The novel ends with a one-legged man being beaten to death by three Japanese soldiers in an empty town, and with a sentence that no socialist-realist novel would have been allowed to print twenty years later.
Matveyev, on crutches, fights all three. A crutch snaps. He spits blood and says, "I can't manage without crutches. One of them's broken." He is trampled; an officer tells the soldiers to drag him out. And then he sees his horse, "with the white heart-shaped mark on its brow", and swings into the saddle and rides down the long moonlit road:
"You see ... I'm ... not as bad as all that ..." he whispered as though in answer to a question someone had put to him in the past. His vanity was satisfied for the last time.
The horse is a dying man's hallucination and the book knows it. Under that last line stands a date: 1928.
This is the barest volume in the whole strand, and the bareness is the first thing to record.
The half-title reads LIBRARY OF SOVIET LITERATURE. The title page gives Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. The credits leaf carries three lines:
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY RALPH PARKER AND VALENTINA SCOTT DESIGNED BY A. LIVANOV
Then a contents page listing twenty-one chapters. Then the novel, ending on page 252 with the date 1928. And that is all. There is no date of publication, no copyright line, no colophon, no printer's imprint, no advertisement for other titles, and not one word about the author. A reader who picks this book up learns the name Victor Kin from the title page and nothing else about him for 252 pages.
Ralph Parker is worth a note in passing: he is also the translator of record for The Blue Notebook in the Kazakevich Selected Works of 1978, the novella in which Zinoviev is Lenin's companion at Razliv. The same English hand carried two of the most politically loaded texts in this collection, twenty years apart.
Everything below comes from outside this volume, because the volume supplies nothing.
Victor Kin was a pen-name. He was born on 14 January 1903, worked as a Komsomol organiser in the Far East during the Civil War — the experience this novel is made from — and published По ту сторону in 1928. He was arrested on 3 November 1937 as an "enemy of the people" and shot on 21 April 1938. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1956. (Sources differ in detail. A Russian biographical dictionary records only В 1937 Кин незаконно репрессирован — in 1937 Kin was illegally repressed — and has him dying in prison; the fuller account gives the arrest and execution dates above. Both agree on the shape of it, and both record the same fact about the book: С 1956 роман «По ту сторону» несколько раз переиздавался — from 1956 the novel was reissued several times.)
That last sentence settles something about the volume in your hands.
Our catalogue dates this printing 1950, on the authority of the Internet Archive cataloguer. The book itself is undated. But a novel by a man who had been shot as an enemy of the people, and who was not rehabilitated until 1956, was not in print in the Soviet Union between 1937 and 1956 — the Russian record is explicit that reissues begin in 1956. A Foreign Languages Publishing House translation into English, with the author's name on the cover, is therefore almost certainly from 1957 or later, and cannot be from 1950. The date should be recorded as unknown, and the 1950 dropped.
Which means this: the state that shot Victor Kin in 1938 put his novel into English and sold it abroad under his own name, and gave the foreign reader no biographical note of any kind. Not a falsified one. None. The apparatus that would have had to say when he died simply was not printed.
The vocabulary count in this strand has usually measured what a 1950s or 1970s editor left out of a book about the 1930s or 1940s. Here it measures something else, because the novel was written in 1928 and the text is the author's.
Stalin: zero. Trotsky: zero. Lenin twice, Marx twice, Communist five times. The Party appears twenty-six times. Komsomol, in this Komsomol novel, appears twice.
In a book written in 1928, those absences are not censorship; they are a young writer's sense of proportion. The Party is in the novel the way a workplace is in a novel — as the thing the characters do all day, argue with, get summoned by, are proud of and rude about. It is never invoked. The one place it turns up as a word of power is a joke, and the joke is at a Bolshevik's expense. Bezais, declaring himself:
"I love you very much — more than anything in the world. You're more important to me than anything on earth..."
And then the narrator, dryly: "But he was always a bit of a pedant." And Bezais, finishing the sentence: "'..., except the Party,' he added conscientiously."
She laughs at him. The novel lets her.
There is a second joke of the same kind, from the other direction. A doctor who shelters illegal literature but keeps out of things offers Bezais, with a bilious smile, "the address of one of your sort" — and then: "Just like you — always talking about the proletariat and the Party and doesn't know a thing about anything else. You Bolsheviks have no sense of humour, you're all alike." In 1928 you could print that. In 1948 you could not, and by then the man who wrote it was ten years dead.
Two Komsomol workers, Bezais and Matveyev, are sent from Chita to Khabarovsk in the Civil War in the Far East, and then across the lines into Japanese-occupied territory. That is the whole plot. What makes the book is the tone.
It opens with the two of them bored on a train. Bezais picks at the putty on the window and complains: "There's another of those chicken-sheds over there. The train's going to stop near it and wait five hours until it's had enough." Matveyev sits on an upturned packing-case drawing five-pointed stars on his palm in indelible pencil. A bottle rolls about the floor for an hour until he gets up, swears, and throws it out of the door.
Two pages later they are given a carriage of their own, and the description of it is the best short account of 1920 I know in any of these books:
The outside of the carriage was decorated like a book for children. There were drawings of workers and peasants, of Negroes, of socialism, and of a big green snake with red eyes.
"Of socialism" — as one item in a list, between the Negroes and the snake. Kin was twenty-five and had actually travelled in those carriages, and he renders the agitational poster exactly as a bored young man would see it: as decoration, and slightly absurd, and his.
The landscape writing is the other surprise. The chapter called "Bezais and Romanticism" opens with a page on the Amur railway that has nothing to do with the plot: the paddle steamers that scared the duck out of the reeds, the wild bees over hollow trees, "enormous grey elks trod softly on the rotting carpet of pine needles", the salmon coming up to spawn until the river seethed, the clandestine gold-panning along the banks. And then the railway, in a single sentence: half-naked Chinese and shaven-headed convicts worked on it. (The scan damages the second adjective — one witness reads "shaven-hezded", the other "shaven-heided" — so it is given here without quotation marks.) They chop the scrub, "and clouds of mosquitoes whined over the bonfires". The romance and the cost of it, in consecutive paragraphs, without comment.
Then there is the sentence that ought to be quoted whenever this book is mentioned.
In the chapter called "That Was a Six-Inch", Bezais does something violent on an impulse he cannot afterwards account for. Kin does not dramatise it and does not excuse it. He explains it:
Of course, it was one of those absurd, sudden impulses which make a man do the most awful things. He had drawn his revolver automatically, without thinking what he was doing. But he was too young to regard people as mere stuff, and had not learned to force himself to shut his eyes and ears when necessary.
Had not learned to. The sentence assumes that learning to is what happens — that regarding people as mere stuff and shutting one's eyes and ears when necessary are acquirable skills, and that a man of Bezais's age has simply not acquired them yet. Kin was twenty-five when he wrote it, and he was naming, in the middle of a Civil War adventure story, the exact training the following decade would administer to his generation and that would kill him.
What follows is better still, because Kin then gives the other position its best possible statement. Bezais begins to justify himself — "It was stupid of me," he says much later, "but all the same, I must say ..." — and Matveyev stops him: "That's enough, that's enough." And then the narrator sets out Matveyev's creed, in free indirect speech, without a hint of irony:
A man's life is cheap and you should not worry about every individual. If you did, it was impossible to fight or, in fact, to do anything at all. You had to think of people as platoons and companies, not as individuals, but in the mass. It was not simply a question of expediency, it was just because you were taking a risk yourself; if you did not think about yourself you had the right not to think about others too. What does it matter to you who is shot or robbed or raped? You must think of your class — individuals will always look after themselves.
And the conclusion, in his own voice: "If you want to be a Bolshevik," Matveyev concluded, "you must first of all stop being a wreck."
Then four words: "But Bezais did not agree with him."
That is the argument of the book, and Kin refuses to settle it. The creed is stated at full strength and given to the character the novel most admires — the man who will die on his crutches at the end fighting three soldiers. The objection is given to the younger man and consists of nothing but disagreement: no counter-speech, no doctrine, no moral. The chapter moves on. A novel that could hold those two things in suspension was possible in 1928; by the time this translation was made, the question had been answered for everyone concerned, including its author.
There is a companion to it in the underground chapters. Bezais's contact in the occupied town is a man called Chuzhoi — the name means the stranger, or the other one — with a lean face and a slight squint, whom Bezais admires so much "that at one time he mechanically began to squint himself", and whom he thinks "wonderful, clever and fanatical, the way Narodovoltsi should be." A young Bolshevik in 1920 measuring his hero against the People's Will, the terrorists of the 1880s: Kin lets the older revolutionary tradition stand in the book as the standard, without a word of the doctrinal correction that would have been compulsory later.
The middle of the book is a long comic-grim sequence about Matveyev's leg — a bone fracture, a doctor, an amputation, crutches — with chapter titles that read like a man refusing to dramatise his own disaster: "A Bone Fracture", "The Professional Approach", "The Leg", "People Don't Die of It". The last of those is the sentence people say to him.
And there is a love story that the novel treats as a nuisance and then takes seriously. Lisa tells Bezais what the order of things is: "The main things in life are, first, work, then food, then rest, and then love. You can't live without the first three but I can get along without your kisses." She is right about the order and wrong about herself, and the chapter in which that becomes clear is the one our own build had lost.
Look at the contents page as a list and the book's temperament is there before you read a word: "Too Much Nature", "All Men Dream", "That Was a Six-Inch", "The Middle-Aged Man", "A Thousand Rubles", "A Matter of Expediency", "A Bone Fracture", "The Leg", "The Clay Dog", "A Small Request", "No Need to Worry", "She Cried", "People Don't Die of It", "Performance Postponed", "I'm Not as Bad as All That". Not one of them is an abstraction, a slogan, or a promise. They are the things people actually say while something is going wrong. The Russian title, По ту сторону, is flatter still — on the other side — and the English Across the Lines is a little more military than the original.
Which is worth admitting, because it is the kind of error this project exists to catch.
The volume's contents page lists twenty-one chapters. The scan read the eighteenth as QSHE CRIED, and because the entry could not be matched it was written off as unproved — so the ebook was built with twenty chapters, and "No Need to Worry" ran on for fourteen printed pages carrying two chapters instead of one. The body heading is perfectly clean: a single line reading SHE CRIED at the head of page 197, and the only such line in the book. It has been restored, and the volume now divides exactly as the 1957-or-later printing does.
The lesson has been written into the build notes: when a contents entry will not match, look for the heading in the body before writing the chapter off. The contents page is the worse witness.
It would be easy to make this introduction a complaint about a missing biographical note, and that would be too small.
The point is what the note would have had to contain. Across the Lines is a novel about young communists who go into danger on the other side of a front line and mostly do not come back, written by a young communist who had done it, and its last words are a dying man's boast that he was not as bad as all that. Nine years after he wrote it, the state he had fought for arrested him; ten years after that, it shot him. Eighteen years after that it decided it had been wrong, and began reprinting the book. Then it translated it into English and sold it abroad with his name on the cover and no dates beside it.
A reader in London or Delhi in 1958 was given a good, funny, sad Civil War novel and no means whatever of knowing that. The omission is not an oversight in the way a missing translator credit is an oversight. It is the shape the rehabilitation took: the work returned, the man not accounted for. The Soviet state was prepared to un-ban a book and not prepared to print the sentence that would have explained why it had needed un-banning.
That is the same operation this series has now found in four other volumes, each time in a different register: Polevoi's novel revised in 1957 with Stalin's name scoured out and no note saying so; Paustovsky selected up to 1954 and no further, so that the years in which he defended Sinyavsky and Daniel disappear; Tvardovsky's afterword printed "in abridged form" with the abridgement unspecified; Kazakevich's Zinoviev printed a hundred and eleven times with no annotation at all. Here the method is at its purest, because here there is no apparatus to examine. There is only a book, and the absence of everything that would have placed it.
Read it as a first novel by a young man who was very good and did not get to become anything else.
The things to watch for are the ones a socialist-realist editor would have removed: the boredom of the opening, the pedant's "except the Party", the doctor's crack about Bolsheviks and humour, the decorated carriage with socialism between the Negroes and the snake, the convicts under the railway, the flat refusal to make the amputation heroic. None of it is dissident. All of it is simply a writer noticing things, in a year when noticing was still allowed.
And read the last page knowing what it is. A man alone in an occupied town, beaten down by three soldiers, imagining a horse and telling someone who is not there that he was not as bad as all that — and a narrator who will not let him have even that, and writes "His vanity was satisfied for the last time."
Victor Kin was thirty-five when they shot him. The book is dated 1928 and the volume is dated nothing.