Russia...

Actually, not in my NaNo novel (so far), but concurrently I'm working on a play which is an ensemble piece based on / about Chernyshevsky's novel 'What is to be done?' and its readers. And on hiatus I have a stage adaptation of the memoirs and fiction of Nadezhda Durova aka Alexander Alexandrov (received her commission 1811). Her memoir, translated into English as 'The Cavalry Maiden' has many fascinating details about the campaigns in East Prussia before Tilsit and the Russian campaign of 1812-1813. (Sleep deprivation and scarce/rotten food & water figure prominently.)

Last year I did a magic-realist novel with scenes from Moscow 1919 (largely based on the notebooks of Marina Tsvetaeva, who showed up in cameo). This year I have a character doing ethnographic research in Poland for the German Government General. On the other hand, Russia is my literary second homeland, so it may well pop up somehow (likely WW2).

From experience, War and Peace is GREAT for getting into the right mood--I used it myself for some scenes in my work.
The Russian film adaptation (1967?) is phenomenal for the visuals. It's quite historically accurate and the battle scenes are amazing.
If you want to see the battlefields (and re-enactments) there's a fantastic site based in Moscow called the 1812 Project. They cover activities of 1812 re-enactment, as well as archiving many primary sources about Napoleon in general and the Russian campaign in particular. The English version is less extensive than the Russian, and the content overlap between the sites is not exact (i.e. there are some materials on the English site that are not on the Russian site and vice versa.)

English version
http://www.museum.ru/museum/1812/English/index.html

Russian version (MUCH more extensive, including original sources--many of Tolstoy's, in fact)
http://www.museum.ru/museum/1812/index.html

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

Thanks, Aurora, That is superbly useful! :)

Your stage adaptation of Nadezhda Durova sounds fascinating, it's a really interesting subject. Do you write full time? It sounds like you really put a lot into research.

A friend had mentioned the Russian film adaptation too in terms of Borodino, I'm definitely going to check that out, and I'm really grateful for the links too. Unfortunately my Russian extends little further than saying hello and ordering a coffee so I think I'll stick to the English one for now ;)

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

It's great to talk to a fellow enthusiast!

The Borodino sequence in the Russian adaptation of 'War and Peace' is one of the most remarkable bits of film-making bravura that I know of; it fakes a 360-degree single take. (Watch for how he fakes the continuity!) If I'm not mistaken, it's based on a very well-researched series of paintings that once formed a diorama at the Borodino battlefield site.

The cinematography in that film is quite remarkable, and the script follows Tolstoy's original most closely. As an exercise in point-of-view, you might take selected scenes and go back to Tolstoy's original. The man is a screenwriter before his time, and the cinematographer is following very closely. The other thing to note is how many of the tableaux mimic compositions from art history. I think I saw both Goya and Delacroix being quoted.

I forgot to mention in my post above: for a rousing (though not musicologically period) soundtrack, do check out Prokofiev's opera of 'War and Peace'. It's one of my favorites, and the story of its making is just as fascinating as the novel; it was born in World War II, Prokofiev's boss was Joseph Stalin... you can fill in parts of this. The boss from hell. I have had bad bosses and worse clients, but none of them have had the power to send me to Siberia.

You're right; Durova is a fascinating subject, and to be frank, what drew me in as a playwright was her voice. I started reading her memoir in Russian. The language is dense and archaic (she's of the generation before Pushkin, she's polyglot in the way that professional soldiers are, as well as having been reared in what is now Tatarstan, and her text is full of Polish, Ukrainian, Tatar, French and German terms). But she is such a storyteller that I was drawn in and was following that voice, over rough ground in the dark, so to speak. When I went and looked up the words, I frequently needed three dictionaries or more. Fortunately the Russian text I was using translated the Tatar and Polish, so I only needed the dictionary for French and German.

The English translation is absolutely smashing, by the way. The translator solved all of the problems I couldn't figure out.

That was in June 2001, and I hadn't been reading Russian for very long. It took me six months to read the memoir at about an hour each morning before leaving for my day job (alas, I do not write full time, so things take a long time). Then I found the translation, which has a wonderful bibliography, and as I'm convenient to a very fine university research library, I began to follow up on her other work. The project has since morphed into two plays, one about her experiences as a soldier and one about her literary career. I'm very interested in the suppressions in her autobiography and the extent to which they may be filled in from suggestions in her fiction. (Like many other writers of her literary generation, she subtitled many of her works 'A True Occurrence'). And then I got sucked into translating (for my own use) parts of the second, untranslated volume of memoirs...

The play about her literary career has turned into a three-actor chamber piece including Durova, her editor/mentor Pushkin, and the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who is buried in the same town (if not the same graveyard) as Durova. (And knew about her. And took her Amazon example as an inspiration.) Which means even more research. I've started listening when novelists and playwrights talk about 5-7 year projects. They are not joking about that.

The intensive research is a by-product of obsessive reading (admittedly my addiction). It's my relaxation before and after work, so when I'm on a project, it's often 3-4 hours a day. You don't have to be a 'professional,' you just have to do the work. And I have caught out the professionals in major errors. (I'd estimate that at least half of the Sovietologists who refer to Chernyshevsky's 'What is to be done?' have never read it.)

PS on the Russian 1812 site. if there's something you'd like to see visuals on, and you can't find it on the English version of the 1812 site, let me know and I'll check out the Russian site for you. I can at least give you a rough idea what you're looking at (I'm not a professional translator but my reading is mostly OK, though I'm a bit out of practice lately). Feel free to send me a NaNoMail. I check the forums etc every day or so.

PPS: Your web site is gorgeous.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

My novel will be set in Russia this year. Towards the end of Tsar Nikolai's reign. It's mostly focused on (a fictionalised version of) Rasputin's daughter, Vara.

[~] [Bruins] [Lightning] [Red Wings] [Devils] [Predators] [~] [Red Sox] [Braves] [Dodgers] [~]

~ Started: 4 ~ Finished: 1 ~ Here we go again! ~ Historical Fiction, Imperial Russia. ~

Hi Aurora,

Sorry about the delay in replying - I suddenly got busy with work; which I guess does not bode well for November, eek! I've been checking some of those scenes on youTube and they're amazing I'm going to go try and get the whole thing from the library. It's a glowing reference to say that it sticks close to Tolstoy's original.

I listen to quite a lot of Russian music - though, as you have said about Prokofiev, none of it is muicologically period, I still find it gets me into a good mood to write. (I am a huge cliché) I'll have to try that opera. I have to agree about Stalin too; did you see that his grandson failed in his defamation of character case in Russia this week?

Your Durova projects sound really epic - do you have a publisher for it? It sounds like the kind of thing that would be of good interest to Historians as well as the general public.

The translation work you've done must have been difficult but it'll really make the satisfaction greater when you're done. I'm afraid I'm not near as thorough with research; I have done a lot of reading and I research online but I suspect anyone really in the know would have a field day with my errors. I sometimes sacrifice fidelity to try and achieve effect, though hopefully not so far as to make things false.

That's for offering to give me an idea if I run across any Russian, much appreciated. And thanks also for your kind words about my website - web design is the day job!

Pete

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

Lady Browncoat, I love the late imperial period, there is so much going on at any time. I like the idea of looking at a different character yet still so closely linked to events, it's a good one. :)

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

I love the late imperial period as well, though I am not quite expert in all of the events. The thing that strikes me about it is that everything comes apart at once. World War I and the 1917 revolutions are just the capper.

I'm not sure about the circles that Rasputin's daughter would have travelled in, but some of my favorites for getting in the Silver Age mood are:

Andrei Bely. Petersburg. Very edgy, experiment, unsettling novel about 1905, set in Petersburg. In modern terms I think it would be classified as magic-realist, although one can argue that a good part of Russian literature can be placed in that box (Pushkin's Bronze Horseman, much of Gogol, Tolstoy's talking/thinking trees and wolves in War and Peace). Bely's novel gives a really good sense of just how unsettled things were.

Marina Tsvetaeva's essays, published in English in a collection called 'Captive Spirit'. She recalls the poetry and cultural scene in Moscow (and occasionally Petersburg) with vividness and verve. And even in translation, she is an example to us all of terse, evocative prose. There are also some gut-wrenching pieces about the Revolution and the Civil War in this collection as well.

Anna Akhmatova. Poem without a hero. Ghosts of 1910 visit the poet on New Year's Eve during the siege of Leningrad. Many glorious, bone-chilling lines, among them: "Along the legendary embankment / The real--not the calendar-- / Twentieth century draws near." The Hemschemeyer translation is highly recommended.

Note that Bely, Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova were all from the upper middle class (all three were children of academics: a mathematician, a museum founder/director, and I believe a professor of engineering), but they really nail the atmosphere.

Film: "A Rider Called Death": recent, last 5 years I think, Russian, and it covers assassinations and terrorist activity in the pre-WW1 period, including the assassination of a grand duke. Set in Moscow. Gives a real sense of just how crazy things were getting by that point.

Visual art: "Mir Iskusstva / World of Art" (exhibition catalogue). The exhbition actually came to the museum at the University of Minnesota and I walked in one fine morning to find myself face to face with the famous cubist portrait of Akhmatova. Includes portraits of Czar Alexander III as well as society folk who were important in the era--including the prince who was involved in the assassination of Rasputin. Interestingly enough, many visual artists in the World of Art group were obsessed with the eighteenth century, in particular the period right before the Revolution in France.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

Pete01:

In re the Durova project.

Gods. No. It's nowhere near got a publisher, and (let this be a lesson to all persons writing historical fiction) it's on hiatus because I got confused about whether I'm an historian or a playwright. I was waylaid by an Inner Editor (nay, an Inner Censor) whom I have nicknamed Gus, after Gustave Flaubert, who was known to chase down 30-year-old restaurant menus in the quest for historical accuracy. You don't even want to know what minutiae hung me up. When last seen, I was trying to decide which of FIVE different birth and death dates for her father I was going to accept. (Civic records in pre-revolutionary Russia a mess? Oh yes.)

And currently it's cast as a play, which (on the American scene at least) makes the odds of publication, let alone production, unnervingly steep. I'm planning whatever the theatrical equivalent of samizdat is and hoping to scare up a circle of actors to read it in public and/or comment.

To the generality on this thread:

A very good friend and theatrical colleague of mine said to me: "Research is how _you_ do writer's block."

I also got a warning in a lecture by the novelist A.S. Byatt. She said that fiction centered on real-life historical persons is a dangerous business, and in her own experience as a writer, the most fruitful setups put the historical persons at the periphery (see how Tolstoy deals with Napoleon! and Alexander! and anybody else real!) with an historically accurate but fictional person at the center. When I was doing backstory for the Durova play, I ended up writing a 30,000-word novella about the life of Durova's mother, a person about whom history reports practically nothing. (which now that I think about it, with some additional research on the 18th-century Ukraine, might turn into a viable fiction project all by itself).

For an extreme example of creativity trumping historical accuracy, see the history plays of Shakespeare, or the tragedies. Macbeth, for example, which I researched briefly for last year's NaNo novel. The history in that play is, as Mr. Ford would have put it, bunk. But what a play!!!

On the other hand, I still do have nightmares of being lynched by a committee of Russian immigrants and specialist scholars.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

Gus seems like a very fitting name for your inner editor. You must be a dab hand at research to be able to find so much to get hung up on in the first place though! I can well believe that about civic records in pre-rev. Russia, when we studied it at college it seemed like disorganised chaos. (I do think given more time Stolypin may have whipped it into better shape though!)

It's a shame that plays are harder to get published - I really don't know very much about that side of things, but there must be a way to get it out there and actors is probably a good start - plus it would be satisfying to see what you'd writte performed!

I think that what A.S. Byatt said is very wise, I was thiking a little of this earlier on - I was also thinking about how it must be easier if your protagonist does not change the course of world history, but rather just effect the existing outcome. I'm hoping to keep real figures mainly periphery in mine, although I must admit at present the plot ends with my protagonist meeting Napoleon.

You're spot on about Shakespeare. He's so creative with words and the plays have such power - but the stories are also very far from the truth often. It's amazing to pull it off so well while being so cavalier with the facts. :)

I think writers have to accept that what we write will upset/annoy somebody, no matter how hard we try to be accurate and fair. People and their opinions and knowledge are far too varied to please all of the people, all of the time!

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

I've been reading and researching for years, and I do have an obsessive streak.

I think that the fear behind the obsessiveness over detail is that I will tell a fundamental untruth, and there's a very real fear about my audience as well: that I will be their only source of information on a subject, and will get it wrong. Critics in the USA constantly stress that audiences are stupid, fickle, unwilling to read. I'm not sure that's true, but it's a demoralizing message, and there's already enough misinformation floating loose.

Cross-training in theater has actually been very important to my practice as a writer. I have learned how far words will go, and (as noted in my Shakespeare example) the difference between 'historical accuracy' and emotional or spiritual accuracy. Then there's the very great extent to which details are actually filled in by the imaginations of others. For the playwright, that's the director, the actors, the lighting designer, the costumer, the set designer, etc. For the novelist, that's the reader. My job is to give a hint.

The truly great writers give us very sparing details, around which our reading brains crystallize a coherent scene; that's the ground they share with great playwrights.

As a performer, I've actually faced the audience across the footlights, and talked with them afterward. I'm very fortunate to live in one of the few American cities with an active cabaret scene, so if I'm conscientious, I have the chance to read or perform 1-2 times a year. In reading about the "scene" in other countries, I'm realizing that I'm working in an intensely hostile official culture: both more anti-intellectual and more anti-artistic than even Soviet Russia. After all, the Soviets, and the czars before them, respected artists enough to shoot them.

So your point about not pleasing all the people all the time is well taken.

Those of us who read and research a lot develop a certain hesitation. We've learned from experience that there's always more to learn, and we treat our knowledge as provisional. However, the creative artist is the one who grabs the present moment and makes something out of it. There is a sense in which all art is improvisation, indeed, that all art is performance. Even the seventeenth draft of a well-considered essay is the writer's decision about the right choices in that moment, and his/her decision to stop there.

All of us who read and research have assimilated an enormous amount. After a while, we are not the creature or image of any particular book, author, or school. My approach to NaNoWriMo is to take the test with the book closed, so to speak, to respond, in writing--in the form of story--to something out there, and bring to bear on it everything I know.

This is a very interesting and fruitful dialogue.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

Mine isn't set in Russia, but was inspired when I was writing my IB essay on the Romanovs. It is a fictional country going through a revolution similar to the ones of 1917.

Aurora, when you speak of historical accuracy vs emotional/spiritual accuracy I find myself seeking a quote from a lecture from David McCullogh: "It's perfectly possible to have all the facts exactly right and miss the truth just as it's perfectly possible to get alot of the facts wrong or mess them up a little bit and hit the truth right on the bullseye." He was talking about how some biographers can write fact and yet they don't create a picture - like you say, the reader needs to fill in bits themselves and imagine things given what you've told them. I think that in that sense you shouldn't be too hard on yourself over small facts as it's the bigger picture that's most important.

I think we have to accept the audience as most likely in the main not to have knowledge of what we right - some will, of course but in general unless people have studied the area they won't know it. However that doesn't mean that, like critics say, they're all ignorant. I think that people can read things and understand without knowing all of it. Take Hemingway - he makes you understand what's going on without needing too much detail or forknowledge on behalf of the reader. I don't know details of WW1 in Italy but "A Farewll To Arms" remains a hugely powerful work. He tells you enough to support the plot and the reader can then enjoy the work without needing to know to much.

I think that the mainstream culture in the UK is pretty bad too, in that sense, the things society as a whole places value on have drifted away to detritus. To use art as an example Emin and Hirst are lauded while really gifted painters are ignored. Society is ruled by the quick hit entertainment and thus things that take effort or thought are less appreciated. Which is a shame. But there are always people who will enjoy them none the less. While the Da Vinci Code may sell by the crate load it doesn't mean real books aren't selling at the same time, unnoted by the media.

I know what you mean about more to learn too - I finished up on my first book because I realised I would never be happy and never be finished unless I just called it quits at somepoint. There was always more to learn and more to change and some new fact to be integrated. In the end I decided to let the story stand, it's fiction after all. (Albeit a touch implausible in places ;))

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

Anastasia, that's a really interesting idea. It was such a time of political upheaval there is a lot to draw upon for inspiration.

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

@Anastasia:

There's no equipment more valuable to a writer of fantasy and/or science-fiction than a strong grasp of history and economics. For one thing, history is full of great ideas for stories. The tragedy of the Romanovs (wrong place, wrong time, wrong kind of sticking-to-principle) is compelling in purely storytelling terms. And, as my posts above indicate, writing an "actual historical novel" has pitfalls for the conscientious as well as the cavalier. Taken in the proper spirit, though, history reading can be seen as one big fat writing prompt!

For a really fine example of fantasy of the "imaginary countries" variety (i.e. in a non-magical universe) you might enjoy the collection "Orsinian Tales" and the novel "Malafrena" by the American science-fiction & fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin. The short stories are based on the twentieth-century history of Central Europe and the novel on the nationalist uprisings of 1848. She has also written utopian societies, a rarely attempted feat among contemporary novelists.

Then there's the territory of magic-realism, represented by authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, and Gunter Grass, in which fantastical happenings occur in real countries (or countries near enough to real) in a kind of dream-time alive with imaginary beasts, supernatural happenings, etc. A lot of those novels are heavily loaded with political commentary.

A very popular fantasy writer who draws on history extensively is J.K.Rowling of Harry Potter fame. Some number of the political actors (i.e. the adults) in her series are sketched from life, notably the Black sisters, who appear to have been partially inspired by the famous Mitford sisters. The race laws sketched out in the seventh book of the series parallel very closely the Nuremberg Laws of the Hitler regime (in interviews, Rowling has indicated that they were arrived at independently, which proves that bad ideas have a life of their own; her villains are working the same political and emotional territory as real-life racist and nationalist thinkers). She's not as strong on economics and matters military, and an army of fan theorists as well as fan-fiction writers has stepped in to delineate more plausible scenarios and, in the case of the fan-fiction writers, to bring them to life, thus proving what literary history will also demonstrate: that the best answer to a fiction is another fiction.

I should also add that the creative interchange between fantasy and history goes both ways. One of my most daunting projects is a play in which 17-year-old Lenin appears as a (minor) character, along with teenaged versions of other historical persons. Part of the preparation for this project turned out to include a political novel about war-crimes trials set in Rowling's universe--technically a fan-fiction--taking her books and their commentators deadly seriously as eyewitness accounts and secondary sources, respectively. It was remarkably freeing, because I'm nowhere near as daunted by Rowling's imaginary people or the politics of her equally imaginary universe as I am by my source material. I found myself taking an affectionate-but-not-reverent attitude to the characters, and along the way I discovered an unsuspected taste for scenes of twisty diplomacy as well as economic drama. (So who knows... maybe next year's NaNo will take place at the Congress of Vienna or Versailles...)

So, as one result, 17-year-old Volodya Ulyanov (aka Lenin) now appears in my play as a comic character: the annoying little brother of a student activist. (Comic, that is, until act five, when All is Revealed.)

The other thing about fantastic settings is that you can make political and historical points without people getting (as) upset that you are talking about subjects as emotionally loaded as genocide, racism, etc. Le Guin, cited above, stirred considerable controversy with her 1970s science-fiction novella "The Word for World is Forest" which drew on debates about the human-rights and environmental impact of the US involvement in Vietnam. And I strongly suspect that some of the US religious right's objection to Rowling's books is less about favorable mention of magic than it is about the political notions therein.

@Pete01:
In re the current Anglo-American cultural climate: well, I'd hesitate to say it couldn't be worse. Things can always get worse (History is good for reminding us of that). What's distressing is that the focus seems to be on money rather than content--i.e. a bestseller is de facto a good book. I read pretty ecumenically (as the post above indicates) and more than occasionally I'm appalled at what gets hyped as truly great work. One of my disciplines as a reader and buyer of books is to make sure that along with things I've heard of, I also take care to select (sometimes at random) books and authors I have never heard of. I've had some quite delightful surprises that way.

Your point about Hemingway is well taken. He's a master of the poetically evocative detail, which is the very thing I admire most in Durova and Tolstoy, both of whom evoked the random and comic, as well as the horrific, aspects of actual combat. There are passages in Durova that put me in mind of Hemingway in their terseness and emotional power (I'm thinking in particular of a description of a gunshot suicide that has precisely two visual details in it, which suffice to summon up an entire crime scene).

As for Mr. Brown and the DaVinci Code... well, I also dabble in art history, the birth of science out of alchemy and numerology (see Frances Yates, among others), and feminist theology, and the book left me intellectually unsatisfied. (I spent the better part of a morning enumerating its absurdities.) Though I will say that it hooked right into the piece of my brain that responds to plot, and lost me some piece of a good night's sleep. The reason I started reading in French and Russian is REALLY that I was losing too much sleep to all-night English-language novel-reading marathons.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

@Anastacia: Another good book in a fictional country is The Prisoner of Zenda, it's a short but enjoyable adventure in a entirely made up location.

@Aurora: True things can always get worse. For instance, I just saw a real live fascist party leader on television; he was speaking about something else, and I trust the British people not to ever elect the swines to real power, but it reminds you that worse exists. I read quite a lot, but find I often go back to classics as I figure the chances of them being good are better - they've stood the test of time and the writers seem less prone to cheap tricks. Did you read Suite Francais by Irene Nemirovsky (I just know you're going to say 'yes, in the orginal french'!) Amazing book. Like you I also like to choose authors I don't know too, I love browsing random names in the book store and seeing if the books sound interesting, you feel like you've struck gold if you find a really good book that way.

It's interesting how literature grows and how different people influence each other. Hem would cite Turgenev as a major influence and it's more than possible that Turgenev was influenced by Durova's generation too, though I don't know enough to say.

I think what annoyed me more than Dan Brown was the spate of other art-history type mysteries that followed. It shows what I dislike about society. People should write because they want to tell a story, not because they see an opportunity to make money. I find it so unlikely that all those people woke up and suddenly thought - I know, I'll write an art history mystery. I think it cheapens the work when it's an imitation like that. (I love art and history, so I'd actually enjoy a really well written Art History novel, but won't read any as they're all marketed like Dan Brown now)

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

I think part of this year's novel will be set in the Kievan Rus' around 1100. It's not quite historical fiction, but that's my base. (There will be magic-- it's a reworked folktale.)

Needless to say, I will be doing a lot of reading before November. :/

There's something wondrous in sitting at a keyboard and seeing a story flow up and out of your fingertips. A terrible, wonderful joy.

Is this how all-powerful dictators feel?

@Renbirde
Your novel project sounds very exciting, and good luck on your reading! I'm in the same place, revisiting fat tomes that I read in a spirit of curiosity--now they're background information, and that's a very different feeling.

Oh yes, and I do like the motto on the little graphic icon on your profile "I never make stupid mistakes, only very very clever ones." The territory of very very clever mistakes comprehends some rather horrific pieces of human history...

@Pete01:
First, I thank you VERY much for two book recommendations: "The Prisoner of Zenda," which I've heard about for years and never read, and Nemirovsky's "Suite Francaise." I did look up some reviews just now, and it sounds brilliant: an historical novel being written at the same time as the history unfolded, and a rather terrifying chapter of history at that. I suspect that Nemirovsky's narrative is not alone; there is an irresistible urge to make sense of things as they're happening. In the visual arts (well, actually on the boundary between visual and literary) there's the work of Charlotte Salomon, who did a marvelous novel-in-paintings, covering both her family's history (and a disturbing trend of suicide) and her own life. She too ended in Auschwitz.

I wonder how many cultural treasures we have lost in the wars of this last century, or that remain unknown to us because they are yet in manuscript in someone's attic.

What we think of as our 'classics' are the result of a fortuitous selection process involving publication, criticism, readership (both qualitatively, in terms of the effects on individual readers, and quantitatively, in the raw terms of pure circulation numbers). A hundred and fifty years ago, Dickens was a wildly best-selling writer who toured to promote his work. Now he's entered the canon. He's very much on my mind lately, given that I'm studying two of his students, Chernyshevsky and Rowling. Not that either of those two writers had him as their exclusive influence--both are quite clear about this in interviews, essays and between the lines of their fictional work--but it's interesting to note that the energy of the two is similar in some respects. (Chernyshevsky's Vera Pavlovna is Harry Potter's Russian cousin in more ways than I can easily enumerate.) I'm very interested in books that are never cited for 'literary greatness' i.e. fine writing, but have enormous appeal and in some cases political influence. ('Uncle Tom's Cabin' would be another example--a book I find tremendously entertaining, and have read several times).

Literary lineage... well, that's an interesting and complex question. The thing that fascinates me about literary lineages are that they jump across continents and centuries. Because I don't come from a literary family (we run mostly to mechanics, engineers, nurses, manual therapists, etc.) I regard my literary ancestors as actual family, in the sense that their work made it seem possible I could do something similar. Those of us who write do a lot of reading first, so we don't ever have a single 'mother' or 'father' in the literary line. Some would say that the great task of an artist is to give birth to oneself, but we do have a lot of older brothers and sisters.

To take the example of Turgenev... Turgenev was strongly influenced by a number of his contemporaries, but I'll pick just one, who was not Russian--George Sand. She's an interesting figure because her opus is on the scale of Dickens or Balzac, and like them she was able to cross the border into Russia (past the censorship) because it was "only stories." Pushkin was one of many translators who brought her work into Russian, and her interest in the folklore of her native province of Berry sparked similar interest in Russia; Turgenev's "Sportsman's Sketches" or "Huntsman's Sketches" is one of many such works. She also strongly influenced the young Dostoevsky, who wrote a tremendously moving obituary of her in his "Writer's Diary."

Turgenev influenced Hemingway; Dostoevsky influenced one of Hemingway's younger contemporaries, James Baldwin. So Sand has two American grandchildren that I know of. (Walt Whitman, on the other hand, was one of her 'children'--i.e. influenced in the direct line). I'm also one of her grandchildren, since I count both Turgenev and Herzen as literary older brothers. She's the wicked grandma I never knew I had. :) When I read her work, which ranges from the gritty-realistic to the fantastic to the utopian, something clicked into place.

When you read her novels (e.g. Mauprat, a tale of redemption) they will seem very Russian. They did to me. But that's ex post facto. They fell out of fashion in France, but continued to be quite popular in Russia, even to this day. And what the Russians read of her work is from her utopian-socialist-swashbuckling period, not her pastoralist-folklorist period.

On your comments about Dan Brown et al: The thing that never ceases to amaze me is the endless quest for the 'sure thing.' So if Dan Brown wrote an art-history bestseller, then by gosh that must be it, and it becomes 'flavor of the month.' I think of the bestseller phenomenon as a fluke like unto winning the lottery. A bestseller can be trash or treasure--on the 'treasure' side of the balance I'd cite Byatt's 'Possession,' which is a very sophisticated entertainment full of literary games (and a narrative drive comparable to that of anything by Brown). The economics of publishing, of course, is quite different from what it was in Dickens' day, in the respect that literary works are quite cynically regarded as 'product.' (On the other hand, as I've been reading Sand's correspondence, I'm struck by her frustration at her publisher demanding 'another one just like the one before'--i.e. his idea of 'a George Sand novel').

To stay sane as artists, we have to pay attention to the story that's calling us, not to the hype, which is a discipline of non-attachment as stern as that of any Zen Buddhist monk.

Point on fascists: oh yes. It chilled my blood to meet the American variety, years ago, and I meet them unexpectedly from time to time. In the USA, our scariest and most virulent strain is shot through with a particularly anti-intellectual variety of evangelical Christianity. Listening to them, I find it not difficult to imagine the emotional climate of the Crusades or the Thirty Years' War. Part of what spurred my reading on the links between American and German fascism was this feeling of chill and recognition, and I confess I am not comforted by what I have learned. In particular, the machinery that enabled the genocides to proceed with such efficiency is very much in place, the basic ideas have never been repudiated, and it could quite literally happen again at any time. And has. And some of the propaganda of my government in the last decade has sounded eerily like Germany 1933 or the Soviet Union 1937. I won't speak here of the human rights record; the parallels speak for themselves.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

Renbirde - what is the end of October for if not frantic reading research!? :D

I hope your book goes well, I don't know much about the Kievan Rus' but it should be a really interesting time period to recreate.

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

Aurora, hehe, I hope you REALLY enjoy those books. I have to say mind the notes at the end of Suite Francaisse are so unbelievably sad as they contain the letters from her husband to the varying authorities trying to find her. Such an amazing work. Have you ever heard of the Cellist of Sarajevo - it's a novel but the true story behind it is the amazing part. It shows what you say about that art response to things, the Cellist went down into a shell crater everyday for 22 days (22 people had died in the blast while queuing for bread) and sat there in a tuxedo playing Albinoni's Adagio while the war continued round about. You must be spot on about the cultural treasures lots - so terrible to think about.

It's funny you should mention Dickens touring - I pass a blue plaque on a building in the city where he read his works on tour and he stayed in the old hall in a village near by. I do find it interesting, as you say, when fine writing occurs in things with enormous appeal. (Also worth noting that Buchan delibratley set out to write a 'dime novel' when he wrote 39 steps and Conan-Doyle was serialised in magazines!) I think some excellent writers probably get unfairly dismissed because their publishers package them for a specific audience and thus they are overlooked by more "serious" readers.

You're very deep on literary lineage - and raise a very good point about the none literary influences. I guess as well as all the things we read, our work is the sum of who we are and where we've been too. I also wonder when reading how much we unconciously might pick up style wise and not realise. Your tracing of the Sand line was very interesting; I struggle to come up with my influences so clearly, though I would say that Dumas influenced my plotting, but for writing style I have no idea!

I don't mind one bit that the novels will seem very Russian - that's a bonus in my book! ;) It's interesting how work falls out of fashion like that, but what is exciting is that sometime it will be "rediscovered" for a new generation. Like on a swashbukling historical type front, much of Rafael Sabatini has been forgotten but he wrote so many stories that people know, even though they don't know him per se.

You're so right about it being seen as product. I think it's hard as it is so prevalent now you can't avoid it. Once or twice books I like have been chosen for Richard and Judy's Bookclub - it's so middle of the road, safe, cautious, bestsellerish, that I was slightly peevish that they'd chosen some real good books. On one hand I liked that good authors would get the income spike but the thought that people would read it just because some old couple on tele said so was strange - and, curse my pride, I also hated the idea that people would assume I read them for the same reasons.

I guess the George Sand example demonstrates that it's always been conflict between writer's ideas and publisher's demands in some ways.

On fascists: I'm a born-again Christian, but I must say, the extreme American ones are scary because they mix politics and hate with religion - something Jesus never did. It's sad what they attach His name too. I am also scared sometimes by the parralells between our western goverments actions and what went on in the past. (Last year an MP here was arrested and his office raided by anti-terror police. They also used the terrorism act to physically drag an 83 year old man out of a conference because he dared shout "rubbish" while the then foriegn secretary spoke.) But here we have a Fascist party that's making the news a lot, though mercifully because the large proportion of the country can't stand them!

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

@Pete01

on Russia (the nominal topic of this thread):

Well, I fibbed a bit when I said there's no Russian connection in this year's NaNo. I was working on names for my characters and free-association led me to Russian folklore (not a subject in which I'm that well grounded, but my niece is taking a university course in it)... and Koschey Bessmertny.

And my villain (or one of them) is an eternal type and something of a shape-shifter. So we now have... Anne-Marie Bessmertny.

And my Citizen of Utopia has echoes of the Firebird. Faint echoes, but nonetheless there. Pure coincidence, but now it suggests something I might do with the plot.

Oh yes, and I looked up the Prisoner of Zenda. Read it last night. Plot! yes! Lots of plot! For reference, it's 54,532 words in the Project Gutenberg text (after removing header and footer text). Anthony Hope wrote a NaNo novel :) It's very helpful to count the words in well-loved books, because it gives one an idea of just how much plot is 50,000 words, 75,000 words, etc.

On Dickens:
He toured in America as well, and last year I read his Notes from America, which apparently offended folks here... well, there was the slavery thing, and then there was the copyright thing, i.e. his complaints about pirated editions of his work (the USA pretty well ignored British and Continental copyright, to the immense annoyance of writers and their publishers). What's marvelous is all of the disgruntled detail about food, lodging, transportation, manners (or lack thereof), characteristic speech, etc. which add up to give a marvelously vivid picture of the United States of mid-century last--in some cases, places I know in present tense. For historical detail, tight-lipped and stoical travelers are dead useless. That's why I treasure Dickens on nineteenth-century America and the Marquis de Custine on 1830s Russia (Even the Winter Palace had bedbugs. Lots of them, in numbers sufficient to turn a blue cloak into a pululating brown mass... and then there's the headache you have after 12 hours of travel in a tarantass).

On popular appeal and the stuff of bestsellers:
I think there are certain stories that appeal, and not merely for satisfying the desire for wish-fulfillment. I'm thinking here of tales of quest, or righting wrongs, or solving puzzles, or discovering love, friendship, solidarity. There is a very deep spiritual component to plot, as well as a structural rightness, as in music. Stories are one way that we know the world. I honestly believe that stories and pictures are our first language; everything else is a second language (speaking here as an erstwhile teacher of mathematics). There are shoddy books that sell well, and there are magnificent ones that sell well. And in spite of publicists' expensive efforts, best-sellers are often made by word-of-mouth, or the electronic equivalent. To return to the contemporary example of J.K.Rowling, one factor in how quickly her series 'jumped the pond' was word-of-mouth from children's librarians in the US, many of whom special-ordered the books from Amazon-UK. (And her career does remind me of Dickens... cf people standing on the docks in NY meeting incoming ships from England with the question about the fate of Little Nell in 'The Old Curiosity Shop').

On fascists, religion, and distortions of the message:
Reading history has given me a real appreciation for how fast a good message can be distorted, usually by considerations of political self-interest. The corruption of Christian monastic institutions in the Middle Ages, that led to the Reformation, finds a nearly exact echo in the history of Buddhism... and for much the same reasons. Those who pay for physical plant (monasteries, temples, churches) want an endorsement up front, which is how religions of peace end up producing army chaplains and royal advisers. Unfortunately, reason is no shelter from distortion--it's just one more tool in the box. As a student of medieval philosophy, I read elegantly constructed arguments as to why it was necessary to burn heretics alive for their own good, bolstered by the expectable Bible verses (I believe the injunction--embedded in a parable, mind you--to 'compel them to come in').

I actually read the socialist movements of the 19th century as the Second Reformation, with the atheist wing taking the 'no graven images' rule to its ultimate extreme. One theme that runs throughout is the corrupt relationship between the organized churches, state power, and the dominant social classes (whether aristocracy or nascent industrial tycoons). Certainly up to 1848, the socialist movement was explicitly Christian in character (see Lamennais, Sand, Blake, etc.--and, I believe, even Marx initially). In Russia, Britain, and America, it was intertwined with the abolitionist movement, which definitely sprung from the ethical imperatives of the New Testament (and in the Jewish tradition, the prophets' call for social justice). Lots of preachers' kids involved here... Chernyshevsky was the son of an Orthodox priest; his American counterpart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, came from a family of prominent Christian ministers and married into yet another.

On your 'Volga Ruby':
OK, could not resist, even though I'm supposed to be reviewing work on the American eugenics movement, the planning of the Holocaust, etc. (such cheerful subjects). I checked out the sample chapters at Lulu.com.

Stenka Razin. Check.
The Volga. Check. [The Volga staggers me, and that's speaking as someone who lives on the Mississippi.]
Ill-fated Persian Princess. Check. [can't resist a citation here: Tsvetaeva's essay "Pushkin and Pugachev", her poems on Stenka Razin, and her essay on same... all but the poems to be found in the collection 'Captive Spirit']
Valuable, possibly talismanic, gem. Check.
Petersburg 1907 and twisty diplomacy. Check.
Viciously cold Russian weather. (Petersburg is noplace humans should live--it's north of Anchorage, Alaska for gosh sakes). Check.
Young English diplomat. Check. [I'm assuming you know "Reilly, Ace of Spies"--I was immediately reminded!]

All right, you have me hooked now. After NaNo madness has passed, I will get myself a copy and read it.
And you have a standing offer to read this year's production.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

Aurora,

See - your story is being drawn inevitably back to Russia. Though I must admit folklore tends to go over my head as I'm usually grounded in history so much.

Like you I do like to see novels of similar word counts - I believe The Great Gatsby and The Thirty-Nine Steps weigh in around about the 50k mark too. It's amazing what good writers can do with such a relatively small word count.

The USA ignored our copyright laws? Tsk. I'm surprised Queen Victoria didn't send in the redcoats again ;) His notes from America sound very interesting, it's cool to see how societies were in differet eras. I didn't need to know about the bed bugs at the Winter Palace though - how ghastly! The poor Marquis must have been pretty horrorfied. It does seem to fit with the paradox that was (and is) Russia.

I do like that word-of-mouth can still play such a roll in book sales; I think it's better to trust a first hand opinion that go off what a marketing man says, especially as people get to know others taste and whether they're likely to agree on things.

I don't think that the position of an Army Chaplain is a distortion of religion - soldiers, like everyone else in society, need spiritual guidance. While there were inevitably the crazies (like Sir Thomas More or the Inquisition) who bayed for blood and burned people alive, there were also people who believed in the gospel as originally delivered - unfortunatley for many this meant they got burned, but it shows that while there were some in positions of power subverting religion for their own ends their were still people who were doing it right and being sincere in their faith - I think if we look at the situation now 500 years on we see that the likes of Tyndale and Luther had far more impact on the world than the likes of More.

I did read Wilberforce's biography and it was quite inspiring how driven he was - presenting an abolition bill yearly for twenty years and foresaking the pursuit of higher office to do so. He was quite something.

Thank you for the kind words about my book, please don't get your hopes to high though, lol. I have a lot to learn before I get to my magnum opus ;)

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

Me me me! :)

I'm covering the late-19th and early-20th century - the time period of the rule of Nicholas II. The plot is intertwined with present-day Canada, and also involves "ordinary people" and the Empress Alexandra. So lots of juxtaposing going on. It's a topic of interest for me anyway, so I'm just building on the research I've already done, with some additional plot-specific research thrown in.

Yvette! That sounds very interesting. Have you read Robert K. Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra? It's a gold mine of a biography. I really love that era (Though I've went earlier this time round) it's so fascinating.

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

I have - twice! Probably will again through the course of November. You're right - it's fantastic. (The movie *butchered* it! Blech! I hate movies based on books!)

@everybody:

Best of luck with your novels! I'm fascinated to see how many are drawn to the late imperial / revolutionary period. Nicholas strikes me as a tragic figure who might have had a much happier life had he been born into different circumstances... i.e. not the autocrat business--very similar in fact to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who seem to me to have been pleasant and unassuming people who were given altogether the wrong job for the place and time.

And the period was a fascinating (if unsettled) time to be alive...

Should any of you be interested in a reader at the end of things, I would definitely be willing.

@Pete01:
Very interesting that you mention Thomas More! I'm re-reading his 'Utopia,' because I'm borrowing at least some of the geography for my version of that fabulous land. (The crescent-shaped harbor is just lovely.) It's an interesting paradox that the tolerance advocated in this literary work is in contradiction to his track record as a political actor, and serves, I think, to illustrate the range of thought and behavior in just one person's life. That Christianity in Europe--as a cultural and political institution--could give birth to both superhuman self-sacrifice on behalf of others and to ferocious persecution of 'heretical' sects, is a poignant illustration of the breadth of human moral capacity. We're somewhere between the beasts and the angels, as someone observed, but at the extremes we exceed either.

What's really interesting is the interaction of spiritual belief with institutions. Augustine described armies as bands of robbers, and put pirates and emperors in more or less the same category. (I think that would be in 'City of God'--I do remember that the citation is an epigraph to a book of essays by Noam Chomsky on US foreign affairs--called 'Pirates and Emperors'). But Augustine was writing before Christianity became the official religion of the Empire. Military metaphors become more prevalent thereafter... I think that the position of the military chaplain is actually a very difficult one, because it places one in a position where two sets of duties may conflict. Consider the position of a chaplain ministering to US soldiers in a situation like Abu Ghaib or My Lai. And a good piece of the history of the middle ages consists of power struggles between representatives of church and state. Persons of conscience often found themselves caught between--see Thomas a Becket--and the results were often personally unpleasant (although from our point of view as readers of history or writers of historical drama, quite compelling).

And yours is the third reference to Wilberforce I've heard in the last two weeks... which tells me that's the next research project.

Very best of luck on your novel! Don't feel self-conscious about your level of attainment as a novelist; we only improve by continuing to write. And the excerpt I read was most promising...

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Emily Dickinson)

2009: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne
2008: The Scottish Play, or Fire and Ice

@Everybody: I'm not quite sure -what- I'm going to be doing yet come November, but the most developed idea I've got at the moment uses as its backdrop a not-terribly-disguised equivalent of St Petersburg right after its founding. Not quite sure how I'm going to keep the local equivalent of Peter the Great from grabbing the book and running away with it -- talk about your larger-than-life personalities.

@Pete and Aurora: I'm a native Russian speaker, so feel free to tag me if you have questions about the language.

mine isn't set in russia either, but it's about an alternate fate for anastasia. i'm writing a fanfic for twilight (yeah, i'm one of those people in love with the novels ^_^) i'm making the story as she was turned to a vampire when her family was killed. she was changed by none other than rasputin (that's why he was a little hard to kill off). i have enough knowledge of the events of the time to write it, but i'm having a hard time keeping her identity secret

i'm planning on making it a romance with her and someone else i've brought in that's part of the cullen's coven. she has met him before, but she has the power to make people forget her. that's how she has survived so long. i have to make it to where the people whose memory she has blocked still have this nagging feeling that she's familiar.

the love interest is a holocaust survivor. yeah, going for the tragedy here, huh?

@aurora

Yes, I agree Nicholas was tragic; especially when you look at say Bloody Sunday which History remembers as lots of innocent Russians coming to see him and then being massacred. Except he wasn't there and didn't know about the demonstration until it was too late to do anything and didn't order the military to fire. Autocrats get the blame for everything that goes on in their countries when often they're as much a prisoner of events as anyone else, if not more so.

I think that the worse the situation the more the need for a chaplain - "They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick" The worse the situation the more desperate the need for spiritual succour.

If you're researching Wilberforce may I suggest William Hague's biography? It's a fantastic and amazing book.

@cunningrat

Thank you kindly, I'll shout if I do :)

@Everyone

Less than 24 hours! Let the fun commence. Good luck one and all.

NaNoWriMo '07 - The Volga Ruby

Yes, they do. "With great power comes great responsibility." - Ben Parker, "Spiderman"

Oh, fantastic! I read War and Peace while I was living in Moscow last year, and have a fascination with all things Russian. My novel has a tie-in with Russia (before it was even Russia), but it's not set within Russia itself. Maybe next year. :)