tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45645364325909849042023-11-15T11:08:53.754-08:00Reading Notes in Russian Intellectual HistoryMy reading notes on Russian history, culture, language and literature. I will also be discussing many readings from my M.A. thesis treating Fyodor Dostoevsky's significance as a public intellectual and journalist during the 1870s.Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-12860665811097878702016-12-03T23:06:00.002-08:002016-12-03T23:14:32.677-08:00A Tale of Two Luzhins<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?-->
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14px;">As soon as I read the Russian title of Nabokov’s novel <i>Защита Лужина</i> (which is translated into English as simply <i>The Defense</i>], I realized immediately that the name of the hero could not be coincidental. The first Luzhin in Russian literature, of course, is one of the villains in Dostoevsky’s</span> <i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">Crime and Punishment</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14px;">. Indeed, the latter seeks to rush Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya into what is very much a marriage of convenience. In Nabokov’s novel, the mother of Luzhin’s fiancée also accuses her would-be son-in-law of seeking to rush into marriage: “You would probably get married today and right now, if you could” [</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14px;">Вы, вероятно, хотели бы жениться уже сегодня, сейчас]. (Perhaps the mother also has Dostoevsky’s character in mind: when she first hears his name, she wonders if it is not a pseudonym). She dresses down the hero for his slovenliness and lack of personal hygiene. She wonders aloud to him whether he is not a “lecher” [разватник], and she suspects that he might have a venereal disease. Here we think of the other villain seeking to despoil Dunya in</span> <i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">C&P</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14px;">: the truly lecherous Svidrigailov. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue";"><span style="font-size: 14px;">In truth, Nabokov’s Luzhin is really quite innocent and completely without ulterior motives. Though he is far from uninterested in pursuing the relationship and does indeed clumsily seek sexual gratification, the relationship is in many ways initiated and advanced by his wife-to-be. During the initial courtship at the German resort, Nabokov makes clear that it is the girl who pursues the man and not the other way around. In this way Nabokov’s passive Luzhin, who gradually goes mad and becomes the victim of hallucination during the match with Turati, deflates Dostoevsky’s active and designing villain of the same name. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue";"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue";"><span style="font-size: 14px;">In either case, it is worth noting that the name could be literally translated as the rather negative and deprecating “Mr. Puddle” in English (since лужа = puddle).</span></span>Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-12312260437856006722015-12-14T19:56:00.000-08:002015-12-14T19:58:41.370-08:00Strange Russian Etymology from the Beginning of Leibniz's Theodicy<div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">
<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=VUMgHq9lE2UC&pg=PA72#v=onepage&q&f=false">Leibniz proposes an odd etymology for the Russian word for Wednesday (sreda)</a>, as though the word derived from the name of Zarathustra:
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">
His [Zarathustra’s] great learning caused the Orientals to compare him with the Mercury or Hermes of the Egyptians and Greeks; just as the northern peoples compared their Wodan or Odin to this same Mercury. That is why Mercredi (Wednesday), or the day of Mercury, was called Wodansdag by the northern peoples, but day of Zerdust by the Asiatics, since it is named Zarschamba or Dsearschambe by the Turks and the Persians, Zerda by the Hungarians from the north-east, and Sreda by the Slavs from the heart of Great Russia, as far as the Wends of the Luneburg region, the Slavs having learnt the name also from the Orientals.</blockquote>
<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?-->
<br />
<div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">
Yet Terence Wade (in his <i><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Russian_etymological_dictionary.html?id=Ea8jAQAAIAAJ">Etymological Dictionary of Russian</a></i>, p. 208) notes that the word is related to other terms that emphasize the meaning of "middle" (like serdtse, seredina, and srednii). Hence, like the German Mittwoch, it just means the middle of the week. </div>
<div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">
Though Leibniz may have known some Russian from being <a href="http://www.helsinki.fi/~mroinila/russia.htm">the confidant of Peter the Great</a>, he lived long before the era of modern linguistics and thus knowledge of sound changes. I would thus be willing to believe Wade. It couldn't be true that both etymologies are correct?</div>
Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-91664703369686048362013-03-06T22:55:00.001-08:002013-03-06T22:56:44.560-08:00Continued discussion of Danilevsky's Russia and Europe<br />
<div class="p1">
</div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><a href="http://russianreadingnotes.blogspot.com/2012/12/reading-danilevskys-russia-and-europe.html">Two blog posts ago</a></span> I began discussing Danilevsky's influential Slavophile book, <i>Russian and Europe</i>. I have recently gotten some time to continue to read it, and whereas in my previous post I focused on what Danilevsky said to differentiate Russia's actions from those of contemporary European powers, I wanted now to remark on some of the more interesting and surprising opinions that the author had about the Russia and its relationship to its empire.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Danilevsky's civilizational model of world history is constructed in such a way as to justify the entire territorial integrity of the Russian Empire as the homeland of the Slavs. According to Danilevsky, unlike the other two great land empires, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey, the Russian Empire was not formed out of conquest [<i>zavoevanie</i>] of lands belonging to foreign nationalities: "not one of Russia's possessions may be considered to have been won through conquest, in the bad, anti-nationalist sense of the word so detested by humanity [<a href="http://litrus.net/book/read/103557?p=10"><span class="s2"><i>ni odno iz vladenii Rossii nel'zia nazyvat' zavoevaniem - v durnom, antinatsional'nom i potomu nenavistnom dlia chelovechestva smysle</i></span></a>]." Regarding Congress Poland, which at the point of Danilevsky's writing had attempted two uprisings against Russian rule (in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_Uprising"><span class="s1">1830-1831</span></a> and in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Uprising"><span class="s1">1863-1865</span></a>), the author believes that Russia is protecting this country's Slavic identity in the face of encroachments by Germanic powers (Prussia and Austria-Hungary). Danilevsky claims that between 1815 and 1830 the Poles enjoyed semi-autonomous status and "constitutional forms of government." This time was "one of the happiest in Polish history", only to be spoiled by the 1830 uprising fomented by the Polish intelligentsia and apparently completely unrepresentative of the wishes of the Polish population.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The author admits that Russia's territorial acquisition of the Caucasus had met with rather mixed resistance. Russia's intervention in the region was a response to the pleas for help from the "trans-Caucasian Christian regions" [<i>zakavkazskie khristianskie oblasti</i>] (i.e., the Georgians and Armenians, though Danilevsky does not name these peoples by name). The author admits that the conquest was significantly less popular with the "Caucasian mountain peoples [<i>kavkazskie gortsy</i>]", who are, of course, Muslims. I was interested to learn that Danilevsky names Russia's conflicts in the Caucasus against these Muslim nationalities as an ongoing point of negative publicity in Europe.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I was most surprised to read that Danilevsky thinks that Russia's historic acquisition of Siberia cannot be considered to be a subjugation, since no peoples worthy of civilizational status have ever occupied that space. This land can either be considered to be vacant [<i>pustoporozhnii</i>] or "inhabited by wild tribes with no history" [<i>zaselennykh dikimi neistoricheskimi plemenami</i>]. Obviously, Danilevsky does not have a very high opinion of the aboriginal and Turkic peoples that have historically occupied the non-European part of Russia. Yet it is interesting that later in the same paragraph the author accuses Spain of having forcefully dominated and destroyed "entire civilizations" in the Americas. There is no academic way, even by nineteenth-century standards, of justifying a pronouncement that while Mesoamerica, for example, contained civilizations which should not have been disturbed, Siberia did not and thus was open to Russian colonization. (The author asserts that this ongoing colonization of the Russian east is a project advanced by many Russians of their own free will and without assistance from the government, a statement that is dubious and perhaps hard to justify. It is interesting that another Slavophile writer, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aksakov"><span class="s1">Sergei Aksakov</span></a>, wrote <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ehaZrlRY_YgC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&dq=aksakov+family+chronicle&source=bl&ots=OMWXxts-7S&sig=moXbJeDbak3jtjUmDrVKSAXP3KA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QTg4UYv-CbDo2gXwq4DgDQ&ved=0CGMQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=aksakov%20family%20chronicle&f=false"><span class="s1">a family-saga novel</span></a> about one such group of Russians who chose to resettle east of the Volga).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
All of Danilevsky's cherry-picked examples serve only to put into question the enterprise of state and empire building by European powers but to justify Russia's historical expansion.</div>
<br />Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-62980391198609598432013-02-12T23:23:00.001-08:002013-02-12T23:44:54.171-08:00Review of Rosamund Bartlett's "Tolstoy: A Russian Life"<br />
<div class="p1">
I will resume my discussion of Danilevsky shortly, but in this post I wanted to ruminate about Rosamund Bartlett's recent <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tolstoy-Russian-Life-Rosamund-Bartlett/dp/0151014388/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360739408&sr=8-1&keywords=Tolstoy%3A+A+Russian+Life"><span class="s1"><i>Tolstoy: A Russian Life</i></span></a>, which I recently finished reading. Interestingly, this is the first biography of Tolstoy that I have read, so I cannot compare it against earlier efforts. But I will say that much is familiar from what I have gleaned in my other readings about Russian literature, and I have read something independently about the life and photography of Tolstoy's wife, Sofia, in Bendavid-Val's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Song-Without-Words-Photographs-Countess/dp/B003IWYL98/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1360739455&sr=1-1&keywords=Song+Without+Words%3A+The+Photographs+and+DIaries+of+Countess+Sophia+Tolstoy"><span class="s1"><i>Song Without Words: The Photographs and DIaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy</i></span></a>. (I can wholly recommend this latter book; it would be a fascinating album even if most of the photos did not feature the great Russian writer, since Sofia was extremely diligent in taking so many photos of life at Yasnaya Polyana and providing posterity with captions and comments. She presents a rich historical record of what life looked like on a nineteenth-century Russian estate, even if Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana could hardly be termed a typical estate).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The great question about Tolstoy's life for me (and probably for many others) has always been why Tolstoy, given his talents, wrote two outstanding works of literature, namely <i>War and Peace</i> in the 1860s and <i>Anna Karenina</i> in the 1870s, only to never take up fiction on such a scale again afterwards fiction on such a scale again afterwards. Granted, I do like the writings from the latter part of Tolstoy's life (in particular <i>The Death of Ivan Ilych</i> and <i>Kholstomer</i>, the story told from the perspective of a horse). I also own an early edition of <i>Resurrection</i> replete with interesting marginalia that was printed by the Tolstoyan <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Chertkov"><span class="s2">Vladimir Chertkov</span></a>'s press, which was set up in England with the express purpose of printing Tolstoy's later religious writings. So I do not mean to sound like a philistine. But I am sure anyone can appreciate the difference in sheer significance between <i>W&P</i> and <i>AK</i>, on the one hand, and <i>The Kreuzer Sonata</i> and <i>Resurrection</i>, on the other.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The answer to my question, of course, lies in Tolstoy's initial religious conversion of the late 1870s and early 1880s, and his decision to devote himself to writing for the peasantry and eventually developing the body of tracts, essays and short parables that would come to make up the core body of Tolstoyan doctrine. I appreciate that these writings are perhaps magnitudes more interesting than some of the non-fiction to come from Dostoevsky's pen, for example (namely the latter's jingoistic writings in the <i>Diary of a Writer</i> on the Russo-Turkish War of 1878). I also appreciate the historical significance of the Tolstoyan movement, and I was unaware of all the Tolstoyan communes that have sprout up around the world, even in the Soviet Union.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
But I nonetheless sympathize with the attitudes of many contemporary Russian writers who believed that Tolstoy could have better devoted his talents by continuing to produce sophisticated long-form fiction (or novels, but it is a matter of classic debate whether Tolstoy wrote in this genre, or if his writing defies such classification). Take, for example, Ivan Turgenev, who on his deathbed wrote a letter to Tolstoy entreating him to return to writing novels for the educated public.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Bartlett describes the process of Tolstoy's religious conversion and then eventual rejection of the Orthodox church well enough, particularly considering that this is a one-volume biography published by a trade press and does not treat Tolstoy's life in such meticulous and critical details as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dostoevsky-Writer-Time-Joseph-Frank/dp/0691128197"><span class="s2">Joseph Frank does in his five-volume biography and study of Dostoevsky</span></a>. Yet Bartlett can offer no really satisfactory reasons for the fundamental changes in Tolstoy's written output after the end of the 1870s other than to say that Tolstoy's headstrong and defiant attitudes towards his society and social caste became stronger and more dominant as he grew older, and that these interests dominated over his wish to be a novelist. Bartlett shows that Tolstoy's non-conformist personality traits may also have their roots in other members of the Tolstoy clan, such as the wild <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Ivanovich_Tolstoy"><span class="s2">Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy</span></a>, who returned from a combined sea voyage around the world and land trek from Alaska to St. Petersburg in 1805 with tattoos that he received in Hawaii.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Some of Bartlett's research about Tolstoy's self-education and development as a writer did strike me as particularly interesting and perhaps without parallel among his other peer writers from the Golden Age of Russian Literature. For example, Tolstoy had a particular enthusiasm for language learning that remained a constant through his life. Whereas most all members of the Russian educated classes and nobility had fluent French (the famous literary critic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vissarion_Belinsky"><span class="s2">Vissarion Belinsky</span></a> was a notable exception since he could only speak and write Russian), Tolstoy also knew German, wrote frequently in English to his American and British correspondents, and learned Greek and even the invented internationalist language, Esperanto.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
There is a notable lack of discussion in Russian literary criticism about the reception of the literary heritage of classical civilization, and in light of this it is all the more striking that Tolstoy learned Greek expressly so that he could translate Aesop's fables for inclusion in his ABC primer for Russian peasants. Tolstoy also read Homer's <i>Illiad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> and Xenophon's <i>Anabasis</i> in the original during the early 1870s, which was an experience that had great influence on him. Bartlett reports Tolstoy's remarks to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afanasy_Fet"><span class="s2">Afanasy Fet</span></a> at the height of his interest in reading the classics: "I'm completely living in Athens. I speak in Greek in my dreams."</div>
Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-2269703003274677912012-12-31T22:53:00.000-08:002012-12-31T22:53:31.559-08:00Reading Danilevsky's Russia and Europe
<br />
<div class="p1">
I have started reading <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Danilevsky"><span class="s1">N. Ya. Danilevsky</span></a>'s <i>Russia and Europe</i> [<i>Rossiya i Evropa</i>]. Since, as far as I can tell, there are no translations of Danilevsky into English, I am of course reading the work in its original Russian. Note the facsimile of the 1895 edition <a href="http://imwerden.de/pdf/danilevsky_russia_i_evropa_1895.pdf"><span class="s1">here</span></a>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The book is an influential treatise that describes a theory of historical and cultural development that is determined by a nation's particular civilizational type. In this way Danilevsky's work prefigures the works of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler"><span class="s1">Oswald Spengler</span></a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee"><span class="s1">Arnold Toynbee</span></a>, historians of culture who seem to be somewhat forgotten nowadays.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I have come to know of the importance of Danilevsky's book through my study of Dostoevsky. Danilevsky and Dostoevsky were both members of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrashevsky_Circle"><span class="s1">Petrashevsky Circle</span></a>, which was a literary gathering of intellectuals and freethinkers that was discovered and broken up by Nicholas I's regime in 1849. Dostoevsky was initially sentenced to execution for his participation in the group, but he was granted a last minute reprieve in which he was sent into a Siberian exile that lasted nearly a decade. Danilevsky was given the much lesser sentence of spending 100 days in the Peter and Paul Fortress, which was largely due to the fact that <a href="http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9,_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B9_%D0%AF%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87#.D0.91.D0.B8.D0.BE.D0.B3.D1.80.D0.B0.D1.84.D0.B8.D1.8F"><span class="s1">he wrote a letter to the authorities proving his political innocence</span></a>. Given the importance Dostoevsky would later give to his time as a prisoner, I am sure that the great Russian novelist would not have found it beneficial to use his writing abilities to extract himself in such a way from this difficult situation.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Russia and Europe</i>, which was originally published in 1869, made a big impression on Dostoevsky. The latter proclaimed that it would become a "bedside book [nastolnaya kniga]" for Russians in the decades to come (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=86tiAAAAMAAJ"><span class="s1">Budanova 138</span></a>). The particular idea advanced in the book that Russia would create an independent Slavic civilization initiating the next phase of world history informs Dostoevsky's character of Shatov in <i>The Devils</i> (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dostoevsky-The-Miraculous-Years-1865-1871/dp/0691015872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357022948&sr=8-1&keywords=Joseph+Frank+The+Miraculous+Years"><span class="s1">Frank 560</span></a>). However, Dostoevsky was on the whole dissatisfied with Danilevsky's reduction of the significance of Russian Orthodoxy to a national characteristic, denying its status as a universal embodiment of Christian doctrine suitable for the whole world.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Like so much nineteenth-century expository prose, whether written in Russian or another language, the beginning of <i>Russia and Europe</i> meanders and is in no hurry to get to its thesis. Instead, it gradually works up to its main argument by first positing the question of why Russia is treated like a second-class power by the other great powers of Europe. Danilevsky compares the outcomes of two recent historical events. In 1864 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig-Holstein_Question"><span class="s1">Denmark, a small power, was forced to cede Schleswig and Holstein to two great powers, Austria and Prussia</span></a>, despite an earlier treaty which guaranteed Denmark these territories. A decade earlier, in 1853, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War"><span class="s1">Great Britain and France declared war on Russia</span></a> because of the latter's insistence that Turkey honor its previous agreement that the Orthodox Church be given supreme authority over the Ottoman Empire's Christians. Danilevsky insists that Russia had no intention or invading or declaring war on Turkey and thereby expanding its own empire. Clearly we are meant to understand a certain continuity here where the great powers are allowed to use arms to seize territory in contravention of a previous treaty, and Russia is also prevented from acting in accordance with its diplomatic agreements with Turkey.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
These events testify to the existence of a fundamental civilizational/cultural divide between Latin-German and Slavic civilizations. I will write more about my readings in Danilevsky in future posts to come.</div>
Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-75802724863923140702012-12-07T00:18:00.001-08:002012-12-07T00:18:30.886-08:00Review of "Is That a Fish in Your Ear"
<br />
<div class="p1">
I have just finished reading David Bellos's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/That-Fish-Your-Ear-Translation/dp/0865478767/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354866645&sr=8-1&keywords=Is+That+a+Fish+in+Your+Ear%3A+Translation+and+the+Meaning+of+Everything"><span class="s1"><i>Is That a Fish in Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything</i></span></a>, and though it is not exactly a book in Russian studies, the topic of the book touches directly on my career as a Russian translator. In addition, the author does use a number of foreign language examples from Russian (even though Bellos is a French-studies scholar). In what follows I will present what I found to be the most interesting points and passages that I noted down in <a href="http://www.evernote.com/"><span class="s2">my digital commonplace book</span></a>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Bellos discusses the problem of translating in such a way that the "foreigness" of the source text is preserved. <a href="http://russianreadingnotes.blogspot.com/2012/01/review-of-translator-in-text-part-2.html"><span class="s2">As I discussed earlier this year</span></a>, the task of trying to preserve the ethnic content of the original in a new language is problematic to say the least. Bellos says that it "runs the risk of dissolving into something different --- a representation of the funny ways foreigners speak." In literary translation, it is hard if not impossible to mark the fact that characters in a foreign-language novel, though they are made to speak the language of the target text, originally spoke a different language.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Bellos makes the interesting point that the English language allows only foreign words from certain cultures that have had a historical relation with an English-speaking nation to be allowed into translations. So the preservation of certain French words in the English translations of French novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an accepted and common practice due to the prestige of the source culture, and modern American English is receptive to the use of certain Spanish phrases in translation since they have been made familiar to a large audience due to the presence of large numbers of Spanish-speakers in the United States.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The author states that the translation of poetry, drama, film subtitles and even sometimes literature (as in the case of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) is often a collaborative process. Bellos even confesses that he translates the novels of Ismail Kadare, who writes in Albanian, from a French translation by Tedi Papvrami: in essence a translation of a translation. This is the kind of practice that <a href="http://languagesoftheworld.info/translation/on-google-translate-again.html"><span class="s2">some critics believe is one of the faults underlying the Google Translate engine</span></a>, in that most language pairs translated by the machine translation service are translated through an intermediate translation into English (what Bellos terms a pivot language).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I find the author's argument that foreign works of fiction, and even films, are now created in such a way as to facilitate adaption and translation into English, to be quite compelling. In the case of dialog for films this means crafting short dialogue that lends itself to the subtitling constraints of how many characters can be displayed on the screen at one time and the reading speed of the average moviegoer. "Our standard vision of Swedes as verbally challenged depressives is in some degree a by-product of Bergman's success in building subtitling constraints into the composition of his more ambitious international films."</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Bellos believes that there is no special mental procedure (other than requisite knowledge of two or more languages) that distinguishes translation from other activities that rephrase and recontextualize language: "[N]o precise boundary can be drawn between translation, on the one hand, and drafting, editing, correcting, reformulating, and adapting a text, whether written in the same or in some other tongue, on the other." He gives the example of the practice of journalists around the world who, while reading one of the major news wires published in French, Russian or Arabic, create news stories for their target markets. They inevitably end up translating the news into their local language, but these journalists do not think of what they do as translation; in fact, what they do is not just servile translation, since they add to and embellish the plain information that is published in the source wires.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The book is not just concerned with written translation, but it also devotes much discussion to oral interpretation. The practice in the West of only translating or interpreting in one's native language (which is what I do as a Russian to English translator) is not universally true. Bellos gives the example of official Soviet interpreters at the UN, who were all native Russian speakers who interpreted into foreign languages. This may have had a political motivation (the Soviets were not going to trust foreigners to do their interpreting), but nonetheless these interpreters supposedly performed just as well as others who interpreted into their native languages. Bellos cites a Soviet-era textbook in interpreting which explicates this method (G. T. Chernov, <i>Osnovy sinkhronnogo perevoda</i> (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1987)), but my hunch is that except in the case of exceptional individuals (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov, who admittedly spent much time in an anglophone environment), it is extremely hard to exercise native command of a foreign language. I encounter English written by native Russian speakers who have university educations in foreign languages, linguistics and translation studies on a daily basis, and though their writing is competent and serviceable, rarely does it seem like it came from the pen (or keyboard) of a native speaker.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Bellos repeats the insights of Walter Ong's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Orality-Literacy-New-Accents-Walter/dp/0415281296/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354867765&sr=8-1&keywords=Orality+and+Literacy"><span class="s1"><i>Orality and Literacy</i></span></a> when he states that "[i]n large areas of national and international affairs, speech has now become a secondary medium, a by-product of writing." The author spells out what this means for the practice of oral interpretation, which in pre-literate times was the only form of translation, sharing with epic poetry the same kind of immediacy of performance and characterized by the same ephemeral, fleeting nature of an utterance that could not be recorded. Today, by contrast, interpreters working at the UN often receive ahead of time the texts of speeches that are to be delivered by delegates.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Indeed, though it is ostensibly just a book about translation, Bellos has plenty to say about the nature of language. For example, much of the active vocabulary of any fluent speaker of a language is concentrated on just the few thousand most common words, and that most other words, such as most of the headwords that can be found in a large dictionary, are used only in rather precise contexts and have recondite meanings. The fact that this is true helped me immensely when I was in the initial stages of learning Russian, since one of the ways that I built up my vocabulary was through studying Nicholas Brown's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Learners-Dictionary-Words-Frequency/dp/0415137926/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1354867971&sr=8-2&keywords=nicholas+brown+russian"><span class="s2">frequency dictionary of the 10,000 most common Russian words</span></a>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Though we tend to think of dictionaries and other wordlists as primarily monolingual constructs, and of bilingual dictionaries as secondary specialist tools of translators and bilinguals, the latter tools preceded the former by many centuries. According to the author, "[a]mong the very earliest instances of writing are lists of terms for important things in two languages." Bellos cites the example of Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual dictionaries from the ancient Near East. By contrast, the first alphabetically complete general-purpose monolingual dictionary was Samuel Johnson's dictionary of the English language, which was published in 1755. Indeed, I remember reading this tidbit before in C. M. Millward's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Biography-English-Language-C-M-Millward/dp/0495906417/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354868159&sr=1-1&keywords=A+Biography+of+the+English+Language"><span class="s1"><i>A Biography of the English Language</i></span></a>, one of my favorite textbooks from college. (I see that it is now in a third edition, whereas what I used was the second).</div>
Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-26528110855737206322012-11-04T14:22:00.001-08:002012-11-04T14:36:29.082-08:00Review of Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit<br />
<div class="p1">
Andrey Platonov's<i> </i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-York-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590173058/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352066617&sr=8-1&keywords=Andrey+Platonov%27s+The+Foundation+Pit"><span class="s1"><i>The Foundation Pit</i></span></a> presents a nightmarish world set during the Stalinist drive towards mass collectivization and industrialization. The novel opens as Voshchev (whose name, as Chandler and Meerson note, is perhaps derived from the Russian <i>voobshe</i>, or "generally", hence a Soviet everyman), who has just been dismissed from his job for "thoughtfulness," walks to a neighboring town and joins a group of workers who are digging the foundation pit for an apartment building to house future proletarians. The major irony of this project is that the foundation pit eventually becomes the grave for Nastya, an orphaned girl who throughout the novel represents to all the other characters the hope of the future proletarian generation destined to live in the world of total communism.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Indeed, the thinking of the ardently devoted members of the work crew, such as of Chiklin and Safronov, strictly runs along the lines of Leninist-Marxist dialectical materialism. The engineer Prushevsky, who oversees construction of the foundation pit, understands the construction project not just as an engineering problem, but thinks about the social structure of the project in terms of Marxist<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure">base and superstructure</a> theory (19). Many of the workers seem to be resigned to the fact that they will die in achieving socialist construction in order to facilitate the ultimate transition from capitalism to communism.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The tension of the current moment of socialist construction that the novel captures is so great that even the natural world conforms to the Marxist plan, as though following the animal-world equivalent of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism"><span class="s1">Lysenkoist botany</span></a>. This is particularly true of the part of the novel that focuses on a collective farm located not far away from the foundation pit. For example, a group of rooks "felt like departing ahead of time [i.e., before the normal migration], in order to survive the organizational collective farm autumn in some sunny region and return later to a universal institutionalized calm" (75). Not only does the collective farm contain conscious, collectivized middle and low peasants, but also a group of collectivized horses who are able to equitably distribute hay among themselves according to communist principles. The following sentence describing their behavior echoes the Leninist mantra of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs": "Each animal took a share of nourishment proportionate to its strength and carefully carried it in the direction of the gate from which all the horses had first emerged" (88). And finally, there is a blacksmith bear named Misha (apparently taken at least in part from Russian folklore) on the collective farm who represents a kind of idealized proletarian worker and helps root out kulak peasants.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The novel is heavily grounded in the language of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_effect"><span class="s1">estrangement</span></a> (<i>ostranenie</i>). (This is a concept perhaps best articulated by the Russian formalist literary critic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shklovsky"><span class="s1">Viktor Shklovsky</span></a>.) In the afterword to his translation Chandler emphasizes all the unusual turns of phrase that Platonov employs in Russian in order to make strong allusions to Russian orthodoxy, literature and philosophy. This is certainly true, and I appreciate how Chandler attempts to remain faithful to Platonov's experimental language. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
However, earlier this year <a href="http://russianreadingnotes.blogspot.com/2012/01/review-of-translator-in-text-part-2.html"><span class="s1">I discussed the problem of translating language too literally</span></a>, so that the resulting English is awkward. It seems the case that there are some rather odd-sounding renderings in the Chandler and Meerson translation where the Russian would seem to justify a more natural English translation. For example, Voshchev refers to the worker's barracks at the foundation pit as "the dwelling place", though the original <i>zhilishche </i>can mean simply "lodging, quarters" (50). At another point near the beginning of the novel Safronov asks Kozlov to "reinforce yourself with physical culture" (24), which sounds like a rather literal translation of the original <i>fizkul'tura. </i>When I am translating texts (which are admittedly much less literary than Platonov) I simply render this word as "exercise" or "physical fitness," which are certainly much more common in English than "physical culture." (But I will also note that "physical culture" was a major theme of 1930s official Soviet culture, as <a href="http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1934fizkultura&Year=1934"><span class="s1">this page</span></a> from the <i>Seventeen Moments in Soviet History</i> explains, and it is true that Chandler and Meerson include a short note on this as well). And in a scene that takes place at the village church, the translators render Russian <i>khram</i> as temple (93). Though the latter can be translated as a temple, I think the context here dictates that it should be a simple parish church.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3" style="text-align: center;">
Works Cited</div>
<div class="p3" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Platonov, Andreĭ P, and Robert Chandler. <i>The Foundation Pit</i>. New York: New York Review Books, 2009. Print.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-44059276396843598712012-09-28T22:02:00.000-07:002012-09-28T22:02:16.999-07:00Pushkin, Genre Experimentation and the Creation of the Literary Language
<br />
<div class="p1">
Harsha Ram (in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Imperial-Sublime-Wisconsin-University/dp/B008NE94W0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1346992067&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=The+Imperial+Sublime%3A+A+Russian+Poetics+of+Empire"><span class="s1"><i>The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire</i></span></a>) demonstrates how a certain set of formal traits pertaining to the ode, and in particular to the victory ode, as written by Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavrila Derzhavin in particular, became subject to formal experimentation by the Romantic poets, and most notably Alexander Pushkin. Thus, Pushkin's first published poem, <i>Memories in Tsarskoe Selo</i> [<i>Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele</i>], which Ram notes was declaimed in front of an aging Derzhavin, contains elements of the odic sublime mixed with elegy:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Instead of simply writing a patriotic ode celebrating Russia's victory over Napoleon, Pushkin feels compelled to frame that victory in a remembrance of the past. 'Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele' is less an ode, it seems, than an elegiac commemoration of the ode as a genre: the poet's stylistic distance from the ode precisely mirrors the temporal remove that separates him from the victory monuments he so wistfully contemplates (162).</blockquote>
<div class="p1">
Ram notes other examples of experimentation in different forms: "Pushkin's other political verse of the time is similarly hybrid: 'Derevnia' (The countryside') (1819) begins as a pastoral idyll and ends with an odic denunciation of serfdom (1:359-61), whereas Pushkin's celebrated poem to Chaadaev of 1818 superimposes the imagery of love poetry onto the political theme of liberty (1:346)" (162).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It is interesting that Pushkin, who is regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature and is a Shakespeare-like figure within the Russian canon, began his poetic career by violating established genre boundaries. And this experimentation in mixing the public, high-style elements of the ode with the topoi of private, elegiac reflection, for example, was intimately connected with Pushkin's creation of a unique literary language that would mix elements of the low and high styles. We are told in V. V. Vinogradov's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/History-Russian-Literary-Language-Centuries/dp/0299052605/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348894610&sr=8-1&keywords=V.+V.+Vinogradov%27s+History+of+the+Russian+Literary+Language"><span class="s2"><i>History of the Russian Literary Language</i></span></a>, for example, that Pushkin belonged to the Karamzin school, which believed in bringing the Russian literary language into accord with the spoken language of the intelligentsia and opposed the dominant use of the Church Slavonicisms, which was advocated by an opposing conservative camp headed by Admiral A. S. Shishkov. (Of course, Pushkin as a poet would grow to use all the stylistic resources of the Russian language as well as foreign borrowings.) So it is no wonder that a major aspect that bothered Pushkin about the unadulterated odic style was its exclusive use of what Lomonosov termed the high style, which is dominated by the Church language. Ram notes that in a letter to his brother, Pushkin expresses his dissatisfaction with an ode written by his fellow Tsarskoe Selo classmate, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, in which the latter uses "Slavo-Russian verse taken entirely from [the Book of] Jeremiah" to champion the Greek revolutionary cause in the early 1820s.</div>
Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-64032454946948476462012-09-06T21:48:00.002-07:002012-09-06T21:51:31.329-07:00Tyutchev and the Imperial Sublime<br />
<div>
<span style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am just finishing up reading Harsha Ram's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Imperial-Sublime-Wisconsin-University/dp/B008NE94W0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346992067&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Imperial+Sublime%3A+A+Russian+Poetics+of+Empire">The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire</a></i>. The book focuses in particular on the evolution of the poetic genre of the ode from Mikhail Lomonosov's <i>Ode on the Taking of Khotin</i> (the archetypal "ceremonial ode" of Russian literature) through to the odes of Pushkin and Lermontov, with some attention to how the meaning of the sublime (as evoked in these works) evolved over this period of Russian literature from being a simple borrowing from Longinus to use as a device of Romantic dissent. And though there is much of interest to comment on from the main arguments developed in the body of the book, I wanted to touch on on some ideas brought forth in the conclusion about Fyodor Tyutchev, one of my favorite Russian poets and someone who admittedly falls outside the author's chronological scope.</span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ram concludes that for poets before Tyutchev the ode, in spite of whether it was used to attack or praise the monarch, had nonetheless been "based on an implicit (ideological or structural) identification between poet and monarch as well as with the monarch's expanding realm" (218). However, Tyutchev "identified with a liminal state of inchoate inspiration that no longer found an immediate analogy in the figure of the tsar." So in such poems as <a href="http://www.ruthenia.ru/tiutcheviana/stihi/bp/158.html"><i>Prophecy </i>[<i>Prorochestvo</i>]</a> (1850) (cited by Harsha) or even in <i><a href="http://www.ruthenia.ru/tiutcheviana/stihi/bp/155.html">Napoleon</a></i> (1850) (which is not mentioned by the author), Russia is presented and addressed as an independent agent whose historical path and future greatness lie all before her. There is no one appointed person to affect anything, but the country itself is destined to achieve her lot according to the laws of history. (The Russian tsar occurs in the closing lines of <i>Prophecy </i>almost as an afterthought, and even there he bows down at the altar of Hagia Sophia, from which he derives his power). What Ram does not mention, but which might be a determining factor in separating Tyutchev from earlier Russian poets, are his formative years spent in Germany (he attended lectures by Schelling in Munich) and thus his strong intellectual relationship to German philosophy. And it is this particular messianic formulation of Russian geographical expansion and Panslavism that also has particular relevance when trying to understand Dostoevsky's political essays in the <i>Diary of a Writer</i>. In any case, it is important to understand that Tyutchev and Dostoevsky were not simply conservative apologists of the Tsar.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">More comments on this book will follow in future posts. I will make a point of taking more time away from translation work to write them.</span></div>
Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-62847484496177945682012-02-11T22:11:00.000-08:002012-02-11T22:31:21.593-08:00Review of "The Translator in the Text," Part 3: Narrated Monologue and Punctuation<div class="p1">One of the most interesting sections of May's book on the problems of translating Russian literature into English (also see earlier discussion of this book in Parts <a href="http://russianreadingnotes.blogspot.com/2012/01/review-of-translator-in-text-part-1.html"><span class="s1">1</span></a> and <a href="http://russianreadingnotes.blogspot.com/2012/01/review-of-translator-in-text-part-2.html"><span class="s1">2</span></a> of my review) is how translators should treat what she calls "narrated monologue," which is the equivalent of the Russian literary term <a href="http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7"><span class="s2"><i>skaz</i></span></a>. This is basically the phenomenon of a third-person narrator assuming the speech patterns of one of the characters, thus making it hard to distinguish between the thoughts of a character and those of the objective narrator. I remember this topic being treated in my Russian lit courses, and the primary examples that we discussed were from Gogol, Zoshchenko, and, of course, Dostoevsky. As May duly notes, it is mostly thanks to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin"><span class="s1">Mikhail Bakhtin</span></a>, and in particular to his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Problems-Dostoevskys-Poetics-History-Literature/dp/0816612285/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329026500&sr=8-1"><span class="s2"><i>The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics</i></span></a>, that we have such a rich literary criticism in Russian literature laying bear the unstable, polyphonic narratives of Dostoevsky's novels.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">My previous understanding of <i>skaz</i> was that it was a technique practiced by a distinct group of writers. However, May does a good job of showing that a large circle of litterateurs have dipped into this narrative style, and not just those from the Golden and Silver Ages or, after 1917, from the Russian emigration. For example, May discusses <span class="s1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yury_Trifonov">Yury Trifonov</a>,</span> who was a Soviet writer published in authorized venues and who thus had to deal with the stylistically-constructive demands of the official literary doctrine of socialist realism. But yet even he employed narrated monologue for emphasis, a fact which lends support to the idea that this a not particularly stylistically marked feature of the literary language. May particularly notes that the exclamation mark in the following example from the novel <i>Another Life </i>[<i>Другая жизнь</i>] shows how the narrator assumes his character's anger:</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Тогда, на веранде, она почувствовала вдруг бурное отвращение, как приступ тошноты, --- и к нему, и к людям за столом, глазевшим на него с веселым, пьяным дружелюбием, как в ресторане. Как же она разозлилась! </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">At that moment on the veranda she suddenly felt a wild revulsion, like a wave of nausea, --- both toward him and toward the people around the table, gazing at him with cheerful, drunken amiability, as if in a restaurant. She go so angry! (92, May's translation)</blockquote><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">May translates the last sentence in a way that best carries across the emotional content. However, her major point is that heretofore other translators have been neglecting to properly convey this technique. For example, Michael Glenny translates the key sentence above without the exclamation ("she completely lost her temper"), thus "appropriat[ing] the entire sentence as part of the omniscient narration," and thereby making the narration completely conventional from an English literary point-of-view (93).</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Indeed, many of May's more subtle and interesting points cite examples from translators who fail to properly understand the meanings of Russian punctuation, and in particular of exclamation points, ellipses and dashes. Indeed, the chief English-language textbook devoted to the problems of understanding the meanings of Russian punctuation (Edward Vajda and Valentina Umanets, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Punctuation-Related-Symbols-Speakers/dp/0893572756/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329026743&sr=8-1-fkmr0"><span class="s2"><i>Russian Punctuation and Related Symbols: A Guide for English Students</i></span></a>), makes the point that "it is not sufficient to have mastered a large vocabulary, the Russian system of orthography (spelling), and the rules of Russian grammar; you must also learn the system of Russian punctuation. Just as you have already learned the sound value of each letter of the alphabet in various contexts, you must also begin learning the various functions of each mark of punctuation" (xiii). Thus, we might say that for a translator to fail to adequately translate punctuation is more than just to fail to convey a certain marker of style, since it cuts to a more fundamental level of language understanding: it is tantamount to misinterpreting the meaning of a word or the case assignment of a noun.</div>Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-81349960185089657402012-02-03T21:20:00.000-08:002012-02-03T23:02:12.747-08:00New Books in History Podcast<div class="p1">I wanted to put in a word about the <a href="http://newbooksinhistory.com/"><span class="s1">New Books in History series of book-review podcasts</span></a>. Marshall Poe, who hosts each podcast, is a noted Russian historian, and I know of his work from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/People-Born-Slavery-Ethnography-1476-1748/dp/0801437989/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328328649&sr=8-1"><span class="s1"><i>A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748</i></span></a>, which would be an excellent book for me to review on this blog, especially given what <a href="http://russianreadingnotes.blogspot.com/2010/09/medieval-russian-thought-and-classical.html">I have written so far here</a> about the reception of the West in Russia and vice-versa.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Though there are a number of historians from the various subfields of history and other allied disciplines who appear on the show to talk about their most recent monographs, as you might expect Russian studies features prominently. For example, recent podcasts have featured Rosamund Bartlett's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0151014388/"><span class="s1"><i>Tolstoy: A Russian Life</i></span></a><i> </i>and Rodric Braithwaite's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/019983265X/?tag=newbooinhis-20"><span class="s1"><i>Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89</i></span></a>. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p3"><span class="s2"><a href="http://newbooksinhistory.com/2010/10/28/abbott-gleason-a-liberal-education/">One older podcast</a></span><span class="s3"> that I enjoyed listening to featured Abbot Gleason, who is among the founding figures of American Slavic studies. It was interesting to hear him recount his interactions with such legendary figures as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Malia"><span class="s1">Martin Malia</span></a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrzej_Walicki"><span class="s4">Andrzej </span><span class="s5">Walicki</span></a></span>. The latter features very interestingly in one anecdote: apparently Gleason decided to write an undergraduate thesis on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Xaver_von_Baader"><span class="s1">Franz Xaver von Baader</span></a>, a conservative Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher who is perhaps not as famous a member of the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Enlightenment"><span class="s6"> </span><span class="s1">Counter-Englightenment</span></a> as someone like, say, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre"><span class="s1">Joseph de Maistre</span></a>. Gleason clearly was embarrassed about his research topic since it was not as sexy as the projects of his peers, who were writing about things like the rise of German National Socialism and Nietzsche's critique of liberalism. However, Walicki, who was Gleason's advisor at the time, was very enthusiastic about Baader, and he applauded Gleason for picking an understudied topic to research. Walicki also encouraged Gleason to study German, Polish, Russian and other languages so that he could read the existing scholarship on Baader since there was very little in English about him at the time.</div><div class="p4"><br />
</div><div class="p5">I have a vital sympathy with this approach to scholarship, since in my own plan of study I chose to research one of the most understudied corners of Fyodor Dostoevsky's output, namely his journalistic pieces that were published throughout the 1870s as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Writer"><i>The Diary of a Writer</i></a>; the <i>Diary </i>features some of the famous novelist's more unsavory and reactionary opinions about European politics and the Russian Jews, while at the same time containing some celebrated vignettes and other fictions (such as, for example, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_a_Ridiculous_Man"><span class="s1">The Dream of a Ridiculous Man</span></a>"). The lack of monographs and journal articles on the <i>Diary</i> (in contrast to the huge scholarly attention that Dostoevsky's major novels have enjoyed) as well as on figures like Baader may be attributed to the fact that there are always fewer scholars who are interested in studying the more reactionary aspects of intellectual history.</div><div class="p4"><br />
</div><div class="p5">At any rate, the New Books series has been a satisfying way for me pass the time when I am out of the office and taking walks around the parks and other natural areas of scenic Tucson.</div>Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-18286025652118516582012-01-29T23:22:00.000-08:002012-02-11T22:31:08.785-08:00Review of "The Translator in the Text," Part 2: The Reception of "Abusive" Translation<div class="p1">May talks about the problem that twentieth-century translators who make the most efforts in their translations to preserve the distinctive stylistic features of the Russian language are often forgotten and uncelebrated. She notes the following translators and their respective translations: Robert Maguire and John Malmstad (Andrey Bely's <i>Petersburg)</i>, Hugh Mclean (selected short stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko), Leonard Stanton (Victor Erofeyev's "The Parakeet") and T. H. Willetts (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"). On the other hand, those translators who follow in the footsteps of Garnett by making Russian literature conform to English literary stylistic norms are praised:</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span class="s1">Paradoxically, as translations bring more obvious innovations into English, translators seem to be becoming more anonymous. The supposedly 'invisible' translation strategies of earlier times, that smoothed and packaged the work for general consumption, made celebrities of the translators, while much more daring translations now appearing are the work of unassuming scholars and writers who are willing to bring language out into the open in all its materiality while themselves 'disappearing' behind it (52).</span></blockquote><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p3">If readers could only become familiar with some translation theory, then perhaps they would be receptive to these more avant-garde translations. In particular, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Venuti"><span class="s2">Lawrence Venuti</span></a> in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Translators-Invisibility-History-Translation/dp/0415394554/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327907690&sr=8-1"><span class="s2"><i>The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation</i></span></a><i> </i>has contributed the notion of "abusive translation," meaning translation that deliberately subverts English stylistic conventions, in providing an academic framework in which to appreciate translations that privilege fidelity to the original text's linguistic structure over all other considerations. Such a technique is ultimately bound to contribute more to the literature of the target language: "If a work is worth translating, then it should not just slip unobtrusively into the target language. It should be allowed to stretch and challenge that language with the same vitality that its original possesses--- possibly even a greater vitality, born of new linguistic and metaphorical contrasts" (8). The problem is, however, that most English-language critics and readers, and particularly those monolingual readers who have no way of understanding or appreciating how the target-language translation mimics the source-language text, will naturally privilege fluency, comprehensibility and even some stylistic normativity over experimentation.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p3">It seems that many critics, even bilingual ones, find abusive translation to be bad. Like I mentioned in my previous post, May wrote before the advent of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky as the most recognizable (and even acclaimed) current translators of Russian literature into English. P. & V. have often been criticized for using unnatural English, whether or not such English usage carries across more literally Russian lexical or syntactic content. For example, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/06/doctor-zhivago-boris-pasternak-translation"><span class="s2">in her recent review of P. & V.'s translation of</span><span class="s3"> <i>Doctor Zhivago</i></span></a> Ann Pasternak Slater points out just some of the problems of literalism in the translation:</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Sustained, low-level unease is intensified by un-English word-order. "Yura was pleased that he would again meet Nika." Inversions (ubiquitous in early Conrad) are natural to foreigners speaking English and a mistake in translators. The inversion of subject and verb, aggravated by an invasive parenthesis, is an elementary translator's error. "At the turn there would appear, and after a moment vanish, the seven-mile panorama of Kologrivovo." It is quickly apparent that Volokhonsky-Pevear follow the Russian very closely, without attempting to reconfigure its syntax or vocabulary into a more English form.</blockquote><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p3">So, in the end, we as readers in English want to read translations that adhere to John Dryden's "imitation" principle of translation, that is we want to read what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pasternak would have written had they been born in England or America, and not in Russia. (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=CHvjoFf19NQC&pg=PA56&dq=I+have+endeavoured+to+make+Virgil+speak+such+English+as+he+would+himself+have+spoken,+if+he+had+been+born+in+England,+and+in+this+present+age&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lUImT-mwNeOA2wWKvcTfDg&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=I%20have%20endeavoured%20to%20make%20Virgil%20speak%20such%20English%20as%20he%20would%20himself%20have%20spoken%2C%20if%20he%20had%20been%20born%20in%20England%2C%20and%20in%20this%20present%20age&f=false"><span class="s2">In the preface to his translation of Virgil's</span><span class="s3"> <i>Aeneid</i></span></a>, Dryden wrote: "I may presume to say. . . I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age").</div>Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-64660748010622312812012-01-22T01:04:00.000-08:002012-01-26T15:05:33.442-08:00Review of "The Translator in the Text," Part 1<div class="p1">I just finished Rachel May's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Translator-Text-Reading-Russian-Literature/dp/0810111586/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327220870&sr=8-1"><span class="s1"><i>The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English</i></span></a>. It reads as a collection of independent essays; the first of them provides a short history of the translation of Russian literature into English, and the remaining describe the characteristic features and devices of Russian literature and the difficulties translators encounter when Englishing them. There are also two short appendices that provide case studies. There are many excellent insights that are laid out in a very compact fashion. In this first post I will note what I found most striking about May's concise history of Russian translation. Naturally, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Garnett"><span class="s2">Constance Garnett</span></a> dominates the discussion, since there was no other Russian-English literary translator of note until the twentieth century.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p3">The history of Russian translation in Great Britain (and America) is very close to the history of the reception (<span class="s3"><i>Rezeptionsgeschichte</i>) </span>of Russian literature. Early translations addressed the British public's interest in gaining information about Russia, and early translators of Gogol and Lermontov distorted and added to the original texts in order to confirm popular stereotypes about the shortcomings of the Russian character and the backwardness of Russia. Artistic appreciation of Russian literature, and with it a demand for more accurate translations, came only in the late Victorian era in Britain (and in particular after 1885). French criticism on Russian literature was translated into English to address the lack of native works on the subject, and de Vogue's <i>Le roman russe</i> was the most popular such work (21).</div><div class="p4"><br />
</div><div class="p3">The "informational" attitude to translation so prevalent in Britain in the nineteenth century once again took hold during the Cold War. The first English translation of <i>Doctor Zhivago</i> was rushed and did not attempt to convey Pasternak's style. "In other words, the literary qualities of the work had to take a back seat to its political importance. Curiously, despite the universal dissatisfaction with this translation, no other version has yet appeared [circa 1994; since then Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated the novel]" (47). Indeed, it was this Max Hayward and Manya Harari translation that I read when I first read the novel as a high school student, and when I read it again for a course as an undergraduate. (It's funny that I chose this translation mostly because I liked the production values of the book, which falls within the Everyman's Classics Library series: all the books in this series come exquisitely bound in cloth. However, perhaps this publisher did not make it a policy of always choosing up-to-date or artistically accomplished translations (with perhaps the exception of John Edwin Woods' new translations of Thomas Mann's novels. I really like that translator, though it is true that I have no way of judging the fidelity to the German)).</div><div class="p4"><br />
</div><div class="p3">May describes the formation of the canon of Russian Golden Age writers in translation: "The darlings of the English literati of the late nineteenth century were Turgenev and Tolstoy, in that order. Dostoevsky remained too foreign for even late-Victorian tastes; his moment was not to come until a quarter of a century after Turgenev's" (22). Turgenev, or more accurately Constance Garnett's translations of Turgenev, set the normative expectations in Britain about how a Russian novel should read in English: "Though British readers recognized Russian novelists as having something special to contribute to world culture Turgenev helped them to believe that Russian literature could fit into the stylistic mainstream in England, and subsequent translations increasingly forced Russian novels into this mold" (22). Constance Garnett began her career as a translator with Turgenev, and she was perhaps most successful translating him because his style was already close to that of nineteenth-century English novelists. At least one of the latter group found Turgenev easy to appreciate it: Joseph Conrad was very impressed with Garnett's translations, and to him she and Turgenev are inseparable (25).</div><div class="p4"><br />
</div><div class="p3">May notes: "Turgenev also appealed to literary purists, perhaps because his style was less convoluted than those of other Russian writers" (23). Yet Pushkin stands at the head of the strand of Russian literary tradition to which Turgenev belongs (Pushkin - Tolstoy - Turgenev - Chekhov, which is defined in binary opposition to the Gogol - Dostoevsky strand). However, May reserves no place in her book for a discussion of the translation of either Pushkin's poetry or prose into English</div><div class="p4"><br />
</div><div class="p3">Early translators of Dostoevsky treated the Russian author "as a rough-hewn writer in need of stylistic assistance" (28). "Dostoevsky simply was not sufficiently genteel for the late Victorian audience. They looked on Dostoevsky, as on Gogol earlier, as a curiosity or a window onto Russian life, but not as an artist" (29). (Robert Louis Stevenson, however, was an early admirer of Dostoevsky nonetheless.) Garnett had to make Dostoevsky acceptable, and to transform his style into the same that she used for Turgenev: "Amidst the general acclaim for Mrs. Garnett's translations of Dostoevsky, we can detect hints that her triumph lay partly in adapting him to the aesthetic demands of the English reader. Mrs. Garnett wrote, 'Dostoievsky is so obscure and so careless a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him --- sometimes it needs some penetration to see what he is trying to say'" (32). By contrast to Dostoevsky, Chekhov was much easier to translate for Garnett: "Chekhov's writing lends itself to translation in much the same way as Turgenev's: it has simplicity and grace, it tends to use a single perspective and little extraneous detail" (36).</div>Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-15297113607884685452011-08-29T22:01:00.000-07:002011-08-29T22:05:54.830-07:00Review of "Rulers and Victims", Part 2: the Soviet Union and the Enlightenment<div style="background-color: transparent;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8224403918720782" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wanted to point out something problematic I came across in Hosking's </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rulers-Victims-Russians-Soviet-Union/dp/0674030532/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314165456&sr=1-1"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rulers and Victims</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (see the </span><a href="http://russianreadingnotes.blogspot.com/2011/08/review-of-rulers-and-victims-part-1.html"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">previous post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for the first part of the review). The author aims for a succinct characterization of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Hosking is right to point out that the United States represented a unique kind of enemy in Russian history, because Russia, as one of the great land empires, had for centuries dealt with nearby and internal enemies all with competing territorial claims to Eurasia. This was not so of the United States, an entity with no land border that presented the Soviet Union with a purely ideological confrontation. However, I do not know if I completely understand the next statement: "In some respects the two countries resembled each other: both were partly European [yes], both had grown out of visions of the perfect society generated by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment [?], and both aimed to spread their particular version of it around the world [ok]" (Hosking 228). I am strongly familiar with idea that the United States was founded under the auspices of the Enlightenment. For example, Montesquieu's </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Laws"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Spirit of the Laws</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is certainly fundamental to the origins of American legal culture, and in the twentieth century this culture certainly began to be widely adopted and spread around the world.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But what Enlightenment philosophy provided the ideological foundation of the Soviet Union? Granted, we can of course certain trace lines in intellectual history, from, for example, Kant to Herder to Hegel to Marx to Lenin. (Even if we grant this connection, an understanding of Marxism is only helpful in understanding what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">some</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Russians thought the Soviet Union should be. There were also conservative thinkers, such as the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smenovekhovtsy"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Smenovekhovtsy</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, who understood the Soviet Union as a successor great power state to the Russian Empire, and who I will discuss in a future blog post). The first two German philosophers, </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kant</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Herder"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Herder</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, are traditionally considered members of the Enlightenment. I doubt, however, that there was any sincere eighteenth-century tradition explicit in the Soviet Union. One can, of course, make certain specific comparisons which would seem on the surface to be completely unintentional and certainly lacking any approval from the Soviet authorities. For example, </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinyavsky"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Andrey Sinyavsky</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (aka Abram Tertz) in his </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BxymxhxmrFJ4MzJlODYxOTYtZjQ5YS00Yjc5LTkyOTgtOGUzYTMxNmU1OGEx&hl=en_US&authkey=CJ3z9agO"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Socialist Realism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> claims that Socialist Realism in many ways represents a revival of Neoclassicism. So when the eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin "wrote the ode 'To the Great Boyar and Military Commander Reshemysl,' he gave it a subtitle: 'or the image of what a great lord should be.' The art of socialist realism might be given the same subtitle: it represents the world and man as they should be" (</span><a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BxymxhxmrFJ4MzJlODYxOTYtZjQ5YS00Yjc5LTkyOTgtOGUzYTMxNmU1OGEx&hl=en_US&authkey=CJ3z9agO"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sinyavsky 200</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Similarly, the English Augustan poet Alexander Pope described an ideal world order in his </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_Criticism"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Essay on Criticism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> modeled on the Neoplatonic great </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_being"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">chain of being</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, several pages later Hosking does argue that after World War II during the period of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhdanovism"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Zhdanovism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the Soviet authorities did try to cultivate an attitude towards science and the role of positivist thinking through Russian history that might seem at first glance related to the Enlightenment's emphasis on rationalism and empiricism. However, the important point is that this narrative was adopted not to advance any true eighteenth-century values of impartiality, objectivity and cosmopolitanism, but as a way of contextualizing a new Russian nationalism; "At the height of the 'anti-groveling' propaganda, Russians were credited with having invented the steam engine, the electric light bulb, the radio, and the aircraft, while the eighteenth-century polymath Mikhail Lomonosov was lauded as the founder of modern science" (Hosking 232). Because of this rather blinkered attitude to science (and all other academic disciplines, for that matter) as a tool for advancing other ends, research and inquiry were certainly not promoted for their own sake. Hosking describes how cancer research was crippled in the 1950s due to the desire of Soviet scientists to work with others abroad (and particular with researchers in the United States). Particularly in the later years of the Soviet Union, the Academy of Sciences became a place (though one that was certainly restricted and limited) where these Enlightenment values could be pursued outside the needs of the regime: "Science at the highest level requires the freedom to think, facilities for keeping up with the latest international research, and opportunities to discuss ideas with leading foreign colleagues; the regime thus had no choice but to provide these resources, even if on a tightly rationed basis" (Hosking 340). So, clearly, the Soviet Union cannot really be understood as a true follower of the Western Enlightenment.</span></div>Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-62544184214344501892011-08-23T23:31:00.001-07:002011-08-24T01:09:54.013-07:00Review of "Rulers and Victims", Part 1<div style="background-color: transparent;"><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.4843043964356184" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Geoffrey Hosking's </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rulers-Victims-Russians-Soviet-Union/dp/0674030532/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314165456&sr=1-1"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rulers and Victims: the Russians in the Soviet Union</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the chronological continuation of the historian's earlier exploration of the relationship between Russian national identity and the Russian Empire in </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russia-People-Empire-1552-1917-Enlarged/dp/0674781198/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314160923&sr=8-1"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And though this book eventually arrives at a conclusion similar to the first volume's (that the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation, like the Russian Empire before them, are not nation states advancing any coherent Russian national identity), I found the history to be interesting for its portrait of the Soviet Union as a constantly changing construction that meant different things to succeeding generations of intellectual and political factions.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hosking's explanation of the Bolsheviks' success during the Russian Revolution is fresh to me. The Reds won out not because the Russian population (and the rural, peasant population in particular) was particularly susceptible to Marxist ideas imported from Western Europe, but because the Bolsheviks were better organized than the Whites and the "Greens" (those "independent" Russians who fought against both of the major sides during the civil war). Unlike the two former groups, the Reds also presented a unified, consistent message and made popular concessions. Indeed, one of the key factors that helped generate widespread support for the October Revolution was Vladimir Lenin's </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_on_Land"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Decree on Land</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which authorized members of the rural population to seize land and make it their own private property (at least initially). Leaders in the White Army, by contrast, differed on whether to reconstitute the fallen Provisional Government and the Russian Empire, and "[t]he only formula on which they could all agree was 'Russia, one and indivisible'" (34). The Whites were advancing an extremely vague notion of Russia, and most often they were characterized negatively by what they were against (and not what they were for) by the population at large: "Most peasants, workers, and soldiers feared that the Whites would deprive the peasants of their recently won land and self-government [in the form of the workers' soviets], bring back capitalism, and let foreigners rule Russia" (34-35).</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was struck from the author's description of the civil war by how the whole conflict represented a huge step backward in the country's material living conditions. Hosking reminds us that given the sustained wartime conditions that public sanitation and even indoor plumbing ceased to function in urban areas. (I wonder if the situation was not also negatively influenced by the general exodus of the professional middle classes after the Revolution, including those responsible for maintaining public infrastructure). Disease and famine spread widely and quickly. Hosking quotes Emma Goldman, who, upon returning to Petrograd in 1921, noted that the city</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was almost in ruins, as if a hurricane had swept over it. The houses looked like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries. The streets were dirty and deserted; all life had gone from them. . . . The people walked about like living corpses. . . . Emaciated, frost-bitten men, women and children were being whipped by the common lash, the search for a piece of bread or a stick of wood (41).</span></div><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have read other secondary and even primary sources about the first years of Soviet rule and the civil war (for </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russia-Reader-History-Culture-Politics/dp/0822346486/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314165697&sr=1-1"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Russia Reader</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I even translated an account (A. Okninsky's "Two Years among the Peasants in Tambov Province") of what was going on in one slice of the countryside in 1919). But Hosking's account really communicated to me the complete horror of trying to live a day-to-day existence under such conditions, particularly in the capitals of Moscow and Petrograd.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The author's description of how the Soviet Union initially represented the abolition of private domestic space is also appreciated. The general trend of urbanization that characterized the entire history of the Soviet Union (and which was perhaps made most acute by the mass exodus from the countryside to the cities prompted by the beginning of Collectivization in the 1930s) coupled with the lack of new residential construction in the cities precipitated a housing crisis that forced all urban residents (with the exception of the elite members of the upper echelons of the Party hierarchy, the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nomenklatura</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) to live in communal apartments. It was not until the establishment of the large apartment building projects of the Khrushchev era (the so-called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">novostroyky</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) starting in the late 1950s that many Soviet citizens were able to acquire private living spaces. One conclusion that Hosking makes from this evidence that I find most striking is that for the first formative decades of the Soviet Union the state could rely on people to police each other. (This is despite the fact that the state always had at least one central institution dedicated to carrying out repression). Especially during the 1930s, people lived in fear of their neighbor denouncing them to the authorities. There was no space for any kind of private reflection, whether innocuous or seditious, and the result was that people carried out their lives constantly in public and thus always practiced the self-censorship. As Hosking nicely summarizes, "[t]he communal apartment and [. . .] the Soviet enterprise ensured the continuation of what Daniel Bertaux has called the 'communal' model of Russian life: equality, joint responsibility [krugovaya poruka, which is an important concept in Hosking's general analysis of Russian culture], discipline, and subjection to authorities, with enforced interdependence generating a certain reluctant solidarity" (118).</span></div></div>Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-42732520006331200172010-09-06T00:14:00.001-07:002010-09-06T00:14:32.925-07:00Medieval Russian Thought and Classical AntiquityI have always wondered when Western learning first came to Russia. The question of how and from where it entered the country is posed in various ways by different scholars. One solid tradition, represented by James Cracraft's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Petrine-Revolution-Russian-Culture/dp/0674013166/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283329208&sr=8-1" id="n97r" title="The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture">The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> and Gary Marker's </span><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=M9rgAAAAMAAJ&dq=Publishing,+Printing+and+the+Origins+of+Intellectual+Life+in+Russia,+1700-1800&hl=en&ei=2w1-TLumGZPmsQPwvKmdCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA" id="plh7" title="Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800">Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, argues that secular categories of thought only took root with the reforms of Peter the Great. Especially in Marker's treatment, Western print culture is argued to have provided the proper containers for the transplantation of European intellectual norms in scientific inquiry and literary production. On the other hand, Kievan Rus', the progenitor state of Muscovite Russia, had received its religion and writing system from Byzantine Greece. The question is whether any Byzantine classicism (represented, for example, in <a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/psellus-chronographia.html" id="jz5r" title="the work of Michael Psellos">the work of Michael Psellos</a>) was able to penetrate into Rus'.</span></i><br />
<br />
<div>Scholars such as Francis J. Thomson and Simon Franklin discount the value of any medieval Russian acquaintance with classical antiquity. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=4cPLahmoWLUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA303&ots=ryzjOHSRhO&sig=LcNG5xZYfnuR6ikszADsKlNWijQ" id="t:r4" title="In a book chapter">In a book chapter</a> Thomson severs any possible connection between Byzantine classicism and the Slavonic literary culture that the Byzantines created for the proselytization of the Bulgarians and the Eastern Slavs of Kievan Rus' (304). He admits that while medieval Russians gradually gained access through translations to "a considerable amount of information about classical mythology and legends, even if it is given in a distorted form, they provide no understanding of the main currents of classical philosophy," for example (326). Moreover, though Russians had access to a smorgasbord of aphorisms and selected passages from various classical authors, "[n]ot a single classical work was translated in its entirety in the sixteenth century" (314). A smattering of learning cannot masquerade as true understanding. Franklin even goes so far as to say that "[t]here was no debate over classical learning as there was no classical learning to debate" (quoted in Thomson 303).</div><br />
<div>I would beg to differ.<br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Indeed, none of these objections disprove that classical antiquity played an important role in medieval Russian thought, even if the understanding of antiquity was not as sophisticated or as nuanced as that of contemporary Western scholars.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">William Ryan has devoted <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3722206" id="pcgw" title="an article">an article</a> to the question of the status of Aristotle in Medieval Russia. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Ryan provides several interesting examples demonstrating how </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Aristotle was a central figure in the religious debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassian_Patrikeyev" id="ufpd" title="Vassian Patrikeev">Vassian Patrikeev</a>, a member of the non-possessor party, was condemned by church authorities sympathetic to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_of_Volokolamsk" id="ik9j" title="Joseph">Joseph</a> for "introduc[ing] into his translation of the </span>Nomokanon</i> (code of ecclesiastical law) the pagan philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, Philip, and Homer" (Ryan 652). Anticipating certain Protestant objections to Catholic doctrines during the Reformation, Russians of the time objected to the use of classical antiquity on the basis of its incompatibility with Christian doctrine:</div><br />
<blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px;"><div>In the religious polemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in South-west Russia, the protagonists of Orthodoxy objected to the teaching of classical philosophy in church schools, claiming that their Roman adversaries paid more attention to logic than to sacred tradition (652).</div></blockquote><br />
The author of Russia's first substantial work of secular prose (the <i>Zhitie protopopa Avvakuma</i>, or the <i><a href="http://web.ku.edu/~russcult/culture/handouts/avvakum.html" id="ivmd" title="Autobiography of Avvakum">Autobiography of Avvakum</a></i>) felt compelled to rhetorically position himself in opposition to everything that Western antiquity stood for:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px;"><div>At a less sophisticated level, the Archpriest Avvakum, one of the leaders of the Old Believer schismatic sect in seventeenth-century Russia, simply consigned all the Greek philosophers to eternal damnation (654).</div></blockquote><br />
Classical learning was very much in the foreground of Russian debate, even if its role was to serve as a point of opposition to native Orthodox ways.<br />
<br />
Works Cited</div><br />
<div>Ryan, William F. "<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3722206" id="ffop" title="Aristotle in Old Russian Literature">Aristotle in Old Russian Literature</a>." <i>The Modern Language Review</i> 63.3 (1968): 650–658. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3722206>.</div><br />
Thomson, Francis J. "<a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=4cPLahmoWLUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA303&ots=ryzjOHSRhO&sig=LcNG5xZYfnuR6ikszADsKlNWijQ" id="d1vr" title="The Distorted Mediaeval Russian Perception of Classical Antiquity: The Causes and the Consequences">The Distorted Mediaeval Russian Perception of Classical Antiquity: The Causes and the Consequences</a>." Ed. Andries Welkenhuysen, Herman Braet, and Werner Verbeke. <i>Mediaeval Antiquity</i>. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, ser. 1, studia 24. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1995. 303-364. <http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=4cPLahmoWLUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA303&ots=ryzjOHSRhO&sig=LcNG5xZYfnuR6ikszADsKlNWijQ>.Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-41594042532198374082010-08-28T01:28:00.000-07:002010-09-06T00:28:08.378-07:00Russian Conservatism and its Critics Part IIIn his <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=I1yCrMAfg_IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Russian+Conservatism+and+its+Critics&hl=en&ei=F3hzTOKaIou8sQPczYiRDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false" id="xuji" style="color: #551a8b;" title="Russian Conservatism and its Critics: A Study in Political Culture">Russian Conservatism and its Critics: A Study in Political Culture</a></i> Pipes argues that the beginnings of Russian conservative ideology emerged from the possessor versus non-possessor controversy that took place around the turn of the sixteenth century. That the party of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_of_Volokolamsk" id="o.0w" title="Joseph of Volokolamsk">Joseph of Volokolamsk</a> defending the Orthodox Church's landholding practices won out over <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nil_Sorsky" id="zpuk" title="Nil Sorsky">Nil Sorsky</a>'s denying the validity of Church property was not a given in a patrimonial state where the sovereign aspired to own everything. (Pipes explains that it was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Daniel" id="vu51" title="Metropolitan Daniel">Metropolitan Daniel</a>'s support for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_III" id="dfdl" title="Basil III">Basil III</a>'s decision to divorce his barren wife Solomoniia and marry a Lithuanian princess, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Glinskaya" id="llhe" title="Elena Glinskaia">Elena Glinskaia</a>, which swung the Grand Prince's support in favor of Joseph's possessor party (37)). According to Pipes, what is important about this argument is that it opens the first debate in Russian intellectual history between proto-liberals who claimed that the body politic must rest on law and justice, and those first conservatives (namely the followers of Joseph) who believed it was sufficient that the state rely on the will of the ruler (38). I found it very surprising that there was anyone in the nascent liberal category at this time. Pipes points to one Fedor Karpov [1], a diplomat in the service of Basil III, who wrote against the injustices committed by the Josephites in power by invoking the rule of law:<br />
<blockquote>The public order in cities and states perishes from long suffering; forbearance without justice and law destroys the well-being of society and reduces the people's affairs [delo narodnoe] to naught, allowing the penetration of bad customs and producing men who, because of poverty, dis-obey their sovereign (Druzhinin 106-113, quoted in Pipes 38).</blockquote>Karpov not only challenges the consolidation of autocracy, but he also rejects the quintessentially Russian values of passivity and humility in the face of oppression. (Compare <a class="externalLink" href="http://www.stjohndc.org/Russian/saints/e_0807_boris_gleb.htm" target="_blank" title="External link to http://www.stjohndc.org/Russian/saints/e_0807_boris_gleb.htm">the Saints' Life</a> of Boris and Gleb, who became model figures for their willingness to let themselves be murdered by their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sviatopolk_I_of_Kiev" id="uh3t" title="overly ambitious brother">overly ambitious brother</a>). It is also important that Karpov invokes the people's affairs, the very thing that pre-twentieth century Russian rulers always denied when insisting on their prerogatives. Notably, the Russian words here for this concept, <i>delo narodnoe</i>, are also a direct translation of Latin <i>res publica</i>.<br />
<br />
<div>Notes</div><br />
<div>[1] Dmitri Cizevskij also writes about the same passage from Karpov's epistle <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=IJBJVtUdxr4C&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=Fedor+Karpov&source=bl&ots=43a2Ac57tw&sig=hC_3fghjqUddI-BEBThW52ZbH8o&hl=en&ei=d794TKGzA4X2swPKhvWtBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Fedor%20Karpov&f=false" id="i:so" title="in his Comparative History of Slavic Literatures">in his <i>Comparative History of Slavic Literatures</i></a>. Cizevskij makes clear that Karpov was acquainted with classical political theory, namely in the form of Aristotle. Having read many standard narratives of Russian history, I am surprised that sixteenth-century Russia harbored any students of Western learning. Yet in addition to Karpov <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximus_the_Greek" id="fddl" title="Maksim Grek">Maksim Grek</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juraj_Kri%C5%BEani%C4%87" id="x3z1" title="Juraj Križanić">Juraj Križanić</a> and Prince <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Kurbsky" id="stmn" title="Andrei Kurbsky">Andrei Kurbsky</a> all were influenced by Renaissance thought. It should be pointed out, however, that Maksim Grek and Juraj Križanić were both foreigners who came to Russia after studying in Renaissance Italy. Kurbsky only became acquainted with classical European thought after he defected to Russia. Indeed, like Karpov, Kurbsky also invoked Western political theory as a way of snubbing the Tsar's autocratic rule (though the Tsar in this case is Basil's son, Ivan the Terrible):</div><blockquote>Residence abroad gave Kurbsky the opportunity to become acquainted with the writings of Aristotle and Cicero, as evidenced in one of his letters, where he refers to the "laws of nature" mastered by the ancients — of which, he wrote scornfully, the Russians knew nothing (Pipes 44).</blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">Works Cited</div><br />
<i>Letopis' russkoi zaniatii arkheograficheskii komissii</i>, vol. 21 (1908). Supplement edited by V. G. Druzhinin (St. Petersburg, 1909), 106-113. [Note: this looks like a very important resource, but <a href="http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%D0%9B%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B8+%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B9+%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%85%D0%B5%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B9+%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8+1908" id="q.:n" title="Google Books">Google Books</a> and the <a href="http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006073626" id="e93v" title="Hathi Trust">Hathi Trust</a> both have spotty coverage of this series. <a class="externalLink" href="http://intueri.narod.ru/raritet/raritet_01.htm" target="_blank" title="External link to http://intueri.narod.ru/raritet/raritet_01.htm">This website</a> has digitized volumes 1-19, but nothing after that].Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4564536432590984904.post-21715524892343976412010-08-24T00:53:00.000-07:002010-08-24T09:36:00.700-07:00Russian Conservatism and its CriticsRichard Pipes' <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=I1yCrMAfg_IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Russian+Conservatism+and+its+Critics&hl=en&ei=F3hzTOKaIou8sQPczYiRDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false" id="xuji" title="Russian Conservatism and its Critics: A Study in Political Culture">Russian Conservatism and its Critics: A Study in Political Culture</a></i> discusses the work of a selection of intellectuals who are considered to be the major apologists for Russian autocracy and the status quo from the sixteenth century to the 1917 Russian Revolution. What is interesting is that in Pipes' presentation these thinkers do not offer a uniform picture of Russian conservative thinking over time. But before I speak about the book's main narrative, in this post I would like to briefly discuss Pipes' interesting historical claims.<br />
<div><br />
Pipes does touch on a major thesis in his book -- namely, that Russian rulers have always treated their state like a private patrimony, much like the Frankish rulers of the eighth century AD in the West. In a state [gosudarstvo] that made no distinction between the public powers and private ownership rights of its sovereign [gosudar'], there could be no room for society, and thus no independent social opinion (15). Yet this thesis, as Pipes demonstrates, is best supported by appealing to the thinking and behavior of Russia's ruling elites, and not to the intelligentsia. Indeed, two of the more interesting anecdotes illustrating how the conception of the Tsar's proprietary right over his country and its people passed down from <i>gosudar</i>' to <i>gosudar</i>' are included in the concluding chapter of the book. The first comes from the openly atavistic reign of Nicholas I: "During the audience he accorded Iury Samarin to scold him for presuming to criticize Russian policies in the Baltic provinces, [Nicholas I] said: 'You have attacked both the government and me, because the government and I are one and the same; although I heard that you separate me from the government, I don't accept this" (180).</div><br />
<div>The second comes from just months before Nicholas II's abdication in 1917. This is more surprising given the second Nicholas' much more precarious hold on power:</div><br />
<blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px;">On the eve of the Russian New Year (January 12, 1917, new style) and two months before he would be compelled to abdicate, Nicholas [II] received Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador. It was a difficult time, as the parliamentary majority was mounting a concerted assault against him and his conduct of the war, an assault that at times assumed revolutionary features. Buchanan, asking for and receiving permission to speak frankly, alluded to this political crisis and then went on: "'Your Majesty, if I may be permitted to say so, has but one safe course open to you -- namely, to break down the barrier that separates you from your people and to regain their confidence.' Drawing himself up and looking hard at me, the Emperor asked: 'Do you mean that <i>I</i> am to regain the confidence of my people or that they are to regain <i>my</i> confidence?" (180-181).</blockquote><br />
So even to the very end of the Romanov dynasty Russian rulers lacked the ability to distinguish between the ruler and the body politic, a notion that had become a commonplace in Western political thought by the Early Modern era (note, for example, Hobbes' <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(book)" id="xqe4" title="Leviathan">Leviathan</a></i>). It is no wonder that it is commonly observed that Russia did not participate in the Renaisannce. This observation is also tangential to the fact that Russia, though excelling in literature and the other arts, does not have a vital tradition of political philosophy.<br />
<div><br />
Pipes also finds other reasons for why Russia never developed an active social discourse, other than from adopting the Eastern despotism of the Tatars during the period of Mongol occupation. He cites Geoffrey Hosking's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russia-People-Empire-1552-1917-Enlarged/dp/0674781198/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1282633854&sr=8-1" id="dlxg" title="Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917">Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917</a></i> in noting that Russia failed to develop any national consciousness. (Look for my comments on this book in the near future). Great Russians were widely dispersed across the vast Russian Empire, thus keeping them from developing any sense of shared ethnic identity. Pipes' point that Russians have always been more likely to identify themselves on the basis of their religion (Orthodoxy) rather than nationality rings true from my study of Russian literature and culture. After all, Anton Chekhov's Anna Sergeevna (from "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_With_the_Lapdog" id="qlli" title="The Lady with the Lapdog">The Lady with the Lapdog</a>") concedes that her husband, though having a German grandfather, is Orthodox (rather than being simply "Russian").<br />
<br />
I also really like how Pipes supplements this argument by using demographic data, noting that "the density of population in Muscovite Russia around 1500 was 2.9 inhabitants per square kilometer; in England a century and a half earlier, it had been nearly ten times as great (28.1)" (182). The idea here is that the amount of empty physical space between people influences how society develops (or does not develop). The ability to deploy this kind of comparative statistical information clearly shows Pipes' pedigree as an historian.</div><div><br />
</div>Kenny Cargillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00698977164474735780noreply@blogger.com0