Selected Essays

Literary Moscow: Birth of the Fabula

I.

Once upon a time the monks in their chill Gothic refectories ate more or less lenten fare, while listening to a reader, to the accompaniment of a prose that was quite good for its time, from the book of Chet’i-Minei.^*1 It was read aloud, not only for instruction; the reading was added to the refectory as table music, and, freshening the heads of those who dined, the seasoning provided by the reader supported the harmony and orderliness at the common table.

But imagine, if you will, almost any social group, the most enlightened, the most modern, wishing to renew the custom of reading aloud at table and inviting a reader; and this reader, wishing to please everybody, brings along Andrei Biely’s St. Petersburg and he reads it to the group. Well, he begins. The results are incredible. Somebody has something stuck in his throat; somebody else is eating his fish with his knife; a third person burns himself swallowing the mustard.

It is impossible to imagine such an occasion, such an event, such a group occasion, to which Andrei Biely’s prose might conceivably serve as an accompaniment. Its rhythmic periods are reckoned on the scale of a Methusalean age; incompatible with any kind of human activity. The tales of Scheherazade, on the other hand, were measured to 366 days, one for every night of a Leap Year, and the Decameron befriended the calendar, attentive to the shifting of day and night. Why mention the Decameron! Dostoevsky makes excellent table reading; well, if not just yet, then he will in the very near future, when, instead of weeping over him and being moved by him, as chambermaids are touched by Balzac and by good cheap novels, people will apprehend him in a purely literary way, and then for the first time they will have read and understood him.

Extracting pyramids from your own depths is an indigestible, unsociable activity; it is a stomach probe. It’s not entertainment, but a surgical operation. From the time that the plague of psychological experimentation penetrated literary consciousness, the prose writer has become a surgeon and prose a clinical catastrophe, to our taste quite unpleasant; and a thousand times I’ll drop the belletristic psychologizing of Andreev, Gorky, Shmelev, Sergeev-Tsensky, Zamiatin,¹ for the sake of the magnificent Bret Harte in the translation of an unknown student of the nineties: “Without saying a word, with a single motion of hand and foot, he flung him from the staircase and turned very calmly to the unknown lady.”

Where is that student now? I’m afraid he is unjustly ashamed of his literary past and in his leisure hours places himself at the disposal of the psychologist-authors to be vivisected, though now it’s no longer the clumsy ones from the clinic of The Miscellanies of Knowledge,² where the least operation, the extraction of the tooth of a member of the intelligentsia, threatened blood poisoning, but rather the excellent surgeons of Andrei Biely’s polyclinic, equipped with all the resources of antiseptic Impressionism.

II.

Merimée’s Carmen ends with a philological discussion about where in the family of languages the gypsy dialect belongs. The highest tension of mood and plot is unexpectedly resolved by a philological tract; yet it sounds approximately like the epode of a tragic chorus: “And everywhere there are ill-fated passions, and against the fates is no defense.” This happened before Pushkin.

Why should we then be especially surprised if Pilniak³ or the Serapions⁴ introduce notebooks into their narration, building estimates, Soviet circulars, newspaper advertisements, excerpts from chronicles, and God knows what else. Prose belongs to nobody. It is essentially anonymous. It is the organized motion of a verbal mass cemented together by whatever comes to hand. The basic element of prose is accumulation. It is all fabrication, morphology.

Our current prose writers are often called eclectics; that is, collectors. I think this is not meant as an insult; it’s a good thing. Every real prose writer is precisely an eclectic, a collector. Personality to the side, make way for anonymous prose. This is why the names of the great prose writers, those contractors of grandiose literary plans, anonymous in essence, collective in execution, like Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel or War and Peace, are transformed into legend and myth.

In Russia, this passion for anonymous, collective prose coincided with the Revolution. Poetry itself demanded prose. It had lost all sense of scale—because there was no prose. It achieved an unhealthy flowering and could not satisfy the demands of the reader to be given access to the pure and direct activity of verbal masses, bypassing the author’s personality, bypassing everything that is incidental, personal, and causes suffering (the lyric).

Just why is it that the Revolution turned out to be propitious for the renaissance of Russian prose? Precisely for the reason that it advanced the type of anonymous prose writer, the eclectic, the collector, who does not create verbal pyramids from the depths of his own spirit, the modest Pharaonic overseer who supervises the slow but true construction of real pyramids.

III.

Russian prose will begin its advance when the first prosewriter appears who is independent of Andrei Biely. Andrei Biely is the peak of Russian psychological prose. He soared to the top with astonishing energy; yet with his high-flown and varied devices he merely completed the spadework of his predecessors, the so-called belletrists.

Can it be that his pupils, the Serapion Brothers and Pilniak, are returning to the bosom of belles-lettres, closing in this way a cycle of rotations, and that all that remains for us now is to wait for the reappearance of the Miscellanies of Knowledge, where psychology and byt^*2 will re-engender the old novel, the novel of the convict with the wheelbarrow?

As soon as the fabula disappeared, byt appeared in exchange. Earlier, Jourdain had not surmised that he was speaking prose; earlier, people did not know there was byt.

Byt is dead fabula; it is a decomposing plot, a convict’s wheelbarrow which psychology drags after itself, because after all it needs to lean on something, on a dead fabula if there isn’t a living one. Byt is a foreignism, the always falsely exotic; to the eyes of those who live in the same house it does not exist: the native knows how to notice only what is needed, what is to the point, but to the tourist, the foreigner (the belletrist) it’s another matter. He stares at everything and keeps talking about everything, inopportunely.

Our present Russian prose writers, like the Serapions and Pilniak, are just as much psychologists as their predecessors were before the Revolution, before Andrei Biely. They have no fabula. They do not lend themselves to being read aloud at table. Only their psychology is chained to another convict’s wheelbarrow—not to byt, but to folklore. I’d like to speak in more detail about just what difference this makes, because the watershed between byt and folklore is a serious matter. They are not at all one and the same thing. Folklore is a better brand. Higher quality.

Byt is a kind of night-blindness to things. Folklore is a conscious strengthening, an accumulation of linguistic and ethnographic material. Byt is the deadening of plot; folklore is the birth of plot. Listen intently to folklore and you will hear how thematic life stirs there, how the fabula breathes, and, in any folkloric entry, the fabula is present in embryo; here interest begins, here everything is fraught with the fabula, flirts, intrigues, and threatens with it. The brood hen sits on a heap of straw and clucks and cackles; the folkloric prose writer clucks and cackles about something, too, and whoever has a taste for it listens to him. In actual fact, he’s doing something worth doing—he’s hatching the fabula.

The Serapions and Pilniak (their older brother, and he needn’t be set apart from them) cannot please the serious reader; they are suspect because of their use of the anecdote; that is to say, they threaten with the fabula. Of the real fabula—that is, of deep narrative breathing—there is not a trace; but the anecdote tickles with its whiskers through every crack, quite as in Khlebnikov.

Winging with the goldletter of most delicate veins

The grasshopper stowed into the belly of the basket

A multitude of varied grasses and faiths.

“A multitude of varied grasses and faiths,” is what Pilniak, Nikitin, Fedin, Kozyrev and others, and Lidin (another Serapion not initiated into the brotherhood for some reason) and Zamiatin and Prishvin have.⁵ The beloved anecdote, the first free and joyful fluttering of the fabula, emancipation of the spirit from the melancholy monk’s cowl of psychology.

IV.

Meanwhile, let us dig in. Folklore is coming at us like a voracious caterpillar. In teeming locust swarms, jottings, notes, remarks, sayings, quotation marks, small talk, observations come crawling. A great gypsy-moth invasion, threat to cropped field. Thus, in literature, the turn of the fabula and folklore is legitimized, and folklore gives birth to fabula, as the voracious caterpillar gives birth to the delicate moth. If we did not notice this change earlier, it was because folklore was not trying to consolidate itself and tended to disappear without a trace. But as a period of accumulation, a period of voracious invasion, the folklore period preceded the flowering of any kind of fabula. And since it did not aspire to literature, not having been labeled as such, it remained within the contents of private letters, within the tradition of home-grown storytellers, in only partly published journals and memoirs, in petitions and chancery messages, in juridical protocols and in placards.

There may be some people (who knows?) who actually like those discourses of Pilniak, which are like the ones Leskov⁶ placed on the lips of his first railroad conversationalists, who were whiling away the boredom of the not-too-rapid transport. In all of Pilniak, however, I much prefer the epic conversation in the bathhouse, of the deacon with a certain Draube, on the theme of what sense the universe makes: there, you won’t find a single strophe beginning with “something,” nor a single lyrical simile, intolerable in prose, but the elementary play of the fabula being born, as, you will recall, in Gogol, approaching Pliushkin’s, you can’t at first distinguish “whether it’s a man or a woman; no, it’s a woman; no, a man.”

At the same time as the folklore line in prose, the purely byt line goes on to this day. One should overlook all the differences that characterize the Serapions, Pilniak, Zamiatin, Prishvin, Kozyrev, and Nikitin, because of the common badge of folklore by which they are united, their pledge of vitality. As the legitimate children of folklore they all slip into using anecdote. The only one who absolutely does not slip into anecdote is Vsevolod Ivanov,⁷ and what I said above about byt relates to him.

If you listen attentively to prose at a time when folklore flourishes, you will hear something that resembles the rich ringing of grasshoppers coupling in the air. This is the universal sound of contemporary Russian prose, and I don’t wish to take this ringing sound apart, since it was not invented by the clockmaker, since it is composed of an incalculable multitude of winging grasses and faiths. In the period inevitably ensuing, in the period of the flourishing fabula, with these multitudes thick upon each other, the voices of the grasshoppers will be transformed into the sonorous singing of the skylark—of the fabula, and then the skylark’s high notes will ring out, of which the poet said:

Fluent, frisky, sonorous, clear—

He has shaken me to the depth of my soul.

Notes

Note: See footnote, p. 85.

*1 Book of saints’ lives and similar edifying reading, divided according to the calendar. (Title Slavonicized from the Greek.)

*2 A word that has no precise equivalent in English. “Way of life,” “mores,” but assuming that these form a discernible pattern. A literary genre that emphasizes the way of life of a society or a segment of society as expressed in daily life, the ordinary, the quotidian, the daily round.