Reviews by Robert Blaisdell
In this graphic-biography of the world’s greatest and perhaps most sensitive author, Katya Gushchina uses very simple elements: cut-outs from historical photos of Tolstoy and his family, of his Yasnaya Polyana estate, of his rooms; she inks line-drawings onto or around the photos for comic and illustrative effect; on every page she pastes in enormous blue tears rolling down and off Lev Nikolaevich’s face. Gushchina depicts the biggest trauma of his life, losing his mother before he was even two years old: “He did not have time to remember [her]… but he cherished her bright image in his heart all his life and placed it in his works.” She then depicts how “In his first work, Childhood, he so convincingly described the feelings of the main character who lost his mother… he burst into tears himself.”
Imagine an art exhibit in which you walk through a maze of the moments and events of Tolstoy’s life. “Such sensitivity and receptiveness to others’ pain,” writes Gushchina, “not only helped him create his most famous works, but also saved many lives!” That is, he raised money and gathered supplies for starving peasants when the government wouldn’t during the famines of 1891-92. Gushchina allows us to witness in brief quotations and descriptions the charms, pleasures, sadnesses, and shames Tolstoy felt in this world.
Translated (no telling by whom) from the Russian (the book was first published as “100 причин, почему плачет Лев Толстой” in 2022), the language is plain and simple and biographically accurate. Admirers of Tolstoy’s life and work will no doubt remember an overlooked instance or two beyond these 100 of the great man’s weeping. Tolstoy particularly adored Chekhov’s comic stories, and I would have enjoyed seeing Gushchina’s depiction of Tolstoy’s tearful commentary on Chekhov’s divine “Darling” (Душечка): “I cannot read without tears some passages of this amazing story.”
Gushchina’s final illustration depicts herself as a girl offering Tolstoy a bouquet of flowers while simultaneously asking, “Can you please make it so that Andrey Bolkonsky doesn’t die?… Please?”
Even if you have read as many biographies of Tolstoy as I have, you will be pleased by this clever and affecting book.
This unique anthology is like a curated museum exhibit. It features parallel and exemplary works by two outstanding poets, early twentieth-century contemporaries whose work was occasionally strikingly similar in approach. “In character,” writes the editor and translator Robert Chandler, “the two poets could hardly have been more different. Apollinaire struggled with deadlines and debts and his lifestyle was often chaotic – but he was a man of the world. During the war he proved competent both as an ordinary gunner and, later, in command of others. Khlebnikov, on the other hand, was helpless in regard to practical matters. In all that related to their work, however, the two poets had much in common. Like Apollinaire, Khlebnikov knew nearly all the major artists of his place and time.”
The multinational Apollinaire (born Guglielmo Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky in 1880) was educated in French, and in Paris became close with Picasso. Fighting for France in World War I, he was wounded in the head; he died of the Spanish flu in 1918. Khlebnikov (1885-1922), whose father was a government official among the Kalmyks on the Volga, grew up loving the steppe and its creatures. Here, for example, he describes the nutcracker bird: “Their calls are unusually rich in intonations; at the sight of an enemy, they caw threateningly, moan and cheep, or else murmur as if talking to someone. After feeding, a nutcracker often sits for some time, its eyes closed and its feathers ruffled, evidently enjoying the sound of its own voice, as if recounting something of its impressions of the day in its own strange language.” His fellow poet Osip Mandelstam thought of Khlebnikov as “a man of god.” Debilitated while serving in the army, Khlebnikov fancifully reflects how “Once I was sitting deep in thought, pen in hand. My pen was hanging idly in the air. Suddenly war flew in and, like a merry fly, landed in the inkwell. Dying, it began to crawl across my book – and these are the tracks its feet left as it crawled along it in a sticky lump, all covered in ink. Such is the fate of war.” The short-lived poets wrote so much but, as Chandler cautions, “this small book allows only a glimpse of their work.”
Chandler is a deft and esteemed translator of Russian. Most important are his particular selections of the vast number of poems themselves, but secondly marvelous are his introductions to each section and the recountings of the poets’ lives. Though the poets never met, it’s possible they were aware of each other. Both are playful; both are conversational and lively thinkers: “Like Apollinaire [Khlebnikov] often wrote in perfect rhyme and meter… He invented several thousand neologisms and sought meaning in the shapes and sounds of individual letters.” Apollinaire was a witty charmer (“I worship you O my exquisite goddess even if you live only in my imagination”), while the Futurist Klebnikov was comparatively an innocent. In poems and prose, Khlebnikov’s earnestness is utterly charming: “Human happiness is a faint moon beside the many earths circling the sun. It is the beauty of a cow’s eyes. It’s the sight of a little kitten scratching its ear. It’s coltsfoot in spring or the splash of sea waves.”
Apollinaire’s love poems, meanwhile, are as keen and sharp as those by the Greek classical poets (don’t miss “The Pretty Redhead”), and while this collection is, at its modest size as good as possible, it would be better with facing-page originals (see for example the translator Ron Padgett’s Apollinaire collection, Zone, or Gary Kern’s Khlebnikov collection, Snake Train: Poetry and Prose).
Here, in conclusion, is an excerpt from Khlebnikov’s 1921 prayer to “Our Lady of Autumn”:
A forest at prayer. All at once golden smells fall to the ground. Trees stretch out – rakes gathering armfuls of the sun’s hay. Autumn’s tree resonantly evokes a sketch of Russia’s railroads. The golden autumn wind has scattered me everywhere.
The Talnikov Family might be one of those novels that, because of its place in literary history, is worth reading. Prohibited from its first publication in 1848 by a Russian censor, it teeters between outrageousness and ridiculousness. The novel opens with the mother’s weary indifference at the funeral of one of her children. Narrated by Natalya, one of the dozen or more Talnikov children, she presents her parents as grotesques: brutal, selfish, petty, hypocritical, monstrous. The privileged but financially unstable St. Petersburg couple have baby after baby, practically to their own surprise, always with resentment that the child has come to rob them of food and increase their household expenses. The children, when not being beaten, threatened or humiliated, amuse themselves and torture other creatures: “Lacking toys, we would sometimes tie a long string to a fly’s legs and follow its flight. It flew tirelessly, frightening other flies and amusing us during our long lessons. And how afraid we were whenever one of those flies, with its long tail, came out of nowhere, buzzing around the room and landing on the head of our sullen and anxious father. What if he noticed? The cockroaches were a different story. We would cut a horse out of playing cards and glue a cockroach under each of the horse’s legs with sealing wax. We did the same thing with paper-geese and ducks, and often a whole flock of these never-before-seen animals ran with extraordinary speed to the crevices of the room as we screamed with joy.”
The relentlessness of the emotional abuse and the extremity of the physical abuse (rendered on Natalya’s brothers) makes for melodrama and occasionally somehow humor. Irony flows from almost everyone’s bitter lips, which, if not for the violent goings-on, might remind us of Jane Austen. The mother “especially disliked her daughters. Her reasoning went along these lines”:
“As soon as a boy grows up, he’s out of sight. But you’ve got to keep girls around until they get married, and who’s going to marry them? Their father is broke, and no one’s lining up to look at their faces.… How did we end up with children like these? Their father isn’t bad looking, and their mother…” Here she would stop, giving whatever woman who had come to her for help a chance to speak. And when that woman responded, “Marya Petrovna, ma’am, you are a princess! If your daughters take after you, they’ll have to beat the suitors off with sticks, even without dowries.” Then my mother would conclude, “Yes, well, what can I say, God’s rewarded us with freaks. If you only knew how ugly their feet are.”
The only relief from the poison air of the house comes in the form of oral tales told by a couple of the less-awful characters. The abused grandfather, tormented by an alcoholic wife and a psychopath of a son (Natalya’s mother’s brother), is the most touching, pathetic and comic among them. Having moved into his daughter’s house (though he has to pay rent), he chatters at any opportunity about the predictive wisdom of Bruce’s Calendar.
The novel ends with our sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued narrator Natalya, who was born somewhere in the middle of the pack, becoming sixteen and marrying a nobleman, leaving the den of viperish relatives behind.
The translator, Fiona Bell, while making a case in her introduction for the radical nature of the novel, and its connection to the later What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, admits: “The novel often reads like its author’s breathless attempt to recount every impression and every wrongdoing, sometimes at the expense of literary style.” And I’ll admit that the people are so awful, it’s sometimes fun. Though Panayeva (1819-1893) edited the important journal Contemporary with her lover Nikolai Nekrasov and hosted tea parties for seemingly all the mid-century literary bigshots, she has been overlooked in her and in our time. The Talnikov Family was not published until 1927, and while it will not climb onto the list of important nineteenth-century Russian fiction, it may be read as a curious supplement to that unexcelled literary century.
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