'A Very Peculiar Sorrow Attacks Me'

The feuilleton is an attractively flexible form, part journalism, part essay, that has seldom successfully crossed the Atlantic. The name is derived from the French feuillet, meaning the leaf of a book. Though spawned in France, the feuilleton achieved mastery among German-language writers, specifically Austrian, more specifically Viennese, even more specifically Jewish. Among its most accomplished practitioners are Alfred Polgar, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg and Egon Friedell. 

Clive James described the feuilleton as “a demanding genre that reached a high state of development in Vienna.” A minor literary critic named Hitler snuffed out the tradition, which has never fully recovered. Another practitioner, better known in the Anglophone world (thanks largely to the translations of Michael Hofmann), is the great novelist Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March (1932).

 

On October 31, 1926, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Roth published “How does it look in the Russian street?” (trans. Zachary Suri), a feuilleton based on his recent visit to the Soviet Union. Historians will make much of the date, as 1926 is the year Stalin consolidated his power. He had achieved “Socialism in One Country.” The Revolution was nearly a decade old. Unlike many Western visitors to the Soviet Union – Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Dreiser, H.G. Wells, among others – Roth was not seduced by the charms of the Workers’ Paradise. His tone is resolutely unpolitical. He sees people, not politics:

 

“. . . I find the Russian street gray. The masses that people it are gray. It engulfs the red of the scarves, of the banners, of the insignia, and the golden reflection of the church roofs. They are a truly poor and haphazardly dressed people. A great earnestness wafts from them, overpowering in its soberness, pathetic in its poverty.”

 

What Roth misses is the spontaneity of life in a free country. In the Soviet Union he observes little joy, much humorlessness, little sense of life lived for its own sake, few children or animals, no evidence of celebratory improvisation. He concludes:

 

“I confess, ashamed, that in these streets, sometimes a very peculiar sorrow attacks me. In the middle of my admiration for a world which out of its own force—with more ecstasy than material, without money and without friends—prints newspapers, writes books, builds machines and factories, digs canals, after they just barely buried their dead—in the middle of this admiration, a homesickness seizes me for our frivolity and our damnability, a yearning for the aroma of civilization, a sweet aching for our scientifically-already-extinguished decadence. A childish, stupid, but fervent wish to see once again a fashion show at Molyneux, a lovely evening gown on a silly girl, a number of ‘Sourire,’ and the whole downfall of the occident: probably this is a bourgeois atavism.”