Search Results for: Leskov

I’ve written about Nikolai Leskov frequently (e.g. The Sealed Angel, The Enchanted Wanderer), and now I’ve read the last of his major works, Заячий ремиз, written in 1894 but not published until 1917. Leskov sent it around to journals with a cover letter saying it dealt with some touchy issues but they were well disguised by madness and Ukrainian hijinks so it should pass the censors, but the 1890s were one of the more repressive periods in tsarist Russia, so nobody was willing to try to print it, and it languished in his drawer. Finally, over two decades after his death and after the February Revolution removed essentially all censorship, the magazine Niva published it in its September 16 issue. (Happily, that volume is online, and you can see the story’s original publication here.) You will notice I haven’t translated the title, and there’s a reason for that: it’s essentially untranslatable, because nobody knows what it means. It’s been translated as The Hare Park, The March Hare, The Rabbit Warren, and even The Rabbit Carriage, although ремиз does not mean ‘carriage’ in any variety of Russian (it normally means a penalty in a card game, but it can also mean ‘a place where wild animals live and breed’), so that seems to me a particularly silly suggestion, despite the arguments in its favor by Sperrle — see my discussion with Erik McDonald of XIX век here. As I wrote at the end of that thread:

You know, actually I think using “Remise” is brilliant — it restores the sense of mystery and avoids having to pin down the sense of the word. If I didn’t believe in entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (does the world really need yet another title for a fairly obscure Leskov story?), I’d go for it in a heartbeat. I might even overcome my purist urges regarding “rabbit” vs. “hare” because “The Rabbit Remise” sounds so great.

(There is a rare English remise meaning ‘coach house’; see this LH post.) Leskov had originally used the title for a different story, so there needn’t be any close connection with this one — he said he wanted something “sharp but unintelligible” (“то резким, то как будто мало понятным”). As for the plot, I’ll let Prince Mirsky describe it:
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I’ve finished another of Leskov’s most famous works, the novella Очарованный странник (The Enchanted Wanderer), and I’m having confused thoughts about my reactions to his writing that I’ll try to clarify here.

There’s no question that he’s a wonderful writer, and I enjoy his sentences and paragraphs enormously, especially when he’s in his skaz (oral-style narrative) mode. So why do I sometimes get irritated and reluctant to continue? At first I thought maybe he was just not good at telling continuous stories as opposed to strings of anecdotes, as in Смех и горе (Laughter and Grief; see this post), but then I remembered that he had done a fine job of that in Запечатленный ангел (The Sealed Angel; see this post) and in the first part of Некуда (Nekuda, conventionally translated No Way Out; see this post) — the reason I had given up on that was its turn to a tedious plot involving radicals, not a failure of storytelling per se. However, I did recently give up on Соборяне (The Cathedral Folk; see this post) precisely because it began to seem like one damn thing after another, and it was considerably longer than Laughter and Grief. The same is true of The Enchanted Wanderer, but it was shorter, so I was able to finish reading it.

I learn from the relevant Wikipedia article that my complaint is by no means original; in 1895, Mikhailovsky wrote: “In terms of fabula richness it might have been Leskov’s most significant work, but total lack of focus is more than obvious so there is no fabula as such, rather a set of fabulas, strung together, so that any bead could be removed and replaced by another, and any number of other beads could be put onto the same string.” My question is: if he was able to tell a coherent story when he wanted, why did he sometimes settle for the string-of-anecdotes pattern? Maybe that’s what he liked himself, or maybe he was just lazy. In any case, The Enchanted Wanderer has a lot of good stories; just don’t expect any coherence. As with Laughter and Grief, it’s a guy telling some other guys “Here’s how my life has brought me to where I am today.” If you’re looking for shapeliness, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Having advanced to the year 1873, I’ve read Nikolai Leskov‘s famous novella Запечатленный ангел (The Sealed Angel), and I have a question and a complaint. The question is a simple one, addressed to my Russian-speaking readers: how do you pronounce the word запечатленный? I had always assumed it was запечатлённый [zapechat-LYON-ny], as in the Wiktionary entry, but when I looked at the Wikipedia articles I linked to the titles above, I saw that they claimed it was запеча́тленный [zape-CHAT-lenny], the Russian one explaining that it was from the verb запеча́тывать, which as far as I can see doesn’t work morphologically (“В названии повести обыгрывается многозначность слова «запечатленный», причем основное значение — производная от «запеча́тывать» — накладывать печать”). Huh, I thought. And then I found this audio version, where the reader says запечатле́нный [zapechat-LEN-ny]. So which is it?

The complaint has to do with the ending. (Warning: spoilers!) Up till then, the story is great: the narrator tells a group of travelers at an inn his tale of a group of Old Believer traveling workmen he belonged to. When their revered icon of an angel was confiscated by officials and sealed with wax while they were building a bridge (apparently in Kiev in the early 1850s), they hatched a plan to replace it with a copy. It’s a gripping account told in a wonderful skaz style, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But then at the end an apparent miracle causes the leader of the group, and then all the rest, to give up their heresy and join the established church. It’s exactly like all those unconvincing endings where criminals go straight or (to use a Soviet example) when former Mensheviks, SRs, or other heretics see the light and join the Bolsheviks. The English Wikipedia article says: “The story’s finale, where the Old Believers’ community all of a sudden return to Orthodoxy, was criticized as being unnatural. Ten years later Leskov conceded that, while the story itself was mostly based on real facts, the end of it was made up.” The problem isn’t in the conversion per se but in the fact that it was so obviously required by both official tsarist censorship and the sensibility of the reading public of the day, and thus wasn’t artistically motivated but tacked on dutifully. I highly recommend the story, with the caveat that the ending is a letdown.

Leskov’s 1871 Смех и горе (Laughter and Grief, not translated into English as far as I know) is a short novel, around 200 pages, and it shouldn’t have taken me a month to read it, but I had very mixed feelings about it and kept putting it aside. It didn’t repel me enough to reject it entirely, like the later parts of Nekuda (see this post), but it didn’t grip me either. Gabriella Safran describes it as “a series of tales united only by the narrator’s thesis that Russian life is full of unpleasant surprises,” and that’s pretty much what it is. So there’s not much of a plot line to keep you hooked, but most of the tales are enjoyable enough you want to read more of them. Since I did end up finishing it, I figure I’ll provide a public service by summarizing it so people can get a better idea of what it’s like.

It starts on a brisk March evening in Petersburg; the narrator, his uncle Orest Vatazhkov, and a couple of acquaintances have come from the Palm Sunday fair (вербный базар) where people buy gifts for the holiday, and they are discussing the meaning of such presents. Orest, an old bachelor, says the only presents children get should be whippings to prepare them for adult life, and offers to tell a “potpourri” of tales to illustrate his point. Most of the rest of the book consists of his narration; there are 92 chapters, which can be divided into various sections, and I’ll give a brief description of these, with chapter numbers in parentheses. Basically, the first half consists of random events, which I’ll present in some detail; the second half, set in Orest’s home village, is a tangled tale of corruption and stupidity that I’ll describe more briefly.
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I remember those halcyon days (was it really only a few weeks ago?) when I picked up Leskov’s first novel, Некуда [Nekuda, conventionally translated No Way Out, although the novel itself has never been translated; the Russian word is rather ‘nowhere (to go),’ but you can’t make a good title out of that]. I knew it had been highly controversial when it was published in 1864, and its 700 pages were theoretically somewhat daunting, but I’d liked everything of Leskov’s I’d read, and I was eager to give it a go.

Then I started it, and within a couple of chapters I was bowled over and expecting great things. I had the vague idea it was about radical politics, but Leskov immediately introduces the reader to two young women, Lizaveta (Liza) Bákhareva and Evgenia (Zhenni) Glovátskaya, who have been best friends at boarding school and are now returning to their home town, a provincial city in the Black Earth region, doubtless not all that far from Leskov’s own Oryol Gubernia. Zhenni is a tall, raven-haired beauty of a quiet, peaceable disposition; Liza is shorter and fierier, eager to read, learn, and think for herself. On the way home they stop at the convent where Liza’s aunt is abbess; as Anna Bakhareva she had been a famous beauty who had once danced with Emperor Alexander I, but she had plighted her troth to a young man who was exiled to Siberia (implicitly in connection with the Decembrist revolt) and sent her a note asking her to forget him, upon which she joined the convent and became Mother Agnia. While capable of stern piety and aristocratic hauteur, she is good-hearted and supportive at every turn of Liza’s independence. At night, the girls have a talk with young Sister Feoktista, who tells them how she became a nun: she had made a love match and was happily pregnant when she had a craving for a kind of fish stew and insisted her husband bring her some, whereupon he fell through the ice on the river and drowned, his family (who’d never liked her) threw her out, and she took the veil. When they get to their respective homes, the girls settle into their family lives again, Zhenni easily and Liza unhappily — her family loves her but doesn’t understand her, and her mother uses fainting spells to get her way. Eventually they try to marry her off to an oaf in uniform, whereupon she flees to Zhenni, and after the intervention of Mother Agnia her father agrees to let her be and to order her all the magazines and books she wants.
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I ran across Letters of state written by Mr. John Milton, to most of the sovereign princes and republicks of Europe, from the year 1649, till the year 1659 and of course was particularly interested in the one to the ruler of Russia (presumably Aleksei Mikhailovich, since it’s dated 1657), which starts off resplendently:

Oliver Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, &c. To the most Serene aud Potent Prince and Lord, Emperor and great Duke of all Russia, sole Lord of Volodomaria, Moscow and Novograge, King of Cazan, Astracan and Syberia, Lord of Vobscow, great Duke of Smolensko, Tuerscoy, and other Places. Lord and great Duke of Novogrod, and the Lower Provinces of Chernigoy, Rezansco and others. Lord of all the Northern Climes; also Lord of Eversco, Cartalinsca, and many other Places.

Most of it was easy to decipher (Volodomaria = Vladimir, Novograge = Novgorod, etc.), but what on earth was “Vobscow”? Comparison with a similar but modernized list of titles gave me the key: it’s Pskov, which used to be Pleskov (Плѣсковъ) and “was historically known in English as Plescow.” I have no idea how Plescow turned up as Vobscow (bad handwriting?), but googling [Vobscow Pskov] gets no hits, so I’m guessing this is not commonly known, and I thought I’d put it out there for those who might be interested.

As I said here, NYRB Classics was kind enough to send me a review copy of Telluria, Max Lawton’s translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 Теллурия, and having finished it, I’m here to say a few things about it. It’s not really a novel in the traditional sense, in that there is no continuing plot and no consistent set of characters (except for chapters 39-41, which describe the same event from the points of view of the three characters who take part in it); it consists of fifty vignettes set in the neo-medieval future Sorokin created in День опричника, translated by Jamey Gambrell as Day of the Oprichnik, each with its own style and use of language (often a parody of some well-known writer). To give you an idea, the first is about two “littleuns,” Zoran and Goran, creating a set of brass knuckles; here’s a paragraph from Lawton’s translation:

Goran extended his hand demonstratively and poked his finger through the smoky stench of the packhouse. And there, seemingly at the command of his tiny finger, two biguns removed a crucible with the capacity of a hundred buckets and filled with molten lead from the furnace and carried it over to the casting flasks, a peal of thunder seeming to escape from their bellies. Even the steps they took with their bare feet made the packhouse tremble. A human-size glass clinked around in a glass-holder on the table.

The second takes the form of a letter from a visitor, beginning:
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In my readthrough of Russian literature, I’ve come to another author I’ve been anticipating for years, Mikhail Shishkin. I’ve now read the first three things he published, and while I’m very much looking forward to more, he’s certainly a stranger writer than I suspected.

His first published story was “Урок каллиграфии” («Знамя», Jan. 1993), translated by the wonderful Marian Schwartz as “Calligraphy Lesson” (it’s available in this collection); it made quite a splash, winning the Debut Prize for 1993, and I can see why — in only a couple of dozen pages it presents an entire world of experience and imagery. The protagonist, Evgeny Aleksandrovich, is a court clerk who describes the appalling cases he’s recorded (and, in the end, participated in) to a succession of women who are present only in brief exchanges, prompting him to further revelations, but the realia of the story are (in good modernist fashion) subordinated to the way of the telling, as you can see from the opening paragraph (Schwartz’s translation):

The capital letter, Sofia Pavlovna, is the beginning of all beginnings, so let us begin with that. It’s like a first breath, a newborn’s cry, you might say. Just a moment ago there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. A void. And for another hundred or thousand years there might still have been nothing, but suddenly this pen, submitting to an impossibly higher will, is tracing a capital letter, and now there’s no stopping it. Being the pen’s first movement toward the period as well, it is a sign of both the hope and the absurdity of what is. Simultaneously. The first letter, like an embryo, conceals all life to come, to the very end—its spirit, its rhythm, its force, and its image.

Заглавная буква, Софья Павловна, есть начало всех начал, так что с нее и начнем. Если хотите, это все равно что первое дыханье, крик новорожденного. Еще только что ничего не было, абсолютно ничего, пустота, и еще сто, тысячу лет могло бы ничего не быть, но вот перо, подчиняясь недоступной ему высшей воле, вдруг выводит заглавную букву и остановиться уже не может. Являясь одновременно первым движением пера к точке, это есть знак и надежды и бессмыслицы сущего. В первой букве, как в эмбрионе, затаена вся последующая жизнь до самого конца — и дух, и ритм, и напор, и образ.

This establishes the primacy of writing over everything else, which is a constant theme with Shishkin. Another thing to note is the name Sofia Pavlovna, which happens to be that of the female lead in Griboedov’s immortal play Горе от ума (Woe from Wit); as it turns out, there’s no happenstance about it, because the other named women are Tatyana Dmitrievna (from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), Nastasya Filippovna (from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot), Anna Arkadievna (the heroine of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), and Larochka (presumably Zhivago’s Lara). This sort of thing will either send readers running for the hills or enchant them; I am in the latter camp. Shishkin has said that this story contains the germ of everything he has written since, and I believe it.
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I’ve just finished Aksyonov’s В поисках жанра [In search of a genre], which Mark Lipovetsky and Eliot Borenstein in Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos call “a kind of sequel to ‘Barrelware'” (see my Surplussed Barrelware post); as they say, though, it’s a sequel in a much darker key: “In the beginning, Durov, who has spent the night at the highway patrol station, intrudes upon the quiet discussion of the ghostly victims of car crashes, and in the end, Durov, who has been killed by an avalanche, awakens in the Valley of Miracles. […] utopian motifs appear only and without exception in relation to death.” It’s neither as cheerful nor as coherent as the earlier book (it reminded me of Leskov’s adventure-on-the-road books like Смех и горе [Laughter and Grief]), but it’s a good read, and has some bits well suited for quoting here:

So Mamanya [an elderly woman who has hitched a ride with Durov] was usually muttering some nonsense to herself […]. Mamanya loved words. She didn’t admit this secret even to herself. In her youth she almost cried thinking of how enormous was the beautiful world of words and how little of this world was given to her. These days she sometimes surprised her relatives by turning on the Spidola and sitting and listening to any old foreign gibberish, looking as if she understood. Naturally Mamanya didn’t understand a damn thing, she was just feeling joy at how enormous the world of words was. My, how they do chatter: esperanza, verboten, multo, opinion… the individual words flew from the radio to Mamanya and joyously astonished her.

Так Маманя обычно бормотала себе под нос какую-нибудь несуразицу […]. Маманя любила слова. В этой тайне она и сама себе не признавалась. В молодости, бывало, чуть ли не плакала, когда думала о том, как огромен красивый мир слов и как мало ей из этого мира дано. В нынешние времена родичи порой удивлялись: включит Маманя «Спидолу», сидит и слушает любую иностранную тарабарщину, и лицо у нее такое, будто понимает. Никакого беса Маманя, конечно, не понимала, ее только радовала огромность мира слов. Экось балакают: эсперанца, ферботен, мульто, опинион… — отдельные слова долетали из радио до Мамани и радостно изумляли ее.

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You know, this blog has always been a comfort to me, first when I was working for Hideous Soulless Corporation and then when I had left the familiar environs of New York City and was trying to establish myself as a freelancer, but in these pestiferous times it’s more important to me than ever. I hardly see anyone but my wife from week to week, but I have all you good folks to keep me company and carry on lively conversations (many of which I can only understand scraps of, but that’s good for me). It no longer seems quite so amazing LH is still around — one does get accustomed to things — but it’s even harder to imagine giving it up. My deepest appreciation to all of you; thanks for hanging around and chatting so companionably!

A quick update on my literary adventures: I had been reading Tessa Hadley novels to my wife at night (I particularly recommend The Past), but we’re taking a break to read something both of us, George Eliot fans that we are, have been wanting to try, Daniel Deronda. So far it’s a delight (and reminds me of Russian novels set in German spas where gamblers congregate). In Russian, I read a bunch of Andrei Bitov stories (recommended: «Большой шар” [The big balloon], about a little girl who falls in love with a big red balloon, and «Инфантьев» [Infantyev], about a guy mourning his wife); then I went back to the 19th century and read Chekhov’s famous «Палата № 6» (“Ward No. 6”), which is very good indeed, and Leskov’s 1893 «Загон» (The cattle pen), which is frustrating in the same way so much Leskov is frustrating: the writing is excellent, the individual anecdotes are often hilarious, but the thing doesn’t hang together. Leskov had no sense of form — it starts with stories of Russian peasants refusing to accept Western improvements in farming and ends with stories about thievery, fakery, and Baltic churches, all supposed to be somehow connected with the idea of Russia as a cattle pen walled off from the world. Now I’m going to return to the 20th century and read my first Trifonov, the 1969 «Обмен» [The Exchange].
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