Saturday, May 23, 2015

Reading 19th Century Russian Wrters

 - in English, of course -- more or less. Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and others had a great deal to say and generally said it well. I missed out on these literary treasures as a young person. I was usually found reading scifi under the covers at night at age 11 or 12 or down at the local Carnegie library of our small town indiscriminately reading my way through the works of Thomas Hardy or S. S. VanDine. Now at age 89 I am discovering the riveting world of 19th century Russia as seen through the eyes of some remarkable literary figures. If you haven't had the pleasure of reading Dostoyevsky's  Crime and Punishment because you thought it might be too long or too dull you couldn't be more mistaken.

There are certain tricks one must get onto, though, to get much out of these masterpieces. The first and foremost concerns proper names of the characters. Everyone seems to have a given name, although this can vary all over the map during the course of the tale, a middle title referred to as a patronomic (these are surprisingly crucial to following the story), and a family name. Closely related to learning how to keep everyone straight is the task of pronouncing the names themselves. There may be rules but I don't happen to know what they are. I finally came up with the following trick - pronounce them so they sound Russian. Here's one to practice on - Mikhail Illianovich Kutusov - the general who defeated Napoleon in 1812, a remarkable man, shot twice through the right eye, who was fluent in ten languages, and is remembered today by Russians as we remember George Washington. A good example of what can happen to given names in the dialog is that of Fydor who is variously referred to as Fedya, Fedor, and Theodore.

Now to the stories: don't expect any transformations of the the road to Damascus type. Bad guys finish as bad guys, losers stay losers. I have yet to find 'they lived happily ever after.' Children and women get extensive development. Marriage is sacrosanct and the plot often hinges on the iron bound nature of those vows. A spouse must die before the principal finally can hook up with the true love or the desired romantic ending simply never happens. All of these literary geniuses present us with the ominous stirrings of inevitable change in Russian society. Though the tales are generally of the upper class educated and highly structured society the peasants or serfs are sympathetically portrayed.

It helps if the reader does a little French. It seems that nearly every educated person in Russia communicated in that language. For some reason the translators left the French bits in without parenthetical explanation. Never mind. You will get it. Speaking only Russian and certainly speaking German was just uncouth in those days.

A reader once complained about what he perceived as an historical error in Tolstoy's War and Peace. The reviewer responded - "It is fiction you know." Fiction or not, it is the best account of that titanic war ever written.