By Vladimir Nabokov (1981)
Lectures on Russian Literature by Nabokov is just a joy to read again and again. If you’re at all interested in 19th century Russian Literature this is a delight, and if you’re not, you might well be after reading his hilarious study of Gogol – a lunatic and a genius, in one of the most eccentric works of criticism of all time, which starts with leeches dangling off sick writer’s nose, and then meditates on noses, Russian obsession with noses, Gogol’s desire to become one giant nose, which goes off wondering the streets without his owner’s awareness.
A joy to read again and again
My main problem is that it is difficult to find versions of, say, Chekhov’s short stories that are as luminous as the fragments Nabokov translates himself. In his rendering of In the Gulley (usually translated, rather senselessly, as In the Ravine) the pathos of the protagonist – whose baby is burnt to death by the grasping wife Aksinia of the powerful family who controls the village, but in her simplicity fails to tell anyone – is left in Nabokov’s translation as
her old self, dissolved in song, happy in the tiny enclosure of her limited world โฆ in the coolness of nightfall – and innocently, unconsciously, carrying to her God the pink dust of the bricks that are making the fortune of Aksinia
That’s hard to match.