Authors: Andrei Bitov
For his naiad, the woman named Margarita, Bitov draws on the Faust legend. In Goethe’s version (1832), Faust’s seduction of Margaret leads to her death, which causes him to repent his bargain with Mephistopheles. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita
(1940), Margarita gladly enters into a compact with the devil in order to free the Master from a Soviet mental hospital.
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On this date in 1940, as Germany appeared to be on the verge of gaining the whole world, the hero of Mann’s
Dr. Faustus
died; in 1968, a small, brave, futile demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia took place in Red Square; in 1991, Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist Party.
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An echo of Pushkin’s fairy tale “King Saltan” (1831), in which the queen reportedly bears a child of indeterminate sex and species.
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The Russian words for “death” and “laughter” begin with the same syllable,
sme.
Bitov’s wordplay recalls Velemir Khlebnikov’s “Incantation by Laughter” (1910).
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A wandering Ukrainian philosopher and poet (1722—94), who wrote dialogues treating biblical problems from the point of view of Platonism and Stoicism.
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Kornei Chukovsky (1882—1969), distinguished author, translator, and critic.
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Engels said that the monkey became man when he took a stick in his hands.
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Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s
The Unforgettable Year 1919,
about Stalin’s role in the Civil War, received the Stalin Prize in 1950 and was made into a film, with music by Dmitry Shostakovich.
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The great epic poem by twelfth-century Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli.
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In 978, after two hundred years of independence from Byzantium, the kingdom of Abkhazia was absorbed by its powerful neighbor Georgia. At mass demonstrations in Sukhum and Lykhny in the spring of 1978, Abkhazians threatened to secede from Georgia and join the Russian Republic.
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In 1991, the body of a man who had been frozen in a Tirolian glacier for some 5,000 years was damaged by Austrian rescue workers. A jurisdictional dispute with Italy ensued.
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Both author and hero of Rustaveli’s epic. (Avtandil is not, in fact, the knight in the tiger skin, but rather his spiritual brother; with a third knight, they rescue a maiden from demon country.)
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The anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was regularly celebrated by a two-day holiday featuring massive parades.
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On September 1, 1983, en route from Anchorage to Seoul, a Korean Air Lines jet was shot down by the Soviets near Sakhalin with 269 people aboard, most of them civilians.
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The title of this fictitious book parodies a contemporary genre of patriotic Georgian novels. Colchis is the classical name for Abkhazia, to which Jason, in order to regain his throne from a usurper, voyaged in quest of a golden fleece hanging in an oak grove. The Black Sea was known in ancient times as the Pontus Euxinus.
The plot of the book is a pastiche of details from familiar works on the themes of betrayal and usurpation. The cloak with a red lining is emblematic of Pontius Pilate, in Bulgakov’s
Master and Margarita;
the broad-chested Ossetian is Stalin, in the poem (1933) for which Mandelstam was arrested and exiled.
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For political reasons, the princes of medieval Russia often postponed baptism until they thought their time had come.
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The river Kura is in Georgia.
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This often repeated phrase is from Gorky’s tale “Old Woman Izergil”.
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That is, a beer hall—so called after Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.
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Mikhail Kuzmin (1872—1936), an esoteric writer, openly homosexual, with an interest in classical and religious themes. His poetry reflects his spiritual quests in southern lands such as Italy and Egypt.
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Homelessness, or the lack of a residence permit, was a crime in the Soviet Union.
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Saltychikha was an eighteenth-century landowner famous for torturing her serfs. M. E. Saltykov, who took the pen name Shchedrin, was a nineteenth-century novelist.
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From a Soviet song, often quoted ironically by people wistful for bourgeois material comfort.
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Immensely popular satirists of Soviet bureaucracy; joint authors of
The Golden Calf.
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A mad scientist bent on cornering the world gold market with his death ray, in a novel (1925) by Alexei Tolstoy, who was a distant relative of the great Lev Tolstov.
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Adapted from Pushkin’s self-congratulatory exclamation on finishing his drama
Boris Godunov
(as recounted in a letter to a friend in 1825).
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H. G. Neuhaus (1888-1964), eminent and influential Soviet pianist. (His daughter became Boris Pasternak’s second wife.)
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Pushkin is reported to have made this remark on reading an early draft of Gogol’s
Dead Souls,
the theme of which—the purchase of lists of dead serfs, to be mortgaged for a profit—Pushkin himself had suggested to Gogol.
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In St. Petersburg (Leningrad).
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On October 26, 1983,
The New York Times
reported that journalist Oleg Bitov (the author’s brother) had defected from the USSR in September and had been granted asylum in Britain. He reappeared in Moscow a year later, claiming that he had been abducted from a film festival in Venice and held involuntarily by British agents
(New York Times,
September 19, 1984).
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These details suggest a central scene in Thomas Mann’s
Dr. Faustus:
an I/he dialogue between the hero and his changeable devil, who emanates a bone-chilling cold despite the summer warmth of Italy. (Zyablikov’s name derives from the Russian for “chilly.”)
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Adapted from an untitled lyric by Joseph Brodsky (1962)—printed in 1990 as the opening poem of the first extensive collection of his émigré works published in Russia.
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The demons of Dostoevsky’s novel (also known as
The Possessed;
1871) are radical revolutionaries, precursors of the Bolsheviks.
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Vladimir Dahl’s dictionary was published in 1880—82.
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The Rafik is a light van; its nickname derives from the initials of the Latvian factory where it is produced. By linguistic coincidence, Rafik can also be a personal name or nickname in several of the Caucasian lands.
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Although he has an ordinary Russian first name, Valery Givivovich’s patronymic is strange to Russian ears because it derives from the name of his Georgian father.
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Jvari is the site of a sixth-century cathedral overlooking the confluence of the Aragva and Kura rivers in Georgia. The quotation is from the opening stanzas of Lermontov’s poem “The Novice” (1833), where he mentions that the Georgian king had entrusted his nation to Russia, and describes it as blessed by God behind Russian bayonets. The poem is the story of a rebellious young monk who tries to flee to his native mountains rather than take monastic vows. He travels in a circle, back to the monastery, and dies an exile.
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From a children’s counting rhyme.
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Sukhum
…
Sukhumi
…
Batumi
…
Batum
The short forms of these names are older, often used by local people; the Georgian forms ending in
-i
were accepted as standard by Soviet authorities.
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From Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman.” The poem’s angry hero addresses the threat to the statue of Peter the Great, whom he blames for the death of his beloved in a Petersburg flood. The “idol” then pursues the hero through the streets until he dies.
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Here the name Rezo is substituted for Vano, in an exchange of remarks taken from one of Erlom Akhvlediani’s “Niko and Vano” stories (1969). Of these modern fairy tales Bitov wrote in 1973: “Niko and Vano are one man simultaneously, they are pronouns of a kind: I and he, he and I, I and they, as he, he as I
…
”
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Ruler of Georgia in the twelfth century, when the country was at the height of its power.
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This passage appears to be from a seventeenth-century Church Slavonic translation of the writings of St. John Chrysostom (d. 407). He began his religious life as an ascetic in the desert outside Antioch, but eventually became Archbishop of Constantinople and gained fame for his eloquence in condemning the sins of the mighty. Banished by the empress in 403, he was recalled at the insistence of the common people but was soon banished again, first to Armenia and then to what is now Pitsunda, in Abkhazia. An old man, forced to travel on foot, he died on the journey, in a Pontic town called Comana, whose exact location is now unknown.
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From Pushkin’s poem “Arion” (1827), about a legendary Greek poet of the sixth century
B
.
C
.
Like Orpheus on Jason’s
Argo,
Arion had only one task on the ship—to make music for the crew. (He survived the wreck of the ship when a dolphin enchanted by his song guided him to shore.)
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Poet Afanasy Fet (1820—92) was of German extraction.
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Hyrcanian, Iberia
: Classical names for the Caspian Sea and Georgia. (“Author-Khan” and his men follow roughly the same route as the narrator of this book, from the Baltic to Abkhazia, via Moscow, Baku, and Tbilisi.)
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If Goethe’s Faust prays for the moment to linger, it is time for Mephistopheles to claim his soul. (That moment comes when Faust—who has devoted his life to good works after repenting his fatal seduction of Margaret—admires a landscape that he has reclaimed from under the sea. Despite his old bargain, he is redeemed.)
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The phrase recalls the opening of Chekhov’s story “The Student” (1894). Beside a bonfire on a wintry Good Friday, a divinity student talks about the long, chill night during which Peter denied Christ three times before cock-crow. The student is comforted by the realization that Peter’s betrayal and grief are linked to the present day by an unbroken chain of events.
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A variant of a poem by Osip Mandelstam (1917), on the themes of distance, time, and exile, with allusions to the voyages of Jason and Odysseus.
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Adapted from lines near the end of Pushkin’s Eugene
Onegin
(1831). In Nabokov’s translation (Bollingen, 1975): “A restlessness took hold of him, / the urge toward a change of places.”
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There are women of whom you’re unworthy
…
I have no God, I have no Mom
.
.
.
: Lines by the author’s friend Gleb Gorbovsky.
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That is, Khasbulatov and Nishanov. Both are politicians from the Caucasus; they figured in the televised parliamentary struggles over the status of the Soviet republics—struggles which led to the failed coup against Gorbachev on August 19, 1991, and ultimately to Boris Yeltsin’s accession to power.
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The phrase recalls Pushkin’s sardonic fairy tale “The Golden Cockerel” (1834). Perched on a tower, the cock crows thrice to warn of approaching danger. The danger proves to be a woman; the king’s two sons kill each other in battle over her; the king wins her. Insufficiently grateful, he is pecked to death by the cockerel.
On quite another level, the image recalls Mandelstam’s poem “Tristia” (1918). In literal translation: “
…
Who can know
…
what the cock’s crowing promises us when fire burns on the acropolis, or why, at the dawn of a new life
…
, a cock, the herald of the new life, beats his wings on the city wall?”
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The first phrase is from a modern proverb; the second, from an ancient Russian folk song.
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Stalin said, in 1931, “Anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous survival of cannibalism.”