Tom Crewe on Turgenev
Tom Crewe has a delightful review of Turgenev’s body of work in the April 21st issue of the London Review of Books. Two highlights whose combination struck me:
In reading Turgenev in English we are not departing from historical precedent. The vast majority of his 19th-century readers, in company with his most distinguished European and American admirers (James, Flaubert, Zola, George Eliot, Howells, the authorities in Oxford who gave him an honorary doctorate in 1879), read him largely in French or English. His importance for Western literature is unavoidably a mediated one, and it is through translation that we see what made those readers praise him so highly.
And:
Turgenev’s greatest strength as a writer was his talent for detail, which had several different applications. One of his most distinctive habits is his use of similes drawn from the natural world (the result of much time spent outside, first as a child frightened of his mother and then as a devoted huntsman).
Among the examples Crewe gives is this complex metaphor from Turgenev’s novella First Love:
Indistinct streaks of lightning flickered incessantly in the sky; they did not so much flash as flutter and twitch like the wing of a dying bird.
It takes a gifted writer to manage the handoff between these two images. I, at least, find it convincing; in my mind the lightning and the bird’s wings work on something like the same underlying principle of motion.
And for a writer who has largely made his reputation through translation, it is a risky, high accomplishment to mark naturalistic detail with so much vitality that your translators have what they need to keep it alive.