ON LITERARY TRANSLATION: "Sympathy for the Traitor"

On Literary Translation

These remarks are based, largely, on Emily Wilson’s book review of Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (MIT Press, 2018). The review appears in the New York Review of Books, May 24, 2018, p. 46-47.

Assuming that most of us are not bilingual or trilingual, without literary translation we cannot read novels, stories, poems written in foreign languages. But practically no one seems to agree on what makes for a good literary translation. The crucial question always seems to be how much leeway the translator is given. Must he/she (1) remain very close to the original, producing a literal translation that may not read well in the target language? (2) diverge from the original to produce a kind of imitation? (3) push the imitation so far that it amounts to a traducing of the original (even though it may read well and be a work of creative art in the target language)?

According to Emily Wilson, Translation Studies as an academic discipline is a phenomenon only of the past fifty years or so. Professors who are not themselves translators have made careers in “translation theory,” which, alas—like so many academic disciplines—involves “increasingly abstract discourse.” In fact, Polizzotti suggests that Translation Studies is “one of the few disciplines in which the study of a subject seems bent on demonstrating that very subject’s futility.”

According to Polizzotti, academic specialists on literary translation seem to be asserting that (1) it cannot really be done successfully; and (2) you should not even try to do it, if successfully means producing a fluent, readable, creative literary work in the target language. Being totally faithful to the original means, apparently, creating “unreadable, unidiomatic, clunky translations.”

This recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s attempt in the sixties of last century to translate the greatest narrative poem in Russian literature, Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin. After making herculean efforts to get the thing across into an English that maintained the creativity and literary form of the original, Nabokov finally gave up and said it could not be done. He published his four-volume translation into English, the first volume containing the original and a “pony” literal translation, and the other three volumes containing extensive academic commentary on the work. He also wrote a little poem, in commemoration of his new attitude toward literary translation:

What is translation? On a platter

A poet’s pale and glaring head,

A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,

And profanation of the dead.

Of course, only academics, who often make abstraction and obfuscation for its own sake a paramount virtue, could argue logically for bad—awkward, unreadable, “foreignized”—literary translations. Not an academic himself, but “a prolific translator of French experimental fiction into English,” Polizzotti argues for a commonsense approach to the issue. “He quotes approvingly the maxim of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that ‘a good poem [must] not be turned into a bad one.’”

Polizzotti asserts what should be apparent but what often is not: “the single most crucial requirement in producing a viable target version is to be a talented writer in one’s own language.” Emily Wilson continues, “It is never enough to ask if a translator knows the source language well enough to translate from it: we must also ask, always, whether she is a good enough writer of English to create something that will live on its own. In his blithe assumption that there is such a thing as literary value and that you know it when you read it, Polizzotti stands outside the fashions of the contemporary academy; he is quite willing to claim that some pieces of writing are simply better than others.”

Just try reading reviews of translated literature in practically any American periodical. Does the reviewer dwell upon the literary talents—or lack thereof—of the translator? Seldom. The reviewer is most often concerned with quibbling over how the translator failed to get this or that word right, or how the translator missed some single subtlety in the original. Reviewers “very rarely comment on how any new translation might enrich contemporary English literature, or on whether the translator is a thoughtful, well-read, or original writer of her own language.”

“Polizzotti meanders around the crucial question of whether a translator can go too far from the original and slip from translation into imitation, or betrayal. It depends on whether the result is any good, and we are given no general parameters by which to make this judgment. The implicit criterion is not whether this or that phrasing or syntax is preserved, but whether the overall result allows the text to speak as best it can ‘across nebulous cultural boundaries, and not lie mute and moribund on the page.’”

When I taught Russian literature in a university I would sometimes ask my students why anyone would want to read creative literary art. There are a variety of answers to that question. Unfortunately, the number one answer in the twenty-first century, I fear, is that no one, or practically no one, does want to read creative literature. But my best answer, back then, and even still now, is that you read literature for pleasure. 

It’s not a simple, easily attained pleasure, but it is pleasure nonetheless: the joy of communing with the aesthetics of art, which are contagious. You read great literature, you commune with it properly, and it infuses you with creativity; you end up making creative art in your own mind—and that’s a joyful business.

Polizzotti’s book “is in some ways a negative polemic, against the excesses and abstractions of contemporary translation theory.” Polizzotti argues for “making sure that literature is enjoyable, so that people actually want to read it . . . . . . The academic theorists often imply that clunky, unidiomatic, foreignized translations are good for us, no matter how stodgy they may be. By contrast, Polizzotti makes one feel that creating and reading translated literature can be a genuinely pleasurable experience.”

As for myself, it should be obvious by now that I’m on Polizzotti’s side. I have translated literary works by the Russian writer Ivan Bunin extensively. My book of Bunin’s stories and novellas appeared in 2006 (Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial, Northwestern University Press). I would like that book judged largely on whether the translated works read as literary art in English. 

Lately I have begun translating some Russian poetry, with the emphasis largely upon whether I can create an effective poem in English. This means translating not word for word, but “sense for sense.” I try to make a good poem in English, while retaining, to the extent this is possible, the same sense of the words in Russian. I try for the same atmosphere, the same mood, the spirit of the original—but not the exact words of the original.

Are my results not translation, but “imitation,” not translation, but even “traducement”? Some would say so. Most Russian poems are metered and rhymed. I try for the meter and the rhyme in the target version. This in itself places a huge burden on the text. Rhyme is especially tyrannical, in the way it has of forcing the translator into “imitation” to satisfy its ringing and jangling demands.

For years before he gave up on the possibility of literary translation, Vladimir Nabokov did his best at the same thing I’m trying to do now. Sometimes he was remarkably successful at producing an English version that remained, essentially, true to the spirit of the original, but also succeeded as a work of art.

Here is Nabokov’s version in English of one of Mikhail Lermontov’s most well-known poems.

Михаил Лермонтов

Парус

Белеет парус одинокой В тумане моря голубом.  Что ищет он в стране далекой? Что кинул он в краю родном?  Играют волны, ветер свищет, И мачта гнется и скрыпит; Увы! - он счастия не ищет И не от счастия бежит!  Под ним струя светлей лазури, Над ним луч солнца золотой:  А он, мятежный, просит бури, Как будто в бурях есть покой! написано в 1832 году (written in 1832, first published in 1841)

The Sail

Amid the blue haze of the ocean

A sail is passing, white and frail.

What do you seek in a far country?

What have you left at home, lone sail?

The billows play, the breezes whistle,

And rhythmically creaks the mast.

Alas, you seek no happy future,

Nor do you flee a happy past.

Below the mirrored azure brightens,

Above the golden rays increase—

But you, wild rover, pray for tempests,

As if in tempests there were peace!

Vladimir Nabokov, Verses and Versions, Edited by Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin (Harcourt, Inc., 2008), p. 287.

Rosamund Bartlett on Best Russian Short Stories

See the link below for one person's take on the best Russian short stories. I put a picture of Gogol on here to remind the reader that if you're talking best short stories, no way you can leave out "The Overcoat" ("Шинель").

Then again, Rosamund Bartlett leaves out Bunin and Nabokov as well, Turgenev, plenty of others. But she, after all, limits herself to five stories, and what she has to say about the stories she chooses is worth reading. I can pretty much do without Leskov altogether, but she has picked two of my all time favorite stories: Chekhov's "Gusev," and Babel's "The Sin of Jesus."


https://fivebooks.com/best-books/rosamund-bartlett-on-russian-short-stories/

Notes on Chekhov's "Little Trilogy" ANNA KARENINA

What was Chekhov's favorite novel? What was Bunin's, Nabokov's? The answer to all three questions is Anna Karenina. Chekhov once remarked that in comparison to such full-blooded women as Tolstoy’s Anna all of Turgenev’s heroines are bland and insipid.

Once, while rushing by train from the south of Russia to the bedside of his brother Aleksandr, who was thought to have typhus, Chekhov spent the whole long journey reading Anna Karenina, and in a letter he later noted that at this time of emotional turmoil he was consoled on the train by “dear sweet Anna.”

Chekhov's "Little Trilogy" THE THEME OF ENCASEMENT (TWO): UNIVERSALITY

КРЫЖОВНИК  GOOSEBERRIES

Chekhov’s “Little Trilogy”

The Theme of Encasement (Two): Universality

In all three stories of Chekhov’s trilogy the characters are all “encased” in one way or another, trapped in lives that are stultifying and never fulfilled. But world literature is full of such characters. You might even say that “encasement” is a condition typical of the human predicament.

To speak only of Russian literature, in reading these stories, one constantly is reminded of authors and literary works who came both before and after Chekhov. Gogol’s characters (say, Shponka and Akaky Akakievich) are men in cases. So is the vile Iudushka in Saltykov’s The Golovyov Family and Sologub’s Peredonov in The Petty Demon. Nabokov’s Pnin is a man who craves “discreteness,” who constantly seeks protection from the intrusive world around him. Belikov, the Man in the Case, loves pronouncing the word “man” in ancient Greek (Anthropos), as will later Maxim Gorky in his apotheosis of Soviet man: “Man: that word sounds proud!”

Many Russian authors themselves are in cases of their own making, or sometimes at least partially made by their society. Gogol was in a case practically all his life, Tolstoy in a different sort of case, Mayakovsky in a case that drove him to suicide. The list could be extended almost indefinitely.

“Oh, I could be bounded by a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” Who said that? Another man in a case, Prince Hamlet. 

Readers of Chekhov in the year 1898, and the year 1998, and the year 2098 (if there is any humanity left then, and any readers), look at the major theme of Chekhov’s “Little Trilogy” and say to themselves: You know what? I’m a man in a case myself.

Notes on Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich" "ANYBODY BUT ME" The Caius Syllogism

The Caius Syllogism

In Tolstoy’s story there is not a single character who conceives of his/her own individual death. Absolutely all of Ivan Ilyich’s family and all of his friends—except Gerasim the servant—go to great efforts to shield themselves from that dire possibility. In fact, Gerasim, practically the only positive character in the whole long story, most likely does not believe in his own death either. He simply is more willing to accept the fact that death does exist and that the dying should be comforted as little children are.

In Chapter Six Ivan Ilyich recalls a passage from a textbook of logic by J. G. Kiesewetter (1766-1819), widely used in Russian schools and seminaries. The passage citing the Kiesewetter syllogism and describing Ivan Ilyich’s attitude toward it is probably one of the best in world literature in regard to how an individual regards his/her own death.

“The syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s Logic: ‘Caius [Julius Caesar] is a man; men are mortal; therefore Caius is mortal,’ had for all his life seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite apart from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mama and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with toys, a coachman and a nurse, then, afterwards, with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs and ecstasies of childhood, boyhood and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball that Vanya had so loved? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of pleats in her dress rustle that same way for Caius? Had he rioted like that at the School of Law when burnt pastry was served? Had Caius been in love the way he had? Could Caius preside at a judicial session the way he could? Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. And it just cannot be that I ought to die. That would be altogether too horrible.”

In voicing such thoughts, Ivan Ilyich speaks for the whole human race, then and now. A refusal to face one’s death appears to be built into the human psyche as a kind of instinct of self-preservation. Here is a quote from Sigmund Freud:

“It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality” (from “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”). 

But the matter more often is expressed not by “I cannot conceive of my death,” but by the words Ivan Ilyich screams out for three straight days at the end of the story: “Я не хочу (I don’t want to).”

Taking off on the Kiesewetter syllogism, other thinkers have come up with their own:

(1)    The Israeli writer Amos Oz, in a discussion of Tolstoy’s story: “Everyman [note that this is written as one word] is indeed mortal; but I am not everyman—I am me.”

(2)    The writer R. Beauvais: Everyone in the history of the world, so far, has ended up dying. But I’m still alive. Therefore I choose never to die.”

(3)    Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire (Canto 2): “A syllogism: other men die; but I//Am not another; therefore I’ll not die.”

(4)    The philosopher Arnold Arms, taking off on Oz: “Everyone who has ever died since the creation of the world has been someone else; I am not someone else, I am me: therefore, I do not consent to die.”

Eventually, Tolstoy forces his character Ivan Ilyich into the final realization that he is Caius, and, of course, all human beings are eventually forced down that same dead end. The critic Ronald Blythe writes that if we do not take the trouble to grow up and accept death, we’ll have to leave the world the same way we entered it: kicking and screaming. He quotes the symbolist Maeterlinck as amazed at the crudeness of Western man’s thought when it comes to the subject of his own death: “We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct, and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence.”

Perhaps true, but the instinct of self-preservation precludes our acceptance of individual death. What kind of life can you live if you have your own death ever on your mind? No kind of life. George Steiner has written that human beings could not survive without the future tense, which is a chimera. The future does not really exist, but we invent it and make our plans for years in advance. This “looking forward” to the future gives us a reason to live. Death, on the other hand, is a future event best ignored. At least if we hope to enjoy what little time we have here on earth.

ON CREATIVE WRITING AND CREATIVE WRITERS

U.R. Bowie

Observations on Creative Writing and Creative Writers

“Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation of ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue  his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting.”

                                                     Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Jan. 16, 2017, p. 84

Most of today’s creative writing in America is highly imitative, lacking the creative spark of originality. Writers imitate other writers: their themes, their literary form, their tone, everything. Much of what is published amounts to bad imitations of bad stories to begin with. The imitators apparently took the bad stories for good ones. A writer writes another bad story imitating a previous bad story. How does a writer avoid such a misfortune? Read the greatest writers who have ever lived. Read Lev Tolstoy, Flannery O’Connor, Flaubert, Gogol, Rebecca West, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf,  many many others in the grand pantheon of world literature. If you must imitate somebody, try imitating them. Don’t bother reading ninety-five percent of living American writers, even the ones who have won awards.

Then there is the brilliant young writer who proclaims, “Why do I got to read all them old dead white men (plus a few dead white women)? Me, I got my own ideas!” How do we answer such a proclamation? We say, “Duh, yeah.”

About imitation. One thing that’s ever so hard to be is original. Good writers present something novel in tone or style; a good writer has his/her own voice. When you find your voice you have begun. Some writers never begin.

On The Envy of the Creative Writer

One day a writer of creative literary fiction sits down and writes a masterpiece. Other writers are plunged into sorrowful depression, thinking, “Dang, there are only a limited number of masterpieces to be written, and now this guy has filched another one and run off with it.”

                                                      Paraphrase of James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 50

As for myself I don’t even know what Salter is talking about here. I don’t have any feelings of envy whatsoever. Never have had. What’s wrong with me? I just read the brilliant novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Didn’t feel envious of him; just felt, “Wonderful, how great to have a young writer writing at that level of creativity.” Then again, I don’t know what writer’s block is either; can’t even conceive of not being able to write—unless I go blind or senile. Guess I’m just dumb.

What do good creative writers do? They “make the shape and rhythm of sentences intensely felt” (Salter, p. 56). Yes!

Then there’s the aspiring creative writer who proclaims, “I’m not interested in rhythms of sentences; I want to write about ideas.” Urggh.

Here’s the layman’s image of a writer who teaches creative writing in a university: “… a dramatic figure striking in appearance, wearing boots and jodhpurs, perhaps, with long white hair like a prophet and bearing a kind of literary ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods” (Salter, p. 57).

Can that white-haired prophet teach you to write? No, you have to learn yourself, through years and years of intensive practice, while reading only the best creative writers who ever lived and learning from them.

Salter mentions his friend Saul Bellow, who once remarked on “the sexual heartlessness of women.” As Salter says, “Women were especially on his mind at the time since his ex-wife—his third—was suing him for more money, given that he’d received the Nobel Prize with the six or seven hundred thousand dollars that came with it” (p. 58, 61). No big secret there—that women can be sexually heartless, or even just plain heartless, or mercenary, cruel or meretricious. But so can men. Welcome to the human race.

We Write Ourselves

“In a copy of a book that Colum McCann signed for an auction of first editions, beside the disclaimer that is always printed proclaiming that the book is a work of fiction, the names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, beside this McCann wrote simply, ‘Bullshit’” (Salter, p. 38).

Then again, you don’t want to get sued, do you?

Important Books and Unimportant Books

“Books that are important weren’t written to be important, generally. They became such. By important, I mean so-deemed. Referred to. I can’t think that The Catcher in the Rye was written as an important, life-altering or significant book. I believe that it was simply heartfelt. To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t bear marks of an intended importance although I don’t know what Harper Lee actually felt. Fitzgerald thought all of his books were important. The Great Gatsby was a short book, only 214 pages, and he was insistent that the publisher sell it at the same price as his longer ones” (Salter, p. 42-43).

Speaking of the so-deemed, the above paragraph demonstrates the sometimes dated opinions of James Salter. Read by everyone and his brother in the fifties and the sixties, The Catcher in the Rye is read by practically no one these days. Not only not important, but already moribund, almost dead.  To Kill a Mockingbird is still widely read, its so-deemed greatness still afloat, but it is “a book for children” (as Flannery O’Connor said), and for people who do not or cannot read real literature. As for The Great Gatsby, this book has claims to being the Great American Novel; it should be sold at twice the price of any other book.

Where and When You Write And Who Is Helping You Out

“You don’t do all the writing at your desk. You do it elsewhere, carrying the book with you. The book is your companion, you have it in your mind all the time, running through it, alert for links to it. It becomes your chief companion, in the real sense of the word, you can talk to it quietly. It becomes your sole companion” (Salter, p. 76).

What Salter hints at here is that, unbeknownst to you, the book is writing itself in your mind all the time. Your deepest neurons of the brain work on the writing day and night. As recent studies in brain science have revealed, on a conscious level we have no idea about the decisions those independent neurons are making. Romantic writers used to think of themselves as the amanuensis of the gods, who guided their pens and sent down original ideas. But more likely writers are the amanuensis of their own creative neurons. When your favorite character suddenly does something totally unexpected on the page, it’s not because God so decided. The neurons decided—and they very well may have made that decision at three a.m. in the morning, while you were fast asleep.

“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real” (Salter, p. 77).

Selected Passages from the Writings of Good, and Sometimes Great Writers

[description of a ritual butcher in a Ukrainian shtetl, inspecting the lungs of a cow or sheep he has butchered] “the glossy brownish organs . . . . . the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone—from a mouse to a man—had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin” (David Bezmozgis, The Free World).

“Her light-brown hair was drawn smoothly back and gathered in a knot low on her neck, but near the right temple a single lock fell loose and curling, not far from the place where an odd little vein branched across one well-marked eyebrow, pale blue and sickly amid all that pure, well-nigh transparent spotlessness. That little blue vein above the eye dominated quite painfully the whole fine oval of the face” (Thomas Mann, “Tristan”). [Mann is great at describing human faces, human bodies.]

[description of a delicatessen] “there were glass showcases where smoked mackerel, lampreys, flounders, and eels were displayed on platters to tempt the appetite. There were dishes of Italian salad, crayfish spreading their claws on blocks of ice, sprats pressed flat and gleaming goldenly from open boxes; choice fruits—garden strawberries and grapes as beautiful as though they had come from the Promised Land; rows of sardine tins and those fascinating little white earthenware jars of caviar and foie gras…” (Thomas Mann, Felix Krull) [Mann is also great at describing a scene by accumulating masses of detail; in this he reminds me of Nikolai Gogol.]

“She’d never met a child with beady eyes. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment,

usually in middle age” (Lauren Groff, “For the God of Love, for the Love of God”).

“She felt a single drop of sweat slip from the small of her back, hang for an instant, and then slide into the mellow groove between the flexed jaws of her buttocks” (Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes).

“A vast strand of white fleece, brutally bright, moved south to north in the eastern vault of the heavens, a rush of splendid wool to warm the day” (William Kennedy, Ironweed).

“joyfully gazing out from behind the cobblestone barrier are white crosses and monuments, which hide in the greenery of cherry trees and look from afar like white spots . . . . . when the cherry trees bloom these white spots blend with the cherry blossoms to form a broad seascape of white; and when the fruit ripens the white monuments and crosses are bedizened with specks that are blood-scarlet in color” (Anton Chekhov, “The Steppe”). [Chekhov’s tone-poem novella, “The Steppe,” full of such brilliant nature descriptions, was much influenced by his friend, the wonderful landscape painter Levitan.]

“You know, I have an uncle who’s a country priest, and the man is such a believer that when, in time of drought, he goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes with him an umbrella and leather raincoat, so that on the way back home he won’t get soaked” (Chekhov, “The Duel”).

“there was something wooden about his walk, something like the walk of toy soldiers, the way he barely bent his knees and tried to make each stride as long as possible” (Chekhov, “The Steppe”). [Chekhov loves describing how people walk. Tolstoy, who loved Chekhov when he met him, marveled at the way Chekhov himself walked. “He has the walk of a little miss of the noble class,” said Tolstoy with delight.]

“In sadness there is some alloy of pleasure. There is some shadow of delicacy and quaintness which smileth and fawneth upon us, even in the lap of melancholy. . . . . Painters are of the opinion that the motions and wrinkles in the face which serve to weep serve also to laugh” (Michel de Montaigne, “We Taste Nothing Purely”).

[Desdemona, reveling in the stories Othello tells her about his adventurous life] “She swore in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange; ‘twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man” (Shakespeare, “Othello”).

"GOOGLEGOGOL" 'product descripton' on Amazon

U.R. Bowie. Collection of short stories. Googlegogol: Stories from the Database of Russian Literature, Inc. [published July, 2016]

Available for purchase on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Googlegogol-Stories-Database-Literature-Collected/dp/1534676961/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467820511&sr=1-1&keywords=U.R.+Bowie%2C+%22Googlegogol%22

U.R. Bowie writes in the grand tradition of Russian literature. "Googlegogol" consists of thirteen short stories, based (thematically, biographically, or stylistically) on Bulgakov, Bunin, Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Tolstoy, and others. The entire production is refracted through the consciousness of that quintessential deranged master of Russian prose: Nikolai Gogol.

Some of the stories are set in Russia, others in the U.S. Some are written in purely realistic style, but the collection as a whole owes much to Russian modernism. An example of the realism is “The Death of Ivan Lvovich,” which tells the tale of the brief life of Tolstoy’s last and most beloved son, Ivan, as narrated by Ivan Bunin—winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933. Bunin, who is eking out a poverty-stricken life in the south of France, while Hitler’s forces are invading Russia, looks back on the year 1895—when, as a young writer, he visited Lev Tolstoy in Moscow and found him grieving over his dead son. “Running Thoughts” is a stream-of-consciousness tale that takes the reader into the mind of Tolstoy, on the evening in 1910 when he made his decision to flee his Yasnaja Polyana estate and his intolerable life—and ended up running into the arms of Death.

Several stories describe events in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky.  “Man Beating Man Beating Horse” relates an episode that occurred in 1837, when Dostoevsky, his father and brother were on their way to St. Petersburg, where he would enroll in the Academy for Military Engineers. “Something in the Way of a Parricide” tries to get a handle on the story of the “murder” of Dostoevsky’s father in 1839, while “Executed (Almost)” relates how Dostoevsky was put through the ordeal of a fake execution in St. Petersburg (1849).

Other stories range far from the style of traditional Russian realism.  Owing much in its themes and style to Gogol and Bulgakov, “Shoes Run Amuck” describes the misadventures of a man who—much to his subsequent chagrin—robbed the grave of Nikolai Gogol in 1931, on the day when Gogol’s body was disinterred for reburial at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. “Hobnob” uses Nabokovian tropes to recreate a pale version of the great Nabacocoa and describe his proctoring of an exam in Ohio, 1952— and his interactions with the mind of one of the students taking that exam.

Several stories are written in a Chekhovian vein. “The Lady from Berdichev” is the tale of an old lady living out her life in Brighton Beach, while ever yearning back toward her birthplace of Berdichev, as Chekhov’s three sisters yearn for Moscow. In “Divertimento for Strings and Structure,” a story into which Raymond Carver pokes his nose briefly, Chekhov makes a personal appearance in the flesh (or at least in the mind of the hapless protagonist).

Other stories feature highly unusual characters or narrators. “Anteayer” is a modern tale of schizophrenia, a story of a young woman who leaves Russia for the American Dream, only to find that the only dreams she knows how to dream are Russian dreams. The lead story, “Recruiting,” describes obliquely  how Russian Literature goes about gathering its personages and images, while its companion story, “Chimeras,”—the last in the collection—is a tale of Russian nesting dolls; open one up, and whoops, there’s a new narrator or author inside, and then open that one up and whoops, there’s still someone else. “The Riddle of the Duck” is, primarily, about Russian mentalities, the way Russians can hold simultaneous contradictory notions in their minds. It features a man who may or may not be Lee Harvey Oswald, still alive on the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.

A brief word about the cover art. The front cover depicts a scene from the famous fabulist Ivan Krylov, his tale (“Quartet”) of how a nasty and uppity monkey decided to organize a string quartet. The monkey recruited an ass, a goat and a bear, and they all set about sawing away on their instruments; only to discover that none of them had ever learned to play an instrument. The back cover shows three of Russia’s finest writers—Lermontov, Pushkin, and Gogol—mulling over life in general, while cogitating over the back cover copy beneath them and the way Russian literature is presented in Googlegogol.

"GOOGLEGOGOL (ГУГОЛЬГОГОЛЬ): Stories from the Data Base of Russian Literature, Inc." NEW BOOK BY U.R.BOWIE

https://www.amazon.com/Googlegogol-Stories-Database-Literature-Collected/dp/1534676961/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467651672&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=U.R.+Bowie%2C+%22Googlgogol%22

Series: The Collected Works of U.R. Bowie, Volume Nine

Ogee Zakamora Publications, 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Robert Lee Bowie

            All Rights Reserved

ISBN-13: 978-1534676961

ISBN-10: 1534676961

Cover image: Detail from base of statue, monument to Ivan Krylov, St. Petersburg, Russia, photograph by Alexsey Sergeev

Проказница-Мартышка,

Осел,

Козел,

Да косолапый Мишка

Затеяли сыграть квартет.

Cover design by Christy Sanford

AUTHOR’S NOTE

All the stories in this collection come, in one degree or another, out of the grand tradition of Russian literature. Some have direct connections (stylistically, thematically, or biographically) with certain prose writers: (1) “The Death of Ivan Lvovich, ” Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Bunin; (2) “Running Thoughts,” Tolstoy; (3) “Shoes Run Amuck,” Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov; (4) “The Lady from Berdichev” and “Divertimento for Strings and Structure,” Anton Chekhov; (5) “Hobnob,” Vladimir Nabokov; (6) “Man Beating Man Beating Horse,” “Something in the Way of a Parricide,” and “Executed (Almost),” Fyodor Dostoevsky.

As the title suggests, the entire collection has been refracted through the head of that quintessential deranged genius of Russian literature—the man about whom the critic D.S. Mirsky once wrote the following:

            “If mere creative force is to be the standard of valuation, Gogol is the greatest of Russian writers. In this respect he need hardly fear comparison with Shakespeare, and can boldly stand by the side of Rabelais. Neither Pushkin nor Tolstoy possessed anything like that volcano of imaginative creativeness.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Recruiting (Набор)                                                                  

           The Death of Ivan Lvovich (Смерти нету)                              

           Man Beating Man Beating Horse (Бьет Россия, бьет)

           The Lady from Berdichev (Дама из Бердичева)                  

Running Thoughts (Бегство)                                                    

           Something in the Way of a Parricide (Отцеубийство?)       

The Riddle of the Duck (Уткина загадка)                               

Shoes Run Amuck (Башмаки вдребезги)                               

Divertimento for Strings and Structure (Дивертисмент)          

           Hobnob (Междусобойчик)                                                   

           Executed (Almost) (Приглашение на почти)                        

           Anteayer (Позавчера)                                                

           Chimeras (Химеры)                                                               

           

           

BEST RUSSIAN SHORT NOVELS

Theophany Convent (Богоявленский монастырь, Кострома), May, 2003

http://twitter.com/robaroundbooks

Recently Rob Burdock @RobAroundBooks retweeted from Apostrophe Books a list of 46 Best Short Novels that you can read in a day.

These include "The Great Gatsby," which probably should be savored for its prose, not read in one day.

Other greats are Marquez's "Memories of My Melancholy Whores." Probably a better choice for a short Marquez novel would be the wonderful, "Chronicle of A Death Foretold."

Then there is Kosinsky's "Being There," a rare example of a situation in which the movie (with Peter Sellers) is better than the book.


There are no Russian novellas in this list, so here are my choices for best Russian short novels (or long stories, if you want to look at it that way), listed in no particular order of merit:

Ivan Turgenev, "First Love"

Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"

Lev Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from the Rat Hole"

Ivan Bunin, "Drydale"

Vladimir Nabokov, "The Eye"

Anton Chekhov, "The Duel"

Yury Olesha, "Envy"


                                Front Cover, Russian Translation of "The Great Gatsby"

Dostoevsky's Greatest Line (from "Operation Shylock")

From Operation Shylock, p 111-12 of the paperback edition.

Smilesburger has just given Philip Roth a check for a million dollars, and Roth hands the check to his friend, the writer Aharon Appelfeld:

"That makes me think," I said, . . . . "of Dostoevsky's very greatest line."
"Which line is that?" . . . .
"Do you remember in Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov's sister, Dunya, is lured to Svidrigailov's apartment? He locks her in with him, pockets the key, and then, like a serpent, sets out to seduce her, forcibly if necessary. But to his astonishment, just when he has her helplessly cornered, this beautiful, well-bred Dunya pulls a pistol out of her purse and points it at his heart. Dostoevsky's greatest line comes when Svidrigailov sees the gun."
"Tell me," said Aharon.
"'This,' said Svidrigailov, 'changes everything.'"


It's not surprising that Dostoevsky is quoted, in a novel that owes so much to his themes and to the manic intensity of his plots, but it's odd that this line is declared his greatest. Here's how it goes in the original Russian:

--Ага! Так вот как! --вскричал он в удивлении, но злобно усмехаясь,--Ну, это совершенно изменяет ход дела! (Book Six, Ch. 5)

"Aha, so that's how it is!" he screamed in amazement, but smirking maliciously. "Well, that completely changes the way things are going!"

The Jessie Coulson translation has it, "Well, that entirely changes matters!" Not much here in the nature of a great line.

Another interesting thing about the passage cited here. It is a perfect illustration of the kind of scene that so put off so many Russian writers when they read Dostoevsky (Chekhov, Bunin, Nabokov). They could not take seriously a writer whose works were roiling with such incessant melodrama.Then again, the scene has another problem. Given her fiery but masochistic nature, self-abnegating Dunya would be much more likely to yield to Svidrigailov, if she had to do this to save her brother.