Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  In the second half of 1994, a contract was signed in Amsterdam finalizing the sale of all six Malevich paintings to Galerie Gmurzynska. The Khardzhievs purchased a house in Amsterdam. Having no recourse, Khardzhiev signed away to the Russian state the archive that had been confiscated at Sheremetyevo Airport. Into the lives of Khardzhiev and his wife came three “caretakers”: Boris Abarov, a failed Russian actor with an Amsterdam address, his girlfriend, Bella Bekker, hired by the Khardzhiev household as a housekeeper, and Johannes Buse, who played financial adviser. In keeping with the new constellation, Khardzhiev penned a new will: now he left everything to his wife, Lidia Chaga. Soon after the will was signed, Chaga slipped on the stairs in their canal-side home, fell, and died. Now, after Khardzhiev’s death, the treasure trove would go to Boris Abarov. Two days after Chaga’s death, the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation was established to manage the remaining Khardzhiev collection and archive. The foundation was run by Boris Abarov and Johannes Buse.

  In March 1996, Khardzhiev was visited by Vadim Kozovoi, a Russian poet living in Paris. Khardzhiev complained to Kozovoi that Abarov was essentially holding him hostage. He drew up a new will according to which he would leave everything to Kozovoi after his death, under the condition that Kozovoi move Khardzhiev to Paris. The will, however, was never certified because Abarov apparently stepped in to prevent Kozovoi, during his brief stay in Amsterdam, from having it witnessed. Kozovoi returned to Paris without finalizing the matter; Khardzhiev died in June, Boris Abarov was still the legal heir, Bella Bekker was given the house where she’d served as housekeeper, Buse, after receiving his payout, went off to somewhere in France. Boris Abarov agreed to a payout of some ten million guilders, signed away all other pretensions to Khardzhiev’s estate, and then vanished from the story. This was followed by tortuous and lengthy discusssions between Dutch and Russian state negotiators about returning Khardzhiev’s treasures to Russia. In 2011, the archive (or what was left of it) was returned to the Russian authorities. The valuable paintings, however, remain with the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation at its seat in Amsterdam.

  This report is not complete or, I assume, fully accurate; it’s merely a hasty compilation of several articles published at the height of the scandal. Much remains hidden from view. After the petty hyenas (Abarov, Bekker, and Buse) and farcical elements worthy of Mikhail Bulgakov amused the reading public for a time, the game was taken over by more serious players.

  So was Nikolai Khardzhiev the Salieri of the Russian avant-garde or was he its Mozart, as an admirer claimed? The Mozart-Salieri relationship is one that Russian culture has not been able to avoid. It has been raised repeatedly over the years with Pushkin’s play Mozart and Salieri, the Rimsky Korsakov opera, Boris Pilnyak’s story “A Story about How Stories Come to be Written,” Vaginov’s novels, Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita . . . Did Khardzhiev’s long and rich biography accelerate unjustly toward its end, culminating in a brief moralistic fable? A gamblers’ proverb on deadly greed? The myth of King Midas? A story of tragedy arising from the plunder of treasures (robbed = damned!)? A moralistic legend about rare diamonds that bring bad luck? A Bulgakov farce about money turning into worthless pieces of paper? To gloat over somebody’s crushing defeat is in poor taste. On the other hand, not to see that Khardzhiev’s story is an inseparable part of the art world (and not only the Russian art world) would be a fatal oversight.

  But perhaps all is not as it seems, the secret may lie in longevity, and we barely know anything about the secret of longevity . . . “In the autumn of 1941, when the Germans were marching on Moscow, Khardzhiev and his comrade Trenin§§§ reported to the Writers Union as volunteers. Both volunteers, in civilian garb, set out on foot for the front lines. Their city shoes soon fell to pieces, Khardzhiev ended up more or less barefoot, he caught a cold, and in a semi-conscious state he was left in a remote village far from Moscow. The entire detachment was killed, and with them, Trenin. Khardzhiev was decorated with the “For the Defense of Moscow” medal (from Russian Wikipedia).

  6.

  Come On, Behemoth, Let’s Have the Novel!

  Asen had an eye for style. The book by I. Ferris arrived in “Eastern European,” retro postal packaging, wrapped in coarse, old-fashioned, brown paper, done up with string, with my address written out in a hand that pretended to a clumsy lack of familiarity with Roman-alphabet penmanship. And the book cover was retro, too, Soviet, gray, hardcover, yet nevertheless the whole effect was one of superb design. On the title page at the bottom was the name of Asen’s small publishing company, Asen, in fine print, while across the middle of the page crawled the title: The Magnificent Art of Translating Life into a Story and Vice Versa. The book was not large, I don’t know whether Asen had made an effort to fit everything onto the ninety-nine pages or the book simply turned out that way. I assumed numerologists assign a meaning to the number ninety-nine. An internet text I skimmed on numerology and translated into “my” language said that ninety-nine is the number for the guardian angel, responsible, mainly, for intuition.

  Leafing through the book, I noted something that surprised me: each chapter was headed with the same title, the quote from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita: Come on, Behemoth, let’s have the novel!, but printed in Russian Cyrillic. Why this quote wasn’t used as the title of the entire book baffled me. I don’t believe Asen would have insisted on a catchy commercial title; in his miniature publishing firm with its tiny distribution and profile, none of the books could count on enjoying big success, regardless of whether the title was Figurae Veneris, or The Confessions of Stalin’s Geisha, or The Vegetarian Bible. I figured I. Ferris left the phrase in Russian because she felt no translation would do it justice. The peerless devil speaks, momentarily, with the voice of a plumber. And perhaps Ferris was employing chertykhan’e—an evocation calling forth the devil. Situations in The Master and Margarita were rife with this trick. Perhaps she felt she needed demonic forces to spur her on with her writing. Perhaps she meant her story of the lost novel to expose the banality of Russian everyday life in the 1930s rather than something bizarre. And while the fictional Master in Bulgakov’s novel burned the manuscript of his own novel about Pontius Pilate, many manuscripts were plundered by the NKVD, or, as with archives or even whole libraries, they were burned as heating fuel.

  The prose of I. Ferris was not exotic, but it was also not entirely pedestrian. My first impression was that it sounded like the dispirited thesis of a librarian. The topic of the thesis was the “most neglected member of OBERIU,” Doivber Levin; this hit me, briefly, as a blow to the solar plexus. I, like I. Ferris, knew a little about Levin, who had “smuggled” himself and his work into Russian literary history via his tragic fate, but voilà, she’d been the first to publish on it! My initial expectation was that this would be a modest monograph on Levin’s children’s fiction. His children’s fiction was the only material available that one could actually work with. But his children’s fiction, it turned out, was of no interest to Ferris.

  Then I imagined Ferris might attempt to reconstruct the novel of Levin’s mentioned by the two witnesses, Gennady Gor and Igor Bakhterev. At the outset, instead, Ferris presents her vision of the future of literature. She imagines ours as a new age in which the interest in literary reception will shift from original works to reconstruction of forgotten, burned, and lost works of world literature, a mission of literary restoration. Parallel to this process, existing canonized works will undergo a process of deconstruction, thereby resulting in a new version of Madame Bovary, Lolita, Anna Karenina in new multimedial forms. The literary classics will be the most quickly and efficiently transmitted to future generations as animated films, virtual reality experiences, video games . . . Ultimately, the future age will be called the age of “digital classicism” . . .

  “We live in a time of the accumulation and squirreling away of rubbish,” writes Ferris, “our lives are focused on the continual production of rubbish and, in parallel, we dwell on ways
to handle the problems posed by rubbish. From medicine to cosmetics and so on, everything constantly reminds us that we’re living in a culture centered on pollution, and, therefore, need detoxification. Our relationships with other people are toxic, our environment is toxic, the food we eat is toxic. Toxic is the key word of our times. Perhaps we need a historical time-out, production should, perhaps, be halted, we should reset, re-canonize the canonical values, hence, perhaps, we should stop having children for a while. The market persuades us of the urgency of constant production. We live in the age of the overfed, daily we serve up lotus, we’ve become lotus-eaters, and, look, we belch with satiation, why, the sound of burping is the only authentic sound we’re able to make.” Ferris does not actually say as much outright, but she hints that there can be no grand works without grand risk, no literature can matter without a “sword hanging over the author’s head.” True, the literature of the Russian avant-garde does matter, but this is due, at least in part, says Ferris, to the authors’ “dread of the sword.”

  “Emperor Shahryar is Scheherazade’s audience, her putative executioner, her requisitioner, her misogynyst commander, her tormenter. He is not there as a literary-aesthetic mediator. He’s as amoral as a child, his actions are fueled by a hunger for the story. He postpones Scheherazade’s death only so he can hear the next installment of her tale. Scheherazade tells the story only because she must, in doing so delaying the moment of her own death through the art of storytelling. Over her head hangs the sword. True, Stalin was no Shahryar. Stalin was a sadist, a head-chopper, who believed himself to be God. The greatness of many of the Russian avant-garde writers is not only in their texts but in their embrace of risk, in the sword hanging over their heads, in their dread of the sword.”

  Ferris added numbers to her thesis, trying to prove that a great deal revolved around the number 37 at the time. Stalin destroyed the “flower of the Russian intelligentsia” in 1937. Many artists lost their lives at the age of thirty-seven: Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and—Doivber Levin (!). Nikolai Oleynikov, affiliated with OBERIU, died at thirty-nine, Konstantin Vaginov (true, from tuberculosis) at thirty-five, Yuri Vladimirov (also from tuberculosis) at twenty-three. Hardly any of the great figures of the Russian avant-garde made it to fifty: Isaac Babel died at forty-six, Mikhail Bulgakov at forty-nine, Osip Mandelstam at forty-seven, Boris Pilnyak at forty-five, Marina Cvetaeva killed herself at forty-nine, Sergei Yesenin at thirty, and Vladimir Mayakovsky killed himself before he reached the fatal age of thirty-seven . . . Ferris didn’t venture into further explanation of the mechanisms of the Great Lottery, but she did reveal what had prompted her to write the book.

  “In 1936, the right to abortion was abolished in the Soviet Union. A year later, in 1937, began the so-called Great Purge, when hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. The ‘intelligentsia gene’ was the first target. And then it was as if Stalin, the great engineer of human souls, knew this loss would require compensation. I was born in 1938, I was a ‘child’ of Stalin’s decision to ban abortion. The beginning of Kharms’s children’s story—I was born in the rushes. Like a mouse. My mother gave birth to me and placed me in the water—could serve as the opening lines of my biography. All of us born between 1936 and 1955, while abortion was illegal, were born like mice. We were programmed to replenish the population vacuum, the demographic shortfall.”

  Ferris spends the first thirty pages of her book wandering in various directions: after her careen through literary-prophetic material, she launches into laments over contemporary culture, which she doesn’t understand well; these laments are followed by autobiographical details which are, I should say, the most successful in terms of literary merit. With skill and precision, Ferris sketches the quotidian existence of Moscow student and intellectual life in the 1960s and her protracted struggle with the Soviet bureaucracy to procure for herself and her husband the papers they need to leave the country. The passages about anguished, arduous, and absurd bureaucratic everyday life are brightened by her sketches of Moscow oddballs, dreamers, liars, compromisers, informers, scoundrels, geniuses, lunatics, drunks, petty profiteers, and desperados.

  Some of the finest, but also most wrenching, lines Ferris writes are dedicated to her mother. Her mother’s bitterness radiates from every word, as do Ferris’s youthful obstinacy and her headlong clashes with her mother; her mother’s obsessive worry for her daughter and the way she is entranced by her daughter’s very existence; the daughter’s surges of hatred for her mother for the same reason. And between the demanding and possessive love of her mother and David’s gentile reserve, Ferris chooses the reserve, leaving open the possibility that her marriage to David and departure for England are but a surreptitious avenue for escape from her mother.

  Ferris speaks here and there of her present life, her life in London, the loneliness, isolation, immobility. She is a living skeleton and she knows it. All big cities like London are full of people who, like her, are half-alive. Most of them live in rundown apartments slowly succumbing to mildew, most of them do not have the financial resources to move to upscale places to die, homes for the elderly, people like this pray to God they’ll sink into a blessed oblivion or simply breathe their last. The passages with the most sparkle are descriptions of a university student, a young woman to whom Ferris has offered a free room, asking in return only that the student do the shopping, which Ferris, with her limited mobility, can no longer manage. Ferris, who’d spent her whole adult life with men—her husband and two sons—describes her quiet delight in the young woman. The girl becomes the very center of her life, a substitute for the daughter Ferris never had, the grandchildren she never had, the friends who were gone. She comes to love the girl, love everything about her, love the new habit of sitting for hours in her wheelchair by the window, waiting for the young woman to come home, and, in the morning, seeing her off from the same vantage point with a long gaze still clouded by sleep. She repeats the same gaze, the same posture, with a stolid, dogged devotion. She sniffs the air when the young woman comes back, thinks up little tasks during the day to assign to her or questions she might ask just to prolong the time they spend together. The young woman is a beauty with a pale complexion, a slender face, high cheekbones, eyes that are closer than usual to the bridge of her nose, something that lends her gaze a look both alert and intent. Her movements are unusually supple and limber, she dresses in colorful clothing, unencumbered, wearing lavender socks with low-heeled green shoes, for example, and arranging her hair in wispy pigtails decorated with brightly colored clips. One time when she lies down on the sofa in the living room, she falls asleep and Ferris holds her breath, watching her: she slumbers like a child, firmly, deeply, drifting into sleep as if she were sinking into quicksand. She is soft-spoken and quiet yet deeply present. Yes, she communicates with Ferris and the space of the apartment in a way all her own. After the girl leaves the house, Ferris still feels her presence for a long time, as if she’s left her shadow behind.

  When I’d already given up on trying to guess where the book would go next, Ferris abruptly changes direction and begins elaborating on a wild premise . . . Since the time in which Doivber Levin lived was nightmarish and chaotic, and since there were two Levins with the same first and last name born in the same region with similar literary fates and similar dates of birth and death, and since there is no reliable information for where and when Doivber Levin was killed, and since people on all sides and in all places were dying and evading bullets by changing their identities, papers, identity cards, falsifying documents, personal histories, beliefs, faiths, and class, since all this was true, why would we not, asks Ferris, by that same logic, imagine that Doivber was not killed, but instead that he turned up elsewhere? Why, for instance, did Levin’s compatriot L. Panteleev, when recalling how Levin had lived on Chekhov Street in Leningrad, write this sentence in his diary: He did live yet no longer will he live. Not here nor anywhere else on this earth. A person must be not only a
bad writer, but a fool, writes Ferris, to claim that somebody was killed, and that therefore no longer will he live, and then in addition to jump up and down on the corpse, stomping on the soil with words and claiming that the corpse (Levin) will live no longer, not here nor anywhere else on this earth.

  So what if Doivber did survive and turn up elsewhere? Just maybe, he turned everywhere else on earth? Daniil Kharms—the best known and most popular of the OBERIU crowd, a writer who derided many writers including himself, who ridiculed literary texts including his own and literary genres including the genre of aphorism, once wrote: A person lives more than once. What was not finished in this life will be finished in the next.

  7.

  Out of His House Went a Man

  Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Igor Bakhterev were arrested in 1931, having spent six months at the Leningrad investigative jail known as Shpalerka.**** Kharms was given a three-year sentence (in Kursk), while Vvedensky and Bakhterev were released but banned from residing in Leningrad and Moscow and several other major cities. That same year, Yuri Vladimirov, the youngest of the OBERIUTs, died, followed soon after by Konstantin Vaginov. Aleksandar Tufanov, a translator and a Futurist who, with Velimir Khlebnikov, had influenced members of OBERIU, was arrested that same year, 1931. During questioning by the police, he confessed that some of his zaum verses were, in fact, coded calls to overthrow the Soviet regime. He was sentenced to three years in prison. Igor Terentyev, a friend of OBERIU, was active in experimental theater and associated with painters Kazimir Malevich and Pavel Filonov, as well as composer Mikhail Matyushin. Terentyev was arrested that same year, 1931, and sentenced to five years of hard labor, building the White Sea-Baltic canal. He was released early, but then arrested again in 1937 and shot at the notorious Butyrka prison in Moscow. Nikolai Oleynikov, a poet close to the OBERIU group, was arrested in 1937 and shot. Nikolai Zabolotsky was arrested in 1938 and sentenced to five years. And Vvedensky was re-arrested in 1941, after which he soon died of pleurisy. Kharms was arrested in 1941 and died in a locked-down psychiatric ward in early 1942.