As I listened to the soft click of the Yale lock, I would count the gritty steps of the stairs leading down and cast about for metaphors. I soon tired of the image of the worn-out doorbell. Walking through a market one day, I noticed something better: People jostling among market trays and bins know very well what a bun is, the ordinary bun set out by the urchin selling it, for mistrustful customers who would test the ware. A pile of buns, warm and plump, lies under a canvas blanket. But on top of the canvas there is always one bun for probing; people hurrying past with their briefcases, string bags, and sacks, to work and on errands, snatch up the solitary bun—now for a short sharp squeeze, now for a long pensive knead—then back it goes to shiver alone on top of the canvas; its golden crust, no longer crackly, has sunk down; its warm body has grown cold and pitted from the probing.
I remember that when it came the turn of a letter with the address 14 Zatsepsky Val, I hesitated for some reason. I grabbed my hat. Put it back. Then unfolded my map. Perpendicular to a long string of letters, Z-a-t-s-e-p-a,9 the word Shchipok10 suddenly assaulted my pupils. It looked familiar. I leafed through: first Zabelin—no, not there; then Martynov (Moscow Streets and Side Streets); and finally Snegiryov. Aha, here it was: It turned out that a forebear of Shchipok was the ancient Moscow shchupok, a long rod surmounted with an iron hook the better to poke and prod whole cartloads brought to the gates of Moscow. It must be admitted that in the last few centuries Muscovites have greatly improved upon this sharp-witted instrument; they have made it invisible while increasing and refining its effectiveness.
The history of old Moscow is the history of its enwalling.
By the eighteenth century, when all cities and towns both here and in the West had long since pulled down all their walls, had cast them off like old clothes, Moscow was still encasing its stout round body in walls and ramparts.
As late as the nineteenth century, Moscow still lived behind barricades and chevaux-de-frise, peering with suspicion and half-closed eyes through half-open gates at everything from outside, from the provinces, and only very slowly raised its painted barriers to anyone from beyond its walls.
All this, of course, was in the past: But has it all disappeared into the past?
Every day at Moscow’s six stations more and more trains unload people-imports: People are imported in the green cars, while the red cars contain timber, flour, and long slatted crates of Kiev eggs.
One by one, the eggs are held up to the light and inspected through their fragile shells using special paper cylinders. The people, on the other hand . . .are of no concern to anyone. But even so, first with straight backs, long strides, and loud (from provincial habit) voices, they quickly fade and quiet, as if they too had been probed and peered at: Day by day, their strides become shorter and quieter; their arms hang limp; the imported person soon learns to walk on the shady side of the street, jerking away from intersecting lines of vision, ducking the hooks and probes.
Moscow has managed to reach you, my good friend, only in letters, odd journals, and random books. But don’t those round Moscow postmarks stare up at you like wide-open blue-black eyes? And what about the books? Don’t you feel their lines probing?
Moscow literature is complex, branching, and manifold. Even so, I have long wanted to capture this whole huge and to me irritating paper pile in one succinct image (or formula), without mincing words. But no image has come to mind.
Yet.
LETTER FOUR
I’ve got it: Regardense. An old folk charm to ward off fevers mentions Sisinnius and the thirteen fever sisters. One of them is Regardense.
In Moscow as in Moscow. We have no Helicons and no Parnassuses, only seven hummocks of swamp and mud—the seven ancient hills of Moscow; instead of the songs of cicadas, the bites of malarial mosquitoes; instead of the nine Muses, the thirteen fever sisters.
The Muses teach an evenly pulsating verse clad in meter and rhythm; the fever sisters know how to disrupt and discombobulate a line—with them it is always feverish and nervously dropping letters. Incantations cannot vanquish the sisters. They are alive. And close at hand: here. Encounters with them are dangerous. With Regardense most of all. Regardense can only stare, and teaches one only to stare. People’s eye sockets are not empty, but the eyes in those sockets are now empty, now full; now seeing, now unseeing; now ripping up rays of light, now letting them knit back together; people now close their eyelids to dream, now open them to reality. Regardense’s eyes are naked: The lids have been torn away.
For others, dawns fade and flare; the sky is now blue, now stippled with stars; things now recede into the darkness, now reemerge beneath the sun’s scourge. But for Regardense there is no rest, no sleep, no night; sight is ceaselessly, incessantly, eternally hers. Those who feel ashamed lower their eyelids: Regardense has nothing to lower.
That is why many call her shameless. And it’s true, this fever sister is not overly shamefaced: With her even, unblinking gaze she stares—both up at the glimmers of blue sky and down into the holes of privies; at what is shameful and what is pure; at the vile and the holy. But Regardense is pure because she knows the great torment of sight; the sun lashes her naked eyes with its rays, glint upon glint, image upon image, without cracks or stops, yet Regardense does not ask to be shielded from the sun; she bears her terrible burden of sight without complaint. If in wandering the city streets at night she does not shun Moscow of the Taverns, that is not because in the taverns of that Moscow people drink and love for money but because there they do not sleep—they know how to keep her covenant of sleeplessness.
The Imaginists have been overly forgotten, yet they were the first to sustain Regardense’s gaze. Today this school lives cooped up in its cramped Hotel, but during the years of revolution these theoreticians of Regardense managed to grab almost all the bookshop windows and even bookstalls in Moscow. The Imaginists’ sight is lidless; images plaster their eyes, caulk the cracks in their pupils. Their theory of the “free image” frees only the image, which may do what it likes with the defenseless eye.
The old formula “Homer nods” signifies that images, like people, now open their eyes, now close them; between the images are visual caesuras; the sun now extends its rays, now draws them in; colors now nod, now wake; lines now run, now stop.
The new formula “the image is free” means: down with visual pauses; out with desiccated colors; let the sun be always at its zenith—and eyes without their lids. The Imaginist principle is alive in all the Moscow schools; it drives the images in the strophes and phrases of all the local poets and writers.
To explain Moscow poetics, the “one-eyed” or even “two-eyed” vigilance of which Lezhnev wrote will not suffice: The idea of a lidless vigilance is essential.
Mayakovsky pretends that his eyelids are in place, that he stares at everything wide-eyed (a habit from his Presnya days) because he wants to; but in his poems on placards, in his verses strung across streets, pelting the eyes of passersby and refusing to hide inside bindings, one senses a sort of revenge. Take that, they seem to say, go on and suffer, at least a little, you too. I cannot not see—so I won’t let you not see.
As for Aleksei Tolstoy, it’s very simple: I refer you to Chukovsky, a resident of Petersburg who, from that distance, sees things more clearly. “Aleksei Tolstoy only sees,” writes Chukovsky, “but he does not think.”
Mr. Williams Hardisle, a stockholder in Trust D.E., wipes millions of people off the face of Europe lest they prevent him from seeing it. I don’t know if Ehrenburg has anything in common with Mr. Hardisle, but under his heap of images, containing most of old Europe, one finds barely two or three “because’s” and not a single “why.”
Pilnyak’s novels, which even he has called only “material,” are a storage room cram-full of bright stage sets among which is rummaging—alas!—a common stagehand. Pasternak journeys in vain from Moscow to Marburg for Unsichtbar (“the unseen”), in short, for a German-made pair of eyelids that fasten shut—a poor fit for
Moscow.
Moscow is too diverse, too vast, and its images too striking for someone living in it without eyelids to shield even a tiny pocket inside his skull, even one convolution of his brain from the welter of images flooding it. Hence the terrible crush inside Moscow minds; everything, as in a backstage storage, is buried under painted backdrops, even the artist can scarcely breathe; images on top of images, more images on top of them; there’s no room for ideas: They are conceived somehow sideways, sandwiched in amongst the sunny scenery. There’s nowhere to run from one’s eyes. Only as far as the eye can see.
Regardense visits not only poets; she has a permanent pass to the Kremlin. It is she who told Tikhonov that “the men in the Kremlin never sleep.” The lidless fever sister wanders beside the night-wreathed Kremlin walls like an image of eternal watchfulness; she calls to the sleepless sentinels and stares in the ever-blazing windows of the Kremlin palace.
Regardense “did the Revolution a great service.” If Macbeth, in killing the king, “does murder sleep,” then a revolution must do away with sleep before it can lay hands on the king. A mass revolt is a collective awakening; as sleep may be deep, so an awakening may be deep, a total and prolonged connection to reality, a honing of nervous systems when life becomes a tense and total sleeplessness.
Men of the revolution never sleep; even in sleep their agitated brain—enmeshed in the hum of telephone wires, in the ceaseless vibrations of nerve fibers, saturated and shot through with watchfulness—never lets their eyelids close completely; it lives and thinks as if they didn’t exist.
Only by liquidating night, by banishing those barren black inserts of sleep, by fusing day with day and turning life into one long October multiplied many times over, did the Revolution manage to do what it did. Regardense’s service must not be belittled.
And if a man with blinking eyes cannot understand those whose eyelids have been torn away, so much the worse for him: Let him use his eyelids so as to lower them.
Six months or so ago, a Leningrad, no, a Petersburg man of letters came to Moscow; he brought with him—from the city of ideas to the city of images—a manuscript. When, surrounded by Muscovites, he began to read this manuscript, it seemed to us (actually, “us” is the wrong word here: I’m an import, not a Muscovite) that it was crawling with faded and formless blots; one’s eyes could not capture it. When the reading ended, an argument began: The Muscovites maintained that the Petersburger saw nothing, the Petersburger that the Muscovites understood nothing. On which note we parted.
The hour was late. Ringing at the front entrance for the fortieth minute I thought, or no, rather I saw in my mind’s eye first a line from a fairly well-known narrative poem, then a line from the ancient Moscow Synopsis, to you, I suspect, fairly unknown:
Upon a shore of desolate waves
Stood he, with lofty musings grave
And:
And Vasily the Greek said to the prince: “I had a vision: on this place a great and ancient city shall be built . . .and it shall be called Moscow.”
LETTER FIVE
Monroe mentions Hanlin Yuan. In Chinese this means “Forest of Pencils.” This was the name given, I don’t remember when, to a tiny settlement of ten or twenty bamboo roofs inhabited, at the government’s behest, by the best writers, poets, and scholars of the Middle Kingdom.
The “Chinese tea tree” popular in Moscow is delivered—alas!—ground up, inside tea chests and postal wrappers. But we do have our own “forest of pencils.”
At first, a century ago, it was a sparse little plantation, a modest grove of ten or twenty lacquered pencils whose tops were still dull. But the shoots formed up and grew stronger. Graphite began to poke out of their flat tops and turn sharp. The little pencils became full-grown pencils. Inside its walls, Moscow established its own literature.
Gradually it became the custom to drive out to Sokolniki on Sundays in the late afternoon for leisurely cultural strolls in the “forest of pencils.” But as it grew up, multiplying its lacquered, round and hexahedral, red and yellow trunks, the forest seized more and more paper space, more and more swathes of time. So that today one doesn’t know what the native Muscovite is more proud of: the Sokolniki forest or the “forest of pencils.” Moscow’s literature is indeed a pencil literature, not from a pen but from fragile graphite. In the West, and also in Petersburg, they write with pens; here—no.
A pen is flexible, yet firm, correct, exact; a lover of loops and flourishes, it is given to musing on its way to the inkwell or back to the line. A pencil writes without pause, without respite; it is nervous, sloppy, and fond of first drafts: It rustles and scrawls, rustles and scrawls, then in mid-phrase—cra-a-ack!—it breaks.
A certain fastidious foreigner who visited Moscow in the 1820s later complained: “In Moscow I discovered a fifth element: mud.” The Moscow eye has mastered the four elements: A disciple of Regardense, it sees the whole horizon, takes everything in, from stars to dust motes; the world in this eye stratifies like earth, flows like water, vanishes like air, and incinerates like fire. But on top of the four elements there is a “fifth”—as the foreigner rightly said—that has covered everything with a dingy gray film, a turbid graphite dust. Muscovites see clearly but write muddily; the eye grasps but the fingers splay.
I have in my pencil box almost all of pencil Moscow. I slide open the lid. Tumble the contents out onto my desk. There: A thick, ribbed, two-color pencil, it has the same rights as a pen, but . . .and both colors write: the blue this way, the red that; a fragile but sharp piece of graphite with a metal cap to protect it; a round indelible pencil slippery with shellac, it has the same rights as a pen, but . . .; a packet of as-yet-unsharpened pencil striplings; and several stubby pencil ends completely worn down by paper.
I think that’s all. But that’s enough. I’m putting my literature back, under its lid. All the best to you, my faraway friend.
LETTER SIX
A century ago in the middle of crooked-cornered, many-angled Arbat Square there stood a large wooden theater. Under its round dome suspended over a white colonnade, throngs of Moscow theatergoers gathered every evening to debate who was the better actress: Mademoiselle Georges or the young Semyonova.
The theater has long since burned down, the debaters have long since gone in well-sprung hearses to their graves, and the place where the stage once stood is paved with flat stones over which, as though finishing some long and tedious crowd scene, people keep rushing and rushing—while one strangely lingering spectator still refuses to leave his bronze seat in the front row. His eyelids are lowered; if you were to drop imaginary plumb lines down from them, the bobs would bump against the corners of sharp feet planted on a square pedestal. In winter the snow lies lovingly, like a clean sheet of paper, on the spectator’s lap. But now the heat of July is here—the white manuscript melted long ago—and on the giant’s bronze knees sparrows scuffle and chirp.
When the summer languor sets in, even I tire of whirling along the boulevards and searing my soles on the molten asphalt. To stride about Moscow now means forcing oneself through the leaden air with its dust-choked pores; stepping over the chalk-drawn squares inside which earnest children play; walking past the scales awaiting citizens who (as the sign says) “respect their health” and past hawkers’ dirty trays of rotten dried peaches.
I do not disturb the children at their childish games in the middle of the sidewalk (nor should they disturb me), I detest dried peaches, my health I “do not respect”—and so, having gone only a block or two, I sit down on a bench opposite the bronze man and, stretching out my legs, learn from his downcast gaze not to look. Sometimes, eyes shut tight, I raise my face to the zenith rays (the Crimea is beyond my means, and explaining to friends why I’m not tan long and tedious); other times, armed with a bundle of new books, I hide my eyes inside their covers. In the last month I have leafed through thousands of pages, and a strange feeling comes over me whenever I try to discover and explain to myself the point of this fresh t
ypographical heap.
The “ideologies,” so to speak, of all these socially minded novelists (90 percent of all novelists today) have lost their way, like some bumpkin, in a forest of three pencils; their themes begin not from the beginning but from the workbench, which they know about from Granat’s Encyclopedia.
All these pretentious colored covers work like this: They take emptiness and clothe it, at least in a leather jacket, but when they’ve buttoned up all the emptiness’s buttons, they don’t know what to do next. Even the most talented, most fluent of fiction writers always makes the Chekist fall in love with the White Guard girl, the White officer with the female revolutionary, and so on and so forth till the eyes glaze. I repeat: Their pencils are sharp, their eyes keen; everyday life has been placed under the strictest writerly surveillance, caught in the beams and not so much recorded as arrested, crammed into lines by main force.
However, all of this is by nature so complex, so ramified, and so resistant to exact analysis that I might have gone on with my readerly experiments if not for one extremely simple and clear scene, which yesterday put an abrupt end to my reading. Possibly for a long time.
It was late afternoon. I was sitting behind Gogol’s bronze back on one of the first benches along Prechistensky Boulevard. Having finished a slim white volume of Arosev, I looked up: Opposite me, a little girl was playing in the sand. Beside her, black and branching, lay the shadow of a tree. Crawling about on plump knees, she was trying—not with a pencil, no, with a stubby wooden stick—to trace the black blot-like shadow. But toward evening a shadow creeps quickly, and she could never manage to trace it from end to end before it had crept on, past the outline painstakingly etched in the sand. Her nurse kept pulling her by the hand, saying it was time to go. But the little girl and, I confess, I too had both become so engrossed—she in catching shadows, I in my observerly, almost readerly pastime—that when the child and her nurse did finally go, I even felt some dismay.
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