The Golovlyov Family

The Golovlyov Family - Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov (pen name: Shchedrin)

This novel  Gospodá Golovlévy, written in the 1870s and called “the grimmest of Russian novels,” features the members of a spectacularly dysfunctional family. In the back country of Russia, set just before and just after the emancipation of the serfs, the characters duke it out over money or anger over perceived ingratitude. Like many carriers of grudges, the characters enjoy play-acting while listing their sacrifices for an ungrateful world. It’s almost as if they were practicing their spiel for St. Peter in order to enter the Pearly Gates, posturing like the wretched goofs in Fargo (e.g. Wade, in the kitchen, pulling out a gun, cracking the barrel, peering in, saying “Okay ... here's your damn money, now where's my daughter?... Goddamn punk ... where's my damn daughter...”).

The character of Arina Petrovna Golovlyova is an outstanding businesswomen who has increased the size of the family estate with canny acquisitions of bankrupt estates. But since she has never felt, much less expressed, tender feelings for her children, they grow into idle, shallow, reprobate adults.  After two sons drink themselves to death, the son Porfiry Golovlyov, nicknamed Little Judas (Iúdiushka) and The Bloodsucker, eases Arina Petrovna out of the way. Porfiry is one of the most atrocious characters in the whole of Russian literature.  He chatters endlessly to divert himself and others from reality. When any threatening reality asserts itself, he distracts himself with religious platitudes and procrastination. One early critic noted Iúdiushka’s “cold, calculating, cynical hypocrisy, its miserly ferocity.”  The set pieces in which he thwarts serious conversation are masterworks of tension, between Porfiry’s humbug and the interlocutor’s hopeless desperation to get to a decision and then get away.

I suppose one could read this novel as an indictment of the horrible shapes that loveless childhoods and avarice twist people into. This novel is a social artifact, a presentation of manners among the landed gentry at their worst before serfdom was abolished. But I think the social interpretation would detract from the writer’s psychological insight into the roots of alcohol abuse and the artistic touches, such as Shchedrin’s brilliant treatment of silence. Plus, there’s that Russian audacity to treat in fiction the giant themes, the most desperate questions we face in life. Readers that liked Ivan Goncharov's 1859 Oblomov would probably like this one too. Grim, yes, but this novel exerts a spell I’ve not often fallen under while reading a novel.

Dead Souls

Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol; tr. David Magarshack,  0140441131

A con man makes his way through remote towns in early nineteenth century Russia. He meets and deals with a variety of grotesque types. Our interest in this novel focuses not on the plot, but on colorful scenes that detail the social and psychological oddness of the characters. Gogol scrutinizes the attitude of peasants and gentry and their favorite activities, such as love and jealousy, intrigue and lawsuits, dirt and squalor, adventure and anguish. It is for readers to decide if his combination of anguish and humor is their cup of tea. I’m always surprised at Gogol’s exuberance, his exasperated caricatures of Russians..

Gogol’s witty and caustic style reveals characters. Smart, sharp and fun, he addresses the reader directly. It’s easy to read, it is hard to understand sometimes whether incidents really further the plot or expose the nefarious plans of the characters, and the trustworthy and not.

The late University of Michigan professor and critic Carl R. Proffer praised Magarshack’s translation as the one that he recommended to his students instead of Constance Garnett's rendering.  Sometimes the high-falutin’ word choices  -- "Good Lord, my dear fellow, what nonsense you talk" --  made me wonder if subsequent translators such as Pevear and Volokhonsky have tried to be more colloquial.

David Magarshack (1899 - 1977) was best known for his translations of Dostoevsky. In fact, Kazuo Ishiguro said in 2005, “I often think I’ve been greatly influenced by the translator, David Magarshack, who was the favourite translator of Russian writers in the 1970s. And often when people ask me who my big influences are, I feel I should say David Magarshack, because I think the rhythm of my own prose is very much like those Russian translations that I read.”

It’s funny how I get interested in people and read things by and about them. I’m from Michigan so Dr. Proffer of the U of M draws my attention. I’m interested in Magarshack because he was born in the city where I lived from 1994 to 1997, Riga, birthplace also of Isaiah Berlin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Cynthia Lynn (born Zinta Valda Zimilis) who played Fraulein Helga on Hogan’s Heroes.

European RC #6

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

Conquered City – Victor Serge

This novel is set in Petrograd in 1919, the first year of the Russian Civil War. Serge, whose real name was Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, was a professional revolutionary with a specialties in the skill of journalism and the craft of printing. He returned to Russia in 1919 in order to work in the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He wrote this book in the early 1930s in the shadow of Stalin’s early purges because Serge was a member of the Left Opposition to Stalin’s policies.  So this book has the feeling of novelized memoir, with a text written in different times in various places.

Serge organizes the novel in 20 episodes spread out over course of about one year. Like more traditional Russian novels I don’t need to name, Serge creates scores of characters, whose hard names need to be remembered, which is a challenge. Transitions between episodes seem jerky, which also requires attention. He wrote this book under the threat of imminent arrest by the secret police and sent the novel to France in fragments so one can understand the lack of smoothness. However, on the other hand, this bumpiness gives a feeling of beleaguered and muddled life in Petrograd at this time.

There are too many ideas in this novel to deal with in a short review. The one that burned brightest for me was Serge’s ambivalence about the use of the organs of repression. On one hand, as a democratic socialist, he saw the Russian Revolution as a great hope. Fearing counterrevolution, he was for using Czarist-type repression against spies, speculators, wreckers and traitors. He felt, then, there was a place for secret police, truncheons, jails, torture, internal exile, and treachery. On the other hand, he felt for workers and peasants that stole in order to eat, for soldiers who deserted because they’d been fighting one battle or another since 1914. Serge’s disenchantment is palpable – the typical disappointment of socialists in the wake of communist terror.

For me, the two topics of the American Civil War and Russia between the wars hold endless fascination. But I can’t say it’s for everybody.  Basically, this is an unrelenting novelized memoir that I can recommend only to the most unwavering student of topics such as state terror, St. Petersburg, and failed revolutions.

European RC #5

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army - Vasily Grossman, Antony Beevor (Editor), Luba Vinogradova (Translator)

During World War II, Grossman was a war correspondent for a Soviet Army newspaper. He was embedded with various units of the Russian army as it fought the Germans from Stalingrad and Kursk, through the Ukraine and Poland, and finally to Berlin. His reporting on the war made him famous with both the troops and civilians. This book is a collection of gleanings from his notebooks. 

This collection is made up of hundreds of stories, some mere sentences long, some a page or two. For instance, near the end of the book a Russian soldier, abroad for the first time in his life, was struck by Germany’s tidy towns, well-cultivated fields, well-maintained roads, and its overall appearance of an ancient and rational culture. He wondered “Why would the attack us? Why did they come to us? What could they want that they had not already?”

Grossman's editors routinely changed his words as censors spiked his stories. But by writing on the unconquerable spirit of the Red Army (as required by Stalin and his minions), he also described regular soldiers and their experience of battle. He wrote about the sufferings of the Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jewish people under Nazi occupation. In Poland and Germany he was the first to collect the first-hand testimonies of the local population with regard to the Red Army’s looting, gang rapes, and other disgusting crimes that were censored by the propaganda machine that wanted the Russian soldier painted as a bearer of peace and progress.

I must confess I could only skim the chapter on the liberation of the death camp Treblinka. It was heavily censored because the Stalinist line did not allow the disclosure of the crimes perpetrated on a specific group. It allowed journalists only to refer to crimes against the Soviet people. This line anticipated persecution of Jewish people in the USSR and its satellites after the war.

Grossman has the ability to convey in a few words the raw barbarity and humanity in a theater of war. Readers interested in the Eastern Front and Holocaust will get much out of this book.

European RC #2

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2015.

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia - Orlando Figes

The author is probably best-known for his prize-winning narrative history A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891 – 1924. He takes the title of this intellectual history from a scene in War and Peace. Princess Natasha tosses her French-influenced ways aside as she dances a Russian peasant dance. Nobody taught her the steps, hand motions, or stillness of her head. In short, not needing instruction, she just has the knack, through genetics, or inherited characteristics, what Lafcadio Hearn would call “the race ghost.”

Without bugging us general readers with the jargon of Theory, Figes argues that the Russian sense of identity has been socially constructed over the course of time. Russian thinkers rejected the automatic Westerner-worship of Peter the Great to create their own sense of identity, literary language, and canon of literature, often coming up with ideas as dubious as “the race ghost.” Figes persuasively argues Russian culture has borrowed from many traditions such as Mongol, Persian, Kazakh, and ethnic Russian, besides the usual Western European traditions.

This is a serious book, but it is readable. As he proved in A People’s Tragedy, he has an eye for the telling anecdote, which is often quite funny or forceful or both. This on the effect of sheer numbers of serfs available for tasks:

At Kuskovo, there was a horn band in which, to save time on the training of the players, each musician was taught to play just one note. The number of players depended on the number of different notes in a tune; their sole skill lay in playing their note at the appropriate moment.

I highly recommend this brilliant work to readers into things and people Russian.

Night of Stone

Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-century Russia – Catherine Merridale

Saying “I enjoyed reading this incredible book” seems strange. Reading the history and anthropology of death and mourning in Russia and the USSR in the 20th century depressed the hell out of me. It would any thinking person reading about 50 million human beings dying due to badly run wars, induced famine, political mass murder, and diseases of deprivation such as cholera and typhus.

Not just the sheer scale, but the question “How could cops, jailers, torturers, executioners do this to other people” brings to mind issues of compliance to authority. I was impressed by the brilliant research of archives and period materials for the documentary history and the interviews of ordinary Russians for the oral history.

Being English, Merridale is gifted writer of highly readable prose. Another plus is that she lets a lot more soul and humanity show than many historians.  Readers that are interested is how human beings cope, remember, or repress memory will get much out of this book as will reader who focus on the psychology of people over prolonged and extraordinary hardship.

The Fatal Eggs

The Fatal Eggs – Mikhail Bulgakov, tr. Hugh Alpin, 1843914115

This is an early novelette by the author of the famous novel The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov describes his main character Professor Persikov with a mix of respect and exasperation. Persikov is dedicated to his zoological and cytological research. But he is so disconnected from the real world that he doesn’t even read newspapers and his first wife left him for a mere entertainer.

Persikov makes a stunning finding purely by chance. The Stalinist government muscles in, sending in a dumb thuggish yes-man to take over Persikov's research and equipment. Due to bureaucratic muddle and ignorant misuse of Persikov's discovery, catastrophe ensues. This is sophisticated science fiction, on the level of H.G. Wells and Doris Lessing (who wrote the introduction to this edition).

I suppose one impression would emphasize that this book is really about how far the Bolshevik revolution went off the rails. Soviet critics branded Bulgakov as “a slanderer of Soviet reality.” But Bulgakov, I think, is not narrow. It wasn’t just in the Soviet Union that scientists have had to square the applications of their discoveries with their consciences– just ask J. Robert Oppenheimer. As for bureaucratic slowness exacerbating disaster, see Japan after the triple disaster of March 11, 2011. And as for luck, I think Bulgakov would assent to E.M. Forster’s observation, “There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.”

Bulgakov was skeptical about the Revolution – why else would the ray that causes disaster be colored red? Just focusing on the politics, however, detracts from the art. Take, for example, the wonderful combination of the exuberant and the yucky in his luscious descriptions of the snakes eating people.  It calls to mind that kind of sexy, kind of gross scene in The Master and Margarita where Margarita and Natasha are applying the rejuvenating cream. Also positively Gogolian are the grotesque scientists, reporters, cops, and frenzied mobs bent on murder.

Lady Macbeth in Mtsensk

Lady Macbeth in Mtsensk – Nikolai Leskov, tr. Robert Chandler, 1843910683

The sensational plot will bring to mind Madame Bovary. The title character is a fed up wife in the provinces:

Katerina Lvovna would pass to and from through the empty rooms, start to yawn from boredom and then climb the stairs to the conjugal bedroom… She would steal an hour or two’s nap, but awake from it once again to that peculiarly Russian boredom, the boredom which reigns inside the houses of merchants, and which, it is said, makes even the thought of hanging oneself seem a cheerful prospect… no-one paid the slightest attention to the boredom that was weighing her down.

Enter Sergei, a farm hand and deceiver of women. Horseplay changes into lusty embraces, a la The Postman Always Rings Twice. The violence will shock even jaded readers of James M. Cain. I mean, Russian novels of the 19th century are supposed to realistic but really this novel approaches the down-sides of desire shading into lust just like the better noir novels of the Forties and Fifties did.

Before this one, I had read only On the Edge of the World (about Russian missionary bishop's meeting of The Other in the far reaches of Siberia) and his amazing short story The Steel Flea. Leskov (1831 - 1895) grew up in a small village in Orel, where he came into close contact with common people. He also travelled widely in Russian for various jobs, getting direct experience with a variety of types among the ethnic groups in Russia. His vivid characters are both familiar and foreign.

Leskov does not celebrate the lower classes, but takes the hard-boiled view that peasants and soldiers and cowherds are not more or less honest than anybody else. In Lady Macbeth, for instance, we meet lowlifes who find it fun to cheat somebody out of their woolen socks in a transit prison on the way to Siberia. So dumb, too, that they don’t even suspect that their amusements and antics can escalate to murder to suicide.