I’ve enjoyed Sergei Dovlatov’s writing for years and posted on him various times (e.g., here). But I had no clue regarding one feature that Anatoly Vorobei describes. I’ll translate a couple of paragraphs:
Rereading Dovlatov’s Zone, I find myself unable to overlook a particular stylistic trick. Surely many are unaware of this interesting principle. From the ’80s, Dovlatov’s books obey a severe restriction. Different letters must begin the words in each sentence. The rule is strict; deviations exist but are quite uncommon. […]
His style appears in many ways determined by this rule. Sentences wind up quite brief. Sometimes chopped up. Many short, but afterwards you notice one unexpectedly long, thirteen words (I espied fifteen!). You sense how the author operates, finding words but making changes if letters repeat.
It’s a strange restriction, not very easily complied with, unlikely to be perceived.
“Each sentence”, in a paragraph, a chapter or what?
Not sure what you mean. Each sentence means each sentence; it doesn’t carry over from one to the next.
No two words within any sentence may begin with the same letter. Legend has it that sometimes Dovlatov even wrote things like “Shakespeare was born in Rugby” because this rule disqualified Stratford.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I hadn’t realized my formulation was ambiguous.
I feel like this would be harder in some languages than others, and someone with time on their hands could do an analysis and maybe get a publishable paper out of it? In other words, the odds that for a sentence of length N words you will reuse at least one initial letter are probably not going to be the same cross-linguistically even among languages that use the same alphabet. (In English, and probably other languages as well, initial-letter frequency is quite a different thing than overall letter frequency, i.e. “e” is the most common letter but E-initial words aren’t the most common words.)
Note that you can’t even (in English) fish for “Stratford” as an answer by asking “Where was Shakespeare born?” because the question violates the rule. Learning tricks to avoid pairing any of the W-initial “question words” with “was” would be something an Anglophone Dovlatov would have done early on.
It’s as well Russian doesn’t have articles.
Indeed. And it’s hard in English, I’ll tell you what. I’ve had to revise my post several times and have still probably missed something.
Zdesʹ dolžny žitʹ èstoncy, — skazal on, uhodja, — a vanʹkam, fricam i različnym grenlanam tut ne mesto!..
(From Zona)
16 words and he avoids two zdes’ with tut. On the other thread they seem to make a great thing of tut as a Belarusianism????
I don’t know anything about Shakespeare in Rugby, but one funny line the rule produced is in Pushkin Hills (Заповедник). Galina, who is showing the protagonist around says Исполнилось пророчество: «Не зарастет священная тропа!..» — The prophecy has been fulfilled: “The hollowed path will not grow over!…”. Pushkin, of course, has written “К нему не зарастёт народная тропа” — “The people’s path to it will not grow over”, but не and народная begin with the same letter and poor Galina was forced to sound a bit overwrought, which served Dovlatov’s purpose just fine. She also was forced to begin the quote in the mid-line because нему begins with the same letter as well.
I don’t know whether or not to be glad I discovered this before reading Заповедник and some other late works; it’s going to distract me…
Then there is Alaric Alexander (aak!) Watts, who did the reverse:
An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade.
Cossack commanders cannonading come,
Dealing destruction’s devastating doom.
Every endeavor engineers essay,
For fame, for fortune fighting – furious fray!
Generals ‘gainst generals grapple – gracious God!
How honors Heaven heroic hardihood!
Infuriate, indiscrminate in ill,
Kindred kill kinsmen, kinsmen kindred kill.
Labor low levels longest, loftiest lines;
Men march ‘mid mounds, ‘mid moles, ‘ mid murderous mines;
Now noxious, noisy numbers nothing, naught
Of outward obstacles, opposing ought;
Poor patriots, partly purchased, partly pressed,
Quite quaking, quickly “Quarter! Quarter!” quest.
Reason returns, religious right redounds,
Suwarrow stops such sanguinary sounds.
Truce to thee, Turkey! Triumph to thy train,
Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine!
Vanish vain victory! vanish, victory vain!
Why wish we warfare? Wherefore welcome were
Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xavier?
Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell!
Zeus’, Zarpater’s, Zoroaster’s zeal,
Attracting all, arms against acts appeal!
Can/changes in the last sentence – unless c and ch are separate in Russian and you’ve carried that over.
Overlook/of in the first, but it’s hard to avoid the little words.
😀
Well done, though – I didn’t realise it was your work when I noticed the two ‘c’s.
Thanks, fixed ’em both — rules is rules! (And the last sentence actually got closer to the Russian.)
One senses how the author operates, finding words but making changes if letters repeat.
Let’s make a change!
Dammit! Fixed, thanks. This is hard!
Have you fixed something that wasn’t broken? It was one/operate that I saw (this time!), and there doesn’t seem to be another s?
Yes, I got my wires crossed while I was trying to work on it. I think I’ve fixed it this time!
And I find it hard to imagine why Dovlatov thought this was a good idea. I mean, as a one-off bit of oulipian fun, sure, why not, but as a constriction for your entire career? Talk about masochism!
I’ve never really seen the point of this kind of thing – books without the letter ‘e’, and whatever. But I suppose it’s some kind of relation of poetry.
That’s what the whole Oulipo movement was about. Setting an arbitrary constraint and working around it is fun, if you’re good enough at your craft. I read parts of Georges Perec’s A Void (translated masterfully and e-lessly from La disparition) and it’s an entirely fun read. I’ve never read Ernest Vincent Wright’s Gadsby, though.
I am not an authority, but he was concerned with endless possibilities of the author and wanted to limit his as a discipline, as a way to stay focused and not get on a tangent or succumb to writing “beautifully”. I think you can understnd it a bit better knowing that he was a raconteur, but held Chekhov and Bunin as an ideal. His manner always forced him to ask of each word whether it was necessary and in its place.
Some of my friends from grad school and I took on an Oulipian challenge where our organizer proposed writing an e-less sonnet about weasels.
Mine titled, “On a Stoat”, began “O thou rapacious mammal, sharp of claw”.
Yes, yes? Go on?
I think you can understnd it a bit better knowing that he was a raconteur, but held Chekhov and Bunin as an ideal. His manner always forced him to ask of each word whether it was necessary and in its place.
Sure, but Chekhov and Bunin didn’t do this. Did he think they would have been even better if they’d avoided repeating letters? As I say, I can understand it as a one-off thing, but as a lifestyle it seems misguided to me. Avoiding repeated letters does not make you a better writer. You can ask each word whether it is necessary and in its place without that.
How is this kind of a constraint “as a lifestyle” different from the constraint of writing in evenly scanning, rhyming lines?
@Y: One of them is a matter of sound and prosody, whereas the other is primarily, if not purely, a product of artificial orthography. It is surely not just a coincidence that may cultures have developed rhymed and stress-schemed poetry, whereas Dovlatov’s rule is a far outlier in the space of writing techniques.
Apparently Dovlatov didn’t have enough self-discipline otherwise. He never advertised his rule and it’s operation is hard to notice.
“Each sentence”, in a paragraph, a chapter or what?
Coming to this late, never the less my reaction was the same as Dan’s.
@Hat I’ve had to revise my post several times and have still probably missed something.
I think your translation carries the wrong sense (irrespective of what you’re doing with the spellings)/perhaps the original also carries the wrong sense?
The “each” is misplaced: it should qualify ‘word’ rather than ‘sentence’:
Different letters must begin _each_ word in a sentence. (You might say more clearly ‘…in each sentence’, but that would break the rule. Annoyingly, ‘every’ begins with the same letter as ‘each’.)
In all sentences, different letters must begin each word./each word must begin with a different letter. Damn! repeated ‘a’.
And if the rule can be awkward for just this one sentence, I’m not seeing that it adds anything for pages-and-pages worth.
He never advertised his rule and it’s operation is hard to notice.
Exactly, so what’s the point?
And if the rule can be awkward for just this one sentence, I’m not seeing that it adds anything for pages-and-pages worth.
Exactly! Masochism, I call it.
Однажды отец Онуфрий, обходя окрестности Онежского озера…
Thank you, John Cowan, for Alaric Watts’s “The Siege of Belgrade”. I see that the version you quote was written in that period in our alphabet’s development, by the time U and V were regarded as separate, but before I and J were. The V line is one in a tercet, which betrays the fact that it was interpolated (google “Ukraine Why wish we warfare” and you’ll find some pages that quote the poem without the V-line). In one version a half-hearted J line is interpolated (“Just Jesus, instant innocence instill!”). For those mystified by Suwarrow, look up Alexander Suvorov.
Much less so in Russian than in English; I think all initial letters in Russian correspond to phonemes 1 : 1. But of course it’s still much harder to notice than rhyme or meter.
There’s some lovely lines in that poem, but the change of style from line to line is a bit jarring (if inevitable).
I especially like the first couplet, and ‘Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine!’
I hadn’t noticed the lack of J, although I was surprised it got round to A again at the end.
David Marjanović: it is not true that initial letters correspend to phonemes 1:1. For instance, огонь and облако have the same initial letters but different initial phonemes; огонь and агония have different initial letters but the same initial phonemes.
Well, in most dialects, anyway.
Bill Shakepeare grew up in Warwickshire.