Casting about for something to read, I glanced at my old Soviet collected works of Aleksandr Kuprin (which I have thanks to the generosity of jamessal) and realized that I’d hardly read anything by him, so I hauled down vol. 5 and decided to try his 1917 Звезда Соломона (translated, by one Maria K., as The Star of Solomon and originally published in the journal Zemlya as Каждое желание [Every desire]), which Dmitry Bykov called one of the main novellas of the period and Kuprin’s best (there’s an extended quote from him at the end of the Russian Wikipedia article).
The basic plot is easy to describe (and critics at the time thought it was simple-minded and a sign of Kuprin’s decline): petty clerk Ivan Tsvet meets a mysterious fellow who says he’s a lawyer named Mefodii Isaevich Toffel (Mef. Is. Toffel = Mephistopheles, as Tsvet eventually realizes). Toffel tells Tsvet a hitherto unknown uncle has died and left him his estate, which is in ruinous condition, but he has to hurry and claim it before potential rivals grab it, so he has to leave that very day — Toffel has already gotten Tsvet leave from his work and bought the necessary tickets. When he gets to the estate, it is deserted and, as advertised, in a state of near-collapse, but he decides to spend the night there anyway and winds up absorbed in a dusty old book of magick which contains a drawing of a star of Solomon with various letters inscribed in it. He tries various combinations (Tanorifogemas? Morfogenatasi?) before crying out in a sudden inspiration “Afro-Amestigon!” This is the secret name Toffel badly wants to know, but Tsvet forgets it for a long time, during which he becomes (thanks to Toffel’s supernatural intervention) rich and successful, his every desire fulfilled (sometimes to his dismay, as when he goes to the circus and has a momentary wish to see an acrobat fall, which immediately happens). He lives in a mansion and is invited everywhere in his provincial city, but turns out to have only the most modest desires, and when in the end Toffel reveals all (after Tsvet remembers the name and tells him), he says his modesty has saved both of them — anyone else would have gone for worldly power and been doomed. Tsvet then finds himself back in his old modest quarters, wondering if it was all a dream. Bykov sees this as an attempt to answer the great question of the 20th century: what’s better — omnipotence and genius, or an ordinary, simple human life? But that’s putting far too much weight on its shoulders; it’s more of an enjoyable picaresque based on a fantastic plot element. And that reminded me of some other writer; I eventually realized it was Alexei Slapovsky (see this post). Both men started as reporters, which doubtless gave them a knowing and cynical view of the world; their work isn’t Great Literature, but it’s enjoyable and can be thought-provoking.
My favorite element in the story is the woman he sees from a train window and falls in love with; naturally they meet up (thanks, Mef. Is. Toffel!), but they don’t wind up getting together. At the end, after he’s back in his old life, he runs into her at a racetrack and finds that she remembers him as well; they share their reminiscences (“Yes, you threw me a bouquet of lilacs, I remember!”)… but then she suddenly says “But you’re not him. That was a dream,” and bids him farewell. It’s a nice Gogolian touch that casts a melancholy light over the whole gauzy tale.
Мефодий is apparently what happened when Russians transmogrified the name of Μεθόδιος/Methodius because they couldn’t pronounce the θ. No doubt someone out there with a weakness for drug humor has created an amphetamine-enthusiast “Methistopheles” character. It would be more learned-seeming and maybe even helpful to transliterate the ф in Russian loanwords of Greek origin as “ph” but for whatever reasons that doesn’t seem to be the custom.
Why would it be? English John and Matthew are not spelled according to the Hebrew transliteration of their forebears.
@Y: Hebrew is a different kettle of fish. English orthography has a well-established practice (carried over from Latin) of using the “ph” digraph for Greek-origin loanwords where there’s a φ (or ϕ) in the Greek spelling of the original, so doing the same for Greek loanwords into Cyrillic-scripted languages would be parallel and harmonious.
Oh, I see what you mean. I misread you as arguing for spelling Мефодий with a th. But still, that ф is not Greek, it’s Russian.
Before 1918 wouldn’t it have been spelled with a etymological ѳ?
Hmm. Was Kuprin’s “Mef. Is. Toffel” joke (or Heavy Symbolism or what have you) completely an artifact of the Bolshevik spelling change, or would it have still worked before then because Ѳ and Ф were pronounced the same and readers would have sounded it out in their heads?
It couldn’t have been an artifact of the Bolshevik spelling change, because it was written and published before the Bolshies took over. The spelling doesn’t matter that much, it’s the sound that counts.
“But you’re not him. That was a dream”
Was she also visited by a female version of Mephodiy Isaevich? Who is a female version, btw?
Good question — he should have written a companion story from her point of view.
Actually, that might be an interesting prompt for a modern writer.
Let me amend my prior phrasing to the more precise “Bolshevik-implemented-and-enforced spelling change.” I daresay the 1917 proposal, however, bourgeois-reformist and Kadet-affiliated many of its proposers may have been, did not have so much historical-inevitability momentum behind it by the end of October that the Совет народных комиссаров was powerless to make its own subsequent decision whether or not to implement it.