When we say good-bye, he kisses mama. And mama kisses him. And they even embrace.
Dressed in our coats again, we leave.
On the way, mama suddenly begins to scold me. She says: "Ah, why are you strapped on to me? .. ."
I found this rather strange. I wasn't strapped to her at all. She herself had dragged me to the studio. And now she was displeased.
Mama says: "Ah, how sorry I am I brought you with me. Without you, we would have made up for good."
I whimper. But I whimper because I don't understand what I've done wrong. I had behaved quietly. I hadn't even run around the studio. And now such injustice.
My mother says: "No, I will not take you with me any more."
I wanted to ask her what it was, what had happened. But I keep silent. I would grow up and then everything would become clear. It would become clear why people were blamed for things when they had done absolutely nothing wrong.
[Zoshchenko concludes that, although he was a difficult child, and a number of sad and even tragic things occurred to him, these by no means serve to account for his melancholy, and his childhood was not at all unusual. He decides that the trouble must lie farther back, in the murky period "before the sun rises," his
early childhood between the ages of two and five. Here he has only very fragmentary glimpses of himself, surrounded by darkness. But as he thinks of these, he feels his excitement growing, and concludes that he must be approaching "the wound." One of these glimpses is given below.]
V. BEFORE THE SUN RISES
OPEN YOUR MOUTH
On the blanket—an empty box of matches. The matches are in my mouth.
Someone yells: "Open your mouth!"
I open my mouth. I spit out the matches.
Some fingers fish around in my mouth. They pull out a few matches still there.
Someone is crying. I am crying louder, and for this reason: because the matches tasted bitter, and because they were taken out of my mouth.
[These fragmentary memories fail to disclose, however, what Zoshchenko was looking for. He concludes that he must push even farther back, to the period before two years, to the pre-conscious stage. But here words and memory fail. As a way to a solution, Zoshchenko begins to read works on the physiological aspect of the psyche, especially Pavlov. There follows a lucid but rather elementary digression on Pavlov, an exposition of what is meant by "conditioned reflexes," "temporary associations," etc., and a description of some of Pavlov's experiments with dogs and monkeys. What follows is a classic example of Freudian self-analysis, in spite of the Pavlovian conclusions. Whatever its interest or lack of interest as a contribution to science, it is translated below as a vivid, partly sardonic, partly heroic, self-portrait of the author and his troubles.]
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This great discovery, this law of conditioned reflexes, this law of temporary nervous associations—I wanted to apply it to my own life.
I wanted to see this law in action, in concrete examples from my early life.
It seemed to me that my unhappiness could have arisen from ftie fact that early in my life "untrue" conditioned associations
had been established in my brain, which haunted me in terror through my later development. It seemed to me that spray terrified me, and that by this means the poison must at some time have been spread.
I wanted to destroy these erroneous mechanisms that had been established in my brain.
But once again there was an obstacle before me. I could remember nothing of my early life.
If I could only remember even one scene, a single event, I might press on farther. No, it was all wrapped in a cloudy oblivion.
But someone told me that if I wanted to remember something forgotten, it would help to go back to the place where it had occurred, and that then what was forgotten might be more easily recalled.
I asked my relatives where we had lived when I was a child. And my relatives told me where I had lived during the first years of my life.
There had been three houses. But one had burned down. In another I had lived when I was two. In the third I had spent no less than five years, from the age of four.
And there was still another house. This house was in the country where my parents went every summer.
I wrote down the addresses, and with unusual agitation I went to have a look at these old houses.
I looked for a long time at the house in which I had lived as a three-year-old. But I could remember absolutely nothing.
And then I went to the house in which I had lived for five years.
My heart fell when I approached the gates of this house.
My God! How familiar everything seemed here. I recognized the stairway, the little garden, the yard, the gates.
I recognized almost everything. And yet, how unlike it was my memories of it.
At one time the house had seemed like an immense hulk, a skyscraper. Before me now stood a smallish, rather shabby three-story dwelling.
At one time the garden had seemed fabulous, mysterious. Now I saw a pitiful little patch.
It had seemed that a massive, high iron fence had girdled this little garden. Now I touched pitiful iron bars no higher than my waist.
How different the eyes were, then and now!
I climbed up to the third floor and found the door to our apartment.
My heart contracted from some obscure pain. I felt badly. Convulsively, I grasped the banister, without understanding what was wrong or what disturbed me so.
I ran down the stairs and sat for a long time on the pedestal by the gate. I sat until the gatekeeper approached. Eyeing me suspiciously, he ordered me to leave.
I returned home quite sick, exhausted, disturbed without knowing by what.
In a terrible melancholy, I returned home. And now this melancholy did not leave me day or night.
By day I lumbered about my room—I could neither lie down nor sit. By night terrible dreams tormented me.
Formerly, I had not had any dreams. Or, rather, I had them but forgot. They were brief and incomprehensible. I usually had them toward morning.
Now they appeared as soon as I shut my eyes.
They were not even dreams. They were nightmares, terrible scenes, from which I awoke in terror.
I began to take bromides to stifle these nightmares, to be more at peace. But the bromides didn't help.
Then I called a certain doctor and begged him to give me something against these nightmares.
When he learned that I was taking bromides, the doctor said: "What are you doing?! On the contrary, you need to see these dreams. You have them because you are thinking about your childhood. These dreams are the key to your illness. Only in your dreams will you see those scenes from infancy that you are looking for. Only through the dream can you penetrate that long forgotten world."
Then I told the doctor my latest dream, and he began to analyze it. But he analyzed it in such a way that I was disturbed and did not trust him.
I said I had seen tigers in my dream and some kind of hand emerging from the wall.
The doctor said: "It's more than clear. Your parents took you to the zoo too young. There you saw an elephant. Its trunk
frightened you. The hand—that's a trunk. The trunk—that's a phallus. You have a sexual trauma."
I did not trust this doctor and I was disturbed. Having taken some offense, he answered me: "I analyzed your dream according to Freud. I'm a disciple of his. There is no truer science that can help you."
Then I called several more doctors. Some laughed, saying that the analysis of dreams was nonsense. Others, on the contrary, attributed the greatest significance to dreams.
Among these latter, there was one very clever doctor. He explained a lot to me and told me a lot. And I listened very attentively to him. I even wanted to become a disciple of his. But then I rejected this notion. It seemed to me that he wasn't right. I did not believe in his therapy.
He was a frightful opponent of Pavlov. Except for experiment
s of a zoological nature, he saw nothing in the latter's work. He was an orthodox Freudian. In every act of child or adult, he saw the sexual. He analyzed every dream in terms of erotomania.
This method did not concur with what I considered infallible; it did not concur with Pavlov's method, with the principle of conditioned reflexes.
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Nevertheless, the method of this therapy struck me.
There is something absurd in the discussion of dreams. It had seemed to me that such preoccupations had sprung to life from the minds of old women and people of a mystical bent.
It had seemed to me that this was incompatible with science. I was very surprised when I learned that all of medicine had arisen, essentially, from a single source, from a single cult—from the science of dreams.
All of ancient, so-called "temple," medicine had developed and had been cultivated on a single basis—the analysis of dreams. This was the significance of the cult of Aesculapius, the son of Apollo, the god of healing among the Greeks.
[There follows a brief digression on Greek medicine. Zosh-chenko then returns to modern works on the physiology of dreams.]
What is a dream from the point of view of contemporary science?
First of all, it is a certain physiological condition from which all the external manifestations of consciousness are absent. Or, better—all the higher psychic functions are excluded, and the lower ones released.
Pavlov considered that at night a man was "disconnected" from the external world, and during sleep inhibited forces came to life, suppressed emotions, repressed desires.
This occurs because while there is some inhibition operative during sleep, it is only partial: it does not cover the whole of our brain; it does not cover all points of those great hemispheres.
Our brain, in the opinion of physiologists, has, as it were, two levels. The higher level is the cortex. This is the center of control, logic, the critical faculties, the centers of acquired reflexes, life experience. And the lower level is the source of inherited reflexes, the source of animal drives, animal powers.
These two levels are joined together by means of the associations or connections of nerves, which we have already mentioned.
At night the higher level sinks into sleep. Therefore, consciousness is absent. Control, the critical faculties, acquired habits, these are all absent.
The lower level continues to keep its watch. The absence of control, however, permits it to some degree to declare itself to the town.
Let us suppose that logic or intellect has hindered or stifled the terror that rose up at one time in the child. In the absence of control, the terror may rise up again. But when it rises up again, it assumes new shapes.
Therefore, the new shape is a continuation of the man's psychic activity in the absence of control.
And, therefore, the new shape may serve as a clue to the nature of the forces that inhibit the man, that terrify him, and that are capable of snuffing the light of logic, the light of consciousness.*
It becomes comprehensible why ancient medicine attributed such significance to dreams.
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And so, our brain has two levels—a higher and a lower. Life experience, acquired habits, keep house with inherited
** * Further developments have shown that the dream is not the only means by which one can get at the reason for pathological inhibition.
experience, with the habits of our ancestors, with the habits of animals.
As though there were two worlds enclosed in the complex apparatus of our brain—the civilized world and the world of the animal.
These two worlds are often in conflict. The higher forces struggle with the lower. They conquer them and push them lower down, but rarely do they entirely banish them.
This struggle would seem to be the source of many a nervous ailment.
But this is not at all the source of trouble.
I do not wish to run too far ahead of myself, but I will linger on this briefly. Even if one admits that this conflict of the higher with the lower is the cause of nervous ailments, it is by no means all-embracing; it is only a partial reason, by no means the most important, and by no means basic.
This conflict of the higher with the lower could (let us assume) lead to certain sexual psychoneuroses. But if science saw in this conflict, in this struggle, the only cause—it could go no farther than the revelation of sexual inhibitions.
This struggle, however, is a kind of norm. It is not a pathology.
It seems to me that on precisely this point, Freud's system goes astray.
This mistake was an easy one to make since the mechanisms revealed by Pavlov were not taken into account.
Inaccuracy in his basic assumptions, lack of clear focus in his formulation of the struggle between the higher and the lower forces, led Freud to an inaccurate conclusion, led him to one side, to the side of the sexual drives. But this did not encompass the matter. This was only part of a whole.
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In the conflict of the higher with the lower, in the collision of atavistic drives with the emotion of modern, civilized man, Freud saw the source of nervous ailments. Freud wrote: "Forbidden entry into civilized life and driven into the depths of the subconscious, these drives exist and make themselves felt, erupting into our consciousness in a distorted manner . . ." Therefore, the victory of intellect over animal instincts is seen as a cause for tragedy. In other words—the lofty intellect is subjected to doubt.
There are many occasions in the history of human thought in
which troubles were ascribed to the intellect, in which assaults were made on the notion of a high state of consciousness, and therefore people sometimes saw the tragedy of human life as residing in a high state of consciousness, in the conflict between the higher and the lower forces. It seemed to them that the victory of consciousness over the lower instincts bore a terrible burden, the burden of disease, nervous ailments, weakness of spirit, psy-choneuroses.
This seemed a tragedy from which there was only one way out —a return to the past, a return to nature, leaving civilization behind. It seemed that the ways of the human intellect were mistaken, artificial, unnecessary.
I do not consider this philosophy as the equivalent of the philosophy of fascism. Fascism has other roots, a different nature; but as far as its attitude toward the intellect is concerned, Fascism did draw something from this philosophy, distorting it, simplifying, lowering it to the level of the dull of wit.
A return to barbarism—this is not simply a formula invented by the Fascists for the needs of war. This is one of the basic principles of Fascism, its basic draft of the future image of man.
Better barbarism, savagery, the instincts of an animal, than the further progress of consciousness.
Stupidity!
People, artificially returned to barbarism, would in no way escape the nervous ailments that alarm them. Scoundrels would populate the world, from whom all responsibility for their vile-ness had been removed. But these would still be scoundrels who had not escaped their former ailments. These would be suffering scoundrels, even more unhealthy than they had been before.
The return to harmonious barbarism, concerning which people had fantasies, would not have been possible even a thousand years ago. But even if it had been possible—the source of sufferings would have remained. For the mechanisms of the brain would have remained. We are unable to destroy them. We can only study and adjust them. And we must study them with an art that is worthy of high consciousness.
These mechanisms revealed by Pavlov, we must study them until we have reached a full understanding. The capacity to come to terms with them will free us from those immense sufferings which people tolerate with barbaric resignation.
The tragedy of the human intellect proceeds not from the height of consciousness, but from its insufficiency.
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And so, having pondered all this, I understood that I could now attempt to penetrate into the closed-off world of infancy. The
keys were in my hands.
At night the doors of the lower level open. The sentinels of my consciousness sleep. And then, the shadows of the past, languishing underground, appear in their transfigurations.
I wanted to meet these shadows immediately, to see them, in order finally to understand the tragedy or error that had been performed in the light of day, before the sun rose.
I wanted to bring back to mind one of those dreams of not long ago, of which I had seen so many. But I could not recall a single dream in full. I had forgotten.
Then I began to think about the dreams I had most often, about what I saw in them.
And at this point I recalled that I most often saw tigers that entered my room, beggars who stood at my doors, and the sea in which I swam.
VI. DARK WATERS 1
Accidentally, I visited the village where I had spent my childhood.
I had been thinking of going there for some time. And then, strolling along the riverbank, I saw a steamer at a wharf. Almost mechanically, I got aboard this steamer, sat down, and went to the village.
The village was called Peski ("Sands"). It was on the Neva River, not far from Schliisselburg.
I had not been in those parts for more than twenty years.
The steamer did not stop at the village Peski. There was no wharf there. I crossed the Neva in a rowboat.
Ah, with what agitation I got out on the shore. I instantly recognized the small round chapel. It was intact. I instantly remembered the huts opposite, the village street, and the winding ascent from the shore, where there had at that time been a wharf.
All this now seemed a sorry miniature, compared to the grandiose world that had remained in my memory.
I walked along the street, and everything there was so familiar it hurt. Except the people. I could not recognize a single one of the people I met.
Then I entered the yard of the house where we had once lived.
In the yard stood a woman no longer young. In her hands was an oar. She had just chased a calf out of the yard. And now she was standing there angry and flushed.
She did not want to talk with me. But I mentioned the names of several villagers whom I remembered.
And Other Stories Of Communist Russia Page 27
