This is one of those posts that will not be of much general interest, but as sometimes happens I have to vent my irritation and you are all the victims. Marietta Shaginyan is now probably utterly forgotten even in her homeland; back in the day, she was known largely for a series of worshipful books on Lenin and a few cheeky pseudo-adventure novels from the 1920s (back before such things became libri non grati). I happened to have Vol. 2 of her Collected Works, which contains two of the latter: Месс-менд, или Янки в Петрограде (tr. Mess-Mend: Yankees in Petrograd) and Кик [Kik]. I tried the first, which is relatively well known, and liked it to some extent, but once I got the idea I quailed at the thought of reading hundreds more pages of it, so I thought I’d give the later — and much shorter — work a try.
At first I enjoyed it quite a bit. It starts with a list of characters involved with the brand-new Amanausskaya Pravda, the four-page newspaper of the Amanaus sanatorium somewhere in the Caucasus; having been a wall newspaper, it has graduated to its first printed edition, and after a series of letters from the editor to potential contributors, the book reproduces it for us: an editorial celebrating the end of the Civil War and the beginning of socialist reconstruction, a local-news section (The Arrival of Comrade Lvov, A Convent Has Become a Factory, etc.), a brief poem, an essay on the mineral riches of the region, and so on, the final item being an ad for a new movie The Deed Is Done being shown at the Svetozar Cinema. But it turns out there is no such movie, the ad is suspected of being a White plot, and various people connected with the paper are called in for questioning by the GPU. Furthermore, Comrade Lvov has disappeared while on a trip hunting bison. Mystery! We then get documents written by the people arrested: a poem, a novella, a melodrama in verse (called Колдунья и коммунист ‘The witch and the communist,’ abbreviated as Кик, whence the title), and a movie treatment (with digressions on geology), all incomplete. It’s good fun, and the reader is eager to know how it will be resolved.
Alas, the final section consists of a speech by the purportedly missing Lvov, who reveals that the whole thing was a setup, a trap to catch the counterrevolutionary White bandits who had been planning to overthrow Soviet power in the region. Much worse, he then turns to analyzing the literary submissions in political terms, explaining how each was weakened by adherence to prerevolutionary norms and comes alive only when the lessons learned from the genius of Lenin were applied. And then I read the preface she wrote thirty years later, in which she explained that the whole adventure-novel element was just a pretext for the literary lesson she wanted to impart to herself and others (she went on to write Гидроцентраль [Hydroelectric plant], about the construction of a power station in northern Armenia, which has been called “talentless,” and those books on Lenin, starting with Билет по истории [History exam], which was absurdly rendered as “Ticket to History” in a reference work). What a letdown! “It was all a lesson on socialist realism” is even worse than “It was all a dream.”
On the plus side, at least part of it is set in Abkhazia, and it includes a couple of sentences in Abkhaz: Адàгуа iзvн фýнт адаvл адvрhòм (translated as ‘they don’t beat the drum twice for a deaf person’) and Aqynàл мбvлгоз ахфà ахащèiт (‘the clay pot rolled along and covered itself with a lid along the way’). I have no idea if they’re real Abkhaz or if they mean what they’re said to. And I finally looked up the obviously Armenian surname Shaginyan, which turns out to be Shahinyan (Շահինյան) in Armenian, and discovered it’s from Shahin, “a female or male given name which is the Persian term for hawk or falcon,” which I should have figured out for myself (I once had a boss named Shaheen, and boy did we celebrate when she was fired), but I guess I was thrown off by the Russian -g- for -h-.
Apropos “Shahin”, I couldn’t help remembering Galich’s immortal Милицанерку Леночку and its closing line,
Шахиню Эль-Потапову узнал весь белый свет
which of course shares the same etymology.
Back in the days we had to read too much Lenin hagiography and to write essays about these books, and as far as I can still remember, Shaginyan’s Lenin series was somewhat fresher / weirder / less nauseous (although her own life story was pretty disgusting, of course). But I tried purging it all out of memory and so only vague memories remain. Equally vague memories of Mess-Mend, which I remember as a shapeless / too long adventure story which must have come from an author just beginning to master literary craft. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as what we had to read instead (we had to cover the 1920s prose in the Russian literature classes, and whatever was recommended for reading was much worse)
“same etymology”
Well, -in is a coincidence:) (just saying. of course you understand that)
Yes, the first Galich’s song as a dissident singer-songwriter (as opposed to songwriter for movies).
And thank you for Эль! I alwaus though it is just L. (which does not makes sense because she must be Je. then):)
Huzza for the counterrevolutionary bandits! Although of course seven decades later when the Bolshevik Yoke was finally lifted, it turned out that not all counterrevolutionary or post-revolutionary forces were in harmony and Abkhazia was rent by violence and atrocities where none of the contending factions were explicitly Bolshevistic.
Heresy! The GPU, I mean KGB, I mean FSB will be contacting you shortly…
whatever was recommended for reading was much worse
Oh, I believe that!
I see that wikipedia says of her ‘She was one of the “fellow travelers” of the 1920s led by the Serapion Brotherhood and became one of the most prolific communist writers experimenting in satirico-fantastic fiction.[‘ What could possibly go wrong with a set-up like that?
EDITED TO ADD: Now I realize I don’t know if “satirico-fantastic fiction” is a one-off coinage by an Anglophone wikipedia contributor or a translation of an established Russian genre label.
Oh, and I love the detail that one portion of her odious Lenin hagiography “caused a scandal because it revealed that Lenin was part Kalmyk.” I guess there was no Russian catch-phrase of the day equivalent to “not that there’s anything wrong with that”?
Sounds as if somebody should write a new ending replacing or following the speech by Lvov. i happen to be busy this week, and I don’t know Russian, so…
Эль! I alwaus though it is just L.
Well it was made vague on purpose, Эль the letter L and Эль the Arabic article
Both Abkhaz proverbs are included on this page, with breakdowns in Russian. Search on the following two strings:
Is the second proverb used on the occasion of an unexpected stroke of good fortune or a pleasant encounter on a journey?
(А)даул looks like a loanword, from Turkish طاول davul.
Thanks, I was hoping somebody would be able to do something with the Abkhaz! And yes, that does look like a Turkish loan.
In which case it’s related to tabla.