Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage, by Yuz Aleshkovsky (introduction)

INTRODUCTION SUSANNE FUSSO

I was a good-time Charlie, an idler, a lazybones, a gambler, a crook, a hooligan, a scoundrel, a smoker, a street urchin, a bicyclist, a soccer player, a glutton, although I always helped my mother around the house, I was rapturously interested in the mystery of procreation and the relations between the sexes, the organization of the Universe, the origin of the species of plants and animals and the nature of social injustices, and I also managed to read the great works of Pushkin, Dumas, Jules Verne, and Mayne Reid. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that I never in my life sold anyone out or betrayed them.

Although of course I managed to perpetrate umpteen little dirty tricks and peccadillos.

Yuz Aleshkovsky, “Autobiographical Information”

Y

uz Aleshkovsky was born in Siberia in 1929, the year of Stalin’s “Great Turn” toward industrialization and collectivization. Raised in Moscow, where he recalls that he became acquainted with street obscenities much earlier than he learned about the fairy tales most children read, he endured some of the key experiences of the Soviet century—wartime evacuation,

x\

Introduction

imprisonment in Siberia (on a petty criminal charge), liberation upon the mass amnesties that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, and the ideological totalitarianism that forced some of Russia’s best literary talents into writing “for the desk drawer,” i.e., with no hope of publication.1 The paradox of the unfreedom of official literary life in the Soviet Union is that it engendered literature of a breathtaking freedom of form and language, of which Aleshkovsky’s works are a prime example. By 1979, Aleshkovsky realized that his personal freedom was in peril, and he and his wife, Irina, left the Soviet Union. In the same year, Priscilla Meyer, a scholar of Soviet-era Russian literature and professor of Russian at Wesleyan University, invited them to settle in Middletown, Connecticut, where Aleshkovsky has been a precious literary and cultural resource for students and faculty of Wesleyan University ever since, and where his wife Irina is a beloved professor of Russian language and film. Aleshkovsky received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction in 1987 and the Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in 2001 for his entire body of work. Two of his novels and one novella have been published in English: Kangaroo (1986), a tragicomedy narrated by a man accused of “the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905”; The Hand; or, The Confession of an Executioner (1989), the monologue of a vengeful Soviet security police agent, which Oliver Ready has called “a 300-page outburst of bile, traumatic recollection, and historical speculation”; and A Ring in a Case (1995), a fantastic tale that captures the absurdity of the early post-Soviet period.2 This volume is the first published English translation of Nikolai Nikolaevich, Aleshkovsky’s debut work of prose, as well as Camouflage (Maskirovka). The original Russian texts of both works appeared first in print in a single

volume published by Ardis in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1980, after Aleshkovsky had left the Soviet Union for the West.3 Nikolai Nikolaevich (written in 1970) and Camouflage (written in 1977) focus on two historical eras: the immediate postwar years just before and after Stalin’s death (Nikolai Nikolaevich) and the Brezhnev era, later labeled by Mikhail Gorbachev “the period of stagnation” (Camouflage). The “science fiction” novel Nikolai Nikolaevich is a monologue spoken to a drinking companion by the titular hero.

A pickpocket by trade, Nikolai Nikolaevich is released from prison after World War II and finds a job in a Moscow biological laboratory.

He begins as a kind of janitor but is soon recruited to provide sperm for strange experiments intended to create life in the Andromeda galaxy. The uneducated but preternaturally perceptive hero eventually finds himself at the center of the 1948 purge of biological science in the Soviet Union. The novel is not just a science fiction (and science fact) tale, but also a Bildungsroman and a love story.

Nikolai Nikolaevich was first circulated as samizdat (“self-publishing,” usually typescripts with multiple carbon copies passed from hand to hand among trusted friends). Aleshkovsky says that copies of it, as well as his songs, the most famous of which is popularly known as “Comrade Stalin” (1959), “spread through Russia like a pandemic of flu.” He gave a copy of the manuscript to Ardis publisher Carl Proffer in Moscow, with the injunction that it not be published until Aleshkovsky was in the United States, because he felt that gaining fame in the West was not worth risking the loss of his freedom in the Soviet Union. Despite the wide distribution of Nikolai Nikolaevich and his songs, Aleshkovsky believes that he escaped arrest because “critically thinking KGB men” read his “phantasmagorical works and had a good laugh.”4 Introduction

\ xi

xii \

Introduction

Nikolai Nikolaevich is perhaps best known as an example of Aleshkovsky’s virtuosic deployment of the rich tradition of Russian obscene language, known as mat. The word mat is derived from the Russian word for “mother,” probably because some of its most taboo expressions involve the speaker copulating with the addressee’s mother. (The common expression “Yob tvoyu mat,” often translated as “Fuck your mother,” literally means “I fucked your mother.”) In an excellent introduction to mat published in The New Yorker, the writer Victor Erofeyev describes the political significance of Russian obscenity: “Mat expresses aggression, but in a country that has suffered from a chronic lack of freedom it also plays the role of a language of dissidence, of protest against official ideology, both political and religious.”5 Although Russian literature of the fin de siècle and early Soviet period could be quite frank about sexual matters, by the 1930s, with the establishment of socialist realism as the only acceptable writing style, the language of official literature became sanitized. Russian mat had always been to some extent an underground phenomenon, transmitted orally (notably in obscene folktales or the humorous couplets known as chastushki) or in unpublished manuscripts (the works of the eighteenth-century writer Ivan Semyonovich Barkov or Alexander Pushkin’s erotic tales). Aleshkovsky’s incorporation of mat into literature was a perfect expression of the taboo-breaking ethos of samizdat. As his friend, the major writer Andrei Bitov, wrote, “The use of Soviet phraseology in his pages sounds far more indecent and obscene than vulgar slang and thieves’ argot. But the noble crystals of mat, the only natural and inherent part of the Russian language that has been preserved in Soviet language, continue to send us the light of human speech, like extinguished stars in the darkness of a planetarium.”6

Mark Lipovetsky has linked Aleshkovsky’s challenge to Soviet official language to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival: The poetics of the lower bodily stratum, the “slum naturalism,” the eccentricity of plot and style, the reliance on coarse language, the blasphemous defamation of official dogmas and symbols of truth, the comic grotesque and in general “unrestrained carnival word— familiar, cynically frank, eccentric, eulogistic-abusive” (Bakhtin)— all of the most important components of the carnivalesque tradition, including the drama of confrontation with “that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change” (Bakhtin), appear in Aleshkovsky’s fiction with exceptional precision and in an utterly natural, unmannered style.7

This is no mere coincidence—Aleshkovsky was close friends with scholars like Sergei Bocharov, who were instrumental in reintroducing the works of Bakhtin to a broad public in the 1960s, and he also knew Bakhtin personally.8 Priscilla Meyer sees Aleshkovsky’s use of mat as serving “an incantatory, purifying purpose, purging the corrupt language that is forced upon every Soviet citizen.”9 The plot of Nikolai Nikolaevich is particularly transgressive, since it deals with masturbation, a subject that even today in the West, not to speak of the puritanical official culture of the Soviet Union, bears a lingering burden of shame and embarrassment.

In his Writer’s Diary for 1873, in a feuilleton called “Little Pictures,” Fyodor Dostoevsky describes listening to a group of drunken workmen on the street and realizing that the language of obscenity is the perfect language for a drunk person, whose physical ability to articulate is impaired but whose “flow of thoughts and sensations” Introduction

\ xiii

xiv \

Introduction

has increased along with his intoxication (a perfect description of many of Aleshkovsky’s narrators). Listening to the workmen, Dostoevsky realizes that their language can be encapsulated in one word: “Purely and simply, it is one noun not found in the dictionary, so that the entire language consists of but one word that can be pronounced with remarkable ease.” Listening to the workmen, he “realized that it was possible to express all thoughts, sensations, and even entire, profound propositions using only this one noun which, besides, has very few syllables.”10 In fact, the word that Dostoevsky has in mind, khui, the vulgar term for the penis, has only one syllable and is spelled with only three letters in Cyrillic. Dostoevsky clearly exaggerates when he claims that the workmen are carrying on a complex conversation using only this one unadorned word. But it is undeniable that Russian mat is in general a more flexible and multifarious linguistic tool than are English obscenities, although the deployment of obscenity in present-day hip-hop discourse is probably the closest approximation to the richness of mat. Jesse Sheidlower has assembled an impressive lexicon of the permutations of the English word “fuck.” But in Russian, not only is khui only one of several deeply taboo words on which mat is founded, but these nouns can be endlessly varied by the use of prefixes and suffixes to create a panoply of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives with connotations ranging from positive to negative. The word khui can also be combined with various prepositions to create cogent twoword mat idioms.11 This translation attempts to capture the rhythm and verve of the demotic speech of Aleshkovsky’s narrator, but the predominance of “fuck” in English obscenity cannot be wished away. English simply has no precise equivalent for the richness of Russian mat.

Yet another layer of language in Nikolai Nikolaevich is the narrator’s deployment of criminals’ and prison slang (fenia or blatnoi iazyk), which is very much in character for a pickpocket recently released from a prison camp. Some of these words are derived from Yiddish. According to tradition, the use of Yiddish originated with Jewish criminal gangs as a language that would be incomprehensible to police, and it came to be used by non-Jewish Russian criminals as well. Nikolai uses the words ksiva (from the Yiddish ksiveh, translated here as “papers,” chapter 2) and tsimes (tsimmes, a sweet stew, translated here as “the most delicious thing in the world,” chapter 3). The most important of these words in Nikolai Nikolaevich is fraer (freier, translated here as “amateur”).

Although this word is often translated as “sucker,” it in fact refers to “a free person,” a person who has never served time. Nikolai and other criminals see themselves as set apart from the amateurs by their experience, worldview, and not least of all, language. For many of the educated Russian readers of Nikolai Nikolaevich, both the obscenities and the prison slang would require glossing, which Nikolai sometimes provides himself in the space of a single sentence. (The original Ardis edition included a few explanatory footnotes for the slang, but by no means enough to render the text fully comprehensible to the uninitiated.)

Just as important as mat and prison slang for the texture of Nikolai Nikolaevich is its engagement with the tragedy of twentieth-century Russian biology. Starting in the late 1920s, the peasant agrobiologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) made claims for a native Russian form of biology based on the work of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin (1855–1935) in hybridization. In broad terms, Lysenkoism claimed to be materialist, as opposed to the supposedly Introduction

\ xv

xvi \

Introduction

idealist theories of Western genetics as represented by Gregor Mendel, August Weismann, and T. H. Morgan. Lysenko rejected the methods of experimental science in favor of getting "practical" agricultural results. The story of Lysenkoism is a long and complicated one that has been widely studied by historians of science and of Stalinism.12 The episode in the saga that is crucial for Nikolai Nikolaevich is the postwar triumph of Lysenkoism, supported personally by Stalin, and the rout of the geneticists at the 1948 meeting of the Lenin All-Union Agricultural Academy. At this meeting, as Ethan Pollock writes, “Practical science was equated with the ability to transform nature. One of the speakers, a director of a cattle-breeding station, was fearful of the results of Mendelism-Morganism, which he said was ‘reactionary to the core since it is bound to lower the role of Soviet man into a passive appendage of nature, a placid contemplator of nature who humbly waits for gifts and favors from her.’ In contrast, Michurinism was the ‘great transformer of nature.’ ”13 In the aftermath of the 1948 meeting, the Central Committee of the Communist Party acted to replace supporters of "Mendelism-Morganism" in research institutions and other venues of scientific enterprise.

Although Aleshkovsky invents a fanciful research program for the scientists who employ Nikolai Nikolaevich, the destruction of their laboratory has its roots in Soviet reality.14 Aleshkovsky says, “I know important biologists who were driven mad by Lysenkoism and by the strange hatred the ignoramuses in power had for the bases of modern genetics and microbiology, which held back the growth of this science for decades.”15 Oliver Ready, the author of one of the best analyses of Aleshkovsky’s work, writes, “Nikolai Nikolaevich . . . deals in equivocation

and paradox, leaving the reader uncertain as to the exact balance in his speech of idiocy and cunning, affected simple-mindedness and true ignorance.”16 The same can certainly be said of Camouflage, in which equivocation and paradox are the very essence of the plot. For most of the novel, we are left in doubt, not only about the narrator’s sanity but also about the nature of the story that he is telling to a man he addresses as his brother, the General. The narrator, Fedya Milashkin, claims to be “a camouflager of the eighth (highest) rank” (chapter 1), part of a vast team engaged in creating a simulacrum of depressing Soviet reality for the benefit of American spy satellites flying overhead. According to him, the drunks, prostitutes, and people standing in line for scarce food products are performing an elaborate charade to deceive the Pentagon, while underground, in sparkling laboratories, scientists and technicians are hard at work on nuclear bombs, which are transported in vans labeled “MEAT” and “EAT COD FILLET.” But throughout the novel, the reader is left unable to decide: Is this a science fiction tale or a realistic picture of Soviet life in the 1970s? Is the city of Staroporokhov (“Old Dusty”) a godforsaken provincial town, a mythic conception like Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Glupov (“Stupidtown”), or is it Moscow itself (as becomes more and more likely as the tale goes on)?

Like most of Aleshkovsky’s works, including Nikolai Nikolaevich, Camouflage is a monologue by a narrator with a strongly marked linguistic profile. If Nikolai Nikolaevich’s speech reflects his experience as a criminal and former camp inmate, Fedya Milashkin’s speech, although also rich in mat, is far more steeped in the clichés and rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism-Brezhnevism, as filtered through the Soviet mass media. Nikolai Nikolaevich is the Soviet version of a social drinker, while Milashkin is an out-and-out alcoholic, so the Introduction

\ xvii

xviii \

Introduction

peculiar slang of drinkers plays a more prominent role in Camouflage, while prison slang is virtually absent (Milashkin’s experience with imprisonment is limited to stays in the drunk tank).

While Nikolai Nikolaevich deals with the tragic derailment of Soviet biological science by blind ideology, Camouflage, written seven years later, grapples with bread-and-butter issues in the most literal sense. The novel centers on the bitter realization that a revolution in the name of the People has devolved into a system in which those at the top enjoy a luxurious life while the People starve and descend into mindless drunkenness. In a deliriously imagined meeting of the Politburo (the ruling group of the Central Committee of the Communist Party), KGB director Yuri Andropov proposes prohibition, to which Premier Aleksei Kosygin replies, “Are you all crazy? Prohibition would bring an immediate halt to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway and all our other youth-initiative construction projects! You can’t buck people up just with slogans. . . .

People in the provinces have nothing to eat, so let them at least get drunk” (chapter 10). Perhaps the most pointed satirical thrust of Camouflage is what Ready calls “a critical view of Russian drinking habits as an instrument of state oppression.”17 The drunkenness and resulting impotence of the men of Staroporokhov, as well as the genetic defects appearing in their children, lead the women to stage a protest that goes well beyond Lysistrata (and will not be spoiled in this introduction). Milashkin’s wife, Duska, the ringleader of the women’s rebellion, goes to the heart of the novel’s morality in her speech to her interrogators: “You see, Comrade Prosecutors, we too want to sleep with our husbands like normal broads, just for fun and for pleasure, and to have babies. And we don’t want to feel ashamed when we compare our babies’ brains and appearances

to those in other countries. Let Kosygin know: we’re going to stand up for ourselves!” Referring to the frantic preparations for the 1980 Olympics to be held in Moscow, Duska continues, “We . . . don’t give a damn about your stadiums! The Dotsenkos’ daughter can hardly walk. She has eight toes on each foot. Do you expect her to set new records at your 1980 Olympics? And the Dolidzes’ little Givi—he’s got a crooked vertebra—are you going to send him out on the ice to do double toe loops?” (chapter 9).

Lipovetsky discusses the “epic scope” of Aleshkovsky’s grotesque plots, which intersect with and interpret the major landmarks of the Soviet story: “All of Aleshkovsky’s characters are highly historical.”18 Aleshkovsky’s son, Aleksei, echoes this statement when he writes that his father aspires to the laurels of Oswald Spengler or Arnold J. Toynbee, historians whose works have broad civilizational ambitions: “The object of his study is not fates or characters, not the general and not the typical; the object of his study is Soviet power, the civilization of horror. His books are an encyclopedia of Soviet life, the image of which has become the novella Camouflage—a devastating metaphor of lies.”19 Aleksei Aleshkovsky is paraphrasing Vissarion Belinsky’s 1845 characterization of Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, as “an encyclopedia of Russian life.” Belinsky also called Pushkin’s novel “an act of consciousness for Russian society”—a label that applies just as well to Camouflage, which cuts through the illusions of propaganda (whether emanating from Soviet television or the Voice of America) to the essence of the Soviet experience.20 The “unprintable” language in which Aleshkovsky couches his artistic engagement with the fate of Russia in the twentieth century is an indispensable part of his mission—to return a voice to a suffering nation. Joseph Brodsky compares Aleshkovsky to Mozart in the Introduction

\ xix

xx \

Introduction

way he is able to hear and capture Russian speech; Lev Loseff says that he “does not encrust his prose with vulgarisms, the way writers of the past did to create portraits of the common people; he saddles the powerful element of the common people’s speech. . . . He seldom uses indecent speech to describe sexual phenomena, rather it is an oceanic eros out of which myths arise.”21 We may return to Dostoevsky for an answer to the charge of indecency. He responded to a critic of his feuilleton about the cursing tradesmen by asserting that there is really nothing obscene about the Russian people’s use of obscenity. The common people who bought up copies of the journal in order to laugh at his feuilleton “did not laugh for the sake of the abomination, not from love of that and the art of it; their laughter was extremely simple-hearted and not depraved; healthy, though coarse; entirely unlike the laughter of some of those who spread filth in our society or in our literature. The People use profanity to no purpose and often when talking about things that are not at all indecent. Our People are not corrupt and are even very pure, despite the fact that they are unquestionably the greatest users of profanity in the whole world.”22 There is a healthy dose of romanticization here, but Dostoevsky’s words are applicable to both Nikolai Nikolaevich and Fedya Milashkin, whose “unprintable” language, ultimately the instrument of loyalty, faithfulness, and love, is juxtaposed with the truly obscene persecutions of the Soviet state.

A NOTE ON THE TE XT This translation is based on the original publication, Nikolai Nikolaevich & Maskirovka (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), checked

against Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Collected Works in Three Volumes), vol. 1 (Moscow: NNN, 1996). In the notes, we have used a slightly modified Library of Congress transliteration.

In the text, we have used the somewhat inconsistent principle of “what looks good to an English-speaking reader.”

Russian names consist of a first name, a patronymic, and a last name. The patronymic is formed from the father’s first name plus the suffix “-ovich”/“-evich” for men or “-ovna”/“-evna” for women.

Russian also uses a wide array of diminutives for the first name.

“Nikolaevich” is not Nikolai’s last name, but his patronymic (his father also was named Nikolai). He is sometimes referred to by the diminutives “Kolya” or “Kolenka.” We never learn Milashkin’s patronymic. His formal first name is Fyodor, but he is more often called by the nickname “Fedya.”

The Soviet secret police were founded in 1917 by Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky and given the official title “All-Russian Emergency Commission for the Struggle with Counter-Revolution and Sabotage,” most often referred to by its shortened name, “Cheka.” The agency was given various names over the course of the twentieth century, but continued to be called “the Cheka” in colloquial speech. In 1954, it became the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), better known as the KGB.

Introduction

\ xxi

P R A I S E F O R N I KO L AI N I KO L AEV I C H & C AM OU F L AG E “Forget old myths about cen-

“Completely irreverent—

sored, obedient Soviet citizens

in the best possible way. Un-

and meet Yuz Aleshkovsky’s

derneath the biting satire

wildly enterprising and em-

and the unrelenting hilarity,

phatically free-thinking pro-

Aleshkovsky’s rapid-fire prose

tagonists who don’t hesitate to

reveals intricate insights into

use colorful language to make

late Soviet politics, culture, sci-

a point about body politics, the

ence, and daily life. The deeply

scientific use of semen, and

problematic narrators of both

other absurdities of modern

novellas will introduce you to a

life.”—YVONNE HOWELL,

Soviet Union you hadn’t sus-

University of Richmond

pected existed.”

—M ICHAEL G ORDIN,

“Aleshkovsky is absolutely bril-

Princeton University

liant. These outstanding English translations of two of his early works offer readers a chance to encounter his idiosyncratic, occasionally profane, and thoroughly remarkable voice.”

Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.

—DEREK C. M AUS, State University of New York at Potsdam ISBN: 978-0-231-18966-8