ARKADY AVERCHENKO’S STORY «THE BLIND MEN»: A Nietzschean Humorist in Search of Truth
Аркадий Аверченко / uain.press
Contemporaries called him the «king of laughter». But, to be precise, Arkady Averchenko was the king of Ukrainian laughter, though he amused readers in the Russian language. Much like the Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol before him, and the Ukrainians Ilf and Petrov after him. Gogol’s famous «laughter through tears» found a peculiar continuation in Averchenko’s work.
A literary talent that blossomed in southern Ukraine gained worldwide resonance. Averchenko’s humor is easily translatable into any language. Even during his lifetime, he earned fame as a major European writer. Let us take a look behind the scenes of the Ukrainian master of short prose, guided by Averchenko’s brief story The Blind Men.
LIFE AS A PARADOX
T
he terrible and the comic walked hand in hand in his fate from early childhood. His mother was a «kind, gentle woman,» despite being the daughter of a notorious bandit. She was born in the Poltava region, where her father kept an inn. In his autobiography, the writer recalls how his maternal grandfather «robbed travelers on the highway without the slightest pang of conscience».
Averchenko’s father, trying to feed young Arkady and five other children, attempted to run a business, but in the end went bankrupt. The writer explained it this way: «My father was a very good man, but an extremely bad merchant». Humor is always a paradox, an unexpected combination of the incompatible. And that was exactly what filled the Ukrainian childhood of young Arkady.
UKRAINIAN «ODYSSEY»
He began wandering across Ukraine «for a crust of bread» at the age of sixteen. Sevastopol, Donbas, Kharkiv, Kyiv… Work in a transport office, in accounting, as a clerk in a mine… Apparently, his father’s genes hindered his professional career. The management’s verdict was unequivocal: Averchenko was a good person, but a hopeless worker! Especially since it was usually his sharp tongue that gave his superiors the hardest time.
The only gift fate could give him — and did — was a writer’s career. Yet even that did not spare him from worldly discomfort and endless wanderings: after Ukraine came St. Petersburg, Istanbul, the Baltics, Sofia, Bucharest, Berlin, Paris, Prague… Perhaps it could not have been otherwise — Arkady had the gift of noticing what others passed by.
THE FUNNY MIRROR OF AN ERA
At first, he was a master of the short story with an unusual plot twist and vivid details. But, like the sea reflected in a drop of water, his best miniatures reflected the entire era. Alas, this reflection did not please everyone — especially the authorities, of any kind: imperial or Bolshevik. Even Averchenko’s first literary successes in Kharkiv were cut short for the same reason as his job in the Luhansk mining office.
In 1905, for his «artistry», the authorities fined the publisher of the satirical magazine Bayonet a hefty sum, and the publisher refused to pay Arkady. Later came other publishing ventures, the most significant of which were the St. Petersburg magazines Dragonfly, Satirikon, and New Satirikon.
A NIETZSCHEAN HUMORIST
Yet the good-natured Ukrainian humor in Averchenko’s works gradually evolved. His view of the world and of human nature grew increasingly dark. However, this only made his satirical attacks sharper, brighter, and more uncompromising. His humor, like a scalpel, dissected the surrounding reality, and the power of his denunciation was such that critics, quite seriously, compared him to Friedrich Nietzsche in terms of his impact on minds.
At the height of his fame, Arkady also achieved commercial success — a moment his father could have been proud of, for in publishing, his son proved to be quite a capable entrepreneur. Over the course of seven years, Averchenko’s book Merry Oysters was republished 24 times! None of his contemporaries in literature could boast of anything similar.
TO THE EMPEROR — A REFUSAL, TO MARX — A BURIAL
The power of laughter made him equal to the mighty of this world. When Emperor Nicholas II, wishing to meet Averchenko in person, invited him to the palace for dinner, the «king of laughter» denied the Tsar of All Russia this pleasure. No writer before him had ever dared show such disrespect to the imperial crown!
Arkady regarded the 1917 Revolution as a revolt of stupidity and rudeness against common sense and universal values. From that time began his satirical «crusade» against Bolshevism. «Karl Marx. 1818. Born in Germany. 1918. Buried in Russia» — this caption under Marx’s portrait in New Satirikon expressed in the briefest possible way Averchenko’s view of Soviet reality.
A STAB IN THE BACK OF THE REVOLUTION
His satirical masterpiece A Dozen Knives in the Back of the Revolution, published in exile, had the effect of a bombshell. It was indeed a blow to which Soviet propaganda was forced to respond. They could not completely erase a writer like Averchenko from the literary process, so they began spreading the myth that in emigration, he had written himself out and degenerated. That this was far from the truth is proven at least by his final novel, The Patron’s Joke.
Arkady Averchenko died on March 14, 1925, in Prague. Before his death, the writer bequeathed that his body be placed in a coffin specially designed to make it easier to transport his remains back to his homeland. Averchenko firmly believed this would happen soon: Soviet absurdity could not last long! And, judged by the scale of history, he was right.
AVERCHENKO’S «THE BLIND MEN»
In delivering his satirical diagnoses of various socio-political phenomena of the 20th century, Averchenko, unfortunately, proved all too often to be right. Despite its brevity and simplicity, the story The Blind Men is a parable in which the writer seeks to explore the true nature of power. Is it enough to be a good person to succeed as a ruler, leader, or businessman? It would seem that even the biographies of Averchenko himself and of his father tell us that being a good person is not a profession. But the most frightening thing is something else: the road to hell, it turns out, is paved with good intentions.
The royal throne is a place that distorts those intentions beyond recognition. Power bends them not because a person is evil, but because such is the very nature of the power of a hierarchical social system built on dominance and subordination. The image of the «blind man» in the story is no accident. It refers us to the Gospel of Matthew 15:14 — «Leave them: they are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch».
Averchenko’s story is about the inevitability of blindness for all: for those «at the top», for those «at the bottom», and even for those «on the sidelines», namely, the creative intelligentsia. Yet we should not be too quick to accuse the writer of social pessimism. Averchenko was compared to Nietzsche by his contemporaries for a reason. Like Nietzsche, he relentlessly confronts us with the same question: «What is a human being, truly?» And the answer, we must seek on our own.
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