I wonder if Marydell has read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Anna. I think she might like it. She might also like Turgenev, who I think is just wonderful.
Update: Here is a link to Goya's The Pilgrimage to San Isadore, which Andrew mentions in the comments. I must say I should have taken a look at Goya before making my glib comment. Here's a self-portrait that's as good as they get. And take a look at Winter.
Damnit, recently bought Master and Margarita byt Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny, not realising Pevear and co have a translation. Wonder how they compare.
ReplyDeleteI have not read Anna Karenina, but I might have to considering how many times Tolstoy has been mentioned in Doctor Zhivago. Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is another one filled with bad memories from college. It's been more than 15 years since I graduated, so you'd think I'd be over it by now. Maybe I should challenge myself to reread all those books I thought I hated, and see if I can transcend my bias.
ReplyDeleteI'd have to wonder how anyone could fail to love War & Peace. And as for compulsive page turners, I don't think anyone is in Dostoevsky's league.
ReplyDeleteMy wife's problem with Dostoyevksy is that his world just does not appeal to her essentially sunny disposition. Personality figures a good deal in the appreciation of art.
ReplyDeleteTurgenev could probably use a new translation. Also there is something about books that are assigned as opposed to those we discover on our own. I had to read Hardy's The Return of the Native in high school and could make nothing of it. Later, though, when I had to read it in college, I was entralled. In that case, of course, it wasn't the fact of assignment, but the timing of it that made all the difference.
Understandable and probably similar to how Goya divides people. For me, Goya over the Impressionists any day, though I imagine this contrary to most people. Dunno if you saw Simon Schama's art series just finished on BBC(I guess not0 but given his taste for art that shakes the viewer out of his comfort zone, I'm amazed he didn't include Goya. Especially giventhat he did include David, a much lesser light.
ReplyDeleteSome interesting and relevant thoughts by Hermann Hesse on Dostoevsky I might try and dig up later.
Though not quite what I was searching for.
ReplyDeleteI said Dostoevsky is not a poet, or he is only a poet in a secondary sense. I called him a prophet. It is difficult to say exactly what a prophet means. It seems to me something like this. A prophet is a sick man, like Dostoevsky, who was an epileptic. A prophet is the sort of sick man who has lost the sound sense of taking care of himself, the sense which is the saving of the efficient citizen. It would not do if there were many such, for the world would go to pieces. This sort of sick man, be he called Dostoevsky or Karamazov, has that strange, occult, godlike faculty, the possibility of which the Asiatic venerates in every maniac. He is a seer and an oracle. A people, a period, a country, a continent has fashioned out of its corpus an organ, a sensory instrument of infinite sensitiveness, a very rare and delicate organ. Other men, thanks to their happiness and health, can never be troubled with this endowment. This sensory instrument, this mantological faculty is not crudely comprehensible like some sort of telepathy or magic, although the gift can also show itself even in such confusing forms. Rather is it that the sick man of this sort interprets the movements of his own soul in terms of the universal and of mankind. Every man has visions, every man has fantasies, every man has dreams. And every vision every dream, every idea and thought of a man, on the road from the unconscious to the conscious, can have a thousand different meanings, of which every one can be right. But the appearances and visions of the seer and the prophet are not his own. The nightmare of visions which oppresses him does not warn him of a personal illness, of a personal death, but of the illness, the death of that corpus whose sensory organ he is, This corpus can be a family, a clan, a people, or it can be all mankind. In the soul of Dostoevsky a certain sickness and sensitiveness to suffering in the bosom of mankind which is otherwise called hysteria, found at once its means of expression and its barometer. Mankind is now on the point of realizing this. Already half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss and, as she reels, she sings a drunken hymn such as Dmitri Karamazov sang. The insulted citizen laughs that song to scorn, the saint and seer hear it with tears.
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/people/hesse.html
This is getting interesting, Andrew. I react to Goya (often, not always) the way my wife reacts to Dostoyevksy - though. like you, I'm not overly fond of the Impressionists. I prefer the Barbizon painters - and Constable and Turner over all of them. Of the Impressionists, my favorite is probably Sisley (also part English). Come to think of it, while we're being heretical, I rather like the American Impressionists better than the French.
ReplyDeleteI think Hesse is on the money regarding Dostoyevksy and that is quite a site you linked to.
I better clarify that it isn't the especially ghoulish Goyas that appeal to me, Frank, such as Saturn Devouring His Son. I actually think he has a lot in common with Turner in terms of a kind of an elemental power within his work. And both share a very loose style, a stunning and mysterious stabbing with the brush in Goya's case. Noone could accuse the following image of light-relief but ...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.artchive.com/galleries/goya/st_isidore_zoom1.html
I don't think it gives a great idea of the greatness of the painting....how often reproductions leave one disappointed. I also think there's a real delicate beauty to Goya that one may not expect.
Anyway, my searches for images led me to this extract
"ALDOUS HUXLEY was himself middle-aged when he imagined an Anthology of Later Works. To be included, an artist had to have been a master who lived "without ever ceasing to learn of life," and, in the novelist's view, not all masters had achieved this.
Wordsworth, for example, spent his last 50 years preserving "an almost unbroken record of dullness," and "Peter Pan-like," Haydn "continued to write the same sort of thing he had written 20, 30 and 40 years before."
In fact, the only masters to make it into the hypothetical anthology were Shakespeare, Bach, El Greco, Beethoven, Verdi and last but not least Goya."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE4D7133AF93BA15750C0A965958260
Huxley being a bit of a hero of mine, the above a pleasant surprise. And perhaps Goya apllicable to Huxley's line that "Truth lies at the bottom of a very dirty well."
Just checked and saw that my Goya image link didn't work. Perhaps this will od the nedful thogh again, doesn't really do the painting justice.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.spanisharts.com/prado/goya/romeria.htm
Neither does that. I give up, anyway the painting was The Pilgrimage to San Isidiro.
ReplyDeleteGood images, Frank. Thanks for the self-portrait which I hadn't seen before. Goya for me, the only artist in Rembrandt's league at this kind of psychological level. Though what these artists achieve is something far deeper than suggsted by mere words like psychological.
ReplyDeleteHere's a particularly stinning virtuoso display of a bullfight, where the connection to Turner is, I think, apparent.
http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?42668+0+0+gg52
Bullfights in those wilder days far more chaotic phenomena!
ReplyDelete