Mosses from an Old Manse

5 hrs. 27 min.

Romance & Prose

Author Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrator Svetlana Repina

Description

Writing about Hawthorne is hard—not even because Hawthorne was a great writer. If you’re going to do hierarchical research, then it’s unlikely he would have made it into the top ten American writers of the last century. Let alone the top ten worldwide. The difficulty is something else. As we know, Borges wrote about Hawthorne. But then—about whom didn’t he write?
So here is the thing: there exists a set of unspoken but obligatory rules for readers. One of them says: it’s stupid to start talking about a book that Borges has already talked about. You won’t be able to say anything new anyway. And, unfortunately, that is the truth. And from it follows the necessity to refuse the conversation about books altogether. Look at the last sentence of the previous paragraph. And that’s when the question arises: why, after all, did Borges write about Hawthorne? The last sentence of the first paragraph mentioned above gives an answer to that—at least one possible one: Borges wrote about everyone who wrote before him. But with Hawthorne, it seems, it’s more complicated. Or simpler. In this particular case, I won’t be the judge.
A small collection of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published by “Tekst” (“Text”), containing nine tales—not, by the way, the very best ones by this author—explains a lot. I don’t know if it happened by chance, but these very nine (seven—first time in Russian) short stories clarify better than the famous and beloved, by the way, Borges’s “The Scarlet Letter,” why Borges nevertheless noticed Hawthorne.