A Belinsky moment. . .

I think I mentioned, in one of my previous blogs, that I spent five years translating the Rape of the Lock into Italian rhyming couplets. What I may have not mentioned is that around ten years ago, when I finished my translation, I sent it to two Italian publishers, the only ones who I believed could do a good job with it, Mondadori (the publisher of my other translations) and Adelphi, a literary house I have always admired for their uncompromising taste.

Mondadori sent me a very nice letter, saying that they liked my translation but didn't think that there was a market for a new edition of The Rape of the Lock (I can well understand them: they are a very big concern, and they'd struggle to find a mainstream market for it). Adelphi also loved my translation, but could not find a way to make this project happen at the time.

Then I recently had lunch with Adelphi's publisher in London, and my translation of Pope was brought up again – imagine – after ten long years. I was asked to revise the translation and resubmit, because there was a chance that it could now be published. I sent it by courier, and the following day I got a call on my mobile to say that they really love my translation and there's every chance it may be published by Adelphi.

Now, why did I say this? It's because it reminded me of a Dostoevsky anecdote. After he finished writing Poor People (a book I published at Hesperus, incidentally), Dostoevsky gave a manuscript copy to his friend Dmitri Grigorovich, who in turn brought it to the poet Nikolai Nekrasov. They read Dostoevsky’s manuscript aloud, and were so overwhelmed that, although it was close to 4:00 am, they went straight to Dostoevsky to congratulate him. Later that day, Nekrasov brought Poor People to one of the leading critics of the day, Vissarion Belinsky. “A new Gogol has appeared!” Nekrasov announced – to which Belinsky replied, “With you, Gogols spring up like mushrooms!” But Belinsky soon communicated his own enthusiasm to Dostoevsky: “Do you realize what it is that you have written?” In his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky remembered this as the happiest moment of his life.

Obviously I am no Dostoevsky, and this is only a translation – but this was my Belinsky moment, and it goes to show how publishing is still able, even in our unromantic digital age, to create such moments of pure bliss in a man's life.

AG

Burning Books

There has been a great deal of news recently over the forthcoming publication of Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished work The Original of Laura, due to emerge in November (see the article in The Telegraph and try to ignore poor "Dimitry Nabakov's" mangled name). It is hard to believe that Nabokov would have been terribly happy about this event: although an admirer of Kafka, whose requests to have his work burnt after his death never seemed especially plausible, he expressed regret that Gogol had not fully destroyed the second part of Dead Souls. Nabokov had always been piqued by the relentless attention he received from the shoals of academics belonging to the Venetian witchdoctor's school – to the extent that a great deal of the prefaces he wrote to his own books usually allude nastily to them in one way or another – and he saw the publication of unfinished manuscripts, authors' diaries and letters not designed for publication as something that missed the point completely about a work of art, and instead promoted a sort of literary muckraking, rummaging in the drawers (both types) of literary celebrities.

The BBC, true to its increasingly tabloid tone, jollies the prospective reader along: "Perhaps it is true that his final work is even more scandalising than the earlier book, that it has 'all the sex' in it." But I find Tom Stoppard's opinion far more agreeable: that Nabokov's dying wish (which he consistently expressed throughout his life) ought to have been respected; "since he didn't want me to read it, I won't". The book was a long way from being finished - all that remains is 138 index cards (compared to around 2,000 for Ada) in a non-linear order. It has been described by the publisher (Penguin Classics) as 'not necessarily extremely polished' but 'incredibly interesting', which is exactly the kind of thing Nabokov would have loathed. It's difficult to see why, after hinting at first that he would destroy the manuscript (see an article in the Guardian from last year), the writer's son Dmitry changed his mind so quickly, against his father's express wishes.

Nabokov always had something of the schoolmaster about him. From his mode of writing – standing at a lecturn for hours on end, pencilling his work onto index cards – to his tirelessly sententious tone and "strong opinions", it's hard not to imagine the disapproving wagging of a pedagogical finger from beyond the grave. Of course this isn't an appropriate image because Nabokov naturally chose to be cremated, which fact doesn't surprise me in the least.

Petersburg

Few of the world’s great cities have given rise to national myths as powerful as the myth of Petersburg. Founded in the early eighteenth century by Peter the Great as the new imperial capital, with the express purpose of redirecting Russian history and creating a new identity for the nation, it became from the early nineteenth century the dominant symbol of Russian historical experience. In one aspect it proclaims the triumph of human endeavour over elemental forces, but more consistently it is perceived as a city built against nature, lost in the mists and marshes where no human habitation previously existed or ought to exist, a spectral city whose inhabitants lose touch with their own roots and become unreal themselves. In the nineteenth century this tradition is most forcefully expressed in the work of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky, and echoes of them can be detected on every page of Bely’s novel. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to claim that the central hero of Petersburg is none of the shadowy human figures that populate its pages, but the equestrian statue of Peter, who descends from his pedestal as he did in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman to compel the obedience of his reluctant vassals. Many a conversation between the characters recalls the dialogues of Dostoevsky with their psychological tension and threat. And the depiction of the city streets, the scampering pedestrians defined by the hats they wear or the shape of their noses, could only come from Gogol’s Petersburg Tales.

Petersburg shows us the city at a time of crisis. Russia is reeling from defeat in the war with Japan, and the revolution of 1905 is beginning to seethe. Subversive nondescripts crowd the city streets, through which the main upholder of order and stability, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, must make his way to his government office in his black cube of a carriage. The novel’s material is almost all derived from real circumstances and events which can be traced in the historical record of the time, but that does not make it a historical novel in any customary sense. Time does not move in straight lines here, it turns back to devour its own tail, and it is only in myth that anything can truly be explained. When he published his first novel, The Silver Dove (also translated by John Elsworth, Angel Books, London, 2000), in 1909, Bely stated in a preface that it was to be the first novel of a trilogy entitled East or West. If that first novel was a study of the Eastern aspect of Russian culture, the darkness and religious ferment of the countryside, then it was natural for its sequel to focus upon the most Western of Russian cities. But what we find is that this utterly rational, Western city is no less chaotic than its rural counterpart.

In the course of composition the links with Bely’s first novel became more and more tenuous, although there are glimpses of it in the character of Styopka and the tales he tells. Bely was never fully satisfied with Petersburg, and published a much shortened redaction of it in Berlin in 1922; however, it was shortened almost exclusively by a process of excision, leaving a text which, though critics have appreciated its increased pace, is not in the last resort entirely coherent. He also dramatised it for production in the Moscow Arts Theatre. The dramatic text went through innumerable modifications before it saw the stage, and then it survived only one performance in 1925. My translation is of the longer original version, written between 1911 and 1913 and first published in the Moscow journal Sirin in 1913–14.

Petersburg is the work for which Bely is best known, though he was the author of seven novels in all, much poetry, extensive works of philosophy and literary theory, and a vast output of memoirs. Born into a Moscow academic family in 1880 (his real name was Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev), his career spanned an equal period on either side of the 1917 revolutions. Most of his life was spent in or very near to Moscow, though he lived in Switzerland for two years in 1914–16, and in Berlin for two years in the early 1920s. One of the acknowledged leaders of the Russian Symbolist movement in the first decade of the century, in demand as a contributor to all the cultural debates of that time, he fell out of favour after the revolution and lived his last years in relative seclusion and considerable penury. He died in January 1934.

There is a strong autobiographical substratum to Petersburg. There are considerable similarities between Nikolai Apollonovich’s relations with his parents and the known biographical facts of the Bugaev family – not that Bely’s mother really fled the family home, nor that Bely ever sought to kill his father. His triangular relationship with the Likhutins bears a clear resemblance to Bely’s relations with his friend and fellow poet Alexandr Blok and his wife, Liubov Dmitrievna, with whom Bely at one time nearly eloped. But the interest of these personal elements lies in the way they are threaded into the broader canvas and become typical images of the psychological and philosophical malaise that Bely diagnoses in the culture of his time. The conflicting aspects of the city itself, its rational geometry and its haunting nebulousness, are reflected both in the political conflict between reactionary status quo and revolutionary turmoil, and in the unresolved tensions between logic and emotion in the characters themselves. Neither aspect can hope to win; it is only in a faintly mooted apocalypse that redemption may be found.

Petersburg is the culmination of the pre-revolutionary tradition of the city’s depiction, absorbing and re-interpreting a century of literary history. Very soon after Bely wrote this novel, the city was renamed Petrograd out of wartime chauvinism, to become Leningrad a decade later, by which time the capital had been moved back to Moscow. Nevertheless, the Petersburg tradition did not disappear, even if for much of the twentieth century it took refuge in the more private realm of poetry. In post-Soviet Russia the city’s historical name has been restored and its cultural reverberations have come to resound afresh.

— John Elsworth

(John Elsworth’s translation of Petersburg by Andrei Bely is available from Pushkin Press for £14.99)

Gogol Celebrations: Part 2

Gogol is one of my favourite authors. I have published his Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Fell Out with Ivan Nikiforovich (under the title The Squabble) and other stories at Hesperus, and my greatest ambition is to publish a new translation of Dead Souls and his Petersburg Stories.

I think he is one of the greatest and most influential geniuses in the world of letters. He should be as widely read as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Bulgakov. Still, his works are very little known in this country. Perhaps it’s because he’s a humorous writer, and humour must be of a particular kind to appeal to English and American readers.

But another reason why Gogol is so dear to me – apart from the fact that he was stark raving mad – is that he has a strong connection with Rome. He commented on and praised the poetry of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, and even talked about my hometown Genzano in one of his letters:

I want to tell you about a feast that took place over the past few days in Genzano, a small village not far from Rome. It is called the Infiorata. Just imagine: all the streets are strewn and adorned with flowers – but don't think that the flowers are simply scattered around. Not at all! You wouldn’t even guess they are flowers: imagine some sort of carpets depicting a variety of things, and these all made of petals: baskets, vases, patterns and even a portrait of the Pope – simply extraordinary. The streets, the windows, the door frames were crowded with people…

And he goes on to describe the Infiorata procession.

Our Oneworld Classics edition of Dead Souls should be coming out in the Spring of 2010. For the time being, dear Nikolai, a happy two-hundredth anniversary, with many returns!

AG

Gogol Celebrations: Part 1

Today is the bicentenary of the birth of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), who was one of greatest and strangest writers to come out of Russia or Ukraine, and deserves considerably more fame than he has in Britain. Gogol was born in the town of Poltava in present-day Ukraine, and many of his earlier stories were based on gobbets of Ukrainian folklore supplied by his mother along with financial support. Naturally, there has been a lot of wrangling between Ukraine and Russia over his true nationality since he wrote in Russian and lived for a considerable while in St Petersburg.

I was first put off reading Gogol at the age of 17 by a nasty Penguin cover for Dead Souls depicting a bunch of peasants grubbing around in filth (at least that’s how my memory has repainted something by Repin), and didn’t actually start reading his work until several years later. That picture was wholly inappropriate to Gogol, whose genius lies in his humour, his ability to get hopelessly and wonderfully distracted by details, and his utterly bizarre vision of the world.

Take The Nose, for instance, one of the celebrated Petersburg stories: Major Kovalyov wakes up one morning to find that, instead of a nose, he has simply “an extremely uncouth, smooth, and uniform patch” slap-bang in the middle of his newly egglike face. Later, on Nevsky Prospekt, he recognises the nose leaping into a carriage, “clad in a gold-braided, high-collared uniform, buckskin breeches, and cockaded hat”. Аfter pursuing it into a building he then has an awkward social encounter with the nose, unsure of how to conduct himself because the nose is wearing a uniform of a higher rank and regards the Major with evident disdain…

One day during a visit to St Petersburg, I decided to locate a memorial to Major Kovalyov's nose which had been installed in 2002 on the wall of Prospekt Rimskovo-Korsakova, peering over a set of traffic lights. I was galled to find that the organ in question – which weighed in at a good six poods and was positioned several metres above the ground – was simply absent. I checked and rechecked the address – it was correct. I approached a somnolent security guard working in a nearby bank and explained everything to him; his look was as blank as the wall. I didn’t know what to do, I’d walked a long way to get to that nose, I hesitated. And then, abruptly and unpleasantly, before turning back to the little TV flickering in the plastic booth: no, he had no recollection of any nose, there’s no nose here.

The fact was, the nose simply vanished one morning. Perhaps it was taken by thieves, perhaps it sauntered off to a cushy job in GazProm where it was something of a hit with the ladies and liked to read trashy magazines.