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Andrei Bitov's “Zhizn' v Vetrenuiu pogodu”: The Creative Process in Life and Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ellen Chances
Ellen Chances*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
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Extract

Henry David Thoreau, in "Walden," wrote about people leading "lives of quiet desperation." Russian literature is filled with examples of people who cannot break out of the paralysis of selfimprisonment and who are deadened to life by their addiction to habit. In "Zhizn' v vetrenuiu pogodu" ["Life in Windy Weather"] Andrei Bitov explores the process, in life and literature, of escape from those ossified forms of existence and art. He plots the path toward creative living and creative writing. For him, one cannot divide the creative process in life from the creative process in literature.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 400 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1991

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References

1. Sergei is the protagonist's name in Andrei Bitov, Dachnaia mestnost'. Povesti (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1967), 187-222. His name is changed to Aleksei in the Ardis translation. (He is also Aleksei in the Ardis volume, Contemporary Russian Prose, in which the English translation included in the 1986 Ardis Bitov volume originally appeared: “Life in Windy Weather,” trans. Carol Luplow and Richard Luplow, ed. Priscilla Meyer, in Contemporary Russian Prose, ed. Carl Proffer and Ellendea Proffer [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982], 305-333.)Google Scholar He is Sergei when the story appears in Bitov, Andrei, Obraz zhizni. Povesti (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1972), 71–105 Google Scholar and in Bitov, Andrei, Voskresnyi den'. Rasskazy, povesti, puteshestviia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1980), 75–109 Google Scholar. Bitov changed the character's name to Aleksei in the Ardis volume of his works so that many of the short stories become explicitly linked by their focus on the same major protagonist at various points in his life.

2. Schmid, Wolf, “Verfremdung bei Andrej Bitov,” Wiener slawistischer Almanach, 5 (1980), 40.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., 41-42.

4. Ibid., 46.

5. Ibid., 46-47.

6. Priscilla Meyer, “Autobiography and Truth: Bitov's A Country Place,” in Bitov, Andrei, Life in Windy Weather. Short Stories, ed. Meyer, Priscilla (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1986), 365 Google Scholar, and “Notes from the Corner,” 180. This story appeared for the first time in any language in this collection, 145-185. It has since appeared in the Soviet Union: Bitov, Andrei, “Zapiski iz-za ugla,” Novyi mir, no. 2, 1990, 142–165 Google Scholar. My “The Ecology of Inspiration: The Shapes of Andrei Bitov's Prose,” a study of Bitov's works, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

7. Meyer, ed. Life in Windy Weather, 366.

8. Ibid., 367.

9. Ibid., 368.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 369.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 371.

14. Ronald Meyer, “Andrej Bitov's PuSkinskijDom” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1986), 28-43.

15. Ibid., 32-33.

16. Stephen George Sidney Hagen, “The Stories of Andrei Bitov, 1958-1966: A Search for Individual Perception” (M.A. thesis, University of Durham [England], 1980), 127. See pages 127-146 for his discussion of “Life in Windy Weather,” and 139 for Bitov on Zen Buddhism.

17. Ibid., 128, 131.

18. Ibid., 128, 137-138.

19. Bitov letter as quoted by Hagen, “Stories,” 245. The letter is also reproduced in Stephen Hagen, “An Unpublished Letter by Andrei Bitov,” Scottish Slavonic Review, no. 5, 1985, 108-118.

20. Hagen, “Stories,” 137, 133, 132.

21. Ibid., 137.

22. Andrei Bitov, “Zhizn’ v vetrenuiu pogodu (Dachnaia mestnost’),” in Andrei Bitov, Dachnaia mestnost', 214.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 190.

25. Andrei Bitov letter to Frederick R. Croen, in Frederick R. Croen, “A Translation of The Wheel of Andrei Bitov” (senior thesis, Princeton University, 1974), appendix, 1.

26. Bitov, “Zhizn',” 189. Emphasis mine.

27. Ibid., 222.

28. Stephen Hagen, “Stories,” 128 and Priscilla Meyer, “Autobiography and Truth,” 366.

29. Priscilla Meyer points out that the description of the dacha matches that of Bitov's in-laws’ dacha in Toksovo, not far from Leningrad. Priscilla Meyer, “Autobiography and Truth,” 365.

30. Bitov, “Zhizn',” 191.

31. Ibid., 192.

32. Boris Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, intro. A. D. Siniavskii (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1965), 432; English translation by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks, Modern Russian Poetry (Indianapolis, Ind. Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 605.

33. Ronald Meyer quotes an unpublished section of E. Khappenenn's “Commentary,” where Khappenenn explains that Bitov had wanted to name the entire collection in which the story appears Zhizn’ v vetrenuiu pogodu. Ronald Meyer says that the story came out under the title “Dachnaia mestnost'” in 1967. This is not true. The book in which the story “Zhizn’ v vetrenuiu pogodu” appeared in 1967 is called Dachnaia mestnost'. The story appears there as “Zhizn’ v vetrenuiu pogodu” with a subtitle “Dachnaia mestnost'.” Khappenenn writes, “In general it's dangerous [to write about ] the weather … They didn't let me call the book Life in Windy Weather: what kind of climate, where is the weather? where is the wind blowing from?” E. Khappenenn, ed., “Kommentarij” (unpublished manuscript), 47, as quoted by Ronald Meyer, “Andrej Bitov's Puskinskij Dom, 28, 42.

34. Andrei Bitov, “Vkus,” Literaturnaia gruziia, no. 1 (1983), 80-81; Andrei Bitov, “The Taste,” in Bitov, Life in Windy Weather, ed. Priscilla Meyer, 351.

35. Bitov, “The Taste,” 351; Bitov, “Vkus,” 81. Emphasis mine.

36. Ronald Meyer, “Andrej Bitov's PuSkinskijDom,” 60.

37. Ibid., 65-66.

38. Boris Pasternak, “Veter (Chetyre otryvka o Bloke),” in Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy, 464.

39. Bitov, “Zhizn',” 191.

40. Pasternak, “Veter (Chetyre),” in Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy, 465.

41. Boris L. Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago (Paris: Societe d'Edition et d'lmpression Mondiale, 1959), 90. Emphasis mine.

42. Psalms, as quoted in Andrei Bitov, “Les,” in Bitov, Andrei, Dni cheloveka. Povesti (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1976), 100 Google Scholar. These lines, from Psalm 103, in the standard English version of the Bible and from Psalm 102 in the Russian version are generally rendered, “As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field.”

43. Ronald Meyer explains that the novel Dni cheloveka appeared as a unified novel for the first time as the volume entitled Life in Windy Weather in English. Ronald Meyer, “Andrej Bitov's PuSkinskijDom,” 44, 74.

44. Psalm 103; Bibliia, Hi Knigi sviashchennopisaniia vetkhogo i novogo zaveta, v russkom perevode (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, 1956), Psalm 102. I quote from this edition of the Russian Bible because the prerevolutionary Bible's rendering of the “dni cheloveka” verse does not match Bitov's quotation in “Les” or in the title of his 1976 collection of short stories. The prerevolutionary version is “Chelovek, —kak trava, dni ego,” Sviashchennye knigi vetkhogo i novogo zaveta (Vienna: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1912).

45. Bitov, “Zhizn',” 213.

46. Bibliia, 573.

47. Hagen “Stories,” 142. Hagen speaks of the relevance of the song to the theme of the wind and to Sergei's confused feelings after his experiences of harmonious clarity. Hagen sees the woman as a symbol of the wind (life-force), churning up man's (the island's) ordinary life. Hagen, “Stories,” 142.

48. Bitov, “Zhizn',” 218.

49. Hagen, “Stories,” 134, 236, 137, 141, and passim.

50. Bitov, “Zhizn',” 206.

51. Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago, 599.

52. Priscilla Meyer, “Introduction,” Andrei Bitov, Life in Windy Weather, 1.

53. Ronald Meyer, “Andrej Bitov's Puskinskij Dom,” 39, 40.

54. Bitov, “Zhizn',” 214. Emphasis mine.

55. Ibid., 204.

56. Boris Pasternak, “Pakhota,” in Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy, 483.