The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (27 page)

The brutalization of writers was no longer funny. Meanwhile, as Foucault has observed, the institution of authorship is largely dependent on the author’s liability to state punishment. It’s true that Russia subjected its writers to an unusual degree of state control; consequently, it’s also true that nowhere in the world has literature been taken more seriously. Mayakovsky wasn’t really joking in 1925 when he compared poetry to industrial production:

I want the Gosplan to sweat in debate,

assigning me goals a year ahead,

and for Stalin to deliver his Politburo

reports about the production of verse

as he would about pig iron and the smelting of steel.

“. . . in the Union of Republics the understanding of verse

now tops the prewar norm . . .”

Mayakovsky could never have retired to the country to write poetry about raising cucumbers. He could never have identified virtue with the sofa. He needed literature to be a form of action or work, just like fighting in a war or building a railroad. And once he started to worry that his own poems
were merely aesthetic, the mere products of leisure, it wasn’t the kind of problem that could be solved simply by writing a poem about the uselessness of poetry. “I’d rather compose romances for you,” he wrote, early in 1930, “But I have subdued myself, setting my heel / on the throat of my own song.” This poem, “At the Top of My Voice,” was unfinished when Mayakovsky shot himself that April.

The reconstruction of the House of Ice was slated for destruction on a Friday, but since the cold weather was holding up, the organizers announced they would leave it standing over the weekend. On Sunday morning, I decided to stop by one last time, to take photographs. But when I turned the corner on Nevsky Prospekt, all that remained was a pile of broken ice. A small crowd had gathered, and I heard echoes of a raven like sound. “
Zrya! Zrya!
” they were saying: “What a waste!”

A small bearded man in a long overcoat and a fur hat stood next to me, shaking his head.

“When did they tear it down?” I asked him.

“Who knows? Late at night, when nobody saw. What a waste. What a shame.”

“It was a historical reconstruction, right?” I asked, hoping at least to ascertain the contours of the ice palace in his cultural imagination.

“Of course,” the bearded man said. “It was all historical. It was all made from plans, from original documents. There was an empress, you see. I’m not an expert—I forget her name. Alexandra Fyodorovna, something like that. She built the palace.”

“Why?”

“Well, for a joke! For fun! Tsars had to enjoy themselves, too. And what a beauty it was.” He sighed. “There were thousands of people here, such a line, you couldn’t get close.
They had cannons that shot real cannonballs, and it was all made out of ice. I saw it on television. It’s just shameful what they’ve done. A shame.”

“They deceived us,” said a woman nearby. She had Asian features, wore a snow-white ski suit, and spoke very precisely. “They promised that they would leave the palace standing until tonight. I bring my daughter to Palace Square for her art class every Sunday morning—we came an hour early, just to see it one last time. It’s hurtful, even.” Her daughter, about seven years old and missing several teeth, had joined some children who were clambering on the ice boulders, resembling, in their padded snowsuits, tiny astronauts. I remembered Krafft’s
Description.
He had written that, for its beauty and rareness, the ice palace was “well worthy of being transported to Saturn and of taking its place there, as among the stars.”

The next day, I met Gromov and Mikheyeva for the last time in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Europe. They strode through the metal detector with the dynamism of a figure-skating duo. I asked why they hadn’t left the palace standing through the weekend. They exchanged glances. “It’s complicated,” Gromov said.

“We tried to reach you,” Mikheyeva said. “We didn’t know until the last minute.”

When I told her about the disappointed citizens I had seen, Mikheyeva averted her eyes. “We didn’t go there the entire day. We knew everyone would be angry at us, so we went to Vyborg.”

“Why didn’t you just leave it up?” I asked.

“Well, you know, an ice palace is so beautiful at first. Then the sun shines, and it melts, slowly, slowly—it’s depressing. We wanted to end on a positive note.”

Leaving the hotel, I stopped by the Palace Square to take another look at the heap of ice, but it had already vanished.

_____________

*
Dostoevsky, who called St. Petersburg “the most abstract and premeditated city in the world,” chose it as the setting for
Crime and Punishment.
In Andrei Bely’s modernist novel
Petersburg
, a terrorist has to kill his own father using a time bomb concealed in an anthropomorphic sardine can known as Pepp Peppovich Pepp. In Gogol’s most famous Petersburg tale, “The Overcoat,” a gang of thugs steals the overcoat belonging to a miserable clerk; the clerk falls into a fever, dies, and himself becomes a ghostly thug, roaming the city and stealing overcoats.

*
In fact, St. Patrick was born in Kilpatrick, Scotland, in the year 387. His father belonged to a high-ranking Roman family, and his mother was a relative of St. Martin of Tours. Patrick was kidnapped in his sixteenth year by Irish marauders, who sold him into slavery to a chieftain and druidical high priest in present-day County Antrim.

*
An analogous balance of art and sermon also characterizes Ruysch’s dioramas. The decadent miniature landscapes, made of human lung tissue and kidney stones, are redeemed by their subjugation to self-canceling sermons about the vanity of human endeavor. Pointing at their own impermanence, the dioramas simultaneously condemn and justify themselves.

The housecleaning at Gulya’s house was attended to every few days by Delia, a cheerful and attractive woman in her forties with fair skin, dimples, and dark hair. Bent double, she swept the entire courtyard and all the steps using a little whisk broom with no handle. Why didn’t she have a normal broom? Probably the same reason Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying. Delia spoke perfect Russian, which seemed strange for a cleaning lady; the mystery was explained when it turned out she was one of Gulya’s old high-school friends. “I help her out,” Gulya said of her practice of hiring a school friend to clean her house.

I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia’s alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all
his
money.

“But Gulya told us that her husband was in California, studying to be a yogi.”

“California? No, he lives just two streets away from here; I saw him last week.” Delia thought a moment. “Maybe he was in a
bar
called ‘California’?”

Her version of the story was supported, some five weeks into our stay, by the reappearance of the missing yogi. Shinyheaded,
with muscular shoulders and a paunch, Sharif indeed projected the impression of someone who had never lived in California, which he thought shared a border with New York. He did, however, frequently try to make us listen to some cassettes of a Swedish yogi choir that he said could induce trances.

Sharif’s dominant conversational mode consisted of repeating the same sentence over and over, for inconceivably long periods of time. One afternoon, when Eric and I were sitting in the courtyard drinking tea, Sharif came out with a stale
lepyoshka
and proceeded to tell us
at least thirty times
that Uzbeks love to tear up
lepyoshka
, put it in their tea, and call it “duck soup.”

“Have some of our Uzbek ‘duck soup.’ We love ‘duck soup’ here. This ‘duck soup’ is the best kind of soup—filling, inexpensive, and, above all, delicious. Uzbek people love to eat delicious ‘duck soup.’ We call it ‘duck soup’ when we put
lepyoshka
in tea.” Desperate to make him stop, I ate an entire bowl of the tea-soaked bread. It didn’t work. “You ate our ‘duck soup,’ eh? So you love our ‘duck soup,’ do you?” He himself didn’t eat any “duck soup.”

Another statement Sharif liked to repeat was that Satan wasn’t outside us, in the world, but within us. “You think Satan is out there” (pointing in the bushes); “but Satan is everywhere—above all, inside us!” (pointing at his stomach).

“What’s wrong with his stomach?” Eric asked.

“He thinks Satan lives there,” I told him.

“Tell him!” Sharif urged me. “Tell your husband! Satan is everywhere!”

“He wants me to tell you that Satan is everywhere, including his stomach.”

Eric narrowed his eyes, assessing Sharif’s stomach.

One day when I got back from class, the neighborhood water had been turned off. Sharif was sitting shirtless in a
plastic chair in the courtyard. He started to explain to me that Uzbeks can live without electricity or fire, but they can’t live without water, because water is an essential need for Uzbek people. At that point, the gate creaked open and Eric edged in sideways, lugging three enormous jugs of water.

“Do you see what we have to do in Uzbekistan?” Sharif demanded, pointing at Eric, who had carried the water all the way from the fountain in front of Dynamo stadium. “We have to carry water because sometimes our water doesn’t come to our house, and we can’t live without it. We can live without electricity or fire, but we Uzbeks cannot live without water, which is necessary for the human organism.” The water dependence of the Uzbek human organism, like most subjects, eventually led Sharif back to the problem of Satan’s whereabouts. “Not somewhere out there—but inside every one of us!” he shouted, pointing at his stomach, just as Eric came out of the kitchen. “What’s the matter?” Eric asked, drying his hands. “Satan in his stomach again?”

In literature class, Dilorom was teaching me about the second greatest Old Uzbek writer: Timur’s great-great-great-grandson, Emperor Zaxiriddin Muhammad Bobur, founder of the Mughal dynasty.
*
At age twelve, I learned, Bobur had been caught up in a feudal war. He fell into a chasm with dovecotes. Bobur had an ignorant cousin, a soldier, who wasted all his time on revenge killings and on staging fights between
chicken and sheep. At fifteen, Bobur conquered Samarkand and again made it the capital of an empire. During the blockade, Bobur’s army ate dogs, donkeys, and boiled trees. Bobur is the author of the
Boburnoma
, or “Book of Bobur,” which recounts his conquests of Kabul and Delhi, his learned conversations with the Indian aristocracy, and the planting of many gardens.

A martyr to his own imperial vision, Bobur suffered all his life from a disease known as
gemoroi
. “That sounds like ‘hemorrhoids’ in Russian,” I remember thinking.

“Do you know what
gemoroi
is?” Dilorom asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

A sad smile hovered around the corners of her mouth. “Every one of us does two things. We do them every day in the bathroom . . .
Ey, Xudo
!” she called to the ceiling. “Hey, God! Forgive me for mentioning these words in front of respected Elif!” Dilorom went on to describe a certain affliction of the large intestine that caused great difficulties in one of the two things we do every day in the bathroom, involving swelling and pain and the passing of hard particles through the anus. In short, the Timurids, as passionate horsemen, suffered chronic hemorrhoids. Luckily, such was the refinement of their culture that they had a special grain that, when cooked with fat, water, and sugar, made a special porridge; when you ate it, you never had to defecate. “Oh, if I could taste it even once!” Dilorom exclaimed.

Bobur, a lover of poetry, once wrote a letter to Alisher Navoi, who wrote back. Bobur wrote another letter. Then Navoi died. “How will one survive the next hour?” Bobur shouted. After Navoi’s death, a big black snake started thrashing violently. Bobur slit the snake open from mouth to tail. The snake died, and another snake came out. Bobur slit open the second snake, and out came a rat. While crossing
the Himalayas, Bobur dipped his head seventy times in a hole cut in the ice. Then he swam forty laps across the Ganges, despite the undertow, despite the snowdrifts piled higher than his head.

In India, Bobur and his ten thousand soldiers defeated one hundred thousand Indian soldiers and one thousand elephants. To defeat the elephants, they used nails. Nehru wrote about Bobur and liked him, even though he had killed so many Indians, and their elephants. Bobur seized all of northern India, but gallantly installed the rajah’s mother in a castle with servants. The mother bribed Bobur’s cook, so that every day Bobur ate poisoned bread. He got sick, and so did his son. Bobur prayed to God that he would die instead of his son.

“This was a marked contrast from Ivan the Terrible,” Dilorom observed.

Bobur outlived his son by three days. During this time, he ate only the purest birds, boiled for two hours into a soup. His hemorrhoids miraculously vanished, but then he died.