Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  NOTES

  1. Gogol referred to Dead Souls as a poema, i.e., a long poem, rather than a novel.

  Further Reading

  I list only translations which, in my view, do justice to their originals. As well as short stories, I include a few novels and narrative poems. I do not include writers such as Tolstoy who are readily available in a number of good editions.

  Babel, Isaak, Collected Stories, tr. David McDuff (London: Penguin, 1994).

  Brown, Clarence (ed.), Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (London: Penguin, 1993).

  Buida, Yury, The Zero Train (London: Dedalus, 2001); The Prussian Bride (London: Dedalus, 2002); both tr. Oliver Ready.

  Bulgakov, Mikhail, A Country Doctor’s Notebook, tr. Michael Glenny (London: Harvill, 1975); The Fatal Eggs, tr. Hugh Aplin (London: Hesperus, 2003); The Master and Margarita, tr. Michael Glenny (London: Harvill, 1996).

  Chekhov, Anton, About Love and Other Stories, tr. Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Early Stories, tr. Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); The Steppe, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Rosamund Bartlett (London: Hesperus, 2006).

  Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonskaya (London: Vintage, 1992).

  Eppel, Asar, The Grassy Street, tr. Joanne Turnbull (Moscow/Birmingham: Glas, 1994).

  Gogol, Nikolai, Diary of a Madman, tr. Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 1972); Dead Souls, tr. Robert A. Maguire (London: Penguin, 2004).

  Grossman, Vasily, Life and Fate, tr. Robert Chandler (London: Harvill, 1995).

  Kharms, Daniil, Incidences, tr. Neil Cornwell (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993).

  Leskov, Nikolay, Satirical Stories of Nikolay Leskov, tr. William B. Edgerton (New York: Pegasus, 1969); Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, tr. Robert Chandler (London: Hesperus, 2003); The Priest who was Never Baptized, tr. James Muckle (Ilkeston: Bramcote Press, 2004).

  Nabokov, Vladimir, Collected Stories, tr. Dmitri Nabokov (London: Penguin, 1997).

  Pelevin, Viktor, The Life of Insects, tr. Andrew Bromfield (London: Faber, 1999); A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, tr. Andrew Bromfield (London: Harbord, 1999).

  Petrushevskaya, Ludmila, The Time is Night, tr. Sally Laird (London: Virago, 1994); Immortal Love, tr. Sally Laird (New York: Pantheon, 1995).

  Platonov, Andrey, The Foundation Pit, tr. Robert Chandler and Geoffrey Smith (London: Harvill, 1996); The Return and Other Stories, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone (London: Harvill, 1999); The Portable Platonov, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler et al. (Moscow: Glas, 1999); Happy Moscow, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler et al. (London: Harvill, 2002); Soul, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson et al. (London: Harvill, 2004).

  Pushkin, Aleksandr, The Bridegroom, tr. Antony Wood (London: Angel, 2002); Dubrovsky, tr. Robert Chandler (London: Hesperus, 2003); Yevgeny Onegin – Pushkin’s greatest work has been well translated by James Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For extracts from Stanley Mitchell’s still finer translation-inprogress see Modern Poetry in Translation, nos. 11, 15 and 18 (Queen’s College, Oxford).

  Shalamov, Varlam, Kolyma Tales, tr. John Glad (London: Penguin, 1994). Though omitting important details, this still conveys much of Shalamov’s greatness.

  Shukshin, Vasily, Stories from a Siberian Village, tr. John Givens and Laura Michael (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).

  Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, tr. Harry Willetts (London: Harvill, 1996); Invisible Allies, tr. Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson (London: Harvill, 1997).

  Struve, Gleb (ed.), Russian Stories (New York: Dover, 1990). Twelve stories by writers from Pushkin to Zoshchenko. Bilingual edition.

  Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We, tr. Clarence Brown (London: Penguin, 1993).

  Zinik, Zinovy, Mind the Doors, tr. Andrew Bromfield and Bernard Meares (New York: Context Books, 2001).

  Zinovyeva-Annibal, Lidiya, The Tragic Menagerie, tr. Jane Costlow (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).

  Zoshchenko, Mikhail, A Man is not a Flea, tr. Serge Shishkoff (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989); The Galosh and Other Stories, tr. Jeremy Hicks (London: Angel, 2000).

  Reference

  The following works of criticism and reference, and annotated editions of texts, have been especially useful:

  Bartlett, Rosamund, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (London: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

  Classe, Olive (ed.), Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000).

  Cornwell, Neil (ed.), Reference Guide to Russian Literature (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998).

  —, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993).

  Graffy, Julian, Gogol’s The Overcoat (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000).

  Kharms, Daniil, The Old Woman (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995).

  Lermontov, Mikhail, A Hero of our Time (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992).

  Mirsky, Prince D. S., A History of Russian Literature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).

  Popkin, Cathy, The Pragmatics of Insignificance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

  Skatov, N. N., Russkie Pisateli: XX Vek (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1998).

  Woodward, James, Ivan Bunin: A Study of His Fiction (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

  Sovlit.com (www.sovlit.com) has also been a useful source of biographical information.

  Note on the Translations

  It has been a privilege both to be able to retranslate such masterpieces as ‘The Queen of Spades’ and to have the chance to introduce great writers like Platonov who are still undervalued in the West; or, like Dobychin and Krzhizhanovsky, little known even in Russia. And I am proud both to be including unpublished translations by other translators I admire and to be republishing two old but shamefully neglected translations: William Edgerton’s translation of Leskov’s ‘The Steel Flea’, and the translation of Bunin’s ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ by S. S. Koteliansky together with D. H. Lawrence and Leonard Woolf. Both these works have, I believe, gained more in translation than they have lost.

  All the translations credited to myself are the product of greater or lesser degrees of collaboration with my wife Elizabeth, with the many people who have checked through drafts, and – in the case of the earlier and better known stories – with previous translators. Many translators avoid looking at the work of their predecessors; others evidently do look but are ashamed to admit it. This is surprising: in most fields of human endeavour ignorance of previous work in a given field is considered unacceptable. I have many times been saved from a misunderstanding, or helped towards a more satisfactory rendering, by looking at earlier translations – especially those of the often underrated Constance Garnett.

  One last point: for all our lip service to cultural pluralism, both British and American readers are often surprisingly intolerant of ‘Americanisms’ or ‘Britishisms’. This volume contains work by both British and American translators; I enjoy their different styles and have not attempted to reduce them to a pallid norm. It may even be the case that some stories translate more readily into particular varieties of English. It is hard, for example, to imagine Vasily Shukshin’s ‘In the Autumn’ sounding as effective in British English as in the American version by John Givens and Laura Michael.

  The order of stories in this volume is first by author’s birthdate and then by date of publication, except in the case of stories from Babel’s Red Cavalry and Shalamov’s The Kolyma Tales, where I have followed the order in which they were arranged by the authors.

  Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida

  ALEKSANDR SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN (1799–1837)

  Pushkin was born in Moscow and brought up mainly by tutors and governesses. One of his great-grandfathers, Abram Gannibal, was an African slave who became a favourite and godson of Peter t
he Great. Like many aristocrats, Pushkin learned Russian mainly from household serfs.

  As an adolescent, he attended the new élite lycée at Tsarskoye Selo, outside St Petersburg. In his early twenties he was exiled for several years because of his political poems. Although several of his friends took part in the Decembrist Revolt, Pushkin did not. It is unclear why; it may simply be that his friends were not confident he could keep a secret. In 1826 Pushkin returned to St Petersburg, with the Tsar as his personal censor. He suffered a variety of humiliations in his last years, including serious debts and worries about the fidelity of his young wife, Natalya Goncharova. He was fatally wounded in a duel with D’Anthès, the Dutch Ambassador’s adopted son, who was said to be having an affair with Natalya.

  Pushkin’s position in Russian literature can best be compared with that of Goethe in Germany. Not only is he Russia’s greatest poet; he is also the author of the first major works in a variety of genres. As well as his masterpieces – the verse novel Yevgeny Onegin and the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman – Pushkin wrote one of the first important Russian dramas, Boris Godunov, the first great Russian historical novel, The Captain’s Daughter, and the greatest of all Russian short stories, ‘The Queen of Spades’.

  Pushkin did not start writing prose until 1827. His prose style is clear and succinct. He himself said that ‘Precision and brevity are the most important qualities of prose. Prose demands thoughts and more thoughts – without thoughts, dazzling expressions serve no purpose.’ In ‘The Queen of Spades’, as in several of his later works, Pushkin shows a remarkable ability to treat dark, difficult material (obsessive madness, insoluble personal and socio-political conflict) with clarity and grace. Unlike the writers of the French Enlightenment, he writes clearly without being in any way simplistic. And unlike many later writers, he can evoke the most terrifying aspects of human nature without, even momentarily, losing his own balance.

  ‘The Queen of Spades’ is laconic and enigmatic. It can be read as a social comedy, a tale of the supernatural, a parody of the then popular E. T. A. Hoffmann or as a meditation on the symbiosis between rationalism and superstition. Above all, it is a gripping story, one whose structure – in the words of the literary historian D. S. Mirsky – ‘is as tense as a compressed spring’.

  Mirsky also said that ‘The Queen of Spades’ is ‘so economic and terse in its noble baldness that even Prosper Mérimée, that most fastidious of French writers, had not the courage to translate it as it was, and introduced various embellishments and amplifications into his French version’. A Russian friend, hearing we were translating the story, said: ‘That must be very difficult. You can’t afford to change a single comma.’ We have tried to follow her advice.

  Readers will enjoy the story more if they have some understanding of the card game faro (also known as stoss), a game of pure chance that was popular with the European aristocracy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each punter – and there can be any number of them – has his own pack of cards; as does the banker. A punter looks at his pack, selects a card and puts it face down on the table, placing his stake on top of the card or chalking the amount on the card itself. The banker then deals out the cards from his own pack in pairs, placing one card, face up, on each side of each of the punters’ cards. If a punter’s card matches the card to his right, the banker wins; if it matches the card to his left, the punter wins; if it matches neither of the banker’s cards, a more complex reckoning (the details are irrelevant to this story) is carried out at the end of the round. A punter can double the stake by bending back a corner of his card, or quadruple it by bending back two corners. The game continues, unless the bank is broken, until the banker has dealt out his whole pack.

  THE QUEEN OF SPADES

  The Queen of Spades signifies secret malice.

  The latest guide to fortune-telling.

  1

  In rainy weather

  They gathered together

  To play.

  To double – redouble –

  A stake was no trouble,

  They say.

  They did not find it hard

  To entrust to a card

  Their pay,

  So no day of rain

  Ever slipped by in vain,

  They say.

  That night their host was Narumov, an officer in the Horse Guards. The long winter night slipped by unnoticed; only after four in the morning did they sit down to supper. The winners ate heartily; the others sat there abstractedly, refusing all offers of food. But then champagne appeared, the conversation livened up and everyone joined in.

  ‘How did you do, Surin?’ asked Narumov.

  ‘Same as always – I lost. You have to admit I’m unlucky. I play cautiously, I never get carried away, nothing distracts me, but I just keep on losing.’

  ‘And you’ve never been tempted? Never been fooled by a card that seems fortunate? I’m astonished at your self-control.’

  ‘How about Hermann, though?’ said one of the guests, pointing at a young engineer. ‘Never touched a card in his life, never once doubled a stake, but he sits with us until five in the morning and watches us play.’

  ‘Cards hold a fascination for me,’ said Hermann. ‘But I cannot afford to sacrifice the essential in the hope of acquiring the superfluous.’

  ‘Hermann’s a German. He counts the pennies, that’s all,’ said Tomsky. ‘But if there’s one person I can’t understand, it’s my grandmother, the countess Anna Fedotovna.’

  ‘Why? How’s that?’ people called out.

  ‘I can’t understand,’ Tomsky went on, ‘why my grandmother never gambles.’

  ‘But what’s so astonishing,’ asked Narumov, ‘about a lady in her eighties who doesn’t gamble?’

  ‘You mean you really haven’t heard about her?’

  ‘No, not a word!’

  ‘Well then, listen! About sixty years ago, my grandmother went to Paris and became the toast of the town. People chased after her to catch a glimpse of La Vénus Moscovite. Richelieu paid court to her, and my grandmother assures me that he almost shot himself because she was so cruel to him.

  ‘In those days ladies used to play faro. At Court one evening, grandmother lost a large sum of money to the Duke of Orléans. When she got home, as she was peeling off her beauty spots and undoing her hooped petticoat, she informed grandfather of her gambling losses and told him to settle up. My late grandfather, as far as I recall, was a kind of butler to my grandmother. He feared her like fire; hearing of these terrible losses, however, he flew into a rage, fetched his accounts book, pointed out that they had got through half a million in six months and that neither their Moscow estate nor their Saratov estate happened to be in reach of Paris – and flatly refused to pay. Grandmother gave him a slap on the face, and retired to bed on her own to indicate her displeasure.

  ‘The following day she sent for her husband, hoping that this domestic punishment would have had its effect, but she found him unshakeable. For the first time in her life she went so far as to argue and reason with him; she pointed out condescendingly, thinking this would shame him, that there are debts and debts and that a prince is not the same as a coach-builder. All in vain: grandfather was in revolt. No meant no! Grandmother didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Among her close acquaintances was a most remarkable man. I am sure you have heard of Count Saint-Germain,1 the subject of so many wonderful tales. You know he claimed to be the Wandering Jew, to have discovered the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone, and so on. People laughed at him and called him a charlatan, while Casanova2 says in his memoirs that he was a spy; in spite of his mysteriousness, however, Saint-Germain was a man of dignified appearance and the most agreeable of company. Grandmother still adores him and gets angry if anyone says a word against him. Grandmother knew that Saint-Germain had large sums of money at his disposal. She decided to appeal to him. She wrote him a note, asking him to come and see her at once.

  ‘The old e
ccentric came immediately and found her in terrible distress. Grandmother described her husband’s barbarous conduct in the blackest of colours and ended by saying that her only hope lay in Saint-Germain’s friendship and courtesy.

  ‘Saint-Germain thought for a while.

  ‘ “I can do you this service,” he said, “but I know you won’t feel at ease until you’ve repaid the sum and I’d rather not involve you in yet more worries. There’s another solution: you can win back the money.” “But my dear Count,” answered grandmother, “I’ve told you, we have no money at all.” “There’s no need for money,” said Saint-Germain. “Be so kind as to hear me out.” And he revealed a secret to her for which every one of us here would be willing to pay dearly.’

  The young gamblers doubled their attention. Tomsky lit his pipe, drew on it and went on: ‘That same evening grandmother appeared at Versailles, au jeu de la Reine.3 The Duke of Orléans was keeping the bank; grandmother casually apologized for not bringing the money she owed, making up some little story by way of excuse, and began playing against him. She chose three cards and played them one after the other; all three won, and grandmother quite recovered her losses.’

  ‘Luck!’ said one of the company.

  ‘A fairy tale!’ said Hermann.

  ‘Perhaps the cards were marked,’ said someone else.

  ‘I think not,’ Tomsky replied gravely.

  ‘What!’ said Narumov. ‘You have a grandmother who can predict three cards in sequence and you still haven’t got her to tell you her cabalistic secret?’

  ‘Not a hope in hell!’ replied Tomsky. ‘She had four sons, one of them my father; all four were incorrigible gamblers, but she didn’t let any of them know her secret – although it would certainly have been quite a help to them, and to me too. But this is what I was once told by my uncle, Count Ivan Ilyich, and he swore it was all true. The late Chaplitsky – you know, the one who died penniless after squandering millions – once, when he was young, lost around three hundred thousand. To Zorich, if I remember rightly. He was in despair. Grandmother always took a stern view of youthful foolishness, but for some reason she took pity on Chaplitsky. She gave him three cards to play in sequence, making him give his word of honour never to gamble again. Chaplitsky went back to the man who had defeated him; they sat down to play. Chaplitsky put fifty thousand on the first card and won straight off; he doubled the stake, doubled again – and recovered his losses and more.