Calligraphy Lesson

by Mikhail Shishkin

  There is no road to understanding except through words.

  Word corpses watch over us. The only way to get past them is to revive them. We have to breathe new life into them, so that love can once again be called love.

  Each new generation of living prose is just another path leading to where each of us is loved and awaited. Tradition consists in finding language of a new clarity and writing a classic Russian novel today, a novel about love, about how God will always have compassion for Nineveh, about overcoming death, which is a boundary between people.

  The Taking of Izmail is a novel about grabbing life, about overcoming death with a “collection of words” and the birth of a child. The novel’s world is constructed from the elementary particles of biographies that are more substantive than fictitious. Sentence fragments are jumbled up because the mumbling coming from the anteroom of Judgment Day cannot be coherent. There, there are no longer any “intact” physical bodies, but there is still pain, joy, fear, and love, in short, the sensation of life. The person is gone, but his breath is preserved. I collect human breath.

  Language has a grammatical past and future but no past or future. In the dimension of words, time twists like a screw with a stripped thread. Time can be opened at any line. Open the first line a hundred times, and you will force Him to create heaven and earth a hundred times and race over the water. He is racing right now.

  The Izmail meridian passes through Russian letters and through my life. The book begins in Russian literature and ends with the birth of my son in the Winterthur canton hospital. In Switzerland, I cut my child’s umbilicus and my novel’s.

  The words’ time, multiplied by the words’ dimension, equals the style. The generally accepted unit of the novel is the character. In Izmail, style is a character. The scratching of styles that play the part traditionally allocated to conflicts between good and evil—between the hero’s will and fate, between a man’s fist and the bronze horseman, and so on—are the text’s load-bearing construction. The styles are heroes that each defend their own picture of the world. It’s not the edges of phrases that wrangle but the edges of worldviews.

  The Taking of Izmail is a declaration of love to a monstrous fatherland. For this reason the novel turned out to be too tightly sealed, too Russian.

  The Taking of Izmail is a metaphor for capturing that Russian life the way you would capture an enemy fortress.

  But leaving helps you understand that King Herod, who killed children, is a matter of time and not geography at all.

  That meant I had to write another novel. I had to talk about these things, and in such a way that what was written was clear to Hellene and Jew. Five years were spent on Maidenhair.

  After arriving in “boring” Switzerland, where there was seemingly nothing to write about, I plunged into Russia. For the last few years I worked as an interpreter in the immigration service, interpreting interviews with refugees from our former fraternal republics. I translated words into destiny. No one tells unhorrific stories there. The novel’s hero, “an interpreter in the refugee chancellery of the Defense Ministry of Paradise,” turned out to be an interpreter between two worlds. An interface between two incompatible systems.

  The Swiss bureaucrat, Peter Fischer, doesn’t believe the stories he is told, and the heavenly gates remain under lock and key forever.

  What really happened, no one will ever find out. But the stories told, the words, create their own reality. The details are important. Words create realities and decide destinies.

  Unidentified writers, under four evangelical pseudonyms, wrote a book that made the world what it is today. Their words created the very reality in which we have been living for two thousand years; the words simply had to be worthy of faith. Had it not been for the detail about the baked fish he ate after going hungry after he died on the cross, and the finger stuck into the wound, the world would not be Christian and would not be awaiting resurrection. The word becomes the reality, a reality of which we ourselves are merely a part.

  A person writing is a link between two worlds: the unreal world of life, where everything is transient, fleeting, and mortal and vanishes without a trace, like the second—or the thousands of generations—that just flashed by; and the world of words worthy of faith, which sprinkle the elixir of immortality on that baked fish, and that honey, and that finger. And on that living man whose feet both Marias rushed to embrace, death notwithstanding.

  Unless life is transformed into words, there will be nothing.

  The author becomes a translator translating all these people into words. In the book, refugees to Switzerland from the countries of the former Soviet Union become a metaphor for people, living and dead, trying to make their way to their own historical homeland, which is the same for all of us: God. It is the place where someone loves us all. Even if there is no good reason to love us. The author is these people’s translator.

  But just as Peter Fischer, Peter the Fisherman holding the keys to heaven, stands on a real border, so too language stands on the border of reality. Language itself is the world that will remain. And the border of the world beyond which you cannot poke your head. Just try. And you’ll smash into language, like a window.

  The author is the interface between earth and sky. Between life and text. It is he who can lead people out of time and into forever.

  On the one hand, there is the fleeting, transient world where you cannot live and from which everyone flees, not because there’s not enough money somewhere, not because someone is in pain there, or someone is humiliated, and not because someone was put in prison, rather everyone flees from a world when there is death in it. After taking in this world, the author at the other end must counter with something equivalent in force. For this, he must create a world without death.

  Language is a means of resurrection. My novel is about there being no death. Everyone knows there is no death, but each person has to find his own proofs. And so I search. One apocrypha says, “For by the word was the world created, and by the word shall we be resurrected.”

  Words must be made living not only until the cock crows but so that they cannot die anymore. I have to suck dead time out of the word and blow living time in, mouth to mouth—and force it to breathe, like a drowning victim. I have to resurrect it to eternal life with our breath. I have to use words to create a reality where there is no death.

  Death can be overcome only by the word and by love. This is a novel about love, which is the force of life. Maidenhair is a plant, adiantum capillus-veneris; in the South, in Rome, in the Eternal City, where all the lines of the novel tie up, it is a weed, but in Russia, it would perish without human love and warmth. In the novel, maidenhair is the God of life, which grew before the fleeting eternal city and will grow after it.

  There is a legend about a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement for life. He spent years scratching a boat on the wall with the handle of a prison spoon. One day, they brought him his water, bread, and gruel, as usual, but the cell was empty, and the wall was blank. He had climbed into his scratched boat and floated away.

  The novel is a boat. Words have to be revived so the boat can be genuine. So it can be climbed into and float out of this lonely life and go where we are all loved and awaited. Saved. Taking me us all my heroes. And the reader.

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  MIKHAIL PAVLOVICH SHISHKIN is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Russian literary figures, and the only author to win all three major Russian literary prizes (the Russian Booker Prize; the National Bestseller Prize; and the Big Book Award). Born in Moscow in 1961, Shishkin studied English and German at Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. After graduation he worked as a street sweeper, road worker, journalist, schoolteacher, and translator. He debuted as a writer in 1993, when his short story “Calligraphy Lesson” was published in Znamya magazine, which went on to win him the Debut Prize. Since then his works—both fiction and non-fiction—have been translated into 29 languages and have received
a large number of prestigious national and international awards across the world. His prose is universally praised for its style, and his novels and stories deal with universal themes like death, resurrection, and love. Shishkin’s prose fuses the best of the Russian and European literary traditions: the richness and sophistication of the language, the unique rhythm and melody of a phrase, the endless play with words and the nuanced psychological undercurrent are reminiscent of Nabokov and Chekhov. The change of narration styles and narrators within a text yield a fragmented, mosaic structure of composition that focuses on the language itself, recalling James Joyce’s genius. Shishkin carries on the tradition of the greatest Russian writers, and admits to their influence in his work, “Bunin taught me not to compromise, and to go on believing in myself. Chekhov passed on his sense of humanity—that there can’t be any wholly negative characters in your text. And from Tolstoy I learned not to be afraid of being naïve.” Shishkin has lived mostly outside of Russia since 1994, and today lives between Germany and Switzerland.

  · MARIAN SCHWARTZ began her career in literary translation in 1978, and in the three decades since then she has published over sixty volumes of fiction and nonfiction—biography, criticism, fine arts, and history. Schwartz studied Russian at Harvard University, Middlebury Russian School, and Leningrad State University and received a Master of Arts in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. Schwartz is perhaps best known for her prize-winning translations of works by Russian émigré writer Nina Berberova, Edvard Radzinsky’s the bestseller, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, several novels by Andrei Gelasimov, and Mikhail Shishkin’s first novel to appear in English, Maidenhair (Open Letter 2012). She lives in Austin, Texas.

  · LEO SHTUTIN studied French literature at the University of Oxford, completing his DPhil in 2014. He translates for The Calvert Journal and other online publications. His translation from the Russian of Victor Beilis’ novel Death of a Prototype (2005) is due to be published by Thames River Press, and a version of his DPhil thesis—an investigation of the notions of spatiality and subjectivity in the writings of Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Maeterlinck and Alfred Jarry—is currently being readied for publication by OUP.

  · MARIYA BASHKATOVA is an alumna of Brown University, where she studied Comparative Literature and Cognitive Neuroscience. At Brown, she wrote for the school newspaper and was involved in the Aldus Journal of Translation. An avid reader, Bashkatova translates Russian and French literature.

  · SYLVIA MAIZELL studied Russian Literature at the University of Chicago, in Moscow and in Saint Petersburg, and taught Russian for many years. For the last decade she worked as a translator from Russian, including stories by Vladimir Makanin, Andrei Gelasimov, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, and Dina Rubina. Her translations have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Best European Fiction 2011, Moscow Noir, Russian Love Stories (Middlebury Studies), Metamorphoses, Partisan Review, and Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and Related Arts.

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  ALSO PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH BY MIKHAIL SHISHKIN:

  Maidenhair

  (translated by Marian Schwartz)

  The Light and the Dark

  (translated by Andrew Bromfield)