Category: Translations

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.

Before the Law by Franz Kafka – Translation and (brief) Analysis

This is my translation of Franz Kafka’s story “Vor dem Gesetz”, which also appears towards the end of The Trial. After the text there are some casual comments on the meaning and on reading Kafka generally.

Before the Law

Before the Law there stands a gatekeeper. And to this gatekeeper comes a man from the country and asks for entry into the Law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry. The man thinks for a moment and then asks whether he will be able to enter later on. “This much is possible,” says the gatekeeper. “But not now.” Since the door onto the Law stands open as ever and the gatekeeper stands to one side of it, the man bends forward so as to see through it into what lies within. When the gatekeeper notices it, he laughs, saying: “If you’re so allured by what’s inside, why not try going through in spite of my forbidding it? Be warned, though: I am mighty. And I am but the lowest of the gatekeepers. From each hall to the next there are gatekeepers, each one mightier than before. By the third one I cannot even bear his sight.” Such difficulties the man from the country has not counted on. Surely the Law, he thinks, ought to be accessible to all people and at all times. But as he looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, with his sharp nose and long thin black beard like a Tartar’s, he then decides he had better wait until he received permission to enter. The gatekeeper gives him a little stool and lets him set himself down on the side by the door. He sits there for days and then years. He makes many efforts to be let in and tires the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper every-so-often engages to give him little interrogations, where he asks the man about his homeland and about plenty of other things. But they are lifeless questions, however, of the sort that great men ask, and in the end he tells him once more that he still cannot let him in. The man, who had prepared a great deal for his journey, uses everything he has, whether valuable or not, in order to bribe the gatekeeper. The other man takes everything from him, but says as he does so: “I am only taking these from you so that you don’t think you haven’t tried everything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost without a moment’s pause. He forgets about the other gatekeepers, so that this one seems to him the only obstacle preventing him from entering the Law. He curses his misfortune, at first heedlessly and loudly; then, as he grows older, he just mutters to himself. He grows childish and, since from his years of study of the gatekeeper he has come to recognise the fleas in his felt collar, he asks the fleas to aid him in changing the gatekeeper’s mind too. At last his sight grows weak and he is unable to tell whether it is really getting darker, or if it is just his eyes deceiving him. He does recognise well, however, a radiance shining forth in the dark, one that escapes inextinguishably from the door into the Law. Now he has little time left to live. Before his death all the experiences of the whole time gather themselves inside his head into a single question, which he had hitherto not asked the gatekeeper. He beckons to him, for now he can no longer hold his head up straight. The gatekeeper has to bend himself deeply to lower himself down to him, since the height difference between them has greatly changed to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know?” Asks the gatekeeper, “You are insatiable.” “Look, if every man strives after the Law,” says the man. “How does it happen that in all these years nobody but myself has demanded entry?” The gatekeeper recognises that the man has already reached his end and, so as to reach him through his failing hearing, he shouts to him: “Nobody else could obtain permission here. This entrance was destined only for you. And now I am going to shut it.”

Comments

I’ve never been much of a fan of German, either as a language or as a literature, in comparison with others. I guess I’ve struggled to see the beauty in the words, and for a long time it seemed that German literature was a lesser copy of the Russian version, but without the redemptive hope of national faith. That is, simply a little grim and depressing. But Kafka has always been an favourite exception, in part because he has never fit snugly into the classification of “German literature”, being a Jew in what is now the Czech Republic, which even in the early 20th century was not exactly the centre of German culture. Yet Bohemia produced, in some way or other, Kafka, as it did Rilke. No matter my misgivings about the wider literature, misgivings which truth be told time and experience are quickly changing anyway, it’s hard not to feel grateful for those two.

Picture of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is perhaps the most widely read German language author outside of the German-speaking lands, and just as ambiguous a fellow as is his work.

Even so, “getting” Kafka took a long time. I’ve read The Metamorphoses two or three times now, in both the original and in translation, and have struggled to enjoy it. Only recently, under the full weight of various critics’ opinions, did the work begin to open up to me. But in spite of that misfire, other parts of Kafka’s oeuvre have more easily reached and crashed against the inner shore of my soul: “In the Penal Colony”, “A Hunger Artist”, and both The Trial and The Castle are among them.

It is perhaps foolish to have people in schools read Kafka because often they haven’t themselves lived in any serious way. It was certainly my problem when I started out. Without experience, it’s hard to appreciate the absurdity, because the stories seem simply absurd, as opposed to that Kafkaesque standard – absurd yet constantly revealed in our own lives to be entirely real. Within school and even, to be fair, university, usually we can only look at them clinically, rather than personally – that is, we can only appreciate, rather than truly enjoy them.

Kafka’s Train Ticket

My first experience of Kafka’s world being transported into my own came with receiving a penalty fare while trying to take the train home after having had dinner with a friend. I had bought a return ticket at the same station a few hours earlier, but unfortunately after going through the turnstiles I had thrown away the return ticket rather than the outbound one. When I arrived that evening the ticket office had closed, so there were only machines for buying tickets still operating. But I didn’t have a card on me, so I couldn’t buy a new ticket. I waited on the platform for the train to arrive, hoping to buy a ticket on board. Instead, what happened was that one of the railway workers came up and asked to see my ticket beforehand.

I explained what had happened and why I was unable to buy a replacement ticket, then asked to buy one as I saw that the worker had a ticket dispensing machine on her. I said that I had more than enough money in cash to buy the ticket. She told me to be quiet and asked for my ID. She then began writing me a penalty fare for trying to travel without a ticket. I tried once more to explain, and indeed I asked the worker to go and speak with her co-worker – the exact person I had bought both tickets from only a few hours previously – who I could see a few meters away.

Yet again, though, and against all that could be called reasonable – given that I had plenty of money and my receipts and an eyewitness in addition to everything else – I was told to stop being rude and to write down all of my details. I was then told that I had a month to pay the inflated price of the ticket she was giving me, or else I would be forced to go to court. Unexpected and in part inexplicable exercises of power and an illogical and cruel bureaucracy are all mainstays of Kafka’s world, but here they had been transported into my own. In a particularly sour mood, I eventually got my train back home. The penalty fare had cost about £5. The damage to my pride and dignity had cost considerably more.

There was a silver lining to this tale, though: it was the key to understanding Kafka. This, of course, turned out to be a great overestimation on my part, for as with the many doors of “Before the Law”, there are many different Kafka stories and each of them is be opened up by a different experience or several. But this was the first of many, and over time I’ve begun to enjoy Kafka more and more. What at first was simply a cold academic understanding of possible meanings is now a personal understanding of a few meanings.

Before the Law

“Before the Law” is probably my favourite of Kafka’s parable-like shorter stories. In part this is because it is simple linguistically and, like anyone who reads in a foreign language they are not yet the master of, I much prefer those works I feel I fully understand, even if the works themselves are perhaps on some other scale less great or complex. But the fact that it’s easy to read is not the reason it’s my favourite. No, I love it because it uses its simplicity not to leave its meaning concealed, like some abstract postmodern text, but rather to multiply its potential meanings, so that each new reading and each time it reappears in one’s mind is accompanied by a new thought, a new guess at one of its many possible truths.

Some Interpretations

I mean, in a sense you can list the things it might be about. It may well be about Gnosticism. It may also be about trying to reach God through a faith that never seems sufficient. Here in Cambridge it seems to me to be at least partially about the struggles of learning, how in spite of our best efforts we can waste away on a goal of knowledge that turns out to be entirely illusory, or at best the first door when there are many others left to come. Or maybe it is more broadly about any of those goals or ideals that become so great that we fail to live as a result of our quest to grasp them and even give away all that actually can give our life happiness and meaning instead – the equipment the man from the country has with him.

I mean those are just some ideas. As part of the translation process I had to make decisions that undoubtedly also contribute to the meanings you can locate in the text. Capitalising “Law” is a little controversial because it undoubtedly makes it harder to imagine that the story as simply being about trying to reach a lawyer for some advice. That said, I think by capitalising it I make it more clear that the Law is itself a symbol, and worth substituting if you feel like it. Another thing is the translation of “bestimmt” as “destined” when talking about the door itself. This reinforces the suggestion that perhaps the story as a whole is a way of looking at our relationship to fate. We need to accept it as personal and at the same time immutable. The man is a fool for wanting to change it by entering.

We do talk about the “laws of fate”, after all.

Conclusion

But there are so many meanings that going on would be foolish. What is true without a shadow of a doubt is that this is a wonderful story in the way that Walter Benjamin conceived of the term. I narrated it to a friend as we both went out for a burger and with my own retelling it took on newer meanings while still retaining the heart of Kafka’s work. “Before the Law” is special precisely because its size and interpretative potential mean that wherever it goes it can have its impact, and that repeating it is like simply adding a new flavouring to a dish. That’s the best argument for reading it and retelling it, again and again and again.

What do you think the story is about? Let me know in the comments

Photograph of Franz Kafka taken by Sigismund Jacobi is in the public domain.

A Righteous Man by Nikolai Leskov

Since I finished reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”, which I discuss here, I have been meaning to read some Leskov, and translate it as well if it weren’t too hard. I’m not sure whether the piece I chose was necessarily the best introduction, but I found it very funny, and hope I conveyed that a little in the translation. A few comments of my own follow the main text.

A Righteous Man – Nikolai Leskov

A Vision at Midnight

I have heard it said often and indeed several times read it too: that he has “vanished” – “the righteous man” has vanished, and he has vanished not only completely without a trace, but also without any hope of ever finding him again in Russia. This is grave news, and at the same time one didn’t quite want to believe it. Perhaps, though, the matter depends more on those people who are seeking him: they are looking even though they don’t know how to find such a “righteous man”. All this makes me remember the old vaudeville “A Peaceful Night in Sherbakovii Lane”. There, if I remember right, there was a couplet, going thus:

“And even on Sherbakovii Lane

You could find a goodly soul.”

What that means is that the author of this piece knew how to find “a good man” even in such a small and dirty lane as that one. And so, how could it be the case that there cannot be found in all of Russia but one “righteous man”? And what sort of justness are we expecting from this “righteous man” anyway? That he “in the face of social injustice finds within himself courage and determination to say publicly to the people: “You are making a mistake and are going on the path of error – but look: here is the path to righteousness”?”

I am citing this from an article I found in one public news organ whose name I feel no need to mention. I can vouch but one thing: that these printed words I have just repeated seemed to a great many to be deeply true. But I remained biased against them. I believed that a righteous man still survived, somewhere out there, and that I would soon meet him – and indeed I did. I saw him in a battle with the whole of society, which he strove to defeat on his own and without fear. This is how it happened.

It was the summer that has just passed by. I had left Petersburg with one rather devout friend, who had enticed me to have a look at a big religious celebration out in the country. The way there wasn’t particularly long or tiresome: one cool evening we sat down in a carriage in Petersburg, and the next morning we were already at the place. And within half an hour of crossing the threshold my religious friend had already quarrelled with some church sexton or other! (He had apparently said something disrespectful to him).

When evening came it found both of us in our room and my fellow traveller sitting and busily writing a letter of complaint back to the capital about this poor man, so I went down to breathe some fresh air and also have a look at what exactly it was that people got up to out here. I was accompanying an easy-going artist I had met who said he’d come here to “read his scenes” to the public.

At such an hour back home in Petersburg all respectable people are busy, as is well known, out in restaurant gardens eating, and here it turned out that people were doing just the same. It thus happened, then, that we landed without any misunderstandings right in the public garden, where my acquaintance, the artist, was supposed to be showing off his talents.

He wasn’t a newcomer like me – he knew a lot of people here, and they knew him too.

The garden, into which we had arrived, was rather large for a provincial town, though it was rather similar to a mere boulevard from my perspective. In any case, to the left there were entrances to the place where this evening there happened to be a paid concert going on, as a result everything was closed off. The paying public went through a single middle way, shaped like a concave semicircle. Around the gates were placed plank booths for selling tickets, and a number of policemen and idlers were standing there too, the latter having no chance of getting through to the garden due to lacking the necessary funds.

In front of this entrance to the main garden there was a small front garden, but I couldn’t tell what it was growing or why it was here and fenced round in the first place. Its relation to the larger garden was like that of a waiting room in a bathhouse to the baths themselves.

The artist went through according to his “special right”, while I bought a ticket, and we entered through the gates to the accompaniment of the Skobelevskii March[1], after which there were cheers of “hoorah” and new demands for the exact same thing again.  

The public were out in great numbers, and all of them were pressed together on a small lawn, in the corner of which there was a wooden restaurant, made to look like a pagan temple. On one side of it a summer theatre had been erected from wood panels, and this was where the performance was now taking place and where a little while later my Petersburg orator ought to be doing his readings. Meanwhile, on the other side there was the “shell” where the military band was located and busy playing the march.

The society here clearly belonged to several different ranks: there were petty councillors, officers from the army, merchants and the “grey people” of the petty bourgeoisie. In the more obvious places were packed the traders, while in a far corner a regimental clerk and a certain sort of woman were hanging around.

Decrepit little tables covered by dirty cloths had been haphazardly thrown about, all inconveniently near to one another and all of them occupied. The people cheerfully gave me a public demonstration of what exactly it was they did here. In great demand it seemed was tea, beer, and vodka, although they called the latter “Simple person’s wine”, as if it would sound more respectable that way. Only in one place did I notice someone who was managing himself in a way suggestive of greater wealth: before him stood a bottle of champagne and cognac, and a teapot with boiling water for making punch. There were rather a lot of empty glasses around him, but he was at that moment sitting alone.

This guest had a remarkable appearance which soon thrust itself upon one’s sight. For one, he was gigantic, with a thicket of thick hair which already had flashes of grey in it among the black. His dress was extraordinarily elaborate, colourful, and tasteless. He was wearing a bright and deep blue linen shirt with a high upturned and starched collar. On his neck a white foulard with brown spots was carelessly hung, and over his shoulders was slung a jacket in the Manchester style. Then, on his chest was an extraordinarily massive golden chain with a diamond and a great number of dangling pendants. Even in terms of his footwear he was extremely original: he had on his feet such low boots that one might sooner have taken them for slippers, and between them and his pantaloons flashed bright stripped red cotton socks, just as if he had scratched his legs until they bled.

He was sitting at the biggest table, which was placed in the very best location – just beneath a large old lime tree for shade – and it seemed that he was in a state of nervous agitation.

The artist, who had accompanied me thus far, as soon as he saw this most original specimen squeezed my hand quietly and murmured to me:

“Well, well, well. Now this is something unexpected!”

“Who is he?”

“This, my dear friend, is a subject[2] of the finest sort.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that he is extremely curious. This is Martin Ivanich – a nobleman, merchant, and extremely prosperous fellow and an absolute nutcase to boot. In common parlance among our people he is often known as “Martin the righteous”, because he loves to tell everyone the truth. His fame, just like that of Ersha Ershovich[3], has spread along every river and port of our dear Russia. And he is not without an education either – he knows a lot of Pushkin and Griboedov[4] by heart, and if you get him to have a drink he’ll start to draw upon “Woe from Wit” or something from Gogol. Indeed, it looks as though he’s already started with his spree – he’s already sitting without his hat.”

“Well, it has gotten hot.”

“No – he always brings another bottle with him hidden under his hat, just in case they refuse to give him any more at the buffet.”

The artist stopped a lackey, just at that minute going past, and asked: “Has Martin Ivanovich got a bottle underneath his hat?”

“Sir… I don’t know what you mean…”

“Well, that means he’s ready,” the artist turned back to me, “and soon we two will witness a righteous performance of the most unexpected and noblest sort. We ought to go and have a chat with him.”

The artist went towards Martin Ivanovich and I trudged after him, stopping close by so as to observe their meeting.

The artist stopped in front of Martin and, after taking off his own hat, with a smile said: “I bow to your honour.”

Martin Ivanovich in response to this extended a hand to him and immediately brought him down onto the empty chair next to him, then answered:

“”I beg you to join me” – this said Sobakevich[5]”

“But I don’t want to,” Uttered my friend, but at that moment a glass of punch was already sitting before him, and Martin once more repeated the quote.

“I beg you to join me” – said Sobakevich.”

“No, truly I cannot. I have to go and read now.”

Martin poured out the punch onto the ground and muttered some unpleasantry or other befitting a Nozdrev[6].

I didn’t much like this – I understood why everybody ran away from this antique. As an original he certainly was an original, but it seemed to me that within him was contained not only the character of Sobakevich, but also Konstantin Konstandzhoglo[7], who boiled fish with their skins still on. Only, this Konstandzhoglo now had drunk a little more and in an even less pleasant mood he began to slag off the whole of society. He talked of how they “all are wretches and scoundrels”; and when the public once again demanded the Skobelevskii March he suddenly stood up without a cause and shushed the lot of them.

“Why’d he do that?” I asked my friend as he fled the vicinity.

“Because he is now going to cast a little righteousness in their direction. But anyway, we should head into the theatre.”

I left with my friend and made myself comfortable in his dressing room. We sang, read, and once more went out into the garden.

The spectacle was finished. The public had markedly thinned out and, as they were leaving, once more demanded the same Skobelevskii March. Without difficulty we found ourselves a table, but luckily or unluckily we had ended up right next to our Martin Ivanovich again. He, while we had been away, had managed to increase his sensibility still further, and his sense of justice, it appeared, now demanded a vocal stand from him. He now no longer sat, but stood and declaimed not poetry, but a prose excerpt which really made you admit that he was very well-read for someone of his milieu. He was rolling off from memory phrases from the praised word of Zakharov[8] to Catherine, which was located in “Considerations on the Matter of New and Old Style”.

“”Suvorov[9], so spoke Catherine, show us! He rose like a tumultuous whirlpool and he blasted the Turks from their guarded borders; like a hawk he fell upon his prey. Whoever he saw he sent to flight; whoever he met he conquered; and to whomever he brought his thunder he annihilated. There were none who escaped. Europa herself was left trembling… and…””  

But just at that moment the public once more demanded the Skobelevskii March, and once the orchestra had started fulfilling this request it was no longer possible to discern whatever Martin Ivanovich was declaiming. Only when the march had finished did his words reach us again:

““-Thus, must we honour our forebears and never think too highly of our own poor selves!””

What is this man trying to get at?” I asked my friend.

“Verily, verily, my good fellow, he is trying to achieve his justice.”

“What does he want it for now?”

“For him it is essential: the man is righteous, and you can see it on his face. Look look…” The storyteller finished, and I saw that Martin Ivanovich had suddenly stood up from his place and with rapid if tipsy steps had gone after an older man in military uniform who at that moment just happened to be walking past.

Martin Ivanovich caught up with this stranger (who happened to be the bandmaster of the orchestra), grabbed him from behind by the collar and shouted: “”No, no, you shan’t get away from me” – so said Nozdrev”.

The bandmaster smiled with a look of embarrassment but asked that he be released.

“No, I shall not let you go,” Answered Martin Ivanovich. “You are tormenting me!” And he forced him down towards the table and shouted again: “Drink to the insult to our affronted forebears and the darkness now covering our future descendants!”

“Who did I insult?”

“Who? Me, Suvorov, and all the righteous people of our land!”

“I didn’t think I… I wasn’t suggesting to…”

“Then for what in God’s name were you playing that itch of a march for the entire evening long?”

“The public requested it.”

“You are tormenting me with this injustice.”

“The public requested it.”

“Despise the public, then, if they are unjust!”

“What is this injustice you are going on about?”

“Why aren’t you playing Suvorov’s March, eh?”

“The public did not request it.”

“I suggest you clear up the matter with them. Play the Skobelevskii March once, then Suvorov’s March twice, because he waged war more than him. Yes! Now I shall let you go – head back right at this moment and play Suvorov’s March!”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no such thing as Suvorov’s March.”

“How could there be no march for Suvorov? “Suvorov, spoke Catherine, show us how it’s done! He blew things up, swooped down upon them, destroyed them, conquered them, gave a shake to Europa!…” and you’re saying he doesn’t have a march?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The public hasn’t requested one.”

“Aha! Well, I will show them what’s what!”

And Martin Ivanovich suddenly let go of the bandmaster, stood up on top of the table and cried out: “You public! You are unfair, and what’s more, you are a pig!”[10]

Everything suddenly grew noisy and people started moving about, while near the table where Martin Ivanovich the Righteous was continuing his speech a policeman had appeared and was now demanding that the orator lower himself back to the ground. Martin did not comply. He defended himself by kicking about with his legs and loudly continued to reproach everyone for their injustice towards Suvorov. He finished with a challenge for a duel, throwing down one of his shoes instead of a glove. A couple of townsfolk who had come to the rescue grabbed at his legs, but they couldn’t put an end to the mayhem: into the air there flew yet another boot, the entire table flipped over, and the sounds of smashing cutlery could be heard alongside the splashing of water and cognac… in a word, it was a right mess… at the buffet table for some reason the lights all momentarily went out and a everyone began a stampede towards the exit, while on their platform the musicians decided have a go playing their finale: “Only Gloried is our God in Zion.”[11]

My friend and I joined the handful of curious ones who had not rushed to leave and were now awaiting the denouement. We were all tightly packed in that place were the police were trying to restrain Martin Ivanovich, who was still managing to keep them off him and all the time was heroically defending the matter, crying: “Catherine spoke: Suvorov, show us… Explosions, swooping, annihilation, shaking!”

And then he was silent, either because he was tired or because something had finally managed to interrupt him.

In the darkness that now followed it was hard to see who had a hold of whom, but then the voice of the righteous man resounded anew: “Stop strangling me: I am on the side of righteousness!”

“There isn’t any justice here” Said the policeman.

“I am not speaking to you, but to the whole of society!”

“Maybe if you just go over here…”

“And I will go – but only get your hands off – come on! I’m going… hands off! No need to embrace me.”

“Gentlemen, please move out of the way.”

“I am not scared… Why is there no march for Suvorov?”

“Go complain to the justice of the peace.”

“And I will complain! Suvorov conquered more!”

“The justice will decide the matter.”

“The justice is an idiot! Where is that devil of a man to learn about it?”

“Well just wait and see!… it’s all in the protocol.”

“Well I’m not scared of your justice. I’m going!” Martin shouted. He threw off the arms of the policemen and went with big steps towards the exit. He was still not wearing any shoes – he was walking with only those multicoloured socks…

The police didn’t keep off and tried to encircle him.

From among the rows of the public who were still there someone cried out: “Martin Ivanovich, go and find your shoes… you need to put something on your feet.”

He stopped for a moment, but then he waved his hands and carried on, shouting: “It’s nothing… if I am a righteous man then I should be walking like this. Justice always walks without boots.”

At the gates they forced Martin into a carriage with a policeman and then they drove off.

The public then went off to wherever each of them needed to be.

“Well, all things considered, his reasoning was just,” Said one stranger to another as they overtook us.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just like he said – Suvorov conquered more than Skobolev after all – why shouldn’t they have played his march?”

“There isn’t an arrangement.”

“So that’s your injustice right there.”

“Eh, shut up. It’s not for us to bother with it. Maybe the justice of the peace will have to worry about it, but not you. Who cares about being just or not?”

My friend took me by the arm and whispered: “If you want to know – this is the real truth.”

While I was getting undressed in my room I heard two people going along the corridor, quietly discussing something. They decided to part ways by the entrance to the room next door and finished with the following: “Well, however you want to look at it, in his drunken state there was some justice alright.”

“Yes, well, maybe you’re right, but the devil was in it too.”

And they wished each other good night.

[1] Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev (1843-1882), recently deceased at the time the story takes place, had been a successful general during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

[2] The Russian has “suzhekt” a pun on “sub’ekt” meaning a subject, and “syuzhet”, meaning a plot.

[3] Ersha Ershovich was a character in a popular satire of the 17th Century

[4] Pushkin is the most famous Russian writer, equivalent in stature to Shakespeare in English. Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov (1795-1829) was a diplomat, poet, and dramatist. His comedy “Woe from Wit” is extremely popular in Russia and has had a huge influence on literature ever since its publication.

[5] A character in Gogol’s Dead Souls.

[6] Nozdrev is a character in Dead Souls as well. He is two-faced and superficial.

[7] See note 5

[8] I. S. Zakharov was a famously good stylist according to the work mentioned

[9] A V Suvorov was general under Catherine, and among the most well-known generals of the Imperial period altogether. Far more important that Skobelevskii.

[10] “You are swine” is another translation, but I thought using pig was more funny. In the Russian he is speaking to the public as if it were an individual, including using the second-person singular form of “you”.

[11] A religious hymn by M. M. Kheraskov

Comments and (brief) Analysis

As I mentioned above, this is the first Leskov piece I’ve read, so there’s only so much I can say about it. He’s not a particularly well-known writer outside of his homeland, and then only for “Lady Macbeth of Mtensk”. He writes simply, and that gives me an advantage translating the piece, because I have less recourse to the dictionary or my Russian friends. Still, I hadn’t anticipated Martin Ivanovich’s quotes when I started reading, and they were a bit trickier to translate – I did need help for those, because the Russian is much older than what I’m used to, being as it was from the 18th century.

Nikolai Leskov around the time this story was written. Doesn’t he look like a man with plenty of yarns to spin?

More useful, probably, is to explain a few of the ways the story connects to Benjamin’s ideas of storytelling.

For one, the story is recounted as if it were a story from real life – and indeed, Leskov is recounting a largely real event, according to the notes in his collected works. The narrator explains how they heard about the story then tells the story itself, which is simply an event. He also tries to frame it, in the beginning, within moral questions. That is, the story has a moral – another key element for Benjamin. It is trying to tell us something, most obviously that there are still righteous people out there, though they may seem strange to us.

The story is also written simply. The language is of a low register, and indeed in recounting the speech of people the narrator even veers into coarse day-to-day language of the time. He doesn’t try to explain actions, or provide justifications – he lets the characters speak for themselves, and then the reader find their moral. Because of the lack of a psychological level – another distinguishing characteristic of stories as opposed to novels – there is a layer of ambiguity. Are we to treat Martin Ivanovich as a truly righteous person, or is there more irony involved? These questions depend on how the story is told – with each retelling, a narrator could focus on one or the other.

Though it is true that this is a story in a book, and thus it lacks some of the other traits that oral stories would, it nonetheless serves as a kind of base, which through real-life retellings, could be shaped and moulded into a truer story. Perhaps you, reader, could pass it off as one of your own experiences, the next time you find yourself enjoying an evening with your friends, and see what they think. 🙂