Beginning Russian Literature

                                                 

                                                   
                                               Spasskaya Tower - Fotopedia

     During a tedious moment in a recent "closing" process my banker asked, "I have a son going to college and thinks he is interested in Russia. How should he start, what should he read?" I thought for a couple of minutes, scribbled down a couple of titles and pushed them over to her.
     The Greenwich Village drugstore on the corner of East 8th and 2nd Ave was crowded on a Friday night in 1959. A rotating wire rack was packed with books - I selected Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don. In my poorly lit room I began to read. The Cossack Pantaleimon Melekhov has awakened his son Gregor and told him they are going to do some early morning fishing. "But has mother boiled the bait?" - "Yes, go to the boat."
     "Here and there stars were still piercing through the ashen, early morning sky. A wind was blowing from under a bank of cloud. Over the Don a mist was rolling high, piling against the slope of a chalky hill, and crawling into the cliff like a grey, headless serpent. The left bank of the river, the sands, the back waters, stony shoals, the dewy weeds, quivered with the ecstatic, chilly dawn. Beyond the horizon the sun yawned and rose not."
    With that paragraph I joined the Melekhovs in the skiff trying to catch carp - then on to Cossack training encampments where I saddled my horse next to Gregor's  Later in 1914 I rode with the Don Cossacks slashing through Austrian army positions, then attacking reactionary "Whites", flirting with independence becoming "Greens" and finally overwhelmed by the Bolsheviks, the "Reds". Fishing on the Don I became hooked on Russian literature. Over succeeding years Sholokhov wrote two additional books as part of the The Quiet Don series: Harvest on the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea. These volumes may be ignored. Sholokhov won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. But as Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, a former Chairman of the Soviet Union's Politburo and in retirement a literary critic said (paraphrase) "All the drama around Comrade Sholokhov and he only wrote one damn good book!"
     Konstantin Simonov as a youth in Soviet Russia was trained to be a lathe operator. He worked his way through and up the Soviet system and by 1942 was a poet, novelist, war correspondent and senior battalion commissar in the Red Army. His rank meant that Simonov had the power if necessary to override the orders issued by his battalion commander. By 1959 his book The Living and the Dead ** was approved by multiple layers of Soviet censorship and published. The story begins in the Ukraine days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Simonov's protagonist, Vanya Sintsov is a company level commissar on leave with his wife at a family gathering. The festivities are interrupted by news of the Nazi invasion and reports of
mechanized units rapidly advancing across Belarus and the Ukraine. Sintsov departs to rejoin his unit last heard to be near the front line. In his search he and comrades are repeatedly encircled and battered by the Germans. In one fire fight Sintsov is knocked unconscious. Unable to remove him from the field of combat a comrade tears the commissar insignia off Sintsov's uniform. The Germans were summarily executing captured commissars. But Red Army regulations stated that any soldier without identification insignia was considered a traitor or coward and subject to immediate execution. For the next 300 pages our hero is desperately fighting the Germans and yet trying to stay away from Soviet NKVD personnel who will also shoot him. At its core The Living and the Dead is about Russian GIs trying to fight and survive The Great Patriotic War.
     I must digress - in 1948 Norman Mailer published The Naked and the Dead, a novel that focused on American GIs fighting the war in the Pacific. It made Mailer a star in the literary firmament. But compared to Simonov's effort, Mailer's book struck me as fatally flawed. Soldiers and sailors often use foul language. Still there is no crude language in either Sholokhov's or Simonov's book - Soviet censors would never permit it. But Mailer was determined to tell it the way it was - almost. His characters when upset or alarmed repeatedly cry "fug this" or perhaps "fug that". Mailer was at a New York cocktail party in the early 1950s and met Marlene Dietrich. Reportedly Ms. Dietrich smiled at him and said "So you are the young man that can't spell fuck."
     Sholokhov and Simonov captured my attention. From there I would slowly move into what the erudite Vladimir Nabokov has described as the ". . . resplendent orb of the nineteenth century." Here we find the heavyweights of Russian literature - Chekhov, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevski, Gorki and Tolstoy.
     A strong recommendation, nay a warning - do not start your reading with War and Peace. To read this magnificent work requires preparation (brush up on your French), maturity and time. Early in my college teaching career I was embarrassed that I had not read War and Peace. So I sought to rectify this by purchasing Edmund Fuller's "authoritative abridged" edition and rushed through it. This helped - I was now familiar with some of the characters. Through the years I would also see the short American movie version (Henry Fonda was much too thin to play Pierre Bezukhov, but Audrey Hepburn was Natasha Rostova); the BBC mini series (Anthony Hopkins was outstanding but perhaps a too gentle Bezukhov); and the three hour Soviet movie War and Peace with an advertised cast of 100,000. 
     Three years ago, now a gentle, old pensioner I went to my Barnes and Noble outlet and purchased Tolstoy's War and Peace and in a sun lit room began to read. First, it is hard to imagine that there could be a better translation than Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's. Second, few things in life live up our expectations - but Tolstoy's tome exceeds them.**** One does not read War and Peace - one participates in a literary adventure. I expect that I shall read it again.

*Mikhail Sholokhov And Quiet Flows the Don (translated by Stephen Gerry) Vintage; 1966.
**Konstantin Simonov The Living and the Dead 1959.
***Vladimir Nabokov Lectures on Russian Literature Harvest Book; 1981.
****Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky) Vintage; 2008.