3.6.04

Anna - Oprah; Oprah - Anna

Oprah announced the latest installment to her book club (a while ago? I think.): Anna Karenina by Russian literature's reigning grumpy old man, Lev Tolstoi. (Solzhenitsyn made a move for the title, but will have to wait fifty years after his death to see if he assumes the throne.) And look, she's using the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation.

Now that K. and I have dug out the television, I'm going to watch the discussion. Part of me is happy that middle America will be laboring over a piece of Russian literature for the next little while. Part of me, though, is terrified at the prospect of the typical Oprah viewer analyzing the novel, especially if the show years and years and years ago that featured Bernhard Schlink's The Reader is any indication of what's to come. For those of you who neither watched the show nor heard about it, Schlink sat onstage and listened to audience members rant about the immorality of the book (a much older woman has an affair with a teenage boy). They were not pacified by his insistence that the affair is a metaphor for intergenerational relations in Germany and that The Reader is a work of fiction. No teenage boys were actually seduced by much older women. K. watched and said that it was horrifying. This type of naive reading isn't exclusive to the average Oprah viewer, either. I can think of one individual who studies literature professionally who announced that the screenwriter for American Beauty had to be a sicko since he thought up all of that depravity. Uh, sure. I was left wondering how this individual got tenure...

So, I'll continue this after the show, provided that I remember to watch it. Will there be a discussion of Tolstoi's role as a precursor of modernism and the narrative structure (watch the bags!) or will the audience members focus instead on the tough choices women are forced to make, moral outrage at Anna's abandonment of her child, and Tolstoi's supposed misogyny? A note on the misogyny: by today's standards Tolstoi would probably be labeled a misogynist: he felt that women had it easy compared with men: they didn't need to find a career (see War and Peace) because their pre-ordained role in life was to make a happy home and pop out baby after baby after baby, but I have problems with anachronistically applying the label. If you don't, go for it, just don't use it around me. -Zh.

Updates:
Oprah's Anna Karenina site

And over on SEELANGs, the listserv for anyone involved in Russian and East European studies, only one member is being an elitist snob (so far) but at least he owns up to it and provided the above link. I think he gets a couple of things wrong, though. 1. He cites the most asinine sentence in the novel's description in his message (Go to the site above and click on "Novel."). The rest of the short page tries to do what any good instructor of Intro to Russian Lit would do: set some context and alleviate some of the anxiety resulting from reading such a large, foreign book. Oprah should be given credit for trying hard, even if she fails (as was the case with Schlink). 2. He assumes that secretaries are both dumber than him and can't read Tolstoi in the same fashion as him. Admittedly, they are not going to have invested all of the time and effort in understanding the novel that a specialist would, but to assume a priori that they are either not going to be able to get beyond relating the novel directly to their lives or are not going to "get it," is offensive. Education does not equal intelligence, to which the tenured reader I mentioned above attests. 3. I also thing that he makes a tacit assumption that a naive reader is always a naive reader as well. I read Anna Karenina in high school, skipping all of the Levin and Kitty parts (frickin' agriculture!) in order to get to the racier Anna and Vronskii bits, and now, here I am, a doctoral candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures who is deeply disturbed by people who view novels only as a means of vicarious living and by people who analyze anachronistically those same works. I would love it if every reader read my beloved novels on my terms, but that is not going to happen. Most times the reader needs to met half-way and sometimes he/she can eventually become a sophisticated/educated reader. If Oprah's approach to Anne Karenina hooks even a couple of readers, who eventually go on to appreciate Russian literature more fully or go on to become specialists in the field, I think that sitting through some, for me, painful interpretations/readings of the work will be worth it.

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