Gleb Struve and M. Kantor on Sirin: Three Translations
by Paul D. Morris
page three of three

Sirin has been zealously praised and too passionately censured. At one and the same time, there is, amongst his admirers, the suspicion that all is not well with him, while amongst his revilers there is the secret awareness that before them is indeed an outstanding writer. Certainly, our relationship to Sirin is somehow bipartite: we are enraptured by him, but always with reservations; we censure him, but with respect. He is purposefully dry and full of irony; yet there is, nonetheless, something uncanny in him. He is penetrating and observant, his descriptions are precise and graphic to the utmost. And nonetheless, rarely does he achieve total persuasiveness. A strange writer.

Whence, in fact, that constant impression of uncanniness, of doom--I am not even sure what to call that foretaste of non-freedom, that immutable presence of an external power as if steered by the hand of the author? What moves Sirin internally? By what "idea" or "complex" has he been subjugated?

Sirin's first novel, Mary (Mashen'ka), recounts the following: a Russian émigré, Ganin, finds in the possession of his fellow border--also a Russian émigré--a photograph of the fellow border's wife, whom he recognizes as Mary, a woman he once passionately loved in Russia. From that moment, Ganin is entirely in the power of memories and, in essence, the novel is filled only by these memories. In a few days, Mary is due to arrive from Russia to meet her husband. Ganin decides to run off with her. On the eve of her arrival, he gets the husband drunk and then sets off himself to meet her at the train station. "He stopped in a little square close to the station and sat on the very bench where, not that long ago, he had remembered Mary's typhus, the country-estate and his presentiment of Mary" ... "Ganin gazed at the light sky, at the transparent roof and already felt with merciless clarity that the affair with Mary had ended forever. It had lasted only 4 days--those four days were, perhaps, the happiest time of his life. But now he had drained his memories to the very end* sated himself with them completely and the image of Mary remained ... there in the house of a phantom which had itself already become a memory." Rather than meet his beloved, Ganin himself leaves on the next train.

A man's wife dies during their honeymoon. He returns to the city where they married, he stays in the same hotel, in the very room, where they spent their first night together. "Thus Chorb returned to the very source of his memories. It was an agonizing and voluptuous trial which was now coming to an end. It remained only to spend one more night in the first room of their marriage. Already tomorrow the trial would be over and her image would be made perfect" ("The Return of Chorb," "Vozrashchenie Chorba"). And Chorb spends the night in that room with the first prostitute he meets.

In The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina), the entire narrative is interwoven with memories of youth. His whole life, Luzhin attempts to recall something important, thereby to find, once and for all, the solution to the riddle of existence. The culminating point in the story is a championship match with Turati, which is followed by Luzhin's mental illness. And then, leaving the café where the tournament is taking place, Luzhin hears someone's voice whispering to him: "homewards!" "Homewards, -- he quietly said -- So that's where the key to the combination is." But what does "homewards" mean? Not to his Berlin apartment, but rather to a Russian dacha where he lived in early childhood. "Luzhin felt that he needed to turn to the left, that a large forest would appear there where he would easily find the path." "Now a river and a saw-mill will appear and through the bare shrubs, the country-estate peers. He will hide there and feed himself from the large and small glass preserving jars." ... "The key to the combination"--a return to the memories of an unrepeatable past.

Contrary to Luzhin, Martin, the hero of Glory (Podvig), is possessed of a clear consciousness and a sense of the real. But he too is in the power of memories of Russia and memories of childhood. In essence, Martin's "glory," his trip to Soviet Russia--a trip which is unjustified--is an attempt to return to his early memories, to realize them and overcome them completely. Perhaps like Ganin in Mary, Martin will turn back somewhere on the Latvian-Soviet border "having drained his memories, sating himself with them completely...."

This predominance of memory--a destiny not willfully chosen by Sirin--is fate; it is a force thrust upon him from without, "an agonizing and voluptuous trial." Not to submit to it would be impossible for him. He continually returns to the sources of his spiritual life, to the first impressions of his being, to the everydayness of childhood life, to the wealth, clarity, variegation, and extravagance of its depiction.

The whole of Sirin's vast literary arsenal, his striking comparisons, refined metaphors, images, and metonyms are of the same mnemonic provenance. Subjects and scenes force their way into Sirin's consciousness with such importunate power that in recounting them he cannot simply name them; he strives to render them with the same distinctness and vividness with which they have impressed themselves into his unusual memory. Sirin has often been reproached for mannerism, particularly the misuse of metaphors. The charge is unfounded. Sirin in no way flaunts the "figurativeness" of writing; he can not write in any other way, for this is precisely how he sees the world. There is no point in citing examples; anyone who has read Sirin can select many for himself. Incidentally, in order to understand the mnemonic provenance of all these striking comparisons, it is enough to track in Sirin's work the role of one sign, inherent to objects of the external world, one which has the particular ability to act on memory, calling forth in us associations with greater strength than other signs. As is known, scents have this ability. As Sirin himself acknowledges: "nothing so completely revives the past like the smells once connected to it." And thus it appears that Sirin is unable to take a step without recalling scents connected with the things he is talking about. People, objects, cities--they all possess for him specific smells: it is enough to leaf through Sirin's books--especially the earliest ones--to convince oneself of this.

It is no easy thing to escape the tyranny of memory. Like the sense of smell, the other four senses incessantly thrust themselves upon Sirin. The reader tires of the zeal with which Sirin attempts to communicate to him that sensual perception of the external world. Sirin has almost taken the urge for graphicness to the point of absurdity. He, like no one else, is able to portray people seized by carnal passion, or an embittered fight, or a dangerous ascent in the mountains. Not only in Russian, but also in contemporary literature, there are few to be found who are his equal in this ability. Yet this sensual art is merely a virtuosic trompe l'oeil, the celebration of a memory that is as yet unorganized and unmastered.

The predominance of memory naturally establishes a certain parallelism between Sirin and a writer he so little resembles externally--Marcel Proust. It is enough, however, to consider this parallelism to immediately grasp what an abyss separates Sirin from the author of In Remembrance of Things Past. At issue is the very character of memory, its diapason and orientation. Proust's memory is of expansive, almost unlimited, scope; it is of a sensual, psychological, aesthetic and social order. It is so widely ramified that Proust's work, in essence, may be interconnected, appearing to us as a powerful torrent freely choosing its own channel. This is not the case with Sirin. His memories revolve in the close circle of the sensual. For him, they are a burden hindering his artistic impulse, fettering the freedom of his movements.

As long as Sirin remains in the power of purely sensual perception of the world, his art is condemned to remain limited and superficial. Only in shaking off the yoke weighing upon him can he enter onto the difficult path of great art. We are hopeful that this will be so. Sirin is not standing still. Since the appearance of Mary, he has evolved significantly, giving evidence of incessant work on himself. The recently released Laughter in the Dark (Kamera obscura) allows one to think that Sirin has realized the dangers with which he is threatened by the one-sided keenness of his memory. It is as if he is controlling its force, avoiding excessive figurativeness, "shock," in his writing. Despite this, the splendor of his exposition has remained as before. This demonstrates that Sirin's possibilities are very great. They will be realized when he achieves complete inner freedom, when his spirit finally comes into its own right.

From Vstrechi 3 (March 1934), pp. 125-28.

* All italics by the author, Michael Kantor.