Visions of Russia

Is Doctor Zhivago—more accurately, was Doctor Zhivago, when it appeared in English translation in 1958, a “new kind of novel”? So claimed Alfred Kazin in a 1959 essay entitled “Saints for Our Time,” commenting on how “peculiarly difficult” it was to judge the literary merits of a novel that was

...not anything like the great nineteenth-century Russian novels. It lacks the old-fashioned fullness of detail, the self-dramatizing “big” characters who struggle against an utterly provincial background to realize their freedom.

What [other] critics and literary intellectuals fail to realize about this novel, Kazin argues, is that Pasternak has undertaken something entirely new:

...to describe a hero who has to make a world, to be the spirit of life itself to people fatalistically sunk in tyranny and subjection.

The realization, however, does not do away with the difficult of the task, because

...we are now so likely to be in sympathy with Pasternak, to identify ourselves with his motive in writing the book, that we can be almost too eager to praise the novel and to overlook those sides of it that are merely doctrinaire, theoretical, and sentimental.

I want to say something about Kazin’s assessment of Doctor Zhivago as “a new kind of novel,” and to then say something more about Russian generals and, finally, about novels in general.

Kazin’s working definition of a “problem” (or “problematical” or “existential”) novel is that it will make its readers see “our own world” as “entirely problematical.” Perhaps by this definition any “problem novel” of a half-century ago is bound to fail, for don’t most of us in the 21^st century already feel our world to be problematical before we pick up any particular novel? And then, if Kazin is correct that Pasternak’s is a “problem novel,” must it necessarily fail any literary test of our time? In other words, must we understand and evaluate it only as an anachronism? More directly focusing on Kazin's claim, I ask myself these questions:

Ø  Does Doctor Zhivago lack fullness of detail?

Ø  Were 19^th-century Russian fictional characters “big,” and are Pasternak’s “small” by comparison?

I might have taken Kazin’s word on Pasternak except that he inspired me to read the novel, and in it I found a wealth of descriptive detail, very much in the Russian style—unnecessary (to the moving forward of the plot, that is), intoxicating, overflowing. In the following example, Yurii is on a crowded train, sitting on his luggage in the corridor. I want to quote a lengthy passage, precisely because of its “fullness of detail.”

The stormy sky had cleared. In the hot, sunny fields, crickets chirped loudly, muffling the clatter of the train. 

... All around people wre shouting, bawling songs, quarrelling, and playing cards. Whenever the train stopped, the noise of the besieging crowds outside was added to the turmoil. ...  

Then, like a telegram delivered on the train, or like greetings from Meliuzeievo addressed to Yurii Andreievich, there drifted in through the windows a familiar fragrance. It came from somewhere to one side and higher than the level or either garden or wild flowers, and it quietly asserted its excellence over everything else.

Kept from the windows by the crowd, the doctor could not see the trees, but he imagined them growing somewhere very near, calmly stretching out their heavy branches to the carriage roofs, and their foliage, covered with dust from the passing trains and thick as night, was sprinkled with constellations of small, glittering waxen flowers. 

This happened time and again throughout the trip. There were roaring crowds at every station. And everywhere the linden trees were in blossom. 

This ubiquitous fragrance seemed to be preceding the train on its journey north as if it were some sort of rumor that had reached even the smallest, local stations, and which the passengers always found waiting for them on arrival, heard and confirmed by everyone.

I love this passage, and it is typical of many pages of the novel, rich and full with details that make every scene come alive, “old-fashioned” in a very good way. I might also note that this kind of passage, as well as those indicating characters’ states of mind, is precisely what film can never show. (If the fragrance of linden blossoms could be piped into the movie theatre simultaneous with the appropriate scenes, would this give the effect of the written passage? What do you think?) And so I have to disagree with Kazin on this point.

What about the “size” of characters? How do Konstantin Levin, Anna herself, and Anna’s lover, Count Vronsky, compare with Yurii Zhivago, Komarovsky, Lara et al.? Kazin writes of 19^th-century Russian fiction as offering “self-dramatizing ‘big’ characters,” struggling against a provincial background to find freedom, while he says Pasternak gives us characters who must make a whole world, “to be the spirit of life itself to people fatalistically sunk in tyranny and subjection.”

I pluck a copy of Anna Karenina from my bookstore shelves. It is the Penguin Classics Deluxe paperback edition of 2002, with an introduction by one of the translators, Richard Pevear, and there in his introduction comes the first surprise, for according to Pevear

...none of the great Russian prose writers of the nineteenth century, with the possible exception of Turgenev, was on easy terms with the novel as a genre. Gogol called Dead Souls, his only novel-length work [my note: and unfinished, at that], a poem.

The traditional form of the Russian novel, you see, was “the form for portraying ordinary domestic life,” according to Pevear, and Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy all had other and bigger fish to fry. So, “great” as these writers were, they hardly saw themselves as “old-fashioned” novelists. With Anna Karenina, Tolstoy claimed for the first time in his career to be writing a traditional Russian novel, focusing precisely on domestic life, but also turning the “old-fashioned” genre on its head, by giving readers a “heroine” who was a fallen woman, one deserving of—and here the author seemed conflicted within himself—pity if not outright censure. I am not going to argue for or against Anna’s suicide as a judgment against her. My question here is on the stature of the main characters and how Pasternak’s characters, especially Lara and Doctor Zhivago, measure up against them.

(There are so many minor and incidental characters in Doctor Zhivago, some of them appearing only for a page, a brief passage, others reappearing at different points in the story, that their sheer number alone contributes to the “fullness of detail” in this work of fiction. The movie cannot begin to do justice to the cast of characters. No film-goer would be able to keep them straight. Reading, however, is more like life: we don’t expect that everyone we meet will become a permanent part of our lives.)

In both novels, the lives of the characters play out against the backdrop of a huge, sprawling country, in a time of social change, with pressures on individuals to make critical decisions and to choose among radically different possible lives. For Kitty and for Anna, marriage and family were givens, women’s goals as handed down by tradition, but even within this prescribed domain there were social changes afoot and thus uncertainty. How was Kitty to find a husband, with arranged marriages now considered “old-fashioned”? As for flirtation and infidelity, society was prepared to smile and look the other way so as not to see a married woman engaging in an affair, but the price of this was that the woman not take the affair seriously. Both in the case of marriage and in that of adultery, love, the wild card, presented problems. The same cause of personal anguish and contravention of social norms comes into the life of Yurii Andreievich when he falls in love with Lara. Revolutionary Russian life had no place for the concerns of Yurii and Lara’s love affair--but the earlier Russia had not been able to make a place for Anna and Vronsky’s love, either.

Of course there is more at stake than love, and the stature of the main characters must be considered against larger issues, social and historical. For Levin, the question of how he should live is paramount. How to regulate his family life, how to manage his farm, what relationship he is to have with the peasants who work his land—all these questions torment Levin, and he must find his own answers as an individual, whatever tradition or the church or his neighbors have decided for themselves. Zhivago’s questions have more to do with art—primarily, his own creative work as a poet and his place as a poet in the society of his time--but again, no one else can give him answers.

I may not be coming at Kazin’s question from the perspective of his concerns, and perhaps I am missing something essential, but for me a red flag went up when I encountered this phrase: “his motive in writing the book.” A single motive? Could either Tolstoy or Pasternak give one all-embracing reason? Could Tolstoy say, “I wrote Anna Karenina to show x” or Pasternak say, “I wrote Doctor Zhivago to illustrate y”? 

When I think about it like this, the whole idea of a “problem novel” becomes problematic to me. There may be mediocre (or better) novels written to highlight a particular social problem at a particular time, but they will not have the breadth or depth or richness or staying power of either Anna Karenina or Doctor Zhivago. We come back to these novels not because we necessarily have the same personal questions or social problems but because these characters live for us on the pages of their respective books. We enter their lives. We live with them. No, more--while reading, we become the characters and live their lives.

Every novel raises problems for its characters. Without conflict, there is no story. There are different problems at different times in history, but always, in every age, there are individuals looking for their own answers, and any serious novel is an exploration of specific individuals doing just that. In my opinion--what do you think?

Fox in a Snowstorm

The last ice in the harbor (photo on “A Shot in the Light”) was not the last snow of the season. Seasons, anyway, are designated by human beings, not respected by Nature as hard boundaries of behavior, and so we woke this morning to snow falling (blowing sideways) at a rate of one inch per minute, with all schools “for a hundred miles around,” although “around” in this context, on the side of a peninsula, must not be taken literally. It’s all right. We have all the necessities of life, and being snowed in one more time is no tragedy for a pair of foxes. Yes, I am a fox.

No, not the cute little red or grey creature, half-cat, half-dog, but a philosophical bookseller snowed in at home during a spring blizzard. A fox? In what way?

Isaiah Berlin makes the distinction in his well-known essay titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which takes its title from a fragment of Greek poetry attributed to Archilochus, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin acknowledges that scholars give different interpretations of the poet’s sentence, but he has no desire to take sides or to give a competing interpretation. His intention is to use the contrast between hedgehog and fox figuratively, in order

to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, more or less coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance—and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last live lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.

That was a lengthy quotation, I realize, with complicated sentences, but anyone with the patience to read it carefully sees that Berlin’s basic distinction is simple.

Hedgehog: The hedgehog is only interested in capital-T Truth, and that Truth must be unitary and all-encompassing. The hedgehog is, then, a True Believer. Everything must be made to fit into the Truth he has found, and no other perspectives are of any interest to him.

Fox: The fox’s interests are wide-ranging, his curiosity about the world limitless. What does not interest the fox is trying to force all experiences and ideas and bits of knowledge into one over-arching Truth or theory.

Berlin gives some examples of philosophers and writers (any field will yield some of each), and as it should be he tells us that Plato was a hedgehog, Aristotle a fox. Yes! Who on earth could ever love Plato and Aristotle equally? One must choose between them, which is to choose between idol worship and independent curiosity. The focus of the essay, however, is Tolstoy—specifically, Tolstoy as historian, and Berlin’s thesis is that “Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog....” In other words, Tolstoy’s nature (or, we might say, his personality) was in conflict with his beliefs.

Haven’t you known people whose stated beliefs clashed with their nature? Long ago, I had a professor of religion who was the diametrical opposite of Tolstoy, in that he was by nature a hedgehog but believed in being a fox. He avowed very Western European democratic ideals. According to his beliefs, he had us move our desks into a circle at the beginning of each class period. More democratic. According to his beliefs, he assigned each of us a segment of the course material to prepare and present to the rest. His hedgehog nature, however, got the better of him session after session. A student would be only one or two sentences into a presentation—this is not an exaggeration; I kept close track—when the professor would interrupt, take over and deliver a lecture, from his place in the circle, for the rest of the class. It was not that the student had made an error or had not done a good job of preparation, because the professor never waited long enough to find out. He just could not restrain his own nature, and time after time it collided with his beliefs. I watched the dynamic repeatedly, and when my turn came to present material I stood up from my desk and went to the blackboard. My presentation did not require terminology and diagrams on the blackboard, but having a chance to deliver my presentation required that I take a position of authority. Naturally, the professor interrupted me, too. Did you think he wouldn’t? But I interrupted back and continued and managed to present the material more or less as I had planned.

Teachers have several classes a semester of students, so it’s far easier for the students to remember a professor’s name than vice versa. I must admit, though, that meeting the professor on campus that very same semester and speaking to him, after my presentation, I was chagrined that he had no memory of me at all, with or without a name.

That’s one of the problems with hedgehogs, you see. Even when you think you’re having a conversation with one, you are more or less invisible and inaudible. Your presence as another sentient warm body might be noted, and perhaps the hedgehog would observe later that you were, in some vague, general way, either bright or dull, attractive or repulsive, attentive or pig-headed. But your ideas will not be heard as your ideas, if indeed they are heard at all. You will be given no credit for any contributions or insights. The hedgehog has it all figured out, you see. Why should he care what you say or think?

I used to feel sorry for hedgehogs but have learned a few things from encounters with them. They don’t feel sorry for themselves (how could they, when they possess Truth?), so I can save my pity. Also, there is a definite limit to any personal, conversational, philosophical or any other kind of rewards I might hope for when engaging with a hedgehog. Initially, there is a chance to hear someone else’s Truth--always interesting--and many examples or references will probably be given. But then? Since the hedgehog’s Truth is unchanging, there will be nothing more, nothing new. Impasse. Dead end.

The animal hedgehog is adorable, sweet and unaggressive and droll. The human hedgehog is an armed fortress, closed except to other True Believers of the same Truth. Thank you, I would rather run with my fellow foxes, exploring woods, fields and shore, books, blogs, bookstores, libraries, coffee shops, small towns, big cities, the open road--the list is endless. The world is so rich and multifacted, so full of mysteries and delights! Sarah, I’m happy to say, is on my side when it comes to the outdoor adventures, and David is on board for the rest, so I can go solo or in company, the way foxes do.

Backward with Weather, Forward with Books

Can you see the coyote? He or she is well camouflaged against the background of the bare field. That was on Sunday, cold but sunny. By Wednesday, on our way to Lake Leelanau for an appointment, the picture had changed dramatically. A blizzard had arrived! These shots were taken from the passenger seat while the car was in motion.




One last Wednesday image, a few hours later in Leland, shows the snow in a melting phase. But we still have plenty today on Friday morning!


No matter. It’s only winter’s last gasp and about what we can expect in March. Or April. Yes, it could happen in April, but I’ll call it a “last gasp” then, too, if it comes, because the days are noticeably longer, and there is no stopping the cycle of the seasons.

Weather seems to take a step back now and then, but forward movement is the essence of reading (in English!). In my current adventure with Tolstoy, surviving Anna’s tragic death at the end of Part VII, I have come to the early pages of Part VIII, where Chapter I opens with a brief anecdote about a disappointed writer. Sergey Ivanovich had worked for six years on his “Sketch of a Survey of the Principles and Forms of Government in Europe and Russia” and expected it to make “a great stir in the scientific world.” Its reception was otherwise.

After the most consciencious revision the book had last year been published, and had been distributed among the booksellers.

...

But a week passed, a second, a third, and in society no impression whatsoever could be detected. ...

Servey Ivanovich had clculated to a nicety the time necessary for writing a review, but a month passed, and a second, and still there was silence.

Apart from a “contemptuous allusion” in a “comic article” on another subject, no one seems to have any opinion about his book at all or even to have noticed its appearance until finally, three months after publication, a devastating review is published. Sergey Ivanovich himself cannot help admiring the wit of the reviewer, despite the fact that he has completely misunderstood the book. No matter. His six years’ work have come to naught, and he must now find something else to do.
From there Tolstoy shifts to a wider angle, taking in volunteers for the war in Serbia and the fever pitch of enthusiasm for the war in Russian society.



Northport is no St. Petersburg or Moscow, and it’s pretty quiet in the winter, when even those who live here year-round find ways to escape for a few weeks in February or March. Despite appearances, however, there’s life in the old town yet. Olivia is baking croissants at Barb’s Bakery this winter. That’s a treat! And at Dog Ears Books, I had to restock A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach for the author’s drop-in visit tomorrow morning (Saturday, @ 11 a.m.)


Loreen Niewenhuis will sign the books I have in stock (and those my customers have already bought, if they want to make a trip in Saturday morning), and we’ll talk about a summer date for her to come back for a reading at Dog Ears Books and/or the Leelanau Township Library in Northport.

Whatever the season, something is always happening in the world of books. Here's a tip: Come back to "Books in Northport" on Monday for a big surprise! Something we've never done before!

A Little Random Reading

Here at week’s end, I’m sorry to report that February has brought illness to many Up North residents—colds, flu, what-have-you. The only way I can think to turn the sad fact of illness in a happier direction is by telling you of a children’s book that has won both the Caldecott Medal and the award for Best Illustrated Children’s Book from the New York Times. Here it is, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, written by Philip C. Stead and illustrated by Erin E. Stead.


Amos the zookeeper loves his job at the zoo and always manages to spend “quality” time with his animal friends. What will the animals do when Amos has to stay home sick? You might make a general guess, but you’ll want to investigate more closely so as not to miss each engaging encounter.


Making this an even better story, I can report to you that the Sneads divide their time between NYC and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I’m in Part VI (of VIII parts) of Anna Karenina, and things are not going well with Anna and Vronsky, which is no surprise to anyone who has read the book before, as I have, but would probably not surprise anyone coming to it for the first time, either. I set Tolstoy aside to read yet another delightful book by Oliver Sacks, this one his memoir, Uncle Tungsten, which allowed me to live a vicarious boyhood in London. Then it was off for a trip to New York City during Prohibition with Archy and Mehitabel, the irrepressible cockroach and alley cat duo created by Don Marquis. Everyone should make the acquaintance of Archy. It’s difficult, though, as the fictional bookseller in The Haunted Bookshop learned when his wife objected to his taste, to find excerpts to convey that adequately convey Archy’s charm.

i heard a
couple of fleas
talking the other
day says one come
to lunch with
me i can lead you
to a pedigreed
dog says the
other one
i do not care
what a dog s
pedigree may be
safety first
is my motto what
i want to know
is whether he
has got a
muzzle on
millionaires and
bums taste
about alike to me

That was the cockroach talking, but it’s Archy’s pal, the alley cat named Mehitabel, the free spirit claiming to be “always a lady,” who is the star.

i look back on my life
and it seems to me to be
just one damned kitten
after another
i am a dancer archy
and my only prayer
is to be allowed
to give my best to my art
but just as i feel
that i am succeeding
in my life work
along comes another batch
of these damned kittens

I want to go back a couple of weeks to say a word about Allen Shawn’s memoir, Twin. Well, two words. First, it is called a memoir, so I’m not sure why I expected it to be more about his autistic sister than about his own life; once I got over my faulty preconception, however, I enjoyed the book much more. Second, the audience I expect to be most fascinated and moved by this book is not parents or siblings of autistic children or memoir readers in general but people interested in what goes on in musical composition. Shaw is a composer, you see, and the way he writes of composition and how he grew into it is unlike anything else I’ve read. Musicians and music lovers, here is a book for you, though actually it will interest anyone interested in odd “corners” of the world and the human psyche.

Finally, you could do worse this week than to pick up a copy of the New Yorker magazine, the Feb. 14 & 21 issue. An Adam Gopnik essay begins on page 124 and is, as always, worth several times the cover price of the magazine. Bear with me while I quote just a fragment (and I promise to do so briefly, despite all the many underlined sentences and bracketed paragraphs in the magazine in front of me). He has introduced “cognitive entanglement” and the ways spouses’ memories intertwine, and then comes the Gopnik arabesque:

Google is really the world’s Thurber wife: smiling patiently and smugly as she explains what the difference is between eulogy and elegy and what the best route is to that little diner outside Hackensack. The new age is one in which we all have a know-it-all spouse at our fingertips.

I happen to have in stock, right now, a new paperback copy of Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon and have no hesitation in saying that this writer is a treasure of our time. If Don Marquis hadn’t created Archy the cockroach, Adam Gopnik might have.