Sisters of the Cross Read online

  SISTERS OF THE CROSS

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

  Editorial Board:

  Vsevolod Bagno

  Dmitry Bak

  Rosamund Bartlett

  Caryl Emerson

  Peter B. Kaufman

  Mark Lipovetsky

  Oliver Ready

  Stephanie Sandler

  Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski

  Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

  Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen

  Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson

  City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

  Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France

  Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview by Linor Goralik, edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokur

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

  Copyright © 2018 Roger John Keys and Brian Murphy

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54615-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Remizov, Aleksei, 1877–1957, author. | Keys, Roger, 1947–, translator. | Murphy, Brian, 1923–2017, translator.

  Title: Sisters of the cross / Alexei Remizov ; translated by Roger Keys and Brian Murphy.

  Other titles: Krestovye sestry. English

  Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: Russian library

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017021730 (print) | LCCN 2017024109 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231546157 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231185424 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231185431 (pbk.)

  Classification: LCC PG3470.R4 (ebook) | LCC PG3470.R4 K713 2018 (print) | DDC 891.73/44—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021730

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Sisters of the Cross

  INTRODUCTION

  “There is a problem with you—you are untranslatable.”

  (D. S. Mirsky)1

  Alexei Remizov (1877–1957) was one of the leading figures in the Symbolist movement in Russian literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Sisters of the Cross (1910)2 is arguably his greatest fictional achievement, worthy to rank with such high points of Russian modernism as Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg (1913–1914) and Fiodor Sologub’s The Petty Demon (1907). At the same time, Remizov is probably the least well-known of the three great novelists of the movement, and unlike Belyi and Sologub, has been little translated into English. Three of his six novels did appear in English translation during the 1920s, it is true,3 but for some reason his masterpiece Sisters of the Cross never appeared in the language, either then or in more recent times. This may be because of the complexity of Remizov’s style, which is a singular amalgam of colloquial, literary, and folkloric Russian. Remizov himself was philosophical about the fact. “Sisters of the Cross has been translated into German, French, Italian, and Japanese,” he once wrote, “but you won’t find it in English; there was no Russian around to give the word, and the English themselves are too rich—they lack curiosity about other people’s literatures.”4

  The plot of Remizov’s novel is universal in its resonance. The thirty-year-old Piotr Alekseevich Marakulin lives a contented, if humdrum, life working as a financial clerk in a Petersburg trading company. He is jolted out of his daily routine when, quite unexpectedly, he is accused of embezzlement and loses his job. The iron enters his soul as he gradually becomes aware of the indifference of the majority of people to the misfortunes of others. His change of status will bring him into contact with a number of women whose life experiences bear upon his own, and whose sufferings will lead him to question the justice of God’s universe. Three of the women share the name Vera (“Verushka” or “Verochka” in its affectionate forms), which means “belief” or “faith” in Russian, and this group of characters, which includes Marakulin’s deceased mother, are by implication the “sisters of the cross” referred to in the title.

  In some ways Sisters of the Cross derives from what Donald Fanger has dubbed the “romantic realist” tradition in European literature,5 familiar to us from the work of such writers as Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. In romantic realist works, writes Fanger, “facts become symbols, revealing through the events of the temporal world a transcendent sphere of causes and effects.”6 Remizov’s hero lives in the Burkov flats in Petersburg, a tenement building not unlike the pension Vauquer in Balzac’s novel Le Père Goriot, and like old Goriot he is forced to move apartments and rent a room higher up in the building, an act symbolizing the decline in his financial and social circumstances. Burkov House—the building and the four-chimneyed electricity station overlooking it survive to this day—operates as a symbol of “all Petersburg” in a social sense, therefore, but, as it turns out, may also be the point of contact with metaphysical forces inimical to humankind. (There are plot links here with Andrei Belyi’s novel Petersburg, written a little later and almost certainly influenced by Remizov’s novel.)

  A different intertextual link connects Marakulin with the depiction of the lowly clerk Akaky Akakievich in Gogol’s Petersburg tale, “The Greatcoat” (1842), and here, too, the similarities point beyond those of mere social typicality. Like Gogol’s hero—and like Remizov in real life, incidentally—Marakulin is a master copyist who, as the narrator tells us, for days and nights “traces out one character after another,…until he achieves such perfection that you could display his work in an exhibition.” Most of Akaky Akakievich’s colleagues attribute no significance at all to such a skill, preferring, indeed, to mock him as he immerses himself in the single aspect of his existence that approximates perfection. Marakulin’s devotion to calligraphy is presented as an attribute of freedom, possessing value in and of itself and associated perhaps with the “feeling of inexplicable joy” that the hero experiences at unexpected moments in his life, including that of falling in love.

  Above all, however, Remizov’s novel is replete with social, psychological, and plot motifs reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s work, especially of Crime and Punishment (1866). The hero Marakulin resembles Raskolnikov in many ways, although he lacks the latter’s will to dominate others. The suffering of the women around him leads Marakulin to become increasingly fixated on the wife of the deceased General Kholmogorov, who inhabits one of the richer apartments of Burkov House. Nicknamed the “louse,” she comes to symbolize in his eyes the heartless nonchalance of a life focused entirely on its purely material, nons
piritual attributes. He wonders, however, in words that recall the figure of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), whether a life deprived of suffering, moral responsibility, and fear of mortality might not be the preferred choice of most members of the human race. Parallels with Raskolnikov’s victim—the grasping moneylender Aliona Ivanovna—are inescapable. She was also referred to by Raskolnikov as the “louse,” and although Marakulin does indeed consider various ways in which the louse might be disposed of, it is noticeable that, unlike Dostoevsky’s hero, he cannot bring himself to deny another creature the gift of life.

  As already alluded to, a recurring semantic and stylistic presence in Sisters of the Cross are motifs taken from folklore, old Russian heroic poetry (byliny), and Orthodox Russian apocryphal texts. These convey both the notion of Christ’s suffering (participated in by “sisters [and brothers] of the cross”) and the possibility of forgiveness, the latter particularly embodied in the life of another of the main female characters, the peasant woman and “holy fool” Akumovna. One of the novel’s major stylistic tours de force, indeed, is the account given by Akumovna of her visit to hell, a nightmarish vision that is shot through with motifs from an apocryphal tale concerning the Virgin Mary.7 Marakulin is particularly affected by Akumovna’s profound belief that whatever happens in life, “no one should be blamed.” Nevertheless, he rails inwardly against what he perceives to be his own submissiveness and that of others. Far from believing that self-abasement will bring people closer to God, he becomes more and more convinced that there is no God or that, if he exists, he is indifferent or evil. The “sisters’ ” very different experiences of suffering provide the backdrop against which Marakulin’s Karamazovian rejection of a world seemingly abandoned by God is played out. On the other hand, Sisters of the Cross is undoubtedly a post-Dostoevskian novel that belongs firmly in the Russian modernist tradition.

  Sisters of the Cross is a rich and intricate novel, therefore, that successfully unites ethnographic depiction of the realia of Petersburg in 1910 with folklore traditions inherited from the Russian past—all coexisting with colloquial skaz narration à la Gogol and metaphysical speculation à la Dostoevsky.8 Remizov’s dense “ornamental” style is used to embody a plot that moves both metonymically—the life, sufferings, and dreams of Marakulin interspersed with descriptions of the trials and tribulations of seven “sisters of the cross”—and metaphorically—the complex web of cyclically repeated leitmotifs that imply the existence of another dimension beyond the world of our common interpretation.

  Remizov and his wife left Russia in 1921, never to return. After a period spent in Berlin, they settled in Paris, and Remizov eventually became a leading Russian émigré writer alongside Ivan Bunin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Aleksandr Kuprin, and others. Like most émigré writers, with the notable exception of Vladimir Nabokov, he never found a large audience for his work, either in France or elsewhere, and he was reviled by the Soviet critical establishment until his death in 1957. Remizov’s work always attracted the attention of cognoscenti in the west, however, and his collected works in ten volumes finally appeared in Russia some fifteen years ago.9 He was also a talented graphic artist and illustrator of his own works; a book on this subject was published in the United States not long ago.10

  Sisters of the Cross was regarded by Remizov’s fellow Symbolist writers and critics as among his best and most significant achievements, and the novel was one of the few works that Remizov—an arch-rewriter of his own œuvre—did not tamper with in subsequent years. This makes it all the more extraordinary, perhaps, that the novel has never before appeared in English translation. It was, in fact, not the case, as Remizov later wrote, that his work lacked Russian advocates in England. On the contrary, Dmitry Mirsky, the most gifted of Russian critics living in the west and the author of the greatest history of Russian literature in the English language, made valiant efforts on the writer’s behalf throughout the 1920s. Remizov had “created an entirely fresh style of Russian prose,” he wrote, one based “not on the logic of written language, but on the system of intonations of living speech.”11 Remizov’s intention, Mirsky argued, was to “de-Latinize and de-Frenchify the Russian literary language and to restore to it its natural Russian raciness.”12 By comparison with certain Western European languages, Russian’s highly inflected nature does indeed give it extraordinary syntactic flexibility, and this, together with Remizov’s predilection for obscure archaisms and unusual coinages, was bound to cause difficulty for translators. “He uses so many hard words,” lamented one potential English translator in 1916,13 a sentiment echoed by Mirsky in his letter to Remizov of March 11, 1924: “There is a problem with you—you are untranslatable. But we will see what can be done.”14

  Roger Keys,

  Oxford, April 30, 2017

  In the text that follows, the translators have used the Library of Congress system for transliterating the majority of Russian names.

  NOTES

  1. “ ‘…S Vami beda—ne perevesti’: Pis’ma D. P. Sviatopolka-Mirskogo k A. M. Remizovu, 1922–1929,” published by Robert Hughes in Diaspora. Novye materialy 5 (Paris and St. Petersburg: Athenaeum-Feniks, 2003), 335–401.

  2. “Krestovye sёstry,” in Al’manakh “Shipovnik,” book 13 (Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1910). Reprinted in Sochineniia, vol. 5 (Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1911). Also in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2001), 95–208.

  3. The Clock, trans. John Cournos (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924, and New York: Alfred Knopf, 1924); The Fifth Pestilence and History of the Tinkling Cymbal and Sounding Brass, trans. Alec Brown (London: Wishart and Co., 1927).

  4. Alexei Remizov, Vstrechi. Petersburgskii buerak (Paris: Lev, 1981), 36. Also in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10 (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2003), 197.

  5. Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

  6. Ibid., 129.

  7. “Khozhdenie Bogoroditsy po mukam” (Journey of the Mother of God Through Hell), dating to the twelfth century. The original Greek text is said to be from the fourth or fifth century.

  8. The best general treatment of the novel in English is to be found in Greta N. Slobin’s Remizov’s Fictions, 1900–1921 (DeKalb: Illinois University Press, 1991), 96–107.

  9. Remizov, Sobranie sochinenii, vols. 1–10 (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2000–2003), ed. A. M. Gracheva, T. G. Ivanova, A. V. Lavrov, N. N. Skatov, O. P. Raevskaia-Kh’iuz, and N. M. Solntseva. Two additional volumes (11 and 12; St Petersburg: Rostok) appeared in 2015 and 2016, respectively, ed. A. M. Gracheva, A. D’Ameliia, A. V. Lavrov, E. R. Obatnina, O. P. Raevskaia-Kh’iuz, N. N. Skatov, and T. S. Tsar’kova.

  10. Julia P. Friedman, Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2010).

  11. D. S. Mirsky, Modern Russian Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 113

  12. D. S. Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature: 1881–1925 (London: George Routledge, 1926, and New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926); incorporated in A History of Russian Literature (London: Routledge, 1949; abridged edition, ed. F. J. Whitfield 1964), 479.

  13. The translator referred to is the Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, to whom Mirsky dedicated his A History of Russian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Death of Dostoyevsky (1881) (London: Routledge, 1927). She went on to edit and translate a collection of Remizov’s animal tales, entitled The Book of the Bear (London: Nonesuch, 1926). The quotation is taken from page 193 of Marilyn Schwinn Smith’s informative article “Aleksei Remizov’s English-Language Translators: New Material,” A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, ed. Anthony Cross (Cambridge: Open Book, 2012), 189–200.

  14. “ ‘…S Vami beda—ne perevesti’: Pis’ma D. P. Sviatopolka-Mirskogo k A. M. Remizovu, 1922–1929,” published by Robert Hughes in Diaspora. Novye materialy 5 (Paris and St. Petersburg: Athenaeum-Feniks, 2003), 335–401. For information conce
rning Remizov’s relationship with Mirsky, see G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  It was not because their duties brought them close together that Marakulin and Glotov were friends. Neither of them could manage without the other: Piotr Alekseevich gave out the payment slips, Aleksandr Ivanovich was the cashier. The order in which they worked was as follows: Marakulin would write only in ink and Glotov would count out only in gold. And they were both so different and unlike each other—the one being narrow chested and with a thin line of moustache, the other broad shouldered and with whiskers like a cat, one looking out from the depths of his being, while the other was always ready to break into a smile. All the same they were friends who ate at the same table.

  They both had a distinguishing mark—part of their nature and so deep there could be no hiding it. It would shine out from under the eyelids of a person even when asleep, and anyway it didn’t matter in the slightest whether it was buried in the pupil of the eye or ran from the pupil around the eyeball. It was like an insect’s proboscis or a feeler that both had in common, and it’s not as though this feeler clung to life, but somehow sucked into itself everything that was living around it, down to the merest blade of grass that breathed, to the tiniest stone that grew, and sucking them in with a kind of voracious joy—with a joy, indeed, that you might find infectious. That’s what it was.

  Who needed to, could see it; who couldn’t see, could feel it; and who couldn’t feel, could guess it.

  They were young—both were thirty or thirtysomething; they were successful—they somehow managed to make a go of everything; they were physically strong—they were never ill, never complained about their teeth, and they had no obligations either in wedlock or out of wedlock; each was alone in the steppe, as it were, and the steppe stretched out far and wide in all its might around them, free, unbridled and unconfined—one’s very own.