Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  With great difficulty I rose to my feet and crossed to the opposite sidewalk to take note of the building and the choppy curls of water in the canal. Suddenly, at the startling speed of a light source erupting into our field of vision, a Bach prelude flowed from one of the windows on the top floor. It was LINDA who, seeing me down there suffering in the light’s unbearable brilliance, was making use of this simple and touching prelude to bring the chapter to a pious close. And—why not admit it?—I was overwhelmed with true emotion, standing in front of that gray building, with LINDA in her garret, and the flapping wing of a sob hit me full in the face.

  Other sources: 1) Cristo in scurto, Andrea Mantegna, 1480; 2) Danaë, Gustav KLIMT, 1907.

  CZARS (TWILIGHT OF THE). In a Saint Petersburg antique shop I discovered an old photo album and spent half an hour examining it in minute detail. It opened with a postcard bearing an image in sharp focus of a woman who, to judge by her dreamy air, had gone out shopping that morning, more than seventy years earlier. An annotation on the back was written in Roman characters, “Vera Vasilievna, 1907,” and when I had managed to decipher this, it left me pensive, uncertain of having understood correctly. In the dead language of the first IMPERIUM, those words may have meant something else, may have possessed a significance different from the one we attribute them today. Clumsily translated into modern Russian, they emerged, dragging along the blue-green algae of a past that was hard to imagine. (How many Veras had I met, irrelevant, insipid Veras, not one among them capable of carrying a parasol with this woman’s grace?) And the photo’s Saint Petersburg was gleaming and resplendent. Vera Vasilievna (I decided it was a woman’s name, this woman’s name) had stopped at the edge of the sidewalk and a crosshatched sea of paving stones, gleaming like fish, opened out at her feet. Their wet twinkle reflected the woman’s white form, and since I happened to be in Russia (that narrow, poorly ventilated store, the vibration of the tramway on the bridge, the red sun of the north) I thought of the specular image of its Byzantine temples built next to lakes, and also, of course, of the Grad Kitezh, the submerged city of Russian legend. (On the banks of Lake B, the reflection’s inverted temple, A1, seems more real than Temple A, which rises in the air. If we listen closely we can hear bells ringing, the sound dulled and condensed by the water’s mass. A grad where a perfectly coherent subaqueous life goes on: muzhiks sharpening their knives in the marketplace, the assembly of boyars [боярин] plotting the czar’s death.)

  The old Saint Petersburg, which had also sunk beneath the waters, threw off faint sparks from the depths of that yellowing postcard: the endless double row of buttons on V.V.’s dress, her starched collar, the fine lambskin of the gloves she clutched in one fist. Standing there on the edge of that sidewalk, V.V. had all the presence of an idol sculpted in metal, the full support of the strong wind that ruffled her bronze garments. The message transmitted by her figure was, nevertheless, one of petit bourgeois warmth, a life lived frivolously, and the picture could be broken down into the following primary elements, or rather was the point of vector convergence for the following weak forces: a) the Czar, who was perfectly cast in his role as the last monarch, an individual who disbelieved in the throne (the transition from His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II to simple Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov seems to have caused little pain to the former Emperor of Russia and even afforded him more time to lavish the pages of his diary with mundane jottings); b) the triumphal apotheosis of Diaghalev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, the black shadow of V.V.’s beautiful hat prefigured in Bakst’s daring set design for L’aprés-midi d’un faune, which also derived its effects from great swaths of darkness; c) the sky blue background of La Musique and La Danse, the two great canvases by Matisse that adorned the mansion owned by the celebrated patron of the arts Sergei: Shchukin (that photo album also contained a picture of a male in his forties with abundant sideburns and an old portable Kodak in his hands, a vacant figure, devoid of any inscription on the back into which I could pour my concept of an eminent industrialist); d) the lovely Art Nouveau chalet Chekhov built in YALTA in 1899, to die there eight years later, and the equally wondrous edifice I discovered one afternoon while strolling along a Saint Petersburg canal; e) the following VERSES by Gumilev, the “decadent” poet who died before a firing squad in 1921:

  Hay más tristeza hoy en tu mirada,

  y son más tenues los brazos que ciñen tus rodillas.

  Today the sadness in your eyes has grown,

  And your arms, wrapped round your knees, are thinner.

  Vera Vasilievna, or the woman in the photo, was very beautiful and for a moment I thought she might be Áнна Ахмáтова, Anna Andreyevna (Akhmatova) herself. What’s more, an advertisement in the store window behind her featured a gigantic pencil that might be taken to suggest the woman’s profession, her relationship to the world of letters. Couldn’t the initials V.V., for Vera Vasilievna, be a key that we should invert to read A.A. (Anna Andreyevna), the specular image, the Grad Kitezh, the Saint Petersburg that lies beneath the waters?

  Before leaving the store, I acquired a lovely lorgnette that Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, had given up for lost. (Says Nabokov: That lorgnette I found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary, and later Anna Karenin had it, and then it passed into the possession of Chekhov’s Lady with the Lapdog and was lost by her on the pier at YALTA.) But I found it there amid the jumble of history. There can be no doubt that by 1907—the year of the postcard—such lorgnettes were long out of style. This one might have had a place in V.V.’s parlor, displayed on the piano as an exotic touch. Such lorgnettes had the heft and presence of those old instruments of measure that allowed a very ample margin of error but—since they operated by the confrontation of analogous magnitudes—also granted a more intimate knowledge, one that cannot be achieved with a pair of these dehumanized modern glasses made of plastic.

  D

  DACHA (дáча). In 198* I lived for a long while in a small town, practically a village, next to a wide river. In the afternoons, I would stroll down to its bank and, captivated by the grandeur of what was virtually an immense inland sea, would spend hours admiring the beauty of the landscape. Sometimes, for a long second, there appeared before me all the good books I would one day write: a precise vision of my future fragmented not into days but into the works that would someday appear under my name. What remained was the annoying task of writing them. (In the winter, a meter-thick layer of ice could support the weight of trucks loaded with wheat, and there, again, was I, observing the scene, amazed that they didn’t plunge straight to the bottom of the river: truck, driver, and grain.)

  To live there was like dwelling in a DACHA on the outskirts of some large city on the outskirts of the world. I knew that not far from Moscow a town of DACHAS had been built for writers loyal to the IMPERIUM, where they’d spend their summers, each and every one describing the flight of the selfsame grouse, the same rosy-fingered dawns. So strong was this custom of writing in DACHAS that, even when they became fugitives from the IMPERIUM and were declared to exist outside its laws, many writers took refuge—for what occult reason I know not—in DACHAS. The fearsome Solzhenitsyn completed his blood-curdling circumnavigation of the Archipelago in a dacha that belonged to Rostropovich, the famous cellist. The beautiful Anna Akhmatova lived out the end of her days in something like a small DACHA, the “cabin in Komarovo” which, according to her biographers, at last accorded her the peace of a home of her own. Finally, the entire Pleiades of the IMPERIUM’S bad writers (such as Yevtushenko, Mijalkov, and a very bad one indeed, Bondarev) lived in DACHAS where, as if thereby constricted or encumbered, they slipped into a comfortable prose, the flight of the selfsame grouse, the same rosy-fingered dawns.

  Perhaps private DACHAS still exist—it would appear that Alexander Isaievich (Solzhenitsyn) inhabits one in a Vermont BOSCAGE—but I maintain that the DACHA-IST era had a negative impact on Russian literature. (In self-justification, certain Pushkinists—all of them owners of dachas—paint
Pushkin’s retirement in Mikhailovskoe during the autumn of 1825, a period that can obviously be characterized as DACHA-IST, as a time of superproductivity. And therefore, if Pushkin himself . . . That is, given that we find traces of DACHA-ISM in this genius, too, et cetera.)

  I, too, had my DACHA-IST period, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve never written more or better. I would get up every morning . . .

  E

  ESTEPA (СТЕПЬ, or STEPPE). Observed from the sky for a period that stretches across centuries, the color of the STEPPE vertiginously changes as it is traversed by myriad beings and overrun by shimmering waves of AGRICULTURE beneath the microscope that is the passage of the epochs. (You might also want to imagine raising a languid arm and placing the finger of Providence, the mark that designates the chosen one, on an obscure Mongol horseman, tautening his bow at full gallop, who, just as he’s about to release the arrow, discovers in horror the Absolute Presence of God and topples over dead, flat on his back in the grass.)

  The STEPPE is the low-pressure zone where the Golden Horde, the violent cyclone that uprooted the Kievan Rus, took on more water vapor and increased its wind speed. But when the Horde disintegrated into the shreds of impotent nomadic tribes, the Muscovite lava flowed toward its rarefied savannahs and little by little—a period of time measured out in centuries—reached the coasts of the ocean called Тихий (Tiji), an adjective that can be translated from the Russian as “pacific,” or peaceful, calm, and smooth, but that also allows for translation as “peaceable,” in the sense of nonwarlike.

  I deduce, therefore, that it was a sensation of calm, of journey’s end, that overtook the first explorer who sighted the edge of that other steppe, its vast blue immensity. An identical apathy is provoked by the real STEPPE, seen from the window of our train: it is interminable, empty, desolate, devoid of food.

  EURASIA. In 1949, two scholars in Hamburg discovered the slow march of a glacier toward the Elbe. Some still cling to the erroneous notion that Europe extends to the Urals, but in fact it is Asia that extends to the borders of Western Europe. Russia, the IMPERIUM, is an Asiatic country, one that happens to be inhabited by pale-skinned peoples.

  I. It seems fitting to amplify this entry with the following notice on the Hyperboreans offered by Gaius Plinius Secundus in his Naturalis Historia. In Book IV, paragraph 89, we read:

  Pone eos montes ultraque Aquilonem gens felix, si credimus, quos Hyperboreos appellavere, annoso degit aevo, fabulosis celebrata miraculis. ibi creduntur esse cardines mundi extremique siderum ambitus semenstri luce solis adversi, non, ut imperiti dixere, ab aequinoctio verno in autumnum: semel in anno solstitio oriuntur iis soles brumaque semel occidunt. regio aprica, felici temperie, omni adflatu noxio carens. domus iis nemora lucique, et deorum cultus viritim gregatimque, discordia ignota et aegritudo omnis. mors non nisi satietate vitae epulatis delibutoque senio luxu e quadam rupe in mare salientibus; hoc genus sepulturae beatissimum.

  Behind these mountains and beyond the north wind there dwells (if we can believe it) a happy race of people called the Hyperboreans, who live to extreme old age and are famous for legendary marvels. Here are believed to be the hinges on which the firmament turns and the extreme limits of the revolutions of the stars, with six months’ daylight and a single day of the sun in retirement, not as the ignorant have said, from the spring equinox till autumn: for these people the sun rises once in the year, at midsummer, and sets once, at midwinter. It is a genial region, with a delightful climate and exempt from every harmful blast. The homes of the natives are the woods and groves; they worship the gods severally and in congregations; all discord and all sorrow is unknown. Death comes to them only when, owing to satiety of life, after holding a banquet and anointing their old age with luxury, they leap from a certain rock into the sea: this mode of burial is the most blissful. (Trans. H. Rackham)

  EXPECTORATION (or SPITTING). The Muscovites are exceedingly adept expectorators. They constantly announce плевать мне на все (I spit on this and on that), and at the appropriate point in the diatribe emit a ptui of profound disdain that is the impeccable acoustic counterpart of SPITTING. Despite what might generally be supposed, this pantomime is not frowned upon; everyone does it and it is quite theatrical. But a real expectoration—so innocent a thing, a simple gob of saliva on the lawn—sends them into near-hysterics; first because of the lawn (they are great lovers of verdure), and then because it’s so very “ugly.” And the false but sonorous ptui is not? What do you make of this, K**? And of the way they crack sunflower seeds in public and toss the shells to the ground?

  F

  FLUTE (MAGIC). The decor of the fall of the IMPERIUM included street musicians, felt hats at their feet anticipating the occasional crumpled ruble or some small change. MONK was taken by surprise as he shot beams from his eyes to probe a Byzantine church’s multicolored cupolas at the far end of the canal for, at that very moment, the high notes of a flute made him turn his head.

  I. I panned rapidly over the bear cub exhibited in chains so that cruel children could be photographed with him, the Great Man on his pedestal, the stone fountain. Another warble from the flute. I finally located the musician who was clearly playing for his own delight, far from the public. I would leave him some money: for Bach, for the instrument’s sweet tones in the lower registers, for the excellent acoustics in the chosen spot. You see, at first I took this musician for a boy (there was another boy nearby, a Cossack’s overcoat on his shoulders), wearing a pair of jeans with holes at the knees and a long sweater. I understood my mistake when she raised her head to attack the next phrase.

  I followed the melody with eyes closed, the original version of a tune I also knew in an adulterated rendition by the Swinger Singers.

  II. A few months after finding myself surrounded by snow, when the imminence of nuclear war still troubled me more, much more, than the idea of giving K** a kiss, a friend gave me a recording of a group of Budapest virtuosi (FLUTE, clarinet, violin, and clavichord) playing Mozart. I had noted the name of that Austrian musician among the plans for “breaking through” I had sketched out during my last year of school, long before going to study in Muscovy, when I was still a model student, extremely conscientious in my fulfillment of what was expected and not yet gone to hell in a handbasket . . . politically, that is, to finally say it outright.

  With all the gravity of one embarking upon a rite of initiation, I drew the curtains in my room to create a penumbra that would be conducive to my listening. The first chords sounded. I followed the violin’s arabesques and the phrasing of the clarinet and before the end of the first movement was already fed up, unpleasantly surprised and disgusted by such irresponsible lightheartedness. The idea of frivolity, this ENCYCLOPEDIA’S central concept, had not yet been installed with all its nuances and implications in my mind, but the ensemble of sensations Mozart’s music aroused in me that day could only have been summed up by an allusion to frivolity in its most pejorative sense.

  Preoccupied, I compared his music to Bach’s—which I knew better —and the latter came out far ahead for the weightiness of his themes, the monumentalism, the seriousness of his proximity to God. Years would go by before I, happy to be young, without a speck of dust on my conscience, would enjoy myself while listening to the “jewel tones” of Mozart’s music, a music that could justify my shameful inclination toward (SWISS) CHOCOLATES and Dutch cheese.

  Bach and Mozart are names that may be impressive to some, but those who know what I’m talking about will not place the authenticity of this episode in doubt. For someone as concerned with transcendence as my former “I” was, and as my current internal “I” continues to be, Bach represents the fundamental framework of my musical appreciation, a phase that cannot be left behind, and as such continues to occupy the same place in my esteem. Only now, over him, or rather, surrounding him concentrically, Mozart has covered that primary skeleton with new and pink flesh, and today when I hear the works of the German Konzertmeister I can read
ily discern the voids Mozart would later fill, the places where he would lighten the weight of the phrase to make it fly. Another aspect, no less important, is that in Bach no priority is given to the feeling of lieder, which the Austrian’s melodies convey. Perhaps the fact that the latter wrote fashionable operas plays a role in this, I don’t know. But Mozart’s melodies have all the charm and ease of a song. This is something that the Russian Чайковский (Tchaikovsky) learned better than anyone else from Mozart. In this, and insofar as timbre is concerned, my quasi-compatriot Pyotr Ilyich and the Austrian Amadeus seem to me to be akin, both equally beloved by God. As product of an era when the once minor genre of the song has displaced all others, I am perforce most grateful to these two splendid musicians for their happy union, so gratifying to my ears, of the trivial and the sublime.

  III. (Trapped within networks of reflections such as these, his vision enmeshed by that melody, Monk was henceforth prepared to see only LINDAS who were haloed by that celestial music.)

  FLUORIDE. It took me years to ascend from the abyss of dreams into the superior levels of wakefulness. Before that, in the depths of my existence as a multipod amoeba, I had no ears for the death rattle of the cetaceans in bloody struggle against the flesh-eating orcas. I did not know that one or more public personalities had launched a proclamation that denounced my abyssal existence, I had no eyes for the gradations of the color blue and was incapable of distinguishing, among all the many oceans, the good one of free will.