Once two zones separated by a pretty decent wall, in the space of twenty years Europe has become a chaotic mega-market. There are now no walls, and no coordinates either; no one knows where the West is, and where the East. The West is settling in the East, the East surging into the West, the North heading South, and the South, well, it’s mulling its options. Young Spaniards are abandoning their homeland en masse; young Greeks seeking out relatives long dispersed to far corners of the earth; trying to extract themselves from the ever-widening quicksand, young Croats recently snapped up three hundred Canadian working visas in a record forty minutes. The Spanish coast is flooded with refugees from Africa, most of whom live crammed into refugee camps. There’s no place to go anymore. The Albanians have given up on Italy — there’s no room since the Chinese hordes invaded. Highly-qualified Bulgarian women work in Turkey as cleaners. The few remaining Austrian elderly who can afford it hire highly-skilled caregivers from Slovakia. The Russians are making a big noise just about everywhere; doing deals in Austria, living large in England, summering in Montenegro. Bulgarians once surged in the direction of Spain, yet now they’re in retreat, as if caught in a vicious undertow. The backwash has caused of tidal wave of Bulgarian prostitutes to swamp Amsterdam. The red lights of Amsterdam’s red light district now burn in other parts of the city. During the day, fish, meat, and vegetables are sold at the Albert Cuyp market, and at night, in the streets parallel, red lights illuminate human flesh in shop front windows.
“It’s terrible,” says another acquaintance. “Have you heard that thing about the earth opening up?” What do you mean by opening up? I ask. “The earth just opens up, and then there are these gaping holes that swallow everything in sight! It’s happening everywhere, in Guatemala, in China. . Some guy in Florida had this hole open up in the middle of his bedroom, and it swallowed him and his bed together! We’ve had the same thing here at home, in Međimurje, in Slavonski Brod, in Drniš. Didn’t you hear about that guy from Lovran? He was sitting on a bench on the promenade, and suddenly a hole opened up in front of him. The guy and the bench went in together!” my acquaintance shrieks, and then quietly adds: “I don’t know, I’d rather die of hunger than be swallowed up by a hole!”
In Europe it used to be only the Easterners who did the grumbling. Today everyone’s at it. Easterners grumble because they didn’t get what they expected, and moreover, because everything they ever worked for was sold for a pittance. Westerners grumble because their personal wealth has plateaued, and of course it’s all the Easterners’ fault — whoever those damn Easterners are. Western Europe has been leveled by a tsunami of Easterners. Polish is the most frequently spoken language in England after English! C’mon, that can’t be normal!. . The reality is, Europe is a ruin; the continent littered with industrial skeletons, graveyards of progress, of communist and capitalist utopias alike. Europe is a twilight zone inhabited by losers, by “human remains,” rats, drug addicts and alcoholics, prostitutes, the living dead, all furiously trying to end their own lives.
Europe is a circuit board for human flesh, travelers, traffickers, hucksters, migrants, new slave contingents, tourists, adventurers, believers, day laborers, pedophiles, pilgrims, pickpockets, drug dealers, undocumented workers, smugglers, murderers, tulip pickers and dish washers, street musicians and entertainers, the exploited and their exploiters. Everyone’s on the make. People cry over old black-and-white images, their former lives seem a whole lot better. People cry watching National Geographic, moved by the deeply human lives of flora and fauna. People cry over clips of their past, suddenly seeing it in a completely different light. The threatening clatter of money has sent words once in general use into general hiding, or so people say. What words? Hope, dreams, passion, curiosity, the future, compassion. . Today the only thing we hear, from all four corners of the globe, is a monotone rumbling drumming, hungry stomachs on the march. Tam-tam-tam-tam-tam-tam. .
In the essay “Europe Today” (1935), Miroslav Krleža wrote that in Europe absolutely everything can be bought and sold, “and in place of the human being, money is today the only measure, the only scale, the only testimony to human virtue.” Is money really the only measure of all things? “Europe — it’s all about the dengi, dengi, money, money,” a taxi driver tells me as we glide the snowy streets of Oslo. He’s Afghan. For some reason he’s convinced I’m Russian, and so stutters away in Russian before translating himself into halting English.
Options still smolder in the dirt, but the prisoners of starvation are too exhausted to arise. . Debout, les damnés de la terre. . Stand up, damned of the Earth. . Ustajte prezreni na svijetu. . Vstavaj, prokljat’em zaklejmennyj. .
2. A BOOK
A recent re-reading reading of Yuri Olesha’s novel Envy provoked an equally disproportionate reaction in me as the old video clip did in my Zagreb acquaintance’s husband. Olesha’s short novel is what we might call “a great book.” What makes a good book good, or a bad book bad, is a little easier to explain than what makes a book great. The books they hold dear say a lot about individual critics, reviewers, and other arbiters of literary values. In this respect, Nabokov’s most personal book is that on Gogol. In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino outlined the six characteristics a book must bring together in order to become “great”: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Envy combines all six characteristics, yet even they don’t fully explicate the greatness of Olesha’s slender novel.
Canonic texts are not always reliable indicators of value; the protective embrace of the literary canon is often where thickest dust settles. Once it settles, literary kitsch fused with artistic mythologization is as hard to get rid of as dust. And who can be bothered jerking around making literary denunciations? It’s an ungrateful job — canonization, like corruption, is something where there are many hands in the pie. Thankfully, by a kind of divine grace, some works establish standards of literary excellence under their own steam. Olesha’s Envy is one of them.
Although the author of one of the more svelte oeuvres (a short novel, a handful of short stories, a play, a book of autobiographical sketches, a book for children and adults) within the general corpulence of Russian literature, Olesha is a shining light in the Russian avant-garde. Envy was published in 1927. Olesha obviously wasn’t bothered by communism during its writing, and neither did communism have any qualms about publishing it. In the intervening years, nothing seems to have lessened its power. Down through the decades, it’s as if a secret internal energy has kept the novel afloat, and it’s as if this same energy catapulted it into the future, into our present; and that owing to this energy, it is today more brilliant, alive, and relevant than ever before.
What’s the trick? Among the mythological anecdotes about Olesha there is one about him stopping by his publisher’s office to collect his fee. The cashier refuses to hand it over because he hasn’t got his ID on him.
“How can I pay you your fee when you don’t have an ID? Tomorrow some other Olesha might show up with his hand out!”
Olesha, who was short in stature, straightened himself to his full height, and with magnificent tranquility replied: “There’s no need to get worked up. If another Olesha ever appears, it’ll be four hundred years before he comes along.”