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إيفان موسكو
في روايته القصيرة "إيفان موسكو" يقدم لنا بيلنياك صدمة الحداثة والثورة والعنف وتأثيراتها على المجتمع الروسي. رواية قصيرة وتجريبية مليئة بالتصادمات بين العالمين القديم والحديث، وبين تشتت الشخصية الواحدة التي تعيش وجودًا سابقًا ووجودًا حاضرًا وتأمل في تحقيق وجود مستقبلي.
- GenresLiteratureFiction
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1927
1 person is currently reading
88 people want to read
About the author
Boris Pilnyak
90 books28 followersBoris Pilnyak (Russian: Борис Пильняк; October 11, 1894 in Mozhaysk – April 21, 1938 in Moscow) was a Russian author.
He was Born Boris Andreyevich Vogau (Russian: Борис Андреевич Вогау) in Mozhaysk. His father was a doctor of German descent, and his mother came from an old merchant family from Saratov. Boris first became interested in writing at the age of nine. Among his early influences were Andrei Bely, Aleksey Remizov, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.
He was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society. These views often brought him into disfavor with Communist critics. His most famous works are The Naked Year, Mahogany, and The Volga Falls into the Caspian Sea, all novels concerning revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia. Another of his well-known works is OK, an unflattering travelogue of his 1931 visit to the United States.
In Artists in Uniform, Max Eastman wrote a chapter about him called "The Humiliation of Boris Pilnyak."
On October 28, 1937, he was arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activities, spying and terrorism. One report alleged that "he held secret meetings with (André) Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in this book attacking the USSR." Pilnyak was tried on April 21, 1938. In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes, he was condemned to death. A small yellow slip of paper attached to his file read: "Sentence carried out."
He was Born Boris Andreyevich Vogau (Russian: Борис Андреевич Вогау) in Mozhaysk. His father was a doctor of German descent, and his mother came from an old merchant family from Saratov. Boris first became interested in writing at the age of nine. Among his early influences were Andrei Bely, Aleksey Remizov, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.
He was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society. These views often brought him into disfavor with Communist critics. His most famous works are The Naked Year, Mahogany, and The Volga Falls into the Caspian Sea, all novels concerning revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia. Another of his well-known works is OK, an unflattering travelogue of his 1931 visit to the United States.
In Artists in Uniform, Max Eastman wrote a chapter about him called "The Humiliation of Boris Pilnyak."
On October 28, 1937, he was arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activities, spying and terrorism. One report alleged that "he held secret meetings with (André) Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in this book attacking the USSR." Pilnyak was tried on April 21, 1938. In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes, he was condemned to death. A small yellow slip of paper attached to his file read: "Sentence carried out."
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 26, 2025
Reads tonally somewhere between Pynchon and Cendrars. Bizarre, punchy, sprinkled with extreme historical specificity, and with an emotional heft that comes seemingly out of nowhere. A perfect pairing/spiritual sequel to Pilnyak's earlier (and more famous) The Naked Year. All in this slim 100 pages: the Russian Revolution; the civil war; the consequences of the previous two; the peasants; the provinces; the cities; scientific discourse; superstitious discourse; a mummy; radiation; radium; mining; marionettes; typhoid; hereditary syphilis; airplanes; the Urals (in fact and in folklore); hallucinations; love; what camaraderie means beyond armed struggle; death; even something like hope. And there is more, and more after that. This book is packed and comes across effortless and reads with a clarity that's sparkling.
Pilnyak is a giant lost on the anglophone world, but this would be a good place to find him.
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update June 2024:
So stuck in my brain I read it again. Even better a second time through. Cited in the front matter of The Naked Year as being Pilnyak's last novel totally untrammeled by concerns of the censors, we get a look at what Soviet literature could have really been had it not been brought under the Stalinist heel first of "dialectical materialist" writing (a vagueness instituted at the Karkhov Congress of 1930) then two years later officially replaced with the also vague but longer lasting category of Socialist Realism. Pilnyak as a fellow traveller and Slavist, but not a party member, has here given a much more moving account of the positive change brought by the Russian Revolution than any Cement or And Quiet Flows the Don ever could have—and with such brevity it is shocking. Had the arts been allowed to flourish independent of the state, as Trotsky and Lenin proposed, we'd perhaps have more works of this potency. Pilnyak would have lived.
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Update February 2025:
Got a new shipment of these in for the shop and started idly reading and just ended up reading the whole thing again. The more I read of Pilnyak the more I wonder at just what he does that makes stories that on their face though interesting are not necessarily captivating into something truly incantatory.
Need to read through the rest of Mahogany and Other Stories (the novella Mahogany already likewise jumping into one of my favorites of all time), maybe a quick reread of Naked Year, and then I will finally read the notorious sellout-to-socialist-realism SOS novel The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea, which I have read in secondary material is a failure-as-sellout novel, still holding Pilnyak's idiosyncrasy, and certainly not saving him from Stalin's purge.
Pilnyak is a giant lost on the anglophone world, but this would be a good place to find him.
———————————————
update June 2024:
So stuck in my brain I read it again. Even better a second time through. Cited in the front matter of The Naked Year as being Pilnyak's last novel totally untrammeled by concerns of the censors, we get a look at what Soviet literature could have really been had it not been brought under the Stalinist heel first of "dialectical materialist" writing (a vagueness instituted at the Karkhov Congress of 1930) then two years later officially replaced with the also vague but longer lasting category of Socialist Realism. Pilnyak as a fellow traveller and Slavist, but not a party member, has here given a much more moving account of the positive change brought by the Russian Revolution than any Cement or And Quiet Flows the Don ever could have—and with such brevity it is shocking. Had the arts been allowed to flourish independent of the state, as Trotsky and Lenin proposed, we'd perhaps have more works of this potency. Pilnyak would have lived.
——————————
Update February 2025:
Got a new shipment of these in for the shop and started idly reading and just ended up reading the whole thing again. The more I read of Pilnyak the more I wonder at just what he does that makes stories that on their face though interesting are not necessarily captivating into something truly incantatory.
Need to read through the rest of Mahogany and Other Stories (the novella Mahogany already likewise jumping into one of my favorites of all time), maybe a quick reread of Naked Year, and then I will finally read the notorious sellout-to-socialist-realism SOS novel The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea, which I have read in secondary material is a failure-as-sellout novel, still holding Pilnyak's idiosyncrasy, and certainly not saving him from Stalin's purge.
October 18, 2023
Sublinary’s Emperean series again delivers a miraculous obscurity — strange, singular, tight but wild. Reminiscent of Gombrowicz — funny and weird and dramatic and confusing all at once, with multiple registers in play on any page. Intensely modern; there’s a sort of gothic horror story at ground level for this book, but there’s a science fiction novel one floor up, and an allegory in the attic. All this in under 100 pages. I would love to read more Pilnyak and am thankful to Sublunary for putting two of his books into print.
September 27, 2021
Phantasmagoric little novel about the truly mischievous paths life and living can take you down. Mummies, radioactivity, aeronautics, love, and revolution, all in a compact little 100 pp package. Get it today, it's amazing.
May 10, 2025
تدور أحداث الرواية حول إيفان موسكو، العامل البسيط في موسكو، الذي يعاني من مرض الزهري، مما يجعله عرضة للهذيانات والهلوسات. يجد إيفان نفسه يعمل في مصنع في جبال بولودوف، محاصرًا بين صراعات العمال وأجواء المصنع القاسية. في خضم هذه الأحداث، تظهر مومياء مصرية مشعة كرمز للغموض والخطر، بينما تزداد هلوسات إيفان، فيفقد القدرة على التمييز بين الواقع والوهم.
"إيفان موسكو" ليست مجرد قصة رجل ضائع في موسكو، بل هي انعكاس لحالة مجتمع كامل ضائع بين الماضي والمستقبل.
"إيفان موسكو" ليست مجرد قصة رجل ضائع في موسكو، بل هي انعكاس لحالة مجتمع كامل ضائع بين الماضي والمستقبل.
January 23, 2026
I went to a bookstore a year ago and I felt a little off. I was aimlessly waddling around and I turned to the man next to me and I said “I want an amazing Russian novel, do you know of anything good?” The man turned to me and then reached into his jacket and pulled this book out and gave it to me. I took it, went home. Once home, I immediately got in bed and had one of the nastiest flues I ever had for a week. I honestly forgot that whole thing until about a week ago when I found this book in my bedside table. Perfect way to find this book! From syphilitic fits, reflections on flying in plane and a haunted ancient mummy being passed around in Moscow during the Russian revolution; this book sure has everything a gal could ever want.
March 31, 2022
Originally published in 1927 (this translation is from 1935), Ivan Moscow is the story of a third-generation syphilitic (Ivan) who turns his skills toward digging, refining, and finding uses for uranium to improve the quality of life for all Russians. (Returning the favor to Pilnyak, the Russian government had him executed in 1938 for purportedly plotting to assassinate Joseph Stalin, which also would have improved the quality of life for all Russians.)
Ivan tells us that the syphilis he’s inherited has malformed his internal organs but has left his brains intact; thus, he chooses to sacrifice life with a woman and child to a greater cause, despite the grief it causes him and the woman who loves him, Alexandra. The lovers part, but not before consummating their love, even though Ivan pretty much drips with radiation poisoning. Russian society too is poisoned ten years into its revolution, and the streets of Moscow are rife with criminals and petty thieves.
After Ivan and Alexandra take their leave of each other, Ivan encounters a 3,000-year-old mummy in a friend’s house that reminds him of Alexandra (it glows with radiation) that he dances with, caresses, and kisses. Ivan Moscow may easily be read as a veiled attack on the goals and hypocrisy of the Communist Revolution given that its putative hero adds to his disfiguring legacy handling toxic minerals to improve his country’s future. Putin’s Russia certainly demonstrates that the poisonous heritage remains firmly rooted in the country.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Ivan tells us that the syphilis he’s inherited has malformed his internal organs but has left his brains intact; thus, he chooses to sacrifice life with a woman and child to a greater cause, despite the grief it causes him and the woman who loves him, Alexandra. The lovers part, but not before consummating their love, even though Ivan pretty much drips with radiation poisoning. Russian society too is poisoned ten years into its revolution, and the streets of Moscow are rife with criminals and petty thieves.
After Ivan and Alexandra take their leave of each other, Ivan encounters a 3,000-year-old mummy in a friend’s house that reminds him of Alexandra (it glows with radiation) that he dances with, caresses, and kisses. Ivan Moscow may easily be read as a veiled attack on the goals and hypocrisy of the Communist Revolution given that its putative hero adds to his disfiguring legacy handling toxic minerals to improve his country’s future. Putin’s Russia certainly demonstrates that the poisonous heritage remains firmly rooted in the country.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
October 17, 2025
Picked up this little book on a whim at a bookstore. It's the story of a man, Ivan Moscow, whose biography is said to begin in October, 1917. Ivan is of the Komi (alternatively called "Zyryan") ethnicity, an indigenous group in the Ural Mountains who have toiled for the empire since Peter the Great. "Zyryan" translates to "the displaced."
After the revolution, Ivan cuts himself from this difficult and never-changing past, and his real life begins. He devotes himself first to the Civil War and later to the latest in nuclear science (the author, Pilnyak, is quite accurate here about how important this would be in the future).
But the past catches up with Ivan as his body is decaying due to his family's long history with syphilis. So, he is constantly caught in a state of delerium and is obsessed with everything falling apart - society, reality, his love interest, everything. A lot of the book deals with the "shock" of modernity to everyday people in the USSR, from planes to electricity, but with this brooding undercurrent of loss. There's even an odd scene where Ivan lovingly embraces a thousand-year-old mummy, thinking she's someone else.
It's tragic that the author, Boris Pilnyak, was killed by Stalin in 1938. This kind of lit would have flourished had artistic creativity actually been allowed after Lenin's death.
After the revolution, Ivan cuts himself from this difficult and never-changing past, and his real life begins. He devotes himself first to the Civil War and later to the latest in nuclear science (the author, Pilnyak, is quite accurate here about how important this would be in the future).
But the past catches up with Ivan as his body is decaying due to his family's long history with syphilis. So, he is constantly caught in a state of delerium and is obsessed with everything falling apart - society, reality, his love interest, everything. A lot of the book deals with the "shock" of modernity to everyday people in the USSR, from planes to electricity, but with this brooding undercurrent of loss. There's even an odd scene where Ivan lovingly embraces a thousand-year-old mummy, thinking she's someone else.
It's tragic that the author, Boris Pilnyak, was killed by Stalin in 1938. This kind of lit would have flourished had artistic creativity actually been allowed after Lenin's death.
August 21, 2022
!! a mere 100 pages, but what a delirious brightly dark journey it is, with a 3000 year old mummy; the miracles of radium, electricity, airplanes, alongside the ancient forest gods of the Urals; syphilitic sacrifices, war, love.
May 13, 2025
في روايته القصيرة "إيفان موسكو" يقدم لنا بيلنياك صدمة الحداثة والثورة والعنف وتأثيراتهم على المجتمع الروسي، لكنه كتب روايته بصورة رمزية شعرية. في هذه الرواية يرسم لنا بيلنياك عالمًا غامضًا مضببًا شأن واقع المجريات الاجتماعية والسياسية في روسيا في هذه الفترة.
تدور أحداث الرواية في تخوم عالم إيفان موسكو الذي يوجّه كل جهوده إلى الاستفادة من طاقة غير محدودة ناتجة عن الراديوم واليورانيوم، ويحاول خلق عالم آخر جديد في روسيا الريفية. ترصد الرواية صدمة الحداثة بأسلوب رمزي حيث ترصد حكاية حب بين إيفان وألكسندرا تكتنف أحداثها الفوضى والهذيان، وتبدو ألكسندرا تارة إنسانة وتارة أخرى مومياء مصرية مشعة!
ينقل بيلنياك أجواء عالمه بشكل أسطوري وغرائبي حيث تزداد قوة صدمة الحداثة على خلفية من العنف الثوري ووصف مدينة موسكو. لا أحد يتذكر شيئًا في الرواية ويبدو كل شيء غامضًا. ينسى البطل كل شيء ويبدو خاضعًا لتأثيرات خارجية غير مفهومة.
يمكننا أن نقرأ أمورًا كثيرة في الرواية بوصفها هجومًا مستترًا على أهداف الثورة الشيوعية ونفاقها حيث يضيف البطل الثوري إلى إرثه المشوّه (إصابته الوراثية بمرض الزهري) مستقبلا مسممًا بالإشعاع لبلاده بدعوى تحسين مستقبلها. من المؤكد أن الأحداث التالية، وأهمها إعدام كاتب الرواية نفسه، تؤكد هذا المستقبل المشؤوم والمُسمّم.
رواية قصيرة وتجريبية مليئة بالتصادمات بين العالم القديم والحديث، وبين تشتت الشخصية الواحدة التي تعيش وجودًا سابقًا ووجودًا حاضرًا وتأمل في تحقيق وجود مستقبلي. رواية عن روسيا ما بعد الثورة بأسلوب رمزي يخلط الواقع بالخيال، والوعي بالهذيان. كل سطر وكل كلمة هنا يخلق عالمًا له دلالاته الخاصة والمهمة لفهم رؤية الكاتب وشاعريته المعجونة بعنف الثورة والحرب الأهلية.
تدور أحداث الرواية في تخوم عالم إيفان موسكو الذي يوجّه كل جهوده إلى الاستفادة من طاقة غير محدودة ناتجة عن الراديوم واليورانيوم، ويحاول خلق عالم آخر جديد في روسيا الريفية. ترصد الرواية صدمة الحداثة بأسلوب رمزي حيث ترصد حكاية حب بين إيفان وألكسندرا تكتنف أحداثها الفوضى والهذيان، وتبدو ألكسندرا تارة إنسانة وتارة أخرى مومياء مصرية مشعة!
ينقل بيلنياك أجواء عالمه بشكل أسطوري وغرائبي حيث تزداد قوة صدمة الحداثة على خلفية من العنف الثوري ووصف مدينة موسكو. لا أحد يتذكر شيئًا في الرواية ويبدو كل شيء غامضًا. ينسى البطل كل شيء ويبدو خاضعًا لتأثيرات خارجية غير مفهومة.
يمكننا أن نقرأ أمورًا كثيرة في الرواية بوصفها هجومًا مستترًا على أهداف الثورة الشيوعية ونفاقها حيث يضيف البطل الثوري إلى إرثه المشوّه (إصابته الوراثية بمرض الزهري) مستقبلا مسممًا بالإشعاع لبلاده بدعوى تحسين مستقبلها. من المؤكد أن الأحداث التالية، وأهمها إعدام كاتب الرواية نفسه، تؤكد هذا المستقبل المشؤوم والمُسمّم.
رواية قصيرة وتجريبية مليئة بالتصادمات بين العالم القديم والحديث، وبين تشتت الشخصية الواحدة التي تعيش وجودًا سابقًا ووجودًا حاضرًا وتأمل في تحقيق وجود مستقبلي. رواية عن روسيا ما بعد الثورة بأسلوب رمزي يخلط الواقع بالخيال، والوعي بالهذيان. كل سطر وكل كلمة هنا يخلق عالمًا له دلالاته الخاصة والمهمة لفهم رؤية الكاتب وشاعريته المعجونة بعنف الثورة والحرب الأهلية.
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