The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  It was the most imperfect of all natural mechanisms of giving birth—human childbirth. No other animal suffered as much. The pain, the duration, and sometimes the danger for the health of the mother were signs of human beings’ special status in this world. The two-legged, straight-backed, forward-looking, freehanded, and sole creature in the world conscious of the connection between conception and childbirth, between corporeal love and that other variety, known only to human beings. The price of walking straight up, some thought. Recompense for original sin, claimed others.

  The child had already bent its head so that the posterior fontanel faced forward, turned it slightly, and, straightening its head, entered the pubic arch. The pain was so unbearable that Zhenya’s world went black.

  The midwife slapped her, saying, “Hey, Mommy! Everything’s fine … Just a little bit longer,” while commenting to someone on the side, “Left occiput anterior position.”

  Tears and sweat streamed over Zhenya’s face. The head tore through. He was already turning his shoulder, and the midwife, grabbing the wet, elongated head with both hands, coaxed the front shoulder forward …

  3

  ELENA DOZED ON HER BENTWOOD CHAIR WITH THE humiliating hole in the seat. She dreamed a dream: one bright spring day when the buds had already opened on the trees but each separate leaf was still small, pale, and not yet its full color, she was walking down Bolshaya Bronnaya Street and turned into Trekhprudny, tilted her head back, and saw a crowd of people standing on the semicircular decorative balcony under the polycircular window of their old apartment on the top floor of the building. She wanted to look more closely to see who was standing there, and she found herself level with the balcony and even slightly above the balustrade and saw that there on a cot lay her grandfather—very old with a not entirely live face—and alongside him her grandmother, Evgenia Fedorovna, Vasilisa, her mother, her father, her young brothers, and all of them were waiting for her in order to tell her something important and joyous. In addition to her own family—the Miakotins and the Nechaevs—in the receding distance that widened like a wedge with the crowd she saw the adult bald Kukotskys with their exotic wives, Toma’s relatives from Tver, bearded Jews with a Torah at their head, and some completely unfamiliar people. What was so surprising was how many people could fit on that tiny balcony. More and more of them appeared, and suddenly, in their midst, there appeared two people—a young man who was tall with a head of thick hair, not very clean skin, and a puffy mouth, and a girl resembling Tanechka or Zhenya or Tomochka, with an infant in her arms. This couple was at the very center of this geometrically improbable composition, and Pavel Alekseevich took the infant into his arms and turned it so that it faced Elena … And this infant emanated light, sense, and all the joy of the world. As if in the middle of a sunny day another sun had risen … This infant belonged to them all, and they to it. And Elena Georgievna sobbed with perfect happiness, just a tiny bit amazed that she could sense both the salty sweetness of her tears and her total disembodiment …

  4

  ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY VITALY SET OUT FOR the Central Telegraph: for certain reasons he did not call America from his home phone. He and his father were connected very quickly. Ilya Iosifovich picked up the receiver, heard his son’s voice—quick, businesslike, without “hello” or “how are you doing.”

  “Zhenya gave birth to a son. Congratulations! You’ve got a great-grandson.” With no superfluous comments.

  He did it within one minute. Then it took him twenty minutes to get through to Leningrad. He told Sergei that everything was all right. She’d had a boy, without any complications.

  “Can I come to see her?” Sergei asked.

  “Call Zhenya when she gets out of the maternity hospital. Figure it out with her.”

  He felt no particular weakness for this long-haired musician and was even a little jealous of his relationship with Zhenya. Whatever connection they shared was completely incomprehensible … Sergei also did not know what connected him with this girl who had been his daughter for a few years. But he didn’t think about it. He took his instrument and began to play his old composition, “Black Stones.”

  5

  ILYA IOSIFOVICH HAD DECIDED LONG AGO THAT HE WOULD go to Moscow when his great-grandson was born. The visa was ready. Valentina at first was categorically against it, but then gave in—under the condition that she go along. All that was left to do was order the tickets. Their older daughter, born four months after Zhenya, had her own place. The younger one, the sixteen-year-old, brought from Russia when she was just an infant, they never left alone. She was a shy, rather strange little girl who loved cats and aquarium fish. They decided that it would be good for her to spend ten days living on her own.

  There was a bit of difficulty with Valentina’s job. She taught at Harvard University and could not just up and take a vacation. But her class was over in three weeks. As for Ilya Iosifovich, he had retired long ago, and although he was an honorary member of a dozen or so various societies and editorial boards, he could pick up and leave whenever he wanted.

  The last three years he had been reading the Torah in German and English, upset that his parents had not sent him to heder as a child. Learning Hebrew at eighty-six was not easy. On the other hand, he’d never been frightened by difficulties. He didn’t have and would never again have a conversation partner like Pavel Alekseevich. He spoke and even argued with him frequently in his head. Although he had to admit that a certain rapprochement was taking place between them: Ilya Iosifovich was now inclined to believe in the existence of a Universal Higher Reason and was toying with the idea that the Bible represented a grandiose encryption, that Universal Higher Reason’s cosmic message to humankind. But humankind had still not matured to the point where it could decipher this encryption. He constantly attempted to discuss questions of theology with Genka, who lived in New York, but Gena had a decided preference for all varieties of Eastern hogwash—beginning with Chinese food and ending with karate. When he found out that Zhenya had given birth to a son and his father was planning to travel to Moscow as a result, he was alarmed.

  “A trip like that at your age! You’re better off sending her the money! And I’m ready to …”

  But Ilya Iosifovich said firmly: “Don’t teach me how to live! The girl has a grandfather. I have a great-grandson. Too bad Pasha didn’t live to see the day.”

  Translator’s Afterword

  THE HISTORY OF THIS TRANSLATION IS WORTHY OF THE notebook of Chekhov’s Trigorin: “an idea for a short story.” But that is not what this afterword is about, or at least not entirely. I first read The Kukotsky Enigma in its debut incarnation, which was titled Journey to the Seventh Dimension (Puteshestvie v sedmuyu storonu sveta) and published in the Moscow literary journal Novy mir in 2000, its place of publication a recommendation in its own right. In 2005, along with millions of Russian television viewers, I watched Yuri Grymov’s twelve-part eponymous adaptation of the novel (on which Ludmila Ulitskaya collaborated), and my disappointment—despite the film’s talented actors and clever cinematography—was not atypical. As film adaptations often prove, there is more to a great novel than the love story at its core.

  The love stories in The Kukotsky Enigma certainly deserve twelve episodes and great actors. Ulitskaya weaves wonderfully complex tales with unanticipated turns, and her storytelling has made her work popular among readers as diverse as her cast of characters. Tanya Kukotskaya’s Soviet hippie friend Nanny Goat Vika or Vasilisa’s intellectual monastic mentor, Mother Anatolia, both would have liked The Kukotsky Enigma, but for very different reasons. Certainly, the love story has attracted millions of Russian readers to this novel, now in its fifteenth printing and at the same time available free of cost online in Russian in the Russian Federation. But readers who focus on the love story alone will miss Ulitskaya’s true artistic innovation in this work.

  On the odd chance that someone will read this afterword before embarking on the novel and in any event no
t to diminish readers’ pleasure in solving The Kukotsky Enigma on their own, the only clue to be provided here is that the core of this novel lies in your, the reader’s, experience, particularly of part 2. Throughout the rest of the book, Ulitskaya’s narrator, like Elena Kukotskaya, leaves little notes to her readers to assist them in deciphering Elena’s and the other characters’ experiences in part 2. There Ulitskaya veritably re-creates for her readers an experience of the novel’s fictional reality as if they themselves were victims of Alzheimer’s disease. The process of memory (or the thwarting thereof) comprises the principal mechanism that makes reading possible and pleasurable, and Ulitskaya has given that process a twenty-first-century name.

  The novel’s title merits comment. In an interview given shortly before the first book edition emerged (published online in Russian by Tatyana Martyusheva in a posting titled “A Mondial Hodgepodge or The Kukotsky Enigma” Erfolg.ru. http://www.erfolg.ru/culture/ulizkaya.htm), Ulitskaya confessed that she had changed the novel’s title because she had tired of explaining what she meant by Journeys into the Seventh Dimension. Perhaps similar confusion had led Ulitskaya’s German publishers to release the novel as Reise in den siebenten Himmel [Journey to Seventh Heaven]. In Russian, Казус Кукоцкого—the title the novel bears to this day—is marvelously alliterative and polysemous. The first word, derived from the Latin casus (as in casus belli) in Russian conveys: “an incident that occurs independent of the will of any person and cannot be anticipated under certain conditions; a condition or noteworthy occurrence or event or meeting that involves complications; an extraordinary occurrence, particularly from a legal standpoint; a particular incidence of any particular disease or illness; a cause or reason,” and “something inexplicable.” Clearly, the English word “case,” which has been used in English-language references to this novel, does not convey the wealth of meanings implied by the Russian kazus. Neither does “enigma,” entirely, but at least it suggests the novel’s core mechanism and encompasses all of the events contained within it—each in its own way an explication of one of the definitions above.

  As with many great novels—including Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, two literary predecessors as “Moscow” novels that are directly and indirectly referenced by Ulitskaya—The Kukotsky Enigma contains so many references to cultural phenomena, Russian, European, and worldwide, that annotating this novel would require a companion publication twice its size. In my translation, I have tried to elucidate references for English-speaking readers without spelling them out, knowing that those so inclined will do extratextual research.

  The majority of work on this translation was completed in Moscow, in an apartment five minutes’ walking distance from the Kukotskys’ building (a real place that housed very real doctors and academics) and across the street from the church where baby Zhenya was baptized. Most of the sites Ulitskaya mentions in the novel were very familiar to me; many of them are surrounded by legends and linked to particular stages in the city’s history. Some of the places Ulitskaya names no longer exist, although their legacy remains in street names that now refer only to a memory. Each part of Moscow mentioned adds a dimension of characterization to events in the novel. The same is true of places named in Leningrad–St. Petersburg (Piter), which include the building where Dostoevsky located his pawnbroker’s apartment in Crime and Punishment. Literary tours of Russian cities are a staple of the tourist diet; perhaps someday tours will be given of Ulitskaya’s “Novoslobodskaya,” a traditionally mixed (working-class and intellectual) neighborhood in Moscow that has finally found its poet.

  In Russian, Ulitskaya’s prose is, for the most part, unlabored and easy to read. She is also a master of dialogue. The accessibility of her language, though, can be misleading, encouraging readers to slide over references the same way some of her characters stroll past cultural monuments oblivious to their significance, in a kind of cultural amnesia. To the extent possible I have striven to style the language of The Kukotsky Enigma to mirror Ulitskaya’s idiom, and this has also involved shifts to more complex syntax or unusual lexicon to signal disjunctions in the original Russian. American spellings and punctuation have been used throughout, following style guidelines specific to Northwestern University Press. Transliteration from the Russian generally follows the Library of Congress system, simplified for readability. Names ending in the letter i kratkoe (й) are spelled with an i (e.g., Sergei); names ending in the letters i (и) or y (ы) and i kratkoe are rendered as y (Gennady and Vitaly); names including the soft sign, miagkii znak (ь), have been transliterated using i (e.g., Vitalievna), whereas names including so-called “soft” vowels with or without a miagkii znak (e.g., я, ё, ю) have been rendered as y plus phoneme (e.g., Tanya and Ilya). The metric system in some cases has been replaced by the U.S. system of measurements. Place-names have been transliterated, but words such as “street,” “lane,” and “monastery” are supplied in English.

  This is the third translation project I have published with Northwestern University Press, and the third that freelance editor Xenia Lisanevich and I have collaborated on. Not a few of the “enigmas” in The Kukotsky Enigma derive from Ulitskaya’s creative choices, some of which are inexplicable even on repeated readings. The translation and editorial team, headed by Anne Gendler at the Press, aided by graduate assistant Jessica Hinds-Bond, turned what could have been agony into an intellectual project, as the four of us have worked to coax out layers of meaning in this very tricky (not to repeat “enigmatic”) text. To Xenia, Anne, and Jessica this translator owes much. Any infelicities that have eluded their scrutiny are my responsibility. And, finally, to Ludmila Evgenievna: thank you for your marvelous work.