the Russian novel – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

ROLL OVER TOLSTOY: SIX STUPENDOUS LOST RUSSIAN LITERARY CLASSICS.

You have already laboured your way through the hit parade of Gold and Silver age Russian greats: War and Punishment, Masters and Sons and The Bronze Orchard and so on. Brought to you by august frock-coated gentlemen, these tomes have been worth the effort. Like a trip to a cathedral or a Schoenberg concerto, however, they are respected more than enjoyed.

Quick resume.

The kingpin, Alexander Pushkin produced material that is youthful, cheeky, and experimental and was decent enough in his politics to boot. As national poets go, you could hardly ask for more.

Tolstoy, the second in the roll call is associated with a thundery King Lear persona which wears a bit thin in our age. It remains an inescapable fact , however, that Anna Karenina (1878)anticipated a great deal of the Twentieth Century novel in the pages of that one book.

The commonplace framing of Russians as being incomprehensible and crazed derives a lot from attempts to read and make sense of the byzantine novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Do read Crime and Punishment (1866), but feel free to leave the others to theologians and pyschoanalysts, say I.

Ivan Turgenev though is a reliable teller of human interest stories with an economy of expression all too rare in Russian letters. There is little by him that I have not read with some unforced interest.

An alternative list.

These are writers of both novels and short stories who published in a forty year period from the time of Tsar Alexander the Second to that of Stalin.

Some of them boast a global reputation but their work has been eclipsed by their most celebrated works; others are known far better in Russia than in the West. What is most crucial, however, is that they all can be found in translated form in paperbacks, or be it some of them only having been republished in recent times.

Moloch is a short story/novelette from Alexander Kuprin which appears in a collection of his writings named after his best known work, The Garnet Bracelet. Kuprin, who lived up to 1938, constitiutes a missing link between the writers of the Silver Age and those that flourished in early Soviet times. Viewed as an exponent of realism, his prose is in fact quite far-ranging

The short story/ novelette `Moloch`appears in this collection published in English by the Russian publishing house Karo books in St Petersburg.

A thirty-something engineer who has devoted much of his working life to overseeing the running of a provincial steel plant, feels alienated from his life and work on account of his sensitive nature. Addicted to morphine supplied by his only friend, a doctor,he has designs on an eligible young woman living in a nearby household. Then the arrival of his ebullient boss onto the scene throws all his dreams into question….

Kuprin’s prose is strenuous in its descriptiveness and from this banal beginning he sculpts something almost apocalyptic and which encompasses in its vision capitalist industrialisation, male hierarchies, and our capacity for self-deception. (The intensity of it reminds me a little of Nathaniel West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust.) Written in 1896, Moloch still speaks loud and clear to us in our time.

Far lighter fare, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Peskov’s The Golden Calf has been brought to life again in English translation just this year by Karo books in St Petersburg. Should you persist in the misapprehension that Russian fiction is all shadow and agony then try this satirical romp.

As we follow anti-hero Ostip Bender on his quest to become a millionaire in the Soviet system, we are treated to a panoramic tour through the Russia of the early thirties and it is one which raises eyebroows in its colourfulness.

The prose brims with zest and serves up a droll observation on every page. (I can even detect their influence on much more recent and edgier writers such as Garros- Evdokimov). There is such a parade of satirised character studies here that everyone who reads this novel has their own favourite one.

Still from a 1968 screen adaptation of `The Golden Calf``[Twitter]

Mikhail Bulgakov sealed his reputation with the puzzling Master and Margarita (1940) – although I tend to think his real masterpiece is The White Guard (1925). For enjoyment however, turn to The Fatal Eggs. This came to see print that same year despite being perceived, for reasons not so clear to the contemporary reader, as a swipe at the incumbent Bolshevik regime.

In the near future – 1928- a crotchety Muscovite zoologist. Persikov, discovers by accident a mysterious ray. This ray seems to have the effect of accelerating the growth any organisms it is directed at. The Soviet powers-that-be are soon eager to co-opt the professor’s new technology. Chickens are in short supply that year owing to chicken plague and something must be done to boost their production. An administrative cock-up, however, results in chicken eggs being swopped by those of snakes and lizards and it is these that receive the dose of the Red Ray. Moscow thereafter becomes encircled by an unstoppable contingent of super-sized reptiles….

This Frankenstinian science fiction yarn all gets Bulgakov’s detached and sardonic treatment. Like some kind of Prosfessor Branestawm-meets-Jurasssic Park, this is a story I can read again and again.

Still from a 1995 Russian screen adaptation of `The Fatal Eggs.[`Vilingstone.net]

His name synonymous with the Superfluous Man novel Oblomov (1859) Aleexander Goncharov had earlier published The Same Old Story (1847).

The narrative concerns an attempt by a dreamy and idealistic young man from the country to embark on a career as a poet in Saint Petrsburg. There he is mentored by his nemesis in the form of a wordly-wise and rather more matter-of-fact uncle. From this situation many poignant verbal clashes result and these form the main part of this comic novel with its drawn out dialogues which are both funny and profound.

The theme of country life versus the cynicism of town life takes on a symbolic stature which makes the inevitable corruption of the protaginist seem like a universal outcome: this is the Same Old Story.

So here we get a bit of a potshot at Romanticism written at a time when Romanticism was in the ascendancy and the would-be villain in the form of the uncle seems to become more likeable as the tale proceeds.

Ivan Goncharev [1812 -1891] [900igr.net]

Nikolai Leskov is known in Russia for the melodramatic crime tale The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk (1865) but also, in the last year of his life, brought out A Winter’s Tale, and critics tend to say that this novella was an expression of his near total disenchantment with Russian society. If so, his disenchantment sparkled.

The central situation is the interaction between a series of characters in an upper-class country estate in an unamed part of Russia in the late Nineteeenth Century. We have two aging female sophisticates and their spunky daughter and a rascal of a retired colonel among others informing the dialogues – for it is talk for the most part.

The sparse writing makes it all resemble the script of a drawing room drama. Moral and sociopolitical ideas are hurled about with great abandon which makes for a stimulating read which still feels fresh.

Leonid Andreev has been called `the Russian Poe` on account of some of his short stories, many of which could be labelled `weird fiction`.

The Abyss, from 1902 and republished in an eponymous collection in 2018 falls into this category. It seems to have unnerved Tolstoy a bit who is quoted on the dust jacket as being ` not scared` by it.

A love struck young couple make their way home through a twilit forest. There they come up against a groupof ne’erdo wells who subject them to an ordeal. This ordeal will test the very core of their humanity….

I am put in mind of early Ian McEwan. At any rate,if you like his brand of `mundane chiller`, with its metaphysical foray into darkness, then this is for you.

Anrd reev’s `The Abyss` appear in a collection of his writings published by Alma books in 2018 – with a great cover design by Will Dady.

You have no need to don a hairshirt to read these fictions. You might also be struck by how they lay waste to assumptions about Russian life while really engaging with our own time.

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Sources:

Andreev, Leonid The Abyss and other Stories (Surrey: Alma Books Ltd. 2018)

Bulgakov, Mikhail The Fatal Eggs (Surry: Alma Classics, 2018)

Goncharov, Ivan The Same Old Story (Surrey: Alma Classics, 2015)

Ilf, Ilya and Petrov Evgeny The Golden Calf (St Petersburg: Karo books, 2021)

Kuprin, Alexander The Garnet Bracelet (Saint Petersburg, Karo Books 2019)

Leskov, Nikolai The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and other stories (London: Penguin Books, 1987).

LOVE PANGS IN A GLASS FORTRESS: `WE` BY YEVGENY ZAMYATIN RECONSIDERED.

Ahead of the forthcoming film, I take a fresh look at this seminal science fiction anti-utopia – and the new relevance it has since gained.

I am a man and not a number.

Yet, my life is overuled by passcodes, passport numbers and national insurance numbers. I have sold my privacy to vast tech empires who decide what I want through algorithms. With me I carry a device which allows all my movements to be monitored…And whilst .I am not obliged to wear a uniform, I choose to dress in more or less the same way as everyone else….

This year marks the century after Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s novel WE was completed. No coincidence is it that the cultural event of this year is to be the big screen adaptation of this challenging fantasia. The timing, in terms of world events could not have been more auspicious.

WE was written when Zamyatin, a ship architect by trade living in St Petersburg, was 37. It received its first main publication in English in New York however in 1924 – the same year that Kafka’s The Trial also came out.

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 – 1937) [Goodreads.com]

My own introduction to the book came back in the Eighties when I was discussing Nineteen Eighty Four with a doped up undergraduate. He informed me that Orwell had, like, stolen all his ideas from some Russian geezer.

This half-truth forms most people’s first brush with WE. If they then go on to read the novel itself they do so only to make comparisons with Orwell’s classic – or perhaps with Huxley’s Brave New World.

Orwells’s debt to Zamyatin is a matter of record: Orwell reviewed the novel in Tribune (4th January, 1946). Huxley has never acknowledged the same influence, but Orwell (in that piece) felt it existed.

In any case, whilst it is by no means true to call WE `the first dystopian novel` it is, for sure, one that laid down the blueprint for many which came to follow. (My version, the Vintage imprint, is introduced by Will Self. This well-read bibliophile admits to not having read the novel before he did so to review it, and he read it on the Hebridean island where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four).

Zamyatin penned much else in different genres. If he is only known for WE then this is because is is this work that prompted the just installed Bolshevik apparatchiks to enusure that it never saw print in the Soviet Union. Zamyatin’s response – to get it printed on foreign soil -set the trend for many dissident scribes that followed him.

Better late than never: A Russian imprint of WE [goodreads.com]

It is time to excavate this novel from all of its associations with better known writings and also from its political backstory and try and encounter it afresh.

Everything is awesome.

We are in the far future. The One State, presided over by the ever watchful Great Benefactor, is the only collection of humans to have survived the Two Hundred Year’s War which has shattered urban society. They now live protected from individual freedom in a city composed of glass buildings. Around this is a `Green Wall` which quarantines them from the savagery of the natural world. Their daily activities are circumscribed by a Taylorist style `Table of Hours`. They have been assigned numbers instead of names and all wear a uniform.

`WE` established the archetype of the quintessential industrial-technocratic anti-utopia.[pinterest.com]

A spaceship engineer called D-503 keeps a journal and it is these first person present tense reflections that make up this novel. He is helping to build the Integral – a spaccraft that has the purpose of exporting the values of this society to other worlds. The narrator is foursquare behind this:

`Indeed is there a place where happiness is wiser, more cloudless than this miracle world?…nothing is happier than digits living according to the well-constructed, eternal laws of the multiplication table` (p-59).

However he comes to obsess over an unusual young woman (serial dating is encouraged by a voucher system which would put Tinder to shame). It turns out that she is an opponent of the regime. His attraction to her has distinct sadomasochistic overtones:

`And suddenly she burst out laughing. I could see this laughter with my eyes: the ringing, sever, stubbornly supple (like a whip), crooked line of this laughter`. (p-27)

D503’s inner struggle between his conventional loyalty to the One State and primal lust for this woman – I-330- drives the narrative to its tragic foregone conclusion.

The premise, then has since become so embedded that you will have encountered it in popular film culture in such films as Metropolis (1927), Sleeper (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demolition Man (1993) and Equilibrium (2002), to name but a few.

Russian S.F from the Twenties.

WE comprises a novel that belongs to the Nineteen Twenties just as surely as, say, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It is drenched with all the concerns of that decade: new machineries, female emancipation, modernism and a sense of despair at the future of humanity.

Also WE is far more of a generic science-fiction story than Orwell’s much more down-to-earth and more topical extraction of it.

It also must not be forgotten that is a part of Russian literature. It contains echoes of Dostoevsky here and there, as well as references to Pushkin. The polished style partakes of the avant garde ferment which enriched Russia at that time. (In fact, it is this latter aspect of the novel – its difficult prose – which has done much to discourage people from giving WE more attention).

More than an anti-Soviet diatribe.

It seems simplistic to view this Twenty Sixth Century world as being a comment on the Soviet Union. Yes, some aspects of `Stalinism` were anticipated with accuracy by Zamyatin: the use of Secret Police as spies (`The Guardians`) and The Day of One Vote, for example. Much else is more about technocracy than State Socialism, however.

Like Bulgakov, Zamyatin was labouring under the long shadow cast by H.G.Wells, with his antiseptic messianism. The society of One State, a kind of Rationalist Utilitarian one, resembles Gene Roddenberry’s Vulcans as much as anything:

`Take two trays of a weighing scale: you put a grain on one, and on the other put a ton. On one side the `I` and on the other is the `we`, the One state…Assuming that `I` has the same `rights` compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a grain can counterbalance a tone` (p-102).

Then against the psychology of this totalitarianism Zamyatin juxtaposes a primitive sexual infatuation – in its way just as deranged.

New resonances.

I have read WE about four times during the last decade, and in different translations. Clarence Brown (1993) then Mira Ginsburg(1983) and now the London based American Natasha Randall ((2006) Her variant seems to work best for me, although I would be hard pressed to explain why.

Getting past the Expressionist style of narration we find a novel that delivers a science fictional kick. There is a death ray that turns people to liquid, a Bell Jar used as a torture device,diaphanous listening gadgets lining the streets, robot tutors and a space craft that gets given a test flight.

On top of all that the world of WE has never seemes less implausible. Post-Covid, Zoom and so on have become all pervasive – with the result that we all indeed live in glass compartments, in effect, and the police have been granted unpresedented powers to direct people’s private lives.

Anticipations.

So I really hope that Hamlet Dulyan’s cinema adaptation will be more on the edgy side than precious. That is to say that it should not treat the tale as some sort of signed and sealed `period piece`, still less some kind of retrospective on the Soviet years.

I hope that the director has not been too `highbrow` has remembered that WE functions above all as a science-fiction yarn. Furthermore he needs to have brought out the eroticism of it all,

We shall see.

All translations are from: Zamyatin, Yevgeny WE. Translated by Natasha Randall. (London: Vintage, 2007).

The lead image is from: atomsand archetypes.wordpress.com