Oct - Dec 2020: Russians Write the Revolution 1881 - 1922
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1SassyLassy
Welcome to the last quarter of 2020: Russians Write the Revolution 1881 - 1922
The Assassination of Alexander II, March 13, 1881
The Assassination of Alexander II, March 13, 1881
2SassyLassy
Despite popular history accounts and even some schoolbook summaries, revolutions do not start with a single spark. Long before the tea was thrown into Boston Harbour, or the French queen suggested diet alternatives, popular resistance among the people was building against the respective established orders. Oppression from above, often ruthless, nationalist aims, war, hunger, poverty, religious dissent, and land distribution and ownership; all are fuel for revolutionary fires.
So it was with the series of early twentieth century Russian revolutions in 1905, February 1917 and October 1917, that transformed Russia from a feudal state into the power broker it was for much of the twentieth century.
Long before the 1905 Revolution, resistance to auotcracy was building. A complete overthrow wasn’t necessarily being sought, but a constitutional monarchy seemed to many to be a reasonable goal at that time. Novels, plays, political writing, newspapers and poetry all played their part; an astonishing feat in a country where literacy was estimated to be only between 30 - 40% of the population; a figure that would dramatically increase during and after the revolutions. As time went on, more and more radical ideas gained popularity and it became obvious that autocracy was not the way forward. However, not everyone was seeking change. Some were doing just fine with things as they were, and they wrote too.
1881 is the date selected to start this literary survey. Alexander II was assassinated on March 13th of that year. Ironically, he was the tsar who had passed the Emancipation Edict in 1861, freeing more than 23 million serfs, albeit keeping them on the same lands. His son Alexander III succeeded him. After punishing the perpetrators of the assassination, he immediately clamped down on dissent, establishing the Okhrana or political police, forerunner of the KGB.
1922 is the end year. That year saw the end of the Civil War and the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on December 30th.
In between these two years, there was an unprecedented amount published.
So it was with the series of early twentieth century Russian revolutions in 1905, February 1917 and October 1917, that transformed Russia from a feudal state into the power broker it was for much of the twentieth century.
Long before the 1905 Revolution, resistance to auotcracy was building. A complete overthrow wasn’t necessarily being sought, but a constitutional monarchy seemed to many to be a reasonable goal at that time. Novels, plays, political writing, newspapers and poetry all played their part; an astonishing feat in a country where literacy was estimated to be only between 30 - 40% of the population; a figure that would dramatically increase during and after the revolutions. As time went on, more and more radical ideas gained popularity and it became obvious that autocracy was not the way forward. However, not everyone was seeking change. Some were doing just fine with things as they were, and they wrote too.
1881 is the date selected to start this literary survey. Alexander II was assassinated on March 13th of that year. Ironically, he was the tsar who had passed the Emancipation Edict in 1861, freeing more than 23 million serfs, albeit keeping them on the same lands. His son Alexander III succeeded him. After punishing the perpetrators of the assassination, he immediately clamped down on dissent, establishing the Okhrana or political police, forerunner of the KGB.
1922 is the end year. That year saw the end of the Civil War and the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on December 30th.
In between these two years, there was an unprecedented amount published.
3SassyLassy
Many of the intelligentsia of late nineteenth century Russia saw themselves as Europeans, and looked westward for inspiration. Many did not have Russian as their first language, beyond that used to communicate with their household staff. However, the material they chose to write about was starting to change. Many authors were already writing in a realist style, telling what they saw, but now they started to focus that technique on Russian topics.
Nationalism was a huge part of this. In the nineteenth century there was a cultural move away from Europe toward pan slavic topics. Dostoevsky and others called themselves pochvenniki, or people rooted in the soil. The Russian peasantry suddenly became interesting to them, and folklore emerged as a theme in art, music and writing.
Russian writers, unlike many western writers, did not restrict themselves to one format. They often wrote in several formats, moving back and forth from one to another: novels, novellas, plays, poetry and short stories. The short story form, although used by writers like Gogol and Turgenev, was being redirected in the early twentieth century away from realism and toward a more experimental form. Some saw it as a break with the long novel tradition of the past, a more modern expression.
Symbolism, mysticism, magical realism, stream of consciousness, all became new material to use for the hoped for new world.
Writing was a dangerous activity. Censorship was a given, but what was censored often changed. Something written in one year without any political problems could become something to put the writer in exile, prison, or worse in another year. Some writing was done and published in exile. Some was smuggled out of Russia and published elsewhere, often making dates and texts somewhat uncertain.
The following is just a small sample of what is currently available in English. For those lucky enough to read in French, German, Polish, Yiddish or Ukranian, not to mention Russian, the field is much more broad.
The dates here are arbitrary. Many writers who are gods in the Russian literary pantheon do not appear in these lists as their writing was earlier or later. For example, Dostoyevsky, although hugely influential, does not appear, dying just a few days before the assassination of the tsar. Similarly the early work of Tolstoy and other authors does not appear, but is easily found. If your inner anarchist’s reading roams outside these dates, please post anyway.
Just a note on translation. The translator is so important s/he can make or break a reader’s response to a particular book. If one translation doesn’t work, but the book seems otherwise worthwhile, look for a different translator.
Nationalism was a huge part of this. In the nineteenth century there was a cultural move away from Europe toward pan slavic topics. Dostoevsky and others called themselves pochvenniki, or people rooted in the soil. The Russian peasantry suddenly became interesting to them, and folklore emerged as a theme in art, music and writing.
Russian writers, unlike many western writers, did not restrict themselves to one format. They often wrote in several formats, moving back and forth from one to another: novels, novellas, plays, poetry and short stories. The short story form, although used by writers like Gogol and Turgenev, was being redirected in the early twentieth century away from realism and toward a more experimental form. Some saw it as a break with the long novel tradition of the past, a more modern expression.
Symbolism, mysticism, magical realism, stream of consciousness, all became new material to use for the hoped for new world.
Writing was a dangerous activity. Censorship was a given, but what was censored often changed. Something written in one year without any political problems could become something to put the writer in exile, prison, or worse in another year. Some writing was done and published in exile. Some was smuggled out of Russia and published elsewhere, often making dates and texts somewhat uncertain.
The following is just a small sample of what is currently available in English. For those lucky enough to read in French, German, Polish, Yiddish or Ukranian, not to mention Russian, the field is much more broad.
The dates here are arbitrary. Many writers who are gods in the Russian literary pantheon do not appear in these lists as their writing was earlier or later. For example, Dostoyevsky, although hugely influential, does not appear, dying just a few days before the assassination of the tsar. Similarly the early work of Tolstoy and other authors does not appear, but is easily found. If your inner anarchist’s reading roams outside these dates, please post anyway.
Just a note on translation. The translator is so important s/he can make or break a reader’s response to a particular book. If one translation doesn’t work, but the book seems otherwise worthwhile, look for a different translator.
4SassyLassy
Prose
By sheer coincidence this first writer resembles some kind of imaginary idea of a Russian writer
Leonid Nicolayevitch Andreyev by Ilya Repin
Leonid Andreyev 1871 - 1919
was considered by many to be the foremost writer in Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
His short stories, novels and plays "explore the world of deprivation and depravity"
The Seven Who were Hanged 1908
The Little Angel and Other Stories - 1916
The Crushed Flower and Other Stories 1916
Satan’s Diary 1919
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev pen name Andrei Bely 1880 - 1934
The Silver Dove 1910
Petersburg 1913 - a novel of Petersburg in 1905 with magical realism overtones
Selected Essays of Andrey Bely ed Steven Cassedy 1985
David Bergelson 1884 - 1952 (executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets)
Arum vokzal (At the Depot)1909 in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas 1986
Opgang 1920 (Departing) - decline of the shtetl
When All is Said and Done 1913 novel of the final years of the Russian Empire
The Stories of David Bergelson 1996
Ivan Bunin first Russian to win Nobel Prize for Literature (1933) 1870- 1953, was a realist in the school of Tolstoy and Chekov, an anti Bolshevik
To the Edge of the World and Other Stories 1897
The Village 1910
Dry Valley 1912
The Gentleman from San Francisco 1916
Anton Chekhov 1860 -1904
short stories (over 500)
Motley Stories 1886
In the Twilight 1888 (collection)
The Duel1891
Ward Six 1892
Semen Iushkevich / Semjon Juskevics / Semjon Juschkewitch
Leon Drei serialized 1908-19, book 1922 - a novel with a capitalist antihero protagonist
Aleksandr Kuprin 1870-1938 novelist and short story writer
The Duel 1905
Moloch 1896
The Last Debut 1889
The Garnet Bracelet 1911
Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya pen name Teffi 1872 - 1952
satirist, short story writer
stories collected in Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi NYRB classics 2016
Leo Tolstoy - 1828 - 1910
realist fiction writing developed in his later works into a reflection of his pacifist Christian beliefs
The Death of Ivan Ilyich 1886
The Kreutzer Sonata 1889
Resurrection 1899 (illustrated by Boris Pasternak’s father Leonid)
Hadji Murat1912
Yevgeny Zamyatin 1884 - 1937
satirist, dystopian
We 1921
By sheer coincidence this first writer resembles some kind of imaginary idea of a Russian writer
Leonid Nicolayevitch Andreyev by Ilya Repin
Leonid Andreyev 1871 - 1919
was considered by many to be the foremost writer in Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
His short stories, novels and plays "explore the world of deprivation and depravity"
The Seven Who were Hanged 1908
The Little Angel and Other Stories - 1916
The Crushed Flower and Other Stories 1916
Satan’s Diary 1919
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev pen name Andrei Bely 1880 - 1934
The Silver Dove 1910
Petersburg 1913 - a novel of Petersburg in 1905 with magical realism overtones
Selected Essays of Andrey Bely ed Steven Cassedy 1985
David Bergelson 1884 - 1952 (executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets)
Arum vokzal (At the Depot)1909 in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas 1986
Opgang 1920 (Departing) - decline of the shtetl
When All is Said and Done 1913 novel of the final years of the Russian Empire
The Stories of David Bergelson 1996
Ivan Bunin first Russian to win Nobel Prize for Literature (1933) 1870- 1953, was a realist in the school of Tolstoy and Chekov, an anti Bolshevik
To the Edge of the World and Other Stories 1897
The Village 1910
Dry Valley 1912
The Gentleman from San Francisco 1916
Anton Chekhov 1860 -1904
short stories (over 500)
Motley Stories 1886
In the Twilight 1888 (collection)
The Duel1891
Ward Six 1892
Semen Iushkevich / Semjon Juskevics / Semjon Juschkewitch
Leon Drei serialized 1908-19, book 1922 - a novel with a capitalist antihero protagonist
Aleksandr Kuprin 1870-1938 novelist and short story writer
The Duel 1905
Moloch 1896
The Last Debut 1889
The Garnet Bracelet 1911
Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya pen name Teffi 1872 - 1952
satirist, short story writer
stories collected in Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi NYRB classics 2016
Leo Tolstoy - 1828 - 1910
realist fiction writing developed in his later works into a reflection of his pacifist Christian beliefs
The Death of Ivan Ilyich 1886
The Kreutzer Sonata 1889
Resurrection 1899 (illustrated by Boris Pasternak’s father Leonid)
Hadji Murat1912
Yevgeny Zamyatin 1884 - 1937
satirist, dystopian
We 1921
5SassyLassy
Poetry
Anna Akhmatova by Nathan Altman 1915
Russia may seem to be a nation of poets. By chance, the time frame of this quarter, the late 19th C to the 1920s is considered the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian poetry. It was characterized by a move away from realism to symbolism and imagination, sometimes incorporating mysticism. Poets also started to form groups for different stylistic movements.
Osip Mandelstam said “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed.”
His poem ‘Stalin Epigram’ (1933) had him arrested and interrogated.
Anna Akhmatova1889 - 1966
founder with Mandelstam and Gorodetsky of the Guild of Poets, concrete poets as opposed to the symbolists
Evening 1912
Rosary 1914
White Flock 1917
Anno domini MCMXXI 1921
Wayside Grass 1921
_____
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev pen name Andrei Bely 1880- 1932
symbolist poet
Gold in Azure 1904 - Jason and the Argonauts' quest for the golden fleece
_____
Alexander Blok 1880 - 1921
symbolist poet
Poems of Sophia 1904
The Stranger 1906
The Twelve 1918 12 Red Guards as 12 apostles of revolution
_____
Sasha Chorny 1880 - 1932 wrote for magazine Satirikon
satirist
https://ruverses.com/sasha-chorny/
_____
David Hofstein 1889 - 1952 executed on 'The Night of the Murdered Poets'
Troyer (Tears) 1922 illustrated by Chagall
_____
Osip Mandelstam 1891 - 1938 died in the Gulag
The Stone 1913 collection reissued 1916 with additional poems
The Meaning of Acmeism 1913 published 1919 manifesto for the Poets’ Guild
_____
Vladimir Mayakovsky 1893 - 1930 suicide
A Cloud in Trousers 1915
Backbone Flute 1915
The War and the World 1917
The Man 1918
150 000 000 - 1921
_____
Nikolai Minsky 1885 - 1937
symbolist poet
From the Gloom to the Light 1922
_____
Sonya Yakovlevna Parnokh 1885 -1933, pen name for journalism Andrei Polianin
work suppressed during Soviet period - she had written openly about her lesbian relationships
Poems 1916
Roses of Pieria 1922
_____
Boris Pasternak 1890 - 1960
Nobel Prize 1958
Twin in the Clouds 1914
Over the Barriers 1916
Themes and Variations 1917
My Sister, Life 1917, pub 1922
_____
Marina Tsvetaeva 1892 - 1941 suicide
lyric poet, but also satirist
Evening Album 1910
The Magic Lantern 1912
Mileposts 1921
_____
Maximilian Voloshin 1877 - 1932
banned during Stalin’s time so little known now but popular in his time
poetry linked Civil War Russia to mythical past
_____
Sergei Yesenin 1895 - 1925
hugely popular ‘peasant poet’
The Last Poet of the Village: Selected Poems by Sergei Ysesnin trans Anton Yakovlev 2019
Collected Poems: Volume One ed Will Jonson 2014
Collected Poems: Volume Two ed Will Jonson 2014
_____________
Collection:
The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems NYRB Classics 2006
Anna Akhmatova by Nathan Altman 1915
Russia may seem to be a nation of poets. By chance, the time frame of this quarter, the late 19th C to the 1920s is considered the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian poetry. It was characterized by a move away from realism to symbolism and imagination, sometimes incorporating mysticism. Poets also started to form groups for different stylistic movements.
Osip Mandelstam said “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed.”
His poem ‘Stalin Epigram’ (1933) had him arrested and interrogated.
Anna Akhmatova1889 - 1966
founder with Mandelstam and Gorodetsky of the Guild of Poets, concrete poets as opposed to the symbolists
Evening 1912
Rosary 1914
White Flock 1917
Anno domini MCMXXI 1921
Wayside Grass 1921
_____
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev pen name Andrei Bely 1880- 1932
symbolist poet
Gold in Azure 1904 - Jason and the Argonauts' quest for the golden fleece
_____
Alexander Blok 1880 - 1921
symbolist poet
Poems of Sophia 1904
The Stranger 1906
The Twelve 1918 12 Red Guards as 12 apostles of revolution
_____
Sasha Chorny 1880 - 1932 wrote for magazine Satirikon
satirist
https://ruverses.com/sasha-chorny/
_____
David Hofstein 1889 - 1952 executed on 'The Night of the Murdered Poets'
Troyer (Tears) 1922 illustrated by Chagall
_____
Osip Mandelstam 1891 - 1938 died in the Gulag
The Stone 1913 collection reissued 1916 with additional poems
The Meaning of Acmeism 1913 published 1919 manifesto for the Poets’ Guild
_____
Vladimir Mayakovsky 1893 - 1930 suicide
A Cloud in Trousers 1915
Backbone Flute 1915
The War and the World 1917
The Man 1918
150 000 000 - 1921
_____
Nikolai Minsky 1885 - 1937
symbolist poet
From the Gloom to the Light 1922
_____
Sonya Yakovlevna Parnokh 1885 -1933, pen name for journalism Andrei Polianin
work suppressed during Soviet period - she had written openly about her lesbian relationships
Poems 1916
Roses of Pieria 1922
_____
Boris Pasternak 1890 - 1960
Nobel Prize 1958
Twin in the Clouds 1914
Over the Barriers 1916
Themes and Variations 1917
My Sister, Life 1917, pub 1922
_____
Marina Tsvetaeva 1892 - 1941 suicide
lyric poet, but also satirist
Evening Album 1910
The Magic Lantern 1912
Mileposts 1921
_____
Maximilian Voloshin 1877 - 1932
banned during Stalin’s time so little known now but popular in his time
poetry linked Civil War Russia to mythical past
_____
Sergei Yesenin 1895 - 1925
hugely popular ‘peasant poet’
The Last Poet of the Village: Selected Poems by Sergei Ysesnin trans Anton Yakovlev 2019
Collected Poems: Volume One ed Will Jonson 2014
Collected Poems: Volume Two ed Will Jonson 2014
_____________
Collection:
The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems NYRB Classics 2006
6SassyLassy
Logo of the Stray Dog Café
Theatre
Theatre was exceptionally popular not only in St Petersburg and Moscow, but also in other centres such as Kyiv, Odessa and Minsk. One of the most famous meeting spots for playwrights and poets was the Stray Dog Café in St Petersburg (1911 - 1915).
Alexander Pushkin and Nikola Gogol (The Government Inspector) were realist writers in the early to middle nineteenth century, who influenced play writing in a major way for decades to come. Their plays are still being performed today. Some of the people they influenced:
Anton Chekhov 1860 -1904
prolific playwright and short story writer
Ivanov 1888
The Seagull 1896
Uncle Vanya 1900
Three Sisters 1901
The Cherry Orchard 1904
_____
Maxim Gorky 1868 - 1936 playwright and novelist
one of founders of socialist realism school of literature
all around involvement in culture and politics
_____
Vladimir Mayakovsky 1893 - 1930 suicide
playwright, poet, silent screen actor
-Mystery Bouffe 1921 socialist drama celebrating proletarian triumph of the 'unclean' over the 'clean' bourgeoisie
_____
Konstantin Stanislavski 1863 - 1938
developed the role of director and the school of method acting
7SassyLassy
Religious
Lou Andreas-Salomé 1861 - 1937
Sex and Religion 2 texts, 1917 and 1922, trans 2016 by Maike Oergel and Kristine Jennings
_____
Nikolai Minskii 1885 - 1937
The Religion of the Future 1905
_____
Leo Tolstoy 1828 - 1910
The Kingdom of God is Within You published in Germany in 1894 after being banned in Russia
pacifist plea for non violent resistance
Lou Andreas-Salomé 1861 - 1937
Sex and Religion 2 texts, 1917 and 1922, trans 2016 by Maike Oergel and Kristine Jennings
_____
Nikolai Minskii 1885 - 1937
The Religion of the Future 1905
_____
Leo Tolstoy 1828 - 1910
The Kingdom of God is Within You published in Germany in 1894 after being banned in Russia
pacifist plea for non violent resistance
8SassyLassy
Title page of 1905 edition of Chernyshevsky's What is to Be Done?
Political Writings
It would be hard to look at this period of Russian writing without considering works devoted to politics.
Political thought , no matter what its underlying ideology, is in constant evolution. One of the leading titles influencing the writings below was Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What is to be Done?, written in prison. It advocated the bypass of capitalism on the road to a communal socialism. Chernyshevsky is still read today.
_____
Sergei Kravchinskii, revolutionary name Stepniak 1851 - 1894
assassin of General Mezentsov who was head of the secret police (1878)
Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life 1883
_____
Piotr Kropotkin 1842 - 1921 anarchist prince
In Russian and French Prisons 1887
Memoirs of a Revolutionist 1899
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution 1902
_____
Vladimir Illyich Lenin 1870 - 1924
What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement 1902
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/
_____
Vladimir Solovyov 1853 - 1900
philosopher active in spiritual thinking at end of 19th C Russia
War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ 1915
_____
Leon Trotsky
1905 pub 1908-1909 in Germany, 1922 in Russia
Trotsky’s account of the 1905 revolution and backroom machinations
9SassyLassy
Diaries, Memoirs and Letters
There's nothing like snooping in people's personal accounts, no matter how self-serving, to get an idea of who they really are. Here is just a taste:
Lou Andreas - Salomé 1861 - 1937
Russian born psychoanalyst and essayist
Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters
_____
Ivan Bunin
Cursed Days - diary excerpts of the years 1918 - 1920, first serialized in Paris 1925 -1926
_____
Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya pen name Teffi 1872 - 1952
Memories: from Moscow to the Black Sea her account of her flight from Russia to Istanbul in 1919
_____
Maria Tsvetaeva 1892 - 1941
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917-1922 ed James Gambrell NYRB classics
There's nothing like snooping in people's personal accounts, no matter how self-serving, to get an idea of who they really are. Here is just a taste:
Lou Andreas - Salomé 1861 - 1937
Russian born psychoanalyst and essayist
Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters
_____
Ivan Bunin
Cursed Days - diary excerpts of the years 1918 - 1920, first serialized in Paris 1925 -1926
_____
Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya pen name Teffi 1872 - 1952
Memories: from Moscow to the Black Sea her account of her flight from Russia to Istanbul in 1919
_____
Maria Tsvetaeva 1892 - 1941
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917-1922 ed James Gambrell NYRB classics
10SassyLassy
Just a Little Bit too Early, Some Writings of Influence
Mikhail Bakunin 1814 - 1876
anarchist, socialist, collectivist, opponent of Marx
God and the State 1871 published posthumously in Geneva 1882
_____
Nikolay Chernyshevsky
What is to Be Done? 1863 see above >8 SassyLassy:
_____
Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 - 9 Feb 1881 wrote 15 novels and novellas plus 17 short stories
The House of the Dead 1861 prison experiences in Siberia
Notes from Underground 1864 novel challenging various political ideologies prevalent at the time
_____
Alexander Herzen 1812 - 1870 advocate of agrarian socialism
My Past and Thoughts: Memoirs Vol 1 and 2
Who is to Blame? Herzen 1846 (novel)
Mikhail Bakunin 1814 - 1876
anarchist, socialist, collectivist, opponent of Marx
God and the State 1871 published posthumously in Geneva 1882
_____
Nikolay Chernyshevsky
What is to Be Done? 1863 see above >8 SassyLassy:
_____
Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 - 9 Feb 1881 wrote 15 novels and novellas plus 17 short stories
The House of the Dead 1861 prison experiences in Siberia
Notes from Underground 1864 novel challenging various political ideologies prevalent at the time
_____
Alexander Herzen 1812 - 1870 advocate of agrarian socialism
My Past and Thoughts: Memoirs Vol 1 and 2
Who is to Blame? Herzen 1846 (novel)
11SassyLassy
Just a Little Bit too Late - Some Writers who Lived through it and Wrote on it Later
Mikhail Bulgakov 1891 - 1940
The White Guard 1924 1918-19 Civil War in Kyiv
The Master and Margarita started in 1928, published 1967 (translation is everything with this novel)
_____
Osip Mandelstam 1891 - 1938
The Noise of Time 1925 in The Noise of Time: Selected Prose 2002 trans Clarence Brown
_____
Boris Pasternak 1890 - 1960
Nobel Prize 1958
Doctor Zhivago finished 1956 (okay more than a lttle bit late but parts were written in the 1910s and 1920s)
_____
Mikhail Sholokov - 1905 - 1984
Nobel Prize 1965
And Quiet Flows the Don 1928
The Don Flows Home to the Sea 1940
Mikhail Bulgakov 1891 - 1940
The White Guard 1924 1918-19 Civil War in Kyiv
The Master and Margarita started in 1928, published 1967 (translation is everything with this novel)
_____
Osip Mandelstam 1891 - 1938
The Noise of Time 1925 in The Noise of Time: Selected Prose 2002 trans Clarence Brown
_____
Boris Pasternak 1890 - 1960
Nobel Prize 1958
Doctor Zhivago finished 1956 (okay more than a lttle bit late but parts were written in the 1910s and 1920s)
_____
Mikhail Sholokov - 1905 - 1984
Nobel Prize 1965
And Quiet Flows the Don 1928
The Don Flows Home to the Sea 1940
12SassyLassy
Boris Pasternak by Bill Mauldin, won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning
Caption says "I won the Nobel Prize for Literature: What was your Crime?"
A Miscellany of Further Reading
Whole libraries have been filled with books on this era. Indeed some could be filled with books on just one topic, like Trotsky, or the last Romanovs.
History
Isaiah Berlin
Russian Thinkers 1978, 2nd edition revised by Henry Hardy 2008
Berlin's thoughts on Tolstoy, Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev and others
_____
Orlando Figes
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1881-1924 1996
Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia 2002 interweaves Russian art, history, literature, music and theatre from the 18th century to the Soviet era, including the work of Russians in exile
_____
Richard Pipes a master historian - even though this history is older, it is well worth reading
The Russian Revolution 1990
if that's too long, try A Concise History of the Russian Revolution 1996
There is also an interview with Pipes on this book in Cahiers du Monde Russe, Issue 58/1-2 (the interview is in English) which can be found online but the url will not copy
_____
Douglas Smith
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy 2012 book documenting its systematic destruction
_____
Literature
NYT What Makes the Russian Literature of the 19th Century so Distinctive?
1915 survey by Piotr Kropotkin
Woolf and Russian Literature
small section on Russian Jewish writing from the late 19th to early 20th centuries
_________
Political
New York Times report on the Emancipation Manifesto 1861
Quick Timeline of the Russian Revolution
Education, Literacy and the Russian Revolution
13Dilara86
I am looking forward to this quarter! I've had a look on my library's website, and requested Requiem and Poem Without a Hero (which I now realise was written in the thirties - never mind!) by Anna Akhmatova and a CD of Russian music from the twenties to start with. I might also read Doctor Zhivago again. It wasn't written in the right era, but the action takes place during the revolution. I feel I didn't give a chance the first time round. My mum loved it and pushed it on me, but I was probably too young to appreciate it.
14spiralsheep
>3 SassyLassy: The first five segments up and already a great introduction. Thank you.
"Just a note on translation. The translator is so important s/he can make or break a reader’s response to a particular book. If one translation doesn’t work, but the book seems otherwise worthwhile, look for a different translator."
Very true.
A quick scan of my tbr pile shows only two contenders and neither of them especially relevant but I've been reading Belarus related books anyway so I might try Marc Chagall's autobiographical My Life. The other book is later and would only squeeze in to this topic as a novel relevant to the Soviet agricultural revolution in Asia.
"Just a note on translation. The translator is so important s/he can make or break a reader’s response to a particular book. If one translation doesn’t work, but the book seems otherwise worthwhile, look for a different translator."
Very true.
A quick scan of my tbr pile shows only two contenders and neither of them especially relevant but I've been reading Belarus related books anyway so I might try Marc Chagall's autobiographical My Life. The other book is later and would only squeeze in to this topic as a novel relevant to the Soviet agricultural revolution in Asia.
15Dilara86
>14 spiralsheep: The other book is later and would only squeeze in to this topic as a novel relevant to the Soviet agricultural revolution in Asia.
Not to derail, but what is this book? I'm still interested in titles that fit the 2019 Q3 theme Between Giants: Central Asian Border Regions...
Not to derail, but what is this book? I'm still interested in titles that fit the 2019 Q3 theme Between Giants: Central Asian Border Regions...
16spiralsheep
>15 Dilara86: I'm sure you've already heard of Jamilia and many people here have read it. I've also got the new English translation of Sovietistan on hold at the library. I've also recently found a few poems by two contemporary Turkmen poets in exile, and my list says I've also read some poems/short prose pieces by Uzbeks this year (but I can't remember everything without googling).
Ak Welsapar:
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/tag/turkmenistan/
ETA: https://www.nationalpoetrylibrary.org.uk/online-poetry/poems/night-dropped-stars...
There was another contemporary exiled male poet I can't recall now but I'll have a think.
I haven't read this by Batyr Berdyev:
http://provetheyarealive.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Batyr-Berdyev_Parting_so...
Might be worth googling for Annasoltan Kekilova.
ETA: https://james-womack.com/2020/03/01/kekilovas-scarf/
The image can be enlarged:
https://twitter.com/MPTmagazine/status/1202903874534858752/
Older "classic" "national" poet: Magtymguly Pyragy.
Rauf Parfi:
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/tag/uzbekistan/
Hamid Ismailov:
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2016/04/12/translation-tuesday-a-corpse-by...
Ak Welsapar:
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/tag/turkmenistan/
ETA: https://www.nationalpoetrylibrary.org.uk/online-poetry/poems/night-dropped-stars...
There was another contemporary exiled male poet I can't recall now but I'll have a think.
I haven't read this by Batyr Berdyev:
http://provetheyarealive.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Batyr-Berdyev_Parting_so...
Might be worth googling for Annasoltan Kekilova.
ETA: https://james-womack.com/2020/03/01/kekilovas-scarf/
The image can be enlarged:
https://twitter.com/MPTmagazine/status/1202903874534858752/
Older "classic" "national" poet: Magtymguly Pyragy.
Rauf Parfi:
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/tag/uzbekistan/
Hamid Ismailov:
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2016/04/12/translation-tuesday-a-corpse-by...
17NinieB
Hello all, I am new to this group, and I'm impressed by the extensive reading you have been doing and have planned. I will try to read something this quarter--a couple of options in my TBR are Mikhail Artsybashev's Sanine (1907) and Ivan Turgenev's Virgin Soil (1877), which is a little early on the date but is about middle-class revolutionaries.
18spiralsheep
>17 NinieB: Hi, and welcome!
19spiralsheep
>15 Dilara86: My apologies to SassyLassy for this but I guess it's of interest to several RG members reading this thread so....
Annasoltan Kekilova
The image can be enlarged:
https://twitter.com/MPTmagazine/status/1202903874534858752/
https://james-womack.com/2020/03/01/kekilovas-scarf/
Annasoltan Kekilova
The image can be enlarged:
https://twitter.com/MPTmagazine/status/1202903874534858752/
https://james-womack.com/2020/03/01/kekilovas-scarf/
20ELiz_M
I was thinking nyrb might have several books that fit this theme/era and found this one:
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva
21NinieB
>18 spiralsheep: Thanks!
22SassyLassy
Thanks all for the enthusiastic response. Naturally I'm excited about this quarter.
>13 Dilara86: Timeline doesn't matter with someone like Akhmatova - it's always time to read her and I love the idea of doing it to music.
Parts of Doctor Zhivago were written in this timeline and I imagine Pasternak had other worries, so the same applies to him.
>14 spiralsheep: Chagall, excellent
>16 spiralsheep: >19 spiralsheep: Thanks for those links - no apologies necessary!
>17 NinieB: Welcome
>20 ELiz_M: Had that for my unfinished posts - see >9 SassyLassy: above-, so happy to see someone else thinking of it
Odd that there are two posts numbered 20
>13 Dilara86: Timeline doesn't matter with someone like Akhmatova - it's always time to read her and I love the idea of doing it to music.
Parts of Doctor Zhivago were written in this timeline and I imagine Pasternak had other worries, so the same applies to him.
>14 spiralsheep: Chagall, excellent
>16 spiralsheep: >19 spiralsheep: Thanks for those links - no apologies necessary!
>17 NinieB: Welcome
>20 ELiz_M: Had that for my unfinished posts - see >9 SassyLassy: above-, so happy to see someone else thinking of it
Odd that there are two posts numbered 20
23SassyLassy
We all need a break from time to time, so here are two completely escapist, not entirely historically correct Russian series, dubbed into English.
Trotsky
a 2017 Russian production for the centenary of the Russian Revolution, available on Netflix
won 8 awards from The Association of Film and Television Producers (Russia) so it must have pleased someon
directors Alexander Kott and Konstantin Statsky
starring Konstantin Khabensky, Olga Sutulova and Max Matveev
plot - Trotsky is in exile in Mexico, waiting for his assassin. He tells his life to a journalist in a series of flashbacks for an imaginary political testament.
_____
The Road to Calvary based on a 1921 - 1940 trilogy by Alexei Tolstoy 1883 - 1945 also on Netflix
a 2017 Russian production following a family in St Petersburg during the years 1914 - 1919
stars Yuliya Snigir, Anna Chipovskaya, Leondid Bichevin and Pavel Trubiner
since it ends in 1919 and the book goes later, there is room for a sequel
Trotsky
a 2017 Russian production for the centenary of the Russian Revolution, available on Netflix
won 8 awards from The Association of Film and Television Producers (Russia) so it must have pleased someon
directors Alexander Kott and Konstantin Statsky
starring Konstantin Khabensky, Olga Sutulova and Max Matveev
plot - Trotsky is in exile in Mexico, waiting for his assassin. He tells his life to a journalist in a series of flashbacks for an imaginary political testament.
_____
The Road to Calvary based on a 1921 - 1940 trilogy by Alexei Tolstoy 1883 - 1945 also on Netflix
a 2017 Russian production following a family in St Petersburg during the years 1914 - 1919
stars Yuliya Snigir, Anna Chipovskaya, Leondid Bichevin and Pavel Trubiner
since it ends in 1919 and the book goes later, there is room for a sequel
24thorold
Thanks for setting this up, SassyLassy! Russia's one of my literary blind spots, and I don't have anything Russian on the TBR pile at all at the moment, so there's a lot there I could have a go at. The only vaguely relevant things I've read in the last few years are Red cavalry and Kropotkin's memoirs.
Akhmatova and Lou Andreas-Salomé are writers I've had my eye on for a while, I hope to get to them. (I did study Akhmatova's "Requiem" on one of my long-ago courses, but that's from much later in her career, outside the time-frame.)
I've got Natasha's Dance on order.
Akhmatova and Lou Andreas-Salomé are writers I've had my eye on for a while, I hope to get to them. (I did study Akhmatova's "Requiem" on one of my long-ago courses, but that's from much later in her career, outside the time-frame.)
I've got Natasha's Dance on order.
25LolaWalser
Thanks, Sassy, great job.
As it happens, I'm reading Gorky's The Artamonovs at the moment, topically relevant but completed in 1924 (Tolstoy gave him the idea at the turn of the century).
I'd mention Alexander Herzen's memoirs as another source for understanding the cultural and political landscape from which various reformist-to-revolutionary oppositions to tsarism emerged.
Since there is a rubric "Religion", it seems necessary to mention at least two hugely influential figures (to this day) who straddled, as Russians in particular seem apt to do, mysticism, philosophy and politics: Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev (as I don't know what or how available anything of theirs might be, I'm going with author touchstones).
As an antidote to the conservative accounts above of the October revolution, China Miéville's October.
I'd like to concentrate on early Russian feminists but I'm afraid they probably won't be easy to find in English. I think there's a book of Alexandra Kollontai's stories (in German published in 1922?--Wege der Liebe, Love's paths), and Modern Language Association brought out Sofya Kovalevskaya's Nihilist Girl. Kovalevskaya, by the way, is one of the few famous female mathematicians.
As it happens, I'm reading Gorky's The Artamonovs at the moment, topically relevant but completed in 1924 (Tolstoy gave him the idea at the turn of the century).
I'd mention Alexander Herzen's memoirs as another source for understanding the cultural and political landscape from which various reformist-to-revolutionary oppositions to tsarism emerged.
Since there is a rubric "Religion", it seems necessary to mention at least two hugely influential figures (to this day) who straddled, as Russians in particular seem apt to do, mysticism, philosophy and politics: Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev (as I don't know what or how available anything of theirs might be, I'm going with author touchstones).
As an antidote to the conservative accounts above of the October revolution, China Miéville's October.
I'd like to concentrate on early Russian feminists but I'm afraid they probably won't be easy to find in English. I think there's a book of Alexandra Kollontai's stories (in German published in 1922?--Wege der Liebe, Love's paths), and Modern Language Association brought out Sofya Kovalevskaya's Nihilist Girl. Kovalevskaya, by the way, is one of the few famous female mathematicians.
26SassyLassy
>25 LolaWalser: Happy to see you here and was hoping you would come up with more recommendations!
I had looked at Vladimir Solovyov and then left him out when I should have included him. I suspect there are others in that category lost in my notes.
A Story of Anti-Christ 1900
A Justification of the Good 1918
War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations 1915 (I specifically remember noting this title, who knows where it went!)
_____________
Nikolai Berdyaev thanks for that recommendation
prolific writer in philosophy
an idea of his range:
The New Religious Consciousness and Society 1907
The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia 1910
The Crisis of Art 1918
Dostoevsky: An Interpretation 1921
_____
Thanks for the Miéville recommendation as well. It looks like a needed balance to the histories above, as well as being a more modern work.
Love the idea of chasing down early Russian feminists. Lou Andreas-Salomé looked interesting, but more are needed. Can we count Emma Goldman?
i'm interested in reading Alexander Herzen's memoirs (see also >10 SassyLassy: above). In an earlier life agrarian socialism was required reading.
_____
>24 thorold: Russia's one of my literary blind spots How can that be?!
Seriously though, how did you escape Isaiah Berlin?
Gorky would be one of my blind spots, but I may find it hard to resist a title like The Life of a Useless Man from 1908,, just to see how the protagonist was deemed useless.
I had looked at Vladimir Solovyov and then left him out when I should have included him. I suspect there are others in that category lost in my notes.
A Story of Anti-Christ 1900
A Justification of the Good 1918
War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations 1915 (I specifically remember noting this title, who knows where it went!)
_____________
Nikolai Berdyaev thanks for that recommendation
prolific writer in philosophy
an idea of his range:
The New Religious Consciousness and Society 1907
The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia 1910
The Crisis of Art 1918
Dostoevsky: An Interpretation 1921
_____
Thanks for the Miéville recommendation as well. It looks like a needed balance to the histories above, as well as being a more modern work.
Love the idea of chasing down early Russian feminists. Lou Andreas-Salomé looked interesting, but more are needed. Can we count Emma Goldman?
i'm interested in reading Alexander Herzen's memoirs (see also >10 SassyLassy: above). In an earlier life agrarian socialism was required reading.
_____
>24 thorold: Russia's one of my literary blind spots How can that be?!
Seriously though, how did you escape Isaiah Berlin?
Gorky would be one of my blind spots, but I may find it hard to resist a title like The Life of a Useless Man from 1908,, just to see how the protagonist was deemed useless.
27thorold
>26 SassyLassy: Seriously though, how did you escape Isaiah Berlin?
It seems extraordinary to me too with hindsight; I’m here to tell you that it can be done! He must have been just about the most famous thinker in the university when I was there, but at that point I probably wouldn’t even have recognised him if I’d been standing behind him in the queue at Blackwell’s. I don’t think I’ve ever read more than two or three essays.
It seems extraordinary to me too with hindsight; I’m here to tell you that it can be done! He must have been just about the most famous thinker in the university when I was there, but at that point I probably wouldn’t even have recognised him if I’d been standing behind him in the queue at Blackwell’s. I don’t think I’ve ever read more than two or three essays.
28spiphany
I want to mention Gaito Gazdanov, an emigré writer who settled in Paris. He fought for the White Army and his earlier works, though published after the end of the Civil War, reflect on this period, e.g. The Spectre of Alexander Wolf.
Apart from that, I didn't think I had much on my shelf that applied to this period (most of my Russian collection seems to be either Soviet/post-Soviet era or mid-nineteenth-century romanticist-fantastic), but it looks like I may get to dust off my never-very-fluent Russian skills, as I have an e-book with some stories by Teffi and another with stories by Alexander Kuprin (I read and loved his story Olesya years ago and have long intended to read more by him).
And I have some anthologies in translation that include stories by, for example, Nikolai Leskov; some of his later work just barely squeaks in the period under consideration (The Steel Flea is a delightful tale which I recommend regardless of whether it technically qualifies). Leo Tolstoy is represented, too, though his later writing tends to be somewhat too moralizing for my taste, and of course Anton Chekhov (no moralizing, but I've already read a lot by him).
I also found a verse play by Marina Tsvetaeva, Phoenix, and a volume on Mayakovsky for Russian learners which I've been too intimidated by to tackle as of yet. Also some satires by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, who is somewhat too early, but seems to anticipate some of the social developments that culminated in the Revolution.
Apart from that, I didn't think I had much on my shelf that applied to this period (most of my Russian collection seems to be either Soviet/post-Soviet era or mid-nineteenth-century romanticist-fantastic), but it looks like I may get to dust off my never-very-fluent Russian skills, as I have an e-book with some stories by Teffi and another with stories by Alexander Kuprin (I read and loved his story Olesya years ago and have long intended to read more by him).
And I have some anthologies in translation that include stories by, for example, Nikolai Leskov; some of his later work just barely squeaks in the period under consideration (The Steel Flea is a delightful tale which I recommend regardless of whether it technically qualifies). Leo Tolstoy is represented, too, though his later writing tends to be somewhat too moralizing for my taste, and of course Anton Chekhov (no moralizing, but I've already read a lot by him).
I also found a verse play by Marina Tsvetaeva, Phoenix, and a volume on Mayakovsky for Russian learners which I've been too intimidated by to tackle as of yet. Also some satires by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, who is somewhat too early, but seems to anticipate some of the social developments that culminated in the Revolution.
29LolaWalser
>26 SassyLassy:
Oops, apologies for missing the Herzen ref before. This is a fascinating topic but I'm afraid I bring more appetite than knowledge to it--looking forward to what everyone unearths.
Just a quick warning I forgot yesterday, not being in the habit of reading e-books myself--in case anyone finds Solovyov and Berdyaev online, perhaps it's not amiss to make sure the website is a known public database or academic resource.
As cornerstone thinkers of the Russian right, it's not unusual to see neonazi sites peddling their texts in pamphlet form etc.
And, just so I don't leave the impression they speak only to the right, it must be noted that their Great-Russian nationalism and Russian-Orthodox messianism is widespread, really popular (even beyond Russia...)
I may find it hard to resist a title like The Life of a Useless Man
Hey, if you do, I'll join you on that. Had the same reaction for ages. :)
>27 thorold:
Have you read Mikhail Kuzmin? Not a revolutionary in the conventional sense so not a great fit to the thread, but within that same period and a "rebel" in his own right.
Oops, apologies for missing the Herzen ref before. This is a fascinating topic but I'm afraid I bring more appetite than knowledge to it--looking forward to what everyone unearths.
Just a quick warning I forgot yesterday, not being in the habit of reading e-books myself--in case anyone finds Solovyov and Berdyaev online, perhaps it's not amiss to make sure the website is a known public database or academic resource.
As cornerstone thinkers of the Russian right, it's not unusual to see neonazi sites peddling their texts in pamphlet form etc.
And, just so I don't leave the impression they speak only to the right, it must be noted that their Great-Russian nationalism and Russian-Orthodox messianism is widespread, really popular (even beyond Russia...)
I may find it hard to resist a title like The Life of a Useless Man
Hey, if you do, I'll join you on that. Had the same reaction for ages. :)
>27 thorold:
Have you read Mikhail Kuzmin? Not a revolutionary in the conventional sense so not a great fit to the thread, but within that same period and a "rebel" in his own right.
30thorold
>29 LolaWalser: I didn’t know about Kuzmin — sounds interesting!
There seem to be one or two recordings of his music around: I liked the little bit of the Alexandrian Songs I listened to, I’ll certainly come back to that.
There seem to be one or two recordings of his music around: I liked the little bit of the Alexandrian Songs I listened to, I’ll certainly come back to that.
31SassyLassy
>29 LolaWalser: Not a revolutionary in the conventional sense so not a great fit to the thread
There are at least two sides to every revolution, so read as many as possible, or more likely, as many as you can tolerate!
>29 LolaWalser: >30 thorold: How did I miss this, the Kuzmin Collection at Dalhousie University:
https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/21661/toc_e.html
There are at least two sides to every revolution, so read as many as possible, or more likely, as many as you can tolerate!
>29 LolaWalser: >30 thorold: How did I miss this, the Kuzmin Collection at Dalhousie University:
https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/21661/toc_e.html
32rocketjk
I read Gorky's Bystander way back in 2008. It is long and slow, but in the end I felt like it painted an effective picture of the Russian gentry class in decline, 1880 through around 1905. My full review is on the book's work page. As I put it then, "And yet, as one reads, if one pushes through, an increasingly detailed picture of the ideas and behaviors of the time and place is painted for us. Think of a a very, very long minimalist symphony and you will get the idea."
33SassyLassy
>32 rocketjk: Just read your review, and it sounds as if the book still stands up for a picture of that time.
Have you read The Golovlyov Family? It has the same theme: no balls and ballerinas here, and the gentry is certainly in decline. I think it is one of the most depressing books I have read, and that's probably saying a lot. I think it moves faster than Bystander though, given your description.
Have you read The Golovlyov Family? It has the same theme: no balls and ballerinas here, and the gentry is certainly in decline. I think it is one of the most depressing books I have read, and that's probably saying a lot. I think it moves faster than Bystander though, given your description.
34rocketjk
>34 rocketjk: No, I haven't read the Golovlyov Family, although I remember being it on the shelves of the used bookstore I used to own. Funny how certain covers stick with me.
35thorold
>26 SassyLassy: >27 thorold: Challenge accepted, warm-up exercise done!
Russian thinkers (1978) by Isaiah Berlin (Russia, UK, 1909-1997)
A classic collection of Berlin's essays on nineteenth-century Russian writers, which has suffered a bit from being too much on student reading-lists: the current Penguin edition has expanded so far that the poor little text is almost completely swallowed up in notes and editorial material. But it is worth fighting your way in thought the thickets of forewords and glossaries to get to grips with Berlin's alarmingly concise summaries of what was important in Russian intellectual life, and how the currents of European thought and the concrete events of Russian history influenced the way it developed.
Berlin's big idea, of course, is his repugnance, developed out of his experience of the first half of the 20th century in Europe, for any idea of history or politics that is founded on aggregated utilitarian principles of a common good, or on some sort of promise of future good in exchange for present sacrifice. The primacy of the rights of the individual is always central for him, and that comes through in his choice of heroes: he approves of the social thinker Alexander Herzen and the critic Vissarion Belinsky, who were always ready to dismiss an abstract idea if they didn't like it, but doesn't have much time for dogmatic opportunists like Lenin and Bakunin. Similarly, in literature his preference is for Tolstoy and Turgenev, who let their human characters drive the stories, even if it comes at the expense of the theories they are trying to promote. Poor old Dostoyevsky doesn't even get an essay to himself, although Berlin does approve of the fact that he was arrested for reading out Belinsky's "Letter to Gogol".
I loved Berlin's self-confident, offhand put-downs of things he doesn't like — for instance when he compares the Russian reception of Turgenev's A sportsman's sketches to that in America of Uncle Tom's cabin "from which it differed principally in being a work of genius". He's a critic who bores down to the essentials with great precision, but also someone who doesn't mind telling us about the simple pleasure he takes in a text.
Slightly tough going, and written from a very clear political standpoint, but it makes for a useful overview of who was who: I'll probably come back to it when I've read more Russians.
(I read this in the Penguin edition as a Kobo e-book, which had all sorts of odd formatting errors, most bizarrely the way that all the acute accents in French quotations got turned into grave accents: "èmigrè" — do publishers never read the books they produce?)
Russian thinkers (1978) by Isaiah Berlin (Russia, UK, 1909-1997)
A classic collection of Berlin's essays on nineteenth-century Russian writers, which has suffered a bit from being too much on student reading-lists: the current Penguin edition has expanded so far that the poor little text is almost completely swallowed up in notes and editorial material. But it is worth fighting your way in thought the thickets of forewords and glossaries to get to grips with Berlin's alarmingly concise summaries of what was important in Russian intellectual life, and how the currents of European thought and the concrete events of Russian history influenced the way it developed.
Berlin's big idea, of course, is his repugnance, developed out of his experience of the first half of the 20th century in Europe, for any idea of history or politics that is founded on aggregated utilitarian principles of a common good, or on some sort of promise of future good in exchange for present sacrifice. The primacy of the rights of the individual is always central for him, and that comes through in his choice of heroes: he approves of the social thinker Alexander Herzen and the critic Vissarion Belinsky, who were always ready to dismiss an abstract idea if they didn't like it, but doesn't have much time for dogmatic opportunists like Lenin and Bakunin. Similarly, in literature his preference is for Tolstoy and Turgenev, who let their human characters drive the stories, even if it comes at the expense of the theories they are trying to promote. Poor old Dostoyevsky doesn't even get an essay to himself, although Berlin does approve of the fact that he was arrested for reading out Belinsky's "Letter to Gogol".
I loved Berlin's self-confident, offhand put-downs of things he doesn't like — for instance when he compares the Russian reception of Turgenev's A sportsman's sketches to that in America of Uncle Tom's cabin "from which it differed principally in being a work of genius". He's a critic who bores down to the essentials with great precision, but also someone who doesn't mind telling us about the simple pleasure he takes in a text.
Slightly tough going, and written from a very clear political standpoint, but it makes for a useful overview of who was who: I'll probably come back to it when I've read more Russians.
(I read this in the Penguin edition as a Kobo e-book, which had all sorts of odd formatting errors, most bizarrely the way that all the acute accents in French quotations got turned into grave accents: "èmigrè" — do publishers never read the books they produce?)
36NinieB
>35 thorold: I don't think publishers read e-books, because they are usually full of annoyances like that. That's why I tend to avoid them unless they are free.
37SassyLassy
Just back from a week away in one of the last spots on earth, right here in Canada, where cell reception and wifi are almost impossible to find, especially in weather. I did pass a pole that had a poster on it saying 'wifi hotspot', a new way of connecting.
>35 thorold: Well done - You make me think I should take this on again, this time without an exam at the end!
I always want to read Michael Ignatieff's biography of him too, but somehow have not.
Here are some of his thoughts on Berlin:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/12/18/on-isaiah-berlin-1909-1997/
Getting a weird garbled version of 'enigma' when I try to pronounce 'èmigrè'
>35 thorold: Well done - You make me think I should take this on again, this time without an exam at the end!
I always want to read Michael Ignatieff's biography of him too, but somehow have not.
Here are some of his thoughts on Berlin:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/12/18/on-isaiah-berlin-1909-1997/
Getting a weird garbled version of 'enigma' when I try to pronounce 'èmigrè'
38LolaWalser
I've been meaning to say a few words about this for a long time:
Explodity : sound, image, and word in Russian futurist book art
Revolutionary ferment in Russia was indivisible from the arts, all of them, music to painting to theatre etc. One of the many streams of Russian modernism and avant-garde, dubbed futurism, is most interesting to me for its truly unique nature*. Russian futurists included poets such as Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, linguists (Roman Jakobson), painters of Suprematist, neo-Primitive, Constructivist etc. outlook.
Futurist poets were greatly interested in sound, in the phonic quality of speech and its ability to carry meaning--and then past it, going beyond meaning into a "transrational" realm. The combination of sound and image intrigued them no end. They called this poetry zaum (beyond/behind reason, "beyonsense").
The subject of Perloff's monograph is the artistic collaboration in 1910-15 between poets and painters in creation of futurist livres d'artiste, produced in small numbers, by hand, and thus each being completely original.
You can see some of these books and hear this poetry interactively here (translations are included):
http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/explodity/index.html
And at this link, more books, the exhibition (Tango With Cows), and video of the Explodity performance:
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/tango_with_cows/
*Russian futurism has nothing in common with the Italian futurism, they are so much about different things that straight comparisons of their respective aesthetics are un-illuminating of either. However, one simple opposition that is meaningful can be seen in the Russian futurists' overwhelmingly provincial origins, whereas the Italians were largely metropolitans. Thus, the Russians maintain a great interest in nature as well as in folk art, which they explore for its intuitive qualities, its closeness to primary experiences, whereas the Italians show zero interest in those and are wholly turned to the urban experience.
Politically, Russian futurists were of the left, in stark contrast to the essentially fascist, i.e. extreme right-wing orientation of Italian futurism.
Explodity : sound, image, and word in Russian futurist book art
Revolutionary ferment in Russia was indivisible from the arts, all of them, music to painting to theatre etc. One of the many streams of Russian modernism and avant-garde, dubbed futurism, is most interesting to me for its truly unique nature*. Russian futurists included poets such as Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, linguists (Roman Jakobson), painters of Suprematist, neo-Primitive, Constructivist etc. outlook.
Futurist poets were greatly interested in sound, in the phonic quality of speech and its ability to carry meaning--and then past it, going beyond meaning into a "transrational" realm. The combination of sound and image intrigued them no end. They called this poetry zaum (beyond/behind reason, "beyonsense").
The subject of Perloff's monograph is the artistic collaboration in 1910-15 between poets and painters in creation of futurist livres d'artiste, produced in small numbers, by hand, and thus each being completely original.
You can see some of these books and hear this poetry interactively here (translations are included):
http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/explodity/index.html
And at this link, more books, the exhibition (Tango With Cows), and video of the Explodity performance:
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/tango_with_cows/
*Russian futurism has nothing in common with the Italian futurism, they are so much about different things that straight comparisons of their respective aesthetics are un-illuminating of either. However, one simple opposition that is meaningful can be seen in the Russian futurists' overwhelmingly provincial origins, whereas the Italians were largely metropolitans. Thus, the Russians maintain a great interest in nature as well as in folk art, which they explore for its intuitive qualities, its closeness to primary experiences, whereas the Italians show zero interest in those and are wholly turned to the urban experience.
Politically, Russian futurists were of the left, in stark contrast to the essentially fascist, i.e. extreme right-wing orientation of Italian futurism.
39spiralsheep
>38 LolaWalser: I'm still reading Marc Chagall's autobiography My Life, but I can confirm that one of the cultural trends he emphasises in the 1906-1914 sections is the ideological separation of Russian artistic movements from Parisian movements, even when they appear superficially similar.
He also mentions the influence of Ballets Russes which demonstrated as LolaWalser says, "the Russians maintain a great interest in nature as well as in folk art, which they explore for its intuitive qualities, its closeness to primary experiences".
He also mentions the influence of Ballets Russes which demonstrated as LolaWalser says, "the Russians maintain a great interest in nature as well as in folk art, which they explore for its intuitive qualities, its closeness to primary experiences".
40LolaWalser
>39 spiralsheep:
Note that I was talking specifically about Russian futurists, not the Russian arts scene in general. Chagall was another provincial, but there were plenty of Russian artists and writers in the high literary circles in St. Petersburg and Moscow well acquainted with the European trends and traditions, some of whom felt closer to them than to the native developments. "Classical" modernists like Akhmatova and Mandelstam, Blok and Gumilyov, erudite polyglots, might mingle and perform along with the futurists in the Stray Dog Cabaret and similar venues but they were on different wavelengths (not to mention the reactionaries, the decadents, mystics, symbolists etc.)
Dhiaghileff exoticised his own (or, nominally his own) culture for Western consumption, it's got nothing to do with the interests of the futurists--mind you, he did employ them from time to time--Goncharova most notably. However, that decorative commercial work has little in common with her free experimentation in the futurist art books in the links above.
Note that I was talking specifically about Russian futurists, not the Russian arts scene in general. Chagall was another provincial, but there were plenty of Russian artists and writers in the high literary circles in St. Petersburg and Moscow well acquainted with the European trends and traditions, some of whom felt closer to them than to the native developments. "Classical" modernists like Akhmatova and Mandelstam, Blok and Gumilyov, erudite polyglots, might mingle and perform along with the futurists in the Stray Dog Cabaret and similar venues but they were on different wavelengths (not to mention the reactionaries, the decadents, mystics, symbolists etc.)
Dhiaghileff exoticised his own (or, nominally his own) culture for Western consumption, it's got nothing to do with the interests of the futurists--mind you, he did employ them from time to time--Goncharova most notably. However, that decorative commercial work has little in common with her free experimentation in the futurist art books in the links above.
41Tess_W
Hello! I've lurked for a couple of years, but now that I'm retired I would like to read along, when able. I especially love Tolstoy and have 2 on my shelf: Master and Man and The Death of Ivan llyich. I also have a book of plays by Chekov that has been collecting dust for 20 years. A dilemma as I only have time for one!
42spiralsheep
>40 LolaWalser: I was agreeing with you by noting more general trends.
43thorold
A Kuzmin selection and the NYRB Stray Dog Café anthology have arrived, so I’m all set...
44spiralsheep
>41 Tess_W: Hello! And welcome. I hope you enjoy whichever selection you read.
45LolaWalser
>42 spiralsheep:
Er, that's confusing me. Apologies if what follows is too much pedantry, I get antsy about lack of clarity. I was pointing out the distinction of the futurists, not to be confused with the agenda of some other (let alone all other) Russian groups. There is no single Russian aesthetic, artistic preoccupation, philosophy etc. and therefore no general trend (the plural makes nonsense of "general", no?)
What the futurists mined in nature and folk traditions is different from various tendencies of "going to the people" (which are also different among themselves). The iconography of folk art, for example, disseminated in popular prints and the practice of this printing itself, fascinated them for its immediacy and power--the eye understands the primitive print like the ear understands the sound, without the burden of the overeducated ratio. This interest is planets away from the mystico-religious and/or conservative and/or chauvinistic and/or folkloric, historical etc. interest many others evince for the same traditions.
The "primitivism" of the futurists, the riotous child-like playfulness and roughness of those books, for example, is inspired by and seeks to emulate that immediacy of communication and freedom of the "unschooled" printers of folk prints, but is not itself either "folkish" or unsophisticated. It is also not "traditional" or backward-looking in the least; they were self-consciously propelling themselves where no art had gone before. The name would be a clue to that!
And to do so they used in part the instrumentarium of folk lore. Which is different from being interested in folk lore, tradition etc. for its own sake, historical continuation, identification etc.
Similar remarks pertain to nature, which interested them not (as in almost every other Western European and Russian group) as the site of non- or anti-urbanity (a site of "purity", "innocence", "authenticity" etc.) but as the matrix of primary relations and insights. They were interested in "what occurs" naturally--for instance, what is the "natural", "unschooled" relation of image and sound, how we "naturally" relate to them.
I don't know if I'm choosing the best details because the ground for confusion can be so vast--suffice it to say, one should not mistake the willful "naiveté" of the futurists and the crudeness of their art for some actual lack of sophisticated skill. Their hailing from the provinces only means that they were not originally participants in the usual career of a metropolitan artist; being predominantly middle-to-lower class explains why they wouldn't have knowledge of other languages (and thus of the mostly untranslated foreign literature). But by no means were they uneducated and unskilled.
Khlebnikov, for instance, grew up in a Siberian steppe among Mongolian nomads, but his parents were people of wide culture, his father a scientist, and Khlebnikov would develop his unprecedented poetic experiments from a scientific interest in bird song and other sounds occurring in nature.
Ack, too long.
>43 thorold:
Speaking of, you'll find Kuzmin rubbed elbows with the futurists too!
Er, that's confusing me. Apologies if what follows is too much pedantry, I get antsy about lack of clarity. I was pointing out the distinction of the futurists, not to be confused with the agenda of some other (let alone all other) Russian groups. There is no single Russian aesthetic, artistic preoccupation, philosophy etc. and therefore no general trend (the plural makes nonsense of "general", no?)
What the futurists mined in nature and folk traditions is different from various tendencies of "going to the people" (which are also different among themselves). The iconography of folk art, for example, disseminated in popular prints and the practice of this printing itself, fascinated them for its immediacy and power--the eye understands the primitive print like the ear understands the sound, without the burden of the overeducated ratio. This interest is planets away from the mystico-religious and/or conservative and/or chauvinistic and/or folkloric, historical etc. interest many others evince for the same traditions.
The "primitivism" of the futurists, the riotous child-like playfulness and roughness of those books, for example, is inspired by and seeks to emulate that immediacy of communication and freedom of the "unschooled" printers of folk prints, but is not itself either "folkish" or unsophisticated. It is also not "traditional" or backward-looking in the least; they were self-consciously propelling themselves where no art had gone before. The name would be a clue to that!
And to do so they used in part the instrumentarium of folk lore. Which is different from being interested in folk lore, tradition etc. for its own sake, historical continuation, identification etc.
Similar remarks pertain to nature, which interested them not (as in almost every other Western European and Russian group) as the site of non- or anti-urbanity (a site of "purity", "innocence", "authenticity" etc.) but as the matrix of primary relations and insights. They were interested in "what occurs" naturally--for instance, what is the "natural", "unschooled" relation of image and sound, how we "naturally" relate to them.
I don't know if I'm choosing the best details because the ground for confusion can be so vast--suffice it to say, one should not mistake the willful "naiveté" of the futurists and the crudeness of their art for some actual lack of sophisticated skill. Their hailing from the provinces only means that they were not originally participants in the usual career of a metropolitan artist; being predominantly middle-to-lower class explains why they wouldn't have knowledge of other languages (and thus of the mostly untranslated foreign literature). But by no means were they uneducated and unskilled.
Khlebnikov, for instance, grew up in a Siberian steppe among Mongolian nomads, but his parents were people of wide culture, his father a scientist, and Khlebnikov would develop his unprecedented poetic experiments from a scientific interest in bird song and other sounds occurring in nature.
Ack, too long.
>43 thorold:
Speaking of, you'll find Kuzmin rubbed elbows with the futurists too!
46spiralsheep
Long comment is long. No apologies. :-)
I read My Life by Marc Chagall as part of my recent focus on Belarus.
This autobiography was written by Marc Chagall while he was in Moscow in 1922 when he was in his mid-thirties. It covers his early years in Vitebsk in Belarus in what was then the Russian Empire, his time as a young artist in St Petersburg and Paris, and his return to revolutionary Russia as a mature artist and teacher. Chagall was a secular Jew but his origins in Russian-Jewish folk culture and his beloved hometown of Vitebsk were important to him (and illustrating his wife Bella's book Burning Lights about her childhood in Vitebsk could be said to be a true expression of his own Hasidic, Chabad, upbringing). The expressionistic writing style of this autobiography is very reminiscent of his visual artistic style, which is also amply demonstrated through his many illustrations of the text.
Chagall's account of the Russian Empire and subsequent revolutions (plural) is that of an artist whose interest is in cultural expression not political expression but his account appears to be historically accurate, albeit from a fragmented personal perspective.
1887 onwards - His expressions about his childhood are sharp-eyed to the socio-economic conditions around him but he describes these through lived experience. He loves Vitebsk.
- He notes the ongoing pogroms, targeted murders of Jews, tacitly sanctioned by the Russian Empire, but they are outside his personal experience.
- He notes that Jews are required to perform military service for the Russian Empire (while the Empire criminalises their existence).
- He is honest about receiving state and private patronage which enables him to become a career artist.
1907 - He records his arrest and imprisonment by the Russian Empire for the "crime" of being Jewish in St Petersburg outside the concentration area of the Pale of Settlement.
1914 - He experiences a pogrom consisting of a group of off duty Russian Imperial soldiers murdering Jews on the streets of St Petersburg. He lies about his identity and runs away.
- He is so angry about conscripted Jewish soldiers being deliberately targeted and murdered in pogroms by the Russian Imperial Army that for the first time in 130 pages he names and blames an individual he holds responsible for enabling this murderous anti-Semitism: GD Nicholas Nicolaevich. (I'll add a historical note that Nicholas Nicolaevich also promoted and enacted the genocidal mass murder of German-speaking Russians, Poles, and Muslims, before dying at the age of 72 while living in luxurious exile in France.)
Before the February Revolution 1917 - Chagall deserts his conscripted military post in an office under his brother-in-law's command.
- He is in favour of everyone having a right to life and food. This is humanitarian not political.
After the February Revolution 1917 - He is offered a semi-political position as a national visual art Commissar. He prefers to found and head a regional government art school in Vitebsk (there are some implied minor shenanigans in which he uses state money designated for training artists to feed young men, mostly Jewish, and uses his influence to try to have the same young men exempted from compulsory military service on the grounds that they're training as artists, but obviously he's not entirely candid about this). This school, Vitebsk Art School, became one of the most prominent in Soviet Russia.
After the October Revolution 1917 - He realises the Leninist communists are in the ascendent when the font used on political posters changes.
- A statue of Karl Marx, who Chagall notes was Jewish, is erected in Vitebsk, possibly by sometime art students of Chagall, and then a second statue. Chagall's reaction is to lament the heavy realist style of the sculpture.
- He describes a difficult relationship with Anatoly Lunacharsky the Commissar for Education and says he was threatened with prison because he didn't "at least bow to his (Lunacharsky's) authority". (Side note: in 1919 the right-wing New York Times described Soviet educational reforms, of which Chagall's Vitebsk Art School and his teaching of orphans was a part, in an article headlined, "REDS ARE RUINING CHILDREN OF RUSSIA; Lunacharsky's System of Calculated Moral Depravity Described", lol. Odd for a newspaper to be against increased general literacy... or feeding and housing orphans.)
- His mother-in-law was one of the townsfolk arrested "simply because they were rich" (she owned three jewellery shops).
- He protects his landlord from Chekists but can't protect the wealth of his in-laws.
- One of the few direct mentions of "the Revolution" is in a diatribe about politicised mass meetings with other people involved with the arts: "I think the Revolution can be great without giving up respect for other people."
- He mentions various food shortages.
1921 and 1922 - He talks about teaching traumatised orphaned boys in two educational colonies, the Third International and one at Malakhovka (for Jewish boys mostly orphaned by White Russian pogroms in Ukraine, 1919-21). He describes some of the traumatic circumstances these boys endured before arriving at their new homes but he deliberately avoids specifying the cause of those circumstances. Chagall chooses not to use these children's trauma to push personal or political points against anti-Semitism, pogroms during the Russian Empire, mass murders by Russian Imperial forces, mass murders by invading German Imperial forces, mass murders by White Russian forces, or murders by various revolutionary factions. His disgust is aimed at all perpetrators.
----------------
While it's outside the scope of the book, I'll mention for this thread that from the comparative safety of America in 1944 Chagall publicly stated his belief that the Soviet Union had done more to save Jews from fascism than any other European country. He returned to Europe immediately after the Second World War but didn't revisit the Soviet Union until 1973 when he was reunited with his surviving sisters. Needless to say Chagall's opinions would have been influenced by his personal experiences of his arrest and imprisonment by the Russian Empire for the "crime" of being Jewish, promoted to an art Commissar in Soviet Russia and founder/head of a prestigious art school in Soviet Byelorussia, and then the genocidal realities of Nazism and Pétainism in France. Depending on arguable geographical borders, at least 751,861+ Jewish people in Belarus were murdered by the Nazis and their White Russian allies or, in simpler terms, the majority of Belarussian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The Jews who survived were mostly either with the Red Army or the Byelorussian red partisans.
Other points of historical interest
- Chagall's very personal descriptions of Apollinaire in Paris, amongst others.
- Chagall's two page description of meeting Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn (and the implication that he goes home to his wife not only spiritually inspired but also, ahem, full of the joys of spring... although I couldn't figure out if he was also implying his daughter Ida Chagall's birth in 1916 was a result of the rabbinical blessing).
- The mystery of where Chagall's missing art went. Even if we ignore his tally and stick to historically attested works, where did it all go and why didn't more of it reappear in his lifetime? Apart from the many, many, many forgeries, obviously.
(Edited to try to get the touchstones working again.)
I read My Life by Marc Chagall as part of my recent focus on Belarus.
This autobiography was written by Marc Chagall while he was in Moscow in 1922 when he was in his mid-thirties. It covers his early years in Vitebsk in Belarus in what was then the Russian Empire, his time as a young artist in St Petersburg and Paris, and his return to revolutionary Russia as a mature artist and teacher. Chagall was a secular Jew but his origins in Russian-Jewish folk culture and his beloved hometown of Vitebsk were important to him (and illustrating his wife Bella's book Burning Lights about her childhood in Vitebsk could be said to be a true expression of his own Hasidic, Chabad, upbringing). The expressionistic writing style of this autobiography is very reminiscent of his visual artistic style, which is also amply demonstrated through his many illustrations of the text.
Chagall's account of the Russian Empire and subsequent revolutions (plural) is that of an artist whose interest is in cultural expression not political expression but his account appears to be historically accurate, albeit from a fragmented personal perspective.
1887 onwards - His expressions about his childhood are sharp-eyed to the socio-economic conditions around him but he describes these through lived experience. He loves Vitebsk.
- He notes the ongoing pogroms, targeted murders of Jews, tacitly sanctioned by the Russian Empire, but they are outside his personal experience.
- He notes that Jews are required to perform military service for the Russian Empire (while the Empire criminalises their existence).
- He is honest about receiving state and private patronage which enables him to become a career artist.
1907 - He records his arrest and imprisonment by the Russian Empire for the "crime" of being Jewish in St Petersburg outside the concentration area of the Pale of Settlement.
1914 - He experiences a pogrom consisting of a group of off duty Russian Imperial soldiers murdering Jews on the streets of St Petersburg. He lies about his identity and runs away.
- He is so angry about conscripted Jewish soldiers being deliberately targeted and murdered in pogroms by the Russian Imperial Army that for the first time in 130 pages he names and blames an individual he holds responsible for enabling this murderous anti-Semitism: GD Nicholas Nicolaevich. (I'll add a historical note that Nicholas Nicolaevich also promoted and enacted the genocidal mass murder of German-speaking Russians, Poles, and Muslims, before dying at the age of 72 while living in luxurious exile in France.)
Before the February Revolution 1917 - Chagall deserts his conscripted military post in an office under his brother-in-law's command.
- He is in favour of everyone having a right to life and food. This is humanitarian not political.
After the February Revolution 1917 - He is offered a semi-political position as a national visual art Commissar. He prefers to found and head a regional government art school in Vitebsk (there are some implied minor shenanigans in which he uses state money designated for training artists to feed young men, mostly Jewish, and uses his influence to try to have the same young men exempted from compulsory military service on the grounds that they're training as artists, but obviously he's not entirely candid about this). This school, Vitebsk Art School, became one of the most prominent in Soviet Russia.
After the October Revolution 1917 - He realises the Leninist communists are in the ascendent when the font used on political posters changes.
- A statue of Karl Marx, who Chagall notes was Jewish, is erected in Vitebsk, possibly by sometime art students of Chagall, and then a second statue. Chagall's reaction is to lament the heavy realist style of the sculpture.
- He describes a difficult relationship with Anatoly Lunacharsky the Commissar for Education and says he was threatened with prison because he didn't "at least bow to his (Lunacharsky's) authority". (Side note: in 1919 the right-wing New York Times described Soviet educational reforms, of which Chagall's Vitebsk Art School and his teaching of orphans was a part, in an article headlined, "REDS ARE RUINING CHILDREN OF RUSSIA; Lunacharsky's System of Calculated Moral Depravity Described", lol. Odd for a newspaper to be against increased general literacy... or feeding and housing orphans.)
- His mother-in-law was one of the townsfolk arrested "simply because they were rich" (she owned three jewellery shops).
- He protects his landlord from Chekists but can't protect the wealth of his in-laws.
- One of the few direct mentions of "the Revolution" is in a diatribe about politicised mass meetings with other people involved with the arts: "I think the Revolution can be great without giving up respect for other people."
- He mentions various food shortages.
1921 and 1922 - He talks about teaching traumatised orphaned boys in two educational colonies, the Third International and one at Malakhovka (for Jewish boys mostly orphaned by White Russian pogroms in Ukraine, 1919-21). He describes some of the traumatic circumstances these boys endured before arriving at their new homes but he deliberately avoids specifying the cause of those circumstances. Chagall chooses not to use these children's trauma to push personal or political points against anti-Semitism, pogroms during the Russian Empire, mass murders by Russian Imperial forces, mass murders by invading German Imperial forces, mass murders by White Russian forces, or murders by various revolutionary factions. His disgust is aimed at all perpetrators.
----------------
While it's outside the scope of the book, I'll mention for this thread that from the comparative safety of America in 1944 Chagall publicly stated his belief that the Soviet Union had done more to save Jews from fascism than any other European country. He returned to Europe immediately after the Second World War but didn't revisit the Soviet Union until 1973 when he was reunited with his surviving sisters. Needless to say Chagall's opinions would have been influenced by his personal experiences of his arrest and imprisonment by the Russian Empire for the "crime" of being Jewish, promoted to an art Commissar in Soviet Russia and founder/head of a prestigious art school in Soviet Byelorussia, and then the genocidal realities of Nazism and Pétainism in France. Depending on arguable geographical borders, at least 751,861+ Jewish people in Belarus were murdered by the Nazis and their White Russian allies or, in simpler terms, the majority of Belarussian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The Jews who survived were mostly either with the Red Army or the Byelorussian red partisans.
Other points of historical interest
- Chagall's very personal descriptions of Apollinaire in Paris, amongst others.
- Chagall's two page description of meeting Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn (and the implication that he goes home to his wife not only spiritually inspired but also, ahem, full of the joys of spring... although I couldn't figure out if he was also implying his daughter Ida Chagall's birth in 1916 was a result of the rabbinical blessing).
- The mystery of where Chagall's missing art went. Even if we ignore his tally and stick to historically attested works, where did it all go and why didn't more of it reappear in his lifetime? Apart from the many, many, many forgeries, obviously.
(Edited to try to get the touchstones working again.)
47Dilara86
>16 spiralsheep: Thank you for all the recommendations, especially Annasoltan Kekilova whom I'd never heard of ! I've read Jamila and other works by Chingiz Aitmatov, as well as The Railway and The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov.
I've now finished Poème sans héros ; Requiem ; et autres œuvres - Anna Akhmatova's collected poetry, and really loved it. The French version felt very natural and moving. It's just a shame that the translators ran out of steam towards the end and botched the last work - Poem without a Hero. You could tell they didn't spend as much time on it as on the other poems: there were typos, missing footnotes and it wasn't quite on the same level as the rest.
There were a number of nods to Mikhail Kuzmin in the poems. Between this and the mentions in this thread, I feel like I should read him. Fortunately, I was able to order Les ailes (Wings) from the library.
I've now finished Poème sans héros ; Requiem ; et autres œuvres - Anna Akhmatova's collected poetry, and really loved it. The French version felt very natural and moving. It's just a shame that the translators ran out of steam towards the end and botched the last work - Poem without a Hero. You could tell they didn't spend as much time on it as on the other poems: there were typos, missing footnotes and it wasn't quite on the same level as the rest.
There were a number of nods to Mikhail Kuzmin in the poems. Between this and the mentions in this thread, I feel like I should read him. Fortunately, I was able to order Les ailes (Wings) from the library.
48SassyLassy
>38 LolaWalser: >42 spiralsheep: >45 LolaWalser: Thanks for the links. 'Explodity' - what a wonderful word. Also one of the best descriptions of 'the iconography of folk art' I've seen: the eye understands the primitive print like the ear understands the sound, without the burden of the overeducated ratio. This interest is plan
>46 spiralsheep: I should read more about Chagall's life.
>41 Tess_W: Welcome! The Death of Ivan Ilyich is one I've stashed away for this read.
>43 thorold: Also have The Stray Dog Café hiding somewhere. Great cover.
>47 Dilara86: Interesting about Akhmatova in French translation. Do you think it could be the ability of French to frame things in a more existential fashion than English?
>46 spiralsheep: I should read more about Chagall's life.
>41 Tess_W: Welcome! The Death of Ivan Ilyich is one I've stashed away for this read.
>43 thorold: Also have The Stray Dog Café hiding somewhere. Great cover.
>47 Dilara86: Interesting about Akhmatova in French translation. Do you think it could be the ability of French to frame things in a more existential fashion than English?
49SassyLassy
Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others and Me: The Best of Teffi by Teffi pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Rose France and Anne Marie Jackson
writings first published from 1919 - 2006
also published by Pushkin Press as Rasputin and Other Ironies
Sometimes when you read a book, the author's personality shines through so strongly that convinced you would hit it off immediately, you wish you could somehow meet. So it was with this collection of writings by Teffi.
Probably such a meeting would be as humiliating as the one the thirteen year old Teffi had with Tolstoy. Recounted in the short story "My First Tolstoy", (1920), Teffi captures perfectly the awkwardness of such a meeting when everything you pictured saying and doing condenses into the briefest of encounters. How else could it be when you plan to ask the great author to save Prince Andrei?
While it's easy to relate to the stories from childhood, seeing yourself in the anecdotes, it's a completely different matter with "Rasputin". Written in 1924, Teffi's encounters with Rasputin are still fresh enough in memory to enable her to convey a chilling picture of a sexual predator, a 'sorcerer' as she describes him, a man who has asked particularly to meet her. Reading of his murder, she remembers his prediction:
...there's one thing they don't know: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.She did.
Remember me then! Remember me!
Much of Teffi's fame in Russia was as a satirist. Satire usually has a short shelf life. However, reminiscences such as "New Life", recalling the politics of the Petersburg newspaper where she worked for awhile, are just as relevant to any office setting today, and still inspire a chuckle.
Teffi left Russian in 1919, just after writing "The Gadarene Swine", a devastating critique of the Whites. She didn't fully realize at the time that she would never return. Perhaps saddest of all are her reflections written in exile, such as "Ilya Repin", a sketch of a celebrated Russian artist living in Finland. His early portrait of her had disappeared, probably to the US. She wrote in 1951, a year before she died
I've never been able to hold on to anything. Neither portraits, nor poems dedicated to me, nor paintings I've been given, nor letters from interesting people. Nothing at all.
There is a little more preserved in my memory, but even this is gradually, or even rather quickly, losing its meaning, fading, slipping away from me, wilting and dying.
It's sad to wander about the graveyard of my tired memory, where all hurts have been forgiven, where every sin has been atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.
50spiralsheep
>47 Dilara86: You're welcome for the authors' names.
I'm glad you found a generally good translation of Anna Akhmatova into French. As recently as this week I read a bad translation of one of her poems into English (by a writer who should know better).
>49 SassyLassy: I've never read Teffi. Interesting summary. Thank you.
"Much of Teffi's fame in Russia was as a satirist. Satire usually has a short shelf life. However, reminiscences such as "New Life", recalling the politics of the Petersburg newspaper where she worked for awhile, are just as relevant to any office setting today, and still inspire a chuckle."
Satire only needs a short life when targets heed the warning sting!
Я расту вось тут пад плотам
I не так даўно ўзышла,
А ўжо многім абармотам
Рукі-ногі папякла.
The Nettle, by Kandrat Krapiva, 1922
In Art's noble kitchen
Vain and worthless weed I lie,
Of what kind? Fit but for laughter!
I am the stinging nettle — I.
Here beneath the fence I
No great time have grown as yet,
But a host of knaves I've worried,
Arms and legs with stings beset.
Who comes here after cucumbers,
Let that man my blisters wear —
Pluck me, friend, but well remember —
Careful, if your hands are bare!
Who shall meet with me, then let him
Touch me once or twice and try!
Then he'll know, and not forget me;
I am the stinging nettle — I!
I'm glad you found a generally good translation of Anna Akhmatova into French. As recently as this week I read a bad translation of one of her poems into English (by a writer who should know better).
>49 SassyLassy: I've never read Teffi. Interesting summary. Thank you.
"Much of Teffi's fame in Russia was as a satirist. Satire usually has a short shelf life. However, reminiscences such as "New Life", recalling the politics of the Petersburg newspaper where she worked for awhile, are just as relevant to any office setting today, and still inspire a chuckle."
Satire only needs a short life when targets heed the warning sting!
Я расту вось тут пад плотам
I не так даўно ўзышла,
А ўжо многім абармотам
Рукі-ногі папякла.
The Nettle, by Kandrat Krapiva, 1922
In Art's noble kitchen
Vain and worthless weed I lie,
Of what kind? Fit but for laughter!
I am the stinging nettle — I.
Here beneath the fence I
No great time have grown as yet,
But a host of knaves I've worried,
Arms and legs with stings beset.
Who comes here after cucumbers,
Let that man my blisters wear —
Pluck me, friend, but well remember —
Careful, if your hands are bare!
Who shall meet with me, then let him
Touch me once or twice and try!
Then he'll know, and not forget me;
I am the stinging nettle — I!
51spiralsheep
I've been reading samizdat copies of two books of Belarusian poetry translated into English by Vera Rich: The Images Swarm Free and Like Water, Like Fire. I'm possibly not the best reviewer for these because of my general discomfort around nationalists.
Like Water, Like Fire, published in 1971, was the first book of Belarusian poems translated into a Western European language. Vera Rich's translation work and the publication were sponsored by UNESCO and the Byelorussian Soviet authorities, who appear to have had some editorial control over the content. That control resulted in Vera Rich's later 1982 companion volume The Images Swarm Free including works by Maksim Bahdanovich, Zmitrok Biadulia, and Ales Harun, that were absent from the first volume. Even with editorial control, the Byelorussian Soviet authorities seem to have insisted on the withdrawal of the first edition of Like Water, Like Fire book because they disapproved of the nationalist implications of the heraldic imagery on the original cover, hence the current plain typographic cover.
Both books can be difficult to find now, although Like Water, Like Fire is more likely to have found a home in libraries.
So, do you want to read rabid Belarusian nationalist poems banned by both the Russian Empire and the Byelorussian Soviet? Of course you do! Don't get your expectations up too much though, as they're very much products of their time....
1886-1941 Zmitrok Biadulia
In the Night Fields They Sing, by Zmitrok Biadulia, 1910
In the night fields they sing. Mist veils the campfires' gleam.
Song is a joyous sorrow. Like rivulets the voices,
And from the bushes, from the silvered clearings stream
Ballads like small bells, ballads that chime, rejoicing.
In the night fields they sing. Their words tell of wild woods,
And wild birds crying where the marsh-lands spread, unstable,
Sensitive summer whisper of wheat-ears ripe and good,
The fishing boat and, fair with gilding, the bright maples.
In the night fields they sing. Echoing through the night,
Like fans their voices rise to the stars, pearly-crying,
Sing louder, friends. O song, never do thou grow quiet,
And, maybe, eyes, like flints, shall set a spark-shower flying.
In the night fields they sing. Thither your singing send,
Where in the heart and breast it blazes and compresses.
You'll find a plenitude of fiery words, and then...
In conflagration's flame your song will find expression.
A Winter Tale, by Zmitrok Biadula, 1910
A snowy night hangs, a savage night hangs,
A grey pelt above forests’ wild tresses.
In white plumage of snow, in a white silk of snow,
Valleys, hills under rich snowy dresses.
In the wild of the woods, the age-slumbering woods,
Dwell a people, ill-natured, unspeaking.
In a palace of glass, on a bed all of glass
Lies a maiden with sun-bright hair, sleeping.
Go you, call her by name; go you, wake her again —
Then tall fir-trees will utter harsh creaking.
Then the tempest will moan, then the tempest will groan,
White-eyed winter complain with loud speaking.
Winter then, in alarm, winter then, fearing harm,
In a frenzy of frost will spin, swirling;
Like a horse without rein, like a grey-and-white flame,
The blind snowstorm will rush, rearing, whirling.
And the maid will sigh deep, stir in heavy-dreamed sleep,
With her fingers brush brows clear of hoar-frost,
She will gaze all around, unrestrained, all around,
Sad the grey wolves will howl in the forest.
Go you, rouse her again — and the spring comes again,
Over ploughland larks revel unstinting,
On the river, ice cracks, and away the floes break,
And the playful floods wash out the winter.
1887-1920 Ales Harun (exiled to Siberia by the Russian Empire)
To People, by Ales Harun, before 1914
I love the vault of stars above,
The earth so broad, so long,
The flat field, the humped hills I love,
The forest and its song.
And I love life, and folk, indeed,
The forms their souls imply,
I love to braid from hopes a wreath,
But I’m no poet. Why?
Some days my work keeps on the boil,
I slave away the time,
Until my shoulders creak with toil ...
Your heart will hear the chime,
You catch at one sound, you catch twain,
And more and more they throng,
Until they merge in one great train,
Ringing the whole day long.
The day is burned out. Home I go,
Off to bed. But at night
The lines of ringing notes still flow.
Sleep departs. Then I write.
Before my eyes in a great pack
The images swarm free.
And someone stands behind my back,
It seems, so close to me.
A pair of arms my neck entwine,
The silk of a girl’s braids,
The heart beats stronger, and the chime
In the soul does not fade ...
I look: the room is empty quite ...
Time, like a snake, slid by,
Beyond the window fades the night ...
But I’m no poet ... Why?
Because time eats my impetus,
Freedom comes rare and hard.
Poets like this abound with us,
The nation is a bard.
Here I have simply penned a mere
Fistful of my sad strains;
Sadness of my soul for my dear
Country sang their refrains.
And I’ll say yet for what I long:
To hear a girl’s voice chime
In at least one of my poor songs,
At least a single time.
1891-1917 Maksim Bahdanovich
Above the white down of the cherries, by Maksim Bahdanovich, 1910
"De la musique avant toute chose." - P. Verlaine
Above the white down of the cherries,
Like blue fire, soaring high,
Cleaving, weaving pathways, light and
Swift — a blue-winged butterfly.
All around the air is trembling
With the sun in golden strings,
And almost too quiet for hearing
It strums them with trembling wings.
And in waves the song is pouring,
Gentle gleaming paean to spring.
Is it not my heart that carols?
Is it not my heart that sings?
Is it not a bell-voiced zephyr,
Whispering in the thin plants, hides?
Or perhaps the tall dry rushes
Rustling at the waterside?
Not for us to understand it,
Nor discover it, nor learn:
The notes flying, quivering, ringing,
Let me not to thinking turn.
Song bursts forth and gushes into
The great world, unfettered, free.
But who is it that will hear it?
The poet alone, maybe.
Like Water, Like Fire, published in 1971, was the first book of Belarusian poems translated into a Western European language. Vera Rich's translation work and the publication were sponsored by UNESCO and the Byelorussian Soviet authorities, who appear to have had some editorial control over the content. That control resulted in Vera Rich's later 1982 companion volume The Images Swarm Free including works by Maksim Bahdanovich, Zmitrok Biadulia, and Ales Harun, that were absent from the first volume. Even with editorial control, the Byelorussian Soviet authorities seem to have insisted on the withdrawal of the first edition of Like Water, Like Fire book because they disapproved of the nationalist implications of the heraldic imagery on the original cover, hence the current plain typographic cover.
Both books can be difficult to find now, although Like Water, Like Fire is more likely to have found a home in libraries.
So, do you want to read rabid Belarusian nationalist poems banned by both the Russian Empire and the Byelorussian Soviet? Of course you do! Don't get your expectations up too much though, as they're very much products of their time....
1886-1941 Zmitrok Biadulia
In the Night Fields They Sing, by Zmitrok Biadulia, 1910
In the night fields they sing. Mist veils the campfires' gleam.
Song is a joyous sorrow. Like rivulets the voices,
And from the bushes, from the silvered clearings stream
Ballads like small bells, ballads that chime, rejoicing.
In the night fields they sing. Their words tell of wild woods,
And wild birds crying where the marsh-lands spread, unstable,
Sensitive summer whisper of wheat-ears ripe and good,
The fishing boat and, fair with gilding, the bright maples.
In the night fields they sing. Echoing through the night,
Like fans their voices rise to the stars, pearly-crying,
Sing louder, friends. O song, never do thou grow quiet,
And, maybe, eyes, like flints, shall set a spark-shower flying.
In the night fields they sing. Thither your singing send,
Where in the heart and breast it blazes and compresses.
You'll find a plenitude of fiery words, and then...
In conflagration's flame your song will find expression.
A Winter Tale, by Zmitrok Biadula, 1910
A snowy night hangs, a savage night hangs,
A grey pelt above forests’ wild tresses.
In white plumage of snow, in a white silk of snow,
Valleys, hills under rich snowy dresses.
In the wild of the woods, the age-slumbering woods,
Dwell a people, ill-natured, unspeaking.
In a palace of glass, on a bed all of glass
Lies a maiden with sun-bright hair, sleeping.
Go you, call her by name; go you, wake her again —
Then tall fir-trees will utter harsh creaking.
Then the tempest will moan, then the tempest will groan,
White-eyed winter complain with loud speaking.
Winter then, in alarm, winter then, fearing harm,
In a frenzy of frost will spin, swirling;
Like a horse without rein, like a grey-and-white flame,
The blind snowstorm will rush, rearing, whirling.
And the maid will sigh deep, stir in heavy-dreamed sleep,
With her fingers brush brows clear of hoar-frost,
She will gaze all around, unrestrained, all around,
Sad the grey wolves will howl in the forest.
Go you, rouse her again — and the spring comes again,
Over ploughland larks revel unstinting,
On the river, ice cracks, and away the floes break,
And the playful floods wash out the winter.
1887-1920 Ales Harun (exiled to Siberia by the Russian Empire)
To People, by Ales Harun, before 1914
I love the vault of stars above,
The earth so broad, so long,
The flat field, the humped hills I love,
The forest and its song.
And I love life, and folk, indeed,
The forms their souls imply,
I love to braid from hopes a wreath,
But I’m no poet. Why?
Some days my work keeps on the boil,
I slave away the time,
Until my shoulders creak with toil ...
Your heart will hear the chime,
You catch at one sound, you catch twain,
And more and more they throng,
Until they merge in one great train,
Ringing the whole day long.
The day is burned out. Home I go,
Off to bed. But at night
The lines of ringing notes still flow.
Sleep departs. Then I write.
Before my eyes in a great pack
The images swarm free.
And someone stands behind my back,
It seems, so close to me.
A pair of arms my neck entwine,
The silk of a girl’s braids,
The heart beats stronger, and the chime
In the soul does not fade ...
I look: the room is empty quite ...
Time, like a snake, slid by,
Beyond the window fades the night ...
But I’m no poet ... Why?
Because time eats my impetus,
Freedom comes rare and hard.
Poets like this abound with us,
The nation is a bard.
Here I have simply penned a mere
Fistful of my sad strains;
Sadness of my soul for my dear
Country sang their refrains.
And I’ll say yet for what I long:
To hear a girl’s voice chime
In at least one of my poor songs,
At least a single time.
1891-1917 Maksim Bahdanovich
Above the white down of the cherries, by Maksim Bahdanovich, 1910
"De la musique avant toute chose." - P. Verlaine
Above the white down of the cherries,
Like blue fire, soaring high,
Cleaving, weaving pathways, light and
Swift — a blue-winged butterfly.
All around the air is trembling
With the sun in golden strings,
And almost too quiet for hearing
It strums them with trembling wings.
And in waves the song is pouring,
Gentle gleaming paean to spring.
Is it not my heart that carols?
Is it not my heart that sings?
Is it not a bell-voiced zephyr,
Whispering in the thin plants, hides?
Or perhaps the tall dry rushes
Rustling at the waterside?
Not for us to understand it,
Nor discover it, nor learn:
The notes flying, quivering, ringing,
Let me not to thinking turn.
Song bursts forth and gushes into
The great world, unfettered, free.
But who is it that will hear it?
The poet alone, maybe.
52SassyLassy
Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy translated by Rosemary Edmonds 1966
first published in censored form in 1899
first full publication in Russian in England 1900
cover painting by Leonid Pasternak from a series of illustration he did for the book
Before the publication of Resurrection in 1899, it seemed that Leo Tolstoy had finished writing full length novels. It had been more than twenty years since the publication of Anna Karenina (1877), and more than thirty since War and Peace (1867 in serial form). In the meantime, his interests and ideas had changed dramatically.
No longer interested in portraying Russian life for the entertainment of his readers, he had become interested in a more spiritual life than that he had heretofore portrayed in his novels. He wanted an ethical focus to his art. The plight of the peasants, land reform, prison reform, spirituality: all had become of consuming interest to him, as he searched for ‘truth’. This clearly placed him outside the accepted beliefs of his class.
Prince Dmitri Ivanovitch Nekhlyudov is Tolstoy’s chosen instrument in this search for meaning, one which parallels Tolstoy’s in many ways. Selected for jury duty, Nekhlyudov was horrified to discover that the principal defendant in the murder trial had been a sort of ward of his aunts; a girl whom he had raped and left pregnant when she was only sixteen. Now years later, she was living as a prostitute in a brothel. Had he set her on this road to destruction? Should he make amends, and if so, how?
Wrongly convicted and sentenced to transportation in error, Maslova’s future appeared dire. Overcome by guilt, Nekhlyudov resolved to appeal her sentence, and if unsuccessful in that, accompany her to Siberia. Tolstoy uses this quest for justice to reveal the machinations of the Russian legal system, in all its self serving ways. The lack of interest in correcting this wrong shocked the prince. ‘After all, these things happen’ seemed to be the prevailing attitude.
At the same time, frustrated and guilty about the idle life he was living based on the labour of others, Nekhlyudov was trying to settle his estates by giving the land to the peasants. Here he encountered another kind of incomprehension at the other end of the social scale. The peasants could not believe such a thing was possible, and looked for the catch. Nobody in their world would just give away land.
Nekhlyudov explained his plan to the imprisoned Maslova, but she, with far more insight than the prince himself, replied
You want to save yourself through me. You had your pleasure from me in this world and now you want to get your salvation through me in the world to come.
Through Tolstoy, the reader is able to see the conditions that would lead to bloodbaths in the provinces during the early twentieth century. His unrelentingly harsh descriptions of the convict convoy, the tales told by the prisoners along the way, the conditions in the waystation prisons, the twin curses of poverty and starvation were so shocking and revealing that the book was highly censored in Russia. Its first complete Russian edition appeared first in England in 1900, with the title page proclaiming ‘not mutilated by the censor’.
Tolstoy’s criticism of religion as an instrument of power and suppression was so strong that he was officially excommunicated in 1901. However, it is not actually a Resurrection in the Christian sense that the imperfect protagonist was seeking, rather it was a rebirth, a rising from the ashes of his old corrupt self. However, Tolstoy was portraying an imperfect world, and so this too was imperfect.
The final sentence of the novel hints at a sequel, but that was not to be. Perhaps it is better that way, for in life as in art, there is no final resolution.
___________
This was my second reading of Resurrection, both times reading the Penguin edition translated in 1966 by Rosemary Edmonds. It is a long novel (568 pages), but should I read it again, I would read the newer Oxford World’s Classics edition, 2009 with an “updated” 1900 Louise Maude translation, who was an actual friend of Tolstoy, or the newer Penguin edition, translated by Antony Briggs 2009. It’s difficult to imagine anything was left out in my old Penguin, but the notes in either of the new editions and another take on the language would make them of interest.
I also discovered a five part audio version of the Lousie Maude translation read by David Barnes on YouTube, but found it positively soporific and bailed after a few minutes.
53SassyLassy
As mentioned above, Leonid Pasternak illustrated Resurrection, and I suspect that like some of the illustrations done by George Cruikshank for Oliver Twist, his work made as much of an impression on the readers as the actual novel. Unfortunately the grittiest ones don't copy, but here are two:
Maslova in the defendants' box
The Jury
Maslova in the defendants' box
The Jury
54spiralsheep
>52 SassyLassy: "You want to save yourself through me. You had your pleasure from me in this world and now you want to get your salvation through me in the world to come."
That's quite a quote!
Great illustrations too. Thanks for posting those.
That's quite a quote!
Great illustrations too. Thanks for posting those.
55SassyLassy
>54 spiralsheep: That quote sounded positively biblical to me, but the insight was amazing.
Maslova emerges as a strong character, but we mostly see her through Nekhyudov's eyes, so it takes some time to realize it.
>51 spiralsheep: Those poems were interesting in that while they were all different styles, the natural world comes through so clearly.
...time eats my impetus - what a line.
_______________
It's been pretty quiet around here - what are you reading?
Maslova emerges as a strong character, but we mostly see her through Nekhyudov's eyes, so it takes some time to realize it.
>51 spiralsheep: Those poems were interesting in that while they were all different styles, the natural world comes through so clearly.
...time eats my impetus - what a line.
_______________
It's been pretty quiet around here - what are you reading?
56thorold
I got sidetracked into lots of other things, but I’ve been plodding through Natasha’s Dance, hoping to post a review of that shortly. And I’m a little way into a fat collection of Chekhov stories, which I’m reading at the rate of two or three a day. Figes has also sent me off on another sidetrack into Soviet films...
57spiralsheep
>55 SassyLassy: "Those poems were interesting in that while they were all different styles, the natural world comes through so clearly."
Yes, there's the straightforward love of the Belarusian (Mother)land but also expressing nationalism through nature symbolism:
maidens = Belarusia as Motherland,
sun = Socialist Revolutionaries (political party),
fires / burning = revolutionary and nationalist feelings and actions,
spring / thaw / summer = independence from the Russian Empire,
night / mist / winter = Russian Imperial occupation,
forests / marshes = sites of resistance to Imperial occupation,
songs / poems = Belarusian culture,
birds / butterflies = Belarusian artists and activists.
Of course they also work as nature poems and love poems and hopes for other types of personal freedom. I'm sure it goes without saying that some Belarusian nationalists were also poor, women, homosexual, Jewish, Muslim, etc.
I've finished my Belarusian reading for now and after a century in Sierra Leone I'm currently on my second African road trip novel in a row - (1) Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique, and (2) Tunisia, via Libya and Egypt, to Lebanon - so my contribution to this topic will mostly be admiring other people's posts. :-)
Yes, there's the straightforward love of the Belarusian (Mother)land but also expressing nationalism through nature symbolism:
maidens = Belarusia as Motherland,
sun = Socialist Revolutionaries (political party),
fires / burning = revolutionary and nationalist feelings and actions,
spring / thaw / summer = independence from the Russian Empire,
night / mist / winter = Russian Imperial occupation,
forests / marshes = sites of resistance to Imperial occupation,
songs / poems = Belarusian culture,
birds / butterflies = Belarusian artists and activists.
Of course they also work as nature poems and love poems and hopes for other types of personal freedom. I'm sure it goes without saying that some Belarusian nationalists were also poor, women, homosexual, Jewish, Muslim, etc.
I've finished my Belarusian reading for now and after a century in Sierra Leone I'm currently on my second African road trip novel in a row - (1) Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique, and (2) Tunisia, via Libya and Egypt, to Lebanon - so my contribution to this topic will mostly be admiring other people's posts. :-)
58Dilara86
So many interesting titles!
I finished Les ailes (Wings) by Mikhail Kuzmin, about a young gay man's path to self-acceptance through the mentoring of older men and the study of Greek authors. It feels very familiar, but I racked my brain for other novels with the same themes and couldn't name one... Maybe Maurice?
It's quite short - less than 200 pages. The "modernist" writing, with disjointed paragraphs and direct speech from unintroduced characters for example, requires a bit of concentration. It's also quite fun and well-observed. I liked the way Kuzmin peppers the narrative with snippets of background conversations with no forewarning. It takes some getting used to, but it's also very lifelike. The homosexuality theme, while central and unambiguous to the discerning eye, isn't half as explicit as I was led to believe. I'm sure the innocent would just think it's about forming strong friendships with other men, being an aesthete with a love of Greek literature, and avoiding marriage because all women are hags! This book was written in 1905, after all...
Another short work I read for this theme is The Read Laugh by Leonid Andreev. I think it should be required reading for anyone contemplating going to war. It's a haunting multiple-voice novella describing the horrors of the Russian-Japanese war and the resulting PTSD.
I finished Les ailes (Wings) by Mikhail Kuzmin, about a young gay man's path to self-acceptance through the mentoring of older men and the study of Greek authors. It feels very familiar, but I racked my brain for other novels with the same themes and couldn't name one... Maybe Maurice?
It's quite short - less than 200 pages. The "modernist" writing, with disjointed paragraphs and direct speech from unintroduced characters for example, requires a bit of concentration. It's also quite fun and well-observed. I liked the way Kuzmin peppers the narrative with snippets of background conversations with no forewarning. It takes some getting used to, but it's also very lifelike. The homosexuality theme, while central and unambiguous to the discerning eye, isn't half as explicit as I was led to believe. I'm sure the innocent would just think it's about forming strong friendships with other men, being an aesthete with a love of Greek literature, and avoiding marriage because all women are hags! This book was written in 1905, after all...
Another short work I read for this theme is The Read Laugh by Leonid Andreev. I think it should be required reading for anyone contemplating going to war. It's a haunting multiple-voice novella describing the horrors of the Russian-Japanese war and the resulting PTSD.
59thorold
>58 Dilara86: I've still got Kuzmin on the TBR shelf, hope to get to him very soon.
There aren't many gay love stories from the early 1900s in English, and those there are are mostly very heavily encoded — some short stories by Saki, E. F. Benson, Henry James, even D. H. Lawrence get claimed as "early LGBT writing", but you have to read them looking for that. There's a good selection in Mark Mitchell's Pages passed from hand to hand. For a full-on gay-men-and-Plato novel, you have to wait for Maurice (published in 1971 after half a century in the back of a drawer) or for Mary Renault's The charioteer in 1953.
The postman just arrived with Speak, memory and Chekhov's Sakhalin Island...
---
As promised:
Natasha's dance : a cultural history of Russia (2002) by Orlando Figes (UK, 1959- )
Figes takes us through about two centuries of literature, theatre, music and visual arts in Russia in the space of a little less than 600 pages, starting more or less with Pushkin's generation and ending with that of Nabokov and Shostakovich. That means we don't get very much about any one topic, and a lot of potentially interesting things get left out (e.g. Tchaikovsky, who barely gets more than a footnote). But we do end up with a very handy overview of who the main players were, and why they matter, and there is a generous bibliography to get us started with further reading.
There are some rather TV-like narrative tricks used to make the book more "inviting", such as picking a particular person or house as a kind of viewpoint character in each chapter — in particular, the Sheremetev Palace ("Fountain House") in St Petersburg, where Akhmatova had an apartment for a long time, and which allows Figes to establish a narrative bridge between the late 18th century and the Stalin-period. Fortunately, he doesn't invest too much in this fashionable silliness (as far as I know, the book never did result in a commission for a TV series), it's mostly just confined to a few pages at the start and end of each section, and only detracts a little from the interest of the book.
Figes seems to be equally comfortable talking about literature and music, which is unusual, but obviously very important for a book like this. On the musical side, he is especially interested in Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, and he has useful, if not necessarily very original, things to say about all of them. It was interesting to see him dismantling a lot of the usual notions about traditional sources for Russian music: most of the folk tradition (especially outside European Russia) seems to have been invented retrospectively by practitioners of art music. In literature most of the usual suspects get a fair crack of the whip — Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th century; Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Nabokov in the 20th. Others (Gorky, Pasternak, Bunin, etc.) get a quick burst of the spotlight from time to time but aren't discussed in detail.
There's quite a detailed discussion of the Moscow Arts Theatre, of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes and of the early days of Soviet cinema (Vertov and Eisenstein), but not very much else about performing arts: even Chekhov's plays are passed over fairly swiftly. Painting and sculpture also get less space than you might expect.
A very useful, accessible introduction, but — inevitably for a book with such a wide scope — you're likely to find it rather thin on anything you already know something about.
There aren't many gay love stories from the early 1900s in English, and those there are are mostly very heavily encoded — some short stories by Saki, E. F. Benson, Henry James, even D. H. Lawrence get claimed as "early LGBT writing", but you have to read them looking for that. There's a good selection in Mark Mitchell's Pages passed from hand to hand. For a full-on gay-men-and-Plato novel, you have to wait for Maurice (published in 1971 after half a century in the back of a drawer) or for Mary Renault's The charioteer in 1953.
The postman just arrived with Speak, memory and Chekhov's Sakhalin Island...
---
As promised:
Natasha's dance : a cultural history of Russia (2002) by Orlando Figes (UK, 1959- )
Figes takes us through about two centuries of literature, theatre, music and visual arts in Russia in the space of a little less than 600 pages, starting more or less with Pushkin's generation and ending with that of Nabokov and Shostakovich. That means we don't get very much about any one topic, and a lot of potentially interesting things get left out (e.g. Tchaikovsky, who barely gets more than a footnote). But we do end up with a very handy overview of who the main players were, and why they matter, and there is a generous bibliography to get us started with further reading.
There are some rather TV-like narrative tricks used to make the book more "inviting", such as picking a particular person or house as a kind of viewpoint character in each chapter — in particular, the Sheremetev Palace ("Fountain House") in St Petersburg, where Akhmatova had an apartment for a long time, and which allows Figes to establish a narrative bridge between the late 18th century and the Stalin-period. Fortunately, he doesn't invest too much in this fashionable silliness (as far as I know, the book never did result in a commission for a TV series), it's mostly just confined to a few pages at the start and end of each section, and only detracts a little from the interest of the book.
Figes seems to be equally comfortable talking about literature and music, which is unusual, but obviously very important for a book like this. On the musical side, he is especially interested in Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, and he has useful, if not necessarily very original, things to say about all of them. It was interesting to see him dismantling a lot of the usual notions about traditional sources for Russian music: most of the folk tradition (especially outside European Russia) seems to have been invented retrospectively by practitioners of art music. In literature most of the usual suspects get a fair crack of the whip — Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th century; Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Nabokov in the 20th. Others (Gorky, Pasternak, Bunin, etc.) get a quick burst of the spotlight from time to time but aren't discussed in detail.
There's quite a detailed discussion of the Moscow Arts Theatre, of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes and of the early days of Soviet cinema (Vertov and Eisenstein), but not very much else about performing arts: even Chekhov's plays are passed over fairly swiftly. Painting and sculpture also get less space than you might expect.
A very useful, accessible introduction, but — inevitably for a book with such a wide scope — you're likely to find it rather thin on anything you already know something about.
60Dilara86
>59 thorold: Thanks, that's fascinating. I've added Pages passed from hand to hand to my wishlist.
61spiralsheep
>58 Dilara86: If I recall correctly, in anglophone literature it was mostly women who wanted to set up fictional single-sex (women-only) utopias while gay men preferred to run away individually to imagined Arcadian forests with various versions of the god Pan. I've often wondered if so many of those writers decided against all-male communities because they'd barely survived single-sex boarding schools.
>59 thorold: "It was interesting to see him dismantling a lot of the usual notions about traditional sources for Russian music: most of the folk tradition (especially outside European Russia) seems to have been invented retrospectively by practitioners of art music."
I hope that means Figes claims the classical composers were faking sources and isn't some dodgy ignorance about peasants making and enjoying their own "folk" music. (Klezmer is still quite popular... and I know from experience that Georgians are still very proud of their local musical traditions.)
>59 thorold: "It was interesting to see him dismantling a lot of the usual notions about traditional sources for Russian music: most of the folk tradition (especially outside European Russia) seems to have been invented retrospectively by practitioners of art music."
I hope that means Figes claims the classical composers were faking sources and isn't some dodgy ignorance about peasants making and enjoying their own "folk" music. (Klezmer is still quite popular... and I know from experience that Georgians are still very proud of their local musical traditions.)
62SassyLassy
This will relate to this theme believe it or not.
BBC Scotland is naturally full of stories about Sean Connery, following his death this past weekend. Here is a role which provokes some cognitive dissonance for me:
Connery as Count Vronsky (Anna Karenina) from a 1961 BBC production
BBC Scotland is naturally full of stories about Sean Connery, following his death this past weekend. Here is a role which provokes some cognitive dissonance for me:
Connery as Count Vronsky (Anna Karenina) from a 1961 BBC production
63SassyLassy
>57 spiralsheep: fascinating symbolism - thanks for posting that
>58 Dilara86: Leonid Andreyev is next up for me too, with a different book, but The Read Laugh sounds certainly sounds worthwhile.
>59 thorold: A very useful, accessible introduction, but — inevitably for a book with such a wide scope — you're likely to find it rather thin on anything you already know something about.
I had the same impression about Natasha's Dance, but it is as you say a very useful introduction, and good introductions are often hard to find.
>61 spiralsheep: Klezmer is often hard to find too. I do enjoy the more mournful side of it.
>58 Dilara86: Leonid Andreyev is next up for me too, with a different book, but The Read Laugh sounds certainly sounds worthwhile.
>59 thorold: A very useful, accessible introduction, but — inevitably for a book with such a wide scope — you're likely to find it rather thin on anything you already know something about.
I had the same impression about Natasha's Dance, but it is as you say a very useful introduction, and good introductions are often hard to find.
>61 spiralsheep: Klezmer is often hard to find too. I do enjoy the more mournful side of it.
64Dilara86
>61 spiralsheep: This is getting off-topic, but if you can recommend early all-women utopias, I'm all ears! I've read The Gate to Women's Country and Herland...
>62 SassyLassy: Cognitive dissonance indeed ;-) Having said that, I like him better in this picture than dressed in a tuxedo, or god forbid, in that awful leather nappy he wore in Zardoz.
>62 SassyLassy: Cognitive dissonance indeed ;-) Having said that, I like him better in this picture than dressed in a tuxedo, or god forbid, in that awful leather nappy he wore in Zardoz.
65spiralsheep
>64 Dilara86: I'll post a comment on your profile later but this is relevant to Reading Globally so: Sultana's Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. I'm betting you've already heard of this and possibly read it too.
ETA link to full text:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sultana%27s_Dream
/ETA
>63 SassyLassy: Before 'rona murdered live music Klezmer was easy to find in the pubs around here... amongst other Eastern European folk musics. ;-)
ETA link to full text:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sultana%27s_Dream
/ETA
>63 SassyLassy: Before 'rona murdered live music Klezmer was easy to find in the pubs around here... amongst other Eastern European folk musics. ;-)
66thorold
>61 spiralsheep: I hope that means Figes claims the classical composers were faking sources and isn't some dodgy ignorance about peasants making and enjoying their own "folk" music.
Yes: in the 18th-19th century he's talking about Glinka's "Russian" style, which was actually invented by his predecessor the Venetian expat composer Cavos. And in the 20th century the Soviet need to have socialist forms of national culture from the constituent republics for display purposes that meant sending music students out from Moscow to write "Uzbekh" or "Kazakh" works for the new opera houses there, or the official folk ensembles all created on the "Red Army Choir" model.
The main source for most "Russian" themes in classical music (including western composers like Beethoven) seems to have been a collection of folk-songs made by Lvov and Prach in the 1790s, which was apparently basically authentic, but cleaned up (musically) to make it salonfähig.
Yes: in the 18th-19th century he's talking about Glinka's "Russian" style, which was actually invented by his predecessor the Venetian expat composer Cavos. And in the 20th century the Soviet need to have socialist forms of national culture from the constituent republics for display purposes that meant sending music students out from Moscow to write "Uzbekh" or "Kazakh" works for the new opera houses there, or the official folk ensembles all created on the "Red Army Choir" model.
The main source for most "Russian" themes in classical music (including western composers like Beethoven) seems to have been a collection of folk-songs made by Lvov and Prach in the 1790s, which was apparently basically authentic, but cleaned up (musically) to make it salonfähig.
67spiralsheep
>66 thorold: Thank you for the expansion comment. Very interesting! And not much different to the fauxk music sources and heavily laundered real folk used by many (not all) other European classical composers.
'official folk ensembles all created on the "Red Army Choir" model'
To be fair, most traditional part songs are scalable up to a full chorus and were often sung in varying circumstances from private homes through pubs or churches to public parades.
I've often wondered if the "Russian" basso profundo tradition owes a debt to Mongolian and related Asian musical roots but I've never followed it up.
'official folk ensembles all created on the "Red Army Choir" model'
To be fair, most traditional part songs are scalable up to a full chorus and were often sung in varying circumstances from private homes through pubs or churches to public parades.
I've often wondered if the "Russian" basso profundo tradition owes a debt to Mongolian and related Asian musical roots but I've never followed it up.
68LolaWalser
I hope I didn't mislead anyone about anything. I wrote about Kuzmin in 2012 here, expressly noting his subtleness:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/136227#3589399
I added the touchstone now so presumably that post should start appearing in the "Mentions" list.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/136227#3589399
I added the touchstone now so presumably that post should start appearing in the "Mentions" list.
69Dilara86
>68 LolaWalser: You definitely did not mislead me! I was thinking of the people who were scandalised by Wings. How easily shocked - and sensitive to gay themes - they were... (I know, it was 1905.)
70thorold
I wanted to read some Chekhov: out of the bewildering array of selections and translations of his stories I somewhat arbitrarily picked this one, mostly because it happened to be newly-published:
Fifty-two stories (1883-1898) (2020) by Anton Chekhov (Russia, 1860-1904), translated by Richard Pevear (US, 1943- ) & Larissa Volokhonsky (Russia, US, 1945- )
This is the second selection of Chekhov short stories Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated: in 2000, they published a first batch of thirty of the best-known stories as well as a collection of the short novels. This new batch includes a lot of short sketches, many of them only two or three pages long, as well as a dozen or so more substantial stories.
Most are set in small towns or on country estates, usually with characters who are small landowners or minor officials — teachers, priests, civil servants, junior officers, and of course doctors. Servants and peasants are rarely at the centre of the stories: when they appear it is often in order to demonstrate how blind even the most enlightened of the educated characters are to the lives their social inferiors lead. But the stories in this selection at least are rarely overtly political: they sometimes illustrate things that are wrong with the world, but they don't offer to solve them, and they often make fun of idealists with theoretical political programmes.
The short sketches are often little more than anecdotes, with a situation — touching, comic or absurd — summed up with amazing economy, and a punchline that somehow subverts what we've just read. In the longer stories, characters struggle with financial problems, romantic entanglements, or the many kinds of rural pettiness, and it's interesting to see how often Chekhov is more interested in setting up the problem and confronting his characters with it than he is in solving it. Often the ending is left to the reader to imagine.
Chekhov was clearly an absolute master of the form, and hugely influential: that is actually a large part of the problem with stories like this, because the chances are that we've read half a dozen later stories "inspired by" before we see the original that inspired them...
Pevear and Volokhonsky get a lot of stick from critics, possibly mostly inspired by the massive, production-line scale of their attack on the classics of Russian literature, almost all of which they have translated by now. Their language is often said to be flat, uninspired, unliterary (etc.). Obviously you can't really judge a translation unless you are in the happy position of not needing one, but I put a few passages from these translations side-by-side with the Constance Garnett translations available from Project Gutenberg, and failed to see any huge differences. Sometimes Garnett uses a British word where Pevear and Volokhonsky use an American one, sometimes they use a less colourful adjective than she does, and occasionally there is a weird difference of interpretation ("fifty acres" instead of "sixty acres") that probably comes down to one or other side being better informed about 1890s Russia. Pevear and Volokhonsky do make a point of translating the jokey names Chekhov gives to some of his characters, which you might or might not like. But there's no obvious systematic difference in syntax or sentence structure: I suspect that Chekhov must be writing in such a plain, straightforward way that he doesn't give his translators enough scope to allow them to go off the rails at all.
You probably wouldn't buy this for the translations: its main selling point seems to be the way it gives a broad cross-section of Chekhov's writing. There are also some reasonably useful notes, filling us in on details of Russian life and culture relevant to the background of the stories, and a short introduction by Pevear that gives an outline of their reasons for picking the stories they have (but without mentioning that all the most famous stories are in their earlier book!).
Fifty-two stories (1883-1898) (2020) by Anton Chekhov (Russia, 1860-1904), translated by Richard Pevear (US, 1943- ) & Larissa Volokhonsky (Russia, US, 1945- )
This is the second selection of Chekhov short stories Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated: in 2000, they published a first batch of thirty of the best-known stories as well as a collection of the short novels. This new batch includes a lot of short sketches, many of them only two or three pages long, as well as a dozen or so more substantial stories.
Most are set in small towns or on country estates, usually with characters who are small landowners or minor officials — teachers, priests, civil servants, junior officers, and of course doctors. Servants and peasants are rarely at the centre of the stories: when they appear it is often in order to demonstrate how blind even the most enlightened of the educated characters are to the lives their social inferiors lead. But the stories in this selection at least are rarely overtly political: they sometimes illustrate things that are wrong with the world, but they don't offer to solve them, and they often make fun of idealists with theoretical political programmes.
The short sketches are often little more than anecdotes, with a situation — touching, comic or absurd — summed up with amazing economy, and a punchline that somehow subverts what we've just read. In the longer stories, characters struggle with financial problems, romantic entanglements, or the many kinds of rural pettiness, and it's interesting to see how often Chekhov is more interested in setting up the problem and confronting his characters with it than he is in solving it. Often the ending is left to the reader to imagine.
Chekhov was clearly an absolute master of the form, and hugely influential: that is actually a large part of the problem with stories like this, because the chances are that we've read half a dozen later stories "inspired by" before we see the original that inspired them...
Pevear and Volokhonsky get a lot of stick from critics, possibly mostly inspired by the massive, production-line scale of their attack on the classics of Russian literature, almost all of which they have translated by now. Their language is often said to be flat, uninspired, unliterary (etc.). Obviously you can't really judge a translation unless you are in the happy position of not needing one, but I put a few passages from these translations side-by-side with the Constance Garnett translations available from Project Gutenberg, and failed to see any huge differences. Sometimes Garnett uses a British word where Pevear and Volokhonsky use an American one, sometimes they use a less colourful adjective than she does, and occasionally there is a weird difference of interpretation ("fifty acres" instead of "sixty acres") that probably comes down to one or other side being better informed about 1890s Russia. Pevear and Volokhonsky do make a point of translating the jokey names Chekhov gives to some of his characters, which you might or might not like. But there's no obvious systematic difference in syntax or sentence structure: I suspect that Chekhov must be writing in such a plain, straightforward way that he doesn't give his translators enough scope to allow them to go off the rails at all.
You probably wouldn't buy this for the translations: its main selling point seems to be the way it gives a broad cross-section of Chekhov's writing. There are also some reasonably useful notes, filling us in on details of Russian life and culture relevant to the background of the stories, and a short introduction by Pevear that gives an outline of their reasons for picking the stories they have (but without mentioning that all the most famous stories are in their earlier book!).
71thorold
I’m enjoying Michael Green’s edition of Selected prose and poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin (Review coming shortly). It has some of the best subtly disturbing misprints I’ve seen for ages. My favourite so far is Truth comes before error, clam precedes turmoil. But there’s also the fine passage where Alexander the Great came out to the troops and again tried to convince them of the obvious impossibility of immorality, even in his, Alexander’s, divine guise.
>58 Dilara86: The other “English counterpart” who came to mind immediately when I started reading Kuzmin is Ronald Firbank. Very much the same way of handling dialogue, and that sense of unspecified naughty things happening just out of sight.
>58 Dilara86: The other “English counterpart” who came to mind immediately when I started reading Kuzmin is Ronald Firbank. Very much the same way of handling dialogue, and that sense of unspecified naughty things happening just out of sight.
72Dilara86
Speaking of subtle gay hints... I've just read Transsibérien, a travelogue by the Académicien and gay activist Dominique Fernandez. In it, he describes the journey he took in the Trans-Siberian in 2010, as part of a group of French and Russian writers and photographers. They stop at towns along the way to give talks, visit cultural sites, etc. At one of these talks, a shy young man gives him a commemorative coin with Tchaikovsky's head on it, which Fernandez understands means the man was gay (as was Tchaikovsky). So clearly, discretion is still very much needed in Russia these days. It's a vicious circle: the more intolerant a place is, the more subtle and careful people have to be, but then, the potential for misunderstandings grows, as do repercussions for getting it wrong...
73spiralsheep
>71 thorold: "the fine passage where Alexander the Great 'came out to the troops and again tried to convince them of the obvious impossibility of immorality, even in his, Alexander’s, divine guise.' "
A fine passage indeed.
A fine passage indeed.
74thorold
My take on Kuzmin:
Selected prose & poetry (1980, 2013) by Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (Russia, 1872-1936), edited and translated by Michael Green (US, 1937-2018)
This collection, compiled and translated by Michael Green, who taught Russian literature at UC Irvine, contains the short novel Wings and the play The Venetian madcaps, as well as a dozen or so short stories and several poems.
Wings(1906) sets the tone for the rest of the book: young men who are mysteriously reluctant to fall in love with eligible girls, oddly close to their male friends/servants, and keep a bust of Antinous in their living-rooms (apparently this was before the fashion for Michelangelo's David). Bright, apparently inconsequential drawing-room chatter, usually at cross-purposes. Trips to the opera to see Tristan. Knowing allusions to Tchaikovsky. Holidays on the Volga. Short, inconclusive scenes, little or no linking narrative or description. All very fin-de-siècle. But much more upbeat and joyful than similar works by English and German-speaking contemporaries. Fun in Venice, rather than Death there.
Kuzmin doesn't actually get to be sexually explicit, but even when his characters are too obtuse to notice what's going on in front of their noses, he makes sure that we understand that this is all about men falling in love with other men and (sooner or later) going to bed together. He doesn't see any need to defend or to condemn that. Apparently the Russian censor (at least before the revolution) was too busy looking for political subversion to waste time on mere sexual hi-jinks.
The short stories mostly develop similar plots to Wings, sometimes shifting to female narrators or moving the scene from modern Petersburg to classical antiquity or 18th century Venice.
Fish-scales in the net is a short collection of aphorisms or epigrams inspired by Kuzmin's reading, designed to look like random jottings from a notebook, but presumably actually prepared for publication by Kuzmin himself.
The Venetian madcaps (1912) is a bizarre musical farce, with a plot that draws on Figaro, Don Giovanni, commedia dell'arte and Shakespearean cross-dressing. The Count is in love with his friend Narcisetto(!), the Marquise is planning a tableau vivant in which her maid Maria will appear nude as Venus, and at least two young women are, separately, plotting to seduce the Count. For some reason, everyone has to dress up as everyone else in the second act, and it's anyone's guess what happens. Green's real interest seems to be the theatre, and this is by far the most natural-sounding translation in the collection. It also comes with a set of black-and-white reproductions of costume designs (presumably by Kuzmin himself?).
Of the poems, the autobiographical cycle The trout breaks the ice (1928) looks as though it should be the most interesting, but I found it very difficult to read in Green's translation. It's hard to know when rhyme-schemes and metres come and go in the middle of a section whether that's a deliberate effect of the poem, or the translator simply failing to keep up. The "Alexandrian Songs", mostly in free verse, seem to work much better.
I read this in a 2013 reprint of the original edition from 1980. It looks as though some of the ludicrously large number of typographical errors might be the result of the reprinting process, but that surely can't account for the way Green's footnotes end a short way into Wings and never resume. Especially in the piece Fish-scales in the net, it would have been useful not to need to Google all the names Kuzmin drops in passing. It's particularly irritating that there's no summary anywhere of when and how the individual pieces were first published: some of the information is there in Green's introduction, but other items are mentioned nowhere at all.
Also, even in 1980, the editor of a collection likely to be bought mostly by readers with an interest in LGBT literature isn't doing himself any favours with his audience by going on about "the word 'gay', so widely used in our day, and often so inappropriately". Astonishing that the publishers didn't think to delete this quite irrelevant reactionary whinge in the new edition.
Selected prose & poetry (1980, 2013) by Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (Russia, 1872-1936), edited and translated by Michael Green (US, 1937-2018)
This collection, compiled and translated by Michael Green, who taught Russian literature at UC Irvine, contains the short novel Wings and the play The Venetian madcaps, as well as a dozen or so short stories and several poems.
Wings(1906) sets the tone for the rest of the book: young men who are mysteriously reluctant to fall in love with eligible girls, oddly close to their male friends/servants, and keep a bust of Antinous in their living-rooms (apparently this was before the fashion for Michelangelo's David). Bright, apparently inconsequential drawing-room chatter, usually at cross-purposes. Trips to the opera to see Tristan. Knowing allusions to Tchaikovsky. Holidays on the Volga. Short, inconclusive scenes, little or no linking narrative or description. All very fin-de-siècle. But much more upbeat and joyful than similar works by English and German-speaking contemporaries. Fun in Venice, rather than Death there.
Kuzmin doesn't actually get to be sexually explicit, but even when his characters are too obtuse to notice what's going on in front of their noses, he makes sure that we understand that this is all about men falling in love with other men and (sooner or later) going to bed together. He doesn't see any need to defend or to condemn that. Apparently the Russian censor (at least before the revolution) was too busy looking for political subversion to waste time on mere sexual hi-jinks.
The short stories mostly develop similar plots to Wings, sometimes shifting to female narrators or moving the scene from modern Petersburg to classical antiquity or 18th century Venice.
Fish-scales in the net is a short collection of aphorisms or epigrams inspired by Kuzmin's reading, designed to look like random jottings from a notebook, but presumably actually prepared for publication by Kuzmin himself.
The Venetian madcaps (1912) is a bizarre musical farce, with a plot that draws on Figaro, Don Giovanni, commedia dell'arte and Shakespearean cross-dressing. The Count is in love with his friend Narcisetto(!), the Marquise is planning a tableau vivant in which her maid Maria will appear nude as Venus, and at least two young women are, separately, plotting to seduce the Count. For some reason, everyone has to dress up as everyone else in the second act, and it's anyone's guess what happens. Green's real interest seems to be the theatre, and this is by far the most natural-sounding translation in the collection. It also comes with a set of black-and-white reproductions of costume designs (presumably by Kuzmin himself?).
Of the poems, the autobiographical cycle The trout breaks the ice (1928) looks as though it should be the most interesting, but I found it very difficult to read in Green's translation. It's hard to know when rhyme-schemes and metres come and go in the middle of a section whether that's a deliberate effect of the poem, or the translator simply failing to keep up. The "Alexandrian Songs", mostly in free verse, seem to work much better.
I read this in a 2013 reprint of the original edition from 1980. It looks as though some of the ludicrously large number of typographical errors might be the result of the reprinting process, but that surely can't account for the way Green's footnotes end a short way into Wings and never resume. Especially in the piece Fish-scales in the net, it would have been useful not to need to Google all the names Kuzmin drops in passing. It's particularly irritating that there's no summary anywhere of when and how the individual pieces were first published: some of the information is there in Green's introduction, but other items are mentioned nowhere at all.
Also, even in 1980, the editor of a collection likely to be bought mostly by readers with an interest in LGBT literature isn't doing himself any favours with his audience by going on about "the word 'gay', so widely used in our day, and often so inappropriately". Astonishing that the publishers didn't think to delete this quite irrelevant reactionary whinge in the new edition.
75thorold
And something that falls slightly outside the period by an author who was a few hundred metres away from being a Russian:
Reisen nach Galizien und in die Sowjetunion. Reisereportagen (2016) by Joseph Roth (Austria, 1894-1939) Audiobook, narrated by Jan Koester
This collection of Roth's newspaper reports on Russia and Galicia in the mid-1920s seems to have been put together specially for this audiobook edition, but there are quite a few collections with similar contents available in book form, in English as well as German.
Before establishing himself as a novelist with Job and Radetzkymarsch, Roth was already a top-flight journalist, working for some of the biggest Berlin and Frankfurt papers. His writing here does often have a tendency towards rhetorical bombast designed to floor any hint of disagreement from the reader, but it's (mostly) used in a good cause, to expose silliness and hypocrisy and to engage our compassion for the victims of war, hunger, poverty and disease, things that were not hard to find in Russia and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Civil War.
The essays range fairly widely: the collection starts off with Roth painting comic pictures of the fashion for "Ukrainian" culture in twenties Berlin (he points out that most of the things using that label weren't Ukrainian at all) and making gentle fun of the Russian émigré community in Berlin and Paris; then we move on to essays where he combines memories of Galicia during the war with its present shattered state (he grew up in a small town in that region). The main part of the collection is an extended trip to the Soviet Union in the second half of 1926. He spends time in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev; he travels on the Volga and visits Baku. He's generally impressed by what the new revolutionary government has achieved, and he's unequivocal in his condemnation of Czarist Russia. He approves of the Soviet idea of autonomy for ethnic groups — and in particular the abolition of antisemitism — but he raises doubts about how sustainable it will all be, especially in the Caucasus where the many nations all overlap with each other and are sitting on important mineral resources. He also wonders about whether Jewish identity, defined as it is by religion, makes any sense in a secular state. At the moment (1926) the Soviet Union is an attractive place for Jews to live, but how long will that go on? He didn't exactly foresee Stalin, but he certainly put his finger on some of the weak points of the new state.
Something he singles out for particular criticism is the New Economic Policy and the aggressive class of petty-bourgeois entrepreneurs who are emerging in Russian society, undermining the attractive egalitarian ideas of the revolution and threatening to turn it into something no better than its bourgeois capitalist neighbours. Well, we all know how that panned out, both in the short term and in the long term.
On the Soviet emancipation of women he is a little less than enlightened: whilst agreeing that the way the marriage market worked for peasant women in Czarist times was unacceptable in the modern world, he is very unhappy with the unromantic, "hygienic" Soviet approach to sex and relationships. He feels that (bourgeois) women should be making themselves beautiful for his amusement, not dressing in functional clothes and working in factories. He also seems to be suspiciously well-informed about the shortage of prostitutes in Moscow...
Altogether, a very lively and entertaining snapshot of Soviet life in the interregnum between Lenin and Stalin.
Reisen nach Galizien und in die Sowjetunion. Reisereportagen (2016) by Joseph Roth (Austria, 1894-1939) Audiobook, narrated by Jan Koester
This collection of Roth's newspaper reports on Russia and Galicia in the mid-1920s seems to have been put together specially for this audiobook edition, but there are quite a few collections with similar contents available in book form, in English as well as German.
Before establishing himself as a novelist with Job and Radetzkymarsch, Roth was already a top-flight journalist, working for some of the biggest Berlin and Frankfurt papers. His writing here does often have a tendency towards rhetorical bombast designed to floor any hint of disagreement from the reader, but it's (mostly) used in a good cause, to expose silliness and hypocrisy and to engage our compassion for the victims of war, hunger, poverty and disease, things that were not hard to find in Russia and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Civil War.
The essays range fairly widely: the collection starts off with Roth painting comic pictures of the fashion for "Ukrainian" culture in twenties Berlin (he points out that most of the things using that label weren't Ukrainian at all) and making gentle fun of the Russian émigré community in Berlin and Paris; then we move on to essays where he combines memories of Galicia during the war with its present shattered state (he grew up in a small town in that region). The main part of the collection is an extended trip to the Soviet Union in the second half of 1926. He spends time in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev; he travels on the Volga and visits Baku. He's generally impressed by what the new revolutionary government has achieved, and he's unequivocal in his condemnation of Czarist Russia. He approves of the Soviet idea of autonomy for ethnic groups — and in particular the abolition of antisemitism — but he raises doubts about how sustainable it will all be, especially in the Caucasus where the many nations all overlap with each other and are sitting on important mineral resources. He also wonders about whether Jewish identity, defined as it is by religion, makes any sense in a secular state. At the moment (1926) the Soviet Union is an attractive place for Jews to live, but how long will that go on? He didn't exactly foresee Stalin, but he certainly put his finger on some of the weak points of the new state.
Something he singles out for particular criticism is the New Economic Policy and the aggressive class of petty-bourgeois entrepreneurs who are emerging in Russian society, undermining the attractive egalitarian ideas of the revolution and threatening to turn it into something no better than its bourgeois capitalist neighbours. Well, we all know how that panned out, both in the short term and in the long term.
On the Soviet emancipation of women he is a little less than enlightened: whilst agreeing that the way the marriage market worked for peasant women in Czarist times was unacceptable in the modern world, he is very unhappy with the unromantic, "hygienic" Soviet approach to sex and relationships. He feels that (bourgeois) women should be making themselves beautiful for his amusement, not dressing in functional clothes and working in factories. He also seems to be suspiciously well-informed about the shortage of prostitutes in Moscow...
Altogether, a very lively and entertaining snapshot of Soviet life in the interregnum between Lenin and Stalin.
76spiralsheep
>74 thorold: "It's hard to know when rhyme-schemes and metres come and go in the middle of a section whether that's a deliberate effect of the poem, or the translator simply failing to keep up."
I've just checked my dual Russian/English copy and it looks like deliberate cracking of the structural ice by our authorial trout.
A quick google for a side-by-side online translation brought up this essay+ which might be relevant to your interests if you want to invest more time (warning: I only skimmed it but there are promising notes and the author knows enough to mention Edward Carpenter):
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxkb...
I've just checked my dual Russian/English copy and it looks like deliberate cracking of the structural ice by our authorial trout.
A quick google for a side-by-side online translation brought up this essay+ which might be relevant to your interests if you want to invest more time (warning: I only skimmed it but there are promising notes and the author knows enough to mention Edward Carpenter):
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxkb...
77thorold
>76 spiralsheep: Thanks for that link — it clears up quite a few puzzles. Especially the Border ballad bit: I really wasn’t expecting that in the middle of a Russian poem. A very different kind of translation from Green’s (which Radlova apparently didn’t know about). He’s the sort who always says “azure” where she says “blue”.
But also funny to see that Radlova, despite all her footnotes, didn’t manage to identify “Гринок” as Greenock!
But also funny to see that Radlova, despite all her footnotes, didn’t manage to identify “Гринок” as Greenock!
78spiralsheep
>77 thorold: You're welcome!
"didn’t manage to identify “Гринок” as Greenock!"
Especially after "her green country" and along with Ervin Green (Irvine?), but such are the perils of transliterations from one script to another within translations from one language to another.
"didn’t manage to identify “Гринок” as Greenock!"
Especially after "her green country" and along with Ervin Green (Irvine?), but such are the perils of transliterations from one script to another within translations from one language to another.
79thorold
>78 spiralsheep: Michael Green goes for “Erwin Green” — he probably thought “Irvine Green” was a bit too close to home, even if it does sound more Scottish.
80spiralsheep
>79 thorold: I believe they're all historically correct versions of the name of Clan Irvine whose Latin motto "sub sole sub umbra virens" would translate literally as "green shadow under the sun" or "under green shadow under the sun" (they prefer "Flourishing in both sunshine and shade") so Ervin Green could be Mr Green Shadow Under The Sun Green. Probably not but if Kuzmin had been reading up on Highland culture....
81spiralsheep
>76 spiralsheep: I've now also read the A. Radlova translation (link above) of the poem cycle The Trout is Breaking (Through) the Ice, by Mikhail Kuzmin, 1929, and it seems fair to claim the work as part of an ongoing sexual revolution in Russia that was at least partially enabled by political and legal revolutions (then repressed again under Stalinism).
Full of thrusting and little deaths, in the green land reached through the blue... with rainbows. And the encounters of several and various non-Platonic twin souls:
"Oh how this breakfast is akin
To a pair of sideshow twins:
A single stomach and two hearts,
Two heads and a single back...
Born to bear simple taunts,
A mystery inexplicable to us.
To reveal the exchange outright
Will make one a fairground sight."
(BRB, busy making terrible "the beast with one back and a funny shaped middle" jokes.)
Full of thrusting and little deaths, in the green land reached through the blue... with rainbows. And the encounters of several and various non-Platonic twin souls:
"Oh how this breakfast is akin
To a pair of sideshow twins:
A single stomach and two hearts,
Two heads and a single back...
Born to bear simple taunts,
A mystery inexplicable to us.
To reveal the exchange outright
Will make one a fairground sight."
(BRB, busy making terrible "the beast with one back and a funny shaped middle" jokes.)
82spiralsheep
I've just finished the excellent 2019 English translation of Sovietistan, which is Erika Fatland's physical and journalistic travelogue through the five ex-Soviet Central Asian 'stans. The book's historical coverage picks out times and places to illuminate the present narrative so there isn't much from this revolutionary period (because ancient history, the silk road, Islamic cultures, Mongol hordes, local histories, Russian Imperial conquest, and the various Soviet periods, all had more lasting influence).
83spiphany
>82 spiralsheep:
We had a theme read in 2018 on Central Asia and the Caucasus, if you have additional thoughts that you feel like posting in that thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/293054
We had a theme read in 2018 on Central Asia and the Caucasus, if you have additional thoughts that you feel like posting in that thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/293054
84spiralsheep
>83 spiphany: Posted.
85SassyLassy
Seven Hanged by Leonid Andreyev translated from the Russian by Anthony Briggs 2016
also known as The Seven who were Hanged
first published in 1908 as Rasskaz o semi poveshennykh
There has always been a childhod memory lurking in the back of my mind, of a painting or photograph in an old Russian history book: young revolutionaries being hanged together, among them a young woman. I’m not sure why it made such a strong impression, but it was the first thing I thought of when I discovered Leonid Andreyev’s Seven Hanged.
Andreyev was a lawyer, with a side job of court reporter, so he was thoroughly acquainted with the Russian legal system and those caught up in it on both sides. Five of the seven here were idealistic young revolutionaries, bent on assassinating a government minister, but betrayed by an unknown person. The other two, in a kind of crucifixion echo, were common criminals. The trials of those being hanged are told here only briefly, as almost peripheral events. Andreyev was concentrating on what it means to the individual to know life will end at a given date and time and in a terrible way.
Initially, he describes each of his defendants as they were in real life, life before their lives were interrupted, giving the reader an idea of what is being lost in this senseless state directed slaughter. Even before that, however, he spends time on the minister who has been told of the plot to assassinate him the next day. This man, knowing the plot has been subverted, can easily continue in his belief that he is immortal, for death doesn’t come to such as he.
The minister constrasts sharply with the intinerant Estonian peasant, barely able to comprehend Russian, completely alone in the world. Sentenced to death, he can only say “Not hang me”. Such a fate was beyond his imagination. Then there was Gypsy Mike, for whom there was no hope. In court, he asked for permission to whistle.
The desperate agony of a man being murdered, the savage thrill of a killer, a terrible pang of foreboding, a call for help, the darkness of foul weather in an autumn night, a sense of solitude - all of these things were there in that shrieking, wailing sound, which belonged to neither man nor beast... And with easy hearts, without pity or any feelings of remorse, the judges sentenced Gypsy Mike to death.
Writing of the five, Andreyev’s portrayal of the suddeness and finality of the trial, the sentence and the thirty-six hours left of life is almost visceral. Each approaches the inevitable in a different way. One is terrified, unable even to walk. One, nameless, is the classic revolutionary, “grown weary of living and struggling”. The young girl, Musya, is almost accepting.
By following these seven and their thoughts right to the steps of the scaffold, Andreyev’s plea against capital punishment is an existential masterpiece with the impossible hope of moving the Russian establishment.
This book was initially published in 1908, at a time when Andreyev was considered by many to be the greatest living Russian author, an assessment he would have agreed with, although most added the caveat ‘next to Tolstoy’. However he opposed the Bolsheviks and in 1917 moved to Finland, where he died in 1919. His works were suppressed in the Soviet Union and he has only been rehabilitated there since its collapse. As early as 1909, however, this book was translated into English by the Russian born American Herman Bernstein, with an introduction by Andreyev, explaining his opposition to capital punishment, which unfortunately is not included in this Penguin edition.*
In an essay in BBC Arts**, the translator Anthony Briggs suggests that ironically other anarchists, particularly those who murdered the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, were influenced in completely the opposite way than that intended by Andreyev. The ringleader of that plot, Danilo Ilic, had actually translated Andreyev’s book. In Briggs’s words, Instead of condemning the young activists for their naive and immoral conduct, he was won over by their idealism, selfless sincerity and courage.
_________________
*it can be found here: http://rozenbergquarterly.com/leonid-andreyev-the-seven-who-were-hanged/
** https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/FZndnQHF6qX2Mq8KJ2n012/seven-hanged-th...
86rocketjk
>85 SassyLassy: Just two days ago I purchased a beautiful Modern Library anthology, Best Russian Short Stories, that was originally published in 1917 and includes "The Seven That Were Hanged." I'm looking forward to getting to this collection soon.
87rocketjk
>85 SassyLassy: Just two days ago I purchased the beautiful Modern Library anthology Best Russian Short Stories which includes "The Seven That Were Hanged." The anthology was originally published by Modern Library around 1917, though my edition is from 1955. I'm looking forward to getting to the collection soon.
88SassyLassy
>87 rocketjk: You probably have the Bernstein translation then. He sounds like a truly interesting person.
What else is in your anthology?
What else is in your anthology?
89rocketjk
>88 SassyLassy: Oddly, there is no mention of translators anywhere in this collection, which is unusual for Modern Library. The collection is compiled and edited by Thomas Seltzer, though, if that means anything to you. In the collection we find . . .
Pushkin: The Queen of Spaces
Gogol: The Cloak (possibly another name for The Overcoat?)
Turgenev: The District Doctor
Dostoyevsky: The Christmas Tree and the Wedding
Tolstoy: God See the Truth, but Waits
Saltykov: How a Muzhik Fed Two Officials
Korolenko: The Shades, a Phantasy
Grashin: The Signal
Chekhov: The Darling, The Bet, and Vanka
Sologub: Hide and Seek
Potapenko: Dethroned
Semyonov: The Servant
Gorky: One Autumn Night, and Her Lover
Artzybashev: The Revolutionist
Kuprin: The Outrage
Andreyev: Lazarus, The Seven that Were Hanged, and The Red Laugh
Bunin: The Gentleman from San Francisco
You'll note that above I said this collection was originally published by Modern Library in 1917, but it seems it was revised and added to in a later edition. The Modern Library collectors' site says:
"The first edition was replaced in 1934 with an edition combining the original stories plus those in Andreyev's Seven That Were Hanged plus one additional story (Bunin's The Gentleman From San Francisco)."
Pushkin: The Queen of Spaces
Gogol: The Cloak (possibly another name for The Overcoat?)
Turgenev: The District Doctor
Dostoyevsky: The Christmas Tree and the Wedding
Tolstoy: God See the Truth, but Waits
Saltykov: How a Muzhik Fed Two Officials
Korolenko: The Shades, a Phantasy
Grashin: The Signal
Chekhov: The Darling, The Bet, and Vanka
Sologub: Hide and Seek
Potapenko: Dethroned
Semyonov: The Servant
Gorky: One Autumn Night, and Her Lover
Artzybashev: The Revolutionist
Kuprin: The Outrage
Andreyev: Lazarus, The Seven that Were Hanged, and The Red Laugh
Bunin: The Gentleman from San Francisco
You'll note that above I said this collection was originally published by Modern Library in 1917, but it seems it was revised and added to in a later edition. The Modern Library collectors' site says:
"The first edition was replaced in 1934 with an edition combining the original stories plus those in Andreyev's Seven That Were Hanged plus one additional story (Bunin's The Gentleman From San Francisco)."
90SassyLassy
>89 rocketjk: That's quite a collection. Seeing 'The Gentleman from San Francisco' reminds me that somewhere I have a Bunin book of short stories to finish.
91Dilara86
>85 SassyLassy: I'm halfway through this book. Only my version is called The Seven Who Were Hanged, and its translation is evidently older and less pleasant than yours, if your quote is representative...
By the way, the Guardian published an article about human bones dating back from the 1917-1922 civil war discovered on a Siberian road.
By the way, the Guardian published an article about human bones dating back from the 1917-1922 civil war discovered on a Siberian road.
92MissWatson
I'm not entirely sure if Das Phantom des Alexander Wolf fits the parameters, as it was published in 1947, but the author did participate in the Civil War and wound up among the émigré Russians in Paris. It starts with an incident where the unnamed first-person narrator kills a man. Years later he finds the killing described minutely in a book and concludes that the victim survived, after all. He tries to find the author. From the afterword it would seem that the trajectory of the narrator's life closely resembles the author's.
93SassyLassy
>92 MissWatson: Fascinating sounding plot. I see the book has recently been reissued by Pushkin Press, and the reviews on LT are really positive.
Thanks for posting.
Thanks for posting.
94thorold
Another slightly peripheral one — an eye-witness account of pre-revolutionary aristocratic life, but written a long time later, and by someone who was demonstratively dismissive of Russian politics:
Speak, memory : an autobiography revisited (1967) by Vladimir Nabokov (Russia, US, etc., 1899-1977)
This book has a long history: Nabokov published much of it as essays in the New Yorker in the late 1940s, but there were also some parts he had originally written in French before the war and later reworked. It first appeared as a book under the US title Conclusive evidence in 1951; as a result of that, relatives and others provided Nabokov with further information that allowed him to revise and expand it considerably when he translated it into Russian. He expanded the English version in a similar way, and in 1967 it reappeared in its present form under the title Speak, memory (which had also been the UK title of Conclusive evidence).
It is not so much a straightforward autobiography as a literary examination of his own reaction to his memories of growing up in a privileged family in Russia before the Revolution. Chapters are arranged thematically rather than chronologically: he talks in one place about the way his interest in butterflies and moths developed, in another about his nannies and tutors, in another about his parents and uncles and aunts, in another about travelling with his family, and so on. Along the way we hear about the family estate, about his father's political career (culminating in the liberal Kerensky government), about the girls he fell in love with, the cowboy stories he devoured so enthusiastically, the delights of the Nord Express, and much else. And, almost in passing, about how all this was broken up by the events of 1917, and how the family moved into exile first in the Crimea and then in the émigré world of Berlin and Paris.
Nabokov tries to make it clear to us that he doesn't hold a grudge against the Bolsheviks for depriving him of his property — his nostalgia is for childhood, which is lost for good whatever we do, not for land and houses and servants (which he has regained to a large extent in his new American life, thanks to Lolita). But he obviously does hold a grudge against the Bolsheviks for frustrating his father's dream of a Russian liberal democracy, and he clearly hates them for being ill-bred philistines at least as much as he despises their personal ambition and totalitarian abuses of human rights. He also shows his contempt for non-Russians who see only two sides to Russian politics: extreme reaction or Marxist-Leninism, and in many cases turn a blind eye to the abuses of Lenin and Stalin. But this isn't meant as a reasoned book on Russian politics, it's a personal memoir, and he's entitled to use it to set out personal views.
There are some very memorable, beautiful passages of description and recollection, but there's also a lot of arrogant, Humbert Humbert-ish teasing of the simple-minded American readers he clearly imagines as he's writing. Some of that is very funny, and we are obviously meant to see it as tongue in cheek, but there are other places where it comes across more like an aristocrat whipping a servant for not getting precisely the required degree of shine out of his riding boots. The first time you see an obscure scientific term used for something that has a perfectly good common name it strikes you as clever and amusing; by the fourth or fifth time it's getting a bit stale, and you're only about ten pages into the book...
(...Not to mention the strong current of homophobia that runs though the whole thing!)
Speak, memory : an autobiography revisited (1967) by Vladimir Nabokov (Russia, US, etc., 1899-1977)
This book has a long history: Nabokov published much of it as essays in the New Yorker in the late 1940s, but there were also some parts he had originally written in French before the war and later reworked. It first appeared as a book under the US title Conclusive evidence in 1951; as a result of that, relatives and others provided Nabokov with further information that allowed him to revise and expand it considerably when he translated it into Russian. He expanded the English version in a similar way, and in 1967 it reappeared in its present form under the title Speak, memory (which had also been the UK title of Conclusive evidence).
It is not so much a straightforward autobiography as a literary examination of his own reaction to his memories of growing up in a privileged family in Russia before the Revolution. Chapters are arranged thematically rather than chronologically: he talks in one place about the way his interest in butterflies and moths developed, in another about his nannies and tutors, in another about his parents and uncles and aunts, in another about travelling with his family, and so on. Along the way we hear about the family estate, about his father's political career (culminating in the liberal Kerensky government), about the girls he fell in love with, the cowboy stories he devoured so enthusiastically, the delights of the Nord Express, and much else. And, almost in passing, about how all this was broken up by the events of 1917, and how the family moved into exile first in the Crimea and then in the émigré world of Berlin and Paris.
Nabokov tries to make it clear to us that he doesn't hold a grudge against the Bolsheviks for depriving him of his property — his nostalgia is for childhood, which is lost for good whatever we do, not for land and houses and servants (which he has regained to a large extent in his new American life, thanks to Lolita). But he obviously does hold a grudge against the Bolsheviks for frustrating his father's dream of a Russian liberal democracy, and he clearly hates them for being ill-bred philistines at least as much as he despises their personal ambition and totalitarian abuses of human rights. He also shows his contempt for non-Russians who see only two sides to Russian politics: extreme reaction or Marxist-Leninism, and in many cases turn a blind eye to the abuses of Lenin and Stalin. But this isn't meant as a reasoned book on Russian politics, it's a personal memoir, and he's entitled to use it to set out personal views.
There are some very memorable, beautiful passages of description and recollection, but there's also a lot of arrogant, Humbert Humbert-ish teasing of the simple-minded American readers he clearly imagines as he's writing. Some of that is very funny, and we are obviously meant to see it as tongue in cheek, but there are other places where it comes across more like an aristocrat whipping a servant for not getting precisely the required degree of shine out of his riding boots. The first time you see an obscure scientific term used for something that has a perfectly good common name it strikes you as clever and amusing; by the fourth or fifth time it's getting a bit stale, and you're only about ten pages into the book...
(...Not to mention the strong current of homophobia that runs though the whole thing!)
95thorold
Sakhalin Island (1895; this translation 1993) by Anton Chekhov (Russia, 1860-1904), translated by Brian Reeve
No-one quite knows why Chekhov decided to make an extended tour of the penal colonies on Sakhalin Island in 1890 — he was 29 years old, reasonably well established in medical practice and making a name for himself as a short-story writer, and he'd just had a big flop with his first major play, The wood demon. He'd also diagnosed himself as suffering from TB, which would seem a pretty good reason not to make a long and arduous journey to a notoriously cold and damp part of the world. But perhaps there was a feeling of "now or never"?
Whatever the reason, he set off from Moscow on 18 April, 1890 (just over a year before construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway started), travelling by horse-carriage, sleigh and river steamer, to reach Nikolayevsk at the mouth of the Amur on the 5th of July, from where he could embark to cross the straits to the island. He travelled around Sakhalin until mid-October, visiting (almost) every settlement and interviewing everyone he could find, returning to Moscow the "fast" way by sea to the Crimea, with stopovers in Hong Kong and Sri Lanka.
His description of the trip, written up over the next few busy years and published in 1895, is in many ways a glorious, disorganised mess: there's far too much quantitative data for a mainstream travel book, but it's too full of subjective description to be read as a social science dissertation. In the version translated and edited by Brian Reeve, the footnotes make up almost half the book, and at least 90% of them are Chekhov's own: not just references to sources, but often also lengthy anecdotes and bits of description that somehow got left of the main body of the text. The book starts off as a geographically-organised description of the settlement, but at some undetectable point it veers off into a thematic discussion of different aspects of the working of the penal colonies. (It doesn't help that this 2019 Alma Classics paperback reprint, which looks to have been cut down from an earlier version, has neither maps nor index.)
All the same, if you're reading it out of general interest rather than in search of some specific piece of information, it's a wonderful — if disturbing — book, full of Chekhov's clear, compassionate observation of what is really going on here, out of sight of the judges who routinely sentence people to penal servitude without the least idea of what that means, and also out of sight of the academics who write articles about prison reform in learned journals.
In theory, Chekhov agrees, it's a wonderful idea to make convicts do useful work during their imprisonment rather than sitting around at the state's expense, and it also sounds like a good idea to use this capacity to develop new regions. In real life, however, as the British found in the much more promising setting of New South Wales, it rarely works out like that. There are always going to be conflicts of interest and opportunities for abuse when forced labour is involved, especially when it's happening out of sight on the other side of the world. Convicts are, almost by definition, poorly adapted to become a labour force in tough conditions: people are likely to fall into crime because they can't or won't work. And it's foolish to imagine that you will be able to recruit competent, honest and highly motivated people to run remote penal settlements unsupervised. Incompetence, corruption and sadistic brutality are bound to result.
Moreover, as he found as soon as he got there, Sakhalin turns out to be a really stupid place to set up an agricultural colony. The indigenous people were migrant hunter-gatherers for a reason. It's winter for about nine months of the year, and it rains almost incessantly: the land is either mountainous or boggy taiga. So it's a good place to do small-scale fishing and trapping, but planting anything other than potatoes is pretty much a waste of effort. There was one coal mine in Chekhov's time, but it was badly managed and unproductive. Distance from markets and the lack of a proper harbour obviously also played a part in holding up the development of mining and forestry. Commercial fishing was left to the Japanese.
Most of the convicts sent to Sakhalin were serving long sentences for murder or other serious criminal offences (Chekhov was expressly banned from talking to any political offenders, but there only seems to have been a handful of these on the island anyway). The system was that after serving their sentences, they had to remain on the island as a "settled exile" for a period of from six to ten years. During this time they could farm or follow a trade to earn money. Vodka-smuggling and prostitution were apparently the only trades in which it was possible to make good money. After the expiry of the settled-exile period they were free to move elsewhere in Siberia, but not allowed to return to their home district. Conditions on the island were such that everyone who could leave did so, and there was no real settled population, so the hope that the penal settlement would lead to the development of a proper colony was not realised.
Chekhov also points out that the system made absolutely no allowance for the supposed role of the penal system in helping convicts to reform and build new lives. There was no trade training, many convicts spent their time in illegal activities (smuggling, gambling, prostitution), and only a handful had any hope of getting out of the system while they were still young enough to work.
Moreover, they were badly fed, their work was poorly supervised, and the medical services on the island were in a completely run down state. Whilst corporal punishment and the death sentence had been abolished in Russian criminal law, prisoners fell under a different set of rules, and beatings were regularly used by the prison authorities as punishment for even quite trivial offences (failing to take ones cap off when a free person passes). Chekhov witnessed a whipping, and had recurrent nightmares about it afterwards.
There was a lot here that reminded me of Solzhenitsyn, but of course the 1890s weren't the 1960s: Chekhov encountered some censorship when he published parts of the book in journals, but it was allowed to appear in full in book form.
No-one quite knows why Chekhov decided to make an extended tour of the penal colonies on Sakhalin Island in 1890 — he was 29 years old, reasonably well established in medical practice and making a name for himself as a short-story writer, and he'd just had a big flop with his first major play, The wood demon. He'd also diagnosed himself as suffering from TB, which would seem a pretty good reason not to make a long and arduous journey to a notoriously cold and damp part of the world. But perhaps there was a feeling of "now or never"?
Whatever the reason, he set off from Moscow on 18 April, 1890 (just over a year before construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway started), travelling by horse-carriage, sleigh and river steamer, to reach Nikolayevsk at the mouth of the Amur on the 5th of July, from where he could embark to cross the straits to the island. He travelled around Sakhalin until mid-October, visiting (almost) every settlement and interviewing everyone he could find, returning to Moscow the "fast" way by sea to the Crimea, with stopovers in Hong Kong and Sri Lanka.
His description of the trip, written up over the next few busy years and published in 1895, is in many ways a glorious, disorganised mess: there's far too much quantitative data for a mainstream travel book, but it's too full of subjective description to be read as a social science dissertation. In the version translated and edited by Brian Reeve, the footnotes make up almost half the book, and at least 90% of them are Chekhov's own: not just references to sources, but often also lengthy anecdotes and bits of description that somehow got left of the main body of the text. The book starts off as a geographically-organised description of the settlement, but at some undetectable point it veers off into a thematic discussion of different aspects of the working of the penal colonies. (It doesn't help that this 2019 Alma Classics paperback reprint, which looks to have been cut down from an earlier version, has neither maps nor index.)
All the same, if you're reading it out of general interest rather than in search of some specific piece of information, it's a wonderful — if disturbing — book, full of Chekhov's clear, compassionate observation of what is really going on here, out of sight of the judges who routinely sentence people to penal servitude without the least idea of what that means, and also out of sight of the academics who write articles about prison reform in learned journals.
In theory, Chekhov agrees, it's a wonderful idea to make convicts do useful work during their imprisonment rather than sitting around at the state's expense, and it also sounds like a good idea to use this capacity to develop new regions. In real life, however, as the British found in the much more promising setting of New South Wales, it rarely works out like that. There are always going to be conflicts of interest and opportunities for abuse when forced labour is involved, especially when it's happening out of sight on the other side of the world. Convicts are, almost by definition, poorly adapted to become a labour force in tough conditions: people are likely to fall into crime because they can't or won't work. And it's foolish to imagine that you will be able to recruit competent, honest and highly motivated people to run remote penal settlements unsupervised. Incompetence, corruption and sadistic brutality are bound to result.
Moreover, as he found as soon as he got there, Sakhalin turns out to be a really stupid place to set up an agricultural colony. The indigenous people were migrant hunter-gatherers for a reason. It's winter for about nine months of the year, and it rains almost incessantly: the land is either mountainous or boggy taiga. So it's a good place to do small-scale fishing and trapping, but planting anything other than potatoes is pretty much a waste of effort. There was one coal mine in Chekhov's time, but it was badly managed and unproductive. Distance from markets and the lack of a proper harbour obviously also played a part in holding up the development of mining and forestry. Commercial fishing was left to the Japanese.
Most of the convicts sent to Sakhalin were serving long sentences for murder or other serious criminal offences (Chekhov was expressly banned from talking to any political offenders, but there only seems to have been a handful of these on the island anyway). The system was that after serving their sentences, they had to remain on the island as a "settled exile" for a period of from six to ten years. During this time they could farm or follow a trade to earn money. Vodka-smuggling and prostitution were apparently the only trades in which it was possible to make good money. After the expiry of the settled-exile period they were free to move elsewhere in Siberia, but not allowed to return to their home district. Conditions on the island were such that everyone who could leave did so, and there was no real settled population, so the hope that the penal settlement would lead to the development of a proper colony was not realised.
Chekhov also points out that the system made absolutely no allowance for the supposed role of the penal system in helping convicts to reform and build new lives. There was no trade training, many convicts spent their time in illegal activities (smuggling, gambling, prostitution), and only a handful had any hope of getting out of the system while they were still young enough to work.
Moreover, they were badly fed, their work was poorly supervised, and the medical services on the island were in a completely run down state. Whilst corporal punishment and the death sentence had been abolished in Russian criminal law, prisoners fell under a different set of rules, and beatings were regularly used by the prison authorities as punishment for even quite trivial offences (failing to take ones cap off when a free person passes). Chekhov witnessed a whipping, and had recurrent nightmares about it afterwards.
There was a lot here that reminded me of Solzhenitsyn, but of course the 1890s weren't the 1960s: Chekhov encountered some censorship when he published parts of the book in journals, but it was allowed to appear in full in book form.
96spiralsheep
>95 thorold: "There was a lot here that reminded me of Solzhenitsyn, but of course the 1890s weren't the 1960s: Chekhov encountered some censorship when he published parts of the book in journals, but it was allowed to appear in full in book form."
Was the difference in time and government or that Chekhov wasn't a political prisoner or other banned person? Because the Russian Empire banned publication of some authors' whole bodies of work including, for example, Ales Harun (who I mentioned above >51 spiralsheep: ).
Was the difference in time and government or that Chekhov wasn't a political prisoner or other banned person? Because the Russian Empire banned publication of some authors' whole bodies of work including, for example, Ales Harun (who I mentioned above >51 spiralsheep: ).
97thorold
>96 spiralsheep: Others probably know more about the background here, but I would guess: both. Censorship in the second half of the 19th century seems to have been fairly haphazard, there wasn't the sort of “thought control” that came later, it sounds as though writings only got banned if they pressed certain sensitive buttons. But people who’d been exiled for political offences weren’t allowed to publish anything.
The astonishing thing is that Chekhov just turned up in Sakhalin and asked the governor if it was OK to have a look around, then spent four months counting and interviewing prisoners and officials, tabulating their ages and occupations, going through the official records and accounts, investigating the contents of the soup cauldron, etc., without any authority at all. He’d asked a couple of important friends for letters of introduction, but they got lost somewhere in the post.
The astonishing thing is that Chekhov just turned up in Sakhalin and asked the governor if it was OK to have a look around, then spent four months counting and interviewing prisoners and officials, tabulating their ages and occupations, going through the official records and accounts, investigating the contents of the soup cauldron, etc., without any authority at all. He’d asked a couple of important friends for letters of introduction, but they got lost somewhere in the post.
98Dilara86
I've just finished L'Amour est une région bien intéressante : Correspondance et notes de Sibérie (The Amur is a very interesting region: letters and notes from Siberia) by Chekhov. For some reason, I thought it would be the French translation of Sakhaline Island. It isn't - it is Chekhov's personal notes and letters to friends and family on his way to the island. He describes his misadventures, the people he meets on his journey, and the places he travels through. There was enough to sustain my interest over its 100 pages, but I think it's one for Chekhov completists.
>94 thorold: There was a lot here that reminded me of Solzhenitsyn, but of course the 1890s weren't the 1960s: Chekhov encountered some censorship when he published parts of the book in journals, but it was allowed to appear in full in book form.
I read an interesting article from the Paris Review on Scribd: The Cornel West-Ta-Nehisi Coats Twitter Feud Explained Through Russian Writers, comparing Cornel West's Chekhovian morality to Ta-Nehisi Coat's Solzhenitsynian (?) outlook.
>94 thorold: There was a lot here that reminded me of Solzhenitsyn, but of course the 1890s weren't the 1960s: Chekhov encountered some censorship when he published parts of the book in journals, but it was allowed to appear in full in book form.
I read an interesting article from the Paris Review on Scribd: The Cornel West-Ta-Nehisi Coats Twitter Feud Explained Through Russian Writers, comparing Cornel West's Chekhovian morality to Ta-Nehisi Coat's Solzhenitsynian (?) outlook.
99thorold
>98 Dilara86: Sounds as though what you read was something similar to what Reeve includes as prologue and appendix to the text of the book Sakhalin Island proper — there was a set of newspaper articles under the title "From Siberia" describing his journey more or less as far as Lake Baikal, and then excerpts from letters relating to the planning of the trip, the journey from Baikal to Nikolayevsk, and the homeward journey by sea.
In Reeve's version, "the Amur is ... a fine and curious part of the world". The French translator manages to get a bit more mileage out of that phrase! Chekhov is (uncharacteristically?) speculating at that point in his letter about how nice it would be to have a super-yacht on the Amur if he were a millionaire...
Yes, that was quite an interesting article, but the writer ultimately didn't seem to be convinced that you could make clear distinctions in political approach based on the difference between Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn. The two of them were reacting to things that really only overlap at the detail level of the suffering prisoners endured. If you zoom out to look at the system as a whole Sakhalin Island probably has a lot more overlap with The fatal shore than it does with The Gulag Archipelago.
In Reeve's version, "the Amur is ... a fine and curious part of the world". The French translator manages to get a bit more mileage out of that phrase! Chekhov is (uncharacteristically?) speculating at that point in his letter about how nice it would be to have a super-yacht on the Amur if he were a millionaire...
Yes, that was quite an interesting article, but the writer ultimately didn't seem to be convinced that you could make clear distinctions in political approach based on the difference between Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn. The two of them were reacting to things that really only overlap at the detail level of the suffering prisoners endured. If you zoom out to look at the system as a whole Sakhalin Island probably has a lot more overlap with The fatal shore than it does with The Gulag Archipelago.
100LolaWalser
I'm too lazy to register in order to read the whole article, but I gotta say I found extremely off-putting that "what a wacky 22-yo I was, getting a PhD in Russian literature" comment, as if it takes something special to be interested in what is one of the greatest corpuses of literature on the planet. And that contrast-cum-analogy sounds beyond gauche and strained however you look at it (being "off-put", I don't mind scoffing without having read the thing... :))
101AnnieMod
>96 spiralsheep: 1890s vs. 1960s
The Russian Empire banned authors based on the norms of the day - sometimes for being offensive to the throne, sometimes because the author was offensive to the throne. And sometimes just because someone just felt so. It was not an attempt to suppress the different and the vocal or a thought out policy to create a single voice for the empire.
The Soviet censorship was a different thing altogether - it was trying to erase ideas and ensure that people do not think outside of their own boxes. And the 60s is probably the worst of it - after the euphoria of the end of war ended, the 50s and 60s was the time for the Soviets to consolidate their power -- thinkers and people with different opinions were not only unwanted, they could unravel the whole enterprise. So with a territory as large as theirs, with more languages spoken inside of it than probably in the whole continent of Europe, traditions that did not match, they had to do something to unify -- so they chose to simply enforce the "one country - one thought" model - you cannot be different, you cannot think differently, you are not allowed to have an opinion. Of course this is not how human minds work so it ultimately failed but... they did all they could to achieve it. And it was not just the Soviets - the whole block was at it. It was considered the only chance to survive when the inevitable war breaks up again. The fact that the world actually survived to see the 21st century was probably the biggest surprise of the 20th century. But that is a different conversation ;)
The Russian Empire banned authors based on the norms of the day - sometimes for being offensive to the throne, sometimes because the author was offensive to the throne. And sometimes just because someone just felt so. It was not an attempt to suppress the different and the vocal or a thought out policy to create a single voice for the empire.
The Soviet censorship was a different thing altogether - it was trying to erase ideas and ensure that people do not think outside of their own boxes. And the 60s is probably the worst of it - after the euphoria of the end of war ended, the 50s and 60s was the time for the Soviets to consolidate their power -- thinkers and people with different opinions were not only unwanted, they could unravel the whole enterprise. So with a territory as large as theirs, with more languages spoken inside of it than probably in the whole continent of Europe, traditions that did not match, they had to do something to unify -- so they chose to simply enforce the "one country - one thought" model - you cannot be different, you cannot think differently, you are not allowed to have an opinion. Of course this is not how human minds work so it ultimately failed but... they did all they could to achieve it. And it was not just the Soviets - the whole block was at it. It was considered the only chance to survive when the inevitable war breaks up again. The fact that the world actually survived to see the 21st century was probably the biggest surprise of the 20th century. But that is a different conversation ;)
102LolaWalser
>101 AnnieMod:
I don't disagree with your main point about the nature of Soviet repression of ideological differences but I would introduce some other angles there and qualify a lot. For example, the 50s and the 60s saw a mellowing and opening of the (official) attitudes, relative to the Stalinist period, not a hardening. The trend continued--suffice it to compare, say, the prison experience of dissident Brodsky to that of people like Mandelstam, Kharms etc. To be sure, there was no real freedom of expression at any time in the USSR except for the few brief years after October, and the fact that people could lose their livelihoods and lives if their mere opinions attracted hostile attention, condemns that system enough. But it wasn't exactly the same in the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.
Moreover, while ideological "diversity" wasn't formally welcome; as you note yourself, people be people and, in part at least, the "plurality" of opinion expressed itself in factionalism. For all that there were no other parties (and let's remember that party politics are only one aspect of "differences of opinion" in society, not its alpha and omega), the Communist party itself was roiled non-stop by division from the left to the right. Stuff fell through the cracks. The USSR was not, in a term du jour, a "monolith".
I don't disagree with your main point about the nature of Soviet repression of ideological differences but I would introduce some other angles there and qualify a lot. For example, the 50s and the 60s saw a mellowing and opening of the (official) attitudes, relative to the Stalinist period, not a hardening. The trend continued--suffice it to compare, say, the prison experience of dissident Brodsky to that of people like Mandelstam, Kharms etc. To be sure, there was no real freedom of expression at any time in the USSR except for the few brief years after October, and the fact that people could lose their livelihoods and lives if their mere opinions attracted hostile attention, condemns that system enough. But it wasn't exactly the same in the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.
Moreover, while ideological "diversity" wasn't formally welcome; as you note yourself, people be people and, in part at least, the "plurality" of opinion expressed itself in factionalism. For all that there were no other parties (and let's remember that party politics are only one aspect of "differences of opinion" in society, not its alpha and omega), the Communist party itself was roiled non-stop by division from the left to the right. Stuff fell through the cracks. The USSR was not, in a term du jour, a "monolith".
103spiralsheep
>101 AnnieMod: To me your comment is internally self-contradictory.
"The Russian Empire banned authors based on the norms of the day"
Yes, the Russian Empire targeted, banned, exiled, and executed people who weren't considered European Russian enough, especially people who weren't primarily Russian-speaking white Europeans, at least culturally Russian Orthodox, and relatively politically conservative (including monarchist).
"It was not an attempt to suppress the different and the vocal or a thought out policy to create a single voice for the empire."
But it was: non-Russian speakers were specifically targeted, anyone mildly to the left of absolute monarchists were targeted, Jews and Muslims were specifically targeted, homosexuals were specifically targeted. Etc, etc, ad nauseam. These groups weren't only targeted as individuals but as groups and suffered collective punishments ranging from harassment and denials of state services through to imprisonment, exile, execution, and mass democide. Publishing was monitored and controlled, which was easier when paper was expensive and mass publication involved large heavy printing presses.
The main reason why 19th century empires were less successful at repression than 20th century states was their lack of instantaneous communication (e.g. telephones) and fast motorised mass transport (for individuals and troops).
"So with a territory as large as theirs, with more languages spoken inside of it than probably in the whole continent of Europe, traditions that did not match, they had to do something to unify -- so they chose to simply enforce the 'one country - one thought' model - you cannot be different, you cannot think differently, you are not allowed to have an opinion. Of course this is not how human minds work so it ultimately failed but... they did all they could to achieve it. And it was not just the Soviets - the whole block was at it."
Yes, I agree, because that's what empires do, including the Soviet empire. The Roman empire imposed centralised social models. The Christian empires imposed centralised social models. The Muslim empires imposed centralised social models. The Central and South American empires imposed centralised social models (and presumably the sub-Saharan African empires too although we mostly have oral evidence there). The European colonial empires imposed centralised social models. Etc, etc, ad nauseam. All without the technology of repression available in the 20th century. I have yet to see evidence that the Soviets magically created new human behaviours, either good or bad.
I'm not arguing with the obvious historical fact that the Soviet bloc was repressive, in this example of publishing, I'm only adding historical context that ALL similar cross-cultural empires (and many smaller states) have been similarly repressive within the human and technological resources available to them in their times and places.
"The Russian Empire banned authors based on the norms of the day"
Yes, the Russian Empire targeted, banned, exiled, and executed people who weren't considered European Russian enough, especially people who weren't primarily Russian-speaking white Europeans, at least culturally Russian Orthodox, and relatively politically conservative (including monarchist).
"It was not an attempt to suppress the different and the vocal or a thought out policy to create a single voice for the empire."
But it was: non-Russian speakers were specifically targeted, anyone mildly to the left of absolute monarchists were targeted, Jews and Muslims were specifically targeted, homosexuals were specifically targeted. Etc, etc, ad nauseam. These groups weren't only targeted as individuals but as groups and suffered collective punishments ranging from harassment and denials of state services through to imprisonment, exile, execution, and mass democide. Publishing was monitored and controlled, which was easier when paper was expensive and mass publication involved large heavy printing presses.
The main reason why 19th century empires were less successful at repression than 20th century states was their lack of instantaneous communication (e.g. telephones) and fast motorised mass transport (for individuals and troops).
"So with a territory as large as theirs, with more languages spoken inside of it than probably in the whole continent of Europe, traditions that did not match, they had to do something to unify -- so they chose to simply enforce the 'one country - one thought' model - you cannot be different, you cannot think differently, you are not allowed to have an opinion. Of course this is not how human minds work so it ultimately failed but... they did all they could to achieve it. And it was not just the Soviets - the whole block was at it."
Yes, I agree, because that's what empires do, including the Soviet empire. The Roman empire imposed centralised social models. The Christian empires imposed centralised social models. The Muslim empires imposed centralised social models. The Central and South American empires imposed centralised social models (and presumably the sub-Saharan African empires too although we mostly have oral evidence there). The European colonial empires imposed centralised social models. Etc, etc, ad nauseam. All without the technology of repression available in the 20th century. I have yet to see evidence that the Soviets magically created new human behaviours, either good or bad.
I'm not arguing with the obvious historical fact that the Soviet bloc was repressive, in this example of publishing, I'm only adding historical context that ALL similar cross-cultural empires (and many smaller states) have been similarly repressive within the human and technological resources available to them in their times and places.
105spiralsheep
>103 spiralsheep: And I don't want to bore on but the Soviets were understandably more concerned about the cross-border mass media influence of hostile states on a literate population with broadcast receivers than the Russian Empire was about a Russian book printed in their own capital which only a tiny percentage of their population could even hypothetically physically access and then actually read.
106thorold
>105 spiralsheep: That’s probably a key point: illiteracy can be a much more powerful repressive tool than censorship.
The Bolsheviks exploited mass communication very successfully, but they knew it could be used against them as well.
The Bolsheviks exploited mass communication very successfully, but they knew it could be used against them as well.
107thorold
Off-topic for the timeframe, but a book I realised I ought to have read because of the way absolutely everyone mentions it (Turgenev and Mayne Reid are the two writers who've been coming up over and over again in the things I've been reading for this theme):
A Sportsman's Notebook (1852; this translation 1992) by Ivan Turgenev (Russia, 1818-1883), translated by Charles and Natasha Hepburn
On the face of it this seems a very modest, unassuming collection of short stories, most of them little more than sketches or anecdotes, narrated by a gentleman who has inherited his grandfather's estate in the Russian countryside and goes there to shoot for a few weeks of the year. But it's considered to be one of the most politically influential texts in 19th century Russian literature.
The reason for that seems to lie in the way Turgenev's sportsman-narrator engages with the country people he meets and tries to discover their stories and the way they live. Naturally, they all turn out to be complex human individuals, each with a unique background and personal characteristics, and highly-specific relationships, problems, hopes and dreams. The serfs stubbornly refuse to dissolve into the romantic notion of "Russian peasant" (spirituality, resignation, stubbornness, tradition); the landowners equally fail to fall into any stereotypical notions we might have of gentlemanly or aristocratic attitudes.
Moreover, it often turns out that the serf characters have had their lives messed up in multiple ways by the thoughtless and arbitrary behaviour of their owners. The narrator never explicitly criticises this behaviour, but he notes its effects, and he leaves us to draw our own conclusions about whether that sort of thing is acceptable in a modern European country in the middle of the progressive nineteenth century.
The narrator is always described as a sportsman, but shooting birds doesn't enter much into the stories. The usual pattern is that he goes to a particular place in order to shoot, there's a lyrical description of the landscape, and then something happens to prevent him from getting to grips with the birds, and he meets someone who turns out to have an interesting story. More often than not, something else then happens to prevent that person from quite getting to the end of the story, so we are left dangling slightly, and have to work things out for ourselves a little. A couple of times we get someone who appears as a minor character in one story and is then fully developed in their own right in the next, but apart from that there is no overall development between the stories.
Oddly enough, Turgenev's technique reminded me very strongly of Mary Russell Mitford, a writer from a rather different background, but with the same kind of intelligent interest in how rural life works and what problems country people have to deal with. And the same sort of mix of lyrical-but-precise scenic description and realistic observation of human behaviour. Lovely, compassionate and very compelling writing in both cases.
This edition comes with an introduction by Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, who talks about how relevant he still finds Turgenev's stories to the semi-feudal agricultural society he grew up in.
A Sportsman's Notebook (1852; this translation 1992) by Ivan Turgenev (Russia, 1818-1883), translated by Charles and Natasha Hepburn
On the face of it this seems a very modest, unassuming collection of short stories, most of them little more than sketches or anecdotes, narrated by a gentleman who has inherited his grandfather's estate in the Russian countryside and goes there to shoot for a few weeks of the year. But it's considered to be one of the most politically influential texts in 19th century Russian literature.
The reason for that seems to lie in the way Turgenev's sportsman-narrator engages with the country people he meets and tries to discover their stories and the way they live. Naturally, they all turn out to be complex human individuals, each with a unique background and personal characteristics, and highly-specific relationships, problems, hopes and dreams. The serfs stubbornly refuse to dissolve into the romantic notion of "Russian peasant" (spirituality, resignation, stubbornness, tradition); the landowners equally fail to fall into any stereotypical notions we might have of gentlemanly or aristocratic attitudes.
Moreover, it often turns out that the serf characters have had their lives messed up in multiple ways by the thoughtless and arbitrary behaviour of their owners. The narrator never explicitly criticises this behaviour, but he notes its effects, and he leaves us to draw our own conclusions about whether that sort of thing is acceptable in a modern European country in the middle of the progressive nineteenth century.
The narrator is always described as a sportsman, but shooting birds doesn't enter much into the stories. The usual pattern is that he goes to a particular place in order to shoot, there's a lyrical description of the landscape, and then something happens to prevent him from getting to grips with the birds, and he meets someone who turns out to have an interesting story. More often than not, something else then happens to prevent that person from quite getting to the end of the story, so we are left dangling slightly, and have to work things out for ourselves a little. A couple of times we get someone who appears as a minor character in one story and is then fully developed in their own right in the next, but apart from that there is no overall development between the stories.
Oddly enough, Turgenev's technique reminded me very strongly of Mary Russell Mitford, a writer from a rather different background, but with the same kind of intelligent interest in how rural life works and what problems country people have to deal with. And the same sort of mix of lyrical-but-precise scenic description and realistic observation of human behaviour. Lovely, compassionate and very compelling writing in both cases.
This edition comes with an introduction by Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, who talks about how relevant he still finds Turgenev's stories to the semi-feudal agricultural society he grew up in.
108spiralsheep
>107 thorold: Interesting review, thank you. I'm another one who's nearly read that book more than once.
"an introduction by Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, who talks about how relevant he still finds Turgenev's stories to the semi-feudal agricultural society he grew up in"
Earlier this week I was bitching with the local horse rescue woman about wealthy property developers who own farmland as an investment without a second's thought to either their peasant tenant farmers or the physical maintenance of the land, apart from bribing the government to remove legal restrictions on profitable development (e.g. the unnecessary badger cull).
"an introduction by Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, who talks about how relevant he still finds Turgenev's stories to the semi-feudal agricultural society he grew up in"
Earlier this week I was bitching with the local horse rescue woman about wealthy property developers who own farmland as an investment without a second's thought to either their peasant tenant farmers or the physical maintenance of the land, apart from bribing the government to remove legal restrictions on profitable development (e.g. the unnecessary badger cull).
109NinieB
>107 thorold: Very interesting. The title had led me to think it was about hunting. I still want to read Virgin Soil soon.
110Dilara86
>99 thorold: Sounds as though what you read was something similar to what Reeve includes as prologue and appendix to the text of the book Sakhalin Island proper — there was a set of newspaper articles under the title "From Siberia" describing his journey more or less as far as Lake Baikal, and then excerpts from letters relating to the planning of the trip, the journey from Baikal to Nikolayevsk, and the homeward journey by sea.
Mine contains letters written on his journey from Moscow to Sakhaline - including the notes/articles he sent to newspaper owner Suvorin - but nothing about his return trip. I think I'll have to borrow Chekhov's complete works to get to Sakhalin Island...
In Reeve's version, "the Amur is ... a fine and curious part of the world". The French translator manages to get a bit more mileage out of that phrase! Chekhov is (uncharacteristically?) speculating at that point in his letter about how nice it would be to have a super-yacht on the Amur if he were a millionaire...
That's... a completely different take from the French translation! Here it is, before I return the book to the library:
It's more Call of the Wild than super-yacht!
>100 LolaWalser: I'm too lazy to register in order to read the whole article, but I gotta say I found extremely off-putting that "what a wacky 22-yo I was, getting a PhD in Russian literature" comment, as if it takes something special to be interested in what is one of the greatest corpuses of literature on the planet. And that contrast-cum-analogy sounds beyond gauche and strained however you look at it (being "off-put", I don't mind scoffing without having read the thing... :))
Yes, that was an odd introduction, for an article in a literary magazine!
Mine contains letters written on his journey from Moscow to Sakhaline - including the notes/articles he sent to newspaper owner Suvorin - but nothing about his return trip. I think I'll have to borrow Chekhov's complete works to get to Sakhalin Island...
In Reeve's version, "the Amur is ... a fine and curious part of the world". The French translator manages to get a bit more mileage out of that phrase! Chekhov is (uncharacteristically?) speculating at that point in his letter about how nice it would be to have a super-yacht on the Amur if he were a millionaire...
That's... a completely different take from the French translation! Here it is, before I return the book to the library:
L'Amour est une région bien intéressante. Originale en diable. Elle grouille d'une vie dont on n'a même pas idée en Europe. Cela me fait penser aux récits sur la vie américaine. Les rives sont si sauvages, si pittoresques et luxuriantes qu'on aurait envie d'y vivre jusqu'à la fin de ses jours. J'écris ces dernière lignes le 25 juin. Le bateau vibre et m'empêche d'écrire. Nous sommes repartis. J'ai déjà parcouru mille verstes sur l'Amour et j'ai vu quantité de paysages splendides... Comme il fait chaud ! Et que les nuits sont douces ! Le matin il y a du brouillard mais il n'est pas froid.
Je scrute les rives à la jumelle ; je vois des myriades de canards, d'oies, de grèbes, de hérons et toutes sortes d'animaux à long bec. Voilà où il faudrait louer une datcha !
It's more Call of the Wild than super-yacht!
>100 LolaWalser: I'm too lazy to register in order to read the whole article, but I gotta say I found extremely off-putting that "what a wacky 22-yo I was, getting a PhD in Russian literature" comment, as if it takes something special to be interested in what is one of the greatest corpuses of literature on the planet. And that contrast-cum-analogy sounds beyond gauche and strained however you look at it (being "off-put", I don't mind scoffing without having read the thing... :))
Yes, that was an odd introduction, for an article in a literary magazine!
111thorold
>110 Dilara86: Ah! The "super-yacht" passage I was looking at was in a letter to his sister dated 21st June, and yours was from another dated 23rd-26th June, which Reeve also quotes part of, but he doesn't include the first three sentences in your extract.
112thorold
Off-topic, again, but a quick mention of a book Lola mentioned (off-topic there as well!) in the Southern Africa thread: Ice by Sonallah Ibrahim, a 2011 novel about an Egyptian postgraduate in Moscow in 1973, which came out in English translation about a year ago. A very odd book that seems to be snowing the reader with trivial detail whilst avoiding all the things you would expect a novel to be telling you about, but interestingly different, and full of Russian atmosphere.
113thorold
Another odd one, but on-topic...
The Stray Dog cabaret : a book of Russian poems (2007) by Paul Schmidt (USA, 1934-1999), edited by Catherine Ciepiela & Honor Moore
In 1984, Paul Schmidt collaborated with the composer Elizabeth Swados on a musical, The beautiful lady, set among the avant-garde poets who frequented the Stray Dog Cabaret in St Petersburg between 1912 and 1915, using Schmidt's own translations of their poems. After his death, Catherine Ciepiela and Honor Moore expanded on that idea to create this anthology of Schmidt's translations of Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and the rest.
Schmidt notoriously took all kinds of liberties with the texts, both in taking them out of context and juxtaposing poems from different poets to create dialogue and tell a story, and in picking styles and tones for their English voices to help characterise the poets more strongly on stage. Ciepiela and Moore are open about this, and give a summary of the most drastic changes in the notes, but this still isn't a collection you would want to use for any kind of serious study of the individual poets: it's probably better to see it as something like a historical novel that uses artistic licence to try to give you a vivid and intelligible picture of what was going on in a previous age. Taken in that way, it's interesting and lively to read, and many of the poets really seem to come alive, despite Schmidt's one-man-show effect: I thought Tsvetaeva and Khlebnikov came over particularly well. I'm not sure that I really buy Sergei Esenin as a country-and-western singer, though...
The Stray Dog cabaret : a book of Russian poems (2007) by Paul Schmidt (USA, 1934-1999), edited by Catherine Ciepiela & Honor Moore
In 1984, Paul Schmidt collaborated with the composer Elizabeth Swados on a musical, The beautiful lady, set among the avant-garde poets who frequented the Stray Dog Cabaret in St Petersburg between 1912 and 1915, using Schmidt's own translations of their poems. After his death, Catherine Ciepiela and Honor Moore expanded on that idea to create this anthology of Schmidt's translations of Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and the rest.
Schmidt notoriously took all kinds of liberties with the texts, both in taking them out of context and juxtaposing poems from different poets to create dialogue and tell a story, and in picking styles and tones for their English voices to help characterise the poets more strongly on stage. Ciepiela and Moore are open about this, and give a summary of the most drastic changes in the notes, but this still isn't a collection you would want to use for any kind of serious study of the individual poets: it's probably better to see it as something like a historical novel that uses artistic licence to try to give you a vivid and intelligible picture of what was going on in a previous age. Taken in that way, it's interesting and lively to read, and many of the poets really seem to come alive, despite Schmidt's one-man-show effect: I thought Tsvetaeva and Khlebnikov came over particularly well. I'm not sure that I really buy Sergei Esenin as a country-and-western singer, though...
114Dilara86
>113 thorold: That's interesting! I can't decide whether it's a genius or terrible idea, though. I suppose I'll have to read it to make up my mind...
I started a collection of works by Pasternak: Écrits autobiographiques - Le Docteur Jivago, which I borrowed from the library because I couldn't find my own (formerly my mother's) copy of Doctor Zhivago and for some unfathomable reason, none of the branches carry it as a standalone book. I now know more about Pasternak's life and work than I ever envisaged. And I found my mum's copy of Dr Zhivago on the day the reservation for Écrits autobiographiques came through!
I've finished Sauf-conduit (Safe Conduct), his autobiographical novel about his youth, which is intrinsically linked with the revolutionary events and politics of the early XXth century. Because it was clearly written for readers who lived through these times, or were knowledgeable about them, I realized a few pages in that I would get a lot more out of it if I first read the 130-page biography / short Russian history provided at the end of the book. It was very well-made and instructive (with plenty of illustrations), and made reading Sauf-Conduit much more fruitful.
I’ve also read Esquisse autobiographique (sketch for an autobiography), then started Doctor Zhivago, but I’m pausing it because there are other – non-Russian – library books that I have to read and return soon.
I started a collection of works by Pasternak: Écrits autobiographiques - Le Docteur Jivago, which I borrowed from the library because I couldn't find my own (formerly my mother's) copy of Doctor Zhivago and for some unfathomable reason, none of the branches carry it as a standalone book. I now know more about Pasternak's life and work than I ever envisaged. And I found my mum's copy of Dr Zhivago on the day the reservation for Écrits autobiographiques came through!
I've finished Sauf-conduit (Safe Conduct), his autobiographical novel about his youth, which is intrinsically linked with the revolutionary events and politics of the early XXth century. Because it was clearly written for readers who lived through these times, or were knowledgeable about them, I realized a few pages in that I would get a lot more out of it if I first read the 130-page biography / short Russian history provided at the end of the book. It was very well-made and instructive (with plenty of illustrations), and made reading Sauf-Conduit much more fruitful.
I’ve also read Esquisse autobiographique (sketch for an autobiography), then started Doctor Zhivago, but I’m pausing it because there are other – non-Russian – library books that I have to read and return soon.
115spiralsheep
>114 Dilara86: "I found my mum's copy of Dr Zhivago on the day the reservation for Écrits autobiographiques came through!"
Fate!
Fate!
116SassyLassy
>114 Dilara86: Like the sound of Safe Conduct. I would like to read more autobiographical works from this period, be they novels or not.
117SassyLassy
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin translated from the Russian by Natasha Randall 2006
written 1920 - 21 but not published in the Soviet Union until 1988
earliest (reliable) Russian text published as My by Chekhov House Publishers 1952
earlier versions circulated as samizdat manuscripts and as a publication in Prague
Sometimes a book's reputation builds up a mystique that makes us avoid it completely. Naturally, such books are different for different people. We was such a book for me. I had actually bought a copy back in July 2014, but looking at the name of the bookstore, I realize I was on holiday, and probably overly optimistic. It sat on a shelf for three years, then moved half way across the country and sat on another shelf for another three years, still in pristine condition.
Then along came the Reading Globally Russians Write the Revolution quarter. If there was ever a time to read it, it was now. What was I afraid of? The answer lies partly in the very first sentence of Bruce Sterling's introduction: "Yevgeny Zamyatin has a sound claim to the invention of the science fiction dystopia." In the next paragraph he says "Written with radical invention, deliberate verbal obscurity and cunning political intent, We is a rather hard book to read..."
Happily, although science fiction dystopias are about the farthest thing from my usual reading, I found the protagonist, D-503, strangely sympathetic. Writing hundreds of years in the future, committed to the even further future the One State will create elsewhere, D-503 is the engineer and project manager in charge of building the Integral, a mighty space ship intended to conquer new worlds, to bring their inhabitants "...the mathematically perfect life of the One State."
This is a world where reason is paramount. Happiness, and so freedom, is only possible through reason. Spontaneity, being unreasoned, is non-freedom and must be suppressed. Everything is prescribed and all actions have an allotted time in each unit's schedule, be it eating, walking, work, or sex.
D-503 unwisely ponders how life could have been lived in the freedom of the old days, for instance the twentieth century, when people lived "...without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them". He frets over the atavistic hair on his knuckles. He worries about the irrationality behind the idea of √-1. He wonders about the Green Wall enclosing the One State; green from the uncontrolled chaos of vegetation on the other side of its glass. Strange creatures appear there from time to time, but best not to think about them either. Best not to think at all in any contemplative way. When D-503 wrote in his diary, he realized this, trailing off his thoughts each time with a "..."
We was written in 1920 - 21 at a time when the idea of a new Soviet Man was being idealized and promulgated. New efficiency models were being tried out in new and rebuilt factories, following the chaos of war and revolution. Zamyatin was an engineer with an interest in language. His satire of this new world, expressed through the symbolism of mathematics, sound, and colour, was suspect. Forbidden to publish in the Soviet Union, it was not until 1988 that his book appeared there officially. Various copies made it out though, influencing George Orwell, and possibly Aldous Huxley. Zamyatin himself was arrested for the fourth time in 1922. He was allowed to leave the country in 1931, but died a few years later in poverty in Paris. Although he wrote essays, satire and plays, We was his only novel. Among other firsts, it was the first book to be banned by the Soviet censors.
written 1920 - 21 but not published in the Soviet Union until 1988
earliest (reliable) Russian text published as My by Chekhov House Publishers 1952
earlier versions circulated as samizdat manuscripts and as a publication in Prague
Sometimes a book's reputation builds up a mystique that makes us avoid it completely. Naturally, such books are different for different people. We was such a book for me. I had actually bought a copy back in July 2014, but looking at the name of the bookstore, I realize I was on holiday, and probably overly optimistic. It sat on a shelf for three years, then moved half way across the country and sat on another shelf for another three years, still in pristine condition.
Then along came the Reading Globally Russians Write the Revolution quarter. If there was ever a time to read it, it was now. What was I afraid of? The answer lies partly in the very first sentence of Bruce Sterling's introduction: "Yevgeny Zamyatin has a sound claim to the invention of the science fiction dystopia." In the next paragraph he says "Written with radical invention, deliberate verbal obscurity and cunning political intent, We is a rather hard book to read..."
Happily, although science fiction dystopias are about the farthest thing from my usual reading, I found the protagonist, D-503, strangely sympathetic. Writing hundreds of years in the future, committed to the even further future the One State will create elsewhere, D-503 is the engineer and project manager in charge of building the Integral, a mighty space ship intended to conquer new worlds, to bring their inhabitants "...the mathematically perfect life of the One State."
This is a world where reason is paramount. Happiness, and so freedom, is only possible through reason. Spontaneity, being unreasoned, is non-freedom and must be suppressed. Everything is prescribed and all actions have an allotted time in each unit's schedule, be it eating, walking, work, or sex.
D-503 unwisely ponders how life could have been lived in the freedom of the old days, for instance the twentieth century, when people lived "...without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them". He frets over the atavistic hair on his knuckles. He worries about the irrationality behind the idea of √-1. He wonders about the Green Wall enclosing the One State; green from the uncontrolled chaos of vegetation on the other side of its glass. Strange creatures appear there from time to time, but best not to think about them either. Best not to think at all in any contemplative way. When D-503 wrote in his diary, he realized this, trailing off his thoughts each time with a "..."
We was written in 1920 - 21 at a time when the idea of a new Soviet Man was being idealized and promulgated. New efficiency models were being tried out in new and rebuilt factories, following the chaos of war and revolution. Zamyatin was an engineer with an interest in language. His satire of this new world, expressed through the symbolism of mathematics, sound, and colour, was suspect. Forbidden to publish in the Soviet Union, it was not until 1988 that his book appeared there officially. Various copies made it out though, influencing George Orwell, and possibly Aldous Huxley. Zamyatin himself was arrested for the fourth time in 1922. He was allowed to leave the country in 1931, but died a few years later in poverty in Paris. Although he wrote essays, satire and plays, We was his only novel. Among other firsts, it was the first book to be banned by the Soviet censors.
118rocketjk
>117 SassyLassy: I read We several years back when it appeared in an interesting anthology I was working my way through called An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak, edited and translated by Bernard Guerney. I thought it was very interesting and readable.
119LolaWalser
Zamyatin wasn't satirising only the trends in Russia; he had seen mass-organised, taylorised, capitalist exploitation of workers in England and Germany. It should also be noted that he was an avid fan of Wells, who really popularised the notion of "scientific" fables for adults. If Huxley's Brave new world owes everything to We, We owes not a little to The sleeper awakes.
>113 thorold:
I'm not sure that I really buy Sergei Esenin as a country-and-western singer, though...
Heh, I totally do. He was a country boy himself...
>113 thorold:
I'm not sure that I really buy Sergei Esenin as a country-and-western singer, though...
Heh, I totally do. He was a country boy himself...
120LolaWalser
sorry, the curse of the double post is upon me... again...
Well, in order to make this post slightly less dull... was googling for a pic of Yesenin in a cowboy hat (I could swear such exists), came across this articlet: Skyscrapers, poverty and the power of the dollar: Things that impressed Russian writers in the U.S.
Writers mentioned, besides Yesenin, are Gorky, Mayakovsky (Hesperus Press published his American travelogue), Ilf and Petrov.
Well, in order to make this post slightly less dull... was googling for a pic of Yesenin in a cowboy hat (I could swear such exists), came across this articlet: Skyscrapers, poverty and the power of the dollar: Things that impressed Russian writers in the U.S.
Writers mentioned, besides Yesenin, are Gorky, Mayakovsky (Hesperus Press published his American travelogue), Ilf and Petrov.
121Tess_W
The Death of Ivan Ilych This was the fourth Tolstoy I've read (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), and while it rates fourth in my "likability", it was nonetheless interesting. Most of the book is focused on Ivan's life and his climb up the corporate ladder in the Ministry of Justice as a lower-level judge. Ivan was very careful to live his life according to the social class that he wanted to become. He was very respectful of all, but he was a toady. Ivan's wife was a bitter harpy, thinking Ivan should have done better financially for the family than he did. One day Ivan falls and injures himself and from that point he has a long, drawn-out death. He ruminates about many things while lying on the divan contemplating his life; but the biggest question was: Did I live a life worth dying for? He then agonizes and finally resolves that (IMHO) his life was both selfish and also compassionate.
After I finished reading this book, it reminded me of Socrates, "the unexamined life is not worth living."
After doing some background reading (again) on Tolstoy, it seems that The Death of Ivan Ilych was the culmination of 9 year writing hiatus for Tolstoy after writing Anna Karenina. This was written in 1886 after his spiritual conversion at which time Tolstoy began focusing on his own death.
The version I read was published independently in 2019 and was translated by Louise Maude. Interestingly, LT does not have a touchstone without spelling Ilych with an "i"!
After I finished reading this book, it reminded me of Socrates, "the unexamined life is not worth living."
After doing some background reading (again) on Tolstoy, it seems that The Death of Ivan Ilych was the culmination of 9 year writing hiatus for Tolstoy after writing Anna Karenina. This was written in 1886 after his spiritual conversion at which time Tolstoy began focusing on his own death.
The version I read was published independently in 2019 and was translated by Louise Maude. Interestingly, LT does not have a touchstone without spelling Ilych with an "i"!
122SassyLassy
>113 thorold: Not sure Esenin as a CW singer is any more strange than Tilda Swinton as one in that great totally off topic Gorbals classic Your Cheatin' Heart from BBC Scotland and John Byrne
>118 rocketjk: Another example of the beauties of anthologies - sounds like a good one
>119 LolaWalser: I was writing a long answer to this when the power unexpectedly went off for over an hour and it all disappeared. I'll try to recreate some of it.
First, thanks for the mention of Taylorism. In her introduction, the translator Natasha Randall gives a background to this, and the mechanization of agriculture with the introduction of Ford tractors, saying that "...the terms fordizatsiya and teilorizatsiya were used in Soviet universities in the 1920s.
She also cites Brett Cooke's Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We, in which Cook says We is "...the second most studied novel of the twentieth century among Western scholars". Not sure about that claim, but she goes on to mention some of his details like Auditorium 112, featured in the novel, had the same number as Zamyatin's prison cell. Also, the number of the character S-4711 refers to the launching of an icebreaker on which Zamyatin had worked. Details like this would have been great in notes, but this edition only had notes to the introduction.
Apparently Huxley claimed he hadn't read We, but Orwell insisted he had. Who to believe? It appears you're right about Wells though.
>120 LolaWalser: Enjoyed this link. Ilf and Petrov always make me chuckle.
>121 Tess_W: This was a book I had in mind for this quarter's reading, but I am currently reading a 500+ page Russian tome, so not sure if I will finish even that by year's end. It may have to wait until next year.
>118 rocketjk: Another example of the beauties of anthologies - sounds like a good one
>119 LolaWalser: I was writing a long answer to this when the power unexpectedly went off for over an hour and it all disappeared. I'll try to recreate some of it.
First, thanks for the mention of Taylorism. In her introduction, the translator Natasha Randall gives a background to this, and the mechanization of agriculture with the introduction of Ford tractors, saying that "...the terms fordizatsiya and teilorizatsiya were used in Soviet universities in the 1920s.
She also cites Brett Cooke's Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We, in which Cook says We is "...the second most studied novel of the twentieth century among Western scholars". Not sure about that claim, but she goes on to mention some of his details like Auditorium 112, featured in the novel, had the same number as Zamyatin's prison cell. Also, the number of the character S-4711 refers to the launching of an icebreaker on which Zamyatin had worked. Details like this would have been great in notes, but this edition only had notes to the introduction.
Apparently Huxley claimed he hadn't read We, but Orwell insisted he had. Who to believe? It appears you're right about Wells though.
>120 LolaWalser: Enjoyed this link. Ilf and Petrov always make me chuckle.
>121 Tess_W: This was a book I had in mind for this quarter's reading, but I am currently reading a 500+ page Russian tome, so not sure if I will finish even that by year's end. It may have to wait until next year.
123LolaWalser
It's hard to do justice to a character and body of work as strange and complex as Andrei Bely's. Nabokov famously included Petersburg among the four most important literary works EVER (the other three belonging to Kafka, Proust, and Joyce), but I'm thinking The Dramatic Symphony, the work of a teenager published privately in 1902, might be an even more intriguing introduction.
This is Bely not only at his most experimental, but a pre-revolutionary religious-mystic Bely who, following the prophecies of Vladimir Solovyov, expected the Apocalypse to bring forth a new religion, a neo-Christianity theosophical in flavour and hinduistic in shape. However, Bely managed to combine religious fervour with a serious interest in science (son of a mathematician, he studied mathematics and physics himself), topping it all with the drive to create musically, but outside the realm of music. Music being the "highest" form of art is an old philosophical trope which had been taken up and renewed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche--both Bely's influences--and with his theosophical inclination for unity of concepts, Bely turned to writing prose "symphonies". As he writes in the essay appended to The Dramatic Symphony, he meant to create:
(May be interesting to compare this to the effects of "impressionists" writing around this time elsewhere, Herman Bang, Keyserling, or the later Imagists.)
Bely numbers all sentences, arranging them in what I suppose we may see as chords; the "chords" organising in larger contrapunctal structures, which are further on delimited into movements (parts 1-4). It would take many more rereadings to come up with a really interesting interpretation of Bely's "music", and I must admit I'd do this for the original, but don't feel the same eagerness with the English translation.
But even a superficial, one-time reading is interesting--and a "story" definitely emerges, with characters, situations, "plot".
The book begins:
I hope I've illustrated the formal interest of Bely's work sufficiently. Of course, the most important thing is what he wanted to accomplish with "musicalising" prose--and that is to get as close to reality as possible, not describing, but depicting; not indirectly, but directly.
There's no end to things one might mention, discuss and speculate about here, but there is only one that seems to me oddly conspicuous by its absence in the editorial apparatus that accompanies the novel, and that is the immense influence of the composer Alexander Scriabin in pre-revolutionary's Russia new thinking and discourse on music.
I don't think it can be a coincidence that Bely formulated "musically" an expectation that a new (post-apocalyptic) life and the new man would be theurgical in nature (the re-enchantment of the world), in the wake of an older mystic like Scriabin whose work was to climax in an (unfinished) synesthetic, multi-medial Mysterium as the composer's final revelation.
Lest I made all this sound heavy, here's a taste of Bely's humour... perhaps pre-figuring that of Vvedensky et al.--Bely was a fan of Carroll's and Edward Lear, after all:
This is Bely not only at his most experimental, but a pre-revolutionary religious-mystic Bely who, following the prophecies of Vladimir Solovyov, expected the Apocalypse to bring forth a new religion, a neo-Christianity theosophical in flavour and hinduistic in shape. However, Bely managed to combine religious fervour with a serious interest in science (son of a mathematician, he studied mathematics and physics himself), topping it all with the drive to create musically, but outside the realm of music. Music being the "highest" form of art is an old philosophical trope which had been taken up and renewed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche--both Bely's influences--and with his theosophical inclination for unity of concepts, Bely turned to writing prose "symphonies". As he writes in the essay appended to The Dramatic Symphony, he meant to create:
an art form that strives by means of images to convey the image-less immediacy of music
(May be interesting to compare this to the effects of "impressionists" writing around this time elsewhere, Herman Bang, Keyserling, or the later Imagists.)
Bely numbers all sentences, arranging them in what I suppose we may see as chords; the "chords" organising in larger contrapunctal structures, which are further on delimited into movements (parts 1-4). It would take many more rereadings to come up with a really interesting interpretation of Bely's "music", and I must admit I'd do this for the original, but don't feel the same eagerness with the English translation.
But even a superficial, one-time reading is interesting--and a "story" definitely emerges, with characters, situations, "plot".
The book begins:
1. A season of sweltering grind. The roadway gleamed blindingly.
2. Cab-drivers cracked their whips, exposing their worn, blue backs to the hot sun.
3. Yard-sweepers raised columns of dust, their grime-browned faces loudly exulting, untroubled by grimaces from passers-by.
4. Along the pavements scurried heat-exhausted intellectuals and suspicious-looking citizens.
5. All were pale and over everyone hung the light-blue vault of the sky, now deep-blue, now grey, now black, full of musical tedium, eternal tedium, with the sun's eye in its midst.
6. Streams of white-hot metal poured down from the same spot.
7. None knew where they ran to or why, fearing to look truth in the eye.
I hope I've illustrated the formal interest of Bely's work sufficiently. Of course, the most important thing is what he wanted to accomplish with "musicalising" prose--and that is to get as close to reality as possible, not describing, but depicting; not indirectly, but directly.
There's no end to things one might mention, discuss and speculate about here, but there is only one that seems to me oddly conspicuous by its absence in the editorial apparatus that accompanies the novel, and that is the immense influence of the composer Alexander Scriabin in pre-revolutionary's Russia new thinking and discourse on music.
I don't think it can be a coincidence that Bely formulated "musically" an expectation that a new (post-apocalyptic) life and the new man would be theurgical in nature (the re-enchantment of the world), in the wake of an older mystic like Scriabin whose work was to climax in an (unfinished) synesthetic, multi-medial Mysterium as the composer's final revelation.
Lest I made all this sound heavy, here's a taste of Bely's humour... perhaps pre-figuring that of Vvedensky et al.--Bely was a fan of Carroll's and Edward Lear, after all:
1. Popovsky was a conservative. Free thinkers hated him for his free attitude to their opinions.
2. Lucid minds contorted their browless foreheads before his puny little figure.
3. He had the effrontery not to fear blank cartridges, and real ones flew over his head, as Popovsky was rather short.
4. Popovsky was a man of the church. He shunned the devil and progress. He thought that we were living through our final days and that whatever shone with talent came from the Devil.
5. He detected signs of devilry in his acquaintances and read the Gospel in the evenings.
6. Popovsky was a cynic. His thin lips were always twisted in a scarcely perceptible smile. He was on the look-out for the ridiculous in every opinion and rejected everything.
7. Such was Popovsky, and no power on earth could change him.
124LolaWalser
>122 SassyLassy:
I had the post above open for so long trying to format it, I didn't see your post. Yeah, I'm with Orwell on this, Huxley's a big pants on fire liar :)--although i suppose technically he needn't have read the book, someone could have told him about it or something...
Zamyatin lived in Europe before the twenties and spoke English well, he needn't have waited for "taylorisation" to enter Soviet dictionaries before getting to know it, but I'm afraid I'm responsible for the confusion here--my point wasn't about taylorisation per se, I used it as shorthand for the phenomenon Zamyatin was aware of in mass industry because he saw it--the tendency to automation, uniformisation, and total forceful control of workers' time, including outside the factory.
In this subjugation the British and American industrialists were not just far ahead of the Russians (whose industry was still rudimentary at the time of the Revolution) but also exploitative in a manner that the Soviet state simply wouldn't be (Soviet labour would have other problems, though).
Ha, I'm a fan of Ilf & Petrov too. Btw, I forgot to touchstone yesterday, since that's one title available in English, Mayakovsky: My discovery of America...
I had the post above open for so long trying to format it, I didn't see your post. Yeah, I'm with Orwell on this, Huxley's a big pants on fire liar :)--although i suppose technically he needn't have read the book, someone could have told him about it or something...
Zamyatin lived in Europe before the twenties and spoke English well, he needn't have waited for "taylorisation" to enter Soviet dictionaries before getting to know it, but I'm afraid I'm responsible for the confusion here--my point wasn't about taylorisation per se, I used it as shorthand for the phenomenon Zamyatin was aware of in mass industry because he saw it--the tendency to automation, uniformisation, and total forceful control of workers' time, including outside the factory.
In this subjugation the British and American industrialists were not just far ahead of the Russians (whose industry was still rudimentary at the time of the Revolution) but also exploitative in a manner that the Soviet state simply wouldn't be (Soviet labour would have other problems, though).
Ha, I'm a fan of Ilf & Petrov too. Btw, I forgot to touchstone yesterday, since that's one title available in English, Mayakovsky: My discovery of America...
125spiralsheep
>119 LolaWalser: Rose Macaulay's What Not is less famous than Zamyatin's We now but was almost certainly very influential on Huxley at the time as he knew Macaulay personally. She, of course, would also have read HG Wells.
>124 LolaWalser: "In this subjugation the British and American industrialists were not just far ahead of the Russians (whose industry was still rudimentary at the time of the Revolution) but also exploitative in a manner that the Soviet state simply wouldn't be (Soviet labour would have other problems, though)."
Yes, there are reasons why Engels was radicalised in Barmen and Manchester.
>124 LolaWalser: "In this subjugation the British and American industrialists were not just far ahead of the Russians (whose industry was still rudimentary at the time of the Revolution) but also exploitative in a manner that the Soviet state simply wouldn't be (Soviet labour would have other problems, though)."
Yes, there are reasons why Engels was radicalised in Barmen and Manchester.
126SassyLassy
>123 LolaWalser: By coincidence, Petersburg is the lengthy book I'm reading mentioned above in >122 SassyLassy:. I'll keep your notes on The Dramatic Symphony in mind as I read it. I can already see some of the same stylistic similarities.
>124 LolaWalser: >125 spiralsheep: Contemplating how I interpret 'subjugation', but I definitely agree about the UK, US and I would add, Germany, being far ahead of industrial Russia chronologically.
>124 LolaWalser: >125 spiralsheep: Contemplating how I interpret 'subjugation', but I definitely agree about the UK, US and I would add, Germany, being far ahead of industrial Russia chronologically.
127spiralsheep
>126 SassyLassy: Yes, Barmen, where Engels first encountered factory workers, is now Wuppertal. There's an Engels-Haus museum!
128thorold
>127 spiralsheep: ...as opposed to Manchester, where Engels first encountered barmen?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Have to admit that I’ve been to Wuppertal on numerous occasions, ridden on the monorail and visited the zoo (which weren’t there in Engels’s day), but never quite had time for the museum. Next time...
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Have to admit that I’ve been to Wuppertal on numerous occasions, ridden on the monorail and visited the zoo (which weren’t there in Engels’s day), but never quite had time for the museum. Next time...
129spiralsheep
>128 thorold: I suspect Engels was more interested in barmaids, lol.
TBH given a direct choice between any writer's house museum and even the world's least inspiring monorail I have to admit the monorail would probably win my attention, even second time around.
ETA: Although I did make a side pilgrimage to the Engels statue in Manchester, which still had free Ukrainian national flag colours painted on it from before it was relocated.
TBH given a direct choice between any writer's house museum and even the world's least inspiring monorail I have to admit the monorail would probably win my attention, even second time around.
ETA: Although I did make a side pilgrimage to the Engels statue in Manchester, which still had free Ukrainian national flag colours painted on it from before it was relocated.
130LolaWalser
>126 SassyLassy:
Petersburg is equally amazing and perplexing, I found. And yes, the young Bely of the symphonies was already in possession of his style.
Coincidentally, my next read also involves St. Petersburg, but is very much of "something completely different". In fact I didn't expect to want to talk about it, but it turned out to be quite fascinating.
Unemployed councils in St. Petersburg in 1906 is a short (about 40 pages) memoir by Sergei Malyshev of a period of about two years, 1906-08, when Malyshev was involved in organising the proletariat to combat mass unemployment. The memoir was first published in 1931 by an association of "Old Bolsheviks", and although (apparently) discreetly suppressed in Russia in the Stalinist period, it was kept in print in numerous translations in other countries.
Malyshev was a minor figure (per marxists.org, "two mentions in Lenin, none in Trotsky"), born proletarian in 1877, joined the Bolsheviks in 1902, suffered the usual lot of the revolutionaries of frequent imprisonment, beatings etc., held a series of posts after October, was featured in an anthology of Gorky's dedicated to the work of authors-autodidacts, and died in 1938 "of natural causes"--the last achievement not to be scoffed at, in those years!
A quick search didn't unearth anything that would throw some light on the reception of the memoir in Russia, or on why Malyshev's name was "forgotten" until the perestroika, but it shouldn't be assumed there's some "big" story behind this, could be something as simple as Stalin burying "Old Bolsheviks" on principle, no specific reason necessary... whatever the case, already the first edition had certain names modified, of people who had already been blacklisted. A recent (2017) Italian edition contains much additional material, including a memoir by one of the suppressed people.
My copy is a reprint (1960s?) of the 1931 version, by Proletarian Publishers of Chicago, and you can find the body of the text on this link, albeit with many typos (the website is Spanish), an intro and note from 1992 from a British edition, and a few interpolated graphics:
https://elpiquetero.org/2017/01/04/how-the-bolsheviks-orgasnised-the-unemployed/
After the crushing of the first Russian revolution in 1905, the government and the capitalists tried to definitively destroy the threat of workers' militancy by prolonged locking out of work. Mass unemployment was wielded as a political tool and across large cities in Russia (those with factories) hundreds of thousands of workers found themselves and their families without the means of support in the winter of 1905/06.
Malyshev, wanted by the police, was smuggled out of Kostroma to St. Petersburg where he helped organise the Soviet (council) of the unemployed, a body that would successfully, although only through constant struggle, negotiate with the city council (the Duma) for the organisation of public works for the unemployed. The projects involved raising of the harbour, paving the streets and similar, and lasted about two years. During this whole time the Powers That Be, the tsarist government and the capitalists, were trying to kick the workers out, which they eventually succeeded in doing. But, as Malyshev concludes, even that relatively short period of victory not only helped basic survival, but let the workers find unity and recognise their strength, and served as a school for those who would rise in October.
Malyshev writes with directness, simplicity, and zero "effects". There is a brusque stoicism about his tone even when he mentions things that a Dickens could turn into Oliver Twist cubed. You get a sense of the misery of the people between the lines--presumably it didn't need dwelling on for those in his world. For instance, the hand-to-mouth existence of the majority of the workers is evident in the constant and immediate threat of starvation. The first thing everyone tries to organise are free dinners, offered in special cafeterias for the unemployed. Unable to pay rent, workers' families break up, with men and women reduced to collective lodgings where one pays for the bed alone, while children get scattered among luckier friends if one has them, or end up in children's homes.
After the unemployed cafeterias, the help most often urgently requested concerns the pawnshops where the workers pawn whatever little they have that may be sold--such as "sewing machines and underwear". The council of the unemployed regularly demands intervention in the pawnshops to obtain longer grace periods and lower interest on these items... precious sewing machines, irreplaceable underwear...
But Malyshev is cool, the most (blatant) outrage is expressed in this bit, which is also funny:
Petersburg is equally amazing and perplexing, I found. And yes, the young Bely of the symphonies was already in possession of his style.
Coincidentally, my next read also involves St. Petersburg, but is very much of "something completely different". In fact I didn't expect to want to talk about it, but it turned out to be quite fascinating.
Unemployed councils in St. Petersburg in 1906 is a short (about 40 pages) memoir by Sergei Malyshev of a period of about two years, 1906-08, when Malyshev was involved in organising the proletariat to combat mass unemployment. The memoir was first published in 1931 by an association of "Old Bolsheviks", and although (apparently) discreetly suppressed in Russia in the Stalinist period, it was kept in print in numerous translations in other countries.
Malyshev was a minor figure (per marxists.org, "two mentions in Lenin, none in Trotsky"), born proletarian in 1877, joined the Bolsheviks in 1902, suffered the usual lot of the revolutionaries of frequent imprisonment, beatings etc., held a series of posts after October, was featured in an anthology of Gorky's dedicated to the work of authors-autodidacts, and died in 1938 "of natural causes"--the last achievement not to be scoffed at, in those years!
A quick search didn't unearth anything that would throw some light on the reception of the memoir in Russia, or on why Malyshev's name was "forgotten" until the perestroika, but it shouldn't be assumed there's some "big" story behind this, could be something as simple as Stalin burying "Old Bolsheviks" on principle, no specific reason necessary... whatever the case, already the first edition had certain names modified, of people who had already been blacklisted. A recent (2017) Italian edition contains much additional material, including a memoir by one of the suppressed people.
My copy is a reprint (1960s?) of the 1931 version, by Proletarian Publishers of Chicago, and you can find the body of the text on this link, albeit with many typos (the website is Spanish), an intro and note from 1992 from a British edition, and a few interpolated graphics:
https://elpiquetero.org/2017/01/04/how-the-bolsheviks-orgasnised-the-unemployed/
After the crushing of the first Russian revolution in 1905, the government and the capitalists tried to definitively destroy the threat of workers' militancy by prolonged locking out of work. Mass unemployment was wielded as a political tool and across large cities in Russia (those with factories) hundreds of thousands of workers found themselves and their families without the means of support in the winter of 1905/06.
Malyshev, wanted by the police, was smuggled out of Kostroma to St. Petersburg where he helped organise the Soviet (council) of the unemployed, a body that would successfully, although only through constant struggle, negotiate with the city council (the Duma) for the organisation of public works for the unemployed. The projects involved raising of the harbour, paving the streets and similar, and lasted about two years. During this whole time the Powers That Be, the tsarist government and the capitalists, were trying to kick the workers out, which they eventually succeeded in doing. But, as Malyshev concludes, even that relatively short period of victory not only helped basic survival, but let the workers find unity and recognise their strength, and served as a school for those who would rise in October.
Malyshev writes with directness, simplicity, and zero "effects". There is a brusque stoicism about his tone even when he mentions things that a Dickens could turn into Oliver Twist cubed. You get a sense of the misery of the people between the lines--presumably it didn't need dwelling on for those in his world. For instance, the hand-to-mouth existence of the majority of the workers is evident in the constant and immediate threat of starvation. The first thing everyone tries to organise are free dinners, offered in special cafeterias for the unemployed. Unable to pay rent, workers' families break up, with men and women reduced to collective lodgings where one pays for the bed alone, while children get scattered among luckier friends if one has them, or end up in children's homes.
After the unemployed cafeterias, the help most often urgently requested concerns the pawnshops where the workers pawn whatever little they have that may be sold--such as "sewing machines and underwear". The council of the unemployed regularly demands intervention in the pawnshops to obtain longer grace periods and lower interest on these items... precious sewing machines, irreplaceable underwear...
But Malyshev is cool, the most (blatant) outrage is expressed in this bit, which is also funny:
On my arrival in St. Petersburg, I immediately presented myself at the party organization headquarters, and after meeting the party leaders, went to the Vyborg district. There I met a good comrade Simon Loktev. (...) We had some hours at our disposal before the meeting so we walked up and down the Sampsonevsky Prospect as we compared notes on the past events. We wanted to go into a beer hall, but the state of our finances and the fear of spies held us back. (...) We were hungry and would have liked to go to Filippov's for some food, but an examination of our pockets convinced us that that was a pleasure we would have to deny ourselves.
Strolling along the Nevsky, we watched the well-fed, contented bourgeoisie. Some--of higher rank-- rode in magnificent carriages, with coats of arms and one or two splendid horses; others, a lower estate--a bourgeois crowd--moved on foot (...) They went into the stores filled with goods, came out with armfuls of purchases, and youngsters, laden with those purchases, dragged after them to their homes. All that there was in these stores, stands, warehouses, produced by the proletariat, was quite accessible to the bourgeoisie. We also went several blocks up along the Nevsky but we could only look into the Soloviev store. We could not go in and buy even a quarter of a pound of sausage because the merchant Soloviev's well-fed salesmen would not want to sell such small portions, and further, the price of the sausage did not fit the size of our pockets.
To relieve our feelings we swore roundly, linked arms, and turned away from this smug Nevsky. We went along narrow alleys and finally, at Bassein Street, found a cheap restaurant where the two of us filled up on some kind of tripe for two kopeks.
131spiralsheep
>123 LolaWalser: This is absolutely fascinating. I'm always wary of experimental works in translation but those quotes work well.
>130 LolaWalser: 'died in 1938 "of natural causes"--the last achievement not to be scoffed at, in those years!'
I remember thinking the same about a Jewish Belarusian nationalist, born 1886, who died of natural causes in 1941. Too young but still a remarkable achievement.
Having to pawn sewing machines is especially sad and ironic as they were one of the few "means of production" regularly in the hands of workers (the same was previously true of hand looms).
Lastly, I collect tripe quotes so thank you for that. :-)
>130 LolaWalser: 'died in 1938 "of natural causes"--the last achievement not to be scoffed at, in those years!'
I remember thinking the same about a Jewish Belarusian nationalist, born 1886, who died of natural causes in 1941. Too young but still a remarkable achievement.
Having to pawn sewing machines is especially sad and ironic as they were one of the few "means of production" regularly in the hands of workers (the same was previously true of hand looms).
Lastly, I collect tripe quotes so thank you for that. :-)
132thorold
>130 LolaWalser: >131 spiralsheep: I’m sure there must be some interesting literary/social history stuff around somewhere on the pawnbroker as ruthless exploiter of the working class versus the mont-de-piété as charitable institution.
133Dilara86
>130 LolaWalser: >131 spiralsheep: My mind went somewhere much darker: I saw the quotes arround "natural causes", and assumed it meant he died of natural causes the way some political opponents are found to have committed "suicide" by gunshot to the back of their own heads... Then I read the end of the sentence and was reassured!
Thank you for the link, I've bookmarked it for later today.
So many books I'd like to read: Petersburg has been on my radar for a while, but I never got round to it. And I meant to reread We for the Speculative Fiction from around the World Reading Globally quarter, but did not have time for it...
>115 spiralsheep: Fate!
Quite! I am very happy with the extra material in the library's copy, and it's probably better for my mum's paperback to stay unopened because the paper is getting quite brittle.
I've hit a bit of a roadblock with Dr Zhivago. Komarovsky is grooming/abusing Lara, which is hard to read, all the more so as I was (partially) named after her! What were you thinking, mum?
Thank you for the link, I've bookmarked it for later today.
So many books I'd like to read: Petersburg has been on my radar for a while, but I never got round to it. And I meant to reread We for the Speculative Fiction from around the World Reading Globally quarter, but did not have time for it...
>115 spiralsheep: Fate!
Quite! I am very happy with the extra material in the library's copy, and it's probably better for my mum's paperback to stay unopened because the paper is getting quite brittle.
I've hit a bit of a roadblock with Dr Zhivago. Komarovsky is grooming/abusing Lara, which is hard to read, all the more so as I was (partially) named after her! What were you thinking, mum?
134SassyLassy
Still reading Petersburg, so in the meantime, offering some notes on this read from 2016. It's not quite in the time frame, only five years out, but it certainly gives a good idea of why things needed to change:
The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddington
first published as Gospoda Golovlevy in 1876
This was the most dismal of books, full of drunks, despair and suicides. It also had some of the most unpleasant characters in Russian literature populating it. Why keep reading? It may have been one of those trances where you just have to know what happens next, even though you know it will be awful. Still and all, it does much to dispel the fairytale idea of life on a Russian estate in the nineteenth century, which was interesting, because it is not possible that it was all furs and dances.
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin 1826 - 1889 was primarily known for his satire, but The Golovlyov Family is less satire and more realism. Shchedrin is quoted as saying "The sole object of my literary work was unfailingly to protest against the greed, hypocrisy, falsehood, theft, treachery, and stupidity of modern Russians." He certainly managed that here.
The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddington
first published as Gospoda Golovlevy in 1876
This was the most dismal of books, full of drunks, despair and suicides. It also had some of the most unpleasant characters in Russian literature populating it. Why keep reading? It may have been one of those trances where you just have to know what happens next, even though you know it will be awful. Still and all, it does much to dispel the fairytale idea of life on a Russian estate in the nineteenth century, which was interesting, because it is not possible that it was all furs and dances.
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin 1826 - 1889 was primarily known for his satire, but The Golovlyov Family is less satire and more realism. Shchedrin is quoted as saying "The sole object of my literary work was unfailingly to protest against the greed, hypocrisy, falsehood, theft, treachery, and stupidity of modern Russians." He certainly managed that here.
135SassyLassy
Finished at last. This is a book I started in 2009, read the first 249 pages, put it down and never got back. I started at the beginning again this time and it made far more sense.
Petersburg by Andrei Bely translated from the Russian by John Elsworth 2009
first published in the Moscow joural Sirin in 1913-1914
published in much shortened form in Berlin in 1922
this translation from the original long version
cover art on this Pushkin edition from an Ilya Repin painting
finished reading December 29, 2020
Petersburg is an exhausting book. Not exhausting in the sense that you just want to crawl off to bed, but rather exhausting because it is full of motion; there is no rest. Things are always moving, they never stay still. Just when the reader might think there is a pause, Bely will repeat some actions, some sentences.
All this movement is accompanied by colours and sound, often smells, adding layers of depth to the narrative.
Just like navigating in a mist, nothing is ever clear. There is a plot on the part of radicals to kill a high government official, but who dreamed it up? Was it the person entrusted to carry out the assassination, or was it the bomb-maker, the Fugitive? Maybe it was even the Person, he who directs it all (maybe). The designated killer and the Fugitive both obsess over ten days until nothing is clear to either. The reader too is often left befuddled until the action circles around again and more is revealed and then a bit more.
This world of obsession and hallucination makes the omniscient narrator work hard; circling back, making connections, speaking up when things get too absurd. Nothing is sure until the very end, when suddenly everything is resolved.
This is a book I imagine people spend years studying, reading it over and over. Despite an excellent translation, I suspect it can only ever be fully grasped in the original Russian. This Pushkin edition did not have notes and they were sorely missed. Reading it, there was always a feeling of "If only I knew more about..."; "If only I knew more about the accepted stereotypes behind regions and family names"; "If only...". This is not to take away from the book in any way whatsoever. Rather, it is to suggest that there is always something more Petersburg has to offer the reader. As the quote from the New York Times Book Review on the back cover put it, this book is regarded by many as "The most important, most influential, and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the twentieth century."
Petersburg by Andrei Bely translated from the Russian by John Elsworth 2009
first published in the Moscow joural Sirin in 1913-1914
published in much shortened form in Berlin in 1922
this translation from the original long version
cover art on this Pushkin edition from an Ilya Repin painting
finished reading December 29, 2020
Petersburg is an exhausting book. Not exhausting in the sense that you just want to crawl off to bed, but rather exhausting because it is full of motion; there is no rest. Things are always moving, they never stay still. Just when the reader might think there is a pause, Bely will repeat some actions, some sentences.
All this movement is accompanied by colours and sound, often smells, adding layers of depth to the narrative.
The Petersburg street in autumn penetrates your whole organism: it turns the marrow of your bones to ice and tickles your freezing spine; but as soon as you escape from it into a warm room, the Petersburg street flows in your veins like a fever. The stranger now experienced the quality of this street as he entered a grimy vestibule, densely crammed with black, blue, grey and yellow overcoats, swanky hats, lop-eared hats, dock-tailed hats, and galoshes of every description. A warm dampness enveloped him; in the air hung a milky steam: steam that smelled of the pancakes.As the book progresses, it becomes clear that the different colours represent different people and states of mind. A character's change of colour choice often indicates a change of mind. The one constant is the green swirling mist, coming in off the marshes, hiding who knows what, enveloping the Bronze Horseman who created it all. There is a threat out there, undefined as yet, but in October 1905 Petersburg, everyone sensed it.
Just like navigating in a mist, nothing is ever clear. There is a plot on the part of radicals to kill a high government official, but who dreamed it up? Was it the person entrusted to carry out the assassination, or was it the bomb-maker, the Fugitive? Maybe it was even the Person, he who directs it all (maybe). The designated killer and the Fugitive both obsess over ten days until nothing is clear to either. The reader too is often left befuddled until the action circles around again and more is revealed and then a bit more.
This world of obsession and hallucination makes the omniscient narrator work hard; circling back, making connections, speaking up when things get too absurd. Nothing is sure until the very end, when suddenly everything is resolved.
This is a book I imagine people spend years studying, reading it over and over. Despite an excellent translation, I suspect it can only ever be fully grasped in the original Russian. This Pushkin edition did not have notes and they were sorely missed. Reading it, there was always a feeling of "If only I knew more about..."; "If only I knew more about the accepted stereotypes behind regions and family names"; "If only...". This is not to take away from the book in any way whatsoever. Rather, it is to suggest that there is always something more Petersburg has to offer the reader. As the quote from the New York Times Book Review on the back cover put it, this book is regarded by many as "The most important, most influential, and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the twentieth century."
136LolaWalser
Eleven years! That calls for a toast if nothing else. :)
I was hoping to finish the Artamonovs in time to draw a parallel with your Golovlyovs but... things... are against serious reading where I'm at mentally.
I think Bely is probably more enjoyable in Russian but I won't make predictions about whether he makes more sense in it. This is one case where knowing more about the author and his intellectual interests might be necessary to get a real grasp on the story, because he poured them into it. In a way--and yes, here I think the comparison stands--that it helps to understand Ulysses better the more one knows about Joyce, his preoccupations, and his times.
I was hoping to finish the Artamonovs in time to draw a parallel with your Golovlyovs but... things... are against serious reading where I'm at mentally.
I think Bely is probably more enjoyable in Russian but I won't make predictions about whether he makes more sense in it. This is one case where knowing more about the author and his intellectual interests might be necessary to get a real grasp on the story, because he poured them into it. In a way--and yes, here I think the comparison stands--that it helps to understand Ulysses better the more one knows about Joyce, his preoccupations, and his times.
137spiralsheep
I read The border : a journey around Russia through North Korea, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Norway and the Northwest Passage, by Erika Fatland in the 2020 English translation.
The Border has more material relevant to the 1881-1922 period than the author's previous travel book Sovietistan (mentioned above) because The Border concentrated on military history along a line on the map, while Sovietistan expanded more on the inhabitants of the places visited and their differing societies. Both books are equally well written and translated.
Favourite sentence: "He was arrested in 1930, accused of having established a counter-revolutionary organisation of agricultural specialists."
The Border has more material relevant to the 1881-1922 period than the author's previous travel book Sovietistan (mentioned above) because The Border concentrated on military history along a line on the map, while Sovietistan expanded more on the inhabitants of the places visited and their differing societies. Both books are equally well written and translated.
Favourite sentence: "He was arrested in 1930, accused of having established a counter-revolutionary organisation of agricultural specialists."
