![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Portrait_of_Euge\u0300ne-Melchior_de_Vogu\u0308e\u0301-220x300.jpg\")
<\/a>A brief bio: Eug\u00e8ne-Melchior de Vog\u00fc\u00e9 was a viscount born in 1848 in Nice; he died in Paris in 1910. His father belonged to one of the oldest French noble families; his mother was Scottish. In his day Eug\u00e8ne-Melchior was famous for bringing the literature of Russian writers to French readers in his 1886 book, Le Roman russe <\/em>(The Russian Novel). His introduction of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy revealed to new readers the intellectual and spiritual richness of the Russian soul.<\/p>\n His love for Russian writing developed during his appointment as a French diplomat to St Petersburg from 1877 \u2013 1882, and his interest really bloomed with his marriage to a Russian aristocrat in 1878, and with later time spent in Ukraine.<\/p>\n Previously he\u2019d had diplomatic postings to Constantinople and Egypt and had written accounts of his experience there in various Oriental tales, Vangh\u00e9li<\/em> for example.<\/p>\n But once he\u2019d fallen in love with a Russian and Russia, de Vog\u00fc\u00e9 developed a desire to help France, to save her from literary, political and spiritual crises. This desire is a thread running through all his writing. He believed his country could be saved by adopting the sentiments of Russian orthodoxy: sympathy and love and helping one another.<\/p>\n In 1884 he began publishing short stories set in Russia and Ukraine in a style influenced by Turgenev. One I\u2019ve translated and published, \u2018Histoires d\u2019hiver\u2019 or \u2018Winter Tales\u2019<\/a> is a long short story that appears at the beginning of the collection C\u0153urs russes <\/em>(Russian Hearts)<\/em>. It\u2019s a nest of short tales told to the narrator during his visit to a friend, Micha\u00efl Dmitrich P\u2014 , a landowner who has invited him on a wolf hunt in provincial Russia.<\/p>\n The hunt being unsuccessful that day, the two men return to the house and engage in a dialogue on the situation of peasants and former serfs now that serfdom has been abolished. Micha\u00efl Dmitrich P\u2014 has recently retired on his inherited provincial property, where he \u201cdabbled a little in agronomy with no great illusions about the results of such a pastime.\u201d<\/p>\n Let me give you a taste of de Vog\u00fc\u00e9\u2019s writing in this excerpt introducing Monsieur P\u2014, a landowner and former serf owner:<\/p>\n He devoted himself to the study of economic questions, that is, he mulled them over, smoking his pipe and discussing them for entire evenings with the Mar\u00e9chal de Noblesse or the justice of the peace. The first being a ferocious reactionary and the second a confirmed red<\/em>, Mikhail Dmitrich had for each problem an authoritative solution and a liberal solution which prevailed by turns in his mind, depending on who had spoken to him the day before. When he was too troubled by the contradictions of social problems, Monsieur P\u2014 would read over a chapter from Kant or the \u2018Introduction to Negative Synthesis\u2019<\/em> by Professor Verblioudovich. His mind if I may say found a digestive aid in these readings, a mixture of something both soothing and lightly stimulating, of the kind an after\u2011dinner cigar provides. His intelligence enjoyed these vapours of thought as his body enjoyed the vapours of the Russian bath, in the lukewarm atmosphere which is neither water nor air, but a soft fog.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can find this little ebook or paperback, \u2018Winter Tales\u2019 <\/a>, at Amazon.<\/p>\n If you\u2019d like a free<\/em> taste of de Vog\u00fc\u00e9, my translation of his story, \u2018Joseph Olenin\u2019s Coat\u2019<\/a> is available online at The Cossack Review here<\/a><\/em>, where you can read about a lonely man in a cold and isolated part of Ukraine, who loses a coat, finds one, and falls in love with it.<\/p>\n *<\/strong><\/p>\n To finish my praise of Monsieur de Vog\u00fc\u00e9, I must mention a new book by a French researcher, Anna Gichkina, just published in 2018: Eug\u00e8ne-Melchior de Vog\u00fc\u00e9 ou comment la Russie pourrait sauver la France<\/a>. (E-M de V or How Russia could save France).<\/em> It\u2019s on my To Read list.<\/p>\n *<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the past eight years I\u2019ve been translating the writings of a small handful of French authors, and I\u2019ve come to know them quite well. On my \u2018Translated Short Stories\u2019 page (see above) there\u2019s a list of titles mostly from 19th-century metropolitan France, with a few from 21st-century New Caledonia. I took a look at…<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/DSC06405-300x264.jpg\")
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