The Capacious Greatcoat

I did not know the name Robert Chandler until New York Review Books published, early in 2006, his translation of the monumental World War ii novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Since I do not know Russian, I cannot speak with any authority about the fidelity of that translation. I can only say that I was seldom unduly conscious that I was reading a translation; and, when I forced myself to become conscious on that level, Chandler's English prose seemed to me closer to the best translations of Chekhov than to those of any other major Russian writer I've read (if you can imagine Chekhov devoting chapter after chapter to accounts of close combat).

Of the forty-one selections in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, Mr. Chandler translated about half and cotranslated another eight. In terms of pages, twenty to thirty stories must have been a lark compared to the nearly nine hundred pages of Life and Fate; but on another level the challenge might well have been daunting: keeping each of an alphabet of writers from reading less like himself or herself than like Robert Chandler. Collections of stories rarely profit from being read straight through, a caveat that certainly applies here, for many of these stories sound—stylistically—more alike than different. The exceptions are several stories that employ specific and distinctive literary devices. In Turgenev's "The Knocking" the peasant Filofey speaks with an accent close to cockney; in Leskov's "The Steel Flea" deliberate and amusing malapropisms abound; and the first-person narrator of Babel's "My First Goose" uses much harsher language than in any other version I've read of that much-translated masterpiece.

The similarities are not just stylistic. Nearly all of the stories feel Russian, though it is not always easy to say just where the Russianness resides. But anyone who has read much of the incomparable literature of that unfathomable country will recognize the open and intense emotionalism, the unrelieved menace of brutal and often irrational authority, and the tendency to indulge in samovar philosophy fed by what Maksim Gorky called the "Russian bent for sadness." It is hardly surprising that the stories which seem least Russian are those set elsewhere: "The Gentleman from San Francisco" and "In Paris," both by Ivan Bunin (the former also boasts the most impressive committee of translators: S. S. Koteliansky, D. H. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolf—and the result, against odds, is close to perfection). It is also the case that these resemblances in form and content are genealogical. The aphorism "We have all come out of Gogol's greatcoat" has been attributed to half a dozen Russian masters of the short story and might well have been voiced by writers all over the globe.

Not by Pushkin, however, whose story "The Queen of Spades" was published almost a decade before "The Greatcoat." Chandler's selections are arranged chronologically, and so he begins, inevitably, with Pushkin and "The Queen of Spades," which he calls "the greatest of all Russian short stories." He does not, unfortunately, defend that accolade, and I am not quite sure that it is easily defensible, though I should add that for me all of Pushkin's prose suffers by comparison with that charlotte russe of a poem "Yevgeny Onegin." Nevertheless I can think offhand of a dozen Russian stories for whose superiority I would argue: half a dozen by Chekhov, two by Gogol, several by Babel, and, preeminently, Tolstoy's "The Three Hermits." Chandler includes one Chekhov story, "In the Cart"; Gogol's "Greatcoat"; three by Babel; and one by Tolstoy, "God Sees the Truth, but Waits"; also one apiece by Lermontov, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. The work of all these writers is readily available in English, and Chandler is to be commended for choosing in several instances a lesser-known but first-rate story over the more familiar anthology standard.

Furthermore most serious readers will be especially grateful to Chandler for bringing to their attention a group of modern...