The old man leans toward me and descends to a whisper. “A true story: a case of child perversion in a bath house. A subject on which the greatest silence has been preserved but which, nevertheless, was a secret well-known to many in the eighties of the last century. Strajov, his most intimate friend. .”
I cut him off. “Excuse me, I don’t believe I have any interest in this.”
“But it’s true! The most important part of my report! Count Tolstoy certainly knew about it. To be perfectly honest, I myself. . at times (for I am no saint). Certain slender twelve-year-old backs. . Напрасно сударь, совершенно напрасно! (You are making a mistake and you’ll regret it!)”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “Certain supple, bare twelve-year-old backs. . frail, honey-hued shoulders” (Lolita, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov — or Набóков, if you like).
I stormed to my feet, head spinning, cheeks on fire. Barely keeping my balance, I headed for the exit. In the doorway, unable to restrain myself, I turned and shouted back at this Humbert: “But this is a vile slander, a filthy донóс! Clearer than water! Aren’t you ashamed! And there I was, hearing you out without an inkling of your true intent! To defame the memory of a great writer thus! Listen. . A viper, that’s what you are. A viper who lurks waiting to inject others with your venom. How low can a man. .” Et cetera.
BIBLIOSPHERE. We can imagine it as an immense spherical structure, Ptolemaically centered on every man-reader. Its thin walls — thick as a single page from the Bible — harbor all texts that have been written and all those being written at this moment (including this one), their surface ceaselessly expanding. The vastness of the BIBLIOSPHERE, its cosmic diameter, in no way slows the velocity of access to its texts, for any journey across it is mental and instantaneous. After a more or less exhaustive exploration of the BIBLIOSPHERE a writer who is less than shrewd may enter a perilous state of ecstatic dejection, having deduced that nothing new can be created. A dynamic intelligence — one we might qualify as Copernican — will understand that we must return to the scholastic practice of the gloss, acknowledging the BIBLIOSPHERE as an authority. All that remains then is to discover the generative nature of the BIBLIOSPHERE, its capacity to create texts out of itself. Bacon writes, in The Masculine Birth of Time or Three Books on the Interpretation of Nature, “A pig might print the letter A with its snout in the mud, but you would not on that account expect it to go on to compose a tragedy.” The theorem of the British Museum proposes virtually the same thing: “If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all of the books in the British Museum” (Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World). Or, to simplify things a bit, the monkeys might limit themselves to the thirty-five volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Indeed, why not suppose — again, Copernicanally — that literature is no longer the province of mankind, that the fictional corpus will henceforth emerge by spontaneous generation from the depths of the BIBLIOSPHERE: originality of style, exquisite composition, the stamp of genius all the results of a roll of the dice, or rather, an automated spin of the painstakingly labeled spheres of a combinatorial optimization machine.
BOGATYR (БогАтыРь: mythic warrior). We might call him a colossus out of a medieval epic poem of heroic deeds. He represents the немереная (incomparable) force of the Russian nation. Many secretly know themselves to be BOGATYR, a conviction for which no evidence whatsoever is required. One need only sprawl next to the wood stove, drink KVAS, be large-bellied and wide-shouldered, and remain imperturbably in that reclining position until the fateful day arrives: the day when little Mother Russia is in need.
In everyday life, the term has been put to unfortunate use as the name of a chain of shops that deal in plus-size menswear.
BOOGIE SHOES. Now, as I stand before the Astoria’s gilded logo, I must say a special word of thanks to VASARI, the Italian shoe manufacturer, who have provided me with an excellent pair of my first alligator shoes with reinforced soles. They are exceptionally comfortable; the foot “sleeps” within them. Ideal for undertaking my search for LINDA.
At moments of discouragement, I would come to a stop in the middle of the Nevsky Prospekt and contemplate my shoes from above: their perfection, the solid stitching along their seams, was confidence-inspiring, OCCIDENTAL. A weight would fall from my shoulders at such moments, I would breathe deeply and go on my way, more certain of my own talent, more convinced I would be able to bring my project to fruition as long as I was wearing these formidable shoes, so fully aligned with the stars, so perfectly calibrated to the zeitgeist, so delicately musical. (Yes, incredibly enough: this whole rich gamut of sensations.)
I. Mere contact with certain objects of a reality not abandoned to its free play but organized according to strictly hierarchical criteria of quality and class inculcated me with a strong notion of authenticity, of absolute worth, a mental alteration that, over time, redounded to the benefit of previous efforts to correct my careless ways.
I will illustrate this with an example. On one occasion I spent several days contemplating the purchase of two pairs of shoes, both made of genuine leather and both in the very latest style, but each in a different color: one gray, the other blue. Gray and blue! The possibility of buying them (I had the money), reinforced by the other and even more hallucinatory possibility of choosing between two pairs of new shoes, not at all flashy, magnificently well made, occupied my mind for a week. In the end I acquired neither pair, but I had enjoyed the pleasure of taking them, albeit abstractly, into my life’s eccentric orbit, which, in the wake of that experience, came to revolve around truly notable things, things guaranteed by certificates of authenticity to belong to this new world that had taken so long — it was so far away and I was beyond the reach of its gravitational pull — to draw me toward it, but that, once I was beneath its influence — like those wandering comets that pass by the solar system only to remain confined forever within it — was a world I could never abandon, dazzled by the brilliance of its genuine elegance. Then, after that profound contemplation of the symbols of this new religion — the shoes resting on a velvet cushion, their little altar protected by a bell jar — and in full knowledge of what this step would mean for me, I began to make use of the fork, and my former affinity for eating with the knife alone, and far more rapidly than anyone else at the table, came to seem (and in fact is) a barbarity of which, inexplicably, I had previously remained unaware. I don’t mean I’d never heard any criticism of the practice; only that I was incapable of acknowledging or attributing significance to it. The same thing happened with other innocent vices, less graphic ones that are more difficult to explain (such as the habit of urinating into the sink, which can be very convenient for those of average or above-average stature), which, when I finally became conscious of them, struck me as equally serious.
BOSCAGE (or FOREST, CONIFEROUS). We can lose our way in the FOREST. “Once, as children, we went into the FOREST for mushrooms and got lost. We shouted and shouted. .” A person might wander for hours among identical trees without finding the way out, the moss on the tree trunk, the newly cut stump. Real wolves lurk there, heads thrown back in a howl, and that little hummock of bones is all that remains of an unfortunate passerby. There’s the story of the little girl in the taiga who was killed by mosquitoes that sucked out her blood. People go into the forest in summertime to gather mushrooms and wild berries. Preparations for this journey are the same as those made for excursions to the beach during my childhood: thermoses, insect repellent, and the soup tureen, a solemn ritual we must undertake with absolute seriousness.