A Hunt for Optimism. Viktor Shklovsky

I was working abroad. My best friend was traveling with her. I was expecting them. She was laughing strangely when they arrived. And my friend said: ‘The road — you see . . . It’s so charming . . . Forgive me.’ Why did he tell me that? I couldn’t forgive him . . . And my third . . .”

      The sky was getting lighter. Then it was completely light. A stray tram car with a wrong letter and wrong number stood on the Kudrinskaya Square. It was not supposed to be there — it was picking up a group of conductors to take them to work.

      The loader came and threw a newspaper to the police officers.

      We separated.

       II

      One of my friends is a lighthearted, portly, ruddy-cheeked doctor. When we meet, he likes to entertain me with conversations about Buryatia and venereal diseases. He traveled to an island on Lake Baykal to provide medical care to the islanders. When he went back there a few years later, or maybe after a year, he found a small shrine on the island. There were a syringe and an empty vial on the shrine. People made sacrifices there.

      And even monetary offerings, as he claimed.

      Lake Baykal is wide; the people can be cured and their cities can be modernized.

      Once he told me the following:

      “I have a patient — he’s a strong, healthy man. I did some tests to check his general health. And do you know what he does?”

      I was thinking about Lake Baykal. The water is exceptionally clear and you can see the stones forty meters below the surface.

      “Just imagine — the man reads chronicles of tragic occurrences and chooses tragedies with women, convincing himself that he loves them.

      “He’s searching for rejection, tragedy, impossibility. He quarrels with his friends, because they take his women away.

      “Yet he’s very handsome. You should see his neck and chest! Reminds me of a younger Bakunin. And he has psychological impotence . . .”

      “It’s Romanticism,” I told him, “I know your patient’s name. He’s afflicted with Romanticism. They made sacrifices to the disease. His name is — ”

      But he stopped me, saying that it was a medical secret.

      3. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s essay “Russky chelovek na rendezvous” (1858), which critically analyzes the hero’s indecisiveness in romantic affairs in Ivan Turgenev’s Asya and other works.

       THE GENERAL’S SON

      I knew this man rather well.

      He had light reddish-brown hair, slightly goffered on the temples. A small nose. The nostrils were as if painted on, so that you could see the tip of the nasal septum.

      He spoke eloquently, clearly.

      And he dressed smartly — the way he spoke. He apparently never threw around his clothes, but folded them when undressing. He was always in the same clothes and his coat was never creased.

      He was a communist. With a military past. He fought in Siberia. With Aleksandr Kolchak.⁴

      In terms of his lineage, he was a general’s son. I am not sure if he was a hussar or a dragoon officer.

      You could tell he was a cavalryman from the way he walked.

      He didn’t hide his pre-revolutionary past.

      He clicked his heels. Held his coat. Wore a ring. Not too expensive and very old.

      He had dry hands.

      He was a bit sentimental.

      Loyal, eloquent, he burned his bridges with the past.

      It was even impressive how he hadn’t taken off his ring or changed his stride.

      There was a purge. He honestly talked about all of his mistakes.

      He was answering promptly, answering the committee’s and audience’s questions without even turning toward them.

      Generally speaking, he was orienting himself rather well on the terrain.

      Then suddenly there was a problem with the years. He turned out to be younger than what he claimed to be. He was thirty-three. The revolution had been thirteen years ago. So he would have been twenty years old then. But he hadn’t graduated from the Page Corps. So he must have been eighteen. Then he fought in the war for four years in the tsar’s army.

      And he talked about his wounds. He had real wounds.

      Then he started talking about the revolution again, about Kolchak.

      How he defected from Kolchak’s army to our ranks.

      He told the story calmly. And everyone was listening.

      The trains of the retreating army all moved in the same direction. Along with the people. The country had dried out around the road. Only the rails remained, and the rails were endless, and people kept moving along those rails. Trains moved with strange belongings that hadn’t been thrown out for some reason.

      The glass was broken in the train stations, the interior ripped out.

      People kept going. And the Reds chased after them, taking over the entire road, they were everywhere, in all the white steppes. They were hungry. They were probably wearing rabbit fur hats. They were going right through, straight to the sea.

      Driving away the Japanese. Forever.

      And among them was the man who is talking now.

      You can tell that this man fought and drove them away.

      There are people in the audience who had known him then.

      The hall is quiet. People in the audience are remembering. Then he finished.

      Vladivostok. They drove them all away.

      “How long did you serve in the tsar’s army?”

      He’s nervous. It won’t come out.

      And nobody understands what the problem is.

      The man gets tired. He gets completely exhausted. He would rather leave, sit somewhere in the back, or ride through the city in a tram car. So that nobody would look at him. And so that he wouldn’t have to look at anyone either. And it is all right if tram cars get crammed, that people crush you — standing is easier, your knees don’t bend.

      He looked at his hands and said suddenly with a plain voice:

      “I have never served in the tsar’s army.”

      No one was surprised.

      “What were you doing in 1914 then?”

      “I was working in my father’s shop. He was a tailor in Lubny, under Poltava. I left home to join the Red Army.”

      Maybe he was ashamed to say that he was a Jew!

      Or maybe he had wanted to become an officer. By rejecting his past, which didn’t exist, he was confirming it.

      And perhaps this is how, step by step, he was building his past. He was building two lives simultaneously. The present and the past.

      4. Aleksandr Kolchak (1874–1920) was a prominent Russian naval commander and later head of all the anti-communist White forces during the Russian Civil War.

       FIREWOOD

       (A Conversation by the Prison Gates)

      Were they always this heavy?

      By the time you get the logs, fetch them home somehow, and carry them upstairs, you don’t feel like heating up the stove anymore.

      There is a man who helps me with the logs.

      He’s a nice man, he’s very generous — we live on the fifth floor.

      But