On page 71 of this anthology there is a headnote of eight lines. It reads, in full:
AKSEL BAKOUNTS Armenian Author (1899-1937) There are stories that imperceptibly usher you not only into the psychology of their characters, but also into that of the author. It is stories such as these that Aksel Bakounts wrote. He began his literary career by penning a little fairy-tale when he was a boy of twelve. He did not write much, but the little he did write—a volume of short stories and two novels that he had no chance to finish—placed him among Armenia's prominent authors.
Read the dates and read the clause again. A writer born in 1899 who died in 1937, and who wrote "two novels that he had no chance to finish". The volume does not say why a man of thirty-eight had no chance to finish them. It prints the year and the phrase and moves on to the story.
The story is Cyclamens, and it carries a dedication: To the memory of Arphenik Charents.
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. The half-title reads LIBRARY OF SOVIET LITERATURE. There is a Russian title page, but the scan reduces it to unreadable Latin lookalikes, so it is not transcribed here.
And, for the sixth Foreign Languages Publishing House volume in a row in this strand: no date, no copyright line, no colophon. The last leaf is a "TO THE READER" card and nothing else.
Our catalogue says 1955. The book says otherwise, in its own headnotes. Ostap Vishnya's gives his death as 1956. Derenik Demirjyan's mentions an article "which he wrote shortly before his death in 1956". And Valentin Katayev's headnote opens by recording that his sixtieth birthday was celebrated in early 1957 — both scans corrupt the word birthday, so that clause is paraphrased rather than quoted — before going on to say that he is "already familiar to the English reader from A White Sail Gleams, which Alexei Tolstoi described as 'a delightfully translucent book about children.'" The volume cannot be earlier than 1957, and the 1955 should be dropped. That is the fifth catalogue date in this strand to fail against the object.
But this volume does something the others in the FLPH run do not, and it is worth crediting. It has apparatus. Every one of the twenty authors gets a headnote: name, nationality, usually dates, and half a page of biography or — in several cases — a passage of the writer's own prose standing in for a biography. Yon Drutsa's headnote is his own recollection of having no shoes as a boy and his father carrying him to school through the mud, asking, "Do you think you'll grow up to be something?" Andrejs Upits's is a description of a peasant family on a winter night, the women spinning, a child reading aloud from a calendar's "pulpy 'literary supplement'". These are the best-made front pages in the whole collection.
And the translators are credited, story by story, at the foot of each. Harvest them and you get ten names for twenty-five stories: S. Apresyan (eight), Robert Daglish (two), D. Sanders (two), Eve Manning (two), V. Shneerson, D. Rottenberg, G. Ivanov-Mumjiev, L. Navrozov, Y. Triumfov. Apresyan carried a third of the book alone. Daglish turns up here as he does across the strand.
Count the nationalities the headnotes assign, and the anthology's politics are on the page before you read a story.
Twenty authors: Russian four (Sholokhov, Granin, Menshikov, Katayev), Byelorussian two (Bryl, Samuilyonok), Ukrainian two (Gonchar, Vishnya), Armenian two (Demirjyan, Bakounts), Abkhazian two (Gulia, Lakerbai), and one each Chukchi (Rytkheu), Lithuanian (Cvirka), Kazakh (Auezov), Estonian (Vilde), Tajik (Aini), Uzbek (Kahhar), Moldavian (Drutsa) and Lettish (Upits).
Set that against the sixteen union republics of the day. Eleven are represented. Five are not: Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kirghizia, Turkmenia, and the Karelo-Finnish republic. Georgia's absence is the loud one, because Georgia is not absent at all — it appears twice, as Abkhazia, an autonomous republic inside it. Two of the twenty slots go to Abkhazian writers and none to a Georgian, in a book assembled within two or three years of Stalin's death.
The other absence is a whole literature. There is no Jewish writer and no story translated from Yiddish. The volume was put together at the end of the years in which Soviet Yiddish literature was destroyed and its leading writers shot, and in a collection that reaches as far as the Chukchi peninsula for a nationality, that gap is not an accident of taste.
A last arithmetical oddity: the book is called 25 Stories and its contents lists twenty-five. The body contains twenty-seven titled pieces. Sadriddin Aini's twenty pages carry three — My Last Days at the Madrasah, The Pilgrims' Shoes and The Girl in the Desert — and only the first is listed. Nobody counted.
The anthology's real subject, for a reader now, is what its headnotes can and cannot say.
Aksel Bakounts (1899–1937). The dates are printed. Armenian readers knew what 1937 meant; an English reader in the mid-1950s was given a year and the phrase "had no chance to finish". Cyclamens is the best story in the book, and it is dedicated to the memory of Arphenik Charents. It is a slow, cold piece about riders coming up to a ruined fortress, Kaqavaberd, where the sky is overcast most of the year. (Its opening sentence begins with a decorative capital that both scans lose, so it is described here rather than quoted.) The dogs fly barking at the horses; the guide tries in vain to put them off with his whip; and then "The stones of Kaqavaberd seemed to have come alive to speak with the archaeologist. He walked up to this or that slab and bent to look, to take a measure[ment]". The name is the point. Charents is the surname of Yeghishe Charents, the greatest Armenian poet of the century, who died in prison in 1937, the same year as Bakounts. The dedication is to his first wife, who had died ten years earlier. Whatever the compilers intended, the word Charents stands on the page, in a Soviet state publisher's book, attached to a writer who died in 1937.
Ostap Vishnya (1889–1956). His headnote opens not with biography but with a passage of his own, from a sketch called Ostap Vishnya the Martyr, dated 1944:
During my stay in Lvov in 1944, after it was liberated from the Nazis, I was told that the Ukrainian-German newspapers, published by the invaders in the city, had kicked up a racket, claiming that the Bolsheviks had tortured me, Ostap Vishnya, to death. Well, here's what really happened.
What follows is a comic interrogation. A man "with the whitish eyes" has "a dagger made of the purest tempered national question and as sharp as they come", and he jabs it "into the most sacred recess of Ostap's national ego", and then the questioning begins.
"Confess," he says, "that you wanted to put blue trousers on the whole of Great Russia." "I confess," says Ostap. "Confess," says the other, "that you've been telling everybody that Pushkin isn't Pushkin but Taras Shevchenko." "So I have," says Ostap.
Asked who wrote Eugene Onegin, Ostap says Shevchenko. Asked what Pushkin wrote, he says there was no Pushkin at all "and there won't be any", except that once "it did look as if something of the sort had sprouted, but then they saw it was a woman—she's called The Captain's Daughter."
The target is the occupiers' Ukrainian-language press. The form is an interrogation in which a Ukrainian writer confesses to Ukrainian nationalism, absurdly, and is forgiven by the joke.
Ostap Vishnya — Pavlo Gubenko — had been sentenced in 1933 to ten years in a labour camp on a charge of nationalism and plotting terrorist acts against the Party leadership, and returned to literature in 1943. He wrote this in 1944, the year after he came back. The headnote gives 1889–1956 and quotes the sketch. It does not mention the ten years.
They deserve a paragraph of their own, because whoever wrote them was doing something unusual and doing it well.
Several are not biography at all. Mikhail Lakerbai's begins: "To every Abkhazian the word alamys implies many things", and then tells a story about an old man on a bench in Gudauta on a hot July day, beginning "It was some forty years ago". Yury Rytkheu's opens with a Moscow writer in a Chukchi hunter's tent watching the hunter's six-year-old son run naked into the freezing cold to test the weather. Mukhtar Auezov's is in his own voice: "I was born in 1897 in a nomad family of Kazakhs. My ancestors came from Central Asia, but they joined the tribe of Tobikta as early as the beginning of the 19th century." Yon Drutsa's is a memory of having no shoes, and of his father asking him on the way to school, "Do you think you'll grow up to be something?" — and then, flatly: "I now have three small books to my credit, but Father doesn't seem to be impressed."
Others are dates and a shape. Petras Cvirka (1909–1947), "a former herd-boy", "one of the founders of Lithuanian Soviet literature". Eduard Vilde (1865–1933), born "on a landlord's estate where his father was employed", who "had ample opportunity to observe the hard life of the peasan[ts]". Eduard Samuilyonok, who "was born in 1907 and died in 1939 in his prime" — the second writer in this book to be given a bare early death and no cause, and the second time the volume reaches for a formula rather than a fact.
Taken together the headnotes are the most generous editorial work in the whole fiction strand: they name the nationality, give the dates where they can, and often let the writer speak first. They are also, precisely because they are generous, the clearest demonstration of where the limit fell. The same editorial hand that could find room for a Chukchi weather anecdote could not find room for the word arrested.
The collection opens with Sholokhov's The Fate of a Man, which is the only piece here most English readers will have met, and it has worn better than almost anything else in this strand: a driver's account, given to a stranger at a river crossing, of captivity, escape, and the loss of his whole family — ending with a boy he takes for his own because he has no one. It runs 46 pages and is the longest single story in the book.
After that the anthology is more interesting than its title suggests, because it is not a survey. It is a set of literatures at very different stages, printed side by side without comment.
Eduard Vilde (Estonian) gets sixty-two pages and two stories — the largest allocation to a single author — and he died in 1933, so the Estonian entry is pre-Soviet nineteenth-century realism. Sadriddin Aini (Tajik), whose headnote says he "laid the foundations of Tajik realist prose", supplies memoir: a madrasah in 1891, a party given by an assistant instructor. Mukhtar Auezov is the Kazakh novelist whose Abai is elsewhere in this collection. Yury Rytkheu, described as a Chukchi Author, sends a woman from the Arctic to a conference in Khabarovsk. Yanka Bryl's Galya — the story our own build had lost until this pass — is a piece of straightforward heartbreak about a farm girl and an accordion-player, prefaced by a headnote that tells you Bryl was born in 1917, that his father was a railwayman, and that western Byelorussia "had for years been under Poland's imperialist rule."
Valentin Katayev's story is called Our Father, Which Art in Heaven. Andrejs Upits's is The Priest of Bung Hung Hama, and readers who have his Outside Paradise in this collection will recognise the anticlerical instinct that runs through everything he wrote before 1940.
What holds the book together, and what a survey anthology usually loses, is that the editors did not try to make the literatures match. Vilde is a nineteenth-century Estonian realist who died in 1933; Drutsa is a Moldavian born in 1928 with three small books to his name; Aini is writing memoir of a Bukharan madrasah in 1891; Rytkheu is writing about air travel. Nothing has been levelled. A reader moving from Vilde's Baltic skipper to Rytkheu's Chukchi delegate covers seventy years and four thousand miles in a page-turn, and the book does not pretend the distance is small.
That is the honest half of the volume's claim. The Soviet Union really did contain these literatures, and really did translate them, and an English reader in 1957 could buy twenty-five of them in one volume for a few shillings — which no commercial house in London was going to do. It is worth saying plainly, because the criticism that follows is not that the enterprise was fraudulent.
Two authors were missing from this ebook until now, and the reason is worth recording because it is the same reason twice over.
The volume is arranged by author: a headnote page, then the story or stories. The build's list of author headings was taken from the contents page, which the scanner read badly — it produced "Yanka Bryl, GALYA" as one run-on entry and mangled "Yon Drufsa" — so Yanka Bryl and Andrejs Upits were written off as unproved and left out. Both headings are clean lines of their own in the body; Upits's simply has the J read as an S, "ANDRESS UPITS". Without them, Bryl's Galya had been swallowed into Petras Cvirka's division and Upits's story into Eduard Samuilyonok's, which is why those two came out at fifteen and nineteen thousand words against a book whose authors average five. Both are restored, the J is restored, and all twenty authors now stand where the book puts them, at 233 to 353 words per printed page across the volume.
The contents page has now been the worse witness in four books in this strand. Look in the body first.
Read Bakounts's headnote, then Cyclamens, then the headnote again.
Read Vishnya's Ostap Vishnya the Martyr knowing where he had been between 1933 and 1943, and decide for yourself what kind of joke it is.
Read the nationality line under each name and keep a tally. The book's argument is that Soviet literature is a federation of literatures, and it makes that argument honestly enough to give a Chukchi writer the same twenty-six pages as a Lithuanian one. Then notice which republics are not there, and that the Georgian slots went to Abkhazia, and that a country with a Yiddish literature only a few years dead has sent nobody.
This is the only volume in the fiction strand whose apparatus is good — real headnotes, real dates, translators credited at every story. That is exactly what makes its silences legible. A book that told you nothing would tell you nothing. This one tells you that Aksel Bakounts was born in 1899 and died in 1937 and had no chance to finish his novels, and then leaves you to work out the rest.