In the Bin
ONE of the funniest scenes in fiction is that in Ilf and Petrov's Golden Calf (1931), set in a Soviet lunatic asylum. The inmates are all sane. But then 'a loony-bin,' as one of them con- cludes, 'is the only place in Soviet Russia where a sane man can live.' That this passage has become less of a fantasy than its authors may have intended is now suggested by the real-life history of Valeriy Tarsis.
His new novel is the latest in a memorable series of Russian works, including Dr. Zhivago, issued in foreign translation after being spirited out of the Soviet Union where there was no possibility of publishing them. Mr. Tarsis is an old hand at this game, being already known to the English reader as Ivan Valeriy. His two pre- vious smuggled stories appeared under this pseudonym in English translation (as The Blue- bottle) in 1962, after which he was dispatched to a Soviet mental hospital for compulsory 'treatment.' This is one fashionable way of handling undesirables nowadays, and, as this book shows, it is a lot less funny than it may sound.
Released in February 1963, the unrepentant Tarsis proceeded heroically to compound his earlier misdemeanours by having the Russian text of this new work smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It describes his own experiences as a medical prisoner disguised as the fictional ad- ventures of one Valentin Almazov, and estab- lishes one of the most richly ironical dialogues that any author can ever have held with his readers and gaolers. It is also a magnificent gesture of defiance.
Imprisonment in mental hospitals is not exactly new in Russia, for similar treatment was meted out to the writer Chaadayev under Nicholas I. The technique has been revived and brought up to date—and on a pretty big scale, too, according to Tarsis's evidence—to fill the gap created by the decrease in the number of Soviet concentration camps, so imprudently allowed to run down after Stalin's death. Most of the medical personnel in this book are prison warders except in name, while the 'patients' are all sane, apart from one real lunatic who seems to have got there by accident. This re- minds one of an awkward incident in the asylum in the Golden Calf, where some of the sane inmates are caused to complain, 'They've dumped a genuine loony on us.'
At his best, Tarsis is a good storyteller, but I wish that he had concentrated more on straight reportage, for which he has real talent. In any case, this book is chiefly important as a docu- ment of our time. All the more reason why the mutilation of Tarsis's text perpetrated by the translator and/or editors of the present English version is so regrettable. Comparing this version with the Russian original, published in the etnigr6 journal Grani in January 1965, I at first thought that I was dealing with an entirely different text. Whole passages have been omitted or bodily transposed, while proper names have been pointlessly altered. For instance, why on earth turn Tarsis's `Soloveychik' into 'Sokol'? This document should have been made available to the English reader in a form reflecting. its original condition as closely as possible.
RONALD HINGLEY
Previous page
