Aleksei Remizov: the Imp has landed!

Aleksei Remizov, c. 1907

On 23 April 1914 Bertram Christian, of the publishers James Nisbet & Co. Ltd, wrote to George Calderon suggesting that he produce for them a volume of stories by the Russian writer Aleksei Remizov (1877-1957). There had been a glowing review of Remizov’s fairy tales in the TLS of 9 April 1914 and ‘again today’, Christian wrote, there had been an article about Russian writers which referred to Remizov as ‘a great man [who] may be said to be the writer of the most beautiful stories that Russia is bringing forth’. The author of the two pieces in the TLS was the Russophile Stephen Graham, and at the beginning of the first he had written: ‘Someone of sympathetic genius should translate the new fairy tales of Remizov. These are the most delicate and fresh creations of today.’

Without a doubt, George would have been that ‘sympathetic genius’, as he had spent twenty years studying Russian folklore, relished its humour, and like Remizov loved quirky words. Moreover, as Roger Keys puts it in his profound Introduction to the just-published Sisters of the Cross, Remizov’s style is a ‘singular amalgam of colloquial, literary and folkloric Russian’ and George would have been able to handle all three with precision.

But he didn’t. He was deep in a lucrative contract translating Il’ia Tolstoi’s memoirs of Leo, as well as working on Tahiti, his ballet libretti for Fokine and, probably, his blockbuster on folk religions Demon Feasts. So, dear follower, you have probably never heard of Aleksei Remizov. There was a cluster of book translations in the 1920s by ‘cognoscenti in the west’, as Keys puts it, some of whom knew Remizov in his Paris emigration, and there have been a number of English-language academic publications of Remizov works since 1981, but the first are now antiquarian rarities and the second never penetrated beyond Academe. That is about to change, I hope, with the publication in 2018 of this 175-page translation:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Sisters of the Cross is by common consent Remizov’s best short novel. It will blow your mind. If the opening, in which a pay clerk is suddenly sacked for no apparent reason and sinks to the bottom of society, strikes you as conventional (the ‘little man’ of Russian literature), you will soon realise that the joke is on you. This work is post-Dostoevsky, post-Tolstoi, post-Chekhov. It is a classic of Russian modernism, to be set on a par with Belyi’s Petersburg. You will find yourself in a world where it is an article of faith that dreams and cartomancy tell the truth, where the spirits of woodland and water torment a property developer to death, an old woman goes to hell and comes back to describe it convincingly, houses ignite spontaneously, a man with ‘no head, his mouth in his back and his eyes on his shoulders’ eats so much honey in the comb that he has ‘bees inside him, a whole hive of them’, and sees the salvation of Russia in flies…

The ‘sisters of the cross’ are the women whom the destitute hero, Marakulin, encounters in the vast barrack of St Petersburg flats that he is reduced to living in. Most of them are brutally exploited and abused, especially but not only sexually. Yet the various ways in which these women respond to their oppression and survive are deeply instructive to Marakulin. The women save him from illness, despair and suicide, and he falls tragically in love with one, who is driven into a classy form of prostitution. Some work hard, drag themselves up, soothe others, bring joy into the barrack world by their spontaneity, and are always engaged in helping or at least communicating with others. A paragraph repeated in different contexts in the book is:

If people studied each other carefully and took note of one another, if they all were granted eyes with which to see, then only a heart of stone would be able to bear all the horror and mystery of life. Or perhaps none of us would need a heart of stone if only individuals took note of one another.

Other women just disappear, as if in Stalin’s purges or China today. Three are called Vera (Faith). Several seem to believe that it is their Christian duty to submit, to suffer, to forgive, and one even believes it is her own fault if a revolutionary comrade, and then her own brother, rapes her repeatedly. ‘Nobody should be blamed’, is the cartomancer-holy fool’s refrain. There is a very strong current of Russian Orthodox kenoticism here: the belief in being a strastoterpets, a martyr who gives herself like the Lamb to the slaughter. But if ‘nobody should be blamed’, is nobody guilty, asks Marakulin, and does nobody have self-responsibility? It is an old, old Russian problem.

The last thing I want to do, however, is give the impression that Sisters of the Cross is heavy and depressing. Certainly you need strong nerves to take the brutality of much of it, which I am sure is utterly authentic. But Remizov not only looks like an imp, his whole approach to writing is impish. He constantly catches the reader unawares (‘If only [he] would drink an infusion of horse manure, then everything would be all right’), he plays with the reader, his plot is never predictable, he embeds leitmotifs and refrains in his prose that he dares his reader to notice and appreciate, he suddenly digresses into anecdote and joke. My only reservation about this translation, in fact, is that it does not appear to reproduce all the idiosyncratic paragraphing and typographic layout of the original, but tends to give the impression of a much more assimilated English paragraph structure. I immediately qualify that, though, because a) my copy of the original Russian may not be canonical, b) Remizov himself can produce monster prose periods, so there is no such thing as a ‘Remizov paragraph style’, c) the translators have well over a hundred years between them of working with Russian literature, so one can be sure they know what they are doing, and d) they manage to reproduce the telegraphic pace of Remizov’s prose in English without resorting to his very short (sometimes one-word) paragraphs:

When some teacher or other complained to Obraztsov that the school was damp and cold and only six degrees Centigrade, this is what he replied […]: ‘For heaven’s sake, six degrees,’ he exclaimed, ‘that’s real luxury! Now in Pokidoshenskaia Province when I was carrying out inspections there, I once came into a school where the children were all wearing sheepskins and the teacher was in a fur coat and galoshes. I sat there for a short while and got chilled to the bone myself. I was going to make a note about my visit, but the ink had frozen. The teacher blew and blew into the inkwell, trying to thaw it out, but nothing would work. So I had to leave without making a note. That’s what real cold is like — but you’re in clover here.’

This gag is then applied twice more, and just as hilariously, to ‘overcrowding’ in the school and the ‘masses of frogs’ that infest it. Afficionados of the Gogolian and Chekhovian absurd will never be disappointed with Remizov. But laughter in Sisters of the Cross covers the whole spectrum from irony to farce. Beneath the diabolical realia of Remizov’s world there is always his own irrepressible carnival.

This first-rate translation by two masters of the craft should at last put Remizov on Anglophone reading lists. Sisters of the Cross bears comparison with the best in European modernist literature. The Russian Library of Columbia University Press are to be congratulated on their enterprise in producing it, and I trust that in due course they will seek a famous commercial publisher to bring it to an even larger readership.