Mikhailovsky, e-texts, and translation problems

[Michael Denner]

Dear SEELANGers,

A farrago:

1) Does anyone have handy a reference to either the English or Russian of
Mikhailovsky's "Right and Left Hand of Tolstoy" (1875 I think). I need to
interlibrary loan the article, and have had no luck finding a likely volume
in catalogs. Please send me off list the title and, if possible, the year of
publication and editor of the volume.

2) I just came across far and away the best e-text site for Russian texts in
Russian: http://lib.km.ru/cgi-bin/library.cgi. I poked around a bit, and was
surprised to find things I hadn't heretofore seen on such sites: an
excellent Gogol section, all of Pasternak's poetry, most (if not all) of
Nabokov's Russian novels, a good mix of Dostoevsky, some strange Tolstoy
texts that incl. Detstvo. There's also a database of Akvarium, Kino, et al.
lyrics and a pretty respectable collection of Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres
(mostly translation from English). Particularly nice is the fact that it's
all in zipped text files that can be downloaded in toto & unpacked into Word
(I think it's all encoded in Windows Cyrillic).

3) Regarding Prof. Jameson's question about translation problems that result
from "a mismatch of the English and Russian languages and cultures": I can
only speak to the American experience, but I've always had the hardest time
explaining the notion of narod to American undergrads. "National" is a
wretched translation, and "people" simply doesn't work -- as a nation of
plebeians founded by plebeians, all we Americans are, after all, "the
people." We really lack any national consciousness of Volk or peuple or the
connotation and denotation of "people" as I imagine it existed/exists in
England (but maybe not). When I speak of Public Education (narodnoe
obrazovanie) or the People's Will in a culture or literature lecture, I have
to digress for a while on what it meant for someone not "of the people" in
the 19th century - and to a lesser extent in the 20th - to speak of "the
people" and "their" needs. An 18-year-old American has real trouble
imagining this cultural phenomenon. Anyone have any recommendations on
translation of "narod" that would avoid this problem?



Michael A. Denner
Russian Studies Department
Campus Unit 8361
Stetson University
DeLand, FL 32720
904.822.7265

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