Category: Soviet Literature

Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time

I’ve always found it strange that to think, whether on the metro or while wandering through the streets of my beloved Petersburg, that not thirty years ago this all was a completely different country. By that time, of course, it was clear that the Soviet Union was on its way out. But what would replace it was anybody’s guess. Gorbachev, ever the idealist, hoped to reform the USSR into a new confederation – the Union of Sovereign States – that would alleviate many of that country’s worst failings by decentralizing its power structure. An attempted coup in August of 1991 put this proposal on ice and led to the collapse of the USSR in December of that year. But though the Soviet Union was no more, its people remained. Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time gives these people a voice.

Its pages explore the lives of these people whose homeland evaporated before their eyes. The book is structured as a series of interviews, edited into monologues. “I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama”, Alexievich explains. These monologues are presented almost without judgement or comment, and are divided in theme between the end of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s years of power, and the time after the dawn of the new millennium when Vladimir Putin became dominant. But in contrast to the historic scope of much writing on this period, these stories are fundamentally human in scale. Love again and again comes up, alongside the pain of women and immigrants in a society that – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – became fundamentally reactionary and nationalist in terms of its culture.

A photo of Svetlana Alexievich, author of Second-hand Time
Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2015, was born in Ukraine, is Belorussian, but writes in Russian. As you read Second-hand Time it’s worth remembering that Alexievich lost her homeland too. Photo by Elke Wetzig (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A lot of people will tell you it’s a miracle that the Soviet Union collapsed bloodlessly. Second-hand Time goes against that clinical view and shows that even the “little” violence that did take place had a real and terrible human cost. Especially in the West, we also tend to take the rather parochial view that the USSR was an “Evil Empire”, that its citizens were relentlessly crushed under the wheels of a terrifying totalitarian regime. But the Soviet Union outlived Stalin, and things got better than that. Second-hand Time does not paint the closing days of the Union as filled with joy and plenty, but it shows through its many and varied speakers how great the loss experienced by its citizens in many cases was. The creation of the USSR may have been a tragedy, but its collapse – in light of what’s come after – seems even worse.

Maybe Gorbachev had the right idea after all.

Hopes and Ideals

Anybody who has come into contact with Russia and its culture knows that Russia is special. It likes to tell you as much. “we’re so soulful, we’re so special” one speaker says without irony. It retains a belief in itself as a country of chosen people, with a unique path. A path of suffering, not of joy. The Soviet Union was created because of the great faith – and opportunism – of the communists. Its collapse, likewise, was a moment when Russia seemed to be special once again. Freedom meant everything to everybody, and people were soon disappointed. The nineties were a time of lawlessness and extreme poverty – Yegor Gaidar’s “shock therapy” brought capitalism to the masses, but not the money to take advantage of it. People died in the streets and the sheets, and few could afford the coffin to bury them in, or the ambulance to try to save them.

“Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket”. Salami comes up again and again as this symbol of capitalism’s allure. In the Soviet Union it wasn’t easy to get access to good meat – and impossible to get to choose it. But people soon realised that meat isn’t a substitute for anything good – especially when you don’t have the money to buy it. The first section of Second-hand Time, The Consolation of Apocalypse, shows people falling out of love with the changes brought about by the collapse of the USSR. There is a continual lament for the values they have lost. In the Soviet Union, people read books, people talked in kitchens – the atmosphere is decidedly intellectual. The small guy was looked after.

But alongside of shock therapy the Russians were also introduced to a new set of values, ones that were more suitable to the new system. Buy buy buy – greed grew dominant. The poor weren’t to be pitied – they had failed to show the skill and hard work that the rich (apparently) had. Instead of discussing books, people get excited about new technology, blue jeans. One speaker, a rich man who made himself in this system, says “money is a test, like power or love”. It’s hard not to agree. And this early part of Second-hand Time shows that the Russians weren’t quite ready to pass it. Next to the chaos of the new free market, socialism is utopian: “Socialism isn’t just labour camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules”. One party official tells Alexievich.

Faulty Memory and Greatness

We remember what we want to remember and, except for those of us whose depression is particularly great, in the end the good memories rise above the bad and we come to remember the past as a better place. For the Russians of today, that innocent trick of the mind is potentially dangerous. It leads to a longing for the Soviet Union. “You forget about the long lines and empty stores faster than you do about the red flag flying over the Reichstag.” Again and again, those interviewed mention the war with Germany as a high point in their nation’s history. They were great; they saved the day.

The challenge that Russians face now, when the belief in their country’s unique path is so strong, is to decide between “great history and banal existence”. It’s not entirely clear which choice is best. One path seems to hold the salvation of the soul, the other the salvation of the body. “I can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can’t do without is the past.” – these are not the words of a salami-lover.

“We all believed that the kingdom of freedom was right around the corner… But life just kept getting worse. Very soon, the only thing you could buy was books. Nothing but books on the store shelves…” Russians turned the wheel of history with the collapse of the USSR, but very soon their naïve hopes turned to bitterness and despair. Socialism was a way of looking at the world, and without it the ground fell out from under people’s feet. And few were ready to fly… There are a great many suicides in Second-hand Time.

“I cannot go on living while my Fatherland is dying and everything I heretofore considered to be the meaning of my life is being destroyed.”

Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. It’s hard not to feel sorry for those who truly believed in the Communist project and had their world fall apart. Ed Yourdon from New York City, USA (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Butcher Returns

Each one of the stories in Second-hand Time is worth telling. It’s hard to decide what to mention here. Each one hit me in different ways, but some were so powerful – so frightening – that they left me speechless. The final story in the first part of Second-hand Time is such a story. It begins with the experience of a woman who had grown up in one of Stalin’s camps in Kazakhstan as she searched for the truth of her past, but ended even more shockingly with her son’s story of a betrothal gone wrong. He is a lieutenant in the army, about to get married. The girl and her family live well for Soviets. They have crystal chandeliers, porcelain, rugs. The old grandfather, the patriarch, is an honoured veteran. He’d speak at schools, get kids as visitors to hear his stories.

Before the wedding the lieutenant and the veteran go out to the family country house to get drunk. They’re completely alone, and the grandfather begins to talk about his past and his views. He’s an old man, and sounds like one… with a particularly Russian bent. He rails against the liberals, the new generations – they don’t need freedom, they need to work, to suffer. And he reveals he was in the NKVD, how he executed the Soviet people…

“I watch TV, I listen to the radio. It’s the rich and poor all over again. Some people gorge themselves on caviar, buy islands and private jets, while others can’t afford a loaf of white bread. This won’t last long around here! People will once again acknowledge Stalin’s greatness. The axe is right where it always was… the axe will survive the master. Mark my words…”

This idea of the axe, of the power of the state for mass power through fear – this for the grandfather is message of hope. Russia demands a strong leader, it demands control and violence and destruction – not cheese and salami and blue jeans.

It is too much for the lieutenant. He breaks off the engagement without explanation. A note at the end of the story explains that he and his family emigrated to Canada before he let Alexievich publish the story. He adds “I’m glad I left in time. For a while, people liked Russians, now they’re afraid of us again. Aren’t you?”

Support for Stalin is currently at a record high in Russia. In 2000 Vladimir Putin became president and the dominant political actor in Russia, the latter being a role he has not relinquished since then. The story is the perfect end to the chaos of the 1990s. Russia’s period of anarchy – everybody agreed – had to end some way. But it is only the angry old man, filled with hate, who understood fully what would have to happen – since he believed there had been no change to the Russian people, then just as before they needed to be crushed rather than raised up. Putin is no new Stalin, but the idea that Russia needs a strong leader is dangerously ingrained into the Russian idea of its own path that with hindsight it’s hard to see what else could have happened. The second part of Second-hand Time looks at the consequences.

“The Friendship of the Peoples”

The Friendship of the Peoples was a cultural policy introduced under Stalin in 1935, designed to reduce the ethnic barriers between the various peoples of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself was a Georgian; Brezhnev was Ukrainian; and in the USSR as a whole the Russians only constituted about half of the overall population. It was a good idea, but it should be mentioned that Stalin was also responsible for large-scale population transfers, genocide in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and generally was not exactly a paragon of ethnically harmonious leadership. All the same, the policy continued after his death, and a degree of unity began to form between the peoples of the Union. A number of monologues in Second-hand Time serve as evidence for the success of the policy.

For some people, the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t just mean the loss of their homeland – it also meant the loss of their homes as ethnic tensions tore the new states apart. Here are some Azeri refugees displaced from Ngoro-Karabakh in Azerbaijan – a territory that was predominantly ethnically Armenian, but only after the fall of the Soviet Union became almost homogeneously so – through violence. Oleg Litvin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

And all this success was destroyed by the collapse of the USSR. In scenes that are reminiscent of the persecution of Jews under the Nazis, so too we read here of families hidden in attics to avoid being murdered – whether by Azeris, or Georgians, or Abkhazians, or Tajiks. Moldavia was split in two, Georgia and Tajikistan underwent civil war, and even in those countries that did not go to war there were still forcible expulsions.

Today there remain many Russians abroad, particularly in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, while in other former Soviet Republics there are almost none. Russia itself attracts immigrants from all over the former Soviet lands, but Second-hand Time shows that the dream of ethnic harmony remains as dead now as it was then. A particularly unpleasant interview deals with the lives of the Tajiks in Moscow in our own days and the ways they are treated by the Russians – killed, beaten, left unpaid. It’s something I’ve come to notice a lot recently in my own time in Russia – just how racist the Russian people are towards those who were once their equals. There’s a hierarchy here, one that’s almost invisible unless you look for it. It’s easy to live in Russia without meeting a single non-Russian. But you see them every day, cleaning the metro, manning stalls at the market.

I’ve travelled in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, and other former Soviet countries. The people I met there were no better or worse than the Russians are. It’s disappointing that after the collapse of the USSR the peace that very nearly existed was replaced by a revival of ethnic and religious tensions that nobody, really, needs or wants.

The New World and Its Heroes

“What’s the point of changing governments if we don’t change ourselves?” People changed after the end of the Soviet Union – they had to change or else die. Their values, as I’ve written above, were overhauled. But their hearts were harder to change, and many of the characters in Second-hand Time didn’t succeed in shaking off the Soviet past. But Alisa Z, one interviewee, did succeed. She’s 35, an advertising manager, and the kind of shark that found the new world one of endless opportunities. Her monologue is fascinating… in a way, it’s like a deranged Dostoevsky character going on a rant to explain their worldview. She took advantage of the “revolution of desires” to desire everything. Sex, money, power. And she got it.

“Loneliness is freedom… Now, every day, I’m happy I’m free: Will he call or won’t he, will he come over or not? Is he going to dump me? Spare me! Those aren’t problems anymore! So no, I’m not afraid of loneliness… What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the dentist! People always lie when they talk about love… and money… They’re always lying in so many ways. I don’t want to lie… I just don’t! Excuse me… please forgive me… I haven’t thought about any of this for a long time…”

She’s repulsive; she’s free and completely hedonistic. Her confidence, her directness of experience and existence is mesmerising. She is the kind of person who needed, truly needed, the world of capitalism. She sleeps with oligarchs and eats and drinks and enjoys herself. The world is her oyster. In my own experience of oligarchs (bless the British public school system!) I’ve seen the same brutal hunger. I’m not sure it’s the best way to live, but there’s no denying that this is a type of life… just one that I find terrifying and alluring in equal measure. And when so few of us live, even a repulsive life is more attractive than death-in-life…

Love

History was taking place all the time these people were speaking, but what almost always stands out is not the history, but the love that tries to get in the way of it. A good friend of mine in Moscow is dating a Ukrainian and – would you believe it! – both sets of parents have been trying to keep them apart from the first day of the relationship. But that’s nothing compared to the loves that are described here. There’s a woman who falls in love with a murderer stuck for life in a prison, a woman who is separated from her husband for seven years because his family refuse to let him be with an infidel, and many other examples of loves that refuse to let anything stand in the way.

Russia is a country of romantics, and it seems that love is one of the ways that the Russians – the women especially – were able to survive the horrors that the 1990s brought with them. It’s a way of living and loving that seems strange at best, and silly at worst, to us in the West. But giving oneself up truly to another person, just like giving oneself up completely to an idea like Communism, seems one of the surest ways to salvation of the soul. In any case, the passages of self-sacrifice in the name of love were regularly touching, even if it made me deeply sad to read about all the challenges these people faced, and perhaps ought not have had to.

Photo of protesters in Minsk in 2010. Second-hand Time ends on a high, suggesting that the youth will be able to change the world the way everyone had naively hoped to in the 1990s.
Protests in Belarus took place in 2010 as Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected to the office of president. The young generation in the former Soviet Union may not be placed well politically to enact changed, but from my experience of them their hearts are almost without exception in the right place. Things in these countries, which have suffered so much, will only get better. Photo by Isabel Sommerfeld (CC BY 2.0)

Conclusion – Future Hopes

The last chapter of Second-hand Time details the experience of a few students in the ill-fated protests in Belarus to Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election in 2010 to the office of president. Many of these people were put in prison and kicked out of university; others were simply beaten by riot police; Lukashenko won, of course. He also won a fourth term in 2015, and is standing for a fifth term in 2020 – although at the time of writing it’s not clear whether Belarus will be absorbed into Russia at some point after that. However much these people faced pain and disappointment, like the protesters in Moscow in 2011, the fact that they tried – Alexievich seems to hint – is already a huge achievement, and a step towards the future.

I’ve lived in Russia for two years now, and I intend to live here after university. I can’t say I love the Russians, but for me they really are a special people, just as theirs is a special country. And the times are changing. The dreams of the 1990s are not yet dead. If there is one thing that gives me more hope than anything else it is the young generation – here, and across the world. People may complain about the present situation – regarding Russia, it’s not my place to – but Russia’s youth will surely, once they come of political age, change the world for the better. Perhaps the dream of love and brotherhood that the Soviet Union held so dear may also, one day, prove not simply idealistic twaddle, but something really worth believing in.

Alexievich’s book is probably the best book I’ve read all year. Both heartwarming and heart-rending, hopeful and hateful, it is a roller-coaster of real emotions. But most importantly, it’s making me go with reopened eyes into the world and realise yet again that every human carries with them their own story, like a cross. And if we do not listen to them, however misguided or deluded they may be, how can we hope to change the world?

For more of the challenges faced by people living today, look at my thoughts on Joker, and on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.

The Siberian Dignity of Valentin Rasputin’s Money for Maria

Introduction: In Search of the Real Russia

Money for Maria is a novella by the late Soviet writer Valentin Rasputin. I came across him and his work quite by chance, as I generally prefer reading older writers. But come to him I did, because I’ve always been interested, as most foreigners who end up in Russia are, in “the Real Russia”. And Rasputin is one of its prophets.

A stamp showing Valentin Rasputin and a quote by him.
Valentin Rasputin on a stamp. The quote reads “Literature has but one goal – to help us as we read by breathing into us warmth and kindness”. Money for Maria celebrates the small acts of charity that we are all capable of.

After a time shuttling between Moscow and Petersburg one realises, especially if you look out of the train or bus window, that there is an awful lot of Russia out there that you hardly see in either of the capitals. It’s all well and good to read Crime and Punishment or The Master and Margarita – both of which take cities as their settings. But Russian literature has always stretched far beyond urban limits, as anyone who loves Chekhov, or the Gogol of Dead Souls, knows. To truly get to know the country these books were born in, one must pack one’s bags and head out into the great wilds of the small provincial towns, endless forests, and towering mountains. This world is Rasputin’s element.

Introduction: Rasputin and Siberian Fiction

Valentin Rasputin was born in Irkutsk Oblast, the area of Russia lying immediately west of Lake Baikal, and he spent most of his life in Siberia – that unknowable mass of Russia that lies beyond the Ural Mountains, home to Dostoevsky, the Decembrists, and many others during their internal exile by the Tsars. Me, I’ve never been, but it’s always been something of a dream of mine, alongside the Russian Far North. Reading Rasputin, for the moment, is as close as I can get to that mythical land. It is a Russia that can no longer claim to being European, but simultaneously is unwilling to designate itself as truly Asian. I remember a quote by Vladimir Putin that goes something like this: Russia is neither in Europe or Asia, but Europe and Asia lie to the left and the right of Russia respectively.

Siberia is a different world, and it stands to reason that it brings something of a different literature with it too. One with a new (or, as it happens, old) set of values, symbols, and virtues. Rasputin is very much an inheritor of the intellectual tradition laid out by Dostoevsky and the later Tolstoy, both of whom idolised the peasant life and soul. Money for Maria, written in 1967, is a novella that both looks to the communal past while showing the ways in which the Soviet Union challenged it. But, well, is it worth reading?

Money for Maria – The Story

Money for Maria tells the story of a few days in a small Siberian village and a crisis that erupts there when a man from the government arrives in town. Kuzma’s wife Maria runs that local shop – an essential part of day-to-day life when other villages and the city are miles and miles away. But one day there arrives this government inspector to look through the stores, and he discovers that through Maria’s poor accounting skills – she’s not been working in the job for long – a great number of things are unaccounted for. As a result, she has to pay up to the tune of one thousand roubles – a huge amount of money. The inspector explains that if she can find the money within five days, she’ll be let off. But if she can’t, then the prison awaits.

A photo of the Russian wilderness at the edge of a lake
It’s difficult to have an idea of the vastness of Russia unless you’ve been there, or to another country like it – America, Canada, Australia. The beauty of its emptiness can at one moment inspire the greatest joy, and at the next nothing but fear. Rasputin leaves the nature in the backdrop in Money for Maria, but it’s hard to forget it anyway. Photo by Octagon [CC BY 3.0]

While Maria’s reacts to the terrible news by falling into depression and lethargy, Kuzma sets out to collect the money. The story is split into two strands. The present strand concerns one last-ditch attempt by Kuzma to borrow the remaining money from his brother, who lives in the city. As he goes on the overnight train he remembers the events of the previous days, where he tried to collect as much as he could from the local townsfolk. These memories are woven into the fabric of the first narrative. Through them and through Kuzma’s journey on the train, we encounter a broad variety of Soviet citizens. They range from the snide Soviet upper class to honourable old men, petulant children, and hard-working farmers.

A Kafkaesque Arrangement –Structures and Symbols

I don’t know whether Rasputin was familiar with the works of Kafka when he wrote Money for Maria. But when Kafka’s works were, eventually, smuggled into the Soviet Union, the Soviets originally believed he was someone living within their borders – they couldn’t believe that a Jew from Prague could have created his world for himself when it seemed so eerily like a twisted version of their own. Money for Maria is not overtly absurd, in the way that the short pieces of Daniil Kharms are. But in its structure, its underlying attitude towards bureaucracy, even in its setting and subtle symbolism, I get a sense of the absurd and of Kafka, nonetheless.

To begin with, there is the question of the money. One thousand roubles was, in those days, a lot of money. It appears to be more than most people make in an entire year. When Kuzma goes around begging for donations most people are only able to give him a few roubles. When the head of the local council offers to give him the month’s pay of the councillors there’s still not nearly enough to repay the debt. Though we know that occasionally Maria might have made a mistake, the scale described by the inspector is unbelievable. When Kuzma gathers together all the money he’s managed to collect on the night before he heads out in the train, he thinks that he must have more than anyone else in the whole town. The money quickly becomes a symbol for the absurd punishments meted out by an unknown and unstoppable state.

The train also reminds me of Kafka’s style. The idea that Kuzma is going, going, but never seeming to actually arrive anywhere because each mile is accompanied by lengthy detours into the past. It creates the same uncertainty as Kafka’s stories have, where one hopes against hope that the protagonists might – just this once – succeed in entering the castle, or proving their innocence, or whatever. At the very end the train does arrive, but that doesn’t change the overall effect. The story ends just as Kuzma knocks on his brother’s door – we don’t know whether he will be met with success or be turned away. The abrupt ending thus prolongs the uncertainty of the whole work, and refuses to grant the reader the respite from the feelings of persecution that a more positive ending would offer.

The symbolism of Money for Maria is also Kafkaesque, though this time closer to The Castle than The Trial. Kuzma spends the story waiting for snow to arrive, but it never does – not until the last moment. Until then, the liminal windy space between autumn and winter reflects the general feelings of uncertainty and fragility of peace:

“He thought that such was the time of year: neither fully autumn nor fully winter, but an autumn that at any moment could shatter, then winter would arrive.”

The wind becomes the main weather symbol, like the snow in The Castle. Here the wind comes to represent the fatalism of the characters – their feelings of powerlessness. Early on, Kuzma looks at the street and wonders whether people are going by their own strength, or whether the wind is just blowing them around instead.

Christian symbols are occasionally visible too, but under State Atheism it’s hard to know what to think of them. Like Kuzma, we are left trying to find hope in a world whose magic has been ripped out of it by state machinery. It’s up to the reader to decide whether its symbols should reassure or disappoint us.

The Politics of Money for Maria

We don’t know how that much money was lost. We don’t know whether the inspector is right. But we know that he can’t be questioned, and, like Josef K in The Trial, Kuzma tries to rid himself of the feeling of persecution rather than questioning the truthfulness behind the accusations themselves. The atmosphere of persecution and disbelief is also pretty reminiscent of Kafka. Here are two examples:

“And he did not move for a long time – it seemed that he was waiting for a miracle, when someone would arrive and tell him that the whole thing was just a joke and that the whole story about the shortfall was nothing for either him, or Maria, to worry themselves about.”

“Kuzma rested, but it was the temporary respite of one being tried before the moment of judgement, and he knew it.”

This atmosphere cannot exist independently of political questions. Kafka’s works are universal in that there’s little to mark them as originating in Prague as opposed to anywhere else. Money for Maria, meanwhile, is a clearly Soviet work. There is the history – the references to the Second World War; there also is the particularly Soviet vocabulary of Kolkhozes and other bits and pieces. This is not essential, by any means, to the work. But it means that reading it you are aware that it’s set within a particular place at a particular time, and that its problems are the problems of that time. Rasputin was a member of the Village Prose movement, a group of writers who wrote about life in the Soviet villages in the later part of the twentieth century. They were critical of the state, but ultimately nationalistic in outlook – and thus useful enough to remain publishable.

Another photo of the Russian wilderness
Just another photo of some empty space. I’d love to go to Siberia one day. Have you been? Why not leave a comment to tell me about your experience if you have? Photo by jxandreani [CC BY 2.0]

Rasputin’s criticism of the state in Money for Maria is not overt, and in its essence, it boils down to the traditional complaint of countryfolk the world over – leave us alone to get on with our lives. Stalin’s rule is implicitly criticised after one member of the town is described as having been given a fifteen-year sentence for a minor crime. But as for the modern state, there is only the silence to suggest the “crime” committed by Maria isn’t entirely real. And once, only within the context of this historical crime under Stalin, there is the suggestion that the mistake may lie higher up, on some rung within the endless mechanisms of bureaucracy, but that because nobody is willing to take responsibility and accept the blame for themselves, the person who is punished ends up being the villager, who cannot defend themselves. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment.

Dignity and Heroism in Money for Maria

With all that said, Money for Maria diverges from Kafka in a vital way. It places the supreme value upon the village community. While Kafka’s works showcase the endless isolation of modern life, Rasputin finds salvation within retreating to the old, close, ways of living. What this means is an emphasis on the kindness and generosity of those who have almost nothing to give. The same people who inspired Russia’s utopian socialists in the 1860s and 1870s, and Tolstoy later on, also inspire Rasputin. The kindness of the chairman of the local council in offering his and his workers’ pay is matched by the generosity of old men and women who give all they can to Kuzma as he wanders about. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who don’t want to part with their money – but Rasputin shows that in the village old ideas of charity still predominate.

This same attitude is reflected in the depiction of village people generally, even those who don’t know of Kuzma’s struggle. On the train he meets an old couple and a young man, and after a time the four of them start talking about love. It is a scene that would feel right at home in Chekhov, and Rasputin’s attitude towards the characters is equally Chekhovian. The young man’s wife has just left him, and he boasts about his serial infidelity. Life, he says, is boring with only one person. But in opposition to him the old woman says that she’s been with her husband without either of them being unfaithful even once, and that it’s never been boring. The old man doesn’t speak, and we might suspect – as does the young man – that the woman doesn’t know the whole story. But her love shines so brightly that we don’t worry.

In much the same way, Kuzma hasn’t always been faithful to Maria. But, as he goes around, collecting money, and travelling on the train, he realises just how much he loves her. Loyalty doesn’t always mean love, and the opposite can be true too.

There is also a small amount of humour in Money for Maria which further adds to this view of the world. The moment I remember best is when, having collected the council’s wages, Kuzma waits the next morning for the money to be gradually begged away by frustrated family members. First the wife of one of the worker’s comes, and Kuzma dutifully parts with some of the money. We sit with him in awful apprehension as we wait for the next guest. At last we hear footsteps outside, and a girl appears, one of the worker’s daughters. We suspect the worst. But then she tells Kuzma that she just wants his eldest son to stop teasing her at school. It’s a moment that defuses the tension and makes aware of the respect Rasputin has for the lives and struggles of even the most simple of villagers.

Conclusion

I started writing this piece unsure of whether I had actually enjoyed Money for Maria. As much as I had found the story interesting and new, it seemed to lack the passion and belief of the great Russian works of the nineteenth century. Now that I’m finished, I realise I’ve changed my mind a little. The story does lack great essays on the fate of humankind, and characters who I can see living inside me as long as I live. But it carries on the quiet faith in the common man and woman and their small deeds that Chekhov is justly famous for, while adding a distinctly Soviet, Kafkaesque twist to his work. Money for Maria is beautiful and warming more than it is deep. But it doesn’t need to be deep. It’s still well worth reading, and a lot cheaper than a ticket to Siberia.

Rasputin’s most famous work is a short novel, Farewell to Matyora. I’m hoping to read that too, once I have time and energy, but for the moment I’m putting Rasputin aside. If you want to read more about works set in Siberia, have a look at my thoughts on Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales; for another Soviet writer who shares Rasputin’s preoccupation with human dignity in the face of terrible circumstances, look at Andrei Platonov.

Have you read Rasputin yourself? What did you think of him? Leave a comment!

Crossing the Zbruch by Isaac Babel – Translation and Commentary

This is my translation of “Crossing the Zbruch” by Isaac Babel. It is the first story in Konarmiia, or Red Army Cavalry, a collection of his stories on the Polish-Soviet war in the early 1920s. In other translations it has been rendered as “Crossing the River Zbrucz”. Following the text there are a few comments on the meaning of the piece.

Crossing the Zbruch

The leader of the sixth division had announced that Novograd-Volynsk was taken this morning at dawn. The headquarters moved out of Krapivo and our convoy, a noisy rear-guard, spread itself out along the highway that runs from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of countless peasants by Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowy rye, and on the horizon the virgin buckwheat rises like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn river bends, she flows away from us into the pearly fog of birch groves, she creeps among the flowery little hills, and with weakening strength she gets lost in the thickets of hops. The orange sun rolls across the sky like a head after a beheading, and a tender light illuminates the canyons in the clouds, as above our heads our unit’s standards blow in the sunset. The smells of yesterday’s bloodletting and dead horses drip into the evening coolness.

The Zbruch, now grown black, sloshes and twists the foamy loops of her rapids. The bridges have been destroyed so we have to fjord the river. A majestic moon lies on the waves. The horses, end to end, enter the water, its noisy currents trickling between a hundred horses’ legs. Someone goes under and loudly curses the Virgin Mary. The river is strewn with the black squares of carts; she is filled with murmurs, whistles and songs, rumbling above the lunar shapes and shining depths.

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. I find a pregnant woman in the flat that I’ve been allocated, and two ginger Jews with thin necks; a third is asleep, hiding his head and lying close to the wall. I find a looted cupboard in the flat I’ve been allocated, and on the floor scraps of women’s coats, human shit, and shards of pottery from the special crockery used by Jews once a year – at Passover.

“Clean it up.” I say to the woman. “How can you live in such filth, and when it’s your own home too…”

The two male Jews get up from their spot. They jump onto their felt soles and clean up the pottery from the floor; they jump around in silence, like apes, like Japs in the circus, their necks swelling and twisting as they go. They place a scruffy feather bed on the floor, and I lie towards the wall, right by the third, still sleeping, Jew. A timid poverty closes in around my pillow.

Everything is dead with silence, and only the moon, with the blue arms of night wrapped around its shining, carefree head, wanders above the window.

I loosen up my numb legs; I lie on the scruffy bed and fall asleep. The leader of the sixth division comes to me in a dream. He is on a heavy stallion and chasing after the leader of the brigade, and then he places two bullets into the other’s eyes. The bullets make holes in the brigade leader’s head, and both his eyes fall to the ground. “Why have you turned the brigade around?” Savitsky, leader of the sixth division, shouts at the wounded man… And there I awake, because the pregnant woman is groping at my face with her fingers.

“Sir,” She says to me. “You’re shouting in your sleep and throwing yourself around. I’ll make your bed up in the other corner, because here you are kicking my dear father…”

She picks up her thin legs and round belly from the floor and takes the blanket off the sleeping man. It is a dead old man that lies there, thrown onto his back. His throat has been torn out, his face is chopped in half, and dark blue blood lies in his beard, like a piece of lead.

“Sir,” the Jew says as she shakes out the feather bed. “The Poles cut him down, and he begged them: kill me in the yard outside in the dark, so that my daughter doesn’t have to see me die. But they did what they thought was necessary – he died in this room, thinking of me… and now I want to know,” said the woman suddenly, and with a terrible strength, “I want to know where else on the whole earth you might find another such father as my own…”

Commentary

The River: Border and Baptism

“Crossing the Zbruch” has also been translated as “Crossing the River Zbrucz”, and this is a good place to start when considering what exactly we can get out of the text. The river Zbruch is a river running in Western Ukraine, which at the time of Red Army Cavalry was part of Poland. For that reason, the title can use either the Polish name of the river, or the Russian/Ukrainian one. I chose the second primarily because that’s what is the case in the original, but in using the former option the sense of strangeness, of non-Russianness is heightened. Either way, we are moving, just as the Russians of the story do, from a familiar world into an alien one, both ideologically and culturally. Poland was a democratic country in the 1920s, and Western Ukraine contains a large number of Jews and Catholics compared to the East.

A Picture of the River Zbruch
The River Zbruch looking particularly mysterious and misty. Crossing this river brings the Soviets and their worldviews into a challenging conflict with the outside world.

The image of the river as a border has a long history. The Styx comes to mind, and the images of death as the army crosses, such as the dead horses, give this suggestion a particular resonance here. A river marks a division, and divisions are central to Red Army Cavalry as a whole. Partially they are cultural divides – between the old world and its culture as seen predominantly in the Jewish characters, and the new world of the Cossacks – but there are also divides between night and day, fathers and mothers, and plenty more besides. Entering the water also denotes baptism, made more obvious by the full immersion of one of the soldiers (who then curses the Virgin Mary in a reversal of the sacredness of the baptismal act).

Ambiguous Descriptions

What we have is a profane crossing and an entry into the unknown. The suggestion that the Soviets were in some way fulfilling a divine (or at the very least a fated – think Marx’s conception of historical development) role would have been welcomed in Soviet literature in the 1920s, but Babel undermines the purity of the idea by corrupting the Christian image. This is one of the ways he works in Red Army Cavalry – no image or idea is permitted without being questioned simultaneously. Indeed, one of the main metaphors employed by Babel in the collection is the idea of “rot” or “mould” – at the centre of what we take to be perfect there is a hostile element. Another example of this in “Crossing the Zbruch” is the standards. Though they suggest military glory, they are tainted by their association with the horrific decapitated head of the sunset.

A Divided Narrator: Misanthropy and Poetry

The narrator, who we learn later on in Red Army Cavalry is called Liutov, also seems uncertain in his role. We go from the formal language of the first paragraph into the lyrical second paragraph, and then back round again. The poetic beauty of the landscape is stressed, but then suddenly its horrors come to the fore. I take the image of the decapitated head to mean that it is impossible, even as you try to focus on the splendour of the natural world, to escape the violence and destruction that penetrates it throughout – even the sky is not safe from blood.

Liutov arrives at the flat he has been allocated, and here the main action of the story takes place. After the dream-time earlier on, where each paragraph seems to move at breakneck speed, here everything slows down. The formal tone returns as Liutov repeats the phrase “I’ve been allocated”, as if he is trying to take responsibility away from himself for what he sees and place it onto his superiors. The initial scene is dreadful, with only the image of the moon providing a sense that there is a better world out there. A sense of misanthropy permeates Liutov’s interactions with the Jewish inhabitants of the flat. He calls them “apes”, and when he describes the pregnant woman she seems to be a body before she is a human being – the image of her picking up her own body from the floor is particularly repellent.

Heroisms

But even here there is a tension. Liutov’s hostility towards the Jews is countered by his own Jewish nature, which is at this point only hinted at through his recognition of the Passover crockery. And even as he tries to order the other inhabitants of the flat around, his own nightmare makes his apparent confidence and leadership seem very much feigned, or at least unnatural. This is then contrasted with the pregnant woman. Her very nature as someone pregnant in a warzone suggests great suffering and asks questions about how she became so.

But instead of cowering away, she alone of the other characters is given a voice to express herself, and she does so at length and with self-assurance. This is in sharp contrast to Liutov’s speech, which is marked by the uncertainty of its closing ellipsis. She has experienced death – just as we, seeing her father’s body described in grim and unusual detail, have too – and for that she has come out stronger. Her own speech ends the story, and the message of her words is ultimately a positive one, stressing love for her father and also praise for his heroism. Her language, memorialising her father’s memory within the story, defends heroic death over cowardice, even as his body repels us. In Red Army Cavalry we see time and again that language’s power is transformative, giving us protection against the hostile world around us. It makes the woman herself a hero.

Conclusion

“Crossing the Zbruch” is the first story in Red Army Cavalry and it sets out immediately the main thematic currents of the collection. The nature of suffering and heroism in the form of the woman and her father, the dehumanising effects of war through the other Jews, and also the counterpoint to all this, the glorious loud and boisterous army – all are given attention. Key to the representation of all of these themes is Babel’s lack of judgement about them – the story, after all, ends with the woman’s words, not the narrator’s. As a result, the reader is forced to consider for themselves what they think the woman’s speech means – should we find it uplifting, or is horror a more sensible reaction? It is also important that images are always undermined, such as the connection between beauty and blood, and water and a distorted baptism.

Picture of Babel after being arrested.
Ultimately Babel was murdered by the Soviet secret police for his writing. But Red Army Cavalry comes from an earlier time, and portrays an uncertain if cautiously hopeful attitude towards the Revolution.

Nothing is ever clear in Babel’s world. The challenge of finding one’s way in the new and tragically flawed ideology of the Soviet Union makes itself manifest in the competing impulses of the narrator of Red Army Cavalry and the collection’s world. But these confusions were present in Babel’s own life too, and his death in 1940 at the hands of the secret police. We have to make up our own minds here instead of going in with our opinions already iron-cast, and repeated readings of Red Army Cavalry only give more food for thought. The intelligence of Babel’s stories, and their ambiguity, is something that I hope is captured here in my translation of this one.

For my essay on Red Army Cavalry as a whole, look here. Another Soviet writer whose attitude towards the new state was dangerously ambiguous is Andrei Platonov – see my review of his Soul and Other Stories here. For more Russian translations, check out my work on a Tolstoy short story here, or some Leskov here.

Picture of the Zbruch by Arts at pl.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]; Picture of Babel after being arrested is in the public domain.