Varangian Times

...It next goes into the equivalent in "Mahogany" for the Marinovs of "Ryazan Apples," the family of the patriarch Yakov Karpovich Skudrin...

...The ending of "Mother Earth" is as bleak and ironic as that of Pilnyak's 1927 novel Ivan Moscow, where the radium mining engineer Ivan, on his way back to his beloved, is killed in a gratuitous airplane accident, and his energy at once decomposes into 150 students...

...Pilnyak writes: "Here slept Communists who had been called to duty by War Communism and discharged by the year nineteen hundred and twenty-one, men of arrested ideas, madmen and drunkards, men who, living together in a cave and working together unloading barges, sawing firewood, had created a strict fraternity, a strict Communism, having nothing of their own, neither money, nor possessions, nor wives...

...The first, Yakov's younger brother Ivan, who has deserted the family and changed his name to Ivan Ozhgov, calls the Skudrins "the everyday counterrevolution...

...Mother Earth" begins brutally with an image of a peasant climbing a tree to steal bark, and hanging upside down after a fall until his eyeballs burst...

...When the doings of the Merinovs involve blasphemous multiple marriages with mock priests and a peasant girl impersonating the Virgin, the author suddenly announces: "Stop...

...The one marvelous piece, "The Bridegroom Cometh" (1925), is about a tidy English clerk, Mr...

...He recanted abjectly, and rewrote "Mahogany" into a long epic of Socialist construction, "The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea," which was published in 1930...

...At one point Pilnyak refers to "oniony Russian life," and this life is clearly medieval, "pre-Petrine Russia," what The Naked Year, describing a scene of primitive barter, calls "Varangian times...

...At his best, Boris Pilnyak was a matchless captor of the historical moment in all its rich life, a master of the full range of comic rhetoric, and a unique poetic voice in fiction...

...Samuel Garnet, and his tidy little wife, who go to a Nigerian rubber plantation where all their belongings are eaten by termites...

...The short stories in Mother Earth and Other Stories are less significant...

...The Merinovs are far from a vision of New Soviet Man...

...Pilnyak capitulated utterly...

...Mahogany" is a kaleidoscope of Soviet life on the order of The Naked Year, and like its predecessor it teeters continually on the edge of poetry...

...The earliest, "Ryazan Apples," written in 1921, is impossible to synopsize, since it has not a shred of plot...

...Of the remaining stories, only "The Three Brothers," a charming autobiographical piece about Pilnyak's childhood in a community of his German relatives, is of much interest...

...One is an absurd official named Nil Nilovich Tyshko, who in his constant washing and cleaning his teeth and nails seems to represent decency as opposed to the Merinovs' filth, and in his comic habit of leaving a notice on the door of his office when he goes out?Back by six o'clock old time," "Back by six o'clock Central European time"?seems to represent order as opposed to their disorder...

...It consists of cruelly funny vignettes of the life in and around the city of Ryazan in 1921, and the chief character, a terrible strumpet called "Ryazan-baba" is in fact a personification of the town...

...But Rimma had two daughters by the actor, and the elder daughter, by the time of the novella, is married and has two children of her own...

...Pilnyak was the victim of the first Soviet literary frame-up...

...He leads a band of fel-lov/okhlomons who were wartime Communists but whom history has passed by...

...Rimma was the disgrace of the town...

...It is savagely funny, allowing Pilnyak to show the absurdity of capitalism (Garnet loses not only his own money but the company's, Elsa loses the novel she had been writing to console herself for Garnet's infidelity) as well as the ruthlessness of Socialism (the termite state "does not tolerate individuality, ownership, freedom of instinct...

...He assures them that "We are the only real Communists in the whole town...

...The Skudrins naturally disowned her...

...Nothing like this ever happened—nothing like this would ever have have happened if I had not existed...

...Opposed to these savages is the woman Nekulyev loves, Irina Arsenyeva, who has some of their earthy vitality but channels it in a post-Revolutionary direction, running a tannery like a man...

...The others are rather formless vignettes, perhaps justified by a statement in "The Brothers": "Every story is endless, as life itself is boundless...

...The story ends with Pilnyak's characteristic ironic nihilism: The Nigerians survive by selling termite excrement as a delicacy at the bazaar...

...At least five volumes of Pilnyak's work were published in this country in the 1920s and early 1930s, without gaining him any substantial number of American readers...

...It is about the old human lumber that the Revolution cannot utilize, imaged as the antique mahogany furniture that the former gentry live by selling...

...All three novellas are loosely organized into dichotomies of two opposed moral worlds...

...A new government forester, Anton Nekulyev, comes to the Hills of Medyn, on the Volga, where the brutish peasants are bitterly opposed to any interference with their free use of the woods, to which they believe themselves entitled by the Revolution...

...The finest of the three novellas, "Mahogany," perhaps Pilnyak's finest work, was written in 1929 and has never been published in the Soviet Union...

...It contains three of Pilnyak's most significant novellas, as well as a variety of short stories It may at last gain for Pilnyak an American public, although the allusive difficulty of his prose, along with the poetic and musical nature of his forms—full of repetition with variation and what the translators call "incantatory digressions"—make this seem somewhat unlikely...

...anyway, their wives had left them, their dreams, their madness, their alcohol...

...From then on he was a writer of undeviating orthodoxy and slight interest...

...Ivan lectures to his band of dotty archaic Communists, telling them that the Wright brothers perished in an airplane crash, and that "Comrade Lenin perished like the brothers Wright...

...Its end is as delightful as it is unexpected: "Russian china is the most marvelous art adorning the earthly globe...

...The novella begins with a catalogue of Holy Russia's human debris: "Paupers, soothsayers, beggars, mendicant chanters, lazars, wanderers from holy place to holy place, male and female, cripples, bogus saints, blind psalm singers, prophets, idiots of both sexes, fools in Christ...

...Nekulyev is oddly squeamish: He is revolted by Irina's slaughtering of horses with her own hands for her tannery, and he cannot stand the stench of blood...

...The imagery of Merinov life is comparably revolting: When a declassed prince, his face "like wolves in November," comes to visit Lipat Merinov, they sit "in the Merinov house, in the big room where the beds stood, each one like Ryazan, covered with smears of gorged bedbugs...

...At one point a group of woodcutters kill and eat a pedigreed bull hired from a breeding farm (as their American cousins, the Snopes Indians, kill and eat a pedigreed pekinese in Faulkner's Snopes trilogy...

...After 30 years of neglect, we now have another selection from Pilnyak, Mother Earth and Other Stories (Praeger), translated and edited by Vera T. Reck and Michael Green...

...It ends as brutally, and with heavy irony...

...Another story, "The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon" (1926) is a most courageous (or most fool-haidy) attempt to make fiction out of Stalin's ordering of General Frunze to the operating table, on which he died...

...They never succeed in killing him, but they almost get Coming Next Issue A TALK WITH SHIMON PERES BY JOAN PETERS him, and they do manage to murder one of his assistants...

...With her daughters and grandchildren Rimma "is happy in her life...

...She is a virgin of 30 until "one brisk, sunny day the urgings of Mother Earth rose within her" and she gave herself to Nekulyev, "with all the abandon of Mother Earth...

...Like a number of them, he modeled his writing on Andrey Bely's St...

...After her death one of the peasants takes the pup, which he discovers to be a fox, not a wolf, and thriftily converts it into a nice warm cap with earflaps...

...The other Skudrin fugitives are Yakov's youngest son Akim, who has become an engineer and a Trotskyite, another fossil in amber, and Yakov's younger sister Rimma...

...He was arrested in Stalin's purges of 1937, charged with Trotskyism and spying for Japan, and appears to have died in a labor camp in 1941...

...It is a rather wooden story, whose odd title seems to symbolize something unkillable in Pilnyak's General Gavrilov, and it ends with "the city—now frosted by the moon—howling...

...Nekulyev writes in a letter that he never mails, "All around me there is savagery, shame, abomination...

...The peasants not only murdered Nekulyev's predecessor, but they mutilated his corpse in a most revolting manner, and when they were unable to stuff the corpse into his grand piano, they threw both corpse and piano down the steep bank of the Volga...

...When "Mahogany" was due to be printed in Russia in 1929, after already appearing (for copyright purposes) in Germany, he was charged with slandering the Soviet system, treasonable relations with emgre circles abroad, and so forth—charges that were later to become routine...

...He deflowered her in the town park, for all the boys to mock, "and not once in all the three years of her shame did she meet her lover under a roof, meeting him in the woods and the streets, in the ruins of houses, in deserted barges, even in fall and winter...

...See "Between Issues," page 2.) Boris Pilnyak," the pen name of Boris Andreyevich Vogau, born in 1894, was part of the teeming growth of fictional talents that mushroomed after the Russian Revolution and Civil War, including Isaac Babel, Evgeni Zamyatin, Yuri Oleska, and many others...

...Great is Mother Russia, Devil take her," the author says near the beginning of the novella, but at the end an eagle owl in the ravine cries out the latest ridiculous Soviet abbreviation, "Goo-voo-ooz" (for the Central Board of Schools of Higher Learning), and spirit and nature are reconciled...

...Then there are the mahogany buyers, the Bezdetov brothers, who are a related image of greed: "buying was all they knew," and they try to buy people as crassly as they buy antique sofas...

...It is I who have come, the author," he announces triumphantly...

...Opposed to this repulsive Ryazan and Merinov world are two attractive figures...

...The second of the novellas, "Mother Earth," written in 1924, has by comparison almost a conventional plot...

...All this, of course, is written by me, the author...

...Like the wolf cub that she keeps as a pet and fails to tame, Irina is "a bundle of forest and animal instincts," for all her being a woman on the new Soviet model...

...When a commission arrives to inspect the commune, Sidor Marinov procures girls for the commission members...

...Here he is, wonderfully, celebrating the return of a" grown son: "Maryushka, yes, hee-hee, a drop of vodka, my dear, bring us a drop of vodka, cold from the cellar, and a bit of something cold to go with it—he's grown up, our boy, grown up—he's come back, our boy, to blight our old age, the s-son of a bitch...

...Ivan and his outcasts, all of whom have taken surnames punning on "fire," are a bit of ancient Soviet history preserved in amber...

...The hero of this story," Ivan has become an okhlomon (a word Pilnyak made up from Greek roots to mean something like "outcast...

...Petersburg, which pioneered a new sort of poetic and symbolic novel...

...At another point he says, "Words to me are like coins to a numismatist," and ultimately words are the "ancient wine" he manufactures...

...Alas, he had not reckoned with Varangian times...

...There is a similar magical moment in The Naked Year, when the author suddenly turns on us, "And to hell with you all, you sweety-tartish lemon-squashes...

...Writers &.Writing VARANGIAN TIMES BY STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN The following previously unpublished essay by The New Leader's former literary critic, who died in 1970, will appear in a forthcoming collection of his work, The Critic's Credentials...

...The vessels of value opposed to the Skudrins and the Bezdetovs are Skudrin dropouts...

...The most dramatic single event in the novella is the decision of four of the Merinovs to celebrate the coming of spring by driving away their wives and children and taking new young wives...

...The other vessel of value is the author, who appears in his own voice and squeezes some "ancient wine" out of the rotten Ryazan apples...

...For me history is not a lesson, but a poem," Pilnyak writes, and the terrible famine year of 1921 becomes the poem of the novella: "Who will stand as tall as nineteen hundred and twenty-one...

...The imagery is of boundless savagery...

...they are in fact peasants of the most medieval and swinish sort...

...His "face was the face of a madman," and he talks in "a soft, mad voice...

...There is a peasant commune that has most of the arable land and livestock in the region, run by a disgusting family named Merinov...

...she has distilled joy from her misery and shame, like the wine Pilnyak makes from Ryazan apples...

...they live as derelicts in underground caves in the town brickyard...

...For three years she consorted publicly with a married lover, a drunken swine of an actot...

...When the forester is out, a peasant called Yegorushka brushes his beard and whiskers with Nekulyev's toothbrush, trying to figure out its use...

...The state of their culture is evidenced by their making a former prince's mahogany cabinet into an icon-case that they decorate by pasting it all over with brewery labels...

...The most important of these is The Naked Year, his phantasmagori-cal novel of the revolutionary year of 1919...

...For the most trivial of reasons, a bite from the pup, Irina is caught by a detachment of Cossack Whites, raped, and impaled alive in one of her tannery vats, to die slowly...

...Yakov Karpovich has had a hernia for 40 years, "and when walking he supported this hernia of his with his right hand through the fly of his trousers...