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August 15, 2023

Books We Liked

THE STORY OF A LIFE

Konstantin Paustovsky
Translated by Douglas Smith
New York Review Books
$24.95; 816 pp.
The Story of a Life
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“Book One: The Faraway Years,” the first 290 pages of Paustovsky’s immense, never-completed autobiography, is a gem, glorious, beautiful. This newly translated volume collects the first three “Books”; the next three and a half may be awaiting or undergoing translation now. Douglas Smith, the translator, tells us that, even in the tumultuous 1920s, Paustovsky (1892-1968) had already found his literary niche, one that luckily kept him out of the line of fire that compromised or murdered so many of his contemporaries. A Soviet editor impatiently objected to one of Paustovsky’s early stories because it was only “a romantic episode, completely devoid of social significance.” Decades later, a Soviet critic squawked about Paustovsky’s evocation of his life during the Revolution: “this book is filled with lots of liberal kindliness and very little revolutionary wrath.”

Paustovsky disarmingly confesses in the midst of the first part’s gorgeous chapters about his childhood and youth that “my memory pushed aside everything unpleasant. It was as if my memory had cut out the bad sections in a piece of cloth and sewn together only the good parts – autumn in Crimea and the cheerful, noisy Russian winter. I tried not to think about what had recently happened in Kiev.” Paustovsky was born in Ukraine and loved Kyiv but wrote only in Russian. It occurs to me that if he hadn’t been a real person, he might have been invented by Nikolai Leskov: “My spirit was as light as only that of a boy with a clean conscience can be,” he writes in an early chapter. “I’m nothing more than a child of a petty-bourgeois family from the village of Vasilkov in the province of Kiev,” he told an acquaintance. As a teenager, because of family trouble, he moved to Moscow. His father abandoned the family for another woman, and Paustovsky describes, in a heartbreaking passage, a latter-day encounter: “I looked at Father. This was no longer the man I knew from 1905 or before… It was as if that had been my real father, and this was some double who had ruined his life.”

Paustovsky committed himself to a primarily non-political response to the events occurring during his long life in the Russian Empire, then in independent Ukraine, and lastly in the Soviet Union. He consistently expressed objections to violence and seems to have been one of the least prejudiced or bigoted writers of his time. As a budding author he developed a reflex to beautifully render details that readers will reasonably suspect are impossible to actually remember: “I could spend hours crafting different descriptions of sunshine… I wanted to forget real life, and so I never did struggle to give my writings the precision of reality. Eventually, I created my own literary school out of these descriptive sketches.… Traces of this misty, florid prose remained… even now, I have to be on guard against my predilection for pretty words.”

He wrote bundles of books, mostly fiction, but by his own account he didn’t join movements or seem to experiment. For decades he mostly ducked the spotlight and searchlight and forever stayed out of official administration and the Party. He seems to have been decent and likable. He admirably did not use his reputation to degrade the outspoken dissident writers of the 1960s; his entire writing life he decried the pogroms and anti-Semitism that were part and parcel of Russian and Soviet society and politics. With the international popularity of these creative memoirs in the early 1960s, he was considered for the Nobel Prize, but the Nobel administration apparently feared ticking off the USSR by awarding an unsponsored, apolitical author (the Nobel Committee had angered the USSR by handing bold Boris Pasternak the prize in 1958); in 1965 Paustovsky lost out to the shallow and corrupted Mikhail Sholokov.

I am eager to plead for readers of Book One. There are so many dazzling passages, which are over-the-top yet finely evocative of a boy’s discovery of a world: “It was already September [of about 1900]. Twilight was approaching. No one who has ever been in Kiev in autumn could ever imagine the delicate beauty of those hours. The first star catches fire up in the sky. Autumn’s lush gardens wait in silence, knowing the stars must fall to earth and the gardens will catch them in their dense foliage, as if in a hammock, and then set them down on the ground so gently that no one in town will wake up or even know.”

The remaining 500 pages in this edition, extending to only about 1924, are, despite Smith’s evocative translation, empty and, for me, tedious. The busily flowering writing cannot make up for Paustovsky’s loss of energy or spirit. The second and third Books, “Restless Youth” and “The Dawn of an Uncertain Age,” were written several years after Book One; in them Paustovsky reads as if he was imitating himself, hoping to restore the brightness and vividness of his evocation of his youth in the first part. Youth? How brilliantly and tenderly Paustovsky describes it! As a boy he was reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in Kyiv’s Mariinsky Park with his sister when he glimpsed “a tall, tanned midshipman… The midshipman walked past, the gravel crunching under his feet… All my dreams of the sea were embodied in this man. I had often imagined the sea, foggy and gold in the evening calm, and myself on some distant voyage, the whole world changing before my eyes like the quickly shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope. My God, if only someone had thought at the time to gift me a piece of crusty rust off an old anchor! I would have cherished it like a jewel.”

Book One is a jewel.

STRAVAGING “STRANGE”

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
Columbia University Press; $17.95; 224 pp.
Stravaging Strange
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At least eight books by Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) have been translated into English and published in the last ten years. Born in Kyiv, the philosophical comedian mocks our stupid devotion to logic, though (as he shows) that is sometimes all we have to hold onto as we navigate the illogical world.

This collection is made up of two novellas, “Stravaging ‘Strange’” (“Странствующее ‘Странно’)” and “Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalki,” as well as a comedic story, “Catastrophe,” an amusing collection of rueful one-liners and comic self-reflections from Krzhizhanovsky’s notebooks (among them: “My life in two parts: 1) a lost chess match, 2) analysis of that loss”), and a short memoir by his friend and late-in-life wife, Anna Bovshek.

The long tales are fruitful and funny until, inevitably, we know the outcome of the episode long before the hapless, idiotic protagonist does. You could say that, too, of course, for Laurel and Hardy and other clowns, though it wouldn’t be true for, say, Gogol’s heroes or Don Quixote. Krzhizhanovsky’s protagonists are cartoon characters who fail again and again in cleverly stupid ways. Gorgis Katafalki, for example, is as ambitious and resilient as Wile E. Coyote: “Katafalki decided to declare himself a state. After all, the great often begins from something quite small. Next morning, sticking out of a letterbox slot on a Moscow backstairs (to greet the scurrying slop buckets), was the flag of the Obrrepublic. Katafalki well understood the duties imposed on him by his new political position. He would have to be commissar of all his commissariats and his own subject.” The hero of “Stravaging ‘Strange’,” meanwhile literally shrinks beyond any dimension imagined by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels; he becomes so tiny that he eventually tries to unionize his host’s blood-vessels so that they no longer have to work 24-hour days.

Anna Bovshek remembers Krzhizhanovsky as a man and writer who never gave up, despite his hunger and poverty through the World Wars and Revolution. Krzhizhanovsky is an original comic voice – more extreme and, depending on your taste, funnier than his near contemporary Zoshchenko. He was clever enough and modest enough, maybe not famous enough (“I am known for being unknown,” he remarked), to survive and write productively until the last weeks before his death.

HOMEWARD FROM HEAVEN

Boris Poplavsky
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk
Columbia University Press; 192 pp.; $16.95
Homeward from Heaven
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This odd, modern, often marvelous novel ascended somewhere towards Heaven 88 years ago and seems to me to have fallen back out of the sky into just the time and place to be appreciated. Written in 1934-1935, it was published for the first time, in Russian, in 1993. The previous novel by Poplavsky (1903-1935), Apollon Bezobrazov, was translated into English only in 2015, but I missed it. How Poplavsky could have expected to publish this one in its time, I have no idea, as his plain-spokenness about sexual activity makes the presentation of similarly explicit situations by his contemporaries D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce seem relatively evasive. (Yes, a quotation is called for here, but I’ll leave it to readers to discover examples for themselves.)

We follow the romantic adventures and only occasional forays into work of Oleg, a young, confused Russian émigré writer in the years 1932-1934, living in France, both on the Riviera and in Paris. As Bryan Karetnyk, the novel’s translator, tells us in the introduction, “Like Poplavsky himself, Oleg is ‘a zealot and a skeptic, a born mystic and mystifier,’ and bears a pronounced resemblance to his author in habits, prejudices, and outlook. […] all this shared life and experience binds Poplavsky and Oleg together profoundly and inextricably.”

Oleg tries to appear shameless about cadging off of his friends and lovers, though the humiliations this entails enrage him. He is alternately in love with Tania and Katia, emigrés themselves. He behaves pitifully, arrogantly, self-destructively, and yet we and his friends accept him as he is and forgive him, as we and they witness him being fully conscious of his errors and sins: “O what an unholy pleasure it is to quarrel, to tear up the precious past and, giddy with malevolence, to utter irrevocable words.”

Tellingly, perhaps, Poplavsky does not recount Oleg’s experiences with heroin, by which Poplavsky died of an overdose shortly after completing this exceptional novel, which seems to me no Soviet-based novelist could have composed, much less dreamed of ever publishing: “You, unknown soldier of Russian mysticism, inscribe your occult-black revelations, rewrite them on a typewriter and, having made of your ream a neat stack, place it on the steps by the front door and let the spring wind scatter them, bearing them away and, perhaps, carrying a few pages to future souls and times, while you, athletic author of an unpublished apocalypse, rejoice in your fate… Were it not for the revolution, you would now be, at thirty-one years of age, an old, dissolute, unloved, clapped-out writer, and there would be nothing intense, nothing ascetic or electric, nothing pleasing to God about you.”

The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World

Karl Schlögel
Princeton University Press; 928 pp.; $39.95
The Soviet Century
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The specialty of the German historian Karl Schlögel is the Soviet Union, an empire he first encountered as a visitor in 1966. Having since then composed several books, among them the quirky and engaging The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow, Schlögel has compiled this ambitious encyclopedic tome. His metaphor for the 60 personally chosen articles is a museum: “Everything that has been brought together and set out […] amounts to an exhibition or museum of Soviet civilization. The objects and shards appear to fit together into a musée imaginaire almost of their own accord.”

Though the Leninist and Stalinist terrors hang like dark clouds over nearly everything, Schlogel’s energy and interest are embedded in his appreciation of discovering or recovering the details of the experiences of everyday life, from flea markets and photography to tattoos and graffiti; from encyclopedias, dioramas, libraries and purged books to athletes and fashion; kommunalkas to dachas; cookbooks to pianos and bells; steel works to dams; parades, holidays and queues to ballet and palm trees; toilets and kitchens to Kolyma and Solovki; Gorki Park to pre-fab housing; and eventually the short hop from Lenin’s tomb to the Lubyanka.

When we read twentieth-century novels and memoirs by Soviet citizens and writers, we derive the same sorts of information that Schlögel carefully assembles and succinctly lays out. His entries serve as documentation of those evocative and impressive fictional and remembered details that we might have gleaned in works by Zoshchenko, Akhmatova, Ilf and Petrov, Bulgakov and Varlam Shalamov. 

Though scholarly, Schlögel writes well (in this translation from the German by Rodney Livingstone), and never bogs himself down in trendy academic theories or mannerisms. He is an explorer, a historian as archaeologist, excited by what is known through research and regretful of all the information that has been lost, destroyed or is still unreachable.

I read the first half in fits and starts, but the second half in a few days. My wandering, fitful experience is well described by Schlögel, who observes: “Museums are places in which to reflect, where visitors who are exhausted, overinformed and frequently perplexed by all they have seen are able to gather their wits again. They can take notes and go over everything in their minds once more; they can try to get a handle on whatever they missed or did not quite grasp.”

References to the post-Soviet present-day atrocities committed by Putin and his cronies are occasional but crystal-clear: “No one foresaw that the dioramas erected in the late phase of the Soviet Union and dedicated to the memory of the victims and heroes of the Great Patriotic War could be used to justify military actions against former ‘fraternal nationalities.’” In fact, Schlogel says he was inspired to embark on this grand project several years ago by Putin’s criminal invasion of Crimea.

– Bob Blaisdell

Tags: fictionmemoirliterature

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Scents and Memoirs

Scents and Memoirs

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