GOGOL

just ordered dead souls through the library, the p&v one - is there a translation that's better that I should be looking for? (not a huge fan of p&v)

a little gogoling suggests that the guerney translation is best; ordered

i have the penguin one but of course i haven't read it. are p&v bad? i never notice

who are p&v?

gogol is aight imo

pevear & volokhonsky. i've read a few of theirs and liked them.

i think they're actually considered among the best, especially their dostoevsky translations, which are the ones i've read.
the nose is probably one of my favorite short stories ever.

the golden-eyed duck

(we are putting on The Government Inspector)

what dont u like abt p&v dyao? ive only read their anna karenina translation + it was rad (had nothing to compare it to tho)

I dunno, it's kind of baseless for me to say but I feel p&v get in the way of the original too much (NB I don't know Russian and never will) insofar as I will marvel at some word choices/sentence structures and go "hmm, isn't that odd"... basically I think P&V are more interested in translating it poetically than literally if that makes sense

There's been lots of interviews with them recently, and, uh, they actually mention that they sometimes fight to get through some translations that people say "seem odd" -- because, well, the original text is odd!

Actually, hmm, found the interview:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/interview.asp?PID=19363

(Rest of this post is a quote of the section I had in mind. Recommend reading the whole interview though, they say quite a bit about their process, word-choices etc)

--

LV: Or I may point out a slang expression. Like, instead of "steal" Dostoevsky can say "filched" or something like that. So I comment on that, and Richard takes it and works on it, following in the original and occasionally looking at other translations. He also asks all kinds of questions. Sometimes he comes running to me and says, "Is this true? Is this what the original says?" Our authors can be pretty wild.

RP: One of my favorite examples of that is a little sentence in Dostoevsky, in Crime and Punishment. His narrator says, 'it was a very simple matter, and there was nothing complicated about it.' I read it three times, and then I said, "Look, is that what he said, really?" "Yes, that's what he says." So I wrote it, and when a well-known professor from Harvard reviewed the book he said, "Occasionally, they lapse into banality," and he quoted this sentence. But it's not my fault!

very interesting! thanks for that. maybe I'm just being too contrarian. well, I have both on the way - I guess I'll flip a coin

Tolstoy, as you know, had very great doubts about art altogether, and liked to express them, although not so much in the period when he was writing War and Peace, which was later.

I would like to know more about this; off to find a good biography of Tolstoy, I suppose

i can buy a nice cheap copy of nabokov's book on gogol. i guess i should?

I read a chapter or two from it awhile back (having only read the nose) which made me get dead souls. it's very good! pick it up!

Notwithstanding the mysterious threadstarter's comments, I can reveal that "Dead Souls" is amazing fun. At least so far.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2188717/

I have consumed I think zero Russian literature so far in my life so this thread reminded me to go get tix to see The Government Inspector at Shakespeare Theatre Co.

as an aside to other ilxors who are "young adults", theaters are desperate to get you in the habit of going to them and will sell you tickets for like $20.

i often think dead souls is the greatest book i've ever read (def top 5)

On a writing table, inlaid with mother-of-pearl which, in places, had broken away and left behind it a number of yellow grooves (stuffed with putty), lay a pile of finely written manuscript, an overturned marble press (turning green), an ancient book in a leather cover with red edges, a lemon dried and shrunken to the dimensions of a hazelnut, the broken arm of a chair, a tumbler containing the dregs of some liquid and three flies (the whole covered over with a sheet of notepaper), a pile of rags, two ink-encrusted pens, and a yellow toothpick with which the master of the house had picked his teeth (apparently) at least before the coming of the French to Moscow.

On reaching the tavern, Chichikov called a halt. His reasons for this were twofold—namely, that he wanted to rest the horses, and that he himself desired some refreshment. In this connection the author feels bound to confess that the appetite and the capacity of such men are greatly to be envied. Of those well-to-do folk of St. Petersburg and Moscow who spend their time in considering what they shall eat on the morrow, and in composing a dinner for the day following, and who never sit down to a meal without first of all injecting a pill and then swallowing oysters and crabs and a quantity of other monsters, while eternally departing for Karlsbad or the Caucasus, the author has but a small opinion. Yes, THEY are not the persons to inspire envy. Rather, it is the folk of the middle classes—folk who at one posthouse call for bacon, and at another for a sucking pig, and at a third for a steak of sturgeon or a baked pudding with onions, and who can sit down to table at any hour, as though they had never had a meal in their lives, and can devour fish of all sorts, and guzzle and chew it with a view to provoking further appetite—these, I say, are the folk who enjoy heaven's most favoured gift. To attain such a celestial condition the great folk of whom I have spoken would sacrifice half their serfs and half their mortgaged and non-mortgaged property, with the foreign and domestic improvements thereon, if thereby they could compass such a stomach as is possessed by the folk of the middle class. But, unfortunately, neither money nor real estate, whether improved or non-improved, can purchase such a stomach.

God alone perhaps could tell what Manilov's character was.... You will never get from him any sort of lively or even merely provoking word, such as can be heard from almost anyone, if you touch upon a subject that grips him. Everyone is gripped by something: for one it is borzoi hounds; another fancies himself a great lover of music and wonderfully sensitive to all its profundities; a third is an expert in hearty meals; a fourth in playing a role at least an inch above the one assigned him; a fifth, of more limited desires, sleeps and dreams of taking a stroll with an aide-de-camp, showing off in front of his friends, acquaintances, even non-acquaintances; a sixth is gifted with the sort of hand that feels a supernatural desire to turn down the corner of some ace or deuce of diamonds, while the hand of a seventh is simply itching to establish order somewhere, to get closer to the person of some stationmaster or cabdriver--in short, each has his own, but Manilov had nothing.

That same moment, after taking the tailcoat and trousers to the room, Petrushka came downstairs, and the two went off together, saying nothing to each other about the goal of their trip and gabbing on the way about totally unrelated matters. They did not stroll far: to be precise, they simply crossed to the other side of the street, to the house that stood facing the inn, and entered a low, sooty glass door that led almost to the basement, where various sorts were already sitting at wooden tables: some who shaved their beards, and some who did not, some in sheepskin coats, and some simply in shirts, and a few even in frieze greatcoats. What Petrushka and Selifan did there, God only knows, but they came out an hour later holding each other by the arm, keeping a perfect silence, according each other great attention, with mutual warnings against various corners. Arm in arm, not letting go of each other, they spent a whole quarter of an hour going up the stairs, finally managed it and got up. Petrushka paused for a moment before his low bed, pondering the most suitable way of lying down, and then lay down perfectly athwart it, so that his feet rested on the floor. Selifan lay himself down on the same bed, placing his head on Petrushka's stomach, forgetting that he ought not to be sleeping there at all, but perhaps somewhere in the servants' quarters, if not in the stable with the horses. They both fell asleep that same moment and set up a snoring of unheard-of density, to which the master responded from the other room with a thin nasal whistle. Soon after them everything quieted down, and the inn was enveloped in deep sleep; only in one little window was there still light, where lived some lieutenant, come from Ryazan, a great lover of boots by the look of it, because he had already ordered four pairs made and was ceaselessly trying on a fifth. Several times he had gone over to his bed with the intention of flinging them off and lying down, but he simply could not: the boots were indeed well made, and for a long time still he kept raising his foot and examining the smart and admirable turn of the heel.

gogol was a metaphysically anxious dude, prone to religious delusions, and this manifests itself in fiction where the fabric of reality seems awfully flimsy, as if at any moment the entire universe could just evaporate. in stories like the nose this is explicit: you wake up one morning and your nose is impersonating a gentleman; the coordinates of reality have shifted irrevocably. in dead souls this quality of his writing is less pronounced, but i think it's still very much there. the world of the novel is incredibly memorable and engrossing and clearly the product of a writer of the highest gifts. but that's the thing: gogol was too talented a writer to be doing this sort of horatian satire/mock epic defending traditional russian values. his caricatures are too vivid, and instead of seeming humorously flattened they become unsettlingly hyperreal. just look at the passage describing manilov. his pathos are real but unrealistic. everything about this book is like that. reading it is like being trapped inside a potemkin village. push against any character, event, or circumstance and you'll find nothing behind it. the worst part is that nobody is more aware of this than the narrator. he frantically scrambles from vignette to vignette, patching up the holes in his expansive umwelt with peasant grotesques, hoping to prevent the black light of the void from peeking through, which of course is impossible. you can keep it out of sight but it remains a palpable presence, lingering behind the surfaces. it's fitting that the book was never finished because everything about it is incomplete. that's it's brilliance but from gogol's perspective it was its failure, which is why he was probably right to burn the second half. it's his book after all.

i found a book in the hilo public library today (from CHICKEN SKIN PRESS) containing detailed case files on what seemed like every time anyone had said they saw anything strange in hawaii, w suggested explanations from local mythology/folklore. (i grew up with a similar book, just called CHICKEN SKIN, probably by the same people, that wasn't nearly as thorough--a gift for tourists, not a reference volume.) i thought of something i'd read (i forget where--nabokov's lectures?) about how gogol had grown up contemptuous of the rural superstitions of provincial ukraine and only wanted to move to petersburg and become a sophisticated writer, and then when he got there found that the city was amidst a craze for spooky ukrainian stories: witches, goblins, baba yaga etc.. he wrote an urgent letter home requesting "full details" on everything his aging relatives recalled about that stuff. i thought how happy he would have been to have a book like this.

anyway one of the reasons i like the strange mock-epic qualities of dead souls is that he uses a version of the same tone he used to sell his strip-mined ukrainian ghost stories to the city folk--lots of dear-reader asides and guidebook descriptions of "our russia", as he once told non-ukrainians about that strange province "little russia"--but this time it's human personalities he's selling as gargoyles and goblins, and russia itself he's acting like petersburg book-buyers know nothing about. the whole book is addressed to someone to whom russia is an alien place, populated with grotesqueries, but it doesn't feel exactly like it's meant for westerners: it's for russians to whom russia is alien. and behind russia's monsters, "peeking through" yes, is the same kind of dread controlling force gogol imagined behind the ukrainian monsters, animating and distorting them, but now instead of satan it's a thoughtless nullity, poshlost. idk that that's the same as nothing tho; it's more unsettling than nothing. in the 21c we are used to grappling with an indifferent universe but i think gogol was grappling with an actively malevolent one.

and then at the same time there is an element of sincerity to every paean to russia he launches into (the passage at the end of one of the early chapters about "the russian word" especially: his bread and butter!) in the same way the ukrainian stories he wrote for money forced him to acquire (excavate) love in himself for all the creepy corners of the place he'd come from that he thought was dumb and evil. as you say the book is thoroughly unfinished and i don't think this contradiction, in particular (i love russia / everyone in russia is a monster) is ever even close to resolved. for this reason even tho the book is notoriously impossible to categorize in one or the other of the century's big intellectual narratives (despite its radischev-esque road-movie social critique, and despite all its mock-passionate/passionate slavophil passages) it also feels eerily central to the country's whole identity crisis at the time, which manifested itself (at a bunch of different points on the political spectrum) as a simultaneous deep insecurity and intense messianic self-belief. gogol, insisting the whole time he doesn't even pay attention to stuff like that, is honest in his confusion about russia where even tolstoy can be a little pat (NATASHA'S DANCE to the peasant music, f'rinstance: a more "realistic" window on russian_life than gogol's, but also faintly schematic; not a complicated moment to interpret, not an upsetting moment). but it is honest in an unfinished way that will never say to you all the things you think it might. he is lynchian, actually. (dead souls even has two seasons: a big-hit first volume and a big-mess second.) this is why nabokov, who likes imagined worlds and exquisite things that work just so, accuses the book of having nothing whatsoever to do with real life or with anything at all before he praises its language for hours: there is no fully coherent and satisfying way to think about its relationship to russia 1842. i am usually down with the hermeticism of the artifact or whatever but in this case i think the confusion is all the more reason to spend a lot of time thinking about exactly that.

i thought of something i'd read (i forget where--nabokov's lectures?)

i remembered, it's in the introduction to the p/v translation of gogol's short stories.

This is very, very necessary for me. I expect from you in your next letter a complete description of the costume of a village deacon, from his underclothes to his boots, with the names used by the most rooted, ancient, undeveloped Little Russians; also the names, down to the last ribbon, for the various pieces of clothing worn by our village maidens, as well as by married women, and by muzhiks ... a minute description of a wedding, not omitting the smallest detail ... a few words about carol singing, about St. John's Eve, about water sprites.

(in light of that btw the ghoulish scene w chichikov poring over the contents of his chest, the lists of dead names he's bought, imagining their faces and lives, becomes just as ambiguous for me as everything else. this empty man who preys on the dead, who catches them and puts them in a little box with which he hopes to become rich and respected: as robert downey jr says in wonder boys, does that sound like anyone we know.)

this is a really late response but dll's comments about this book along with edmund wilson's "a window onto russia", which i read recently, legitimately made me want to learn russian. i'm doing a mini-lesson on gogol for class in about a month and i am having a lot of fun thinking about just what aspect of gogol to focus on: the proto-kafkaesque vision of the absurd, the idea of a moralistic social novel gone wrong, the unwieldiness of truly original literary talent, or just the fact that gogol is the most conflicted and difficult of the great russian writers. it's very hard to summarize what, exactly, is great about him, but even for people who have read him in translation the sense that he is a major writer is undeniable.

i think what dll mentioned -- the idea that the relationship between gogol and russia's self-conception in the 19th century is something that shouldn't be overlooked -- is a really interesting. it's hard for me to think about gogol as any sort of "representative" of his time. his was such an idiosyncratic sensibility: paranoid, mystical, lacking any sort of perspective about the limitations of his own cognitive or artistic power (he wanted his bizarre novel to "rejuvenate" russia). but maybe the outliers can tell us more about their milieu than those whose thoughts are more readily assimilated by the thinking of their time....

For UK ILXors, "The Bespoke Overcoat", which won an Oscar for best short film in 1957, is on at 2.30 on Talking Pictures today.

i have never read gogol, but dead souls seems like it would be up my alley. is there a consensus on the best translation?

I have the Guerney vol talked about above but read an old translation.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300060997/dead-souls