Russian Reading Challenge 2008

Hello

Thanks for adding me to this challenge.
So far I've decided to read:
Doctor Zhivago
War & Peace (which I've never finished)
Gulag by Anne Applebaum (non-fiction)

Tali, The Miracle of Chegem by Fazil Iskander

The story opens on the day that Tali, the beautiful fifteen year old daughter of Uncle Sandro, wins a contest for tobacco workers in her village in a far-away part of the Soviet-Union, Abkhazia. Today this is a disputed part of what is now the independent state of Georgia in the Caucasus. Since the story takes place in about 1936-1937, Tali wins the first ever grammophone player in the village. With it, Tali wins the complete set of records of "The speech of Comrade Stalin I.V. at the Extraordinary National Congress of the Soviets of 25 November 1936 dedicated to the project of the Constitution of the Soviet Union".

After the competition Tali disappears: she has eloped with her lover Bagrat, which of course turns the entire village upside down. Eloping or (if the bride didn't want to marry the man in question) kidnapping was a common practice in the Caucasus in those days and one that still occurs from time to time if the parents (usually those of the bride) are against the marriage. It is also in some cases a way of avoiding the huge expenses of a wedding. I know that eloping still happens in Armenia from time to time, especially outside of the capital.

The story is told with humor, a sort of wonder and hints of irony. It almost feels as if the story takes place in some fantastical fairy-tale country, though one or two hints of the "real world" are there for the attentive reader. The story reminded me more of the writing of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century than of the Russian literature of the twentieth.

This one story was translated into Dutch a couple of years ago and published in a series of short stories in literally pocket-size (about 10 by 7 cms) hardcover books with thick cream-colored paper and a beautiful dust jacket (unfotunately, the only picture of the cover I could find, is rather blurry as you can see above). The story is part of a cycle of short stories called Sandro of Chegem, centered around Uncle Sandro and Chegem, the village where he lives. I have never read the entire collection, but based on this one story I would love to. Apparently it is available in English as I've seen it at Amazon when I searched for more information about book and writer. A review of Sandro of Chegem is here.

Other stories by Fazil Iskander are available online here and a collection of more links to his works is here (many of the links mentioned point to online versions of his stories in Russian, but there are some English links too).

Myrthe
Crossposted at my own blog The Armenian Odar Reads

Gogol's The Overcoat - a rather peculiar sound

Poor Akaky Akakievich. First, his name is ridiculous (it seems to have the same scatological associations in Russian that it does in English, plus it’s a humble saint’s name). Second, he himself is ridiculous. He’s a government clerk, a sort of anti-Bartleby. Akaky is barely more than a human photocopier. He takes copying work home with him because he has no other interests. Poor Akaky.

Akaky needs a new overcoat – this is winter in St. Petersburg, so that's no small thing. After some scraping, and some luck, he finds the money to order a new coat. When he does, his life changes, everything changes, in expectation of the new overcoat:

"His whole existence had in a sense become fuller, as though he had married, as though some other person were present with him, as though he were no longer alone but an agreeable companion had consented to walk the path of life hand in hand with him, and that companion was none other than the new overcoat with its thick padding and its strong, durable lining." (317)

As though he had married!

By the time Akaky acquires his new coat, we’re at page 16 of a 31 page story. Nothing whatsoever has happened besides this: a clerk gets a new coat. If the story were merely a moral parable (which it is, in part) or a ghost story (ditto), Gogol could have begun the story here. But then we would miss this horse:

"Whatever Akaky Akakievich looked at, he saw nothing but his clear, evenly written lines, and it was only perhaps when a horse suddenly appeared from nowhere and placed its head on his shoulder, and with its nostrils blew a real gale on his cheek, that he would notice that he was not in the middle of his writing, but in the middle of the street." (308)

And this tailor's wife:

"Since we have now mentioned the wife, it will be necessary to say a few words about her, too, but unfortunately not much is known about her, except indeed that Petrovich had a wife and that she wore a cap and not a kerchief, but apparently she could not boast of beauty; anyway none but soldiers of the guard peered under her cap when they met her, and they twitched their mustaches and gave vent to a rather peculiar sound." (311)

And a dozen other Gogolian delights. Those soldiers and their mustaches are a sort of Gogol specialty. They're not characters in any sense, just apart of the description of the tailor's wife, but Gogol somehow invests them with a little life of their own.

The Overcoat is, along with The Nose,* a pinnacle of Gogol’s art.

I would be remiss if I failed to point readers to the fine description of The Overcoat at Lizok's Bookshelf.

References are to the University of Chicago Press Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol.

Also posted at the Wuthering Expectations.

* And Dead Souls, and The Government Inspector.

Gogol's The Portrait - Was this also a dream?

Nikolai Gogol's The Portrait (1842, though there’s an earlier version as well) is about the mysyterious effect of a portrait on two artists. In one case, talent is corrupted, in the other, exalted. Whenever I come across a story about a painter, or composer, or whatnot, I assume that the author is really working out his ideas about writing. It's what Gogol is doing here, anyway.

A young, brilliant, impoverished painter buys a strange, compelling portrait. Through an obscure circumstance - a ghost? a prophetic dream? - the portrait leads the artist to a great sum of money. Will it surprise anyone to learn that this leads to new problems?

So goes part one. The sequel, or prequel, returns to the beginning but pushes the same ideas to an entirely different conclusion.

Gogol's prose sparkles. At the picture shop:

"A winter scene with white trees, an absolutely red sunset that looked like the glow of a conflagration, a Flemish peasant with a pipe and a broken arm, more like a turkey cock in frills than a human being – such were usually their subjects." (252)

And here's the same sunset again, but real this time:

"The red glow of sunset still lingered over half the sky; the houses which faced the sunset were faintly illuminated by its warm light, while the cold blue light of the moon grew more powerful. More and more the artist began to glance at the sky, which was shimmering in a faint, translucent, uncertain light, and almost at the same moment there burst from his mouth the words, 'What a delicate tone!' and the words, 'Damn it! How upsetting!'” (256)

And that moon returns in the great dream scene. The man in the portrait come to life and reveal a secret. Then that the dream is followed by another dream, and then another - a vertiginous scene.

Gogol is writing at a high level here. Was anyone else writing with as sure a hand at this time (early 1840s)? And this isn’t even Gogol at his best – see tomorrow for that.

References are to the University of Chicago Press Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol.

Also posted at Wuthering Expectations.

The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy

Although this post begins with a review of a book I read for my Book Club a few months ago, it contains a little known work by Tolstoy which I found extremely interesting:

WINNER 2001 - Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award - Fiction Book of the Year

FINALIST 2000 - Governor General's Literary Awards -

Fiction WINNER 2000 - Scotiabank Giller Prize

NOMINEE 2001 - Trillium Book Award

WINNER 2001 - Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award - Author of the Year

WINNER 2001 - Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award - Fiction Book of the Year

This is absolutely, positively, without a shadow of a doubt, the MOST depressing book I have ever read. In my life. Ever. Every time something horrible happens, and you're crying in your chair waiting for something good to happen, something worse happens. And it goes like that until the very bitter end. You name it, it's there: poverty, death, despair, hopelessness, cutting, drunkenness, blackmail, thievery, hate. I think there's more, but that covers the main themes. Except for religion.

Several times in the novel, Tolstoy's short story, The Forged Coupon, was mentioned. I love Tolstoy. He is my favorite Russian author, and probably one of my favorite authors period. So, of course, I had to buy my own copy of The Forged Coupon having neither read it, nor heard of it, before.

Now, here is a book! The Forged Coupon starts in the same place as Mercy Among The Children. Basically. One crime begets another, and another, and another.

But, along the way, we encounter a woman of faith who believes in nonviolent resistance. Her very act of not defending herself before she is murdered so changes the criminal's viewpoint that he becomes a man of love instead of hate. Just the opposite of Mercy Among Children, where one crime begets another, and another, and another, until every one dies and no one ever finds any hope at all.

Least of all the children, who suffered from their parents' interpretation of nonviolent resistance: complete submission in the face of any evil they encounter.

I much prefer Tolstoy's point of view on this theme. ~Bellezza

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford World's Classics), translation by James E. Falen

had no idea what to expect with my first reading of Pushkin and perhaps that's why I felt a bit unsure at the beginning. I'd seen a ballet of "Onegin" a few years ago, so perhaps had other expectations due to that as well. And then I wondered if it was the translation; but I've since read of how it reads in Russian, and it seems the translation is just fine. Once I got in the swing of this formal style but very 'informal' words, I really enjoyed it.

This is really much more than...more I had no idea of what to expect with my first encounter of Pushkin, and perhaps that's partly why I felt a bit unsure at the beginning of Eugene Onegin.  I'd seen a wonderful ballet, Onegin, based on Pushkin's work, a few years ago, so perhaps had other expectations due to that as well. And then I wondered if it was the 'fault' of the  translation; but I've since read of how it reads in Russian, and it seems the translation is just fine. However, once I got in the swing of this formal rhyming style with very 'informal' words, I really enjoyed it.

This is really so much more than just a story of a man and a woman who can't click with each other at the right time. The narrator (who is -- and isn't -- Pushkin) is the main voice. He meditates on the nature of art; his own progression from poetry to prose; the roles that we take on (and that become us) from what we read and what we learn from our readings; and much more. The narrator is funny, and he is serious.

I would need to study and know much more to get everything I could out of this book.

Teresa

Vera Zasulich Biography

For my second book of the RRC I wanted something less daunting than W&P and selected the new biography of Vera Zasulich by Ana Siljak.  It is written in an engaging style that makes it easy to read and assimilate.  The basic question about the Russian terrorists of the 1870s is just what were they thinking?  Zasulich tried to murder an official for flogging someone she did not know. She was so committed to humane treatment that she was willing to kill. Then the jury acquitted her after just 30 minutes deliberation and she became a great celebrity, inspiring Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle etc. And inspiring a series of copycat assassination attempts that eventually murdered Alexander II, the most enlightened leader of Russia ever, who instituted the jury system, freedom of the press, abolition of serfdom. Vera did not approve of the later violence that she helped spark, but it was too late.  Just what were they thinking?  The book is really a group biography of the terrorists including the sinister Nechaev, who deliberately compromises her by sending her radical literature that the political police were sure to notice.  There are implications for the psychology of political martyrs in general, but Siljak wisely does not go there. She provides insights into 19th century Russian radicalism. I am still not sure what they were thinking. Elena D.

Solzhenitsyn's August 1914

I didn’t pay close attention when I got my copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 on ebay.  As it turned out, I bought the 1971 edition, which was published first in Paris, translated, as a novel-in-progress.  So what I read was something of a time capsule – this was the novel Solzhenitsyn was eager to release, and willing to publish tamizdat, during a time when he was under much persecution for his writings in the USSR.  There are chapters omitted, passages that don’t fully integrate into the narrative, and incongruous intertextual stuff – newspaper clippings, cinematic scriptings of scenes, and what appear to be historical excerpts from other sources.  I read his autobiography years ago, which was full of his concerns about his work being further censored or banned in Russia if it was read first in the West.  This novel could demonstrate a lot about the politics of the publishing industry in the USSR, if you looked at it closely enough. 

     The scholar in me wants to track down a copy of the completed, much expanded edition published in 1984, after Solzhenitsyn had been living in the USA for a number of years, and do a study of the differences, to really make sense of his meticulous and perfectly reasonable paranoia about tamizdat publishing.  In the end, though, I probably never will. Wikipedia tells me that the new edition is several hundred pages longer and is full of Solzhenitsyn’s musings about Lenin and Marx, which I’m just not up for reading.  Furthermore, the parts of the book that are more character driven I found lacking in the kind of authenticity I’ve found in other Solzhenitsyn novels, so I’m just not that concerned about finding out what happened.  The book certainly had its powerful moments and was educational for me as a historical novel bordering on nonfiction, but August 1914 was overly ambitious, and simply not as valuable a work of art as, say, Cancer Ward or Gulag Archipelago.

     The novel begins as Russia is preparing to enter into battle with Germany in WWI, with a typically Solzhenitsyn narrative that switches perspective every few chapters, from a peasant conscript to a recent military academy graduate to the wife of a wealthy draft-dodger.  Then the narrative settles into the battlefield, focusing on an interesting juxtaposition between Vorotyntsev, a shrewd, valiant colonel,  and Samsonov, a dottering, overwhelmed general.  Samsonov feels like his fellow generals are setting him up for failure, not giving him a chance to figure out a workable strategy; Vorotyntsev sees Samsonov as a man unworthy of leading and army, having risen in rank through seniority rather than merit.  It’s clear that, while Samsonov means well, he doesn’t understand war, and his clumsy maneuvering is disasterous for the Russian army.  An image develops of an army comprised of mostly untrained but strong, capable men who are forced by their incompetent leaders to march across the German landscape in senseless zigzags during the worst heat.  They’re not given ample time to rest or sleep, drinking water is in constant shortage, and they eat on an erratic schedule, whenever their supply trains manage to catch up with them (sometimes at midnight, just after they’ve finally gone to bed hungry).  For a little while, I was compelled.  But then Solzhenitsyn gets bogged down in hundreds of pages of meticulously described army maneuvers, abandoning his well drawn characters and working far too hard to make grandiose political statements about the tsarist institution’s colossal failure to recognize the twentieth century’s new and far more deadly form of warfare. 

     I gather these hundreds of pages were all quite historically interesting.  I could sense that Solzhenitsyn was drawing out terrible ironies as he detailed how the regiments marched hither and yon, all too often finding themselves in situations impossible to salvage.  Let me tell you, I’m a person who can stomach a lot from a hefty Russian tome, but this was just too much dry detail.  By the time he got back to his characters, I couldn’t see them as more than mouthpieces for Solzhenitsyn’s political agenda.  Characters in his better novels speak for themselves and present political themes naturally, without authorial puppet-mastery.  In the case of August 1914, I think Solzhenitsyn’s vision was simply too unwieldy.  My book’s dust jacket says that he considers his other novels “minor” compared to this one, simply “a result of the oddities of [his] life story.” But here’s the thing – his life took him to prison camps, Siberian cancer wards, remote Russian outposts, places we hear quite little about, really.  When he writes from his life experience, he is able to salvage the stories of people who would otherwise be crushed under “the red wheel” as he calls the Soviet machine in August 1914.  He seems unaware, ironically, that his talent is not in history or political theory – it is in the capturing of human details. 

   I do think, though, that there is value in reading a book like this.  Every author has such a project, a compelling idea that’s just too huge to be truly successful. Especially in this book’s unfinished state, I was really able to see how Solzhenitsyn’s writing process works.  I suspect he has to constantly reign himself in from tangents and cut pages by the dozen in the editing process.  But unless I happen upon it by chance, I’m not going to read the finished version, or any of the other books that comprise this series.  Next time I get an itch to read Solzhenitsyn, I’ll read First Circle.

-- Andrea

Generations of Winter by Vassily Aksyonov

Generations of Winter is a family history set in the Soviet Union spanning about twenty years, from 1925 till 1945 - the Stalinist era. I know, you're all thinking: "There she goes again, another book about Stalinist Russia." I admit, I am a bit on a Stalinist reading spree. That is coincidence, I am not doing it on purpose, though I do generally read a lot about Eastern Europe anyway. Somehow over the past year or so, I gathered a couple of books through which Joseph Stalin runs like a read thread. All these books are so far turning out to be excellent reads, Generations of Winter as well. This was a book that I had been trying to find in Dutch translation for years, but never could. A Dutch translation appeared at some point, but I guess it wasn't reprinted or something. Then some time last year I found out that an English translation is available in paperback. So that eventually ended up on my bookshelves.

The book tells the history of the Gradov family, Mary and Boris Gradov and their three children. Over time the children's spouses and children also enter the saga. Boris Gradov is one of the top surgeons in the Soviet Union and regularly counts the Communist Party's leaders and the country's leaders among his patients. He has to make some tough moral choices about the extent to which he will participate in the intrigues among the country's leaders to save his career and life. Mary is his Georgian wife. Their oldest son Nikita moves up the army's career rank unusually fast, until he is arrested and sent to the Gulag during the purges of the 1930s. Their daughter Nina is a poetry writer and is drawn to both ideological Party workers of the very wrong type and to a circle of poets. Over time her ideology fades as she has to work hard on simply surviving the years of the Great Terror. Finally, Boris and Mary's youngest son Kyrill is a staunch believer of the Communist ideology and starts to make a career within the Communist Party. Like his older brother, Kyrill ends up arrested during the purges as well. Boris and Mary in the meantime, try to keep their house a haven of peace during the turbulent Stalinist years.

Despite some flaws, I enjoyed this book enormously. While reading the book, I didn't feel terribly involved with the characters, they stayed at a distance, but I was still way too interested in what would happen to them, how they would fare. Or at least I thought I wasn't too involved in the characters...

I felt that there were a bit too many coincidental meetings and happenings in the book, especially those that involved American journalist Townsend Reston. He pops up from time to time and just happens to run into the main characters without of course knowing who they are or that and how they are related to each other. The opening scene in which this happens, worked very well for me, but other chance meetings, like with Boris Gradov on the Red Square or with Nina in the metro felt annoying to me.

I could also have done without the "Intermissions" in between the chapters. They didn't add anything to the story for me. Some intermissions I suppose, were meant to put the story of the Gradovs in a larger perspective, of other intermissions I have no clue what their point was. Even the first category was not really necessary I think, because the main story contained enough information.

Another thing that bugged me were the awkward English translations of slang and some of the conversations involving young adults. They felt strange, out of time and took the rhythm and flow away from my reading. Reading a passage like that would feel like a bump in the road that your car crosses too fast.

I had the strong feeling that the book was written for a non-Russian or a Western audience (though the book was originally written in Russian). At one point there was a passage about the family celebrating Christmas some time in the 1930s. First of all, I am just not sure how much Christmas was actually celebrated in those years, as before the start of the Second World War, religion was severely restricted and believers and priests were persecuted and churches blown up. It would seem a particularly risky thing to celebrate Christmas with a tree and all in those years. I also felt that this passage implied that Christmas was celebrated in December, which is definitely not the case in Russia: Christmas is celebrated on January 6, according to the Orthodox calendar. New Year was and still is celebrated as a much bigger holiday in Russia as a result of the position religion had in the communist era. Unfortunately I forgot to mark the passage and couldn't find it back later on. If anyone who reads this, can help me out about celebrating Christmas at the height of the Great Terror: please do leave a comment.

Finally, there was another thing that bugged me throughout the novel. None of the main female characters in the book carry the proper last name with the feminine ending. In Russian a woman's surname almost always (there are exceptions) has another ending. Thus, Nina and Mary's last name should really be Gradova instead of Gradov. It isn't, they're last name is Gradov. When Nina gets married, her married last name and that of her daughter from this marriage also keep the masculine ending Kitaigorodsky instead of Kitaigorodskaya. The names of other, minor female characters do have the proper feminine ending. Either be consistently wrong or be consistently right, preferably the second one!

Call me a nitpicker, but these things bugged me, especially since the writer is Russian and thus should know what he's writing about.

Still, despite this, Generations of Winter is a great and engrossing saga, a book that I do very much recommend. I actually hope that Aksyonov will write a sequel. There really is room for that. In fact, after finishing the book I felt that the fate of some of the major characters was left hanging in mid-air.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

What happened to Mitya after he escaped the firing squad? What happened with Boris IV after we last meet him? And with Savva after he is captured by the Germans? Did Veronika make it to the US with her new lover? Will Cecilia and Kyrill meet again? And if they do, does their marriage survive the long separation? Did Nina find the love that is hinted at towards the end of the book? And what will happen with Boris and Mary?

There are lots of open questions left at the end of the book, as if the writer thought that at 500some pages he had written enough and needed to wrap things up before page 600. I would love to read a sequel to Generations of Winter that would provide answers.

I guess I was more involved with the characters than I thought. It might just be Aksyonov's writing style that made it feel as if the characters remained at distance. I realized that this review sounds kind of negative, but despite my nitpicking I did really enjoy the book very much, believe me! Well, this is about the fourth time I mention that in this post, so I guess you must have understood that by now. It just feels kind of strange to write a not so glowing review about a book that I did love and felt sorry about finishing.

Apparently, Russian tv made this book into a tv-series called Moskovskaya Saga (Moscow Saga - the Russian title of the book). I should try if I can find it on DVD here in Armenia).

"Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen!"

[Cross-posted from Eve's Alexandria; written for a less Russian lit-versed audience, and I hope not too repetitious for this blog. Warning: I got a bit carried away, so it's rather long...!]

"Paul!" the countess cried from behind the screen.

"Send me a new novel to read, only pray not one of those modern ones."

"How do you mean, grand'maman?"

"I want a book in which the hero does not strangle either his father or his mother, and where there are no drowned corpses. I have a horror of drowned persons."

"There aren't any novels of that sort nowadays. Would you like something in Russian?"

"Are there any Russian novels?"

[--from 'The Queen of Spades']

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) had a remarkably eventful short life. Not content with writing poetry, prose fiction, drama, history, and poetry-novels that won him fame in his own time and acclaim ever since, and developing Russian as a literary language by setting stylistic trends and introducing new words whenever the language's existing pool of vocabulary let him down, he was also politically active in an extremely repressive era: he spoke out for social reform, mixed with radicals like the Decembrists, supported a subversive Greek movement aimed at ending Ottoman rule, and wrote dissident poems that went down badly with Tsar Nicholas I. His activities earned him six years in exile and extended periods of government surveillance - his letters were opened, he was forbidden to travel, and his literary activity was strictly monitored and censored. All this, and he died after fighting a duel with the man strongly rumoured to be having an affair with his wife, Natalya Goncharova (a rumour apparently emphasised by a series of goading poison pen letters sent to Pushkin in late 1836).

The Queen of Spades and Other Stories collects two unfinished novels - The Negro of Peter the Great (1827) and Dubrovsky (written 1832, published in 1841) - and two short stories - 'The Queen of Spades' (1833) and 'The Captain's Daughter' (1836). Taken together, they make for an interesting mix of tones and styles: morality-tale fable, Romantic melodrama, historical epic. But the prose itself is consistently precise and unfussy throughout - making for a smooth, swift read unusual for work of Pushkin's time (not just, I think, a function of translation) - and the engagement with the characters' inner lives markedly less insightful and unflinching than the likes of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Characters are revealed not so much by their actions or thoughts as by how the author introduces them to us, and they do what the story demands of them.

The Negro of Peter the Great sees Pushkin looking back to the early eighteenth century, to explore the themes of his family history. Pushkin's great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African - recent research suggests probably from modern-day Cameroon - who was enslaved as a boy by the Ottomans and subsequently (1704) taken to the court of Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) by the Russian ambassador, where he attained high rank. The story centres on the life and fortunes of a black courtier, and godson, of Peter, named Ibrahim (the Arabic cognate of Abram/Abraham). On the evidence of the six chapters that exist, Ibrahim's experience closely follows that of Pushkin's kinsman: we open with Ibrahim in Paris, having been sent to Europe by Peter to "acquire the learning needed by a country in the course of reorganization", as part of the Tsar's quest for 'Westernisation' in Russia.

Westernisation had a two-fold meaning under Peter's direction. On the one hand, it meant an attack on many of the bastions of Old Russia - which Peter considered to be superstitious or otherwise symptomatic of backwardness and barbarity, preventing his country from modernising - such as the Church (whose rituals Peter mocked) and aspects of the dress and habits of the boyars (nobles; he introduced a tax on beards, that great symbol of Russian manhood, to strongarm his courtiers into shaving them off, and forced them to wear European clothes). On the other hand, it meant learning from the countries of Europe so as to put Russia on a stronger fiscal and military footing - he was particularly interested in new ship-building techniques, and reorganised the army - and to follow its example in making the mores and manners of its society more 'modern' in the European sense.

"How glad I am that you have not died of tedium in this barbarous Petersburg!" Korsakov went on. "What do people do here? How do they spend their time? Who is your tailor? Is there at least an opera-house?"

Ibrahim replied that probably the Tsar was at work in the dockyard.

The perceived cultural gulf between Russia and the west, and the often problematic legacy of Peter's forced modernisation of the country, is the uneasy backdrop to the story. Pushkin himself admired Peter, viewing his policies as bringing "culture and enlightenment, which in the end must bring us freedom, too", as he wrote towards the end of his life. Since it is unfinished, it is of course hard to say on which side the book's preferences might have lain; in the early stages, at least, traditionalist characters speak clearly for an image of a shallow, permissive West undermining the moral strength of Russia:

"The living image of Korsakov," said old Prince Lykov, wiping away tears of laughters when eventually quiet was restored. "But why not admit it? He is not the first, nor will he be the last, to return to Holy Russia from foreign parts transformed into a buffoon. What do our children learn abroad? To scrape a leg, to chatter in goodness knows what gibberish, to treat their elders with disrespect, yes, and to run after other men's wives."

Outside the character dialogue, meanwhile, Paris is presented in all its stereotypically decadent glory (with post-1789 hindsight, of course):

According the testimony of the historical memoirs nothing could equal the frivolity, folly and luxury of the France of that period. [...] The orgies of the Palais-Royal were no secret in Paris; the example was infectious. [...] greed for money was united to a pleasure for thirst and dissipation.

There are all sorts of interesting issues that start to come to the surface in these opening chapters, not least the thematic parallels and contrasts between educated Ibrahim and Westernising Russia. Prince Lykov, our traditionalist speaker, goes on to note that Ibrahim "is a steady, decent man"; but his wife does not share his assessment:

"Of all the young men who have been educated in foreign lands the Tsar's negro (the Lord forgive me!) is more of a man than any."

"Dear me, prince!" said Tatiana Afanassyevna. "I have seen him, seen him quite close... what a dreadful visage! I was quite scared."

The suggestion, here and elsewhere, is that Ibrahim will always be judged first and foremost as a fear-inducing black man, for all his education, strength of character, and sensitivity. The latter is illustrated by a heartfelt letter he writes to break off his relationship with a Countess in Paris, which is of a notably higher-flown style than the surrounding prose ("better that I should die" etc.), and by his lavishly Romantic agonies about same ("his eyes went dim, his head reeled"). Obviously, being a seventeenth-century man, the sensitivity is mostly about his own feelings - specifically, his insecurities about whether she will leave him - but his desire to avoid putting his lover through further anguish, as when she became pregnant with their child and was forced to give birth in secret, marks him out as a hero in (what I take to be, given the other stories here) Pushkin terms. Ibrahim is well aware of the obstacles he faces, and when Peter decides that his godson must marry and that he has just the girl in mind, Ibrahim demurs:

"But even if I did think of marrying, would the girl and her relatives consent? My appearance..."

"Your appearance? What nonsense! There is nothing wrong with you. A young girl must obey her parents, and we shall see what old Gavril Afanassyevich will say when I come in person to ask his daughter's hand for you!"

Naturally, Peter goes ahead anyway, with results that look nothing if not ill-omened - the girl in question is a) in love with someone else, b) disgusted by the very idea of Ibrahim and c) vocally determined to die rather than marry him (her parents, meanwhile, dare not refuse the Tsar) - when the story breaks off. Peter's blithe colour-blindness here, and his bulldozing disregard for the strength of others' beliefs and prejudices, strikes me as an acute characterisation of him. Only an immense stubbornness could have pushed through his agenda within Russia; the question remains, however, whether all the 'modernisation' in the world will change peoples' assumptions about what Russia is and should be. Or, perhaps, whether the essential nature of Russia, as conceived by the traditionalists, will always win out.

Likewise for Ibrahim. The otherwise air-headed Korsakov sounds a note of caution (and, one suspects, lays out the Othello-esque plot of the novel for us):

"Look here, Ibrahim," said Korsakov, "follow my advice for once: I assure you, I have more sense than would appear. Give up this mad idea - don't marry! I do not think your betrothed has any particular liking for you. [...] There is no relying on a woman's fidelity: happy are those who do not bother about it. But you... With your passionate, brooding and suspicious nature, with your flat nose, thick lips and fuzzy hair - for you to rush into the dangers of matrimony!"

Korsakov betrays the bigoted stereotyping that can lie beneath even the most tolerant-seeming surface, and undoubtedly foreshadows the ways in which Ibrahim is likely to be condemned by the other characters. Where the novel as a whole would have come down on this is open to debate. A Byronic anti-hero tragically brought down by intolerant society, perhaps, or something more discomforting about 'essential natures'; either way, it looks unlikely that it would have ended happily.

The other unfinished novel, Dubrovsky, gets rather further into the melodrama before its premature ending. A tit-for-tat dispute between two provincial landowning neighbours - dissolute Kiril Petrovich and gruff Andrei Gavrilovich (father of the titular hero, Vladimir) - escalates into a full-on battle that shatters the lives of everyone connected with them. A breathtakingly-cavalier legal ruling hands the Dubrovky estate - land, house, dependants and all - over to Kiril Petrovich. "We quote it in full, believing that everybody will be gratified to learn of one of the methods whereby in Russia we can be deprived of an estate to which we have incontestable rights", says Pushkin, reproducing the verdict from a real-life case of the 1820s, with only the names changed to fit his fiction.

Indeed, the narrator emphasises how habitual is the resort to violence and cruelty for a capricious landowner, so rarely held accountable for his actions and so accustomed to wielding absolute power over his many subordinates. We are told that "Very few of the serf-girls of his household escaped the amorous attentions of this elderly man of fifty"; we see how he delights in trapping unsuspecting guests in a room with a bear, the length of whose chain leaves them one single corner in which to cower, often injured, until Petrovich chooses to release them ("Such were the noble amusements of a Russian country gentleman!"); we are privy to his thuggish thoughts:

[Kiril Petrovich] was beside himself with fury and at first wanted to attack Kistenyovka (as his neighbour's village was called) with all his serfs, and, razing it to the ground, besiege the owner in his very house. Such exploits were nothing out of the way to him.

Kiril Petrovich finds his victory a hollow one, however, and regrets its pursuit; but bad blood, and shed blood, have reached such levels a cycle of revenge ensues. When Andrei dies of the strain, Vladimir and some of the family's surviving dependants turn outlaw, and set about making things impossible for Petrovich. The situation takes a turn for the melodramatic with the introduction of Petrovich's daughter Masha, who is, of course, beautiful:

The reader has probably already guessed that Kiril Petrovich's daughter, of whom so far only a few words have been said, is the heroine of our story. At the time of which we are writing she was seventeen and in the full bloom of her beauty.

(This conversational, winking-at-the-reader style reminds me of Vanity Fair; signs of unconventional self-awareness when doing something so conventional and essential as describing the heroine are always welcome.)

Soon Masha is also in love with Dubrovsky, and he with her, after he - clever, dashing and a master of disguise in the making - poses as a new tutor for her and spends some weeks in the unwitting Petrovich's household. It being that sort of story, Petrovich retaliates by forcing Masha to marry someone of his choosing, Masha despairs extravagantly and decides her impending nuptials are "like the executioner's block, like the grave!", and Vladimir Dubrovsky trembles, flushes, and rages. Masha further demonstrates her angelic disposition by refusing (despairingly) to run away with Dubrovsky after he fails to rescue her, and the forced marriage is sanctified:

"No!" she answered. "It is too late! I am married - I am Prince Vereisky's wife."

"What are you saying?" Dubrovsky cried in despair. "No, you are not his wife! You were forced to, you could never have given your consent..."

"I did; I made the marriage vow," she answered firmly. "The prince is my husband. Tell your men to let him go, and leave me with him. I did not play false, I waited for you up to the last moment ... but now, I tell you, it is too late. Let us go."

But Dubrovsky could no longer hear her; the pain of his wound and the violence of his emotions overcame him.

It is predictable and formulaic, but exciting nonetheless, playing out at a swift pace in stripped-down, very readable prose. Pushkin's notes yielded a very brief outline of how the story was supposed to have developed: widowhood for Masha and more outlawry and disguises for Dubrovsky, by the looks of things. Par for the course, and yet I wish I could have read more of it.

The two short stories have traces of the high emotional tone of the novels, but each is also leavened with sardonic humour - and, in the case of 'The Queen of Spades', with a sadistically-fun twist ending well worthy of the nasty fairy tale it is. It is also a marvellously pithy, fine-tuned little story in its own right; again, the language is stripped of much of its descriptive padding, and the plot rattles along. A young man of questionable morals, Hermann, hears of an old Countess who is said to have a secret, infallible way - a lucky three-card run - to win at cards. He determines to learn the trick, and sets about worming his way into the household by manipulating the Countess' put-upon ward, Lizaveta, with false declarations of love, giving Pushkin a chance for more sly meta-humour (as in the quotation at the start of this post):

Lizaveta Ivanovna paid no attention to her. When they returned home she ran up to her room and drew the letter out of her glove: it was unsealed. She read it. The letter contained a declaration of love: it was tender, respectful and had been copied word for word from a German novel. But Lizaveta Ivanovna did not know any German and she was delighted with it.

It is hardly a spoiler to say that Hermann's scheme backfires, or that there is plenty of schadenfreude to be had when he gets his comeuppance. Along the way, though, there are plenty of nefarious deeds, tense encounters and even a ghostly visitation; great fun.

Finally, 'The Captain's Daughter' is a short historical epic about a brutal Cossack revolt in 1773, under the leadership of a man named Pugachev, who claimed to be Catherine II's (dead) husband returned. It also contains the collection's only examples of first-person narration, much of it being, ostensibly, the edited memoirs of its main character, Piotr Andreich. Piotr's voice is an enjoyable one: intelligent, ironic, warm, and dryly amused by - without seeking to excuse - his spoilt youthful excesses. Piotr, having recently joined the army on the strength of his father's connections, is rudely awakened from his dissolute ways when his remote, apparently boringly-safe posting is caught up in the tide of Pugachev's revolt.

The picture that emerges of Piotr is of a clever young man with little to occupy him and nothing to check him, least of all self-control. When describing his early life, his tales of running amok are fun:

At that particular moment Beaupre [his tutor] was sleeping the sleep of innocence on my bed. I was busy with my own affairs. I ought to mention that a map of the world had been obtained for me from Moscow. It hung on the wall but was never used and for long had I been tempted by the size and quality of the paper it was printed on. Now I had decided to make a kite with it.

When he is older, this becomes plain irresponsibility, and his military career begins with him squandering the faltering family fortunes on drinking and gambling (apparently an endemic issue for army officers; Piotr notes it as "zeal for the service"). But what could have been just censorious moralising, a too-simple story of a worthless boy made good through adversity, is made into something much more affecting and effective by a retrospective narration that is wry rather than preachy; the lighter tone elsewhere offsets, and emphasises by contrast, the real sufferings of the characters:

Pugachev looked at the old man menacingly and said to him: "How dare you resist me, your Sovereign?" The commandant, spent from his wound, summoned his last remaining strength and replied in a firm voice: "You are not my Sovereign: you are a thief and a pretender, do you hear!" Pugachev frowned darkly and waved a white handkerchief. Several Cossacks seized the old Captain and dragged him to the gallows. Astride upon the cross-beam sat the mutilated Bashkir whom we had questioned the day before. He was holding a rope in his hand and a minuted later I saw poor Ivan Kuzmich hoisted into the air.

Like the other stories in this collection, 'The Captain's Daughter' is concise and fast moving, rarely staying still for long enough to do more than glance at the scenery or hint at its characters' states of mind. Instead it juggles its various concerns rapidly and dextrously: the course and cost of the revolt; the sinister but not-without-a-point Pugachev's disposition and discontents; Piotr's development into an altogether leaner, sharper individual through both compromise and resistance (when his posting is taken, he is spared because he once gave Pugachev a gift, without realising who he was; he lives to fight another day, but is marked as a collaborator and traitor); and the efforts of Piotr's beloved Maria Ivanovna to save his life by petitioning Catherine (described, charmingly, as having "a plump, rosy face" and "calm dignity") for a pardon.

Thus ends part the first of my Russian Reading Challenge. Only 18 or so to go... :-)

~~Nic