Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet Read online

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  Winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy awards

  August Derleth Fantasy Award

  British Fantasy Award

  Guardian Fiction Award

  Prix Utopiales

  Bram Stoker Award

  John W. Campbell Award

  SFWA Grand Master

  Member, Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame

  Praise for Michael Moorcock and Byzantium Endures

  ‘Historical picaresque on the grand scale, a vast … chronicle of tall tales, brief encounters and expert twitches on the thread of destiny.’

  —D.J. Taylor, The Guardian

  ‘I much admire Michael Moorcock’s blazing energy…. The narrative carries its enormous weight of detail ever forward like a stiff Byzantine costume, loaded down with jewels. Old ranting Colonel Pyat is a grand creation…. Altogether an opulent and steaming story, built on the scale of Hagia Sophia itself.’

  —Brian Aldiss

  ‘The master of fantastic realism has fabulously enlarged Ladbroke Grove to take in the world of Dostoevsky and the Urals.’

  —Angus Wilson, The Observer

  ‘Michael Moorcock … has moved into a new field with great adroitness and credibility with Byzantium Endures … Pyat is a mysterious source of light with which to illuminate the catastrophic events of his early life … the effect is compelling.’

  —Mary Gordon, The Times

  ‘One of the the features of this novel is the splendid way Moorcock makes us aware of the essence of his settings … all this in a tremendous rush of incidents and action. I look forward to the next volumes.’

  —W.J. Nesbitt, Northern Echo

  ‘Clearly the foundation on which a gigantic literary edifice will, in due course, be erected. While others build fictional molehills, Mr Moorcock makes plans for great shimmering pyramids. But the footings of this particular edifice are intriguing and audacious enough to leave one hungry for more.’

  —John Naughton, Listener

  ‘There are those of us who have buttonholed strangers on the Underground and raved about Moorcock’s masterpieces Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Carthage’

  —Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A master craftsman at the height of his powers. He has the energy of a Golden Age author.’

  —Iain Sinclair, New Statesman

  ‘Moorcock is perhaps the most imposing landmark left upon the British literary landscape, once one ventures past the neatly-tended suburbs of Booker-approved civilisation and into the lurid, surprisingly healthy pulp wilderness beyond.’

  —Alan Moore

  ‘Moorcock seemed to be a kind of twentieth century Alexander Dumas—a man with a huge gift for simple storytelling … Now in Byzantium Endures, he extends his range still further … a long, wonderfully detailed, lovingly reconstructed picture of a particular society and an individual sensibility … puts Michael Moorcock straight into the front rank of contemporary English novelists.’

  —Robert Nye, Guardian

  ‘I think about the loopy ancien fascist Pyat as the ultimate comedic character, a literary anti-Charlie Chaplin.’

  —Andrea Dworkin

  ‘A writer of rare goodness and sanity.’

  —The Sun

  ‘Moorcock is elegant and aggressive, consistently entertaining, and frequently wise and generous.’

  —Spectator (UK)

  Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

  Michael Moorcock

  © 2012 by Michael Moorcock

  This edition © 2012 PM Press

  Introduction © 2012 by Alan Wall

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-491-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927976

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Bibliography reprinted with the kind permission of Moorcock’s Miscellany (www.multiverse.org)

  Project editor: Allan Kausch

  Copy editor: Gregory Nipper

  Cover by John Yates/www.stealworks.com

  Interior design by briandesign

  Copyright © Michael Moorcock 1981

  Cover photo by Linda Steele

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PM Press

  P.O. Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  PMPress.org

  Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

  www.thomsonshore.com

  Dedicated to the memory of Babel and Mandelstam.

  For Ernst, a father, and for Josef, a brother

  FOR JILL

  A facsimile page from Pyat’s manuscript (see p.3)

  Contents

  MAP

  LIST OF DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  INTRODUCTION BY ALAN WALL

  INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  Byzantium Endures

  APPENDIX A: The Manuscripts of Colonel Pyat

  APPENDIX B: A Brief Account of the Russian Civil War

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  MAPS

  Dramatis Personae

  MAXIM ARTUROVITCH PYATNITSKI (DIMITRI MITROFANOVITCH KRYSCHEFF)

  Narrator

  YELISAVETA FILIPOVNA

  His mother

  CAPTAIN BROWN

  A Scottish engineer

  ESMÉ LOUKIANOFF

  A friend

  ZOYEA

  A gypsy girl

  PROFESSOR LUSTGARTEN

  A schoolmaster

  FRAU LUSTGARTEN

  His wife

  SARKIS MIHAILOVITCH KOUYOUMDJIAN

  An Armenian engineer

  ALEXANDER (‘SHURA’)

  Maxim’s cousin

  EVGENIA MIHAILOVNA (AUNT GENIA)

  Maxim’s great-aunt

  WANDA

  Her poor relation

  SEMYON JOSEFOVITCH (UNCLE SEMYA)

  Maxim’s great-uncle

  ESAU

  Slobodka tavern-keeper

  MISHA THE JAP

  Slobodka gangster

  VICTOR THE FIDDLER

  ISAAC JACOBOVITCH

  LITTLE GRANIA

  BORIS THE ACCOUNTANT LYOVA

  Denizens of Esau’s tavern

  M. SAVITSKY

  A drug-trafficker

  KATYA

  A young whore

  KATYA’S MOTHER

  A whore

  H. CORNELIUS

  A dentist

  HONORIA CORNELIUS

  An English adventuress

  ‘SO-SO’

  A Georgian revolutionary

  NIKITA THE GREEK

  Maxim’s friend

  MR FINCH

  An Irish sailor

  SERGEI ANDREYOVITCH TSIPLIAKOV (‘SERYOZHA’)

  A ballet dancer

  MARYA VARVOROVNA VOROTINSKY

  A student

  MISS BUCHANAN

  Her ‘nanyana’

  MR GREEN

  Uncle Semya’s agent in St Petersburg

  MR PARROT

  His assistant

  MADAME ZINOVIEFF

  Maxim’s landlady in St Petersburg

  OLGA AND VERA

  Her daughters

  DR MATZNEFF

  Tutor at the Petersburg Polytechnic Institute

  PROFESSOR MERKULOFF

  Another tutor

  HIPPOLYTE

  A catamite

  COUNT NICHOLAI FEODOROVITCH

  PETROFF (‘KOLYA’)

  A Petersburg bohemian


  LUNARCHARSKY

  A Bolshevik

  MAYAKOVSKI

  A poet

  ‘LOLLY’ LEONOVNA PETROFF

  Kolya’s cousin

  ALEXEI LEONOVITCH PETROFF

  Her brother

  ELENA ANDREYOVNA VLASENKOVA (‘LENA’)

  Marya’s flat-mate

  PROFESSOR VORSIN

  Head of the Polytechnic

  HETMAN PAVLO SKOROPADSKYA

  A puppet dictator

  ATAMAN SEMYON PETLYURA

  Effective leader of Ukrainian Nationalists

  GENERAL KONOVALETS

  Commander of the ‘Sich Riflemen’

  VINNICHENKO

  Ukrainian Nationalist leader

  POTOAKI

  Ukrainian Bolshevik

  MARUSIA KIRILLOVNA

  Ukrainian Bolshevik

  SOTNIK (CAPTAIN) GRISHENKO

  Hrihorieff officer (Cossack)

  SOTNIK (CAPTAIN) YERMELOFF

  The same

  STOICHKO

  Cossack officer

  BRODMANN

  Socialist ‘liaison officer’

  NESTOR MAKHNO

  Anarchist leader

  CAPTAIN KULOMSIN

  A White infantry officer

  CAPTAIN WALLACE

  Australian tank commander

  MAJOR PEREZHAROFF

  A White commander

  AJEWISH JOURNALIST

  In Arcadia

  MADAME ZOYEA

  An hotelier

  CAPTAIN YOSETROFF

  White Intelligence officer

  MAJOR SOLDATOFF

  Maxim’s CO

  CHIEF ENGINEER OF THE RIO CRUZ

  A fellow spirit

  OTHER CHARACTERS INCLUDE

  KORYLENKO (a postman); CAPTAIN BIKADOROV (a Cossack); whores and entertainers in Odessa; whores, entertainers and artists in St Petersburg; revolutionaries in St Petersburg; Cossacks (Red, Black, White); policemen, Chekists, naval officers, army officers, ‘Haidamaki’ soldiers, beggars, a drunken couple, the Jews of a shtetl near Hulyai-Polye, the inhabitants of a village in the Ukrainian steppe, and, off-stage, LEON TROTSKY, DENIKEN, KRASSNOFF, ULYANSKI, PRINCE LVOV, KERENSKI, PUTILOV, JOSEF STALIN, STOLYPIN, LENIN, ANTONOV, SIKORSKI, SAVINKOFF, CATHERINE CORNELIUS, H.G. WELLS.

  Introduction to

  Byzantium Endures

  Pyat

  At the beginning of Dombey and Son, Dickens informs us that Paul Dombey Senior is forty-eight years old, and Paul Dombey Junior forty-eight minutes. The book was published in 1848. Dickens was telling us that we were looking at the progress of the century, witnessing its signature both big and little, majuscule and minuscule. This was the last moment of time. It always is, of course. The most ambitious novelists try to tell us what it might mean to be here, at the most recent moment experienced on earth, perched on the bleb of our temporal glacier. The writer and artist constantly remind us: we are positioned at the meeting-point between all preceding millennia and the future we are stepping into, at this very second, even as we write, even as we read. Right now.

  Colonel Pyat, Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, we are informed at the beginning of Byzantium Endures, was born at the same instant as the twentieth century. His function, we soon realise, is to be that century in singular human form. He witnesses and endures its wars and revolutions, its persecutions and atrocities, even its frequently opprobrious states of peace. Pyat is twinned with the century at the moment of his nativity, and accompanies it year by year on its egregious itinerary, until he drops dead in 1977. But even here a query arises, and we are forced to note something before we have turned many pages: Pyat appears able to match the century in mendacity. There is no way to compute these things since no machine has yet been invented with a big enough memory, but it is possible that the twentieth century was the greatest period of lies in the history of our species (so far). Lies were manufactured, along with bombs and Zyklon-B, on an industrial scale and, twentieth-century man that he indubitably is, Pyat is right up there with the most gargantuan misleaders. The literary device known as the Unreliable Narrator might have found its apotheosis here, and this begins, appropriately enough, with the data concerning his birth. No sooner have we been assured that the old rogue is Gemini-twinned with the century itself, than we immediately have doubts placed before us on this very score. We are alerted, right from the start then, that nothing here is to be taken for granted. The more vehement Pyat is in his protestations of truthful sincerity, the more we are forced to doubt him. And we might feel we are entitled to ask why Michael Moorcock has chosen this manoeuvre: what, in other words, is the function of Pyat’s unreliable narrative? What is its design upon us?

  This volume begins with an introduction in which Moorcock explains how he encountered the narrator, and how he subsequently came to be in possession of his manuscript. The old boy owned a shop on the Portobello Road in Notting Hill. This frame-story device allows the author to situate the narrative within a larger overall narrative, the story of the story. And the most important single item here is the chronology. Pyat is born along with the century and dies in 1977. He is Russian, although the precise details of his genealogy remain a matter for conflict and confusion. He comes to manhood during the Great War, the October Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, and he lives the rest of his life in a world divided up between capitalist and communist blocs. It will be more than a decade after his death that the Berlin Wall falls and Soviet communism starts to collapse. Although the final volume of the Quartet was published long after the collapse of the USSR, it was something Pyat himself never lived to see, though he would have undoubtedly applauded with great vigour as the stones of that mighty edifice began to tumble down.

  So he lives his life in a world divided up between two grand ideologies and his denunciation of communism and all that it represents, its distortion of the Russian soul, is uncompromising. He is born into the world of high imperialism and lives on into a world of multinational companies and global finance capital. And his attitude to it all? Well, Pyat denounces just about everything at one point or another; this is part of his undoubted fascination. His attitude to the world around him and everyone in it is opportunistic. He exploits his various environments and ecologies with Darwinian vigour. He has turned being unprincipled into a matter of principle, and grandly justifies everything he does, however atrocious his behaviour might actually be.

  The Form of the Novel

  When T.S. Eliot reviewed James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1923, he said that the traditional novelistic form was dead; that the chaotic and shapeless quality of modern life meant that the anticipated narrative bagginess of the novel could no longer suffice as a means of approaching and describing it. He recommended instead Joyce’s ‘mythical method’, in which a form was borrowed from antiquity and applied to contemporary urban experience. This was the modernist manoeuvre. Yet Byzantium Endures represents the survival, in novelistic form, of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Iain Sinclair has spoken of ‘the dynamism of a nineteenth-century master’ and the word picaresque has been used more than once to describe Moorcock’s method. Let us pause for a moment and consider precisely what is being said here.

  It is fair to say that Moorcock shows no real interest in formal innovations in fiction. So great is his commitment to narrative and characterisation, and so monumental is his appetite for global data, that he simply leaves the form of the pre-modernist narrative in place. Had he found any of the formal questions of fiction seriously problematical, then he could not have produced his vast output. You can’t agonise over voicing or the philosophical implications of the free-indirect style and still produce fifteen thousand words a day. So our author leaves the old structures in place and trusts that they will be sufficient for his purpose, which they turn out triumphantly to be. It’s probably the case that more contemporary authors now stand with him on this than stand with James Joyce and the fissiparous text. The obvious comparison might be two great ni
neteenth-century writers: Flaubert and Balzac. Flaubert tormented himself over the meaning of style, and finally published six books; Balzac charged on, gathering historical data and storylines the way a magnet gathers iron filings, and ended up with a bibliography whose size bears respectable comparison with Moorcock’s own.

  So what about the picaresque? Well, appropriately enough, picaro is the Spanish word for rogue. And the picaresque novel traditionally follows a socially deviant figure through a series of episodes in which realistic technique is employed and in which the only unifying factor is the presence and character of the protagonist. That does not seem like a bad way of describing the Pyat Quartet. Don Quixote might be the single best-known example of this mode. The old Don is patently off his rocker, though there is a certain grandeur to his delusion that he is pursuing both honour and romance as he mistakes the world once more. So what of Pyat?

  Why Pyat?

  Let us put the matter bluntly and at its most troublesome. Why create a figure so morally murky, so intellectually dubious, so devious, mendacious and self-serving and then let him romp across the twentieth century for four sizeable volumes? Why create a character who, after the Holocaust, still denies his Jewish identity? Before or during it, such a denial might be understandable as a practical response to worldly advancement; a deceitful variation on the manoeuvre by which Disraeli’s family had themselves baptised— a smart move at the time if you were planning on becoming prime minister. But after Auschwitz? Why is Pyat so virulent in his denial of Jewish identity in an age when others have queued up to acquire a little of it, however genealogically vestigial?

  Pyat is as old as the century, as we have noted, but then how do you date a century, and why? Our secular divisions announce cultural identities. The Russian Revolution happened in October, but only according to a calendar we no longer employ. An enormous amount of history takes place in the Quartet, but we can never trust Pyat to tell us the truth about it. The titles of the volumes announce the fact that he believes he sees beyond the sordidly contemporary: Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands and The Vengeance of Rome. These titles announce long continuities, cultural genealogies stretching through centuries and millennia. And we should surely note that we are given the word God four times on page one. Pyat is never shy in appealing to the Almighty, who he seems to assume will always keep a place for him in His divine heart. So Pyat as a creation is prophetic in one respect at least: he believes in the clash of civilisations, he believes he has God’s ear, and he is utterly unscrupulous in pursuing his own ends, wherever they might lead him.