Novels and Soviet Children

FATHERS AND CHILDREN

Ivan Turgenev
Translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater
NYRB; $16.96; 256 pp.

Forty years have passed since I last read Fathers and … Children (sometimes in translation dubbed Sons). “Children” (Дети) is certainly correct but less apt, considering that the novel is about two university graduates, Arkady Kirsanov and Evgeni Bazarov, and their loving fathers. Anna and Katya Odintsova, the interesting sisters that enchant the heroes, are fatherless.

Speaking of familial relationships, Nicolas Pasternak Slater is Boris Pasternak’s nephew, and his life and frequent translation partner is his wife Maya. Their translations of Chekhov’s stories in The Beauties (Pushkin Press, 2018) seem to me among the finest ever done.

What Turgenev does in his most famous but probably not greatest work is similar to what Chekhov so often does, narrate a tale of young people who seem to understand themselves less well than we readers do. Arkady’s doting father, Nikolai Petrovich, is a widower who lives in the countryside with Arkady’s cynical uncle, Pavel Petrovich, and Nikolai’s young girlfriend, Fenichka (a former servant), who has just had Nikolai’s baby. It is May 1859, and liberal, good-hearted Nikolai has freed his serfs ahead of the tsar’s decree.

To my surprise, and maybe to Turgenev’s, the plot of Fathers and Children is very simple: the attractive, idealistic friends spend their summer vacation visiting each other’s family homes and meeting young women. What will turn anyone’s head are Turgenev’s easy, gorgeous, evocative descriptions of places, which are unsurpassed in Russian literature:

The day was waning, the sun had sunk behind a little copse of aspens not far from the garden, casting its shadow far into the distance over the quiet fields. A peasant on a white horse was trotting along a dark, narrow track by the edge of the copse; though he was riding in the shade, Nikolai Petrovich could easily make out his whole shape, down to the patch on his shoulder and the distinct, delightful twinkling of the little horse’s legs. The sun’s rays penetrating into the copse cast such a warm light on the aspen stems that they looked like pine trunks; their leaves showed almost blue, and the pale blue sky shone above them with the faint reddish tinge of sunset. The swallows flew high in the sky; the wind had dropped; the few bees out late buzzed lazily and sleepily among the lilac blossom. A column of midges hovered motionless above a lonely projecting branch. “Oh my God, how beautiful!” thought Nikolai Petrovich, and almost found himself repeating one of his favorite verses […]. But still he sat, giving himself over to the melancholy comfort of his lonely thoughts. He loved to dream, and life in the country had fostered that gift in him. (58-59)

Turgenev’s sketches of gentlefolk and servants are swift and sure. His heart, however, doesn’t seem as fully immersed in the romances as those of his heroes. He’s almost as restrained as Anna Odintsova:

“You’d like to be in love,” interrupted Bazarov, “and you can’t. That’s where your misfortune lies.”

Odintsova began inspecting her lace sleeves. “Can’t I really fall in love?” she asked.

“I should say not! But I was wrong to call that a misfortune. Far from it—it’s the ones who go through it that deserve to be pitied.”

“Go through what?”

“Falling in love.”

“How do you know?”

“By hearsay,” replied Bazarov crossly. “You’re flirting with me,” he thought to himself. “You’re bored, and provoking me because you’ve nothing better to do, while I ...” His heart was bursting. (102)

I had forgotten that by the novel’s end, the affected, proud nihilist Bazarov and his worshipful parents rise to heights of sympathy:

Bazarov did not get up again that day and spent the whole night in a heavy, half-conscious doze. Some time after midnight he opened his eyes with an effort and saw his father’s pale face in the lamplight, bending over him. He sent him away, and his father obeyed, but came back at once on tiptoe, hid himself as best he could behind the cupboard doors, and stared fixedly at his son. Arina Vlasyevna also stayed up. Keeping the study door ajar, she came back, again and again, to “listen to Yenyusha breathing” and watch her husband. (198)

In comparison to the eight other English translations I found in the library, the Slaters’ is especially fresh and clear.

BRISBANE

Eugene Vodolazkin
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Plough; $24.95; 344 pp.

Brisbane is unlike the Ukrainian-Russian Eugene Vodolazkin’s excellent and fantastical previous three novels translated into English (The Aviator, Solovyov and Larionov, Laurus). First published in Russia in 2018, Brisbane seems written for the video-screen rather than for paper. On the other hand, it is timely, because the protagonist, Gleb Yanovsky, a world-famous humming guitarist, is a divided soul: his father is Ukrainian, his mother Russian, and though born and raised in Kyiv, his heart wanders in the Russian manner.

The set-up is neat and tidy, like a popular movie: Yanovsky is nearing fifty and has begun realizing that his fingering is becoming clumsy. A popular Russian novelist has proposed writing a biography of him and regularly meets with him to elicit his story. Yanovsky keeps an intermittent diary, and we read it in alternation with the novelist’s chronological rendering of Yanovsky’s life: his upbringing by his grandmother, his success at and then rejection of a music school, his wearying teaching job, his sudden, unlikely rise to international fame, and his present-day discoveries of the limitations his neurological disorder imposes on him.

Katya is waiting for me at the office door. I gesture to her: let’s go.

And we head for the exit at the end of the hall. Running down the stairs, I turn for a second: “Parkinson’s.”

Katya groans muffledly, slows down, and stops. Hanging over the railings, she looks at me stopped a flight below. I’m reflected in her eyes. My face is a bright blurry oval in the staircase’s quasi-gloom. There’s nothing left in it of the face on hundreds of posters. Just pain and distress. (102)

Married to a German woman he met when they were students in Leningrad, Yanovsky travels the world to his concerts, where he is worshiped for his peculiar originality, though the Parkinson’s more and more frequently disables him. He and his childless wife adopt the daughter of his first love. The girl is herself a musical prodigy but with an even more devastating medical condition. Yanovsky never reaches Brisbane, Australia, which destination only symbolizes an escape to the other side of the world.

As for Yanovsky’s inner Russian-Ukrainian conflict? Vodolazkin doesn’t really take sides.

RUSSIAN ROULETTE

Victor Pogostin
Blotter Books; $14.50; 221 pp.

LIKE A DROP OF INK IN A DOWNPOUR:
MEMORIES OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Yelena and Galina Lembersky
Cherry Orchard Books; $19.95; 272 pp.

The memoirs Russian Roulette and Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour: Memories of Soviet Russia are as different as their émigré authors, yet similar in that each of them bid farewell to the good old bad old days of the USSR. They recount their childhoods and careers that were blocked or challenged because of the authors’ Jewish backgrounds.

Pogostin, a past contributor to Russian Life, is a natural-born storyteller:

One night back in 1987 I was working at home translating Hemingway’s novel The Garden of Eden. My wife Natasha was busy preparing dinner. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my seven-year-old son George crouching in the hallway past my tiny study to the kitchen. He was holding my passport behind his back. “Mom!” I heard him whisper in surprise. “Daddy is a Jew!”

My son, like my elder brother and I, grew up in an assimilated family. My parents were nonreligious, and ethnicity had never been the subject of family conversations. As a teenager I had not encountered what many friends of mine rightfully called ‘domestic’ anti-Semitism. … My first brush with the latent state-anti-Semitism occurred later when I was making my life and career decisions. (187)

In common with compilations of anecdotes by stand-up comedians and actors, there are sections and stories that must have worked for Pogostin a lot better out loud, but there are several satisfying tales. He narrates his merry travels as a Russian translator on Soviet business in India and details his work as a Hemingway expert and literary editor. Like the author of A Moveable Feast, Pogostin is good company, but he is light where Papa Hemingway was dark and deep.

In Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour: Memories of Soviet Russia the daughter and mother Lembersky tell their overlapping stories, including their efforts to preserve and export the art of the renowned Ukrainian painter who was Yelena’s grandfather and Galina’s father, Felix Lembersky. There are exquisitely poetical passages by Yelena:

In the fall, my grandmother bought eight heads of cabbage and carved them one by one with a long kitchen knife. When she pressed the knife, the veins on her hands swelled like tree roots. (10)

Another:

Soon snow will come in flakes, wafers, tufts of fleece and serpentine. Snow will hide the footpath and manholes. It will turn a street inside out to resemble a bed made up with white sheets. It will soften the brusque clanging of trucks, the hoots of cars, the screeches of buses. (43)

Mother and daughter recall Yelena’s adolescence differently, which is no surprise, but they also remember the USSR quite differently, so distinctive were the 1950s-1960s from the 1970s-1980s.

“I don’t remember when I heard the word Jew for the first time, only that it was at home and I was a small child,” writes Yelena, who goes on to recount in the present tense her girlhood experiences. “I know that Jews are different from others. Grandma’s Jewish friends have unusual names—Moisey, Naum, Simka or Tzila—which none of my classmates have. At my home the word Jew is said with empathy and in a hushed voice, though no one explains to me why. My mother is a Jew, and so is my grandmother. But not my father. He is a Russian, and that is why I am a Russian too, as it is written on my birth certificate.” (50)

You might have read such attempts at dual or multiple perspectives and narrations in novels and in oral histories, but the Lemberskys’ retellings of some of the exact same events, instead of deepening the story, only make it seem repetitive, something like a pot-luck dinner where two guests bring an abundance of the same marvelous dish made from the same family recipe. I kept feeling Yelena ought to have taken over the job and incorporated her impressive and indomitable mother’s story into her own solo book. Before they emigrated in 1987, she and her mother did all in their power to rescue Felix Lembersky’s artwork from Leningrad and the land where it, including his renowned paintings of Babi Yar, had been suppressed.