And Other Stories Of Communist Russia
Page 2
For the nontotalitarian reader it is at first a little difficult to understand the violence of Zhdanov's obliterating speech. It is true that Zoshchenko makes bureaucrats look absurd, that he exposes the inefficiencies and incompatibilities of daily life in the Soviet Union, and that he is more than a little wistful about the goods famine. But these things are well within the pale of samo-kritika. One can find their equivalents in almost any issue of Pravda or Krokodil. What, then, was the real reason?
A "pseudo writer": an interesting expression. It is a little like calling Harry Truman a "pseudo politician." The point is that Zoshchenko was a real writer and nothing but a writer, and that in spite of a few deliberately disconcerting gestures to the contrary, he never tried to drive nails with a samovar. In a totalitarian society, that is reason enough to blast away. However, there were even better ones.
Reading one or a few stories of Zoshchenko is not the same as reading him in bulk. He is, obviously, a very funny writer. Nevertheless, the over-all effect of his work is anything but funny. He leaves one with the sense of a dreary, depressing, mournful, almost intolerable world. One might well exclaim, as Pushkin was supposed to on reading Gogol: "How sad is our Russia!" Moreover, Zoshchenko's "objective correlatives" are very much more obviously there, in the real world, than Gogol's were. It is not so much a question of his violation of this or that canon of socialist^ realism, of his remaining inside or outside the bounds of samo-kritika> as of the total effect of his work. Altogether, one can
hardly claim that Zoshchenko's stories would bolster the mandatory optimism of a Soviet citizen.
There is a short preface appended to one of the hospital stories. In it Zoshchenko states that Krokodil had entrusted him with a number of letters to the editor complaining of treatment in Soviet hospitals and had commissioned him to write either a conventional article, in the samo-kritika vein, or a sketch. He claims that he decided, after deliberation, on the latter; but we cannot believe for a moment that he deliberated at all. Any or even all of the details might appear in a conventional Soviet article; however, the hospital we see is a Zoshchenko hospital, and surely he could have created no other. It is the essence of everything that is wrong with hospitals at their worst, where science (which Zoshchenko respects almost as Gogol respected religion) goes astray in the hands of a contemptuous, case-hardened bureaucracy.
Again, Zoshchenko has never created a single "positive hero" (a must, for Soviet writers)—one that Zhdanov could look on with approval. Few of the stories are without some human pathos, and some (like "The Crisis," one of his funniest) actually approach the humor of Charlie Chaplin; unlike Chaplin's films, however, Zoshchenko's "little fellows" rarely came out on top.
For the most part, his protagonists are fools, knaves, charlatans, fakes, poseurs, reeking of poshlost. There are some exceptions. Nazar Ilich Sinebriukhov (the hero of "Victoria Kazimirovna"), although vamped by a false ideal, has heroic traits. So does the protagonist of "My Professions." However, most of his people are victims—either of themselves, or of history, or of nature, or of all three.
Let us examine more closely what happens when Zoshchenko takes nature to the bathhouse. You can't do without a public bathhouse when there's an acute housing shortage. There is something elemental and at the same time microcosmic about this locale, and Zoshchenko returns to it obsessively. There are three bathhouse stories in this collection, written about twenty years apart. The first is by far the funniest and makes the most vivid impression, and the other two depend on one's having read the first for their effect. For one thing, all three stories take place in the same bathhouse. By taking a good look at the d6cor, by noting how the arrangements change, and by listening to the quality of the talk, one can learn something of what the Five-Year plans have done, and what they have not done.
The first story is Chaplinesque. The "little fellow" is frustrated by the crude and irrational arrangements at every turn. He needs tickets to get his clothes back. "But where is a naked man going to put tickets?" He can't get himself clean because the other bathers, scrubbing out their dirty laundry, keep splashing him. He is denied even the elementary pleasure of hearing the soap squeak as he washes himself. Frustration at every point.
In the second story, conditions have improved considerably. Manners are more civilized—but only on the surface. Clothes are stolen. The manager who barges in when the theft is reported turns out to be a woman who embarrasses everyone in the men's dressing room. The "little fellow" who had his clothes stolen turns out, after some administrative confusion, to have been a thief himself. The problems here are already a little more complex.
The third story is scarcely funny at all. It is a "symbolic" story, not the sort of thing Zoshchenko does best. It ends on a note of real gloom, which Zoshchenko's attempt to modify by rather mechanical means does little to attenuate. The bathhouse by this time is everything a public bathhouse should be. The bathers are decorous and civilized. The manager is still a woman, the same woman, but elderly now and with some respect for the dignity of her male customers. Yet, something is wrong, in a deeper and far more complicated way. There is a malady.
One of the attendants is a bright-eyed young lad from the country. What is he doing, working at a job like this? He has ambition but no imagination. One of the customers is a stuffy, unpleasant, moralistic papa, who keeps lecturing his snively little boy (his name, shades of Gogol, is Icarus!) on public behavior. Another is an even more unpleasant, and even sinister, butt-insky who can't wait to denounce someone to the police. The central figure is an elderly mechanic who has earned a Soviet fortune by working for years at bonus wages in the Far East, for a motive that has now become irrelevant, and who carries his wealth as though it were an albatross. He cannot spend it; he cannot give it away; he is not a miser and takes no joy in keeping it for its own sake. "It's only money." However, in this case it is symbolic money. The old mechanic has won out against nature, but in the winning he has had to make himself the kind of man for^whom the victory is useless. He leaves the bathhouse in deep melancholy. Zoshchenko doesn't bring this one off too well. This
bathhouse is almost bathos; but against the background of the two other stories it is not without a certain power.
The cumulative effect of Zoshchenko's stories is, as I have noted, a depressing one. His work is poor in positive figures and entirely lacking in heroes of the imperative never-never-land type that socialist realism requires. In this struggle with nature, there are moments of real pathos and occasional little victories, but no triumphs. If orthodox Soviet critics try to palm off Gogol's nightmare world as "the Russia of his time," they would like to pass off Zoshchenko's Russia as a misfit "pseudo writer's" nightmare, or still better, ignore it entirely.
One aspect of Zoshchenko's work is depressing in a different sense: his curious lack of development as a writer. The third bathhouse story, it is true, involves a far more complex situation than the first; but Zoshchenko's means are not up to it. His successful pieces, in spite of their enormous range of incidents and their variety of observed detail, have a curious sameness. Nor is this a function of their brevity alone. (One has only to compare an early Chekhov story with a later one to grasp what a writer's development means.) Nor is it the limitation of his talent. At least there are a few striking indications that this is not the case.
"Victoria Kazimirovna," one of his very early stories, written in 1917 and published in his first volume, is of a quite different dimension than the rest of his work. The gallows humor, the crude and yet complex cogitations of Nazar Il'ich Sinebriukhov, his peasant's way of looking out for himself, knowing his life isn't worth much but that he has no other, his infatuation with the strumpet-aristocrat, Victoria Kazimirovna—these have a depth and a resonance and a poignance that is lacking elsewhere: "Only I remembered then just how that crow had flown over me ... Och, I pulled myself together." That crow is Sinebriukhov's vision of his own death. Isaac Babel might have been glad to have written this story.
>
There is also that moment in the brief sketch called "Confession"—that inexpressible moment of terror when baba Fekla realizes that the priest doesn't believe in God either. And there is the strange case of the autobiography, which deserves some special attention.
In 1943, during the war, when a Soviet victory over the Nazi invaders was in the air but still a long way off, Zoshchenko began to publish in serial form an intensely personal prose work called
Before the Sun Rises, subtitled "a novella." It was not a conventional autobiography but took the form of a Freudian self-analysis — only the form, for the "flashbacks" are anything but free associations. They are concentrated evocations of the utmost simplicity and most careful composition.
Zoshchenko begins with his young manhood and pushes further and further back to the dawn of his consciousness. Where conscious memory fails him, he begins to draw on his dreams, and on Freud and Pavlov for their meaning, to discover the forces that shaped his infancy and to answer the question he poses at the beginning: Why am I such a melancholy man? He never answers the question. Possibly he never intended to. At any rate, publication was discontinued after three issues, and Zoshchenko was violently attacked in the party journal Bolshevik for his concern with himself, for his "nasty" friends and relations, for his interest in sex, for mentioning Freud, for being Zoshchenko. One can never be certain about such things, but in my opinion this tirade suggests as good a reason as any for Zoshchenko's over-all lack of development as a writer. The only directions in which he might have been able to move were padlocked for him from the outside.
Some of the brief flashbacks are masterpieces. "Nerves" has, again, the Babelian touch. A number of others have a poignance and depth that set them altogether apart from the rest of Zosh-chenko's work. Their humor and irony are altogether gentler and more complex—almost Chekhovian—than the humor of the stories. The portrait that emerges is of a detached, restless, haunted, gentle, and very intelligent man in a rough world. But is the man Zoshchenko?
One has an almost uncanny sense, as one reads, of the author outside himself—if it is, indeed, himself he is describing, for the work is properly "a novella" and not an autobiography at all. There is a sad and at the same time deliciously funny moment toward the end of the published fragment, in which Zoshchenko is finally aware that the obsessive dread that has haunted him all his life is connected with water. He goes through the many notebooks he has unwittingly accumulated, filled with objective but entirely useless information about water: the percentage of water in the human body, in the world at large, the depth of seas, and the havoc wrought by floods. Without meaning to imply that it has tl%same power or that the effect was arrived at by the same means, or that it is in any way a scene of comparable achievement,
JCVH
there is, nevertheless, something here that reminds me of Aristophanes' image, in Plato's The Symposium, of the sundered halves of the once-whole human self pursuing each other across the great waste of the world. And one might recall Socrates' seemingly casual remark, at the end of the banquet, that comedy and tragedy are one.
A Metropolitan Deal 12
Confession 15
What Good Are Relatives? 17
The Aristocrat 20
The Bathhouse 23
The Patient 26
Poverty 29
The Overshoe 32
The Economy Campaign 35
The Actor 37
Rachis [Paris] 40
The Crisis 42
Kitten and People 45
The Electrician 47
The Receipt 49
M. P. Siniagin 52
A Weak Container 74
Bathhouse and People 78
A Romantic Tale 82
Poor Liza 88
An Amusing Adventure 93
Liaisons Dangereuses 101
Personal Life 105
My Professions 709
Love 118
On Pushkin's Anniversary 139
Houses and People 144
Rose-Marie 147
The Story of My Illness 151
A Happy Game 155
A Last Unpleasantness 159
An Instructive Story 163
Kochergd (The Poker) 766
The Photograph 770
The Adventures of An Ape 774
An Extraordinary Event 181
In the Bathhouse 787
Before the Sun Rises: A Novella 796
VICTORIA KAZIMIROVNA
I've never been in America and I don't mind telling you I don't know a thing about it.
When it comes to foreign powers, though, I know Poland. And I can damn well expose it.
I spent three years on Polish soil in the German war . . . And, no! I don't care for Polacks.
There's every kind of slyness in their nature, I know.
Take a woman.
A woman of theirs will kiss your hand.
Only when you get to her hut, it's: "Nothing doing, pan."
And she goes and wipes off your hand.
You just can't do this to a Russian man.
That peasant of theirs is absolutely a sly one. He's always going around clean, beard trim, saving up money.
Well I'll do a little clarifying of their nation for you. Take Upper Silesia . . .
Now, please, why should the Polack have Upper Silesia? Why this mockery of the German nation?
So live as a separate power if you want, all right, have your own monetary unity, but why such an impossible demand?
No, I don't like the Polacks.
So it's like this: I met this Polish miss, and she was the kind could make me sympathize for Poland, better, I think, if one doesn't visit this people.
Well, I just made a mistake.
I don't mind telling you, such a wonder came over me, I was in such a fog, that this charming beauty, no matter what she'd say, I'd up and do it.
Let's say I wouldn't agree to murder a man, my hand would shake. And there I murdered one, and another one, too. Murdered an old, old miller, and even if not by hand but only by way of a little personal slyness of my own.
And I myself, sad to think, approached this Polack girl frivolously, just like a bridegroom, even trimmed my beard and kissed her vulgar hand . . .
There was a Polish village called Krevo.
On one end there was a little hill, and the Germans had dug in. On the other, opposite end, a little hill, and we had dug in. And this Polish village was left lying there in the ravine between the trenches.
The Polish inhabitants, certainly, had been told to clear out, but there were some who just couldn't stand the idea of leaving their goods behind, so they stayed.
And how they managed to exist there—it's fearsome to ponder. The shells whistle and whistle over them, but they don't mind. They're Polacks. They live in their own way.
We came as their guests.
You might say we were on reconnaissance, but on our way we would absolutely wind up in a Polish hut.
More and more we would wind up at the miller's.
There existed just such an old, old miller.
His old woman would always say—he has, she would say, some money. Call it capital. But he just won't say where.
Seems he promised to tell before his death, but meanwhile for some reason he's afraid, and he hides it.
And this is exactly right about the miller—he hid his little pile.
He told me all about it once, in a heart-to-heart talk.
He said before he died he wanted to get some full pleasure out of family life.
Let them, he says, spoil me a little. Because, just tell them where the little pile is, they'll strip it like bark off a lime tree and throw it away on their lovers, even though they're my own blood kin.
I understood this miller and even felt sympathy for him. Only I wondered how he could get his full pleasure out of family life, because he has this disease, and I noticed his nails were blue.
But they catered to the old man.
This miller had a family. His wife was getting on. And he had a stepdaughter, that charming beauty, the Miss Victoria Kazimi-rovna.
I was just telling you that sophisticated story about his excel-lex|py the old prince, and of course I wouldn't tell you anything that wasn't true, and I was telling you about those damn picky
whores and how they were beating me with an instrument, only at that time there was not yet the beautiful Polack Victoria Kazimirovna . . . And could not yet be. She was another time and in another business.
And this is what I, forgive me, a poor peasant, went through.
There was this Victoria Kazimirovna, daughter of the old, old miller.
And it was to her we came as guests.
And how did it all turn out?
From the very first days you might say there were kind of relationships between us.
I remember once we arrived at the miller's . . .
We're sitting around giggling, and Victoria Kazimirovna picks me out of the bunch and plays up to me. You know how, sometimes with her shoulder, sometimes with her foot.
Feh, you, I break out in admiration, you're something I like! It was a charming occasion.
I was still on my guard then, and when I left her I kept my trap shut.
Only a bit later she starts taking me by the hand, and admiring me all over the place.
She says: I, Mr. Sinebriukhov, could even love you. (That's just the way she said it.) And I already have a something in my breast, even though you are not a handsome youth.
Only, she says, I have a little favor to ask of you. Save me, she says, for God's sake. I want to leave home and go to Minsk or some such Polish city somewhere around there, because —you can see for yourself—I'm wasting away here for the chickens to laugh at. My father, the old, old miller, has capital, so it is necessary to discover where he keeps it. It is necessary for me to live on money. I, she says, wouldn't do anything bad to my father, but if it isn't today, it's tomorrow he will die of quinsy and I fear he will not tell about his capital.