To Me With Impulse Immediacy

We all watched Woody’s “Love and Death” (1975) over the weekend.  Say what you want.  Woody’s great.  Maybe there were one too many jokes about sex with underage twins, I’ll grant you.  But in a home trying to prep for a trip to Russia, trying to consider that country’s great literary tradition, Woody packs a lot in to an hour and a half and had me gut laughing as he almost always does or did, in those days.  And now we have visual metaphors to refer to scenes at the opera, and scenes at the front, and scenes at the dacha. 

My older one and I are half way through Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  The younger one and I are making our way through Turgenev’s “Father’s and Sons.”  Reacquainting myself with the latter I discovered that he once so angered the prior that Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel.  Fortunately for one of the two of them and all of us, the duel was never consummated.  For it almost certainly would not have ended as Woody’s does, with no one dead and an aggressor reborn.  Pushkin, however wasn’t so lucky. 

I remember having started Eugene Onegin at one time or another, during some decade back there, and never having gotten through.  I’d dutifully made my way through scores of other Russian fiction and I’m not sure precisely what knocked me off track.  In the old French Concession in Shanghai, where so many White Russians settled after making their way across Eurasia, there is a commanding statue of the father or modern Russian literature.  Standing beneath it a few years back, it wasn’t the first time I’d thought to reconnect with the author. 

With so many pieces of Russian prose lying open around th home, I decided, I should probably get another copy of the Eugene Onegin and try again.  And Amazon.cn being what it is, inconsistent, I wasn’t able to find any copy of the book to send to me with impulse immediacy.  But there was an interesting collection of the complete prose of Pushkin, translated into English by the prolific couple, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  And when the kuaidi man rang the bell with the package the next day I tore it open and dove right into the mini-biography they’d penned for an introduction.  Novels, Tales and Journeys of Alexander Pushkin are now on-deck.

Tuesday, 02/13/18