The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (26 page)

To his contemporaries, Ruysch was best known for his still lifes and dioramas, which used skeletons and anatomical tissue to illustrate the baroque topoi of
vanitas mundi
and
memento mori
. They didn’t last as well as the embalmed subjects—none have survived to the present day—but catalogues describe
skeletons weeping into handkerchiefs made of brain tissue, with worms made of intestines encircling their legs. Geological backdrops were made of gall- and kidney stones; trees and bushes, of wax-injected blood vessels. In one diorama, a child’s skeleton, using a bow made of a dried artery to play on a violin made from an osteomyelitic sequestrum, was surmounted by the Latin legend: “Ah fate, ah bitter fate!”

Peter, however, was less interested in the dioramas than in Ruysch’s advances in teratology: the study of monsters. Inspired by Ruysch’s work, Peter issued several ukases prohibiting the killing of deformed children and animals; “all monsters,” dead or alive, were to be sent to his collection, with the idea of simultaneously promoting the study of biological form and combating the popular belief that birth defects were caused by the devil. Treasures began to pour in: a two-mouthed sheep from Vyborg, an eight-legged lamb from Tobolsk, “strange dog-faced mice,” infants with missing and extra limbs, Siamese twins, a baby with “eyes under its nose and hands under its neck.”

For Peter, the teratological cabinet represented a redemption of Russia’s backwardness, darkness, and malformation. Preserved in jars using the latest European techniques, deformities were transformed into data, enlisted in the great humanist project of the arts and sciences. The glimmer of a similar intention seemed to hover over the House of Ice, with its transparency, its juxtaposition of ethnicities and monstrosities, of Russian imperialism and Germanic science—but the meaning was dimmer, murkier, obscured by the material excesses of the allegory itself.

As the ice palace was “benightmared” by the Kunstkamera, so was Anna’s ethnographic bridal parade a dreamlike distortion of the famous parade staged by Peter after the battle of Poltava. In Peter’s parade, Russian soldiers bearing trophies
from the Swedish campaign marched alongside a whole typology of captured Swedes: officers, halberdiers, bodyguards, artillerymen, members of the royal household (“the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, the Master of Horses and his assistants, the royal pharmacy attended by doctors and surgeons, the king’s cabinet, the king’s ‘secret secretary,’ and the king’s entire kitchen, complete with chefs”). Also present was a weird, jesterlike character called Wimeni, a gift to Peter from the king of Poland. Wimeni claimed—spuriously, it turned out—to be a French nobleman, whose fits of temporary insanity were attributable to a long internment in the Bastille. Dubbed by Peter “King of Samoyeds,” Wimeni participated in the parade from a supine position on a sled drawn by reindeer, attended by twenty fur-clad Samoyed tribesmen on twenty more sleds.

Despite its bizarre excesses, Peter’s parade had a clear symbolic meaning: to manifest the total conquest of Sweden. The “King of Samoyeds” was easily decipherable as a parodic replacement for King Charles XIII, who had fled to Ottoman Moldavia. A similar logic of replacement accounted for the roles played by Charles’s secretary, pharmacist, and chefs. Peter was using the “problem of the person” to his advantage: the person might have escaped, but everything that constituted him was on display.

When Anna restaged the parade, everything became confused. Her parade was supposed to somehow commemorate the Treaty of Belgrade, but the Ottomans were replaced by Kvasnik and Buzheninova who had, in their capacity as an apostate and a Kalmyk, only a very tenuous connection to the Turkic menace. Anna also had a “King of Samoyeds”: after Wimeni’s death, that title had passed to the Portuguese jester D’Acosta, who appeared in the bridal procession wearing an authentic Samoyed costume from the Academy of Sciences.

By 2006, who could say what was being resurrected, and why? Watching news footage of the opening festivities, my attention was drawn to a middle-aged woman in a silver gown and tiara, wandering inexplicably among the bridal couples and fashion models (there was a runway show for fur coats). Leading a gorgeous Samoyed dog on a leash, she looked as utterly lost as the meaning of the King of Samoyeds.

The most elaborate literary treatment of Anna Ioannovna’s ice palace occurs in “The Task,” by the eighteenth-century British poet William Cowper. Cowper, best remembered as the author of the hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” was literally driven mad in 1763 by his anxiety over the entrance examination for a Clerkship of Journals in the House of Lords. After three suicide attempts, he wound up in an asylum where he began writing poetry. His most famous poem from this period is called “Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion.” “The Task” was commissioned in 1783 by Cowper’s friend the Lady Austen, who, presumably trying to steer him to more neutral topics, asked him to write a blank-verse poem about “this sofa.” Cowper complied “and, having much leisure . . . brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended . . . a Volume!”

As Thomas Mann’s short story about Davos became
The Magic Mountain
, so did Cowper’s trifle about the sofa expand from its comic Virgilian incipit—“I sing the sofa”—into a six-canto book-length poem, taking the evolution of the sofa and the concept of leisure as a point of departure for musings on country walks, London, newspapers, gardening, thieves, laborers, domestic life, animals, and retirement. (Could the same book be writen in reverse: an anatomy of types of activity and leisure, which gradually turns into a meditation upon
the sofa? Did Proust already write it?) The dominant themes in this poem are the superiority of retirement to action, and of nature to artifice. The ice palace, introduced by means of an unfavorable comparison to a frozen waterfall on the Ouse, turns out to represent the transitory nature of human achievements—an ephemeral dollhouse for miniature skeletons, a
vanitas mundi
in the style of Ruysch.

The strange thing about Cowper’s description of the ice palace, a structure whose fundamental existence he deplores, is the beauty of the language:

Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ . . . no forest fell

When thou wouldst build; no quarry sent its stores

To enrich thy walls: but thou didst hew the floods,

And make thy marble of the glassy wave.

In such a palace Aristæus found

Cyrene, when he bore the plaintive tale

Of his lost bees to her maternal ear:

In such a palace Poetry might place

The armory of Winter; where his troops,

The gloomy clouds, find weapons, arrowy sleet,

Skin-piercing volley, blossom-bruising hail,

And snow, that often blinds the traveler’s course,

And wraps him in an unexpected tomb.

Silently as a dream the fabric rose . . .

What is such a beautiful description of an ice palace doing in a poem that denounces ice palaces in favor of frozen waterfalls? Why does Cowper turn the poem against itself, canceling out some of its loveliest lines?

I first became attentive to this kind of literary move in graduate school, when I began to recognize it in many of
my favorite novels. I learned that it has a long history in the conversion narrative, going all the way back to St. Augustine. In the first half of his
Confessions
, Augustine recounts the adventures of his youth: competing in rhetoric contests, going to the theater, pursuing his desire “to love and be loved.” In the second half, he not only denounces these adventures as hollow and vain—he also denounces narrative itself, shifting in the last four books to the non-narrative mode of biblical exegesis, interspersed with philosophical musings on the nature of memory and time.

What is the relationship between the two halves of the
Confessions
? You could call it a contradiction, but I prefer to think of it as a balance—a kind of credit and debit. Augustine racks up a debit by writing the almost protonovelistic story of a frivolous young man in Carthage—then balances it in the last four books, which are the exact opposite of the protonovelistic story of a frivolous young man in Carthage.

Cowper, likewise, racks up a debit with his lyric-aesthetic description of the ice palace—but earns the corresponding credit by claiming that frozen waterfalls are more beautiful, and that really poets should only write sermons.
^*
(The fifth and final book of “The Task” actually
is
a sermon, on the nature of the Christian life.)

A similar mechanism may be observed in certain novels. Tolstoy writes a marvelous, gripping, seven-book-long novel about an adulterous romance—then throws Anna under a train and writes book 8, in which Vronsky leaves for Serbia to fight the Turks (the novel is absorbed into history) and
Levin returns to his estate to find God (the novel is absorbed into spiritual meditation). Analogously, Thomas Mann spends a thousand pages in the decadent hothouse of the Magic Mountain—then balances his account when Castorp, woken from his spiritual stupor by World War I, leaves the sanatorium to serve on the front. Facing a likely death in the trenches, Castorp falls to his knees, “face and hands raised toward a heaven darkened by sulfurous fumes, but no longer the grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight.”

“The grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight”: isn’t that just what the jesters saw above them when they lay on the bed of ice? Anna’s palace is the monstrous crystallization of the anxiety that made authors from Cowper to Tolstoy to Mann cancel out their most captivating pages: the anxiety of literature, that most solitary and time-consuming of arts, as irremediably vain, useless, and immoral. The ice palace is like the first half of a conversion narrative, with no second half. Anna herself resembles one of Thomas Mann’s “problem children”—the scion of a vitiated dynasty, corrupted by puppet shows, sensual love, and dimly grasped notions of zoology—and she never grows up. Spellbound in her Magic Mountain, she never recovers. She dies up there, attended by jesters and medics.

The negative fantasy of literature embodied by the House of Ice reaches its most terrible pitch in the fate of the court poet and classicist Vasily Trediakovsky: one of the most famous personages from Anna Ioannovna’s reign.

The day before the wedding, Anna’s cabinet minister commissioned
Trediakovsky to write a matrimonial ode to be read at the ethnographic procession. Before Trediakovsky had time to complete the work, the minister summoned the poet to his chambers and, for reasons lost to posterity,
beat him unconscious with a stick
. Thrown in jail for the night, Trediakovsky finished his ode anyway, and even read it in person at the wedding the next day, wearing an Italian carnival mask to hide his injuries. Despite this tremendous display of professionalism, in which all writers may take pride, he was returned to his cell afterward and subjected to another near-fatal beating. Reaching home the next day, more dead than alive, his first act was to draw up a will, bequeathing his library to the Academy of Sciences.

Had Trediakovsky died of his injuries, he would have become a tragic figure. Instead, he lived another twenty-five years, a subject of constant mockery. His very propensity for receiving physical abuse became a popular comic premise; as Pushkin himself put it, “It often happened that Trediakovsky got beaten up.” Lazhechnikov’s Trediakovsky brags about an audience during which Anna Ioannovna “deigned to rise from her seat, came up to me, and from her generous hand granted me the most benevolent box on the ear.”

Trediakovsky was said to have written exactly one hundred books, each boring enough to induce seizures. “On the song ‘Farewell, My Dear,’ I composed a critique in twelve volumes
in folio
,” remarks a character based on Trediakovsky in a 1750 comedy. Trediakovsky plus the ice palace: could there be any more vivid illustration of the pathos of graphomania? “It was considered extremely funny that Trediakovsky had to translate thirteen volumes of Rollin’s
Histoire ancienne
and three volumes of his
Histoire romaine
twice, because the first translation was consumed in the fire that occurred in his house in 1747,” observes the scholar Irina Reyfman, who wrote an entire book about the mania for making fun of Trediakovsky. Trediakovsky was also famous for his hatred of his almost equally boring rival, the scholar and versifier Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov was incorrectly credited with some of Trediakovsky’s literary accomplishments, including the development of the Russian hexameter. Reyfman’s thesis is that,
in the “creation-myth” of Russian letters, Lomonosov played the role of the founder-hero, while Trediakovsky played that hero’s “foolish twin” or “dumb demonic double.”

In retrospect, however, the beating of Trediakovsky acquired a tragic and prophetic cast. To quote the twentieth-century poet Khodasevich: “On that ‘masquerade’ night, when Volynsky beat Trediakovsky, began the history of Russian literature . . . the history of the destruction of Russian writers.” The Russian state has always oppressed its writers: Tsar Nikolai I was Pushkin’s personal censor. In 1940 Stalin, notwithstanding his busy schedule, signed Babel’s death sentence with his own hand.