Worlds Apart
Page 63
In 1929 Zabolotsky, Kharms, and Olesha collaborated with eminent Formalist critics in a never completed collection entitled Archimedes’ Bath, which was to include contributions by members of Oberiu—The Association for Real Art (Ob”edinenie real’nogo isskustva). Zabolotsky and Kharms had been instrumental in the 1927 founding of this, the last freely-formed Russian literary group. When Oberieu was effectively quashed in 1930, several of its participants were able to work in the somewhat marginalized area of children’s literature; others perished in the purges. The fates of the two founders of Oberiu—each represented here by a couple of entries—can be said to typify what happened to the rest. Zabolotsky’s collections of poetry beginning in the late twenties and continuing into the thirties were harshly attacked by the Soviet press; in 1938 he was arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labor; he was to survive into the post-Stalin years, but rarely again to write with the striking originality of the late 1920s. Kharms was arrested in 1931 on the charge that his “trans-sense” poetry was distracting the people from the task of building socialism; although he was only held for a year and released, he was increasingly under a cloud, and 1941 saw him again in prison, where he died.
Olesha’s 1927 novel, Envy, and a series of superb short stories had earned him wide acclaim, but after 1932 Olesha published very little. Olesha’s highly original and evocative imagery—representing the world “through the wrong end of binoculars” (as Nils Åke Nilsson, a connoisseur of Olesha’s oeuvre, notes)—deftly made everyday objects seem alien or new by stirring up the “estrangement response” (ostranenie). But beyond such devices, showering his readers with an ensemble of pioneering similes, the writer contemplates in his fiction the role of human sensuality, feeling, and myth within the context of an insistently materialist, dehumanized, and demythologized world. This is evident in the miniature masterpiece newly translated for this volume, which was first published in the Moscow almanac “Earth and Factory”, vol. 2. Beyond the obvious allusions to such universally recognizable topoi as the Garden of Eden, the Western reader should be aware that in naming his heroine “Lelia,” Olesha is creating a feminine counterpart to the Russian Love-god, Lel’. In fact Lel’ is of doubtful antiquity, with roots in the folkloric revival rather than in the deep past, but mention of this deity is common in the writings of Russian early nineteenth-century poets such as Derzhavin and even Pushkin, who felt the need for a native variant of the classic Love-god, Eros.
Our other selection from Olesha’s oeuvre is his essay “On the Fantastic in H. G. Wells,” written on the eve of WWII in 1937, which provides the reader with a rare glimpse into the autobiographic laboratory of Olesha’s own growth as a writer. Moreover, the essay serves as a natural transition to the space-fantasies in the final section, predicated on the belief in the victory of technologies which would ground fantasy-making in the experienced reality of space-flight.
Selections from the writings of Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (1891-1940), equally famous for his prose works and his plays, end this section. Some details of Bulgakov’s biography parallel those of Russia’s two greatest nineteenth-century writers who excelled in composing both fiction and drama, Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov. Like the latter, Bulgakov was trained as a medical doctor and practiced this art; along with Chekhov he wrote socially relevant plays and prose works, was acclaimed in his lifetime, and died in his forties. But it is especially to Gogol that Bulgakov cultivated a life-long aesthetic allegiance. Like Gogol, Bulgakov was born and raised in Ukraine, and moved as an adult to the capitol; like Gogol he wrote satires, reworking in the process many of Gogol’s themes and images, even rewriting and adapting Gogol’s masterpiece, Dead Souls, for the contemporary stage. And just as Gogol had done before him, Bulgakov would ultimately burn some of his own manuscripts. Indeed, in tribute to his admiration of Gogol, a piece of rock which used to stand on Gogol’s grave in the Donskoy cemetery was reused for Bulgakov’s tomb.
Especially mindful of this comparison with Gogol, we have made our brief selections from what is arguably the twentieth-century Russian novel best known in the West, The Master and Maragrita. Bulgakov ultimately suggests in this novel that society founded solely on materialist values is the least desirable destiny for Man. The exhilaration of flight is present in the novel as experienced by the central protagonist Margarita, transformed into a witch by the application of a magic cream. Although reminiscent of the flights in Gogol’s Vyi and Turgenev’s Fantoms, Margarita’s flight gives her and the reader a bird’s eye view of a modern, Soviet Russia caught in a mesh of cities and their lights: the signs of “progress.”
The meaning of technological progress is in doubt in the first selection of this section, The Fatal Eggs (an homage to Wells’ The Food of the Gods), where Bulgakov advances the notion that technology is doomed to catastrophe in the Soviet social context. In our ealier neo-Wellsean selection, Kuprin’s Liquid Sunshine, social bliss based on technology was undermined by the romantic woes of a single individual. In The Fatal Eggs, however, such failure is shown to be systemic. The ray causing the reptilian eggs to mutate, thus hatching the catastrophe, is a red ray—the hue itself an overarching symbol of everything touched by the Bolshevik regime. The significance of the machine, consistently glorified by the Communists, is embodied in their most powerful vehicle, the propaganda press: the ray’s inventor, Persikov, is badgered by such publications as Red Spark, Red Pepper, Red Projector, Red Evening Moscow, Red Raven, etc. Under the umbrella of the color which medieval Russians had considered the most appealing of all (“Red Square,” for example, originally meant “Beautiful Square”) the disoriented, powerless citizens of the new command society bungle everything, sleep during working hours, and drink homerically. Bulgakov shows how, in such a society, it is no wonder mistakes are made, and a fatal “error” is, in fact, inevitable. Set in the 1920’s, the story (especially chapter V) even seems prescient, given the current plausibility of a global avian plague.
The Fatal Eggs, first published in 1924 in a collection of stories titled The Diaboliad, was set in the years of the very near future—1928-29. But in 1929, when Bulgakov began Master and Margarita under the working title The Man with a Hoof, reality had become even bleaker than he had anticipated five years earlier. His art thus began to exploit even more seriously the concept which had been a life-long concern for Gogol as well—the Devil and all His works. The fact that ethical concerns are of primary importance to Bulgakov is underscored by his implicit invitation to the reader to ponder the meaning of the famous exchange from Goethe’s Faust that he chose as the novel’s epigraph:
—Then who are you?
—I am a part of the force that eternally wishes Evil and eternally accomplishes Good.
In the Soviet Russia of the 1930’s, with the Church decimated to the point of extinction, the only FORCE of any consequence was Communist rule. And if we were to read this epigraph with the plus and minus signs switched—as Bulgakov clearly wishes—the exchange unmistakably alludes to the Bolshevik regime, which trumpeted explicitly utopian notes about its Good intentions, but accomplished Evil beyond comprehension. All of Russia had essentially become a huge concentration camp, as its people were murdered in orchestrated famines and purges on a scale transcending any medieval plague. Under such circumstances metaphysical intervention was to Bulgakov the only remedy. With a Savior utterly silent in those days, he focused his artistry on the Old Testament God’s “right hand”—the Devil. For reasons too complex to summarize here and in any case best discovered by reading this uniquely intriguing work itself, the Devil in the person of a gentlemanly yet sinister stage magician Woland descends on Moscow. Woland observes Soviet reality, and through his eyes we see a humanity deadened, all vital impulses wasted on banal trivialities. Satan seems to find it almost depressing that He can do no worse to Man than Man has done to himself. Accompanied by Behemoth, a huge cat packing a Browning, and Koroviev, an etiolated prankster in a checkered jacket, Woland ruthlessly and th
oroughly disrupts the comfortable socialist philistinism of the Soviet capital.
The Germanic root of Woland’s very name plays productively with the Latinate morphology of More’s Utopia—Which land? Where is that land? No land. Nowhere. His diabolical realm begins to intersect with Soviet materialist space right from the first chapter. The novel begins as Berlioz, the well-paid editor of a state-sponsored literary journal, is about to explain to a colleague the historical impossibility of Jesus Christ, when Koroviev appears in midair:
At that moment the sultry air thickened in front of Berlioz, and wove itself into a transparent citizen of the very strangest appearance. He wore a jockey cap, and a cropped, checkered, spectral jacket … The citizen was nearly seven feet tall but narrow in the shoulder, incredibly thin and with a face that was, please note, derisive.
Berlioz’ life had been arranged in such a way that he was unaccustomed to unusual apparitions. Turning even paler he rubbed his eyes and exclaimed confusedly: “This can’t be! …”
But alas, it could be, and the elongated transparent citizen, feet not touching the ground, hovered before him and swayed to the left and to the right.
Whereupon terror seized Berlioz to such an extent that he shut his eyes. And when he opened them,—he saw it had all passed off, the mirage had dissolved, the checkered individual had disappeared, and simultaneously the dull needle withdrew from his heart.
—Oof … what the Devil!—exclaimed the editor …
Such intersection never relents, as Bulgakov crafts his revenge on the regime that tormented him. The novel ultimately succeeds in turning the Soviet world, predicated on a false utopia, upside down.
Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky
(1903–1958)
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Signs of Zodiac
(The original, 1929 version)
Zodiac signs dim their gleaming
Over the expanse of fields,
DOG—the Animal—is dreaming,
SPARROW to Bird-dreams now yields.
Fatly buttocked water-nymphets
Fly away straight to the skies,
Firm their arms, like tree-trunk limblets,
Round their breasts, like turnip pies.
There the Witch rides on three angles
Disappearing in a whiff,
Mermaids rouse a corpse which dangles
In a dance with them—all stiff,
Wizards’ pallid troops behind them
Stalk the wily common FLY,
And beyond the nearby mountain
Moon’s calm face still hangs on high.
Zodiac signs dim their gleaming
Over buildings on a farm,
DOG—the Animal—is dreaming,
FISH—the Flounder—dreams disarmed.
Hear the clapper clack-clack-clack:
SPIDER dozes on a rack,
COW and FLY sleep near the hearth,
Moon still hangs above the Earth.
As the ladle of spilt water,
Hangs on high for reasons weird,
Goblin pulls a log that’s tauter,
From his shaggy drooping beard.
From behind the cloud—a Siren
Bares her shapely leg apart;
And a Cannibal, desiring,
Bites off Sire’s private part:
Africans and Brits thus humbled,
Witches, bedbugs, carrion—
All come flying rough-and-tumble
In a dance vulgarian.
Page of long-past generations,
Paladin of bright new Dawn:
Heed, my Mind! Such imp-creations
Seed in Man new doubts when spawned.
In this cramped-by-Nature kingdom,
Midst the want, the mud and rust,
What seek you—my King of Freedom—
In our restless Earth-born dust?
Earth’s abode soars high and wayward.
Sleep! It’s really late—Good night!
Reason—my poor Mind’s crusader—
Dream till sunrise scales the height.
Why nurse doubts, why flinch and startle?
You and I, now day is gone,
Each half-beast and half-Immortal,
Slumber at the very portal
Of this new and vibrant Dawn.
Hear the clapper clack-clack-clack:
SPIDER dozes on a rack,
COW and FLY dream near the hearth,
Moon still hangs above the Earth.
As the ladle of spilt water,
Hangs on high while, planted deep,
Sleeps POTATO—Flora’s daughter.
You should too be fast asleep!
Translated by A. L.
Human of the Snows
Word is, someplace in the Himalayas,
Reaching past the temples and retreats,
Lives, unknown to us, that Realm’s pariah:
Being savage, fostered by the beasts.
Tranquil is his gait, his white pelt shaggy,
He, at times, descending from his tors,
Whirls and dances like a shaman craggy,
Hurling snowballs at the temples’ doors.
Only when he hears the Buddhist elders
Piping down the wall their moaning horn,
He runs off in fear and, dazed, surrenders
To his rugged, icy mountain home.
If such tales can’t be dismissed as gossip,
All that means: in this all-knowing age,
There still lives that missing—it’s a toss up—
Nexus, link: half-beast, half-human sage.
Yes, it’s clear, his mind has not been tempered,
His beclouded keep is not ornate:
No pagodas, schools, or idol’s temples
Welcome creature-hunters at the gate.
He has no idea why beneath him,
Hidden in his mountain’s catacombs,
Docile, acquiescent to their leaders,
Shimmer in the caverns—atom bombs.
Why, this Himalayan humanoidal
Hardly could discern their workings’ trace,
Even if, in onrush asteroidal,
He were hurled, aflame, into deep space.
But so long as the lamenting Lamas
Chant, reflecting on his fresh-laid tracks,
Pace around, unfold their temple’s drama,
Drumming on their weird, demonic clacks,
And so long as Buddha sits there, telling
Fortunes from above his navel’s hub,
Yeti, in his snowdrift-laden dwelling,
Feels comparatively safe and smug.
As he skins his roebuck at the mountain’s
Spring, he splutters sounds, at times—a word:
His loud laughs are nothing more than pronouns,
Shunning Adam’s right to name the World.
(1957) Translated by A.L. and M.L.
Daniel [Evgeny] Kharms
(1905-1942)
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The Young Man who Surprised the Watchman
“Whaddya know?” said the watchman, inspecting the fly. “You smear that thing with carpenter’s glue and that’s all she wrote—right? Just think! Plain old glue!”
“Hey you—boogeyman,” a young man wearing yellow gloves shouted at the watchman. The watchman immediately understood that this was aimed at him, but went on looking at the fly.
“Am I talking to myself here, or what?”—the young man shouted again—“You lummox!”
The watchman squashed the fly with his thumb and, without turning his head toward the young man, said:
“What are you yelling for, you punk? I hear you anyway, no need to yell!”
The young man dusted off his trousers with his gloves and asked, now in a delicate voice:
“Please tell me, gramps, how do I get to Heaven?”
The watchman inspected the young man, first screwing up one eye, then the other, then stroked his bea
rd, then again inspected the young man, and said:
“So what are you waiting for? Move along!”
“Excuse me”—said the young man—” but I’ve got some urgent business. Up there, they’ve even got a room ready for me.”
“Fine, then,” said the watchman. “Show me your ticket.”
“A ticket? They said they’d let me in regardless,” said the young man, looking the watchmen straight in the face.
“Whaddya know?” said the watchman.
“So what do you say,” said the young man, “you gonna let me through?”
“Fine, then, fine,” said the watchman, “go on!”
“But how do I go? Where to?” the young man asked. “I mean, I don’t even know the way.”
“Where you headed?” asked the watchman with a suddenly stern expression.