With Russia and the Ukraine in the news, and renewed discussion around Russian identity, the Russian soul, and the history of the region, who better to turn to than Russian authors themselves from Turgenev to Makine? But first let me posit that my own relationship with Russian authors is a complex one. I was introduced to the classics by an uncle who gave me a few books form his library that he thought age appropriate—I must have been around ten. I remember especially a beautifully illustrated book of folklore called The Malachite Maid, and also Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. My uncle may have found a connection with Pushkin, also a member of a landowning family in a period of turmoil. When I was reading these classics, however, was in the sixties, the decade of Nasser’s pro-Soviet years, and I disassociated the Russians in the books from the real live Russians who roamed the streets of Cairo, representating as they did the “Socialist” system in the name of which my family had been stripped of its estates and possessions. But my own bias apart, in general they were not liked by Egyptians of all classes. I remember one afternoon coming upon our maid standing behind the window watching a young Russian across the street sitting on his balcony under the broiling summer sun, stripped to the waist, his skin strawberry-red and peeling, sweating and fanning himself with a newspaper.
“Doesn’t he have enough sense to get out of the sun at midday?” She shook her head. “Someone should warn him. He’s some mother’s son, after all, even if he’s Russian.” Then she sighed and drew the shutters closed. No one regretted the Russians when Sadat booted them unceremoniously out in the early seventies.
Later I read Turgenev and Chekhov, but only dipped in and out of Tolstoy. I have yet to finish War and Peace.
Now though, rereading Turgenev, I am struck by turns of expression that did not arrest my thought before. For instance, a landowner’s estate was not expressed in terms of acreage, but by the number of “souls” he owned, that is serfs. One book I found invaluable in putting Russian literature of the 19th century in context is Amanda Brickell Bellows’s American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post Emancipation Imagination. She highlights the progressive landlords like Turgenev, but also the apologists for serfdom, as evidenced in the fictional and artistic representations of the period. As she pointed out to me—Amanda is a friend and fellow editor—when I mentioned the reference to “souls”, in the American context the word “souls” could not have been used for enslaved people as their possession of souls was controversial. Truly fascinating.
