Kissing Tolstoy, or Dammit, Dostoyevsky!

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 Poldark and the Brothers Karamazov; why James Norton doesn't speak Russian; and even about how the BBC uses Great Russian Novels 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 Kissing Tolstoy. 

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 War and Peace, 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 What Is To Be Done and Gorky's Mother (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?" 

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 Onegin 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 War and Peace 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 Fathers and Sons - 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."

We applaud the message of Kissing Tolstoy (although we fear Tolstoy would not). Another genre author who knows her Lev Nikolaevich is Jilly Cooper. Here she is summarizing Anna Karenina for The Guardian: '... [T]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!"'

Thankfully, the Russian classics continue to inspire popular genre-writing: I'm intrigued by Death with Dostoevsky, an American campus thriller by Katherine Bolger Hyde (whose other titles include Arsenic with Austen, Bloodstains with Bronte, Cyanide with Christie and - more surprisingly - Everything Tells Us About God). I expect great things from it. Let's not forget, as Claire Whitehead points out in her excellent recent book The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860-1917 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 Big Ben Strikes Eleven (1934) adapts several formative elements from Crime and Punishment. Clearly, crime pays, and so does Russian literature. As Dorothy Parker never wrote:

Men frequently make passes

At girls who take Tolstoy classes.

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.

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!

A Tourist in Tula, or Yasnaya Polyana 2018

Yasnaya Polyana archive with unknown child

It has been, astonishingly, six years since my first jaunt to Yasnaya Polyana 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. 

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.

Galina Alekseeva & Donna Orwin

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 Resurrection as a rewriting of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Kibal’nik claims that Resurrection is Tolstoy’s most Dostoevskian novel, although also informed by readings of Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island 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 (tolstovedy) by demonstrating Tolstoy’s ubiquity abroad, while simultaneously evading difficult questions by making sure no-one had heard of X. I think 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 (pereryv) 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 tolstovedy present took the first of two 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 lacked the scandals – and here I really mean skandal, 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.

The Tula Armour Museum

Tula is a Second World War hero-city – a gorod-geroi – 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, priyarniki (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 this. 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 tolstoved 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 Hadji Murat 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 “Kapitan, kapitan, ulybnites’” (“Smile, my captain!”), which caused the stately Olga Slivitskaya, dowager conference queen, to tell him firmly that he was a russkii chelovek.

Tolstovedy in conference, August 2018. Dinosaur not in shot

I might add that the only way to travel the 15 miles from Yasnaya Polyana to Tula is by marshrutka, 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 marshrutka halt, you have to follow a winding paved track from the conference hotel through the les, 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 les. 

The les at Yasnaya Polyana

Now there was a path through the les 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 les, like mythical creatures. The last glimpse I had of either of them was the bright pattern on the babushka’s headscarf. 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 marshrutka 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 marshrutka 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 les 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 marshrutka 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. 

But, for future reference, I found the local supermarket and the Tolstoy family graveyard. Time to plan 2020’s adventure, if I am lucky enough to join the tolstovedy in conference one more time.

Lenin in Tula

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 (Falanster), 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 Lizok’sBookshelf, my go-to book critic for that it’s-all-got-to-fit-in-carry-on shortlist; to Languagehat, who is unique; to the lovely Boris Dralyuk and his long-standing blog (and whose guest-edited edition of Cardinal Points is up next on Russian Dinosaur). Thank you all for sharing your knowledge – and long may you blog!

The Great Pond at Yasnaya Polyana

Scylla and Charybdis: steering between Tolstoy translations

When, three years ago now, I was invited to review two new translations of Tolstoy's great 1877 novel Anna Karenina, 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 this blog post's list of previous Anna 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.

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.

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' (Translator's Note, xxiii). An obvious example of repetition that both translators cite is the adjective veselyi (jolly) and its cognates such as veselost' (jolliness, good cheer), which Bartlett claims occurs 318 times in Anna (and she should know). Schwartz chooses to translate this word wherever it occurs by a single English equivalent – cheerful – and its 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?

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 veselyi, 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' (Notes on the Text and Translation, 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.

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: nasmeshlivo (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 nasmeshlivo. 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.

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 foreignization, as opposed to domestication). Or should they produce a 'smoothed-over' version that doesn't - shock horror - read like a translation? 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 Anna, 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.

Peaceful and rather scholarly debate spilled over into the global media when the journalist Janet Malcolm wrote an extended review of Tolstoy translations in The New York Review of Books, Socks, which attacked Schwarz's Anna 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 here. A few months later, the NYRB published selected responses 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 shapify '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 TLS 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?

Here comes my pennyworth. Another media flurry, so far positive, is in progress around Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's Odyssey 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, Anna Karenina  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' (Translator's Note, 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 Odyssey, she could well have Anna Karenina in mind: both are texts that are 'deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance' . Even though Anna'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.

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 Anna Karenina, with the less widely-cited but equally contentious first line of the Odyssey, discussed here 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 Anna Karenina, and could even justify her use of shapify 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.

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 reproduce 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 Odyssey, 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 is 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?

Parts of this post have previously appeared in my review articles on translating Tolstoy in the East-West Review (Autumn 2015) and Translation and Literature (26: 2017), pp. 214-222.

Opportunity, Glory, and Doom: Married to Tolstoy

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 Cynthia Asquith's Married To Tolstoy (Hutchinson of London, 1960), and The Life of Tolstoy 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.

                                               

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. "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 Anna Karenina. 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 Tolstoy's moral fixations accompanied by rather less than moral behaviour as "curdling themes". 

Like Rosamund Bartlett, whose Tolstoy biography I discussed in a previous post, 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 "philosophical garments", while these same children enjoyed traditional family games such as their father's impossible challenge to stand in a corner while not 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 War and Peace, 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). 

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, 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). 

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: 

"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).

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 The Kreutzer Sonata, 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 new edition by Michael R. Katz). 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 Daily Mail 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.

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 v tom svete - 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.

                                      

Tolstoy: A Russian Life

Rosamund Bartlett's Tolstoy: A Russian Life has been on my bookshelf almost since it was first published in 2010. I've recommended it to students. I've mined it for facts and key dates. But I never, dear readers, actually read it start to finish until recently... and I am now more impressed than ever with this book as a scholarly achievement. Although readable and indeed almost conversational throughout, it teaches a great deal about Tolstoy and his times. Not only does Bartlett manage to remain more or less in sympathy with her exasperating, idealistic, hypocritical, inexhaustible subject, she adds a final chapter exploring Tolstoy's posthumous legacy in Russia, of which more below. She even succeeds in staying neutral in the great scholar-polarizing soap opera of Sofia Andreevna (Sonia) versus Vladimir Chertkov, acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses of each party involved.

For example, as Bartlett negotiated the complicated prehistory of the Tolstoy clan, I realized for the first time how much of War and Peace is recycled family history. I was vaguely aware that the novel's Bolkonskys owed much to Tolstoy's relatives the Volkonskys (the rhyme is a heavy hint, after all), but I hadn't realized clearly that Maria Nikolaevna Volkonskaya, Tolstoy's mother and the heiress of Yasnaya Polyana, was an important model for Maria Bolkonskaya - or that the marriage the latter contracts with Nikolai Rostov (saving the Rostov family's fortunes) was a reflection of the real-life match between Tolstoy's parents. Tolstoy's own father, Nikolai Ilyich, also had to pick up the pieces - just like Nikolai Rostov - after the death of Tolstoy's benevolent but spendthrift grandfather, Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy, left the family almost bankrupt, and the logical way to fix their finances was to marry a wealthy wife. This was Maria Volkonskaya. While showing how embedded his fiction was in Tolstoy's family life and cultural milieu, Bartlett also succeeds in defamiliarizing the man himself - or at least stripping him of his sanctity as a cultural idol. For instance, she quotes Tchaikovsky's impression of him as a 'fatuous and offensive' bore, who when they met in 1876 announced without any prologue that 'Beethoven lacked talent' (372). Tchaikovsky struggled to reconcile his respect for Tolstoy the artist with his inevitable contempt for Tolstoy the man. Bartlett's own love of music shines through in a brief riff noting the similarities in worldview and artistic aims between Tolstoy and Wagner, despite the former's vocal disdain for the latter in What Is Art? - a disdain which, Bartlett points out, Tolstoy apparently founded upon a single visit to one performance of Siegfried (which he left early). Turgenev called him 'a mixture of poet, Calvinist, fanatic, nobleman [...] highly moral and at the same time unattractive' (133). It was an insightful, if harsh, assessment.

One of Bartlett's most important achievements in this biography is to emphasize the golden thread running through Tolstoy's career: his self-perception as an educator first and foremost. This is why his post-Anna Karenina return to simple language, his retellings of the New Testament and the classical philosophers, his devotion to Chertkov's popular publishing firm Posrednik and to his own edited collections of wisdom such as Weekly Readings and Circle of Reading, was less a rejection of his career as a feted novelist than a resumption of his life's obsession. The Azbuka (Alphabet, or basic reader) he laboriously compiled for peasant children in the early 1870s, and which he vigorously supported (and compelled others to support) despite the first edition's embarrassing failure, was inspired by lessons at the first school he organized at Yasnaya Polyana in 1849 (even though this was a brief experiment that would not be resumed until 1859).

Mature Tolstoy, the moral philosopher, is in many ways admirable, but he is much less likable than the bear-hunting repentant playboy of the earlier chapters. Bartlett's sympathies are clearly and justifiably with Sofia Andreevna, as she describes the worsening fault lines in their marriage. It's difficult not to sympathize with Sonia's desperation for a break from childbearing, or with her efforts to obtain financial security for her children, or her longing for opportunities to enjoy Moscow society - all aspirations which were misunderstood, thwarted, and eventually demonized by Tolstoy. In what other family could a wife declare war on her husband simply by hiring a wet nurse? The section dealing with Sonia's gradual decline ([after her son Andrei's death in 1916] 'Sonya steadily lost interest in life; she took to sitting for hours in the old Voltaire chair that Tolstoy had particularly liked because it had been in his family since before he was born', p. 421) is one of the most touching parts of the book. After the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, Tolstoy's other heirs - his daughter Alexandra, Chertkov and the various Russian Tolstoyan communities -  gradually declined from an initial position of considerable cultural influence. Alexandra was arrested three times before finally leaving the country for good; Chertkov obdurately fought Stalin for the miserly sums required to eke out the publication of the Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy's Collected Works; and individual Tolstoyans were exiled, absorbed into collective farms, sent to gulags, or shot for conscientious objection. The story of the many pitfalls in the publication of the Jubilee Edition (which finally appeared, intact but uneven in quality, in 1958) is a fascinating one, as told by Bartlett. Most importantly, she explains how the Soviet regime managed to claim Tolstoy as a classic Soviet writer avant la lettre, absorbing his fiction into their canon, despite this attitude to Tolstoyism. The secret was to ignore Tolstoy's philosophical legacy completely and focus on his fiction. His religious essays, after appearing in the Jubilee Edition, were 'banned from future publication' (443). Tolstoy the writer of fiction was welcome in Soviet literature; Tolstoy the moralist was forgotten. Before we condemn this sleight of hand on the part of the Soviet literary establishment, it's worth looking at the contemporary reception of Tolstoy. I've got A Confession of my own to make: I've read very little Tolstoy that isn't literary fiction. And yet all Tolstoy's final hopes were placed in his non-fiction, educative texts, rather than his novels, which he rejected (in a very real sense, by signing over the rights to others). If some of my readers have read Tolstoy's non-fiction, do comment below with your views on your favourite text.

Next post: Adventures in titology: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and book titles

Disclaimers: Rosamund Bartlett is a personal friend. And some of my current research is on Tolstoy and classical literature (what he read, what he translated, and what he wrote about the Greek and Roman classics). Of which, more anon.

Image credits: Both photos of L.N. Tolstoy and his wife Sofia Andreevna Bers, commemorating wedding anniversaries, can be found on William Nickell's UCSC page.

Raskolnikov in Shetland, or Anna Karenina goes to Grantchester

The recent media agitation about the BBC adaptation of War and Peace has alerted me to subtler cameos by Russian literary masterpieces in popular culture. To my surprise (and to Chernyshevsky's, no doubt, were he still around to insist on utility over aesthetic value), I have discovered that these are useful. In particularly essential ways. Russian novels help the police with their enquiries - literally. If you're a detective, forget background checks - a squint at your chief suspect's bookshelf will tell you all you need to know. If you've got your suspect fingered but can't make an arrest, a knowledge of Tolstoy will help you stay one step ahead of his or her nefarious game.

Starting, naturally enough, with the BBC, let's take their northerly crime series Shetland, now on season three. When DI Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall) gets leery about his only suspect in a murder case, played by Ciaran Hinds, he invites himself around to tea and checks out Mr Hinds's reading matter. And this is what he sees:

Suspicious tomes in Shetland

Reunited with his colleagues, DI Perez is quick to share his deductions: ".... His books. These big tomes. You know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of a lifer's cell. No possessions and it's full of these books that no-one but a lifer's got time to read."

Take that, War and Peace - thought you were on-trend? Only a lifer would read you. And as for you, Crime and Punishment, lurking there in the David McDuff translation -  more exciting than picking oakum, but only just.

In the BBC's hit science fiction series, Being Human, vampire heartthrob Hal Yorke is deep in the Penguin Brothers Karamazov when his werewolf housemate storms in to start an argument. Did we mention Hal was a vampire? Hence, a mass-murderer, serial killer, probable child-killer and future world dictator (spoilers). And yet, periodically, he repents. So very Dmitrii (although Dmitrii didn't do it. Did he?).

Brothers Karamazov: light reading for vampires

Channel-hopping to ITV's Grantchester series, or rather to the series of novels by James Runcie that inspired the television drama, we find crime-busting vicar Sidney Chambers already at the top of his game in the opening story of Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (2012). The villainness attempts to tip her love rival into the path of a train at Cambridge Station, but plainclothes detectives foil her on the platform. How did Canon Sid know what she was about to do? He explains that he '"noticed that she liked to read Russian novels. [...] The first time I spoke to her I realized that she was reading Anna Karenina. [...] A story of adultery that begins and ends on a railway line. I informed Inspector Keating of my suspicions..."' Busted! Another fair cop, thanks to Tolstoy.

James Norton, who plays Sidney Chambers in the ITV series, also starred as Prince Andrei Bolkonskii in War and Peace. Now there's a suspicious coincidence...

James Norton before Bald Hills
By Punting Cambridge: Website - Scudamore’s Punting Cambridge - https://www.flickr.com/photos/punting/21028740138, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45084760

Moscow comes to Moffat, or Tolstoy and Toffee

Dear readers, I apologize for my long silence and many overdue posts - including a report on the April 2015 Chinese Russian Literature Studies conference in Xian (CURLS) and a review of Gazdanov's The Buddha's Return. Both coming soon, I promise. Unfortunately, I've been retained again as an expert consultant by the Jurassic Park franchise, and I've also had two dinosaur eggs to look after - no easy task, as fans of Ice Age III know.

I've decided to break my silence by reporting on a rather extraordinary mini-conference I've just attended in Moffat, a small town near the southern Scottish border (and not a Dr Who theme park). This was the Wide, Wide World of Leo Tolstoy, a commemorative event dedicated to the late Ekaterina Yurevna Genieva and jointly arranged by a local organisation called Moffat Book Events and several eminent Russian cultural bodies. These include the All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature (VGBIL), the Institute of Translation, and the State Museum-Estate of Yasnaya Polyana (the Dinosaur has visited the latter on two previous happy occasions, as regular readers will know). It's rather as if the Librarian of Congress came to your local book club meeting to argue about the latest Jodi Picoult - except that the intellectual tenor was much higher. The sheer oddness of concatenating Slavic cultural heavyweights in a minute and remote, if charming, Scottish town is so striking it must have a precedent; and indeed, Nicholas I stayed in the conference hotel, the Annandale Arms, in 1817, as a callow youth. (He didn't come for the conference, of course. It was only established in 2010).

Moffat; the Annandale Arms is the tall white building on the right

Olga Tolstikova, a  VGBIL director, with photo-bombing infant

The Slavophiles of Moffat first appeared on my radar when they organized the UK's only major Lermontov commemoration last year; which has since produced this lovely anthology of translations (some into Scots Gaelic). Moffat Book Events tells its own story quite well (this page includes a programme for this year's conference), but the secret of their success seems to be the friendship between the VGBIL's much-loved and insightful librarian, Ekaterina Genieva, and two Dumfries-based Russophiles - the literary scholar and church historian Ann Shukman (incidentally, one of the first women ever ordained by the Church of England, in 1994), and Elizabeth Roberts, currently editor of the Scotland-Russia Forum. This personal friendship - strengthened by shared interest in the life and fate of the murdered Orthodox priest, Aleksandr Men - led to practical collaboration, which the Moffateers are determined to preserve despite Genieva's death earlier this year. To this end, this year's conference brought together a constellation of Tolstoy experts and former colleagues  and friends of Genieva, including Tolstoy biographer Pavel Basinsky (who read an extract from his book Flight from Heaven, soon to appear in English translation), essayist Andrei Boldin, the directors of the newly-founded Institute for Literary Translation (which dispenses grants to translators and dispenses the Read Russia prize, won this year by Oliver Ready for his mesmerizing version of Vladimir Sharov's Before and During), Lehman College Slavist Robert Whittaker, Yasnya Polyana's Galina Alekseeva, a sprinkling of senior VGBIL staff, Dmitry Bak (director of Moscow's State Literary Museum), and the chairperson of the Ecclefechan Carlyle Society, Mary Hollern.

One of Yuri Kossagovsky's Anna Karenina illustrations 

As at any gathering of Tolstoyans, there were surprises. One delegate flew in from Iowa, for 24 hours (on the Moffat red-eye). One speaker came from Pamplona. There was a seanachie, a documentary film about Yasnaya Polyana, and a number of art exhibitions including key scenes from Anna Karenina imagined by Yuri Kossagovsky.

Nor did the papers disappoint. Galina Alekseeva discussed Tolstoy and Thackeray - how Pendennis (1850) might have inspired the young Tolstoy to write autobiographical fiction, while the fortunes of the War of Independence as described in Esmond (1852) probably encouraged him to think about how historical forces crush individuals. Robert Lehmann used the fable of the blind men and the elephant as a metaphor for the transmission of the earliest versions of Tolstoy to American readers. This was an occasionally scandalous process; established translators such as Nathan Haskell Dole refused to touch The Kreutzer Sonata, a text considered so incendiary it was confiscated by police from New York bookshops (a 'Trojan elephant', if ever there was one). Dmitry Bak's heartfelt paper retraced the falling-out between Tolstoy and his publisher Katkov which resulted in the rejection of the final chapter of Anna Karenina by Katkov's journal, Russkii vestnik; Bak suggested that Katkov insisted on the black-and-white delineation of character (sinners are bad, saints are good), Tolstoy preferred to allow his readers (and characters) to absorb morality by instinct and experience. The two men fell out over Tolstoy's failure to condemn Anna in the final chapter. There were many other talking points, proving that this unusual conference is already a worthy legacy of Genieva's work and an important day in the British Russian Studies calendar. The real (Trojan?) elephant in the room was the question none of the delegates dared to address: did Tolstoy like toffee? Specifically, the local speciality, with its unique (and secret) recipe? It's safe to say quite a lot of this sticky stuff is flying back to Moscow this week...

After (Before and During)

A man crosses snowy Moscow to reach a psychiatric hospital. Amnesia is gradually erasing his personality, funneling his future into the black hole of early dementia. To fortify his ebbing consciousness, he starts a Memorial Book (Sinodik). In the Orthodox tradition, this was a list of the dead to be prayed over. But despite the narrator's Christian faith, his Memorial Book is inspired not by religion but by a gruesome childhood obsession: the ominous Book of the Disgraced (Sinodik opal'nykh) where Ivan the Terrible inscribed the catalogue of his own cruelties. In our time, this is often the only historical record of Ivan's atrocities and of the thousands of lives he erased. As the historian S.B. Veselovsky noted, Ivan's 'extreme measures' were deliberately intended to extirpate victims as if they had never existed: to '[strike] the soul for all eternity' by giving no chance for repentance before execution, refusing Christian burial, feeding corpses to dogs, killing whole families. Not even memories survived: 'in order to deprive the person of hope for the salvation of his soul, he was deprived of memorialization'.* The Book of the Disgraced was Ivan's late-career policy reversal, an attempt to salvage these lost souls and, perhaps, with theirs, his own. For our man in the Moscow asylum, menaced imminently by oblivion, his own Memorial Book is in no way a light-hearted, or sentimental, or even an individual record. First and foremost he dedicated it to 'people who [...] died before their time, leaving nothing behind except in my memory'. This book is not P.S. I Love You. It is a project for collective resurrection, for the rebirth of generations scythed down, if not by tyrants, by time itself.

Russian novels, eh? All of the above develops in the first nineteen pages of Vladimir Sharov's Before and During (Do i vo vremia, 1991), now translated into English for the first time by Oliver Ready. Already Sharov (an old Dinosaur acquaintance) has melded madness, faith, politics, historical and personal tragedy. Even his narrator's career - as a children's writer in the late Soviet period - dimly echoes that of Daniil Kharms, the brilliant satirist who starved to death in a mental ward in 1942. Before and During is a darkly brilliant book which sometimes ironizes, sometimes genuinely challenges conceits woven through modern Russian history and culture: fleshly resurrection, holy foolishness, erotic utopia and the sexualization of terror. As his Memorial Book grows, the narrator finds himself transcribing the life stories of every inmate in the asylum. Senile Party apparatchiks and institutionalized geniuses queue up patiently to be recorded, never interrupting each other's stories, understanding 'that the life of one man is just a tiny piece, that to survive, to be saved, they had to become one whole'. Sharov has much restrained, culturally specific fun by materializing the sacred trope of collective unity in grotesque sexual incidents. Stalin, half-drowned, copulates transcendently with his birth mother. A Georgian ex-bandit conceives a son (not coincidentally, Stalin's father) in his final paroxysm on the scaffold. Vladimir Solovyev promised his followers eternal life if they had the right kind of sex; Nikolai Fyodorov and Lev Tolstoy promised their followers eternal life if they had no sex at all; naturally, all three are recurring characters. Madame de Staël has sex with everyone and twice gives birth to herself. De Staël, whom I  always thought of as an influentially incidental historical figure (remember her working a room in Pushkin's unfinished Roslavlev: 'The guests' attention was divided between the sturgeon and M-me de Staël'), here takes centre stage. Not only does she use opium to drug and technically rape an illegitimate half-wit, Nikolai Fyodorov, exploiting his romantic obsession with her (she subsequently bears him three idiot sons); in a later incarnation, she abuses her special relationship with Stalin to manipulate him into ordering the Great Purges. At the novel's end, she and Fyodorov both inhabit the narrator's ward, still deadlocked between desire and consummation, passion and betrayal. History is retold as a sexual act: Scriabin explains to Lenin that 'Russia [...] is already pregnant with the Revolution', a seductive transsexual siren who transfixes its victims with the phallic principle of terror. I couldn't find a flaw in Oliver Ready's translation; he copes well with Sharov's rolling alternation of sonority and absurdity. Personally, I wouldn't translate Stalin's coital murmurs of 'Mama... mamochka' as 'Mummy, mummy'. But a jarring endearment was hardly the most grotesque aspect of that particular scene.

To make sense of Sharov, it helps to think about Tolstoy - another writer whose bafflement with erotic love shaped both his life and his most famous works of fiction. In Before and During, Sharov suggests that Tolstoy's estrangement from his wife intensified when the children she bore disappointed him: 'Tolstoy was waiting for [...] his wife to give birth to followers. But she didn't know how to give birth to disciples, only children, so then he walked out on his own family'. In so doing, he failed to realize that his eldest son Lev Lvovich was actually his own twin, a perfect copy of himself: 'Lev Nikolayevich had the good fortune to be resurrected without dying, to be given two lives, both very long - but he failed to appreciate this gift'. Because they don't acknowledge their shared identity, both Levs die unfulfilled, equally if differently baffled. Another such failed resurrection affects Fyodorov, De Staël's great love in Before and During. Historically, he is credited with a utopian theory that sons will achieve the material resurrection of their fathers and forefathers, provided they abstain from procreation and other bodily lapses. Fate punishes the fictional Fyodorov for his hypocritical (albeit unconscious) sexual liaison with De Staël by making their three sons both illegitimate and witless: 'The task, the mission of the sons was the resurrection of the fathers, but Fyodorov's sons, who'd never seen him and knew nothing about him, would never be able to resurrect him'. In his last major novel, the aptly named Resurrection (1889-99), Tolstoy renewed his attack on Eros, switching between male and female perspectives to tell the story of a nobleman, Dmitrii Nekhliudov, who seduces and abandons his aunts' ward; as a result, she becomes a prostitute. Ten years later he accidentally causes her to be condemned for a crime she did not commit, then seeks redemption by following her into Siberian exile.


Although Resurrection contains some of Tolstoy's most lyrical evocations of sexual love (Nekhliudov's yearning for Katiusha as ice breaks on the river! Pregnant Katiusha chasing Nekhliudov's carriage - what is it about Tolstoy, women and trains?), most of the novel attacks Russia's political, legal and social structure, not forgetting some criticism of agricultural economy, with an occasional broadside against Orthodoxy. (The book's raison d'être as a fundraiser for the Dukhobors' flight to Canada has been well-publicized.) These rodomontades are oppressive, occasionally tendentious, but sincere. Idealistic, mercurial Nekhliudov reflects Tolstoy's perception of his own spiritual evolution from self-indulgent rake to penitent philosopher. And yet it would be disingenuous to suggest that Resurrection was written wholly, or even primarily, as social critique. This is a novel about a man's love for a woman: the insolence of office and the law's delay are merely tropes for the frustrations and failures of passion. The Song of Solomon famously uses erotic metaphors to represent religious faith; Tolstoy is doing the reverse. His blasts against Church and state, political and legal bodies veil his preoccupation with more intimate forms.

Nekhliudov consummates his relationship with Katiusha very early in the novel, but when they meet again, he discovers that spiritual unity with the woman she has become is much harder to achieve, even when he offers marriage. As he criss-crosses Russia, lobbying on her behalf and following her convoy into Siberia, he simultaneously pursues possession of the woman he loves, body and soul: a quest that is hopelessly impeded by their previous sexual connection. Similarly, in Sharov's novel De Staël and Fyodorov begin their relationship with a tumultuous affair (unconsciously, on one side), followed by a long estrangement. Their ultimate reunion falls short of reconciliation: Fyodorov will not compromise his chastity, nor will De Staël renounce her sexuality. Admittedly Sharov reverses the polarities in their relationship, making De Staël the socially powerful pursuer. But Sharov's Fyodorov and Tolstoy's Nekhliudov share other personality traits, including their notorious holy-foolishness. Nekhliudov even worries that his rapacious brother-in-law will cite his eccentricities as grounds to have him sectioned and administer his estate. (The asylum looms again). Like the unworldly, ranting Fyodorov, Nekhliudov is a conversation killer. In Resurrection, when everyone is conventionally lamenting the tragic outcome of a duel between two drunken officers during which one (an only son!) is fatally wounded, Nekhliudov points out the double standard. An officer gets slapped on the wrist for committing manslaughter in the name of his regiment, but a peasant, although provoked to murder by poverty and injustice, can expect exile for life under brutal conditions. 'He spoke what was in his mind. At first Countess Katerina Ivanovna tried to agree with her nephew, but then she fell silent. So did everyone else, and Nekhliudov had the feeling that by telling this tale he had committed something verging on an indelicacy' (Part II, Chapter 17).  Resurrection  recounts many indelicacies and awkward silences left in Dmitrii Nekhliudov's wake. And yet - despite the tendentiousness shared by novel and hero - both confront the psychological gap between sexual knowledge and spiritual intimacy. So do the characters in Sharov's Before and During. Neither Sharov's novel nor Tolstoy's offer a cure for this rift, this shortfall between souls, but both find tentative faith in the collective - not only by memorializing extinct lives but by choosing to love others (for Tolstoy's Nekhliudov, in a strictly philanthropic sense).

Despite Tolstoy's political crusades and Sharov's grotesque invented histories, both novels are really about the same thing: the ineffable despair latent in human love. Our destiny is to despair of love, and to love, despairing. At least, in Russian novels...

*S.B. Veselovsky cited by Alexander Yanov in The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (University of California Press, 1981), p. 253.
Illustrations by Alexander Smirnov are from the 2009 edition of Do i vo vremia (Arsis, 2009).