Published in Russia in 1910; published in translation by Columbia University Press on December 19, 2017
Sisters of the Cross is a novel of dark themes. Life is brutal and unfair. Love robs men of their senses. People who hold power wield it arbitrarily. “Man is born into the world and is already condemned”; sentenced to death on an unknown date with no hope of reprieve. But Alexei Remizov does offer a mild prescription of relief from the darkness: “If people studied each other carefully and took note of one another, if they were all granted eyes with which to see, then only a heart of stone would be able to bear all the horror and mystery of life. Or perhaps none of us would need a heart of stone if only individuals took note of one another.” But what are the odds of that happening?
Remizov takes note of the characters in Sisters of the Cross, seeing them through the eyes of Marakulin Piotr Alekseevich. Marakulin is unexpectedly fired from his job in Petersburg because of a bookkeeping error, perhaps caused by his kind-hearted willingness to issue paychecks to people who had not earned them. He spends his savings and sells his property, moves to a smaller room in his rooming house (the Burkov), and falls ill before he comes to see himself as liberated. His life needs no purpose, he decides; it is enough “just to see, just to hear, just to feel.” But is it?
Much of Marakulin’s attention is on the other characters who live in the Burkov. They include a woman who loves religion and the sea, a clown and his artistic brother, a woman who reads cards and is living under an unfair curse, a teacher at the girls’ high school, and two students, Vera and Verochka. Vera is a student who aspires to be a doctor while Verochka is a theater student who claims to be a brilliant actress but who is “somehow always saying different things, and you couldn’t fathom where the real truth was and what was just her imagination.” Vera and Verochka are later joined by Verushka, a 15-year-old orphan who has experienced enough abuse to last a lifetime. All of the residents have sad tales and, to some degree, are living unfortunate lives. They come and go from the rooming house as the novel moves forward, but Verochka eventually leaves for good, much to Marakulin’s regret, given the obsession that he develops for her.
Marakulin is obsessed in a different way with a general’s widow who lives in one of the better rooms in the Burkov. Obsessed as in, he wants to kill her. Marakulin nearly drives himself mad with the thought that she, “in rude good health, carefree, sin-free, and immortal, a vessel of God’s choosing, the louse, was sleeping the sweetest of sleeps.” He rejects that kind of life, “life as an absolute entitlement,” a life “with no aim, simply seeing, hearing, and feeling: the life of a louse.” He wants to feel supreme joy, and comes to believe that he can only achieve joy with the absent Verochka, “the source of his life.”
The novel’s most tormented character is Marakulin’s mother Zhenia. We learn in Marakulin’s backstory that Zhenia was used repeatedly by men who were blinded by lust. Zhenia responded by slashing crosses into her flesh with a razor.
While the arbitrary unfairness of life is a dominant theme, it is linked to “wandering Holy Russia, so meek in her wandering beggary, Holy Russia, engirdled by poverty in its pilgrim’s belt from the Bogoliubsky monastery, Holy Russia, so humble, long-suffering, and patient, who will not make her own coffin, but can only build a funeral pyre and burn herself upon it.” To Marakulin, suffering is a way of life in Russia. It is inevitable and, at least for those of unfortunate birth, unavoidable.
Readers looking for an affirmation of faith in the justice of the universe won’t find it in Sisters of the Cross. The novel’s value lies in its intricate characterizations, both of Marakulin and of the other Burkov residents. The story is bleak, and the bleakness is emphasized by Remizov’s repetition of dark phrases and sentences (and occasional paragraphs), but life for most people in Remizov’s Russia was bleak, and Sisters of the Cross is true to that sad reality.
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