All the Same The Words Dont Go Away Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition Caryl Emerson Caryl Emerson STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SLAVIC ARS ROSSIKA LITERATURES, CULTURES AND HISTORY Series Editor: Lazar Fleishman Series Editor: David Bethea (Stanford Universtity) (University of Wisconsin — Madison and Oxford University) All the Same The Words Dont Go Away Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition Caryl Emerson Caryl Emerson Boston 2011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emerson, Caryl. All the same the words don’t go away : essays on authors, heroes, aesthetics, and stage adaptations from the Russian tradition / Caryl Emerson. p. cm. -- (Studies in Russian and Slavic literatures, cultures and history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934843-81-9 (hardback) 1. Russian literature--History and criticism. 2. Russian literature--Adaptations--History and criticism. I. Title. PG2951.E46 2011 891.709--dc22 2010047494 Copyright © 2011 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Effective May 23, 2016, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. ISBN 978-1-934843-81-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-618111-28-9 (electronic) Book design by Ivan Grave On the cover: Saskia Ozols Eubanks, St. Isaac’s Cathedral After the Storm. Oil on Panel, 2010 (a fragment). Published by Academic Studies Press in 2011 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com For Sophia (Wisdom) CONTENTS Preface . xi Great Art Should Slow Us Down: “Participative Th inking” in the World and as the World of Caryl Emerson. By David Bethea . xiii I ON MIKHAIL BAKHTIN (Dialogue, Carnival, the Bakhtin Wars) 1. Polyphony and the Carnivalesque: Introducing the Terms . 3 Polyphony, Dialogism, Dostoevsky (1997) . 3 Carnival: Open-Ended Bodies and Anachronistic Histories (1997) . 30 2. Th e Early Philosophical Essays . 42 Bakhtin at 100: Looking Back at the Very Early Years (1995) . 42 3. Coming to Terms with Carnival . 53 Coming to Terms with Bakhtin’s Carnival: Ancient, Modern, sub Specie Aeternitatis (2002) . 53 4. Gasparov and Bakhtin . 74 Twenty-Five Years Later: Gasparov on Bakhtin (2006) . 74 II ON THE MASTER WORKERS (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) 5. Four Pushkin Biographies . 99 Our Everything (2004) . 99 6. Pushkin’s Tatiana . 132 Tatiana (1995) . 133 Postscript to “Tatiana”: the Reaction from Tambovsk, Pskov, Novosibirsk (1997) . 154 — vii — ------------------------------------------------------------------------- C O N T E N T S ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7. Pushkin’s Boris Godunov . 162 Boris Godunov: Tragedy, Comedy, Carnival, and History on Stage (2006) . 163 Postscript on Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (2010) . 189 8. George Steiner on Tolstoy or Dostoevsky . 192 Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Seductions of the Old Criticism (1994) . 192 9. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on Evil-Doing . 215 Dostoevsky versus Tolstoy on Evil-Doers and the Art of the Novel (2001) . 215 Postscript to “Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on Evil-Doing” (2010) . 222 10. Kundera on Not Liking Dostoevsky . 223 Milan Kundera on Not Liking Dostoevsky (2002) . 223 11. Parini on Tolstoy, with a Postscript on Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and the Performing Arts . 235 Review of Jay Parini’s Th e Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year (1990) . 235 Postscript to Parini and Hoff man, 2010: Some Th oughts on Tolstoy in the Performance Mode, with a Digression on Tolstoy and Shakespeare (2010) . 240 12. Chekhov and the Annas . 249 Chekhov and the Annas (1997) . 249 III MUSICALIZING THE LITERARY CLASSICS (Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Prokofi ev) 13. Foreword to Richard Taruskin’s Essays on Musorgsky . 263 Excerpts from the Foreword to Richard Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (1993) . 263 14. From “Boris Godunov” to “Khovanshchina” . 269 Musorgsky’s Libretti on Historical Th emes: From the Two Borises to Khovanshchina (1988) . 269 15. Tumanov on Maria Olenina-d’Alheim . 301 Review of Alexander Tumanov’s Th e Life and Artistry of Maria Olenina-d’Alheim (2002) . 299 16. Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana . 304 Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana (1997) . 304 Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin: the Women and their Worlds (2001) . 308 17. Little Operas to Pushkin’s Little Tragedies . 313 Little Tragedies, Little Operas (2003) . 313 — viii — -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 18. Playbill to Prokofi ev’s “War and Peace” at the Met . 337 Th e Endurance of War, the Deceptions of Peace: Prokofi ev’s Operatic Masterpiece (2002) . 337 19. Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” . 342 “Shostakovich and the Russian Literary Tradition” (2004) . 342 20. Princeton University’s Boris Godunov . 362 Editor’s Introduction: Princeton’s Boris Godunov, 1936/2007 (2007) . 363 Editor’s Postscript to Actors’ Testimonials (2007) . 369 Afterword: Th e Fate of the Jubilee Pushkin on the Stalinist Musical-Dramatic Stage (2007) . 372 21. “Eugene Onegin” on the Stalinist Stage . 378 Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) Bio-bibliographical sketch (2010) . 379 Th e Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofi ev Collaboration on Eugene Onegin, 1936 (A Lesser-Known Casualty of the Pushkin Death Jubilee) (2008) . 391 In Conclusion . 416 Index . 418 — ix — PREFACE Th e articles, reviews, and excerpts from monographs gathered together in this book are drawn from twenty-fi ve years of activity in the fi eld. Such a winnowing is always instructive for the author, for it reveals a contour of interests that is often obscured as we tack from topic to topic. Th is tacking — which in retrospect becomes our “academic career” — responds in part to inner intellectual prompts but just as often to outside accident. Such accidents include a chance commission to read or to review another’s work; a passionate if not professional avocation (in my case, singing); the research interests of a respected professor in graduate school (Michael Holquist’s invitation to me, a clueless Ph.D. candidate fed up with the abstract cunning of French structuralism, to co-translate some essays on the history and theory of the novel by a just deceased and little known Russian thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin, in 1975); a buried archival document uncovered and shared by a generous colleague (how I happened upon Krzhizhanovsky in 2007, through Simon Morrison’s work on Prokofi ev). A trickier problem than this “view from within” is how to organize one’s work from without, so it might prove useful and coherent to others while remaining open-ended. To that end the material here has been arranged in three parts. First comes Bakhtin, my enduring critical inspiration; then the three great 19th century master workers who have been constant companions: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Th e third part is devoted to “musicalized” classics. Th ere my attention has shifted from nineteenth-century “native” opera (most stubbornly Boris Godunov, from the dissertation onward) to twentieth-century experimental stage works and, recently, to musically enhanced drama and the challenge of performed, as opposed to silently privately consumed, verbal art. All entries have been excerpted and lightly edited for this edition, provided with headnotes, and several have substantial “postscripts.” With the exception of occasional corrections in the footnotes, the reprinted entries have not been updated to refl ect more recent thoughts or publications — which would have been to risk wholesale rewriting. Two pieces were written for this volume: one on Tolstoy and Shakespeare (the fruit of this Tolstoy Centennial Year) — xi — ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- PREFACE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- and another on the focus of my recent research, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Overall I was astonished to discover how stable — or perhaps how crimped — my interests and aesthetic priorities have been over this past quarter-century, and how persistent are the patterns I detect in widely disparate cultural material. Whether this is the good news or the bad is diffi cult to say. Th e title of this collection is double-voiced. Th e fact that “words don’t go away” pays tribute to two happy accidents. First is my fascination with literary personality in danger of losing its depth, thoughtfulness and privacy to the immediacy of a “moving set” — to melody, harmony, rhythm, external gesture — and how such fl attening-out can be, and has been, averted. Second is the fact that up to now in the humanities, the scholarly medium for a discussion of synthesizing artworks has remained the narrated word rather than visual, spatial, or musical expression. A dance, a mime, a portrait, a piece of sculpture, a sequence or pattern of projected lights, a soundtrack or interweave of melodic themes are all wonderfully rich signifying systems capable of precise communication, but they are far more diffi cult to master and to mount than a book of essays. So far, mainstream debates in aesthetics, even as regards technical aspects, remain mired in the realm of the word. And that means: having talked