Fear in the World - Introduction
If Corrado Alvaro is known to the English-speaking world, it is for his most famous novel, Gente in Aspromonte, which was translated into English as Revolt in Aspromonte (the part of Calabria he came from – the very toe of the Italian peninsula). This successful title published in 1930, and strangely one of Mussolini’s favourites – led to him being categorised as a “regionalist” author.
He was in fact not only a highly cosmopolitan intellectual, as his other writings demonstrate, but also a successful novelist and journalist throughout the fascist period, or as successful as could be expected under a regime that was not amused by his antifascist statements.
He emerged from that period as someone who could well have expected great success, but like the talented Sicilian writer, Giuseppe Borgese, his face didn’t really fit in that new world (you could say that this should be part and parcel of being a novelist). Both were individualistic writers and often perceived as very similar, though Borgese was more controlled in his narration, whereas Alvaro was bolder in his expressionism and innovative technique, and is generally considered to be one of the founders of magical realism, whose roots go back to the interwar period in Europe. He died in 1956 and by the eighties his star appeared to have fallen, but fortunately it has been rising in more recent times.
Fear in the World was published in 1938 (a decade earlier than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) and written after he had travelled in the Soviet Union, principally in 1934. No characters, countries or cities are mentioned by name, but we know that it’s set in Russia. The man “with a low forehead” and a black moustache is clearly Stalin and he remains a distant figure because Alvaro is fascinated by the quasi-religious nature of the personality cult, but the northsouth divide seems more appropriate to fascist Italy than Soviet Russia which is more of a west-east country. The civil war which is still being waged doesn’t reflect the historical facts of the Russian civil war, but this is an imagined reality however much his travels may have influenced him. In this fiction, Alvaro is more interested in the meaning of events. And of course he was writing against the Fascist censors.
Fear in the World is not Alvaro’s only work on Soviet Russia; the other is The Masters of the Deluge (I maestri del diluvio), a non-fiction which is best described as a collection of essays on Russia over a period, unlike the travelogues he wrote on Germany and Turkey. This is very useful to any study of this novel, as we can see how the two books match up, and what he really thought about subjects merely suggested in the novel. There is also evidence of his interest in Russia and its culture as far back as 1920, when he edited a collection of Russian short stories, and wrote its preface. The attraction appears to have been literary, but his attitude was complex. Russian literature was “the greatest modern literature”, and yet it “conserved its infantile smile.” It “always had a humanity to it, which makes our humanitas look weak and pale.” The reference to humanitas was possibly a barb against himself, by education a classicist. However, the Russian author, unencumbered by past and ancient glories, “didn’t sympathise with the people, nor did he love them; he shared their loves and respected what the people respected. He himself was the people.” Moreover, “he didn’t know the truth”, whatever that may mean. There is a degree of European aloofness in Alvaro – as I will examine later in the context of how other peoples are presented – but clearly he felt that there was something important to learn from the Russians, which becomes clearer when he turns on his own country and its literature in this same preface. Italian writers in “this little country” create characters influenced by Russian literature, “arrayed as though on a boat moored along the seashore” where they “have lost their context, their strength and their primitive warmth,” thus reducing that this literature to something amounting to little more than run-of-mill realism. “We have our bourgeois literature too: Nero is fed up with being a tyrant and has converted to Christianity, and Ulysses tells us that his story was all a pack of lies and he’s bored to death.”
We should remember that this is the youthful Alvaro, and here the appeal of rhetoric often detracts from the analysis, but it is an excellent starting point for understanding the dystopia set in Soviet Russia, which would be published seventeen years later once he had grown to know the country better.
Fear in the World is the original title Alvaro chose; it says exactly what the book is about. But the censors imposed their own title, Man Is Strong, which in spite of its ugliness has stuck and is still the title used for recent editions (to revert to Alvaro’s original one would only confuse people in Italy). The relationship between the explicit and the implicit was better understood by the Nazi German censors who simply banned the book.
Alvaro isn’t so much interested in why the politics of fear is used as in how the populace seem to be unable to resist its irrational pull and indeed participate in its allure even when reason tries to steady their nerves.
Homo sapiens, in spite of what that fancy name for ourselves implies, is a highly irrational animal, or so Alvaro clearly thinks and current events tend to reaffirm his view. Not only the content of the novel but the whole way he goes about narrating this novel (and to some extent not only this novel) is itself an expression of the way we think or the way he thinks we think. In part there is a form of free indirect discourse: the narration reflects the inner thoughts of the character currently front of stage. But Alvaro has many colours on his palette, as he also puts thoughts into inverted commas (these are perhaps more structured, conscious thoughts rather than settled prejudices and unconscious thoughts). A translator should be wary of interfering with such devices, because they are clearly carefully thoughtout. He also has thematic repetitions that reflect items and obsessions important to the central characters.
This is particularly true of Dale, the male protagonist and dominant figure, whose hotel room will become very familiar to whoever reads this novel. Its furniture and even more so its ornaments left over from a previous era appear to have a life of their own, though of course it is Dale who confers this inner life on such objects, which have a somewhat judgmental attitude to what they witness (that verb is actually used by Alvaro), as do the buildings which are affronted by the way they’re now crowded out with tenants and by the general “carry-on” that surrounds them: “Every object conserved its own spell against time and events – consisting of a secret now unknown to all, and immortal as are immortal the precise forms of objects that outlive human beings. The clock on the mantelpiece, the yellow, leather armchairs and the curtain that separates the room from the recess containing a bed looked like exhibits in a museum.”
Alvaro isn’t interested in the fact that stately buildings are overcrowded because the Tsarist regime never bothered about the question of housing its population, which had in any case been mainly rural. Fear in the World is a political novel only in the sense that all novels are political: he is interested in the psychology and what we so often refer to as the human condition, but really the human condition in the interwar years. This is as true of this novel published just before the Second World War as it is of his first one, The Man in the Labyrinth, which was published in 1921, just after the First World War. If you think that this suggests a degree of nostalgia in the novel, you would be right but it is nostalgia close to that of Joseph Roth: it is relative nostalgia rather than the dreamy nostalgia of a perfect past; perhaps it is not so much nostalgia as a powerful sense of being decidedly unimpressed by the post-war reality and its own self-image. At the beginning of the book, Dale goes to his own country’s stand at an international exhibition and sees the statue of a man and a woman that is little more than a Socialist- Realist cliché. One carrying a hammer and the other a sickle, these two builders of the future are proudly and fearlessly marching in lockstep with progress. Dale however is very impressed and when he receives a postcard from Barbara, who had already returned to their country, he decides to end his exile as well. He arrives as an engineer fully acquainted with Western technology and brimming with self-confidence and unwilling to understand the signals he receives in a society with which he has lost all familiarity. He is not entirely unprepared and comes armed with various items likely to fascinate those unaccustomed to Western affluence (which was not actually there in the midst of the Depression). When the narration suggests that this was not planned, it is only expressing Dale’s disingenuousness.
For all his airs of cosmopolitan nonchalance, he is a man of instinct and sometimes a fraud (as the highly symbolic watch will demonstrate as it changes hands bringing dangers to whoever touches it). He is tainted by his extended sojourn outside the country’s borders and Barbara is the daughter of a couple executed by a mob for their Combatant sympathies during the Civil War (for “Combatant”, you can read “White”, but the two contenders appear to be remarkably similar). They both vacillate between attraction and terror at what this attraction could mean. One night he leaves her house keen to put this relationship behind him and conform to what is expected of him. “Well it would be as though none of this had happened once he’d reached the door of his hotel and his room. He would be at peace with the world, and from that day on he would behave like everyone else.” The reader feels better informed of his destiny and the mechanisms that will lead to his downfall. Because of the way the novel is structured, we later re-examine his trip home and discover that he decided to place a wager with Fate on the outcome of this ordeal: “He came across a militiaman on duty, and in his heart he promised that if he passed unhindered, he would become a different man. He was not stopped. The militiaman was seated on a low wall, and his uniform was the colour of dawn. He watched Dale go by, and the sound of Dale’s footsteps echoed as they went; surely the whole city could hear.” He is capable of great courage, generosity and morality, but also of inexplicable violence, insensitivity and a compulsion to bend to the crowd. He is a human being. Later, following a betrayal by Barbara (I’ll say no more than that), he is on the run as he passes by her home, and the reader knows this because it is opposite a building site with scaffolding previously described, but Dale’s unconscious rejects this reality, suggesting that she lives elsewhere (polymathic Alvaro’s knowledge of psychology is interwoven with the narration, as in this suggestion of a mental defence mechanism). That same evening, having walked to the city’s perimeter, he “smelt the city’s odour of the stable and human habitat. He sensed its warmth, also that of a stable, and he felt that it could revive him. What had Barbara been for him if not a nucleus of warmth that helped him to live? Or a warm reflection of life or even the essence of life itself? He quickened his step” back to her house, in spite of the dangers involved. Such a man had not been trained to survive in Stalin’s Russia.
Often the same scene is approached from more than one narrative viewpoint, and this relates to another important theme in the novel: the malleable and unreliable nature of human memory.
On his trip back to Barbara’s home, he thinks that he has come across some steps which may or may not have been the ones he walked down with her. This is strange because he has obsessed about these steps throughout the novel as the formative moment in his relationship with Barbara.
And she is as erratic as he is, and far more damaged. She cannot resist the temptation of exotic objects, starting with the green smock. We know that in her past she heard her parents being murdered in the next room and she had a short, probably unhappy marriage. She has found equilibrium in her dull life through work and a solitary life outside work. Her distrust of men is overcome by Dale’s apparent sophistication and easygoing self-esteem. Perhaps they don’t so much fall in love with each other as with some kind of Platonic form (in part I mention this because in other contexts the author does refer to Plato’s philosophy). Dale appears to find in Barbara the idea of the Socialist-Realist woman that had seduced him at the exhibition: “that body didn’t belong to him or any other man, not even to the shadow of that woman, like an impediment, a form or way of existing in this world. Her hands reminded him of work, her breast reminded him of nurturing and her face reminded him of the recognition of that living creature amongst the great confusion of beings.” At one point, he even says that she resembles a Greek statue. Yet she does not resemble the steadfastness supposedly represented by the statue in the exhibition, whatever physical resemblance she may have had; she is in fact a timorous soul incapable of making a decision, but like Dale she is capable of spontaneity. In her case, however, this is momentary and relatively rare. The author often compares them to teenagers, very probably reflecting a subservient attitude to the “paternal” or “patriarchal” regime.
The other principal characters are referred to by their roles: the Director, the Secretary and the Inquisitor. Each fulfils a role in this society that the author considers to be in some way typical and illustrative. Minor characters have names which are Italian and not Russian, so I have made them English.
Unsurprisingly there are in this novel elements of received ideas typical of the time. Consider that during the interwar years, even a great intellectual and man of the left like George Bernard Shaw could write these lines: “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive” and “if we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture, we must exterminate the kind of people who do not fit into it.” There is nothing in this novel to compare with those terrifying words, but some of Alvaro’s assertions have to be confronted. Dale has a jailor called Isidore, and this is how he is described with more than a hint of the nineteenth-century pseudoscience, phrenology, which continued to have some currency in the first half of the twentieth century: “Isidore was not old, but the features of his face and the form of his skull were the ancient ones that reproduce themselves untiringly. He was an ancient man, and without doubt he would have had the same face and the same expression as a youngster, just as he would conserve them in old age. This is what happens to working people, who have the eternal youth of a clay figurine.” According to the shifting narrative technique, these could be Dale’s views, but such views appear elsewhere and need to be examined. When Dale and the Secretary go to a musical event whose principal act is a Gypsy11 choir, the narration introduces the female singers: “They had coarse terracotta faces, and the women were tall and brown with translucent eyes. Seven women from the fantasy and infancy of the world, who sat in their festive clothes, wrapped up in their shawls, with their heads held high. Their hands, hips and breasts were distinctive” This breath of orientalism was typical of its time, though never universal. I am intrigued by it because it draws very heavily – sometimes with the same words – from an article Alvaro wrote for La Stampa and published in March 1935. Not Dale, but definitely Corrado Alvaro. Like all novels, this one is a snapshot of how the author saw the world at the time, and his ideas in the post-war period would no doubt have been different. This aspect of his writing is more noticeable because of his humanity and empathy – albeit cloaked in an understandably pessimistic view of the present and the future.
The encounter with the Gypsy musicians in the novel is the backdrop for Dale’s evolving and fascinating relationship with the Secretary who he finds both repulsive and frightening. In a society built on lies, her fantasies find traction. She plays on people’s fears and thus the character has a fundamental role in expressing the author’s ideas about fear, alongside the Inquisitor. In the social psychosis suffered by Russia at the time, the absurd could never be treated as absurd because it was a serious danger to the citizen and had to be treated carefully. Here Dale is uncomfortably present at an event primarily to ingratiate himself with her. On more than one occasion, physical proximity comes close to a sexual relationship, but he holds back. In this state of agitation and alienation, Dale suddenly shouts out “Let the enemies of the people die,” a slogan he has heard at a public demonstration. This is an entirely instinctive act, a howl that comes from a desperate desire to conform. He doesn’t know what he has said, and it only reveals itself to him slowly. This explains why no one reacts: given the content of what he has said, no one can do anything and the singers continue to sing uninterrupted: “He thought that the change in him was so great as to mutate his entire nature: he had become at one with the Inquisitor and the woman next to him and the crowd itself.”This is not a unique event in the novel, but it is the most explicit. Dale’s inner life is as turbulent as his composure appears to nonchalant and self-confident – until the end when that exterior falls away. This is where the greatness and complexity of this novel rests. Alvaro continues to comment in his inimitable style: “Dale’s scream was his way of revealing his voice to himself, as though it were unknown to him, and in the moment that he both articulated and listened to his own scream, he measured the extent of what he could not express, of the being that was asleep within him, something invisible that hurls itself at invisible things.”
Throughout the novel, Alvaro enumerates parts of the body as though to underscore the physicality of our existence and our closeness to animals, while still emphasising the complex, erratic nature of our human psyches.
This is not just the regime; it is us. Continuing to comment on this momentous scream, he writes, “He could understand all of himself, body and soul, through an expression of sounds, and these sounds were all the voices of existence, just as a musical instrument contains weeping, anger and laughter within its seven notes. It was the revelation of his whole physique – his lungs, his heart, his stomach – and he regretted the passing of its purity.”
Robert Dale (whose forename is used only twice in the novel) is very different from Winston Smith (the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four), who also has a relationship with a woman which plays a part in their clash with the state. Winston is naive like Dale, but morally upright. Dale lives a privileged life and has quite a bit on his conscience. In fact, he leaves a trail of destruction behind him, but it is only in his humiliation towards the end of the book that he starts to feel guilt. When he is caught by the Partisans, the first thing they do is beat him up methodically as though it were job that had to be done: “Dale realised that blood was gushing down his face, and he didn’t know where from. He touched himself and looked at his bloody hand. He didn’t feel the slightest urge to hate them; he was only humiliated, as though he hadn’t only touched his face, but also the features of a grand and generous personage – these were perhaps the very features of nature. … One of the group muttered to his comrade, ‘Wouldn’t it be best to just bump him off? That way he’ll stop talking this nonsense.’ In that moment, he computed just how little it would take to destroy a life, and he felt this could happen to his own life in no more than a breath of air. This brought back a distant memory of pointless and absurd actions and events, and of the slow and assiduous manner in which his parents and school teachers set about destroying what would have been truly useful to him, that is to say his instinct for violence and duplicity. And this voice of his that would ordain his end seemed to him to be vigorous, genuinely strong, human and superior. … He had a clear idea of his life and a very distinct one of his guilt. Up till then he had never been aware of his crimes in his rush to save himself. It had all been contained by that instinct to flee, and now his sense of guilt was being awakened by those blows to the head delivered with great diligence as though someone wanted to expunge a sculptor’s work while the clay was still soft.” This is not just powerful writing; there is also the psychological precision that divides his literary work from his journalistic. This is the description of a middle-class man brought up to believe in his superiority and blind to his misdeeds big and small, who has never imagined that he could be roughed up by those beneath him. This is a dystopian novel that doesn’t want to teach, and the author doesn’t “have to have any purpose or aim”. Dale is no more of a victim than anyone else. This is not some future conjured up to warn us; it is the depressing present as it was then in twenties and thirties Russia, Italy and much of the world. It is difficult to believe that when he wrote these lines, Alvaro did not think of his friend and mentor Giovanni Amendola who died in 1926 as the result of a brutal beating he had received from Fascist squadristi a year before. Amendola of course was nothing like Dale, but art for Alvaro was not about representing ideals or autobiographical references, it was about revealing the complexities of our lives through a poetic and allusive prose.
I have mentioned the materiality of life, the physicality of the person and the animal nature of humanity which pervade this book, and this is backed up by an endless number of people being compared to animals (there is a thematic, figurative and symbolic cohesion to the novels of Alvaro and Borgese, and perhaps more widely in Italian literature of the time, and it may have dated back to some of the works of Giovanni Verga in a less emphatic form). Here are just some examples: “Isidore observed [Dale] as one observes an animal that is trying to make amends for his presence,” “the Partisans … felt that they’d trapped an animal with very off-putting habits,” “He was of a colour and complexion that you often find on shepherds and all those who live for a long time in a state of chastity: something pearl-like and transparent, with innocent eyes like those of a young cat,” “Those footsteps whose rhythm he recognised with the same feelings of an animal in the forest which, while its instincts keep watch, can hear through its sleep the obscure presence of a being that could inflict harm,” “His mother [was] tied to the home with the sated look of an animal in its lair, unaware of evil and free from surprise and remorse,” and “Then, taking advantage of that astonished silence, she entered and took away her creatures without a sound, like a cat.” And then a metaphor relating young boys to the vegetable world: “they can feel themselves growing with the mysterious sensitivity of plants.” Alvaro was brought up in small village and his maternal grandfather was a smallholder, so he would have had the opportunity to observe the behaviour of animals.
Orwell seems to be an almost obligatory comparison given the way he dominates the history of the dystopia (quite rightly so, although we should also remember Yevgeny Zamyatin, the dapper Bolshevik who tore up his party card in disgust two or three years after the revolution, and whose We was supposedly the first dystopia, though he in turn was influenced by H.G. Wells).
Perhaps surprisingly the parallels between Fear in the World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are many: both are anti-Soviet, but not in a particularly informed way. If we want to know about the mechanics of the purges, we turn to Victor Serge, Arthur Koestler and, for a later period, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Our two here are dystopias proper and not witness novels with a very different purpose. Both have a forbidden love story at their centre. Both attribute great importance to the interrogator (Orwell’s O’Brien and Alvaro’s Inquisitor, a name that is also outdated in Italian and reflects the religious theme) who delight in philosophical and political arguments with their victims (a little like the philosopher-policeman in Crime and Punishment). Both seem increasingly omnipotent, though in both books the workings of repression are ramshackle and survive principally on the persuasive force of fear and a crowd mentality. In both books the male protagonist is not initially a rebel. They want to be accepted but something innate in their characters makes this impossible. And in both cases, their muddled, halfcocked rebellion is useful to the system. Surveillance and the abuse of language are other common themes. And finally and quite bizarrely (or perhaps not, given that an interrogation must take place somewhere), both books have a room: Orwell’s “Room 101” and Alvaro’s more
modest but never discovered “Room No. 3”.
These were two very different authors: Orwell was a dedicated political activist first and foremost. He andMI5 agreed on one thing, that he was a communist fellow traveler before going to Spain. It was the Spanish Civil War that turned him into a ferocious critic of the Soviet Union. Alvaro was a poet and literary figure first and foremost (though both authors were prolific journalists as well). O’Brien could be Beria, but the Inquisitor seems to come from another century. Anyone with a little knowledge of twentieth-century politics could read Animal Farm and recognise Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik old guard, but apart from Stalin this is not the case in Fear in the World, and there seems to be little to distinguish the two sides to the civil war. There is a great deal more plot in Orwell’s dystopia, which is a much more conventional novel. In Fear in the World, the same dialogue occasionally recurs in different parts of the book to demonstrate that the novel doesn’t evolve in chronological order. It is a more literary work in the sense that a great deal of thought has been put into its structure and the way the story is told. At the risk of over-defining this work, I have to say that it is an experimental novel, but one that is surprisingly accessible. A good combination.
The Director, who may in part be the author’s alter ego, makes an interesting statement on literature: “In my opinion writers don’t have to say anything, nor do they have to have any purpose, or aim at any particular result. Look at the classics. The business of teaching something to someone was a dismal one – not for artists. Today civilisation and progress offer so many forms of teaching that art could be dispensed with. Art is the artist himself.” If that is Alvaro’s manifesto for this book, then it confirms my hunch that this is an open text designed to make readers think about these matters and come to their own conclusions.
I have attempted to reprise the language of Corrado Alvaro, which here is standard Italian but more specifically the language of nowhere. This is a significant element in magical realism which has both geography and none – in this case it is Russia but isn’t. There is no attempt to give a flavour of Russianness (and of course the country isn’t mentioned by name, but hovers in the background like scenery in a play). Linguistically this is liberating and provides the author with room for invention. That freedom can also be enjoyed by the translator, though a translation can never free itself of the original if it wishes to remain a translation. The relative freedom in translation is restricted to how the tone of the original is reproduced in another language, a task that is not that different from the business of writing a novel set in a country where the author’s language is not spoken – a situation where the use of accent and dialect is never an easy solution. This freedom was an exhilarating experience precisely because it came with its own challenges, principally the one of keeping both the readability and innovation of the original style within an entirely different syntax – that of our own language which, like every other language in the world, has its own forms of inflexibility.
Magical realism works so well in this particular work of Alvaro’s because it allows him to write about Russia, modernity everywhere and to some extent and yet again that difficult business of being a human being.
I first read the novel to assess it for translation and was immediately convinced that it is an exceptional work of literature and perhaps the missing piece in the dystopian jigsaw, but when I was translating I started to have second thoughts. Don’t misunderstand me, the translation was very enjoyable, but I had doubts about whether the novel would work in English, and even that my assessment of the original had been wrong – that I had missed serious flaws in the work. Translators work through a novel at a slower pace, lingering on every clause as they reimagine it in another language, and they are like painters obliged to work too close-up to the canvass because that’s where they apply the paint. Painters, at least, can take a few steps backwards and assess their work, but this opportunity is not open to the translator who must push on until the end, sometimes unsure whether it is worth the effort (but at this stage there’s no turning back). Only once I was reading through the completed translation did I realise that my fears had been unwarranted. I am now convinced that Fear in the World does work very well in English and that it brings to anglophone readers and writers many possibilities in terms of style, structure and technique that they could enjoy or imitate. Although written at a time when the content was highly topical, it feels like this is the book that puts those terrible years into their historical context. Possibly Alvaro was unaware of the enormity of those crimes, but now this only adds to the power of the work which mainly concentrates on the psychology of fear which has since been repeated elsewhere on various scales. It is perhaps an inherent part of modernity in a world where the technological means of control and manipulation are becoming ever more sophisticated. If so, Fear in the World can continue to make us think.
Allan Cameron, Glasgow, June 2020