The lyrical English translation of Guzel Yakhina’s Russian historical novel, A Volga Tale, sent me back in time to my teenage obsession with Russian literature. First, Polly Gannon’s lush and rhythmic English translation reminded me of Constance Garnett’s translations of 19th-century Russian fiction. The over-the-top behaviors of characters in A Volga Tale, and the impassioned dialogues between them, reminded me of interactions between Dostoevsky characters like Rogozhin and Nastassya Filipovna from The Idiot, a book where even pedestrian conversations sound like high-stakes debates. Uncontrollable circumstances and characters who go to extremes in A Volga Tale were also familiar Russian narrative templates for me. I was left wondering if these reasons were why the novel, written over 150 years after classics like Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, should sound and feel so comforting.
Jacob Ivanovich Bach, the novel’s protagonist, lives alone Gnadenthal, a village of Volga German farmers, one of many such villages spawned by Catherine the Great’s immigration policies. Beside the Volga River in early 20th century Russia, Bach is the eccentric schoolmaster instructing local children in a one-room schoolhouse for long enough that “he had learned to split his mind off from his own body” as he recited lessons by rote. His only ecstasy is in declaiming favorite lines of German poetry. In his insignificance and outsider status, he resembles archetypal heroes including the “little man” character of Russian literature. When Bach receives a mysterious and life-changing summons to cross the Volga River, he is helpless, as so many hesitant protagonists have been, to resist “an irrepressible current” flowing within him.
After an arduous crossing of the Volga and a climb up the steep, bleak banks of the river’s other side, Bach arrives at a farmstead owned by the gigantic and intimidating Udo Grimm, who wants Bach to tutor his 17-year old daughter, Klara. Once Bach agrees to the work, this “other side” transforms from a frightening and literally Grimm place to a pastoral paradise. When he returns to the ferry boat, he can’t recall whether he “flew like a bird or rushed like a whirlwind down the path” to the river. The strange, other shore of the Volga is a place of transformation and re-transformation, where Bach is changed by love, death, and love again.
In a 2018 interview conducted prior to the novel’s English translation, Yakhina says, “It’s a circle of topics that concern me – the relationship of the country and personality, the story of the little man in the big country, the issue of internal freedom and its ratio to the external freedom …” Yakhina is herself a sort of “little man,” or outsider, a Tatar woman who is bilingual in Tatar and Russian. Her first novel, the international bestseller Zuleikha, was based on the life of her Tatar grandmother, who endured dekulakization and exile in a Siberian gulag. A Volga Tale is dedicated to her grandfather, who taught German in “the countryside” like Bach. Yakhina grew up on the Volga and was also a teacher of German, but writing the novel required a deep dive into the history of Volga Germans. The novel is set entirely in Russia and reflects the country’s multiple ethnicities and includes Russian, Volga German, and Kyrgyz essential characters, like the “little stray” Bach takes in, a Kyrgyz boy who can swear in at least seven languages.
In such a country, translation is critical. As a reader who still knows only English, I have depended on Constance Garnett who was the default translator of classic Russian texts in the first half of the 20th-century. And as an inexperienced reader, I believed her words captured the cadences and passions of Russian authors I sought out, including Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Reading her translations felt like traveling on an elaborate train through the vastness of Russian culture. The same satisfaction of being transported overcame me in reading Polly Gannon’s translation of A Volga Tale; Gannon’s work has the same rhythmic roll from one thought to another, the same graceful movement of language, the same sonic pleasures of subtle meter and rhyme. Since the novel concerns itself deeply with translation, I contacted the publisher, Europa Editions, to secure an interview with Dr. Gannon.
One interesting thing Dr. Gannon told me about the translation process is that it can feel like coercion; it can feel like “transgressing the original.” The translator must, ultimately, overcome those feelings to make a book from one language accessible by people who do not speak that language. Bach himself is a translator who both fails and succeeds in his translations, and sometimes he refuses translation entirely, perhaps because of a fear of transgressing. In his schoolhouse, he teaches and translates Russian to the German-speaking children. On the other side of the Volga, he translates the outside world to the sequestered Klara, whose father makes her sit behind a curtain during lessons in case looking at a strange man will turn her into “a receptacle of sin.” The two of them fall in love, of course, but when Klara runs to Bach in Gnadenthal, Bach’s surprise and worship of Klara renders him speechless, and he fails in translating her to the conservative village, perhaps out of a fear of transgressing Klara as an original. He also fails in translating the village to her. The two become social outcasts; they cross the Volga again and retreat to the farmhouse, which has been abandoned by Udo Grimm. When Bach turns speechless again after Klara’s death in childbirth, he translates in a new way to the child, Antje, who may or may not be his daughter:
“Their whole existence was a single long conversation with one another — a perpetual, gravely serious conversation in the language of breath and gesture and movement. Each of them was like an enormous ear, poised to listen and understand the other.”
This image of the enormous ear is a memorable depiction of the power of attentiveness, one of countless fresh and startling images in the novel that bring clarity to the mysteries of human behavior. The protean Volga River, however, is the central image of the novel, a literal and metaphoric barrier between realities and a powerful fulcrum for the plot as Bach crosses from one side of the river to the other, time and again. From the “other side” he has watched Gnadenthal suffer through World War I, devastating famines, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Desperate for milk to feed the infant Antje, he agrees to write for Gnadenthal’s Communist leader, Comrade Hoffman, at first translating Germanic sayings, then moving on to translation of folk tales, then inserting propaganda into the tales. Soon, though, he begins to write stories of his own, and these stories, with little fanfare, take on disquieting powers to change reality.
This insertion of magic into a realistic struggle to provide for a child is but one example of magic realism in A Volga Tale. It is a style that has been posited as characteristic of post-catastrophic art. In my interview with her, Polly Gannon said, “Russian history is so violent and extreme that fairy tale and myth are the only way to cope with it.” I agree, but my perspective is that catastrophe has no geography or era, and that the magic realism of post-terror and post-colonial literature exists without regard to geography or era. Our world has been on fire since its birth.
I see a form of magic realism in Dostoevsky quite clearly, for what is Prince Myshkin’s feverish religious belief but a subtype of belief in magic? Between temporal lobe epilepsy, chronic poverty, his political imprisonments, and his gambling addiction, Dostoevsky’s life was a series of catastrophes. He described his conception of “fantastic realism” in a detailed 1868 letter to the poet Apollon Maikov, claiming insight into a spiritual reality, or what we might call “the other side.” In The Idiot, for example, Myshkin’s character and abilities are inflated and enshrined, but he deflates into weakness and babble as the story ends. This is the fate of so much magic: the bubble is burst, the veil and the scrim are pulled back, revealing the emptiness we all fear, until the next story captures our attention. This cyclical pattern is enacted repeatedly by Jacob Bach, the character whose translations and writings create so much of the magic in A Volga Tale, while his surrenders to emptiness make up so much of the novel’s tragedy.
Yakhina excels in translating a massive catastrophe, like the 1920-21 famine that starved five million people to death, into a comprehensible story. By pulling factual events from the sticky web of history and re-weaving them into coherent and compelling tales about the struggles of individual men and women like Jacob Bach, she creates complex human creatures whose triumphs and mistakes resonate on deep emotional levels. When A Volga Tale progresses from Bach’s personal isolation to his encounters with a new, collective world imagined by Bolsheviks and early Soviets, we see the parallels between personal loneliness and an imperialist society that pushes self-reliance. When the bold aspirations of a cooperative, worldwide workers’ revolution are defeated, piece by piece, by flawed and corrupt human implementations, we’re reminded of love’s bold aspirations and the inevitable disappointments that so often follow.
Steeped in the human history of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Soviet regime, Guzel Yakhina’s magnificent novel A Volga Tale matches the power and majesty of that great river.
[Published by Europa Editions on September 19, 2023, 512 pages, $28.00 US hardcover]