ONE OF MY CONTINUING and more respectable prejudices has always been, not altogether justly, against anthologies. “Not altogether justly” because an anthology can, I suppose, be very exciting on occasion, and at least as handy as those other indispensables of the earnest middle-brow American, Barlett and Roget’s Thesaurus. Anthologies are apparently designed to make life easier for the inveterate sampler and rereader and to fire the neophyte with an urge to more fully discover the authors who have been obligingly edited and presented to him by some zealous editor. It appeals to me usually about as strongly as watered whiskey; but, of course, even watered whiskey is better than none.
Mr. Guerney’s watered blend is better than most. His self-avowed determinations to indicate to American readers that Russian literature is not all epileptic melancholia—which hardly seemed likely—and that Russians can be gay as well as gloomy, of which I, for one, received overwhelming evidence from the deluge of Moscow-Sings-Moscow-Dances movies during the recent war. Nevertheless, Mr. Guerney has set out to deliver Russian literature from under “Dostoevsky’s somber cape.” This is admirable, perhaps, though of the work printed here (in spite of an occasional, tight, nightmarish humor), none is precisely lighthearted, and most of it is quite strenuously grim.
Mr. Guerney apparently feels that of all literary instruments, the Russian language is the mightiest and most profound, a belief which I, naturally, would not dare to challenge; moreover, according to him, almost all translations from the Russian have been at best weak infidelities or downright profanations. It is something of a blow to discover that one has never really read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky at all but has been merely titillated by irresponsible pastel corruptions. Since Mr. Guerney at no point indicates that he will translate the major works of these men himself, one is left with the rather despairing alternatives of buying a Linguaphone or sticking close to Shakespeare. In spite of all this—or quite possibly because of it, since here each translation has Mr. Guerney’s guarantee—The Portable Russian Reader is a moderately fascinating grab bag. It is quite dreadfully comprehensive, including fables from the eleventh and seventeenth centuries and aphorisms and proverbs from the Lord knows when. More familiarly, there are short stories and excerpts from Pushkin, Gogol, Krylov, Garshin, Turgenev, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Ehrenburg. Much of these I have never read before and I am glad to have found them now; some are slight or so completely Russian idiom that they have little relevance; later on, with Ehrenburg, for instance, the grim revolutionary simplicities become rather hard to take. But as a matter of fact, Mr. Guerney’s taste, if not irreproachable, is sound, and he has included nothing which could be called mediocre. There are some things which are unforgettable: Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6,” for instance, and Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” and Garshin’s “Four Days.” It includes one of Gorky’s most successful sketches, “Birth of a Man,” Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (there is an unwritten law, Mr. Guerney claims, that every Russian anthology must include it), and the understated, bloodcurdling “Specters” by Turgenev. Mr. Guerney went hog wild, it seemed to me, with the aphorisms and proverbs, but that is undoubtedly the privilege of an anthologist. In this book, in spite of Mr. Guerney’s irritating tendency to sound as though he alone understood the Russian psyche, there is evidence of much loving care, a genuine determination to do the best job possible. But precisely because it was meant to be both portable and comprehensive, it is pretty much of a failure. It is never a critical study, though Mr. Guerney sometimes sounds as though he wishes it were; nor yet is it a history, though it tries to be; and there is no sense of development, though that, presumably, is what Mr. Guerney was aiming at. Since we have no sense of a growing literature, the earlier selections—the fables, etc.—seem charming but irrelevant, conceived in a vacuum. Beyond discovering that it has been going on for a devilishly long time, we do not have any greater understanding of Russian literature than we did before. We have, as I say, a grab bag: diverse, portable, suitable for journeys and after-dinner table conversations.
(1948)