Fafajockling

Mondo hot book receives killer rave review! I thought this was going to be some old, pre-Lamaz class edition of Gogol. But it was quite crisp and new, and put out by the same wackadoodle anarchistos who released Kharms and other suppressed Soviets. Therefore it is great! I bought it because I never read any Gogol plays other than The Govt Inspector. And the intro is right: Gogol was not really a master of the stage craft. There are some really funny moments and some damn well written conversations (the translator is good, not verbose), but also too much monologuing and Vaudevillian stuff. The appendices are really good here, full of Gogol Notes and a lengthy essay about this poor man. Burned a whole play because someone fell asleep during a reading! And burned his last book too! Damn you, Gogol, why! However if you love Gogol as I do, then it doesn't feel like the decision is in your hands. Read all of his work. I guess pretentious old Nabokov should have done a translation ...

 A Russian man takes you from slapstick moment to slapstick moment through this orgiastic saga, and relates it to the human ass and how that relates to role reversal--in all kinds of reference, like religious rituals and garb, the study of anatomy, natural cycles. And Bakhtin, as an oppressed Russian citizen, loved Rabelais... idolized the free expression of each chapter. If I recall, he says "Gargantua and Pantagruel is the bravest book ever written." Extra doses of country respect go to the translator, who must have faced quite a challenge in deciding on the exact terminology for Bakhtin, such as his references to the "lower stratum" which occur on almost every page. I would like to have a look at the raw source material myself--educated Russians of the 19th century knew French almost as well as their own language, yet I wonder how Bakhtin chose to read Rabelais. (I have sided ultimately with the Screech translation of Rabelais. It has the most additional cl...

  The Byzantine and the Disenfangled I bought this edition, even though I was originally hunting anything translated by Mirra Ginsburg. Those who have read her translation of Master and Margarita know she is of inestimable talent. (I don't read Russian) A few beers later, I bought the Ginsburg translation, too. I read this version, NYRB, first... loved it. The dialogue is funny, surreal, and I am pretty positive it reads with the bizarre ideological fixity the author intended. I liked it so much I read it again with the Ginsburg translation, right away! That one was good in a different way, but I have to say the NYRB is superior if you are only going to read one version. The dialogue, the added "cut" material, the poetic phrasing, the introduction, and the extra deleted scenes at the end--well worth it. However! I will say Ginsburg's version is very rewarding. She offers a literary warmth and consistency, not in the characters themselves, but in the flow of ...

 Wish I had it sooner Sooner in life. I was obsessed with Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Bulgakov as a teen. This would have been another corridor to investigate, but I don't have the same sentimental pull as I do with those authors, like the verve to read an obscure Russian author is not the same after the big dogs: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, et cetera. These stories are imaginative, and full of style to be sure, so I would say go ahead and know Leskov's main works. Yet between Chekhov and Tolstoy, there is some amount of moralizing that always killed my buzz, maybe I detect a little of that here too. I am still continuing to read Leskov in different translations and phases of his work--NYRB has a recent offering that includes Robert Chandler, whose efforts with Platonov are of the utmost echelon. The Enchanted Wanderer was decent, Lady MacBeth didn't hit me too strong, but Russian prose from this period is always welcome on a dark night--it reads like a friend. Why not hav...

  Edition Decree: Solid Honors Done to Middling Work of Authors (review copy from publisher) Censored, obstructed Soviet tomes can be hard to come by--you have an author you love, and you know there are books left to read... but they haven't been translated, or translated in full. The sorrow!... So it was great news to hear of this Strugatsky book released in new, uncut form. This edition is more extensive than other editions by page number, although it was hard for me to discern what all didn't make it through the censors. The afterword denotes certain changes. The story itself is not my favorite Strugatsky-- I think "Dead Mountaineer's Inn" is their tightest, most atmospheric, profound, and entertaining read. Even "Roadside Picnic" did not become a book I would reread almost annually like Dead Mountaineer... and perhaps that will be the case with "The Inhabited Island". It is an adventure story, told with great Strugatsky effect: A f...

  A classic in disreputable motley The first thing I thought was, "This paperback is HUGE." It's the size of a Bible. My War and Peace isn't nearly this big. Then... that cover! I don't usually care about the cover, but I don't want to be seen reading this book--it looks like it was designed as a 25c birthday card originally, with a naked boy on a horse and a clipart star in the middle. Then, the pages! You can see the opposite-facing text through each page. Printer paper? Man. As eastern Europeans say, "it's a pity" because the text is a masterpiece, and I chose this edition based on a lot of research about the translation, and which one has the whole text. I'm a little surprised... a work like this, and no one is stepping up to make an authoritative edition?... Get Pevear and Volkhonsky to translate this one!

  Influences In the Introduction to my version of The Iliad, Tolstoy is said to have claimed it as the highest achievement of storytelling. The analogies that run rampant through The Iliad are used in Tolstoy's style too... “Like a gambler who begins to win at cards, and instead of attributing this to the luck of his hands, instead believes he has discovered a winning method...” and so on. War and Peace is full of the Iliad . And For Whom the Bell Tolls is full of War and Peace . And sprigs of Vonnegut's style grow there too. Not only is Tolstoy a fan of “And so on,” he also sums up his book at the end with two pages of pure Vonnegut style: The tone is deadpan, every reason for the Napoleonic wars is a fallacy, and at the end there is a shrug about the inexplicable, arbitrary path of everything that has happened. Pierre is even a good reflection of Billy Pilgrim as he walks through battle scenes in his white suit, staring and seeming lost in thought, even developi...