BOOK: Yuri Tynianov, "Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar"

Yuri Tynianov: Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar. Translated by Susan Causey. London: Look Multimedia, 2018. 978-1-9999815-0-1. xii + 406 pp.

I have no idea where I first heard of this remarkable and unusual historical novel; very possibly it was on the Language Hat blog, which had a couple of posts about it back in 2010. A few years ago it was finally translated into English and I got around to reading it now.

I enjoyed it, though reading it required a bit more work than I would have liked — this book is not exactly from the Walter Scott school of historical novel writing. Although it is not terribly long (400 pages in the present edition, though admittedly there is a decent amount of text per page), impressively many people appear in it and impressively many things happen. The chapters are further subdivided into a number of short sections, often no more than a couple of pages long, almost like scenes in a play; this, together with the author's fondness for very short paragraphs,* helps him keep things moving at a rapid pace all the time.

[* I couldn't help being reminded of another historical novel written about the same time and likewise based on real people and events, which likewise used very short paragraphs: Klabund's Borgia (published in 1929, while Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar appeared in 1928). I wonder if this is just a coincidence, or are they both part of some larger trend that was in fashion at the time. Or maybe that's just what all modernist writing is like anyway.]

He is helped in this by a slightly impressionistic style, but this also leads to a downside: there is often something of a vagueness to the way he tells things, which made it harder for me to have a clear idea of what is happening and when. Occasionally the narrative jumps back in time to belatedly provide some potentially useful background information that should have been given much earlier; and some background information is never provided at all. For instance, the book opens with an extremely vague preface about the Decembrist revolt, but as someone who knew more or less nothing about it except that something by that name had indeed happened in 1825 and had been quashed, this preface told me next to nothing. Griboyedov, the protagonist of the novel, seems to have been vaguely in touch with people involved in the revolt, but not so closely as to be implicated himself; and his subsequent career in the service of the government seems to be regarded by the author of the novel as something of a betrayal of his former connections to the Decembrists.

Anyway, fortunately the rest of the novel is not quite as vague as that, though we still get a short super-impressionistic vague section now and then. But I shouldn't complain too much; I suppose all this is necessary so that the book can have been considered literary art and not mere genre shlock, and so reading it may be somewhat likened to eating one's vegetables: not the tastiest possible thing, but hopefully good for one in some sense. —

It is an ancient privilege of Russian writers to abuse and confuse their readers by trying to come up with as many different ways of referring to the same character as possible. I loved to hate this technique in Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, and Tynianov here also makes full use of it. A character may have a name, patronymic, surname, one or two nicknames, one or two titles, and all this is never introduced together, but little by little as other characters drop this or that bit of information in passing, leaving it to the reader to figure out which names fit together and belong to which character. A man may be Ivan Fyodorovich on one page, Jean on another, Paskevich somewhere else, the General a few pages later, Count Yerevansky still elsewhere, and so on ad nauseam. In the end I was reduced to writing an improvised index of characters in a blank page near the end of the book — the publisher would have done the readers a great service if they had provided something like that by themselves.

There are also many words and phrases in an impressive range of foreign languages, not just French (which we sort of expect in Russian novels set in the 19th century) but also English, German, Italian, Georgian, Persian and quite possibly some others that I've overlooked. Fortunately, in the present edition such things are all translated in footnotes; but even so, the abundance of Persian vocabulary often struck me as excessive and confusing. When I encounter chelonger on p. 373, I certainly can't be expected to remember that it had been glossed in passing as “locksmith” on p. 334. At that point it would almost have been better to add a gloss each time such a word appears, or to add a separate glossary at the end of the book. But more importantly than that, it isn't obvious to me that saying chelonger instead of “locksmith” accomplishes anything. If this Persian word conveys any shade of meaning that a plain “locksmith” doesn't, we are in no position to know this from the two or so passing instances where it is used in this book. Exotic words are fine when they refer to exotic concepts, but here it seems to be just pointless; and there are a lot of such dubious exotic terms in the Persian sections of the novel.

As is not uncommon with historical novels, this one is inspired by real people and real events, but as I don't know anything much about the historical background, I couldn't tell where exactly the boundary between fact and fiction lies. At any rate, what we read in the Wikipedia article about Griboyedov, the protagonist of the novel, agrees quite well with what happens in the novel, so I guess that any liberties taken by the author must be in fairly minor matters, and in little details that are valuable in a novel but that you can hardly expect to find their way into the historical record.

The plot

<spoiler warning>

The novel is set in 1828–29 or so. Griboyedov is a poet and playwright (and an acquaintance of Pushkin's — incidentally, they share the same name: Alexander Sergeyevich; p. 121), but also a diplomat working for the Russian Foreign Ministry, hoping to benefit from the influence of a powerful relative, General Paskevich, to advance faster in his career. G.'s relationship to the ruling regime seems to be somewhat ambiguous: on the one hand he is a civil servant, on the other hand he used to have uncomfortably close ties to the Decembrist rebels (pp. 100, 195, 231–2), and his main literary work is a play that is apparently subversive enough that he hasn't been able to get it past the censors despite years of trying.

As the novel opens, G. is returning from Persia with a peace treaty he has negotiated there after the recent conclusion of a war between Russia and Persia. The war was a success for Russia, and G.'s treaty requires Persia to pay large indemnities, allow kidnapped/captured Russians to return home, and extradite Russian deserters. Neither G. nor the author of the novel seem to be in any very great hurry, so we see G. visiting his mother in Moscow and various friends and acquaintances both there and in St. Petersburg. Eventually, he presents the treaty to the Tsar (in a fine scene that illustrates vividly the ludicrously elaborate court ceremonial; “the quiet childish game, played by old men embroidered with gold”, p. 37), and both G. and his superiors at the Foreign Ministry are rewarded for their efforts. (A curious detail: the foreign minister, Nesselrode, is really more of a German and can't speak any Russian (p. 32)! — but that's OK, since diplomacy was all done in French anyway.)

While G. waits for his next assignment, we see a few scenes from his life in St. Petersburg; he attends a ballet performance and an examination at the School of Oriental Languages, he meets literary friends, he visits a mistress or two, etc. He also has an ambitious project for setting up an “Agricultural, Manufacturing and Trading Company” — a sort of Russian equivalent of the British East India Company, to improve the economic exploitation of territories that Russia has recently conquered in the Caucasus. G. envisions himself as the director of this company, with powers so extensive that he would be more like a viceroy than a businessman (p. 94); but when he submits his plan to the Foreign Ministry, nothing comes of it because one of his superiors covets the post of director for himself (p. 116).

Instead, they decide to send G. to Persia again, tasked with making sure the Persians actually comply with the treaty they have just signed; notably, the indemnities he is supposed to squeeze out of them would be very useful to finance the upcoming Russian war against Turkey. G. gets promoted to a higher rank in the civil service hierarchy and is sent to Persia as a Minister Plenipotentiary (p. 130), or Vazir-Mukhtar in Persian — hence the title. (Another funny detail: his new position entitles him to have no fewer than fifteen horses draw his carriage when travelling on the state post-roads; p. 135.)

Once again, G. is in no great hurry to get to his destination. On the way they stop for several days at a farm-house because the farmer has a pretty daughter, and they continue only when G. notices that his valet has more success with her than G. himself does :)) (pp. 143–4). They continue to Tiflis, where G. used to live for eight years (p. 154). He is in love with a girl named Nina, the daughter of a Georgian noble family, and plans to marry her before continuing to Persia. Moreover, he wants to present his trading company proposal to some influential people there, including the aforementioned Paskevich (pp. 176, 230). It takes a couple of angry letters from St. Petersburg to finally badger G. into resuming his journey (p. 207); and he is further delayed on the road by a plague epidemic, with G. himself falling seriously ill (p. 242).

As the novel moves towards more exotic locales, the author not infrequently treats us to little historical asides, which I found very interesting. Thus we get short sections about the Persian sack of Tiflis in 1795 (p. 153) and about the Russian conquest of the Caucasus (pp. 172–4), and later almost a whole chapter about Persia (pp. 249–63), where the elderly Shah has an enormous harem which includes one of his own daughters, with whom he has two sons/grandsons :)) (p. 261).

G. eventually makes his way to the Persian city of Tabriz, the seat of Abbas Mirza, one of the Shah's sons, who is the heir-apparent and pretty much the de facto ruler of the country. G. manages to get Abbas to hand over part of the indemnities, but it's clear that the Persian economy is badly depressed, and popular discontent is rising as the government tries to extract more money to pay the Russians (pp. 256, 286, 290). We also see some glimpses of the rivalry between Russia and Britain for influence over Persia; the British are hoping that Persia will side with Turkey against Russia, but that won't happen if Persia is impoverished by the indemnities paid to G. (pp. 280–1, 288). Despite all this, G. gets along very well with the British representative in Tabriz, a Col. Macdonald.

News arrive of Russian defeats in the new Turkish war, so getting the remaining indemnities from Persia is a higher priority than before and G. leaves Tabriz for Teheran to deal directly with the Shah (pp. 283, 287). He is received with great pomp (and carefully ignores some details of court etiquette to assert the status of Russia relative to Persia; pp. 325–8), and does receive some more money; but another important part of his mission now comes to the fore. Under the terms of the treaty, people born in Russian territories but held in captivity in Persia now have the right to return home under G.'s protection. Besides numerous other people, this turns out to include two of the prime minister's wives (p. 337) as well as Khodja Yakub, an Armenian-born eunuch who is now the Shah's treasurer (and apparently the only man in Persia who understands double-entry book-keeping; p. 305, 345–9).

The treaty also covers the extradition of Russian deserters now serving in Persia; there is in fact a whole battalion of them, led by a commander named Samson Khan (formerly Samson Makintsev, a Russian NCO; pp. 70, 263). They come across as a formidable force that is unlikely to allow itself to be extradited without a fight (pp. 342, 354).

G.'s refusal to compromise on these issues finally brings matters to a head. The Shah refuses to extradite Samson (p. 349), and refers the defection of Yakub (who has meanwhile moved into G.'s embassy compound) to a Sharia court, which predictably reacts by declaring jihad. Moreover, it is the holy month of Muharram, when the Shiites are extra fanatical. Between this and the already-mentioned public discontent due to economic depression, high taxes and the like, a large mob of Teheranians gathers and marches on G.'s embassy. His Cossacks are badly outnumbered and despite a valiant defense, the crowd eventually breaks in and kills Yakub and all the Russians, with the exception of one of G.'s secretaries, Maltsov, who bribed some Persian soldiers to hide him.

I was saddened and disappointed by how the novel ends. Maltsov is brought before the Shah and blames G. for the disturbances, not only to save his own skin but because he himself really hates G. at that point (pp. 376–7). The Persians pretend to be sorry and blame the rabble, even though the authorities deliberately dragged their feet before restoring order (pp. 366, 370). And the Russian government — oh, that was the most disappointing part of all. I hoped they would react like Genghis Khan, swoop down with an army and raze Teheran to the ground. That would certainly have been appropriate. But no, they agree that the Persian government is not to blame, they forbid Paskevich from undertaking any anti-Persian military measures, and all they ask from Persia is for a Persian crown prince to come to Russia and repeat personally that the Persian government had nothing to do with the events (pp. 383–4). A prince duly arrives, not as a penitent seeking forgiveness but as an honoured guest of state, and his visit is a great success (pp. 388–97; in fact he has such a good time that he gets syphilis in the process, p. 400). G.'s body, which had been hacked to pieces by the mob, is never recovered, so they just pack some random and sufficiently decomposed body parts into a coffin and send that to his widow in Georgia (p. 404). A new Vazir-Mukhtar is appointed, and G. is soon forgotten.

</spoiler warning>

The English translations

Incidentally, the story of the English translation(s) of this novel appears to be a curious one. It first appeared in English as Death and Diplomacy in Persia (London: Boriswood, 1938; tr. by Alec Brown); but that translation was abridged (it's just 357 pages long). It was reprinted in 1975 (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press).

The book on which the present blog post is based appears to be the first complete translation into English. As we learn from the publisher's note at the start of the book, Susan Causey worked on the translation in her retirement and had just about finished it when she was killed in a traffic accident. Her family members managed to find an editor to finalize the translation, and then also found a publisher (London: Look Multimedia; 406 pages); the book appeared in 2018 (only in paperback, as far as I can tell). The publisher's website appears to be gone now, but the Internet Archive has a few snapshots; they describe themselves as “a specialist publishing company founded in 1991”, and even in 2020 their website still said that “In 2018 Look will publish” Causey's translation.

And then just three years later, in 2021, another complete translation appeared, by Anna and Christopher Rush. This was published by Columbia University Press in hardcover, paperback, and epub editions. This version has 632 pages, but this higher number is largely due to less economical typesetting, because the additional materials in this edition (an introduction, a glossary of foreign words and phrases, an index of persons, and notes) certainly can't account for 200 pages.

So I can't help wondering if it wouldn't have been better to read the Rushes' translation instead of Causey's; but in 2020, when I got my copy of the book, the Rushes' translation hadn't been published yet. Still, what I can do now is to attempt a hasty comparison of the two editions, with the caveat that I haven't actually read the Rushes' translation.

The notes in the Rushes' edition are no more extensive than those in Causey's, except that they appear as endnotes instead of as footnotes. Mostly they are translations of foreign passages in the text, but occasionally they do provide additional information that is not to be found in Causey (for example, mehmandar appears without any explanation on p. 281 of Causey, but it is glossed in the Rush edition); no doubt the reverse is sometimes also true.

The Rushes' glossary of foreign words is not very extensive either, but could be useful because Causey only translates each foreign word in a footnote the first time it appears; if you encounter it again 150 pages later and don't remember what it means, it's up to you to hunt down the original appearance and look at the footnote there. This is where a glossary at the end of the book could be quite helpful.

The Rushes' index of persons looks very useful indeed and contains a good amount of biographical details (such as years of birth and death) not to be found in the novel itself, for as it turns out, nearly all of these persons are historical and not fictional. If something like this had been available in Causey's translation, it would have saved me the trouble of writing a much more modest version of such an index on the blank page at the end of my copy of the book :)

Whereas the Causey edition contains only a couple of brief notes about Tynianov and about Griboyedov, amounting to barely a page or so of text, the Rushes' edition contains a much more extensive introduction by Angela Brintlinger, which provides a lot of useful background information about such things as: the Decembrist revolt; the life and work of both the author of the novel, Tynianov, as well as its protagonist, Griboyedov; the reception of the novel, both in Tynianov's day and later (apparently later critics pointed out that the story as we see it in Tynianov's book is not as close to historical facts as one might think at first sight); the modernist style in which it is written; Brown's abridged English translation of 1938; and she ends with fulsome praise of the Rushes' new translation — but not even once does she mention Causey's version. This last detail counts as a huge minus in my eyes. She writes that “[n]ow the novel is finally available in a full English translation”, as if Causey's translation didn't even exist. In my opinion, if you publish a new translation of a novel just three years after the previous one, it behoves you to explain why you thought another translation was necessary — you should say what you think is wrong with the previous one and what yours will accomplish that the previous one didn't. But to not even acknowledge the existence of that previous translation — that makes it seem as if you considered it so to be far beneath yours that you didn't even think it worth comparing the two. It may be that Causey's version is worse in various ways, but it is by no means so much worse that it would be appropriate to ignore it altogether.

There is one other very prominent difference between the two translations: Causey's translation is badly proofread and very badly typeset. The typesetting of that book is a crime against humanity; a cell in the Hague, and a circle in Hell, await whoever has typeset it; it looks as if it had been typeset in 1995 by the boss's nephew who ‘is good with computers’, using his trusty pirated copy of Word for Windows. It is really an atrocity that after all the hard work put into the translation by the translator and the editor, it ends up being mauled this badly by the carelessness of a typesetter. Most of the time it uses hyphens where there should be em-dashes; doubly nested quotes always open with ‘ ”Foo instead of ‘ “Foo, an obvious sign that someone has been relying too much on a naive automated approach to replace straight quotes by curly ones (no doubt for the same reason, apostrophes at the beginning of words are invariably printed as ‘ instead of ’ as they should be); it is not uncommon for the opening line of a paragraph to be indented more than it should be; a number of spaces between words are missing; typos in punctuation abound, the combination “,.” (an unnecessary comma preceding a full-stop) being a particular favourite; foreign words and names, especially Persian ones, are often spelled inconsistently (e.g. “Melikianets” (p. 317), “Melikiants” (p. 319), “Melikiyants” (p. 355)), sometimes with what I suspect are leftovers of a Russian plural suffix where you probably wouldn't expect it in English.

The Rush edition, by contrast, appears to be typeset decently and profesionally. Persian names generally appear in forms that modern academics are fond of, with their abundance of hyphens, apostrophes, uvular q's and the like. For example: “Fath Ali Shah” (Causey, p. 250) vs. “Fat’h-Ali-shah” (Rush); “Abul Kasim Khan” (Causey, p. 256) vs. “Abu’l-Qasim-Khan” (Rush). I'm not sure if that is necessarily a good thing, however; I suspect that the way in which these names appear in Causey's version is closer to Tynianov's original — he was, after all, writing a novel and not an academic text, and I'm pretty sure he didn't bother with apostrophes and almost certainly didn't try to distinguish the uvular q from the plain old velar k. [That said, there is also one instance of the uvular q in Causey's edition, namely the spelling “Qazvin” (p. 309) for the town in northern Persia.]

Anyway, if I try to draw the line under all this, I suppose that on purely objective terms, the Rushes' edition has to be regarded as the better one; but that very fact makes Causey's version the underdog, and I always support the underdog. How could I not be moved by a book that reaches out to us from beyond the grave, published in the translator's memory by a grieving family, with the very amateurishness of its typesetting serving as a testament to their commitment to getting the book into the hands of the public; how could I not cheer on this little David, when in the other corner there is the Goliath of a University Press with its ready access to all manner of academic knowledge and professional skill, a team of two translators with doctorates and the like — no indeed, I have to support the underdog, and I don't regret having read the Causey translation.

A couple of miscellaneous quotes

Here is a quote for the ages: “The salons everywhere were buffed and gleaming to perfection. It was explained to him that this winter they had begun cleaning the walls and ceilings as it was done in Moscow, with bread — only the soft part. The bread was then distributed to the poor.” (P. 124.) Marie Antoinette had nothing on these people! Where is the asteroid when you need it :S

Griboyedov is... ploughing a friend's wife while thinking about his grandiose future plans: “With obstinate steel he was entering the rich earth, cutting through the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, pushing a wedge into Persia.” (P. 47.) :)))

Here's a small effort to compare several translations. One line that I really liked appears early in the book, when Griboyedov is visiting his mother in Moscow; when he tells her that he won't be dining at home, she alludes to his frequent affairs with actresses by asking: “Délices de coulisses again?” (P. 8. There is also a footnote translating the French phrase as “Backstage delights”.)

I was curious what this line looks like in other editions. The Rushes' translation says: “Actresses again, and all that backstage stuff?” I was surprised to see that the tone is so informal, and that the French phrase was lost. Next I looked at the French translation by Lily Denis (La mort du Vazir-Moukhtar, 1969): “Toujours les coulisses? Toujours les actrices?” (i.e. “Still backstage? Still actresses?”) And finally the original: “Opyat' kulisy i opyat' aktrisy?” (i.e. “Again backstage and again actresses?”).

I can't help being a little disappointed by this experiment; the proverb about translators being traitors has been confirmed again. Of the three translations, only the French one is close to the original. The Rush version removed the rhyme and introduced what seems to me to be an excessively informal tone. And Causey has just plain fabricated a nifty French phrase of the sort which a reader would naturally expect to have been there in the original — I was rather shocked by this, but perhaps she had to resort to it for the sake of keeping the rhyme (even if she had to replace actresses with delights), which would be hard to do in English since the word coulisses is hardly present in that language. Even so, fabricating a foreign phrase that wasn't there in the original strikes me as going a bit too far. Neither of the two English translations comes out looking terribly good here.