Zahar Davydov

GOGOL IN CANADA

(Translations, academic studies, theatre)

TRANSLATIONS

Interest among French- and English-language scholars and translators (Canada, as you know, is a bilingual country) in the works of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol began in Canada in the first decade of the last century. In 1917 the series Everyman's Library published a 300-page book of English translations of Gogol's works entitled Taras Bulba and Other Tales which included, apart from Taras Bulba, "St. John's Eve" (Вечер накануне Ивана Купала), "The Cloak" (later entitled "The Greatcoat" or "The Overcoat) (Шинель), "How the Two Ivans Quarreled" (Повестъ о том, как поссорился Иван Ивановицч с Иваном Никифоровичем), "The Mysterious Portrait" (Портрет) and "The Calash" (Коляска). The introduction and translations were done by the American poet and writer John Cournos (1881-1966, pseudonyms John Courtney and Gorky). Cournos's family emigrated to America from tsarist Russia in 1871, when he was ten years old. John Cournos, incidentally, was the first to translate "The Nose" into English. This was in 1918.

In 1944 another English translation of "The Overcoat" appeared (now entitled "The Greatcoat"). It was the product of two translators, Zlata Shoenberg and Jessie Domb. This was a bilingual edition, with a page in Russian opposite each page in English. The book received very good reviews and was well regarded by specialists; three more editions of it came out in the 1940s.

An English translation of Dead Souls was published in Canada in 1948. This was by the translator Bernard Gilbert Guerney (1894-1979) with an introduction by Rene Wellek (1903-1995). It is considered one of the best translations of Gogol's immortal poem. Even Vladimir Nabokov, in whose opinion the majority of translations of Gogol recalled "the death by a thousand cuts, a punishment at one time widespread in China" and who believed that "the English language is [so] … dry, colorless and unbearably proper [that] … only an Irishman may be capable of tackling Gogol." He called Guerney's translation "an extraordinarily fine piece of work." The translator, in fact, was not Irish. Bernard Gilbert Guerney was also knows as a fantasy writer and made fine translations of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bunin, Kuprin, Merezhkovsky, Gorky and Pasternak.

Canada is a multinational country, and one of its largest diasporas are the Ukrainians, who number more than one million. In 1952, in the series Ukrainian Book Club in Winnipeg published a translation of some Gogol stories into Ukrainian. This was The Terrible Vengeance and Other Stories (Страшна помста та iншi оповiдання), translated by M. Kharchenko and Maksim Rylsky. The editor and author of the introduction was Yaroslav Rudnycky. I will say more about Prof. Rudnycky later when discussing academic works on Gogol's life and writings.

In 1953 it was at last time for the publication of a translation of Gogol's play The Inspector General (Ревизор). This was first done in French. This edition was produced by Radio Canada, which broadcast the play on February 15, 1953.

Two editions of Taras Bulba came out simultaneously in 1962. The first was published by Signet Books (The New American Library of Canada) and also included two of Gogol's stories, "The Lost Letter" (Пропавшая грамота) and "The Terrible Vengeance" (Страшная месть). All the translations in this book were done by Andrew R. MacAndrew, a professor at the University of Virginia and one of the best known specialists and translators of Russian literature into English. Apart from Gogol, MacAndrew also translated the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Babel, Olesha and the Autobiography of Evgeny Evtushenko that made a considerable sensation at the beginning of the 1960s. His introduction to his translation of A Raw Youth (Подросток) is still considered one of the best essays written by an American critic on Dostoevsky.

The second English version of Taras Bulba in 1962, published by Acropolis Press, was done by Andrew Gregorovich. He is widely known among the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the USA. Andrew Gregorovich has been the editor of Forum, the English-language journal of the history of the Ukrainian diaspora in the USA and Canada, since its founding in 1966 to the present. He is a bibliographer who worked for more than thirty years at the University of Toronto and who has been the president of the Ontario Library System and chairman of the Toronto Historical Board. He is also an author who in 2008 published a four-hundred-page Bibliography of the Cossacks (Библиографии Козацства) (the Zaporozhians in Ukraine, the Don and Kuban Cossacks in Russia) as well as a series of articles on the history of the Cossacks. He also illustrated the 1962 edition of Taras Bulba.

In 1964 the Winnipeg publishers Trident Press put out a Ukrainian translation of Taras Bulba. The book was most likely the work of a Soviet translator whose name was not given so as to avoid causing any problems.

In 1985 the Ontario Arts Council in Ottawa published an English translation of Gogol's story "The Nose." The translators were Robert Bellefeuille and Robert Marinier. This was not merely a translation, however, but an adaptation of Gogol's text for the theatre. More will be said about the authors and their play, which had great success in Canada, when I discuss Gogol's drama.

Twenty-two years later, "The Nose" was translated and published in French in the Ottawa series La Bibliotheque canadienne francaise.

In 1987 the Montreal publishers Graficor put out an illustrated edition (with illustrations by Virginie Faucher) of Taras Bulba in French. The translation was done by Carmen Marois, a popular Canadian French-language children's writer who also specialized in the adaptation of texts for the series Mes premiers classsiques. Apart from Gogol, Mme. Marois has also adapted Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Gautier's Le roman de la momie, Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, and Frances Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy for this same series. As we see, Gogol is in distinguished company.

Among the recent English translations of Gogol's works published in Canada are the Collected Tales translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published in 2008, and in the same year the book by Morris Panych published in Vancouver, Still Laughing: Three Adaptations, with a new translation of Gogol's Inspector General. Pevear's Collected Tales contains the latest of the nine translations of The Nose." Panych's book has two other classic plays along with The Inspector General: Arthur Schnitzler's Anatol and Hotel Peccadillo by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallieres.

Translations of Gogol's stories have also appeared in Anthologies of World Literature published in Canada, as well as in the Wascana Anthology of Short Fiction, University of Regina, 1999 and in Anthologies of Russian Literature (Vieille Russie, Montreal, 1972).

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Two names particularly stand out in Canadian academic studies of Gogol's life and works: Jaroslaw Rudnyckyj (1910-1995) and George Luckyj (1919-2001).

Jaroslaw Rudnyckyj was a linguist, literary scholar, folklorist and a professor in the Ukrainian Free University in Munich (from 1943) and in the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg (from 1949); he was also president of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences in Canada (1955-1969) and for many years edited the Slavistica series of monographs (more than a hundred volumes, the first three of which came out in 1948 in Augsburg, Germany and then, from 1949, in Winnipeg).

The second volume of this series, in 1948, contained the work of the linguist and writer Vasyl Chaplenko (1900-1990), Ukrainisms in Gogol's Language; vol. 13, in 1952, contained the study of the Ukrainian literary scholar, poet and translator Pavel Filipovich (1891-1937), The Ukrainian Element in Gogol's Works.

Yet another monograph was published in Winnipeg in 1956. This was Gogol: A Literary Study. All these works were written and published in Ukrainian.

Vol. 64 of Slavistica (1969) contained the English-language monograph by the literary scholar Maria Ovcharenko, Gogol (Hohol') and Osmachka. The work is a scholarly interpretation and comparative analysis of Gogol's early works and the novel of the Ukrainian writer and poet Todos Osmachka (1895-1962), The Old Boyar (Старший боярин).

One of the most widely known Canadian scholars of Gogol's works was George Luckyj (1919-2001), a professor at the University of Toronto. In the 1970s he supervised several dissertations on Gogol in the Slavic Department of the University of Toronto. These include Gogol in Russian and Western Psychoanalytic Criticism (1977), by Donald Young, and Taras Bulba and The Black Council (1978), by Romana Pikulyk.

In 1971 Prof. Luckyj's monograph, Between Gogol and Shevchenko: Polarity in Literary Ukraine, 1798-1847 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink) appeared in the series Harvard Ukrainian Studies. In this work Prof. Luckyj compares the lives and works of two great Ukrainians of the same generation whose literary careers moved in opposite directions. These two geniuses are examined not only as writers but also as distinctive poles of Ukrainian cultural development in the first have of the nineteenth century. The work is divided into two parts. In the first, Luckyj examines the historical preconditions of the literary and spiritual development of Ukrainian society; in the second part he provides a detailed analysis of the milieu, ideology and work of Gogol and Shevchenko. In his chapter "Ukraine in Russian Literature" Luckyj analyzes Ukrainian-Russian literary links before Gogol, and in his chapter "Gogol" he looks at Gogol's origins and his life in Ukraine, Russia and Italy. Gogol's attitude toward Ukraine as expressed in his works and letters is analyzed, as are his relations with Russians and Poles.

George Luckyj's monograph ("in many ways, a pioneering work," as Yury Barabash rightly, in my opinion, remarked in his article "Украина Тараса Шевченко: словообраз, дискурс, 'текст'" Вопросы литературы, 2008, No. 4) was translated into Ukrainian in Kiev in 1998 (Луцький Ю. Мiж Гоголем и Шевченком. Київ: Час, 1998) and still enjoys the well justified attention of specialists.

Studies of Gogol by another Canadian Slavist, Oleh Ilnytzkyj, a professor at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, are also well known. These include: "Exploring Gogol," Canadian Slavonic Papers 41 (1999); "Hohol' i postkolonial'nyj kontekst," Kryikya (Kiev), No. 3 (29), March 2000: 9-13; "Is Gogol's 1842 Version of Taras Bulba really 'Russified'?" Festschrift for Prof. J-P. Himka (University of Alberta) [provisional title; forthcoming], 29 pp.

Articles on Gogol's works appear on the pages of the Canadian scholarly journals Canadian Slavonic Papers and Journal of Ukrainian Studies. I note here only a few articles of recent years:

C.J.G. Turner, "Dead Souls among the Devils," vol. 41, Mar. 1999;

Peter Sawczak, "Heterogeneity of the Sacred in Gogol's Dikanka Stories," vol. 41, 1999;

Russell Scott Valentino, "Gogol's The Overcoat," vol. 44, Sep.-Dec., 2002;

Kristin Bidoshi, "Gogol's Afterlife: The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia," vol. 47, Sep.-Dec., 2005.

Courses on Gogol are given in Canadian universities. These are generally for senior students studying Russian and Ukrainian literature and for graduate students in Slavic. Readings in these courses, that study Gogol's stories, generally include "The Nose" and "The Overcoat" along with others. These two stories quite often serve as material for the study of the interpretation of a literary text as well as for issues of plot and fabula. One of the most interesting examples of such courses is that of Prof. Taras Koznarsky (University of Toronto). The course, entirely devoted to Gogol ("the father of Russian prose," as Koznarsky calls him in the course description) examines Gogol's narrative technique, his descriptions and his argumentation.

THEATRE

Gogol's plays have often and, generally, successfully performed Gogol's plays. I will discuss only a few such performances--ones that have received broad publicity and have left a distinct mark on the history of Canadian theatre.

In Ottawa, the artistic director of the Theatre de la Vieille 17, the very gifted Robert Bellefeuille (writer and translator, director and actor, professor at the National Theatre School of Canada) has translated into English and adapted and performed on stage his theatrical version of Gogol's "Nose." This was a musical spectacle for children than immediately won great success. The show ran from 1983 to 1988 and again from 1994 to 1998 and won several Canadian theatrical awards. One of this was the highly prestigious Chalmers Prize for the outstanding children's show (1985) and the annual Theatre Prize for 1995.

In 1985 one of the well established French-language theatre companies in Canada, Theatre Jean Duceppe (founded in 1972) staged the play by the French-Canadian writer and dramatist Michel Tremblay, The Guy from Quebec (Le gars de Quebec). After the author's name and the play's title, the playbill carried the notation "d'apres le Revizor de Gogol" (based on Gogol's Inspector General).

The storyteller, translator, scriptwriter, director and, of course, the playwright Michel Tremblay is well known not only to Canadian audiences. His works have been translated into twenty-five languages. He is written twenty-four plays, eleven novels, several collections of stories and film scripts. Tremblay has been awarded more than thirty literary prizes and is on Officer of the Order of Canada.

This comedy is not merely a translation of Gogol's play into French but a complete reworking of the plot in terms of Canadian reality. The play is based on the plot of The Inspector General, but the action takes place in a small provincial town in Quebec in 1952. In the play, this town is depicted as almost the only bastion of les rouges (the "Reds,' i.e., the Liberals). The town's mayor receives a letter from his friend in Ottawa warning him of the imminent arrival in his town of a representative of the government (the ruling party being les bleus, i.e., the Conservatives) to make a very thorough inspection.

The town's residents are seized with panic.

The play had enormous success with audiences and received excellent reviews from the critics.

And finally, a few words about "Gogol's Theatre in Canada." This is the title of a project created by the actor and director Gregory Hlady in Montreal.

Gregory Hlady-as his name now appears in the captions of films made in the USA and in Canada and on the playbills of theatrical performances in Canada, the USA and Western Europe-was once an actor in the Kiev Young People's Theatre and in 1982 was literally driven out of the country by the organs of the KGB. Hlady, a devotee of experimental theatre and the theatre of Anatoly Vasiliev (Hlady took part in the works of this avant-garde Russian director) and a follower of the theatrical reformer Jerzy Grabowski) found a place for himself in the West. Moreover, it was here that he found his own territory, one in which he could freely carry out his own plans by using his theatrical experience and talent.

At the very beginning of his theatrical career in Canada Hlady staged in the Theatre de la Vieille 17 (which I discussed earlier) a trilogy: Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, Franz Kafka's Amerika, and Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King.

The Dreams of Katerina, a play Hlady staged as part of his project "Gogol's Theatre in Canada," was performed in French with Canadian actors singing Ukrainian songs.

Hlady's work with Gogol in Canada did not happen by chance. He had staged works based on Gogol's "Viy" and "The Terrible Vengeance" in Switzerland and had led a master class on "Themes of the Forgotten Ancestors in Nikolai Gogol" in Ukraine.

In Hlady's own words, all these theatrical events "were linked by a common theme: a turn to the past rather than to the future, a return to the ancestors, a materialization of memory, a way out at the level of the overcoming of the fear of death, a spiritual moment that brings hope. Because, despite all the material adversities, there does exist the chance for freedom; despite all the restrictions and limitations, there is an inner world, a territory into which no one else can enter-no external power, no authorities."

I know of two film treatments of Gogol's works on Canadian national television: The Inspector General in 1997, and Diary of a Madman in 2000. Both of these were in English.

In conclusion I would note that interest in the works of Nikolai Gogol in Canada has almost always coincided with periods of political cataclysm in the homeland of this genius.

I express my gratitude to the bibliographer, University of Toronto for their assistance in working on this article

© Z. Davydov

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