Gott & Blandat

Critical Companion & I saw this sign in the window of the Science Fiction Bookstore around the corner [most literally] on Saturday. Right away I decided I would buy all the gifts for my family from this store – coincidentally, most of them are big sci-fi fans. Then we went into the store and were told they’re closed because of “trouble with the tax man”. Oh well…

A lovely ‘fulkväll’ with Mrs S on Saturday evening.  That’s right – no such occasion is ever complete without two buck chuck from Trader Joe’s…

Drinking hot toddies – warm spiced cider together with our old friend Jameson – tonight with Critical Companion by candle light. I thought the best place for the powerful shot of Ingrid Bergman was next to our impressive bookshelf.

It’s been pretty much up and down the past couple of days for me – some ‘gott’ but mainly ‘blandat’ as they say in my native country – I’ve been stressing out about the master’s exam coming up and this stress has at times been so paralyzing that I haven’t been able to concentrate in class and thus wondered if my mental ability has all of the sudden drastically decreased. I don’t think it has but it is not a pleasant feeling to be sitting with lots of things to say and no way of expressing them and in this way giving the general impression of an individual who doesn’t know what she’s doing there in the first place. I’ve also been suffering from some slight pain in my throat for the past couple of days which added to the overall sensation of discomfort and left me feeling tired and out of it for most of the time. Today I decided to stop procrastinating and spend the entire day with the Russian novel; yesterday, I talked some with one of my professors about how to best prepare myself for the exam and was told to ‘play with the canon’. This creative idea has never occurred to me before and so today I decided to first figure out which works included in ‘the canon’ as stated by my department here are monumental in my understanding of Russian literature. Once I had figured that out, I broke up the chronology of the usual MA list – which is first divided into periods and then alphabetically by author and their works in an almost chronological order [but I found some slip ups in the chronology here and there] – and made my own chronology of major Russian novels, focusing on answering three questions as I made my own list: when? (time of publication versus time of writing); where? (serialized in what journal and when they appeared as separate editions); and what? (genre, as defined by the author versus defined by literary history). Then I included as ‘extra’ information about the novels which I think is interesting to me and something I would pay attention to if I were teaching these works to students. My list includes 43 major Russian works out of which I confessed to having read 29 as well as not having read 14 of them. This exercise generated very basic entries looking like the following:

1823-31: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837)

Genre “novel in verse”, eight parts plus a ninth chapter (“Onegin’s Journey”) demolished by censorship. Published seperatly in 1833. Belinsky called it “an encyclopedia of Russian life”. Nabokov said “it’s all about language”. In the 20^th century, Lotman used its details to describe life in the first half of the 19^th century.

1862: Fathers and Children by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818-1883)

Written 1860-1862. Major contemporary reaction in criticism: Pisarev’s article “Bazarov”. The character Bazarov became a living part of contemporary Russian culture and society.

1862-63: What is to Be Done? by Nikloai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828-1889)

Genre “(socialist) utopian novel”. It was intended as an answer to Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. Written from December 1862 to April 1863 in prison. Published in the journal «Современник» in 1863. Published seperatly in 1867 (Geneva) and 1906 (Russia). Lenin loved this book; Shalamov hated this book.

1873-77: Anna Karenina by Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Published in parts (seven parts – the eighth part only when the novel was published as a whole) in «Русский вестник» 1875-1877. Major critical response from Boris Eikhenbaum in the 20^th century.

1925: Cement by Fedor Vasilevich Gladkov (1883-1958)

A classic of socialist realism (a so called construction novel). The same author as Energy (1933). Niether of these classic Soviet prose works I have read.

1927: Envy by Yuri Karlovich Olesha (1899-1960)

Published in the journal «Красная новь». Has the best opening line in all of Russian literature: «Он поет по утрам в клозете» [“He sings in the mornings in the toilet”].

1927: Twelve Chairs by Il’f (1897-1937) and Petrov (1903-1942)

The continuation «Золотой теленок» was published in 1931. Petrov is the younger brother of Valentin Kataev who wrote «Алмазный мой венец» and had a crush on Bulgakov’s sister.

1929-40: Master and Margarita by Mikhail Afanas’evich Bulgakov (1891-1940)

Published for the first time in 1966 (incomplete version); separate edition in 1973.

1945-55: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960)

Published on November 23 1957 in Italy; in Soviet Union it appeared only in 1988 in the journal «Новый мир». Pasternak received the Nobel Prize in literature 1958.

Next Thursday – this is the one day of the week when I don’t have to come in to the university – I will devote to Russian poetry which is something that I like a lot but don’t know a whole lot about. The following Thursday I will spend figuring out my ‘isms’ and how they each fit into literary history: sentimentalism, romanticism, realism, symbolism, futurism, modernism, socialist-realism, post-modernism. I’m not at all as stressed after having spent this day getting some things straight in my head and also made a plan for the next two weeks. I will pass this exam. And with a little bit of luck it will indeed be a ‘happy and healthy experience’.