I’ve been saving Mikhail Osorgin’s novel, Quiet Street, for a quiet break. There is something about a good, thick Russian book — things like Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, or Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography — that demand you set aside distractions and carve out hours to let it take over your life, and I could tell that Quiet Street was one of these. Full of characters, full of emotions, full of life, abuzz with bullets as well as bees.
Quiet Street is the story of the Russian Revolution as told through the flotsam that was swept up in its currents. No one in this book is in charge. Even the opportunistic ex-soldier who works his way up to a position of influence with the Bolsheviks ultimately finds himself merely a tool, valued only for his skill and efficiency in shooting the victims sent to him in the basement of the Lubyanka by those signing the letters.
We all know this story. Anyone who is good, innocent, or just plain unlucky will end up dead, broken, scarred, in prison, or exiled. Such knowledge is enough to put some readers off even reading a Russian book. Titles like Life and Fate appear to promise great, grey monoliths of suffering, appealing only to masochists. I confess to feeling some dread at picking up Quiet Street, but only because I knew it would involve getting to know and care about characters and then watch them suffer and be abused.
Like Stolnikov, the handsome young university student who rushes to enlist in the first patriotic frenzy after the outbreak of war in 1914. A good officer, considerate of his men, he steps out of a dugout and is blasted by a stray artillery shell that strikes his trench. His arms and limbs are amputated at a field station, he is evacuated to a Moscow hospital where he soon becomes universally referred to as “The Trunk.” The staff trains him to carry out a few trivial tasks with the aid of a stick held in his mouth. “The doctors said: ‘A miracle. Just look at him. There’s nature for you!'”
For Osorgin, though, nature is a force more powerful and elusive than any man-made constructs encountered in this book. The comings and goings of the swallows, the nightly journeys of the mice living under the floorboards of the house on Sivtsev Vrazhek in Moscow that provides the epicenter of Quiet Street are just as important as those of any of its human inhabitants. “It’s possible that the world of humans, with all its happenings and all its personal joys and sorrows, is overestimated, and that it all leads to very little in reality,” Stolnikov cautions a young woman who visits him.
Man’s small place in the world is a central theme in Quiet Street. As the Bolsheviks spar with the White Russians and others, Osorgin recognizes the real victor: “In the summer of 1919 Moscow was conquered by rats.” The rats harbor lice, and the lice introduces typhus, and soon characters are being comandeered into burial brigades at mass graves outside Moscow. The owner of the house in Sivtsev Vrazhek, an ornithologist, gives the swallows and other small birds he studies a greater place in his scheme of things:
“It is all the same to the swallows what people are quarreling about, who is fighting against whom and who comes out on top. One to-day, another to-morrow, and so all over again…. Now the swallows have laws of their own,a nd their laws are eternal. And these laws are of much greater importance than any of our making. We still know very little about them; so much yet remains to be discovered.”
Of all nature’s forces, none is greater than death. Osorgin’s death is not blind but subtle in its logic, capable of patience and restraint when required. As the ornithologist’s wife lays in her deathbed,
Death stood at the bedside and listened to the old lady’s moan, then withdrew to a corner. It had been keeping watch for over a month at the bedside of Tanyusha’s grandmother, shielding her from all the attractions of life and preparing her for admission into the void. When the night nurse fell asleep Death would hand the old lady her drink, cover her up with the blanket and wink at her fondly. And, not recognizing Death, the old lady would say to it in her weak little voice, “Thank you, dear one; thank you so much!”
And when the old lady went to sleep Death would yield to an impulse to play impish tricks: fling off the blanket, pinch the old lady in her side and stop up her mouth with the palm of its bony hand to impeded her breathing. And it would laugh quietly, chuckling and displaying its black teeth.
Death is everywhere in the book, in the form of old age, war, revolution, famine, disease, and the arbitrary exercise of power. Yet some of Osorgin’s characters manage to maintain a remarkable obliviousness to its presence:
It needed the deeply ingrained mentality of the civilian and the profound ignorance of the research student to enable Vassya to go on standing there quite calmly, without even noticing the bullets whizzing past. Nobody stopped him; and it did not enter his head that he was being shot at from the whole length of the street.
The one fate Osorgin spared his characters was exile. That he saved for himself. The gist of his story can be found in Lesley Chamberlain’s book, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. Cosmopolitan (he worked as a correspondent in Italy for years), progressive (he converted to Judaism when he married his second wife, Rachel, daughter of the Zionist Ahad Ha’am, more interested in art and nature than politics, Osorgin was just the sort of minor member of the intelligentsia Lenin found most irritating.
Ignored in the chaos following the October Revolution, Osorgin then found refuge in running a cooperative used bookstore with Nikolai Berdyaev and like-minded intellectuals. The bookstore provided both practical and moral support to its community, offering much-needed cash for their books and a refuge of rationality in the midst of the madness swirling outside. The ornithologist takes advantages of such a bookstore to get money for food and wood in the winter of 1920. Soon, however, Lenin found time to return to his favorite irritants. Osorgin was arrested and found himself in the same Lubyanka basement his characters refer to as “The Ship of Death.” He was exiled rather than shot, ending up in Kazan before being returned to Moscow for medical reasons. Within weeks of his return, his name appeared on a list of 160-some intellectuals that was presented for Lenin’s approval, and loaded on a steamer headed for Germany and permanent exile. He and his wife eventually settled outside Paris, publishing two novels that were translated into English, Quiet Street and My Sister’s Story (1931), before his death in 1942.
Chamberlain writes that Quiet Street is undermined by Osorgin’s nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia, but I think this is a misreading. I doubt that Osorgin considered any particular regime superior to another. For him, all man’s constructions were like the house on Sivtsev Vrashek, more vulnerable to destruction by rust, worms, mold, and weather than by war or conspiracy. Osorgin was greatly influenced by the writings of the Stoics, particularly the Meditations , and it’s hard to believe that in writing Quiet Street he didn’t keep in mind Marcus Aurelius’s injunction: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”
You can find over 50 copies for sale at Amazon and other sides using the AddAll.com search engine. This link will send you to them: Copies of Quiet Street.
My grandmother grew up on Sivtsev Vrazhek. I’d love to obtain a copy of this book… any clues as to how I could do this would be appreciated.
I enjoyed reading this review of the book.