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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 9
Introduction
Hemingway acknowledged that he would not have known Leo Tolstoy
and Fedor Dostoevsky if not for the translations of Constance
Garnett. How could we learn about other cultures and civilizations
without reading their literature? And how could we do that without translation,
the most vital and underappreciated art?
While Russian literature provided the world with the gold standard for
novels, it also gave us quintessential short stories, certainly by the acknowledged
master Anton Chekhov (who was a dab hand at plays, as well), but
also by Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Bunin, and
Isaac Babel, among many others.
In the nineteenth century, Gogol’s stories created a new form within the
genre. His tales of life in a Ukrainian village poked gentle fun at characters
who are universal in their cares and concerns, and his stories about bureaucrats
in St. Petersburg, the new capital built on swamps and the bones of the
laborers, present the city in an eerie and phantasmagorical light. Pushkin,
who is the most beloved writer in Russia to this day, Shakespeare and Byron
rolled into one poetic genius who argued with tsars and died in a duel over
love and honor in 1837, published Gogol’s stories in his literary magazine. He
claimed that all Russian literature came out of the pocket of Gogol’s “The
Overcoat.”
Most readers of this volume will have read some Russian literature in
college or at a good high school. If scenes still dance in your heads of cavalry
charges, aristocrats dancing and falling in love in brilliant ballrooms, rural
gentry spending cozy evenings philosophizing, oppressed or luminous peasants
ruminating in their muddy villages, passionate revolutionaries conspiring
in underground cells, and miserable prisoners of the gulag going about their
day, you are in for a surprise.