Remizov

 MONTAGNES RUSSES

On Aleksey Remizov

It’s an impudence on my part to write about Aleksey Remizov, to try to introduce to Polish readers this Russian writer who has such a completely unique character. I write of him not as a literary critic, which I’m not, and even less as a literary scholar; I write because I am astonished by this writer, and I would like to share my late discovery.

Remizov’s prose seems to me composed not of words as we commonly think of them, but of a living, tangible fabric present to every sense. It contains pain “to the point of a whine,” to the point of cruel bitterness, blind revolt, and also “angelic tears,” a sensitive and tender all-forgiving regard, a love restorative of man, a love of life, every the most tormented and downtrodden life. A reader is constantly thrown from the darkest pitch black to the stars and again thrown back into complete night. I would not recommend the expedition into the montagnes russes1 of his books to every gentle sensibility.

And every day Verka goes down those stairs to school, carrying the slippery filth and foulness of the staircase around with her feet.

And I don’t know why there’s that sticky foulness, that stuffy cramped apartment, when the stars have such a wide berth in the clear heavens and transparent streams flow across our harsh earth . . . 

Here in our attic, which the water doesn’t reach and where only the wind wanders in the cold nights, when the stars come out I whisper to them under the steely noise of wires, through the window frame:

“stars, most beautiful stars of mine.”

I know of no writer who voices the Russian language so sensually, colorfully, richly, and sonorously, with a rhythm and diction that grow from the Muscovite era, before Peter, long before the “too German” epoch of Karamzin’s and Pushkin’s “too French” one.

Aleksey Tolstoy, author of Peter the Great, told me in Tashkent that as a writer he owes everything to Remizov. But in the heavy, thick historical prose of Tolstoy’s novel I did not find Remizov’s stars, I found nothing of the light subtlety that runs through Remizov’s work.

Remizov’s prose should be read aloud, so important is the texture of the words and the rhythm of the sentences. You have only to immerse yourself in this world a little to feel the impoverishment of sound in your own words, the randomness, the lack of finesse, the trivialization of glib, threadbare phrases thoughtlessly repeated.

Remizov is the first formalist on the list of heretical writers in Zhdanov’s anathema. This discoverer of unrepeatable sentences and harmonies, a formalist? But I have not found one passage in this writer’s prose where the most unexpected sentence, rhythm, or word was not a necessity, a budding of inner content that could find expression only in that one word, that syntax. If you consider haphazard chiseling and language play that are unconnected to content to be formalist, then Remizov is the least formalist of any writer I know.

The Petersburg period from Pushkin to Blok is really the only Russian world to which I have had intimate access, until now. After a period of striving to acquaint myself with Remizov, I now discover new facets of Russia of which I knew very little and always from the outside, facets that are a hundred times more Russian. This world is so terrible, and so far away from me at times, so alien in its life’s passions, those of every life, even in its mercy and sweetness, which coexist painfully, but quite naturally, with a world of breathtaking cruelty, injustice, blood, and humiliation, that I more and more often put his books away, lacking the strength to go on reading them. I lack the strength to be harried on every page as if on a speeding car, not at a funfair but across some vast montagne russe built between heaven and earth. Remizov’s genius obliges me not only to come to know this world but also in some way to honor and even grow to love it.

Moscow and the Russian provinces around it—that is Remizov’s world. His language, like his strange handwriting, is no mere pastiche of the seventeenth century. The spirit of that century is resurrected in him but at the same time it is made contemporary. It grows not from imitation but from Remizov’s own being, not just from his enormous knowledge of that world, his feeling for the Russian language, but also from an inner blood connection, a Moscow childhood, an unbroken tradition and a memory of the centuries bordering on sorcery.

Remizov lives on the edge of the world of fantasy, not just in his fairy tales and stories, but he himself is forever surrounded by fantasy figures, which for him are just as alive as living people. On the table lies a tattered dwarf: “It’s accompanied me since 1921.” Remizov tells of gnomes, of Asyta, the king of monkeys, as if these creatures visited him daily. And at the same time his fairy tales, like Tale of Two Beasts: Ikhnelat, are based on many years of study. Remizov found the first sources in Sanskrit, a Tibetan version of Persian, Arabic, Yiddish, Latin translations from which these fairy tales passed into all European languages, and constantly changing with every epoch and country, they became the favorite reading of Muscovite Rus'. This particular tale with Remizov’s own illustrations was published by his friends in 1950 in an edition of three hundred copies. His fantastic stories about the possessed, also published in three hundred copies in 1951, tell the love of Savva Grudtsyn and the sufferings of the possessed Salomonia. Into the seventeenth-century story about Savva, Remizov inserts an unchecked invocation of love—breathless as an avalanche, growing like a flame—to the lover he has killed in a fit. Two packed pages without a comma or a full stop. I remember pages in Joyce’s Ulysses that flow like a current, without commas or periods. But the worlds of these two books are too remote for comparison. It’s probably only in the medieval legends and tales of love that you find Remizov’s large breath and thrust.

The tale of Salomonia breathes a morbid atmosphere of cruel fate, despair, and possession, and, toward the end, of all-embracing mystical charity. Even Dostoevsky seems less obscure in comparison; after all, he read Les Misérables, and Georges Sand, and next to Remizov, Dostoevsky’s Russianness is “groomed.”

Remizov published his first book almost fifty years ago, in 1902. In emigration, he published nothing in Russian for eighteen years. From 1931 right up to 1949. None of his books has appeared in Russia for twenty-six years. To one of the last Remizov added about sixty-two titles of previously published books! Four of his novels have appeared in French. La Famille Bourkow with an introduction by Romain Rolland. His novel Sur champs d’azur came out at Plon in the excellent series Feux croisés, which includes prominent writers from all over the world, even one Korean writer (though there is not a single Pole).

I first heard about Remizov from Dmitry Filosofov, who had been a friend of his at the beginning of the twentieth century. He spoke to me about him around 1924. He was just back from the West, and he’d met Remizov briefly in Germany. He was visibly under the impression of their conversation, which as he said had been too “brutal,” because they had to speak of the most important matters in haste. He told me only: “I told Remizov that he should go back to Russia. He is too exclusively Russian. He won’t be able to bear emigration.” These words surprised me; Filosofov was always vehemently against all returns by what were then called smenovekhovtsy.2 I didn’t manage to get more out of him at the time. He kept repeating: “He won’t be able to bear emigration . . .” A few days later a postcard from Remizov arrived. The height of German kitsch: a fat German in a brightly colored jacket grabs the tail of a fat piglet. From some kind of masochism Filosofov pinned the card to the wall of his room on Sienna Street.

I met Remizov a few years later at one of Diaghilev’s ballets. He was standing with Prokofiev during the intermission. The diminutive figure of Remizov caught my eye at once, with his large, almost Chinese head and dark glasses. I was struck by the gaze, immediate and so very personal and cordial, from behind those dark glasses, by the attention he granted me at the time. He was then interesting to me mostly indirectly, as a friend of Rozanov and Blok. But I had read only scraps of Remizov, and incidentally at that, on the side. I cared about the vivid details about Blok, Rozanov described by their friend.

Only in 1938, on a Warsaw tram traveling down Nowy Świat, did I discover in Nouvelles littéraires the first real prose of Remizov, his short stories. Even through an irritating translation, irritating because so remote, I felt such a knot of desolate solitude and pain that I still remember the place where I read the story. It was a fragment from the as-yet-unpublished novel The Music Teacher. I was overcome by acute regret that living in Paris I had made no attempt to visit him and come to know him better. From that day another thirteen years passed, and what years they were. Now I suddenly heard that Remizov was living completely alone; in 1945 he lost his wife, the closest companion of all his years of misfortune, and all his work, he was almost entirely blind, poor, living with the fitful help of a handful of friends. Lonely, suspended in a void, not like Pan Twardowski3 between heaven and earth, but between the hell of quarrels, jealousies, and poverty in emigration and the hell of repression in his native country.

I went to see him: a card on the door with strange handwriting telling the visitor to knock loudly, and a light, quick step inside. The door opens and I recognize the same little figure, just more humpbacked from bending over books, and the big Chinese face with the charming smile. With the same warm smile he leads me down a long, dark corridor to a bright study and bedroom. Shelves with books, walls stuck from floor to ceiling with little clippings of abstract paintings that look like Chinese screens and drawings by Paul Klee. Those walls glow silver and red. Remizov sits me down across from himself on a sofa worn threadbare by visitors, and he himself sits at a table with a big inkwell.

“What do you live on?” I ask him outright after a brief exchange.

“Oh, you see, there are many more kind people then we tend to imagine. They take care of me. Here, today, I have a piece of pork fat, du lard, a good neighbor brought it for tomorrow. And in the evening, tea with bread is enough for me. If only you knew how good it is to work in this complete silence and solitude. The last few years, I almost never leave this apartment. I’m so happy I live on the rue Boileau—after all, it was Boileau who wrote L’Art poétique. The French really know how to work the word, they know what the word is, while we Russians are still only talking about content. How few people understand the meaning of a word. Because either they are geniuses, like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy—whatever they tried to write, they could carry it off!” (I think of Mallarmé’s remark to Degas, when the painter complained that he had a bunch of ideas, but he couldn’t manage to write a decent sonnet: “Mais Degas, ce n’est pas avec des idées que l’on fait des vers . . . C’est avec des mots.”)

When that most Russian of Russians, Remizov, pronounces sentences in French, I don’t so much have the impression that he’s speaking French with a Russian accent, more that he assimilates French words into Russian. How very Russian French words like concièrge, coffre, or ordure sound on his tongue. And how are they any worse than the existing Russian words taken from foreign languages, like parikmakher (barber) or galstuk (necktie). Let purists take no offense. In 1833, Mickiewicz, who after all had not been in Paris long, wrote blithely in his articles of “eklerers” (éclaireurs), “emetes” (émeutes), and of the fact that émigrés doomed to inactivity “ruminate” (ruminent)!4

Even in the best translation we fail to reach the core of Remizov’s language, but Łobodowski’s translation seems to be closer than the best French translations, so diametrically opposed is the spirit of the French language to that dark treasure house full of twists, that shimmering sensuality of Remizov’s tongue. The author speaks of the word with mysterious piety, as of a word born from “the radiance of blood, for in the beginning was blood.”

Rozanov, who shared more than friendship with Remizov, for they had a great affinity and a passionate, arch-Russian attitude toward life, in his book Solitaria railed at the printing press: “As if that cursed Gutenberg had measured all writers with his bronze tongue.” Printing had caused literature to lose its mystery, the enchantment of intimacy possessed by the literature of the Middle Ages. Remizov’s manuscripts, unpublished, written in graceful handwriting with drawings by the author, bound in covers made by the author: Is this perhaps a return to the intimate, medieval literature of which Rozanov wrote with such ecstasy, literature not written for the Prix Goncourt, or for American speculation on best sellers and Hollywood, or for the censors of Czytelnik or Gosizdat? (“It’s not worth writing if you’re read by only a thousand people,” I am told by a jaded but gifted writer dazzled by the news of Koestler’s having bought an island).

In Remizov’s currently unavailable book Whirlwind Russia (published in Paris by Tair in 1926) there is a chapter dedicated to the memory of Blok, also a friend of his. “There is not one among the younger writers untouched by a ray from his star,” Remizov writes of him, and he quotes the words Blok spoke to him in the last year of his life: “It’s impossible to write under this kind of pressure”—but remembering those words Remizov adds in those first years of exile that for a Russian, writing outside Russia is even harder, and if you have to perish, it’s better to do it in Russia. To him it also seemed at that time that for a writer to leave his country amounted to suicide, but Remizov did not cease to write. He creates the work of his life, cut off from his homeland for thirty years. Volumes with memoirs of Russia, fairy tales and historical tales, grow despite his solitude and his poverty.

Perhaps not despite but because of them? Perhaps it is necessary to pass through desolation, through this desert, to arrive at this radiance of language, this glow of goodness and these “angels’ tears.”

A cedar is born not of gardens but deserts

The void is the cradle of giants

Great poets only arrive

when they don’t exist!

Suddenly, after eighteen years, four books are published in 1949, two of them by a group of friends as poor as Remizov himself, but one by YMCA press: With Cropped Eyes. His memories from early childhood through the first exile. A reader insensitive to the word may hear the small print run of these books—written in strange and difficult language—with a smile of condescending pity, the pity of people who think in terms of mass culture, noisy publicity, and fat earnings. But it seems to me that when millions of books printed under the pressure of one sort of power or another, some fad or another, perish and fall to dust, these books of Remizov’s will endure and nourish us.

The Music Teacher (1923–1939) is an autobiographical book, as is everything he writes. Not just in the books that describe the present or the confessional fairy tales; Remizov writes of himself even when he describes the remote past: “I tell of my past from the ninth century onward,” he writes in the introduction to Dancing Demon.

When he works on Tristan and Isolde—that love story that, as he says, came to Russia by way of a Belorussian version—when he works on fairy tales whose origins he finds in Sanskrit literature, or when he writes about the cruel fates of the first Russian printers, who had to flee from Russia to Lithuania with Prince Kurbsky after the burning of the Moscow printing house, then on to Lvov, from where Batory moved one of them to Kraków, ordering him to cast not letters but weaponry; or when he writes of Avvakuum, burnt at the stake for defending the old versions of holy scriptures, of about the mice who were his friends at the time of the German occupation of Paris, about the hunger and cold of the war years, in that meld of vision and piercing realism, Kafkaesque fantasy and the most sensual delight in the life’s phenomena, we feel everywhere the writer’s intimate confessions about himself. “I only know how to write about myself,” Remizov tells me. I remind him of a page from his story about the printers who fled Moscow to the West. “Ah yes,” he says. “That story was written on the basis of documentation. I read everything that could ever have been written about it.”

The old man bows his big Chinese head with the glasses and speaks to me as if confessing. “That . . . that was from memory . . . You can’t learn things like that, or make them up. It’s all from the depths of memory . . .” And when Remizov says during our conversation: “You Poles were in Smolensk at that time,” it’s as if he’s speaking of yesterday that he witnessed those events. Born in Moscow, living outside Russia for thirty years, this writer has the history of his country in his blood and in the folds of his brain.

This indefatigable seventy-year-old writer, who has to grope for his inkwell with one hand, because he can no longer see it, and who touches the end of his cigarette with a finger before he lights it, for he doesn’t see it, either, continues to write and bind in his library, volumes of books written by hand in thick letters and very black ink. Surrounded by books, by silver, red, sapphire picture cuttings, and a tight, a very tight circle of devoted friends, torn from their own world like him, solitary and poor—Remizov has preserved his burning heart and creative power through all the injustices, ambushes, and humiliations of emigration.

“Humiliation,” Rozanov wrote, “after a few days always transforms itself into a spiritual light, to which nothing can compare. It is not implausible to say that some of the highest spiritual illuminations are unattainable without first suffering humiliation, that some spiritual absolutes would remain hidden forever, closed to those who were always victorious, who celebrated only triumphs and were always ‘on top.’”

The humiliation of every emigration that lasts not days but years gives rise not just to bitterness, bickering, and hatred, it also yields light.

The more I think about emigration, the more it seems to me that a phenomenon like creative power in the desert of exile is the greatest justification for the wanderings of emigrants. The most Russian of writers has become universal through his faithfulness to that Russianness and creative passion.

Once in the period of Poland’s brief and phony flirtation with the Soviets, Radek5 in an article for Wiadomości arrogantly settled scores with the Russian emigration. He wrote that it had given the world only Parisian chauffeurs and cabarets. The fact that thirty years after leaving Russia, Remizov is writing, and more, able to publish a few books with the funding of those impoverished Russian followers—that fact, which is not an isolated case, is the reply to that article.

“Heavy is the road of exile,” but what if it leads to pure stars moving in the pure heavens, as Remizov writes, and to the transparent streams running across our harsh earth?

MEMORIES OF STAROBIELSK

Essays Between Art and History

JÓZEF CZAPSKI