Russian Tales of Demonic Possession

A very prolific writer, artist, and calligrapher, Remizov was a paradoxical figure, well known for his love of the grotesque and the comic, in both life and literature. While influenced by symbolism, he maintained a quite personal style in his writing, which over the years moved from realism, albeit with modernist tendencies (as in the novels The Pond and The Clock, both published in 1908), into an indefinable fictional world of dreams and fantasy. He was fascinated by ethnography and history, particularly Russian, and many of his works are reworkings of medieval and folk texts. A superb stylist, his ornamental prose influenced such writers as Prishvin, Zamyatin, and Pilnyak. An emigre since the 1920s, Remizov was almost totally ignored in the Soviet Union for decades, but in the Gorbachev period, several collections of his writings were issued. Translations have been appearing for a long time in the West, though these include but a small fraction of his prodigious output. For a translator, Remizov's language---rooted deeply in idiom, dialect, and folkloric or literary allusion---presents a major challenge. Rendering a substantial body of his texts into an English---adequate both semantically and stylistically---is still a task for the future, though the volume by Sona Aronian is a good start. 020