The Beiderbecke Affair

'This man did not understand the meaning of the event'

I mentioned yesterday how Orlando Figes praised the War and Peace translation of Pevear and Volokhonsky, how the husband-and-wife team were able to capture the “awkward bumps and angularities” of Tolstoy’s language. Figes focused on Tolstoy’s repetition, but he also mentioned the writer’s long sentences. He quoted one in particular in which the mayor of Moscow despairs before the French advance.

Garnett breaks it into seven sentences; Briggs into five; Edmonds breaks it toward the end. But Pevear and Volokhonsky recognize the sentence for exactly what it is—the description of a man who cannot “stem the flow of the enormous current of people which carried him along with it”—and they leave it as they should, in all its glory, as one unbroken stream of words:

But Count Rastopchin, who now shamed those who were leaving, now evacuated government offices, now distributed good-for-nothing weapons among the drunken riffraff, now took up icons, now forbade Augustin to evacuate relics and icons, now confiscated all private carts, now transported the hot-air balloon constructed by Leppich on a hundred and thirty-six carts, now hinted that he would burn Moscow, now told how he had burned his own house and wrote a proclamation to the French in which he solemnly reproached them for destroying his orphanage; now he assumed the glory of having burned Moscow, now he renounced it, now he ordered the people to catch all the spies and bring them to him, now he reproached the people for it, now he banished all the French from Moscow, now he allowed Mme Aubert-Chalmet, the center of all the French population of all Moscow, to remain in the city and ordered the old and venerable postmaster general Klyucharev, who had done nothing particularly wrong, to be arrested and exiled; now he gathered the people on the Three Hills to fight the French, now, in order to be rid of those same people, he turned them loose to murder a man and escaped through a back gate himself; now he said he would not survive the misfortune of Moscow, now he wrote French verses in an album about his part in the affair—this man did not understand the meaning of the event that was taking place, but only wanted to do something himself, to astonish someone or other, to accomplish something patriotically heroic, and, like a boy, frolicked over the majestic and inevitable event of the abandoning and burning of Moscow, and tried with his little hand now to encourage, now to stem the flow of the enormous current of people which carried him along with it.

This is a case where form mimics content brilliantly. And it reminded me of another instance, another Russian instance, even. Here is the magnificent & mind-boggling opening sentence of Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden, a novel about Dostoevsky.

IMAGE: Moscow on Fire (aquatint on paper tinted watercolor) by J. F. A. Clar (1768-1844)

 This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

Constance Gar-NYET!

Wow. That’s a really stupid pun and may betray my one-time profession as a copyeditor for a daily paper. Nevertheless, it adequately summarizes the sentiment behind Orlando Figes’ essay in the New York Review of Books praising the new translation of War and Peace.

On the one hand, Figes is interested in the merits of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s work. “It is an extraordinary achievement,” Figes writes, “particularly because Pevear does not speak or read Russian but relies on a literal translation (with notes on syntax, nuances of meaning, and literary references) by his wife Larissa to write a more finished English draft.”

But mostly he has come to bury Constance Garnett, whose Victorian-era translations set the standard for how we read Russian literature in English. Which is to say, we read it as if it were English literature and not Russian. That was Nabokov’s complaint. He groused that Dostoevsky’s frenzied, piercing, sorrowful, and despairing Notes from Underground, in Garnett’s hands, “becomes a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.”

Figes quotes D. H. Lawrence, who notes that Garnett worked so quickly her pages would fly from the table and pile up beside her. And if she found a passage to be strange or awkward in its original Russian, well, then she might just delete it altogether.

As a result, Figes says, English readers can’t really tell the difference between Tolstoy’s language and Doestoevsky’s. In particular, we miss the “awkward bumps and angularities” of Tolstoy’s style, his idiom, his loose grammar, and above all his repetition. Figes quotes the following paragraph from the new translation:

During his service, mostly as an adjutant, Prince Andrei had seen many anterooms of significant persons, and the differing characters of these anterooms were very clear to him. Count Arakcheev’s anteroom had a completely special character.

Note the repetition of “anteroom.” Previous translators have found it awkward and reached instead for the elegant variation:

The Maude translation uses three different words for “anteroom” and omits it once. Edmonds omits the word twice; Garnett once; while Briggs removes the repetition altogether by omitting the noun twice and using two rather different words (“reception-room” and “waiting-room”) on the other occasions. Pevear and Volokhonsky are the only ones to translate all five repeats of the noun.

What’s the difference? Says Figes: “It is a specific word with a specific meaning.”* Which is to say, Tolstoy was no fool. To quote myself this time: “If we are to call Tolstoy a great writer, then we must grant that he actually knew what he was doing, that he wasn’t just indulging himself.” That is true about the length of War and Peace, but it is also true about the language.

* Figes leaves it to his reader’s imagination what that word (priemnaya in Russian) specifically meant to Tolstoy or to Count Arakcheev.

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

Tolstoy v. Dostoevsky

From a great essay on War and Peace by Michael Dirda in Sunday’s Washington Post:

Some of these same polarities recur in another classic juxtaposition: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Young people nearly always prefer the latter—Dostoevsky’s alienated heroes are anguished intellectuals, often murderous and dangerously attractive. But then Dostoevsky is fundamentally romantic. By contrast, Tolstoy possesses an almost Homeric indifference to his characters’ fate. His only interest is truth. This is Natasha, this is Pierre, he seems to say, I am not creating them so much as simply recording what they felt and did. As Isaac Babel once observed, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

IMAGE: Dostoevsky x 3 (from the portrait by Vasily Perov, 1872)

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

‘She’s the one always reading War and Peace’

From Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth:

My Uncle Max came home and while I dialed Brenda’s number once again, I could hear soda bottles being popped open in the kitchen. The voice that answered this time was high, curt, and tired. “Hullo.”

I launched into my speech. “Hello-Brenda-Brenda-you-don’t-know-me- that-is-you-don’t-know-my-name-but-I-held-your-glasses-for-you-this- afternoon-at-the-club . . . You-asked-me-to-I’m-not-a- member-my- cousin-Doris-is-Doris-Klugman-I-asked-who-you-were . . .” I breathed, gave her a chance to speak, and then went ahead and answered the silence on the other end. “Doris? She’s the one who’s always reading War and Peace. That’s how I know it’s the summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace.” Brenda didn’t laugh; right from the start she was a practical girl.

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

‘The wine was necessary for him’

Yes, Rick. War and Peace is long. But that’s so Tolstoy has the room to give us every last detail of an interminable dinner party whose plot significance is as yet undetermined. I feel like I’ve been reading this scene for days—which makes it feel exactly like more than a few dinner parties I’ve attended. Still, I enjoyed this paragraph in particular:

Nikolai sat far away from Sonya, next to Julie Karagin, and again was saying something to her with an involuntary smile. Sonya smiled formally, but was clearly suffering from jealousy: she turned pale, then red, and tried as hard as she could to hear what Nikolai and Julie were saying to each other. The governess looked around anxiously, as if preparing to resist, if anyone took it into his head to offend the children. The German tutor tried to memorize all the kinds of dishes, desserts, and wines, in order to describe everything in detail in his letter to his family in Germany, and was quite offended that the butler with the napkin-wrapped bottle bypassed him. The German frowned, trying to show by his look that he did not even wish to have this wine, but was offended because no one wanted to understand that the wine was necessary for him, not in order to quench his thirst, nor out of greed, but out of a conscientious love of knowledge.

The scene-setting and characterization are so brisk and efficient, the humor effortless. Of course, it’s possible, too, that Tolstoy wasn’t meaning to be funny. One gets the sense that Germans—with whom the Russians were about to engage in an unhappy alliance—are sometimes like that.

IMAGE: A birthday party in the town of Swienciany, on the Polish bornder with Lithuania, March 20, 1937. Photograph by Yaakov (Yankl) Levine. What does this have to do with War and Peace? Read here.

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

‘Hemingway must have envied that scene to death’

Rick again:

So you are reading War & Peace and wonder about its length. It’s a 19th-century opus. All those guys (and gals) wrote tomes. Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov isn’t much shorter, and Charley Dickens’ Bleak House & Great Expectations are—hell, all of Charley’s books are tomes. You quote Henry James, but once he got relaxed and in his European groove, he wrote at great length. And then there’s George Eliot, a woman with a man’s name—long books. Face it. 19th-century readers had lots of time and wanted a good yarn. And War & Peace is the best of the good. Even some of the extraneous stuff—when Tolstoy writes about the hunt and the dogs, those dogs that must have gotten into Alfred Knopf’s imagination, for he used that kind of dog as symbol of his publishing house—hell, that’s good writing when those dogs go out and the hunters chase after them. You just have to kick back and let the book wash over you, like a month of tides. Treat yourself to a vacation where you dig foolish Pierre coming to terms with his bastardry and poor Prince Andrei having to die two times—that almost-death scene on the battlefield ranks right up there. Hemingway must have envied that scene to death. And Natasha! Dig her. When Hollywood came to cast that role, they had to wait for Audrey Hepburn to get old enough. And by that time, Henry Fonda was kinda old for his role, but what the heck, the guy stars can always be two decades older than the ingénues. It’s Hollywood. So, don’t complain about its length. If you want to read a short book, try Chekhov.

FOR THE RECORD: I wasn’t complaining, Rick. Honest.

Tolstoy Consommé

If you are unconvinced by my argument that the page count of War and Peace is necessary, then there is relief. Earlier this year, the Independent released The Reduced Tolstoy [scroll down], a 155-word abridgment by Adam Long, co-writer of The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkpr (abridged). Here you go:

Sonya and Natasha say bye to their boyfriends, Boris and Nicholas, who are going off to fight Napoleon, and they promise to be faithful, but Natasha is really fickle and as soon as Prince Andrew shows up she promises to marry him, and as he goes off to war she decides to run off with Anatole, but Sonya saves herself for Nicholas because she's a symbol of selfless and unconditional love. Meanwhile, the Russians are fighting the French and finally the Battle of 1812 happens, complete with cannon. So Sonya waits for Nicholas for years, and when he shows up he says his family's broke and he needs to marry this rich chick if that's OK and she says sure, because if you're a symbol of selfless and unconditional love you get dumped on all the time. And they all live happily ever after, except for the French, who are destroyed by a final Cossack attack.

Battle of 1812?

IMAGE: Portrait of Leo Tolstoy by Nikolay Gay

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

'You have to commend him for writing a story 1,600 pages long, but it could have been much, much shorter'

The new translation of Tolstoy’s Titanic of novels is 1,296 pages, but others have run even longer. I’m curious right from the start to know how this length is a function of Tolstoy’s art. I assume, of course, that it is a function of his art, that if we are to call Tolstoy a great writer, then we must grant that he actually knew what he was doing, that he wasn’t just indulging himself. “‘War and Peace,’ the man himself wrote, “is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.” And I am guessing that its length is a part of this novel’s form no less than a sonnet’s length is a part of its form.

Which is why I’m frustrated with folks like Stacia from the blog Stacia’s Library. She argues that the novel’s page count suggests a kind of failure on Tolstoy’s part. “You have to commend him for writing a story 1,600 pages long,” she writes, “[but] it could have been much, much shorter.” (The novel as marathon. Can I get a T-shirt for finishing?) Stacia reminds me of a teacher I had in high school who used to raise his arms and declaim: “Brevity is the handmaiden of concision!” In this vein, Stacia recommends Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as a substitute for the first half of War and Peace and Red Badge of Courage or All Quiet on the Western Front for all the battle stuff. “And again,” she writes, “both these books are much, much shorter than War and Peace” . . . as if one war book, or one novel, were really the same as another, give or take a few hundred pages.

In Stacia’s defense, she had an ally in no less a figure than Henry James, who rather dismissively referred to War and Peace as a “loose, baggy monster.” Another, more sympathetic perspective comes from Tom Goodfellow: “Length is, in fact, the key to the novel’s success,” he writes.

It allows Tolstoy to describe scenes in fantastically vivid detail, and to change perspective throughout. We experience the Napoleonic wars through the eyes of soldiers, aristocrats and even those of the omniscient author musing on the nature of history itself. The enormous scope enables War and Peace to encompass a range of ideas that appear contradictory at times. The main storylines have a soap opera quality but the author argues against the role of the individual in history; it embraces Russian patriotism at the same time as critiquing it; the battle scenes are both thrilling and devastatingly bleak. Instead of feeling disjointed, the book feels generously accommodating.

To which I would add this: What is the point of all these things made possible by Tolstoy’s verbosity? What is the point of Tolstoy’s details and perspectives and why are they all necessary? What is the point of presenting these ideas and these contradictions and why can’t Tolstoy do it in fewer than a thousand pages? Whom are all these pages accommodating and how?

I have plenty of ideas, but I thought I’d wait until I had read at least a hundred pages before spouting.

IMAGE: Portrait of Leo Tolstoy by Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945)

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

Look on my book, ye Mighty, and despair!

We humans like stuff that’s big—that’s huge!—and the sheer size of War and Peace has been much of its attraction over the years. When I was in ninth grade I read it not in spite of its length but because of it. I had already conquered Michener, but that was kids’ stuff, or so I imagine myself thinking. Let’s see if I’m ready for the big leagues.

War and Peace is not like, say, Anna Karenina, whose adulterous heroine seems so modern, so recognizable, and who bears a stamp of approval from luminaries such as Oprah and Candace Bushnell. Anna Karenina is familiar, even to people who have never cracked its cover. But what about War and Peace? “What can you pick up about Tolstoy’s earlier and more massive novel if you haven’t read it?” wondered Laura Miller in Salon back in 2005.

Its size! Perhaps that was too obvious a point for Miller to make, but not for me. War and Peace exists as a familiar cultural object for that reason alone. People who don’t know Tolstoy, who don’t even know he’s Russian, know that War and Peace is really long. And we like stuff that’s big—although “like” may be the wrong word. We are in awe of stuff that’s big. That seems to be how Scott Esposito felt “when modestly making my ant-like way word by word through this massive stack of paper” (there’s that word “massive” again). He felt small, which is another way of saying he felt unworthy, which led him to feel “a responsibility to like” the book.

Or maybe more like a duty. Well whatever you call it, I would be either unbelievably arrogant or unbearably stupid if, counter to the wisdom of the many who have preceded me, I stopped to trifle with this book.

All of which is an unfortunate way to approach a novel like War and Peace, or any novel for that matter. But it’s honest. And predictable. After all, when a company wants to explain how many megabytes of text it can cram onto a USB stick, it talks in terms of War and Peace:

1 Gigabyte on a USB stick – 640 copies of Zipped ‘War and Peace’ can fit on it. 310 copies unzipped.

And when a dorky blogger brags about his reading habits in junior high, he talks in terms of War and Peace. Still, one of the things I’m interested in, as I begin the book again, is how this massive (!) length is a critical function of the book—a function not simply of the reading experience but of the novel’s art, as well.

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

Remembering Pierre, or a Long Adventure Starts

I’ve decided to read War and Peace again. A big thank-you to the good people at Knopf for sending me a review copy of the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is set to be released on October 16. It’s a gorgeous book, with a design that is elegant and spare, and I’m a total sucker for a book that looks good. Anyway . . . again? I first read War and Peace when I was in the ninth grade—I was even more of a reader then than I am now, I think—but I don’t remember too much about it. Pierre. I remember Pierre, and a tiny bit about Prince Andrei. (Pierre was fat and nerdy and wore glasses, a natural draw to any junior high school student inclined to pick up a thousand-page Russian novel.) I don’t remember any of the women, but I remember the Battle of Austerlitz, sort of. The name turned up many years later, like an echo from the past, in the title of W. G. Sebald’s wonderful novel. How Sebald-appropriate is that?

I’m not approaching the novel as a “project,” as did Laura Miller a couple years ago; it’s not spinach.* I read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Magic Mountain while living in Korea, and I loved them all. They are big, challenging, idea-packed. Life just seems more intense when you’re inside their covers. Frank Wilson expressed something similar last year in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Settle in with War and Peace for a couple of hours, and you’ll find, when you get up, that the things round and about you seem a little lackluster compared with things as Tolstoy evokes them. But you soon find yourself taking the time to look at those things around you a little more closely, because Tolstoy has shown you how.

Now’s as good a time as any for this adventure because of Knopf’s new edition. Pevear and Volokhonsky are a star translation team—their Anna Karenina earned the seal of Oprah’s book club—and I’m curious to read their work. It comes on the heels of a new version—not simply a new translation—of War and Peace that is causing an uproar among publishers and academics alike. (“This is purely commercial bullshit,” Stanford Slavist Gregory Freidin told the Observer.) I’ll write some about that, as well as about this new translation, and as I get on in the Knopf edition, I’ll also use this space to record my impressions.

Don’t expect a diary, though. If I don’t have anything to say, rest assured, I’ll shut up. But how can you read War and Peace and not have anything to say?

* Actually, it might very well be the literary equivalent of eating your spinach, but that is, I think, a disastrous way to approach a novel.

IMAGE: Battaile d'Austerlitz by François Gérard (1810)

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.