Category Archives: Russian Literature

Reflections on Reviewing, Reading and Turgenev

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Around fourteen years ago, I began writing in this space about what I’ve come to think of as my experience of reading. The books written about here reflect less of a personal canon than those that offered sufficient satisfaction that I read the book from cover to cover. I make this statement without being certain of who  I am, the “I” that is writing, or what I mean by satisfaction. Both are shortcuts offered to me by my language,

Writing reviews interests me because however much I attempt to avoid the personal, every review becomes, however impersonal, a reflection on what matters to the reviewer. Writing what I am calling a review, while not seeing myself as a reviewer, often helps me discover something of what matters to me. I don’t particularly like to read literary criticism, but some critics I do read with interest, for instance: Steve Mitchelmore, Merve Emre, Ryan Ruby and Dustin Illingworth. I read their reviews less for their subject matter, as intriguing as it always is,  and more for what they lay bare about themselves, however masked, in their concerns for the internal worlds of fiction. What their writing has in common with the books in which I find what I am calling satisfaction is voice. To offer a further example, one of my favourite blogs about books, an eudaemonist – the single-line reviews add up, however wrong my impression, to a particular barometer reading of the writer’s internal weather that compels me to keep reading.

Believe it or not, when I decided to use a window opened up by early morning insomnia, it was to offer a few thoughts on Ivan Turgenev’s Father and Sons and why for a while at least I intend to return to my practice of reading books with ten years or more of age, For every Septology, there are at least fifty contemporary novels I  have not read cover to cover and rather abandoned to the pile to go to the local bookshop. I feel like reading against the grain and those books that have weathered time interest me.

The satisfaction of Fathers and Sons (I read Richard Freeborn’s Oxford translation, aware that all later translators revert to Fathers and Children), is how Turgenev uses his characters to reflect on the supposed wisdom that comes with age. Maturity is more frequently a learned caution not to repeat past mistakes that have opened one up to revelation and embarrassment. The freshness of youth expressed in the younger members of Turgenev’s cast of characters comes from their willingness to expose their vulnerabilities. Staying young, if such a state is desired, is less a question of vitamins than a continual opening up to opportunities to be vulnerable.

Sunday Notes

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In 100 Days, Gabriel Josipovici, approaching his eightieth year, writes of trying to resist his innate sense of immortality, to be able to approach the inevitability of death with equanimity. It is, I suppose, the only way to contemplate the fact of death, our conspiracy to keep it unconscious a first and necessary line of defence.

Today, prompted by reading Karl One Knausgaard’s The Morning Star, I consulted the tables of life expectancy in England. Unless I get seriously ill or die in an accident I will experience roughly twenty-five more birthdays. Time enough maybe for another couple of thousand books though I do sometimes wonder what I miss when huddled in a fortress of literature. The Morning Star is infuriating and compelling in equal part. It ends with an extraordinary essay that gave me a sense that I should read the whole book again after carefully rereading the essay. I looked up some reviews and learnt that it may have been added as an afterthought and that The Morning Star is the first of a series.

In his novel, Knausgaard refers to a three-volume treatise on death, The Realm of the Dead: A World History, by Olav O. Aukrust. If it exists, it is not translated into English. It is a sufficiently compelling area of study for me to turn to online sources to order Philippe Aries’ The Hour of Our Death, recommended by Daniel, Thomas Laquer’s well-reviewed The Work of the Dead, and successfully look for my unread copy of Robert Pogue Harrison’s Dominion of the Dead (thanks, Steve).

This week I bought Bruce Kirmmse’s new translation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and his earlier translation of The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, both also prompted by The Morning Star. In London I also picked up a copy of Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Carolyn Forché’s In the Lateness of the World (primarily for the poem Museum of Stones, but there are several others of interest), Peter Handke’s newly translated essay collection: Quiet Places, and a second-hand copy of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

Wakeful glimpse of the wonder

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‘Celebration . . . is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder – the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.’

Martin Heidegger, quoted as the epigraph to the first chapter of Richard Polt’s Heidegger: an introduction.

I’m preparing for another attempt to read Being and Time, encouraged by Danyl McLauchlan’s Tranquility and Ruin. I read the latter out of curiosity, thinking I was reading against the grain, but instead found his writing on metaphysics, meditation, Heidegger and effective altruism thought provoking. It’s another rabbit hole, but not so different from the Andrei Bely-Nietzsche train of thought I was chasing before reading McLauchlan’s book.

Uniting Life With Mystery

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They are not frequent visitors, the uncommon threshold moments when you read something that reverberates deeply, leading you to a cognisance of something you’ve always known but never found a way to express. Often, I’ve looked at the bookshelves that house my pantheon of tutelary thinkers and wondered what draws them together as an external reflection of what I can only call my soul. They are powerful voices who are destined to unite life with mystery.

The passage below is from Andre Bely’s Olenina-d’ Alheim, an essay in the collection Between Crisis and Catastrophe. I didn’t start to read these essays expecting understanding. I’ve not yet read Bely’s famous novel. I picked up the book of essays to read something new, an attempt to smash a reading block.

To unite life with mystery: I will not put it into quotation marks or italics here as it is now mine, a response to converging lines of writing, music, painting and dance. But I will quote a passage, written ostensibly about a famous concert singer at the beginning of the 20th century:

‘The epoch of geniuses and great thinkers has passed. Here and there they are being replaced by personalities in whom we see a prophetic pathos and who are destined to unite life with mystery.

Olenina-d’ Alheim unfurls before us the depths of the spirit. On how she unfurls these depths and what she reveals before us lies the shadow of prophecy. That is why we feel strongly that she herself is a link uniting us with mystery.

Our consciousness is a fine boundary between the subconscious and the superconscious. Different relations between given psychic spheres cause variations in this boundary. By introducing new combinations of emotions into our soul through symbols that are being unfolded, we provide new material for our nerves. And since the variable atmosphere of nerve effects can lead to new regroupings of the material of our conscious activity, this atmosphere is capable of affecting variations of the boundary between the superconscious and the subconscious . . . By changing our psychic structure we will be able to change not only the particular elements of consciousness but also the general forms of the latter.

Defined externally, religion is a system of successively unfolded symbols. This inner connectedness of symbols differentiates religious revelation from artistic creation. From the external side there is no boundary between art and religion. There is only a difference in the quality and quantity of internally connected images. The purpose of art is to express ideas; the deepening and purification of every idea invariably extend this idea to a universal significance. Thus, all ideaness in art has a religious nuance.

The symbol that is deepened and expended analogously to an idea is therefore connected with the universal symbol. This is the final and invariable background of all symbols. The relation of the Logos to the world Soul as the mystical principle of humanity is such a symbol. That is why the foundations of symbolism are always religious.’

Talismanic Identifications and Ghostly Demarcations

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There was a time when I drifted between reading books of poetry and fiction without a thought for the writer; choosing what to read next— there was no enduringly impatient stack—was a function of where the endlessly reflective waves induced by the last book led me, or more prosaically, whatever caught my attention when browsing in my nearest bookshop.

Around my early twenties, a different whole seemed to fall into shape and I begun to pay attention to certain writers and, setting a pattern that has followed throughout my reading life, to read them to completion, seeing the inevitable minor works as a pathway to answering the thousand questions that arose around the major books.

Once I drew up a list of best books, what I termed a personal canon, but this would prove a shot-silk, a slippery list that refused stability. What, after all, is best? The Canon? Or those books that once read refused to be forgotten, crystal-carbon in memory? What of those evanescent books thought of as favourites, where little lingers beyond perhaps an atmosphere, or a single character?

Instead, in what I optimistically term my maturity, I choose writers over specific books, and my choices embody what Anthony Rudolf in Silent Conversations terms: “magical thinking, talismanic identifications and ghostly demarcations”. There is a distinction between those I read that will probably always be read whilst there are literate readers to be found, say Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce and Charles Baudelaire.

There are those I read closely because I am, for reasons not always fully understand, intrigued by the way they think or observe the world, for example Peter Handke, Gerald Murnane, Dorothy Richardson, George Oppen, Clarice Lispector, Christa Wolf, Mircea Cărtărescu and Enrique Vila-Matas. Time and the quick sands of taste will decide whether each find a home in posterity.

There is a far stranger category of writers I have only sampled, yet fascinate me deeply: Maurice Blanchot, Ricardo Piglia, Marguerite Duras, Hans Blumenberg, Laura Riding, Arno Schmidt are all examples, but I could name a dozen others. These interest me as much for the lived life as the work, though I always plan to explore the latter more deeply.

Reading books becomes a way to find the writer, or at least to see a glimpse of that writer’s mind. In doing so, I find that I am a part of all that I have read, that reading is a process to becoming. The more I contemplate the act of reading and of what I read, the stranger it seems. I understand less than I did when I began. Where once writing seemed certain and assured, as I moved toward the depthless prose of the writers that I came to consider part of my pantheon, the more I felt strangely included in that writer’s thought process.