Marina Stepnova’s Doktor Ogarev: First, Do No Harm?

Some books are most interesting to write about long after I’ve read them: my impressions seem to sort themselves out, leaving a clearer picture of what truly felt most important. That’s particularly helpful when books are as flowlingly easy to read but tremendously, disarmingly complicated to describe—and filled with detail—as Marina Stepnova’s Безбожный переулок, which Stepnova’s literary agency is provisionally calling The Italian Lessons in English.

Even the novel’s title requires a bit of explanation: Bezbozhnyi pereulok refers to a Moscow street, the name of which implies, literally, Godless, not religious, antireligious, or even (if I synthesize a translation in the Oxford Russian Dictionary with definitions in the Ozhegov and Dyachenko dictionaries) outrageous in various ways that may be immoral. The street’s pre-Revolutionary name, Protopopovsky, was restored in 1992, according to Wikipedia. Simpler to translate since it’s just a surname, but hardly as interesting for a book title.

I’m not sure which title—the Russian original or the very different provisional English title—fits the book better but I’ll use the title as an entry to describing the novel’s plot. On a purely geographical level, something that’s important to the novel, I like the English title because the novel’s main character, Dr. Ivan Ogarev, is involved in two love triangles: the first between his wife Anya (also Antoshka) and his mistress Malya, the second between his native Russia, where he lives, and Italy, where he goes with Malya. The triangles themselves are remarkably similar because life with Antoshka, who’s the receptionist at the medical office where Ogarev works, is filled with Russian routine, but life with Malya, who lives off her wealthy father’s money, is filled with spontaneity and travel… to places including Italy. Malya might have studied in London but Ogarev, who’s a little older and grew up in the Soviet era, didn’t even know about passports for foreign travel. It is Malya, by the way, who lives on Bezbozhnyi pereulok.

Part of the fun of reading The Italian Lessons lay in observing how the novel differs from Stepnova’s previous book, The Women of Lazarus, (previous post), which will (here’s a shameless mention!) be out this fall, in my translation, from De Geus’s new World Editions imprint. I was glad to find Stepnova’s wonderful literary tics ticking away again: lots of quoting from and referring to classics, food preparations (walnuts are ground on the very first page) that never fail to make me hungry, and characters whose lives coincide with changes in Russian history. Ogarev comes of age during perestroika and the lives of the three main women in The Women of Lazarus reflect their times, too: the 1917 revolution and World War 2, the thaw era, and the socioeconomic difficulties of the 1990s. Stepnova also includes lots of one-word sentences, off-hand parenthetical comments, and even a budget from the nineties… in short, Stepnova is still the indescribable literary magpie I came to love more and more with each new draft of The Women of Lazarus. (And there were many drafts… the book is stylistically very complex…)

What’s different in The Italian Lessons is that Stepnova focuses on just one generation—Ogarev’s generation, with its Soviet-era childhood and post-Soviet adulthood—as the setting for a story that’s less about a doctor healing patients than about a doctor healing himself in a country that’s critically ill. Ogarev is a guy who’s angry with the world (he didn’t exactly have a happy childhood) and Stepnova writes early on that if he’d been born in the nineties, he probably would have been some sort of criminal. Instead, he’s a talented doctor who’s almost criminally unhappy. Here’s a brief paragraph about his Moscow life, from about two-thirds of the way through the book:

Три тысячи двести семь пациентов в базе данных. Простуженная жена. Пробки. Путин. Съёмная квартира. Системно чужой город. Системно чужая безрадостная страна.

Three thousand two hundred and seven patients in the database. Wife sick with cold. Traffic jams. Putin. Rented apartment. Consistently/systematically alien city. Consistently/systematically alien, joyless country.

That day is cold and dark, and Ogarev has fallen out of love with his native country (I purposely used “alien” to reflect Ogarev’s alienation), but it’s also a week after he met Malya, a patient, who brings him coffee. From Starbucks. True to the book’s provisional English title, though, The Italian Lessons ends in [spoiler alert!] Italy. Where Ogarev is described as a “свободный человек,” a “free person,” and reminds me of a modern-day Levin as he mows the lawn. A page of so later, there’s a run of words that includes July, Italy, sun, and, yes, even Tolstoy. And then Stepnova finishes the book a bit later with the word “человек,” meaning “person” or, perhaps better yet, “human being.” I won’t spoil anything else with more details—this book, which I liked very much (and would, of course, love to translate), is desperately difficult to write about without giving everything away—though I will say that Ogarev pays dearly for that freedom to become a human being.

Disclaimers. The usual. As mentioned, I translated Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus. And I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Stepnova in Moscow last September. I’ve also worked on projects with Stepnova’s agency, Banke, Goumen & Smirnova.

Up Next. Another difficult-to-describe book: Evgeny Vodolzakin’s Solovyov and Larionov. And then Gleb Shulpyakov’s Museum Named After Dante, which I found mysteriously enjoyable. I’m still trudging along through Alexei Nikitin’s Victory Park, which sometimes seems to have too many backstories for its own good… though there’s something about the humor, which seems to be turning darker, that keeps me going. And the NOSE award at the end of the month, too…

Moscow Trip Report: Book Fair, Kongress, and Miscellany

My trip to Moscow last month turned out to be even more packed with events, meetings, and, of course, books than I’d expected… I’ll just get right to it with a few highlights…

With visible soft sign.

Andrei Platonov. I visited Andrei Platonov’s grave at the Armenian Cemetery on my first full day in Moscow: I wasn’t quite sure where to find Platonov and had to ask several people before a helpful security guard and his friend (who’d never heard of Platonov and grilled me about what to read) led me to Platonov’s grave. I would certainly have found it without the guard: two people were celebrating Platonov’s life, graveside, with vodka and a book. There’s something a bit odd about Platonov’s gravestone: at certain times, depending on the sun’s angle, the soft sign at the end of the word писатель (writer) seems to disappear. I noticed it was missing as we stood, talking, and everyone assured me it existed… and it did reappear a while later. Platonov turned up again, in the form of a book of his letters, published in 2013 by Elena Shubina’s imprint at AST: writer Vladimir Sharov very kindly gave me his extra copy and it’s a nice, heavy book with lots of photos, footnotes, and a lengthy introduction by Natalya Kornienko. For more: EricNaiman’s review in The Times LiterarySupplement complements positive comments I heard from a writer friend.

The Congress of Literary Translators. The main reason I went to Moscow was the Congress of Literary Translators, hosted by the Institute of [Literary] Translation at the Library of Foreign Literature. Each attendee presents a brief paper within a small “section”: with over 200 attendees from 55 countries, there were nine simultaneous sections. That might sound like a madhouse but everything seems to work itself out. Scheduling conflicts meant I missed a few talks I wanted to hear, but each section I attended magically worked out to a manageable size that allowed dialogue. I’ve come to appreciate the short presentations, too: at first it felt difficult to come up with something meaningful and brief but I now think of the mini-papers as executive summaries or micro-length case studies of current work… My paper addressed usage and translation of old language in contemporary fiction, drawing on my work on Marina Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus, Vladislav Otroshenko’s Addendum to a Photo Album, and Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Laurus. I spoke most about Laurus since I could offer a method for my handling of old Russian words: I have a raft of reference materials but find it particularly useful to compare Bible translations (the Elizabeth and Tyndale translations) on the STEP Bible site from Tyndale House at the University of Cambridge. One of the high points of my Kongress was the chance to speak with Vodolazkin about Laurus—particularly that old language—and my translation. During a joint evening session with Valerii Popov, Vodolazkin, who’s a scholar of Russian medieval literature at Pushkin House, mentioned that he had to get away from the philological before he could write the book: he didn’t want to write a professory book. And he didn’t which is why, I think, his medieval setting and occasional archaisms work so well, so organically… As for other papers, I particularly enjoyed Christine Mestre’s talk about translating dialogue in Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina’s The Little Man: Christine mentioned topics including mistakes in characters’ speech and handling details on what people do as they speak. The Little Man is one of the books I brought home so I’ll be watching for those elements. A few other papers of interest: Margherita Crepax on enriching language through translation; Oliver Ready on his translation of Vladimir Sharov’s Before & During, which I’d just read; and Kristina Rotkirch on Margarita Khemlin.

The Moscow International Book Fair. I made two trips to the book fair this year: beyond more opportunities to buy books and hear presentations, the weather was so nice I was more than happy to make the trip twice and do more walking between the Metro and the pavilion at VDNKh where the book fair is held! My biggest book fair highlight was probably hearing Marina Stepnova speak and then meeting her when I asked her to sign a copy of her new novel, Безбожный переулок, known in English as Italian Lessons, about a Moscow doctor and, well, freedom. Another highlight: meeting, by chance, Viktor Remizov, author of Воля вольная, known in English as Ashes and Dust, which I’m reading now. Remizov’s book looks at freedom, too, but from a completely different angle: through hunters and fishermen in the Russian Far East. They’re an odd pair to read one after the other but both are very good. I also bought Tatyana Tolstaya’s collection Легкие миры. Among other things…

All Those Other Books. It’s obvious from the photo why my checked baggage was overweight this time! Fortunately, all I had to do to avoid charges was pull out the copy of Sofia Lubensk(a)y(a)’s idiom/phraseology dictionary and stick it in my (wheeled) carry-on bag. This isn’t the updated 2014 edition of Lubensky’s Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms but, at 500 rubles, the 2004 edition is easy on the budget. As is the new Ozhegov dictionary I bought in the cheap-paper edition to save space and weight—it has 43,000 more words than my (very!) old Ozhegov but takes up less than half the space. My new dictionary of Russian Orthodox terms (for children!) is very helpful in translating Laurus, as is the “almanac” Текст и традиция (Text and Tradition), which Vodolazkin gave me: it includes his very engaging article about medieval writing and contemporary literature. And then there’s an anthology of Russian translations of contemporary Georgian poetry, compiled by poets Maxim Amelin and Shota Iatashvili, both of whom were at the Kongress… I loved hearing various translators read some of the poems at an evening presentation, particularly since I knew next to nothing about contemporary Georgian poetry before meeting Shota. I also brought back a few “thick” journals that I bought at the book fair: the woman at the thick journal booth particularly recommended a few specific novels (she even threw in a free issue so I could finish one of them!) so I bought those issues and then, of course, started by randomly reading articles and reviews. I wish it were more practical/reliable to subscribe to a journal or two. As for the other books in the photo, it’s hard to pick favorites but I’m particularly looking forward to Zakhar Prilepin’s The Cloister, which many people recommended, Aleksei Nikitin’s Victory Park, and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid, which I’ve always wanted to read, if only because of the word “hyperboloid.”

Disclaimers & Disclosures: The usual. I work on occasional projects for the Institute of Translation, which subsidized many of my travel expenses, and Read Russia. Many of the books in the photo were gifts. Thank you!

Up Next. Yasnaya Polyana Award winners on Tuesday. Then books galore… After something of a summer slump, I’ve been having a great reading run, starting with Evgeny Vodolazkin’s first novel, Solovyov and Larionov, and followed by Marina Stepnova’s latest book, Italian Lessons and Viktor Remizov’s Ashes and Dust. There’s also a bunch of books I’ve been reading in English. I’m glad to have lots of books waiting for posts: after Ashes and Dust, my next Russian-language book will likely be Zakhar Prilepin’s rather long (okay, very long) The Cloister, which has relatively small print, too, meaning it will take some time.

Image Credit. Platonov’s grave photo by Andranikpasha, through Wikipedia Commons.

(Not-so-New-Anymore) LitNews

I’ve developed a bad habit: accumulating news stories until they’re not new. And then posting them in clumps. Here’s hoping something below is news to you!

The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, is now available in an online edition. It’s easy to spend lots of time here… Language and literature, for example, opens with an article on the history of Yiddish plus a list of links to other articles, starting with Belarusian literature. The paper edition of the encyclopedia won the 2008 Judaica Reference Award. I wish I’d had this inviting site as a reference when I read Anatolii Rybakov’s Heavy Sand (previous post). I added a link to the sidebar of the blog. (Thank you to MZPR for cluing me in!)

PEN Translation Awards. Two translators of Russian received grants from the PEN Translation Fund: Peter Golub for flash fiction by Linor Goralik and Margo Rosen for Anatoly Naiman’s novel Поэзия и неправда (Poetry and Untruth). Some of Goralik’s work is in the Rasskazy collection, and I haven’t read anything by Naiman, though I have his Каблуков (Kablukov) on my shelf. Poetry and Untruth sounds interesting: according to PEN, it combines novel and document, looking at Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandel’shtam, and Tsvetaeva. PEN’s summary of all grant winners is here. May all the books find publishers!

Anyone who reads Russian and enjoys contemporary literature will want to read this extensive online Q&A session with Russian critic Galina Iuzefovich. There are screens and screens of information. The Big Book short list (previous post) served as the starting point for reader questions. Iuzefovich’s favorites are Gigolashvili’s Devil’s Wheel and Zaionchkovskii’s Happiness Is Possible (previous post). Among other things, Iuzefovich also provides a list of 10 books she thinks represent late 20^th century and early 21^st century Russian fiction. They include Viktor Pelevin’s Generation П, known in English as Homo Zapiens, Vladimir Makanin’s Asan (previous post), and Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 (previous post). The Pelevin and Slavnikova books have been translated into English by, respectively, Andrew Bromfield and Marian Schwartz.

Metro Stop «Dostoevskaya». Thank you to a reference librarian at my local library for mentioning the marble mosaic murals at the new Dostoevskaya Metro stop in Moscow: they apparently include Raskolnikov with an axe and a Possessed/Devils-inspired scene with a gun, prompting fears that public art could make the spot popular for suicides. There’s a photo of one of the offending scenes here. An English-language article with a run-of-the-mill Dostoevsky portrait is here. The Moscow Metro Web site says the Dostoevsky stop is scheduled to open tomorrow. (Maybe there is news in this post…)

Fun with Russian Bestseller Lists. Elena Chizhova’s 2009 Booker Prize winner, A Time of Women (previous post), is near the top of the Russian bestseller list, at number 2. The novel came out recently in book form. Today’s top seller is A.....a, Evgeny Grishkovets’s thoughts about America. Others: Boris Akunin’s All the World’s a Theater (previous post) at number 4, Mariam Petrosian’s The House in Which…, at 37, and Vladimir Sorokin’s The Blizzard, which I recently finished, ranking 46^th. Translations on the list include Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (she also Plays with Fire in Russian), Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol, and Jerome D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I had no idea that J. stood for Jerome.

Russian Publisher Ad Marginem

I intended to make this post last Tuesday (!) but got pretty distracted by client rush jobs, a painfully beautiful early stretch of spring weather, and making plans to go to Russian Literature Week at the London Book Fair next month. I’ll write more soon about Russian Literature Week as well as a slew of books I’ve finished: Bykov’s ZhD/Living Souls, Chizhova’s A Time for Women, Senchin’s Yeltyshevy, Snegirev’s Petroleum Venus, and maybe Gogol’s Dead Souls.

And so. On Tuesday, Publishing Perspectives posted “Notes from the Underground: Indie Publishing in Putin’s Russia,” an article by Daniel Kalder about Russian publisher Ad Marginem Press. I’d forgotten Ad Marginem’s early history – Sado-masochism and all! – so enjoyed reading it.

Kalder mentions several of Ad Marginem’s writers and books, including Vladimir Sorokin’s Голубое сало (Blue Lard) and Zakhar Prilepin’s Патология (Pathology) and Санькя (San'kia). I was pleased to see that Aleksandr Ivanov, head of Ad Marginem, thinks Prilepin should be better known in the West. I hope stories in the recent Rasskazy and Life Stories collections help Prilepin find an audience here.

I see irony – a strange and sad irony – in Ad Marginem finding itself, well, at the margins in terms of distribution and sales, despite so many of its books hitting prize shortlists. Kalder notes that some Ad Marginem books do sell fairly well. He doesn’t mention Mikhail Elizarov’s Библиотекарь (The Librarian), which won the 2008 Booker Prize, but my book is from the fourth edition, which had a print run of 10,000 copies. It’s also reassuring to know that sales of foreign rights, particularly to Germany, have been good for Ad Marginem.

I’m happy to read that Ivanov won’t quit: Ad Marginem’s list always includes something unexpected -- Vasilii Avchenko’s Правый руль (Wheel on the Right), a “documentary novel” about imported cars in the Russian Far East comes to mind. A big plus for people like me is that Ad Marginem’s Web site includes newsy information about books and authors, with lots of links to interviews and reviews, both positive and negative.

I’d love to hear recommendations of favorite Ad Marginem books. Unless I’m forgetting something, mine would have to be The Librarian (previous post), though I’m going to start Prilepin’s San'kia tonight…

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

Notable New Translations: The Rasskazy Anthology, Post 1 -- Background

Some people look for summer thrills in surfing or skydiving. Not me. I get excited when I read new writers and have a chance to recommend a good Russian book on my blog. So here you go: Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, an English-language anthology of very contemporary Russian stories.

After reading about a third of the stories in Rasskazy, paging through the rest, and reading author bios, two thing have struck me: the unusual readability of the translations and the variety of the writers’ topics and styles. I’m pretty tough to please when it comes to translation, but the stories I’ve read only in English read naturally, normally. Meaning I could read in peace without wondering what I was missing. When I’ve read stories first in Russian then in translation (or vice versa), the translations reflected the vocabulary and tone of the originals.

Mikhail Iossel, one of the book’s editors, told me producing Rasskazy was a labor-intensive process involving unique challenges because translators worked with texts written by a new generation of writers, whose language also feels new. (Rasskazy situations include blogging, drugs, sex, and military conflict, topics that beg for specialized, slangy, or very individual vocabulary.) Generation was the primary guiding principle for selecting authors: the oldest Rasskazy writer is Dmitry Danilov, now 40. Says Iossel, “We wanted for all of them to have grown up after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.”

Space was the other major limiting factor for Iossel, his co-editor Jeff Parker, and publisher Tin House. Rasskazy contains 22 stories chosen from about 50 writers’ work. Iossel says compiling the book built on experience he and Parker gained editing Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, an anthology of essays that Dalkey Archive Press published in 2004. Rasskazy also draws on holding Summer Literary Seminar writing conferences in St. Petersburg for the last decade. Iossel says one program goal is to put St. Petersburg “into the literary mind of America.” (The St. Petersburg SLS is on hiatus for a summer or two.)

Iossel describes the current profusion of new literary talent in Russia as an “explosion,” with the new generation coming into its own several years ago, after something of a lull in fiction. Though he says “you can pretty much write anything at all,” Iossel notes that literature is not censored because audiences are so small. There is censorship on Russian TV and radio, however, and Iossel compares the current political atmosphere to the Soviet era and says society is “engulfed in this post-imperial syndrome.” He believes Russian literature and writers have “a very apt sense for the condition of nonfreedom and they feel comfortable.”

Though translations account for only about three percent of books published in the United States, Iossel says some publishing houses – he specifically mentioned Dalkey and Gray Wolf – are working to raise that figure. He thinks those efforts reflect Americans’ weariness of isolationism and their wishes to look into other lives and aesthetic experiences. “Literature does bring people together like no other art form,” says Iossel. He adds that Rasskazy is a good way for people to learn about what’s happening in Russia, both politically and aesthetically: “Everyone interested in Russia should probably take a look at it.”

I think Rasskazy’s varying voices on Russian life are a big part of the book’s fun and appeal. I pick, randomly, at anthologies rather than reading them cover to cover and have been welcoming the element of the unexpected in Rasskazy. Today: a dog named Ivan Denisovich who likes pel’meni in Oleg Zobern’s “Bregovich’s Sixth Journey,” translated by Keith Gessen. Who knows what I’ll find tomorrow?

I’ll write more about specific stories in September.

Note: This post is the first in my “Notable New Translations” category. My plan is to write more about new translations because they, their publishers, and their translators never seem to get enough attention. I encourage publishers, writers, and translators to tell me about upcoming translations so I can work them into my reading, if possible, and the blog, at the appropriate time.

Rasskazy on Amazon

Amerika on Amazon

Back to Classics: Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time

“Герой Нашего Времени, милостивые государи мои, точно портрет, но не одного человека: это портрет, составленный из пороков всего нашего поколения, в полном их развитии.”

“The Hero of Our Time, my dear sirs, is indeed a portrait, but not of one person: it is a composite portrait of the flaws of our whole generation, in their full development.” (all translations are mine)

-M.Yu. Lermontov in the forward to A Hero of Our Time

The Writer: Mikhail Lermontov

Work and Date: Герой нашего времени (A Hero of Our Time), a novel in five easy pieces: “Бэла” (“Bela”), “Максим Максимыч” (“Maksim Maksimych”), “Тамань” (“Taman’”), “Княжна Мери” (“Princess Mary”), and “Фаталист” (“The Fatalist”), 1838-1840

Why it’s important: Very modern-feeling prose presenting events out of chronology told by varying narrators. The title has become an inescapable phrase for era-specific anti-heroes, and there are many literary references to Pechorin, the ennui-drenched title character. Vladimir Makanin’s Андеграунд, или Герой нашего времени is one of the most obvious contemporary examples.

Favorite criticism, analysis, and background: I particularly liked excerpts from Boris Eikhenbaum’s comments in the prose section of his writings about Lermontov: after discussing Lermontov’s early novel-length prose, he writes that Lermontov solved narration difficulties by stringing together stories. I also enjoyed Vladimir Nabokov’s introduction to the novel, in which, toward the end, he mentions some technical weaknesses that he sees in the book but then refers to its eternal appeal for rereading. (I read this piece in a Russian collection of lectures on Russian literature; I believe the introduction is from this edition of A Hero, which Nabokov and his son Dmitri translated. The book includes illustrations by Edward Gorey!)

IMHO:

First, a brief summary: Lermontov uses five stories of varying provenance and genre to tell of Pechorin’s escapades in the Caucuses. This thin volume includes abduction, cultural differences, moody nature descriptions, death and a duel, a mermaid, people taking the water cure, various forms of deception, and much more as Lermontov exposes Pechorin’s lack of morals. Pechorin is world-weary to an extreme, bored and cynical, so there is frequent yawning and shoulder shrugging.

Pechorin is a thoroughly reprehensible person – he even kills a horse by riding too fast – who frequently mentions his moral shortcomings but never seems to regret them. I doubted his sincerity and trustworthiness as a narrator, perhaps because he is something of a charmer at times. (Of course he is also, thanks to Lermontov, an excellent writer.) There is a reference or two to Lord Byron in Hero, and Pechorin is also a relative of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin. Victor Terras points out in A History of Russian Literature that both names spring from Russian bodies of water.

My favorite story is “Princess Mary,” no surprise since it’s the longest (70 pages) piece in Hero. “Princess Mary” is Pechorin’s diary at the waters, and he writes of romantic rivalries, displaying caddish treatment of women and a frequent disregard for the truth. Yes, the plot turns are very predictable, but Lermontov makes them so enjoyable through Pechorin’s vinegary first-hand accounts that these old stories – written in 1838-1840 and filled with stock characters – feel almost contemporary.

Nabokov notes the energy and rhythm of Lermontov’s storytelling, and I think that’s what I found so compelling, too, both times I’ve read the book. It feels like Lermontov was absolutely driven to write this book. And I felt driven to keep reading it, whether I was at the beach or in a soft chair.

Lermontov’s understanding of psychology is another factor: even if he’s a composite, Pechorin seems so real that it’s easy to see why readers thought Lermontov was writing about himself. I also enjoyed hearing the voice of Maksim Maksimych, in whose home Pechorin stays in “Bela.” Maksim Maksimych, whose patronymic tells me he’s a man of tradition, clearly feels affection for Pechorin, so one moment stands out in the book as particularly sad. When Maksim Maksimych and Pechorin find themselves in the same town and Pechorin finally arrives for a meeting, Maksim Maksimych reaches to hug Pechorin, but Pechorin can only cough up a smile and a handshake.

I almost forgot to mention that A Hero of Our Time is also very funny, often in a sneakily cynical way. In “Taman’,” a story that includes a treacherous mermaid, Pechorin frets that he has disturbed “мирный круг честных контрабандистов” (“a peaceful group of honest smugglers”). In “Princess Mary” he says the man who becomes, in a way, his rival for a woman has the goal of becoming the suffering, main character of a novel. (Of course Lermontov makes sure he does.) My favorite line comes from the lips of Princess Mary’s mother, who tells Pechorin, basically, that he makes everyone crazy, then says, “Я надеюсь, что воздух моей гостиной разгонит ваш сплин...” (“I hope that the air of my drawing room will clear away your melancholy…”)

Summary:

A Hero of Our Time is an indispensable part of any Russian literature reading list: it’s important for its structure and storytelling techniques as well as Lermontov’s famous portrayal of Pechorin. I also think it’s a lot of fun to read. To draw on Nabokov’s comments once more, A Hero is particularly remarkable because, to paraphrase crudely, the book was written when Russian prose was still a toddler and Lermontov himself was only 25.

And a brief note: The Russian word “герой” translates into English as both “hero” and “main character,” giving the book’s title a nice ambiguity. It’s too bad Christopher Hitchens didn’t know that when he wrote this piece for The Atlantic.

Painting: Lermontov's "Перестрелка в горах Дагестана" (A Skirmish in the Mountains of Dagestan), 1840-41, via Wikipedia.

Lermontov on Amazon

Back to Classics: Sologub’s Petty Demon

The Writer: Fedor (Fyodor) Sologub

Work and Date: Мелкий бес (The Petty Demon), dated June 19, 1902, in my book.

Why it’s important: A classic novel of Russian symbolism or decadence (your choice!). The unpleasant traits – general loutishness, corruption, and lack of morals -- of the main character, Peredonov, inspired a new Russian word, передоновщина (peredonovshchina or peredonovism).

Background information and criticism: Time magazine’s review dated September 7, 1962, gives a decent summary of the book. Andrew Field’s translation, which Time was evidently reviewing, includes a helpful introduction and background notes. Searching on Google or Google Books for Sologub and “petty demon” brings up a fair bit of academic criticism, and first pages on JSTOR (e.g. Murl Barker and Harry Snyder) provide a good sampling of critical thought about the book.

IMHO:

I loved The Petty Demon when I read it 20 years ago in grad school, and I loved it so much this time around that I didn’t want to finish the book. And what’s not to love? A book about the sacred and profane that includes literary allusions, puns, and a suspected hex or two, plus tragicomic portrayals of provincial пошлость (poshlost’, a combination of vulgarity, banality, and ignorance) is my kind of book.

Plot basics: Peredonov, an anti-intellectual, cruel, and paranoid schoolteacher, wants to be promoted to school inspector. His girlfriend Varvara, who has the body of a nymph and the head of a sinner, tells him that if she marries him, a princess will get him the inspector job. Peredonov and Varvara are a fun pair: in their leisure time they enjoy drinking and tearing at the wallpaper to irk the landlady. Meanwhile, one of Peredonov’s favorite students to abuse, the androgynous Sasha, becomes involved with the older Liudmila, a lover of perfume, clothes, and beauty who calls herself a pagan and also loves church rites and the crucifix.

The miracle of The Petty Demon is that Sologub so skillfully combines humor with drear, including Peredonov’s fear and toska, that horrible Russian longing that resembles angst. When he’s not inflicting physical or psychological pain on someone, Peredonov is capable of wandering around in a state where he feels that nature is reflecting his toska and fears, though Sologub writes that Peredonov misses out on the more Dionysian and elemental aspects of nature because, essentially, he sees only his own pettiness. Sologub concludes that paragraph by writing: “Он был слеп и жалок, как многие из нас.” (“He was blind and pathetic, like many of us.” (translations are mine)) Moments like these, where Sologub sets aside the more grotesque realism displayed in much of the book, felt particularly symbolist to me because they contrast the earthly “here” with something more mystical and spiritual.

Then there’s the funnier side. Here’s the worst love letter I’ve ever seen, which Peredonov writes to the aging princess he thinks could help him:

“Я люблю вас, потому что вы – холодная и далёкая. Варвара потеет, с нею жарко спать, несёт, как из печки. Я хочу иметь любовницу холодную и далёкую. Приезжайте и соответствуйте.”

“I love you because you are cold and distant. Varvara sweats, it’s hot to sleep with her, she radiates like a stove. I want to have a cold and distant lover. Come here and be that.”

Then he wonders if he did the right thing to send it. Sologub soon compares Peredonov to a corpse, and a bit later Peredonov sees the princess as the queen of spades or hearts and tosses a deck of cards in the fire. (Subtext alert: Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”) Yes, Peredonov’s paranoia extends to inanimate objects: his history also includes writing denunciations of queen cards and, in a fit of pique, he hacks up a table because his nemesis – the недотыкомка (nedotykomka, an untouchable or unproddable thing), his personal petty demon of an apparition – was hiding there.

Peredonov’s use of words is often hurtful, which feels particularly significant in a symbolist novel. To be sure, he’s hardly the only gossip in town: everyone thrives on rumor and clichés Sologub calls dead words. Peredonov’s nasty gossip contrasts with the poetry he claims to like, but his respect seems limited to possessing pictures of Adam Mickiewicz and Pushkin. Of course the Pushkin picture’s place is in the сортир, the bathroom or outhouse. Peredonov also doesn’t seem at all familiar with Chekhov.

I could write much, much more about lots of things, like religion and literary allusions, but I’ll limit myself to a few of Sologub’s names – Peredonov seems rooted in remaking Don, as in Quixote, and other names, some Gogolesque, have significant roots: Skuchaev (boredom), Khripach (wheeze), and Pyl’nikov (dust).

I also want to briefly mention the decadent Liudmila’s corruption of Sasha’s youth, which [Spoiler warning!] crescendos at a masquerade party where Sasha, dressed as a geisha, wins the costume prize for women. The crowd then tries to unmask Sasha but an actor saves him – yes, an actor, a person whose job is to be masked – by carrying him out and not revealing his identity.

Summary:

The Petty Demon is a little-known Russian classic that presents a dim but very funny view of humankind’s inability to appreciate knowledge, beauty, and the divine. Although Sologub stuffs the book with plenty of characters, events, and, yes, symbols, the novel never feels too heavy, either in volume or in theme. Sologub said in the introduction to the second edition of The Petty Demon that he wrote the book about his contemporaries, but the book still feels awfully relevant in the 21^st century.

Photo by Karl Karlovich Bulla: Sologub at home with his wife, Anastasiia Chebotarevskaia, 1910s.

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.

Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: Bulgakov and Brodsky

The Russian letter Б – B in the Roman alphabet – is tremendously busy! A letter has to be pretty good if the list of not-favorite authors includes Isaak Babel, Andrei Belyi, and Ivan Bunin.

But then there is Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novella Собачье сердце (Heart of a Dog) has been a favorite for years, thanks to Bulgakov’s humor in depicting bureaucracy, the Soviet housing shortage, and what I will just call a medical transformation. I thoroughly enjoyed Bulgakov’s play Иван Васильевич (Ivan Vasilyevich) in late 2007, too. (Previous post)

Though I have a more complicated relationship with Мастер и Маргарита (Master and Margarita), I love the Soviet-era passages -- particularly Satan’s ball and certain other scenes involving unclean forces -- more than enough to put Bulgakov onto my favorites list. Next time I read M&M I will use Kevin Moss’s Master & Margarita Web site to compensate for my embarrassingly anemic knowledge of the Bible. Maybe then the many sections of the book set in Biblical times will mean more to me, and I’ll be able to connect the novel’s two tracks.

I also want to mention a poet: Joseph Brodsky. I first read Brodsky in grad school, rather incidentally, when a professor handed out Brodsky’s “Бабочка” (“The Butterfly”) as an example of a poem whose shape mirrors its content. A few years later, I was asked to translate a few Brodsky poems for a stage production. The poems were horrifically difficult for me, and when I asked a Russian co-worker for help, he also found them difficult and told me he thought of Brodsky’s poems as an uncomfortable house that he didn’t enjoy visiting. I’ve heard similar comments from other Russians.

I understood. But now that nearly 20 years have passed and I’ve increased my Russian vocabulary and cultural knowledge, I love visiting Brodsky’s poetic house. I read his work rather randomly so don’t know why I seem to have a preference for his poems from the ‘70s, though I know it’s the existential themes I like best. One of my favorites so far, “Я сижу у окна,” reads as an interpretation-translation in Howard Moss’s English-language New Yorker version, “I Sit by the Window.”

The B-List for Future Reading: There’s a lot to look forward to in the letter Б: I want to make amends to Ivan Bunin by reading beyond “Солнечный удар” (“Sunstroke”), the first story in a collection I never quite seem to get into… perhaps something longer, like Жизнь Арсеньева (The Life of Arsenyev) or Деревня (The Village), will hold my interest. Then there is Isaak Babel’, whose Конармия (Red Cavalry) scared me off with its brutality. I think it’s finally time to read all Babel’s Одесские рассказы (Odessa Stories). One of these years I will also get to Petr Boborykin’s Китай-город (transliterated: Kitai-gorod; the translation Chinatown is a false friend... see comments for more), which has been sitting on my shelf, untouched, for years, though it comes highly recommended by several friends.

My reread list includes Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and Andrei Belyi’s Петербург (Petersburg), which I remember as a difficult but very rewarding symbolist novel. I also want to put in a better effort at reading Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (The White Guard); maybe the third attempt will be a charm. 

Bulgakov on Amazon

Bunin on Amazon
Belyi on Amazon
Brodsky on Amazon
Babel on Amazon

Yet More Russian Literary Awards

Two days. Three announcements about Russian literary awards. I’ll take them in order:

Olga Slavnikova, the 2006 Booker Prize winner, won the Kazakov prize for the short story “Сёстры Черепановы.” Slavnikova’s 2017, which won the Booker, has already been translated into English, according to translator Marian Schwartz’s Web site, but is “not yet under contract.” In the meantime, Schwartz’s English translation of an excerpt from Slavnikova’s Бессмертный (The Man Who Wouldn’t Die), a book with themes similar to those in Goodbye, Lenin!, is available on Words Without Borders.

Next up: Daniil Granin won the St. Andrei Pervozvannyi Order. According to Lenta.ru, Granin turned 90 on January 1, 2009, and the award is one of the highest given by the Russian government. I’ve only read a bit of Granin so can’t recommend anything, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that several of his books have been translated into English and German.

Finally, today, I noticed an announcement listing six nominees for the Belkin Prize. They include Margarita Khemlin, who was nominated for the Big Book Award last year; Marina Palei, who is also no stranger to literary short lists; and actor Sergei Iurskii (Yursky), whom I have seen on stage and screen (he’s quite a presence!) but never read. This post on Lenta.ru contains the list of nominees plus links to most of the nominated works.

And one slightly off-topic note. Lenta.ru also reported the death of John Updike. I thank him for many memorable and enjoyable hours of reading. I associate Russia and Updike because he’s so well-known there… I borrowed the Rabbit trilogy from a Russian friend when I lived in Moscow. And another Russian friend loves The Centaur so much that I asked Updike to sign a copy for her when I went to a reading in Boston. 

Olga Slavnikova on Amazon

Daniil Granin on Amazon
John Updike on Amazon

Post-1917 Top Fiction Hits of Russian Literature: A Very Biased Russian Lit Reading List

Choosing a list of top hits from post-1917 Russian fiction falls into the “herding cats” category. Genuine hits are elusive, thanks to official cultural ideology during the Soviet era. Then there’s the fact that the time period under consideration began less than a century ago, meaning it’s tough to know what will be considered classics in another hundred years.

So... This list includes prose popular among readers (Russian and otherwise) and books that reflect certain tendencies or trends in fiction after 1917. Like them or not, I’ve made sure to include books involving Soviet-era repression, socialist realism, satire, World War 2, and absurdity. Like the Top Ten list of pre-revolutionary books (here), these are the books I’d want to teach in a survey course.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I wrote about Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and its popularity in this previous post. I respect One Day but have always had more affinity for two of Solzhenitsyn’s longer novels: В круге первом (The First Circle) and Раковый корпус (Cancer Ward), which Barack Obama also lists as a favorite. Another thought: Varlam Shalamov’s acclaimed short-short stories, such as Колымские рассказы (Kolyma Tales), are also about prison camps.

Mikhail Bulgakov. Мастер и Маргарита (Master and Margarita) is often referred to as a cult favorite, but I think its popularity is too broad to fit the term. I’ve enjoyed the novel twice, though I admit my indifference (or sleepiness?) in Sunday school means I enjoy the Soviet-era scenes much more than scenes with Pontius Pilate. Others: I am a bigger fan of Bulgakov’s novella Собачье сердце (Heart of a Dog). Bulgakov’s play Иван Васильевич (Ivan Vasilyevich) is a modern classic for its adaptation to film. (Previous post: Mikhail Bulgakov and Ivan Vasilyevich.)

Isaak Babel’. I struggled with Babel’s Конармия (Red Cavalry) when I read it in grad school because of the brutality of certain scenes, so I would probably choose some of Babel’s atmospheric stories about Odessa.

Il’f and Petrov. Двенадцать стульев (The Twelve Chairs) is a classic satirical novel of the early Soviet era that I am ashamed to have never finished, despite beginning and loving it twice… it’s laugh-out-loud funny, and I wonder if maybe I’m afraid to finish it.

Vladimir Voinovich. No list of Soviet-era fiction would be complete without Voinovich’s satirical Private Chonkin books. It seems they’re going out of fashion – they’re very popular among readers my age and older. When I lent them to several readers who are, uhm, considerably younger than I who had never heard of Chonkin, they also loved them.

Boris Pasternak. Doctor Zhivago, about a doctor in early Soviet Russia and the consequences of the revolution, is unavoidable for the list, thanks to David Lean’s movie adaptation and Pasternak’s Nobel Prize. It is, indeed, an interesting book for contemplation and analysis, though not an easy one to read. (Why? Previous post here)

Socialist Realism. Although you might not want to spend money on any of these books, I think it’s important to read a bit of socialist realism to get a feel for how propaganda was forced into a new genre of fiction during the Soviet period. Ubiquitous books included Nikolai Ostrovskii’s Как закалялась сталь (How the Steel Was Tempered) and Maksim Gorkii’s Мать (Mother), which is misfiled here because it was written before the revolution. My recommendations would be either Fedor Gladkov’s Цемент (Cement) or Valentin Kataev’s Время, вперёд! (Time, Forward!).

Daniil Kharms. Though Kharms may not have mass appeal, I can’t leave him and absurdity, a crucial part of Soviet culture, off the list. My personal favorite is “Старушка” (“The Old Lady”).

Anatolii Rybakov. I like Rybakov’s straightforward writing in Дети Арбата (Children of the Arbat), which looks at how the Stalinist terror affected regular people. Friends who’ve read it in Russian seem to like it much better than friends who’ve read it in English, leading me to suspect the stylistic simplicity doesn’t translate well. The first book of the trilogy is best.

Andrei Platonov. Platonov’s Котлаван (The Foundation Pit) is a tough bit of fiction to read, thanks to a blend of neologisms and cultural references, but it’s important as a counterpoint to socialist realism (see above) and as a linguistic experiment. (Previous post here) My favorite Platonov so far: “Возвращение” (“The Return”), about a World War 2 soldier coming home.

Vasilii Grossman. I get the impression that Grossman’s Жизнь и судьба (Life and Fate) is a bigger hit in translation than in Russia. It’s a very good, sprawling novel about World War 2 in the Soviet Union. (Previous post here)

Post-Soviet. I think it’s important to include something post-Soviet on the list, too, despite a complete lack of historical perspective. I don’t especially like Vladimir Sorokin’s manipulative Лёд (Ice) or Tat’iana Tolstaia’s primer-like Кысь (The Slynx), but both are post-modern novels available in translation that have earned followings. I’m more partial to Vladimir Makanin’s quieter Лаз (Escape Hatch) (previous post here) because I admire the philosophical depth of his simple prose; his Стол, покрытый сукном и с графином в середине (Baize-Covered Table with Decanter) won the Russian Booker and is probably his best-known book in the U.S.

Finally, the biggest literary writing hit of the post-Soviet era thus far is probably Liudmila Ulitskaia, whose engrossing Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator), about religion, World War 2, and humane behavior, is one of the best books I’ve read in years (previous post here). I don’t know when (or if) it will be available in English.

The Nabokov Question. There’s no Nabokov on this list because he is, for me, as they say in Russian, тёмный лес, a dark forest. I don’t know my way around. I’d love readers’ suggestions of favorite Nabokov books originally written in Russian... 

Edit: P.S. The more I think about it, the more I want to include Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg in one of these hit lists. It was originally published before the revolution, then revised after, so it could go on either one. I also forgot to include an old favorite, Evgenii Zamiatin’s Мы (We). These lists just keep getting bigger! 

Photo: nkzs on stock.xchng