DickFotta+ ha scritto:Durakkone toja sistrà ..comunque ora ti dó una notizia sconvolgente: a lezione,la lettrice di russo,una topa totale,che non porta il reggiseno bensì gli stivaloni pure quando fà caldo(Est trattieniti,questa non si vende..)mi ha detto che il mio modo di fare le ricorda paro paro il protagonista de le 4 notti del sognatore,una delle prime opere di Dostojevskij..sarà che non ciulo perchè troppo romantico?
IMHO questo è + in linea con le nostre discussioni (cè anche in italiano,ricordo averlo letto)
Mikhail Artsybashev. Sanin: A Novel. Translation by Michael R. Katz. Introduction by Otto Boele. Afterword by Nicholas Luker. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001, 268 pp. Select Bibliography. $42.50, cloth. $17.95, paper.
With his masterful translation Michael R. Katz has revived an important novel-one that sent shock waves from one end of the Russian Empire to the other in 1907. Some Russian critics attacked it as immoral, others as a distortion of reality, and a few found some art in it. Even so, its fame was short-lived. Later, Soviet critics uniformly expressed contempt for it. Nevertheless, in 1932 Three Sirens Press (New York) published Percy Pinkerton's abridged translation in a large printing, part of which was in a numbered luxury issue. Mark Slonim, in his From Chekhov to the Revolution, declared the novel lacking in intrinsic value and thought Sanin's philosophy of free love merely Artsybashev's attempt to prove a thesis (freedom to do what one pleases). Victor Terras, in his History of Russian Literature, summed up the novel in half a sentence as "a somewhat pornographic vulgarization of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, or Lidiia Zinovyeva-Annibal's Thirty-three Abominations...."
Professor Katz, Otto Boele (Introduction), Nicholas Luker, (Afterword), and the far- sighted people at Cornell University Press, deem Sanin worthy of republication and study, and they are right. Unfortunately the lurid covers of the softcover impression seem at cross purposes with the seriousness and quality of the Cornell publication: On the front cover a figure in Russian costume stares with gaping mouth and dazed expression. He sits in something resembling a satanic throne, surrounded by visions (?) of naked, muscular men and undraped statues. On the back cover the words of Kornei Chukovskii and other serious scholars, cited out of context, give the impression that the book is not only pornographic but preoccupied with gay and lesbian love, incest, suicide and murder. In fact, suicide is the only shocker realized in Sanin.
True, Sanin is quite willing to relieve his sister of her virginity, which she seems to find burdensome, and she is sexually drawn to her brother, but she lacks his philosophy and nerve. So no incest transpires. True, Sanin's handsome, powerful physique is stressed by Artsybashev, and there is a scene with Sanin and a friend sunbathing and swimming together in the nude. But there is no evidence that the men are attracted to one another sexually; on the contrary they spy, spellbound, on a group of nude young women sporting by the water. Sanin and a rascally officer each seduce a virgin in the novel, but neither woman is taken by force and both enjoy their initiation, though they suffer guilt afterwards. The seduction scenes are described abstractly and briefly, not in "naturalistic detail," as Slonim suggested. There is no pornography in this novel. And Sanin stops short of murder when disfiguring the officer with one blow of his Herculean fist. Humiliated, the soldier commits suicide.
Boele's and Luker's essays are perceptive and go far toward correcting misjudgements and neglect. For example, Luker's comments on the seminal importance of Max Stirrer (Johann Kaspar Schmidt, 1806-56) to Artsybashev are particularly enlightening. Valuable also is Boele's review of Russian critical and scholarly writing about the novel, pro and con. Both articles are rich in biographical and socio-political information and are constructively provocative.
If the two scholars err in any way it is only in their somewhat narrow view of the novel's functions and importance. Boele asserts (p. 12): "The significance of Artsybashev's novel, then, lies in its function as a framework for structuring and understanding the confusing reality of a rapidly changing society. Whether it was held responsible for the corruption of educated youth or perceived as an objective document, as a mimicry of reality, Sanin seemed to hold the key to understanding what was really happening in Russia. That perception makes it required reading for any student of Russian history or literature today." Luker (p. 266) sums up his afterword with "...Artsybashev's thought-provoking novel made a uniquely important contribution to the debate about both sexual consciousness and public morality in Russian society after the crisis year of 1905." Though both writers offer a great deal of essential information and welcome insight concerning the novel's themes, its social background, Artsybashev's known intentions, influences (such as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky) on the author, and the importance of the work as a social, political, and to some extent philosophical document, they do not stress enough that Sanin works as art.
Artsybashev does not carve out anything new in technique nor attempt to explore new spiritual and psychological realms, as Andrei Belyi does in Petersburg and Kotik Letaev, for instance. There are some lapses into hackneyed phrases such as "muscles like steel" and "white-hot passion," and the omniscient narrator sometimes tries to guide the reader by simply applying summary epithets to the description of characters and their thoughts. One senses that Sanin is one culmination of a line going back to Pechorin and Bazarov, as well as of Tolstoi's heroes who are torn between the notion "he who is happy is right" and the old civic and Christian ideals of self-sacrifice. However, there are many deftly written pages about the powerful and shapeless malaise, often giving way to hopelessness, existential horror and suicidal thoughts, experienced by many Russian intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century. Artsybashev's writing is lean, the characterization effective, the characters' motivation believable, and the ending moving, if only because Sanin has the wisdom to quit the smothering Dumdrudge he has been visiting and head into the steppes' vastness. There is real art in the way Artsybashev portrays (or parodies, if one prefers) essentially Chekhovian heroes and heroines whose transmission is forever stuck in neutral, though their motors may occasionally race.
Sanin believes that it is within people's power to avoid dead ends, as he does, but understands that few do or ever will. Opposed to the unconscionable double standard imposed on women, he merely wonders why they do not rebel. He cannot empathize with the exiled student Yurii, originally the novel's protagonist. Yuri kills himself because he cannot find a course in life that fits his heroic image of himself, and he fancies that he is baffled by excessive consciousness-of existential dilemmas and his failure to be a man of action. Yurii is one of the Underground Man's offspring. Asked to say something at Yurii's funeral, Sanin says succinctly: "one fool less." Because he cannot deal with the antisemitism which surrounds him, and is convinced that his life is not worth living, Sanin's friendship notwithstanding, a Jewish intellectual kills himself, with Sanin's tacit approval. Sanin prevents his sister from drowning herself after a cad gets her with child, but ultimately thinks she might have been better off dead than to slowly smother in the sticks. None of the characters finds succor in the Church. A young tubercular intellectual dies horrified and infuriated by his fatal disease. A bumbling priest performs the last rites and declares him dead, whereupon the man rouses enough to gasp "what a windbag!"
Again and again Artsybashev's answer to Chernyshevskii's "What is to be done"? seems to be "nothing except to avoid pain and enjoy pleasure as long as possible." And to Gertsen's "Who is to blame?".-"No one, unless it be oneself." Though Sanin's philosophy and behavior are not original, Artsybashev appealingly portrays his unfettered personality and how it clashes fundamentally with provincial ways. The townsfolk are shocked because Sanin speaks his mind and lives by his own rules and conscience. He relishes life's gifts unhesitatingly, never coveting what others have. He accepts as natural his grasshopper's existence, and is as free as a bird. As he departs at novel's end with only the clothes on his back, he tells a friend that he neither asks nor expects anything from life. "The end is never happy: old age and death, that's all." This understanding constitutes part of his freedom: he has no illusions, no hopes for anything he cannot achieve by himself.
Sanin is a breath of fresh air, a respite from the brilliant but gloomy pages of post- conversion Tolstoi; from the Underground Man's morbid duality and circular perversity; from superfluous heroes, Oblomovism, Nihilism, fatalism, Mystical Anarchism, what have you. Artsybashev's novel is as good as some of Dostoevsky's juvenilia, some of Tolstoi's senilia, and any number of Gorky's works. The Cornell edition is a welcome revival of a good novel.
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