Fandango and Other Stories Read online

  In 1930 Grin and his wife left Feodosia for Stary Krym, about 15 miles inland, in part to live more economically and in part because the higher elevation at their new home was reputed to have health benefits for those experiencing respiratory problems. With his fiction not in demand, he reluctantly began his Autobiographical Tale, which was serialized in a major journal, Zvezda, the following year, but that was to be his only publication of 1931. In August that year he fell seriously ill, apparently suffering from a recurrence of tuberculosis, and two months later was diagnosed with pneumonia. He continued to weaken as the months passed, then in June 1932 was found to have stomach cancer. Grin died on July 8, already, it seemed, largely forgotten by the wider literary community.

  Oddly enough, Grin’s reputation underwent a mild revival shortly after his death. During the final years of his life, the powerful Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, popularly known by its Russian acronym, RAPP, had strongly advocated for a proletarian literature and railed against those it deemed insufficiently wedded to the revolutionary cause. RAPP was dissolved a few months before Grin’s death, to be replaced in 1934 by the Writers’ Union. Although socialist realism then became the officially sanctioned mode for writers, the harsh attacks on Grin ceased. Several collections of his stories were published during the years leading up to World War II, and, if the few critical articles on him still expressed reservations, they could at least praise his originality and see his works as having a place in Soviet literature.

  Grin’s standing thus survived the purges of the 1930s, only to run afoul of another Stalinist campaign shortly after World War II. A pair of vicious articles attacked Grin as a “rootless cosmopolitan,” a label more typically applied to Jews whose loyalty to the Soviet Union was being questioned, and for some years his works were no longer published. However, the thaw that followed Stalin’s death brought a rapid change.

  In 1956, a collection of his work appeared, containing a preface by the popular writer Konstantin Paustovsky, who did much over the years to promote Grin’s reputation. From then on, Grin’s renown grew rapidly, and his best-known works have been republished many times. In 1965, a six-volume collection of his writings came out in an edition of nearly half a million copies, making a wide selection of his works readily available. Other multivolume editions have followed since. Although only a handful of scholars outside Russia have devoted extensive attention to Grin, within Russia, the body of research on his work has become substantial. Although information about his life remained scattered and, in some cases, unpublished into the twenty-first century, a publishing house in Feodosia issued a series of volumes that were extensively annotated by associates of the Grin museum in that city and that contained memoirs, biographical materials, and Grin’s modest epistolary heritage.

  Many of Grin’s writings are widely known today, but none other matches the prominence of his signature work, Scarlet Sails, which has been adapted for film and stage (including an opera and a ballet). The title has become ubiquitous, appearing as the name of not only restaurants and hotels but also enterprises ranging from a trucking company in St. Petersburg to a sauna in Nizhny Novgorod and an apartment complex in Moscow. Perhaps most famously, it serves as the name of an all-night festival in St. Petersburg that marks the end of the school year; a highlight of the celebration is the appearance on the Neva River of a ship rigged with scarlet sails. The fame of this single work has assured Grin’s lasting renown, though in a way it also has sometimes served—at least among the broader public—to limit a full appreciation of his achievement.

  While Grin was being reintroduced to Soviet readers in the post-Stalin era, an attempt was made to see the elements of Romanticism in his work as implying an underlying optimism and belief in the ability of people to achieve a bright future—thereby aligning him with one of socialist realism’s goals, even if realism was not always present in his mature work and socialism, hardly at all.

  Scarlet Sails certainly can be seen as in keeping with the official agenda. Its impoverished heroine, Assol, has endured the mockery of the local village inhabitants for having believed since childhood in a prophecy by a collector of tales named Egl, who had foretold that a handsome man on a ship with scarlet sails would one day carry her away to find happiness. Meanwhile, the tale’s hero, Grey, has grown up wealthy and privileged but stifled by his environment. Drawn to the sea, he has become captain of his own ship. Reaching the shore where Assol lives and learning of the prophecy, he has scarlet sails stitched for his vessel and, as predicted, carries her away to happiness. The action takes place in the indeterminate realm of Grinlandia, as is true of almost all Grin’s novels. The narrative shares certain similarities with fairy tales: the emphatically happy ending, a clear-cut conflict between good and evil, and seemingly miraculous happenings. However, Scarlet Sails in fact contains no outright fantasy but only some unlikely coincidences and the presence of a character who has both the means and the will to fulfill his own dream and that of another.

  Among the works in this volume, “The Heart of the Wilderness” is thematically closest to Scarlet Sails. Again, a single individual endures the taunting of others: as a cruel prank, several men try to convince the protagonist to search for a wondrous settlement supposedly hidden in the jungle. Their made-up tale fulfills the role of Egl’s prophecy by serving as a vision that one person manages to transform into reality through the strength of his own efforts: the seemingly duped hero goes on to create the village that was described to him. The notion that a single individual would possess the means and ability to create the ideal jungle colony described in the tale may strain the bounds of credibility, but, as in Scarlet Sails, nothing beyond the realm of the possible actually occurs. It is, finally, a work filled with optimism, in which the power of the human spirit prevails, enabling good to overcome evil. The 1956 collection that reintroduced Grin to Soviet readers included both these works, along with several others featuring a clearly positive outcome. This volume established a trend of seeing Grin as essentially an upbeat writer of adventure stories, some with fantastic elements, that appeal largely to a young adult audience.

  Grin’s work as a whole, however, tends to be darker and more probing of the human psyche than such stories suggest. Granted, the salient features of Scarlet Sails and “The Heart of the Wilderness” also appear in many of his other works: the foreign and often imaginary settings; events that are implausible, if not unreal; a sense of adventure; clear-cut distinctions between good and evil characters; and central figures possessed of enormous capabilities. But often his protagonists’ struggles with the surrounding world are less readily resolved and the conclusions not necessarily so auspicious. The inner lives of characters frequently come to the fore, with readers plunged into the world of dream, delusion, or delirium. Grin essentially wrote fables in which the components of the work are harnessed to illustrate some central point and the verisimilitude of events or settings is of secondary importance. Indeed, his imaginary or at least unusual locales serve to isolate his figures from the usual trappings of civilization and bring into sharp relief their unusual traits that serve to convey Grin’s central ideas.

  Grinlandia thus emerges as a favored setting for Grin’s fables. Granted, its exotic features—the tropical locale, the curious mix of figures who inhabit it, a sense of adventure and peril—can be seen as the author’s creating in his imagination the world that he was never able to reach during his youthful wanderings. Indeed, many of the protagonists inhabiting that world, lone figures who reject or are rejected by society but who are motivated by a vision of an ideal, bear resemblances to Grin himself. More important, however, Grinlandia facilitated his unique manner. Grin claimed that he had a concrete picture of his nonexistent land and described in detail to at least one acquaintance a journey from one imaginary city to another. The made-up names of places and people put it outside any real-world geography, and yet it is a world much like ours, containing all kinds of people: rich and poor (money or it
s lack often plays a major role in his works), good and bad, cowardly and brave. Actual historical events, though, only occasionally penetrated Grinlandia, with, for instance, the Bolshevik Revolution being essentially absent from his novels. Some of the works set there contain phenomena not seen in the real world—thus in The Shining World, the hero is a man with the ability to fly—but at other times the narratives are entirely realistic. The key point is that Grinlandia is a world of expanded possibilities, where the improbable or even the impossible is on an equal footing with the everyday, thus allowing Grin to create fables in which the focus can be on the psychology of his heroes and what their struggles represented rather than on the specifics of a place or time.

  The stories in this volume together represent the greater portion of Grin’s literary career and convey a sense of how his concerns and technique evolved over the years. The first two, “Quarantine” and “‘She,’” are from the pre-Grinlandia period. The former is based on an episode in Grin’s own life. When he joined the Socialist Revolutionaries, he was considered a suitable candidate for terrorist activities. Those recruited for such deeds were sometimes placed in a sort of quarantine, spending a length of time in another town in order to learn whether they were under police surveillance. If they were not, they would be dispatched to the location where a terrorist act was to be carried out. While Grin was with the SR branch in Nizhny Novgorod, he was sent to Tver, more than 350 miles away, to sit out his quarantine. During that time he came to the conclusion that he did not wish to kill anybody, and upon his return to Nizhny Novgorod, he refused to undertake the attack to which he had agreed. The story, one of Grin’s earliest psychological studies, explores in depth the thought processes by which its protagonist comes to the realization that he lacks the soul of a terrorist.

  “‘She,’” unlike many of Grin’s early stories, does not deal with either army life or revolutionaries but anticipates some of the qualities that recur in his later work. The anguished state of the tale’s protagonist recalls Poe’s writings, a likely influence that was to become even more evident in years to come and that was noted by critics even in the prerevolutionary era. Although the geography in the story is not imaginary, it is also strikingly unspecific: the events occur in a European country that uses the franc as currency, but even that much is not evident until toward the end. The not entirely benign role of the then–new cinema prefigures Grin’s general suspicion of modern technology: movies, automobiles, airplanes, and the implements of modern warfare are treated with misgivings, if not outright hostility, in subsequent works.

  Although “Reno Island,” of 1909, is generally considered to be the first work set in Grinlandia, the considerably longer “Lanphier Colony,” published just a few months later, at the beginning of 1910, offers the sharper presentation of iconic elements for such works: the self-reliant hero, who is in conflict with his surrounding society and often bears a name similar to that of Grin himself (Horn [Gorn in Russian], Grey, etc.); a stark distinction between good and evil figures; adventurous action in a warm clime on a sea or by the coast; odd names for both places and people; and the threat of or actual violence. Particularly important is the characterization of Horn, who, like Steel in “The Heart of the Wilderness,” attempts to create his ideal community, but with far less felicitous results.

  “The Devil of the Orange Waters” notably suggests that Grinlandia is located somewhere on the sea route between Australia and China. (San Riol, the port city for which Bangok and Baranov are heading, is one of the imaginary cities that recur in Grin’s writings.) The story is of most interest, though, for Baranov, who is specifically Russian—and hence something of an alien presence in Grinlandia—as well as a political exile. Is he meant to be a former SR, with his despair and unfitness for life once again reflecting Grin’s disillusionment with the movement and its members? In any case, Grin seems to hold this character at a distance, having him observed mostly through the eyes of Bangok, and not probing the inner person to the extent that Grin does with Horn and Steel, who are Baranov’s antithesis.

  Evidence of Grin’s ability to write fine work even at the height of World War I, when he was busily turning out the short pieces that consumed much of his time, is provided by “The Poisoned Island,” a finely wrought exploration of the fear that can be caused by the horrors of war, even when they are perceived only indirectly. Narratively, this is one of Grin’s more elaborately structured works. He allows information about what took place on the island to be revealed only gradually, with the initial findings by the crew of the Viola, the fragmentary account by one of the surviving children, and the contrasting newspaper speculations that only lead readers astray from the facts.

  Grin sets “The Poisoned Island” several years in the future, as though predicting that the war would continue for some time. He is concerned, however, less with prognosis than with diagnosis, examining the causes of the mass hysteria that strikes the island’s inhabitants. Their way of life—the kind envisioned in both “The Heart of the Wilderness” and “Lanphier Colony”—as well as their distance from the rest of civilization not only fail to protect them but make them even more vulnerable to the ravages of the modern world.

  The final two stories in this collection, “The Rat-Catcher” and “Fandango,” are among Grin’s most enigmatic—and among his highest achievements. Atypically, he has his narrators living in a real city, Petrograd, at very specific times, just a few years after the Bolshevik Revolution (which goes essentially unmentioned). Both stories make use of Grin’s own experiences, and both freely mix fantasy and reality, with the reader’s perspective confined to that of their first-person narrator. If “Fandango,” the later of the two, seems the stuff of dreams, then “The Rat-Catcher” is more the stuff of nightmare. The latter begins on March 22, 1920, just two days after the ailing Grin returned to Petrograd from his service in the Red Army. Like the narrator, Grin suffered from typhus and, like the character, found refuge in the huge structure that had once included the “Central Bank”—which had become the House of Arts in 1919. Some of the House’s occupants lived in a number of the sixty-three rooms on the building’s upper floors, which had comprised the living quarters of the wealthy Eliseev family, who owned the building before fleeing Russia in 1917. Grin’s room, though, was in a different section, on a dank corridor lower down and once used for servants’ quarters. The abandoned bank, with its labyrinth of empty rooms, created an eerie attraction for the House’s inhabitants, who scavenged the piles of papers described in “The Rat-Catcher” for fuel as well as writing material. (Thus Grin used letterhead stationery from the “Central Bank of the Mutual Credit Society” when writing The Shining World.) This very real locale inspires haunting phantasmagoria, amid which the narrator, whether as the result of delirium or because he actually comes face to face with the uncanny, confronts his inner demons and sense of loss. Grin’s qualms about modern technology appear once again, this time through the somewhat ambiguous role of the telephone.

  “Fandango” centers on a visit to the House of Scholars, another real-life enterprise set up to aid the country’s intellectual elite during the harsh aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Grin went there regularly to receive the food ration to which he was entitled. This is a narrative in which time and space have been cut loose from their moorings, with the disjunction between the date of the main action and that at the end of the tale never fully resolved, and with the narrator magically transported to Zurbagan, the Grinlandian city that appears most often in Grin’s works. (Bam-Gran, the agent involved in his going there, appears in at least one other story as well.) Although this work, too, has its dark moments, it is ultimately about the power of art and beauty. Unlike the music the narrator hears in a restaurant, the melody of the “Fandango” is transportive—as, literally, is the great work of art, in opposition to the more ordinary paintings that are described. Meanwhile, Ershov, a statistician, has no use for beauty. His material needs are quite real, but by insisti
ng on their primacy, he causes the fine items brought by Bam-Gran to disappear. The narrator’s sojourn in Grinlandia signifies the need to transcend the everyday, to believe in an ideal despite the realities of cold, hunger, and want. It is the assertion of such an ideal that makes “Fandango” one of Grin’s most memorable stories, as well as a fitting conclusion to this collection.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The twenty-six years spanning Alexander Grin’s literary debut and his death in 1932 were some of the most tumultuous in not only Russian political history but also literary style and taste. When Grin began to publish in 1906, the decadent and fanciful phoenix of the Russian Silver Age was emerging from the ashes of sober nineteenth-century realism, ushering in an era of renewed interest in stylistic innovation and experimentation, a penchant for the symbolic and mysterious (both sacred and profane), and a thematic preoccupation with the metaphysical and transcendental. It was altogether a more subjective mode of writing. The rupture wrought subsequently by the Great War and the events and repercussions of 1917 would cause yet more reverberations throughout the world of Russian belles lettres for years to come as literature gained further in political immediacy. Although the ever-romantic Grin often stood outside the major trends of mainstream Russian literature, his writing, as this collection shows, nevertheless underwent its own distinct development, never quite losing track of those profoundly changing worlds—real and literary—around him. From his almost Turgenevian treatment of prerevolutionary political radicalism (“Quarantine”) and his modernist appropriation of the cinematic vernacular (“She”) to the worlds of pure imagination (“Lanphier Colony” and “Heart of the Wilderness”) and their bridges with historical reality (“The Rat-Catcher” and “Fandango”), the stories presented here take in the broadest possible range of Grin’s writing, from his accomplished early work to the masterpieces of his mature fiction.