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I’m still reading Chukovsky’s Diary, 1901-1969 (see this post), and I’ve come across a couple of short, striking passages I wanted to share. (Russian below the cut.) On endings:

Amazing! English writers don’t know how to end their works. The best of them turn to the most shameful commonplaces. They start off brilliantly, all fresh energy and muscles, but the ending is trivial, cobbled together from cliches. I’ve just finished Far from the Madding Crowd. Who would have expected Thomas Hardy to turn into such a vulgarian! Everything is perfectly predictable: one villain ends up in prison, another in the grave, and the third, the hero, after the requisite anxieties and impediments ends up in the arms of Bathsheba, the woman he was meant to marry.

And on plagiarism:

[Sologub] had a playful way of talking about his plagiarisms. “[Aleksandr] Redko found a passage I’d plagiarized from a trashy French novel and printed it en regard. All that proves is that he reads trashy French novels. What he didn’t notice was that at nearly the same spot I’d cribbed five or so pages from George Eliot. Which proves that he doesn’t read serious literature.”

I disapprove of plagiarism, but that’s pretty funny.

[Read more…]

I’m now reading Mandelstam’s dense 1927 novella “Egipetskaya marka” (“The Egyptian stamp”), and in trying to look up the odd word финолинка [finolinka], evidently a sort of night light (which turns out to occur only here in all of Russian literature), I ran across this LJ site, dedicated to a line-by-line analysis of the story. (It began in April 2009 with a post about the title and is now nearing the end of section 5; here‘s the archive for 2009, and you can click on the link at the top to get to 2010.) In the post relevant to my search, it is suggested that финолинка is a distortion of филаменка [filamenka] ‘filament lamp.’ The site is going to be very useful to me, as it would be to anyone engaging with the story in Russian, and I thank Alik Manov for maintaining it.
Incidentally, the story is available in English in the excellent collection The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, edited and translated by Clarence Brown; “The Noise of Time” (Shum vremeni), Mandelstam’s quasi-autobiography (comparable to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory), is one of the classics of Russian literature.

Those of you who spend any time on sites where technology is discussed will doubtless be familiar with the term fanboy, meaning ‘someone so emotionally attached to a tech product or company that any perceived attack will send them into a defensive frenzy.’ (The company involved is frequently Apple, for doubtless complicated historical reasons that I’m happy to say I’m ignorant of.) Harry McCracken of Technologizer has done some digging and come up with Fanboy! The Strange True Story of the Tech World’s Favorite Put-Down, and since I always enjoy a good etymological investigation, I’m sharing it here. The gist of it is that although the OED has a cite from 1919 (Decatur Rev. 2 Oct. 6/2 “It was a shock to the fan boys when Cincinnati.. beat the Chicago White Sox”), its current use dates from a 1973 fanzine created by “two fans who took Marvel Comics, the work of Frank Frazetta, and other matters a wee bit too seriously,” called Fanboy. McCracken also points out that the Merriam-Webster definition, “a boy who is an enthusiastic devotee (as of comics or movies),” is incorrect, since a fanboy is not necessarily a boy (the OED has it right: “a male fan (in later use chiefly of comics, film, music, or science fiction), esp. an obsessive one”). Don’t miss the comment by Jack, who points out that McCracken has overemphasized the priority of the fanzine and has other sensible things to say (“All language is spoken. The written word is the extremely temporary capturing of language”). Hat tip to Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org.

The Macmillan Dictionary Blog has a guest post by Yuliya Melnyk called “The influence of English on the Russian language”; it’s short and pretty superficial, but this struck me: “Many words are produced in Russian slang every day; they have English roots and Russian affixes, e.g.: mastdait, which means ‘criticize’, comes from English must die…” I’m sure glad she told me, because I don’t think I’d ever have figured that out if I saw мастдаить in the wild. It seems it can be used intransitively as well, because one Google hit has “Ну как, рулит или мастдаит?” which seems to mean “So, does it rule or suck?” Are my Russian-speaking readers familiar with this oddly formed loan word? (Thanks for the link, Stan!)

I wrote briefly about Konstantin Vaginov here, and since I’m currently engaged in reading Soviet works from 1927, I’ve finally gotten around to his magnum opus, the novel Goat Song (Козлиная песнь). I must say, I’m disappointed. Among other things, it’s apparently a roman à clef about the circle around Bakhtin in mid-1920s Leningrad, and I’m sure if you were part of that circle or knew people who were (which in the incestuous intellectual world of early Soviet Leningrad was everybody who was anybody), it was a lot of fun to read, just as I enjoy reading a short story written by a friend of mine a quarter century ago about the circle I hung out with in NYC. But for me, much of it was a fairly tedious dip into what I suppose must be called early postmodernism, with a lot of ostentatious intertextuality and toying with the puppets the author has created as characters. Of course, I may simply not have been in the mood for it, and I’ll probably give it another try someday. At the moment, however, I’m very much looking forward to the next items on the agenda, Mandelstam’s “Египетская марка” (“The Egyptian Stamp”) and Tynyanov‘s “Подпоручик Киже” (“Lieutenant Kizhe”). Then some Zoshchenko, and on to 1928: Vremya, vperyod!

This Ask MetaFilter thread has made me grumpy, and I trust you’ll forgive me if I vent a bit here. Before I do, I will state for the record that Pale Fire is a wonderful book and I’m glad Nabokov wrote it. But, as with Pachelbel’s Canon, I’m starting to want never to hear of it again.

The thread starts with the perfectly good question “What’s the next Nabokov book for my book group? Not Pnin, Lolita, or Ada.” The first half dozen responses are an interestingly varied lot: people suggest Bend Sinister, Laughter in the Dark, Invitation to a Beheading, Lectures on Don Quixote, and Despair. Then comes the fateful suggestion of Pale Fire, and suddenly everybody and his brother is chiming in: “Pale Fire ++. My all time number one,” “I’m nthing Pale Fire. It’s really fantastic,” “Pale Fire is my favorite book in the world,” “Pale Fire for sure,” “Pale Fire is excellent and fun,” “I’m all about the Pale Fire“….

Now, the gimmick of the novel is that it consists of a series of extended annotations to a longish poem, and if you put the annotations together with the chatty index you can work out the actual story, as opposed to the nutty and self-serving one the annotator is trying to tell. It’s loads of fun, and I have no objection to anyone enjoying it; I certainly did. But it’s essentially a gimmick, and to mistake the enjoyment of working out a gimmick for the enjoyment of reading a great novel irritates me.

Furthermore, I have read too many blorts of enthusiasm about the poem that is at the heart of the novel; it’s true nobody in the MeFi thread has mentioned it, but I’m getting all my gripes off my chest here, so I’m going to announce that I don’t think it’s a very good poem. It’s clever, of course, and well phrased—this is Nabokov we’re talking about—but Nabokov was not essentially a poet; he wrote a few genuinely good poems in Russian (and a couple of excellent translations into English before he decided readable translations were a bad thing), but here he is simply providing a plausible MacGuffin for his crazed-annotator plot. (I hope and trust he would agree with me.) To mistake a MacGuffin for a real poem, let alone a great one, irritates me even more.

So there you have it. Pale Fire: enjoyable, but in my opinion second-rank Nabokov. Which is better than 95% of everything else, of course, but I still don’t like seeing it waved onto the victor’s podium by popular acclamation. If this be elitism, call me Cincinnatus C. and sentence me to death for gnostical turpitude.

Several years ago Mark Liberman had a Log post investigating the contraction I’ma for I’m going to; today he has an update in which he reproduces a snippet of Art Blakey introducing his musicians from the famous “Night at Birdland” recording of February 1954 with a quintet that was a forerunner of the Jazz Messengers he was to lead for over three decades, one of the most influential groups in the history of American music. Here’s how Mark transcribes it: “Yes, sir, I’ma stay with the youngsters. When these get too old, I’ma get some younger ones.” What I (like others in the comment thread) hear in the second sentence, however, is “I’mna”—i.e., a reduced “I’m gonna,” a different form. Listen to the clips at the Log and see what you think; theoretical issues hang on it!
On a non-linguistic note, I will add that the “youngsters” were Horace Silver on piano, Curly Russell on bass, Lou Donaldson on alto sax, and the immortal (though dead too young) Clifford Brown on trumpet. It doesn’t get much better than that, and I urge anyone with any interest in jazz to get this wonderful two-disc set (Vol. 1, Vol. 2).

Nothing earthshaking in this Economist column by Robert Lane Greene, but it’s nice to see Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage getting some love in such a respected venue. Thanks, Kattullus!

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading Yuri Olesha‘s masterpiece Zavist’ (Russian text), translated into English as Envy (Wikipedia), and I understand why Nabokov called it the greatest novel produced in the Soviet Union—not only because it is in fact great, but because it’s Nabokovian in a way hardly any Soviet writing is, with a focus on language and imagery that is sometimes amazingly reminiscent of Olesha’s coeval (both men were born in 1899, less than two months apart). There has been much written about other aspects of the novel (for a well-written analysis of Olesha’s man-centered artistic world, along with those of Babel and Platonov, I recommend Eliot Borenstein’s Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929), but I want to limit myself to some bits of prose that made me sit up straight and reread them, and that I’m sure Nabokov loved as well. The (inadequate) translations are mine; the Russian is below the cut, along with a couple of perhaps enlightening quotes. Here I’ll just mention that according to Irina Ozyornaya, the Olesha archive contains more than two thousand pages of drafts for Envy; Olesha had worked on the novel for five years, and he said there had been 300 versions of the first page.

Transparent and quivering, like the elytra of an insect, the name of Lilienthal from my childhood years had a marvelous sound to me… That name, flying as if stretched on light bamboo laths, was linked in my memory with the beginning of aviation. The fluttering, gliding Otto Lilienthal was killed. Flying machines no longer resembled birds. Light wings with yellow shining through were exchanged for flippers. You could believe that they beat against the ground on takeoff. At any rate, on takeoff the dust springs up. The flying machine now resembles a heavy fish. How quickly aviation has become industry.
* * *
On the corner a little group of people were listening to the peal of the church bells. They were ringing the bells of a church invisible from the balcony. This church is renowned for its bell-ringer. The gawkers craned their necks. To them the work of the well-known bell-ringer was visible. […]
I listened from the balcony.
— Tom-vir-lir-li! Tom-vir-lir-li! Tom-vir-lir-li!
Tom Virlirli. Some Tom Virlirli was hovering in the air.

Tom Virlirli,
Tom with a knapsack,
Tom Virlirli, young Tom!

The disheveled bell-ringer set many of my mornings to music. Tom was the toll of the big bell, the big cauldron. Virlirli was the little plates, the cymbals.
Tom Virlirli penetrated me on one of those fine mornings I met with under that roof. A musical phrase turned itself into a verbal one. I pictured vividly to myself this Tom.
A youth, viewing the city. Unknown to all, the youth had come already, is already near, already sees the city that sleeps, suspecting nothing. The morning mist is just dispersing. The city swirls in its valley like a green, glimmering cloud. Tom Virlirli, smiling and pressing his hand to his heart, looks at the city, seeking people he knows in the childish pictures formed by their outlines.
The youth has a pack on his back.
He can do everything.
He is the very arrogance of youth, the very secretness of proud dreams.
Days pass—and soon (not many times will the sun’s reflection leap from the doorjamb into the other room) the boys, themselves dreaming of passing in just such a way, with a pack on their back, along the suburbs of the city, the suburbs of glory, will sing a little song of the man who did whatever he wanted to do:

Tom Virlirli,
Tom with a knapsack,
Tom Virlirli, young Tom!

* * *
A huge cloud with the outlines of South America stood over the city. It shone, but its shadow was menacing. The shadow with astronomical slowness approached Babichev’s street.
Everyone who had already set foot in the mouth of that street and walked against the current saw the movement of the shadow; their eyes were darkened; it took the ground from under their feet. They walked as if on a turning sphere.

That’s just a tiny sample, all from the first part of the book; I may translate more in another post. Here are a couple of facts and a couple of scholarly quotes, followed by the original Russian:

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Having spent the better part of two days creating this Wikipedia article, and having worked harder on it than on most of my college papers, I’m damn well going to post it here. This guy was pretty much forgotten by the time he died and has never had a revival, only a few lonely voices raised in his defense (the usually reliable D.S. Mirsky gave him the wrong first name, rendered his last name as “Weltmann,” and was off by ten years in his death date), but he was extremely popular in his heyday, he was one of the pioneers of Russian science fiction and wrote what may have been the first time travel novel anywhere, Predki Kalimerosa [The forebears of Kalimeros] (1836), both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky praised him (his Serdtse i dumka [Heart and head, 1838] was one of Dostoevsky’s favorite novels), and I say he deserves to be better known. As far as I know, the only translation into English is A. F. Veltman, Selected Stories, ed. and trans. James J. Gebhard (Northwestern University Press, 1998), which I’ve just ordered; somebody should translate Strannik or Koshchei bessmertny. And if anybody knows how to upload the image from the Russian article into mine, that would be great, and I thank you in advance.

For those who read Russian, here’s the original of the Bukhshtab quote I open the Reputation section with: “В истории русской литературы нет другого писателя, который, обладая в свое время такой популярностью, как Вельтман, так быстро достиг бы полного забвенья.”