“We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it and weep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punish ourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who will judge us and whose Name we know not. But we have science, and by means of it we shall find the truth and we shall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher than feeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness.”
That is what they said, and after saying such things every one began to love himself better than any one else, and indeed they could not do otherwise. All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones. Holy blood was shed on the threshold of the temples. Then there arose men who began to think how to bring all people together again, so that everybody, while still loving himself best of all, might not interfere with others, and all might live together in something like a harmonious society. Regular wars sprang up over this idea. All the combatants at the same time firmly believed that science, wisdom and the instinct of self-preservation would force men at last to unite into a harmonious and rational society; and so, meanwhile, to hasten matters, “the wise” endeavored to exterminate as rapidly as possible all who were “not wise” and did not understand their idea, that the latter might not hinder its triumph. But the instinct of self-preservation grew rapidly weaker; there arose men, haughty and sensual, who demanded all or nothing. In order to obtain everything they resorted to crime, and if they did not succeed—to suicide. There arose religions with a cult of non-existence and self-destruction for the sake of the everlasting peace of annihilation. At last these people grew weary of their meaningless toil, and signs of suffering came into their faces, and then they proclaimed that suffering was a beauty, for in suffering alone was there meaning. They glorified suffering in their songs. I moved about among them, wringing my hands and weeping over them, but I loved them perhaps more than in old days when there was no suffering in their faces and when they were innocent and so lovely. I loved the earth they had polluted even more than when it had been a paradise, if only because sorrow had come to it. Alas! I always loved sorrow and tribulation, but only for myself, for myself; but I wept over them, pitying them. I stretched out my hands to them in despair, blaming, cursing and despising myself. I told them that all this was my doing, mine alone; that it was I had brought them corruption, contamination and falsity. I besought them to crucify me, I taught them how to make a cross. I could not kill myself, I had not the strength, but I wanted to suffer at their hands. I yearned for suffering, I longed that my blood should be drained to the last drop in these agonies. But they only laughed at me, and began at last to look upon me as crazy. They justified me, they declared that they had only got what they wanted themselves, and that all that now was could not have been otherwise. At last they declared to me that I was becoming dangerous and that they should lock me up in a madhouse if I did not hold my tongue. Then such grief took possession of my soul that my heart was wrung, and I felt as though I were dying; and then … then I awoke.
It was morning, that is, it was not yet daylight, but about six o’clock. I woke up in the same arm-chair; my candle had burnt out; every one was asleep in the captain’s room, and there was a stillness all round, rare in our flat. First of all I leapt up in great amazement: nothing like this had ever happened to me before, not even in the most trivial detail; I had never, for instance, fallen asleep like this in my arm-chair. While I was standing and coming to myself I suddenly caught sight of my revolver lying loaded, ready—but instantly I thrust it away! Oh, now, life, life! I lifted up my hands and called upon eternal truth, not with words but with tears; ecstasy, immeasurable ecstasy flooded my soul. Yes, life and spreading the good tidings! Oh, I at that moment resolved to spread the tidings, and resolved it, of course, for my whole life. I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings—of what? Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory.
And since then I have been preaching! Moreover I love all those who laugh at me more than any of the rest. Why that is so I do not know and cannot explain, but so be it. I am told that I am vague and confused, and if I am vague and confused now, what shall I be later on? It is true indeed: I am vague and confused, and perhaps as time goes on I shall be more so. And of course I shall make many blunders before I find out how to preach, that is, find out what words to say, what things to do, for it is a very difficult task. I see all that as clear as daylight, but, listen, who does not make mistakes? And yet, you know, all are making for the same goal, all are striving in the same direction anyway, from the sage to the lowest robber, only by different roads. It is an old truth, but this is what is new: I cannot go far wrong. For I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth—it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it. And so how can I go wrong? I shall make some slips no doubt, and shall perhaps talk in second-hand language, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and guide me. Oh, I am full of courage and freshness, and I will go on and on if it were for a thousand years! Do you know, at first I meant to conceal the fact that I corrupted them, but that was a mistake—that was my first mistake! But truth whispered to me that I was lying, and preserved me and corrected me. But how establish paradise—I don’t know, because I do not know how to put it into words. After my dream I lost command of words. All the chief words, anyway, the most necessary ones. But never mind, I shall go and I shall keep talking, I won’t leave off, for anyway I have seen it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. But the scoffers do not understand that. It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination. Oh! As though that meant so much! And they are so proud! A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the great thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted—you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it’s an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times—but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness—that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only every one wants it, it can all be arranged at once.
And I tracked down that little girl … and I shall go on and on!
Translated by C. Garnett, ed. by A.L. and M.K.
PART II
Modern Russian Fantasy, Utopia, and Science Fiction
SLOWING DOWN THE PACE of the volume from its “warp-drive” across Russia’s first millennium, Part II retraces the country’s fictional leaps into the unknown within the mere half century culminating with the launch of Sputnik, when one no longer needed a writer or a composer to imagine the sound of the celestial spheres, but could hear it on radio. Another difference resides in the fact that every writer represented below died in the 20th century, and thus lived to see the epoch when technology began to fulfill humanity’s primordial
dreams.
Yet even a half-century turns out to be an insufficiently short yardstick to measure a country’s literary heritage in a sensible way, most particularly the heritage of a country as vast as Russia. This is especially true given the tumultuous social changes of these years: the two World Wars, a revolution, and the Civil War—events which destroyed a good half of Russia’s population, leaving virtually no family untouched and a vast number of families exterminated altogether. If the current universally accepted memory of human suffering in the 20th century is repeatedly reinforced by remembering or revisiting such sites as Auschwitz or the beaches of Normandy, this repository of remembrance seems reluctant to acknowledge the fact that Russians were subject to the same genocidal practices as Hitler’s victims, and that Russia’s losses in combat during WWII are measured not in thousands or millions, but in tens of millions. However, Russia’s greatest losses in the pre-Sputnik years of the 20th century, challenging in their scope any cataclysm or plague surviving in mankind’s cultural memory, resulted from a peculiar merger of utopian beliefs, advanced through works literature, with the political aims of the power elite that governed Russia from 1917—the Bolsheviks. Using utopian idealism posited in literature to excuse the ruthless extermination of all who threatened their authority, they imposed a new social order which was to be the culmination of all mankind’s dreams. By most accounts over 50 million Russians died (the noted Russian historian, Medvedev, has estimated the losses to have been closer to 80 million) in the gulags—those weird, real-life permutations of classic utopian designs—in which their subjects faced not the green wall of Zamiatin’s We, but barbed wire, torture and execution.
While fully aware that dividing literary history by socially relevant dates rarely reflects strictly literary concerns—indeed, noting that all writers entered here lived and created equally prolifically before and after 1917—we nonetheless find it serviceable to split the material below into three sections. Section C-1 contains those literary works which were mostly written prior to 1917 and in an atmosphere relatively free from political coercion. We offer a sampling of the poetry and prose by the Russian poet-Symbolists, Alexander Blok, Valery Briusov, Fyodor Sologub and Andrei Bely. We continue in Section C-2 with the post-symbolist prose by Alexander Kuprin, newly translated writings of Alexei Remizov, important selections from Evgeny Zamiatin, and end with new translations of the haunting writings of Boris Pilniak. Section C-3 introduces works—some for the first time in English—by Nikolai Zabolotsky, Daniel Kharms, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Bulgakov, written after the first decade of Soviet rule. Utopian idealism, when present, is viewed in nearly all works of Section C with suspicion or outright rejection. Conversely, our Section D represents authors who saw in space a fruitful frontier for reaching Utopia; selections chosen here are abridged from longer writings by these authors, as our aim was to familiarize the reader solely with their unique representations of outer space itself.
Section C
Russia’s Silver Age and the Fantastic of the Twenties and Thirties
C1. Sampling Russian Symbolist Enigmas
IT IS A HISTORICAL fact that the term fin de siècle—and, some would argue, the very notion of modernity accompanying it—arose in France. But it is just as true that Russia, originally influenced by the French visual arts and literature of the 1880s and 1890s, contributed to the international sense of modernity in its own ebullient and inimitable way. After the celebrated Paris exhibitions of Russian paintings in the first decade of the new century and the premiere of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe in the teens, the Russian sense of the The Modern effectively eclipsed the movement’s French origins, shaping international understanding for years to come. In many spheres of art and science Russia was at last regarded as an equal partner, paving the way for a new future of mankind. So of course were the western empires of England, Germany and Austria—and other, smaller countries overtaken by the international sense of modernity. In the eighteenth century Russia had been still barely known to Europeans, and Peter I and his successors, notably Catherine The Great, were mostly importing European art—amassing in the process the largest extant collection of Rembrandts and other masters in the world’s richest museum, The Hermitage. Now, however, at the turn of the twentieth century, Russia was no longer merely assimilating and absorbing European culture, she was for the first time in European memory transforming and creating it as well—in music with Rachmaninov, Scriabin, and Stravinsky, and later with Prokofiev and Shostakovich; in painting with Kandinsky, Chagall, and Bakst, or later the Constructivists; in cinema, ballet, costume design, and so on.
Modernism was as much about seeing the old in new ways as exploring new worlds, formerly hidden by established artistic conventions. Its early phase—Symbolist literature—originated indeed in France, spawned by the works of its first poet-practitioners Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The movement was a reaction against positivism and the working assumptions of the realist artists. The dominance of socially conscious, “engaged” art had been particularly strong in Russia for more than half a century. The Symbolist challenge to realism and social utilitarianism was correspondingly strong. Symbolist writers held that empirical reality was a chimera, a mysterious veil through which—as in Baroque poetry—the artist could discern hidden meaning or fragments of higher truth, indeed of Truth itself. Like the earlier Romanticism which Symbolism in many ways recapitulated, the movement rediscovered the Orient and the exotic as an escape from the everyday and exercised a pervasive cultural influence in Europe, expressing itself in aspects of literature, music, and the fine arts. In fact, a distinguishing feature of Symbolism and Modernism was the degree to which they creatively merged and combined previously distinct art forms: literature and music, music and painting, etc. Writers and painters wrote symphonies and sonatas, such as Bely’s Four Symphonies or Chiurlionis’ Sonata to the Stars, Allegro; composers rendered the essence of painting, poetry, or myth in music, as Rachmaninov did in his Isle of the Dead, Mussorgsky in Pictures at an Exhibition, and Scriabin in Prometheus: The Poem of Fire; Russian painters drew inspiration from motifs of written and oral literature, such as Vrubel’s The Demon and Bilibin’s famous illustrations of Russian folk tales. Most of the ideas connected to this synthesizing tendency were born within an association of artists called The World of Art (Mir Isskustva), which began publishing their trend-setting journal in 1898.
Since non-verbal arts are quite readily absorbed and shared across linguistic and cultural borders, many westerners of this period became familiar with a broad range of Russia’s visual arts, its music, dance and graphic design. The same cannot be said of the art of poetry in which the Symbolist and consequent schools had their true flowering in Russia. Often called Russian literature’s Silver Age, this period remains largely unknown in the west. Regrettably, our volume can in no way attempt to remedy this situation, but the reader should be aware that the three Russian Symbolists whose prose is given an entry or two in this section—Valery Briusov, Fyodor Sologub and Andrei Bely—like the Golden Age writers Derzhavin, Pushkin and Lermontov—were all first-rate poets. We supply a newly translated sampling of the poetry of Briusov and Sologub, and (in lieu of translating any poem by Bely) provide a major new translation of one of the best known poems of the period, The Stranger by Alexander Blok (1880-1921), arguably the Silver Age’s greatest poet. This work best exemplifies how the Russian Symbolist school transformed the original French movement and gave it a new expression. The phrase “vernal and decaying breath” in the poem’s first stanza signifies Blok’s aesthetic choice to expand on the Decadent poetics of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, but the eerily divine features of the female which Blok’s poetic persona—in a drunken stupor—sees in a tavern window, has uniquely Russian origins. The image evokes the notion of Sofia, or Holy Wisdom, found in the writings of Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) Russia’s most influential philosopher, who predated and greatly influenced the Russian Symbolist school. It is preeminen
tly due to his writings that Russian Symbolism combined philosophical idealism and Orthodox mysticism with the French movement’s interest in decadence and artistic experimentation. While the seeds of Russian Symbolist idealist poetry go back to such mystical poets as Tiutchev and Fet (not represented in our volume), Solovyov’s teachings on the feminine aspect of God had a profound effect on Russian Symbolists, indeed on an entire school of Russian Orthodox philosophy—the Sophians—which sprang into being in the twentieth century. Solovyov’s teachings anchored their rhetoric in three visions experienced by the philosopher in which he saw Sophia incarnated as a beautiful female, most fully described in his poem “Three Meetings” (Tri svidaniia). The first vision occurred in a church in Solovyov’s youth, the second in the British Museum during his trip abroad in 1875, and the third in the Egyptian desert. Blok’s image of the enigmatic female stranger is a reflex on Solovyov’s visions, but the sacrilegious use of holy symbols and of the phrase in vino veritas is the poet’s own, as is this poem’s unique musicality and expression of the existential paradox by which one may sit in a city bar yet travel, motionless, to enchanted shores.
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