Languor Management

Katorga i Ssylka

Sticking with the Gulag theme that seems to have developed, here's a link to an interesting from from Lyndon over at Scraps of Moscow about the journal of the Publishing House of the All-Union Society of Political Prisoners and Internal Exiles:

It is hard to believe such a publication would have been imaginable 10 years after this 1927 issue came out, although tales of time spent in exile remained important parts of the official, myth-making biographies of Lenin and Stalin even as the Soviet government sent more people into forced labor and internal exile than the Tsars ever dreamed of. In fact, Google helped me to ascertain that this journal was published from 1921 to 1935, which confirms (if anyone doubted it) the profound hypocrisy of the Soviet government at the time - a government which sent millions to the GULag system of prison camps while still supporting the publication of "Katorga i Ssylka," the pages of which were a venue for old revolutionaries to rehash the unpleasantness of Tsarist Russia's system of forced labor - some of them, no doubt, would later have the chance to see firsthand how the Soviet version compared.

In the Main Line of the Attack

Vasili Grossman, as a war correspondent, was an eye-witness to and participant in the historic Battle of Stalingrad. Years later, in his novels For A Just Cause and Life and Fate, Grossman would present a somewhat controversial view of that battle. But in 1942, his views were less ambiguous, celebrating the unquestionable courage of Soviet troops and highlighting the horrors of this hideous war. His article In The Main Line of Attack describes life and death in a division of Siberian troops who had to bear the brunt of the most frenzied period of Nazi attacks on Stalingrad, withstanding 80 straight hours of bombardment, and more.

Measured, indulgent and benevolent

What's this? Yet another Boris Akunin mystery?! Sigh...this takes me back to my summer in Los Angeles where I spent my days reading either Akunin on the beach or Byron on the lanai....sigh...Anyhow, Andrey Kurkov (author of The Penguin) review's Akunin's The Turkish Gambit for the Guardian.

It is impossible to ignore the cosmopolitan spread of Akunin's characters. Just about every European, and many a non-European, nationality is represented, and it is usually the non-Russians who are Fandorin's chief suspects. Such is the case in Turkish Gambit, where an Irishman, a Frenchman and a Romanian are suspected. In The Winter Queen, the chief criminal turns out to be Lady Esther, an Englishwoman who runs a Masonic lodge-style orphanage for grooming the world's future masters. In Turkish Gambit, the villain, Turkish super-agent Anvar-effendi, whose plan is thwarted by the shrewd Fandorin, is one of Lady Esther's fold. And this Anvar-effendi is definitely a Bond type: a sly, agile, resourceful, intellectual playboy. Again an interesting parallel unfolds: international evil arises in Russia, but under the control of international agents.

Andrew Bromfeld's excellent translation is as enjoyably dynamic as the original. It succeeds in conveying the writer-patriot's message to his many Russian readers that, in her pre-revolutionary past, Russia was surrounded by enemies, unable to trust even her allies, and that this is still the case. Thus Akunin's novels afford the English reader not only some fine entertainment, but also a conscious vision of something that Akunin's Russian fans probably access only on the level of the subconscious.

Speaking of the Gulag Archipelago

From Anne Applebaum's The Gulag: A History

Catering for the intellectual crowd

Novy Mir, the first Russian journal to print Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, celebrates its 80th birthday this month:

In 1991, the journal's print run skyrocketed to a staggering 2.7 million copies -- an almost absurd number for a literary publication, but illustrative of the period's euphoric sense of freedom. Over the next decade Novy Mir relied heavily on printing previously banned books, attracting readers' attention with such masterpieces as Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago," Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" and George Orwell's "1984."

A world of Ronald Reagan, space shuttles, Bill Cosby, the Rolling Stones, Red Army Factions

Mark Spitzer reviews The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews by Jean Gent and translated by Jeff Fort in the Center for Book Culture's Context:

From Genet’s highly polemical observations on the Vietnam War, to his involvement with the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, to his witnessing the aftermath of massacred refugees in Jordan, the genius of Genet employs the “language of the enemy” to comment on issues such as terrorism, civil rights, and the “poetic emotion” of revolution in a world he will soon be leaving. A world of Ronald Reagan, space shuttles, Bill Cosby, the Rolling Stones, Red Army Factions, computers, and a future he examines through a prophetic social condemnation resounding with a rare poetic omniscience that is now accessible in English—and has nothing to do with the category of “gay studies” stamped on the back of this book (an area Genet has been pigeonholed in due to the mass audience of his erotic novels); for these are “human studies” written by the last link in a chain of visionary poets, and (if we’re lucky—which is unlikely) the first link in a new chain of visionary journalists.

A new source of literary legitimacy

From Nipposkiss:

An interesting bit from The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova, pp. 169. This statement lends some creedence to the notion that what we are doing by 'literary blogging' essentialy could help bring more autonomous literatures to the fore, especially when covering independent publishers and marginalized writers dismissed by the publishing giants. I'd suggest picking up this book if you haven't already.

The second pole consists of commercial literary production, associated by definition with the least autonomous sectors of publishing, which today excercises all the more attraction as it manages to imitate the achievements of a certain narrative modernity. American (or Americanized) large-scale literary production, having effortlessly succeeded in making articles of domestic consumption pass for "international" literature, poses a grave threat to the independence of the world of letters as a whole. What is being played out today in every part of world literary space is not a rivalry between France and the United States or Great Britain but rather a struggle between the commercial pole, which in each country seeks to impose itself as a new source of literary legitimacy through the diffusion of writing that mimics the style of the modern novel, and the autonomous pole, which finds itself under seige not only in the United States and France but throughout Europe, owing to the power of international publishing giants. The American avant-garde is no less threatened today than the European avant-garde.

Their grotesque blindness often led to swift poetic justice

Two new books on the gulag, Tomasz Kizny's Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917-1990 and Oleg V. Khlevniuk's The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, "make some headway toward explaining how passing politics prevented the gulag from achieving the notoriety of the Nazi concentration camps or Cambodia's killing fields."

While their approaches are starkly different, both Khlevniuk and Kizny have made it their goal to slow down and reverse the world's growing indifference to communist violence. Khlevniuk, senior researcher at the Russian State Archive, provides a tightly knit record of confidential memos, official resolutions, individual testimonies and tabulated statistics. His is an academic narrative, while Kizny's approach is primarily artistic, defined by its hundreds of large-format, black-and-white landscapes. A Polish photographer and journalist, Kizny combines archival portraits of inmates and guards with contemporary images of the camps as they look today and accounts by survivors of their experiences.

And let us not forget Anne Applebaum's The Gulag: A History.

A crib for the original

Timothy C. Westphalen reviews Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's new translation of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls for the St. Petersburg Times:

Their translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels have won numerous awards, including the PEN translation prize, and their version of Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" hit first place on the New York Times bestseller list last June after talk show host Oprah Winfrey assigned it to her book club. Indeed, current theory holds that a translation is best rendered in tandem by a native speaker of the original language such as Volokhonsky, who handles the intricacies and nuances of the Russian, and a native speaker of the target language such as Pevear, who shapes the text in English.

Despite the awards and theories, however, discriminating critics have taken the pair to task, particularly in matters of style and overall artistry. Some of these shortcomings became apparent in their earlier Dostoevsky translations, where the author's original polyphonic narration, which can switch from rhapsodic to vulgar to lyrical in the space of several paragraphs, was leveled out to an even flow. If these concerns are already palpable in the Dostoevsky translations, they are magnified in renderings of writers for whom style is even more important. Simply put, Pevear and Volokhonsky's Dostoevsky is better than their Tolstoy.

"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.

[Spaceeba, Maud!]

Spend all day crapping raisins

NPR's Renee Montagne talks to Christopher J. Moore about his his new book, In Other Words, on words that "defy easy translation into English." Three of which sums my pathetic existence up fairly quickly:

litost [lee-tosht] (noun)

This is an untranslatable emotion that only a Czech person would suffer from, defined by Milan Kundera as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery." Devices for coping with extreme stress, suffering, and change are often special and unique to cultures and born out of the meeting of despair with a keen sense of survival.

esprit de I'escalier [es-pree de less-ka/-iay] (idiom)

A witty remark that occurs to you too late, literally on the way down the stairs. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations defines esprit de l'escalier as, "An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one's way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room."

korinthenkacker [core-in-ten-cuck-er] (noun)

A "raisin pooper" -- that is, someone so taken up with life's trivial detail that they spend all day crapping raisins. You can spot these types a mile off -- it's that irritating pen pusher or filing fanatic whose favorite job is tidying up the stationery cupboard.

[Spaceeba, Rebecca!]