The Write Advice 098: BORIS PASTERNAK

What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such high-sounding matters of the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation.  It isn’t that they didn’t think about these things, and to good effect, but they hadn’t the presumption to weigh in on the discussion –– they felt it was not their business or their place.  While Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky worried and looked for the meaning of life and prepared for death and drew up balance sheets, these two were distracted, right up to the end of their lives, by the current, individual tasks imposed on them by their vocation as writers, and in the course of fulfilling these tasks they lived their lives, quietly, treating both their lives and their works as private, individual matters, of no concern to anyone else.  And these individual things have since become of concern to all, their work has ripened of itself, like apples picked green from the trees, and has increasingly matured in sense and sweetness.

Doctor Zhivago (1959)


 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of Russian poet, novelist and translator (and winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature) BORIS PASTERNAK (1890–1960):

 

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/boris-pasternak

 

 

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The Write Advice 079: ANTON CHEKHOV

Behind me there are mountains of mistakes, tons of paper covered with writing, an Academy prize and a life of sudden success…yet in spite of all this, I don’t believe there is a single line I’ve written that has real literary value.  I long to hide somewhere for five years or so and do a piece of painstaking, serious work.  I must study, learn everything from the beginning, for as a writer I am completely ignorant. 

From a letter written to a friend written in 1889


 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of acclaimed Russian playwright, short story writer and novelist ANTON CHEKHOV (1860–1904).  According to his translator ELISAVETA FEN '…1889 was the happiest year of his career as a writer.'

 

https://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/

 

 

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Collected Stories 1900–1944 (2007) by IVAN BUNIN

Ivan R Dee Publisher US edition, 2007

 

 

She had small, dark freckles on her stomach and her back as well –– and they delighted him.  Because she wore soft shoes without heels, her whole body seemed to sway under the yellow sarafan* when she walked.  The sarafan was light and loose-fitting, and her tall, girlish body moved freely under it.  Once, her feet soaked by the rain, she ran from the garden into the living room: he hurried to remove her shoes, kissed the narrow, wet soles of her feet –– and there had never been such happiness in his life.  Everyone had gone to sleep in the darkened house after lunch; more and more fresh-smelling rain was pouring over the patio beyond the open doors –– and how terribly the rooster frightened them as he too ran from the garden into the living room, his black feathers shot with a strange, metallic green, his crown as brilliant as a flame, his claws clicking on the floor at the very moment when they'd lost themselves and let all caution go.  Seeing how they jumped up from the couch, he ducked his head, as if embarrassed, and politely trotted back into the rain with his shimmering tail drawn down.

 

 

Rusya (1940)

 

 

 

 

[*sarafan = a sleeveless loose 

 

fitting peasant dress]

 

 

 

 

 

Translated by

  

GRAHAM HETTLINGER

   

 

 

 

The Collection:  The early days of a lovely Russian autumn.  Fields of new green wheat surveyed from the seat of a tarantass as it slowly rolls through them, its horses guided by a mumbling but kindly old peasant.  A grizzled cobbler seated in the doorway of his rudely built hut, beating his uncomprehending dog because it refuses to learn the trick of shaking hands with him.  The blue-grey face of a wealthy tourist, slowly stiffening as life departs from it in a luxury hotel room on the Mediterranean island of Capri.  Peasant girls, their strong smooth legs bare beneath their rough homespun skirts, sorting good potatoes from bad as it softly, ever so gently begins to snow.  The delight felt by a lonely hunchback when he receives a note from an anonymous admirer, begging him for a rendezvous in the park the following day.  The familiar but comforting taste of blinis and fresh raspberry preserves, washed down with hot smoky tea poured straight from the samovar.  The fashionable restaurants of Moscow, richly ornate in the gilt-edged glow of candlelight, where new lovers sit dreaming of the perfect if unrealistic future they one day hope to enjoy together. 

 

These are just some of the moments to be savoured in the moving, elegiac and, above all, poetic stories of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin, rendered magnificently into English by North American academic Graham Hettlinger.

 

Bunin, the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is best known these days –– outside Russia, at least –– for his 1915 story The Gentleman From San Francisco.  While that story –– a perfectly told tale of a wealthy Yankee businessman vacationing in Europe whose fortune nevertheless fails to save him or his dignity after he succumbs to a stroke –– is excellent and obviously very deserving of its place in this collection, it is by no means typical of Bunin's work or representative of what characterizes his unique and occasionally disquieting genius.  

 

Like many a Russian writer before and after him, including his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov, Bunin was an unwilling exile from his homeland whose life and work were intimately bound up in his memories of a childhood and adolescence spent on his family's vast but crumbling ancestral estate.  Like another great recreator of the past, the Frenchman Marcel Proust, memory is both Bunin's central theme and his most compelling subject, the past something that did not and could not really die for him because he never stopped re-experiencing it in his imagination day after achingly nostalgic day.   

 

The most affecting stories in this collection –– Rusya, Tanya, Mitya's Love, Zoyka and Valeriya, The Scent of Apples –– are generally those which place the reader directly in Bunin's pre-revolutionary Russian past, recapturing the vanished world of his youth by presenting it as a series of vivid, stirring and sometimes tantalizingly erotic images.  This emphasis on the visual component of memory makes it easy to understand why he first gained recognition as a poet.  These thirty-five stories are less stories in the traditional sense –– narratives that move from point A to point B by cleaving to a continuous narrative line –– than collections of vividly recalled, sharply drawn impressions, interlaced with images which capture and reflect emotions in a manner that masterfully evokes and recreates a certain place (Russia) at a very specific time (the years before the Bolsheviks took over and wiped out, virtually overnight, everything that 'home' had symbolized to people of Bunin's class and generation).  While Bunin does all that's expected of any gifted writer –– creates believable and memorable characters, places them in interesting situations, shows how conflicts arise and how these conflicts are confronted and resolved –– he also reaches beyond this, offering the reader glimpses into the innermost souls of his characters which are as honest as they are profound, as moving as they are, on occasion, uncompromisingly brutal and shocking. 

 

 

OneWorld Classics US edition, 2008

 

 

 

As great as all of these stories are, for me Bunin's masterpiece is the very different tale Chang's Dreams –– a story told from the point of view of a dog who belongs to a drunken old sea captain.  Chang's memories of his life with the captain, of the adventures they have had at sea and in scores of exotic foreign ports, are interspersed with scenes from the new life they live together in the Russian city of Odessa, where his master lurches from restaurant to restaurant in search of the cheap vodka which has become his only comfort since the woman he adored impulsively abandoned him to run off with another man.  The scene describing Chang's reaction to the captain's not entirely unexpected death is an unforgettable piece of prose, revealing the dog's emotions as it simultaneously offers us penetrating insights into his loyal, devoted and infinitely patient personality.

 

Later, when the door is taken from its hinges, when all the different people come and go in noisy conversation –– the yardmen and police, the artist and his top hat, the other men who joined the captain in the restaurants –– Chang is like an object made of stone… But now not even horror registers with Chang.  He lies on the floor with his face in the corner, his eyes closed tight to keep from seeing the world –– to forget it.  And over him the world's noise is dim and distant, like the sea above one who is descending deeper and deeper into the abyss.   

 

Remarkably few writers possess the skill required to tell a story like this without making it seem completely artificial or, worse, embarrassingly twee and mawkish.  It serves as further confirmation of Ivan Bunin's genius –– as well as that of Graham Hettlinger, whose translations capture every nuance of his poetic and uniquely subtle style with incredible acuity –– that he was able to make Chang (and his pain, which is as real as any experienced by a human being when they lose a loved one) so believable without stooping to the Disneyfied trick of sentimentalizing him to obtain the reader's sympathy.  Like all the stories selected for this superb and important collection, Chang's is one that remains fixed in the mind long after it has been read and absorbed, demanding to be reconsidered not just as a piece of literature but as an uncannily perceptive slice of what feels like an actively pursued, vividly recalled life.   

 

 

 

IVAN BUNIN, c 1888

 

 

 

 

The Writer:  'The general sound of the piece is created in the very beginning of the work,' Ivan Bunin once declared in an essay titled How I Write.  'Yes, the first phrase is decisive.  If you don't manage to capture that primordial sound correctly, then you… get all tangled up and set aside what you started, or just throw it away as useless.'  This principle was one that Bunin adhered to throughout his career, applying it as rigorously to the stories he wrote after fleeing his Bolshevik-run homeland in 1920 to those he wrote as an impoverished, largely forgotten old man living in the French town of Grasse during the harshest years of World War Two and beyond. 

 

Bunin's eventual obscurity would have come as a shock to the crowds of reporters who mobbed him in Paris following the announcement that he had won the 1933 Nobel Prize for Literature.  He was the first Russian writer to receive the award and, for a time, became one of the world's most celebrated and widely translated authors, one whose work and achievements the Russian emigré community took justifiable pride in boasting of.  But Bunin's fame did not endure and nor did his prize money, much of which was donated to literary charities while the rest was squandered on bad investments or found its way into the hands of the swindlers for whom he was always an easy and reliable target.  He was virtually penniless when he died in his tiny attic apartment in Paris on 8 November 1953, the victim of nearly two decades of unmerited literary neglect and of the generosity which made it impossible for him to say no to any friend or fellow writer who approached him for a loan.

 

Bunin was born on his family's estate, near the village of Glotovo in the Russian province of Voronezh, on 22 October 1870, the third and youngest son of a hard drinking nobleman of Russian-Polish ancestry who, by the end of that decade, had managed to gamble away the larger part of his family's considerable fortune.  Things had become so grim by 1886 that sixteen year old Ivan was expelled from school in the nearby town of Yelets because his family could no longer afford to pay its modest tuition fees.  After that he was educated at home by his elder brother Yuly, a political agitator placed under house arrest by Czar Alexander III, who taught him philosophy and psychology and encouraged him to write by insisting that he familiarize himself with the work of classic Russian authors including Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy.  

 

An intelligent and highly sensitive boy, Bunin began writing poetry at a young age and had his first poem Village Paupers published in a St Petersburg literary magazine in 1887.  This was followed four years later by the publication of his first short story Country Sketch in the magazine Russkoye Bogatstvo [Russian Wealth] –– a liberal minded journal that his brother, who belonged to the same Populist Party whose members helped to fund it, most likely exerted a strong influence on in both a political and an editorial sense.  Yuly remained the dominant force in the budding author's life and in 1889 Bunin moved to the city of Kharkov to be close to him, working first as a government clerk before taking jobs as a librarian and then as a court statistician.  

 

Bunin next moved to the city of Oryol, not far from Glotovo, where he found work as an editorial assistant on one of its local newspapers –– a job which offered him the chance to publish much of his newly written poetry and fiction in its pages.  It was in Oryol that he was reunited with Varvara Paschenko, a former schoolmate he had fallen passionately in love with but had tried hard to forget after leaving Glotovo.  By August 1892 Bunin was living with her in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, where for a time they shared a house with Yuly.  In the meantime, Bunin's first, favorably received poetry collection had been published, creating enough of a stir in literary circles to ensure his work was printed in some of St Petersburg's leading newspapers.  These successes did not help to salvage his stormy relationship with Varvara Paschenko, who left him for good in 1894 and shortly afterwards married one of his closest friends, the actor and writer AN Bibikov.

 

 

 

IVAN BUNIN, 1901

 

 

 

Between 1894 and 1895 Bunin spent most of his time traveling through the Ukraine, acquainting himself with peasant life in what was considered to be the emotional and spiritual heartland of Russia.  In 1895 he visited Moscow for the first time, where he met a number of important political figures and fellow writer Anton Chekhov, establishing a friendship with the playwright that would endure until Chekhov's death in 1904.  After 1895 Bunin began to divide his time equally between Moscow and St Petersburg, consolidating his position as a writer of tremendous promise and originality with the publication of his first story collection To The Edge of the World and Other Stories (1897) and his second poetry collection In the Open Air (1898).  After moving briefly to Odessa, he returned to Moscow in the winter of 1899 where he began attending meetings of the Wednesday Literary Group, at which he was introduced to and befriended by many important writers of the day including Nikolai Teleshov and Maxim Gorky.  In 1910, shortly after the publication of Bunin's bitingly realistic and controversial novella The Village, Gorky would publicly describe his new friend 'the best Russian writer of the day.'  Between 1909 and 1913 Bunin would be Gorky's annual winter guest on the Italian island of Capri, where the latter had temporarily relocated partly for reasons of health and partly to escape the increasingly repressive and chaotic regime of Czar Nicholas II. 

 

In September 1898 Bunin married Anna Tsakni, the eighteen year old daughter of a Greek-born activist and newspaper editor whom he had originally met in Odessa.  The relationship quickly soured and within a year Bunin left his young bride despite the fact that she was pregnant with what proved to be his only child, a son named Nikolai whom he rarely saw prior to the boy's early death from scarlet fever and associated heart problems.  In 1906 Bunin met Vera Muromtseva, the niece of a high-ranking Russian civil servant whose family were firmly opposed to the idea of her becoming romantically involved with an upstart writer.  They soon became inseparable –– and remained so despite the many affairs Bunin had with other women –– and married in 1922 following his divorce from Anna Tsakni.  It was with Vera that he traveled to Egypt, Palestine and eventually to Ceylon –– journeys that inspired a series of travel writings that were collected and published in 1931 as The Bird's Shadow.  These writings came as something of a surprise to the critics, some of whom had already begun to dismiss Bunin as a talented but largely irrelevant peddler of nostalgia, pining for a world that, even before the Revolution, no longer existed even for the most privileged members of Russia's land owning gentry.  

 

As the decade progressed, opinion would become increasingly divided about Bunin's work, with many on the left accusing him of not going far enough in his criticism of the Czar and the effect his repressive policies had on the Russian peasantry while those on the right declared him to be too negative in his depictions of the lives of the poor and the Czar's painfully slow attempts to modernize.  Bunin himself refused to participate in this debate, preferring to spend his time writing either in Moscow or in what remained of his family home in Glotovo.  He continued to do this throughout the first two years of World War One, preparing a six volume collected edition of his work which was published to widespread acclaim in 1915. 

 

 

 

IVAN BUNIN, 1933

 

 

 

By the following year, depressed about the conduct of the war and with talk of violent revolution becoming ever more prevalent among his countrymen, Bunin more or less stopped writing altogether, unable to continue in the face of what he deemed to be such pointless brutality.  The war also cost him his friendship with Gorky, who by 1917 had become an outspoken advocate of the Bolshevik cause –– an affiliation which remained, for a romantically minded artist like Bunin, unthinkable if not detestable.  He was in Moscow when the Bolsheviks seized power from the interim Kerensky government in October 1917 but soon relocated, with Vera, to Kiev and eventually to Odessa where he worked for a time as the editor of Iuzhnoe Slovo [The Southern Word], a newspaper which openly supported the White Russian (ie. anti-Bolshevik) cause in what had now become a bitter and very bloody civil war.  The couple fled Odessa on 26 January 1920 aboard a French ship bound for the Turkish capital Constantinople.  Although neither suspected so at the time, they would never set foot on Russian soil again.  

 

After brief stays in Greece and Yugoslavia –– Bunin was robbed of his academic medals and nearly all his money in the Greek city of Sofia, where Vera was also robbed of her jewellery –– the couple somehow found their way to Paris where a thriving Russian emigré community had by now established itself.  Bunin received a warm welcome from his fellow exiles but, according to Vera, never felt comfortable in his adopted homeland –– a discomfort that was to be intensified by his winning of the Nobel Prize and the unwanted (and unmerited) attention it drew to him as the voice of anti-Bolshevism.  He refused to see himself as anything but a writer and certainly not as a political or polemical writer, a point of view which influenced his decision to move from his apartment at 1 Rue Jacques Offenbach to the relatively isolated town of Grasse, located high in the Alpes-Maritimes region.  It was here, in a house known as the 'Villa Jeanette' that he shared with Vera and several other emigrés of both sexes, that he spent the late 1930s and the war years.  

 

Although he was technically a stateless person and by now extremely poor –– one French neighbor remembered him cutting grass on its hillsides that he would then carry home and boil for soup –– he did not flinch when it came to publicly denouncing Hitler and Mussolini or hiding refugees, including several Jews, inside his home.  Throughout this time he continued to write with the same feverish zeal he had nearly always shown for his work, refusing to publish as a form of protest against Nazism while he gathered the stories that would be published in New York in 1943 as Dark Avenues, with a French edition appearing three years later.

 

 

 

IVAN BUNIN, c 1945

 

 

 

Bunin and Vera returned to their former Paris apartment following the Liberation and remained there, except for visits to hospitals and convalescent homes, for the remainder of their lives.  For a time, during the immediate post-war years, it seemed that Bunin was on the verge of being officially welcomed back to the USSR by the Soviet government, representatives of which he met in Paris and apparently provided copies of his work to in the hope it might be published in his native land in a new, state-approved collected edition.  (This edition eventually appeared, in fifteen volumes, in 1965.)  These negotiations came to an abrupt end, however, following the publication of his Memoirs (1950), in which he was scathing in his condemnation of Communism and of the debasing impact he felt it had had on all aspects of Russian life and culture.  His last years were marred by the combination of chronic ill health and almost universal neglect, although his death in November 1953 saw lengthy obituaries appear in French and especially Parisian Russian-language newspapers.  His final book, an important critical study of his friend Chekhov, was completed by his wife and published in 1955.

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to download two digital story collections by IVAN BUNIN from Project Gutenberg:

 

 

 

 

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=ivan+bunin&submit_search=Go%21 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Selected Poems 1909–1963 (1985) by ANNA AKHMATOVA

 

 

 

 

 

Last updated 25 September 2021 § 

 

David Golder (1929) by IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY

Le Livre de Poche France, 2011

 

 

D'ici là… il aligna  des chiffres avec rapidité.  Ces deux dernières années, surtout, avaient été terribles.  La faillite de Lang, l'accord de 1922… Du moins, il n'aurait plus à payer les femmes de Marcus, ses bagues, ses dettes… Assez de frais sans lui… Tout ce que coûtait cette vie idiote… Sa femme, sa fille, la maison de Biarritz, la maison de Paris… À Paris seulement, il payait soixante mille francs de loyer, les impôts.  Le mobilier avait coûté plus d'un million à l'époque.  Pour qui?  Personne n'y vivait.  Des volets clos, la poussière.  Il regarda avec une sorte de haine certains objets qu'il détestait plus particulièrement que d'autres: quatre victoires de marbre noir et de bronze soutenant la lampe, un encrier vide, carré, énorme, orné d'abeilles d'or.  Il faillait payer pour tout ça, et l'argent?  Il grommela avec colère: <<Imbécile… tu me ruines, et après?… J'ai soixante-huit ans… Qu'il recommence… Ça m'est arrivé assez souvent, à moi…>>

 

 

From here to there… he quickly lined up the numbers.  These last two years, especially, had been terrible.  The Lang bankruptcy, the 1922 deal… At least, he wouldn't have to pay for Marcus' women anymore, their rings, their debts… Enough expenses without them… Everything cost money in this idiotic life… His wife, his daughter, the house in Biarritz, the house in Paris… For Paris alone, he paid sixty thousand francs in interest, the taxes.  The building had cost more than a million at the time.  For what?  Nobody lived there.  Closed blinds, dust.  He looked with a sort of hatred at certain objects which he detested more than others:  four winged victories of black marble and bronze holding up a lamp, an empty inkwell, square, huge, decorated with golden bees.  He had to pay for all of that, and hand out still more money?  He muttered in anger: 'Imbecile… you ruin me, and afterwards?… I'm sixty-eight years old… Start again… That's happened to me often enough…'

 

 

 

Excerpts translated by  

 

BR

 

 

The Novel:  For international petroleum magnate David Golder his business and the money it earns him –– hopefully at somebody else's risk and expense –– rank as the two most important things in life.  Money is what allows him to maintain his position as one of France's wealthiest tycoons, what pays for his luxurious homes in Paris and Biarritz and keeps his wife Gloria and beloved debutante daughter Joyce clothed, fed and entertained in the style to which they have both become so contentedly accustomed.  Of course, Golder realizes that his wife and 'Joy' –– the nickname he bestowed on his daughter when she was a baby –– view him as little more than a money-making machine, a role he plays willingly in their lives and has always accepted without complaint.   

 

Business is bad, but then his partner, Simon Marcus, adds insult to injury by begging him to sell their mutually owned interests in a Russian oilfield so he can gain access to some urgently required capital.  Marcus hopes to create a run on the stock market by liquidating the shares, an act he believes will, in time, restore his rapidly dwindling fortune –– a fortune eroded, as Golder knows only too well, by the greed of his partner's many mistresses and their incessant demands for cash, jewellery and other expensive trinkets.  But Golder stands firm in his refusal to part with the shares.  The stock might become valuable again, he predicts, if the Soviets can be persuaded to allow foreign investors in to pump out their state-owned oil so his answer, he repeats, must be no, he will not sell.  Marcus protests, citing the deal the Soviets are now poised to sign with a different company as a valid reason to cooperate with his scheme, only to learn that Golder, his friend and associate for twenty-six years, has already done an alternative deal behind his back with one of their rivals, a fellow Jew named Tübingen.  

 

Marcus is horrified.  Can this be true?  Can his partner really have gone behind his back to Tübingen as he appears to have done?  Although Marcus pleads with him one final time to change his mind about liquidating the stock, Golder refuses to be persuaded.  The partners part on bad terms, Marcus telling Golder before he leaves that his duplicity has ruined him –– a prediction confirmed when Golder receives word next morning that his former associate has shot himself and subsequently died from his wounds.

 

Golder, sorry that Marcus felt desperate enough to commit suicide but not sorry that he will no longer have to carry him as a business partner, pays a call on his widow to offer his condolences.  Naturally, he asks Madame Marcus if her husband's death was the result of his refusal to offload the stock her husband had been so desperate to sell.  It was partly due to that, she answers, but she believes the true cause of his death was explained by what proved to be his final words, gasped out to her while he lay bleeding on the floor.   'Fatigué… j'étais… fatigué.'  ['Tired… I was… tired.']  Little does Golder realize, as he takes his leave of her, how these words will come to haunt him in the ensuing months as he begins to question, with steadily mounting urgency, his own relentless pursuit of wealth for its own sake and what that obsession has done to his life.

 

Shaken but unbowed by his partner's death, Golder continues to pursue what he feels confident will be his lucrative Soviet oil deal.  He also eats, drinks and smokes as heavily as ever, yet still can't rid himself, as he socializes with his wealthy Jewish friends, of the image of Marcus being lowered into his grave at the end of his gloomy rainswept funeral.  He begins to experience panic attacks at the thought of his own death, attacks which often wake him in the night and leave him feeling weak and breathless –– symptoms, did he but realize it, of the heart condition he has been blithely ignoring for so many years.  Once again, he chooses not to heed the messages his body is sending him.  He is much too busy to be sick, he tells himself, has too many deals to make, too many vital business appointments he needs to keep.  

 

Golder's only relief from the pressures, financial and otherwise, which continue to assail him is the love of his daughter, the light of his life and the only person capable of bending him to her will.  Not even Gloria, his wife of more than thirty years, nor any of the mistresses he has taken and casually discarded throughout the course of their marriage, have been able to wield the kind of power over him that his darling 'Joy' wields over him.  Yet it is Joyce –– spoiled, impulsive, reckless and selfish –– who sparks the crisis which brings the privileged lifestyle he has so painstakingly created for them crashing down round their ears.

 

 

Circulo de Lectores Spain, c 1995

 

 

Joyce pleads with her father to give her the money she needs to buy a car, explaining that she needs the vehicle to take herself and her gigolo lover Alec to Madrid for the summer.  Golder, the recent sufferer of a minor heart attack which has finally shown him what a self-perpetuating torment his life has become, refuses her request on the grounds that he doesn't want her flinging her youth and beauty away on a man whose frivolousness, in his opinion, can only cause her sorrow in the end.  Joyce, however, stubbornly refuses to abandon her lover.  Taking advantage of her father's illness and the new attitude of cautious world weariness it has seen him adopt, she persuades her 'Daddy darling' to accompany her to a Biarritz casino while they're on their way to a friend's house for dinner one night, nagging him until he agrees to let her play a few hands of baccarat to see if she can perhaps 'earn' the money she needs to pay for her car.  A few hours later, having lost the small amount her father gave her to gamble with, she is astonished to find Golder himself playing baccarat at one of the tables, gambling with a zeal which, to her and their fellow patrons, appears nothing short of obsessive.  Believing that he has won a large hand and has had a change of heart about buying her what she wants, Joyce is astonished to hear, as the sun rises outside, that her father has lost close to 1.5 million francs –– in other words, virtually everything he owns.  Moments later, he suffers a second, far more serious heart attack and collapses right in front of her.

 

Golder's illness does more than physically incapacitate him.  It changes the whole dynamic of his life and the nature of his relationship with his daughter and, very soon, with his similarly spoiled and selfish wife.  Panicked by his doctor's order that he give up his business and begin to take things easy, that complete rest and peace is required for him to have any hope of recovery, Gloria quickly concludes where this advice, if followed, is likely to leave her.  Everything they have, including their Paris and Biarritz homes, is in her husband's name, leaving her without a sou of her own to live on should he succumb to a third, potentially fatal heart attack.  Indeed, she feels certain that Golder will leave everything that is purportedly 'theirs' to Joyce, his favorite, rather than to herself, the woman who agreed to marry him when he was a poor young immigrant struggling to eke out a living as a porter in New York's garment district.  

 

Joyce, on the other hand, remains unaffected by what she witnessed when she made her father accompany her to the casino.  As soon as he feels well enough to see her, she asks him again for the money he previously refused to give her for her car.  But this time no amount of endearment-laden persuasion can make him change his mind.  Golder, still weak from his illness, remains adamant in his refusal to give his daughter anything.  If she wants to take Alec to Spain, he tells her, then she will have to pay their expenses out of her own pocket or find another benefactor willing to finance the trip.  Denied what she wants for the first time in her life, Joyce declares that she hates him and storms out of the house, vowing to have nothing more to do with him until he comes to his senses and gives her what she wants.

 

This incident, so uncharacteristic of her husband, further alarms the already frantic Gloria.  Her lover, a playboy named Hoyos, advises her to confront Golder and get things settled before her husband's physical and particularly his mental condition deteriorate any further.  Once Golder is feeling stronger, Gloria takes her lover's advice and asks him what sort of provision he has made for her in his will, only to be told that he has decided to sell the Biarritz property and the long despised contents of their palatial Paris residence immediately.  He goes on to add that Gloria will be entitled to no share of the proceeds of these sales and will hereafter need to rely on Hoyos and her other fancy friends to care for her in her dotage.  Outraged, Gloria tells her husband, before storming out on him as Joyce did, that the daughter he's so proud of, the daughter he has been working so diligently all these years to cosset and defend from the threat of future poverty, is not even his child but, in fact, the child of her lover.

 

Golder becomes a self-pitying recluse following this revelation, living alone in his now-empty Paris mansion, filling his time by playing cards with another tightfisted Jew named Soifer who, like him, is loved by his family, if at all, only for the inheritance they expect to receive upon his death.  Determined to get well again, Golder pushes himself to walk a little further each day, gradually regaining his strength and, with it, his interest in rebuilding his career and his all but vanished fortune.  Yet no matter how hard he tries to rid himself of the image of Joyce and the memory of what he lost, seemingly forever, when Gloria informed him that she was not his child, he finds himself unable to completely erase the girl from his mind or, more tellingly, from his heart.

 

Yet forgiving Joyce remains no easy task for him.  When the girl swallows her pride and visits him, again seeking money –– money, in this case, that will allow her to marry Alec instead of the rich but repulsive old man, a financier named Fischl, she has become engaged to after taking his advice about finding herself an alternative means of support –– all he can do at first is laugh.  It will be smart for her, he says, to marry a 'fat little Jew' like Fischl, someone capable and no doubt willing to give her everything she wants in exchange for her glamor, her beauty and her willingness to publicly play the role of his adoring bride.  But he does not feel as bitter towards Joyce as he sounds.  Moved by the girl's tears, Golder eventually asks her if she will be willing to wait a year before giving herself to Fischl so she can continue to pay for her affair with the impoverished (and terminally lazy) Alec.  Agree to wait, he explains, and he will work like a dog to regain his fortune, give her everything she has asked him for and more.  But she must be patient and give him the full twelve months to achieve this financial miracle, no questions asked.

 

With this promise to keep, Golder gains a new lease on life, personally traveling to Russia to close the oil deal with the Soviets that is now poised, thanks to his shrewd bargaining skills, to restore his fortune and make him, once again, the envy of his peers.  But in his haste to keep his promise to Joyce he pushes himself too hard, becoming sick again in the dirty little Russian town where he has gone to catch the boat to Greece, intending to travel from there to Turkey and then back to France.  Being in this town, with its dirt and poverty and noise, is like being plunged back into his own shameful, poverty-stricken past –– a past he has spent most of his life attempting to forget and put behind him.  Yet he realizes, when he meets a young New York bound Jew on deck one night, that he cannot deny what he used to be any more than he can deny the fact that success has transformed him into someone who has been rendered blind to the truth of what his life has become by his own callousness and greed.  His last thought is not of himself, however, but of Joyce, waiting in Paris for what she believes, or at least hopes, will be his triumphant return and the announcement of her long-delayed engagement to Alec.  Golder gives the young immigrant his wallet and makes him promise, before God, to carry out his final wishes to the letter, taking it to his accountant in Paris so the accountant can hand the small amount of money it contains personally to Joyce.  

 

But it is not his lost daughter who occupies Golder's thoughts as he lays dying in his cabin on this grubby Russian freighter.  He thinks briefly of Marcus, dead and buried all these months, and then hears the sound of his name being called –– 'David, David!' –– by his mother in the snow just as she used to call to him when he was a boy.  The voice fades and vanishes and is soon followed by Golder's death, leaving the unknown immigrant he has entrusted with his legacy standing guard over his lifeless corpse.

 

 

Vintage/Random House UK, 2007

 

 

David Golder was Irène Némirovsky's third novel, published in 1929 when she was twenty-six years old.  It is an astonishingly acerbic book for anyone so young to have written, replete with the kind of damning insights into the causes and consequences of human greed that seem as though they should have sprung from the embittered heart of a novelist at least twice her age.  Unfortunately, its themes –– wealth, privilege and the recklessness, moral as much as social and financial, that the ungovernable desire to attain them all too frequently inspires –– have not dated in the slightest and remain as relevant today as they were in the boom-and-bust culture of the 1920s.

 

The most confronting thing about David Golder, however, is its blatant anti-Semitism –– a quality that puts it in a difficult category when it comes to assessing it as a work of literature.  Golder, Gloria and Joyce, not to mention all their friends and business associates, are Jews.  They are also grasping, selfish, unscrupulous, miserly and lecherous –– all the things, in other words, that defined them as 'vermin' in the eyes of the Nazis and their equally virulent, anti-Semitic predecessors.  That the author herself was a Jew, the pampered daughter of Russian immigrants who fled to France in 1918 in order to escape the Bolshevik revolution, only makes the portrait she paints of Golder and his world all the more damning and, in the end, disturbing.  To be a member of a universally distrusted and despised minority is one thing, but to write a novel that gives ammunition to one's would-be persecutors is, as many critics have suggested, another thing entirely.  Némirovsky herself later admitted that she went too far in caricaturing her Jewish characters, that it had been a reckless thing to do given the political climate in Europe in the years preceding World War Two.  She regretted it but by then it was too late for regrets.  Hitler had come to power and the rest, as we know, is history.

 

The fact that the book appeared in 1929, the first year of the Depression, adds another layer of irony to Golder's story, serving to highlight the terrible price that would be paid by those who had so enthusiastically attended what F Scott Fitzgerald –– that other clear-sighted chronicler of wealth and its sometimes catastrophic impact on personal morality –– once described as 'the most expensive orgy in history.'  Golder is a hollow man who has the luck –– or is it the misfortune? –– to recognize his own hollowness and that of the materially successful but spiritually bankrupt life he leads.  His tragedy, as often proves to be the case when the single-minded pursuit of money to the detriment of everything else becomes less a career goal than an end unto itself, is that the knowledge of who and what he has become arrives too late to save him.  He dies as he lived –– alone and unloved, mourned, if at all, by a daughter destined to marry a man she despises in order to maintain a lifestyle she can only maintain by prostituting herself.  The implication, which must have been very pleasing to Némirovsky's anti-Semitic collaborationist friends, is that this sort of behavior is only to be expected because Joyce is a Jew and Jews, as was held to be obvious in Fascist circles between the wars, will submit to any form of degradation to get their hands on money.  

 

While Némirovsky's considerable gifts as a novelist make this and all her other work worth reading, it is tempting to speculate how much more powerful a novel David Golder may have been had she chosen to temper her anti-Semitism with a more balanced view of her own people –– a people who would soon find themselves paying the ultimate price for the insanity of Hitler and his henchmen in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau. 

 

 

IRÈNE NÉMIROVKY, c 1929

 

 

 

The Writer:  'Ma pauvre, nous serons bientôt tous morts!' ['My dear, we'll all soon be dead!'] was allegedly Irène Némirovsky's response to the news, which reached her in Paris in January 1933, that Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany.  In the case of herself and her successful banker husband –– a fellow Russian-born Jew named Michel Epstein –– her prediction proved to be tragically accurate.  They would both die at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 within a few months of each other while their daughters, Dénise and Élisabeth, would escape that horrifying fate with their help of their governess, spending the next three years in hiding, the elder girl carefully guarding the handwritten manuscript of what would be published, in 1999, as her mother's final unfinished novel, Suite Française.

 

The fact that Némirovsky had converted to Catholicism in February 1939, eight months prior to the outbreak of the war, meant nothing to the Germans or to those who ran their puppet government for them in Vichy.  Némirovsky and her husband were not even legally recognized as being French citizens under the new 'Aryanization' laws put in place by the Nazis and so enthusiastically enforced by their collaborationist allies.  The writer's decision to convert to Catholicism, while not unusual and in many ways understandable given the political climate in Europe at the time, is now judged by the Jewish community as being irrefutable evidence of the writer's own collaborating tendencies, her willingness to support an evil regime that sent herself and her husband to the gas chamber.  Even her youngest daughter Élisabeth Gilles once described her as being 'criminally blind' to the plight of her fellow Jews, particularly to those who inhabited Europe's many slums and ghettos.

 

To understand Némirovsky's complicated attitude to her own ethnicity, it is first necessary to understand something of her background.  She was born on 11 February 1903 in Kiev, the only daughter of Léon Némirovsky and his much younger socialite wife Fanny.  Léon himself was born in Elisabethgrad, a city where pogroms and similar acts of violence against Jews were common at the time of his birth, as they had been throughout Russia and in many other European nations for centuries prior to it.  The Némirovsky family made its fortune as dealers in grain but it was a financier that Léon truly excelled, becoming an important figure in the world of Russian finance and, in time, a member of the Czar's personal entourage –– a distinction that would see a price put on his head by the Bolsheviks, obliging him and his family to flee St Petersburg in 1918 disguised as peasants and seek political asylum in neighboring Finland.  From here they traveled to Sweden and, in July 1919, to what would become their new home in Paris where Léon immediately set about the task of rebuilding the fortune he had been forced to abandon in Russia while Fanny devoted herself to enjoying the attentions of a series of suave, predominantly Latin American lovers.

 

Despite growing up as the pampered daughter of rich if emotionally distant parents –– they rarely spent time with her when she was a child, preferring to leave her in the care of a French governess while they socialized in Biarritz, Nice and other popular Riviera resorts –– Némirovsky was, until her late teens, a solitary and unhappy child who seemed to find more pleasure and comfort in books than she did in the company of her fellow human beings.  By the age of fifteen she was already thoroughly familiar with the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Guy de Maupassant and Oscar Wilde, whose 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray remained a favorite book of hers for life.  This early grounding in literature served her well when she entered the Sorbonne in 1920, where for the next few years she combined studying for a degree in this subject with the successful launching of her literary career.  

 

 

French film poster, 1930

 

 

The early 1920s saw her work appear in print for the first time, with several of her stories appearing in the magazine Fantasio, each of which earned her the princely sum of sixty francs.  More of her work appeared in Matin and Les Oeuvres libres, the latter of which also published her first novel Le Malentendu [The Misunderstanding] –– written when she was just eighteen –– in 1923.  It was around this time that she met her future husband Michel Epstein, who had abandoned a career as an electrophysicist to found and run his own bank.  They were married three years later and lived a life uncannily similar to that enjoyed by Némirovsky's parents, entertaining on a lavish scale and vacationing in the best hotels on the Côte d'Azur.  It was while she was staying in Biarritz, one year prior to her marriage, that she began working on what would be published in 1929 as David Golder –– a novel that was read and admired by, among others, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and pro-Nazi author Paul Morand.  The book made her reputation as a writer and was almost immediately turned into a successful play and then a film, both productions directed by Julien Duvivier with Harry Baur playing the title role.  

 

The 1930s saw Némirovsky consolidate her position as one of France's most popular novelists, with her fourth novel Le Bal [The Ball, 1930] being followed by Les Mouches d'Automne [The Flies of Autumn, 1931] and L'affair Courilof [The Courilof Affair, 1933].  The following year her work began to appear in Gringroire, a French magazine noted for its popular and provoking anti-Semitic editorials.  Her work would continue to appear in this magazine until 1941, when she was living with Michel and their two daughters in a newly-rented house in Issy-L'Évêque, forced to wear the yellow star despite her conversion to Catholicism and Michel's job as part-time interpreter to the officers of the occupying Wehrmacht.   She would stay in Issy-L'Évêque –– feverishly working on what would be the only completed part of a planned 'suite' of novels about the Fall of France and the country's subsequent Occupation, publishing stories under various pseudonyms because the Vichy government forbade Jews from publishing under their own names –– until her arrest by the French police on 13 July 1942. 

 

DÉNISE, IRÈNE, MICHEL & ÉLISABETH (baby) EPSTEIN, c 1939

 

 

Némirovsky was first sent to Pithiviers, calmly telling her daughter Dénise as she was led away not to be frightened because she was only going on a trip.  She was kept in Pithiviers overnight, writing what was to be her final letter to her husband and children from her prison cell.  'Courage et espoir,' she told them.  'Vous êtes dans mon cœur, mes bien-aimés. Que Dieu nous aide tous.' ['Courage and hope.  You are in my heart, my beloved ones.  May God help us all.']  She was transported to Auschwitz the following day where she was immediately sent to its attached 'extermination' camp Birkenau.  It was here, on 17 August 1942, that she was gassed by the Nazis along with everyone else who had been sent to Poland as part of Transportation Convoy Number Six.  

 

Michel, who lobbied everyone he knew in government and the world of literature in a futile effort to secure his wife's release, was himself arrested in October after writing to the German ambassador to explain that Irène should not have been sent to a concentration camp because she was a writer, a Catholic and suffered from fragile health.  The couple were survived by their daughters, with Élisabeth going on to write a fictionalized memoir of her mother titled Le Mirador [The Watchtower] that was published to widespread critical acclaim in 1992.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read Scandale Française, a long (and highly critical) article about IRÉNE NÉMIROVSKY by North American literary critic RUTH FRANKLIN which originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of The New Republic:

 

 

https://newrepublic.com/article/61151/scandale-francaise 

 

 

 

In addition to her daughter's memoir, two biographies of IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY have been published in recent years –– Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (2006) by JONATHON WEISS and The Life of Irène Némirovsky (2011) by PATRICK LIENHARDT. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship (1999) by BRIGITTE HAMANN

 

 

 

Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945) by CARLO LEVI

 

 

 

Babbitt (1922) by SINCLAIR LEWIS

Last updated 14 March 2021