The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar Read online

  We might read the title through the formalist concept of ostranenie, “making it strange.” Viktor Shklovsky wrote in his 1917 essay “Art as Device” that the purpose of art is to activate our perception of things that we no longer see, to highlight the actual qualities of items or people with which we have become too familiar. In Shklovsky’s words, art “makes a stone stony again.” This novel, too, takes an idea—a diplomatic negotiation over boundaries in the wake of a war between empires—and turns it into something unfamiliar. Using Persian words and titles turns an envoy into something exotic, a vazir-mukhtar. Griboedov, presented in the preface as a “man of short stature, yellow-skinned and prim,” disappears, and readers follow instead a concept, a title, a fate.

  So what did Tynyanov’s contemporaries and countrymen make of this odd compendium of facts and stories, not about Griboedov and not about his life?

  Boris Eikhenbaum, one of the most astute critics of the novel, asserted that Tynyanov was creating the genre of biography anew. In crafting his portrait of Griboedov, he believed, Tynyanov created an “intimate image,” a lyrical story that revealed the hero’s fate. It is not just a description of the chronological events of a historical personage’s life, but also an explanation of those events and a search for their links with the era. The man who arises in the opening pages of the book is gradually pushed out of existence, until only his title remains. By combining research and fiction—in Shklovsky’s words a “new genre,” in Eikhenbaum’s a “scientific novel”—Tynyanov was seeking to reveal some authentic truth about both one man’s life and the more general laws that govern fate in every man’s life. Instead of following the principles of the Marxist dialectic, or indeed the rules of socialist realism that had already begun to emerge at the time, Tynyanov found his own route to a truth about Griboedov.

  Most famous, perhaps, is Maxim Gorky’s reaction to Tynyanov’s portrait. “Griboedov is remarkable,” he wrote, “although I didn’t expect to find him thus. But you showed him so convincingly that he must have been like that. And if he wasn’t—now he will be.” Here, perhaps we see the result of Tynyanov’s successful creation of the intimate image, his use of the hero’s own voice, and his deep understanding of the poet and his epoch.

  In the 1960s, Tynyanov’s biographer, Arkady Belinkov, added another dimension to this view. In his mind, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is a thinly veiled analogy between the reign of Tsar Nicholas I and Joseph Stalin. Themes of betrayal of the old ideals, cooperation with the government, and friendship with agents of the secret police echo circumstances from Tynyanov’s own time. And when Griboedov fails and—friendless, alone, and isolated—perishes, the reader feels a horror and frustration: the individual cannot overcome the system, cannot fight his own fate. An allegorical reading like Belinkov’s suggests that Tynyanov was aware of, and indicting, the processes and social organizations around him in the late 1920s.

  Griboedov’s more recent biographers argue that there is nothing true in Tynyanov’s portrait at all. Scholar Sergei Fomichev has written that the novel’s protagonist is “as artistically convincing as he is historically inauthentic,” and biographer Ekaterina Tsimbaeva argues that Tynyanov’s Griboedov is “openly at odds with the real Griboedov.” But, Tsimbaeva agrees, this characterization seemed to Tynyanov “more interesting than the truth.” We leave it to today’s readers to decide for themselves.

  THE NEW TRANSLATION

  1

  The novel’s prologue opens with a scene of tragedy, destruction, lost hope:

  In the freezing cold square in the month of December 1825 the people of the twenties, those with a spring in their step, ceased to exist. Time was suddenly shattered; the crunch of bones was heard in Mikhailovsky Manège—the rebels fled over the bodies of their comrades—the times were on the rack; it was one great torture chamber (as they used to say in the days of Peter the Great).

  With the translators Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush’s choice of the word “shattered,” the bitter cold climate wreaks havoc on the physical bodies of the reformers. In cold weather like that, sound travels sharply, and readers almost sense the “crunch of bones” physically, in their own bones. Empathy for the panicking rebels grows, thanks to this vivid description. And this is the background of the novel. Griboedov is described as one of the “transformed,” those whose crushed hopes turned to vinegar rather than wine. The narrator aligns himself with Griboedov and his fate: “An old Asian vinegar fills my veins instead, and the blood seeps sluggishly, as if through the wastelands of ruined empires.” From the first page, the Rushes have captured the immediacy and urgency of Tynyanov’s prose, and the reader is hooked.

  “Time was suddenly shattered.” These words resonate backward and forward for both Soviet and post-Soviet readers. Tynyanov was writing about the “shattered” decade of the 1820s, but his novel was read in the wake of the bloody events of the first third of the twentieth century. Bread riots in Petersburg in 1905 gave way to frustrated noncompliance in the hopeless European war, for which Russian imperial troops were poorly trained and even more poorly supplied. By the time of the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin was promising “Land, Peace, and Bread,” but erecting a new Communist government on the broken shards of the tsarist regime turned out to be a difficult process for citizens and leaders alike. When Joseph Stalin ascended to power, he quickly turned all manner of Soviet people against each other, and the resulting Terror was far more bloody than the Decembrist Revolt. This political history looms in the background when reading the novel.

  I always think of these opening lines to The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar as Shakespearean, as evoking Hamlet with his cry “the time is out of joint” (act I, scene 5). And if Hamlet longed to “set it right,” then so did the hero of Tynyanov’s tale, Alexander Griboedov. Tynyanov wrote this novel in part to demonstrate the connections between the two time periods—the first third of the twentieth century and the first third of the nineteenth. But for contemporary readers, the gloomy scenario seemed to reflect the unsettled atmosphere of the Soviet twentieth century, and even to predict the grief and suffering of Stalin’s Great Terror.

  Tynyanov’s prose has proved notoriously difficult to translate. But this novel in particular requires a light touch, and not only because of its content. The modernist style includes sharp jump cuts and montage effects. Throughout the book, sentences loom up like dangerous brigands on a dark highway; they create not a colorful tapestry but a jagged surface, not a clear and straightforward story but an intricate pattern, a constant circling and juddering around and across the real meaning, a cryptic set of messages that the reader must struggle to decode. It is a game, not unlike the complex and dangerous diplomatic game that Griboedov was fated to lose in Iran.

  The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar was first rendered into English in 1938 by the British translator Alec Brown, who retitled the novel Death and Diplomacy in Persia. This title helps to exemplify Brown’s abridged and simplified project: Griboedov’s Persian designation, vazir-mukhtar, is elided, and his death at the end of the novel is revealed up front. A death not for nothing, but due to a failure of diplomacy. And not Iran—which after all was the name of the country with which Griboedov negotiated the Turkmenchai Peace Treaty—but Persia, the more ancient and exotic-sounding label. As Brown described it, he and his publishers worked together to excise material that was only interesting to Russian readers, and he characterized their work as creating “a pleasing blend of dash and delicacy.” For British readers in the period between the wars, this was just the ticket.

  In a way, Brown brought the novel closer to British understandings of what Russian fiction was supposed to be. The new title follows the This and That tradition of Russian works—Crime and Punishment, Fathers and Sons, War and Peace—and transforms Tynyanov’s novel into something more closely resembling the moral and ethical explorations of nineteenth-century Russian fiction. By highlighting Persia, the mysterious East, as the location, Brown deemphasized Britain’s own
possible involvement in the murder of Griboedov—still not definitively proved, but quite likely based on what evidence remains—and Brown’s readers were left with the sense that the Russians deserved their fate.

  But the British title hides how closely The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar resembles a nineteenth-century work of another type entirely: Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). Like Tolstoy’s philosophical and tragic novella, Tynyanov’s novel reveals its culmination at the very start; this biographical novel, like all lives, inevitably ends in death. The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar highlights the last year of the poet-diplomat’s life, the inexorable progression as Griboedov approaches his fate, and again, as Tolstoy does in his story of the everyman Ivan Ilyich, Tynyanov renders the simplicity of childhood, the seduction of everyday life, of bureaucracy, and of ambition, and the hero’s betrayal by circumstances that he thought he could control. It was not the Russians who deserved their fate, but any man foolish enough to think that he has control of his own destiny. Late in the novel, the hero thinks that he has followed the treaty to the letter; in Tynyanov’s presentation, it is that inflexibility, that wrongheaded approach to Iranian culture, that caused Griboedov’s death.

  And now, with empires rising again in both of these geographic locales, I can’t help but hear the echoes of Griboedov’s tragedy. Iranians today, when they sense that they are being cheated in the marketplace, cry out “Ai, ai, Turkmenchai!” The treaty was a travesty, a deep and disastrous cultural misunderstanding, and its result was bloody. Whatever evidence of diplomatic manipulations may come to the surface years from now, we will be able to channel Tynyanov in realizing that no diplomatic incident can be “enveloped, finally and irrevocably, in oblivion.” The truth will out. Eventually. And that is part of the ambiguity of Tynyanov’s novel.

  The Rushes’ translation returns rich and important details to the experience of reading Tynyanov’s novel in English. The pacing is superb, the apparatus has been removed from the text but is available to readers who want to clarify who various figures are, and the sprinkling of Persian words into the text gives it just the right flavor. Not Brown’s exoticism, but the real experience. The vazir-mukhtar died; Griboedov lives. And now he lives on in this lovely and compelling English translation as well.

  TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

  The success of his first novel, Küchlya (1925), about the 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 critics for its dark mood. The author was accused of historical determinism 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 Griboedov novel stemmed from his dissatisfaction with what he called “confection history” or the “history of generals,” which concentrated only on the great and famous. Tynyanov wrote that as he began to research Griboedov, he was amazed by the scholars’ “complete lack of understanding” of Griboedov’s celebrated Woe from Wit, as well as by “how little he was understood and by how different Griboedov’s own works were from everything that has been written about him by historians of literature.”1

  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, Griboedov’s biography is a problem which can hardly be resolved by scholarly methods.”2 Alexander Pushkin concluded Chapter II of his Travels to Arzrum saying: “What a pity that Griboedov left no memoir! 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, Tynyanov 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 memories, 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 protagonist’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 necessarily 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 emotional 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 compared 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 translators’ 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 passages 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 concealed, flickering meaning of the subtext, which the reader must grasp in the text’s allusions, taxes the reader’s memory and associative perception but enriches the meaning of the work. Tynyanov’s writing is at times categorically aphoristic or seemingly contradictory, and indeed calculatingly paradoxical, but always arresting in its “new” or “double” vision.

  A complex of poetic leitmotifs (road, home, honor, fate) and of antithetical ones (life–death, fertility–sterility, love–hate/indifference, East–West, success–failure, strength–weakness, loyalty–betrayal) persistently repeated throughout the text ensure its internal cohesion and form the figurative-symbolic meaning of the novel. Explicit and implicit echoes of episodes and of the characters’ dialogue permeate all levels of the structure, informing the narrative 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 perception 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 permeated 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 northern 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.