The Tsarist Emigrants
A translation from Joseph Roth (1894-1939)
Zachary Suri
This feuilleton by the great Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth is one of nearly two dozen from a trip he made to the Soviet Union in 1926. It appeared in German in the Frankfurter Zeitung on September 14th, 1926, likely written a few months earlier. My translation is based on archival work with the original at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library) in Leipzig this summer sponsored by the Jehiel R. Elyachar Foundation. Roth’s journalistic German is conversational and free-flowing, a series of vignettes and stream-of-consciousness reflections that turn single sentences into substantial paragraphs. His literary digressions are written in the language of the street. Roth is a witness to the mundane realities of life, and so, through his sentences, is his reader. Roth’s German, like his life at the time, is a kind of wandering—half-drunk and angry—through the perils and possibilities of European life; he takes the familiar and the strange equally in stride and responds with equal bitterness to each. His feuilletons are an unredacted encounter with humanity. In my translation, I hope to capture the raw elegance of Roth’s writing, how—with a kaleidoscopic dynamism and seamless, empathetic changes of perspective—he turns the ordinary and even unrefined objects, events, and people of the street into scenes imbued with meaning and feeling.
Roth’s description of the Tsarist emigrants who flooded Western Europe after the Russian Revolution is both haunting and hilarious. With biting sarcasm, Roth shows how quickly the Tsarist exiles turned their culture into kitsch, and turned themselves into caricatures of Russianness after lives spent trying to become Western. It is appropriate that this is where Roth begins his journey to the Soviet Union—this is the first in a series of feuilletons from a long journey East—with the exiles of the new nation he is going to visit, the old elite of a land “becoming.” Roth will spend most of his trip mocking the emptiness of Soviet culture. First, he must mock the emptiness of the elite culture it replaced.
Long before one could think of searching out the new Russia, the old Russia came to us. The emigrants carried the wild scent of their homeland: of desolation, of blood, of poverty, of an extraordinary, novel-worthy fate. It fit the European cliche-imaginings of the Russians that they experienced this: outcasts, expelled from warm hearths, wanderers through the world without aim, train hoppers defended for every leap over legal borders with the old literary phrase: “the Russian soul.” Europe knew the Cossacks from the Varieté,* the Russian peasant weddings from the operatic scenes, the Russian singer and the Balalaikas. It never learned (even after Russia came to us), how much sentimental Dostoevsky-readers and French novelists —the most conservative in the world—had turned the Russian people into a kitschy figure of divinity and bestiality, alcohol and philosophy, Samovar-gloom and Asiatic-ness. What they had made out of the Russian woman! A kind of human-beast, gifted with loyalty and with a passion for deception, a spendthrift and a rebel, a literary woman and a bombmaker. The longer their exile lasted, the closer the Russians came to the image that had been made of them. They performed for our tastes and assimilated themselves to our cliche. Perhaps the feeling of bearing a “role” lessened their misery. They bore it more lightly if they were valued as literary. As chauffeur of a Paris taxi, the Russian prince steers directly into literature. His fate may be cruel. But it is belletristically useful.
The anonymous life of the emigrant became a public production. As at first, when they set themselves up for show: hundreds founded theaters, singing choruses, dance groups and Balalaika orchestras. For two years everything was new, real, staggering. Later everything became obvious and dull. They lost their relationship to the soil of their homeland. They distanced themselves more and more from Russia—and Russia distanced itself more from them. Europe already knew Meyerhold—they still followed Stanislavsky. The “blue birds” began to sing German, French, and English. Eventually they flew to America and lost their plumage.
The emigrants regarded themselves as the only representatives of the truly Russian. What grew and became important in Russia after the Revolution, they slandered as “un-Russian,” “Jewish,” “international.” Europe had long been accustomed to see Lenin as a Russian representative. The emigrants still followed Nicholas the Second. They held firmly onto the past with touching loyalty, but they offended history. And they themselves diminished their tragedy.
Ach! They had to live. So they rode the cossack-canter of their homeland in Paris Hippodromes on horses of foreign blood, adorned themselves with crooked Turkish sabers acquired at the flea market of Clignancourt, and wielded empty ammunition pouches and blunt daggers strolling on Mont-Martre. They placed great bear caps from real cat fur on their heads and stood, terrible to look upon, like Don chieftains before the revolving doors of restaurants, even if they came into the world in Volhynia. Some advanced to grand dukes on uncontrollable Nansen passports. But it hardly mattered. They could all pull homesickness and melancholy from Balalaikas with the same skill, wear red moroccan-leather boots with silver spurs and whirl around on one heel while squatting with a deep bend of the knees. I saw a princess act out a Russian wedding in a Parisian Varieté. She was a dazzling bride. Nightwatchmen from the Rue Pigalle, costumed as Boyars, grew into an honor guard, as if from flowerpots. A cardboard cathedral flickered in the background, from which the Orthodox priest stepped in a beard of straw. Glass gems sparkled in the splendor of the Russian sun which rafted from the spotlight. And from subdued fiddles, the band trickled the song of the Volga into the hearts of the audience. Other princesses were waitresses in Russian pubs; notepads hung on tula-silver chains from their aprons.
Their heads stood proud on their necks, paragons of steadfast emigrant tragedy. Others, broken, sat idle on the benches of the Tuileries, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Vienna Prater, the Berlin Tiergarten, on the banks of the Danube in Budapest and in the caféhouses of Constantinople. They had connections with the reactionaries of each of these countries. They sat there and mourned their fallen sons and daughters, their missing wives—but also their golden pocket watch, a gift from Alexander the Third. Many left Russia because they “could not bear the misery of the country.” I know Russian Jews, who, “dispossessed” only a few years ago by Denikin and Petljura, today nevertheless hate nothing more on earth than Trotsky, who did nothing to them. Humble and unworthy, they want the false baptismal certificates back which they had used to obtain residency in the great Russian cities.
In the small hotel in the Parsian Latin Quarter where I stayed lived one of the most famous Russian princes, with father, wife, children and a “bonne.” The old prince was still authentic. He cooked his soup on an alcohol stove, and, although I knew him to be an antisemitic authority and a leading light in peasant-flogging, he seemed heartrending to me nevertheless on those wet autumn evenings through which he creaked frozen. A symbol, no longer a person, a leaf blown away from the tree of life. But his son, raised abroad, elegantly clothed by Paris tailors, supported by rich grand dukes—how different he was! In the telephone room he conferred with former bodyguards, to real and fake Romanovs he sent addresses of devotion on their birthdays, and for the ladies in the hotel, he placed kitschy pink love letters in the key cupboards. He rushed to tsarist conferences in automobiles, and he lived like a little emigrated God in France. Fortune-tellers, Orthodox priests, card-readers, theosophs came to him—everyone, who knew the Russian future, the return of Catherine the Great and the Troikas, the bear hunts and the Katorga, Rasputin and serfdom...
Everyone lost themselves. They lost their Russianness and their nobility. And, because they were nothing more than noblemen and Russians, they had lost everything. They sank out of their own tragedy. The heroes slipped from the great tragic drama. History inexorably went its iron and bloody way. Our eyes became tired of considering a misery that had made itself so cheap. We stood before the leftovers that did not grasp their own catastrophe. We knew more about them, than they could tell us. And arm in arm with the times, we passed over the lost ones, cruel yet sad.
*Varieté refers to a burlesque show
Zachary Suri is a student at Yale University majoring in English and History.
ABOUT THE ART | Walking Diotima by Jasmine Ross, 2025. Jasmine Ross is a student at Yale University.
