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.
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.
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.
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 someAzeri 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
