The Monkey Link

by Andrei Bitov

  {29} Popular in the Caucasus, chacha is a strong homemade liquor distilled from grape pressings.

  {30} Alexander Blok, in “Free Thoughts” (1907). Blok died in 1921, a victim of hunger and disease in the aftermath of the Civil War. His ambiguous poem “The Twelve” shows marauding Red Guardsmen as apostles of the Revolution.

  {31} Senyok is a familiar diminutive of the name Semyon. The slang word translated here as “drifter” originally referred to a seaman who had lost his berth on a ship. The word is now broadly applied to any vagrant alcoholic.

  {32} From Lermontov’s poem “Homeland” (1841), in which he professes to love Russia not for its “glory bought with blood,” but for its landscape and the homely details of the countryside.

  {33} The hero of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1868).

  {34} The unfulfilled dream of Ostap Bender, the great schemer of Ilf and Petrov’s satire The Golden Calf (1931), was to abscond to Rio de Janeiro with his suitcase full of money and walk down the street wearing white pants like the mulattos.

  {35} The alcoholic narrator of Venedict Erofeev’s painfully comic novel Moscow to the End of the Line (1977) maintains that “Privy Councillor Goethe” secretly wanted to drink but instead forced Faust and Mephistopheles to drink on his behalf.

  {36} Among the many other structures designed by A. V. Shchusev (1873 – 1949) was Lenin’s mausoleum.

  {37} Lavrenty Beria (1899—1953) played a leading role in Stalin’s purges as head of the Soviet secret police.

  {38} That is, designated to receive a much smaller supply of food and consumer goods than the first-category cities, Moscow and Leningrad. (Voronezh is the provincial capital to which the poet Osip Mandelstam was exiled in the mid-1930s.)

  {39} Anton Chekhov’s familiar story (1899) of ill-starred, middle-aged love.

  {40} From Joseph Brodsky’s “Letters to a Roman Friend” (1972).

  {41} Soviet “Armenian jokes” were often cast in the form of reports from Radio Erevan. The Chukchi, a frequent target of ethnic humor, are a remote Arctic people.

  {42} From “To the Detractors of Russia” (1831), Pushkin’s patriotic reply to Frenchmen who were siding with Polish agitators against the tsar. You hate us, he says, because we toppled your idol Napoleon, but the Russian land—from Finland to Colchis (Abkhazia)—will rise up united against anyone who interferes in our family quarrel.

  {43} Ermak Timofeev (d. 1585) was the Cossack ataman who began Russia’s conquest of Siberia. The Drang nach Osten was the “drive to the east” of the medieval Teutonic Knights.

  {44} A novel by Victor Hugo (1866), in which a fisherman trying to raise a sunken ship battles a giant octopus.

  {45} From a Russian folk song. But the motif also brings to mind the beautiful red-shirted youth who is the hero’s rival in Mikhail Kuzmin’s novella Kings (1906).

  {46} From “The Cherry,” a bawdy poem classified among the dubia of the youthful Pushkin.

  {47} The reference is to a banquet in Stalin’s honor, as recounted by Abkhazian writer Fazil Iskander in his novel Sandro of Chegem (1973).

  {48} The prince of Abkhazia sought and received Russian protection in 1810, but the Muslim tribesmen of the highlands resisted infidel rule for the rest of the century. Deluded by promises of religious toleration, thousands emigrated to Turkey.

  {49} This town in the Russian Republic, just over the northern border of Abkhazia, was a center of Partisan resistance against the German Occupation during World War II.

  {50} During the calamitous flood in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” Peter the Great (“He”) is metaphorically linked with an angry Triton destroying the people.

  For his naiad, the woman named Margarita, Bitov draws on the Faust legend. In Goethe’s version (1832), Faust’s seduction of Margaret leads to her death, which causes him to repent his bargain with Mephistopheles. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1940), Margarita gladly enters into a compact with the devil in order to free the Master from a Soviet mental hospital.

  {51} On this date in 1940, as Germany appeared to be on the verge of gaining the whole world, the hero of Mann’s Dr. Faustus died; in 1968, a small, brave, futile demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia took place in Red Square; in 1991, Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist Party.

  {52} An echo of Pushkin’s fairy tale “King Saltan” (1831), in which the queen reportedly bears a child of indeterminate sex and species.

  {53} The Russian words for “death” and “laughter” begin with the same syllable, sme. Bitov’s wordplay recalls Velemir Khlebnikov’s “Incantation by Laughter” (1910).

  {54} A wandering Ukrainian philosopher and poet (1722—94), who wrote dialogues treating biblical problems from the point of view of Platonism and Stoicism.

  {55} Kornei Chukovsky (1882—1969), distinguished author, translator, and critic.

  {56} Engels said that the monkey became man when he took a stick in his hands.

  {57} Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s The Unforgettable Year 1919, about Stalin’s role in the Civil War, received the Stalin Prize in 1950 and was made into a film, with music by Dmitry Shostakovich.

  {58} The great epic poem by twelfth-century Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli.

  {59} In 978, after two hundred years of independence from Byzantium, the kingdom of Abkhazia was absorbed by its powerful neighbor Georgia. At mass demonstrations in Sukhum and Lykhny in the spring of 1978, Abkhazians threatened to secede from Georgia and join the Russian Republic.

  {60} In 1991, the body of a man who had been frozen in a Tirolian glacier for some 5,000 years was damaged by Austrian rescue workers. A jurisdictional dispute with Italy ensued.

  {61} Both author and hero of Rustaveli’s epic. (Avtandil is not, in fact, the knight in the tiger skin, but rather his spiritual brother; with a third knight, they rescue a maiden from demon country.)

  {62} The anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was regularly celebrated by a two-day holiday featuring massive parades.

  {63} On September 1, 1983, en route from Anchorage to Seoul, a Korean Air Lines jet was shot down by the Soviets near Sakhalin with 269 people aboard, most of them civilians.

  {64} The title of this fictitious book parodies a contemporary genre of patriotic Georgian novels. Colchis is the classical name for Abkhazia, to which Jason, in order to regain his throne from a usurper, voyaged in quest of a golden fleece hanging in an oak grove. The Black Sea was known in ancient times as the Pontus Euxinus.

  The plot of the book is a pastiche of details from familiar works on the themes of betrayal and usurpation. The cloak with a red lining is emblematic of Pontius Pilate, in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita; the broad-chested Ossetian is Stalin, in the poem (1933) for which Mandelstam was arrested and exiled.

  {65} For political reasons, the princes of medieval Russia often postponed baptism until they thought their time had come.

  {66} The river Kura is in Georgia.

  {67} This often repeated phrase is from Gorky’s tale “Old Woman Izergil”.

  {68} That is, a beer hall—so called after Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

  {69} Mikhail Kuzmin (1872—1936), an esoteric writer, openly homosexual, with an interest in classical and religious themes. His poetry reflects his spiritual quests in southern lands such as Italy and Egypt.

  {70} Homelessness, or the lack of a residence permit, was a crime in the Soviet Union.

  {71} Saltychikha was an eighteenth-century landowner famous for torturing her serfs. M. E. Saltykov, who took the pen name Shchedrin, was a nineteenth-century novelist.

  {72} From a Soviet song, often quoted ironically by people wistful for bourgeois material comfort.

  {73} Immensely popular satirists of Soviet bureaucracy; joint authors of The Golden Calf.

  {74} A mad scientist bent on cornering the world gold market with his death ray, in a novel (1925) by Alexei Tolstoy, who was a distant relative of the great Lev Tolstov.

 
{75} Adapted from Pushkin’s self-congratulatory exclamation on finishing his drama Boris Godunov (as recounted in a letter to a friend in 1825).

  {76} H. G. Neuhaus (1888-1964), eminent and influential Soviet pianist. (His daughter became Boris Pasternak’s second wife.)

  {77} Pushkin is reported to have made this remark on reading an early draft of Gogol’s Dead Souls, the theme of which—the purchase of lists of dead serfs, to be mortgaged for a profit—Pushkin himself had suggested to Gogol.

  {78} In St. Petersburg (Leningrad).

  {79} On October 26, 1983, The New York Times reported that journalist Oleg Bitov (the author’s brother) had defected from the USSR in September and had been granted asylum in Britain. He reappeared in Moscow a year later, claiming that he had been abducted from a film festival in Venice and held involuntarily by British agents (New York Times, September 19, 1984).

  {80} These details suggest a central scene in Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus: an I/he dialogue between the hero and his changeable devil, who emanates a bone-chilling cold despite the summer warmth of Italy. (Zyablikov’s name derives from the Russian for “chilly.”)

  {81} Adapted from an untitled lyric by Joseph Brodsky (1962)—printed in 1990 as the opening poem of the first extensive collection of his émigré works published in Russia.

  {82} The demons of Dostoevsky’s novel (also known as The Possessed; 1871) are radical revolutionaries, precursors of the Bolsheviks.

  {83} Vladimir Dahl’s dictionary was published in 1880—82.

  {84} The Rafik is a light van; its nickname derives from the initials of the Latvian factory where it is produced. By linguistic coincidence, Rafik can also be a personal name or nickname in several of the Caucasian lands.

  {85} Although he has an ordinary Russian first name, Valery Givivovich’s patronymic is strange to Russian ears because it derives from the name of his Georgian father.

  {86} Jvari is the site of a sixth-century cathedral overlooking the confluence of the Aragva and Kura rivers in Georgia. The quotation is from the opening stanzas of Lermontov’s poem “The Novice” (1833), where he mentions that the Georgian king had entrusted his nation to Russia, and describes it as blessed by God behind Russian bayonets. The poem is the story of a rebellious young monk who tries to flee to his native mountains rather than take monastic vows. He travels in a circle, back to the monastery, and dies an exile.

  {87} From a children’s counting rhyme.

  {88} Sukhum … Sukhumi … Batumi … Batum

  The short forms of these names are older, often used by local people; the Georgian forms ending in -i were accepted as standard by Soviet authorities.

  {89} From Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman.” The poem’s angry hero addresses the threat to the statue of Peter the Great, whom he blames for the death of his beloved in a Petersburg flood. The “idol” then pursues the hero through the streets until he dies.

  {90} Here the name Rezo is substituted for Vano, in an exchange of remarks taken from one of Erlom Akhvlediani’s “Niko and Vano” stories (1969). Of these modern fairy tales Bitov wrote in 1973: “Niko and Vano are one man simultaneously, they are pronouns of a kind: I and he, he and I, I and they, as he, he as I … ”

  {91} Ruler of Georgia in the twelfth century, when the country was at the height of its power.

  {92} This passage appears to be from a seventeenth-century Church Slavonic translation of the writings of St. John Chrysostom (d. 407). He began his religious life as an ascetic in the desert outside Antioch, but eventually became Archbishop of Constantinople and gained fame for his eloquence in condemning the sins of the mighty. Banished by the empress in 403, he was recalled at the insistence of the common people but was soon banished again, first to Armenia and then to what is now Pitsunda, in Abkhazia. An old man, forced to travel on foot, he died on the journey, in a Pontic town called Comana, whose exact location is now unknown.

  {93} From Pushkin’s poem “Arion” (1827), about a legendary Greek poet of the sixth century B.C. Like Orpheus on Jason’s Argo, Arion had only one task on the ship—to make music for the crew. (He survived the wreck of the ship when a dolphin enchanted by his song guided him to shore.)

  {94} Poet Afanasy Fet (1820—92) was of German extraction.

  {95} Hyrcanian, Iberia: Classical names for the Caspian Sea and Georgia. (“Author-Khan” and his men follow roughly the same route as the narrator of this book, from the Baltic to Abkhazia, via Moscow, Baku, and Tbilisi.)

  {96} If Goethe’s Faust prays for the moment to linger, it is time for Mephistopheles to claim his soul. (That moment comes when Faust—who has devoted his life to good works after repenting his fatal seduction of Margaret—admires a landscape that he has reclaimed from under the sea. Despite his old bargain, he is redeemed.)

  {97} The phrase recalls the opening of Chekhov’s story “The Student” (1894). Beside a bonfire on a wintry Good Friday, a divinity student talks about the long, chill night during which Peter denied Christ three times before cock-crow. The student is comforted by the realization that Peter’s betrayal and grief are linked to the present day by an unbroken chain of events.

  {98} A variant of a poem by Osip Mandelstam (1917), on the themes of distance, time, and exile, with allusions to the voyages of Jason and Odysseus.

  {99} Adapted from lines near the end of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1831). In Nabokov’s translation (Bollingen, 1975): “A restlessness took hold of him, / the urge toward a change of places.”

  {100} There are women of whom you’re unworthy … I have no God, I have no Mom . . . : Lines by the author’s friend Gleb Gorbovsky.

  {101} That is, Khasbulatov and Nishanov. Both are politicians from the Caucasus; they figured in the televised parliamentary struggles over the status of the Soviet republics—struggles which led to the failed coup against Gorbachev on August 19, 1991, and ultimately to Boris Yeltsin’s accession to power.

  {102} The phrase recalls Pushkin’s sardonic fairy tale “The Golden Cockerel” (1834). Perched on a tower, the cock crows thrice to warn of approaching danger. The danger proves to be a woman; the king’s two sons kill each other in battle over her; the king wins her. Insufficiently grateful, he is pecked to death by the cockerel.

  On quite another level, the image recalls Mandelstam’s poem “Tristia” (1918). In literal translation: “ … Who can know … what the cock’s crowing promises us when fire burns on the acropolis, or why, at the dawn of a new life … , a cock, the herald of the new life, beats his wings on the city wall?”

  {103} The first phrase is from a modern proverb; the second, from an ancient Russian folk song.

  {104} Stalin said, in 1931, “Anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous survival of cannibalism.”

  {105} Based on the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 22. In Marvin Meyer’s translation: “Jesus said to them, ‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female … then you will enter [the kingdom].’ ”

  {106} “Manuscripts don’t burn,” says the devil in The Master and Margarita, and from a pile of manuscripts he retrieves the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate and Jesus. (The Master himself had burned it, in fear and anger, because he could not publish it in the Soviet Union of the 1920s.)

  {107} Nikolai Gogol, after completing his novel Dead Souls, turned to religion and tried to write a sequel depicting a moral, reformed world. He burned his drafts shortly before his death in 1852.

  {108} Adapted from Pushkin’s famous poem “The Prophet” (1826), a grand statement of the poet’s sacred mission to “fire the hearts of men” with God’s word. Untranslatable echoes of the poem are worked into Bitov’s dialogue, for an irreverent comic effect.

  {109} In 356 B.C., in order to immortalize his name, Herostratus set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus (on the night Alexand
er the Great was born, as it happened).

  {110} Tea brewed so strong as to have a narcotic effect—a concoction favored by prison-camp inmates.

  {111} From Boris Pasternak’s “August,” one of the poems in Dr. Zhivago (1955). The Transfiguration of Our Lord, which under the pre-Revolutionarv calendar was observed by the Russian Orthodox Church on August 6. now falls on August 19. The holiday is traditionally associated with the apple harvest.

  {112} The quotation is adapted from a medieval account of Prince Alexander Nevsky’s successful battle to drive the Teutonic Knights from Pskov in 1242. Above the carnage on the bloodied ice of Lake Peipus, the Russian warriors see “God’s army” coming to their aid.