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From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 4/13/2005 3:41 AM

Basic Instincts

There's precious little room for redemption in the world of 19th-century short prose, where one sin leads to another in a catalog of human vice and viciousness.

By Oliver Ready
Published: April 8, 2005

Since launching its first list in 2002, Hesperus Press has acquired an enviable name in British publishing for its adventurous editorial policy and the attention it lavishes on each of its graceful volumes. Specializing in short works by major writers of the past, mainly from Western Europe, Hesperus has also earned praise for the high standard of its translations. The publishers may require further encouragement in fulfilling their stated commitment to "bringing near what is far" (they still offer no examples of genuinely distant literary cultures, from Poland to Greece), but we can only be grateful for their sustained efforts in bringing closer at least one neglected fictional family: Russian novellas and long stories of 150 pages or less.

Over the last three years, Hesperus has published more than a dozen fresh renderings of lesser-read works in this category, mainly from the 19th century. Reading just a handful of these provides a new perspective on apparently familiar writers and the tradition they helped create. From the early flowering of Fyodor Dostoevsky's idiosyncratic genius in "The Double" (1846) to the brief but brilliant last expression of Leo Tolstoy's epic gift in "Hadji Murat" half a century later, the range of concerns and styles is dazzling. Unexpected echoes between the texts can be equally striking. It is an insult that begins the comic standoff between once inseparable neighbors in Nikolai Gogol's "The Squabble" ("And you, Ivan Ivanovich, are a real goose"); and an insult that drives a wedge between once inseparable neighboring landowners, one rich and one poor, in Alexander Pushkin's "Dubrovsky," unleashing terrible retribution.

Slight as they are, the Hesperus volumes reflect the entire canvas of Russian society, from serfs to princes. There are the tight-laced, posturing provincial merchants of Nikolai Leskov's "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk"; the sycophantic, posturing civil servants of Dostoevsky; the magnificent, posturing officers and generals of Tolstoy; the dissolute, idle gentry, typified by Pushkin's wealthy landowner, Troekurov; and the mostly unhappy mothers, wives, daughters, lovers and housekeepers of all the above. In general, it is an exceptionally unpleasant and merciless world where one sin leads to another and there seems to be no way back. The possibility of redemption, a key theme of longer Russian 19th-century fiction, is chillingly absent here. Dostoevsky's novels "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov" offer the hope that the internal fracturing of the modern personality can be transcended; not so "The Double," in which the main character, lonely Golyadkin, gabbles his way to insanity in a psychological case study fundamental to all Dostoevsky's later writing.

As pessimistic as "The Double," yet utterly different in its expression and approach, is the taut, sometimes primitivistic storytelling of Leskov. His Lady Macbeth is a 23-year-old given in loveless marriage to a provincial merchant. Left to herself in a clean, empty house, with icon lamps glimmering in the sepulchral silence, she dozes her way through the long days, forever waking "to that same Russian boredom, the boredom of a merchant house, a boredom so profound that, as people say, it makes even the thought of hanging yourself seem like fun." In the event, things take a much nastier turn, though the combination of violence and bitter humor in this sentence is entirely typical, and not only of Leskov's story.


Hesperus Press

"Hadji Murat"
By Leo Tolstoy
Trans. by Hugh Aplin
Foreword by Colm Toibin
128 Pages. 6.99 Pounds
    
Many of these works are founded on what Leskov's narrator calls "vile jokes," sprung by fate or design. They explore not so much "the basest of animal instincts," as asserted in the translator's introduction to "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" (why should animal instincts be base?), but specifically human forms of revenge, mockery and humiliation. The vicious humor of the characters draws further irony from the narrators. "Such were the noble pastimes of a Russian gentleman," comments Pushkin's narrator in "Dubrovsky" after describing Troekurov's habit of locking the less fortunate of his visitors in a room with a hungry bear (the bear is tied on a rope that can stretch to every corner of the room bar one). At such moments, Pushkin, widely celebrated for his non-judgmental authorial stance, begins to sound almost as sarcastic as Tolstoy; such is the reality he is describing.

In "Hadji Murat," one of the highlights of the list, Tolstoy contrasts the reality of a corrupt social order with Russia's perennial antithesis in imagination and fact: the ethos of Muslim life and resistance in the Caucasus. A hero among his people, the rebel leader Hadji Murat has nevertheless been forced by his feud with the local ruler, the imam Shamil, to pledge his loyalty to the Russians. Placing Murat among the top Russian brass in the south allows Tolstoy to indulge fully his loathing for the masquerade of flattery and decadence that passed for Russian power under Nicholas I. (Though written at the turn of the 20th century, "Hadji Murat" is set 50 years earlier.) At times, this hatred erupts in almost buffoonish interjections on the part of the narrator, to whom ladies at balls seem to be wearing no clothes and who pictures government couriers "exhausting [their] horses and punching drivers in the face." Set against this circus of vice is the sober, awestruck depiction of Hadji Murat as a man of faith and deed, a hero impregnable to the pervasive cynicism of the world he inhabits. Compelling in its own right, and superbly structured, the tale is an essential counterbalance to the rest of Tolstoy's late writings. He had not, it seems, entirely rejected literature or violence.


RIA-Novosti

Leo Tolstoy was one of many 19th-century writers who skewered Russian society in short works of fiction.
    
"Hadji Murat" has been translated by Hugh Aplin with the authority that marks the many other Hesperus volumes for which he has been responsible. His translations are loyal in the fullest sense; each rises to the particular challenge of the author in question. Tolstoy, arguably the most straightforward in style, is rendered with a minimum of fuss; the word "cheerful" can occur three times in six lines, just as its Russian equivalent does in the original. The "rough stylistic edges" of a writer who, as Aplin comments in his introduction, "was not renowned as the most polished of the great Russian classics," are rightly preserved. Quite in contrast is the linguistic exuberance of his version of "The Squabble," which recasts Gogol's wandering narrative voice in a funny and entirely appropriate idiom; perhaps no other Russian title published by Hesperus gives quite as much pleasure.

At the risk of imitating one of Gogol's disturbingly friendly landowners, to whom everything is always quite splendid, it must be said that the renderings of Pushkin and Leskov supplied by Robert Chandler are, indeed, also excellent. Pushkin, in particular, seems to be the ideal match for the poise and brightness that characterize Chandler's work. It only seems a shame that, on all the covers of the Hesperus volumes, it is the authors of the generally dispensable forewords who are acknowledged and not the translators, whose efforts make the whole enterprise worthwhile.

Oliver Ready's most recent translation is "My Paris," by Ilya Ehrenburg, published to accompany a reprint of the original edition of 1933.

Hesperus press titles mentioned in this review:


"The Double"
By Fyodor Dostoevsky
Trans. by Hugh Aplin
Foreword by Jeremy Dyson
172 Pages. 7.99 Pounds

"The Squabble"
By Nikolai Gogol
Trans. by Hugh Aplin
Foreword by Patrick McCabe
112 Pages. 6.99 Pounds

"Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk"
By Nikolai Leskov
Trans. by Robert Chandler
Foreword by Gilbert Adair
112 Pages. 6.99 Pounds

"Dubrovsky"
By Alexander Pushkin
Trans. by Robert Chandler
Foreword by Patrick Neate
112 Pages. 6.99 Pounds

"Hadji Murat"
By Leo Tolstoy
Trans. by Hugh Aplin
Foreword by Colm Toibin
128 Pages. 6.99 Pounds

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