In the Russian soul it\u2019s always winter, as the saying goes. Much of Russian literature too exists in a state of hibernation. It\u2019s a survival strategy, as in nature, a way of adapting to adverse weather conditions. But the good news from the bookshelves is that the desolation of winter doesn\u2019t have to be depressing. The Russian winter can be long and lustrous, a kind of deity, as Prince Vyazemsky claimed in \u201cThe Russian God\u201d (1828), which is a poem about blizzards.<\/p>\n
Nobody reads Vyazemsky these days but his best friend Alexander Pushkin alluded to that poem in chapter ten of Eugene Onegin<\/em>, where he notes that a survival strategy can work not just for individuals but for the nation as a whole. \u201cThe storm of the year 1812 happened. Who helped us then?\u201d asks Pushkin. \u201cWinter or the Russian God,\u201d whose freezing blizzards reduced Napoleon\u2019s Grand Arm\u00e9e from an original force of 700,000 troops advancing on Moscow in the summer of that year to approximately 15,000 by December when they crossed the river Nieman back into Lithuania. Another of Vyazemsky\u2019s winter caricatures, \u201cFirst Snow\u201d, furnishes the epigraph (\u201cTo live it hurries and to feel it hastens\u201d) to Onegin<\/em>, which is not only the greatest work in Russian literature but also contains the most beautiful lines about ice, snow and frost. Its heroine personifies a state of hibernation:<\/p>\n Tatiana (being Russian in her soul, Her pre-Freudian dream of being swept away by Onegin in the form of a bear that emerges from a snowdrift recalls the star-crossed lovers of Pushkin\u2019s most romantic story, \u201cThe Blizzard\u201d, in which a perfect storm stands in plotwise for the Friar and sleeping draught of Romeo and Juliet<\/em>. It has a happier (or weirder) ending, though, and a good translation by Ronald Wilks can be found in The Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings<\/em> (Penguin).<\/p>\n The Russian god of 1812 is the backdrop for Tolstoy\u2019s famous account, in War and Peace<\/em>, of Count Pierre Bezukhov stalking Napoleon through Moscow and off again into the harsh winter. The novel\u2019s counterpart in the twentieth century, Life and Fate<\/em> by Vasily Grossman (in a brilliant translation by Robert Chandler, recently dramatized on BBC Radio Four), actually contains superior descriptions of a foreign invasion coming to grief on a winter battlefield.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to forget Grossman\u2019s journalistic sketch of snow falling not on cedars, but on the ears of dead men at Stalingrad. \u201cIt was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow\u2026This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps that memorability owes something to the fact that Grossman, unlike Tolstoy, was writing with a first-hand knowledge of Stalingrad, as a former war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda<\/em>.<\/p>\n The dream sequence in Onegin<\/em> always comes to mind when I think of poor Yuri Zhivago in Boris Pasternak\u2019s novel hallucinating in the Siberian taiga and imagining that he sees his beloved Lara\u2019s arms in the outstretched branches of a snow-laden bush. In the white landscape his void is a blackness so deep and frozen that a reader senses it will never thaw.<\/p>\n On a lighter note, it might be worth saying that the best joke about the Russian winter occurs in an American film. In Groundhog Day<\/em>, Bill Murray\u2019s weatherman kills time (literally) by sermonizing to the good people of Punxsutawney. \u201cWhen Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope,\u201d he says one time around.<\/p>\n That\u2019s funny, of course, but it\u2019s not strictly true. For Chekhov, the Russian winter was always full of hope, not least because the promise of spring is almost the main imaginative theme of Chekhov\u2019s plays. If we can only find snowboots thick enough, his characters seem to be saying, if we can only hold out until it comes!<\/p>\n In the short story \u201cMisery\u201d, which is modeled on \u201cThe Blizzard\u201d, a sledgedriver is buried alive in the snow, \u201call white, like a ghost, with snow-plastered eyelashes,\u201d like the clowns blown away in a Buryat blizzard in Angela Carter\u2019s astonishing Nights at the Circus<\/em>.<\/p>\n As Irina says to Olga in Chekhov\u2019s Three Sisters<\/em>: \u201cThe time will come, and everyone will know the meaning of all this, why there is all this suffering, and there won\u2019t be any mysteries, but meanwhile, we must go on living. It\u2019s already autumn, soon it will be winter, the snow will fall, but I will go on working.\u201d Here the joke is the same as in Vyazemsky\u2019s \u201cFirst Snow\u201d. The odd thing about the Russian winter is that it starts in the autumn.<\/p>\n Reproduced with permission of the <\/em>Moscow Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the Russian soul it\u2019s always winter, as the saying goes. Much of Russian literature too exists in a state of hibernation. It\u2019s a survival strategy, as in nature, a way of adapting to adverse weather conditions. But the good news from the bookshelves is that the desolation of winter doesn\u2019t have to be depressing. 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\nAnd not knowing why)
\nLoved the Russian winter
\nWith its cold beauty.<\/p>\n