How does it look in the Russian street?

TranslationFall 2024

Jan 28

A translation from Joseph Roth (1894-1939)

Zachary Suri

This feuilleton by the great Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth is one of nearly two dozen from a trip he made to the Soviet Union in 1926. It appeared in German in the Frankfurter Zeitung on October 31, 1926, likely written a few months earlier. My translation is based on archival work with the original at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library) in Leipzig this summer sponsored by the Jehiel R. Elyachar Foundation. Roth’s German is coarse and free-flowing, a series of vignettes and stream-of-consciousness reflections that turn single sentences into substantial paragraphs. I strove to capture this distinctly Germanic syntax in my translation while prioritizing legibility for English speakers unfamiliar with the original.

Roth draws a distinct contrast between the old “bourgeois” life of the “decadent” European capitals he inhabited and the new, but interminably “gray” cities of the Soviet Union and the United States. He is drawn to the excitement of a world “becoming,” of a society building and rebuilding constantly, but he finds the frenzy of the Soviet Union even more empty than the decadence of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris which he made a career of mocking. Here, there is no beauty, only necessity.

At first glance, the streets of the Russian cities appear colorful and vibrant. Many women wear red headscarves smooth on their hair, broadly knotted. Albeit practical, it is the only gallantry of the revolution. The red scarf rejuvenates the old women; to the young it lends a bold, erotic elan. From several houses, red banners fly. Above doors and signs stands the red Soviet star. The placards before the movie theaters are of a naive, bucolic joy of colors. The people swell before the shop windows. They love to stroll on winding roads. It is a great abundance of movements. In a deliberate, probably pedagogic contrast to the pedestrians, the public transportation demonstrates speed, swiftness—‘America.’ There are good English autobuses of modern construction, lighter and more dignified than the Berliner or Parisian.

Smooth and brisk, they run thither—on the most terrible pavement in the world: the Russian, which is like a stony, consolidated sea beach. The streetcars ring quite brightly, like alarm clocks. The automobiles cheep shrilly, like young dogs. The droshky horses flick drolly with their hooves. The flying traders shout and sing out their wares—they seem to lend more courage to themselves than to their customers. Above, the roofs gleam with the fairytale cupolas of the Russian church. The golden onions bloom, fronts of a colorful, strange, exotic Christianity.

Nevertheless, I find the Russian street gray. The masses that people it are gray. It engulfs the red of the scarves, of the banners, of the insignia, and the golden reflection of the church roofs. They are a truly poor and haphazardly dressed people. A great earnestness wafts from them, overpowering in its soberness, pathetic in its poverty. The Russian street is reminiscent of the scenery of a social drama. It is filled with the odor of coal, leather, food, work, and people. It is the atmosphere of a people’s assembly.

It is still as if the gates of the city were first opened just a few hours ago and those of the factories, the narrow doors of the prisons, and the pompous portals of the train stations. As if the barriers were first lifted just an hour ago, locomotives set into motion, tunnels bored, chains blasted. As if the masses were just now freed. As if all of Russia were afoot. It still lacks that mirthful white which is the color of civilization, as red is the color of the revolution. It lacks the bright cheerfulness that only an old, perfectly formed world brings forth, never one becoming. It lacks the effortlessness which is the child of abundance. Here one sees only need—or necessities. It seems to me as if I am walking through fields in which pure potatoes grow, bitterly needed, freely sown.

Much is improvised: the wooden booths of the bootblacks with black and brown shoelaces, with paltry pyramids of shoeshine boxes, with their large gray rubber heels—horseshoes for people. A man stays standing, lifts a foot and has himself shod. The cables spray in the twilight, while the blacksmith, who is a shoemaker, swings the hammer. Women in thick frocks perch on the pavement and sell sunflower seeds. For two kopecks one gets a full glass, to some extent with foam. Every fifth person sprinkles the gray peelings around him. A troop of homeless, picturesque, ragged children saunters, runs, sits in the streets. Beggars of all types and sizes peer rapaciously for noble hearts. There are melancholics with their famous mute accusatory gaze, clericals, who threaten with the afterlife and sing their own lyrics to the melodies of the hymns, women with children and children without women, amputees and malingerers. Here there are small provisionary stores with shared shop windows. On the left lie hammers, knives, nails; on the right are brassiers, stockings, handkerchiefs.

In between, the crowd pushes: men in cheap blouses, many in leather jackets, all with brown and gray caps, in gray, brown, black shirts. Many peasants and half rural, the first generation which learned to walk on the street pavement. Soldiers in long, yellow coats and militiamen in dark ones, in dark red caps. Men with briefcases, recognizable as functionaries even without these instruments. Old bourgeoisie stick with white colors, still wear their hat, a little black beard—the style of the Russian intelligentsia of the nineties—and the inevitable pince-nez on a thin golden chainlet which divides the ear cup from the skull. Debaters who go to the club begin already on the way. A few anxious, very primitive ‘girls of love’, stage-type. Very seldom a well-dressed woman. Never an idle person. Never a person whom one would regard as having no worries at all. From everyone wafts the breath of a work-rich or a problem-rich life. Either one is a laborer or a functionary or an office-clerk. One is active or one first is acted upon. One is in the party or one is preparing himself currently to be admitted into the party. (And even this ‘party-lessness’ is still a kind of activity.) One is always securing his place in this new world. One corrects his point-of-view. One is never entirely a private citizen. One is always a very varied component of society. They organize, they save, a campaign is begun, a resolution composed, a delegation expected, a delegation accompanied, one person is barred, another accepted, they collect, they deliver, they stamp—it is done, it is done, it is done! The whole world is an enormous apparatus. Every old man, every child is involved and responsible. It is a great building and filling and brickcarrying. Here lie ruins, there lies new building material—and all the people climb on scaffolding, stand on ladders, go up stairs, repair, dismantle, fill up. Still no one stands free and poised on the earth.

Thus, even the streets of the oldest Russian cities (of Kiev and Moscow) seem to me sometimes like streets in a new land. They remind me of the young cities out of American western colonies, of that atmosphere of frenzy and constant birth, of a hunt for luck and rootlessness, of daring and sacrifice, of mistrust and fear, of primitive wooden buildings alongside the most complex technology, of romantic raiders and sober engineers. The people here have also flocked together from all sides of the great land (in every city, the population alters each year). Hunger, thirst, struggle, and death lie behind them. A blue, but very distant, tomorrow lies before them. Today forms: wooden slats, dismantled crosses, destroyed houses, barbed wire in front of gardens, new scaffolding before half-finished buildings. Old monuments, destroyed out of disgust, new ones, erected by all-too-hasty hands. Temples converted into clubs, but still no club which supplants the temple. Conventions destroyed, and a new, slowly forming shape. Some are all too new, brand new, too very new to become very old. It bears the mark of America on its brow—of America, whose technology is the preliminary goal of the new Russian architects. The street hastens from sleepy Orient to the most western West, from the beggar to the neon sign, from the slow droshky nag to the clattering bus, from Tsvoshtshik* to chauffeur. Just another very small turn—and this street leads directly to New York.

I confess, ashamed, that in these streets, sometimes a very peculiar sorrow attacks me. In the middle of my admiration for a world which out of its own force—with more ecstasy than material, without money and without friends—prints newspapers, writes books, builds machines and factories, digs canals, after they just barely buried their dead—in the middle of this admiration, a homesickness seizes me for our frivolity and our damnability, a yearning for the aroma of civilization, a sweet aching for our scientifically-already-extinguished decadence. A childish, stupid, but fervent wish to see once again a fashion show at Molyneux, a lovely evening gown on a silly girl, a number of “Sourire,” and the whole downfall of the occident: probably this is a bourgeois atavism.

*Tsvoshtshik is a Russian word roughly equivalent to “coachman”