I love translated literature. Great characters, compelling plot, amazing setting. Will definitely recommend this book. Can't wait for the public to discover it!

This little known Russian novel has been acclaimed as a “masterpiece of early modernist fiction” so I rather expected it to be hard to read. I was therefore pleasantly surprised that it is in fact a fairly linear narrative, rooted in reality, although with some surreal elements woven in, rather in the manner of Gogol, that other fantastical Russian author. Alexei Remizov (1877-1957) was one of the leading figures in the Russian symbolist movement of the beginning of the 20th century, but is not as well known as Belyi or Sologub who have been more widely translated into English, and this is the first English translation of Sisters of the Cross. It’s a simple enough plot. 30 year old Marakulin works as a financial clerk in a St Petersburg office. One day, quite unexpectedly, he is accused of embezzlement and is sacked. The novel recounts what happens next, and introduces the reader to the motley collection of inhabitants in his apartment building. It’s a bleak tale, with Marakulin, the underdog, oppressed by bureaucracy and an uncaring society, and very much recalls a similar story by Gogol, The Overcoat. Dostoevsky is also an influence, with Remizov’s emphasis on suffering, faith and forgiveness. All told, this is a very “Russian” novel, but engaging enough even for a reader unfamiliar with Russian literature – although admittedly some knowledge will enhance comprehension of this occasionally bizarre tale.

This is like Gogol and Bulgakov but um... a bit more boring? The Symbolists are a movement I thoroughly enjoy and am fascinated by but one that I find very difficult to talk about. Remizov is a good example of Symbolist but it's also like such a good example that if you've read other Symbolists it is almost like Remizov has a check list of things to hit because he doesn't do anything with it. Bely, Gogol, Blok all take the basic Symbolist philosophy and write interesting things out of them. Remizov is a bit too interested in realism but not so far that it feels like the over realism for a purpose it's just a bit banal.

Published in Russia in 1910; published in translation by Columbia University Press on December 19, 2017

Sisters of the Cross is a novel of dark themes. Life is brutal and unfair. Love robs men of their senses. People who hold power wield it arbitrarily. “Man is born into the world and is already condemned”; sentenced to death on an unknown date with no hope of reprieve. But Alexei Remizov does offer a mild prescription of relief from the darkness: “If people studied each other carefully and took note of one another, if they were all granted eyes with which to see, then only a heart of stone would be able to bear all the horror and mystery of life. Or perhaps none of us would need a heart of stone if only individuals took note of one another.” But what are the odds of that happening?

Remizov takes note of the characters in Sisters of the Cross, seeing them through the eyes of Marakulin Piotr Alekseevich. Marakulin is unexpectedly fired from his job in Petersburg because of a bookkeeping error, perhaps caused by his kind-hearted willingness to issue paychecks to people who had not earned them. He spends his savings and sells his property, moves to a smaller room in his rooming house (the Burkov), and falls ill before he comes to see himself as liberated. His life needs no purpose, he decides; it is enough “just to see, just to hear, just to feel.” But is it?

Much of Marakulin’s attention is on the other characters who live in the Burkov. They include a woman who loves religion and the sea, a clown and his artistic brother, a woman who reads cards and is living under an unfair curse, a teacher at the girls’ high school, and two students, Vera and Verochka. Vera is a student who aspires to be a doctor while Verochka is a theater student who claims to be a brilliant actress but who is “somehow always saying different things, and you couldn’t fathom where the real truth was and what was just her imagination.” Vera and Verochka are later joined by Verushka, a 15-year-old orphan who has experienced enough abuse to last a lifetime. All of the residents have sad tales and, to some degree, are living unfortunate lives. They come and go from the rooming house as the novel moves forward, but Verochka eventually leaves for good, much to Marakulin’s regret, given the obsession that he develops for her.

Marakulin is obsessed in a different way with a general’s widow who lives in one of the better rooms in the Burkov. Obsessed as in, he wants to kill her. Marakulin nearly drives himself mad with the thought that she, “in rude good health, carefree, sin-free, and immortal, a vessel of God’s choosing, the louse, was sleeping the sweetest of sleeps.” He rejects that kind of life, “life as an absolute entitlement,” a life “with no aim, simply seeing, hearing, and feeling: the life of a louse.” He wants to feel supreme joy, and comes to believe that he can only achieve joy with the absent Verochka, “the source of his life.”

The novel’s most tormented character is Marakulin’s mother Zhenia. We learn in Marakulin’s backstory that Zhenia was used repeatedly by men who were blinded by lust. Zhenia responded by slashing crosses into her flesh with a razor.

While the arbitrary unfairness of life is a dominant theme, it is linked to “wandering Holy Russia, so meek in her wandering beggary, Holy Russia, engirdled by poverty in its pilgrim’s belt from the Bogoliubsky monastery, Holy Russia, so humble, long-suffering, and patient, who will not make her own coffin, but can only build a funeral pyre and burn herself upon it.” To Marakulin, suffering is a way of life in Russia. It is inevitable and, at least for those of unfortunate birth, unavoidable.

Readers looking for an affirmation of faith in the justice of the universe won’t find it in Sisters of the Cross. The novel’s value lies in its intricate characterizations, both of Marakulin and of the other Burkov residents. The story is bleak, and the bleakness is emphasized by Remizov’s repetition of dark phrases and sentences (and occasional paragraphs), but life for most people in Remizov’s Russia was bleak, and Sisters of the Cross is true to that sad reality.

RECOMMENDED

Entirely too cerebral and uneventful for most American readers. The names and sheer number of characters also makes it an extrememly difficult read. There could be some academic value.

Thanks to tip off by writer of foreword I was guided to read this extraordinary work properly. It all depends on our being engaged with wronged clerk, thrown out of his job to mercies of uncaring society which drives him potty. Memories of his mother and a holy woman, a simpleton, living in his building as his condition and life deteriorate combine with a fixation on the boss's swaggering wife who does not deserve to live her life, indifferent to misery around her .. it culminates in a kind of comedic fated tragedy .. descriptions of place and. characters are engrossing and while desultory, still engaging. It's terrific the publisher has got this out again.

Sisters of the Cross was a fascinating read. From the start, I found myself swept into Marakulin's world and experienced his highs and lows, gaining insight into his mind. This story put me in mind of two other works. Firstly, Kafka's The Trial, as there was that same sense of non-understanding about his situation as the story began. Secondly, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, as there is something of Raskolnikov about Marakulin. The book is very atmospheric, and it draws you into the lower spaces of Petersburg and those who occupy them. Every character came across as complete and interesting, and I loved the feeling of non-reality at times, when you weren't certain if what Marakulin was describing was real or a figment of his imagination. If you enjoy works by writers like Kafka, Camus and Kundera, then this is a book for you!

Alexei Remizov’s Sisters of the Cross (1910) is widely regarded as a Symbolist masterpiece and possibly the modernist author’s best work. It may therefore come as a surprise that this is the novel’s first ever translation into English, one which arrives more than a hundred years after the novel was written. Or perhaps it is not surprising at all, considering that even some of Remizov’s early admirers deemed his works “untranslatable”.

Translator Roger Keys, who together with Brian Murphy, acts as the intrepid “midwife” to this English-language rendition, provides an introduction to the work which highlights the peculiar characteristics that make Remizov’s work so distinctly, and “untranslatably”, Russian. In a bid to “de-Latinize and de-Frenchify the Russian literary language”, Remizov mixes the colloquialisms of spoken Russian with the style and vocabulary of fairy-tales and that of the sacred texts of the Orthodox Church. In the process, he shows a predilection for archaic words and neologisms. “He uses too many hard words,” an early potential translator complained.

The plot does not simplify matters either. Nominally, it has its roots in the gritty realist fiction of the 19th and early 20th century, as it tells the story of poor St Petersburg clerk Marakulin who is unexpectedly fired from his job, and, consequently, finds modest lodgings in Burkov’s block of apartments. As the story progresses, however, it takes on a surreal tinge. Burkov’s flats become a symbol of the suffering world; a society peopled by women (the “sisters” of the title) to whom life (and men) have dealt terrible blows. The Sisters are a diverse group: some, like the fallen actress “Verochka”, are branded as sinners; others are considered visionaries or holy women. What they have in common is this aura of dignity in suffering; in contrast, for instance, to “the General’s wife” who lives a comfortably “good life” but one which barely recognizes the distress of her fellow human beings. This moral message however is suggested, rather than spelt out, in a series of increasingly fantastical scenes, including a harrowing vision of hell, and a final, shimmering climax.

It is no mean task to convey, in a foreign language, the wildly different registers of this multi-layered work, which certainly does not yield its treasures easily. However, Murphy and Keys somehow manage to combine Remizov’s quirky marriage of realism and folklore, sacred and profane. They have given us English-language (and non-Russian) speakers an opportunity to savour a complex but rewarding novel.