Sprawa pułkownika Miasojedowa

The Colonel Myasoedov Affair (London, 1962) is a monumental panorama of Russian society in the period preceding the outbreak of World War I and in its early duration. At the same time it is a novel of the fall of tsarist Russia, of the destructive influence of history on the individual, and the helplessness of ordinary people in the face of modern politics, which is unpredictable and omnipresent, because it “knocks at thousands of doors and windows”. This pertains especially to the twentieth century, in which “left over historical matters at the level of rulers and politics later spread like circles on the water” and “reach the private lives of all particular people”. An example is the eponymous Colonel Sergei Myasoedov, a Russian military policeman, who was hung in 1915 as an alleged German spy. Mackiewicz begins the novel with a matter-of-fact news item on the topic, after which in retrospect, starting from 1903, he shows the possible reasons for the judicial murder of Myasoedov. Called the Russian Dreyfus, unlike his French counterpart he was not saved, because public opinion – which “became the ruling power” – was against him. In this manner the novel becomes an excellent literary analysis of the mechanism of how a destructive smear campaign is conducted against

an ordinary individual by means of gossip, intrigues and the press, but also of the dramas which incidental victims are forced to participate in through modern, dehumanised politics. An example of the latter is the wife of Myasoedov, Klara, whose story ends with a devastating portrayal of the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in 1945, another symbol of the ruthlessness of the era against an individual life. In Mackiewicz’s novel fictional characters are placed alongside historical figures, while literary descriptions of nature, battles or banquets clash with anonymous documents and press extracts. The work is a unique portrait of the tragedy of an ordinary person crushed by politics and also a story of the birth of the new, worse world of the twentieth century.