“You’re mistaken, Kolia,” I told him. “RUDI is Moldavian, a land of magnificent wines. I don’t see why. .”
But Kolia had recovered his composure. “Yes, well, you’re right. It’s just that those scallywags from the Caucasus have invaded our cities. . But that’s not worth talking about. Instead, let’s toast our glorious army.”
“A toast!” I shouted, too, like a Muscovite.
LIFT. The people of Russia suffer from a compulsion to inventory the cosmos and make everything within it intelligible. The Bolsheviks, fervent adepts of social engineering, loved definitions so exhaustive that they left all meaning entirely dessicated. Every Metro car bore a plaque in minuscule text: “How to make use of the Metropolitan underground rail system.” The elevators (called LIFTS in Russian, too), those “infernal machines,” are also equipped with extensive instructions. Those for the elevator in my building read like this (as I waited for the lift I would read the text again and again, hypnotized):REGULATIONS FOR USAGE OF THEPASSENGER ELEVATOR(Weight Limit: 500 kg or six persons)
This elevator is intended for the transportation of passengers, furniture, and other objects of quotidian use.
To summon the empty car, activate the button located next to its entrance on every floor, on the external side. After the call button has been pressed, wait for the car to arrive.
When the car arrives at the floor from which the call was made, the doors of both the elevator shaft and the car will open automatically.
Enter the elevator or place your cargo inside it without delay. If the doors close too soon, it will be necessary to press the call button again.
After entering or completing the loading of cargo into the car, press the button (situated on the panel in the interior of the car) for the desired floor. The doors will close automatically and the car will begin to move. In case of surcharge, the SURCHARGE light will illuminate on the control panel and the car will not begin to move.
Upon arrival at the desired floor, the doors will open automatically.
Should the elevator function defectively, press the STOP button for an emergency stop.IT IS FORBIDDEN8. To attempt to accelerate or in any way tamper with the movement of the automatic doors, and to lean against them.9. To attempt to open the doors when the car is in motion.10.To attempt to open the doors of a malfunctioning elevator on one’s own. Such a procedure is extremely dangerous.11.To open the trap door in the roof of the elevator.12.For preschool children to travel on the elevator without being accompanied by an adult.13.To load the elevator with flammable liquids or objects of large dimension.14.To smoke in the elevator.Let us take good care of the elevator. Do not permit mischief by children, vandalism by adolescents, or mistreatment of the elevator by adults!
(I always thought that one piece of chilling advice was missing: When the doors of the elevator open, please ascertain that the floor is there prior to entering.)
More about elevators: “The Angel of the Bridge,” by John Cheever.
LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS, THE. In close-up a movie screen is not the homogenous canvas we imagine from our seats in the ninth row but a sheet of polyvinyl riddled with minuscule orifices almost invisible to the eye. Thus we see only a small percentage of the projected image; a great part of it passes through these tiny orifices and lands in the terrifying void behind the screen. When the brick wall that stands back there reaches a certain level of saturation, a process of spontaneous emission of all the films projected over the years takes place. Since the force of this emission rarely exceeds in energy that of the primary emission — the one from the projector — the phenomenon was only quite recently discovered. In the mid-seventies, Kliuchariov and Alimushkin, two BRODIAGAS who’ve now become famous, chose to spend a cold winter night in an abandoned movie theater on Nevsky Prospekt. At three in the morning, unable to sleep because of the excess of light that flowed across the screen, they discovered a phosphorescent flickering of inverted forms on the polyvinyl. The inexplicable nature of the phenomenon meant that the secret had to be kept for almost two decades. This fortunate interdiction spared us extensive monographs on the lousy movies of the 1930s and the agitprop films of the 1920s. Now, in 1991, titles from 1918 “and on” (that is to say, and earlier) have begun to appear. The face of one beautiful woman in particular persists against the white background.
I. In 1910, four years before the premiere of Song of Triumphant Love, her apotheosis, Vera Vasilievna, the future great star of Russian silent film (one of those butterflies of pleated ORGANDY at her waist), took special care to exchange the crude fetter of her hard maiden name of Levchenko for the alluring and exotic double-stranded necklace of Холодная (Kholodnaya). When this name, full of soft as and os, was murmured in every salon in Muscovy, many imagined it to be a very apt pseudonym. In Russian, kholodnaya means “cold woman,” and Vera Lánina, the adulterous beauty she played in At the Fireside, was indeed cold and distant. Russia’s so-called “Silver Age” (another lovely name) had had its tastes distorted by Игорь Северянин (Igor Severyanin, a pen name meaning “Northerner”), Андрéй Бéлый (Andrei Biely, whose chosen pseudonym was “White”), and Сáша Чёрный (Sasha Chorny, or “Black,” another nom de plume). Thus when, after At the Fireside, everyone flocked to her next film, Forget Your Home, the Fire There No Longer Burns, no one was inclined to lend the slightest credence to the hypothesis that Kholodnaya was simply her married name.
a) This quaintly antiquated vogue for pseudonyms has a fossiclass="underline" Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин (Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, whose adopted monicker means “man of steel”).
For her husband, Vladimir Kholodny, the name had no exotic meaning: what’s more, he was the editor of Авто or Auto (Steam and Speed) the first Russian magazine for car enthusiasts. Vera Vasilievna Levchenko, too, seems to have had a taste for technological novelty. Four years later, metamorphosed into “the queen of the screen,” she drove only the latest model Renaults for her appearances in Daughter of the Century, Why Do I Love So Madly? and The Chess Game of Life.
b) Already in 1918 automobiles summoned notions of power and strength. Trotsky scandalized Moses Nappelbaum, a portraitist whose studio was on Nevsky Prospekt, by having his picture taken in a chauffeur’s uniform adorned with leather and buckles, precisely the attire that would become characteristic of the civil war’s terrible commisars.
In 1914, with the outbreak of world war, the fiery glances and heavily retouched eyes of Lyda Borelli and Francesca Bertini suddenly caught on in Moscow. That same year, Vera Kholodnaya, a complete unknown, appeared in the offices of gospodín Khanzhonkov, a magnate of the nascent film industry. Vera Vasilievna signed a five-year contract with Khanzhonkov, without suspecting that this gospodin was the devil and she would die at the end of that period.
She acted in forty-seven films of love and despair. Her heroines’ laughter always contained a note of sadness: Pola, the unhappy acrobat, who executed dangerous moves and one night lost her grip on the trapeze, flew across the tent, and fell, luxuriously dressed — in a hat adorned with ostrich feathers — into a beautiful Muscovite mansion.