Russkie pisateli i Nobelevskaia premiia (1901-1955). Bausteine zur Slavischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte. Neue Folge, Reihe A: 55 by Tat'iana Marchenko (review)

Abstract

542 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20I0 diminish theweight of detailed information on many individuals associated with the Silver Age provided by this highly engaging study that will be welcomed by cultural historians and literary specialists involved in twentieth century studies. School ofLanguages,Literaturesand Cultures Alexandra Smith Universityof Edinburgh Marchenko, Tatiana. Russkiepisateli i Nobelevskaiapremila (igoi-igjj). Bausteine zur Slavischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte. Neue Folge, Reihe A: 55. B?hlau, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2007. 626 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 69.90. All literary prizes generate controversy, from which their reputation and integrity sometimes sufferbut from which literature always gains, if only because more people than otherwise read the laureates and, where there is a 'short list' (this term has now entered theRussian language), the runners-up as well. In the eyes ofmany observers, theNobel Prize forLiterature got off to an almost incredibly bad start by refusing to honour Lev Tolstoi, even though theyhad ten opportunities to do so (withonly one exception, in 1931, this award has always been granted to livingwriters ? p. 374). In fact, as Tat'iana Marchenko indicates on pp. 107-08 and 484, it was clear thatTolstoi would have refused the award if ithad been offered to him, and this could well have damaged the reputation of thisPrize even more seriously. So far as I know, no writer, afterbeing approached, has declined the honour, although it is tempting to think that after 1965Nabokov might have done so, not want ing to join a club that had Sholokhov as one of itsmembers. (One thinks of another Russian laureate, Brodskii, who angrily resigned from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1987 after it enrolled Evtush enko as an honorary member.) The list of great modern writers who never became Nobel laureates is impressive ? Strindberg, Ibsen, Val?ry, Joyce, Malraux, Moravia, Pound, Brecht andWells, for instance ? but in retrospect the five core judges and the thirteen auxiliaries have done a remarkably good job, especially when assessing writers whom most or all of them could read only in translation. (So far as one can tell from thisweighty monograph ? it is entirely inRussian, not German ? not a single judge in theperiod covered had a reading knowledge ofRussian, a very different situation from, say, the judges of the Booker Prizes forworks written inEnglish and Russian.) It is rather depressing, nonetheless, to read that on occasion irrelevant matters ? politics (pp. 66-68, 384), the different financial situations of the leading contestants (p. 329 ? who needed themoney more?) and the reluc tance to award the Prize within a fairly short period of time to two or more authors from the same country orwriting in the same language (p. 53) ? did play a role in coming to a decision. Marchenko even suggests (pp. 60 and 221) thatThomas Hardy (d. 1928)may have been passed over because of the award toYeats in 1923 and to Shaw in 1926.However, Alfred Nobel himself, and not the judges, is responsible formuch of themisunderstanding that his Prize REVIEWS 543 has incurred.As Marchenko writes (pp. 49-52), in order to qualify for consid eration the authors must, inter alia, have written something 1)with an 'ideal ist' tendency and 2) done so within the previous year (thereby supposedly disqualifying authors likeMerezhkovskii who were already long past their peak). The second proviso was often simply disregarded, but what on earth did Nobel mean by 'idealist', especially as in the original draft of the condi tions for thePrize he used a word thatdoes not exist in Swedish? This require ment came intoplay when the rival claims ofBunin and Gor'kii (whose name was firstput forward in 1918)were being considered in the early 1930s. The Prize has on two occasions been shared by twowriters (p. 296), but the judges were (and are) very reluctant to take thiseasy way out (by,for instance, award ing the Prize in the same year to both Pasternak and Sholokhov). Could not Gor'kii, who made no secret of his extremely high opinion of Bunin's work (p. 355), be regarded as an idealistic believer in the possibility of a future Communist society, despite his philosophical materialism? And how much of an idealistwas Bunin...