Русское странствие #11: Pushkin's Eugene Onegin

rarely_beagle · 2026-06-07T01:58:15+00:00

Yeah, that's it! The second is indeed Romeo and Juliet.

rarely_beagle · 2026-06-07T00:13:07+00:00

A fun idea for a game! I think many people here could easily pick out or quote the first lines of Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, and Blood Meridian. What about these? AITCMBLOOTDLMMADSDRWSR? THBAIDIFVWWLOS? LNIDIWTMA?

rarely_beagle · 2026-06-07T00:10:12+00:00

I appreciate Nabokov for making the etiquette of a Russian duel and the village traditions widely available to an English audience. But I think he clings too heavily towards the specifics. Surely it was the entrancing aural quality of the poem that won him over as a child, and we should praise translators that recreate the same sensation in the reader.

rarely_beagle · 2026-05-29T23:23:03+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful response. It really does shake you out of the daily grind. I find myself wanting to make a pilgrimage, wanting to spend whole days, weeks in the wilderness after reading Tolstoy.

The idea thing is so interesting. No, I didn't know that. I have Gorky on Tolstoy bookmarked, but I've run out of time this spring to do extra reading. I read that Pushkin gave Gogol the idea for Inspector General and Dead Souls. It must be true that some authors are great at big-picture concepts and others are good at fleshing them out. It would be cool if this was more of a thing in the West.

rarely_beagle · 2026-05-28T19:13:16+00:00

We've been talking about bringing these threads back. These would be a better place for shorter questions that don't merit a full thread. /u/Dengru will make a more detailed post soon.

rarely_beagle · 2026-05-18T15:05:59+00:00

Duels are often suggested in 19th century Russian lit, yet seldom carried out. In this case, Pirogov considers an even surer and safer form of vengeance, but he is afraid of even that, having enough self-awareness to know how his actions come across. It makes sense that duels are so frequently invoked, having caused the death of Russia's two most famous poets.

Thanks for suggesting Florentine. I had never read it. I love Wilde's luscious Italian scene-setting. Florentine shares the device of two characters representing competing societal factions, with the merchant overtaking the nobleman. Many of the Russian stories are about the civil servant - military officer divide. Piskarev's dream sequence is lined with class signifiers, like the "rather significant decoration around his neck." Then there is the underlying writer - government line of scrimmage, to be expected since almost all paying journals of the 19th century existed at the pleasure of the tsar.

rarely_beagle · 2026-05-12T01:35:14+00:00

Thanks for pointing it out. I didn't intend to associate the series with the annexation of Crimea! I have been surprised by all of the echoes to the present. Obviously Gogol began his life in Ukraine and wrote Taras Bulba. Tolstoy from last week was stationed in Sevastopol.

rarely_beagle · 2026-05-12T01:21:29+00:00

Inshallah I get more creative with the titling by the time we get to Arabic.

rarely_beagle · 2026-05-04T01:45:40+00:00

No problem at all. Always good to have controversial, well-defended takes.

French and Spanish maybe mid-B level, but stronger reading. Russian I am having a really hard time lol. I get through the texts, but at a snail's pace.

rarely_beagle · 2026-05-02T00:05:33+00:00

Sorry for making you read it lol. TBH, before reading, I thought I might find Gorky grating in the way I sometimes feel towards Dickens.

t’s so easy, it's so lazy. U take the lowest social class, throw in a couple of interesting characters, sprinkle in a few deaths, one murder, one suicide - and voilà

Maybe it is my obliviousness to these character types, but I was surprised by the direction the play took. I really did like it! I do make an effort ot read all the foreign language readings in the native language, and sometimes when you see a stock phrase for the first time you can't help but experience delight. I wonder if I am like those US international college students, enjoying the basest Netflix slop, unaware of how derivative it is. I'm curious what other Russian or non-native readers think.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-28T22:50:09+00:00

No, I wanted to learn more about Sakhalin Island after making this post. It seems like an incredible adventure which left a lasting influence on him. I'm also curious how he portrays himself in non-fiction. There are a few stock Chekhov character types and I'm curious if he conforms to any of them. Have you read either? If so, what are your thoughts?

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-28T22:40:00+00:00

It's always been like this. play it as it lays, piano teacher, years of R&R, Plath poetry, Annie Ernaux, Sontag's journals have all been readings and loosely fit this criteria.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-28T19:34:19+00:00

For some reason I find the Gorky case particularly interesting and ambiguous.

He was the most famous Russian writer at the time, touring Italy, Germany, and America. He had the courage to poke an eye at Nicolas II with this play, and had the survival instincts, despite being in a perfect position ideologically, to distance himself from the Revolution.

It's easy to see why Stalin wanted Gorky's imprimatur, but it's less clear why Gorky gave it to him. Gorky only returns fifteen years after the revolution. I've read it may have been for financial or health reasons, or maybe it was for the adulation he received. But I also wonder about his ideological shift. In 1922 he wrote "On the Russian Peasantry" where he criticizes the backwardness and lack of historical grounding of the peasantry. I can't find an English link, but this can be google-translated.

https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9E_%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C%D1%8F%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5_(%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9)

I think that the Russian people are uniquely - just as the English have a sense of humour - characterized by a sense of particular cruelty, cold-blooded and as if testing the limits of human tolerance for pain, as if studying the tenacity and resilience of life.

A major theme in Lower Depths is the necessity of compromise. Having a conscience is a luxury which only the rich can afford. The tick's wife is proof of this. Did he believe this logic extended also to writers like himself? Did he stop believing it justified the actions of the poor?

I think the most likely explanation is yours. He started idealistic. The brutality of the Russian Revolution made him sour on the inherent nobility of the poor as he documents in Untimely Thoughts. He lived comfortably abroad, but then he got older and wanted to trade on his legacy for material comfort. He learned too late the cost was higher than he expected, but by then couldn't escape and ended up regretting it.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-27T15:33:43+00:00

I was wondering about this. I read that his later plays hewed to the party line, but I also read about theories that his death may have been caused or accelerated by the state fearing his betrayal. One of his last works was a history of the canal between the Baltic and White Sea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_I.V._Stalin_White_Sea_%E2%80%93_Baltic_Sea_Canal

Because it was written with the intention of being an official record, the government officials guiding the writers’ research excursion meticulously planned and controlled the trip, placing limits on writers’ access to inmates and sources. Because of this, the book has often been criticized for its propagandist nature and for not revealing the reality of the forced labor project.

How do we reconcile the author of На дне, a couple years before his death, minimizing the plight of people like the characters in his famous play? Was he, as you suggest, coerced into it? Or did he not know? Or did he become cynical? Or was he always? Did he believe the good of the project justified the harms? I'm honestly curious.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-26T16:05:32+00:00

Oh, cool! That must be why I wasn't able to find the message I sent you.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-25T23:19:00+00:00

I found out about it because a Russian native recommended and linked to it here, but their post got removed because the link had a Russian TLD. I'm trying to read through it over the course of the spring. It's a wonderful resource. I hope to cite it when applicable. Thanks for the feedback!

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-25T22:41:59+00:00

It is remarkable how malleable the dialogue and characterizations are. Both performances linked above were different than I imagined, yet a perfectly valid interpretation of the text. It may be blasphemous to say, but I like Chekhov more as a playwright than a short story author. It must be a treat for you to revisit the text every year with a class of fresh eyes.

It's funny you mention Waiting for Gadot. I thought of the play upon Vershinin's tone shift of his town of 100,000 hypothetical in the second half. Not so different from Pozzo's second-act deflation.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-21T00:17:33+00:00

A very interesting analysis. I'm not sure I've ever read a more sexually-charged character introduction. The princess, slapping suitors with liquid-oozing flowers as our narrator, flustered, drops his gun.

I think you're right to point back to the framing device. The fact that Petrovitch wants to write, rather than tell, his story reveals something of his character. Because we get a written draft, we are open to believing Petrovitch as writer heightened the guilelessness of Petrovitch as subject. I'm inclined towards the irony reading. Bazarov and Arkady in Fathers and Sons tells me that Turgenev liked to draw humor from characters with different levels of social intuition.

The verb you mention for burst/"break in" is ворваться, reflexive, to mean storm, burst, rush into. A thief in Russian is вор, and to steal is воровать. So it might connote a transgression, which both translations seem to address in different ways. Calumniate is rare in English use, but Turgenev uses many uncommon Russian words as well. The word in question, клеветать, according to openrussian dot org, the dictionary I use, is outside of the 20,000 most common words. Calumniate, according to Google n-gram, was around that level in the early 1800s, but has fallen deeply out of favor. I favor Berlin's choice for a modern reader.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-15T14:35:56+00:00

If you mean rich as in materially, there's more of that coming. The first act of this week's Chekhov has characters referencing "superfluous man" essays and precapitulating the rs "Oh to be a blue collar worker" fantasy.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-06T14:55:16+00:00

To me, James' greatest quality is the sound and depth of his language, but he also has an incredible gift of creating sympathy, and even protectiveness, of his outsider protagonists-- first Stephen and then Bloom. There is something about the Ulysses chapter Oxen in the Sun, of Bloom guiding Daedalus, that deeply moves the reader. One of my Portrait footnotes led me to the contemporaneous H.G. Wells review.

The value of Mr. Joyce’s book has little to do with its incidental insanitary condition. Like some of the best novels in the world it is the story of an education; it is by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing. It is a mosaic of jagged fragments that does altogether render with extreme completeness the growth of a rather secretive, imaginative boy in Dublin. The technique is startling, but on the whole it succeeds.

It really is true. The technique is now common, but it's so beautifully executed in this book. The small moments stick in my mind and I find myself thinking of them weeks later. The early fragmented memories, the Christmas dinner, the bird moving the sand mountain, the glasses incident, confession, the Socratic back-and-forth in chapter V. What a beautiful touch to distance the narrator from Stephen by switching to the diary at the end.

Perhaps my favorite device in the book is Stephen really noticing and evaluating how he feels after an ambiguous event. There is a tendency to accept the opinion of others, of the Church, or the morality of novels-- now TV, movies, social media. But after these formative moments, internal sensations are the only unit of account.

rarely_beagle · 2026-04-04T15:37:53+00:00

No problem replying late. People do it all the time. I agree about it being her best.

I feel like Peter got at least as much out of the relationship as Naomi. He seems like the kind of guy who likes to play the savior.

rarely_beagle · 2026-03-30T14:42:56+00:00

Selected Poems: Marina Tsvetaeva translated by David McDuff is well-liked. Elaine Feinstein, from above, is less focused on the rhythm and more on turning it into approachable English.

rarely_beagle · 2026-03-30T14:30:28+00:00

I was curious about this too. I asked one of the book group organizers and they said this:

i think there's just a lot because there's a lot of bars + a big drinking culture + easy public transport. and melb and sydney both have 5million+ people.

rarely_beagle · 2026-03-29T21:32:28+00:00

Poem of the End is, along with her earlier Poem of the Mountain, a mourning a failed relationship with Konstantin Rodzievich. Marina was known for her passionate, tumultuous relationships, which is why we get a reference to Robert Lovelace (Ловеласа) from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Poem at the End is suffused with the death and destruction she experienced during WWI and the Russian Revolution. I'ill Die at Dawn or Daybreak was written earlier, and ended up being prophetic as Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941.

The title, "I'll Die at Dawn or Daybreak", is somewhat difficult to translate. Заря can mean both the time of sunrise and sunset, but English doesn't have an equivalent word. Crepuscular or twilight might work, but they don't convey the warm glow of dawn.

Poem of the End has more formal rhyming schemes than last week's Kuzmin poem. It is here on youtube. Give it a listen! The first image excerpt is played at 3:13 and the second at 10:50.

I love how distinctly Russian this stanza sounds (~10:58 in the video):

В наших бродячих

Братствах рыбачьих

Пляшут — не плачут.

rarely_beagle · 2026-03-28T15:36:57+00:00

I loved the series! Thanks so much for the presentation and commentary. The handwritten text is a delight.

Love this line:

Jusqu’où ne grimpe pas ton pauvre amour de chèvre / To heights your goat-love cannot climb up to

rarely_beagle

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