There is no foreword to this book. There is no critic's essay, no author's note, no publisher's statement of purpose. Between the contents page and the first line of the novel there is one leaf, carrying two lines:
And never ending battle! Tranquillity is but a dream.... ALEXANDER BLOK
That is the whole apparatus. A Soviet state publisher sent a 474-page novel about a doctor abroad in English, and the only thing it put in front of the reader was a couplet by a Symbolist poet who died in 1921.
The lines come back three hundred pages later, in the mouth of a schoolgirl. Varya, who is in love with Volodya and cannot say so, recites "a line of Blok" to him in a whisper — "And never ending battle! Tranquillity is but a dream..." — and he asks what it is, and she recites the whole poem, and he listens with his eyes closed and repeats the words. That is how this novel handles its own epigraph: not as a motto stamped on the front, but as something one adolescent says to another on a walk.
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. The half-title reads LIBRARY OF SOVIET LITERATURE. The credits leaf carries three lines and nothing else:
ILLUSTRATED AND DESIGNED BY A. VASIN TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY OLGA SHARTSE EDITED BY ROBERT DAGLISH
Note the third line: this is a translation with a named editor, and the editor is Robert Daglish, who turns up across this whole strand — translating Tvardovsky's preface to the Kazakevich volume, translating Bondarev's The Hot Snow in 1971, and here, in the 1950s, editing Olga Shartse. The house's English was made by a small number of people working over decades, and the catalogue that records "translated from the Russian" and stops has thrown away most of what is knowable about how these books were made.
Three corrections to our own record.
The series. Our catalogue lists this under the Progress Soviet Authors Library, on the strength of advertisements on the 1974 Paustovsky and Serafimovich jackets. The volume itself says LIBRARY OF SOVIET LITERATURE — the earlier FLPH series. Describe it as what it is.
The date. This volume carries no date and no copyright notice of any kind. The last leaf gives the Russian title, Дело, которому ты служишь, and the words "Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", and nothing more. The only year printed anywhere in the book is 1956, in a back-matter advertisement for Sergei Antonov's It Happened in Penkovo (1956). The printing therefore cannot be earlier than 1956, and the "1955" attached to our file is the Internet Archive cataloguer's, not the book's.
The extent. The last printed page is 474, and the text ends with three words the catalogue does not record: END OF BOOK ONE. This is the first volume of a trilogy, and the volume says so.
Inside, the structure is unusual and worth noticing: fifteen numbered chapters, each of which is only a divider, and inside them fifty-two named sections — "Natural Sciences", "Mushrooms", "No Skeletons for Sale", "Old Man Pych", "I Drink!", "Black Death". The chapters carry no titles and the sections carry no numbers. The book reads like a serial, which is what its rhythm is built for.
Volodya Ustimenko decides, in the ninth form, to become a doctor, and the novel follows him from that decision to a plague expedition in the Far East on the eve of the German invasion. It is a Bildungsroman about a vocation, and its subject is the difference between doing a job and serving a cause.
Around him the book assembles a hospital's worth of people: Aunt Aglaya, an Old Bolshevik who raises him; Varya, who loves him; Professor Zhovtyak, a careerist; Postnikov and Polunin, doctors of a different kind; Old Man Pych; the trader Markelov, who owns the ferocious dogs and asks the question that titles one of the best sections, "What Is the Purpose of Life?". Yuri German was a professional at this. The sections are short, each turns on a scene, and the prose gets out of the way.
Two things make it more than competent.
The first is that the novel takes medicine seriously as work. Volodya is not gifted; he is stubborn. The measure of him at the end is not a triumph but an audit. On the last page, riding out of Khara with the caravan, he weighs what he has done:
"A certain amount! Not very much, really," he was thinking. "But then did Professor Barinov's expedition mean so little? And I was a part of it. A tiny part of the whole, of my country."
And the novel's last sentence, with the war already burning beyond the mountains: "There, too, he would serve the cause to which he had dedicated his life." The title phrase occurs nowhere in the body of the book. It is the name of the final section and of the volume, and the novel never says it out loud.
The best single scene is the one the title-question names. Markelov is an Old Believer trader in the Far East, rich, dying, with chained dogs in the yard and a daughter whose fingers are "ablaze with diamond rings". He sends her out, drinks from a bottle kept behind a threadbare armchair, and delivers an account of his own upbringing that is worth more than any amount of class analysis:
"My ancestors came here, fleeing the persecutions of our father the tsar. They taught me their faith. 'Tell me, brother, who dies but rots not?' And very glibly I answered, 'The Mother of God, she died but rotted not, and was taken alive to heaven.'"
And then, in the same breath, what else they taught him: "to put myself above the local people, because another newcomer of another nationality might put himself above me and bleed the local people drier than I could"; to sharpen his fangs, "for man, they said, is like wolf to man"; to make the vodka that cost next to nothing and sent the local native "round in circles"; to smoke sable skins darker so they would fetch three times the price; and "how to make a quiet end of a heathen in the taiga if that unbeliever became difficult". All this while "a visiting canoness of the old faith kept mumbling about the divine virtues, humility, understanding, abstinence, charity, brotherliness, concord, and love of your neighbour."
He cannot square the two, and he knows it. "I spilt no native blood myself, it sickened me to, but my late parents were smeared with that blood, plenty of it, and now it is crying out. That is why my brains are twisted and all upside down. Is there an illness like that?"
"Not that I've heard of," Volodya replied. "You will."
Then the question: "What is the purpose of man's existence?" A colonial merchant on the Soviet frontier, asking a young doctor whether there is a diagnosis for inherited guilt. German gives him the better lines, and gives Volodya no speech at all in reply.
The second is Spain.
A third of the way through, Volodya's father — a flyer — disappears on an assignment whose destination the family is not told. The novel handles it as a conspiracy inside a household. Aglaya asks straight out, "To Spain?", and is lied to, badly; and then she buys herself a map of Spain and studies it at night with the door locked against her nephew, while the children keep their own map in Varya's room.
What she hears while she looks at the map is the song her brother Afanasy and her husband Grisha had both loved:
We're out to fight the bankers, the landlords and the rest, We'll seal the doom of kulaks, the damn blood-sucking pests. We, Red Army soldiers, are fighting for the poor, To give the people freedom and make their lives secure...
Grisha is dead; the novel does not say how, and Aglaya's certainty that "her own husband would certainly have been too" in Spain is the nearest it comes to telling us. And what she thinks over the map is the best passage in the book, an elegy for a generation:
She knew that generation of Bolsheviks well, loud-voiced lads who had gone through fire and water and never said die. Practically illiterate in the years of Civil War, they were now graduates of academies. There was nothing they couldn't do, those men of steel.
Read that in 1956 and count what is missing. Aglaya is remembering Bolsheviks who fought the Civil War and then took degrees — the cohort that was destroyed between 1936 and 1938. The novel puts them in Spain, where a great many of them did in fact go, and where the ones who came back were frequently arrested for having been there. It says none of that. It says "men of steel" and moves on.
The Spain material itself is unusually concrete for a Soviet novel of the period. Volodya, half asleep, follows the war through the press: the torreros of Seville who gave in to "Queipo de Llamo, the insurgent general" [sic — the book's spelling of Queipo de Llano]; the island of Minorca; the Valencian expedition aboard the Almirante Miranda; the Iviza landing that the newspapers will not explain. Varya starts wearing a Spanish cap, and asks Volodya whether the Spanish drink tea, "and there was no one to answer her question". And when she is trying not to cry in the street she talks too fast about the day's news:
"Have you read about that wonderful brigade forcing a crossing over the Ebro? It was the battery named after Ernst Thaelmann."
A few pages later the two of them go to the cinema and the newsreel is Spain: "Germans in the Thaelmann battalion singing the 'Carmagnole'", the insurgents' tanks at Jarama, volunteers moving up at the Segovia bridge, "Huge, black 'Junkers'" overhead. The section that follows is titled FATHER IS DEAD.
International Brigades, named; German communists fighting fascism in Spain, named; the Ebro and Jarama, named. In a Soviet novel published in Moscow in 1956, for export. That is not nothing, and it is worth saying why it could be there at all: Spain was the one internationalist commitment of the 1930s that the post-1956 Soviet state was prepared to remember warmly, because the men who went could be honoured without asking what happened to them afterwards.
Now the count, which in this strand has become the most reliable instrument we have.
Stalin: zero. Not once, in a 474-page novel that runs from the Civil War to June 1941, whose characters argue about the news every week, who follow Spain in the papers, who listen to the radio. Lenin appears nine times, the Party twenty-six, Marx five, Communist three, Komsomol eleven. Spain, twenty-three.
A 1956 novel could have gone either way. In February 1956 Khrushchev made the secret speech; this printing is from that year or later, and the man whose name had been in every Soviet book for twenty-five years has simply been left out. Not attacked — left out. It is the same manoeuvre we found in the Polevoi volume, where a 1946 novel reprinted from a 1957 revision contains the name nowhere except inside Stalingrad, and where an Order of the Day is quoted without its signature.
What is there instead is more interesting than an absence, and Yuri German put it at the front of the book, in a portrait of a marriage in 1919.
Stepanov is a young commissar working himself to pieces at a railway junction. In his sleep he grinds his teeth and shouts: "Saboteurs! I'll get you shot, you dirty sharks, it'll be too late then." His wife Alevtina lies beside him and weaves her ambitions:
He would climb the ladder, to the very top, and stand alone above all the rest, and everyone would be afraid of him, and then she, Alevtina, would take a ride through the town in a red, powerful car with great big headlights, the kind of car that once used to be brought to the door for Mrs. Gogolev, the barrister's wife.
She dresses her child in velvet and lace collars like the barrister's children, serves carrot-brew in Dresden cups, draws more than her ration at the stripped Petrograd warehouses, and learns the register that gets results: "And a commissar's wife can just go and starve, eh? Never mind, I'll go to the Cheka and everybody'll get it hot."
Two pages. A man who dreams in the vocabulary of the show trials fifteen years before the show trials, and a woman who has already worked out that the revolution has a ladder and that fear is what it is made of. German published that in the Soviet Union in the middle of the 1950s, at the front of a book whose hero is a doctor, and then never returned to it.
The novel also thinks hard about fascism, which is rarer in this fiction than one would expect. One character runs through the evidence like an analyst: why Hugo Eckener flew his airship to the United States, why the Bremen took the Blue Riband outbound and not homeward, the flyers and the boxers and the films — "German strength demonstrated everywhere, German victory, German superiority, the German fist" — and then the list that matters: "Thaelmann is in prison — what does it imply? The 'Thousand-Year Empire' — what does that imply? The German delegation has left Geneva — why? Now they've founded an Anglo-German corporation in London". A Soviet novelist writing in the mid-1950s remembering, accurately, what the mid-1930s looked like to someone who was paying attention, and remembering that the City of London was in the story.
It is worth being exact about what this novel does and does not do, because the temptation with a book like this is to over-read it.
It is not a dissident novel. Volodya is a good Soviet man, Aglaya is a good Bolshevik, the villains are careerists and traders and time-servers, and the state is never wrong about anything that matters. The plot does not go near a purge. Of the two occurrences of the word "arrest" in the whole book, one is a drunk and the other is a quarantine.
But it declines to do several things that a 1949 novel would have had to do. It does not name Stalin. It does not give its hero a moment of doctrinal certification — nobody tells Volodya what a real man is, as Polevoi's ward tells Meresyev at a Bolshevik's funeral. It takes its motto from Blok rather than from a Congress. It gives the careerist's psychology to a commissar's wife rather than to a class enemy. And it puts a generation of Old Bolsheviks on a locked-door map of Spain and then stops the sentence, which is a different act from never having written it.
The best single index of the book's politics is its structure: fifteen empty chapter-numbers and fifty-two named scenes. There is no thesis holding it together, only a vocation.
The last words are END OF BOOK ONE, and that is the frame the reader should keep.
German went on to complete the trilogy, and where he ended up can be watched inside this very collection. By 1980, Felix Kuznetsov's Of Human Values — a Progress book, also in this series, written by the First Secretary of the Moscow Writers' Organisation — was conducting a tour of Soviet prose in which every writer's conscience is certified as having come out where the Congress said it should. German is not in that book, but the machinery is, and it is the machinery that received this trilogy. A novel that begins with Blok and a boy deciding to be a doctor ends up, two volumes later, inside a genre whose official critics knew exactly what it was for.
For the reader now, what survives is the first volume's stubbornness. Volodya is right about almost nothing except that the work matters and that most of the people around him are not doing it properly. "A certain amount! Not very much, really." That is a strange sentence to find at the end of a Soviet novel of the 1950s, and it is the reason to read this one.
Read the sections as they come; they are built to be read that way, and the best of them stand alone — "Mushrooms", "Old Man Pych", "A Nocturnal Conversation", "What Is Happiness?"
Read the Spain chapters against the calendar. The father goes out, the maps come into the house, the newsreel shows the Thaelmann battalion singing the "Carmagnole", and then the section called FATHER IS DEAD. Nothing in the book says what the year is or what was happening in Moscow while Varya was learning where the Ebro runs.
And read the two pages about Alevtina twice. The man shouting "Saboteurs!" in his sleep in 1919, and the wife who has already understood that the point of the ladder is that everyone below it is afraid — those pages are the part of this novel that its author could not have published under the name of analysis, and did publish under the name of a marriage.