Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics) Read online

  RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES FROM PUSHKIN TO BUIDA

  ROBERT CHANDLER has translated Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire for Everyman’s Poetry. His translations from Russian include Aleksandr Pushkin’s Dubrovsky, Nikolay Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. With his wife Elizabeth and other colleagues he has co-translated numerous works by Andrey Platonov; Soul won the 2004 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award for best translation from a Slavonic language; Soul and Happy Moscow were both shortlisted for the Weidenfeld European Translation Prize; ‘The Macedonian Officer’ won second prize in the 2004 John Dryden Translation Prize.

  Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida

  Edited and translated by

  ROBERT CHANDLER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This collection first published in Penguin Classics 2005

  1

  The Acknowledgements (pp. 394–6) constitute an extension of this copyright page

  Introductory material and notes copyright © Robert Chandler, 2005

  Introductory material to Krzhizhanovsky and Dovlatov copyright © Joanne Turnbull, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the translators and editor has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-191024-6

  Contents

  Chronology

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  Note on the Translations

  Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida

  ALEKSANDR PUSHKIN

  The Queen of Spades

  MIKHAIL LERMONTOV

  The Fatalist

  NIKOLAY GOGOL

  The Greatcoat

  IVAN TURGENEV

  The Knocking

  FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

  Bobok

  COUNT LEV TOLSTOY

  God Sees the Truth, but Waits

  NIKOLAY LESKOV

  The Steel Flea

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  In the Cart

  LIDIYA ZINOVYEVA-ANNIBAL

  The Monster

  IVAN BUNIN

  The Gentleman from San Francisco

  In Paris

  TEFFI

  Love

  A Family Journey

  YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

  The Lion

  SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY

  Quadraturin

  VERA INBER

  Lalla’s Interests

  MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

  The Embroidered Towel

  ISAAK BABEL

  My First Goose

  The Death of Dolgushov

  Salt

  MIKHAIL ZOSHCHENKO

  Electrification

  Pelageya

  The Bathhouse

  The Crisis

  The Galosh

  The Hat

  LEONID DOBYCHIN

  Medical Auxiliary

  The Father

  Please Do

  ANDREY PLATONOV

  The Third Son

  The Return

  DANIIL KHARMS

  The Old Woman

  VARLAM SHALAMOV

  Through the Snow

  Berries

  The Snake Charmer

  Duck

  ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

  What a Pity

  VASILY SHUKSHIN

  In the Autumn

  ASAR EPPEL

  Red Caviar Sandwiches

  SERGEI DOVLATOV

  The Officer’s Belt

  YURY BUIDA

  Sindbad the Sailor

  Note on Names

  Note on Ranks

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Chronology

  1703 Peter the Great founds St Petersburg.

  1799 Birth of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin.

  1812 Napoleon captures Moscow, but is forced to retreat.

  1825 Decembrist Revolt: an unsuccessful coup by liberal members of the aristocracy. Tsar Nicholas I comes to the throne.

  1833 Pushkin publishes Yevgeny Onegin.

  1837 Death of Pushkin.

  1840 Publication of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. He is killed in a duel the following year.

  1842 Publication of Gogol’s Dead Souls and ‘The Greatcoat’.

  1852 Publication of Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Notebook.

  1853–6 The Crimean War, which ends in Russia’s defeat.

  1861 Emancipation of the serfs.

  1865–9 Publication of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

  1879–80 Publication of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

  1881 Aleksandr II assassinated by members of the terrorist Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) organization. Leskov publishes ‘The Steel Flea’.

  1891 Beginning of construction of Trans-Siberian railway.

  1898 A revival of Chekhov’s The Seagull is the main event in the opening season of the newly founded Moscow Arts Theatre.

  1905 Russia is defeated in a war against Japan. The ‘1905 Revolution’ is defused by liberal reforms. Russia becomes, in principle, a constitutional monarchy.

  1910 Tolstoy’s funeral is attended by several thousand people.

  1914 Beginning of First World War. St Petersburg is given the more Russian-sounding name of Petrograd.

  1916 Murder of Rasputin, a self-styled ‘holy man’ who exercised a malign influence on the Tsar and his family.

  1917 Nicholas II abdicates after February Revolution. Workers’ soviets (i.e., councils) are set up in Petrograd and Moscow. Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seize power in October.

  1918–21 Russian Civil War. After 1919: Emigration of much of the upper and middle class, including Bunin, Nabokov and Teffi.

  1924 Death of Lenin. Petrograd is renamed Leningrad. Stalin begins to take over power. First publication (in English translation) of Zamyatin’s We.

  1926 Babel’s Red Cavalry first published in book form.

  1927 Publication of Zoshchenko’s Nervous People.

  1929 Collectivization of agriculture begins.

  1932 Foundation of Union of Soviet Writers.

  1933 Nobel Prize is awarded to the émigré
Ivan Bunin.

  1934–9 The great purges. At least a million people are shot and several million sent to the Gulag.

  1939 Stalin–Hitler pact. Beginning of Second World War. Kharms completes ‘The Old Woman’.

  1941 Hitler invades the Soviet Union. Leningrad is blockaded and Moscow under threat.

  1945 End of Second World War.

  1946 Control over the arts is tightened. Akhmatova and Zoshchenko are expelled from the Writers’ Union. Platonov’s ‘The Return’ is also fiercely criticized.

  1953 Death of Stalin. Khrushchev begins to seize power.

  1956 Khrushchev denounces Stalin at twentieth Party Congress. Shalamov returns to Moscow, one of several millions released from the camps. Start of more liberal period known as ‘The Thaw’.

  1958 Publication abroad of Doctor Zhivago. Under pressure from the Soviet authorities, Pasternak declines Nobel Prize.

  1962 Publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

  1964 Fall of Khrushchev.

  1966–7 First publication of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (written in the 1930s).

  1974 Solzhenitsyn deported after publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago. Shukshin dies of a heart attack; his film Snowball Berry Red enjoys huge success.

  1985 Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power. Beginning of the period of liberal reforms known as perestroika; the next few years see the first publication in Russia of major works by Kharms, Grossman, Nabokov, Platonov, Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn and many others.

  1989 Fall of Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany.

  1991 Boris Yeltsin becomes President of the Russian Federation. Collapse of Soviet Union.

  1994 Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia.

  2000 Vladimir Putin elected President of the Russian Federation.

  Introduction

  The roots of literature lie in song, prayer and story. For all its sophistication, Russian literature is relatively young and therefore closer to these roots than the literature of Western Europe. Aleksandr Pushkin absorbed Russian folklore from a peasant housekeeper; the anekdot, usually a political story-cum-joke, was an important art form in the Soviet Union; and Russians still sing and recite poetry on social occasions. It is not surprising that both poems and short stories continue to have a central place in Russian literature; the English, in contrast, tend to pay only lip service to the importance of poetry and to look on the short story as a minor genre, something for an apprentice to cut his teeth on before the serious work of writing a novel.

  Russian literature probably includes more great short stories than the literature of any other European country. There is no major Russian prose-writer who has not written short stories, and many of Russia’s finest prose-writers wrote chiefly in this form. This may come as a surprise to English-speakers, who tend to assume that the supreme achievement of Russian literature is the epic novel. It is my hope, however, that the stories gathered here will convince readers there is as much vitality, linguistic creativity and emotional depth in the finest Russian short stories as in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky or the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetayeva.

  Great literature often arises from marriages – or battles – between different cultures. Persian poetry arose from a collision between native Persian culture and imported Arabic beliefs and vocabulary. English literature began with Chaucer’s fusion of English and French traditions and entered its greatest period during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as writers struggled to absorb the impact of far-off cultures – the Americas in the distant present, and Greece and Rome in the distant past. The age of Pushkin, the so-called Golden Age of Russian poetry, is another such era of cultural collision. The Russian literary language was still a relatively new and fragile creation in the early nineteenth century, and there were furious debates between those who wanted to ‘gallicize’ Russian (to draw on French for both vocabulary and syntax) and those who preferred to borrow from Church Slavonic – a liturgical language closer to Bulgarian than to Russian. One of Pushkin’s achievements was to assert his right to make use of every possibility available to him: colloquial Russian, Church Slavonic and borrowings from French, German and English.

  Poetry always comes before prose in the creation of a national literature. Russian literature developed so fast, however, that there was no real interval between the great age of poetry (the 1820s and 1830s) and the first great age of prose (the 1830s and 1840s). The years 1831 to 1842 saw the publication of some of the finest works of Russian prose: Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’ and The Captain’s Daughter; Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, all of Nikolay Gogol’s short stories and the great long novel of the period: Gogol’s Dead Souls.1 ‘The Queen of Spades’, Lermontov’s ‘The Fatalist’ (from A Hero of Our Time) and Gogol’s ‘The Greatcoat’ were obvious choices as the first three stories in this volume.

  The second half of the nineteenth century – from the publication of Ivan Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Notebook (1852) – is the only period when the long novel really was more important in Russia than either poetry or short fiction. Count Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote good and sometimes innovative short stories, but their supreme achievements are their novels. And apart from Nikolay Leskov – who wrote fine works in most prose genres – we find no great short story writer in this period until Anton Chekhov. Chekhov’s achievement, however, is extraordinary – both in itself and as regards its importance to other writers. It is possible that not even Dostoyevsky had such an influence on the literature of Europe in the twentieth century.

  The decade from 1910 was a period of intellectual and artistic innovation in Russia, the climax of a cultural Silver Age more brilliant than the Golden Age a century before. The years 1912–16 saw the publication of the first collections of poetry by Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the première of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and the first showing of the painter Kasimir Malevich’s notorious ‘Black Square’. Once again, new developments in short fiction followed quickly after new developments in poetry: Isaak Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrey Platonov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and the émigrée Teffi all wrote many of their best works in the 1920s, registering and drawing creative energy from a linguistic ferment even wilder than that of Pushkin’s time. People only semi-literate had suddenly assumed positions of power and there was a general sense that a New World required new words. The authorities called on writers to produce works of epic proportions, arguing that the heroic achievements of the Russian Revolution could only properly be celebrated in long poems or long novels; writers themselves, however, evidently felt that this confused and fragmented era could be better represented in shorter forms. The two great novels of the decade, Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don and Platonov’s Chevengur, were completed only towards the end of the 1920s – and in any case, it would be another 60 years before Chevengur was first published in Russia.

  The best Russian writers of the 1920s were often criticized by the authorities, but they were, in the main, able to publish their work. During the 1930s, however, it became increasingly difficult to publish good work in Russia. Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Teffi and Zamyatin were in France. Babel became a master – as he declared at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 – of the ‘genre of silence’; Bulgakov, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and Daniil Kharms wrote only ‘for the drawer’; Leonid Dobychin managed to publish both a short novel and a collection of stories, but he committed suicide soon after being criticized at a Writers’ Union meeting in 1936. Zoshchenko wrote interestingly and amusingly, but his work lost its edge. Only Platonov, with heroic tenacity, continued both to develop as a writer and, now and then, to publish. ‘The River Potudan’ appeared in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges; ‘The Return’, published in 1946, was the last great work of the Stalin era. The post-war cultural clampdown (which began shortly before the publication of ‘Th
e Return’) seemed for a while to have brought about the death of Russian literature.

  The Gulag was a defining feature of the Soviet Union, and it is no accident that it was through writing about the Gulag that Russian literature was reborn in the mid-1950s, after Stalin’s death. Varlam Shalamov wrote about little else; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about little else during the first half of his literary career; and the Gulag is an important theme of the greatest Russian long novel of the second half of the twentieth century: Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. During the 1960s and early 1970s Vasily Shukshin was one of the first writers after Platonov to look at another Soviet tragedy: the damage done by collectivization to the fabric of peasant life. Yury Trifonov – whose best works are too long for this anthology – examined the life of the Moscow intelligentsia under Stalin and in the decades that followed. Sergei Dovlatov wrote about labour camps with humour, from the position of a guard rather than that of a prisoner; this broadening of perspective marks another small step in Russia’s recovery from Stalinism. Georgy Vladimov went further still in his novel Faithful Ruslan, describing a labour camp from the perspective of a devoted guard-dog. And Asar Eppel asserted a writer’s right simply to celebrate ordinary life and love.

  I have chosen for this anthology only stories I have been able to reread many times, in both Russian and English, with increasing enjoyment. A few notable omissions are Maksim Gorky, Vasily Grossman, Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Sholokhov, all of whom are great writers but whose short stories are inferior to their work in other genres. Gorky is at his best in his memoirs and autobiographical writings; Pasternak is a finer poet than prose-writer; and the greatest works by Grossman and Sholokhov are their long novels. Nabokov is another writer whose novels are greater than his short stories; I would, however, have included him had I been able to reach an agreement with his publishers.

  It was easier to decide where to begin this anthology than where to end it. The 1990s may prove to have been an important era for Russian prose, but no anthologist has unlimited space; of the writers who first became known in that decade, I have included only Yury Buida. Viktor Pelevin, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Aleksey Slapovsky and Lyudmila Ulitskaya are all good writers, but Buida is remarkable both for his philosophical reach and his ability to use postmodernist playfulness to express deep feeling. And, since almost all Russian writers – even writers as different from one another as Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Bunin, Pasternak, Tsvetayeva and Platonov – have turned to Pushkin for inspiration – I was glad of the chance to end this volume with a homage to one of his most famous poems; I was all the more glad because it happens to be the first Russian poem I learned by heart myself.