Review of Rosamund Bartlett's "Tolstoy: A Russian Life"

I will resume my discussion of Danilevsky shortly, but in this post I wanted to ruminate about Rosamund Bartlett's recent Tolstoy: A Russian Life, 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 Song Without Words: The Photographs and DIaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy. (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).

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 War and Peace in the 1860s and Anna Karenina 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 The Death of Ivan Ilych and Kholstomer, the story told from the perspective of a horse). I also own an early edition of Resurrection replete with interesting marginalia that was printed by the Tolstoyan Vladimir Chertkov'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 W&P and AK, on the one hand, and The Kreuzer Sonata and Resurrection, on the other.

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 Diary of a Writer 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.

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.

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 Joseph Frank does in his five-volume biography and study of Dostoevsky. 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 Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy, 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.

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 Vissarion Belinsky 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.

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 Illiad and Odyssey and Xenophon's Anabasis in the original during the early 1870s, which was an experience that had great influence on him. Bartlett reports Tolstoy's remarks to Afanasy Fet at the height of his interest in reading the classics: "I'm completely living in Athens. I speak in Greek in my dreams."

Review of Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit

Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit 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 voobshe, 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.

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
base and superstructure 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.

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 Lysenkoist botany. 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.

The novel is heavily grounded in the language of estrangement (ostranenie). (This is a concept perhaps best articulated by the Russian formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky.) 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. 

However, earlier this year I discussed the problem of translating language too literally, 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 zhilishche 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 fizkul'tura. 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 this page from the Seventeen Moments in Soviet History 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 khram 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.

Works Cited

Platonov, Andreĭ P, and Robert Chandler. The Foundation Pit. New York: New York Review Books, 2009. Print.

Pushkin, Genre Experimentation and the Creation of the Literary Language

Harsha Ram (in The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire) 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, Memories in Tsarskoe Selo [Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele], which Ram notes was declaimed in front of an aging Derzhavin, contains elements of the odic sublime mixed with elegy:

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).

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).

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 History of the Russian Literary Language, 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.

Tyutchev and the Imperial Sublime

I am just finishing up reading Harsha Ram's The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire. The book focuses in particular on the evolution of the poetic genre of the ode from Mikhail Lomonosov's Ode on the Taking of Khotin (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.

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 Prophecy [Prorochestvo] (1850) (cited by Harsha) or even in Napoleon (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 Prophecy 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 Diary of a Writer. In any case, it is important to understand that Tyutchev and Dostoevsky were not simply conservative apologists of the Tsar.

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.

Review of "The Translator in the Text," Part 3: Narrated Monologue and Punctuation

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 1 and 2 of my review) is how translators should treat what she calls "narrated monologue," which is the equivalent of the Russian literary term skaz. 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 Mikhail Bakhtin, and in particular to his The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, that we have such a rich literary criticism in Russian literature laying bear the unstable, polyphonic narratives of Dostoevsky's novels.

My previous understanding of skaz 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 Yury Trifonov, 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 Another Life [Другая жизнь] shows how the narrator assumes his character's anger:

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! 

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)

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).

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, Russian Punctuation and Related Symbols: A Guide for English Students), 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.

Review of "The Translator in the Text," Part 2: The Reception of "Abusive" Translation

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 Petersburg), 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:

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).

If readers could only become familiar with some translation theory, then perhaps they would be receptive to these more avant-garde translations. In particular, Lawrence Venuti in his The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation 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.

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, in her recent review of P. & V.'s translation of Doctor Zhivago Ann Pasternak Slater points out just some of the problems of literalism in the translation:

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.

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. (In the preface to his translation of Virgil's Aeneid, 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").

Review of "The Translator in the Text," Part 1

I just finished Rachel May's The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English. 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, Constance Garnett dominates the discussion, since there was no other Russian-English literary translator of note until the twentieth century.

The history of Russian translation in Great Britain (and America) is very close to the history of the reception (Rezeptionsgeschichte) 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 Le roman russe was the most popular such work (21).

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 Doctor Zhivago 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)).

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).

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

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).