Exile and Loneliness in A Novel About London by Miloš Crnjanski

intellectual and moral consistency of character are clearly portrayed.
These circles are distinctly demarcated and may be defined as his re-
lation to loneliness, suicide, old-age, his wife, his past in Russia, the
emigrant organization, England and the English, free will etc.
Everything that Ryepnin thinks, says or does evolves out of these
clear attitudes towards his surroundings and towards his personal fate.
Although at times, both by himself and through his wife's suggestion,
he comes to the idea that perhaps there exists some way of making his
situation less burdensome, he rejects all such thoughts with a defiant
pride. For Ryepnin the awareness of his own dignity is a part of his
class complex with is so strong that he even dislikes the thought of
entering relations with middle-class women.19)
The Ryepnins begin to feel the 'helplessness in a foreign country'20)
only when they face poverty. In Roman o Londonu loneliness is ex-
perienced as the direct result of poverty. 'Since they had fallen intot his
state of want, they sensed how isolated they were in a foreign country.'21)
Repeating, with almost the identical example, the existential parabola
of Pavle Isakovič, Ryepnin comes to the same knowledge as does Isa-
kovič in the novel Seobe (The Migrations), when, on arriving in Russia
he says: 'We have not even brethren when we are gripped by misfortune.
A man is alone in poverty.'22) In Roman o Londonu poverty is indicated
in various places as the principle cause of isolation. When they Ryep-
nins arrived in England they had plenty of friends, but the number
lessened 'as their bank account dropped.'23) 'Once they had invitations
from the Court. Then, for years, they received invitations from several
generals and many officers, both Russian and English. Even English
whom she knew kept in touch with Nadya. Later only Ordinsky kept
in touch. Then only the butcher, the greengrocer and the baker. Then
even they stopped.'24)
Though Ryepnin felt that the status of a 'displaced person' in a
foreign country had an influence on their isolated fate, he knew that
the principle factor was money. He defines his experience thus:
A man is not isolated because he's a foreigner, – a foreigner, if he
has money, is nowhere more welcome than in London. Everybody
crowds around such a foreigner. But this extremely wealthy metropolis
possesses a dreadfully strong heart towards the unfortunate man and
people in poverty.25)
Still earlier Ryepnin states that he knew little of this vast mastodon
of a city until he remained 'a beggar on the street, in the gutter.'26) Only
then did he discover the power of money. 'Money, in the time in which
we live, ha the power of the sun, a power that tears no longer have.
Man's happiness is now in money.'27) His wife, Nadya, finds it hard to
be reconciled to her husband's belief. To accept such a concept would
mean being reconciled to his idea of suicide, to his indifference, his
apathetic depressions, his inactivity and lack of will to act. On various
occasions she knows a vitality which is foreign to Ryepnin and a bright-
ness that he has long rejected. But even she cannot dissuade him from
the thought in which his bitter experience is crystallized, from the idea
which he expresses in the eloquent metaphor: 'Here, darling, money
has the might of thunder. The warmth of spring.'28 )
Isolation is something that Ryepnin finds hard to accept, but to
which, in time, he grows accustomed. The hellish paradox of their fate
lies in the fact that they are isolated amidst a multitude of people. This
makes their isolation yet more depressing. the ambiguity of Ryepnin's
attitude to loneliness is well illustrated by the following passage:
We must get used to the feeling that we are completely alone on
a desert island, on which live fifty million people, men and women.
Just imagine, utterly alone, with nobody. Nobody asks about us, no-
body among those millions of men and women cares a rap for us. All
around us houses, street, trains rumble. They pass and pass, men, wo-
men, laughing, crying, pairing. There's fog, it rains and now it snows.
So many ports, so many ships that come and go. And not a soul asks
about us.29)
Ryepnin comes to universal truths about life in the natural way,
through his own experience. At one moment he states: 'Life was always
like this, only we did not know it. Misfortune came so suddenly. Now
we know.'30) Although he utters these words not only to lend courage
to Nadya, but also to himself, such realization can change nothing. It
merely leads him to pour all his experience of solitude into the bitter
thought: 'No, there is no community of people. it's all a tale. All there
is man's loneliness.'31)
From the painful present Ryepnin can escape only into the past,
into memory. Yet he is aware that the hours of escape into reminiscence
are no more than distracting self-deception, a deceptive dream and
that, afterwards, in hours of painful sobering, the present would be
all the harder to bear. Though he seeks solace in days gone by, he is
aware that to live in the past is impossible. Loneliness, poverty, un-
employment make of his life 'a dreadful dream from which there was
no awakening.'32) For such a life, 'strange, senseless and unreal,'33) there
is no point in struggling.
When a man has once grown used to loneliness and accepts it with
a philosophically based fatalism, he is not willing to replace it with
any manner of human society for which, perhaps, he has previously
yearned. In this sense the episode of Ryepnin's summer holiday in
Cornwall is especially indicative. The days in London combined into
a horrific nightmare of loneliness that weighed down on him with its
poisoning silence. Finding himself in the hotel 'Crimea', among a pack
of vulgar, jolly people who expected him to join in their amusement
and who seek his society, Ryepnin feels a deep revulsion for these tire-
some individuals who threaten his loneliness. 'To Ryepnin, who desi-
red solitude and peace, all this seemed boring, foolish.'34) Once, deep
within himself, reconciled with his own loneliness, once again, as
earlier in London, he experiences what had become clear to him then, –
that 'it is not so easy as he'd thought to move from one life to another.'35)
When, after his holiday, Ryepnin moves from the suburbs to the
centre of London, he feels the change yet more intensively. 'He desired
to be alone. He no longer wanted to go out into London.'36) Nadya, on the
other hand, wanted company,37) yet even she could not free him from the
'mad impression'38) that all London consisted 'of cells, prisons, in which
only individuals dwelt – each a male and a female on their own.'39)
In those moments of reconciliation with loneliness, Ryepnin reali-
zes that there are worse things than poverty. 'The dread city'40) had
robbed them of will, 'that last thing in human life that resents some-
thing bright.'41) Then loneliness ceases to be unbearable; on the contrary
it turned into a inner requirement for the being condemned to living
with others. 'There are isolated people on earth, and he is one of them'42)
Ryepnin reasoned. Later, however, he would realize that a belief in
the will was also a phantom all too easily dispersed. All his ambitions
aimed at showing that a Russian possess an iron will43) end in defeat.
Ryepnin is a man who believes not in the will, but in suffering. 'The
will cannot change the world,'44) it can only, like a blind weapon of
suffering, aid a man to leave it. Ryepnin proves his strength of will
only by the single act of suicide, yet another ironic significance in
his fate. He believes not in free will but in geographical fate45) and in
chance, that life is, in this novel as in Seobe, 'the greatest comedian
in the lives of people and nations.'46) He is struck by the fact that such
changes may turn the rich and famous man into an attendant in
public lavatories47) and consciously choose death rather than agree to
humiliating metamorphoses.
____________________
19) Ibid., p. 305.
20) Ibid., p. 67.
21) Ibid., p. 43.
22) Seobe i Druga Knjiga Seoba, Belgrade, 1962, p. 311.
23) Roman o Londonu, Vol. 1, p. 104.
24) Ibid.
25) Ibid., p. 192.
26) Ibid., p. 45.
27) Ibid.
28 ) Ibid.
29) Ibid., p. 124.
30) Ibid., p. 41.
31) Roman o Londonu, Vol. 2, Belgrade, 1971, p. 270.
32) Roman o Londonu, Vol. 1, p. 54.
33) Ibid.
34) Ibid., p. 302.
35) Ibid., p. 115.
36) Roman o Londonu, Vol. 2, p. 11.
37) Ibid.
38 ) Ibid.
39) Ibid.
40) Ibid., p. 13.
41) Ibid.
42) Ibid., p. 75.
43) Ibid., p. 210.
44) Ibid., p. 213.
45) Ibid., p. 230.
46) Seobe i Druga Knjiga Seoba, p. 1054.
47) Roman o Londonu, Vol. 1, pp. 273-74