Slav Sisters E-Book

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This anthology illustrates the evolution of Russian women's writing over the 20th century. It wasn't until the 1900s that women authors finally made a notable breakthrough on the Russian literary scene. Despite a brilliant start further development of women's writing in Russia was crudely interrupted by Soviet censorship and only resumed after the downfall of the USSR. Whereas critics unanimously recognise the greatness of such literary stars as Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva, opinions differ about other writers such as Nadezhda Teffi and Lydia Ginzburg who reached wide readerships only in the 1990s, when most of the formerly banned books were published. Mid-century, women were almost invisible in Russian literature, but world-famous authors like Ludmila Ulitskaya, Galina Scherbakova, and Svetlana Alexiyevich were still writing. Latterly women writers such as Olga Slavnikova, Irina Muravyova, and Margarita Khemlin increasingly dominated publishing programmes. Contents Introduction by Natasha Perova 1. Solovki and Kishmish by Nadezhda Teffi, translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler. 2. My Jobs by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Jamey Gambrell. 3. Autobiographical Sketches by Anna Akhmatova,translated by Andrew Bromfield. 4. Conscience Deluded by Lydia Ginzburg, translated by Boris Dralyuk. 5. Lady with the Dog by Galina Scherbakova, translated by Ilona Chavasse. 6. The Gift Not Made by Human Hand by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Arch Tait. 7. Landscape of Loneliness : Three Voices by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by, Joanne Turnbull. 8. The Stone Guest by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Marian Schwartz. 9. Philemon and Baucis by Irina Muravyova, tanslated by John Dewey. 10. Such a Girl by Ludmila Petrushevskaya, translated by Joanne Turnbull. 11. Jewish Woman Farewell by Margarita Khemlin, translated by Arch Tait.

Leseprobe

The Editor

Natasha Perova is a translator, editor, publisher and literary agent. A philology graduate of Moscow University, she worked in publishing houses producing Russian books in English translation.

In 1991 she started the independent small press Glas to publish and promote new Russian writing in translation.

The Authors

Nadezhda Teffi (1872-1952) is regarded today as the foremost chronicler of Russian émigré life in Paris in the years following the 1917 Revolution, the most valuable creation of Russian émigré literature, a major writer in the Gogolian tradition. She was born Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya in St. Petersburg, into a distinguished gentry family. By the start of World War I Teffi was Russia’s most famous female author. Liberal in her political beliefs, she drew the line at communism and settled in Paris in 1919, where she focused her acute powers of observation on her fellow émigrés. Almost all of her hundreds of sharply comic stories have been published in the last decade after a long neglect in her homeland. Three books of her prose came out in English translation recently.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest 20th-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life beset by loss and hardship. In her diaries of 1917 to 1920, she describes the broad social, economic, and cultural chaos provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Events and individuals are seen through the lens of her personal experience – that of a destitute young woman of upper-class background with two small children, a missing husband, and no means of support.

“Is there prose more intimate, more piercing, more heroic, more astonishing than Tsvetaeva’s? Was the truth of reckless feelings ever so naked? So accelerated? Voicing gut and brow, she is incomparable.” – Susan Sontag

Anna Akhmatova (born Anna Gorenko: 1889-1966) has long been recognised worldwide as one of the most important Russian poets. Her work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem and Poem Without Hero, her tragic masterpieces about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, is strikingly original and powerful. The strong and clear leading female voice marks both her poetry and her autobiographical prose. In 1964 she was awarded the Italian Etna-Taormina prize, and in 1965 she received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honours were her first trips outside her homeland since 1912. Akhmatova’s works have been translated into most languages, and her international stature continues to grow.

Lydia Ginzburg (1902-1990) Russian literary scholar, writer, and memoirist, winner of the State Prize in 1988, graduated from the Institute of Art History in 1926. In her youth Lydia Ginzburg was close to the Formalists’art circles and the literary avant-garde. She was a friend of many famous cultural figures of the time, such as Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Shklovsky, and wrote perceptive memoirs about them. She is best known for her definitive monographs On Lyrical Poetry (1964) and On Psychological Prose (1971). Her Notes on the Siege has been translated into many languages including English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish. Ginzburg considered her unique diaries of the 1920s through 1980s as “intermediary prose”. It is only in the 2000s that the importance of Lydia Ginzburg’s legacy and her role as a witness of the age were recognised and studied.

Galina Scherbakova (1932-2010) grew up in Donetsk and began her career as a provincial teacher. Later she worked as a reporter on various papers (which she hated) and wrote children’s stories (which she loved). It is only in her fifties that she finally managed to devote herself full-time to writing fiction which instantly brought her nationwide fame. Scherbakova created an impressive array of characters from all walks of life, old and young, rich and poor and she could write about love and human relationships with great insight and sympathy but without sentimentality. Her stories have been published in Germany, China, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland. She left several short novels and more than thirty collections of short stories which have lost nothing of their relevance. Many of her stories have been adapted for films.

Ludmila Petrushevskaya (born in 1938) made a name in the 1970s with her sombre and unusual plays which were highly popular among dissident intellectuals. She has published fifteen works of fiction, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, which won a World Fantasy Award. In 1992 her novel The Time Night was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and widely translated. Winner of many other literary prizes Petrushevskaya was awarded the prestigious Pushkin Prize by the Toepfer Foundation in Germany. For the animated cartoon Tale of Tales, directed by Yuri Norstein, she received several international prizes and the international jury of film critics called it “the best film in the archives of animation”.

Olga Slavnikova (born in 1957) in Yekaterinburg in the Urals, is one of the most important contemporary authors. She has a degree from the Urals University and worked on the Urals magazine before moving to Moscow in 2001 to coordinate the Debut Prize. In 1997, her novel Dragonfly the Size of a Dog was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize. In 1999, Alone in Mirror was awarded the Novy Mir Prize and the Bazhov Prize. Her novel Immortal (2001) was shortlisted for the Bestseller Prize and the Belkin Prize as well as receiving the Critics Academy Prize in 2002. In 2005, Slavnikova published her anti-utopia 2017 which won her the Russian Booker Prize, was short-listed for the Big Book Prize and was translated into English, French, Italian, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, German, etc. In 2008, she published a collection of short stories, Love on the Train, shortlisted for the Big Book Prize. Slavnikova’s latest novel, Light-Headed, has been shortlisted for the Big Book Prize and was published in English translation by Dedalus.

Ludmila Ulitskaya (born in 1943) is one of Russia’s most popular and renowned literary figures. A former geneticist she is now the author of fourteen works of fiction, three children’s books, and six plays that have been staged by a number of theatres in Russia and abroad. Her books won her almost thirty literary prizes in different countries, including the Russian Booker Prize, the Big Book Prize, the Medicis Prize, Prix Simone de Beauvoir pour la liberté des femmes. She was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her best known novels are: Kukotsky Case, Sincerely Yours, Shurik, Daniel Stein, Interpreter, Imago/The Big Green Tent, Yakov´s Ladder and Medea and Her Children.

Irina Muravyova (born in 1952) in Moscow, has lived in Boston since 1985. She is a prolific novelist with some of her novels and stories translated into English, French, Arabic, Serbian, Slovak, and Hungarian. She enjoys a reputation as one of the foremost Russian women writers, her books have been shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and the Bunin Prize, and her story “On the Edge”, was included in Women on the Case, a collection of the best women’s writing from around the world. She continues the tradition of the classical Russian novel, offering, as Oliver Ready writes, “A richly suggestive blend of prose and poetry, tirelessly jumping back and forth in time and place and begging multifold connections with the present that remain poignantly unclarified.”

Svetlana Alexievich (born in 1948) to a family of school teachers was the 2015 Nobel laureate for literature. She studied journalism at Minsk University and later worked on various newspapers in Belorussia. For many years she collected materials for her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face based on interviews with hundreds of women who participated in the Second World War. It was soon a worldwide success and became the first in Alexievich’s cycle: Voices of Utopia, where life in the Soviet Union is depicted from the perspective of the individual. Published so far are Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future; Zinky Boys. Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War; Second-hand Time: The Demise of the Red (Wo)man; and Last Witnesses. Landscape of Loneliness comes from her yet unfinished book on love Soviet style.

Margarita Khemlin (1960-2015) was born in Chernigov, Ukraine, studied at the Literary Institute in Moscow, worked in the press and on television, and published her first work of fiction in 2005. She was a finalist for the Big Book Prize in 2008, won the Russian Booker Prize in 2010, and NOS in 2014. Her novel Investigator was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 2013 and translated into German and English. The Jewish world was her main theme which she treated in a highly original and evocative way. Her works are noted for their colourful language of the Jewish shtetl.

The Translators

Andrew Bromfield is the most popular and prolific translator of Russian fiction today. His list of published translations includes Leo Tolstoy, Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Voinovich, Boris Akunin and Svetlana Alexievich.

Robert & Elizabeth Chandler are best known for their translations of Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman. They have also translated Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Nadezhda Teffi and Hamid Ismailov. Robert Chandler is the editor and main translator of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski he co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He runs regular translation workshops at Pushkin House in London.

Ilona Chavasse has been working in publishing for many years as a foreign rights executive while also translating from the Russian. Her literary translations include books by Yuri Rytkheu, Sergei Gandlevsky, and Dmitry Bortnikov.

John Dewey’s published verse translations include a selection for the 15-volume Complete Works of Pushkin, and Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman which was shortlisted for the John Dryden Translation Prize; also novels by Boris Yampolsky and Irina Muravyova. He is the author of Mirror of the Soul. A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev.

Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He is a co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and has translated Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, both of which are published by Pushkin Press.

Jamey Gambrell won a number of prizes for her work, but she is also a prolific journalist writing on Russian art and culture. Her many published translations include works by Joseph Brodsky, Tatyana Tolstaya, Daniil Kharms, Vladimir Sorokin, and Tsvetaeva’s diaries and essays. In 2016 she won the Thornton Prize for Translation which recognises “a significant contribution to the art of literary translation”.

Marian Schwartz is an award-winning translator of Russian classic and contemporary fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art, with over seventy published books to her name. She has done new translations for several Russian classics, including Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Contemporary authors she has translated include Nina Berberova, Leonid Yuzefovich, Olga Slavnikova, and Mikhail Shishkin.

Arch Tait studied Russian at Latymer Upper School, London; Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Moscow State University. He has a PhD in Russian literature from Cambridge. From 1993 he was a co-editor of the Glas New Russian Writing Translation Series. To date he has translated thirty-five books by leading Russian authors of fiction and non-fiction, among them Ludmila Ulitskaya, Anna Politkovskaya, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Makanin.

Joanne Turnbull is best known for her prize-winning translations of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, a rediscovered genius from the 1920s. As a co-editor of Glas she translated many contemporary authors such as Asar Eppel, Andrei Sinyavsky, Lev Rubinstein, Andrei Sergeev, and many others. She is the winner of the AATSEEL Award for Best Literary Translation into English and the PEN Translation Prize.

Contents

Title

The Editor

The Authors

The Translators

Introduction

Kishmish by Nadezhda Teffi

Solovki by Nadezhda Teffi

(Translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler)

My Jobs by Marina Tsvetaeva

(Translated by Jamey Gambrell)

Autobiographical Sketches by Anna Akhmatova

(Translated by Andrew Bromfield)

Delusion of the Will by Lydia Ginzburg

(Translated by Boris Dralyuk)

The Lady with the Dog by Galina Scherbakova

The Death of an Official by Galina Scherbakova

(Translated by Ilona Chavasse)

What a Girl by Ludmila Petrushevskaya

(Translated by Joanne Turnbull)

The Stone Guest by Olga Slavnikova

(Translated by Marian Schwartz)

The Gift not made by Human Hand by Ludmila Ulitskaya

(Translated by Arch Tait)

Philemon and Baucis by Irina Muravyova

(Translated by John Dewey)

Landscape of Loneliness: Three Voices by Svetlana Alexievich

(Translated by Joanne Turnbull)

The Jewess’s Farewell by Margarita Khemlin

(Translated by Arch Tait)

Dedalus Celebrating Women’s Literature 2018 – 2028

Copyright

A century of women’s writing in Russia

“I gave a voice to our womanhood…” Anna Akhmatova

Under the impact of turbulent Russian history the evolution of women’s writing in Russia differed from that in Western countries. Although the earliest records of writing by women date back to the eleventh century, none of those early literary efforts have stood the test of time and today they are of interest only to scholars. Women’s presence in 19th-century Russian literature was more conspicuous, but it was largely in the form of memorable literary heroines: either idealised or demonised, either angels or femmes fatales.

Only at the turn of the 20th century did women really make a significant appearance on the literary scene. The fruitful period of Russian modernism in the first decade of the 20th century produced Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nadezhda Teffi, Zinaida Gippius, and some lesser known names, mostly poets. However, this brief flowering of the Russian “Silver Age” fell prey to the ravages of the revolutionary years and the consequent tightening of state censorship. How was it possible that women’s writing, having made such a promising start, soon ran into the sand and women had to keep a low profile until the end of Soviet rule in the 1990s? Why was women’s writing regarded as subversive by the Soviets? It seems that in conditions of totalitarian ideology anything unorthodox, even not openly dissident, was an irritation to the authorities. When women addressed topics from real life, such as their day-to-day lives, family and child-rearing, abuse, alcoholism, suicide, depression, mental illness, and abortion, they were accused of being petty and sensationalist. Women were discouraged from writing about their personal problems and their low social status as these were an embarrassment to the state, while their inner world was of little interest to the male-dominated society.

With the ideological shackles gone after the collapse of the Soviet Union women’s writing in Russia soon thrived. Initially its tone was plaintive and confessional as women tried to get their Soviet-era ordeals and grievances off their chests. A decade later their tone had a more vigorous and confident ring, reflecting increased self-awareness and the rise of feminist attitudes. Subsequently, stories by women were still focused on women’s rights, often being straightforwardly autobiographical. Another decade later you could no longer tell male and female writing apart while women’s rights were taken for granted. Currently, in the 21st century, young women authors increasingly tend to write under men’s names to emphasise the fact that gender is irrelevant in real art.

Women’s writing today immerses you in a world of basic human values such as love, children and family, but also looks at such problems as ageing, the generation gap, and violence against women. These stories reflect the current stage in the evolution of Russian women’s fiction from its marginal position under the Soviets, through several stages of vigorous progress in the 1990s, to its current confident craftsmanship, wide thematic range, and high stylistic standards. Today Russian women have increasingly become a force in the world of letters. Under the Soviets the proclaimed gender equality was purely fictional: literary journals and anthologies would grudgingly include just one or two token women. Where in the past women were celebrated chiefly as literary widows or devoted wives, occasionally as poets or critics, and only very rarely as novelists, today they are beginning to dominate publishing lists in fiction and non-fiction alike.

During the early years of perestroika, a whole constellation of excellent women authors came on the scene, mostly authors banned from publication under the Soviets. Thus the interrupted tradition of women’s writing in Russia was resurrected and allowed to develop normally. In conditions of a market economy women, as more practical creatures, have become particularly active in mass-market publishing whereas in Soviet times women’s names, and gender problems as such, were practically absent in Russian literature. Today at least half of the authors in publishers’ catalogues are women while in the past they would account for five to ten per cent. The current profusion of successful female authors, both in commercial and literary fiction, is a new feature of Russian book publishing.

In the present anthology the first half of the 20th century is represented by authors of unquestionable genius: Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva, who are internationally known as poets and whose prose is no less important and engaging; also by Nadezhda Teffi and Lydia Ginzburg, both fairly recently discovered by readers abroad. If not for the limits on the size of this book and the number of names I would also have included Zinaida Gippius, Nina Berberova, and Lydia Zinovyeva-Annibal. The highlights of the mid-century include Evgenia Ginzburg, Olga Berggoltz and Bela Akhmadulina, who might have also been in this collection.

The later decades are represented here by such recognised names as Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Svetlana Alexievich, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Galina Scherbakova, Margarita Khemlin, Irina Muravyova, and Olga Slavnikova. But mention should also be made of Svetlana Vasilenko, Nina Gabrielyan, Marina Palei, Nina Sadur, Maria Galina, Dina Rubina, Victoria Tokareva, and Tatiana Tolstaya – they are not included in this collection only for reasons of space or copyright.

The turn of the 21st century gave us some young talents such as Alisa Ganieva, Liza Alexandrova-Zorina, Maria Rybakova, Anna Starobinets, Marina Stepnova, to name just a few, who also deserve attention and translations into other languages.

Women’s writing exists because there is a women’s world which differs from the world of men whether people are aware of it or not. Women authors don’t repudiate their gender or apologise for its weaknesses – that would be as futile as repudiating one’s historical roots. But they view the world from a slightly different perspective and that should be of interest to men and women alike.

Female readers in the West will be surprised to find many more common issues than they expect – the setting is different but the issues and problems are essentially the same.

Natasha Perova

Kishmish

Nadezhda Teffi

Lent. Moscow.

In the distance, the muffled sound – between a hum and a boom – of a church bell. The even strokes of the clapper merge into a single, oppressive moan.

An open door, into murky pre-dawn gloom, allows one to glimpse a dim figure, rustling quietly and cautiously about the room. For a moment this shifting figure takes form – an uncertain patch of grey – and then it dissolves, merging into the gloom round about. The rustling quietens. The creak of a floorboard – and of a second floorboard, further away. Then silence. Nanny has left – on her way to church, to the early morning service.

She is observing Lent.

Now things get frightening.

The little girl curls up into a small ball in her bed, barely breathing. She listens and watches, listens and watches.

The distant hum is becoming sinister. The little girl is all alone and defenceless. If she calls, no one will come. But what can happen? Night must be ending now. Probably the cocks have crowed in the dawn and the ghosts are all back where they belong.

And they belong in cemeteries, in bogs, beneath solitary graves with simple crosses, at the crossings of forgotten roads on the outskirts of forests. Not one of them will dare touch a human being now; the liturgy is already being celebrated and prayers are being said on behalf of all Orthodox Christians. What is there to be frightened of?

But an eight-year-old soul does not believe the arguments of reason. It shrinks into itself, trembles and quietly whimpers away. An eight-year-old soul does not believe that this is the sound of a bell. Later, in daytime, it will believe this, but now, alone, defenceless and in anguish, it does not know that this is a bell calling people to church. Who knows what this sound might be? It is something sinister. If anguish and fear could be translated into sound, this is the sound they would make. If anguish and fear could be translated into colour, then it would be this uncertain, murky grey.

And the impression made by this pre-dawn anguish will remain with this little creature for many years, for her entire life. This creature will continue to be woken at dawn by a fear and anguish beyond understanding. Doctors will prescribe sedatives; they will advise her to take evening walks, or to give up smoking, or to sleep in an unheated room, or with the window open, or with a hot water bottle on her liver. They will counsel many, many things – but nothing will erase from her soul the imprint of that pre-dawn despair.

*

The little girl’s nickname was “Kishmish” – a word for a kind of very small raisin from the Caucasus. This was, no doubt, because she was so very small, with a small nose and small hands. Small fry, of small importance. Towards the age of thirteen she would suddenly shoot up. Her legs would grow long and everyone would forget that she had, once, been Kishmish.

But while she was still just a little kishmish, this offensive nickname caused her a great deal of pain. She was proud and she longed to distinguish herself in some way; she wanted, above all, to do something grand and unusual. To become, say, a famous strongman, someone who could bend horseshoes with their bare hands or stop a runaway troika in its tracks. She liked the idea of becoming a brigand or – still better, perhaps – an executioner. An executioner is more powerful than a brigand since, in the end, it is always he who has the last word. And could anyone have imagined, as they looked at this skinny little girl with shorn, flaxen hair, quietly threading beads into a ring – could anyone have imagined what terrible dreams of power were seething inside her head? There was, by the way, yet another dream – of becoming a terrible monster. Not just any old monster, but the kind of monster that really frightens people. Kishmish would go and stand by the mirror, cross her eyes, stretch the corners of her mouth apart and thrust her tongue out to one side. At the same time, she would say in a low voice, acting the part of an unknown gentleman standing behind her, unable to see her face and addressing the back of her head: “Do me the honour, Madame, of this quadrille.”

She would then put on her special face, spin round on her heels and reply, “Very well – but first you must kiss my twisted cheek.”

At this point the gentleman would run away in horror. “Hah!” she would call after him. “Scared, are you?”

Kishmish had begun her studies. To start with – just Scripture and Handwriting.

Each of one’s tasks, she learned, should be prefaced with a prayer.

This was an idea she liked. But since she was still, amongst other things, considering the career of brigand, it also caused her alarm.

“What about brigands?” she asked. “Do they need to say a prayer before they go out briganding?”

She did not receive a clear answer – only the words, “Don’t be silly.” And Kishmish did not understand. Did this mean that brigands don’t need to pray – or that it is essential for them to pray, and that this is so very obvious that it was silly even to be asking about it?

When Kishmish grew a little bigger and went for the first time to confession, she underwent a spiritual crisis. Gone now were the terrible dreams of power.

“Lord, Hear our Prayer” was, that Lent, being sung very beautifully.

Three young boys would step forward, stand beside the altar and sing in angelic voices. Listening to them, her soul grew humble and filled with tender emotion. These blessed sounds made a soul wish to be light, white, ethereal and transparent, to fly away in sounds and incense, right up to the cupola, to where the white dove of the Holy Spirit had spread its wings.

This was no place for a brigand. Nor was it the right place for an executioner, or even for a strongman. As for the monster, it would go and stand behind a door and cover its terrible face. A church was certainly not the right place to be frightening people. Oh, if only she could get to be a saint. How marvellous that would be! So beautiful, so fine and tender. To be a saint was above everything and everyone. Something more important than any teacher, headmistress or even provincial governor.

But how would she get to be a saint? She would have to do miracles – and Kishmish had not the slightest idea how to go about this. Still, miracles were not where you started. First, you had to lead a saintly life. You had to make yourself meek and kind, to give everything to the poor, to devote yourself to fasting and abstinence.

So, how would she give everything away to the poor? She had a new spring coat. That was what she should give first.

But how furious Mama would be. There would be an unholy row, the kind of row that didn’t bear thinking about. And Mama would be upset, and saints were not supposed to hurt other people and make them upset. What if she gave her coat to a poor person but told Mama it had simply been stolen? But saints were not supposed to tell lies. What a predicament. Life was a lot easier for a brigand. A brigand could lie all he wanted – and just laugh his sly laugh. How, then, did these saints ever get to be saints? Simply, it seemed, because they were old – none of them under sixteen, and many of them real oldies. No question of any of them having to obey Mama. They could give away all their worldly goods just like that. No, this clearly wasn’t the place to start – it was something to keep till the end. She should start with meekness and obedience. And abstinence. She should eat only black bread and salt, and drink only water straight from the tap. But here too lay trouble. Cook would tell on her. She would tell Mama that Kishmish had been drinking water that had not been boiled. There was typhus in the city and Mama did not allow her to drink water from the tap. But then, once Mama understood that Kishmish was a saint, perhaps she would stop putting obstacles in her way.

And then, how marvellous to be a saint. There were so few of them these days. Everyone she knew would be astonished.

“Why’s there a halo over Kishmish?”

“What, didn’t you know? She’s been a saint for a long time now.”

“Heavens! I don’t believe it!”

“There she is. You can see for yourself.”

And there Kishmish sat – smiling meekly as she ate her black bread and salt.

Her mother’s visitors would feel envious. Not one of them had saintly children.

“Maybe she’s just pretending.”

Fools! Couldn’t they see her halo?

She wondered how soon the halo would begin. Probably in a few months. It would be there by autumn. God, how marvellous all this was. Next year she’d go along to confession. The priest would say in a severe voice, “What are your sins? You must repent.”

And she would reply, “I don’t have any. I’m a saint.”

“No, no!” he would exclaim. “Surely not!”

“Ask Mama. Ask her friends. Everyone knows.”

The priest would question her. Maybe there was, after all, some tiny little sin she’d committed?

“None at all!” Kishmish would reply. “Search all you like!”

She also wondered if she would still have to do her homework. If so, she was in trouble. Because saints can’t be lazy. And they can’t be disobedient. If she were told to study, then that’s what she’d have to do. If only she could learn miracles straightaway! One miracle – and her teacher would take fright, fall to her knees and never mention homework again.

Next she imagined her face. She went up to the mirror, sucked in her cheeks, flared her nostrils and rolled her eyes to the heavens. Kishmish liked this face very much. A true saint’s face. A little nauseating, but entirely saintly. No one else had a face anything like it. And so – off to the kitchen for some black bread!

As always before breakfast, Cook was cross and pre-occupied. Kishmish’s visit was an unwelcome surprise: “And what’s a young lady like you doing here in the kitchen? There’ll be words from your Mama!”

There was an enticing smell of fish, onions and mushrooms. Kishmish’s nostrils twitched involuntarily. She wanted to retort, “That’s none of your business!” but she remembered that she was a saint and said in a quiet voice, “Varvara, please cut me a slice of black bread.”

She thought for a moment, then added, “A large slice.”

Cook cut her some bread.

“And please sprinkle a little salt on it,” she continued, looking up as if to the heavens.

She would have to eat the bread then and there. If she took it anywhere else, there would be misunderstandings. With unpleasant consequences.

The bread proved particularly tasty and Kishmish regretted having only asked for one slice. Then she went to the tap and drank some water from a jug. Just then the maid came in.

“I’ll be telling your Mama,” she exclaimed in horror, “that you’ve been drinking tap water!”

“She’s just been eating a great chunk of bread,” said Cook. “Bread and salt. So what do you expect? She’s a growing girl.”

The family was called in to breakfast. She couldn’t not go. So she decided to go but not eat anything and be very meek.

For breakfast there was fish soup and pies. She sat there, looking blankly at the little pie on her plate.

“Why aren’t you eating?”

In answer she smiled meekly and once again put on her saintly face – the face she had been practising before the mirror.

“Heavens, what’s got into her?” exclaimed her astonished aunt. “Why’s she pulling such a dreadful face?”

“And she’s just eaten a great big chunk of black bread,” said the telltale maid. “Just before breakfast – and she washed it down with water straight from the tap.”

“Whoever said you could go and eat bread in the kitchen?” shouted her mother. “And why were you drinking tap water?”

Kishmish rolled her eyes and flared her nostrils, finally perfecting her saintly face.

“What’s got into her?”

“She’s making fun of me!” squealed the aunt – and let out a sob.

“Out you go, you nasty little girl!” her mother said furiously. “Off to the nursery with you – and you can stay there for the rest of the day!”

“And the sooner she’s packed off to boarding school, the better,” said the aunt, still sobbing. “My nerves, my poor nerves. Literally, my every last nerve…”

*

Poor Kishmish.

And so she remained a sinner.

Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

Solovki

Nadezhda Teffi

for Ivan Bunin

The seagulls from the shore accompanied the steamer for a long time. After a while they grew tired and began coming down more often onto the water, barely touching it with one point of their breast, spinning – as if on the head of a screw – and then wearily gliding off again, leading first with one wing and then with the other, as if taking long strides.

From the stern, pilgrims threw them bread. Russians from inland, who had never seen the sea, were astonished by the gulls.

“What strong birds!”

“What great big birds!”

“But people say you can’t eat them.”

When the boat reached open sea and the shore it had left behind was no more than a low, narrow strip of pale blue, the gulls dispersed. Three last greedy birds took a few more strides, begged again for bread, veered off somewhere to the left, cried out to one another and disappeared.

The sea was now empty and free; in the sky shone diffuse areas of crimson. One that was not yet extinguished, still red hot from the departed sun – and one now catching fire from the rising sun. The steamer, lit by their silvery-pink light that cast no shadow, was cutting aslant through the waves; from the deck it appeared to be sailing sideways, skimming weightlessly over the water. And high in the air, fastened to the mast, swaying gently against the pink clouds, a golden cross marked out the boat’s path.

“The Archangel Michael”, a holy boat, was carrying pilgrims from Arkhangelsk to the Solovetsky Monastery.1

There were a lot of passengers. They sat about on benches, on steps and on the floor, conversing quietly and respectfully, and looking with awe at the golden cross in the sky, at the boat’s steward – a monk in a faded, now greenish cassock – and at the gulls. They sighed, yawned and made the sign of the cross over their open mouths.

Up on the bridge a monk in a sheepskin coat and a black skullcap kept coughing hoarsely, calling out to the helmsman – his commands as abrupt as the cries of the gulls – and then bursting out coughing again.

Waves were beating rhythmically against the hull; the crimson glow had faded; the birds had flown away. The drama of departure was now over and the passengers began to settle down for the night.

Peasant women hitched up the calico skirts they had starched for the holiday and this unusual sea journey, and then lay down on the floor, tucking in their legs and their heavy, awkward feet. The menfolk were talking quietly in separate groups.

Red-haired, thickset Semyon Rubaev came down the ladder and joined the men. His wife remained alone, sitting on one of the steps. She didn’t move. She didn’t even turn her head. She just gave him a sideways look, full of mistrust and malice.

Semyon was listening to the men. A tall curly-haired old man from White Lake was telling people about the smelt they now caught there: “We’ve a damage now. A damage. Engineers constructed it. They were needing earth for this damage. They took earth of mine.”

“What damage? Ye’re not making sense.”

“For the damage… The da… For the dam.” After correcting himself, the old man fell silent for a moment, then added, “I’m in my nineties, you know. Yes, that’s how it is now.”

Semyon didn’t care in the least about the old man’s age, nor about the smelt in the lake. He wanted to talk about his own concerns, but it was difficult to find the right moment, to find a way to slip these into the conversation. He looked around at his wife. She was sitting sideways to him, turning her broad face and the long, pale line of her mouth away from him.

And then nothing could hold him back – and off he went: “Well, we come from around Novgorod. From the Borovichy district. Penance, a church penance – that’s why I’m taking her.”

He stopped. But since no one asked him anything, he eventually began again: “Penance, confession and penance.2 Varvara, yes, my wife. A serious matter, I had to take it to the district officer.”

Varvara got up from the step. Baring her many white teeth like a vicious cat, she walked a little further away, then stood beside the rail, resting both elbows on it.

There was nowhere further to go. The pilgrims sitting on the deck were densely packed. She could hardly just step on their heads.

Now at least she could no longer hear everything Semyon said. The odd word, however, still reached her.

“The whole village was complaining… There wasn’t one woman that Vanya Tsyganov… The officer… My wife Varvara…”

Varvara hunched her shoulders and went on baring her teeth. But Semyon was still talking, talking, talking:

“Varvara, yes, Varvara… ‘We just kissed,’ she said… A court sentence wasn’t possible. But a penance, a church penance…”

For ten months Semyon had been telling this story, over and over. And now, like clockwork, all through this journey. On the iron road, at every station their train had stopped at, in the pilgrims’ hostel at Arkhangelsk, wherever there were ears to be filled, he had told this story. Since the day it had all begun, since Yerokhina their neighbour had come running back from the fields, pulled off her kerchief and wailed out that Tsyganov had wronged her – and then old Mitrofanikha had rushed out and yelled that her granddaughter Feklushka was being pestered by Tsyganov too, that Tsyganov wasn’t giving the girl a moment’s peace. Other women of all ages had appeared, every one of them white with fury, kerchiefs slipping off their heads, all cursing Tsyganov and threatening to make their complaints and drive him out of the village. And then Varka Lukina had caught sight of Varvara at her window and shouted out to everyone that she’d seen Varvara together with Tsyganov, out in the rye:

“Them two, walking side by side! Arms around each other!”

And that was it. From then on work had been forgotten. Semyon had done nothing but tell this story, over and over.

He had gone along as a witness for Yerokhina. He had told the officer about Varvara. He had demanded she be brought to trial and punished. He had dragged Varvara around with him and wherever they went – on the road, in country inns, in lodgings in towns – he had gone on and on telling this story. At first he had been quite gentle, calling her “Varenka”, just as he always had done: “So, Varenka, tell me how all this came to happen. All of the circumstances.”

“How wot happened? Nowt happened.”

Then he went purple all over, his red beard seeming to fill with blood. Choking with fury, he said, “Bitch! Snake! How dare you? How dare you speak so to your wedded husband!”

And all day long Varvara had busied herself around the house, not exactly working, more just fussing about in one corner after another – anything to get out of earshot, anything not to hear Semyon.

Tsyganov was nowhere to be seen. He had gone off to the city to work as a cab driver. The women began to calm down. Only down by the river in the evening, when they were beating the damp linen with their bats, would the young girls, in their thin mosquito-like voices, sing a jokey song from St Petersburg:

Vanka, Vanka, wot you done wi’ yer conscience?

Where be yer heart of hearts?

– Wasted them both in the taverns for love of billiards and cards.

As for Semyon, there was no end to his questions, his interrogations, his story telling. And Varvara fell more and more silent. When the officer questioned her about Yerokhina, her only reply, reiterated with true Novgorod obstinacy, was “Wot’s it to do wiv me?”

And so life went on. In the daytime she hardly spoke. At night she kept thinking things over, reliving that day again and again. All over the village the women had been screaming. The devil, it seemed, had got into them; there was no escaping the women’s white, maddened rage. And what a lot of them there had been. Even pockmarked Mavrushka had shouted out, as if bragging, “Think he didn’t touch me? No, he touched me all right. Only I hold my tongue. But if all of you speak, then I’m speaking too!”

Her pockmarks, evidently, had not counted against her. The lads had jeered: “Oh Mavrushka, Mavrushka! And she’s got the body of a bear!”

Yerokhina, for her part, had lamented, “Eight years, I believe, I’ve kept a hold of my honour – and then… Along comes this fiend – and snatches it from me!”

All shaking in jealous rage. All shouting, as if bragging: “Me too. Yes, me too!”

A sly fellow with the nickname “Tomcat” had smirked mischievously and said, “My good ladies, you seem most dreadfully angry. Why might that be? Eh?”

He seemed to have hit on something.

*

They reached Solovki as the bells were ringing for matins.

On the shore to meet them were monks and seagulls.

The monks were all thin, with severe faces. The gulls were large and stout, almost the size of geese. They waddled about proprietorially, exchanging preoccupied remarks.

Unloading and disembarkation took a long time. Some of the pilgrims were still packing their knapsacks when one old woman, the wife of the curly-haired fisherman, returned from the Holy Lake, having already bathed in its icy waters. She was wearing a clean linen shirt and smiling beatifically, her lips purple with cold.

The hosteller, a tall monk with a neatly combed beard, was organising the new arrivals, arranging who should sleep where. Since there were crowds of people and little space, the Rubaevs were put in what had once been the best room; with two windows and whitewashed walls, it was now divided into three by partitions. One part had been given to a teacher and his wife, and the biggest part, with three beds and a sofa, had been given to a party of four.

The head of this party was an Oriental-looking abbot. Handsome and well turned out, he had chosen, for convenience while travelling, to abandon his monastic dress for that of a priest: “People, I understand, have little love for monks, and they criticise them for everything: Why’s he smoking? Why’s he eating fish? Why’s he got sugar in his tea? But how can a man observe the rule when he’s on the road? Dress as a priest – and you don’t tempt people to judge.”

Together with the Father were a merchant, a lanky young gymnasium student – and a hypocritical old bigot of a public official. All three were family.

The remaining little cubicle, with no window, was allocated to the Rubaevs.

*

All that day the pilgrims were either attending church services, looking around the monastery, wandering about the forest or along the shore, walking down the long, musty corridor of the hostel – with its damp and grimy, finger-marked doors, weighted to slam shut – or visiting the little monastery shop and asking the price of icons, small cypress-wood crosses and belts for the deceased, with a prayer woven into them.3

Standing out amid this crowd was a young man who had come for healing. He was enormously tall, and finely dressed, with a new peaked cap and patent leather boots. He suffered from convulsions that repeatedly wrenched open his mouth; it was as if a vast, insuperable yawn were dragging at his jaw, pulling at his tongue, making him slobber all down his chin and neck. The fit would come to an end and his mouth would snap loudly shut, his teeth clicking together like those of a dog that has caught a fly.

The young man was accompanied by a rather short little fellow with a silver chain that hung across his round belly. He took pride in the young man’s illness and behaved like the impresario of an exotic theatre troupe, always in a whirl, always bustling about and proffering explanations: “Keeps on yawning, he does. Several years now, yes indeed. He’s the son of rich people. Make way, make way now, if you please!”

The monastery courtyard was full of seagulls. They were placid and round, like household geese. They sat between gravestones and on the track leading to the church. They had no fear of people and did not get out of the way for anyone – it was for you to walk round them. And on the back of almost every one of these gulls was a fledgling – like a fluffy, spotted egg standing on two thin little twigs.

The gulls called out to one another in quick, curt barks. They would begin loudly, then gradually quieten, despondent and hopeless. They sat crowded together about the monastery and did not fly anywhere. It was too cold. The small rectangular Holy Lake was swollen with grey-blue water. One of the seagulls went down to the lake and looked for a long time, with one suspicious eye, at its violet ripples. Some way off, a fledgling was cheeping importantly, as if giving advice. The seagull stretched out one foot, touched the water, quickly withdrew the foot and twitched its head a little.

“Too cold, old girl?” asked a young monk.

Against the grey sky swayed one-sided trees; all their branches were on the side facing south, like arms outstretched towards the sun, towards a distant dream. The northern side, gnawed by cold breaths from the throat of the Arctic Ocean, stayed naked and sickly all summer, as in winter.

Down by the harbour some young lads, with faded skullcaps over thick strands of fair, curly hair, were throwing pebbles in the water and scuffling with one another. They were like puny young bear cubs, fighting clumsily and without anger. Pomors, from villages along the mainland coast, they had been brought to the monastery to labour for a year or two in fulfilment of vows made by their mothers: “Yes, the boy’ll serve the Lord – and he’ll earn his keep.”4

And there were solitary monks wandering along the shore. Now and again they would stop and look at the water, as if waiting for something.

One after another the grey-blue waves uncoiled, splashing against the brown rocks, filling hearts with a sadness like lead.

Along with the other pilgrims, the Rubaevs went to the church and then on into the forest. Monks in faded cassocks emerged from the chapel cells. They seemed to find it hard to understand even the simplest questions: “Which church is this?” – or “Which way?”

The monks would smile affably, then withdraw to gaze at the water.5

Outside the chapel of Saint Philaret, the pilgrims took it in turn to lift the long stone that had served Philaret as a pillow. They laid it on their heads and walked three times clockwise around the chapel – a cure for headaches.6

In the furthest of the little chapels, seven miles or so from the monastery, the pilgrims were met by the very oldest elders of all. They were barely able to put one foot in front of the other, barely still breathing.

“But how, good fathers, do you make your way to the main church?”

“We go, good people, but once a year. On Easter Sunday, yes, to Holy Matins. That’s when we all meet together – from the cliffs, from the woods, from the open fields, from the bogs. Every one of us goes – and they count us up. As for food, we get by. They bring us our bread.”

The hostel was no place to sit in for long. The Rubaevs’ cubicle was dark and damp. Semyon would come in, sit down on the bed and, in a low voice, drone on yet again:

“Mind you tell everything. As God is your witness. Every circumstance. You must tell everything, or there’ll be trouble.”

Varvara did not reply.

Behind the partition the merchant and the gymnasium student were asking for samovars and drinking tea. The official was sighing piously.

Behind the other partition the teacher’s wife was criticizing the ways of the monastery: “They just stand there, gazing at the water. Will that save their souls? And at table they defile themselves with mustard.7 Will that save their souls?”

And then they would all wander along the shore again, or along the monastery corridors.

They looked at the paintings of the Last Judgement and the Parables of Our Lord. A huge beam planted in the eye of the sinner who so clearly beheld the mote in his brother’s eye. And the temptation of beauty, illustrated by a devil – with a rather appealing canine muzzle, shaggy webbed paws, a curly tail and a modest brown apron tied around his belly8 – and his charming legend: as the brothers were praying in church, this devil had moved unseen between them, handing out the pink flowers known as house lime. Whoever received a flower was unable to go on praying; charmed by the spring sun and grasses, he stole out to freedom9 – until in the end the devil was caught by the Holy Elder. And ordeals and hardships of every kind, and sins and torments, sins and torments…

Towards evening they were called to the refectory. The women sat in a separate room.

To one side of Varvara was a woman all covered in scabs. Opposite her was an old woman with a nose like a duck’s. Before taking a scoop from the communal bowl, she would give her spoon a thorough licking with her long, flaccid, rag-like tongue. They drank insipid monastery kvas10 with a faint taste of mint and ate salt-cod soup while a monk read aloud to them in a dismal drone: “Lechery, lechery, the devil…”