Bolsheviks and Bashleviks

More Dovlatov wit, but a little tricky to translate, my preference is to preserve the phonetics of the play on words:

“Все люди делятся на большевиков и башлевиков…”

(appears on page 21 of The Compromise, Chatto & Windus translation by Anne Frydman)

“All people can be divided into bolsheviks and bashleviks” … a bashlevik being a loaded guy who can dish out the money. Being loaded in Russia or the Soviet Union of course comes with certain connotations.

The context is 

— У меня было восемь рублей, я их по-джентльменски отстегнул. Сам хочу у кого-нибудь двинуть.  Дождитесь Митьку, и пусть он башляет это дело. Слушайте, я хохму придумал: “Все люди делятся на большевиков и башлевиков…”

For which Frydman’s translation runs:

“I had eight rubles. I handed them over like a gentleman. I’d like to put the touch on someone myself. Wait for Mitya, and let him foot the bill for this affair. Listen! I just thought of a good one. You can divide all people into two categories: Bolsheviks or bill-footers.” 

Geht denn die Natur etwa ins Ausland?

Walser

Carl Seelig is his wonderful small book Wanderungen mit Robert Walser (Walks With Walser) recalls a conversation where in one of his many walks with Walser, Seelig quoted in summary form some lines from Walser’s book Geschwister Tanner — usually translated as The Tanners although more literally it would be The Tanner Siblings. Here is Seelig: 

“I have often come across this attitude in your books, by the way, for example where you say: ‘Does nature go abroad? I’m always looking at the trees and telling myself: They aren’t leaving either, so why shouldn’t I be permitted to remain?’” Robert: “Yes, only the journey to oneself is important.”

This is a powerful thought and reminiscent of the first Psalm: “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.”

The remembered text in Geschwister Tanner reads: “Geht denn die Natur etwa ins Ausland? Wandern Bäume, um sich anderswo grünere Blätter anzuschaffen und dann heimzukommen und sich prahlend zu zeigen? Die Flüsse und die Wolken gehen, aber das ist ein anderes, tieferes Davongehen, das kommt nie mehr wieder. Es ist auch kein Gehen sondern nur ein fliegendes und fließendes Ruhen. Ein solches Gehen, das ist schön, meine ich! Ich blicke immer die Bäume an, und sage mir, die gehen ja auch nicht, warum sollte ich nicht bleiben dürfen?”

“Does nature go abroad?  Do trees wander off to get greener leaves elsewhere and then return home and braggingly show themselves off?  The rivers and the clouds are always leaving, but that is a different, deeper leave-taking, with no returning ever.  It is also really no departure, but rather a flying, flowing way of being at rest.  Such a departure — that is beautiful, if I may say so!  I’m always looking at trees and saying to myself, they don’t leave either, why shouldn’t I be allowed to stay?”

The mad old confusion of spring

Painting by Gottfried Keller aged 10

I’ll admit to both having messy desks and harbouring suspicions about those with immaculate photospread-ready desks. I was pleased at coming across the following little aside in Gottfried Keller’s autobiographical Bildungsroman Der grüne Heinrich. 

Der Frühling war gekommen; Schlüsselblümchen und Veilchen waren im erstarkten Grase verschwunden, niemand beachtete ihre kleinen Früchtchen. Hingegen breiteten sich Anemonen und die blauen Sterne des Immergrün und die lichten Stämme junger Birken aus am Eingange der Gehölze; die Lenzsonne durchschaute und überschien die Räumlichkeiten zwischen den Bäumen; denn noch war es hell und geräumig wie in dem Hause eines Gelehrten, dessen Liebste dasselbe in Ordnung gebracht und aufgeputzt hat, ehe er von einer Reise zurückkommt und bald alles in die alte tolle Verwirrung versetzt. 

Gottfried Keller, Der grüne Heinrich, Zweiter Teil, 8.

Spring had come: cowslips and violets had vanished in the thick growth of the grass, nobody heeded their litle fruits. On the other hand, there were anemones, and the blue stars of the periwinkle, and the pale stems of the young birches at the edge of the copses. The spring sun glanced through and shed light upon the gaps between the trees; for it was still bright and spacious, as it is in the house of a scholar whose best beloved has tidied and cleaned it before his arrival home from a journey, whereupon he will immediately throw it all into the same mad old confusion again.

Gottfried Keller, Green Henry, Pt II, Ch 8

Helvetia, in Figuren leben, et la cité désirée

“Wir leben wahrhaft in Figuren” wrote Rilke – pictured here on a Swiss stamp – “We truly live in figures”, that is amongst symbols, abstractions, figments, the imagined. This is from the Sonnets to Orpheus which he wrote while living in the Château de Muzot, which is about halfway between Geneva and Locarno. Our reality is in fact something fabricated by our brains, the real world as we experience it is essentially a hallucination which is more or less faithful to our sense perceptions, but filled in with interpolation, cached memories, predictions and such. 

In his most recent book Homo Irrealis, André Aciman explores the theme-and-variations way the mind and world inter-relate and the role art plays in our inner lives. 

“Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them, by giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they are and will remain forever incoherent. Incoherence exists, which is why composition—art—exists. Grammarians called this unthinkable, imponderable, impalpable, fluid, transitory, incoherent zone the irrealis mood, a verbal mood to express what might never, couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t possibly occur but that might just happen all the same. The subjunctive and the conditional are irrealis moods, as are the imperative and the optative. ... Most of our time is spent not in the present tense, as we so often claim, but in the irrealis mood—the mood of our fantasy life, the mood where we can shamelessly envision what might be, should be, could have been, who we ourselves wished we really were if only we knew the open sesame to what might otherwise have been our true lives. Irrealis moods are about the great sixth sense that lets us guess and, through art sometimes, helps us intuit what our senses aren’t always aware of.”

“Comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s'imaginet qu'on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe.” Proust, Du côté de chez Swann.

“Like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charm of a dream” transl Lydia Davis, Proust The Way by Swann's p.9

But reality has a way of superceding and overwriting our fragile and fleeting imagined worlds.

“He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country by that name. More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia” Gerald Murnane, Emerald Blue p.86

“Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion.” ibid. p.87

Dovlatov

What does an emigrant bring with them? In Чемодан (The Suitcase) Sergei Dovlatov starts out by describing how he was allowed to take only one suitcase with him when he left the Soviet Union. The book goes on to describe several indicents from Dovlatov’s life in the Soviet Union before emigration, amusingly recounted, each one centring around the one of the items in the suitcase. He produces a vivid picture of 1970s Russia, and — particulalrly given relatively recent demostrations in Russia where large crowds have been protesting and shouting “Putin thief” — it seems that some things have not much changed.

Двести лет назад историк Карамзин побывал во Франции. Русские эмигранты спросили его:

— Что, в двух словах, происходит на родине?

Карамзину и двух слов не понадобилось.

— Воруют, — ответил Карамзин…

Действительно, воруют. И с каждым годом все размашистей.

Two hundred years ago, the historian Karamzin visited France. Russian emigrants asked him:

— What, in two words, is happening at home?

Karamzin didn't even need two words.

— Stealing, — he answered ...

Indeed, they steal. And every year it gets worse.

In Заповедник — translated somewhat surprisingly as Pushkin Hills — we get the typically cynical and ironic tone:

Ты добиваешься справедливости? Успокойся, этот фрукт здесь не растет.

Are you looking for justice? Settle down, that fruit doesn’t grow here. 

Of course everyone stealing in Russia is a cliché, but also we must acknowledge that clichés gain circulation through various means and Dovlatov is perhaps to some extent the voice of a generation. Russian drinking is of course another universal cliché, and there are plenty of references to it through Dovlatov’s books. 

Меня зачислили в бригаду камнерезов. Нас было трое. Бригадира звали Осип Лихачев. Его помощника и друга — Виктор Цыпин. Оба были мастерами своего дела и, разумеется, горькими пьяницами.

I was enrolled in the brigade of stone cutters. There were three of us. The foreman's name was Osip Likhachev. His assistant and friend was Viktor Tsypin. Both were masters of their craft and, of course, real drunks.

In Заповедник the protagonist remarks:

Знаете, я столько читал о вреде алкоголя! Решил навсегда бросить...читать. 

You know I’ve read so  much about the dangers of alcohol I decided to give up … reading.

The deterioration of the Soviet Union, the delapidation of the State, is a theme often implicit and sometimes explicit throughout his books:

Между делом я прочитал Лихоносова. Конечно, хороший писатель. Талантливый, яркий, пластичный. Живую речь воспроизводит замечательно. (Услышал бы Толстой подобный комплимент!). И тем не менее, в основе – безнадежное, унылое, назойливое чувство. Худосочный и нудный мотив: «Где ты, Русь?! Куда все подевалось?! Где частушки, рушники, кокошники?! Где хлебосольство, удаль и размах?! Где самовары, иконы, подвижники, юродивые?! Где стерлядь, карпы, мед, зернистая икра?! Где обыкновенные лошади, черт побери?! Где целомудренная стыдливость чувств?!..» Голову ломают:

«Где ты, Русь?! Куда девалась?! Кто тебя обезобразил?!»

Кто, кто… Известно, кто… И нечего тут голову ломать…

(I’ll follow mjuch of Katherine Dovlatov’s translation, including replacing the reference to the Rus’ with simply the word “Russia”)

In the meantime, I read Likhonosov. Of course, a good writer. Talented, bright, flexible. He reproduces live speech remarkably. (Tolstoy should get such a compliment!) And yet, at the core is a hopeless, dull, and nagging feeling. An exhasuted and tedious motif: “Where are you, Russia?! Where did it all go?! Where are the folk verses, embroidered towels, the fancy headdresses?! Where is hospitality, bravery and grand scale?! Where are the samovars, the icons, ascetics, and holy fools ?! Where is sturgeon and carp, the honey and caviar?! Where are the regular horses, damn it?! Where is chaste modesty of feeling?! .. ” They rack their brains:

“Where are you, Russia?! Where did you disappear?! Who ruined you?! "

Who, who ... Everybody knows who ... There is no need to rack your brain. 

The emigrant’s suitcase is naturally packed with clichés, with fragments of an abandoned life, with triggers for nostalgia. You bring your culture, moreover a snapshot of your culture at a particular point in time, with you when you relocate: the Chinese Imperial Dragons that have been used in Melbourne and Bendigo dated back to the 1800s, and I can’t help thinking that some of the intricacies of Polish grammar (for instance the first person plural verb forms that depend on the genders of the people the speaker is representing) have something to do with the banning of the language for some period when teaching had to effectively go ‘underground’. 

Like The Suitcase, his book The Compromise (Компромисс) also relies on the external scaffolding of a collection of things, this time short articles he had written during his time as a journalist. The Zone (Зона: Записки надзирателя) narrates incidents from his time as a prison guard, and Заповедник describes in a straightforwardly sequential manner a lightly fictionalized account of the author’s time working as a tour guide at the Mikhailovskoe, the Pushkin family estate.

All these books are suffused with a wry and ironic humour. The central character — either Dovlatov himself or a thinkly disuguised stand-in — is usually struggling to get by in the environemnt in which he finds himself. 

Жизнь расстилалась вокруг необозримым минным полем. Я находился в центре.

Life spread around like an endless minefield. I was at the centre.

Self-deprecation is his strong suit, often voiced via recollected conversations with his wife:

– Даже твоя любовь к словам, безумная, нездоровая, патологическая любовь, – фальшива. Это – лишь попытка оправдания жизни, которую ты ведешь. А ведешь ты образ жизни знаменитого литератора, не имея для этого самых минимальных предпосылок… С твоими пороками нужно быть как минимум Хемингуэем…

“Even your love of words, insane, unhealthy, pathological love, is false. This is just an attempt to justify the life that you lead. You lead the lifestyle of a famous writer, without having even the minimal prerequisites ... With your vices, you need to be at least a Hemingway ...

And:

Я говорил:

— Пушкин волочился за женщинами… Достоевский предавался азартным играм… Есенин кутил и дрался в ресторанах… Пороки были свойственны гениальным людям в такой же мере, как и добродетели…

— Значит, ты наполовину гений, – соглашалась моя жена, – ибо пороков у тебя достаточно…

I said:

“Pushkin chased after women ... Dostoevsky indulged in gambling ... Yesenin boozed and picked fights in restaurants ... Vices was just as common to men of genius as virtue …”

“Then you must be at least half a genius,” my wife would agree, “you’ve more than enough vices …”