Two Souls: A Novel of Revolution in Belarus (1919)

Moscow, the last night of the fighting. In a brick cellar lit by a single flickering lamp, the old nurse lies dying, her waxen fingers tracing the edge of the blanket, while Vasil busies himself with the samovar (самавар) by the door. Artillery rumbles in the distance, machine guns rattle like a rusty ratchet, and the red glow of a fire shows in the window. Vasil tells her the Reds will storm the Whites in the morning.

Her thoughts keep returning to two men. Karpavich, the old troublemaker, lies wounded somewhere among strangers, and her Ignalik, the young master she raised, is out in the burning city in an officer’s coat. Is he alive, and whose side is he on? Vasil can’t quite make him out: neither with the workers, he thinks, nor with the gentry. She is sure Ignalik could never go against the people. Then a knock comes at the door, a familiar voice asks to be let in, and the sick woman raises herself on her elbows. In this short, tender chapter, she sends Vasil out into the night on an errand and makes a deathbed confession.

Glossary and notes:
samovar (самавар): a metal urn for boiling water for tea
the Whites: the anti-Bolshevik forces in the civil war; the Bolsheviks were the Reds

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

The cannonade over Moscow has not let up for five days. On the fifth foggy evening, Karpavich and Vasil, dirty and disheveled, with machine-gun belts over their shoulders and loaded rifles in their hands, are allowed home for a few hours’ rest before going back to fight the bourgeoisie. They dart along the walls under fire from hidden windows, recalling the fight on Gazette Street, where Prince Halszansky, who fights “like a demon” for the Whites, escaped Vasil’s five shots. Vasil worries about his mother, who is failing and longs to see her Ignalik one more time, and Karpavich wonders whose side the young master is on now.

At a whistle, a column of captives comes up the street under a Red Guard escort, and from among them a subdued voice calls out, “Vasilyok!” It is Abdziralovich, in a coat with the epaulets cut off, arrested on his way from the station. Vasil and Karpavich vouch for him, and the three walk on together into the darkening streets. But the night is not over, and before it ends, Abdziralovich has to ask himself who is his friend and who is his foe.

Glossary and notes:
Junkers: cadets of the military schools, who took up arms against the Bolsheviks in Moscow
Red Guards: the Bolsheviks’ armed workers’ detachments
White Guards: the armed opponents of the Bolsheviks
Petrograd: St. Petersburg, renamed in 1914

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Back at the resort, Alechka knows that her life runs in streaks of good days and bad, and that her bad streaks always begin on a Monday evening. Abdziralovich has left at night without saying goodbye, and she hides her hurt behind jokes, so that no one will think she regrets it. Prince Halszansky sees through her, and she begins to detest him for it.

At bedtime, her quiet younger sister Lelya says what no one else will: that Alya traded a kind, fine man for the prince, and that the prince has no right to talk about who is of what blood when the Makaseis themselves come from the commoners. Alya protests that their mother is a general’s granddaughter and leaves in tears to sleep in the nanny’s room. At that moment, the bell rings in the corridor. Mikola Martynavich, the father she adores, has arrived at last, yet instead of joy she feels something new and ominous. By the next day, she is in bed with a fever, attended by a cheerful old resort doctor, when the prince comes to present himself to the millionaire and sound him out about a proposal.

Glossary and notes:
Alechka, Alysya, Alya: affectionate forms of her name
Lelya, Lelka: affectionate forms of her younger sister’s name
Kakhetian wine: wine from Kakheti, in eastern Georgia

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

The novel turns back to tell the story of Ivan Karpyachonak Harshchok, the man everyone calls Karpavich. He belongs to the long line of Belarusian villagers who have gone out into the world: to St. Petersburg and Moscow, Riga and Odessa, even New York. Some get lucky, like Mikola Martynyonak Makasei, who walked barefoot to N. after wearing out his bast shoes and is now Mikola Martynavich, with many millions. Harshchok comes to Moscow by train, in the boots his dying father left him.

A gifted village boy, he finishes church school, teaches grammar to the children and reads the “Soul-Saving Leaflet” to the grown-ups. Then a voice in a dream calls him to a monastery. Handsome and cheerful, he wins the favor of the Archimandrite and is set to stand by the holy relics, where two princesses love to come. And he slips. Theft and vodka follow, until he wakes on a filthy bunk in a city night shelter with nothing left and his father’s silver cross gone. With nowhere else to turn, he sets off for the monastery to ask the Archimandrite for his share of what they once earned together.

Glossary and notes:
bast shoes (лапці): peasant shoes woven from strips of linden bark
Archimandrite: the head of a large Orthodox monastery, a senior monastic rank
kliros (клірас): the place for the choir and readers beside the altar screen in an Orthodox church
panagia (панагія): a small round icon worn on the breast by Orthodox bishops and senior clergy
transit prison: a prison through which prisoners were moved under guard, stage by stage, across the Russian Empire
gendarmes: the political police of the Russian Empire
Karpyachonak and Martynyonak are the village forms of the fathers’ names (“Karp’s lad,” “Martyn’s lad”); out in the world they become the formal patronymics Karpavich and Martynavich.

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Alone again on the long road to the station, Abdziralovich rides behind a silent, fair-haired coachman with a red, wrinkled neck, in a white coat and a white magierka (магерка) cap. The horse plods, the bell on the harness bow clinks, the autumn fog settles over the fields, and after twenty or thirty versts on hard wheels, the kind of clarity that only a slow country road can bring begins to come.

Or almost. What comes instead is an image: a muddy puddle with a splinter drifting in it, floating, stopping, turning. He takes stock. Alya, he decides, was not the main thing; perhaps that love has burned out, or was never there at all. Karpavich, with his tobacco and his “Comrades peasants!”, knows his main thing, the struggle against the injustice of the gentry. Yet when one inner voice tells Abdziralovich to join the party, another mocks it: there is no party for him. And the student’s question keeps coming back. The boy speaks Belarusian far better than he does, and the officer, drowsing in the fog, tries to catch himself in the act of thinking, to tell whether it is in Belarusian or in Russian.

Glossary and notes:
versta (вярста): an old measure of distance, about 1.07 km, or two-thirds of a mile
magierka (магерка): a Belarusian peasant’s felt cap, here white
bow: the wooden arch (дуга) over a harnessed horse’s neck, often hung with a bell

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

On the road to the station, past a cluster of small outposts where people still wear white coats and white magierka (магерка) caps, Abdziralovich finds the silent settlement unexpectedly astir. By an old chapel on a hill of red clay, the villagers are listening to a young student from the Agricultural School in Horki. Standing on a fence, hoarse, his hand as red as the clay with cold, he urges them all, women and girls included, to vote in the elections to the Constituent Assembly for the Belarusian list, list number eight.

Not everyone is listening. A knot of lads heckles him, led by a scruffy fellow called Kalistrat and egged on by a curly-haired old man in city clothes who doesn’t recognize Abdziralovich in his raincoat, and whom Abdziralovich only gradually recognizes as Karpavich. As the elders drift home in the chill, Karpavich climbs onto the fence and offers the crowd the Bolshevik program, peace and the lords’ land, and the soldiers’ coats move toward him. Abdziralovich stays to watch, then gives the student a lift toward the station. In the carriage, the boy wants to know what the officer, a Belarusian himself, is doing for Mother Belarus.

Glossary and notes:
magierka (магерка): a Belarusian peasant’s felt cap, here white
Constituent Assembly: the all-Russian assembly elected in November 1917 to decide the country’s future form of government
list number eight: the number of the Belarusian slate on the ballot
Horki (Горкі): a town in eastern Belarus, home of an agricultural school
muzhyk (мужык): a peasant

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Late autumn. Abdziralovich has come back to Belarus and is staying with his friend Mikola at his village school. The quiet season he loved, with its first fires under the ash trees and sparrows in the hemp, is long gone, and snow is falling on children running to school between rows of bare birches. There has been no newspaper for three days, and the village is full of rumors that all the gentry will be killed and the manor houses torched. In Moscow, it seems, soldiers are fighting the Junkers.

Images of the Caucasus keep surfacing: the giant Beshtau seen from the morning train, the prince on the stage, and a glimpse, at the station in Rostov-on-Don, of Alya’s father, Mikola Martynavich, whispering with a bald Armenian. His soul is torn in two. One half weeps for a girl; the other hardens, grows cruel, and does not care. Then good-natured Mikola brings news from Krupki, the estate where Abdziralovich was born and raised, and leaves him to mind the classroom while he goes to a dying old man in the village. Behind the stove, a tiny boy with hedgehog hair, Taukach, is busy with a game of his own.

Glossary and notes:
Junkers: cadets of the military schools, who took up arms against the Bolsheviks in Moscow
versta (вярста): an old measure of distance, about 1.07 km, or two-thirds of a mile
Mahileu (Магілёў): a city on the Dnieper in eastern Belarus
The novel’s title appears in the text here for the first time: “And the soul is torn. Two souls.”

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Now come days of jealousy and despair. Alya seems to have forgotten Abdziralovich entirely: she spends her time on excursions to Kislovodsk, the mountains and the Italian colony with her mother and Prince Halszansky, who has plainly claimed his place at her side. Abdziralovich is not invited to the next soiree. In the park, the Makaseis’ nanny guiltily leads the children away from his bench, and the carefree warrant officers who still go to the house to feast and drink tell him to give it up. The girl is green as the wind and spoiled, they say; she smokes, drinks wine and kisses the prince in public. He wants to kill them for it, but only forces a smile.

Then, early one morning after a sleepless night, he wanders into the railway station just as the first train is about to leave and meets the nanny by the ticket office with a basket. It is Valya’s birthday, and the family is going to Beshtau station for pie. Alya is standing by the carriage, waving a new, elegant walking cane, and he has only a few minutes to ask her what has become of them.

Glossary and notes:
Kislovodsk: a spa town in the Caucasian Mineral Waters region
Beshtau: a five-peaked mountain near Pyatigorsk, with a railway station at its foot

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

With Alya and her mother gone to Mineralnye Vody station to meet her father, Abdziralovich spends a morning in the park with the Makaseis’ nanny and the children. Alya’s little brother Valya repeats what the prince has told him: that the “comrades” are hooligans, that the commoners are all stupid, and that only officers who come from the commoners stand up for them. There is a question the boy doesn’t quite dare to ask.

After dinner, a consumptive Latvian actor at the hospital, usually a silent man, invites the warrant officer to his room for watermelon and grapes and asks about the Belarusian meeting. When Abdziralovich says he doesn’t believe in a government of the proletariat, the actor changes his tone and remarks that the officer, judging by outward signs, seems to be of white bone. A knock interrupts them: a young Kazakh caretaker brings a secret note. “Ignalik! Come now. I am waiting. Alya.” At the Makaseis’, Warrant Officer Kunst is playing the guitar, the girls are waltzing with the officers, Madam Makaseeva greets him without her usual jokes, and the prince is already sitting with her by the samovar.

Glossary and notes:
white bone: an old expression for noble birth, like “blue blood”
Mineralnye Vody: “Mineral Waters,” the railway junction for the Caucasian spa towns
soiree: an evening party at home

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

At a Caucasian resort at the end of the season, the girl with the sparkling black eyes from the Moscow station turns out to be Alya Makaseeva, the eldest daughter of a landowner from N. who made a great fortune during the war. Her mother, bored in her husband’s absence, opens the house to convalescent officers, and the regulars include Prince Halszansky, the well-fed guardsman from the train, who has no liking for officers of simple origins. Alya and Abdziralovich have confessed their love and agreed to wait until spring, when her father, Mikola Martynavich, should arrive. But the prince keeps arranging rides into the mountains that a poor warrant officer cannot afford, and when Abdziralovich tries to talk about wealth and politics, Alya stops his mouth with kisses.

Then a notice appears at the hospital: a meeting of Belarusians stranded in the Caucasian Mineral Waters, at the Lermontov Gallery in Pyatigorsk, and among the signatures is the prince’s. Abdziralovich, nesvyadomy (несвядомы) and wary of the revival movement, goes to see. Before soldiers, teachers and refugees from the Hrodna province, the prince speaks in Russian of Mother Belarus and declares that between lord and peasant there is no class struggle.

Glossary and notes:
nesvyadomy (несвядомы): literally “unconscious”; a Belarusian not committed to the national movement, the opposite of svyadomy (свядомы), “conscious”
revival movement: the Belarusian national and cultural revival, for the language, literature and self-government
Caucasian Mineral Waters: the spa region of the North Caucasus around Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk and Mineralnye Vody
Lermontov Gallery: a hall in the park at Pyatigorsk, named after the poet Mikhail Lermontov
Hrodna province: the Hrodna (Гродна) province of the Russian Empire, in western Belarus

The complete novel is available in print, ebook and audiobook at grunwald.ca:
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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.