Ah yes, at some far distant date, When I am gone, and cannot know it, The cordial words: “There was a poet!”< Some dunce may yet pronounce as he Points out my portrait unctuously.
Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (2:XL)*
In his superb short biography of Alexander Pushkin (Hesperus, 2009), Robert Chandler notes that “Not only is Pushkin Russia’s greatest poet, he is also the author of the first major work in almost every literary genre.”
The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s final published work, was Russia’s first great prose novel. And it is the sort of linguistic and literary masterpiece one would expect from a great poet working at the height of his art, steeped in the history that surrounds his work (the Pugachyov Rebellion).
Pushkin had been studying Pugachyov for years, and had released a monumental historical work on the rebellion just two years before, including a special edition (with instructive notes) for Tsar Nicholas. But if his history was remarkable for its use of primary (eyewitness) sources and a well-rounded if chaotic presentation of events, The Captain’s Daughter was not interested in truth. Instead, Pugachyov becomes a vehicle for telling a touching story about forgiveness, duty and honor. It is a vivid, symmetrically crafted, sonorously poetic tale that deserves greater attention.
The Chandlers’ give it that attention not merely by offering a translation that is easy and true, but by placing the novel in proper historical context, with fascinating appendices on the challenges of its translation (and thus the hidden riches in the prose), and on Pushkin’s work as a historian (with necessary background on the rebellion). The latter two are vital additions to this translation, which originally appeared under the Hesperus imprint in 2008.
Pushkin’s senseless death in a duel followed soon after the publication of The Captain’s Daughter, and one year later the critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that “Every educated Russian must have a complete Pushkin, otherwise he has no right to be considered either educated or Russian.”
Any Russophile’s “complete Pushkin” should include this volume.
In April of this year, the CIA declassified 99 documents detailing the agency’s role in publishing Russian language versions (and attempting to smuggle them into the USSR) of Doctor Zhivago, a novel that Soviet authorities had decided, in their infinitesimal wisdom, to ban.
In a memo dated April 24, 1958, a senior CIA officer wrote: “We have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country [and] in his own language for his people to read.”
The agency quickly printed up copies of the novel for distribution to Soviet visitors at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, handing out 355 copies. Thousands more were later smuggled into the Eastern Bloc, and a year later a smaller, lightweight paperback version, designed to be surreptitiously fit into a jacket pocket, was printed.
Pasternak rocketed to world fame, winning the 1958 Nobel Prize thanks to the CIA’s literary intervention. It led to a tempest in the Soviet samovar that surely made leaders wish they had just allowed the quiet publication of Doctor Zhivago by some obscure Novosibirsk publishing house.
I recall a friend in Moscow saying how he had been eager to read a copy of the book when it first came out in the post-Soviet era. He said he had devoured it, only to be left wondering “what the fuss was about.” But of course this was a Russian living in the maelstrom of the 1990s, and it can be difficult to project oneself back into the fear-ridden 1950s to understand all that was at stake.
Finn and Couvée provide that context by telling far more than just the story of the CIA’s conspiracy. For it is the larger story of Boris Pasternak – the entwining of his life with Stalin, his uncharacteristically (for the Soviet 1930s and 40s) stiff spine, and his bold egotism – that created this perfect storm of tamizdat, Cold War espionage and publishing sensationalism.
It is a tale worthy of Le Carré, and, frankly, one that deserves close reading in our times, when Russia’s media and literature, while not subject to Stalinist censorship, are under increasing attack. The vitriol of personal and professional attacks on Pasternak have an eerily familiar ring to them, as does the rock-and-hard-placing of dissidents between the high politics of East and West.
There are few things as immutable to Russian culture as the banya. The banya, adages tell us is “an entire philosophy,” “communion,” “life.” The banya is, in fact “everything.”
In Moscow and Muscovites, Vladimir Gilyarovsky begins his exhaustive ethnological description of Moscow’s banyas by noting that “The banya was the one place that no Muscovite avoided. No master tradesman, no grandee, no poor man, no rich man could live without the commercial baths.”
MacWilliams, newly arrived in Moscow in the mid-1990s, soon found he could not live without banyas. He was sucked into the bathing subculture, ostensibly seeking to understand the mysterious culture of Russia through the rite that is the banya.
Yes, there is plenty of talk here about steaming techniques, eucalyptus leaves, felt hats and hidden rituals, but the broader focus of the book is on one man’s decade-long quest to observe Russian culture through the lens of this most Slavic of traditions. Often very frank (this is a PG-13 read at least) and open, With Light Steam is a personal and engaging look at a side of Russian life that few westerners can claim entry to or experience in.
MacWilliams travels the breadth and depth of Russian following his passion for the banya, from the Solovetsky Islands, where Gulag prisoners once bathed in bitter cold, to “field banyas” in Siberia, showing the lengths some will go to exercise this millennial-old custom. And traveling with him is a joy. He is a refreshingly self-deprecating, easy-going traveler and a superb storyteller. This is a book not to be missed.
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