Uncle’s Dream and Other Stories, Fyodor Dostoevsky

3.5 stars

First Sentence: Under a certain roof, in a certain one-roomed apartment, on a certain fourth floor, lived two young civil-servant colleagues, Arkady Ivanovich Nefedevich and Vasya Shumkov…

Thoughts: This was an okay collection of four short stories. They were entertaining, but nothing really grabbed me. Then again, nothing really annoyed me so there’s that. Rated in ascending order of how much I liked them they are:

White Nights: The story of an unnamed narrator and his brief friendship with a woman named Nastenka. The narrator liked to walk alone at night along the streets of St. Petersburg and imagine the houses were talking to him. One night he came across a young woman being annoyed by an oafish man. He rescued the woman and walked her home, conversing all the way. She invited the narrator to come over the next night so they could continue their conversation. Over the next four nights Nastenka told him her life story. It was mainly the tale of her love for the young man who boarded at her aunt’s house the year before. He went home to earn enough money to get married on, promising to contact her when he returned to St. Petersburg. Nastenka found out the young man was back in town, but hadn’t gotten in touch with her. The narrator spends his time in the story falling in love with Nastenka, but all for naught since the other young man does meet up with her and they get married.

A Weak Heart: Arkady Ivanovitch Nefedevich and Vasya Shumkov are roommates, as the first sentence implies. Vasya comes home late one New Year’s Eve absolutely incandescent with delight. He got engaged to a Nice Young Girl that day. Unfortunately he also has a pile of papers for work that are due on January 2 that he hasn’t even started on yet. He tries to sit down to work, but he can’t. Arkady tells Vasya that he’ll pay all his New Year’s visits for him so Vasya can catch up on work. Instead Vasya goes insane, leaving Arkady to pick up the pieces.

Uncle’s Dream: The story of how Mariya Aleksandrovna Moskaleva lost her standing in the town of Morsadovo thanks to Prince K. The Prince was an elderly man with a touch of the dementia. Everyone loved him, though, and called him “Uncle” even if they weren’t related. One day Pavel Mozglyakov found Prince K next to his overturned sleigh in the woods. Uncle was escaping from the harpy of a housekeeper at his estate. He had no idea where he was going, so Pavel took him to Moskaleva’s house. Pavel knew Moskaleva well because he was in love with her daughter Zinaida, even though she kept refusing his proposals. Moskaleva got a brilliant idea to marry Zinaida to Prince K because he was old and wouldn’t live much longer. Then Zinaida would inherit all his money and they’d be living on Easy Street. Pavel finds out about the plans, however, and tells Uncle who then turns the whole thing into a scandal.

The Meek One: A dark, disturbing tale of a woman driven to suicide. The narrator is a pawnshop owner with a checkered past. He met his wife when she brought trinkets to pawn to get enough money to run newspaper ads offering her services as a governess. The narrator discovered the girl (she was only sixteen) was running the ads so she could get a job away from her aunts who wanted to marry her to a brutal grocer. The narrator offers his hand in marriage instead. She accepts, but comes to regret that decision. There is absolutely no communication between them once they are husband and wife. She tries to get away from him through an affair, but that doesn’t work. She points a revolver at his head one night, but can’t bring herself to pull the trigger. Eventually she falls ill and the narrator has to nurse her back to health. When she recovers, he promises to take her to the Mediterranean to recuperate. He goes to get their passports, but when he comes home he finds a crowd gathered over his wife’s broken body in the street. She had jumped out the window to get away from him, although the narrator refuses to acknowledge his role in her death.

Why was that one my favorite? Why am I like this?

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

5 stars

First Sentence: Towards the end of a sultry afternoon early in July a young man came out of his little room in Stolyarny Lane and turned slowly and somewhat irresolutely in the direction of Kamenny Bridge.

Thoughts: I’ve been rewatching Columbo lately, which inspired me to reread Crime and Punishment. Also I’m currently on a Dostoevsky Quest. But it was Columbo that made me push this novel to the top of the list because Police Inspector Porfiry Petrovich was one of the inspirations for our good lieutenant. They were both rumpled, unprepossessing men who intruded on their subjects’ personal space, and both expert psychologists who never missed a trick. They both know you did the crime, they’re just annoying you until they get enough evidence to bring you downtown.

Even the structure of the book is like a Columbo episode. They all started off with the murder being committed* and the rest of the story was just gathering evidence and wearing down the suspect until the confession and/or final confrontation with the evidence that clinches their fate. Both the book and the show are how catch’em rather than whodunits. The difference, though, is that Crime and Punishment is about the criminal himself and how he feels while he’s being worn down enough to confess.

The criminal is Rodion Raskolnikov, a university dropout who’s obsessed with Napoleon. He believed that Great Men like Napoleon could commit crimes with impunity because they were improving society. From the beginning it’s clear that Raskolnikov’s cheese and cracker are not in close proximity. He decides to kill an old pawnbroker because she’s preying on the poor. He pawns a couple of items with her to case her apartment and find out where she keeps her money. When he hears her sister will be out for the evening, he takes his chance. Raskolnikov comes in pretending to pawn another item only to bludgeon the old woman with an axe. While he’s rummaging around in her pawn chest, he hears her sister come home. Sister is the next to get bludgeoned with the axe. He has a close call when two other men come up with items to pawn, but he gets away without being seen along with the axe and what little loot he could gather.

From then on Raskolnikov is constantly tormented by his conscience and/or everyone he knows. He works himself into a fever after he hides the loot in a vacant lot. In a fit of delirium he actually confesses to a police officer, but no one’s sure if it’s a real confession or if it’s just the fever talking. When his best friend invites him to a party he meets Porfiry Petrovich who immediately suspects him of the murder. Eventually he gets enough evidence to call Raskolnikov into his office and tell him he knows he’s the killer and it would be better if he made a formal confession.

Meanwhile Raskolnikov’s mother and sister Dunya move to St. Petersburg for his sister’s wedding. Raskolnikov meets his intended brother-in-law and it’s hate at first sight. He knows this man is a cad and a bounder who’s only marrying Dunya so he can have someone to boss around. He also befriends Marmeladov, a down-on-his luck civil service officer, and through him Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya, a hooker with a heart of gold. Sonya is the only person who has any influence on Raskolnikov, but he’s made such a mess of his life even she may not be able to save him.

*The good ones anyway. There are a few that break the mold but those are generally considered the episodes we do not speak of.

The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden

5 stars

First Sentence: It was late winter in northern Rus’, the air sullen with wet that was neither rain nor snow.

Thoughts: Marina was the daughter of a witch-woman who entranced the Tsar in Moscow and married him. When Marina was old enough, she was married off to Pyotr Vladimirovitch, a boyar on the edge of the wilderness. It was a happy marriage that produced four children. When she was pregnant with her fifth child, though, Marina knew her end was near. She died shortly after giving birth to Vasilisa.

When Vasilisa was still a little girl, Pyotr went to Moscow with his son Sasha to pay his regular tribute to the Tsar. And also to look for a new wife because raising five children was hard for a single father even if he did have the nurse, Dunya, to help. Two strange things happened on this trip. The first one was when Sasha met a priest who had just formed a new monastery. He went to the monastery and found his life’s calling. Pyotr was, as the English say, not best pleased about his son’s choice of vocation but he agreed as long as Sasha met certain stipulations: wait a year, don’t expect an inheritance, and once you’re gone you stay gone. It’s not that Pyotr wasn’t Christian, he just didn’t want to lose an entire son’s worth of grandchildren to inherit his estates.

The second strange thing happened to Pyotr. He met a man in the marketplace who gave him a sapphire star pendant for Vasilisa. With certain stipulations, of course. Once she put it on, she couldn’t take it off and Pyotr couldn’t tell her where he got it.

What about the wife? Well, Pyotr looked around but his brother-in-law the Tsar had already picked out a wife for him. It was his sister Anna, a weird woman who really wanted to go to a convent, but she was always seeing demons and becoming an embarrassment to the court so best to marry her off and send her far, far away from Moscow.

It worked out about as well as you’d expect, especially once Anna met Vasilisa who was, to put it mildly, a handful. They continually clashed as Vasya grew up. She enjoyed running around in the woods and climbing trees to staying indoors and doing housework. What Vasya didn’t tell anyone is that she also saw “demons” except she recognized them as the nature and household spirits of rural Rus’. She befriended the rusalka, saving several village men in the process, as well as the stable spirit who taught her how to talk to the horses. The horses, in turn, taught her how to ride bareback.

Then a new priest came to town. Konstantin was a handsome man who painted icons when he wasn’t preaching. Anna fell for him immediately. Konstantin, in turn, tolerated her but he was really attracted to Vasya even though he kept denying it. Vasya didn’t like him at all because he was sowing fear among his parishioners and driving them away from the spirits that had been helping them for centuries. And protecting them from things even worse than demons, as it turns out. When the dead start rising, Vasya takes her necklace and goes into the woods to speak to Morozko, the frost spirit, and beg him to save her village and family.

This is a chilly book full of frost and snow and cold, which I absolutely love. It also has a spirited heroine, which I also enjoy. I had read this years ago, but I forgot that it was the first of a trilogy that is now complete. Now I need to look up the other two books to find out what happens in the further adventures of Vasya and her horse Solovey (the titular nightingale, if you were wondering).

The Clockwork Dynasty, Daniel H. Wilson

5 stars

First Sentence: The age of a thing is in the feel of it.

Thoughts: June is a niche anthropologist. She specializes in automata, specifically their preservation and repair. She’s in a Russian monastery in Oregon for her latest job, looking over a little girl automaton they have in their archives. The mechanism inside has been damaged so it doesn’t work any more, but after a bit of tinkering June thinks she can fix it. She takes out her travel 3D printer and makes a replacement part. Now let’s see what she can do.

Write, apparently. They put a pen in the automaton’s hand and a piece of paper in front of her and she starts writing in Russian. June’s interpreter, Oleg, freaks out when he reads what she’s writing, as do the monks. It’s a message to Tsar Peter the Great from the “avtomats,” which Oleg translates as robot. The monks snatch up the automaton and toss Oleg and June out on their ears. Back at the motel things get even stranger. Some guy breaks in and kills Oleg. June takes off running, only to be picked up by another strange man who fights the first guy, revealing that they’re both avtomat.

The story switches between June in the present and Peter’s life since 1709 when he woke up in a workshop in the Tsar’s palace. He wasn’t alone there. Along with the man who fixed him, there was another avtomat, a little girl named Elena. They served Tsar Peter until his death when his wife chased them out of Russia. The pair traveled to England where they hid out for several centuries. Elena, who was ruled by logic, was intrigued by their brief encounters with other avtomat and began researching their origins. What she discovered drove a wedge between her and Peter.

Peter, who was ruled by pravda, or truth, was confused by all this. It didn’t fit in with his view of the world, so he went back to his warrior training and hired himself out to fight various wars all the way up to WWII where he met June’s grandfather and dropped a strange metal piece that Grandpa picked up and bequeathed to June. She calls it her “relic” and wears it on a chain around her neck.

That relic is why June is now fair game in the hidden war among the avtomat. It’s actually a piece of an avtomat, the most vital piece that gives it life. And it doesn’t belong to just any avtomat, but the father of all of them who has been missing for millennia. Peter was charged with guarding it in time immemorial, but now it’s time to remember it and bring it back to its owner before the avtomat queen destroys them all.

It’s a fun action-packed adventure tale, but the real gift of this book is that it sent me on a quest to find automata videos. Real automata, not the robots in this book, but they’re still neat. Some of my favorites:

The Silver Swan

Tipu’s Tiger

The Mechanical Galleon

The Monk

The Writer/Draughtsman

Chernevog, C.J. Cherryh

4 stars

First Sentence: Snow fell in the woods, drifted deep, a pristine, starlit world in which a single winter hare made significance—slow advance from a wandering, footprinted time past into a white, unwritten time to come.

Thoughts: Everything seemed fine at the end of Rusalka. Eveshka had shed her rusalka form and was a living woman again. Sasha was getting a grip on his magic. Pyetr found love. Uulamets found peace after sacrificing himself. Chernevog was out cold and guarded by leshys. Time to go home and settle down!

Five years passed before they remembered that Chernevog was a huge loose end. He wasn’t dead, just asleep. The leshys could guard him for a while, but not forever. And now there are signs that he’s waking up.

Pyetr’s old horse Volki shows up out of nowhere. Pyetr and Sasha build a new bathhouse and try to call a new bannik to it, but the one who arrives isn’t the one who was there before according to Eveshka. Sasha and Eveshka are having visions of thorns and blood. Then Pyetr gets lost in the woods. Sasha goes out to find him. When they get back, Eveshka’s gone. The only thing she left was a note in Sasha’s wizard-book telling them not to follow her.

Sasha and Pyetr immediately pack some supplies and head out into the woods. Eveshka’s taken the boat, so who knows how far ahead she’s gotten. Their first stop is the grove where the leshys have been keeping Chernevog. Good news: Eveshka’s not there. Bad news: Chernevog’s up. Even worse news: He’s going to join Sasha and Pyetr as they search for Eveshka. Because there’s an even more powerful wizard out there and they’ve got ‘Veshka. And her unborn child.

As with the previous book, there are LOTR-levels of walking through the now-living forest and bickering among the characters as they refuse to tell each other the whole truth or do more than hint at what’s really going on. There’s also a lot of philosophical discussions of how magic works in this world. It’s a good thing I like the characters so much or it could have gotten really frustrating.

Rusalka, C.J. Cherryh

3.5 stars

First Sentence: The Winter dwindled in amber evenings and daytime haze: snow melted, puddles multiplied.

Thoughts: Pyeter and Sasha grew up in the same town, but they never had much to do with each other. Pyetr was the son of the local ne’er-do-well and seemed like he was set to follow in his father’s footsteps. Sasha was an orphan living with his aunt and uncle at the local tavern. The one thing both boys had in common was no one trusted either of them. Pyetr because of his reckless nature and Sasha because people thought he was a wizard because his parents died in a mysterious house fire when Sasha was young. He really might be a wizard. Things tend to happen when Sasha wishes for them.

When the husband of Pyetr’s mistress suddenly drops dead during a fight, the sorcery accusations attach themselves to Pyeter as well. People say he killed the husband with magic. He didn’t, but that won’t stop the lynch mob on his tail. Pyetr hides in the tavern’s barn where Sasha finds him. Sasha, sympathetic to anyone else accused of sorcery, gives Pyetr food, blankets, and a good hiding place until the wound he got in the fight heals. Except the hiding place isn’t really that great, Pyetr is is discovered, and now both boys are on the run.

They plan to go to Kiev to start a new life, but they can’t take the main roads. They end up wandering through a dead forest. There are no animals, no living plants, and Pyetr’s wound is getting infected. Fortunately they find a cottage in the middle of the forest and make themselves at home. Unfortunately the owner of the cottage comes home and finds them there. Even worse, the owner, Uulamets, is a powerful wizard. Sasha convinces him to help them, so Uulamets heals Pyetr’s wound and makes a deal with the boys: he’ll let them stay if they help him find his daughter Eveshka.

Thing is, Eveshka is dead. She turned into a rusalka after drowning in the river. Uulamets believes he can bring her back to life, but he needs Sasha’s power to boost his own. Pyetr would be useful since magic doesn’t have much of an effect on him so he can see past all the glamors. Eveshka, though, does have an effect on him and vice versa.

Things go bad quickly when the local vodyanoi (river spirit) gets involved. Then Eveshka returns…or does she? To uncover the truth behind all the weirdness in the woods, Uulamets, Pyetr, Sasha, and Babi the domovoi (house spirit) set out on a quest to find Uulamet’s former student Chernevog who has the key to the riddle.

This is an atmospheric fantasy novel rather than an action-packed one. There is a lot of walking around in this book. Like, LOTR levels of walking around. Most of the book is the characters wandering through the dead forest arguing with each other and having vague revelations that they won’t explain for several chapters. It’s a slow burn that gets a touch annoying at times but everything is explained by the end.

Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin

Thoughts: IMPORTANT CAVEAT: This post was scheduled two weeks ago before current events were current. Alexander Pushkin has been dead for 180-odd years and has absolutely nothing to do with anything going on today. To those responsible for what’s going on today:

4 stars

First Sentence: My uncle, matchless moral model,
When deathly ill, learned how to make
His friends respect him, bow and coddle—
Of all his ploys, that takes the cake.

Before we begin, a brief pronunciation guide. Eugene’s last name is pronounced “on-YAY-gin.” I didn’t know that so I’m telling you. Sounds better than “on agin” which is how I was saying it.

This is a Russian novel written in verse and one of, if not the, most famous poems in Russian. According to the introduction, this novel is taught to all the little Russian schoolchildren and they can still remember stanzas from it years later as Hofstadter, our translator for this edition, learned when he quoted half a line and a Russian woman in his group capped it with the other half of the line.

Since this is The Official Poem of Russia, there have been multiple translations. Hofstadter goes over them in his introduction which is far more interesting than an introduction about translating has any right to be. He describes his first encounter with Eugene Onegin when he and his late wife read stanzas from different translations to each other. He fell in love with the book and started reading other translations until one day he decided to try doing it himself. It was an ambitious goal, especially considering he only knew enough Russian to get by in Moscow. But he did it, one stanza at a time for a year, only consulting other translations when he was absolutely positively stuck for a word.

In the introduction we find out exactly what Hofstadter thinks of the various English translations along with his total disdain for Vladimir Nabokov. Apparently Mr. Nabokov had Feelings about the advisability of translating poetry from one language to another. He, too, translated Eugene Onegin, but he did it as a literal translation, word by word, line by line. It reads about as well as you’d expect if what you were expecting is the first draft of a school translation assignment before you polish it into complete sentences that make a lick of sense. Still, it was useful for Hofstadter when he was working on his own version of the poem since that was the translation he used when he was stuck.

So how did Hofstadter do on his translation? Pretty well, I think. He wrote it in modern English (as you can see from the first sentence) with a sort of jazzy beat to it. There were a few times he took some liberties (what he called “poetic lie-sense”) but he explained why he made those decisions in the end notes, along with explaining all the references that people who aren’t familiar with Russian history or literature wouldn’t get. And that’s why end notes are wonderful.

What about the story itself? As you might have guessed from the title, it’s about a young man named Eugene Onegin, a young gentleman living in St. Petersburg in the early nineteenth century. He was a dashing young dandy, but he was getting bored with the fashionable life. Then his father died and bequeathed him all his debts. Then his uncle died and bequeathed him enough money to pay off those debts with a little (very little) left over. In order to make his money last, Eugene moved out to his uncle’s country estate.

There he met a man named Vladimir Lensky, a country gent with dreams of becoming a poet. Vladimir was in love with Olga, a very pretty girl on the estate next door. Olga had an older sister, Tatyana (Tanya) who read a lot of British novels. Vladimir brought Eugene over to meet the neighbors and Tanya fell head over heels in love with him. She wrote him a passionate love letter which took Eugene by surprise. He let her down as gently as he could, telling her that he knew himself and if he did start courting her he would get tired of her. Tanya took it about as well as you’d expect. Moping ensued.

Then their parents threw a birthday party for Tanya and invited the entire village. Eugene came and, since he was feeling froggy, decided to ignore her and dance with Olga all night instead. Vladimir was most put out by this and challenge Eugene to a duel. Eugene accepted and the date was set. On that wintry dawn the two men met out in a field and shot their shots. Vladimir died. Eugene, heartbroken, returned to St. Petersburg. Tanya continued moping. Olga was sad for about a minute and then married someone else. Tanya was sent to St. Petersburg to live with her aunt so she could find a nice rich husband.

If you’re hoping for a happy ending, let me remind you that this is a Russian novel.

It is shorter than your average nineteenth-century Russian novel, though. And Eugene did deserve all that he got. So it has that going for it.