Oh, now I understood the little white book in my palms: It, and really all of them, can only try to trace moving shadows. But shadows shorn of things—everyday life (byt) shorn of existence (bytiye)—are powerless and illusory. Then again, if things must be shorn of their shadows, bytiye of byt, one mustn’t stop halfway; one must take byt and lop off that obtuse “t”: by (“as if”) is pure subjunctivity, a fusion of the free phantasms beloved by Alexander Grin. This is the first way out of the world of shadows to the world of fanciful romanticism; bytiye (“existence”)—of which one syllable, one ingredient, is byt (“everyday life”)—is the second way out of the “dwelling place of shadows”: It is known, I think, only to Andrei Bely.
Well, please forgive this perhaps incomprehensible algebra. I must stop. My fifty-six square feet have become insufferably hot. Stifling. I would go somewhere. But there’s nowhere. And no one.
LETTER SEVEN
At the moment I’m very busy looking for Moscow on library shelves. I couldn’t have done without the mysterious drawer of the extremely kind and learned Pyotr Nikolaevich Miller; this drawer is stuffed with little square cards: No matter which one you pull out, it is marked “Moscow.” This is my third week sitting in the airy reading room on the top floor of the History Museum flicking the dust off old books about Moscow. You may ask: What did I find under the dust? Ashes.
Yes, on forty layers of ashes we all abide, over forty layers of ashes we walk and ride.
I haven’t finished my work, but I can already assert that Moscow was tricked out in brick and stone by the kopeck candle. With a relentlessness by no means trifling, this candle set fire to Moscow again and again and year after year until the city hid from it inside stone. The story of those incinerating kopecks, of those pitiful gutterers that consumed all the work piled up by hundreds of thousands of people, may be told in dry numbers. Old official records, more ancient chronicles, later memoirs, and, finally, more recent police reports provide not complete but fairly reliable statistics. Here is a small handful of those numbers: the All Saints Fire in 1365; one before it in 1354; in 1451 the Kremlin and the adjacent trading quarter were burned almost to the ground by the Tatars; a string of fires in 1472, 1475, 1481, 1486; in the late sixteenth century Moscow burned from 1572 to 1591; and again in the seventeenth century, in 1626, 1629, 1648, 1668; and yet again in 1701, 1709, 1737, 1748, 1754, and so on and so forth. I mention only the “citywide” fires that wiped out one-quarter, one-third, even one-half of all residential and nonresidential buildings. These fires were given special names: All Saints, Great Trinity, Small Trinity, etc. Through the centuries, without respite, the kopeck candle did its work: A fire would begin to smolder in some small chapel, by an icon stand, then creep down passages, up into rafters, from shed to shed, hurling firebrands from roof to roof; its flaming tongues would leap over the Kremlin’s stone walls, slither up to the tent roofs of towers and belfries, and send bells crashing down amid the growing clamor of crowds and tocsins. And then cooling ashes and another ant-like building frenzy for five or six years. Because in five or six years the kopeck candle would again set to work.
The candle forced streets, crossroads, districts, and squares to be named in its honor: Fire (the old name for Red Square), Scorched Ruins (as Kitai-Gorod was sometimes called in the seventeenth century), Burnt Swamp (where the Petrovsky Monastery now stands), Fiery Lane (now lost among new street names), Sear Street, and so forth. The candle expresses itself, as you can see, with a certain sameness.
Everything burned: in 1571, the Palace of the Oprichnina; in 1845, the manuscript of Dead Souls. Past residents of Moscow were professional pogoreltsy[11]: They lived from fire to fire; they built to please not so much themselves as the kopeck candle. Both the construction of their rough-and-ready houses and the way of life inside them were calculated not so that one might live in those houses but so that they might burn freely and completely, so that they and the things in them might at any moment, without resistance, turn to ashes. In the sixteenth century, residents of Moscow’s trading quarter called these slapdash structures just that: a hasty-house (skorodom) or a hasty-thought (skorodum). There was no point laboring over architectural forms, no point reinforcing walls or digging deep foundations; the kopeck candle would still have the last word. “Almost every year,” wrote the visiting foreigner Johann Georg Korb (1698), “the Muscovites’ most important festivals are accompanied by fires that cause people much misery. These fires almost always happen at night, sometimes reducing several hundred wooden houses to ashes. During the last fire, which destroyed six hundred houses this side of the Neglinnaya River, several Germans came running to help douse the flames, but instead were beaten and then thrown into the blaze” (p. 57). Later on, Pyotr Sheremetev, who liked to amuse guests at his estate near Moscow with exquisite “painted fires” scattered about the gardens, was considered, not without reason, a keeper of Moscow traditions. Even when Moscow had begun to change out of its wooden clothes and into ones of stone, Catherine the Great wrote to Voltaire: “Nowhere in Europe do they build with such precipitancy as in Russia” (meaning Moscow; Part II. M., 1803, p. 26). But sometimes it happened this way: Hasty-houses were built on the ashes; in those hasty-houses, thinking in haste, dreading fresh disasters and dislocations, anxious people lived on top of one another; but, for some reason, the kopeck candle delayed—a fire was expected, yet none came. The little houses, built quickly to last five or six years, began to sag and crack; slouching sideways, they waited impatiently for a fire but still none came, so that life’s routine was upset, perplexed, and at a loss.
But so it happened.
Now, instead of crooked log huts with plain deal roofs pulled low over their eyes, there are straight-backed, five- and six-story stone boxes; instead of cramped wooden nests, vast ceilings and vaults supported by columns. That’s from the outside. But inside you find the same cramped, constricted, wooden Moscow; inside you find the same panicked life, the same hasty thinking and nervous need to move. The old wooden Moscow is alive, but hiding behind stone façades, behind a sham monumentalism and inviolability. Look closely at buildings of the late seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, and you will see stone blocks interlocking like logs: By architectural design they are wooden, while their stone ornamentation recalls the ancient wooden fretwork. Inside, behind the thick brick walls and large square windows, life went on as before—from fire to fire, revolution to revolution, catastrophe to catastrophe.
All people, houses, pursuits, and ideas, once they have begun to live, want and need to expend themselves to the end, but the kopeck candle objected: It wanted more and more, it kept rushing to rebuild Moscow on top of Moscow. That is why no one and nothing here, no idea and no person has ever managed to expend themself to the end. The kopeck candle alone burned down to the end.
But whatever dies unspent, before its time, will not be still even in death. Hence the fundamental paradox of Moscow: What is dead is not entirely dead, what is alive is not fully alive, because how can anyone live among myriads of deaths, among such uncorpse-like corpses, which, though fast asleep, keep tossing under their blankets of sod. Moscow is the old folktale about the water of life and death, but told by a taleteller who has got it all backward: The living are sprinkled with the water of death, the dead with the water of life, and no one can tell who’s alive, who’s dead, and who should bury whom.
A preconception exists: Moscow is conservative. Nonsense. Today even the ancient brass tinged with green is singing that hymn to the future, “The Internationale.” Yes, there were things, then there were ashes, then even they grew cold. Now almost all that remains of that past life, which existed only yesterday, are the old dogs that still go barking through the courtyards, as they were once taught, barking at anyone in shabby clothes: They alone cannot grasp what has happened.
LETTER EIGHT
Yes, my friend, drill and magnetic needle attest: Moscow sits on a void. There are houses, and under the houses soil, and und
er the soil subsoil, and under the subsoil a gigantic earthen bubble, a round void the size of three Moscows.
A week ago a slanting rain was propelling me along a broken line of bystreets, from Nikitskaya to Tverskaya. I walked and I thought: Now there, in that mansion behind the acacias, Stankevich lay thinking and dying, and there, at that crossroad, piemen used to sell those then traditional “puffs of naught.”
And suddenly I clearly sensed it: stuck to the soles of my shoes, the enormous blistering bubble, the round void brazenly ballooning under us. One wrong step, one wrong thought—and . . . No. That’s bunk. I looked back: Rain was lashing the slick walls. In the puddles, under the ripples from staccato raindrops, Moscow’s upturned roofs were stirring. A man with his face under a waterproof hood passed quickly by, bumping me with the briefcase bulging out from under his mackintosh.
I turned round and went home. There, with my eyes shut tight and my head in my palms, I again returned to my fantastical Land of Nots.
You and I have often argued about whether this land of the non-existent exists. After all, every today is a bit vulgar; all Ises are puffed up and swellheaded. The soap bubble that doubts Plato’s proofs of its immortality isn’t likely to believe that the iridescence shimmering on its surface won’t burst with it.
The soap bubble, however, is wrong: If you blow on it, the reflections will die, but the things reflected in its glassy camber will go on being as they were.
What’s more, the eye that delights in the play of reflections will be forced, when those reflections disappear, to look for those things not in the bubble but in the things themselves.
Remember that Atropos’s shears do not measure out the thread, they merely cut it; for a poet, for instance, the name, the appellation of a thing—that is the thing, that real material, every sound and half sound in which is for him bethinged; whereas the actual “things” are for him just glints on a bubble, and only when those thing-glints disappear, fall away from life, do the things’ names begin to long for their things—and make pilgrimages to the Land of Nots. Yes, in order to begin to exist in lines and strophes, things must cease to exist in time and space: Names speak only of those things that no longer exist.
The Land of Nots has been calling to me for a long time. I haven’t resisted its charm. I have tried to leave the Nots for the Ises, but now I can’t: The old ashes warm me. And I am chilled to the bone.
Yesterday I happened to read Bely’s “Arbat”; in it he talks about the recent past, about what existed only a moment ago; but when I, with the images of his “Arbat” still fresh in my mind, stepped out onto the real Arbat, I right away saw that to find even a faint impression of what had finished existing would be next to impossible. I felt rather annoyed. In the end, the stone of those Ises is no harder than wax; thirty years go by, and everything has been remolded anew.
Words are stronger. Here’s just one example: On Maroseika Street, now wedged between tall buildings, is the little Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker. A very old church: Once upon a time, when it was surrounded not by brick buildings but by maple trees, it was called Nikola v Klennikakh (Nikola in the Maples); then they cut down all the maples (1504) and built armories for the manufacture of sword blades, and the church became known as Nikola v Klinnikakh (Nikola in the Blades); and finally, when in place of the ruined armories they built a pancake house, Nikola fiddled with the letters and began calling himself Nikola v Blinnikakh (Nikola in the Pancakes). Thus the name, its letters in lockstep, carried its root through five centuries without relinquishing the rhythm (klenniki, klinniki, blinniki) and changing its sound only around the edges.
How I love those tent-roofed belfries and little wooden churches on the city outskirts, like the one at Solomennaya Storozhka, or the affecting architecture of Praises to the Virgin at Bashmachki: They are all at some distance, removed from life, already nonexistent, yet still reaching with their carved tent roofs for the emptiness in the sky. They know how not to exist in a more lasting way than everything crowding in around them knows how “to exist.”
My favorite is the steep-roofed Krutitsky Tower. Not an easy place to find. Near Kamer-Kollezhsky Val, in among a tangle of Kamenshchiki Streets (Great and Small) and several Krutitsky Lanes, at the top of a narrow cul-de-sac, fragile, faced with the faded designs of Dutch tiles under old cracked glazes, the tower floats above the double arc of a gateway. To the left, along a high wall, white pouter-like balusters support the roof of a gallery that once connected Krutitsky Tower to the five-domed Church of the Assumption.
I will never tire of wandering among the crosses and headstones of Donskoi, Danilovsky, and Lazarevsky cemeteries, deciphering old words gauzy with mold. On the dozens of acres at Kuskovo (an estate near Moscow) what touches me most is an old marble pedestal (on the drive, to the left of the house) inscribed: VENUS. On the pedestal there is no Venus—the statue must have been smashed long ago—only a single marble foot and the delicate outline of her toes. That is all there is, but I, as I recall, stood for a long time contemplating what there was not.
With each passing day the Land of Nots expands; the timid peals of church bells, mingling now and then with the city’s clanks and rumbles, remind us of what is most nonexistent in this country of nonexistences: I mean God. Walking past churches, I sometimes see a man glance furtively about, then timidly tip his cap and allow his hand to dart from his forehead to his chest then shoulders: Thus do we greet our poor relations.
No. 29 Tverskaya Street, where Dolidze now lives, was once home to Karamzin. He invented “Poor Liza,” and tram No. 28 will take anyone who cares to the Lizino freight station, a few hundred paces shy of Liza’s Pond: It was there—remember?—that she perished.
I boarded tram No. 28 and soon found myself standing by a stinking pool sunk like a round black blot inside its crooked banks: Liza’s Pond. Five or six squat wooden houses, with their backsides to the pond, throw their slops straight into it, filling it with foulness. I turned right around and walked off: No-no, I must get back to the Land of Nots.
LETTER NINE
Dear friend, I wanted to write yesterday—but couldn’t. Even now I can’t summon the words. I knew that Moscow takes hold of one, but that it should hook even me, that, I admit, I had not foreseen.
It all happened yesterday, all at once—between two and three in the afternoon. Many times before, on coming to Ipatyevsky Lane, I had turned down it so as to admire the old (seventeenth century) Church of the Georgian Mother of God at Nikitniki: the high, well-proportioned tent-roof with gimlet-eyed, stone-fringed “dormers”; the dwarfish little porch of fairy-tale fretwork; the bold turn of the quadrangle; and the walls’ whimsical stone ornamentation. But whenever I went by the church—it was always locked. And the steps were deserted—not a soul. I had long wanted to go inside since I knew that there I would find works by Moscow’s last icon painter, Simon Ushakov: The Annunciation with Acathistus (1659) and The Mother of God by the Tree (1668).
Having discovered the hour when the custodian shows the church, I rushed off to Ipatyevsky Lane so as to be there by three. But when I reached Tverskaya, my way was blocked. I had forgotten (I rarely read the papers) that this was the day and hour set for one of those political parades that have become so frequent in Moscow.
An endless stream of people, marching shoulder to shoulder to the strains of competing orchestras, had severed my route. I would have to wait.
To be honest, I felt rather annoyed. I had come across these Moscow marches before, of course, and I knew it would take time. I pulled out my pocket watch; the minute hand crept from division to division, and I would be late. But it couldn’t be helped. Time was passing, and the crowds were swelling. I glanced first over the tops of heads (I dislike crowds, and the tramp of hundreds and thousands of feet was beginning to irritate me), but above the crowds was another, oddly bright yet uniform life. Hundreds and thousands of letters, formed up on banners, were marching in gold ranks straight at me. You remember I once wro
te you about the alphabet gone mad, about the chaos of letters thronging Moscow walls and playbill pillars. This was something entirely different: A sort of extremely regular, rhythmic swash of letters, a solemn procession of typographical symbols that, conscious of the power hidden in them, kept marching and marching over the crowd, like an army over an army.
I lowered my gaze; only now did I see the faces: There were both old men and raw youths, but strangely, though their ages varied, their eyes all shone with the same young—no, not even—the same callow world. My ears were pounding, I couldn’t make out the words, and I mostly didn’t read the gold-on-red slogans, but the main thing I understood. Yes, I did.
Meanwhile the ranks were thinning, the last orchestra of six trumpets and one drum screamed something in its brass language—and the way was clear.
I continued mechanically on to Ipatyevsky Lane. But when the old caretaker, keys jangling, opened the Church of the Mother of God for me and the gold and ocher faces swam up out of the semidarkness, I suddenly saw that I no longer needed any of this. Thrusting a coin into the man’s stiff fingers, I went quickly down the steps. Behind me, a heavy padlock clonked shut.
Yes, that’s over.
LETTER TEN
At first, crosses were for crucifying: They say that among the crucified an occasional god turned up. Later on, the blood on their crosspieces gilded, crosses were hoisted up onto the tops of domes. To see them there, people had to raise their heads. At first they raised them, then they stopped: no time. Everyone knew those metal plus signs could not put anything together; they could not unite disparate lives into a single life. Love remained as disorganized and amateurish as ever.
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