Don't Translate The War: Bulgakov in Kiev

From an email written by a friend's son in February 2014:

‘In Kiev everything is very bad… I wasn’t even allowed through with my passport and my pass… yesterday I came under fire on Arsenalnaya; fighting broke out just as I was on my way home, stones and grenades were flying, I hid myself with some other people behind a kiosk, and made it home by running from shelter to shelter [перебежками].’

Here’s Nikolka Turbin in December 1918:

‘Panting heavily and feeling his legs weakening and giving way under him, Nikolka ran along the empty Razyezhaya Street and made his way without incident as far as the crossroads at the junction of two streets […]. By the side of a pillar he saw a pool of blood and a pile of manure, together with two abandoned rifles and a blue student’s cap. […] The crackle of machine-gun fire from the Upper City was now constant.’

Modern reality and Mikhail Bulgakov's fiction dissolve into each other on the strange, steep, seductive streets of Kiev, as civilization blurs into chaos overnight and two young men, a century apart, flee sniper fire through the same ancient capital city. Roger Cockrell’s definitive new translation of Bulgakov’s The White Guard (1925-9; Alma Classics, 2012) has appeared at a tragically apposite time for those who frame Ukraine’s current conflicts in the context of her even more turbulent transition from Tsarist to Soviet imperial possession. The White Guard, Bulgakov’s first novel, follows the Turbin family – elegant Elena, deserted by her callous, tergiversating husband; dourly patriotic Alexei (the author’s alter ego); naïve Nikolka, and a coterie of colourful neighbours and friends – through the bitter winter of 1918-19. They occupy the first floor of a townhouse modelled precisely on Bulgakov’s own, down to the famous caricatures and doggerel inked on the tiles of the Dutch stove and the well-loved volumes of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nat Pinkerton in the family library. Bulgakov hymns the middle-class luxuries of home, although clearly on the ebb, in contrast to other, inimical cultural riptides: the Jew-hanging, cadet-shooting nationalist army commanded by quasi-mythical Semyon Petlyura; the desperately decadent nightlife of billetless officers and cash-rich refugees from Bolshevized Moscow; the grief of the newly bereaved; and the sudden, senseless deaths of loyalist Ukrainian forces, abandoned by their own high command as the latter follows its government into exile.

Bulgakov in 1913

Bulgakov’s novel is confusing, winding, structurally flawed (he later reworked the plot into Stalin’s favourite play, The Days of the Turbins). It is also enticing, richly evocative, and in places maddeningly skilful (such as the constant sub-audible dialogue with Tolstoy). I don’t mean the intentional echoing of War and Peace; the resonances are subtler. A minor character – an archetypally downright, inspiringly simple sergeant-major, not even a character proper as he predeceases the narrative by two years – is named Zhilin after the similarly ordinary hero of Tolstoy’s novella The Prisoner of the Caucasus. This is typical intertextual finesse. On the other hand, Bulgakov’s lyrical descriptions of the magical ‘City’, or melodramatic scenes like Elena’s passionate bargaining with the Virgin Mary for her dying brother's life, are beautifully written but feel forced; their intensity distracts. I prefer more plebeian set pieces such as the burgling of Vasilisa (the Turbins’ avaricious downstairs neighbour) or the wonderful inanities of Lariosik, their bumbling country cousin who turns up in the middle of the civil war with a canary and a sheaf of currency, and falls quietly and immediately in love with Elena. Lariosik’s mini-Bildungsroman unfolds in the second half of the book, unfairly but perfectly concealed behind the storylines of other family members.

This new translation goes further than the previous versions by Michael Glenny (1971) and Marion Schwartz (2008), and succeeds better than either. Cockrell’s version is more rigorously authentic than Glenny’s very good translation, even where accuracy challenges the capacity of the language. To give just one example, he is the first translator to find an English equivalent for Colonel Nai-Turs’s distinctive Serbian accent. For Schwarz, Nai-Turs is simply the 'burring, laconic colonel' (p. 146). Glenny ducks the issue, thus ignoring Bulgakov’s comic portrayal of this otherwise repressively gloomy character. When Cockrell’s Nai-Turs is forcing a senior officer at gunpoint to release footwear for his men, he says, ‘You pick up phone, you sirry old man, and my gun shoot you in head… Then you rie on froor.’ Even dying in front of terrified Nikolka, Nai-Turs is laughable: ‘Don’t be so damned heloic’ are among his last words. 

Cockrell also pulls off the novel’s difficult introduction (original here); this is one of several places where Bulgakov’s deliberately elegiac style, keyed to the Book of Revelations, teeters constantly on the verge of tendentiousness. Translators can easily fall over the edge. Here’s Cockrell: ‘Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, the second year after the revolution. The summer was abundant with sun and the winter with snow, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the shepherds’ star – the evening Venus – and red, quivering Mars. […] that very same week the white coffin containing the body of [the Turbins’] mother had been carried down the steep St Alexei’s Hill to the little church of St Nicholas the Good in Podol, on the Embankment’. Glenny tumbles off the cliff, or rather, the embankment: ‘Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter with snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds’ star, eventide Venus; and Mars, quivering, red. […] the white coffin with the body of their mother was carried away down the slope of St Alexei’s Hill towards the Embankment, to the little church of the [sic] St Nicholas the Good’. Schwartz is oratorical: 'Great was the year and terrible was the Year of Our Lord 1918, the second since the Revolution has begun. Sun had been abundant in the summer, snow in the winter, and two stars had risen particularly high in the sky: Venus, the Evening Star; and Mars, red and quivering. [...] a white coffin with his mother's body was carried down steep Alexeyevsky Slope toward Podol and the little church of St Nicholas the Good, on the Embankment'. Here as throughout the novel, Cockrell restrains Bulgakov's rhetoric whenever it becomes incompatible with English literary prose, without sacrificing accuracy. Such skilled compromises more than justify his new translation.

‘I will be terribly sorry if I’m mistaken and if The White Guard is not an exceptional piece’, Bulgakov, modest as ever, confided to his diary on January 5, 1925. Mikhail Bulgakov: Diaries and Selected Letters (Alma Classics, 2013) is the latest of Cockrell’s Bulgakov translations (which include The Fatal Eggs, also for Alma). It is beautifully presented (every page headed by the year of composition, making navigation easier) and thoroughly endnoted, as is The White Guard. As a cold-blooded reader, I prefer footnotes (endnotes force you to break the flow of concentration by flicking to the end, or else they generate guilty guesswork if you refrain and read on). Their sheer plenitude in this edition is distracting. Two other immediately striking points about the presentation reflect the unstable status of translation in the UK: Diaries and Selected Letters was subsidized by the Arts Council, a sobering reminder that literary translation is a niche, unsustainable activity; and the disappointing absence of the translator’s name from the front or back covers (it is sequestered, instead, on the flyleaf). 

Unlike The White Guard, however, this volume begs an existential question: was there any need to replace Julie Curtis’ groundbreaking translation of largely identical material, Manuscripts Don’t Burn: A Life in Letters and Diaries (Bloomsbury, 1991)? Moreover, Curtis’ translations were made at a time when the goodwill of Bulgakov’s widow (the apparently adipose Lyubov’ Evgenyevna – see below) was required to obtain original documents, not forgetting the goodwill of an intimidating network of Soviet scholars. Manuscripts Don’t Burn  remains a more important scholarly resource, primarily because it provides fuller historical context by including letters from Bulgakov’s family and acquaintances (and helpfully prefaces each chronological section with a characterful commentary). Curtis’s collection, however, achieves its range by omitting or editing sections of Bulgakov’s own correspondence. These are restored in Cockrell’s new translation, which excludes all voices except Bulgakov’s own. The writer emerges through his own words: bitter, observant, whimsical, flippant, conceited, bizarrely unjust to his first wife (he asked her not to acknowledge him if she ever saw him in the street with another woman; she apparently consented), extravagantly uxorious toward his third.

Bulgakov and poklonnitsa [female admirer]

Curtis’s and Cockrell’s books complement, rather than replace, each other; moreover, Cockrell is probably the better stylist, reproducing Bulgakov’s suave yet idiosyncratic flow in absorbingly natural English. But because he is less literal than Curtis, he is also, in places, less strictly accurate. This sample comparison demonstrates both Cockrell’s  smoother style (and tact, in his choice of adjective for Bulgakov’s wife), and his slightly misleading version of the phrase ‘унижаюсь даже до легкой ревности’. Here's the original (and my deliberately 'straight' translation):

 Ужасное состояние: все больше влюбляюсь в свою жену. Так обидно--10 лет открещивался от своего... Бабы,  как бабы. А теперь унижаюсь даже до легкой ревности. Чем-то мила и сладка. И толстая. Газет не читал сегодня.

A dreadful state of affairs: I'm falling more and more in love with my wife. It's offensive - for 10 years I've been swearing off my... Women are women. And now I'll even humiliate myself to the point of feeling slightly jealous. There's something nice and sweet about her. And plump. I didn't read any newspapers today.

Julie Curtis:

I'm in a dreadful state: I'm falling more and more in love with my wife. It's so infuriating: for ten years I've refused to have anything to do with... Women are just women. And now I am demeaning myself to the extent even of slight jealousy. Somehow she's very dear to me and sweet. And fat. [last line omitted from translation]

Roger Cockrell:

I'm in a terrible state: I'm falling more and more in love with my wife. How annoying: for the last ten years I've kept on turning away from anyone close to me... a woman is just a woman, after all. But now I allow myself to be humiliated by even the slightest twinge of jealousy. She's sweet and lovely. And large. Didn't read the newspapers today.

Lyubov' Evgenyevna, Bulgakov's second wife. Large? Fat? Or just plump?

Comparisons like these may seem petty, but they highlight the importance (and elusiveness) of total accuracy in non-fictional translation. Nuance is crucial when so much of Bulgakov’s prose, already involuted, had to be guarded and self-censored. The watershed moment in Bulgakov's diary comes in spring 1926, when an infamous OGPU raid on his flat confiscated both the manuscript of Heart of a Dog and the author's diaries. Understandably, Bulgakov never wrote another diary entry. Cockrell continues the story with Bulgakov's letters, his OGPU interrogation statement of September 1926 ('I love the intelligentsia and consider it a weak but nevertheless very important social group in the country. The fates of its members are close to my own, and their experiences are dear to me'), and the famous letters sent in 1930 and 1931 respectively to the 'Government of the USSR' and to Stalin. It remains extraordinary that Bulgakov said what he did as publicly as he did; it is astonishing that even The White Guard, published (with cuts) in the Soviet Union in 1925, honestly reflected Bulgakov’s contempt for the Bolsheviks and sympathy with the Turbins’ class (which was, of course, his own).

Bulgakov in 1928

He pulled off political blasphemy by historicizing it: The White Guard can be anti-Bolshevik because its characters, and their milieu, are understood to already be as extinct as, well, me. Perhaps because his novels and plays are so successful at showing the real man, Bulgakov’s diaries and letters disappoint, for all their charm. Their glittering brevity affords only glimpses of Bulgakov: the writer's truth shines through his fiction. 

Disclaimers: Julie Curtis is a personal friend. Roger Cockrell has previously written kind reviews of my work. Many thanks to Alma Classics for sending me review copies of both books, and to YK for sharing her son's message with me. RD

Buy this book

Buy this book

Free PhD

I must apologize to regular readers for this blog's recent irregularity - caused by a mad dash to finish my academic monograph, and also by self-indulgent visits to some rather eclectic conferences - including a Byron Society conference in Nottingham where so many Russianists spoke that I shall try to review their papers here in a future post, and where my name was prominently misspelled in two brand-new and original ways (although I admit Trisseratopz is hard to write). Nabokov would sympathise with my plight, since he admitted that his own surname 'is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong' (from Strong Opinions).

But now to the substance of this post - my free PhD offer. Not a BOGOF, no terms and conditions, and no obligation to supply your social security number, your grandmother's maiden name or the ISBN of the last book you read. This PhD is free to take home - but only the topic, not the degree. Consider the passage below:

'I am standing by a slippery mound of sticky earth and looking into the pit wherein they have thrown the coffin of my father. At the bottom there is a quantity of water, and there are also frogs, two of which have even jumped onto the yellow lid of the coffin. [...] The gravediggers, bending nearly double, began to fling the lumps of earth on the coffin rapidly, striking the frogs, which were leaping against the sides of the pit, down to the bottom.'

Which Russian writer does this frog resemble?

The four-year-old Maxim Gorky - not yet the 'formidable mediocrity' that Nabokov would call him - is famously more concerned with the fate of the drowning frogs than with the funeral of his own father. As he is brought away, he asks his grandmother anxiously, "Will those frogs ever get out?", thus showing even as an infant the keen, instinctive empathy with underfrogs that would determine his long career and eventually see him become Soviet Russia's Prince of Proletarian Poetics. (In fact, the American cartoonist William Steig - better known for creating Shrek - actually wrote and illustrated a children's book, Gorky Rises, about a frog called Gorky, but that's beside the point.)  And Gorky's My Childhood is only one example of the key symbolic role of frogs in Russian literature. At the recent conference of the British Society for Literature and Science, I gave a paper called 'Faith in Frogs' which reflected (slightly gruesomely) on how amphibian vivisection became a key trope for describing Russian fictional scientists who pose any kind of threat to social norms: namely, Bazarov from Ivan Turgenev's 1852 Fathers and Sons and Professor Persikov from Mikhail Bulgakov's 1925 novella The Fatal Eggs. Vivisection as a trope used to flag nasty customers is also found in British fiction (most famously in Eliot's Middlemarch, where Dr Lydgate prefers slicing up animals (a logical process) to developing illogical love relationships with the opposite sex), and please don't deprive yourself of Mrs Leo Hunter's Ode to an Expiring Frog from Dickens's Pickwick Papers. In Russian literature, however, vivisection appears to be almost inevitably associated with amphibians. In Turgenev's novel, for example, Bazarov is rarely mentioned without some reference to his frog collection. For instance, he settles down at the Kirsanovs' estate, Marino, with ‘his frogs, his infusoria, and his chemical experiments’; and before he leaves Marino for the last time, he frees all his experimental subjects – insects, birds, and, naturally, frogs. And his final, disastrous and wasteful death – when he accidentally infects himself with typhus – results from carelessly treating himself like one of his frogs, as another experimental subject. It is Pavel Kirsanov who declares that Bazarov 'doesn't have faith in principles, but he has faith in frogs'; and it is this overriding faith in frogs - that is, in pure scientific observation and analysis - that offers a convenient tagline for the nihilistic, unromantic social vision that Bazarov represents. While Bazarov's frogs are seen from several perspectives - those of Arkadii and Pavel Kirsanov, for example, and of the peasant boys on the estate - we don't really get a frog's-eye view of narrative until Bulgakov's Fatal Eggs. As they did for Bazarov, frogs here provide a leitmotif to the character of Professor Persikov, an ingenious but obsessive biologist. We learn that Persikov’s first wife abandoned him for an opera singer, leaving a note: ‘Your frogs instil in me feelings of unbearable revulsion. Because of them my life will always be a misery’. The vicissitudes of his personal life and his career are expressed in terms of the presence, absence, or relative health of his collections of frogs and toads. He can only conceptualize the atrocities accompanying the revolution and its aftermath relative to the consequences for his frogs; for example, the death of the Surinam toad in his vivarium causes him to remark, “People are shot for less!” – apparently unaware of the multiple ironies of this comment. The death of the Institute’s custodian is, for Persikov, simply a footnote to the death of his specimens. His first major post-revolutionary scientific publication is entitled ‘The Embryology of Frogs’. And Persikov's major discovery, the Ray of Life, is prefaced by a prolonged examination of a dying amphibian:

“Vladimir Ipatych, I have opened up the frog’s mesentery. Would you like to see?”
Abandoning his microscope, Persikov eagerly climbed down from his stool and went into his assistant’s office, slowly twirling his cigarette in his hand. There, on the glass table, stretched out on a cork base, lay a frog in a semi-asphyxiated state, half dead from pain and fear. Its transparent, slimy entrails had tumbled out from under the microscope.
“Excellent!” exclaimed Persikov, looking through the eyepiece of the microscope.
The frog’s intestines were clearly revealing something of unusual interest; corpuscles of blood were flowing swiftly along the vessels. Persikov forgot about his amoebas and, for the next hour and a half, he and Ivanov took turns looking through the eyepiece, the two of them all the time engaged in animated conversation, using vocabulary that would be incomprehensible to ordinary mortals.
Finally Persikov sat back from the microscope.
“The blood is congealing”, he announced. “There’s nothing more to be done.”
The frog slowly moved its head, its dying eyes clearly enunciating the words: “You absolute swine, you…”

It's not easy being... metonymous for so many important things

The martyrdom experienced by this frog, however, foreshadows Persikov's own demise at the hands of a frustrated mob - who also torture and trample his beloved amphibians and reptiles. So although the frogs in both novels suffer at the hands of scientists, they should not be interpreted as direct symbols of the proletariat. What, in fact, do they symbolize? But that's the topic of today's special  PhD offer... frogs in Russian literature. Horses have been done; I'm working on dogs already. But that's no reason to neglect amphibians. A reviewer once almost scuttled one of my (unrelated) articles by commenting, 'one can do a Google tour of almost anything nowadays and pull out enough references to write an article. I have just googled "Russian literature" and "cows" and found enough to write a quite interesting article'. Perhaps (s)he was right, but the role of search engines in their discovery is no reason to reject striking resonances. Shortly afterwards, Robert Bird's article 'The Poetics of Peat in Soviet Literary and Visual Culture, 1918-1959' came out in Slavic Review 70:3: clearly the product of a truly worrying Google addiction. Here's to apparently random connections with underlying significance... and continuing the froggy theme shortly with a trip to inter-war Paris, the next post will be a guest piece on translating Gaito Gazdanov, by Justin Doherty of Trinity College Dublin, the translator of Gazdanov's acclaimed novel Night Roads.

Credits

1. Citation from Gorky's My Childhood, 1915 edition, translator unknown, digitized here.
2. All Turgenev citations from Constance Garnett's translation.
3. All Bulgakov citations from Roger Cockrell's new translation of The Fatal Eggs (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2011).
4. For my comments on vivisection in Eliot's Middlemarch, I am indebted to George Menke, ‘Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot’, ELH, 67: 2 (2000), pp. 617-653.