Byzantium Endures

As I have said, in editing these memoirs I was faced with a whole variety of technical and moral problems. The colonel left it to me to reproduce Mrs Cornelius’s characteristic speech, for instance, but insisted I retain his ‘philosophy’. The vitriolic asides (on matters of sex, race and culture) were nearly always in a language other than English, so they could be isolated. To leave them out completely would be to destroy some of the reader’s perspective on the material and on Pyat himself. There is no doubt, of course, that the colonel was a poseur, a liar, a charlatan, a drug-addict, a criminal, but that he had once possessed great charm is evident from his successes. People felt protective towards him, and fell over themselves to help him, often at great inconvenience. It is from this evidence, rather than his own statements, that I became convinced he had not always been so obviously the ruined personality I knew. Moreover, he was not uncultured. He had a grasp of engineering principles quite unusual for a man of his time and background. He was familiar with art and literature (even if, as you will see, his taste was sometimes questionable) yet he remained, in a peculiar way, innocent.

I would prefer to let the reader judge what are lies and what is truth. That is why I have tampered as little as possible with the material, merely providing concentrated narrative links wherever necessary. I believe that M.G. Lobkowitz’s translations are excellent and very true to the spirit of the original. I have rephrased and reworked many sentences to improve their readability, but I have retained a certain crudeness here and there in case the reader should begin to doubt the genuineness of the memoirs. The problem of length was also daunting and I have condensed some episodes (though not, as might appear, the prison scenes). Usually I have resorted to literary methods - to paraphrase, for instance, producing an intensified version of the original text. The alternative, to present a précis of certain sections, would have been less appealing. I have been anxious to preserve as much as I could of the original because I believe Colonel Pyat’s story to be unique. He travelled widely and was involved, between 1920 and 1940, with some of the key engineering experiments of those years - years characterised by a euphoric, optimistic attitude towards technology which we have never quite recaptured (but which our hero fully exploited). I believe he possessed an insight into character rarely shared by more sophisticated professional commentators. These insights might be reduced to an observation that he was merely able to recognise his own kind, but I think he was, as he says himself, a survivor: his survival instinct, if not his moral instinct, was extremely highly-developed. It enabled him to recognise those he could use and those who would think they could use him. Certainly he does not come to us, even by his own account, as a noble person. He was either malicious towards the weak or else utterly oblivious of them; he was placatory and almost nauseatingly agreeable to the strong. Yet he reflects the spirit of his age. Some might argue he reflects it far too emphatically, but the same could be said of many of us to this day.

I have left in the majority of his exceptionally grandiose claims for his genius, as well as a number of his naiveties, examples of his unconscious humour, and I have made no attempt to correct flaws in his scientific theories or alter the dates and places he gives for events. Again, I would prefer it if the reader were to decide on the authenticity or otherwise of Colonel Pyat’s often incredible accounts of an era which had so many similarities with, and such a particular influence on, our own. As Lobkowitz said to me: ‘Pyat’s story is unusual, but his wounds are common enough.’

I have, incidentally, checked with both the local Serbian Church and the Russian Church in Bayswater, and nobody there remembers Pyat. His description, I was told, fits many of those who ‘drift in’.

* * * *

Once again I should like to acknowledge the great debt I have to Prince Lobkowitz, to Leah Feldmann, who was able to confirm some of Pyat’s reminiscences of Makhno (she was a seamstress on his education train), to Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer, to Charles Platt, to Maxim and Dolores Jakubowski, to Georges and Boris Hoffman, to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, to John Clute, Hilary Bailey and Giles Gordon, who helped me to organise the final manuscript: to my wife, Jill Riches, who had to live with Pyat for so long and then had to live, as it were, with his ghost for much longer, and finally to Simon King and Tim Shackleton, the editors who decided that Pyat’s memoirs would be worth publishing.

Michael Moorcock

Ladbroke Grove,

May 1979

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