Autobiography of a Corpse

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  Soon people, even those with a little cross tucked inside their shirtfront, learned to live near the cross, yet past it.

  And only when a person had been placed in the earth, and his name inside a black box in the newspaper, did his name remeet the cross. Now, however, it was called not a cross (old typesetters will know this) but a “dead sign.” The dead sign spent its last prerevolutionary years cooped up in the square compartment of a type case and, as if ashamed of itself, hid its tiny black crosspiece inside the palms of parentheses. Thus: (†). But then the parentheses closed ranks and the compartment in the type case’s middle row was left empty: The “dead sign” had died.

  Hanging over Moscow even now is a strange aerial cemetery: two thousand dead signs, their crosspieces sullenly crossed over a city that lives either past them or away from them.

  Kitai-Gorod has a number of extremely strange churches, such as Nikola Big Cross or, again, the Georgian Mother of God. These churches were built in two tiers: Above, in the shape of an enormous stone hat, is the actual church; below is an ordinary trader’s vault. The builder needed a strong and secure storehouse for his goods, and, so as to protect them “from evil” (as noted in late-seventeenth- century acts), he covered them with a church. His presumption: The God-fearing thief would not steal from the God-fearing builder of a storehouse-church. Thus that, the heavenly, was made to accommodate this, the worldly.

  Which brings us, my friend, to a very curious problem: Our mind groups the things before it into those and these, into things excluded from the sense organs and things included in perception; these are the immanent things in life, those the transcendent; these are the clear, lived-in foreground; those are the hazy, inaccessible distance.

  Classify people’s minds and you will find that they work, depending on their stripe, in opposite directions. Some minds strive to move things from those to these; others from these to those. If I call people who seek to turn that into this that-into-thisers, and those who wish to change this into that this-into-thaters, then that will take care of the nomenclature.

  Now about Moscow: Moscow has always been concerned with this, with what is inside its walls; it has built only this and kept it from evil by covering it with that; it has always written and always writes “about this.” The most Muscovian of Moscow writers, Alexander Ostrovsky, while living in Zamoskvorechye, prided himself on having discovered a new country—Zamoskvorechye.

  All Muscovites are born that-into-thisers. The Tolstoyans, invented at No. 21 Khamovnichesky Lane, were also not this-into-thaters.

  The styluses and pens of all Plutarchs usually favored this-into-thaters, heroes who had the power to exchange the accessible “this” for the inaccessible “that.”

  But if someone wanted to write a biography of the most consistent that-into-thiser, he would have to begin by visiting Semyonovskoye Cemetery; near the main path one may find a grave whose hunched black headstone is inscribed with these words:

  Take wholesome food

  And exercise in the fresh air.

  In times of repose, that is at night,

  Sleep with the window wide.

  Stop physicking yourself.

  Fall into Nature’s arms

  And

  Be well.

  I respect everything that is whole: Standing by the hunched black headstone, I took off my hat.

  LETTER ELEVEN

  No wonder the tsar’s confessor, the old Moscow priest Sylvester, said that “one must live providently.” Moscow devoutly obeys this precept: Inside its stone shell, it has everything it needs; its orbi12 is only urbi13; even general theories, like those of idealism and materialism, became Moscowized inside the Moscow shell, turning from those into these.

  People have written, for instance, about the “school of Moscow idealism.” What interests me now, however, is not the building on Mokhovaya Street but the ancient Kremlin and its trading quarter; not latter-day philosophical theories touched with Germanism but primitive idealisms and materialisms from the time of Kalita and Saint Sergius, Ivan IV and Basil the Blessed.

  In the elliptical embrace of the Kremlin/Kitai-Gorod wall, the whole cramped space of this proto-Moscow was originally divided by the Kremlin’s eastern wall into two half cities: the Kremlin and its trading quarter, Kitai-Gorod. In the Kremlin, they built churches and barracks; in Kitai-Gorod, shops and warehouses. In the Kremlin, soldiers met with priests; in Kitai-Gorod, merchants with buyers.

  The idea of immortality is, I maintain, indispensable to the soldier. It is easy to sacrifice this life only in exchange for that. True, to the subtle and sophisticated mind, the idea of fighting for one’s own cause, a cause which will outlive those who perish for it, may replace the idea of personal immortality. But for a landsknecht, a professional seller of his life, or for a Moscow strelets, bound to die for someone else’s cause, that wasn’t enough.

  This is why, hard by a barracks, wall abutting wall, a church would be built; this is why the prerevolutionary Russian soldier received seventy-five kopecks plus guaranteed immortality.

  No wonder imperialism, organized soldiering, requires an idealistic ideology. This explains the emergence (I’m giving you just a rough outline) of a distinct Kremlin idealism.

  But right next to it, just over the wall, over the centuries, there grew up a distinct Kitai-Gorod materialism: If the soldier firmly believed in his indestructibleness, in his immortality, which, having arisen as an idea, entrained the whole idealist triad (immortality of the soul, free will, God), then the merchant believed as firmly in things, in those purely material premises that determine a merchant’s worth. According to the accounts of foreigners—Olearius, Herberstein, and Korb—the owners of Kitai-Gorod’s six or seven hundred miserable little shops were born merchants and middlemen; they were “thing people” so adept at touting and selling this or that thing that even the best foreign traders were hard put to compete. Kitai-Gorod’s enormous, thick-walled storehouses were built not for “mental phenomena,” “shadows,” and the “spirit’s otherness” (thus do idealists define matter) but for the most genuine matter broken down into things. No one shuts “mental phenomena” away under heavy double-lock padlocks.

  To me it’s clear: Kitai-Gorod’s shop counters were the first rostrums for a materialism specific to Kitai-Gorod.

  LETTER TWELVE

  (postcard)

  This letter will be my last. I had only to rouse my words, and now they are tormenting me. A month or so ago I noticed that my theme was feeling cramped in envelopes: It kept proliferating under my pen, like Moscow, expanding and throwing out new shoots.

  I’ve had to resort to thick notebooks: I’ve already filled two. This work is taking almost all my time and, more important, all my will.

  So then—let’s stop. Don’t be angry: You know I’ve always been this way.

  LETTER THIRTEEN

  My friend, what a surprise you gave me! I was working at my desk when, out of the blue, I had a letter: your handwriting, your signature, but otherwise so strangely unlike you. You calmly informed me that you had typed up all twelve of my letters and readdressed them to an editorial office in Moscow. I was utterly indignant: you, and suddenly this.

  I would have to hurry. Without wasting a minute, I raced off to the editorial office to retrieve my letters. I must have been extremely upset because, as I was rushing along the boulevard, my heart started to pound so hard (I have a murmur) I had to sit down on a bench.

  Calm people were walking calmly by. Little children were digging busily in the frigid autumn sand. My agitation subsided. My thoughts took a different tack. I put my trust in them.

  First my thoughts said: What, in essence, have you lost? Just some scraps of paper. What matters most is in your notebooks.

  Besides, people who edit other people’s thoughts have their own particular probes; they’ll never find their Moscow in your fragmented lines, they won’t bother about the imported thoughts of an imported person: They’ll pass over them, li
ke the others.

  But now my thoughts added: Then again you’re thirty-seven, almost an old man. You could, if you want, go on living as you always have, in silence, with your teeth clenched. You could. Only remember, soon you’ll have nothing left to clench.

  Then my thoughts went away, and I was left alone on the cold autumn boulevard. The dusk was deepening. I sat for a long time like that.

  Again they broke in: It’s time, high time you became a Muscovite, at least in part. Here everyone’s words are wide open. So go ahead. Or are you afraid of Regardense’s eyes?

  I got to my feet and trudged off; not after the letters, no, away from them, home.

  Now I’m writing to you.

  Pratica14: Since you started this adventure with your letters (or mine—I can’t tell anymore), you finish it. I ask only this: Remove the dates and my name.

  Well, perhaps it’s all for the best; words, once they’ve broken away from your pen, might as well go, like orphan urchins, where they will—they have their own fate. And if those words could reach Moscow from Moscow only after making a thousand-mile loop, then that too is not without its meaning: We—both they and I—are imports, provincials.

  Here’s something else I’ve just remembered: Professor Yurkevich, a longtime Muscovite, was wandering through a maze of bystreets with Solovyov, then a lecturer in philosophy. The old professor rapped an edifying spur stone with his knotty cane and said, “My young friend, don’t believe Kant when he says that a stick is a thing-in-itself; no, a stick is a thing-for-others.”

  Well, perhaps he’s right. I wonder if tomorrow I shouldn’t lug my Kant to Sukharevka. What do you think, will someone buy it?

  The recipient of the above letters, living far from Moscow, asked me to take it upon myself to find them a publisher.

  Having apprised my correspondent of the address of the editorial office that had accepted “Postmark: Moscow,” I in my turn asked for a few particulars concerning the letters’ author, concerning his pre-Moscow “where.”

  In reply I received only the thirteenth letter (the one with which the exchange apparently ended), without any comment or elucidation.

  Thus the question of to whom he, the man who invented that rather curious classification of people as either that-into-thisers or this-into-thaters, belongs—to the former or the latter—remains, for me at any rate, unanswered.

  S. Krzhizhanovsky

  1925

  1. Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks).

  2. Truth. (Russian)

  3. Val: Earthen wall; rampart. (Russian)

  4. Will be. (Latin)

  5. Phrase. (Greek; used by Lenin)

  6. I am (my) shackles. (Russian)

  7. Lazybones. (Russian)

  8. Peter’s Lines. (Russian)

  9. Hook. (Russian) Zatsepa Street is near Zatsepsky Val.

  10. Pinch. (Russian) Shchipok Street is near Zatsepa Street.

  11. People who have lost everything in a fire. (Russian)

  12. For the world. (Latin)

  13. For the city. (Latin)

  14. Practice, experience, training. (Italian)

  NOTES

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE

  the hum . . . of a Primus: A one-burner stove fired by the steam of its fuel (e.g., kerosene), causing it to hum and hiss; used in communal apartments in the years before gasification.

  had I not vacated my hundred square feet by hanging myself: Krzhizhanovsky’s own room in Moscow (Arbat 44, Apt. 5) was previously occupied by a dead man. Alexander Naryshkin, a regional vice-governor before the Revolution, was renting a room at that address when he was arrested in 1919. He died in prison in 1921. See Obrecheny po rozhdeniyu (Moscow: Zvezda, 2004), 91.

  syntagms: Syntactic units.

  Stirner: Max Stirner (1806–1856), a German philosopher who advocated psychological and ethical egoism; the author of The Ego and Its Own.

  Gogotsky: Silvester Gogotsky (1813–1889), a philosopher born in Kiev; the author of Russia’s first multivolume dictionary of philosophy (Philosophsky Leksikon).

  For a political meeting: An anti-tsarist rally held by workers and students at Moscow University in October 1905.

  Manège: A vast hall (1817) opposite the Kremlin originally used for military parades.

  Herberstein: Sigismund von Herberstein (1486–1566), an Austrian diplomat and historian; the author of Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Notes on Muscovite Affairs), an account of his extended visits to Muscovy in 1517 and 1526, which first appeared in Russian in 1748.

  In 1893 a new University Statute: Instituted in 1863 (not 1893) under Alexander II, this statute accorded university professors greater autonomy while curtailing that of students, now considered “separate visitors of the university” and not allowed to organize for social or academic purposes.

  Chelishchev: Pyotr Ivanovich Chelishchev (1745–1811), the author of Puteshestvie po severu Rossii v 1791 (Travels in the North of Russia in 1791), in which he calls his readers “arrogant stay-in-your-studies” (nadmennye ushel’tsy v kabinety vashi), ignorant of Russia’s riches, human and mineral, and how to make productive use of them.

  The city in which I lived changed hands thirteen times: An apparent reference to Kiev, where Krzhizhanovsky lived until 1922. The Ukraine was part of the Russian empire before the revolution of February 1917. During the anarchy that followed, Kiev changed hands no fewer than twelve times as White Russians, Bolsheviks, Germans, and various Ukrainian factions fought for supremacy.

  spur stone: One of the round granite blocks formerly set at intervals along the edges of some Moscow streets to protect the sidewalks from incursions by passing carriages.

  Rabelais: François Rabelais (1483–1553), a French priest, physician, and writer. Rabelais’s dying words are said to have been: “Je vais quérir un grand Peut-être” (I go in quest of a Great Perhaps).

  The revolution crashed down like lightning: The February Revolution (1917) that led to the collapse of the old tsarist order.

  “Comrade Owl”: “Comrade” being the polite form of address under recently established Soviet rule.

  Kirik: A writer, deacon, and head-chorister of the Antoniev Monastery in Novgorod (1110–1156); the author of Voproshanie Kirika, 152 questions that Kirik put to Bishop Nifont.

  Greens: Armed partisans (including bandits and anarchists) who supported neither the Reds nor the Whites.

  they picked me up near Saratov—we were fighting Czechs: Czechs who, during World War I, had chosen to be taken prisoner by Russia rather than fight for the Austrian emperor. They fought on the Russian side until the Bolsheviks made peace, then threw their support behind the Whites. The summer of 1918 (to which this phrase refers), “White Czechs” virtually controlled the Volga, the Urals, and Siberia.

  IN THE PUPIL

  Quagga: A South African mammal (Equus quagga) related to the zebra, but with stripes only on the forepart of the body and the head; now extinct.

  telegony: The supposed influence of a previous sire on subsequent offspring of the same mother by other sires.

  Lord Morton: George Douglas, 16th Earl of Morton (1761–1827). “In Lord Morton’s famous hybrid from a chestnut mare and male quagga, the hybrid, and even the pure offspring subsequently produced from the mare by a black Arabian sire, were much more plainly barred across the legs than is even the pure quagga.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859).

  Mr. Ewart: James Cossar Ewart (1851–1933), a Scottish zoologist and professor of natural history. His pioneering experiments in animal breeding and hybridization disproved the theory of telegony.

  recept: A mental image or idea formed by repeated exposure to a particular stimulus.

  ‘a soul waiting for someone’: A line from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (act 3, scene 7).

  Freud: Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), an Austrian neuropsychologist, founder of psychoanalysis. Freud’s works were translated into Russian from 1904 to 1930.

  Adler: Alfred A
dler (1879–1937), an Austrian psychiatrist who developed the school of individual psychology. In 1908 he treated the Communist revolutionary Adolf Joffe, then working in Vienna with Trotsky.

  Meyer: Adolf Meyer (1866–1950), a Swiss-born American psychiatrist who stressed the importance of detailed patient histories; the first director of the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins.

  Ebbinghaus: Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), a German experimental psychologist who devised methods of measuring rote learning and memory.

  Thales: A Greek philosopher (c. 624–546 BC) who made several discoveries in geometry and astronomy, once accurately predicting an eclipse.

  Weber-Fechner law: A law (1834) stating that the intensity of a sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the intensity of the stimulus causing it.

  SEAMS

  spur stones: See note on same for “Autobiography of a Corpse.”

  children’s whistles cheeping cheerlessly after me: Go ’way! Go ’way!: These cheap noisemakers sold on Moscow street corners were called uidi-uidi (“go away, go away”) for the sound they made.

  only then do I see words calling to me: “Passerby” and “Stop”: “An epitaph is a memorial inscription on a gravestone [ . . .] addressed in most instances to the ‘passerby,’ i.e. to the person rushing past—which is why it must be clear and succinct.” Krzhizhanovsky, Epitafiya (in his Collected Works in Russian [St. Petersburg: Symposium, vol. IV, 2001–2013], 696).

  Man is to man a wolf: A phrase from Asinaria by the Roman playwright Plautus (c. 254–184 BC); often quoted in the Latin (Homo homini lupus est).

  Leibniz: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a German philosopher, mathematician, and logician, who believed that because God created the world, it must be “the best of all possible worlds.” In his Monadology, Leibniz maintains that the divine order of the universe is reflected in each of its irreducible parts, or monads.