Encounters with Lise and Other Stories (European Classics)

188 Pages·2005·0.72 MB·English

by  Leonid Dobychin

Encounters with Lise
and Other Stories

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Leonid Dobychin
Encounters
with Lise and
Other Stories
edited and with an introduction
by richard c. borden
translated from the russian
by richard c. borden
with natalia belova
northwestern university press
evanston, illinois
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Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois 60208–4170
English translation copyright © 2005by Northwestern University Press.
Published 2005by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
isbn0–8101-1972–2
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dobychin, Leonid.
[Short stories. English. Selections]
Encounters with Lise / L. Dobychin ; edited and with an introduction by
Richard C. Borden ; translated from the Russian by Richard C. Borden with
Natalia Belova.
p. cm. — (European classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn0-8101-1972-2(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Dobychin, Leonid—Translations into English. I. Borden, Richard C.
(Richard Chandler) II. Belova, Natalia. III. Title. IV. European classics
(Evanston, Ill.)
pg3476.d573a22 2005
891.73'42—dc22
2005001544
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansiz39.48–1992.
» » » « « «
CONTENTS
Editor’s Introduction vii
Farewell 3
Kozlova 9
Encounters with Lise 17
Lidiya 25
Savkina 29
Yerygin 34
Konopatchikova 41
Dorian Gray 48
The Nurse 53
The Medass 56
The Father 58
The Sailor 61
Palmistry 65
As You Wish 67
The Garden 70
The Portrait 75
Material 87
Tea 91
Old Ladies in a Small Town 95
Ninon 107
Editor’s Notes 111
»»» «««
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Until the 1990s, L. Dobychin was almost entirely unknown out-
side the circle of Leningraders who for half a century had pre-
served the writer’s manuscripts and kept his memory alive. Today,
his recognition as a unique and important talent, one of the last
and brightest blooms ofRussian literary modernism, is secure.1
After witnessing the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost and the
subsequent fall of the Soviet state, students of Russian culture
believed that a parade ofunknown manuscripts would emerge, like
long-confined gulag prisoners, from the secret drawers to which
nonconformist Soviet writers had consigned them for decades.
But this anticipation was largely frustrated. This was especially so
for readers in the West and among the Russian elites who had long
been familiar with the works ofwriters such as Vladimir Nabokov,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Sergei Platonov,
all of whom had been exiled, incarcerated, or had their works
banned or butchered by the censor. For such readers, there were
few surprises. One delightful revelation, however, came with the
rediscovery of“L. Dobychin.”2
Dobychin’s idiosyncratic writing, while never broadly known,
was highly regarded by such contemporaries as Kornei Chukovsky,
Yury Tynyanov, Veniamin Kaverin, and Evgeny Shvarts. Often com-
pared with eccentric prodigies such as Bruno Schulz, Paul Gauguin,
and Velimir Khlebnikov, Dobychin was an exacting miniaturist. Like
Nabokov and Anton Chekhov, he was an artist in the “lesser”
Encounters with Lise and Other Stories
Russian tradition, whose delicately contrived narratives challenge
readers to return again and again to wrestle with their subtleties.3
Leonid Ivanovich Dobychin was a tragic figure. An awkward
and lonely man who died a probable suicide, Dobychin was born in
the Latvian city ofDvinsk, today’s Daugavpils, in 1894, the son of
a doctor who died when the writer was still a boy and a mother
who worked as a midwife. Nothing is known of Dobychin’s child-
hood except, perhaps, for what one may extrapolate from his fic-
tional portrayal in The Town ofN(Gorod En,1935) ofa childhood
set in a time and place similar to his own. Nor, for that matter, is
muchknown ofDobychin’s adult life, other than the briefreminis-
cences left by Kaverin and Marina Chukovskaia and the glimpses
of his life as a writer and social observer that are afforded by the
letters he addressed to literary acquaintances.4
Like his character Kunst in the story “Farewell,”Dobychin was
studying at the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg when revo-
lution upended Russian society in 1917. He subsequently worked
for most ofhis life as a poorly paid statistician, living in provincial
towns in northern Russia and Latvia and sharing single rooms with
his mother, brother, and two sisters. He claimed that, because of
his perennial lack ofmoney and a private workspace, he wrote only
in summer, out-of-doors, or when he was absent from work due to
illness. He did not even have his own writing table until he was
forty years old and received a room in a Leningrad communal
apartment from the Writers’ Union. The conditions under which
he created could hardly have been worse. Glimpses may be gleaned
from remarks in his correspondence. On December 3, 1924, for
example—when Dobychin was just beginning to publish the occa-
sional story in the Soviet press—he wrote to Chukovsky to thank
him for a letter and requested that he write again, since the letter
had allowed him to feel less like an “office rat.” In a letter to his
editor, M. L. Slonimsky, on March 15,1933, he writes:
viii
Introduction
Nine chapters ofmy novel [The Town ofN] have been written, and
when there are ten I’ll send them to You. The chapters’ composi-
tion is delayed by the absence
a) during the entire winter ofelectricity,
b) for more than a month ofkerosene, as a result ofwhich a short-
age of lighting is experienced, and days off from work are
devoted to standing in lines.
With no literary ties outside the Leningrad publishing world, itself
distant, Dobychin’s isolation was acute. When, in a letter ofJanu-
ary 17, 1925, Dobychin asks Chukovsky not to get angry because
he pesters him with so many requests to read stories, he explains:
“After all, You are my only reader.”On the other hand, Dobychin
disputed any suggestions ofliterary influence and asserted that he
was impervious to criticism, since he wrote the only way he knew
how and had no intention of writing otherwise. He dismissed all
comparisons made between his writing and that of others, espe-
cially obvious candidates such as Tynyanov, Mikhail Zoshchenko,
and the Oberiu absurdist Daniil Kharms.5While he did single out
the work of several contemporaries—Isaac Babel, Tynyanov,
Yevgeny Zamyatin, Zoshchenko—for measured praise, he had a
reputation as a caustic critic. And while he regarded himself as
fully independent, he was to have been included in an anthology of
Oberiu-related writing that never appeared, together with the likes
of Kaverin, Tynyanov, Yury Olesha, and Victor Shklovsky, who,
while not part ofthe Oberiu circle, were deemed to be aesthetically
and spiritually akin.6
Despite Dobychin’s undeniable originality, some ofthe defining
traits ofhis art may be less sui generis than idiosyncratic variations
of practices shared by contemporaries. Zoshchenko’s radical con-
cision; Zoshchenko’s and Platonov’s attempts to capture the
grotesque nuances of speech and thought that were developing
ix