In essence, this had been a time as old as any other. (Darius, king of the Persians; Chang Hua, the first Chinese ENCYCLOPEDIST; the Russian explorer Афанáсий Никтин [Afanasy Nikitin] who made the long journey to India in 1466.)
VERSE. In Russia they do write blank VERSE, as well, composed for declamation as a litany, the singular emotion of a monotonous buzz in the ears. Nevertheless, people on the street will acknowledge only what rhymes, and everyone knows long sequences of VERSE by heart. A young female trolley conductor whom I took back to my room one night with very clear intentions stood on the bed and declaimed the reasons for her refusal of me, which were taken from a long poem by Ттчев (Tyutchev). Dumbstruck, I desisted from my endeavor, for I could not oppose a woman who contained so much poetry. When at last, exhausted and out of breath (we’d ingested a good deal of AQUA VITAE), she went to the bathroom to take her clothes off, I already had another subject for an indispensible book: “Moscovy for Beginners.” Declaiming long stanzas of rhyming VERSE is nothing, don’t be impressed; it’s a juggler’s art, the same sort of popular erudition as a knowledge of many different dance steps would be for other more immediate peoples whose vision is less permeated by literary culture. Essentially, my trolley conductor, the nurse who took care of a friend, the gentleman who read me his deplorable VERSE for five full Metro stops, or the BRODIAGA I saw in an underground passageway trying out cadences and rhymes with movements of his head—when I asked him as I went by if he was writing VERSE, I turned out to be correct: he read me the one he’d just composed (heavy spikes of wheat, white birch trees) and offered to write me two salutatory stanzas at fifteen rubles per word—essentially, all these VERSIFIERS were, in the end, very elementary, uninformed, crude, whatever else you like.
VILLAGE (see: AGRICULTURE).
W
WHEN ME YOU FLY, I AM THE WINGS (SI HUYES DE Mí YO SOY LAS ALAS—EMERSON). Someone, a woman you met in a pension in YALTA, an inconsequential summer romance, suddenly initiates a correspondence and the very first letter leaves you disconcerted by her refined mastery of the epistolary art.
In Russia, words retain a force that has been lost in the OCCIDENT. I’ve received letters that could be published without the addition of a single comma, and yet which I knew to have been written in a frenzy of jealousy, in a single sitting, at a kitchen table amid pots of jam. A kitchen I imagined perfectly: the house lost in the immensity of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, the point thousands of kilometers distant to which her astral existence had displaced her and from where she was sending me these letters like radiograms containing her coordinates, the chronicle of her very dull life: the hated husband, the fearful gloom of the world outside. The fortuitous intersection of our orbits in that pension in YALTA had activated all her reserve systems—which had been awaiting the signal of an embrace for years—and now she was sending me detailed reports on all her functions: “You won’t believe me, but I haven’t stopped thinking of you since that night we spent at the lookout. My heart . . .” Nineteenth-century formulae that retain all their power in Russian, a language well suited to descriptions of delicate states of being such as nostalgia, the absence of a beloved, the unbearable sorrow of a rupture. A system of categories that slammed into me with the crushing force of a sudden crash to the ground after slipping on a banana peel. In her letters I found fresh ideas, truths I myself had taken a very long time to discover, and her citations evinced an intimate mastery of such topics as music, sculpture, and the arts in general. (I’d had a friend, E**, who would sometimes speak to me in perfectly calibrated verse, stringing together miraculous improvisations on whatever it was she wanted to say to me at the moment: “Take the teapot from the fire, would you be so kind?” “Do me the favor of toasting up a slice of that nice bread!” and “Don’t you agree we should make the most of the sunshine and go out for a stroll?” and so forth. To receive three perfect letters from this woman, letters I’ve kept all these years, barely surprised me at all, for it was clear that her breast harbored great quantities of literature in the rough. But the truly curious thing was that I’d also received admirably well-written letters from simple bookkeepers, nurses, attendants at child-care facilities. All of them exceptionally skilled at dashing off five handwritten pages, the complete naturalness of the epistolary novel, a genre I’d always thought of as rather too clever, somewhat forced.)
I’d picked up this letter at the porter’s lodge as I was on my way out to an appointment. In the café, I asked K** to give me a second, tore open the envelope, and began reading. The woman described our visit to the lookout the evening before my departure and asked if I still loved her, if I remembered the starling chirping in the hedge that woke us in the morning. Her letter contained such tenderness, such promises of eternal fidelity, such certainty that I’d been desperately needed during the days since we’d last seen each other, that for a second I weighed the possibility of taking a plane, traveling 5,000 kilometers, and living with her for a while in her log cabin, lighting the woodstove in late afternoon, shoveling snow from the doorstep. Hurriedly I began my response on a paper napkin, “As you can see, I haven’t even waited to get home before answering your letter.” But when I raised my eyes to find the right word, the turn of phrase that would say precisely what I felt, I encountered the astonishment on K**’s face and my plan vanished in an instant. What sense would it make to travel so far when I have a woman right here within reach, et cetera?
WONDER, STEVIE: THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS. Through my capillaries ran the sap of a hundred thousand melodies, green globules that sometimes passed through the alkaline barrier of the cell walls and burst forth upon my lips in the form of song. Many of these particle-songs had names that were incapable today of reactivating the nervous centers of those intense sessions of listening—“BOOGIE SHOES,” “THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS”—now more or less forgotten but that, during my adolescence, had been the key to deciphering the messages of truth we receive from the world’s RADIO broadcast centers. At night, immobile in the penumbra of my room, I twirled the receiver’s dial tirelessly until the galvanic discharge of That’s the way, oh-hoh, un-huh, I like it, oh-hoh, un-huh, came pouring through, and I would shake my leg like a frog in an experiment, kicking out reflexively in response to the electric shock, and raise my head, eyes full of life. I should have explained all of this to LINDA.
I. In YALTA, we rented the DACHA of a former member of the Politburo, a small mansion next to the sea with a lovely little terrace for the sunsets. One afternoon, as I was relaxing on its warm tiles, an unforeseen sublimation occurred, the random union of certain molecular strings, and a clean and beautiful melody blazed forth in my mind. I hummed it twice without being able to believe my good fortune, leapt to my feet, and intoned an involuntary recitative, droning in a full and resonant voice—the voice of another man who lived in my bosom and spoke through my mouth—phrases that alluded to the beauty of the view, the warmth of summer, LINDA and myself. I was like an automat that had connected itself all on its own to the world centers of RADIO broadcasting and I laughed and apostrophized, emitting spine-tingling threnodies, ululating in diabolical tones. That was me, you must all believe me, singing out a sea of well-being.
This unexpected rap-ture awoke LINDA who came out to the terrace. “LINDA,” I cried in jubilation, “I have the solution! To hell with P.O.A. Just one song! It’s genius! It’s fantastic! We’ll sell a hundred thousand copies this year! Listen!”
LINDA heard me out for a long time without understanding. She didn’t know a thing about jazz or Brazilian litany, or syncopation: her primary cultural stock consisted of long phrases performed on the oboe. Finally she slipped her verdict into a pause for breath: “Gregorian or plain chant.”
I went on for five more stanzas before the light of that revelation stopped me short.
“Precisely. Gregorian chant. The beginning and the end. Do you think that’s proof of an exhaustion of all forms? Great, perfect. Look, I know something abou
t this, too.” (I whistled the entire first movement of Vivaldi’s concerto in E minor for bassoon and orchestra, impeccably.)
LINDA listened, flabbergasted. “Truly you astonish me. Wherever did you hear such good music?”
“But I told you about my CD collection. The best performers in the world: Horowitz, Kissin, Richter, almost all of them Russians (or Jews, whichever you like), though the point is not to linger over that. To go forward or . . . backward. Think of it: in one Handel concerto there are at least ten tunes that could be massive hits. When the violins attack the second movement”—I whistled it, inspired—“don’t you hear a number one song on the Billboard top one hundred? This melody would be perfect for those VERSES by Blake:
The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble Sheep a threat’ning horn;
While the Lily white shall in love delight,
Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.
Then a block of energetic brass, blowing their hearts out . . . I have goose bumps! Two or three more repetitions of the chorus, then the song ends on a very high note and the brass cut off at one fell swoop. Nothing could be easier . . . No, LINDA, for the love of God! Those EURASIAN sonorities; I’d lose all my money. Bring me some lined paper, please. I’m tired of recording ballads I never manage to work through to my own satisfaction. Now that you’re here and you know about music (though not precisely the kind required) . . . But listen: don’t you hear? It’s not a matter of the word that becomes music as it joins the rhythm, but the inverse process: the music coming undone into strips of words, the unconscious surfacing of strings of melody in their virgin state which, when intermingled and subjected to TECHNOLOGICAL processes, acquire the consistency of song. And we could add in that snatch of folk tune you were humming just now, that ROMANZA—why not?”
Y
YALTA. Sometimes I woke up to find myself possessed by the idea of boarding a plane and flying to YALTA. The irascible beauties I walked past every day in the Metro flowed south during the summer to toast their bodies in the sun, in a mood that could not be improved upon. A complete sampling of all that was on offer in the IMPERIUM—a world that extended from the luminous green of the subtropics to the white of the polar circle—deployed on deck chairs within a few meters of the sea. And me there, strolling along the shore, registering the astonishing diversity of EURASIA, which is to say, of much of the planet: pale blondes from the Baltic, Ukrainians with thick braids and honeyed skin, unsleeping Kazakhs, graceful Tartars; the daughters of hunters and reindeer herders who adorned their simple Taiwanese bathing suits with shamanistic trinkets and would often come down to the beach wearing slippers trimmed in otter skin: the cold breath of the tundra.
I. YALTA is the nervously scribbled note, the sweet little foot. I knew women who, over the slow fire of a twilight on the beach—coarse sand inside their dresses—would isolate every fracture in an unhappy marriage, rubbing salt into the wounds of their lives. Late at night, I would hear the sighs and ayes that floated across the boulevards of YALTA and think of Ивáн Бýнин (Ivan Bunin)—one of the sources for this entry—the writer who transported me to a new perception of the Russian language, which included “gentle breezes,” damp petticoats, burning thighs. In the 1936 short story “The Caucasus” an officer arrives on the shore of the Black Sea, in search of his adulterous wife.
Он искал ее в Геленджике, в Гаграх, в Сочи. На другой день по приезде в Сочи, он купался утром в море, потом брился, надел чистое белье, белоснежный китель, позавтракал в своей гостинице на террасе ресторана, выпил бутылку шампанского, пил кофе с шартрезом, не спеша выкурил сигару. Возвратясь в свой номер, он лег на диван и выстрелил себе в виски из двух револьверов.
He looked for her in Gelendzhik, in Gagry, in Sochi. The day after he arrived in [YALTA], he went for a morning swim in the ocean, then shaved, changed his underwear, and donned a military jacket that was white as snow. At lunch on the terrace of the hotel restaurant he drank a full bottle of champagne, drained a cup of coffee laced with chartreuse, and unhurriedly smoked a cigar. Then he went back to his room, lay down on the sofa, and fired two pistols into his temples.
Z
ZIZI. In Paris, they called her ZIZI, short for Zinaida Pavlovna. She had been a lady-in-waiting to the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, and in 1918 she fled straight from Tsarskoye Selo, the VILLAGE of the CZARS, to France. One limpid Monday in 1923, penniless, in despair, she went to a tryout for models at the haute couture salon of monsieur D**. The designer watched her move toward him, born along smoothly on those foreign legs of hers, gliding soundlessly as a swan: her grace, the fingers she extended in greeting as if they were alien things that did not belong to her. Monsieur D** dismissed all the little shop girls and seamstresses who had modeled for him until then. This was the start of another Russian period no less important than the one organized by Diaghilev years earlier. Understand? The exhaustion of trench warfare, gas creeping along the lowlands, the thrust of bayonets, the disaster of General Samsonov’s defeat on the Prussian front, the famine that stalked Saint Petersburg during the winter of 1919; a tremendous effort of nature and the intersecting tensions of history, all were necessary, all were translated into the elegance of the former Russian nobility on the CATWALKS of Paris: fashion modeling transformed into an art. You could cause exactly the same furor today, Linda, I imagine it perfectly. These Russian women, so strikingly beautiful; you, my angel, so perfectly in accord with my ideal of beauty . . . Russian beauty.
I. I notice ripples of light reflected on the canvas cloth beneath which I am slowly sipping a lemonade—YALTA, the sea, LINDA there beside me—and half-close my eyes. (At the next table, two Mongolian girls begin speaking in their harsh and unmistakable language, full of tongue clicks and hypnotically rolled rs. I follow that avalanche as the hare does the serpent’s rattle. I know perfectly well that if chance had sent me off to live in captivity in Inner Mongolia I would eventually have kissed the hard lips of the younger one, would have tapped her white teeth with the nail of my index finger, untangled that hair, wiry as a horse’s mane.) Full of life, now, compact, visible (Whitman). (Lleno de vida hoy, compacto, visible.) Me.
José Manuel Prieto was born in Havana in 1962. He lived in Russia for twelve years, has translated the works of Joseph Brodsky and Anna Akhmatova into Spanish, and has taught Russian history in Mexico City. He’s the author of Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire and Rex. He currently teaches at Seton Hall University and lives in New York City.
Esther Allen teaches at Baruch College, City University of New York. She has translated a number of books from Spanish and French, including the Penguin Classics volume José Martí: Selected Writings, which she edited, annotated and translated. She has been a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, has twice been awarded Translation Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been decorated by the French government as a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres.
Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia Page 17