Reviews by Robert Blaisdell
The Ukrainian Ivan Franko (1856-1916), a contemporary of Anton Chekhov, also started publishing stories very young. He outlived his Russian counterpart, but like Chekhov was often able to find humor in painful childhood moments. “This took place a long time ago,” he writes in “The Myktych Oak Tree,” one of Down and Out in Drohobych’s 17 tales. “Not only those times, but even the memories of them have dimmed in my mind. Occasionally, like lightning piercing darkness, moments from the past appear in a flash and evoke an indescribable melancholy. They shimmer and flicker, and joy, fear, laughter and tears become intertwined in them, and one’s memory is barely able to compose a vivid, true picture from such fragmented, chaotic recollections.” Franko’s narrators, however, are more than able to compose vivid pictures of old Ukraine. Memory is one of the collection’s primary themes. Franko creates a fine metaphor for it in “In the Carpentry Workshop”: “Life is like going on a long journey: what falls off your wagon is lost forever. And memories are like a concerned farmer, walking along that road many years later, seeking out those long-lost things.”
The title story, written in one night when Franko was 24, is about a hellish prison cell wherein the idealistic author-based protagonist encounters a thoroughly desocialized brute, Bovdur, who has lost among other things the ability to reminisce; that is, his “early years flashed before him in such fragmentary images, interspersed with words half-whispered. There was nothing comforting in them, nothing that the soul could find solace in or feel joy in recalling. His thoughts flew on and on, flipping through each memory like a man who had slipped money into a book and was hastily seeking to find the banknotes between the pages.” Bovdur is so disconnected from his integrity as a human being that he demonically murders the kindest man in reach: “Andriy Temera was no more… But what of his thoughts, his hopes – did they perish with him too?” Franko suggests that, no matter what, something of good always remains.
Seemingly inspired by Tolstoy’s Childhood, several tales concern earnest, well-meaning, guilt-ridden boys (only a single story has a female protagonist). Franko makes room in “In the Blacksmith’s Shop” for a beautiful sentence and image: “I was really scared of those sparks, but I awfully liked to watch as they flew out from under father’s hammer like a swarm of fiery bumblebees and scattered in all directions.” Franko was in fact a blacksmith’s son.
My favorite story, “The Mustard Seed,” is about the bookish father, Limbach, of the bookish narrator’s new classmate. Though the narrator as a youth has been the most literary fellow in the backwater town, Limbach impatiently exclaims at him, “Anyone who does not know Dickens naturally knows nothing about literature, has no taste, no eyes. Come to my place, I’ll lend you Pickwick. You must read it, and then we can speak. I simply have no desire to talk about literature with people who have not read Pickwick.” We’ve all met blustery bookworms, but it’s rare to meet one in literature who, despite his abruptness, is comic and likable. Limbach concludes in German: “I am not a book; I am a man with his contradictions.” That is, he never stops thinking and reassessing, and apparently neither did Franko ever stop.
The lively translations are by Yuri Tkacz, but there is inexplicably no preface or introduction explaining the nonchronological arrangement of the stories, written between 1879 and 1905; only on the back cover is there any information about the author. So here are some highlights, gleaned from “The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine”: Franko was born in a village in Galicia, south of present-day Lviv, in what was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was jailed or imprisoned three times for political activity. He wrote in seemingly every genre, from poetry and drama to novels and short stories, children’s tales, linguistics and politics, politics, politics. He translated world literature (including Russian). He was a Ukrainian nationalist and socialist who eventually rejected Marxism. His collected works have been published in 50 volumes; the university he attended in Lviv (and was expelled from for his activism in the 1880s) was renamed after him; in fact, an entire region in Western Ukraine has been named after him! The encyclopedia article declares that “Franko regarded Ukraine as a sovereign entity belonging to ‘the circle of free nations.’” We can all hope that Ukraine will continue to be sovereign and free. I’m embarrassed to say, though, that I had never heard of Ivan Franko before reading this eclectic and most excellent collection of his autobiographical stories.
What did this man, one of the greatest and bravest people of the twentieth century, say when he stood before audiences of rapt, admiring listeners? Mostly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave them an earful: “it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles the five continents of the Earth.” We humbly listened because we knew what the 1970 Nobel Prize winner had done – stared down the might and terror of the USSR on his own two feet, wielding nothing more than his pen: “…what can literature do in the face of a remorseless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not and cannot exist by itself: it is invariably intertwined with the lie… The lie can prevail against much in this world, but never against art.”
I remember reading a few of these speeches decades ago (all the translations are new) and being excited and moved; the magnificent 1972 Nobel lecture still does it for me: “the persuasiveness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable; it prevails even over a resisting heart.” The art he describes and himself created is evidence of the truth, or at least the sincerity, of these hopeful statements. The artist and fearsome historian of The Gulag Archipelago is always worth heeding: “Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another being’s life experience, with all its hardships, colors, and flavors; it recreates – lifelike – the experience of others, and allows us to assimilate it as our own.”
After the Soviet Union deported Solzhenitsyn in 1974, he and his family settled in 1976 in Cavendish, Vermont, but unlike his exiled predecessors – the butterfly-collecting Vladimir Nabokov and the hobnobbing Joseph Brodsky – he did not hop into a convertible and drive around the country or hang out in bars in literary New York. As far as I can judge from these ten “Essential Speeches,” Solzhenitsyn, fenced off in his compound, thought that by reading the New York Times and Washington Post and watching the PBS NewsHour he was experiencing life in the United States. His middle son, Ignat, offers an editor’s introduction that is informative, unargumentative and excellent; he notes that his father “was ever reluctant to break away from his work for external engagements.” It shows! Because unfortunately, many of the speeches (the last from 1997) are chock full of political-religious rant, preaching against authoritarian communism and dangerous “humanism” (!), while exalting what some of us reject as authoritarian and nationalistic Christianity: “In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity that had remained true to the Church of the early centuries.”
I recommend this volume if only to re-experience the inspirational highlights and to make conscious to ourselves again how gigantic Solzhenitsyn was, but then on the other hand to remind ourselves how easy (and perhaps pleasurable?) it is to act the biblical prophet and denounce every aspect of the present world. Besides making strong statements about the need to preserve God’s green Earth (“nature needs to be supported rather than conquered”), Solzhenitsyn wastes his energy bemoaning a Disney cartoon (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and the showing of a farcical movie that he most certainly had not actually watched, Monty Python’s Life of Brian: “what further evidence of godlessness does one need?” There he sounds as indignant as the Soviet toadies who denounced novels sight unseen.
To end on a deservedly positive note, I bow to Solzhenitsyn’s sobering and bracing reflection: “All those prognosticators of the decay, degeneration, and death of art were wrong and will always be wrong. It is we who shall die – art will remain. … Through art we occasionally receive – indistinctly, fleetingly – revelations the likes of which cannot be worked out by rational thought.”
Almost all of these 15 short stories take one swoop into science fiction or “magical realism.” The swoops are the means by which Dolgopyat’s characters experience different lives for themselves or through which the author sees the operations of her own imagination: “I did what I’d many times thought of doing as I came into my station: I went on. Going I know not where” (“Katerinaa”). On her Russian website, Dolgopyat writes: “~And yet it seems to me that I write in one little line; the line unspools like a thread, and I go alongside it, I don’t know where.~”
Someone Else’s Life (Чужая Жизнь, published in Russia in 2019) asks and answers, Where has the time gone? “The most banal of truths settled on him: you can’t bring back the past and you can’t catch up with it. The memory of you will disappear, and if her son’s eyes are not there to remind her, even your own wife will forget the color of your eyes” (“The Second Half”). The protagonist there, in a witness protection program, is presumed dead, but in everyday life he might as well be the divorced husband visiting his ex-wife’s place.
Dolgopyat dramatizes the ways in which memory remakes the past. On the eve of turning thirty, a woman doesn’t want to grow old, and so she doesn’t! But at forty, those ten years come back to her all at once. “Of course, she remembered them only after a fashion. We all remember our lives only after a fashion” (“Birthday”).
In “The Facility,” a woman is imprisoned at work because her pass has been lost (or stolen); it gives her time, anyway, to compose long overdue handwritten letters: “My sentences are short and my disquisitions are few […], but I have a whole heap of time. So I’m keeping myself busy, writing, recalling all the details. I’m writing about my life and at the same time kind of distracting myself from it.” Such profundities occur in the midst of Dolgopyat’s artistic wanderings.
A regular contributor to Novy Mir, she avoids criticism of Putin’s tyranny (or her characters have forgotten or put out of their minds that the Little Man exists), though there is occasional nostalgia for the good old Soviet days as far back as 1970 (Dolgopyat was born in 1963). Her apolitical characters live internally more than socially. Police officers are unusually kindly. Doctors and psychological counselors are well-meaning. Her protagonists are decent and honest: “So on the one hand I’m incapable of lying, but on the other, I provide complete freedom to be fooled” (“Illusion”). To each character, it’s as if someone else has been living or is about to live their life: “He had never, he thought, never lived his own life. (“Someone Else’s Life”).
A tighter collection of the better stories would do Dolgopyat greater justice, as by the second half of this book we see repetitions of her experiments in time- and place-travel. But then I am continually reminded of the twentieth-century Argentine master of “ficciones,” Jorge Luis Borges, who pointed out that every artist has their own obsessions that replay themselves again and again. Katerinaa, the narrator of the best story, reflects: “It’s as if I’m rereading the same book or watching a film again and being surprised at how blind I was the first time around. If I had to live my life all over again, I’d live it exactly the same way, only with a difference: I’d see differently; I’d see everything I missed the first time.”
I recommend a first- or second-time experience of these engaging tales, with a kudos to Richard Coombes for his very readable translations.
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