by Lev Ozerov
eyes sliding over the bindings
of the books in the rich,
well-cared-for library
that resembles its owner.
Platonov gets to his feet.
I do the same.
We run—fly—hurtle
down the stairs
and wander for a long time
about Moscow.
There are a lot of cars.
Which are Black Marias,
we don’t know. We don’t
discuss this, but we know
we both think about it
and think about
how we both know this.
“And you? Can you
make out
what’s relevant
to the needs of our time
and what isn’t?”
Platonov asks, boldly,
on Bolshaya Ordynka.
I’m twenty years old. Wet
behind the ears. “No,”
I reply. I feel ashamed
of my answer, but it’s the truth.
“Precisely!” A pause. A look.
A pause. “Stay like that.
Don’t change.” Platonov falls
silent, withdraws into himself,
then says, “In fifty years’ time,
who knows, it may perhaps
become clear
what era you and I live in
and what name
should be given it. But,
more likely, it will
be given many different names—
some very strange—
chosen by the grandchildren
of those in power at this hour—
the grandchildren, I should say,
of everyone living today.”
He was walking fast,
not looking from side
to side, holding his head
up high,
with its high cheekbones
and flinty chin.
Translated by Robert Chandler
*Zelinsky was a Soviet literary critic of great influence from the early 1930s until his death. In 1940 he wrote a damning internal review of a collection of poems that Marina Tsvetaeva, recently returned to the Soviet Union, was trying to publish. He also played an important part in the public attacks on Boris Pasternak in 1958, after Doctor Zhivago had been published abroad.
MIKHAIL ZOSHCHENKO (1895–1958) is best known for the comic short stories he wrote in the 1920s. These were hugely popular; 700,000 copies of his books were sold in 1926 and 1927 alone. Zoshchenko also won the admiration of other writers—from Maxim Gorky to Osip Mandelstam. In 1946 he was denounced as an “enemy of Soviet literature” and expelled from the Writers’ Union. Zoshchenko’s stories perfectly capture the texture of everyday life in Soviet Russia: the inescapable bureaucracy; the constant shortages of everyday necessities, especially living space; and people’s strange eagerness to denounce one another. Zoshchenko is not only one of the funniest of Russian writers but also one of the most sober; no one is more aware of the harm carried out in the name of grand visions of progress. The harsh and cramped world of his stories is a paradoxically eloquent assertion of the importance of what is so strikingly absent from it: acts of kindness.
MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH ZOSHCHENKO
This is how the story begins.
I had had my left eye operated on
in the clinic
of one of the fastest
and most furious
of our new businessmen,
a truly Soviet
caricature of a capitalist,
a man, I could see,
with an unerring
eye for commercial opportunity.
There were nine of us patients,
crowded into a small ward. I knew
everyone’s name. We had already
talked about everything
there was
to talk about,
and there was nothing,
I think I can say,
we didn’t know about one another.
We’d exhausted our supply
of jokes. Well-wishers
had ensured
that all of us
languishing in the hospital
had a clear grasp
of the system of bribes:
so much for a cataract,
so much for a glaucoma,
so much for a scratched lens,
so much for a detached retina—
each item on this list, of course,
more expensive
than the item before it.
And then there was a redoubtable lady,
an administrator who could have been
a grenadier guard, with a snowplow
of a bust and a baritone
that would have done her proud onstage.
She accepted payment
in cash
or in French cosmetics—
as long as the bottles
were not too small.
We were all feeling bored
and one of the other patients
said to me,
“You, probably, have some books.
You look like one of those . . .
intelligentsia. What’s damaged
your eyes is books.
Get your friends to bring you some
so you can read to us.”
My friends
brought me some books.
I read a little Tolstoy:
The Sebastopol Stories.
“Not bad—but it’s
ever so serious. And we’ve
all had enough of war.”
I tried Dostoyevsky:
The Adolescent, Poor Folk.
“Not bad, but it’s all
ever so serious. Enough
to make you start to cry.
Give us something
a bit simpler, something
that’ll make us all laugh,
even just a little bit.”
And so I read them some Zoshchenko.
Everyone was transformed.
Everyone was reborn.
Laughter’s more powerful than vitamins.
The roars of laughter made it difficult
to keep reading.
We knew joy
and a sense of community.
“Just what we need!” people were saying.
“That fellow knows his stuff!”
They were falling off mattresses.
Bandages were slipping off eyes.
In dashed the head nurse. “What’s going on
in here? I’ve never heard
such a racket. Stop all
this reading at once. You should
be ashamed of yourselves!”
I stopped reading. Everyone
went back to being bored.
Zoshchenko, once again,
was forbidden. Of course:
What else
could we have expected?
And so, instead of reading,
I talked to them about Zoshchenko.
My own thoughts and impressions.
Swarthy, quiet, timid. Brown eyes.
A man who had kept his counsel
among wheeler-dealers and their floozies,
among criminals and swindlers—
he knew them not from clever books
but from the life he’d led. He’d seen
enough—more than enough of them.
And he had learned
to keep his mouth shut.
He was a man like no one else.
His eyes had a wonderful glitter,
almost as if there were tears in them.
He seemed to me to be looking
somewhere into the depths of the soul,
as if the world lying outside
the soul were too much for him.
He’d been in the war,
he’d suffered concussion,
he’d been gassed. All this had left him
with heart p
roblems. He had bred rabbits
and chickens. He had worked as a cobbler,
a policeman, an agent
for the Criminal Investigation Department.
This wealth of professions
had come in useful.
He’d got to know people.
Then it was time
to say goodbye to fun
and games, time for Zoshchenko
to start his real work.
How does it start—
the mad day, the mad life
of a writer? What whim,
what overwhelming force
presses a pen into some poor fellow’s hand
and leads him down
through all of Dante’s
twisting circles?
One day
I was walking
down Nevsky Prospekt
with Slonimsky—not the composer
but his father, the writer,
one of the Serapion Brothers.*
And there, coming toward us,
not far from the Anichkov Bridge
and Clodt’s famous horses,
was Zoshchenko. Two writers,
two Serapions, two Mikhails,
two old friends. I was introduced.
“I’ve been wanting to meet you for years!”
I said breathlessly. Zoshchenko
said nothing. He seemed to be almost
pitying me. Had I said the wrong thing?
What was I to do? Best, I thought,
to hold my tongue. Which
I did. The two Mikhails
talked for a long time. And then,
as we were saying goodbye,
Zoshchenko said, “I’m reading
this evening. A workers’ club
in Vyborgskaya. Do come if you can!”
And he wrote down the address.
Slonimsky was doing something else,
but I went along. And I didn’t regret it.
Zoshchenko and I arrived
together. Chance?
Sometimes chance is a bearer of gifts.
It was early. No one
to greet the writer. He invited me
backstage. We’d only just met
and there I was—in the role
of trusted friend. I was
all eyes, and I soon realized
that Zoshchenko was a lonely man
who hid this with great skill.
It was my lucky day:
The author, Zoshchenko,
reading his own work.
And me backstage, looking out
into the packed hall. Z. read
clearly, as if at ease,
as if simply chatting,
one to one, with individual listeners.
He read “The Forked Object”
and “The Aristocratic Lady.”
He sounded sad and thoughtful—
and the audience went wild.
They roared with laughter.
I saw mouths twisted into strange shapes;
I heard snorts, neighs, and bleats.
One man was slapping his hand on his knee;
another kept turning his head
madly from side to side;
a third was trying to silence
someone mooing and weeping beside him.
A fourth was howling, head
thrown back. Where were you,
Brueghel? O Goya,
where were you? I saw these things
with my own eyes.
And I saw thoughtful looks,
expressions of deep alarm;
I saw the shining faces of true
lovers of the word. And I saw
Zoshchenko, calm and pale,
retire backstage,
a little hunched, as if battered
by the waves—those rolling
breakers of applause.
“Why are they all laughing?”
he asked. “I’ve been telling them
terrible things.” With a shrug
of despair he goes out again.
One more story. The story’s creator
is swarthy, brown-eyed.
Quiet. Unsmiling. Sad.
And only now and then
do the corners of his slightly
swollen mouth betray
that he has something to say.
And so he writes, his pen
scratching away in some room
near the Griboyedov Canal.
No, this is no portrait. Only
a first sketch. We leave the club.
He says nothing. But then,
as we’re saying goodbye: “What can I
teach them? All they ever learn,
and they learn it quicker and quicker,
is how to poison one another’s lives.
Goodbye. See you soon.” But I
never
saw Zoshchenko again.
May–June 1993
Translated by Robert Chandler
*The Serapion Brothers was a group of writers formed in Petrograd in 1921. Among its members were Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Slonimsky, and Zoshchenko. Among their teachers were Yevgeny Zamyatin and Korney Chukovsky.
ISAAC BABEL (1894–1940), one the twentieth century’s most innovative and influential prose stylists, was born in Odessa, Ukraine, into a relatively well-to-do Jewish family. A lifelong Francophile and devotee of Guy de Maupassant, he began writing short stories at an early age. During the Civil War he joined the Red Army as a political commissar and correspondent, and his experiences with the Cossacks during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921 inspired one of his masterpieces, Red Cavalry (1926). In his other great cycle, The Odessa Tales, he fictionalized the exploits of the city’s legendary Jewish gangsters, as well as his own childhood and youth. He based his play Sunset (1928) on one of his gangster tales. He was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940, a victim of Stalin’s purges.
ISAAC EMMANUILOVICH BABEL
More than any other storyteller,
he married sorrow with delight.
I read his prose like poetry,
all breathless, getting it by heart.
I was fifteen years old.
I read him aloud, to myself—
my poet,
he drew me like first love.
Behind thick glasses
(yes, always—ever since childhood)
lay laughter, slyness, a sparkle of eyes.
An upturned nose,
head tilted back.
I first saw Babel at a publisher’s
on Bolshaya Cherkasskaya,
leaving the accounts department.
Film clip: He stuffs his wallet
into his jacket pocket,
a little stooped,
his face not quite content,
not quite self-mocking—
he did, after all, once say of himself:
“This is someone
I’ve been fighting against
all my life.”
He walks down the stairs,
and I follow him with my eyes.
Here—the man who wrote Red Cavalry,
The Odessa Tales, Sunset.
And then a second meeting.
His face is always acting.
The eyes, cheeks, lips, and nose
find it hard to get on together.
It’s hard to grasp the story.
We weren’t here for the start
of this act; by the time we arrived
it was already
scene three or four.
“Don’t be shy, kids, come in!”
To Babel we were kids—
two students bearing an invitation
from our institute
to a meeting with André Malraux,
who had just arrived from Paris.
“All right! Let’s think it over. Sit down.
Want a drink? Hungry?”
We refused so vehemently
that Babel said, “Of course
you’re hungry.” We were indeed.
When food was brought,
we found it difficult
to eat and drink in a leisurely manner.
“What would you have me do
at this meeting with André Malraux?”
“Whatever you like. Talk.
And, of course, interpret.”
“That’s right—interpret.
Malraux’s already called me. I agree.”
For us two students
this was a victory.
Our friends had said we’d never
get to speak to Babel.
Feeling awkward, we rose,
thanked him for the meal, and said goodbye—
my classmate Rita and I.
Weightily, Babel rested
his palms on our shoulders.
A pressed suit, a tight waistcoat.
How old was he?
Twenty-three? Thirty-three? Forty-three?
At the institute they asked us
to meet the car bringing Malraux and Babel.
Students poured out into the street: “They’re here!”
Both wearing black suits.
I’ve told you about Babel already.
Malraux is thin-faced and pale.
His soft hair falls every now and then
over his eyes. His long thin fingers
sweep back these strands
that still, as if out of spite,
keep falling across his forehead.
He speaks softly but quickly,
as if carried away, not trying to please.
The year, I think, is 1936.
Malraux is not yet minister of culture.
Babel still has his freedom.
Later, after his arrest,
he’ll want the news of his arrest
passed on to Andrey,
as he called Malraux. But at the time—
there we were, firing our questions.
Babel could barely interpret
fast enough. The great man of silence
found himself
with a great many words to say.
The nervously proud Malraux
kept thinking,
and his thoughts rolled over us
like the wheels
of a weather-beaten carriage.
Babel kept glancing at his watch,
lifting the edge of his cuff,
and shaking his head.
“What do they know in France of Pasternak?”
A pause, a long pause.
Suddenly Malraux brightens up, raises his head:
“I’ve heard that in the Latin Quarter
they read about a young man
who walks around the city
blithely, giddily repeating
the name of the girl he loves—I think it’s . . .”
“Marburg, Marburg!” the hall bursts out.
And no less than twenty voices
