Last Translations; Three Stories by Vsevolod Garshin (review)

168ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW One Book/Five Ways. Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1978. 337p., illus. Originally published as a workbook for use at the 1977 annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, One Book is a presentation of the logs and files maintained on one manuscript — No Time for Houseplants — submitted simultaneously to five university presses (Chicago, MIT, North Carolina, Texas, Toronto). As a "make-believe" book submitted for casebook purposes, the manuscript was given extraordinarily close attention by each press in major areas of publishing operations: acquisition and administration, editorial production and design, and sales and promotion. All of the pertinent paperwork is reproduced: letters and memos exchanged, readers' reports, contracts, edited copy, information checksheets, and samples of the finished product. Finally, there is an appendix of materials from the University of Oklahoma Press, which "really" published the manuscript in 1978. Although each product is distinctive in appearance and format, a very clear work pattern emerges for all five books spanning the crucial points of the editorial policy ofscholarly publishing, the referee evaluation process, and the intenseediting of the manuscript. The materials are of special concern to the academic publishers who belong to organizations like the Association of American University Presses, and it is probable that this work will have wide adoption in courses of scholarly editing. But it is also especially to be recommended for bibliography and research methods courses in languages and literature, where there is the lack of enough solid materials for introducing students to the intricacies of scholarly publishing. Although now over three years old, One Book deserves wider recognition than it appears to have received by scholarly writers themselves. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER, Arizona State University Vsevolod Garshin. Last Translations; Three Stories, translated by Eugene M. Kayden. Boulder: Colorado Quarterly Bonus Issue, February 1979. 131p. Garshin (1855-1888) was the son of a landed aristocrat. Although he was a pacifist and could have easily obtained an exemption from military service, his guilt feelings about the others who were fighting and dying in Russia's 1877 war with Turkey moved him to enlist as a simple soldier. On the front lines he observed thousands of gallant young men dying for a cause they did not understand. This senseless tragedy drove him to write a number of short stories about the human consequences of armed conflict. These stories made Garshin very popular in the 1880s, but this popularity did not alleviate his plight. Overwhelmed by incremental guilt for the mass suffering of his society, Garshin went mad and, at the age of 33, committed suicide. The pathological empathy and the morbidity which characterize Garshin's stories is nowhere more evident than in the story "The Coward." Here the narrator agonizes over the decision to go fight while he aids in nursing a friend who is slowly rotting away from a gangrenous dental abcess. In one prophetic passage, the narrator is asked "Aren't you dying too? If they don't kill you, you'll go mad or send a bullet into your head." The friend dies as the narrator's troop train departs for the front where he then describes a gentleman-soldier, a volunteer of conscience like himself, who is killed by a stray bullet in his first skirmish. Garshin's personal feelings about these tragedies are expressed by the female character of the story who says: "You think, and think; you excuse and justify yourself, but all the time deep down in your BOOK REVIEWS169 soul something keeps on saying 'You are guilty, guilty, guilty!'" Similar strains are observed in the "Reminiscences of Private Ivanov," which concern an officer's feelings of personal responsibility for the deaths of his men in battle. The story "Nadezhda Nikolaievna," however, explores the psychological pathology of a different social problem. Can a "fallen woman" be ransomed by love and respect or will human jealousy intercede with tragic consequences? Concerning Garshin the answer is easy to guess. The translation by Kayden is smooth, never awkward or distracting. In a few difficult places, he finds wonderfully equivalent English phrases for Russian tropes, the literal translation of which would be misleading, as in the description of a brigadier-general's...