IV.
I went to work for the newspaper Moscow Komsomol straight from the caravanserai of TSEKUBU.5 There were twelve pairs of earphones there, almost all broken, and a reading room without books, remodeled from what had been a chapel, where people slept like snails on small round sofas.
The service staff at TSEKUBU hates me because of my straw baskets and because I’m not a professor.
In the afternoon I would go to observe the high water and I firmly believed that the obscene waters of our Moscow River would flow over the scholarly Kropotkin Embankment and TSEKUBU would telephone for a boat.
Mornings I would drink pasteurized cream right on the street, straight from the bottle.
I would take somebody else’s soap from the professors’ shelves and wash myself in the evenings, and I was not caught once.
People would come there from Kharkov and Voronezh and would be on their way to Alma-Ata. They accepted me as one of their own and took counsel with me as to which republic might work out best for them.
At night TSEKUBU was locked up like a fortress and I would bang my stick against the window.
Every decent man received telephone calls at TSEKUBU, and in the evening a servant would hand him his messages as if he were giving a priest a funerary list of souls to be prayed for. The writer Alexander Grin6 lived there, and the servants cleaned his clothes with a brush. I lived at TSEKUBU like everybody, and no one bothered me until I myself moved out in the middle of summer.
When I moved to another apartment, my fur coat7 lay draped across the cab, as it does when a patient has been dismissed from hospital after a long illness, or a convict released from prison.
V.
Things have reached the point where in the literary trade I value only raw meat, only the crazy excrescence:
And by the falcon’s cry, the entire
Gorge was wounded to the bone.
That’s the sort of thing I need.
All the works of world literature I divide into those that have been authorized and those that have been written without authorization. The former are all trash; the latter, stolen air. As to writers who receive authorization first, and then write, I would like to spit in their face; I would like to beat them on the head with a stick and sit them all down around a table in Herzen House,8 and put a glass of police-tea in front of each one of them and hand each one of them personally a steaming sample of Gornfeld’s9 urinalysis.
I’d forbid such writers to marry and have children. How can they have children? Our children, after all, must carry on for us, must finish saying what was most important for us to say. And how can they, when their fathers have sold out, to a pock-marked devil, for three generations to come?
Now that’s a tidy little literary page.
VI.
I have no manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives. I have no handwriting, because I never write. I alone in Russia work from the voice, while all around me the pack of accomplished pig-dogs writes. What the hell kind of writer am I? Get out of here, you fools!
On the other hand, I have a lot of pencils and they are all stolen and of different colors. One can sharpen them with a Gillette blade.
The blade of the Gillette razor with its slightly notched beveled edge has always seemed to me one of the noblest products of the steel industry. The good Gillette blade cuts like sedgegrass, bends but doesn’t break in the hand, something like a Martian’s calling card, or a note from some punctilious devil, with a hole drilled in the middle.
The Gillette razor blade is the product of a dead trust, whose shareholders include packs of American and Swedish wolves.
VII.
I am a Chinaman; nobody understands me. Hack-shmack!10 Let’s go to Alma-Ata, where the people have raisin-eyes, where the Persian has eyes like fried eggs, where the Sart has sheep’s eyes.
Hack-shmack! Let’s go to Azerbaijan!
I had a patron once—People’s Commissar Mravian-Muravian,11 antic People’s Commissar of the Armenian land, that younger sister of the Land of Judea. He sent me a telegram.
Dead is my patron, the People’s Commissar Mravian-Muravian. Gone from the Erevan anthill is the black ant-commissar. No longer will he come to Moscow, in the international car of the train, as naïve and curious as a priest from a Turkish village.
Hack-shmack! Let’s go to Azerbaijan!
I had a letter for People’s Commissar Mravian. I took it to the secretaries in the Armenian residence in the cleanest, most ambassadorial street in Moscow. I was just about to depart for Erevan on an assignment from the ancient People’s Commissariat of Education to conduct a terrifying seminar for those roundheaded youths in their poor monastery of a university.
If I had gone to Erevan, for three days and three nights I would have been hopping off the train to eat buttered bread with black caviar at the station buffets.
Hack-shmack!
On the way I would have read Zoshchenko’s very best book and I would have been happy as a Tatar who had just stolen a hundred rubles.
Hack-shmack! Let’s go to Azerbaijan!
I would have taken fortitude with me in my yellow straw basket with its great heap of clean-smelling linen, and my fur coat would have hung on a golden nail. And I would have gotten out at the station in Erevan with my winter coat in one hand and my elder’s walking stick—my Jewish staff12—in the other.
VIII.
There is a splendid line of Russian poetry which I will never tire of declaiming in the dog-smelling Moscow nights, a line from which, when uttered, as from a spell, the unclean spirits disperse. Guess what line, friends. It inscribes itself on the snow like sleigh runners, it clicks in the lock like a key, it darts into a room like frost: “. . . I didn’t shoot the poor bastards in the dungeons . . .”13 There you have a symbol of faith, there you have the genuine canon of a real writer, a true mortal enemy of Literature.
In Herzen House there is a certain lactile vegetarian, a philologist with a Chinaman’s noggin, of that breed that tiptoes about our blood-soaked Soviet land intoning hao-hao, shango-shango, while heads are being lopped off, a certain Mitka Blagoi,14 a piece of high-school rubbish, authorized by the Bolsheviks, in the name of the advancement of science, to stand guard in a special museum over the length of cord with which Seriozha Esenin hanged himself.
And I say: Blagoi to the Chinese! To Shanghai with him! To the Chinks—that’s where he belongs! Ah, to think, what Mother Philology once was, and what she has now become . . . Pure-blooded and uncompromising she was; cur-blooded and all-compromising she has become.
IX.
To the number of murderers and apprentice-murderers of Russian poets, the murky name of Gornfeld has been added. This paralytic d’Anthès,15 this Uncle Monia from Basseiny Street, who preaches morality and statesmanship, carried out the orders of a regime completely alien to him, orders which he accepted about as he would a touch of indigestion.
Dying of Gornfeld is as foolish as dying because of a bicycle or a parrot’s beak. But a literary murderer can also be a parrot. I, for instance, was almost killed by a polly named after His Majesty King Albert and Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko.16 I am quite pleased that my murderer is alive and has in a sense survived me. I feed him sugar and listen with pleasure as he recites aloud from Eulenspiegel, “The ashes are knocking at my heart,” alternating this phrase with another not less beautifuclass="underline" “There is no torment in the world greater than the word . . .” A man who can title his book Torments of the Word is born with the Cain’s mark of the literary murderer on his brow.