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out, Max was profoundly hurt by Wilson's criticism, which turned
out to be without foundation. While there were, to be sure, some
stylistic infelicities, the famous "six errors" that Wilson lister! turned
out to be half Wilson's own (his Russian was never as good as he
seemed to think it was) and half the responsibility of the American
publisher.
It was a mark of Max's diffidence, his respect for Wilson, and
his utter incapacity to hold a grudge, that they later became good
friends, and it was Max who coached and helped him in his famous
duel with Vladimir Nabokov over the vagaries of the latter's transla–
tion of
Eugene Onegin.
It
was diffidence, charm and a selfless immersion in the work,
too, that made Max such a superb collaborator. The anthologies
compiled and edited with Patricia Blake, outstandingly
Dissonant
Voices in Soviet Literature
and their bilingual selection of poems and
plays from Mayakovsky, still stand as models of their kind. Again
with the intermediacy of Patricia Blake, his collaboration with poets
like Auden and Stanley Kunitz to bring outstanding modern and
contemporary Russian poets into English was remarkably suc–
cessful. Yet his personality and the centrality of his role in the enter–
prise remains very much in the background .
For every book that Max translated from the Russian, as
Patricia Blake points out, he was responsible for at least twelve more
finding their way into English. With his assistance, Manya Harrari
and Susan Villiers founded the Harvill Press in England, which
published a considerable number of important books translated from
Russian that other publishers would not handle, including Gladkov's
Meetings with Pasternak.
He organized and encouraged a number of
important symposia on Russian literature and the Soviet Union. His
influence at St. Antony's - which enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality
from his general discomfort at Oxford - was considerable . In the
end, unlike Matthew Arnold's "Scholar-Gypsy," he returned to Ox–
ford, and held court in his hospital room, before he finally died of
cancer, somewhat in the manner of those people at Oxford he had
once referred to as "the Lords," yet at the same time reminding his
visitors that he still considered himself a
muzhichok.
I think there are few of us in Anglo-American scholarship of
Russian and Soviet literature and the politics of Soviet culture who
have been untouched by his knowledge or uninfluenced by his views .
SIDNEY MONAS
