The Return of Munchausen

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  and in my hands I have a steeple . . . an ordinary church steeple . . . it all seems somehow familiar: The mythical Munchausen’s adventures begin with him riding through deep snow in Russia. Overcome by night and sleep, he ties his horse to a tree stump poking up out of the snow. He wakes to find himself lying in a village graveyard, his horse dangling from the church steeple, the snow having melted.

  Versailles Conference: Or the Paris Peace Conference, a meeting to establish the terms of the peace after World War I; it resulted in various agreements, including the Treaty of Trianon, signed on June 4, 1920, at the Grand Trianon.

  My career . . . began with a modest secretaryship in an embassy: The real Münchhausen began his professional life as a page in the Russian service, in the Brunswick Regiment under Prince Anton Ulrich, nephew-in-law of Tsarina Anna.

  League of Nations: An intergovernmental organization that came out of the Paris Peace Conference with a mission to maintain world peace.

  Brest peace: The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918) between Bolshevik Russia and the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, the Ottoman Empire); a separate peace that extricated Russia from World War I.

  Amsterdam conference: Convened by labor and socialist groups (April 26–29, 1919), partly in an effort to influence the Paris Peace Conference.

  treaties, including Washington, Versailles, and Sèvres: The Washington Naval Treaty (February 6, 1922), an agreement between the major powers that won World War I to limit naval armaments; the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919), the Allies’ peace agreement with Germany; and the Treaty of Sèvres (August 10, 1920), the Allies’ peace agreement with the Ottoman Empire.

  2. SMOKE THAT ROARS

  four parallel rails suspended in air: The Berlin Stadtbahn, or elevated railway.

  the king’s quondam street: Königstrasse, now Rathausstrasse.

  the stone cubes, arcs, and cornices of the palace: Berlin’s city palace (Stadtschloss), the residence of the ruling dynasty of Brandenburg-Prussia until 1918.

  flags of revolution: The German Revolution of 1918–1919.

  Teniers: David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690), the Flemish genre painter.

  The beans went on twirling upward with their thread-like tendrils, obviously aiming for the sickle moon . . . “Again?”: While enslaved to the Turkish sultan, the mythical Munchausen threw his silver hatchet at two bears; by mistake, it flew up to the moon. The baron managed to retrieve the precious hatchet by planting a fast-growing Turkey bean, which “actually fastened itself to one of the moon’s horns.”

  [in] the words of a popular American author: “The world is managed by people who do about two hours work a day—that is, on the days when they work at all”: W. E. Woodward (1874–1950), whose best-selling novel Bunk, about a professional debunker, was soon followed by Bread & Circuses (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), the source of this quote (47).

  a pair of allegorical figures: On the Wellington Monument (1858–1912) in St. Paul’s; the female figure of Truth is shown bracing one foot against the chest of the unmasked male figure of Falsehood as she pulls his long forked tongue out of his mouth.

  Paternoster Row . . . Fleet Street: The third edition of Munchausen’s Travels (1786) was sold in London by M. Smith at No. 46 Fleet Street and by the booksellers in Paternoster Row.

  Mosi-oa-Tunya: The indigenous name for Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, which is nowhere near Lake Victoria.

  “Sir, how can I turn into Saul without turning around?”: An absurdist question suggesting that the cathedral would like to return to pre-Christian times when Paul was Saul.

  Alekhine’s defense: Introduced in 1921 by the Russian-French world chess champion Alexander Alekhine; a provocative opening in which Black runs his king’s knight across the board, inviting White’s pawns to chase it.

  the drooping mustache of the Labor Party leader . . . the knave: Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), the illegitimate son of a Scottish servant girl; he had a shaggy, circumflex-shaped mustache.

  Li Hung Chang: Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), a Chinese general and leading statesman; he attended the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II and was decorated by Queen Victoria.

  Saint Nobody: Or Saint Nemo, a nonexistent saint evidently invented by the medieval French monk Radulfus Glaber (see note above). Radulfus had the idea of treating the Latin word nemo (nobody, no man) in biblical and classical texts as a proper noun. His superhuman Nemo can see and do what no man can.

  Pius X: Pope Pius X (1835–1914); his coronation took place on August 9, 1903.

  Genoa: In 1922 the city hosted the Genoa Conference, a failed postwar effort to negotiate a commercial relationship between capitalist Europe and Bolshevik Russia.

  “Munchausen sleeps, but not his cause”: A reworking of the Soviet-era slogan, “Lenin died, but his cause lives.”

  3. KANT’S COEVAL

  Kant’s Coeval: The real Baron Münchhausen was a contemporary of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

  the last international peace conference: The Paris Peace Conference (1919).

  My ancestor Heino embarked on a crusade with Frederick II: A forefather of the historical Münchhausens, Heino did in fact accompany the Holy Roman Emperor to Palestine in 1228.

  Kant says: ‘I know only what is introduced by me into my experience’: In his introduction (1787) to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant wrote: “But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself. . . . Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.” (Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn)

  when I saw a platoon of Versaillais take up rifles and level them at unarmed Communards (this was by the walls of Père-Lachaise): A reference to the summary executions on May 28, 1871, that marked the end of the Paris Commune, which Lenin saw as a pioneering attempt at a proletarian dictatorship.

  ‘Man is the ultimate purpose for man and should not be anything but the ultimate purpose’: In his Critique of Judgment, Kant wrote: “[Man] is the ultimate purpose of creation here on earth, because he is the only being upon it who can form a concept of purposes.” (Translated by J. H. Bernard)

  Shaw . . . maintains that we do not live forever only because we do not know how to wish for our immortality: In his preface (1911) to The Doctor’s Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.”

  Methuselah: The longest-lived man in the Bible (Genesis 5:27); he died at the age of 969.

  not counting a few minor publications, this material has never seen the light of day: By the 1920s, Munchausen’s adventures (under various titles) had been a bestseller in the major European languages for well over a century at more than three times the original length.

  My acquaintance with Russia took place during the reign of my late friend the empress Catherine the Great: The real Münchhausen’s first acquaintance with Russia took place during the reign of Tsarina Anna in the late 1730s. By the time of Catherine’s accession in 1762, he had retired to his patrimonial estate at Bodenwerder to hunt and entertain. But in 1744, when the German princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst (the future Catherine II) passed through Riga on her way to St. Petersburg, she was met by an honor guard commanded by Hieronymus von Münchhausen. See A. N. Makarov, ed., Priklyucheniya Barona Myunkhgauzena (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), 253.

  Denis Diderot: The French encyclopedist and Enlightenment thinker (1713–1784) was, unlike Münchhausen, an intimate friend of Catherine the Great (1729–1796). At her invitation, Diderot spent five months in St. Petersburg in 1773–1774.

  persons fond of reminding one—apropos and not so—that sweet-smelling ambergris is in fact the excrement of a sperm whale: S
uch as Melville in Moby-Dick: “Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is.”

  in perpetual breach of court etiquette, Diderot might strut back and forth in front of her nose, interrupt her, and even, in the heat of argument, slap her on the knee: During their long tête-à-têtes in the Winter Palace, Catherine delighted in the brilliance and passion of this “quite extraordinary man” despite the violence to her person. “My thighs are bruised and all black,” she wrote Mme Geoffrin, “I have been obliged to put a table between him and myself so as to shield myself and my limbs from his gesticulations.” Quoted in Blake Hanna, review of Denis Diderot’s Mémoires pour Catherine II, in Études françaises, vol. 2, no. 3 (1966): 367.

  Catherine, smiling graciously, listened to all his nonsensical plans: Diderot had made a careful study of Russia and devised plans for its reform. But by the time he arrived in Petersburg, a decade after first being asked, various challenges to Catherine’s rule, including the then unfolding Pugachov Rebellion, had cooled her reformist zeal.

  my own experiments—mentioned in my memoirs, if you recall—in the forcible eviction of foxes from their skins: The mythical Munchausen once flogged a fine black fox in a Russian forest “out of its fine skin.”

  The poor man . . . had to sell . . . his library: it was acquired by the empress: Diderot sold his library in 1765, long before he went to Russia, to provide a dowry for his daughter; Catherine bought it on the condition that it remain at his disposal for his lifetime.

  certain circumstances of a more delicate nature, on which I shall not comment except to note that I am not overly fond of corpulent women: Catherine’s licentiousness was legend: “Lover after lover was admitted to the embraces of the Messalina of the North, until soldiers of the guards were employed in fatiguing an appetite which could not be satiated.” See Henry Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen Who Flourished in the Time of George III (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1839), 206.

  I soon found myself hunting Turks. Russia, you see, had declared war on Turkey: “As a cornet in the Brunswick Regiment, [the real Münchhausen] served against the Turks in the campaigns fought by Count Munich between 1738 and 1740, and was present at the capture of Oczakov which marked the turning point of the war.” See John Carswell, introduction, in Rudolf Raspe et al., The Singular Adventures of Baron Munchausen (New York: The Heritage Press, 1952), xxvii.

  Order of Basil the Blessed: The nonexistent order of a holy fool, Basil the Blessed (d. 1552), who lived under Ivan the Terrible. Basil had the gift of prophecy and told the truth to everyone, including the Tsar.

  verst: An old Russian measure of length, slightly more than a kilometer (3,500 feet).

  curricle: A light two-wheeled chaise, usually drawn by two horses.

  Time of Troubles: A fifteen-year period of political crisis and convulsions in Russia in the absence of a hereditary tsar—from the end of the Rurik dynasty in 1598 to the beginning of the Romanov dynasty in 1613.

  ‘When a Russian is at death’s door, a German feels fit as a fiddle’: An inversion of the Russian catchphrase, “What’s good for a Russian is death to a German.”

  4. IN PARTES INFIDELIUM

  perlustrators: Those who open and inspect correspondence.

  ‘Zinoviev’: The assumed name of G. E. Radomyslsky (1883–1936), a Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician; then chairman of the Communist International.

  5. THE DEVIL IN A DROSHKY

  the old building in Piccadilly: The Royal Society was then located in Burlington House with other leading scientific societies.

  Newton: Isaac Newton (1642–1727), an English mathematician, natural philosopher, and past president of the Royal Society, where his bust remains.

  Cook: Captain James Cook (1728–1779), a British explorer, navigator, and cartographer; elected a Royal Society Fellow in 1776; stabbed to death by Pacific islanders on Hawaii.

  a revolutionary song . . . about a little apple: A Russian folk song that amassed many new verses after the revolutions of 1917. Of these, the best known was: “Hey, little apple, / Where are you rolling? / You’re mine to gobble, / So stop your bowling!”

  the land where everyone from commissars to cooks runs the state: An allusion to a phrase ascribed to Lenin. In 1917 he wrote that cooks could not run the state yet, but the Bolsheviks would teach them. In 1925, the year after his death, a poster appeared with this “quote”: EVERY COOK MUST LEARN TO RUN THE STATE—Lenin.

  Eydtkuhnen: The easternmost terminus of the Prussian Eastern Railway, on the border with Lithuania. Now part of Russia (Chernyshevskoye).

  a tiny buffer state: Lithuania.

  in my salad days I could break in not only wild horses, but flying cannonballs: While taking tea with the ladies of a noble country house in Lithuania, the mythical Munchausen heard shouts of distress coming from the yard. A young horse had just arrived from the stud, “so unruly that nobody durst approach or mount him.” The baron dashed downstairs, jumped on the horse’s back, then forced it to leap in at an open window of the tea room to show the ladies. Later, while fighting the Turks, he leapt astride an outgoing cannonball so as to infiltrate an unassailable enemy fortress.

  my favorite hound—she appears in my memoirs: A greyhound that ran so fast, so much, and for so long in the baron’s service that she ran off her legs; he kept her on as a terrier.

  Cimmerian: Of an ancient nomadic people thought to have inhabited southern Russia as early as 1300 BC.

  foot wrappings: Pieces of cloth worn with shoes or boots in place of socks.

  bread and salt: Traditional symbols of hospitality.

  the civil war: Five years of armed struggle (1917–1922) between the Bolshevik Red Army and various adversaries.

  My memoirs helped me to solve this difficult case: I ordered a saw to be brought and had the horses sawed, one by one, in two: The mythical Munchausen’s “spirited Lithuanian” is cut in two by a dropped portcullis as he races into a walled Turkish town. He finds the back half larking about outside in a field full of mares.

  The peasants had warned me of the dangers near railroad tracks where, on a dark night, one could easily fall into the hands of bandits: “The peasants reacted to food requisitioning by sowing less, so that food output by 1921 had fallen to less than half the 1913 level. Disbanded Red army men, with axes, bludgeons and pistols, roamed for food and plunder, setting up camps by railroad tracks.” See Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century (New York: Random House, 1994), 117.

  I reached for the back of my head, intending to pull myself out of this unsuitable society by my pigtail (as I had once pulled myself out of a swamp): Having miscalculated the width of a swamp, the mythical Munchausen once found himself about to drown in slime when he famously grabbed his own pigtail with his own strong arm, rescuing both himself and his horse.

  Albert Einstein . . . jumped to conclusions concerning these celestial anomalies: An allusion to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

  “unextinguished moon”: An allusion to Boris Pilnyak’s Tale of the Unextinguished Moon about an army commander who submits to a murderous medical operation ordered by “the Unbending Man.” It ran in Novy Mir (1926). Party officials said the story was not a work of imagination, as Pilnyak claimed, but clearly based on “slanderous” talk about the recent death in hospital of Army Commander Mikhail Frunze. (The fatal ulcer operation to which Frunze submitted had been ordered by Stalin.)

  My ware, you see, was of roughly the same sort: Truth in lies.

  Anti-Dühring: Engels’s 1878 attempt to summarize and popularize Marxist theory was, wrote Lenin, “a wonderfully rich and instructive book.”

  Health Commissar Semashko was asking, for some reason, that he not be nibbled: Munchausen has mistaken a public notice from the Health Commissariat asking citizens not to nibble sunflower seeds (semechki) for a private plea from Semashko not to nibble him. Health Commis
sar Nikolai Semashko (1874–1949) was also a professor of public hygiene at Moscow University.

  the Martinique earthquake: A “convulsion of nature” in 1902 that wiped out St. Pierre, the cultural capital of the French Caribbean island.

  “Only a billion, your Lordship”: Inflation spiraled out of control after the Bolshevik coup. In 1924 a currency reform exchanged fifty billion “old” rubles for one “new” ruble.

  Zamoskvorechye: A large loop of land on the south side of the Moscow River, opposite the Kremlin.

  Professor Korobkin: Ivan Ivanovich Korobkin, the mathematician hero of Andrei Bely’s 1926 novel Moskovsky chudak (The Moscow Eccentric).

  thirteen telephones: Here Lenin is apparently associated with God, in communication with his twelve apostles and a thirteenth, Judas (Trotsky). Years before the revolutions of 1917, Lenin had referred to Trotsky as a “little Judas.”

  our country of huts shall become a country of palaces: A rewording of Lenin’s revolutionary slogan “Peace to the huts, war to the palaces!,” derived from the French revolutionary motto “War to the châteaux, peace to the cottages!”

  ‘how life smells’: The title poem of a popular collection (Kak pakhnet zhizn, 1924) by Alexander Bezymensky.

  This telephone here plus three letters: Presumably a direct line to the Cheka (secret police) plus the letters VMN, vysshaya mera nakazaniya (supreme measure of punishment), a Soviet-era euphemism for the death penalty.

  you would be driven away like chaff by the wind: Psalm 1:4.