Archive for May, 2019

Another Look turned its attention to an earlier century on May 1, with Madame de LaFayette’s landmark 1678 novella, The Princesse de Clèves. The Another Look director, Robert Pogue Harrison, led the panel, joined by Chloe Edmondson, a Stanford PhD candidate studying French literary and cultural history, and very special guest, Yale’s Prof. Pierre Saint-Amand, the author of The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment. Mostly the participants spoke off-the-cuff, but Edmondson’s opening remarks were an excellent introduction to this short and compelling work:

“Many of you may be familiar with French classics like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, yet you may not have ever heard of Madame de Lafayette, not to mention the book she wrote in 1678. To the French though, it is as much of a national treasure and classic, as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The book in fact had a huge resurgence of popularity in 2009 after President Sarkozy publicly disparaged the book.

He said, “Non”!

He was talking about the entrance exam for public sector workers and how it included questions about Lafayette’s work. He suggested it would be absurd to ask a metro ticket clerk what he or she thought about the Princesse de Clèves, that it was useless that candidates must have a knowledge of the Princesse de Clèves.  He added, too, that he “suffered greatly by the princess” in school.

These comments triggered a full-blown scandal, and the French people took to defending the work as a pillar of their national and cultural heritage, a work they felt should be read and appreciated by everyone, not mocked as irrelevant. University strikes that year gave rise to marathon public readings throughout the country of La Princesse de Clèves as a form of protest. Publishers saw sales of the book double within a year. Even a book fair in Paris that year sold, in mere hours, more than 2,000 pins that said “I read The Princess of Clèves” and “This year, the Princess will vote!”

Edmondson also retraced the history of the book for the audience:  “Born 18 March 1634 to a family of minor but wealthy nobility, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, became a maid of honor to Queen Anne of Austria in 1651, which initiated her entrée into the world of high society. It is during this time that she first became a part of the literary world of 17th-century France, frequenting the salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madame de Scudéry, as well as becoming friends with Madame de Sévigné.

But the people said, “Oui!”  Vive la France!

“She married François Motier, Comte de LaFayette in 1655, and with him had two sons. She lived with him in the countryside until her return to Paris in 1660, when she started her own literary salon, regularly receiving in her home some of the most important men of letters of her time, like the Duc de La Rochefoucauld who introduced her to the great playwright Racine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she starts to write as well.

“In 1678, La Princesse de Clèves was published anonymously, though it is quickly attributed to Lafayette. At the time of its publication, it was the source of literary scandal. It was a question of genre – people weren’t sure how to categorize what seemed to be a unique text, combining elements of two of the most popular genres at the time – the romance and the historical novella.

“Romances were generally set in a time and place distant from the author’s, with implausible heroic plots and fantastical events, whereas novellas – short novels – were generally set in recent history, with historical characters behaving according to social conventions. La Princesse de Clèves, set in the court of Henri II in the mid-16th century would seem to favor realism, but readers believed that the characters did not conform to the ways that people “really” would behave, because of what seemed to be exceptionally strange behavior of the heroine, such as the Princess’ confession to her husband of her feelings for another man.

“Today, one of the big scholarly debates surrounding the book also has to do with genre – namely whether or not it really did mark the birth of the modern novel. Regardless, I think we can appreciate that it holds qualities that will become characteristic of the types of books we consider novels, works that give readers access to the inner thoughts and emotions of the main characters over an extended period of time.

“Indeed, if we look at the history of the work’s reception, what no one seems to contest, even in the 17th century, is that it captured – to quote her contemporary critic Jean-Baptiste Valincour – the expression of “what happens in the depths of our hearts,” the “expression” of things that all have experienced.”

Grossman as a reporter for the Red Star. In Germany, 1945.

A few days ago, Vasily Grossman‘s 1952 Stalingrad arrived at my Stanford mailbox – a surprise for me, and an absolute miracle for Russian literature. It’s the first-ever translation of the “prequel” to Life and Fate (we’ve written about that book here and here and here). Both books have been considered a twentieth century update of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But there’s a significant difference: while Count Tolstoy tended to focus on the stories of aristocrats, Grossman, a Ukrainian Jewish journalist and soldier who had written about the opening of Treblinka (he was there), “accords a proper humanity to his subsidiary cast of steelworkers, factory chemists and Red Army soldiers, who battle against the odds from their ice-bound dugouts and foxholes,” according to Ian Thomson, writing in the London’s Weekly Standard. But there was another big difference: the Soviet Union didn’t want Grossman’s stories told, and did its best to suppress and destroy the manuscript. Evans tells that story, too, in London’s The Telegraph. 

Chandler and his wife and co-translator for Stalingrad, Elizabeth Chandler, are already getting the reviews most writers dream of. According to Robert Chandler, “Vasily Grossman was a man of unusual courage, both physically and morally. He spent longer than any other Soviet journalist in the thick of the fighting on the right bank of the Volga, in the ruins being fought over building by building and even room by room. And then, within months of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, he was writing some of the first articles and stories published in any language about the Shoah.”

From Evans in The Telegraph:

“I read Life and Fate on a trip to Moscow during the post-Soviet badland years, at the very end of the last century. Its vividness and power were so extraordinary that I felt my understanding both of that century, and of human love and fragility, shift on their foundations.

“The appearance of Stalingrad, Grossman’s prequel to Life and Fate written a decade earlier, is then a cause for excitement. Why do we so admire him? If you haven’t read him, you may be surprised that he does not feel ‘new’. His prose is plain, rugged, nearly old-fashioned. He has none of the bravura of Bulgakov, Olesha or Platonov, not much of the refinement of Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. He is Hemingway without the modernism (and exalted masculinity).” [Solzhenitsyn … refined? – B.H.]

“But a choice of detail, a descriptive lovingness in his sentences (he revels in lists as much as a panning movie camera), and a tireless curiosity about people under stress from tectonic events, enable him to articulate with an arresting empathy how it feels to be alive and human under such pressure. His minute and compulsive interest in his characters might feel intrusive, if his understanding were not so true. When, at Stalingrad’s start, Pyotr Vavilov, a middle-aged kolkhoz [collective farm] worker, receives his call-up papers in the summer of 1942, his first worry is that he cannot leave his family enough wheat and firewood to see them through the winter:

That night Vavilov stood in the moonlight, chopping up the tree stumps stacked under an awning behind the shed… Marya – tall, broad-shouldered and dark-skinned like her husband – was standing nearby. Now and again she bent down to pick up stray pieces of wood and occasionally she gave her husband a sideways look… Neither was speaking, which was their way of saying farewell. All around was silence. Like soft linseed oil, the moonlight covered the ground, the grass, the broad fields of young rye and the roofs of the huts, dissolving in the puddles and little windows…

“That’ll do,” said his wife. “You’re not going to lay in enough firewood for the whole of the war.”

According to Thomson in The Evening Standard, “For good or ill, no definitive version of Stalingrad exists. The ‘official’ version published in Moscow in 1954, one year after Stalin died, was heavily cut by the Central Committee and contained drearily propagandist overtures to collective farm output. Thanks to the editorial endeavours of Grossman’s superb translators, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Stalingrad has now been restored to the version that Grossman himself might have wanted.”

According to Evans in The Telegraph:  “Stalingrad (flawlessly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler), beyond its breathtaking fictional panorama, is, I think, even more moving because it also tells the story of a liminal moment, a moment that is briefly innocent both of the full hell of the Holocaust that Grossman would go on to document in Life and Fate, and of the knowledge we now have, that nations can be both victims and perpetrators.”

Read The Telegraph review here. Read The Evening Standard review here.

Marianna Yarovskaya

Think you have it bad here? When you see what’s selling in Russian bookstores, you’ll be grateful for Amazon.com. Filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya was presenting her Women of the Gulag at Cannes International Film Market, and was en route to Chisnau in Moldova, where the film about the last surviving women of the Soviet gulag system will be getting an award.

But she took a moment to write to me from Cannes: “Moscow friends occasionally send me snapshots from local and big bookstores. Here are a few more. Photos of ‘wonderful’ legally sold books in Moscow stores that have been sent to me: Beria: The Best Manager of the Twentieth Century (left), The Genius of Stalin, The Genius in Power.” This was photographed at the newspaper stand near Kazansky train station in Moscow this morning.”

Joseph Stalin is infamous and renowned. But Lavrentiy Beria? Not so much. Yet he engineered the Katyń massacres, which destroyed a generation of Poland’s leadership, about 22,000 officers and civilians.

He administered and expanded the vast gulag system, the subject of Marianna’s film. He also oversaw secret detention facilities for Soviet scientists and engineers, and the Communist takeover of the nations in Central and Eastern Europe, along with the repression of the people in those countries. He even supervised the development of a Soviet atomic bomb project.

But some of you will remember him from The Death of Stalin. Simon Russell Beale portrays the unsavory Beria in the film clip below, with Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov (in white), who briefly assumed power after Stalin’s death, and Steve Buscemi as the wily Nikita Khrushchev, who launched a successful coup d’état.

Theatrical distribution of the film was banned in Russia, but pirated copies circulated.

A rare copy of an early German winemaking book is on the auction block. It’s expected to fetch £2000-3000. The unusual offering comes to us courtesy the Rare Books & Works on Paper sale at Chiswick Auctions. The bidding ends on May 29.

Here’s the cool part: the beautiful woodcuts are by Hans Schäufelein, one of Albrecht Dürer‘s most gifted pupils. Schäufelein, born sometime between 1480 and 1485, was one of Dürer’s first journeymen. He developed his own style, yet never lost Dürer’s friendship and confidence along the way.

The illustrations, which show a winemaker at his labors, were originally planned for the Heinrich Steiner’s edition of the Liber Ruralium Commodorum by Petrus de Crescentiis, a work that was never printed.

This extremely rare copy on the production, storage, and improvement of wines, as well as beer, vinegar, mead, wormwood, and brandies, was reprinted eleven times until 1560, often bound together with Kuchenmeysterey, the first German cookbook.

According to Carmen Donia of Chiswick Auctions, interest in wine books, as well as an increase in their prices, has been a trend for the last few decades, thanks to the explosion of interest in food and wine in our wider culture. Among the earliest and most desirable titles is a work by Bartolomeo Plantina, the first printed cookbook from the late 15th century, the 1514 First Aldine Edition of Libri de re rustica (Book of Country Affairs), including works by Columella, Cato, Varro and Palladius, as well as Paulo Mini’s Discorso della natura del vino (1596), one of earliest books on wine.

“The author, not surprisingly a physician, considering the role wine played in health and wellbeing, tries to analyze tasting notes from different regions around Italy,” she says.

“Large collections of rare and first edition wine books have typically been amassed by wine estates, but equally academic institutions and wealthy individuals, especially traders and passionate oenophiles, have taken an interest. All early printed books (15th-16th century) on wine making, or on the culture surrounding wine, are very rare. We are therefore delighted to be able to offer this unique edition in our upcoming sale.”

Interested? Place your bids here.

Translator Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk alerted me to Joshua Yaffa‘s “A Doctor’s Literary Calling,” in the New Yorker this month. The article is a profile of Russian writer and cardiologist Maxim Osipov. Boris’s enthusiasm is understandable: he is one of the early champions of Osipov’s  writing, and his translator as well. Osipov’s rueful reaction to his newfound fame and the controversy it’s caused in Tarusa, the small provincial town that is his home: “It’s any author’s dream … You write a poem and a window breaks—such is the strength of your word.”

According to Yaffa, “Osipov’s legend grew, and so did the inevitable comparisons to Chekhov, who, in the eighteen-nineties, at his estate outside Moscow, often treated peasants for free and helped contain a cholera outbreak. ‘Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent,’ Chekhov once wrote to his publisher, adding that they share ‘identical goals and an identical enemy—the Devil.’ Osipov bristles at the comparison. ‘All it illustrates is the inclination to typecast people,’ he said. But it is hard not to find something Chekhovian in Osipov’s precision and pitiless honesty.”

“Precision and pitiless honesty.”

More praise: “In the past two decades, Russian literature has been dominated by surreal, dystopian tales—an appropriate genre, perhaps, to describe the convulsions that followed the Soviet collapse. Osipov’s stories, by contrast, are quiet, almost documentary. ‘There’s something of the late nineteenth century in Osipov,’ Anna Narinskaya, one of Russia’s leading literary critics, told me. ‘He allows himself a certain moral judgment. He knows what’s right, in life and in literature.’”

Varya Gornostaeva, who has published Osipov’s books with Moscow’s Corpus Books, told Yaffa: “Russian society is sadly marked by a certain infantilism. Maxim isn’t so much a liberal—though he’s that, too—as he is an adult, a person who can answer for himself. He’s one of the few grownups.”

“A year and a half after his first essay appeared in Znamya, he published an elegiac follow-up called “Complaining Is a Sin,” in which he describes receiving an early-morning summons from the hospital. “Cold, fog,” he writes. “Ten minutes later, you run into the office, shove the plug into the socket, everything is noisy, you put on a robe, look at the canvas-colored twilight outside the window, and say to yourself, ‘One, it won’t get any better, and, two, this is happiness.’ ”

Yaffa’s profile includes the fascinating history of Tarusa, a city 101 kilometers outside Moscow, the nearest former prisoners were allowed to get near the capital. It became a refuge for dissidents:

“As the camps emptied out after Stalin’s death, in 1953, Tarusa became increasingly populated with former prisoners. In 1955, Konstantin Paustovsky, a mid-century Soviet Thoreau, who was an officially recognized writer and was not a dissident himself, sought to escape the distractions of the capital and settled in Tarusa. In his small blue house at the end of a dirt lane, he began hosting the kinds of cultural figures who were treated with varying degrees of suspicion by the Soviet authorities—among them Arkady Steinberg, a poet and a translator who spent eleven years in the gulag, and Bulat Okudzhava, a talented folksinger whose parents had been arrested as ‘enemies of the people,’ in the thirties.”

The town became a sort of “sanctuary city” for those out of favor, “including, in 1959, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, one of the great lyricists of the twentieth century, who disappeared into the gulag in the thirties. Nadezhda had spent years evading arrest, moving from one provincial town to the next. In Tarusa, she found a place of refuge. ‘It’s Heaven,’ she wrote in a letter inviting another poet to visit her. ‘It’s wonderful here. I live well.’”

“It was in Tarusa where she began to work on her memoir, which circulated in samizdat copies in the Soviet Union and was first published in the West in the nineteen-seventies. ‘I knew she was writing something,’ [translator] Viktor Golyshev … who is now in his eighties, recently recalled. ‘But at the time I was honestly far more interested in lying on the beach by the Oka and getting a suntan.” …

“A young, relatively unknown Joseph Brodsky came to visit; so did his fellow future Nobel recipient Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the chronicler of the gulag. Rumor had it that as many as eleven K.G.B. agents were assigned to the town to keep track of all the political undesirables.”

Read the whole thing here.

Reading from “Lives of Maria” in Wrocław, Poland (Photo: Rafał Komorowski)

Just back from a busy day in Berkeley, but not too tired to share an article I just discoverd on Serhiy Zhadan in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Steadfast Book Haven readers will remember me writing about Ukraine’s leading writer (poet, novelist, essayist, translator), who visited Stanford a year or so ago, here and here and, in a piece titled “They told him to kneel and kiss the Russian flag, then he told them to…” here.

An excerpt from Amelia Glaser’s article, “Poems for an Uncertain World: On Serhiy Zhadan’s “What We Live For, What We Die For”:

…with the beginning of the war in Donbas in 2014, the present grew grimmer, and Zhadan’s verse grew more urgent. He has remained in close contact with many who still live in the region, and has written a series of poems in versions of their voices. “Headphones,” from 2015, describes a “quiet drunk” who has stopped watching the news. Instead,

He walks around the city with headphones on,
listening to golden oldies,
as he stumbles into burned-out cars,
blown-up bodies.

The poet in a café…

In addition to writing, Zhadan fronts a rock band, The Space Dogs (Sobaki v Kosmose), which has recently been renamed Zhadan and the Dogs (Zhadan i Sobaki), reflecting the poet’s new status as a household name. Phipps and Tkacz did not include his songs in this volume, but the fact that Zhadan is a public figure, immersed in the contemporary culture he writes about, is very much a part of his poetic persona. Rejecting the ivory tower, the 44-year-old Zhadan — whose boyish face is framed by a punky crew cut — articulates the voices of the crowd.

Much has been written about Zhadan’s street-level activism, about his involvement in the Kharkiv protests during the 2014 Euromaidan standoff. The poet made international news when he was badly beaten by a pro-Kremlin “Titushka,” or rabble-rouser, that spring. But what is striking about Zhadan — who read his work at my home institution, UCSD, two years ago — is his ability to connect with individuals on a personal level. He is direct, engaging, and remarkably patient. As a small group of us shared dinner after the event, a woman at the next table overheard our Russian-language conversation and, when we introduced Zhadan as a Ukrainian poet, asked whether he was a nationalist. Zhadan, who had recently been listed by the Russian government as a nationalist terrorist and arrested for attempting to attend a poetry festival in Belarus, shook his head, then added, “But I believe in a people’s right to decide its future.” He agreed to send the woman some of his writing electronically. I was stunned by his empathy and generosity. But Zhadan, a native speaker of both Ukrainian and Russian who has always written in Ukrainian, has a long relationship with Russian readers, and one that has not always been confrontational. In Russia, his books have been shortlisted for the Andrei Belyi Prize, the “National Bestseller” award, and the “Book of the Year”; he was nominated in 2010 for Russian GQ’s “Man of the Year” for literature, and his work remains important to the Russian literary counterculture.

Read the whole thing here.