Palace and Prison

Twelve pages in, the narrator stops and gives an instruction to the printer. He has been explaining how Mikhail Beideman came to spend twenty years in the Alexeyev Ravelin without trial: an order of 2 November 1861 that he be held pending special decree, renewed on the first of every month for twenty years.

"The printer should always italicize these words, in order that their appearance, so conspicuous beside the monotonous type of the pages, might in some way startle the complacent reader, completely absorbed in his own joys and sorrows."

And then: "Attention, dear reader! The special decree was never issued!"

That is Olga Forsh in 1923, breaking the frame of a historical novel to tell the compositor how to set three words. It is the sort of thing that was possible in Russian prose in 1923 and would not be possible again for a long time, and this volume reprints it without comment thirty years later.

Forsh was forty-four in 1917 and had been publishing since before 1905. She spent forty years writing about Russians destroyed by the Russian state for what they made or said - Radishchev, the Decembrists, the architect Rossi. The jacket lists them, two pages after describing her as having been swept up by the truth of the new way of life.

Her own sentence is the better epigraph: history has swept all into the grave, but it has not forgotten anything.

Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, undated. Translated by Fainna Solasko.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.