著者

阿部 賢一

出版者

北海道大学スラブ研究センター

雑誌

スラヴ研究 (ISSN:05626579)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.52, pp.99-117, 2005

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There are many writers who write in a different language from their native one. This bilingualism is a political intention which reveals the power balance of languages; not a few writers choose a more major language over a minor one. Nikolaj Terlecký (born in Saint-Petersburg in 1903, died in Zurich in 1998) is one of the exceptions in this regard, for the reason that he made a decision to write his works not in Russian, his mother tongue, but in Czech, his acquired second language. Generally speaking, we could call him simply a "Russian émigré who wrote in the Czech language." But this is not the only reason that his name rarely appears in references to "Czech literature" or "Russian literature in exile." In this paper, the author tries to define the place of Nikolaj Terlecký within the broader context, especially by discussing his final work Curriculum vitae, published in Prague 1997. In order to understand this autobiographical text, we should also understand his whole life. The life of Terlecký was characterized by certain changes from one pole to another: dwellings, languages and nationalities. After spending his childhood in Saint-Petersburg, he settled in the Caucasus where his father served in the Russian Army. With the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, he tried to join the White Army despite the fact that he was still 14 years old. It was not long before he had to move to Istanbul with other soldiers. In 1921, Russian refugees in Istanbul received an offer that the government of Czechoslovakia would accept them as political refugees. This financial support made it possible for Terlecký and other Russian students to move to Moravská Třebová, a germanized village in Czechoslovakia. Since the financial support for Russian refugees in the early 1920s was focused particularly on education, with the aim of sending educated Russians back to Russia, Prague was known as the "Russian Oxford"; the city where the academic élite of the Russian empire congregated. For the émigrés, there was a choice to be made: should they abandon their Russian identity and try to assimilate? Or, should they attempt once again to find a new and welcoming place of residence? Among these identity problems, Terlecký regarded Russia, his motherland, as "Atlantis," i.e. "a beautiful place, but one which has already disappeared." He tended to join Russian literary circles such as "Skit poetov" organized by Alfred Bem. Nevertheless, his first novel provoked no reaction from Russian friends; Terlecký had to seek other stimuli in Czech society. In the early 1940s, when Prague became a protectorate of the Reich, Terlecký encountered many Czech intellectuals such as M. Majerová, V. Nezval, J. Dudl, and others. These figures, influenced by Russian trends, sought a private teacher of Russian and found Terlecký to be a good one. This encounter posed Terlecký with the dual difficulties of his reception in Czech society. For example, Majerová as a representative activist was willing to translate his Russian texts to Czech, to help to find a publisher for his first work and to find a job as a translator for Z. Fierlinger, the first Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia after World War II. Unfortunately, the critics did not know how they should categorize Terlecký: he was neither a Czech writer, nor a Soviet one. At that time, it was impossible to call him a Russian writer in exile for political reasons. This is one reason why the relationship with these representatives of Czech socialist literature forced him into a tight corner. After the coup d'etat in 1948, most of his ex-friends became official representatives of Czech culture and simultaneously severed their connections with Terlecký. These circumstances left him in a very difficult position, because he was on the "black list" of Czech literature, but he did not belong to Soviet literature. His second exile to Austria and Switzerland would be interpreted as a quest for liberty or a search for his own identity, called only by his name. Since he could not assimilate into the Czech community, he was forced to find his own land. As Jan Vladislav says, Terlecký made a choice to "be a stranger in the unknown place, even though he became a stranger in the homeland where he was adopted." This reflects on his choice of language; the choice of the Czech language is connected with the ideal that Czechoslovakia as a democratic state would not eliminate the possessor of different thoughts. In the late 1940s when assimilation into the Russian community had already become chimerical, Terlecký could not continue to write any more in Russian, which to him signified merely a piece of nostalgia. On the other hand, Czech was the language of the place where he was adopted; Terlecký attempted to write in Czech and continued to do so until his final years. This is no longer a question of assimilation; however it reveals the question of identity as "an émigré," not that of ethnicity. Thus we could treat him as a denationalized writer, i.e. as a writer who transcended the categories of a particular national literature. He concludes Curriculum vitae with this passage: "as everybody has his own fate and his own fingerprints, no one will have the same fate." It would be less productive to categorize him in the so-called "literature in exile." Similarly, it would be less important to cram him into the "national" literature such as "Czech" or "Russian in exile." The importance of Nikolaj Terlecký lies elsewhere. Terlecký goes beyond such categories. His works show us the possibility of reading and that of perception. In order to compare this aspect, it would also be useful to mention an affinity with the theory of "the quest for multiplicity" which Alexis Carrel evoked in Man the Unknown. In this respect, Curriculum vitae is not a mere autobiography but a text where the writer tries to maximize his own ego, especially representing many alternatives in his life, particularly an alternative called "exile."