One final consideration important for understanding the novel is that in addition to being the story of Griboedov and his times, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is also a story of Tynyanov and his times. Tynyanov was renowned for his deep, personal knowledge of Russian literature, a strong identification with some of its heroes (Pushkin, first and foremost), and putting much of himself into his characters. But in none of them has he depicted himself so frankly as in Griboedov. By the late 1920s, as the atmosphere around the formalists and the political ambience in the Soviet Union grew more dogmatic, Tynyanov’s fiction seems to have provided him with an artist’s antidote against the political horror—a retreat into the world of imagination, creativity, and the historical past. The resulting novel carries strong autobiographical overtones about Tynyanov’s own life and his generation; it was in fact an epitaph for himself and for those dismayed and saddened by the transformation of the great revolutionary fervor of 1917 into the strengthening grip of Stalinism and the concurrent metamorphosis within those who had believed in it. As such, this stylistic miracle of a novel is also an intensely personal protest against what had become of the promise of the Revolution, and for this reason, for the last ninety years it has been one of the most treasured and well-loved books of the Russian intelligentsia.
NOTES
1. Yury Tynyanov, “Avtobiografiya” [Autobiography] in Sochineniya [Collected Works] in 3 Vols., Vol. 1, (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoy literatury [State Publishing House of Literature], 1958), 8.
2. Boris Eikhenbaum, O proze (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1969), 419.
3. Cited in Tatiana Wolff, Pushkin on Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum International, 1998), 384.
THE DEATH OF VAZIR-MUKHTAR
Take a look at this cold face,
Take a look: no life, no zest,
But how the trace of former passions
Is manifest.
So hangs the mighty cataract
Ice-shackled o’er the abyss.
Though its wild roar is silenced,
It surges still, it lives.
Evgeny Baratynsky
PROLOGUE
In the freezing cold square in the month of December 1825, the people of the twenties, those with a spring in their step, ceased to exist. Time was suddenly shattered; the crunch of bones was heard around Mikhailovsky Manège—the rebels fled over the bodies of their comrades—the times were on the rack; it was one great torture chamber (as they used to say in the days of Peter the Great).
In the freezing cold square in the month of December 1825, the people of the twenties, those with a spring in their step, ceased to exist. Time was suddenly shattered; the crunch of bones was heard around Mikhailovsky Manège—the rebels fled over the bodies of their comrades—the times were on the rack; it was one great torture chamber (as they used to say in the days of Peter the Great).
Faces of remarkable muteness appeared immediately, right there in the square—craning faces, cheeks like taut breeches, sinews ready to burst. The sinews were the piping on the gendarmes’ uniforms, the color of the northern blue, and the Baltic muteness of Benckendorff turned into the Petersburg skies.
Then they began to calculate and assess, to judge their fluttering fathers; the fathers were sentenced to death or to a dishonorable life.
A chance traveler, a Frenchman, struck by the structure of the Russian state machine, described it as an “empire of catalogues,” and added: “brilliant ones.”
The fathers bowed their heads, the sons went into action, the fathers began to fear them, to respect them, to ingratiate themselves. At night, they felt remorseful; they sobbed bitterly. They called it “conscience” and “remembrance.”
And there was a great void.
In that void, very few people saw that the blood had drained away from the fluttering fathers, now brittle as a foil, that the blood of the age had undergone a transfusion. In just two or three years, a new breed had appeared, sons barely younger than their fathers. By slave labor and the subjugation of conquered peoples, by bustling and bargaining (but without the spring in the step), they wound up Benckendorff’s sterile state machine and set factories and mills spinning. In the thirties, it started to smell like America; it had the reek of the East Indies.
Two winds were blowing: easterly and westerly, both bringing loss and death to the fathers and profit to the sons.
What did politics mean for the fathers?
“What is a secret society? In Paris, we used to chase the girls; here, we shall hunt the Bear.”
So said the Decembrist, Lunin.
He was not being flippant; later, from Siberia, he irritated Nicholas with letters and proposals written in a tauntingly clear hand; he was baiting a bear with his walking cane—with his usual lightness of touch.
Liberty and love—these were what made poetry, and even common talk, so enticing and voluptuous. But liberty and love also brought death.
Those who died before their time had been overtaken by death quite suddenly, as if by love, as if by rain.
“He grabbed the frightened doctor’s hand and demanded his help urgently, shouting at him loudly: ‘Don’t you get it, my friend? I want to live, I want to live!’”
The dying words of General Ermolov, military leader of the twenties, sealed off in a glass jar by Nicholas.
And, squeezed by the hand, the doctor fainted.
The people of the twenties recognized each other later, in the thirties crowd; they had a “Masonic sign,” a certain look, and, in particular, a little smile incomprehensible to others. The little smile was almost childlike.
All around them, they heard unfamiliar words, which they struggled with, words such as Kammerjunker or “rent,” which they could not understand. Sometimes they paid with their lives for their failure to learn the vocabulary of their sons and younger brothers. It’s easy to die for girls or secret societies; it’s harder to die for a Kammerjunker.
A hard death befell the men of the twenties, because the age had died before them.
In the thirties, they had a keen sense of when their time was up. Like dogs, they chose the most comfortable corner to die in. And before they died, they demanded neither love nor friendship.
What was friendship? What was love?
They had lost their friendships somewhere in the previous decade, and all that remained was the habit of writing to friends and interceding for the guilty—incidentally, there were many guilty ones at that time. They wrote long, sentimental letters to each other and deceived each other as they had once deceived women.
In the twenties, women were not taken seriously and love affairs were no secret; only sometimes the men fought duels and died with a look on their faces as if to say: “I am off to the ballet tomorrow.” There was an expression at that time: “wounds of the heart,” one that incidentally did not prevent marriages of convenience.
In the thirties, poets took to writing to empty-headed beauties. Women began to wear gorgeous garters. The womanizing back in the twenties now seemed almost earnest and innocent, and the secret societies seemed little more than a “bunch of ensigns.”
Blessed were those who fell in the twenties, like proud young dogs, with blazing red sideburns!
How terrible was the fate of the transformed ones, for those of the twenties whose blood had been transfused!
They felt they were the objects of an experiment carried out by an alien hand whose fingers would not falter.
The age was in ferment.
The age is forever fermenting in the blood; each age has its own special ferment.
In the twenties, there was fermentation of wine—Pushkin.
With Griboedov, it was fermentation of vinegar.
And then, from Lermontov onward, there was putrefaction, spreading through words and blood, like the sound of a guitar.
The fragrance of the finest perfume is founded on decomposition, on waste (ambergris is the waste of a sea creature), and t
he most exquisite aroma is the closest to stench.
Nowadays, poets no longer even concern themselves with perfume; instead of fragrance, they peddle waste.
On this day, I have waved aside the whiffs of perfume and waste. An old Asian vinegar fills my veins instead, and the blood seeps sluggishly, as if through the wastelands of ruined empires.
A man of short stature, yellow-skinned and prim, occupies my imagination.
He lies motionless, his eyes glistening after his sleep.
He has reached for the spectacles on the bedside table.
He does not think, does not speak.
Nothing is yet decided.
01
Sharul’ belo iz kana la sadyk.
The greatest misfortune is not to have a true friend.1
▶ Griboedov, letter to Bulgarin
1
Nothing was yet decided.
He stretched himself up on his arms and hands and leaned forward; his nose and lips protruded, gooselike, from the effort.
Strange thing! In his adolescent bed, certain old habits came back to him unconsciously. He used to stretch just like this in the mornings, listening to the sounds of his childhood home: Is Mama up? Is she nagging Papa yet? A preposterous thought flashed through his mind: would his uncle appear right now, leaning on his walking stick, coming to wake him, to get him out of bed, calling on him to join him on his round of visits?
Why had he made such a fuss with that walking stick of his?
He lowered his eyelashes slyly and pulled the blanket lightly over his nose.
Sure enough, he immediately came to his senses.
He stretched a yellowish hand toward the bedside table and settled the specs on his nose.
He had slept soundly: he could sleep well only in new places. Today, the new place happened to be his family home, so he had had a good night’s sleep, like one in a quiet inn, but now that morning had come, he felt as if he were being poisoned by the mysterious smells that for some reason permeate ancestral homes.
Alexei Fyodorovich Griboedov, the uncle with the stick, had died five years ago. He was buried here, in Moscow.
He could not possibly appear.
In due course, Papa had died too.
But the ancestral sounds could still be heard.
The clocks called to one another through the wooden walls like roosters crowing. In maman’s boudoir, the pendulum always swung like mad.
Then a rasping sound and the sound of someone spitting.
It took him a while to work out what the sound was.
Then suppressed giggling (undoubtedly female). The rasping stopped for a moment, then eventually resumed with greater vigor. Somebody hissed from behind a door, a cheap little bell gave a thin tinkle—issuing undoubtedly from the boudoir. And the meaning of the rasping and spitting became apparent, as well as that of the laughter: his man Alexander, or Sashka, was giving the boots a spit and polish, while playfully digging Mama’s chambermaid in the ribs.
By and large, on this latest visit Alexander had displayed astonishing impudence: he fell on his master’s house like a Persian thief, took it by storm; he referred to himself as “we,” his eyebrows arched, his nostrils flared, his whitish eyes silly. He looked almost majestic.
Since he had taken it into his head that Alexander Sergeyevich would not permit the brushing of boots and clothes in the menials’ room, he was now spending his nights upstairs and pawing the maid.
And yet Alexander Sergeyevich Griboedov couldn’t help smiling because he was so fond of Alexander. Sashka looked like a frog.
Mama rang the feeble little bell again to prevent Sashka from disturbing him, or so she thought; in fact it woke him up—how insufferable!
Then, impishly, as if to mimic the hateful din, he reached out and shook his bell too. The sound was every bit as unpleasant as Mama’s bell, but louder. He gave it another shake.
Alexander came slinking in, stealthily, like a snake, shuffling his feet. His gait was reminiscent of the dervish’s walk in The Ali’s Passions.2 He was carrying his master’s clothes in his outstretched arms, like a sacrifice to the gods. His quiff had already been curled and pomaded with kvas. An amazingly stupid smile appeared before Griboedov. He took some satisfaction in watching Alexander fold the thin black garments on the stool, and with a ceremonial gesture evenly arrange the foot straps on the trousers.
So they looked at each other admiringly, quietly, as was their way.
“Bring me some coffee, would you?”
“Kava, sir? Right away.” Sashka flaunted the Persian word as he arranged the long, pointed toes of the shoes in a row.
(Kafechi, good God! Who’s he showing off to, the fool?)
“Have you called a cab?”
“It’s waiting, sir.”
Alexander left the room, nodding in time with each step.
Griboedov stared at the black clothes. He had the hopeless look of a hunted beast.
He noticed a speck of dust near the lapel of his frock coat, flicked it off, and blushed. He did not want to dwell on the thought that soon a diamond star would be shining there, while he couldn’t help picturing it vividly on the exact spot from which he had just removed the speck of dust.
Coffee.
He dressed swiftly, gritted his teeth, went through to Mama’s boudoir, and knocked with a wooden finger on the wooden door.
“Entrez?”
The puzzlement was false, the raised pitch of the question a third higher than it ought to have been; maman’s voice was particularly syrupy on this visit, a honey-sweet dolce.
He lowered his long, submissive eyelashes and breathed in various smells as he passed through the room: sulfur pills, juniper powder, tresses scented with eau de cologne.
Mama sat in the chair, her thin locks, not gray but colorless, fluffed up at the temples.
She was scrutinizing Alexander through a lorgnette, her eyes squinting. The stare was almost carnivorous. Alexander had been promised the rank of state councillor.
“Did you sleep well, my son? For two mornings in a row, your Sashka has woken the whole household.”
For two mornings in a row, he had been longing to get away from the house.
This time he had made up his mind, and it looked like he would have to make himself clear. He was fleeing to Petersburg, or rather not so much running away as taking the Turkmenchai Treaty to Petersburg, and he could stop off in Moscow for only two days. But the previous day, Mama had turned sulky when he’d said that he would be leaving the following morning—surely he could stay for another day? He had stayed. Now she was looking at her son in a particular way.
Nastasya Fyodorovna had squandered her fortune.
Was she a spendthrift? She was grasping. And yet the money ran through her fingers, poured out like sand, the corners cracked, and little by little the house crumbled; ruin was in the air; everything was in its place, and yet the house felt empty.
Nastasya Fyodorovna, mother, mistress of the house, was no fool—so where did the money go? The very air of the Griboedov establishment seemed to eat it up. Their peasants had already been sucked dry to the last possible drop. Five years ago, they had rebelled, and the mutiny had to be crushed—put down by force. Yet, in spite of the victory, the governor of the province paid her a visit, had tea with her, and said that it would be better to have no more revolts.
Alexander was well aware of the significance of the voice and lorgnette. The honey-sweet legato invited a discussion, which he began. He listened to himself speaking, disgusted by his own excess of expressiveness; he seemed to be infected with her manner of speaking.
All this, of course, was meant to end in a scene with tempers lost; both mother and son knew that and were dragging it out.
Mother had no idea what it was that he wanted. He could stay in Moscow, join the diplomatic service in Petersburg, or even obtain a post back in Persia. Surely the world was his oyster: he had shown himself to be a great diplomat. Mother had already written to Paskevi
ch, who was married to her niece and under whose command Alexander had served. Paskevich, inclined to surround himself with indebted relatives, had advanced Alexander’s career. He advised Nastasya Fyodorovna to opt for Persia.
So they were making decisions about his life behind his back, as if he were a little boy; worst of all was the fact that he knew about it. The mother sensed as much: as soon as she mentioned Persia, Alexander would start to oppose her, even though it might have been exactly what he wanted.
Persia was a plum. There was the money, and the rank, and Paskevich’s patronage; Moscow, and even more so Petersburg, were an entirely different kettle of fish and a different sort of game. Neither Persia nor Petersburg meant anything to Nastasya Fyodorovna—these were the places where her son had simply vanished off the face of the earth for years at a time, as if he’d gone to the office and come back not four hours, but four years later. As a matter of fact, she would not even say “Alexander is in Persia” or “in the Caucasus,” but “Sasha’s at the mission.” The mission was the office, which sounded quieter and more stable. Moscow was actually all she could understand, and yet she didn’t want Sasha to stay there.
“Are you eating at home tonight?”
“No, maman, I have a dinner invitation.”
There was no invitation, but he could not bring himself to dine at home. Their dinners were admittedly pretty poor.
Nastasya Fyodorovna glanced archly through the lorgnette.
“Actresses again, and all that backstage stuff?”
He hated to hear his mother talking about his amorous affairs.
“I have things to see to, mother dearest. You still think of me as if I were twenty.”
“I see you’re in no great hurry to go to Petersburg, are you?”
“On the contrary, I am leaving tomorrow morning.”
She was doting on him through the lorgnette.
“Where is your Lion and your Sun?”
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar Page 3