Ivan Babichev is one of the most memorable tricksters in European literature (“No charlatan from Germany— / Deceit is not my game. / I’m a modern-day magician / With a Soviet claim to fame!”). Ivan is a garrulous barfly, a kind of dilittante-Christ, whose miracles either miss their mark, or, according to legend, punish rather than heal. He’s a drunk, a raconteur, in his self-description, a representative of “an epoch on the wane.” The “steeds” and “elephants of revolution” are trampling his epoch underfoot, he a representative of the world of yesterday. (“That’s me sitting on the pole, Andrysha, me, the old world, my era is sitting there. The mind of my era, Andrysha, which knew how to compose both songs and formulas. A mind full of dreams, which you want to destroy”) Ivan, equally plausible as both Antichrist and pseudo-messiah, believes in his mission in the world. One such mission is to rouse “the bearers of decadent moods,” those who feel “pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy,” “all the emotions comprised by the soul of the man in the era now coming to a close”—and to warn them that they are doomed. Ivan finds an ally in Kavalerov and invites him to join the insurrection, advising that one should depart the stage of history “with a bang,” that one should “raise one’s fist to the coming world”:
“Yes, envy. Here a drama must unfold, one of those grandiose dramas in the theater of history that have inspired the lament, ecstasy, sympathy, and fury of mankind. Without even knowing it, you are a bearer of a historical mission. You are a clot, so to speak. A clot of envy in the dying era’s bloodstream. The dying era envies the era that’s coming to take its place.”
“What can I do?” asked Kavalerov.
“My dear, here you must resign yourself or else. . create a scandal. Go out with a bang. Slam the door, as they say. That’s the most important part: go out with the bang. Leave a scar on history’s ugly face. Shine, damn it! They aren’t going to let you in anyway. Don’t give up without a fight. .”
Readers are generally able to identify with literary heroes, and their lines — whether those of Volodya Makarov, who wants to be a machine and considers that the understanding of time must become the chief human emotion, or those of Ivan Babichev (him being a prophet and all) — can form attractive manifestos. Olesha, however, rejects a world in which ultimate truth exists. And in “a world where there is no ultimate truth (a world without Christ), every option reveals itself to be incomplete, only partial. Ivan is the antipode of Andrei, yet also similar to him (he is contrary, but not contradictory, speaking the language of logic).”1
Great novels are like blotters, absorbing the fundamental dilemmas of their epochs while blindly anticipating future ones. Olesha’s novel is one such blotter, functioning at multiple levels, uniting not only the richness of Russian literary history, but also that of West European literary history. The novel boldly calls up conflicts between the European giants, Rabelais and Cervantes, between biblical concepts (Adam, Jesus, the Antichrist), between avant-garde utopias (Volodya as man-machine) and socially utopian ideas and systems (revolution, communism, capitalism). Olesha draws the reader into a dramatic polemic of opposing concepts, yet nowhere does he offer final answers. Today, in a post-utopian time — when concepts flap around us like battered, moth-eaten flags, and when few still believe in the institutions of democracy, in the state, justice, equality, progress, the rule of law — we stand, each with our own pillow (whatever it might symbolize: security, home, a belief in family values), not knowing where to turn. We’ve tried all the options, and we’ve compromised the lot. And so we — like Kavalerov, who dithers over whether to sleep on a park bench or in the widow Anichka Prokopovich’s bed — we dither between equally bad options in our own lives. To reach the bed, Kavalerov has to walk the stinking hallway where Anichka cooks soup from animal entrails (“Once I slipped on something’s heart — small and tightly formed, like a chestnut”), meaning that in order to survive he has to embrace indifference — which is, in any case, what the prophet Ivan Babichev’s new program encourages:
“I think that indifference is the best of all conditions of the human mind. Let’s be indifferent, Kavalerov. Take a look! We’ve got ourselves a room, my friend. Drink. To indifference. Hurrah! To Anichka! And today, by the way. . listen: I’ve got some good news for you. . Today, Kavalerov, is your turn to sleep with Anichka. Hurrah!”
Like Kavalerov’s, our resistance is feeble, and soon peters out. We’re easily bought, which only sees our bitterness grow by the day. We can’t make out the face of our enemy, or perhaps we simply don’t want to see him. Perhaps that’s why we constantly point the finger at others. Like Kavalerov, we’re eaten by envy. We are the end of an era, unable to decipher the signs of what is coming. Our ability to imagine a new society has expired, and so we stand, like a blind man waiting expectantly for an explosion. We’re caught in the same trap Olesha was in not even a century ago: “We know what was, we don’t know what will be.”2
3. AND YOU, WHERE DO YOU STAND?
Oh, yes, you’re probably wondering how things turned out for my Zagreb acquaintance, the one who sent me the clip, and her husband. There’s nothing much to tell. Her husband, thank Christ, finally quit bawling, and took matters into his own hands. How so? He took the taxi driver’s exam, got his permit, and off he went. The children still haven’t found jobs, so they sponge off her and her husband. .
Oh, yes, what’s the latest with my Zagreb acquaintance? Not much. Her husband ended up in the psych ward, they’re going send him home soon, and then it’s going to be tough, someone has to be with him, and she can’t, because she works. She can’t put him in care, a home costs more than double what she makes in a month. The kids are trying to go abroad, but that’s tough too, their applications for Australian work visas were just rejected.
Oh, yes, what happened with my Zagreb acquaintance? Nothing much. She won the lottery. Not big money of course, but enough. They bought a little piece of land, they’re going to breed Californian earthworms, they even got an EU loan. And their son has started up a little business too. What kind of business? He’s making fake ice cubes! How do they work? They’re made out of plastic and go phosphorescent in the glass, but without cooling the contents, it’s some sort of trick, people are crazy about them. .
Oh, yeah, what happened with my Zagreb acquaintance? Nothing much. I’m trying to think up a happy ending, but it’s not going so well. You’ve already worked it out — I’m with the losers. Nikolai Kavalerov is my brother (“I’m never going to be handsome or famous. I’m never going to come to the capital from a small town. I’m never going to be a commander, or a commissar, or a scholar, or a racer, or an adventurer”). Yes, I am his sister. Everything gives me away. I see the world through his eyes. I’m lazy like he is, envious like he is, and things don’t like me either: The door handle is always catching my sleeve, the door always banging me on the snout. And like Kavalerov, I hate the high and mighty from the bottom of my soul. I’m drawn to snake-oil peddlers, conjurors like Ivan Babichev, slickers, street vendors hawking magical potions to eliminate stains, fire eaters and tub-thumpers, whom people avoid as if they were contagious, yet who only speak the prosaic truth. Oh yeah, I’m promiscuous, if one can put it that way. You can easily imagine me in bed with both Nikolai Kavalerov and Ivan Babichev — the old widow Anichka Prokopovich is in here too. The bed is enormous, joining with the horizon, we’re all lying about — you’ve no idea how many we are! Oblomov’s here, and Don Quixote, charging at pillows like they’re windmills, Emma Bovary’s here too, and Oskar Matzerath, and Molly Bloom, and Humbert Humbert, and Margarita, and Stephen Dedalus, and Tess d’Urberville. . Many authors and their characters are here, and we’re here too, their faithful readers, we’re all here, lying about on this enormous bed under a clear blue sky. Our faces write a manifesto, bristling, unsettled, and shimmering like a fish hatchery. We’re on the bottom, and somewhere up high, high above us rumbles time (“Then for the first time I heard the rumble of time. Time was racing overhead. I swallowed ecstatic tears,” says Kavalerov), roars the modern world. Yet something tells me that this bed full of losers, each clutching his or her pillow like a life raft, will endure for a time to come, and that those above, that they are ephemeral, like the sun and rain that cast a rainbow above us, like the wind that blows golden leaves upon us, like the snow that covers us like a duvet, and then melts. . Of course, one shouldn’t believe in such things. Betting on the ephemerality of those on the top, and the eternity of those on the bottom, is but the sweet refuge of all losers. But then again. .