At this very moment, I trust, a novelist somewhere is trying to weave Russia’s election-year meddling into the stuff of fiction. (I wish Keith Thomson would take it on.) Meanwhile, one of the most interesting literary stories of the last decade has gone mostly unnoticed—and this too, so it happens, has a Russian angle.
The story involves a writer named Paul Watkins, who completed his first novel before he turned 20. Over the years, his books (mostly fiction but some nonfiction as well) received many splendid reviews, but he was never a big seller, nor was he was taken up and anointed by any influential taste-making faction. After 2006, it seemed he had stopped writing, much to the sorrow of his faithful readers (me included).
Not so: He had assumed another identity. With the 2010 novel Eye of the Red Tsar, writing as Sam Eastland, Watkins (who has taught for many years at the Peddie School in New Jersey) started a series centering on Inspector Pekkala, part detective, part secret agent, serving Tsar Nicholas and then Stalin. Pekkala, a Finn, is a larger-than-life figure, with ancestors in The Kalevala (the great Finnish mythological epic), yet his adventures are always grounded in the quotidian. In 2014, in the preface to the fifth book in the series, The Beast in the Red Forest, Watkins revealed that he hadn’t gone silent after all.
This summer, the seventh and final book in the series was published. Berlin Red is a superb tale—but don’t start there. Go back and try Eye of the Red Tsar. If you like it half as much as I did, you have a lot of good reading to look forward to.
How did people live (or die) under Stalin? How did they go on? (Pekkala spends almost a decade in the gulag.) And are the answers to those questions more pertinent than we might suppose to people (like us) living under very different circumstances? Yes, they are indeed, if the shelves taken up with biographies and memoirs and novels inspired by the lives of Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Shostakovich, among others, are any measure.
One name to add to that list is Sergei Eisenstein. This fall, thanks to Seagull Books, we have five volumes by the great filmmaker, newly published or reissued, some of them gathering disparate pieces, some of them quite fragmentary, but none without interest. The title piece of one such collection, On the Detective Story, is particularly interesting.
Like his contemporary Viktor Shklovsky, the literary theorist (though that description makes him sound tedious if you associate it only with the “high theory” of recent decades), Eisenstein ransacks the span of world literature within the space of a few pages, moving nimbly from folk-tales to classics to contemporary writing, from Shakespeare to Fantomas. (He has some excellent observations on Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, and his account of Ellery Queen’s The Chinese Orange Mystery is more nourishing than an entire shelf from the Yale School.) In contrast to many contemporary writers, Eisenstein doesn’t overelaborate; he leaves it to his listeners or readers to make connections.
Reading this essay is like sitting in on an irresistible monologue, as if we were around a table where Eisenstein was holding court. Not even the ritual quotations from Marx, Engels, and their comrades can break the spell. Following the title essay are some bits and scraps under the somewhat misleading heading “Lectures on Literature,” including roughly six more pages on detective fiction: some tasty passages, some not (“The detective story is the most naked expression of bourgeois society’s fundamental ideas on property”).
That last sententious pronouncement makes me think of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which parodied this line of thinking before Eisenstein was even born. If you’ve never read it, or haven’t read it for years, you have at least three new versions to choose from in addition to the recent one by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear.
Novels appear in new translations for many reasons: to make money for a publisher and a little at least for a translator; to replace (perhaps) an older translation whose idioms now seem fusty; to compete with another contemporary translation that (so the rival translator believes) has failed to do justice to the original; and so on. Contrary to much huffing and puffing about the estimable Pevear/Volokhonsky versions having cornered the market, never in my reading lifetime have so many competing translations of Russian classics been available. There’s Oliver Ready’s 2014 Crime and Punishment from Penguin and two brand-new translations just released in November: Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s from Oxford and Michael R. Katz’s from Liveright. I can’t think of a book more timely for our moment.
John Wilson edited Books & Culture from its founding in 1995 until its closure in 2016.
