Van Gogh and Mental Illness

Maria Popova looks at the painter's letters

Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait (1887)

From Maria Popova (Brain Pickings):

Around the time that Tolstoy was tussling with depression and his spiritual crisis, on the other side of Europe another creative icon was struggling with the darkness of his own psychoemotional landscape. As he was painting some of the most celebrated and influential art of all time, Vincent Van Gogh was combating his anguishing mental illness — frequent episodes of depression, paralyzing anxiety and, according to some accounts, the symptoms of bipolar disorder — which would eventually claim his life in 1890, shortly after his 37th birthday.

Van Gogh’s most direct and honest account of his psychoemotional turmoil comes from the letters to his brother Theo, originally published in 1937 as the hefty tome Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh and later excerpted in My Life & Love Are One — the same wonderful 1976 gem that gave us his thoughts on love, tracing “the magic and melancholy of Vincent van Gogh.” The title comes from a specific letter written during one of the painter’s periods of respite from mental illness, in which he professes to his brother: “Life has become very dear to me, and I am very glad that I love. My life and my love are one.” [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophy and Vincent van Gogh's Shoes
• Van Gogh: The Life
• David Lynch and the Big Fish
• Georgia O'Keeffe on her Life and Work
• Joan Mitchell Foundation

Do we need another Tolstoy translation?

Rosamund Bartlett on her translation of Anna Karenina

Ilya Repin, Portrait of Vera Repin, the Artist's Wife (1878)

From Rosamund Bartlett (The Guardian):

Do we really need another English translation of Anna Karenina? This is a bit like asking whether we need a new recording of Beethoven's Ninth. There is no English translation of the 1970 Academy of Sciences edition of the novel currently in print. This version contained a host of small differences from earlier versions; these may not amount to much individually, but cumulatively they add up to a new reading. And just as conductors and performers can produce revelatory new interpretations after intense listening, so translators have the potential to allow the author to speak more clearly. It's all about the detail.

[...]

Do such details matter? Tolstoy certainly thought so. After helping him prepare the text for publication in book form in 1878, Nikolay Strakhov recalled his friend staunchly defending the slightest expression, and opposing even the most innocuous changes. Strakhov realised that "in spite of all the apparent carelessness and unevenness of his style", Tolstoy had "thought over every word, every turn of speech no less than the most fastidious poet." Such informed comments give the lie to the perception that Tolstoy was somehow indifferent to questions of form and style. In 1887, a year after the first woefully inadequate English translation of Anna Karenina was published, Matthew Arnold voiced the opinion that we are to take the novel as a "piece of life rather than as a work of art". Henry James, who identified with his friend Turgenev's elegance and consummate artistic restraint, in turn railed against Tolstoy's "lack of composition" and "defiance of economy and architecture". [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Secrets of Leo Tolstoy
• Anton Chekhov on Leo Tolstoy
• Leo Tolstoy: Stepan Arkadyich reads a newspaper
• Leo Tolstoy Speaks
• Famous Writers’ Sleeping Habits

The Secrets of Leo Tolstoy

Victor Erofeyev on literature, life and ideology

Leo Tolstoy's country estate, Yasnaya Polyana

From Victor Erofeyev (The New York Times) (link via European Graduate School):

I get a physiological pleasure from reading Tolstoy, and the more I read him, the greater the pleasure. His words generate smells, sounds, vibrations of feelings and moods. They are broader than any philosophical doctrine, and more significant even than the author himself, whom his words mercilessly exploit. In all literature, perhaps, there never was so “idea-less” a writer who released into the world writing that fills us with admiration of its power, and fear of its candor.

Tolstoy’s words seem to break away from the writer to reveal the meaning of existence — sometimes surprising the writer himself in the process. Marcel Proust considered Tolstoy to be the almighty lord of his works, controlling all their actions and thoughts. If so it is a generous lord, who is great because he gives freedom to his heroes, and they, on entering our memory, become more alive than the living. Natasha’s first ball, the horse race in “Anna Karenina,” the illness and death of Ivan Ilyich — all these fill the reader with both elemental delight, and also with the horror of confronting the very sources of existence. Sometimes it seems that Tolstoy was born to overturn the rules of literature and to laugh at its pretensions to be a textbook of life.

Tolstoy did not like to discuss “literature,” and did not much like writers like Dante and Shakespeare. He did not regard himself as a professional writer. He was more a serial killer of literary canons. His mind and body raged with such unchecked passions that it was not possible to make ends meet.

He was a monster in his personal behavior; he hated “progress” and the “age of progress”; he hailed freedom for women in a world of stern social convention; he loved the simple peasant, though by blood and habit he was the complete lord. Lenin was unusually accurate when he called Tolstoy a “mirror of the Russian revolution.”

I love to read about Tolstoy’s relationships with his famous contemporaries, so full of misunderstandings and treachery. He hated Turgenev for his “democratic thighs” and love of chatter. He longed to challenge him to a duel with hunting rifles at six paces. He described the horrors of war in his Sevastopol stories, yet his own character was equally belligerent, terrorizing his wife, Sofia Andreevna. His demonstrative vegetarianism and peasant labors became the brunt of jokes (“A muzhik comes before the count and announces, ‘The plow is served”’).

André Gide in an essay on Dostoevsky wrote that Tolstoy obscured the greatness of Dostoevsky. But with time, the prevalent view among intellectuals came to be that Dostoevsky’s mountain was higher than Tolstoy’s. Yes, Dostoevsky has clear goals and defined action. The curtain opens and we watch how a godless existence leads inexorably to sin and evil. Crime becomes punishment. By contrast, when Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina throws herself under a train, what is it? Her punishment? High tragedy? The fate of fallen women? A delirious stream of consciousness? There is no answer. For that, in Tolstoy’s logic, you go to the police, not to the writer. In Dostoevsky, life is subservient to thought. In Tolstoy, thought is in a constant spin, like the grenade that will explode and take the life of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.

Tolstoy’s novels arise out of the small details of his daily diary; they grow out of social gossip, childhood impressions, family legends. He waters this garden, and there grows a tree with heavenly fruit — delicious, fragrant, juicy, unique. [Read More]

Find Leo Tolstoy on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Anton Chekhov on Leo Tolstoy
• Leo Tolstoy: Stepan Arkadyich reads a newspaper
• Leo Tolstoy Speaks
• Famous Writers’ Sleeping Habits
• How Terrence Malick Constructed To The Wonder

How Terrence Malick Constructed To The Wonder

On Malick's filmmaking process

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

From Bilge Ebiri (Vulture):

Terrence Malick’s films have always been divisive, and To the Wonder, which hit theaters and video on demand last weekend, is proving more divisive than most. (Our own David Edelstein, for one, was not a fan.) The film is a lyrical, moody tale about a couple (played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko) who find themselves increasingly alienated from each other when they move from Paris to Oklahoma, where the man reconnects romantically with a woman from his past (Rachel McAdams). Built out of fragmentary moments, glimpses of memories, and occasionally even visions, overlaid with quietly ruminating voice-over, the film has struck some as a particularly Malick-y Terrence Malick film.

But regardless of the opinion on any of his individual works, there remains a fascination and curiosity about Malick’s filmmaking process, which has in recent years become even more distinct and unorthodox. Over the course of his career, Malick has put together a team of creative allies — including cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, production designer Jack Fisk, costume designer Jacqui West, and first assistant cameraman Erik Brown — who have been able to embrace a very organic style of filmmaking, one that’s often improvisatory in a way most filmmakers try to avoid. “When we sat down at first to discuss this film,” says producer Nicolas Gonda, “we didn’t talk about a script, but rather a way of working.”

While Lubezki himself notes, in this recent American Cinematographer interview, that he did insist on seeing a script, the producers and the actors were content to work mostly from Malick’s treatment and his own descriptions of the story. Malick wrote voraciously throughout preproduction, filming, and postproduction. Usually these pages consisted simply of characters’ internal thoughts. “At first, Terrence just told me the story,” says Kurylenko, who plays Marina. “Once we started shooting, I’d get ten or fifteen pages every morning describing the mood of my character.” Different actors would get different pages, each describing their own internal thoughts. “You never really walk through a scene with Terry. He wants everything to be spontaneous, without you having any time to overthink it.”

Nowhere in To the Wonder was this approach more evident than in the film’s early scenes in Paris and the island of Mont Saint-Michel (whose nickname, “le merveille,” French for “the wonder,” gives the film its title), off the northwest coast of France. Working in France with a reduced crew of about eight people and a shoot schedule of just a couple of days, Malick’s style was quicker and more impulsive than ever. Ever since they first worked together on 2005’s The New World, he and Lubezki have put together a set of unwritten “rules” that allow them to shoot quickly and freely; among them is the fact that they almost exclusively use natural or available light. They also often shoot handheld or with a Steadicam. (Lubezki was unable to accompany the crew to France, so he gave instructions to cameraman and Steadicam operator Joerg Widmer for these scenes.) “At this point, watching [Lubezski], Joerg, and Terry, it’s actually kind of funny, because even their body language is the same now,” says producer Sarah Green, whose collaboration with Malick also dates back to The New World. “They’re like a band that’s been playing together for years. The camera has to move and the focus puller has to adjust without Terry necessarily having to tell them what to frame — but they know what he will respond to.”

[...]

Although many of the actors never saw a script for To the Wonder, there was still a lot of dialogue shot for the film — much of it taken off Malick’s daily pages for the cast. “We wouldn’t have to read the lines literally,” Kurylenko says. “Terry leaves you free to say the lines or to not say them.” This, too, is a style of working the director has perfected over the years: He gives his actors dialogue to get them thinking about certain things, but then shoots the scene in a variety of ways, doing some takes without the dialogue or cutting it out in post. There were numerous arguments full of shouting and wounding dialogue filmed between Neil and Marina in the film’s Oklahoma scenes, most of which only exist in spectral fashion in the finished work — seen as glimpses and fragments. “The scenes in Oklahoma were incredibly dark,” Kurylenko says. “A lot darker than what was in the final film.” In editing, however, Malick discovered that such dialogue often had the effect of making the characters seem small, whereas he was going for something more elemental, almost mythic. In casting, producer Sarah Green recalls that Malick looked for actors who “really could stand in for the male and female of the species — who seemed iconic in that way.”

As prompts for the actors, Malick shared representative works of art and literature. For Affleck, he suggested Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. (Affleck read Martin Heidegger on his own, having known that Malick had translated one of the German philosopher’s works as a grad student.) For Kurylenko, he also recommended Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — specifically, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot. “Those books were, in a way, his script,” she says. But he did more than give the actors the books; he suggested ways to approach the texts and characters to focus on. So, for example, he recommended that Kurylenko read The Idiot with a particular eye on two characters: the young and prideful Aglaya Yepanchin, and the fallen, tragic Nastassya Filippovna. “He wanted me to combine their influences — the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side. ‘For some reason, you only ever see that combination in Russian characters,’ he said to me.”

In fact, Malick will use existing works of art and literature as touch-points with virtually all of his cast and crew. “It enables them to have a common vernacular on set that’s not about technique, but emotion — a shared memory,” Gonda says. For example, with the producers, the director often referenced paintings. With camera operator Widmer, who is also an accomplished musician, the references were often musical. With his editing team, Malick often passed out books such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. But he would also reference other films: Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, with its heavy and unique use of voice-over, was a constant reference point. (At one point, the score for Truffaut’s film was used as part of a temp soundtrack.) Malick is also a huge fan of Jean-Luc Godard and often referenced Godard films such as Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, and Vivre Sa Vie, for their elliptical narrative and editing styles. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy
• Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick
• Terrence Malick on Days of Heaven
• Terrence Malick: act of creation
• Paul Thomas Anderson: An Autocritique

The Essays of Schopenhauer: E-book

A selection from Parerga and Paralipomena

Screenshot from essaysofschopenhauer.com

From essaysofschopenhauer.com:

This website presents six essay extracts from Schopenhauer's last work entitled 'Parerga and Paralipomena', a collection of philosophical reflections first published in 1851. A further eighteen essays are available in both paperback and e-book formats at a small cost. This unique and comprehensive curation is a must have for anyone interested in learning more about Schopenhauer's ideas and literary style.

Schopenhauer's depth of insight into the human condition influenced a long list of famous thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Hardy and Charles Darwin to name just a few. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Spinoza's Guide to Living Well
• Homes of German Philosophers
• A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer
• Beckett and Schopenhauer
• Samuel Beckett and Quietism

Famous Writers’ Sleeping Habits

A visualisation of rising times set against literary productivity

Click for source

From Brain Pickings (thanks to Michael John Goodman for the link):

Over the years, in my endless fascination with daily routines, I found myself especially intrigued by successful writers’ sleep habits — after all, it’s been argued that “sleep is the best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac” and science tells us that it impacts everything from our moods to our brain development to our every waking moment. I found myself wondering whether there might be a correlation between sleep habits and literary productivity. The challenge, of course, is that data on each of these variables is hard to find, hard to quantify, or both. So I turned to Italian information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who make masterful visualizations of cultural phenomena seemingly impossible to quantify — and, together, we set out to explore whether it might be possible to visualize such a correlation.

First, I handed them my notes on writers’ wake-up times, amassed over years of reading biographies, interviews, journals, and other materials. Many came from two books — Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors by Celia Blue Johnson — as well as from the Paris Review interviews and various collections of diaries and letters.

We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom wake-up times were available — this became the base data set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the literary productivity of each author. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Homes of German Philosophers
• Nietzsche's Daily Habits
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Odd Type Writers
• Marcel Proust's Obituary

Charlotte Mandell on Translating Blanchot

A 2005 interview by Ready Steady Book

Photograph: E. E. Pridgeon

Mark Thwaite of Ready Steady Book talks to Charlotte Mandell about translating the French writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot:

I first came across your name as a translator of the work of Maurice Blanchot. What first got you interested in Blanchot?

Fate. My friend Pierre Joris, who translated Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, was asked by Helen Tartar (then editor-in-chief at Stanford University Press) to translate La part du feu. He didn’t have the time, so he recommended me. I sent in a sample chapter – I was only 24 then and the only book-length work I’d translated was a book of poems, Le feu l’ombre, by the French poet Jean-Paul Auxeméry. Helen liked the straightforwardness of my translation, the fact that it didn’t use any acadamese – I tried to translate Blanchot as simply and as honestly as I could.

Do you find the close reading required to translate a work has helped you to understand Blanchot more clearly than you would otherwise have done?

Definitely, yes. I feel I’ve never really “read” a work until I’ve translated it. I also make it a rule never to read too far ahead in the book I’m translating – that way everything is fresh and new, and I can’t form any preconceived notions about what will come next. I figure the author never had the luxury of reading his book beforehand, so why should I? (In the case of Blanchot it’s a little different – I’d already read many of his books in French when I was a student in Paris.)

Do you think "the common reader" can get much out of Blanchot or should he be left to academics?

Reading Blanchot is a little like watching someone think. You have to have patience, since his essays move by nuance and suggestion, and come to focus slowly. English readers – Americans especially – are used to being fed information; in the case of an essay, they’re used to the conventional statement-exposition-conclusion format. The nice thing about Blanchot (and the thing a lot of people find exasperating about him) is that he doesn’t follow that formula, or any formula for that matter. Often no conclusion is reached. The subject is examined, and questioned, and looked at from different angles, but never really resolved. I like that a lot – it’s sort of like reading poetry. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Fynsk on Maurice Blanchot
• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Leo Tolstoy Speaks

A rare audio recording of the writer from 1909

Open Culture reports that the 'audio recordings above were made at the writer’s home in Yasnaya Polyana on October 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old'. The website also includes a transcription of Tolstoy's English extract, taken from Wise Thoughts For Every Day, as follows:

That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing? [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Leo Tolstoy: Stepan Arkadyich reads a newspaper
• Anton Chekhov on Leo Tolstoy
• Leo Tolstoy on Film
• Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Experts Decide
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?

Leo Tolstoy: Stepan Arkadyich reads a newspaper

An excerpt from Anna Karenina

Nicolai Fechin, 'The Artist's Father Reading the Newspaper' (1916)

From Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky):

Stepan Arkadyich subscribed to and read a liberal newspaper, not an extreme one, but one with the tendency to which the majority held. And though neither science, nor art, nor politics itself interested him, he firmly held the same views on all these subjects as the majority and his newspaper did, and changed them only when the majority did, or, rather, he did not change them, but they themselves changed imperceptibly in him.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Anton Chekhov on Leo Tolstoy
• Leo Tolstoy on Film
• Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Experts Decide
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• A Jubilee for Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov on Leo Tolstoy

An extract from Chekhov's correspondence

Leo Tolstoy at his writing table. Portrait by Leonid Osipovich Pasternak (1908)

Anton Chekhov, in letter to M.O. Menshikov (28 January 1900):

I fear Tolstoy's death. His death would leave a large empty space in my life. First, I have loved no man the way I have loved him. I am not a believer, but of all beliefs I consider his the closest to mine and most suitable for me. Second, when literature has a Tolstoy, it is easy and gratifying to be a writer. Even if you are aware that you have never accomplished anything, you don't feel so bad, because Tolstoy accomplishes enough for everyone. His activities provide justification for the hopes and aspirations that are usually placed on literature. Third, Tolstoy stands firm, his authority is enormous, and as long as he is alive bad taste in literature, all vulgarity in its brazen-faced or lachrymose varieties, all bristly and resentful vanity will remain far in the background. His moral authority alone is enough to maintain what we think of as literary trends and schools at a certain minimal level. If not for him, literature would be a flock without a shepherd or an unfathomable jumble. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Leo Tolstoy on Film
• Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Experts Decide
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• A Jubilee for Anton Chekhov

Teju Cole talks to 3:AM Magazine

An interview by Max Liu

Teju Cole

Max Liu interviews the author of Open City, Teju Cole, for 3:AM Magazine:

Increasingly, novels are praised for how much of the culture they manage to include. Open City is entirely contemporary and worldly and it includes a great deal. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of literary inclusiveness?

In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don’t mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects – maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books – and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don’t think it’s as simple as literary inclusiveness. That phrase, in fact, brings to mind David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers. They are keen to include and, in fact, itemize the present in all its gaudy multiplicity. My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There’s an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there’s enough of the present included to lull the reader. So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn’t use a smartphone, and he doesn’t discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail. [Read More]

Alexandra Popoff, The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants

New book explores the role writer's wives played in the creation of Russian masterpieces

Leo and Sophia Tolstoy, 1906.

Yelena Akhtiorskaya reviews Alexandra Popoff's new book, The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants. A fascinating subject that is often overlooked: 'Alexandra Popoff’s book is a look at Russian writers’ wives—greatest hits edition—the women who brought us the men who brought us the classics. Included are Anna Dostoevsky and Sophia Tolstoy (the originals), Véra Nabokov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Elena Bulgakov, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, each of them paired with a handy epithet—Nursemaid of Talent (Mrs. Tolstoy) or Mysterious Margarita (guess who). The central argument of The Wives is twofold: that great writers have demanding habits, and that the women who tended to those habits deserve recognition.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Vladimir Nabokov: Literary Psychologist
• Leo Tolstoy on Film
• Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Experts Decide
• Diurnal vs. Nocturnal Writers: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• Life of a Dostoyevsky Translator
• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature

Plunkett Lake Press: Stefan Zweig

A range of Zweig's non-fiction works published as e-books

Stefan Zweig

Plunkett Lake Press have made available a number of rare non-fiction titles by Stefan Zweig, the Austrian novelist, journalist and playwright. You can find out more about their selection, which is published in e-book form, by visiting their website. [Read More]

Leo Tolstoy on Film

Last days of Russian novelist captured on film

Video via Open Culture

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Experts Decide
• Diurnal vs. Nocturnal Writers: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?

Auster/Tolstoy: Winter Journal

James Meader senses affinities between Auster memoir and Tolstoy's work

Paul Auster, Winter Journal

The Picador Book Room takes a look at the galleys of Paul Auster's new memoir, Winter Journal, and compares a moment in The Inventional of Solitude with Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych: 'In The Invention of Solitude, it is the death of Paul’s father that urges him to write. In Winter Journal, he writes about the death of his mother, but the focus is more broadly about his own mortality. This book, unlike The Invention of Solitude, has after all been written by a man in his mid-60s, and the sentences carry an honesty that comes from direct experience.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Paul Auster
• Paul Auster, Winter Journal

Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Experts Decide

8 experts seek to answer the age-old question

Leo Tolstoy (left) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (right)

There's something slightly ridiculous about literary polls. (Or any form of artistic poll, for that matter.) They presuppose, among other things, that creative work can be neatly judged according to a set of empirical standards, or regulations. But, of course, no one can explain in any final or definitive sense why we prefer one book to another, or judge one painter above the next. Love is not a science.

Nevertheless, polls can be fun (if we remember not to take them too seriously). Writing for The Millions, Kevin Hartnett asks the age-old question of 19th century Russian literature: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?

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. [Read More]

In order to resolve the debate once and for all, Hartnett draws upon 8 experts, from professors to graduate students to critics and columnists:

• Carol Apollonio, Professor of the Practice of Russian, Duke University
• Ellen Chances, Professor of Russian Literature, Princeton University
• Raquel Chanto, Graduate Student, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
• Chris Huntington, author of the novel Mike Tyson Slept Here
• Andrew Kaufman, author of Understanding Tolstoy and Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Virginia
• Gary Saul Morson, Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University
• 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
• Joshua Rothman, graduate student in English at Harvard University, and author of the column, Brainiac, which appears every Sunday in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section

Of course, whether we can be convinced by their arguments remains to be seen. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time
• Life of a Dostoyevsky Translator
• Diurnal vs. Nocturnal Writers: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?

On Philosophical Novels

From Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Sartre and Bernhard

Leo Tolstoy reading, pencil portrait by Ilya Repin (1891)

Jennie Erdal writes a survey of the philosophical novel in the Financial Times, and Geoff Dyer lists five examples of memorable philosophical fiction:

At St Andrews University in the early 1970s, philosophy was still a required subject for entry into an honours course. To leave the way clear for reading modern languages, I decided that the requirement would best be dispatched in my first year. Before I knew it, I was hooked and ended up dropping one of the languages in favour of a joint degree in moral philosophy and Russian. For me it seemed the dream ticket. Russian literature was awash with existential difficulties and moral disorder, from the problem of free will in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) to the meaning of life itself in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) – not to mention all the ungovernable passions, suicide, murder and suffering humanity encountered along the way. Philosophy on the other hand, with its categorical imperatives and systematic approach to concepts of right and wrong, would provide a disciplined moral analysis. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Can Literature be Philosophical?
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky read Nikolai Leskov

Acclaimed translators read from their new collaboration

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The American University of Paris is now hosting free audio content online. The first posting is a series of readings by acclaimed translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: 'Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, renowned translators of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Gogol, Pasternak, and Chekhov, joined the CWT and the students of the MA in Cultural Translation to discuss and read from their forthcoming translation of Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895). Leskov, much beloved in Russia and held in almost equal esteem with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, was a master of the short story. He sought to write about ‘good people,’ who, as Pevear points out, are notoriously difficult to write about. Pevear and Volokhonsky read, in both English and Russian, selections from the stories “Lefty,” “Singlemind” and the preface to “Singlemind,” and “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov

A Press Release from Columbia University Press

Brian Boyd. Stalking Nabokov

The following is a press release from the Columbia University Press website:

Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov

At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote a thesis on Vladimir Nabokov that the famous author called “brilliant.” After gaining exclusive access to the writer’s archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). This collection features essays written by Boyd since completing the biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations.

Boyd confronts Nabokov’s life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokov’s best English-language works: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the author’s world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov’s biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokov’s metaphysics, Boyd cautions against their being used as the key to unlock all of the author’s secrets, showing instead the many other rooms in Nabokov’s castle of fiction that need exploring, such as his humor, narrative invention, and psychological insight into characters and readers alike. Appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever the author’s multifaceted genius.

Praise for the book

A readable collection on one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, this will be enjoyed by Nabokov fans and students of 20th century literature.

Library Journal

A remarkable read—all readers and scholars of Nabokov will need this book.

Michael Wood, Princeton University

About the Author

Brian Boyd is University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland. His work on American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand, and Russian literature, from epics to comics, has appeared in seventeen languages and has won awards on four continents. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, books on Pale Fire and Ada, and the enormous AdaOnline. He has edited Nabokov’s English fiction, autobiography, butterfly writings, and verse translations and is now editing a collection of the author’s letters to his wife. Also known for his evolutionary and cognitive work, he is the author of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction and the forthcoming Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets and is coeditor of Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. He is currently working on a biography of the philosopher Karl Popper.

[Publisher website]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Vladimir Nabokov: Literary Psychologist
• New Nabokov editions from Penguin
• Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov
• Author Insults

Vladimir Nabokov: Literary Psychologist

Has Vladimir Nabokov's writing anticipated trends in modern psychology?

Vladimir Nabokov. Photograph: Yousuf Karsh

In The American Scholar, Brian Boyd asks whether Vladimir Nabokov could be our greatest literary psychologist: 'We could move in many directions, which is itself a tribute to Nabokov’s range and strengths as a psychologist: the writer as reader of others and himself, as observer and introspector; as interpreter of the psychology he knew from fiction (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce), nonfiction, and professional psychology (William James, Freud, Havelock Ellis); as psychological theorist; and as psychological “experimenter,” running thought experiments on the characters he creates and on the effects he produces in readers.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• New Nabokov editions from Penguin
• Author Insults
• Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'