Papers by Tatyana Gershkovich
Narrative , 2023
The novels we know best have an architecture, " writes Zadie Smith in an essay on reading (43). "... more The novels we know best have an architecture, " writes Zadie Smith in an essay on reading (43). "Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, etcetera. It's a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime" (42). Despite having their "own ideas of the floor plan, " however, Smith reminds readers that they are only tenants, not landlords, let alone architects. Readers fashion a "wonderful way of living in" a novel, but they must still abide by "the house rules [.. .] the author's peculiar terms" (Smith 43, 57). This was not always Smith's view; she describes her way of reading as evolving over time. Like many modern readers, Smith has tried to navigate two contradictory impulses. The first is to embrace linguistic skepticism and to accept-even to revel in-the multiple meanings it is possible to find in texts when they are unmoored from an authorial anchor. The second is to grieve that loss of a shared textual center and to search for ways to restore it. For Smith, the first impulse is personified by Roland Barthes, the second by Vladimir Nabokov. As a college student she thrilled to Barthes' brash disregard for the supposedly dubious project of pinning down the meaning of a text. Barthes declared that the "unity of the text is not in its origin, but its destination"-not in the writer, but in the reader (Barthes 129).
Two centuries of Russian classics
Discusses the Russian-language edition of Donna Orwin’s book about Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tols... more Discusses the Russian-language edition of Donna Orwin’s book about Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, which came out this year with Academic Studies Press / Bibliorossika. The reviewer considers this book’s publication in Russian a significant scholarly contribution as well as an important reminder of the cultural entanglements among Russia, Europe, and North America. Orwin’s Consequences of Consciousness provides its readers with a comprehensive account of the cultural and philosophical circumstances that gave rise to Russian psychological realism, and offers innovative readings of key literary texts that demonstrate the dynamic dialogue among the three authors who established the genre.
Slavic and East European Journal, 2019
This article argues that when Vladimir Nabokov translated his novel Kamera obskura (1932) into En... more This article argues that when Vladimir Nabokov translated his novel Kamera obskura (1932) into English under the title Laughter in the Dark (1938), he significantly transformed its aesthetic concerns. Both versions of the novel attend to the nature of aesthetic response, and specifically to the way our responses might be falsified or corrupted. But in the Russian novel Nabokov explores rather well-trodden territory: he depicts the way our desire for gratification interferes with our aesthetic perception and judgment. In Laughter in the Dark he illuminates a different, more surprising, and in some ways more insidious impediment to aesthetic perception—namely, our own creative desires. To demonstrate the transformation of Nabokov’s aesthetic concerns through the process of self-translation, I consider the Russian and English versions of his novel alongside Leo Tolstoi’s stories The Devil and The Kreutzer Sonata, both important intertexts for Kamera obscura and Laughter in the Dark. Tolstoy and Nabokov share the intuition that our own creative drives, far from being always beneficial or even benign, can impede our moral and aesthetic responses.
В статье утверждается, что в своем переводе романа «Камера обскура» (1932) на английский язык под новым названием «Смех в темноте» (1938), Владимир Набоков значительно трансформировал эстетическую идею оригинала. Обе версии романа рассматривают природу эстетического отклика, в частности, то, как наша ответная реакция может быть сфальсифицирована или искажена. Но в русской версии романа Набоков идет довольно проторенным путём, показывая, как наше стремление к поощрению мешает эстетическому восприятию и суждению. В «Смехе в темноте» он освещает другое, более неожиданное и, в некотором смысле, более завуалированное препятствие для ожидаемого эстетического восприятия, а именно, наш собственный творческий стимул. Чтобы продемонстрировать трансформацию эстетической идеи Набокова в результате авторского перевода, я рассматриваю русскую и английскую версии его романа параллельно с повестями Льва Толстого «Дьявол» и «Крейцерова соната», которые являются важными интертекстами для «Камеры обскуры» и «Смеха в темноте». Толстой и Набоков разделяют идею о том, что наши собственные творческие побуждения, далекие от того, чтобы быть всегда благотворными или даже благонаправленными, могут стать препятствием для наших моральных и эстетических реакций.
PMLA , 2019
The postcritique debate tends to presuppose that reading suspiciously or restoratively is largely... more The postcritique debate tends to presuppose that reading suspiciously or restoratively is largely a matter of choosing to do so and that texts themselves do not incline us to read them one way or another. Drawing on works by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov, this essay contests these presumptions. Both authors regarded distrust as a state of mind to which we are ineluctably condemned; only by reading artworks designed to allay our suspicion can we hope to be briefly relieved of it. Tolstoy’s famous Kreutzer Sonata and Nabokov’s little-known variation on it, “Pozdnyshev’s Address,” explore strategies for disarming readerly distrust. If these authors are right that suspicion is our existential condition rather than a freely chosen interpretive stance, the project of prescribing the ways that readers ought to relate to texts is unlikely to succeed—or cease. We might instead set ourselves the task of investigating how particular texts shape the ways they are read.
Татьяна Гершкович Ясная Поляна 2016 Хаджи-Мурат, как прообраз эстетической восприимчивости В 1898... more Татьяна Гершкович Ясная Поляна 2016 Хаджи-Мурат, как прообраз эстетической восприимчивости В 1898 году, вскоре после окончания работы над статьей «Что такое искусство?», Толстой, в письме Черткову, рассуждал -«Хотел я всё это время написать художественное, что-нибудь такое, что соответствовало бы мною же поставленным требованиям. Но ничего не мог». i Это желание Толстого следовать своим собственным художественным правилам привело к тому, что повесть «Хаджи-Мурат» и другие литературные произведения этого позднего периода часто анализируют в свете его эстетических теорий. K «Хаджи-Мурату» чаще всего обращаются для критического анализа тех же вопросов, которые Толстой поставил в своем трактате об искусстве-вопросов о природе художественного выражения. При этом одной из основных тем ученых является выяснение вопроса о том, следует ли повесть тем же рецептам искусства, которые постулировал Толстой в своем эссе. ii Я, в свою очередь, полагаю, что «Хаджи-Мурат» и «Что такое искусство?» на самом деле ставят разные вопросы касающиеся искусства и решают проблемы относящиеся к различным областям эстетического опыта. Эссе в первую очередь касается вопросов художественного творчества и ответственности художника. Повесть, с другой стороны, уделяет больше внимания
Digital Projects by Tatyana Gershkovich
At 63, Tolstoy set out to write a list of a hundred books that had made a deep impression on him.... more At 63, Tolstoy set out to write a list of a hundred books that had made a deep impression on him. But compiling the list was slow going: it was not so easy to remember which books had been significant, and when. Some remained clear in his memory: “Childhood to 14 years old: The story of Joseph in the Bible, Pushkin’s poetry… 14 to 20 years old: The Gospel of Matthew, Rousseau Confessions, Schiller’s Die Räuber” and so on. But in the end his list numbered only around fifty titles—a small fraction of the many works he had read and contemplated throughout his long life.
Beyond the Ant Brotherhood (http://colloquy.us/) aims to pick up where Tolstoy left off, to vastly expand the list he began to compile. This project will assemble a database that catalogues the multitude of works that shaped, in one way or another, Tolstoy’s intellectual life. It will also create a visualization of Tolstoy’s network of interlocutors, the many friends and colleagues with whom he corresponded about literature, politics, and philosophy.
In addition to being an avid reader, Tolstoy was a meticulous chronicler, and thanks to his own efforts, as well as those of his friends and family, there is a wealth of information about what Tolstoy read, when he read it, and what he thought about it. At the moment, this information is difficult to retrieve. His citations and impressions are dispersed across volumes of diaries and letters, as well as accounts written by others. Tracking down a single reference can take hours, and forming a broad impression of the type of reading Tolstoy was doing at a particular time requires dedicated research that only a specialist is likely to undertake. Although Tolstoy’s diaries and letters have been made accessible through extremely impressive and useful efforts to digitize his works, these materials have not been collated in a way that allows for easy search and analysis.
Beyond the Ant Brotherhood will organize, parse, and index these various materials, enabling them to be searched according to dates, places, events, and names of individuals. A reader curious about Tolstoy’s thoughts on Jean-Jacque Rousseau will able to find instantly all mentions of Rousseau in all of Tolstoy’s diaries and correspondence. A scholar trying to figure out which philosophical works Tolstoy studied as he wrote the epilogue to War and Peace could examine Tolstoy’s reading over these months. If he wants to know when Tolstoy became interested in a particular book, idea, or person, he can search for these terms and compare how frequently they come up in this or that span of time.
Our project seeks not only to assist scholars in pursing their research, but also to offer a more comprehensive picture of Tolstoy’s intellectual life to all students and readers of Tolstoy. We hope that in searching through Tolstoy’s many extra-literary works, readers will come across insights no less profound, humorous, or outrageous than in any of Tolstoy’s great novels.
Books by Tatyana Gershkovich
Two figures central to the Russian literary tradition-Tolstoy, the moralist, and Nabokov, the aes... more Two figures central to the Russian literary tradition-Tolstoy, the moralist, and Nabokov, the aesthete-seem to have sharply conflicting ideas about the purpose of literature. Tatyana Gershkovich undermines this familiar opposition by identifying a shared fear at the root of their seemingly antithetical aesthetics: that one's experience of the world might be entirely one's own. Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds demonstrates how the authors' shared yearning for an impossibly intimate knowledge of others formed and deformed their fiction and brought them through parallel logic to their rival late styles: Tolstoy's rustic simplicity and Nabokov's baroque complexity. Both hold out hope that skepticism can be overcome not by force of will but with the right kind of text, one designed to withstand our impulse to doubt it. Through close readings of key canonical works, from Anna Karenina to Pale Fire, this book brings the twin titans of Russian fiction to bear on contemporary debates about how we read now-and how we ought to.
Drafts by Tatyana Gershkovich
In contrast to their elders, who continued to depict pre-revolutionary Russian life, the so-calle... more In contrast to their elders, who continued to depict pre-revolutionary Russian life, the so-called ‘younger’ émigré writers sought to render their life in exile, suspended between Russia and Europe. The otherwise dissimilar ‘younger’ writers Ekaterina Bakunina, Gaito Gazdanov, and Vladimir Nabokov are united in their search for ways to depict the émigré everyday in all its precarity, brutality, and uneventfulness. This aim aligned them with European modernists like Proust, Joyce, and Woolf who also attended to the banality of the everyday. But it also risked alienating an already small and rapidly shrinking émigré reading public, whose expectations were still largely set by the sweep and grandeur of the 19th-century Russian novel. In negotiating between their aesthetic agendas and the expectations of their readers, these authors discovered new forms befitting what might be called (after Khodasevich) a truly émigré literature.
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Papers by Tatyana Gershkovich
В статье утверждается, что в своем переводе романа «Камера обскура» (1932) на английский язык под новым названием «Смех в темноте» (1938), Владимир Набоков значительно трансформировал эстетическую идею оригинала. Обе версии романа рассматривают природу эстетического отклика, в частности, то, как наша ответная реакция может быть сфальсифицирована или искажена. Но в русской версии романа Набоков идет довольно проторенным путём, показывая, как наше стремление к поощрению мешает эстетическому восприятию и суждению. В «Смехе в темноте» он освещает другое, более неожиданное и, в некотором смысле, более завуалированное препятствие для ожидаемого эстетического восприятия, а именно, наш собственный творческий стимул. Чтобы продемонстрировать трансформацию эстетической идеи Набокова в результате авторского перевода, я рассматриваю русскую и английскую версии его романа параллельно с повестями Льва Толстого «Дьявол» и «Крейцерова соната», которые являются важными интертекстами для «Камеры обскуры» и «Смеха в темноте». Толстой и Набоков разделяют идею о том, что наши собственные творческие побуждения, далекие от того, чтобы быть всегда благотворными или даже благонаправленными, могут стать препятствием для наших моральных и эстетических реакций.
Digital Projects by Tatyana Gershkovich
Beyond the Ant Brotherhood (http://colloquy.us/) aims to pick up where Tolstoy left off, to vastly expand the list he began to compile. This project will assemble a database that catalogues the multitude of works that shaped, in one way or another, Tolstoy’s intellectual life. It will also create a visualization of Tolstoy’s network of interlocutors, the many friends and colleagues with whom he corresponded about literature, politics, and philosophy.
In addition to being an avid reader, Tolstoy was a meticulous chronicler, and thanks to his own efforts, as well as those of his friends and family, there is a wealth of information about what Tolstoy read, when he read it, and what he thought about it. At the moment, this information is difficult to retrieve. His citations and impressions are dispersed across volumes of diaries and letters, as well as accounts written by others. Tracking down a single reference can take hours, and forming a broad impression of the type of reading Tolstoy was doing at a particular time requires dedicated research that only a specialist is likely to undertake. Although Tolstoy’s diaries and letters have been made accessible through extremely impressive and useful efforts to digitize his works, these materials have not been collated in a way that allows for easy search and analysis.
Beyond the Ant Brotherhood will organize, parse, and index these various materials, enabling them to be searched according to dates, places, events, and names of individuals. A reader curious about Tolstoy’s thoughts on Jean-Jacque Rousseau will able to find instantly all mentions of Rousseau in all of Tolstoy’s diaries and correspondence. A scholar trying to figure out which philosophical works Tolstoy studied as he wrote the epilogue to War and Peace could examine Tolstoy’s reading over these months. If he wants to know when Tolstoy became interested in a particular book, idea, or person, he can search for these terms and compare how frequently they come up in this or that span of time.
Our project seeks not only to assist scholars in pursing their research, but also to offer a more comprehensive picture of Tolstoy’s intellectual life to all students and readers of Tolstoy. We hope that in searching through Tolstoy’s many extra-literary works, readers will come across insights no less profound, humorous, or outrageous than in any of Tolstoy’s great novels.
Books by Tatyana Gershkovich
Drafts by Tatyana Gershkovich
В статье утверждается, что в своем переводе романа «Камера обскура» (1932) на английский язык под новым названием «Смех в темноте» (1938), Владимир Набоков значительно трансформировал эстетическую идею оригинала. Обе версии романа рассматривают природу эстетического отклика, в частности, то, как наша ответная реакция может быть сфальсифицирована или искажена. Но в русской версии романа Набоков идет довольно проторенным путём, показывая, как наше стремление к поощрению мешает эстетическому восприятию и суждению. В «Смехе в темноте» он освещает другое, более неожиданное и, в некотором смысле, более завуалированное препятствие для ожидаемого эстетического восприятия, а именно, наш собственный творческий стимул. Чтобы продемонстрировать трансформацию эстетической идеи Набокова в результате авторского перевода, я рассматриваю русскую и английскую версии его романа параллельно с повестями Льва Толстого «Дьявол» и «Крейцерова соната», которые являются важными интертекстами для «Камеры обскуры» и «Смеха в темноте». Толстой и Набоков разделяют идею о том, что наши собственные творческие побуждения, далекие от того, чтобы быть всегда благотворными или даже благонаправленными, могут стать препятствием для наших моральных и эстетических реакций.
Beyond the Ant Brotherhood (http://colloquy.us/) aims to pick up where Tolstoy left off, to vastly expand the list he began to compile. This project will assemble a database that catalogues the multitude of works that shaped, in one way or another, Tolstoy’s intellectual life. It will also create a visualization of Tolstoy’s network of interlocutors, the many friends and colleagues with whom he corresponded about literature, politics, and philosophy.
In addition to being an avid reader, Tolstoy was a meticulous chronicler, and thanks to his own efforts, as well as those of his friends and family, there is a wealth of information about what Tolstoy read, when he read it, and what he thought about it. At the moment, this information is difficult to retrieve. His citations and impressions are dispersed across volumes of diaries and letters, as well as accounts written by others. Tracking down a single reference can take hours, and forming a broad impression of the type of reading Tolstoy was doing at a particular time requires dedicated research that only a specialist is likely to undertake. Although Tolstoy’s diaries and letters have been made accessible through extremely impressive and useful efforts to digitize his works, these materials have not been collated in a way that allows for easy search and analysis.
Beyond the Ant Brotherhood will organize, parse, and index these various materials, enabling them to be searched according to dates, places, events, and names of individuals. A reader curious about Tolstoy’s thoughts on Jean-Jacque Rousseau will able to find instantly all mentions of Rousseau in all of Tolstoy’s diaries and correspondence. A scholar trying to figure out which philosophical works Tolstoy studied as he wrote the epilogue to War and Peace could examine Tolstoy’s reading over these months. If he wants to know when Tolstoy became interested in a particular book, idea, or person, he can search for these terms and compare how frequently they come up in this or that span of time.
Our project seeks not only to assist scholars in pursing their research, but also to offer a more comprehensive picture of Tolstoy’s intellectual life to all students and readers of Tolstoy. We hope that in searching through Tolstoy’s many extra-literary works, readers will come across insights no less profound, humorous, or outrageous than in any of Tolstoy’s great novels.