by Sergio Pitol
“Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long, there will be good and bad to come, there will be everything. Great is mother Russia,” he said, and looked round on each side of him. “I have been all over Russia, and I have seen everything in her, and you may believe my words, my dear. There will be good and there will be bad. I went as a delegate from my village to Siberia, and I have been to the Amur River and the Altai Mountains and I settled in Siberia; I worked the land there, then I was homesick for mother Russia and I came back to my native village. We came back to Russia on foot; and I remember we went on a steamer, and I was thin as thin, all in rags, barefoot, freezing with cold, and gnawing a crust, and a gentleman who was on the steamer—the kingdom of heaven be his if he is dead—looked at me pitifully, and the tears came into his eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘your bread is black, your days are black...’ And when I got home, as the saying is, there was neither stick nor stall; I had a wife, but I left her behind in Siberia, she was buried there. So I am living as a day labourer. And yet I tell you: since then I have had good as well as bad. Here I do not want to die, my dear, I would be glad to live another twenty years; so there has been more of the good. And great is our mother Russia!” and again he gazed to each side and looked round.25
In a single paragraph he has invoked the greatness of Mother Russia three times! Not only is a Russian susceptible to feeling the pulse of Mother Russia. Rainer Maria Rilke, whom the Russian Lou Andreas-Salomé accompanied for several months as a guide, mother, muse, lover, teacher, writes on July 31, 1900, aboard a steamer down the Volga, “All that I had seen until then was but a picture of country, river, world. Here was the real thing in natural size. I felt as if I had watched the creation; few words for all that is, things made on God the Father’s scale.”26 What about that!
23 Pitol uses Tiflis to allude to the city’s historic name and one that Pushkin would have known, to distinguish it from contemporary Tbilisi. —Trans.
24 Translated by Richard Howard.
25 Translated by Constance Garnett.
26 Translated by Margaret Wettlin.
WHEN THE SOUL IS DELIRIOUS
“Paupers, soothsayers, beggars, mendicant chanters, lazars, wanderers from holy place to holy place, male and female, cripples, bogus saints, blind Psalm singers, prophets, idiots of both sexes, fools in Christ—these names, so close in meaning, of the double-ring sugar cakes of the everyday life of Holy Russia, paupers on the face of Holy Russia, holy Psalm singers, Christ’s cripples, fools in Christ27 of Holy Russia—these sugar cakes have adorned everyday life from Russia’s very beginnings, from the time of the first Tsar Ivans, the everyday life of Russia’s thousand years. All Russian historians, ethnographers, and writers have dipped their quills to write about these holy fools. These madmen or frauds—beggars, bogus saints, prophets—were held to be the Church’s brightest jewel, Christ’s own, intercessors for the world, as they have been called in classical Russian history and literature. A noted Muscovite fool in Christ—Ivan Yakovlevich,28 a onetime seminarian—who lived in Moscow in the middle of the nineteenth century, died in the Preobrazhensaya Hospital. His funeral was described by reporters, poets, and historians. A poet wrote in the Vedomosti:29
What feast is in the Yellow House30 afoot,
And wherefore are the multitudes there thronging,
In landaus and in cabs, nay e’en on foot,
And ev’ry heart is seized with fearful longing?
And in the midst is heard a voice of woe
In direst pain and grief ofttimes bewailing:
‘Alas, Ivan Yakovlevich is laid low,
The mighty prophet’s lamp too soon is failing.’
“Stravronsky, a chronicler of the times, relates in his Moscow Sketches that during the five days that the body lay unburied more than two hundred masses for the repose of the dead were sung over it. Many people spent the night outside the church. An eyewitness of the funeral, N. Barkov, the author of a monograph entitled Twenty-six Muscovite Sham Prophets, Sham Fools in Christ, Idiots, Male and Female, relates that Ivan Yakovevich was to have been buried on Sunday,
as had been announced in the Police Gazette, and that day at dawn his admirers began flocking in, but the funeral did not take place because of the quarrels which broke out over where exactly he was to be buried. It did not quite come to a free-for-all, but words were exchanged, and strong ones they were. Some wanted to take him to Smolensk, his birthplace; others worked busily to have him buried in the Pokrovsky Monastery, where a grave had even been dug for him in the church; others begged tearfully that his remains be given to the Alekseyevsky Nunnery; still others, hanging on to the coffin, tried to carry it off to the village Cherkizovo. It was feared that the body of Ivan Yakovlevich might be stolen.
“The historian writes: ‘All this time it was raining, and the mud was terrible, but nevertheless, as the body was carried from the lodgings to the chapel, from the chapel to the church, from the church to the cemetery, women, girls, ladies in crinolines prostrated themselves and crawled under the coffin.’ Ivan Yakovlevich—when he was alive—was in the habit of relieving himself on the spot:
He made puddles [writes the historian], and his attendants had orders to sprinkle the floor with sand. And this sand, watered by Ivan Yakovlevich, his admirers would gather and carry home, and it was discovered that the sand has healing properties. A baby gets a tummy ache, his mother gives him half a spoonful of the sand in the gruel, and the baby gets well. The cotton with which the deceased’s nose and ears had been plugged was divided into tiny pieces after the funeral service for distribution among the faithful. Many came with vials and collected in them the moisture which seeped from the coffin, the deceased having died of dropsy. The shirt in which Ivan Yakovlevich had died was torn to shreds. When the time came for the coffin to be carried out of the church, freaks, fools in Christ, pious hypocrites, wanderers from holy place to holy place, male and female were gathered outside. They had not gone into the church, which was packed, but stood in the streets. And right there in broad daylight, among the assembled, sermons were preached to the people, visions called up and seen, prophecies and denunciations uttered, money collected, and ominous roarings given forth.
“During the last years of his life Ivan Yakovlevich used to order his admirers to drink the water in which he had washed: they drank it. Ivan Yakovlevich made not only spoken but also written prophecies that have been preserved for historical research. People wrote to him; they would ask, ‘Will so-and-so get married?’ He would reply, ‘No work—no supper…’
“Kitai-gorod31 Moscow was the cheese in which the fools in Christ—its maggots—lived. Some wrote verse; others crowed like roosters, screamed like peacocks, or whistled like bullfinches; others heaped foulness on all and sundry in the name of the Lord; still others knew only a simple phrase which was held to be prophetic and gave the prophet his name; for example, ‘Man’s life’s a dream, the coffin—coach and team, the ride—was smooth as cream!’ Also to be found were devotees of dog barking who with their barking prophesied God’s will. To this estate belonged paupers, beggars, soothsayers, mendicant chanters, lazars, bogus saints—the cripples of all of Holy Russia; to it belonged peasants and townfolk, and gentry and merchants—children, old men, great, hulking louts, brood mares of women. They were all drunk. They were all sheltered by the onion-domed, sky-blue clam of the Asiatic Russian tsardoms; they were bitter as cheese and onions, for the onion domes atop the churches are, of course, the symbol of oniony life.”32
BORIS PILNYAK
Mahogany
Ardis, 1993
27 Pitol cites here a translator’s note to the Spanish translation, which employs the Spanish word “inocentes.” The note reads: “The ‘innocents’ (yurodivy) were fools from birth whom the Russian people considered holy, attributing to their words magical and prophetic meanings.”—Trans.
28 The English translation quoted here includes the following note:
“Ivan Yakovlevich Koreis
ha (ca. 1780-1861), for many years as inmate of a Moscow institution for the insane; his followers regarded him as a saint and a seer.”—Trans.
29 A note to the English translation reads: “Moskovskiye Vedomosti (Moscow Gazette), a conservative Moscow daily.”—Trans.
30 A note to the English translation reads: “Institution for the insane.” —Trans.
31 A note to the Spanish translation reads: “An ancient commercial district of Moscow.” —Trans.
32 Translated by Vera T. Reck and Michael Green.
2 JUNE
The trip is almost over. What a shame! Yesterday I spent a long time sitting on the terrace of the hotel. I made a lot of notes of my stay in Georgia. I went early to the Museum of Fine Arts, just to see the paintings again by Niko Pirosmani, a Georgian painter from the beginning of the twentieth-century, who made a living painting signs for stores, workshops, restaurants, and taverns. Compared to Georgian painting of the period, he is head and shoulders above the rest. But not just in Georgia, his paintings would stand out no matter where they were. He was a great painter, but he never knew it. Sometime in the twenties, old, alcoholic, poverty-stricken, he was discovered by some connoisseurs of art. His most notable paintings revolve around the supra, that passion of the Georgians: tables filled with delicacies, wine bottles, dinner guests in ceremonial attitude, like sculptures of themselves, and the small Jewish orchestra at the bottom or to the side. The outlines are powerful; the lines are broad and are one of the most important parts of the structure. Immediately after, I was taken to the airport, and at four in the afternoon, I was walking the streets of Moscow. The return has been sensational. Midsummer, 93 degrees. Last night, I took a stroll through the city center for several hours. This morning the same. I was looking for the house where Dr. Chekhov also saw patients. I got lost, took another route and arrived in the old neighborhood of my old embassy; it was more than worth it. It is a place where art nouveau villas abound—meticulously maintained precisely because they host embassies. I passed the International Bookshop opposite the Italian Embassy—lots of books in Spanish in the windows, most from Seix Barral. Under this sun, I’ve almost regained color. Fascinating city steeped in literature, only suitable to be appreciated by the person who has returned. I remember Pepe Donoso’s excitement when we met beside St. Basil’s years ago. And the surprise that I felt when he told me that he felt better here than in Leningrad. Leningrad, on that we both agree, is a city built all in the same period, governed by a unique architectural canon, which imprints on its beauty an unspeakable monotony, an artificiality that lacks the mysteries of Venice, Prague. “Having seen the inside of St. Isaac’s,” Pepe tells me, “says it all, it revealed another city to me. The emptiness of power.” I am so happy to be back! To see and feel the beginning of this resurrection. The city’s progress is evident in its cleanliness. They have restored many buildings during my absence and publishers are translating more. Books that just five years ago seemed impossible to imagine in Russia are being published. Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh, The Sleepwalkers, by Hermann Broch. Clearly, a new thaw has begun. It’s a shame that the same intensity is not present in the fields of Hispanism and Latin-Americanism, one doesn’t notice the same intensity! Apparently our literatures do not possess such capable defenders. Inna Terterian, who just died, has written the prologue to the works of Borges. That leaves Vera Kuteishchikova. Maybe there are new young ones I don’t know. For now, our literature’s time has not yet come, but it is coming. Hopscotch will soon appear, as will the Borges volume. In the hotel, I saw on television the opening of the World Cup of Soccer. Our president wasn’t allowed to speak; he was interrupted by a vociferous public that shouted over him. I’m making a list of characters in my novel. Three or four groups of families. They all have brothers and sisters, I don’t know why, but the plot requires it. Reading Gogol is indispensable. It will be the novel’s backbone. Gogol, his biographers, his characters…The key figure has to be the woman, the widow of the anthropologist studying indigenous festivals in Mexico. And I’ve decided that her existential adversary is an academic who epitomizes all the human miseries I detest: avarice, pettiness, inauthenticity, and other things of this tenor; and that he is (inconceivably) a fan of Gogol. I view it as a tribute to the author of The Nose and The Diary of a Madman.