Sayers, Augustin, Turgenev, Behn, Cecil, Dostoievsky, Morrell, Hourani

Since my last post, I've read Hone's Dorothy L. Sayers, Saint Augustin's Catechese, polemique, philosophie; David Magarshack's Turgenev; Janet Todd's Secret Life of Aphra Behn, Albert Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples, Stephanie Seymour's Ottoline Morrell, Avrahm Yarmolinsky's Dostoevsky His Life and Art, and The Cecils by David Loades. For magazines, I've read two issues of Eclectic Reading, and one issue each of The New Yorker, The Economist, and OK Magazine.

I didn't even know who Dorothy Sayers was (a crime writer, among other things), so reading her life was a revelation. But I have two other books about her and I don't think I'll read them -- I think I have an idea of who she is. Saint Augustin was relaxing to read. It was a recent translation from the Latin, and given that I had read a lot of theology in the past, I could follow these texts from a Father of the Catholic Church. The writings were intended to be pastoral, anyway, so they are usually more accessible. I read Turgenev with interest, since I had read in the last couple of years the memoirs of Herzen, but the Dostoevsky biography was sad. He was imprisoned in Siberia for four years, he was an epileptic, he was a compulsive gambler, he was in debt...I guess it's easy now to see the genesis of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot...I was glad to read of Aphra Behn, I'd never heard of her, but I also thought this book ought to have been entitled The Possible Life of Aphra Behn, as the author uses historical context to speculate on what might have been. In the end, I found that a little disappointing.

Albert Hourani's book deserves its accolade as a classic. I found I learned more about the history of Arabs in the chapters covering the early, post-Prophet years than in the chapters of more recent times, but it was excellent. Finally, I read Ottoline Morrell and The Cecils for pleasure. The Morrell biography filled in a lot of gaps for me, as I had heard the name repeatedly as that of a great eccentric. turns out she was an impoverished member of a very rich family -- Mother failed to leave her as much money as her brothers. It must have been very difficult. I had read a review of The Cecils commenting on how great events were barely mentioned, but having read about the Tudors at great length, I liked a book focusing on the great secretary and his successor son.

Turgenev, Emmons, Lacey

I have finished reading Turgenev's novels, in recent days the shorter ones such as The Lear of the Steppes and The Priest's Story. The comments I made about his longer novels apply to his shorter one. I am glad to have filled out the Russian canon, but I didn't not find him riveting like Tolstoy, whose naturalism is so acute and whose mastery of language is so obvious. I went on to read, rather idly, Emmon's Russian Landed Gentry. I was interested by the title, which turned out to be too general -- it should have read 'The Abolitionist Movement in the Russian Landed Gentry.' I was interested to read that in the days of serfdom, it was not the land which was mortgaged, but the serfs. Their exploitation is what provided the gentry with income. I also read Robert Lacey's Aristocrats. This was also something of a puff piece about titled people who are no longer necessarily rich -- but the only people in the book are both titled and rich. Hm mm, is there is a bias here?

Marai, Turgenev

I finished reading Marai's Memoirs of Hungary, and it was as good as the first few pages, right to the end. I still recall one of the last lines: "The train began to move, and we went forward into a world where no one was waiting." Very poignant. The man is also a great anti-Communist. I also read more of Turgenev's novels: Sketches of a Sportsman, and Torrents of Spring. Torrents is merely a tale of love lost -- I am getting bored with sentimental efforts, but also these novels are the same as other sentimental 19th century novels, there is no difference, as the French would say. I enjoyed Sketches the most, I like a good pastoral, but the author recounts terrible things like the beating of a Jew or the despair of a serf with a lightheartedness unbecoming to a modern reader.

Turgenev, Virgin Soil

I read the last of Turgenev's novels, Virgin Soil, last night. The experience consolidated for me the idea that Turgenev's great theme is the lack of political freedoms in Russia. I thought the protagonist, Nedhezov, might actually be based on Alexander Herzen, whose memoirs I read lately. The novel itself, spare and smoothly written, didn't interest me all that much. The introduction to this 1920 edition was written by Edward Garnett, the reader in London who established Somerset Maugham.

Turgenev's Fathers and Children and Smoke

I've read two more of Turgenev's novels, both of which mention in some detail nihilism. I thought at the start of Smoke that I was reading a political novel, in the same sense that Magic Mountain is a philosophical novel. Both of these are tales of love misplaced, of passion forbidden. Both novels were also received as allegories of political occurrences in a Russia without freedom of expression. Well, those allegories went right by me: I suppose I don't know the context well enough to appreciate all of this. I confess, though, that I don't see this on a level with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Two novels to go in this Turgenev week-end.

Turgenev's House of Gentlefolk, On the Eve

I've read two of Turgenev's novels since my last post -- at the end of the week I'm always a bit more tired and cannot write as much, so I fuel myself with more reading. Well, Turgenev's plots are so far all romantic entanglements. I am interested to discover that he also mixes in other ethnic groups with the Russians: Poles, Ukrainians, Bulgarians. In House of Gentlefolk, there are comments made about little Russians (Ukrainians) to raise a lot of eyebrows in that ethnic community! The novels continue to be short, easy reads. The stateliness I noticed in the first novel seems to be more like lightweightedness now. Not a lot of happy endings for women who defy convention: in House, the heroine became a nun; in On the Eve, an expatriate widow.

Ivan Turgenev's Rudin

I picked up seven volumes of Turgenev's novels, translated by Constance Garnett, this morning, and I expect I can read most of them over the week-end, a Turgenev weekend! I am filling out reading the Russian canon, having read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Tolstoy, I remember, exploded on my consciousness like a bomb when I first read him, back in high school. Naturalism has been my object and my passion in writing ever since. I still look for the universal truth and the telling detail in all novels, as I found so richly in his.

I have already read the first Turgenev, Rudin. I must be predisposed to like Russian literature of the 19th century, as I liked it immediately, the stateliness, the characters, the pace. Perhaps it's because I so loved the Russian author who wrote children's classics in French, the Comtesse de Segur. Anyway, Turgenev is much shorter and has many fewer characters than the other Russian authors, and is a quick good read. There is a whiff of fin de siecle here, with the coming revolution hinted at...Turgenev draws characters much more easily and quickly that either other Russian writer. A pleasure. I may have time to read something else before bed.