Victims of Revolution
THORNE, LUDMILLA
Victims of Revolution A Tomb for Boris Davidovich By Danilo Kis Harcourt Brace. 135 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Ludmilla Thorne Translator, freelance writer Although small and unassuming, this...
...But he is not executed for his crimes...
...Novsky signs a purely fictitious 10-page confession, diligently composed by the two men like a college term paper...
...In 1919, Novsky marries Zinaida aboard the torpedo boat Spartacus, anchored in Kronstadt harbor...
...What also lends this novel a fresh vitality is the fact that the writer, like his characters, is an exotic blend of East European bloodstreams, being partially Hungarian, Jewish and Chernogor...
...Petersburg...
...By some miraculous coincidence, moreover, the two men have similar names (Boris Davidovich Novsky...
...He is, in addition, obviously well-versed in European, including Russian, history and literature...
...He is, however, also an anarchist, w ho participates in "expropriations" (armed robberies), transports explosives and arms to Russia and is the mastermind behind spectacular assassinations that shock his cultured friends...
...Besides being an accomplished Yugoslav novelist, Kis is also a poet...
...Finally, Fedukin finds the key to Novsky's downfall...
...A. L. Chelyustnikov, the editor of the Ukrainian newspaper New Dawn, dispels a visiting French mayor's suspicions about the persecution of religion in the Soviet Union by masquerading as a priest and conducting a service at the Cathedral of Saint Sophia...
...Baruch David Neumann) and the identical dates of arrest (December 23), separated by a span of six centuries...
...History, in other words, repeats itself...
...Of course, the real sore point is Kis' sacrilegious attitude toward the Soviet Union, evidenced by five of the seven revolutionaries described here dying in Soviet prisons or labor camps...
...But the character most central to this miniature novel is Boris Davidovich Malamud?the Bolshevik Hamlet" —a mixture of Lenin, Mazurin and Bukharin, who would go down in history under the name of B.D...
...Assisted by Zinai-da Maysner?the muse of the Revolution"—a sexy version of Krupskaya, Novsky escapes to Paris via Constantinople and moves on to Berlin, where he becomes a collaborator on two Social Democratic papers...
...It concerns a certain Baruch David Neumann, a Jew whose travails in the face of the Inquisitor of Toulouse uncannily mirror the ordeals of Boris Davidovich...
...Neumann also chose to sign a false document rather than be destroyed, and the same methods were used on him as on Novsky...
...Novsky...
...Although this book has won a major literary prize in Yugoslavia, Kis has come under veiled political attack...
...To some Yugoslav apologists, the depiction of such occurences is obviously still distasteful...
...Anna Akhmatova, Maxim Gorky and Edouard Herriot glide through his novel with plausible ease...
...Disillusioned by that city's "slow progress of revolutionary ferment," he leaves for Berlin and finally ends up in Moscow as a member of the Comintern...
...He becomes an agitator among the soldiers and is instrumental in cutting Lieutenant General Anton Denikin's rearguard...
...By that time he is already an important political commissar of the new regime...
...They are of different nationalities and backgrounds, but all are fired by a zeal that places no limits on their actions...
...His story serves as a vivid example of the author's major theme—that the Revolution devours its most devoted children...
...A year later, he is arrested and spends the next 17 years in Soviet labor camps...
...The revolutionary fire has turned into a wisp of smoke...
...unable to escape, he commits suicide by leaping into a cauldron of molten iron...
...Under Chelyustnikov's personal supervision, too, 120 prisoners from a nearby labor camp carry out a quick restoration of the church, and the slogan "Religion is the Opiate of the People" is promptly replaced with the more metaphysical sign, "Long Live the Sun, Down with the Night...
...Gould Verschoyle of Dublin, the exterminating angel who proclaims "vivala Republica" in Catalonia, ends his revolutionary sojourn in the Karaganda labor camp, where he is murdered...
...Kis' handling of the purge ritual, starting with interrogator Fedukin's endless efforts to persuade Novsky of his "moral obligation to make a false confession," is classical in its power and lyricism...
...each day of his life would be paid for with the life of another man...
...Miksha, a Czech revolutionary who can Hay a live skunk or rip out the entrails of a Polish colleague with equal ease (on the mere suspicion of treachery), dies of pellagra in a Soviet prison...
...He is released, only to be killed by Kostik, the Georgian king of thieves, a fellow Gulag survivor...
...He wanders through the camps like an apparition...
...Longing for death, he is instead exiled, only to be rearrested in that terrible winter of 1937...
...A Tomb for Boris Davidovich bears traces of Orwell's 1984 and Koestler's Darkness at Noon, but it has its own special flair, particularly since it comes to us from someone who is there, on the other side...
...Karl Taube, a pharmacist's son born in Hungary, spends four years in Vienna...
...In 1934, writes Kis, "it was easier to meet a reindeer than a priest in Kiev...
...The first sparks of the Revolution catch him in Basel and are quick to bring him home...
...His career continues to ascend until 1930, when it abruptly falls, like a red comet...
...and Fedukin's full use of his victim's egocentricity, is fascinating to observe...
...In this connection, Kis quotes, among others, Marcus Aurelius: "He who has seen the present has seen everything, that which happened in the most distant past and that which will happen in the future...
...Yet even achievements as extraordinary as these do not save Chelyustnikov from prison...
...The interplay between the prisoner's internal line of defense ("I've reached my mature years—why spoil my biography...
...Thus begins the liquidation of Novsky, a process well know to the world from the real-life cases of Lev Kamenev, Gri-gory L. Pyatakov.KarlRadek, etal...
...Eventually, they are reduced by fate to mere playthings in a monstrous game of history...
...Arrested, he confronts a bizarre spate of accusations, including spying for Britain and sabotaging the economy...
...He has been accused, for example, of borrowing ideas from Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge...
...The author engages in a bit of novel-istic license by telling us that soon after composing the story of Boris Davidovich he "accidentally" came upon an identical tale in the Registers of the Inquisition...
...A few years before the Bolshevik upheaval, Novsky is a young engineer, a perfect dandy much sought after in the elegant salons of St...
...Reviewed by Ludmilla Thorne Translator, freelance writer Although small and unassuming, this novel about the Russian Revolution bursts with a cavalcade of characters, some historical, others fictitious...
Vol. 61 • December 1978 • No. 25
