Category: Russian Literature

The Ghosts in Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary

I am haunted by the ghosts of lost worlds. In a sense, this is what all literature is about – taking us into the past or into another world altogether and making it real to us so that we can live in it and love it. But I do not mean that sense of lost worlds here. What I mean is the desolation, the empty space where a world once was. The world of religions in which most of us can no longer believe, or countries or spaces that no longer exist, like the Habsburg Monarchy or the Soviet Union, function in my life like ghosts. Driven by curiosity, I want to know them, but at the same time, they come to me, often against my wishes, like obsessions, to torture my mind. They gather me into conflicted mourning for what was lost.

Ukraine is a land of ghosts, and one of the greatest horrors of Russia’s invasion is that it promises the creation of more ghosts and more hauntings. When I awoke on the 24th of February last year and saw the first fires on Ukrainian soil, I was overwhelmed in a way that I didn’t think possible of myself with visions of emptiness. Empty houses, empty villages, emptied worlds.

Babel’s Ukraine

Many worlds have been lost in Ukraine. At least two of them we see in the work of Isaac Babel. The Soviet writer, a Jew from Odessa on the Ukrainian coast, described a world of gangsters and crime that seems more appropriate to America than anywhere this side of the Atlantic, in his Odessa Tales. But today I am writing about another world, the world of today’s West Ukraine, a land that at the time was the site of one of the Soviet Union’s first wars – in fact, a war before the Union really had that name at all – the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-1921.

Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, a short story cycle that is the most brilliant I have ever read, is his main work of the period. (You can read my translation of one story here). But even though it is written with plenty of cunning, and was successfully published in the USSR, it is still a work of evasiveness. Babel also kept a writer’s diary of the period, the 1920 Diary, and here he is much less equivocal about what he saw and what he experienced. Here, for readers, there is the terrible horror and curiosity of a world that is being annihilated before our eyes, a world that will be finished off some twenty years later with the invasion of the lands by German troops and later population transfers organised by Stalin.

Contested Identities – Babel and the Land

The 1920 Diary is a text about identity. In the contested land of today’s West Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus live Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Czechs. They speak languages ranging from German to Yiddish, Polish to Ukrainian and Russian, and practice a hodgepodge of faiths including traditional Catholicism, the Uniate faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, and of course Judaism. From town-to-town identity shifts in a way that seems scarcely believable today. But beyond this, there is Babel himself. We can read the diary, like we read the Red Army Cavalry Stories, as a site of struggle between Babel’s understandings of himself. In fact, due to its personal nature, the 1920 Diary is perhaps even better for this than the stories are.

But first, who was Babel? An Odessan Jew of course. Raised in Odessa – then the most cosmopolitan city of the Russian Empire – and briefly in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), he was educated in Kiev (Kyiv), moved to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) where he met Gorky, who helped him establish himself as a writer. He seems to have been fluent in at least Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and French. He wrote a little, and used to joke that he was “the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence.” Silent or not, he managed to fall under the suspicion of the authorities and was executed under false charges by the authorities in 1940. Babel had several opportunities to emigrate from the Soviet Union, but he did not take them. Like Andrei Platonov, one element of Babel’s fascination to me lies in his attitude towards the USSR, mixing the love of its hopes and criticism of its realities.

Babel wrote primarily in Russian, but we know that some of his first stories were written in French. Like Nabokov, or Taras Shevchenko in Ukrainian literature, he was at ease not just reading, but even writing in multiple languages. The 1920 Diary is written in Russian (as was Shevchenko’s personal journal), but it is peppered with other languages, including the ever-popular refrain from the poor Ukrainians he meets: “nemae” – we have nothing left to give.

Was Babel a Jew, a Russian or perhaps even a Ukrainian, or rather a Soviet and a Communist? The 1920 Diary is a place where we can begin asking these questions.

If he refers to himself occasionally as Russian, there are certainly moments when he seems more comfortable with the Ukrainian cultural space. “Ha, what a gloomy life these Russians lead! Where is the Ukrainian mirth?” he asks at one point. His main allegiance, however, seems to be to Odessa and to the Jews. “An old Jew – I love talking with our people – they understand me,” he remarks, even as at other times he lapses into a more critical voice towards the “Yids”. He notes every town and city where he encounters the Jews and he notes the injustices of the rampaging armies towards them, from rapes to being forced to cook on the Sabbath. Besides this, it is Odessa that he longs for. “We spoke about Tiflis, fruit, sun. I think about Odessa, my soul is torn.” Whenever a character has some association with the city Babel seems to brighten.

Revolution and the Vanguard

The Red Army are in Poland to spread Communism. In the early days after 1917, it seemed as though the workers’ revolt could truly become international, and military might would help to spread it. At the time of the diary Babel is certainly a supporter of the Revolution – after all, he was accompanying the army as a propagandist – but we also see increasing uncertainties come into his voice as the war goes on and he sees what the Revolution means in practice. As he asks at one point, “We are the vanguard, but of what?” He believes that the poverty and rank destitution of many of the people he encounters can be improved under Soviet systems – “I am exasperated, I can’t contain my indignation: the dirt, the apathy, the hopelessness of Russian life are unbearable, the Revolution will do some good work here.” But he discovers that his understanding of the Revolution is not shared with the soldiers themselves.

The cavalry are predominantly Cossacks, in Babel’s case from the Kuban region in today’s Russia. At the time, before the Holodomor and related policies, the land was populated mostly by ethnic Ukrainians, and the Cossacks go around singing Ukrainian songs. “What kind of men are our Cossacks?” Babel asks of the people who are bringing Communism to the West. “Many-layered: rag-looting, bravado, professionalism, revolutionary ideals, savage cruelty. We are the vanguard, but of what? The population is waiting for liberators, the Jews for freedom—but who arrives? The Kuban Cossacks. . . .”

Babel wants to see the Revolution as progress. Marxism, after all, envisions the world as tending towards Communism and peace and prosperity for all. But he realises instead that history is much more cyclical than this. A few posts ago I wrote about Gogol’s novella of Cossack violence, Taras Bulba. There the Cossacks go on a rampage throughout Ukraine and Poland, murdering Jews and Catholics and everyone else. Babel sees much the same in his own day.

“An ancient church, the graves of Polish officers in the churchyard, fresh burial mounds, ten days old, white birch crosses, all this is terrible, the house of the Catholic priest has been destroyed, I find ancient books, precious Latin manuscripts. The priest, Tuzynkiewicz, I find a photograph of him, he is short and fat, he worked here for forty-five years, he lived in one place, a scholar, the assortment of books, many of them in Latin, editions of 1860, that was when Tuzynkiewicz lived.”

Babel meticulously notes each pogrom, each act of violence against the Jews.

“The Zhitomir pogrom carried out by the Poles, and then, of course, by the Cossacks.

After our vanguard units appeared, the Poles entered the town for three days, Jewish pogrom, cut off beards, they always do, rounded up forty-five Jews in the market, took them to the slaughterhouses, torture, they cut out tongues, wailing over the whole town square.”

“the same old story, the Jews have been plundered, their perplexity, they looked to the Soviet regime as saviors, then suddenly yells, whips, Yids. I am surrounded by a whole circle, I tell them about Wilson’s note, about the armies of labor, the Jews listen, sly and commiserating smiles,”

The betrayal of the Jews by the Soviets is something Babel is obviously upset by. He tries to console those he meets with words of the Revolution, but it becomes increasingly inauthentic as the diary goes on: “The husband: Will there be freedom to trade, to buy a few things and then sell them right away, no speculating? I tell him yes, there will, everything will be for the better— my usual system—in Russia wondrous things are happening: express trains, free food for children, theaters, the International.”

What is happening in the war is a repetition of the violence that had come again and again to the people of the region:

“The Jewish cemetery outside Malin, centuries old, the stones have toppled, almost all the same shape, oval at the top, the cemetery is overgrown with weeds, it saw Khmelnitsky, now Budyonny, the unfortunate Jewish population, everything repeats itself, once again the same story of Poles, Cossacks, Jews is repeating itself with striking exactness, what is new is Communism.”

Communism with the Cossacks? No, “they are simply an instrument the party is not above using.” Instead, Babel comes to see the war as violence and hate. “About the atamans, there had been many there, they got themselves machine guns, fought against Shkuro and Mamontov, merged into the Red Army, a heroic epic. This is not a Marxist Revolution, it is a Cossack uprising that wants to win all and lose nothing. Apanasenko’s hatred for the rich, an unquenchable hatred of the intelligentsia.” The Cossacks care nothing for the Revolution, and certainly nothing for the people Babel records them raping, butchering, and stealing from. But the Poles, too, are little better. The Jews time and again recount the double pogrom, as first the Poles, then the Ukrainian Cossacks, torture them. At one point we get a brief glimpse of the ghost of a better world, then see the present that has replaced it:

“I won’t forget this shtetl, covered courtyards, long, narrow, stinking, everything 100-200 years old, the townsfolk more robust than in other places, the main thing is the architecture, the white and watery blue little houses, the little backstreets, the synagogues, the peasant women. Life is almost back on track again. People had led a good life here— respected Jewry, rich Ukrainians, market fairs on Sundays, a specialized class of Russian artisans: tanners trading with Austria, contraband.

The Jews here are less fanatical, better dressed, heartier, they even seem more cheerful, the very old men in long coats, the old women, everything exudes the old days, tradition, the shtetl is saturated in the bloody history of the Polish Jewish ghetto. Hatred for the Poles is unanimous. They looted, tortured, scorched the pharmacists body with white-hot iron pokers, needles under his nails, tore out his hair, all because a Polish officer had been shot at—sheer idiocy! The Poles have gone out of their minds, they are destroying themselves.”

Loss

It is extraordinary that in a region where blood had only just dried from the First World War, people are so willing to spill it again. Babel notes that “more and more often we come across trenches from the last war, barbed wire everywhere, enough for fences for the next ten years, destroyed villages.” Rather than rebuilding, in poverty, the people are turning against each other. Even within the Red Army, as the war (which they ultimately lost) goes steadily worse, antisemitism increases: “Down with the Yids, save Russia!” As one soldier yells.

The Revolution, Babel realises, is not doing what it is supposed to. “I mourn the fate of the Revolution.” But an army cannot bring a revolution. Instead, “we are destroying, moving forward like a whirlwind, like lava, hated by all, life is being shattered to pieces, I am at a huge, never-ending service for the dead.” It is not Communism that they bring, but ghosts and fresh graves.

To read the 1920 Diary is to be surrounded by these ghosts. There is the Polish estate that the Cossacks loot, where Babel finds the books the owners in their hurry to leave were unable to take: “Extremely precious books in a chest, they didn’t have time to take them along: the constitution approved by the Sejm at the beginning of the eighteenth century, old folios from the times of Nicholas I, the Polish code of laws, precious bindings, Polish manuscripts of the sixteenth century, the writings of monks, old French novels.”

Babel, this most wonderful writer, lives and breathes culture. His joy at the Jewish celebrations, at the old churches and synagogues, is palpable. He sits and talks to a priest about the differences between Catholics and Uniates. He is curious about these differences, about all the peoples in the area. And as a “Russian” and a Jew, he has access to more areas than most.

The End of the Story

Yet Babel is out of place. In some twenty years this world, already aflame, will be ruined completely. The Ukrainian UPA, now celebrated as national heroes in that country, will collaborate with the occupying Nazi German government to slaughter as many as 100’000 men, women and children, Poles and Jews and any Ukrainians who dared intermarry or believe in Soviet ideals, in an act of terrible ethnic cleansing. The Poles retaliated with just as much force, to the delight of the occupying German forces who could leave the resistance to wear itself out on self-slaughter. As for the Jews, caught in the middle, they were systematically murdered even if they escaped the UPA and the Poles. A bit further East, Babel’s Odessa, with about 30% of its population Jewish, was more or less emptied of them and began a precipitous decline similar to that of Trieste, which I wrote about last year. Finally, Stalinist population transfers made West Ukraine unrecognisable, shunting Ukrainians and Poles and other ethnicities around so that the multiethnic, multicultural, world of the diary became just a dream. Lviv, today that most “Ukrainian” of cities, only became ethnically Ukrainian in this period. Before it, Lwów was mostly a home for Poles and Jews.

I came away from the 1920 Diary just so desperately sad. There was a world here, and human savagery ruined it. I despise the nationalists who have destroyed culture here and elsewhere, whether they be Ukrainian or Russian, British or German or French, they are all my enemies. Babel, the Jew from Odessa, writing in Russian, multilingual and ever curious, was a hero of literature and his time. This land, which has only recently become Ukraine, gave birth to some of the most extraordinary literary figures the world has known – Schulz, Babel, Gogol, Shevchenko, Bulgakov, Lispector – to name just a few of them. But as for the ghosts of writers stranded in today’s quite understandably nationalistic Ukraine but did not write in that language or belong to that culture, who now will tend to their graves? With a world of mixed language, mixed culture, mixed identity, safeguarding heritage can only be a communal, collective effort, and matters of culture must not be left in the hands of the nationalists, who cannot even successfully look after their own.  

Alexander Herzen’s idea of Justice in My Past and Thoughts

Alexander Herzen was a radical socialist thinker of Russian extraction, best known for his newspaper The Bell. I have written about him and his thoughts on this blog before, after reading Aileen Kelly’s biography of the man, The Discovery of Chance.

Herzen was not just a radical thinker, he was also a talented writer, with his massive My Past and Thoughts as worthy a monument to Russia’s 19th century as anything by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev. This is a memoir, taking us from the author’s birth in 1812 to his later life in London. It is hard to find in English, and hard to find in a modern Russian edition too for the matter, but there are some old Oxford World’s Classics versions of the text for those who are willing to search them out or stumble upon them, the first of which, entitled Childhood, Youth and Exile, has prompted this particular post.

We may come to Herzen’s writings from different paths. Perhaps we want to see a different vision of Russia and its potential to the one we see in the religious nationalism of Dostoevsky, the ascetic pacifism of the later Tolstoy, or the wishy-washy liberalism of Turgenev. But there is a better reason to read this book and one that places My Past and Thoughts next to the great works of Russia’s 19th century – it is a brilliantly humane, sympathetic work that covers the ground the writers mentioned above occasionally seem not to know exists.

In Russia, Progress

The two sections in this book deal with Herzen’s youth and university years, and then his first experience of exile. There is a temptation, one I had to struggle with when writing about Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, just to write a blog post about how little has changed. But this is a terribly pernicious way of thinking that forces us into a kind of historical fatalism that is unworthy of us, and of the people whom we ignorantly aim to criticise. Still, I had to give a chuckle on reading this dialogue after Herzen has been led out onto the street following his arrest:

“Who is that?” I asked, as I took my seat in the cab.

“He is a witness: you know that the police must take a witness with them when they make an entrance into a private house.”

“Is that why you left him outside?”

When Russia’s secret police raided my flat, one joyous September morning in 2019, they did at least allow the witnesses to come in. I do not think they had any practical use, however, and the report that the officers drew up, sitting at the kitchen table, with me and my then girlfriend standing awkwardly in our pyjamas, bore little relation to the actual facts that they must have felt they had been dragged out of bed early for nothing. But the witnesses were at least allowed in the room, and therefore we must give progress its dues.

Justice and Humour

Moving on from this little joke, justice is a central theme of My Past and Thoughts. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it occupied the thoughts of a man who was exiled both within his country, ultimately ending his days alone far from it. In the work Herzen’s approach is twofold – the first is to draw our attention towards injustice, and the second is to remedy it, as much as he can. In this he might seem to be following those other Russian writers whose greatness we identify vaguely as being of a piece with their loosely defined “sympathy”, but I find Herzen’s treatment of the matter, and his heart, much more convincing. In this, perhaps, the autobiographical nature of his text is key.

The first thing that sets Herzen apart is his interest in systems. Dostoevsky liked to find sympathy for unlikely characters, but he was always careful to keep his magnifying glass focused on the ideological systems of the mind, not the practical systems that states live upon. Here is what Herzen has to say about an uncle:

“On his return to Russia, he was created a lord-in-waiting at Moscow – a capital which has no Court. Then he was elected to the Senate, though he knew nothing of law or Russian judicial procedure; he served on the Widows’ and Orphans’ Board, and was a governor of hospitals and other public institutions. All these duties he performed with a zeal that was probably superfluous, a love of his own way that was certainly harmful, and an integrity that passed wholly unnoticed.”

I hope readers have chuckled to themselves at this. My Past and Thoughts is one of the funniest books I have read, with a grand sense of comedic timing. But what does this paragraph say? It describes a man getting positions that aren’t right for him, thus causing havoc.

Let’s hear Herzen’s evidence on torture and the effectiveness of Russian state power:

“Peter III abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star-chamber.

Catherine II abolished torture.

Alexander I abolished it all over again.

Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible, and any magistrate applying torture is himself liable to prosecution and severe punishment.”

This is ridiculous, yet again. I am reminded of the satirist, Saltyakov-Shchedrin’s famous quote that “the strictness of Russian laws is tempered somewhat by the fact that obeying them is optional.”

But of course, Herzen was a man who experienced the justice system first-hand. For him, punishments were not optional. He does not merely laugh at the injustice or get us to laugh at it. Laughter breaks down our defences, and it is then that we are made to see the horror, that, “the Russian system of justice and police is so haphazard, so inhuman, so arbitrary and corrupt, that a poor malefactor has more reason to fear his trial than his sentence.”

Herzen himself is lucky, as the son of a nobleman. His time in prison is boring, but not overly miserable, though he struggles with the noxious gases floating through his cell. This is what a peasant has to go through:

“The enquiry went on just as enquiries do in Russia: the peasants were flogged on examination, flogged as a punishment, flogged as an example, and flogged to get money out of them; and then a number of them were exiled to Siberia.”

Statistics and Serfs

The Russian Empire was a country which was not working. One of the funniest sections concerns Herzen’s work on statistics for the remote town of Vyatka, now Kirov. The challenge in producing statistical analysis for the past ten years, as requested by the Ministry of the Interior itself, was that one also had to produce data for the past nine of those years where none actually existed. But once the determination to record things has taken root, there comes the matter of actually recording them correctly. I consider myself to be slightly poor at maths, but Herzen has convinced me I am at least better than a petty functionary in a remote province in the Russian Empire.

“Persons drowned: 2

Causes of drowning unknown: 2

Total: 4”

Or a particular favourite, “Under the heading ‘Morality of the inhabitants’ this was entered: ‘No Jews were found living in the town of Kay.’”

This is stupid. At another point, an old officer tells the story of the abduction and murder of a Moldavian woman, which was requested by his commander out of jealousy. The officer grabbed her and threw her over a bridge into a river, where she drowned. Herzen thinks of this neither as a funny story nor an example of the wondrous power of duty.

“I was horrified by the childlike indifference with which the old man told me this story. He appeared to guess my feelings or to give a thought for the first time to his victim; for he added, to reassure me and make it up with his own conscience:

‘You know, Sir, she was only a benighted heathen, not like a Christian at all.’”

Serfdom is also an enemy here, and one that we will probably be familiar with at this point from the likes of Turgenev, whose criticism of the system in the Sportsman’s Sketches made him famous. However, what Herzen writes seems more direct because of its unambiguous basis in reality. We read of a serf whose devotion was great, but who once sold some of his master’s wood in 1812 – when he had no way of contacting his master under Napoleonic occupation – in order to avoid starvation. After Herzen’s uncle, whose serf he was, returns to his estate, he discovers the sale, nullifies the past service of the serf and removes him from his office, throwing him and his family into poverty. Yet what is the serf’s reaction? “The old man, now paralysed and walking on crutches, never failed to visit us, in order to make a bow to my father and talk to him” – about none other than his old master. This kind of innocent devotion, even after a terrible punishment, strikes us as insane. But it is the insanity of an awful system, and Herzen makes us well aware of it.

We learn the practical methods of serf control, things like the punishments a master could hand out, and the practicalities of exiling a peasant into the army. We learn how much money a servant is paid, for each role, as well. This kind of granular information, absent from the great novels of the period, fills their downtrodden, half-hidden from view characters with new blood.

What justice is within Herzen’s power to give?

So much for injustice, in all its varied forms – exile, bad governors, serfdom, inefficient and cruel government ministries – for I could go on but will not. Readers looking for continuity between the Russia of today and the Russia of the past may enjoy ample shocking stories of corruption and the impossibility of removing it, and the use of insanity as an excuse to remove problematic characters from view. But I said that Herzen’s intention in My Past and Thoughts is twofold – he also seems to aim at rectifying some of these injustices, or at least softening them.

This statement gives the best indication of what he means to do: “This publicity is the last paltry compensation to those who suffered unheard and unpitied.” He aims to make aware of the miseries of those whose names vanish from the record, whether serf or friend. Herzen dedicates a whole, lengthy chapter to Alexander Vitberg, an architect who found royal favour and then lost it, ending up exiled in Vyatka alongside him. He ends the chapter thus: “’Poor martyr,’ thought I, ‘Europe shall learn your fate – I promise you that.’” These and other phrases indicate Herzen’s feeling of duty towards his friends. “I should record here some details about Polezhayev,” – the emphasis is mine. Here are some others: “Kohlreif returned to Moscow, where he died in the arms of his grief-stricken father.” “After writing the preceding narrative, I learned that Sungurov died at Nerchinsk.”

Death, death, death. There are no happy endings here. Even those who survive, like the Polish exiles, are still victims of exile. But Herzen gives them a voice, an identity as individuals. Here is a touching moment from a parting visit to a Polish exile: “After dinner he came up to me with his glass in his hand, embraced me, and said with a soldier’s frankness, ‘Oh, why are you a Russian?’ I made no answer, but his question made a strong impression on me.” This is, indeed, a quote that makes you pause.

Herzen identifies the injustice of systems, but he never condemns groups. My Past and Thoughts is a collection of stories about individuals – corrupt governors, inane petty officials, heroic friends, desperate serfs – but not groups. He is aware, as some of us never are enough, that people are individual people, and it is as individuals that we must attempt to deal with him.

I quote at length a paragraph of his on the subject, to give a sense of how he writes, and his spirit:

“Nothing in the world can be more stupid and more unfair than to judge a whole class of men in the lump, merely by the name they bear and the predominating characteristics of their profession. A label is a terrible thing. Jean-Paul Richter says with perfect truth: ‘If a child tells a lie, make him afraid of doing wrong and tell him that he has told a lie, but don’t call him a liar. If you define him as a liar, you break down his confidence in his own character.’ We are told that a man is a murderer, and we instantly imagine a hidden dagger, a savage expression, and dark designs, as if murder were the regular occupation, the trade, of anyone who has once in his life without design killed a man. A spy, or a man who makes money by the profligacy of others, cannot be honest; but it is possible to be an officer of police and yet to retain some manly worth, just as a tender and womanly heart and even delicacy of feeling may constantly be found in the victims of what is called ‘social incontinence’”.

Conclusion

Herzen was, it is hard to deny from these pages, a thinker with the right spirit. In this first part of My Past and Thoughts, there is little philosophy, but there is the spirit upon which that philosophy will later be built. That spirit is enough. It is the spirit of love for one’s comrades and a recognition of the individual’s non-negotiable value and the importance of hearing about their lives, instead of deciding on the basis of their membership of arbitrary categories. Where other thinkers of the time were willing to allow for mass suffering to achieve some distant utopian goals, even condoning murder, Herzen always saw people, even his enemies, as people first. That makes My Past and Thoughts not only entertaining but a wise and worthy book too.

“Whenever I see someone, I want to hit them in the face” – Daniil Kharms

Daniil Kharms was an early Soviet writer who died, with a little help from the Party’s security apparatus, in 1942. Before that, his work for children allowed him – for a time – not to starve to death. That we have his stories and poems for adults is thanks to the hard work of brave men and women who held onto his notebooks until a better age arrived. What follows is a short piece I stumbled upon recently by him which made me pause, and some suggestions as to its interpretation. The translation is my own.

[186]

Whenever I see someone, I want to hit them in the face. It’s so nice to get them in the mug.

I am sitting in my room and doing nothing.

Now here comes someone for a cup of tea, I hear them knocking at the door. “Come in!” I tell them. He comes in and says “Hello! So good that I caught you at home.” I give him one in the face then kick him in the crotch with my boot. My guest falls on his back in terrible pain. Now I go for the eyes with my heel. Let me tell you, that ought to teach a man not to come by without being invited!

Here’s another way it happens: I offer the guest a cup of tea. The guest agrees, sits at the table, drinks his tea, and starts to tell some story. I act as if I’m listening really intently, nod my head, go “oh” and “ah”, look all surprised and laugh away. The guest, flattered by my attention, gets more and more into his story.

I calmly pour myself a full mug of boiling water and throw it in my guest’s face. He jumps to his feet and clutches at his skin. I just say to him: “My soul has run out of good deeds. Get out of here!” And I push him out of the door.

1939/1940. Russian original here.

Kharms’ work initially did nothing for me when I first encountered it at Cambridge. The stories are, on the surface and quite possibly also underneath it too, absurd and meaningless. But I was lucky enough to have a professor who was able to help me appreciate why these short little things – the one I have translated is somewhat representative in length, style, and content – can in fact be quite subversive and full of meanings for those who seek them.

In this story, we have a man who likes hitting people. “It’s so nice” to hit them, he tells us. He hits two people in the story, and not just in the face. That appears all there is to it.

What can we say about this? Let’s begin with the narrator. He seems an odd one. First, he enjoys this violence. He does not seem to have any idea of the pain he might be causing. At the same time, he is quite aware of social cues, as we see him “nod” and “look all surprised”, mimicking a normal person to achieve a particular goal – enticing his speaker to continue with their story. Beyond just his hitting people, he has a distorted idea of right and wrong, or even appropriate and inappropriate, as his ostensible reason for the violence is either annoyance at people arriving without arranging the meeting beforehand, or else the exhaustion of his goodwill.

The narrator is recognisably a human being, but not “like us”. His easy tolerance of violence and his strange ideas of propriety are probably the keys to unlocking the deeper meaning here. The Soviet government, as part of its attempts to radically reformulate society during its early years, imagined creating a new type of human being – the New Soviet Man. Strong, healthy, intelligent, and fiercely adherent to Communist ideals, they/he would be responsible for ensuring the USSR’s success along with the spread of revolution around the world.

By the time Kharms wrote this piece in 1940, the experiment had failed, and over a million people were living in the Gulag. We can read the narrator as the monstrous creation that results when we try to change a human being from what is “natural”.

We can also, of course, think of the narrator as the kind of creature that war produces. Kharms was arrested because of alleged anti-war sentiments, expressing the desire to punch in the face any mobilisation officer that tried to recruit him. (We see a certain similarity in gesture here to the story). War, too, makes us less human, and more easily violent, while bringing a strange set of norms whose infraction leads to disproportionate violence. Either way, what we see is a situation in which violence is normal, funny even (you should,at the very least, have chuckled while you read the piece). This is not, we must reflect, a particularly healthy situation. Something must have gone wrong to produce it.

Here’s another thought. Perhaps the narrator is a civil servant, not a private individual. He is part of a big, frightening, Soviet bureaucracy. People come to the state, which Stalinist propaganda imagined as a big family, trusting that it will protect them and “listen” to their stories and problems. But instead, in many cases, the state reacted with inexplicable violence against those people who had trusted it, arresting, beating, and exiling them. The phrase I translated as “without being invited” could be written more literally as “being called”, which to me suggests a waiting room at a miserable municipal office, a thing of which I have had more than enough experience in the Former Soviet Union. In this reading, the guests have assumed they have rights that the authorities, in actual fact, do not grant them. 

Daniil Kharms is one of those writers whose appearance and writings seem well matched

And what to make of the narrator’s words about the soul – “My soul has run out of good deeds”, or perhaps alternatively out of “virtues”? It’s startling to see goodness reduced to a transaction that you do until you run out of energy. This may be so in real life, but we like to hope that it is not true and that, instead, we are always capable of doing good. As noted above, we can read this phrase as indicating the narrator’s monstrous loss of humanity caused by the state or war. But can we not also read it as something unnerving – as a statement that understands human nature all too well?

See, the narrator knows how to manipulate his audience to get them to tell a story. Perhaps the problem here is that he knows also that we are only good so long as we have the strength for it. In this, he seems rather more honest than the rest of us. Don’t we all, from time to time, get annoyed at an unexpected guest? And maybe occasionally we may think to ourselves that a slap or a mug of tea in the face may hasten their departure and get us a bit of peace and quiet. We are restraining ourselves, pretending to be good, while just getting frustrated inside. Our narrator meanwhile just lets it all out and speaks his truth. Well, it’s not good, but perhaps the narrator’s blatant disregard for social norms, as can so often happen, makes us consider our own unthinking adherence to them?

Anyway, there is no obvious answer to the question of what this story means. I found it shocking and funny when I stumbled upon it. But there is plenty to think about, even though it is short. I’d be interested to hear any interpretations I may have missed in the comments.