The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, by Yury Tynyanov (prologue)

PROLOGUE

I

n the freezing cold square in the month of December 1825, the people of the twenties, those with a spring in their step, ceased to exist. Time was suddenly shattered; the crunch of bones was heard around Mikhailovsky Manège—the rebels fled over the bodies of their comrades—the times were on the rack; it was one great torture chamber (as they used to say in the days of Peter the Great).

Faces of remarkable muteness appeared immediately, right there in the square—craning faces, cheeks like taut breeches, sinews ready to burst. The sinews were the piping on the gendarmes’ uniforms, the color of the northern blue, and the Baltic muteness of Benckendorff turned into the Petersburg skies.

Then they began to calculate and assess, to judge their fluttering fathers; the fathers were sentenced to death or to a dishonorable life.

A chance traveler, a Frenchman, struck by the structure of the Russian state machine, described it as an “empire of catalogues,” and added: “brilliant ones.”

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The fathers bowed their heads, the sons went into action, the fathers began to fear them, to respect them, to ingratiate themselves.

At night, they felt remorseful; they sobbed bitterly. They called it “conscience” and “remembrance.”

And there was a great void.

In that void, very few people saw that the blood had drained away from the fluttering fathers, now brittle as a foil, that the blood of the age had undergone a transfusion. In just two or three years, a new breed had appeared, sons barely younger than their fathers. By slave labor and the subjugation of conquered peoples, by bustling and bargaining (but without the spring in the step), they wound up Benckendorff ’s sterile state machine and set factories and mills spinning. In the thirties, it started to smell like America; it had the reek of the East Indies.

Two winds were blowing: easterly and westerly, both bringing loss and death to the fathers and profit to the sons.

What did politics mean for the fathers?

“What is a secret society? In Paris, we used to chase the girls; here, we shall hunt the Bear.”

So said the Decembrist, Lunin.

He was not being flippant; later, from Siberia, he irritated Nicholas with letters and proposals written in a tauntingly clear hand; he was baiting a bear with his walking cane—with his usual lightness of touch.

Liberty and love—these were what made poetry, and even common talk, so enticing and voluptuous. But liberty and love also brought death.

Those who died before their time had been overtaken by death quite suddenly, as if by love, as if by rain.

“He grabbed the frightened doctor’s hand and demanded his help urgently, shouting at him loudly: ‘Don’t you get it, my friend?

I want to live, I want to live!’ ”

The dying words of General Ermolov, military leader of the twenties, sealed off in a glass jar by Nicholas.

And, squeezed by the hand, the doctor fainted.

The people of the twenties recognized each other later, in the thirties crowd; they had a “Masonic sign,” a certain look, and, in particular, a little smile incomprehensible to others. The little smile was almost childlike.

All around them, they heard unfamiliar words, which they struggled with, words such as Kammerjunker or “rent,” which they could not understand. Sometimes they paid with their lives for their failure to learn the vocabulary of their sons and younger brothers.

It’s easy to die for girls or secret societies; it’s harder to die for a Kammerjunker.

A hard death befell the men of the twenties, because the age had died before them.

In the thirties, they had a keen sense of when their time was up.

Like dogs, they chose the most comfortable corner to die in. And before they died, they demanded neither love nor friendship.

What was friendship? What was love?

They had lost their friendships somewhere in the previous decade, and all that remained was the habit of writing to friends and interceding for the guilty—incidentally, there were many guilty ones at that time. They wrote long, sentimental letters to each other and deceived each other as they had once deceived women.

In the twenties, women were not taken seriously and love affairs were no secret; only sometimes the men fought duels and died with a look on their faces as if to say: “I am off to the ballet tomorrow.”

There was an expression at that time: “wounds of the heart,” one that incidentally did not prevent marriages of convenience.

In the thirties, poets took to writing to empty-headed beauties.

Women began to wear gorgeous garters. The womanizing back in Prologue

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the twenties now seemed almost earnest and innocent, and the secret societies seemed little more than a “bunch of ensigns.”

Blessed were those who fell in the twenties, like proud young dogs, with blazing red sideburns!

How terrible was the fate of the transformed ones, for those of the twenties whose blood had been transfused!

They felt they were the objects of an experiment carried out by an alien hand whose fingers would not falter.

The age was in ferment.

The age is forever fermenting in the blood; each age has its own special ferment.

In the twenties, there was fermentation of wine—Pushkin.

With Griboedov, it was fermentation of vinegar.

And then, from Lermontov onward, there was putrefaction, spreading through words and blood, like the sound of a guitar.

The fragrance of the finest perfume is founded on decomposition, on waste (ambergris is the waste of a sea creature), and the most exquisite aroma is the closest to stench.

Nowadays, poets no longer even concern themselves with perfume; instead of fragrance, they peddle waste.

On this day, I have waved aside the whiffs of perfume and waste.

An old Asian vinegar fills my veins instead, and the blood seeps sluggishly, as if through the wastelands of ruined empires.

A man of short stature, yellow-skinned and prim, occupies my imagination.

He lies motionless, his eyes glistening after his sleep.

He has reached for the spectacles on the bedside table.

He does not think, does not speak.

Nothing is yet decided.

“Together with Shklovsky and Jakobson, Tynyanov was the face of Russian formalism —the premier student of Romanticism.

His historical novels draw on the extensive wealth of archival materials he acquired as a critic. Tynyanov’s novel is a must-read!”

—P ETER S TEINER, author of Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics

PRAISE FOR THE DEATH OF VA Z I R - M U K H T A R

“The well-known formalist literary scholar Yury Tynyanov was a master of form. In bracing prose style, his novel The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar dives deeply into the life of the Russian poet Alexander Griboedov and Russian cultural and political history. This translation by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush brings the reader every unexpected turn of Griboedov’s life and thoughts.”

—S IBELAN FORRESTER, translator of Vladimir Propp’s The Russian Folktale “Tynyanov’s novel transforms the life of writer-diplomat Alexander Griboedov into the death of the author as such, dispersed discursively even as he is dismembered physically, through bureaucratic manipulation, high-society intrigue, diplomatic complicity, and social oblivion. This book recasts the familiar story of the martyred Russian writer, anticipating by a century the fate of Soviet intellectuals whose life and work would be subsumed by the state.”

—H ARSHA RAM, author of The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire

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

ISBN: 978-0-231-19386-3