I listen and meanwhile study her shapely manicured hands with their long, shiny pink nails, and try to recall how she wormed her way into my apartment where she’s chatting away with me as if she’s my best friend. She insinuated herself into my space like a vapor. In she oozed, odor-free, under the door. My “compatriot” asked to meet me and I felt awkward turning her away, as if I’m a socialist worker writer, some Maxim Gorky. She’s never read anything of mine, I interest her only as somebody who has been successful at publishing books abroad. She doesn’t say that, of course, she’s polite. But she, too, would like to do the same. And she will. She waits, mouth open wide, for me to toss her a morsel, anything that might, in that sense, be of use. Her eye color is light, her eyes are glazed, nothing will stop her on her path to her goal, she’s giddy with her fantasy of success, success is the drug that keeps her going. She’s not pushy, she drops me a line by email from time to time, every three or four months or so, though she says she visits my building once a week, so we could be getting together for coffee weekly. She cleans the apartment for somebody she knows in my building, he pays her three times the going rate, she’s very lucky, and other people also overpay her for similar jobs. This neighbor of mine is caught up in couch surfing, a collection of people trickles through his apartment and he himself is seldom home . . .
The upper part of her body is slender, she comes across as fragile, she even leans forward just a little as if about to tip over, her lower half is bulkier than her torso, as if she’s put together of two separate pieces. And she draws attention to her lower half: she wears clingy leopard-skin tights and garish boots covered, on the outside, in artificial fur. Her walk is penguin-like: her torso slightly forward-thrusting as if she’s about to break into a run, her lower half holding her back . . .
I listen to her and wonder where I get this feeling, justified by nothing, that I’m superior to this woman. There’s no difference, in essence, between us. All of us—young and old, men and women, published and unpublished, experienced and novice, celebrated and anonymous, productive and unproductive, educated and uneducated, successful and unsuccessful, smart and stupid, fêted and unrecognized—we’re all, in fact, the same. We’re poised for the shot announcing the start of the race, then we each urge on our own little egg, slather it with our sperm, fertilizing ourselves. And after that we pester others to cast their eyes on the result of our perverse contrivance, our artistic offspring. And the fact that there’s no difference between us, that we all have equal chances, that there are so many of us in the race, many more than there used to be, can be explained only by the absence of risk. The absence of risk makes our efforts comforting and so unimportant.
2.
Who is Doivber Levin?
Today everything is different, today everything can be fished from the blessedly de-hierarchized archive of the internet. Before, in the BG (Before Google) age, one’s imagination compensated for the lack of information. Only twenty years ago the world was alluringly mysterious and vast. Today, like some divine mechanical llama, the internet spits its indifferent answers in our faces. And the answers are, in proportion to the ease with which we retrieve them, weightless, unreliable, and fluid.
Who is Doivber Levin? Doivber Levin is a writer who was, for a long time, one of the briefest of footnotes in Russian avant-garde literature. Today Doivber Levin is a somewhat longer footnote. Boris Mikhailovich Levin was born in 1904 in the small Belorus hamlet of Lyady, in the Vitebsk province. He died, some sources say, while heroically defending Leningrad in early January 1941. The date and place of his death are not reliably recorded: Russian Wikipedia, for instance, gives Levin’s date of death as December 17, 1941 in the village of Pogostie. Other sources offer a date that obliges them less, saying only that Boris Mikhailovich Levin died at some point between 1941 and 1942.
In the early 1920s, Levin came to Petrograd for his studies. He enrolled in the theater department of the Institute for the History of the Arts and joined the last avant-garde literary collective, OBERIU (Obshchestvo real’nogo iskusstva—the Society of Real Art). Members of the art collective included Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Konstantin Vaginov, Igor Bakhterev, and Doivber Levin. Levin authored several works of fiction for children and young readers, and memoirs by Levin’s contemporaries—Gennady Gor and Igor Bakhterev—tell of Doivber Levin reading fragments, at one (or more) literary soirées from his novel The Theocritus Adventure [Pohozhdenie Feokrita]. In fact, Russian Wikipedia refers to the novel as The Origin of Theocritus [Proishozhdenie Feokrita], while other sources speak of it as The Life of Theocritus [Zhizn’ Feokrita].* Aside from a mention in two or three brief memoirs by his contemporaries there is no further evidence that this novel ever existed. Under the heading “orientation” (meaning Levin’s literary leanings), Russian Wikipedia lists “avant-gardism.” Levin added the moniker “Doivber” after discovering he had a double: there was another Boris Mikhailovich Levin.†
In the rare source (a few brief biographies), the information about each of these two writers is not always entirely separated: there are overlaps. Even the small black-and-white photographs (the only ones preserved) that appear on-line with the blurbs about Boris Mihailovich Levin and Boris Mihailovich (Doivber) Levin are sometimes jumbled. Doivber Levin was, it seems, more handsome than his double. In the cruel lottery that was spinning in those years—the revolution, the Stalinist purges, the Second World War—Doivber was granted a slightly better posthumous fate than his double, thanks, ironically, to the absence, rather than the presence, of his work. This may be the very reason why Doivber Levin, and not Boris Mikhailovich Levin, is the hero of the story that follows.
3.
The Forgotten OBERIUT
Doivber Levin largely owes his posthumous life to writer and art collector Gennady Gor. In “Slow Motion,” a memoir, Gor writes about the Leningrad literary and art scene in the twenties and thirties and the last Russian avant-garde group, OBERIU. In a single line of the OBERIU manifesto Levin appears as Bor. Levin: “Bor. Levin—prose writer, currently working in an experimental style.” Gennady Gor recalls a literary evening at which Doivber Levin read from fragments of his work.
“OBERIU prose writer Doivber Levin [. . .] read a chapter from his novel The Theocritus Adventure. Levin’s novel is reminiscent of a painting by Marc Chagall. In The Theocritus Adventure, as with Chagall, the borders are erased between what might happen and what happens only in dreams. On the ground floor of a Chagall-esque fantasy house lives an ordinary Soviet official, while on the floor above lives a mythological creature with the head of a bull. Only the ceiling separates the two epochs, modernity and antiquity, linked by the author’s whimsical fancy.”‡
It is entirely possible that the parallel drawn between Levin’s prose and Chagall’s painting was inspired by the fact that Chagall and Levin were both born in Orthodox Jewish communities in the Vitebsk province. There were Hasidic Jews living in Levin’s hamlet of Lyady, and the famous Rebbe Shneur (or Schneur) Zalman hails from there. The name DovBer, which Levin chose for himself, means bear—in both Hebrew (Dov) and Yiddish (Ber). Samuil Marshak apparently nicknamed Levin “Himalayan bear.” The hamlet of Lyady was eradicated; all its inhabitants were murdered in pogroms and the buildings were destroyed during the Second World War. Levin’s mother tongue was Yiddish, he also knew Hebrew, and he taught himself Russian, as writer and folklorist S. Mirer, a compatriot of Levin’s, penned in his memoirs. Mirer remembers Levin as a ladies’ man; he recalls how the local beauty, Sonia Volkova, fell for Levin. Levin left her, dealing her, in Mirer’s words, a “cruel spiritual blow.” To Mirer’s profound regret, the heartsick Sonia Volkova disappears without a trace after her marriage to the ambassador from Sweden.
From L. Panteleev, another compatriot of Levin’s, we learn that Levin enjoyed reading Ibsen, Shakespeare, Hamsun, and Przybyszewski; that he lived on Chekhov Street in Leningrad (He did live there yet he will no longer. Not here nor anywhere else on th
is earth—L. Panteleev wrote these harsh words in his diary in 1944); he jotted down that during their last encounter, sickened with dread by the imminent world war, Levin had said: It’s over! All the lights have been snuffed out worldwide; and that Levin had been married to a pretty Komsomol girl (I wonder where their daughter Ira is now. How old could she be? Seven?).
As far as OBERIU-related documents are concerned, aside from the mention in the manifesto, Doivber Levin’s name comes up in a newspaper article, “A Reactionary Juggle,”§ by one L. Nilvich (perhaps the pseudonym of an informer who’d been assigned to monitor the performances put on by the “literary hooligans”). Thanks to Nilvich’s article, a description of Levin’s story has been preserved . . .
“Levin was the first to read. He read a story crammed with all sorts of nonsense. There was a metamorphosis of one person into two beings (one man, but two women: then one was a wife and the other a spouse), then people turned into calves, and other circus tricks.” Nilvich’s article also records the answer that Levin gave to a question from the audience:
“Levin said they are not understood for now, but they are the sole representatives (!) of a new art that is building its grand edifice.
“‘For whom are you building it?’ they asked.
“‘For all of Russia,’ came the typical answer.”
Critic Valery Dimshits in his text The Forgotten OBERIUT,** written for Levin’s one hundredth birthday, suggests that Doivber Levin, aside from The Theocritus Adventure, also authored another text, also lost, a short story entitled “Parfeny Ivanich.” Dimshits does not, sadly, cite any sources that could confirm the existence of the story.
With no shortage of good will, but short on compelling arguments, Dimshits suggests that Levin’s fiction for children is complex; he tries to force it into a relationship with Russian avant-garde poetics and the larger OBERIU affinity for the absurd and zaum. The example of zaum that Dimshits discerns in Levin’s children’s fiction is not, perhaps, entirely aligned with Khlebnikov’s idea of zaum as the “language of the birds,” the “language of the gods,” and the “language of the stars” (meaning that not every instance of onomatopoeia is zaum), but it’s a laudable attempt by a critic to bring attention to this neglected writer:
“It (a rooster, op. au.) seems to have overslept and is embarrassed, so now it crows as loudly as it can muster ‘. . . ri-kuuuuuu!’ meaning ‘. . . oood morning’!”
With his well-meaning yet clumsy reanimation attempt, plucking Levin from oblivion, Dimshits proposes a modernized reading of Levin’s children’s fiction. The main hero of Levin’s novel Shoemaker Street is an itinerant boy, Irme the hooligan, who joins a revolutionary gang. This detail feeds the widespread (Russian?) expectation, nowadays, that revolutionaries were vagrant hooligans, which lends Levin an anticipatory halo and allows him to dovetail with today’s ideological circumstances, or so, more or less, Dimshits’s convoluted premise proposes.
Salamandra P. V. V.†† mentions Kharms’s papers, among which were preserved program notes for a group OBERIU performance in December 1928. The performance was canceled, but the program notes show that Levin was scheduled to perform “eucalic prose” (eu/good and kalos/beautiful). Another notable assertion, though in no way substantiated, is that painter Pavel Mansurov (traveling in Italy in August 1928) brought with him texts by the OBERIUTs at Kharms’s urging. Among them were, supposedly, four stories by Levin.‡‡ The author of the foreword does not disclose a source to support her claim, but she does list the titles of three of the stories.
Thanks to Salamandra P. V. V.’s foreword, Levin’s status has been somewhat revived. The foreword mentions, for instance, evidence—this time a little more convincing—of Levin’s work on the staging of OBERIU performances.§§ Yet Levin remained in the background, as if merely an extra in the wings of the remarkable avant-garde experiments for which the most talented, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, deservedly fanned their feathers. Further, the author of the foreword attempts to term Levin’s passable children’s fiction a “complex formalist experiment” are a stretch at best, especially as she furnishes no arguments to support her claim. She proceeds to describe Levin’s writing for young readers as “grotesquely, tightly penned prose, describing the daily life in Jewish settlements before the revolution and the civil war,” saying it is prose with no “juvenile content.” The true matter, she says, of Levin’s children’s fiction is “the gory blizzard of historical cataclysm; pernicious, absurd speech; prophetic dreams.” This is far more germane to the times that gave rise to Levin’s children’s books than it is to the books themselves.
“The Forgotten OBIERUT,” becomes, in Dimshits’s words, “the most neglected” among the OBIERUTs, which guaranteed him, paradoxical as this may sound, a secure future within Russian literature. “Manuscripts do not burn!” exclaims Woland in the novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.*** Whether or not we choose to believe this is up to us. The only thing that cannot burn is the absence of a manuscript. And if we were to bet on eternity, perhaps it is precisely this absence of substance that would have the greater chance for victory than its presence.
4.
Foxes Prefer Deserted Places
I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Ferris at a Slavic Studies conference in Nottingham. I’d been invited to give the keynote address; I accepted. I had my reasons: first, I hadn’t been in the company of Slavic scholars for some time, yet they used to be my close intellectual kin, whom I, the prodigal daughter, had deserted. Second, this was a chance to see my old friend, Asen Smirliev, who taught South Slavic: Bulgarian, Macedonian, and the literatures written in BCS (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian), in the Department for Russian and Slavonic Studies. He was, in fact, the one who had proposed that they invite me and pay me reasonably well. In his free time, Asen ran a tiny publishing company called “Asen” which occasionally put out a work from one of the East European literatures in English translation. The funds needed for translating the Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian, and Bosnian writers into English came through financial support from the ministries of culture, embassies, and consulates of the interested countries, as well as the occasional measly handout from English foundations.
During my lecture, my first and last name and the title of my talk were projected onto the screen behind me. Afterward several Slavic scholars clustered around me. They offered the standard compliments and mentioned the titles of my books they’d especially enjoyed. The titles were not, however, mine. The author of the titles was my, clearly more popular, colleague. I could have gracefully accepted the compliments intended for her, smiled, and let the students show off. Instead, however, I said . . .
“For God’s sake, you had an entire hour to get my name right! It was there right in front of you. You could have Googled me during the talk, you all have iPhones and iPads, I assume you aren’t lost in the world!” I said.
“Are you really this touchy?” sprang a young scholar of Polish immediately to their defense.
“Surprise, surprise, I am!” I snapped.
During the first day of the conference an already familiar feeling came over me that I’m no longer a player in this game; the literary-scholarly lingo is different from the parlance I knew; the way of thinking about literature has changed, the values have changed, and the interests today are altogether different. Only two panels at this three-day conference were on literary themes. All the others belonged to the broader discipline of cultural studies. The titles of the papers in the program promised they’d shed light on the culture of Russian adolescent gangs, they’d say something about film and post-Communism, post-Communism and fashion, post-Communism and pop culture, pop culture and politics, Russian celebrity culture, digital media and post-Communism, social networks and literature, social networks and democratization, the role of culture in the branding of young nations and nation-states. I grumbled to myself about the obvious drop in university education standards, though I was, clea
rly, in the wrong. Literature, whether I liked it or not, was simply no longer the focus. Even I found the panel about Russian adolescent gangs far more compelling than the papers on a publicly over-rated, effete, middle-aged post-communist writer who had created a literary universe all his own of interest to no one. So this was the bitter truth I had to make my peace with. My anger bubbled over like the head on a beer and sloshed again onto the young student of Polish who had done nothing to deserve it . . .
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