A Handbook to Eighty-Six of Chekhov's Stories in Russian. by Edgar H. LehrmanReview by: Andrew R. DurkinSlavic Review, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 407-408Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2499280 .

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Reviews 407

the literary genius and moral thinker. Christian made his choice from the Jubilee Edition, which he then reduced to approximate a selection published in Moscow in 1965, while including political and otherwise sensitive material omitted from the Moscow edition. His formula was successful; the best of Tolstoi's diary writing is here. Christian used the annotations from the Jubilee Edition except for some commentary and updated the notes with references to recent works.

In the preface to his selection of Tolstoi's letters, Christian confessed that he believed Tolstoi was a great writer because he was a great man. Tolstoi would have agreed that the second attribute was necessary for the first. In fact, a great value of Christian's translations is his rapport with Tolstoi. He emphasizes T'olstoi at his finest (an emphasis both fair and overdue), although the picture is balanced with plenty of weaknesses. By weeding out repetitive and less important entries, Christian makes it easier to see Tolstoi plain and remarkably of a piece. All his character traits were there in the early diaries, subjected to ruthless analysis, and the same traits and the same self-examination contin- ued throughout his life. The selections reveal a similar consistency in Tolstoi's curiosity; nothing slipped through his fingers but that he tried to understand and improve it. At twenty-six he was working on a plan to reorganize the military, and at seventy-six he was trying to find an explanation for hypnosis. The editing of religious comments is especially successful; windy passages are eliminated and Christian shows a commonsensical, un- mystical Tolstoi: "I don't want to be Christian, as I . . . wouldn't want people to be Brahmins, Buddhists, Confucianists, Taoists, Mohammedans, etc. We must find what is common to all, renounce what is exclusive to one's own and hold onto what is common." Tolstoi's awesome amount of reading is not neglected, nor his happy but tempestuous marriage, nor his irony. Omitted are nearly all of the notebook entries. This was a delib- erate act; there was no room in two volumes. Missing also are Tolstoi's cogent remarks about himself and his marriage that he buried among notebook memoranda.

Toward the end of his work, Christian takes care that the human side is not lost in spiritual speculations. Tolstoi was growing old, becoming more obsessed with his body's functions and his dreams; he wept often, dwelt on early memories, and pined for the mother he had never known: "I wanted to . . . cling to my mother as I imagine her to have been. . . . I can't speak of my mother without tears." Did he resent his mother for dying, and could such a simple explanation be behind his resentment of women? A lot in the diaries remains to be interpreted.

Since both Aucouturier and Christian used the Jubilee Edition, it would be good to know their reasons for any changes from that text. In Tolstoi's last diary entry, for in- stance, the Jubilee Edition has "Ch[ertkov] came on the 2nd. They say that S[ofya] An[dreyevna]." The sentence is unfinished. Christian has "Chertkov came on the second. They say that Sofya Andreyevna has too." According to those present Tolstoi never knew that Sonya was in Astapovo. Did Christian follow the 1965 Moscow text here? The difference is important.

All in all, immense gratitude is due both Aucouturier and Christian for making available to a larger audience the inner workings of Tolstoi's extraordinary sensibility.

LOUISE SMOLUCHOWSKI Austin, Texas

A HANDBOOK TO EIGHTY-SIX OF CHEKHOV'S STORIES IN RUSSIAN. By Ed- gar H. Lehrman. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1985. 327 pp. $14.95, paper.

Edgar Lehrman's Handbook offers precisely what its title suggests: commentaries to the texts of eighty-six of Anton Chekhov's most frequently read (and assigned) stories from "Death of a Chinovnik" ("Smert' chinovnika," 1883) to Chekhov's last story, "The Be-

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408 Slavic Review

trothed" ("Nevesta," 1903), in all covering approximately 20 percent of Chekhov's output but most of his major stories. The purpose is primarily pedagogical: to provide students of Russian who are reading Chekhov for the first time with necessary and useful gram- matical, lexical, historical, geographic, and cultural information in the format of a line- by-line commentary (there are also appendixes covering irregular verbs, repeated words and phrases, and other matters of general pertinence). Lehrman at times seems to assume (perhaps on the basis of classroom experience) that students are tabulae rasae and ac- cordingly identifies such arcane allusions as one to Othello. He also provides a great wealth of information that Chekhov could assume his readers knew but that is dated or obscure for modern readers, especially non-Russians. Realia identified include streets, well-known shops, restaurants, and hotels; the basics of card games mentioned in Chek- hov's works; the Fahrenheit equivalents of temperatures given in Reaumur; and, to con- tinue the Othello motif, the location of Desdemona's putative house in Venice, which figures in "The Story of an Incognito" ("Rasskaz neizvestnogo cheloveka," 1893); and many other subjects. Lehrman is particularly thorough on matters pertaining to the ec- clesiastical practices of the Russian Orthodox Church, on citations from the Orthodox liturgy (not only are the texts given, but their liturgical function is usually mentioned), and on Biblical allusions. In this area the usefulness of this commentary greatly exceeds that of the annotations in the recently completed Academy edition of Chekhov. Lehrman is also meticulous in indicating his published sources, so that further exploration is pos- sible; when information has been provided by an individual, he is gracious in his acknowl- edgement, reminding us that textual commentary is perhaps the highest expression of the human capacity for cooperation.

Of course no book of this sort is complete without lapses, or its review complete without pointing them out. Spot-checking revealed a number of typographical errors, such as soddat for soldat or Lacrece for Lucrece. There is also some infelicitous termi- nology: cussing seems less precise a designation than expletive would be. There are also some errors and misreadings: although Lev Tolstoi was concerned about the Molokans, he helped not them but the Dukhobors to emigrate to Canada; in the story "Student" (1894), the phrase pri Petre in the second paragraph surely refers to Peter the Great, not to the Apostle Peter (the phrase is part of the central character's reflections on negative aspects of Russia's history).

Despite such quibbles, this handbook should be a required reference text for students reading Chekhov in the original and will serve as an extremely useful supplement to the Academy edition for anyone working on Chekhov's fiction.

ANDREW R. DURKIN Indiana University, Bloomington

FEDOR SOLOGUB, 1884-1984: TEXTE, AUFSATZE, BIBLIOGRAPHIE. Edited by Bernhard Lauer and Ulrich Steltner. Specimina Philologiae Slavicae, vol. 6. Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1984. 165 pp. Illustrations. Cloth.

This excellent volume of texts, essays, and bibliography edited by Bernhard Lauer and Ulrich Steltner commemorates the one-hundredth anniversary of Fedor Sologub's first published work, the little-known fable in verse "Lisitsa i ezh," issued by the children's journal Vesna in January 1884. This piece, signed "Te rnikov," opens the collection and is followed by two texts of equal fascination: Sologub's first published prose work, the 1894 story "Ninochkina oshibka" (published under the pseudonym Fedor Mochovikov in the Petersburg weekly Illiustrirovannyi mir) and his short play Liubvi, reproduced here from volume 8 of his Collected Works but containing the variants from the much more controversial first version, originally printed in Pereval (1907). Preceded by several pages

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