The Silence of the Oligarchs: Why James Norton's Keeping Mum

For a man who consistently refuses to speak the language, actor James Norton can't leave Russia alone. He made a fetching, if not exactly voluble (and, like the other actors, exclusively Anglophone) Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in the BBC's notorious 2016 adaptation of War and Peace. Already in the home-grown Yorkshire police drama Happy Valley (2014), where Norton plays a homicidal psychopath, we note which book his character grabs in order to pass for a soft, fuzzy, studenty type: War and Peace. A subtle in-joke? A heads-up to viewers?

Happy Valley - spot the psychopath

(In a previous post, I've discussed how the BBC cunningly deploys Russian classics as clues to the real identity of baddies. This is an ever-growing list).

In the 2018 oligarch drama McMafia, a high-profile co-production between the BBC and AMC, Norton plays Alex Godman, the 'handsome, rich, and eligible' (in his girlfriend's words) only son of a minor Russian oligarch, now living in exile in London.

James Norton, expressionless hedge fund manager

The elder Godman, played by Alexei Serebryakov, intrepidly drinks vodka from an Evian bottle, especially when driving; behaves inappropriately with everyone (including the ducks in the park); and switches between just two emotional settings: melancholy sentimentality and raging grief. (This role is essentially a reprise of his part in Leviathan, even down to both men's real estate woes - in each plot, Serebryakov's character has been pushed out of his home by a bigger player). Rather than regretting the loss of a bricks-and-mortar property, Serebryakov's McMafia character mourns for all Russia, which he can never re-enter on pain of assassination. To compensate, he insists on speaking exclusively in Russian to his adult children. Young Alex, on the other hand, is an ethical banker with his own fund, which he refuses to invest in Russian interests in order to retain his reputation for probity. He never responds in Russian to his dad, usually citing the presence of his monolingual English-rose girlfriend Rebecca (Juliet Rylance) as an excuse for using English only. His father, unable to object, mutters that Alex speaks Russian like a six-year-old child - the age at which his son left Russia.

James Norton, milking that perfect blankness

Both Godman Sr's slur, and Alex's determined silence, contradict current research. Heritage speakers of Russian (like the Alex Godman character) do lose language-specific morphosyntactic structures in the L1 (here, Russian), but evidence shows that these tend to be minor vocabulary errors rather than incorrect grammar, particularly when the L1 has been used consistently at home.* Odds are, therefore, that instead of doing a Tyutchev, so to speak, Alex and his sister should be well away with the cúpla focal.

Moreover, the BBC is very proud of its decision to use Russian actors (speaking Russian with English subtitles) in McMafia, thus saving the world from cod Slavic accents yet again. (I was slightly disappointed that the Mumbai drug runners spoke the Queen's English instead of Marathi, but I suppose one can't have everything at once). This is why Serebryakov, Maria Shukshina, and others have been hired. Even Alex's preferred martial art is the intimidating Russian Sistema. So why is the man so tongue-tied? In all of episodes 1 and 2, he manages one word in Russian: "Da". At the end of Episode 3, he really goes for it, with two words: "Nichego, Papa." How a man who braves death threats while buying milk can be afraid of speaking Putin's Russian is beyond me. In any case, it will be fun to watch the BBC negotiate the challenges of bilingual filming as the series progresses.

The Platonov Puzzle - a new Ludlum title perhaps?

Will Alex speak THREE Russian words in a row? Will the English subtitles continue to be amusingly inaccurate? Why does Alex's dad have a Platonov anthology stashed in his bedside drawer next to love letters from his mistress?

Where are you taking my girlfriend's passport?

My own suspicion is that James Norton's silence, in character, is simply the logical continuation of a new acting style characterized by extended, awkward reticence and by facial expressions finely calibrated between quizzicality, blankness, and constipation. Ryan Gosling and Tom Hiddleston (the star of another BBC series, 2016's The Night Manager, with which McMafia is readily compared) are both trend leaders. In this series, James Norton spends most of his screen time not saying what we certainly hope he's thinking (Stop sitting on my uncle! Where are you taking my girlfriend's passport? What bloody man is this? Take your hand off my nose, etc) and instead, working truly hard on looking completely blank. It's exhausting just watching him show no expression at all.

Or perhaps he's just really, really keen on Tyutchev.

Молчи, скрывайся и таи
И чувства и мечты свои –
Пускай в душевной глубине
Встают и заходят оне
Безмолвно, как звезды в ночи, –
Любуйся ими – и молчи.

(Nabokov's translation of Silentium can be found here).

James Norton looking faintly quizzical in the buff

*See Eva G. Bar-Shalom and Elena Zaretsky, “Selective attrition in Russian-English bilingual children: Preservation of grammatical aspect”, International Journal of Bilingualism, Vol 12, Issue 4, pp. 281 - 302, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006908098572; or Olga Kagan and Kathleen Dillon, “Russian Heritage Learners: So What Happens Now?”, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Special Anniversary Issue (Spring, 2006), pp. 83-96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20459235

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

Dinosaurs Aren't Aunts, or P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad

A Small Pterodactyl fluttered into the Dinosaurs' Club and squawked disconsolately for a gin and bitters. His nibbled-looking crest and raffishly cocked beak told experienced observers that, although not extinct, he was not precisely tinct, either.
A kindly Stegosaurus/Triceratops cross glanced at the newcomer from his easy chair. "You appear cheesed off with the earthly stint, my son", the elder reptile remarked benevolently.
"Exactly!" exclaimed the Pterodactyl stormily. "No-one appreciates my sense of humour! No-one shares my literary pursuits! I pitched a scenario to a fur-bearing mammal today, and he accused me of being," he hurled a well-picked coelacanth skeleton across the room in rage, "past my sell-by date!"
There was a collective intake of breath in the the Club. Only the Stegosaurus/Triceratops failed to flinch at the distasteful insult.
"I knew a mammal once," began a Lesser Diplodocus.
"I can offer you the cheering example of one of my younger relatives," the elder dinosaur replied smoothly as if no-one had spoken, "who was confounded in life by not one but two old-fashioned interests: he admired Russian literature and the stories of P.G. Wodehouse. Imagine his happiness when, one day, he opened a book called The Clicking of Cuthbert and realized that the two were, as you might say, one. And this is what he told me..."

Whether P.G. Wodehouse was a serious reader of Russian literature, I doubt. It's difficult to imagine Plum reading Dostoevsky in Paris or sitting spellbound through Three Sisters. However, he knew enough about Tolstoy's prose to summarize an entire imaginary novella: "Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty” (from Jill the Reckless). And in The Clicking of Cuthbert, otherwise a rather weak effort from 1922, a young, enthusiastic, and decidely un-bookish golfer (a sort of Pierre Bezukhov to the other's moody Bolkonsky) pits the niblick against the pen in a contest for the heart of a beautiful girl against a moody literary aesthete called Raymond Devine. Cuthbert fights his battle not on the golf course, his natural sphere, but in his opponent's court: the suburban London Literary Society run by Mrs Willoughby Smethurst where Devine is worshipped as a genius. As the narrator remarks,

"I do not know if you have had any experience of suburban literary societies, but the one that flourished under the eye of Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst at Wood Hills was rather more so than the average. With my feeble powers of narrative, I cannot hope to make clear to you all that Cuthbert Banks endured in the next few weeks. And, even if I could, I doubt if I should do so. It is all very well to excite pity and terror, as Aristotle recommends, but there are limits."

Cuthbert's agony of inadequacy is exacerbated by the Society's constant chat about famous Russian novelists, especially Vladimir Brusiloff, currently touring England, who 'specialized in grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide'. Despite his stamina as a golfer, Cuthbert might not have stood firm 'had it not been for the daily reports in the papers of the internecine strife which was proceeding so briskly in Russia. Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out'. Before it does, however, Brusiloff is inveigled into attending the Smethurst salon, where two astonishing things happen. The first is the fall and utter ruin of Raymond Devine, who is unwise enough to mention that other great novelist, Sovietski, in Brusiloff's presence. Brusiloff, although 'not a man who prattled readily', is moved to pithily denounce his rival: 

'"Sovietski no good!"

He paused for a moment, set the machinery working again, and delivered five more at the pithead.

"I spit me of Sovietski!"

There was a painful sensation. [...] Raymond Parsloe Devine was plainly shaken, but he made an adroit attempt to recover his lost prestige.

"When I say I have been influenced by Sovietski, I mean, of course, that I was once under his spell. A young writer commits many follies. I have long since passed through that phase. The false glamour of Sovietski has ceased to dazzle me. I now belong whole-heartedly to the school of Nastikoff."'

But this transparent act of ingratiation also founders:

'"Nastikoff no good," said Vladimir Brusiloff, coldly. He paused, listening to the machinery.

"Nastikoff worse than Sovietski."

He paused again.

"I spit me of Nastikoff!" he said.[...]

Vladimir Brusiloff proceeded to sum up.

"No novelists any good except me. Sovietski--yah! Nastikoff--bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me."'

The second astonishing event is that Brusiloff reveals himself as a passionate golfer and a personal fan of Cuthbert's; at which point the young lady transfers her affections from the false idol Devine to the suddenly redeemed Cuthbert. Brusiloff barely notices, as he is too busy telling a highly spurious anecdote about Lenin and Trotsky playing golf in Nizhnii Novgorod ('someone in the crowd he tries to assassinate Lenin with a rewolwer--you know that is our great national sport, trying to assassinate Lenin with rewolwers--and the bang puts Trotsky off his stroke and he goes five yards past the hole, and then Lenin, who is rather shaken, you understand, he misses again... ').

Despite Plum's unorthodox grasp of Russian history and politics (one of his great comic contemporaries, Richmal Crompton, makes her hero Just William [an eternal superfluous schoolboy, or лишный лицеец] founder-member of the Junior Branch of the Society of Reformed Bolshevists, with the credo 'All gotter be equal. All gotter 'ave lots of money. All 'uman beings. That's sense, isn't it?' as expressed in The Weak Spot), his stories enjoy great popularity in Russia, as the success of the Russian Wodehouse society shows; and its foundress, Natalya Trauberg, daughter of director Leonid Trauberg, relates a wonderful story about how her parents met. The young director, who would have just finished making his version of The Overcoat at this time, 'read with great fervour the books of Wodehouse. True, they were hastily translated, abriged and vulgarized, but all those "young men in spats" lived the very life that their unfortunate Soviet counterpoints were dreaming about. To that I can testify, for I was growing up among them. The year of 1927 saw especially large number of those little books, and my mother, pregnant with me, was reading them. About three years before she was renting a room from a rather avant-garde artist, Valentina Khodasevitch. It was then and there that my mother (her christian name is Vera) heard two young men laughing and one of them, Leonid Trauberg, told her that they were waiting for the landlady and reading an excellent author named Wodehouse. It was the first meeting of my parents." You can read more here; additionally, I think Plum would have appreciated her brief site bio, which remarks delightfully 'She lived in Lithuania for many years and was an example of Christian with two lungs.' Perhaps Brusiloff wrote it.

"You see," intoned the Stegosaurus/Triceratops cross impressively, "my nephew's tale shows that there is no need to despair of niche, irrelevant, antiquated hobbies. There will always be someone else to share your interests!"
"That reminds me of a story about an Allosaurus I used to know," began the Diplodocus, unabashed.
But no-one was listening...

The full text of The Clicking of Cuthbert can be found online here.