Recently, I read an article about Constance Garnett, the prodigious turn-of-the-century British translator of the great 19th-century Russian authors. I remember her steady English voice so clearly. It accompanied my adolescent and young adult reading. It resounded in contrast to the extremes of the translated Russians. It was like hearing a staid clinician recount the ravings of the outraged or the cries of the crazed and desperate. If I thought about her, I assumed that she was a self-possessed Victorian, not quite a prude but not someone who shared the extremes that she rendered in prim and proper English. It seems, however, that Garnett in fact felt a deep sympathy for those extremes. A socialist and a discreet non-conformist, she met with and supported oppositional Russians. Today, our sanctimonious anti-Russian hysteria eclipses the universal heritage of the great Russian Realists. We would have to go back to the testimony of a Garnett or a Rilke to recover the reception of that brilliant and many-faceted colloquy that extended from Pushkin to Chekhov and beyond. Even anti-communism, even anti-fascism did not eclipse Tolstoy or Goethe the way Russian literature and culture are overshadowed today. What made them unique for me was that like the young American that I was, the Russians, too, had received the heritage of European literature and struggled to make sense of it by asking what sort of human beings in what sort of situations would respond in what sort of ways to those deeper and stronger traditions and currents that they received from abroad. Russia was as remote from Europe as America was. Both were seeking their cultural roots in, and exploring their distinctness from, the old world. This led to all sorts of responses and articulations. One of the most logical was the recognition that the outer form assumed by a society and culture is not something inevitable and natural, but rather something that has to be adjudicated and worked out, imagined and realized. Even an author whose political convictions are reactionary can have this critical effect. What is, is not inevitable. A young person asking who she is raises the self-questioning to a universal plane. Who I am depends on what the world is: two tormentingly open questions. It’s enough to consider the deep sympathy that Dostoyevsky engenders for Raskolnikov who represents everything that the author despises. I was Raskolnikov, drowning in his own nothingness and at the same time convinced of his potential exceptionalism. Every self-conscious young person is him. I should face death the way Pierre Bezukhov unflinchingly readies himself for a French firing squad after the fall of Moscow in 1812 (and, spared, becomes a brother to the wise peasant Platonov).
Now that I am facing my impending death, the literature I read offers exempla for how to die well.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 