P. G. Wodehouse: On the Benefits of Optimism

Alexander Livergant is a literary scholar, translator, and editor-in-chief of the journal “Foreign Literature,” as well as a professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU). Author of biographies of Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Oscar Wilde, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Graham Greene, and Virginia Woolf. The new audiobook “Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. On the Benefit of Optimism” is the first portrait in Russian of the greatest English humorist of the 20th century within the literary, theatrical, public, and political context of the era.

“In September 1915, the Philadelphia magazine ‘Saturday Evening Post’ printed the story ‘On the Side of Young Gussy,’ which would seem unremarkable if not for two short, seemingly minor remarks. First, an older but recently hired butler tells his employer: ‘Mrs. Gregson wishes to see you, sir.’ Then, when the employer—a young rake—announces that they are going to America, he tips his hat as the butler does: ‘Very good, sir. What suit will you wear?’ Who could have guessed that these throwaway lines would make it into the annals of English literature? And yet it happened, because those remarks signaled the birth of the famous pair: Jeeves and Bertie Wooster.

‘Now that I’ve written so much about him,’ Wodehouse will say half a century later, ‘it seems amusing how quietly and unobtrusively Jeeves entered my life… I blush to think that during our first meeting I was so rude to him.’”