Authors: Andrei Bitov
-—Inscription on a monument at the Kaliningrad Zoo
Andrei Bitov wrote the three tales in this novel between 1971 and 1993, while the Soviet Union moved from peace to war to collapse. The first tale was published in 1976, but the second did not appear—and the third could never have been written—until after
glasnost.
As time flows through the novel, the changing fortunes of the author, the hero, the censor, and their country generate a very complex set of ironies.
On the simplest level,
The Monkey Link
is a novel in three acts, a comedy of ideas. Bitov originally intended to pose three questions: What is man’s role in relation to other biological species? To God? To humankind? The story was to end in the early eighties—that is, before Mikhail Gorbachev, before
glasnost
and
perestroika,
in the so-called era of stagnation, when, as Bitov wrote in a synopsis in 1990, “time and the Empire itself were frozen like eternity, and the boldest mind could not have guessed the course of history.” But history overtook the novel. The events of 1991—the failed coup against Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin’s sudden ascent to power, and the dissolution of the Soviet empire—forced another question: What is a man’s role in relation to
himself
?
An empire inevitably shapes the mental landscape of its citizens. The pride of empire distorts their moral boundaries to include dominion over others, while tyranny and terror divide people against each other and against themselves, forcing them to betray friends, country, and conscience. For people of Bitov’s generation the problem is compounded by the trauma of a wartime childhood. His fictional heroes tend to suffer from a painful, multifaceted alienation: a sense that they do not know who they are, that they do not belong in their own time and place, that they are distant from “the people” and from life itself, that they live only in books or movies. Like some of Dostoevsky’s heroes, or Thomas Mann’s, they cannot be sure which of their self-contradictory identities is real, where their deepest loyalties lie, or whether they serve God or the devil.
Hidden at the center of the hero’s problems in
The Monkey Link
is the image of the Bronze Horseman, Peter the Great (1672—1725). Bitov was born in Peter’s capital, and his writings are steeped in the Petersburg literary heritage. Nevertheless. his heroes have expressed a profound ambivalence toward the brilliant tyrant who designed the city and shaped the destiny of the empire. In
A Captive of the Caucasus
(1983). Bitov’s book about his spiritual quests in Armenia and Georgia, he formulates the problem of imperial pride and envy very simply: “This journey begins from afar
…
From Peter the Great—half benefactor, half Antichrist.” The Antichrist of contemporary Russian history, of course, was Stalin, and an identification of the two men was the artistic premise underlying Bitov’s use of imagery from Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” in his first novel,
Pushkin House
(1971).
In
The Monkey Link,
another figure lurks behind these two. Not mentioned, but implicit in the structure of the book, is the three-faced Lucifer of the
Divine Comedy,
who stands waist-deep in the frozen lake of hell and gnaws on the three worst traitors of all time (Judas Iscariot, Cassius, and Brutus). Bitov’s personal map of the twentieth century might be described as a three-dimensional design with its horizontal surface covered by a thick layer of Soviet ice. Wherever the hero finds himself in space and time, a vertical axis runs up to heaven and down to hell: his life journey traces spirals around it. He exists at that spiritual center, waist-deep in the ice like Dante’s Lucifer, and his ego relentlessly punishes him for his various betrayals (of God, of Caesar, of self). He must acknowledge the part of him hidden in the ice, recognize and forgive his own capacity for betrayal, understand that Stalin is within him—he must, like Dante the Pilgrim, climb down past Lucifer’s hairy loins before his soul can complete another spiral upward through time.
The Monkey Link
begins, psychologically, at the end point of
Pushkin House.
Lvova, the hero of that novel, feels that his life has traveled in a circle; he is trapped within coils of deceit and betrayal. Although powerless to free himself, he gives “the author” a copy of his grandfather’s journal, containing a message of salvation. In an essay titled “God Is,” written in the early twenties on the eve of his arrest by the new Soviet regime. Grandfather asserts that
under other conditions he might never have looked up and learned that he was free.
This insight establishes the framework of
The Monkey Link.
The setting of
Birds,
the first of the novel’s three tales, is a peninsula in “East Prussia.” Königsberg, the historic seat of the princes of East Prussia, fell to Soviet forces in 1945 after a long siege. Founded in 1255 by the Teutonic Knights, the city had retained its German identity through centuries of struggle among neighboring empires for control of the lands along the Baltic coast. Between the World Wars. East Prussia was an island of German territory within Poland; on today’s map, Königsberg is the Kaliningrad District, an isolated scrap of the Russian Republic, with just the northern tip of the Kurish Spit extending beyond the international boundary into Lithuanian territory.
When Bitov went there in the late sixties to work on
Pushkin House,
the Kurish Spit was the westernmost reach of a monolithic empire. The Soviet system had rigidified again after the relative thaw of the Khrushchev years (Bitov has commented that Leningrad never even thawed as much as Moscow). Leonid Brezhnev’s regime seemed unshakable. In August of 1968 the flowering of the “Prague Spring” had been crushed by Soviet tanks. Writers like Sinvavsky, Brodsky, and Solzhenitsyn were being cruelly harassed and would soon be exiled. Pacing the beaches of the long, narrow sandspit and writing about the sequelae of a Stalinist childhood, Bitov was balancing on a geographical and political knife blade between East and West.
Revisiting that shore in
Birds,
the author-hero finds his thoughts returning to human aggression, to empires, boundaries, anti-tank barriers, to images of pursuit and flight, concealment and confinement, exile and homeland. He is trapped, like the feathered prisoners who blunder into the nets erected on the Spit by ornithologists, and the only way out is up. Hence his impulse toward God—toward the ideal, the “supreme thought.” (This, too, is appropriate to the setting: many an eighteenth-century philosopher made the pilgrimage to Königsberg to study under Immanuel Kant, who lived and taught there all his life.) In dialogue with a Soviet “priest of science,” the hero’s sense of exile is transmuted into a discussion of man’s abandonment of his primitive niche in nature. But in his private reflections on the ambiguous paradise of the Spit, he stops barely short of equating ordinary Soviet life with spiritual death.
That equation is stated more explicitly in the novel’s second tale,
Man in a Landscape.
The germ of this tale is an incident in the final chapter of
A Captive of the Caucasus,
in which the author-hero, on his way home to Leningrad from Georgia, visits a historic site. Depressed by the shoddy restoration effort, he suddenly perceives God’s original design in the Russian landscape and feels that the reality around him is like the back of a painting: he has momentarily fallen through a hole in the canvas and landed in the paint layer. He is inspired to write a new “journey,” to be called
Man in a Landscape: New Information on Birds.
Man in a Landscape
was thus conceived as a mischievous reversal of “reality,” a view of the Soviet paradise from below. The allegorical setting is a somewhat fantastic preserve outside Moscow, dating from the time of the early tsars. With an artist as his quasi-supernatural guide, the hero journeys into the medieval heart of Russia. From there he descends further into the darkness of modern treachery (the lowest, ninth circle of Dante’s hell), and finally, in an autumn sunset in 1979, arrives at what may or may not prove to be the threshold of paradise.
At that pivotal moment in history, Soviet forces were preparing to invade Afghanistan. For Bitov, as he has since told an interviewer, the invasion marked the end of the twentieth century—and the beginning of the end of the empire that the Soviets had so stubbornly dragged behind them. When he wrote this story in 1983. however, public protest of the Afghan debacle was still impossible. Cold War rhetoric was intensifying under the new regime of Yuri Andropov. Bitov himself was in trouble with the authorities for allowing
Pushkin House
to appear abroad (1978) and for co-editing the samizdat anthology
Metropol
(1979). He was virtually unable to publish.
The author-hero of
Man in a Landscape
hints at similar circumstances, and they emerge undisguised in
Awaiting Monkeys,
the novel’s third tale. By the time Bitov undertook to write it, his previously suppressed works (including
Pushkin House
and
Man in a Landscape)
had at last been published in Russia, he had made several trips to the West, and he could openly parody the Soviet utopia. He chose to parody his pre-
glasnost
self as well.
In another era, he might have described this phase of his hero’s pilgrimage in terms of a journey to the holy sites of the Mediterranean region. But his hero, in 1983, cannot hope to travel abroad, and for Russians the Caucasus has been a traditional substitute. Abkhazia is a particularly fitting locale, on a number of counts. Its native name,
Apsny,
means “Land of the Soul.” It still boasts a remnant of an ancient forest to which Christians were exiled from Rome and Constantinople. It is also the shore to which Jason voyaged with his Argonauts, in quest of the golden fleece that would regain his throne from a usurper. For the last thousand years the nation’s political fortunes have been bound up with those of neighboring Georgia—and in the twentieth century, therefore, with Stalin. Its capital, Sukhum, has been the site of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine fortresses, Ottoman and Genoese slave markets. Russian and Soviet health resorts, and now also a research institute’s monkey colony. A visit to the “free” monkeys becomes the goal of the author-hero’s travels: he will exploit the colony for satirical purposes.
The first two parts of
Awaiting Monkeys,
“The Horse” and “The Cow,” stand in the same relation to each other as
Birds
does to
Man in a Landscape:
a journey to an equivocal paradise, followed by a journey to a netherworld where the hero gains partial insight. In “The Horse” (perhaps because the date is given as August 23, anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939), the hero travels back in memory through the Stalin years to the collectivization of agriculture, which emptied the Russian village and turned the populace into a nation of policemen. His earlier sense of society’s spiritual death thus acquires a symbolic focus—the peasant, repository of the Russian soul—and in “The Cow” he begins to see his own complicity in the Mephistophelean bargains of Soviet history.
The pattern is repeated again in the third part. “Fire.” From Moscow, where the evil of the socialist paradise is so banal as to be its own parody, the hero plunges into an unreal world of filmmaking and literary criticism in Azerbaijan and Georgia: there, fleeing demons in 1984, he finds himself at the source of evil and comes close to genuine insight. The plot then spirals back and forth between Moscow and Abkhazia, from the illusory freedom of the Gorbachev years to a moment of self-confrontation to a moment of revelation.
All the points visited in this novel are stages in the hero’s quest for a spiritual homeland. But if those points are plotted on a map of the Soviet Union, the line obtained gives his journey an added subliminal significance. In the Great Patriotic War of 1941—45, German forces failed to reach either Moscow or the oil fields of Baku; Leningrad withstood a 900-day siege (Bitov has written of being evacuated, as a child, over frozen Lake Ladoga). The boundary of the German Occupation was thus an irregular diagonal line starting below Leningrad on the Baltic shore, passing just west of Moscow, extending almost to the Caspian Sea in the south, and from there turning west across the Caucasus to the Black Sea. In its own way, this book is a tour of the front and an exorcism of childhood trauma.
It is also an epic poem: the hero is Odysseus returning from war, Jason dethroning the usurper, Aeneas hoping to found a new empire—the empire of the soul, as Dante’s Virgil called it. The poetic structure of the book grows organically with the narrative. On the first page the hero sets sail in Lermontov’s “air-ocean.” where demons roam and angels watch unseen; along the way the demons and even the angels become increasingly visible and real. The components of the opening metaphor (modern man as an armored creature who lives on a boundary line and never looks up unless compelled) become actual elements of the final scene at the barricade. The gyrations of the bird in the trap become the loops of the hero’s journey, the shadow cast by the painter’s Gogolian nose becomes the author’s alter ego—image after image seizes life and plays its role in the narrative.
Bitov’s allusions to other literary works complement this structure. Whether quoting openly or writing in “invisible ink,” like Akhmatova, he is taking the azimuth, as it were—measuring off arcs that connect the fictional moment with an outside reality and thus define his location, or his hero’s, or ours. As more of these sight lines are added, they intersect to form an airy design of their own, enveloping the narrative in a sphere of relevant human experience. Fundamentally, Bitov draws on our shared literary heritage: the Bible, the
Divine Comedy
,
Don Quixote,
the Faust legend. He also uses elements from Russian classics, but they undergo a late-twentieth-century metamorphosis, and his hero exists in a world that knows Mann and Grass, Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov.