The Worst of Times

...unfortunately, the character of his work has also undergone a change, and not for the better...

...The first chapter of Cities and Years is the last chronologically, and the novel moves in intersecting planes...

...Kurt Wahn is presented as "the most promising young artist of his generation" and ends as a commissar...

...Granting the tremendous moral force of Pasternak's novel, Fedin's is still the better written book...

...Historically, the Russian novel has developed in conditions quite unlike those in which the novel has developed in most other European countries...

...For the Russian writer has traditionally had a greater consciousness of the structure of his novels, the "bones" of the thing...

...Ladies with missing or maimed lower limbs, but with good heart and character, are urgently asked to take compassion on a broken, noble soul in a mutilated body and, in complete confidence and with an indication of their family status and state of health, to write to . . . Fedin's perception of the latent moral deformities which later gave rise to Nazism (the German translation of the novel was banned by Hitler) is as striking as Katherine Anne Porter's in Ship of Fools...

...That is not to say, however, that Cities and Years is primarily a humorous novel...

...contributor, "Slavonic Review," "Russian Review" "Slavic Journal" Konstantin Fedin has been referred to as "one of the three or four most important Soviet novelists...

...Now, even in a novel, you just can't bring more than two people together at a time...

...The secondary characters are, on the whole, better drawn...

...Now the first English translation of the novel has finally appeared—to total silence in the American critical press...

...He is also certainly the least known in the West of the significant post-Revolutionary Russian writers...

...I somehow thought that novels are written the way they put together boxes...

...As in Doctor Zhivago, coincidence plays a major role, but the coincidences seem better integrated into the fabric of Fedin's work...

...This may be ascribed partly to the very real economic discrimination against original paperbacks which is the rule in too many of our journals, partly to ignorance of Fedin...

...One of the characters, in a remark which may be taken as referring to the entire novel, says...

...It's necessary that each piece come together on all sides with the other pieces...

...The Russian novel really cannot be said to have achieved any degree of independence until 1814, in the work of Vasily Narezhny, a writer from whom Gogol borrowed much...

...And Leskov in his picaresque novels was influenced by Sterne and referred to "Shandyism" as not merely a style but also a moral state...

...The translation by Michael Scammell is quite competent, and, all in all...

...We think of the jerry-built structure of Lermontov's novel, A Hero of Our Time...

...Letters, newspaper clippings, signs and posters are all thrust directly into the text and boxed off or set in different print...

...An intellectual who cannot come to terms with the Revolution, he becomes entangled in his conflicting values and ends by betraying himself and his cause...

...There is ambiguous irony in Fedin's concluding sentence: ". . . Kurt did for Andrei everything that a comrade, friend, and artist should have done...

...of good family who, having lost a leg in war and, as a consequence of this, having been jilted by his fiancée, seeks a fellow sufferer as a comrade in life...

...Here it should be said in Fedin's defense that his point of focus is not on people as much as it is on cities and the cultural atmosphere and problems of the times...

...it is an exceptional buy at 95 cents...

...Andrei's lover, Marie Urbach, changes from a genuinely demonic child to an archetypal noble young woman...

...But if this apparent stylistic backwardness had its negative sides, there were many positive ones, too...

...Also, Dostoevsky used the epistolary form and leaned heavily upon such penny-thrillers as Anne Radcliffe's novels...

...This may even account, at least partially, for the unorthodox structure of Nabokov's work...

...Far from it...

...That's at least how they wrote novels until the War...

...Very significantly, one of the epigraphs to Cities and Years is taken from Dickens...

...He succeeds in portraying this brilliantly...

...Dell paperbacks are often not available in bookstores, but Cities and Years is well worth picking up when you next see it at your drugstore...

...Chapters have ironic titles such as "A Chapter of Digressions" or "About Whom Was General Field Marshal von Hindenburg Thinking...

...Young Fedin's work was clearly under this influence...

...Bely, whose best-known novel, St...

...Like Sterne and Bely, too, Fedin often plays with his novel...

...Fedin, who is still alive, has been around a long time (he was born in 1892) and was one of the members of the ill-fated Serapion Brothers, a group of outstanding writers who, in the years following the 1917 Revolution, attempted to defend the artist's right to follow his own path of development...

...In a chapter on flowers, Fedin writes, "It is sad to think that not a single young girl will have read the novel as far as these sympathetic words...

...As a result of this, throughout the 19th century many Russian novelists incorporated epistolary and other equally "old-fashioned" features in their work at a time when such devices were out of currency elsewhere...

...He is shot by his friend, Kurt Wahn, a German who is a devoted Communist...

...The glue isn't right, doesn't hold...

...The novel's protagonist, Andrei Startsov, is a young Russian in Germany during the War...

...In the early part of the 20th century this consciousness was further strengthened by the work of the Formalist literary critics— precursors of our own New Critics —and especially by the prose innovations of one of the symbolist writers, Andrei Bely...

...The very first Russian novel appeared only in 1763, and it was as much an adapted translation as it was an original work...

...Whereas the technique of narrative planes is a game in Bely, it serves Fedin very well and allows him to show the effects of World War I and the Revolution in widely separated areas (cities) in both Germany and Russia...

...A major fault in Cities and Years is the often inexplicable characterization...

...Since that time Fedin has gone "respectable," even to the point of becoming head of the Writers' Union...

...Petersburg, appeared in English translation several years ago, initiated the complex oblique style which strongly influenced many writers of the early post-Revolutionary period...

...Nothing he has written since compares to his remarkable first novel, Cities and Years, which was published in 1924—the first fragment was printed as a short story in 1919—and is still being reprinted in the Soviet Union...

...One of Fedin's characteristic inserts is a newspaper advertisement by a German soldier...

...But then Cities and Years appeared in 1924, and foresight is dearer than hindsight...