The Name of Hero was published by Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin in 1981. The rights have reverted to the author, Richard Seltzer. He grants permission to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies for non-commercial purposes provided that the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
This historical novel is based on the life of Alexander Bulatovich, a Russian who was an explorer in Ethiopia, a cavalry officer during Russia's conquest of Manchuria in 1900, and later, as a monk at Mount Athos, led a group of "heretics" who challenged the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, asserting the divinity of the Name of God.
You can buy this book in hardcover:
The
Name of Hero by Richard Seltzer. an historical novel based
on the life of Alexander Bulatovich, a Russian who was an explorer in Ethiopia,
and a cavalry officer during Russia's conquest of Manchuria in 1900. Later,
as a monk at Mount Athos, he led a group of "heretics" who challenged the
hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, asserting the divinity of the
Name of God.
You can also buy it on CD ROM with the author's other works:
Everything
But the Internet gathers the complete non-Internet
works of Richard Seltzer on CD, in plain text, with software that lets
you listen as well as read. It includes: The Name of Hero, Ethiopia Through
Russian Eyes, The Lizard of Oz, Without a Myth, Spit and Polish, Mercy,
Rights Crossing, short stories, articles, book reviews, and poems.
You'll find related materials at www.samizdat.com/readers.html#ethiopia
Alexander Bulatovich (1870-1919) was a soldier, explorer, and religious leader whose field of action ranged from Tsarist Russia to Ethiopia to Manchuria to Mount Athos. The Name of Hero covers his life up through the Manchurian campaign of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. After Manchuria, Bulatovich returned to Petersburg, became a monk, returned to Ethiopia to try to found a Russian monastery and school there, then went to Mount Athos and became involved in a bitter heresy dispute. He was a chaplain at the front in World War I and survived the Russian Revolution, only to be murdered at his family's estate, Lutsikovka, in December 1919. His story and that of a core of people close to him, such as the Mazeppy and the Ethiopian boy Vaska, will continue in two subsequent volumes -- The Name of Man and The Name of God.
The odd shifts in the career of Bulatovich first drew me to him as a subject for historical novels. I was interested in the man himself -- his energy and enthusiasm, and the puzzle of what motivated him. I suspected that he was on some sort of quest, driven by an inner need to push himself to the limits of his capabilities.
I was also drawn by the strangeness of the events -- Russian explorers in Ethiopia, the Russian conquest of Manchuria, a heresy battle in the twentieth century. I wanted to understand the man and his time, to get some insight into how the people and circumstances could have interacted to produce such events.
I first discovered Bulatovich in the London Times of 1913. I was hunting through microfilms looking for leads for another story when I chanced on a article describing how Russian troops had besieged two monasteries at Mount Athos in Greece and exiled some 880 monks to remote parts of the Russian Empire for believing that "the Name of God was a part of God and, therefore, in itself divine." Bulatovich -- former Guards officer and African explorer -- was the leader and defender of the monks.
News was a far more leisurely business then than now. The reporter drew an analogy to characters in a novel by Anatole France and drew an interesting sketch of the background and motivations of the main figure. I got the impression of Bulatovich as a restless man, full of energy, chasing from one end of the world to the other in search of the meaning of life. Eventually, he had sought quiet as a monk at Mount Athos, only to find himself once again in the midst of a battle.
I was in the Army then (1970), a reservist stationed in San Angelo, Texas. When I returned to Boston and then to graduate school, I tracked down all available leads, but could uncover very little additional information. There was a poem by Mandelshtam about the heresy. The philosopher Berdyaev had nearly been sent to Siberia for expressing support for the heretics. But that was it. I tried spinning a largely fictional account around these few facts, but never got very far.
Then in the spring of 1972, the "B" volume of the new edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia appeared. The previous edition had mentioned an "Alexander" Bulatovich who died about 1910. The Bulatovich in the Times article was named "Anthony" and was very much alive in 1913. The new edition made it clear that Alexander and Anthony were the same man. (One changes one's name when one becomes a monk). The item was signed by I.S. Katsnelson, a professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. I wrote to him and he replied, sending me a copy of a book he had just published -- a new edition of two long-out-of-print books by Bulatovich about his experiences in Ethiopia (1896-98), together with a biographical introduction.
Katsnelson specializes in ancient Egypt and Sudan. He has written several books on ancient Egyptian literature and a major monograph on early Sudan. His interest in Bulatovich's activities in Ethiopia is a sideline.
At any rate, Professor Katsnelson was very helpful, providing me not only with copies of his books but also with the address of Bulatovich's 98-year-old sister, Princess Mary (Mariya or "Meta") Orbeliani, who was then living in British Columbia. From that point on, one lead led to another.
In the summer of 1972, I traveled to Mount Athos and visited the one remaining Russian monastery there. On the way I met a scholar, Popoulidis, in Salonika who was writing a doctoral dissertation on the heresy. And in Athens, at the National Library, I found and photocopied a book Bulatovich had written about the heresy.
At Harvard's Widener Library and at Hellenic College in Brookline, Massachusetts, I found more articles and books by and about Bulatovich and the heresy.
The following summer I visited Mary Orbeliani in Penticton, British Columbia. In long tape-recorded conversations and in letters before and after that visit, she provided me with valuable information about her brother's life and insight into his character. At 99 she was very articulate, lucid, and helpful. She was a remarkable and very memorable person in her own right -- at that time still active as a water-color artist and pianist. (She passed away in 1977 at the age of 103.)
Back in Boston, I tracked down references to Bulatovich's participation in the Manchurian campaign of the Boxer Rebellion. The only work in English dealing with that campaign, The Russo-Chinese War by George A. Lensen, mentioned Bulatovich often in the few chapters dealing with battles at Ongun, Hailar, Yakeshi, and the Greater Hsing-An Mountains. The comprehensive bibliography led me to the source materials: two versions of General Orlov's autobiographical account of the campaign, one in book form and one in an historical journal, both available at the Widener Library. Also, at that time, Mary Orbeliani's son, Bulatovich's nephew, Andre, found and sent me a copy of the handwritten official record of Bulatovich's military career, with many previously unknown details on the Manchurian campaign.
Gradually, the story began to take shape in my mind as a trilogy, with the first volume structured around events in Manchuria in 1900.
For the background, the historical events, and the details of camp life, I stayed very close to my sources. The major events of the campaign and of Bulatovich's life as recorded in this volume are true, to the best of my knowledge. But I wasn't interested in simply presenting a series of historical facts.
I was fascinated by Bulatovich's character. I wanted to work out the puzzle of his motivations, to figure out what could have led to all the shifts and twists of his life story.
Regarding his character and motivation, my sources were incomplete and often contradictory, giving me plenty of room to pick and choose, invent and discover, while remaining consistent with the historical probability.
As for the rest of the characters: I had some notion of General Orlov from his writings. He emphasizes the feats of the enlisted men in his command. He praises only one officer -- Bulatovich. He quotes Bulatovich's superiors, the commander and assistant commander of the regiment, only to present them in a negative light, as doctrinaire disciplinarians -- in contrast to Bulatovich's bravery, initiative, and bold individual style. Although Orlov lists the names of hundreds of enlisted men, he never gives the names of this commander and assistant commander. I invented the names "Kupferman" and "Strakhov" and fleshed out their characters and gave them each a past.
As for the Mazeppy, I knew from Mary Orbeliani that half a dozen men in Bulatovich's command were so devoted to him that when he entered the monastery, they followed him there. I speculated that to be that close they would probably have been in battle together. According to Orlov and the military record, Bulatovich frequently led a small group on scouting missions. And according to Mary Orbeliani, his men called him "Mazeppa." So I chose names from the general roster given by Orlov and dubbed the group "Mazeppy."
Orlov described a fifty-four-year-old, white-haired giant of a Cossack named Starodubov, who received a medal for capturing an enemy flag at the Battle of Ongun. I invented the theft and moved him to Bulatovich's command.
One of Bulatovich's men named Butorin actually did get caught behind enemy lines at Hailar and escaped, very much as described here. (At Hailar, too, the headless bodies of three missing Cossacks were found near a temple. My description of that funeral, however, is fictitious.)
The other enlisted men in Manchuria were invented, as was Chinese Sonya. One sparse and disputed account of an affair with an Ethiopian noblewoman was the basis for Asalafetch.
There were rumors of love interest between Bulatovich and Sophia Vassilchikova, but only her name and approximate age can be considered "historical."
The same General Rennenkampf whom Bulatovich confronted in Manchuria was largely responsible for the disastrous Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenburg at the beginning of World War I (see Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's August 1914).
There was an unexplained gap in Bulatovich's military record. He did, in fact, rescue a French missionary named Lavesier or Lavoisier and later was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor for having done so. His sister described how he killed the young Chinese boy who attacked and wounded him on the return trip (a horrifying vision that recurred in his dreams). She also mentioned that he caught typhus form the missionary and that after he recovered he made a short trip to Japan. The military record says nothing about that trip and says that he was never on leave for convalescence from wounds. It just skips from the rescue of the missionary to about four months later when he was with another Russian army in another part of Manchuria. Apparently he had been left behind, considered as good as dead.
For background on Ethiopia, I relied heavily on Bulatovich's own accounts. I also received considerable help form Solomon Kenea, an Oromo from an area of Ethiopia Bulatovich had frequented. While he was a student at Harvard, he tutored my wife and me in Oromo. (At that time, just before the Ethiopian Revolution, we had hoped to be able to travel there.)
Chris Rosenfeld was also very helpful, providing insight into the role of women in Ethiopia. She let me read the manuscript of the biography she was writing about the wife of Menelik II, the Empress Taitu.
Many other people have been very helpful to me over the eleven years it took to make this book. Rex Sexton, Claude Thau, and Mark Saxton provided advice and encouragement, reading and reacting to my various attempts. Bulatovich's nephew, Andre Orbeliani, read several early versions of the manuscript and set me straight on a number of important details. He also provided me with his uncle's official military record and lent me a copy of the original edition of his uncle's book With the Armies of Menelik II, which includes photos that Bulatovich himself had taken in Ethiopia 1897-98.
People who helped me with information, advice, and leads included George Ivask, Yfraim Isaak, Zaude Gabre Sellassie, Cynthia Citron, Greg Moshnin, and Sayers Brown.
People who helped by reading and commenting on the various drafts of the book included Gary Wolfe, Laszlo Tikos, Susan Brownsberger, Sheila Goggin, Howie Rosenof, Vicki Mutascio, Bonnie Keyes, Elynor Harrington, Dan and Julie Horton, Mike Chapman, John Huzzard, Terry Earls, Kathy Pikosky, Ed Trobec, Jeff and Dagmar Barnouw, Karen Harrison, Noreen Webber, Derek White, and my parents.
The advice of my agent, Ashley Grayson, led to some important revisions.
The probing questions and detailed comments of my editor, Janice Gallagher at J.P. Tarcher, Inc., led to substantial final changes and additions that, I believe, vastly improved this novel.
I wish to thank all these people (and others whom I may have neglected to mention) for their help and support.
Above all I wish to thank my wife, Barbara, for the crucial advice and keen insights she has provided time and again.
Richard Seltzer
West Roxbury, Mass.
Feb. 3, 1981
This site is published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
Links to the complete novel, The Name of Hero.
To contact Richard Seltzer send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
Sample chapters from The Name of Man
Complete text of From Entotto to the River Baro
Complete text of With the Armies of Menelik II
Return to Readers' Room and Writers' Showcase.
You can buy this book in hardcover:
The
Name of Hero by Richard Seltzer. an historical novel based
on the life of Alexander Bulatovich, a Russian who was an explorer in Ethiopia,
and a cavalry officer during Russia's conquest of Manchuria in 1900. Later,
as a monk at Mount Athos, he led a group of "heretics" who challenged the
hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, asserting the divinity of the
Name of God.
You can also buy it on CD ROM with the author's other works:
Everything
But the Internet gathers the complete non-Internet
works of Richard Seltzer on CD, in plain text, with software that lets
you listen as well as read. It includes: The Name of Hero, Ethiopia Through
Russian Eyes, The Lizard of Oz, Without a Myth, Spit and Polish, Mercy,
Rights Crossing, short stories, articles, book reviews, and poems.
A
library for the price of a book.
Return to B&R Samizdat Express.
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