Jacob read and liked Gabriel's review of Tales of Belkin (The Art of the Novella):

"Josh kept telling me how weird this novella is, and, now I've read it, I think I understand.

The "From the Publisher" note at the beginning seems to me the most intriguing part of the whole book, putting, as it does, the rest of ...more Josh kept telling me how weird this novella is, and, now I've read it, I think I understand.

The "From the Publisher" note at the beginning seems to me the most intriguing part of the whole book, putting, as it does, the rest of the tales into their proper context: this is supposed to be a novella and not a collection of short stories. So we can take that note as a frame, and the stories as discrete stories, or we can take the (more interesting) stance that it is no frame at all, and the stories are meant to throw light onto their teller, Belkin. Then they are not so much "Tales from Belkin," as they might have been, but "Tales of Belkin," with Belkin as their proper subject. (less) "

Jacob read and liked Josh's review of Tales of Belkin (The Art of the Novella):

"An inherent Yankee repugnance of self-promotion made me hold off on posting a review of this, for a little while at least, but last night I watched a native and very well-read Russian read four pages of the copy I gave him. My breath was bated and my...more An inherent Yankee repugnance of self-promotion made me hold off on posting a review of this, for a little while at least, but last night I watched a native and very well-read Russian read four pages of the copy I gave him. My breath was bated and my heart literally in my throat as I waited for the inevitable grimace that I remember seeing on the faces of parents at my piano recitals, which were followed, when caught, by the immediate cover-up or worse, attempt to convince me that yes, everything's fine. Anyway, everyone cuts their teeth, knuckles, hands and hearts on Pushkin at some point in their lives, I have nothing to be ashamed about (I imagined him saying)...At that point in the evening I had eaten my weight in mushrooms and drunk more glasses of tea than I'm used to; I was trying - as anyone who's every watched someone read something they wrote - not to fall at this reader's feet and cry out please, PLEASE LOVE ME, while beating my breast and pulling my pigtails out, etc. etc. Seconds ticked by; minutes. My napkin found itself translated into a pyramid of tiny, anxiously-rolled pellets. Eventually I decided that said reader was in fact wearing one of those bad comedy glasses with fake eyes painted on the lenses and had been asleep for the last half hour - but then suddenly, who knows how, I heard a chuckle escape his mouth! I could barely believe it. "Nod bed," he said. "Ektually, is quite good." At which point I realized that I could die, right then and there, a happy man.

He was being kind, of course - for even with the most generous post-release beer goggles fully installed, it's impossible for me not to recognize that mine is, like all its fellows in English, an imperfect translation of Pushkin's incredible short story cycle. Given this, I can only pray that it captures a fragment of the original's humor, wit, and speed - all of which are remarkable, not only for the time and circumstances, but in the total body of Russian literature. To pull a LeVar Burton for a second, if you won't take my word for it, take Leo Tolstoy's: after reading them for the seventh time (he thought) he said that every writer should study the Tales closely. My own personal immersion (a painstaking, sentence by sentence one: translation is truly one of the strangest arts on earth) helped me see/feel how a story can be quick and deep at the same time, and how a work can simultaneously combine sincerity and parody. Pushkin never seems to be trying hard. Nontheless, the tales are fully realized: works of art so compact that the rest of Russian literary history could easily be read as a gigantic, complicated unpacking of their deep, deceptively plain-looking carpetbag.

Anyway, as always with these things, felicities are Pushkin's, mistakes are mine. I hope you (whoever you are) enjoy, or, if not, do what I did and channel your frustration into an attempt at learning Russian so you can read the original for yourself. It is definitely worth it.


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