1927
POSTMARK: MOSCOW
(Thirteen Letters to the Provinces)
LETTER ONE
Dear friend, the fate of belated letters is well known: First they are expected, then no longer. I know; my envelope postmarked MOSCOW is by now useless and vain. But it could not have been otherwise: I myself have been living inside a sealed envelope. I’m only now scrambling out. Two years have clicked by like the beads on an abacus; behind me lies a bare spindle. This you will forgive and understand, dear friend, because you are . . .a dear friend.
But will you forgive me your disappointment? Under my MOSCOW postmark you will find nothing but musings about postmarks with the MOSCOW impress. To me this theme has immediacy and importance. To you, at a distance of five hundred miles, it is foreign and, perhaps, dull. But I can write only about what I can: I am so completely engrossed in my problem of postmarks, I am so busy with my investigation, however eccentric, of that “particular imprint” (to quote Griboyedov) that distinguishes and marks the life all about me, that I cannot and will not come up with other themes more amusing and compelling to you.
Every morning at nine forty-five, having buttoned myself into my coat, I set forth in quest of Moscow. That’s right: Two years ago a train—I remember it was thirteen hours late—took me only as far as the Bryansk Station; the meaning of Moscow was still a long way off.
So then, every morning I stride from bystreet to bystreet, letting the crossroads break my way where they will as I treasure up Moscow. Striding beside me in the shopwindows, if I half turn my head, is a tall, slightly stooped man, his face obscured by a hat’s black brim. Together, exchanging occasional glances, we go in search of our meanings.
I even find it strange: That first day when, my suitcase tugging at my shoulder, I gazed up from the Dorogomilov Bridge at a heap of buildings under a heap of lights, I could never have imagined that one day that gigantic congeries would straddle my thinking like a hard-to-solve problem.
Other people too, of course, wrestle as best they can with this or that problem; under any frontal bone lives some question to unsettle the mind and torment the “I.” Even so, I envy other people: They can hide their problem inside notebooks, lock it away in a laboratory, contain it in mathematical symbols. They may, at least for a short while, go away from their conundrum, disengage from it, and give their thoughts a rest. But I can never leave my theme: I live inside it. The windows of the buildings I walk past stare with a particular expression; every morning, my eyes barely open, I see the red brick of the house opposite: must be Moscow. And so the thought: Moscow. My problem materialized, crowded round me with a thousand stone boxes, branched out beneath my feet in a thousand crooked and broken streets—and I, odd fellow that I am, exploring my where, walked right into it, like a mouse into a mousetrap.
When I pass first the faded yellow building chased with the symbols CC RCP (B),[1] and half an hour later the crooked belfry of the Church of Nine Martyrs, by the Humpbacked Bridge, I can’t help but make a desperate attempt to find a common denominator. I stride past bookshop windows with their ever-changing covers: Moscow. Past the beggars who block my way with their outstretched palms: Moscow. Past the fresh printer’s ink impressed on white bundles in the blunt black word PRAVDA[2]: Moscow.
Moscow is too well trodden, its cobbles and asphalt have amassed too many footsteps; people just like me have walked, day after day, year after year, century after century, from crossroad to crossroad, around squares, past churches and markets, encircled by walls, immured in thought: Moscow. On top of their footprints lie more footprints and more footprints still; on top of their thoughts, more thoughts and more thoughts still. Too much has been thrown onto this heap encircled by the long line of Kamer-Kollezhsky Val.[3] I, at any rate, measure everything by that hazy yet besetting symbol: Moscow.
The white mansion at 7b Nikitsky Boulevard, turned sullenly sideways to the street noise, tells me more than Shenrok about the soul of one of its former tenants.
To this day newspaper columns harp on that half-dead word “Slavophilism,” but to anyone who sets off of a Sunday between two and four to see Khomyakov’s ramshackle house on Sobachia Square, the corner room, the so-called parloir, will explain everything more clearly and definitively: Against its close-set, windowless walls is a worn leather sofa for five or six people; in the corner is a stand for Turkish tobacco pipes. That’s all. In that dark, close, cramped room, the Slavophiles, sitting knee to knee, talked themselves completely out.
Tram No. 17, which goes all the way to Novodevichiy, will show you far better than some books the name Vladimir Solovyov. The name is written in a crabbed black script on a white crosspiece, between three small icons of different denominations. Look closely at the faded letters on one of them, the lower one, and you will make out only erit . . .[4]
But he will be. Start ransacking this heap, pull at one thread, and out comes the whole huge tangled ball: Moscow. You must be wondering: How did what I call “my problem” thrust itself upon me? How did my wanderings among the meanings of Moscow begin?
Very simply. The quadrature of my room is fifty-four square feet On the small side. You know my old habit—when pondering something or fiddling with an idea—of pacing from corner to corner. Here the corners are too close together. I’ve tried: If I put the desk against the window and the chair on the bed, I free up three paces down, one and a half across. You can’t let yourself go. So instead, when an idea in my head starts pacing and I want to do the same, I lock up my three paces and dash out into the street, down its long crooked lines.
To protect the life hidden between your temples from the life swirling about you, to muse down a street without seeing that street, is impossible. Try as I did to concentrate my images, to shield my thoughts from the jostlings, it was unthinkable. The street always intruded; it shoved under my lowered eyelids, stamped on my eardrums, fumbled my worn-out soles with its cobbles. The only escape from a Moscow street is down a side street, and from a side street into a cul-de-sac. Then it begins all over again. The city, with its clangs, whirrs, and words torn up into letters, beats on your brain, bursts into your head till it has filled it full, right up to the crown, with its flickering scraps and fanfaronade.
There is in me, no doubt, a certain passivity. At first I resisted. Then I stopped: I let the city inside me. As I walked, rapping out the stipple of my steps down the streets’ long lines, I sometimes felt that stipple blend into a line that combined with the line of the streets. Sometimes, standing at a deserted crossroads, I distinctly heard the rumble and thrum of Moscow between my temples. Other times, it was strange: I would be swinging along from bystreet to bystreet and, at the abrupt stop of a thought, would look round and suddenly find myself inside a stone cul-de-sac with small curtained windows and crooked streetlamps down the sidewalks. Yes, I often noticed with a certain joy that the lines of a thought of mine coincided with the lines scoring the city—turn for turn, veer for veer, curve for curve—with the exactitude of a geometrical blueprint.
Little by little I was drawn into this game of my soul with space; in the evening I liked to stroll past a series of streetlamps while glancing back at my shadow. Drawing even with each lamppost, I would slow my step, for I knew that now would come the moment when my shadow would suddenly, soundlessly draw even with me and, strangely twitching, slip ahead. Or else, gaping right and left, I would follow the incremental progression of white numbers on blue: 1—3—5—7 . . .and 2—4—6—8 . . . Well, I must stop. At this rate, even two stamps mayn’t be enough.
I’ve unfolded my map of Moscow. I think now I shall pore over this motley, round-as-a-postmark splotch sprouting new colored shoots: No, it shan’t get away from me. I shall capture it in a steel encirclement.
LETTER TWO
Here’s an odd thing: I had only to drop my first letter in a yellow box, and now, wherever I go, those tin repositories obtrude from most every wall. Their black rectangular mouths gape and wait for more. Wel
l, more they shall have. Moscow, by the way, decants countless piles of words into those boxes every day. At eight in the morning and five in the afternoon, canvas-covered crates of words, stacked one on top of another, judder along on mail carts, then Moscow pounds those words with postmarks and shies them down radiuses: to all—to all—to all. Just as it did my handful. So be it.
My first days in Moscow, I felt myself caught up inside a chaotic whirl of words. An alphabet gone mad swirled about me on playbill pillars, posters, and plates of painted tin; poked out of newsboys’ bundles and grated on my ears with the ends and beginnings of words. Huge letters—black, red, blue—pranced round my eyes or mocked them from the flapping banners spanning streets. I walked along with my pupils first wide, then wearily withdrawn amid the tumult of letters, trying to look past and through, but the brazen letters kept tugging at my eyelids and shoving under my lashes in an endless stream of glints and blots. At night, when I snapped out the light and tried to hide my eyes under my lids, the lettered flotsam fidgeting in my pupils would refuse to sleep and, tumbling out onto the white pillowcase in motley scrawls, would go on fidgeting before my eyes, catching at my lashes and keeping them from closing.
Curiously, my first Moscow nightmares—with buildings collapsing noiselessly on top of me; with my panicked (to the point of mortal lassitude) dashes down tangled streets that all led, again and again, to the same crooked crossroad; with the dull despair of dead and deserted side streets that took me almost to the confluence and din of a large and busy square, only to sheer back into the gloom and hush—all those nightmares, I repeat, were in effect my first sleepy grapplings with Moscow, my first attempts, however absurd and unconscious, at mastery, at synthesis.
Remarkably, the conclusions I drew from my waking hours did not in the main conflict with the black logic of nightmares. At first, even the sunniest, most diurnal reality to enter my “I” left me feeling as one does stepping off a fast-moving merry-go-round and seeing the trees, clouds, pavement, and people still sailing and spinning down a crooked arc. I often entrusted myself to trams A, B, and especially V, which bowled along a long swaying radius (strange coincidence). Signboards rushed by, their letters streaming away; people flickered down slippery sidewalk ribbons to the rattle of cartwheels and horse-drawn cabs; while on desolate outlying squares, past my clangorous letter V racing along the rails’ parallels, swam the rain-faded cylinders of weary and mostly motionless merry-go-rounds. Glancing back at them, I thought: Right here.
I distinctly remember a tattered playbill pillar—somewhere on Khapilovka, or thereabouts—words on top of words: motley layers of filthy paper coming away from the metal and hanging down in absurd strips. I pressed my palms to the half-rotten letters, and that merry-go-round of words, creaking rustily, made a half turn. Sometimes I too, dead tired, eyelids drooping, would walk along without looking at people, only feeling their elbows elbowing mine. Then all I saw were the toes of shoes—some square, some pointed, some polished, some patched. Plodding along the sidewalk, tripping over upturned bricks, those methodical toes tapped with utter indifference and mechanicalness, as if the distance from shoes to eyes was not five or six feet but . . . Jerking my head up, I would see to my amazement not faces and not eyes but the pied slopes of roofs, and between the roofs, powder-blue air—the color of washed chintz—flecked with white cloudy splotches. One day I walked into Phasis,[5] a beerhouse on Neglinnaya (see where the word had wandered!); a waiter brushing a pea pod off a table (“Small bottle?”) gave me such a strange look that for some time I was afraid to look in the mirror. What if under the brim of my hat, in place of my face, there was nothing at all?
Another day, as I was walking across the High Bridge, over the putrid Yauza, I suddenly thought: Ya—uzy.[6] I’d never made associations like that before. And do you know why? Here, in the city, associations tend to be strangely uniform: An association by similarity (especially an inner, essential similarity) is rare and almost unachievable. Here the barbershops all trim mustaches the same way, dress shops all button women into much the same styles, bookshop windows all display the same book covers—all billed as THE LATEST THING! From nine to ten every morning four-fifths of the total number of eyes are hidden behind newssheets identical down to the last misprint. No, here in the city, if you make associations by similarity, you’re bound to confuse everything (the familiar with the unfamiliar, today with yesterday), to grow melancholy, and even to go mad.
The local denizen, Homo urbanus, makes associations by contiguity: The city’s very layout and construction teach the people in it to construct and connect their speech and thoughts that way and only that way. Wherever you look, everything is in a row: a seven-story pile abutting a three-windowed log hut hard by a fantastical L-shaped mansion; ten paces from its columns is an outdoor market; farther on, a polluted pissoir; farther still, the white flight of a belfry’s tent roof, fringed cupolas rising into the blue—and, towering over the tiny church, another enormous edifice gleaming with fresh paint. Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles, of large and small houses crammed from cellar to eaves with utterly unrelated offices, apartments, people living apart, at odds, past one another, yet separated by only thin walls, often plywood that doesn’t even reach the ceiling. In Moscow people and their paraphernalia are close to each other not because they are close but because they are side by side, cheek by jowl, that is to say, in the language of the Jameses and the Bains, “contiguous.” Here in the Moscow vortex, people meet and sometimes become friends not because they are similar but because boulevard benches are not built for just one, while horse-drawn cabs seat two. Of the eight hundred side streets in this city-tangle, there is one at the head of which stands the little white-painted Church of the Nativity at Putinki. It consists of three buildings side by side, shrine by shrine, another shrine, and added on to it an afterthought. After a century’s hesitation, a refectory was suddenly added on to the third shrine.
Association by contiguity built the seventeenth-century village of Izmailovo (the estate near Moscow); it also built Kolomenskoye, the way a bird does its nest, without a plan, by instinct: wooden manor by wooden manor, without any logical connection, according to the principle of elementary contiguity. An ancient “prospective,” made in the eighteenth century by the artist Zubov, supplies the missing pieces from these old tsarist estates while coming as a complete surprise to correct architectural thinking: In re-creating Izmailovo, as well as Kolomenskoye, of which only odd bits remain, the mark of a unifying similarity is absolutely useless. To my mind, all those long-rotted wooden frames, cold rooms, storerooms, quadrangles, and octagons piled one on top of another, sloppily cemented or knocked together from logs and boards, though unable to convey a city’s full weight and scale, as did Western architecture, nevertheless expressed the essence of a city (outwardly always chaotic, connecting what cannot be logically connected on one small quadrature) more enduringly and unequivocally. All those Smirnoys, Petushoks, Potapovs, and Postniks may not have had the necessary material or the proper technique, but they had the right idea about urban planning, they knew the right way to conceive a city.
The two shortest streets in Moscow are Lenivka7 and Petrovskie Linii.8 Lenivka is short—three or four slapdash houses at odd angles—because it’s too lazy to be longer. Petrovskie Linii, straight but curtailed, turned out to be powerless because, despite Peter the Great’s command that streets be built along straight lines, this straight line immediately got muddled in a morass of bystreets, blind alleys, crossings, and windings, and went no more than a hundred paces. The maze of Moscow side streets made short work of the straight line. That same maze—nonsensical, contradictory, taking you to the right only to make you turn left—muddled my thoughts my first weeks in Moscow when, though I’d worn out two pairs of leather soles, I had yet to arrive at this very simple thought: If I couldn’t untangle Moscow’s knots, was that because the knots were too tight or because my fingers were to
o weak? I would have to strengthen my fingers, make them quicker and nimbler. This I set out methodically to do.
LETTER THREE
When I arrived in Moscow, my tightly belted suitcase contained three changes of underwear, Kant’s three Critiques, an odd volume of Solovyov, some bachelor bric-a-brac, and around half a pound of letters of introduction. The letters were tied with twine; once undone, I became “the bearer of this letter” and began my rambles from bell to bell. On the doors by the door handles there was usually a note: for so-and-so, two long rings and one short; for someone else, three short rings period. I rang as instructed, both briefly and at length, carefully counting off applications of finger to bell—always with the same result: The recipients would open the envelope and scan the text, then do the same with me—open and scan. Their looks were both lengthy and brief, usually longer at first, then briefer; their pupils probed me this way and that, once, again, a third time, and squinted meditatively—first at me, then through me, then past.
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