by Andrei Bitov
The Monkey Link begins, psychologically, at the end point of Pushkin House. Lvova, the hero of that novel, feels that his life has traveled in a circle; he is trapped within coils of deceit and betrayal. Although powerless to free himself, he gives “the author” a copy of his grandfather’s journal, containing a message of salvation. In an essay titled “God Is,” written in the early twenties on the eve of his arrest by the new Soviet regime. Grandfather asserts that under other conditions he might never have looked up and learned that he was free. This insight establishes the framework of The Monkey Link.
The setting of Birds, the first of the novel’s three tales, is a peninsula in “East Prussia.” Königsberg, the historic seat of the princes of East Prussia, fell to Soviet forces in 1945 after a long siege. Founded in 1255 by the Teutonic Knights, the city had retained its German identity through centuries of struggle among neighboring empires for control of the lands along the Baltic coast. Between the World Wars. East Prussia was an island of German territory within Poland; on today’s map, Königsberg is the Kaliningrad District, an isolated scrap of the Russian Republic, with just the northern tip of the Kurish Spit extending beyond the international boundary into Lithuanian territory.
When Bitov went there in the late sixties to work on Pushkin House, the Kurish Spit was the westernmost reach of a monolithic empire. The Soviet system had rigidified again after the relative thaw of the Khrushchev years (Bitov has commented that Leningrad never even thawed as much as Moscow). Leonid Brezhnev’s regime seemed unshakable. In August of 1968 the flowering of the “Prague Spring” had been crushed by Soviet tanks. Writers like Sinvavsky, Brodsky, and Solzhenitsyn were being cruelly harassed and would soon be exiled. Pacing the beaches of the long, narrow sandspit and writing about the sequelae of a Stalinist childhood, Bitov was balancing on a geographical and political knife blade between East and West.
Revisiting that shore in Birds, the author-hero finds his thoughts returning to human aggression, to empires, boundaries, anti-tank barriers, to images of pursuit and flight, concealment and confinement, exile and homeland. He is trapped, like the feathered prisoners who blunder into the nets erected on the Spit by ornithologists, and the only way out is up. Hence his impulse toward God—toward the ideal, the “supreme thought.” (This, too, is appropriate to the setting: many an eighteenth-century philosopher made the pilgrimage to Königsberg to study under Immanuel Kant, who lived and taught there all his life.) In dialogue with a Soviet “priest of science,” the hero’s sense of exile is transmuted into a discussion of man’s abandonment of his primitive niche in nature. But in his private reflections on the ambiguous paradise of the Spit, he stops barely short of equating ordinary Soviet life with spiritual death.
That equation is stated more explicitly in the novel’s second tale, Man in a Landscape. The germ of this tale is an incident in the final chapter of A Captive of the Caucasus, in which the author-hero, on his way home to Leningrad from Georgia, visits a historic site. Depressed by the shoddy restoration effort, he suddenly perceives God’s original design in the Russian landscape and feels that the reality around him is like the back of a painting: he has momentarily fallen through a hole in the canvas and landed in the paint layer. He is inspired to write a new “journey,” to be called Man in a Landscape: New Information on Birds.
Man in a Landscape was thus conceived as a mischievous reversal of “reality,” a view of the Soviet paradise from below. The allegorical setting is a somewhat fantastic preserve outside Moscow, dating from the time of the early tsars. With an artist as his quasi-supernatural guide, the hero journeys into the medieval heart of Russia. From there he descends further into the darkness of modern treachery (the lowest, ninth circle of Dante’s hell), and finally, in an autumn sunset in 1979, arrives at what may or may not prove to be the threshold of paradise.
At that pivotal moment in history, Soviet forces were preparing to invade Afghanistan. For Bitov, as he has since told an interviewer, the invasion marked the end of the twentieth century—and the beginning of the end of the empire that the Soviets had so stubbornly dragged behind them. When he wrote this story in 1983. however, public protest of the Afghan debacle was still impossible. Cold War rhetoric was intensifying under the new regime of Yuri Andropov. Bitov himself was in trouble with the authorities for allowing Pushkin House to appear abroad (1978) and for co-editing the samizdat anthology Metropol (1979). He was virtually unable to publish.
The author-hero of Man in a Landscape hints at similar circumstances, and they emerge undisguised in Awaiting Monkeys, the novel’s third tale. By the time Bitov undertook to write it, his previously suppressed works (including Pushkin House and Man in a Landscape) had at last been published in Russia, he had made several trips to the West, and he could openly parody the Soviet utopia. He chose to parody his pre-glasnost self as well.
In another era, he might have described this phase of his hero’s pilgrimage in terms of a journey to the holy sites of the Mediterranean region. But his hero, in 1983, cannot hope to travel abroad, and for Russians the Caucasus has been a traditional substitute. Abkhazia is a particularly fitting locale, on a number of counts. Its native name, Apsny, means “Land of the Soul.” It still boasts a remnant of an ancient forest to which Christians were exiled from Rome and Constantinople. It is also the shore to which Jason voyaged with his Argonauts, in quest of the golden fleece that would regain his throne from a usurper. For the last thousand years the nation’s political fortunes have been bound up with those of neighboring Georgia—and in the twentieth century, therefore, with Stalin. Its capital, Sukhum, has been the site of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine fortresses, Ottoman and Genoese slave markets. Russian and Soviet health resorts, and now also a research institute’s monkey colony. A visit to the “free” monkeys becomes the goal of the author-hero’s travels: he will exploit the colony for satirical purposes.
The first two parts of Awaiting Monkeys, “The Horse” and “The Cow,” stand in the same relation to each other as Birds does to Man in a Landscape: a journey to an equivocal paradise, followed by a journey to a netherworld where the hero gains partial insight. In “The Horse” (perhaps because the date is given as August 23, anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939), the hero travels back in memory through the Stalin years to the collectivization of agriculture, which emptied the Russian village and turned the populace into a nation of policemen. His earlier sense of society’s spiritual death thus acquires a symbolic focus—the peasant, repository of the Russian soul—and in “The Cow” he begins to see his own complicity in the Mephistophelean bargains of Soviet history.
The pattern is repeated again in the third part. “Fire.” From Moscow, where the evil of the socialist paradise is so banal as to be its own parody, the hero plunges into an unreal world of filmmaking and literary criticism in Azerbaijan and Georgia: there, fleeing demons in 1984, he finds himself at the source of evil and comes close to genuine insight. The plot then spirals back and forth between Moscow and Abkhazia, from the illusory freedom of the Gorbachev years to a moment of self-confrontation to a moment of revelation.
All the points visited in this novel are stages in the hero’s quest for a spiritual homeland. But if those points are plotted on a map of the Soviet Union, the line obtained gives his journey an added subliminal significance. In the Great Patriotic War of 1941—45, German forces failed to reach either Moscow or the oil fields of Baku; Leningrad withstood a 900-day siege (Bitov has written of being evacuated, as a child, over frozen Lake Ladoga). The boundary of the German Occupation was thus an irregular diagonal line starting below Leningrad on the Baltic shore, passing just west of Moscow, extending almost to the Caspian Sea in the south, and from there turning west across the Caucasus to the Black Sea. In its own way, this book is a tour of the front and an exorcism of childhood trauma.
It is also an epic poem: the hero is Odysseus returning from war, Jason dethroning the usurper, Aeneas hoping to found a new empire—the empir
e of the soul, as Dante’s Virgil called it. The poetic structure of the book grows organically with the narrative. On the first page the hero sets sail in Lermontov’s “air-ocean.” where demons roam and angels watch unseen; along the way the demons and even the angels become increasingly visible and real. The components of the opening metaphor (modern man as an armored creature who lives on a boundary line and never looks up unless compelled) become actual elements of the final scene at the barricade. The gyrations of the bird in the trap become the loops of the hero’s journey, the shadow cast by the painter’s Gogolian nose becomes the author’s alter ego—image after image seizes life and plays its role in the narrative.
Bitov’s allusions to other literary works complement this structure. Whether quoting openly or writing in “invisible ink,” like Akhmatova, he is taking the azimuth, as it were—measuring off arcs that connect the fictional moment with an outside reality and thus define his location, or his hero’s, or ours. As more of these sight lines are added, they intersect to form an airy design of their own, enveloping the narrative in a sphere of relevant human experience. Fundamentally, Bitov draws on our shared literary heritage: the Bible, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, the Faust legend. He also uses elements from Russian classics, but they undergo a late-twentieth-century metamorphosis, and his hero exists in a world that knows Mann and Grass, Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov.
There is special beauty, impossible to translate, in the ties between this book and the twentieth-century Russian poets—Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky, Kuzmin, Pasternak, Brodsky. The Western reader will hear in their names a litany of persecution and exile, but what must also be remembered is that these people salvage the human spirit from the flames of their century. Many of them knew each other, knew the Caucasus, translated from the Georgian: their work spans the Soviet era. Like the invisible beings poised silently in Bitov’s mountain forest, they are a living presence in the novel.
In its deepest structure, this “pilgrimage novel” is a drama of salvation—a battle between good and evil for possession of the hero’s soul, and for the soul of his nation. The hero’s journey is not done: it is the eternal struggle upward, toward God. But it takes place in time, our time, and its end point in this novel is an unforgettable moment of hope in our history.
The notes that follow [these have been converted to footnotes for ebook] should be consulted only if the reader feels need of further information in order to gauge Bitov’s irony. I have tried to provide relevant details that might be part of a Russian’s general background of awareness. Since Bitov delights in what he calls “rhymes”—seemingly accidental correspondences that give added meaning to life—I have also included a few “rhymes” from my own recollections of the century and its literature. The reader will undoubtedly find many more.
For advice and encouragement in the preparation of this translation I sincerely thank Rosemarie Tietze, the author’s German translator; Professor Michael Connolly of Boston College: Irina Ryumshina, Vladimir Gurin, Boris Hoffman, Rima Zolina, and all the very kind friends who commented on my manuscript.
{1} When Bitov revised Birds in 1993, he “censored” his own opening and closing remarks by substituting symbolic rows of dots, as poets from Pushkin to Akhmatova have sometimes done when lines were cut by official censors.
Bitov also eliminated some of the ecological argument, reshaped the text typographically in a way that suggests his hero’s tendency to intellectualize, and inserted mention of East Prussia and 1968.
{2} In Mikhail Lermontov’s “The Demon” (1841), the stars sail in the air-ocean, indifferent to earthly passion. The demon of the poem is a fallen angel trying to seduce a Georgian maiden. He pursues her to a convent, but she dies in his embrace, and when he tries to claim her soul the angels bear her away.
{3} From Alexander Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum (1835). Never allowed to travel abroad, Pushkin unofficially accompanied the Russian army to Armenia, crossed the river into Turkey, and was chagrined to find himself “still in Russia.”
{4} From an untitled poem by Evgeny Baratynsky (1840). He goes on to say that for the “priest of the word,” thought is a naked sword dividing him from the life of the senses.
{5} Ivan Krylov, much-loved fabulist (1769—1844).
{6} From Nikolai Zabolotsky’s poem “A Stroll” (1929), which continues: “An equal suffering is their invisible lot … All of nature smiled, like a tall prison … And all of nature laughs, dying every second.”
{7} From Lermontov’s famous lyric “The Sail” (1832).
{8} The author notes that this is from the poetry of Galaktion Tabidze, a well-known Georgian writer (1892—1959).
{9} From Maxim Gorky’s “Song of the Stormy Petrel” (1901), a romantic allegory urging revolution.
{10} Phrases from Soviet songs.
{11} In A Captive of the Caucasus, Bitov writes of Amsterdam as “a city whose name, to us, means Peter the Great.”
{12} That is, an unbaptized convert, still receiving training in Christian doctrine. In the Russian Orthodox Church, catechumens are “strangers” who may listen to the sermon but must leave before the sacraments.
{13} The epigraph is taken from the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 66. In Marvin Meyer’s translation (Harper San Francisco, 1992), it reads: “Jesus said, ‘Show me the stone that the builders rejected: That is the cornerstone.’ ”
The Gospel of Thomas, although cited by some of the early church fathers, was lost until 1945, when a Coptic version came to light in Egypt. It is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, with many parallels to the canonical four gospels. It includes no promise of a second coming, however; in this gospel, Jesus teaches that the kingdom is to be found here, around us and within us, and counsels us to “Be passersby.” The author of the gospel identifies himself as the Apostle Thomas, called Didymus (“The Twin”). Some Christians have believed him to be literally the twin brother of Jesus, but modern scholars generally interpret the name as a metaphor meaning that each person should strive to be as a twin to Jesus.
{14} Peter’s cabin has been moved from Archangel to Kolomenskoe, a former estate of the Grand Princes of Moscow, overlooking the Moscow River. The dominant feature of the estate is a tall church built in 1532 to celebrate the birth of Ivan IV (the Terrible). There is also a Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist.
{15} All of these Russian artists [Shishkin, Ayvazovsky, Levitan, Vasiliev] had ties to the late-nineteenth-century group called the “Wanderers.” Shishkin is best known for his paintings of the forest, Ayvazovsky for his seascapes, Levitan and Vasiliev for their emotional landscapes. Repin painted a variety of subjects; one of his historical canvases, The Zaporozhye Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan, shows the men gleefully defiant.
{16} From Pushkin’s play Mozart and Salieri (1830). Apropos of rumors that the playwright Beaumarchais had poisoned two wives, Mozart remarks: “But he’s a genius, like you and me. Genius and villainy are two things incompatible. Isn’t that true?” At this point, Salieri drops poison into Mozart’s glass.
{17} One of Shishkin’s best-loved paintings (Morning in the Pine Forest, 1889) includes some bear cubs. The painting is reproduced on the wrapper of a popular Russian candy.
{18} Ayvazovsky and Repin collaborated on a painting in which Pushkin is shown gesturing with his top hat as he stands on some jagged rocks, dangerously close to the pounding surf. The painting’s title is taken from Pushkin’s poem “To the Sea” (1824).
{19} From works of Maxim Gorky, founder of Socialist Realism. The “Man with a capital letter” was Lenin.
{20} Danko, the hero of Gorky’s “Old Woman Izergil,” rips his flaming heart from his breast and uses it as a torch to lead his people through a dark forest.
{21} From Anna Akhmatova’s “Seaside Sonnet” (1958).
{22} “Simyon” is not a standard Russian name. The spelling suggests the pronunciation of the name Simeon, a biblical form of Simon (Semyon).
{23} The ninth-century Byzantine missionaries who created the first Slavonic alphabet (“Cyrillic”) and translated the Bible.
{24} From an “urban ballad” sung by the author’s friend S. G. Saltykov.
{25} The Emperor Paul (Pavel Petrovich, great-grandson of Peter the Great) had a quarrelsome disposition and a snub nose. He was assassinated with the complicity of his son in 1801.
Mentioned by Dante (Inferno, Canto II), and perhaps also relevant here in this anti-world, is St. Paul’s experience of visiting paradise (II Corinthians 12:2—4): “ … Whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth.”
{26} Adapted from Lermontov’s long moral poem Sashka (1839).
{27} In Dead Souls (1842), Mizhuev always protests against, but then submits to his brother-in-law, the braggart Nozdrev. (The name Nozdrev derives from the Russian for “nostril”—the hero is following his own nose, so to speak.)
{28} Anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939, which precipitated the Soviet takeover of the Baltic countries and led directly to World War II. The fiftieth anniversary, in 1989, was the occasion for a protest demonstration in which two million people formed a human chain across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, seeking independence from the USSR.