Last fall, I began researching a new novel with the Russia writer Anton Chekhov as a character, oblivious to what was about to happen in Ukraine. That means I spent the past few months reading Russian history, biographies and literary criticism while reading and re-reading the literature, this at a time when Vladimir Putin’s army was getting ready to invade. 

Now, safe in Canada, all I can do is protest the invasion—I’m sure Putin is shaking in his boots—and watch furiously and helplessly as atrocities are revealed. Meanwhile I keep ploughing through my shelves of books to try to understand the long history of autocracy in Russia. One scholar notes that Russians know too well their country’s abysmal history of autocratic governance, from the czars through the Bolsheviks to Putin. Yet they still consider Russia the greatest country in the world, feeling justifiably proud of its heritage of artistic genius, while taking a certain wounded gratification in believing Russia to be both the best and the worst place in the world. Or at least, taking their identity from the exaggerations of their vast country and its brutal, brilliant past. 

Back-pocket psychologizing. I can’t read or speak Russian, and have planned the novel so my main, modern-day character doesn’t either, not at first. I also intend to take an elementary language course along with my character. But this has gone from being a rough plan to a very rough sketch, with the invasion turning everything so fluid. Who knows what’s going to happen even next week? I feel terrible for the Ukrainians, and for anti-Putin protestors inside Russia who are facing repression.

Yet here’s a tiny dilemma amid the carnage. Novelists currently writing books set even partly in the present are having trouble deciding what tone to give them and what news to include. By this I mean several novelists I know, not just me. Between the pandemic, the Russian invasion, accelerating climate change and a predicted worldwide recession, we’re living in radically unstable times. How many pandemic books do we need? (Publishers are bracing themselves for a flood of submissions.)

It’s tempting to jump ship on the present and write speculative fiction and sci-fi, or more likely in my case, historical fiction. Yet setting my novel entirely during Chekhov’s lifetime in the late nineteenth century represents a deeper dive into his country than I feel comfortable taking. I’ve never been to Russia, and God knows when I might get there now. It’s roughly the same situation as writing about contemporary people from different backgrounds than yourself. Writing one character can work, at least if you do your research and beg a read from a friend who’s a member of that community, offering to read something they need notes on themselves. But setting it entirely within a different culture that you’re radically unfamiliar with?

I’ve got other projects on my plate—a new collection of short stories, a novel out last year for which I’m still doing publicity, another novel accepted for publication in the fall of 2023 that I’ll be editing later this year. (Yes, I know. But what else is there to do during the lockdowns?) The Chekhov book won’t be published until 2026 at the very earliest, giving me plenty of time to think it through. 

I don’t foresee any extraordinary problems in writing about Anton Chekhov himself. He was human, and quite a modern human at that, restless and forward-thinking. There’s also the fact that being a famous writer from the age of twenty-five meant his family and friends kept every scrap of paper he sent them. Chekhov and his sister Masha also filed his own copies of letters her wrote, the bills he sent and received and other papers into a series of boxes every year at Christmas. There’s a huge Chekhov archive, and especially after the re-opening of post-Soviet Russia, it’s generated an academic industry, exactly the sort of thing I love diving into.

Yet as I say, my problem lies more in understanding something of Chekhov’s immense, radically unmodern country. That seems increasingly daunting, and my worries were underlined a couple of days ago when I re-read Chekhov’s famous short story, “The Lady With the Dog,” which was published in 1899. 

Underlined, in fact, by reading two different English translations of the story. 

One is the classic version, done by the British translator Constance Garnett in the 1910s. Her command of Russian was imperfect, and she only visited the country twice for short periods, but her translations are preferred by many scholars because she was almost exactly Chekhov’s age. Born one year after him in 1861, she translated Chekhov’s work into an English that captured the diction and tone of the period in which he wrote. 

Here’s the opening paragraph of Garnett’s translation of “The Lady with the Dog,” which is collected in The Chekhov Omnibus, edited by Donald Rayfield. The italics are mine.

“It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight in Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney’s pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a beret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her.”

And here is the more recent translation, collected in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, selected and edited by Ralph E. Matlaw who, as that middle initial indicates, was American:

“People were telling one another that a newcomer had been seen on the promenade—a lady with a dog. Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov had been a fortnight in Yalta, and was accustomed to its ways, and he, too, had begun to take an interest in fresh arrivals. From his seat in Vernet’s outdoor café, he caught sight of a young woman in a toque, passing along the promenade; she was fair and not very tall; after her trotted a white Pomeranian.”

As a Canadian, I can’t get past that “toque.” Visions of Bob and Doug McKenzie leap to mind. There’s also my own navy blue toque saying North Toronto Hockey. Both are a little difficult to picture on the Yalta seafront in 1899.

Over the years, I’ve picked up a couple of thick illustrated books of fashion history. Yet after reading the translations, I couldn’t find anything there or online that resembled either a beret or a toque worn in the 1890s. Cloche hats, which sound roughly appropriate, didn’t come into style for thirty more years. And since I don’t read Russian, I can’t come up with my own translation of the original. It’s one small word, and it’s frustrating.

It’s also at the heart of my tiny parable: How hard it is to read your way into a foreign culture.

Despite being entirely against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are times when I see or read the news reports that I can’t help but feel carry a whiff of propaganda. Innocent wide-eyed blond children seem to have a habit of appearing when photographers pass by. Inconvenient details get passed over, including the presence of the far-right, white supremacist Azov Battalion in Ukraine’s National Guard, its history detailed in this article by the fact-checking site Scopes. Some Ukrainians point out that in the recent presidential election, won by the moderate and Jewish Volodymyr Zelensky, far right parties took a far smaller percentage of the vote than the extreme right parties in recent French and other European elections (which I don’t find particularly reassuring). Then again, there’s the fact that Zelensky recently brought Azov representatives on the podium with him when he spoke to the Greek Parliament. 

On the one hand. On the other hand. On the one and the other and the other. We all end up with a dozen hands as we try to juggle our way to a partial understanding of the truth. It’s much easier to try for nuance in novels than in breaking news. But my small point is that writing a novel isn’t easy either, especially when your project gets blown open by that brutally inconvenient thing called war. (Can’t we try to do without them, please?) 

Bonus quote from The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham, which is a very good book, and available here.

“Near the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has a fever dream that he considers prophetic: a plague ‘from the depths of Asia’ would one day sweep the entire planet. The first symptoms of infection from the ‘microscopic creatures’ are a form of madness: ‘Never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable.’”

Crime and Punishment was published in 1866.