Russian literature. A short introduction

readers as disappointing. The reaction of Rebecca West, used as the chapter epigraph, typifies the frustration of those who have tried to read Pushkin in English and not been able to get the point.

But one should not get too melodramatic about this. Pious sentiments about the untranslatability of Pushkin seem to be a genre requirement in every introduction to the writer: they are as true, but also as false, as platitudes about poetry getting lost in translation. Certainly, Pushkin is best read in Russian, just as Aeschylus is in Greek, or Dante in Italian. But reading these writers in English is better than not reading them at all. And, as the cases of Shakespeare in Russian or Dostoevsky in English make clear, great writers are best served by a proliferation of translations. Only if the whole range of a writer’s work is available does his or her diversity become clear. At least until the 1990s, when more ambitious translation projects got under way, Pushkin in English meant Evgeny Onegin plus a handful of famous love poems – ‘I remember the wonderful moment’ (1825), ‘I loved you’ (1829), ‘On the hills of Georgia’ (1829). He came across as a sort of Russian Byron, though much of his verse is far closer in spirit to Pope, or then again to Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, or even Burns. The more translations there are, the more likely readers are to find in one or other poem, or in one or other version of the same poem, the ‘sense of discovery’ that is (as the Italian writer Italo Calvino has argued) one of the most important reasons for reading a classic writer.

This ‘sense of discovery’ does not necessarily make itself felt when the text reads easily in English. Ted Hughes’s version of Pushkin’s Romantic poem ‘The Prophet’ (1827) uses harsh consonant clashes not found in the original, as well as dispensing with rhyme. But the use of a rough, abrasive manner is probably the only way in which the mythic force of Pushkin’s belief in the poet’s messianic gifts (not a notion with which an Anglophone audience is immediately comfortable) could be captured in 1990s English. Nabokov’s annotated prose version of Evgeny Onegin, a supplement to the Pushkin text rather than an autonomous ‘translation’