Fandango and Other Stories Read online

  FANDANGO AND OTHER STORIES

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

  Editorial Board:

  Vsevolod Bagno

  Dmitry Bak

  Rosamund Bartlett

  Caryl Emerson

  Peter B. Kaufman

  Mark Lipovetsky

  Oliver Ready

  Stephanie Sandler

  For a list of books in the series, see Series List

  Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Translation copyright © 2020 Bryan Karetnyk

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54850-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Grin, A. (Aleksandr), 1880–1932, author. | Karetnyk, Bryan, translator.

  Title: Fandango and other stories / Alexander Grin; translated by Bryan Karetnyk.

  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. | Series: Russian library

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019016190 (print) | LCCN 2019980628 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231189767 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231189774 (paperback) | ISBN 9780231548502 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Short stories, Russian—20th century—Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PG3476.G68 A2 2020 (print) | LCC PG3476.G68 (e-book) | DDC 891.73/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016190

  LC e-book record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980628

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  CONTENTS

  Introduction, by Barry P. Scherr

  Translator’s Note

  Quarantine

  “She”

  Lanphier Colony

  The Devil of the Orange Waters

  The Poisoned Island

  The Heart of the Wilderness

  The Rat-Catcher

  Fandango

  INTRODUCTION: THE MAN FROM GRINLANDIA

  BARRY P. SCHERR

  It is easy to understand why some of Alexander Grin’s contemporaries within Russia assumed that he was a foreign writer. The surname is not only very unusual for a Russian but also pronounced like (and in the Cyrillic alphabet serves as the transliteration for) the English Green or Greene. Similarly, many of his characters have names that are not typically Russian. In a few instances these, too, sound English (Hart, Steel, Grey), some resemble names found among other nationalities (the German Braun, the French Dupleix, the Italian Garducci), and still others (Bam-Gran, Scorrey, Egl) simply seem invented. The influences on Grin, whether cited by himself or others—including Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, and Edgar Allan Poe—were almost exclusively foreign and often authors who wrote in English. Some even suspected him of plagiarism: one of the many legends that swirled around the reclusive Grin held that, as a sailor, he had murdered an English sea captain, stolen a suitcase full of manuscripts, and was gradually translating them into Russian, passing them off as his own.

  Grin’s style no doubt played into the rumor that his works had been rendered into Russian from another language. He frequently resorts to convoluted syntax that requires careful parsing, devises odd phrasings and similes that impress with their originality but can resist ready interpretation, and employs italics with a frequency rarely found among Russian writers. Readers of this volume will find that Bryan Karetnyk’s fine translations have met the challenge of dealing with Grin’s sometimes difficult manner. While remaining admirably close to the Russian and conveying the sense of Grin’s style, he has managed to find ideal equivalents for even the more obscure Russian phrasings and to put the whole into highly readable English. The settings of Grin’s stories also set him apart. Some take place in Russia, whereas in others the action occurs abroad, often in exotic regions. And many of his major writings refer, either entirely or in part, to places that are not found on the globe at all: Zurbagan, Liss, and Gel-Giu are among the place names that recur from work to work, so that more than one attempt has been made to create a map of this nonexistent territory. Shortly after Grin’s death, a Soviet critic labeled it “Grinlandia,” a term reminiscent of the Russian name for an actual exotic locale, Greenland (“Grenlandia”). Grinlandia has since become synonymous with the world that found expression in Grin’s work, yet again emphasizing the so-called foreignness that distinguishes so much of his writing.

  And yet Grin was very much a Russian. Born in 1880 as Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky, he died in 1932, with his literary career, which began in 1906, bisected by the Bolshevik Revolution, an event that was to prove fateful for him personally and for his reputation as a writer. His early years were spent far from the political and literary centers of Russia. When he was two, his family moved twenty miles from his birthplace in the town of Slobodskoy to what was then the small city of Vyatka. Today, renamed Kirov to honor an assassinated Bolshevik leader, that city has some 500,000 inhabitants and is a major manufacturing center. But in Grin’s youth, Vyatka was a relatively quiet place, with a population of perhaps 25,000 that a few decades earlier had served as a place of political exile, thanks in no small part to its relatively remote location nearly 600 miles northeast of Moscow. Among those sent there was the famous political activist and writer Alexander Herzen. Grin’s own father, Stepan Grinevsky, had ended up in the area because of his exile to Russia after involvement in the Polish rebellion of 1863.

  Most of what we know about Grin’s early life comes from his unfinished Autobiographical Tale, which he wrote near the end of his life and breaks off abruptly in 1910. Like many autobiographies, it should be approached with caution: comparison of the published text with early drafts indicates that he occasionally rearranged or embellished events for literary effect. That said, some collaborating evidence exists for its latter portions and suggests that he remained broadly faithful to his experiences. Grin describes reading voraciously as a child, drawn to adventure stories that described distant lands and the romance of sailing ships, all of which contrasted with the drab milieu of Vyatka.

  The growing allure of the sea—abetted by the oppressiveness of life in his hometown and a lack of desire to continue his schooling—caused Grin to set off for the port city of Odessa, 1,400 miles away, shortly before his sixteenth birthday in 1896. There his dreams quickly clashed with reality. His lack of experience and frail build made it difficult to find work as a sailor, and his money soon ran out. He managed to find a few temporary jobs on ships that sailed the coast of the Black Sea, and in 1897, he served on a cargo ship to Alexandria—the only time he ever ventured abroad. But he was fired during the return voyage and that July returned to Vyatka. The following year Grin again headed for a southern port, this time Baku on the Caspian Sea, but found only occasional employment, his one enduring remembrance of that time the malaria that would plague him
off and on for the rest of his life. His subsequent efforts to establish himself included odd jobs back in Vyatka, brief work mining for gold, lumberjacking, and sailing on a river barge.

  In 1902, still unsettled, Grin volunteered for the army, but he chafed against its discipline. His first attempt to desert, only a few months after he enlisted, ended with his swift capture. Later that year, assisted by a cell of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) with whom he made contact, he succeeded. The SRs, along with the Bolsheviks and other groups, were agitating for the overthrow of the tsarist regime and conducting a campaign of terrorism, assassinating numerous individuals associated with the government. Grin proved a poor terrorist but was an effective propagandist until his November 1903 arrest in the Crimean seaport of Sevastopol. He spent nearly two years in jail, thus missing the violent events of 1905, which began in January with the shooting of demonstrators in St. Petersburg on what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday” and continued with strikes and riots throughout Russia for much of that year. Freed by a general amnesty for political prisoners, Grin went to St. Petersburg under an assumed name but was again arrested early in 1906 and sentenced to four years’ exile in Siberia. He soon escaped from the city to which he had been sent and by July was back in St. Petersburg, where he spent the next four years under a different false identity, living with Vera Abramova, who would become his first wife. The authorities only discovered his identity in 1910, when he received a less severe sentence: a two-year exile to the northern province of Arkhangelsk. This time Grin served out his term. After six years of wandering about Russia and failing to find a calling, he spent ten years living either illegally, in jail, or in exile. These early experiences are reflective of his character: unwilling to submit to discipline or to social norms, motivated by a youthful idealism, and drawn to adventure and to following his own path.

  Grin’s literary career began in 1906, first with stories that served as propaganda pamphlets for the SRs—toward whom he soon cooled—and then with a series of tales largely based on his experiences with that movement, sometimes depicting individual adherents favorably but for the most part reflecting antipathy toward the SR program. He signed his first published story with the initials of the false name under which he was living but soon settled on “A. S. Grin,” the name by which he was thenceforth to be known and which for several years proved sufficient to conceal his true identity from the authorities.

  Grin’s signature technique developed rapidly: the first manifestations of Grinlandia appeared in his prose as early as 1909. During these years, he also enthusiastically embraced the bohemian life of the capital, spending hours in various drinking establishments where he especially associated with other writers. Among these, his closest friend was Alexander Kuprin, at the time among the most popular Russian prose writers. Grin, though, never became associated with any literary school, and his mode of writing—with its frequently non-Russian characters, imaginary settings, adventure-filled plots, and excursions into the improbable or unreal—remained very much his own.

  On returning from exile, Grin quickly resumed the unruly life he had led prior to his arrest. Although he was to look back on this time fondly, his years of wandering had left him with an unsociable manner, so that even those to whom he felt close found him to be reserved and melancholy. Arkady Averchenko, a prominent satirist and editor of Novyi satirikon, to which Grin began to contribute in 1914, called him “Mr. Inveterate Pessimist.” Another writer recalled that Grin impressed him as a person who did not know how to smile. Meanwhile, Grin’s heavy drinking, dating from the pre-exile period, helped bring about the end of his marriage to Vera Abramova and was to remain a near-constant habit.

  The writing, though, continued apace. Grin’s first volume of stories had appeared as early as 1908; by 1913, he had written enough that a three-volume collection of his works appeared that year. When World War I started, he was found unfit to serve in the army, but he began to write frequently about the war. Grin found a ready market for stories on that topic in the popular magazines that served as the chief outlet for his work. Their publishers wanted brief tales, preferably exhibiting a patriotic view of the conflict, and were not much concerned with literary quality. The pay was poor, so that to earn enough to survive, Grin wrote scores of short pieces: in 1915 alone, he published more than 100 stories and poems. Many were eminently forgettable and not republished for many decades; only in 2017 did an edition of his stories gather nearly all the previously uncollected writing. However, alongside this work Grin managed to produce several excellent tales, including this volume’s “The Poisoned Island.”

  In the summer of 1916, Grin was banished from Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called at this time) to a Finnish village some 40 miles away after being overheard making disdainful remarks about the tsar. However, he was able to return after the February Revolution of 1917, the event that led to the establishment of the Provisional Government. In general Grin wrote little about politics, but a nonfiction piece titled “To the Revolution on Foot,” describing his journey back to the capital, indicates that he was excited about the fall of the regime that had jailed and exiled him. He appears, though, to have been less enthusiastic about the Bolshevik takeover: through the first six months of 1918, until strict censorship was established, he published regularly in several satirical journals that were hostile to the new government.

  From mid-1918 Grin’s life in postrevolutionary Petrograd became increasingly difficult. With many of his usual publishing outlets closed, he found his options becoming limited and frequently went hungry. Although in 1919 he managed to publish several stories in Plamia, a journal edited by Anatoly Lunacharsky, a prominent Bolshevik and first head of the People’s Commissariat for Education, Grin’s financial situation remained precarious. That same year he was drafted into the Red Army, where, thanks to his age and physical condition, he was assigned a noncombat role. Nonetheless, he soon fell ill, was eventually given leave, and then returned to Petrograd. With the assistance of the influential Maxim Gorky, he was able to get into one of the city’s overcrowded hospitals, where he was diagnosed with typhus. Lacking any means of support after his discharge, he again turned to Gorky, who saw to it that Grin was allocated a food ration and a room in the House of Arts, one of several institutions that Gorky helped to establish in order to assist Petrograd’s cultural elite during this harsh period.

  The House of Arts, which occupied a large building in the heart of Petrograd, became a center for intellectual and cultural life during the several years of its existence, serving as both a refuge and a focus of intellectual ferment for its inhabitants. Leading literary figures either lived there or came to give readings; the swirl of activities included seminars, concerts, and painting exhibitions. Friendships and literary alliances were forged, and the House became a hotbed for nurturing younger writers. However, Grin’s personality had not changed. Although he became friendly with a few of his fellow residents, for the most part he was remembered as a taciturn and morose individual who kept largely to himself. The poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who also lived in the House, described him as “an author of adventure tales, a gloomy and tubercular man… acquainted with almost no one and, it was said, engaged in the training of cockroaches.”

  Despite Grin’s relative uninvolvement in the life of the House, the months that he spent there proved crucial for both his professional and personal life. He completed Scarlet Sails, the novella that was to establish his subsequent reputation and remains, to this day, his most beloved work; he began writing what would become his first novel, The Shining World; he composed several fine stories; and he found inspiration for both “The Rat-Catcher” and “Fandango.” During this time, too, he renewed an acquaintance with and then married Nina Nikolaevna Mironova, who was to remain his companion for the rest of his life.

  The three years after Grin left the House of Arts in the spring of 1921 and lived elsewhere in Petrograd brought a revival of the publishing industry. He began to earn a
reasonable income and saw his modest reputation grow. Granted, his works were sparsely reviewed, and even at the beginning of the 1920s, some had little patience for literature that did not deal with the realities of the postrevolutionary era. However, through the middle of that decade, some critics would express at least a degree of admiration for the romantic and imaginative elements that characterized many of his works, as well as for his psychological acuity.

  In the spring of 1924, Grin and his wife moved to the Crimea, where the warm weather and proximity to the sea had long been attractions. They settled in the port of Feodosia, and for a few years Grin’s career was at its height, necessitating occasional trips to Moscow and Leningrad regarding publishing matters. Although he remained essentially a literary outsider and was rarely able to place his writings in the most highly respected journals of his day, Grin did not lack readers or opportunities to see his work in print. He published many stories in Krasnaia niva, a biweekly for which Lunacharsky again was an editor, and in the highly popular Ogonyok. Collections of his tales came out regularly, and, by 1930, he had published six novels as well. Thus the mid-1920s in particular were relatively happy years for Grin, though his wife later remarked that he was still his reserved and solitary self, with the couple having a narrow social circle in Feodosia.

  As the decade wore on, negative assessments of Grin’s works became dominant, with sharp attacks for their Western influences, fantastic elements, and seeming indifference toward contemporary Soviet life. A publication that made recommendations to libraries summarily described his books as “not needed.” By the late 1920s he was thus finding it increasingly difficult to place his work. The years 1929 and 1930 witnessed the publication of his last two completed novels, but Grin had been left with relatively little time to write new stories, and reprints of his previous work had virtually stopped. The honoraria for his writing were such that his finances had never been secure; now he and his wife began to endure genuine hardship. Furthermore, his health, thanks in part to his continued drinking, was beginning to decline.