In the longest story in this book, the respectable ladies of Versailles come out after the Commune to look at the prisoners.
They are roped together in the dark outside four requisitioned buildings — the Stables, the Castle Hothouse, the Saint-Cyr-l'École manège, the Satory Docks. The ladies inspect them. Mme Loriot, whose husband is mayor of the sixth arrondissement, asks a woman where she tore her skirt.
A flush appeared beneath the dirt on the woman's face. "The Versailles soldiers tried to rape me." "What did you say?" cried Mme Fabre, leaning forward. "Our gallant liberators? And you have the face to say such a thing? They jumped into blazing houses to save the children!"
Two girls under a parasol push forward, wanting to know exactly where it happened. And then a voice from the end of the line: "Why don't you send those little piglets home to bed? Isn't it enough for the big ones to enjoy themselves here?" The commandant, who fears nothing so much as an incident that might suggest "he was not capable of managing his animals", goes red and swishes his whip and shouts: "Look down when decent ladies pass, all of you!"
The ladies go on searching the crowd "for interesting specimens". Their cheeks are flushed. "What amazing creatures! Their savage customs and almost unbelievable vices were so exciting to read about in the daily newspapers!"
That is from Clemence Perrier's Death, sixteen thousand words on the suppression of the Paris Commune, written by a Latvian in 1930. It is the best thing in this volume and one of the best things in this collection, and there is not a single word of Marxist vocabulary in it anywhere.
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. The half-title reads LIBRARY OF SOVIET LITERATURE. The credits leaf gives three names:
TRANSLATED FROM THE LETTISH BY T. ZALITE EDITED BY R. DAGLISH DESIGNED BY B. MARKEVICH
"Lettish" for Latvian is already archaic by 1955 and worth noticing: this is a book made by a Russian-language house for an English readership, and the language it translates from is named in the form an English reader of 1900 would have recognised. Robert Daglish edits, as he does the German volume in this series and as he translates the Bondarev and the Tvardovsky preface — the same handful of people made the whole imprint's English.
And then, for the fifth Foreign Languages Publishing House volume in a row in this strand: no date, no copyright line, no colophon, and no note of any kind about the author. The last leaf carries a "TO THE READER" card inviting comments and nothing else. There is no foreword, no afterword, no biography, no editorial statement.
The contents lists twelve stories and their page numbers. That is the entire apparatus of a 362-page book.
Upīts dates his stories, and the volume keeps the dates at the foot of each one. Set them in order:
1902, 1903, 1905, 1914, 1920, 1922, 1923, 1925, 1930, 1930.
Every story in this Library of Soviet Literature volume was written before Latvia was a Soviet republic. The earliest three are from the Russian Empire, before and during the 1905 revolution. The rest are from the independent Latvian Republic of 1920–1940. Not one was written under Soviet rule, and not one is a socialist-realist work.
Which is the more interesting once you know who was being published.
Andrejs Upīts (4 December 1877 – 17 November 1970) was, at the moment this book appeared, one of the most powerful literary officials in the Soviet Union. He was Chairman of the Union of Writers of the Latvian SSR from 1944 to 1954 — the decade of the Sovietisation of Latvia, the deportations, and the reconstruction of Latvian letters. He founded and directed the Institute of Language and Literature of the Latvian Academy of Sciences from 1946 to 1952. His 1945 novel Zaļā zeme took the USSR State Prize in 1946. And in 1957 he received the Latvian SSR State Prize for a book called Sociālistiskā reālisma jautājumi literatūrā — Problems of Socialist Realism in Literature.
None of that is in this volume. The man who wrote the Latvian handbook on socialist realism, and who ran the republic's writers for ten years, is represented for the English-speaking world by a dozen stories he wrote between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-three, under two other states, in a manner that owes far more to Maupassant and to the nineteenth-century Latvian anticlerical tradition than to anything laid down at the First Congress of Soviet Writers.
The count here is the shortest in the strand and the most startling.
Stalin: zero. Lenin: zero. Marx: zero. The word Party occurs once, and it is a hunting party — "The three others of his party stare thoughtfully". Communist occurs once, in dialogue, as an accusation: "are a socialist, perhaps even a communist. I ought to..." Bolshevik occurs three times, twice in the mouths of people who fear them.
What the book is full of instead: God, forty-five times. Baron, thirty-seven. Riga, forty-one. Priest, ten.
A collection of stories about God, priests and Baltic German barons, issued by a Soviet state publisher in a series called the Library of Soviet Literature, under the name of the president of a Soviet Writers' Union.
They are provincial, cold, and very funny in a way that hurts.
The Romantic (1902) opens on the market-place of Laicene, where the photographer Mikelis Maigais has his workshop looking out over "the muddy, unpaved square framed with garbage heaps and centred about a water-pump that was protected by a ramshackle wooden shed". Peasant carts come in from Kurzeme with curds and groats and live piglets. That is Upīts's world: small towns, mud, and people whose romanticism has nowhere to go.
Hue and Cry (1903) begins at dawn on a Sunday: "The gentlefolk on the Apare estate are still asleep....", and ends with dogs still after their quarry in the distance. It is a hunt, and the quarry is a man.
The Flight of a Hen contains the funniest page in the book, which is also a small essay on provincial hospitality as a form of captivity. Three visiting wives — the forester's, the estate manager's, and a third who says only "Hm-m" — try to leave, and Mrs. Meyer will not let them:
"But I beg you!" cries Mrs. Meyer, not only her face, but her whole body expressing resolute protest. "We must have some tea, and then... and besides... you must wait for the men to come home. You can go back with the same horses.... They've gone for a little drive—I mean to say..."
The men are not out for a drive. Upīts's method in these stories is to give you the sentence a person says and let the gap between it and the truth do the work; he almost never explains.
Contending Passions is, of all things, a story about literary politics. Its protagonist Zile is a playwright watching his own dress rehearsal, listening to "praise and criticism", joking and arguing while his mind is elsewhere, and discovering that the company resents him: "Perhaps the actors had something against the leading lady of the play; perhaps they simply resented the idea of an author having an opinion about the respective aptitudes of actors and the casting of a play." And then the sentence that a reader who knows what Upīts became cannot pass over: "Zile could never tell where, in this world, objective judgement ended and plain subjective interests began."
That is a young writer's observation about a theatre. Thirty years later the man who wrote it would be chairing the body that decided which Latvian writers were published.
The best of the Latvian material is in Metamorphoses, the volume's longest story, which carries a whole province through the 1905 revolution, the war, and 1917. A pastor detests his handyman Abol, who "had had one son in Siberia since 1906, while the other had joined the Red Army and left with the Bolsheviks" — and realises "the full weight of his own folly in giving a job and a home to this atheist and rioter." Later, "Kerensky's commissar arrived from Petrograd and took up lodgings in the Brivuls' living room", and, having nobody else to talk to, pours out his heart to a young woman of the house
about the blind fanaticism of the Bolshevik agitators, and about the catastrophic state of Russia. He unfolded to her the whole programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, promising to the Latvians autonomous rights and liberation from the yoke of the barons, if only the Latvian riflemen stood firm, if only they did not allow themselves to be misled.
The Latvian Riflemen were the decisive armed force of October, and here they are seen from a manor house, as the subject of a lodger's persuasion. Upīts does not editorialise. He lets the commissar make his offer — autonomy, and the end of the barons, in exchange for holding firm — and lets the reader remember how it went.
Four of the twelve are religious fables, and they are the oddest thing in the book.
Outside Paradise (1922), which gives the volume its title, is the expulsion from Eden told from Adam and Eve's side. Outside, the stars are not the wan things they were in the garden: they "sparkled and glittered scintillating blue like a thousand eyes all turned upon the exiled sinners", and the fear the pair feel is mingled with "a thrill of delight they had never yet experienced". Adam's speech at the end is the volume's argument:
"And if we suffer hunger, and thirst, and weariness—what of it? We know now that there is rest and relief. We shall not fear Jehovah's ever-present eye, nor his anger. We ourselves shall conquer, and we ourselves command. My arms will support us by day, and your hair will warm us by night. "We have lost Paradise. We shall gain the earth!"
That is a Promethean humanism with a Latvian accent, written in the second year of Latvian independence, and it is about as far from Problems of Socialist Realism in Literature as a sentence can get and still be written by the same man. It is also, if you want it to be, a paraphrase of the last line of the Internationale — and the beauty of it is that Upīts never says so.
Jehovah's Transformation, The Atheist and God's Finger complete the set. The last, from 1930, ends with a priest's dinner and two boys with bowed heads on whom, the narrator observes, God's finger has smitten hard.
It is worth asking the obvious question, since the book will not.
Why does a state publisher, in about 1955, put out three hundred and sixty pages of an official's early work — none of it Soviet, none of it socialist realist, much of it anticlerical fable and provincial satire — and present it to the English-speaking world as Soviet literature?
Part of the answer is simply that it is the good work. Zaļā zeme won the State Prize; nobody chose to translate it here. What travels is the 1930 Commune novella and the 1902 small-town stories, because they are better.
Part of it is that the early Upīts was translatable in a way the late Upīts was not: a book of stories set in Latvian manor houses, revolutionary Paris and the Garden of Eden could be sold to a foreign reader who would have put down a novel about collectivised Latvian agriculture.
And part of it — the part this series exists to point at — is that by 1955 the category "Soviet literature" had become an administrative one. It did not mean literature written under socialism, or about it, or according to its doctrine. It meant literature by writers the Union of Soviet Writers claimed. Upīts was claimed, comprehensively; he was the man doing the claiming in Latvia. So his 1902 stories about a provincial photographer became Soviet literature retrospectively, by virtue of what their author later became, and the volume does not have to argue the point because it never states it.
Which is why the absence of a biographical note matters more here than in any other book in the strand. Without it, the English reader meets a fine, bleak, funny minor European story-writer of the early twentieth century. With it, he meets the same writer and the literary administrator of a Soviet republic during its most brutal decade, and has to decide what the relation between them is. The volume declines to raise the question by declining to date itself or describe its author.
The twelve story titles in this volume are set decoratively, in a display face the scanner could not read at all: the opening of Hue and Cry, for instance, came through as Z / a / ADX / \ / \ / wy \ and then straight into the prose. Every title in this ebook has therefore been placed from the volume's own contents page, which gives both the title and its printed page number, matched against the scan's page map — nothing is guessed, and the twelve landing points each fall on a leaf that begins a story. One stray character from that wreckage, the Z at the head of page 23, had been adopted as a subtitle and appeared in the contents of earlier builds as "Hue and Cry — Z"; it has been removed. A second bare Z elsewhere in the same story is a section divider — a numeral the scanner lost — and has deliberately been left where it is.
Read Clemence Perrier's Death first. It is a full-dress historical novella about the Bloody Week and its aftermath, written by a man who had never been to Paris, and it is exact about the thing that matters: not the barricades, which are over before it starts, but the disposal — the bodies at Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse, the Buttes-Chaumont ditches, the prisons at Versailles, and the ladies with parasols coming out to look. Its method is to keep the camera on the victors and let them talk.
Read Metamorphoses for the pastor and Abol and the commissar from Petrograd, which is the whole of the Latvian twentieth century compressed into a house.
Read Outside Paradise for the sentence the book is named after.
Read Contending Passions if you want the volume's private joke, and The Flight of a Hen if you want to know why Upīts was worth translating at all: he is very good on the small brutalities of politeness, on people trapped in rooms by other people's hospitality, and on the exact words in which someone lies about where the men have gone.
And read the dates at the foot of each story, because they are the only piece of evidence the volume gives you about itself. Nineteen-two to nineteen-thirty, in a Library of Soviet Literature, by a man who was then running the Writers' Union of the Latvian SSR and would shortly be given a state prize for a book about socialist realism. Nothing in these pages is socialist realist. Somebody in Moscow knew that, chose these twelve stories anyway, and printed no date on the result.