Fridrikh Gorenshtein (1932–2002) was a Russian Jewish writer renowned in the early 1970s for his screenplay for Andrei Tarkovskii's film Solaris. He was known among Moscow writers and directors for largely unpublished fiction that broke with the literary conventions of the intelligentsia. This milieu knew Gorenshtein, too, for the unusual figure he cut: for his “shtetl” accent, his ornate sartorial style, and his disdain for Moscow-elite mores. Gorenshtein saw himself as a silenced outsider, while writers like Vasilii Aksenov and Evgenii Popov saw him as a talented and captious insider.
Redemption, Andrew Bromfield's excellent new translation of the novel Iskuplenie (1967), reflects Gorenshtein's impatience with the norms of literature, language, and historiography in the Soviet 1960s and 1970s. Like other works by Gorenshtein, the novel belongs to the tradition of “southern” Russian prose, whereby writers such as Anton Chekhov and Isaak Babel΄ imagined themselves as flouting the literary practices of Russia's capital cities, where they also found patrons and readers. Iskuplenie disrupts the narrative of World War II that stressed Soviet solidarity and largely failed to acknowledge the specifically Jewish tragedy. Works that did recognize the mass executions of Jews in Soviet territory rarely used humor as a strategy. A story of tragedy that borrows vaudeville devices, Iskuplenie breaks the conventions of Soviet war stories and mixes literary modes. It is an ethnography of the Soviet southwest; a catalog of the fabrics and foodstuffs that communicated postwar social status; and an account of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. It is also the story of a set of murders, a Bildungsroman about a girl named Sashenka, and a love story between Sashenka and a Jewish fighter pilot whose family was murdered.
The translator's task is thus fraught with difficulties. A plot that revolves around Sashenka's denunciation of her mother and her transformation upon witnessing the exhumation of a Jewish dentist is difficult to square with comic elements that recall Fedor Dostoevskii's Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, Anton Chekhov's clumsier protagonists, and Mikhail Bakhtin's discussion of the menippea. It is impossible to tell where the author stands amid the novel's lofty speeches and awkward moments. The translator is compelled to decipher between irony and sympathy. Lofty theories about love and violence are articulated by a professor with no sense of his audience, but the text suggests that the author empathizes or perhaps agrees with him.
Rather than trying to smooth out the novel's heterogeneity, Bromfield accentuates the swings between big ideas and ungainliness by emphasizing elements of performance. Sometimes, the performance is physical. The “хромой «культурник» в кителе с петлицами танкиста” (1992, 158) who oversees a New Year's ball and might be described in English as a “cultural worker” or “organizer” becomes a “‘master of ceremonies’ with a limp” (14). Theatrical “hobbling” replaces his “walking” (khodil) across the dance hall. Verbal performance is equally pronounced. The professor's “sobstvennaia rech΄,” for instance, is translated as a “diatribe” (121).
Bromfield differentiates between the performances of the author and his characters by splitting Iskuplenie into three translations: penance, atonement, and redemption. Fanya, a drunken Catholic custodian, holds that the murderer's embarrassing illness in prison is his “penance.” Fanya's belief that the murderer will “suffer eternal penance in hell” draws out the relentless punishment and apologetic performance embedded in Iskuplenie (48). The professor uses “atonement” to imagine the inevitable achievement of Iskuplenie. He explains what he calls a “biblical limit” and prophesies that “now, beyond that boundary, crossed at the price of millions of innocents, retribution and atonement will fuse and become one. . .” (164). The Iskuplenie in the title becomes Redemption and implies the ambiguity of Gorenshtein's stance. He may be using iskuplenie ironically to describe the impossibility of his flawed characters receiving the redemption they seek. He may thereby address the impossibility of redemption after the Holocaust. As “redemption,” iskuplenie may also be used empathically towards characters muddling through the first postwar year the best they can, and it may recognize the acts of tenderness they muster amid that chaos. It may even suggest that verbal art after Iosif Stalin and the Holocaust offers its own form of redemption.
By maintaining these possibilities and drawing out the over-the-topness that characterizes his serious and comic modes, Bromfield has captured Gorenshtein's style. The paucity of English translations of Gorenshtein means that this style has been unavailable to the English reader. Redemption will thus interest not only Jewish Studies scholars but also popular and scholarly readerships that wish to see what the postwar literary imagination made possible.
