Twelve pages into this novel the narrator stops and gives an instruction to the printer.
He has been explaining how Mikhail Beideman came to spend twenty years in the Alexeyev Ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress. There was no trial. There was an order of 2 November 1861 that he be left in solitary confinement pending special decree, and thereafter, on the first of every month for twenty years, the Emperor was informed that such and such a person was in such and such a prison, and each time it was his will that the order be continued in force.
The printer should always italicize these words, in order that their appearance, so conspicuous beside the monotonous type of the pages, might in some way startle the complacent reader, completely absorbed in his own joys and sorrows. Attention, dear reader! The special decree was never issued!
That is Olga Forsh in 1923, breaking the frame of a historical novel to tell the compositor how to set three words, so that a reader who is not paying attention will be made to. It is the sort of thing that was possible in Russian prose in 1923 and would not be possible again for a long time, and this volume reprints it without comment thirty-odd years later.
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. The half-title reads LIBRARY OF SOVIET LITERATURE. The credits leaf gives two names:
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY FAINNA SOLASKO DESIGNED BY A. VASIN
The Russian title page, in the scan's Latin lookalikes, is Одеты камнем — Clad in Stone, which is what Forsh called the book and which the English title abandons. The phrase survives inside: Part One's last chapter is "Encased in Stone During the Reign of Catherine II", and the narrator says of himself at the close of Part One, "Encased in stone as Mikhail was in 1861, I now take his place in 1923."
For the seventh Foreign Languages Publishing House volume in a row in this strand, there is no date and no copyright line. The last text leaf is followed by a "TO THE READER" card and a line saying the book was printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
But there are two jacket flaps, and they are the second-best apparatus in the FLPH run — better than most of the Progress forewords, because they are specific.
The front flap opens by quoting the phrase the novel is built on: "'Pending special decree'—these cold and heartless words determined the fate of Mikhail Beideman, Russian revolutionary, and one of the noblest men of his time." It names Dmitry Karakozov and Sergei Rusanin, notes that Rusanin's "soul was tortured by a feeling of guilt throughout his long life", and gives the novel's theme in the author's own words: "History has swept all into the grave, but it has not forgotten anything."
The back flap dates the volume for us, which is more than the copyright page does.
Olga Forsh, the oldest living Soviet writer, had the honour of opening the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in December, 1954.
So the book is after December 1954, and Forsh (1873–1961) was still alive when it was printed. Our catalogue's 1958 is a library record rather than the object's own statement, but nothing in the volume contradicts it and the flap is consistent with it.
The flap also supplies the one date that matters most: "Palace and Prison (1923), which went through nearly 20 printings". This is a novel of 1923 — the year of Lenin's last illness — appearing in English in the second half of the fifties. It is the oldest Soviet text in the fiction strand apart from Serafimovich's Iron Flood of 1924, and it comes from a moment of Russian prose that had been officially over for twenty years by the time this translation was made.
And then the flap does the thing this series exists to notice. It quotes Forsh on herself:
"The truth of the new way of life has helped me to perceive correctly all that was best in the culture of the old society... to determine my goal and see more clearly the problems confronting me in my work on the historical novel. In my creative searchings I have attempted to show history truthfully, to bind the interests of art with the revolutionary ideas of modern times."
And then glosses her:
"The truth of the new way of life" came to Olga Forsh when she was already a mature writer with an established world outlook. This new way of life swept her up so forcefully that she found she could not but dedicate herself to it completely.
Swept her up. Forsh was forty-four in 1917 and had been publishing since before the 1905 revolution. What the sentence covers is a decision — a woman of middle age, of gentry background, with an established manner, choosing the revolution and then writing historical novels about Russian revolutionaries for forty years. The flap turns that into weather.
Stalin: zero. Lenin: once. Marx: once. Party: five times.
Against that: Beideman seventy times, Tsar seventy-one, Karakozov thirty-five, Vrubel twenty-four, Herzen ten.
This is not an evasion; it is the book's subject. Palace and Prison is about the Russian revolutionary movement of the 1860s — the generation between the Decembrists and the Narodniki — and it uses real people. Mikhail Beideman was a real officer who was taken in 1861 and held without trial until he went mad. Dmitry Karakozov really did shoot at Alexander II in 1866 and was really hanged. Forsh's invention is Sergei Rusanin, Beideman's schoolfellow, who watches, does nothing, survives, and writes it all down in 1923 at the age of eighty-three.
Readers who have Yuri Trifonov's The Impatient Ones in this collection will recognise the territory: Trifonov's novel of 1972 is about Narodnaya Volya and Zhelyabov, and Karakozov is in it too. The two books are fifty years apart and take the same question — what were the terrorists of the 1860s and 1870s, and what is owed to them — from opposite ends of Soviet history.
It is a confession, and its engine is guilt rather than heroism.
Rusanin begins on 12 March 1923, his eighty-third birthday, with something that "crased every last vestige I ever had of a nobleman's monarchist feeling" — the scan damages the verb, so the sentence is not quoted whole here — and with a seal falling from his lips, enabling him to make public a matter he had kept secret.
What he kept secret is how Mikhail died. And at the very end, having told it, he arrives at his own verdict. Vera, who loved Beideman and waited for him, is laid out with copper coins on her eyelids, and one eye will not close; an old woman says that means she has to find her enemy.
I am that enemy. I did not fulfil Vera's last wish. I did not tell anyone how Mikhail died a slow death, neither then, nor in 1905, when an historian appealed to the public to shed some light on the matter. They have found out about it from the archives without my help. But I did not want any unpleasantness and lived quietly on my estate, and was often drunk.
That is the moral centre of the book: not the martyr in the ravelin but the friend who could have spoken in 1905 and did not, because he "did not want any unpleasantness".
Forsh then does something extraordinary with the ending. Rusanin goes mad on the page — the hoopoe of Vera's story begins tapping in his brain, "No good here... no good here" — and the prose breaks into a suicide performed to music:
I'm putting down my pen, for I must hold my head and teach my arms to be wings—flap! flap! At the first sound of the music tomorrow and the words "Tis the final conflict...." One! Slit my throat! Two! Go through the window head-first!
The music is the Internationale. The last representative of the old order kills himself on the downbeat of the new one, and the book ends with him flying over the city. A novel that began with an instruction to the compositor ends with a man counting himself out of a window.
Part Two is stranger than Part One and is worth being warned about.
It opens with a chapter called "Black Vrubel", and its first sentence dissolves the whole realist premise. Both scans lose the decorative capital that begins it, so it cannot be quoted from its first letter; what it says is that Sergei Rusanin and Mikhail Beideman are one and the same person. Rusanin then explains that he found out only gradually "about the permeability of bodies and the possibility of taking possession of another person's personality. It came about after I had become the son of Mikhail's mother, the lover of his mistress." Mikhail Vrubel, the painter — who really did die insane in 1910 — walks through the later chapters, and by the end the reader cannot be sure which of the narrator's twenty years of memory happened.
Whether this is a device or a symptom is exactly the question Forsh wants open. It is also, in 1923, unmistakably of its moment: the ravelin, the doubled self, the artist going mad, the occultist salon in Part One where Countess Kushina's Sunday gatherings are held in a library "that spoke of its owner's passion for occultism". None of this belongs to the socialist-realist novel that would be legislated eleven years later, and all of it survives in this reprint because nobody rewrote the book.
Two things, and they are of different orders.
The first is small and worth fixing in passing: nowhere does the book tell an English reader that Palace and Prison is Одеты камнем, or that the phrase means clad in stone, or that Forsh's title is a metaphor which the translated one turns into a pair of buildings. The novel's own chapter titles preserve it — "Encased in Stone During the Reign of Catherine II" — but nothing connects them to the book's name.
The second is larger. This is a novel about a man imprisoned for twenty years without trial on an administrative order that was renewed, unexamined, on the first of every month, and about a witness who stayed silent for forty years because he "did not want any unpleasantness". It was published in the Soviet Union in 1923 and reprinted, the flap says, nearly twenty times. It was translated into English and sold abroad in the second half of the 1950s.
The volume offers no gloss on that at all — no foreword, no note, no editorial sentence of any kind between the flap copy and the first chapter. It does not have to. A reader in Moscow in 1956 who had just heard the Twentieth Congress speech, or a reader in London who had read about it, would supply the gloss unaided: pending special decree is a formula for indefinite detention by administrative order, and the book's horror is that the machinery does not need malice, only a monthly signature. Whether the house that chose to reissue it in those years saw what it was doing is not recorded, and cannot be recovered from the object.
What can be said is that the choice was made twice. Somebody kept Palace and Prison in print in Russian through the 1930s and 1940s; somebody else put it into English after 1954. It is the oldest Soviet novel in this fiction strand, the least assimilated to any doctrine, and the only one whose subject is a prisoner nobody remembered to release.
This ebook had been built with seventeen divisions. The book has twenty-two.
The printed contents gives two parts of ten chapters each. Three separate scanner faults had eaten the difference. Every chapter opens with a decorative headpiece that the scanner reads as noise, and Part One's chapter I emerged as CHAPTER | followed by a line consisting of a single bar — so the first two chapters of the novel fell outside the built book entirely, and it began at chapter III. The numeral II came through as Il — capital I, lower-case L — in both of the book's chapter twos, so Part Two's chapter II had been swallowed by its chapter I, which came out at 9,408 words against a 2,500–5,000 average. And neither PART title exists as text in the scan, so nothing marked the division between them.
All three are repaired, the two part titles are inserted, and a fragment of headpiece wreckage that had been adopted as chapter VII's subtitle has been removed. The volume now divides exactly as its contents page says, at 264 to 333 words per printed page throughout.
Read the first twelve pages for the instruction to the printer, which tells you what kind of book this is going to be.
The other flap sentence to keep in view is the one listing what else she wrote: the trilogy Radishchev, "about a Russian revolutionary, author of the famous Journey from Petersburg to Moscow"; Mikhailovsky Castle, "about the talented architect Rossi and his tragic fate"; and Freedom's Firstlings, "about the Decembrists". Radishchev was exiled by Catherine II for a book; the Decembrists were hanged or sent to Siberia by Nicholas I; Rossi built the centre of Petersburg and died poor. Forsh spent forty years writing about Russians destroyed by the Russian state for what they made or said, and this volume prints the list without remark, two pages after describing her as having been swept up by the truth of the new way of life.
Read Part One for the thing Forsh was best at — the salons, the Round Room, the lindens, the Italian trip — and for the slow closing of the trap on a young man who said the wrong thing once.
Read Part Two knowing that the narrator has stopped being reliable, and that Forsh knows it.
And read the back flap last, because it is where the volume states its own problem. A writer of forty-four in 1917, from the class this novel dissects, wrote in 1923 a book about a man buried alive by the state for twenty years without trial, and about the friend who stayed silent about it for forty. Thirty-odd years later the same state's export house printed it in English, described her as having been "swept up" by the new way of life, and dated the volume nowhere.
Forsh's own sentence is the better epigraph, and the flap quotes it: History has swept all into the grave, but it has not forgotten anything.