Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence

by Lodge, Kirsten; Rosen, Margo Shohl; Dashevsky, Grigory

  Madness, blissful madness, shines in their eyes.

  Above them night is falling.

  1 In the 1870s, idealistic members of the educated class made trips to the countryside to live among the peasants and to teach them about their downtrodden position and potential to effect revolution. This was known as “going to the people”.

  My tedious lamp is alight,

  Again, as always, it hurts my eyes.

  Lord, if I am to be meek,

  If I am to be poor and weak,

  If I am to languish every night

  Over work that is boring and slight,

  Just once, grant me my request—

  That I may conquer my weakness,

  That a perfect work I may create,

  And flare up in a pure, immortal flame.

  Fyodor Sologub, 1898

  Death and sleep, sister and brother,

  Are very much alike,

  But we all gladly welcome him,

  While she inspires fright.

  But sometimes the reverse is true—

  We drive the sister away

  And entreat the brother desperately,

  “Please, death, end my pain!”

  The brother reminds us of our evil deeds,

  And in the silence of the night,

  Oppressive, dark and endless,

  We moan, “I can’t stand life!”

  But those fatigued by life

  The sister comforts soon:

  She saves them from despair

  With the silence of the tomb.

  Fyodor Sologub, 1889

  You raised the veil of night

  And drove away sweet sleep,

  But my eyes will not stay bright for long,

  For daytime wearies me.

  I lie, indifferent to your call

  To labour and to play.

  I refuse to follow you;

  You beckon me in vain.

  In vain you dress the charm of day

  In sundry masks,

  The joy and grief you offer me

  I cannot grasp.

  Soon my saviour will return;

  I’ll leave you then for sleep,

  And drift off to a distant place—

  Oblivion, darkness and peace.

  Fyodor Sologub, 1898

  The Living and the Dead (Among the Dead)

  Zinaida Gippius

  I

  Charlotte was the daughter of the warden of the big Lutheran cemetery outside the city. The respectable Ivan Karlovich Buch had held that position for many years. This was where Charlotte had been born, and where quite recently Buch had given his elder daughter in marriage to a rich young watchmaker. Charlotte did not remember her mother. She knew only that she was not dead: there was no grave for her in the “park,” among all the other graves. She didn’t dare ask her father about it. When the children spoke of their mother, his blond brows would furrow, and in spite of his gentle, good nature, his entire red, full face would take on an expression of anger, or perhaps sadness.

  Ivan Karlovich was quite portly, almost bald, and jovial. He loved his nice white house beyond the cemetery fence, and adorned his front garden and terrace with climbing plants and all sorts of flowers. The canvas curtains on the terrace had prettily embroidered red calico edging. Ivan Karlovich had decided to put stained glass—yellow and red—in the windows of the cool dining room, and although it was darker that way, the light that came through those windows was extraordinarily pleasant, as if it were always sunny in the garden.

  Ivan Karlovich’s office accounts were always kept in perfect order. All the graves were numbered, and for each it was noted how much money had been left for special upkeep during the summer months. The only furniture in the big, empty front room—the reception room—was a desk and some dark chairs. Large and small wreaths, made of immortelles, wool, scraps of cloth, big beads and the tiniest little coloured beads, hung in glass cases fixed to the walls. These wreaths were wrought to perfection by Charlotte and—until she got married—her sister Caroline. On a table in the corner were a number of thick albums, containing drawings and models of various monuments and samples of tombstone inscriptions in German. When visitors came, Ivan Karlovich bore himself with great dignity, almost with sorrow, but the rest of the time he moved with alacrity, despite his girth. He loved to laugh so that his entire corpulent body shook, and he fed the pigeons himself and raised a special kind of turkey, and in the evenings he was wont to play a hand or two of cards with the neighbours from German Street, and, if no one came over, he himself would go visiting.

  II

  Charlotte was sitting in her room upstairs, the little white room under the eaves that she used to share with her sister and now occupied by herself. Although she loved her sister, Charlotte was glad to have the room to herself. Caroline, who was tall, ruddy and jovial just like her father, sometimes irritated the more reticent Charlotte, who was pale, serious, quite thin and smaller than average. In the German school she’d attended for several years, the other girls didn’t like her, although she was pretty. “Your sister isn’t at all lively,” they would say to Caroline. “It’s like she’s made of porcelain and you’re afraid if you touch her, she might break.” However, their family doctor, Finch, Ivan Karlovich’s friend, saw no sign of illness in her, and recommended only that she get more fresh air. And Charlotte spent many a day amidst the verdant growth in the cemetery park, where she did her work, threading big and little beads for her endless wreaths.

  Now Charlotte was sitting upstairs in her favourite place, on the left side of the wide Venetian window. She hadn’t been in the park for a long time; she had hurt her leg and couldn’t walk. Today she was feeling better. The day seemed summery, warm and clear, although it was only the end of April. The tops of the birches, pale green and still almost bare, swayed slightly. From here, from the height of the second storey, she had an excellent view of the central avenue and the rows of white and black crosses amidst the greenery, as well as Frau Sommer’s chapel and General Friederich’s monument. Charlotte knew that if she squinted her eyes she would even be able to see the fence around little Heinrich Wiegen’s grave. But from Charlotte’s favourite place the whole realm of the cemetery, the sandy avenues, the trees, and the monuments’ white stones, seemed different—absolutely extraordinary. When Ivan Karlovich was putting the red and yellow glass into the dining room windows, he was accidentally sent a light-blue one as well. Charlotte asked that the glass be put in her window, on the side where she liked to work. Everything was transformed in Charlotte’s eyes: the tiny little forget-menots became a darker blue, and the colourless daisy took on soft hues. Light-blue stripes lay on the white tablecloth, burning with a pale, cold light, like a swamp fire. And beyond the window, the world seemed different, translucent, and quiet, as if underwater. The crosses and monuments glowed as if lit up, the painfully bright foliage took on more muted tones, and the sand on the pathways turned greyish. A monotonous, light haze enveloped the park. And the sky became such a soft shade of blue, so azure and clear, such as Charlotte had seen only when she was a small child, in pictures—and also sometimes in dreams.

  And when Charlotte would finally tear herself away from her window and from her work, and go downstairs for lunch with her sister and father, everything around her seemed too defined, too red. Blood showed through in her father’s fat neck and bald head and through the soft skin of Caroline’s ruddy cheeks. And Charlotte would drop her eyes, and she would be quiet and paler than ever, as if the reflection of the light-blue window still remained on her face.

  But Charlotte found the park tolerable enough. She had grown accustomed to it and now always saw it the way it looked from her room. She had really missed it in the past few long days. She wanted so much to see if everything was still the way it had been before, and how her dear, quiet friends were doing, and if Frau Tesch’s cross had fallen down, because it had been leaning before, and whether the wind had blown the woollen wreath off Lindenbau
m’s grave. The wreath had been poorly fastened. Charlotte had her favourite graves that she tended to specially. Many of them were not visited even by the deceased’s own relatives, who had forgotten them or died themselves, but Charlotte cherished them year after year, and decorated them with turf and flowers. Beginning in spring, all over the park, from every direction, the heavy smell of funerary flowers rose up beneath the ancient trees’ vaults.

  “The gardener’s been to papa three times already,” thought Charlotte. “Probably there’s been a lot done there. I can’t stand it, I simply must go.”

  She could restrain herself no longer, and although she had not quite recovered yet, she seized her big white kerchief, draped it over her thick flaxen braids, which she had wrapped in a crown around her head, and went out to the park.

  III

  But at present it did not smell of flowers in the avenues; they had just been put in and hadn’t had time to blossom yet. Even the greenish-white and deep purple buds of the lilac that was always so plentiful were still tightly closed. It smelled of sticky new birch leaves, new grass and the innocent yellow stars of dandelions that were scattered along both sides of the avenue and next to and behind the little fences around the graves.

  The sand crunching beneath her heels, Charlotte walked on. The new foliage did not yet meet overhead, and Charlotte, raising her eyes, saw the sky. There were hardly any visitors at that hour. Charlotte avoided strangers: they bothered her. She disliked funerals, and disliked and feared the deceased. They should be hidden away in the earth as quickly as possible and covered over with a lovely, even mound and a layer of fresh turf … In the mornings, a nightingale sings in the lilac bushes, and dew wets the turf and the large black pansies by the crosses. And there aren’t any of those long, cold, yellow people who get brought there in wooden boxes. What remains is a name, perhaps a memory—a trace left in the heart—and a fresh mound of earth. Charlotte never thought about the bones of the people whose graves she cherished and adorned. Ever alive, invisible, incorporeal, like the sounds of their names, they were constantly with her, always young, independent of time. In one little nook at the end of the second lateral pathway, there were two tiny little graves. The inscription on the cross said that here lay Fritz and Minna, twins who had died on the same day. Charlotte especially loved Fritz and Minna. When their decayed cross fell down, she spent her own money to put up a new little white cross. Fritz and Minna had died a long time ago. According to the inscription, they died before Charlotte was even born. But for her they eternally remained two-year-old children, little, sweet and unchanging from year to year. She herself planted flowers for them and indulged them with wreaths skilfully made of big, bright beads.

  Now Charlotte turned her steps towards Fritz and Minna. Along the way she had a look into the crypt of the Barons Rhein. It was very nice there. A white chapel with carved windows. Inside—an altar, a few white chairs, an icon lamp. Its flame was barely noticeable, as the bright sun was beating in through the door of the chapel. To the right of the entrance a curved staircase led down into the crypt itself. The steps were broad and white, the stairway so radiant and inviting that it seemed it must be a pleasure to descend. Next door, at the grave of a certain Nordenschild, a half-withered wreath hung unattractively from the arm of an enormous angel in an unnatural pose. Charlotte adjusted the wreath and went on. She didn’t like Nordenschild. In general she very much disliked graves with gigantic monuments—always clumsylooking—accompanied by long inscriptions and verses: what memories or peacefulness they might have held had been destroyed by the vain stupidity of the living.

  Charlotte turned to the right, onto a small pathway, quite narrow, that wound among the endless little fences and crosses. It got more shady and damp: the freshly-thawed earth had not yet had time to dry out. The rows of familiar graves stretched out in front of Charlotte. Mrs. Ein, her husband … And there was the broad, but not very large, grave of a general with his portrait on the cross. He was so jovial and nice, that general, that Charlotte always answered him with a smile. She turned to the right—and here, finally, were Fritz and Minna. Her poor children! Charlotte’s absence showed clearly now. The last time she had come here before her injury, Fritz and Minna had still been covered by a white blanket of late snow. The snow hadn’t been swept off in time, and it had melted right there and left a penetrating dampness. The grass was half-heartedly trying to grow on the little unkempt graves. Dead branches lay all around.

  “My poor little ones!” Charlotte whispered. “Just wait a bit, tomorrow I’m going to tidy you up, and I’ll plant you some flowers … Mark will give me some flowers,” she said, thinking of the old gardener who loved her very much.

  There was one thing here, near Fritz and Minna, that Charlotte didn’t like: in the opposite corner, very close, was a gigantic monument someone had raised over a mechanical engineer. A black cross made of some sort of iron was supported by wheels, some smooth and some cogged, connected by chains. The intricate, tall, heavy monument, all those chains and wheels to which the engineer had once devoted himself and left behind him when he passed away—all this seemed to weigh on the grave. At dusk, the cross, so tall and dark, probably looked like a gallows. Charlotte was angry at the engineer: she was vexed that this stupid, frightening monument had been put right next to her children.

  She went a little closer and raised her head. The wheels and chains were unwavering and inviolable. They were only slightly rusted from the snow. A mausoleum like that would stand for a long, long time.

  Charlotte decided to walk to the outer pathway, next to the tall, old board fence that faced the still-damp meadows and the distant forest beyond the river. She could see these meadows and the forest through the cracks in the grey fence.

  The outer pathway ran parallel to the main avenue, although it was quite a distance away, and it was narrow and very long, running the whole length of the cemetery. Here it wasn’t yet so crowded, the graves coming at longer intervals. There was one place Charlotte especially loved: in the summer, she would sit for whole hours at a time with her invariable work on an old bench among white lilac bushes, not far from Fritz and Minna.

  Charlotte took a few steps—and then suddenly stopped in surprise. What was this? Her place had been taken. When had this happened? How had she overlooked it? True, she hadn’t been by this way, this deep in, since autumn. Somehow she had been certain that everything would be just as it had been before, that no one would take her favourite spot. The lilacs, fresh and glistening, waved their clusters of buds ever so slightly. But now all the lilac bushes were confined behind a very tall, graceful metal railing with spiked tips. Charlotte went closer. There was a door in the fence, which opened right up, easily and silently. Charlotte went inside.

  Only one grave occupied that spacious quadrangle. A curved wooden bench stood beneath a lilac tree. Fresh turf embraced the grave. It had been thickly planted with large, dark-purple violets, which gave off a heavy fragrance. At one end of the grave was a simple cross of grey marble on a modest pedestal. Approaching closer still, Charlotte was able to discern a medallion of white marble on the pedestal; it was round, and there was a profile on it, also white and barely noticeable. The relief was so slight that the face’s features were almost indistinguishable. Charlotte could discern the straight line of a nose, tossed-back hair that was not very long, and the face of a girl or youth. Still lower a simple inscription faintly gleamed, in Russian:

  “Albert Renault.

  Died in the twenty-fifth year of his life.”

  And that was all.

  Charlotte sat down on the bench and lapsed into thought. The fragrance of violets clouded her head, and the bluish veins on the transparent skin of her temples began to throb. Who was this mysterious Albert Renault? Was this his portrait—this fine, almost invisible profile on white marble? Charlotte knew that her father charged a high price for rare garden violets. That meant that his relatives were wealthy. However, to Charlotte’s experienced ey
e, it appeared that the grave had not been visited for some time, for the grass around it had not been disturbed.

  “If only I dared …” Charlotte thought. “That grey cross, it’s lovely, but it seems too mournful to me. What a fine wreath I could make! From big and little beads … No, that wouldn’t be right. It has to be a soft one, from scraps of silk. Forget-me-nots, really big ones and very pale … But I don’t dare!” she interrupted herself. “The relatives might come and be upset … What am I to him?”

  Suddenly she felt sad. She got up from the bench and sat down on the turf and sand at the very edge of the grave. The violets, dark and velvety, were right by her face. Now, under a ray of sun that had suddenly penetrated through the branches, the marble profile was completely erased. The tall sharp spikes of the railing shut out the pathway and the other monuments. Only the top edge of the wooden fence and the clear sky above it could be seen. Charlotte, tilting her head back towards the fragrant grave, looked at the sky. It seemed so close and familiar to her, like the blue glass in her window. And it seemed to her that beyond it she could see another world, quiet, hazy and unknown.

  IV

  When her father went to have his afternoon nap, Charlotte shyly and cautiously stole into the big “reception” room. A difficult task lay ahead of her. She had to find the number of Albert Renault’s grave. Charlotte understood that otherwise her questions—who he was, when he was buried, whether his relatives visited often—would all come to nothing. Her father knew only the numbers.