Remizov - Sisters of the Cross - Introduction

 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, nonspiritual 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

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.