As a Laurence Sterne fan of long standing (see my reveling in A Sentimental Journey in 2012 and my description the following year of his influence on Russian lit: “both writers got this style from the fons et origo of all divagating, diverting, dissertating novelists and prestidigitators of prose, Laurence Sterne, especially his Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy“), I was pleased to read Peter Budrin’s OUPblog post about what sounds like a very interesting book, his Laurence Sterne and his Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans:
Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.
What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing. […]
One of Sterne’s most influential early Soviet advocates was Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic associated with the experimental literary criticism of the 1920s. In a 1921 pamphlet devoted to Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky presented Sterne as a ‘radical revolutionary of form’ whose digressive prose anticipated the poetry of the Russian Futurists and paintings by Picasso. Sterne’s Soviet afterlife, however, was not confined to the avant-garde circles. By the 1930s, as official discourse turned against modernism, Sterne continued to be read, but attention shifted from questions of form to philosophical and psychological concerns. Despite this change, one association remained constant. Sterne was repeatedly linked, whether approvingly or critically, with artistic and inner freedom.
The book takes Sterne as a point of entry into the everyday intellectual life of Soviet translators, critics, and readers. The circulation of works by the ‘freest writer of all times’ (as Friedrich Nietzsche once called Sterne) an author with no obvious utility for the Soviet state, allows the reconstruction of a form of intellectual life that existed alongside, and partly outside, the enforced unanimity of Stalinist culture.
Readers turned to Sterne for many reasons. In 1937, the celebrated Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, consulted A Sentimental Journey while searching for a name for their newborn daughter. Among those drawn to Sterne in the 1930s was Gustav Shpet, one of Russia’s leading philosophers before the Revolution. Excluded from academic philosophy under Soviet rule, Shpet turned to literary translation as a means of both economic and intellectual subsistence. In his notes to an unfinished translation of Tristram Shandy, he read Sterne as a belated Renaissance humanist, an author who sought distance from his own times by immersing himself in older comic traditions. Shpet’s fate, however, underscores the limits of such refuge. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was executed in 1937.
The book follows figures from very different backgrounds. One of them is the Ukrainian critic Stepan Babookh. Before becoming a literary editor, most notably one of the editors of the 1935 Russian edition of A Sentimental Journey, he had been a worker, soldier and Bolshevik activist. Babookh discovered English literature while being held as a POW by the British during the war, first in an internment camp in India and later in a London prison. A self-taught intellectual of the new Soviet generation, he chose to abandon a Party career in order to become a scholar of English literature.
In the late 1930s, Izrail Vertsman, a scholar of Marxist aesthetics, defended the first Soviet doctoral dissertation devoted to Sterne. Vertsman belonged to a group of critics known as “the Current”, led by philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács. These intellectuals advocated more sophisticated forms of Marxist criticism, opposing the crude (in their view) sociological approaches of the 1920s. For Vertsman, Sterne embodied the spirit of creative renewal he associated with “the Current”, yet his private letters reveal the difficulty of reconciling his deep admiration of Sterne with the intellectual constraints of the Stalinist 1930s.
Through these intertwined lives, the book reconstructs what it calls the secret order of Shandeans—an imagined community of readers ranging from literary scholars, translators, and high school students to soldiers and Gulag prisoners. For many of them, Sterne’s humour offered an imaginary escape at a time of political uncertainty and mounting restrictions on creative freedom, when public expressions of individuality were becoming increasingly dangerous.
(Shklovsky, of course, reused a Sterne title for his memoirs.) I’d never heard of most of the writers and scholars mentioned, and I’m glad to learn of them; I always root for people who can preserve culture in times that don’t encourage such frivolous attachments.
Wikipedia (in English) seems unaware of Stepan Babookh* and indeed pretty much all of the google hits for that name are connected with the same Peter Budrin. This makes me wonder if this is an eccentric romanization on Budrin’s part and SB is known in other English sources under a different spelling of his name?
*The “oo” in Babookh seems weird for a standard romanization of a Ukrainian name. Googling “babookh” on its own leads to links about “Assyrian swear words.”
Maybe it’s not standard, but just happened in the internment camp in India?
Babookh is a fiendish disguise for what would scientifically be rendered Babukh; his name in Russian (and I presume Ukrainian) is Степан Романович Бабух. I direct you to such other mystifications as Tchaikovsky and Tschebyscheff. Budrin renders his surname more conventionally here.
I had forgot all about “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.”
Re “fiendish disguise” I personally appreciate the archaic vibe of e.g. “Hindoo” as an alternative to “Hindu” at least as much as the next fellow. I’ve just never seen it in romanization of East Slavic surnames. It’s not a question of what’s “scientific” for me; it’s simply a question of what’s conventional.
Author here! Re. Babukh/Babookh: I would assume Babukh is more conventional, but I decided to follow his own preferred form: that’s the transliteration he used signing the books he owned and brought to Soviet Russia from England
“Taboo” seems to have got specialised to referring to Western vaguely-analogous avoidances, with “tabu” for yer actual Polynesian thing.
Ah, transliteration, a subject dear to any cataloguer’s heart. Tchaikovsky has conventionally been transliterated that way simply because of the absence in the self-styled 19th-century language of culture, French, of the “ch” sound and the consequent use of the lashup “tch” to render it, as the French also do with the author of the plays Les Trois Sœurs and La Cerisaie.
Of course, using ISO 9:1995, the current best, most rational, and utterly ignored transliteration system, these would be Čajkovskij and Čehov.
This is a two way street, of course, and the unwary cataloguer can easily be tripped up by Russian books by or about Ualt Uitman, say, or Genri Dzheims. But, hey, even Gomer nods.
That “Babookh” was used by the man himself is certainly a relevant factor, but it also just shifts the mystery to why he should have used that seemingly-eccentric spelling. Obviously there have been changes over time in transliteration style, like Romanoff to Romanov, but are there other instances of cyrillic “у” turning into ASCII “oo”? Poking around a bit suggests that “Baboukh” might be a cromulent romanization of Бабух in a French-language context, but that’s not quite the same.
“Čajkovskij” is just the Slovak spelling (also the Czech one) of the composer’s surname. It’s not a good romanization because it’s not spelled in the actual Roman alphabet or for that matter the English alphabet, so a second-stage transliteration from the Slovak alphabet into the actual Roman-or-English alphabet would be required. If we’re going to do that sort of two-step process, I favor using Japanese as the conduit. Чайковский yields
チャイコフスキー, which in turn yields Chaikofusukī. The macron may get omitted in practice, but comparing Slovak “Čajkovskij” to Slovene “Čajkovski” suggests that there’s not very much non-redundant information encoded in the macron.
To me a mystery of why Babookh should have been a POW of the British, unless it was pre-Hitler’s attack on Russia. Afterwards, we were allies.
Googliing his name just gets me Assyrian swearwords.
@Peter G.: you’re maybe thinking of the wrong war. Think British involvement in odd bits of the becoming-Soviet world in 1918-19 as WW1 was turning into the Russian Civil War. But I’m still puzzled because I don’t know why the Brits would have taken Red POW’s all the way back to the UK or to India for that matter rather than letting their local White-or-whoever allies deal with them. (The referenced Brit general led troops into Azerbaijan in 1918 but was focused on fighting the Ottomans while trying to avoid letting his local anti-Bolshevik allies draw him into direct conflict with the Bolsheviks who were also likewise fighting the Ottomans; the direct Brit-v-Bolshevik conflicts around the Caspian only really got rolling once the Ottomans were out of the picture.)
JWB – oh, yes, of course. To my generation “the war” is only one war: very parochial.
My Russian textbook from the 60s had a preface that used spellings like “Ooshakov.”
Yes, such spellings used to be fairly common.
The referenced Brit general led troops into Azerbaijan in 1918
Known to some of us as Stalky?
“Ooshakov” does indeed make “Babookh” less weird, but the google books corpus presently has three hits for “Ooshakov” plus seventeen (including some duplicates) for the more old-style “Ooshakoff,” compared to hundreds for both Ushakov and Ushakoff. So not an unknown variant but not a common one either. (Also six for “Ooshakof” – after ignoring some weird spurious ones – and about fifty for “Ushakof.”)
As a retired cataloguer, I remember a time when we were required, following the standard transliteration rules, to call the composer of ‘Swan Lake’ Chaikovski’i. This decision was later reversed because the general public found it too confusing.
Those were standard transliteration rules?!?
The ISO one is very different, but I don’t know how old it is.
And it would not be less confusing to the public.
I’m glad that this thread has digressed. Poor Lieutenant LᴇFᴇᴠᴇʀ and I are still not expecting the Spanish Inquisition, though.
I have seen books published in the 1960s (basically reproduction of the author’s typescript) using (a version of) that transliteration. This was a time when scholars had to write their books with a mechanical typewriter. It was the official Slavist transliteration. If I remember correctly, the catalogue of the Cologne University library also used that transliteration.
This was a time when every professor 1) had a secretary and 2) had that secretary type his books and articles on a mechanical typewriter. Sometimes he thanked her in the acknowledgments.
I don’t know if mere university assistants typed their own works or if the professor they were assistants of had his secretary type them, too. I imagine it varied.
The romanized name in the OP of Viktor Shlovsky, by contrast, seems pretty normal and matches wikipedia’s usage, although I’m sure some would prefer Shlovski’i or Shlovskij and/or to replace the “Sh” with a Š.
Said secretaries/typists were sometimes copy editors, too. Unofficial of course.
I don’t know about assistants, but graduate students sometimes hired typists for dissertations and such. Maybe richer universities had a typist pool as a perk.
At least as of a decade ago my father still had possession of the century-old mechanical typewriter – a special model with extra math/science symbols – on which his own father had typed his own doctoral dissertation (in chemistry) in the 1920’s. I imagine a university might have had department-to-department variation in the typographical resources available.
@jwb
At a certain point (80’s?) the external keyboard remained the same, but the modern typist used different “golfballs”, e.g., Cyrillic, mathematical, etc. to type non-Ascii characters. Some enterprising mathematics graduates at this time preferred to use the vi editor on a computer monitor to create documents in TeX and save them on 5 1/4 “” floppy disks for back up and printing.
the noble IBM Selectric! interchangeable fonts, too! (and apparently, per wikipedia, at least some models could do right-to-left as well!)
At a certain point (80’s?) the external keyboard remained the same, but the modern typist used different “golfballs”, e.g., Cyrillic, mathematical, etc. to type non-Ascii characters. Some enterprising mathematics graduates at this time preferred to use the vi editor on a computer monitor to create documents in TeX and save them on 5 1/4 “” floppy disks for back up and printing.
Early ’80s? Late ’70s? At least by the mid ’80s, at least in physics in the U.S. as far as I know, TeX had become the only possibility. I tried to avoid vi, though, since by that time full-screen editors were available.
David Marjanović – This was probably the late 80s, and we would have been using this system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russian. I don’t read Russian, but I sometimes had to transliterate the details of art exhibition catalogues from Cyrillic using a conversion table.
That ISO looks very much like the German Slavist transliteration system I learned back at university. I typed my first term papers (ca. 1986) on a mechanical typewriter, then I got my first computer. Both had a German keyboard without hačeks, so I would insert them by hand on the typed / printed pages.
Oh how I despise the Library of Congress system, with its ė and i͡u and i͡a! I’ve complained about it many times in these parts.
At one time (ca. 1984) the MLA recommended that Cyrillic names be written in Library of Congress without the diacritics, which added ambiguity to awkwardness.
I like the ALA-LC system for Arabic, or, at least, feel that it’s the best among the variously unsatisfactory systems commonly available. But I think they were asleep at the switch with Russian.
As I said before, what you want in a romanization system* is a system whose output is actually written in the Roman alphabet, meaning those glyphs standardly used to typeset texts in Latin and none other. Late additions like “W” as well as subdividing I/J and U/V are acceptable, and macrons over vowels are grudgingly tolerable. The committee is admittedly deadlocked on the question of apostrophes.
*Or at least as a widely-available standard-alternative to a fussier system that uses weirder characters.
AFAIR the only use of the apostrophe in LC Russian transliteration was for the “soft sign”. I think what Kate was remembering is an “i” with a brev (as in iĭ)? It’s been a long time, though, and no British library I ever worked at used “pure” LC, anyway: there was no shortage of both official and home-grown alternatives and mash-ups! In the days that 5×3 cards were typed out and duplicated for the catalogue drawers all those brevs, etc., had to be inserted by hand… When computerised MARC records appeared, there was an almighty car-crash of “authority control” standards. Sorry, shop talk…
Don’t apologize, that’s my kind of shop talk!