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By Brygida Pudelko, Opole University,
Poland
Viktor Borisov. Joseph
Conrad v Rossii. Moscow: N.p., 1997. v+220 [In Russian].
Viktor Borisov’s valuable and detailed
Joseph Conrad v Rossii focuses
on the reception of Conrad’s works in Russia from the first
translations published in 1898 to criticism of the 1990s. Although
critics differ in their understanding and evaluation of his fiction,
the interest in Conrad’s personality dates to the beginning
of the twentieth century.
The study opens with a preface evaluating Conrad
as a master novelist and stylist whose realism is integrally bound
to a romantic conception of life. Borisov points to Conrad’s
affinities with Polish romanticism, but concedes that background
was only one factor shaping the writer. In Borisov’s view
Conrad’s interest in the sea does limit him to being a fine
sea writer, and he eludes classification as exclusively neo-romantic.
Doubtless one of the most impressive features of Conrad’s
writing, Borisov explains, is his affirmation of solidarity, fidelity,
a sense of duty, an ideal of honour, and a concern with social injustice,
despotism, and anarchy. According to Borisov, the memorable moments
in Conrad’s fiction often involve the tragedy of men in hostile
environments.
Conrad’s Russian reception is presented
in a now standard chronological framework. The opening chapter analyses
the first translations during the final years of tsarist rule. The
second chapter focuses on reception in the post-Revolutionary period,
from 1918 to 1957. It notes examples of the left-wing criticism
that popularised official Soviet doctrine and emphasised Russian
cultural uniqueness and its superiority over the West and its decadent
writers, whose work reflected bourgeois decay and were irrelevant
to Communist society. Borisov’s third chapter highlights critical
opinion following the centenary of Conrad’s birth in 1957,
and his final chapter examines criticism from 1979.
Conrad’s works have long been read and
appreciated in Russia. The first translations – “Karain”
and “The Lagoon” appeared in Russki
Vestnik in 1898, a year after their publication in England
– were followed by “Youth” in 1901. Published
without the names of their translators, these failed to garner the
attention of critics unlike the later translations of Conrad’s
novels on Russian subjects.
Borisov points to 1908, when The
Secret Agent, translated by Zinaida Vengerova (1867–1941)
appeared in Vestnik Evropy,
three years after the 1905 Revolution, in a period of anarchy, terrorism,
and revolutionary treacheries and provocations. Married to the poet
N. M. Minsky (1855–1920), Vengerova, a well-known critic and
translator from English, French, and other languages and the author
of works on Western literature, corresponded with Constance Garnett,
Hugh Walpole, and English writers and scholars. The
Secret Agent revealed Conrad’s interest in the psychological
aspects of betrayal and resulted in credible, ironic portraits of
revolutionaries and anarchists.
Under Western
Eyes, Conrad’s second novel on Russian themes, was
translated in 1912, soon after its initial appearance. Borisov concludes
that Conrad’s interest in and bitterness against Russia was
the result of the failed 1863 Polish Insurrection and the bootless
struggle against Russian imperialism. He notes Conrad’s interest
in Turgenev and his detestation of Dostoyevsky, who was “too
Russian” for him, but whose The
Devils and Crime and Punishment
influenced Under Western Eyes.
Borisov states that although critics seriously
differed in their understanding and evaluation of that novel, it
has attracted serious attention since Vengerova’s appreciative
essay of 1912. Borisov concludes his evaluation of Conrad’s
pre-Revolution reception by quoting information about the writer’s
life and work in the New Encyclopaedic
Dictionary, edited by K. Arsenev (1911-16), in which Conrad’s
output is treated solely in terms of the sea stories and the depiction
of distant lands.
Not until the 1920s did Conrad’s life
and work attract serious and extensive critical attention. As proof
of this Borisov quotes a fragment of a letter of 31 October 1924
by the liberal poet Boris Pasternak to his sister Josephine, then
in England, recommending her to read Hardy, Conrad (“a great
contemporary writer”), Joyce, and Proust.
Borisov’s second chapter opens with Maxim
Gorky, a great admirer of Conrad, whose visit to London in May 1907
led to his meeting Charles Wright (1862-1940), a publisher and expert
on Russian literature, at whose home Gorky met Conrad, Hardy, Shaw,
and other writers at a dinner. Borisov also mentions Gorky’s
criticism of the translations of Nostromo, published in Izvestia
in 1931, and of Almayer’s Folly, published in Vsemirnaya
Literatura in 1923 with a brief, approving preface by K.
Chukovsky, an expert on English and American literature and one
of the journal’s editors.
Borisov’s second chapter also provides
information about a four-volume collection of Conrad’s works
that began appearing in 1924 with translations of Tales
of Unrest, “Freya of the Seven Isles,” Typhoon,
Under Western Eyes, and Lord
Jim. The introduction by the well-known Russian critic, translator,
and novelist Evgenii Lann (1896–1958) evaluates Conrad’s
works highly and takes issue with the classification of Conrad as
a sea writer. In Lann’s opinion, Conrad, “the finest
stylist in the English language” offers a “psychological
analysis of the human spirit” (25) squarely in the Slavic
tradition. Under Western Eyes,
which appeared in this series in 1924 in a new translation by A.
Krivtsova, met with critical appreciation.
In this chapter Borisov offers interesting
and insightful observations on the first translations of The
Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Chance,
Victory, and The
Rescue (1925). The year 1926 marked the publication of a
collection of Conrad’s works translated by E. Lann under the
title Heart of Darkness (it also included “The End of Tether”
and “Youth”) and the publication of A. Polotska’s
translation of The Shadow-Line,
followed by “The Informer,” “The Brute,”
“The Duel,” “Freya of the Seven Isles,”
Typhoon, “An Outpost
of Progress,” and “The Secret Sharer.”
Borisov agrees with critic and translator I.
Kashkin (1899–1963) who, analysing the first Russian translation
of Nostromo (1928), draws
attention to Conrad’s Tolstoyan skill of handling plot achronologically
and his adeptness at switching point of view. Kashkin was especially
interested in Conrad’s creation of dynamic characters à
la Tolstoy who are constituted of a number of minute factors, deeds,
and features that develop as the plot unfolds.
Borisov also mentions critics who describe
Conrad, together with Joyce and Lawrence, as a “bourgeois
decadent” abandoning “true social subjects” (46)
for the exotic and subjective. He comments on the 1953 edition of
the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia,
which ranks Conrad among “bourgeois decadents” who escape
from reality to a distant and threatening environment and notes
that Conrad goes unmentioned in Professor Anikst’s The
History of English Literature (1956).
The enormous differences between the Russian
political and cultural situation in the 1920s and the gloomy Soviet
1950s mark criticism of the period. Cultural decline was already
underway in the 1930s as the result of strict guidelines and control,
but with the hardening of ideological control after the Second World
War cultural connections with the West were severed, and the harsh
Stalinist climate paralysed creative activity in all fields. The
party line was enforced, partiinost in literature meaning that both
recent and distant history could not be truthfully described. It
also implied the almost complete exclusion of lyricism and satire,
with literary works being obliged to deliver a positive message
and featuring larger-than-life heroes. Conflict was taboo for, according
to party doctrine, conflict had disappeared from Soviet society.
Conrad’s books, especially those on Russian
subjects, were thus not published during this period. Artists had
to deal with “typical” people and situations because
“socialist realism” was not a synonym for realism, and
official philosophers devoted their energies to criticising bourgeois
and “revisionist” doctrine. Conrad was thus often praised
as an anti-colonialist and as a critic of bourgeois society, although
he was at times also accused of a “bourgeois orientation.”
In the years of darkness most of the intelligentsia took a position
somewhere in between, bitter experience having taught that straying
too far from the official line led to repression. This explains
the ambiguity that some critics expressed about Conrad’s works.
Borisov’s third chapter opens with a
review of J. Kagarlitsky’s 1957 essay in Inostrannaya
Literatura to mark the centennial year of Conrad’s
birth. A serious attempt to understand and evaluate the Conrad canon,
the essay focuses on Conrad’s romanticism, with Kagarlitsky
juxtaposing Western “decadent literature” and its concern
with the crisis of human ties, with Conrad’s successful attempt
to overcome pessimism and his belief in human potential.
As Borisov observes, J. Kagarlitsky’s
and I. Katarsky’s contribution to the third volume of The
History of English Literature (1958) reflects a sincere interest
in Conrad as a writer of the sea, who successfully portrayed brave
seamen, praised for their endurance, friendship, and loyalty. His
awareness of the crisis of bourgeois ideology and uncertain future
prospects helped him to develop the idea of human isolation. The
authors express their favourable opinion of Almayer’s
Folly, Nostromo, and
Victory, and they view Conrad
as a critic of bourgeois reality and colonialism in “An Outpost
of Progress,” “Heart of Darkness,” and Nostromo.
They regard Under Western Eyes
as Conrad’s worst novel because of its repulsive portrayal
of revolutionaries and reliance on Dostoyevskian imagery and situations.
The year 1959 marked the publication of a two-volume
set including Lord Jim, “Youth,” “Heart of Darkness,”
Typhoon, The
Shadow-Line, and “Freya of the Seven Isles” as
well as the first translations into other languages of then Soviet
Union. The growth of Conrad’s popularity was due to changes
in the intellectual climate after the 20th Congress of the Communist
Party in 1956 and gradual improvements after Stalin’s death
in 1953. Slow at first, this thaw gathered momentum after 1956,
to be followed by a re-freeze in the 1960s.
The literature of the thaw aimed at reducing
the gulf between official slogans and reality, with propaganda discouraged
and “sincerity” becoming the new watchword. At this
time Conrad’s fiction received some laudatory reviews. Borisov
finds notable traces of Conrad in the novels of the liberal writer
Konstantin Paustovsky (1892-1968), in particular, from The
Mirror of the Sea in Chernoye
Morye. Borisov cites Lev Levitsky’s discussion of this,
which found Conrad and Paustovsky united by a passionate love of
the sea as a source of values and moral standards.
Borisov states that after the publication of
Conrad’s works in 1959 a number of merely incidental, superficial,
and odd commentaries appeared, but Conrad’s popularity in
Russia registered a considerable growth. Socialist realism imposed
certain rules on historians, philosophers, and critics who not only
had to preach the party line but to cite Marx, Lenin, and Stalin
as often as possible. Hence, many books and essays of the period
are little more than loosely strung together quotations from the
“classics.” This is true of Chuchuvadze’s essay,
which declares that Conrad’s novels attack imperialism.
Borisov stresses the importance of E. Sebeshko’s
1971 essay on The Secret Agent,
which exposes Conrad’s bourgeois individualism as a philosophy
of life. In her opinion, scholars examined the novel as “a
caricature of revolution” and failed to concentrate on its
analysis of the “tragedy of human life” (104). She points
to the use of irony and Conrad’s attention to detail, which
helped him “to depict the truth of a repulsive existence in
a monstrous world” (105). Conrad was, she believes, interested
in and terrified by Russia, but never identified Russia with its
despotic government. Borisov also focuses on difficulties and factual
inaccuracies M. Urnov’s 1970 essay focussing on Conrad and
Dostoevsky. He finds verbal echoes of Dostoyevsky and imitations
of Dostoyevsky’s methods of characterization. Particularly
striking is his assertion that Conrad read Dostoevsky in Russian.
Borisov’s final chapter is devoted to
recent criticism, with the 1980s marking a revival of Conrad’s
popularity. A new translation of Nostromo appeared in 1985, followed
by a number of novels and stories, accompanied with prefaces (sometimes
containing factual errors), in which, according to Borisov, Conrad
is viewed as one of the best English writers, a writer of the sea
and the tropics, an anti-colonialist, and a master of psychological
analysis.
The chapter provides an overview of N. Anastasev’s
essay in Voprosy Literatury in
1985 on Conrad’s artistic methods. It points to Conrad’s
“cosmic scope of artistic ideas” in Typhoon,
Lord Jim, The
Nigger of the “Narcissus,” and “Heart of
Darkness,” and examines Conrad as an artist who “explored
mysterious phenomena and depths of the universe” (133). In
Anastasev’s view, the knowledge of Russia expressed by the
teacher of languages in Under Western
Eyes is only “cold rhetoric about guilt, betrayal,
honour, and endurance” (134). Borisov argues with this opinion
finding that the portrayal of revolutionaries and of facts in
Under Western Eyes is no less convincing than in Dostoyevsky.
The final chapter also focuses on Volume 8
of E. Geneva’s The History
of World Literature (1994) that contains basic biographical
facts and presents Conrad as a realist and romantic, the author
of complex novels describing tragic human destiny. She concentrates
on moral and psychological aspects, the ability to uncover human
destiny, character, and individual mysteries. Geneva admits that
even though traces of Dostoyevsky can be found in Conrad (the Russian
subject and characterization), he was closer to Henry James in his
presentational methods and moral interests. She classifies Conrad
as a predecessor of existentialism and a master of extreme situations
whose most notable characters are proud, isolated solitaries. As
members of bourgeois society,
their solitude differs from that of the classic romantic heroes.
Borisov closes with information about a three-volume
collection of Conrad’s works published by Terra in 1996 after
an unexpectedly long period of gestation. The volumes contain
The Mirror of the Sea, The
Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Almayer’s
Folly, An Outcast of the Islands,
The Rescue, Lord
Jim, “The End of the Tether”, Victory,
“Youth,” Typhoon,
“Heart of Darkness,” “The Secret Sharer,”
“The Black Mate,” and “The Duel.” The old
translations largely fail to meet contemporary needs, and T. Prokopov’s
preface, in addition to its factual errors, views Conrad as a descriptive
writer of the sea, “who loved it and cursed it” (138).
Nothing is said of Under Western
Eyes or The Secret Agent.
Although most of Conrad’s work is known
and appreciated by Russian critics, there are some evident misconceptions
about it. Most critics repeat Conrad’s strongly voiced anti-colonialism
and criticism of bourgeois life. Favourable reactions to Under
Western Eyes testify that it was not considered an attack
on Russia.
© 2005 Brygida Pudelko
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