by Viv Groskop
Viv Groskop
* * *
THE ANNA KARENINA FIX
Life Lessons from Russian Literature
Contents
A Note on Sources, Translation, Transliteration and Those Funny Russian Names
Introduction
1. How to Know Who You Really Are:
Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy
(Or: Don’t throw yourself under a train)
2. How to Face Up to Whatever Life Throws at You:
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
(Or: Don’t leave your wife while she’s pregnant)
3. How to be Optimistic in the Face of Despair:
Requiem by Anna Akhmatova
(Or: Don’t wear tight shoes on prison visits)
4. How to Survive Unrequited Love:
A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev
(Or: Don’t fall in love with your best friend’s wife)
5. How to Not be Your Own Worst Enemy:
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
(Or: Don’t kill your best friend in a duel)
6. How to Overcome Inner Conflict:
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Or: Don’t kill old ladies for money)
7. How to Live with the Feeling That the Grass is Always Greener:
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
(Or: Don’t keep going on about Moscow)
8. How to Keep Going When Things Go Wrong:
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(Or: Don’t forget to take your spoon to prison with you)
9. How to Have a Sense of Humour about Life:
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
(Or: Don’t get run over by a tram after talking to Satan)
10. How to Avoid Hypocrisy:
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
(Or: Don’t buy non-existent peasants as part of a get-rich-quick scheme)
11. How to Know What Matters in Life:
War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy
(Or: Don’t try to kill Napoleon)
Recommended Reading
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
A Note on Sources, Translation, Transliteration and Those Funny Russian Names
However much anyone loves Russian literature, it’s easy to see that, generally speaking, from the outside, it is hugely off-putting. First, there’s the issue of translation. How do you know which translation to choose? If you’re struggling to get through a book, is it the fault of the author or of the translator? Or – God forbid! – of you, the reader? And in any case, even if it is a very good translation, isn’t every translation a betrayal of the original? What if it’s too good a translation and all the original meaning has been stripped out and anglicized? You’ll never read it like a Russian would read it, so what’s the point?
These are the kinds of arguments that usually go through someone’s mind when approaching the entity people used to call ‘the Russians’ (meaning ‘the great Russian classics’). They’re the reason there’s a photograph which surfaces on the internet from time to time which depicts a bookshelf proudly showcasing a much-loved copy of Anna Karenina. Squashed between other books on the shelf, the spine of the book is bent out of shape an eighth of the way across. The rest of it is pristine and untouched. The picture says it all. This is a book lots of people start (and restart, often many times) but not everyone finishes. But it’s also a book no one ever quite gives up on. It’s still sitting there, hopefully, on the shelf, waiting for someone to get past the first hundred pages. We all have books like that, books whose spine we hope to crack all the way across one day.
The reputation that accompanies ‘the Russians’ is fearsome. ‘They’re deep.’ ‘They’re difficult.’ ‘They’re self-contradicting.’ ‘You’ll never understand X if you haven’t read Y.’ And on and on. I hate this kind of talk and find it reductive and insular. All literature should be for everyone, no matter how obscure and no matter how supposedly imperfect the translation. When it comes to translation, although I do love long-suffering translators everywhere and see them as the unsung heroes of the modern world, I am not a translation nerd and I don’t insist on special favourites. I tend to think that if someone has spent the best part of four or five years translating War and Peace (and has been paid by a publisher to do so), they’ve probably done a pretty good job and there’s no point in splitting hairs about whether someone else’s job is marginally better. So I just tend to go for the editions of the book that seem to be the most popular or the most recent. I think life is too short to get any more specialized than that. That said, I’ve tried to pick editions of the books in question here which are easy to get hold of and are generally accepted by people who care deeply about these things as the most readable – or ‘best’ – translations.
I do sympathize with people’s strongly held feelings about translation. As Anthony Briggs writes in his foreword to his translation of War and Peace, over time, colloquial language changes and things that once seemed normal suddenly read oddly. Personally, I find this rather charming and wouldn’t seek to eliminate it. But Briggs makes the point that in a decent translation you try to get rid of any howlers: ‘Infelicities will be edited out, such as “Andrei spent the evening with a few gay friends”, “Natasha went about the house flushing”, “he exposed himself on the parade ground” or “he ejaculated with a grimace”; we cannot read phrases like these without raising an inappropriate smile.’ Ah, but we want some inappropriate smiles! Nonetheless I get it. I get it. No gay privates allowed on parade.
It’s as well to assume when reading this book that I am talking about (and quoting from) the translations of the books referred to in the Recommended Reading list at the back. I did my undergraduate degree in Russian in the early 1990s and a postgrad degree ten years later. Back then, I could breeze through a book about Soviet constructivism in Russian, just for fun. (Admittedly, it was about as much fun as it sounds.) So, at some point or another, I have read most of these books in the original language. And where I haven’t read them entirely in the original, I have tried bloody hard to give it a go. But a lot of this reading was when I lived in Russia for a year twenty years ago. Nowadays, I don’t sit around reading War and Peace in Russian. I could have created a huge challenge for myself, gone to live in a cave with some large dictionaries and based everything here on my own translations from the originals. But I thought that would undermine the point I most want to make: that these books are for everyone, not just the special few who have mastered the language. Plus, I love reading literature in translation. You read differently in your own language. I don’t think you ever read quite as naturally in another language, no matter how well you acquire it. This is a long-winded way of saying: very few of the translations in this book are mine. (Although if something has been translated wrongly, it’s almost definitely me.)
The transliteration in this book is also not mine. Transliteration is a tiresome but necessary phenomenon that I did not come across until I learned Russian. It is the business of transposing Russian (the Cyrillic alphabet) into English (the Latin alphabet). Where I’ve quoted from a book, both the translation of the Russian and the transliteration of any Russian words come from the editions mentioned in the Recommended Reading. If I have saved myself years of research by not translating anything myself, I have possibly saved even more by not doing the transliterating. I especially hate transliterating.
Over the years, different systems of transliteration have emerged, which is why you sometimes see Chekhov written as ‘Tchekov’ or Dostoevsky written as ‘Dostoyevskii’. None of these different spellings is inherently wrong, but there’s an accepted system of
transliteration and you are supposed to follow it. Russian and English have many letters and sounds in common. But they also have letters that are incompatible. So, for example, there are single letters in the Russian alphabet for the sound ‘ch’ and the sound ‘shch’. (Yes, these are different sounds.) There is a variation on the letter T (and other consonants) which involves softening that letter with a ‘soft sign’, represented by an apostrophe in transliteration. And there are several extra vowels in Russian, including a vowel that we don’t have in English that is pronounced ‘you’ and a vowel sound we don’t have that is pronounced as something between ‘ee’ and ‘oi’. I can see why you need an agreed system. But I have never been able to master it. So, if there are any transliteration mistakes, they’re all mine, too.
Finally, on top of the competing translations, the confusing transliterations and all those feelings of intellectual insecurity which swirl around any time we talk about Russian literature, there is the undeniable business of the names. I once met a Danish academic who was incredibly intelligent and well read and had himself, in one of his books, prescribed reading War and Peace for the purposes of intense relaxation. When I praised him for this excellent recommendation, he adopted a pained expression and said, ‘Ah, yes, Russian literature is wonderful. But the names! The names! Why do they all have to have forty-seven names?’
He’s right, of course, although usually for a character to have more than three or four names would be unusual. It just feels like forty-seven. What derails non-Russians is the use of the patronymic, by which I mean the second bit of Ivan Ivanovich. Really, though, this is very easy to understand, and the more you read patronymics, the more you get used to them and learn to ignore them, as they’re not really that useful. In spoken speech, it’s polite to use them, but they’re almost thrown away and half swallowed.
All ‘Ivanovich’ is doing is telling you the name of that person’s father. Let’s say this person is called (and it is entirely plausible) Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov. That means, in Western terms, his name is Ivan Ivanov (Christian name and surname). The ‘Ivanovich’ bit can more or less be overlooked: it just means that his father’s name was also Ivan. Literally, it means: John, Son of John, Of the John Family. In Russian, though, you would never ignore the Ivanovich bit, as it is used as a mark of respect. Instead of saying, ‘Hello, Mr Ivanov,’ which is what we might say in English to convey respect (instead of saying, ‘Hello, Ivan’), Russians would say, ‘Hello, Ivan Ivanovich.’ (‘Hello, John, Son of John.’) The words for ‘sir’ and ‘Mister’, ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ are not commonly used in Russian. They don’t need them, because they have the patronymic. It’s actually much nicer. (Although quite stressful if you cannot remember someone’s patronymic. And by the time you have figured out how to ask subtly, ‘By the way, what was your father’s name?’, you will already have been rude by not addressing them by name, which is a bad thing to do in Russian.)
For women, the rules are the same (the patronymic still refers to their father), only their patronymic will end in, for example, ‘–evna’ or ‘–ovna’ instead of ‘–evich’ or ‘–ovich’. ‘Anna Ivanovna Ivanova.’ (Anna, Daughter of John, Of the John Family.) The surname is also changed, to reflect that it’s a woman’s name. Naturally, this would not be Russian if everyone agreed with this system. So, some people when they are translating from Russian into English do not preserve the difference between the male and female surname. In the edition I’ve used here, Anna Karenina is Anna Karenina (her patronymic is Arkadyevna because her father’s name is Arkady) and her husband is Karenin, with no ‘a’. (He is Alexei Alexandrovich, as his father is Alexander. Isn’t this fun, guys?)
Some people (let’s call them pedants, because that’s what they are) get so overexcited about this business of names and transliteration that they fuse the two and become ultra-pernickety. Nabokov, for example, was legendarily testy on this question and refused to accept the idea that it was normal in English to say ‘Anna Karenina’. He, without exception, referred to the novel as ‘Anna Karenin’. Amusingly, his wife did not agree with his system and always called herself ‘Vera Nabokova’. I would like to have been a fly on the wall of the suite of their luxury Swiss hotel when they were discussing this point of difference.
To be fair, it is really easy to see why people get intimidated by all things Russian when you have all this to contend with before you have even started reading a novel. Plus, the patronymic thing is just the beginning. I know what the Danish academic would say now. ‘Why, then, is Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov sometimes called Vanya? Is his name Ivan? Or is his name Vanya? Why can’t they make up their minds?’ ‘Vanya’ is the diminutive of Ivan. (Like ‘Johnny’ for John.) But then, of course, you get into the endearments for Ivan: Vanyusha, Vanechka, Vanyushechka, Vanyushka, Ivanyushka … (I promise I’m not making this up.) And if you want to be mean, vulgar or jokey, the pejoratives: Vanka, Ivashka. So that’s already eleven names for one person. It’s not forty-seven, but it’s still a lot. Also, every name has these possibilities. For Anna, for example, you could have any of these: Anya, Annochka, Anechka, Nyura, Annushka, Annusha, Annyusya, Anyusha, Annyunya, Nyunya, Nyuta, Anyusya … And this doesn’t even take into consideration the really silly ones that your family members could make up for fun.
I understand why this is annoying and confusing. I have studied Russian for over two decades, and I still encounter diminutives and can’t figure out what name they come from. How you make Olga into Lyolya or Lyalya is beyond me but, apparently, you do. Dimitry becomes Dima or Mitya or many other things. For Vladimir: Volodya, Vova, Vovochka, Vladik … It goes on. I have concluded that it is best not to get hung up on these things and to muddle through as best you can.
The Holy Grail of Russian-speaking is getting so good at it that you feel comfortable making up your own diminutives and still manage to sound authentic. This is how some Russian-speaking friends have ended up calling me mad things like Vivushka and Vivinka. If you’re ever lucky enough to be christened with a name like this, my advice is that it’s best not to fight it. Equally, if you’re encountering names you don’t recognize in a Russian novel and it is driving you crazy and making you scream, ‘Who the hell is Kolya?’ (it’s from ‘Nikolai’ – see also: Kolyenka, Kolka, Kolyan, Lado, Nika, Nikolasha, Nikolenka, Nikolka, Nikusya …), try and channel the advice Tolstoy gives in his Calendar of Wisdom on 21 October: ‘You can’t always remain calm, but whenever there are times of peace and calm in your life, you need to value them and try to prolong them.’ In other words: don’t sweat the diminutives.
One small mercy in Russian literature is that you rarely get the sort of name you hear a lot in everyday spoken Russian. One lovely thing people do when calling names out in everyday life is to give up on all these things completely and just use the first syllable of the name. So, for Alexandra (Sasha), they will just say ‘Sash’. For Ivan (Vanya), ‘Van’. This is much more like Dave and Bob and Pete. Really, they are just like us. No, really they are. They just have more names for each other.
Introduction
‘I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.’
Woody Allen
An enemy of baked goods of all kinds, Tolstoy was not one of those insufferable people who breeze through life unencumbered by frustration and angst. Comfortingly enough, he was a person who struggled to understand why, at times, life felt intensely painful, even when nothing that bad was happening. His empathy for the pain of the human condition is surprising in some ways, because he lived a monastic existence and indulged in few, if any, pleasures. Unlike the rest of us, he really had very little to feel bad about. Tolstoy was very much not a doughnuts-and-beer kind of guy. He only ate cake if it was a family birthday, and then it had to be a particular cake, his wife’s Anke pie, a sour lemon tart named after a family doctor. Mostly, he ate simply and repetitively. One of the researchers at the Tolstoy Museum at his estate in Yasnaya Polyana recently uncovered evi
dence of his fifteen favourite egg dishes, which he ate in rotation. These included scrambled eggs with dill, and peas with eggs. He didn’t drink alcohol. He didn’t eat meat. And yet still he frequently felt that he was a terrible person.
Perhaps as a result of this tortured way of thinking, long before self-help manuals became hugely popular in the early twentieth century, Tolstoy had already written one of his own. It was full of the sort of inspirational quotes we’re now used to seeing on fridge magnets and as advertisements for mindfulness retreats. Some of the sayings are his own quotes:
We only truly come alive in ourselves when we live for others.
If a rich man is to be truly charitable, he will give away all his wealth as soon as possible.
In itself, work is not a virtue, but it is an essential condition of a virtuous life.
The other sayings are from writers and thinkers who inspired him: Rousseau, Plutarch, Pascal, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Emerson, John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau among others, as well as quotations from the Talmud and the Bible. In Tolstoy’s defence, A Calendar of Wisdom was deeply serious and well meant. The book itself is calming, fascinating and often unintentionally entertaining: ‘If you are in the grip of carnal passions and overwhelmed by them, you will become entwined in the creeping bindweed of suffering’ – Buddhist wisdom. (Bring on the carnal passions, I say. Worry about the bindweed later.) Also known as A Circle of Readings or The Thoughts of Wise People, A Calendar of Wisdom consisted of a page of inspiring quotes for each day of the year, collected by Tolstoy over sixteen years and a popular edition was published in 1912, two years after his death.
A lot of the quotes directly contradict the messages of today’s self-help movement, which encourages us to devote ourselves passionately to the art of learning to love ourselves, or, at the very least, to move away from self-hate. In A Calendar of Wisdom, it’s the other way round. Pride and a love of the self are wrong; and if we are going to hate anyone, we should hate ourselves. (It literally says this. This sentiment is very typical of Tolstoy, who disliked doing anything pleasant, easy or fun.) Tolstoy prescribes an extreme, ascetic way of life, where lustful desires are especially dangerous and overeating is a sin because it denotes a lack of self-respect. Here are some of his other entries. On 4 June: ‘Because Christianity has become perverted, we now lead a life that has become worse than a pagan’s.’ Some of his edicts are painfully enigmatic. On 27 October: ‘The light remains the light, even though a blind man cannot see it.’ And anything relating to women is generally bad news. On 2 June: ‘A woman has a great responsibility: to give birth. But she doesn’t give birth to ideas – that is the responsibility of men.’
