Mikhail Vrubel, "Primavera," 1894
Spring Scene by Isaac Levitan. Evening. Path. 1882
Book Review Article
Penelope Fitzgerald, The
Beginning of Spring, originally published in England by Collins, 1988;
republished by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, a Mariner Books paperback
edition, 2015, 246 pp.
Set in Russia in 1913, this is an astounding book. Seldom does
a novel so astound me. My first question is “How did Penelope Fitzgerald do
it?” In an article on the writer Julian Barnes mentions that everyone asked
this same question about her last four novels, all set in foreign locales.
Andrew Miller asks it again in his introduction to the paperback edition: “how
on earth can someone living in England in the second half of the twentieth
century know so much about the minutiae of day to day life in Moscow in 1913?”
In answer to the question we have only a few hints. In the
front matter of the book the writer thanks Harvey Pitcher for allowing her to
use details from his book, The Smiths of
Moscow (Swallow House, 1984). From published material about her life we
also learn that Penelope Fitzgerald had an intense interest in Russian
literature, that starting in the 1960s she took Russian language courses. That
in 1975 she and her daughter Maria went on a two-week package tour to Moscow,
which included a visit to the Tolstoy Museum (the author’s house in the
Khamovniki District) and a dacha in a birch forest. In the early 1970s she
became friends with a Swiss art curator who had been brought up in
pre-revolutionary Russia; and whose family had had a greenhouse business in
Moscow since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Even all this seems far too little to explain how Fitzgerald
went imaginatively into the Russia of 1913 and described it with such
authenticity. Unlike so many other writers who have tried pulling this off. I
have recently discussed this issue in a note about foreign writers who have
made countless little missteps in the fictional Russia they chose to depict—see
the posting on this blog, and on Dactyl
Review, “When Writers Who Are Not Russian Write Novels Set in Russia.”
d
The main protagonist of the book, Frank Reid, is an
Englishman born in Russia. His parents owned several businesses there and, at
the time the novel is set, in March, 1913, Frank continues to run a small
printing shop. Another matter of amazement is how much Fitzgerald seems to know
about the printing business in 1913, but that is not my expertise, so I’ll have
nothing to say about it here.
All crammed into only one month, the action begins when Frank’s
wife Nellie suddenly leaves him. She disappears on page one, returning by train
to England, and only reappears on the very last page, so we never see much of
her, though her absence throws a pall over the rest of the characters—including
the couple’s three children, Dolly/Darya (ten years old), Ben (8), and Annie or
Annushka (2). The names Fitzgerald selects for the female children appear to be
a nod to Tolstoy’s great novel, Anna
Karenina, which features three characters with the name Anna (the lead
character, her maid, and her daughter by Vronsky), and one character named
Darya/Dolly (Anna’s sister-in-law, Stiva’s wife).
Tolstoy, in fact, who died in 1910, only three years before
the action of the book, is a behind-the-scenes presence throughout the novel.
Not only is he the inspiration for the pacifism and simple life chosen by one
of the main characters, Selwyn Crane. He also sticks his head into several
scenes, attending a concert—during which Selwyn sings at the lunatic asylum
beside Tolstoy’s Moscow house—and dressing as a performing bear for a New
Year’s celebration. His third big novel, Resurrection,
is mentioned near the end of the book. Frank Reid’s house is in the Khamovniki District,
very close to the Tolstoy house, now a museum.
Upon leaving, Nellie has taken the children with her, but
then, only a few railway stops from Moscow, she—fortunately for us, the readers—abandons
them, and they return to their father. Why fortunately? Because Penelope
Fitzgerald is a master psychologist in many ways, but she has a special
aptitude for portraying a certain bright and independent-minded child.
As for Nellie and Frank, both of them are rather ordinary,
practical-minded people. Nellie appears only in a few scenes describing how she
and Frank met in her provincial home of Norbury. Most of what we learn of her
is not very positive, and she gives the impression of a rather dull person. Her
brilliant, intellectually curious children seem not all that bothered by her
departure. Apparently she did not have much rapport with her children.
Frank Reid is presented as an efficient, honorable man, who
is rather unimaginative; he is also often a straight man for the author’s wry,
understated British humor. Everyone in Moscow, it appears, learns immediately
that his wife has left him, and no one—neither Russian characters, nor British
ones—can resist constantly reminding him of his misfortune and giving him
unsolicited advice.
Of course, when Frank hires a beautiful young woman, Lisa
Ivanovna [first name and patronymic; no surname ever given] to live in his
house caring for his children, the whole of Moscow also immediately learns of
this, and the gossip mill runs nonstop. Everything in this novel happens fast.
With Lisa a resident in his household less than a month, and with his wife
Nellie only recently departed, Frank discovers that he is in love with Lisa.
d
This is a very funny book. A lot of comedy is generated by
the male characters: Frank the straight man, Selwyn Crane the meddler and
recommender, and Uncle Charlie the bungler from abroad. Charlie is Nellie’s
brother, who comes to visit Frank, apparently hoping to console him for his
loss, but ends up simply getting in his way. While Charlie and Frank are
visiting with the chaplain’s wife, Mrs. Graham, she tosses out one of her usual
catty remarks in Frank’s direction, and the very next paragraph reads as
follows: “Mrs. Graham struck Charlie as a gracious, friendly woman, who seemed
to have a kind word for everyone.”
A central character in the novel, Selwyn Crane, 52, who
works as accountant at Frank’s printing company, is a pacifist do-gooder
vegetarian, follower of the teachings of Tolstoy. He also writes poetry about
birch trees and snow, and a good deal of fun is milked from the publication of
his first book of poems, Birch Tree Thoughts.
Here is the only sample quoted from that chapbook:
‘Dost feel the cold, sister birch?’
‘No,
Brother Snow.
I feel it not.’ ‘What? Not?’ ‘No, not!’
Described early on as “not quite sane looking,” Selwyn is a
man who brings a smile to people’s faces whenever his name is mentioned. The
Russians all love him for his impractical ways, seeing him as a cloud in
trousers and “a man of God.” Mrs. Graham, the sharp-tongued and cynical wife of
the Anglican chaplain in Moscow, calls Selwyn “the great recommender,” since he
is always trying to help people by recommending them to others for employment.
Selwyn would seem an unlikely candidate for a prime mover of
the novel’s action, but he is precisely that, for it is he who makes almost
everything happen. Ironically, most of his impulses are aimed at doing good,
but his altruism ends up creating tremendous problems. We find out only near
the end of the book, when he confesses to Frank, that he had been gently
nudging Nellie past her down-to-earth pragmatism, hoping that she, like him,
would learn to commune with Mother Nature and Holy Impractical Russia. He
didn’t count on her falling in love with him.
As he explains to Frank, “Nellie was turning towards the
spiritual. Unfortunately, she couldn’t, as yet, distinguish it from the
romantic, which casts a false glow over everything it touches.” In a word,
Nellie decides to run off with Selwyn, who gets cold feet at the last minute.
As he tells Frank, “I failed the tryst.” He does not meet her at the railway
station agreed upon. Whereupon, Nellie abandons her children, sending them back
to Moscow, while she herself travels on to England.
Selwyn is also responsible for Frank’s bringing of Lisa
Ivanovna into his household as governess, leading to the many complications
near the end of the book. As usual, Selwyn appears to believe that he is only
helping an unfortunate, a young woman of peasant background who works at the
department store Muir and Merrilees. But Lisa, with her quiet and gentle ways,
is too attractive and too much of a temptation for Frank. If that were not bad
enough, Lisa apparently has nebulous connections with student revolutionaries.
Near the end of the book Frank receives a letter from the Ministry of Defense,
suggesting rather strongly that he might wish to sell his business and leave
Russia at his earliest convenience. This is the logical end result of Selwyn’s
well-meaning maneuverings and meddling.
d
Now a bit about the details that so authenticate the action
of the book, making us feel as if we really were in the Russia of 1913. Frank
Reid was born in Russia, speaks perfect Russian, as do his children, and all of
them are perfectly attuned to the way things work. There are countless examples
of this. On his way to the train station in the morning to pick up his
abandoned children, Frank reasons that he must find a horse-drawn cab with a cabman
who is starting work in the morning, not one who is ending his shift of night
work. Why? Because the driver getting off will always be drunk. After he finds
a cab the driver immediately begins taking him the long way around, so as to
increase the fare, and Frank calmly tells him where to turn, so as to drive
directly to the station.
Frank keeps vodka in his office at the printing company,
expressly for the visits of the police. Among the many things you needed to
know if you wanted to do business in Russia, “you had to have a good digestion,
a good head for drink, particularly spirits, a good circulation and an instinct
for how much in the way of bribes would be appropriate for the uniformed and
for the political police, the clerks from the Ministry of Direct Import,
Commerce and Industry, and the technical and sanitary inspectors.” All of this would be familiar to anyone trying to do business in the New Russia of the post-Soviet Era.
Frank’s bright-eyed children are more like Russian children
than English. Dolly takes her bungling Uncle Charlie to the outdoor market to
buy souvenirs. Not Russian speaking and totally out of his element, Charlie is
lost at the market, but Dolly knows all its ins and outs: “Taking pity on him,
she turned left at the crossing point of the next glass corridors, and they
bought a number of small birchwood objects and a cigar-case. She counted his
change and recovered, without argument,
another thirty kopeks” (my emphasis).
There it is, one of the many little details that you would
not expect an English writer to know, but she slips it into the sentence so
matter of factly. Back then, and still today, in a Russian outdoor market you
must expect to be short-changed; you will always be short-changed. You are not
expected to be offended by this; it is simply the way things are done. You must
always count your change, confront the short-changer with his/her mistake, but
not in anger, simply as a matter of course. The short-changer, in turn, will
not usually defend her/his self, but will, equally without rancor, return the
change to you. That’s the way it is done, but how did Penelope Fitzgerald know
that? And this is just one of scads of authentic details that sprinkle the
pages of the book.
Perhaps most amazing of all is how the merchant Arkady
Kuriatin is portrayed. Frank knows exactly all the divagations of Kuriatin’s
mind, and, consequently, Fitzgerald must know as well. Everything about
Kuriatin rings true: his swagger, his drunken bravado, his way of openly lying
in business dealings, while aware that his fellow businessman knows that he is
lying. Best of all is the way that Kuriatin is sometimes under the sway of
contradictory impulses, which inhabit his devious brain simultaneously.
Now that his wife is gone Frank wonders who will care for
the children when they are not at school. He assumes that he can leave them temporarily
under the care of the Kuriatin household. But he soon sees the error of his
ways when the Kuriatin children run wild, show off in front of the English
children by tormenting a pet bear cub and feeding it vodka. The bear runs wild,
smashing things up in the dining room, and Frank later goes by to apologize to
Kuriatin, whose reaction is to be magnanimous—poo-pooing the whole incident and
playing up his wealth.
“An unfortunate incident? The children left to themselves?
Damage? Broken china, pissed carpet, fire, destruction, twenty-three and a half
bottles of the best vodka? Did Frank think his credit wasn’t good enough to
bear a little loss, a little trifle? Did he think there was some shortage of
tablecloths?”
What this is is a kind of potlatch behavior: see how rich
and carefree I am? Give me more precious material objects—I’ll throw them into
the fire to prove how little they mean to me, how far above the mere material I
am. This is also very typically Russian behavior. Shortly after this response
to Frank’s apology Kuriatin invites him to stay for an evening meal. Frank
knows that the invitation is not made to be accepted; it is more empty bravura.
If he decided to stay all sorts of preparations would have to be made, and he
would cause as much trouble as the bear had.
Kuriatin escorts Frank to the door, and Frank asks him why
he doesn’t do something about the weak spots in the stairway, and why he
doesn’t let his clerks have a telephone. Whereupon Kuriatin, resenting the
implied criticism, throws an insult after him: “’Why don’t you get your wife to
come back to you?’ shouted Kuriatin, exploding with laughter, as the doorman
came out of his cupboard-like room and ushered them, deeply bowing, into the
street. For Kuriatin life, like business, was a game, but not a gambling game.
On the contrary, it was one in which he had arranged to win, although the rules
were peculiar to himself. Knowing that the children had been put at risk in his
half-savage household, he had felt Frank’s visit as a reproach. But by
insulting Frank—of whom he was genuinely fond—he had restored himself to a
superior position. It almost compensated him for the loss of his tablecloth,
glass and china, to which he had been insanely attached.” Exactly.
These games of pecking order, who is superior, who is
inferior, are perpetually revolving in the Russian psyche. Later, in the
presence of naïve Uncle Charlie, Kuriatin offers to adopt the Reid children,
and Charlie calls him “the soul of hospitality.” Frank knows otherwise. “He
doesn’t really want to adopt my children. It’s just a general expression of
good-will, or more likely, the opposite”
(my emphasis).
Once again we get the Russian propensity for holding two
contradictory impulses in the psyche at the same time. In the generosity of his
heart—and Kuriatin half believes it to be real generosity—he makes the offer to
adopt the children, while aware somewhere else in his psyche that he is being
magnanimous only in an effort to make himself look good, and make Frank look
bad. As if to say, “Look at this sorry spectacle; a man who can’t even take
care of his own children!”
One more thing about Kuriatin. He was resident in the Russia
before the Soviet Era, but Kuriatins by the scores still walked the streets of
the U.S.S.R., behaving exactly as this Kuriatin does. And now, with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the coming of the New Russia in the new
millennium, are the Kuriatins all gone? By no means. As long as there is a
Russia there will be Kuriatins.
More details. The mention of a Russian lullaby, featuring
sleep, who walks along the benches, saying, “I’m sleepy,” and drowsiness saying
“I’m drowsy.” Here’s how it looks in Russian:
Сон ходит по лавке,
Дремота по избе,
Сон-то говорит:
--Я спать хочу!
Дремота говорит:
--Я дремати хочу!
(“Snooze is walking along the bench,/Drowse along the
hut,/Snooze says:/I’m sleepy!/Drowse says:/I’m drowsy.”)
Ходит сон по
лавке,
А дремота по
избе,
Ищет-поищет
деточку мою,
Где найдет, тут и
спать укладет.
(“Snooze is walking along the bench,/And Drowse along the
hut,/Looking for, searching for my little kiddikins,/Wherever may they find him/her,
there they put her/him straight to bed.”)
Don’t know where Penelope Fitzgerald came up with that bit
of Russian folklore. I found it in the “Lullabies” section of Мудрость народная: жизнь человека в русском фольклоре (Folk Wisdom: the Life of Man in
Russian Folklore, Book One, Infancy and Childhood, Moscow, 1991, p. 41).
d
A big issue for a reader of The Beginning of Spring is that reader’s foreknowledge, and what
might be termed reading beyond the bounds of the book. The novel was first
published in 1988, and the Western reader of that time would probably have been
caught up in “Gorbymania”—perestroika
and glasnost’—expecting big changes
out of the Soviet Union. A close reading of the book in those heady times would
suggest, however, that Mother Russia, who had nearly weathered the storm of
seventy years of Communism, was not one to become suddenly a twin of the
Western democracies.
The book is set in 1913, and the reader of 1988 is aware of
many things soon to come—things that the characters cannot know. The Great War
is to begin in only a year, 1914, and its horrors will set the stage for the
Russian revolutions of 1917. The second of those revolutions being that of
Lenin, who is biding his time in Western Europe. With the connivance of the
Germans—who want to make mischief in Russia, so that Russia will withdraw from
the war—he will be sent in a sealed train back to Petrograd. Departing Zurich
in April of 1917, Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries will ride that
German-sponsored train through Berlin, then on through Sweden and Finland and
home. It is no accident that Fitzgerald selects Berlin as the original
destination of her two traveling female characters: Nellie, and then Lisa
Ivanovna.
Unlike the characters in 1913, the reader of 1988 will know
about the upheavals of the early twentieth century: two revolutions in Russia,
followed by a Civil War, which led to Lenin’s triumph and the establishment of
a “peasants’ and workers’” U.S.S.R., a utopian attempt to transfigure Mother
Russia—making it into an atheist nation-state and obliterating all the
accouterments of Orthodox Christianity, which are so predominantly displayed in
The Beginning of Spring. The reader
of 1988 also knows about the terrible depredations of WWII in Russia and the
many victims of Stalinist terror.
At one point Selwyn mentions the holiday for the name day of
the Tsarina, adding “poor woman, poor woman.” He alludes here presumably to the
Tsarina’s problems with Rasputin (also mentioned once) and the affliction of
her only son (hemophilia). Poor woman indeed. The reader of 1988 will be aware
that Tsar Nicholas II and his wife—in a mere five years, July, 1918—are to be
murdered, with all of the children as well, by the Bolsheviks in a gruesome act
of butchery.
But the reader of 2018 knows even more. He/she knows about
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of that Utopian Project that may have
done some good, but also succeeded in murdering millions of innocent people. Only
eighteen years into the future of 1913, the monumental Cathedral of Christ the
Saviour (mentioned on p. 89)—constructed from 1839 to 1883—will be razed,
destroyed by Stalin in a deliberate act of blasphemy and desecration (in 1931).
On its site an outdoor swimming pool will be built. The reader of 1988 knows
that, but the reader of 2018 also knows that after the fall of the U.S.S.R. the
Russians will build that structure back from scratch. That today it stands once
more in all its glory, and Vladimir Putin goes there to worship on Easter and
Christmas.
Same goes for the revered Chapel of the Iverskaia (Iveron)
Mother of God, located at the entrance to Red Square and mentioned by
Fitzgerald on p. 212 (misspelled here twice—a superfluous letter n is
inserted). Here Fyodor Dostoevsky (age 16) and his brother Mikhail came to pray
in May, 1837, asking for guidance and succor from the Virgin, before setting
out on their journey to Petersburg, where they would be enrolled in the Academy
for Military Engineers. This chapel too was destroyed by evil Joe Stalin, but,
once again, Holy Russia turned the tables on him. The Iverskaia has also been
rebuilt from scratch, and in 1996 a copy of the wonderworking Iverskaia Icon of
the Mother of God was brought from Mount Athos and installed in the chapel. By
a strange quirk of fate, the reader of 1988 can only imagine what the Cathedral
of Christ the Saviour and the Iverskaia Chapel looked like. The reader of 2018
can go to Moscow and see them.
What the reader of 2018 knows best, compared to the reader
of 1988, is that the Communist Era was just a blip in time, compared to the
thousand-year history of Mother Russia, and that Mother Russia—having sloughed
off Communism and spit in disgust—would build back her holy structures and go
right back to being what She was before: with all the positives and negatives
of Orthodox Christianity, the same God-haunted place with the same slow pace,
the same corruption, bribery, the same blend of gross cruelty and magnanimous
kindness: “the whole unwieldly administration of All the Russias, which kept
working if only just” (146). Yes, by some miracle Fitzgerald has captured this
spirit.
So much for Gorbymania and the deluded hopes of naïve
Americans, that the Russia of the New Millennium would be just a carbon copy of
the U.S.A. If you want to really know what the Russia of the New Millennium
most resembles, read Fitzgerald’s novel about the Russia of 1913. Sure, Moscow
looks different now, it’s a modern Western city, and its denizens have adapted
to Western ways. But deep down, in Moscow and all over the country, Russians
are still going about their lives being Russians.
d
Penelope Fitzgerald likes to keep some of her characters in
the shadows. In fact, we never learn much about the two main female characters,
Nellie and Lisa Ivanovna. Nellie is absent for the whole book, so mostly what we
get about her is a kind of hearsay. Only about twenty years old, Lisa at her
first appearance is described as having “the pale, broad, patient, dreaming
Russian face.” Later she is consistently described as being somehow in her
thoughts not entirely present, part of her somewhere off in the clouds. Always
calm and self-assured, “She had the gift of quiet.” This personality seems to
captivate males by the boatload.
Much is left to the reader to intuit about Lisa, but this
leaving of much to the reader seems to be Fitzgerald’s preference. Why did
Selwyn once find Lisa reduced to tears behind the counter at Muir and
Merrilees? We don’t know. What does Lisa think about her employer Frank, who is
in love with her? We don’t know. On page 219 there is a blank space left in the
text for the only sex scene in the novel, when Frank goes to Lisa’s room. I
have no objection to a writer’s leaving out explicit descriptions of sex, but
the reader is left here wishing for more—for at least a lengthy dialogue
between two of the book’s main characters. The next morning, with nary a fare
thee well, Lisa leaves with the children for the dacha. Frank’s last words to
her—probably the last words he will ever speak to her—are these: “For God’s
sake, stay with me Lisa.” No reply. “There was no way of telling whether she
had heard him.”
The birch tree is the national tree of Russia, probably the
most beloved tree of all in a country of tree lovers. Throughout pagan Russia
the birch played a role in rituals welcoming back spring, and a residue of such
goings on still hangs over modern Russia. Fitzgerald runs the birch leitmotif
through the whole novel, and near the end she spends three pages (224-226) in a
lengthy, fascinating description of the smells, the, look, the feel, the very
voices of the birch trees as they progress through the seasons. This wonderful
passage, which any Russian would read with utter delight, is too long to quote,
but here is a short sample.
“When the heavy autumn rains began the trees gave out a new
juicy scent of stewed tea, like the scent of the bundles of birch twigs in the
steam-room of a public bath house [those thrashers are called веники], which the customers used to beat
themselves, leaving stray damp leaves on the tingling skin.”
Then comes the ghostly scene at the dacha in the middle of
the night, something that could have been taken from a Fellini film.
Accompanied by Dolly, who wakes up when she hears a door open, Lisa goes out
into the birch grove. The scene is written from Dolly’s point of view.
“The leaf scent pressed in on her. There was nothing else to
breathe. They had turned to the left, and walked perhaps almost as far as they
had come along the first path from the dacha. Then Dolly began to see on each
side of her among the thronging stems of the birch trees, what looked like
human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness.
‘Lisa,’ she called out, ‘I can see hands.’
Lisa stood still again. They were in a clearing into which
the moon shone. Dolly saw that by every birch tree, close against the trunk,
stood a man or a woman. They stood separately pressing themselves each to their
own tree . . . . . .
‘I have come, but I can’t stay,’ said Lisa. ‘You came, all
of you, as far as this on my account. I know that, but I can’t stay. As you
see, I’ve had to bring this child with me. If she speaks about this, she won’t
be believed. If she remembers it, she’ll understand in time what she’s seen.’”
So speaks mysterious Lisa the final words she will speak in
the novel. After which, she turns, and, “in her usual serene and collected
manner,” she walks with Dolly through the trees and back to the dacha. So what
is this scene all about? We, the readers, are left to decide. It could be the
playing out of some pagan spring ritual, a “rite of spring” complete with tree
huggers and birches, as is suggested by the mention of Igor Stravinsky only a
few pages later. But, more likely, it is a gathering of student
revolutionaries, with whom Lisa is allied.
Earlier on, wishing apparently to ingratiate himself with
Lisa Ivanovna, Frank has given her back her internal passport, which by law he
is required to keep while she is employed by him. Without this passport a
Russian was not allowed to travel more than fifteen miles from his place of birth.
Without it you certainly could not leave the country. But having her passport
in hand enables Lisa to flee abroad, to Berlin, abandoning the children—their
second abandonment of the book. What awaits her in Berlin? We don’t know, but
given the Russian authorities’ sudden change in attitude toward Frank—the
letter from the Ministry of Defense, in which it is strongly suggested that he
leave Russia—we can only assume that Lisa is involved with Russian
revolutionaries abroad, and that she leaves the country to join them.
Nellie’s return on the final page of the novel is, as Andrew
Miller writes, “a sort of faux-resolution, a moment that seems to offer the
possibility of a return to good order, but which in fact promises the exact
opposite.” Spring and hope are in the air, and we have the lovely scene of an
annual ritual—opening the sealed windows of the house, to let Spring in. But
there is a mixed message here. Traditionally in Russian households, when there
was a death in the house all the windows were thrown wide open, to let the
spirit of the deceased escape. There is no physical death in the novel, but Frank’s
new spring love turns out to be short-lived—is in fact stillborn. And even such
an unflappable person as Dolly has lost her self-confidence, shaken by the
second abandonment.
Given everything that has happened in this one short month
of their separation, Frank and Nellie are hardly likely to reconcile quickly,
if at all. The children (at least Dolly) are thoroughly discombobulated by the
events of March, 1913, and given that they seem to have related better to Lisa
Ivanovna than to their own mother, Nellie’s return will probably not bring them
much cheer.
Soon to come are tumultuous political upheavals, which the
Reid family may not be in Russia to see. But then, a return to England is not a
happy prospect for them either. After all, Frank was born in Russia and has
lived there most of his life. The children know nothing of the world beyond
Russia, are in effect Russian children who love the country. In England they
will be something like political émigrés, having lost their native land.
d
“Life makes its own corrections,” says the Russian cabman to
Frank early on, and the characters of the novel are alive at the end, waiting
for the next set of corrections. As for the writer, Penelope Fitzgerald, corrections of her few mistakes would have
improved the novel, but apparently there was no Russian fact checker at the
time the book was published. A few examples.
For the most part she is good on the name/patronymic thing,
which often presents problems for foreign readers and writers. She bungles this
only once, with the appearance of the student in love with Lisa (and probably a
potential revolutionary) Vladimir Semyonich Grigoriev. This is his real name, but
he lies to Frank upon their first encounter, calling himself “Volodya
Vasilych.” Not possible. You cannot use a nickname (Volodya, a nickname for
Vladimir) with a patronymic. What he should have said: Vladimir Vasilych.
On p. 141 “the almond trees would be in flower” in Moscow.
Hmm. If so, that’s the first I’ve heard of almond trees growing in Moscow, or
anywhere else in the northern part of Russia. Here is how the making of the
sign of the cross is described (153): “As they faced the icon they crossed themselves,
striking the forehead, each shoulder in turn, then the breast.” Nope. As any
believer in Eastern Orthodoxy worldwide can tell you—in Greece, in Syria, in
Russia—your pursed fingers touch the forehead first, then the breast or
abdomen, then the right shoulder, and finally the left.
Kuriatin takes Uncle Charlie on a jaunt outside Moscow, to
visit “the Merchants’ Church, between Kursk and Ryazan, about twelve miles out
of Moscow” (p. 180). Huh? Don’t know what happened here. Kursk is a provincial
city some 500 km. south of Moscow; Ryazan is another, some 200 km. south of
Moscow.
On the eve of Palm Sunday the servants in the Reid household
go around the house, and then to the neighbors, asking forgiveness for any sins
they may have committed, knowingly or unknowingly, over the past year—sins of
commission and omission (203). Actually, that is done not on the eve of Palm
Sunday, but on Forgiveness Sunday, the last day before Lent.
Then there is the problem of the Russian Orthodox saints.
St. Modestus, we are told, is the patron saint of printers. His saint’s day in
Russia is commemorated on March 27 (Old Style, old Julian calendar). We are
even shown a very convincing scene, in which the priest comes to Frank’s
establishment to commemorate the holiday, bless the icons and honor the saint.
But I can’t find any such St. Modestus anywhere in the Orthodox calendar, and I
have checked all the saints’ days in the months of March and April, even in
Cyrillic (Russian) script. There is a Modestus of Jerusalem, whose saint’s day
is May 17 (New Style; modern Gregorian calendar); he is the patron of domestic
animals.
Oddly enough, although much is made of the celebration of
Modestus the Printer’s day, nothing is said in the book about a much, much
bigger holiday in March, Благовещение (Annunciation Day), which falls on March 25 Old Style (now
celebrated in Russia on April 7). Mention is also made of the Feast of St.
Benjamin, commemorated on March 18 (p.160), but alas, I cannot find Ben either
in the church calendars.
There is a martyr Benjamin the Deacon, whose day is
October 13 (NS). In the Catholic Church he is commemorated on March 31, so
maybe Fitzgerald is conflating Roman Catholic saints with Eastern Orthodox
saints. I don’t know. It will take somebody with much more insight into
Orthodoxy than me to figure out what is going on with the saints in The Beginning of Spring.
In correcting, or trying to correct the mistakes of the
author, am I finding fault with her? By no means. I still remain astounded by the
brilliance of her book. It’s worth the price of the book just to read her
description of how people in Russia stand on bridges in springtime, watching
the amazing spectacle of the ice breaking up in the water below. If you’ve
never done this, I would highly recommend it. Get on a bridge in Russia at the
end of March or early April. Pick a sunny day. Watch. Free of charge too.
Isaac Levitan, "Birch Grove," 1878
