Translating Eugene Onegin
All the translations of Onegin are riddled with errors, often monstrous ones. Even such a major literary scholar as the well-known Polish poet Julian Tuwim, Babette Deutsch, the German Wulf and others have translated Pushkin’s text unfaithfully. The translation of Onegin into French by Turgenev and the famous singer Viardot is flawless.
Doctor Zhivago?
A mediocre melodrama with Trotskyist tendencies. It is an antiliberal work, undoubtedly pro-Bolshevik, even if anti-Stalinist. The book is badly written, very badly. Pasternak was never a good prose writer. He is, of course, a good poet. Not as great, of course, as Blok, but good.
Soviet literature?
Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don? Third-rate. [My] favorite Soviet writers are Yuri Olesha, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Ilf and Petrov [and] among poets [Osip] Mandelshtam and [Ilya] Selvinsky. Soviet literature is philistine literature. This is typical of the literature of any country with an extreme political regime. Ilya Ehrenburg? He’s a dazzling journalist and a big sinner. My late mother at one time would read and reread his long poem “A Prayer for Russia,” which he wrote while his stance was still anticommunist.
Alexei Tolstoy?
Peter the First and Road to Calvary are virtuosically written, but a sequence of chapters there is artificially accommodated to the “general line.” Nonetheless, Tolstoy is without a doubt a major talent. Some of his stories are masterfully written.
* “Vstrecha s avtorom Lolity” (“A Meeting with the Author of Lolita”), Novoe russkoe slovo, Feb. 5, 1961, 8. Svet interviewed VN in Nice.