Lieutenant Kizhe

29/03/2022

We are delighted to have got the Rush translation of Yuri Tynianov's "Kükhlya", the first published in English we believe. It is beautifully produced by Cherry Orchard Books, an imprint of Academic Studies Press (https://www.academicstudiespress.com/cherry-orchard-books/kuchlya-decemberist-poet?rq=Tynianov).
The cover is "Meeting - Pushkin and Küchelbecker" by the Soviet artist Oleg Korovin.

"Kükhlya" - Tynianov's first historical novel - appeared in 1925. It was initially commissioned as a children’s book but grew into a lengthy study instead. He based the storyline on the life of the Decembrist poet and critic, Wilhelm Küchelbecker (1797-1846), whose life Tynianov researched during his university years out of personal interest. Küchelbecker was Alexander Griboyedov’s friend, especially close to him in Tiflis in 1821. Küchelbecker was exiled to Siberia until his death for attempting to murder Grand Duke Michael Romanov during the revolt on Senate Square. Tynianov wrote in the Theme of Griboyedov’s play ‘Gore ot uma’ (“Woe from Wit”) that Küchelbecker was probably one prototype for Griboyedov’s Chatsky, as was the Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev.

18/03/2022

We are delighted to see Sophie Pinkham’s overview of Yuri Tynianov’s works in the current (10th March) issue of The New York Review of Books (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/10/the-freedom-of-historical-fiction-yuri-tynianov/).
Until now, Tynianov has been little known in the English-speaking world, but with a series of important translations in recent years that is beginning to change.

Will the shocking invasion of Ukraine make people want to turn their back on all things Russian, even the literature? Much of Russian literature is about the struggle to express liberal and progressive ideas under an authoritarian regime. Yuri Tynianov is a particular example: he satirised the stupidity of autocracy in the novella 'Lieutenant Kizhe', and dramatized its suffocating effect on Russian society in the novel 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar'. Both books were written just as Stalin was taking control. But in these cases the results are much lighter than the tragedy in Ukraine.

Both books were published by Look Multimedia:
- 'Lieutenant Kizhe' translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, 2021.
-'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' translated by Susan Causey, 2018.

27/01/2022

The Lieutenant Kijé orchestral suite by Sergei Prokofiev has been used for at least two ballets and co-opted for many films and songs. Michel Fokine used it as the basis for his Russian Soldier ballet premiered in 1942 at the Boston Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera House. It was Fokine's last completed ballet. With designs by the Russian painter Mstislav Doboujinsky and an original libretto by Fokine, the story of the ballet revolved around a wounded Russian soldier who recalls scenes of his life as lies dying on the battlefield. Reviewers called this ballet sublime and genuinely moving.

Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. 'Yurek Lazowsky in Fokin's "Russian Soldier"' The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1942. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/33785680-a769-0133-874e-00505686a51c

28/12/2021

Fans of TV series ‘The Great’ will get extra enjoyment from Tynianov's ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’. ‘The Great’ gives an ‘anti-historical’ view of the young woman who became Empress Catherine II of All Russia. She was also the mother of Tsar Pavel (or Paul) I, whose interrupted nap kick-starts Lieutenant Kizhe’s career.
Despite taking liberties with the facts, both ‘The Great’ and ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’ revel in historical detail. ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’ portrays the neurotic and obsessive Tsar Pavel, terrified of assassination. ‘The Great’ shows us the amoral and destructive court he grew up in. Catherine seized power from her husband Peter III barely six months after he succeeded to the throne. Within a few weeks he was dead and Catherine reigned for 34 years, to be succeeded by Pavel.

27/12/2021

Fans of TV series ‘The Great’ will get extra enjoyment from Tynianov's ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’. ‘The Great’ gives an ‘anti-historical’ view of the young woman who became Empress Catherine II of All Russia. She was also the mother of Tsar Pavel (or Paul) I, whose interrupted nap kick-starts Lieutenant Kizhe’s career.
Despite taking liberties with the facts, both ‘The Great’ and ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’ revel in historical detail. ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’ portrays the neurotic and obsessive Tsar Pavel, terrified of assassination. ‘The Great’ shows us the amoral and destructive court he grew up in. Catherine seized power from her husband Peter III barely six months after he succeeded to the throne. Within a few weeks he was dead and Catherine reigned for 34 years, to be succeeded by Pavel.

27/12/2021

The five-movement ‘Lieutenant Kijé’ orchestral suite by Sergei Prokofiev has one of the most popular Christmas pieces ever written – Troika. Although it was not originally linked to the Christmas theme, the subject of this piece is a three-horse sled flying across the snowy Russian countryside.
Listen to the famous theme from Prokofiev’s ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7GUzJ7fQBtg

This is the most popular number in the Orchestral Suite that comes from the score Prokofiev wrote for the 1934 Soviet film "Lieutenant Kije." A 'troika' is a...

03/10/2021

Lieutenant Kizhe was previously translated by Mirra Ginsburg. Her translation of Lieutenant Kizhe and another Tynianov's novella Young Vitushishnikov were published in the USA in 1990/March 1991 in the Eridanos Library series as Lieutenant Kije / Young Vitushishnikov. Ginsburg’s translations were published in the UK in 1992 by Quartet Books, London, as Lieutenant Kije and Young Vitushishnikov, by arrangement with Eridanos Library New York.
One feature of Ginsburg’s translation is that it follows the French release of the 1934 film as Le Lieutenant Nants by calling the hero Nants rather than Kizhe. This is because the error bringing him to life is supposed to come from breaking the officer rank into ‘Lieut Nants’. However, the title of the novella is left as Lieutenant Kizhe.

Mirra Ginsburg (1909-2000) was born in Babruysk (then in the Russian Empire, now in eastern Belarus). Her parents moved to Latvia and then to Canada and the USA in the 1920s. She is best known for her translations of folk tales and for her children’s stories.

30/09/2021

For we in Look Multimedia want to thank our literary translator Nicolas Pasternak Slater for inspiring English-speaking readers to sample Russian literature! Here are some of his translations.

23/09/2021

The satirical Lieutenant Kije ballet, set to Sergei Prokofiev’s music, was premiered at the Bolshoi Ballet in 1963 to mark the tenth anniversary of the composer’s death.
Watch the filmed version of this ballet (1969) with the Bolshoi stars Raisa Struchkova as the Lady-in-Waiting and Vladimir Vasiliev as Tsar Pavel the First (in Russian).
https://youtu.be/ur7-AcFqIe0

Балет "Подпоручик Киже" на музыку С.С. Прокофьева в постановке О. Тарасовой, А. Лапаури▶Подписаться на канал "Советское телевидение": https://goo.gl/qw3iEKГо...

23/09/2021

Yurek Lazowsky in Fokin's "Russian Soldier".
The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1942.

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/33785680-a769-0133-874e-00505686a51c

17/09/2021

Tynianov wrote and edited film scripts for the Leningrad film studio Sevzapkino. He was enthusiastic about moving into cinema and in 1925 he wrote: ‘It is difficult to find an ambitious person who would not at some point write a screenplay’. His screenplays resulted in successful film productions.
One of them was ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’ (‘Poruchik Kizhe’), released in 1934. The score was composed by Sergei Prokofiev. It became lastingly famous and one of the most popular pieces of twentieth century classical music. Prokofiev refused the commission at first but then changed his mind as he found the story interesting. Soon after the film came out he got further commission, from the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, to turn the episodic music of the film into the five-movement 'Lieutenant Kijé' orchestral suite. He described it as "a devilish job", which gave him much more trouble than the film itself, but the results have gone round the world.
Listen to the famous theme from ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’.


https://www.youtube.com/embed/tSWjA3DSJfY?rel=0&fbclid=IwAR1ZLC-jYTcFzWIspaK2Q0wtIPW-tWRQt-93a1AF-erPszZNYNHpjImELE0

13/09/2021

Nicholas Pasternak Slater, the translator of Lieutenant Kizhe, is from an Anglo-Russian family. He is the grandson of Leonid Pasternak, one of Russia’s major post-impressionist painters and nephew of Boris Pasternak, awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago. Nicolas Slater’s background, from a family which excelled in both science and arts, with a history shaped by revolution and persecution, makes him a unique interpreter of Russian literature for the English-speaking world.
Nicolas Pasternak Slater has published a wide range of translations of the great Russian authors, from Tolstoy to Teffi. They include Lermontov (A Hero of our Time), Tolstoy (Death of Ivan Ilyich), and Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment) plus stories by Chekhov, Turgenev and Teffi. He also translated and edited the Family Correspondence 1921-1960 of his uncle Boris Pasternak.
Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s most recent major translation was of Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning novel Doctor Zhivago, published in 2019. The original translators of Doctor Zhivago into English, Max Hayward and Manya Harari, modestly expressed the wish that the novel should in future “fall into the hands of a translator whose talent is equal to that of its author.”
Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Christine Jacobson , remarked that the “translation by the Russian author’s nephew . . . suggests the day Hayward and Harari wished for has finally come, more than 60 years later. . . .Pasternak Slater’s translation of the novel succeeds precisely where the previous attempts have failed. He successfully navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis of translation, rendering Pasternak’s text in natural English prose while also remaining faithful to the original tone.” (Christine Jacobson, Los Angeles Review of Books, 5 Mar 2020)

List of translations by Nicolas Pasternak Slater:
Boris Pasternak, People and Propositions, in Boris Pasternak, The Voice of Prose, ed. Christopher Barnes, Polygon Books, 1990
Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence 1921-1960, Hoover Press, Stanford University, USA, 2010
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of our Time, and Alexander Pushkin, A Journey to Arzrum, Oxford World’s Classics, 2013
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2015
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Oxford University Press, 2017
Anton Chekhov, The Beauties – essential stories, Pushkin Press, 2017
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, The Folio Society, 2019
Ivan Turgenev, Love and Youth – essential stories, Pushkin Press, 2020
Teffi, three stories, in: Teffi: Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints, edited by Robert Chandler and co-translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and others, NYRB 2021

13/09/2021

Yuri Tynianov (1894-1943), a pioneer of innovation in literary theory, author, screenwriter, poet and translator, was one of the brave and talented young people of the Russian Revolution. The son of a Jewish doctor, born in what is now Rezekhne in Latvia, he went up to Saint Petersburg in 1912 and married while still a student, scrambling between jobs to support his family. A hugely popular lecturer and thinker, he taught at several institutions, did a variety of publishing work and wrote screenplays for Sevzapkino and other film studios. Tynianov’s great legacy is his literary criticism as a member of the Russian Formalist group and his meticulously researched historical fiction.
To write such works as ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’, Tynianov combined literary innovation with a screenwriter’s eye for actual events and concrete situations. He used the technique of ‘estrangement’ combined with frequent scene changes to surprise his readers and keep them hanging on for the ride. Most of his fiction is set in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, supported by meticulous research in the tsarist archives.
Tynianov’s peak as a creative writer was in 1926-28. This was when he wrote ‘Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar’, a multilayered exploration of Alexander Griboyedov’s interior life and Russian society, described by the French poet and critic Louis Aragon as “the most extraordinary historical novel one could read.” As if as a break from that great work he scripted Lieutenant Kizhe for an aspiring film director and then turned it into the novella when the project fell through.
Sadly, by this time, a long-term illness – multiple sclerosis – was tightened its grip on Tynianov and Stalin was tightening his grip on the Soviet Union. Time had run out for the Leningrad spring. Tynianov wrote more novellas and a biographical novel Pushkin while earning his living mainly as an editor. Illness increasingly limited him. When war came he was evacuated from the siege of Leningrad and died in Moscow.

01/09/2021

Being a precise scholar, Yuri Tynianov based the events and characters of his novel on official documents, memoirs and letters. His story of Lieutenant Kizhe is based on two anecdotes about Pavel’s reign told by Vladimir Dal’, a noted Russian-language lexicographer, and published in the journal Russkaya Starina in 1870 and in the historical and literary monthly magazine Russky Arkhiv in 1894 (№2). Many named characters in Lieutenant Kizhe, drawn from research, are genuine: Tsar Pavel the First, the influential statesman Baron Arakcheyev, Count Pahlen (one of the conspirators in Pavel’s assassination), the Tsar's court favourites Nelidova and Lopukhina-Gagarina.
In his search for material Tynianov consulted the volume ‘Paul I. The collection of anecdotes, stories, etc.’ edited by Alexander Geno and Tomich, 1901. From this volume he borrowed the anecdote that provided the basis for Lieutenant Sinyukhaev's story as well as several episodes, such as the one about the shoe that Nelidova threw at Tsar Paul, and about Tsar Paul pinching the adjutant threatening him to ‘flog that Potemkin spirit’ out of him.
Through the writer's immersion in the period, his portraits largely conformed to known data. But Tynianov was clear – it wasn’t a straightforward work of history that he offered to his readers. He wrote in a fragment of autobiography (1939): 'Literature differs from history, not through "invention", but through a greater, more intimate understanding of people and events'. Asked to describe his method in writing historical fiction for the anthology ‘How We Write’ (‘Kak my pishem’, 1930), Tynianov replied ‘Where the document ends, I begin’.

30/08/2021

Ask for 'Lieutenant Kizhe' at your local bookshop. That will help to move us up the distribution pecking order and get us into bookshops. When people see this little volume with its Nutcracker-inspired cover they can't resist picking it up.

29/08/2021

We've just found a delightful blog about dramaturg Pete Hartley's relationship with 'Lieutenant Kizhe'. Prokofiev's tune 'Troika' (a three-horse sleigh) from the Orchestral Suite provided an introduction for him to 'Lieutenant Kizhe' which led to several theatrical productions:

https://uneasywords.com/2018/12/21/kije-and-me/

Dashing through the show; in a three-horse open sleigh. From a Soviet soundtrack to a festive farce.

28/08/2021

Yuri Tynianov's novella ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’ started out as a film scenario. In 1927 Tynianov wrote the first version of the screenplay for a budding film director. The project got nowhere and Tynianov recast the script as a novella. A few years later, Tynianov wrote a new version and the project resulted in a successful comedy film - one of the earliest sound films made in the Soviet Union. The script was picked up by the Belgoskino film studios in Leningrad. The film 'Poruchik Kizhe' ('Lieutenant Kizhe') was directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer. It’s a broader, simpler version of the novella. Events happen more straightforwardly and there is no Sinyukhayev subplot. It was released in March 1934 and soon afterwards in London and New York as 'The Tsar Wants to Sleep' and in Paris as 'Le Lieutenant Nantes'.
The music accompanying the film was composed by Sergei Prokofiev. It was his first venture into film music, and after the successful release of the film Prokofiev returned to the original score and developed it into the five-movement ‘Lieutenant Kijé’ orchestral suite which was first performed in December 1934.
Watch 'Lieutenant Kizhe' in Russian with English subtitles.



https://archive.org/embed/LieutenantKizhe_0

1934 Russian film with music by Prokofiev, English subtitles added. [subtitles updated 6/20/08]

22/08/2021

In ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’ Tsar Pavel is woken from his afternoon nap by someone shouting ‘Guards’ under his window. The Tsar falls into a rage, somebody guilty has to be found, and that guilty man is Kizhe known and seen by nobody.
Tsar Pavel was right to be agitated. ‘Lieutenant Kizhe’ is set at the end of the 18th century. In the 70 years since Peter the Great died there had been eight different tsars and tsarinas. Most died young or were dethroned in coups. Only the two great empresses, Elizaveta and Catherine, reigned for more than ten years. An autocracy which ruled by fear across a vast kingdom was deeply fearful itself. There were no clear rules of succession and any ruler was in danger of being deposed and murdered.

“…Terror overcame the Tsar. He gasped for air. He feared neither his wife nor his elder sons, any of whom […] might stab him to death with a fork and mount the throne.
He did not fear his suspiciously cheerful ministers, nor his suspiciously gloomy generals. He did not even fear any of that fifty-million-strong rabble […]of his empire […]. He did not fear them, taken individually. But taken together they were an ocean, and he was drowning in it. […]
And when the great anger turned to a great terror, the Criminal Affairs office set to work, and one man was strung up by his arms, and another felt the floor give way under him, and down below the masters of the executioner’s trade were waiting…” (Yuri Tynianov, Lieutenant Kizhe, trans. by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, p. 18)

Tynianov’s novella imagines how people of all stations, from a beggar to an emperor, would have survived in such a world. He brilliantly documents the details of their lives, so we feel the reality of oppression and servility through their actions rather than abstractions.

18/08/2021

“The translators wrestle skilfully with an unruly original, and we are lucky to have ringside seats” - in his review in the Times Literary Supplement (23 July, 2021) Boris Dralyuk wrestles with the three English translations of Yuri Tynianov’s works (‘Permanent Evolution: Selected essays on literature, theory and film’, trans. by Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko, Academic Studies Press; ‘Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar’, trans. by Susan Causey, Look Multimedia; and ‘The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar’, trans. by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush, Columbia University Press) and one English translation of Alexander Griboedov’s verse comedy 'Woe from Wit' (trans. by Betsy Hulick, Columbia University Press).
It’s another step towards setting Tynianov in his rightful place as one of the Russian Greats.



https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/how-a-russian-formalist-resisted-social-realism-book-review-boris-dralyuk/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter =1626887058

If you wake a graduate student of Russian literature in the middle of a seminar and ask them to identify three concepts associated with the Formalist

12/08/2021

Tsar Pavel is woken from his afternoon nap by someone shouting ‘Guards’ under his window... ..A harassed clerk enters the name of non-existent Lieutenant Kizhe in an official document, by mistake... ..Tsar Pavel falls into rage because the person who shouted ‘Guards’ cannot be found. In a moment of inspiration Kizhe is chosen as the guilty man...

Interested to find out what happened next? You can buy Yuri Tynianov's Lieutenant Kizhe in Nicolas Pasternak Slater's translation on Amazon in Kindle edition or paperback: https://amzn.to/3Aw8WTo

Lieutenant Kizhe

26/07/2021

Look Multimedia are delighted to let you know that we have published the English translation of Yuri Tynianov’s 1927 novella Lieutenant Kizhe (Подпоручик Киже). The translation is by Nicolas Pasternak Slater. The book is available through your local bookshop or online, in paperback or ebook versions.

If you see an opportunity to review or discuss this new take on a known masterpiece, please email Elena Goodwin at [email protected] and we will send you a complimentary copy.

Nicolas Pasternak Slater is already known for his versions of such major works as Crime and Punishment and The Death of Ivan Ilych (Oxford World’s Classics), and Doctor Zhivago (Folio Society). His sparkling rendition of Tynianov’s immersive prose reads as if a film camera had been sent back to the 18th century. We hope that this attractive illustrated edition will inspire a new generation of readers to sample Russian literature.