The lady with a dog

As part of my Russian course, we've been translating one of Chekhov's short stories, The lady with a dog. Below is my loosish translation of the first part. The picture to the side is of Chekhov with his wife, Olga. They look, I must say, surprisingly cheery and wry.

I

It was said that someone new had appeared on the promenade: a lady with a dog. Dmitry Dmitrych Gurov, who had already been in Yalta two weeks and who was settling in there, also took an interest in the new arrivals. Sitting in Vernet's Pavilion, he saw as a young lady, a diminutive blond in a beret, passed along the promenade; behind her ran a white Pomeranian dog.

And then he would meet her in the municipal park and the urban gardens several times a day. She would stroll alone—always, however, in that beret, with the white Pomeranian; no-one knew who she was, and they would call her simply “the lady with a dog”.

“If she is here without her husband and without friends,” mused Gurov, “then there wouldn’t be any harm in making her acquaintance.”

He was not yet 40, but had a daughter aged 12 and two boys in grammar school. He had married early, when he was still an undergraduate, in the second year, and now his wife seemed to be half as old as him again. A tall woman with dark eyebrows, she was upright, important, solid and—as she herself put it—intellectual. She read a great deal, in letters did not use the hard sign, and articulated her husband’s name “Di-mi-try” rather than “Dmitry”—while he secretly considered her shallow, limited, graceless, was afraid of her, and loathed to stay home. Long ago he had started to cheat on her; he cheated often, which is probably the reason that he almost always spoke about women derisively, and when they came up in conversation in his presence, he referred to them thusly:

“ A low race!”

It seemed to him that he had learned enough from bitter experience to name them as he pleased, but all the same, without the “low race” he would have been unable to survive even two days. In the company of men, he was bored, not himself; with them he was taciturn, cold, but when he found himself among women, then he felt free, and he knew what to talk about—with them, it was even easy to be silent. In his appearance, character, in his whole nature there was something attractive, indefinable, which predisposed women to him, lured them; he knew of this, and he was also drawn to them by some sort of power.

Repeated experience, in fact bitter experience, had taught him long ago that any attachment, which initially so pleasantly relieves the monotony of life and appears to be a precious and carefree adventure, for respectable people—especially for Muscovites, who are sluggish and irresolute—inevitably turns into the whole problem, extraordinarily complex, and in the end the situation becomes burdensome.

At any new meeting with an interesting woman, however, this experience somehow slipped his mind—he wanted to live, and everything seemed so simple and amusing.

And so one day, towards evening, he was dining in the garden when the lady in the beret, without rushing, approached to take the adjacent table. Her appearance, gait, dress and hairstyle told him that she was from respectable society, married, in Yalta for the first time and alone, that she was bored here…

In the tales of the immorality of local mores, much was untrue: he hated them and knew that such tales in the main are invented by people who themselves would willingly have sinned, if they could; but when the lady sat down at the next table, no more than three steps from him, he recalled these stories of easy victory, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting notion of a quick and fleeting liaison, of an affair with an anonymous woman whom you did not know by first or family name, suddenly gripped him.

Softly, he beckoned the dog to him, and when it came he wagged a finger at it. The dog began to growl. Gurov wagged again.

The lady glanced at him and instantly lowered her eyes.
"He doesn't bite," she said, and blushed.
"Can he have a bone?" And when she nodded in assent, he asked politely:
"May I ask if you've been in Yalta long?"
"About five days."
"And I've been here two weeks already."

They remained silent for a while.

"Time flies, and yet it is so boring here," she said, not looking at him.
"That's just what people say, that it is boring here. Your average fellow lives in his anywhere in Belyov or Zhizdra—and he is not bored, but arrives here, and it's: 'O, it is boring! O, the dust!' You'd think that he'd come from Grenada."

She burst into laughter. Then they both continued to eat in silence, like strangers; but after dinner they walked side-by-side—and began the playful, easy conversation of people who are free, happy, with whom it is all the same where they go and what they talk about. They strolled and talked about how strangely lit the sea was; the water was of such a soft, warm lilac colour, and along it from the moon ran a golden strip. They talked about how stuffy it was after a hot day. Gurov said that he was a Muscovite, a philologist by education, although he worked in a bank; that he had once trained as a singer in a private opera, but had given up, that he had two houses in Moscow…And from her he found out that she grew up in St Petersburg, but left to marry in Saratov, where she had already lived for two years; that she was to stay in Yalta another month, and that possibly her husband, who was also in need of a rest, would come for her. She couldn't for the life of her explain where her husband worked—in the provincial government or in the provincial district council, and this was comical to her. Gurov found out further that her name was Anna Sergeievna.

If you want things to stay the same, everything has to change

In her recent book, Central Asia’s Second Chance, Martha Brill Olcott attempts to address an apparent contradiction at the heart of contemporary US foreign policy in the Central Asian region. This contradiction is that the failure of the current Bush administration to encourage democratic development more actively—instead relying on partnerships with authoritarian regimes out of short-term expediency linked to the prosecution of the so-called war on terror—risks reproducing long-term security threats to the West because of the potential for ongoing political, social and economic discontent to catalyse anti-Western terrorism.

She argues that the attention and resources of the US administration have been diverted from vital long-term democracy-promotion projects by the war on terror itself, and that this is shown by the low and declining level of US regional funding, which was just US$210m in 2004 (compared with US$1.9bn and US$2.7bn for the more significant US allies, Egypt and Israel, in the same year).

A second important theme of the book is that the nation-building approach adopted by international bodies may have been counterproductive for the region—in particular, in view of the interdependent histories, transport infrastructure, and energy and water resources of the countries involved, the country-specific approach may have encouraged rivalry and protectionism, hindering the development of a regional market.

In some ways, this is a frustrating book, since the author seems to share uncritically the terms and perspectives of the US policy establishment, so that the reader has the feeling of wading through quite a lot of policy-wonk material before getting to a discussion of the details of what has happened regarding the political systems of the Central Asian states themselves (the book might thus more accurately have been called America’s Missed Second Chance in Central Asia).

However, in relation to these political systems, the author makes the points that the countries' leaders were all products of Soviet political structures, and that their emergence, practically intact, from the wreckage of the Soviet Union following the failed Moscow coup of 1991 meant that they lacked the legitimacy that might have been conferred upon them had they risen to power as leaders of independence struggles. Although none of the region’s citizens enjoy as full a range of political rights and civic freedoms as those of the formerly communist countries of central and eastern Europe, there is some variety in the types of political systems that have obtained in Central Asia in the independence period, running along a line from “semi-democratic” to fully authoritarian, with the Kyrgyz Republic usually conceived of as the most democratic and Turkmenistan as the least.

The thesis that US funding was insufficient to allow it to influence positively the political outcomes in the region (in particular, to minimise the chances of political instability by helping to pave the way for the smooth, democratic handover of power) is illustrated by the case of the Kyrgyz Republic. Here, the author argues, such a policy had the best chance of success in the early years of the present decade, because of the country's experience of rapid democratic development in the early 1990s, and because the desire of the then president, Askar Akayev, to compete for prestige with other Central Asian leaders would have predisposed him to accept a high degree of conditionality in return for grant assistance for political reforms already under way, such as of local government, electoral mechanics and anti-corruption programmes. However, the sums involved were too small to yield any decisive influence (funds from the Freedom Support Act for democracy-building were just US$1.16 per head for the Kyrgyz Republic in 2002, although this was the highest per-head level of funding from the US for any country in the region). Instead, therefore, Akayev’s increasing authoritarianism went unchecked, and the chain of events leading up to the Aksy killings of 2002 and resulting in the president’s ouster in the Tulip Revolution of March 2005, while illustrating the greater political influence of public protest in the Kyrgyz Republic relative to its Central Asian neighbours, also began a curious phase of political instability and constitutional struggle that is probably not yet over. Indeed, the regime of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, which replaced Akayev’s, appears to have reproduced many of the features of its predecessor, re-employing many of its personnel, and adopting many of its operation and control techniques.

Oh moon of Alabama

The girl at the front who mid-song turned to discuss
the more compelling nuances of that day's soap instalment,
was it her or the players' plummeting conviction, kerplonk,
in the sincerity of their venture that began the wave
of indifference that soon engulfed the entire audience
who, tight-scarfed and back-packed, started in groups
to abandon the performance by way of the corkscrew stair?
The bass is holed below the waterline
and the band are blow-up lifebuoys rapidly leaking air.

When the singer looks round, he's lost at sea;
as if to the valve of some last-hope dinghy, he blows
with desperation into an unresponsive mic.
But his voice cracks like glass and the sharp notes jag,
deflating expectation, piercing the dinghy's skin
so that the hissing punctures now are legion
and the penetrating melodies buckle or lose their point.
The thump from the toms is that of a doomed galley.
All non-essential personnel make gratefully for the alley,

although stalwarts in the remaindered audience hold tight
to meet the end-set silence with relieved applause.
The cellar drains. Songs twitch like fishes on the floor
and the weary writer, thankful of the darkness,
slumps on his amplifier, wondering what went wrong.
He hardly recalls his earlier buoyant spirits
and it's only the face of his loved one—
brought to his remembrance ideally bright and shining—
keeps him afloat as he too skulks quietly to the door.

(Summer 1999)

A sea of troubles

Economic transition in Central Asia
Richard Pomfret’s book, The Central Asian Economies Since Independence, is a clear and reasonably up-to-date account of the economic developments in the first 15 or so years since the collapse of the Soviet Union thrust independence upon the five former Soviet republics—Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan—that comprise the Central Asian region. Taking into account both the similarities and differences in their starting positions, Pomfret outlines the distinctive policies adopted by each of the new countries in response to common political and economic disruptions, and tries to relate these policies to the subsequent economic performance and prospects of each.

The broad picture
At the start of transition in 1991, the Central Asian countries inherited a number of shared features. They:

• began with very similar economic and political systems, based, respectively, on central planning and the constitutionally enshrined leading role of the Communist Party;
• were among the poorest republics in the Soviet Union, with around 30-50% of households living below the poverty line in 1989 (defined as a monthly income of less than Rb75), compared with a figure of 5% for the Russian republic;
• had relatively high levels of human capital for their income levels;
• had functioned as suppliers of primary products and minerals; and
• had a low indigenous capacity for economic management.

In addition, they faced a number of common deficiencies, disruptions and shocks, including:

• a lack of experience of independent nationhood, so that attempts at nation-building had to go hand in hand with attempts at economic reform, complicating reform;
• economic disorganisation, which was brought on by the shift from central planning and the split of the single Soviet economic unit;
• disruption of inter-republican trade links by new national borders; and
• the stoking of hyperinflation by the attempt to maintain the rouble zone, with prices in all five countries exceeding 50% per month in 1992.

These were the main factors behind the very steep output falls across the region at the start of the transition process, although other factors may be expected to have exaggerated or ameliorated the impact on living standards. First, there are valuation problems linked to the nature of the transition itself that make measurement difficult. For example, it is hard to value products for which demand dried up following the introduction of market mechanisms, or to account for changes in product quality or the introduction of new kinds of products. Second, the impact of output falls on living standards was likely to have been exacerbated by the cessation of transfers from the central Soviet authorities, as well as by the widening of income inequality. Third, in the Soviet economy energy products were undervalued and manufactures overvalued, so that a change in the terms of trade brought about by a shift to world market prices might have been expected to favour energy producers such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Fourth, in Tajikistan, the exceptionally steep falls in output were the result of the destruction of the centrally planned economy by two bursts of civil war, which only came to an end in 1997.

In tandem with these steep falls in output, all of the new central Asian states suffered a loss in budgetary revenue, not only absolutely, but also relative to declining GDP, creating dilemmas of how to achieve both macroeconomic stability at the same time as maintaining social programmes (in most cases, this was not possible).

Bearing in mind that the region suffers from a number of common international trade data deficiencies, in 1994-97 the foreign trade of the Central Asian economies began to recover from the initial transitional shocks and disruptions, and, with high trade to GDP ratios, all may be said to have quickly developed into open economies.

A closer view
The Kyrgyz Republic. Policy choices: The Kyrgyz Republic embraced the standard Western advice concerning stabilisation and reform (often referred to as the "Washington consensus"), for which it received extensive multilateral support. Price liberalisation and enterprise reform took place rapidly. Later on, in 1998, the country was rewarded for its choice by becoming the first of the former Soviet countries to be allowed to join the Word Trade Organisation (WTO).

Stabilisation: The Kyrgyz Republic introduced a national currency, the som, in 1993 as a prerequisite to asserting macroeconomic control, and it was the first country to curb hyperinflation, bringing the average rate of monthly price increases below 50% in 1995.

Output performance: Description. As a result of the economic disruptions and shocks that affected the whole region in the early phases of transition, output in the Kyrgyz Republic fell by a cumulative 45% in 1991-95. Manufacturing output also dropped sharply, and the increase in the contribution of agriculture to GDP in these years is probably explained by the migration of the newly unemployed from the cities to the countryside to look for work. Following the years of recovery from the low base so created—that is, in 1996-97—economic growth has been moderate and subject to wide fluctuations.

Explanation. The radical reform and stabilisation policies probably contributed to the steepness of the fall in output in the Kyrgyz Republic in the early transition era. The failure of the expected gains of its radical policy choices to materialise is perhaps explained the republic’s paucity of readily tradable resources, in contrast to some of its neighbours. Also, low levels of initial income and human capital, exacerbated by emigration of skilled (often Russian) staff, perhaps hindered the establishment of well-functioning market institutions. The fluctuations in GDP output are linked to an overreliance on gold production of the Kumtor mine.

Budget and debt: Anxious to maintain its social programmes, in the 1990s the Kyrgyz government did not allow expenditure to fall as far as revenue, keeping the government deficit fairly wide, at about 4% of GDP at least, until the early 2000s. To avoid inflationary financing, the authorities plugged the gap by borrowing from international financial institutions, building up a large external debt, which rose from zero at the start of transition to the equivalent of 139% of GDP in 1999, according to the World Bank. This was a negative development for at least two reasons: first, the borrowing was not used to invest in productive ventures that could later generate earnings from which government revenue could accrue and the original borrowing be repaid; second, debt repayments on the accumulated sum have acted as an ongoing drain on scarce public funds ever since.

Foreign trade: After a recovery, total trade turnover fell in 1997-2002.