Zamyatin: Ross: Calderon

Everyone should read Zamyatin’s anti-Utopian novel We, which had such an impact on George Orwell and is so different from his own 1984. But I don’t believe newcomers to Zamyatin should start with the masterpiece…

Yevgeniy Zamyatin by Boris Kustodiev, 1923.

The best way into the delightful, geometrical, farcical, Carrollian, delicate, synaesthetic, quasi-Aspergerian, intense and disturbing world of Zamyatin is through his short stories. A browse on Amazon will offer you two collections published over thirty years ago, but I warmly recommend the selection recently translated by John Dewey — see http://www.brimstonepress.co.uk/books/detail/YZ-TheSignAndOtherStories.htm .

I was amazed to discover that of the ten stories in Dewey’s volume only one had been translated before: A Fisher of Men. But I can well understand that Dewey could not resist making his own translation of this hilarious story of sexual represssion in Edwardian London! In style and theme it is a sequel to The Islanders, Zamyatin’s much longer satire on life in Jesmond, an impeccably upper middle class area of Newcastle upon Tyne. If Orwell is supposed to have based the totalitarian state of 1984 on his schoolboy experience of Eton, We could be seen as the ultimate extrapolation of Zamyatin’s experience of living at 19 Sanderson Road, Jesmond.

As I discover from J.A.E. Curtis’s magnificently lucid The Englishman from Lebedian — A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin (1884-1937) (Boston, 2013), Zamyatin was sent to Newcastle by the Tsarist government in 1916 as a civilian marine engineer to supervise the construction of Russian icebreakers. He lived there for eighteen months and, at least in the six months before his wife arrived from Russia, was very unhappy. He found Newcastle ‘utterly dull’, its theatres ‘completely stupid’, the English ‘terribly virtuous’, Jesmond inspissately bourgeois, and the Russian community ‘not my sort of people’.

Whether he knew it or not, about a mile away, at ‘Sherwood’, Graham Park Road, Gosforth, was living a thirty-nine-year old Russian woman who would have agreed with him. She objected to Newcastle’s architectural gloom, its perpetual rain, the dedicated conformism of English life, its lack of vitality and culture. It was ‘absolutely wrong for her’, her second son told me in a phone conversation on 19 March 1986. Whenever she could she would get away, either with or without her husband.

She was Mariia (‘Manya’) Iakovlevna Guseva, married to Archibald Campbell Ross, a naval engineer who worked for R. & W. Hawthorn of Newcastle and had fallen deeply in love with her when he was working on Tsarist battleship projects in St Petersburg. This was in 1895, when Manya was only eighteen, and he married her the year after. Both Archie and Manya Ross were close friends of George Calderon’s from his years in Russia, 1895-97. In 1900 Manya gave birth to George Campbell Ross, George Calderon attended his christening as a godfather, and Rear Admiral G.C. Ross was the son who rang me in 1986.

From left to right: Archibald Campbell Ross, George Campbell Ross, George Calderon, c. 1902, at 4 Collingwood Terrace, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne

So could Zamyatin have known the Rosses whilst he was living in Newcastle? The icebreaker that Zamyatin was working on there was being built by Armstrong Whitworth and, of course, there were an awful lot of other marine engineers in Newcastle. On the other hand, Archie Ross spoke fluent Russian, wrote the language well, and knew Russian naval ways, so he might have been brought in as a consultant. More likely, the Rosses met Zamyatin at a Russian social or cultural event, as Manya gravitated to the Russian community and Zamyatin was friends with the Russian consul. Manya Ross would certainly have been interested in him as a writer, but otherwise she was not one of his ‘sort of people’: she was a Tsarist patriot and he was a Bolshevik!

When Manya Ross made her cultural forays to London, she may well have occasionally stayed with the Calderons at Heathland Lodge in the Vale of Health. The only specific information we have about a visit is from George’s 1907 pocket diary. At 10.00 p.m. on Saturday 4 May 1907 George took Kittie’s niece May Hamilton ‘to Easter service at the Russian Church with Manya’. An entry for 8 May reads: ‘8.15 Red Lamp [the comedy by Hilliard Booth?] with Manya and supper at the Criterion’. On 10 May George and Manya went to ‘Balkan Exhibition’, three days later Manya came for ‘lunch and tea‘ (underlined in the original), then presumably returned to Newcastle. In  November 1909 Manya travelled to Glasgow to be with George and Kittie at the premiere of George’s translation and epoch-making production of The Seagull.

With her unassailable sense of realism, Kittie took a nuanced view of Manya’s visits to London. On 25 September 1941 she wrote from White Raven to her niece Nancy Knox in Australia:

Melbourne [is] within such easy reach for the Little Knoxes to go for a night or two at intervals to see ‘the Life’ [i.e. zhizn’], as a Russian friend of  ours used to say when she used suddenly to appear on our doorstep from Newcastle where fate had planted her and her delightful engineer husband. Manya never could see any of ‘the Life’ in Newcastle — though it was there sure enough but not easy for Russian eyes to discern.

In 1926 or 1927 the Rosses moved nine miles out of Newcastle to Heddon-on-the-Wall, where Manya must have been even lonelier. After Sir Archibald’s death in 1931, she appears to have moved permanently to London.

In St Petersburg 1895-97 Manya and her family gave George Calderon an enormous amount in terms of Russian language practice, sight-seeing, initiation into Russian culture, manners and understanding of Russian women, which he used in his articles published in the Pall Mall Gazette. When George and Kittie announced in October 1900 that they were getting married, Manya wrote George the only letter of congratulation that has survived in his archive. It is in Russian and I translate:

Don’t tell me you are getting married, too?! How unlike you that is, — that you are in love, I can believe, — but that you are getting married and so soon — it’s simply incredible. I approve of your choice, but am sorry to lose you as a dear, good friend and interesting person to talk to. I know that both of you will be happy, because you are both suited to each other, I felt that immediately I saw your darling Kittie. She really is wonderful, and her old mother too. I send you my parental blessing. I am sorry that we shan’t  be at your wedding, much as we would like to be, it’s your own fault, you should have told us earlier. Your devoted and ever-loving MANYA.

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