This is a novel about people who killed a tsar, published by the state that descended from them, and it ends on a scaffold with nothing said about what any of it was for.
Andrei Zhelyabov is driven through the Petersburg streets to his execution. The crowd shouts; fists are waved; Mikhailov in the second cart strains against his straps and shouts something that the drums drown. Then a young woman perched on the pediment of a street lamp makes "a timid, welcoming gesture" and is pulled down at once; Zhelyabov catches a glimpse of her face and it vanishes, and "it looked as if she was being beaten." The carts come out into the square, the sky clears, and there rises from the earth "the smell of melting snow and puddles that had always gone to his head when he was a child". That is the last sentence of the book.
There is no forward look. No 1905, no 1917, no line drawn from this gallows to the Finland Station. A Soviet novel of 1978 about the People's Will ends with a man smelling the spring he remembers from childhood, on his way to be hanged, and stops.
Everything worth saying about this book follows from noticing that.
The Impatient Ones is built out of three kinds of writing, alternating.
There are twelve chapters of narrative, following the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya — the People's Will — from the split in Land and Freedom through the long hunt for Alexander II to the bombs on the Catherine Canal on 1 March 1881, the trial and the executions.
Between them are the Voices: first-person testimonies, set out as if transcribed, from people who knew the conspirators. P. P. Semenyuta, who taught with Zhelyabov. M. F. Frolenko. A. I. Sitsyanko, described as a forgotten voice. M. P. Dragomanov, writing from Geneva. And — this is the one that matters — N. I. Rysakov.
And between those are five sections headed Clio—72, in which the muse of history speaks from the author's own present. Here is how she introduces herself:
Nothing but events, facts, names, years, minutes, hours, days, decades, centuries, millennia constantly disappearing in the eternal flux that I, Clio, observe, a flux that knows neither grief nor passion, that is neither slow nor swift, not devoid of meaning and yet without any goal, the flux in which all is ultimately submerged.
Read that again with an eye on the doctrine. History here is not devoid of meaning and yet without any goal. In 1978, in a book issued by the state publishing house for export, the muse of history announces that history has no goal. She then proceeds, in a flat administrative register, to recite what became of people: who was expelled from France, who married an Italian anarchist, who died where. The Clio sections are an obituary column. They do not point anywhere. That is their point.
The Voices do something equally awkward. They disagree with each other, they are self-serving, and they are given no adjudication. Most remarkably, Rysakov — who threw the first bomb, was caught, and informed on his comrades — is handed the first person and allowed to explain himself:
Why did I have to throw first? We had made no such agreement. It was a tragic misunderstanding. I, being the youngest, should have been standing in reserve, so to speak, as number three or four and carrying a bomb just in case, but Mikhailov got cold feet or perhaps he played a trick on us, and the numbers got mixed up, that was how it happened.
A Soviet historical novel about heroic revolutionaries gives the informer a voice and lets him blame the scheduling. Nobody corrects him. The reader is left to weigh a man's excuse for himself, which is what the reader would have to do in life.
Put the three devices together and you have a novel that systematically declines to close. It refuses the summary, refuses the verdict, refuses the arrow from 1881 to 1917. Trifonov has built into the form of the book the one thing the official account of the revolutionary tradition could not tolerate: an open ending.
Let us be clear about the politics, because a reader coming to this from the left may expect a celebration and will not find one, and a reader coming from the right may expect an apology for terrorism and will not find that either.
The Marxist position on the tactic these people adopted has been settled and public for over a century, and it is not admiring. Writing in 1909, in the wreckage of the Azef affair — the discovery that the head of the Socialist Revolutionaries' terrorist organisation had been a police agent throughout — Trotsky summed it up in an essay whose title is its argument: "The Bankruptcy of Individual Terrorism". His case was not moral squeamishness. It was that the individual bomb substitutes the hero for the class, teaches the masses to wait for a deliverer, and leaves the machinery of the state untouched while wrecking the organisation that threw it. Azef was the proof: a conspiracy small enough to be heroic is small enough to be bought.
And yet the same tradition claimed these people as ancestors, unembarrassed. Speaking in December 1925 on the twentieth anniversary of the first revolution, Trotsky drew the line of descent explicitly — "Without Radishchev there would not have been Pestel. Without Pestel, no Zhelyabov. Without Zhelyabov we would not have had Alexander Ul'yanov. And without Alexander there would not have been Vladimir" — and concluded: "In Leninism live the Decembrists, the teachers of the 1860s, the Populists and the People's Will."
And here is the thing that makes this novel better than its reputation: it contains the objection, spoken aloud, by a character. Arguing with Zhelyabov about whether to kill, Ivan puts to him the precise difficulty — not a moral one, a social one:
"Blood is a serious business. You're from peasant stock, you know what they'll say, 'The gentry's begun shooting 'mongst 'emselves!' At best they'll just be indifferent..."
That is Trotsky's case, in dialogue, in a Soviet novel of 1978. The peasants will read the killing of the tsar as a quarrel among gentlemen and will not stir. And it is aimed at Zhelyabov specifically because of who he is — the son of a serf among the children of the gentry, the one member of the Executive Committee who might have known what the villages would actually think.
Trifonov builds the whole book on that contrast and does not resolve it either. Awaiting trial, Zhelyabov looks round at his co-defendants and thinks: "What scoundrels, what bandits! They had been driven by a sense of duty. They yearned to give the people what they owed them, what their parents, their remote ancestors owed them." Sofya Perovskaya is the daughter of a former Governor-General of St Petersburg whose family descends from Count Alexei Razumovsky; Kolya Morozov is a wealthy Yaroslavl landowner's son. These are people discharging an inherited debt to a class they do not belong to, and the novel knows it.
Both things at once, then: the tactic was bankrupt, and the people who practised it are ours. This series has had occasion to make the same point before, introducing Fyodorov's collection on the Decembrists, and the distinction that mattered there matters here. It is not whether the genealogy is drawn — everyone draws it — but whether it is drawn open or closed. Trotsky's chain is a record of heroic insufficiencies, each one defeated, each one paid for, each redeemed only by what came after and never by itself. The official Soviet version is a ramp: every stage a step up, the whole sequence graded by its arrival at a finished state, the argument concluded by a monument.
Trifonov's novel is on the open side of that line, and it gets there by sheer refusal. He will not say what Zhelyabov was for. He gives you the man, the impatience — "to give history a push", as they said of themselves — the tremendous courage, the amateurishness, the informer, the rope, and the smell of melting snow. Then he stops.
One more thing the novel does that its packaging cannot. It opens not on a character but on a diagnosis:
By the end of the seventies it was quite obvious to those who were living at the time that Russia was sick. The only debatable points were what the sickness was and how it could be cured.
That is the frame of the entire book: not here is what they did but here is an argument nobody had settled. Trifonov then spends twelve chapters, five documentary interludes and five appearances by a goal-less muse declining to settle it.
The volume carries an introduction by A. Svobodin, and it is an intelligent piece of criticism. Svobodin is good on Trifonov's subject, which he identifies correctly as time — "its passage through each of us" — and good on the quality of attention that makes the novel work: Trifonov "avoids anything that cannot be thoroughly documented, he dislikes romantic colours and is deliberately unemotional."
He is also good, up to a point, on where the book comes from. "Trifonov comes from a family of revolutionaries," he writes, "revolutionaries of a generation that was a concentrated charge of historical energy. His father entered the struggle in the 1900s, he was one of those who were later to be called the Lenin Guard." He tells us about Trifonov's documentary book on his father, Reflection from a Fire (1966), and praises it justly as "one of the finest and most highly emotional books ever written about the revolution and Civil War in Russia". He describes it as reconstructing the father's biography "from the beginning of his conscious life to the end of the Civil War."
To the end of the Civil War. That is where the introduction leaves Valentin Trifonov, and it is not where his life left him. He was arrested in the Terror and shot. The generation Svobodin calls "a concentrated charge of historical energy", the men who "had the feeling, which we can only envy, that they were seeing history in the making" — that generation was destroyed, in very large part, by the state that later commissioned introductions about it.
This is not an inference about Trifonov's private grief. It is the declared subject of his work. His unfinished novel The Disappearance, published after his death, is about precisely this: the repression in the thirties of the men who had made 1917. Roy Medvedev, writing the standard history of the Terror, drew on Valentin Trifonov's papers from his son's personal archive, and quotes his letters from the Civil War fronts — including, as it happens, a furious complaint about Trotsky's conduct of the Southern Front, which is worth recording here rather than quietly dropping, since this introduction is written from the tradition Trifonov senior was rude about. The father was a real man with real opinions, not a symbol, and the opinion is worth quoting at its full length rather than trimmed to an insult:
The Southern Front is Trotsky's "favored child," and flesh of the flesh ... of this extremely untalented organizer. It was not Trotsky who built the army but we, the rank and file army workers. Wherever Trotsky has tried to work, the most tremendous confusion has immediately arisen. There is no place for a muddle head in an organism that must operate precisely and efficiently, and the military machine is such an organism.
That is not factional abuse; it is a line commander's complaint about resource allocation and command competence, written from a front that was not the favoured one, and this series has no interest in suppressing it. Valentin Trifonov was killed by the faction he had sided with.
So: a novel about revolutionaries destroyed by the state they fought, written by the son of a revolutionary destroyed by the state he built, introduced by a critic who follows the father to 1921 and then changes the subject. The silence is not Svobodin's alone and there is no point being sanctimonious about it — he wrote what could be printed in 1978, and what he did print, about time and about documentation, is true and useful. But the shape of the omission tells you exactly what the apparatus was for. It could praise the Lenin Guard. It could not say what happened to them.
Put the question this series puts to every volume: can the category the book celebrates ever be turned homeward?
The People's Will are honoured here for conspiring against an autocracy — for the illegal press, the false passports, the safe houses, the refusal to accept that the existing order was permanent. Every one of those activities was a serious criminal offence in the Soviet Union of 1978, and the apparatus that prosecuted them was a direct institutional descendant of the one that hanged Zhelyabov. The novel is published in the year that Soviet dissidents were being tried under Article 70. Its heroes are people who would have been, in the state that honoured them, defendants.
Trifonov cannot say this, and does not try to. What he does instead is more interesting than an aesopian wink. He removes the machinery by which the comparison would be forbidden. A closed genealogy protects the present: if the line runs from Zhelyabov to 1917 and stops in triumph, then the revolutionaries are safely historical and their methods safely superseded. Trifonov's Clio has no goal and his novel has no terminus, and a history without a terminus cannot certify anybody. Once the arrow is gone, the reader is free to ask what this story has to do with now, and the book neither prompts the question nor prevents it.
That is as far as a novel could go, and it is further than most went.
Not the tactic. Trotsky was right in 1909 and the century since has not produced a counter-example; the bomb has never once delivered what its throwers promised, and the organisations that relied on it have been penetrated, as Azef penetrated the SRs, with a regularity that looks less like bad luck than like a property of the method.
What is living is the seriousness with which Trifonov treats the question of impatience, which is the book's real title and subject. These are people who could see what needed to happen and could not wait for the conditions under which it could happen. That is not a nineteenth-century problem. It recurs wherever a small number of people see clearly and the many are not yet moving, and the temptation it produces — to substitute one's own resolve for the movement that does not yet exist — is permanent. Trifonov neither condemns it nor excuses it. He shows what it is like from inside, which is the one thing a political argument cannot do and a novel can.
And what is living, finally, is the book's refusal to tell you what it means. That refusal was a political act in 1978, performed by a man who had particular reason to distrust histories that arrive at monuments. Read it for Zhelyabov, and for Rysakov, who is harder. Read it above all for Clio, who observes the flux, declines to find a goal in it, and goes on reciting what became of people.