Vlas Doroshevich could not stand tyranny in any form and in his tales he availed himself of complete freedom to mock, to despise, and to accuse the authorities for their wickedness, hypocrisy, and stupidity. These tales could be written by and for rebellious "anti-establishment" youth of today

  

Vlas Doroshevich, What the Emperor Cannot Do, Trans. by Rowen Glie and John Dewey, GLAS New Russian Writing, 2012.

These tales could be written by and for modern, rebellious “anti-establishment” youth of today. The anti-establishment feeling is probably universal, timeless, and starts with Adam and Eve. Whatever their subject, Doroshevich’s tales are unexpected, exciting, colorful, and tremendously readable. They are a mixture of fantasy, irony, and often despair, caused by the fact that between men in power living in the complete isolation of an “ivory tower” and the ordinary people there exists a corrupt bureaucracy – an “establishment.” Any effort by a man in power – an “Emperor of China” or a “Caliph” – is always thwarted by his own “establishment” created to execute his orders. The “Emperor” or “Caliph” are kept so far from reality by their own underlings that the most obvious solution of a problem often escapes them. Any chance for a better solution devised by the ruler himself or his corrupt “establishment” results in greater suffering of the very people the change was supposed to help. Doroshevich was born in Ryazan province into a wealthy upper class family, but his mother Alexandra Sokolova was disinherited by her family for marrying Vlas's father, an unsuccessful writer who died shortly before Vlas was born. When Vlas was six months old his mother who had two other children and was struggling financially, abandoned him and he was adopted by a childless couple by the name of Doroshevich.
At the age of sixteen Vlas withdrew from school and left home. After a short spell as a laborer he found work as a proof-reader and actor. During the 1880s he became a skillful journalist and critic, writing for the popular papers, which also employed the young Anton Chekhov. In 1893 he moved to Odessa to work as a reporter for the Odessa Flyer, a local paper with a large circulation. In 1897 he traveled to Sakhalin as part of a larger international assignment. He recorded his experiences and impressions in his book Sakhalin (published in English translation by the Anthem Press as Russia's Penal Colony in the Far East.) From 1902 to 1918 he was made the editor of the major paper Russian Word raising its circulation to one million. His travels in the East produced a book called Legends and Fairy Tales of the Orient. His best known work The Way of the Cross (1915) is an account of the refugees from the German invasion of Russia during World War 1, in August and September of 1915.
Even though he was rich, Doroshevich welcomed the Russian Socialist Revolution of 1917. The censorship of the Soviets turned out to be no less strict than the censorship of the Tsar. Fairy tales, however, did permit him to talk openly about the many wrongs that could not be discussed in a newspaper article under either regime. Doroshevich could not stand tyranny in any form and in his fairy tales, he availed himself of complete freedom to mock, to despise, and to accuse the strong and the rich for their wickedness, hypocrisy, and stupidity. - www.glas.msk.su/

Styled as Oriental tales, these parables are unexpected, exciting, colorful, and tremendously readable. Vlas Doroshevich could not stand tyranny in any form and in his tales he availed himself of complete freedom to mock, to despise, and to accuse the authorities for their wickedness, hypocrisy, and stupidity. These tales could be written by and for rebellious "anti-establishment" youth of today. Doroshevich's works were often banned during the tsarist times and then finally banned completely under the Bolsheviks. This great Russian writer, who was a friend of Anton Chekhov, is only now being resurrected from oblivion. This is the first English translation of his tales.

"Today's reader may find these very short stories a little repetitive and heavy-handed in English, with their stream of overblown honorifics and hyperbolically stressful narrative situations. Some of the tales are neatly absurd" - Barbara Heldt
What the Emperor Cannot Do is a collection of tales, legends, and parables that Doroshevich wrote in imitation of a variety of 'Oriental' tales. There are 'Chinese Tales', 'Arabian and Other Tales', and 'Indian Tales", and not the least of Doroshevich's accomplishments is how well he imitates the different styles and approaches and uses them to his own ends. The tales are relatively simple and straightforward, but often with beautifully twisted morals. So, for example, many of the Chinese tales feature a well-meaning Emperor who is entirely cut off from the masses he rules, and whom corrupt advisers mislead about the actual state of the nation. In one tale the emperor pities the unfortunates who, on a rainy day, don't have a hat to cover their heads with; his underlings (and their underlings) rectify the situation -- by beheading anyone who doesn't have a hat, allowing them to then assure the emperor that: "In all of Peking there is not one Chinese who does not have a hat to put on his head in the rain", leaving the emperor overjoyed at how prosperous all his subjects are.
That nice hard edge to the moral of the stories comes even where the main character has all the information in hand -- but still takes a different lesson from it than what one might have expected to be the obvious one. In 'The Good Emperor' the emperor actually ventures out in disguise, and sees for himself that his viceroys' reports of the great prosperity of his subjects is entirely a lie, and that the people are poor and miserable -- but in a nice twist of 'Oriental wisdom' the emperor does not choose the obvious (but admittedly previously ineffective) path of replacing the corrupt officials...
Written in Tsarist Russia, much of Doroshevich's attack is directed against the bureaucracy and misrule of that age, but his tales remain surprisingly universal and timeless, exaggerations and parables that reflect (sadly still pervasive) truths. There are also fortuitous coincidences for the contemporary reader, such as an Arabian tale in which elected Arabs threaten to undermine the domination of the ruling class -- viziers here -- by actually promulgating laws. The viziers know this threatens the very foundation of their power:
They'll pass a law that it is light by day and dark at night. That water's wet and sand is dry. And people will be convinced it is light by day not because the sun shines, but because those children of misfortune, elected Arabs, have ordained it so. And that water is wet and sand is dry not because Allah created them like that but by order of the delegates. People will come to believe in the delegates' wisdom and omnipotence. As for what they will come to think of themselves, only Allah knows!
The way the viziers assure that the laws don't quite have the desired impact is absolutely inspired, and the story resonates particularly nicely in this post-'Arab Spring' time of piecemeal democratization in much of the Arabic world.
Doroshevich's light, deft touch -- there's no preachy moralizing here -- and clever variations on age-old ideas make for an inspired collection. It's rather stunning that these stories only now appear in English translation; fortunately, they easily hold up more than a century after they were written. As the editors observe in their Introduction:
His parables stylized as Oriental tales are timeless. They sound as topical today as they did in Doroshevich's time.
Another very nice (re)discovery from Glas.- M.A.Orthofer

Russian writer and journalist Vlas Doroshevich is not the only writer of parablelike stories exploring issues of justice and power who died in the 1920’s and whose work seems to illuminate the much darker period of history that followed his death, when the liquid that smoothed the grinding wheels of bureaucracy was revealed to be blood. Doroshevich’s writing doesn’t approach the spare and unique precision of Kafka’s that has been so influential in modern literature, yet in many ways his work is even more pessimistic.
What the Emperor Cannot Do: Tales and Legends of the Orient, published by Glas New Russian Writing, is comprised of short stories organized into categories of Chinese, Arabian and Indian tales. The different groupings allow Doroshevich to focus on different aspects of the themes of justice and power, with the Arabian tales, for example, giving him the opportunity to provide a theological angle to his explorations.
The story “Without Allah,” features a perplexed Allah in retirement asking why people keep referring to him now that he no longer exists. The story is strongly reminiscent of Aleksander Wat’s “Lucifer Unemployed,” where the former prince of darkness has to pound the pavement looking for work in an unbelieving modern world.
In Doroshevich’s writing profundity is never far from a near slapstick, black humor redolent of Russian writers such as Ilf and Petrov, Bulgakov as well as a Polish writer like Wat. A story titled “2 x 2 = 4 ½” begins, “With the Arabs, my friend, as you know, everything is invariably Arabian.”
While the Chinese stories have some similarities to Kafka’s parables, the Indian stories have a greater resemblance to the Oriental Tales of Marguerite Yourcenar. The stripped-down parables of injustice become fleshed out with exotic description and mythological flavor. Yet while Yourcenar keeps to a lofty tone in her evocative stories, Doroshevich maintains his irony, satirizing the figures he depicts with exaggerated reverence.
The Chinese tales are the strongest in the collection, and in many respects, the darkest. In many of these stories the all-powerful emperor is revealed to be virtually powerless, often himself the victim of the power he supposedly wields. Not only aren’t the emperors able to bring happiness and justice to their subjects, but the tangled webs of power prevent them from doing something as seemingly ordinary as traveling out of the palace into the streets of Peking.
In the “First Outing” the Emperor San Yanki is constantly attempting to venture into Peking, and everyday someone in court, whether the Court Astronomer, Court Historian or Chief Eunuch, offers up a reason against going. Realizing that his trip is being prevented by his scheming prime minister the emperor does some scheming of his own. He has himself declared dead, with his only posthumous wish being that he is brought to his burial on the very couch he died on, thus allowing him to peer out through his nearly closed eyes and finally see the city. What he sees and hears is a poverty and bitterness attributed to this same scheming, corrupt prime minister.
When the emperor reveals his trick the sight of the pale, frightened prime minister leads one to suspect that justice will win out. But then the courtiers began objecting that the emperor, once declared dead, must stay dead or otherwise risk the very dissolution of the social order and China itself. In the end the emperor agrees, allowing himself to be buried. The new emperor is so impressed by the hated prime minister that he not only retains him but gives him added power. The story ends with the prime minister executing the courtiers who had convinced the emperor to remain dead – “As he said himself, they were all far too wily for their own good.”
As whimsical as these stories are they have a cumulative effect that borders on despair. Doroshevich deftly manages to vary them in terms of the plot twist while continuing to hammer the point home that justice is unobtainable on heaven or earth.
What comes across isn’t that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but the much more interesting idea that absolute power is like a mirage, or rather, like the proverbial oasis that is the form mirages supposedly take. Oases really exist in the desert and so does power in the human world, yet what looks like power from a distance often turns out to be something else while the real sources of power can prove hard to locate and be even more problematic to contain.
Another unusual feature of the book that perhaps shouldn’t be unusual at all is reading Russian stories that seemingly don’t have anything Russian about them. All the well-known signposts are absent –sleigh rides through freshly fallen snow, vodka-fueled gambling binges, a blushing French governess cantering off into a copse of birch trees, duels, renunciations, nihilism and the rambling soliloquies of revolutionaries drunk with self-hatred.
Yet as you read the stories of inaccessible justice, fruitless sacrifice and kindness that kills, it becomes easier and easier to project them onto the reality of Tsarist Russia that they came from, not to mention the Bolshevik reality that finished their author off.
In “The Green Bird” the Great Vizier’s attempt to shift focus from punishing evildoing to preventing it leads to a hilarious story of society of informers where people’s innermost thoughts become targets of suspicion, a foreshadowing of Soviet reality that would reach its depths long after Doroshevich’s death. The story includes an Ostap Bender-like con man named Abl-Eddin, who convinces the Vizier to adopt his scheme of getting at people’s true thoughts.
Abl-Eddin’s plan begins with all the emperor’s subjects in Tehran receiving a parrot as a pet. In the dark as to the young trickster’s plans, the Vizier visits the first of his parrot-owning subjects and asks him if he is content. Following his pat answer, Abl-Eddin has the parrot brought over, feeds him, which causes the bird to blurt out “The Great Vizier is a fool! The Great Vizier is a fool!”
The parrots become the society’s de facto informers, which compels the people to ask Abl-Eddin for a way to manipulate the process so they can keep their heads attached to their necks. He suggests they kill their parrots and buy new ones (from him, of course), teaching them to say “Long Live the Great Vizier! Abl-Eddin is the benefactor of the Persian people!”
When popular discontent begins to rise, due in part to all the unemployed spies, the Vizier is prepared to get rid of the young con-man, but is convinced to ride through the streets and hear the people’s true thoughts, convincing him that he is beloved and that no changes need to be made.
Manipulating public opinion and ending up baffled and manipulated yourself is a feature of Russian political life (and obviously, not only Russian) that continues to this day, giving Doroshevich’s stories an ongoing relevance in his native country. The fact that justice seems as inaccessible as ever and that often the only bearable reaction to this is laughter makes these stories comprehensible, vivid and refreshing everywhere else on the earth as well. - literalab.com/


Vlas Doroshevich, Russia's Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich's "Sakhalin",  Trans. by Andrew A. Gentes, Anthem Press, 2011.

Russia's Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich's "Sakhalin" is the first English language translation of the Russian journalist Vlas Doroshevich's 1903 account of his visit to tsarist Russia's largest penal colony, Sakhalin, in the north Pacific. Despite the publication of Anton Chekhov's account of his visit to Sakhalin in 1890, many Russians remained unaware of the brutality and savagery of the devil island'. In 1897 Doroshevich, Russia's most popular journalist, travelled to Sakhalin and spent three months touring the island, interviewing numerous prisoners and officials, and recording his impressions. The feuilletons he wired back to his publishers were eventually collected and published in book form in 1903, under the title Sakhalin (Katorga).

Doroshevich's book was enormously popular when it first appeared, and it continues to be published in Russia, as a historical record of the striking barbarity of late nineteenth century penal practices. Despite this popularity, it has never before been translated into English, and Doroshevich remains largely unknown outside Russia. This translation introduces English-language readers to an important writer and original stylist who defined journalistic practice during the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution, by way of a book which helps explain the causes for that revolution.

'Offers a grim picture of the underworld of czarist Russia. Recommended.' —D. Balmuth
'Andrew Gentes has done a masterful job of translating the “journalese” in which Doroshevich described the unique culture that prisoners created in the process of forging an existence from so baleful an environment. […]Doroshevich launched a career that made him the most influential journalist in pre-Revolutionary Russia from these vignettes, and Gentes’s translation makes evident why.' — The Russian Review
‘Andrew Gentes has here produced the first annotated English translation of Doroshevich’s Sakhalin articles, collated and published in Russia in bookform first in 1903 and, as such, it is a useful contribution to the anglophone literature on Siberia as a whole.’ —Alan Wood