Scrambled Eggs, or Why the Russian Revolution Happened.

Fried eggs - яичница-глазунья.
Design by ©A.Anichkin.

I wrote about Maugham's Christmas Holiday here. Another of his Russian novels is Ashenden.

In a series of novellas Maugham recalls, through his alter-ego Ashenden, how while in the service of the British foreign intelligence he was tasked with preventing the bolshevik takeover in 1917.

Ashenden sets everything in motion to stop the revolution but in the end fails, as we know from history.

It turns out that scrambled eggs were, at least partly, to blame. The passage below describes the falling out between Ashenden and Anastasia, the Russian woman, on whom he later had to rely in St.Petersburg.

There is an awkward translation point here. The Russian translator Victor Veber (see the passage on my Russian blog post here) uses the word омлет  — omelette — for scrambled eggs.

It may be a mistake but could also be a deliberate choice to avoid readers' confusion. Fried eggs in Russian is яичница, or to be more precise, яичница-глазунья — fried eggs with eyes, as in my photo above. Scrambled eggs is also called яичница but with a different extension, яичница-болтушка — whipped, stirred or scrambled fried eggs. To build the growing antagonism between Ashenden and Anastasia on the differences between глазунья and болтушка could distract the reader from the humour of the original, the translator may have thought.

On the other hand he may have missed an opportunity to introduce a play on words: болтушка has another meaning — chatter-box, which is exactly what is Anastasia. See for yourself and enjoy the passage. It's tickling when you think what the world could have been in the past Century had it not been for Maugham-Ashenden's dislike for scrambled eggs.

I also recommend a short review of Ashenden on Tolstoy is My Cat blog.

(English text quoted from here)

Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she would have for breakfast.

'Scrambled eggs,' she said.

She ate heartily. Ashenden had already noticed that she had a healthy appetite. He supposed it was a Russian trait; you could not picture Anna Karenina making her midday meal off a bath-bun and a cup of coffee, could you?

After breakfast they went to the Louvre and in the afternoon they went to the Luxembourg. They dined early in order to go to the Comedie Francaise; then they went to a Russian cabaret where they danced. When next morning at eight-thirty they took their places in the dining-room and Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she fancied, her reply was:

'Scrambled eggs.'

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday,' he expostulated.

'Let's have them again today,' she smiled.

'All right.'

They spent the day in the same manner except that they went to the Carnavalet instead of the Louvre and the Musee Guimet instead of the Luxembourg. But when the morning after in answer to Ashenden's inquiry Anastasia Alexandrovna again asked for scrambled eggs, his heart sank.

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday and the day before,' he said.

'Don't you think that's a very good reason to have them again today?'

'No, I don't.'

'Is it possible that your sense of humour is a little deficient this morning?' she asked. 'I eat scrambled eggs every day. It's the only way I like them.'

'Oh, very well. In that case of course we'll have scrambled eggs.'

But the following morning he could not face them.

'Will you have scrambled eggs as usual?' he asked her.

'Of course,' she smiled affectionately, showing him two rows of large square teeth.

'All right, I'll order them for you; I shall have mine fried.’

The smile vanished from her lips.

'Oh?' She paused a moment. 'Don't you think that's rather inconsiderate? Do you think it's fair to give the cook unnecessary work? You English, you're all the same, you look upon servants as machines. Does it occur to you that they have hearts like yours, the same feelings and the same emotions? How can you be surprised that the proletariat are seething with discontent when the bourgeoisie like you are so monstrously selfish?'

'Do you really think that there'll be a revolution in England if I have my eggs in Paris fried rather than scrambled?'

She tossed her pretty head in indignation.

'You don't understand. It's the principle of the thing. You think it's a jest, of course I know you're being funny, I can laugh at a joke as well as anyone, Chekhov was well-known in Russia as a humorist; but don't you see what is involved? Your whole attitude is wrong. It's a lack of feeling. You wouldn't talk like that if you had been through the events of 1905 in Petersburg. When I think of the crowds in front of the Winter Palace kneeling in the snow while the Cossacks charged them, women and children! No, no, no.'

Her eyes filled with tears and her face was all twisted with pain. She took Ashenden's hand.

'I know you have a good heart. It was just thoughtless on your part and we won't say anything more about it. You have imagination. You're very sensitive. I know. You'll have your eggs done in the same way as mine, won't you?'

'Of course," said Ashenden.

He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning after that. The waiter said:' Monsieur aime les oeufs brouillés.' At the end of the week they returned to London. He held Anastasia Alexandrovna in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder, from Paris to Calais and again from Dover to London. He reflected that the journey from New York to San Francisco took five days. When they arrived at Victoria and stood on the platform waiting for a cab she looked at him with her round, shining, and slightly protuberant eyes.

'We've had a wonderful time, haven't we?' she said.

‘Wonderful.’

'I've quite made up my mind. The experiment has justified itself. I'm willing to marry you whenever you like.'

But Ashenden saw himself eating scrambled eggs every morning for the rest of his life. When he had put her in a cab, he called another for himself, went to the Cunard office, and took a berth on the first ship that was going to America. No immigrant, eager for freedom and a new life, ever looked upon the statue of Liberty with more heartfelt thankfulness than did Ashenden, when on that bright and sunny morning his ship steamed into the harbour of New York.

Russian Emigrants: 'Shiftless and undependable'.

WS Maugham.

There is a persistent romanticised view of the Russian post-Revolution emigration: the noble, impoverished and dignified in their suffering intellectuals fleeing the horrors of bolshevist regime.

The reality was, of course, far from romantic. And by the end of 1930s the attitude to Russian emigrants had changed.

W Somerset Maugham's novel Christmas Holiday (1939) is an exploration of the Raskolnikov question, first articulated by Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment: can you kill a fellow human being to prove yourself that you can and in doing so to prove that you are a superior being. An experiment that was part of the revolutionary psychology.

Christmas Holiday is one of the most 'Russian' works of Maugham. Possibly, more insightful than Ashenden, the writer's account of his work as the British secret agent in Russia in 1917. The book is full of witty observations on Russians and comparisons with the English and the French.  

One of the main characters in the book is Lydia, a young Russian woman who works in an upmarket brothel under the name of 'Princess Olga'. It is through her that Maugham makes his comments.

This one is when Charley, an Englishman who comes to Paris to spend Christmas, meets Lydia:

"

Tell the Princess Olga to come here." Then to Charley: "She's Russian. Of course since the revolution we have been swamped with Russians, we're fed to the teeth with them and their Slav temperament; for a time the clients were amused by it, but they're tired of them now. And then they're not serious. They're noisy and quarrelsome. The truth is, they're barbarians, and they don't know how to behave. But Princess Olga is different. She has principles. You can see that she's been well brought up. She has something, there's no denying it.

"

And later in the book, when we learn more about Lydia:

"

It was true that her father had been a professor of some small distinction at the university, but in Russia, before the revolution, and since then Paris swarmed with princes and counts and guardsmen who were driving taxis or doing manual labour. Everyone looked upon the Russians as shiftless and undependable. People were sick of them. Lydia's mother, whose grandfather had been a serf, was herself hardly more than a peasant, and the professor had married her in accordance with his liberal principles; but she was a pious woman and Lydia had been brought up with strict principles. It was in vain that she reasoned with herself; it was true that the world was different now and one must move with the times: she could not help it, she had an instinctive horror of becoming a man's mistress.

"

Later in the book we discover that Lydia is in fact different from other Russians, or at least doesn't fit with the stereotype that had formed, according to Maugham, among the French.

The full text of the novel is here (link takes to the passage quoted in this post) and a Russian translation is here.  

How to Please the Masses. (The Creative Impulse).

At the end of Summer I went to a literary festival in Saint-Clémentin, Poitou-Charente. 

Among other events I went to there was a workshop on the short story. The British writer Bill Kirton talked about the principles of a good short story in terms that reminded me of a favourite of mine, The Creative Impulse, 1926, by W.Somerset Maugham. 

Kirton didn't know the story, so I gave a brief summary and retold the following passage in which the mystery of the birth of a best-selling detective novel is revealed.  

It was then that Mrs Bulfinch had the idea that was to have consequences of such magnitude.
‘Why don’t you write a good thrilling detective story?’ she asked.
‘Me?’ exclaimed Mrs Albert Forrester, for the first time in her life regardless of grammar.
‘It’s not a bad idea,’ said Albert. ‘It’s not a bad idea at all.’
‘I should have the critics down on me like a thousand bricks.’
‘I’m not so sure of that. Give the highbrow the chance of being lowbrow without demeaning himself and he’ll be so grateful to you, he won’t know what to do.’
‘For this relief much thanks,’ murmured Mrs Albert Forrester reflectively.
‘My dear, the critics’ll eat it. And written in your beautiful English they won’t be afraid to call it a masterpiece.’
‘The idea is preposterous. It’s absolutely foreign to my genius. I could never hope to please the masses.’
‘Why not? The masses want to read good stuff, but they dislike being bored. They all know your name, but they don’t read you, because you bore them. The fact is, my dear, you’re dull.’
‘I don’t know how you can say that, Albert,’ replied Mrs Albert Forrester, with as little resentment as the equator might feel if someone called it chilly.
‘Everyone knows and acknowledges that I have an exquisite sense of humour and there is nobody who can extract so much good wholesome fun from a semicolon as I can.’
‘If you can give the masses a good thrilling story and let them think at the same time that they are improving their minds you’ll make a fortune.’
‘I’ve never read a detective story in my life,’ said Mrs Albert Forrester. ‘I once heard of a Mr Barnes of New York and I was told that he had written a book called The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. But I never read it.’
‘Of course you have to have the knack,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘The first thing to remember is that you don’t want any lovemaking, it’s out of place in a detective story, what you want is murder, and sleuth–hounds, and you don’t want to be able to guess who done it till the last page.’
‘But you must play fair with your reader, my dear,’ said Albert. ‘It always annoys me when suspicion has been thrown on the secretary or the lady of the title and it turns out to be the second footman who’s never done more than say, “The carriage is at the door.” Puzzle your reader as much as you can, but don’t make a fool of him.’
‘I love a good detective story,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘Give me a lady in evening dress, just streaming with diamonds, lying on the library floor with a dagger in her heart, and I know I’m going to have a treat.’
‘There’s no accounting for tastes,’ said Albert. ‘Personally, I prefer a respectable family solicitor, with side–whiskers, gold watch–chain, and a benign appearance, lying dead in Hyde Park.’
‘With his throat cut?’ asked Mrs Bulfinch eagerly.
‘No, stabbed in the back. There’s something peculiarly attractive to the reader in the murder of a middle–aged gentleman of spotless reputation. It is pleasant to think that the most apparently blameless of us have a mystery in our lives.’
‘I see what you mean, Albert,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘He was the repository of a fatal secret.’
‘We can give you all the tips, my dear,’ said Albert, smiling mildly at Mrs Albert Forrester. ‘I’ve read hundreds of detective stories.’

Surprisingly, it's not easy to find Maugham's story on the internet. You'd think that works published in 1920s would be somewhere there on an open resource - but no. Amazon has collections of Maugham's stories but there aren't library sites with this one. In the end I found the full text on Cadwallen.

Read about the festival here and here, and on the organisers' blog here.

Bill Kirton's website is here.

WS Maugham and David Goodis.

Russian version of this article is here.

Goodis, not Maugham.

This is a web experiment, please republish this photo of David Goodis (1917-1967), an American writer, but please don’t change the name of the jpeg file.

Here’s why. 

The English writer William Somerset Maugham has a memorable face, with piercing blue eyes and a thin hooked nose. Born in Victorian times, he became a fashionable playwright at the beginning of the last century, a popular novelist later, in the twenties, and his reputation as one of the greatest masters of the short story is unshakeable. His opus magnum, the coming-of-age novel Of Human Bondage, is one the rare examples of a literary work that acquired a cult status twice, first when it was published in 1910s and again in 1960s, when the writer was still alive and wrote a witty preface to the new edition of the book, where he complained that he can’t remember the story because he hadn’t reread it for nearly fifty years.

Unfortunately, Maugham is a bit unfashionable these days, probably because he is associated with British imperialism, unfairly. This is, perhaps, why a few websites, including in Russia (where his novels and stories are widely used as language learning aids), got into a muddle with his portrait, publishing the picture of a different writer, the American David Goodis, about forty years younger than Maugham. The picture below shows results of a Google image search for Maugham. (click on the picture to repear the search)

I didn’t know anything about Goodis, but the wrong photo annoyed me so much that I decided to find out who was in the picture. I don’t regret an hour or two I’ve spent compulsively searching on the internet and finding out that it was of Goodis. It turns out that he was a prominent novelist of the noire genre and had a successful career in Hollywood writing scripts and screen adaptations of existing literary works, until he suddenly and mysteriously quit and retired to his native Philadelphia where he carried on prolifically writing pulp for New York magazines. He sometimes churned out up to 10,000 words a day. 

While in Hollywood Goodis worked on a screen adaptation of Maugham’s play, The Letter. This is probably why the mistake with the photo attribution occured.

I look forward to reading Goodis and I love Maugham. This is why I want the photo with the file name ‘Goodis, not Maugham’ to circulate on the net and get noticed by search engine spiders. Help.

The photo itself shows Goodis working on a script at Warner Brothers and, apparently, is in free domain. I have contacted Centipede Press, who deal with Goodis’ work, and Larry Withers, a designer and photographer, who has published work on Goodis, and got their approval for republishing this photo of the writer.

Read more about him on Shooting Pool with David Goodis.  Wikipedia also has an article on the writer.

Can! or Another Example of Russian Conciseness

'Russian verbosity' is a long-standing stereotype supported by mammoths like 'War and Peace' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Maugham, in Ashenden, even goes so far as to claim that all his carefully laid plans to stop the bolshevik takeover in 1917 (the writer was on a secret mission in Petrograd during the events) were ruined because members of his team preferred to talk and not to act.

Anyone, who really works with the language, would agree with the opposite: Russian in fact is very concise. Take for instance The Penguin Russian Course AБВ. Before saying anything else about the language it warns: Russian doesn't have articles, 'is' and 'are' are omitted in the present tense and there is no need for additional 'do' or 'does' in the interrogative. How many words do we instantly drop?

Here is a good illustration. I was experimenting with various 'inspirational' designs, in English and Russian, and came up with this one, based on Howard Miller's 'We Can Do It' poster (also referred to as 'Rosie the Riveter', confusing it with Norman Rockwell's Rosie). There is a wonderful story behind it illustrating the evolution of American socrealism (read here), but in this post I just want to point out the conciseness of Russian phrase structure.

In English it wouldn't look or sound right if you just put 'Can!' even though Buzz Lightyear does use it after a flight skills demo in response to Woody's 'Toys can't fly!' challenge.

But in Russian not only the auxiliary 'to be' is dropped in the present tense, but it is also grammatically correct, stylistically neutral (usually) and very common in speech if the first person pronoun is dropped. The sentence appears to be without a subject which is only implied. The object 'it' is also omitted in sentences like this. The three-word English sentence 'it is light' in Russian is just 'светло". (A little note: what is this 'It' in 'It's light'? is it some sort of Higher Power or Superior Being running things for us? Has anyone investigated it?)

These features of Russian sentence structure pose certain difficulties for students and translators, but once mastered – not that difficult! – they provide obvious advantages in speech and, as seen here, in design.

Note: We Can Do It poster is not copyrighted and is in free domain. Which partly explains its popularity compared for instance to Rockwell's Rosie, which is copyrighted. This design is ©A.Anichkin.

Maugham on Tolstoy: what to do with unwanted chapters

War and Peace ( War and Peace (Vintage Classics)) is, probably, a Russian classic with the highest world-wide reference ratio. Not just because it is a great read, but also because it has become a metaphor for 'difficult' literature - too long, too serious, too many characters, too many historical or philosophical digressions.

Languagehat, the brilliant American blogger, reports that he has just finished reading War and Peace (over a year since he'd started) - and grumbles that philosophical chapters are amateurish, unnecessary and spoil the novel.

Many desperate readers agree. Here is what Andy K from Australia writes in an Amazon.com review of War and Peace:

I have tried War and Peace several times since I was a teenager, and each time I have enjoyed it UNTIL I get to the same bit. This is the bit where Tolstoy decides it's time to give us all a little lecture (say, a mere hundred and fifty pages) on his theory of history. I think this is in an inexcusable flaw in a story, book, or epic. Worst of all, it makes poor Leo Nicholayevich into precisely the pretentious git which he didn't want to be remembered as. Because of the pretentious and boring quality of the classic War and Peace, I quit reading this book. But I felt like I had failed when I was a teenager. Now I am a mature adult and I know better: Tolstoy was being a pretentious bore.


Well, ask Tolstoy's good friend and follower Gandhi, he would agree - Tolstoy is some work. But that work helped Gandhi change himself - and the world.

A lot of writers can't help but moralize. Few are ready to admit that it may be boring for the reader. In fact, I only know one, W.Somerset Maugham, a younger contemporary of Tolstoy, who honestly advised his readers to skip the next chapter, where he was going to philosophise, if they wanted just the story. Here is what he writes in the first paragraph of Part VI of The Razor's Edge:

I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book.

I suspect Maugham envied Chekhov for his ability to construct a gripping story without a real plot - and diguised it as a critique of Russian 'verbosity' in general. Even though compactness is one of the most striking features of Chekhov's style. Maugham digresses into a whole chapter of criticising Chekhov for his lack of narrative in 'Ashenden', supposedly a spy thriller based on Maugham's own experience on Her (sorry - His) Majesty's secret service while trying to stop the bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917. In another chapter Maugham implies that the revolution only happened because the people who could have stopped it spent too much time talking.

I think Tolstoy also envied Chekhov for the same reason - and also criticised him. But Tolstoy hated his own 'verbosity' and worked hard to make his language compact. I agree, we Russians are famous for our 'verbosity', but, in fact, we generally hate it too. We have a huge thesaurus of hate phrases for it, including many expletives.

And Maugham is one of our favourite English writers.


A note: if you think it's not fair to pay for a book which contains hundreds of pages you know you won't read, get ECCO Press 2007 version of War and Peace translated by Andrew Bromfield (War and Peace: Original Version) - it's Tolstoy's own abridged 'hollywood' version of the epic novel, half the size and with a different, happy ending. Read comments on Amazon.com here.

Please read a small review
of the two new (2007) translations
of War and Peace on the Normandy Review of Books.