Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  Two old-timers took Churilin by the arm. I pulled out my cigarettes and headed for the exit…

  Churilin got a year in a disciplinary battalion. A month before his release I was demobilized. I never saw the crazy prisoner again, either.

  That whole world has disappeared somewhere.

  Only the belt remains.

  First published in 1986

  Translated by Joanne Turnbull

  YURY VASILYEVICH BUIDA (b. 1954)

  Buida’s surrealism seems to derive partly from his early reading of Gogol, and partly from historical circumstances. His story-cycle The Prussian Bride is set in the Kaliningrad region, the area once known as East Prussia, which Stalin seized from Germany in 1945. By the end of 1947, every last German had been deported. To Russian settlers the region was, in Buida’s words, ‘an alien land scattered with miracles mutating into monsters’.

  Buida has described how his mother, who had been brought up in Central Russia, first arrived in this region in 1947. Her train ticket bore the name of her destination: the town of Wehlau. She arrived, however, to find workmen blanking out this name from signs in the station. That night she and two friends speculated as to how the town would be renamed. Her own suggestion, ‘Somewhere’, was dismissed as too definite, not Russian enough. Her friends suggested ‘Sometime or Other’ or ‘Any Old How’. In the event, the town was called Znamensk, after the Russian for banner.1

  All the stories in The Prussian Bride are set in Znamensk, where Buida was born and brought up. They resemble a collection of small-town myths whose truth has been embellished over the decades. Many of the characters are remarkable not only for their ready acceptance of the surreal, but also for their feats of memory. In a land with no past, memory is of supreme importance.

  Like Dante, from whom he claims to have learned economy of means, Buida is a poet of love – and the memory of love. And like Dostoyevsky, another writer of importance to him, he is afraid neither of emotional intensity nor of the profoundest philosophical themes. All this is apparent even from a story as short as ‘Sindbad the Sailor’.

  SINDBAD THE SAILOR

  Before dying, Katerina Ivanovna Momotova sent for Doctor Sheberstov, who’d treated her all her life and had been pensioned off a long time ago. She handed him the key to her little house and a scrap of paper folded in four, asking him to burn it along with all the others.

  ‘They’re at home,’ she explained in embarrassment. ‘But please don’t tell anyone. I’d have done it myself, only you see how it’s all turned out…’

  Sheberstov raised his eyebrows, but the old woman just smiled guiltily in reply. She was in a very bad way: dying from a sarcoma. The doctor looking after her at the hospital said she was unlikely to make it through the night.

  Lyosha Leontyev was having a smoke on the bench by the hospital entrance. Next to hulking Sheberstov, he looked like a teenager in police uniform. His cap with its faded band was lying in the sidecar of his motorbike.

  ‘Fancy a walk?’ asked the doctor, gazing over Lyosha’s head at the midges circling a dim streetlamp atop a wooden post turned green by the damp. ‘To Katya Ivanovna’s.’

  ‘To Sindbad the Sailor, you mean? She hasn’t died, has she?’

  ‘No.’ Sheberstov showed the policeman the key. ‘She asked me to look in. I’m an outsider, at least you’re law and order.’

  Lyosha dropped his fag-end in a wide stone vase filled with water and got up with a sigh. ‘Wish it were winter already…’

  They set off at a leisurely pace along the slabbed pavement towards the mill, next to which lived Katerina Ivanovna, famous throughout the town for her exemplarily unsuccessful life.

  She’d arrived here in East Prussia with the first settlers. Her husband had worked at the paper mill, she as a washerwoman at the hospital. They’d had four kids: two of their own and two they took from the children’s home. The withered little woman had a big household to look after: a vegetable patch, a cow, a piglet, two dozen sheep, chickens, ducks, her ailing husband Fyodor Fyodorovich (who’d been wounded three times at the front) and the kids. In ‘57 she lost half a leg – she was run over by a train as she was bringing the heifer back from pasture. She’d had to leave the wash-house. Got a job as a caretaker at the nursery school. That same year her eldest boy, Vasya, drowned in the Pregolya. Three years later Fyodor Fyodorovich died too: an operation on his heart, which had been grazed by shrapnel proved too much for him. The girls grew up and left town. The youngest, Vera, married a drunken, thieving down-and-out; dumping their son on his granny, they upped and left for Siberia, hoping to make some money – and vanished. For the sake of the kid, Katerina Ivanovna knitted to order (before her fingers became riddled with arthritis), sheared sheep and herded all summer long. It wasn’t easy for her chasing after the animals on her peg leg, but the pay wasn’t bad and sometimes she’d even get fed out in the fields – she didn’t grumble. The boy grew up, did his stint in the army, got married and only rarely – for New Year or May Day – sent his grandma a card wishing her success in her work and happiness in her private life. Katerina Ivanovna’s pension was piddling. By and by, she found herself collecting empty bottles in vacant plots and backstreets or outside shops. She’d get into squabbles with her rivals, boys who yelled ‘How much for a pound of old hag!’ when they saw her and swiped her booty. Katerina Ivanovna got angry and swore, but her rage only lasted so long. Eventually she found a solution. She’d head out of town bright and early with a sack over her shoulders and hunt for empties in the ditches and woods by the road. Despite the pain from her leg, she trudged for miles each day, returning home with her rich pickings late in the evening, her eyes sunken and hot sweat streaming off her. She crumbled bread into a deep bowl, poured vodka over it and slurped it up with a spoon. Once in a while she’d start singing something afterwards in a quiet, tinkling voice. ‘Others in her shoes would’ve croaked ages ago,’ Battle-Axe, the town Tsarina, would say. ‘But she’s not even properly bonkers yet.’ It was thanks to her bottle hikes that Katerina Ivanovna received the nickname Sindbad the Sailor.

  Glancing furtively to both sides, Doctor Sheberstov opened the front door and motioned Lyosha ahead. Lyosha turned on the lights in the hall and kitchen. ‘What did she want anyway?’ he shouted from the other room. ‘What is it we’re after?’

  Sheberstov didn’t reply. He unfolded the piece of paper that Katerina Ivanovna had given him along with the key, and his face became flushed and swollen. He flung the scrap on to the kitchen table, bent down to avoid hitting his head on a beam and, wheezing noisily, came up behind Lyosha. The policeman was pensively inspecting the old woman’s second room. A dim, unshaded bulb shone on an enormous pile of paper that took up nearly all the available space.

  ‘What’s she been doing, writing novels?’ muttered Lyosha. ‘Look here…’ He picked up a scrap of paper from the floor. ‘I loved you. Even now, perhaps, love’s embers…’ He threw the doctor a puzzled look. ‘What’s it all about, eh?’

  Sheberstov put his stick in his other hand and shoved Lyosha firmly to one side. Puffing and panting, he squeezed through a narrow gap to a bent-backed chair and sat down. He grabbed a handful of scraps from one of the piles and started reading.

  ‘So what is all this?’ Lyosha repeated, gazing in bewilderment at one of the scraps covered with an old woman’s scrawl. ‘She can’t have…’

  Sheberstov angrily looked him up and down.

  ‘So who do you think invented the soul, the Devil?’

  All night long they sorted through the papers that Sindbad the Sailor had asked to be destroyed and which she’d hidden from sight for almost fifty years. Every day, starting on 11 November 1945, she’d written out one and the same poem by Pushkin: ‘I loved you.’1 Eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-two pieces of paper of various sizes had been preserved, and those eight immortal lines were on every one of them, their beauty undimmed despite the lack of punctuation: the old woman had never used so much as a comma. S
he must have written from memory and had made many spelling mistakes; as for the word ‘God’, she’d always capitalized it, despite the Soviet orthography of the time. She’d put the date at the bottom of every scrap and, very rarely, added a few words: 5 March 1953 Stalin died; 19 April 1960 Fyodor Fyodorovich is dead; 12 April 1961 Gagarin flew away to the moon; 29 August 1970, Petinka (her grandson) had a girl Ksenya. Several sheets were burnt at the corners, others were ripped, and you could only guess at the emotional state she must have been in that day, when she wrote yet again, I loved you… Eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty-two times she’d reproduced those eight lines on paper. Why? And why those eight lines in particular? And what were her thoughts when she wrote out the end of the poem, As God grant you may yet be loved again, adding neatly Stalin died or Fyodor Fyodorovich is dead?

  Just before dawn, Sheberstov and Lyosha lit the stove and started burning the paper. The stove took only half an hour to warm up, and the room got stifling hot. Both felt uneasy, but when Lyosha said, ‘What’s the difference, burning a person or burning this…?’ the doctor just snorted angrily. There was one scrap – the one Katerina Ivanovna had given him – which Sheberstov decided to keep, even if he didn’t know why. Perhaps just because, for the very first time, the old woman hadn’t written the date, as though she’d understood that time is powerless not only over the eternity of poetry, but even over the eternity of our wretched life…

  First published in 1998

  Translated by Oliver Ready

  Note on Names

  A Russian has three names: a Christian name, a patronymic (derived from the Christian name of the father) and a family name. The first name and patronymic, used together, are the normal polite way of addressing or referring to someone. Thus, Pushkin’s Countess Anna Fedotovna is the daughter of a man whose first name is Fedot; Solzhenitsyn’s Anna Modestovna is the daughter of a man whose first name is Modest; and Gogol’s Akaky Akakiyevich bears the same first name as his father. Married or older peasants often addressed one another by the patronymic alone. By addressing the schoolteacher simply as ‘Vasilyevna’, the peasant driver in Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’ indicates that he sees her as one of them, just another peasant. Close friends or relatives usually address each other by one of the many affectionate forms of their first names. Masha and Mashenka, for example, are both affectionate forms of Mariya; Katya, Katyenka and Katyusha are affectionate forms of Ekaterina; Liza and Lizochka are modern affectionate forms, and Lizanka an older affectionate form, of Elizaveta.

  Note on Ranks

  Tsarist Russia was, in some respects, a highly organized and surprisingly meritocratic society. In 1722 Peter the Great decreed that all members of the nobility must serve the State, joining either the Army, the Navy or the civil service. He instituted the Table of Ranks given below; the higher civilian ranks all have precise military equivalents (and equivalents also exist for the clergy and the Imperial court). Compulsory State Service was abandoned under Catherine the Great, but the Table of Ranks remained in force throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with only minor modifications.

  Table of Ranks

  1. Chancellor

  Field-Marshal

  2. Full Privy Councillor

  General

  3. Privy Councillor

  Lieutenant General

  4. Full State Councillor

  Major General

  5. State Councillor

  Brigadier

  6. Collegiate Councillor

  Colonel

  7. Court Councillor

  Lieutenant Colonel

  8. Collegiate Assessor

  Major

  9. Titular Councillor

  Captain

  10. Collegiate Secretary

  Lieutenant

  11. Ship’s Secretary

  Lieutenant

  12. Governor’s Secretary

  Second Lieutenant

  13. Provincial Secretary

  14. Collegiate Registrar

  Holders of any rank were considered members of the nobility, and ranks from the eighth upwards conferred the status of hereditary nobility. It was thus easier in Russia than in many countries for a talented individual to join the nobility. Superiors were addressed according to their rank. Ranks nine to fourteen: Your Honour ( Vashe blagorodiye); ranks six to eight: Your Highest Honour ( Vashe vysokoblagorodiye); rank five: Your Worship (Vashe vysokorodiye); ranks three and four: Your Excellency ( Vashe prevoskhoditelstvo); ranks one and two: Your Highest Excellency ( Vashe vysokoprevoskhoditelstvo); princes and counts: Your Radiance (Vashe siyatelstvo).

  There are references to these ranks throughout much of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Both Gogol in ‘The Greatcoat’ and Dostoyevsky in ‘Bobok’ make fun of the importance attached to them.

  Notes

  ALEXSANDR PUSHKIN THE QUEEN OF SPADES

  1. Count Saint-Germain: Famous, among other things, as a mystic, alchemist, magician, painter, musician and secret agent, the Comte Saint-Germain (?169–?1784) is supposed never to have looked older than the age of forty or fifty.

  2. Casanova: Giacomo Casanova (1725–98) is best known for his sexual adventures, as described in his Memoirs, first published in German in 1822.

  3. au jeu de la Reine: In the Queen’s gaming room (French, as are translations below).

  4. ‘Il paraît… plus fraîches’: ‘Monsieur seems to prefer the lady’s maids to the ladies.’ ‘But of course, Madam, the maids are fresher.’

  5. Vous m’écrivez… les lire: ‘You write four-page letters, my angel, more quickly than I can read them.’

  6. Mme Lebrun: The French artist Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842) painted mainly aristocratic ladies. She was well known in Russia, where she lived for five years.

  7. the celebrated Leroys: Julien and Pierre Leroy were eighteenth-century French clockmakers.

  8. the Montgolfier balloon and Mesmer’s magnetism: The Montgolfier brothers invented the hot-air balloon in the early 1780s. Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) claimed to have discovered a hidden energy which he called ‘animal magnetism’. This energy, and Mesmer’s theories, came to be known as ‘mesmerism’.

  9. Voltaire armchair: A type of armchair with a high back.

  10. galvinism: The eighteenth-century Italian scientist Luigi Galvani had shown that the muscles of dead animals could be made to contract if an electric current is passed through them.

  11. Homme… sans religion: A man without morals or faith! (an unacknowledged quotation from the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire).

  12. mazurka: A ballroom mazurka could last a long time. After a general promenade, there were sections during which each couple, one after another, would dance a solo. There was plenty of opportunity for partners to converse, both while sitting out and during the promenades.

  13. oubli ou regret: A way of randomly selecting partners during the mazurka. Each of a group of ladies would choose a word, such as oubli or regret (‘forget’ or ‘regret’), to represent them. The gentleman would then have to pick one of these words – and dance the rest of the figure with the corresponding lady.

  14. à l’oiseau royal: An eighteenth-century hairstyle; literally, ‘his hair arranged in a “royal bird” style’.

  15. That night… Swedenborg: The misattribution of these words to Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic widely read in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seems to be a deliberate mystification on Pushkin’s part.

  16. Attendez, sir: There were moments in the game of faro when a player was allowed to change his bet. If he wished to do so, he would call out to the banker Attendez! (‘Wait!’). A contemporary of Pushkin recorded an occasion when the banker, a distinguished figure, took offence at being addressed so peremptorily.

  17. corner was being bent back by an absentminded hand: The implication is that a player might ‘absentmindedly’ be doubling his stake after, rather than before, he sees the banker’s cards.

  MIKHAIL LERMONT
OV THE FATALIST

  1. the left flank: A line of Russian fortresses extended the whole length of the Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian.

  2. playing a seven: In this variant of faro it is the banker who decides upon the sum to be played for. A punter then either agrees to the banker’s terms or declines to take part in that round. Here, by saying he is playing a card, the punter indicates his agreement to play for the high stake determined by Vulich.

  3. chikhir: A Caucasian new red wine.

  4. Nastya: The most common affectionate form of the name ‘Anastasiya’.

  NIKOLAY GOGOL

  1. Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 199.

  THE GREATCOAT

  1. Yeroshkin… Senate: Yeroshkin is derived from a word meaning ‘tousled’ or ‘dishevelled’. The St Petersburg Senate was both a civil court and a legislative body.

  2. Belobryushkova: The literal meaning of this improbable-sounding surname is ‘white-bellied’.

  3. Khozdazat: A fourth-century bishop. Before his conversion to Christianity, Khozdazat was a lawyer with a great reputation for his rhetorical powers – unlike Gogol’s hero.

  4. promoted to state councillor: That is, from the ninth grade to the fifth grade, a considerable leap (see ‘Note on Ranks’).

  5. chibouks: Long-stemmed Turkish pipes.

  6. Falconet’s Peter the Great: Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s The Bronze Horseman is the most famous statue in St Petersburg. The horse is rearing up on its hind legs. If the tail, which provides a third point of support, were to be cut off, the statue would collapse.

  7. Petrovich: Younger or unmarried peasants were generally known by their Christian name or a nickname. The tailor’s wish to be called by his patronymic indicates his desire for status.

  8. cross in the calendar: In the Orthodox calendar there were twelve great festivals, printed in red, and a large number of saints’ days, marked with a cross.

  9. a bonnet rather than a headscarf: That is, a lady’s bonnet, rather than a peasant woman’s headscarf.

  10. foot-cloths: A length of cloth wound round the foot and ankle. Socks or stockings were not worn by most Russians until the twentieth century.