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, one of the most
influential members 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 Dostoyevsky'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.
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