Shklovsky: Witness to an Era. Serena Vitale

brought me provisions for two days. On January 3, after pulling out two more of my hairs, I went back to Shklovsky’s for what would be, I announced, our last conversation: I had to go back to Italy—serious family problems—but I had gathered enough material . . . The pained look of those two was touching. When his wife left the room to prepare the tea, Viktor Borisovich said to me: “You’re terrified, Serenochka, I know that look in your eyes very well. I have for fifty years. You don’t have to tell me anything, but for the love of God, leave, go back to Italy. Nadezhda Mandelstam once said that we were living in a torture chamber. Today I call it an operating room. Every day they give us the anesthetic of fear, an ether that paralyzes the soul.”

      The morning of January 4, Afanasy drove me to the airport. Queasy again, with a few more bandages than before, I remained silent the whole ride. Once we reached Table no. 1 he pulled out his own identification and mine. The Petenky and Vovochky pounced on us like starved vultures. Afanasy’s eyes bulged, the employee at Table 1 paled. A Petenka gestured for me to open my suitcase, then to follow him to a room where I was met by a woman in uniform. Once the door was closed, the policewoman (?) said to me politely: “Please, if you’re hiding something—jewelry, drugs, papers—tell me, I don’t want to have to search you.” I emptied my pockets and my purse. That didn’t convince her. “Since you don’t want to cooperate, please remove your clothes.” Later, the same woman took me to passport check and from there to the exit; my bags, she explained, would be returned to me on the plane.

      I was alone on the bus and on the ramp. On the plane I was greeted by the sarcastic applause of the other passengers, who had been waiting over four hours on the runway. The flight attendant quickly ushered me to first class—empty, or emptied, for the occasion.

      Back home, I found a piece of paper in my suitcase with a pencil sketch of my hair dryer and four pages on which someone had diligently copied the names up to “B” from my address book, including their phone numbers and addresses. Careless, the KGB! And what a disappointment: everything by hand, no photocopies . . . Even the legendary KGB, I now realized, suffered the inexorable constraints of the Soviet defitsit.

      2003. Vladimir Voynovich’s “Dossier n. 34840” is made public:

      “ . . . After that nobody touched me again, physically, but there were assaults on those who came to see me, even on those who didn’t. The Italian Slavicist Serena Vitali [sic] was the guest of my neighbor Viktor Shklovsky, and when she left and got on a trolleybus, she was hit in the head with something heavy wrapped in a newspaper. During the attack they said to her: “If you see Voynovich one more time, we’ll finish you off.’”

      Was Voynovich—ever since Private Chonkin, in open battle with the regime—the real reason for my little (you know, word travels, information gets exaggerated . . .) mishap? Out of respect for the much more vicious attacks others went through, due to my now firm disbelief in a logic to violence, out of laziness, ultimately, I never asked to see my file when the Lubyanka opened its archives. The Petenky and Vovochky? I can see them now, bodyguards for some powerful nouveau riche. Or perhaps they have gotten rich themselves and they ride around in black six-door limousines. Or they scrape by with the modest pension afforded even the most idiotic KGBists, no longer of use to anybody . . .

      SERENA VITALE, 2010

       The Interviews

       December 23

      ON THE INFINITY OF THE NOVEL. ART HAS NEITHER BEGINNING, MIDDLE, NOR END. EPILOGUES ARE CLOYING LEFTOVERS. ART DEALS ALWAYS AND ONLY WITH LIFE.

      My first question, Viktor Borisovich, is not so much about what you’ve written as it is about what you haven’t written. Why is it that in these last two decades, which have seen such a massive revival of your activity as a literary critic and historian, you’ve never—or certainly very rarely—commented on the themes or problems of contemporary Soviet literature?

      I’m guilty, I admit. I don’t work much on contemporary literature. To tell the truth, I haven’t been crazy about what I have read. But, I repeat, the fault is mine. I hope to take on this task, at least in part, to remedy this lack, in my next book, which will have a great title, taken from Tolstoy: Energy of Delusion. The fact is that new, contemporary material will always pile up and then slip away, whereas the classics don’t go anywhere, they endure. Please, you be the interpreter of my excuses for the Italian public, but this time too I’m going to limit myself to talking about literary material that’s generally known, that has become the patrimony of all humankind. One author who I worked a lot on, for example, is Boccaccio. My book also came out in Italian. What did I want to say, and what do I still stand by today? Essentially this: art derives from the fact that man is marked by contradictions. And in art these contradictions can be resolved more or less favorably, but completely favorably—that’s impossible. You know why I can’t bear to read Dante’s Paradiso? Because I believe that, normally, novels cannot be finished. Look at the beginning of Aristotle’s Poetics: “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” With that, of course, I agree. But let’s try to apply this concept to art. Let’s take our literature, Russian literature. It struggles to comprehend the world, and the world has no end. In War and Peace, Pierre’s nephew Nikolenka has a dream. Right at the end of the novel. He dreams of him and Pierre at the head of an enormous army made of white lines fluttering in the air like spiderwebs. Glory is before them, the same as those threads. At a certain point, the threads begin to go slack, to tangle. And Nikolenka and Pierre come upon Uncle Nikolai Ilyich Rostov standing there in a menacing pose and saying: “I loved you, but Arakcheev has given me orders, and I’ll kill the first one who moves forward.” What does the boy see? He sees the future, his own future. In the dream the boy is already the man of Dostoyevsky’s era, of the Petrashevsky Circle. Art always projects itself into the future. Let’s take, finally, the end of Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov is in the penal colony, he doesn’t like the prisoners who, in turn, are hostile to him, but a change starts to take place in him and his transformation is itself a potential novel. Exactly analogous to that is the end of Resurrection: the story of Nekhlyudov’s transformation also contains another novel. But that novel was not written. That’s why I say that there are no novels with an ending. A novel can come to an end, but it has no ending. Thackeray said that every time he wrote a novel he wished that the valet who shined his shoes would take care of the ending for him. And Tolstoy writes: “My God! Who’ll finish the novel now!” And he says that because finishing his novel would mean knowing the future, and we don’t know the future. Eugene Onegin isn’t finished. Friends tried to convince Pushkin to finish it, but he didn’t. And why? Push-kin is going through the post-Decembrist repression. As he’s writing Onegin many of his friends are already dead, or far away, in exile. Pushkin can only send them a few coded messages. He can write, citing the epigraph to “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”:

      But those to whom, as friends and brothers,

      My first stanzas I once read—

      ‘Some are no more, and distant . . . others.’

      As Sadi long before us said.

      Without them my Onegin’s finished.

      But in the case of Onegin it was also a kind of self-censorship . . .

      Of course. In fact, what would Onegin’s fate have been? In all likelihood he would have become a Decembrist. Everyone knows that some of Pushkin’s verses are in code, and there’s a clear allusion to Decembrism, that “storm” which Tolstoy said had spread over Russia like a magnet, attracting all the iron from the heaps of trash. In his notebooks, Pushkin drew the hanging of the Decembrists, and next to the drawing he wrote: “I could have. . .” It was only chance that kept him out of the revolt. When the emperor asked him, “Where would you have been?” Pushkin, as an intelligent, courageous man, replied: “On the square.” And Onegin would have been there too. And Pushkin drew all this. He drew the Peter and Paul Fortress, with Onegin and Pushkin looking out at the Peter and Paul Fortress.

      And yet Tatiana’s refusal in some way constitutes the “ending”