7 ]Yܖ^DJbpppތ(޴<xp~ ߞߴ*8 Translators Introduction The Christened Chinaman (Kreq\nyj kitaec), originally entitled The Transgression of Nikolai Letaev: (I: Epopee), appeared in 1921 to mixed reviews. A. Veksler called it one of the most artistically vibrant and complete works of Russian literature, if not the most vibrant work of A. Bely. Viktor Shklovsky, the well known Formalist critic, wrote: I don't think that he himself [Bely] knows what in the world an Epopee is. Critics have also varied widely in their evaluations of the stylistic innovations of the work. Gleb Struve complained of the artificial, obsessive verse rhythm of the work, noting I confess to not having been able to read it through. This same rhythm seemed to Marietta Shaginyan just exactly right for the epic form chosen by Bely for his work. Andrei Bely and his works often called forth extreme responses, positive and negative, from his contemporaries. Now most of his works are met with silence in the Soviet Union, read by few and understood by even fewer in the West. The Christened Chinaman is an autobiographical novel relating the world as seen through the eyes of a five year old in the prose-poetry of a forty-one year old Symbolist writer. Like all of Belys works the novel has multiple levels and meanings. Bely is a lover of synthesis and triangularity. His world is broken down into tripartite structures in which the third element is the embodiment and resolution of the first two. This type of structure can be found at every level of the novel. On the stylistic level there are elements of sense, sound and meaning. The structural level consists of content, form and symbol. The thematic level is composed of autobiography, literature and mysticism or myth. The autobiographical, contextual level is the easiest to decipher: it is simple and direct, a bare skeleton for the work. The novel is set in the mid-1880s in the Moscow apartment of a Professor of Mathematics, Mikhail Vasilevich Letaev. With him are his much younger and beautiful wife, Elizaveta, and their son, Nikolai, nicknamed Kotik or Kitten. The action of the novel flows through the seasons of fall, winter and spring with an imagined and anticipated summer. Kotik, the narrator, is largely confined to the apartment save for a few strolls in the environs of the Arbat district. There is little or no plot in the narrative; rather, a series of incidents and episodes helps to define the family members and the relationships between them in the familial triangle. The conflict of the work is the struggle of the father and mother over the fate and future of the son. Should he be allowed to develop into an eggheaded eccentric mathematician like his father or into a muliebral musician like his mother? While the conflict is clear, the proper course of action for the child is not. He retreats into a pose of ignorance and slow-wittedness in order to avoid his mothers wrath. He withdraws into his own inner self, into a world of imagination inhabited by frightening creatures who arrive with the darkness of night, but who fortunately disperse with the coming of mornings light into the bedroom. Despite his attempts to conceal his intellectual development, Kotik is eventually discovered and beaten by his mother for listening to the father. Kotik is then bundled up and rushed away from the house by his father to spend the day at his Uncles. The next morning he returns home for a reconciliation with the repentant mother. The struggle between science and art, the mathematician-musician conflict of Professor Nikolai Vasilevich Bugaev and Aleksandra Dmitrievna, nee Yegorova, over their only son, Boris, is well documented both by Bely himself (the pseudonym of Boris Bugaev) in his memoirs and by other biographers. Similarly many of the persons and events found in the novel can also be traced to references in Belys non-fictional works. In a preface to the first edition which was subsequently omitted, Bely warned against too close a comparison between his fictional and actual father. To some extent all fiction is a mixture of fact and fantasy, of memory enhanced by imagination. Ideally the line between the two should disappear for both writers and readers in the texture of the final work. In Belys case the enhancement and imagination occur more on the levels of style and symbol; memory preserves in large part the real events which become the content. As it is, most accounts of his father including those by Bely himself provide considerable evidence that the fictional Mikhail Letaev has much in common with the real Nikolai Bugaev. If the content is only the skeleton, then the format, the literariness of the work, is the body. In Bely the style is the substance. Sound prevails over sense. The word predominates over the sentence. The part is often more important than the whole. Shifting the burden of meaning from the forest to the trees, Bely disassembles the linear and temporal components of logic. In place of traditional exposition, in which one word following another is logically connected with it, there is a verbal and spatial logic based on the repetition of sounds, roots, words, phrases and sentences. Connections are made by associating like elements wherever they are found. The chaos of external reality is ordered only by the the imposition of an internal patterning upon the words. Here the narrator is not only a five year old but a middle-aged Symbolist poet sensitive to rhythm and rhyme and asserting the poets right to order his world verbally. This combination of child and adult in a single narrator is the unifying device of the novel. In curious ways what the boy and what the poet see and say are often identical, even though the former arrives there through ignorance or accident, the latter through knowledge or design. For example, the father often buys antonovka apples and brings them home to the boy. Anton, the yardman, is a swindler who sells the fathers books. Antonovich is a professor like the father, but he is a gangster and kidnapper. Gangrene in Russian is called Antons fire. The only connection which exists among all of these is the Russian root anton (anton). Later the boy commits an original sin and is kidnapped by his father. When presented with an anise apple the boy imagines being thrown into the biblical fire of the book of Daniel. These seemingly random thought-trains of the boy are at the same time elaborate systems devised by the poet. The poet is likewise responsible for the other systems such as the color scheme. The world is constructed primarily of reds and greens, blacks and whites, blues and yellows. All of these help to order and establish limits in the mind of the child. Another device is the cyclical alternation of day and night in which darkness, fear and incom-prehensibility are replaced with light, security and clarification. Finally there is the important motif contained in the growth of sexual aware-ness. The boy is confused but curious about bodily functions, sexual organs, menstruation and love-making. The middle-aged poet mirrors this ignorance (although he presumably knows what the boy doesnt) with euphemisms, hints, double entendres. In effect both aspects of the narrator (young and old) while seeming to disguise things only reveal them all the more clearly to the reader. The story is as simple as the style is complex. The prose under-goes that dislocation of language into its meaning referred to by T. S. Eliot. It is a poets prose in which the denotation or signification of a word often is less important than the connotations, sounds or symbols evoked by the word. Belys aim throughout his artistic career was to revitalize language, to create the living word. Words take on new additional meanings, or recapture older forgotten ones. Sounds abound, and gradually the reader comes to see and hear that the sound precedes the sense, the unit comes before unity. Where old words are insufficient for the task, new words are invented. Here again we confront the narrator-double. Is it baby-talk or poetic license? The false analogy of the child or the poetic inspiration of the adult? Names take on meanings: the family name Letaev comes from the root letto fly. Metaphors have literal meanings and homonyms confound the youth. The boys consciousness still before the stage of figurative perception combines with the poets rediscovery of coincidences which have been forgotten or lost. All of this sound and sense is intended to culminate in meaning, in a synthesis of symbolic metaphysical themes that inserts a spirit into the body and skeleton of the work. There are actually two major themes in the novel. The first is revealed in the title and in the last words of the work: The Christened Chinaman. In the father are united two disparate cultures, religions, traditions and regions. West (which for Russians is Europe) meets East in a series of unions which alone are capable of bringing fulfillment and release from the search for Truth. The Elohim of Abraham, Moses and the prophets come together with Ahura Mazda and Brahma in Christ and Christianity, the New Covenant. Latin and Sanskrit return once again to the one language understood by all before the tragedy of the Tower of Babel. Professor Letaev, the cultured intellectual with roots in Pythagorus, Leibniz and Kant, respected in European mathematical circles, is also the bearer of the wildman Scythian-Tatar heritage. He is a wiseman and a fool, this genius is an eccentric, the dean is a buffoon. The rationalism and reserve of Europe are complemented by the intuitivism and impetuosity of the East. Professor Bugaev becomes the embodiment of Russias age old identity crisis: are we Europeans or Asians? The truth embodied in the person of Professor Bugaev is the message that Russia is unique. Russia is descendant of both East and West, but belongs to neither. It is as if the Mongol father had committed the rape of the gentile Byzantine mother and both had decided to disown the bastard called Russia. Yet the son of the father cannot deny or ignore his heritage. Just as Russia is troubled and divided by the circumstances of its birth, so too is the narrator. He loves and fears the father whom he loses as a young man, but as the middle aged poet he will use the literary process to find him and recreate him. This theme of the son is the second major theme of the novel. The theme of son versus father, the underlying Oedipal complex in many of Belys prose works, was first explored by Khodasevich. Others have parroted his interpretation, but left it essentially undeveloped. Freuds Totem and Taboo does provide several clues for unlocking the mysteries of the novel. His theories on the covenant between father and son, the identification of filial guilt with the inception of religion and his recognition of art and religion as two outgrowths of the Oedipal complex are all pertinent to The Christened Chinaman. The issues of sexual awakening, love-hate relationships, and taboos in the work remain to be unraveled, but the Freudian approach is limited because it focuses attention solely on the gender aspect of rod. The key element of the novel is, indeed, the concept of rod, but in its far broader implications of genus, generic, generation, genteel, congenital and original. Bely, the writer and myth-maker, sets out to resolve the problem of birth by combining the Old and New Testaments, Genesis and the Gospels. The original sin is birth itself. Generated by the act of procreation between progenitor (father) and the genetrix (mother), it is the son who must be sacrificed. The mock sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham at the Lords command prefigures the crucifixion. God the Father sacrifices Christ, his only begotten Son, on the Cross. Christ, the innocent one, sheds his blood for all men in the only sacrifice acceptable to the Father, a sacrifice of both man and God. The Christian myth, the mystery of Christ, is perpetuated in the sacrament of Baptism. Water, the sign of the New Covenant, replaces the blood of circumcision of the Old Covenant. In Baptism, man is christened, he becomes Christlike and is reconciled with the Father. Kotik seeks the same reconciliation. In his own mystical dream world he is crucified, dies and is buried, only to resurrect and live in glory thereafter. The resurrected Kotik can return home to his mother who herself has been reconciled with her son by his sacrifice. In his dreams Kotik, created in the image and likeness of the Father, comes to recognize and accept the cup of sorrows presented to him. The poet comes to a similar realization that he is his fathers son, and Andrei Bely effects a reconciliation with Professor Bugaev in his literary creation. In accepting their fate, in resigning themselves to their heritage, both child and poet fulfill their covenant and find peace. This search for peace and reconciliation was the driving force in the life and works of Andrei Bely. Born in 1880, the lone and lonely child of a mismatched marriage, Boris Bugaev grew up in the Arbat district of Moscow. Intelligent and quickwitted, he was constantly drawn between the two poles represented by his father and mother. The duality of their relationship was to be reproduced in his personality and make itself felt throughout his artistic career and adult life. Surrounded mostly by relatives and adult friends of the family in his early years (his father was already over forty at his birth), he kept himself the center of attention only by acting the part of a child. Consequently, he grew old and yet never grew up. Already in school he displayed his independence and individuality by skipping classes for several weeks and going instead to the library, where he simply devoured books. This particular incident in his life, this transgression, was to have constituted the central event in the Transgression of Nikolai Letaev. In subsequent editions the heading for the first chapter, The Christened Chinaman, became the title of the entire novel, when the work never progressed to this autobiographical moment. Boris enrolled at Moscow University in 1899 in a course of studies in the natural sciences. After graduating in 1903, he enrolled for a second degree in philosophy which he never completed. Failure to pursue things to their conclusion is another characteristic trait of Bely, but his inability to finish his second degree is at least understandable. In 1902 he had already published his first major work, Symphony (The Second, Dramatic One), in which he tried to capture in prose the magic of music. In this first decade of the century Andrei Bely (the pseudonym he had chosen to avoid embarrassment for and confusion with his father's name) became a widely published poet, prosaist, critic and essayist. For a while he became the most prolific and polemical theorist of the Symbolist movement in Russia. At the same time he was acquiring an encyclopedic, albeit at times superficial, knowledge of almost everything under the sun, but especially of philosophy and aesthetics. He read so many works, was influenced by so many figures and traditions, that it is difficult to believe any attempts to separate neatly and divide precisely these influences into periods, as Bely and his biographers often do. Vladimir Solovyov, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Blavatsky, Besant, Steiner, all fascinated this impressionable young man at least temporarily. If there is any progression, it can be seen only in the broadest terms as one passing through Orthodoxy to Rationalism and finding its synthesis in mysticism. In the end Bely apparently found the answers to his questions in the rational religion of Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy. By 1910 at the age of thirty Bely had insured for himself a place in the history of Russian letters. Four prose symphonies, a major novel (The Silver Dove, 1909), three major collections of poetry, over two hundred articles, essays and reviews and his monumental work Symbolism were all being read and discussed. Eventually Symbolism would lay the groundwork for the Russian Formalist movement, initiate a school of statistical critical analysis still carried on in the Soviet Union and the United States, and indirectly by its influence on Formalism, have an effect on the later New Critics and Structuralists. Yet Bely went abroad at the peak of his career, and by the time he returned the Symbolist concerns, persons and movement had been replaced in the publics mind. The brash challenges of the younger Symbolists seemed mild and conventional compared to a new gene-ration of screamers and shouters, such as Mayakovsky. If Belys popularity declined in the second decade of the century, at least his talent did not suffer. In the teens he wrote and published the novel upon which much of his reputation rests: Petersburg (1914). This most important event of his literary life was matched by the single most important influence for the rest of his life: his meeting with and acceptance of Rudolf Steiner. Ten years after the death of his father, Bely finally found a new father figure, a spiritual advisor, one who could show the way and lead him through this earthly existence. The story of Rudolf Steiner and Andrei Bely, if and when it ever becomes fully known, will certainly clarify much about Bely and his art. Bely settled with Asya Turgeneva, his companion and later his wife, in Dornach to work on the construction of the Goetheanum. In 1916 he returned to motherland Russia ravaged by war and soon to be racked by revolution. Bely like Blok eagerly accepted the Revolution as the long anticipated and awaited Apocalypse. In the next few years he participated fully in trying to build the new society. Bely lent his hand to the training of cadres of writers for the Proletkult. There had always been something of the frustrated teacher in Bely, reflected in the various introductions, prefaces, forewords to his works, or the several hundreds of pages of footnotes and commentary to Symbolism. Meanwhile he continued work on various manuscripts which would eventually see the light. It was primarily a period of prose: Petersburg, Kotik Letaev, Notes of an Eccentric and a series of critical works. Bely continued to write prolifically in the 1920s in spite of his complaints that publishers were ignoring him. In the first years of the decade he turned his attention to his father in the poem The First Encounter and the novel The Christened Chinaman. Having apparently resolved for himself the image of his father, Bely was hit by a severe loss with the death of Aleksandr Blok, symbolist poet, friend, spiritual brother. In November of 1921 Bely, unable to cope with the physical hardships of life in Russia, departed for Berlin. Here he was dis-appointed by Asya, who had disowned him for a new lover, and he felt betrayed by Rudolf Steiners restrained and reserved attitude toward him. In spite of these disappointments or perhaps because of them, Bely provided an almost non-stop stream of works for Berlin publishers. In a two year period he published nine original works and several reprints of older works, including a rewritten version of Petersburg. Bely left Berlin and returned to Russia in October of 1923. In the next ten years he would produce two major novels, three volumes of memoirs and two major critical studies. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in January, 1934. In the end Bely had come to grips with his life, although in a highly individualistic way. Having purged himself and his guilt in his fiction, he could turn to fact. In one sense, however, there wasnt really any dividing line between the two. Khodasevich remarks that Belys autobiography is a series of non-existent events, just like those of his autobiographical novels. It might be more correct to say that they are filled with events which often exist for Bely alone. For Bely, appearance is not to be mistaken for reality. Reality is a synthesis of both an event and the individuals perception or experience of that event. In his world it is the word which comes first and then becomes flesh. Art is not merely a reflection of life, but an expression and the image of reality itself. This results, of course, in a vision of the world that is highly individualistic and unique to Bely. The very personal quality of the reality makes empirical verification of it irrelevant. The key to the The Christened Chinaman is not to be found in the events depicted, which may or may not have occurred, but in the writers perception and portrayal of those events. To read Bely does not require that we have faith in his vision. But to confront, appreciate, truly understand Belys art we must enter for a time into his world, into his mind. At times frustrating, at other times refreshing, the journey is always nothing less than a magical mystery tour. The Text and the Translation The story of Belys writings is the history of grandiose plans most often unrealized. Bely was forever drawing up, discarding, modifying and revising not only his works, but also the grand designs which they were intended to fit. He began his publishing career in prose with the appearance of A Symphony (The Second, Dramatic One) in 1902. This was followed by the Northern Symphony (The First, Heroic One) in 1904, The Return: The Third Symphony in 1905 and finally A Goblet of Blizzards: The Fourth Symphony in 1908. His next major effort in prose was The Silver Dove (1909), intended as the first part of a trilogy to be entitled East or West. This was followed by Belys most famous novel, Petersburg (1914), also conceived as part of the trilogy. While one can indeed find the theme of east and west in Petersburg, the work itself has almost no connection to the first novel. The third element of this trilogy was to have been a work entitled My Life. In fact, a new autobiographical novel, Kotik Letaev (1917-1918) did appear, but it had absolutely no relation to the first two novels. By this time Bely considered Kotik Letaev to be not the end of his first trilogy, but only the first part of the promised My Life. In 1918 Bely began what would eventually become Notes of an Eccentric, announced in 1919 as the first part of Volume I of the new I: Epopee, conceived as a ten volume opus. The project was somewhat altered when from October to December 1920 Bely wrote four chapters, only one of which was eventually edited in the spring of 1921 and survived as: The Transgression of Nikolai Letaev: (Epopee Volume I), The Christened Chinaman, Chapter 1. Printed in Zapiski mechtatelej, IV (Petrograd: 1921, pp. 21-165), this text will change titles but little else throughout its subsequent reprintings. In the Instead of a Foreword to the work Bely alerted his readers that Notes of an Eccentric, the former Volume I of Epopee, should now be considered merely a Foreword to the overall work. In 1922 The Transgression of Nikolai Letaev appeared in the Paris journal, Sovremennye zapiski. This version contains only five of the fifteen sub-chapters of the 1921 version: Instead of a Foreword, The Study and Papochka (XI, 65-89); This and Thats Own (XII, 53-68); Ahura Mazda and Papa Hit the Nail on the Head (XIII, 99-115). In 1925 while planning his Complete Works, which also never appeared, Bely expressed a desire to unite Kotik Letaev and The Transgression of Nikolai Letaev as pieces of the unwritten Epopee, which at one time I wanted to call My Life. They should be united under the general title Kotik Letaev, as parts I and II. This idea was obviously abandoned by 1927, when the identical work appeared as a separate volume The Christened Chinaman (Moscow: Nikitinskie subbotniki). In 1928 the remainder of the five thousand copies printed received a new cover and title page, this time as The Christened Chinaman: A Novel. The work has not been reprinted in the Soviet Union. A photographic reproduction slightly reduced in size of the 1927 Moscow edition appeared as Volume XXIII of the Slavische Propylen series of the Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 1969. This edition has a brief introductory note plus some useful identification of the major characters by Dmitrij Tschizewskij and Anton Hnig. Belys abandonment of his fictional autobiography after The Transgression may be connected with the death in 1921 of his friend and sometimes foe, fellow Symbolist, Aleksandr Blok. Bely dates his Instead of a Foreword July 1921. Blok died on August 7, 1921, an event which spurred Bely to write his remembrances of the poet. Bely spent much of the latter part of 1921, then 1922 working on Remembrances of Blok, first printed in Zapiski mechtatelej (1922) and then later expanded and revised into a book-length project for the Berlin journal Epopeja (1922-1923). This in turn led to work on his own memoirs in late 1922 and early 1923 which eventually became The Beginning of the Century (1933). Two other volumes of memoirs have appeared in Russian: On the Border of Two Centuries (1930, 1931) and Between Two Revolutions (dated 1934, actually appeared in 1935). In many ways the memoirs constitute not a break with, but a continuation of, the autobiography. These memoirs record events and personalities, the accuracy of which has been questioned by reviewers, largely because they are seen through the prism of Belys own unique vision. In one sense Bely merely switched from writing factual fiction to writing fictional facts. The text of The Christened Chinaman, unlike those of Petersburg, underwent almost no revision and no major rewriting by the author. Some differences do exist and they are by no means minor. The 1922 version differs considerably from the other variants. As has been noted it contains only one third of the full text, a fact left unmentioned in the text itself and often ignored by bibliographers. It is written in the old orthography, which had been retained by Russian emigrees after the Soviet reforms of the language. Most notably, the 1922 edition omits almost all of the typographical peculiarities of Belys text, thereby reducing it in the readers vision to a conventional prose work. Irregular spacing and indentation, the off-setting of passages by dashes and dots, the liberal use of accent marks and italics and the separation by lines of dialogue are mostly absent so that the text conforms to a more standardized prose model. The 1922 version also omits the final paragraph of the Instead of a Foreword in which Bely explains the relationship between this work, Notes of an Eccentric and Epopee. Many of the alterations in typography may be attributed to the never-ending efforts of editors to conserve space, a concern to which Bely was not altogether insensitive. But this version as a whole conceals a major structural element of Belys prose. The versions of 1921 and 1927 (including the subsequent reprint) are almost identical except for a few minor distinctions. It is significant that not a single word has been added or deleted in the 1927 text. For the most part the distinctions are purely mechanical ones. We have already mentioned the change in title, which was required when the action of the novel failed to contain the envisioned transgression. The subsequent omission of the Instead of a Foreword in the 1927 edition has also been noted. Another element which distinguishes the two versions is the number of characters per line. The 1921 version has approximately 65 characters per line compared with 50 characters for the 1927 version. This explains, of course, the increase in pages of text from 142 to 230 in the later edition. More significantly, fewer characters per line result in far more frequent and more graphically distinct configurations in the text. The visual aspect enhanced by the typography is an important element of Belys overall design and I have tried to preserve it basically unchanged in this translation. Other distinctions between the two texts are minor. There are several instances of spelling having been changed to conform presumably with newer Soviet standards. One does find fewer instances of capitalization in the later edition, especially when used referring to religious persons and places. The lower case is used for the initial letters of the personal pronoun he for Christ and for bogorodica (Mother of God). Where these changes are the result of conformity with Soviet attempts to de-emphasize religion, the upper case has been restored in the translation. There are misprints, typographical errors or simply mistakes in both versions, although the 1927 version seems to have cleared up several questionable uses of punctuation from the earlier text. I have chosen the 1927 text as the authoritative one, as the last one to have been printed during the lifetime of the author, but I have consulted the other texts when difficulties arose. This explains, for example, why bezbojnye of the 1927 edition is translated as wallpaperless (bezobojnye) of the 1921 version. Belys works have not always fared well in English translation. Some excerpts from Kotik Letaev were done by George Reavey (Soviet Literature ed. George Reavey and Marc Slonim, 1933; and his Modern Soviet Short Stories 1961). Reavey has also translated The Silver Dove (New York: Grove Press, 1974). In 1959 John Cournos translated St. Petersburg (New York: Grove Press). While these translations represent various degrees of literary and artistic merit, they are far removed from Bely and his prose, and they fail to explain why Nabokov would consider Petersburg one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century prose, ranking just after Joyces Ulysses and Kafkas Transformation, but before Prousts In Search of Lost Time. More recently a new generation of American scholar-translators has turned its attention to Bely with considerable success. Gerald Janecek broke important ground with his 1971 translation of Kotik Letaev (Ann Arbor: Ardis). Robert Maguire and John Malmstad contributed years of work to a masterful edition of Petersburg (Indiana Univ. Press, 1978). This is not just a translation: a solid introduction and extensive notes make this an excellent primer on how to read a Symbolist or modernist novel. Gerald Janecek has also published a translation of Belys long poem The First Encounter, annotated by Nina Berberova (Princeton Univeristy Press, 1979). This scholarly notation seems to be the only way to make Bely comprehensible to a wider audience. Also in the last decade a few of Belys critical articles have appeared, as well as a volume of short stories. Even so, all of these translations represent only a small part of Belys literary legacy. Why have Belys works been less fortunate than those of other writers? Why has this Russian James Joyce been denied to an extent the attention and appreciation which he seems to deserve? Some of the reasons are purely extra-literary. This genius was also a very, very strange fellow, hudak, in his looks, in his manner, in his intellectual temperament. Nina Berberova recalls him in the 1920s as a frightening physical specimen, with overdeveloped arms and legs, and the high brow inherited from his father. Others recall him as absent-minded, distant, alone in his own world. Surely he was listening to a different drummer when he eurythmically danced out his poems. Perhaps he would have been happier if he had remained silent. Unfortunately he refused to restrain himself and was no less of a wrangler than his father. Indeed, throughout his entire life he was constantly alienating friend and foe alike in both word and deed. When he returned to Russia after two years in Berlin in 1923, he found himself rejected by the emigrees as a traitor, and never fully accepted by the Soviets. In many ways he was a man without a country and without an audience. Finally, there was Belys search for some way out the chaos which he perceived around him and in his own life. Much has been made of the domestic quarrels between father and mother over the sons development and their eventual deleterious effect on the child. Most scholars and critics are willing to follow Belys lead in assigning the blame elsewhere. Ultimately, the blame should rest where it belongs, on the shoulders of Bely himself. Even as he grew physically he failed to mature intellectually. He was forever searching for that special secret, a synthesis, which would provide a simple answer to a complex world. A variety of solutions were briefly embraced then discarded along the way. From Orthodoxy, through Rationalism and then mysticism, Bely arrived at Anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner, who would serve as the father figure which Bely had lost. In the midst of the Anthroposophists, in the teachings of Steiner, in the building of the Goetheanum Bely seemed to find the long awaited synthesis. It is in the teachings of Steiner that East meets West (The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul); sound meets sense (Eurythmy as Visible Speech); the rational and the irrational, the physical and the spiritual all unite. Most of Belys contemporaries dismissed Steiner and his theories, considering them only a harmful influence in Belys literary output. Modern scholars have been more willing to be objective, but they have been hampered by the nature of Anthroposophy and its mysteries. Only one who has been initiated into the secrets of the movement can fully appreciate and understand them; likewise, attempts to explain them in a coherent fashion to the uninitiated are doomed from the beginning to failure. Western scholars of more recent times have been able to return to Bely, perhaps because of the time which separates them from the man. With a healthy disinterest in Belys political leanings, or lack of them, and a tolerance for the man not put to the test by personal acquaintance, they can turn their attention to the works themselves. Here the literary impediments to translation become starkly clear. Evgeny Zamyatin once wrote of Belys books: I am not certain, however, whether one can properly say that they are written in Russian, so unusual is Belys syntax, so full of neologisms his diction. The language of his books is Belys language, just as the language of Ulysses is not English, but Joyces English. Zamyatins comparison of Bely with Joyce is one frequently echoed. Certainly a translator can look to Joyce to find a new and expanded English language. Yet one should caution that Bely and Joyce are allied more in spirit than in substance; both were innovators, but both were bound by the systems of their respective native languages. Thus while one might look to Joyce for inspiration, one ought to translate Bely as Bely, not as a Russian Joyce. The difficulty of Belys prose increases with his development as a writer. In his own prose there seems to be an inverse proportion between form and content. There is a steady decrease in the simple narrative structure at the same time that the stylistic devices increase. Likewise, the meaning of words is slowly replaced by the sound of words as the most important element in a work. There is a gradual progression from the most conventional of his novels, The Silver Dove, to a greater and greater departure from novelistic techniques in Petersburg, Kotik Letaev and then The Christened Chinaman. The basis of Belys prose is the word, both diachronically and synchronically. The word is like a toy snapper, in which you pop open one end in order to reveal the contents. The explosion of a word pronounced opens a world of delightful surprises. Out jump etymologies; the word ob=[snit's[ with the accent diverted to the second syllable points the way back to the clear in clarification. Sound overwhelms, sometimes supersedes all the other senses as a match chiffichurs. The poet understands and wants his reader to know that words don't always mean the same thing. When is a wajka a gang and when is it a bucket? When do hares become sunbeams (zajhiki) and when do kitchen fumes become offspring (hado)? The poet can imitate childlike vision if he chooses to see metaphors literally. What does it mean to have one foot on the grave? Logic is reduced to sound and not sense: Persians eats persics, Anton doesnt have an antonovka apple, a beadle isnt a beagle, Pudel' ne pedel'. With childlike naivete new words are formed by analogy with old ones: what for the child is a cute mistake is for the poet a neologism, a blackroach (hernokan) instead of a cockroach (tarakan). The poet recaptures the innocence of the child and assumes for a time a selective ignorance of the constraints imposed by the system of language. Nouns turn into verbs, verbs generate nouns and adjectives, new combinations appear (over four hundred neologisms in The Christened Chinaman) as the poet expands and then legitimizes the illegitimate language constructions of a child. Bely also experiments with larger units. Syntax is modified and altered to fit the mood and thought train of the author. One looks in vain for the period ending the first sentence, which finally appears after some thirty lines. Bely is the master of the run-on sentence, that nemesis of high school English (and probably Russian) teachers. His punctuation and arrangement of text also make Belys style distinctive and difficult. Several translators of Bely have simply ignored his uniqueness and proceeded to render his writings in acceptable, often elegant, English with traditional punctuation, pagination etc. Others, namely, Gerald Janecek, Robert Maguire and John Malmstad, have tried to remain true to the spirit of Bely. They have sought to maintain Belys word repetition by employing one English equivalent for any given Russian word. But they have also attempted to retain most of the peculiarities of Belys prose within the bounds of commonly accepted English . True as they are to the spirit of Bely, even they have had to bend at the letter, as they attempt to recapture the original. It is essential to keep in mind, however, that as the central element of Belys prose progresses from content to style new modes of translation are required. Vladimir Nabokov, both theorist and practitioner of the art and craft of translation, once declared: The only object and justification of translation is the conveyance of the most exact information possible and this can be only achieved by a literal translation, with notes. This doctrinaire attitude is one which Vladimir Nabokov, the writer, liberally violates in the translations of his own novels. The merit of his English translations is that they represent not the Russian Nabokov but the English novelist Nabokov, one who creates original works in both languages. The theory, however, which he applied with more rigor to Pushkin and Lermontov, is well suited for works of the modern age. A translation of a work of Bely should, I believe, be exactly that: the transfer in the most direct way of the Russian novel into English. My purpose has been to change languages and yet retain the features of the original. This broad statement of intention is easy to make, harder to adhere to. But in most cases I am confident that more has been retained than lost. I have, for example, chosen to duplicate Belys punctuation and typographical distinctions throughout. This may prove uncomfortable for the English reader, but only slightly more so than it is for the Russian reader. Similarly, I have often preserved awkward syntax and word order. Here I have been influenced by an analogy with Joyce and Ulysses. Joyce would certainly be easier to read if one would add punctuation to parts of Ulysses, or exercise minor editorial control. I chose not to modify or alter deliberate devices employed by the Bely. I simply found no good reason for simplifying the original in the translation. I have also tried to center my focus on the word or word-root. Almost exclusively I have chosen and then stuck with one English equivalent for each Russian word. The repetition of roots and words is the primary organizing feature of the text. It is the very essence of Belys prose. Without this repetition much of the work becomes meaningless. Joseph Frank has defined this concept of spatial literature as follows: ...language in modern poetry is really reflective. The meaning-relationship is completed by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its reader to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity. The temptation to stray from the norm of one word for one word is at times immense. How easy bo]s' can be either I fear or I am afraid. Bol'woj wants to be big or large or even great and ogromnyj doesn't know whether to be huge or massive or enormous. In one way I have had help in keeping track of all of these strays. In place of a system of index cards, which seemed to multiply endlessly and yet still lag behind the need, I originally turned to a mainframe computer to keep track of the some 9000 lines of text. While the computer should share some of the credit, it certainly cannot bear the blame for my human error. But I am reasonably satisfied that in the few instances when I have used two English words at different points for one Russian word that I have done so as a matter of choice and not chance. Ironically, the result of this insistence on precise repetition of words, preferring them to phrases or sentences, will seem to some the oft-maligned word for word translation. Much of this will be disconcerting for the reader. English seems to pride itself on the ability to use a variety of words for one and the same thing. Russian since at least the time of Pushkin has had no difficulty with calling a thing by its name. Russians dont seem to need a Thesaurus. The Russian language also builds new formations and words by adding suffixes and prefixes to a given root. From the root wir (wide) Russians can make wirokij (wide or broad) wir' (expanse or full width) wirit' (expand or broaden) raswirenie (expansion or dilation) wirokoplehij (broadshouldered). In most places I have settled on one root-word, in this case wide to recreate in English the verbal repetitions which constitute the leitmotifs of Belys work. Often the word combinations which spring from this such as wideshouldered or a widening of the corridor will be perceived as strange by the English reader. I have also turned to several infrequent and sometimes obsolete usages of words in order to preserve a single reference in English. This is the case with the thematically important root rod (gen-), for example, why I have used the word genteel to translate the Russian blagorodnyj. Other examples include Abraham who concludes a testament with the Lord instead of the more commonly used covenant. (In Russian the words have one form zavet.) Granny complicates instead of folding her work for the Russian slo;it'. (The concept of folding is actually the first, though obsolete meaning of complicate.) In the above cases the strangeness for the English reader is not present for the Russian reader. The English reader gets some compensation because of the greater selection of words in English resulting in fewer neologisms than in the original. All of the above retentions result in a text which is complex and difficult to read. This is certainly in accordance with Belys own desire to use retardation devices to focus the readers attention on individual words and to restore the Magic of Words to their proper place. For Bely the secret to understanding and criticism is to be found in the art of slow reading. If much has been preserved in words and word play, any translator must still be aware of how much has been lost. A major loss is the rhythm of the prose. Although he does not state so, Bely has written a prose-poem. In an introduction to Masks (1933), Bely notes that it appears in prose format to save space. The Christened Chinaman is a work of two hundred and thirty pages of sustained hexameter, mostly amphibrachic, interspersed with dactylic-trochaic interludes. Bely was a serious student of rhythm in verse (Symbolism, 1910; Rhythm as a Dialectic, 1928) and also wrote an article on Rhythm in Prose, 1919. Ivanov-Razumnik was to comment on the rhythm of Belys novel Petersburg, which after the revision of 1922 was declared amphibrachic. Several Russian readers found the sustained rhythm disturbing. I omitted the rhythm not because it is an insignificant feature, or because I agreed with the critics. Simply stated, to have included the rhythm would have meant to subjugate almost all of the other features to that one consideration. The other element which cannot find its way into translation is eurythmy. Bely was introduced to eurythmy through the lectures of Rudolf Steiner. Eurythmy is an attempt to establish a direct correspondence between sounds of words and their meanings. Bely offers his own version in Glossolalia: A Poem about Sound, written in 1917 and published in 1922. While the practice of eurythmy is a fascinating exercise in word association based on common sounds, it is highly subjective and is essentially determined by the source language. The vr sound of vrem[ (time) and vereteno (spindle) and vraqat' (to revolve) found in all three Russian words is reproduced only in the English word revolve and then in reverse order. This sound coordination is unique to each language. If A. Veksler is correct in identifying Mother as the sound combination mr and Father as br with the son as a synthesis of r and m, there may indeed be a sound code. If any such corresponding sound code has occurred in the English it is either accidental or mystical coincidence, and in either case I am unaware of it. For most Bely will remain a writers writer, who like Joyce, is admired from afar, studied and taught mostly by specialists and read by a few non-academic aficionados. Ultimately Bely must be read in the original and so this translation is but a bridge across the barrier of his complicated and complex language. For students of Russian literature I hope it will be a tool through which they will be encouraged to begin uncovering the magic and mystery of Bely on their own. For others I hope it is a taste which whets the appetite for further study and acquaintance with Russian modernist prose. It has been said that a translation is like a wifeif she is beautiful, she is not faithful; if she is faithful, she is not beautiful. Belys first wife Asya left him to stay in Dornach. Klavdia Nikolaevna, his second wife, was a faithful companion to him and the preserver of his work and his memory. I too have opted for faithfulness. The notes appendixed are presented in such a way as not to interfere with the reading of the text. Dmitrij Tschizewskij and Anton Hnig began the process of identifying persons through Belys own memoirs in their introduction to the 1969 reprint of the novel. I have expanded upon these and added to them in the growing tradition of annotation. We are still far from the copious companions and commentaries which help to make Joyce and his world accessible to a broad readership, but as teachers-turned-translators we can make a beginning by sharing our own limited findings. I suggest that one consult the notes for each chapter either before or after the chapter. The omission of page numbers from the notes as well as the lack of stars, numbers, dots etc. are deliberate; a desire not to distract the reader from the text. Many people have been kind enough to provide guidance, insights and suggestions concerning both the translation and the notes. Their help has certainly added much to my own efforts, the shortcomings of which are mine alone. I would like to thank Alexandra Baker for her clarifications of many of the Russian passages. Nina Berberova, Ivan Elagin and Natalya Minihan, all in their own special ways, provided enlightening comments. Gerald Janecek, Alexander Woronzoff, Richard Sheldon and Sergei Davydov were all kind enough to examine the manuscript. Others include my colleagues at Middlebury College who were very generous with their time, especially Thomas Huber for his key to Bismarcks three hairs. Thanks to Dodo, Rinny, Steffi and Sasa for making sure that Papa doesnt follow too closely the path of Kotik. Thomas R. Beyer, Jr.  A. Veksler, ~popeeA. Belogo. (Opyt kommen-tari[),Sovremenna[ literatura sbornik statej (Leningrad 1925), 52.  V. Wklovskij, Andrej Belyj, Russkij sovremennik, 2 (1924), 233.  Gleb Struve, Andrey Bely Redivivus in Andrey Bely: A Critical Review ed. Gerald Janecek (Univ. of Kentucky, 1978), p. 41.  Marietta Wagin[n, Literaturnyj dnevnik (Peterburg 1922), 72-82.  See T. Beyer, Andrej Belyjs The Magic of Words and The Silver Dove, Slavic and East European Journal, XXII, 4 (1978), 464-472.  V. Xodasevih, Ableuxovy-Letaevy-Korobkiny, Sovremennye zapiski, XXX1 (1927), 255-279. See also T. Beyer, The Christened Chinaman, Russian Literature, X (1981), 369-380  V.Xodasevih, Nekropol' (Pari; : YMCA Press,1976), 99.  N. Bugaeva , A. Petrovskij, Literaturnoe nasledstvo Andre[ Belogo, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 27-28 (1937), 605.  See the Notes for a further discussion of the title of the work.  Gogol, trans. by Elizabeth Trahan, Russian Literary Triquarterly, 4 (1972), 131-144; selections from Symbolism as a Weltanschauungand Forms of Art in Readings in Russian Philosophical Thought trans. by Louis Shein (Mouton: 1973); Adam by Charlotte Douglas, Russian Literary Triquarterly, 4 (1972), 81-92; Complete Short Stories, trans. by Ronald Peterson (Ardis, 1979); Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, trans. Steven Cassedy (Univ. of California, 1985); and The Dramatic Symphony by Roger and Angela Keyes and The Forms of Art by John Elsworth (Grove: 1987).  Mirra Ginsburg, ed. and trans. A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Univ. of Chicago, 1970), p. 242.  Jane Grayson, Nabokov Translated (Oxford Univ.Press, 1977), 16.  The Widening Gyre (Indiana Univ. Press, 1963), p 13.  Andrej Belyj, rec. Energi[ , Novyj mir, 4 (1933), 274.  A. Veksler, 60.  The Christened Chinaman Translators Introduction   The Christened Chinaman The Text and the Translation  ix vz vz# @ A. Belogo. (Opyt kommen , ., ,trans. , trans. by , trans. ,trans. . Energi[ emenna[ literatura sbornik statej (Leningrad 1925), 52.  V. Wklovskij, Andrej Belyj, Russkij sovremennik, 2 (1924), 233.  Gleb Struve, Andrey Bely Redivivus in Andrey Bely: A Critical Review ed. Gerald Janecek (Univ. of Kentucky, 1978), p. 41.  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