406
PARTISAN REVIEW
"You're absolutely right," Yuri Pavlovich Gherman would say .
"How is it I didn't notice that myself?"
Nevertheless, I still believe a writer doesn't need an editor,
even a good writer.
We have, for example, the following historical example. Dosto–
evsky wrote a sentence in one of his novels that went, "Beside it stood
a round table of oval form." Someone reading the work in manu–
script said, "Fyodor Mikhailovich, you've made a slip here. It should
be corrected."
Dostoevsky thought for a moment and said, "Leave it as it is."
In his early works, Gogol used to use the word "stucko." Once
the writer Aksakov said to him, "Why do you write 'stucko'?"
"Why, what's wrong with it?" Gogol asked .
"It should be 'stucco'."
"I don't think so," Gogol said .
"Look it up in the dictionary."
So they got out the Dal' dictionary and looked it up , and there
it was-"stucco." From then on, Gogol invariably wrote "stucco," but
he didn't correct the mistake in new editions of his works.
Why? Why didn't Dostoevsky want to eliminate a glaring er–
ror? Why did Alexandre Dumas call his novel
The Three Musketeers,
though there cannot be any question there are four of them? There
are hundreds of instances like this in literature. What becomes ap–
parent is that the errors, the inaccuracies, are in some way dear to
the author, which means to the reader as well.
How can you correct Rozanov's line, "We never cried anything
like that"?
If
it were up to me, I wouldn't even correct typographical errors
without the consent of an author. Not to speak of punctuation.
Punctuation is something every writer invents for himself.
I think my aunt was a good editor, or rather, she was a good
person, full of goodwill and intelligence .
,
Personally, I have never met good editors, though there were
many fine people among those I did meet. Actually, there was one
time I met a good editor. It was at "Lenfilm," I think, and it was a
certain woman named Hellie Rummo. She was Estonian and barely
I
spoke Russian, and her weak command of the language gave her
pronouncements a special clarity. She would say, "The scenario is
good. That means they won't take it."
In the 1960s I began writing short stories. I showed my work to
my aunt. She found hundreds of mistakes in my stories: stylistic,
spelling, and punctuational.
