10th February 2015
The possibilities from books
(on occasion of UK participation in the 2015 Minsk international book fair)
I was attracted to my job by Russian culture, which I first came across in my late adolescent and early adult years. It started with music and literature – mostly 19th century. But then I read a lot about 20th century Russian and Soviet history which fascinated, but also horrified me.
The attraction began with the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. My parents encouraged me to take an interest in music. I enjoyed listening to, and learning about, classical music. I suspect like many other adolescents, I was most attracted to tuneful music – especially the works of the great romantic composers. The most romantic of all was Tchaikovsky. He expressed so much more feeling than the more restrained German and Austrian romantic composers.
My favourite piece was the Pathétique symphony, which is perhaps his most intense. It was one of those featured in a British film about Tchaikovsky’s life “The Music Lovers” directed by Ken Russell, which I saw at about that time. It vividly dramatised his life and strange relationship with his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, without (if I recall correctly) explicitly revealing Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality.
I remember having a long conversation when I was about 19 with someone older who commented that he understood my love of Tchaikovsky’s music. He too had very much liked it when he was my age. But he had tired of the emotionalism of the music. Instead, he had come to appreciate the restraint of the baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the more ambiguous post-romantic music of the likes of Dmitri Shostakovich.
If music was my introduction to Russian culture, I then read Russian literature. At about the same age as the conversation about Tchaikovsky, while I was preparing to study history at university, I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Like Tchaikovsky’s music, the book made a big impression on me. I was swept along by Tolstoy’s story, and how his characters were caught up by great events (but I think I only skimmed his philosophical musings at the end of the book).
After Tolstoy, I read other Russian authors. There was nothing on the scale of Tolstoy, although perhaps the works of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn came nearest, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was as shocking as I had expected. I particularly enjoyed Chekhov’s short stories. As I have said before, we Britons seem to have a particular affinity for Chekhov. I enjoyed watching his plays when I started to go regularly to the theatre in early adulthood.
I found some authors hard, especially Dostoevsky, and was defeated by Crime and Punishment (so I didn’t know what finally happened to the awful Raskolnikov). I was also fascinated by the problems faced by writers during Soviet times, and perhaps it was reading the likes of Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov and others, that prompted me to read more Russian history books than novels.
In adulthood, and for most of my professional life, I have read fewer books than when I was at school and university. Maybe that’s the same for many other people, as making a living and becoming a parent and many other distractions reduce time for reading. As a professional diplomat, I read lots of journalism on current affairs. And while I still read a lot of history books, I don’t read much fiction. We also live in a very different world now, with lots of television and online material which competes for our attention.
This is a loss, because while you can learn a lot from history books and film documentaries, you don’t necessarily get into the minds of other people in the way that you can with fiction. Not all fiction, of course, illuminates the minds of other people. But it can be far more intimate and tell far more about other people than reportage or history books.
While reflecting on those Russian writers whom I have read, I realise that I have read those in the “literary canon”. These are the books most studied in university language and literature departments, and are supposedly the most important and best reflect “high culture”.
However, In Britain, and elsewhere in the western world, the last 30 odd years have been marked by a strong challenge to the dominance of DWEMs, or “dead white European male writers”, whose works dominated the literary canon. Most obvious DWEMs would be Shakespeare, Goethe and Tolstoy. In the 19th century many women writers pretended to be men so that they could be published, like the Bronte sisters and George Eliot.
There has been an explosion of published new writing by “non-DWEMs”, in English and I think also in other languages. There was the discovery (or re-discovery?) of books written by women, and published by such specialist publishing houses, like Virago. There has also been a new generation of writers who come from different backgrounds, such as immigrant communities.
Many writers in English from other countries around the world have had their books published in Britain. And the large English language market makes it profitable for foreign language writers to translate their works into English. The main book prize for a novel written in English and published in Britain, the Booker Prize, has been won by many non-British writers – though they are all from countries of the British Commonwealth. Sales of the winning novel are often high.
From all these sources, there is now a very wide variety of books available in Britain, with many different voices, themes and opinions. As I wrote last year at the same time, Britain is still very “bookish”, although many people now buy digital versions for their digital readers. My main regret is that I don’t read as much as I would like, so I miss opportunities for broadening my exposure to different points of view.
When I came to Belarus, I discovered a much richer literature than I had realised from my early adulthood. And I learned about Belarusian writers like Yanka Kupala, Yakub Kolas and Vasil Bykau. I imagine that contemporary writing in other countries is similarly much more varied than it used to be. Until I researched for this piece, I hadn’t realised that there is a Russian version of the Booker Prize. I don’t know if the prize is open to writers from outside Russia, but I hope that a Belarusian could one day win it.
I hope that visitors to our stand at this year’s book fair will enjoy the variety of books on display. Our theme is the British national identity, a subject I wrote about last year. I look forward to meeting visitors and hearing what they think about our books.
In return, I hope someone can tell me what happened to Raskolnikov, and also advise me on what modern Russian and Belarusian books I should read.