Languor Management

Gogol has eluded capture

Yes! I'm terribly excited about this. The husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose latest translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was picked was picked for Oprah Winfrey's summer Book Club, have tackled my favorite novel ever: Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls.

But Timothy C. Westphalen calls the new translation a "mixed bag":

"Dead Souls," then, represents a challenge for Pevear and Volokhonsky. A stylistic tour de force, Gogol's novel encompasses an astonishing range of voices and offers bravura passages in every register within that range. From its delicate, intimate lyricism to its robust, bawdy ribaldry, "Dead Souls" requires a light touch and a bold stroke all at once.

Not surprisingly, Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is a mixed bag. Were we to accept the definition of translation at which Vladimir Nabokov arrived while Englishing Alexander Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" -- that translation should essentially be a crib for the original -- then this team of translators would deserve high praise, indeed. Of all the English translations, theirs is most faithful to the original.

A treasure trove of literary trivia

Josef Stalin dominated the pack of 64 Russia-related books reviewed this year in The Moscow Times, with Vladimir Putin, another rising despot, a distant second.

What, according to The Times, are the top five best Russia-related books of 2004? Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Best History); Vladimir Voinovich's Monumental Propaganda (Best Novel); Emma Gerstein's Moscow Memoirs (Best Memoir); Rosamund Bartlett's biography of Anton Chekhov (Best Biography); and David Bezmozgis' Natasha and Other Stories (Best Debut).

I've already read Monumental Propaganda and highly recommend it. I'm presently slogging through Moscow Memoirs (Thanks, L—!), an important book but one I have some issues with; and thanks to a gift card from my lovely new niece A—, I just picked up Natasha and Other Stories, which I will be reading sometime in the near future after, of course, that I finish David Sedaris' Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Thanks, F—!). One can hardly be expected to live on Russian-related books alone, nyet?

Feeling the elephant

Russian online literati and academics have joined forces in a last-ditch effort to save one of Russian literature's "greatest treasures":

Representatives of Moscow-Tartu Initiative, an association of private donors organized on the Internet, have pledged to bail out the Russian department of Estonia's Tartu University from financial ruin. Tartu University's Russian department is dear to many of Moscow's literati, as it became a haven for liberal thought during the stagnation of the 1970s. Yet falling enrollments meant that two of the department's professors would have been fired if the donors hadn't stepped in.

Speaking at the ceremony, Moscow-Tartu Initiative chairman Sergei Kuznetsov, who recently published a history of the Russian Internet called "Feeling The Elephant" (Oshchupyvaya Slona), said that the foundation lays waste to the charge that Russia's businessmen couldn't care less about their country and culture. "As private persons we are able to solve problems that politicians and officials ruefully neglect," the association reported Kuznetsov as saying.

Tartu University has been an important center of Russian studies for more than three decades, primarily due to the charisma and prominence of professor Yury Lotman, a leading figure in the field of structural semiotics. After Lotman's death in 1993, former students such as Dmitry Itskovich, owner of Moscow's OGI literary cafes, and Roman Leibov, a scholar of Russian literature who teaches at Tartu, transformed the quiet Estonian town into one of the centers of Russia's intellectual Internet movement.

"Ten years ago, the Internet was more developed in Russian university communities outside Russia," Kuznetsov said, "and it's time for us to repay the debt."

Farewell, beloved Kalmyk girl!

Nipposkiss points us to Pushkin Among the Ossetians in the Times Literary Supplement:

As he passed Vladikavkaz on his journey south to war in May 1829, Pushkin witnessed an Ossetian funeral. In Journey to Arzrum, the prose work crafted six years later out of his travel notes, he describes the scene. Friends and kin of the dead tribesman gathered, beating their brows and wailing; the women of the aul stood by meekly. The body was carried out of the saklya and laid on a wagon; “like a warrior taking his rest / With his martial cloak around him”, Pushkin remarked, quoting in English from Charles Wolfe’s elegy for Sir John Moore, the hero of the Napoleonic Battle of Corunna. One of the guests laid the dead man’s gun at his side, and the mourners rode behind the ox-drawn wagon to a burial place thirty versts into the mountains. “No one could explain these rites to me”, Pushkin admitted in conclusion.

If at times uncomfortably

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries Web site features an online exhibit of Czech Book Covers of the 1920's and 1930's, featuring over 20 designers and illustrators in four major styles: Poetism, Constructivism, Surrealism, and Socialist Realism.

Close to the ground, forthright, a rock 'n' roll reality

Boris Fishman interviews Wladimir Kaminer at Words Without Borders:

I would say there are two major groups of young German writers. Closest to me are my colleagues--slam writers, people who write short stories, what we call "rock 'n' roll" literature, that is, literature with "drive," that communicates directly with the reading public, a kind of new urban realism. There was a record released several years ago called "Asphalt Poets." Kind of a silly name, but it gives you the idea--close to the ground, forthright, a rock 'n' roll reality. This is becoming more and more popular. And it isn't confined to the short form. Now there are rock 'n' roll novels, too. The idea is to try to remain open-ended, spontaneous, free to experiment, without getting locked into some kind of form. Because form, by definition, is contrivance, theatre, phoniness. There are no novels in life. Each novel in life has its own prehistory, and an endless posthistory, too.

Then there is "dandy" literature--"pop" literature, written by young, disappointed intellectuals from very rich families. They like to write about sad things.

CESLIT.org also tells us that the Winter 2004 issue of Rain Taxi is now online, and includes "Tomaz Salamun on Tomaz Salamun," a review of Tomaz Salamun and Metka Krasovec's Blackboards:

What a wacky fellow, this Salamun. He can make you think you had too much espresso and cough medicine and cell phonage when you read this stuff. Take, for instance "Stefanel Jacket." He talks about "broiling gilthead bream. Hardy meat shot through the sea." Okay, but then watch--all of a sudden he says, "I'm covered in basil." Is Salamun about to be sacrificed? Is this the bream speaking? Help! Then he tells us, "I yank my catch up the stairs. . ." Fine. But look what he does to us next: He adds to the end of that sentence the name "Metka," his wife, the artist whose artwork complicates terribly this book.

We live without feeling the earth beneath our feet

Lewis H. Siegelbaum finds many faults with David Rayfields's "angry and accusatory" Stalin and his Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him:

But...he didn't do it alone. Stalin needed men nearly as loathsome as he to carry out the dirty work of whipping his socialist society into shape and stifling real or suspected opposition. Rayfield's argument pushes an already open door, for others have written about "all Stalin's men," his lieutenants, magnates, henchmen, inner circle, and the like. Usually included in this gallery of rogues are Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Klement Voroshilov, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenty Beria. Rayfield focuses on the leaders of the Cheka security force and its successors, which brings "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and Genrikh Yagoda into the mix.

(***)

Stalin and his "hangmen" did enough damage without larding an account of their exploits with statements of dubious accuracy. The fall of the Soviet Union, the opening of its archives, and the emergence of a new generation of historians both in Russia and abroad has led to considerable improvement in the quality of the history being written about the Stalin era. Unfortunately, these same developments also gave license for writing and getting published almost anything about the Soviet Union that is sufficiently sensationalist. As educators, we should to try to aim higher than pandering to the lowest common denominator.

What do you mean, I've got to stay home

Mikhail Kuzmin
From Alexandrian Songs (1906). This, and more Kuzmin here.

In spring the poplar changes its leaves;
in spring Adonis returns
from the kingdom of the dead...
And you -- where're you going to in spring, my sweet?
In spring all will go riding
in the sea or the gardens on the outskirts
on swift horses...
And I -- who am I going to share the boat with?
In spring all will don festive clothes,
will walk out in couples to the fields to pick violets...
And I -- what do you mean, I've got to stay home?

[Spaceeba, Alex(ei)!]

Holidays with the Slavs

O— informs me of two readings:

1. Thu, Dec 30, 8pm, The Russian Samovar:

Edward SHENDEROVICH, Eugene OSTASHEVSKY and Matvei YANKELEVICH
reading their poetry in Russian (Shenderovich)
and English (Ostashevsky+Yankelevich).

The Russian Samovar is located at 256 W 52nd street, bet Bway + 8th. The readings take place upstairs.
The drink of choice is a carafe of vodka: horseradish, garlic, loganberry, etc.

2. Sun, Dec 26, 8pm, Bowery Poetry Club, $5 at door:

J. KATES
(editor of Zephyr Press, reading translations of contemporary Russian poets), ANA BOZICEVIC-BOWLING
(reading her poems in English, as well as translations of Croatian poetry), SERGEY LEVCHIN (reading from the prose work of Konstantin Vaginov)

In addition, Ugly Duckling Press will be celebrating Daniil Kharms' 100th birthday with the release of The Blue Notebook (UDP, 2004) and the release of Mikhail Aizenberg's Less Than a Meter, translated by J. Kates.

at the BOWERY POETRY CLUB ~ $5 at the door 308 Bowery, East Village, New York, 10012

Coming from Moscow, you have to understand that Berlin is heaven

Wladimir Kaminer is an air-guitaring, best-selling Russian writer in Berlin. His collection of stories, Russendisko, "describes the Russian-German encounter in a seres of funny, poignant, satirical and affectionate vignettes":

It was something of a fluke that Mr. Kaminer became a writer in the first place. Educated as a sound engineer in the Soviet Union, he worked for various theater companies in Berlin until 1998. As Mr. Kaminer tells it, one day at a local bar he was asked to give a talk about the relationship of art and dictatorship.

"I talked about the many similarities of writers and cosmonauts in the Soviet Union and was convinced I'd prepared a scientific lecture," he recalls. "But the audience was laughing nonstop." Afterward, an editor approached him to write for his newspaper, die tageszeitung, a national daily newspaper.

Mr. Kaminer's career took off. Readers couldn't get enough of his bizarre tales about Russian immigrant life in Berlin, and soon he was regularly writing for several German newspapers and magazines.

More than 750,000 copies of "Russendisko" have been sold in Germany, and the book has been translated into 16 languages. (In 2002, the English translation, "Russian Disco: Tales of Everyday Lunacy on the Streets of Berlin," was published by Ebury Press in Britain.) Critics praised Mr. Kaminer as one of the first immigrant authors to succeed in German mainstream literature.