PARTISAN
REVIEW
311
PLUCK AND POLEMICS
A WINDOW ON RUSSIA.
By
Edmund Wilson, Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$7.95.
Pushkin once said of Lomonosov, the astonishing polymath
and poet of Russia's 18th century, that he was "our first university."
Universities being whaJt they have now become, it would scarcely be
possible to liken Edmund Wilson to one of them, but the idea holds
in general. What we have jn his last book is a summary of the work
done over nearly three decades in the Russian Department. The early
things are the work of a brilliant young Assistant Professor; the latter
essays, while certainly magisterial in manner and occasionally illuminated
by the former sparks, show the frequent lapses that reviewers can hardly
bring themselves to notice, for they are the lapses of the Grand Old
Man, who can be captious, crochety, self-indulgent, and downright
erroneous.
He begins with a mov<ing dedication to
h~s
wife (of Russian ex–
traction). It is self-deprecating, which is interesting in
itself,
but more
importantly it points
to
what strikes one first of all about Wilson's an–
fatuation with the literature of Russia (and of how many other foreign
cuLtures?): his contempt for translations and
his
determination to read
writers in their own language. How many there were eager to pronounce
this or that judgment on Pushlcin - when they had heard of him–
or Tolstoy at a time when Wilson was patiently concing the crude text–
books of his era! The first essay is a tribute to the language
in
which
alone he was willing to read Pushkin, a tribute and an exhortation to
learn it. It is good-humored, unbuttoned, and sympathetic, as pedagogues
bent
on encouraging their students ought to 'be, and it is sometimes
mistaken, as,
,all
things considered, it could hardly have failed to be
("there is no rule for neuter plurals"). But it does convey a sense of Rus–
sian, as opposed chiefly to French, the language and culture from whioh,
even more than from American, Wilson seems to have approaohed his
study of Russia, and it allows one to glimpse his own heroic travails and
frequent exasperation.
ThaJt was written in 1943, a time when many of the now senior
generation of certified Russian experts were taking ·their first lisping
lessons in the language from the Avrny or Navy. It was at the same time
that Wilson published a truly remarkable little essay on Pushkin, which,
for all its diminutive size, some dozen small pages, is for me quite the
best of all these pieces. To put its qualities in perspeotive one might
quote a sentence from Vladimir Nabokov, with whom Wilson was still
