THE LITTLE DEVIL AND OTHER STORIES
RUSSIAN LIBRARY
The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.
Editorial Board:
Vsevolod Bagno
Dmitry Bak
Rosamund Bartlett
Caryl Emerson
Peter B. Kaufman
Mark Lipovetsky
Oliver Ready
Stephanie Sandler
For a list of books in the series, see page 309
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54516-7
Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of
Literary Translation, Russia.
Columbia University Press thanks Alla Gracheva, general editor of
The Collected Works of A. M. Remizov, for her invaluable assistance in
selecting the stories for this collection.
Translation copyright © 2021 Antonina W. Bouis
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Remizov, Alekseĭ, 1877–1957, author. | Bouis, Antonina W.,
translator.
Title: The little devil and other stories / Alexei Remizov ; translated by
Antonina W. Bouis.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] |
Series: Russian library
Identifiers: LCCN 2020026893 (print) | LCCN 2020026894
(ebook) | ISBN 9780231183802 (hardback ; acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9780231183819 (trade paperback ; acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9780231545167 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PG3470.R4 A2 2021 (print) | LCC PG3470.R4
(ebook) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026893
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026894
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
CONTENTS
Introduction by Avril Pyman
1. Bebka
2. Petushok the Cockerel
3. The Sacrifice
4. The Little Devil
5. The Profaner
6. Princess Mymra
7. Panna Maria
8. The Kind Guard
9. The Venerable Lis
10. Martin Zadeka
11. Savva Grudtsyn
12. About Pyotr and Fevronia of Murom
13. Grigory and Ksenia
INTRODUCTION
AVRIL PYMAN
Alexei Mikhailovich Remizov (1877–1957), as an artist, defies classification. Solitary as a hermit crab, yet friendly and familiar as a jester, very small, hunchbacked, and nearsighted, with a broken nose and twinkling eyes, Remizov now consoles his “masters” with tongue-twisters and clowning, now, filled with a sense of bitter compassion, reminds us of the madness of a world where “the rain it raineth every day” … and wrinkled “care” comes creeping to finish us off as once she did Goethe’s Faust: bills, rent, electricity, taxes—more unrelenting even than fire, famine, pain, poison, and the general dereliction of revolution.
It is a great good fortune for me that I met him in the flesh at the unsophisticated age of eighteen, and, although I have told the story before, I cannot resist recalling once more his living image for first-time readers of this English version of the story that made his name: “The Little Devil.”1
My introduction to Remizov happened in 1948. I was in Paris to improve my Berlitz-school Russian by staying with a Russian family, Daniil and Natalya Reznikov and their two schoolboy sons, founders, with their extended family the Andreevs and the Sossinskys, of the publishers Opleshnik: a project conceived at the end of the occupation specifically as an outlet for Remizov’s wonderful stories and drawings; small softcover books, each published in a run of 300 copies, now collectors’ items. Natalya Viktorovna, whom I came to call Natasha, took me to an emigré social event, an evening bénéfice for the notoriously penniless and helpless, half-blind writer, who was to recite a story of his own and Pushkin’s “The Fisherman and the Fish.” The Remizov piece was too difficult for me, but Pushkin’s ballad of the modest old fisherman, his rapacious wife, and the golden fish with the power to grant wishes I had read before and was able to follow—as one enchanted!
Remizov’s voice was at once musical and colloquial, instinctively rhythmical, as, I was to learn later, are the voices of Russian country folk when telling a story—a seamless blend of incantation and earthy chitchat with an accompaniment of first gently rippling, then increasingly threatening sea. Remizov himself—a tiny figure, hunched and sturdy as a gnome with the face of a bespectacled Slavic leprechaun—stood small on the podium, oblivious of his audience, altogether concentrated on his magical recital.
A few days later, Natasha took me to visit at his high-ceilinged three-room flat in the “literary” Rue Boileau. At that time he received friends in his own room: a huge desk, a sofa for guests, one or two chairs, and a narrow bed in the corner under shelves of books with a bed table and reading lamp. The other room, once, presumably, the “Cuckoo’s Room” of his fantastic “everyday” memoirs, had belonged to his wife, Seraphima Pavlovna, a specialist in the medieval documents in which he himself found such inspiration, a huge woman with a fiery temperament and the bewildered eyes of a courageous child in a world of subtle undercurrents and double entendres. She had died during the war, but her space remained, disputed only by the overflow of books and manuscripts. In the third room lived the one they called the Duckling, another penniless and homeless soul, who had been persuaded by well-wishers to live in and care—as well as might be done—for the helpless old writer with his “shorn” eyes and shuffling gait. They shared a bathroom, a separate, old-fashioned lavatory with clanking chain, and a cramped but lofty kitchen.
At his great desk, Remizov wrote, rewrote, and recycled old stories, letters, and dreams, his wife’s letters, and his own memoirs of his childhood among the workers busy about the factory with tall red chimneys and the courtyard onto which his own family flat then gave—after his mother took herself and her four boys back from the house of their haberdasher father to the protection of her own brothers and found shelter in a converted dye works that had been part of their industrial complex. The Naidenovs were wealthy merchants, a class whose importance had grown tremendously with the industrial revolution and whose recently acquired appetite for reading, theater, and art, combined with a taste for patronage, had set them up in rivalry to the Europeanized landed aristocracy of their own country and the wealthy Americans then so prominent on the European cultural scene. In early twentieth-century Russia, however, significant remnants of the class system still held, and the home life of these merchants was deeply traditional, regulated by the fasts and feasts of the church. Their kitchens were open to the curious underclass of pilgrims who wandered from monastery to monastery across the enormous spaces of Russia and as far as Greece and the Holy Land. Their women were
well read and outspoken, but the formal choreography of everyday life was still deeply patriarchal. Remizov’s eldest uncle and the head of the family was also head of the Moscow Stock Exchange, whereas he and his mother were poor relations. She drank and kept to her room, whereas the boys got up to all kinds of pranks but submitted to their uncle’s authority. The only escape was the world of imagination:
My wet nurse lived on jam and tea. I always sat with her and listened to her stories about the countryside around Kaluga: there were forests (fairyland for me), fields, beasts; and real-life stories about goings-on in the village got all mixed up with her magic tales. As soon as I learned to write, I would make a list of wishes: what she should bring me from the country; apart from horses, cows, sheep, a goat, and all kinds of birds including a nightingale, my register of goods included a wolf, and a fox, and a bear, and a hare, and … a tree spirit together with a house spirit, a harvest spirit, and a meadow spirit. Everything I had ever heard about in those earliest years.2
Little Alexei, in spite of his broken nose and stunted growth, was a bright boy, but easily overlooked. His acute myopia was not discovered until the age of thirteen when, given spectacles, he discovered a sharply defined world, no longer infused with color and aswirl with music. When the drawing master sat him down before a carefully arranged “nature-morte,” he now saw cubes and pyramids, whereas before he had perceived “ex-objects,” weird, seething forms, monstrous or angelic … and much more interesting to draw. Familiar human faces too were often harsher and, to his mind, less appealing than the haloed pancakes with shimmering, blotchy, luminous eyes that he had formerly perceived. Suddenly “I found myself in quite another world.”3 Only music remained, the sorrow and the beauty of the church choir in which he regularly sang the alto parts, the chiming of bells from the great monasteries, proclaiming the sorrows of a fallen world and the great hope of redemption “with which I came into the world, and without which my life is unimaginable.”4 When he was fourteen, his voice broke and the music, “his” music, became a memory, only to be recaptured in dreams. Other writers, Remizov would complain, would find inspiration through drugs, drink, the adrenalin of danger, passion, even, like Dostoevsky, epilepsy and high fever. He had only his dreams—and the conductor’s baton given him by a sympathetic choirmaster as a talisman when he lost his voice and knew he would never master an instrument. So, in two of his autobiographical books, he himself figures as a music teacher without an instrument, suspended in midair, “above the earth: what depends on me in all the earth? Nothing.”5
On the wall of his room in the flat on the Rue Boileau was a collage of shiny and matte paper inspired by the breaking glass of his windows, shattered by explosive blasts toward the end of the occupation. Suspended between floor and ceiling bobbed a string of strange objects: fish bones, a curious twig, a charred fragment, toys, the indispensable “Feuermännschen” who protected his hearth. As an old man, Remizov conjured stories from these threaded and patched mementos and from elusive dreams, from which he would wake at night to write them down (without his glasses), only to be heartbroken next morning to find his notes unreadable.
This was his world, his place of habitation. But not everyone believed this was truly so. Some saw it as a homemade stage, the artificial background to a self-styled genius who had built a reputation on his own eccentricity and his acquaintance with famous writers, artists, and musicians. No respecter of persons, Remizov often wrote of friends and colleagues with embarrassing intimacy: “Alexei Mikhailovich, from now on you never dream about me,” the emigré poet and critic Vladimir Khodasevich is rumored to have told him. Yet he could not resist the comic detail: Merezhkovsky, remembering Christ suffering “the little children” and taking Baby Natasha gingerly on his knee, suddenly appealing to his wife, “Zina, Zina, she’s making a mess! Quick, take her away!!” or the stately Berdyaev sailing head over heels over the top of the children’s swing in Rozanov’s garden and Andrey Bely “so surprised he swallowed a date.” Only Seraphima Pavlovna, the poet Alexander Blok, and possibly a few others of lesser renown such as his wet nurse seem to have been spared from Remizov’s grotesque misrepresentations.
Yet Remizov never indulged in ill-natured gossip, which he saw as the besetting sin of emigré society, and defended himself vigorously against accusations of intellectual dishonesty such as plagiarism (for his folktales) or caricature (in his dreams and memoirs). “You don’t mean to say you are consulting Alexei Mikhailovich about your dissertation!” exclaimed a genuinely distressed Alexandre Benois in 1953, when I returned to the hospitable Reznikov household to research my PhD thesis on “D. S. Merezhkovsky and the origins of Russian Symbolism” and resumed my visits to the Rue Boileau on a more regular basis. “I really think you should be warned. He—er—makes things up.” “Remizov!” snapped Sergei Konstantinovich Makovsky, the onetime editor of the journal Apollon. “Don’t believe a word he says.” By that time my Russian was quite adequate and I could actually help the increasingly blind old man check facts in the encyclopedia or refresh his memory by reading selected books aloud. Once, to our great excitement, I even disinterred a rare copy of Vasily Rozanov’s doctoral dissertation, “On Understanding,” from the Czechoslovak Protestant library on the Ile de la Cité: a great disappointment to both of us. “Vasily Vasilyevich had not yet found his style,” he said, waking with a start as my struggle to read out a particularly long and involved philosophical passage stuttered to an awkward standstill. “We won’t read any more of that….” So Remizov felt his way, hesitantly and laboriously, through everyday life; but his reminiscences, dreams, the incantatory rhythms of his “music” were bathed in the light of their own truth and not intended to harm.
I think this must always have been so, from the day he discovered his weird genius for the barber’s art, shearing a shaggy kennel dog to look like a poodle in the midst of the Russian winter, and went on to barber the hair and beards of distinguished revolutionaries whose exile he shared in Vologda—exercising a propensity that was later to terrorize literary colleagues in smart St. Petersburg.
Nevertheless, I never heard him attribute discreditable motives to his fellow emigrés or make fun of the grandiose, tragic chaos of his time, when all a person had to hold on to was the spontaneity of children, a moment of empathy, a shared laugh, a tear in the eye for the despair of another human being. “The Russian proverb has it,” he wrote in Sisters of the Cross, “that man is a wolf to man. I say—man is a log.” Remizov the artist, however, like Remizov the choirboy, was not “a log”: “I sang for all the sorrows of mankind, for the abandoned, the weary, the ‘doomed,’ for all human misfortune and disaster, for that unanswered why? Why? Why…. And in answer I saw how the old priest Alexei Dmitrievich Mozhaisky suddenly ceased his censing and his eyes amid the blue clouds of incense filled with tears….”6
Although destined to work in the Naidenov bank and moved from grammar school to keep his youngest brother company in the more prosaic Russian equivalent of a “comprehensive” or “vocational” school, Remizov was accepted into university to study physics and mathematics in 1894. He was well read in Russian—from the seventeenth-century heretic priest and vernacular master Avvakum to Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and on through Russia’s great realist prose to Chekhov and Gorky. In philosophy, however, the great discoveries of his contemporaries were Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx. There was just so much a man simply had to know, and the teenager from “beyond the Moscow River” took a trip to Germany, where all kinds of forbidden literature was available, and returned with a stock of “revolutionary” reading in a suitcase with a false bottom. The university was, at the time, a hotbed of disaffection, and in 1896 the nineteen-year-old was arrested when curiosity impelled him to join a student demonstration. The stash of illegal literature found at his digs led not just to expulsion from the university but to administrative exile. In exile, he became further radicalized and was caught distributing some Marxist pamphlets he had managed to brin
g with him, imprisoned for several months in solitary (according to his own account, in the very cage once used to exhibit the defeated Cossack rebel Emelian Pugachev), then sent on, stumbling in his manacles, with an echelon of hardened revolutionaries and common criminals, to the subpolar settlement of Ust Sysolsk. The sentence was commuted, thanks to the young man’s evident physical frailty and the intervention of well-wishers in the capital, to exile in the “Northern Capital” of Vologda.
Like other such centers throughout Russian and Soviet history, Vologda was a “university” in itself: enlightened, articulate company; all the latest journals sent to individual exiles by sympathizers (Remizov himself received The World of Art from Diaghilev’s cousin, Filosofov, with whom he had a slight acquaintance and who remained a kind friend all his life). It was possible to enjoy reasonable mobility within the confines of the city, even romance. It was here Alexei Mikhailovich met and married Seraphima Pavlovna, a beautiful, statuesque Social Revolutionary Ukrainian aristocrat with a translator’s proficiency in foreign languages and, most important for their lifelong cooperation, a passion for Old Russian culture and paleography. Originally exiled for “terrorism,” she now felt, as he did, that violence was not the way to build a happier society, but an easy relationship with the ex-Marxists from Kiev, Berdyaev and Bulgakov, and Lenin’s future Commissar for Education, Lunacharsky, put an end to the rumors, rife back in Ust-Sysolsk, that Remizov, an eternal misfit in whatever society, was clearly no proper revolutionary and most probably a stool pigeon. Seraphima devoted herself to religion and study, Remizov to his own world of books and “music,” producing his first published literary composition: typically, a stylized yet observation-inspired “Lament of a Young Girl Before Marriage,” a folklore form in which the bride-to-be bids farewell to the freedom of her own friends and family and fearfully anticipates subjugation to a new master in a strange household.
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