A blog mostly about Russian literature and translation issues, as retailed by a small stuffed dinosaur.
In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen emigrated to the US as a child; after an intensely illustrious academic career, she was teaching at the elite Massachusetts women's college, Smith. Wilson did not usually like academics, but…
A long time ago on a famous writer's estate far, far away, I opened two attractive Russian hardback books I had just bought in Moscow. One was The Aviator by Evgenii Vodolazkin, a lyrical, elegiac, richly evocative and thoroughly enjoyable novel which would inspire me to write several articles and reviews about its author in the years to come. The other was Yuri Buida's The Fifth Kingdom , which…
On the edge of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a lovely forest park called Marku čiai . It smells excitingly of moss and pine needles: as you wander across its intricate, sloping paths, you discover fishing lakes, a tiny chapel surrounded by a handful of graves, and a museum dedicated to Aleksandr Pushkin. This last might well give the visitor pause. Was Pushkin ever in Vilnius? No, although…
As a translator of Russian literature, I'm used to silence. My work is rarely published, my few readers rarely cite my words, and if they do, they might not credit me: if I've done my job right, they forget I exist. But now, for the first time, I have reason to be silent; to be ashamed, even afraid of admitting what I do. Because of the tragically misguided decision of the current Russian…
Yulia Yakovleva is one of the most entertaining and deft contemporary writers working in Russian today: she hops with agility between YA literature (we loved her The Raven's Children , which was longlisted for the 2020 Read Russia Prize) and adult detective thrillers like Punishment of a Hunter (Pushkin Vertigo, 2021) - although both titles we've so far have been set in the early Soviet period.…
My readers know I hate to blow my own fog-horn . I prefer to hide behind my human avatar everywhere except in the pages of this blog and my safe places in a few famous libraries. But since it's Halloween once again, time of creepy pumpkins, bewigged vampires and prancing werewolves, I should share with you my own contribution to the annual Danse Macabre : a baker's dozen of scary stories, White…
It's intriguing to note the rise of the Novichok novel, especially given that the first high-profile Novichok poisoning case - the attempted murder of ex-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the quiet English cathedral town of Salisbury in March 2018, by two clandestine Russian operatives - skirted so close to fiction. There was the tragically inept administration of the poison, which…
Regular readers will appreciate that although my posts are often pretty highbrow, I'm most interested in how what's currently perceived as "high culture" gets recycled by so-called "low culture". Hence I've blogged about Poldark and the Brothers Karamazov ; why James Norton doesn't speak Russian ; and even about how the BBC uses Great Russian Novels to finger TV villains. There is, however,…
The fact that it isn't possible to read anything these days without finding a reference to a major Russian writer, the fact that I was reading Ducks, Newburyport the other day and I really thought I was safe for once with all those cinnamon rolls and Obamacare but then the narrator segued into talking about Solzhenitsyn, the fact that she was remembering her beloved mother and then bam!…
Russian culture has no shortage of spooks – and I don’t mean Stirlitz. It’s that time of year when we creep into the cobwebby bathhouse with Pushkin’s Tatyana, organize a BYOB barbecue for the local skeletons (Pushkin again – Belkin Tales ), or daringly defy vampires (Tolstoy – not the cranky one, but Aleksei Konstantinovich). If you really want to make music with the children of the night, you…
Preserved from the passage of time, unaware of changing epochs, facing traumatic re-entry into a profoundly altered world - no, it's not the story of my life as an extinct vertebrate, it's a trope of post-Communist culture. The book that inspired this post, Olga Slavnikova's 2001 Bessmertnyi (or The Immortal ), was released this year in Columbia University Press' Russian Library series as The Man…
My fellow (non-saurian) blogger Languagehat wrote an interesting but critical post about Dostoevsky's The Adolescent (1875) earlier this week. Here he calls it 'one of the most annoying novels I’ve ever read', drawing attention to its 'unreliable narrator' and 'ridiculous' adolescent style, including 'endless coincidences, overhearings, [and] surprise encounters'. One of my avatars has penned a…
"You're a wit, sir, you really are. Nothing escapes your notice! Such a playful mind, sir! And such a gift for winkling out comedy... heh-heh! They say that Gogol, among the writers, had that knack, do they not?" says Porfiry Petrovich, the detective in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , with his usual coruscating irony (he can't resist teasing his suspect one more time: despite knowing perfectly…
I rashly promised a review of Volume 8 of the literary journal Cardinal Points . This issue is edited by Boris Dralyuk and intriguingly dedicated, like the previous seven, to "DeStalinization of the Air". Here are my impressions of my first real Cardinal Points experience, greatly facilitated by the ease of downloading the journal issue to Kindle at minimal cost. The pagination isn't pretty, but…
Yasnaya Polyana archive with unknown child It has been, astonishingly, six years since my first jaunt to Yasnaya Polyana for the 2012 International Tolstoy conference. Although last month marked my fourth event (it’s biannual), I see I haven’t blogged about it since that first exciting convention. I was remiss not to write up the Great Heine Scandal of 2016, in which thirty middle-aged Russian…
The Brothers Carne - Dostoevskian body doubles? When watching the BBC's latest season of Poldark , a series based on the novels by Winston Graham about a swashbuckling Cornish landowner, my first thought was how Dostoevskian it was. (Well, if not my first thought, certainly my seventh, or ninth.) The opening episode of Series 4 (and here comes the first of several spoilers) ends with a dramatic…
Vladimir Sharov 1952-2018 "I am very glad", wrote Vladimir Sharov, who died after a long illness yesterday on 17 August 2018, "that my novel The Kingdom of Agamemnon has been first published in Znamya , a journal which has been important to me in every way and practically my family home. The novel, part of which (about 150 pages of typescript) appears below, I finished under extremely difficult…
For a man who consistently refuses to speak the language, actor James Norton can't leave Russia alone. He made a fetching, if not exactly voluble (and, like the other actors, exclusively Anglophone) Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in the BBC's notorious 2016 adaptation of War and Peace . Already in the home-grown Yorkshire police drama Happy Valley (2014), where Norton plays a homicidal psychopath, we…
When, three years ago now, I was invited to review two new translations of Tolstoy's great 1877 novel Anna Karenina , I had no idea I was about to encounter a tempest in Tolstoy studies. Certainly, the appearance of two Tolstoy translations in the same year is a rare event - looking back at this blog post's list of previous Anna versions, you can see that such simultaneity hasn't occurred since…
Another Antoine de Saint-Exupéry post today, for fans of the flying comte. Recently, I've been reading Katerina Clark's excellent Moscow, the Fourth Rome : Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture 1931-1941 (Harvard UP, 2011), which explores the intersection of cultural expansionism and cultural receptivity in Stalinist Russia via the personal lives and global adventures of…
A riddle - the solution is the picture - sent by A.F. Vangengeim to his daughter There seems to be a special link - a kind of reverse polarity of the imagination - between convicts and pilots. Take Oscar Wilde's famous sky envy: I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky... ( The Ballad of Reading Gaol ) Or consider this paean to…
I wanted to call this blog post 'the unreadable in pursuit of the untranslatable'. Then I wanted to call it 'the weeping translator', since that describes me trying to Anglify the Soviet writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's cryptic fragments. And then, as he will, Krzhizhanovsky himself gifted me a title: the burning umbrella. As part of a larger project to translate the author's non-fiction, I was…
One of my minor hobbies (very well, obsessions) is collecting detective fiction, especially Golden Age mysteries. The British Library recently made collecting these a whole lot easier by republishing the best of a very long backlist with adorable covers adapted from period British Rail posters. I also hoard the Detective Club series of reprints. Basically, if Martin Edwards has written a preface…
Last week I caught myself recommending a student to read "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl". 'Easy to find in translation,' I assured her, then I wondered: was it really? In a second-hand book-cave at the weekend, a shabby Heinemann school edition from 1992 fell into my hands: The New Windmill Book of Nineteenth Century Short Stories . A slightly chewed-looking cover with an out-of-focus print of Frith's…
A recent rummage through the remoter shelves of the Russian literature section of the University of Exeter caused me to acquire (as happens all too often) two obscure, charmingly crumbly volumes not on my list: Lady Cynthia Asquith's Married To Tolstoy (Hutchinson of London, 1960), and The Life of Tolstoy by "Paul Birukoff" (Pavel Biryukov), published in an anonymous translation in 1911. The…