Growing up
Alex de Jonge
A Russian Schoolboy Sergei Aksakov (Oxford £4.50) When Professor Pnin used, as Nabokov put it, to 'get drunk on his private wines', one of the choicer vintages was doubtless supplied by Aksakov. We know Pnin to have been an admirer; Nabokov had him work at the `Bagrov Institute' in Paris, and Bagrov was Aksakov's family pseudonym. His chronicles of ample patriarchal life in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Southern Russia have always been popular with a certain kind of Slavophil Russian, though not, curiously enough, with Nabokov himself. Aksakov was essentially a memoirist or family chronicler. The Family Chronicle itself, his best known work, tells the story of his grandparents and parents, their move into the Russian hinterland, their day to day existence on their estates. The book here translated as A Russian Schoolboy tells of aspects of Aksakov's own childhood and adolescence.
He loved the Russian countryside and wrote about it magnificently, especially about hawking, shooting, and above all fishing. He is brilliant on water, with the ability to make a mill pond, stream or eddy come alive in a way that makes any fisherman green with envy as he longs to fish there too. He puts across the fever of hooking a monster, as his servant tells him to 'pull away, little master, pull away', and renders the desperate need to get to the water despite an anxious mother's attempts to stop him. He also gives a marvellous account of what it was like to travel in those days, crossing rivers in particular, on rafts, or, more dangerously, on ice that was about to break up. As he puts himself back into his childhood, going out with rod, hawk or gun and staying out while daylight lasted, we might almost think of him as a Russian Richard Jefferies, and it is scarcely surprising that Aksakov on fishing should have been translated by Arthur Ransome.
Although this is what Aksakov seems to represent for most Russians he does actually spend much of his time writing about a very different kind of Russian favourite sport — family rows and emotional upheavals. This is the stuff The Family Chronicle is made of, with the family in question displaying what might to Anglo-Saxon eyes appear quite unbelievable bitchiness to one another, while to a Russian it appears to convey the benign warmth of true feeling; a million miles away from the deadly state of emotional 'cold'. A Russian Schoolboy tells of the traumatic impact of boarding school on the young Aksakov and his mother, who having got him a government scholarship to a school in Kazan, and then decided that he was quite unsuited to the life, discovered that the headmaster would not permit her to remove him. Hence various intrigues including phoney doctors' certificates, before she could get him away. He went back in due course and did not hate it too much. Life in a Russian boarding school in those days, as related by Aksakov, was a strangely emotional affair, with masters displaying inordinate concern for the spiritual development of their charges, while discipline both at school and in the home was largely based upon that famous Russian resource, emotional blackmail.
The book traces, loosely, Aksakov's growing up, concentrating on minor emotional crises, at first, and later on his love of amateur theatricals. The love began with a visit to a theatre in Kazan when he saw an opera variously translated as The Pork Butchers or The Sausagemakers, which he never, greatly to his regret, was to see or hear of again. The original Russian title Kolbasniki should more properly have been translated The Krauts, as it is slang for Germans, who were figures of fun in Russia, at least in those days.
This book is a re-issue of an excellent 1924 translation by J. D. Duff, illustrated by Kiri11 Sokolov in a manner loosely evocative of Russian illustrative art of the early 1920s and which I found unsympathetic, which is why I have taken pedantic and unjustified delight in discovering a spelling mistake in his old style Cyrillic lettering on page 189.
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