'Because I Cannot Hear a Human Voice'

In 1985, the year the Politburo elected Mikhail Gorbachev the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Clarence Brown edited The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, a selection ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In his introduction Brown writes:

“I now look back on this banquet of words with much pleasure, which I hope nothing will prevent your sharing. These writers, after all, continue in our time the tradition that has made Russian, along with English and classical Greek, one of the three supreme literatures of the world.”

That will provoke the French but even the resolutely monolingual and jingoistic among us will agree that no self-respecting reader can judge himself literate without a grounding in the Russian classics, beginning at least with Pushkin in the nineteenth century. We can hardly claim to know ourselves without them. For this gift we owe thanks to generations of translators, from Aylmer and Louise Maude and Constance Garnett to Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. We live in an era of lively Russian translation. Prominent among its practitioners are Donald Rayfield (Varlam Shalamov) and Robert Chandler (Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov). In a conversation between them published in Cardinal Points Journal, Chandler admits he falls asleep during the uninspired reading of lectures, and adds:

“It is the same with books; if I cannot hear the intonations of a living voice, I quickly get bored. I find many translations of classic novels unreadable — not because they are especially clumsy, but simply because I cannot hear a human voice.”

The conversation followed Rayfield’s 2008 translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), which amounts to a chorus of human voices. For this reader, it has become the standard version and is available in paperback from New York Review Books. Take Rayfield’s rendering of the famous closing to Part One:

“Russia, where are you hurtling to? Give an answer! There is no answer. The bell peals with a wonderful ringing; the air, ripped to pieces, roars and becomes wind; everything that exists on earth flies past, and other nations and empires look askance and stand back to make way for the troika.”

    

Don’t mistake the tone of the passage for patriotic piety. The adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov are raucous and funny. Gogol’s imagination is wilder than any postmodernist's. He is no stolid realist or chronicler of downtrodden peasantry. In his “Author’s Note” to Up in the Old Hotel (1992), Joseph Mitchell turns the Russian writer’s name into an adjective meaning something like blackly humorous:

“It was the kind of humor that the old Dutch masters caught in those prints that show a miser locked in his room counting his money and Death is standing just outside the door. It was Old Testament humor, particularly the humor in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Gogolian humor.”

Appropriately, Gogol was born on April 1 (Old Style) or March 20 (New Style), in 1809, though some sources give today’s date, March 31 (Old Style) or March 19 (New Style), as his true birthday.

[In his introduction to Dead Souls, Rayfield recommends Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol (New Directions, 1944), the book that introduced the indispensable Russian word poshlust to the English-speaking world. Nabokov writes: “I can only place my hand on my heart and affirm that I have not imagined Gogol. He really wrote, he really lived."]