Byzantium Endures
First-person account of a despicable inventor in revolutionary Russia.
Michael Moorcock, an English author, wrote the historical fiction novel Byzantium Endures. Published in 1981 by Secker & Warburg, it opens the Pyat Quartet tetralogy, with The Laughter of Carthage as its sequel.
Quick Facts
- Author
- Michael Moorcock
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Language
- English
- Series
- Pyat Quartet
- Genre
- Literary fiction
- Publisher
- Secker & Warburg
- Released
- 29 June 1981
- Format
- Print (hardback)
Facts from the source article.
Plot summary
The novel is narrated in the first person by Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, an unreliable figure whose posthumous notes Moorcock claims to have transcribed. Pyat recounts his adventures in Tsarist and Revolutionary Russia. Born in Kiev on 1 January 1900, he dreams of becoming a great inventor and engineer. At age sixteen, his widowed mother sends him to a relative in Odessa, where he encounters bohemian life, cocaine, and sexual adventures. He later secures a place at a technical university in St. Petersburg but fails to obtain a degree. Returning to Kiev, he runs a successful repair business. During the revolutionary and post-revolutionary civil war, he aligns with whichever group holds power, eventually escaping by ship to western Europe. Pyat is addicted to cocaine and sex, and is obsessively antisemitic despite being Jewish himself.
Reception
Frederic Morton, reviewing for The New York Times, noted that the book has two important but conflicting virtues: vivid renderings of Russia's cities before and during the Revolution, and Pyat's authentically unbalanced, egotistical voice. Morton felt these elements worked against each other, and that if Moorcock had resolved the dissonance, the novel would have approached a masterpiece. He concluded that Byzantium Endures is often masterly, especially when Pyat fantasicates on the nature of divinity. Paul West, writing for The Washington Post, described a game of mirrors extending beyond the novel's immediate concerns. He questioned whether the entire novel should have been cast in the mode of the preface, with Pyat placed within authorial speculation, and suggested that Moorcock as himself is a subtler teller than Moorcock impersonating Pyat, whose narration limps and fumbles. West noted that the gain in realism comes with a loss in technique, a loss the other volumes might justify. Kirkus Reviews called the novel a bravura impersonation, with modern Russian history laid out lavishly, and praised the evocation of Russian train-travel around 1920. However, the review found that Pyat never comes to life as more than an emblem, leaving the grand-scale panorama historically vivid but lacking a center, producing an effect of an empty, cold construction.
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