Zhitkov and the Modernist Novel.

I’m finally reading Boris Zhitkov‘s Виктор Вавич (Viktor Vavich), and my thoughts on reading the opening paragraphs were as follows, in this order: “No wonder Pasternak liked it; this is a modernist novel; this guy has definitely read Bely.” Here is the opening (my translation, then the Russian):

The sunny day poured across the city. At noon the empty streets were languishing.

In the Vaviches’ courtyard the wind stirs the straw and gives up — too lazy to raise it. A puppy has placed its muzzle between its paws and is whining from boredom. It twitches its leg and raises dust. The dust is too lazy to fly, too lazy to settle, and it hangs in the air like sleepy gold, squinting in the sun.

And it was so quiet at the Vaviches’ that you could hear the horses chewing in the stable — like a car: “hram-hram.”

And all of a sudden, making the porch and his boots creak, the dashing young Vavich strutted into the courtyard. A volunteer of the second rank. With soft little, dark little mustaches. He tightened his belt: for whom, in the empty courtyard? His jackboots were polished — not government-issue but his own, and not foppish but moderate. Ingratiating jackboots. Not government-issue, but no cause for hazing. He held his rifle lightly, like a walking-stick, tilted forward. Impeccably cleaned. The ducks, startled, toddled into a corner, quacking in annoyance. And Viktor Vavich began to stamp out starting with the left foot, from the garden to the fence, at drill step:

“Hut-two!”

Солнечный день валил через город. В полдень разомлели пустые улицы.
У Вавичей во дворе шевельнет ветер солому и бросит — лень поднять. Щенок положил морду в лапы и скулит от скуки. Дрыгнет ногой, поднимет пыль. Лень ей лететь, лень садиться, и висит она в воздухе сонным золотом, жмурится на солнце.
И так тихо было у Вавичей, что слышно было в доме, как жуют в конюшне лошади — как машина: “храм-храм”.
И вдруг, поскрипывая крыльцом и сапогами, молодцевато сошел во двор молодой Вавич. Вольнопер второго разряда. С маленькими усиками, с мягонькими, черненькими. Затянулся ремешком: для кого, в пустом дворе? Ботфорты начищены, не казенные — свои, и не франтовские — умеренные. Вкрадчивые ботфорты. Не казенные, а цукнуть нельзя. Он легко, как тросточку, держал наперевес винтовку. Образцово вычищена. Утки всполошились, заковыляли в угол, с досады крякали. А Виктор Вавич от палисадника к забору с левой ноги стал печатать учебным шагом:
— Ать-два! .

I’m not at all confident of my translation in a couple of places: цукнуть is not in the dictionaries, but I’m assuming it’s a perfective form of цукать ‘to scold, reprimand,’ comparable to Ivan Savin’s 1924 “Но Главнокомандующий понял, что за любовь не наказывают. Главнокомандующий не цукнул”; учебный шаг is some sort of military pace between slow march and quick march — cf. Gleb Uspenksy’s 1869 “Узнала также от солдата, который, возвратясь с ученья, любил посидеть на крыльце и покурить трубочку, что прежде был тихий учебный шаг и скорый шаг, а теперь осталась одна пальба, а шаг запрещен” — but I have no idea how to render it appropriately, so I’ve used the literal “training pace.” [Changed to “hazing” and “drill step” thanks to helpful commenters.] Вольнопер is a colloquial [and contemptuous] shortening of вольноопределяющийся, which my Oxford dictionary defines as “‘volunteer’ (person with secondary education serving term in tsarist Russian army on privileged conditions)”; there’s obviously no way to convey any of that, so I’ve settled for “volunteer,” and I’m not sure what “второго разряда” (“of the second rank”) means in this context.

The immediate focus on the weather, the streets, the courtyard, the personification of the wind and the dust are pure Pasternak: opening my edition at random, I find Десятилетье пресни (“Глушь доводила до бесчувствия/ Дворы, дворы, дворы…”), Оттепелями из магазинов (“Небу под снег хотелось,/ Улицу бил озноб,/ Ветер дрожал за целость/ Вывесок, блях и скоб”), Весна (“Земля, земля волнуется,/ И катятся, как волны,/ Чернеющие улицы, —/ Им, ветреницам, холодно”), and in the second chapter of Детство Люверс [The Childhood of Luvers] there’s a passage starting “Стоял теплый, солнечный апрель” [It was a warm, sunny April] that resonates with the Zhitkov.

As for the modernism, it leaps to the eye, but I’m not sure how to define it. (If I’d been a literature major, I might have had a better set of tools for this.) What it reminded me of specifically was Bely’s 1913-14 Petersburg (see this post and the earlier ones linked therein), and that made me wonder what the similarity consisted of, and whether Bely’s was the first Russian modernist novel (it certainly was a major source for Russian modernism of the 1920s, like Pilnyak and Tynyanov). For that matter, what was the first modernist novel? I did some googling, and here are the results.

The earliest novel mentioned was Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), and yes, that’s a fine candidate, but in this context it’s too early: it heavily influenced writers for almost a century, but then realism swept the field. What was the first modern modernist novel? Some investigation suggests it was Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), which starts with exactly the inhuman impersonality I associate with the kind of prose I have in mind:

Comme il faisait une chaleur de 33 degrés, le boulevard Bourdon se trouvait absolument désert.

Plus bas le canal Saint-Martin, fermé par les deux écluses étalait en ligne droite son eau couleur d’encre. Il y avait au milieu, un bateau plein de bois, et sur la berge deux rangs de barriques.

Au delà du canal, entre les maisons que séparent des chantiers le grand ciel pur se découpait en plaques d’outremer, et sous la réverbération du soleil, les façades blanches, les toits d’ardoises, les quais de granit éblouissaient. Une rumeur confuse montait du loin dans l’atmosphère tiède ; et tout semblait engourdi par le désoeuvrement du dimanche et la tristesse des jours d’été.

Deux hommes parurent.

L’un venait de la Bastille, l’autre du Jardin des Plantes. Le plus grand, vêtu de toile, marchait le chapeau en arrière, le gilet déboutonné et sa cravate à la main. Le plus petit, dont le corps disparaissait dans une redingote marron, baissait la tête sous une casquette à visière pointue.

Quand ils furent arrivés au milieu du boulevard, ils s’assirent à la même minute, sur le même banc.

It is impossible to suppose we are going to be expected to sympathize or identify with these two men; they are being held out for inspection as if with tongs. The next novel mentioned in this context is Hamsun’s Hunger (1890); there’s no question that it’s modernist, but not in the sense I’m trying to get at. It begins (in Sverre Lyngstad’s translation) “It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its marks upon him. . . . Lying awake in my attic room, I hear a clock strike six downstairs.” That’s a first-person narration reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s The Double (see this post), and I assume Dostoevsky was a considerable influence on Hamsun; the modernism here is in the psychology, not the narration — there is not the immediate defamiliarization you get in the Flaubert. The same is true of Gide’s Paludes (1895: “Leur plaisanterie me parut prétentieuse, de sorte que je crus devoir n’entrer qu’après eux. Le salon d’Angèle etait déjà plein de monde ; au milieu de tous Angèle circulait…”), Conrad’s Nostromo (1904: “It was trying to the nerves. Old Viola had risen slowly, gun in hand, irresolute, for he did not see how he could prevent them. Already voices could be heard talking at the back. Signora Teresa was beside herself with terror”), and Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal (1904: “One of the few things, in fact about the only thing I was sure of was my name: Mattia Pascal. Of this I took full advantage also”). In fact, after Flaubert the first real exemplar I find is Bely’s first published work, the 1902 Simfoniya (2-ya, dramaticheskaya [Symphony (2nd, dramatic)], which begins (first the translation by Roger and Angela Keys, then the Russian):

1. A season of sweltering grind. The roadway gleamed blindingly.

2. Cab-drivers cracked their whips, exposing their worn, blue backs to the hot sun.

3. Yard-sweepers raised columns of dust, their grime-browned faces loudly exulting, untroubled by grimaces from passers-by.

Стояла душная страда. Мостовая ослепительно сверкала.

Трещали извозчики, подставляя жаркому солнцу истертые, синие спины.

Дворники поднимали прах столбом, не смущаясь гримасами прохожих, гогоча коричнево-пыльными лицами.

Here is clearly the kernel of the style he developed more luxuriantly in The Silver Dove (see this post) and to perfection in Petersburg; it only got a few years to flourish before Stalin shut down Russian literature, but it produced wonderful offspring, and Zhitkov’s novel is among them.

Incidentally, my wife and I, after spending a couple of years reading Trollope’s parliamentary novels, are now on his autobiography, and we’ve started watching the BBC adaptation of the novels, The Pallisers, which is absolutely splendid and which I heartily recommend to anyone with a fondness for period drama and great acting.

Addendum. I should add that Zhitkov, like Pasternak, is teaching me all sorts of new words; in the last couple of pages I’ve learned вейка ‘Finnish cabman’ (from Finnish veikko ‘brother’) and кокора ‘tree stump; uprooted tree.’ Also, the cabman says “рисать копек” [risat’ kopek] for тридцать копеек [tridtsat’ kopeek] ‘thirty kopecks”; I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve seen a Finnish accent represented in Russian.

Update (2020). In my survey of putative early modernist novels I forgot about Sologub’s Тяжёлые сны [Bad Dreams], first published in 1895, which begins:

Начало весны. Тихий вечер… Большой тенистый сад в конце города, над обрывистым берегом реки, у дома Зинаиды Романовны Кульчицкой, вдовы и здешней богатой помещицы…

The start of spring. A quiet evening… A large, shady garden at the edge of the city, over the steep slope of a river, by the house of Zinaida Romanovna Kulchitskaya, a local widow and rich landowner…

That clearly belongs in the line of modernism I’m trying to describe, and should replace Bely’s 1902 Simfoniya as “the first real exemplar” (which makes sense, since Bely was strongly influenced by Sologub).