Russian Literature

[Stewart]

Around the middle of the 19th Century, Russian literature went through its golden age, with the likes of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstory, and was promptly followed by a silver age, in which many more Russian writers, poets, and dramatists came to widespread attention.

It has a reputation for being bleak and serious (thanks, in part, to Dostoevsky) but behind the works of many there's an accomplished feel for satire and a sense of humour.

In total, Russia (including its time as the Soviet Union) has produced five Nobel laureates in Literature - these are Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky - and also produced one of the most famous never to take the honour, Vladimir Nabokov.

When it comes to Russian literature, I've had an aborted attempt at War And Peace, although I found Tolstoy's The Death Of Ivan Ilyich much easier to sail through. I've also read the sci-fi classic that is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which supposedly influence Orwell and Huxley in the creation of their own dystopias.

Yesterday I had an attempt at starting Mikhail Kuzmin's Wings, which was supposedly the first Russian novel, back in 1906, to deal with homosexuality. I got three pages in, thanks to distractions and not being in the right mindset. But I'm now finding myself happily working my way through Vladimir Nabokov's first novel, Mary.

So, what Russian literature have you read? What comes recommended?

 

[Bjorn]

I'd say Dostoevsky (who's one of my favourite writers and becomes more so with every re-read) has a healthy dollop of exactly that sort of sense of humour too; The Demons is a hilarious send-up of the politics of his day (and even more interesting considering what happened a few decades later).

But you're right, that mixture of the dark and the irreverent seems to be at the heart of many of the Russian writers who've made it abroad. To take one of Dostoevsky's own favourites, Gogol's The Overcoat, a story I'm sure Kafka wore out several copies of. Or one of my favourite books ever, Bulgakov's The Master And Margarita which is both a laugh-out-loud absurd satire of what happens when you follow leaders too blindly, and one of the most passionate defenses for freedom of thought I've read. The quote Рукописи не горят - "manuscripts don't burn" - became something of a mantra for writers working under Soviet censorship, I'm told.

I've been meaning for a long time to read up on more of the classics. After Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I really should try and get through more by Gogol and Pushkin as well, and Solzhenitsyn, Ageyev and Pasternak too. Having read and loved Lolita I keep meaning to read more Nabokov, but frankly... he scares me.

Oh, and Leonid Tsypkin's Summer In Baden-Baden (which I reviewed on this site) is something of a masterpiece.

One contemporary writer I'm really curious about is Viktor Pelevin. I recently read The Helmet of Horror (his contribution to Canongate's myth project) and found it... shall we say "unique"? Not completely unique, obviously, nothing new under the sun, but a very interesting and very engrossing read.

Also, a while back I read Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch and will probably get around to the two sequels at some point; it's not great fantasy, but it's got a different tone than his US/UK colleagues.

 

[Stewart]

The Demons is a hilarious send-up of the politics of his day (and even more interesting considering what happened a few decades later).

The collector in me has this on the radar as a new translation has recently been published by Penguin Classics.

I've been meaning for a long time to read up on more of the classics. After Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I really should try and get through more by Gogol and Pushkin as well, and Solzhenitsyn, Ageyev and Pasternak too.

Yes, me to. I've already decided that next year I am going to try and focus on Russian literature. (I should do better than my attempt at reading more Scandinavian literature this year.)

Having read and loved Lolita I keep meaning to read more Nabokov, but frankly... he scares me.

You could read Mary, it's nowhere near later Nabokov. But I'll post up my thoughts properly once I've finished it.

One contemporary writer I'm really curious about is Viktor Pelevin. I recently read The Helmet of Horror (his contribution to Canongate's myth project)...

I've skipped the Canongate Myths series, having been nonplussed by Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson's contributions to it. I'm interested in the forthcoming Michel Faber offering, The Fire Gospels though. But, on the subject of Pelevin I have a proof of his latest, The Sacred Book Of The Werewolf. Flicking through it I see references to Mel Gibson, Lolita, and The Matrix. Should be...interesting.

Also, a while back I read Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch and will probably get around to the two sequels at some point; it's not great fantasy, but it's got a different tone than his US/UK colleagues.

I was under the impression that the books were a tetralogy and that only in film would the Watch series - or whatever name is given to it - be a trilogy.

 

[ions]

Chekhov! Ohhh Chekhov! Absolutely fantastic. That Golden age of Russian literature is exactly that. A Golden age. There aren't enough superlatives to describe that group. The Brothers Karamazov is a must. A must! Really all of Dostoevsky's major works are. In fact sitting here trying to think of what to say about the Russians frazzles me. There's so much to say. Superlatives that need applying and devotions to be stated. If I continued listing titles I'd be calling them all must reads.

Try not to be too surprised but I'm going to go on my translation tangent. Be careful with English translations of the Russians. Pevear and Volokhonsky I've found to be the best. I say this having done a decent comparison against Garnett and a mostly superficial inspection of a handful of the others, Maude etc. I also don't speak Russian so can't even begin to speak about the accuracy but I have found that Pevear and Volokhonsky make the most readable and enjoyable translations comparitively. And by no small margin.

 

[fausto]

I see a mention of Pelevin. I really like him, although his most recent books seem less good (The helmet of horror, Homo Zapiens). I have tremendoulsy good memories of The clay machine-gun, Omon-Ra, Life of insects and The Yellow Arrow. I sure hope more goodness is to come, but when his latest was published in Russia, it would seem reactions were mixed.

Other than that quite a few young Russians writers seem to be translated in French but have never tried them and don't even know what are the names to check out first. I've got a Sorokin somewhere.

 

[Eric]

I'm not a great connoisseur of Russian literature, but I get my dose of Russianness as a surrogate when reading Estonian things.

Have any of you read any of the books listed here:

INDEX of GLAS publication

 

[metin]

I'm still somewhat fixated at Russian literature. A few years ago I decided to do a self-study on Russian literature. Until then I had not seriously read anything Russian, except a couple of not-so-important works of Tolstoy and two very important works of Tolstoy again (A Confession, Thoughts On Life). I started with Gogol's Dead Souls and then came Tolstoy again: The Death of Ivan Il'ich, How Much Land Does a Man Need?, Resurrection, Krautzer Sonat and so on. I hope to read Anna Karenina and War and Peace in Russian within a few years. I'm not so eager to read his works any more though. I've kind of grown weary of his preachings.

By the way I've noticed that Turgen'ev and Goncharov haven't been mentioned yet. Salute! These two and the writer of The Village Ivan Bunin have all made my readings more enhanced.

Well, I view Russian writers in two groups: 1) Those who are not Dostoevskij, 2) Dostoevskij himself.

I loved Crime and Punishment but I dont understand why it's considered to be a masterpiece. It's beautiful, I agree. But Notes From Underground and The Raw Youth have affected me more. I loved The Idiot also but Notes From The House Of The Dead didn't make the same impact. White Nights, My Uncle's Dream, The Poor People are so important to me too. Now I'm reading Brothers Karamazov and hopefully that will be the last translation I read from Russian.

Heck, I was about to forget: I -who hardly likes poetry- think that Anna Akhmatova is one great poet. Hope you dont mind me leaving here a short piece from her :

Я пью за разоренный дом,
За злую жизнь мою,
За одиночество вдвоем,
И за тебя я пью, -
За ложь меня предавших губ,
За мертвый холод глаз,
За то, что мир жесток и груб,
За то, что Бог не спас.

 

[Eric]

Metin, could you perhaps you give us a translation of the Akhmatova poem, so we can share? The House of the Dead is interesting in that it describes Russian prison camps long before Solzhenitsyn was born. For some peculiarly Russian reason, they've been going strong since the mid19th century. For both Russians and other peoples from the Czarist and Soviet Empires, Siberia has been quite a preoccupation.

I never seem to remember whether it was Goncharov that wrote Oblomov, or Oblomov that wrote Goncharov...

 

[metin]

I don't think I could translate it but here's a translation I found on the net:

I raise my glass
To ravaged home,
My bitter life,
And lonely days with you.
I drink to you,
To lying lips' betrayal,
To deathly frigid eyes;
To that the world is cruel and crude,
To that we weren't saved by God. translated by Eric Gillan

For more Akhmatova poems:
RussianLegacy.com | Russian Culture - Poetry - Akhmatova

 

[Mirabell]

Haha I am busy brushing up on my russian
will be reading this in no time
just you wait
and I stand drunken on our balcony
and declaim zwetajewa and majakowsky

 

[Mirabell]

say as you're the one with the fluent russian
it appears for me to be a very inadequate translation for this wonderful poem. am I wrong?

 

[metin]

say as you're the one with the fluent russian
it appears for me to be a very inadequate translation for this wonderful poem. am I wrong?

I can't judge this translation as I wouldn't do better myself. Russian is still a language that I am slowly learning and I am still unable to read even just a simple article at Википедия without a dictionary. Also I am not familiar with the poetry in English either.

I had translated this poem to Turkish back in 2005 and impertinently criticized another translation. Cause mine was better. Yet there was another one I translated from Akhmatova which was cruelly derided. And those who didn't like it were damn right. So, I know how it feels. I prefer not to comment.

 

[nnyhav]

Kunitz's rendering of The Last Toast (Selected Poems, Collins Harvill):

I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together;
and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead-cold, pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities:
that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God in fact has not saved us.

 

[Eric]

It's a bit quiet on the Russian literature front. Although I principally went to the library yesterday to borrow the Rayfield book about Georgian literature, as described elsewhere, I did not omit to buy a copy of Literaturnaya Gazeta from 30th July, and another newspaper that I had never seen before called Knizhnoye Obozrenie (Book Survey) from May this year, as I am as curious as any one else what sort of books are being published and discussed in Russia today.

While we should strictly separate the actions of the Russian government from the thriving Russian book market, I couldn't help smiling wrily at the front page of Literaturnaya Gazeta which had a large photo of a demonstrator waving a Czech flag on top of a Russian tank in Prague, almost exactly forty years ago. The scene could be from Gori today! This was published a fortnight before the South Ossetian business, but is curiously portentious.

As I have frequently explained, my Russian is, unfortunately, not good enough to whizz through articles and understand a lot without a good deal of dictionary work. But especially in the case of Knizhskoye Obozrenie, it fascinates me to see what the Russians are producing and translating. The main headline of that newspaper on the front page is also curiously topical: "Ruins of former empires".

Russians have always read a lot of non-fiction and popular science books, and this is reflected in the reviews in Knizhnoye Obozrenie. The number of translations reviewed is small, but there is list of the top ten reads. And I know how you all love lists! So, I'll stick to fiction:

While the list is topped by Boris Akunin (a Georgian born Russian...), Paolo Coelho comes a good second. But the vast majority of names, for both hardback and paperback, are Russian. The Russian top ten almost begins to look as introverted as similar British lists that you see in, say, the Guardian.

So especially Knizhnoye Obozrenie looks to be an excellent way of keeping up with what is going on in the Russian book market.

 

[Eric]

This should probably be put in the "Recent Purchases" section, but I bought a book the other day which had excerpts and biographies of young Russian authors. You might think it a slightly odd time to buy such a book, but we have to keep literature separate from politics.

The book is entitled Eureka! - New Writers From a New Russia. The compiler is Aleksandr Potyomkin. I had heard none of the authors featuring in this small 230-page book. Russia is one of the very largest countries in the whole world, yet I get the uncomfortable feeling that we in Western Europe know (or care!) very little indeed about what is being written there right now.

Anyway, if any of you have heard of the names, they are:

Irina Adelheim
Arkady Babchenko
Igor Belov
Irina Bogatyreva
Hanna Golenko
Nadezhda Gorlova
Oleg Zobern
Aleksandr Ilichevsky
Maya Kucherskaya
Irina Mamaeva
Sergei Perelyaev
Elena Pogorelaya
Ekatarina Ponomaryova
Valentin Postnikov
Zakhap Prilepin
Maria Rybakova
Andrei Rudalev
Elena Sevryugina
Roman Senchin
Sergei Shargunov
Aleksei Shorokhov

Many have studied literature, mostly in Moscow. Predictably, most are born in the 1970s and 1980s.

I'll write more as I proceed.

 

[Mirabell]

A russian book, innit? damn. i really must brush up on my russian.

 

[Eric]

You may be joking about your Russian, Mirabell, but I'm doing just that. The easiest way to expand your vocabulary is to print a few articles from the internet and get out your dictionary.

But reading about murder, mayhem, explosions, threats, shuttle diplomacy, and occupied ports does get a bit wearing after a while. So I now vary it a bit by reading the odd article in Knizhnoye obozrenie which is a good monthly that presents new books. The problem with literature is that it, for obvious reasons, uses a vastly larger and more subtle vocabulary than politics. Once you know the word for "warship", "explosion", "peacekeeper", and so on, the variations are limited. Also the verbs used are limited. And you have already read things in the British, German, etc., press.

But when you turn to literature (i.e. belles lettres), the vocabulary could be coming from anywhere: country life and agriculture, drug addiction and alcoholism, family life in high-rise flats or wooden houses, war and the military, new literary movements, sex, and a mass of other things. Then your reading vocabulary, standard, colloquial and slang is really put to the test. And mine's not up to it yet. I can manage to read the biographies of all these interesting-looking young authors, but the works themselves suddenly introduce so many new words that I am overwhelmed.

And cultural and national allusions are another problematical area. I have never lived in Russia, so even the simplest things, like the names of the supermarket chains, or kids films on TV, are totally unknown to me.

One interesting-looking name of all those I listed is Nadezhda Gorlova, a student of the Gorki Literature Institute, like many writers. The critic there says that Russian literature was getting in a rut, then along came Nadezhda Gorlova. Now this may be exaggeration for effect, but the critic Timur Zulfikarov does say:

(...) And then a real writer turned up - Nadezhda Gorlova. She's about thirty. But writes at the level of Thomas Mann and Borges. I am thinking principally of the story-poem "Rebecca's Bedspread".

The name of the story-poem doesn't sound too thrilling - but it depends on the style, nicht wahr?

My Russian stretches to translating that kind of little quote, but I've not even tackled the first story, Exlibris, or Musical Period, Word and Thirst (or: Lust), four miniature stories featured in the anthology.

The anthology was published this year by the PoRog publishing house in Moscow and contains work by the winners of the Eureka Prize, which is held every other year.

 

[Stewart]

Here's something I found yesterday, a bilingual display of Boris & Arkady Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. I tried reading the translation of this sci-fi classic yesterday but was a bit bored by page fifty and moved on with my life.

 

[Mirabell]

You may be joking about your Russian, Mirabell, but I'm doing just that. The easiest way to expand your vocabulary is to print a few articles from the internet and get out your dictionary.

I am not joking. I can barely read. I never properly learned to read and I read like a first-grader. That makes expanding vocab etc mighty hard. And I don't have that kind of time at my disposal right now. I am having longish talks w/ my mother to get into a fluent use of oral Russian again at least.

 

[Eric]

The Strugatsky Brothers wrote the story, Roadside Picnic, on which one of the Tarkovsky films was based. Not Solaris which was based on work by the Pole, Stanislaw Lem. But this was the depressing film Stalker, which was filmed in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, with one of the actors J?ri J?rvet, an Estonian.

So that story is the original of that film. See:

Arkady Strugatski - Arkady Strugatsky

You will note that the elder Strugatsky Brother, Arkadi, was born in... Batumi, Georgia.

The story in parallel text form is good for improving your Russian, but I would rather see the Tarkovsky film again. Tarkovsky is one of my absolute favourite film-makers, along with Bergman, whose team he used for his last film.

*

Mirabell, I admire the fact that you have, latently, a good knowledge of Russian. I had this with Dutch, which my mother gave to me when I was a baby. Persevere, it's worth it.