(This series is timed to coincide with the 2019 Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies at Robinson College, Cambridge.)
Hale and hearty in his eighty-third year, Harvey Pitcher is not only one of this country’s leading Chekhov experts, he knows Edwardian Anglo-Russian contacts and life in prerevolutionary Russia inside out. When he offered to read in typescript chapter 4 of my biography, dealing with George Calderon’s stay in Russia 1895-97, and to make suggestions, I knew what an inestimable favour he was bestowing. But that was not all. As a full-time professional writer since 1971, he gave me invaluable advice about my ill-starred (requiring seventeen drafts) Introduction.
Pitcher left Academe to set up as an independent Russianist and translator at an earlier stage than Michael Pursglove or John Dewey. Having learned Russian at the famous Joint Services School of Linguists whilst doing National Service, he read the subject at Oxford, then went off to teach it at Glasgow University. After two years there, he was asked to start up the Department of Russian at St Andrews, which he most successfully did, but after eight years he left to concentrate exclusively on his writing. I cannot help feeling that that was his desired career from the beginning. The ‘early retirement’ of which his Wikipedia entry speaks took place at the age of thirty-five!
In every way, Harvey Pitcher has been a trail-blazer. His first book was published when he was twenty-eight. This was Understanding the Russians (George Allen and Unwin, 1964), which grew out of his experiences as an exchange student in Leningrad. On the one hand it presents a depressing pathology of Soviet life. Uniquely for the time, however, it also focussed on understanding how Russians feel and express their feelings. Undoubtedly this laid the foundations for the first book Pitcher published on leaving Academe:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (Chatto & Windus, 1973) unobtrusively overthrew the prevailing British consensus about Chekhov’s full-length plays. At the time, critics, directors and actors believed that the plays were, in Pitcher’s words, ‘vast coded documents which can only be deciphered with the utmost patience’; the plays were supposedly riddled with superfine irony; their whole purpose was to illustrate the ‘tragic lack of communication’ between human beings. What we were offered, then, was an essentially cerebral theatrical experience. We were supposed to think about and evaluate the characters. This melded with the Brechtian influence that British theatre was undergoing at the time, and indeed the disjunctiveness and unpredictability of Chekhovian dialogue/action were presented as a kind of ‘alienation effect’.
In place of this rather male theatre of distancing from the characters, Pitcher offered one of empathy with them. ‘At the heart of the Chekhov play’, he proclaimed, ‘there lies not emotional isolation but emotional contact between human beings.’ Chekhov was a master at activating what Pitcher called ‘the emotional network’ between a group of individuals. In terms similar to Harold Pinter’s about his own plays, Pitcher claimed that the problem was not that Chekhov’s characters couldn’t communicate with each other, but that they communicated only too well. Yet it was ‘important to bear in mind that the social conventions governing the expression of emotion do not coincide from one culture to another’. Pitcher was a pioneer in discussing the nature, strength and expression of specifically Russian emotions in Chekhov’s plays.
Although there have been more popular books in English about Chekhov’s plays, and I think our theatre now takes emotion, interpersonal communication and audience empathy for granted in them, I still feel The Chekhov Play is the most original book written on the subject in the last fifty years. In so far as George Calderon (possibly influenced by the Russian critic Aikhenval’d) originated in English the idea of ‘lack of communication’ between Chekhov’s characters, Pitcher’s interpretation was the first major revision of George’s famous Introduction to his 1912 Two Plays by Tchekhof.
Pitcher’s next book, When Miss Emmie Was in Russia: English Governesses before, during and after the October Revolution (John Murray, 1977) was again groundbreaking. In the 1970s people broadly believed that Tsarist Russia had been as bad, closed and xenophobic a country as the Soviet Union. Only émigré families knew that there had been a whole civilisation beneath the trappings of the Tsarist system. Based on Pitcher’s interviews with elderly British ladies who had lived and taught in prerevolutionary families, When Miss Emmie Was in Russia opened our eyes to the richness and normality of Russian life before 1917. It has gone through four editions. Pitcher’s subsequent books The Smiths of Moscow (1984) and Muir & Mirrielees: The Scottish Partnership that Became a Household Name in Russia (1994) even showed how attractive Russia had been to British businesses in the nineteenth century, how the country had welcomed them, and how at ease with Russia the British families who settled there were. A long, ecastatic review of The Smiths of Moscow by Ferdinand Mount in The Spectator suggested that the book dispelled decades of Soviet propaganda.
Click the image to find books by Harvey Pitcher on Amazon.
An essential feature of all my Inestimable Russianists is that they never take no for an answer. What they do is not just a job, they believe in it and are always prepared to act independently and take risks. Thus when Harvey Pitcher feared he might not find commercial publishers for his work, he founded his own imprint, Swallow House Books. The first book he published was a modest selection of Chekhov’s comic stories entitled Chuckle with Chekhov (1975). But the success of this was instrumental in persuading John Murray to publish in 1982, with great style, Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-88, a collection translated by Harvey and yours truly that stayed in print for twenty-five years. The mission of this book, and Pitcher’s subsequent Chekhov: The Comic Stories (André Deutsch, 1998 and 2004) was to establish the young Chekhov in British culture as a comic and serious force in his own right.
I think it is recognised by publishers, translators and Russianists that it was Harvey Pitcher who brought this off. The proof that he succeeded is that any shelf of Chekhov translations in a bookshop today will contain at least one volume of Chekhov’s early stories translated by younger hands. As with his new interpretation of Chekhov’s plays and his pioneering act of re-establishing historical continuity between Britain and Russia, Harvey Pitcher has lived to see his championing of the early Chekhov become generally accepted. Few things, surely, can be more gratifying than vindication of that kind. But we should not forget the singlemindedness and proactivity that the effort cost Pitcher. No British publisher at the time would touch The Smiths of Moscow, Muir & Mirrielees, or his delicate novel Lily: An Anglo-Russian Romance; he had to publish them himself.
It bewilders and saddens me that Harvey Pitcher even had to self-publish Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime (2010). For OF COURSE the lucid meditations of someone who has worked for over fifty years on a writer of world stature will be worth reading by anyone who loves that writer — which the British do. The book was beautifully produced by Pitcher and could hold its own with any commercial paperback:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
It was not well received by today’s academic Russianists. This is hardly surprising, as the book is not entitled Analysing, or Extrapolating From, Chekhov, it is about how we Respond to his writing, which is a matter of complex feeling. Moreover, just as Bakhtin wrote that ‘an author does not invite literary specialists to his banqueting table’, so Pitcher did not really invite academics to his. He tells us that his book is addressed to ‘all students of Chekhov’ and to ‘that wholly admirable if slightly unreal figure, the general reader’. Personally, I believe that posterity will cherish Responding to Chekhov.
In this brief series I have suggested that the independent Russian scholar and translator is communicative, interactive, collaborative, always proactive, and driven by love of his/her subject. Another feature is that he/she never retires… Harvey Pitcher writes that he is ‘currently engaged on putting the finishing touches to a translation of “The Lady with the Little Dog” and finding the first paragraph the most difficult, especially the first sentence, and especially the first word’. We wish him luck with translating what has been called ‘the best short story in the world’, and at least another decade of happily productive non-retirement.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon, 1912
Captain of the 11
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon c.1901
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Inestimable Russianist 3: Harvey Pitcher
(This series is timed to coincide with the 2019 Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies at Robinson College, Cambridge.)
Hale and hearty in his eighty-third year, Harvey Pitcher is not only one of this country’s leading Chekhov experts, he knows Edwardian Anglo-Russian contacts and life in prerevolutionary Russia inside out. When he offered to read in typescript chapter 4 of my biography, dealing with George Calderon’s stay in Russia 1895-97, and to make suggestions, I knew what an inestimable favour he was bestowing. But that was not all. As a full-time professional writer since 1971, he gave me invaluable advice about my ill-starred (requiring seventeen drafts) Introduction.
Pitcher left Academe to set up as an independent Russianist and translator at an earlier stage than Michael Pursglove or John Dewey. Having learned Russian at the famous Joint Services School of Linguists whilst doing National Service, he read the subject at Oxford, then went off to teach it at Glasgow University. After two years there, he was asked to start up the Department of Russian at St Andrews, which he most successfully did, but after eight years he left to concentrate exclusively on his writing. I cannot help feeling that that was his desired career from the beginning. The ‘early retirement’ of which his Wikipedia entry speaks took place at the age of thirty-five!
In every way, Harvey Pitcher has been a trail-blazer. His first book was published when he was twenty-eight. This was Understanding the Russians (George Allen and Unwin, 1964), which grew out of his experiences as an exchange student in Leningrad. On the one hand it presents a depressing pathology of Soviet life. Uniquely for the time, however, it also focussed on understanding how Russians feel and express their feelings. Undoubtedly this laid the foundations for the first book Pitcher published on leaving Academe:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (Chatto & Windus, 1973) unobtrusively overthrew the prevailing British consensus about Chekhov’s full-length plays. At the time, critics, directors and actors believed that the plays were, in Pitcher’s words, ‘vast coded documents which can only be deciphered with the utmost patience’; the plays were supposedly riddled with superfine irony; their whole purpose was to illustrate the ‘tragic lack of communication’ between human beings. What we were offered, then, was an essentially cerebral theatrical experience. We were supposed to think about and evaluate the characters. This melded with the Brechtian influence that British theatre was undergoing at the time, and indeed the disjunctiveness and unpredictability of Chekhovian dialogue/action were presented as a kind of ‘alienation effect’.
In place of this rather male theatre of distancing from the characters, Pitcher offered one of empathy with them. ‘At the heart of the Chekhov play’, he proclaimed, ‘there lies not emotional isolation but emotional contact between human beings.’ Chekhov was a master at activating what Pitcher called ‘the emotional network’ between a group of individuals. In terms similar to Harold Pinter’s about his own plays, Pitcher claimed that the problem was not that Chekhov’s characters couldn’t communicate with each other, but that they communicated only too well. Yet it was ‘important to bear in mind that the social conventions governing the expression of emotion do not coincide from one culture to another’. Pitcher was a pioneer in discussing the nature, strength and expression of specifically Russian emotions in Chekhov’s plays.
Although there have been more popular books in English about Chekhov’s plays, and I think our theatre now takes emotion, interpersonal communication and audience empathy for granted in them, I still feel The Chekhov Play is the most original book written on the subject in the last fifty years. In so far as George Calderon (possibly influenced by the Russian critic Aikhenval’d) originated in English the idea of ‘lack of communication’ between Chekhov’s characters, Pitcher’s interpretation was the first major revision of George’s famous Introduction to his 1912 Two Plays by Tchekhof.
Pitcher’s next book, When Miss Emmie Was in Russia: English Governesses before, during and after the October Revolution (John Murray, 1977) was again groundbreaking. In the 1970s people broadly believed that Tsarist Russia had been as bad, closed and xenophobic a country as the Soviet Union. Only émigré families knew that there had been a whole civilisation beneath the trappings of the Tsarist system. Based on Pitcher’s interviews with elderly British ladies who had lived and taught in prerevolutionary families, When Miss Emmie Was in Russia opened our eyes to the richness and normality of Russian life before 1917. It has gone through four editions. Pitcher’s subsequent books The Smiths of Moscow (1984) and Muir & Mirrielees: The Scottish Partnership that Became a Household Name in Russia (1994) even showed how attractive Russia had been to British businesses in the nineteenth century, how the country had welcomed them, and how at ease with Russia the British families who settled there were. A long, ecastatic review of The Smiths of Moscow by Ferdinand Mount in The Spectator suggested that the book dispelled decades of Soviet propaganda.
Click the image to find books by Harvey Pitcher on Amazon.
An essential feature of all my Inestimable Russianists is that they never take no for an answer. What they do is not just a job, they believe in it and are always prepared to act independently and take risks. Thus when Harvey Pitcher feared he might not find commercial publishers for his work, he founded his own imprint, Swallow House Books. The first book he published was a modest selection of Chekhov’s comic stories entitled Chuckle with Chekhov (1975). But the success of this was instrumental in persuading John Murray to publish in 1982, with great style, Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-88, a collection translated by Harvey and yours truly that stayed in print for twenty-five years. The mission of this book, and Pitcher’s subsequent Chekhov: The Comic Stories (André Deutsch, 1998 and 2004) was to establish the young Chekhov in British culture as a comic and serious force in his own right.
I think it is recognised by publishers, translators and Russianists that it was Harvey Pitcher who brought this off. The proof that he succeeded is that any shelf of Chekhov translations in a bookshop today will contain at least one volume of Chekhov’s early stories translated by younger hands. As with his new interpretation of Chekhov’s plays and his pioneering act of re-establishing historical continuity between Britain and Russia, Harvey Pitcher has lived to see his championing of the early Chekhov become generally accepted. Few things, surely, can be more gratifying than vindication of that kind. But we should not forget the singlemindedness and proactivity that the effort cost Pitcher. No British publisher at the time would touch The Smiths of Moscow, Muir & Mirrielees, or his delicate novel Lily: An Anglo-Russian Romance; he had to publish them himself.
It bewilders and saddens me that Harvey Pitcher even had to self-publish Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime (2010). For OF COURSE the lucid meditations of someone who has worked for over fifty years on a writer of world stature will be worth reading by anyone who loves that writer — which the British do. The book was beautifully produced by Pitcher and could hold its own with any commercial paperback:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
It was not well received by today’s academic Russianists. This is hardly surprising, as the book is not entitled Analysing, or Extrapolating From, Chekhov, it is about how we Respond to his writing, which is a matter of complex feeling. Moreover, just as Bakhtin wrote that ‘an author does not invite literary specialists to his banqueting table’, so Pitcher did not really invite academics to his. He tells us that his book is addressed to ‘all students of Chekhov’ and to ‘that wholly admirable if slightly unreal figure, the general reader’. Personally, I believe that posterity will cherish Responding to Chekhov.
In this brief series I have suggested that the independent Russian scholar and translator is communicative, interactive, collaborative, always proactive, and driven by love of his/her subject. Another feature is that he/she never retires… Harvey Pitcher writes that he is ‘currently engaged on putting the finishing touches to a translation of “The Lady with the Little Dog” and finding the first paragraph the most difficult, especially the first sentence, and especially the first word’. We wish him luck with translating what has been called ‘the best short story in the world’, and at least another decade of happily productive non-retirement.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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