Breaking Through Historical Oblivion: A Review of Sergei Lebedev's "The Goose Fritz" (2019, New Vessel Press)
Sergei Lebedev’s novel The Goose Fritz, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, consists of many historical layers. The intertwining of historical events and sequences does not promise a positive outcome, but rather, it creates fatal patterns in the life of one family over the duration of two centuries, woven into the socio-historical and anthropological context of the Russian Empire and then, later, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. It should be noted that for Russians the name “Fritz”, historically speaking, is more than just a name: it was a pejorative term commonly used on the frontlines by Red Army soldiers in World War II, as well as by British soldiers in World War I, to refer to the Germans. This is just one of the many semantic keys to interpreting and understanding the novel.
The main character, Kirill, is a historian and researcher. The story begins with two introductory plot themes, the first being a metaphorical description of the storm that “tears down and carries off everything that has faded and died, as well as everything that was just born and has not yet grown strong or well fastened: the remains of the past and the fruits of the future.” This metaphor is not accidental: an adventure in a torrent of historical turbulences with an unlikely predictable result should be expected. The second is Kirill’s childhood recollection of a Red Army sergeant, a veteran of World War II who lived in the same village where he used to spend his summers. The sergeant drank heavily and during his binges, he would become mentally unhinged, regularly hallucinating about the German soldiers with whom he sought to get even. One day, he finally brings his longstanding grudge to an end by strangling a gander named Fritz at the village pond.
Up until his teenage years, Kirill and his grandmother Lina would go to the German cemetery in Moscow every year where her mother, Sofia Uksusova, was buried. The cemetery always seemed to him like an unfamiliar world of hidden symbols and lost meanings, unwritten stories of monuments. Kirill is deeply moved by one particular stone book with no letters on its pages for he “felt a vague challenge coming from it: the one who has the right can read it.”
With his grandmother, Kirill would also go to the Donskoy cemetery, yet he couldn’t see how the two were connected. During one of their visits to the German cemetery, Kirill’s grandmother takes a new shiny piece of steel wool scrubber and, to his surprise, approaches a stranger’s monument and starts rubbing the tombstone to reveal firmly carved letters in German. “Schwerdt. I used to avoid saying the name, even to myself. They all died because of it. Papa. Mama. My sisters and brothers. Gustav and Andreas. Everyone.”
This is how Kirill learns that the real name of his grandmother was Karolina Schwerdt who “took her husband’s name the way people put on other people’s clothes that make them unrecognizable, in order to be saved, in order to escape.” The secret of the Donskoy cemetery is also revealed: there, in the unknown grave, are the remains of Kirill's great-grandfather Arseny Schwerdt, one of many thousands of those who had been executed, burned in the crematorium, and buried on its territory during the years of Stalin’s purges.
This is how the story of the tragic fate of several generations of one family of Russian Germans unfolds: starting in the nineteenth century when the first of them, Balthasar Schwerdt (as one of the three wise men – Caspar, Balthazar, and Melchior) arrives in Russia, and continuing up to the tragic events of the twentieth century: events that none of the Schwerdts were able to avoid or break free of. Here it is worth bringing one more possible reference to the readers’ attention – the word ‘Schwerdt’ (from the German ‘Swert’) is a metonymic occupational name for a sword maker.
Leaving the underworld of Erebus,
The souls of people who had left life came to the pit.
Women, youths, old men who had seen much grief,
Tender maidens, feeling grief for the first time,
Many men fallen in cruel battle, with wounds from sharp spears,
In bloody pierced armor.
This horde of the dead thronged to the blood from everywhere ...
(The Odyssey, Homer)
Over the years, Kirill works steadily and makes a name for himself as a historian. When he receives the Harvard stipend that brings the prospect of work and residency, he comes to the realization that he will not return to Russia.
He goes to the cemetery to bid farewell to his grandmother when he finds her grave marble stone split in two – the fissure separated the first name from surname and birth date from death date. Taking it as some cosmic sign, Kirill decides that he will not go abroad: he decides, instead, to fill the empty pages of the book “about people leaving old ties behind and moving into the unknown. Secret heroes of history, invisibly harnessed to its reins. The ones whose destiny is a letter in a bottle. About those whose actions determine the destiny of subsequent generations.”
And so Kirill commits to investigating Balthasar Schwerdt’s life. When his messianic passion led him to Russia to promote then-new homeopathy, Balthasar thought to change the Russian people. Instead, it was he who changed and became a hostage–that is, a hostage of his own illusions in the land of non-illusory tragedies. Fate was not merciful to him: after his failure, he didn’t return to Germany and ultimately stayed behind in Russia. Kirill finds out that one of the major reasons for this was that Balthasar had been living with guilt over the loss of his younger brother Andreas, a midshipman in the Russian Imperial Navy who had tragically died; eaten by savages in the Marquesas Islands. To make things worse, after the Russian crew discovered his mutilated and decapitated body, he was marinated in a barrel, brought to Kamchatka, and buried there. The rumors spread and a legend about ‘The Marinated Midshipman’ was born but there was no mention that he was German.
Balthasar’s seven daughters’ fates ended either in the late nineteenth or the early years of the twentieth century. The life of his only son, Andreas, who was named after Balthasar’s younger brother takes Kirill on the road of tragic life events of the Schwerdts in the twentieth century, the family of his great-grandfather Arseny Schwerdt.
To understand the fate of both Arseny and his children in Bolshevik Russia, one must understand that it was predetermined by Russian prejudices regarding all Germans. That is, a German was both a German and also the Russian image of a foreigner in general. And even worse, a Russian German was not simply a foreigner but “your own alien” who could read you “like a book, he knows all your secrets and weak spots, all the levers of the national character; you are absolutely defenseless before an enemy like that.” Nothing could save Arseny's children from Balthasar's family fate. With the outbreak of World War I, any bearer of a German surname was doomed not just to a common practice of public distrust but social restrictions imposed by the state through a series of various types of prohibitions which laid the foundations for all subsequent decades-long before the Bolsheviks and became a breeding ground for the birth of totalitarianism.
Throughout his investigation, Kirill sees “how a repressive state arose, how the public was willing to praise terror, keep looking for ‘aliens’, turncoats, agents of evil who were the cause of the all the country’s ills: there wasn’t enough bread and the kerosene lamps blew up. If not for the history of spymania in the last years of the empire, it was not clear why people in the Stalin era slid so easily into the madness of mutual denunciations, approving mass arrests and demanding bigger and more frequent executions of ‘enemies of the people’.”
And the seeds of that evil were sown in the tsarist times. First, there were the Special Committee against German Dominance, Special Councils, and Special Commissions of the tsarist rule. Later on, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK) was founded by the Bolsheviks, changing its name and growing new fangs – OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB. How was it possible to stay alive in a totalitarian state where the scale of violence was so great that it ceased to be a means but instead turned into what Vasily Grossman, the author of Life and Fate called “an object of mystical, religious worship, rapture”?
All of Balthasar's descendants were fed to that illusory monster, the fate “that had historically appeared in images of a multiheaded German Hydra, encircling Russia, drinking its pure national blood, stealing its capital; in images of the fascist Hydra, sending in spies to penetrate the Soviet Land, poison wells, suss out the black hearts of traitors, and weave nets of treachery and lies.”
Arseny's children were not spared – the twentieth century didn't take pity on any of them. His sons were killed in WWII. The Red Army captain Gleb Schwerdt was captured as a POW near Kyiv in the summer of 1941 and joined the Russian National People's Army that collaborated with the Germans against Communist Russia. The German counterintelligence suspected he was a Soviet spy, tortured and shot him in 1942. His brother Boris, a major in the Red Army who'd rejected his father and taken his wife's surname Morozov, was charged with espionage for Germany and executed in 1942. Two sisters Antonina and Ulyana Schwerdt, Boris's wife Marina, and their two daughters died during the blockade of Leningrad.
In Volgograd, Kirill established the fate of Arseny's third son Mikhail who had been lost during the civil war. Mikhail was adopted by a commander of the Red forces that defended Tsaritsyn in the Civil War, became a son of the regiment, received a new name Vladilen, a contraction of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, fought in the Battle of Stalingrad in WWII – “a local Stalingrader. Russian, that's for sure,” according to the Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad curator.
Karolina was the only one who seemed to escape the curse of the Schwerdt’s. She got a new name, having married Kirill's grandfather Konstantin Vesnyansky. He was part of special units in the Chief Administration of War Spoils of the Red Army, scouring and marauding mansions, museums, and galleries of the occupied territories, bringing trophy art for the Soviet grandees. Karolina Schwerdt, an interpreter, was assigned to Konstantin’s unit – daughter of an enemy of the people, she would keep her mouth quiet. During his childhood, Kirill saw that his grandfather had many nondescript visitors, art dealers. There was one person who was not one of them. That was a man with whom his grandfather was particularly servile and submissive, the strange and unknown guest who would visit him every once in a while…
And there was also someone else of whom Kirill learned in a Berlin retirement home, from the former field chaplain of the Wehrmacht Dietrich Schwerdt, another Vladilen, “as if by God’s grace one man was allowed to live two lives: the Nazi priest Dietrich Schwerdt and Communist officer Vladilen Ivanov.” That someone was the liaison between Dietrich and the Soviet counterintelligence, first in the POW camps after Stalingrad and later, in occupied Eastern Germany under the Stasi: “There is no God. But in some room on the second floor, there is always Lieutenant Colonel Kibovsky, reading your personal file. History is Lieutenant Colonel Kibovsky. That is its name.”
And that antique bronze clock that Kirill's grandfather kept on his desk with a scene depicting silver dogs chasing a deer and a golden hunter on its top holding a dead bird in his right hand – Sergeant, Guest, and Hunter merged into one single figure.
And Kirill recalled the guest and slowly breathed out the syllables of his name – the KGB general who was his grandfather's patron.
The fate of Goose Fritz in Russia following its publication is rather unusual. In an interview with radio 'Deutschlandfunk', Sergei Lebedev – who now lives in Germany – said that it was “as if [the novel] suddenly disappeared”. But this is hardly surprising for a country that still hasn't managed to free itself from the tight grip of those who founded the punitive machine of Stalin's ideology that suppressed any kind of freedom. Their successors and followers have been ruling the country into the twenty-first century. The only thing that has changed is the name of their organization, one time after the next, from VChK, OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB to FSB – and no repentance, no penance for their past followed, let alone the fact that even the church that had been persecuted in Bolshevik Russia merged with this regime into a single entity today.
Even though we hardly expect Kirill's investigation to turn out promising in the end, we cannot help but follow the path of desire and persistence to reveal the truth that has been hidden for so many decades; we would like to see ourselves among those who seek to break through the historical oblivion that stands in the way of what gives us the right to be called human.
Erbarme dich (II), from 'Solitudinem', 2005-11
Review and photo by Dmytro Kyyan