Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  Thaw was on the way. The trees were black. Garden fences divided the slopes of the hillocks into crooked quadrangles.

  Factory chimneys smoked. The new houses had rounded corners. Engineers with little pointed beards, with badges on their hats, sauntered proudly. Seleznyova stepped to one side and, standing still, looked at them: she was paid forty roubles a month, they – it was said – six hundred.

  Burdocks poked through the snow. Grey fences sagged. ‘Hey, Auntie!’ little boys yelled and slid past her feet on sleds.

  Down below were dwellings, with little paths and apple trees, and meadows and forest could be seen in the distance. By the gate lay cinders. Seleznyova rang. Wearing a soldier’s greatcoat, the dark curls on her forehead as if sewn to her kerchief, the babka let her in.

  ‘Look at that pine there,’ said the babka, ‘and don’t think.’ The pine looked blue, poking up above a strip of forest. The babka muttered. A band was playing on the skating rink. ‘Here’s some salt,’ – she nudged Seleznyova. ‘Just slip her a little.’

  The goat bent down over the water, then turned away. Hanging her head, Seleznyova went back out. ‘So there you are,’ said a woman who’d called round. She was squat, and wearing a homemade hat. Seleznyova greeted her. ‘He’s coming to have a look,’ the woman announced. ‘I would say Yes. His late wife was very dressy. Everything’s still intact. The house is full of things.’ Picking a lantern up off the ground, they set off, arms round one another’s waists, slowly.

  The visitor arrived – in a sealskin hat and a brown overcoat with an astrakhan collar. ‘Do excuse me,’ he began – and smirked, eyes gleaming, into his greying moustache.

  ‘Not in the least,’ said Seleznyova. The woman watched, delighted.

  ‘Time flies,’ marvelled the visitor. ‘Spring will be here any day. We’re learning the May Day anthem already.

  ‘Sisters,’

  – he unexpectedly began to sing, looking at Seleznyova and waving a spoon. The woman nudged Seleznyova, beaming.

  ‘put on your wedding garb,

  Strew garlands of roses over the floor.

  Brothers,’

  – the woman sang along, rocking forward and winking at Seleznyova so she would join in too –

  ‘open your hearts and your arms,

  The years of heartache and pain are no more.2

  Splendid!’ the woman enthused. ‘Marvellous, truthful words. And you sing superbly.’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Seleznyova. She didn’t like the visitor. She thought the song was stupid.

  ‘Goodbye!’ they said at last.

  Throwing on a short jacket, Seleznyova ran out. There was a smell of damp. Music was wafting from far away. The goat didn’t bleat when the lock rattled. She was lying on the straw, not moving.

  It grew light. The roofs were dripping. The goat didn’t need water now. After she had washed, Seleznyova went out, so as to get everything done before going to the office. She hired a man from the bazaar for fifty kopeks and, sitting in his sleigh, drove back with him.

  ‘But she’s alive,’ he said, as he entered the outhouse. Seleznyova shook her head. Little boys ran off after the sleigh. ‘Dead goat!’ they shouted, and skipped about. Everyone left. Bending down, Seleznyova pulled up a sled with a box and began raking up the litter.

  ‘Greetings!’ said yesterday’s visitor, suddenly appearing behind her. He was smirking, wearing the sealskin hat made from his late wife’s muff, and his eyes gleamed. His cheeks were glossy. ‘The gate’s wide open,’ he said. ‘Too early for school, I thought, so why not?’ Putting her rake down, Seleznyova pointed to the empty stall. He sighed politely. ‘Scarcely do I glimpse death,’ he began to intone, ‘ere I weep and shed tears.’3 Looking down at the ground, Seleznyova brushed her fingers against the outhouse wall and looked at them. Drops fell on her sleeves. A rook cawed.

  ‘Well then,’ said the visitor, twirling his moustache, ‘I won’t keep you. But I’ll send the woman round: for a talk.’

  ‘Please do,’ said Seleznyova.

  First published in 1931

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  ANDREY PLATONOVICH PLATONOV (1899–1951)

  Born in Voronezh, the eldest son of a gifted craftsman and railway worker, Platonov began work aged thirteen – in an office, then in a factory, then as an assistant engine driver. He welcomed the Russian Revolution and began publishing poems and articles in the local press in 1918. He worked as a land reclamation expert during much of the 1920s and as an engineer in the 1930s. Between 1927 and 1933 he wrote his most politically controversial works; two of these, Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, were first published in the Soviet Union only in the late 1980s. Other stories were published in Platonov’s lifetime but subjected to fierce criticism. His fifteen-year-old son was sent to a labour camp in 1938. He was released three years later – after the intervention of Platonov’s influential friend Mikhail Sholokhov – only to die of the tuberculosis he had contracted there. During the Second World War Platonov worked as a war correspondent and published several volumes of stories, but he came under attack again after the publication in 1946 of ‘The Return’. He died in 1951, also of tuberculosis.

  Platonov has often been called a satirist; he once wrote that ‘satire must possess teeth and claws, its plough must dig deep into the soil so that the bread of our life can then grow.’ His own satire – especially that of The Foundation Pit, a response to Stalin’s programme of crash industrialization and collectivization – is certainly not without teeth and claws; nevertheless, it is so intermingled with tenderness that the word ‘satire’ seems hardly appropriate. Platonov has also been called a surrealist; yet the more one learns about Soviet history, the more realistic his surrealism comes to seem. And few writers convey the texture, the smell and feel of everyday life more vividly.

  His subject matter is varied, but a theme to which he often returns is the search for utopia. In Chevengur and The Foundation Pit he shows us the dreams of the builders of socialism in all their inarticulate confusion, his sympathy not lessened by a clear awareness of the consequences of these dreams. In his unfinished Happy Moscow Platonov examines the brave new world of 1930s Moscow, a time when the slogan most frequently repeated on posters and banners was Stalin’s pronouncement that ‘Life has become better, life has become merrier.’ The short novel Soul, set in the remote deserts of Central Asia, is about an attempt to save a dying tribe and lead them to Communism. And the story ‘Among Animals and Plants’ is about the dissatisfied family of a railway worker in Soviet Karelia: the radio reports, and the splendour of the passing trains, lead them to believe that utopia has already been established in the Soviet Union – everywhere except in their own dismal hamlet.

  ‘The Third Son’ is one of Platonov’s subtlest stories. After the death of an old woman, her six sons try three times – through ‘occasional slow tears’, through a perfunctorily performed Orthodox ceremony, and through almost heroic exuberance – to find a way to mourn her. Only when the third son blacks out, suddenly overwhelmed, are they freed to mourn her in their individual ways. According to Joseph Brodsky, who considered Platonov the finest Russian prose-writer of the last century, Ernest Hemingway greatly admired ‘The Third Son’. A translation was published in the 1940s, so it is not impossible that Hemingway read the story and spoke about it to a Soviet journalist.

  The delicately symmetrical narrative of ‘The Return’ represents the acme of Platonov’s skill with regard to narrative construction. Without the least show of artifice, the story of Ivanov’s return frames a second story, which frames a third story, which in turn frames a fourth. These framed stories help to bring about Ivanov’s eventual change of heart; it is after listening to the story told by his son Petya, about another soldier’s difficult homecoming, that Ivanov first begins to admit to himself that he might be less than perfect. It was probably Platonov’s hope that, just as Petya’s story helped Ivanov to renounce the distant utopia represented by the young woman
he met on his journey home, so ‘The Return’ would help his own readers to return more easily to their peacetime lives.

  In a 1999 article in The Moscow Times Penelope Fitzgerald chose ‘The Return’ as one of her ‘three great Russian works of the millennium’. In 1946, however, this wise and humane story was considered a slander on Soviet Russia. Except for one story for children, it was the last work of his own that Platonov was able to publish.

  On the surface, Platonov is the least ‘literary’ of writers. His language can seem crude, elemental – a friend once described it to me as ‘the language that might be spoken by the roots of trees’ – but it is also remarkably subtle, packed with the most delicate puns and allusions.

  THE THIRD SON

  An old woman died in a provincial town. Her husband, a seventy-year-old retired worker, went to the telegraph office and handed in six telegrams for different regions and republics, with the unvarying words: MOTHER DEAD COME HOME FATHER.

  The elderly clerk took a long time doing the sums, kept making mistakes, and wrote out the receipts and stamped them with trembling hands. The old man looked meekly at her through the wooden hatch; his eyes were red and he was absentmindedly thinking something, trying to distract grief from his heart. It seemed to him that the woman also had a broken heart and a soul now confused for ever – perhaps she was a widow or a wife who had been cruelly abandoned.

  And so here she was, muddling money, losing her memory and attentiveness; even for ordinary, straightforward labour, people need to have inner happiness.

  After sending off the telegrams, the old father went back home; he sat on a stool by a long table, at the cold feet of his dead wife, smoked, whispered sad words, watched the solitary life of a grey bird hopping from perch to perch in its cage, sometimes cried quietly to himself and then calmed down, wound up his pocket watch, glanced now and again through the window, beyond which, out in nature, the weather kept changing – leaves were falling, along with flakes of wet tired snow, then there was rain, then a late sun shone, with no warmth, like a star – and the old man waited for his sons.

  The eldest son arrived by plane the very next day. The other five sons all gathered within two more days.

  One of them, the third son, came with his daughter, a six year old who had never seen her grandfather.

  The mother had been waiting on the table for more than three days, but her body did not smell of death, so neat and clean had it been rendered by illness and dry exhaustion; after giving plentiful and healthy life to her sons, the old woman had kept a small, miserly body for herself and had tried for a long time to preserve it, if only in the most pitiful state, so that she could love her children and be proud of them – until she died.

  The huge men, aged from twenty to forty, stood in silence round the coffin on the table. There were six of them – seven including the father, who was smaller than even his very youngest son, and weaker too. In his arms he held his granddaughter, who was screwing up her eyes from fear of a dead old woman she had never met and whose white unblinking eyes could just see her from beneath their half-closed lids.

  The sons silently wept occasional slow tears, twisting their faces in order to bear grief without a sound. The father was no longer crying; he had cried himself out alone, before the others, and now, with secret excitement and an out-of-place joy, he was looking at his sturdy band of sons. Two of them were sailors – captains of ships; one was an actor from Moscow; the one with the daughter was a physicist and a Party member; the youngest was studying to be an agronomist; and the eldest was a head engineer in an aeroplane factory and wore on his chest a medal for honourable labour. All six of them – seven including the father – were silent around the dead mother and mourned her without a word, hiding from one another their despair, their memories of childhood and of love’s departed happiness, which had sprung up continually, making no demands, in their mother’s heart and which had always found them – even across thousands of miles – and they had sensed it constantly and instinctively and this had made them stronger and they had been successful in life more boldly. Now their mother had turned into a corpse; she could no longer love anyone and was lying there like an indifferent stranger, an old woman who had nothing to do with them.

  Each of her sons felt lonely and frightened now, as if somewhere in the darkness a lamp had been burning on the windowsill of an old house far from anywhere, and the lamp had lit up the night, the flying beetles, the blue grass, the swarms of midges in the air – an entire childhood world abandoned by those who had been born there; the doors of that house had never been locked, so that those who went out could always go back, but no one had gone back. And now it was as if the light had been extinguished in that night window, and reality had turned into memory.

  On her deathbed, the old woman had asked her husband to have a priest sing prayers over her while she lay at home; after that she could be carried out of the house and buried without the priest, so as not to offend her sons and so they could walk behind her coffin. It was not so much that the old woman believed in God as that she wanted her husband, whom she had loved all her life, to feel a deeper grief and longing for her while prayers for the dead were chanted and wax candles shone on her lifeless face; she did not want to part from life without solemnity and memory. Once the children had arrived, the old man spent a long time looking for a priest; in the end, towards evening, he brought someone back with him, another little old man, dressed in ordinary civilian clothes, pink-faced from his vegetarian diet, purposeful little thoughts shining in his lively eyes. The priest had an army officer’s kitbag on his hip. In it he carried his spiritual belongings: incense, thin candles, a book, a stole and a small censer on a chain. He quickly placed the candles round the coffin and lit them, fanned the incense in the censer and straight away, without warning, began muttering words from his book. The sons, who were all in the room, got to their feet; they felt awkward and somehow ashamed. One behind the other, eyes cast down, they stood motionless before the coffin. In front of them an elderly man was hurriedly, almost ironically, chanting and muttering, glancing now and again through small knowing eyes at this guard of honour – the offspring of the dead old woman. Partly he was a little afraid of them, and partly he respected them, and it seemed he would have been quite happy to get into conversation with them and even voice his enthusiasm for the construction of socialism. But the sons were silent and no one, not even the old woman’s husband, crossed himself; they were standing guard around a coffin, not taking part in a service.

  After completing the brief rite, the priest quickly gathered his things, then extinguished the candles burning around the coffin and packed all his goods back into his officer’s kitbag. The father of the sons put some money into his hand, and the priest, without lingering, made his way through the line of six men, not one of whom looked at him, and timidly disappeared through the door. Really, he would have liked to stay in the house for the wake, discuss the prospects of wars and revolutions, and draw lasting comfort from a meeting with representatives of the new world he secretly admired but was unable to enter; he dreamed in solitude about how one day he would all of a sudden accomplish a heroic feat and so burst into the brilliant future, into the circle of the new generations – to this end he had even submitted a request to the local aerodrome, asking to be taken up to the very highest altitude and to be dropped from there by parachute without an oxygen mask, but he had not received any reply.

  In the evening the father made up six beds in the second room and laid his little granddaughter down to sleep beside him, where his late wife had slept for forty years. The bed was in the same large room as the coffin; the sons went off into the other room. The father stood in the doorway while his children undressed and got into bed; then he pulled the door to and went and stood beside his granddaughter, first putting out the light. The little girl was already asleep, alone in the wide bed, the blanket pulled up over her head.

  The old man stood over her in night’s d
im light; fresh snow out on the street was gathering up the scarce, scattered light of the sky and lighting the room’s darkness through the window. The old man went up to the open coffin, kissed his wife’s hands, forehead and lips and said to her, ‘Rest now.’ He lay down carefully beside his granddaughter and closed his eyes, so that his heart would forget everything. He dozed off and suddenly woke again. Under the door of the room where his sons were sleeping he could see light – the electric light had been switched back on and he could hear laughter and noisy conversation.

  The noise made the little girl begin to toss and turn; perhaps she was awake too, simply too frightened to poke her head out from under the blanket – because of the night and the dead old woman.

  The eldest son was talking about hollow-bodied metal propellers with animation and the delight of conviction, and his voice sounded rich and powerful – the voice of a man whose teeth were strong and in good repair and whose larynx was deep and red. The sailor brothers were recounting adventures in foreign ports and chortling about how their father had given them the same old blankets they had had in childhood and adolescence. White strips of calico had been sewn onto the top and bottom of each blanket with the words ‘head’ and ‘feet’, so they would keep the blankets the right way round and not cover their faces with the dirty, sweaty end where their feet had been. Then one of the sailors seized hold of the actor and they began rolling about on the floor, just like when they were children and all living together. And the youngest son egged them on, promising to take them both on at once – using only his left hand. The brothers clearly all loved one another and were glad to be together. It was many years since they had all met, and no one knew when they would meet again. Perhaps not until the funeral of their father. Getting carried away, the two brothers knocked over a chair and then fell silent for a minute, but, evidently remembering that their mother was dead and could hear nothing, they soon started up again. After a while the eldest son asked the actor to sing something in a low voice; after all, he must know some good Moscow songs. But the actor said it was difficult for him to start cold, with no cue. ‘All right then, but first cover me up,’ he agreed in the end. They found something to cover his face and the actor from Moscow began singing from underneath it, so he wouldn’t feel awkward getting started. While he was singing, the youngest brother managed to do something that made another brother fall out of bed onto a third who was lying on the floor. They all laughed and told the youngest to pick up the brother who had fallen and put him back on the bed at once, using only his left hand. The youngest quietly answered his brothers, and two of them burst out laughing – so loudly that the little girl poked her head out from beneath the blanket in the dark room and called out, ‘Grandad! Hey, Grandad! Are you asleep?’