The Onegin Live site offers a free download of Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' read by Stephen Fry. But there is also a brief historical bibliography of over forty translations of the great Russian novel in verse.
Much of it would be known to those who have an interest in Pushkin, but still I found this snippet thoroughly enjoyable. Nabokov and Edmund Wilson falling out over whose translation is best:
In 1963, Walter Arndt published a verse translation of Eugene Onegin preserving the rhyme schemes and metrical structure of Pushkin’s text. Vladimir Nabokov reviewed Arndt’s work in an essay entitled “On Translating Pushkin Pounding the Clavichord” that was published in The New York Review of Books. Nabokov furiously criticised Arndt’s translation; according to him, the attempt to preserve the original iambic tetrameter resulted in Arndt’s defacing Pushkin’s spirit and the literal meaning of the novel. Arndt replied with a letter “Goading the pony” that was followed by an article “The strange case of Pushkin and Nabokov” by Edmund Wilson, a critic who rose to Arndt’s defence and thus ruptured his close friendship with Nabokov.
In this clip Nabokov reads Pushkin's testament 'Exegi Monumentum' (1836) -
The Tapestry is a new poem by John Lott, which didn't quite make it into his latest poetry volume 'Winter Beach' (2017, WebVivant Press). Perhaps, a 'Summer Beach' poetry is in the works and 'The Tapestry' will fit well in there. John's poems are written to be heard as well as read. In fact, he records and releases them on discs.
From all points of the compass, They come to the Plaza, The hub and the heart of the city. Here they meet, mix and mingle, In a kaleidoscope of colour. Pacing medieval, marble flagstones Bearing the ghostly footprints of long-forgotten fashions. They are embraced by structures hallowed by history And architecture mellowed by time. Through the centuries, they have come To see, to sell, to learn and to love And the square has become a microcosm of the known universe. Where the complexities of cultures, colours and creeds Combine as one. In their wake, each draws a thread. A thread coloured by their origin, their ethnicity Their aspirations, needs and fears And as their paths cross, so do their threads, Creating a warp and a weft which weaves the tapestry That we call Humanity. 'The Winter Beach' by John Lott is available on major book selling sites and on the publisher's site WebVivant Press. John Lott's profile is also on WebVivant Press website.
Evgeny Yevtushenko, a leading Russian poet of the 60-s generation, died on 1 April 2017, aged 84.
He was a prominent voice of his generation and a controversial, much spoken of figure of later years. Much is being said about his personality and political face. Tetradki want to let you simply listen to him reciting his own poetry.
Here he is, in the 1965 film "I am Twenty" by Marlen Khutsiev (Wikipedia about the film). It is a long semi-documentary sequence of a poetry reading in the Moscow Polytechnic Museum lecture hall, a popular venue for intelligentsia gatherings at the time. (Yevtushenko is the first reader in the episode)
Fyodor Tolstoy the American. Photo of C19 o/c portrait by Shakko.
Tolstoy based Dolokhov, a curious secondary character in 'War and Peace", on several real-life men. One of them was Fyodor Tolstoy the American (Толстой-Американец), Leo Tolstoy's cousin-uncle. As a young boy Tolstoy the future writer knew him personally and was very impressed by his personality and the legends that surrounded him.
Fyodor Tolstoy, among other things, killed eleven people at duels and was demoted to the ranks several times but got restored after feats of heroism in Russia's many wars of the time, including the main battle with Napoleon in 1812, the Battle of Borodino. He got the nickname 'Amerikanets' after taking part in a round-the-world sea expedition.
There is a portrait of Fyodor Tolstoy as a young man in Leo Tolstoy's Moscow house, now a museum.
The new TV adaptation of 'War and Peace,' currently running on BBC 1 and cable channels around the world, plays up the characters of Dolokhov and Sonia to the point of overshadowing the main characters, Pierre, Andrei and Natasha.
At first glance, it may seem a fault with the script author Andrew Davies and director Tim Harper. However, a more careful look at the character of Fyodor Dolokhov makes it clear that 'reading up' Dolokhov is a valid choice that may explain a lot in Leo Tolstoy's novel and the reappraise the comparative weight of characters in the book.
In a sense, Dolokhov is as much a Leo Tolstoy as Pierre, into whom the writer and thinker put most of himself, as conventional interpretation tells us. A writer, especially a great one, cannot help splitting his soul and putting bits of it into the characters he creates. Dolokhov is a kind of horcrux of Tolstoy himself. He reflects the character of Tolstoy the man as much as the floppy humanist Pierre. The cold fury, the anger against conventions, the scornful nationalism, the desire to be accepted rivalling only the desire to humiliate the accepting, the grand society, — those are the traits that were driving Leo Tolstoy too, in life and in writing.
The writer, before his marriage, was not alien to excessive drinking, partying with the gypsies and losing and winning, though mostly losing, in card games.
Tolstoy's appearance and peculiar mannerisms bear striking resemblance with that of Dolokhov. Here is how WS Maugham describes Tolstoy:
"He was irritable, brutally contradictory and arrogantly indifferent to other people's feelings. Turgenev has said that he never met anything more disconcerting than Tolstoy's inquisitorial look, which, accompanied by a few biting words, could goad a man to fury."
Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel and friends had difficulty in preventing him from actually fighting while reconciliation took more than ten years. Tolstoy's stare, that unnerved Turgenev so much, is the same as Dolokhov's: "Dolokhov looked at Pierre with clear, mirthful, cruel eyes, and that smile of his which seemed to say, 'Ah! This is what I like!'" (from Garnett's translation.) This is from the scene at the English Club in Moscow when Pierre challenges Dolokhov to a duel.
That same straight, cruel inquisitional look follows Dolokhov in all his appearances in the novel, all the way to the last episode with him, when he orders that no French prisoners should be kept alive. Before that final scene with Dolokhov, he and Denisov, both commanders of small partisan troops that raided Napoleon's army behind the lines, have a fierce argument about the treatment of the prisoners. It appears that Dolokhov, unlike Denisov, was systematically slaughtering them. Denisov is repulsed by that.
But where does Tolstoy, the great humanist, stand in that argument? Curiously, when Pierre meets Prince Andrew on the eve of the Battle of Borodino and listens to his friend's famous monologue on the 'latent patriotism' of the Russians, Prince Andrew says exactly what later Dolokhov says to Denisov, even with greater clarity and ferocity: "One thing I would do if I had the power," he began again, "I would not take prisoners. Why take prisoners? It's chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals. And so thinks Timokhin and the whole army. They should be executed!" And later, in the same monologue: "Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed!" Pierre looks at Andrew, both frightened and compassionate, but agrees with everything he said.
Horcruxes are from JK Rowling's Harry Potter. They are magical objects where the dark wizard hides parts of his split soul. In Somerset Maugham's essay on Tolstoy in the book 'Great Novelists and Their Novels' (1954) there is a shrewd observation:
"There is a point in the writer's psychology that I have never seen mentioned, though it must be obvious to anyone who has studied the lives of authors. Every creative writer's work is, to some extent at least, a sublimation of instincts, desires, daydreams, call them what you like, which for one cause or another he has repressed, and by giving them literary expression he is freed of the compulsion to give them the further release of action. But it is not a complete satisfaction. He is left with a feeling of inadequacy. That is the ground of the man of letters' glorification of the man of action and the unwilling, envious admiration with which he regards him."
Applying this to Dolokhov, it becomes apparent that the character is part of Tolstoy, the part that the writer couldn't admit in himself or couldn't allow in himself, and so decided to give it to his literary creation.
And yes, JK Rowling took her Antonin Dolohov, a Death Eater, one of the cruellest wizards, from Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.'
Note: Wikipedia has an article on Maugham's book, referring to it as 'Ten Novels and Their Authors' of 1954. My American paper edition of the book is titled 'Great Novelists and Their Novels' with copyright dated 1948.
In this video Dolokhov and Pierre duel, from Sergey Bondarchuk's cinema version (1965-67) -
The Borodino Battle, 1972 series, Prince Andrei's monologue with 'No quarter!' at 24 min. into the video -
I've always had a soft spot for
people with a squint, especially in women. 'What else did she want,
that witch with a very slight squint in one eye?' (from Bulgakov's novel
The Master and Margarita, tr. by Michael Glenny).
But Chekhov! The great playwright and humourist, the master of short
story who is always portrayed, in paintings and photographs, hiding behind his trademark pince-nez on!
In this portrait dated 1903 (watercolour, paper), Valentin Serov, a great portraitist (he is famous for
the portrait of Shaliapin among others), removes the pince-nez and tucks
it inside Chekhov's waistcoat at the bottom of the picture, as though
saying, there, he is not a sad narrator of decline, doom and gloom,
look, he is a bubbly, fun loving man.
Serov met Chekhov in 1900 and immediately started asking him to sit for a portrait. He even tried to ambush him at home, sending a visiting card saying that he will drop by with some paper and pencils. It didn't happen and Chekhov agreed to sit only months later.
Although the portrait is usually dated as of 1903 Chekhov actually sat for Serov in the Spring of 1901. After a few sittings the writer left for Crimea and never had a chance to pose for the portrait again. Serov considered the work unfinished, a study, but apparently had to give up of ever catching Chekhov again. "Chekhov is elusive," admitted Serov.
In 1904 the writer died.
(source: article by T.Yu.Novoselova, teaching scholar, Chekhov Central Public City Library, Taganrog, Russia)
Dolokhov (Tom Burke) banging Helene (Tuppence Middleton) on a dining table is definitely the high point
of Episode 2 in the new BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's novel.
NB: wine in glasses and carafe in the foreground wasn't moving! How does one achieve that, I don't know.
Pierre is wonderful and Andrei still disappointing.
Picture: Colonel Alexander Figner (1887-1813) on whom Tolstoy is said to have based the character of Dolokhov. (wikipedia)
According to BBC, the adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel averaged 6.3 million viewers, peaking at 6.7 million. It was up against ITV's Endeavour and spy drama Deutschland 83 on
Channel 4, which averaged 4.4 million and 1.2 million viewers
respectively.
Daniil Kharms, the genius of absurdism, was born 110 years ago, on 30 December 1905.
His was a hard path to the hearts of readers. He was first arrested in 1931 as part of the 'anit-Soviet children's writers' case but escaped with internal exile. For the second time he was denounced by an NKVD spy within his own literary circle and arrested in 1941, soon after the beginning of Hitler's invasion of Russia.
Kharms died in prison in 1942, most likely of starvation, during the hardest winter of the siege of Leningrad. (read this Wikipedia article.)
Until rediscovery in 1970s he was mostly known for his works for children. Luckily, much of his literary work for adults survived thanks to his family and friends and began trickling out after the first English compilation by George Gibian and then under Gorbachev's glasnost.
I bought Gibian's book, Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd, (link to Amazon, different cover) at a sale in the 80s. His Blue Notebook #10 ("Голубая тетрадь №10") still gives me chills. (From here, with a link to a Kharms page with a searchable collection of his works.)
Blue Notebook #10
There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. Neither did he have any hair, so he was called red-haired theoretically.
He couldn't speak, since he didn't have a mouth. Neither did he have a nose.
He didn't even have any arms or legs. He had no stomach and he had no back and he had no spine and he had no innards whatsoever. He had nothing at all! Therefore there's no knowing whom we are even talking about.
In fact it's better that we don't say any more about him.
Watch two readings in Flemish (Dutch) and in English on Moving Poemshere and here. A Russian version with a video is on the Russian side of Tetradki here.
Hay harvest. (scrrenshot from 'Anna Karenina', 1967)
A few months ago I compared here the three translations of a passage from Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' to show the various devices used by different translators, and a few amusing errors they made in interpreting the text written over a hundred years ago (1877).
The three translations quoted were by Constance Garnett, Richard Peaver/Larissa Volokhonsky and Nathan Haskell Dole. I was rearranging books on my Russian bookshelf and had a look at another version, the 1918 translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude. The couple were Tolstoy's contemporaries and friends. There are books by Aylmer Maude in Tolstoy's library at Yasnaya Polyana. At least there were when I last visited.
This is the passage from Tolstoy with a few words highlighted for comparison:
Тит освободил место, и Левин пошел за ним. Трава была низкая, придорожная, и Левин, давно не косивший и смущенный обращенными на себя взглядами, в первые минуты косил дурно, хотя и махал сильно. Сзади его послышались голоса:— Насажена неладно, рукоятка высока, вишь, ему сгибаться как, —сказал один.— Пяткой больше налягай, — сказал другой.—
Ничего, ладно, настрыкается, — продолжал старик. — Вишь, пошел... Широк
ряд берешь, умаешься... Хозяин, нельзя, для себя старается! А вишь, подрядье-то! За это нашего брата по горбу, бывало.
And here is the corresponding passage by the Maudes (from the Oxford University Press / Humphrey Milford edition, the World's Classics, 1926):
Titus made room for Levin, and Levin followed him. By the roadside the grass was short and tough, and Levin, who had not done any mowing for a long time and was confused by so many eyes upon him, mowed badly for the first ten minutes, though he swung his scythe with much vigour. He heard voices behind him:
'It's not properly adjusted, the grip is not right. See how he has to stoop!' said one.
'Hold the heel lower,' said another.
'Never mind! It's all right: he'll get into it,' said the old man. 'There he goes...'
'You are taking too wide a swath, you'll get knocked up.' ... 'He's the master, he must work; he's working for himself!'... 'But look how uneven! ... 'That's what the likes of us used to get a thump on the back for.'
There is more to think about than it seems when just reading the passage. What is this освободил место/made room, is it that Tit/Titus had mown a space out for Levin to follow him, or did he just move to the side within a row of harvesters who were about to move through the field in formation? What exactly is смущенный — confused, embarassed, unsettled or disconcerted (Garnett)? Instead of 'had not done any mowing for a long time', Peaver/Volokhonsky write 'had done no mowing for a long time.' Which is a better way of conveying Tolstoy? Or there is no difference? Strunk and White in their 'Elements of Style' recommend putting statements in positive form (Part II, 15). Does it apply here?
The bolded words show, I think, that in Maudes' approach there is a tendency to explain Tolstoy's detail while slightly deviating from the text itself. Tolstoy doesn't say the grass was tough, it is just short by the roadside. Adding 'tough' adds to why it was difficult to cut. Tolstoy's muzhik just says 'Hey, look at the swath!' But what about it? And Maudes add: 'Look how uneven!'
They avoid explaining why it makes it awkward to mow when the grip on the scythe is set too high for Levin. They just say 'it's not right.' Evasive, but the reader understands what is going on.
Anichkin, who had not done any mowing for a long while, and was disconcerted by the eyes fastened upon him, cut badly for the first moments...
It then came back to me, both the technique and the enjoyment. A friend came to help with clearing the garden, he had a scythe, and I had a good go. My uncle, a forester in a small village near Pskov, taught me to mow with a scythe and explained how it worked.
It also made me ‘feel Levin’, and I looked up the famous mowing scene (hay harvesting) in Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’, when Levin joins in with the muzhiks. (Watch the hay harvest scene in a clip from the Soviet screen version of 'Anna Karenina', 1967 at the end of this post)
This is the passage from Tolstoy:
Тит освободил место, и Левин пошел за ним. Трава была низкая, придорожная, и Левин, давно не косивший и смущенный обращенными на себя взглядами, в первые минуты косил дурно, хотя и махал сильно. Сзади его послышались голоса:— Насажена неладно, рукоятка высока, вишь, ему сгибаться как, —сказал один.— Пяткой больше налягай, — сказал другой.— Ничего, ладно, настрыкается, — продолжал старик. — Вишь, пошел... Широк ряд берешь, умаешься... Хозяин, нельзя, для себя старается! А вишь, подрядье-то! За это нашего брата по горбу, бывало.
Same passage in Constance Garnett’s translation:
Tit made room, and Levin started behind him. The grass was short close to the road, and Levin, who had not done any mowing for a long while, and was disconcerted by the eyes fastened upon him, cut badly for the first moments, though he swung his scythe vigorously. Behind him he heard voices:"It’s not set right; handle’s too high; see how he has to stoop to it," said one."Press more on the heel," said another."Never mind, he’ll get on all right," the old man resumed."He’s made a start... You swing it too wide, you’ll tire yourself out.... The master, sure, does his best for himself! But see the grass missed out! For such work us fellows would catch it!"
Same passage in Richard Pevear / Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation:
Titus cleared his place and Levin followed him. The grass near the road was low, and Levin, who had done no mowing for a long time and was embarassed by the looks directed at him, mowed poorly for the first few minutes, though he swung strongly. Voices were heard behind him: ‘It’s not hafted right, the handle’s too long see how he had to bend,’ one voice said.‘Bear down on the heel,’ said another.‘Never mind, he’ll get himself set right,’ the old man went on. ‘See, there he goes... The swath’s too wide, you’ll get tired... He’s the owner, never fear, he’s doing his best! And look at the hired men! Our kind would get it in the neck for that.’
Same passage translated by Nathan Haskell Dole:
Sef opened the way, and Levin followed in his track. The grass was short and tough; and Levin, who had not mowed in a long time, and was confused by the watchful eyes of the men, at first made very bad work of it, though he swung the scythe energetically. Voices were heard behind him: "He does not hold his scythe right: the sned is too high. See how he stoops like," said one. "Bears his hand on too much," said another. "No matter, it goes pretty well," said the head man. "Look, he goes at a great rate ! Cuts a wide swath! .... He'll get played out. The master is trying it for himself as hard as he can, but look at his row! For such work my brother was beaten once."
(upd: see the Maudes' version a the end of this post, 9 Dec 2015)
Garnett and Dole are Tolstoy’s younger contemporaries, and perhaps they could visualise the scythe and may have seen mowers at work with it. Pevear/Volokhonsky’s translation was published in 2000, when few, except a number of country dwelling aficionados would have good acquaintance with the scythe, especially with the old Russian type of the scythe. It has a long, straight, not curved, wooden shaft, a relatively narrow but long blade, longer than the modern Western garden scythe, and a V-shaped wooden handle, that grips the shaft somewhere around the middle. It can be clearly seen in this modern photo (2006, Nizhny Novgorod region on the Volga).
The V-shaped grip was tightened by a piece of rope, or leather, or sometimes with strips of fresh soft bark, as my uncle did. The trick was to adjust the handle on the shaft, higher or lower, in such a way that you could hold your back practically straight while making the right-left, left-right swaying movements, keeping the ‘heel’ (the place where the blade is attached to the shaft) as low to the ground as possible and stepping forward step by step. The grass would fall neatly in a row to your left. A team of mowers would move across the field in a staggered formation, leaving the rows across the whole harvested area. Now, these rows are called подрядье - podrYAdye. (Подрядье: ср. Край скошенной полосы, ряда. Толковый словарь Ефремовой. Т. Ф. Ефремова. 2000.), i.e a swath, edge of the line of mowed grass or crop. A swath is also, of course, the width of grass that the mower catches in one swing, which in Russian in this sense is ряд, same as row. The muzhiks are criticising the messiness, untidiness of the swaths that Levin is leaving behind him.
As you see, the two Tolstoy contemporaries caught his meaning regarding the set-up of the scythe and the mowing techniques, while the modern duo of Pevear/Volokhonsky completely missed both. From their translation it appears that they took the scythe to be hafted incorrectly and its shaft too long, while in fact it was just the V-shaped grip for the right hand (рукоятка), that apparently wasn’t adjusted to suit Levin’s height. It also shows in the incorrectly ‘corrected’ word that Tolstoy uses: рукоятка высока — the handle’s too long, instead of the correct translation in two other versions: handle’s too high (Garnett) and the sned is too high (Dole), though the latter uses a rarer word (Collins’ definition here).
Dole stumbles on придорожная grass, omitting this detail and adding ‘tough’ unnecessarily, while Garnett understands Tolstoy’s meaning — near the road. And in Dole’s, there is a really funny misunderstanding of the phrase ‘наш брат’ at the end of the passage. The expression is quite common and simply means ‘our lot’ (compare ‘all men are brothers’), not our or my brother.
Pevear/Volokhonsky boldly translate подрядье (swath) as ‘hired men.’ They were probably thrown off by the previous sentence ‘He’s the owner, never fear, he’s doing his best!’ (for himself as opposed to the hired mowers). Подряд (podryad) means contract, so the translators must have read подрядье as a collective noun for ‘men on contract’ without suspecting that there may be another meaning.
Out of the three, based on this passage, the winner is Garnett. Apart from being correct, to my, admittedly non-native ear, her translation flows more naturally, has a rhythm resembling Tolstoy’s. But that, of course, is a matter or taste.
Add. 9 Dec. 2015 (read a short analysis on Tetradki here):
And here is the corresponding passage by Louise and Aylmer Maude (from the Oxford
University Press / Humphrey Milford edition, the World's Classics,
1926):
Titus made room for Levin, and Levin followed him. By the roadside the grass was short and tough,
and Levin, who had not done any mowing for a long time and was confused
by so many eyes upon him, mowed badly for the first ten minutes, though
he swung his scythe with much vigour. He heard voices behind him:
'It's not properly adjusted, the grip is not right. See how he has to stoop!' said one.
'Hold the heel lower,' said another.
'Never mind! It's all right: he'll get into it,' said the old man. 'There he goes...'
'You are taking too wide a swath, you'll get knocked up.' ... 'He's the
master, he must work; he's working for himself!'... 'But look how uneven! ... 'That's what the likes of us used to get a thump on the back for.' Hay harvest scene from 'Anna Karenina', 1967 —
In case you missed it, 'Eugene Onegin', the great Russian novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin, is now available in audio book format. Stephen Fry (the voice of Harry Potter) reads it in James Falen's translation (1995). To download the full audio book go to Fry Reads Onegin. Here is sonnet (stanza) 6 from Chapter 1 of 'Eugene Onegin': 6.
Cardinal Points Journal is holding their Arseny Tarkovsky translations awards ceremony and readings in New York this Saturday (Poets House, at 4 pm.). Cardinal Points has had Russian poetry translation contests for several years now, each devoted to one particular poet. Last year's contest was dedicated to Arseny Tarkovsky, father of the film director Andrey. (wikipedia about Arseny and a portrait gallery of him.)
Winning translations will appear on the Cardinal Points website and in the 5th volume of the almanac scheduled to come out in a few months.
Cardinal Points website is here and direct link to Tarkovsky contest page is here, for additional information mail Compass (compass at StoSvet dot net) or go to their facebook page.
This translation by Laurence Bogoslaw (USA) won the first prize.
In autumn’s final weeks, on the decline
Of bitter life,
Filled to the brim with wistfulness, I walked
Into a leafless, nameless wood.
It was engulfed from edge to edge in milk-
White fog like frosted glass. Its hoary branches
Dripped tears distilled like those
That only trees weep on the eve
Of winter that drains everything of color.
And then a miracle occurred: at sunset
Out of a raincloud peeked a gleam of blue,
A ray of light broke through, as bright as June,
A weightless spear of birdsong cast
From future days back to my past.
And now the trees stood weeping on the eve
Of noble works and festive offerings
Of cheerful whirlwinds luffing in the azure;
And bluebirds started dancing in a ring
Like hands upon a keyboard, rising measures
From earth to the highest notes the air can sing.
In the first video, Arseny Tarkovsky reads First Encounters ("Первые свидания") in Andrey Tarkovsky's The Mirror. It is this poem that ends with the haunting lines: 'When fate was stalking us like madman, with razor blade in hand.' In the second video Arseny Tarkovsky reads 'Blurring Sight' ("Меркнет зрение"):
This news came a while ago. I have checked the Tolstoy.ru website today and seems to be an impressive piece of work with 'official' full texts of his huge body of work with commentary. It appears to be largely based on the 90 volume Anniversary edition of Tolstoy's collected works that came out in the Soviet Union around 1928, the 100th anniversary of the writer's birth. The site also features news on conferences and seminars related to Tolstoy and his legacy.
“We wanted to come up with an official website that will contain academically justified information,” said Fyokla Tolstaya, the writer’s great-great-granddaughter, who works at Moscow’s Tolstoy museum. “Nowadays, it’s very important [to know] who posts information online.” [...] All of his novels, short stories, fairy tales, essays and personal letters will be available online for free and be downloadable in PDF, FB2 and EPUB formats, recognized by most e-book readers and computers, she said. Tolstoy’s works were part of the obligatory high-school curriculum in the Soviet Union and Russia. Generations of Russian students have had to read the more than 800-page “War and Peace” – with boys preferring the war and girls the peace, according to a popular saying.
Elena Yakovich, a well-known Rusian tv-journalist, has just released a documentary on the story of the arrest by the KGB, safe-keeping, publishing and the final return to world-wide reading public of Vassily Grossman's great novel 'Life and Fate.'
It was broadcast on the Russian tv-channel Kultura (Culture). I have written several times about 'Life and Fate' and its story. Here, in the film, it is unbelievably touching to put a face to many of the characters of this drama. It includes daughters and sons of Grossman and his friends, the writer Vladimir Voinovich, who helped to smuggle the manuscript to the West, and finally the KGB/FSB archives chief handing over boxes and boxes of the original work to literary experts.
The film is in Russian but those who followed the story will recognise the characters.
English Rules, first published in Russian in 2006, is a great romp
through the misadventures of a hapless young Russian living with his
wife and in-laws in Folkstone, England, where he is desperately trying to fathom
the tacit dos and don'ts of English etiquette when his life is turned
upside down by a series of catastrophic events.
The opening scene
sets the note of the absurd which runs through the book, a genre which
has powerful antecedents in soviet literature as does the portrayal of
the "little man" manipulated by Kafka-esque conspiracies.
Ostalski's
observations on his adopted country – a Russian journalist, the author
moved to Britain in the early 90s – are spot on but made with great
warmth. On a more serious level, this is also a novel about the
emigre/immigrant experience of trying to decipher and fit into a society
whose rules appear both impenetrable and unpredictable and as such it
also raises questions about identity itself.
But this is above all a skilfully written and very funny novel.
- by Miranda Ingram, former Daily Mail Moscow Correspondent.
I never stop being fascinated by the inexhaustible appetite of Western writers — and readers — for Russia's Northern capital. When asking my friends why there is so much interest in Leningrad/St.Petersburg and not, say, Moscow, I get all sorts of answers. One friend, a writer and a big fan of Russian literature, said, ‘Obviously, it’s first of all a window on Russia that is more or less comprehensible. There is fatalism but there is also a sense of infinity. Like nowhere else.’
Vanora Bennett’s new novel Midnight in St Petersburg (link to Amazon) is a story of a young Jewish Russian girl Inna Feldman whose relatives flee to Palestine and abandon her in the South of Russia, within the Pale of Settlement. It is 1911, the Russian tsardom feels it has re-established its authority over the Empire after the turmoil and hope of the first revolution of 1905-1907. And it smells of pogrom everywhere.
Inna steals a passport to go to Petersburg and find distant relatives to start a new life. On the train a roaming monk with piercing blue eyes stops anti-Semitic banter by berating the passengers for being un-Christian hate mongers. The monk asks a gypsy woman in the carriage to read his and Inna’s hands. They both have lifelines that peter out too quickly.
The monk, who turns out to be Rasputin, befriends Inna and, in Petersburg, escorts her to her relatives. He wanders off to rise to become the tsar’s family ‘holy man’, and die in a brutal assasination. Inna finds a new life with the help of the family of violin makers and an Englishman, Horace Wallick, who works for Fabergé painting miniatures for rich customers. But not before cutting the lifeline on her hands in a desperate attempt to change her fate.
From here Bennett takes us on a whirlwind tour of Russia in 1911, jumping then to 1916-1917 with the murder of Rasputin, the fall of the Romanovs and the revolution, and then jumping again to 1918-1919 with aristocracy and intelligentsia fleeing the bolshevik regime at the height of the civil war.
It’s not just Rasputin we meet but his assassin Felix Yusupov; Karl Fabergé; the great poet Anna Akhmatova, and, in fleeting episodes, Bryusov, Mayakovsky, Shaliapin; the top aristocrats and the top revolutionaries, including a glimpse of Lenin and the founder of Cheka Dzerzhinsky. The gallery includes Maxim, the thinly disguised writer Gorky, who helps the desperate intellectuals to survive or escape. I started rolling my eyes when I realised the span of ‘things Russian’ in the book, but as I read along I warmed up to Bennett’s knack for making it all credible. It’s not a matryoshka nesting doll with laquered curiosities jumping one out of another. Historic and cultural details are very well-researched and as reliable as an academic work. Then the bits all fall into place to form a convincing mosaic of Russian life at the time.
The main story line of Inna’s tug of love between the pensive selfless Horace Wallick and the passionate Yasha Kagan, I thought, is captivating in that it is free from moralising, it is just, well, as love is: you never know where it will take you without you even knowing.
There is a wonderful ‘sex scene’ between Inna and Yasha, when they play their violins each in their own rooms separated by a thin partition. (see excerpt below) Even if you don’t know much about violins, violin making or music, you’d love Bennett’s guiding the reader from a chunk of wood to a semi-finished shape, to a varnished piece, and then to the first sound of a new-born instrument. And, the wonder of wonders, the Stradivarius.
In a hilarious scene, Prince Felix Yusupov, the richest man in pre-revolutionary Russia, asks Horace Wallick to find someone to restore his broken Stradivarius. Yusupov admits nonchalantly that, when boys, he and his brother got bored with violin lessons and used their instruments for fencing instead. Now, that the bolsheviks are strengthening their grip on Russia, he needs to take all the valuables he can and run. Here the story twists and turns in a dramatic way, with the priceless Stradivarius playing a crucial part.
One obstacle when writing about foreign countries is how to deal with strange foreign words. Vanora Bennet lived in Russia for a long time and discovered a charming way of translating Russian names and phrases into English without explaining too much, and no footnotes. The Lemans, the violin makers’ family, for example, are busy preparing their favourite dish, ‘darling doves’ — cabbage leaf parcels with mincemeat inside, similar to dolma. But why darling doves? Because it’s the literal translation of the Russian word for the dish — ‘golubtsy’. I thought it’s brilliant. Readers may want to find out more about the doves or they may not, the writer is free not to burden them.
The same technique works with placenames. I didn’t know there was Haymarket or Merchant’s Yard in St.Petersburg. Then I realised they were Sennaya and Gostiny Dvor!
And don’t skip the Afterword, there is a very romantic surprise disclosure there.
Picture: Felix Yusupov in 1903, o/c by Valentin Serov. Yasha and Inna's love competition:
The day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, 22 June, Sunday, can never go out of Russian memory, the feeling of catastrophe, universal suffering, separation, the Armageddon, — and in the end, the Victory.
Konstantin Simonov, the famous Russian poet, novelist and editor, reads the poem 'Wiat for Me' that he wrote in 1941 when so many men went missing, so many families got separated, that desperation was settling in.
'Wait for me, don't believe those who sit down and drink to my memory, I will come back,' millions repeated after him. This recording is from 1977.
Organisers of the poetry translation contest in memory of the Soviet poet Maria Petrovykh have announced that submissions deadline is extended to 15 July 2013. Details of the contests (there is a fee) on the Compass Translation Award 2013 website. Read more about Petrovykh and the contest in this Tetradki article in Russian.
I have only just realised that I may have confused the readers with the title of this earlier post, Dostoyevsky on one page. I didn't mean one paper page, which takes 200-500 words, but one internet page, which takes the whole of Crime and Punishment, all 211,591 words of the novel.
Dostoyevsky, 1872.
To compensate, I'd like to recommend an invaluable Russian resource, Брифли. Краткое содержание книг at Briefly.ru. It is in Russian only but these days you can always use machine translation. Briefly offers condensed summaries of world's classic novels. Crime and Punishment, for example, is summarised in 1500 words. Briefly also gives estimated times you'd need to read the summary and the whole book. In the case of Crime and Punishment, it is 5-10 minutes for the summary and 8-9 hours to read the novel in full.
When I first found Briefly I thought it was a collection of students' cribs, but it is based on a printed book, All the Masterpieces of World Literature in Short Summaries, compiled and edited by V.I. Novikov ("Все шедевры мировой литературы в кратком изложении. Сюжеты и характеры", ред. и сост. В.И.Новиков, М., "Олимп"-АСТ, 1996.)
If you are a student too busy to read great novels in full or want to impress a date with your knowledge of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, or if you are an honest reader and just want to refresh in your memory the plot of a book you've read twenty or thirty years ago, Briefly is for you.
(link to Amazon) is a story of a young Jewish Russian girl Inna Feldman whose relatives flee to Palestine and abandon her in the South of Russia, within the Pale of Settlement. It is 1911, the Russian tsardom feels it has re-established its authority over the Empire after the turmoil and hope of the first revolution of 1905-1907. And it smells of pogrom everywhere. 
