May 2016: Leo Tolstoy

Better start now ;) to read Leo Tolstoy for May.

I have a book of Tolstoy's short stories that I'd like to get to finally, and I think I'd also like to tackle some of his well-known novels as well, but we'll see how much time I actually have in May! :)

For what it's worth, there are four Leo Tolstoy titles on the list of 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die:

War and Peace
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Kreutzer Sonata

I've never read Tolstoy. I don't want to tackle War and Peace or Anna Karenina because of their length, even though that would be quite an accomplishment to read either. So, I'm going to try The Cossacks. It's relatively short.

Good timing! I just finished War and Peace and I'm currently reading Anna Karenina. I'll be moving on to the short stories after that.

Well, I just read Anna Karenina last fall (Oct 2015). I just watched the TV mini series of War and Peace ... does that count? LOL

I've read Anna Karenina and am not really in a place to start War and Peace (though I should say, would I ever be?). I'm looking to read The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

I just finished War and Peace (it is long but apart from the epilogues, it's a fairly fast read and really interesting). I read the shorter stories before but will join in with Anna Karenina.

>4 March-Hare:, >7 Yells: What did you guys thinks of War and Peace?

>5 BookConcierge: Hah, sure! It's close enough, right? ;)

>4 March-Hare:, >6 sparemethecensor: How was/is Anna Karenina?

>4 March-Hare: P.S., I'm not sure if I've said it before, but I love your username :)

I loved War and Peace. It's long and sprawling but I loved following along with each family. My only complaint is that Tolstoy's opinion of Napoleon and war kept creeping through and it got a little old.

>8 sweetiegherkin:

Heh heh...thanks.

Both are must reads. It's a shame I can't read Russian. Simply amazing. The writing is so simple and direct yet so vivid and powerful. I would also recommend the non fiction writing for anyone who wants to dig a little deeper. The man is in earnest.

I am excited for May! it gives me an excuse to read fiction, which I rarely do. A true admire of Leo Tolstoy, I feel in love with his writings in college while studying Russian for part of my major. I have already read most of Tolstoy, but look forward to diving into the beauty of his words again after all these years. At this point I have not decided what to reread, but I am narrowing it down. :)

Maybe War and Peace?

>12 ccookie: Great choice! I have had the pleasure of reading it twice in my twenties. I was thinking about Resurrection. To some the subject might seem a bit dark, but through Tolstoy's words comes beauty on the pages.

I just got The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories from the library. I specifically looked for a non-Constance Garnett translation and the option my library offered was Pevear & Volokhonsky, which I've heard good things about. Picking a good translator is key to reading Russian literature, in my experience. Sidney Monas is my favorite, though his repertoire is sadly limited.

(I should note that while I took Russian in college, the most complex novel I could read was A Hero of Our Time or Geroy nashevo vremeni as the high literary style in the 19th century onward uses participles I didn't master... A regret of my academic life I hope to one day rectify.)

I will be reading Anna Karenina this month. Can't wait!

Hopefully I will be reading Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger over the weekend. I'm also reading Collected Shorter Fiction: Volume 2.

>14 sparemethecensor: I will not touch a P&V translation with a 10ft pole. Was Constance Garnett a superduper top notch translator? No, not really. Was she awful? Not even close!! She translated so many books and gave the west so much with the many Russian titles she worked on, it really peeves me off the way people discard her now. Yes, with her speed and non-nativeness she did sometimes exclude small bits if she was unsure of their meaning or thought they were unnecessary, but back then translators in general simply took many more liberties, not merely providing a translation but essentially editing it for their audience. It was certainly not particular to Garnett. I would take one of her translations over P&V and their holier-than-thou haughtiness any day, frankly.

OMG, I almost forgot that we are reading Tolstoy this month. Hope I can find my copy of Resurrection so that I can start reading it before May ends.

>17 .Monkey.: OK, wow. I've never read a Pevear & Volokhonsky translation before, so I can't speak to your complaints there. We'll see how this one goes.

I didn't say Constance Garnett is an awful translator, but I simply don't think she is a good enough translator to disregard other options. I agree with you that she served a pivotal role in bringing Russian literature to English-speaking audiences -- she was the first to do it, after all, and deserves accolades for that. I also think some criticism of her has been unfair, such as Nabokov's (since he thought only men should be translators, ugh). But having seen side-by-sides in my Russian language studies, I don't think she did a good enough job that we should be picking her over others today. In addition to omitting portions of novels -- which you and I may disagree about the importance of, and the frequency of -- she doesn't capture what is unique about the voices of different authors in a way that someone like Monas or Payne did. It doesn't "feel" Russian to me as someone who has read fiction in the native Russian.

The popular opinion of her these days is to consider her pretty awful and the worst of editions. I strongly disagree. She isn't the best, but she is not near the worst, either. Nabokov makes me nuts with his various negative views on women. Especially because I know he viewed his wife as an intelligent and ...intellectually worthy? person, who helped with his writing and to whom he dedicated all(? most, at the least) his novels. But in general he seemed to have little positive to say about them. For someone who was such an amazing genius, I particularly hate that kind of shortcoming.

I examine passages, where possible, of the different translations of works I am looking to get, and more than once I have strongly considered hers above modern ones, who take too many liberties themselves, in other ways than she did.
Okay, after some searching I found where it was discussed when I had scrounged up various articles discussing them:

Donald Rayfield in Literary Review says that "Pevear and Volokhonsky themselves do not hesitate to denigrate far superior work by their rivals, past and present, just as Nabokov did. Nabokov’s arrogance had to be accepted as an inalienable part of his genius, whereas Pevear and Volokhonsky’s merely exposes them to severe critical backlash." Pretty much every time I see anything about them, they themselves are raving about how absolutely fabulous they are and how much better they are than everyone else because their pairing & method is so original and it's all just brilliant doncha know. Except they're not brilliant, their language is often completely unnatural and stilted and weird and blah. Gary Saul Morson wrote in Commentary that their translations "take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles." Lmao.
@japaul22 followed
I've been thinking about Russian translations a lot over the past few years. I've read two works translated by P&V - Doctor Zhivago and Life and Fate. I had a hard time with both of them, mainly not enjoying or understanding the flow of the dialogue and finding it absurd to say the least. But who's to say that it wasn't written that way - after all it reflects a fairly absurd time in Russian history when most likely no one was saying what they thought because of the dangers of speaking your mind at the time. I will reread Doctor Zhivago some day and will definitely chose a different translation to see if it works better for me.

Currently, I'm rereading War and Peace. I own the Constance Garnett translation which was done in the early 1900s. I checked out the P&V translation from the library to compare. Back to back, I really prefer the Garnett. I have no doubt that P&V is a more literal translation and possibly more scholarly and accurate, but it just doesn't work in English - at least for me. It is choppy and again the dialogue sounds sort of ridiculous. I think some of this is my personal bias that I've read a ton of early 1900s British literature so Garnett's flow really works for me.
And my reply back
Your comments about the dialogue are entirely accurate to what others say about P&V. And there is nothing more scholarly about it, she speaks Russian natively, he speaks English, so she simply reads and translates the Russian words quite literally into English, and then he makes them into more proper English sentences. Except, as you say, they're really not good or natural English, nor are they appropriate to the Russian anymore because it's simply literal and that's not how languages work. While in theory their approach sounds like a good thing, in reality, at least for the two of them, it does not work as intended.

So, whatever Garnett's flaws, there are plenty of us who take them quite happily over those of P&V. ;)

I've finished reading The Cossacks, which was written in Tolstoy's early years.

It's about Olenin, a young, wealthy Russian man, who has become a cadet in the army and is sent to a remote post in a Cossack village. He's glad to be leaving his past behind. In the village, he gets to know some of the people and likes their simple life. He eventually falls in love with a beautiful Cossack girl who is already engaged to be married to a Cossack warrior. The young man has to resolve his conflicts about whether to marry the girl and whether he can completely abandon his old life and live simply with the Cossacks.

This was a straightforward story told in a simple and clear way. There was quite a bit about the way of life for the Cossacks. It was only mildly interesting to me. Some of the other reviews I read said that the descriptions of the scenery and wildlife was the best part, as not a lot happened in the story. The Olenin character was also somewhat autobiographical.

I couldn't find any information on who translated this and I haven't read Russian literature before so I couldn't compare anyway. But, there were some odd choice of words or phrases here and there. Overall, though, I wasn't bothered by that.

I'm glad I've now read something by Tolstoy and have an idea of what his writing style is like.

If you couldn't find it, it was probably Garnett. She's out of copyright now so she's got good odds of being found on older & cheaper editions. ;)

Interesting discussions all re: the translator's role. I confess I haven't read a ton of books written in a language other than English originally, so it's not something I think much about. Obviously what we get is going to be different than the original in some respects.

>21 gaylebutz: Sounds like a good novel for looking at a specific culture, though not necessarily the most thrilling read.

This month has been a little hectic already, so I haven't even thought about picking up any Tolstoy yet. I'm still hoping to tackle some of his short stories as I have a collection of those on hand, but we'll see how the rest of the month goes...

I just finished book 1 of Anna Karenina and I am really enjoying it. I have the week off so I just might finish by the end of the month.

>24 Yells: good luck!

I, unfortunately, didn't make it to any Tolstoy this month at all. ah, well, the best laid plans...

I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich in a collection that also included the short stories "The Diary of a Madman" and "The Prisoner of the Caucasus."

I did not care for the last; it seemed pointless, as though Tolstoy were retelling an event from his life without any depth or message (as legend has it, this kidnap for ransom did happen to him while he was in the military; apocryphal or not, I don't know). That isn't a crime, but it isn't what I expect in Russian literature. It just didn't have much depth to it.

Both Ivan Ilyich and Diary of a Madman take on that quintessential Russian literary question of the meaning of morality in daily life -- how do we spend our time, what do we owe, how do our sins revisit us later in life? They were both highly engaging novellas, though I have to say that I prefer Dostoyevsky and Turgenev over Tolstoy any day. Tolstoy's short fiction does not provide the same level of detail and rich sense of time and place that others do -- which I realize is strange to say given his master work is War and Peace, one of the most richly detailed novels in the canon! But especially in Ivan Ilyich, I yearned for more.

>26 sparemethecensor: Hmm, interesting comments. I like the idea of musings on how we spend our time and what we owe ... to the universe? to ourselves? to others?

>27 sweetiegherkin: Russian writers would say God, I imagine, but the universe fits too.

More grist for the translation debate mill.

I just completed my 2nd favorite Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, the first being War and Peace. I loved it all over again. Mine is the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated edition which I think ever so lovely.
What I love so much about Tolstoy's writings is how the backdrop for each work (ie the war, the city, whatever it happens to be) becomes one of the central characters of the work and I always love so much when that occurs. Most authors cannot do it, so it is quite special when the reader comes across it.
My thoughts & comments:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; (4 1/2*)

Tolstoy is a wonderful author.
The story begins with duplicity and ends with a man finding himself, the reason for his life and his life's work.
The tragedy of Anna Karinina was, for me, almost a backdrop for the rest of the book. I liked how the author built her character and toward the end showed how a person, through their search for the ultimate happiness of self, can literally become so filled with anxiety, angst, and depression that they lose their grip on reality and destroy themselves.
The writing is such that I came to know the characters in this novel and I thought that they and their behavior was understandable within the confines of their characterizations. I must admit that the politics of it totally confused me but yet did not disturb the storyline for me. I liked how the author went back and forth with the different character's stories and I found it easy to follow.
Although the title of the book is Anna Karinina, for myself the main character of the book and the one I cared the most about was Levin. To me, it was his story with all of these subplots written behind it. He is the one I related to, cared the most about, and wanted to know about. He is the one I found to be the most mulitfaceted character and there were so many layers to him. I also enjoyed Kitty's character. Anna, on the other hand, was very shallow and altogether a rather boring, though beautiful character. Her demise was almost anticlimactic, but with it Vronsky finally became a man.
I loved the last part of the book where Levin really challenged himself and I thought the ending quite beautiful.
This was my third or fourth reading of the book within 50 + years and I am sure I won't wait so long for the next reading. It read very differently this time around. I highly recommend this classic. I found it to be a beautifully and calmly written novel. Tolstoy was indeed masterful with the pen.

I find all of your comments regarding this author very interesting and am enjoying this group very much.

(attempting to play catch up before the new year)

oopsie,,,,,,,,,,,,, I got nothing here.............

>30 rainpebble: Great review! Thanks for sharing :)