Alexei Remizov’s Sisters of the Cross (1910) is widely regarded as a Symbolist masterpiece and possibly the modernist author’s best work. It may therefore come as a surprise that this is the novel’s first ever translation into English, one which arrives more than a hundred years after the novel was written. Or perhaps it is not surprising at all, considering that even some of Remizov’s early admirers deemed his works “untranslatable”.

Translator Roger Keys, who together with Brian Murphy, acts as the intrepid “midwife” to this English-language rendition, provides an introduction to the work which highlights the peculiar characteristics that make Remizov’s work so distinctly, and “untranslatably”, Russian. In a bid to “de-Latinize and de-Frenchify the Russian literary language”, Remizov mixes the colloquialisms of spoken Russian with the style and vocabulary of fairy-tales and that of the sacred texts of the Orthodox Church. In the process, he shows a predilection for archaic words and neologisms. “He uses too many hard words,” an early potential translator complained.

The plot does not simplify matters either. Nominally, it has its roots in the gritty realist fiction of the 19th and early 20th century, as it tells the story of poor St Petersburg clerk Marakulin who is unexpectedly fired from his job, and, consequently, finds modest lodgings in Burkov’s block of apartments. As the story progresses, however, it takes on a surreal tinge. Burkov’s flats become a symbol of the suffering world; a society peopled by women (the “sisters” of the title) to whom life (and men) have dealt terrible blows. The Sisters are a diverse group: some, like the fallen actress “Verochka”, are branded as sinners; others are considered visionaries or holy women. What they have in common is this aura of dignity in suffering; in contrast, for instance, to “the General’s wife” who lives a comfortably “good life” but one which barely recognizes the distress of her fellow human beings. This moral message however is suggested, rather than spelt out, in a series of increasingly fantastical scenes, including a harrowing vision of hell, and a final, shimmering climax.

It is no mean task to convey, in a foreign language, the wildly different registers of this multi-layered work, which certainly does not yield its treasures easily. However, Murphy and Keys somehow manage to combine Remizov’s quirky marriage of realism and folklore, sacred and profane. They have given us English-language (and non-Russian) speakers an opportunity to savour a complex but rewarding novel.

4.5* ( )