“Do you know,” Shuvalov continued, hiccupping, “do you know what I’ve come to? I was flying today.”
Up in the sky, at the angle of a postage stamp, a skate hovered like a dragon.
“Want me to demonstrate? Shall I fly right up there?” (He pointed to the skate.)
“No, thank you. I don’t want to witness your shame.”
“Yes, it’s awful,” Shuvalov said after a brief silence. “I do know it’s awful.”
“I envy you,” he went on.
“Really?”
“Word of honor. What a good thing, to perceive the whole world accurately and be wrong only on a few color details, the way it is with you. You’re not forced to live in paradise. For you the real world hasn’t vanished. Everything is in order. But me? Just think, I’m completely sane, a materialist … and suddenly these criminal, anti-scientific deformations of matter and substances start happening right in front of me….”
“Yes, that’s awful,” the color-blind man agreed. “And it’s all from being in love.”
Shuvalov seized his neighbor’s hand with unexpected fervor.
“Listen!” he exclaimed. “I agree. You give me your iris and take my love in exchange.”
The color-blind man slid down the slope and stood up.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m pressed for time. Good-bye. Enjoy your paradise.”
He found it difficult to make his way along the slope. He went bow-legged, losing any resemblance to a human being and acquiring a resemblance to a human being reflected in water. Finally he made it to level ground and strode off joyfully. Then, throwing down his twig, he called back one last time to Shuvalov:
“Give my best to Eve!”
The while, Lelia was asleep. A half an hour after the meeting with the color-blind man Shuvalov found her in the middle of the park, at its very heart. He was no naturalist, he could not classify what surrounded him: filbert, hawthorn, elder or dogrose. On all sides the branches and brush clung to him, he went on like a pedlar toting a delicate mesh of the branches that grew denser as he approached the heart of the grove. He shrugged off these nets, the leaves, petals, thorns, berries and birds that had besprinkled him.
Lelia was lying on her back, in a rose-colored dress with its bodice open. She was asleep. He could hear the membranes in her sleep-addled nose shiver. He sat down beside her.
Then he lay his head on her chest, his fingers grazed the cotton fabric, his head was resting on her damp chest, he saw her areola, rose-colored, with delicate crinkles like the foam on milk. He didn’t hear the rustling, the sighs, the snapping branches.
The color-blind man popped up in a thicket of brush. The thicket held him back.
“Listen a minute,” said the color-blind man. Shuvalov raised his head with its pleasure-flushed cheek.
“Don’t follow me around like a dog,” he said.
“Listen, I agree. Take my iris and give me your love.”
“Go and eat some blue pears,” was Shuvalov’s answer.
Translated by A. L. and M. K.
On the Fantasy of H. G. Wells
1.
I was ten years old.
How did I come by that leaflet? I don’t know.
A page from an English illustrated journal. On the glossy paper were printed small pictures of a uniform size. It seems to me now that they were tiny, the size of a postage stamp.
What did the pictures show?
Fantastic things.
I have remembered one of the illustrations my whole life. A kind of cul-de-sac in the ruins of a house. And metallic tentacles were creeping through a window, a doorsill, a break in a wall! Metallic tentacles! And a man hiding in the cul-de-sac stared at them wildly. What were the tentacles? No idea! They were sweeping the room, searching precisely for the man who was pressed to the wall and pale with terror.
How I taxed my imagination, trying to puzzle out the meaning of this spectacle!
I knew that these were not illustrations to a fairy-tale. The events in fairy-tales had all taken place in a far-off time. There were towers, or castles. Fairy-tale characters did not resemble the people around me. Princess in tiaras, kings with swords, peasants in striped stockings. But here everything was contemporary! These were the ruins of an ordinary house. Torn wallpaper. A dangling wire. A brick chimney. A pile of rubble in a corner. And the man was wearing an ordinary black suit.
This was no fairy-tale!
And I thought at the time that I was looking at a depiction of events that had really occurred. Yes, the pictures were like photographs. Small, clear, striking, with such everyday elements as a man in a suit coat and a white shirt with his tie askew.
A photograph of wonders!
If these were photographs it meant that somewhere and for some reason there had taken place a sequence of events during which a certain man had hidden in a ruined house and metallic tentacles searched for him.
What events could these be?
Everything fell into place a few years later. I read H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. The pictures that had so amazed me had been illustrations to that novel.
2.
Wells’ true gift is his ability to describe fantastic events in a manner that makes them seem real.
He transforms the fantastic into the epic, which works only when the events depicted in it seem to represent actual happenings of recorded history. What? That once in a small English town there arrived an invisible man? I don’t know how it is with other readers, but when I read The Invisible Man it is difficult for me to stave off the feeling—though much in it seems out of the ordinary—that I am reading an account of actual occurrences.
How did Wells achieve this verisimilitude? He understood that if a plot had to involve the fantastic then the characters had to be as real as possible. In this way he could make his imaginative invention truly work. Consider a detail from The Invisible Man. The invisible man has attacked a representative of the law, Colonel Adye, and is ready to shoot him. But Wells—before getting to the action—records the following detail:
Adye moistened his lips again. He glanced away from the barrel of the revolver and saw the sea far off very blue and dark under the midday sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff of the Head and the multitudinous town, and suddenly he knew that life was very sweet.
A rich psychological profile of the colonel who is merely a secondary character in the novel, wouldn’t you say? Or how about the rendering of the invisible man himself:
I went to bury [my father]. My mind was still on this research, and I did not lift a finger to save his character. I remember the funeral, the cheap coffin, the scant ceremony, the windy frost-bitten hillside, and the old college friend of his who read the service over him, a shabby, bent, black old man with a sniveling cold.
I remember walking back to the empty home, through the place that had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town: I remember myself as a gaunt black figure, going along the slippery, shiny pavement.
Note: the cheap coffin, the scant ceremony, the university friend suffering from a cold, a gaunt black figure stepping along the slippery pavement. What details! They accumulate gradually. At first our attention is captured solely by the implausibility of the situation itself—an invisible man! But after a few pages this fascination begins to merge with the multitude of varied feelings we customarily experience when we are following the development of human fate, as is especially true of epic.
3.
In Wells’ novels there are many bicyclists. In most cases these are youths. They make their appearance just when the most curious sort of observer is needed to witness some surprising event or other. In The First Men in the Moon a boy-cyclist triggers the denouement.
Wells likes this image of the young cyclist a great deal. Is he perhaps recalling his youth? I don’t know his biography. I believe he was apprenticed to a pharmacist. One can picture the young pharmacist-in-trai
ning careening along the roads connecting those small English towns that he was to describe with such affection in the future. The landscape of his novels consists precisely of the roads between small towns, their cottages, taverns and gardens, the flowering hedgerows, the sea glimpsed beyond the hills. What sort of landscape is this? The landscape of the cyclist.
Here is an excerpt from the novel The Food of the Gods. This work features gigantically proportioned animals, plants and human beings.
The day after, a cyclist riding, feet up, down the hill between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge, very narrowly missed running over a second of these giants [wasps] that was crawling across the roadway. His passage seemed to alarm it, and it rose with a noise like a sawmill. His bicycle jumped the footpath in the emotion of the moment, and when he could look back, the wasp was soaring away above the woods towards Westerham.
This passage is typical for Wells. All the novels and stories of Wells take place in a summer setting. Only in The Invisible Man is there much mention of mist and snow. The plot demanded it. Mist and snow rendered the invisible man visible.
In the most urgent situations Wells doesn’t forget to describe a bit of honeysuckle, two butterflies chasing each other, a wicket-gate.
One might assume that the cyclist peddling between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge was none other than Wells himself. He had been taking a rest beneath a bush and saw an ordinary wasp. And he began to weave a fantasy on the theme of what might happen if gigantic wasps were to appear. In this fantasy one can sense a certain intoxication with the world:
The most dramatic of the fifty appearances was certainly that of the wasp that visited the British Museum about midday, dropping out of the blue serene upon one of the innumerable pigeons that feed in the courtyard of that building, and flying up to the cornice to devour its victim at leisure. After that it crawled for a time over the museum roof, entered the dome of the reading-room by a skylight, buzzed about inside it for some little time—there was a stampede among the readers—and at last found another window and vanished again with a sudden silence from human observation.
What an enchanting play of imagination and with what skill is the fantasy worked out. Could one think of a more telling backdrop for the gigantic wasp up than the cupola around which it crawls? Narrative mastery is besides the point here. The point is that this fantasy is remarkably pure and born of an intoxicated view of the world.
Wells began writing at the end of the nineteenth century. The Time Machine appeared in 1895, The Invisible Man in 1897. On one re-reading of that novel I noticed a certain circumstance that had eluded me before, namely that the London depicted is still full of hansom cabs. This is still an old-world city. The automobile is not mentioned even once in this novel, in which daily life has not yet been altered by technology to the degree it would be within a decade.
Yet as soon as such changes begin to take shape Wells captures them at once. In the novel When the Sleeper Wakes he mentions the name of Otto Lilienthal, builder of the first glider. In essence Wells contemplates in this novel the rise of aviation. The pharmacist’s apprentice became a writer but his relationship to the world remained as it had been—one of intoxication. If earlier he had conceived the idea of gigantic wasps, he now imagines amazing machines. The essence is unchanged. Machines imbue life with the elements of a new fascination, a new attraction.
And Wells has imagined a rocket on which two men make a journey to the moon. How much humor there is in The First Men in the Moon! However, alarm emerges through the lightheartedness. Wells contemplates the fate of a humanity living with advanced technology. The War of the Worlds appears. This is a novel about man and machine. For Wells man is terribly alone and the machine has become the monstrous Martian tripods, they emerge ominously in the flowering world of summer. In horror a human figure presses itself to a wall, and metallic tentacles snake towards him through the ruins.
4
In one of his last works, The Shape of Things to Come, Wells depicts the destruction of capitalist technology. A world war has broken out and is dragging on endlessly. Certain armed bands have begun to seize power in various countries. Using their remaining weapons these bands make war on each other. Human civilization has been razed and only fragments remain of its advanced technology. But the war goes on. Wells gives a portrait of the leader of one of these bands (an unambiguous caricature of of a fascist fuehrer or duce) who is obsessed by the idea of war—constant, eternal. War! War!
And just as the reader is prepared to believe that everything is doomed to total extinction, a report comes of an unknown world. A report that intellectual power continues to exist on earth. It would appear that amid the general destruction an ark of culture has been preserved—Basra. The last mechanics, engineers and pilots have gathered there—people of the machine and technology. Representing some knightly order of the vanished culture, which has made itself the emblem of the rebirth of the world, they fly in on planes from this far off oasis and sedate the locus of warfare with a special gas.
So ends the capitalist world. A new culture is born—the world governed by enlightened scientists and engineers—which has achieved happiness. At this point Wells returns to a pernicious idea of technocracy, which has long served him as an exit from the tangle of the capitalist world and is represented as triumphant in The Shape of Things to Come. His ideas are questionable in this regard. But he has seen the horrors of capitalism. After all it was he who characterized capitalistic society as suffering from a plague of the soul!
Translated by A. L. and M. K.
Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov
(1891-1940)
_______________________
The Fatal Eggs
I. PROFESSOR PERSIKOV’S Curriculum Vitae
ON April, 16, 1928, in the evening, Persikov [Mr. Peach], professor of Zoology at the Fourth State University and director of the Zoological Institute in Moscow, entered his office at the Zoological Institute on Herzen Street. The professor switched on the frosted globe overhead and looked around.
The beginning of the terrifying catastrophe must be set precisely on that ill-fated evening, and just as precisely, Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov must be considered the prime cause of this catastrophe.
He was exactly fifty-eight years old. A remarkable head shaped like a pestle, bald, with tufts of yellowish hair standing out on the sides. A smooth-shaven face with a protruding lower lip. Because of this Persikov always had a somewhat pouting expression on his face. Small, old-fashioned spectacles in a silver frame on a red nose; small, glittering eyes; tall, stoop-shouldered. He spoke in a creaking, high, croaking voice, and among his other idiosyncrasies was this: whenever he spoke of anything emphatically and with assurance, he screwed up his eyes and curled the index finger of his right hand into a hook. And since he always spoke with assurance, for his erudition in his field was utterly phenomenal, the hook appeared very often before the eyes of Professor Persikov’s interlocutors. As for any topics outside his field, i.e., zoology, embryology, anatomy, botany, and geography, Professor Persikov almost never spoke of them.
The professor did not read newspapers and did not go to the theater, and the professor’s wife ran away from him in 1913 with a tenor from the Zimin Opera, leaving him the following note: “Your frogs make me shudder with intolerable loathing. I will be unhappy for the rest of my life because of them.”
The professor never remarried and had no children. He was very short-tempered, but he cooled off quickly; he liked tea with cloudberries; and he lived on Prechistenka [Immaculate Street] in a five-room apartment, one room of which was occupied by his housekeeper Maria Stepanovna, a shriveled little old woman who looked after the professor like a nanny.
In 1919 the government requisitioned three of his five rooms. Then he declared to Maria Stepanovna, “If they don’t cease these outrages, Maria Stepanovna, I’ll leave and go abroad.”
There is no doubt that had the professor realized this plan, he could easily have got settled i
n the department of zoology at any university in the world, since he was an absolutely first-rate scientist; and with the exception of Professors William Weccle of Cambridge and Giacomo Bartolommeo Beccari of Rome, he had no equals in the field bearing in one way or another on amphibians. Professor Persikov could lecture in four languages besides Russian, and he spoke French and German as fluently as Russian. Persikov did not carry out his intention to emigrate, and 1920 turned out to be even worse than 1919. Events kept happening one after the other. Great Nikitskaia was renamed Herzen Street. Then the clock built into the building on the corner of Herzen and Mokhovaia [Moss Street] stopped at a quarter past eleven, and finally, in the terraria at the Zoological Institute, unable to endure the perturbations of that famous year, first eight splendid specimens of the tree frog died, then fifteen ordinary toads, followed, finally, by a most remarkable specimen of the Surinam toad.
Immediately after the toads, whose deaths decimated the population of the first order of amphibians, which is properly known as tailless, the institute’s permanent watchman, old Vlas, who did not belong to the class of amphibians, moved on into a better world. The cause of his death, however, was the same as that of the poor animals, and Persikov diagnosed it at once: “Lack of feed.”
The scientist was absolutely right: Vlas had to be fed with flour, and the toads with mealworms, but since the former had disappeared, the latter had also vanished. Persikov tried to shift the remaining twenty specimens of the tree-frog to a diet of cockroaches, but the cockroaches had also disappeared somewhere, thus demonstrating their malicious attitude toward War Communism. And so, even the last specimens had to be tossed out into the garbage pits in the institute’s courtyard.
The effect of the deaths, especially that of the Surinam toad, on Persikov is beyond description. For some reason he put the whole blame for the deaths on the current People’s Commissar of Education. Standing in his hat and galoshes in the corridor of the chilly institute, Persikov spoke to his assistant, Ivanov, a most elegant gentleman with a pointed blond beard. “Why, killing him is not enough for this, Peter Stepanovich! Just what are they doing? Why, they’ll ruin the institute! Eh? A singular male, an extraordinary specimen of Pipa americana, thirteen centimeters long …”
Worlds Apart Page 65
