Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  After his return to Petrograd, Zamyatin collaborated with Maksim Gorky on various state-funded cultural initiatives; he edited translations of English and French literature and ran a creative writing workshop in the Petrograd House of Arts. A gifted literary critic and theorist, he was a teacher to the ‘Serapion Brothers’, a literary movement that defended the independence of art. His play The Flea (1926), based on Leskov’s ‘The Steel Flea’, was a success, but the production was closed by the authorities. His anti-utopian novel We, a model for both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, was published abroad, in English translation, after being turned down by Soviet publishers. Subjected to fierce criticism, Zamyatin appealed to Stalin for permission to emigrate. This, surprisingly, was granted, and he left for France in 1931.

  Zamyatin at one time described himself as a Neo-realist. The Realists, he wrote, saw man and the world in a mirror. The Symbolists, reacting against the realists, used X-rays and therefore saw only skeletons. Neo-realism, unlike Symbolism, was concerned with life. Its practitioners, however, not content with merely holding a mirror to life, aimed to study it through a microscope. The resulting picture might seem distorted, but it was more authentic. Zamyatin’s favourite writer was Gogol: ‘It was not without his influence that I developed a tendency towards caricature, towards the grotesque, towards a synthesis of fantasy and reality.’1

  The fame of We has unjustly eclipsed Zamyatin’s other work. His stories ‘The Cave’ and ‘Mamai’ are powerful evocations of the frost, famine and despair of post-revolutionary Petrograd, an era that Zamyatin describes elsewhere as ‘the merry, eerie winter of 1917–18, when everything broke from its moorings and floated off somewhere into the unknown’.2 ‘The Flood’ is Zamyatin’s most Dostoyevskian work, about a childless woman who murders an orphaned teenager whom she and her husband have taken in and who has become her husband’s mistress. ‘The Lion’, included here, is one of Zamyatin’s gentlest stories; it appeared first in French translation in 1935 and was published in Russian only in 1939, two years after the writer’s death.

  THE LION

  It all began with a most bizarre incident: the lion, great king of the beasts, was found hopelessly drunk. He kept tripping over all four paws and rolling onto his side. It was an utter catastrophe.

  The lion was a student at Leningrad University and at the same time worked as an extra in the theatre. In that day’s performance, dressed in a lionskin, he was to have stood on a rock, waiting to be struck down by a spear hurled at him by the heroine of the ballet; thereupon he was to fall on to a mattress in the wings. At rehearsals everything had gone off splendidly, but now suddenly, only half an hour before the curtain was due to go up for the première, the lion had taken it into his head to behave like a pig. No spare extras were available, but the performance couldn’t be postponed since a minister from Moscow was expected. An emergency conference was in session in the office of the theatre’s Red director.

  There was a knock on the door and the theatre fireman Petya Zherebyakin came in. The Red director (now he really was red – with anger) rounded on him.

  ‘Well, what is it? What do you want? I’ve no time. Get out !’

  ‘I… I… I’ve come about the lion, Comrade Director,’ said the fireman.

  ‘Well, what about the lion?’

  ‘Seeing, I mean, as our lion is drunk, that is, I’d like to play the lion, Comrade Director.’

  I don’t know if bears ever have blue eyes and freckles but, if they do, then the enormous Zherebyakin in his iron-soled boots was much more like a bear than a lion. But suppose by some miracle they could make a lion out of him? He swore that they could: he’d watched all the rehearsals from backstage, and when he was in the army he’d taken part in Tsar Maximillian.1 So, to spite the producer, who was grinning sarcastically, the director ordered Zherebyakin to put on the costume and have a go.

  A few minutes later the orchestra was already playing, con sordini, the ‘March of the Lion’ and Petya Zherebyakin was performing in his lion costume as if he’d been born in the Libyan desert rather than in a village near Ryazan. But at the last moment, when he was supposed to fall off the rock, he glanced down and hesitated.

  ‘Fall, damn you, fall!’ whispered the producer fiercely.

  The lion obediently plumped down, landed heavily on his back and lay there, unable to get up. Surely he was going to get up? Surely there was not to be another catastrophe at the last moment?

  He was helped to his feet. He got out of the costume and stood there, pale, holding his back and giving an embarrassed smile. One of his upper front teeth was missing and this made the smile somewhat rueful and childlike (incidentally, there is always something rather childlike about bears, isn’t there?).

  Fortunately he appeared not to be seriously hurt. He asked for a glass of water, but the director insisted that a cup of tea be brought from his own office. Once Petya had drunk the tea the director began to chivvy him.

  ‘Well, Comrade, you’ve appointed yourself lion, you’d better get into the costume. Come on, come on, lad, we’ll soon be starting!’

  Someone obligingly sprang forward with the costume, but the lion refused to put it on. He declared that he had to slip out of the theatre for a moment. What this unforeseen exigency was he wouldn’t explain; he simply gave his embarrassed smile. The director flared up. He tried to order Zherebyakin to stay and reminded him that he was a candidate-member of the Party and a shockworker, but the shockworker-lion obstinately stood his ground. They had to give in, and with a radiant, gap-toothed smile Zherebyakin hurried off out of the theatre.

  ‘Where the devil’s he off to?’ asked the director, red with anger again. ‘And what are all these secrets of his?’ Nobody could answer the Red director. The secret was known only to Petya Zherebyakin – and of course to the author of this story. And, as Zherebyakin runs through the autumnal St Petersburg rain, we can move for a while to that July night when his secret was born.

  There was no night that night: it was the day lightly dozing off for a second, like a marching soldier who keeps in step but cannot distinguish dream from reality. In the rosy glass of the canals doze inverted trees, windows and columns – St Petersburg. Then suddenly, at the lightest of breezes, St Petersburg disappears and in its place is Leningrad. A red flag on the Winter Palace stirs in the wind, and by the railings of the Aleksandrovsky Park stands a policeman armed with a rifle.

  The policeman is surrounded by a tight group of night tram workers. Over their shoulders Petya Zherebyakin can see only the policeman’s face, round as a Ryazan honey-apple. Then a very strange thing happens: somebody seizes the policeman’s hands and shoulders, and one of the workers, thrusting his lips forwards in the shape of a trumpet, plants an affectionate smacking kiss on his cheek. The policeman turns crimson and blows a loud blast on his whistle; the workers run away. Zherebyakin is left face to face with the policeman – and the policeman disappears, just as suddenly as the reflection of St Petersburg in the canal, puffed away by the breeze: in front of Zherebyakin stands a girl in a policeman’s cap and tunic – the first policewoman to be stationed by the Revolution on Nevsky Prospekt. Her dark eyebrows met angrily over the bridge of her nose and her eyes flashed fire.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Comrade,’ was all she said – but it was the way she said it!

  Zherebyakin became confused and muttered guiltily, ‘But it wasn’t me, honestly. I was just walking home.’

  ‘Come off it, and you a worker too!’ The policewoman looked at him – but what a look!

  If there’d been a trapdoor in the roadway, as there is in the theatre, Zherebyakin would have fallen straight through it and been saved; but he had to walk away slowly, feeling her eyes burning into his back.

  The next day brought another white night, and again Comrade Zherebyakin was walking home after his duty turn in the theatre, and again the policewoman was standing by the railings of the Aleksandrovsky Pa
rk. Zherebyakin wanted to slip past, but he noticed she was looking at him, so he gave a guilty, embarrassed nod. She nodded back. The twilight glinted on the glossy black steel of her rifle, turning it pink; and, confronted by this pink rifle, Zherebyakin felt more cowardly than in the face of all the rifles which for five years had been fired at him on various fronts.

  Not until a week later did he risk starting up a conversation with the policewoman. It turned out that she too was from Ryazan, just like Zherebyakin, and moreover she too remembered their Ryazan honey-apples – you know, the sweet ones with a slightly bitter taste; you can’t get them here…

  Every day on his way home Zherebyakin would stop by the Aleksandrovsky Park. The white nights had gone quite mad: the green, pink and copper-coloured sky didn’t grow dark for a single second. The courting couples in the park had to look for shady spots to hide in just as if it were daytime.

  One such night Zherebyakin, with bear-like awkwardness, suddenly asked the policewoman:

  ‘Er, are you, that is, are policewomen allowed to get married, like, in the course of duty? I mean, not in the course of duty, but in general, seeing as your work is sort of military…?’

  ‘Married?’ said policewoman Katya, leaning on her rifle. ‘We’re like men now: if we take a fancy to someone, we have him.’

  Her rifle shone pink. The policewoman lifted her face towards the feverishly blazing sky and then looked past Zherebyakin into the distance and completed her thought: ‘If there was a man who wrote poetry like… or perhaps an actor who came out on to the stage and the whole audience started clapping…’

  It was like the honey-apple – sweet and yet bitter at the same time. Petya Zherebyakin saw that he’d better be off and not come back there again, his cause was done for…

  But no! Wonders haven’t ceased! When there occurred that bizarre incident of the lion, thank the Lord, drinking himself silly, an idea flashed into Petya Zherebyak’s head and he flew into the director’s room…

  However, that was all in the past. Now he was hurrying through the autumn rain to Glinka Street. Luckily it wasn’t far from the theatre and luckily he found policewoman Katya at home. She wasn’t a policewoman now, but simply Katya. With her sleeves rolled up, she was washing a white blouse in a basin. Dewdrops hung on her nose and forehead. She had never looked sweeter than like this, in her domestic setting.

  When Zherebyakin placed a free ticket in front of her and told her he had a part in the ballet that evening she didn’t believe him at first; then she grew interested; then for some reason she became embarrassed and rolled her sleeves down; finally she looked at him (but what a look!) and said she would definitely come.

  The bells were already ringing in the theatre smoking room, in the corridors and in the foyer. The bald cabinet minister was in his box, squinting through a pince-nez. On the stage behind the curtain, which was still down, the ballerinas were smoothing their skirts with the movement swans use to clean their wings under the water. Behind the rock the producer and the director were both fussing round Zherebyakin.

  ‘Don’t forget, you’re a shockworker. Mind you don’t ruin everything!’ whispered the director into the lion’s ear. The curtain rose, and behind the bright line of the footlights the lion suddenly saw the dark auditorium, packed to the roof with white faces. Long ago, when he was simply Zherebyakin, and had to climb out of trenches with grenades exploding in front of him, he used to shudder and automatically cross himself, but still run forward. Now, however, he felt unable to take a single step, but the producer gave him a shove and, somehow moving arms and legs which seemed not to belong to him, he slowly climbed up on to the rock.

  On top of the rock, the lion raised his head and saw, right next to him, policewoman Katya, leaning over the front rail of one of the second-row boxes. She was looking straight at him. The leonine heart thumped once, twice, and then stopped. He was trembling all over. His fate was about to be decided. Already the spear was flying towards him… Ouch! – it struck him in the side. Now he had to fall. But suppose he again fell the wrong way and ruined everything? He had never felt so terrified in all his life – it was far worse than when he used to climb out of the trenches…

  The audience had already noticed that something wasn’t right: the mortally wounded lion was standing stock-still on top of the rock and gazing down. The front rows heard the producer’s terrible whisper:

  ‘Fall, damn you, fall!’

  Then they all saw a most bizarre thing: the lion raised its right paw, quickly crossed itself, and plumped down off the rock like a stone…

  There was a moment of numbed silence, then a roar of laughter exploded in the auditorium like a grenade. Policewoman Katya was laughing so hard that she was in tears. The slain lion buried its muzzle in its paws and sobbed.

  First published, in French, in 1935

  Translated by David Richards

  SIGIZMUND DOMINIKOVICH KRZHIZHANOVSKY (1887–1950)

  Krzhizhanovsky was, in his own words, ‘known for being unknown’. The author of five short novels, more than a hundred stories, a dozen plays, screenplays and librettos, as well as hundreds of pages of essays, he went to his now-forgotten grave ‘a literary non-entity’.

  Born in Kiev to a Polish Catholic family, he took two degrees at Kiev University – in law, and in philology. The Revolution put an end to his career as a lawyer, freeing him to devote himself to writing and philosophy. In 1919 he wrote what he would later call his first real story, a ‘fantasy-dialogue’ between Jacobi, the German philosopher, and ‘Supposedly’, the sum of all human meanings.

  At the same time, Krzhizhanovsky was becoming popular in Kiev as a lecturer – on the psychology of creativity, on the history and theory of the theatre, on art. He was erudite, a brilliant speaker and a bold and original thinker. He thought in images and constructed syllogisms out of these images. In 1920 he began collaborating with Anna Bovshek, a former Moscow Arts Theatre actress who became his lifelong companion.

  In the spring of 1922 Krzhizhanovsky and Bovshek made their separate ways to Moscow; there they found separate rooms thanks – indirectly – to the ‘ReMeasuring Commission’. This Commission remeasured Moscow apartments for purposes of enforcing the new ‘ten-per-cent norm’: ten per cent of all house space had to be surrendered for redistribution. To avoid being saddled with strangers, many owners – or rather former owners – of large apartments gave up rooms to friends or friends of friends. That is how Krzhizhanovsky came to live at No. 44 on the old Arbat. Apartment 5 was the home of an elderly count. On the recommendation of a mutual friend, the Count invited the tall, gaunt and impecunious intellectual to inhabit a small, dark unfurnished room at the end of a corridor. Krzhizhanovsky brought in a wooden bed with a horsehair mattress, a plain table with two drawers, an armchair with a hard seat, and hanging bookshelves. The Count died, the Countess moved out, and less sympathetic neighours moved in to what was becoming that symbol of Soviet life, a communal apartment.

  By then there was a new norm stipulating that no one person could occupy more than nine square metres (ninety-seven square feet). An apartment intended for a single family thus became home to half a dozen families or more, with everyone obliged to use the same kitchen, bath and WC. Krzhizhanovsky’s room was only six square metres, but his neighbours hated him none the less; he simply did not fit in. Bovshek pleaded with Krzhizhanovsky to join her in her own somewhat larger room, but he insisted he needed a room of his own. He also felt, she later recalled, that life in one apartment would destroy the enchantment of their relationship.

  It was in that room, probably once a maid’s room or a larder, that Krzhizhanovsky wrote his philosophical, satirical, lyrical phantasmagorias. Editors rejected them on the grounds that they were not ‘contemporary’. According to Bovshek, however, Krzhizhanovsky was not concerned with life’s easily observable surface; he was a ‘writer-thinker’. Many of his stories have the quality of a problem or puzzle: ‘I am interested,’ he once said, ‘not in the a
rithmetic, but in the algebra of life.’

  ‘Quadraturin’ belongs to a cycle of stories called ‘What Men Die By’, a title that recalls ‘What Men Live By’, a parable by Tolstoy in which an angel is sent down to earth to discover what men live by. He finds that men live (and thrive) not by looking after themselves, but by loving each other: ‘He who loves is in God and God is in him, for God is love.’ In ‘What Men Die By’ God is dead: people are engaged only in looking after themselves and what they imagine to be their own good.

  Despite the constant rejections, Krzhizhanovsky went on writing his fictions and submitting them to publishers. The German invasion in 1941 frustrated a near-success: his Stories about the West had been accepted by a publisher and were in the process of being typeset. After this he gave up. Alcohol became an indispensable crutch. Asked what had led him to drink, he joked: ‘A sober attitude towards reality.’ Dangerously ill, he moved in with Bovshek in 1949; neighbours ranted about this ‘illegal’ resident (he and Bovshek had never married). A stroke then deprived him of the ability to read. He tried unsuccessfully to relearn the alphabet. On 28 December 1950 the critic Georgy Shengeli drew a black frame around an entry in his notebook: ‘Today Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky died, a writer-visionary, an unsung genius.’

  Krzhizhanovsky’s first book was published posthumously in 1989. Three volumes of a projected five-volume collected works have recently appeared in Moscow, and they are already being translated into French.