The Beggar and Other Stories

by Gaito Gazdanov

  GAITO GAZDANOV

  THE BEGGAR

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Translated from the Russian

  and with an Introduction

  by Bryan Karetnyk

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  THE BEGGAR AND OTHER STORIES

  Maître Rueil

  Happiness

  Deliverance

  The Mistake

  The Beggar

  Ivanov’s Letters

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  In a letter of 1960 to the author and critic Leonid Rzhevsky, Gaito Gazdanov, then approaching the last decade of his life and career, wrote with characteristic self-effacement: “It wouldn’t be difficult for me to put together a book of [my own] short stories, but I’m still not convinced that it’s necessary.” Time and again Gazdanov demurred, and never did oversee a collection of his stories. In fact, only once, at the very start of his career, had he ever seriously considered editing a selection of his short fiction at all, as part of an envisaged—though never realized—eight-volume collected works. While this prospective tome, tentatively titled Hawaiian Guitars (after an early story first published in 1930), would have included Gazdanov’s juvenilia, the absence of any precedent set by the mature author looking back over his long career creates both an opportunity and a dilemma for an editor: what to include in this first English collection of his short fiction?

  Over the course of five decades, Gazdanov wrote a total of nine complete novels (and a further two that were never finished) as well as over fifty short stories, all of which were published individually in the many émigré journals, reviews and newspapers scattered across Europe and North America. The collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years after Gazdanov’s death enabled a “grand return” to his homeland, where each of his works without exception has since been republished, many of them enjoying regular reprinting. So, too, in France—Gazdanov’s adoptive homeland—his works have received considerable attention over the last quarter-century, with several volumes of his short stories appearing in translation in recent years. For English audiences, however, the picture is rather different. While just over half of Gazdanov’s novels are now available in English translation, his short stories have been greatly overlooked. With that in mind, it seemed paramount to privilege here those of Gazdanov’s stories that have never before appeared in English, as well as those which together represent the best of his work. The stories that follow have been drawn from his two most prolific and successful periods of short-prose writing: first the 1930s, as a young writer basking in the spectacular success of his debut novel, An Evening with Claire; and latterly the 1960s, as a mature author in the ripeness of age and creative practice, at the acme of his artistic talent.

  Although the earliest story in this collection dates to 1931, Gazdanov’s first story in fact appeared as early as 1926, when he was a mere twenty-two. Having arrived in Paris as a refugee some three years earlier, and with memories of the Revolution and Civil War fresh in his mind, he had spent the winter of 1925–26 sleeping rough in the city’s streets and the underpasses of the Métro. At the time of that first story’s publication he was working as a driller at the Citroën factory in Javel. The following year a stroke of luck brought him a job with the major French publishing house Hachette; however, contrary to what one might expect of an aspiring author, he soon quit, oppressed by the bureaucracy and tedium of the industry, and took up work as a night-taxi driver. This unconventional employment, which for almost a quarter of a century constituted a dependable provision against the vagaries of publishing, would be the career for which (aside from writing) Gazdanov would always be remembered, lending him the lifelong moniker “l’écrivain-chauffeur”.

  The stories Gazdanov wrote during these tumultuous first years of exile came out in Prague, and constituted his first step towards serious recognition. Set predominantly in revolutionary Russia, they combine settings, characters and a narrative style reminiscent of Isaac Babel’s short-story cycles with a fashionable degree of typographical experimentation. Yet in a time when language and literature were conspicuously politicized, this “kaleidoscopic” style, which imparted a fragmentariness and episodic quality aimed at conveying the “crisis of the age”, proved an unpopular choice among the more conservative doyens of émigré belles-lettres, who openly—and vociferously—shunned such outré experimentation, associating it with the much-maligned Soviet avant-garde. Seeing in themselves the true heirs and torch-bearers of the Russian national school, they believed it the emigration’s sacred duty to ensure that literature follow the path laid out by the classics, unbroken by the rupture of 1917. Yet Gazdanov was never one to follow suit. As his art matured, it continued to break conventions, and his artist’s voice would prove one of the most individual and distinctive of his generation.

  Gazdanov’s golden age of short-story writing dawned in the years immediately after his novelistic debut with An Evening with Claire, which came out in December 1929 and soon won accolades in all corners of the émigré literary beau monde. In the wake of this success, he began publishing his work in ever more prestigious venues, including a radical new journal, Chisla (“Numbers”). Founded in reaction to the conservatism of the influential “thick journals”, it aimed at giving a voice to the younger generation of poets and prose writers in exile. Here, in the journal’s fifth issue, flanked by and interspersed with reproductions of paintings by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, originally appeared the first story of this collection, ‘Maître Rueil’ (1931). Though by now having discarded his avant-garde aesthetic in favour of a more classical elegance, Gazdanov retains the motley cast of eccentric international characters and thrillerish plot that are the hallmark of his earlier works. Playing provocatively on one of the émigré’s most conspicuous fears (espionage as well as the kidnapping and even murder of high-profile figures by the Soviet secret police were not without basis in reality), Gazdanov transfigures the popular genre with an underlying philosophical tract, metaphorizing the “sad meaninglessness” of life’s journey in the protagonist’s mission to Soviet Moscow. The haunting sense of melancholy and dislocation permeating the work also imparts yet a further layer of existential tension to the story, while the striking series of hallucinatory scenes that blur the boundaries between dream and reality foreshadows Gazdanov’s later metaphysical thrillers.

  How ironic it was that Gazdanov’s success in the radical Chisla should only pave the way for his entry into the established canon of émigré greats. That same year, in 1931, he debuted in that most prestigious of thick journals, Sovremennye zapiski (“Contemporary annals”), and it was there that he placed the next three stories included in this collection. These works of the mid–late 1930s engage in an ever-weightier dialogue with the classical canon in their narrative style and thematic exposition, while transforming recognizable plots through the introduction of exilic settings and an engagement with European literatures and philosophies. Gazdanov’s protagonists are a series of unfortunate individuals, each struggling with humanity’s eternal questions, which for many émigrés had been cast into sharp relief by the wilderness of exile. Experiencing profound loss, the Job-like protagonist of ‘Happiness’ (1932) is forced to contend with the nature and possibilities of life amid suffering and tragic misfortune. ‘Deliverance’ (1936), a secular variation on Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, is a philosophical meditation on the primacy and arbitrariness of death. It probes the paradox that while all desires and actions lead inexorably towards destruction, and while in the face of death all things are
ultimately futile, a life devoid of beauty and sensual pleasure is nevertheless one of “unbearable horror”.

  ‘The Mistake’ (1938) continues Gazdanov’s excavation of the canon. The story, originally titled ‘Betrayal’, served as a preliminary sketch for his most Tolstoyan of novels, The Flight, which, with its complex web of family relationships and adultery, is an overt refashioning of Anna Karenina in the tradition of Chekhov’s ‘Anna on the Neck’. ‘The Mistake’ presents us with a psychological drama in miniature, a devastating portrayal of a woman’s infidelity and the acute repercussions it has for her and her family. Dissolving the nineteenth-century horror of female sexuality, Gazdanov’s narrative leads inescapably towards an astonishing denouement that probes the orthodoxies of morality.

  This modernist “making new” of the classics proved contentious still. Despite Gazdanov’s widely acclaimed stylistic virtuosity, there followed accusations of literary inostranshchina, or “Esperantism”, a pernicious brand of exoticism that supposedly arose from the influence of foreign literatures and threatened the precarious, nostalgic streak of nationalism running through Russian exilic literature. Yet the voguishness of the criticism notwithstanding, Gazdanov in fact found himself in excellent company: two of the emigration’s foremost critics—“the two Georges”, Adamovich and Ivanov—had been levelling those same accusations against Gazdanov’s greatest rival, Vladimir Nabokov, for years.

  As the decade drew on, short prose gave way to larger works. The years immediately before, during and after the war represent the single most intensive period of novel-writing in Gazdanov’s career. The first three instalments of The Flight, his third novel, were published serially in 1939, before the war put paid to the publication of the novel’s fourth and final part. His subsequent novel, Night Road, was luckier, coming out in full in the final two issues of Sovremennye zapiski, just before the journal was forcibly liquidated after the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940. Nevertheless, while the war in Europe may have halted the publication of Gazdanov’s work, it did not stop him writing—though his mode and reading public did alter temporarily. From 1942 to 1945 Gazdanov and his wife, the Greek Odessan Faina Lamzaki, worked for the Resistance in Paris, helping Soviet partisans and editing an underground information bulletin.

  Gazdanov’s hiatus in short prose writing after the war came about for a variety of reasons. For one, the wartime demise of many European journals meant that writers now had to look increasingly further afield for venues in which to place their new writing. Gazdanov found a publisher for almost all his post-war fiction on the other side of the Atlantic in Mikhail Zetlin and Mark Aldanov’s New York-based Novyi zhurnal (“The new review”), which not only published the vast majority of his stories, but also serialized his last five novels, including the much-fêted The Spectre of Alexander Wolf and The Buddha’s Return. The scarcity of journals, however, was not the only impediment to Gazdanov’s return to short fiction. Having turned down the offer of an editorship at the Chekhov Publishing House in New York in 1952, he opted to take up a job in Munich on Radio Liberty’s Russia desk the following year. The intense demands of radio journalism triggered a sharp drop in his literary output, meaning that he would publish hardly any creative writing again until the end of the decade. Happily enough, the decline was only temporary, and the resurgence of creative activity towards 1960 ushered in a splendid new period in the author’s career.

  Gazdanov’s last decade saw the publication of some of his finest stories: ‘Requiem’ (1960), ‘The Beggar’ (1962) and ‘Ivanov’s Letters’ (1963), each a masterpiece in its own right. These late works present crystalline distillations of the aesthetics and philosophies that Gazdanov had explored more extensively in his long fiction: the cruces of happiness and fate, the sovereignty of the metaphysical, the richness of the inner life in counterpoint with physical poverty, and the metamorphoses of the soul throughout life’s journey into death. They simultaneously cast a retrospective look over his œuvre at large, much in the same way as does his final novel, Evelyn and Her Friends. In this decade, Gazdanov’s preoccupation with the mystery of death reached its apogee: these inspired last works constitute his ultimate, elegiac exploration of life’s transmutation into art and, at the same time, a reflection on the very raison d’être of art, and of life itself.

  While Gazdanov may have harboured doubts about the need for a volume of his short stories, I believe it is safe to say that the necessity of such a collection in English is indisputable. Which works he might have chosen himself will for ever remain a mystery; however, in selecting and translating the six stories that follow, I hope I have done the author and his work some justice—and in this endeavour perhaps, just this once, proved the maître, “the master”, wrong.

  B.S.K.

  THE BEGGAR

  AND OTHER STORIES

  MAÎTRE RUEIL

  (1931)

  MAÎTRE RUEIL, a Frenchman, blond with black eyes and a sharp, square face, an agent of the Sûreté Générale, had been dispatched from Paris to Moscow on an important political assignment. In the days in which this story takes place he was around thirty years old; he had long since graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris and for eight years or so had been engaged exclusively in political affairs, which brought in a sizeable income and allowed him, who had no fortune of his own, to live in great style. He enjoyed a reputation as one of France’s finest agents; and the word maître, by which he was known and to which, by virtue of his legal learning, he had the right, rather frequently acquired another, more deferential, character: Maître Rueil was truly head and shoulders above all his colleagues. A brilliant career lay ahead of him. In addition to the purely professional dexterity, essential in people of his occupation, he was endowed with many other gifts. He spoke several languages fluently, could catch the meaning of others from only half a word, never lost his nerve on dangerous assignments, and was rewarded with exceptional success in everything he laid his hands on. It was said that the shadow of good fortune followed him everywhere.

  He was of below-average height but very strong; years of continuous physical training and intense mental exertion had made of him an almost infallible human mechanism. The maître’s nervous system was in perfect working order: even the frequent sleepless nights had no ill effect on him. He endured journeys of any length with ease, was able to sleep in any location, was never burdened by the tedium of endless trips and never knew what it meant to be seasick. Because he was young and in rude health—and also, very likely, because of his constant efforts of imagination, directed at the solution of dangerous, though purely practical, problems—abstract ideas never drew his interest. His penetration extended well beyond his charge of duties—into the realms of ethics, philosophy and art—and was so great as to allow him, should the occasion present itself, to construct and defend all manner of systems of ideas; such an occasion, however, had yet to present itself—and so the maître’s knowledge lay there, dormant and inert. Maître Rueil could not admit the thought that, if it were set in motion, it would spell catastrophe for him: in the mental landscape surrounding Maître Rueil, nothing was supposed to happen that could not be foreseen to a greater or lesser degree of approximation.

  Then, one day, when boarding a ship from Marseilles to Constantinople, the maître suddenly experienced a sensation hitherto unknown to him, one of incomprehensible irritation and utterly inexplicable alarm. No one was there to see him off: he had no family and had deemed it unnecessary to divulge his plans to anyone. Only one figure, in a hat and a tattered blazer, with a face on which there was a decorative blue mole below the left eye, appeared on the quayside at the last moment and immediately vanished, having met the maître’s gaze. This was the man whom the stubborn, stupid officials of the Sûreté Générale’s lower ranks invariably dispatched to ascertain whether the maître was indeed departing. Once, after returning from a routine trip, the maître went to see the bureau chief, who was in charge of agents, and, laughing espe
cially calmly and coldly, told him that he thought he was a fool. The bureau chief remained silent, for he greatly feared that Maître Rueil, using his influence, could have him fired. However, the maître did nothing of the sort—and the bureau chief, each time fearing more than on the previous occasion, would again send the man to follow the maître, because he considered it his professional duty.

  It was cold and beginning to get dark. Scraps of paper, broken boards and glittering oily slicks danced upon the filthy waves. The ship had long been standing on the roads, and Maître Rueil gazed absent-mindedly ahead and saw the nearby quay lighting up and black boats moored to the bank. Then he took several turns about the deck and, after waiting for the first movements of the propeller, whipping up foam instantaneously, went below.

  There were few passengers: a Catholic priest, a tall, slight man of around forty-five and a great lover of anecdotes; a young Greek with quick movements and thievish eyes; and a hulking boxer, a thickset titan from Buenos Aires. The boxer was unable to lay to rest his recent defeat and was for the fourth time telling of how the referee had been far from impartial. He was speaking in English; the priest listened to him with manifest pleasure, yet at times he would laugh at inappropriate moments and again fall silent under the boxer’s heavy gaze. Taking the maître by the arm, he said:

  “Just imagine, I’m not in the least bored by this story. I don’t speak English. Praise be!”

  Maître Rueil politely smiled, with his lips alone.

  Apart from the priest, the Greek and the boxer, there was a tall lady in a blue dress travelling on board the ship—an actress from Odessa, with a proud, troubled face; on her heels followed a short-legged Russian, a businessman to all appearances: the tense expression on his face attested to his unremitting readiness to execute her every wish at the drop of a hat. Maître Rueil watched the actress and felt a sense of envy towards the Russian. “Très bien, la petite?”*—there suddenly came a voice from behind him. The maître turned around and saw the priest’s grinning face.