukrainian who writes in Russian.</p><p> Don't let that happen. If you have a choice, don't choose silence. </p><p><b>Disclaimer: </b>I have <a href="https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/thepregnancytest/2020/07/16/anna-starobinets-look-at-him/" target="_blank">reviewed Anna's memoir </a><i>Look At Him</i>, and <a href="https://puncturedlines.wordpress.com/tag/anna-starobinets/" target="_blank">chaired an online talk </a>about it where Anna spoke vividly despite having Covid at the time; and finally, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-poetics-of-metamorphosis/" target="_blank">I wrote an essay about Anna's science fiction</a> for the <i>LA Review of Books</i>. This year, I was hoping - I am still hoping - to invite Anna to my University to participate in a seminar about coping with child loss. </p><p><br /></p>Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-55663197972037836012022-02-19T17:06:00.003+00:002022-02-19T17:06:46.689+00:00Punishing the Hunter - Not the Reader<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjbT0pmh8xmQQKLOE22eXUp0SIiAojILNq5hkQLlhfcrIvsctdpRSMN0CTFkifJaDaLeE87xfcOiRZSiq2c2OZU42D-vgkgUYnuLQ_kbuH_tnW9jzwUK_JSjB4ax5r0cSM9IQoBRphAWnDZiGcWkyvlVpOqYi6dfeRwPrPzC2Ti62pTy45s2RjcvkjirQ=s800" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="508" data-original-width="800" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjbT0pmh8xmQQKLOE22eXUp0SIiAojILNq5hkQLlhfcrIvsctdpRSMN0CTFkifJaDaLeE87xfcOiRZSiq2c2OZU42D-vgkgUYnuLQ_kbuH_tnW9jzwUK_JSjB4ax5r0cSM9IQoBRphAWnDZiGcWkyvlVpOqYi6dfeRwPrPzC2Ti62pTy45s2RjcvkjirQ=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br />Yulia Yakovleva is one of the most entertaining and deft contemporary writers working in Russian today: she hops with agility between YA literature (we loved her <i><a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/307/307926/the-raven-s-children/9780241330777.html" target="_blank">The Raven's Children</a></i>, which was longlisted for the 2020 Read Russia Prize) and adult detective thrillers like <i><a href="https://pushkinpress.com/books/punishment-of-a-hunter/" target="_blank">Punishment of a Hunter </a></i>(Pushkin Vertigo, 2021) - although both titles we've so far have been set in the early Soviet period. There's plenty of political idealism, casual animosity, frustration, and filth to enjoy - I particularly appreciated the details in <i>Punishment of a Hunter</i> about the sheer difficulty of getting laundry done in a communal apartment. But while there's a wealth of Communist social context to enjoy, you may well find the plot too engrossing to notice - as Yakovleva's hero, Leningrad police detective Vasily Zaitsev, tries to solve a series of grisly crimes committed in his city. <p></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiqAH7spPgx2x7OujhYUdLsrkaG8TsyPGh295LhuLHhjCHW1ze0JSp193H5RU67Q8god8tDa2t4yYE9SBmKuFdURr9af-XaIAu90Fcd-jGXVK4uvHFjSG_1L2VmijcPQsQGASw8MZcpxiRIJTNhmyppLbA0tB343IsJin0lpRdFYcYr6auK-kiF168LLg=s534" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="335" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiqAH7spPgx2x7OujhYUdLsrkaG8TsyPGh295LhuLHhjCHW1ze0JSp193H5RU67Q8god8tDa2t4yYE9SBmKuFdURr9af-XaIAu90Fcd-jGXVK4uvHFjSG_1L2VmijcPQsQGASw8MZcpxiRIJTNhmyppLbA0tB343IsJin0lpRdFYcYr6auK-kiF168LLg=s320" width="201" /></a>Meanwhile, I was trying to solve the mystery of why this excellent crime novel is called <i>Punishment of a Hunter</i> instead of <i>The Leningrad Murders</i> or <i>Comrade Death</i> or some such similarly suggestive, run-of-the-crime-mill name. The Russian title - literally, <i>Suddenly Out the Hunter Runs</i> - didn't help me either. Only as I approached the end did everything make sense - odd title, cute illustrations adorning every new chapter, and the oddly recurring theme of Dutch Masters in the Hermitage Museum. I can't explain without spoilers, so I'll summarize by calling Yakovleva's novel an ek-phras-tastic thriller: an honest, much-wronged detective lead recalling the excellent Arkady Renko of Martin Cruz Smith's late-Soviet crime series, a macabre serial killer who could have dropped out of a Chris Carter novel, and a setting straight out of one of Bulgakov's communal-apartment comedies. There's even a basis in historical fact for the big reveal (if not for the serial killings).</p><p>This is a novel where names, especially traditional 'speaking names' that reveal information about their bearer's character - are important, and Yakovleva's translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp has done a splendid job with this. She kept the hero's name, Zaitsev (a relatively common Russian surname) although English readers lose the subtle association with the hare (<i>zaets</i>), a game animal which features in the titular Dutch canvas by Paulus Potter (and hence the theme of the hunter becoming the hunted, important for Yakovleva's plot, is harder to discern). Another, less savoury detective is called Kishkin in the original (which evokes Tripes or Offal for the Russian reader); Ahmedzai Kemp smoothly changed this to the similarly evocative 'Uglov'. It's a 'speaking name' that works well in English, and one could certainly argue that this novel has quite enough evisceration going on already. I particularly enjoyed Ahmedzai Kemp's lively touch with dialogue, which always sounded vivid and real. There's a wonderful exchange between Zaitsev and a 'cabbie' (<i>izvozchik</i>), who, like all taxi drivers since the dawn of time, draws him into a political discussion. Zaitsev tries to close this down by trotting out some formulaic Sovietese: 'I'm just setting out the political situation in the country'. In Ahmedzai Kemp's translation, the cabbie responds, 'Ooh, check you out. Where you from then?' The original has '<i>Ty otkuda gramotnyi-to takoi</i>' (Or, 'Where was it you learned to speak like that'?). I normally like my translations literal, but I admired the chutzpah of that 'Check you out'. It brought the cabbie to life in my head - just as any well-written text should achieve for its characters.</p><p>Pushkin Press are doing a laudable job of commissioning translations of crime fiction (including vintage detectives) from several languages through their Vertigo series: if you like historical crime, intelligent Russian fiction and a Soviet setting, check it out. It's worth hunting down.</p><p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhWZjDS056spGjp6htPrF9uYAWj_e00VYZuJlE4-3CRizjltOKvqgodtYnk24Rj1FhQT33medSFmlR-GgcAaznESYq_V6uDYOzGH-KMxfkKcXxPhCvbU70rxJSqnab8nZs7yfDDvqbSjatR9KggEu1mtnnw691BV_QylWci7R8b-LMVjgjPwHbMm_zqkQ=s800" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="568" data-original-width="800" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhWZjDS056spGjp6htPrF9uYAWj_e00VYZuJlE4-3CRizjltOKvqgodtYnk24Rj1FhQT33medSFmlR-GgcAaznESYq_V6uDYOzGH-KMxfkKcXxPhCvbU70rxJSqnab8nZs7yfDDvqbSjatR9KggEu1mtnnw691BV_QylWci7R8b-LMVjgjPwHbMm_zqkQ=s320" width="320" /></a></p><p><br /></p>Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-6384110837971245052021-10-21T14:54:00.000+01:002021-10-21T14:54:02.263+01:00White Magic - timely tales for Halloween<div class="separator"><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9PJMdLv6_qPGZmiyUfdDLyBGD0rST6O_NsoXU5FjC68pUncZwrZEXBr7eR2fZCqx_6vtiickr-joEygR3WeXPZW7BwyKXomdQiHiR5MY1P3V4GN7L_QjaOy1uwBOAIvaJzN1c5tECMcI5/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1244" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9PJMdLv6_qPGZmiyUfdDLyBGD0rST6O_NsoXU5FjC68pUncZwrZEXBr7eR2fZCqx_6vtiickr-joEygR3WeXPZW7BwyKXomdQiHiR5MY1P3V4GN7L_QjaOy1uwBOAIvaJzN1c5tECMcI5/w194-h200/image.png" width="194" /></a></div></div>My readers know I hate to blow my own <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_Horn" target="_blank">fog-horn</a>. I prefer to hide behind my human avatar everywhere except in the pages of this blog and my safe places in a few famous libraries. But since it's Halloween once again, time of creepy pumpkins, bewigged vampires and prancing werewolves, I should share with you my own contribution to the annual <i>Danse Macabre</i>: a baker's dozen of scary stories, <a href="https://store.russianlife.com/white-magic-russian-emigre-tales-of-mystery-and-terror/?goal=0_2e99ba62b2-d3f8d3e5a2-84253053&mc_cid=d3f8d3e5a2&mc_eid=04384ba8a0" target="_blank"><i>White Magic: Russian E</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"><i>migré</i></span><i> Tales of Mystery and Terror</i></a>, most - if not all - translated into English for the first time.<div> <br />You'll find two vampires (maybe three?), several ghosts, Edgar Allan Poe in Russia, supernatural visions, a serial killer, a haunted mirror, a murderess who wasn't and a failed suicide, and two absolutely hilarious tales by Zamiatin. Women writers are well represented with tales by Teffi, Irina Odoevskaya, and Georgy Peskov (the pseudonym of Yelena Deisha, one of whose stories also featured in my previous collection <i>Red Spectres</i>). <i>White Magic</i> is a sequel to <i>Red Spectres</i>, although the books have different publishers; the 'White' in the title acknowledges that all the authors in this second anthology were Russian <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">émigré </span>authors whose political sympathies, by and large, lay with the losing, monarchist side in the Russian Civil War. Much of what they write is infused with the trauma of exile and loss, or more gently imbued with nostalgia. Ivan Lukash, a historical novelist whose fiction deserves to be better known, really goes to town in "The Bells", his condemnation of Bolshevik St Petersburg; while in the other Lukash tale I included, "Hermann's Card" is a supernatural follow-up to Pushkin's seminal story "The Queen of Spades". Here's a taste of "The Bells", which helps explain why they had to fire Lukash from the Leningrad Tourist Board in 1925:<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><i>In the Port
on Vasilyevsky Island a rusty horse-tram crawls along. The shabby horses with their
bald patches and sharp tailbones might be pulling a funeral bier, a rusty
catafalque-tram. On top the corpse-passengers sway, knocking their bony
shoulders one against the other. The wind from the Neva sweeps around their
heads.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><i>The
rattling tram has crawled by…</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><i>On the
Nikolayev Bridge the wind has piled up crumbly snow. Hissing, the snow whirled
around feet, blew in faces. Petrov clutched his hat, as the fringes of his coat
flapped: “Let the wind wail…”</i></span></p></div></blockquote><div>
<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG7I8ZxghcgIB59JwHpdWMHY3pOMMt04eI4KSrHCqV9xoNV1QPDzcuRsIZ_XvB0ZRxIn2Whr4iMj8oasjsdomOkhxKf39oi5v119193tV2yHsN38nXDBvnVIX1iTRpE9OE_U0u2nEY36ct/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="435" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG7I8ZxghcgIB59JwHpdWMHY3pOMMt04eI4KSrHCqV9xoNV1QPDzcuRsIZ_XvB0ZRxIn2Whr4iMj8oasjsdomOkhxKf39oi5v119193tV2yHsN38nXDBvnVIX1iTRpE9OE_U0u2nEY36ct/w144-h200/image.png" width="144" /></a></div>Other authors include Alexander Amphiteatrov (who does a nice line in vampires), Pyotr Krasnov (a Cossack nationalist who wrote rampantly imperialist historical fiction and tragically threw in his lot with the Wehrmacht), Gaito Gazdanov, and Pavel Muratov (the only Russian author ever to die in County Waterford). The fact that I have now translated two different short stories called "The Venetian <br />Mirror" about spooky looking-glasses - one by Muratov in this collection, the other by Alexander Chayanov in <i>Red Spectres</i> - gives me great satisfaction. (<a href="https://languagehat.com/" target="_blank">Languagehat</a> and I have had quite an interesting chat about Venetian mirrors and Russian literature). Languagehat kindly gave <i>White Magic</i> a rather <a href="https://languagehat.com/the-bookshelf-white-magic/" target="_blank">nice write-up</a>, and so did the stalwart Kaggsy, whose generous words you can read <a href="https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2021/08/17/he-cast-no-shadow-in-the-shimmering-silver-gloom-muireann-russianlife-whitemagic/" target="_blank">here</a> if you're still wavering.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>If you're in the US, you can buy <i>White Magic</i> direct from my excellent publisher, Russian Life, <a href="https://store.russianlife.com/white-magic-russian-emigre-tales-of-mystery-and-terror/?goal=0_2e99ba62b2-d3f8d3e5a2-84253053&mc_cid=d3f8d3e5a2&mc_eid=04384ba8a0" target="_blank">at this link</a>. If you are anywhere else, you can order this book from Amazon (<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/White-Magic-Russian-Emigre-Mystery-ebook/dp/B0965QK4WK/ref=s" target="_blank">Amazon UK link here</a>) or buy the Kindle version; and <i>Red Spectres</i> <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-spectres-Valery-Bryusov/dp/0946162808/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2KAB8688CZC5B&dchild=1&keywords=red+spectres&qid=1634822156&qsid=262-7598541-7797858&s=books&sr=1-1&sres=0946162808%2CB01A68DR9Q%2CB00NBMWHW8%2CB00SLVU8W0%2C1468303481%2CB08PJMS1RX%2C034941162X%2C1913462196%2C0099532956%2C0199668787%2C1785653326%2C150844868X%2C0241434548%2C1474619304%2C1506713556%2C1640348360" target="_blank">is still available too</a>. <br /><div><br /></div><div>Because my human avatar has been busy lately (obvious lie - she's on research leave, how can she be busy?), I've got a huge backlog of unwritten posts. More soon, I hope. Next up will be a post about Yulia Yakovleva's <i>Punishment of the Hunter</i>, a retro Soviet detective novel spunkily translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. I'm also enjoying Oliver Ready's new translation of the late great Vladimir Sharov's <i>Be Like Children</i>. But, until I write again, here's a few words of warning and a snippet from Amphiteatrov's story "The Cimmerian Disease", from the new collection. Warning first: if you're sitting up alone in your apartment on an icy, foggy night, reading your <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">copy
of Huysmans’ </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Là-Bas, </i>and your valet interrupts to inform you that there's a "young person" asking for you at the street door, it's probably NOT a good idea to let her in. </div></div></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>“What can I
do for you?” I asked again, but, glancing at her delicate figure, I added
unwillingly, “Please sit down, and wouldn’t you like a cup of tea? I’m sure you
need warming up. I would even recommend you take a drop of wine or cognac with
it.”</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>She looked
dreadfully chilled; her face was greenish, her lips blue, her dress soiled with
mud and wet to the knees. It was obvious she had come a long way on foot.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>She sat down
silently. I passed her a cup of a tea. She drank it in a single gulp, as if not
noticing what she was drinking. The tea and cognac warmed her; her lips grew
scarlet, her amber cheeks acquired a faint bloom. She really was very pretty. I
wanted to see her eyes, but her eyelashes only trembled without rising. Her
gaze fell full on me just twice, sharp and glittering, but each time surreptitiously,
from the side, when I was turning away. As she nibbled some bread, she did,
however, reveal excellent teeth – small, even, and white.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>After my
guest’s strange revelations to me regarding Petrov, I genuinely did begin to see
her as a “mamselle” – one whose lover had cooled off and sent her packing.
But I didn’t blame Petrov for the introduction, although I continued to wonder
why he had dispatched this silent female in my direction.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>So instead
of asking her a third time what she wanted, I became rather jolly; I decided
that, as fate had sent me a romantic adventure, I should make the most of it. I
am not one of your sentimental suitors; when I like a woman, I try to be witty.
However, my guest never once smiled; it was as if she didn’t hear my jests and
compliments. Her face was fixed in an expression of dull tranquility. She sat
with her hands on her knees, turned half away from me.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>“I used to
live here,” she suddenly interrupted me, turning neither her eyes nor her head
my way, as if I were not even in the room. This stubborn inattentiveness both
confused and annoyed me. I thought: She’s either a psychopath, or a hopeless
idiot.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>“It’s all
different,” she went on, gazing into a corner of the room, “different – the
wallpaper, and the floors…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aha, I
thought, a vein of sentimentality – let’s make use of it.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>“So you are
very fond of this apartment, I see?” I asked, hoping to provoke some candid outpouring
from her. Without replying, she rose and walked towards the corner she had been
studying.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>“This is
where the stains were,” she said.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>“What
stains?” I was confused.</i></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>“Blood.”</i></span></p></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6h5l69T6r3Rrxwx8fhfsAR6fs-CXOBBbr5KmRo3VRbC_1-KQqmY1fnMjfmfvOFjG0neIns_NBtKt6lWtKpWspx_YvKVtlPdetuPK1BIpwUOqbTzA_-ddC8KidIEIk-3dt8OIZQdDkH2Ax/s1300/87236593-halloween-poster-or-greeting-card-with-cartoon-dinosaur-in-costume.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1300" data-original-width="1300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6h5l69T6r3Rrxwx8fhfsAR6fs-CXOBBbr5KmRo3VRbC_1-KQqmY1fnMjfmfvOFjG0neIns_NBtKt6lWtKpWspx_YvKVtlPdetuPK1BIpwUOqbTzA_-ddC8KidIEIk-3dt8OIZQdDkH2Ax/s320/87236593-halloween-poster-or-greeting-card-with-cartoon-dinosaur-in-costume.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></blockquote><div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">Happy Halloween!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br />
</div>
</div><br /></div></div>Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-90599065967314100562021-07-19T23:22:00.003+01:002021-07-20T09:02:52.638+01:00New kids on the bloc: the rise of Novichok fiction<div style="text-align: left;">It's intriguing to note the rise of the <i>Novichok</i> novel, especially given that the first high-profile Novichok poisoning case - the attempted murder of ex-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the quiet English cathedral town of Salisbury in March 2018, by two clandestine Russian operatives - skirted so close to fiction. There was the tragically inept administration of the poison, which ultimately affected two innocent bystanders - of whom one died - and a serving police officer. There followed the tragicomic denials on prime-time Russian TV made by the two operatives, who expressed their earnest admiration for Salisbury Cathedral and its 123-metre spire. The Facebook page '<a href="https://www.facebook.com/Advice-for-Russian-Tourists-2043163839083634/" target="_blank">Advice for Russian Tourists</a>' has made satirical hay with multiple memes featuring Russian "tourists" Aleksandr Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov (alias <a href="https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/09/26/skripal-suspect-boshirov-identified-gru-colonel-anatoliy-chepiga/" target="_blank">Anatolii Chepiga</a>), reconfiguring them within a gently incompetent vision of spycraft: more Fawlty Towers than Philby. These guys don't need plausible deniability; never mind their flimsy cover story, the reality was so implausible it's <i>easier</i> to deny than accept.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjENLgeNVvDZP38tGgQNebMF_Qexymlr2LOKfU9yhjoL0h7HnxFfcaBYdrZpzMZgWQZJDllhAZDWZH6LbXYw2RuCwQ9m4f9YSGjO63YE9gDnWZKnvv4a_4mBvDtLmOyWII3Jl52aEo1KZ04/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="935" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjENLgeNVvDZP38tGgQNebMF_Qexymlr2LOKfU9yhjoL0h7HnxFfcaBYdrZpzMZgWQZJDllhAZDWZH6LbXYw2RuCwQ9m4f9YSGjO63YE9gDnWZKnvv4a_4mBvDtLmOyWII3Jl52aEo1KZ04/" width="320" /></a></div><br />That mixture of belligerence and bathos was once more in play in August 2020 when the would-be leader of Russia's political opposition, Aleksei Navalny, was near-fatally poisoned by Novichok powder sprinkled in the fabric of his underpants. On the one hand, this incident brought the concept of going commando to a whole new level; on the other, it emphasized the incalculable ubiquity of death-dealing in the post-Soviet era. Who needs a poisoned umbrella or an ice-axe when you can anoint a door-knob with poison or slip death under the waistband of somebody's Y-fronts?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Life may indeed be stranger than fiction, but fiction is not letting life have all the fun. Three contemporary novels - two recent, one still to drop - by well-known authors have fictionalized a scenario that already beggars most people's belief. The first I read was <i>Slough House </i>(2021), the seventh Jackson Lamb spy thriller by Mick Herron, one of only two authors to receive my ultimate saurian compliment: I pre-order their books at full price. Mick Herron writes anti-spy novels: his plots expose a contemporary British secret service undermined by desk-jockey careerism, underfunding, and toadying to Whitehall (one of the joys of reading this series is the evolving caricature of Boris Johnson). His heroes are a bunch of failed spies ("slow horses"), punished for various professional failures with permanent exile to London's dilapidated Slough House, where they file meaningless records under the fabulously alcoholic, balefully obscene and yet unflinchingly loyal guardianship of Lamb, a sidelined big beast of Cold War spycraft. It's almost a misnomer to call the series after Jackson Lamb, often the books' least-active, least-glimpsed character; we have free indirect access to the stream of consciousness of virtually everyone else, including Roddy Ho, whose nerdiness and woeful ineptitude somehow never silence the Bond movie looping in his head:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">[...] Men were just better at the practical stuff - facts and stats, dude. Facts and stats. Time to take charge. Holding one commanding hand up to halt Shirley, Roddy put the other on the knob of the closed door. Twisted and pushed in one swift movement.</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Locked."</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Yeah, try pulling?"</div><div style="text-align: left;">He pulled, and the door opened on an empty toilet.</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Ho," she said, "you're as stylish as a man bun." (from <i>Slough House</i>)</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In Herron's latest novel, a British revenge operation mounted on Russian turf in response to a Salisbury-style incursion has led to general stakes-raising, and to a deadly mission by some rather competent Russian agents. At the end of the novel, my favourite character's life hangs by a thread because he's just made a single, typically Slow Horse mistake; he opens a door. This door isn't dangerous because of what's on the far side (although Herron makes some nicely ironic play with the metaphor of opening a door onto a new stage of life). It's deadly because of what someone has put on the <i>doorknob</i>. Could parts of this narrative actually be true? Of course not; Herron's afterword reminds us that even if we notice "echoes" of "events in Wiltshire between March and July 2018", we should remember that "this novel is pure fiction". Of course it is.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Sergei Lebedev, a geologist by training now much better known for his serious and engrossing historical fiction, may have written the definitive Novichok novel in 2020 (translated by Antonina W. Bouis as <i>Untraceable</i> in 2021). In the original Russian, its title is <i>Debiutant</i>, Lebedev's transparent nickname for the poison, which Bouis translates as 'Neophyte'. Both capture the novelty echoed in the word Novichok (from <i>novyi</i>, Russian for 'new'). I won't review <i>Untraceable </i>at length here, since Robyn Jensen has penned <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/written-in-the-face-on-sergei-lebedevs-untraceable/" target="_blank">this excellent piece </a>in the <i>LA Review of Books</i>. Suffice it to say that Lebedev's real subject, as the Russian title emphasizes, is this elegant, untraceable poison pioneered in an ethically repellent ultra-secret Soviet closed city (inside a lab that makes the Siberian <i>sharashka </i>of Lionel Davidson's <i>Kolymsky Heights </i>look like Montessori playgroup). We learn about its origins (at the expense of the scientist's unborn child); its deadly successes; its long wait inside a meticulously insulated test tube (it accompanies the scientist into Western exile). We follow the GRU operatives sent to assassinate the scientist after his whereabouts are exposed. These agents, armed with another variant of Neophyte, are plagued by a succession of petty disasters that cumulatively unstring their mission. Like the real-life Salisbury hit squad, their cover is tourism. And we follow Neophyte at its terrible work. <i>Untraceable</i> was published just before Navalny's poisoning, but well after the Salisbury poisonings made headlines. The story opens with a sting (in more ways than one) against a retired spy who switched allegiances long ago. He realizes just too late that what he had taken for a "wasp sting" was in fact a skilful subcutaneous injection, delivered in a hilltop restaurant: </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">With a final effort, he rose and holding on to the walls made his way into the corridor. His constricted throat kept him from screaming, calling for help. On the porch, he bumped into a waiter carrying a tray of bottles and wineglasses. The waiter assumed he was drunk and moved aside. He fell from the porch, taking the waiter with him, hearing the crashing glass and hoping that everyone noticed and was looking. He hissed and gurgled into someone's ear: "Ambulance... police.. murder... not drunk... poison... I was poisoned."</div><div style="text-align: left;">And he collapsed, still hearing the sounds of the world but no longer understanding what they meant. (from <i>Untraceable</i>)</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The last of my trio is a novel not yet released, by redoubtable spy novelist Charles Cumming. Its immediate prequel (introducing recurring characters), <i>Box 88 </i>(2020), is the polar opposite of Herron's <i>Slough House</i>. Slough House is under the conventional radar because it's a dump for failed spies; whereas Box 88 is the Jack Reacher, the monster shake, the Perfect Manhattan of secret agent organizations. It's the best of MI6 and the CIA, kept secret from even those organizations and feeding back to senior government officials on a strictly need-to-know basis (and mostly deciding they don't need to know). Box 88 agents can do Black Ops without fear of media repercussions; they can track your Deliveroo orders by finding out your mobile number; they can put an electronic bubble around your house to stop you communicating with the outside world. <i>Judas 62</i>, the second book in the Box 88 series, opens in a Soviet closed city where biochemical weapons are developed, then leaps forward to 2020, mid-Covid-lockdown, to sketch the demise of an elderly Russian-general-cum-Box-88-mole who now lives under an assumed name in Connecticut. Two Russian agents, including an FSB officer disguised as a US mailman, break into the old man's cabin in the Adirondacks. Without leaving any other trace of their presence, they lace the former general's glaucoma medication with a poison which we recognize as a variant of Novichok. Sure enough, when the familiar symptoms take hold, the unfortunate old man only just has time to call his CIA handler before collapsing. Now we learn that JUDAS is "a list of Russian intelligence officers, military personnel and scientists living in the West who had been targeted for reprisal assassinations by Moscow. Alexander Litvinenko had been JUDAS 47, Sergei Skripal [...] JUDAS 14". Hang on - is this novel tracking fact, or fiction? We can't be sure, because who knows what else might have happened by the time <i>Judas 62</i> appears in print in October 2021. As up-to-the-minute as Cumming's novel is, life may well have stolen a lead on fiction yet again by the end of this year.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Just wait until we start to see the Havana Syndrome subgenre hitting our bookshelves...</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7phJb5BorPexZs_ztrUiZ2tIoNJmLFO16bIv0-xu_XpSI6hy7E_I8luKXEWQi8aoY5y32xKrpFTPieQqYADRbhhFt89_t5mAsf3516WoDBSaKNIYwhGcE3uSy0vUJBrRKlPsILtZ3Qsvh/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7phJb5BorPexZs_ztrUiZ2tIoNJmLFO16bIv0-xu_XpSI6hy7E_I8luKXEWQi8aoY5y32xKrpFTPieQqYADRbhhFt89_t5mAsf3516WoDBSaKNIYwhGcE3uSy0vUJBrRKlPsILtZ3Qsvh/" width="240" /></a></div><br /><br /></div>Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-54023880622620192502020-03-04T23:32:00.001+00:002020-03-05T08:16:53.475+00:00Kissing Tolstoy, or Dammit, Dostoyevsky!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO1ayGIPDFWWaU3evS6FCqnv0m20FnKdXEpbz-j6RHxLprBxAtY-Bg4KKb9b9TjdYEQvg0jgb1JzMOslSoXvNuaMZckrg70tFAw5bzknOlvwMoJfGMSYheo8eq1_lb439HMKhDAppFZRP7/s1600/Kissing+Tolstoy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="531" data-original-width="338" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO1ayGIPDFWWaU3evS6FCqnv0m20FnKdXEpbz-j6RHxLprBxAtY-Bg4KKb9b9TjdYEQvg0jgb1JzMOslSoXvNuaMZckrg70tFAw5bzknOlvwMoJfGMSYheo8eq1_lb439HMKhDAppFZRP7/s320/Kissing+Tolstoy.JPG" width="203" /></a><span style="color: black;">Regular
readers will appreciate that although my posts are often pretty highbrow, I'm most
interested in how what's currently perceived as "high culture" gets recycled by so-called "low culture". Hence I've
blogged about <a href="https://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2018/08/dostoevsky-and-poldark-or-brothers.html" target="_blank">Poldark and the <i>Brothers Karamazov</i></a>; <a href="https://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-silence-of-oligarchs-why-james.html" target="_blank">why James Norton doesn't speak Russian</a>; and even
about <a href="https://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2016/02/raskolnikov-in-shetland-or-anna.html" target="_blank">how the BBC uses Great Russian Novels </a>to finger TV
villains. There is, however, endless fun in exploring how one of the lowest
genres of all - so low you need a bathysphere for access, or at least a bath
with lots of scented bubbles and pink prosecco - interacts with classic
literature. I have in mind, of course, the Adult Romance. Readers, I give you
Penny Reid's <i>Kissing Tolstoy</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;">Fear not, this is no 19th century kiss-and-tell.
Tolstoy's presence in the story is purely vicarious (and to judge by the front
cover illustration, he's probably Pushkin, anyway). Russian literature,
especially <i>War and Peace</i>, inspires clever but self-doubting
sophomore Anna to sign up for a senior class in the topic. After running out on
a blind date with a man she found disturbingly attractive, Anna resigns herself to being single: as she warns the sisterhood, "Men who ride motorcycles,
who wear leather like a second skin, and look hot doing it, they don't date
ladies who idolize Tolstoy". After preparing herself for class by
reading every book on the reading list (basically all of Russian literature)
except for Chernyshevsky's <i>What Is To Be Done </i>and
Gorky's <i>Mother </i>(and we sympathize), Anna rejoices: "I was
obviously with my people. I was with the lovers of Dostoevsky and Chekhov"
(I do hope not). Only moments later, however, she's ruing her decision to take
Russian lit: "Dammit, Dostoyevsky! Why did you have to be so tragic and
compelling?" </span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;">Not at all predictably, her new professor, smouldering
second-generation Russian-Ukrainian emigre Luca Kroft, just happens to be the
guy from the bar. As their eyes meet over a stack of <i>Onegin</i> handouts,
Anna reflects: "Not only did he look good in leather pants, fabulous in a
suit with a bow-tie, was a world expert on Russian literature, but also he
apparently spoke Russian. Flawlessly. Flee! He is temptation incarnate. He will
steal your soul with sexiness." And while the ending may fail to surprise
("Ms Harris, can you explain what attracted you to the ripped, sensitive,
yet masterful Tolstoy-quoting bachelor who is so well-endowed his family funds
most of the University's tenured positions?"), we can still value Ms
Reid's novel for the innovative use she makes of the classics. First of all,
Anna and Luca verbalize their feelings for each other by comparing themselves
to Tolstoy's characters: he sees her as Natasha, and thus tells her to wait for
her Pierre. When Anna realizes that Luca has cast himself as Andrei, she needs to
come up with a new version of <i>War and Peace</i> in which Natasha
and Andrei stay together. Secondly, however, Anna draws eclectically on
19th-century prose to put her emotions in context. Here is her response to a
tense feedback session with Luca: "If only I had an autopsy to perform -
like Bazarov, in <i>Fathers and Sons</i> - it certainly would have
been an excellent excuse to flee." Best of all, however, is the moral
lesson that Anna (and Ms Reid) share with us in conclusion: "If Russian
literature and tragic novels had taught me one thing, it was this:
disappointment and heartache might be around the next corner. But adventure,
love, joy, and happiness - the living of a rich, meaningful life - was
now."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;">We applaud the message of <i>Kissing
Tolstoy </i>(although we fear Tolstoy would not). Another genre author who
knows her Lev Nikolaevich is Jilly Cooper. Here she is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/sep/02/anna-karenina-tolstoy-five-writers" target="_blank">summarizing <i>Anna Karenina</i></a> for <i>The Guardian</i>: '... [T]</span><span style="font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;"><span style="background: white; color: #121212;">here's lots of sex. And Tolstoy
obviously knew all the upper classes backwards, because he was a member of them
and moved in those circles. He captures the double standards very well. That's
the more terrible aspect of the story – Anna's brother shags the nanny and
immediately he's forgiven by the wife and nobody minds at all, and Vronsky goes
back into society and everybody goes, "Whoops, oh well, never mind!"</span></span><span style="color: black;">'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;">Thankfully, the Russian classics continue to inspire popular genre-writing: I'm intrigued by <i>Death with Dostoevsky</i>, an American campus thriller by Katherine Bolger Hyde (whose other titles include <i>Arsenic with Austen</i>,<i> Bloodstains with Bronte</i>, <i>Cyanide with Christie </i>and - more surprisingly - <i>Everything Tells Us About God</i>). I expect great things from it. Let's not forget, as Claire Whitehead points out in her excellent recent book <i><a href="http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Poetics-Early-Russian-Crime-Fiction-1860-1917" target="_blank">The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860-1917</a></i> that Dostoevsky himself never fully extricated his characters from the mire of genre fiction; or that, as scholar Cathy McAteer contends in her forthcoming monograph, Dostoevsky's translator David Magarshack's crime thriller <i>Big Ben Strikes Eleven</i> (1934) adapts several formative elements from <i>Crime and Punishment</i>. Clearly, crime pays, and so does Russian literature. As Dorothy Parker never wrote:</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;">Men frequently make passes</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;">At girls who take Tolstoy classes.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTJFr4Elqdi9d3SICqyZcmRz3eKrBP9bxC8RWUJz18rTkp6cqUD5OOe4FWtC6AriJ_hfVSpN-gYHU-5AbUWhqZCse4t0Zar5dzz2X5j7558YXXWCB11PzbxBb7Dfz-HjrqVcsf0L5rnJa8/s1600/Death+with+Dostoevsky.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="522" data-original-width="332" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTJFr4Elqdi9d3SICqyZcmRz3eKrBP9bxC8RWUJz18rTkp6cqUD5OOe4FWtC6AriJ_hfVSpN-gYHU-5AbUWhqZCse4t0Zar5dzz2X5j7558YXXWCB11PzbxBb7Dfz-HjrqVcsf0L5rnJa8/s320/Death+with+Dostoevsky.JPG" width="203" /></a><span style="color: black;">Further note to regular readers: Google stopped notifying me about new comments, and for a long time I sadly resigned myself to believing that no-one was reading this blog any more. It was a pleasant surprise when I finally fixed the glitch and discovered that I had many moons of unread comments awaiting approval! If you feel inspired or just critical, please do take a moment to sound off about one of my posts.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;">I should add that I have just discovered the website Netgalley and I promptly signed up to review two new anthologies of Gogol translations - by Susanne Fusso and Oliver Ready respectively. I will write about both in a new post soon!</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br /></div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-42342287837642716532020-01-27T16:39:00.000+00:002020-01-28T15:39:54.883+00:00The Fact That... (Or, Dinosaurs, Newburyport)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
The fact that it isn't possible to read <i>anything</i> these days without finding a reference to a major Russian writer, the fact that I was reading <i>Ducks, Newburyport</i> the other day and I really thought I was safe for once with all those cinnamon rolls and Obamacare but then the narrator segued into talking about Solzhenitsyn, the fact that she was remembering her beloved mother and then bam! Solzhenitsyn just pops up out of nowhere like this:<br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
[...] Mommy<span style="text-align: center;"> smoking, the fact that she used to lie on a towel on the beach and read a book while we swam, book, sunglasses, and I thought she was so beautiful, Jane Austen, the fact that one summer she was reading </span><i style="text-align: center;">Cancer Ward</i><span style="text-align: center;">, a huge book, and there was a big picture of him on the back, Solzhenitsyn, and he had a sort of Amish beard, the fact that I don't know if he picked that up in Vermont or it's a Russian thing, "It's a Russia thing", the fact that you never see Solzhenitsyn smiling [...]</span></div>
<br />
The fact that (and I'll stop this now) either Lucy Ellmann or her narrator need to get out more, as it's easy to see Solzhenitsyn smiling; he's practically an Internet meme. Here he is, cracking up:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEBEOf8PrU1GVgkOh-739dgiFm3czDy9yOiZXHgoRsIjZ7ds3k1SUX8tGyt3FqBOKE0p_JTSEN1MzcgdQ_JQzg5QQBi8no68ajOP3ueXVzGubJ-Vsm18ZqoQA0HZyZ6eF60wcmaHHEt1tz/s1600/Solzhenitsyn+smiling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="824" data-original-width="570" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEBEOf8PrU1GVgkOh-739dgiFm3czDy9yOiZXHgoRsIjZ7ds3k1SUX8tGyt3FqBOKE0p_JTSEN1MzcgdQ_JQzg5QQBi8no68ajOP3ueXVzGubJ-Vsm18ZqoQA0HZyZ6eF60wcmaHHEt1tz/s200/Solzhenitsyn+smiling.jpg" width="138" /></a></div>
<br />
The ubiquity of Russian literature references aside, I am ever-intrigued by those writers who weave a Russian classic into their plot. This kind of intertextuality is <i>de rigueur </i>in Russian prose fiction; overseas, it's more of a surprise - not least because it shows how other cultures have made these texts their own, re-inventing them for new. There is all too little critical literature on how Russian writing, in translation, has shaped non-Western cultures either directly (in terms of imitation) or indirectly (in terms of political or aesthetic attitudes). In Steven
Marks’ enlightening chapter section<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
about
Dostoevsky’s worldwide influence, he suggests that the great Russian nineteenth-century writers were so popular in societies such as Japan and the Middle East, where they penetrated in the early 1900s in translation, because 'Russian literature taught the art of social and psychological inquiry, and in particular dealt with the familiar problem of making the transition from a traditional to a new way of life' (p. 97). Hence we get international echoes, for example, J.M. Coetzee using Dostoevsky's own persona <i>and</i> characters in <i>The Master of Petersburg (</i>1994); and even more exotically, Atiq Rahimi's not extremely good recasting of <i>Crime and Punishment</i> in modern Afghanistan, <i>A Curse on Dostoevsky</i> (first published in French as <i><span style="background: white; color: #222222;">Maudit soit
Dostoïevksi</span></i>, 2011). Every so often, however, Russian originals get used in an even more subtle way: not as plot templates, but as plot <i>drivers</i> - demonstrating how meaningfully plots and archetypes can persist away from their home culture.</div>
<br />
My example for today is from <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #141412;">Négar Djavadi’s </span><i style="color: #141412;">Disoriental</i><span style="color: #141412;"> (2016; translated from the French by Tina Kover, 2018). As the narrator of the story is a female bisexual atheist Iranian refugee, it's fairly likely that Dostoevsky would not have personally approved of her. Nevertheless, <i>Crime and Punishment</i> defines a key moment of anagnorisis in the lives of the narrator's father and grandmother. (<i>Disoriental</i> tracks back and forth between a Paris fertility clinic, where the narrator is struggling to start her own family, with flashbacks to her parents and other relatives in mid-twentieth-century Iran). Here, her father, Darius, the most intelligent and politically aware person in the family (not least by his readings of Russian authors) has stolen a gun and is on the verge of shooting his despised father, Mirza Ali. </span></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-fk1l15qBHkxJlBHAc9Rm_o0hZsVEYLlo0Lo3ZSByb3alm62B5fhVX-CpLEJ8OeW6VhHwVp7MgwuzIwcOLf8kYVLd43MvlYgGV5O9z4qSv3EGiy6-rudzJHaM5z0KPhbIbyjSJC_u4dDd/s1600/Disoriental.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="932" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-fk1l15qBHkxJlBHAc9Rm_o0hZsVEYLlo0Lo3ZSByb3alm62B5fhVX-CpLEJ8OeW6VhHwVp7MgwuzIwcOLf8kYVLd43MvlYgGV5O9z4qSv3EGiy6-rudzJHaM5z0KPhbIbyjSJC_u4dDd/s320/Disoriental.jpg" width="206" /></a><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #141412;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #141412;"><i>Mother burst into the courtyard and inserted herself between the gun and Mirza Ali. [...] "Don't do this," she begged. "Please, son. Don't do this. If you pull that trigger, you'll be a criminal. You'll end up in prison, and..."</i></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #141412;"><i>As the words tumbled around in my grandmother's head, seemingly having no effect on her son, she became aware of an unexpected flash of clarity in the back of her mind. All of a sudden, she knew with absolute certainty the origin of the anguish that was eating away at him, She had felt the same thing when she read the book she'd found among Darius's things, its pages battered and filled with scribbled notes,. It was Darius she'd seen in that tortured character. Darius who was, who might become...</i></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #141412;"><i>"What do you want? To end up like Raskolnikov?" she shouted.</i></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #141412;">The shock of hearing his mother say that name was so great that </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #141412;">Darius’ arm fell to his side. Suddenly, reality</span> took
on a new dimension. He saw her now. No longer the powerless, docile mother, but
the woman who had read Dostoevsky, had patiently deciphered each sentence, had
educated herself in silence. This woman, he did not doubt, had the strength to
stand up for herself against her husband. She didn't need her son to defend her
any more (p. 65-6).</i></div>
<br />
So Darius doesn't shoot, and his mother leaves her husband for a new life in the city. And thus, long before <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Lolita_in_Tehran" target="_blank">Lolita</a></i>, Dostoevsky was empowering women in Tehran... Enough irony there to make Solzhenitsyn smile.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIUUUUgPdNgOqiHUMLPvUFg-mrEUh2lRptnlJ_WgSRJ0Umg6_CSmbm0qFrlP05c8GtJ09ugo6gSEj2g1HP75tJJI5ZJfHOEWUF4Bu_-C9zxBe45iDVcCjx6f78G-ewJ86FOyscrYC-d4Ne/s1600/solzhenitsyn+little+smile.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIUUUUgPdNgOqiHUMLPvUFg-mrEUh2lRptnlJ_WgSRJ0Umg6_CSmbm0qFrlP05c8GtJ09ugo6gSEj2g1HP75tJJI5ZJfHOEWUF4Bu_-C9zxBe45iDVcCjx6f78G-ewJ86FOyscrYC-d4Ne/s1600/solzhenitsyn+little+smile.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<b>Attributions:</b><br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Steven G. Marks, <i>How Russia Shaped The Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism</i> (Princeton, NY and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004)</li>
<li><a href="https://lifeondoverbeach.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Dover Beach blog</a>, for happy Solzhenitsyn pictures.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-16651998247690848052019-10-30T22:14:00.000+00:002019-10-30T22:14:33.380+00:00Nothing but spiders: Bobok in the bathhouse<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Russian culture has no
shortage of spooks – and I don’t mean Stirlitz. It’s that time of year when we creep
into the cobwebby bathhouse with Pushkin’s Tatyana, organize a BYOB barbecue
for the local skeletons (Pushkin again – <i>Belkin Tales</i>), or daringly defy
vampires (Tolstoy – not the cranky one, but Aleksei Konstantinovich). If you
really want to make music with the children of the night, you can hardly do
better than reading Dostoevsky: FMD is reliably Gothic and ghastly, if not
always ghostly. Never forget that there are actual ghosts in <i>Crime and
Punishment</i>: Svidrigailov, not a man to stint himself, has two. Both perished
in extremely suspicious circumstances: Filka, his manservant, and Marfa
Petrovna, his wealthy but querulous wife. My favourite is Filka: ‘“We’d only
just buried him and I yelled, absent-mindedly, ‘Filka, my pipe!’ and in he came
and walked straight over to the cabinet where I keep my pipes. I’m sitting
there, thinking, ‘He’s come to get his own back,' because we’d had an almighty
row shortly before he died. ‘How dare you,’ I say, ‘come in here with holes out
at your elbows? Get out, you rascal!’ He turned, walked out and never came
back.”’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">As for ghoulish
reflections on the ‘life to come’, Svidrigailov nails it: ‘“What if there’s
nothing but spiders there or something like that? […] We’re forever imagining
eternity as an idea beyond our understanding, something vast, vast. But why
must it be vast? Just imagine what if, instead of all that, there’ll just be
some little room, some sooty bath-hut, say, with spiders in every corner, and
that’s it, that’s eternity?”’</span><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">*</span></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It’s always a little
difficult to move the conversation on from a question like that, so I propose a
sideways dash… into the cemetery, where all is not as you might expect. What
happens if the dead, instead of going quietly into that good topsoil, treat the
afterlife like a Senior Common Room after the college servants have fetched the port – or, even worse, like a Saturday night outside the kebab shop off the
High Street? Dostoevsky’s <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72bo/">strange 1873 short
story <i>Bobok</i></a><i> </i>(which, like most of his late-career shorter
work, first appeared in his <i>Diary of a Writer</i> column in the newspaper <i>The
Citizen</i>) pictures precisely this scenario: a freelance translator, tired
after helping to heft a stranger’s coffin at a funeral, overhears corpses
chatting in a graveyard. Their conversation is, to say the least, unedifying:
although puzzled by their additional lease of life, they make no bones (ahem)
about returning to their mortal preoccupations of lustfulness, gambling, and moral turpitude.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 42.5pt;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">“Tell me first of all how it is we can talk? I've been wondering ever
since yesterday. We are dead and yet we are talking and seem to be moving—and
yet we are not talking and not moving. What jugglery is this?”<br />
“[…] when we were living on the surface we mistakenly thought that death there
was death. The body revives, as it were, here, the remains of life are
concentrated, but only in consciousness. I don't know how to express it, but
life goes on, as it were, by inertia. […] everything is concentrated somewhere
in consciousness and goes on for two or three months ... sometimes even for
half a year.... There is one here, for instance, who is almost completely
decomposed, but once every six weeks he suddenly utters one word, quite
senseless of course, about some bobok, 'Bobok, bobok,' but you see that an
imperceptible speck of life is still warm within him."<br />
"It's rather stupid. Well, and how is it I have no sense of smell and yet
I feel there's a stench?"<br />
"That ... he-he.... Well, on that point our philosopher is a bit foggy.
[…] the stench one perceives here is, so to speak, moral—he-he! It's the stench
of the soul, he says, that in these two or three months it may have time to
recover itself ... and this is, so to speak, the last mercy.... Only, I think, Baron,
that these are mystic ravings very excusable in his position...."<br />
"Enough; all the rest of it, I am sure, is nonsense. The great thing is
that we have two or three months more of life and then—bobok! I propose to
spend these two months as agreeably as possible […]. Gentlemen! I propose to
cast aside all shame." [translation by Constance Garnett]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 42.5pt;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Stranger yet, however,
is a widely acclaimed modernist novel by Irish writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain, <i>Cré
na Cille </i>(<i>Graveyard Clay</i>,<i> </i>1949), which is narrated almost
wholly from the perspective of recently buried corpses in a small Connemara graveyard.
Episodes of conversation – exposing village scandals, and the cupidity and
arrogance of chief mournee </span><span lang="EN-US">Caitríona Pháidín</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> in particular – are interrupted by soliloquies
from the mysterious Last Trump (not Donald). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 42.5pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">“Jesus, Mary and
Joseph! Am I alive or am I dead? Are these here alive or dead? They’re all
giving out as much as they did above ground! I thought that once i was laid in
the grave, free from chores and household cares and fear of wind or weather,
there’d be some peace in store for me… but why all this squabbling in the
graveyard clay?...”<br />
“Who are you? Are you long here? Do you hear me? Don’t be shy. Feel as free
here as you would at home. I’m Muraed Phroinsias.”<br />
“For god’s sake! Muraed Proinsias who lived next door to me all my life. I’m
Caitríona. Caitríona Pháidín. Do you remember me, Muraed, or do you lose all
memory of life here? […]”<br />
“[..] Life’s the same here, Caítriona, as it was in the ‘ould country’, except
that all we see is the grave we’re in and we can’t leave the coffin. You won’t
hear the living either, or know what’s happening to them, apart from what the
newly buried dead will tell you. But we’re neighbours once again, Caitríona.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 42.5pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Fittingly for such a polyphonic novel, </span><i>Cré na Cille</i> can be enjoyed in <a href="http://languagehat.com/cre-na-cille-translated-twice/">either or both of
two recent translations</a> (from Irish; the one quoted above is by Liam Mac
Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson). Did Ó Cadhain crib the plot of his best-known
work directly from Dostoevsky? Some degree of influence is probable, as Ó Cadhain
was a reader of Russian literature and even a scholar of the language; but he
claimed that he was inspired with the idea for <i>Cré na Cille</i> when digging
up an actual graveyard during his internment in the 1940s. The plot, or indeed crypt,
thickens <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>even further when we get to the
publication of Aleksandr Sharov’s <i>The Death and Resurrection of A.M. Butov</i>
(1984). Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with <a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-kingdom-of-agamemnon-in-memory-of.html" target="_blank">the name of Vladimir Sharov</a>, the late and great historian and novelist. Skilled and insightful as he
was, Vladimir Sharov no doubt owed his Soviet-intellectual pass to the fact
that he was the son of Aleksandr Sharov, born Asher Israelievich Nurenberg
(1909-1984), a bibulous but none the less brilliant writer and journalist. Much
of Sharov <i>père</i>’s works belong to the genres of children’s literature or
popular science (he was, briefly, a student of the geneticist Nikolai Kol’tsov,
who was reimagined as a kind of Russian Dr Frankenstein in Bulgakov’s 1925
novella <i>Heart of a Dog</i>), but this late novel – completed in the year of the
author’s death – is a serious study of the consequences of dying, but not going
away. Effectively extinct, but still conscious, Butov revisits his typical Soviet
life – and its moral and emotional consequences.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 42.5pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">Butov was lying
in the newly opened Second Municipal Cemetery of the town of T, which was then
simply known as “The New Cemetery”. There were still very few deceased there,
and there was no-one at all near Butov’s plot. This plot of his had been
temporarily marked out with a string draped between four slender poles.<br />
The plot was square and fairly spacious […]. Farther off, on all sides, were
more squares of the same sort, all marked out with string and poles. Only one
of them boasted a tall black cross erected on a stone plinth. Beyond lay more
flat ground, narrow little paths between the plots, which were half-swamped in
water, with a greyish-brown plank fence on the horizon. It was an unattractive
place – no doubt why it had been selected as a cemetery. <br />
“And rightly so,” he thought, feebly.<br />
His thoughts revolved dully, heavily, as they do in the gap between swallowing
a sleeping pill and falling asleep. He had been in this condition steadily and
unchangingly since the awful pain in his heart had suddenly broken off and
Butov had thought at first, “Well, that’s good!”, but he had not felt glad and,
in the absence of gladness – and of sorrow too – he guessed:<br />
“Well, I’ve died, met my Maker, as they say.”<br />
[…]The damp was not seeping into his coffin. The well-fitted planks smelled
dryly of resin. […] All the time, he was thinking about one thing or another,
without the slightest gap, but differently, than before; if a cheerful thought
entered his head, he felt no cheer; if something sorrowful, the sorrow stayed
away. Thinking like this was unusual and exhausting. “It’s all because I’ve
died,” Butov reasoned. “I wonder, how long will this go on? For eternity? How
terrifying, if it lasts for eternity.” </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">[</span><span lang="EN-US">my</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span><span lang="EN-US">translation</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">; </span><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;">Смерть</span></i><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span></i><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;">и</span></i><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span></i><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;">воскрешение</span></i><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span></i><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;">А</span></i><i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">. </span></i><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;">М</span></i><i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">. </span></i><i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: RU;">Бутова</span></i><span lang="RU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span><span lang="EN-US">is</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span><span lang="EN-US">available on Amazon Kindle in Russian].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 42.5pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I’ll let you know what happens next, as I
haven’t finished reading Aleksandr Sharov’s novel; suffice it to say that while
I’m sure Sharov Sr <i>had </i>read <i>Bobok</i>, he definitely wasn’t
plagiarizing </span><i>Cré na Cille</i>, all superficial similarities aside. Now that <i>would </i>be spooky.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In other news: while sights like this one</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsoZAslZ4X7zOibn6W7_bIPyhPvK720th4EQkra3P5fj5PrWJByzj8ebdayOyyRHvcNaXCvjzTiIO-Uz47pT2E-nOwOKon2xdqbT_6NUua6C2xtfggmFF07-B20BQEwIV5ctnMi-rAchnN/s1600/Boris+pumpkin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="399" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsoZAslZ4X7zOibn6W7_bIPyhPvK720th4EQkra3P5fj5PrWJByzj8ebdayOyyRHvcNaXCvjzTiIO-Uz47pT2E-nOwOKon2xdqbT_6NUua6C2xtfggmFF07-B20BQEwIV5ctnMi-rAchnN/s200/Boris+pumpkin.jpg" width="132" /></a></div>
still
terrify me, Halloween has lost its horror since Brexit was postponed yet again.
In fact, instead of trick-or-treating, I’ll be speaking about Alisa Ganieva and
Guzel’ Yakhina and their brilliant translators Carol Apollonio and Lisa C.
Hayden (respectively) at the Institute for Modern Languages Research-funded
conference <span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">“<a href="https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/20101">Translating Women:
Breaking Borders and Building Bridges in the English-Language Book Industry</a>” </span>in London on 31<sup>st</sup> October and November
1<sup>st</sup>. I recently joined Twitter (twitterati can follow me at @RussianLitDino)
and I hope to live-tweet part of the conference (#TWconf19, #WIT). Do tune in
for a prehistoric perspective on trending translations.<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">*</span></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Both quotations are from Oliver Ready’s 2015 Penguin Classics translation
of <i>Crime and Punishment</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-69669522174063723832019-08-14T18:41:00.000+01:002019-08-14T18:41:51.858+01:00Oblivion and Immortality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Preserved from the passage of time, unaware of changing epochs, facing traumatic re-entry into a profoundly altered world - no, it's not the story of my life as an extinct vertebrate, it's a trope of post-Communist culture. The book that inspired this post, Olga Slavnikova's 2001 <i>Bessmertnyi</i> (or <i>The Immortal</i>), was released this year in Columbia University Press' Russian Library series as <i>The Man Who Couldn't Die</i>, translated by Marian Schwartz.<br />
<br />
<i>The Man Who Couldn't Die</i> begins as the story of a decorated World War II veteran, Alexei Kharitonov, now ancient, speechless and almost completely paralyzed, whose pension is all that keeps his family above the poverty line in post-Soviet Russia. His lonely wife and ambitious stepdaughter (a TV journalist) connive to maintain an artificial "Red Corner" in their apartment to delude the sick man that the Soviet era never ended, complete down to a framed picture of Brezhnev on the wall; for fourteen years, they read aloud to him from heavily edited newspapers and present doctored videos as real-time television news. Only the doctor and the "benefits rep", an energetically dreadful woman whose job it is to check that invalids and pensioners are still eligible for government payments, ever visit the Kharitonovs' flat, so the illusion survives indefinitely. Until one afternoon, Kharitonov's wife discovers that her husband, who in wartime expertly deployed a silken noose to kill fascists, is now indefatigably, stubbornly using his one mobile hand to steal and stockpile strings, ties, belts and anything else he can filch, hide, and gradually twitch and knot into a noose to throttle himself.<br />
<br />
"It turned out that Alexei Afanasievich had <i>always</i> been the creator and center of Soviet reality, which he'd managed to hold onto a little longer; and now this reality, squeezed to the size of their standard-issue living space, retained its permanence, inasmuch as its pillar had not disappeared; on the contrary, it was trapped along with all its medals glowing in their boxes [...]. Now, though, the veteran, who had turned into a body, into the horizontal content if a high trophy bed, had suddenly declared war on his own immortality."<br />
<br />
Alexei's wife respects him even more for the dignity and fixity of purpose he brings to his sustained, if ineffectual, suicide attempts; after all, he has no idea that in killing himself, he would also destroy his family's only reliable source of income. <i>The Man Who Couldn't Die </i>is intense, claustrophobic, bitterly funny, and of course ironic: the bodily claustrophobia of Alexei's existence is echoed most closely not by the Soviet era or its afterlife in the family's Red Corner, but by the corruption and chaos of New Russia - which eventually spills over into the Kharitonovs' apartment.<br />
<br />
The conceit of an elderly person trapped in an artificial chronotope (like Alexei Kharitonov surrounded by his medals) reminds most people of the film G<i>oodbye, Lenin </i>(2003), where a sick woman's children try to protect her from a potentially fatal shock by pretending that the Berlin Wall never came down. Indeed, according to Mark Lipovetsky's Introduction to <i>The Man Who Couldn't Die</i>, Slavnikova felt that the makers of the film had plagiarized her idea. Another post-Communist author to use a similar trope is José Eduardo Agualusa, whose 2013 novel about an Angolan woman who walls herself up on the roof of an apartment building was published in Daniel Hahn's translation (from the Portuguese) in 2015 as <i>A General Theory of Oblivion</i>. (The book famously won the 2017 Dublin IMPAC prize, at the time the most lucrative award in literary translation). Having bricked herself up on the roof terrace at the first sign of civil unrest, Portuguese expat Ludo survives for twenty-eight years on a diet of tinned food, captured birds, and frankly inappropriate substances, overlooking civil war and family tragedy in Angola's capital - until an orphan boy discovers her refuge and gradually brings her back to the world, and her surviving family. The story has a surprisingly happy ending - even if <i>The Man Who Couldn't Die</i> has the edge on catharsis. Can any of my readers recommend similar books on individuals brought back to real life after a long period of trance, delusion, or hibernation? No <i>Jurassic Park</i> jokes, please.</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-19755699261103108812019-03-19T22:15:00.001+00:002019-03-20T11:39:54.141+00:00Dostoevsky: a ridiculous thing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
My fellow (non-saurian) blogger Languagehat wrote an <a href="http://languagehat.com/dostoevskys-adolescent/" target="_blank">interesting
but critical post</a> about Dostoevsky's <i>The Adolescent</i> (1875) earlier
this week. Here he calls it 'one of the most annoying novels I’ve ever read',
drawing attention to its 'unreliable narrator' and 'ridiculous' adolescent
style, including 'endless coincidences, overhearings, [and] surprise encounters'.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of my avatars has penned a much more sympathetic review
of Dora O'Brien's recent translation of <i>The Adolescent</i> which,
if you are a <i>TLS</i> subscriber, you can read <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/accidental-family/" target="_blank">here</a>. (If you're not, you can be tantalized by the first
paragraph). Clearly, Languagehat and I have divergent views on the book that I
call 'understandably, if undeservedly, the least read of Dostoevsky's mature
novels'. His blog post concludes meditatively, 'I can’t help but wonder what
Dostoevsky’s reputation would have been if he had died just after publishing
this, never having written the <i>Writer’s Diary</i> or <i>The
Brothers Karamazov</i> — I suspect he’d be remembered as a very fine
writer like Turgenev rather than Tolstoy’s equal and rival. Fortunately, he
survived and triumphed.' <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This notion of the incomplete obituary – what we might say
about great writers if they had died before writing their legacy works –
returned to my mind the following day when I opened a volume of the Argentine
author Ernesto Sabato’s essays. I was chasing a particular essay by Sabato, “La
Resistencia” (“Resistance”), which is quoted by contemporary novelist Julian Fuks
as the epigram to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his</i> novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Resistance</i>, which in turn, as a
narrative of troubled metafictional fraternity, can be traced back to Dostoevsky
through Nabokov’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Brothers
Karamazov</i>. I couldn’t find Sabato’s “Resistance” but I did find, in a
charming anthology of tiny essays from 1971 called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">El Escritor i sus fantasmas</i>, a piece called “Dostoievsky juzgado
por contemporaneous” (“Dostoevsky judged by his contemporaries”). Here, Sabato
picks up Dostoevsky’s career in the late 1840s, around the time of publication of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Double</i>. Having briefly been the toast of St Petersburg literary
society for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poor Folk</i>, Dostoevsky's star
has fallen. His peers mock his appearance, his style, his pride. Turgenev and
Nekrasov cruelly co-write a stinging stanza, which I give in Sabato’s witty
Spanish version (the original knight, after all, was also Spanish):<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span lang="FR" style="mso-ansi-language: FR;">Caballero de la
triste figura<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span lang="FR" style="mso-ansi-language: FR;">Dostoievsky, mi
querido fanfarrón,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span lang="FR" style="mso-ansi-language: FR;">Sobre la nariz de
la literatura,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
No eres más que una
leve erupción.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sabato goes on:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
'The addressee of these lines lost confidence in his genius;
many of the pages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Double</i>,
which he was writing, seemed to him ridiculous, superficial, useless. He was
living in a kind of hell (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">un infierno</i>).
He had lost the euphoria of that time so near and so far away when Belinsky had
lauded him to the skies. He heard laughter all around him; he mistrusted the
smiles of his circle (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">capilla</i>). Three
years after the memorable night when Belinsky and Nekrasov had wept at the
reading of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poor Folk</i>, he was a broken
man (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">un hombre terminado</i>). He was
saved from either madness or suicide by (paradoxically) prison. Buried alive (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Enterrado en vida</i>),
he found the opportunity to reflect on the vanity of all things. While he was
still sealed up in Siberia, forgotten, one of the individuals who had been part
of his circle, a certain Panaev, remarked: “We were on the point of being
besotted with one of the little idols of the day. We showed him off in the
streets of the capital, we trumpeted his glory everywhere. Eventually he lost
his way. He was immediately abandoned by all of us. Poor man! We destroyed him
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lo hemos aniquilado</i>), we turned him
into a ridiculous thing.'"<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Imagine if Dostoevsky really had stopped with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poor Folk</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Double</i>, stifled by Siberia, suicide, or both. Would we remember
him today as a footnote to Gogol, a minor literary figure (like Ivan Panaev
himself), a “ridiculous thing”?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thankfully, Dostoevsky returned and rebuilt his life and
reputation, writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adolescent</i>… and
one or two other novels.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br /></div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-85749064184465478962018-10-25T14:10:00.000+01:002018-10-25T14:10:58.515+01:00The Milkman Always Rings Twice, or Gogol Goes to Belfast<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"You're a wit, sir, you really are. Nothing escapes your notice! Such a playful mind, sir! And such a gift for winkling out comedy... heh-heh! They say that Gogol, among the writers, had that knack, do they not?" says Porfiry Petrovich, the detective in Dostoevsky's <i>Crime and Punishment</i>, with his usual coruscating irony (he can't resist teasing his suspect one more time: despite knowing perfectly well that Gogol is the writer in question, his rhetorical question forces Raskolnikov to confirm it. Never relax around a rhetorical detective).*<br />
<br />
As a dinosaur, I don't normally venture into the hyper-contemporary playground of major literary awards; I usually hide somewhere to watch the fallout (also my strategy for surviving the Cretaceous extinction event 66 million years ago). For example, I wouldn't want to stand too close to Tim Parks since he just published an excellent, thought-provoking but unabashedly cycad-shaking feature <i><a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/10/23/why-translation-deserves-scrutiny/" target="_blank">Why Translation Deserves Scrutiny</a></i> in the <i>NYRB</i> (he may have rather heavily implied that there are <b>too many </b>awards for translators). But I digress. I have left my cave to discuss Anna Burns' novel <i>Milkman</i>, which, as you probably know even if you do live in a cave, has just won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. This is the fifth year in which American authors have been eligible for the prize, and only the third time since they became eligible in which an American author has <i>not</i> won it. It is also the first time the prize has been won by a Northern Irish writer. What's more, the author herself, despite having won prizes and acclaim for her previous two novels, has experienced health problems and financial hardship; <i>Milkman</i>'s acknowledgements include a food bank and a charity. Hence the allocation of the prize to Anna Burns has become a novel in its own right, a tale that can be interpreted in as many ways as there are literary critics (or indeed, journalists).<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUOFbzIULySlmu4CJ2Mzuc5YBjl7d9CCGQyQy1ee0ACcvOv-wNDWe7VEAXDxESwhX3lkkyWRmu4FoxBmwCb28EFM_YGE_qiN4K-Blxx3uBfKZcCeuAnL4-dnzLCwiJ1bA_xvmrJqJDdNCm/s1600/anna+burns.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="251" data-original-width="725" height="110" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUOFbzIULySlmu4CJ2Mzuc5YBjl7d9CCGQyQy1ee0ACcvOv-wNDWe7VEAXDxESwhX3lkkyWRmu4FoxBmwCb28EFM_YGE_qiN4K-Blxx3uBfKZcCeuAnL4-dnzLCwiJ1bA_xvmrJqJDdNCm/s320/anna+burns.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<i>The Guardian </i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/22/anna-burns-man-booker-prize-food-banks" target="_blank">headlines</a> the story of Burns' success as 'more than a fairytale - it's a lesson', while <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/23/booker-winner-milkman-defies-challenging-bestseller-anna-burns" target="_blank">another article</a> reminds us that the book is considered 'challenging' (which is apparently bad), before explaining why it is not actually challenging, before returning with relief to the more interesting story of its author. A <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/allison-pearson/" target="_blank">senior <i>Telegraph</i> columnist</a> - and I apologize in advance for not having read the whole article, because, for some reason, I don't subscribe to the <i>Telegraph</i> - on the other hand, calls <i>Milkman </i> ''not the best book on the [Man Booker] shortlist [...] not even the best book on the longlist" (impressive that the columnist took the time to read all 11 longlisted books). The 'oddest, most impenetrable' <i>Milkman</i> won the prize, she theorizes, for political reasons - as a way of pre-empting accusations that the Man Booker is being reverse-colonized by US novelists. I wonder whether Anna Burns finds it more irritating to be feted for her life story by people who love her book without reading it, or to have her win dismissed as a cheap geopolitical fix by people who read her book and hated it. I'm not going to defend the excellent <i>Milkman</i> here, because others can do that. The <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/08/anna-burns-milkman-review-man-booker" target="_blank"><i>New Statesman</i> praises</a> a 'brilliantly realized extended metaphor for a totalitarian state [...] a work of timely
universality, it is also a distinctly Irish novel, a darkly mirthful satire
with a twist of Beckettian melancholy and an anarchic touch of Swift'. Christopher Tayler in the <i>LRB</i> <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n20/christopher-tayler/the-psychologicals" target="_blank">does a very good job of justifying <i>Milkman</i>'s success</a>. Not only has he read Burns' two previous books as well, he finds <i>Milkman</i>'s strengths: 'the density and tightness of the plotting behind the narrator's apparently rambling performance', its combination of 'wild sentences and [...] immense writerly discipline', its 'optimistic ending'.<br />
<br />
Enough on Swift and Beckett: not one critic I have seen recognizes <i>Milkman</i>'s homage to Gogol. Tayler comes close when he describes one of the novel's standout devices: never using names for individual characters, places, religions, political parties, or even countries. The setting is clearly 1970s Belfast, but it isn't (as Tayler agrees) 'a Russian novel-style town of B___'; it is merely 'town' with coded topographies of 'dot dot dot places' where young people get up to mischief, the 'red-light street', where unmarried couples cohabit, the 'ten-minute area' with its three empty churches, abandoned shops, and unattended bus stop, and 'the usual place' (or graveyard). <i>Milkman</i>'s narrator is a nineteen-year-old girl from a Catholic family whose marked eccentricity is 'reading-while-walking'; everywhere she goes, to work, to French lessons, to the chip shop, even crossing the wasteland of the ten-minute zone, she reads her way through nineteenth-century novels ("because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century"). Reading-while-walking is the first trait the narrator is enjoined to abandon by her would-be seducer, a fortyish paramilitary hard man; soon she realizes this habit is making her an outsider within her own community. She is becoming "beyond-the-pale". Her friends and family consider reading-while walking "unfathomable", "unyielding and confounding" (says the character called maybe-boyfriend), "not safe, not natural, not dutiful to self", "creepy, perverse, obstinately determined", and - according to her best friend - therefore worse than the socially normalized behaviour of handling Semtex. The narrator insists right back that reading-while-walking is not neglect of self, nor even a rejection of her community, as it might seem: it is "vigilance not to be vigilant", a kind of informed non-alignment with the heavily coded public interactions of her fellow citizens. The narrator realizes that,<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Even at the outer limits of absurdity and contradiction people will make up anything. Then they will believe and build on this anything. It was true that, given the time and place, I might have been scary, walking around, terrorising the neighbourhood with 'How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled With Ivan Nikiforovich', but it wasn't just me. In their own idiosyncratic ways, an awful lot of other people were pretty scary here as well.</i></div>
<br />
On another occasion, she calls in on car-obsessed maybe-boyfriend to find him mooning over a remnant of a vintage racing car and difficult to distract:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>I was unclear if he was still on 'car' or had moved his attention now to me. I suspected it was car but at some moments you can't stop to have an argument, so we kissed and he said he was getting turned on and was I not turned on and I said could he not look how I was looking, then he murmured what's this and I murmured what's what and he prodded something in my hand which I'd forgotten which turned out to be Gogol's 'The Overcoat' so he said he'd just set it there, meaning the table, which he did which was okay and we were about maybe to go to the carpet or to the settee or somewhere when there were voices. They were coming up the path and were followed by raps on his door. </i></div>
<br />
As these glimpses of <i>The Overcoat</i> as gooseberry and of the two quarrelling Ivans suggest, Gogol is something of a leitmotif in <i>Milkman</i>. For starters, he has the privilege of a name. Moreover, he, like other mentioned novelists, adds structure to the narrator's life: '"Where's my Gogol?"' she thinks, protectively, when maybe-boyfriend's house gets over-crowded with classic car enthusiasts. The entire novel is woven out of <i>skaz</i>, Gogol's infamous interpolation of colourful and idiosyncratic oral narrative. The narrator's tale, half-deposition, half-anecdote, winds in and out of the voices of her community, her parents, her charismatic French teacher, Milkman, 'real milkman', 'maybe-boyfriend', 'chef', 'third brother-in-law', 'wee sisters', and the rest of the surprisingly empathetic cast. This is satire, certainly, and most certainly Irish satire despite the carefully neutral labels of 'renouncers-of-the-state', 'over-the-way', 'the country over the water', but comparisons to Swift and Beckett are simply a different kind of cheap geopolitical fix. Burns' studied anonymization of a very specific community at a very specific (and troubled) historical epoch has the odd effect of creating an allegorical u-topia (in the literal sense of nowhere-land) which reminds me of Saramago's magical realism, those suspended plots where readers and characters adapt to an insane but internally coherent system, until a final shock or reversal, as in <i>Blindness</i> or <i>The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis</i>. Moments of absurd horror (a cat beheaded by an antique Nazi bomb, a pile of dead dogs in a residential street) do elevate <i>Milkman</i> momentarily into dark fantasy. Both absurdity and observation are united by Burns' gift for 'winkling out comedy' even in the middle of crisis and of personal and social disintegration, which according to that leading literary critic Porfiry Petrovich, quoted above, makes <i>Milkman</i> such a Gogolain book. No surprise to Nabokov, <a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2011/12/revising-revizor-with-roddy-doyle-or.html" target="_blank">who felt that only an Irishman (or Irishwoman, one hopes) should translate the Russian author</a>. Burns, who studied Russian at UCL in the late eighties, clearly spent time there under Gogol's <i>Overcoat</i>.<br />
<br />
Anyone curious whether <i>Milkman</i> makes suitable reading for their daily commute will appreciate the diligence of the <i>Daily Mail</i>, which <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-6283701/Anna-Burns-Northern-Irish-winner-Man-Booker-Prize.html" target="_blank">skips over the book's boring plot and Burns' uninteresting indigence</a> to ask the Man Booker judges where you can safely peruse your copy.** '<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">Questioned on whether the work was too
challenging for the average reader, [Kwame Anthony] Appiah defended the choice saying: “I have
never thought that being readable on the Tube was an important feature of a
novel.”'. So, best not to read <i>Milkman</i> on the train. But can you read-it-while-walking?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<b>Notes</b><br />
<b>*As ever, I am citing Oliver Ready's 2014 translation of <i>Crime and Punishment</i> (Penguin Classics), p. 425.</b><br />
<b>**The </b><i style="font-weight: bold;">Mail</i><b>'s journalist (who may have misread Burns' publishers' bio-note) entertainingly represents </b><i style="font-weight: bold;">Milkman </i><b>as her "fourth" novel, raising the possibility that there is a lost "<i>Milkman </i>Part I" out there in manuscript limbo, a kind of mirror image of the destroyed second half of <i>Dead Souls</i>...</b></div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-27891373778055141162018-09-25T15:49:00.000+01:002018-09-26T10:41:03.593+01:00Over the Precipice with Cardinal Points<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I rashly promised a review of Volume 8 of the literary journal <a href="http://www.stosvet.net/cp2.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Cardinal Points</a>. This issue is edited by Boris Dralyuk and intriguingly dedicated, like the previous seven, to "DeStalinization of the Air". Here are my impressions of my first real <i>Cardinal Points</i> experience, greatly facilitated by the ease of downloading the journal issue to Kindle at minimal cost. The pagination isn't pretty, but the selection of translated prose, poetry, and ruminative essays more than makes up for this shortfall.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxU5OZu08cusDT_-r7ZklAoHUG2GAFni6Tm7xy3V9bb7gdtZbV-DNuSsfagstPqDl2hei4lchFC_8za0kKZnCYY6IU35WLrSU_tWYGlydYIY8J4czSlK8Y5tvOiNyh9c9J0LuF_1yVFHaM/s1600/yurifelsen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="222" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxU5OZu08cusDT_-r7ZklAoHUG2GAFni6Tm7xy3V9bb7gdtZbV-DNuSsfagstPqDl2hei4lchFC_8za0kKZnCYY6IU35WLrSU_tWYGlydYIY8J4czSlK8Y5tvOiNyh9c9J0LuF_1yVFHaM/s200/yurifelsen.jpg" width="148" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yuri Felsen, 1894-1943</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
First revelation: exciting translations of forgotten works by two outstanding Russian emigre authors, Yuri Felsen (pen name of Nikolai Berngardovich Freydenshtein) and Vasily Yanovsky (two short stories translated by Yanovsky's wife, Isabella Levitin). <i>Cardinal Points 8 </i>features an extract from Felsen's novel <i>Deceit </i>[<i>Obman</i>], 1930, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, who is himself <a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2014/09/playfulness-and-beauty-bryan-karetnyk.html" target="_blank">a former guest on this blog</a> and has recently published yet another volume of Gazdanov in translation. Yanovsky, one of the great Russian tradition of writer-doctors, is represented by two short stories translated by his wife, Isabella Levitin; both Yanovsky and Levitin were friends of W.H. Auden.<br />
<br />
Even without having read Felsen's original, I take my hat off to the fiendishly complex prose mastered by Bryan in, for example, the following lines, where <i>Deceit</i>'s protagonist Volodya writes about his quest to find the perfect woman:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>I have always wanted not only to become a support, but also to find a support - a friend, an opponent, an intellect, a force - and not on account of weakness, but rather because of some (granted, inconspicuous, not even wholly intentional) hubris, so that there come about a fascinating, daring contest, a comradely and romantic union, on equal terms, instead of a swift and foolish takeover, so that my partner already be on the same spiritual plain </i>[sic?]<i>, rarely attained by women </i>[thanks, Nikolai Berngardovich!]<i>, when everything dignified and precious, everything characteristic of love - mutual reliance, ennoblement, support - becomes, for both parties, deserved and assured. Such emotional depth in women, one that rivals my own (or that which I ascribe myself), is the vestige of experience, struggle, happiness and failure, and is in no wise the result of a miracle</i>.</div>
<br />
Unexpectedly, by the end of the extract, Volodya seems to have found himself the perfect woman - the lovely <i>and</i> forthright Lyolya. Can it last? We'll have to wait for Bryan to publish his translation of the full novel, or else find the Russian original. Sadly, for all the sparkle of his prose, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-truest-testament-on-the-life-and-art-of-yuri-felsen/#!" target="_blank">Felsen's life was tragically cut short</a>. Yanovsky enjoyed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/26/arts/vs-yanovsky-a-soviet-emigre-author-and-physician-dies-at-83.html" target="_blank">a much longer span</a>: his two stories published here are entertainingly diverse. The first describes the personalities of mutinous nurses in a hospital ward, while the second, "The Adventures of Oscar Quinn", is a science-fiction fable about the lost continent of Atlantis which reminded me of Wells. In non-Russianist news, I also enjoyed the extract from Romanian author Delia Radu's contemporary novel <i><a href="http://www.eurolitnetwork.com/authors-pitch-the-book-of-becoming-mothers-by-delia-radu/" target="_blank">The Book of Becoming Mothers</a></i>.<br />
<br />
While I won't comment on the poetry translated in this volume (dinosaurs should stick to prose), my second revelation was Maria Tsvetaeva's drama <i>Fortune </i>(<i>Fortuna</i>, ), translated by Maya Chhabra. I did not know that Tsetaeva had written a play (in fact, she wrote at least three verse plays); this one retells, in five colourful episodes, the life of Armand-Louis de Gontaut, Duc de Lauzun (later Duc de Biron and generally known as Biron, 1747-1793). Lauzun is remembered for commanding a French Legion alongside George Washington in 1781 during the American War of Independence; Tsetaeva, however, is more interested in her hero's emotional development, specifically his dalliances with beauteous Polish princesses, his platonic relationship with Marie-Antoinette, and a flirtation with the jailer's daughter on the very day of his execution (I briefly hoped she was going to dress him up as a washerwoman to help him escape, but Lauzun was no Mr Toad).<br />
<br />
For me, the final revelation was Stephen Pearl's humorous and interrogative article about his translation of Ivan Goncharov's 1869 novel <i>Obryv</i>, always known in English as <i>The Precipice</i>. Pearl has taken the radical step of re-naming the novel <i>Malinovka Heights</i>. His title is chosen in order to retain the thematic centrality of the <i>obryv</i> in question, while avoiding the vertiginous connotations of the usual translation. <i>Obryv</i>, Pearl tells us, has the double meaning of "bluff" (in the geographical sense) and "rupture" or discontinuity, which is of course why Goncharov used this word to name his love-story-cum-novel-of-ideas. What's more, the bluff in question, on the estate of Malinovka (modelled on an estate in Goncharov's home town of Simbirsk) is a far from precipitous slope above the Volga - and Pearl includes a photo as proof! Elsewhere in this ruminative piece, he discusses translation problems peculiar to Goncharov's novel: the promiscuity of "passion" (<i>strast'</i>) experienced by the protagonist Raisky, and how literally the word should be translated; similarly, how to deal with a superabundance of diverse relatives known casually as "cousins"; and also a problem familiar to readers of the Dinosaur: the issue of adjectival false equivalents. (I discussed different approaches to this problem in recent translations of <i>Anna Karenina </i><a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2017/12/scylla-and-charybdis-steering-between.html" target="_blank">here</a>.) The Russian language, Pearl reminds us, uses intensifiers like "strong" much more frequently than English as both adjectives and adverbs; and clearly it would be silly to take these too literally by translating a <i>sil'naya prostuda</i> as a "strong cold" rather than a "heavy cold". But what to do when these problems emerge on the narrative plane? Pearl notes that when Goncharov's characters lapse into silence, which they apparently quite often do, they never lapse silently; they always lapse <i>zadumchivo</i> (pensively) or <i>tikho</i> (gently) or fall into <i>razdum'e</i> (rumination). If a translator renders each of these oft-repeated qualifiers punctiliously, inevitably the reader gets the impression that all 19th century Russians were thoughtful, pensive, calm, and, well, ruminant. Yet arguably this is a false impression; these decorative adjectives would have been transparent to the contemporary Russian reader, who would ignore them as merely more of Goncharov's characteristic "purple prose" (which Pearl discusses separately). The modern Anglophone reader is unlikely to be privy to this sort of narrative code and therefore takes it on trust that the folk of Malinovka Heights were an exceptionally reflective bunch. Should the translator, therefore, act as code-buster?<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Tb22-593fZ0QuOdDwjPzrzJ0lWMI8HIt-X_It3RLZKqVXfvQ4_lxYJhSJfFiBYn9eZYvQG-6MN7lddP7q4iWzpUJdeuh0G1BoSb7iWvUuhGLLGPrHnQsPK2k8epit5LXOs5Cn1JAYJLV/s1600/Marguerite-Bryant-Munn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="565" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Tb22-593fZ0QuOdDwjPzrzJ0lWMI8HIt-X_It3RLZKqVXfvQ4_lxYJhSJfFiBYn9eZYvQG-6MN7lddP7q4iWzpUJdeuh0G1BoSb7iWvUuhGLLGPrHnQsPK2k8epit5LXOs5Cn1JAYJLV/s320/Marguerite-Bryant-Munn.jpg" width="226" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marguerite Bryant with novel, c. 1925</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'll be buying <i>Cardinal Points</i> on Kindle again, but I wish that the other journal I want to mention, <i>East-West Review</i>, were as easy to access. <i>East-West Review</i> is the official journal of the Great Britain-Russia Society, but it's currently print subscription only. In the latest, Autumn 2018 edition, Michael Pursglove has an interesting piece - part of an informal series about obscure translators - about the only known translator of <i>Obryv</i> into English, at least pre-Pearl: the mysterious M. Bryant. If you look up <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice_(Goncharov_novel)" target="_blank"><i>The Precipice</i>'s Wikipedia entry</a>, you'll see that M. Bryant's translation gets pride of place; yet Pursglove warns us that it's incomplete - very possibly because it was a translation, and occasionally a mistranslation, of an equally incomplete German version which appeared in 1896 from the pen of one Wilhelm Goldschmidt. Pursglove proposes that Marguerite Bryant (1870-1962), a well-known British novelist, may have pirated Goldschmidt's <i>Der Absturz </i>for Hodder & Stoughton in 1915. This kind of indirect translation, via an intermediate language, was quite common at the time. So we can very probably blame Marguerite Bryant, who also gave the world <i>The Dominant Passion</i> and <i>Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker</i>, for turning an unassuming hilltop above the Volga into a dizzying precipice. The titular misfortunes of Goncharov's novel don't end here: one French translation rendered <i>Obryv</i> as <i>Marc le Nihiliste</i>, while a Belgian newspaper re-named it <i>La Faute de la Grand-mere</i> (Grandmother's Mistake)!<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA_yFrrSaImqJQ0tIFRXYKaf7o_0571jPPf_rxGNz9crOfUHvfefsy7Na9ltJPS1iU569yaPVK1PhFqHpyepz3CgBpgS0DoKACnBLbm0py8ybXuiB9LLo4v9hgVxD-GG2ZQsI8Ui9TSkwG/s1600/marc+le+nihiliste.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="287" data-original-width="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA_yFrrSaImqJQ0tIFRXYKaf7o_0571jPPf_rxGNz9crOfUHvfefsy7Na9ltJPS1iU569yaPVK1PhFqHpyepz3CgBpgS0DoKACnBLbm0py8ybXuiB9LLo4v9hgVxD-GG2ZQsI8Ui9TSkwG/s1600/marc+le+nihiliste.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<b>Disclaimers: </b>On realizing that Bryan Karetnyk had published <i><a href="https://www.pushkinpress.com/product/the-beggar-and-other-stories/" target="_blank">The Beggar and other stories</a></i>, I promptly ordered a copy... this blog still owes Pushkin Press and Bryan a review of <i>The Buddha's Return</i>. It's in the pipeline...And while Stephen Pearl's <i>Malinovka Heights</i> is still forthcoming, you can buy his translations of Goncharov's other two novels <a href="https://almabooks.com/alma-author/stephen-pearl/" target="_blank">here</a>.</div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-32942900695887404512018-09-03T16:26:00.000+01:002018-09-03T20:44:40.952+01:00A Tourist in Tula, or Yasnaya Polyana 2018<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFwWdzDiwXFjyfeenQpuJo6Vhc6yeYEupCOVctDEkbmS7Nk5mtu3ukGasrnV8H69P5j0q5xKRNJghRQswgqb_RALHLyGh7n-vQ5yUUPIwvjvg8FiAC22x9Z-GyN0WXWXwZuKO0x8cenqVY/s1600/Yasnaya+Polyana+hatchling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="855" data-original-width="638" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFwWdzDiwXFjyfeenQpuJo6Vhc6yeYEupCOVctDEkbmS7Nk5mtu3ukGasrnV8H69P5j0q5xKRNJghRQswgqb_RALHLyGh7n-vQ5yUUPIwvjvg8FiAC22x9Z-GyN0WXWXwZuKO0x8cenqVY/s320/Yasnaya+Polyana+hatchling.jpg" width="236" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Yasnaya Polyana archive with unknown child</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
It has been, astonishingly, six years since <a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-joy-of-tolstoy-or-at-sign-of-hadji.html" target="_blank">my first jaunt to Yasnaya Polyana</a> for the 2012 International Tolstoy conference. Although last
month marked my fourth event (it’s biannual), I see I haven’t blogged about it
since that first exciting convention. I was remiss not to write up the Great
Heine Scandal of 2016, in which thirty middle-aged Russian scholars almost
rioted when a German academic attempted to explain Heine’s poetry in a paper
misleadingly entitled “Heine and Tolstoy” – it mentioned Tolstoy once (although
we did learn that Goethe liked playing with model engines). Or the Great Escape
of 2016, in which another delegate and I daringly skipped a panel and walked
(Tolstoy would have approved) three miles to the historic train station of
Kozlova Zaseka. (I remember less about 2014, as I spent most of that visit in
the archives taking notes on Tolstoy’s collection of classical literature, and
minding my hatchling, who came too). When the 2018 conference came round, I
felt quite the old hand. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The organizers, Galina Alekseeva and Donna Orwin, created a full schedule in spite of last-minute cancellations; the Tolstoy bus
ran on schedule to and from Moscow; we were treated to a retired American
general (Rick McPeak, formerly of West Point) as well as an American colonel (Mary
Olea), both paper-givers; there was a welcome meal and a lavish farewell spread,
and the once-onerous process of hotel passport registration was actually painless.
The peaceful birch forest around the hotel was flooded with sunlight every day,
and Yasnaya Polyana itself – where Tolstoy spent most of his life – was accessible
to delegates by the front gate, although sadly the “hole in the fence” that
offered delegates the illicit thrill of out-of-hours access in past years, had
been stopped with some rather unTolstoyan-looking barbed wire. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheK2y5ayPdKYrcri-VoA-bs7PdDIGF25OBxJAV-VIBUuBYHmkgg7xwg1H9FA-o9mYhG10Ef7REY2SY0U86TCtJYAKr-buoxgMA0aLIVfvtn28yaAqz50cUHRSpBIAxxKgzrnvXgLvxSSG0/s1600/Yasnaya+Polyana+Galina+and+Donna.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1059" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheK2y5ayPdKYrcri-VoA-bs7PdDIGF25OBxJAV-VIBUuBYHmkgg7xwg1H9FA-o9mYhG10Ef7REY2SY0U86TCtJYAKr-buoxgMA0aLIVfvtn28yaAqz50cUHRSpBIAxxKgzrnvXgLvxSSG0/s200/Yasnaya+Polyana+Galina+and+Donna.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Galina Alekseeva & Donna Orwin</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There were some splendid papers at this conference, all
given in Russian. I particularly enjoyed Anna Gorodetskaya on the evolving relationship
between Tolstoy and Turgenev; Alexei Vdovin on how Tolstoy’s writings were integrated
into the Soviet school curriculum; and Sergei Kibal’nik on Tolstoy’s <i>Resurrection</i> as a rewriting of
Dostoevsky’s <i>The Idiot</i>. Kibal’nik
claims that <i>Resurrection</i> is Tolstoy’s
most Dostoevskian novel, although also informed by readings of Chekhov’s <i>Sakhalin Island </i>and the landscapes of
Isaak Levitan’s art. My own paper cunningly followed the tried-and-trusted
model of “Tolstoy and X”, where X is an obscure Anglophone author. This plan
was designed to flatter Russian Tolstoy scholars (<i>tolstovedy</i>) by demonstrating Tolstoy’s ubiquity abroad, while
simultaneously evading difficult questions by making sure no-one had heard of
X. I <i>think</i> it worked. When presenting in Russian, not my native language,
I feel even sorrier for my hearers than myself, so I gave them a nice handout
with colour pictures to look at. Papers were supposed to last strictly twenty
minutes, but the panel chairs were not equally strict and each panel had up to
seven speakers. This led to serious overruns and much audience frustration. Just
as my turn came (I was fourth or fifth), someone demanded a break (<i>pereryv</i>) in a tone which did not brook
refusal. Everyone rushed out. My chair was anxious about time, so she tried to
re-start my panel on schedule; but it takes quite a while to get thirty mostly
Russian academics back in a conference room, even if the tables are piled with
fresh apples from Tolstoy’s orchard. I resisted starting my paper before we
were quorate, but possibly as a result of this delay, all too soon I heard the chair’s gentle throat-clearing. A scrap of paper with a five-minute warning, rapidly reducing to minus numbers, began undulating in my peripheral version. (I’ve been on both sides of this infraction before – I’ve been the badly behaved speaker picking up speed in extra time begged from the chair, and I’ve been the chair wondering if a heavy book to the skull is the only way to shut the speaker up – but as I forgot to time myself on this occasion, I have no idea whether I got my lawful twenty minutes or not). Poor X, the writer I’d picked as Tolstoy’s
straight man, sank into even greater obscurity when five minutes into my paper,
one of the senior<i> tolstovedy</i> present
took the first of <i>two</i> mobile phone calls. A groundswell of
whispering started up at the same time in the audience. I’ve never felt so
demoralized mid-paper than I did during the second phone call, nor come closer
to pointedly giving up and walking away, but Russian conferences are not like
other conferences, and Yasnaya Polyana conferences are a law unto themselves,
so I persisted. Apart from my slightly fraught experience, I would say this
conference actually <i>lacked</i> the
scandals – and here I really mean <i>skandal</i>,
or dispute – which, when conducted in a humorous and respectful spirit as they
always are, make Yasnaya panels so rich (I am not, of course, referring to the
2016 discussion on the bra sizes of Tolstoy’s heroines). But this unwonted
peacefulness was because certain regular conference-goers, who can always be
relied upon for an intelligent heckle, were absent. It was also a minor shame
we didn’t have a conference outing to a local Tolstoyan site, although I
compensated for this by skipping half a day to see Tula, the nearest city.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhon0nhYxtreGc5bvrQKZFdSG1baRBOB4IzrIob8mbBXBd99eAHCdJt1SLkFjyL_ELqYc8WksRxUX7SUXhAa9s0q2c0dsehIMFm3DV2xCbAHcG1yZmeUM6b08t44SxdRGex_fXIH_o4xTmW/s1600/Yasnaya+Polyana+Armour+Museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1059" height="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhon0nhYxtreGc5bvrQKZFdSG1baRBOB4IzrIob8mbBXBd99eAHCdJt1SLkFjyL_ELqYc8WksRxUX7SUXhAa9s0q2c0dsehIMFm3DV2xCbAHcG1yZmeUM6b08t44SxdRGex_fXIH_o4xTmW/s200/Yasnaya+Polyana+Armour+Museum.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Tula Armour Museum<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Tula is a Second World War hero-city – a <i>gorod-geroi</i> – and it never lets you
forget this. The broad squares, impressive kremlin, handsome eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century frontages in the centre (many of which are being restored by
the city), and steep, seemingly endless streets are magnificently Russian, and
hundreds of posters, slogans affixed to buildings, and video screens in various
places all summon the visitor to due appreciation of local and national
patriotism. Tula is famous for manufacturing samovars, <i>priyarniki</i> (or gingerbread cakes), and armour. The latter industry
(based at a factory founded by Peter the Great) is celebrated today by not one
but two military museums, old and new; the latter is designed to look like a
gigantic medieval Russian helmet, and the very modern interior included a
floor-to-wall screen spooling extraordinary propaganda videos like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ5BzFXr434" target="_blank">this</a>. It’s
easy to forget Russia’s military heritage in pacifist Yasnaya Polyana, but in
Tula it is unavoidable; the scars of the Great Patriotic War are everywhere.
They remain a source of great and justifiable pride; and also of dangerous
nationalism. I tried to debate this point with a Russian <i>tolstoved</i> on the bus back to Moscow, but it turned into a (very
interesting) one-sided lecture on the production of Russia’s Panzer-beating
T-34 tanks. In this ideological climate, it’s important that the Yasnaya Polyana
organizers host speakers like Rick McPeak, who teaches <i>Hadji Murat</i> to American servicemen in the hope that Tolstoy’s words
will feed their empathy with Russian soldiers, as he described in his talk. And
it was a triumph of multiculturalism at the post-paper party when the same
American general broke into a rendition of “<i>Kapitan,
kapitan, ulybnites’</i>” (“Smile, my captain!”), which caused the stately Olga
Slivitskaya, dowager conference queen, to tell him firmly that he was a <i>russkii chelovek</i>.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCz0lzRoDcom2qX9JS4eTP1qmsCUwyGbkvU07rV4CncNXlayfNRmvjNnHfNIeSXmru4N80JEKoJZubyux3_i92DEbl1meeYb85GlAfsKxbaAbYpS90rjolt6uK0wSqSfWok3th6b427O-M/s1600/Yasnaya+Polyana+everyone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="960" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCz0lzRoDcom2qX9JS4eTP1qmsCUwyGbkvU07rV4CncNXlayfNRmvjNnHfNIeSXmru4N80JEKoJZubyux3_i92DEbl1meeYb85GlAfsKxbaAbYpS90rjolt6uK0wSqSfWok3th6b427O-M/s320/Yasnaya+Polyana+everyone.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Tolstovedy</i> in conference, August 2018. Dinosaur not in shot</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I might add that the only way to travel the 15 miles from
Yasnaya Polyana to Tula is by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">marshrutka</i>,
a kind of minibus where you tell the driver your destination, pay a token sum,
squash in next to the other passengers, and then shout “Stop at the next one!”
when you’re nearly there. To reach the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">marshrutka
</i>halt, you have to follow a winding paved track from the conference hotel
through the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">les</i>, or forest, for about
800 metres, constantly intersecting with even narrower paths leading between
the trees. I had just emerged onto the motorway when an old lady hailed me.
Which way to the hospital, she wanted to know? I still get paralyzed with
anxiety about revealing myself as a foreigner, and a Jurassic, cold-blooded one
at that; so even though I knew very well from previous visits how to get to the
village hospital, I stuck to monosyllabic words to hide my accent. I told her
to turn right along the paved road, and right again, to reach her destination. “Thanks!”
said the frail old lady, and dived into the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">les</i>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn-JlG6GfeKLd-K_TOuhC95jZEPCiGXYVti3xb7S17Gfu1vg9BFGNeCn7tDIQUnPIoc0ZIsindBgBPMaI3UiPAFB7DwdFn38ojP3U97OrNSt_xnZNgQgdAds4kZ07zku-OmfY_sJ5NW-r7/s1600/Yasnaya+Polyana+Les.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1059" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn-JlG6GfeKLd-K_TOuhC95jZEPCiGXYVti3xb7S17Gfu1vg9BFGNeCn7tDIQUnPIoc0ZIsindBgBPMaI3UiPAFB7DwdFn38ojP3U97OrNSt_xnZNgQgdAds4kZ07zku-OmfY_sJ5NW-r7/s320/Yasnaya+Polyana+Les.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>The <i>les</i> at Yasnaya Polyana</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now there was a path through the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">les </i>to
the hospital, but it was long and twisting, and I worried she might get lost. I
yelled at her to wait. To my relief I saw a young man approaching. “Young man!”
I shouted (this mode of address is quite normal in Russian). “Please tell that
old lady how to get to the hospital!” “Of course!” he said, helpfully, and
leapt over to where the old lady was still hesitating dubiously. And then –
they both disappeared into the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">les</i>,
like mythical creatures. The last glimpse I had of either of them was the
bright pattern on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">babushka</i>’s
headscarf.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>On the way to Tula, I had
no idea where to stop; my hope the driver would remember that I’d asked for the
Kremlin evaporated when he drove on past it. I squeaked, “Next one!”, escaped,
and backtracked a kilometre or two (Tula is built on a Brobdingnagian scale,
with gaps between bus stops to match). On the homewards journey, I caught my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">marshrutka</i> without accident and looked
out carefully for Yasnaya Polyana. When I saw it coming up, I opened my
mouth, but I suddenly suffered an intense attack of what you might call <i>marshrutka </i>mutism. (My panel chair might
have wished I’d been afflicted earlier). I somehow couldn’t open my mouth in
that squishy minibus, betraying myself as a foreigner in front of all these
peaceful Russian shoppers and commuters. I devoutly hoped someone else would
get off at my stop. But they didn’t. Nor at the next one. Or the next. And the <i>les</i> closed in around us again. Perhaps
five miles later we stopped in a town called Pervomaiskii (First of May), where
I promptly crossed the square and hopped on the next <i>marshrutka</i> in the opposite direction. This time, for fear of being
carried back to Tula and ping-ponging across the district until someone else
finally chose my stop, I forced myself to speak up – too early, as it turned
out; I had to walk two stops back to the Yasnaya Polyana gates. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNukMczFBuLe-7sazGcDCh-X4KnfdyTV06tTz-PwBnc9VknLCSkzAJLf1klEUogcCME4jcC4z4GbFBVg4Sr_DpGpAPynNBXCAsOsGThTJB30gwV8g8xgFpFoGIFzS050MauWGccBpbINpu/s1600/Yasnaya+Polyana+gates.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1059" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNukMczFBuLe-7sazGcDCh-X4KnfdyTV06tTz-PwBnc9VknLCSkzAJLf1klEUogcCME4jcC4z4GbFBVg4Sr_DpGpAPynNBXCAsOsGThTJB30gwV8g8xgFpFoGIFzS050MauWGccBpbINpu/s200/Yasnaya+Polyana+gates.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But, for future
reference, I found the local supermarket <i>and</i>
the Tolstoy family graveyard. Time to plan 2020’s adventure, if I am lucky
enough to join the <i>tolstovedy</i> in
conference one more time.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfZ2Zx8ndaX9-SEtk1tC7-AqbPf7O-xAe5WxV4vWJaIXtjW9Va-U3u-9COXO4IMAmHYjfn3dE1_7b-Ms9ztbQrQedXHA2X21IWUMAqovovzDGh5BpcwaRadUhciLaeUebdJBKBJP48ux6d/s1600/Yasnaya+Polyana+Tula+Lenin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="font-size: 12.8px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1059" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfZ2Zx8ndaX9-SEtk1tC7-AqbPf7O-xAe5WxV4vWJaIXtjW9Va-U3u-9COXO4IMAmHYjfn3dE1_7b-Ms9ztbQrQedXHA2X21IWUMAqovovzDGh5BpcwaRadUhciLaeUebdJBKBJP48ux6d/s320/Yasnaya+Polyana+Tula+Lenin.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Lenin in Tula</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One final shout-out: My week in Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow
gave me much-needed me-time to remember why I love Russian literature. I rediscovered
the wonderful Phalanstery (<i>Falanster</i>), a bookshop hidden on a staircase off a courtyard off a
side street in central Moscow, where I found a new translation passion (more
soon). I refreshed my contemporary Russian writing collection, and in so doing
I revisited some pages by my fellow bloggers who keep alive (in a much more
dedicated way than I manage to do) their excitement for Russian books and
writers. Among my favourites: here’s to the inimitable Lizok of <a href="http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Lizok’sBookshelf</a>, my go-to book critic for that it’s-all-got-to-fit-in-carry-on
shortlist; to <a href="http://languagehat.com/" target="_blank">Languagehat</a>, who is unique; to the lovely Boris Dralyuk and his
<a href="https://bdralyuk.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">long-standing blog</a> (and whose guest-edited edition of <i>Cardinal Points</i> is up next on Russian Dinosaur). Thank you all for
sharing your knowledge – and long may you blog!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg18oMpjj4RHpBI8e5I7yRniQc1MMq9CoSAcdYg5ae1YMQQmzrbsX6Nh2VWIVsmEImd8f2YMRNvyK0ReFPYCYIyvbE0QEwgdB7fGRD32fxryJ0HNjAXdJK-vfBWR0cs8CeGEcE0HIcVkgMS/s1600/Yasnaya+Polyana+Great+Pond.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1059" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg18oMpjj4RHpBI8e5I7yRniQc1MMq9CoSAcdYg5ae1YMQQmzrbsX6Nh2VWIVsmEImd8f2YMRNvyK0ReFPYCYIyvbE0QEwgdB7fGRD32fxryJ0HNjAXdJK-vfBWR0cs8CeGEcE0HIcVkgMS/s320/Yasnaya+Polyana+Great+Pond.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>The Great Pond at Yasnaya Polyana</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-56925257156483122622018-08-27T16:29:00.003+01:002018-08-27T16:29:58.250+01:00Dostoevsky and Poldark, or the Brothers Carne-mazov<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibf27AYa5UtFrk34YFMk_BprHfHRS5v2BAMk1srb3PYO4jIXg_bQVOX4UdSR8t6a9ckFCAc4nhkVZCxDRM3fO0lhFOMHYxPq4MRv3BqCPjrHJnQ9LIBbLs051ppVytSreBhx4FWuN3pGBW/s1600/carnes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="574" data-original-width="768" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibf27AYa5UtFrk34YFMk_BprHfHRS5v2BAMk1srb3PYO4jIXg_bQVOX4UdSR8t6a9ckFCAc4nhkVZCxDRM3fO0lhFOMHYxPq4MRv3BqCPjrHJnQ9LIBbLs051ppVytSreBhx4FWuN3pGBW/s320/carnes.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Brothers Carne - Dostoevskian body doubles?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
When watching the BBC's latest season of <i>Poldark</i>, a series based on the novels by Winston Graham about a swashbuckling Cornish landowner, my first thought was how Dostoevskian it was. (Well, if not my first thought, certainly my seventh, or ninth.) The opening episode of Series 4 (and here comes the first of several spoilers) ends with a dramatic public execution scene: will the Carne brothers, also the brothers-in-law of hero Ross Poldark, be hanged by the neck until they are dead, or not? Inevitably, I was reminded of what Dostoevsky's biography Joseph Frank euphemistically calls "the incident in Semenovsky Square" on December 22nd, 1849, when the 28-year-old writer and his fellow members of the "Petrashevtsy" reading group, all young men, were led out in the snow and formally condemned to execution by firing squad. Three of the prisoners were marched forwards, tied to stakes in a square in the heart of St Petersburg, and hooded to await the final volley (Petrashevsky himself, the so-called ringleader, defiantly refused a blindfold). An Orthodox priest, armed with crucifix and Bible, instructed them all to repent. Dostoevsky stood in the next group, fully expecting to be shot within a few moments. As he wrote later, a 'mystic terror' overcame him. These men had been condemned for treason, yet they were all quite innocent; Dostoevsky's crime, for example, had been to read Belinsky's controversial <i>Letter to Gogol</i> aloud to the group. They had already spent eight months in the ominous Peter and Paul Fortress. And yet, as we know, the order to fire never came; instead a drummer sounded the retreat, and a rider announced that the men's death sentences had been commuted to exile with hard labour. The entire torturous incident (which cost one of the prisoners, Nikolai Grigoryev, his sanity) had merely been an additional moral punishment dreamed up by the Tsar. The charges on which the Carne brothers and their friend stood accused in Truro market-place were equally trumped-up, but here the suspense and mystic terror were, fortunately, vicarious.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgotFlwx9HvtggEEp4GEUICwcRpAXl46Q_Y5p7IjXlDp50BAGLiaWYQqVBGqS8VfS6BRPyfytrAGKZJsNaX2Y8Luj2sPO3du5xf94U26b5OSq8BPJplAKh07l6yw0Fvsrx339Qf1YKVdkLy/s1600/chest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="439" data-original-width="279" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgotFlwx9HvtggEEp4GEUICwcRpAXl46Q_Y5p7IjXlDp50BAGLiaWYQqVBGqS8VfS6BRPyfytrAGKZJsNaX2Y8Luj2sPO3du5xf94U26b5OSq8BPJplAKh07l6yw0Fvsrx339Qf1YKVdkLy/s200/chest.jpg" width="126" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aidan Turner and his chest</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />I owe Viv Groskop, the <i>Guardian</i>'s brilliant Poldark blogger and out-of-the-closet Russianist (I'm working through her very funny <i>The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature</i>) for my other Dostoevskian interpretation of <i>Poldark</i>. The actor Aidan Turner, who plays Ross Poldark, is widely celebrated for his chest (I can't imagine why). Since Turner proved reluctant to keep displaying his chest in semi-nude scything scenes after the first series, his on-screen wife Demelza's two brothers were '<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jun/11/poldark-recap-series-three-episode-one-ross-gallops-back-into-our-lives" target="_blank">bussed in as Replacement Torso action</a>', in Groskop's words. (These are the same pair who face public asphyxiation in Season Four.) It really shouldn't have taken two more series before I realized that the brothers are, as Groskop all but points out, Dostoevskian doubles of Poldark himself. Just think of the complicated sequence of doubles in <i>Crime and Punishment </i> - the rational side of hero Raskolnikov is reflected by his 'good' friend, Razumikhin, his evil sub-Nietzschean id by the monstrous Svidrigailov, and so on, so <i>mise en abyme</i>, as the doubles get doubles. <i>The Idiot</i> is even worse, with female doubles joining the fray, and <i>Demons</i>, if it had a plot, would lose it entirely, such is the proliferation of alter egos. The Carne brothers may be body doubles (torso doubles) of their brother-in-law in a crudely material sense, but they are also a pair of sensible Razumikhins to Ross's hell-raising Raskolnikov. Meanwhile Ross' nemesis George Warleggan, who glories in the Groskopic moniker of Evil George, is clearly Svidrigailov, attempting to debauch the women Ross/Raskolnikov loves. (I'm managing to oversimplify and distort <i>both</i> plots here, which is no mean feat).<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmQP7c7TLBpY5GqN_csfHAVVabr-ifSQCovSdp2b60VPUDJCd-iXT9nhxjmv-mFDVp2aqRxGzPtDwSu34zpOcoFJCuEOBBkel7Us_5poY9eov3Tz5Qrjy4JLvzUg5j56oFJY_SyaVm1_Jo/s1600/17-poldark-308.w1200.h630.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmQP7c7TLBpY5GqN_csfHAVVabr-ifSQCovSdp2b60VPUDJCd-iXT9nhxjmv-mFDVp2aqRxGzPtDwSu34zpOcoFJCuEOBBkel7Us_5poY9eov3Tz5Qrjy4JLvzUg5j56oFJY_SyaVm1_Jo/s320/17-poldark-308.w1200.h630.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ross Poldark and Svidrigailov, alias Evil George</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The final episode of Series 4 hammers home the tragic truth that Ross, Ross' late cousin Francis and Evil George all loved the same woman - making it more obvious than ever that they are essentially variations on the same man. And one of the final scenes of that episode - where former love rivals Ross and EG weep over the corpse of an (arguably, murdered) woman - was practically identical to the denouement of <i>The Idiot</i>, where saintly Prince Myshkin and the dynamic but all too materialistic Rogozhin weep beside the body of Natasha Filippovna, the woman they both loved.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1j97P9Q3Y_ZPgReS-Jv-7QL4dimo6fymAfdaegWSeL5mhLu2T4EGX8MWUCeQuZzgwSdeUQZVFlRhzZQh1_XKYhOX3TDvXL0iiVj7gYg86WebmVjw45fX6Os7PwFWD1X5osTvwCtMtdsuk/s1600/Poldark-season-4-spoilers-finale-Elizabeth-Warleggan-Heida-Reed-1438985.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="332" data-original-width="590" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1j97P9Q3Y_ZPgReS-Jv-7QL4dimo6fymAfdaegWSeL5mhLu2T4EGX8MWUCeQuZzgwSdeUQZVFlRhzZQh1_XKYhOX3TDvXL0iiVj7gYg86WebmVjw45fX6Os7PwFWD1X5osTvwCtMtdsuk/s320/Poldark-season-4-spoilers-finale-Elizabeth-Warleggan-Heida-Reed-1438985.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Expired Elizabeth Warleggan, Ross Poldark's first love</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU3jTUN9r2zjjstakibsz97pSlxpcy3SbdPgefV7R_r1NhrcGoWsoBVPV60807rHqPcvFgm-Dpy9j6WZEBU1MZlYwQfI2N7XcJaI1JwACK7Oas8sA_2FQDzicxPpeEOVf8JzCeFmm7XX1B/s1600/Ilya+Glazunov+death+of+NF.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="912" data-original-width="768" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU3jTUN9r2zjjstakibsz97pSlxpcy3SbdPgefV7R_r1NhrcGoWsoBVPV60807rHqPcvFgm-Dpy9j6WZEBU1MZlYwQfI2N7XcJaI1JwACK7Oas8sA_2FQDzicxPpeEOVf8JzCeFmm7XX1B/s320/Ilya+Glazunov+death+of+NF.jpg" width="269" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ilya Glazunov's impression of <i>The Idiot</i>'s finale</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="text-align: left;">A parallel which I could extend further, but not without risk of descending into the same gabbling incoherence as Myshkin or poor Nikolai Grigoryev post-mock-execution. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
If you've missed <i>Poldark</i> on-screen, there's always <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poldark" target="_blank">the books</a>. Or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/e/B000APYSC6" target="_blank">the originals</a>. And Series 5 in 2019....</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b>Acknowledgements: I relied heavily on Joseph Frank's <i>Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 </i>for the facts presented about the mock execution staged in 1849 in Semenovsky Square.</b></div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-2592523727057946582018-08-18T15:00:00.001+01:002018-08-18T15:00:24.596+01:00The Kingdom of Agamemnon: In Memory of Vladimir Sharov<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<b>Vladimir Sharov 1952-2018</b></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin5QpfA8hI_sWzRZ7CiFQkP8x7h63JP5X9kbPVMLXVV0iFzx0YR0SxUFLypuA9PK7SGrQdW77I4fLT4s7SExnThesGRni_w_RYo8e1SJRo7Zv772ZZJZbT9j8LrXG15csIvXLqh1xfoacX/s1600/Vladimir+Sharov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin5QpfA8hI_sWzRZ7CiFQkP8x7h63JP5X9kbPVMLXVV0iFzx0YR0SxUFLypuA9PK7SGrQdW77I4fLT4s7SExnThesGRni_w_RYo8e1SJRo7Zv772ZZJZbT9j8LrXG15csIvXLqh1xfoacX/s1600/Vladimir+Sharov.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
"I am very glad", wrote Vladimir Sharov, who died after a long illness yesterday on 17 August 2018, "that my novel <i>The Kingdom of Agamemnon</i> has been first published in <i>Znamya</i>, a journal which has been important to me in every way and practically my family home. The novel, part of which (about 150 pages of typescript) appears below, I finished under extremely difficult personal circumstances, but now I feel that this was all to the good for <i>Agamemnon</i>. Difficulty in one's private life readily colludes with the story one is writing; the two find a common language from the first syllable. With this conviction in mind I wrote the final section of the novel and corrected the proofs."</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
And the novel opens:</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>I'll begin from the finale, which transformed this story into farce. I might even say, into a shameful farce. The last point has become particularly offensive for me, since the terror ended. Now I think more and more often that what I was involved with, what occupied me for so many years, deserved a different outcome. However, who knows? In the past, in 2015 - I had just returned from an expedition - a friend, deciding that I would be intrigued by it, emailed me a long article from the English magazine </i>Esquire<i>. The article is about one of our spies, active in Argentina from 1968 to 1990. [....] The grandson of Grand Prince Mikhail Romanov, Evgenii, was possibly a bastard - Prince Michael had no lawful offspring; however it is even more likely that Evgenii was just a typical pretender - fled in 1967 from Soviet Hungary to Argentina</i>.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuKhqbLD9zqKo5MVoYSFr6jCZ-U3RQTLZuxjI5QBYv1b5IPg4H23AQztAH9f4t879aDDaBccOiZHB6QWfyeNruwEibw9j0tfieU2OMmksxCGKtSbz7Vp2fQ-xcf94xV790n26gJyCXEiag/s1600/kingdom+of+agamemnon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="340" data-original-width="220" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuKhqbLD9zqKo5MVoYSFr6jCZ-U3RQTLZuxjI5QBYv1b5IPg4H23AQztAH9f4t879aDDaBccOiZHB6QWfyeNruwEibw9j0tfieU2OMmksxCGKtSbz7Vp2fQ-xcf94xV790n26gJyCXEiag/s200/kingdom+of+agamemnon.jpg" width="129" /></a>The narrator continues with the exotic adventures of Evgenii in Argentina (first backtracking to describe his birth, his early years in Russia, his mother's grief when he disappeared). By page five I was hooked. But according to the novel's back cover, <i>The Kingdom of Agamemnon </i>is about the life story of another character entirely, and in any case (the blurb promises) this book is vintage Sharov: "unrestrained fantasy and leaps through time, unexpected historical parallels and profound religio-philosophical analyses, large-scale group scenes and the most subtle psychology". Reading a Vladimir Sharov novel is like making your way through the whorls of a sea-shell: once lost in the tunnels, you lose all sense of direction, but the sound of the sea pulls you onwards...<br />
<br />
This post was originally to have been called "Rehearsals in Bloomsbury", to mark a fascinating talk at London's Pushkin House in April 2018 by Oliver Ready, Sharov's English translator, about both <i>The Rehearsals </i>(then just out) and <i>Before and During</i> (discussed <a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.com/2014/07/after-before-and-during.html" target="_blank">here</a> on this blog). I had just finished reading <i>The Rehearsals </i>in Russian and was full of admiration for Oliver's nimble, ingenious, and very naturally styled translation. Both novels, written in the final decade of the twentieth century, are readily comparable, but as Oliver explained that evening, all of Sharov's books are interlinked. Ever since the 1970s, Sharov has been single-mindedly researching his books (just as some of his characters research family secrets), producing one every four or five years, working in national archives and in his Moscow flat. Each book is, in a sense, a rehearsal of the next: Oliver quoted Sharov's description of his own plots as "loving satire", a lovingly satirical work-in-progress to understand Russian mentality and Russian pain. Sharov's father was also a writer; the writer's childhood imagination was shaped by overheard conversations about the Gulags and other Soviet repression between his parents and family friends. Like another contemporary writer I greatly admire, Evgenii Vodolazkin, Sharov still reads Gulag survivors' testimonies. While <i>Before and During</i> explores the cultural currents that led up to the Revolution of 1917, <i>The Rehearsals</i> traces the self-destructive urges in Russian society all the way back to the mid-seventeenth-century Schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, when the Patriarch Nikon forced through radical changes in text and ritual against the will of many, including his former mentor Archpriest Avvakum. Sharov develops Nikon as a brooding, complex, deeply religious and profoundly dangerous character, who all but kidnaps a travelling Breton player, De Sertan, commissioning him to direct and produce a religious mystery play at Nikon's New Jerusalem monastery. But before the "first night" takes place, Nikon is arrested and De Sertan and his Russian players sent into Siberian exile, where they form a unique sectarian community. Not only do they continue rehearsing their mystery play about the birth of Christ for centuries, they live permanently, and pass on to their children and grandchildren, the roles they act - so the community divides into "Christians", "Jews", "Romans", and others. The role of Christ is never cast - Nikon's hope, and the community's unspoken conviction, is that the day the rehearsals are finally complete, Christ will appear and the world will end.<br />
<br />
By documenting the evolution of this sect between the 1660s and the 1960s, Sharov models the emergence of dictatorship and dogmatism in this microcosm of Russian society: the community accepts De Sertan's script as literal, divine Truth, but they periodically despair of summoning Christ through rehearsals alone and fall upon each other in cycles of mutual destruction. (I read <i>The Rehearsals </i>at the same time as Jonathan Safran Foer's 2016 novel <i>Here I Am</i> and I was duly baffled by the unintended parallel in their first lines. Safran Foer writes: "When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing whether to kill himself or move to the Jewish home." <i>The Rehearsals</i> begins (well, its second paragraph begins): "In 1939, Ivan Trofimovich Kobylin ceased being a Jew, and the Jewish nation, of whom he was the last, ended with him [my translation]." Both books presuppose a post-Jewish world, from very different perspectives.) I won't go into detail here on the extraordinary arcs of upside-down-thinking engaged in on both sides to provoke and justify internecine slaughter, but clearly Sharov has a gift for exploring the pain of a nation often torn by antisemitic and interreligious persecution. He leads the reader to empathize with entire groups (for example, with the "Jews" who persecute "Christians" in order to invite the process of revenge persecution and extirpation which will supposedly expedite the Second Coming) even more than with individuals, although the plot unwinds through a labyrinth of interconnected lives. Like <i>Before and During</i>, where a cast of fantastic survivals commit mass murder in firm expectation of an apocalyptic flood (which never happens), <i>The Rehearsals</i> ends (and begins) on an aporic note. The "Jewish nation" has died out, but Christ has yet to appear to those Chosen.<br />
<br />
Sharov loves to thematize translation, as Oliver noted: De Sertan's diary is translated from Breton into Russian; it is destroyed, memorized, and re-copied; the words of the Bible is translated into daily ritual, and history is translated into different conceptions. Oliver described the difficulties of translating Sharov's long, rambling, never quite disorganized sentences into English, often sending questions to the writer (relayed by Sharov's wife, Oliver Dunaevskaya, as the former preferred to avoid email) to clarify religious or stylistic nuances. On one occasion they even visited the site of Nikon's New Jerusalem monastery together, which must have been an intriguing experience (ah, to have been a pterosaur on the wall). Oliver is not only Sharov's translator but a literary scholar who has written illuminatingly about <i>Before and During</i> as a '(failed) experiment in "literary therapy"' and 'the outstanding Russian "madhouse" novel of the 1990s' in his monograph <i>Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013</i>.<br />
<i><br /></i>
I was privileged to meet Vladimir Sharov when he visited Cambridge a few years ago. He was undoubtedly a profound and talented writer, but he was also a modest and approachable human being, with a twinkle in his eye. We will keep reading and re-reading his books - and treasuring the twinkle.<br />
<br />
You can read a Russian-language extract (cited above) from <i>The Kingdom of Agamemnon</i> <a href="http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2018/4/carstvo-agamemnona.html" target="_blank">here</a>, and extracts from two of Sharov's other novels <a href="https://snob.ru/news/164640" target="_blank">here</a>. Светлая память!<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4a40t-GNEkLUeT8Yk65geNDqtVHkdBgGQjASEMHR9w_vcTsq_iBVzL3DzfrTWprI2Mf5gEBLbYU0_y7ZI2STzig2q5dGK-nvCyNOfbw5-92JYoRZ3FQ5pfNZPND2l1pz4lRY8jPdxaW9q/s1600/me+and+vs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="213" data-original-width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4a40t-GNEkLUeT8Yk65geNDqtVHkdBgGQjASEMHR9w_vcTsq_iBVzL3DzfrTWprI2Mf5gEBLbYU0_y7ZI2STzig2q5dGK-nvCyNOfbw5-92JYoRZ3FQ5pfNZPND2l1pz4lRY8jPdxaW9q/s1600/me+and+vs.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br /></div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-44987434502123558752018-01-12T13:33:00.001+00:002018-01-12T20:51:55.511+00:00The Silence of the Oligarchs: Why James Norton's Keeping Mum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHmzgkGCnDNqOFQs1D8qTemBBpceyFqW2U77C64Pr8HD071-_aUexwJshS952OTS098OMysCkE2b83IcPtbIFwUOjBUPn6anUj0cZNJYHgNMkMNrfBrsxx5cODLRy3kmgiGfs3qwKvd9IX/s1600/james+norton+andrei+bolkonsky.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1012" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHmzgkGCnDNqOFQs1D8qTemBBpceyFqW2U77C64Pr8HD071-_aUexwJshS952OTS098OMysCkE2b83IcPtbIFwUOjBUPn6anUj0cZNJYHgNMkMNrfBrsxx5cODLRy3kmgiGfs3qwKvd9IX/s320/james+norton+andrei+bolkonsky.jpg" width="202" /></a>For a man who consistently refuses to speak the language, actor James Norton can't leave Russia alone. He made a fetching, if not exactly voluble (and, like the other actors, exclusively Anglophone) Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in the BBC's notorious 2016 adaptation of <i>War and Peace</i>. Already in the home-grown Yorkshire police drama <i>Happy Valley </i>(2014), where Norton plays a homicidal psychopath, we note which book his character grabs in order to pass for a soft, fuzzy, studenty type: <i>War and Peace</i>. A subtle in-joke? A heads-up to viewers?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA-7Z5S59rTY427U7BJh3958bJqWyrnVePmuXzM8iE_Gimj0_RBvVkTaWgxgzMoA1CI2z7DE0o4oqQM1IJQFicw-f9bd2Y0SQDdhHOcyBGfA1e5OD-U-J2F9zxAkJGYYVXkqI7Vf4MW64D/s1600/James+Norton+War+and+Peace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="517" data-original-width="920" height="111" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA-7Z5S59rTY427U7BJh3958bJqWyrnVePmuXzM8iE_Gimj0_RBvVkTaWgxgzMoA1CI2z7DE0o4oqQM1IJQFicw-f9bd2Y0SQDdhHOcyBGfA1e5OD-U-J2F9zxAkJGYYVXkqI7Vf4MW64D/s200/James+Norton+War+and+Peace.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Happy Valley - spot the psychopath</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
(<a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/raskolnikov-in-shetland-or-anna.html" target="_blank">In a previous post</a>, I've discussed how the BBC cunningly deploys Russian classics as clues to the real identity of baddies. This is an ever-growing list).<br />
<br />
In the 2018 <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05pksm8" target="_blank">oligarch drama <i>McMafia</i></a>, a high-profile co-production between the BBC and AMC, Norton plays Alex Godman, the 'handsome, rich, and eligible' (in his girlfriend's words) only son of a minor Russian oligarch, now living in exile in London.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBj0Mjp84EXlaXoAETzSP4othTful7iLec5MkNUsDcY2pqaLmonJPImDi-yRd3JCYt7v_WuxzV-SzLPxbv-mC9J-H8Aki6gPyDkHKYRolSCXHgkEsQrUYL6VKbNHOymF1uOY3g4YLwiDjQ/s1600/James+Norton+phone.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="827" data-original-width="1453" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBj0Mjp84EXlaXoAETzSP4othTful7iLec5MkNUsDcY2pqaLmonJPImDi-yRd3JCYt7v_WuxzV-SzLPxbv-mC9J-H8Aki6gPyDkHKYRolSCXHgkEsQrUYL6VKbNHOymF1uOY3g4YLwiDjQ/s320/James+Norton+phone.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Norton, expressionless hedge fund manager</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The elder Godman, played by Alexei Serebryakov, intrepidly drinks vodka from an Evian bottle, especially when driving; behaves inappropriately with everyone (including the ducks in the park); and switches between just two emotional settings: melancholy sentimentality and raging grief. (This role is essentially a reprise of his part in <i>Leviathan</i>, even down to both men's real estate woes - in each plot, Serebryakov's character has been pushed out of his home by a bigger player). Rather than regretting the loss of a bricks-and-mortar property, Serebryakov's <i>McMafia </i>character mourns for all Russia, which he can never re-enter on pain of assassination. To compensate, he insists on speaking exclusively in Russian to his adult children. Young Alex, on the other hand, is an ethical banker with his own fund, which he refuses to invest in Russian interests in order to retain his reputation for probity. He never responds in Russian to his dad, usually citing the presence of his monolingual English-rose girlfriend Rebecca (Juliet Rylance) as an excuse for using English only. His father, unable to object, mutters that Alex speaks Russian like a six-year-old child - the age at which his son left Russia.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAGFEQj5oqBYSvS4Hs1GWdZBL3ecyqOHlQR11oW7VaS_VWzGvfasErLYz9-NmokT09GIHmULUIE40hywnYCQZjFtMpjH7sPMP3ojGe_91K779eS4-IYbbFJh0eDZI2ohrm_KOF8V_J-Tzt/s1600/James+Norton+cellar.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="821" data-original-width="909" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAGFEQj5oqBYSvS4Hs1GWdZBL3ecyqOHlQR11oW7VaS_VWzGvfasErLYz9-NmokT09GIHmULUIE40hywnYCQZjFtMpjH7sPMP3ojGe_91K779eS4-IYbbFJh0eDZI2ohrm_KOF8V_J-Tzt/s320/James+Norton+cellar.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Norton, milking that perfect blankness</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Both Godman Sr's slur, and Alex's determined silence, contradict current research. Heritage speakers of Russian (like the Alex Godman character) do lose language-specific morphosyntactic structures in the L1 (here, Russian), but evidence shows that these tend to be minor vocabulary errors rather than incorrect grammar, particularly when the L1 has been used consistently at home.* Odds are, therefore, that instead of doing a Tyutchev, so to speak, Alex and his sister should be well away with the <i>cúpla focal</i>.<br />
<br />
Moreover, the BBC is very proud of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/01/mcmafia-stars-real-russians-audiences-sophisticated-fake-accents/" target="_blank">its decision to use Russian actors</a> (speaking Russian with English subtitles) in <i>McMafia</i>, thus saving the world from cod Slavic accents yet again. (I was slightly disappointed that the Mumbai drug runners spoke the Queen's English instead of Marathi, but I suppose one can't have everything at once). This is why Serebryakov, Maria Shukshina, and others have been hired. Even Alex's preferred martial art is the intimidating Russian <b>Sistema</b>. So why is the man so tongue-tied? In all of episodes 1 and 2, he manages one word in Russian: "Da". At the end of Episode 3, he really goes for it, with two words: "Nichego, Papa." How a man who <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/29/james-norton-reveals-received-death-threats-happy-valley-role/" target="_blank">braves death threats while buying milk </a>can be afraid of speaking Putin's Russian is beyond me. In any case, it will be fun to watch the BBC negotiate the challenges of bilingual filming as the series progresses. <br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIZ-gLz-JNtVVx9hujX7kikAEGSuw8gsrfsKaJHxlX5iKvgfo9rsVOldO7XoHKv2Mi-36UM8KkkdDjkV_HIuRbBhntD_DudxGU_ePE-DoEpjWK3LroUqqnm7NYZD3O-qyxThvgb9DvYfGf/s1600/Platonov+snap.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="817" data-original-width="1452" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIZ-gLz-JNtVVx9hujX7kikAEGSuw8gsrfsKaJHxlX5iKvgfo9rsVOldO7XoHKv2Mi-36UM8KkkdDjkV_HIuRbBhntD_DudxGU_ePE-DoEpjWK3LroUqqnm7NYZD3O-qyxThvgb9DvYfGf/s320/Platonov+snap.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Platonov Puzzle - a new Ludlum title perhaps?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Will Alex speak THREE Russian words in a row? Will the English subtitles continue to be amusingly inaccurate? Why does Alex's dad have a Platonov anthology stashed in his bedside drawer next to love letters from his mistress?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEZqc9TBTpm7AVSsERmDONxpgNXriIpg9WeYSL_nuhZZFwHYGUUDBklOYNZ9aw6WMDN7G39qyCEgYnBsDGqlsc5_6BMtTrnXnWiM_R_LDWefYDaA-uiDULOP6Tjsifpk6FWLr-oULrbW_g/s1600/James+Norton+sun.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="735" data-original-width="1406" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEZqc9TBTpm7AVSsERmDONxpgNXriIpg9WeYSL_nuhZZFwHYGUUDBklOYNZ9aw6WMDN7G39qyCEgYnBsDGqlsc5_6BMtTrnXnWiM_R_LDWefYDaA-uiDULOP6Tjsifpk6FWLr-oULrbW_g/s320/James+Norton+sun.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Where are you taking my girlfriend's passport?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
My own suspicion is that James Norton's silence, in character, is simply the logical continuation of a new acting style characterized by extended, awkward reticence and by facial expressions finely calibrated between quizzicality, blankness, and constipation. Ryan Gosling and Tom Hiddleston (the star of another BBC series, 2016's <i>The Night Manager</i>, with which <i>McMafia</i> is readily compared) are both trend leaders. In this series, James Norton spends most of his screen time not saying what we certainly hope he's thinking (Stop sitting on my uncle! Where are you taking my girlfriend's passport? What bloody man is this? Take your hand off my nose, etc) and instead, working truly hard on looking completely blank. It's exhausting just watching him show no expression at all.<br />
<br />
Or perhaps he's just really, really keen on Tyutchev.<br />
<br />
Молчи, скрывайся и таи<br />
И чувства и мечты свои –<br />
Пускай в душевной глубине<br />
Встают и заходят оне<br />
Безмолвно, как звезды в ночи, –<br />
Любуйся ими – и молчи.<br />
<br />
(Nabokov's translation of <i>Silentium</i> can be found <a href="http://culturedarm.com/silentium-by-fyodor-tyutchev/" target="_blank">here</a>).<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlp32thTIfORw0Yu0X1AwS1Eu66ThkVa5W4H_bMZXb_1-4RlowcgNATIyx_CqwzgAtE66Q8LUI9QcHtilz9G1JGAiQ4OCbRne21BCqpM6XCBQu5uKmujg9f79r6cjB5JsJ7FB5JZ_Au4_1/s1600/James+Norton+nude.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="826" data-original-width="1467" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlp32thTIfORw0Yu0X1AwS1Eu66ThkVa5W4H_bMZXb_1-4RlowcgNATIyx_CqwzgAtE66Q8LUI9QcHtilz9G1JGAiQ4OCbRne21BCqpM6XCBQu5uKmujg9f79r6cjB5JsJ7FB5JZ_Au4_1/s320/James+Norton+nude.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Norton looking faintly quizzical in the buff</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
*See Eva G. Bar-Shalom and Elena Zaretsky, “Selective
attrition in Russian-English bilingual children: Preservation of grammatical
aspect”, <i>International Journal of Bilingualism</i>, Vol 12, Issue
4, pp. 281 - 302, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1367006908098572">https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006908098572</a>; or Olga Kagan and Kathleen Dillon, “Russian Heritage Learners:
So What Happens Now?”, <i>The Slavic and East European Journal</i>, Vol. 50, No. 1,
Special Anniversary Issue (Spring, 2006), pp. 83-96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20459235<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-38911497746952179162017-12-13T22:48:00.001+00:002018-01-08T14:07:39.346+00:00Scylla and Charybdis: steering between Tolstoy translations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When, three years ago now, I was invited to review two new translations of Tolstoy's great 1877 novel <i>Anna Karenina</i>, I had no idea I was about to encounter a tempest in Tolstoy studies. Certainly, the appearance of two Tolstoy translations in the same year is a rare event - looking back at <a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/if-it-squelches-like-snipe-its-anna.html" target="_blank">this blog post's list</a> of previous <i>Anna</i> versions, you can see that such simultaneity hasn't occurred since 1960, and even when the novel was new to Anglophone audiences, it was only rendered in English four times between 1901 and 1918. I won't comment on the market forces that sent two translations careening on a collision course in 2014 - and indeed, my metaphor much exaggerates the reality. Both translations were by eminent translators at the peak of their careers; both were commissioned by university presses; both were well-received by critics. Rosamund Bartlett's version was published by Oxford University Press, while Yale brought out the Marian Schwartz translation. Nonetheless, as I discovered, precisely because of their expertise, skill, and confidence, each translator took a distinctive approach to her material; and any comparison of their translations opens up fascinating questions about how Tolstoy should be translated and, indeed, how any translation of a canonical text should be approached.<br />
<br />
I recently had lunch with a former professor from my own department, long retired, who edited and partially translated one of the first major Penguin anthologies of Russian short fiction in 1981. He is a veteran of translating Turgenev and Bunin, both masters of nature description and therefore of demandingly specific lexis, the latter additionally infamous for twisty clauses and nuanced tenses. "Translating Tolstoy must be easy," he said. He meant that Tolstoy writes in relatively plain language, employing relatively short sentences compared to some of his peers. This notion could hardly be more wrong. Translating Tolstoy is very difficult indeed, for two main reasons: firstly because Tolstoy is a rule-breaker, deliberately writing incorrect Russian (especially in regard to gerunds and participles), and secondly because Tolstoyan simplicity, when translated into English, creates a false impression of undertranslation.<br />
<br />
This is not to suggest that Tolstoy's style is illiterate or unpleasing: quite the contrary. However, his prose does confront the translator with unhelpful syntax: adjectival traffic jams; awkward, unmanageable, and not always even conventionally grammatical gerunds (which, as Eugene Lampert wrote in 1973, ‘fastidious translators do their best to obliterate’); and enigmatic, often incompletely cited, peasant idioms. Schwartz firmly believes that the 'unconventional and unsettling' effect of Tolstoy's style, the occasional 'roughness', the use of apparent "mistakes" and of course the repetitions, are all intended to "convey meaning, to express his spiritual and moral concerns' (<i>Translator's Note</i>, xxiii). An obvious example of repetition that both translators cite is the adjective<i> veselyi</i> (jolly) and its cognates such as <i>veselost'</i> (jolliness, good cheer), which Bartlett claims occurs 318 times in <i>Anna</i> (and she should know).<i> </i>Schwartz chooses to translate this word wherever it occurs by a single English equivalent – cheerful – and <i>its</i> cognates (e.g. cheer, cheery). She suggests that by constantly referring to 'cheer', Tolstoy meant to provoke 'ominous associations' (xxv) in his readers' minds - a suspicion that the characters were in fact very far from cheerful. Because Russian is an inflected language with multiple derivations and affixations possible from a single stem, in the original, this repetitive technique creates a rich web of inferences and implications. In English, it causes most readers to wonder at the apparent poverty of the translator’s vocabulary. Surely Tolstoy couldn’t have been such a limited writer, constantly re-using the same word?<br />
<br />
Bartlett resorts to a richer vocabulary, including ‘merry’, ‘livelier’, and ‘light-hearted’, in order – as her introductory essay explains – to convey the ‘richness of meaning implied in the original’. She asserts that Russian is simply more concise than English, and that therefore multiple meanings may be implicit in a single word; thus to fix on a single English equivalent for that word, as Schwartz does with <i>veselyi</i>, would be unduly confining for the translator (and repetitive for the reader). I quote her introduction to her own translation: 'This translation seeks to preserve all the idiosyncrasies of Tolstoy's inimitable style, as far as that is possible, including the majority of his signature repetitions, so often smoothed over by previous translators [...]. At the same time, it is a mistake to render Tolstoy too literally. He was often a clumsy and occasionally ungrammatical writer, but there is a majesty and elegance to his prose which needs to be emulated in translation wherever possible. Tolstoy loved the particular properties of the Russian language, but he would not have expected them to be reproduced exactly in translation, and would have surely expected his translators to draw on the particular strengths of their own languages. the aim here, therefore, is to produce a translation which is idiomatic as well as faithful to the original, and one which ideally reads as if it was written in one's own language' (<i>Notes on the Text and Translation</i>, p. xxxviii). There is a lot of good sense in this approach, and it certainly makes for a richer text for the Anglophone reader. And yet we must remember Tolstoy uses repetition for several reasons, including for emphasis; for the psychologically jarring sensation which Shklovsky would christen ‘defamiliarization’; and for the ‘Hansel’s breadcrumb’ effect, that is, using a chain of similar words to clarify the narrative’s symbolic underpinnings. The style is meant to convey meaning; to provoke discomfort; and to convey meaning by provoking discomfort, rather like a parallel process in cinema, Eisenstein's notion of intellectual montage, where contrasting or shocking images initiate an emotional or cognitive process in the viewer's mind. Unwise translators, by gobbling up the repeated words and substituting unrecognizable synonyms, may erase Tolstoy’s subtly laid ‘pathway’ through the plot - and forestall the thought processes that the author had intended to unlock.<br />
<br />
Here is an example of a disrupted pathway: in Part Five of the novel, Vronsky is placed in an impossible situation by Anna, who is now living with him openly. Vronsky would like Anna to behave discreetly and accept that she must avoid society until their relationship is regularized by her divorce and remarriage. Anna, however, suffers bitterly from former friends’ contempt for her new status; additionally, she fears that their attitude will undermine Vronsky’s love for her. In St Petersburg, she defies unwritten social rules by attending the opera in full décolleté as if nothing were amiss. Vronsky has to witness Anna’s public snubbing, while fielding his mother’s mockery (despite her own chequered past, Vronsky’s mother hates Anna for spoiling her son’s career). In a short descriptive passage which follows Vronsky’s progress from his mother’s box at the opera to Anna’s, Tolstoy uses the same adverb to describe both women’s actions: <i>nasmeshlivo</i> (jeeringly). Spaced just a few lines apart, the repetition of this word forces the reader to compare these two apparently incompatible women. One is brave, passionate and despairing, the other is an immoral and cynical hypocrite: yet both treat Vronsky similarly during this crucial scene. Schwartz, predictably, rises to Tolstoy’s challenge by repeating the word ‘derisively’ for each use of <i>nasmeshlivo</i>. The effect of the original Russian is thus reproduced: there is, of course, a risk that readers will fail to recognize Tolstoy’s deliberate jar and blame the translator for bad writing instead. Bartlett, on the other hand, dodges out of this quandary by ingeniously making Vronsky’s mother’s tone ‘scornful’ and Anna’s expression ‘arch’. This creates a much smoother reading experience yet disarms that important Tolstoyan tripwire.<br />
<br />
Thus the basic translation question that emerges here is: should translators risk rendering a provocative text in a version that reproduces the lexical and stylistic effects of the original? (The technical term is <i>foreignization</i>, as opposed to <i>domestication</i>). Or should they produce a 'smoothed-over' version that doesn't - shock horror - <i>read like a translation</i>? In both scenarios, the translator gets blamed. In the second scenario, however, only the academics will notice, as readers will be palliated by the more 'natural' style. Marian Schwartz's translation of <i>Anna</i>, precisely because it meets Tolstoy's challenge head-on and, consequently, reads in places more 'like a translation', has received an unfair degree of criticism.<br />
<br />
Peaceful and rather scholarly debate spilled over into the global media when the journalist Janet Malcolm wrote an extended review of Tolstoy translations in <i>The New York Review of Books</i>, <i><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/" target="_blank">Socks</a></i>, which attacked Schwarz's <i>Anna</i> for its 'awkwardness' and 'obtrusive literalism' and singled out one particular translation decision, her use of the invented word 'shapify' to translate the Russian verb 'образоваться', as 'an elaborately badsome English neologism' (pot, kettle, one might murmur). The viciousness of this review galvanized readers, translators, and academics to take sides or at least to discuss the issue: my colleague XIX век has collated many useful links to articles and blog posts on the topic <a href="https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/more-shapifying/" target="_blank">here</a>. A few months later, the <i>NYRB</i> <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/09/29/on-translation-tolstoy/" target="_blank">published selected responses</a> to Malcolm's article: of these, one of the most interesting is by the translator Judson Rosengrant. He is no kinder to Schwartz, calling her choice of <i>shapify</i> 'bizarre' and 'meretricious'. Rather than taking issue with Schwartz's style, like Malcolm, Rosengrant delves into the morphology of the word translated to explain why this translation might distort Tolstoy's style and mislead the reader. Essentially, he asserts that Schwartz has over-translated Tolstoy: by interpreting his use of the word 'obrazuetsia' as a neologism rather than an archaism, she created an unnecessary stylistic disruption and therefore (according to Rosengrant) effectively out-Tolstoyed Tolstoy. My own consultation of Dahl's dictionary suggests that there is a strong case for arguing that there is a fairly strong case for using a colloquial phrase rather than a neologism for 'образоваться.' The verb is used by a servant, speaking casually but respectfully, to mean 'things will take their course'; Dahl suggests possible meanings such as 'to be shaped [by another]', to take form', but these tend to be in quite specific religious or ideological contexts, such as the growth of an unborn child or the blessing of a marriage. Hence, as Rosengrant suggests, the word is an archaic one used in an inappropriate context. It is a defamiliarization - but not quite a neologism. Why, you might ask, is 'shapify' so important? First of all, as a neat neologism, it makes a succinct title for book reviews (such as Carol Apollonio's <i>TLS</i> piece on the Schwartz and Bartlett translations). Secondly, as the word is repeated at key points throughout the novel, it becomes an important breadcrumb in Tolstoy's Hansel-and-Gretel trail of meaning through the narrative. And thirdly, as a radical translation decision, it summarizes the ongoing debate for translators of Tolstoy: should they take the rough with the smooth? Or just the rough? Or just the smooth?<br />
<br />
Here comes my pennyworth. Another media flurry, so far positive, is in progress around Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's <i>Odyssey </i>which, startlingly, appears to be the first ever rendering of this canonical text by a woman - unless you subscribe to the minority opinion that Homer was female. Interestingly, <i>Anna Karenina </i> has been much more frequently translated by women or men working with women than by men alone: which makes me wonder whether one's choice of language for literary translation is strongly gendered and if so, what cultural and educational factors influence this gendering. Wilson's own views on translation and gender are uncompromising: 'the gendered metaphor of the "faithful" translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman' (<i>Translator's Note</i>,<i> </i>86). Rather like Bartlett, Wilson brings impressive academic credentials (she read classics at Balliol and is now Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania) to her role, which makes her translation decisions rather harder for would-be detractors to sneer at. When Wilson writes about the <i>Odyssey</i>, she could well have <i>Anna Karenina</i> in mind: both are texts that are 'deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance' . Even though <i>Anna</i>'s infidelity creates Tolstoy's narrative, the iron fidelity of her sisters-in-law Dolly and Kitty holds the plot together. In Homer, the marriage bed, carved by hand from a tree, forms the linch-pin of the relationship between faithful Penelope and her straying husband). Both texts are about women who stand by their men.<br />
<br />
Tolstoy has often been compared to Homer, and not just because their most famous works have the most contested first lines in literature (compare "All happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way", the opening line of <i>Anna Karenina</i>, with the less widely-cited but equally contentious first line of the <i>Odyssey</i>, discussed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html" target="_blank">here</a> by Wilson). Tolstoy read, adored, and emulated Homer. Stylistically, he has been usefully compared to Homer, and as Wilson reminds us, 'Homeric style is actually quite often redundant and very often repetitious' (82). Doesn't it follow, therefore, that best practice for translating Homer might also apply to Tolstoy? If we turn to Matthew Arnold's 1860 lectures called 'On Translating Homer', which some regard as the gold standard for this task, we are encouraged to aim to translate intention, manner, and inspiration, rather than word-for-word lexis. Arnold warns, 'To suppose that it is fidelity to an original to give its matter,
unless you at the same time give its manner; or, rather, to suppose that you
can really give its matter at all, unless you can give its manner, is just the
mistake of our pre-Raphaelite school of painters, who do not understand that
the peculiar effect of nature resides in the whole and not in the parts. So the
peculiar effect of a poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words
taken separately'. This approach might remind us of Schwartz's with <i>Anna Karenina</i>, and could even justify her use of <i>shapify</i> where, arguably, no such neologism was required: Schwartz, having assimilated Tolstoy's 'manner', which tests and occasionally defies conventional lexis, was simply anticipating his 'matter' with this invention.<br />
<br />
Emily Wilson follows Arnold's injunctions to preserve four aspects of Homeric style ('plainness, simplicity, directness of thought, and nobility'); the same might be said of both Schwartz and Bartlett's approaches to translating Tolstoy. At the same time, Wilson unflinchingly admits that no translation can ever be successful in the sense that it can <i>reproduce</i> the aesthetic effect of the original; as she puts it, all modern translations are inevitably and 'entirely alien from the original' (87). Our modern language is irreparably distinct from Homer's Greek; so is the world as we understand it; so is our culture. We might have more in common culturally and cognitively with Tolstoy's Russia, but not so much that the question of alienation can be avoided. In her <i>Odyssey</i>,<i> </i>Wilson aims for simplicity, making Homer as accessible as he would have been to his original hearers and readers, but she doesn't hesitate to make her text deliberately strange by including poetic effects and discordant language, in order to remind modern readers of the chasm between the Homeric universe and our own, and not least, to remind them that this <i>is</i> a translation. Her hope, as she expresses it, is to sustain 'a register that recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang' (87). What translator can hope for more?<br />
<br />
<i>Parts of this post have previously appeared in my review articles on translating Tolstoy in the </i>East-West Review (Autumn 2015) <i>and </i>Translation and Literature (26: 2017), pp. 214-222.</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-50055461513088193502017-07-20T22:11:00.000+01:002018-04-10T15:13:12.405+01:00A Pilot in the Hive: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Moscow Visit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwHHXg9iO17J3QYebiM0c65gmpGdVlgwCsfv5b6eZLw_Nuo4FHuKGxq5skUFIdHNvgafKpAhy3K-8Mr8UMjJzVnO2caEwoVDQGQAx3UTyw4WmWYTjJhyphenhyphenVrrq7Yp5dYdxgXcV0ZuAYMVgkY/s1600/exupery+in+plane.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="737" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwHHXg9iO17J3QYebiM0c65gmpGdVlgwCsfv5b6eZLw_Nuo4FHuKGxq5skUFIdHNvgafKpAhy3K-8Mr8UMjJzVnO2caEwoVDQGQAx3UTyw4WmWYTjJhyphenhyphenVrrq7Yp5dYdxgXcV0ZuAYMVgkY/s320/exupery+in+plane.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Another Antoine de Saint-Exupéry post today, for fans of the flying comte. Recently, I've been reading Katerina Clark's excellent <i>Moscow, the Fourth Rome</i>: <i>Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture 1931-1941</i> (Harvard UP, 2011), which explores the intersection of cultural expansionism and cultural receptivity in Stalinist Russia via the personal lives and global adventures of certain Russian and European intellectuals, principally Sergei <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenberg. The walk-on cast is full of international luminaries, including Walter Benjamin, who made an 'unheroic, private trip' to Moscow in the winter of 1926-7; Le Corbusier (late 1920s); Paul Robeson (1935); Edmund Wilson (1935); and Bertolt Brecht (in 1932, 1935, and 1941). Clark's central premise - if such a richly complex book can be confined to one argument - is that Stalin's government, aware of its technical and civic disadvantages, emphasised and proselytised its cultural superiority. This involved not just the export of Soviet culture abroad but the promotion of foreign culture at home (via state-subsidized literary translation, screenings of Walt Disney films, <i>King Lear </i>in Moscow's Jewish theatre) and invitations to left-leaning intellectuals and foreign journalists. </span>Saint-Exupéry belonged to the latter category, as a correspondent for <i>Paris-Soir </i>(he was also a commercial pilot and a publicity attaché for Air France). Arriving (by train) in Moscow on 29 April 1935, he remained there for almost a month, during which he published six impressionistic articles in <i>Paris-Soir</i>.<br />
<br />
Clark calls 1935 the 'high point of Soviet internationalism'; that year, Saint-Exupéry was in Moscow at the same time as Brecht. Unlike the latter, however, he was not able to secure a coveted VIP ticket to the May Day parade; in fact, on the morning of May 1st he was officially confined to his hotel (the Savoy on Rozhdestvenka, near the Bolshoi Theatre and the modern-day Kuznetskii Most metro station). 'In an area within a kilometre of Stalin, no-one was allowed to slip through unless their civil status and their ancestors had been checked, re-checked and, for greater security, checked a third time'. Eventually escaping from the Savoy (apparently by a timely bribe), Saint-Exupéry wandered the strangely empty streets near central Moscow, repeatedly encountering a security cordon when he tried to approach the parade. The aerial display - which he described as a thousand planes flying low in formation like a single metal tool - he found unexpectedly oppressive, likening it to a machine press placing its stamp on the surface of the city. When he finally glimpsed the parade, he found the spectacle equally sinister:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The parade of an entire people, like that of the thousand planes, has the same pitiless quality that one finds in the unanimity of a jury. And this flow of black and sombre outfits, in spite of the brightness of red pennants, this march that was slow and almost blind in its strength, was perhaps still more impressive than a parade by soldiers, for soldiers do a job and, when the job is over, they become again different types of men. These people had been seized by their very roots, by their work uniforms, by their flesh, by their thoughts. And as I watched them advance the march suddenly stopped</i> (from '<i>Sous le grondement de mille avions, Moscou tout entière a célébré la fête de la révolution</i>'.)<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPlxcCgvyJhFuN8efOOpaWyX3S6VXBY9OPv6ILmRc4iiZ8XkLEPdQMiE5sg4l7uQoUo33nqBdngCpSzr1Rkxw8XDP459s3Tu1JSIVFvsZUFy21fwvM9I6A1FSek6eSvVptIsUnFqfy4Ege/s1600/tsirk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="501" data-original-width="632" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPlxcCgvyJhFuN8efOOpaWyX3S6VXBY9OPv6ILmRc4iiZ8XkLEPdQMiE5sg4l7uQoUo33nqBdngCpSzr1Rkxw8XDP459s3Tu1JSIVFvsZUFy21fwvM9I6A1FSek6eSvVptIsUnFqfy4Ege/s320/tsirk.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still of a May Day parade in Moscow from Grigorii Aleksandrov's 1936 <i>Tsirk</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
For a few moments, musicians struck up a tune; couples and families began to dance; the terrifying uniformity was shattered, and the May Day marchers acquired an everyday conviviality that reminded Saint-Exupéry of Parisians celebrating the 14th of July. Someone even offered him a cigarette, someone else offered him a light; but once the pause was over, the marchers resumed their unflinching path towards Stalin.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWCzamJDHY6kfsx5i-Tl97jTHlXYqT7uV-BiKJPorjmnJt4ZGBfRuBT2pxDRfw7T4AEDWHI5cJu6XGHpBjwzsVwoHlw9bxb3OewUm7BE48-iLwR56N69JIZYzZ9nVVg6RA61UpcDQ7_W14/s1600/paris-soir.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1405" data-original-width="1032" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWCzamJDHY6kfsx5i-Tl97jTHlXYqT7uV-BiKJPorjmnJt4ZGBfRuBT2pxDRfw7T4AEDWHI5cJu6XGHpBjwzsVwoHlw9bxb3OewUm7BE48-iLwR56N69JIZYzZ9nVVg6RA61UpcDQ7_W14/s320/paris-soir.jpg" width="235" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Paris-Soir</i> cover from 1934</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Saint-Exupéry's view of Moscow was not particularly sympathetic (like Brecht's, at the time). In <a href="https://russiandinosaur.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/aviators.html" target="_blank">a previous post</a> I discussed his relatively clear-eyed, if still over-idealistic, view of Soviet justice, and his insightful reporting of the <i>Maxim Gorky</i> disaster. His negative reaction to the May Day flyover was all the more surprising given that, according to his biographer Stacy Schiff, the editors of <i>Paris-Soir </i>had probably picked him for his competence in reporting on this very event. He did not have cultural luminaries to shepherd him around, unlike Brecht, who was ciceroned by Tretiakov and Eisenstein as well as his German theatrical friends Erwin Piskator and Bernhard Reich; even the lethargic Benjamin (who worried about slipping on ice and misreading signs in Cyrillic) was shown around Moscow by his on-again off-again lover, the Latvian director Asja Lacis. Instead Saint-Exupéry was met in Moscow by Georges Kessel, brother of a fellow literary pilot, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kessel" target="_blank">Joseph Kessel</a>; the family originally hailed from Orenburg. Nor did he pay for hospitality with hagiography; he wrote freely about Stalin as an 'invisible man', controlling the destinies of his people from a 'zone of desert and silence'. There, 'at the heart of the Kremlin, between the black and gilt buildings and the ramparts enclosing them, stretch lawns set like traps' (from 'Sous le grondement...').<br />
<br />
Saint-Exupéry was well aware that foreigners in Moscow were tailed by 'guardians' who supervised their explorations ('Une étrange soirée avec Mlle Xavier at dix petites vieilles un peu ivres qui pleuraient leurs vingt ans...'). This did not discourage him from a foray into a decaying pre-revolutionary apartment block to meet an elderly French lady, one of approximately three hundred Frenchwoman formerly serving as governesses in wealthy Russian families, forgotten survivors of the Revolution, 'grey mice' who live insignificant, invisible lives off informal French lessons and small-scale black marketeering, bartering their neighbours' useless luxuries (make-up, gloves, monocles). After comical interludes with neighbours in the building and in the entrance of the collective apartment, where Saint-Exupéry, who speaks only French, endures successive interrogation in Russian, English, and Danish, he is finally claimed by Mlle Xavier, a frail septuagenarian, delighted with this visit from a glamorous compatriot. She assures him that 'Une révolution, c'est bien ennuyeux', before confiding her anecdotal experience of the Bolshevik regime:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>And she described to me the darkest day of the civil war. That very morning she had been given neck-ties. Neck-ties, on a day like that! But Mlle Xavier saw neither soldiers nor women machine-gunners, nor dead bodies. She was much too busy turning a profit on the neck-ties which, she told me, were all the rage.</i></div>
<i><br /></i>
Or the time a little later, when Mlle Xavier was rounded up with hundreds of others and held overnight for interrogation, sleeping on a quilt she happened to have purchased just before she was arrested. Finally she was brought before the the operatives who reviewed arrestees' papers before either freeing them or sending them to the cellars to be shot; Saint-Exupéry notes that their chairman was bleary-eyed from working through the night.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>And this man from whom only two paths inexorably led, towards life or towards death, this man asked her nervously, scratching his ear: "I have a twenty-year-old daughter, mademoiselle; would you like to give her lessons?"</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>And Mlle Xavier, pressing the quilt against her heart, answered him with crushing dignity: "You have arrested me. Judge me. We will speak tomorrow, if I am still alive, about your daughter."</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>And that evening she added, with a sparkle in her eyes: </i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>"They didn't dare look at me; they were so very ashamed of themselves."</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>And I respect these adorable illusions</i>.</div>
<br />
Saint-Exupéry compares her wilful self-deception with the admirable delusions of Cossacks at a Crimean port, who had arrived too late to catch the last boat out, which was already overloaded with refugees and wallowing dangerously in the water. Any man swimming for the boat was shot, to prevent a capsize that would drown everyone. Yet the Cossacks, indefatigably, magnificently and misguidedly, kept dismounting on the quay, killing their animals (to leave nothing behind for the Reds) and plunging into the water to be shot in their turn. (Saint-Exupéry credits this anecdote to a female acquaintance).<br />
<br />
Clark and others remind us that a fixture of the hagiographic literature expected from foreign visitors was the arrival epiphany: the train journey (as it usually was) into the Soviet paradise. Saint-Exupéry would have disappointed Soviet audiences. He documented a sleepless night in Eastern Europe; finding the luxury compartments almost empty, he roamed into the cheap carriages and viewed the sleeping Polish seasonal workers, leading to a tragic meditation on the ugliness of ageing humans, and our wasted potential as a species. One little boy's beauty arrested him: 'He was born to this couple like a kind of golden fruit. This triumph of charm and grace was born from the heavy-limbed herd! I bowed over that smooth brow, that sweet pucker of the lips, and I told myself: "Here is the face of a musician, here is an infant Mozart, here is a fine promise for life!" The little princes of legend were not a jot better than him. Protected, surrounded, tended, what might he not become?' (from 'Vers l'U.R.S.S.: La nuit, dans un train ou, au milieu de mineur polonais rapatriés, Mozart enfant dormait... Les petits princes de légende n'étaient point différents de lui'). But, Saint-Exupéry concludes, 'Mozart is doomed' to the life of the herd. The lonely pilot met the little prince for the first time, perhaps, on the Moscow train in April 1935.<br />
<br />
Any hopeful Soviet readers would have had to be satisfied with Saint-Exupéry's declaration that he had been naive to expect to appreciate Moscow all at once, to understand it as soon as he stepped on the station platform; and throughout his month there he never posted a definitive account of Stalin's city. In fact, he posted copy belatedly and reluctantly (Schiff suggests he kept running out of cigarettes, which he relied on when writing). His next excursion was to the Mediterranean for a series of aviation conferences; presumably more congenial work. Saint-Exupéry's best impression of Moscow, for better or worse, was also his first (from 'Moscou! Mais où est la Révolution?'):<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The train changes course and the city appears all at once, all of a piece, like a single unit. And I count above Moscow seventy-one planes taking to the air.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>And in this way the first picture I have is that of an enormous hive, fully alive, beneath a swarm of bees.</i></div>
<br />
<b><i>Disclaimers: all translations (and therefore errors) are my own, from </i>Un sens à la vie<i>, the 1956 reprint of Saint-Exupéry's early journalism. I have also used Stacy Schiff's </i>Saint-Exupéry: A Biography <i>(Random House, 2011), Katerina Clark's </i>Moscow: The Fourth Rome<i>, and Walter Benjamin's </i>Moscow Diary<i>, which can be downloaded <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/778471" target="_blank">here</a> with a Jstor subscription.</i></b><br />
<br /></div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-8203501948652847892017-07-14T01:50:00.000+01:002017-07-21T13:48:04.831+01:00Aviators<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFN4FhHHBz0bJ3RMCfYnN0hk01i66wpjUjY2-g_0X9_TidoiHToT5gQfpPmvn-3Em3Nm3Hc2klEnE942q2M-U3Lbx6kcpjDdk59FPkAyk3lMkrbsxZTLRdrWbDSDPSWTRwNMUJGFqekm4Z/s1600/plane+meteorologist.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="379" data-original-width="943" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFN4FhHHBz0bJ3RMCfYnN0hk01i66wpjUjY2-g_0X9_TidoiHToT5gQfpPmvn-3Em3Nm3Hc2klEnE942q2M-U3Lbx6kcpjDdk59FPkAyk3lMkrbsxZTLRdrWbDSDPSWTRwNMUJGFqekm4Z/s400/plane+meteorologist.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A riddle - the solution is the picture - sent by A.F. Vangengeim to his daughter</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />There seems to be a special link - a kind of reverse polarity of the imagination - between convicts and pilots. Take Oscar Wilde's famous sky envy:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>I never saw a man who looked</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>With such a wistful eye</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Upon that little tent of blue</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Which prisoners call the sky... </i> (<i>The Ballad of Reading Gaol</i>)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or consider this paean to aviation, by a 26-year-old airman for whom time spent earthbound was already a kind of incarceration:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The earth is reassuring with her clearly divided fields, her geometric forests, her villages. The pilot dives to enjoy her all the more. From up high, the earth seems nude, dead; as the plane descends, the earth clothes herself. The woods once again cushion her; the valleys and hills undulate over her; she breathes. [...] And the noises he heard? He no longer thinks of them. This is real life, here, so close to the sun. [...] The torrential sun sweeps away under him the roofs, the walls, the trees emerging from the inexhaustible horizon. Landing is a disappointment. You exchange the flooding wind, the growling of your engine and the annihilation of the latest turn for a silent province where you suffocate, a landscape of advertisements with very white hangars, for very green carpets, for neatly cropped poplars beside which young English girls disembark, rackets under their arms, from the blue planes of the Paris-London route.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The passage above is an extract from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's short story <i>L'Aviateur</i> (The Aviator), first published in 1926 and posthumously reprinted by Gallimard in 1956. In the twentieth century, perhaps no-one else has written more evocatively about the air, or about air crashes. Saint-Exupéry visited Moscow briefly, in his dual capacity as a journalist and celebrity pilot, in the late spring of 1935; he wrote copy for <i>Paris-Soir </i>about his experience of flying on the eight-engine propaganda craft <i>Maxim Gorky</i> on the very day before it crashed near Moscow on May 18th. He admired the plane (at the time the largest of its kind in the world) as a triumph of skilled engineering, and also as a unique airborne community, with its own telephone lines and even a typist's office. He understood very well the moral impact of the disaster: 'Its loss is considered here as grounds for national mourning. [Besides the loss of the crew and the thirty-five factory worker passengers for whom this flight had been a reward]... the USSR loses the best evidence it had of the vitality of its youthful industry.' What Saint-Exupéry ultimately distilled from the tragedy was its stark, Hellenistic absence of meaning: the <i>Maxim Gorky</i> crashed not because of equipment failure, or internal enemies, or Jewish doctors. It crashed because one of a trio of accompanying Soviet fighter planes miscalculated during an aerial manoeuvre, impacting on and shearing through the monster craft's massive flanks. '...The wings, the motors, and the fuselage separated, slowly unfurling like a black flower. Even the speed of the fall seemed controlled. The observers felt they were watching a dizzying glissade or the almost ceremonial shipwreck of a torpedoed vessel. [...] At the bloody crossroads of its peaceful path, the <i>Maxim Gorky </i>was struck down for entering the flight path, rigid as a bullet's trajectory, of a blind fighter plane'. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCPmshnOXL5bk2oBkNrjXRY_lNNlnPQvHJJxOkB-uO7QkiR5boHQt9Q5FEPMTwCLOY6CVa1RL4IFZw9oIGJxMdivUGbkyTAyDjggZwtASb4_6q1-r80bG9Mh_TkV91JXjbtdwR-iY-rH-V/s1600/Kuptsov+maxim+gorky+1934.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1088" data-original-width="1280" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCPmshnOXL5bk2oBkNrjXRY_lNNlnPQvHJJxOkB-uO7QkiR5boHQt9Q5FEPMTwCLOY6CVa1RL4IFZw9oIGJxMdivUGbkyTAyDjggZwtASb4_6q1-r80bG9Mh_TkV91JXjbtdwR-iY-rH-V/s320/Kuptsov+maxim+gorky+1934.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The <i>Maxim Gorky</i>, painted by the artist Vasily Kuptsov in 1934</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A year or two earlier, another heroic episode in Soviet flight technology had been followed by tragedy: the world's first successful balloon flight into the Earth's high atmosphere (to a height of 19,500 metres) was performed by three Soviet pilots on September 30, 1933. But the next January a follow-up flight reached 22,000 metres but crashed on descent, killing all three 'proletarian Prometheuses' (as Olivier Rolin calls them) aboard. Their State funerals were no doubt sufficient compensation for lives cut short. On January 8, 1934, three weeks before the doomed flight of the <i>Osoaviakhim-1</i>, one of the senior meteorologists involved in preparing the first balloon ascent had his life cut short in a rather different way. This was Aleksei Feodos'evich Vangengeim (1881-1937), a founding member of the Soviet Union's first Hydrometeorological Service, and its president between 1929 and 1934. Despite his Germanic name, his family's (possibly Dutch) origins were remote; he was born in a Ukrainian village, studied mathematics and physics at Moscow University, and worked at weather stations all over continental Russia. His French biographer Olivier Rolin writes lyrically that 'His kingdom was the clouds. [...] He represented the Soviet Union at the International Commission on clouds, he took part in All-Soviet congresses on the formation of fog, he created the Bureau of Weather in 1930 [...]'. But Rolin stresses that Vangengeim would have disowned any such lyricism; he was a pragmatist, a dedicated worker and researcher, and a Soviet patriot. Within his field, he was also a visionary: Rolin describes his subject's ambitions for a wind-chart that would unite weather reports across Russia and the whole world to create a coherent atmospheric map. If we learned to direct the renewable (and inexhaustible) energy of the wind, Vangengeim wrote in 1935, it could be used as an alternative source of heat and light energy; even for powering turbines that would distribute water to arid central Russian regions. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sadly, Vangengeim was one of many brilliant, avant-garde minds sacrificed to the paranoid politics of High Stalinism. Despite his influential connections (he knew, personally, Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, the much-lionized Arctic explorer Otto Schmidt, even Maxim Gorky himself), once he was denounced as the secret ringleader of a counter-revolutionary, Menshevik clique within the Hydrometeorological Service (an imaginary terrorist ring of actual weathermen: the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground" target="_blank">later American version</a> involved real terrorists and imaginary meteorologists), his days were numbered. He was picked up by the Soviet secret police just before meeting his wife to watch a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera <i>Sadko</i> at Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre. He would next see his wife, for the final time, four months later just before being exiled. After a relatively brief detention in the Lubyanka Prison, Vangengeim was sentenced to ten year's "re-education" in the notorious SLON prison camp on the Solovetski Islands, in the White Sea. (The camp's full name was 'Solovki Special Purposes Camp'; in Russian, its acronym is the same as the Russian word for 'elephant'). Courageously, indefatigably, perhaps even, as Rolin suggests, pathetically, Vangengeim continued to regard his accusation and sentencing as a bitter mistake. Not until the very end of his imprisonment, in 1937, did he allow himself to doubt the probity of Soviet justice or of the powerful individuals who controlled the state. From Solovki, he wrote repeatedly to friends - like Schmidt - and to politicians - including Stalin, enclosing messages for acquaintances in letters to his wife, deliberately blinkering himself with the hope that once the right person read his case notes, he would be instantly extracted and reinstated and allowed to go back to doing his bit for a glorious Soviet future. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If Saint-Exupéry had been available at this point (his visit to Moscow was still a year in the future), he could have set Vangengeim straight about the meaning of his sentence. Saint-Exupéry had rather less time to become acquainted with the Soviet justice system, but he understood it better. In a smart article called 'Crimes and Punishments: Up Before Soviet Justice', he quoted an anonymous Soviet judge's statement that justice 'was not a matter of punishment, but of correction'. In France, long prison terms were routinely assigned for major crimes: 'the old lag of fifty is still paying for the youth of twenty who killed in a fit of anger'. In Russia, Saint-Exupéry noted, the death sentence was used freely but no term of imprisonment greater than ten years was ever allotted (it was not yet obvious to foreign observers that camp sentences were as renewable as wind energy). 'The dissident, if he is to reform, will reform within ten years. So why extend a punishment that would no longer be purposeful?' And punishment, Saint-Exupéry discovers, can be made doubly purposeful in Soviet Russia: the correction process can also be practically useful, as in the construction by convict labour of that great white elephant, the Belomor Canal (1930-2). 'Here is the miracle. These thieves, these pimps, these killers are drawn from jails as if from a reservoir and sent, at the point of several rifles, to dig out a canal which will join the White Sea and the Baltic Sea. There they will find adventure, and what an adventure! There they are ordered to plough, like worker giants, a deep ravine-like furrow between two seas, a furrow built for ships. To plant cathedral-sized scaffolding on collapsing ground and to throw up against their walls logs from the felling of entire forests, which part like straw as they dig underneath. At night, they join their comrades under the sights of rifles. [...] And little by little the game takes hold of them. They live in teams, directed by their own engineers, their own overseers, for in a prison every type can be found. They are governed by those amongst them who know best how to impose their natural dominance.'</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Saint-Exupéry seems to have fallen, like Gorky before him, for the myth of the Belomor Canal as a triumph of rational, humane re-education, when in fact working conditions were inhumane to an extreme degree, and many of the prisoners were criminals only in the political sense. Nevertheless, he raises another thorny point with his anonymous (possibly composite) Soviet judge: How can Soviet people live with constant scrutiny, with subjection to the collective, with internal passports? But this too is explained to him. Soviet society expects that 'men not only respect its laws, but <i>live</i> them' [my italics]. Soviet justice must be internalized by individuals. Given that many Russians share what Saint-Exupéry calls a 'nomad spirit' that pushes them beyond the confines of social norms as well as geography, they must be taught by the benevolent state to re-orient their aspirations and affections to the local and the concrete. 'Thus they build houses to entice the caravan-dwellers. Apartments are not rented, but sold. The internal passport is introduced. And those who raise their eyes too much to the dangerous portents in the sky are sent to Siberia, where winters sixty degrees below zero will laminate them. And thus they may create a new man, who is dependable, who loves his factory and his social circle, as a French gardener loves his garden.'</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of those 'new men' who had been re-educated building the Belomor Canal was Dmitri Sergeevich Likhachev, the future academician and world authority on the origins of Russian culture. Although Likhachev was not among the Herculean diggers envisaged by Saint-Exupéry (he was employed as an administrator, supervising rail deliveries of construction cargo), he worked on the project for over a year and benefited from Stalin's general amnesty to all prisoners (criminal and political) who had contributed to the canal's early completion. In 1928, Likhachev had been sentenced to five years in Solovki for belonging to a supposedly monarchist and anti-semitic student association at Leningrad University known, jokingly, as the 'Space Academy of Sciences'. (His great crime had been to present and publish a paper which decried the Soviet administration's decision to reform old-style Russian orthography). A much younger man than Vangengeim (Likhachev was born in 1906), he had been and gone from Solovki by the time the latter arrived. They would have shared, however, many of the same camp experiences, from the disorienting end of their long train journey in the coastal town of Kem (briefly, during the Civil War, a bastion of British, Finnish and Serbian anti-Bolshevik troops), and the dangerous journey to the Solovetsky Islands themselves: 'A strange country. No earth - stone and scrub', as Likhachev recorded. Thence followed days, months and years of casual brutality, exposure to extreme cold, inadequate food, inadequate everything, and the terrifying random selections of inmates for execution. Likhachev's secret prison diary and later memoirs also preserve some of the more positive aspects of the camp experience: the survival of protective networks of intellectuals and Orthodox believers (who were sometimes the same people), the existence of limited medical care in the prison infirmary, and the educational opportunities furnished by the many scientists, teachers, and university professors who tasked themselves with organizing evening classes, running the camp library and even publishing a SLON journal. Besides those letters to former colleagues and politicians, which were never answered or even acknowledged, Alexei Vangengeim managed the library, gave lectures on meteorology and mentored younger inmates; and he wrote personal letters to his wife and his daughter, who was only three years old at the time of his imprisonment. His letters to little Elena include delightful pedagogic aids, the parts of a flower intricately coloured and labelled to help her learn numbers, pictures of leaves and deer and Arctic foxes to teach her about Siberian nature. While all prisoners numbered their letters and constantly checked with their loved ones ("Did my ninth arrive?"), Vangengeim asked his growing daughter additional, tender questions: "Have you had your second blue fox?" Meaning, has the chain of illustrations - all he could share with his lost daughter - held? It did, until his death.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpuyUzWXs94q9qZ6Iwfhm-0WgocI6_wA7BbX6VckdNy9iKDlDFQJuF_Trq1SgjBqKFAXM1hW3u4dVG3xF-4j7CwEaq71e07m6tAezr5bo2Jxx19cgq1bF0KUCFFGreZNX99SHHWWL39uVt/s1600/fox+2+meteorologist.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="862" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpuyUzWXs94q9qZ6Iwfhm-0WgocI6_wA7BbX6VckdNy9iKDlDFQJuF_Trq1SgjBqKFAXM1hW3u4dVG3xF-4j7CwEaq71e07m6tAezr5bo2Jxx19cgq1bF0KUCFFGreZNX99SHHWWL39uVt/s320/fox+2+meteorologist.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo48z4ueYTdEydz6h8TuLkiWWJXBROi-cgDyT0NTg68zziSsYe0_iYNa0s_6BV2xPowRRdOIICNhLfqKvI2mI2Rgm_wojAMoPWESyPznSb4vKfAMoqLryq0cI5RX5eW2dUmc0i9f3KkUi4/s1600/fox+meteorologist.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="551" data-original-width="926" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo48z4ueYTdEydz6h8TuLkiWWJXBROi-cgDyT0NTg68zziSsYe0_iYNa0s_6BV2xPowRRdOIICNhLfqKvI2mI2Rgm_wojAMoPWESyPznSb4vKfAMoqLryq0cI5RX5eW2dUmc0i9f3KkUi4/s320/fox+meteorologist.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Likhachev was unusually lucky at Solovki; firstly, because his parents were allowed to visit him (actually staying in a room they rented from a camp guard), and secondly because their visit saved his life, as he would much later tell a young novelist called Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then compiling a monumental e<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">xposé of the Soviet camps (<i>The Gulag Archipelago</i>). Likhachev spent an evening away from barracks with his parents; meanwhile, a selection of 300 prisoners for immediate execution was underway. Guards knocked on Likhachev's door but didn't find him because he was with his family. Later, a friend tipped him off that he was on the list; he spent the night hiding inside a woodpile while others were chosen to make up the required number of victims. Likhachev suffered no repercussions for this act of stealthy disobedience, except that from that moment on he vowed to live two lives: his own, and one for the man who had died in his place. Vangengeim was not lucky at Solovki. On October 9, 1937, in Moscow, in response to a new order </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">from Nikolai Yezhov, the head of Stalin's secret police, </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">to 'clean up' the camps by dispatching more political prisoners, Alexei Vangengeim's name was entered on a list of those condemned. And within a month, with over a thousand others, he was shipped back to the mainland at Kem, transported south in a cattle car in the general direction of a Karelian town with the quaint name of "Bear Mountain" (Medvezhegorsk), shot in the back of the head and buried in the forest.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib1zdK0WttOxouSLuuNNc_OSRRLfOXEXOzieQ5ZHdxoAPZLjAqt6tUkLvqAtX-Imrh2ezIADrEUIBrvyD40cwr79B4ycyeAmPERq7slipfj8vms3cijenWcarmCGUJiLD4_QYjoo-dQTov/s1600/Stamp_of_Russia_2012_No_1558_Pyotr_Nesterov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><br /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib1zdK0WttOxouSLuuNNc_OSRRLfOXEXOzieQ5ZHdxoAPZLjAqt6tUkLvqAtX-Imrh2ezIADrEUIBrvyD40cwr79B4ycyeAmPERq7slipfj8vms3cijenWcarmCGUJiLD4_QYjoo-dQTov/s1600/Stamp_of_Russia_2012_No_1558_Pyotr_Nesterov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><br /></a><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">While I read Olivier</span> Rolin's <i>Le</i> <i>météorologue</i> (2014), which has just been published by Penguin in Ros Schwartz's translation as <i><a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1109427/stalin-s-meteorologist/" target="_blank">Stalin's Meteorologist</a><span style="font-style: normal;">, I was discovering, in parallel, another recent book which links the themes of imprisonment and aviation in a very different yet still more explicit way: Evgenii Vodolazkin's 2016 novel </span>The Aviator</i> (watch <a href="http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/big-book-two-vodolazkins-soaring-aviator.html" target="_blank">this space</a> for Lisa Espenschade's forthcoming translation, which will no doubt be as magisterial as her version of Vodolazkin's <i>Laurus</i>). Cryofrozen in a secret experiment in a prison camp laboratory on the Solovki Islands during the early 1930s, Innokenty Petrovich Platonov is found and revived in a private clinic near St Petersburg. Miraculously, Platonov seems to be both physically and mentally sound, although his memories are fragmentary and elusive. Born in 1900, he retains in the year 1999 the appearance of a man in his early thirties.Very gradually, Dr Heiger and nurse Valentina negotiate the impossible task of explaining to Platonov just what happened to him: '"Was I in an accident?" "One could say that."' (He eventually discovers just how long he has been unconscious by reading the best-before date on a container of pills accidentally left in his room). Dr Heiger encourages him to keep a diary for both returning memories and day-to-day events. That diary becomes <i>The Aviator</i>: in the second half of the book, Platonov's notes are joined by those of both Dr Heiger and Nastya, the granddaughter of Platonov's great love, who dies in the geriatric ward of a public hospital a few weeks after his return to St Petersburg. As Platonov's closest companions (Nastya is carrying his child), both Heiger and Nastya begin to share or even anticipate his memories, even unlocking the terrible secret set to destroy his second chance at life. This is a book about the Solovki experience - its recreation of the journey from Kem and of the camps is terrible and accurate - but it is also about aviation. As a boy, Platonov loves playing at flight so much that his family nickname him "Aviator Platonov" (and the nickname lingers like an echo, so that he asks his doctor if he had actually been a pilot in his previous life). He loves visiting the aerodrome and admiring the pilots, even though they smell of the castor oil that lubricates their engines: his bedroom walls are covered with pictures of famous early aeronauts, such as the French fighter ace Adolphe P<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">égoud and the Russian Pyotr Nesterov, the first pilot to perform a loop (and who died in the first month of the First World War, bullishly ramming an Austrian plane). </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Platonov quotes Blok's 1912 poem 'The Aviator': 'But here, in the trembling heat, / In the haze fuming over the meadow, /Hangars, people, everything earthly - / Might have been crushed unto the earth'. Platonov reflects that his earthly life has been well and truly crushed, whereas aviators live by different, glorious, aerial rules. He admires them: he aspired to be one. He might have quoted Yeats' 1918 lines, 'A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds', had they been circulated in peri-revolutionary Petrograd. But, like the narrator of Blok's poem (and the pilot of </span>Saint-Exupéry's short story), the child Platonov also witnesses a plane crash, and even sees the dead aviator up close. Indeed, Blok's poem suggests that the aviator crashes because he sees his own dark avatar approaching: 'Night flyer, in the turbid gloom / Bearing dynamite to earth'. As the reader discovers, Platonov's darker self bears dynamite of its own devising; and the narrative ends, appropriately, mid-flight. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib1zdK0WttOxouSLuuNNc_OSRRLfOXEXOzieQ5ZHdxoAPZLjAqt6tUkLvqAtX-Imrh2ezIADrEUIBrvyD40cwr79B4ycyeAmPERq7slipfj8vms3cijenWcarmCGUJiLD4_QYjoo-dQTov/s1600/Stamp_of_Russia_2012_No_1558_Pyotr_Nesterov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="735" data-original-width="1032" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib1zdK0WttOxouSLuuNNc_OSRRLfOXEXOzieQ5ZHdxoAPZLjAqt6tUkLvqAtX-Imrh2ezIADrEUIBrvyD40cwr79B4ycyeAmPERq7slipfj8vms3cijenWcarmCGUJiLD4_QYjoo-dQTov/s200/Stamp_of_Russia_2012_No_1558_Pyotr_Nesterov.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfqiyFy8o7ZOMv50AcIVphWdX2tCsRfwuB4QW-w5GEvkAZ6cP4Uu7eUqs4By2T_oAgKOH2fa-zG4phzcXg5BCV9O107GBVMPvVhw0sOm3Yd5WO82vHlW4QrkPA1rfF7BNgzC8VAGXTGDvp/s1600/AFV+meteorologist.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><br /></a>Despite its darkness, <i>The Aviator </i>is not a novel about death. It is, perhaps primarily, about resurrection. It is significant that its protagonist, aging with the century, is little older than Dmitri Likhachev; and perhaps also that he comes back to life in 1999, the year following Likhachev's death. Both young Mitya Likhachev and little Platonov spent joyous summers at their families' dachas in Kuokalla, now Repino, in the Karelian forest near St Petersburg. Both learned to cherish their families' cultural connections and intellectual heritage. Both are sentenced to camps on apparently trumped-up pretexts. But where Alexei Vangengeim died, and Dmitri Likhachev lived twice, Innokenty Platonov simply stops. He volunteers as an experimental subject at a secret laboratory on one of the remotest Solovetskii islands, because he is aware that the only alternative open to him is slow, brutal death from malnutrition, overwork and cruelty. Thus he is recruited for the LAZAR: another punning acronym, this time on the name Lazarus (since the laboratory studies cryogenic procedures with a view to freezing and eventually resurrecting Soviet grandees such as Stalin himself) and the word <i>lazaret</i>, which means 'infirmary'. When Dr Heiger resurrects him in 1999, Platonov becomes the only known survivor of the procedure, a true contemporary Lazarus. And yet his resurrection, his flight over the darkest half of the twentieth century, cannot be forgiven; he cannot be allowed to bypass history. After returning from Solovki, Likhachev lived through a sequence of horrors and persecutions that would have crushed other men: continued police surveillance and political persecution, threatened exile from Petersburg, the Siege of Leningrad with all its privations and suffering, the hypocrisy and corruption of the Brezhnev era, the death of a beloved child, grave illness. Of these tribulations, the years in SLON may not have been the worst. By comparison, Platonov can only live the years since the early 1930s vicariously, like Saint-Exupéry's pilot looking down at naked, dead terrain from high above. Likhachev, with whose life Platonov's is entangled, resurrected his own Solovki years and the sufferings of many others through his memoirs and his official work to expose the horrors of the Gulags, a task continued today by organizations such as Memorial. Perhaps this is a truer resurrection than Platonov's miraculous return. Vodolazkin, a specialist in ancient Russian literature, worked at St Petersburg's famous Pushkinskii Dom under Likhachev; <i>The Aviator</i> is, at least in part, an homage to his mentor. Memorial have resurrected Alexei Vangengeim too: just after finishing Rolin's book I bumped into his subject, in a manner of speaking, on the very last day of a <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/revolution-russian-art" target="_blank">Russian Revolution exhibition</a> at the Royal Academy of Arts. I squeezed into an audiovisual booth in the last room of the exhibition and jadedly watched a slideshow of mugshots of Gulag victims, snapped in identically rigid poses by the OGPU and later the NKVD. Every image hung on the screen for forty seconds or so, with a one-line summary of the subject's sentence (and afterlife - if any). Suddenly, Vangengeim was on the screen: stouter, more sedate, more ponderous than I had expected. We looked at each other. Then he was gone: the slideshow proceeded, and new visitors sat down beside me. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfqiyFy8o7ZOMv50AcIVphWdX2tCsRfwuB4QW-w5GEvkAZ6cP4Uu7eUqs4By2T_oAgKOH2fa-zG4phzcXg5BCV9O107GBVMPvVhw0sOm3Yd5WO82vHlW4QrkPA1rfF7BNgzC8VAGXTGDvp/s1600/AFV+meteorologist.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="217" data-original-width="327" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfqiyFy8o7ZOMv50AcIVphWdX2tCsRfwuB4QW-w5GEvkAZ6cP4Uu7eUqs4By2T_oAgKOH2fa-zG4phzcXg5BCV9O107GBVMPvVhw0sOm3Yd5WO82vHlW4QrkPA1rfF7BNgzC8VAGXTGDvp/s320/AFV+meteorologist.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A.F. Vangengeim in 1934 at the time of his arrest</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are two epilogues I would like to offer to the above. First, Likhachev's verdict on his four years in the camps, taken from his memoirs:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>What did I learn on the Solovki? First and foremost I understood that every man is a man. My life was saved by the </i>domushnik<i> (apartment burglar) Ovchinnikov, who travelled with us to the Solovki for the second time (he had been brought back from an escape he had heroically achieved in order to see his "Marukha" once again), and the king of all lessons taught on the Solovki was a robber called Ivan Yakovlevich Komissarov, with whom I shared a cell for a year or so. [...] From all this strife I emerged with a new knowledge of life and a new spiritual identity. The good which I had succeeded in doing for hundreds of adolescents, by saving their lives, and many other people's too, the good that I received from my fellow inmates, and the experience of everything that I saw - these created in me a very deeply rooted calm and spiritual health. I did not cause evil [</i>zla<i>], I did not endorse evil, I managed to develop in myself an ability to observe life, and I even managed inconspicuously to carry out my academic work.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That final line is undoubtedly a sincere victory of human dignity over impossible conditions. It is a fitting note to conclude this essay on (and also a useful daily checklist even for those of us <i>not </i>confined in camps). But, somehow (it must be my mother's Diplodocus blood talking) more of me wants to end with the final paragraph of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's <i>The Aviator</i>. Here there is no reconciliation, no resignation, no dignity, and no evil: only the blind, inevitable collision of human aspiration against nature. Not everyone has the skills or genius to be a Prometheus; but perhaps, at times, we are all Icarus.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The horizon, in one motion, slips over his head like a
sheet. The ground enfolds him, turning like a carousel, spinning its woods,
bell-towers, meadows... The pilot sees a white villa pass by as if flung from a
slingshot... The ground floods towards the slain pilot, like the sea towards a
diver.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAXzIiWJY6PnPPvamxIGjLCoVa9-C7UxRF7Dq7GJvJhT2vlLKPq5YOcdLvIFKi1C2DirfehKqmEdywjWVYuR_2bvUnTshe-68TxChc9B4S3OddoxsKcY9GRD2UGuN5bNysEKSxBGA_MzGx/s1600/5+meteorologist.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="353" data-original-width="483" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAXzIiWJY6PnPPvamxIGjLCoVa9-C7UxRF7Dq7GJvJhT2vlLKPq5YOcdLvIFKi1C2DirfehKqmEdywjWVYuR_2bvUnTshe-68TxChc9B4S3OddoxsKcY9GRD2UGuN5bNysEKSxBGA_MzGx/s400/5+meteorologist.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i>Disclaimers: All translations are my own (also all mistakes). I have excerpted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's fiction and essays from his posthumous collection </i>Un sens <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">à</span> </b><b> la vie<i> </i></b><b><i>(Gallimard, 1956). </i></b><b><i>Information on Dmitri Likhachev's biography comes from Vladislav Zubok, </i>The Idea of Russia; The Life and Work of Dmitry Likhachev <i>(I.B. Tauris, 2017). A useful source for A.F. Vangengeim's life (and his wonderful pictures) has been compiled <a href="http://old.memo.ru/uploads/files/716.pdf" target="_blank">here</a></i>. <i>I haven't read Ros Schwartz's translation of Rolin's </i>Le météorologue<i>, which has already won a PEN translation award, but I can recommend another recent translation of hers which I have just read and enjoyed - Jean-Paul Didierlaurent's charming </i>The Reader on the 6.27.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-66057027534261176092017-06-14T14:31:00.000+01:002017-07-20T11:10:28.513+01:00The Burning Umbrella: Krzhizhanovsky's Epigrams<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wanted to call this blog post 'the unreadable in pursuit of the untranslatable'. Then I wanted to call it 'the weeping translator', since that describes me trying to Anglify the Soviet writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's cryptic fragments. And then, as he will, Krzhizhanovsky himself gifted me a title: the burning umbrella.<br />
<br />
As part of a larger project to translate the author's non-fiction, I was asked to tackle selections from Krzhizhanovsky's 'writer's notebooks' for a new anthology of his non-fiction prose. There are three such notebooks, preserved by the writer's common-law wife Anna Bovshek, plus other miscellaneous jottings, all <a href="http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/19/krzhizh-zapisnye19.shtml" target="_blank">published online</a> by Vadim Perel'muter, the poet (and chief architect of Sigizmund Dominikovich's literary legacy). The notebooks contain <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">jottings, story
ideas, bad puns, and other momentary inspirations recorded by Krzhizhanovsky; some were reworked into stories, others recycle themes (including the word 'theme') which preoccupied him throughout his life, and still more preserve ideas in amber: embryonic plots, throwaway lines, acidic quips and bitter social commentary. </span>Translators involved in this project have been asked to keep footnotes to a minimum, so in my work for publication I must pass over the most obscure, the context-specific, and the untranslatable. And yet, as SDK (let's call him that) would surely appreciate, it's the untranslatable that I most wish to share. For example: this one-liner: <i>Gori, zont</i>. All SDK has done is break the Russian word <i>gorizont</i>, or 'horizon', into its semantic units (or, split semantics at the seams - I've been reading too much of this stuff) to create two new words that make no sense. <i>Gori, zont</i> means <i>Burn</i>, <i>umbrella</i>. Or as my colleague mischievously suggested: burn, brolly, burn. The blazing brolly makes no more sense in Russian than it does in English, but in translation even its semantic prehistory is lost: it reads like sheer nonsense, unless I intrude a forbidden footnote to explain that the words, reunified in Russian, mean 'horizon'. SDK loved building stories by literalizing metaphors ("In The Pupil", "The Unbitten Elbow", "The Runaway Fingers", for starters) but here we see him at his other favourite activity, unlocking individual words to let out the stories hidden inside them. <i>Lear meets Joyce</i>, with libretto by Lewis Carroll.<br />
<br />
Here are more pun-puzzles, <span style="text-align: center;">SDK thinking aloud</span>:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Daughter of vision (<i>Dochka zreniia</i>). The world is the daughter of vision. (This is a play on the phrase <i>tochka zreniia</i>, literally 'point of view'; but since 'daughter' is not assonant with 'point', the harmony is lost in English.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: center;">
We wailed. Did you? (<i>My vyli</i>. <i>Vy li</i>?). (Fun with that uniquely Russian vowel, ы, and the Russian interrogative particle <i>li</i>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: center;">
Welcome and Priam (<i>Priyom i Priam.</i>)</div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Dumb [speechless]. Not mine. (<i>Nemoi</i>. <i>Ne moi</i>.)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
The crown [as in the kind broken by Jack and Jill] of the theme. (<i>Temya temy</i>.)</div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjehS9QfSc7BXMKiaCtiD_j9PW7CfWJDD0HmU2r8CTIwGPDKB84cmQi_g5PVyqCf_1YG_g_ow42EXmdBQ-fPEvncrA4sO8aGJECZG_nzddKmkEGKcWAvQ6Azlg1tYP-Tl-OTrHOLaK-0d4B/s1600/burning-umbrella_53197.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="367" data-original-width="490" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjehS9QfSc7BXMKiaCtiD_j9PW7CfWJDD0HmU2r8CTIwGPDKB84cmQi_g5PVyqCf_1YG_g_ow42EXmdBQ-fPEvncrA4sO8aGJECZG_nzddKmkEGKcWAvQ6Azlg1tYP-Tl-OTrHOLaK-0d4B/s320/burning-umbrella_53197.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
If all this sounds too casual, SDK wakes us up by combining an untranslatable word (<i>toska </i>- ennui, longing) with a neologism (<i>toskizm</i>) to announce, 'I have fallen into miserabilism' (<i>Ya vpal v toskizm</i>). And the notebooks contain much, much more than wordplay: Kozma Prutkov and other less well-known figures from the 19th century comic grotesque (such as Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin, playwright and satirist) stalk through these epigrams. Other aspects (such as his idea for a play called <i>John and Jeanne</i>, about Falstaff and Joan of Arc) relate to his critical essays on Shakespeare. But the translator's life is never made easy. SDK is enthralled by the idea of a fish learning things off by heart (in Russian, <i>na zubok</i>, by the tooth); which allows him to make the groaning joke, '<i>On znaet eto na zubok, no tolk'ko zubov u nego netu</i>' ('He knows this by the tooth, although he's toothless'). Wonderful: except that, as far as I know, fish do have hearts, so the obvious English translation misses, to say the least, a beat: 'He knows this by heart, although he's heartless'. Even more dispiriting for the translator are paragraph-length jokes that founder, literally in this case, on a single syllable:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The girl was very lazy. “So what will it be: yes or no?” he
asked her. “Yes,” she answered, because “no” was one letter longer. They
married. When her time came to give birth, she was too lazy to make an effort.
Things dragged out, and when, finally, at the urging of her doctor and husband she
overcame her laziness, the child emerged perfectly grown-up, with a beard and
whiskers, just like you.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="text-align: left;">Before anyone points out that I made a mistake - that 'yes' is one letter longer than 'no' - may I point out that the reverse is true in Russian. It's just easier to say 'da' then 'net' (which makes Russia's </span><a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP162/index2.html" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">low birth rate</a><span style="text-align: left;"> even more mysterious). </span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or take his one-line sketch of a 'character for a comedy', which is actually a rather scary exercise in Soviet biography: 'In childhood they scared him with pipe-cleaners (<i>trubochisty</i>), in old age with a purge (<i>chistka</i>)'. As a literal translation clearly won't cut the mustard here, I've played it safe by substituting 'purgative' for 'pipe-cleaner'. Very occasionally, SDK's punning works better in English: 'A spare pair of parents' has more assonance going on than SDK's '<i>zapasnaya para roditelei'</i>; it's also a nicely reverse-Bracknell situation ('To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness; always carry a spare pair'). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A shock revelation: SDK could be banal. He penned truisms like 'We are all mortal: we will all die', or uninspired description such as ''An unshaven cheek, rough as sandpaper (<i>nazhdak</i>)' is one of the tossed-away lines recorded in the First Notebook. But then he catches you out with a slow-burning witticism: 'He speaks six Russian languages' - and what sounds like a compliment peels away into a verdict of incoherence (or possibly sycophancy) on an individual who speaks his native language six different ways. Or the splendid, doubtless autobiographical aphorism: '<i>Luchshe uzh krasnyi nos, chem nos po vetry</i>' - literally: 'Better to have a red nose than a nose by the wind'. The first half of this proverb references the inebriation to which SDK ultimately succumbed; the second half derives from a Russian sailing expression, <i>derzhat' nos po vetry</i>, to steer the nose (of a ship) by the wind. Better to be three sheets to the wind, than to trim your sails to it? Thus changing the bogies of metaphor from the human face to the high seas.<i> </i>SDK can also be off-colour - there are some unoriginal, locker-roomish quips about virginity, and this odd 'reported anecdote' from a Soviet-era collective apartment:<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
A<i> man in a collective apartment catches his finger on a nail
in the bathroom – a bloodstain on the floor. He goes to his room, then hears
quarrelling female voices through his wall: “Why don’t you clean up after
yourself? Are you too lazy to clear up once a month?” “I’m perfectly clean. That’s your blood. Mine
finished five days ago…” And the man with the bound-up finger learns the hidden
truth.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These scraps, however, were not written for publication. They were written as <i>aides-memoire</i> and <i>bons mots</i> by a man who couldn't even publish what he <i>did</i> write for publication. (<a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/11/15/the-known-unknown-on-sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky/" target="_blank">This </a>is an excellent article on SDK's life and woes by Adam Thirlwell). He called himself 'a crossed-out person', and enjoined those who were similarly crossed-out 'to believe' (<i>zacherknutomu: verit'</i>), although what they should believe in was not clear; certainly not Soviet literature. In a sense, all his work was already crossed-out; why blame him for a few dodgy extemporizations genuinely not meant to be seen? The real 'wonder' ('wonderful adventures inside a textbook of logic' writes SDK, apropos of nothing in particular) is that these notes, independently of his finished prose, present so much that is cogent and immanent. As Krzhizhanovsky reflected in his Second Notebook, 'As a writer, am I with the majority or the minority? If
counted by the number of heads, I’m in the minority; but if we go by the number
of thoughts, surely I’m in the majority?'<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-87071218863290424972017-03-09T18:49:00.000+00:002017-03-09T18:49:26.389+00:00Called Back: Chasing Convicts in Siberia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
One of my minor hobbies (very well, obsessions) is collecting detective fiction, especially Golden Age mysteries. The British Library recently made collecting these a whole lot easier by republishing <a href="https://www.bl.uk/aboutus/publishing/crime-classics-booklet.pdf" target="_blank">the best of a very long backlist</a> with adorable covers adapted from period British Rail posters. I also hoard the Detective Club series of reprints. Basically, if Martin Edwards has <a href="http://www.martinedwardsbooks.com/goldenageofmurder.htm" target="_blank">written a preface</a> for it, I'll collect it. I'll accumulate retro detective series by contemporary authors too - provided the perspective is ironic, not twee. (Hence Ian Sansom's <i>The County Guides</i> and James Anderson's Inspector Wilkins mysteries are welcome; Posy Parker and Rose Simpson less so).<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVpJcSNjE94yjP2UbQcCBvebRNYQsVpSl2hf-y3OdSyGcdpcAQ4CM5V8u96naubfoHyTTR51muuI4Nq9MjQaD9DOhQ27I2r0LbCf7bLLPl8M8LypTwAPJzse-x5iBHqKMWFH3qqggX0T4x/s1600/lake+disrict+murder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVpJcSNjE94yjP2UbQcCBvebRNYQsVpSl2hf-y3OdSyGcdpcAQ4CM5V8u96naubfoHyTTR51muuI4Nq9MjQaD9DOhQ27I2r0LbCf7bLLPl8M8LypTwAPJzse-x5iBHqKMWFH3qqggX0T4x/s320/lake+disrict+murder.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
<br />
As you can imagine, I'm in seventh heaven when one of my mysteries unexpectedly sports a Russian connection. Normally, it's just a throwaway geopolitical remark by a bobby - as in Chesterton's <i>The Man Who Was Thursday </i>(1907), where a policeman charitably ascribes 'those chance dynamite outbreaks from Russia' to 'the outbreaks of oppressed, if mistaken, men'. (This book is also notable for the presence of a Polish anarchist called Gogol). Or take this longer excursus from R. Austin Freeman's short story "The Moabite Cipher" (1909), often anthologized to exemplify the talents of his 'medical jurispractitioner' hero, John Thorndyke. The plot opens with a visit to London by a Russian Grand Duke: the police, with proto-Trumpian enthusiasm, are seeing Jewish anarchist terrorists everywhere (although the mystery will eventually be prosaically explained as a burglary).<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>A large and motley crowd lined the pavements of Oxford Street
as Thorndyke and I made our way leisurely eastward. Floral decorations and
drooping bunting announced one of those functions inaugurated from time to time
by a benevolent Government for the entertainment of fashionable loungers and
the relief of distressed pickpockets. For a Russian Grand Duke, who had torn
himself away, amidst valedictory explosions, from a loving if too demonstrative
people, was to pass anon on his way to the Guildhall; and a British Prince,
heroically indiscreet, was expected to occupy a seat in the ducal carriage.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Near Rathbone Place Thorndyke halted and drew my attention
to a smart-looking man who stood lounging in a doorway, cigarette in hand.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>"Our old friend Inspector Badger," said Thorndyke.
"He seems mightily interested in that gentleman in the light overcoat. How
d'ye do, Badger?" for at this moment the detective caught his eye and
bowed. "Who is your friend?"<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>"That's what I want to know, sir," replied the
inspector. "I've been shadowing him for the last half-hour, but I can't
make him out, though I believe I've seen him somewhere. He don't look like a
foreigner, but he has got something bulky in his pocket, so I must keep him in
sight until the Duke is safely past. I wish," he added gloomily,
"these beastly Russians would stop at home. They give us no end of
trouble."</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A thought no doubt often voiced by Boris Berezovsky's neighbours on Belgrave Square when he popped round to borrow yet another cup of sugar.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I began Hugh Conway's 1883 bestseller <i>Called Back</i>, I was in for something special: not every British hero travels to Siberia to solve a murder (and clear his wife's name). This short novel was, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044337?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" target="_blank">according to Kenneth Harper and Bradford Booth</a>, translated into Russian quite fast - within a decade of publication, not unusual celerity for popular British novels at that time. Its Russian title was, apparently, 'The Hallucination'. Hugh Conway (or Frederick Fargus, as his mother called him) died two years later of typhoid fever, and although his book would enjoy long-lasting success (a translation into Finnish; plagiarism by Emily Dickinson; screen versions in 1914 and 1933), his own star gradually sank below the horizon - at least until Martin Edwards wrote a preface about him. <i>Called Back</i> is highly sensational, but not, except for one major plot twist, very interesting today.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2fKUmAU9BMuo8llyJROh1r0zUwiUtoCWybSXfrHpIEhS-Gi59f9F9ufpuio1qWQM3gXzDnoVCQ1Fj_DrKbUUfJLTmcR88JeGLgQaarjp26rZ_afq9d1R8GfBJ030fmcRnALgf39OQvAdB/s1600/Conway+early+edition.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2fKUmAU9BMuo8llyJROh1r0zUwiUtoCWybSXfrHpIEhS-Gi59f9F9ufpuio1qWQM3gXzDnoVCQ1Fj_DrKbUUfJLTmcR88JeGLgQaarjp26rZ_afq9d1R8GfBJ030fmcRnALgf39OQvAdB/s320/Conway+early+edition.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
The hero, Gilbert Vaughan, goes blind as a young man because of cataracts; he wanders into the wrong house, overhears a murder, then gets overpowered and drugged by the murderers; unable to prove the strange incident ever happened, he tries to forget it. He then undergoes such unsafe and counterintuitive cataract surgery I almost wanted to stop reading and research 19th-century ophthalmology on the spot, but he does regain his sight - and the lure of the promised plot development pulled me on. Gilbert falls for a beautiful yet mute, almost catatonic girl; hastily marries her with the consent of her enigmatic Italian guardian. Later, holding his wife's hand, Gilbert experiences a waking dream that vividly re-creates the murder; clearly, he and the girl are both witnesses of the deadly deed; but what was the nature of her relationship with the murdered man? As his wife finally shows signs of returning sanity, Gilbert decides he must clear up the secret of her past before they can live together. The only way to clarify her background is to track down her guardian, a mysterious Italian called Ceneri who has previously boasted of spending his ward's entire inheritance on revolutionary activity. So far, so <i>The Woman in White</i>: but Gilbert soon leaves conventionality (and credibility) behind as he traces Ceneri, who has been implicated in a plot to assassinate the Czar of Russia. 'Although he called himself Italian, he was, in truth, cosmopolitan. One of those restless spirits who wish to overturn all forms of government, except that of republican'. After languishing several months in the Peter & Paul fortress in St Petersburg, Ceneri has been sentenced to twenty years' hard labour and dispatched in the general direction of Siberia. Gilbert hightails after him. (It might have been slightly easier to ask his wife, now she can talk again, whether she had a fiance before she went mad, but of course a fanatical republican terrorist man is more reliable than a hysterical woman any day of the week).<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The following chapter reads pleasingly like an abbreviated travelogue, as the hero takes the train to 'Moscow the colossal', passes 'the old picturesque but decaying town of Vladimir', steams along the Volga and Kama rivers to Perm where a 'tarantass' ('a sort of phaeton') is acquired, as well as a 'yemshik' to cajole the post-horses. Gilbert offers the odd thoughtful meditation on Russian ways - the importance of correct paperwork, the way the 'rigid and careless despotism' of the Czar is reflected in the ruler-like straightness of the railway, even a private interview in the Hermitage with Alexander II ('a tall noble-looking man in military attire...[...]. Two years ago when the news of his cruel death reached England, I thought of him as I saw him that day - in the prime of life, tall, commanding, and gracious - a man it does one good to look at. Whether - if the whole truth of his great ancestor Catherine the Second's frailties were known - the blood of a peasant or a king ran in his veins, he looked every inch a ruler of men, a splendid despot'). Although the chapter title ('A Hell on Earth') rather betrays his conclusions about Siberia, he reserves criticism for the conditions created there by men rather than the land itself: 'The weather was glorious, almost too glorious. The cultivated country we passed through looked thriving and productive. Siberia was very different in appearance from what is usually associated with its name. The air when not too warm was simply delicious. [...] The wild flowers, many of them very beautiful, grew freely; the people looked well and contented. Altogether my impressions of Siberia in summer were pleasant ones'. On he goes, past Achinsk, Krasnoyarsk, all the way to Irkutsk - described as charming towns except for the presence in each one of an 'ostrog' or jail, for convicts in transit: 'a gloomy square building, varying with the size of the place, surrounded by a tall palisade, the gates of which were barred, bolted, or sentried'. Gilbert recounts with horror the overcrowded cells where prisoners were housed 'like sardines in a box', with high mortality rates and extra pressure on space during spring floods: 'Men, sometimes unsexed women with them, huddled into rooms reeking with filth, the floors throwing out poisonous emanations - rooms built to give but scanty space to a small number, crowded to suffocation'. Eventually, Gilbert catches up with his particular convict, elicits the information he needs, and returns reassured to his bride - not without a pang or two of conscience at leaving the Italian revolutionary behind to penal labour in the mines at Nertchinsk (an important trading station on the Amur river, which was visited by Jeremy Bentham's brother Samuel in the previous century).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_ajRZzPar57775d2DDqLzXxAsVwNAb7EliAjQFMZBMc0lEwvT51kCVsF8M5tCgOQDdPlzLKFHXytFT-3a1PfvDn_31-zbVR2skN1vaZthajOjEK7jMSWcrFR2RWiYOCULJQj_HzjNnRrl/s1600/eichenberg+engraving.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_ajRZzPar57775d2DDqLzXxAsVwNAb7EliAjQFMZBMc0lEwvT51kCVsF8M5tCgOQDdPlzLKFHXytFT-3a1PfvDn_31-zbVR2skN1vaZthajOjEK7jMSWcrFR2RWiYOCULJQj_HzjNnRrl/s320/eichenberg+engraving.jpg" width="221" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://sacredartpilgrim.com/collection/view/19" target="_blank">Engraving by Fritz Eichenberg (<i>Resurrection</i>)</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wish I knew whether Conway visited Russia, or which accounts by British travellers (there are surprisingly many) he read. What impresses me is his enthusiasm for describing the injustice of the Russian penal system sixteen years before Tolstoy got to grips with the same theme in <i>Resurrection</i> (1899). Compare this passage from the latter (in the Maudes' translation) with Conway's comments on overcrowding and disease:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The strictness of the inspector was chiefly due to the fact
that an epidemic of typhus had broken out in the prison, owing to twice the
number of persons that it was intended for being crowded in it. The isvostchik
who drove Nekhludoff said, “Quite a lot of people are dying in the prison every
day, some kind of disease having sprung up among them, so that as many as
twenty were buried in one day.”</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or take this bitter observation on the "justice" meted out to political prisoners in the aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II (which Ceneri had ostensibly pursued):</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Terrible and endless as were the torments which were
inflicted on the criminals, there was at least some semblance of justice shown
them before and after they were sentenced, but in the case of the political
prisoners there was not even that semblance, as Nekhludoff saw in the case of
Sholostova and that of many and many of his new acquaintances. These people
were dealt with like fish caught with a net; everything that gets into the nets
is pulled ashore, and then the big fish which are required are sorted out and
the little ones are left to perish unheeded on the shore. Having captured hundreds
that were evidently guiltless, and that could not be dangerous to the
government, they left them imprisoned for years, where they became consumptive,
went out of their minds or committed suicide, and kept them only because they
had no inducement to set them free, while they might be of use to elucidate
some question at a judicial inquiry, safe in prison. The fate of these persons,
often innocent even from the government point of view, depended on the whim,
the humour of, or the amount of leisure at the disposal of some police officer
or spy, or public prosecutor, or magistrate, or governor, or minister.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Tolstoy was, as we know, fond of reading British sensational novels (often aloud in the bosom of his family) - and his heroine Anna Karenina read a mysterious British bodice-ripper on the fateful train journey back to St Petersburg. But could he have read Conway too? Could Gilbert's whistle-stop tour of Siberian jails have inspired <i>Resurrection</i>? Sadly, there's no evidence of the book ever having crossed the threshold of Tolstoy's home, Yasnaya Polyana. But who knows? Conway's novel was translated as 'The Hallucination', after all - perhaps Tolstoy just dreamed he read it.<br />
<br /></div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-59628530119828333232017-02-27T09:28:00.000+00:002018-12-21T12:14:47.804+00:00Twenty-Six Men and a Dinosaur<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
</div>
<br />
<br />
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Last week I caught myself recommending a student to read "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl". 'Easy to find in translation,' I assured her, then I wondered: was it really? In a second-hand book-cave at the weekend, a shabby Heinemann school edition from 1992 fell into my hands: <i>The New Windmill Book of Nineteenth Century Short Stories</i>. A slightly chewed-looking cover with an out-of-focus print of Frith's <i>The Railway Statio</i>n; a short and almost exclusively Anglophone contents list, skewed aggressively in favour of female proto-modernists (Olive Schreiner, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her eternally yellow wallpaper). This story by Gorky, with Maupassant's "Country Living", solitarily represented all literature by furriners throughout the 19th century. </div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp2fxsdaKoe1awmg8n-37AFmOYjr4PUaYMjLNaQw39_6QYso8m5B6vYSnQs3IgWeC2zTzJYg4zvwHMum-rLkqpDTANBeA7tGYkQ37k1Zb15k0909PqPRSk9_7UTFBYwnk5KsGTz10qrAfG/s1600/frith.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp2fxsdaKoe1awmg8n-37AFmOYjr4PUaYMjLNaQw39_6QYso8m5B6vYSnQs3IgWeC2zTzJYg4zvwHMum-rLkqpDTANBeA7tGYkQ37k1Zb15k0909PqPRSk9_7UTFBYwnk5KsGTz10qrAfG/s320/frith.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Today, twenty-five years later, Gorky's stories are no longer automatically anthologized: it's hard to imagine an anthology that would pick his fiction over Chekhov's or the revitalised translation of "The Queen of Spades". Socialist realism is no longer recent history; Gorky's importance as its gatekeeper has lapsed. Yet, in an excellent 1993 <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_early_fiction_of_Maksim_Gorky.html?id=KupfAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">short book on Gorky's early writing</a>, Andrew Barratt suggests that "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" is 'arguably the best of his early stories', and still one of the best-known. </div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Barratt's book is suffused with limpid wit that makes me regret the almost inevitably small circle of readers for such a finely focused academic study. The chapter on "Twenty-Six Men" is subtitled "Sex and the Russian Baker"; my other favourite section is called "Games Tramps Play". Beyond these jabs at the mystique of Gorky and Soviet <i>gor'kovedy</i> (Gorky scholars), Barratt makes a serious case for considering this story outside of its usual context as pathetic naturalism.</div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Gorky's insight into his subject matter - twenty-six men earning slave wages in a cellar, endlessly turning out pretzels that they can't bear to eat - comes from his own experience as an assistant baker, in the troubled period of his earliest revolutionary activity and teenage poverty leading up to his suicide attempt. The men are so enfeebled mentally and spiritually by their situation and the universal contempt in which they are held ("we all had yellowish-grey faces, three of us had syphilis, some had skin disease [...] we wore filthy rags, with down-at-heel shoes or bast-sandals on our feet, and the police would not allow us in the park") that they greet the daily appearance of Tanya, a fresh-faced sixteen-year-old seamstress from upstairs, with anxious veneration. It doesn't matter, as Barratt points out, that Tanya is not actually very nice to them and possibly not very nice at all - she only visits them to collect their ritual offering of freshly baked pretzels, and scornfully laughs down one man with the temerity to ask her to stitch his torn shirt. Tanya becomes their goddess of chastity precisely because they are outcasts, because they need someone to admire and not least, as the narrator admits, because she is beautiful to look at (although the men strictly avoid sexualising her in any way, even in her absence). Hence the story is valuable both as a naturalistic account of poverty and as a study in human nature - even in extreme humiliation, Gorky shows us, we still glorify someone or something which we perceive to be better than ourselves. I was struck, re-reading "Twenty-Six Men", by an extra refinement of Gorky's naturalism: the detail that the windows of the bakery had been barred by the boss "with close-meshed grilles" not to prevent the bakers from climbing or seeing out, but to stop them from giving any bread through the windows "to the beggars and those comrades of ours who were unemployed and starving". This is interesting because of the assumption that the very poor, that is the bakers, will still give to those worse off than themselves; and because of the boss's cynical device to stymie any such philanthropy at his expense. One man's theft is another man's charity, but there are no Robin Hoods in Gorky's Russia.</div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Barratt departs from standard readings by arguing that the story is most significant when read as a psychodrama, a 'case study in perverse psychology' (124). The men's relationship with Tanya is perverse; it is not sentimental worship, but unhealthy abasement. The gifts of pretzels are ritual 'acts of idolatry' (128). When a handsome ex-soldier starts work as a higher-status bread-baker upstairs, he threatens to depose Tanya as the men's ruling idol by offering a charismatic masculine alternative for adoration. It is thus inevitable that the men will test the new idol against the old by daring the soldier to seduce Tanya - even while they comfort themselves that Tanya is unapproachable. And it is equally inevitable that the soldier will ruin their illusions by deflowering Tanya. </div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI9Y32eOs-hvxMjXo0bo0_CF_ckSAE16nyvbOtAIwNnFWcDk5eohQNprYQOEGziqKMHjRdS2L5VGcd-OYHmcBsglH8udsdH_JiRk-DTL3Zk94zl3ElSC0Uzsz-lEGlRbsl9bHjqbboNmze/s1600/gorki.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI9Y32eOs-hvxMjXo0bo0_CF_ckSAE16nyvbOtAIwNnFWcDk5eohQNprYQOEGziqKMHjRdS2L5VGcd-OYHmcBsglH8udsdH_JiRk-DTL3Zk94zl3ElSC0Uzsz-lEGlRbsl9bHjqbboNmze/s320/gorki.jpg" width="247" /></a>Barratt calls the scene of Tania's seduction the 'most memorable in all Gorky's writing' (129), primarily because it re-establishes Tanya's moral irreproachability in the face of her apparently very immoral behaviour. Crudely, cruelly, the twenty-six men reject Tanya, pouring on her the calumny and sexualised insults they had reserved for all other women (some of whom, the narrator comfortingly suggests, deserved it); and with unflinching dignity, Tanya rejects them right back. She walks out of their lives serenely, confirmed in her womanhood; they retreat to their cellar. Which underlines, as Barratt argues, one of many eloquent gaps in Gorky's narrative: the story describes an inescapable, dead-end situation for the men, yet one of them has clearly escaped to tell the tale. How can this be? Barratt probes further: Tanya's final attitude of righteous contempt is not just an expression of confident femininity, but an analogue to Gorky's own complex attitude to the very poor. He had lived among them, but like Tanya with her apron full of pretzels, he was able to withdraw and shut the door; his 'narrating consciousness' (134) (not just in this story but in much of his fiction) is a troubled combination of sympathy and contempt for his subjects. Gorky can empathize, but he is more inclined to judge. Ultimately, therefore, in Barratt's reading, this story is a window not just on 19th-century labour conditions, or on the construction of femininity, but on Gorky's contradictory relationship with the topic of poverty, on which his own success and reputation were built.</div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Despite my reservations about the "New Windmill" anthology, I was pleased to see that the editors picked the 1981 Penguin translation of "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl", which is by my "retired" colleague, the translator Roger Cockrell. The same translation has appeared in a Penguin anthology of short Russian fiction edited by another former colleague, David (D.J.) Richards, former Head of Russian at Exeter. The students' magazine from 1977 allude to both when describing David Richards as 'a prolific author and partial to a pint of a dinnertime, when he is to be seen sitting in the Ewe with another member of staff who shall remain nameless'. I like to think of my predecessors in Russian sitting together in a bar that no longer exists, discussing the complexities of Gorky's prose over pints, pies... and pretzels.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-3566156556701366422017-02-01T00:55:00.000+00:002017-02-27T11:35:51.212+00:00Opportunity, Glory, and Doom: Married to Tolstoy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
A recent rummage through the remoter shelves of the Russian literature section of the University of Exeter caused me to acquire (as happens all too often) two obscure, charmingly crumbly volumes not on my list: Lady <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Cynthia Asquith's</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> <i>Married To Tolstoy</i> (Hutchinson of London, 1960), and <i>The Life of Tolstoy </i>by "Paul Birukoff" (Pavel Biryukov), published in an anonymous translation in 1911. The temptation to read them in counterpoint was irresistible: to vicariously retrace the great conflict of Tolstoy's mature life, between the 'Dark Ones' (Countess Sofya Andreyevna's nickname for the Tolstoyan acolytes) and the Countess herself, or simply "Sonya", as Tolstoy always called her. In real life the Tolstoyans, or, in Gorky's words, 'the pestering parasites who fed on his mind' may have had the best of the struggle; but in the field of biography, Sonya wins hands down.</span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheEbbfUBE5UgiSGxt6D4SyupuRvgrIQs75lq82KY4MvNnk1adwn-cTDucHtJBy1UGP1_11E5YMhxkrWHfMrmoseMlTbWNnK3qECc2hgdd6afCODXDlizjyzRQx5SASTYgQlzgIoNvg8Jcj/s1600/bothbbooks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: medium; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheEbbfUBE5UgiSGxt6D4SyupuRvgrIQs75lq82KY4MvNnk1adwn-cTDucHtJBy1UGP1_11E5YMhxkrWHfMrmoseMlTbWNnK3qECc2hgdd6afCODXDlizjyzRQx5SASTYgQlzgIoNvg8Jcj/s1600/bothbbooks.jpg" /></a></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Asquith's light-touch literariness and deft style - she wrote fiction (I have long admired her ghost stories) besides biography - lend the Sonya camp a major advantage. "</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Marriage to a genius can seldom be easy; to be married to one as immense and self-contradictory as Tolstoy was proportionately difficult": Asquith's first sentence delicately echoes the famous opening line of <i>Anna Karenina</i>. She generally takes the side of Tolstoy's wife against the husband and media who jointly condemned her; citing, for instance, in Sonya's support the frequently ignored medical evidence that the Countess was ill with stress even before Tolstoy fled on his quixotic final journey in 1910. Asquith calls herself "a self-appointed Counsel for the Defence", relying on diaries by both spouses and other family members, as well as records left by other family friends (Urusov, Turgenev, Gorky) to vividly frame "the story of the woman whose opportunity, glory, and doom it was to be married to Tolstoy" (16). She coins regular well-cut phrases which demystify some of that portentous "glory and doom", referring to the younger </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Tolstoy's moral fixations accompanied by rather less than moral behaviour as </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">"curdling themes". </span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Like Rosamund Bartlett, whose Tolstoy biography I discussed in <a href="http://russiandinosaur.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/tolstoy-russian-life.html" target="_blank">a previous post</a>, Asquith brings the tensions and shenanigans of the Yasnaya Polyana household vividly to life: the hideous, uncomfortable and supposedly character-forming clothes which Tolstoy wanted his eldest children to wear became mockingly known in the house as the "p<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">hilosophical garments", while these same children enjoyed traditional family games such as their father's impossible challenge to stand in a corner while <i>not</i> thinking of a white bear - or the much-loved chase known as the Charge of the Numidian Cavalry. One of Asquith's many astute psychological asides is her observation that Sonya, in late middle age, was tired of endlessly following Tolstoy's lead; she was worn out charging with the Numidian Cavalry. She intelligently assesses Tolstoy's existential 'Arzamas' crisis as physical and emotional reaction to finishing <i>War and Peace</i>, and in this context, her assertion that Tolstoy's passionately expressed aptitude for Ancient Greek (which Sonya fiercely opposed) was a form of psychological "dope", makes perfect sense. (Next time you want a re-up of Herodotus, call your local Loeb dealer). </span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Two more Tolstoy insights are worth repeating here: "Tolstoy [unlike Dostoevsky] could not sin his way to God. Painfully, laboriously, he had to reason his way to him" (85). On Tolstoy's reaction to the 1891 famine in central Russia, and even earlier to urban poverty in Moscow, Asquith observes: "As a man he seemed less able than others to conceive of anything which he had not been an eyewitness. Not until he was shocked by the actual sight of some horror did the thought of it ever greatly concern him. Than his imagination would be so fired that all sense of proportion vanished" (100). The tellingly titled chapter "The Sky Darkens" indicate the marital crisis exacerbated by the Tolstoys' first extended move to Moscow, <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">where his wife and daughter Tanya indulged a carefree materialism that now alienated him. After the birth of Sasha, whom Sonya had emphatically not wanted, her role as Tolstoy's literary agent adjusted from a source of pride and connubial partnership to a lonely, burdensome task. Tolstoy had made it too plain that he gave her the rights to market his work has a concession to her cupidity and pragmatism rather than as a gesture of respect and affection; now, partly in revenge for his contempt, Sonya's literary work became an explicit excuse not to feed the unwished-for baby (another weapon in their complicated strife). </span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Biryukov's biography, which might (in contrast, and in view of his failed courtship of Masha Tolstaya) have been titled 'Not Married to Tolstoy's Daughter', simply cannot compete. It lacks personal detail; letters and diaries are cited only occasionally, and as extensions of the generally hagiographic approach to Tolstoy's personal life and public achievements. Sonya's dangerous enemy, the opportunistic Vladimir Chertkov, appears here only as 'Tolstoy's friend, V.G. Tchertkoff', [who] gave a great deal of moral and material assistance' to the Intermediary publishing project. As an unpaid assistant and later editor of Intermediary, the former naval cadet and ex-physicist Biryukov could have revealed much about the stress of everyday interaction with the ambitious and Machiavellian Chertkov; but his account is both vague and neutral. Asquith, on the contrary, suggests that Chertkov manipulated the Intermediary specifically to supplant Sonya as Tolstoy's publisher; and she regales us with this rather splendid anecdote: </span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><i>"It was a very hot night and [the Tolstoy family, with Chertkov] were having dinner on the verandah. [...] All were in a happy mood, joking, and laughing. The only drawback was the swirling haze of mosquitoes. After a quick amused glance at Chertkov's lofty head, Tolstoy, grinning like a boy, adroitly swatted its bald top. A smear of blood and the crushed remains of a huge mosquito showed how good his aim had been. Everyone roared with laughter, including the swatter, but Tolstoy's laughter abruptly died when gloomily affronted, without a flicker of a smile, Chertkov portentously said: 'Lev Nikolaevich, what have you done? You have taken the life of a fellow living creature. Are you not ashamed?' Stifled giggles continued to escape, but everyone felt uncomfortable" (139).</i></span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Asquith's clear-sightedness occasionally fails her: she has a (very English) mistrust of excessive emotional vulnerability, and draws attention to Sonya's self-pity and supposed lack of a sense of humour. On the short story "Whose Guilt Is It?" written by Sonya in reaction to her husband's radioactive <i>The Kreutzer Sonata</i>, Asquith feels it was "fortunate" that this "self-exonerating" response was never published (146). (It has since been both translated and published with Sonya's other short fiction in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/books/kreutzer-sonata-variations-has-a-scorned-wifes-rebuttal.html?_r=0" target="_blank">a new edition by Michael R. Katz</a>). When, shortly after the birth in 1881 of Alyosha, her eleventh baby, Sonya writes despairingly to her sister that "bending over the flushed face of my new baby fourteen times a day, I almost faint from the pain in my breasts", Asquith ripostes unsympathetically, "Why, it may be asked, did she need to nurse her baby fourteen times a day [...]?" (113). Now I know the answer to that one, and I'm not even a mammal. The incident certainly explains why the breastfeeding of babies became a political football in the Tolstoy family long before the <i>Daily Mail</i> invented the Breastapo. Thankfully, Tolstoy never met Benjamin Spock (whose ideas about feeding infants at set intervals probably influenced Asquith); both men might have spontaneously combusted. All that Biryukov offers on the topic of familial discord at this period of the Tolstoys' lives is a cautious observation that "The strenuous activity of the seventies, his family cares and duties, the question of the education of the children, his successful literary career, his beneficent social work - all these did not fully satisfy Tolstoy" (87). Of course, as a long-time friend of the family, Biryukov would not have wished to embarrass any of them.</span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Biryukov's book necessarily closes with Tolstoy's death ("With contented, happy thoughts the great teacher of life had passed into eternity [...]. It is our duty to strive with all our strength to realise his ideal of Love and Reason" (155-6)). Asquith also gives surprisingly little space - just one brief chapter - to Sonya's last nine years. Her sources for this part of Sonya's life are limited, although she cites Tolstoy's daughter Sasha for a glimpse of Sonya at table in 1918, consuming a formal meal served by an elderly Yasnaya Polyana manservant with silver plate and a starched tablecloth, although the meal itself consists of boiled beetroot and black bread. Every day, she walked to Tolstoy's grave and she spoke constantly, if silently, with her departed "Leovochka" [sic]. Just before her death, she confessed to Sasha that she felt her bitterness in Tolstoy's final year had "killed" her husband (281). I like to think that this was just one last flicker of the melodramatic instinct that made Sonya such a successful actress at the early, happy Yasnaya Polyana family parties; and that <i>v tom svete</i> - in the other world - Sonya and Lev no longer glower out from plates fixed to opposite sides of a leaf, as they do in Asquith's biography. I hope that they finally fit on the same page, side by side.</span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhven2W_neCBYLDJbKBBeJm988mBoZsQDpepV-vQ36Y8K_kwp7EYIe23UlalKb4DOkSJHHsEo8t1DKcCWrskw7hKxN_aDAODN_st39NL7r2GGuWMoA3R8faGnnkGqUcX6QyCt7VMXW0UBj_/s1600/young+t.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: transparent; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhven2W_neCBYLDJbKBBeJm988mBoZsQDpepV-vQ36Y8K_kwp7EYIe23UlalKb4DOkSJHHsEo8t1DKcCWrskw7hKxN_aDAODN_st39NL7r2GGuWMoA3R8faGnnkGqUcX6QyCt7VMXW0UBj_/s200/young+t.jpg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJfvO-L6nZkaakvVVi0AzHzG_plyPz3s6hRRpYCjIrS_uMA42DoQ7TnHuj3K-7A1a6_kYfA95duLaV6sTjHkxD9wl_X865jyZIN__rA1g_yGmZnnX4YfNApfi7dt_MwpOCaycDszSQRGIO/s1600/young+s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: transparent; clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJfvO-L6nZkaakvVVi0AzHzG_plyPz3s6hRRpYCjIrS_uMA42DoQ7TnHuj3K-7A1a6_kYfA95duLaV6sTjHkxD9wl_X865jyZIN__rA1g_yGmZnnX4YfNApfi7dt_MwpOCaycDszSQRGIO/s200/young+s.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<br />
<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Russian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.com1