The Firebird in Russian folklore is a fiery, illuminated bird; magical, iconic, coveted. Its feathers continue to glow when removed, and a single feather, it is said, can light up a room. Some who claim to have seen the Firebird say it even has glowing eyes. The Firebird is often the object of a quest. In one famous tale, the Firebird needs to be captured to prevent it from stealing the king’s golden apples, a fruit bestowing youth and strength on those who partake of the fruit. But in other stories, the Firebird has another mission: it is always flying over the earth providing hope to any who may need it. In modern times and in the West, the Firebird has become part of world culture. In Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, it is a creature half-woman and half-bird, and the ballerina’s role is considered by many to be the most demanding in the history of ballet.
The Overlook Press in the U.S. and Gerald Duckworth in the UK, in adopting the Firebird as the logo for its expanding Ardis publishing program, consider that this magical, glowing creature—in legend come to Russia from a faraway land—will play a role in bringing Russia and its literature closer to readers everywhere.
This edition first published in paperback in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2015 by Ardis Publishers, an imprint of Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 1975 by Ardis
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ISBN: 978-1-4683-1075-7 (US)
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CONTENTS
Author’s Preface
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Notes
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
A certain Moscow publishing house once asked me to write an introduction for the Persian language edition of my short stories. I got to work on it, and what emerged was a story equal in length to those it was supposed to preface.
I don’t know how this happened, though I may have been somewhat influenced by the fact that the introduction was to be paid for in the usual fashion—that is, according to the number of pages.
“A strange introduction,” said the editorial assistant despondently as he took the manuscript in hand and began counting the pages. “Why, this is as much as a tenth of the whole book.”
“There’s a way to get around that,” I suggested.
“How?” he asked, brightening.
“What’s to prevent your increasing the overall size of the book, thus cutting down on the relative size of the introduction?”
“No,” he replied, for some reason offended by my proposal, “our Persian readers would never forgive us for that.”
“Well, suit yourself,” I said, and without further delay set off for the accounting office to collect my fee for the introduction.
Not long ago I learned that the same publishing house was planning to bring out another foreign-language edition of my book. When I went to volunteer my services as author of the introduction, however, I was told that the rumors regarding the publication of my book were premature—from which I can only conclude that there must also be such a thing as mature rumors. I have since been informed by certain other sources that the book is actually going to be published, but for the time being the whole business remains a tightly guarded editorial secret.
I hope that the introduction to the American edition of The Goatibex Constellation will be considerably shorter than the Persian one, all the more so since it’s length has not, as far as I know, been stipulated by the publisher.
And so, without further ado, what is a goatibex?
In one of our Abkhazian newspapers I once happened to read an article about a man who had crossed a female goat with a male ibex and produced a new animal which he called a goatibex. (Abkhazia, by the way, is my native land; it is situated on the Black Sea coast and is one of the most charming of our Soviet autonomous republics.)
According to the article, the goatibex was in good health and apparently was quite eager to overtake and even surpass the population figures of the more traditional breeds of livestock. Taking into account this and certain other unique characteristics of the hybrid (its high meat and wool yield, for example), the author of the article predicted an unprecedented leap in livestock production, all the more so since there could be no doubt as to the goatibex’s jumping ability—the latter having been inherited from his male parent, the mountain-dwelling ibex.
Along with certain other digressions from the main theme, my story contains several reminiscences of my grandfather’s house and an account of one of my childhood adventures. Why have I included these? Because in the course of writing about the mannequins of goatibexation I began to feel the need for a breath of fresh air. This need was a purely subjective one, but I decided to justify it artistically by letting these childhood memories intrude upon the main theme and overwhelm it with their poetic freshness and vigor.
The creative process is, of course, an unexplained phenomenon, and although we are able to separate some of the individual strands entering into the web of causality, these strands, taken by themselves, represent only a fraction of the whole.
On the subject of humor I also have a number of observations which I am ready to pass on free of charge. I have, to be sure, already shared these observations with my Persian readers, but after all, is it not the author’s right and even obligation to seek out the widest possible audience for his views?
In order to attain a genuine sense of humor I believe one has to descend to the depths of pessimism. And only when one has peered into the murky abyss and convinced oneself that here too there is nothing, can one make one’s way haltingly back from the abyss. The traces of this return trip will be humor— genuine humor.
Humor possesses one modest but undisputed virtue: it is always truthful. In fact, one can even go so far as to say that all humor is humorous precisely because it is truthful. Not every truth is humorous, of course, but all humor is truthful.
It is with this dubious aphorism that I should like to conclude my introduction to the American edition of The Goatibex Constellation.
FAZIL ISKANDER
I
One fine day I was fired from the editorial staff of a youth newspaper in Central Russia where I had been working for less than a year. I had been assigned to the paper directly after graduation from the Institute.
By some freakish coincidence it
turned out that the paper’s editor-in-chief wrote poetry, and what was worse, published his verse under a pseudonym. He had taken the pseudonym out of respect for the local authorities, although as it turned out he could have spared himself the trouble since the local authorities already knew about his verse. They kept this knowledge to themselves, however, having apparently decided that a weakness for poetry was quite forgivable in the editor of a youth newspaper.
The local authorities knew about his verse, but I did not. Thus it happened that at my very first staff meeting I began criticizing a certain poem which had recently appeared in our paper. Although I criticized the poem without in any way making fun of it, my voice may have betrayed a hint of condescension—the sort of Muscovite snobbishness which is perhaps understandable in a young man fresh out of a Moscow institute.
As I was speaking, I noticed a strange look pass over the faces of my colleagues. I attached no great importance to this, however, merely assuming that they were impressed by the smooth logic of my presentation.
Perhaps I might even have gotten away with my indiscretion, had it not been for one small detail. Passing himself off as a village Komsomol, the poet had spoken of the advantages of the potato digger over the manual harvesting of potatoes. In my spiritual and even literary naiveté I concluded that this was but another one of those poems that are always finding their way into editorial offices all over the world. And not wishing to be overly harsh on the aspiring young poet, I concluded my speech with the comment that for a village Komsomol it was a fairly literate attempt.
Never again did I criticize our editor’s poems. The damage had already been done, however, and after this he no longer trusted me. Apparently he assumed that I had merely shifted tactics and was now criticizing him behind his back.
All in all, he was probably right in concluding that one versifier was quite enough for a provincial youth newspaper. He had no doubts as to which one of us it was to be, nor for that matter did I.
A drive to cut back on personnel was launched that same spring, and I became one of its victims. Spring may be a good time for staff reductions, but it is a poor time for parting with one’s sweetheart.
At the time I happened to be in love with a girl who spent her days working in the accounting office of one of our military installations, and her evenings attending night school. Between these two occupations she managed to schedule a number of rendezvous, and not only with me. She bestowed these rendezvous so liberally that it was as if she were making her way through life with an enormous bouquet of flowers, carelessly scattering them in every direction. Each recipient of one of these flowers considered himself the future owner of the whole bouquet, and as a result there arose a great many misunderstandings.
I remember one occasion in particular. She and I had met in the park and for some time had been strolling under the majestic old lindens which lined its paths. I gazed at her face, which kept flickering and dissolving in the twilight, and was entranced by the sound of her laughter. The leaves rustled beneath our feet, and music could be heard somewhere in the distance. It was a marvelous evening.
As we emerged from the path onto a well-lit intersection, I noticed a group of young men standing off to the side. One of them, the least friendly in appearance, abruptly abandoned his companions and began moving in our direction. I took an immediate dislike to his surly face, and it even occurred to me that I would have preferred to see someone else from the group approaching us. But he kept on advancing and when he finally reached us, suddenly, without uttering a word, he slapped her on the face. I pounced on him, and we began to struggle. But at this point the others came up and spoiled everything. Rather than letting us fight it out to the end, they knocked me down and gave me a good thrashing. Such, it seems, is the modern variant of the old-fashioned duel.
It turned out that she had made a date to meet him in this very spot at about this time.
“Well, okay, but why here, in the very same park where you’re walking with me?” I asked, trying to fathom the logic of her behavior.
“I don’t know,” she laughed in reply as she gently brushed off my jacket. “But you’ll have to admit that he managed to get even with me too.”
I looked at her face and sorrowfully reflected that everything seemed to suit her. In fact, her face looked even prettier after the slap.
Shortly after this incident, she began to be pursued by a certain army major—an old man, as he seemed to us at the time. She would often joke about him, and this worried me. I had already observed that if a girl makes too much fun of her admirer and the latter is sufficiently persistent, she may end up marrying him, if only for the simple reason that he makes her laugh. And I had no doubts as to the major’s persistence.
Needless to say, the foregoing circumstances did not greatly contribute to my creative output and eventually provided the editor with a pretext for ridding himself of an unwelcome competitor.
To avoid being accused of any bias in relation to me, he also fired our staff cleaning lady. Actually, he should have fired the two staff chauffeurs, who for the past month had had nothing to do anyway. As a result of a recent government economy drive on fuel they had been unable to get any gasoline, and now out of sheer laziness they had begun to grow beards and for days on end would sit around playing checkers on the office couch. As they sat there, too lazy to take off their coats, one saw in their sullenly bloated features the traces of a still lingering hangover.
And whereas in the past we would have jumped into the staff limousine and tracked down our story in a single day, now we ended up taking a three-or four-day business trip for the same story. The drive to cut back on business trips had not yet been launched.
Be that as it may, the staff reduction took place and I decided it was time to return to my native Abkhazia. Upon dismissal I received my regular month’s salary, some sort of inexplicable vacation funds, and an additional fee for my most recent articles. This struck me as an altogether generous settlement, and I went away happy in the knowledge that my financial independence was fully assured for at least two months. At that time my notions of material well-being were still those of a student.
The day of my departure finally arrived, and I was escorting my girlfriend to class for the last time.
“Be sure to write,” she said. Then, flashing one last, dazzling smile in my direction, she disappeared into the dark recesses of the night school.
Though I knew that a love such as ours exists independently of time or place, still, I was somewhat stung by her fortitude. I would have preferred a more tangible proof of her affection than that dazzling smile.
I spent the evening on a damp park bench, reflecting on the past and dreaming of the future that lay before me. As I was sitting there in that cold, bare, but already blossoming park, I suddenly heard Grieg’s “Solvejg-Song” pouring forth from the loudspeaker. Moved by this beautiful music, I was able for the moment, and with the merest trace of self-deception, to endow my beloved with all of Solvejg’s spiritual qualities.
No, I thought, whatever its inadequacies, a world that can produce a song such as this has every right to happiness and will be happy.
But enough of such daydreaming, I thought to myself. Instead of sitting here, you should be helping to improve the world. It’s high time you grew up, high time you found a job with a real, adult newspaper where people are concerned with real, adult issues.
Here I should point out that even before my dismissal I had for some time been thoroughly fed up with the pseudo-youth vocabulary of our paper and its constant bursts of empty enthusiasm.
I was fed up with its slick contrivance in place of creativity, its “deep” talk instead of depth, and its vivaciousness instead of vitality. In short, a damned, lousy newspaper!
But every cloud has a silver lining, I thought to myself. Now you’re going to become a real journalist, and she will understand and appreciate you. What exactly she was supposed to understand, I was not quite sure, but that she
would appreciate me, I did not doubt for a moment.
Later that evening some of my friends accompanied me to the railroad station. Warmed by their affectionate farewells, I departed for Moscow where I was to make a brief stopover before rushing home to my native land, to the enchanted South.
While in Moscow I managed to have one of my poems published—no small feat in those days and one which helped me to get even with my former editor, whose poems were not published in Moscow. In addition, my poem was to serve as a sort of calling card heralding my arrival at Red Subtropics, the Abkhazian newspaper where I hoped to find a job.
II
“Yes, yes, we’ve already read it,” exclaimed Avtandil Avtandilovich, the editor-in-chief of Red Subtropics, as he caught sight of me in the corridor of the editorial office. “By the way, don’t you ever plan to come back here for good?”
Apparently he thought that I had merely come home on vacation.
“Yes, I’m considering it,” I replied, and right then and there we came to an agreement. He agreed to hire me as soon as a certain elderly staff member retired.
I spent the next month wandering along the city’s deserted beaches, trying to put my not very happy reflections into verse. She had not answered either of my two letters, and pride prevented me from writing a third. I did, however, write to one of my friends at the youth newspaper, making casual reference to the fact that I had gotten a job with a genuine, adult newspaper. I asked him to drop me a line in care of the paper whenever he had a chance. And by the way, I added, if you happen to run into a certain someone, and if the subject should happen to come up, you can tell her about my new job. In closing, I asked him to convey my best regards to everyone in the office, the editor included. The tone of the letter was, I think, calm and dignified, with perhaps a slight overlay of worldly condescension.
The air of my native land, saturated with the sharp aroma of the sea and with the soft, feminine fragrance of blooming wisteria, gradually soothed and comforted me. Perhaps the iodine dissolved in the sea air has a healing effect on emotional as well as physical wounds. At any rate, for days at a time I lay sunbathing on the beach, which was still deserted except for a few young men who would occasionally stroll past in small groups. These local Don Juans would cast a proprietary eye over the entire beach, studying its terrain like a general scrutinizing the site where momentous battles are soon to take place.
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