The Little Devil and Other Stories by Alexei Remizov

 

The Little Devil and Other Stories

by Alexei Remizov

Translated by Antonina W. Bouis 

Alexei Remizov (1877 - 1957) was born and raised in the Moscow merchant class and gravitated to Marxist politics while a student at the city’s university.  In 1896, he was arrested during a clash between police and student demonstrators and was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment and exile in Vologda.  These would turn out his formative years, at least as his literary style was concerned, since it was here that Remizov abandoned Marxism and became, instead, engrossed with philosophy, cosmogony and Slavic mythology and folklore. He also married a student of Russian art who moved in the same circles of painter, writer and philosopher Nicholas Roerich.   It was under the influence of this milieu that, in 1905, he started to imitate medieval folk tales, including hagiographies of Eastern saints.  For the rest of his career, his literary works retained fantastical, folkloric and archaic elements, although as evidenced by his early Symbolist novel Sisters of the Cross, only recently made available in English by Columbia University Press, social issues also remained a concern for this ex-Marxist.

In a bid to “de-Latinize and de-Frenchify the Russian literary language”, Remizov tended to combine the colloquialisms of spoken Russian with the style and vocabulary of fairy-tales and that of the sacred texts of the Orthodox Church.  His idiosyncratic style scared off early potential translators – “he uses too many hard words” was one of the accusations levelled in his regard by a would-be translator.  Hats off to Columbia University Press, then, for following up its edition of Sisters of the Cross, with The Little Devil and other Stories, a collection of thirteen tales. The work of Roger Keys and Brian Murphy, who rose to the challenge of rendering Remizov’s unique novel in the English language, is here ably matched by Antonina W. Bouis who does an equally great job in translating these stories and retaining the lilting, lyrical language of myth and fairy tale.

Indeed, many of the stories in this collection either verge on the fantastical, or are characterised by what we would nowadays describe as “magical realism”.  The earlier items, such as “Bebka”, the opening story, have a stronger grounding in a specific, realistic settings. Towards the end of the volume, we get actual retellings of Russian folk tales.  These are the stories I liked best, masterfully combining a modernist aesthetic with a colourful evocation of a magical past which (possibly) never was.  Devils, saints, demons, magical creatures, princes and princesses, witches and common mortals, all rub shoulders in wonderfully exotic tableaux.

Paperback, 336 pages

Expected publication: April 13th 2021 by Columbia University Press

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While reading Remizov’s stories, I could not help thinking of the works of Russian composers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries who, like the author, were inspired by national myths and folktales.  I was therefore not overly surprised to learn, in the introduction to the story About Pyotr and Fevronia of Murom, that this is based on the same legend which ispired Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya.  What better place to start this brief Russian playlist with the orchestral suite drawn from the opera, in a historic performance conducted by the legendary (in a different sense) Yevgeny Mravinsky.  

 

Another Russian composer who was inspired by the world of myth was Anatoly Lyadov (1855 – 1914).  A particularly self-critical musician, Lyadov only left us few orchestral scores, including The Enchanted Lake, inspired by the painting by Arseny Meshchersky and subtitled “a fairy tale scene”.

Lyadov was allegedly the first composer approached by Diaghilev in 1910 to write the music for the ballet The Firebird.  There seems to be little evidential basis for this however and the score was eventually composed by a young firebrand, Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971).  It would be the first of three ballets written for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, culminating in the controversial The Rite of Spring created in collaboration with Nicholas Roerich (an intriguing link between the composer and Remizov). Although Stravinsky was notorious as an “avant-gardist”, with hindsight his early scores are a natural continuation of the colourful orchestral style of Rimsky-Korsakov and his contemporaries.  This style suits perfectly the magical world of The Firebird.

 

After the First World War, Stravinsky’s style changed, becoming sparer, more angular.   Interestingly, though, one of Stravinsky’s earliest post-war works also brings to mind Remizov’s tales of demons and devils, particularly Remizov’s Faustian Savvy Grutsyn. Like Remizov’s story, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (1918) is a piece of diablerie featuring a man selling his soul.  

One of the greatest contemporary Russian composers is Sofia Gubaidulina, born in 1938. Gubaidulina’s scores are often complex and challenging for both performers and audience – certainly never an “easy listen”!  One of the works I like best is The Rider on the White Horse which is featured in the first ten minutes of the video below.  With its Biblical inspiration, and over-the-top orchestration, it reminds one of Remizov's exotic retellings of medieval saints' lives.