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Sep. 28th, 2010 12:45 amI read Fathers and Sons in Edmonds' translation the first time but it must be in Ohio - all I could find was someone's revision of Garnett's, which seemed fine.
He's a strange half-and-half, at least here - he keeps falling into conventional formulas of storytelling, characterizing, dialogue etc. The kind Chekhov would fight to avoid, Tolstoy instinctually would and Dostoevsky'd be too crazy not to. And he knows better, he's no moron, but strangely you don't get the sense with him that he uses conventions as ways of working on the audience but because he doesn't know how else to proceed.
But then within that there's so many glorious flashes and half-conceptions. His nature descriptions, most famously, but also little, just-right psychological insights, some great interactions, wonderfully present people. He's a genius with a problem, and I'm not entirely sure what it is - lack of confidence? Obsession with personal demons? His take on love doesn't really fit the material here, though it doesn't wash it away or anything. It's like a Hardy novel, where you know everyone will be destroyed implausibly but in the meantime all kinds of things are happening that are quite true and quite interesting. In Turgenev everyone will fail at love and be melancholy, and that has very little to do with what you'll like about them. But even there Hardy takes the palm, because he thinks big and fills everything in. Turgenev's hesitant; there's a strain of that in his disciple Chekhov (who presumably modeled his whole life on Bazarov when young) but it's much less crippling. I wonder if it's audience uncertainty? Who is reading me, what does it amount to, that kind of thing. Which I suspect afflicted Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol too and stunted their ambitions, made so many of their works wayward curiosities or respectable miniatures peppered with startling breakout moments.
Tolstoy's astonishing self-assurance and Dostoevsky's desperate recklessness freed them from this particularly Russian literary bashfulness, I guess? Later Chekhov's mostly free too, either because of Tolstoy's example or his own increasing, purifying outrage. (Actually, this bashfulness is present in pre-Emerson American literature, even in Hawthorne's novels, and almost everything Medieval, in my opinion; a sickness of earliness we may have trouble understanding now, saturated as we are with latecomers' ailments.)
So I loved things in the book but can't say I love the book itself much any longer. The half-and-halfness probably helped me love it more back then, coming out of conventional expectations myself at the time (movie ones and genre fiction ones, mostly). And the literature bits, so to speak, would have been highlighted by the mere storytelling in a way rendering them hard to miss. Flashes of the new thing I'd been rather blind to in whatever else I'd read. And I'd read literature by then, as much as most people had by 20 back at that time - even Dickens, even Shakespeare. But Turgenev was the man. I loved books already, but horizontally. Somehow it was left for him to show there are stars up there. Ack, trite. Rather, left for him to show that mere words can put meat on the me-bone. Gross but exacter.
He's a strange half-and-half, at least here - he keeps falling into conventional formulas of storytelling, characterizing, dialogue etc. The kind Chekhov would fight to avoid, Tolstoy instinctually would and Dostoevsky'd be too crazy not to. And he knows better, he's no moron, but strangely you don't get the sense with him that he uses conventions as ways of working on the audience but because he doesn't know how else to proceed.
But then within that there's so many glorious flashes and half-conceptions. His nature descriptions, most famously, but also little, just-right psychological insights, some great interactions, wonderfully present people. He's a genius with a problem, and I'm not entirely sure what it is - lack of confidence? Obsession with personal demons? His take on love doesn't really fit the material here, though it doesn't wash it away or anything. It's like a Hardy novel, where you know everyone will be destroyed implausibly but in the meantime all kinds of things are happening that are quite true and quite interesting. In Turgenev everyone will fail at love and be melancholy, and that has very little to do with what you'll like about them. But even there Hardy takes the palm, because he thinks big and fills everything in. Turgenev's hesitant; there's a strain of that in his disciple Chekhov (who presumably modeled his whole life on Bazarov when young) but it's much less crippling. I wonder if it's audience uncertainty? Who is reading me, what does it amount to, that kind of thing. Which I suspect afflicted Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol too and stunted their ambitions, made so many of their works wayward curiosities or respectable miniatures peppered with startling breakout moments.
Tolstoy's astonishing self-assurance and Dostoevsky's desperate recklessness freed them from this particularly Russian literary bashfulness, I guess? Later Chekhov's mostly free too, either because of Tolstoy's example or his own increasing, purifying outrage. (Actually, this bashfulness is present in pre-Emerson American literature, even in Hawthorne's novels, and almost everything Medieval, in my opinion; a sickness of earliness we may have trouble understanding now, saturated as we are with latecomers' ailments.)
So I loved things in the book but can't say I love the book itself much any longer. The half-and-halfness probably helped me love it more back then, coming out of conventional expectations myself at the time (movie ones and genre fiction ones, mostly). And the literature bits, so to speak, would have been highlighted by the mere storytelling in a way rendering them hard to miss. Flashes of the new thing I'd been rather blind to in whatever else I'd read. And I'd read literature by then, as much as most people had by 20 back at that time - even Dickens, even Shakespeare. But Turgenev was the man. I loved books already, but horizontally. Somehow it was left for him to show there are stars up there. Ack, trite. Rather, left for him to show that mere words can put meat on the me-bone. Gross but exacter.
