Russian literature

The first time as tragedy, the second time as commercial

Dating from 1960, Vasily Grossman’s very long novel Life and Fate tried to be a War and Peace for the twentieth century. If only in terms of ambition, it failed. It has mass but not copia. Its characters aren’t much more than Socialist-Realist animatronics allegorically posed.

But think of it as journalism. In 1944, when he wrote his newspaper article “The Hell of Treblinka,” the first publication in any language about the Nazi death camps, Grossman enlisted his imagination in journalism’s cause: the discovery of an event, some complex of memory and language which from just before page 1 was already in place on its own ground, on what Grossman then tried to make out as its own terms. For as long as such a complex is interpretable in the language a journalist and his readers have in common, it will remain current. Its lexicon won’t yet have stopped growing and then written on its last page, “But oh well, The End.” It will remain in the state of Unend. It will be Unend.

So during these 2½ pages from Life and Fate, Adolf Eichmann’s car transports us readers into Adolf Hitler’s brain and then the subject of the exposition shifts back to a teaching aid made of sturdy cardboard. No, of course: at least in Robert Chandler’s 1985 translation, Grossman is no Tolstoy. But read on, O viator, in the limousine’s wake. You are bound to the unend.

Afoot down the Autobahn through the blank, panting as you run alongside Grossman’s word “alogical,” consider adopting and naming an analysis of its biographical history. You might call it, for instance, “Carlylean hero” from before Hitler’s time or “Fox News” from the time displaying now at the foot of your monitor. But that won’t work any better, will it? It can’t, because what can’t be thought of (Grossman: “mindless”) must be a non-state: a state unbounded and unboundable; the unending, the audio “But wait, there’s more [of] but wait there’s more.”

Think of the endless night parade at the end of Triumph of the Will; think of the aspirational National Socialist term “working toward the Führer.” You want the real program to resume and the “The End” and the houselights to follow, don’t you? But they don’t seem to be on the way yet, do they? Eichmann’s ashes were scattered into the deep sea, but here you are still reading Grossman. Thanks to the literary genre of the current event, you and Eichmann are now adrift together, to the unend.

For Isaac Babel


Source: Slavic and East European Collections, The New York Public Library. “Vstupaite do Chervonoi Kynnoty!” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1917 – 1921. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47de-83ae-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Photoshopped to restore color. The Ukrainian text translates as:

Join the Red Cavalry!
The Red Cavalry has destroyed Mamontov, Shkuro, Denikin.
It is beating the Poles and Petlyura.
Now the need is to destroy what is left of Wrangel.
Workers and peasants, join the ranks of the Red Cavalry.
.

And after more Photoshop surgery, the cavalryman looks like this.

From the city of Andrei Bely

There was a small public park on the north side of the square. In one of its linden trees an ear and a finger had been found one day – remnants of a terrorist whose hand had slipped while he was arranging a lethal parcel in his room on the other side of the square. Those same trees (a pattern of silver filigree in a mother-of-pearl mist out of which the bronze dome of St. Isaac’s arose in the background) had also seen children shot down at random from the branches into which they had climbed in a vain attempt to escape the mounted gendarmes who were quelling the First Revolution (1905-06). Quite a few little stories like these were attached to squares and streets in St. Petersburg.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, chapter 9

Every few seconds for the last two days, a cyberentity in Russia has been attempting to break into this blog. According to several bloggers, this represents the activity of something called a brute-force password-guessing attack on WordPress’s XMLRPC function.

It claims to originate from an address in St. Petersburg. Of course that claim may be a mere act of literature – say, something like a May Day hommage to Andrei Bely, author of the great Modernist novel of terror and masquerade, Petersburg. In any case, the cyberentity claims to be headquartered not in St. Petersburg but in Moscow, where it calls itself the Super Professional Servers Network.

But its street address in Moscow is all Bely, all Petersburg. It is:

1st Magistralny Blind Alley, 30

And naturally, as a prudent reverence before literature’s power to blind and erase (the pseudonym Bely means “white”), I configured this blog long ago to reject all attempts at communication from Russia.