Cover: Torzhok, the Cathedral of the Transfigured Saviour
and the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem, 1910.
From the expeditionary photography files of Prokudin-Gorsky,
collected in the US Library of Congress
This book is an original translation of
Институт Сновидений/Старгород, copyright © 2009, Peter Aleshkovsky.
English translation copyright © 2013, Russian Information Services, Inc.
Copyright to all work in this volume is governed by U.S. and international copyright laws. All rights reserved. Work may not be reproduced in any manner without the expressed, written permission of the copyright holder. For permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact the publisher at the address below.
ISBN 978-1-880100-80-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935581
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Table of Contents
Author’s Preface
1990
Above the Fray
Twenty Years
Sour Cream
The Living Well of the Desert
Iron Logic
Blessed are...
Mashenka
Clever Elsa
Stargorod Vendetta
Two-Hats
A Miracle and a Vision
The Magic Letter
Eeny, meeny, miney, moe
Petty Officer
Star
Devil’s Bride
Petrushka
The Man with a Sense of Humor
Lukeria’s Hill
Greed
Victory
Lady Macbeth
Fortress
Metamorphoses, or The Art of Instant Transformation
Vladik Kuznetsov
The Real Life
Ox and Mother Love
The Fourth Dimension
2010
A Change of Consciousness
The Horizontal and The Vertical
53:76
Pickle and Little Dragon
The Holy Monkey
Wings
Cat and Dregs
How a Soldier Saved Himself from the Army
Boots and Ballet Slippers
Winds of Change
The Cursed Place
Demons Possess Us
Medici
Candy
The Mermaid
Happiness
The Hourglass
Goats and Sheep
Our Progress
Kindness
Kambiz
Reptile
Karaoke
The Magic Letter
Stone Soup
Beauty and the Beast
Bribe
Institute of Dreams
A Caramel Rooster for Christmas
The Pencil Stub
Author’s Preface
Stargorod and The Institute of Dreams (two books published separately in Russia, but joined together in this English volume) are two parts of one whole. For me, they are not collections of short stories, but a single world; a single expansive story, woven by a great multitude of voices. This is why the book is subtitled as “A Novel in Many Voices.” The world around us always speaks in voices, in many tongues, but it is always talking about the same things. A writer’s task, then, is to create his own world, one in which all of those he loves and hates could live and suffer. Without a world of his own, a writer becomes a journalist – and that’s a completely different, although in its own way also wonderful, profession.
I was not the first to use the name Stargorod. I stole it from one of the best Russian writers, Nikolai Leskov, who lived in the nineteenth century. Leskov, in turn, was also borrowing, in part, from Nikolai Gogol. Gogol, a truly titanic figure in Russian fiction, wrote a collection of short stories he titled “Mirgorod,” after a real town. Gogol’s Mirgorod, however, is vastly more than an aging smattering of buildings under the hot Ukrainian sun. The first part of the name, Mir, means “community,” “all of us” – it is a force that holds people together as a part of a larger world, that makes them a sliver of the universe that reflects, like a shard of the broken mirror, all the small but telling features of humanity.
Nikolai Gogol is the giant on whose shoulders most of our literature stands. All of us who write in Russian continue to draw from him, and this continuity is important as long as everyone contributes something to the map he had laid out. Sometimes, the new is what takes one far and wide from one’s point of departure. But the road is vastly more important than the mile markers or the signposts along its sides, and only a walking man draws breath deeply and freely. After Leskov, the brothers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, writing in the 1920s, populated Stargorod with their own extravagant characters. So, as you can see, all I did was follow my predecessors’ good advice. Stargorod – which in Russian means “an old town” – a place that is by definition on the margins, on the far edges of the known world, is a sort of a Russian Yoknapatawpha County, a place where the nation’s metaphysical essence is held longest, if not in perpetuity. Stargorod is Russia’s test pit, to borrow a term of my earlier profession – archeology – which concerns itself with digging up all kinds of old towns and burial places.
Twenty years separate the two parts of my book – enough time for an empire to collapse and for things to take what seemed like a most radical turn. “Twenty years after” is also the title Alexandre Dumas, père, chose for one of his D’Artagnan romances – books we read compulsively back in the days when Russia was called USSR and lived behind a concrete wall that effectively separated our country from the rest of the world. A particularly inquisitive reader will find this and many more allusions in my book, along with inside jokes, shameless quotations and stolen plots. To steal, for a writer, means to take a thing and think about it anew, to homestead on land someone else discovered and to argue with the discoverer all along. But hasn’t this been a human preoccupation since times immemorial? From the day a Stone Age hunter committed breath-taking images of horses and bison, birds and skiers, and spear-wielding hunters to a cave wall coloring their bodies with sacred ocher or etching them into the face of the rock with his stone chisel? I challenge anyone to step up and tell me that this older predecessor of mine (and no less of a giant) merely recorded his everyday life – that’s laughable! No, sir, I say – that’s no everyday life. It is a life seen anew.
This, I believe, is the task of any art. What about telling a story, you say? A story is a must – without it, the reader falls asleep along the way, and will never travel the full length of the road. The road must be shared with a good company of like-minded people – and that is precisely the kind of journey I invite you to take in these pages. Happy travels!
Peter Aleshkovsky
Moscow, Fall 2012
1990
Stargorod is emphatically not big. It is located at The Lake. There is a chemical plant, the State Bearings Factory No. 4, a brick factory, an agricultural machinery plant, a furniture factory, a kremlin and a great number of old churches and monasteries. Renovation efforts are ongoing.
A Guide to Stargorod
Sad! I feel sad beforehand! But let us return to the story.
Nikolai Gogol, “Old World Landowners”
Above the Fray