Envy

This novella, published in 1927, is set in Moscow. The central character, Nikolai Kavalerov, is a young man consumed by envy of the model Soviet citizen, Andrei Babichev, who happens to be his benefactor. Communism is being shown in the novella to be a crushing of individual egos for the collective good. The book is remarkable for containing one of the earliest detailed accounts in literature of an international football match (actually between a Moscow XI and a German workers’ club) on 21 May 1927.

The author, Yuri Olesha (born 3 March 1899), was born in Elizavetgrad in central Ukraine and grew up in the port city of Odessa. He began writing while in secondary school. He began studying law in 1917 but interrupted his studies to serve as a volunteer in the Red Army during the civil war. He subsequently became involved in the Zelenaya Lampa ('green lamp') literary circle in Odessa, a group that included other writers of this generation, including Ilya Ilf and Valentin Kataev. His first literary output (a short story) was published in 1922. In the same year, he moved to Moscow to write for Gudok, a workers’ newspaper. Two collections of poetry appeared in 1924 and 1927. This, his first novel, was published in 1927 and several works of short fiction and drama followed its success. His autobiography was published posthumously in 1965.

The struggle between individualism and collectivism is often described in the novella in terms of warfare:
“ ‘Against whom are you waging war, scoundrel?’ you shouted to your brother. I don't know whom you had in mind: yourself, your party, your factories, stores, apiaries — I don't know. But I'm waging war against you: against the most ordinary lord, egoist, sensualist and dullard, assured that everything will come off all right for him.”

The Dark Valley

This collection of short stories, published in 1927, is set in Armenia, mostly in the mountain eastern province of Zangezur. In the story ‘The Apricot Field’, the author tells of how this particular field “would have nothing of value to be remembered by had it not been stuck between the endless fights of two villages Mir and Mrots”. (The same could presumably be said of Lone Pine Ridge or Hill 60.) When Armenia comes under Soviet rule, it appears a resolution is in sight with the view that “the land belongs to the worker”. When, however, a land surveyor has examined the case, his verdict is entirely in support of Mir due to it being “poor and deprived of land”. It is up to the people of Mir to see beyond their territorial gain to an outcome of peace for both communities.

The author, Aksel Bakunts (né Aleksandr Tevosyan, born 13 June 1899), grew up in Goris in eastern Armenia. In 1910 he was sent to study at the Gevorgian Seminary in Etchmiadzin on account of his academic promise. His first published writing appeared in 1915 while still a student there. From 1916, he served as a volunteer in the Armenian forces against the Ottoman army, fighting in the battles of Erzurum, Sardarabad and Kars. He studied in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv from 1920 to 1923  before returning to his native Zangezur. He settled in Yerevan in 1927 and in the same year his first collection of short stories was published. A second collection appeared a year later. He was prolific in writing short fiction and screenplays in the early 1930s before his writings brought him under suspicion. He was imprisoned by the Stalinist regime in 1936, along with his literary friend Yeghishe Charents, and was executed on 8 July 1937.

When the Soviet authorities determine that Mir should be granted possession of all of the Apricot Field, the news has a huge impact of the neighbouring community of Mrots:

“Even though that sheet of paper was small and quite common, it produced more noise in Mrots than the biggest bomb in the world would have. They came, looked at the paper and touched it. Even though many were illiterate, they passed on the paper to the next person as if it were a piece of hot tin that had burned the fingers of the one who had touched it.”
The people of Mir, however, were equally uncomfortable, complaining that the outcome had happened too fast. They submit a request to the authorities to rectify the situation:
“Give us half of the Apricot Field”.
It's reasonable to think that the author deliberately gave one of the villages a name that is the same as the Russian word that can mean either world or village or peace, depending on the context.

Days of Disillusion

This novel, published in 1926, is set in Sydney between 1894 and 1926. The central character, Robert Watson, is the son of a suburban stationer, who becomes ambitious in business after his father's premature death. The book is divided into six sections of Robert's life: the little boy (he was born about 1885), the youth, the young man, the married man, the father and a final section termed “the new day”. Towards the end of the novel he battles disillusion and dejection, losing his zeal for business. After experiencing tragedy, he verbalises his newfound philosophy: “I would not be dissatisfied with the world and the people in it because somehow I would understand that no life in the world is perfect and that human nature is but a process of becoming. I would know that anything human has the element of potential failure in it and that we must not make idols of human beings — we shall always be disillusioned; but that we should put our faith in the unseen.”

The author, Chester Francis Cobb (born 8 June 1899) grew up in suburban Sydney. On leaving school, he worked for Sydney's Daily Telegraph. Both his parents having died prematurely, in 1921 he emigrated to England, the country of his father's birth. He settled on a farm in Oxfordshire. His first novel, partly based on his father's life, was published in 1925 and was the first Australian novel to display the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This novel, with a similar setting, was published a year later. He wrote a third novel but it wasn't accepted for publication. Although he had a short life (he died in 1943) and a small body of work, his contribution to Australian fiction was recognised in his inclusion among Colin Roderick's Twenty Australian Novelists in 1947.

The novel doesn't detail the central character's experience of war. When trying to explain his disillusionment, he wonders whether the war was a factor:
“The war... it's no use saying it was the war. I was beginning to be restless and discontented and altogether fed up just before the war. As a matter of fact, if I want to be frank with myself, it was because I was fed up that I went to the war. Going to the war solved the problem for the time. Or it postponed the solving of the problem. But the problem's still here. I'm no nearer the solution than I was before the war.”
Later, when describing an unusually pleasant state of mind, he recalls feeling the same way on one occasion on the Western Front:
“What is this something so peaceful that I feel? ... I felt it first one night in the old office before the war. Since then I've flet it now and again at different times. One early morning in the line in France. And several times when I couldn't sleep at night in hospital [presumably having been wounded]. It was there. It has no voice. It doesn't speak. It doesn't move. It isn't anything that can be seen. It just is. And it's more than a feeling of peace. It's a complete body of life. It is life — a life. The peacefulness is what it is in its entirety. That sums it up.”

Stephen Morris

This novella, written in 1923, was only published posthumously. Although chiefly concerned with aviation and aircraft design in the years immediately following the First World War, it also works well as a classic love story. The eponymous central character had served as an Air Force pilot during the war and on graduating from Oxford looks to aviation for a possible career. Uncertain, however, about his prospects, he breaks off his engagement to his university sweetheart Helen, explaining his predicament after a good job in rubber had fallen through: “I haven't been able to find anything that gives me the faintest chance of marrying, now or in the future.” The novel goes on to describe his progress as a mathematically-minded aircraft designer and his prowess as a pilot for a construction firm (inspired by the author's own role with Vickers). When his job eventually seems secure enough to marry, he thinks about resuming his relationship with Helen.

The author, Nevil Shute (né Norway, born 17 January 1899) grew up in London. His father famously was head of the General Post Office in Dublin during the rebellion of 1916. In 1918, after completing training at Woolwich, he was deemed unfit for an army commission due to having a stammer and instead his war service was spent on the home front as a private in the Sussex Regiment. His brother, Frederick, had been wounded in action in June 1915 and died in a military hospital in France. Like the central character of this novel, the author studied at Oxford, graduating in 1922. Also in line with that character, he worked as an aeronautical engineer after leaving university, firstly with de Havilland and then with Vickers. He wrote his first novels in 1923 (this one) and 1924 but neither were published during his life time. His third novel, Marazan, was published in 1926 and other publications followed. Having set up his own construction company in 1931, he found less time for writing. He left the company in 1938 and began to devote his life to writing and was published prolifically. He served in the Second World War both as a naval weapons engineer and an official war correspondent. He emigrated to Australia in 1950 and settled with his family in rural Victoria. His most important novels, A Town like Alice and Round the Bend were published soon after. A partial autobiography, Slide Rule, was published in 1954.

In addition to the central character, many of the other characters in the novel had backgrounds connected with First World War aviation. His employer, Rawdon, had come to prominence in wartime:
“He had merely been one of a number of gentleman of private means who had been flying and designing aeroplanes obscurely since 1909... His first machine reached the Front after a long series of delays early in 1916; the historic Rawdon Rat. As soon as the first experimental Rat made its appearance, he was organised, protesting, into a limited company and bidden to design like fun; the rank of captain in the R.F.C. was bestowed on him to save him from conscription. But no encouragement was needed. The next production was the Robin... Next came the Ratcatcher, an improved Rat... followed by the Reindeer... Last of all the machines to be used in the war came the Rabbit, a single-seater of phenomenal performance.”

Recollections of a Soldier's Life

Here’s another book that I missed along the way. Although the title suggests a short memoir, this little book, published in 1918, contains two short fictional items along with a collection of verse. The first short story, Four Soldiers, is set at Gallipoli, the formative campaign of the Australian Imperial Force, on 6 August 1915. It tells of an afternoon meal of goat curry shared by an Australian soldier and three Indian soldiers with very little English and the humorous conversation that is exchanged between them in spite of the language gap. That night the Australian with the representative name Digger (the Australian slang term for a soldier) was killed in the first exchanges of the Battle of Lone Pine. The second short story, The Game, describes an infantry assault on a German trench on the Western Front. As they rest after the assault, one of the soldiers tells his comrades “a story of a greater, more silent battle than [this] one... a story of hardship, work and privation” back in Australia.

The author, Herbert Scanlon (born 18 September 1897), grew up in rural Victoria. When enlisting in the Australian Imperial Force in July 1915, he claimed to be 21 and amended his surname to Sanlon. Serving with the 59th Battalion, he was wounded in France on 19 July 1916 and was discharged from hospital in October to return to Australia. Unable to return to farming, he set about making a living as a writer. His first publication (this one) appeared in 1918. He went on to write dozens of short stories, many of them with a wartime setting. The numerous pamphlet-style publications were sold in the 1920s by door-to-door salesman drawn from the ranks of returned soldiers, many of whom were unable to make a living in a conventional way due to physical injury or mental health conditions.

The author accurately describes the preparation for the bayonet charge on the Western Front:
“Again we get the order, ‘Fix bayonets!’ This order is the height of a soldier's ambition. What we have been trained up to is to take this order. ‘Fix bayonets!' calmly and as a matter of course. This is the moment men have waited for since enlisting. How many men have tried to picture this moment when training on the sands of Egypt? It could be fittingly described as the climax of a soldier's life. What will follow in the next half-hour is what the soldier has been trained to; and that, in a nutshell, is to kill, as quickly as possible, and, at the same time, to be careful of his own life. Is it any wonder men's hands tremble and shake as they fix bayonets to their rifles?”

Katrin Becomes a Soldier

I was not aware of this book when last year I was reading books by authors born in 1897. This impressive semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1930, takes the form of a diary of an adolescent Jewish girl. It's largely set in Metz, a historic city of Lorraine, one of the frontier regions that had at different points been part to the Holy Roman Empire, France and Germany. The actual diary — “a lovely fat one made of red leather with gilt edges” — is a present to the central character, Cathérine Lentz, for her 14th birthday (27 May 1911). When war breaks out and her male contemporaries, including her beau Lucien, leave for the Western Front, she is determined to serve in solidarity with them and volunteers to serve with the Red Cross, chiefly at the city’s railway station but also in the military hospitals. There’s no happy ending — Cathérine (or Katrin as she is known to the German soldiers she attends to) outlives most of her young male friends, including Lucien, before herself dying in December 1916 of disease contracted in a military hospital due to poor nutrition and voluntary overwork.

The author, Hertha Strauch (born 24 June 1897), grew up in the town of Saint-Avoid and then the nearby city of Metz. She used the nom de plume Adrienne Thomas, Adrienne being her middle name. During the First World War, she served as a voluntary nurse with the Red Cross. Whereas the central character of this novel opts to stay and serve in Metz when her parents leave for Berlin to avoid the air raids, the author moved to Berlin and continued her Red Cross work there. She married there in 1921 and settled in Magdeburg. Her first novel (this one) was published in 1930 and soon appeared in many translations. She went into exile in 1933 with the beginning of the Third Reich and her book was banned and burned in Nazi demonstrations. She was living in Switzerland when her second novel was published in 1934. She wrote a further ten books for publication, most being semi-autobiographical, as well as several unfinished works. In 1947 she moved to Austria with her second husband, the prominent Austrian socialist, Julius Deutsch. Although highly regarded in the German-speaking countries for many years, she has only recently been honoured in her home town due to a reluctance to acknowledge any aspect of the German occupation of Lorraine. There is now an Adrienne Thomas prize for young historians in her native Saint-Avoid.

The central character’s narration of the war is consistently pacifist. At the start of the war, when her boyfriend asks “Wouldn't you join up if you were a boy?”, she doesn't answer but records in her diary:
“I knew that I should go. This frightful war is more bearable for a man, for he knows that others will be killed today and he himself will die tomorrow.”
By February 1916, she condemns the inhumanity of the fighting going on near Metz:
“I should like to sleep but I can't go to sleep. I wish they would stop that noise out there! I can't stand it. They are attacking each other like wild animals. There! — now I hear it again. But the men out there can't be civilised human beings!”

And the votes are in...

At the end of a third year of the reading project, here are my awards —

Best novel: All Quiet on the Western Front (below) by Erich Maria Remarque
Best memoir: The Prisoners of Mainz by Alec Waugh

Best lead character in a novel: Deborah Seerlie in Deborah by Marian Castle
Best supporting character in a novel: Jack Pugh in Through the Wheat by Thomas Boyd

Best lead character in a memoir: Ludwig Bemelmans in My War with the United States
Best supporting character in a memoir: Milton Hayes in The Prisoners of Mainz