Translators' Note
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TRANSLATORS’ NOTE he success of his first novel, Küchlya (1925), about the T Decembrist Wilhelm Küchelbecker, won Tynyanov the reputation of founding father of the Soviet historical novel. His next novel, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, confounded expectations and was condemned by the contemporary Soviet crit- ics for its dark mood. The author was accused of historical determin- ism and pessimism, “strange and inappropriate in our literature,” and his technique of artistic penetration into his characters was declared erroneous, resulting in distortions of historical perspective. By Tynyanov’s own admission, the impulse to write his Griboe- dov novel stemmed from his dissatisfaction with what he called “confection history” or the “history of generals,” which concen- trated only on the great and famous. Tynyanov wrote that as he began to research Griboedov, he was amazed by the scholars’ “com- plete lack of understanding” of Griboedov’s celebrated Woe from Wit, as well as by “how little he was understood and by how dif- ferent Griboedov’s own works were from everything that has been written about him by historians of literature.”1 xxiv \ Translators’ Note Though grounded in Tynyanov’s meticulous research into Griboedov’s life and works—and as such being an “investigative novel”—The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar shows that his artistic method had obvious advantages, since as formalist critic and scholar Boris Eikhenbaum pointed out, “due to the scarcity of materials, Griboe- dov’s biography is a problem which can hardly be resolved by schol- arly methods.”2 Alexander Pushkin concluded Chapter II of his Travels to Arzrum saying: “What a pity that Griboedov left no mem- oir! The writing of his biography would be a task for his friends; but wonderful men vanish from among us leaving no trace. We are lazy and incurious.”3 In the absence of Griboedov’s papers, Tynyanov created a deliberately subjective narrative with the links between its disparate components being poetical rather than logical, and thus avoided literal truths, in the Nietzschean sense, as dead or fossilized metaphor. The novel is therefore a“ version” of Griboedov’s life and should be treated as such, but Tynyanov insists on the right of an artist to create it. With the formalist striving for innovation in literature, Tynya- nov plays with the genre of the historical novel and that of literary biography and indeed with the actual notion of the hero. Strictly speaking, what he offers the reader is not a biography—the novel covers only the final year of Alexander Griboedov’s life, from March 14, 1828, when the triumphant diplomat brings back to St. Petersburg the Turkmenchai Peace Treaty with Persia until his murder by a frenzied mob in Tehran on February 11, 1829, at the age of just thirty-four. There are flashbacks, often puzzling, to the past rendered through Griboedov’s consciousness (his childhood mem- ories, the ill-fated double duel, his meetings with the Decembrists, his interrogation by the Investigative Committee in the aftermath of the Decembrists’ uprising, etc.). Most of the novel covers the pro- tagonist’s encounters with a number of historical characters—Tsar Nicholas, Russian political, military, intellectual, and literary elites, and personal friends. And although Griboedov is by vocation a nec- essarily and constantly moving figure, even when he traverses the Russian empire and its protected and newly acquired territories, we see him more often on his arrival at those destinations (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tiflis, Tabriz, Tehran). And yet there is no stasis; the novel is dynamically charged by the narrator’s portrayal of the emo- tional reactions and internal states of the characters influenced by, and in turn triggering, external events. This movement is achieved by enhanced metaphoricity, which brings together unrelated, contradictory, or different objects com- pared on the basis of a single common characteristic. Obscure, inaccessible, and confusing though these metaphors might be, they possess their own logic and their own creative truth. The transla- tors’ task thus lies in unyoking those “heterogenous ideas yoked with violence together” and combining once again two stubborn beasts under the one new yoke, now tamed to perform their task. And the task is magnified by the very intensity of Tynyanov’s style: a laconic abruptness interspersed with profoundly dense pas- sages of often grotesque sketching, and a dramatic staccato, which is the essence of great poetry and which, like great poetry, defies even the best attempts at translation—like trying to turn a painting into words, moving from one sense modality into another, all the while avoiding disorientation. The latter is all too easy: Tynyanov’s style does disorientate, deliberately so, and you have to keep your head to find your way. Semantic links between components of the sentence are often omitted, and the reader is left to fill in the blanks. The con- cealed, flickering meaning of the subtext, which the reader must grasp in the text’s allusions, taxes the reader’s memory and associa- tive perception but enriches the meaning of the work. Tynyanov’s writing is at times categorically aphoristic or seemingly contradic- tory, and indeed calculatingly paradoxical, but always arresting in its “new” or “double” vision. Translators’ Note \ xxv xxvi \ Translators’ Note A complex of poetic leitmotifs (road, home, honor, fate) and of antithetical ones (life–death, fertility–sterility, love–hate/indif- ference, East–West, success–failure, strength–weakness, loyalty– betrayal) persistently repeated throughout the text ensure its inter- nal cohesion and form the figurative-symbolic meaning of the novel. Explicit and implicit echoes of episodes and of the charac- ters’ dialogue permeate all levels of the structure, informing the nar- rative and the plot with a special semantic tension and contributing to the creation of its multilayered artistic world that does not lend itself to unambiguous interpretation. This is clear from the first striking sentence of the prologue. The main pervasive metaphors are rooted in Tynyanov’s percep- tion of 1825 as a time of fracture; the time of reaction is the time of frost: the era of Russian victories over Napoleon, of elated hopes, ambition, and exciting intellectual adventure is over; the period of postrevolutionary bitter disillusionment has arrived. In yet another round of Russian cyclical history, the thaw has now been refrozen. Here Tynyanov grapples with the question of how to live and what to believe in a broken age whose traumatized survivors face a world they no longer recognize. Behind that terrifying rupture are the executions and imprisonment of friends, the wreckage of hopes and dreams, the pangs of guilt and internal exile of those who are still alive, degeneration, shallowness, loss of artistic ambience, and, as a result, creative numbness. Ahead is a future that is terrifying, suffocating, deadening, and quite inevitable. It’s a portrait of the times—of the epoch of decay—and the novel is deeply perme- ated with a sense of weariness, futility, impotence, and capitulation before destiny, which consists of movement without destination. Broken reality is depicted in a similarly fragmented, multifaceted manner that strives for an artistic equivalence to the fractured life of the period. These sweeping historical perspectives are often condensed into a single image or group of related images. For instance, “The sinews were the piping on the gendarmes’ uniforms, the color of the north- ern blue, and the Baltic muteness of Benckendorff’s turned into the Petersburg skies” suggests the strengthening grip of the secret police headed by the Baltic German, General Benkendorff. The resonant allusiveness blended with the sheer compression of metaphor in itself is a form of stylistic shorthand: the Tynyanov challenge, the refractory genius of this unique and unignorable writer. One final consideration important for understanding the novel is that in addition to being the story of Griboedov and his times, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is also a story of Tynyanov and his times. Tynyanov was renowned for his deep, personal knowledge of Russian literature, a strong identification with some of its heroes (Pushkin, first and foremost), andputting much of himself into his characters. But in none of them has he depicted himself so frankly as in Griboedov. By the late 1920s, as the atmosphere around the formalists and the political ambience in the Soviet Union grew more dogmatic, Tynyanov’s fiction seems to have provided him with an artist’s antidote against the political horror—a retreat into the world of imagination, creativity, and the historical past. The resulting novel carries strong autobiographical overtones about Tynyanov’s own life and his generation; it was in fact an epitaph for himself and for those dismayed and saddened by the transforma- tion of the great revolutionary fervor of 1917 into the strengthening grip of Stalinism and the concurrent metamorphosis within those who had believed in it. As such, this stylistic miracle of a novel is also an intensely personal protest against what had become of the promise of the Revolution, and for this reason, for the last ninety years it has been one of the most treasured and well-loved books of the Russian intelligentsia. Translators’ Note \ xxvii xxviii \ Translators’ Note NOTES 1. Yury Tynyanov, “Avtobiografiya” [Autobiography] inSochineniya [Collected Works] in 3 Vols., Vol. 1, (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoy literatury [State Publishing House of Literature], 1958), 8. 2. Boris Eikhenbaum, O proze (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1969), 419. 3. Cited in Tatiana Wolff, Pushkin on Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum International, 1998), 384. THE DEATH OF VAZIR-MUKHTAR Take a look at this cold face, Take a look: no life, no zest, But how the trace of former passions Is manifest. So hangs the mighty cataract Ice-shackled o’er the abyss.