Languor Management

New First Unexpected

Hi, all. Just a programming note here: I've been moving my Russian/literary content over to this newish blog: New First Unexpected. I still have hopes for getting Languor Management up and running again, but I've been focusing on some longer form pieces for wider venues and just haven't had much time to update. But please keep coming back! For now, please visit the new site and check out my latest pieces at The Rumpus and Bomb magazine:

Crown of Sonnets, A review of Tin House Book's Rasskazy: New Fiction for a New Russia (The Rumpus)

Big Faces: The Cool Kids of the Russian Avant-Garde  (Bomb)

Bourgeois fog

   

“I’ve just been told about the Krupskaya article. Poor me, poor me! So it’s poverty again?I'm writing a response to Krupskaya. My hands are trembling. I can't sit on my chair; I have to lie down <...> [From Diary: 1901-1969: Kornei Chukovsky]

 “Chukovitis,” an article by N.K. Krupskaya that appeared in the February 1, 1928, edition of Pravda, characterized the acclaimed children’s writer, critic, and translator Kornei Chukovsky’s “The Crocodile” as “bourgeois fog,” and accused him of “distorting the facts about animals and plants” (anthropomorphism), of failing to provide a proper class perspective, and of smuggling reactionary ideas into seemingly innocent tales.  Krupskaya, the head of the Soviet GUS Commission on Children’s Literature and Lenin’s widow, also took issue with his Nekrasov studies, going so far as to maintain that “Chukovsky hated Nekrasov.”

 

It’s not like the “The Crocodile”—in which a cigarette-smoking, German-speaking crocodile strolls down the streets of St. Petersburg—was a new book. It had already been published in 1917, and had reportedly sold some 500,000 copies between then and 1928. Krupskaya’s article came at a time when the story was being prepared for reissue and her office insisted on reading all children’s books before they were released for publication. Nonetheless, as a direct consequence of the article, all of Chukovsky’s works for children were summarily banned.

“I’m forced into silence as a critic, because RAPP [Russian Association of Proletarian Writers] has taken over criticism and they judge by Party card rather than talent. They’ve made me a children’s writer. But the shameful way they’ve treated my children’s books—the persecution, the mockery, the suppression, and finally the censors’ determination to ban them—has forced me to abandon them as well.” [From Diary, 1901-1969: Kornei Chukovsky]

In a letter to the editor appearing in the March 14, 1928, edition of Pravda, Maxim Gorky took issue with Krupskaya’s criticism of Chukovsky’s work, recalling Lenin’s own favorable opinion of Chukovsky as a Nekrasov scholar. According ti Gorky, Lenin characterized Chukovsky’s scholarly work as “good and sensible.” The letter halted the baiting of Chukovsky’s book about the great poet, but “the battle over the children’s tale” went on for years.

On a personal note: When I was in college, the instructor of my introductory Russian course, who did not look unlike a young Krupskaya herself, became enraged when she found that none of her American’s pupils had ever heard of Chukovsky’s “The Crocodile,” saying something like: “Even very young Russian children know this tale by heart!” When it was pointed out to her that we were American students in our first Russian course, she said, “It makes no difference—you will learn the story in two weeks!”

Letter from an honest citizen

The comrades at SovLit.com have posted a new translation of a Mikhail Zoshchenko story. Hooray!

The narrator of "Honest Citizen", his speech somewhat impaired by drink, attempts an official-sounding denunciation of moonshiners. ..not because they're producing an illegal product, but because they won't let him have any on credit.

But, well, if it comes to that, I wasn’t tormenting the poodle; I was just swinging the dish.

Cause I got more rhymes than Joseph Brodsky

The Bookslut on Eugene Ostashevsky's: The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza from Ugly Duckling Presse:

Ostashevsky’s work is best when he follows his natural instinct for rhyme and rhythm, and especially when he turns to zany, historically-rich references: I should have known they were Basques/ Roland says to DJ Spinoza/ By the looks of their casques/ By the widths of their masks/ I should have known they were Basques. There’s a moment, for example, when Andrew Marvell wakes up: AM: Boy, that’s what I call a snooze! That felt, like, thirty thousand years. Hm, and my pants are stained. (Hee! And, ew.) There’s some punk-rock bravado that reminds me, in a good way, of The Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso was Never Called an Asshole”: Yes, I’m a radical rapscallion/ cruising around in my Spanish galleon… There’s a satisfying rap about Brodsky and Trotsky -- It’s me that stalks by the zoccolo… cause I got more rhymes than Joseph Brodsky/ I got more rhymes than Leon Trotsky -- that ends with the DJ getting drop-kicked in the head. And there are some truly powerful conversations between the DJ and the Lord God, who needs Spinoza to convince him that he exists.  Kierkegaard shows up, lest you were worried he wouldn’t.

The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza is a loveable little book, with fitting illustrations by Eugene Timerman. I’ll ignore the fact that it’s part of the Ugly Duckling Presse’s Eastern European Poets series and, I’ll ignore the fact that this is unmistakably Russian poetry, and, when someone asks me which young(ish) American poets I like, I’ll recommend Eugene Ostashevsky.  I’m sure DJ Spinoza could find a zany way to rationalize this. After all, There are so many axioms/ there is not a single proof. And, Is there a beginning that is not also an end? Twenty-three years of school and I don’t know whether ‘this is my foot’ is a true statement.

And if you visit Ugly Duckling's site, why not pick up a Transrationalist t-shirt for a friend?

The Soviet Union's Russell and Mary Wright...

Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova, "the first designers":

 Both artists felt strongly that ideology should form the lifeblood of their work, and nothing shows this more than Rodchenko's design for a Workers' Club, which he exhibited in the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition in Paris in 1925. Tate Modern will have a reconstruction of the club, direct from his designs. This was design with function that went beyond utilitarianism: it was created to enable leisure, an essential tenet of Lenin's revolutionary ideal. Labourers should use their free time outside of work relaxing – but within a context that was productive, communal, and with design at its centre. As such, there was to be a Lenin Corner of the club with Constructivist magazines and a screen on which could be projected signs. This was typical of the Constructivist movement's approach to art, as they branched out to graphic design, theatre stage sets and posters. This Workers' Club was a theatre of sorts, where each worker would play his part.

Hankering for a Soviet food poster?

Yum. [Spaceeba, Amos]

Sidestepping realism

    

Anthology Film Archives (New York City) seems to be holding something of an Eisenstein festival:

STRIKE / STACHKA
1925, 106 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available.
Eisenstein’s interest in the Freudian father complex drives this psychological scenario in which non-actors step forward to acknowledge the viewer, illustrating Eisenstein’s desire to penetrate to the heart of cinema, sidestepping realism by “being real.”
Upcoming Showings: Saturday Jan 31 4:45 PM

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN / BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN
1925, 74 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. With English intertitles.
Eisenstein’s constructivist montage and rigid, super-structured plot share equal weight with a seemingly spontaneous, inflamed emotion.
Upcoming Showings: Saturday Jan 31 8:45 PM, 7:00 PM

OCTOBER / OKTYABR
1928, 143 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available.
Eisenstein celebrates the baroque in OCTOBER, as opposed to the Greek classicism of POTEMKIN, disappointing contemporary audience expectations. "Intellectual cinema" starts here.
Upcoming Showings: Sunday Feb 1 7:30 PM

OLD AND NEW
1929, 120 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available.
Known also as THE GENERAL LINE, this is one of Eisenstein’s least-known films. With it, he developed and perfected his theories of “mise-en-cadre,” using the montage of characters in the foreground and background to conjure meanings, and “overtonal montage,” bringing silent film to its zenith.
Upcoming Showings: Sunday Feb 1 5:00 PM

Strange fruit

This story reminds me of my own office, which is disguised as a laundry room in a *garden* apartment tucked away in the Polish-occupied Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Visitors would come to pretend to buy fruit and leave with pamphlets of dissension to distribute:

The blue, discolored facade at 55 Lesnaya Ulitsa says "Kalandadze's Wholesale Caucasian Fruits Trade," but no lemons have been sold there for more than 70 years. Hidden behind the store is a little-known museum dedicated to what was once a secret printing house.

The Museum of the Underground Printing House 1905-06, a filial of the Museum of Contemporary History, gives visitors a glimpse of the conspiratorial atmosphere of tsarist times when the socialist opposition rallied for reform using the written word to call for strikes and argue for human rights, free press and revolution.

Satire on the fetters of serfdom

Chris Lethem on Marian Schwartz’s "lively" translation of Oblomov (an LM favorite) for Bookforum:

Like all good aristocrats, he has a first-class liberal education and seized in his student years on “the pleasures of lofty thoughts.” But such intoxication faded almost as quickly as it descended: “Serious reading exhausted him. The great thinkers could stir no thirst in him for speculative truth.” Much the same convulsions of ardor and entropy mark Oblomov’s adult life—except entropy now has the upper hand. Absurdly, as his estate succumbs to neglect and declining income, he envisions grand, abstract reforms: “a brand-new plan that conformed to the demands of the era, a plan to organize his estate and administer his peasants.” But since these ideas involve forsaking his dust-filled apartment, Oblomov remains on-site, fretting, sleeping, eating, and sleeping some more.

The last sentence sounds unnervingly like my writing career.

When in the starving regions

 In the heady days of 1992 after Russia's new leader, Boris Yeltsin, declaimed that the secret KGB and Soviet archives should be open to scholars and publishers, Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, flew to Russia to secure the rights to publish selected material from the archives for YUP's Annals of Communism project. Brent's memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives, according to Martin Walker for the New York Times Book Review, reveals as much about the grim realities of post-Soviet life and bureaucracy as it does about the archives themselves.

Through Yeltsin’s wretched early years of poverty and dislocation in the 1990s and through the sleeker but more menacing times of Putin’s oil-enriched restoration of traditional authority, Yale University Press has published more than a score of important books. It has recently published newly discovered stenographic records of some 30 Politburo meetings in the 1930s and ’40s, and it is working on Stalin’s personal archive.

Brent is among the first to stress that none of this could have been achieved without the brave and honest work of Russian archivists and scholars in the Soviet period and after. He relates one haunting anecdote of a respected and elderly historian who just two years ago published a straightforward study that included the historically true statement that Red Army troops had occupied Lithuania even before Hitler's invasion of 1941. Officially ­threatened with the loss of his apartment and pension, and retaliation against his daughter’s career if he dared repeat such allegations, he tells Brent: “It is a return to the 1970s. There is nothing to do about it.”

Different Questions, My Dream, My Dog Thoughts

Some lines end with something like a fish hook--a "question mark" refers to a question.

Me? I wonder about five questions. Why Zina's daddy says that his eyes "popped out of his head." They haven't gone anywhere, I say. Why does he say such rubbish? I crept up to the cupboard, sat in front of the mirror, and bulged my eyes out as far as they could go. Woof! My eyes didn't go anywhere--they stayed right in place.

Are there any fox terriers living on the moon? What do they eat? And do they howl at the earth like I sometimes do at the moon? and where do they disappear to when the moon goes out of sight for many days? Micky, Micky! Someday you'll go crazy!

Why do fish swim into an empty net when it's clearly a trap? Since you're not able to live above water, just sit quietly in your pond, I say. I really pity them! In the morning, they blow bubbles up to the surface, and in the evening they're digested in a dark human stomach--or worse! The mean cat takes them away...

Why was Zina's nanny a brunette yesterday, but today her hair looks like golden straw? Zina giggled, but I was frightened and thought, "Well, Micky, thank God you are a dog." Who would marry such a parrot? Black on Tuesday, orange on Wednesday, and on Thursday--blue with green stripes...Foo! It's getting hot in here.

How come, when I act badly, they put a muzzle on me, but when the gardener gets drunk as a mad bull twice a week they do nothing about it? Zina's uncle says that the gardener is shell-shocked, so we must indulge him. By all means! I will learn what shell-shocked means, then I will become shell-shocked, too. Then they'll have to indulge me. I'm going to chomp on a bone (Where did I bury it? I'll never tell!), then I'll write some more.

--From "Micky the Fox Terrier's Diary", a children's story by Sasha Chernyi, translated by me.

When No One Is Home

All morning long, the moon glows red,
Everyone is gone--I'm all alone.
And it's excellent! It's wonderful!
It's pretty obvious:
I am the bravest of men.

To look at the moon, me and my cat Nonsense
Climbed up on the bed:
The Moon, our brother; the Wind, our uncle--
Now that's an uncle!
The Stars, our sister; the Sky, our mother...

I sing loudly--loudly!
Loudly, loudly I sing,
So that in the darkness
A bear isn't drawn to us
By a ribbon of smoke from the stove

I'm not afraid of rats or the bogyman--
I'll stick a poker in his nose!
Nor of a crippled devil with his cane,
Not even of vipers--
Not of anybody or anything!

In the sky, a cloud has curls,
The curls of a lamb.
I'm not a boy, I'm an elephant
Or a tiger cub
Dozing in the reeds...

I wait adn wait, In vain I wait--
The handbell has grown dumb...
Moon, my brother, red moon...
Clear moon,
Why have you grown so pale?

1921

A draft translation of a children's poem by Sasha Chernyi

So as to create a sense of posturing

The Bookslut on Dmitry Golynko's As It Turned Out (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Rebecca Bella, with Simona Schneider for Ugly Duckling Press):

Poised within a matte black cover are poems that slice, as scalpels sharpened by years of linguistic oversimplification, at the postmodernist scab that formed after the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. With “brutal naturalism” and the reassemblage of stumbled-upon things, Golynko’s incongruous fragments of an equally alien experience come into being as a clinical experiment of sorts: its function resultant upon the “debasement of the soul.” As such, Westerners seeking explanation in Golynko’s chapbook will not find it, for to a large extent the illusionary scenes of a society caught in “the speech of criminality” continue to resound in a pitch that remains as foreign as the original language of this translated collection. Try as we may, our “emery board won’t admit [us] into [Golynko’s] photograph.” And yet, this unflinching non-admittance proves as stimulating as it is cruel.

Whereas “Sashenka” may expound the “dandyism, camp and mauvais goût” of Golynko’s early postmodern writing, his conveyance of human behavior as mechanized manifests most significantly in “Elementary Things”:

it has an increate, morbid, inanimate nature
the elementary thing is always mimicking something
rarely itself, more often the papal nuncio, satrap
old father superior or stepmother maniac
usually monsters or cultural figures
it sometimes imitates an immobilized idol
cadaver tricked out in sackcloth
professor basking in auditoria
at times struts like a hussar, fans itself with a dolman
wears a cossack coat, on the rim of a reservoir

Autumn

Autumn. Boredom. The wind whips.
A light rain on the window drips.
My mind longs; my heart whines;
And my soul for something pines.

- Kozma Prutkov (Translated by Mikhailych)

The beet goes on

Emily Gould for Russia! magazine on why Russian American writers are so "hot" right now.

Overkill or no, the fact is that a generation of Russian-American writers have come of age and begun to document their experiences in fiction, much of which contains autobiographical elements.

An old story, but I've only just come across it because my life is so full and satisfying.