On the literary dangers of searching for Russians

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a novel with which all my readers must be familiar, there is a wonderful episode in which Dolly goes to visit her dear friend, Anna, who is living with Vronsky on his country estate. On the drive to her friend, Dolly broods over her endless family worries, and looks forward with guilty excitement to meeting Anna who has dared to ‘live in sin’ with Vronsky. When she arrives at the house she is greeted with warmth and respect by her hosts but she starts to feel uncomfortable. Their life is somehow false, although Dolly cannot exactly define what is wrong and Tolstoy is careful to keep her mood fluctuating from one encounter to another. When they visit the nursery, Dolly is painfully struck by the luxury of the solid English furniture, the supercilious English nanny and the baby who seems to be inadequately dressed. Then Anna and Dolly go downstairs to join the other guests. What does this account have to do with Footpath or with our project on English Literature? Let us suppose that I am writing an article about Anna Karenina for English readers. The novel is 800 pages long and I have 20 pages for my article. Should I discuss Tolstoy’s attitude towards English nannies (or Dolly’s attitude towards English furniture) because my readers are English? To do so would be a gross and stupid distortion of a great novel. That detail is only important because of what it tells us about Anna - that she has lost her natural Russian instincts, that she has somehow become alien and false. The whole chapter explores this separation of Anna from normality as seen through the simple decent eyes of Dolly. One could certainly discuss Tolstoy’s exasperating mixture of psychological truth and self-enforcing prejudices; but an English nanny is but one tiny example.

I think of this scene whenever I read articles by Russians about the appearance of ‘Russia’ in novels by British writers. Casual references to our hero entering a restaurant full of French, Japanese or Peruvian customers will be (rightly) passed by, but should one of the tables be occupied by a Russian, that detail can be worthy of fifteen minutes discussion with students and a paragraph in an article about cross-cultural communication. Would it not be better for the students to understand and discuss the novel in its own terms - which may include attitudes and values that are distinctively ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’ or ‘Irish’ besides insights and preoccupations that belong to the author as an individual. Nobody thinks of Tolstoy as ‘a typical Russian’ although so many of his stories explore concerns that are ‘typically Russian’ and yet also ‘typically human’. Where would you, dear readers, place ‘Cossacks’ and where ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’?

None of the modern authors in our project are as great as Tolstoy but like him their first concern is with human nature, with the contradictions and confusions that are inherent in our passions and moral judgements. On the evidence of their essays, that truth is quickly grasped and expressed with great liveliness by your students: their problem is that, like students all over the world, once they have recognised an emotion or a problem they tend to follow their own version of what-must-happen rather than the version that the novelist (a different human being) has created. The act of good reading forces us to follow that different human being’s creation rather than our own familiar comfortable pathway through the confusions of life. What Tolstoy’s contemporary, the great English novelist, George Eliot, described as ‘imaginative sympathy’ or that capacity to imagine vividly another person’s way of seeing the world, is what we practice when we read literature. And when we write about literature, we endeavour to convey to our readers some of the specific qualities of a work which have excited our imaginative sympathy.

Russian teachers might well reply, ‘Imaginative sympathy is all very well if you truly understand the culture, but it is extremely difficult when you are struggling to interpret the basic significance of a passage and to identify its tone.’ As a reader who frequently fails to grasp the tone of novels from Indian and Arabic countries (and I haven’t attempted Japanese), I can see the vast task which teachers face, and which they often face with enthusiasm. When writing the commentaries for our novels I am always grateful to those teachers who try to analyse the problems that they and their classes face, so that I can concentrate on explaining such distinctive social and cultural features of Britain together with our prevailing attitudes to them. But our authors are rarely writing documentaries in which they devise socially typical conditions for their characters to face. On the contrary, they like to explore unusual situations within different layers of ironic knowledge which will encourage the native reader first to recognise (‘Ah yes, that’s typical!’) and then to be challenged (‘Where are we going now?’). How can the Russian reader cope with the ironies and fluctuating tones?

English culture insists on ‘examples’ before ‘theories’. It so happens that in Footpath-8 we offer you three discussions of Michael Frayn, so let us take our examples from this author. In our project Frayn’s Headlong offers a fine example of the pleasures and problems of irony and tone. Martin Clay is the protagonist and a first-person narrator. He is eager to tell us his story which begins with his family’s journey to their country cottage. (Not ‘country house’ which implies a mansion, but ‘cottage’ which implies a small old inconvenient but muchloved holiday home. The nearest cultural equivalent is a dacha although only a small minority of the English have a country cottage.) On the journey by car Martin immediately starts wondering about ‘reality’ and ‘definitions’. Are they in the real country? Is the ‘country’ ideal or unideal? The English reader can imagine easily enough the extensive suburbs, the suggestions of ‘countryside’ which are followed by more suburbs, and Martin’s worries about whether the cottage will be horribly damp and cold. That is familiar enough. But slowly (or quickly) we notice that Martin seems to be incapable of experiencing anything without analysing it with the enthusiasm of a philosopher - and also, as he tells us himself, that he keeps making mistakes in his interpretations.

As Tatiana Kolesova points out in her article, if Martin were simply an idiot or an egoistic obsessive we would not follow him with sympathy. The first-person narrative draws us into looking from his point of view (always changing) even as we criticise him. So here is a way forward for all readers. We should not begin with a ‘character analysis’, pointing out Martin’s good qualities and bad qualities. We begin with the ‘imaginative sympathy’ which will open Martin’s way of looking at the world to us. But at the same time we notice not only that he is wrong from his own point of view, but that he is also deceiving himself about his motives. We start making judgements. Frayn is fascinated by the way that Martin explains himself to himself. (Do we do this too? Do we deceive ourselves?) Now we are in a position to appreciate Frayn’s wit and irony. Martin’s first-person narration is so cleverly written that it reveals both his version of events and our critical reinterpretation of them. As readers we are keeping both versions in our mind, juggling between them. We can certainly be shocked by Martin’s choices, but we should never stop noticing how he justifies himself to himself. For anyone who appreciates humour - the discrepancies between what we would like and the reality - this is a most enjoyable way of reading, and not so subject to cultural difficulties.

I am suggesting that the best way of dealing with confusions about a different culture is to identify how to read each novel. Each reader asks himself or herself: ‘What is the author trying to tell me? How do I know?’ In each case the answers will be different and will require careful reading and searching in the text, but the process of finding out is itself a guide to the attitudes of the author. It protects us from seeing everything that happens as somehow typical of ‘the English’ or ‘the British’, just as finding out how to read ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ helps us to understand Tolstoy and distinguish his story from ‘typical Russian attitudes’.

The first of our articles about Frayn is by Ekaterina Barinova, and it is particularly relevant to this discussion because it seems to challenge my opening paragraphs. ‘This Michael Frayn is so ... Russian!’ Is that a distortion of ‘...so human!’? No, for in this case Barinova gives us convincing evidence of the importance of Russia and Russian literature for Frayn, and suggests how this might affect his wider outlook. I admire this article, so I dare to make one correction which does illustrate my original point.

In Headlong, the protagonist, Martin finds himself ruminating on the possibility that Bruegel’s painting represents a ‘reassuring myth’, ‘a happy bucolic world untouched by the conflicts of real life, one more episode in the long-running story of Arcadian shepherds and Bourbon milkmaids, of Soviet tractor drivers and Merrie England.’ Barinova, singles out ‘Soviet tractor drivers’ from this sentence thus: ‘Bitter irony is disguised in putting together Arcadian shepherds and Soviet tractor drivers, as it is evident to the most ignorant reader, knowing nothing about the Soviet Union, that there hardly could be anything romantic or bucolic about a tractor driver’. This is a misreading of Martin’s point: the irony is attached to his entire list of unreal idealized shepherds and milkmaids and merry English peasants who, in real life, were mostly poor, underfed, and exploited by those in power. The Soviet tractor drivers are just one item in ‘the long-running story’ of the ‘reassuring myth’.

Such a small slip hardly matters, especially in a lively and informative article; but it illustrates nicely the dangers of picking out ‘Russian’ or ‘Soviet’ from an English novel and finding some special significance in it. Frayn’s (not Martin’s) real point is a regression of ironies: Martin is inventing a possible explanation for his own unsupported suppositions concerning a picture which he has scarcely seen but which he imagines was painted by Bruegel; in this world of floating possibilities he needs, but lacks, reassurance - so how satisfying to attribute false reassurance to Bruegel!

This is the eighth issue of Footpath; it is coming out a little later than the previous issues because very few of you sent in contributions until we pressed you, at which point they began to flow in abundance! The journal is full of articles which may surprise you or encourage you to speculate further. For example, an analysis of smells as the dominant experience in Crocodile Soup; can smells be so central to the way some people assess other people? Or a commentary on Julian Barnes’ discussion of how the historical horrors of shipwreck and cannibalism might be turned into a balanced work of art - which, as the author tells us, arouses a surging emotional response, but not the savage response to their plight of despairing men. So do we use art to deceive ourselves, or to give meaning to the incomprehensible? In our Section on Teaching Literature, we have, alas, only one article, but to my delight that is about teaching poetry. The author admits to partial failure, but her account of student responses including wrong responses is both familiar and enlightening to all teachers of poetry. ‘What does this poem mean?’ Silence. Someone throws out a hopeful word. Does the suggestion make any sense? Where is the evidence in the text? Where exactly? ... Poetry seems to me to be most often enjoyed through group discussion when that which was obscure can suddenly become clear and intensely moving. What are the words which stand out for you? How are they related together? Where is the mysterious jump from meanings haltingly gathered to a poem which is greater than the sum of its parts? By describing the ideas of the students who failed to understand what was shiningly clear to her - and then by admitting that the confusions may have had their origin in the class discussion itself - the author demonstrates that mixture of understanding the text on the one hand and respect for those who search for meaning on the other which is fundamental to teaching.

I am disappointed that we have no letters - I cannot be the only reader of journals who turns to the letters first. But Footpath-8 has the promised articles by Kirstie Blair and Jonathan Miles, based on their lectures at the Perm Seminar in 2014, and for the first time it has an article (on David Mitchell)

by a teacher from England who has been teaching for nearly two years in a Russian university. In addition we offer you some notable surveys of English literature, discussions of new works for Footpath, including Hilary Mantel’s great novel, Wolf Hall, and three heartfelt student essays. I shall conclude where I thought of beginning: this year many of the editors remarked that in their opinion the contributions were of the highest quality we have yet received. So read on and write on!