Russian literature. A short introduction

Madame Bovary, but there is a direct connection between an image in the opening pages of Flaubert’s novel – Charles Bovary’s hideous hat standing for the inconsequential life remarked by the author alone – and the insignificant stubborn burdock that Tolstoy’s narrator notices at the beginning of Hadji Murat. During the eighteenth century, Russians had been haunted by fears that their literature was too imitative, too dominated by translations. Such fears were replaced during the nineteenth century by pride in native achievements, but receptivity to French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian literature continued. Even writers who had only a poor knowledge of Western languages absorbed foreign material avidly. Dostoevsky’s novels were as indebted to Dickens as they were to Gogol. Though the writer detested the real England when he visited in 1862, that only confirmed his adulation for Dickens. After 1917, love of foreign literature survived not only the bitterness of exile, but the cultural isolation endured by writers who stayed behind in the Soviet Union. Anna Akhmatova’s admiration for T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, and Joseph Brodsky’s for John Donne, are only two of the better-known relationships with Western literature; a more unexpected instance is Marina Tsvetaeva’s enthusiasm for the best-selling American novelist Pearl S. Buck.

By no means all the commentators who shaped Anglophone readers’ views of Russian literature were unaware of the artistic affinity of

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‘Russian’ and ‘Western’ traditions. Many were authors themselves – indeed, the most impressive English- language interpretations of Russian literature have tended to be literary rather than critical. The short stories of Chekhov, in particular, left marks on the work of writers in English such as Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and William Trevor. Chekhov’s stories were models of how to contrive small-scale narratives that almost evaded the onward drive of plot, and captured a character’s entire world in a few moments that were both exemplary and elusive. Chekhov’s writing accorded well with Anglophone admiration for unnoticeable virtuosity (it is not for nothing that the term ‘craft’ also means ‘stealth’). But if greatness in prose involves hardly seeming to write literature at all, then some of Pushkin’s narratives – The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), Dubrovsky (1832–3), or The Captain’s Daughter (1836) – are likely to disappoint. Here, plot matters a great deal, and the need to provide a resolute ending seems uppermost. In addition, Pushkin’s closeness to French models (Chateaubriand’s Rene or Constant’s Adolphe, the poetry of Parny and Lamartine) does him no service in Anglophone culture, which has traditionally equated ‘French’ with ‘trite, superficial, and pretentious’.

To be fair, Pushkin’s strangeness is not something felt only by foreigners. Russian commentators have remarked it too. Those of pro-Western sympathies have considered it a sign of Pushkin’s unique status as a truly civilized person in a society of shameful backwardness; for nationalists, on the other hand, it has been a signal tragedy, a symbol of the alienation of intellectuals from the ‘Russian people’. The philosopher Gustav Shpet, a late follower of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles (the movement that arose in the 1830s in order to lament the harm that had been done to Russian culture by Westernization), saw Pushkin as ‘an accident’. His writing was ‘precisely his writing, the writing of a genius who did not emerge from the Russian national spirit’. But whatever their feelings about Pushkin’s expression (or not)

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of the ‘national spirit’, Russians universally acknowledge him as a master of the language. It is worth pausing a moment to consider why.

All Pushkin’s writings, from his warmly intimate and at times shockingly immediate letters, to his most considered, reserved, and formal lyric poems, particularly exemplify two characteristics that have a peculiar weight in Russian literary culture, even if they are by no means unique to that culture. The first is an intense sensitivity to stylistic register, to the connotations of words. This sensitivity homes in particularly on the opposition between words derived from Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of Russian Orthodoxy, and those of native Russian origin. Zlatyi and zolotoi are translatable only as ‘golden’, mladyi and molodoi only as ‘young’, yet the words are as different in terms of their associations as the English words ‘leathern’ and ‘leather’, ‘burthern’ and ‘burden’. Pushkin’s poetry is peculiarly sophisticated in its blending of these and other stylistic levels. It is also subtle in its exploitation of formal features – metre, assonance, and alliteration. An extraordinary level of stylistic density is offset by a level of compression that exploits to the full the resources offered by Russian grammar, which allows a good deal more ellipsis (the omission of words that a reader can be expected to supply by inference) than is ordinarily possible in English. Pushkin’s poetry works both with and against the norms of literary Russian. It shares the adventurous playfulness of all good writing in the language, yet at the same time keeps a tight hold upon the rhetorical expansion that is natural to a literary tradition where creative repetition, the so-called ‘weaving of words’, is actively sought rather than avoided – as it tends to be avoided in mandarinic British or American usage, as opposed to Irish, African, or British or American vernacular, English. This sense of working against linguistic norms is one reason why the Russian critic and theorist Roman Jakobson asserted that modern readers wanting to understand Pushkin ‘must wholly abandon ordinary aesthetic criteria’.

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One could, then, say of Pushkin, as the playwright Sheridan did of Horace: ‘To give the literal meaning, it should be in verse’. But metrical paraphrases of Pushkin are rather apt to sound like the work of some justly forgotten nineteenth-century poetaster:

The woods have doff’d their garb of purply gold; The faded fields with silver frost are steaming; Through the pale clouds the sun, reluctant gleaming, Behind the circling hills his disk hath roll’d.

This version of the opening lines of ‘19 October 1825’, translated by Thomas Budge Shaw, teacher of English at the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum (the school Pushkin attended) in the 1840s, was highly regarded in its time. But now it sounds unbearably fusty. This is not Shaw’s fault. He is strictly accurate in metrical terms; though inventing some ‘pale clouds’ and ‘steaming frost’, he closely follows the sense of the Russian too, which is quite an achievement. The problem is that linguistic taste has altered in the English-speaking world as it has not in Russia. Though Pushkin’s style in this piece has a formality that recalls eighteenth-century elegies, the Russian words rendered by ‘hath roll’d’ or ‘doff’d’ are still standard in colloquial speech, not mothballed by centuries of non-use. ‘Purply-gold’ is a convincing rendition of the emotional and highly-coloured adjective bagryanyi (crimson: the word bagryanitsa is used for silk brocade in that colour), but it provokes dyspepsia in Anglophone readers of poetry who have swallowed (as many have) T. S. Eliot’s strictures against high-style poeticisms. Given that the phrases that most move Russian readers are likely to strike English-speaking ones as particularly laughable or tasteless, it follows that translations admired by native speakers of Russian tend to go down badly with native speakers of English, and vice versa. Anglophone translators who followed Joseph Brodsky’s advice, and rendered Mandelstam in the manner of late Yeats, would be unlikely to enjoy the warm esteem of their contemporaries. Even if Pushkin had (as with Rabelais and Urquhart) been translated by a brilliant contemporary, the translation would probably strike modern

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readers as disappointing. The reaction of Rebecca West, used as the chapter epigraph, typifies the frustration of those who have tried to read Pushkin in English and not been able to get the point.

But one should not get too melodramatic about this. Pious sentiments about the untranslatability of Pushkin seem to be a genre requirement in every introduction to the writer: they are as true, but also as false, as platitudes