A similar mechanism may be observed in certain novels. Tolstoy writes a marvelous, gripping, seven-book-long novel about an adulterous romance—then throws Anna under a train and writes book 8, in which Vronsky leaves for Serbia to fight the Turks (the novel is absorbed into history) and Levin returns to his estate to find God (the novel is absorbed into spiritual meditation). Analogously, Thomas Mann spends a thousand pages in the decadent hothouse of the Magic Mountain—then balances his account when Castorp, woken from his spiritual stupor by World War I, leaves the sanatorium to serve on the front. Facing a likely death in the trenches, Castorp falls to his knees, “face and hands raised toward a heaven darkened by sulfurous fumes, but no longer the grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight.”
“The grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight”: isn’t that just what the jesters saw above them when they lay on the bed of ice? Anna’s palace is the monstrous crystallization of the anxiety that made authors from Cowper to Tolstoy to Mann cancel out their most captivating pages: the anxiety of literature, that most solitary and time-consuming of arts, as irremediably vain, useless, and immoral. The ice palace is like the first half of a conversion narrative, with no second half. Anna herself resembles one of Thomas Mann’s “problem children”—the scion of a vitiated dynasty, corrupted by puppet shows, sensual love, and dimly grasped notions of zoology—and she never grows up. Spellbound in her Magic Mountain, she never recovers. She dies up there, attended by jesters and medics.
The negative fantasy of literature embodied by the House of Ice reaches its most terrible pitch in the fate of the court poet and classicist Vasily Trediakovsky: one of the most famous personages from Anna Ioannovna’s reign.
The day before the wedding, Anna’s cabinet minister commissioned Trediakovsky to write a matrimonial ode to be read at the ethnographic procession. Before Trediakovsky had time to complete the work, the minister summoned the poet to his chambers and, for reasons lost to posterity, beat him unconscious with a stick. Thrown in jail for the night, Trediakovsky finished his ode anyway, and even read it in person at the wedding the next day, wearing an Italian carnival mask to hide his injuries. Despite this tremendous display of professionalism, in which all writers may take pride, he was returned to his cell afterward and subjected to another near-fatal beating. Reaching home the next day, more dead than alive, his first act was to draw up a will, bequeathing his library to the Academy of Sciences.
Had Trediakovsky died of his injuries, he would have become a tragic figure. Instead, he lived another twenty-five years, a subject of constant mockery. His very propensity for receiving physical abuse became a popular comic premise; as Pushkin himself put it, “It often happened that Trediakovsky got beaten up.” Lazhechnikov’s Trediakovsky brags about an audience during which Anna Ioannovna “deigned to rise from her seat, came up to me, and from her generous hand granted me the most benevolent box on the ear.”
Trediakovsky was said to have written exactly one hundred books, each boring enough to induce seizures. “On the song ‘Farewell, My Dear,’ I composed a critique in twelve volumes in folio,” remarks a character based on Trediakovsky in a 1750 comedy. Trediakovsky plus the ice palace: could there be any more vivid illustration of the pathos of graphomania? “It was considered extremely funny that Trediakovsky had to translate thirteen volumes of Rollin’s Histoire ancienne and three volumes of his Histoire romaine twice, because the first translation was consumed in the fire that occurred in his house in 1747,” observes the scholar Irina Reyfman, who wrote an entire book about the mania for making fun of Trediakovsky. Trediakovsky was also famous for his hatred of his almost equally boring rival, the scholar and versifier Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov was incorrectly credited with some of Trediakovsky’s literary accomplishments, including the development of the Russian hexameter. Reyfman’s thesis is that, in the “creation-myth” of Russian letters, Lomonosov played the role of the founder-hero, while Trediakovsky played that hero’s “foolish twin” or “dumb demonic double.”
In retrospect, however, the beating of Trediakovsky acquired a tragic and prophetic cast. To quote the twentieth-century poet Khodasevich: “On that ‘masquerade’ night, when Volynsky beat Trediakovsky, began the history of Russian literature . . . the history of the destruction of Russian writers.” The Russian state has always oppressed its writers: Tsar Nikolai I was Pushkin’s personal censor. In 1940 Stalin, notwithstanding his busy schedule, signed Babel’s death sentence with his own hand.
The brutalization of writers was no longer funny. Meanwhile, as Foucault has observed, the institution of authorship is largely dependent on the author’s liability to state punishment. It’s true that Russia subjected its writers to an unusual degree of state control; consequently, it’s also true that nowhere in the world has literature been taken more seriously. Mayakovsky wasn’t really joking in 1925 when he compared poetry to industrial production:
I want the Gosplan to sweat in debate,
assigning me goals a year ahead,
and for Stalin to deliver his Politburo
reports about the production of verse
as he would about pig iron and the smelting of steel.
“. . . in the Union of Republics the understanding of verse
now tops the prewar norm . . .”
Mayakovsky could never have retired to the country to write poetry about raising cucumbers. He could never have identified virtue with the sofa. He needed literature to be a form of action or work, just like fighting in a war or building a railroad. And once he started to worry that his own poems were merely aesthetic, the mere products of leisure, it wasn’t the kind of problem that could be solved simply by writing a poem about the uselessness of poetry. “I’d rather compose romances for you,” he wrote, early in 1930, “But I have subdued myself, setting my heel / on the throat of my own song.” This poem, “At the Top of My Voice,” was unfinished when Mayakovsky shot himself that April.
The reconstruction of the House of Ice was slated for destruction on a Friday, but since the cold weather was holding up, the organizers announced they would leave it standing over the weekend. On Sunday morning, I decided to stop by one last time, to take photographs. But when I turned the corner on Nevsky Prospekt, all that remained was a pile of broken ice. A small crowd had gathered, and I heard echoes of a raven like sound. “Zrya! Zrya!” they were saying: “What a waste!”
A small bearded man in a long overcoat and a fur hat stood next to me, shaking his head.
“When did they tear it down?” I asked him.
“Who knows? Late at night, when nobody saw. What a waste. What a shame.”
“It was a historical reconstruction, right?” I asked, hoping at least to ascertain the contours of the ice palace in his cultural imagination.
“Of course,” the bearded man said. “It was all historical. It was all made from plans, from original documents. There was an empress, you see. I’m not an expert—I forget her name. Alexandra Fyodorovna, something like that. She built the palace.”
“Why?”
“Well, for a joke! For fun! Tsars had to enjoy themselves, too. And what a beauty it was.” He sighed. “There were thousands of people here, such a line, you couldn’t get close. They had cannons that shot real cannonballs, and it was all made out of ice. I saw it on television. It’s just shameful what they’ve done. A shame.”