The Clock

by Aleksei Remizov

Алексей Михайлович Ремизов (1877 - 1957) — русский писатель, один из наиболее уникальных стилистов в русской литературе.

212 pages

First published January 1, 1908

About the author

Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov (Russian: Алексей Михайлович Ремизов; 6 July 1877, Moscow — November 26, 1957, Paris) was a Russian modernist writer whose creative imagination veered to the fantastic and bizarre. Apart from literary works, Remizov was an expert calligrapher who sought to revive this medieval art in Russia.

Remizov was reared in the merchant milieu of Moscow. As a student of the Moscow University, he was involved in the radical politics and spent eight years in prison and Siberian exile. At that time, he developed a keen interest in Russian folklore and married a student of ancient Russian art, who brought him in contact with the Roerichs.

In 1905, he settled in Saint Petersburg and started to imitate medieval folk tales. His self-professed ambition was to catch "the bitterness and absurdity of folklore imagination". Remizov's whimsical stylizations of the saints' lives were ignored at first, partly due to their florid and turgid language, but his more traditional prose works set in the underworld of Russian cities gained him a great deal of publicity.

In his satirical novel The Indefatigable Cymbal (1910) Remizov depicted the eccentricities and superstitions of rural sectarians. Another striking work of this period is The Sacrifice, a Gothic horror story in which "a ghostly double of a father comes to kill his innocent daughter in the mistaken belief that she is a chicken".

By the time of the Russian Revolution, Remizov had concentrated on imitating more or less obscure works of medieval Russian literature. He responded to the revolution by the Lay of the Ruin of the Russian Land, a paraphrase of the 13th-century work bemoaning the Mongol invasion of Russia. In 1921 he moved to Berlin and then in 1923 - to Paris, where he published an account of his attitudes towards the revolution under the title Whirlwind Russia (1927).

During his years in exile, Remizov brought out a number of bizarre works, featuring demons and nightmare creatures. The writer also developed a keen interest in dreams and wrote a few works on the subject that involved prominent figures of Russian literature (Gogol, Dostoyevsky and others). Although he was so prolific that many of his works failed to find a publisher (in fact, from 1931 to 1952 there was not a single book published), Remizov was also the first Russian modernist author to attract the attention of the luminaries of the Parisian literary world, such as James Joyce. His reputation suffered a decline when, following World War II, he announced his interest in returning to the Soviet Union and even obtained a Soviet passport (which he did not have a chance to use). After that, Remizov was abhorred by the émigré litterateurs, the most famous of whom, Vladimir Nabokov, used to say that the only nice thing about Remizov was that he really lived in the world of literature. 1952-1957 saw a number of Remizov's books published, though only a very limited number of copies was printed.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aleksey Remizov was a tremendously powerful writer of the Nikolai Gogol’s school and he influenced practically all the Russian modernistic literature at the beginning of the twentieth century – such giants as Andrey Bely and Boris Pilnyak were his faithful pupils.
Time has neither beginning nor end but it is a beginning and an end of everything…
The Clock is a symbol of time – a merciless machine of apocalypse reigning over man’s doom.
“No man, no creature – the clock possesses the power of change and it sends forth days and nights – all belongs to it – all that darkness and hell – and he will kill time – this damned, damned time – he’ll kill it, he will set himself free and he will set free the world.”
But time is indestructible and while trying to destroy time one just ruins oneself.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clock: Fantasies, visions, timelessness vs society, suffering, routine. White Heart & Betrothed: Shorts that add little.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic novel from one of the most underrated russian writers

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a great example of late 19th and early 20th Century Russian literature. Remizov is no Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, even if he does a decent enough job--as they do--of highlighting just how terrible and bleak Russian life has been for a good two centuries or so. Remizov has little else to say, and not much insight into the essential human soul the way some of his fellow Russians do, although he does capture some of the essential Russian spirit well enough in a few places.

Skip this one and read Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov instead.

[Sara G · Rating 4 out of 5]

This left me feeling so off kilter and forlorn.