John Dougherty, Author at Russian Tumble

Panyukov’s Televisions

Andrey Dmitriev’s character, Panyukov, marks time according to the life-cycle of his televisions

Panyukov's 'Sunrise' — ‘Sunrise’-Soviet Television Set

I have shifted back into translating prose for the time being. The poetry break was nice, but I want to try to actually finish a novel at some point. One of the attractive things about translating a poem, excepting epics like Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, is that it can be started and finished in a few days, maybe even just one. A novel, on the other hand, is a long term project.
I will present here another passage from The Peasant and the Teenager (Крестьянин и Тинейджер), by Andrey Dmitriev. As mentioned in an earlier post, this novel begins with the introduction of Panyukov, a man living in a village in rural Russia. Panyukov’s character is initially described through his own reflections on his past, on the “best of times” he had enjoyed when his friend Vova still lived across the road and they worked together raising livestock and growing food in their private gardens and greenhouse. The excerpt below hints that the passage of time for Russians living in farm country could be marked by the life-cycle of televisions. It is funny, poignant and sad in a way that only the relatively minor misfortunes of others can be. Continue reading “Panyukov’s Televisions”

Velimir Khlebnikov’s ‘Don’t Be Bad!’

Khlebnikov’s century-old poem resonates with the Russia of today.

I do love translating poetry, agonizing as it can be sometimes (see previous post- It Has to Be “Love”). My latest effort puts into English a poem written by one of the founders, and leading lights, of the Russian ‘Futurist’ movement, Velimir Khlebnikov (Viktor Vladimirovich; “Velimir” was his pen name). Below is my translation of Не Шалить (pron.-Ne Shalit’!= Don’t Be Bad!), followed by a discussion of Khlebnikov, the futurists and the resonance of this poem with Russian society today.

Don’t Be Bad!

Hey, cut-throat racketeers,
Heads full of sludge!
In old Cossack leathers
Through Moscow I trudge!
Not for its grandeurs
Is truth on our side,
So that in rich furs
We may haughtily ride.
Not in that strife
Did blood flow without check,
So that each merchant’s wife
Could wear pearls round her neck.
It’s no good to rail
All the night long
I will sing, I will sail
The Volga, the Don!
I will go tonight
Ahead where fate tends
Who’s with me in flight?
There are with me–my friends

February 1922
Velimir Khlebhikov
Continue reading “Velimir Khlebnikov’s ‘Don’t Be Bad!’”

A Winter’s Night—Pasternak’s ‘Зимняя Ночь’

A Translation of Boris Pasternak’s poem, ‘A Winter’s Night’

Feeling the need to take a break from translating prose, I decided to finally make an attempt to translate a Boris Pasternak poem that, while not seasonally appropriate in May, is one of my favorites—’A Winter’s Night’.

A Winter’s Night

The blizzard swept over all the land
Beyond the furthest road
A candle glowed near at hand
A candle glowed
Continue reading “A Winter’s Night—Pasternak’s ‘Зимняя Ночь’”

‘Крестьянин и тинейджер’

Andrei Viktorovich Dmitriev’s Крестьянин и тинейджер-The Peasant and the Teenager: A view of Russia in its last decade as a Republic of the U.S.S.R.

Recently I have been engaged in translating and studying certain novels that have won the Russian Booker Prize, an award presented yearly since 1992 to honor outstanding Russian fiction . With this exercise I seek to gain a broader understanding of contemporary Russian thought and culture. My primary interest is in how Russians today view their own history, especially that of the Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet period.

The two works I’ve looked at most recently serve to bookend this period: Казус Кукоцкого (Kazus Kukotskovo = ‘The Extraordinary Case of Kukotsky’), by Lyudmila Evgenyevna Ulitskaya, and Крестьянин и Тинейджер (Krest’yanin i Tinyedzhyer = ‘The Peasant and the Teenager’), by Andrei Viktorivich Dmitriev. In a recent post (‘Казус Кукоцкого’) I examined Ulitskaya’s novel as to how it portrays the Revolution and its aftermath, finding her views consistent with my own narrative of this period. Turning to Dmitriev’s ‘The Peasant and the Teenager,’ I was delighted to find not only a portrayal of Russia in the decisive last decade of the U.S.S.R., but one from the perspective of rural, ‘collective farm’ Russia. Continue reading “‘Крестьянин и тинейджер’”

Kазус Kукоцкого-The Extraordinary Case of Kukotsky

A View of the Revolution and its Aftermath in Contemporary Russian Literature

Казус Кукоцкого, Людмила Улицкая — Казус Кукоцкого

I recently started translating a novel called Казус Кукоцкого (pron.-Kazus Kukotskovo) by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, who won the Russian Booker Prize for this work in 2001. This novel, whose title I’ve chosen to translate as The Extraordinary Case of Kukotsky, begins with a focus on the life of one Pavel Alekseyevich Kukotsky, who is, at the beginning of the book, a boy coming of age at the time of the Revolution of 1917. Not having any idea what this story was about before I started working on it, I am surprised and excited to find that, in addition to presenting some juicy translation problems, it addresses questions that I hope to find answers to in contemporary Russian literature: how do today’s Russians view the Revolution of 1917, the history of Communist Party rule, and life in Russia, generally, in the Soviet period? Here I will discuss one early passage from the novel in terms of both its challenges to translating it into English, and how it speaks to these questions.

The two paragraphs I will look at come at a point in the story when Pavel is of an age to attend university. It is just after the Revolution, and the Civil War is on. (These paragraphs are separated by one short one discussing Pavel’s character as a student, which I will not include here): Continue reading “Kазус Kукоцкого-The Extraordinary Case of Kukotsky”

‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook,’ Episode 1; Starring John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe—Reviewed

A ‘Playhouse Presents’ Production, ‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook,’ Based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘Notes from a Country Doctor’

I was not sure what to expect from a British TV production of a series based on the semi-autobiographical sketches of Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the mid-1920’s in Russia (see earlier post—‘Harry Potter and Don Draper do Bulgakov’). This four-part Playhouse Presents production, ‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook’, was initially aired at the end of 2012 on Britain’s Sky Arts network. On viewing the first episode, I was not surprised to find it to be very British in many ways, but with an impressive stock of allusions to Russian literature and culture. A great deal of effort seems to have been spent to get a lot into the seemingly simple story of the arrival at an isolated, seriously understaffed rural hospital, of a newly graduated medical student from Moscow. Continue reading “‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook,’ Episode 1; Starring John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe—Reviewed”

Третья Мещанская: “№ 3 Meshchanskaya Street”, or “The Third Philistine”?

A Look Back at Abram Room’s Classic Film, Третья Мещанская: a picture of life in Moscow after Lenin, but before the full force of Stalinism.

The focus of my Russia studies has recently turned, through no conscious design of my own, to the period between the two World Wars, in the first half of the twentieth century. This may be no accident, though, as I am deeply fascinated by the unprecedented levels of dynamism, change, brutality and vision of Russian society in the decades after the Revolutions of 1917. My translations of Bulgakov and Mandelstam, my examination of the Soviet Five Year Plans, and my review of Douglas Smith’s book Former People all relate to this era when the revolution was still finding its way (see earlier posts- ‘The Old-Timers of Moscow Will Remember,’ ‘Leningrad,’ ‘All According to Plan,’ ‘Former People’). Deciding to continue in this direction, I thought I should take another look at a Russian silent film from 1927, variously called Третья Мещанская (Tret’ya Meshchanskaya), Любовь втроём (Lyubov’ Vtroyom), Three in a Basement (in Germany) and Bed and Sofa (in English speaking countries). I was introduced to this film as an undergraduate in a class on Soviet film, but watching it again, investigating its history and looking at some of the reviews published in Russia when it first came out, highlight for me the tasks Russians faced in trying to create a new society after the shattering of old social conventions, and the efforts of the Communist Party to define new ones. With this in mind I will offer my own review. Continue reading “Третья Мещанская: “№ 3 Meshchanskaya Street”, or “The Third Philistine”?”

The Fate of the “Former People”: Social Modernization in Russia Compressed

Review—Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy,
by Douglas Smith
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 464 pp.

In 1946, George Kennan argued that the “ideology, and the circumstances of power” inherent in the Soviet regime required the Communist Party to have enemies to point to in order to legitimize its exercise of complete and exclusive control over the economic, political and social life of all citizens of the U.S.S.R. Kennan believed that by the end of World War II, it had become increasingly difficult to target internal “enemies of the revolution”—the purges of the 1930s could hardly have been more effective at eliminating them. But the war, and the subsequent competition among the victors for regional and global influence, allowed the Party to point to external enemies: the capitalist regimes of the West. Thus, with Kennan’s help, the Cold War was initiated.

But who were these “enemies” within the Soviet Union prior to the Second World War? Douglas Smith goes a long way to bring home the reality of one group of these “counter-revolutionaries”—the so-called “former people.” Continue reading “The Fate of the “Former People”: Social Modernization in Russia Compressed”

The Dread Pirate Archibald Archibaldovich

Who the hell is Archibald Archibaldovich? And what is with that name? The introduction of this particular character in chapter V of Master and Margarita is so clever, and fun, that I am awed by it. The process goes something like this: the name is casually dropped, and quickly forgotten; later, a rather striking figure is described, but not given a name; toward the end of the chapter the person and the name come together, and the context is surprising. Continue reading “The Dread Pirate Archibald Archibaldovich”