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Yama (The Pit)

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YAMA [THE PIT]


Of this edition, intended for private circulation only, and
printed from type on Berkeley Antique laid paper, 950 copies have
been printed for America, and 550 for Great Britain. Also, 55
unnumbered copies, for the press.

This copy is Number 223





YAMA [THE PIT]

A NOVEL IN THREE PARTS

BY ALEXANDRA KUPRIN

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN

BY BERNARD GUILBERT GUERNEY

"All the horror is in just this, that there is no horror ..."





AUTHOR'S DEDICATION


I know that many will find this novel immoral and indecent;
nevertheless, I dedicate it with all my heart to MOTHERS AND
YOUTHS--A. K.





TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION


I dedicate the labour of translation, in all humility and
sincerity, to K. ANDRAE. B. G. G.





INTRODUCTION


"With us, you see," Kuprin makes the reporter Platonov, his
mouthpiece, say in Yama, "they write about detectives, about
lawyers, about inspectors of the revenue, about pedagogues, about
attorneys, about the police, about officers, about sensual ladies,
about engineers, about baritones--and really, by God, altogether
well--cleverly, with finesse and talent. But, after all, all these
people are rubbish, and their life is not life, but some sort of
conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world culture. But
there are two singular realities--ancient as humanity itself: the
prostitute and the moujik. And about them we know nothing, save
some tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions in literature..."

Tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions... Let us consider some
of the ways in which this monstrous reality has been approached by
various writers. There is, first, the purely sentimental:
Prevost's Manon Les caut. Then there is the slobberingly
sentimental: Dumas' Dame aux Camelias. A third is the
necrophilically romantic: Louys' Aphrodite. The fertile Balzac has
given us no less than two: the purely romantic, in his fascinating
portraits of the Fair Imperia; and the romantically realistic, in
his Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes. Reade's Peg Woffington
may be called the literary parallel of the costume drama; Defoe's
Moll Flanders is honestly realistic; Zola's Nana is rabidly so.

There is one singular fact that must be noted in connection with
the vast majority of such depictions. Punk or bona roba, lorette
or drab--put her before an artist in letters, and, lo and behold
ye! such is the strange allure emanating from the hussy, that the
resultant portrait is either that of a martyred Magdalene, or, at
the very least, has all the enigmatic piquancy of a Monna Lisa...
Not a slut, but what is a hetaera; and not a hetaera, but what is
well-nigh Kypris herself! I know of but one depiction in all
literature that possesses the splendour of implacable veracity as
well as undiminished artistry; where the portrait is that of a
prostitute, despite all her tirings and trappings; a depiction
truly deserving to be designated a portrait: the portrait supreme
of the harlot eternal--Shakespeare's Cleopatra.

Furthermore, it will be observed that such depictions, for the
most part, are primarily portraits of prostitutes, and not
pictures of prostitution. It is also a singular fact that war,
another scourge has met with similar treatment. We have the
pretty, spotless grenadiers and cuirassiers of Meissonier in
plenty; Vereshchagin is still alone in the grim starkness of his
wind-swept, snow-covered battle-fields, with black crows wheeling
over the crumpled masses of gray...

And, curiously enough, it is another great Russian, Kuprin, who is
supreme--if not unique--as a painter of the universal scourge of
prostitution, per se; and not as an incidental background for
portraits. True, he may not have entirely escaped the strange
allure, aforementioned, of the femininity he paints; for
femininity--even though fallen, corrupt, abased, is still
femininity, one of the miracles of life, to Kuprin, the lover of
life. But, even if he may be said to have used too much of the oil
of sentimentality in mixing his colours for the portraits, his
portraits are subordinate to the background; and there his eye is
true and keen, his hand steady and unflinching, his colours and
brushwork unimpeachable. Whether, like his own Platonov--who may
be called to some extent an autobiographical figure, and many of
whose experiences are Kuprin's own--"came upon the brothel" and
gathered his material unconsciously, "without any ulterior
thoughts of writing, "we do not know, nor need we rummage in his
dirty linen, as he puts it. Suffice it to say here--to cite but
two instances--that almost anyone acquainted with Russia will tell
you the full name of the rich, gay, southern port city of K--;
that any Odessite will tell you that Treppel's is merely
transplanted, for fictional reasons, from his own city to K--...

Alexandre I. Kuprin was born in 1870; 1909 marked the twenty-fifth
anniversary of his literary activity. He attained his fame only
upon the publication of his amazing, epical novel, "The Duel"--
which, just like "YAMA," is an arraignment; an arraignment of
militaristic corruption. Russian criticism has styled him the poet
of life. If Chekhov was the Wunderkind of Russian letters, Kuprin
is its enfant terrible. His range of subjects is enormous; his
power of observation and his versatility extraordinary. Gambrinus
alone would justify his place among the literary giants of Europe.
Some of his picaresques, "THE INSULT," "HORSE-THIEVES," and "OFF
THE STREET"--the last in the form of a monologue--are sheer tours
de force. "Olessiya" is possessed of a weird, unearthly beauty;
"The Shulamite" is a prose-poem of antiquity. He deals with the
life of the moujik in "Back-woods" and "The Swamp"; of the Jews,
in "The Jewess" and "The Coward"; of the soldiers, in "The
Cadets," "The Interrogation," "The Night Watch," "Delirium"; of
the actors, in "How I Was an Actor" and "In Retirement." We have
circus life in "'Allez!'" "In The Circus," "Lolly," "The Clown"--
the last a one-act playlet; factory life, in "Moloch"; provincial
life, in "Small Fry"; bohemian life, in "Captain Ribnicov" and
"The River of Life"--which no one but Kuprin could have written.
There are animal stories and flower stories; stories for children
--and for neuropaths; one story is dedicated to a jockey; another
to a circus clown; a third, if I remember rightly, to a race-
horse... "Yama" created an enormous sensation upon the publication
of the first part in volume three of the "Sbornik Zemliya"--"The
Earth Anthology"--in 1909; the second part appeared in volume
fifteen, in 1914; the third, in volume sixteen, in 1915. Both the
original parts and the last revised edition have been followed in
this translation. The greater part of the stories listed above are
available in translations, under various titles; the list, of
course, is merely a handful from the vast bulk of the fecund
Kuprin's writings, nor is any group of titles exhaustive of its
kind. "The Star of Solomon," his latest collection of stories,
bears the imprint of Helsingfors, 1920.

It must not be thought, despite its locale, that Kuprin's "Yama"
is a picture of Russian prostitution solely; it is intrinsically
universal. All that is necessary is to change the kopecks into
cents, pennies, sous or pfennings; compute the versts into miles
or metres; Jennka may be Eugenie or Jeannette; and for Yama,
simply read Whitechapel, Montmartre, or the Barbary Coast. That is
why "Yama" is a "tremendous, staggering, and truthful book--a
terrific book." It has been called notorious, lurid--even
oleographic. So are, perhaps, the picaresques of Murillo, the
pictorial satires of Hogarth, the bizarreries of Goya...

The best introduction to "Yama," however, can be given in Kuprin's
own words, as uttered by the reporter Platonov. "They do write,"
he says, "... but it is all either a lie, or theatrical effects
for children of tender years, or else a cunning symbolism,
comprehensible only to the sages of the future. But the life
itself no one as yet has touched...

"But the material here is in reality tremendous, downright
crushing, terrible... And not at all terrible are the loud phrases
about the traffic in women's flesh, about the white slaves, about
prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on,
and so on... an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! No,
horrible are the everyday, accustomed trifles; these business-
like, daily, commercial reckonings; this thousand-year-old science
of amatory practice; this prosaic usage, determined by the ages.
In these unnoticeable nothings are completely dissolved such
feelings as resentment, humiliation, shame. There remains a dry
profession, a contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest petty
trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. Do
you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this--
that there is no horror! Bourgeois work days--and that is all...

"More awful than all awful words, a hundredfold more awful--is
some such little prosaic stroke or other as will suddenly knock
you all in a heap, like a blow on the forehead..."

It is in such little prosaic strokes; everyday, accustomed,
characteristic trifles; minute particles of life, that Kuprin
excels. The detailism which crowds his pages is like the stippling
of Whistler; or the enumerations of the Bible; or the chiselling
of Rodin, that endows the back of the Thinker with meaning.

"We all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like
the blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under our
feet. But an artist will come, and he will look over them
carefully, and he will pick them up. And suddenly he will so
skillfully turn in the sun a minute particle of life, that we
shall all cry out: 'Oh, my God! But I myself--myself!--have seen
this with my own eyes. Only it simply did not enter my head to
turn my close attention upon it.' But our Russian artists of the
word--the most conscientious and sincere artists in the whole
world--for some reason have up to this time passed over
prostitution and the brothel. Why? Really, it is difficult for me
to answer that. Perhaps because of squeamishness, perhaps out of
pusillanimity, out of fear of being signalized as a pornographic
writer; finally from the apprehension that our gossiping criticism
will identify the artistic work of the writer with his personal
life and will start rummaging in his dirty linen. Or perhaps they
can find neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-
possession to plunge in head first into this life and to watch it
right up close, without prejudice, without sonorous phrases,
without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous simplicity and
everyday activity... That material... is truly unencompassable in
its significance and weightiness... The words of others do not
suffice--even though they be the most exact--even observations,
made with a little note-book and a bit of pencil, do not suffice.
One must grow accustomed to this life, without being cunningly
wise..."

"I believe, that not now, not soon--after fifty years or so--but
there will come a writer of genius, and precisely a Russian one,
who will absorb within himself all the burdens and all the
abominations of this life and will cast them forth to us in the
form of simple, fine, and deathlessly--caustic images. And we
shall all say: 'Why, now, we ourselves have seen and known all
this, but we could not even suppose that this is so horrible! In
this coming artist I believe with all my heart."

Kuprin is too sincere, too big, to have written this with himself
in mind; yet no reader of the scathing, searing arraignment called
"Yama," will question that the great, the gigantic Kuprin has
shown "the burdens and abominations" of prostitution, in "simple,
fine, and deathlessly-caustic images"; has shown that "all the
horror is in just this--that there is no horror..." For it is as a
pitiless reflection of a "singular," sinister reality that "Yama"
stands unsurpassed.

B. G. GUERNEY.

New York City, January, 1922.





TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.


A word must be said of Kuprin's style. He is by no means a purist;
his pages bristle with neologisms and foreign--or, rather,
outlandish--words; nor has he any hesitancy in adapting and
Russianizing such words. He coins words; he is, at times, actually
Borrowesque, and not only does he resort to colloquialisms and
slang, but to dialect, cant, and even actual argot. Therein is his
glory--and, perhaps, his weakness. Therefore, an attempt has been
made, wherever corruptions, slang, and so forth, appear in the
original, to render them through the nearest English equivalents.
While this has its obvious dubieties and disadvantages, any other
course would have smacked of prettification--a fate which such a
book as "Yama" surely does not deserve.





PART ONE





CHAPTER I.


A long, long time ago, long before the railroads, the stage-
drivers--both government and private--used to live, from
generation to generation, at the very farthest confine of a large
southern city. And that is why the entire region was called the
Yamskaya Sloboda--the Stage-drivers' Borough; or simply Yamskaya,
or Yamkas--Little Ditches, or, shorter still, Yama--The Pit. In
the course of time, when hauling by steam killed off
transportation by horses, the mettlesome tribe of the stage-
drivers little by little lost its boisterous ways and its brave
customs, went over into other occupations, fell apart and
scattered. But for many years--even up to this time--a shady
renown has remained to Yama, as of a place exceedingly gay, tipsy,
brawling, and in the night-time not without danger.

Somehow it came about of itself, that on the ruins of those
ancient, long-warmed nests, where of yore the rosy-cheeked,
sprightly wives of the soldiery and the plump widows of Yama, with
their black eyebrows, had secretly traded in vodka and free love,
there began to spring up wide-open brothels, permitted by the
authorities, regulated by official supervision and subject to
express, strict rules. Towards the end of the nineteenth century
both streets of Yama--Great Yamskaya and Little Yamskaya--proved
to be entirely occupied, on one side of the street as well as the
other, exclusively with houses of ill-fame. [Footnote: "Houses of
Suffrance"--i.e., Houses of the Necessary Evil.--Trans.] Of the
private houses no more than five or six were left, but even they
were taken up by public houses, beer halls, and general stores,
catering to the needs of Yama prostitution.

The course of life, the manners and customs, are almost identical
in all the thirty-odd establishments; the difference is only in
the charges exacted for the briefly-timed love, and consequently
in certain external minutiae as well: in the assortment of more or
less handsome women, in the comparative smartness of the costumes,
in the magnificence of the premises and the luxuriousness of the
furnishings.

The most chic establishment is that of Treppel, the first house to
the left upon entering Great Yamskaya. This is an old firm. Its
present owner bears an entirely different name, and fills the post
of an elector in the city council and is even a member of the city
board. The house is of two stories, green and white, built in the
debauched pseudo-Russian style a la Ropetovsky, with little
horses, carved facings, roosters, and wooden towels bordered with
lace-also of wood; a carpet with a white runner on the stairs; in
the front hall a stuffed bear, holding a wooden platter for
visiting cards in his out-stretched paws; a parquet floor in the
ballroom, heavy raspberry silk curtains and tulle on the windows,
along the walls white and gold chairs and mirrors with gilt
frames; there are two private cabinets with carpets, divans, and
soft satin puffs; in the bedrooms blue and rose lanterns, blankets
of raw silk stuff and clean pillows; the inmates are clad in low-
cut ball gowns, bordered with fur, or in expensive masquerade
costumes of hussars, pages, fisher lasses, school-girls; and the
majority of them are Germans from the Baltic provinces--large,
handsome women, white of body and with ample breasts. At Treppel's
three roubles are taken for a visit, and for the whole night, ten.

Three of the two-rouble establishments--Sophie Vassilievna's, The
Old Kiev, and Anna Markovna's--are somewhat worse, somewhat
poorer. The remaining houses on Great Yamskaya are rouble ones;
they are furnished still worse. While on Little Yamskaya, which is
frequented by soldiers, petty thieves, artisans, and drab folk In
general, and where fifty kopecks or less are taken for time,
things are altogether filthy and poor-the floor in the parlor is
crooked, warped, and full of splinters, the windows are hung with
pieces of red fustian; the bedrooms, just like stalls, are
separated by thin partitions, which do not reach to the ceiling,
and on the beds, on top of the shaken down hay-mattresses, are
scattered torn, spotted bed-sheets and flannel blankets, dark from
time, crumpled any old way, full of holes; the air is sour and
full of fumes, with a mixture of alcohol vapours and the smell of
human emanations; the women, dressed in rags of coloured printed
calico or in sailor costumes, are for the greater part hoarse or
snuffling, with noses half fallen through, with faces preserving
traces of yesterday's blows and scratches and naively bepainted
with the aid of a red cigarette box moistened with spit.

All the year round, every evening--with the exception of the last
three days of Holy Week and the night before Annunciation, when no
bird builds its nest and a shorn wench does not plait her braid--
when it barely grows dark out of doors, hanging red lanterns are
lit before every house, above the tented, carved street doors. It
is just like a holiday out on the street--like Easter. All the
windows are brightly lit up, the gay music of violins and pianos
floats out through the panes, cabmen drive up and drive off
without cease. In all the houses the entrance doors are opened
wide, and through them one may see from the street a steep
staircase with a narrow corridor on top, and the white flashing of
the many-facetted reflector of the lamp, and the green walls of
the front hall, painted over with Swiss landscapes. Till the very
morning hundreds and thousands of men ascend and descend these
staircases. Here everybody frequents: half-shattered, slavering
ancients, seeking artificial excitements, and boys-military cadets
and high-school lads--almost children; bearded paterfamiliases;
honourable pillars of society, in goldon spectacles; and newly-
weds, and enamoured bridegrooms, and honourable professors with
renowned names; and thieves, and murderers, and liberal lawyers;
and strict guardians of morals--pedagogues, and foremost writers--
the authors of fervent, impassioned articles on the equal rights
of women; and catchpoles, and spies, and escaped convicts, and
officers, and students, and Social Democrats, and hired patriots;
the timid and the brazen, the sick and the well, those knowing
woman for the first time, and old libertines frayed by all species
of vice; clear-eyed, handsome fellows and monsters maliciously
distorted by nature, deaf-mutes, blind men, men without noses,
with flabby, pendulous bodies, with malodorous breath, bald,
trembling, covered with parasites--pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes.
They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they
sit, smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry; they dance,
executing abominable movements of the body imitative of the act of
sexual love. At times attentively and long, at times with gross
haste, they choose any woman they like and know beforehand that
they will never meet refusal. Impatiently they pay their money in
advance, and on the public bed, not yet grown cold after the body
of their predecessor, aimlessly commit the very greatest and most
beautiful of all universal mysteries--the mystery of the
conception of new life. And the women with indifferent readiness,
with uniform words, with practiced professional movements, satisfy
their desires, like machines--only to receive, right after them,
during the same night, with the very same words, smiles and
gestures, the third, the fourth, the tenth man, not infrequently
already biding his turn in the waiting room.

So passes the entire night. Towards daybreak Yama little by little
grows quiet, and the bright morning finds it depopulated,
spacious, plunged into sleep, with doors shut tightly, with
shutters fixed on the windows. But toward evening the women awaken
and get ready for the following night.

And so without end, day after day, for months and years, they live
a strange, incredible life in their public harems, outcast by
society, accursed by the family, victims of the social
temperament, cloacas for the excess of the city's sensuality, the
guardians of the honour of the family--four hundred foolish, lazy,
hysterical, barren women.





CHAPTER II.


Two in the afternoon. In the second-rate, two-rouble establishment
of Anna Markovna everything is plunged in sleep. The large square
parlor with mirrors in gilt frames, with a score of plush chairs
placed decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of
Makovsky's Feast of the Russian Noblemen, and Bathing, with a
crystal lustre in the middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet
and semi-darkness it seems unwontedly pensive, austere, strangely
sad. Yesterday here, as on every evening, lights burned, the most
rollicking of music rang out, blue tobacco smoke swirled, men and
women careered in couples, shaking their hips and throwing their
legs on high. And the entire street shone on the outside with the
red lanterns over the street doors and with the light from the
windows, and it seethed with people and carriages until morning.

Now the street is empty. It is glowing triumphantly and joyously
in the glare of the summer sun. But in the parlor all the window
curtains are lowered, and for that reason it is dark within, cool,
and as peculiarly uninviting as the interiors of empty theatres,
riding academies and court buildings usually are in the middle of
the day.

The pianoforte glimmers dully with its black, bent, glossy side;
the yellow, old, time-eaten, broken, gap-toothed keys glisten
faintly. The stagnant, motionless air still retains yesterday's
odour; it smells of perfumes, tobacco, the sour dampness of a
large uninhabited room, the perspiration of unclean and unhealthy
feminine flesh, face-powder, boracic-thymol soap, and the dust of
the yellow mastic with which the parquet floor had been polished
yesterday. And with a strange charm the smell of withering swamp
grass is blended with these smells. To-day is Trinity. In
accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the
establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought
a whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long,
thick blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about--in the
corridors, in the private cabinets, in the drawing room. They,
also, had lit the lamps before all the images. The girls, by
tradition, dare not do this with their hands, which have been
denied during the night.

And the house-porter has adorned the house-entrance, which is
carved in the Russian style, with two little felled birch-trees.
And so with all the houses--the thin white trunks with their scant
dying verdure adorn the exterior near the stoops, bannisters and
doors.

The entire house is quiet, empty and drowsy. The chopping of
cutlets for dinner can be heard from the kitchen. Liubka, one of
the girls, barefooted, in her shift, with bare arms, not good-
looking, freckled, but strong and fresh of body, has come out into
the inner court. Yesterday she had had but six guests on time, but
no one had remained for the night with her, and because of that
she had slept her fill--splendidly, delightfully, all alone, upon
a wide bed. She had risen early, at ten o'clock, and had with
pleasure helped the cook scrub the floor and the tables in the
kitchen. Now she is feeding the chained dog Amour with the sinews
and cuttings of the meat. The big, rusty hound, with long
glistening hair and black muzzle, jumps up on the girl--with his
front paws, stretching the chain tightly and rattling in the
throat from shortness of breath, then, with back and tail
undulating all over, bends his head down to the ground, wrinkles
his nose, smiles, whines and sneezes from the excitement. But she,
teasing him with the meat, shouts at him with pretended severity:

"There, you--stupid! I'll--I'll give it to you! How dare you?"

But she rejoices with all her soul over the tumult and caresses of
Amour and her momentary power over the dog, and because she had
slept her fill, and passed the night without a man, and because of
the Trinity, according to dim recollections of her childhood, and
because of the sparkling sunny day, which it so seldom befalls her
to see.

All the night guests have already gone their ways. The most
business-like, quiet and workaday hour is coming on.

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