Fiction: Scene in Café Griboyedov with Russian Expression

Café Griboyedov

Terrance Lindall

In the above illustration by Terrance Lindall of a scene in my story, "The Bottomless Bottle of Beer," we see Koroviev in his characteristic pince-nez and checkered clothes pointing to Hella as she approaches the table where he and the story's anonymous 'hero' sit, though we can't see the latter's face since he's watching Hella approach, as is also an enamored waiter. The café scene just prior to Hella's appearance is given below:

The café was large, spacious, packed; my traveling companion seemed to know everyone as he grasped hands in greeting while we made our way to a table inexplicably free of patrons. I tried to focus on what the tall fellow was telling me about each individual he greeted but could scarcely hear above a loud, jazzed-up version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." And waiters! Griboyedov had waiters! Bearing trays laden with cups and saucers high above their heads, they pushed their way among the patrons, hoarsely shouting, "Izviníte menyá!" Dropping the ordered cakes and coffees down onto tables with a clunk, sweeping used cups, saucers, and silverware clattering onto their trays, dumping loads of used dish- and silverware roaring into sinks, shouting out orders for various coffees and cakes. In short, pandaemonium.

This scene will feel familiar to those who've read Michail Bulgakov's wonderful novel, The Master and Margarita, for I've borrowed a scene from that tale to structure this description. But I have a question about the Russian expression,"Izviníte menyá," for I originally had "Prostíte menyá." A Russian girl I met suggested the change when I described the scene to her, and she also noted a third possibility, "Proshu proshcheniya," for which I've not yet found the diacritical marks, but I think that one's overly formal. Anyway, here are the three possibilities:

Простите меня!
Prostíte menyá!
Excuse me!

Извините меня!
Izviníte menyá!
Excuse me!

Прошу прощения!
Proshu proshcheniya!
I beg your pardon!

If any of my readers are Russian or at least knowledgeable about the Russian language, please feel free to advise me on the best expression for the scene. Keep in mind that the waiters are not particularly courteous and would likely use the briefest expression possible, so the expression used could even differ from any of the three that I've noted here.

I thank all in advance . . .

Dostoevsky Meets Dickens: Too Good To Be True?

In her 2008 book, Dickens and Creativity, Barbara Nathan Hardy notes with her opening words to chapter seven, "Subversions and Oppositions," that:

Readers of Paradise Lost have sometimes felt that the Devil is so articulate and alluring that he undermines the Divine power and presence. To descend a little from Milton's Sublime, we find Dickens also creating powerful subversions, presences that accompany his portraits and proposals of morality, to counter, criticize, or undermine them. (page 87)

Hardy writes some five pages later of an 'event' that might have been able to offer some insight toward explaining this two-fold nature of Dickens:

In a fascinating interview Dickens had with Dostoevsky, he apparently told his great Russian admirer that both his pure simple characters like Nell and his villains were himself; the good were what he would like to be and the evil derived from his worse self. (page 92)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning. Yesterday, my daughter and I were reading an article on Dickens by the novelist David Gates, "Off the pages, a Dickensian life, too" (November 5-6, 2011), in the weekend issue of the International Herald Tribune. To my surprise, the article described a meeting in 1862 between Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. At the thought of such a scene, I recalled my freshman year Baylor University professor, Morse Hamilton, who taught creative writing and English literature, loved Dickens, but also knew Russian and had read Dostoevsky -- whom he loved as well -- in the original, and I exclaimed:

"Morse would have been thrilled!"

I exclaimed to myself, anyway, for Sa-Rah was reading aloud, and I didn't want to interrupt. But I had a second thought, also unarticulated:

"It sounds too good to be true."

The anecdote on Dickens and Dostoevsky appears in an online version in the New York Times, "Being Charles Dickens" (November 3, 2011), but a fuller version appears earlier, likewise in the NYT, in "Two-Sided Man Gets Two New Biographies" (October 24, 2011), Michiko Kakutani's review of the same two biographies: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. Kakutani provides a fuller quote than Gates, so let's look at his account:

He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.

This may in fact describe Dickens well, but it sounds like something that Dostoevsky might have said about himself . . . or what someone might have imagined Dostoevsky saying about himself, or about Dickens. Douglas-Fairhurst seems not to have recounted the anecdote in his biography, so Kakutani's quote -- and the shorter version in Gates -- come from Tomalin. The same anecdote, however, appears in an earlier biography of Dickens by Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, published in 2009. Gates notes Slater's earlier account, and that both Tomalin and Slater learned of the anecdote in a 2002 issue of The Dickensian, but Kakutani says nothing of this, though he does later offer a "Correction: October 29, 2011," which states:

The Books of The Times review on Tuesday, about "Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist" by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and "Charles Dickens" by Claire Tomalin, recounted an anecdote in Ms. Tomalin's book in which Dostoyevsky told of meeting Dickens. While others have also written of such a meeting and of a letter in which Dostoyevsky was said to have described it, some scholars have questioned the authenticity of the letter and whether the meeting ever occurred.

One such scholar is Sarah J. Young, who identifies the article that describes this supposed letter: Stephanie Harvey, "Dickens's Villains: Confession and a Suggestion," The Dickensian, 98.3 (Winter 2002), 233-235. Young probably isn't the first skeptic, for she writes of this only on December 19, 2010 -- some eight years later -- in a post, "Russians in London: Dostoevsky," on her website, Sarah J. Young: Lecturer in Russian at SSEES. Here's what she says:

A short article in The Dickensian claims that Dostoevsky met Dickens during his visit, citing a letter from 1878 to S. D. Yanovsky in which Dostoevsky states, 'Dickens told me the same thing when I met him at the office of his magazine All the Year Round in 1862' (Harvey, p. 233). One might explain the absence of reference to this meeting in Dickens's papers by the fact that Dostoevsky didn't really become known in Britain until some years later, after the former’s death, but it seems highly unlikely that Dostoevsky would have kept quiet about it until 16 years after the event. The source of the letter seems dubious too. It was supposedly published in 1987 in Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR (Bulletin of the Kazakh SSR Academy of Sciences), which I'm pretty sure does not exist, and if it had appeared in that year, then it's almost inconceivable that it wouldn't have been included in Dostoevsky's correspondence in the Complete Works -- those volumes were published from 1988. One can only conclude therefore that the letter isn't genuine, which is rather sad, because the idea of the two men meeting is so wonderful.

For some reason, I can't access The Dickensian (though readers can try, then perhaps report back), and I've also been unable to find anything about Ms. Stephanie Harvey, so I'm not in a position either to satisfy my curiosity about the supposed letter or about Ms. Harvey's credentials.

But the meeting does seem to have turned out as I feared: too good to be true.

Daniel Clowes: Wilson

Wilson

Daniel Clowes

Click Image Once, Twice to Enlarge

(Image from New York Times)

I'm a sucker for the literary allusion, as in the one below from Sam Lipsyte's New York Times review, "Dyspeptic Living," of the graphic novel Wilson, by Daniel Clowes:

Say hello to Wilson, the eponymous hero of Daniel Clowes's latest novel-­in-comics. Perhaps he is a hero of our time. But if that phrase makes all you comp-lit majors think of Lermontov's Pechorin, think again: this haggard, middle-­aged fellow is no dashingly depressive duelist or seducer. Wilson hectors people in coffee shops and hits on his ex-wife with sweet nothings like, "As you know, I certainly never minded a larger woman."

Lipsyte's Russian-literature allusion to Lermontov's Hero of Our Time -- which I read as a sophomore many years ago during my Russian literature phase -- makes me want to read Clowes's graphic novel . . . though, of course, the two books have little in common because Wilson, unlike Pechorin, is no Byronic hero:

He is a rich mix of states and traits: lonely, alienated, obsessed with his dog and the mistakes of his past, unjustifiably smug, genuinely funny, nettlesome, under­handed, empathetic and always all too human. Does he stand for a generation, like Pechorin? No, he stands for Wilson -- a glorious swirl of confusion, hypocrisy and simple yearning. Wilson may seem like an everyman, but he is soaked in idiosyncrasy, and not necessarily the kind that leads to some imagined universal. Instead we get a flawed and conflicted individual, whose laments, even when tainted by ego, or maybe especially when tainted by ego, are deeply affecting.

I even kind of like the comical sequence above, "Marriage." I'm less certain about some of the others that I've seen, such as "Fellowship" and "Gate 27," which you can also see, along with "Marriage," in this pdf.

If anything appeals to me about Wilson personally, maybe it's because (as Lipsyte describes him) he seems "like many reasonably smart if not completely self-aware people responding to the world with bile" -- not because that sort of person appeals to me but because I might have grown into one of those people if I hadn't met Sun-Ae, so having Wilson around as a reminder and a warning renders him useful to me.

Fortunately, I didn't turn out like Wilson. Granted, I might be one of those "reasonably smart if not completely self-aware people responding to the world with bile," but I'm at least one of those "reasonably smart if not completely self-aware people responding to the world with bile" who also has a lovely wife and two great kids.

So, I'm different.

Andrei Makine: Pardonnez mon français, non?

Life is But a Dream?

(Image from Amazon.com)

Michael Kimmelman, whom I've previously cited in Gypsy Scholar, has written a fascinating NYT article, "Pardon My French" (April 21, 2010), on the feared 'decline' of the elegant, elite French language -- feared by the French to be declining, though Mr. Kimmelman is more optimistic.

Foreign-born speakers, however, are taking over . . . for instance, a certain Andreï Makine, who initially encountered difficulties as a foreigner writing in French in France:

[T]o a contemporary writer like the Soviet-born Andreï Makine, who found political asylum here [in France] in 1987, French promises assimilation and a link to the great literary tradition of Zola and Proust. He recounted the story of how, 20-odd years ago, his first manuscripts, which he wrote in French, were rejected by French publishers because it was presumed that he couldn't write French well enough as a foreigner.

Then he invented the name of a translator, resubmitted the same works as if they were translations from Russian, and they won awards. He added that when his novel "Dreams of My Russian Summers" became a runaway best seller and received the Prix Goncourt, publishing houses in Germany and Serbia wanted to translate the book from its "original" Russian manuscript, so Mr. Makine spent two "sleepless weeks," he said, belatedly producing one. (page 2)

Kimmelman has his own point to make, but I find amusing that the Germans and Serbians both wanted the 'original' Russian rather than the original French and that Makine had to stay up for two weeks writing nonstop to produce the 'original' Russian from the original French.

But perhaps there is something more original about a Russian-language edition of Dreams of My Russian Summers? I am curious. Which is better, the French original, or the Russian translation? For that matter, how are the German and Serbian translations from the 'original' Russian? Are they superior to the French original? And what of the English translation from the French Le testament français?

As I implied once before, I am lost among the translators . . .