The Return of Munchausen
Page 16
I could hear them sealing my boxcar shut: Munchausen is being returned to Germany by the Russians in 1923 the same way Lenin was returned to Russia by the Germans in 1917.
6. THE THEORY OF IMPROBABILITY
Scientists Welfare Commission: Komissiya po uluchsheniyu byta uchenykh (KUBU); created in 1920 in Petrograd by Maxim Gorky to provide Soviet scientists and writers with food, shoes, clothes, and medicine. “This establishment to fight indigence was located on Million-naya Street. The scientists who came there in rags, in torn shoes, with bast sacks and children’s sleds, were given a week’s ration: so many ounces of horsemeat, so much buckwheat, salt, tobacco, fat substitutes and a bar of chocolate.” Yuri Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh vstrech (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1991), I, 33.
American Relief Administration: An American relief mission after World War I to Europe and later to Soviet Russia (1921–1923) in the wake of widespread famine.
the widow’s mite: The small offering that represents a large sacrifice on the part of the giver (Mark 12:42).
Bernoulli’s theorem: Or the law of large numbers, a fundamental theorem in probability theory first proven by Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705), a Swiss mathematician. This law describes what happens when the same experiment is repeated a large number of times: The greater the number of trials, the closer the results will come to the expected value.
seven-leagued boots: Boots that allow the wearer to take strides of seven leagues. They appear in European folklore, including in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1814). Peter, who has sold his shadow to the devil, bargains at a fair for some old boots that turn out to be seven-leagued. Shut out from human society by his shadowlessness, he strides all over the natural world “spread out like a rich garden before me.”
7. THE HERMIT OF BODENWERDER
But didn’t the great Stagirite say: “My friends, there is no friendship in this world!”: In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384–322 BC) distinguishes between passing friendship, based on utility or pleasure, and perfect friendship, based on a mutual desire for each other’s good.
antinomy: A contradiction between two philosophical principles, each taken to be true.
(q), the letter by which mathematicians denote failure: In a Bernoulli trial, a random experiment such as the tossing of a coin, with only two possible outcomes, “success” and “failure”; then p equals probability of success (e.g., heads), and q equals probability of failure (e.g., tails).
blood and dirt: Capital, as described by Marx in Das Kapital: “If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” (Translated by Samuel Moore et al.)
minor mystifiers, all those Macphersons, Mérimées, and Chattertons: The Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736–1796), the French novelist and dramatist Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870), and the English poet Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), authors of successful literary hoaxes. Macpherson produced ostensible translations of epic poems by the ancient Gaelic bard Ossian. Mérimée passed off six of his own plays as translations from the work of a Spanish actress, the imaginary Clara Gazul. Chatterton presented his archaic poems as the work of a fifteenth- century monk, the nonexistent Thomas Rowley.
all those Pascals, Brunos, and Newtons had also begun with trifles, only to suffer thereafter from—ugh . . . acute chronic hypotheses non fingo: Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), a French mathematician, physicist, and moralist; Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), an Italian philosopher, Dominican, and unorthodox thinker denounced to the Inquisition; and Newton (see note above) whose phrase hypotheses non fingo (“I frame no hypotheses”) appears in his General Scholium (1713): “Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power . . . and I frame no hypotheses.” (Translated by Andrew Motte)
parallel fifths: Or consecutive fifths, a recurrence of the same interval between two parts or voices; long an object of academic condemnation.
the famine on the Volga: “Famine swept the Volga in 1921; in that year and the one following, it and the diseases that rode with it—typhus, typhoid, dysentery and cholera—would kill perhaps five million.” See Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century, 118.
I did not realize that the extinguished Tale of the Unextinguished Moon echoed a fact that took place with you on your way from the border to Moscow: Pilnyak’s tale (see note above) was “extinguished” by the Politburo, which ordered the entire print run of the issue of Novy Mir in which it appeared withdrawn from circulation. In the tale’s epilogue, a little girl gazes at the moon from her window and tries to blow it out.
about that empty pedestal, it does exist: In 1918, the Bolsheviks knocked down the statue of Alexander III by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. They left the pedestal intact for an anticipated statue of Liberated Labor. The statue was never executed; the huge pedestal stood empty until 1931 when it was razed along with the cathedral.
a papier-mâché Tsar Alexander: Alexander II, the “Tsar Liberator”; he had planned to consecrate the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1881, but was assassinated shortly beforehand.
Moscow’s bushels and prophet: Soviet Moscow’s dissenting intellectuals and foremost philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev.
Lucretius Carus: Roman poet and philosopher (ca. 98–55 BC); the author of On the Nature of Things, a complete science of the universe. By way of proving the infinity of the universe, Lucretius places a man on its “extremest part” and has him try to throw a dart. Either way, says Lucretius, if “the dart would fly forward, or, hindered, stay . . . that’s not the end.” (Translated by Thomas Creech)
my phantasms won—always and invariably, that is, until I chanced upon the country about which one cannot lie: Soviet Russia. The world’s greatest liar, Munchausen, has been beaten at his own fantastical game by still more fantastical Soviet reality. His tales of the USSR are, as it turns out, not tales at all. Some of the facts they contain are mentioned in these notes.
that flat square between black and white waters: The USSR, bounded to the north by the White Sea and to the south by the Black Sea.
I heard her gigantic crenellations crash to the ground, and then out of nowhere, there she was again, her bloody battlements towering over the lattice of meridians: Here the red queen is a symbol of Soviet rule, which by 1927, when Krzhizhanovsky sat down to write his Munchausen, appeared indomitable and aspired to world supremacy.
8. THE TRUTH THAT DODGED THE MAN
the empty square inside the black typographical rule: The title page of the first printed mock-sermon on the mock-saint Nemo (ca. 1510) was illustrated with an empty frame and the caption: Figura neminis quia nemo in ea depictus (A picture of nobody because nobody is depicted in it). See Gerta Calmann, “The Picture of Nobody: An Iconographical Study,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 23, no. 1/2 (1960): 64.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR THEIR contributions to our work on Krzhizhanovsky, beginning with Seven Stories (GLAS, 2006), we thank Natasha Perova, Robert Chandler, Caryl Emerson, Maxim Amelin, Sergei Kazachkov, Solomon Apt, Anatoly Teriokhin, Vassili Belov, Katerina Grigoruk, Daniel McBain, Alisa Ballard, Stephen Twilley, and Vadim Perelmuter.
—J. T. and N. F.