The admiration for Russian literature in global literature and cinema has been striking for a long time. Even before the war, I encountered this unrelenting love quite often. Dostoevsky was always at the top, though I never managed to finish any of his novels. Ultimately, the same goes for Tolstoy’s novels. But how Hitler and Goebbels admired Dostoevsky!
The well-known American science fiction writer George Saunders, author of the intriguing novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” translated by Andriy Maslyukh for us, teaches a course on “19th-century Russian short story” at Syracuse University. Over the semester, he covers up to 30 stories with students.
In 2021, he published a textbook “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” which has been translated into many languages, including Polish in 2022. This textbook is not only a collection of lectures but also an anthology showcasing stories by selected authors: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol (“Gogol was a provincial from Ukraine, a bit of a mama’s boy”). The book’s title refers to an incident when Chekhov finally dared to visit Tolstoy, and Tolstoy suggested a swim. There’s no pond involved since they went to a river and then had a good drinking session.
Right after the translation appeared, the magazine “Książki” (April 2022) published an interview with deputy editor-in-chief Łukasz Grzymisławski and translator Krzysztof Umiński. Overall, they discussed reasonable points, but sometimes surprising.
When this Second Moscow-Ukrainian war began (as it should be called, with the First happening from 1918-1920), the Polish Minister of Culture stated at a meeting with EU leaders the immediate need to disengage from consuming Russian culture, mentioning ballet and Chekhov in particular. Grzymisławski agreed regarding ballet but noted that in his view, Saunders wants to convey: “without Russian stories, we would simply be worse people.”
No one can forbid me from reading Chekhov, but such a strange conclusion—that if I stop reading him, I would become worse—intrigues me. However, Saunders’ translator Umiński, quoting writer and musician Pavlo Soltys, who stated that “we all need to take a break from Russian culture for a while,” noted he was shocked by this. Instead, he feels closer to the position of writer Renata Lis in “Tygodnik Powszechny”: “Since the war in Ukraine started, I feel that hatred is demanded from me, as if only it would guarantee I stand on the right side. I have no hatred in me and don’t want to have it as long as it’s possible. I don’t need to hate Russians and Russian culture to fairly assess their actions, sympathize and help victims.”
There was already a tragedy in Bucha, in Irpin, yet the lady has not matured to hatred. Perhaps she also does not feel hatred towards those Russians who, in 1831, massacred Prague—the suburb of Warsaw?
And we against the fallen walls
Slaughtered the infants of Prague,
When we trampled to bloody dust
The beauty of Kościuszko’s banners… – rejoiced Pushkin.
And he too is a representative of Russian culture, which Ms. Renata enjoys.
It’s surprising why Saunders chose these particular Russian authors, and not such a sophisticated stylist as Platonov, or Babel, whom he does quote: “no iron can penetrate the human heart with such impressive force as a timely placed period.”
The belief that reading Russian classics somehow fantastically makes people better evokes laughter.
The Polish writer Aleksander Wat (1900–1967) met with Mayakovsky, translated Russian prose, and sympathized with communists. Did it help him? No. In 1940, he was arrested in Lviv and exiled to Kazakhstan along with his wife and young son. In his wife’s memoirs, “Everything That’s Most Important,” there is a very interesting episode on the theme of becoming better from reading Russian stories. Olga Wat describes her exile in the Semipalatinsk region, where she worked at a state farm and lived with an old woman and her daughter. She constantly suffered from hunger while they consumed cabbage soup every evening. In that hut, she found the works of Tolstoy and read to her hostess “stories about mercy, human kindness, compassion” by the oil lamp in the evenings. “I thought it would move her; at least, I held onto the hope that one evening, eating cabbage soup with bread, they would give a little to Andrzej, who was about ten years old and constantly, constantly hungry; but she seemed to sense my intentions and with a cunning smile patiently listened until I finished. Then she would quietly sit down to dinner with her daughter.”
Or maybe it’s just the Russians who aren’t made better by their own classics? And everyone else, like me, is? I haven’t noticed it in myself yet. Falling asleep, I constantly imagine bombing Moscow.
Love for Russian literature didn’t help Polish poet Paweł Hertz either, who was forced to cut trees for ten years in a camp (according to Umiński), and later translated Tolstoy. Umiński then concludes that “apparently Siberia did not sour him on Tolstoy.” A strange conclusion. Or maybe he did it for income? After all, he also translated the anti-Russian memoirs of Astolphe de Custine.
But there’s a sliver in all of this. Hertz didn’t cut forest for so many years. He was arrested in 1940, spent some time in Zamarshtynów, then in Kherson and Dnipro, and in 1942 he was released, returning to Poland in 1945.
Umiński organized the translation of a fragment of Olga Wat’s memoirs into English and sent it to Saunders. He appreciated it. But did he draw conclusions? I think not. Once, a student in his lecture accused Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” of sexism and successfully proved it. Saunders agreed with her assessment. Although it’s nonsense.
Analyzing Gogol’s “The Nose,” Saunders occasionally goes overboard: “None of the writers we are familiar with here, including Gogol, could imagine the horrors of the Holocaust (or the revolution in Russia, or Stalin’s purges), but I think Gogol would have been able to tell about them; his style would suit this. When I watch films that captured Nazi leaders at leisure, these people seem to me like Gogolian characters.”
Grzymislawski recalled a text by the “wonderful Ukrainian writer Yurii Andrukhovych”: “Bucha is the true ‘great Russian culture.’ Talking about Bulgakov is complicity in the crime,” and he says he understands the writer’s anger and radicalism, but… then takes Chekhov in his hands and prefers to stay with him.
Andrukhovych’s reaction concerned the appeal of Members of the European Parliament “to the Russian people,” which mentioned a shared heritage and literary pantheon that includes space for everyone, including Russian classics. Umiński tried to interpret the writer’s words in his own way: “it doesn’t seem to me that Andrukhovych’s anger was directed at Bulgakov.” How so? Not at Bulgakov, but at the discussions about him? But that’s not possible. Then he agrees, but for a different reason: “although – yes – there is a phrase in his text: ‘Mr. Dostoevsky, what were you writing there, damn it, about the tears of a child, did it somehow help your Russians?’”
As for me, reading or not reading Russian classics is a private matter, but glorifying them, popularizing them, quoting and mentioning them at every opportunity is some sort of masochism. I understand Nabokov, who also created a course of lectures dedicated to Russian literature because it is his native field. I also understand the Russians who translated them, as well as Saunders’ lectures. But why Saunders ignored French and English literature, favoring Russian, I do not understand. Nor why it was translated in Poland.
On the cover: A photoshoot of the contemporary choreography collective “Dance Laboratory” and servicemen of the Central Military District took place at the “Botanical” metro station in Yekaterinburg. March 9, 2019. Photo: Wikimedia
