На куличках

by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Евгений Иванович Замятин

Повесть Евгения Ивановича Замятина (1884—1937), впервые опубликованная в 1913 году. «Есть у всякого человека такое, в чем он весь, сразу, чем из тысячи его отличишь. И так же у Андрея Иваныча — лоб: ширь и размах степной. А рядом нос — русская курнофеечка, белобрысые усики, пехотные погоны. Творил его Господь Бог, размахнулся: лоб. А потом зевнул, чего-то скушно стало — и кой-как, тяп-ляп, кончил: сойдет. Так и пошел Андрей Иваныч с Божьим зевком жить. Вздумал прошлым летом Андрей Иваныч — в академию готовиться. Шутка ли сказать: на семьдесят рублей одних книг накупил. Просидел над книгами все лето — и случилось в августе на Гофманский концерт попасть. Господи Боже мой: сила какая.

Genres: Russia, Literature, Fiction

97 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russian: Евгений Замятин, sometimes also seen spelled Eugene Zamiatin) Russian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist, whose famous anti-utopia (1924, We) prefigured Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and inspired George Orwell's 1984 (1949). The book was considered a "malicious slander on socialism" in the Soviet Union, and it was not until 1988 when Zamyatin was rehabilitated. In the English-speaking world We has appeared in several translations.

"And then, just the way it was this morning in the hangar, I saw again, as though right then for the first time in my life, I saw everything: the unalterably straight streets, the sparkling glass of the sidewalks, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the squared harmony of our gray-blue ranks. And so I felt that I - not generations of people, but I myself - I had conquered the old God and the old life, I myself had created all this, and I'm like a tower, I'm afraid to move my elbow for fear of shattering the walls, the cupolas, the machines..." (from We, trans. by Clarence Brown)
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was born in the provincial town of Lebedian, some two hundred miles south of Moscow. His father was an Orthodox priest and schoolmaster, and his mother a musician. He attended Progymnasium in Lebedian and gymnasium in Voronezh. From 1902 to 1908 he studied naval engineering at St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. While still a student, he joined the Bolshevik Party. In 1905 he made a study trip in the Near East. Due to his revolutionary activities Zamyatin was arrested in 1905 and exiled. His first short story, 'Odin' (1908), was drew on his experiences in prison.
Zamyatin applied to Stalin for permission to emigrate in 1931 and lived in Paris until his death.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Godforsaken Hole is a dark modernistic comedy written in the idiomatic, difficult for translation language.
An outpost at the edge of the world… The faraway coast of the Pacific Ocean… Emptiness and thick fogs…

The truth of the matter is this: the army had gone and set up a post that was utterly useless; guns had been put in place and people had been herded to this godforsaken hole: now serve your time! And they do. Late at night, in a sleepless void, every rustle of a mouse, every crackle of a twig – grows, intensifies, fills every nook and cranny.

Wilderness and savagery… Spiritual void and boredom… The corrupt commandant is a glutton, thief and philanderer… The officers at the post are in disciplinary exile… Drunkenness and adultery… Similar to the stray dogs they are ready to howl at the moon…     

The room upstairs was choked with smoke that was thick enough to slice. And this hubbub, this murky haze, teemed not with people, but with human debris: up above was someone’s bald head like a watermelon; down below, severed by a cloud, were Captain Nechesa’s pigeon-toed feet; a bit farther, suspended in the air, was a bouquet of hairy fists.
The human debris floated, wriggled, existed independently in the murky haze – like fish in the glass cage of some fantastic aquarium.

The lieutenant – the main character – is an inexperienced romantic who came here to serve his ideals… But all the ideals and intellectuality is nothing but a handicap here… And he sloppily falls in love to boot… 

“What is love anyway? I t’s an illness. People who are mentally ill… I don’t know why no one has tried to cure it with hypnosis. It would probably work.”

So he involuntarily becomes a partaker in the scandal and a witness of tragedies…
Milieu subjugates personality and turns individuality into its faceless serf.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zamyatin’s A Godforsaken Hole is less a novel than a feral waltz of satire, vodka, and spiritual gangrene. Its setting—a Siberian military outpost so remote it feels like an afterthought in the Almighty’s sketchbook—is, as the title portends, one part a Buzatti existential abyss and two parts bureaucratic purgatory.

Here, Lieutenant Andrei Ivanych Polovets arrives to reinvent himself, lugging with him a pianist’s soul, a scholar’s ambition, and the soul-crushing delusion that Siberia might offer redemption. Instead, he lands in a garrison ruled by a gastronome-general who treats potatoes as if they were painted by Raphael (“Potatoes à la lyonnaise—you’ve heard of it? A treasure, a pearl, a Raphael!”), and a society in which “every trifle assumes awesome dimensions; the unbelievable becomes the believable.” This is not Chekhovian exile, but a Gogolesque grotesquerie.

Andrei’s attempts to find solace—first in music, then in erotic daydreams, finally in vodka-induced despair—unravel a punchline at a time, delivered with a bayonet.

The supporting cast reads like a Dostoevskian fever dream on furlough: a general’s wife whose nine children have nine probable fathers; Marusya Schmidt, a tragicomic sprite with the heart of a lover and the instincts of a trickster (“Have you ever thought about death? Not death exactly, but that one final second—delicate, like the gossamer”); and Captain Schmidt, her brooding, brutish husband, who keeps her both like a porcelain figurine and a sacrificial lamb.

There’s a christening where the godfather may or may not also be the biological father (or the biological victim), a communal dinner that devolves into howling a hymn to a dead dog (“A preacher had a dog...”), and a near-theological discourse on lemon-spritzed tubers.

There is an attempted mutiny over horse fodder, a slap in the face delivered with bureaucratic elegance, and the slow spiritual liquefaction of Tikhmen, a Kant-reading lieutenant tricked into fatherhood and philosophy all in one swig. Every chapter is a funhouse mirror in which identity, decency, and reason slouch into oblivion.

Zamyatin's writing pirouettes between parody and poetry—sentences that pop like gunfire then dissolve into lullabies of winter fog and frying onions. The style is both orchestral and obscene, a sort of Tolstoy-on-tabasco, made all the more uncanny by his ability to render the grotesque as tender, the farcical as fatal. If We is his Nietzschean scream against collectivism, A Godforsaken Hole is his sly burp in the face of military decorum and Russian orthodoxy.

Beneath its drunken waltz lies a savage allegory about power, emasculation, and the terminal absurdity of empire. One walks away from this book not uplifted but destabilized—deliriously so. The comparison to Gogol is deserved, but it’s more Catch-22 meets Gorky with a Chopin soundtrack and a slap from General Azancheev.

If Gogol warned us that “the soul of Russia is in its nose,” then Zamyatin took that nose, stuffed it with peppery ravioli, and threw it into the snow. Three satirical stars, or maybe four slaps. The translation here is probably impossible, and the English result, while commendable, is underwhelming. For those interested in Russian and Soviet literature: required, reviving, and riotous.

[Argos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zamyatin’i distopik romanı “Biz”ile tanımıştım, bu kısa romanı ( ya da uzun hikayesi) ondan tamamen farklı bir kurgu ve uslupla yazılmış. İlk eserlerinden biri. Rus Çarı’nın ordusunu hicveden bir hikaye. Hakikaten dünyanın bir ucunda, sürgün yeri küçük bir askeri kasabada geçer olaylar. Ordunun ve subayların kokuşmuşluğunu, rezilliğini anlatırken mizahi anlatımını karkatürleştirmeye kadar götürmüş yazar. Araya bir aşk hikayesi, ihanet, babası belli olmayan bir çocuk, düello gibi konularar sepiştirerek hikayenin renklenmesini sağlamış. Rahat okunan ve güldüren bir hiciv metni.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yevgeny Zamyatin is one of my very favorite discoveries of late, a revolutionary Russian fabulist of proto-surrealist myth and science fiction and black social satire who supported communism's rise but immediately bucked against its conversion to conservatism and restriction, who foresaw totalitarianism, and sealed his fate (fortunately in willing exile) with words like "there is no final revolution" and "heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought".

This is one of his earlier, pre-Soviet works, of a part with his first novella, A Provincial Tale, and later masterpiece "The North". As with those, he sets this far from urban centers, at a distant military outpost on the far east of Siberia, drawing from his own remote military service. As usual, he has an unforgiving eye for the petty and self-serving impulses of the bored and unmotivated (and worse, much much worse), ranging across a wide cast of sharply-characterized military malingerers. As one says "In a war we'd be great!" but there is no war to relieve these characters from themselves, to force them to think of others. (Rather, it's probably better that no war drives them to desert eachother even more directly, I suspect). Even so, there's some level of humane understanding in this as well. I find myself reminded vaguely of Joseph Conrad, though I've not read him in ages, so who knows really. But most of all it's Zamyatin's expansive and lyrical vision, elevating this to real-felt sorrow and tragedy, that sets him above more typical satiric voices. Dense and sad and rewarding.

Foreshadowing, this was deemed too incendiary under the czar and pulled from publication, just as his later work would be banned by the communists who rehabilitated this novel in anti-czar fervor. Zamyatin was a man who could not silence himself, and we, if not he, reap the rewards.

[Fulya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Zamyatin ve Helikopter Yayınları bir araya gelince beklentilerim oldukça yükselmişti ancak benim için tam bir hayalkırıklığı oldu bu kitap. ¨Biz¨i hem İngilizcede hem de Türkçede okuyup çok sevmiştim ancak bu kitap onun yanına dahi yaklaşamıyor. Bana göre oldukça başarısız bir yalnızlık öyküsü.

[Emina Buket · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben hakkindaki olumsuz gorusleri uzuntuyle karsiladim. Helikopter yayinlarindan zaten ne okunursa okunsun kitaplarin guzelliginden, yazinin ve sayfalarin kalitesinden insan diger kitaplara gore birazcik daha olumlu etkileniyor. Mazlum Beyhan cevirilerine bayilan birisi olarak Hazal Yalini da ruscadan turkceye cevirileri konusunda basarili buldugumu soylemeliyim. Ama bu kitapta bir degisiklik yapip once ruscasini okudum (kisa diye) sonra turkcesini okudum. Iki dilden de buyuk keyif alarak okudum. Ruslarin o kendine has yeren, insana kendini kotu hissettiren, eglenceliymis gibi yazip ama okudugunuzda huzunlendiren bir edebiyat dili oldugunu dusunuyorum. Bunu Pazertesi Cumartesiden Baslar kitabinda da hissetmistim, 12 Sandalye kitabinda. Kitabi ben keyifle okudum ama size illa okuyun diye israr edemem 2.88 ortalama notundan yola cikarak.

[Emre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Denk gelişi ile ayrıca etkileyici bir eserdi benim için. Notu bunu göz önünde bulundurarak normalize etmeye çalıştım.

[Ghasaq · Rating 1 out of 5]

الترجمة ظالمة الرواية!!

[عمّار · Rating 1 out of 5]

طبعة دار آشور سيئة للغاية، أحداث القصة مفككة والترجمة كما لو أنها من كوكل، شيء مؤسف جداً •

[Gülay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rus ordusunu hicvederken biraz da Vadideki Zambak eklemiş Zamyatin.

[Atreju · Rating 3 out of 5]

Se c'è un autore russo che ancora stenta a ottenere il riconoscimento che merita questi è senz'altro Evgenij Zamjatin. Noto per essere il padre della moderna distopia, con il romanzo "Noi" dovette patire la censura, con l'inevitabile conseguenza di essere messo in ombra da romanzi che, per quanto dei capolavori innegabili della SF anglosassone, gli sono pur sempre posteriori, come "Il mondo nuovo" di Huxley e "1984" di Orwell.
La specialità di Zamjatin erano il racconto e la povest' (romanzo breve). In particolare, scrisse 7 romanzi brevi e oltre una quarantina di racconti, senza parlare di saggi, biografie e drammi teatrali.
Nella povest' "Na kuličkach" (traducibile come "Nel bel mezzo del nulla", "In un luogo sperduto") descrive la vita di un distaccamento di soldati nell'estremo oriente russo agli inizi del '900, in un tempo in cui l'isolamento, la noia e la malinconia erano totali. Zamjatin racconta l'alienazione saltando da un personaggio all'atro e spargendo pizzichi di Gogol' a ogni piè sospinto. In Italia è edito da Monte Università Parma (2012). Il traduttore fa leva sull'espressione u čërta na kuličkach (che richiama il diavolo e, implicitamente, ogni altro genere di forza impura) e sulla crudezza del racconto.