Byzantium Endures

I am not sure what would have happened to the project if he had lived. My own work had certainly begun to suffer. My wife tells me I became half-mad, completely obsessed with Pyat. I could not stay away from him. He had met a good many of the leading political and cultural figures of the inter-war years (often without realising their importance) and, although his instinct for obfuscation was highly-developed, he would frequently, it seemed unwittingly, reveal quite astonishing details. At first, because of his violent anti-Semitism, his hatred of the local people, his vicious and reactionary opinions of modern life, I found it difficult to respect his age and his sufferings or to keep my temper with him. It was Lobkowitz, who had seen much of what Pyat had seen, who helped me deal with him. ‘The great tragedies of history,’ he said, ‘are the sum of all our individual tragedies. It takes several million Pyats at least to conspire in the fate of the twelve million who died in the camps. His is a ruined soul.’ I thought this view overly-charitable, even sentimental, at first; but I came to respect it as time went on. Moreover, my fascination always overcame my distaste. I would visit him on Sunday afternoons to tape-record his monologues, some of which I found repeated almost verbatim in his manuscripts. I have not made much use of the obscure, polylingual material he left, but to give the reader an impression of what I had to cope with, I will quote in Appendix A a rather substantial amount of it, primarily to offer a clue as to the difficulties involved in translating, ordering and interpreting the papers. The facsimile on p. vi is of one of the more readily legible pages.

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Pyat was not in the usual sense a fool. Many of his remarks were astonishingly perceptive. It was his inconsistency in almost everything which made me decide not to attempt to over-formalise his material. Therefore the reader will find few literary ironies here and the use of devices common to modern fiction has, of course, been sparing: this narrative has not been shaped according to normal narrative expectations. It would be better to regard it not as the biography Pyat offered (Mrs Cornelius appears only infrequently in this volume) but as autobiography. It is the story of an extraordinary life and, as such, it contains extraordinary coincidences, paradoxes and occasional non sequiturs. For the first volume, which takes us up to the end of the First World War and the last stages of the Russian Civil War, I have selected material which deals pretty directly with this period in Pyat’s life. The completely discursive material I have left out altogether or set aside for later volumes where it will be more appropriate. On certain matters he remained vague - the time spent as a prisoner in Kiev is a good example - but the reader might discover clues, at least as to why he avoids mentioning these experiences in any detail, in other parts of the narrative. I have tried not to speculate while putting the story together and prefer to leave it to the reader to decide what is relevant; for the reader’s guess here is quite as good as mine.

Lobkowitz’s problems of translation have been enormous. Pyat wrote in colloquial Russian for the most part and, according to Lobkowitz, his prose often resembles the conscious artifice of Bely, Piln’iak and the later ‘skaaz’ writers from whom, Lobkowitz claims, Nabokov borrowed heavily. I am, I must admit, unfamiliar with modern Russian fiction, so have relied very heavily on Lobkowitz’s interpretations and references. Naturally, I have considerable respect for my friend. No one else could have coped so well with the problems. If Colonel Pyat possessed a ‘style’ in the literary sense, it altered its tone quite frequently. Editing and omission have resulted in the loss of a certain amount of the original’s inconsistent flavour (another reason for including some of Pyat’s more maniacal prose in an appendix rather than in the main text), though I think what remains of this ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing offers at least an insight into his poor, baffled, terror-ridden mind. Lobkowitz was unable to translate in one or two places where the language used has so far been impossible to identify. A ‘secret’ or made-up language is sometimes a device employed by people with paranoid tendencies. I suppose it is fair to make it clear that in later years Pyat had a history of mental trouble and was occasionally institutionalised.

It has been suggested to me that I should include in this introduction a brief background to the second half of the book, which deals with Pyat’s experiences during the Russian Civil War, one of the most destructive wars of its kind in history.