Five Russian Dog Stories E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Five Russian Dog Stories presents touching narratives from three giants in Russian literature. Some heart-warming, some tear jerking, none will easily be forgotten. Turgenev's Mumu is rescued from drowning by a mute serf, Gerasim, and quickly becomes his closest friend and comforter until Gerasim's mistress intervenes with tragic consequences. Shchedrin's Trezor is the perfect embodiment of canine fidelity, carrying out his duties to the letter, despite being chained up, badly treated and sometimes not even fed. Chekhov's Kashtanka, when lost, is taken in by a circus clown and trained for an act in the ring. However, she prefers to return to her former abusive master, sitting in the audience at her first performance, rather than remain with her new caring, thoughtful owner. These stories have long been held in high esteem, tugging at the readers' heartstrings. When Turgenev died in 1883 a wreath was sent to the grave of 'the author of Moomoo' by British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Leseprobe

Five Russian Dog Stories

translated by Anthony Briggs

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

Mumu by Ivan Turgenev (1852)

Sly Dog A fable by A.A. Rzhevsky (1761)

Good Old Trezor by Mikhail Saltykov (1884)

Beggar and Dog

A fableby I.I. Dmitriyev (1804)

Chestnut Girl by Anton Chekhov (1887)

Elephant and Pug

A fableby Ivan Krylov (1808)

Arthur, the White Poodle by Alexander Kuprin (1904)

Rich Peasant and Dog

A fable byIvan Krylov (1834)

Ich Bin from Head to Foot by Ilf and Petrov (1933)

‘The Dog’

A Postscript by Ivan Turgenev (1878)

Notes

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

‘Sir, I prefer dogs.’

These words were spoken some years ago across the bar at the oldest pub in England, The George at Norton St Philip, near Bath, purveyors of the old familiar juice since 1397. A friend and I had asked the owner whether he would accept dogs into his stone-flagged room; this was his response. On another occasion in the same area, our three Giant Schnauzers were each treated to a slice of hot beef carried from the kitchen by a landlord who, without claiming a preference for dogs, also loved and admired them.

These pleasant recollections are not exceptional. Many people love their dogs with extravagance, sometimes comparing them favourably to any humans they have known. To take a famous example, Lord Byron, having lost a Newfoundland to rabies in 1808, claimed that this animal, Boatswain, possessed ‘all the Virtues of Man without his Vices’. He went on,

To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise.

I never had but one, and here he lies.

The monument, the inscription and a portrait of the dog can still be seen at Newstead Abbey.

Other famous people have had memorable associations with the species. Odysseus’ beloved Argos died from joy when his long-awaited master returned. Greyfriars Bobby watched over his master’s grave from 1858 to 1872. Great men as varied as Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Walter Scott and Sir Winston Churchill are still linked in biographical memory with their dogs Diamond, Hamlet and Rufus.

We have every reason to hold dogs in high esteem if only to acknowledge their role in our emergence as a successful species, which some historians have described as indispensable. Approximately 150,000 years ago modern humans walked out of Africa and spread out. DNA studies suggest that this was also the period during which dogs began to split off from the wolves. Eventually dogs moved in on human communities, from which they have never retreated or been in danger of expulsion. There comes a time when dog and man can be shown to be inseparable, perhaps as recently as 18,000 years ago, and the symbiotic relationship, begun in the Stone Age, certainly helped us through the transition from our days of hunting and gathering to those of settled farming folk in the Neolithic period. Dogs led the field in domestication; other animals would follow into human society, but only after another 5–6,000 years, by which time our dogs were fully prepared to help with the herding and guarding. It was when we sat down with dogs that we could start to build the kind of civilisation that we now enjoy.

But there is another important factor to take note of, one that will not show up in archaeological or DNA evidence. This is affinity. As one historian puts it, ‘The fact is, people like dogs, and vice versa.’ There always has been more to the man-dog relationship than practical advantage. We enjoy being together, and we trust each other. Fifteen thousand years ago we fell in love, the one species with the other, and we still love each other in countless examples until death us do part. This, rather than any idea of usefulness, is what accounts for the affectionate attitudes mentioned above, whereby people sometimes set dogs on the same level as fellow-humans.

In England there are ten million domestic dogs – an astonishing figure when you think how many of us are squeezed into towns. A third of all households share space and time with a dog, and nearly all the dogs are loved to distraction. The landlord of The George was not announcing anything unusual; most of us have a preference for dogs, if not over humans at least over all other animals.

As our oldest friends, dogs were bound to insinuate themselves into our culture, and, sure enough, they turn up at the earliest stages of recorded art. Cave paintings from 10–15,000 years ago show hunting expeditions with the dead animal on display along with men and dogs. Dogs came into their own during the ancient civilisations of Egypt and China, and since then they have been ubiquitous. Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) may be taken as an iconic descendant of the cave-paintings, linking the same partnership and the same tradition over many long millennia, though dogs in modern art are by no means limited to hunting scenes. They fit naturally into many an indoor and outdoor scene, and Byron’s commissioning of Boatswain’s portrait was not unusual.

It is in literature that dogs make good. Brave hounds appear in every ancient myth, national saga and narrative poem, and in modern times writers of fiction have extended the depiction to include every dog you can think of. The dogs of literature come in all breeds, shapes and sizes. Cerberus (three-headed guardian of Hades) and Sirius (the Dog star, with a most impressive Latin name: Alpha Canis Majoris) go way back into myth and legend; from more recent times you may recall Jack London’s White Fang, Jerome K. Jerome’s Montmorency from Three Men in a Boat, or Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles; from childhood, Peter Pan’s Nana, Toto from The Wizard of Oz, and the Famous Five’s Timmy; everybody remembers Bill Sikes’s dog in Oliver Twist (for those with failing memory his name was Bull’s-Eye). One can’t forget Launce’s Crab (‘the sourest natured dog that lives’) from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, or King Lear’s remembered dogs, Trey, Blanche, Sweetheart (canine images of his three daughters); and surely the heroine of Lassie Come Home (1943) will never be forgotten – and she came from a novel. These are just some of the stellar performers. Innumerable novels and stories have walk-on parts for dogs, though they attract little attention because it is so natural for us to see them in human company.

Given the reputation enjoyed by the British for both literary achievement and love of animals, we could be expected to lead the field in bringing these interests together. Strong as we are in this area, however, we seem to be outclassed by the Russians, certainly in relation to dogs. The great Russian writers established a rich tradition, not yet exhausted, of bringing dogs into their stories and poems. Twenty years ago I had no trouble in finding twenty writers who had done this, and determining the names of at least fifty individual literary dogs. The most recent was Georgiy Vladimov’s Good Old Ruslan, a title which is meant to resonate against one of the stories in this collection. This short novel, which describes the decline and death of a Gulag guard dog after the closure of his labour camp, contains a bitter critique of Stalinist totalitarianism; written in the 1960s, it was regarded as unpublishable until the mid-1970s, and came out in Russia for the first time only in 1989.

The first dogs in Russian literature were those who appeared in fables, a genre first popularised by Aesop and imitated in France by La Fontaine during the seventeenth century. These verse stories of talking animals (including many a dog) are intended to demonstrate human failings and follies. Those of Aesop, written 2,000 years before La Fontaine, were themselves inherited, as we can see, from Egyptian papyri dating back a further 1,000 years. We have included one or two of these Russian fables in this collection, for amusement and illustration. Chronologically, they should all have appeared together before the stories, but we have offset them in the interests of diversity. There is one formal feature of these poems that may be worth looking out for. To avoid tedium, the line-lengths are imaginatively varied from one foot to as many as six, and the rhymes do not coincide with line-length; a short line may rhyme with a very long one. We have copied the rhyme-schemes and line-lengths so that the unpredictability of the originals is preserved.

The greatest Russian dog stories are not second-rate literature; they are written by the big Russian writers. For instance, turn to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina if you want to excerpt for your own pleasure some of the best writing about animals. In the former (Volume II, Part Four, Chapters 4–6) you will read some of Tolstoy’s most vigorous prose, based on intimate knowledge of country life, as he describes the most famous wolf-hunt in literature. This is writing of astonishing accuracy and involvement, and the main participants are dogs. The successful hunt is followed by an equally exciting episode later in the day, in which Nikolay Rostov races his beloved and priceless Milka against Yerza, recently exchanged for three whole families of Russian house-serfs, and Rugay, a third dog who cost his owner nothing. We shall not say whether any of them gets the hare. All of this goes to the root of the man-dog partnership, taking us back to where it began, in co-operation for the hunt.

In Anna Karenina (Part VI, Chapters 10–11), there is a third form of hunting: shooting with dogs. The best bit of this outing is not just the triumph of patience over disappointment, when a good day follows a bad one, but in the intimate relationship between Dmitri Levin and his dog, Laska. The dog is a wiser old bird than Levin thinks. Part-way through the bad day Laska realises that nothing is going well, and it is not worth trying too hard. In a moment of sharp insight, the author describes how she picks up her master’s mood – she realises nothing is going to come right.

A snipe flew up from under the dog. Levin fired. But it was not his day: he missed, and when he went to look for the one that he had killed, he did not find that either. He crawled all through the sedge, but Laska did not believe that he had killed the bird, and, when he sent her to search for it, she pretended she was looking for it but didn’t really do so. [Author’s italics]

Could it be that Tolstoy has exaggerated the dog’s powers of perception? Is this an example of the false attribution of human characteristics to animals – of anthropomorphism? Dog-lovers will deny this, recognising this scene as typical of a dog’s sensitivity, resourcefulness and willingness to please.

But we cannot digress further into the work of the great novelists. Suffice it to say that Fyodor Dostoyevsky is also good on dogs, on a smaller scale but over a wider range to include mongrels and scruffy prison dogs. So is Gogol, so are most of the great literary figures. But the best of them all is Ivan Turgenev, the author of the most successful story in this collection.

Ivan Turgenev and Mumu

Ivan Turgenev was the author of six novels, including Fathers and Children (1862); a series of sketches from rural life, A Hunter’s Notes (1852); and more than thirty stories of varying length and quality. Nearly all of these works have dogs in them. Usually the animals have no significance beyond atmospheric or decorative value. For instance, in the twelfth chapter of Rudin (1856), when a carriage arrives at a country house, on the run-in it is ‘accompanied by two enormous house-dogs, one yellow, the other grey, recently acquired. They were always squabbling, and were inseparable companions. An old mongrel then came out at the gate to meet them, opened his mouth as if he was going to bark but ended by yawning and turning back again with a friendly wag of his tail.’

Occasionally, a dog may carry a certain symbolic value. Katya, in Fathers and Children, a member of the younger generation, belongs in spirit to that of her elders, the traditionalists, and this can be seen not only from her music (Mozart) but also from Fifi, the aristocratic Borzoi bitch who is always at her side.

It may easily be imagined that the rural sketches are strong in this direction, and indeed, of the twenty-five essays, no fewer than twenty-three contain dog references; a dozen animals are named, from Astronom to Zhuchka. The detail varies from the merest mention to the most intimate portrait. Breeds range from mongrel to lordly hound; there are puppies and ageing patriarchs. Every canine posture and behavioural pattern is represented. To take a small example, in one sketch the narrator turns his eye on the occasion when dogs first meet each other, describing the whole wary and sniffy ritual as ‘that Chinese ceremonial which is the special custom of their kind’.

In none of these references will you find any lapse of taste. Because of the writer’s knowledge there is no exaggeration, distortion or undue sentiment. The dogs have had their pictures painted by a sympathetic master with his feet on the Russian ground. Turgenev is confident enough not to resist investing his dogs with human characteristics. His animals are credited with ‘a constrained smile’, ‘a dignified growl’, ‘a noble self-importance’, and so on. This is not exaggerated sympathy. Human-like behaviour is not imposed upon animals. We have seen these same characteristics in our own dogs; they invite depiction as imitators of men – it is what they do. Turgenev recognises a truth about the species: they are voluntary anthropomorphists, who would dress like us if they could.

Turgenev wrote the best dog story in Russian literature, ‘Mumu’, which soon became famous abroad. Alexander Herzen said that this work made him tremble with rage. In England Christina Rossetti described it as ‘consummate, but so fearfully painful’, and Thomas Carlyle said it was the most beautiful and touching thing he had ever read.

The story was written in 1852, when Turgenev was supposedly in prison for having published an unofficial obituary in praise of Nikolay Gogol, who had written a good deal of anti-establishment literature. The sentence was served in the comfortable house of a police chief. During the month-long ordeal he wrote down the story of Gerasim, a deaf-mute of six foot six, brought in from the countryside to work as a house-serf in Moscow at the whim of his mistress, who has seen him out in the fields. The giant is in for some setbacks, and these involve his acquisition of a dog, whom he calls Mumu because it is the only sound he can make.

This story draws on real life. There was such a mistress: Turgenev’s mother, a fearsome domestic tyrant, permanently sorry for herself and down on everybody else; most of the other characters were real people too. The only departure from actual events comes at the end of the story, when, in Turgenev’s version, Gerasim makes a brave gesture of defiance. Sad to say, the real-life prototype, Andrey, knuckled under, and never blamed the cruel mistress for his misfortune.

Even from this sketch it may be apparent that there is more to this story than the narrative. Without becoming a formulaic creation, Gerasim can be taken as a symbol of the oppressed Russian serf class that was not emancipated until 1861, and remained downtrodden long after that. It was unusual, and risky, for an author to point out so clearly the atrocities of the current social order, which placed absolute power in the hands of monsters who often abused it. For our purposes it is significant that the pathos in this story comes from the situation and misadventures of the dog after which it is named. No reader is going to get lost in socio-political undertones; this is a powerful dog story that has moved many to tears.

Mikhail Saltykov and Trezor

Something similar might be said of our second story, written in 1884 by Mikhail Saltykov (1826–89), a Russian satirist of the second half of the nineteenth century who used the pen name N. Shchedrin, often appended to give him a double-barrel. His works are local and topical, close to journalism, but through the best of them, especially the novel The Golovlyov Family (1876–80), he has won a place among the Russian giants. His misfortune was to be a man of talent born in an age of genius that was dominated by the masters of Russian literature. That his voice is heard at all is a tribute to his strength as a writer. The story chosen for this selection is well-known in Russia, even though it is more portrait than narrative. We are taken through the life of Trezor, a low-born guard dog, who cheerfully endures deprivation because of his desire to serve his master by being good at his job. The happiest moment of his life comes when the master replaces his old chain with a spanking new one. Having no desire to escape, he can revel in the improved social status bestowed by his new form of constriction.

The story has a mildly sad ending, but its tone is so agreeable and amusing that the conclusion comes as a natural outcome, and can be read without pain. We are dealing with a sympathetic master, who nevertheless beats his badly fed dog whenever he thinks fit. None of this fazes Trezor; as he says, a dog has to be beaten or he might forget who is the boss, and then where would we be? This philosophical attitude, out of tune with his mistreatment, has the ring of truth to it. Dogs are known for closely adhering to monstrous owners – remember Bull’s-Eye. At his entry into the story of Oliver Twist (Chapter 13) he is described as ‘a white shaggy dog, with his face scratched and torn in twenty different places’, who skulked into the room only to be kicked across it, and then left to coil himself up in a corner, quiet but contented, well-used to rough treatment. Even at the end of the novel, after first defying Sikes and running away when about to be drowned, the dog returns to be present when his master hangs himself, and he howls out his loss to the world. Bull’s-Eye and Trezor are brothers in the blood, both of them true to their hard masters.