Ivan Illych and history
[NOTE: Here’s a repeat of one of my earliest posts, written in my very first year of blogging: May, 2005. Back then I didn’t have all that many readers, so I thought I’d bring it out for another go-round.]
I know it’s not a real cheerer-upper, but I recently read Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Illych. Actually, you could say that I re-read it, since my first encounter with the novella was in a Russian literature course I took as a senior in college.
You may remember from Part 4A of “A mind is a difficult thing to change” that this was the year my boyfriend was fighting in Vietnam. Consequently, it was very hard for me to concentrate on anything. But that Russian lit course, and a history course I also took that year entitled ‘Russian Intellectual History,” grabbed me and caught my attention with tremendous force.
Both courses focused on works from the 19th century, which at the time I considered to be more or less ancient history. That’s why I was so amazed at the immediacy and relevance of both courses. Clearly, the Russians didn’t mess around when they wrote; they went for the jugular, the Big Issues, and they didn’t let go. The meaning of life, good vs. evil, that sort of thing. Perfect for a college student, and especially perfect for me at the time because I had no patience whatsoever with anything that didn’t deal with those Big Issues, since I was dealing with quite a few of them myself.
The history course was sobering. It turns out that those old Russians (Bakunin, Herzen, the Slavophiles are the names that now come to mind, although the details have become very fuzzy) had been wrestling mightily with questions such as what sort of society would be best for humankind, and how best to create it. Hmmm. In the 60s, that’s what we were doing, too.
So it seemed that we college students of the 60s were not nearly as unique as we thought we were, after all. Even I could see that, from reading these Russians. Their voices sounded suspiciously like those of the young firebrands who spoke at the local SDS meetings. Since I already knew the endpoint of the path those long-ago Russians had taken, often with great idealism and hope, this made me a lot more skeptical of the modern variety. This was actually the sort of thing that kept me a liberal rather than a leftist in those days.
But back to Ivan Ilych, which I also read that same year. Unlike the others, it’s not about politics, although Tolstoi can’t resist putting in a noble peasant (the only idealized character in the book), and mocking the bourgeousie. The story achieves greatness as a feat of psychological imagination, a relentless study of an “unexamined life.”
Tolstoi himself was an incredibly complex and contradictory man, a titanic figure, and one of the first literary superstars. He could be supremely idealistic and maddeningly cruel all at the same time (read about his treatment of his long-suffering wife, if you want to get an idea of the latter). But boy, could that guy write! Much of his writing in Ivan Illych has an immediacy and an almost brutal honesty, as well as a dry humor, that seems startlingly original and quite modern.
Here’s one of my favorite passages from the work; I recall it from college, and I noted it with a flash of appreciative recognition on my recent re-reading. Just as we students of the 60s had some trouble accepting that we resembled countless others who had come this way before us; so, also, does Ivan Illych have great difficulty giving up his belief in his own exceptionalism:
In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”
Such was his feeling.
For as much I love War and Peace, read it twice and any chance of movies I can get, never read anything else by Tolstoy. Guess should look for his books.
Tolstoy has a gift for re-creating the texture and feelings of everyday life with great vividness. The Death of Ivan Illych is a profound exploration of both life and death. I was fortunate to be able to teach it as part of a World Literature class, more than once. (I designed the course, so I had the chance to include the works that I thought most important!)
Anna Karenina is another favorite of mine. I should probably reread it soon!
What a great post, Neo!
I have had zero success with enjoying Russian literature. I’m hoping I just had poor translations. In the case of War and Peace, after three hundred pages I found myself still consulting the list of character names to remember who was who (everybody seemed to have at least three names they could be referred to as) and upon realizing that there were only two of them I actually gave a damn about gave up. Very rare in those days for me to not at least muddle through a book I’d paid for.
Yes the narodniki of the 1860s and the hippies and leftists of the 1960s do overlap in philosophy
Clearly, the Russians didn’t mess around when they wrote; they went for the jugular, the Big Issues, and they didn’t let go. The meaning of life, good vs. evil, that sort of thing.
Like the suicide passages in Dostoyevsky’s Demons or The Possessed. Probably not the smartest thing for a teenage kid like myself to have been reading. Similar to doing crack or meth at that age, and about as addicting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dostoevsky_novel)#Suicide
Tolstoys uncle? was interior minister in dark winter of 19th century czarism like ignatiev and other notorious figures
I’ve always wondered what gets lost in translation. Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Kafka – I find all of their writing to be exceptionally good. But I assume it can’t be as good as in the original language. Can a non-English speaker really appreciate Joyce or Fitzgerald the way we can? I don’t know.
@Dwaz I do think that’s largely down to War and Peace. It’s not merely that it is dense and inaccessible, but also that I find it is somewhat needlessly convoluted and extremely ideologically driven. And once I figured out Tolstoy’s game and agenda (which as a Napoleonic Wars buff I disagreed with to a large degree) it just waned in favor for me. I find a lot of his other writing to be far better.
Death of Ivan Illych is one I’d recommend people check.
Mike Plaiss asks, “Can a non-English speaker really appreciate Joyce or Fitzgerald the way we can? I don’t know.”
It depends partly on the non-English speaker’s life history and general linguistic ability. Joseph Conrad’s first language was Polish; he learned Latin and German in secondary school; and by the time he was in his twenties, he was fluent in both French and English– he served in the French merchant marine for four years and later in the British merchant marine from 1878 until 1894. Conrad’s best-known novels, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, were written in English without the need for any help from a translator. He moved to England and was friends with a wide range of British writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells to Henry James and Bertrand Russell. Conrad was exceptionally sensitive to the connotations that words (in any language) carry, and once remarked that “No English word has clean edges.”
The only other English-language writers I can think of who grew up outside the Anglosphere are V.S. Naipaul, who was born into an Indian family living on Trinidad; and Salman Rushdie, born into a Kashmiri Muslim family living in Mumbai. Both men, however, were educated in British schools in their homelands before going to the UK for their university educations.
The other factor involved in a non-English speaker’s appreciation of literature written in English is the closeness of the speaker’s first language to English combined with cultural considerations. One example will have to serve: French translations of Shakespeare range from attempts to cast the plays into French alexandrine verse to revisions that cut entire characters or scenes to fit the rules of classical French drama. Voltaire notably criticized Shakespeare as the writer of “monstrous farces” designed to entertain “a barbaric people.” OTOH, the standard German translation of Shakespeare, the nineteenth-century version by Ludwig Tieck and August Wilhelm von Schlegel is sometimes considered the best translation of the Bard into any foreign language– which I think is at least partly due to the fact that English and German are both classified as West Germanic languages, and French is a Romance language.
I have 2 native languages – Russian and Azeri (Caucasian variety of Turkish) and very little English. I really love “Tender is the Night” by Fitzgerald, “An American Tragedy” by Dreiser, “East of Eden” by Steinbeck, which were read in Russian translation. And I associate Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with Great Russian chauvinism and imperialism, and such is the perception of a non-Russian person who lived up to 30 years in the USSR. IMHO 🙂
@ Mike Plaiss > ” Can a non-English speaker really appreciate Joyce or Fitzgerald the way we can?”
A lot of English speakers don’t particularly care for either.
Of course, “appreciation” in the lit-crit sense doesn’t necessarily entail “liking.”
That word and “criticism” used to be neutral descriptors of analysis, and not of literature only, but the former has co-opted all the positive connotations and the latter all the negative ones.
@ PA Cat > “The other factor involved in a non-English speaker’s appreciation of literature written in English is the closeness of the speaker’s first language to English combined with cultural considerations.”
Excellent points, thank you.
A sidebar from the linguist “Rob Words” whose channel has, I think, been cited before in some of Neo’s threads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMA3M6b9iEY
ANGLISH: English without the ‘foreign’ bits
He does an appreciation of Shakespeare’s use of foreign loan-words & Churchill’s preferences for the Anglo-Saxon, and a “translation” of the preamble to the US Constitution.
Dwaz: try “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov. It’s a 20th century satirical novel set in 1930s Moscow and Jerusalem during the time of Jesus and Pontius Pilate. Written in the 1920s-1930s, not published until the 1960s. Accessible and enjoyable. If you’re up for something more heavy duty, try Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle”. It’s set in a research-and-development lab in a Soviet prison camp outside Moscow in the late 1940s. Lots of characters, but relatively easy to follow. Based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in the Gulag.
Pa+Cat: “The only other English-language writers I can think of who grew up outside the Anglosphere are V.S. Naipaul, who was born into an Indian family living on Trinidad; and Salman Rushdie, born into a Kashmiri Muslim family living in Mumbai.”
There’s also Vladimir Nabokov, who was born in St. Petersburg, wrote a series of brilliant Russian-language novels while living as an emigre in Germany and France, then switched to English after escaping to the States in 1940 with his family. The Nabokovs got out of France just ahead of the Wehrmacht (Nabokov’s wife was Jewish and his father had been assassinated in 1922 by a Russian emigre fascist who later got a post in the Nazi bureaucracy).
I didnt get thaf vibe from conrad when i read darkness in high school (my first bout with deconstruction) i read nostromo years later after history of costaguana which was a picaresque take
Which read better in translation
Perfect example. Among people whose first language is English, you just don’t see the word “picaresque” very often, and yet here is Miguel just tossing it around. I think I have a good idea of what it means. In fact, I’d be a little more inclined to read a novel described as picaresque. But I suspect there are subtle connotations to that word that a native Spanish speaker understands that I do not.
Linguistics is a fascinating subject even though I am thoroughly monolingual.
Great video AesopFan. Thanks for posting.
AesopFan–
Thanks for the “Anglish” video. In regard to the difficulties the French have had with translating Shakespeare, I should have mentioned the one play they find particularly difficult, for historical as well as linguistic reasons– Henry V. I can see why a cultivated Frenchman like Voltaire would find Henry’s speech at the siege of Harfleur in Act III particularly barbarous and distasteful:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead. . . .
On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
Parts of the speech almost sound like Anglish, don’t they? And then Shakespeare’s play leads up to the one-sided slaughter of the French nobility at Agincourt. (Modern casualty estimates: 600 English dead to 6,000 French dead, plus 2,200 Frenchmen taken prisoner).
Nabokov is maybe the most famous English as a second or nth language writer of English works.
Outside the realm of great literature there is Billy Wilder who spent his youth in Vienna and Berlin and did not speak any English when he moved to Hollywood. His early Hollywood career was as a screenwriter, and only later did he direct.
A film like Ball of Fire, which he co-wrote with Charles Brackett, features a lead character who is an academic researching and writing a chapter on English slang and idioms.
kind of like tom jones, the narrator is a colombian whose family is like zelig over 19th century history, in the region, his conceit is that conrad stole nostromo from him, anne mclean the translator does a better job then the author
and yet wilder is the quintessential american director, you get some hints in sunset boulevard with stroheim as normas chauffeur
TommyJay: and Emeric Pressburger, who–with Michael Powell–wrote some of the most enchanting movies in the history of British cinema:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeric_Pressburger
I do know a fellow who found his very uncommon Russian family name mentioned in War and Peace, he had it underlined in the (Russian) edition. That gave him something to think about.
I followed along in the penguin edition in english, as best I could,
anton marras, who has written several books on chechnya and russia, name checks another tale, hadji murad, in one of his tales,
Thanks for that Hubert. I don’t know the name. But I’ve seen The Red Shoes, and have heard of Black Narcissus.
I’m watching Ball of Fire tonight. Not the first time I’ve seen it, but it is a rather hysterical mish mash of slang and Stanwyck is quite dynamic as always.
The Death of Ivan Illych describes the best and the worst end-of-life care available at Ivan’s time. For an excellent discussion of that subject today, I suggest Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande.
So I went to the Emeric Pressburger link to see what movies he’d done, and was surprised to see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
That is a really good movie few have seen. I happened across it on AMC and stuck around because of the silly title and I wanted to get a look at a very young Deborah Kerr. I assumed it would be really bad – maybe because of the title and the fact that I’d never heard of it. But it was great!
TommyJay: for the best of Powell & Pressburger (their production company was called “The Archers”), check out:
“The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (1943–one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite movies)
“A Canterbury Tale” (1944)
“I Know Where I’m Going!” (1945)
“A Matter of Life and Death” (1946)
They’re quirky, with a strange dream-logic quality to the narrative. Not everybody’s cup of tea. I showed “Blimp” to my Friday-night movie group. It went over like a lead balloon.
Mike Plaiss: yup! The young Deborah Kerr angle doesn’t hurt either.
Hubert:
The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp – on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkQGZdgJcRo
It looks like a good thing to save for my next Red Cross platelet donation. Very good writing in the first 20 minutes or so, visually interesting, introductory dance sequence with motorcycles ….
If you read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, you will see that what we went through in the 1960s was very similar to what they went through in the 1860s. History rhyming, if you will.
My old college Russian prof absolutely despised Constance Barnett’s translations, and said she was the reason that people feared and hated Russian lit.
Ivan Illych was one of my favorite novels.
Faith2014:
Yes, Fathers and Sons made a deep impression on me back then as well. I felt it helped explain my leftist uncle.