From The Russian Desk
Здравствуйте, товарищи.
So. You say you’ve done for “Война и мир” (War & Peace) and “Братья Карамазовы” (The Brothers Karamazov), and still it’s not enough? Well, and so? You’ve gone after “Мёртвые души” (Dead Souls) and “Мастер и Маргарита” (The Master and Margarita) and still, your thirst is not abated? Perhaps, even, you have plunged into Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn, Akhmatova, Blok, Pushkin, Lermontov, Svetaeva, but…? Well, comrade, there is balm in Gilead.
While there is no experience that will rival the careful reading of the greatest works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – books which, once read, are forever tenant in the mind – I do have some recommendations for the budding Russianist whose taste for the русская душа, or Russian soul, needs a little dietary supplement.
Make no mistake, Russian literature in English translation is enjoying a mast season, but not for nothing. Due in no small part to the recent labor of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Paris-based translators of the Russian canon who have succeeded in the most literal translation possible, allowing the Russian heart of these great works to be vastly more accessible to the reader in English. Unlike the hurried stylization of the Constance Garnett translations, these translations by husband and wife are uncompromising.
So, respectfully, I first recommend all Pevear and Volokhonsky translations of the great classics, in particular, their War & Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, & Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, their Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, their Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, their short fiction of Anton Chekhov, all published by Vintage.
Some others:
Petersburg by Andrei Bely. This is one of the great novels of the 20th century, and a gem of Russian Symbolism; it is regarded by Vladimir Nabokov to be the equal of Joyce’s Ulysses and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. This novel takes as its setting the eponymous city after the revolution of 1905. A ticking, dilated, bomb-throwing time of general agitation. Read if you like Beckett, Céline, Joyce, Kafka. I recommend also G.K. Chesterton’s suspenseful anarchist-dread mystery The Man Who Was Thursday as a sort of literary pairing. If you’re interested in more Russian Symbolism, try out Aleksandr Blok’s epic poem The Twelve and the other poetry.
We by Evgeny Zamyatin. A dystopian novel; the inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984, Orwell routinely sent Zamyatin letters seeking advice on his writing.
Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. The famous long poem: better than the Ralph Fiennes film.
The Red Cavalry and also Collected Stories by Isaac Babel. Again, these can be found in a translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. His tales, all semi-autobiographical, follow him throughout his life. The Red Cavalry are a series of stories he write while serving as a journalist in the Red Army during the conflict with Poland a few years are the October Revolution. Stark, spare, pithy, laconic, unemotional. Winter reading.
A Sentimental Journey, The Third Factory, and Zoo; Or Letters Not About Love, All by Viktor Shklovsky. Released by Dalkey Archive, these are in the store for the first time. The first is a memoir of the October Revolution and immediate post-revolutionary period, is both a beautifully-wrought and succinct autobiography as well as an exercise of the Formalist literary criticism school of which Shklovsky is considered the foremost founder. The combination of a firsthand account of the Revolutionary period with unpretentious theory regarding the estrangement of perception. If you like Brecht, check Shklovsky out too. I recommend this strongly to anyone and everyone.
Soul, and The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov. One of my all-time favorites. Robert Chandler translates the work of Platonov beautifully for NYRB, who have bound it beautifully for us. Platonov walked the razor’s edge of criticism during the period of Socialist Realism. Unlike many of his peers, he survived the purges. Only in the past ten years has his work started to trickle into our hands, but it is the brilliant work of a hopeful young man who, like the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, watched with bitterness and astonishment as the revolution bloated up dead with an internal disease. See also his short story “The Motherland of Electricity”, included in the NYRB edition of Soul.
And a few more we don’t get in quite as regularly, but are worth stopping by the check for:
Mahogany by Boris Pilnyak
The Galosh by Mikhail Zoschenko
The poetry of Osip Mandelshtam
The poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov
The poetry of Aleksei Kruchenykh
The poetry of Boris Pasternak
“Sunstroke” and other short stories by Ivan Bunin
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov (A sort of lethargic novel of an aristocrat suffering ennui and neurasthenia form his life of decadence and plenty – despite how boring this may sound, it’s great).
I will finish with some exciting news: Later this month, Vintage will release the most recent collection of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translations of Tolstoy’s short works. This includes some of his finest stuff, such as the novella “Hadji Murat”, and short stories “The Cossacks”, “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “Strider”.
That’ll do, for now! Apologies if this is a bit much for one meal. We here at Logos, we love Russian literature, and relish the opportunity to share our enthusiasm.
Regards, from the Russian desk.
Будьте здоровы!
