Byzantium Endures

The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

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• Publisher: Pm Press E Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781604864915
• eBook ISBN: 9781604867237
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Meet Pyat: Tsarist rebel, Nazi thug, continental con man and reactionary counterspy. He is the dark and dangerous antihero of the legendary Michael Moorcock's most controversial work. Published in 1981to great critical acclaim - then condemned and unavailable in the United States for thirty years - Byzantium Endures is the story of a cocaine addict, sexual adventurer and obsessive anti-Semite whose journey from Leningrad to London connects him with those from Trotsky to Makhno, and whose career echoes that of the twentieth century's descent into Fascism and total war.

ONE

I AM A CHILD of my century and as old as the century. I was born in 1900, on 1 January, in South Russia: the ancient true Russia from which the whole of our great Slavic culture sprang. Of course it is no longer called Russia, just as the calendar itselfhas been altered to comply with Anglo-Saxon notions. By modern reckoning I was therefore born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on 14 January. We live in a world where many kinds of regression dignify themselves with the mantle of progress.

I am not, as is frequently suggested by the illiterates amongst whom I am forced to live, Jewish. The great Cossack hawk’s beak is frequently mistaken in the West for the carrion bill of the vulture.

I am not a fool. I know my own Slavic blood. It roars in my veins; it pounds as the elemental rivers of my fatherland pound, forever longing to be reconciled with our holy and mysterious soil. My blood belongs to Russia as much as the Don, the Volga, and the Dnieper belong. My blood still hears the call of our vast, timeless steppe under whose solitudinous skies aristocrat and peasant, merchant and worker, were dwarfed and understood how little material prosperity mattered; that they were united by God and were part of His inevitable pattern. Alien Western ideas came to threaten this understanding. It was in the factory towns, where chimneys crowded to shut out our incomparable Russian light, where people were denied the shelter and confirmation of God’s wide roof, God’s cool and merciful eye, where the synagogues sprouted, that Russians began to elevate themselves and challenge God’s will, as even the Tsar would not dare; as even Rasputin, playing Baptist to Lenin’s Antichrist and spreading rot from within, would not dare. Influenced by Jewish socialists in Kharkov, Nikolaieff, Odessa and Kiev, these stokers and these riveters first denied the Lord Himself. Then they denied their blood. And then they denied their souls: their Russian souls. And if I cannot deny my soul after fifty years of exile, how then can I be Jewish? Some Peter? Some Judas? I think not.

Admittedly, I was not always religious. I have come to the Greek Orthodox religion relatively late and perhaps that is why I value it so, as those persecuted millions in the so-called Soviet Union value it, worshiping with a fervour unknown anywhere else in the Christian world. I have suffered racial insinuations all my life and for these I blame my father who deserted his faith as casually as he deserted his family. Since I was a child in Tsaritsyn I have known this suffering and it became worse when my mother (by then probably a widow) moved us back to Kiev after the pogrom. My mother was Polish, but from a family long settled in Ukraine. She told me that my father had been a descendant of the Zaporizhian Cossacks who had for centuries defended the Slavic people against the Orient and who had resisted foreign imperialism from the West. My father had picked up radical ideas first as a clerk in Kharkov, later during his military service. When he left the army he remained in St Petersburg for two years before getting into trouble with the authorities and being deported to Tsaritsyn. Many of these names are probably unfamiliar to the modern reader. St Petersburg was renamed into Russian Pyotr-grad (Petrograd) in 1916, when we wanted no echoes of Germany in our capital. Now it is called Leningrad. Doubtless they intend to change it with every fresh political fad. Tsaritsyn became Stalin-grad and then Volgograd as the past was revised for the umpteenth time, and the inevitable future and the impermanent present re-proclaimed in fresher slogans, sufficient to make schizophrenics of the sanest citizens. Tsaritsyn is probably called something else by now. Nobody knows: least of all those émigré Ukrainian nationalists whom I sometimes speak to after Church services. They have become as ignorant as everyone else living here. It is hard for me to find equals. I am a well-educated man who received Higher Education in St Petersburg. Yet what good is education in this country, unless you are part of the Old Boy Network, or a homosexual in the Central Office of Information or the BBC, or Princess Margaret’s lover, like so many self-styled intellectuals who come over here and betray themselves for the peasants which, in reality, they probably are? It is incredible how easily these Czechs, Poles, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs manage to pass themselves off as academics and artists. I see their names all the time: on books in the library, in the title credits of sex-films. I would not lower myself. And as for the girls, they are all whores who have found richer prey in the West. I see two of them almost every day when I buy my bread in the Lithuanian’s shop. They flaunt their long blonde hair, their wide, painted mouths, their flashy clothes: their skins are thick with make-up and they stink of perfume. They are always gabbling away in Czech. They come into my premises for fur capes and silk petticoats and I refuse to serve them. They laugh at me. ‘The old Jew thinks we’re Russians,’ they say. Ah, if they were. Good Russians would have a discount. The girls speak Russian, of course, but they are obviously Czechs. Believe me, I know I bring these suspicions on myself, because I cannot give anyone, not even the British authorities, my real name. My father changed his name a dozen times during his revolutionary days. For different reasons, I also had to take other names. I still have relatives in Russia and it would not be fair to them to use their title since we had very strong aristocratic connections on both sides of the family. We all know what the Bolsheviks think of aristocrats.

They are of a type, you see, these girls. Ruined by Communism well before they come to the West. Without morals. It is a joke the Czechs tell: the Communists abolished prostitution by making every woman a whore. I remember girls just like them, from good families, speaking French. Fifty years ago they were crawling across the boards of the abandoned Fisch château near Alexandria while shells whistled everywhere in the dark and half the city was in flames. They were filthy and naked, luxuriating in the expensive furs Hrihorieff’s bandits had given them. Some were not more than fourteen or fifteen years old. Their little breasts hanging down, their brazen mouths open to receive us, they were utterly corrupted and it was obvious that they were relishing it. I felt nauseated and fled the scene, risking my life, and I still feel sick when I remember it. But are the girls to blame? Then, no. Today, in the free world, I say ‘Yes, they are.’ For here they have a choice. And they represent Slavic womanhood, for so long pure, feminine, maternal. But this is what happens when religion is denied.

My mother, although of Polish extraction, was attracted more to the Greek than the Roman in her religious preferences, though I never knew her to attend formal services. She observed all the Orthodox holidays. I do not remember ikons (though she doubtless possessed them). She always had a picture of my father (in his uniform) in an alcove, with candles burning. It was here that my mother prayed. She never criticised my father, but she was anxious to remind me of how he had gone astray. He had denied God. An atheist, he had been involved in the uprisings of 1905. During this period he had almost certainly been killed, though the circumstances were never entirely clear. My mother herself would become vague when the subject was raised. My own memory is a confused one. I recall a sense of terror, of hiding, I think, under some stairs. On the other hand the equation itself was clear enough: God had withdrawn his grace and his protection from my father as a direct punishment. Aside from the fact that my father had been an officer in a Cossack regiment and had thrown away his career, that his family had been well-to-do but had disowned him, I knew very little about him. Out of tact, our relatives never mentioned him. Only Uncle Semyon in Odessa ever made any reference to him and that was always to curse him as ‘A fool, but a fool with a brain. The worst kind.’ At any rate I have no memories of him, for he was rarely at home, even in the Tsaritsyn days, and my memories of Tsaritsyn itself are confined to a few narrow, dusty, nondescript alleys, for we moved in 1907 to Kiev again, where my mother had a sister. Here they both worked as seamstresses. This was a terrible descent for a woman like my mother, who possessed a refined sensibility, spoke several languages, and was conversant in all forms of literature and learning. Later she became the manageress of a steam-laundry and after her sister re-married we moved into the two-room flat near Mother’s job. This was in a part of town with many old trees, little copses, parks and some fields even, very close to the Babi ravine (the ‘Old Woman’ ravine) which, with its grass, rocks and stream, became my main playground.

Here I would defend Kipling’s Khyber Pass and, as Karl May’s ‘Old Shatterhand’, explore the Rocky Mountains. I would fight the Battle of Borodino. I would defend Byzantium against the Turks. On rarer occasions I would go to the Dnieper’s beaches and be Huckleberry Finn, Ahab, Captain Nemo. Even then Kiev had its share of revolutionary troubles. The agitation came mainly from the workers in the industrial suburbs beyond the Botanical Gardens: blocks of flats as featureless and smoky as any you can find today. The authorities had had to clamp down quite heavily, but all I knew of this was when my mother kept me inside or stopped me going to school. On the whole, however, I experienced little of the unpleasant side of life in Kiev. It was a wonderful city in which to grow up. Near us was a road which ran through the gorges. This area was known as the Switzerland of Kiev. Thus I had the best of both worlds—country and city—though we were not rich. Kiev, and the Ukraine in general, inspired art and intellectual activity of every kind. Half Russia’s greatest writers produced their best work there. All Russia’s best engineers came from there. Even the Jews excelled themselves. But they, of course, were never content.

Built on hills above the river; full of cathedrals and monasteries with glittering onion-domes, green copper, gold and lapis lazuli; full of great public buildings in the soft yellow brick for which Kiev was famous; of carved wooden houses, crowded street markets, statues, monuments, the large stores and theatres of the Kreshchatik, our main street, the University and various institutes, the Botanical Gardens, the Zoo, modern tramways; its squares crammed with electric signs, advertisement hoardings, kiosks, theatre advertisements; its thoroughfares crowded with motor vehicles and horse-drawn carriages, carts, omnibuses; with trees, parks and green places everywhere, with the great commercial river full of steamers, yachts, barges and rafts (she was founded by the Scandinavian Rus to protect their most important trade-route), Kiev was no provincial city, but the capital of ancient Russia, and well aware of the fact. Once, centuries before, she had been a walled garrison city of grim stone and unpainted wood: ‘Mother City of all the Russias. The Rome of Russia.’ And the infidel had come and the infidel had been forced back, or converted, or accommodated, perhaps temporarily, and Kiev and what she protected had always survived. Now she was Yellow Kiev, warm and hospitable to all. In the summer sunlight it would seem she was made entirely of gold, for her brick glowed while her mosaics and posters, flowers and trees shone like jewels. In the winter, she was a white fairy-tale. In the spring the groaning and cracking of the Dnieper’s ice could be heard throughout the city. In the autumn Kiev’s mellow light and fading leaves blended so that she was a thousand shades of warm brown. By the early twentieth century she had reached the height of her beauty. Now, thanks to the Bolsheviks, she has become a lustreless shell, just another beehive with a few nondescript concrete monuments to pacify tourists. The Germans were blamed for destroying Kiev, but it is well-known that the Chekists blew most of it up in their 1941 retreat. Even the existing statues are copies. Kiev had a history older than most European cities: from her came the culture which civilised the Slavs. From her came our greatest epics. Who has not, for instance, marvelled at the film version of Ilya Mouremetz and the Heroes of Kiev, defenders of Christendom against the Tatar Horde, Bogatyr and the Beast? Ironically, what the Tatar failed to accomplish, the armies of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis succeeded in doing with relentless and unimaginative thoroughness.

We were poor, but there was wealth and beauty all around us. Our suburb, the Kurenvskaya, was rather run-down, though picturesquely countrified, with many wooden buildings and little gardens among the newer apartment houses (which were built around courtyards after the French model). If I wished I could walk down to the main city, or I could take the Number Ten tram past St Kyril’s church to Podol and, if I failed to be seduced by the sights and smells of the Jewish Quarter, could walk up St Andrew’s Hill to that great church, all blue-and-white mosaic on the outside and rich gold on the inside, to stare at the distant Dnieper, at Trukhanov Island where the yacht club was. On a misty autumn evening I would enjoy walking along the wide Kreshchatik boulevard, with its chestnut trees and bright shops and restaurants. But Kreshchatik was best at Christmas, when the lamps were lit and the snow was piled against walls and gutters to make magical pathways from door to door. I remember the smell of pine and ice, of pastries and coffee and that special smell, rather like newly cut wood with a hint of fresh paint, of Christmas toys. Cabs and troikas rolled through the golden darkness; the breath of horses was whiter than the snow itself; warm, rattling trams radiated orange electric light. It is a ghost in my mind. It no longer exists. The Bolsheviks blew it to pieces as they retreated from the Nazis who, only a few months earlier, had helped them loot Poland.

As a boy I was generally more interested in doing than seeing. I am by reputation an intellectual, but my chief instincts are those of a man of action. I owe my scholarship almost entirely to my mother. She insisted on my receiving an education far better than most of the other children in the neighbourhood. Fortunately she had a number of friends who, I suppose, were chiefly would-be candidates for her hand (she was a beautiful and vivacious woman) and they were helpful with advice about the best schools and what special subjects I should pursue. Our apartment was never without at least one visitor. Often there were many more, and they were by no means all Russians. In particular there was Captain Brown, the Scottish engineer, a gentleman living in reduced circumstances. He had a room off the same staircase as ours. He was rumoured to be a deserter from the Indian army. Certainly he knew a great deal about the North-West Frontier, Afghanistan and also the Caucasus, where he had spent several years (giving credence to the notion that he might be a deserter). I hardly heard him repeat a single story, he had so many: about Kazakhs, Turkmen, Tajiks and Kirghiz brigands, about Kabul and Samarkand, or the problems of building railways in Georgia. He was a small, dark man, always genial yet giving off a sense of restrained aggression, though he was very gentle with my mother in that careful, masculine, delicate way of someone almost afraid of their own strength. He not only taught me my first English words but he gave me the set of Pearson’s Magazine which was to supply so much of the reading of my boyhood and youth, make a crucial impression on my imagination and, subsequently, my ambition. I liked him the best, I think, because my mother found him such good company. She went with him to the opera and to the theatre far more often than she went with other admirers.

Kurenvskaya was one of the most cosmopolitan suburbs. My mother was popular with her customers, who were chiefly unmarried men or the servants of well-to-do people. Some of them, doubtless from boredom or loneliness, would prolong their visits to the laundry. A few old regulars would be invited into her private office, a tiny room off the main floor of the laundry, where she would offer a glass of tea or perhaps some seedcake...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• List of Dramatis Personae
• Introduction by Alan Wall
• Introduction by Michael Moorcock
• Byzantium Endures
• Appendix a: The Manuscripts of Colonel Pyat
• Appendix B: A Brief Account of the Russian Civil War
• About the Author
• Bibliography