![Laurent Binet’s “HHhH” and Historical Fiction
The American Ambassador’s residence in Prague was built in the late nineteen-twenties by Otto Petschek. The Petscheks were among the wealthiest families in Czechoslovakia, and the mansion was lavish: long curving corridors, ornate bathrooms, a swimming pool in the basement. The Petscheks were also German-speaking Jews, wise enough to foresee the horrors that awaited them: they left Prague in 1938. When the Germans occupied the city in 1939, Nazi officers, with their unerring instinct for such things, seized the huge home, and made baleful use of it until the end of the war.
As with many buildings in Europe, the Petschek villa is scored and crossed, like the hide of a whale, with the history of its accidents. Last year, I spent some time in the house as a guest—the current Ambassador’s family and my family once shared an apartment building in Washington, D.C., and we became friends. In Prague, my friend showed me something I will not forget: he got me to lie on my back and peer at the underside of some piece of ambassadorial furniture. There, on the naked wood, was a faded Nazi stamp, with swastika and eagle; and next to it, quietly triumphant in its very functionality, was a bar-code strip, proclaiming the American government’s present ownership.
This is one of those “telling details” which are also loudly allegorical facts: it would be hard to imagine a novelist inventing anything better, and equally hard to imagine the historian who would not covet this perfect concrete emblem. To what extent is the useful vitality of that detail inseparable from its historical reality? If a novelist invented it, would it be somehow worth less—morally speaking, aesthetically speaking—than if a historian authenticated it? I take a special pleasure in recording its actuality, but I can imagine relishing it in a novel, feeling that the writer had created a new reality—while being aware, of course, that an invented reality is not identical with an actual reality. The French writer and academic Laurent Binet, to judge from his novel “HHhH” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Sam Taylor), is sure of his answer: invented facts—invented characters, for that matter—have no place in historical fiction, and weaken it both aesthetically and morally. “This is what I think,” he writes. “Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.” There are at least two difficulties with this purism. First, it would abolish most fiction; second, Binet has written a historical novel of sorts, a book that, if not quite full of invented details, certainly uses invention. That Binet’s solution seems obvious is testament to the brilliant ease and fluency of his book: his historical novel makes use of novelistic invention while apologizing for doing so. Binet has his cake and eats it, and gets to cry over the spilt crumbs, too.
“HHhH” is about the rise and fall of Reinhard Heydrich, the monster whom even Hitler called “the man with the iron heart.” As Binet puts it, Heydrich is not the protagonist of this book but its target; almost anywhere you look in the politics of the Third Reich, “and particularly among its most terrifying aspects, Heydrich is there—at the center of everything.” “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” people would say: “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.” (Thus “HHhH.”) […] In some respects, “HHhH” is a conventional historical novel about the Europe of the nineteen-thirties and early forties. As we witness Heydrich’s rise in the Nazi system, and the simultaneous preparation of Gabčík and Kubiš in England, we move through the familiar stations of the period—Hitler’s seizing of power, in 1933; the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, in March, 1939; Chamberlain’s appeasement; Wannsee; and so on. Paragraphs begin with cheap exclamations like “A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss,” or end with duff sentences like “It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution. Heydrich will be its principal architect.” But Binet’s novel has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction. He has threaded his novel with a contemporary story, which is the drama of the book’s own making.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ad247EIN1r42dfro1_r2_1280.jpg)
Unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince have been unearthed, and they contain clues to a political reading of the children’s classic.
Currently Reading: Out by Natsuo Kirino
Nothing in Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino’s award-winning literary mystery Out. This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plot’s ringleader, but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society. At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath.
A gift from Brianna. I don’t usually read crime novels but I’m really enjoying it so far. :)
Charles Bukowski on Censorship
In 1985, following a complaint from a local reader, staff at the Public Library in Nijmegen decided to remove Charles Bukowski’s book, Tales of Ordinary Madness, from their shelves whilst declaring it “very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against certain groups (including homosexuals).” In the following weeks, a local journalist by the name of Hans van den Broek wrote to Bukowski and asked for his opinion. It soon arrived. Bukowski’s brilliant response can be seen below. It currently hangs in the Open Dicht Bus, a mobile book store based — more often than not — in Eindhoven.
7-22-85
Dear Hans van den Broek:
Thank you for your letter telling me of the removal of one of my books from the Nijmegen library. And that it is accused of discrimination against black people, homosexuals and women. And that it is sadism because of the sadism.
The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because of these who I met were that. There are many “bads”—bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even “bad” white males. Only when you write about “bad” white males they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are “good” blacks, “good” homosexuals and “good” women?
In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of “sadism” it is because it exists, I didn’t invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds. In my writing I do not always agree with what occurs, nor do I linger in the mud for the sheer sake of it. Also, it is curious that the people who rail against my work seem to overlook the sections of it which entail joy and love and hope, and there are such sections. My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the “light” and never mentioned the other, then as an artist I would be a liar.
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.
I am not dismayed that one of my books has been hunted down and dislodged from the shelves of a local library. In a sense, I am honored that I have written something that has awakened these from their non-ponderous depths. But I am hurt, yes, when somebody else’s book is censored, for that book, usually is a great book and there are few of those, and throughout the ages that type of book has often generated into a classic, and what was once thought shocking and immoral is now required reading at many of our universities.
I am not saying that my book is one of those, but I am saying that in our time, at this moment when any moment may be the last for many of us, it’s damned galling and impossibly sad that we still have among us the small, bitter people, the witch-hunters and the declaimers against reality. Yet, these too belong with us, they are part of the whole, and if I haven’t written about them, I should, maybe have here, and that’s enough.
May we all get better together,
Yrs,(Signed)
Charles Bukowski
Laurent Binet’s “HHhH” and Historical Fiction
The American Ambassador’s residence in Prague was built in the late nineteen-twenties by Otto Petschek. The Petscheks were among the wealthiest families in Czechoslovakia, and the mansion was lavish: long curving corridors, ornate bathrooms, a swimming pool in the basement. The Petscheks were also German-speaking Jews, wise enough to foresee the horrors that awaited them: they left Prague in 1938. When the Germans occupied the city in 1939, Nazi officers, with their unerring instinct for such things, seized the huge home, and made baleful use of it until the end of the war.
As with many buildings in Europe, the Petschek villa is scored and crossed, like the hide of a whale, with the history of its accidents. Last year, I spent some time in the house as a guest—the current Ambassador’s family and my family once shared an apartment building in Washington, D.C., and we became friends. In Prague, my friend showed me something I will not forget: he got me to lie on my back and peer at the underside of some piece of ambassadorial furniture. There, on the naked wood, was a faded Nazi stamp, with swastika and eagle; and next to it, quietly triumphant in its very functionality, was a bar-code strip, proclaiming the American government’s present ownership.
This is one of those “telling details” which are also loudly allegorical facts: it would be hard to imagine a novelist inventing anything better, and equally hard to imagine the historian who would not covet this perfect concrete emblem. To what extent is the useful vitality of that detail inseparable from its historical reality? If a novelist invented it, would it be somehow worth less—morally speaking, aesthetically speaking—than if a historian authenticated it? I take a special pleasure in recording its actuality, but I can imagine relishing it in a novel, feeling that the writer had created a new reality—while being aware, of course, that an invented reality is not identical with an actual reality. The French writer and academic Laurent Binet, to judge from his novel “HHhH” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Sam Taylor), is sure of his answer: invented facts—invented characters, for that matter—have no place in historical fiction, and weaken it both aesthetically and morally. “This is what I think,” he writes. “Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.” There are at least two difficulties with this purism. First, it would abolish most fiction; second, Binet has written a historical novel of sorts, a book that, if not quite full of invented details, certainly uses invention. That Binet’s solution seems obvious is testament to the brilliant ease and fluency of his book: his historical novel makes use of novelistic invention while apologizing for doing so. Binet has his cake and eats it, and gets to cry over the spilt crumbs, too.
“HHhH” is about the rise and fall of Reinhard Heydrich, the monster whom even Hitler called “the man with the iron heart.” As Binet puts it, Heydrich is not the protagonist of this book but its target; almost anywhere you look in the politics of the Third Reich, “and particularly among its most terrifying aspects, Heydrich is there—at the center of everything.” “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” people would say: “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.” (Thus “HHhH.”) […] In some respects, “HHhH” is a conventional historical novel about the Europe of the nineteen-thirties and early forties. As we witness Heydrich’s rise in the Nazi system, and the simultaneous preparation of Gabčík and Kubiš in England, we move through the familiar stations of the period—Hitler’s seizing of power, in 1933; the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, in March, 1939; Chamberlain’s appeasement; Wannsee; and so on. Paragraphs begin with cheap exclamations like “A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss,” or end with duff sentences like “It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution. Heydrich will be its principal architect.” But Binet’s novel has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction. He has threaded his novel with a contemporary story, which is the drama of the book’s own making.
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be
For the modern American reader, few lines in French literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus’s “L’Étranger”: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Nitty-gritty tense issues aside, the first sentence of “The Stranger” is so elementary that even a schoolboy with a base knowledge of French could adequately translate it. So why do the pros keep getting it wrong?
Within the novel’s first sentence, two subtle and seemingly minor translation decisions have the power to change the way we read everything that follows. What makes these particular choices prickly is that they poke at a long-standing debate among the literary community: whether it is necessary for a translator to have some sort of special affinity with a work’s author in order to produce the best possible text.
Arthur Goldhammer, translator of a volume of Camus’s Combat editorials, calls it “nonsense” to believe that “good translation requires some sort of mystical sympathy between author and translator.” While “mystical” may indeed be a bit of a stretch, it’s hard to look at Camus’s famous first sentence—whether translated by Stuart Gilbert, Joseph Laredo, Kate Griffith, or even, to a lesser degree, Matthew Ward—without thinking that a little more understanding between author and translator may have prevented the text from being colored in ways that Camus never intended.
Stuart Gilbert, a British scholar and a friend of James Joyce, was the first person to attempt Camus’s “L’Étranger” in English. In 1946, Gilbert translated the book’s title as “The Outsider” and rendered the first line as “Mother died today.” Simple, succinct, and incorrect.
In 1982, both Joseph Laredo and Kate Griffith produced new translations of “L’Étranger,” each opting for Gilbert’s revised title, “The Stranger,” but preserving his first line. “Mother died today” remained, and it wasn’t until 1988 that the line saw a single word changed. It was then that American translator and poet Matthew Ward reverted “Mother” back to Maman. One word? What’s the big deal? A large part of how we view and—alongside the novel’s court—ultimately judge Meursault lies in our perception of his relationship with his mother. We condemn or set him free based not on the crime he commits but on our assessment of him as a person. Does he love his mother? Or is he cold toward her, uncaring, even?
First impressions matter, and, for forty-two years, the way that American readers were introduced to Meursault was through the detached formality of his statement: “Mother died today.” There is little warmth, little bond or closeness or love in “Mother,” which is a static, archetypal term, not the sort of thing we use for a living, breathing being with whom we have close relations. To do so would be like calling the family dog “Dog” or a husband “Husband.” The word forces us to see Meursault as distant from the woman who bore him.
What if the opening line had read, “Mommy died today”? How would we have seen Meursault then? Likely, our first impression would have been of a child speaking. Rather than being put off, we would have felt pity or sympathy. But this, too, would have presented an inaccurate view of Meursault. The truth is that neither of these translations—“Mother” or “Mommy”—ring true to the original. The French word maman hangs somewhere between the two extremes: it’s neither the cold and distant “mother” nor the overly childlike “mommy.” In English, “mom” might seem the closest fit for Camus’s sentence, but there’s still something off-putting and abrupt about the single-syllable word; the two-syllable maman has a touch of softness and warmth that is lost with “mom.”
So how is the English-language translator to avoid unnecessarily influencing the reader? It seems that Matthew Ward, the novel’s most recent translator, did the only logical thing: nothing. He left Camus’s word untouched, rendering the famous first line, “Maman died today.” It could be said that Ward introduces a new problem: now, right from the start, the American reader is faced with a foreign term, with a confusion not previously present. Ward’s translation is clever, though, and three reasons demonstrate why his is the best solution.
First, the French word maman is familiar enough for an English-language reader to parse. Around the globe, as children learn to form words by babbling, they begin with the simplest sounds. In many languages, bilabials such as “m,” “p,” and “b,” as well as the low vowel “a,” are among the easiest to produce. As a result, in English, we find that children initially refer to the female parent as “mama.” Even in a language as seemingly different as Mandarin Chinese, we find māma; in the languages of Southern India we get amma, and in Norwegian, Italian, Swedish, and Icelandic, as well as many other languages, the word used is “mamma.” The French maman is so similar that the English-language reader will effortlessly understand it.
As the years pass, new generations of American readers, who often first encounter Camus’s book in high school, grow more and more removed from the novel’s historical context. Utilizing the original French word in the first sentence rather than any of the English options also serves to remind readers that they are in fact entering a world different from their own. While this hint may not be enough to inform the younger reader that, for example, the likelihood of a Frenchman in colonial Algeria getting the death penalty for killing an armed Arab was slim to nonexistent, at least it provides an initial allusion to these extra-textual facts.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the American reader will harbor no preconceived notions of the word maman. We will understand it with ease, but it will carry no baggage, it will plant no unintended seeds in our head. The word will neither sway us to see Meursault as overly cold and heartless nor as overly warm and loving. And while some of the word’s precision is indeed lost for the English-language reader, maman still gives us a more neutral-to-familiar tone than “mother,” one that hews closer to Camus’s original.
Currently Reading
Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
Consciousness is notoriously difficult to explain. On one hand, there are facts about conscious experience—the way clarinets sound, the way lemonade tastes—that we know subjectively, from the inside. On the other hand, such facts are not readily accommodated in the objective world described by science. How, after all, could the reediness of clarinets or the tartness of lemonade be predicted in advance? Central to Daniel C. Dennett”s attempt to resolve this dilemma is the “heterophenomenological” method, which treats reports of introspection nontraditionally—not as evidence to be used in explaining consciousness, but as data to be explained. Using this method, Dennett argues against the myth of the Cartesian theater—the idea that consciousness can be precisely located in space or in time. To replace the Cartesian theater, he introduces his own multiple drafts model of consciousness, in which the mind is a bubbling congeries of unsupervised parallel processing. Finally, Dennett tackles the conventional philosophical questions about consciousness, taking issue not only with the traditional answers but also with the traditional methodology by which they were reached. Dennett”s writing, while always serious, is never solemn; who would have thought that combining philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience could be such fun? Not every reader will be convinced that Dennett has succeeded in explaining consciousness; many will feel that his account fails to capture essential features of conscious experience. But none will want to deny that the attempt was well worth making.
Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre
It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Sartre accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism”, a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (‘existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind.
BBC's In Our Time: Voltaire's Candide
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Voltaire’s novel Candide. First published in 1759, the novel follows the adventures of a young man, Candide, and his mentor, the philosopher Pangloss. Candide was written in the aftermath of a major earthquake in Lisbon and the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, events which caused such human suffering that they shook many people’s faith in a benevolent God. Voltaire’s masterpiece piles ridicule on Optimism, the fashionable philosophical belief that such disasters are part of God’s plan for humanity - that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. Often uproariously funny, the novel is a biting satire whose other targets include bad literature, extremist religion and the vanity of kings and politicians. It captivated contemporary readers and has proved one of French literature’s most enduring classics. With: David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York; Nicholas Cronk, Professor of French Literature and Director of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford and Caroline Warman, Lecturer in French and Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Oxford.
Currently Reading: Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow ‘new age’ philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is in its dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, in its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls’ magazines. A dissection of modern lives and loves. By turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.
Why fiction is good for you
Is fiction good for us? We spend huge chunks of our lives immersed in novels, films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction. Some see this as a positive thing, arguing that made-up stories cultivate our mental and moral development. But others have argued that fiction is mentally and ethically corrosive. It’s an ancient question: Does fiction build the morality of individuals and societies, or does it break it down?
This controversy has been flaring up — sometimes literally, in the form of book burnings — ever since Plato tried to ban fiction from his ideal republic. In 1961, FCC chairman Newton Minow famously said that television was not working in “the public interest” because its “formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons” amounted to a “vast wasteland.” And what he said of TV programming has also been said, over the centuries, of novels, theater, comic books, and films: They are not in the public interest.
Until recently, we’ve only been able to guess about the actual psychological effects of fiction on individuals and society. But new research in psychology and broad-based literary analysis is finally taking questions about morality out of the realm of speculation.
This research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.
But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.
![The Return of the Novella, the Original #Longread
Longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, the form has been the ugly stepchild of the literary world. But that’s starting to change.
Publishers like short stories, and they love novels. But when a writer submits a mid-length work that falls somewhere between two genres, booksellers balk and editors narrow their eyes. This is the domain of the novella, an unfairly neglected literary art form that’s been practiced for centuries by celebrated writers—from Charles Dickens to Jane Smiley to Alain Mabanckou—yet faces an ongoing struggle for commercial viability. “For me, the word denotes a lesser genre,” literary agent Karolina Sutton told The Guardian in 2011. “If you pitch a book to a bookseller as a novel, you’re likely to get more orders than if you call it a novella.”
Mid-length works suffer from a koan-like criticism: They’re too short and they’re also too long. Novellas hog too much space to appear in magazines and literary journals, but they’re usually too slight to release as books. If a reader’s going to spend 16 bucks, the notion goes, he wants to take home a Franzen-size tome—not a slim volume he can slip in a jacket pocket. […]
Now the beleaguered genre, at long last, has found a worthy and consistent champion: Melville House Publishing, whose “Art of the Novella” series is an ongoing celebration of the form. The Brooklyn-based press offers 47—and counting—novellas from writers like Cervantes, Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf. Specifically drawing attention to the novella’s brevity, diversity, and lineage of distinguished practitioners, the series is the first of its kind.
Each sleek, modernist edition comes suited in a monochrome cover with French flaps. There are no blurb quotes, no graphics or illustrations. Just the author’s name, the title, and on the back, a pull quote. At nine dollars each, they’re a steal.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2zus79Ptz1r42dfro1_1280.jpg)
The Return of the Novella, the Original #Longread
Longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, the form has been the ugly stepchild of the literary world. But that’s starting to change.
Publishers like short stories, and they love novels. But when a writer submits a mid-length work that falls somewhere between two genres, booksellers balk and editors narrow their eyes. This is the domain of the novella, an unfairly neglected literary art form that’s been practiced for centuries by celebrated writers—from Charles Dickens to Jane Smiley to Alain Mabanckou—yet faces an ongoing struggle for commercial viability. “For me, the word denotes a lesser genre,” literary agent Karolina Sutton told The Guardian in 2011. “If you pitch a book to a bookseller as a novel, you’re likely to get more orders than if you call it a novella.”
Mid-length works suffer from a koan-like criticism: They’re too short and they’re also too long. Novellas hog too much space to appear in magazines and literary journals, but they’re usually too slight to release as books. If a reader’s going to spend 16 bucks, the notion goes, he wants to take home a Franzen-size tome—not a slim volume he can slip in a jacket pocket. […]
Now the beleaguered genre, at long last, has found a worthy and consistent champion: Melville House Publishing, whose “Art of the Novella” series is an ongoing celebration of the form. The Brooklyn-based press offers 47—and counting—novellas from writers like Cervantes, Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf. Specifically drawing attention to the novella’s brevity, diversity, and lineage of distinguished practitioners, the series is the first of its kind.
Each sleek, modernist edition comes suited in a monochrome cover with French flaps. There are no blurb quotes, no graphics or illustrations. Just the author’s name, the title, and on the back, a pull quote. At nine dollars each, they’re a steal.
This past winter I wrote a pair of essays about The Brothers Karamazov that included the admission that I preferred “Tolstoy’s ability to see the angles of everyday life to Dostoevsky’s taste for the manic edges of experience.” That line elicited more of a reaction from readers than anything else I wrote, which prompted me to dive deeper into the question: Just which of these two titans of Russian literature is considered the greater novelist?
As it turned out, I was not the first to consider the provocation. The literary critic George Steiner has provided the most authoritative resolution to the problem with his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which positions Tolstoy as “the foremost heir to the tradition of the epic” and Dostoevsky as “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare.” Isaiah Berlin considered the seemingly opposing qualities of the two authors in his enduring essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Nabokov argued in Lectures on Russian Literature that it was Tolstoy in a landslide, while America’s First Ladies have tended to give the nod to Dostoevsky: both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush cite The Brothers Karamazov as their favorite novel.
Still, I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I found online so I decided to get a second opinion — or rather, eight more opinions. I reached out to the foremost scholars of Russian literature as well as avid lay readers I know and asked if they’d be willing to contribute 500 words weighing the respective merits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Almost everyone said yes, though a few echoed the sentiments of a distinguished emeritus professor who replied to me from a beach in Mexico, writing, “There really is no competition on Parnassus. From my point of view at least, they are both great writers and now live in a realm beyond competition.” And of course that’s true — just as it’s true that it is fun (and often illuminating) to debate Williams vs. DiMaggio and Bird vs. Magic even though at the end of the day we acknowledge that they’re all irreducibly great.
So with that, enjoy eight very knowledgeable, passionate takes on two of the great storytellers of all time.
Donna Tussing Orwin, Professor of Russian and Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, and author of Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy
I inclined first to Tolstoy. His combination of moral sensibility and love of life appealed to me, and I didn’t like Dostoevsky’s over-the-top world of the self in crisis. The two authors have much in common, and yet diverge in ways that make comparison irresistible.
Both associate the self with moral agency; for both therefore, the individual is the ultimate source of good and evil. For both, goodness, which consists in overcoming selfishness, is natural but weak. For both feelings trump reason in the soul, though Tolstoy is closer to the Greeks and the Enlightenment in his association of virtue with reason. For Dostoevsky, reason is always tainted by egotism, and therefore he relies on love to spur moral impulses. Dostoevsky concentrates more on evil; for this reason his writings anticipate the horrors of the twentieth and the nascent twenty-first centuries. Tolstoy depicts crimes, such as the lynching of Vereshchagin (War and Peace) or uxoricide in Kreutzer Sonata, but not the pure malice embodied in such Dostoevskian characters as Stavrogin (Demons) or Smerdyakov (Brothers Karamazov). Tolstoy’s most evil characters, like Dolokhov in War and Peace, seem to invade his texts from another (Dostoevskian?) world. Dostoevsky also portrays pure goodness. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (The Idiot), even though he is named after Tolstoy, is more virtuous than any Tolstoyan character could be, and so is Alyosha Karamazov. Both authors are wicked satirists. Tolstoy’s rationalizing solutions to social ills can seem naive, while Dostoevsky’s high-minded ones seem sentimental.
Tolstoy’s fiction encompasses a broader range of experience than Dostoevsky’s. No one has described childhood, family life, farming, hunting, and war any better. This reflects his affinity for the physical and the body. Not coincidentally, Tolstoy is also celebrated for his portraits of nature and animals. Dostoevsky usually associates the physical with the base. (Compare fleshy old Fyodor Karamazov with his ethereal son Alyosha.) In his writings illness often brings insight, while Tolstoy mostly (though not always) prefers healthy states to unhealthy ones.
Dostoevsky’s fiction aims at the revelation of character to the fullest extent possible. He believes that each individual is unique, however, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to others. His protagonists vacillate between good and evil; this makes the future of any one of them, even the most virtuous, unpredictable. Tolstoy’s characters are complex but not unique. The variety among them (greater than in Dostoevsky) is a result of a practically but not theoretically infinite number of combinations among all the possibilities inherent in human nature, and the interaction of these with the outside world. Tolstoy depicts the intersection of chance, historical forces, and character. In his view, the more disengaged we are from outside circumstances, the freer we are. Tolstoy gravitated in old age toward Christian anarchy, while Dostoevsky in his last novel (Brothers Karamazov) seems to advocate for a Christian theocracy headed by someone like Zosima.
I still prefer Tolstoy’s earthiness and expansiveness to Dostoevsky’s brilliant, edgy anatomy of the psyche, but I can’t imagine life without them both.
Currently Reading: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced. Kundera discusses life, music, sex, philosophy, literature and politics in ways that are rarely politically correct, never classifiable but always original, entertaining and definitely brilliant.
The Challenges of Translation
Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelist’s “The Map and the Territory” — Knopf will publish the first American edition in January — when he came to a chapter about a character who’d decided to commit suicide at a legal euthanasia clinic. As the book’s narrator put it, the clinic’s medical staff was “going to ‘se faire des couilles en or,’” Bowd recalled. “Literally: they were going to turn their balls into gold.”
Herein lies the translator’s dilemma. Bowd’s mission is stay as loyal as possible to the original text. But in this case, a strict translation would be ridiculous. “I translated: they were going to make a killing” in fees, Bowd added via e-mail from Scotland, where he teaches French at the University of St. Andrews. “In the context, I prefer that.”
These are the kind of decisions that translators make on a line-by-line basis. Readers don’t notice these artful adjustments, but their enjoyment of literature in translation is dependent upon them. But even as the American appetite for foreign fiction — Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium trilogy” remains a bestseller, Haruki Murakami’s just-published “1Q84” is a huge hit, and the months ahead will bring big new English editions from international stars like Umberto Eco, Roberto Bolaño and Peter Nadas — the translators of these works typically labor in anonymity. Some even crave it.
![Moscow by Yevgeniy Fiks
My book Moscow (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), of which the following is an extension, documents ideologically charged Communist sites appropriated by gay subculture in the Soviet era, as photographed in 2008: Sverdlov Square with its monument to Karl Marx, the lavatories of the Lenin Museum, and other public spaces adopted as cruising sites that have become countermonuments of the queer experience under “really existing socialism.” Vladimir Lenin’s government decriminalized homosexuality in 1918; in 1933–34, Josef Stalin’s recriminalized it. British Communist Harry Whyte’s 1934 letter to Stalin, excerpted here, went unanswered; it was released from the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation in 1993, published that year in the journal Istochnik, and translated for Moscow by Thomas Campbell.
To Comrade STALIN.
The content of my appeal is briefly as follows. The author of this letter, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, requests a theoretical grounding of the March 7 decree of the USSR Central Executive Committee on [the institution of] criminal liability for sodomy. Since he strives to approach this question from a Marxist viewpoint, the author of this letter believes that the decree contradicts both the facts of life itself and the principles of Marxism-Leninism. […] Although I am a foreign Communist who has not yet been promoted to the AUCP(b), I nevertheless think that it will not seem unnatural to you, the leader of the world proletariat, that I address you with a request to shed light on a question that, as it seems to me, has huge significance for a large number of Communists in the USSR as well as in other countries.
The question is as follows: Can a homosexual be considered someone worthy of membership in the Communist Party?
First and foremost, I would like to point out that I view the condition of homosexuals who are either of working-class origin or workers themselves to be analogous to the condition of women under the capitalist regime and the coloured races who are oppressed by imperialism. This condition is likewise similar in many ways to the condition of the Jews under Hitler’s dictatorship, and in general it is not hard to see in it an analogy with the condition of any social stratum subjected to exploitation and persecution under capitalist domination.
Read more.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2abn6T5iQ1r42dfro1_r3_500.jpg)
My book Moscow (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), of which the following is an extension, documents ideologically charged Communist sites appropriated by gay subculture in the Soviet era, as photographed in 2008: Sverdlov Square with its monument to Karl Marx, the lavatories of the Lenin Museum, and other public spaces adopted as cruising sites that have become countermonuments of the queer experience under “really existing socialism.” Vladimir Lenin’s government decriminalized homosexuality in 1918; in 1933–34, Josef Stalin’s recriminalized it. British Communist Harry Whyte’s 1934 letter to Stalin, excerpted here, went unanswered; it was released from the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation in 1993, published that year in the journal Istochnik, and translated for Moscow by Thomas Campbell.
To Comrade STALIN.
The content of my appeal is briefly as follows. The author of this letter, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, requests a theoretical grounding of the March 7 decree of the USSR Central Executive Committee on [the institution of] criminal liability for sodomy. Since he strives to approach this question from a Marxist viewpoint, the author of this letter believes that the decree contradicts both the facts of life itself and the principles of Marxism-Leninism. […] Although I am a foreign Communist who has not yet been promoted to the AUCP(b), I nevertheless think that it will not seem unnatural to you, the leader of the world proletariat, that I address you with a request to shed light on a question that, as it seems to me, has huge significance for a large number of Communists in the USSR as well as in other countries.
The question is as follows: Can a homosexual be considered someone worthy of membership in the Communist Party?
First and foremost, I would like to point out that I view the condition of homosexuals who are either of working-class origin or workers themselves to be analogous to the condition of women under the capitalist regime and the coloured races who are oppressed by imperialism. This condition is likewise similar in many ways to the condition of the Jews under Hitler’s dictatorship, and in general it is not hard to see in it an analogy with the condition of any social stratum subjected to exploitation and persecution under capitalist domination.
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Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
