Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  Ferris wrapped herself in her book as if it were a simple scarf she’d knitted herself. She slipped into her book the way a mouse wiggles into a wheel of cheese, with the intention of remaining there until its tiny heart stops beating. Having raised Levin a “monument,” she buried herself under the same tombstone. And as to the question of the veracity of her discoveries regarding Levin’s biography, this became moot the moment Ferris moved into her own book. Though there was nothing OBERIU-like about Ferris, her gesture was worthy of OBERIU.‡‡‡‡

  And me, what about me? Why did this story stick so doggedly to me? Ferris’s obsession with Levin is easy enough to understand: her native literature was Russian, her native language was Russian; and her nightmare—in which history nibbled indifferently at human lives like pumpkin seeds, discarding vast piles of the empty husks—was bound to a particular moment of Russian history.

  During the time I spent in Moscow in 1975-76, I acknowledged a key detail: I was protected from every fear not just by my youthfulness, but by an altogether fragile little item: my passport. With my Yugoslav passport I was treated like a “westerner,” which meant that in Moscow, where there was nothing but shortages, I enjoyed certain advantages. So how did it happen—when there wasn’t a single cloud in my sky and when, while reading The Master and Margarita, I sincerely believed that manuscripts don’t burn—that I latched onto Doivber Levin as a trivial souvenir, a gray pebble by the roadside, a literary footnote, a few references to a non-existent novel? And then I went on cherishing him as a permanent mental possession. My empathy for Doivber Levin was not, it seems, merely empathy out of principle for a man-footnote. It turns out it was anticipation of what I was yet to experience, though I would’ve sworn (at the time) that such a thing could never happen to me. Only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall my little country in the south of Europe crumbled into six even smaller countries, and our minor language split into three or four even more minor ones. And not only that, at a time when post-Communism began to flourish, “unsuitable” people disappeared, “unsuitable” articles disappeared, “unsuitable” books were taken off library shelves (including—surprise, surprise—mine!), relegated to the trash or to personal or organized bonfires; street names disappeared, monuments disappeared, governments in the itty-bitty countries in the European south were swarmed by brutal mobs who decided that all things would be tailored to their taste and their benefit. People were expelled, people were murdered, people fled in groups or singly to neighboring countries, to distant countries, families were broken up, parents found themselves in one country while their children were somewhere else. And I, too—having earlier inscribed on my inner map a random trajectory—found myself living abroad, becoming a person with two biographies, or two people with one biography, or three people with three biographies and three languages . . . All these things happened in other proportions, for other reasons, and in other ways than they did in Doivber Levin’s day. From outside, it all looked as if this were happening inside a glass snow globe with the snow swirling. But, inside, instead of snow there swirled blood. When somebody picked up the globe and shook it, miniature people inside the globe conducted a miniature war, burned books as big as poppy seeds, erected miniature borders, opened their miniature camps for the ethnically unsuitable, raised fences and barbed wire, revised the school books, erased everything old and established everything new, they died in miniature, were expelled in miniature, blew up miniature homes, everything went on in miniature—and over it all flurried that soothing artificial snow. Today, a quarter of a century later, due perhaps to an optical omission, snake eggs have been breeding in the democratic incubators of the new statelets of Croatia and Serbia, in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, in Russia and Romania, and also in the incubators of Greece, Italy, and Spain, Finland and Norway. Will new people hatch from these snake eggs, outfitted with masks and camouflage? Will these new people respond to the first call, or perhaps to no call at all, and begin a massacre of the refugees who are inundating Europe from all possible directions?

  Whether Ira Ferris’s efforts at research are credible or not matters less; what does matter is that the text remains. In Levin’s case what remains is not a text, but the absence of a text, a hole, a yawn, a pale sketch that spurs the imagination. The absence of a text, of an image, of music is the flip side of the medal and the symbol of the age. The text’s absence glows with a magical light, it pulses, it is every bit as authentic and alive. The story of Doivber Levin is not an OBERIU up-yours to the culture of the hierarchy of taste, to the institutions that pretend to a stable eternity. It is a metaphysical up-yours (no matter how ironic this may sound) demonstrating how the power of the imagination and creativity can outstrip the very power of words on paper. In that sense, manuscripts truly do not burn.

  The first review of the book appeared in the Nottingham Post. I doubt it would inspire anybody to rush out and buy it, though in this day and age, with memoirs still at the top of the bestseller list—I won’t swear to that. Ferris’s book has a catchy title, The Magnificent Art of Translating Life into a Story and Vice Versa, and the author of the brief review adeptly quoted a passage that says that the real literary fun begins the moment a story slips an author’s control, when it starts behaving like a rotating lawn sprinkler, firing off every which way, when grass begins to sprout not because of any moisture, but out of thirst for a near source of moisture. If the image of the rotating lawn sprinkler has stuck with me, it may stick with others, too . . .

  * “In the late twenties and early thirties, Levin wrote an interesting, though unfinished novel The Life of Theocritus, the manuscript of which disappeared during the siege of Leningrad.” (Igor Bekhterev, Vospominania o N. Zabolotskom [Recollections of N. Zabolotsky])

  † His double, Boris Mikhailovich Levin, was born on January 5, 1899 in the town of Zagorodino in the Vitebsk province, not far from Boris Mikhailovich (Doivber) Levin’s birthplace. He wrote for the satirical papers, penning witty tales of student and bureaucratic daily life. He fought in a battle between Soviet and Finnish forces near Suomussalmi. He met a heroic death on January 6, 1940, only a day after celebrating his forty-first birthday and two days before the Finnish forces vanquished the Soviets. He was buried where he fell, in Suomussalmi. Boris Mikhailovich Levin is an utterly forgotten figure in Russian literature. Under “genre” (meaning Levin’s genre of choice), the Russian Wikipedia cites “melodrama.”

  ‡ Gennady Gor, “Zamedlenie vremeni” [“Slow Motion”]. In: Geometricheskii les [The Geometric Forest], Leningrad, 1975.

  § L. Nilvich, “Reakcionnoe zhonglerstvo” (A Reactionary Juggle), Smena, April 9, 1930.

  ** Valery Dimshits, “Zabytyi oberiut,” Narod knigi v mire knig, October 2004. The term OBERIUT refers to a member of the OBERIU group.

  †† Salamandra P.V.V, “Medved’ iz Oberiu” [“The Bear from OBERIU”]. In: Volnie shtati Slavichi [The Free States of Slavichi], 2013.

  ‡‡ These are the titles of three of Levin’s stories: “A Street Beside a River” [“Ulitsa u reki”], “Goat” [“Kozel”], “Third Story” [“Tretii rasskaz”]. It’s worth noting that G. Gor’s novel, thought to be lost, was titled Cow. The title of Levin’s lost story “Goat” [“Kozel”] is not far from the title of K. Vaginov’s novel The Goat Song [Kozlinaia pesn’]. Such coincidences, and there are many, suggest that a zoological imagination was not the strong suit of the OBERIUTs, or perhaps it indicates that contemporaries are unreliable witnesses, functioning more like “broken telephone.”

  §§ During one such performance, staged by Doivber Levin, Daniil Kharms read his verses while perched on a cupboard, Alexander Vvedensky rode out onto the stage on a tricycle, Konstantin Vaginov read the verses “I am a Poet of Tragic Entertainment,” while ballerina Militsa Popova performed classical ballet figures and Igor Bakhterev, after the reading was over, unexpectedly flipped over on his back.

  ***“Let me see it.” Woland held out his hand, palm up.

  “U
nfortunately, I cannot do that,” replied the master, “because I burned it on the stove.”

  “Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,” Woland replied, “that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.” He turned to Behemoth and said, “Come on, Behemoth, let’s have the novel.”

  ††† Irina Vrubel’-Golubkina, Razgovory v zerkale [Conversations in the Mirror].

  ‡‡‡ Nikolai Khardzhiev was different in this sense from George Costakis (or Kostaki), who was the only person on a par with Khardzhiev. Costakis, unlike Khardzhiev, actually paid for works of avant-garde artists and then he agreed to the conditions laid down by the Soviet state. In 1960, Costakis emigrated to Greece, leaving half of his collection with the Tretyakov Gallery. This concession allowed him to export the other half of his collection legally.

  §§§ Vladimir Trenin, literary critic and theoretician.

  **** Shpalerka was on Sphalerna Street. This prison in Leningrad was as infamous as the Moscow Lubyanka.

  †††† Boris Pilnyak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa, 1927.

  ‡‡‡‡ Konstantin Vaginov, a member of OBERIU, master of grotesque exaggeration, ended his little novel about the make-believe writer Svistonov:

  “In the end he realized he’d been definitively shut up inside his novel.

  “Wherever he went, everywhere he’d see his characters. They had other surnames, other bodies, other hairstyles, and they behaved differently, but he’d spot them at once. In this way Svistonov moved entirely into his work.” (Konstantin Vaginov, Trudy i dni Svistonova, 1928-1929)

  PART FIVE

  Little Miss Footnote

  Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

  1.

  Apparently only great writers (or those who will one day become great) are not afraid of banality. They strew it throughout their texts like confetti. As if they are calculating in advance that their future readers will peck at these alluring, sagacious gems (the fine paper fortune-cookie slips, future fodder for intimate diaries, yearbooks, and notebooks for pearls of wisdom) like greedy pigeons going after breadcrumbs. These gems are like the sugared fruit in a Christmas cake. Human life is but a series of footnotes—or so says Nabokov, who, after all, made his masterpiece Pale Fire entirely out of footnotes—we are all footnotes. Literary footnotes joust for survival like cocks trained for the fight, at one moment it all comes down to who will make whom into a footnote, who will befootnote whom, who will be the text and who the footnote. We are all walking texts, we stride through the world with invisible copies adhering to us, numerous revisions of ourselves, and we’re ignorant of their existence, number, and content. We bear on our skin the biographies of other people about whom we know nothing. We are glued to one another like transparent layers with hidden text, we grow into one another, all of us, and each of us is being inhabited, individually, by secret dwellers, as we dwell in the homes of others. Nabokov would seem to have been right when he said we’re all pieces of a mega-text, footnotes to some vast, unfinished masterpiece.

  2.

  Dorothy Leuthold became an essential footnote to the history of modern literature through no effort of her own. She had no qualifications for it (Can somebody actually qualify to be a footnote? Oh, yes!), nor did she have the inclination to be anything of the kind. Leuthold is, nevertheless, a footnote appended to the great cultural text known as “Vladimir Nabokov.” And while this is a cultural text that expands daily, Leuthold remains the same miserly and mysterious footnote she was at the outset, and this—in our day and age, when the number of footnotes and their size often threaten to engulf the text—is a genuine rarity.

  Dorothy G. (Gretchen) Leuthold was born on April 8, 1897, in the little town of Waseca, Minnesota. Her parents, Charles and Josephine Cincthold, were of German extraction as was, indeed, half of Waseca. Apparently she never married, so why Dorothy changed her name from Cincthold to Leuthold is not clear. Her entire life is a blank except for a single detail that has propelled her from total anonymity to the literary cocktail party whose guests are condemned to revel on forever. True, at the party Leuthold would be a wallflower, a see-through figure, a person few would ever notice, the woman in the corner who’d be taken for a maidservant and prompted with a gesture to fill the glasses for the guests. Yet her name is right there on the guest list. Chance may have put Leuthold on the list, but she was no party crasher.

  Dorothy Leuthold arrived in New York from Waseca in 1930. She found an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and a job at one of the branches of the celebrated New York Public Library; apparently she also attended classes at Columbia University.

  Andrew Field, an early biographer of Nabokov’s, was one of the first to write of Dorothy Leuthold. Having arrived in the United States in 1940, Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, an impassioned lepidopterist, planned to spend the summer of 1941 collecting butterflies with his wife Véra and son Dmitri, although to do so would be a struggle. Véra had been suffering from back pain that whole winter and they weren’t sure she’d be able to undertake the trip, and besides they had no vehicle, no car of their own.

  “They did go, and on their first trip across America the Nabokovs were fortunate enough to have a driver. Her name was Dorothy Leuthold, and she was the last of Nabokov’s private language pupils, an unmarried American woman who had worked for years in the New York Public Library system. Nabokov had met her quite by chance, and she had expressed a desire to supplement her knowledge of Russian, which was very limited but included, for reasons Nabokov could never fathom, all the swear words, the meanings of which she evidently did not properly grasp. Then, when the Nabokovs told her that they were going to California, she offered them her car, a brand-new Pontiac that she had just bought. But neither Nabokov nor his wife had any more occasion to know how to drive a car than to understand a bank statement—both were simple enough matters abstractly, but neither had obtruded upon their lives in the course of two decades. Their friend and pupil, when she learned that, said, ‘Oh, I’ll drive you.’ Not only did she drive them, she also planned their itinerary, which took a southerly course and included a particularly memorable stop in Arizona, for it was there, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon on a very cold day in June (they had departed on May 26), that Nabokov walked down a path into the gorge and captured a new butterfly, which he gallantly named after their chauffeur, who had made the trip just to follow her whim and improve her Russian and be kind to some newly arrived immigrants.”*

  Dorothy Leuthold would bring the Nabokovs to Palo Alto and then drive the car back to the East Coast. At Stanford that summer, Nabokov would offer a course on creative writing, called “The Art of Writing,” as well as a course on Russian literature.

  Although Dorothy Leuthold is mentioned by many authors, notably Brian Boyd, another of Nabokov’s biographers, Nabokov himself, and Robert Michael Pyle in his article “Between Climb and Cloud: Nabokov among the Lepidopterists,” the itinerary they followed on their trip from the East Coast to the West Coast—which Leuthold planned and pursued with a martial rigor—has stirred more interest than has the actual person of Dorothy Leuthold. The trip, which began on May 26 and lasted precisely nineteen days, was, among other things, an excellent introduction to the America of motels that Nabokov would later describe in his masterpiece, Lolita. The very names suggest the Nabokovs stayed in cheap roadside lodgings (Motor Court Lee-Mead, Cumberland Motor Court, Wonderland Motor Courts, Motor Hotel), while other names of equally cheap lodgings tend to push the reader toward the symbolism of the “memorable experience” (the hotel, for instance, where they stayed at the Grand Canyon and where Nabokov made the big “find” of his butterfly was called Bright Angel Lodge!).

  3.

  In her book Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), on the life of Véra Nabokov, Stacy Schiff describes the Nabokovs settling in New York, where Vladimir “began tutoring three older women studying at Columbia, with whom he was pleased.
Great lovers of Russia all, they appeared to him to ‘brilliantly debunk the émigré preconception of the lacquered emptiness of the American mind’ . . .”†

  Stacy Schiff also describes the famous episode with the butterfly, but her eyes are on Véra: “She caught some of her first American butterflies that summer, as Leuthold chauffeured the family to California, from motor court to motor court, through Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, a trip Véra hugely enjoyed. Some of this collecting she did in a knee-length black dress with a lace collar, a garment she could hardly have purchased with this kind of expedition in mind. She looked unwell, her skin more ashen than translucent, her cheeks sunken. On a crystalline morning in early June, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, both Nabokovs triumphed lepidopterically, each in his own way. Vladimir set off with Dorothy Leuthold down a mule trail, where after a short walk he netted two specimens of what he recognized to be an undocumented Neonympha. When he returned to the Pontiac, where Véra and Dmitri were attempting to warm themselves, he discovered ‘that right beside the car Véra had herself caught two specimens, sluggish with the cold, with nothing but her fingers.’ Nabokov named his capture after Leuthold; he commemorated his success in ‘On Discovering a Butterfly,’ a poem that appeared in the New Yorker in 1943. Véra’s parallel find went undocumented. A certain competitiveness crept into their collecting, for which the passion was primarily Vladimir’s. ‘I’ve had wonderful luck. I’ve gotten many things he didn’t get,’ Véra interrupted her husband to tell his first biographer.’”‡