His wife went timidly up to the sleeping man:
“Zakhar Egorych, go lie on the stove-bench. You’ll catch cold here.”
Hearing no reply, she touched his limp hand. Indeed, he had caught his death of cold.
Well that’s one theme for you. Perhaps you won’t scorn it. As for the other, I don’t know if it’s worth . . . Let’s better put it off. I’m tired. If my true story suits you, I suggest you literaturize it, scratch a few things out, cut. Otherwise some fool will cry: mysticism.
By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you: won’t your neighbors—because you use so much electricity—kick up a fuss?*
7
SAME ADDRESS
My other theme is: about me. I enclose copies of several letters of mine. I wrote them out from memory: the majority have sunk into forgetfulness. It’s not much material, of course. But even so. I won’t suggest a title, you’ll think of a better one than mine, but, as a character, I would like: Unwitting Street.
This letter will be my last. I won’t trouble you anymore. All of this might well have gone on and on, if not for one trifling incident.
This morning I saw, amid a cacophony of wheels, an automobile squash a dog. Entrails spurted forth and . . . But that’s not the point. The dog was still alive. A few seconds remained to him. A strong, purebred beast. He got up on shaking legs, his blood-filled eyes bulging. His master rushed toward him. Followed by several passersby. In response to their outstretched hands the dog began to bite, savagely bite everything that came near his teeth. The circle of people expanded in fright. The dog, gasping for breath, went on gnashing his teeth. His half-blind eyes saw death before them, imminent death, and he was defending himself. He defended himself to the last. Wise beast. Then a brief convulsion, and it was over.
I went straight home—before even getting to the liquor-store sign. Unwitting Street is behind me. Now I am not unwilling. And today I will clink glasses with fate. In my glass will be not vodka, but: something else.
1933
NOTES
COMRADE PUNT
* the crash of water rushing down pipes: Like most people in 1930s Soviet Moscow, Comrade Punt lived in a communal apartment with shared kitchen, bathroom, and WC.
* sansculottism: Political extremism or radicalism. From the French sans-culotte; literally, without breeches. (Webster’s)
MY MATCH WITH THE KING OF GIANTS
* stirrup-stone: A mounting-block at a church door.
THE SLIGHTLY-SLIGHTLIES
* deme: A township or division of ancient Attica. (OED)
* phyle: In Attica, a political, administrative, and military unit. (OED)
THE PLAYED-OUT PLAYER
* the pale horse: Death. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.” (Revelation 6:8)
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF A THOUGHT
* The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me: From Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788): “Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often I reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
THE FLYELEPHANT
* The Flyelephant: A story inspired by a figure of speech; in Russian (as in French), “to make an elephant out of a fly” means “to make a mountain out of a molehill.”
“A PAGE OF HISTORY”
* Nolde: A baronial, originally German surname well known in prerevolutionary Russia. Here its two syllables sound like a charade: Nol (“zero”) and de (short for deskat: “says he”).
* easements: Here, the right to a specific limited use or enjoyment of someone else’s land. (A subject that, with the Bolsheviks’ abolition of private property, would soon be moot.)
* March 1917: Just after the February Revolution that brought down the Russian monarchy.
* Lazarus: Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), German philosopher and psychologist.
GOD IS DEAD
* God Is Dead: An allusion to Nietzsche’s “Parable of the Madman” in The Gay Science (1882): “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” (Trans. Walter Kaufmann)
THE GRAY FEDORA
* others raise their heads aloft like empty ears of corn: cf Montaigne: “It hath happened unto those who are truly learned as it happeneth unto ears of corn which, as long as they are empty, grow and raise their head aloft, upright, and stout. But if they once become full and big with ripe corn, they begin to humble and droop downward.” (Trans. John Florio)
* Descartes: René Descartes (1596–1650), French philosopher, mathematician and scientist.
PAPER LOSES PATIENCE
* paper does not blush: An expression first found in Cicero, the Roman writer and orator (106–43 BC), in his letters to friends: “Epistola non erubescit” (A letter does not blush).
* stirrup-stone: See note for “My Match with the King of Giants.”
* firn: Granular snow.
* “sleep and feed”: “What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.” (Hamlet, IV, 4)
* I seem to be a Shakespeare scholar: Krzhizhanovsky wrote a number of essays on Shakespeare in the 1930s; some were printed at the time.
* kissing rhymes: An abba rhyme scheme.
* Iris: In Greek mythology, the goddess of the rainbow and a messenger of the gods; she is sometimes shown carrying a jug of water from the River Styx with which she put to sleep any Olympian who lied.
* Goethe and Hegel’s snow-white Iris has long needed to be cleaned—completely—of all the flyspecks sticking to her: An apparent allusion to Goethe’s theory of colors (1810), a theory which Hegel defended while most natural scientists opposed it.
THE MUTE KEYBOARD
* tremolo: A rapid reiteration or alternation of notes so as to produce a tremulous effect.
* “My kingdom is in the air”: From Beethoven’s letter to Franz Brunsvik (February 13, 1814): “My kingdom is in the air. As the wind often does, so do harmonies whirl around me, and so too do things whirl about in my soul.” (Trans. Emily Anderson)
* Odoevsky: Vladimir Odoevsky (1803–1869), writer and music critic. His Russian Nights (1844) includes the story “Beethoven’s Last Quartet.”
DEATH OF AN ELF
* Mustardseed and Peaseblossom: Fairies serving Titania in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
* aerobes: An organism that lives only in the presence of oxygen. (Webster’s)
THE GAMBLERS
* by the city gates: Near a city not unlike Kiev during the Civil War that followed the Bolshevik coup of October 1917.
* changes of regime: “Kiev residents counted 18 coups. Certain transient memoirists counted 12; I can report that there were exactly 14, what’s more I personally lived through 10 of them.” Mikhail Bulgakov, “Kiev-gorod” (1923).
* stuss: A banking game of chance similar to faro.
* the poet . . . began to tally: To deal out the whole deck of cards.
* Berenice’s Hair: Coma Berenices, a constellation in the northern hemisphere.
IN LINE
* “citizen plot”: An official form of address in Soviet Russia, “citizen” was more distant and less warm than the alternative “comrade.”
* two times two does not make four: cf. “Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence . . . Mind you, I quite agree that twice-two-makes-four is a most excellent thing; but if we are to give everything its due, then twice-two-makes-five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” Dostoevsky, “Notes from the Underground.” (Trans. David Magarshack)
* “That’s right, we’ll put a spoke in the wheel of his hearse”: cf. “To live is to put a spoke in the wheel of the hearse in which I am being carried.” (Krzhizhanovsky, Zapisnye tetradi)
* “The Night before the Trial”: A comic Chekhov story (1886) whose narrator is about to be tried for
bigamy; the night before the trial he passes himself off as a doctor to a pretty woman with chest pains for which he prescribes: “Sic transit 0.05, Gloria mundi 1.0, Aquae destillatae 0.1. One tablespoon every two hours.”
* Aquae destillatae (distilled water): Here, pure verbiage. In Russian, writing that has “a lot of water” doesn’t have much meat.
* the three-part division, the three elements: An apparent allusion to a 1913 article by V.I. Lenin: “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism.”
* every one of us is supervised by seven nudgers: A rewording of an old Russian saying (na kazhdogo bayalshchika po semi akhalshchikov—for every tale-teller there are seven exclaimers); here, an allusion to the heavy-handed system of Soviet censorship.
* . . . in the fourth act. Addressing Rosencrantz, the prince wonders how it is that a man who cannot play the recorder, a silly wooden pipe, thinks he can play on Hamlet’s soul: The writer is misremembering Hamlet. This scene takes place in the third act (not the fourth) and the prince is addressing Guildenstern (not Rosencrantz): “ ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”
* “The Thousand-and-Second Night of Scheherazade”: As opposed to Poe’s “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade.”
JOURNEY OF A CAGE
* Verzhbolovo Station: On the German-Russian (Eydtkuhnen-Verzhbolovo) border where Europe’s fifty-six-and-a-half-inch gauge ended and Russia’s sixty-and-a-half-inch gauge began, obliging all passengers and goods to change trains. (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory)
* “Marseillaise”: “La Marseillaise,” a revolutionary French anthem (1792) which begins: Allons enfants de la Patrie; forbidden in czarist Russia.
* timbrel: A medieval tambourine.
* Rouget de Lisle: Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836); French poet, army officer, and composer of “Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin,” later known as “La Marseillaise.”
* Beethoven’s Appassionata: Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor.
* “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”: “Germany, Germany above all,” the first line of the “Song of Germany”; it became popular after the Battle of Langemarck in October 1914.
* verst: An old Russian measure of length, slightly longer than a kilometer (3,500 feet).
* Russian Pilgrim: Russky palomnik, a popular illustrated Orthodox journal (1885–1917), sets of which some owners had bound.
* A Journey to the Holy Land: Khozhdenie by Igumen (Abbot) Daniil, the first Russian pilgrim to leave a description of the Holy Land, where he traveled in 1106–1107.
* The Rock of Faith: Kamen Very, an anti-Protestant treatise by Stefan Yavorsky (1658–1722), head of the Russian Orthodox Church under Peter the Great.
* Kaigorodov’s Birds of Passage: O nashikh pereletnykh ptitsakh (1882) by Dmitry Kaigorodov, a professor and popularizer of natural history.
* Notes on Fishing: Zapiski ob yzhenii ryby (1847) by Sergei Aksakov, prose writer, Slavophile, and friend of Gogol.
* Stefan Yavorsky’s A Mournful Farewell to My Books: Possessoris horum librorum luctuosum libris vale, Yavorsky’s elegy in Latin to his library, which he catalogued and left to the monastery he founded in Nizhyn.
* seven ecumenical councils: Those councils of the Christian Church (325–787 CE) recognized by the Eastern Orthodox.
* the three-trunked tree of Adam: A Slavonic legend (“Slovo o krestnom dreve”) according to which Adam was buried at Golgotha in a crown woven from a branch of the Tree of Knowledge; the crown on Adam’s head grew up into a tree with three trunks. One trunk was Adam, the second Eve, and the third God himself. When Christ was crucified at Golgotha, the legend continues, his cross was made from wood of the tree that had grown out of Adam’s head.
* the anchorites of the Thebaid: Christian hermits living in the deserts of fourth-century Egypt.
* Pechersky Paterikon: The Kiev-Pechersky Paterikon, writings about the founding of Kiev’s Monastery of the Caves (eleventh century) and the lives of its first inhabitants.
* a bird that on Good Friday hangs upside down from a branch with wings outspread: A legend of Father Joachim’s own invention, perhaps. In courtship display (in spring), the blue bird-of-paradise hangs upside down from a branch with wings outspread.
* the fire that descends unseen on the lamps in a Jerusalem church on the eve of the Resurrection: The Holy Fire said by Orthodox Christians to appear miraculously every year the day before Easter in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
* epicycle: A small circle, the center of which moves around in the circumference of a larger circle: used in Ptolemaic astronomy to account for observed periodic irregularities in planetary motions. (Webster’s)
* Maury: Alfred Maury (1817–1892), French scholar who studied the effects of outside stimuli on the content of dreams.
* an illiterate country cricket who had never heard of Dickens: An allusion to “The Cricket on the Hearth” (1845), a Christmas story by Charles Dickens.
* Marx-and-Engels, the former Cathedral Square: An allusion to the many place and street names that were changed under Soviet rule.
* In the old days Gleb Borisovich Borisoglebsky occupied an apartment of eleven chambers . . . now he was living out his life behind a makeshift partition in half of a tiny room: Under Soviet rule, formerly separate apartments were turned into communal ones, with shared kitchen and WC.
* Boris and Gleb: Two brothers murdered after the death in 1015 of their father, Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kievan Rus; later canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.
* former things: Things belonging to “former people” (members of the nobility, aristocracy, bourgeoisie, clergy, etc., disenfranchised under Soviet rule).
* Epaminondas: Theban general and tactician who ended Sparta’s domination of Greece; died (362 BCE) at the Battle of Mantinea of a spear wound.
* spur stone: One of the round granite blocks formerly set at intervals along the edges of some Moscow streets to protect the sidewalks from incursions by passing carriages.
* “The Internationale”: “L’Internationale,” a left-wing standard; adopted as the official anthem of the Soviet Union (1922 to 1944).
* Print and Revolution: Pechat i revolyutsiya, an illustrated, book-length Soviet journal (1921–1930) devoted to literature, art, and criticism.
* volume five of Klyuchevsky: Presumably the last volume of A History of Russia by V.O. Klyuchevsky (1841–1911).
* all faces and attention were turned toward the forced-open room: The secret police had come, it seems, to arrest the mysterious “other person” hiding in Borisoglebsky’s half-room and voicing suspicious sentiments.
UNWITTING STREET
* I remember only that you’re six-rings: Communal apartments shared by half a dozen families were not unusual in Moscow during the Soviet era.
* a being not with a briefcase, but under a briefcase . . . works . . . round the clock: Most likely an underling in the state system, possibly a chauffeur. Stalin slept during the day and worked at night when he might summon ministers and officials to the Kremlin at a moment’s notice.
* We renounced the seizure of spaces, the annexation of territories: Here “we” refers to Soviet Russia. On pulling out of the First World War, Lenin called for an immediate peace “without annexations” (i.e., without the seizure of foreign territory).
* This new socialist property: The future. Communism was, ostensibly, the future of humanity.
* Go for help—as the old saying advises—to one’s grave: Gorbatogo mogila ispravit (the grave will correct the hunchback). In other words, a leopard cannot change his spots.
* UNWITTING STREET: Nevolny pereulok. For a brief history of this former Moscow street, see Ya. Z. Rachinsky, Polny slovar nazvanii moskovskikh ulits (Moscow, 2011).
* Vargunikhin Hill: Now part of the Smolenskaya Embankment.
* I walked over Vargunikhin Hill and stood for a while beside the small decapitated church: The church of Nicholas
the Miracleworker built by Old Believers in 1914–1915; before being razed in 1939, it stood for years without its dome and belfry.
* Berezhki: Now the Berezhkovskaya Embankment.
* Bryansk Station: Now the Kiev Station.
* What did we do to make It come: What did we, the liberal intelligentsia, do to make the February Revolution of 1917 come?
* So we hide our eyes behind goggles: A fashion perhaps inspired by the first aviators.
* “Unexpected,” as Blok titled it: An allusion to Nechayannaya radost (Unexpected Joy, 1907), Alexander Blok’s second collection of poems.
* Your shoulders thrust above the serrated sill, your head held high and capped with a cloth helmet: Most likely the Red Army soldier depicted in profile on one of the USSR’s first standard postage stamps (1923–1927).
* I too, in fact, am a quasi-corpse: The writer of these letters is a “former person,” someone disenfranchised by Soviet rule because of their non-proletarian origin and now (in the 1930s) in perpetual danger of arrest.
* Because alive I bar the way of yours to yours: That is, I have no place in the new Soviet order; I’m only in the way.
* When It first happened: Here “It” refers to the Bolshevik coup of October 1917.
* “You’re foisting your February spirit on the October cause”: The spirit of the moderate, anti-authoritarian revolution that brought down the Russian monarchy (February) versus the radical Bolshevik coup (October).
* To muddy the waters and “dissociate yourself”: Dissociate yourself from any ideological “mistakes” made in your previous book.
* Schubert’s variations on a theme: Franz Schubert’s Trout Quintet, fourth movement (a set of variations on his song “The Trout,” 1817).
* verst: See note for “Journey of a Cage.”
* won’t your neighbors—because you use so much electricity—kick up a fuss?: In communal apartments, the electric bill was divided by the number of tenants.
Unwitting Street Page 15
