Back to Classics: Two of Gogol's Petersburg Stories

The Writer: Nikolai Gogol’

Dates: The story “Невский Проспект” (“Nevsky Prospect”) was published in 1835. “The Nose” was published in 1836.

Why they’re important: I’ll forgo the scholarly and methodical in favor of a selfish big-picture summary that fits my current reading: “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Nose” are part of a cycle of Gogol’s stories based in St. Petersburg that contribute to the city’s mythos. (I’m appropriating the word “mythos” from Antonina Bouis’s translation of Solomon Volkov’s St. Petersburg.) Gogol contributes to a curious procession of Petersburg prose and poetry—which includes Pushkin in the early years and (I suspect) continues to the present day—that describes a city with dualistic dreaminess, devilish figures, apparently inanimate objects that come to life, and other strange occurrences. “The Overcoat” (previous post) is still my favorite of Gogol’s Petersburg stories.

Some basic writings about the stories: I’ve particularly enjoyed reading chunks of Dina Khapaeva’s Кошмар: литература и жизнь (Nightmare: Literature and Life), an inviting book that takes an appropriately nightmare-driven look at Gogol’s stories. I also appreciate Vladimir Nabokov’s mentions of Russian nose expressions, plus a discussion in Gogol’ of the nose-conscious writer, dying, with “hideous black clusters of chaetopod worms sucking at his nostrils.” And I still enjoy Gary Saul Morson’s article “‘Absolute nonsense’”—Gogol’s tales,” from The New Criterion, which calls “The Nose” “totally absurd.”

Another appreciation: Victor Terras’s statement in A History of Russian Literature that “’The Nose’ is a piece of virtuosic writing. Still the vast scholarly attention it has received seems excessive.” I dearly love “The Nose”—I’ve read it many times over the years—but, as an individual with a rather long nose that’s highly sensitive to pollen, down, and dust, I have to say that sometimes an annoying nose is just an annoying nose. And sometimes I wish mine would disappear.

ИМХО/IMHO: First, a bit of context: I read “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Nose” to begin what I envisioned as a brief St. Petersburg reading spree: Gogol, Bely’s Petersburg, and then a contemporary Petersburg novel… but then I started wondering why I hadn’t begun with Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades,” which I’ve always loved, and why I hadn’t considered rereading something from Dostoevsky—maybe Crime and Punishment or The Double?—before Bely. The more I read and reread, the more connections I make, and reading Volkov’s St. Petersburg only adds to the fun. Meaning: I’ll probably focus a lot of this year’s reading on fiction based in St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad… though much of my spring reading will center on writers coming to BookExpo America in June.

Onward! I picked up Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” because the first page of Bely’s Petersburg mentioned Nevsky Prospect, the main street in St. Petersburg. Accordingly, my focus on Nevsky and Petersburg, as literary settings, frames my thoughts on the story. The story begins by telling the reader that there’s nothing better than Nevsky—at least not in St. Petersburg—and Gogol quickly establishes it as a place where people promenade and forget about whatever needs to be done. Though a part of everyday life, Nevsky is also apart from everyday life. At the end of the story, the reader is instructed not to believe Nevsky, it’s all a (day)dream and a deception, and a demon lights the lamps to show everything in a false light. [Edit: This is not a rank-and-file demon: it's "сам демон," the demon himself, meaning the Devil.]

Gogol’s sandwich of a story has two substantive subplots that begin as one line: two men walking down the street espy women that they follow. [Warning: spoilers follow...] An artist follows a woman to a house of ill repute and dreams of saving her, and an officer follows a woman to her home, where she lives with her husband, a German craftsman named Schiller, who has a friend named Hoffman(n). Cultural references, anyone?

I found the artist thread particularly interesting, with its fuzzy combination of reality, dreams, and opium use: the poor man finds himself in a fog, drawn by beauty and glad for a миг (an instant) of happiness, but his life becomes a topsy-turvy mess of sleepy days and alert nights. The officer thread offers a fight that reminded me a bit much of Gogol’s Ukraine-based stories, but a nose-threatening scene was a plus. Most striking: I was surprised at how uncomfortable and uneasy, even queasy, I felt after reading “Nevsky Prospect” at night: everything felt grotesque and distorted thanks to Gogol’s mishmash of the grotesque and the romantic plus that demon lamplighter who feels like an evil emcee for his city, a place where any twisted thing might happen. Be careful what you wish for.

A monument to the nose
in question

As for “The Nose,” well, it’s the pure absurdity that’s always appealed to me: a story that begins with a barber finding a nose in a loaf of fresh breakfast bread is my kind of story. Gogol continues by introducing the reader to a certain Mr. Kovalev, former possessor of the nose, who later locates his nose as it walks the street, in uniform and with eyebrows. Of course the fact (or not?) that The Nose prays adds further appeal.

Though “The Nose” is funnier and less ominous than “Nevsky Prospect,” the two stories share plenty. It should come as no surprise that Mr. Kovalev is given to strolling Nevsky, in a clean and starched collar. Later in the story he says that the devil played a trick on him, though a bit later still he’s not sure whether he’s been dreaming. Or perhaps drank vodka instead of water. Like “Nevsky Prospect,” “The Nose” also includes references to dreams, reality, and event-obscuring fog. The narrator also tacks on a confused summary of events, not quite sure himself what was true and what was invented but concluding that these things can happen, albeit rarely. Sweet dreams!

P.S. I enjoyed looking at artist Mikhail Bychkov’s illustrations for “Nevsky Prospect.”

P.P.S. Mapping St. Petersburg has two maps, with helpful tags, for Gogol's Petersburg Tales, here. 

Level for non-native readers of Russian: 4.0/5.0.

Up Next: Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. Leonid Iuzefovich’s Князь ветра (Prince of the Wind), the last of Iuzefovich’s three Petersburg detective novels: this one fits with Bely because there’s a Mongolian connection. I’ll also report on Volkov’s St. Petersburg at some time: I’m reading it slowly and enjoying it very much. I’d love to hear readers’ recommendations of novels written by contemporary writers that take place in St. Petersburg, Petrograd, or Leningrad. I may also put together a brief post about some of Max Frey’s “Echo” stories, which (surprise!) blend reality and dreams. I’ve read four or five of the stories in the last year or so, and they’ve come in handy lately as filler reading when I’m overloaded on the intense wordplay of Petersburg.

Something Light: Anna Karenina Meets the Robots

Functioning robots are all alike; every malfunctioning robot malfunctions in its own way.

Android Karenina, Lev Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters

Call me old-fashioned, if you’d like: I confess that I’ve always thought of mashup books as gimmicky. I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, despite the promise of “ultraviolent zombie mayhem,” nor have I touched Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, though that sounds like a natural for a Mainer because of the giant lobsters.

But then came Android Karenina, a collaborative effort of Lev Tolstoy and Ben Winters. How could I miss that?

Is it heresy to rewrite Anna Karenina, adding robots and aliens? I don’t know. What I do know is that Android Karenina is a moderately entertaining book that works because Winters knows Anna Karenina well enough to mash in material that fits the original’s themes and characters. According to this Russian-language interview with critic Lev Danilkin, Winters has read the original AK several times. Winters says one of his goals with the book is to show a classic in a new light. I think that’s where the book succeeds best.

Winters preserves much of the basic plot of AK, making steampunk-inspired adaptations so the book feels simultaneously quaint and futuristic. So what happens when robots enter Anna Karenina’s world? I won’t mention much, lest I reveal too many of the book’s odd surprises but: Class I and II robots have “three-part nomenclature” just like Russian humans and an advanced class (III) of robots serve as “beloved-companions” who (mostly) calm their masters and mistresses. There is some off-earth travel. The discovery of a metal called groznium has changed Russian life. Winters says in this interview with Lisa Binion of BellaOnline that groznium is “made-up as all hell.”

Some of Winters’s inventions are very funny and apt: Karenin, for example, is half man, half machine, with a mechanical oculus (probably my favorite AK detail), and Levin’s beloved-companion is a giant robot called Socrates. Winters made Levin much more tolerable for me, both by shortening the book considerably and giving Kostya a groznium mining operation. So much for that pastoral scything! I admit I was happy to read that Danilkin also thinks Levin was the book’s weak link.

I’m not an avid sci fi reader and Anna Karenina has never been my favorite Tolstoy... but Android Karenina had a steady enough balance of silliness, legacy plot, existentialism, and futuristic novelty to keep me reading. Though I think Android Karenina is plenty of mashup for me for a long time, I give Winters lots of credit for creating a book that I didn’t abandon. I hope Android Karenina will inspire some readers to pick up Anna Karenina.

I’m grateful to Elif Batuman and her “Book Bench” piece on NewYorker.com for relieving me of the duty of listing some of the ways Tolstoy portrayed mechanization way, way back in the nineteenth century.

An even bigger thank you to Quirk Books for giving me a review copy of Android Karenina at Book Expo America. Quirk tells me that Russian publisher AST purchased Russian rights to the book.

Android Karenina on Amazon

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Two Theater Novels: Bulgakov & Akunin

Reading, Act I: Mikhail Bulgakov’s short, unfinished novel Театральный роман: Записки покойника (known in English by such titles as A Dead Man’s Memoir: A Theatrical Novel and Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel)

Reading, Act II: Boris Akunin’s too-long but too-tidy novel Весь мир театр (literally All the World’s a Theater or All the World’s a Stage)

My reaction: Polite, restrained applause, an indifferent shrug, and a quick exit.

I enjoy a good theater production from time to time but I realized after these two books that I’m not wild enough about the stage – despite having helped present Russian theater here in Portland, Maine, back in the early ‘90s – to read fiction about it. It doesn’t help that I don’t think either of these books is its author’s best… I knew the Bulgakov might be an unsatisfying unfinished novel. (Check!) And I suspected the Akunin might be an unsatisfying potboiler. (Check!) So.

A Theatrical Novel fictionalizes Bulgakov’s experiences working with the Moscow Art Theater (МХАТ) but I’ll focus on summarizing my impressions of the novel rather than decoding “кто есть who” (who’s who). Wikipedia has a full Russian-language plot summary and list of prototypes for characters here. (Google Translate transliterates the list of characters and renders the entry’s narrative into something moderately readable.)

For me, the best fun of A Theatrical Novel was reading about the reactions of the narrator, an unknown writer who admits he’s written a lousy novel, to a director’s demands for revisions to the stage adaptation of the novel: a dagger, for example, must replace a gun. I also thoroughly enjoyed the humor, dialogue, outlandish names (e.g. Poliksena Toropetskaya), and, yes, theatrical behavior in many of the set pieces. Despite the combination of some good laughs and Bulgakov’s scathing portrayal of censorship and theater figures, though, A Theatrical Novel felt uneven and unfinished enough that it left me indifferent. I suspect theater buffs will appreciate its characterizations and situations more than I did.

Alas, Akunin’s book was even more disappointing, despite my low expectations: I think only the first nine Fandorin detective novels are readable. All the World’s a Theater finds Erast Petrovich Fandorin in his fifties in 1911; Petr Stolypin has just been shot in, yes, a theater. Fandorin is soon to go gaga over an actress, Eliza, whom he meets through Olga Knipper. Knipper thinks Eliza, who is much younger than Fandorin, needs Fandorin’s help. Fandorin, ever the Renaissance man, obliges, turning dramaturge to write a play with parts for Eliza and himself and then, of course, investigating when corpses start appearing.

What’s most unfortunate about All the World’s a Theater is that it lacks the verve and narrative drive of the initial Fandorin books: the book feels weighted down with Fandorin’s romantic thoughts and Akunin’s clichéd attempts at contrasting and overlapping art/theater with life/reality. (Like Bulgakov, Akunin has also had dealings with adaptations.) The “Бедная Лиза” (“Poor Liza”) connection of the very first Fandorin novel is made yawningly obvious this time, and Fandorin’s play is included in the book. I’ll confess: I skipped it. I plodded through the pages as I plodded through the miles on the treadmill but the book didn’t made the walk feel much shorter. I guess I hadn’t missed Fandorin that much.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: A Theatrical Novel might have been a bit more difficult than All The World's a Theater, for 2.5/5 and 2.0/5 respectively.

Next up: Мультики (Toons), Mikhail Elizarov’s rather odd follow-up to the Booker-winning Библиотекарь (The Librarian) (previous post)… I think my reading slump is ending, though: I’m loving Oleg Zaionchkovskii’s Счастье возможно: роман нашего времени (Happiness Is Possible: A Novel of Our Time).

Photo: weatherbox, via sxc.hu

Various versions of A Theatrical Novel on Amazon

Boris Akunin on Amazon

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Russian Fiction for Non-Native Readers

A reader e-mailed last week asking me to recommend contemporary novels for advanced intermediate students of Russian. I’m happy to – I’ve been meaning to write this post for more than a year! (If you don’t read Russian, don’t despair: the majority of the titles on the list below are available in translation.) First, a few reading suggestions that draw on my experience learning to read Russian fiction:

Start small, not with War and Peace or Crime and Punishment. I built my Russian reading stamina, speed, and fluency with short stories and novellas.

Look for familiar vocabulary. Search out books that fit your vocabulary strengths. For example, war novels may be difficult if you don’t know military terminology.

Use free resources. If you’re not sure what fits your reading level or interests, order books through interlibrary loan or look at texts online for a test read. Sites like Журнальный зал and the Moshkov library are great places to start. Many author sites are helpful, too. Update in 2021: This list from XIX век mentions films, books, and TV and radio shows. Everything helps!

Know why you’re reading. Are you reading for enjoyment or to parse sentences and study vocabulary? Or both? Any goal is fine but choose your books accordingly.

Don’t translate as you read! The less you translate in your head, the faster you’ll build your reading skills. Try to figure out unfamiliar words using context, roots, logic, and intuition before you reach for the dictionary. Reread passages as needed.

Read what interests you. Read genres that keep you turning pages in your native language: don’t feel guilty if you choose action or romance novels! I got back into reading Russian six years ago with detective novels, then I branched out.

Quit while you’re ahead. If you’re not enjoying a book, don’t finish it. Sometimes I pick up abandoned books months or years later and love them.

EZier Reader. From now on, I’ll mention the relative difficulty of books in my posts. I’ll mark the easier ones with an “EZier reader” tag.

Now, the list: Here are some stories and shorter novels that felt relatively easy to me when I read them – remember that individual vocabularies and tolerances differ greatly. I’ll keep commentary minimal to fit as many titles as possible. Please e-mail me or add a comment if you have questions. This is only a small list: other suggestions are welcome!

Some of my Russian reading firsts:

• First short story: Nikolai Karamzin’s Бедная Лиза (Poor Liza)
• First novella: Lev Tolstoy’s Отец Сергий (Father Sergius) (previous post)
• First novel (I think): Julia Voznesenskaya’s Женский декамерон (The Women’s Decameron) – 10 women x 10 days = 100 stories. And very manageable reading.

Pre-1917 Classics:

• Alexander Pushkin’s Повести Белкина (Belkin Tales) and “Пиковая дама” (“The Queen of Spades”) (previous post)
• Fedor Dostoevsky’s Игрок (The Gambler) (previous post) and Белые ночи (White Nights)
• Anton Chekhov (previous post)

Soviet-Era Fiction:

• Sergei Dovlatov’s Компромисс (The Compromise) (previous post)
• Lidiya Chukovskaya’s Софья Петровна (Sofia Petrovna)
• Irina Grekova’s Вдовий пароход (The Ship of Widows) (previous post) or Дамский мастер (The Ladies’ Hairdresser) (previous post)

Contemporary Fiction:

• Boris Akunin’s Любовница смерти and Любовник смерти (Lover of Death, in female and male versions) (previous post)
• Vladimir Sorokin’s Лёд (Ice) (previous post) – not a favorite but it read quickly and fairly easily
• Zakhar Prilepin’s Грех (Sin) (previous post) – Prilepin’s Санькя (San'kia) looks relatively simple in style and language, too.
• Sergei Lukyanenko’s Ночной дозор (Night Watch) – vampires, conspiracy theory, etc.
• Yevgeny Grishkovets’s Рубашка (The Shirt) or “Спокойствие” (“Serenity”) – feel-good and often lite but Grishkovets has a great understanding of psychology that makes it easy to identify with his stories. Unusually easy reading.
• Andrei Gelasimov’s “Жанна” (“Joan”) (previous post) – Gelasimov’s longer work is generally more difficult.
• Leonid Yuzefovich’s “Гроза” (“The Storm”) (previous post – scroll down)
• Rasskazy short stories: Difficulty varies, but some of the pieces in the Rasskazy collection aren’t too hard to read. (posts about Rasskazy)
Photo: Karamzin monument in Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk), from user Mars02, via Wikipedia. (If I'd been feeling more ambitious today, I'd have searched out and scanned a photo of myself standing in front of this monument...)

The Golden Calf Galleys Online

Open Letter has placed the galleys of a new translation of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s Золотой телёнок (The Golden Calf) online here, for a limited time.

Open Letter’s materials say that Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson translated “the uncensored original, and it restores several chapters missing from earlier versions, including a witty ‘From the Authors’ rant about humor and satire.” The book will be released December 31, 2009.

I won’t let you forget about Il'f and Petrov or the new translation: tonight, yes, tonight, commences my Fall 2009 Il’f and Petrov Reading Project. I’ll start by reading (and finishing, this time!) Двенадцать стульев (The Twelve Chairs), then move on to The Golden Calf, which is a sequel of sorts to Chairs. I’ll finish the project with some nonfiction: Одноэтажная Америка (One-Storey America, also known as Little Golden America), Il’f and Petrov’s account of their 1935-1936 road trip across the United States.

Russian friends have been recommending One-Storey America to me for years, and one was kind enough to give me a nice edition of the book, complete with Il’f’s photographs, as a gift this year. Though I don’t read many whole books of nonfiction, I’m unusually excited about this one for personal reasons: my grandfather and his cousin took a cross-country road trip in 1929.

Photo: Il’f and Petrov, 1932, taken by E. Langman. Via Wikipedia.

Il'f and Petrov on Amazon

Turgenev’s Rudin

Returning to Russian novels I first read over 20 years ago in college is a strange sensation: despite lots of déjà vu, sometimes I remember so little of the plots and characters that I might as well be reading the books for the first time.

Case in point: Ivan Turgenev’s “Рудин” (Rudin, 1855), a portrait-novel of a superfluous man of the 1840s. I read Rudin on my own and suspect I favored it over “Отцы и дети”(Fathers and Sons) because I heard no lectures or canonization, and could enjoy the book on my own terms. Looking back, I admit I was probably Bazarov-ish in my relative dislike of Fathers and Sons. (Previous post on Fathers and Sons, which I read again last summer.) (Note: Blogger is always quirky, and today it will not allow Cyrillic and italics together.)

If I had to choose between the two books now, I’d probably take Fathers and Sons over Rudin, though I think I like “Дворянское гнездо” (Nest of the Gentry) more still. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy Rudin, Turgenev’s first novel, on my second reading. I did. And I’m a little surprised that what I liked “back then” is still what I like best: I’ve always found (anti?)inspiration in portraits of superfluous men who talk nicely about ideas and ideals but never get around to doing much to affect change.

Rudin is a literary kick in the pants, and Dmitrii Rudin is a literary descendant of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin. (Previous post on Hero of Our Time) Rudin is more inert and benign than Pechorin, though: a duel situation is defused, a much-younger woman ends up telling him off, and he slinks out of town. He even knows he’ll never amount to much, which makes him all the more tragic. The slight technical similarities between the two books are also interesting: both writers use other characters to describe their title figures in detail. Rudin doesn’t narrate any portion of the novel like Pechorin does, but other figures tell stories about him that piece together a picture of his life.

Turgenev also uses one of my favorite simple plot structures. Rudin enters a fairly closed social situation where he affects others’ lives, acting as a catalyst on romantic and intellectual relationships. My favorite scene takes place on the ruins of an estate, when Natal’ia, a girl Rudin claims to love, shows admirable spine by, among other things, calling him малодушный (faint-hearted, literally small + soul) after he accepts her mother’s refusal to let them marry and cries, dramatically, “Боже мой!” (“My God!”).

Now that I think about it, maybe it was Natal’ia that I appreciated so much when I first read the book… To quote from D.S. Mirsky’s A History of Russian Literature:

The men, again, are very different from the women. The fair sex comes out distinctly more advantageously from the hands of Turgenev. The strong, pure, passionate, and virtuous woman, opposed to the weak, potentially generous, but ineffective and ultimately shallow man, was introduced into literature by Pushkin, and recurs again and again in the works of the realists, but nowhere more insistently than in Turgenev’s.

Turgenev on Amazon

Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: Dostoevsky (+Dovlatov and Dal’)

Fyodor Mikhailovich, it had to be you! Dostoevsky didn’t became my letter D favorite by default, but the pool of Russian D-writers is so small and Dostoevsky is so worth reading (and rereading) that deliberations were quick and easy.

Dostoevsky and I have been acquainted since my senior year of high school, when my English class read Преступление и наказание (Crime and Punishment). (mentioned in this previous post) Though I haven’t reread C&P since, I feel like it’s always with me because its characters and themes are so ingrained in Russian culture that they seem to pop up in every soapy TV series I watch to keep from falling off the treadmill.

I’ve long recommended two all-time Dostoevsky favorites to anyone interested in Russia or Russian literature: Записки из подполья (Notes from the Underground) and “Легенда великого инквизитора” (“Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”), a self-contained story within the gigantic novel Братья Карамазовы (The Brothers Karamazov). Записки из мёртвого дома (Notes from the House of the Dead), an account of prison camp, is another favorite: the scenes at Christmas are beautiful.

Sergei Dovlatov endeared himself to me so much with Компромисс (The Compromise) (previous post) and certain parts of Заповедник (The Reserve) that I can’t leave him out. Though some of his writing about emigration is good, for my taste, Dovlatov is at his best when he writes about Soviet absurdity.

Off-topic honorable mention goes to Vladimir Dal’ for his nineteenth-century Russian dictionaries. I have a mismatched four-volume set that I bought in the early ‘90s that seems to suck lots of time out of my schedule whenever I look up a word or expression.

The D-List for Future Reading: I have a few Dostoevsky rereads in mind, particularly Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment, plus some novellas/long stories that I’ve never read: “Вечный муж” (“The Eternal Husband”) and “Скверный анекдот” (often translated as “A Nasty Story”). Dovlatov’s Зона (The Zone) is on my shelf, too, and I have high hopes for Iurii Dombrovskii’s Факультет ненужных вещей (The Faculty of Useless Knowledge). Dal’, of course, never leaves my office!

Dostoevsky on Amazon

Dovlatov on Amazon

Dombrovsky on Amazon

Reading Russian Books at the Beach

Ah, the inevitable seasonal spate of summer book lists has arrived! This year they got me thinking about summer reading, beach reading, and, of course, fitting Russian novels into outdoor plans.

A brief aside before I get to the books. “Summer” is a fleeting concept here in Maine. Some people like to say “we have fall, we have winter, and we have fourth of July.” Our state slogan is “The way life should be,” but many people from away (i.e. anyone, including me, not born in Maine) say the thought of cold winters prevents them from contemplating a move here. We’ve had over seven inches of rain this June, another sure way to scare people off.

I’ve found that the trick to Maine summers is to maximize any warm, dry weather that falls my way. This is where Russian books come in. I love to go for short, mid-afternoon reading sessions at the beach, before the sun gets too low and the wind picks up. The beach is very close, but the windows of weather opportunity are often achingly short and unpredictable. Saturday, for example, was warmish and partly sunny with ground-level mist upon arrival but cold, windy, and completely fogged in at departure about an hour later.

As for the books themselves, not everything reads well at the beach for me, but I don’t believe beach fiction needs to be mindless. “Escapist,” though, isn’t always a bad descriptor: if a book absorbs all my attention, I certainly forget my surroundings even when the seagulls around me tussle for cold, sandy French fries. Paradoxically, I think the best part of reading at the beach is that the waves and weather, be it good or bad, make a perfect setting for truly relaxing and contemplating what I read.

One of my most memorable stretches of beach reading was a cool fall afternoon with the lunch scene in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). Lately I’ve been reading Vladimir Orlov’s Альтист Данилов (Danilov the Violist), which has a nice combination of humor, allegory, and demonology; and Il’ia Boiashov’s Танкист, или «Белый тигр» (The Tank Driver or “White Tiger”) worked well, too. Last summer’s reading included Andrei Platonov’s Котлован (The Foundation Pit) and Fedor Dostoevsky’s Бесы (The Devils or The Possessed), both of which were alternately fun and difficult, both on sand and at home.

Lest you think I am alone in suggesting Russian classics for summer or beach reading, please consider this: Jack Murnighan’s Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits (link to a summer reading challenge) includes analysis of six books from Russian writers. They are Evgenii Onegin, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Lolita. I think War and Peace and Anna Karenina would make particularly good beach reading, though I have to say it felt strange reading portions of three novellas I think of as the abstinence trilogy when surrounded at the beach by half-naked people I didn’t know.

Here are a few other suggestions for Russian fiction that’s absorbing, fun, and meaningful, too. I could list lots more but would rather see readers’ suggestions – please add yours in a comment!

-Aleksandr Pushkin’s Повести Белкина (The Belkin Tales) ~ genre fiction from way back.

-Ivan Turgenev’s novels, perhaps Отцы и дети (Fathers and Sons) or Рудин (Rudin) ~ Turgenev’s books often feature some light humor and ensemble casts that won’t keep you wondering who’s who.

-Valentin Kataev’s Белеет парус одинокий (A White Sail Gleams) ~ blends coming-of-age with socialist realism with adventure. (Bonus: Black Sea setting.)

-Vera Panova’s Серёжа (Seryozha) ~ a favorite about childhood.

-Vladimir Voinovich’s Private Chonkin novels ~ very funny Soviet-era satire.

-Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin novels ~ suspenseful, best-selling postmodern detective novels that draw on themes from Russian literature.

P.S. Hmm, The Guardian ran a summer reading list in which Simon Schama recommends Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, writing, in part, “There must be some people who when parked on a beach feel they should be in the permafrost with Ivan Denisovich, but I’m not one of them.”

Photo of a beach in Western Australia from Loojsan, via sxc.hu.

Back to Classics: Pushkin’s Belkin Tales

“Кто бы он там ни был, а писать повести надо вот этак: просто, коротко и ясно.”

“Whoever he is, stories should be written that way: simply, concisely, and clearly.”

-A.S. Pushkin on the identity of the writer known as Ivan Petrovich Belkin

The Writer: Aleksandr Pushkin

Work and Date: Повести Белкина (The Belkin Tales) (published 1831). The tales are: “Выстрел” (“The Shot”), “Метель” (“The Blizzard”) “Гробовщик” (”The Coffin Maker”/“The Undertaker”), “Станционный смотритель” (“The Stationmaster”/”The Postmaster”) “Барышня-крестьянка” (“The Gentry Girl Peasant”/“The Squire’s Daughter”).

Why it’s important: Pushkin’s first completed, published prose. Interesting takes on narration and genre that continue to resonate in Russian fiction.

Online criticism, analysis, and background: Pushkin by John Bayley. Introduction to Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, translated by Alan Myers. The Pushkin Handbook. And to see what Russian children are taught: a (Russian-language) lesson plan for “The Stationmaster.”

IMHO:

Part of the fun of Pushkin’s Belkin Tales is that they function like a mirror, taking on varied meanings depending on the reader’s mood, experience, and preferences. They are autobiographical. They are parodies. They are miniatures depicting the time. And so on. When I first read some of the stories – “The Stationmaster” and “The Shot” were among the first fiction I ever read in Russian – I felt simple gratitude to Pushkin for writing stories that even a third-year Russian student could understand.

Though I’ve always enjoyed the stories, reading them now, without a dictionary and with more experience recognizing genres and stock phrases, I take in The Belkin Tales much differently. I feel the autobiography, I feel the parody, and I feel the times. More than anything, though, I feel Pushkin’s skill as a prose writer.

I know that sounds like a weak, meaningless statement, but Pushkin’s achievement of “simply, concisely, and clearly” is, I think, what keeps the stories feeling so fresh and contemporary more than 150 years after they were written. Tolstoy said every writer should study them, and I couldn’t disagree: Pushkin cut out unnecessary words and description, leaving, to paraphrase Elmore Leonard, only the parts people want to read.

What makes the freshness so paradoxically unique, though, is that The Belkin Tales incorporate so many phrases, plot twists, and characters from genres popular in Pushkin’s time. “The Shot” features romanticism and a Byronic character, “The Blizzard” includes a ridiculously incredible coincidence, “The Stationmaster” is a sentimental, teary family drama, “The Coffin Maker” is a grotesque with ghosts, and “The Gentry Girl Peasant” depicts a young noblewoman who dresses as a peasant. The Belkin Tales have an almost embarrassing effect on me: each time I read them I get so caught up in enjoying the narration and subsequent atmosphere that I forget the endings, most of which are predictably genre-appropriate.

Why do I so willingly suspend my disbelief? Oddly, I think the answer lies in Pushkin’s overt exposure of storytelling techniques and their effects, which always has a way of affecting this reader’s expectations. Pushkin frames each story in multiple ways: he introduces the series of stories, which were allegedly told to and gathered by one Ivan Petrovich Belkin (rest his soul), resulting in a nested set of narrators and commentators. Even more interesting, I think, the narrators often inject themselves into their stories.

The teller of “The Coffin Maker,” for example, refuses to describe clothing, deciding to deviate “в сем случае от обычая, принятого нынешними романистами” (“in this case from the accepted habit of today’s novelists”). In “The Gentry Girl Peasant,” the narrator acknowledges the story’s readers and notes that gentry women learned about life from books. The story’s slightly goth hero, who wears a black ring “с изображением мёртвой головы” (I love this literally: “with an image of a dead head”), even teaches his beloved peasant girl (who is actually a gentry girl) to read, thinking she is illiterate. They read Nikolai Karamzin’s “Наталья, боярская дочь” (“Natalya, the Boyar’s Daughter”), a story that shares themes with “The Gentry Girl Peasant.”

I could go on and on about the intricacies of these stories, so I'll stop with this. I’m not sure I have a favorite Belkin tale, but it’s easy to name favorite aspects of two individual stories: I love the many layers of life imitating fiction in “The Gentry Girl Peasant,” and I also enjoy the melodrama, tautness, and prodigal child element of “The Stationmaster.” More than anything, though, I can’t believe how strongly this brief collection grabs me on every reread.

Summary:

The Belkin Tales are a wonderful example of pleasant, easy reading that has deeper meaning. Read these stories for whatever reason you like: pure plot enjoyment, a window into life and morals in another time, or to analyze genre and Pushkin’s narrative devices. No matter how or why you read them, the stories are a perfect prose introduction to Pushkin, his use of language, and his willingness to experiment.

Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: Gogol’ and Gippius

The Russian letter Г – G in the Roman alphabet – is a gigantic, gleaming gem for Russian writer names. (Sorry!) I have nearly a full shelf of G-authored books, so it’s not easy to choose two favorite writers:

Nikolai Gogol’ would have made it to my favorites list for just two stories: “Шинель” (“The Overcoat”) (previous post) and “Дневник сумашедшего” (“Diary of a Madman”). But I also love “Нос” (“The Nose”), an absurd story about a huge nose walking the streets of Saint Petersburg. And then there is the wonderful humor of Ревизор (The Government Inspector) and the devastatingly sad last paragraph of “Повесть о том, как поссорился Иван Иванович с Иваном Никифоровичем” (“How Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich Quarrelled”), which I mentioned in my “Gogol' Potpourri” post in December.

Zinaida Gippius is a sentimental favorite: I owe my first true enjoyment of Russian poetry to Gippius, a Russian symbolist who wrote poetry and prose. (Her name is sometimes rendered “Hippius” in Roman letters.) The simplicity of Gippius’s language made it easy to grasp both the words and the meanings of what she wrote, and her combination of metaphysics, eroticism, and a Silver Age guest list fascinated me. I haven’t read her in years but have some nice collections of her poems, stories, novellas, and reminiscences of writers to work on. 

The G-List for Future Reading: I’m especially looking forward to reading Irina Grekova’s Свежо предание (roughly, The Legend Is Fresh) after a friend told me how much she enjoyed Grekova. The name of the book comes from a line – “Свежо предание, а верится с трудом” (“The legend/lore is fresh but difficult to believe”) – written by another G writer, Aleksandr Griboedov. The line is from his classic play Горе от ума (Woe from Wit), which I read years ago in school though, honestly, I don’t remember much other than a favorable impression. It’s short, funny, and on the reread shelf. It’s filled with classic lines like “злые языки страшнее пистолетов” (“sharp tongues are scarier than pistols”), which I heard just the other day on a Russian soap opera.

Nikolai Gumilev is a poet and playwright whom I’ve always admired but have ignored for too long, and Gogol’s Dead Souls has been up for a Russian reread for at least three or four seasons. I liked it fine when I read it (in translation) in school but I was in so much of a rush to read a huge list of books and poems that I didn’t have a chance to truly enjoy or grasp it. I’m not sure why I’m afraid to start it, particularly since it’s only about 200 pages long!

After enjoying Arkadii Gaidar’s creepy “Судьба барабанщика” (“The Fate of the Drummer”) I’d also like to read more of Gaidar, who seems to have countless Russian schools named after him (previous post mentioning “Drummer”). As for Gippius, I’m particularly interested in Чертова кукла (The Devil’s Doll), a novella that allegedly shares themes with Dostoevsky’s Бесы (The Devils or The Possessed, pick your Satanist poison).

(1914 Gippius photo by Karl Bulla)

Gogol on Amazon

Gippius on Amazon or Hippius on Amazon

Griboedov on Amazon

Grekova on Amazon

Arkady Gaidar on Amazon or Arkadii Gaidar on Amazon

“War and Peace”: The End

I’ve realized that Maine winters and War and Peace have more in common than I ever thought: I love both very much, but both are so long that I’m always glad to see them end. Tip for betting people: I’m far more likely to reread War and Peace within the next 10 years than move to a climate with no snow, but that’s a topic for a completely different blog.

My honest opinion on blogging about War and Peace: it’s not easy. For me, the problem wasn’t so much that everything’s already been written about War and Peace. It’s Tolstoy’s tendency to recycle themes: mistakes in combat, the propensity to lie, etc. That repetition meant that I felt like I was rehashing old topics over and over in each blog entry. So, a few random thoughts to close out my War and Peace series:

What I enjoy most about War and Peace is that Tolstoy manages to express his messages through both form and content. The idea that life is not completely knowable, for example, appears in his essays, in the fictional passages of the book, and in the very structure of the novel itself, a mashup of genres that covers a lot in 1,200 pages from various angles… but still can’t cover everything, despite all the minutiae. It must, in the end, end!

Oddly, on this fourth reading, the book’s fictional epilogue struck me as more final than it ever did before. Of course Pierre’s ultimate fate is unclear – he might change his mind and quit the Decembrists instead of being exiled – but Pierre seems settled into a new phase in life. And, sure, the fictional portion of the book ends with a new generation, in the person of young Nikolenka, who is afraid of the dark but dreaming of heroics worthy of Plutarch. Still, even the end of the section -- “…” -- felt more like a wrap-up than a new beginning.

Again, not all of life is knowable, but Tolstoy left me with a clean break. I know where most of my characters are, and they seem relatively content. Another factor that signaled “The End”: some of the epilogue’s descriptions felt rushed or programmed or glued on, particularly the mention of “what would Platon Karataev think?” and the fable-like story of Nikolai’s short temper, with its symbolic cameo ring.

What surprises me most about the epilogue, though, is that some readers evidently resent Tolstoy’s depiction of Natasha. The complaint is that she has gained weight, let herself go after giving birth to lots of children, and become a nag. I don’t quite buy those complaints because, for one thing, even fictional characters often grow up. I think Natasha’s adult life fits her youth: Tolstoy created Natasha -- who is, after all, a fictional character -- to evolve this way.

The epilogue Natasha feels like she’s developed logically, organically. Natasha has always had a sharp and honest tongue, and she is an intuitive character who loves family. To me, the most interesting phrase of the epilogue’s descriptions of Natasha is this: “сильная, красивая и плодовитая самка,” roughly a strong, beautiful and fertile/fecund female of the species. Tolstoy writes that, at times, Natasha is more attractive than ever before.

I also don’t believe that Pierre has suddenly become hen-pecked. Remember how Anna Mikhailovna guided him at his father’s deathbed? And how he joined the masons because he wanted discipline in his life? Pierre has always searched for a framework for his behavior, only to find a form of freedom in captivity and then, finally, the opportunity to marry Natasha. I also have to think that if Natasha were truly such a harpy, she wouldn’t let him plot against the tsar!

One other section of the book struck me on this reading: the last days of Petya Rostov. Petya’s Rostovian generosity and emotion are on display as he shares raisins and makes sure a French prisoner drummerboy is fed. He declares his love for Dolokhov, whom he sees as a hero. On his last night, Petya experiences his surroundings as a “волшебное царство” (magical kingdom) replete with остранение, where everything becomes defamiliarized and doesn’t fit expected reality. A black spot could be a guard post or an eye of a huge monster. Everything is possible and, dozing off, Petya even starts to hear and conduct orchestral music in his head. A few pages later, he dies after a resounding “Uraaaa!” Denisov howls like a dog, remembering the Petya who offered up all his raisins despite his affection for sweets.

Of course I remembered Petya would die, but his death felt sadder to me than ever, perhaps because the passage with the magical kingdom and music takes place at night and feels so dreamy. The harmony of the instruments and voices, joined by the sounds of horses and a Cossack sharpening a saber, reads as a metaphor for life, and Petya’s joy feels as childlike as ever. The passage even reminds me a bit of the night when Natasha can’t sleep and wants to fly out the window.

Prince Andrei’s death was also sadder for me than before: his physical and psychological conditions somehow seemed especially vivid and painful. Still, despite identifying with him better this time around because of his straightforwardness, his fading life didn’t move me like Petya’s sudden, passionate last hours. 

After reading nearly 1,200 pages (okay, full disclosure: minus the final essay on history) for a fourth time, it’s the characters’ passion for life and the propensity for human error that that passion generates that will bring me back to War and Peace again some year. That, to me, is the soul of the book, so I’ll watch everyone live, grow, argue, love, go to war, err, and die again. Tolstoy creates characters that feel relentlessly lifelike yet programmed for fiction, so I’m sure I’ll discover new words, quirks, and passages I’d never considered much before. That’s just the way life is.

Happy New Year! & A Look Back at 2008’s Favorites

Happy new year! С новым годом! I left my year-end blog entry for the very last hours of 2008 so will have to be quick...

Here are some favorites from the year’s reading:

Best contemporary fiction: Liudmila Ulitskaya’s Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator). This book about history, religion, and kindness has really stuck with me, for both its polyphonic technique and its look at people. (Previous post) I also thought Zakhar Prilepin’s Грех (Sin) was very good. (Previous post)

Most fun novel: Aleksei Slapovskii’s Синдром феникса (The Phoenix Syndrome) is a funny, concise, and interesting take on contemporary Russia. (Previous post)

Favorite classic I read for the first time: Жизнь и судьба (Life and Fate), by Vasilii Grossman, beat out Nikolai Gogol’s Ревизор (Government Inspector) and Fedor Dostoevsky’s Игрок (The Gambler) because several scenes described so vividly the Holocaust. (Previous post)

Most satisfying reread: I’ve read Nikolai Gogol’s “Шинель” (“The Overcoat”) quite a few times over the years. As soon as I finish it, I always want to read it again. (Previous post)

Best nonfiction: I read so little nonfiction that this may sound like a “damning with faint praise” category, but I thought Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers was a very good book about the Stalin-era repression. (Previous post)

Favorite little-known book: As I looked back at my posts from 2008, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Vera Panova’s Серёжа (Seryozha). This novella about the everyday joys and troubles in a Soviet child’s life left me with tremendous respect for Panova’s abilities to observe and describe. (Previous post)

I don’t have many specific reading plans for 2009. After finishing Vladimir Makanin’s Асан (Asan), I will read Anatolii Rybakov’s Тяжёлый песок (Heavy Sand) then reread War and Peace. I will blog about War and Peace, so if you or someone you know has always wanted to read or reread it, please join me! I’d love to have company.

A big thank you to all my subscribers and other regular readers. I appreciate your comments and visits! I wish all of you a very happy, healthy 2009 with many, many good stories and books!

Art: stock.xchng