After the recent death of Janet Malcolm I reread the one book among the dozen she published that interested me – Reading Chekhov (2000), in which she mingles travelogue, history and literary criticism. Early in the book, Malcolm praises Chekhov’s gift for creating “an illusion of realism” while “hiding the traces of his surrealism.” That’s dubious but let it pass. She goes on to say, rightly, that Chekhov “remains the most misunderstood—as well as the most beloved—of the nineteenth-century Russian geniuses.” Then she gets provocatively interesting:
“In Russia, no less than in
our country, possibly even more than in our country, Chekhov attracts a kind of
sickening piety. You utter the name ‘Chekhov’ and people arrange their features
as if a baby deer had come into the room.”
That's nicely phrased. Keep in mind that Malcolm
admires Chekhov. I’m not sure if what she says is still the case, and I’m
not even sure who reads so essential a writer as Chekhov anymore. The same
thing used to happen when someone would bring up Keats, another writer who died
young from tuberculosis. The romanticizing of Chekhov is a result of his “martyrdom”
and the misunderstanding mentioned by Malcolm. Western readers seem to have
assimilated him as the “good Russian” – sensitive, liberal, an all-around nice guy, and it doesn’t hurt that most of his works are short and easier to consume
than War and Peace. I write as a lover of Chekhov's stories, if not
swooningly so.
Russian literature is no monolith. Chekhov is not Gogol who is not Grossman. Some in the West still
crave Russian soulfulness. We’re fortunate to be living in a Golden Age of Russian
Translation, with multiple versions of familiar classics and previously unknown
writers appearing every week. Still, I’m nagged by the notion that we continue to miss something, that even in Tolstoy some essential qualities elude
non-Russian readers, though the first English translation of War and Peace
was published in 1886. In an interview with Andrew Katzenstein, Gary Saul
Morson says:
“Westerners often take for
granted that the purpose of life is happiness. What else could it be?
Mainstream economics presumes that ‘maximizing utility’ is the only human
motivation. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov exposed the shallowness of such a
view of life, and Soviet conditions made it seem, as Solzhenitsyn writes, like
the prattle of a child.”
I've read War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations, and Anna again in the Garnett translation, and was truly stunned by Tolstoy's mysterious ability to make the reader instantly, fully believe in the reality of each and every character. Because of that, he can literally do anything he wants with you.
ReplyDeleteWhen Norman Mailer died (a writer I like much more than you do) I read An American Dream, a book I'd long meant to get to. Mailer has virtues, but there's one he doesn't have, except in patches - he can't create living characters. I didn't believe in his protagonist, Stephen Rojack, for a single instant, or in anyone else in the novel (except the cops, which were off-the-rack police procedural cliches). It's a severe limitation.
If Tolstoy's power comes through even in translation, I can't imagine what it must be like to read him in Russian. It must be like looking at the sun.