How the Two Ivans Quarelled and Other Russian Comic Stories , livre ebook

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67 pages

English

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The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs. This is Gogol's humour at its best, where the most irrelevant-seeming details and turns of phrase suddenly take on a bizarre life of their own. The second story, Ivan Krylov's Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather, has an ingenuous narrator praise the nobility and modesty of a landowner whose actions prove him to be otherwise. The final two stories, by the Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, are satirical attacks on the inability of civil servants to cope with real life, and on Russia's autocracy. Together, they represent some of Russia's finest comic writing before the twentieth century.

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Publié par	Alma Books
Date de parution	07 juillet 2019
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9780714548371
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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How the Two Ivans Quarrelled
and Other Russian Comic Stories
Translated by Guy Daniels

ALMA CLASSICS

alma classics an imprint of:
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
‘The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’ first published in Russian in 1834 ‘A Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather’ first published in Russian in 1792 ‘A Tale of How One Muzhik Looked after Two Generals’ first published in Russian in 1869 ‘The Eagle as Patron of the Arts’ first published in Russian in 1884 ‘The Tale of Ivan the Fool’ first published in Russian in 1886 These translations first published, together with other stories, in the US in the volume Russian Comic Fiction by New American Library in 1970, and later reprinted by Schocken Books in 1986
These revised translations, with a revised introduction, first published by Alma Classics in 2011 This new edition first published by Alma Classics in 2017
Translation, introduction and notes © Guy Daniels, 1970
Printed and bound in UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-664-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
Introduction
A Note on the Translations
The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich
Chapter the First
Chapter the Second
Chapter the Third
Chapter the Fourth
Chapter the Fifth
Chapter the Sixth
Chapter the Seventh
A Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather
A Tale of How One Muzhik Looked after Two Generals
The Eagle as Patron of the Arts
The Tale of Ivan the Fool
Notes

Introduction
The true homeland of comedy is a
despotism without too many gallows.
Stendhal, Racine and Shakespeare
F or our ausländer ’ s stereotype of Russian literature as unrelievedly gloomy, we can blame other things besides our own ignorance: above all, the vagaries of the Russian comic spirit. The brilliance and vigour of that spirit cannot be called into question. Throughout the history of pre-revolutionary Russian literature, it enjoyed undisputed supremacy on the stage. Without exception, the few eighteenth-century Russian plays that remain worthy of mention are comedies, from Fonvizin’s The Hobbledehoy and The Brigadier General to Kapnist’s Chicane and Krylov’s Trumf . And so are the two greatest plays of the nineteenth century: Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit and Gogol’s The Inspector General. Again, most of the major poets, from Derzhavin through Krylov, Pushkin and Lermontov, to Nekrasov, were masters of comic verse, as were numerous minor poets, like A.K. Tolstoy. But in the realm of Russia’s greatest literary achievement, the novel, the behaviour of that comic spirit has been decidedly skittish. Except for a few brief visits to the dark abodes of Dostoevsky’s novel-tragedies, it has pretty much avoided the domain of the “Great Prose Realists”; and for all the splendour of that one isolated edifice, Dead Souls , the “Russian comic novel” as a genre unto itself can hardly be said to exist.
The same is true of short fiction. There are plenty of humorous sketches (Chekhov alone wrote hundreds of them) but only a few first-rate comic stories. Hence the limited scope of this collection. Indeed, of the authors represented here, only one – Gogol – was primarily a creator of comic fiction. Indeed, in a sense Gogol was the creator of the comic short story, and ‘How the Two Ivans Quarrelled’ (1834) is perhaps the best, and certainly the first, masterpiece of its kind.
It is a sobering thought that one of the gloomiest periods in Russia’s history – the reign of the “pewtery-eyed” Nicholas I (1825–55) – produced its greatest comic genius, Nikolai Gogol. And it is not only sobering but dismaying to reflect that Nicholas, who was the sworn enemy of Lermontov and contrived to make the last years of Pushkin’s life miserable, sometimes just couldn’t seem to do enough for Gogol. He personally intervened, for instance, to permit the first production of The Inspector General ; and during the writing of Dead Souls he responded to Gogol’s appeals for financial help with two handsome grants. Now the “Prussian Tsar” was occasionally obtuse; and this trait of his is nowhere more evident than in these magnanimous gestures – considering the ultimately devastating social effect of the two works in question. On the other hand, we can be sure that when the already demented Gogol – some five years before his death by self-imposed starvation – published his infamous Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847), its abject eulogy of autocracy came as no surprise to Nicholas. The book’s shock effect was reserved for the author’s radical friends – like Belinsky, whose outrage and dismay were vented in his celebrated letter to Gogol.
It was Belinsky who first recognized Gogol’s stature as an artist and called public attention to it – in an article centred upon Mirgorod , Gogol’s second collection of Ukrainian stories, which included ‘The Two Ivans’. For this alone he deserves something better than the downgrading of him that has become fashionable among us. I was therefore much gratified, upon looking again at Vladimir Nabokov’s marvellous (and often misleading) book on Gogol, to rediscover in it a spirited defence of Belinsky against the “little conceptions” of “some modern American critics”. Elated by this unexpected moral support, I turned for further enlightenment to Vladimir Vladimirovich’s comments on Gogol’s Ukrainian stories.
Those comments led off with an abrupt dismissal of Gogol’s first collection, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–32) whose “charm and fun have singularly faded”. True enough. So I settled back in pleasurable anticipation of some deep and delightful insights into Mirgorod – and particularly into those two masterful tales that established Gogol’s fame as a maker of comic fictions: ‘The Two Ivans’ and ‘Old-World Landowners’.
And what did I learn? I learnt: 1) that Gogol is not a humorist; 2) that his misconceived fame as such is based solely on those faded Evenings – except that: 3) it is also based on Mirgorod ; 4) that both Evenings and Mirgorod leave Nabokov “totally indifferent” – except that: 5) when he reread the former it didn’t leave him totally indifferent.
Well. If made by a lesser author, such muddle-headed pronouncements would of course be beneath one’s notice. But when they occur in an otherwise brilliant book by perhaps the most “prestigious” author of our times, duty demands that we hoist the red flag signalling “Danger!”
Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol is in some ways the most important – and by all odds the best-written – book on its subject. That it should be read goes without saying. What doesn’t go without saying is that it is also the worst possible introduction to the Gogol of ‘The Two Ivans’ and ‘Old-World Landowners’.
The best introduction is still the one penned by Belinsky, in his article ‘On the Russian Short Story and the Short Stories of Mr Gogol’, which appeared in The Telescope in 1835. Struck by Gogol’s tremendous originality, Belinsky came up with a phrase which still serves, perhaps better than any other, to mark the watershed between the literature of the old school and modern fiction – of which Gogol and Sterne are the greatest forerunners. In ‘Old-World Landowners’, ‘The Two Ivans’ and ‘The Nose’, said Belinsky, Gogol “made everything out of nothing”.
Exactly. In ‘Old-World Landowners’, as in a play by Beckett or Ionesco, nothing happens . The old couple just “drink and eat, and eat and drink and then, as people have done since time immemorial, die”. This is what Belinsky calls “spareness of plot” ( prostota vymysla ). The real matter of the story lies elsewhere: in that marvellous alchemy by which the “nothing” of everyday trivia somehow becomes “everything”; and in Gogol’s uneasy, ambivalent vision of the world, with a backdrop of gloom behind every comic bit.
In ‘Old-World Landowners’ these elements are fused into a perfect work of art, appropriately low-keyed. In ‘The Two Ivans’ they are jumbled together – in an unbridled exuberance precluding perfection but making for greater comedy – with whatever else comes to hand. One of these odd items is a wild parody of a Flemish painting in which the action has “only one spectator: the boy in the enormous frock coat, who stood rather quietly picking his nose”. Another is a bit of authentic Marx Brothers madness: “Ivan Ivanovich is of a rather timid character. Ivan Nikiforovich, on the contrary, wears big, baggy trousers…” And while he’s at it, Gogol stands E.T.A. Hoffmann on his head and makes even the fantastic trivial and vulgar (not to say unlovely). He has done this before; but never so well as when Ivan Nikiforovich’s petition is spirited away from the courtroom by Ivan Ivanovich’s brown sow, who thereby breaks a deadlock and wins fame as literature’s first suinus ex machina .
How now, brown sow? Are you no more than a fat adjunct to a skinny plot? Far from it! Close inspection reveals that it was the sow who set the whole thing in motion, when she (or the offer of her by Ivan Ivanovich in exchange for a gun) aroused the ire of Ivan Nikiforovich. For Ivan N. (like Gogol) was hypersensitive to hogs, the care and feeding of which, in the rural Russia of those days, was the exclusive province of women – towards whom Ivan N. (like Gogol, again) was even more hypersensit