The novel opens by inviting you to hate the city it is set in.
A stranger of a thoughtful turn of mind, newly arrived in Petersburg from the leafy side streets of some suburban resort, would have experienced complex sensations of mental excitement and spiritual oppression.
He walks the straight misty streets past bleak unlighted houses, each with a drowsing porter at the gate; he looks at the Neva and the "grim cheerless palaces with pillared façades"; he looks up at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, "so un-Russian in its dizzying height", and down at barges of damp logs along the granite quays; he looks into the faces of passers-by, "pale and careworn, with eyes as sombre as the city itself". And then Tolstoy offers him two options, and only two:
the stranger would, if well-disposed, have merely huddled deeper into his coat-collar, or, if disaffected, have told himself that it wouldn't be a bad idea to deliver a crashing blow, and shatter all this petrified magic into smithereens.
That is the first page of a trilogy about the Russian revolution, and the sentence is doing something careful. The impulse to smash Petersburg is not given to a revolutionary. It is given to any disaffected visitor, as an entirely natural response to the place — and the place is then described for four pages as a hallucination that deserves it. Two centuries "passed like a dream"; palace coups, regicides and bloody executions "flitted by like hallucinations"; weak-minded women held almost divine authority; "the country was being drained of its lifeblood to feed the insatiable spectres haunting Petersburg." The poet Bessonov, crossing a bridge in a rubber-tired droshky, decides that the lamps and the sleeping city behind him "were but a dream, a chimera, a figment of his brain, sodden with drink, love-making and boredom."
Hold on to that opening, because of who wrote it and when. It was not written by a Bolshevik. It was written in Paris, by a count who had left Russia after the revolution, for readers who had left with him.
Three dates, and the third is the interesting one.
Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1883–1945) wrote The Sisters in emigration between 1918 and 1921. The last line of this volume is its own date: August 1921. It first reached readers in the émigré press, and it was written for them. Tolstoy broke with the emigration the following year and returned to Soviet Russia in 1923.
The other two books of the trilogy were written afterwards, and inside: Nineteen Eighteen in 1927–28, Bleak Morning in 1940–41. In 1943 the completed trilogy took the State Prize, which this volume announces on its own half-title page. Tolstoy went on to become the most decorated writer in the Soviet Union and died in 1945.
So Ordeal is a trilogy that changes sides in the middle. Book One is an émigré's novel, written abroad for exiles, ending in the summer of 1921. Books Two and Three are the work of a Soviet laureate writing socialist realism. The English reader of this volume is holding the pre-conversion book, and nothing in the volume says so.
This Progress edition is the second printing, 1965, of a translation first published in 1953, with book design by Y. Kogan and illuminations and tailpieces by V. Sveshnikov. The Russian title is Хождение по мукам — literally a walking through torments, the apocryphal Virgin's tour of hell, usually Englished as The Road to Calvary. Progress went with Ordeal.
The title page credits Ivy and Tatiana Litvinov, and this is not a detail to pass over.
Ivy Litvinov was born Ivy Therese Low in England in 1889. In 1916 she married Maxim Litvinov, then a revolutionary exile in London, who would become the Soviet Union's Commissar for Foreign Affairs — the public face of Soviet diplomacy through the 1930s, the architect of collective security against Hitler, and the man dismissed in May 1939 immediately before the pact with Germany. Tatiana was their daughter, born 1918, herself a translator and a fine graphic artist.
Maxim Litvinov died in 1951. Ivy turned seriously to translation afterwards, and in that decade produced some twenty-five volumes of Russian fiction in English, a good many of them with Tatiana. The first printing of this Ordeal is 1953. It belongs to that burst of work.
What it means for the book is this. The English prose here was made by a woman who had grown up in England reading English novels, who had then spent thirty-five years inside the Soviet state at the very top of it, and who was translating an émigré's portrait of the world she had married into. The result is an English that is genuinely literary rather than serviceable — the Petersburg overture is carried in long balanced sentences that most house translations of the period could not have managed — and an ear for social comedy that the Progress list rarely got to use.
It is Dasha's book. Darya Dmitrevna Bulavina, a law student newly arrived from Samara, is named seven hundred and thirty-three times; her married sister Katya two hundred and sixty-six. Everything else — the poet Bessonov, the engineer Telegin, the officer Roshchin — is arranged around the two of them.
What happens is almost nothing, for a long time, and that is the design. Petersburg in 1914 is a city of literary evenings, futurist provocations, adultery discussed as a philosophical position, and an atmosphere of exhausted permission. Katya has had an affair and tells her husband, who cannot decide whether to be modern about it. Dasha falls into and out of infatuation with Bessonov, who is a genuinely good piece of work: a decadent poet of real celebrity and no centre, hollow in a way the novel observes rather than denounces, sitting erect at his restaurant table refusing food. Tolstoy knew these people. He had been one of them.
Then the war arrives and the book changes speed. And here the émigré's eye is worth more than a Bolshevik's would have been, because Tolstoy is not describing a system he opposes; he is describing his own class discovering that the floor has gone. The mood is not indignation. It is bewilderment among people who had assumed their world was permanent and had spent its last decade being clever about it.
That is the achievement of The Sisters and it survives its author's politics entirely. A reader who wants to understand why February 1917 happened, and why the educated classes were no use when it did, will learn more from this novel than from a shelf of analysis, and will learn it from a witness who was on the other side.
The novel's method is to describe a society's symptoms without diagnosing them, and to trust the reader. Three specimens.
The city, in the months before the war. Tolstoy sets down, in a single paragraph and without a word of comment, what Petersburg was doing with itself:
Engineers and financiers worked on plans for the building of a new capital of unprecedented luxury on an island not far from Petersburg which had never yet been inhabited or built on. There was an outbreak of suicides in the town. The law courts were thronged with hysterical women, greedily imbibing the gory details of sensational trials. Everything was to be obtained for money — luxury and women. Depravity was everywhere, it spread to the Court like a plague.
A new capital on an uninhabited island; an outbreak of suicides; the courts as entertainment; and the Court itself infected. No analysis is offered and none is needed. Four sentences carry the argument that the regime had stopped being able to imagine anything except more of itself.
The intelligentsia, arguing. At the Philosophical Evenings Society — divinity professor, historian, philosopher, "that astute writer Sakunin", all seated behind a long table lit by two five-branched sconces — the old men are under siege:
That winter, the "Philosophical Evenings Society" had undergone violent assaults from certain little known but extremely vituperative young people. These attacked the venerable writers and respected philosophers with such virulence, and uttered sentiments so audacious and alluring, that the old mansion on the Fontanka...
The futurists are arriving, and Tolstoy declines to take a side. He is interested in the fact that the venerable are frightened and that the audacious are alluring — that the attraction is the point, not the argument.
And the best of it, which is about Katya buying paintings. She goes to exhibitions and buys futurist canvases, which her husband dislikes because he prefers pictures "with an idea behind them". Then Tolstoy gives the real reason she buys them:
Ekaterina Dmitrevna, with feminine ardour, preferred suffering in the cause of the new art to the risk of being considered old-fashioned.
That is as exact an account of cultural radicalism in a doomed class as anyone has written. Not conviction: the management of the fear of being left behind. Dasha, who is younger and more honest, admires the pictures while "admitting sadly" that she cannot make out the figures.
And then the war, which changes the book's subject entirely. Antoshka Arnoldov, a journalist, is talking to peasants by a railway line. One of them has heard the Tsar is fighting another tsar and is corrected from behind a pile of logs: "It isn't another tsar — we're at war with the Germans." Arnoldov offers a cigarette and picks his words carefully:
"Tell me, did they go to war willingly from your village?" "Many went willingly, sir." "Was there much eagerness?" "There was. Why not go? They'll have a look and see how things are there. If they're killed — well, people die here, too. Our lands are poor, we live from hand to mouth. And everybody says you're given meat twice a day there, and sugar and tea, and tobacco — you can smoke as much as you like." "But isn't fighting terrible?" "Of course it is. There's no denying that."
Meat twice a day. That is the recruiting sergeant of 1914 in rural Russia, given in six lines of dialogue by a novelist who does not editorialise and does not need to. Everything the Petersburg chapters have been circling — the unreality, the talk, the futurist paintings bought against the fear of seeming old-fashioned — is answered by a man who will go to be killed because the food is better there.
And the chapter that follows opens on the army itself:
Like an avalanche, the Russian army advanced ponderously through rain and mud, to the accompaniment of shouts and oaths, the cracking of whips and the creaking of axles. On either side of the road lay horses dead and dying, and overturned carts, their wheels protruding.
Tolstoy could write that because he had been in those rooms. He is not satirising from outside; he is remembering. And it is why the first book of this trilogy is worth more as history than the two that follow it, where he knew in advance what everything meant.
This volume carries a short unsigned "About the Author" note, and it is a small masterpiece of the form. It has one job — to explain how a count who left Russia after the revolution became a Soviet classic — and it does the job in a single word.
However, the whole course of historical events, and his enormous love for his Motherland, made him alter his views. Breaking with the émigrés in 1922, Tolstoy published a unique literary manifesto dictated by patriotism and a desire to do his share in building up his country.
Before that sentence comes the one that has to do the hardest work, and it does it in nine words. Tolstoy left Russia in 1918 and spent five years abroad, part of that time in the orbit of men who were arming against the Soviet state. The note puts it like this:
But still, he did not immediately understand the revolution, and left the country in 1918.
Did not immediately understand. A whole political history — a count's flight, the émigré press, the years in Paris and Berlin — rendered as a delay in comprehension, as though the man had been slow to follow an argument. Nothing in that sentence is false. Everything in it is arranged so that no reader need ask what he was doing in Paris.
Then comes the explanation proper:
Patriotism. Not class, not analysis, not the argument that the Bolsheviks were right. The explanation offered to the foreign reader for the reconciliation of an aristocrat with the workers' state is love of the Motherland — and the note repeats the word, quoting Tolstoy's own credo:
There are four epochs I want to portray: the reign of Ivan the Terrible, that of Peter the Great, the period of the Civil War 1918–20, and our own modern times.
Ivan, Peter, the Civil War, today: a single national story with the revolution as one of its chapters rather than its rupture. And the credo goes on to say what the study of the past is for:
In order to understand the secret of the Russian people, their greatness, one must make a profound study of the past — our history, its main turning points and the tragic and creative epochs when the Russian character was being formed.
History as the formation of a national character. That is not a Marxist sentence and was never meant to be. The note concludes that "Alexei Tolstoy was the founder of the new, Soviet historical novel", which is exactly right, and the emphasis belongs on historical.
Readers of this series will recognise the operation, because it was official policy. From the mid-1930s the Soviet state rehabilitated the Russian national past wholesale — the tsars as state-builders, the generals as ancestors, the nation as the unit of history — and Tolstoy was among the chief literary instruments of it. His Peter the First made an autocratic moderniser into a hero at precisely the moment when a comparison was available and unmistakable. The internationalism of 1917 had been an embarrassment for a decade by the time this note's framing was settled.
We say this without triumph, because the alternative account is not simply the opposite. Tolstoy's love of Russia was real and it produced real work; his war journalism in 1941–45 was read by millions and did not need a lie in it. But the note in front of you explains a political conversion by national feeling, in a volume issued by a publishing house founded on the proposition that the workers have no country, and the contradiction is not the reader's fault for noticing it.
One more thing about the note, which is a caution rather than a charge. Our text derivation of this page produced "In 1943, Tolstoy returned to the Soviet Union", which would be a startling error. The printed page reads 1923. The scan was wrong, not the house.
One last quotation from the note, because the house says the thing itself, and more plainly than we would have dared to put it:
The book, begun abroad as a story of one family or a small group of Russian intellectuals, developed into a narrative about the Russian land, and about the Russian people who had attained their freedom.
Begun abroad. The apparatus concedes the fact we began with, and in the same breath describes the trilogy's trajectory: from a family, to the land, to the people. That is an accurate account of what happens across the three books, and it is also an accurate account of what happened to their author. A novel about four people in Petersburg became a national epic, and the man who began it as an exile finished it as a laureate.
The novel ends in the summer of 1917 on a Moscow street, and it ends better than a first volume needs to.
Katya and Roshchin are walking in the evening. Roshchin — an officer, a man of the old army, who in the next book will fight for the Whites — takes her hand and offers her the consolation of his class:
"The years will pass, wars will die out, revolutions will calm down, and only one thing will be left — your kind, tender, loving heart...."
They pass a bowed figure in a torn straw hat carrying a paste pail. He has been putting up notices along the street. One of them, caught in the light of a lamp, reads:
"Attention, everyone! The revolution is in danger!"
He pastes up another, turns, and from under the brim of the hat "eyes burning with hatred fixed a steady glance at them."
Then: August 1921.
That is the whole of the twentieth century in eleven lines. A gentleman tells a woman that revolutions calm down and love remains. The man with the paste pail, who has no name and one line of print, looks at them with hatred and goes on working. Tolstoy gives the last word to the notice and the last look to the bill-sticker, and he did it in Paris, as an émigré, four years before he went home.
A novelist who could write that ending was not a man who had misunderstood what was happening. He had understood it precisely and had not yet decided what to do about it.
The record of a class that could not see.
The Sisters is the best account in this series of the people the revolution happened to rather than the people who made it — the lawyers, poets, engineers and officers who filled Petersburg with talk until 1914 and were swept off the board within four years. It was written by one of them, while the wound was open, before its author had a position to protect or a prize to earn.
Read it before the other two books, and read it knowing what the other two books became. Then read the last page again, and note that the man with the paste pail is the only character in the novel who knows what time it is.