Thirty-year-old Piotr Alekseevich Marakulin lives a contented, if
humdrum life as a financial clerk in a Petersburg trading company. He is
jolted out of his daily routine when, quite unexpectedly, he is accused
of embezzlement and loses his job. This change of status brings him into
contact with a number of women--the titular "sisters of the
cross"--whose sufferings will lead him to question the ultimate meaning
of the universe.
The first English translation of this remarkable 1910 novel by Alexei
Remizov, an influential member of the Russian Symbolist movement,
Sisters of the Cross is a masterpiece of early modernist fiction. In
the tradition of Gogol's Petersburg Tales and Dostoevsky's Crime and
Punishment, it deploys densely packed psychological prose and
fluctuating narrative perspective to tell the story of a "poor clerk"
who rebels against the suffering and humiliation afflicting both his own
life and the lives of the remarkable women whom he encounters in the
tenement building where he lives in Petersburg. The novel reaches its
haunting climax at the beginning of the Whitsuntide festival, when
Marakulin thinks he glimpses the coming of salvation both for himself
and for the "fallen" actress Verochka, the unacknowledged love of his
life, in one of the most powerfully drawn scenes in Symbolist
literature. Remizov is best known as a writer of short stories and fairy
tales, but this early novel, masterfully translated by Roger Keys and
Brian Murphy, is perhaps his most significant work of sustained artistic
prose.
