Lik

I suppose I do not quite understand those who are fascinated by comets and craters yet cannot believe in the immortality of the human soul. Now there are many, many shades of my ignorance, to be conquered by my future selves or to be left untouched in some dark corners of this universe; but my lack of understanding has more to do with aim than with substance. To wit, why do we bother? Why be kind to each other if kindness is but a façade for advantage? Why love when all love's labor will be lost? Why laugh or cry when all events and emotions are time, that cruelest of tyrants, simply spotting us treats? Some particularly smug proponents of the five senses' predominance have labeled those who think we are better than fossils and fuels "history deniers." These are the same megaphoning militants who tell us that we should not believe anything that cannot be verified – as if any of history can be "verified" – and we will leave them to their morons, oxy or otherwise. I do not deny history because I believe in moral justice; I, on the contrary, reinforce it. Of all things, natural selection is supposed to adhere so strictly to predetermined laws – laws announced to all, in other words – as to make the determinants of those laws likewise predetermined. (This chain goes back in time to something, one might guess, indeterminate; but the megaphoners claim that's when everything exploded into determinism; better to calm them down before in their red-faced rants they, too, explode.) Nevertheless, we should not limit natural selection to the chameleon or the slowly rising primate. Human souls also have a destiny plotted well in advance by their valor and fortitude, which brings us to a story in this collection.

Our Lik, an acronym for his Christian name Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn, is a humble beast, but one relatively well-evolved. He is an actor by the sheer fact that this profession is the only one which brings him any form of intercourse with the world, much less any income. As we meet him, he is consigned to a minor role in an "ideally idiotic" French drama of the conventional family-conflict-honor mould. The drama is in French, and Lik speaks the language with exactly the suitable Russian swallowing of vowels and stress to imbue the play, appropriately called The Abyss, with the proper dash of foreign flavor. He also begins to understand the role as his sole reality, suggesting that he is not so much an actor as a person bereft of true identity:

It was hard to say, though, whether Lik (the word means "countenance" in Russian and Middle English) possessed genuine theatrical talent or was a man of many indistinct callings who had chosen one of them at random but could just as well have been a painter, jeweler, or ratcatcher. Such a person resembles a room with a number of different doors, among which there is perhaps one that does lead straight into some great garden, into the moonlit depths of a marvelous human night, where the soul discovers the treasure intended for it alone.

On the subject of choice, there are few passages in the English language of greater lucidity or beauty. Lik may not have an outward appearance of genius, but then again most persons who seem at first glance to fit that profile turn out to be blustering frauds. What Lik does possess, however, is the inscrutable sense of himself that accompanies a sensitive soul; he could be an artist of any caliber – an organ grinder, a balalaika player, a street mime – but how he views the world makes him a first-class aesthete. He is most afflicted by what has always tortured the artist – time and its undertow, and the vastness of eternity lapping its waves upon the minute skeleton half-buried on a sandy beach:

The proximity of the sea, whose presence he divined beyond the lemon grove, oppressed him, as if this ample viscously glistening space, with only a membrane of moonlight stretched tight across its surface, was akin to the equally taut vessel of his drumming heart, and, like it, was agonizingly bare, with nothing to separate it from the sky, from the shuffling of human feet and the unbearable pressure of the music playing in a nearby bar.

We also learn that Lik is terminally ill, a coincidence that befits a far lesser work of literature – but there are, as it were, no coincidences in the works of Nabokov. Lik will carry on down his lonely path until a palaver with a fellow lodger reveals an element of our actor's past that we might have suspected all along. And that element is Oleg Petrovich Koldunov.

Koldunov is both Lik's relative and nemesis, one thought long dead. We cannot say too much about Oleg Petrovich, who reenters his miserable cousin's life almost twenty years after he left it, because Koldunov bludgeons us with monologue after monologue, often, it seems, arguing with himself or a past version of Lik. In fact, Koldunov is as loquacious and irritating as Lik is quiet and non-offensive (Lik's "absence from friendly gatherings, instead of being attributed to a lack of sociability .... simply went unnoticed"). There are moments in the narrative's second half when we cannot believe in Oleg Petrovich. That is to say, we don't believe in him as a human being at any point ("it was perfectly obvious he was an idler, a drunk, and a boor"); but soon enough we don't even believe in him as a fictional character. He is so exaggerated and incensed that we get the distinct impression that he might simply be a figment of a very neurotic actor's mind. The few alleged facts we do gather may strangely apply to both him and his cousin:  

Why has life systematically baited me? Why have I been assigned the part of some kind of miserable scoundrel who is spat on by everybody, gypped, bullied, thrown into jail? Here's an example for you: When they were taking me away after a certain incident in Lyon .... you know what they did? They stuck a little hook right here in the live flesh of my neck .... and off the cop led me to the police station, and I floated along like a sleepwalker, because every additional motion made me black out with pain. Well, can you explain why they don't do this to other people and then, all of a sudden, do it to me? Why did my first wife run off with a Circassian? Why did seven people nearly beat me to death in Antwerp in '32 in a small room?

There are other hints strewn amidst the story's increasingly odd second part that allow one to think, if for but a few paragraphs, that we are dealing with a single human soul engaged in internal debate. I am happy to say, however, that this impression is thoroughly demolished by our final scene. Or is it? Do white shoes betoken more than summertime and posh eccentricity? Should we be concerned that since Lik "had accumulated no spiritual treasures, [he] was hardly an interesting prey" for the looming Scythe? Hardly interesting at all. 

Pushkin, "Поэт"

Another masterpiece ("The Poet") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Until he hears Apollo's voice
By sacred immolation's fire,                  
The world's vain cares will not inspire      
The poet, burdened against choice.     
By holy harp in silent thrall,                      
His soul will taste but chilling sleep,                    
And from the world's most artless keep,
Perhaps is he the worst of all.          

For only words of root divine                              
Could ever reach his pristine sounds;                 
Entranced, the poet's soul abounds
An eagle waking at a sign.     
No worldly pleasures; no, instead        
So alien to the rabble's talk,       
At icon's feet will he then balk, 
Refuse to bend his haughty head; 
And wild and fierce, he will but flee 
Full of commotion and of sound,
To shores of empty waves aground, 
To oaks still louder than the sea.

Nostalghia

If you were to ask someone of nationalistic bent about the most untranslatable concepts in his mother tongue, he would invariably include a word or short phrase that denotes homesickness (or the much lovelier German analogue, Heimweh, 'home-woe,' of which nostalgia is said to be a calque). He would grudgingly admit that while homesickness is the closest English term, the two words actually lie very far apart. "You cannot really render it as aching for home," he might say, "it is more the yearning to breathe the air in the manner of its natives, air that exists nowhere else." The truth is that nostalgia has expanded its breadth of meaning: now it conveys as much a feeling of missing home as a glorification of the past in the sacrifice of the present and, often enough, of the future – a future that drifts ever further away from those golden years. I have had many instances in my life in which I felt wonderful events, times, and friends could never be repeated, and I was dreadfully right. They cannot and we cannot. What we have in their stead is the sensation of loss and the hope that redemption will allow us to enjoy those moments for eternity. And that is why the preservation of the human soul is the most vital function of culture. I do not for a minute believe that those who worship money and fossils and the materiality of this green globe can ever feel nostalgia: it is, with true love and true art, the deepest of sensations, and it is far beyond their ken as beasts of the moment. Nostalgia for the innocence of one's childhood, of love's labors lost, of the sweetness of things, of books, languages, sunsets, summer evenings of unstinting passion, the headiness of wine and the eternal mystery of our soul's whims – all this makes for an exquisite banquet of memories. It may also make, in the event of proper sidereal alignment, a first-rate Romantic poet. Which brings us to this remarkable film.

We begin with an Italian countryside, something not terribly evolved from what you might find in this animal-slaughtering favorite, a green and brown realm of plain rusticity. At the conspicuous center of our landscape stands a tree, Tarkovsky's eternal hope for the world; to the right and somewhat above the treetop, a power line in the shape of the greatest symbol we have ever known; in the background hills or mountains swimming amidst the mist. Slowly a small European car puffs its way left, the Italian sinistro, and stops before a garden leading up one of these misty hillocks, and a young, voluptuous redhead emerges, her hair in endless knots, first speaking Russian then Italian. As she climbs up the hill through a wondrous garden, the man mutters under his breath that he "can't go on." But he does. He follows her, onward and upward, to a chapel to gaze at a fresco by this famed artist. There our redhead, an Italian by the name of Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), does not ask the chapel curator, likely a priest himself, why women flock to see the Madonna del Parto – that question is very obvious, and would belong in a lesser film. No, Eugenia well understands the despair of a woman who cannot bear children, or a mother whose daughter cannot bear a grandchild. What she wants to know is why they pray in the way they do, so fervently silent, then in a chant that culminates in a release of a bellyful of sparrows from the Madonna's statue. "Why are women more pious than men?" she asks, not incorrectly. The man pontificates a conservative view of women's role – to birth and raise children with patience and sacrifice – and as she walks away in half-feigned disgust, he adds: "You probably just want to be happy, but there is something in life more important than that." Eugenia stops and returns her eyes to all the mothers gathered, all praying to the one Mother, all beseeching that one of their daughters may bear children, a request punctuated by the opening of the belly. She does not look on transfixed, but simply curious. She is curious about her motherhood, about ritual, about all things that get lost in modernity's fire of independence and self-assertion. And suddenly she knows what word is more important in life than happiness.

The Italian for that word, fede, is not known to her companion, the poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), so she translates it for him as vera (вера). She does not, however, convey the information with any solemnity, but with a snicker, and for good reason: fede means both faith and a wedding band, and Eugenia's mind is definitely much more focused on the latter. They converse in Italian (his insistence) even though it seems evident Eugenia's Russian would be more useful; then we consider that Italian may be the one trump card she holds over Gorchakov's Russian wife in Moscow. Indeed, her red hair, her role as his guide to the 'overworld,' and her painful sexual intrigue all denote temptation of the sinister kind and could have led – again, in a far lesser film – to carnal exploration. Yet somehow we know that this will never occur. In one vignette the camera – and, in turn, we and Gorchakov – notice Eugenia's pneumatic curves for what seems like the first time. His sudden compliment that she is so beautiful simply filters a hormonal reaction, and there is often something about very pure and sacrosanct places that shunts minds onto different tracks. Her expression for a few seconds thereafter communicates every ounce of her desire, the entire timeline of her pleasure at the compliment, her arousal, her disappointment when his eyes still do not meet hers, her arousal again, and finally her resignation that even if he did mean it, his comment was probably not enough for them to sleep together. Gorchakov, a melancholy and fatigued creature, has earned this disappointment: he has come to Italy to comprehend why Pavel Sosnovsky, a late eighteenth-century Russian composer, forsook the hills of Rome and a blossoming career to return to Russia and his status as a serf. Some say Sosnovsky loved a Russian serf girl, but some always say that. Others merely aver that he missed his homeland and would rather die enslaved in his native element than live on in exile – one of the most common interpretations of voluntary exile in modern thought. Ostensibly a well-known poet, Gorchakov exhibits more interest in the sadness of the locales he visits – chapels, churches, villages, and finally, these baths – than in any scholarly pursuits. He has not come to discover Sosnovsky's motives, he has come to find his own. His silly joke in Russian to a little Italian girl who could not possibly understand him is one of Nostalghia's iconic passages, in no small part owing to the resonance it receives in its closing shots. Yet at the time it smacks of cavalierness and frivolity, not nearly as sad as later events reveal it to be. Which can also be said about the third tragic figure in our triptych, the eccentric mathematician Domenico (a marvelous Erland Josephson).

It is probably best not to divulge too much about Domenico's backstory, which explains why apart from his outstanding mind and his German shepherd he is very much alone in the world. I stand corrected, there is a third companion: his fede, which is so strong as to augment at once his mathematical reasoning and his emotional pitch. The world simply does not add up. One drop of olive oil (in another much-discussed scene) and another drop of olive oil do not equal two drops, but one bigger drop. What we can say is that as we have three characters, so too do we have three dreams. First, there is Sosnovsky's, recounted in a letter (in Italian) as to why he needs to return to his birthplace. Sosnovsky was supposed to write an opera for his lord, and there were statues in the park where the opera was to be performed. As he approached the park he became one of the statues, and instinctively he knew that if he moved he would be severely punished. Thus, for a moment or a little longer, he actually turned to stone, powerless, and then realized that this was no dream at all, but his own bitter life. And he also realized that he could not forsake Russia, and the thought of not seeing its birches or languishing in the scents of his childhood grew intolerable. Then there is Eugenia's dream, narrated to her Russian guest during a long monologue of frustration when it becomes clear that her desires will not be reciprocated. I need not describe it in detail; suffice it to say that it involves a worm in her hair that escapes under her wardrobe – the context suggests that she has already provided her dream with sufficient analysis. And then there is Gorchakov's dream, the dream he endures after he tells that little girl that little joke about rescuing someone from a pond. And what does he see in his dream? He sees himself as himself; he sees himself as Domenico; he sees churches and streets that were never his but somehow should have been; and he weighs the criteria on which we, consciously and unconsciously, base our notion of what is home. Many claim that for a poet home is his language, the world in which the gilded filaments of his conscience and intelligence fuse into the most sublime and elevated of human expression. So what does this have to do with birthplace or childhood? Haven't countless poets composed countless odes thousands of miles away from their natal fields? They most certainly have. But maybe it is better to ask whether those odes would have been written if those poets and fields had never parted.      

Esenin, "Мне грустно на тебя смотреть"

A work ("To look at you so saddens me") by this poet.  The original can be found here.

To look at you so saddens me:
What pain! What pity!  For I know
We’ve but the copper willow tree
In this September left to show.

Another’s lips have come to feel
Your warmth and bodily convulse,
As if soft rain were to reveal
A heart deprived of mortal pulse.

But anyway, I fear him not,
Another joy has since obtained.
You see, everything that remained
Is only damp and yellowed rot. 

Myself I never had preserved
For peaceful life, much less for smiles.
I’ve walked already so few miles,
By so many mistakes unnerved.

Life’s laughable in its off–tones
So it has been, so it will stay:
A cemetery, as gnawed bones
Of birch tree in a garden lay.

So this is how we wither, fade,
And quell our noise like garden guests.
If winter flowers so forbade,
For them one then should not distress.

Pushkin, "Кто из богов мне возвратил"

A work ("Which god has ever yet restored") by this poet.  You can read the original here.

Which god has ever yet restored  
All those with whom I came to share             
My mud-bound march and vulgar mores,
When Brutus led us in despair, 
And freedom's specter was our lord?  
All those with whom my front line tears           
In bottomless tent cups I drowned,        
And curls tight-wrapped in ivy's sheers  
With Syrian myrrh in embalmed crown?

At war's worst hour will you abide   
That I, poor Quiris fearful, fled
My shield cast down beside my pride,
With vows and prayers in my stead?
How fear reigned whole and how I flew!
But Hermes in a sudden breath 
My world made safe, whence he withdrew
And saved me from most certain death.

But you, O you, first love of mine, 
Again in battle did you rage, 
And then to Rome fate's force would bind  
Your steps to my warm, simple cage. 
Sit now beside my hallowed hearth 
And let us pour.  Do not regret
My wines or perfumes, sweet or tart,
The laurels sit.  Lad, pour us wet!
Here pale restraint will find no place:
Like Scythians wild I wish to drink 
And with a friend so celebrate,
That senses bleed and do not think.