Socialist Surrealism

...This is not a fault, for Tertz can achieve superb artistic effects by sheer narrative manner...

...The turmoil of the hero's personality is resolved as one aspect of him attains a sexual climax with Lida, while the other, who at the time is shaving (a classic castration image), commits suicide...

...In four months you lose 33 pounds clear...

...In another story, "The Icicle," in which the hero is a writer who has the power to see into the future, there is an outlandish, rapid-fire confrontation with a rival in which descriptions of love-making are hurled against predictions of future illnesses...

...He is the main attraction and, I think, very nearly the only one whom we accept as alive and important to us...

...In his essay...

...So no one should be deterred on that account from reading these amazing stories...

...In "The Icicle" Tertz writes, ". . . he twirled a closed cigarette case with Three Epic Heroes on the cover . . . ," and Hayward simply deletes mention of the picture...

...The protagonist's revulsion at seeing his host, whom he hates, kiss this "man" is a clear Oedipal defense mechanism which is extended to include other women (in his eyes, the female guests are NKVD-like men in disguise...

...Then, when he has need of it a few lines later, he cooly inserts a "Three Knights engraved on the lid" where Tertz has none...

...The primitive sexuality of the story is underscored by Tertz's treatment of minor details such as the food at the banquet and, later, shared with Lida, the "piles of yellowed snow" which strongly suggest excrement...

...Time and again he treats his texts with a casualness that takes him beyond the thorny confines of translation and into the freer realms of editing and paraphrase...

...I have a bigger bone to pick with Hayward...

...In "The Graphomaniacs," the subject is the one that Tertz knows best: writing in the Soviet Union...

...The protagonist of this story is a "double" personality who speaks now in one voice, now in another...

...And do you know who that was, Sergei Sergeevich...

...Now, aside from the fact that three knights and three epic heroes are not exactly interchangeable images and that no mention was made of engraving, what was the point of the change...

...the others, by Ronald Hingley...

...The action begins in a dinner scene reminiscent of that in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, with the neat added suggestion of a political inquisition...

...He is convinced that material from his manuscripts has been stolen by such writers as Fedin, Sholokhov, Leonov, and even François Mauriac ("I long racked my brain as to just how this happened, until it dawned on me that the thieves could even send copies of my works across the border...

...On Socialist Realism, Tertz called for a "phantasmagoric art...

...Twelve positions...

...First we lie . . ." ". . . It starts with T.B...

...Now, in his Fantastic Stories (the title is borrowed from that of a collection of supernatural tales by E. T. A. Hoffman), he has set about to answer his own call...

...She longs for her Nikolasha...

...The protagonist, Pavel Straustin, is an unsuccessful writer and also a pseudo-neurotic or "larval" schizophrenic...

...The double-entendre is self-evident...

...Third position, she's lying on her side, and I'm lying on my side . . ." "At the Circus" is a story which stands somewhat apart from the others in that its protagonist, a young drifter who becomes a pickpocket and a murderer by chance, is a realistically and engagingly drawn character...

...From somewhere and someone in the Soviet Union a voice is talking to us, and if the tone is somewhat shaky at times—as all ventriloquial speech must be—its intent and character are not really open to question...

...But the translations do read very well, and, fortunately, the great majority of the errors are of the "Three Knights" variety...

...You and I," on the other hand, though equally complex, is a brilliant and carefully executed examination of paranoia and internal sexual conflict...

...You'll be racked with coughing and hope it's bronchitis...

...Only he is not playing for laughs or applause, but for keeps...

...Still, Tertz can achieve marvelous comic effects, such as in "The Graphomaniacs," when Straustin sits in an editor's waiting room and dreams of performing "all the humiliating procedures" over the secretary, only to have that same secretary's "well-developed body, ripe for shame" block his path as he tries to get into the editor's office...

...I well recalled one rule— a person is more accessible from below, and, if you are standing before him on your knees, you can at any moment seize him by the legs and throw him on his back...

...The struggle between the homoand heterosexual elements of his personality continues to the end...

...Straustin imagines everyone around him to be writing, writing— who will be left to read?—and even sees a rival in his small son and an enemy in his wife...

...The translations of "The Icicle" and "You and I" are by Max Hayward...

...Perhaps such deviations would not be worthy of note if they never exceeded this one in significance, but in the same story, for example, Hayward has given the reader three dots for an entire paragraph...

...Similarly, Straustin speaks of the West where "it's simpler, more ruthless...

...The man is a ventriloquist by profession...

...Abnormal psychology, of which Tertz clearly has a deep understanding, figures prominently in all the stories, but the aptness of its application varies...

...Passages such as this one may be compared with the best of Henry Miller: "Right here on this sofa...

...The apartment becomes a womb where he hides from Lida peering at him through a letter slot...

...Why that was Ninochka come to us...

...This story and "You and I" are my own favorites in the collection and, if I do not undertake discussion of "At the Circus" in the limited space available here, that is simply a mark of my respect for it...

...The hero (one half of him, that is) has been invited to a 25th anniversary wedding party, but we are informed by him that the anniversary is bogus and, in fact, that the wife is really a man...

...The duality should be seen as an emblematic and not a clinical representation...

...By far the most serious fault is his failure to include Tertz's epigraph to "You and I" (Genesis: XXXII, 24)—again, why?—which is extremely important to the story...

...In the other stories there are frequently passages in which sex is introduced "for its own sake," and these have little justification save as gestures of defiance against the prudery of Soviet writing...

...In the case of "The Tenants," which is the only failure of the five, psychological motifs combine with a highly convoluted prose and demonic, animistic imagery ("See under the bed, the rat running...

...The five stories in this book, in spite of the diversity of their themes, are unified by the passages they all share, which, while ostensibly direct statements from characters, are also asides from Tertz...

...to wind the story into an artistic and psychological impasse...

...All the translations read extremely smoothly...

...Some lord or other publishes his little book of vers libre, and it can be seen at once that it's crap," and here too, one catches an ironic reference to our squandered freedom...

...The success of "The Graphomaniacs" is thus both specific (the writer in Russia) and general (the irrational neuroses of all writers...

...Tertz's manner can be most surrealistic, and doubtless the paragraph seemed somewhat obscure to Hayward, so he simply didn't bother to translate it...

...As he is telling Lida how he loves her, he is dreaming of being alone in his nice cozy apartment afterward...

...He does finally run away from the dinner party with a girl named Lida and has a brief affair with her which is presented in terms of a child's ravishment of his mother: "I stood before her on my knees...

...contributor, "Partisan Review," "Columbia University Forum" Abram Tertz is a stage name...

...I take issue with Hingley only on certain minor points to which British translators seem to have a fatal proclivity, things such as "Nicky" for Kolya (remember old "Roddy" Raskolnikov...

...Tertz does not always handle sexual themes as well as he does in this masterpiece...