Russia Washed in Blood

Artyom Vesyoly, Kevin Windle

Description

First English translation of Artyom Vesyoly’s vivid fictionalised account of the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921

Russia Washed in Blood, first published in full in 1932, is the longest and best-known work by Nikolai Kochkurov (1899–1938), who wrote under the pen-name Artyom Vesyoly. The novel, more a series of extended episodes than a connected narrative with a plot and a hero, is a vivid fictionalised account of the events from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier. The title of the novel came to symbolise the tragic history of Russia in the 20th century.

Born in Samara, on the banks of the Volga, the son of a waterside worker, Artyom Vesyoly was the first member of his family to learn to read and write. He took part in the Civil War of 1918–1921 on the Red side, and at its conclusion began a prolific literary career. Vesyoly took as his main theme the horrific events he had witnessed and participated in during the fierce fighting in Southern Russia between the contending forces – Red, White, Cossack, anarchist and others – and the effects of these on the participants and unfortunate civilians caught between them.

Sujets

• World War I
• Historical fiction
• War
• Fiction
• Première Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 03 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785274862
• Langue: English

Extrait

Russia Washed in Blood
Artyom Vesyoly by Daniil Daran
Russia Washed in Blood
A Novel in Fragments
Artyom Vesyoly
Translated by Kevin Windle
With an introduction by Kevin Windle and Elena Govor
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Artyom Vesyoly; Translated by Kevin Windle
With an introduction by Kevin Windle and Elena Govor 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940394
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-484-8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-484-8 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Note on Russian Names
Introduction by Kevin Windle and Elena Govor
Death Tramples upon Death
Private Maxim Kuzhel Has the Floor
The Blaze Spreads and Rages
On the River Kuban
The Black Epaulette
The Conquerors’ Banquet
Bitter Hangover
Etudes
Pride
Summary Justice
A Glimmer of Courage
The Capture of Armavir
A Letter
What the Guns Told of
A Garden of Delights
Escaping Turkish Captivity
Blood Brothers
Filka’s Career
In the Steppe
A Wild Heart
The Town of Klyukvin
The Village of Khomutovo
Might Is Right
Glossary
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to the editors of Cardinal Points for permission to make use of material published therein in October 2019.
The translator is deeply grateful to his colleague Elena Govor, Artyom Vesyoly’s granddaughter, for her close collaboration and advice at every stage of this project. Without her willing support, it would have been difficult to bring it to fruition.
Sincere gratitude is due to Marian Simpson, who read the complete typescript with great care and offered valuable advice, to Robert Chandler for helpful suggestions, to the late James Grieve, for many conversations on matters of wording, usage, phrasing and history, and to Ludmilla, for her ready assistance and patience.
The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.
NOTE ON RUSSIAN NAMES
Personal names in Russian have three components: first name, patronymic and surname, for example Ivan Mikhailovich Chernoyarov, Anna Pavlovna Sinitsyna. The patronymic indicates the name of the bearer’s father, Mikhail in the first example, Pavel in the second.
Formal address, roughly equivalent to Mr and Mrs, is traditionally by first name and patronymic.
First names usually have many hypocoristic forms, which express different nuances of attitude and emotion: Ivan will be known to his intimates as (among other forms) Vanya, or Vanka; Maria – Masha, Mashenka; Dmitry – Dima, Mitya, Mityenka or Mitka; Alexander and Alexandra – Sasha, Sashenka, Sashka, Shura; Vasily – Vasya, Vaska. In the interests of clarity, and at the cost of some expressive nuances, the variety of forms has been somewhat reduced in this translation. Since Vasily Galagan is almost always addressed and referred to as Vaska, the latter form is the one predominantly applied. In southern Russia, Mikhail (Misha, Mishka) often occurs in the forms Mikhailo or Mikhaila, and Nikolai (Kolya, Nika) is replaced by Mikola (in Ukrainian Mykola).
Nicknames and names of animals and ships are translated in the text where possible. Surnames, however meaningful, are left untranslated.
Many geographical names have changed in the past century, some more than once. The translation preserves the forms used in the original, for example Tiflis (Tbilisi), Petrograd (St Petersburg), Yekaterinodar (Krasnodar), Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad, Volgograd), adding a note where required. Where English usage has changed, the translation adheres to the norms of the period: for example the Ukraine, the Crimea. With few exceptions, geographical names are not translated.

INTRODUCTION
Artyom Vesyoly (1899–1938, real name Nikolai Ivanovich Kochkurov) was born in Samara on the Volga. His father was a carter and loader, and the son, who started work at fourteen, would later describe his own working career as follows: ‘factory – tramp – newspaper seller – cabman – clerk – agitator – Red Guard – newspaper – party work – Red Army soldier – student – sailor – writer.’ 1 He joined the Bolshevik Party in March 1917, aged seventeen, and was soon involved in the Civil War of 1918–1921. After being wounded in action in June 1918, having enough schooling to read and write – the first of his family to acquire literacy – he was assigned to propagandist duties. He travelled the front-line areas in an ‘agit-train’, producing propaganda material and editing local Bolshevik newspapers.
At this stage of his life, Vesyoly’s political and ideological views accorded fully with those of the revolutionary leadership. When in the spring of 1918 he met the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, then in Samara and a staunch supporter of the Bolshevik cause, the two argued heatedly: Hašek upheld Russia’s pre-revolutionary literacy legacy, while Vesyoly spoke fiercely in favour of unceremoniously consigning Pushkin and Tolstoy to the dustbin of history. 2
When the Civil War ended, Vesyoly was able to attend the Moscow Institute of Literature, founded by the poet Valery Bryusov, and study the craft of writing. He did not complete the course, but soon began to publish fiction and drama, most of it based on his experience of the social upheaval brought by war and revolution. Recognised as a young writer of great promise, he was a founding member of the Pereval group of writers and briefly a member of RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers).
The novel Russia Washed in Blood ( Rossiya, krovyu umytaya ), first published in full in 1932 but further developed in subsequent editions, is the best-known of his works. In it, he relied heavily on his own experience of the Civil War and on the letters he received from newly literate soldiers and veterans. He also incorporated, in revised form, some novellas which he had published separately in the 1920s.
With Russian writers prominently in mind, Henry James spoke of the novels of the nineteenth century as ‘large, loose, baggy monsters’. Had he lived long enough to read Russia Washed in Blood , which has little else in common with the classics of that period, he might have found that it outstripped in bagginess anything he had previously read. It lacks a unifying plot, and a definite beginning, middle and end. Most parts of the book can be read independently of the others as a series of extended episodes rather than a connected narrative. Nor is unity provided by the characters, though some appear in more than one chapter. It is free of heroes in the traditional sense; its focus is less on individuals than on the crowd, and the voices we hear, often of unidentified speakers, are mostly those of ordinary people with little education. The novel is unfinished: it continued to evolve throughout the author’s life, and we know that his plan was a novel of twenty-four chapters. 3 Some early editions bore the words ‘fragments’ or ‘fragment’ beneath the title. Since this remains fully appropriate, we have retained it here. It helps explain, for example, why Ivan Chernoyarov, who is killed at the end of one episode, reappears alive in the next, and why some of the adventures of Maxim Kuzhel and Vaska Galagan, briefly ‘remembered’ in ‘The Conquerors’ Banquet’, are set out only later, in the ‘étude’ entitled ‘In the Steppe’.
A surviving plan, drafted in 1933, tells us that after every three chapters there would be seven études, serving as ‘musical pauses’. Altogether there would be forty-nine such pieces, free-standing stories of two or three pages, linked to the main lines of the novel by ‘their hot breath, place of action, theme and time’. 4 Clearly, Vesyoly did not follow this design closely: most of the dozen études are much longer, and all are grouped together after the chapter ‘Bitter Hangover’.
The American critic Sophie Court, who read the Russian original at an early date, found much merit in its unusual structure, observing that its ‘fragmentary nature makes each episode, each scene stand out more independently and gives the narrative an unforgettable vividness’. In her view, ‘the sparkling Russian humour, the depth of Russian sadness, and the sincerity and naiveté of Russian pathos combine to make this novel of the Civil War a brilliant, powerful work of art.’ 5
While its form marks a clear break with establishe