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Jim Holt’s NYRB review (July 19, 2018 [archived]) of Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, translated by Pamela Mensch, starts off in Holt’s usual lively fashion:

Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. He may have been a flaming mediocrity. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.” Eighty percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen supposedly said. Well, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers showed up. And by dint of that, its author has become what Nietzsche called “the night watchman of the history of Greek philosophy: no one can enter into it unless he has given him the key.”

What made this fellow so lucky? It’s not hard to explain why certain works survive. We still have Plato’s dialogues because they were diligently preserved by the Academy. Aristotle too founded a school, and his treatises were widely copied and studied. (Still, the nineteen or so dialogues Aristotle composed—esteemed for their literary quality by Cicero as “a river of flowing gold”—were somehow mislaid by Western civilization.) But Diogenes Laertius didn’t have a school, as far as anyone knows. In fact, almost nothing is known about the man. Even his slightly absurd Greco-Roman name is a puzzle—was “Laertius” some kind of nickname? Judging from the historical references in Lives (which stop just short of the Neoplatonists), he probably lived early in the third century CE. There is a hint in his text that he might have been a native of the eastern city of Nicea. Beyond that he is a cipher. That his work should endure, when the vast majority of the philosophical writings he drew on perished, may simply have been a “quirk of fate”—so guesses James Miller, the editor of this welcome new translation.

I don’t remember noticing the Greco-Roman nature of his name before. [That’s because it’s not Greco-Roman; Λαέρτιος is perfectly good Greek. See comments below.] And here’s a great passage from later in the review:

An especially complete portrait is given of Diogenes of Sinope, the most prominent of the Cynics. And this is not the only Diogenes in play. There is also an entry for the less famous Diogenes of Apollonia, whom Diogenes Laertius, in an embarrassment of Diogeneses, manages to confuse with Diogenes of Smyrna. (It should be noted that Diogenes Laertius lived five or six centuries later than the multiple Diogeneses he writes about.)

Shades of Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich…

The Public Domain Review says “we thought we’d […] publish some of our favourites from the first hundred years of the book cover (as we commonly understand it today)”:

Inspired by rising literacy rates and advancing technologies, the nineteenth century saw the book transform from a largely hand-made object to a mass-produced product. In this new environment the book cover took on added importance: it was no longer merely a functional protection for the pages but instead became a key platform through which to communicate and sell the book. Prior to this covers had — bar a smattering of highly bespoke one-off creations (e.g. embroidered covers for personal libraries) — mostly been plain leather bound affairs. From the 1820s, with the rise of mechanical bookbinding, these leather covers of old gave way to new cloth coverings which, in addition to being inexpensive, were now also printable. A wide variety of cover printing techniques were employed over the decades: from embossing to gilt to multi-colour lithography. A totally new artistic space was opened up. As you can see in our highlights below it was one in which illustrators and designers flourished, producing a range of covers as eclectic in aesthetic approach as the myriad contents they fronted.

The covers are some of the most gorgeous I’ve seen. Enjoy!

In my reading of Chekhov stories I’ve gotten up to Степь [The Steppe], a convenient divider between his early and later stories, and it seems like a good time to post about a couple of those early stories and things they made me think of. One of them is Перекати-поле [Tumbleweed, 1887], translated by Constance Garnett as “Uprooted.” It’s from Chekhov’s Gogolian/Leskovian period, when he wrote a good bit about religion and very little about women; here the narrator is at the Sviatogorsk Lavra in eastern Ukraine, named for the Holy Mountains (Святые горы) among which it was built, for the feast-days of John the Apostle and St. Nicholas the Wonder-worker, presumably May 8/21 and 9/22 (though Garnett’s footnote absurdly says of Nicholas “his day was December 6” — the story is clearly not set in winter, and Nicholas, like all major saints, had several feast-days). Because of the huge crowds, the monk in charge of sleeping quarters asks if he would mind letting a young man, “a short figure in a light overcoat and a straw hat,” share his room; he agrees, and the story is mostly about the interactions between the two. The young man turns out to be a converted Jew, and he tells his life story, from his difficult childhood (he loved learning and longed to read newspapers, but his parents wanted him “to know nothing but the Talmud” and he ran away from home) to his peripatetic life (“when my uncle tried to catch me in Shklov, I went off to Mogilev; there I stayed two days and then I went off to Starodub with a comrade… Later on he mentioned in his story Gomel, Kiev, Byelaya Tserkov, Uman, Balt, Bendery and at last reached Odessa”); now he’s passed his examination as a village schoolmaster: “In Novotcherkassk, where I was baptized, they took a great interest in me and promised me a place in a church parish school.” The narrator says, “Up to the time of my departure we strolled together about the Monastery, whiling away the long hot day. He never left my side a minute; whether he had taken a fancy to me or was afraid of solitude, God only knows!”

As I read, something was nagging at my mind, and it turned out to be one of Bunin’s earliest stories, Святые горы [Holy Mountains] (1895), which I read during my Bunin marathon last year (1, 2). Bunin’s narrator is also visiting the monastery, but his tale is entirely different: half the story is about his attempt to get there on foot, he interacts with no one except a Ukrainian peasant he asks for directions (and gets answers in Ukrainian: “Тодi чума на скот була, так казали, що там пробував такий монах, що знав замовляти…”), and when he arrives he walks past the cathedral and heads straight up the steep stairway to the top of the hill above the monastery, where he meditates on nature and history:

Меня тянуло туда, к меловым серым конусам, к месту той пещеры, где в трудах и молитве, простой и возвышенный духом, проводил свои дни первый человек этих гор, та великая душа, которая полюбила горный гребет над Малым Танаисом. Дико и глухо было тогда в первобытных лесах, куда пришел святой человек. Лес бесконечно синел под ним. Лес глушил берега, и только река, одинокая и свободная, плескала и плескала своими холодными волнами под его навесом. И какая тишина царила кругом!

I was drawn there, to the gray chalk cones, to the site of that cave where the first man of these hills, simple and elevated in spirit, passed his days in works and prayer, that great soul who fell in love with the mountain ridge above the Lesser Tanais [the Donets]. It was wild and deserted then in the primeval forests where the holy man came. The forest stretched out beneath him, dark blue and endless. It choked the shores, and only the river, lonely and free, lapped and lapped with its cold waves against the overhang. And what silence reigned all around!

At one point he says “все думал о старине, о той чудной власти, которая дана прошлому… Откуда она и что она значит?” [I kept thinking about olden times, of that wondrous power that is given to the past… Where is it from and what does it mean?]. It’s pure Bunin, and the contrast with Chekhov is characteristic: the former solitary and meditative, the latter social.

Though Chekhov could include philosophizing as well; in his Свирель [The Pipe], also from 1887, Meliton meets an old shepherd who keeps saying “Всё к одному клонится” [Everything’s heading the same way] and expands thus on his depressing thought (Garnett’s translation; in the Russian text, it’s the passage starting “— Не одни птицы, — сказал пастух” and ending “цветик ли какой, всё к одному клонится”):

“Not the birds only,” said the shepherd. “It’s the wild beasts, too, and the cattle, and the bees, and the fish. . . . If you don’t believe me ask the old people; every old man will tell you that the fish are not at all what they used to be. In the seas, in the lakes, and in the rivers, there are fewer fish from year to year. In our Pestchanka, I remember, pike used to be caught a yard long, and there were eel-pouts, and roach, and bream, and every fish had a presentable appearance; while nowadays, if you catch a wretched little pikelet or perch six inches long you have to be thankful. There are not any gudgeon even worth talking about. Every year it is worse and worse, and in a little while there will be no fish at all. And take the rivers now . . . the rivers are drying up, for sure.”

“It is true; they are drying up.”

“To be sure, that’s what I say. Every year they are shallower and shallower, and there are not the deep holes there used to be. And do you see the bushes yonder?” the old man asked, pointing to one side. “Beyond them is an old river-bed; it’s called a backwater. In my father’s time the Pestchanka flowed there, but now look; where have the evil spirits taken it to? It changes its course, and, mind you, it will go on changing till such time as it has dried up altogether. There used to be marshes and ponds beyond Kurgasovo, and where are they now? And what has become of the streams? Here in this very wood we used to have a stream flowing, and such a stream that the peasants used to set creels in it and caught pike; wild ducks used to spend the winter by it, and nowadays there is no water in it worth speaking of, even at the spring floods. Yes, brother, look where you will, things are bad everywhere. Everywhere!”

A silence followed. Meliton sank into thought, with his eyes fixed on one spot. He wanted to think of some one part of nature as yet untouched by the all-embracing ruin. Spots of light glistened on the mist and the slanting streaks of rain as though on opaque glass, and immediately died away again — it was the rising sun trying to break through the clouds and peep at the earth.

“Yes, the forests, too . . .” Meliton muttered.

“The forests, too,” the shepherd repeated. “They cut them down, and they catch fire, and they wither away, and no new ones are growing. Whatever does grow up is cut down at once; one day it shoots up and the next it has been cut down — and so on without end till nothing’s left. I have kept the herds of the commune ever since the time of Freedom, good man; before the time of Freedom I was shepherd of the master’s herds. I have watched them in this very spot, and I can’t remember a summer day in all my life that I have not been here. And all the time I have been observing the works of God. I have looked at them in my time till I know them, and it is my opinion that all things growing are on the decline. Whether you take the rye, or the vegetables, or flowers of any sort, they are all going the same way.”

Of course that bit about cutting down the forests reminds us of The Cherry Orchard, which brings me to the sound of the bucket in a mine. In that first story, the converted Jew describes one of his many difficult moments:

Был я на одних шахтах тут, в Донецком округе. А вы ведь видели, как люди спускаются в самый рудник. Помните, когда гонят лошадь и приводят в движение ворот, то по блоку одна бадья спускается в рудник, а другая поднимается, когда же начнут поднимать первую, тогда опускается вторая — всё равно, как в колодце с двумя ушатами. Ну, сел я однажды в бадью, начинаю спускаться вниз, и можете себе представить, вдруг слышу — тррр! Цепь разорвалась, и я полетел к чёрту вместе с бадьей и обрывком цепи… Упал с трехсаженной вышины прямо грудью и животом, а бадья, как более тяжелая вещь, упала раньше меня, и я ударился вот этим плечом об ее ребро. Лежу, знаете, огорошенный, думаю, что убился насмерть, и вдруг вижу — новая беда: другая бадья, что поднималась вверх, потеряла противовес и с грохотом опускается вниз прямо на меня… Что будете делать? Видя такой факт, я прижался к стене, съежился, жду, что вот-вот сейчас эта бадья со всего размаха трахнет меня по голове, вспоминаю папашу и мамашу, и Могилев, и Грумахера… молюсь богу, но, к счастью… Даже вспомнить страшно. […] Но, к счастью, она упала возле и только слегка зацепила этот бок… Содрала, знаете, с этого бока сюртук, сорочку и кожу… Сила страшная.

I was at a mine here in the Donets district. You have seen, I dare say, how people are let down into the mine. You remember when they start the horse and set the windlass moving, one bucket on the pulley goes down into the mine, while the other comes up; when the first begins to come up, then the second goes down — exactly like a well with two pails. Well, one day I got into the bucket, began going down, and can you fancy, all at once I heard, Trrr! The chain had broken and I flew to the devil together with the bucket and the broken bit of chain. . . . I fell from a height of twenty feet, flat on my chest and stomach, while the bucket, being heavier, reached the bottom before me, and I hit this shoulder here against its edge. I lay, you know, stunned. I thought I was killed, and all at once I saw a fresh calamity: the other bucket, which was going up, having lost the counter-balancing weight, was coming down with a crash straight upon me. . . . What was I to do? Seeing the position, I squeezed closer to the wall, crouching and waiting for the bucket to come full crush next minute on my head. I thought of papa and mamma and Mogilev and Grumaher. . . . I prayed. . . . But happily . . . it frightens me even to think of it. . . . […] But happily it fell beside me and only caught this side a little. . . . It tore off coat, shirt and skin, you know, from this side. . . . The force of it was terrific.

Now, in another story from that year, Счастье [Fortune], Garnett’s “Happiness,” in which two shepherds and an overseer spending a night in the steppe talk about the treasures supposed to be buried in the area, Chekhov includes the following passage:

В тихом воздухе, рассыпаясь по степи, пронесся звук. Что-то вдали грозно ахнуло, ударилось о камень и побежало по степи, издавая: «тах! тах! тах! тах!». Когда звук замер, старик вопросительно поглядел на равнодушного, неподвижно стоявшего Пантелея.

— Это в шахтах бадья сорвалась, — сказал молодой, подумав.

A sound suddenly broke on the still air, and floated in all directions over the steppe. Something in the distance gave a menacing bang, crashed against stone, and raced over the steppe, uttering, “Tah! tah! tah! tah!” When the sound had died away the old man looked inquiringly at Panteley, who stood motionless and unconcerned.

“It’s a bucket broken away at the pits,” said the young shepherd after a moment’s thought.

And many years later, in his last play (Russian text; translation by Julius West, which I’ve altered to bring out the parallel), there is a famous moment with an offstage sound:

Все сидят, задумались. Тишина. Слышно только, как тихо бормочет Фирс. Вдруг раздается отдаленный звук, точно с неба, звук лопнувшей струны, замирающий, печальный.

Любовь Андреевна. Это что?

Лопахин. Не знаю. Где-нибудь далеко в шахтах сорвалась бадья. Но где-нибудь очень далеко.

They all sit thoughtfully. It is quiet. Only the quiet mumbling of Firs is heard. Suddenly there rings out a distant sound as if from the sky, the sound of a breaking string, which dies away sadly.

LUBOV. What’s that?

LOPAKHIN. I don’t know. Somewhere far off a bucket has broken away at the pits. But it’s very far.

I love the sound of that bucket, echoing down the years and tying stories and play together.

Addendum. I just found another striking parallel: in Степь [The Steppe], old Father Christopher says he’s had a happy life and has no complaints to make, then adds “Не век же вековать, надо и честь знать” [You can’t be around forever, enough is enough]. This is an echo of a line in Свирель [The Pipe], when Meliton, infected by the old shepherd’s pessimism, says “И то сказать, не век же миру вековать — пора и честь знать” [After all, the world can’t be around forever, enough is enough]. I’ve rendered the idiom “пора (or надо) и честь знать” as “enough is enough,” but it can be “it’s (high) time to stop,” “there’s a limit to everything,” “don’t overdo it,” or (in the original sense of taking one’s leave) “it’s (high) time (for me/we/you) to go,” “it’s time I was on my way,” “I/we/you mustn’t outstay my/our/your welcome,” etc.; “честь знать” literally means “to know (one’s) honor.”

I’m finally reading Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, which I got back in 2013, and it’s excellent — his treatment of “New France” may be superficial, as Etienne warned in that thread, but his explanation of the origins of the various “nations” and how they spread west and determine culture and politics to the present day is fascinating and provides a useful perspective on the usual accounts. At any rate, I’ve found a paragraph of LH interest in the “Appalachia Spreads West” chapter:

Yankees also had difficulty understanding Appalachian dialects and vocabulary. In Indiana one noted the difference in how the members of the two cultures would describe a runaway team of horses. “It run into the bush and run astride astraddle, and broke the neap, reach, and evener,” a Yankee would say. His Hoosier neighbor would interpret these remarks thus: “The horses got skeert and run astraddle of a sapling and broke the tongue, double-tree, and couplin pole.” Yankees were perplexed when young Borderlanders called their spouses “old woman” or “old man” and amused by their use of “yon” for “that,” “reckon” for “guess,” “heap” for “a lot of” and “powerful” where a New Englander would say “very.”

Incidentally, if you’re wondering about where “Hoosier” comes from, nobody knows.

Martin A. Schwartz’s “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” (Journal of Cell Science 2008 121: 1771) begins:

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can’t be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did.

That’s when it hit me: nobody did. That’s why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn’t really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

That resonated very strongly with me; I’ve been more and more aware of it since my own grad school days. All of us are almost completely ignorant of almost everything, and being aware of that is the only hope of lessening that ignorance even slightly. People to whom it is important that they always be right and that they be acknowledged as the smartest people in the room rarely learn much of importance, though they may accumulate lots of impressive information. (Via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti.)

In this comment, John Cowan linked to the Zompist culture tests, which are very enjoyable — if you haven’t seen them, check them out (and note that JC wrote the NYC one). I, of course, was particularly interested in the Russian one, where I found a couple of items of LH interest I thought I’d post about.

If you are Russian:
[…]
• You are familiar with Cheburashka, Koshei Bessmertnii, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Baba Yaga, Ivan Grozny, Ded Moroz, Snegurochka, Ivan Durak, Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (Moskva Slezam Ne Verit), With Light Steam (S Legkim Parom), Eralash, Ivan Susanin, Santa Barbara, Nu Pogodi, Terminator and MTV.

I was familiar with all of them but Eralash (note that Santa Barbara is the series, not the city), so I looked it up (Wikipedia has it as Yeralash; the Russian is Ералаш, stress on the last syllable) and discovered that it’s “a Russian children’s comedy TV show and magazine” founded in 1974 and that the word ералаш ‘jumble, mishmash’ is “taken from the Turkic languages” — apparently ar(a)laş. And in the comments there was this exchange:

Anonymous said…

“С лёгким паром” in the film title is translated as “Enjoy Your Bath” (see, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000714AW). It’s not a perfect translation, but better than “With Light Steam.”

W. Shedd said…

I’m aware of what that DVD calls the film (after all, I own it) but I know of no Russian who calls the film anything other than “With Light Steam” and always considered “enjoy your bath” as the less accurate translation.

I had the same reaction as Anonymous, and was fascinated to learn that Russians insist on the silly-sounding (to an English-speaker) “With Light Steam.” (It’s what you say to someone who’s just enjoyed a spell in a bathhouse, and it’s the name of one of the most famous and best of all Russian film comedies, Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром! [The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!].)

Last December Susanne Bard reported for SciAm about an unexpected but not actually surprising development:

University of Munich linguist Jonathan Harrington [is] interested in how accents first get started. But because of global communication, most communities are no longer linguistically isolated, and audio recording equipment didn’t exist back when more of them were. So how to capture the early stages of accent formation today? Harrington and his team turned to members of the British Antarctic Survey, who speak with a variety of English accents. “When you are in Antarctica during the winter period, then there’s no way in, and there’s no way out. So they were isolated together, and they interacted with each other, and they have to cooperate with each other.”

Harrington’s team recorded the winterers reciting a list of words before they left for Antarctica. Then, while there, the winterers recorded themselves saying the same words four more times. The linguists then analyzed the recordings—in particular, resonances: the way airflow shapes sound. […] And even during their short time in Antarctica, the way the winterers produced certain vowels began to converge, averaging out the resonances.

In addition, the winterers invented slightly new ways of pronouncing vowels, such as shifting the production of the second syllable in the word “window” very slightly forward in the vocal tract. The linguists think these small changes document the very beginnings a common accent. The study is in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. [Jonathan Harrington et al., Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter] Harrington says the research isn’t just relevant for understanding Earth’s colonial past. He thinks there’s every reason to expect that prolonged isolation will cause astronauts on Mars missions to end up with an out-of-this world accent.

Thanks, Joan!

Years ago I read Andrew Field’s translation of Fyodor Sologub’s most famous novel, the 1907 Мелкий бес (The Petty Demon, also translated by John Cournos and Richard Aldington in 1916 as The Little Demon [Project Gutenberg]). I remember being impressed but not overwhelmed by it then; it seemed depressing and somewhat long-drawn-out. I have now finished reading it in Russian, and it feels like a different book — I understand why it made such a splash at the time, and why Stanley Rabinowitz linked it with Bely’s Petersburg as “the two greatest novels of the Symbolist period.”

Part of that, of course, is reading it in its original language; Sologub was famous as a stylist (and was an important poet as well), and I frequently felt compelled to read sentences out loud, a sure sign of good writing. Akim Volynsky wrote “Стихи меня поразили своею ясною простотою, какою-то неуловимою прозаичностью в тончайшем поэтическом повороте мысли” [His verses struck me with their clear simplicity, a kind of elusive prosaic quality in the most subtle poetic turn of thought], and that seems right to me; similarly, his prose is poetic in a subtle way, not blatantly like Bely’s. He uses adverbs as markers of emotional weather; the antihero, Peredonov, speaks and looks сердито [angrily], тупо [vacantly, obtusely], уныло [despondently], угрюмо [sullenly], испуганно [in a frightened way], and these repeated markers achieve an almost cinematic effect, comparable to that of Dostoevsky’s вдруг [suddenly] (see this post) and hard to translate for the same reason: English adverbs are more obtrusive and the repetition would sound bad. And even though the story of Peredonov’s madness and downfall is not a cheery one, the book is not depressing because good writing is never depressing. (Another testimony is on p. 45 of Johannes Holthusen and Dmitrij Tschiz̆ewskij’s handy little 1959 anthology Versdichtung der russischen Symbolisten: “Sologubs Bilder sind einem strengen Calcul unterworfen, seine Sprache ist präzise und besonnen, oft formelhaft wie mathematische Sätze oder Zaubersprüche” [Sologub’s images are subjected to a strict calculation/calculus, his language is precise and level-headed, often formulaic like mathematical theorems or magic spells].)

One reason I wanted to read it is that I’d been reading novels featuring witches who either were burned at the stake (Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo da Vinci) or escaped that fate by suicide (Bryusov’s Fiery Angel), and when I opened my copy of Мелкий бес the first thing I saw was the epigraph “Я сжечь её хотел, колдунью злую” [I wanted to burn her, the evil witch], which turned out to be the first line of a 1902 poem by Sologub himself. That was something of a red herring, though there is in fact a woman named Vershina who is called a “black witch” at one point and keeps luring Peredonov into her garden and persuading him to do things he doesn’t want to do, but even if it’s not part of the sorcery tradition of those early Symbolist years, it’s very much a part of the larger Russian literary tradition, and that’s another thing that kept impressing me as I read.

The only direct shout-outs I remember are to Pushkin (Peredonov says Mickiewicz was a greater poet, and he’s hung a portrait of Pushkin in his bathroom because of his low rank: “он камер-лакеем был”) and Chekhov (one character asks another if he’s read «Человек в футляре» [“Man in a Case”]), but the whole book is full of resonances. The basic theme of a tormented man sinking into paranoia goes back to Gogol’s “Notes of a Madman” and was developed by Sologub’s hero Dostoevsky in The Double and, of particular relevance, in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan loses his grip on reality and sees a devil — though there it is the Devil rather than Peredonov’s petty demon, which is a measure of the difference between Ivan and Peredonov. Bely will make use of it in Серебряный голубь [The Silver Dove] and Петербург [Petersburg], where Dudkin is visited by the Bronze Horseman, and Nabokov in Защита Лужина [The Defense]. The theme of the corruption of youth (in the person of the girlish Sasha) is dear to both Dostoevsky and Nabokov. And of course the tragicomic hell that is provincial city life is a perennial theme from Gogol (Dead Souls, The Government Inspector) on. The more Russian literature I read, the more echoes I catch and the more I appreciate it.

See Lizok’s review for more details on plot and characters (don’t miss her quoting “the worst love letter I’ve ever seen”!); I liked the novel so much I’ve decided to read his first one, the 1895 Тяжёлые сны [Bad Dreams], which (along with Merezhkovsky’s first novel and poetry by Bryusov and Balmont) kicked off the Symbolist era and Russian modernism in general. But first I’ll read some Chekhov as a palate-cleanser.

Addendum. Two quotes from W.C. Fields’s classic The Fatal Glass Of Beer that are oddly relevant to Sologub’s novel:

“He little thought they were demons, for they wore the best of clothes.”
“My Uncle Ichabod said, speakin’ of the city: ‘It ain’t no place for women, Cal, but pretty men go thar.'”

I could add some more letters and diacritics, but that gives the general idea; it’s my vague transliteration of what is apparently the Circassian translation of the title of Ostrovsky’s 1876 play «Правда – хорошо, а счастье лучше» [The truth is good, but happiness is better] as performed in a theater in Karachay-Cherkessia in the 2008-2009 season, as seen on the poster featured here. As one of the commenters on that thread says:

Какой емкий язык… Интересно, что там правда, что там счастье, что там хорошо и что лучше. Или у них там для описания и счастья и правды и хорошего и лучшего отдельный термин есть. Молодцы.

What a capacious language… I wonder what part of it is “truth,” what’s “happiness,” what’s “good,” and what’s “better.” Or whether they have a special term that describes all four at once. Good for them.

I suppose it’s unlikely that anyone here can explicate how Щхьззыфӏэфӏыжъ works, but just in case, there it is. I really have to try learning a Northwest Caucasian language one of these days.

Update. As pointed out by Rodger C, that title should be SHEZYFEFYZ — I mistook an Э for a З. Hey, you expect weird consonant clusters in Circassian!

Beebe Bahrami writes for BBC Travel about her linguistic adventures in the Dordogne:

On a cold winter’s night nine years ago, I made my way along icy cobblestone streets, a howling wind at my back, into the medieval town of Sarlat-la-Canéda in the Dordogne region of south-west France. This area is famous for its prehistoric caves, medieval castles and truffles – but I was here for another reason altogether. This was to be my first session of Café Oc, a monthly conversation circle at the Café La Lune Poivre, where locals gather to practice the regional Occitan language.

“Benvenguda a Café Oc,” exclaimed 10 people, all age 60 or older, in Occitan. I introduced myself in French, and they assured me that I was welcome. One woman made a point to sit to my left and in soft whispers translated the conversation into French for me. […] That night at Café Oc, participants spoke of many things, all wedded to the land and traditions. They described growing up cultivating and producing all that their family needed to eat; how to hunt for cepes (porcini); the medieval pilgrimage route that passes through their region toward Santiago de Compostela; gathering and selling truffles at Christmas; and colourful folkloric characters, the most memorable being the lébérou, Périgord’s version of a werewolf-like creature. […]

Graham Robb, in his historical geography, The Discovery of France, noted that despite three centuries of efforts to make standardised French the language of all of France, in 1863 in the south of the country more than half the population remained non-French speaking. In the Dordogne the numbers were even higher, where more than 90% of the population was still largely Occitan speaking.

But a little more than 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th Century, the central government launched an aggressive campaign to extinguish any language that was not the standardised French. Occitan was forbidden to be taught in schools, and any children who used their mother tongue were punished, a practice that infused deep shame in many people. Many older adults in the Dordogne still tell stories about being humiliated in school for speaking Occitan. […]

Soon after my first session of Café Oc, I joined Bruno Eluere and Béatrice Mollaret, local guides and co-founders of regional tour company Dordogne Fellow Traveller on weekly treks exploring caves, castles and forest tracts. I was curious about their experience with Occitan. It seemed that, despite being brought up as French speakers, the language was still very close to their hearts. “Occitan is part of my very first memories,” Eluere told me. “Andrea, my grand aunt’s maid used to call me moun cacalou, my little walnut, which became my first nickname.”

Mollaret went further, explaining that the language is intrinsically tied to Périgord culture and how Occitan intimately describes aspects of life here, details that are lost if expressed in French or that simply do not have French words. “[Occitan] is really linked to the land, to the farm, to the traditions and legends,” she said. “Some things concerning the animals, the plants, are only known in the former language. In the Dordogne, le cluzeau [dug out rock or cave shelter], le cingle [looped or circular path], le téchou [pig] are always expressed in Occitan. […]

I also spoke with a farmer who explained that each year, after he ploughed the field, new stone tools emerged, some from Neanderthals and others from Cro-Magnons. I learned that the name Cro-Magnon itself was Occitan: Cro means ‘hole’ or ‘hollow’ in Occitan (creux in French), and Magnon was the family name of the gentlemen on whose property workers, in 1868 in the village of Les Eyzies, discovered five 27,000-year-old skeletons.

Worth it just to learn about Cro-Magnon (even the OED just says “< Cro-Magnon (French Cro-Magnon), the name of a rock shelter in a limestone cliff”). Thanks, Trevor! (I posted about Graham Robb’s book here and here, and linked to an 1847 map of the languages of France here.)