The Return of Munchausen

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  “What are you making?”. . . . “Literature”: An allusion to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s How Are Verses Made? (1926) in which he contends that poetry is an “industry” and “only an industrial attitude toward art can put different types of literary labor on the same plane: both verses and news items.”

  a modest man who collects cracks: Either Gottfried Lövenix, the hero of Krzhizhanovsky’s story “The Collector of Cracks,” or Krzhizhanovsky himself, “collector of the most exquisite cracks in our fissured cosmos,” according to the poet Maximilian Voloshin.

  Association for the Study of Last Year’s Snow: In Russian, the expression “like last year’s snow” refers to anyone or anything for which a person has absolutely no use (for example, a comb for the man who is bald).

  Howard and Haass: The English philanthropist John Howard (1726–1790), a reformer of prisons at home and abroad who died of an infectious fever in Russia; and Friedrich Joseph Haass (1780–1853), a German physician who spent his professional life in Moscow working to alleviate the suffering of prisoners.

  the [rats] marched themselves single-file . . . straight into the kitchen kettles and vats: An inversion of the German legend in which a pied piper charms all the rats out of the town of Hamelin and into the Weser River.

  Medical hypnotists were also pressed into service: In 1922, Vladimir Bekhterev (1857–1927), a neurologist and Russian pioneer in the field of hypnosis, organized (with Bolshevik support) a special Commission for the Study of Mental Suggestion.

  you remember my ducks: The mythical Munchausen caught several dozen ducks with one very long dog leash to which he had attached a small piece of lard. The first duck swallowed the slippery pork fat and passed it undigested; the second duck followed suit, then the third, and so on, until they had all been strung like so many pearls.

  those triumphal parades that have become so widespread: “What makes a Moscow demonstration more imposing and more ominous is its complete organization: the tides are on leash and the leash is in the grip of a small group on Red Square.” See Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1938), 103.

  My long conversations with Hegel left their mark both on me and, I think, on him: Freedom, immortality, God—those are the three legs of my chair: Munchausen is mixing Hegel with Kant. Freedom of will, immortality of the soul, and the existence of God are Kant’s three postulates of pure practical reason: unprovable things that must be assumed as true for man to lead a moral life. In his Philosophy of Nature (1817), Hegel says that man, inasmuch as he is dependent on others to satisfy his animal appetites, is not free: “This is the unpleasant feeling of need. The defect in a chair which has only three legs is in us.” (Translated by A. V. Miller)

  materialists succeed only insofar as they are . . . idealists of their materialism: Possibly a playful allusion to Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818), in which the German philosopher discusses “the fundamental absurdity of materialism” and likens the materialist to Baron Munchausen pulling himself and his horse out of a swamp by his own upturned pigtail.

  Revolution’s notorious broom, which raises more dust than it sweeps out, tried to sweep the idealists out of Russia’s house: A reference to the expulsion from Russia in 1922 of leading members of the anti-Soviet intelligentsia—professors, writers and philosophers, including Nikolai Berdyaev—in an operation initiated by Lenin. See Vysylka vmesto rasstrela: Deportatsiya intelligentsii v dokumentakh VChK-GPU 1921–1923 (Moscow: Russky put, 2005).

  so many bushels, so many leading lights: Dissenting intellectuals who remained in Russia after 1917 had to hide their light under the proverbial bushel.

  The gloomy man to whom the gracious countess now introduced me, naming the rather famous author of books about Russia’s impending fate: Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), the outspoken religious philosopher, idealist turned pessimist, and author of Sudba Rossii (The Fate of Russia, 1918); his maternal grandmother was a French countess.

  the crows on Tverskoi Boulevard, instead of cawing, have started hurrahing: An allusion to Soviet Moscow’s command-performance parades. The crows have evidently begun parroting the “hurrahs that rolled through Red Square like waves.” See Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 102.

  Domostroi: Domestic Order, a sixteenth-century compendium of religious, social, and household rules.

  Smoke: A novel (1867) by Turgenev in which the wind-driven smoke billowing from the train returning the hero to Russia serves as a metaphor for man’s inconstancy and life’s hopelessness.

  ‘the smoke of the Fatherland’ that is ‘sweet and dear to us’: A line from Woe from Wit (act 1, scene 7), which Griboyedov likely borrowed from Derzhavin (“The Harp”), who may have been paraphrasing Ovid in exile (Ex Ponto: Book 1): “Even Ulysses prayed that he might see the smoke of his ancestral hearth again.”

  Amsterdam International: The International Federation of Trade Unions, reconstituted at a congress in Amsterdam in July 1919.

  a fashionable Boston religion: Christian Science, founded in 1879.

  no tongs, no countess: she melted: Like all members of Russia’s old nobility, the countess became under Soviet rule a disfranchised “former person.”

  Una Sancta Sancta Russia: An allusion perhaps to Berdyaev’s 1927 article on Orthodoxy and ecumenism (“Una Sancta,” in German); in it he argues that the Truth of Orthodoxy has long been “hidden under a bushel,” but that now Orthodoxy represents the best way to an ecumenical Christian unity while the Russian Orthodox Church has the advantage of being a church of martyrs and sufferers (that is, godlike).

  “From here the street is cobbled,” the prophet mumbled dully, “people of my profession had best stay away from stones”: In addition to the stoning of biblical prophets, this Russian prophet may be alluding to Stone as a Weapon of the Proletariat (1927), the Soviet sculptor I. D. Shadr’s bronze of a worker wrenching a cobblestone loose from the pavement.

  chekaneries: Searches and arrests or worse by the Cheka.

  Horace’s maxim “Be surprised at nothing”: “Nil admirari” (Epistles 1.6.1); critical detachment is the key to happiness.

  preestablished harmony: A harmony said by the optimist Leibniz (our God-created world is “the best of all possible worlds”) to be established eternally in advance between all monads, but especially between mind and matter.

  Velvet Book: Barkhatnaya kniga (1787), an official register bound in velvet of Russia’s most distinguished boyar and noble families.

  a conditional corpse: “Conditional death by shooting” ( uslovny rasstrel) was a form of suspended sentence instituted by the Bolsheviks in 1919 and applied in July 1921 to the structural engineer and inventor Vladimir Shukhov. Halfway through his construction of a 150-meter hyperboloid radio tower in Moscow, an accident destroyed most of the work. Shukhov was convicted of sabotage and would have been shot but for his indispensability to the project. He went on working, now as a conditional corpse. Only eight months later, when the radio tower went into operation, was his sentence repealed.

  the postilion’s horn . . . in which, like a snail in its shell, the tunes had frozen up so as to come out of their own accord when the warmth and spring returned: The mythical Munchausen left Russia in the bitter cold, traveling day and night by post. On narrow roads the postilion tried to signal with his horn to warn oncoming travelers, but no sound came out. At the next stage, the postilion hung his horn up by the kitchen fire and suddenly: Tereng! Tereng, teng, teng! The tunes, which had frozen up in the horn, came out of their own accord by thawing.

  a certain archivist from Hanover: Rudolf Erich Raspe, the author of Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785).

  Some people champion the slogan EVERYONE INTO THE STREETS for love: An allusion to “Down with Shame!,” a pro-nudist movement promoted by Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik feminist and champion of promiscuity. In September 1924, Mikhail Bulgakov noted in his diary that “absolutely naked people (
men and women) appeared the other day on the streets of Moscow with ‘Down with Shame!’ banners over their shoulders. They boarded a tram. Passengers balked, and tried to stop the tram.”

  others will fight tooth and nail to keep the home fires burning: “One prominent university professor . . . advises Russian youth in almost St. Paul’s own words that it is better to marry than to burn. ‘Take a wife,’ says this professor, ‘a woman who shares your earnest ideals and will collaborate in your work for the communist state; be as continent as possible, because sex is a waste of vital energy which the state needs.’ ” See Dorothy Thompson, The New Russia (New York: Henry Holt, 1928), 275–76.

  Titian’s Amor Sacro and Amor Profano, shown sitting peaceably either side of a well: An allusion to Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, a symbolically mysterious painting (ca. 1514) of two women seated on an ancient Roman sarcophagus filled with water.

  “A great start is worth more than money”: An allusion to a famous pamphlet by Lenin (A Great Start, July 1919) in praise of communist subbotniks, unpaid days of voluntary labor for the good of society, “the actual beginning of communism.”

  “We merely increase or decrease the distance between bodies—nature does the rest”: An allusion to an aphorism in Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620): “Towards the effecting of works, all that man can do is to put together or put asunder natural bodies. The rest is done by nature working within.” (Translated by James Spedding et al.)

  living conditions in the country from which I have just returned will not permit of any further decrease in distances: An allusion to that signature Soviet invention, the communal apartment. “An apartment originally intended for a single family becomes home for half a dozen or more families, depending on the number of rooms, the largest of which may be subdivided. . . . This way of life, aside from being incredibly cramped, involves constant contact with total strangers.” See Andrei Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization (New York: Arcade, 1990), 165–66.

  Restoration of the Soviet economy . . . began with the beams that people began casting out of each other’s eyes. In the past they had been loath to notice even the motes: A mixture of two gospels, Christian (Matthew 7:5) and Soviet (a famous photograph of Lenin shows him pitching in at a subbotnik on the Kremlin grounds by helping to haul a log).

  A FISH ROTS FROM THE HEAD DOWN: A Russian catchphrase meaning that corruption starts at the top (of the government, army, etc.); all bad things come from the powers that be.

  SAVE YOUR SOLES: A number of Soviet posters of the period advertised the powers of rubber galoshes against rain and slush; some were produced by Mayakovsky.

  Thus it was that I, while consultant to a Moscow theater director, advised him to stage Gogol’s Inspector General on my grand scale . . . [turning] everything upside down: An allusion to the avant-garde Moscow stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose dynamic montages rendered plays unrecognizable. In his hands, Martinet’s Night became The World Turned Upside Down. His extravagant and exhausting production of The Inspector General (1926) had, according to some critics, no Gogol in it. Others derided Meyerhold for the inflated role he had given his ambitious actress wife, Zinaida Raikh. “A major point of contention is his use of velvet and silk, fourteen costumes for his wife,” Walter Benjamin wrote in his Moscow Diary, “the performance, moreover, lasts five and a half hours.”

  Gogol’s Inspector General: A social satire (1836) about a minor civil servant, Khlestakov, from St. Petersburg who, stuck in a small provincial town, is mistaken by the corrupt officials there for a government inspector. Khlestakov plays along while wooing the governor’s daughter and wife. He is found out when a boastful letter to a friend in St. Petersburg is read by the local postmaster, though by then he has skipped town.

  The play, as we envisaged it, would be called Thirty Thousand Messengers: the main plot would shift from the individual to the masses: Meyerhold, who publicly embraced the Bolshevik revolution, soon launched a movement (Theatrical October) to revolutionize the theater with politically relevant performances for a mass audience.

  to play the thirty thousand messengers we had engaged two military divisions from districts near Moscow: An allusion to Yuri Annenkov’s Hymn to Liberated Labor (1920), a one-off, open-air mass spectacle, whose cast of four thousand included (in the last act) units of Red Army infantry and cavalry. “The primitive plot consisted of three acts: the oppression of labor by capital, labor’s fight for liberation, the triumph of labor over capital. . . . In a formal sense the newest and most interesting achievement was precisely this participation of the Red Army, i.e. the introduction of concrete pieces of reality into a theatrical performance. Subsequently this device was often used in Meyerhold’s theater.” Yuri Annenkov, Teatr! Teatr! (Moscow: MIK, 2013), 216, 217.

  the general economic revival: Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), a temporary return to private trade in the 1920s.

  Saint Vladimir: Canonized Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kievan Rus; in 986, according to the Primary Chronicle, he chose Christian Orthodoxy over Islam because “Russians find merriment in drink, without which we cannot think.”

  From this proto-rhyme . . . sprang all of Russian versification: An allusion to the half-Scottish, Georgian-born, St. Petersburg–educated orientalist and linguist Nikolai Marr, an esteemed academician who in 1924 maintained that all the world’s languages sprang from a proto-language consisting of “four elements”: sal, ber, yon, and rosh.

  A respected physiologist presented ILP studies in the electrification of thought: An allusion to Bernard Kazhinsky (1890–1962), a Soviet engineer and pioneer of the “brain radio” hypothesis. In 1922 he launched his scientific work in Moscow with a lecture called “Human Thought Is Electricity.” His 1923 book Peredacha myslei (Thought Transference) contained the blueprint of an “electromagnetic microscope” for receiving and registering brain thought emissions.

  “The State is organized violence . . .”: Said by Gandhi: “The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form.”

  “The state is a necessary stage . . .”: Said by Marx: “Between capitalist and communist society lies . . . a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

  Having cut off the hair, one does not cry over the head: An inversion of the Russian saying, “Having cut off the head, one does not cry over the hair.”

  this legend about a Frenchman who traveled to Moscow in 1761: Munchausen is half remembering a half-forgotten Frenchman of flesh and blood. Jean Chappe d’Auteroche (1728–1769), an abbot and astronomer, was sent to Tobolsk (Siberia) in 1761 to observe the transit of Venus. He stopped in Moscow to replace his sledges, “broken to pieces with the continual shocks they had received” on the way from St. Petersburg. After that Chappe’s pace was fairly relentless, to the despair of his clockmaker and interpreter. At Tobolsk, he set up an observatory. Unused to foreigners, the locals took this strange man with a nineteen-foot telescope for a magician. They blamed the catastrophic floods of that spring on him. He had frightened the stars. Undeterred, Chappe went on taking notes (“love of glory and one’s country are unknown in Russia where despotism destroys the spirit, talent and all manner of feeling . . . no one dares think in Russia . . . fear is, so to speak, the only force that animates the entire nation”) and talking to the odd prelate. His unflattering account (Voyage en Sibérie fait par ordre du roi en 1761) so enraged Catherine the Great that she published a refutation. Politics aside, Chappe had mangled many names, including those of churches.

  Wet Nikola: A seventeenth-century church that stood near a pier on the Moscow River; Nikola (Nicholas the Miracleworker) was also a patron saint of seafarers, whom he often saved from drowning.

  Nikola Red Bells: A seventeenth-century church known for the unusually beautiful (“red”) sound of its bells.

  Nikola on Three Hills: A seventeenth-century church built on high ground outside Moscow’s Three-Hills Gate.

  Nikola in t
he Pillars: A seventeenth-century church whose name may in part derive from its icon of the pillar saint Simeon Stylites.

  Nikola in Pyzhi: A seventeenth-century church whose name derives from its locale, a place in Zamoskvorechye.

  Nikola on Chicken Legs: The official name of a seventeenth- century church built near Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s chicken yard. By the 1920s it stood on Great Molchanovka Street, a stone’s throw from Small Molchanovka Street.

  Nikola in the Carpenters: A seventeenth-century church in a carpenters’ settlement on the Arbat; Nikola was also a patron saint of the poor.

  Every house . . . is on rooster legs: Munchausen is mangling an idiom. He means “on chicken legs.” He is referring both to the hut on chicken legs inhabited by the old folktale sorceress Baba Yaga and to all rickety Russian houses, literal and figurative.

  the inscription over the gates of Dante’s hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

  Zabelin: Ivan Zabelin (1820–1908), an historian-archaeologist; the author of History of the City of Moscow (in Russian, 1905).

  Floating toward me was an enormous square: in the center of the square, with five crosses raised up to the sky, stood a cathedral: The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, commissioned by Nicholas I in 1837 and completed more than forty years later under Alexander II.

  Standing with hand outstretched: Like Lenin, pointing the way to communism.

  like the biblical Ruth gleaning ears of corn dropped by the sickle: Ruth 2:2–3.

  “eternal return”: Or eternal recurrence, an ancient doctrine which holds that every actual state of affairs must recur an infinite number of times; Nietzsche proposed something of the kind in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–1885).