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.

Russian Tales of Demonic Possession Translations of Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia

 Introduction

Russia Bedeviled

Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia, the two tales offered here, propel us into the realm of evil with singular force. Each tale poses hard questions. Why does evil afflict us, and how does it manifest itself? Does it emerge from within the afflicted person, or is its locus external? Can it be overcome? These questions have been with us for as long as we have been human, and each generation has wrestled with them anew. Both Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia foreground the evil that befalls ordinary, fallible men and women, and both attempt to explain its origins, its consequences, and the means by which it can be rooted out. 

The original versions of the tales were penned in the seventeenth century, at a time when Russia was embarking cautiously on the transition from medieval aesthetics and modes of thought to more modern, western European ones. Both reflect a distinctly pre-modern view of the world, and both present reality in ways that are sometimes difficult for today’s readers to make sense of. Neither attempts to psychologize its protagonist, so the motivations for Savva’s and Solomonia’s actions are often unclear, and plotlines hare off in unexpected directions. Russian Orthodoxy provides the canvas on which each tale is embroidered, but the authors interlard Church teachings with folk beliefs and carryovers from Russia’s pagan past, making it difficult to determine which value system is in the ascendant at any given moment. Setting, like character development, is reduced to a minimum. Perhaps as a result of these features, relatively little attention has been paid to either tale outside a small community of scholars. 

And yet, Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia appeal to our deepest emotions and instincts, and they have much to offer present-day audiences. Aleksey Remizov, one of Russia’s premier modernists, avidly devoured medieval tales. Throughout his long and prolific career, he returned again and again to Russia’s pre-Petrine legacy, adapting and reworking early texts. He was particularly fascinated by The Tale of the Demoniac Solomonia and published his first rewrite of it in the émigré journal Volya Rossii in 1929. He went on to create several new variants, including a French translation and hand-illustrated albums in Russian and French.[1] His final treatment, which has been used for this translation, marks a return to the Russian, text-only format. He came to Savva Grudtsyn, by contrast, relatively late in his career, and he adapted it only once, at around the same time as he worked on his last rendering of Solomonia.[2] But he paired his Savva with Solomonia in a slim volume entitled Besnovatye (TheDemoniacs, alternately, The Possessed), from which we may infer his partiality for the tale as well as his recognition of its essential kinship with Solomonia. 

Although Remizov’s adaptations fill a number of narrative gaps in the original Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia—and thereby bring them into closer conformity with modern audience expectations—they nevertheless track fairly faithfully with their seventeenth-century models. Indeed, both the medieval and the modernist renderings of the tales share similar approaches and structures. Both heavily foreground the actions of their protagonists, Savva and Solomonia, who are young people caught in the process of crossing a significant threshold into adulthood: the merchant Savva has recently set off on his first unsupervised trading venture; the priest’s daughter Solomonia has just married. It is precisely at these junctures that disaster strikes—dark powers interpose themselves in the young people’s affairs and compel them to forsake their human companions for demonic ones. Both versions of each tale contain a number of empathetic supporting characters who seek to arrest the protagonists’ fall, but almost all of these potential rescuers turn out to be either myopic or ineffectual. Abetted by the human community’s seeming impotence, demons whisk the inexperienced young people away from their proper places and subject them to remarkable geographical to-ing and fro-ing, all of which reeks of both sulfur and illicit adventure. The underworld unfolds itself before us in awe-inspiring ghastliness, but in each tale at least one righteous figure crops up and offers well-intentioned advice on how to escape. Ultimately, the all-merciful Virgin succors both Savva and Solomonia, and the two sufferers embrace celibacy and are forgiven their sins. 

But the most striking confluence between the two tales, in both their seventeenth- and twentieth-century instantiations, is their shared vision of evil. Evil intrudes into each of the narratives in the form of a demon—not, in other words, as Satan himself but, rather, as one of his foot soldiers. For much of his tale, Savva is under the sway of a demon disguised as a perfectly respectable young man; toward the end of his ordeal this demon begins to multiply in alarming fashion. Solomonia, too, falls victim to a single demon (who, however, is definitely not respectable), but she, like Savva, subsequently succumbs to a multitude of diabolical familiars. In both cases, evil is external in origin, anthropomorphic in form, subordinate in echelon, and, ultimately, plural in number. It adheres to its victims tenaciously, and the tried-and-true rituals for vanquishing it—confession and exorcism—prove unsuccessful. Intractable demons, cunningly exploiting the tales’ physical and moral interstices, call the narrative shots, causing both the seventeenth- and the twentieth-century worlds of Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia to founder and teeter perilously on the brink of dualist heresy. Only at the utmost extreme do Savva and Solomonia back away from the abyss and, freed from their demons, return to orthodoxy. 

Russia’s Demons

 Devils and demons have a long and illustrious lineage in Russian letters—we do no more than scratch its surface by pointing out examples such as Pushkin’s “Demons,” Lermontov’s “Demon,” Gogol’s “Night before Christmas,” Dostoevsky’s Demons, Sologub’s Petty Demon, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line. These works, together with a host of other poems, stories, and novels, showcase the devil and his minions in infinitely varied and fascinating ways. As in most European cultures, the genealogy of Russia’s diabolical creatures reaches back centuries and reflects a series of unspoken (and, by the standards of official ecclesiastical culture, unspeakable) crosspollinations between Christian and pagan belief systems. Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia’s demons live out their own discrete existences at individual points along an unholy spectrum that extends from the imposing hell of Orthodoxy to the seamy underworld of folklore. 

 Who are these nightmarish creatures? In part, we can extrapolate an answer from nomenclature, since Russian provides a remarkable variety of designations for evil beings. From the Scriptures, early Russians took “Sotana,” or Satan; “diiavol,” the devil; “Veel’zevul,” Beelzebub; “Iskusitel,” the Tempter; and a host of other euphemistic circumlocutions. The Greek “dæmon” was rendered sometimes as “bes” and sometimes as “demon”; while “chert,” or devil, came into usage on the heels of sustained contact with Poland.[3] The pre-Christian folk tradition contributed the “leshy,” a forest demon or wood goblin; the “vodyanoy,” a water demon; the “polevoy” or “lugovoy,” a field or meadow demon; and the “bolotnoy,” a swamp demon.[4] These represent just a fraction of the possibilities, however, suggesting that Russians have enjoyed a complex, well-articulated, and abiding relationship with devils and demons of all sorts. 

 Another way of approaching Russian devils and demons is to examine their forms and functions. Both the canonical Old Testament and the Apocrypha provide a Jewish underpinning for early Christian demonology, which is then elaborated and expanded on over the course of several hundred years. Ultimately, the Christian narrative recognizes a single, terrifyingly powerful Devil but also multitudinous demonic henchmen, all of whom work to undermine man’s quest for redemption.[5] One of the most insidious of the demonic acts is to create chaos by loosing the powers of “disorder and planlessness,”[6] as we will have ample opportunity to witness in Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia. 

 The Christian Devil enters the earliest Russian Orthodox texts and icons as a somewhat nebulous figure, lacking the sharper definition that pagan and folk accretions would later provide.[7] Unfortunately, our evidence for the early pagan side of the Russian demonic synthesis is—and seems fated to remain—woefully inadequate. Written sources for polytheism among the eastern Slavs originate in monasteries and barely mention the indigenous belief system that Christianity supplanted. Ethnographic studies and place names allow us to augment these meager sources, but only up to a certain point. What we can say with a degree of confidence, though, is that various gods and goddesses seem to have governed life’s most essential activities, including conception and birth as well as planting, harvesting, and the pasturing of livestock. Unfortunately, we lack unequivocal evidence for the presence (or absence) of pre-Christian devils or demons. 

 We do know, however, that at least some of eastern Slavdom’s pagan deities survived Prince Vladimir’s adoption of Christianity. These survivors were sometimes elevated to the status of Orthodox saints but were as often as not demoted to household or nature demons[8] who, well into the modern period, played an active role in Russian village life. Unlike Christianity’s infernal devils, Russia’s folk demons lodge in the mundane world, often in places that mark boundaries between one type of physical space and another, such as swamps, caves, abysses, and ravines. They ply their unholy trade at liminal times and places, overtaking the unwary in doorways, in cemeteries, and at crossroads, at midnight, midday, or midyear. In contrast to Christian-inflected devils, they tend to harry the heedless rather than to beset the morally depraved,[9] although they are perfectly capable of burning down a barn or drowning a foolhardy youth if provoked. 

 In the nineteenth century, demons move beyond church and village and infiltrate the world of secular art. Writers and painters augment the earlier Russian diabolical arsenal with the western European “grand Devil in his majesty,” a figure who is distinguished by his power and singularity and who emerges with particular clarity in Romanticism.[10] This shift away from the demons of the pre-modern tradition toward a lone, majestic devil is in no way absolute—Gogol’s folk devils preserve the earlier paradigm, while Dostoevsky’s multifarious devils and demons defy easy categorization—but there is nevertheless a substantial broadening of possibilities. 

 The nineteenth-century process of reimagining literary demons continues into the twentieth. Most saliently, the Symbolists initiate an “astonishing surge” of interest in depictions of the demonic, casting the devil as a proud rebel who spurns conventional morality, as a spirit of malaise, as an agent of apocalypse,[11]or even as an all-powerful force capable of challenging God.[12] The Symbolist devil, who transforms order into chaos, nicely mirrors modernism’s “fragmentation of the previously monolithic world-view of the realist novel.”[13]

 Even the advent of Soviet power does not wholly efface Russian literature’s fascination with unholy powers. Mikhail Bulgakov’s diabolical entourage in The Master and Margarita reintroduces an entire gamut of demonic beings, both Russian and western. The deeply erudite professor Woland reminds us, on first appearance, of Goethe’s Faust, but later, in his dealings with Margarita, he behaves more like Mephistopheles. In the opening scene of his “magic show” he adopts a world-weary, Romantic guise, but he subsequently performs a series of pranks worthy of a Russian folk demon. In the novel’s final scenes he is resplendent, easily the equal of Yeshua, Bulgakov’s Christ figure. Woland’s protégés, taken as a cohort, are similarly heterogeneous: Azazelo hearkens back to the enigmatic Azazel of Hebrew Scriptures; Korovev looks suspiciously like Ivan Karamazov’s tawdry devil; and Behemoth—the Book of Job notwithstanding—is reminiscent of trickster folk demons. All three ultimately undergo transfigurations similar to Woland’s, after which they are revealed to be austere and deadly serious spirits. 

 The demonic continues to entice Russian writers even after Bulgakov. Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, with its devils masquerading as angels, provides a bone-chilling example of late-Soviet, demon-induced chaos. In Erofeev’s postmodernist vision, nothing is what it seems; his hapless antihero Venya, like the traveler in Pushkin’s “Demons,” finds himself astray in an unrecognizable, demon-beguiled universe. 

 In rounding out our treatment of the Russian devil, we should turn briefly to the question of how he may be recognized. What, in short, do Russian devils and demons look like? F. Buslaev has suggested that the earliest iconographers were parsimonious in their depictions, as if fearful that vividly demonic features might unduly entice viewers. Accordingly, devils were often portrayed schematically, as semi-humans, serpents, or animals.[14] Occasionally, however, they took on human lineaments, in which case they dressed like foreigners. In early literary works, demons sometimes assumed deceptively attractive disguises, masquerading as friends, monks, women, or even angels.[15] Folk demons, by contrast, might have wings or tails or be covered in fur. Those who lived underwater could be blue and slimy or scaly. They might sport long beards, or they might appear as half-man, half-fish. Forest demons often posed as conventional peasants but were capable of metamorphosing into other shapes and sizes.[16] Demons in the modern period manifested yet broader possibilities: they sometimes adopted the guise of brooding giants, like Vrubel’s famous paintings of Lermontov’s demon; at other times they dressed like shabby relatives, like Ivan Karamazov’s devil. Then again, they might be interiorized as overmastering passions, like Father Sergius’s spirit of excessive pride. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a form that Russian devils have not taken, making it quite challenging to discern and evade them. The weak or even the merely unwary were—and presumably still are—in constant danger of falling prey to “a diabolical imitation instead of an authentic Creation.”[17]

1. 

Julia Friedman, Beyond Symbolism and Structuralism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 68. 

2. 

A.M. Gracheva, “Povest’ A.M. Remizova ‘Savva Grudtsyn’ i ee drevnerusskii prototip,” TODRL 33 (1979): 391. 

3. 

F.A. Riazanovskii, Demonologiia v drevne-russkoi literature (Moscow, 1915), 32–44. 

4. 

Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), 64. 

5. 

Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (New York: Meridian, 1977), 60–66. 

6. 

Robert Detweiler, “From Chaos to Legion to Chance: The Double Play of Apocalyptic and Mimesis,” in The Dæmonic Imagination: Biblical Text and Secular Story, ed. Robert Detweiler and William G. Doty (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 1. 

7. 

Simon Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Literary Demonism and the Orthodox Tradition,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 33–35; also Fedor Buslaev, Bes (SPb, 1881), 7. 

8. 

Iu. M. Lotman and B.A. Uspenskii, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the End of the Eighteenth Century),” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky and trans. Robert Sorenson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 36. 

9. 

Faith Wigzell, “The Russian Folk Devil and His Literary Reflections,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 63–65. 

10. 

Pamela Davidson, “Introductory Essay,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 2–3. 

11. 

Julian W. Connolly, The Intimate Stranger: Meetings with the Devil in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 277–80. 

12. 

S.L. Slobodniuk, D’iavoly ‘Serebrianogo’ veka (Drevnii gnostitsizm i russkaia literatura, 1890-1930) (SPb: Aleteiia, 1998), 15. 

13. 

Adam Weiner, “The Demonomania of Sorcerers: Satanism in the Russian Symbolist Novel,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 373. 

14. 

Buslaev, Bes, 7–8. 

15. 

Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell,” 38.

16. 

Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 64–70. 

17. 

Johanna Renate Döring-Smirnov, “Dämonologische Vorstellungen in zwei anonymen russischen Erzählungen des XVII. Jahrhunderts,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 31/31 (1985): 111.

Translator: Marcia A. Morris

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