Somewhere in the middle of this novel a Soviet lieutenant-colonel, unable to sleep, writes out fifteen numbered rules for governing a conquered country. He heads the page MEMORANDUM OF A SOVIET COMMANDANT, signs it, and dates it Lauterburg, 1945.
"1. Self-interest is the worst failing a commandant can have. However brilliant an administrator he may be, however well he may know his district, if he is mercenary by nature he should be removed from his post at once."
"3. A man cannot be an angel, but a commandant must be the nearest thing to it. He must live strictly within his means, drink only at home, and never look at any other woman except his wife."
"10. The commandant must see to it that the citizens of the area under his jurisdiction blame him personally if things go wrong, and credit Moscow for all the good."
"14. The commandant is always right inasmuch as he has the army behind him. Hence he must see to it that he is always in the right."
"5. A commandant is a revolutionary inasmuch as he represents a state and social system brought into being by revolution; as a revolutionary, it is his duty to uphold law and order, to respect and guard the customs of the given country, in order to rid the people of that country which is not yet ripe for revolution, of all fear of revolution."
"8. The commandant must be a diplomat, but only in his dealings with enemies. In his dealings with the population he is obliged to be brutally frank."
And the last of them, which is the one a reader is likeliest to remember:
"15. The commandant is the master of the house, strict at times but always just." "At the same time the commandant is also a guest, and as such he must respect his hosts who have been temporarily deprived of the right to manage their own affairs. He must remember that this was done for the sole purpose of helping them to regain that right."
His friend Chokhov finds the pad and reads it twice. Lubentsov comes in, goes scarlet, and snatches it away: "Dash it, you mustn't read that rot!" Chokhov says quietly, "It isn't rot." Lubentsov insists it is — "The result of insomnia. 'The Confessions of a Second-Rate Commandant.' All right, forget it." And Chokhov: "No, I shan't forget it."
That is the best thing in the book and, in its way, the most surprising document in this whole collection: a political theory of military occupation, set down by a fictional Soviet officer, which its author gives us in full and then has the officer disown in embarrassment.
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. The half-title reads Library of Soviet Literature.
And then — for the fourth FLPH volume in a row in this strand — the credits page is missing. There is no date, no copyright line, no colophon, no printer's imprint. This one goes further than the others: there is no translator's name anywhere in the book. Kin's volume named Ralph Parker and Valentina Scott; Medvedev's named David Skvirsky; German's named Olga Shartse and Robert Daglish. This one names nobody. Somebody turned 150,000 words of Russian into serviceable English and the house did not record who.
There is, however, a jacket blurb, running to two flap pages, and it is worth reading because it does two things.
The first is that it quotes the novel's central parable — the waxen idol that melts beside the fire in which pottery is being baked. "Why are you so cruel to me," the idol asks the fire, "to pottery you impart strength but me you destroy?" And the fire replies: "You have only your own nature to blame. I am always the same." The flap explains: Lubentsov, "like a purifying flame", is "intent on melting the idols of time-honoured prejudice".
It also drops something. In the novel the parable is not the professor's own: he introduces it as "an all but forgotten fable by Heinse", and he tells it to Lubentsov's face as a compliment and a warning — remain true to yourself, "bringing joy to noble clay and striking fear in the hearts of the waxen idols of all shades and hues." The flap keeps the parable and loses both the attribution and the point.
The second thing the flap does is what the Paustovsky jacket in this same series does. It prints, inside quotation marks, a sentence the book does not contain. The flap has Lubentsov writing: "The commandant is always right, because he is backed by armed force. That is why he must see to it that he is really always right." The book has: "The commandant is always right inasmuch as he has the army behind him. Hence he must see to it that he is always in the right." A house that could not find room for the translator's name found time to rewrite him for the cover.
The flap also tells the English reader what else is available: "The English reader has had the opportunity of reading three books by E. Kazakevich in English. These are: Star, Spring on the Oder, Heart of a Friend." Star and Spring on the Oder are in this collection. Heart of a Friend is not, and this is the only place in the strand that records it existed in English at all.
The contents page lists three items and no more: PART ONE. Journey to the Harz (p. 11), PART TWO. The Land (p. 203), PART THREE. The Ordeal (p. 381). The seventy numbered chapters, the three unnumbered interludes called The Tale of the Six Soldiers, and the closing section Two Letters are not listed anywhere. A reader who wants to know the shape of this book has to read it.
Our catalogue records this as FLPH 1950. It cannot be.
Дом на площади was first published in Russian in 1956, in the almanac Литературная Москва — the two-volume collection that was one of the defining publications of the thaw and that was attacked and stopped after its second number. An English translation therefore postdates 1956; the volume itself, carrying no date at all, gives us no way to say by how much.
There is internal corroboration. The novel closes with two letters, and the first is signed and dated: "With Victory Day greetings, Yours truly, V. Chokhov. May 9, 1950." A novel whose epilogue is set five years after the war was not printed in English in 1950.
This is now the fourth title in this strand whose catalogue date came from a library record rather than from the object, and the fourth FLPH volume found to carry no date at all. The pattern should be treated as the norm for this series, not the exception.
Before the first line of the novel stands an epigraph, and the house left it in German:
... Du hast nicht oft Zu solchen edeln Tat Gelegenheit Versagen kannst da's nicht; Gewahr es bald. "Iphigenie auf Tauris." Goethe.
No translation, no footnote, no gloss. An English-language book about the Soviet occupation of Germany, published in Moscow for readers in London and Bombay, opens with four lines of German verse and assumes you will manage. It is, in its small way, the novel's thesis stated as a production decision: the German inheritance is not the enemy's property.
Kazakevich makes the same point inside the book, as a joke. The commandant's office is furnished with a T-shaped conference table "so beloved of bureaucrats", a green baize desk, and "Portraits of Lenin and Stalin hung on the wall to the left of the desk." Then Voronin, the driver, fetches two more from the Soviet Military Administration:
he considered it highly appropriate that the portraits of these two great Germans, the connecting links, as it were, between the ideological life of both countries, should hang in the office of the Soviet commandant.
Marx and Engels as two great Germans, hung in a German town hall by a Red Army driver with an eye for decor.
The apparatus count in this strand usually measures an editor's silences. Here it measures a novelist's proportions, and they are unusual.
Stalin: three. One is a portrait on an office wall; one is a rumour heard in the town; one is a fragment. In a novel of 150,000 words published in 1956 about the Soviet administration of Germany in 1945, the General Secretary is a picture. Lenin: seven. NKVD: zero. Against that, Party 65 and Communist 55 — which is far more than any other book in this collection, because here the words are doing real work: the novel is about German Communists, the merger of the parties in the Soviet zone, the elections, the land reform, and who is to run a town.
German occurs over five hundred times; American a hundred and forty. This is the only novel in the strand whose subject is the frontier between the two.
Lubentsov is a wartime reconnaissance scout — a man from Kazakevich's own trade, and the same figure as the hero of Star — made commandant of the small town of Lauterburg in the Harz. The novel is about administration: water supply, electricity, coal, the burgomaster, the school, the denazification files, the professor who will not leave.
Its moral position is stated against a cynic, which is the right way to state it. Lubentsov's interpreter, a young woman of twenty-four with violet shadows under her eyes, explains what she has learned about Germans: "the harsher the better." They respect the British, she says, "because the British look down on them and treat them like dirt". They respect the Americans less. And the Russians not at all, "because they're always being democratic in the wrong places" — and then, bitterly: "It's funny to see Russians, after all they've been through, slapping Germans on the back like old pals. Even Russian Jews do it, I've seen them myself."
That sentence, in a novel published in 1956 by a writer who had begun as a Yiddish poet, is the only substantive appearance of Jews in the book, and it is a sneer put into the mouth of a character the hero corrects. Lubentsov's answer is four words long and is the whole novel: "There are all sorts of Germans," he says, and then, "Besides, it's very pleasant to be generous."
Readers who have the 1978 Selected Works in this collection will recognise the silence around this. Tvardovsky's preface there names The House in the Square among the war books, records in a subordinate clause that Kazakevich "before the war had been known only as the author of verses and poems in Yiddish", and says no more; the word "Yiddish" occurs once in that whole volume and "Jew" not at all. Here, in a book set in occupied Germany in 1945 and written by that same man, the Jews of Europe appear once, in a remark about backslapping.
It is not evasion by the author so much as the shape of what could be printed. But it is the thing to notice, and it is why the novel's real subject — whether a conquering army can make itself trusted — is being argued at one remove from the thing that made the question unanswerable.
The best scene in the book follows that conversation, and it is quiet. The commandant's platoon puts on its first amateur concert; the hall rocks with laughter; passers-by stop in the street to listen and melt away when they catch sight of "Oberstleutnant Davai" — Lieutenant-Colonel Give-Us, which is what the town calls him — watching them from the window. Tanya and Chokhov go back inside, and Lubentsov is left alone at the glass:
Watching the lights being turned on in the city, Lubentsov realized that the incredible had happened—he had fallen in love with Lauterburg, its streets and gardens, the paving stones of its squares, its tiled roofs and old alleys, the green hills round it and the people—most of them, but certainly not all—inhabiting it.
That parenthesis is the measure of the book's honesty: most of them, but certainly not all. And what he says next, half to himself, is the only thing a man in his position could say — that they must never think of attacking us again.
The last part is the best-judged and the least consoling. It opens on the demarcation line through the Harz, which at first runs "through the bracken, past small mountain waterfalls" and is "barely noticeable", and then
gradually it began to bristle with barbed wire, road blocks, and sentry boxes, to be guarded on one side by Soviet patrols, and on the other by British and American—in the hills by Scots in kilts, and further south by Yanks in steel helmets and baggy trousers. Slowly but surely it was assuming all the features of an international frontier.
Written in 1956, about 1946, this is a novelist watching a line in the woods turn into Germany's border for the next forty-three years, and saying so plainly. The Cold War arrives in this book not as denunciation but as fencing contractors.
And the ending is deliberately small. No summation, no speech. Lubentsov, Tanya and Voronin on a train going east, the trees casting dappled shadows over the compartment; and then two letters, five years later, in which we learn that Lubentsov is in his last year at the Frunze Academy and rents a room near Zubovsky Square, that Chokhov commands a battalion in the Transcaucasus and has a daughter called Tanya, and that Voronin "works at a shoe factory in Ivanovo. He is married now and has two children, I believe."
The last words of a novel about the government of a defeated nation are a shoe factory in Ivanovo and a man who is not quite sure how many children his old driver has.
This ebook has been rebuilt twice in this project and is worth a warning to whoever comes after.
The scan lost nine of the seventy chapter numerals outright, promoted a folio to a chapter heading, and left all three part titles and all three Tale of the Six Soldiers interludes unmarked, because their pages carry no text the scanner could read. None of that showed in a word count — no text was missing, only its divisions — so the automatic audit passed the book while it was in four pieces instead of seventy-five. Every position has since been fixed against the page, using the PDF's own letter-spaced text layer as a second witness where it preserved a numeral our derivation had lost. In this pass the closing section Two Letters, which the scan ran on to the last word of chapter 19, has been given its own heading, and a stray 'Q' — the ghost of a worn numeral on page 77 — has been removed from chapter 8's title.
There is no contents page to check the result against, because the book's own contents lists only the three parts. The structure printed in this edition is the structure of the 1956 text as the scan attests it.
Read the Memorandum. It takes four minutes and there is nothing else quite like it — a serving officer's fifteen rules for occupying a country, including the instruction to read Saltykov-Shchedrin "for he was a vice-governor himself and hence familiar with shortcomings in administration". (The Golovlyovs is in this collection, and the joke is better if you have read it.)
Read the fifth rule twice, because it is the argument the novel exists to make: that a commandant "is a revolutionary inasmuch as he represents a state and social system brought into being by revolution", and that his duty as a revolutionary is "to uphold law and order, to respect and guard the customs of the given country, in order to rid the people of that country which is not yet ripe for revolution, of all fear of revolution." Whether the Soviet Union did that in Germany is a question this book cannot ask. That its best officer thought it was the job is worth knowing.
And read the last page for what it does not say. The man who wrote it had been a Yiddish poet before the war — and, on the evidence of the preface to his Selected Works, a theatre manager and a collective-farm chairman in the Soviet Far East — then a divisional reconnaissance chief, then a Russian novelist; he published this in the most contested Soviet literary publication of 1956; and he died six years later. This volume tells you none of that, does not date itself, and does not name the person who put it into English.