Vasily Belov, son of Ivan who was killed in the war, was born fifty years ago, lives and will go on living thousands of versts from Armenia, in the north, in Vologda with its fleeting summers and heavily settling winters. Immediately after the war, like all orphans, he was trained in carpentry at a vocational school, something he knew from his grandfathers’ time. After two poetry collections, he conscientiously studied literary work at the capital’s Institute of Literature, though its first, only and irreplaceable teacher is the language of grandmothers and grandfathers: the swaying life of language, experience, morality, clear optimism, the authentic memory of a people’s suffering and heroism. He has been to Armenia, to Yerevan. He spoke little; his words were weighed, memorable, heavy as a cold press. Invited to a round-table debate on important questions, he questioned the round table itself. To the female students’ eternal question about love, he replied that they confused their biological tremors with the greatest human feeling, which is a talent and, like talent, within the capacity of only a few. He spoke disparagingly of tourism, considered modern sport absurd, and so on. Taken together, his answers rejected the world’s “mad, mad, mad” rush.
The wider literary and reading public noticed him about twenty years ago through his substantial novella Privychnoye delo, Business as Usual—“That’s how it is”, “Life”, “Our life”, “What can I say”… He was noticed and singled out, and will remain in literature, perhaps world literature too, chiefly through that novella. Though later years have only added glory to his glory, though the unprecedented encyclopaedic book Lad (“Perfection”, 1982) already exists, though his conscience as a devoted worker for literature and his Vologda homeland—which for him are equivalent, one and the same—will allow no idle day at his desk, Business as Usual will nevertheless remain unsurpassed. Its author will never again be able to maintain an impartial chronicler’s stance, and great literature trusts precisely impartial chroniclers. He will no longer be able to be that “cold storyteller”, that indifferent sovereign over today’s good and bad. For he will never reconcile himself to the urban, pensioned superfluity today of grandmothers who yesterday led flocks of grandchildren like old ducks; to the factory-made levelling of the Russian peasant woman, yesterday the labourer and mistress of life; to the conveyor-belt transformation of the all-capable peasant; to the destruction of the old, thousand-year-old village, humanity’s cradle, that “school of conscience”. He will not be able to abandon the cut-away, worn, melted, diminished, already sinking island of the great continent of “peasant-Christian culture” and, from the concrete shore of this century’s civilisation, watch the depletion of what only yesterday seemed the eternal homeland of body and soul. And no situation, no human community in the new realms of our present existence will be able to draw from its chronicler as much compassion as the village of that novella, perhaps the village of his bitter youth.
To renew my old love for that peasant apostle and his gospel, I opened a page at random, and here it is:
“He already knew all the sounds of his parents’ cottage. Especially the sound of the door. Every time his grandmother took a bucket and left the cottage, disappearing, his heart sank in despair. His sadness grew unbearable; tears gathered, about to burst out; his mouth curved hopelessly and remained an irrevocable little horseshoe.
The unbearable seconds gnawed at his soul; he could no longer hold back the tearful cry. His constricted throat was about to release it, but just then the door opened and brought in the real, imposing Grandma Yevstolya. She filled the cottage with herself and went to the stove, paying no attention to the children. The accumulated cry and tears subsided, and the hopelessly abandoned Volodka found himself in joyful relief. Until his grandmother was free of the housework, this happened again and again: he simply could not accept his situation. Longing for his always absent, endlessly absent mother wore away his little heart. And when his grandmother left, the child could no longer bear it, was already falling apart, no longer even wanted them to be rocked.
Older than the two brothers in the cradle, their little sister Marusya came up and rattled a toy over them. Marusya was four; every bar and knot of the cradle was more familiar to her than to Volodka, and she herself wanted, secretly even from herself, to climb into it.
Rock them, Marusya, rock them, sweet girl, so they grow up and take you riding in a car.”
Everything here is so natural, deep, significant, necessary and important, so close that it squeezes the heart, that one cannot end the quotation without forcing one’s own hand. With this textbook clarity, he can tell of a sixty-year-old grandmother and a six-week-old child, a hard-worked collective-farm horse and Rogulya the “Christian” cow, saints and the dissolute, serious rulers and obedient subjects—or, as one sequence of his short sketches is titled, Every Creature of God.
Once I was proud that, should human memory retreat—as it does with stubborn consistency every day and in all our hours—I could reconstruct for all humanity the old, great culture of agriculture and animal husbandry. But here was the man who could do it, the man who could be trusted.
Reading, as others have said of another writer, raises a fierce wave of creative envy. You want to copy, to plunder page after page, until you encounter some shallow patch or some approximate truth that readers always forgivingly tolerate. And there is no such conditional truth, no such obstructive irrelevance.
In this case I envy the translator too, for his opportunity and ability to make his own this finest work created by our post-Twentieth-Congress generation, these truest words about our mothers, this masterpiece belonging to us all. While taking the excerpt above, I stopped several times before the untranslatable. PODKOVKA is a little horseshoe; GORKY means bitter; but “a bitter horseshoe” is absurd. Translating a literary work is simply impossible. Not only from one language into another, but within one language too: transferring one writer, say Sholokhov, into the language of another, say Belov. That means taking a writer out of his linguistic environment, when the writer himself is his language. Must we recreate the translated work according to the laws of a new linguistic environment, make it Armenian or German, for instance, or leave it Russian or English inside Armenian or German, a possibility Thomas Mann already noted? I do not know. I know only that the work must not be killed on the journey of transfer. The accomplished translator Armen Hovhannisyan, who won Armenian readers’ grateful trust particularly with his translations of Shukshin’s whimsical stories, has at least repeated his success here.
Vasily Ivanovich Belov, who cherishes himself as an exemplary son of his time and country, thinks he is lamenting only the Russia of grey soils and only Vologda’s destinies. Yet these are precisely Armenian destinies; it is precisely our daily life that is portrayed with such intimate knowledge in his “northern” novellas. He strives to reveal the uniqueness of his place and time, yet what emerges is the universal and the universally human: that seed of love, loyalty and compassion which exists beneath the seven folds of all our differences and still keeps us human, still keeps us very much alike in our humanity.
Yerevan, 24 October 1983