Selected Essays

SUKHUM

At the beginning of April I arrived in Sukhum—a city of mourning, tobacco, and fragrant vegetable oils. Here is where one should begin studying the alphabets of the Caucasus; here every word starts with a. The language of the Abkhazians is powerful and sonorous, but abounds in the upper and lower guttural compound sounds, which make pronunciation difficult; one might say it was torn out of a larynx overgrown with hair . . .

I’m afraid the kindly bear Baloo has not yet been born to teach me, as he did the boy Mowgli of Kipling’s jungle, the excellent language of “Achoo!”—although in the distant future I foresee academies for the study of the groups of Caucasian languages, scattered over the whole world. The phonetic ore of Europe and America will run out. Its deposits have their limits. Even now young people are reading Pushkin in Esperanto. To each his own.

But what an awesome warning!

One can easily get a panoramic view of Sukhum from Mount Cherniavsky, as it is called, from Ordzhonikidze Square. It is completely linear, flat, and, to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march, it sucks into itself a great crescent of the sea with a heave of its resort-colonial breast.

It is spread out below like a case of drawing instruments containing a compass ensconced in velvet that has just described the bay, sketched the arched eyebrows of the hills, and closed up.

Although public life in Abkhazia has about it much that is naïvely crude, and many abuses, one cannot help being captivated by the administrative and economic elegance of this small maritime republic, proud of its rich soils, box-tree forests, its State Farm olive grove at New Athos, and the high quality of its Tkvarchel coal.

Rose thorns punctured kerchiefs, and the tame bear cub with the grey snout of some ancient Russian, of some dunce-capped Ivan the Fool, squealed, and his squeal cut through glass. Brand-new automobiles kept rolling up straight from the sea, and their tires sliced up the eternally green mountain . . . From underneath the bark of the palm tree they extracted a grey fiber from which they made theatrical wigs, and in the park the flowering agave plants, like candles weighing six poods, shot up a couple of inches every day.

Lei gave sermons on the mount on the danger of smoking and issued fatherly reproofs to the gardener. He once asked me a question that struck me profoundly: “What was the mood of the petty bourgeoisie in Kiev in 1919?”

I think his dream was to quote Karl Marx’s Capital in the hut of Paul and Virginie.

In my twenty-verst strolls, accompanied by silent Latvians, I developed a certain feeling for the lay of the land.

Theme: a race to the sea of gently sloping volcanic hills, joined together by a little chain—for the pedestrian.

Variation: the little green key of altitude is passed from height to height, and each new slope puts the hollow under lock.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

I visited Beria, the president of the Society of the Friends of Caucasian Letters, and was close to giving him greetings for Tartarin and the gunsmith Costecalde.

A marvelous figure from Provence!

He complained of the difficulties involved in working out the Abkhazian alphabet, and spoke with respect about that Petersburg clown, Evreinov, who had been seduced in Abkhazia by the cult of the goat, and complained about not being able to obtain any serious scientific studies because of the distance from Tiflis.

The hardheaded knocking together of billiard balls is just as pleasant to men as the clicking of ivory knitting needles is to women. The bandit-cue would devastate the pyramid, and a quartet of epic heroes from Blücher’s army, resembling each other like brothers, serving on the duty roster, with an air of precision about them and a bulb of laughter in their chests, exclaimed with pleasure over the charm of the game.

And the old men, Party members, didn’t lag behind them.

From the balcony, through army binoculars, you could get a clear view of the track and the stands on a swampy parade ground the color of billiard cloth. Once a year there are great horse races to test the endurance of anyone who wants to compete.

A cavalcade of biblical elders would follow the boy who won.

Relatives scattered around the many versts of the ellipse would deftly pass wet towels on the end of poles to the flushed horsemen.

In a distant swamp meadow a lighthouse would keep turning like the Tate diamond.

And somehow I saw the dance of death, the wedding dance of phosphorescent insects. At first it seemed as if the tips of very thin little cigarettes that kept wandering about were being puffed to a glow, but their flourishes were too daring, free, and bold.

The devil knows where they were heading!

Coming closer: insane electrified ephemera, twitching, tracing, devouring the black hack-work in print at the present moment.

Our heavy fleshly body decays in just the same way, and our activity will turn into just such a pandemonium of signals gone amuck, if we do not leave behind us substantial proof of our existence.

It is frightening to live in a world that consists only of exclamations and interjections!

Bezymensky,¹² strong man lifting cardboard weights; round-headed, gentle, inkstained blacksmith—no, not blacksmith, bird-vender—no, not even birds—the balloons of RAPP—he was forever stooping, humming, and swacking people with his blue eyes.

An inexhaustible operatic repertoire gurgled in his throat. His open-air-concert, mineral-water heartiness never left him. A lounger, with a mandolin in his soul, he lived on the string of a ballad, and his heart’s core sang under a phonograph needle.