by Viv Groskop
The argument between Wilson and Nabokov, who were great friends for over twenty years before this incident, exemplifies all the worst stereotypes about Russian literature. That it’s only for the select few who are ‘intelligent enough’ to understand it. That it’s best not to try to understand it if you don’t read Russian fluently. That there’s no point in reading it at all if you don’t read the perfect translation. All this stuff came up. Worst of all? If you hold an opinion on these books, you will be shot down in flames by others who are better read and more intelligent than you are. So best to stay away, really. The irony is, the two of them were behaving exactly like academic versions of Eugene Onegin: cutting their noses off to spite their faces and throwing a relationship under a bus just to take the moral high ground over the translation of a few nouns.
To be fair on Nabokov, he had every reason and every right to translate Eugene Onegin, widely seen as ‘the first Russian novel’. You can see why Nabokov might have been annoyed by Walter Arndt’s translation; he felt it did the original a disservice. In Arndt’s translation, there were, admittedly, some liberties taken. According to Nabokov’s account, at one point a husband is mistaken for a lover and an arrow is rendered as a gun. The opening line, ‘My uncle has most honest principles’, comes out as ‘My uncle, decorous old prune.’ Clearly, this is about more than just being pedantic. (Although, personally, I would be totally up for reading a poem about an old prune.) But these small differences of opinion (surely the translator’s version of ‘alternative facts’) render Nabokov apoplectic and cause him to embark upon the translation to end all translations, which runs to four volumes and 1,850 pages. This is not quite as long as War and Peace, but it’s quite an achievement if you consider that the most popular version of Eugene Onegin is around two hundred pages. So Nabokov has added 1,650 pages of footnotes. That is a hell of a lot of footnotes. It is quite possibly the biggest act of pedantry in the history of literature.
Nabokov’s translation was completely skewered in Edmund Wilson’s review in The New York Times, which pointed out that the following words don’t really exist in English (or, if they ever did, they are now more or less obsolete): rememorating, producement, curvate, habitude, rummers, familistic, gloam, dit, shippon and scrab. (And you thought Russian seemed like a difficult language.) In the final nail in the coffin of their friendship, Wilson criticizes Nabokov’s translation of a line of Russian that reads ‘Shall I ever see you again?’ Nabokov has it as ‘Shall I see you?’, which Wilson says sounds like ‘the products of those computers which are supposed to translate Russian into English’. It’s hard to know at this point which of these two great men comes across as the bigger twit. While all these academic arguments are vastly entertaining, they do discourage ‘normal’ readers (i.e. people who are not deranged, pedantic Russophiles). And this is deeply unfair, because Eugene Onegin is so important in understanding the novel as a literary form. Aside from anything else, it is significant because it serves as a prototype for so much Russian literature that came after. It’s the first ‘novel’ (even though it’s in verse). And the character of Tatyana is also important as a type: she provides inspiration for Dostoevsky’s Dunya, the ‘good’ sister of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, as well as for Natasha in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
It’s in Onegin that we first encounter this particular ‘type’ beloved of Russian fiction: the superhero Byronic man (I am very proud of this Nabokovian wordplay; please applaud) who is above ordinary social and moral norms. Many critics have argued that there is no big message in the book. In my favourite edition, Professor Michael Basker agrees with this to some extent, although he also adds in his introduction: ‘It discloses a more serious preoccupation with how best to accommodate to the difficult task of living within life’s many vicissitudes and constraints’. That’s a mouthful. In other words: it’s about exactly what Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are about – how to live a decent life, what to do with your life, how to be a good person. It’s a heavily rhymed and metred version of an early self-help book.
I’m not sure Pushkin would have cared about any of this, though. He led a fairly reckless sort of life, not unlike Eugene Onegin’s. He courted disaster and loved risk. He was the sort of person who wasn’t afraid to do the sorts of things that, further down the line, are likely to make you think, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, why did I do that?’ He was completely obsessed by duels, because they were about a) defending his manly honour and b) proving that he was right. He was a social climber, a gambler and a womanizer prone to irrational rages. But love or loathe Pushkin, there is no denying that he is the most extraordinary storyteller (who loved fairy tales, magic and folklore – think J. K. Rowling), the best kind of fantasist, with melodramatic thespian qualities (think the Shakespeare who wrote the sonnets); perhaps, in modern times, he’s someone we would even call something of a drama queen (think Oscar Wilde): Pushkin’s biographer T. J. Binyon describes the great writer recounting the personal betrayal that led to his death ‘as if he were narrating a drama or a novelette that had absolutely nothing to do with him’.
Pushkin was born in 1799 to a family of minor nobility and fading grandeur and it would be difficult to find anyone in Russia at the time with a more exotic background. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side was an African prince, kidnapped as a gift for Peter the Great, most probably from the country we now know as Chad. That man went on to become a general and the Tsar’s adopted godson, and Pushkin later started a work about his great-grandfather’s life entitled ‘The Negro of Peter the Great’.
Apart from his increasingly prodigious literary output, I love the characterization of Pushkin as otherwise leading ‘a reckless and generally non-productive life’. The best kind of life, surely? He loved to gamble. He loved to drink. He loved women and regularly transferred his affections from one to another. ‘All women are charming,’ he wrote. ‘But the love of men makes them beautiful.’ Yet he also maintained childlike qualities throughout his life: he used to graffiti his work with doodles and sketches, he picked wild strawberries in the forests at Zakharovo, the estate an hour west of Moscow where his grandmother had an orchard; in pictures, we see him with messy hair, the collar on his shirt rakishly raised, always with the wrinkled jacket, Byronesque, dishevelled, beautifully tragic. As the biographer Serena Vitale has written, he often had a button trailing off his jacket, a detail that always makes me wish he had spent more time learning needlecraft and less time challenging people to duels.
Pushkin’s marriage to Natalia Goncharova, known as the most beautiful woman in all of Russia – she was seventeen, he was thirty-one – was seen as ill-fated from their wedding day. It had been postponed for months because of a cholera epidemic, and the day itself was blighted by signs regarded as bad omens: a wedding ring accidentally dropped, candles mysteriously blowing out during the ceremony. During their first few months of married life in Moscow, though, Pushkin was, for once, content: ‘I am married and happy,’ he wrote. ‘My only wish is that nothing will change.’ Shortly afterwards, however, the newlyweds left for St Petersburg, with Pushkin writing: ‘I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.’
What happened when they returned to St Petersburg was a nightmare for Pushkin. The Tsar granted him an honorary but ridiculous and humiliating title – kammerjunker; ‘junior gentleman of the chamber’ – purely so that it would be appropriate for his wife to attend court. She had already caught the eye of the Tsar, as well as that of other admirers. Natalia was described as beautiful and a favourite at court, but she also had a reputation for being uneducated and rather vulgar.
By this time, Pushkin had written Eugene Onegin, which he began in 1824 and completed in 1831. The novel itself is weirdly prophetic, or perhaps just brilliantly evocative of the mores of the time. There was a terrible echo of Pushkin’s work in the (incredibly stupid) circumstances that led to his death. In real life, Pushkin ended up in exactly Lensky’s situa
tion. Pushkin’s wife flirted (probably innocuously) with a young officer called George d’Anthès. An anonymous letter was sent to Pushkin, admitting him to ‘The Serene Order of Cuckolds’. Pushkin was then more or less obliged to challenge d’Anthès to a duel. Pushkin was shot and died two days later at the age of thirty-seven. D’Anthès never really apologized or showed any sign that he was sorry. But, then, these entirely pointless duels were happening a lot in those days, as Pushkin himself knew. In fact, the only thing that is perhaps not that true to life in Eugene Onegin is that Onegin is tortured by having killed his best friend in a duel and never recovers from it. In real life, men were forced to get over this the whole time and didn’t beat themselves up about it.
Eugene Onegin reads, then, as an entertaining diversion, a tragic love story and the confession of someone who realizes they have been a complete and utter dolt. As Onegin writes to Tatyana:
From all sweet things that gave me pleasure
since then I wrenched my heart aside;
freedom and peace in substitution
for happiness, I sought, and ranged
unloved, and friendless, and estranged,
What folly! and what retribution!
Awaiting her reply and hoping for the best, Onegin reads Rousseau and Fontenelle, but the only thing he can see in his mind’s eye is the letter that Tatyana sent him as a young girl, the letter he laughed at. Tatyana has her chance now to reject him, and we leave Onegin with his heart plunged ‘into a raving ocean’. How not to be your own worst enemy? Avoid hubris. Stay humble. Keep an eye out for self-defeating behaviours. Don’t duel. And when a very beautiful and intelligent woman sends you a declaration of love, think very, very hard before rejecting it and laughing in her face. Because, one day, she will be the one laughing in yours.
6. How to Overcome Inner Conflict: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Or: Don’t kill old ladies for money)
‘To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.’
Whatever you’re going through in life, you don’t have it as bad as Raskolnikov, the student who believes he is capable of great things and attempts to, er, prove it to himself by killing the elderly pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna with an axe and finishing her half-sister off, too. This is a book about how easy it is to convince yourself of things that are a) quite untrue and b) quite mad. If Eugene Onegin has an overly developed sense of entitlement, Raskolnikov feels so insecure that he will do anything to raise his status. Pushkin’s greatest work is about blithely destroying your own chance at happiness. Dostoevsky’s is about those moments in life when you know you’re about to do something very wrong but you do it anyway. Crime and Punishment is also predominantly a warning about the dangers of getting too hungry. Raskolnikov always copes with his inner conflict particularly badly when he has not had enough pies to eat.
I often thought of Raskolnikov the year I was living in St Petersburg, as I was near a lot of the places Dostoevsky mentions in the book. My route to the English-language school where I taught went through Sennaya Ploshchad (Haymarket), one of the novel’s main settings. Raskolnikov sets out from his rented lodgings here when his mind is tormented by thoughts of murder and he is finally on his way to commit the deed. Coincidentally, when I was there, I found a purveyor of the most superb pies, an old lady who used to set up shop outside the metro with cabbage pirozhki which she would keep in a metal bucket, warmed underneath by hot coals. I would buy a few of these hot little pies and munch wistfully on them as I walked along the same canals where Raskolnikov once roamed. At the time, I had an inner conflict of my own: how could I become more Russian but still be English at the same time? The longer I spent in Russia and the more I immersed myself, the more I could feel my identity splitting. I was not inspired to commit murder during my time wandering these streets (although I occasionally wanted to when I was kerb-crawled by all manner of creeps, something that happened on a regular basis at that particular time, as if it had become some sort of fashionable pastime), but I was still gripped with delusions about Russianness which reached almost Raskolnikov levels of insanity. I became more and more convinced of the idea that I had a ‘Russian soul’. In my defence, I was high on the exoticism of my temporarily adopted homeland and, being young and naive, low on self-awareness. I did eventually overcome my obsession with speaking exclusively Russian for a period of several months (something I insisted on doing to maintain the ‘purity’ of my Russian – what a lummox), just in time to realize that it would be a good idea if I got some work experience at the English-language newspaper the St Petersburg Press. I thought this would be a good way to incorporate the two halves of me: I could interview people in Russian and write up the interviews in English. That way, I could be both my old self and my new self at the same time. I worked there for a few months in the spring before the summer of the disastrous skinny-dip.
This newspaper was a peculiar set-up, a magnet for expats who were passing through and for young people like me who thought they wanted to be journalists. I wrote articles about rock bands (including about the band of God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift). I reviewed restaurants, which often served really terrible food; this wasn’t especially mentioned or acknowledged in the ‘reviews’ because we wanted to make it seem as if St Petersburg was a great place to live (partly because we were busy convincing ourselves). The big scoop that came in when I was there was a picture exclusive provided by a young American photographer who had managed to get a snap of the ultra-nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky wearing only his Y-fronts (greyish white, wrinkly, much like the man himself) and a pair of roller skates. It caused a scandal in the office. I can’t remember whether we published the photograph or not. I have a terrible feeling we did.
My first assignment at this newspaper happened to channel a Dostoevskian idea of nightmarish self-delusion and was a study in the art of inner conflict. I was sent to interview one of the head clowns at the circus. He was a sad, sweet man, with real-life fuzzy clown hair and a mournful, expressive face. The circus was a big deal: a tourist attraction that was on year round but regularly had new performers they wanted to publicize. This man was one of them. He had a message for the world via me, his long-awaited interviewer. He was not a clown. He was so much more than that.
He had pioneered an act that was unique: he had a troupe of performing hedgehogs. He had travelled the world with this act (‘Las Vegas, Tokyo …’) and was keen to impress on me that he was ‘no longer a clown’. This was because of his great international success as a renowned animal trainer, which is evidently one step up from being a mere clown. The whole interview was conducted as if he were making some kind of public statement about the end of his previous career. I took it very seriously. I can still see him shaking his head insistently, as he corrected me. ‘So when you started out as a clown …’ ‘Ya ne klon … [I’m not a clown]’ ‘Oh, yes, I’m so sorry … So, er, when you became a clown …’ ‘Ya ne klon … [I’m not a clown].’
His act was amazing. Hedgehogs would come and go on his command. They were hedgehogs he had caught himself in the wild and spent months domesticating. He taught them to run around and jump over each other (with the help of various strategically placed ramps). During the finale of his show, he would put a hedgehog in one end of a tube and it would come out as a porcupine at the other. One of his greatest challenges in life, he sighed, was getting the porcupine to stay in the tube (which was like a sort of a tunnel) during the show. This had taken a lot of training. This non-clown really was an extraordinary character. They were extraordinary hedgehogs. And I was very pleased with my scoop. (And with my Russian, which, as you can tell from the content of this hedgehog-based conversation, was now quite advanced.)
When I got back to the office and wrote up my copy, I was called into the editor’s office. Editor: ‘Why do you keep saying in the copy that he is not a clown?’ Me: ‘Because he was at great pains to point out that he’s not a clown. He is a
world-renowned animal trainer. He would be very upset if I didn’t say explicitly that he isn’t a clown.’ Editor: ‘But look at the picture.’ The circus had supplied a picture of this man posing alongside the hedgehogs and the no longer recalcitrant porcupine. He was wearing a massive fright wig, a Pierrot costume, full-face make-up and a red nose. I paused. ‘Yeah. I guess he pretty much looks like a clown.’ Editor: ‘You need to take out the stuff about him not being a clown.’
I nodded, reluctantly. I got the point. No story makes sense if it contradicts what’s in front of your face. On the other hand, in his own eyes, this guy was not a clown. The moral of this story is, I suppose: if you are not a clown, do not dress up as a clown. Or, in other words, sometimes other people can see more clearly who you are than you can. You might want to pretend to be something you’re not, but, even if you can’t see through it, other people can. You can tell them as many times as you want that you’re not a clown, but, if you look like a clown, people will assume you are a clown. This is one of the most painful lessons in life. We all believe things about ourselves that are not true. Usually, these things reflect unresolved inner conflict. Often, we are not aware of them. Other people can see them from a mile off.
When things like the clown encounter happened, it seemed as if Russia was flaunting its madness. One incident occurred around the corner from the huge bookstore Dom Knigi, a place which in itself was slightly mad. This store was a joke among Russian-language students because its name translates as ‘House of Book’ (rather than ‘House of Books’, which would be ‘Dom Knig’). No one was ever able to tell me properly why it was called House of Book instead of House of Books, but we liked to imagine that it had been named that in the Soviet era in case there was only ever one book on sale. That way, customers could only be pleasantly surprised if there was more than one. Hence the expectation-managing name, House of Book. Funnily enough, House of Book was usually extremely well stocked and contained many exciting items which could be bought for pennies (or, rather, kopecks, while they still existed) in the early 1990s. It also sold postcards with crazy Soviet cartoons on them, one of which featured a bear emerging from a matryoshka carrying the slogan: UNEXPECTABLE RUSSIA. Over the course of that year, Russia became a place where I saw terrible and mad things and often barely registered them, or considered them to be completely normal. If someone told me they weren’t a clown, even though they dressed in a clown costume, I nodded and believed them. One day on a walk to my English classes near the House of Book, I saw a small bear sitting in the passenger seat of a Lada. I swear it was wearing a seat belt. The only explanation for this bear being there was that it was from the circus. Maybe it was taking a break from the porcupine and his friends.
