If an authentically humanistic justification is not at the base of the coming social architecture, then it will crush man as Assyria and Babylonia did.
The fact that the values of humanism have become rare now, as though removed from circulation and hidden, isn’t at all a bad sign. Humanistic values have merely gone underground and hoarded themselves away, like gold currency, but, like the gold supply, they secure the whole ideational commerce of contemporary Europe and from their underground administer it all the more authoritatively.
Switching to gold currency is a matter for the future, and in the realm of culture it will mean the exchange of current ideas—paper issue—for the gold coinage of the European humanistic heritage; and it is not under the spade of the archeologist that the excellent florins of humanism will ring; but they will see their day, and as sound current coin they will start circulating from hand to hand, when the time comes.
Fourth Prose
I.
Benjamin Fedorovich Kagan1 approached this matter with the spare, sage prudence of a wizard or that of an Odessite Newton. All of Benjamin Fedorovich’s conspiratorial activity rested on infinitesimals. Benjamin Fedorovich saw the law of salvation as a matter of maintaining a tortoiselike pace. He allowed himself to be shaken out of his professorial cubicle, answered the telephone at all hours, neither renounced nor refused anything or anyone, but for the most part what he tried to do was hold back the dangerous course of the disease.
The availability of a professor, what’s more a mathematician, in this improbable affair of saving five lives by way of those cognizable, yet utterly imponderable integral progressions that are called “pulling strings,” evoked expressions of satisfaction everywhere.
Isaiah Benediktovich2 behaved himself from the very first as if the disease might be contagious, something catching, like scarlet fever, so that he, too, Isaiah Benediktovich, might, for all he knew, be shot. Isaiah Benediktovich went bustling about without rhyme or reason. He seemed to be racing from doctor to doctor, imploring them to disinfect him immediately.
If Isaiah Benediktovich had had his way, he would have taken a taxi and driven all over Moscow at random, without any plan, imagining that that was how one performed the ritual.
Isaiah Benediktovich would keep asserting and constantly recalling that he had left a wife behind him in Petersburg. He even managed to acquire a secretary of sorts, a small, stern, very sensible companion, a woman who was a relative of his and who had already begun to baby him. To put it briefly, by appealing to different people at different times, Isaiah Benediktovich seemed, as it were, to be inoculating himself against the firing squad.
All Isaiah Benediktovich’s relatives had died in their Jewish beds of carved walnut. As a Turk will travel to the black stone of Kaaba,3 so these Petersburg bourgeois descended from rabbis of patrician blood, brought into touch with Anatole France by way of the translator Isaiah, made pilgrimages to the very most Turgenevian and Lermontovian spas, preparing themselves by taking the cure for their transition to the hereafter.
In Petersburg Isaiah Benediktovich had been living the life of a good Frenchman, eating his potage, choosing acquaintances as innocuous as the croutons in his bouillon, and making visits, according to his profession, to two stock jobbers in junk translation.
Isaiah Benediktovich was good only at the very beginning of the “string pulling,” during the mobilization and, as it were, the alarm. After that he faded, drooped, stuck out his tongue, and those very relatives of his pooled their money and sent him back to Petersburg.
I have always wondered where the bourgeois gets his fastidiousness and his so-called probity. Probity is the quality that relates the bourgeois to the animal. Many Party members relax in the company of a bourgeois for the same reason that grown-ups need the society of rosy-cheeked children.
The bourgeois is of course more innocent than the proletarian, closer to the uterine world, to the baby, the kitten, the angel, the cherubim. In Russia there are very few of these innocent bourgeois, and the scarcity has a bad effect on the digestion of authentic revolutionaries. The bourgeoisie in its innocent aspect must be preserved, entertained with amateur sports, lulled on the springs of Pullman cars, tucked into envelopes of snow-white railway sleep.
II.
A boy in goatskin booties, in a tight-fitting velveteen Russian coat, with his locks combed carefully back, stands there surrounded by mammas, grandmammas, and nursemaids, and beside him stands a cook’s brat or a coachman’s waif—some kid from the servants’ quarters. And this whole howling pack of sniveling, pulling, hissing archangels is urging Little Lord Fauntleroy on:
“Go on, Vasenka, let him have it!”
Now Vasenka lets him have it, and the old maids, the vile toads, nudge each other and hold back the mangy little coachman’s kid.
“Go on, Vasenka, you let him have it, and we’ll grab him by the curly-locks and we’ll waltz ‘im around . . .”
What’s this? A genre painting in the manner of Venetsianov? A scene by some serf-artist?
No, this is a training exercise for a Komsomol baby under the guidance of his agit-mammas, grandmammas, and nursemaids, so Vasenka can stomp him. Vasenka can let him have it, while we hold the scum down, while we waltz around . . .
“Go on, Vasenka, let him have it . . .”
III.
A crippled girl approached us from a street as long as a streetcarless night. She puts her crutch to one side and sits down as quickly as she can, so she can look like everybody else. Who is this husbandless girl? She is the light cavalry . . .4
We shoot cigarettes at one another and adjust our Chinese dialect, encoding into brute-cowardly formulae the great, powerful, forbidden concept of class. Brute terror pounds on the typewriters, brute terror proofreads a Chinese dialect on sheets of toilet paper, scribbles denunciations, hits those that are down, demands the death penalty for prisoners. Like little kids drowning a kitten in the Moscow River while a crowd watches, our grown-up kids playfully put on the pressure; at noon recess they give it the big squeeze: “Hey, come on and push it under. So you can’t see it any more.” That’s the sacred rule of lynch law.
—A shopkeeper on the Ordynka short-weighted a working-woman: kill him!
—A cashier shortchanged somebody a nickel—kill her!
—A manager signed some nonsense by mistake—kill him!
—A peasant stashed away some rye in his barn—kill him!
A girl approaches us, limping on her crutch. One of her legs is foreshortened, and her crude prosthetic shoe reminds one of a wooden hoof.
And who are we? We are school children who don’t study. We are a Komsomol volunteer. We are rowdies by permission of all the saints.
Filipp Filippych had a toothache. Filipp Filippych had not and would not come to class. Our notion of study has as much to do with science as a hoof with a foot, but this doesn’t bother us.
I have come to you, my artiodactylous friends, to stomp with my peg leg in the yellow socialist arcade-complex created by the unbridled fantasy of that reckless entrepreneur Giber out of elements of a chic hotel on Tver Boulevard, out of the night telegraph and telephone exchange, out of a dream of universal incarnate bliss disguised as a permanent foyer with a buffet, out of a permanently open office with saluting clerks, out of a postal-telegraph, throat-tickling dryness of the air.
Here we have a permanent bookkeepers’ night under the yellow flame of second-class railroad lamps. Here, as in Pushkin’s tale, a Jew and a frog get married, that is, we have a wedding ceremony permanently going on between a goat-hoofed fop spawning theatrical fish eggs and his unclean mate from the same bathhouse, the Moscow editor-coffinmaker, who turns out brocade coffins on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. He rustles his paper shroud. He opens the veins of the months of the Christian calendar that still preserve their pastoral-Greek names: January, February, March . . . He is the terrifying and illiterate horse doctor of proceedings, deaths, and happenings, and he is pleased as can be when, like a fountain, the black horse blood of our epoch spurts forth.