The gadfly and the spy
PERSONAL COLUMN TIBOR SZAMUELY
Some months ago I began thinking about Russian children's books. I was set off on this line of thought after reading a review of Mr Robin Bruce Lockhart's Ace of Spies: the biography 'of the incredible British master-spy, Sidney Reilly. The reviewer, having delivered the obligatory stock sneers about Bulldog Drummond, British Intelligence, John Buchan, the Zinoviev Letter, and old Uncle Percy Blakeney and all, wistfully regretted never having come across progressive children's books, with a clean-limbed young leftist hero besting the evil forces of imperialism and finance capital; sadly, he even doubted whether anything like that had ever been written. Ha-ha, I thought (or words to that effect). For I had certainly read such books—hundreds of them, in fact. And I started to recollect.
What are they like, the children's books on which little Russian boys and girls are edu- cated in the virtues of patriotism, courage, spying and purity? Much the same as the English ones, only worse—both more tedious and more tendentious. Yet strangely enough the most popular work of homiletic children's fiction in the USSR is an English novel—even though no (non-communist) Englishman I know has ever heard of the book or even its author. It is called The Gadfly, and it was written in 1897 by Ethel Lilian Voynich (nee Boole).
I must have been about ten when I first read The Gadfly, but as I was already familiar with some much better books, even at that tender age I found it hard to swallow Mrs Voynich's preposterous plot and gushing romantic soppi- ness. It is all about the secret societies of the Italian Carbonari in the 1830s and 1840s. The hero is a young Englishman, Arthur Burton, a devout Catholic, who gets mixed up with the revolutionaries—and suddenly discovers not only that he has unwittingly betrayed his com- rades to the police through the perfidy of his father-confessor, but also that he is the illegitimate son of another Catholic priest whom he loves and admires, one Montanelli. Arthur fakes suicide and escapes to South America, when he reappears years later as the mysterious and dreaded revolutionary, 'The Gadfly,' unrecognised by all except the readers. In the end he is caught, sentenced and executed; the last rites are administered . . . by Mon- tanelli, now a cardinal, who discovers the ghastly truth and immediately dies of remorse.
From the moment The Gadfly first appeared, its combination of anti-clericalism, revolution- ism and high-coloured romance proved irre- sistible to the Russians. The book was translated into RusSian the year after its English publication: the tsarist authorities' dis- approval only enhanced its popularity. Young revolutionaries swore by The Gadfly. But it was only after 1917 that it really came into its own: since the revolution nearly four million copies have been printed in the USSR, in forty-nine languages; it has had lots of stage and screen adaptations, and even been made into an opera. Innumerable polls over the years have shown that Arthur Burton was the favourite literary hero of every right-minded Soviet youth.
The Gadfly became even more popular after the appearance in the early 1930s of that other wholesome Soviet best-seller, Nikolai Ostrov- sky's How the Steel was Tempered: an in- tensely heroic tale (based on the author's own life) about a fearless young communist, Pavel Korchagin, who performs astonishing deeds of derring-do in the Civil War and after, suffers numerous wounds and illnesses, and finally ends up an incurable invalid. But his spirit never flags, his revolutionary ardour never cools— because at every critical moment of his life he turns for inspiration and moral sustenance to The Gadfly. Before battle, Korchagin would gather his rough comrades around him and announce a reading from the Good Book : 'It's called The Gadfly, comrades. The Bat- talion Commissar gave it to me. Wonderful book, comrades. If you'll sit quietly I'll read it to you.' Not surprisingly, after a short ses- sion the Red Army men would leap refreshed into the fray and smash the Whites before you could say 'Giuseppe Mazzini.'
When Korchagin was critically wounded his doctors marvelled at the sixteen year old boy's fortitude. One of them expressed her amaze- ment in her diary : 'Where does he get that tremendous endurance, I wonder?' A few days later she had her answer : 'I know now why he never groans. I asked him, and he replied:. "Read The Gadfly and you'll know." '
And so millions of Soviet young people read The Gadfly and found out what a good revo- lutionary was supposed to be like. For a very long time, however, its author remained some- thing of a mystery. She had faded from sight early in the century, and no one had heard of her since. It was widely believed that she was dead.
The years passed. In 1955 a delegation of Soviet journalists visited the United States, for the first time since the onset of the Cold War. And one morning a Russian diplomat burst into the New York hotel room occupied by Boris Polevoi, a delegation member. Almost in- coherent with excitement, he barely managed to stammer out that he had just seen Ethel Voynich! The incredulous journalists crammed into a car and raced off to the 450 West •24th Street. They rang the bell—and there she was before them: Ethel Lilian Voynich, the author of The Gadfly, ninety-one years of age. She had lived in New York since 1920, forgotten and unread in the West, and totally unaware (Soviet copyright laws being what they are) of having become one of Russia's great legendary figures. She could hardly believe it. 'Strange,' she murmured. 'They remember me in Russia . . . How very strange.' The last Russian edition she knew of was dated 1912.
The Soviet journalists were, if anything, even more astonished: for them it was like a resurrection from the dead. That night Polevoi wrote in his diary : 'Everything that happened today is like a fantastic dream . . . Was it dream or reality? I can hardly believe that this meeting actually took place.' He collected himself sufficiently to cable his office—and next day the Russian papers blossomed forth with the headline : 'Ethel Voynich is alive and living in New York.' Great was the rejoicing from Brest to Vladivostok. From that day on the old lady's home became a place of pil- grimage for every Soviet visitor to the us— a kind of New York Marx's grave. Mrs Voynich died in 1960, bewildered and still somevOtat unbelieving, despite the stacks of copies of various editions of The Gadfly which now occupied most of her flat. Her death was mourned as that of a great national figure.
Yet one last mystery still remained unsolved. Who was the splendid revolutionary upon whom the character of 'The Gadfly' had been modelled? The Russian journalists eagerly put the question to Mrs Voynich. She had thought for a while, then shook her head : 'No, I'm afraid I can't remember . . It was all so long ago.' And that was that. Then the Soviet literary historians had a go. They dragged out various nineteenth century Italian, Russian and even Polish revolutionaries (Mr Voynich had been a Pole), but for one reason or another none of them fitted. There the matter rested.
But no longer: the riddle has been solved at last. At this point I must return to Mr Bruce Lockhart's life of Sidney Reilly. For soon after reading the review I got down to the immensely fascinating book itself. And there, on page 27, was the answer to the problem which has occupied some of Russia's best minds for so many years. It appears that in 1896 Reilly had had a brief but passionate love affair with a young English woman writer, to whom he had confided the strange story of his early life. Greatly intrigued, she decided to make him the hero of her next novel.
Yes, you have guessed it : the woman was Ethel Voynich, and the book, The Gadfly. It is all in it: Reilly's Catholic upbringing, his illegitimacy, discovered by accident at the age of nineteen, his betrayal and arrest, his pre- tended suicide and journey to South America —even the details of Reilly's odd personality and his physical appearance, down to his stammer. :The Gadfly' is Sidney Reilly . . . with one crucial difference: so far from having been a revolutionary, Reilly was the Bolsheviks' deadliest and most determined opponent. the author of a dozen conspiracies against the Soviet regime. He is the only foreign spy whose name is known to every educated Russian.
Is it possible to imagine anything more weird than the fact of Soviet Russia's most revered literary hero being based upon the real- life character of their greatest enemy? I wonder what they are going to do about it now, when 'The Gadfly' has finally been exposed for what he was? Since he has already been executed twice—by the forces of reaction as 'Arthur Burton' and by the OGPU as Sidney Reilly—they can hardly do much more along these lines. Of course, they might simply try to brazen it out. But anyway, things could never be the same again : how does one recover the joyous rapture of revolutionary hero- worship when one knows that the fellow is really a filthy imperialist agent?
Sidney Reilly was a man of infinite disguises —French cure, German staff officer, Russian Bolshevik—but not one of them can compare with that of 'The Gadfly,' in which he has suc- cessfully insinuated himself into the heart and mind of every Soviet boy and girl brought up since the Revolution. What a coup!
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