The Beggar and Other Stories
Page 15
The contents of this letter, which was just as long as the others, led up to Ivanov’s needing to buy an artificial leg and his lack of money for the purchase. Indeed, all his letters contained an appeal for help—but sometimes this appeal was not expressed directly. Each letter was a tale, and they were all written in such a tone, as though Ivanov were addressing people who could not fail to understand him, who along with him were inclined to contemplate the vicissitudes of fate and the woeful lot of their correspondent. In almost every letter Ivanov asked himself the question: did he in fact have the moral right to ask anyone for help? This question, however, was of a purely rhetorical nature.
Among those to whom Ivanov sent these letters were, by all accounts, the most diverse people, which was evident from their content. One could but wonder at the range of topics Ivanov discussed—topics that always depended upon the addressee of the letter. He would write on the economic development of the world, on the transformation of various forms of capitalism, on politics, on the destiny of France and its historical past, on Western culture. There were letters that dealt with the last ages of Byzantium, painting, literature—in all this Ivanov displayed exceptional erudition. However, a particularly pathetic tone was reserved for those letters dispatched to people of a spiritual calling and making reference to religion. With that same unfaltering inspiration Ivanov wrote on Catholicism (“ultimately, the history of Christianity is the history of the Catholic Church, regardless of what people may say, whatever the horrors of the Inquisition, which dissolve and vanish in the true and eternal Rebirth of Christian faith in the incomparable radiance of Our Saviour”), on Lutheranism (“only Luther, only he, grasped the danger of Christianity’s ossification, of the petrification and rigidity of its iconography—without him we should not know the meaning of true faith”), on Buddhism (“if we are to assert objectively that the fundamental distinction between monotheistic religion and various types of pagan faiths—examples of which are given us from Hellas and Rome, among others—consists in the fact that meditation and spiritual contemplation are extraneous to paganism and without them we cannot imagine monotheism, then a religion in which the main role is played by this solemn act of contemplation is naturally Buddhism”). To each letter was affixed a small slip of paper with the dates of its dispatch, reply and cheque.
I pored over these letters for several hours. In each of them Ivanov transformed: after an architect appeared an engineer, after the engineer a former history teacher. As I read them, I pondered what agonizing labours of imagination were required of the author of these letters. After all this, there could no longer be any doubt, of course, about the source of Nikolai Franzevich’s income: the second apartment in a poor district of Paris, the falsified documents in the name of some Ivanov who had never existed, and the persistent toil of many years. Several times the Italian woman came into the study where I was sitting and then left. I eventually told her, sans explanation, that she could destroy these letters. Then I bid her farewell and went home.
It was a summer’s evening. I was sitting in my armchair and thinking about what I had just learnt. The fact that, in the end, there had never been any Ivanov did not seem so important to me. Of minor importance, too, was the fact that this was how Nikolai Franzevich had made his money. What truly mattered was that Nikolai Franzevich, the man we knew and remembered, did not exist either, despite his deceptive corporeality—the apartment, the dinners and the Italian woman. The fluidity of form in which his existence had passed, that improbable array of metamorphoses to which his letters attested, all these were, perhaps, his spasmodic and unsuccessful attempts at incarnation, the fruitless striving to find his place in the world, which, for reasons unknown, had long been lost, like a recollection of the past that no effort of memory or imagination is capable of resurrecting. And what was more, no meditative philosophy or edifying reading of Bossuet or Descartes could have saved Nikolai Franzevich—insofar as he existed—from the constant lying, from the consciousness of his gnawing guilt before these guileless people to whom he wrote his letters and to whom he turned in the name of those positive principles—of which his life was a cruel and irredeemable negation. It was all was myth and chimera—his philosophy, his life, Ivanov’s epistolary literature—it was all untrue and deceitful, right down to the calendar date of his funeral, for Nikolai Franzevich, whom I had known for so many years and in whose reality I could never fully bring myself to believe, disappeared and vanished within that empty grave, into which his empty coffin had been lowered, not when a speech was made about the non-existent merits of this non-existent person, but several days later, on that summer’s evening when I returned home after reading Ivanov’s letters.
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STEFAN ZWEIG · EDGAR ALLAN POE · ISAAC BABEL TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ · ULRICH PLENZDORF · JOSEPH KESSEL · VELIBOR čOLIĆ · LOUISE DE VILMORIN · MARCEL AYMÉ · ALEXANDER PUSHKIN · MAXIM BILLER · JULIEN GRACQ · BROTHERS GRIMM · HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL · GEORGE SAND · PHILIPPE BEAUSSANT · IVÁN REPILA · E.T.A. HOFFMANN · ALEXANDER LERNET-HOLENIA · YASUSHI INOUE · HENRY JAMES · FRIEDRICH TORBERG · ARTHUR SCHNITZLER · ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY · MACHI TAWARA · GAITO GAZDANOV · HERMANN HESSE · LOUIS COUPERUS · JAN JACOB SLAUERHOFF · PAUL MORAND · MARK TWAIN · PAUL FOURNEL · ANTAL SZERB · JONA OBERSKI · MEDARDO FRAILE · HÉCTOR ABAD · PETER HANDKE · ERNST WEISS · PENELOPE DELTA · RAYMOND RADIGUET · PETR KRÁL · ITALO SVEVO · RÉGIS DEBRAY · BRUNO SCHULZ · TEFFI · EGON HOSTOVSKÝ · JOHANNES URZIDIL · JÓZEF WITTLIN
COPYRIGHT
Pushkin Press
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London, WC2H 9JQ
Despite all efforts, the publisher has been unable to ascertain the owner of the rights to the original Russian text. We welcome any further information on the matter.
English translation and introduction © Bryan Karetnyk 2018
‘Maître Rueil’ was first published in Chisla in Paris, 1931
‘Happiness’ was first published in Sovremennye zapiski in Paris, 1932
‘Deliverance’ was first published in Sovremennye zapiski in Paris, 1936
‘The Mistake’ was first published in Sovremennye zapiski in Paris, 1938
‘The Beggar’ was first published in Mosty in Munich, 1962
‘Ivanov’s Letters’ was first published in Novyi zhurnal in New York, 1963
First published by Pushkin Press in 2018
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia)
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ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–402–5
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