The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure by C. D. Rose

Author:C. D. Rose [Rose, C. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-379-3
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2014-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

MAXIM MAKSIMICH

ONE APRIL MORNING in 1862, Maxim Maksimich set off early so as not to miss the first steamer of the season, the one that would take him up the rapidly thawing river as far as Tomsk, then Perm, then Chelyabinsk or Ufa, across Siberia and through the Urals to Yekaterinburg and the eventual west. There, he believed, he would board a train for Moscow, where he would find some work teaching, a small room in a boardinghouse and then, in time, a wife, and then, in time, having published a chain of stories in respected literary gazettes, fame.

It didn’t happen that way.

After three weeks on board, during which time his ship had made only a tortuous few miles along the unexpectedly ice-bound river, Maksimich tired of the endless diet of kasha, salt fish and Georgian brandy. When the Princess of the Rhine (in later years Maksimich would often wonder how the single-funnelled ship had ended up so far from home) stopped to refuel at an apparently nameless town, he went ashore and found himself in a small hostelry, drank several flagons of the local kvass and woke up in a haystack two days later. He discovered he had been robbed of everything he owned, including the laboriously handwritten manuscript of The Christ of the Cornfields. He ran to the boarding platform only to find the Princess had left some hours before.

At first, other than ruing the loss of what he believed was his masterpiece, Maksimich worried little, figuring that another steamer would be along soon. He didn’t realise that the Princess of the Rhine (due to its inebriated Bavarian captain) had lost itself hopelessly along a neglected tributary, one no other steamship passed along for that entire year, nor the next, nor the one after that. He tried not to worry and told himself the railway would soon arrive in the small town (which he eventually found did have a name at least, though little more), and that surely within a year or two he would be reaping the benefits of his labours, ensconced in a comfortable Muscovite townhouse, gazing adoringly at his devoted wife, who would sit patiently copying out his manuscripts for him while he engaged in a rubber of bridge with Lev or Anton or Fyodor.

He spent the next fifty years in the town, waiting for the locomotives to arrive or a ship to depart, occasionally contemplating taking a carriage through the thick forest, but always thinking better of the idea, slowly composing a series of stories commemorating village life as the turn of the century approached then passed, largely unnoticed.

He died in 1912, impaled by a falling icicle, a casualty of the thaw for which he had waited so long.

In 1992, on the eightieth anniversary of his death, some local townsfolk who valued their literary heritage set up a museum in Maxim Maksimich’s honour. His living room and study are preserved exactly as they would have been during his heyday: a quill pen lies on

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