A brilliantly emotional tragedy, July 19, 2000

As is often the case in O'Neill's plays, the premise is fairly simple and unoriginal and the development of the plot is relatively predictable, but the intensity with which the characters are developed is excellent and truly memorable. We see in Rob the same sort of futile hope that O'Neill would develop so well some years later in The Iceman Cometh, and the despair of the other characters is quite moving. At times, the pathos in the play can almost be over-the-top (and I imagine that in live performances this might be something that the actors have to be all the more careful to avoid), but O'Neill manages to avoid going into the realm of melodrama and create very real, touching characters.

O'Neill would, of course, go on to write many other deeply emotional plays, a number of which are still better known than this one. Beyond the Horizon shows us many of the talents for which O'Neill is now universally recognized, and the almost-universal acclaim that it received upon its 1920 premiere seems equally apt today.

Could have been better, but it's awfully good, July 14, 2000

Nabokov's essays on The Inspector General, Dead Souls, and "The Overcoat" are all quite illuminating and entertaining. He escorts us through each work, discussing the numerous ways in which each innovatively reflects Gogol's unique and charming quirks, and including, with annotations, numerous passages (each translated by Nabokov himself) which demonstrate Gogol's excellent prose. His emphasis is not at all on the plots of the works (which he only grudgingly included at the end of the book at the request of his publisher) but rather on their style, which he successfully shows to be a much more fundamental aspect of Gogol's works than any satire that one may choose to read in to them.

At times, though, it seems that Nabokov gets a little too caught up in his own dogma. Most critics nowadays would agree with Nabokov that Gogol was much more important as an artist than as a social commentator, but it's pushing it awfully far to say, as Nabokov does, that Dead Souls is no more authentically a tale about Russia than Hamlet is authentically about Denmark. Also, Nabokov confines almost all of his attention to just three works, which put together, if memory serves, wouldn't come to much more than 300 pages. He dismisses Gogol's numerous Ukrainian tales (the last of which were written when Gogol was 25; The Inspector General, by contrast, was written at the ripe old age of 26) as "juvenilia" which are emphatically not "the real Gogol," and pays little more than lip service to any of Gogol's other acclaimed short stories. The one other slightly irritating aspect of Nabokov's book that I can think of is that in the long passages that he quotes he insists on interjecting his own comments [in brackets] mid-sentence, thus ruining the flow of the prose that he took the trouble of translating so very well.

But these are all minor quibbles, and I hope you won't let them discourage you. Nabokov makes his point very entertainingly and very well, and although it might have been nice if he'd broadened his study to more of Gogol's work, his discussions of Gogol's three most important works are really excellent. Since it would be hard for me to think of a 20th-century author more suited to writing about Gogol than Nabokov, I had high expectations for this book, and I was not at all disappointed.

A bit disappointing, July 14, 2000

The novel primarily emphasizes the characters of Yegor and Foma. Yegor is one of Dostoevsky's stock "meek types" (in the same vein as Myshkin in The Idiot, Sonia in Crime and Punishment, and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov) and is quick to be self-effacing and lie down in awe before anyone even seeming to have more knowledge of the world than he. This opens the door for Foma, who despite Yegor's status as head of the household takes every opportunity to insult Yegor and impose his own will--in an amusing example of his excesses, one Thursday he demands that everyone in the household pretend that it is actually Wednesday. Foma, incidentally, is based partly on Nikolai Gogol, and as translator Ignat Avsey's annotations show, many of Foma's statements were inspired by the infamous Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, in which Gogol exposed himself as a peasant-hating reactionary.

Considering how short it is (just under 200 pages), the plot of the work is fairly engaging, and I certainly found it a pleasant read. However, I was disappointed that, despite its billing as Dostoevsky's longest comedic work, once I got past the first couple chapters I really didn't find the novel particularly funny. Apparently Dostoevsky initially envisioned it as a play but made it into a novel for financial reasons. I can see how it might be more entertaining as a play, as Foma and several other characters could be quite humorous. As it stands, since it's narrated by Sergey, who is understandably indignant about the state of affairs at Stepanchikovo, Foma's tyranny over the estate comes across as pathetic, not amusing. Dostoevsky was of course a genius and remains my favorite author, but it seems that in the genre of provincial comedy Gogol was his superior. If you're interested in something by Dostoevsky with a lighter tone than his most famous works, I'd recommend The Gambler or Uncle's Dream over this novel.

All in all, The Village of Stepanchikovo is certainly not boring, and Avsey does a very good job with the translation, introduction, and notes, but unless you're really a fan either of Dostoevsky or of 19th century Russian provincial novels, I frankly don't see much of a reason to choose this particular work.

A splendid translation of a splendid author, July 14, 2000

Critics still disagree to some extent over the quality of Gogol's Ukrainian tales and the extent to which they reflect the artistic vision found in his later, most famous pieces. I would acknowledge that there aren't any absolute masterpieces among these stories, but the world he creates through the lot of them, with the constant presence of the supernatural (probably best seen in "The Night Before Christmas" and "Viy") and a charming provincial sense of humor (at its height in "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich"), is really quite memorable. Also, it's very interesting to see how the simple country folk of the Ukrainian tales evolve into the often equally naive clerks found in the Petersburg tales, and how the demons and ghosts of Gogol's earlier pieces anticipate the haunted portraits and phantoms of departed eternal titular councillors that would later win Gogol lasting fame.

It is, however, the Petersburg tales that are really the centerpiece of the collection. Though it would be a mistake (one that has tempted many a socially-minded critic over the years) to portray these stories as representing a profound sympathy on Gogol's part for plight of the little man, Gogol uses humble copying clerks, struggling artists, and their ilk to paint a wondrously alive picture of the bustling imperial capital. In each of the stories (among which I should mention "Nevsky Prospect" and "The Portrait," neither of which appears in anthologies nearly as often as it should), Gogol infuses the experiences of a seemingly undistinguished individual with something extraordinary, sometimes using the supernatural and other times exploring the protagonist's dreams or his madness. Though Gogol's contemporaries (like Pushkin and Lermontov) were producing a number of excellent works at the same time, those works tended to focus more heavily on the privileged few, and, innovative though they were in various ways, they were written somewhat more in the spirit of the works of foreign authors like Byron and Scott. In Gogol's Petersburg Tales we see Russian masterpieces written for almost the first time in a relatively non-Western European style about the masses who were not lucky enough to belong to the high nobility, and these works (though Gogol surely had no intention of things turning out this way) would go far to influence the social realism developed by later Russian authors.

Gogol's prose is known among Russians for its beautiful lyricism, which sometimes fails to come through in translation. This translation is (unsurprisingly, given how widely praised Pevear and Volokhonsky are) an exception to that; each of the four stories in the volume that I had previously read in other translations improved substantially under the influence of Pevear and Volokhonsky, and throughout the volume I often marvelled at the elegance of the narrative. The one complaint I might have about the collection is the omission of the historical romance Taras Bulba, which is probably the best known of Gogol's Ukrainian tales and is substantively different from any other story he wrote. However, since (at about 120 pages) it might better be described as a novella that a short story, and since the volume is already slightly Ukraine-heavy, it's understandable that Tara Bulba didn't make it in. Other than that issue, I can't think of a single weakness in the collection, and I highly recommend it to anyone with any interest in Russian literature or in the development of the short story as an art form.

Innovative, though sometimes dull, July 9, 2000

The novel was quite innovative for its time (1840) and had a substantial influence on Russian literature for many years to come. Pechorin may be the best example of the "superfluous men" often found in 19th-century Russian novels; Lermontov does a fine job of bringing us to understand the depth of the disenchantment which prevents Pechorin from developing any sincere and lasting attachments to other human beings and causes him to interfere in the lives of others out of sheer boredom, often with tragic consequences. The non-chronological structure of the novel, though perhaps a bit awkward, allows Lermontov to show Pechorin from three different vantage points (the narrator's, Maxim Maximych's, and Pechorin's own) and was definitely ahead of its time.

For all its virtues, the novel did drag at times. In part because of the unusual chronology, there were occasions when I couldn't figure out what the purpose of some of the passages was until quite a while after I had read them. Also, some of the musings on travel through the Caucasus were quite unnecessary and seemed a bit boring; perhaps in the original Russian they allowed Lermontov to show off his lyrical talents (he was, after all, first and foremost a poet), but any substantial lyric quality that may have existed in the original gets lost in the translation (I'm referring here to the Penguin Classics edition translated by Foote; Nabokov's translation may be better in this regard, but I tend to doubt it).

In any case, although it does have its dull moments, A Hero of Our Time is a milestone in Russian literature and should be read by anyone with a substantial interest in the numerous authors (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Blok among them) who were heavily influenced by this short novel.

Four intriguing plays, July 9, 2000

The approach of the plays is extremely interesting. Each is very concise and intense, focussing on the main character at a moment when he must make an important choice, and in each case the choice the protagonist makes results in one fashion or another in the destruction of at least a part of himself. Though Pushkin didn't write all that much drama (if I'm not mistaken his only other completed dramatic work is the considerably more orthodox Boris Godunov) and for that matter seldom set his works outside of Russia (all four of these plays are set in western Europe), he seems very much in his element here, and while these pieces aren't particularly multifaceted, they are sufficiently gripping that they really deserve more attention than they tend to get. In this edition (which appears to be the only edition in print in English), translator Nancy Anderson provides a detailed critical essay for each of the plays as well as a general introduction and a discussion of translation issues, and I found each of her essays to be strong and helpful. It's unfortunate that the Little Tragedies had been out-of-print until the release of this volume, and Anderson has done us a substantial service by making these innovative and exciting plays available again to the general English-speaking audience.

An excellent translation of an incomparable work, July 9, 2000

The work can't possibly be praised enough in a single review, and I won't try to do so; suffice it to say that Eugene's provincial boredom, Tatyana's passion, and Vladimir's poetic romanticism are all splendidly drawn, and many of Pushkin's digressions have justly become proverbs in his native land. Presumably much of the reason that the novel doesn't receive quite so much attention in the non-Russian speaking world is that, due to its verse structure (it consists of 14-line stanzas in iambic tetrameter with a consistent ababccddeffegg rhyme scheme), it's very hard to translate while still retaining both the meaning and the delightfully spirited rhythm of the original. Vladimir Nabokov asserted very emphatically back in the 1960s that any faithful translation would have to almost completely sacrifice the original's lyric quality, and Nabokov's translation is notoriously dull, if extremely adherent to Pushkin's exact meaning. Not speaking Russian, I haven't read the original, nor have I read any other translations than the one I'm reviewing, so I can't say for sure how it compares, but I can say that Falen's translation is extremely good. It adheres, for all intents and purposes, exactly to Pushkin's meter, and does so without any particularly awkward diction, resulting in an end-product that must at least approach the beauty of the Russian version. Some others seem to agree with me: in the preface to his own recent (1999) translation of Onegin, Douglas Hofstadter praises Falen's translation so highly that he has to spend a section explaining why he bothered with a translation when Falen had already done it so perfectly. While most bilingual readers would probably state that to call Falen's (or anybody else's) translation "perfect" would be a stretch, it is still a delightful work, and hopefully other English-speaking readers will acquire, as I have, a better appreciation of the beauty of Pushkin's greatest work as a result of it.

Terrific variety of stories from Russia's first great writer, July 7, 2000

Pushkin's prose was certainly heavily influenced by the literary world in which he lived--especially in Dubrovskii and The Captain's Daughter we constantly see the influence of the then-very-popular Lord Byron and Walter Scott. However, Pushkin seems to be aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary literary fashion, and the fact that he doesn't take it too seriously and strikes out on his own fairly often is surely a big part of the reason he has proven to be vastly more enduring than the likes of Scott. His characters, though predictably drawn almost exclusively from the landed gentry, are very well-developed considering the brevity of his works (the longest, The Captain's Daughter, is only about 120 pages). Some of his works, especially The Captain's Daughter and the History of Pugachev, unfortunately do bear clear marks of censorship at the hands of the archconservative Tsar Nicholas I, but this didn't prevent Pushkin from producing interesting narratives.

Pushkin is generally better-known for his poetry than his prose; however, as one would expect, his poetry is extremely difficult to translate. Although much effort has been spent on translating his poetry and some very good translations have resulted, these inevitably will heavily reflect the art of the translator and at least somewhat obscure the art of Pushkin himself. This problem is largely avoided with prose, a field in which Pushkin undeniably also excelled. As such, this volume, with its almost-exhaustive collection of Pushkin's great prose works and a very strong introduction, is an excellent choice for English-speaking readers interested in this great writer.

Good, but it left a bit to be desired, July 7, 2000

All of the essays are fairly well-written and are accessible to anyone who has casually read the long novels (on the other hand, I suppose that if you haven't read the long novels, with the possible exception of A Raw Youth, you'll probably be somewhat lost whenever something you haven't read comes up). Terras refrains from putting forth any especially daring theses, instead taking us through each work in a thorugh but very concise fashion and pointing out a number of subtleties that would tend to escape the casual reader. Each of the essays definitely enriched my understanding of Dostoevsky. However, I have to admit I expected a bit more than what Terras offered. Not including the appendix, bibliography, and index, the book only comes to about 140 pages, which is hardly enough to do justice to Dostoevsky; Terras uses each of those pages well, but when I came to the end I felt like there should still be more. Perhaps the editorial reviews overpraise the book somewhat--in particular, contrary to some of the reviews, Reading Dostoevsky neglects some of Dostoevsky's more noted works: Notes From Underground gets only a couple of pages' worth of attention, and I'm not sure The Gambler is even mentioned.

That said, I definitely enjoyed Terras' book, and I certainly came away from it with a deeper understanding of Dostoevsky's long novels.