Book no. 217. A.F. Pisemskii. Stories. Leningrad, IKhL, 1970, 199 pp.
We have just finished cataloguing my Russian library for the American bibliophile who is interested in it. We started on 7 January and in the process I have handled over a thousand books…lingering over some as I went. The bibliophile wrote to me: ‘I know when I reorganize books it is almost like an historical analysis or an epistemological archaeological dig. That is to say kind of a reflection of where and what subjects someone was interested in at a particular time in one’s life.’ Very well put.
In my case, it has also brought me face to face with books that I have never actually read! By this I don’t, of course, mean the voluminous reference books — which I’ve copiously consulted over the past sixty years — or some of the forty-eight specialist works on the Russian language which I have used and in many cases read. I mean books like the above that I must have bought in Russia thinking ‘I’d better have one of those before they run out’, yet never even wrote my name and the date in; that are in pristine condition and to my certain knowledge have never been opened before. I have identified five books like that, very varied, which I’ll write short posts about after at last reading them.
Probably I was put off Pisemsky by the conventional wisdom that he is an exponent of the Age of Realism in Russian literature, which to me has always meant photographic sociology crossed with radical ideology. But this volume’s introduction, by N. Totubalin, is exceptional for the Soviet period in telling us that Pisemsky focussed on moral issues in pre-Emancipation Russia, not sociology, class, and overturning the system. Totubalin even quotes Chekhov, who in 1893 was reading Pisemsky’s stories for the first time and wrote that Pisemsky (d. 1881) was ‘a big, big talent’, his novels ‘tiring’, but his characters ‘living people’ and his ‘best work’ the story The Team of Carpenters.
There I must disagree with Anton Pavlovich. The said Team is written in beautifully clear literary Russian, its page after page of demotic dialogue is stunningly alive, but the narrative rambles on and on, Pisemsky appears in it in person, and the total effect is simply of higher journalism about The Awfulness of Russian Life. The best work here is the much shorter Wood Demon: A District Police Officer’s Story. It’s a masterly weaving of detective story, folklore, the supernatural, psychology, and shocking realism: its subject is serial rape. A beautiful and hard-working peasant girl who lives with her widowed mother suddenly disappears, then returns incoherent, screaming, shouting, and throwing herself on the ground. All she will say is that she has been abducted by a leshii, which is usually translated as ‘wood demon’. Most peasants believed in wood demons and thought they heard them screaming and howling in the forest. Near a church, the girl has fits like the traditional klikusha, an ‘hysterical woman’ whom peasants considered possessed by a devil. Layer by fascinating layer, the police officer gets to the truth, employing formidable psychological skills. The girl’s abuser forced her into the wood demon story and is unmasked as a married man who has consistently used his social position to harrass, abduct and rape women over a wide area. A truly devastating and timeless tale.
As far as I can tell from the Web, it has not been translated into English. It certainly deserves to be, but I think there are two hurdles. First, there is no adequate translation of leshii, as there’s nothing like them in English folklore — the words ‘wood demon’ have already been used and fallen flat as the title of a Chekhov play. Second, the dense peasant dialogue is not impossible to understand, with the help of Dal’s dictionary, but it would take a genius of English dialogue to bring it alive. Not me, then, but I am glad I read this book of Pisemsky’s stories, fifty-five years after acquiring it, for Wood Demon alone.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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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K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Captain of the 11
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon c.1901
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon, 1912
‘Library Notes’ (1)
Book no. 217. A.F. Pisemskii. Stories. Leningrad, IKhL, 1970, 199 pp.
We have just finished cataloguing my Russian library for the American bibliophile who is interested in it. We started on 7 January and in the process I have handled over a thousand books…lingering over some as I went. The bibliophile wrote to me: ‘I know when I reorganize books it is almost like an historical analysis or an epistemological archaeological dig. That is to say kind of a reflection of where and what subjects someone was interested in at a particular time in one’s life.’ Very well put.
In my case, it has also brought me face to face with books that I have never actually read! By this I don’t, of course, mean the voluminous reference books — which I’ve copiously consulted over the past sixty years — or some of the forty-eight specialist works on the Russian language which I have used and in many cases read. I mean books like the above that I must have bought in Russia thinking ‘I’d better have one of those before they run out’, yet never even wrote my name and the date in; that are in pristine condition and to my certain knowledge have never been opened before. I have identified five books like that, very varied, which I’ll write short posts about after at last reading them.
Probably I was put off Pisemsky by the conventional wisdom that he is an exponent of the Age of Realism in Russian literature, which to me has always meant photographic sociology crossed with radical ideology. But this volume’s introduction, by N. Totubalin, is exceptional for the Soviet period in telling us that Pisemsky focussed on moral issues in pre-Emancipation Russia, not sociology, class, and overturning the system. Totubalin even quotes Chekhov, who in 1893 was reading Pisemsky’s stories for the first time and wrote that Pisemsky (d. 1881) was ‘a big, big talent’, his novels ‘tiring’, but his characters ‘living people’ and his ‘best work’ the story The Team of Carpenters.
There I must disagree with Anton Pavlovich. The said Team is written in beautifully clear literary Russian, its page after page of demotic dialogue is stunningly alive, but the narrative rambles on and on, Pisemsky appears in it in person, and the total effect is simply of higher journalism about The Awfulness of Russian Life. The best work here is the much shorter Wood Demon: A District Police Officer’s Story. It’s a masterly weaving of detective story, folklore, the supernatural, psychology, and shocking realism: its subject is serial rape. A beautiful and hard-working peasant girl who lives with her widowed mother suddenly disappears, then returns incoherent, screaming, shouting, and throwing herself on the ground. All she will say is that she has been abducted by a leshii, which is usually translated as ‘wood demon’. Most peasants believed in wood demons and thought they heard them screaming and howling in the forest. Near a church, the girl has fits like the traditional klikusha, an ‘hysterical woman’ whom peasants considered possessed by a devil. Layer by fascinating layer, the police officer gets to the truth, employing formidable psychological skills. The girl’s abuser forced her into the wood demon story and is unmasked as a married man who has consistently used his social position to harrass, abduct and rape women over a wide area. A truly devastating and timeless tale.
As far as I can tell from the Web, it has not been translated into English. It certainly deserves to be, but I think there are two hurdles. First, there is no adequate translation of leshii, as there’s nothing like them in English folklore — the words ‘wood demon’ have already been used and fallen flat as the title of a Chekhov play. Second, the dense peasant dialogue is not impossible to understand, with the help of Dal’s dictionary, but it would take a genius of English dialogue to bring it alive. Not me, then, but I am glad I read this book of Pisemsky’s stories, fifty-five years after acquiring it, for Wood Demon alone.
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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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