Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  11. Kolomna: In Gogol’s day this district was on the outskirts of St Petersburg.

  IVAN TURGENEV THE KNOCKING

  1. Filofey… more appropriate at the christening: The only well-known Filofey in Russian culture is a monk who lived in the early sixteenth century and helped to popularize the idea that Moscow was the ‘Third Rome’, i.e. the successor to Constantinople, which fell to the Turks in 1453.

  2. Zhukovsky: Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) was one of the greatest Russian Romantic poets. The poem is ‘On the Death of Field Marshal Count Kamensky’ (1809).

  FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

  1. Donald Rayfield, ‘The Pram in the Hall was his Fulfilment’, Literary Review (London, August 2002).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (London: Vintage, 1992), p. xvi.

  BOBOK

  1. Attic salt: That is, Athenian wit, refined wit.

  2. collegiate councillor: A civil servant of the sixth grade (see Note on Ranks).

  3. Suvorin’s Almanac: Aleksey Suvorin (1834–1912), a well-known publisher and later a friend and mentor to Chekhov, published an annual almanac. It was used widely as a reference source.

  4. Pervoyedov: Means ‘First Eater’.

  5. court councillor: A civil servant of the seventh grade.

  6. fortieth day: Russian Orthodox custom is to hold the funeral on the third day after someone’s death, and a memorial service on the ninth and fortieth days. On the fortieth day a place is laid for the deceased at table; this is popularly believed to be the last time he or she eats with the family.

  7. Full Privy Councillor: A civil servant of the second grade, the equal of an admiral or a full general.

  8. Valley of Jehoshaphat: Named in the Bible (Joel 3:2) as the Place of Judgement.

  9. state councillor: Fifth grade.

  10. Lebezyatnikov: This name is derived from the Russian for ‘to fawn’.

  11. en haut lieu: French for ‘in high places’ – presumably, in court.

  12. Yulka Charpentier de Lusignan: An obviously incongruous name. Yulka is a diminutive form of the Russian equivalent of Julie; Charpentier is a common French surname, and Lusignan a very aristocratic one.

  13. Katiche: A Frenchified form of the Russian Katya, the affectionate form of Ekaterina.

  14. Prussians… make mincemeat of us: Prussia was at this time the dominant military power in Europe.

  COUNT LEO TOLSTOY

  1. See Hugh McLean, ‘Could the Master Err?’, in Tolstoy Studies Journal (University of Toronto, 2005). The revised text was used in the Sytin edition of Tolstoy’s Collected Works, ed. P. I. Biryukov (Moscow, 1913).

  NIKOLAY LESKOV

  1. Hugh McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 115.

  2. Hugh McLean, ‘Nikolai Leskov’, in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, ed. Olive Classe (London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), p. 829.

  3. Nikolay Leskov, Satirical Stories of Nikolay Leskov, tr. William Edgerton (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 24.

  THE STEEL FLEA

  1. Council of Vienna: The Congress of Vienna (1814–15), held after the defeat of Napoleon, established a balance of power in Europe that was to last until 1848. Aleksandr I died in 1825 and was succeeded as Tsar by his brother Nicholas I.

  2. Don Cossack Platov: Matvey Ivanovich Platov (1751–1818), a general in the Russian army and a Cossack hetman, accompanied Tsar Aleksandr I to London. (William Edgerton’s note.)

  3. Apollo Velvet Ear: The ‘correct’ name of this sculpture is the Apollo Belvedere. A Roman copy of a Greek original, it has itself been copied many times.

  4. Tula Town: The Central Russian city of Tula was famous for its gunsmiths.

  5. ‘Molvo’: At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a sugar factory in St Petersburg owned by a certain Ya. N. Molvo. Apparently this name was a Russified form of the French name Mollevaut. If this supposition is true, then the irony of Platov’s patriotic Russian defence of ‘Mollevaut’ sugar becomes all the sweeter. (W.E.)

  6. Bobrinsky’s factory: Count A. A. Bobrinsky owned a sugar refinery in southern Russia during the 1830s. (W.E.)

  7. Father Fedot in Taganrog: ‘Father Fedot’ was not made up out of thin air. Before his death in Taganrog, Tsar Aleksandr I did go to confession to the priest Alexey Fedotov-Chekhovsky, who was known after that as ‘Confessor to His Majesty’ and loved to call everybody’s attention to this completely chance occurrence. This Fedotov-Chekhovsky is apparently the legendary ‘Father Fedot’. (Leskov’s note.)

  8. Zhukov tobacco: A popular brand in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century, was manufactured in St Petersburg in a factory owned by Vasily Zhukov. (W.E.)

  9. chibouk: A long-stemmed Turkish pipe.

  10. Count Nestlebroad: Count Karl Vasilyevich Nesselrode (1780–1862) was Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1816 to 1856. (W.E.)

  11. Riga Dunamunde: A port town at the mouth of the Western Dvina river. (W.E.)

  12. Count Kleinmichel: Count Peter Andreyevich Kleinmichel (1793–1869) served from 1842 to 1855 as Chief Administrator of Highways and Public Buildings. (W.E.)

  13. Commandant Skobelev: General Ivan Nikitich Skobelev (1778–1849) was commandant in 1839 of the Fortress of Peter and Paul in St Petersburg, which was used as a prison. (W.E.)

  14. Martyn-Solsky: Martyn Dmitriyevich Solsky (1798–1881) was an army doctor and a member of the medical council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. (W.E.)

  15. Count Chernyshov: Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshov (1786–1857) served as Minister of War from 1827 to 1852. (W.E.)

  16. ‘affairs… yore’: Echoes of Pushkin’s poem ‘Ruslan i Lyudmila’ (1820). (W.E.)

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  1. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, tr. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 282–3.

  2. Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov (London: Granta, 2003), p. 21.

  3. Rosamund Bartlett, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (London: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 349.

  IN THE CART

  1. zemstvo: An elected local administrative assembly in late-ninteenth-and early-twentieth-century Russia.

  LIDIYA ZINOVYEVA-ANNIBAL

  1. From the Voloshin archive in Pushkinsky dom, St Petersburg.

  2. Jane Costlow, ‘Lidiia Zinov’eva-Annibal’, in Reference Guide to Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), pp. 927–8

  THE MONSTER

  1. Konstantin Aleksandrovich Siunnerberg: (1871–1942), an art critic, a theoretician and a contributor to the Symbolist journal the Golden Fleece; his work elaborates a theory of intuitive creativity.

  IVAN BUNIN IN PARIS

  1. ‘Rien n’est… de bien’: ‘There’s nothing harder than picking out a good melon or a decent woman’ (French, as are the sentences below).

  2. zubrovka: A spicy vodka.

  3. shashlyk à la Kars: A shashlyk is much the same as a kebab. Kars is a town in Eastern Turkey.

  4. L’eau gâte… l’âme: ‘Water spoils wine as a cart spoils a road and a woman – a man’s soul.’

  5. rassolnik: A meat or fish soup made with pickled cucumbers.

  6. C’est moi qui vous remercie: ‘It’s I who should thank you.’

  7. Le bon Dieu… pas de derrière: ‘The good Lord always sends trousers to those who have no bottom.’

  8. Qui se marie… mauvais jours: ‘He who marries for love enjoys good nights and bad days.’

  9. Patience… pauvres: ‘Patience – the medicine of the poor.’

  10. femme de ménage: A cleaning lady.

  11. L’amour… ânes: ‘Love makes even donkeys dance.’

  TEFFI LOVE

  1. lisp… drag his right foot as he walked: Probably in imitation of Lord Byron.

  2. baba… neckweed: A baba is a peasant woman; neckweed is a word for hemp.

  3. ‘Kishmish’: A Russian borrowing from the Turkic lan
guages of Central Asia, it means ‘raisins’.

  4. Martha: Martha, or Richmond Fair (1847) by the German composer Friedrich von Flotow (1812–83).

  5. Yelena the Beautiful: The heroine of a Russian folk tale, here confused with Helen of Troy.

  6. Nanny: In a gentry household typically a peasant woman employed first as a wet-nurse to a baby and then kept on as a household servant. She was often more intimately involved with a child’s life than its mother was.

  A FAMILY JOURNEY

  1. tout ce joli monde: ‘All these fine people’ (French).

  2. sale étranger: ‘Dirty foreigner’ (French).

  YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

  1. From a 1931 questionnaire (IMLI archive, f. 47, op. 3, ed khr. 2).

  2. Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic (London: Quartet, 1991), p. 13.

  THE LION

  1. Tsar Maximillian: A Russian folk play.

  VERA INBER

  1. Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 235.

  LALLA’S INTERESTS

  1. communal apartments: See introductory note to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, pp. 206–7.

  MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

  1. Reference Guide to Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), p. 203.

  2. Doris Lessing, preface to Mikhail Bulgakov, The Fatal Eggs (London: Hesperus, 2003), p. xii.

  3. Bulgakovskaya Entsiklopediya, www.bulgakov.ru/p/polotentse (May 2004).

  THE EMBROIDERED TOWEL

  1. feldsher: A partly qualified medical assistant.

  2. Dmitry the Pretender: A pretender to the Russian throne who, in 1604, invaded Russia with Polish support.

  ISAAK BABEL

  1. In A Jew on Horseback: Isaac Babel in Life and Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Gregory Freidin refers to Babel as ‘the first “embedded” war correspondent’.

  2. Clarence Brown, The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 204.

  3. Primo Levi, The Search for Roots (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 140.

  SALT

  1. Yids… Lenin: Many Cossacks imagined Lenin to be Jewish.

  MIKHAIL ZOSHCHENKO

  1. Mikhail Zoshchenko, Scenes from the Bathhouse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), pp. viii–ix.

  2. Quoted by Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 60.

  3. Andrey Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization (New York: Arcade, 1990), p. 199.

  PELAGEYA

  1. Young Pioneers: The Communists’ children’s organization.

  THE BATHHOUSE

  1. Foot-cloths: See note 10 to Gogol, ‘The Greatcoat’.

  THE GALOSH

  1. House Management Office: Responsible for all matters relating to the administration and physical upkeep of a residential building. It had an internal passport office to register new residents, to de-register those who had left or died, and to make sure that no one was living there illegally. And it certified all manner of documents.

  LEONID DOBYCHIN

  1. Ludza was formerly known as Lyutsin, Daugavpils as Dvinsk. See L. Dobychin, Polnoye Sobraniye sochinenii i pisem (St Petersburg: Zvezda, 1999), p. 7.

  2. Ibid., p. 41.

  MEDICAL AUXILIARY

  1. Mary Pickford: American film actress (1893–1979).

  2. Jenny Jugo’s: Austrian film actress (1905–2001). The translator Richard Borden has pointed out that, in this story, ‘only the representatives of the world of far away… have names’.

  PLEASE DO

  1. babka: A baba is a peasant woman; the diminutive form babka means a traditional woman healer.

  2. ‘Sisters’: The words are from ‘A May Day Song’ (1918) by the Proletkult poet Vladimir Kirillov.

  3. ‘Scarcely do… shed tears’: These words are part of the Orthodox burial rite.

  ANDREY PLATONOV THE RETURN

  1. Stakhanovite: Aleksey Stakhanov was a coal-miner whose improbably vast output of coal – twelve tonnes a day – led to his being held up as a model for Soviet workers.

  2. killed in Mogilyov: This suggests that he was Jewish. Mogilyov was a major centre of Jewish life, and most of its Jews were killed by the Nazis. See Philip Bullock’s ‘A Modern Ahasuerus’ in Essays in Poetics, 27 (Autumn 2002) (Keele University).

  DANIIL KHARMS THE OLD WOMAN

  1. Hamsun: Kharms was an admirer of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), who was influenced by Dostoyevsky; the epigraph is from Hamsun’s novel Mysteries (1892).

  2. kvass: A very slightly alcoholic drink made from bread.

  3. Grab the mallet: It is worth pointing out that croquet remained popular in Russia for a surprisingly long time (20,000 copies of Chesnokov’s Descriptions and Rules of the Game were printed in 1930).

  VARLAM SHALAMOV

  1. See R. Chandler, ‘Varlam Shalamov and Andrei Fedorovich Platonov’, in Essays in Poetics, 27 (Autumn 2002) (Keele University).

  THROUGH THE SNOW

  1. makhorka: Coarse tobacco.

  THE SNAKE CHARMER

  1. The Club of the Knaves of Hearts… The Vampire: The first ‘novel’ is derived from Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail’s 1857–70 feuilleton saga, Rocambole or The Dramas of Paris, whose anti-hero was the mastermind of a criminal organization known as ‘The Club of the Knaves of Hearts’; Platonov’s transposition of the action to St Petersburg in 1893 can be seen as an indication of the liberties that camp ‘novelists’ took with their material. Shalamov is probably also alluding to Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’. The second ‘novel’ is derived from The Vampyre by John Polidori. A huge success when published in 1819, this novella was at first thought to have been written by Lord Byron.

  ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN WHAT A PITY

  1. the Seven Rivers region: In what are today the independent republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

  2. Modest Aleksandrovich V.: Modest is an uncommon name and the heroine’s patronymic is Modestovna. It is clear that this man is the heroine’s father.

  3. pension: Work in a labour camp did not count towards a pension; it was considered as payment for the (alleged) crime.

  VASILY SHUKSHIN

  1. Quoted by John Givens, Introduction, in Vasily Shukshin, Stories from a Siberian Village (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. xxx. My information about Shukshin derives mostly from this source.

  2. Donald Rayfield, ‘Cussedly Independent’, Times Literary Supplement, 8 August 1997.

  3. Quoted by Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism (London: Granada, 1980), p. 179.

  IN THE AUTUMN

  1. kolkhozes: Collective farms. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were deported in 1929–30 as a result of Stalin’s policy of ‘Total Collectivization’.

  2. muzhik: Peasant. Often the word is used as a synonym for ‘man’.

  3. Komsomol: The Communist Youth organization.

  4. Krayushkinites: Inhabitants of the village of Krayushkino, where Pavel and Marya have been living.

  ASAR EPPEL

  1. Andrey Sergeyev, on the back cover of Eppel’s The Grassy Street (Moscow/Birmingham: Glas, 1994).

  RED CAVIAR SANDWICHES

  1. Without the Bird Cherries: A sentimental love story by Panteleimon Romanov (1884–1938).

  2. Blok: Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921), the Symbolist poet. His works include Verses on the Beautiful Lady (1904) and Nocturnal Hours (1911).

  3. ‘Unmöglich!’: ‘Impossible!’ (German).

  4. ‘Unmöglich… und Seife!’: ‘Impossible, because I don’t know where Aunt Dusya’s washstand and soap are!’ (German)

  5. Sumarokov: Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov (1717–77) was a Russian dramatist and poet.

  SERGEI DOVLATOV

  1. Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Dovlatov Sobranie Prozy v Trekh Tomakh (St Petersburg: Limbus Press, 1995), Vol. III, p. 358.

  THE OFFICER’S BELT

  1. Forsyte Saga:
John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922) was surprisingly well known in Soviet Russia.

  YURY BUIDA

  1. Yuri Buida, ‘Zamok Lokhshtedt’, Znamya, 2 (2000) pp. 179–80.

  SINDBAD THE SAILOR

  1. ‘I loved you’: This is probably the single most famous Russian lyric poem:

  I loved you. Even now, perhaps, love’s embers

  Within my heart are not extinguished quite.

  But let me not disturb you with remembrance

  Or cause you any sadness, any fright.

  I loved you hopelessly, could not speak clearly,

  Shyness and jealousy were ceaseless pain,

  Loved you as tenderly and as sincerely

  As God grant you may yet be loved again.

  (Translated by Jim Reed)

  Acknowledgements

  Editing this anthology has impelled me not only to read fine writers I had never read before, but also to enter into conversations with friends and colleagues from many countries. Olive Classe, Musya Dmitrovskaya, Olga Kuznetsova, Olga Meerson, Mark Miller, Natasha Perova, Ian Pindar, Natalya Poltavtseva and Joanne Turnbull have made invaluable contributions. I also wish to thank Denis Akhapkin, Hafiza Andreeva, Andrey Aryev, Carol Avins, Rosamund Bartlett, Ksana Blank, Natalya Bragina, Yury Buida, Peter Carson, Jane Chamberlain, Lucy Chandler, Sylvana Chandler, Jenefer Coates, Neil Cornwell, Jane Costlow, Julie Curtis, Richard Davies, Martin Dewhirst, Tom Dolack, Carol Dougherty, Katya Dovlatova, Sibelan Forrester, Gregory Freidin, Kobi Freund, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Yury and Therese Galperin, Genevra Gerhart, Elizabeth Ginzburg (and all eighteen members of her 2004 ‘Chekhov to Zoshchenko Seminar’ at DePaul University in Chicago), Igor Golomstock, Julian Graffy, Jane Grayson, Robert Hodel, Hamid Ismailov, Daniel Jeffreys, Masha Karp, Nina Karsova, Catriona Kelly, Elena Kolesnikova, Natalya Kornienko, Sally Laird, Angela Livingstone, Olga Makarova, Hugh McLean, Robin Milner-Gulland, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, Eric Naiman, Dora O’Brien, Cathy Popkin, Donald Rayfield, Oliver Ready, Robert Reid, Ruth Rischin, Omry Ronen, Caroline Sigrist, Christopher Tessone, Anat Vernitskaya, Faith Wigzell, Evgeny Yablokov, Elizabeth Sara Yellen, Zinovy Zinik, and my translation students at Queen Mary College, London. The SEELANGS e-mail discussion group has been a great help; my thanks to everyone who offered advice, and my apologies to those whose advice I did not follow. I cannot imagine having completed this book without the help of my wife Elizabeth, who has been deeply involved at every stage of my work on it. I also wish to thank my first two teachers of Russian, both of whom were unusually gifted, imaginative and generous: Gordon Pirie and Count Nicholas Sollohub.