WHY RUSSIANS LOVE HEMINGWAY
It’s not the guileless body-puncher sentences that translate so effortlessly and well and sound like originals in Russian. It’s not the (vaguely) simpatico politics, of which way too much was made. It’s not the Cuba connection either, or the unspoken Russian need you sometimes sense for An American We Can Really Understand. All of that is real enough, sure, but it’s actually this, the sensation conveyed right here:
“I knew I was quite drunk, and when I came in I put on the light over the head of the bed and started to read. I was reading a book by Turgenieff. Probably I read the same two pages over several times. It was one of the stories in ‘A Sportsman's Sketches.’ I had read it before, but it seemed quite new. The country became very clear and the feeling of pressure in my head seemed to loosen.
[…]
“I turned on the light again and read. I read the Turgenieff. I knew that now, reading it in the oversensitized state of my mind after much too much brandy, I would remember it somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me. I would always have it…”
-- “The Sun Also Rises” (1926), Chapter 14
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