Worlds Apart

by Alexander Levitsky

  He was thinking it was getting more and more expensive to live. Life was hard for working folk. From over there pierced Petersburg, both with the arrows of prospects and with a gang of stone giants.

  From over there rose Petersburg: there buildings blazed out of a wave of clouds. There, it seemed, hovered someone spiteful, cold. From over there, out of the howling chaos someone stared with stony gaze, skull and ears protruding into the fog.

  All of that was in the mind of the stranger. He clenched his fist in his pocket. And he remembered that the leaves were falling.

  He knew it all by heart. These fallen leaves were the last leaves for many. He became a bluish shadow.

  * * *

  And as for us, here’s what we’ll say: oh, Russian people, oh, Russian people! Don’t let the crowd of shadows in from the islands! Black and damp bridges are already thrown across the waters of Lethe. If only they could be dismantled …

  Too late….

  And the shadows thronged across the bridge. And the dark shadow of the stranger.

  Rhythmically swinging in his hand was a not exactly small, yet not very large bundle.

  AND, CATCHING SIGHT, THEY DILATED, LIT UP, AND FLASHED …

  The aged senator communicated with the crowd that flowed in front of him by means of wires (telegraph and telephone). The shadowy stream seemed to him like the calmly current news of the world. Apollon Apollonovich was thinking: about the stars. Rocking on the black cushions, he was calculating the power of the light perceived from Saturn.

  Suddenly—

  —his face grimaced and began to twitch. His bluerimmed eyes rolled back convulsively. His hands flew up to his chest. And his torso reeled back, while the top hat struck the wall and fell on his lap.

  The involuntary nature of his movement was not subject to explanation. The senator’s code of rules had not foreseen … Contemplating the flowing silhouettes, Apollon Apollonovich likened them to shining dots. One of these dots broke loose from its orbit and hurtled at him with dizzying speed, taking the form of an immense crimson sphere—

  —among the bowlers on the corner, he caught sight of a pair of eyes. And the eyes expressed the inadmissible. They recognized the senator, and, having recognized him, they grew rabid, dilated, lit up, and flashed.

  Subsequently, on delving into the details of the matter, Apollon Apollonovich understood, rather than remembered, that the upstart intellectual was holding a bundle in his hand.

  Hemmed in by a stream of vehicles, the carriage had stopped at an intersection. A stream of upstart intellectuals had pressed against the senator’s carriage, destroying the illusion that he, Apollon Apollonovich, in flying along the Nevsky, was flying billions of miles away from the human myriapod. Perturbed, Apollon Apollonovich had moved closer to the window. At that point he had caught sight of the upstart intellectual. Later he had remembered that face, and was perplexed by the difficulty of assigning it to any of the existing categories.

  It was at just that moment that the stranger’s eyes had dilated, lit up, and flashed.

  In the swarms of dingy smoke, leaning back against the wall of the carriage, he was still seeing the same thing in his eyes. His heart pounded and expanded, while in his breast arose the sensation of a crimson sphere about to burst into pieces. < … >

  THUS IT IS ALWAYS

  A phosphorescent blot raced across the sky, misty and deathlike. The Heavens gradually misted over in a phosphorescent glow, making iron roofs and chimneys flicker. Here flowed the waters of the Moika. On one side loomed that same three-storied building, with projections on top.

  Wrapped in furs, Nikolai Apollonovich was making his way along the Moika, his head sunk in his overcoat. Nameless tremors arose in his heart. Something awful, something sweet …

  He thought: could this too be love? He recalled. He shuddered.

  A shaft of light flew by: a black court carriage flew by. Past window recesses it bore blood red, lamps that seemed drenched in blood. They played and shimmered on the black waters of the Moika. The spectral outline of a footman’s tricorne and the outline of the wings of his greatcoat flew, with the light, out of the fog and into the fog.

  Nikolai Apollonovich stood for a while in front of the house. He kept standing and then suddenly disappeared in the entryway.

  The entryway door flew open before him; and the sound struck him in the back. Darkness enveloped him, as though all had fallen away (this is most likely how it is the first instant after death). Nikolai Apollonovich was not thinking about death now; he was thinking about his own gestures. And in the darkness his actions took on a fantastic stamp. He seated himself on the cold step by the door, his face buried in fur, listening to the beating of his heart.

  Nikolai Apollonovich sat in the darkness.

  * * *

  The stone curve of the Winter Canal showed its plangent expanse. The Neva was buffeted by the onslaught of a damp wind. The soundlessly flying surfaces glimmered, the walls that formed the side of the four-storied palace gleamed in the moonlight.

  No one, nothing.

  Only the Canal streaming its waters. Was that shadow of a woman darting onto the little bridge to throw itself off? Was it Liza? No, just the shadow of a woman of Petersburg. And having traversed the Canal, it was still running away from the yellow house on the Gagarin Embankment, beneath which it stood every evening and looked long at the window.

  Ahead the Square was now widening out. Greenish bronze statues emerged one after another from everywhere. Hercules and Poseidon looked on as always. Beyond the Neva rose an immense mass-the outlines of islands and houses. And it cast its amber eyes into the fog, and it seemed to be weeping.

  Higher up, ragged arms mournfully stretched vague outlines across the sky. Swarm upon swarm they rose above the Neva’s waves, coursing off toward the zenith. And when they touched the zenith, the phosphorescent blot would precipitously attack them, flinging itself upon them from the heavens.

  The shadow of a woman, face buried in a muff, darted along the Moika to that same entryway from which it would dart out every evening, and where now, on the cold step, below the door, sat Nikolai Apollonovich. The entryway door closed in front of it; the entryway door slammed shut in front of it. Darkness enveloped the shadow, as though all had fallen away behind it. In the entryway, the black little lady thought about simple and earthly things. She had already reached her hand toward the bell, and it was then that she saw an outline, apparently masked, rise up before her from the step.

  And when the door opened and a shaft of light illuminated the darkness of the entryway for an instant, the exclamation of a terrified maid confirmed it all for her, because first there appeared in the open door an apron and an overstarched cap; then the apron and cap recoiled from the door. In the sudden flash a picture of indescribable strangeness was revealed. The black outline of the little lady flung itself through the open door.

  Behind her back, out of the gloom, rose a rustling clown in a bearded, trembling half-mask.

  One could see how, out of the gloom, the fur of the caped greatcoat soundlessly and slowly slid from the shoulders, and two red arms reached toward the door. The door closed, cutting off the shaft of light and plunging the entryway stairs once more into utter darkness.

  * * *

  In a second Nikolai Apollonovich sprang out into the street. From beneath the skirts of his greatcoat dangled a piece of red silk. His nose, buried-in-the greatcoat, he raced in the direction of the bridge.

  * * *

  On the iron bridge he turned. And saw nothing. Above the damp railing, above the greenish waters teeming with germs, bowler, cane, coat, ears, nose, and mustache rushed by into the gusts of Neva wind.

  YOU WILL NEVER EVER FORGET HIM!

  In this chapter we have seen Senator Ableukhov. We have also seen the idle—thoughts of the senator in the form of the senator’s house and in the form of the senator’s son, who also carries his own idle thoughts in his head. Finally, we have seen another idle sh
adow—the stranger.

  This shadow arose by chance in the consciousness of Senator Ableukhov and acquired its ephemeral being there. But the consciousness of Apollon Apollonovich is a shadowy consciousness because he too is the possessor of an ephemeral being and the fruit of the author’s fantasy: unnecessary, idle cerebral play.

  The author, having hung pictures of illusions all over, really should take them down as quickly as possible, breaking the thread of the narrative, if only with this very sentence. But the author will not do so: he has sufficient right not to.

  Cerebral play is only a mask. Under way beneath this mask is the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us. And granting that Apollon Apollonovich is spun from our brain, nonetheless he will manage to inspire fear with another, a stupendous state of being which attacks in the night. Apollon Apollonovich is endowed with the attributes of this state of being. All his cerebral play is endowed with the attributes of this state of being.

  Once his brain has playfully engendered the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really exists. He will not vanish from the Petersburg prospects as long as the senator with such thoughts exists, because thought exists too.

  So let our stranger be a real stranger! And let the two shadows of my stranger be real shadows!

  Those dark shadows will, oh yes, they will follow on the heels of the stranger, just as the stranger himself is closely following the senator. The aged senator will, oh yes, he will, pursue you too, dear reader, in his black carriage. And henceforth you will never ever forget him!

  End of the First Chapter

  Translated by A. Maguire and J. Malmstad

  C2. Russia’s Modernist and Post-Symbolist Prose

  THIS BRIEF SUBSECTION, just as the previous one, devoted principally to the poets, cannot even pretend to convey the period’s true thematic richness. Yet even those who initially shared neither apocalyptic apprehensions nor Symbolist sensibilities eventually came around to the conviction that the future unfolding of the century heralded doom for their homeland. Perhaps the best example of this kind of transmogrification is represented in the writings of Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870-1938). Kuprin, then a rising star in literature and an associate of the politically conscious Knowledge (Znanie) group, was a writer whose best-known works exposed and dissected social ills. In the heat of events surrounding Russia’s 1905 revolution he illustrated the hopes of contemporary Russians in a brief magazine piece, The Toast (1906), in which technology, social engineering and enlightened anarchy are shown to have made the Earth a paradise, thriving even in the harshest conditions for life—at the Earth’s poles. The piece is saved from outright propaganda on the benefits of social engineering by the emotional tribute, voiced at the end of the story, to the visions and sacrifices of early 20th-century revolutionaries. Yet, Kuprin was prescient in one regard: the reader should be struck by his description of global festivities, eerily reminiscent of the round-the-clock, satellite-assisted celebrations of Y2K.

  But such festivities were hardly in view in the years immediately following the aborted success of the 1905 revolution, and Briusov’s The Republic of the Southern Cross, offered in the previous subsection and describing the fall of another circumpolar society, might have been written in response to this work by Kuprin. Kuprin’s own disillusionment with futuristic dreaming is reflected in the story Liquid Sunshine (1913), generally regarded to be the first Wellsean work of science fiction produced in Russia. The protagonists of writers like Chernyshevsky, Bulgarin and Odoevsky had been usually no more than devices allowing the author to describe future political or scientific transformations. In contrast, Kuprin strikes a more human note. His characters (just as those crafted by Wells) are individuals, and the narration is much more concerned with their particular personal response to events as they unfold. The Wellsean theme of global cooling and its attendant catastrophes also makes its appearance in Liquid Sunshine, and once again Kuprin seems prescient—this time in describing the destructive power of a tsunami, which we have witnessed quite recently indeed. The story recalls Dostoevsky as well: the most enlightened, altruistic man of science will in the end find himself at the mercy of his own self-destructive emotions. Human nature at its irreducible core is the true enemy of any utopia.

  But the “tsunami” produced by the arrival of Bolshevik rule in 1917 was unlike any natural catastrophe Russia had witnessed earlier, and Remizov, Zamiatin and Pilniak, the last three writers chosen to represent the Modernist period—just as all those listed in the previous subsection—suffered from its mindless terror: Remizov and Zamiatin were forced into emigration and Pilniak died in a concentration camp. None of them was a Symbolist but each represented the very best the Symbolist school spawned. Of these three Evgeny I. Zamiatin (1884-1937) is best known in the west, and his dystopian novel We, together with Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky and Petersburg by Bely, forms a trio of requisite readings in Russian fantasy. Zamiatin is represented here by the initial chapters of We (which project an embodiment of the Grand Inquisitor’s society into the future), and by two shorter works. One is the prose-jewel The Dragon which testifies to Zamiatin’s full control of a fantastic scape in a miniature, and the other, a powerful short story The Cave—with an embedded text from Plato—in which the once-proud capital Petersburg is engulfed by a true apocalypse. We may recall that Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman begins with Peter the Great standing on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, and takes the reader on a whirlwind time-journey forward, to the same spot a century later—site of the glorious city that Peter’s imagination and will had called into being. Peter’s creation survives a flood, just as Noah’s Arc does in the biblical story: Pushkin may mourn the cost of his poor protagonist’s life, but in a way that celebrates the city’s magnificence nonetheless. Zamiatin takes his reader on the reverse journey—in which the formerly modern city exists only in memories—backwards in time, to the frozen wasteland of the ice age. No archangel sounds his horn here; the apocalypse is heralded by the trumpeting of a wooly mammoth, emblem of a society reduced to primeval savagery whose inhabitants see death as a longed-for privilege. Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice, written two years before The Cave, was chosen by us to serve as a prescient summation of Zamiatin’s apocalyptic vision.

  Alexei M. Remizov (1877-1957), another giant of Russian fantasy predating Zamiatin, shows very convincingly the apocalypse about to engulf Russia in his superb early story The Blaze, in which the role of the mystical monk is just as enigmatic as that of any Symbolist protagonist. What is clear in the story is that Russian folk culture had degenerated by Remizov’s time to a set of debased superstitions, richly challenging those represented in Sologub’s far better known novel, Petty Demon. Remizov’s art is in lifting his readers from the common perspectives of the everyday world, and even from the conventional representations of a fairy-tale world. In his exquisite story The Bear Cub, a child’s power of fantasy-weaving is given free rein as a young girl associates a snowflake with the constellation Ursa Major. Russia in a Whirlwind (1927) clearly shows that the old Russian culture whose richness Remizov so keenly embraced is doomed to destruction under the new regime, and his Orison (1917) is a mournful reflex of its medieval prototype (cited in Section I). Finally, the “meaning” of Petersburg gets an interesting and profound alternate expression in Remizov’s novel In A Rosy Light (1952) from which we give the Prologue just as we have done with an excerpt from Bely’s novel.

  Old Russia and its former customs are given a nuanced portrayal by Boris A. Pilniak (1897-1937?) from whose writing we choose one prerevolutinary work, a realist-impressionist tale A Year in their Life (1915, an echo of the bear motif in Russian culture), and one post-revolutionary sample from his famous novel The Naked Year (1921). The latter serves as a mini-representation of Pilniak’s newly found and unique telegraphic style in prose fiction (enabling him to create an entire chapter in three phrases, for instance); it also shows the disintegration of folk-culture. The author obviously holds t
he Russian countryside as dear as Remizov does; alas, he also clearly shows that its legendary hero, Ilia of Murom, no longer inhabits Rus’ and that the Russian forest awaits in vain for his return.

  Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin

  (1870–19380

  _______________________________________________________

  A Toast

  The two hundredth year of the new era was drawing to its close. In fifteen minutes it would be the 200th anniversary, to the month, day, and hour, of the time when the last country with an organized state system, the most obstinate, conservative and obtuse of all nations—Germany—finally decided to abandon its ridiculous and outdated national identity and happily joined the worldwide anarchist union of free peoples, to the jubilation of all the Earth. According to the ancient Christian calendar it was early in the year 2906.

  The new year 200 was greeted nowhere with greater festivities than at the North and South Poles in the main stations of the huge Electrogeo-magnetic Association. During the last thirty years, thousands of technicians, engineers, astronomers, mathematicians, architects, and other specialists had worked selflessly to complete one of the most inspired and heroic ideas of the second century. They had decided to turn the globe into a gigantic electromagnetic inductance coil and to carry this out they had wound a spiral of insulated steel cable, approximately three billion miles long, around the Earth from north to south. At both poles they erected electroterminals of exceptional capacity and then ran countless connecting cables from both of the polar stations to all corners of the Earth. This astonishing project was not only closely observed on Earth but also on neighboring planets with which the inhabitants of the Earth maintained constant communications. Many looked upon the Association’s undertaking with scepticism, others with misgivings, and some even with horror.