The Voice Over

NOTES

IN UNHEARD-OF SIMPLICITY

The title of this essay alludes, with a polemical twist, to a phrase from Boris Pasternak’s 1931 poem from the cycle Waves, in which he declares “falling into unheard-of simplicity like into heresy” as a culmination of a poet’s career.

1. From Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Valerik” (1840).

2. From Daniil Kharms’s sketch “Four Illustrations” (1933) included in his cycle Accidents.

DISPLACED PERSON

1. Grigorii Dashevskii, “Kak chitat’ sovremennuiu poeziiu,” in his Stikhotvoreniia i perevody (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2015), 143–56.

2. This formula belongs to Marina Tsvetaeva; it first appeared in her notebook in 1921 and was later used many times in her works and letters.

3. An opening line from the Kontakion of St. Seraphim of Sarov.

4. A Nanai hunter who, in 1906 and 1907, served as a guide for Vladimir Arsenyev’s expeditions in the Russian Far East and later became a character in two of his books that describe these expeditions, one entitled Dersu Uzala (1923). In 1975, a film of the same name came out, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

5. From Osip Manselstam’s poem “No, never have I been anyone’s contemporary” (“Net, nikogda, nichei ia ne byl sovremennik,” 1924).

6. From Vladimir Mayakovsky’s narrative poem A Cloud in Trousers (1915).

7. Il’ia Kukulin, “Proryv k nevozmozhnoi sviazi,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 50 (2001): 452–53; see also Kukulin, Proryv k nevozmozhnoi sviazi (Ekaterinburg; Moscow: Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2019), 308–309.

8. Clones of prominent Russian writers are among the characters in Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (1999).

TODAY BEFORE YESTERDAY

1. A reference to the film project Dau (directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky), which was in the works for many years and was released in 2019.

2. An image from the opening of chapter XIV of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Terrible Vengeance” (1831).

3. A line from Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” (1837), a retrospective vision of the 1812 Napoleon invasion of Russia.

4. The White Guard fought the Bolshevik Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1918–1920). The actual reference here is to Igor Strelkov (real name Girkin), a warlord of Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and a vocal public figure during the active phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

5. Chekist (historically, a member of Cheka, the first Soviet intelligence agency, which was formed in late 1917) can be a general reference to any member of the secret police or, by extension, any supporter of an oppressive regime. Banderite, or banderovets (historically, a follower of Stepan Bandera, a leader of the militant wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists active before, during, and after World War II) became a catch-word used by Russian media as well as in popular discourse in reference to active supporters of the 2013–2014 anti-government rallies in Ukraine (which resulted in the overthrow of the president) and, by extension, to all Ukrainians.

6. Derogatory nicknames of various origin used in reference to Ukrainians (ukropy) and supporters of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (vatniki, kolorady).

7. An allusion to the title of a book by Arkadii Belinkov, The Surrender and Death of the Soviet Intelligent: Yuri Olesha (Sdacha i gibel’ sovetskogo intelligenta: Yurii Olesha).

8. A term from Boethius’s De institutione musica, here referring to its use by Alexander Blok in his historiosophical reflections.

AFTER THE DEAD WATER

1. A reference to “Today Before Yesterday”: the first sections of the essay, not included in the translation published in this volume, deal with Russian poetic responses to World War I.

2. On the use of the word “Banderite” see note 5 to “Today Before Yesterday.” Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) is the central square in Kyiv that became a site of a three-month anti-government rally in November 2013–February 2014.

3. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once an owner of a major Russian oil company, spent ten years in prison, nominally for economic crimes but allegedly for his disloyalty to Putin and his cronies. He was unexpectedly pardoned and released in December 2013.

4. Parmesan was among many products whose import to Russia was banned in 2014 as part of the so-called “counter-sanctions”—the Russian government’s response to sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States, European Union, and some other countries following the Russian annexation of Crimea and aggression in eastern Ukraine.

5. The name of a square in central Moscow, which was the site of several major opposition rallies in 2011–2012.

6. A politically motivated criminal case (alleged mass riots) brought against a number of the participants in a rally on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on May 6, 2012.

7. See note 4 to “Today Before Yesterday.”

8. Nestor Makhno was the leader of an anarchist army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War; Huliaipole (literally “walk-about field”), the small town where he was born, became the center of an anarchist republic at that time.

9. From Eduard Bagritsky’s narrative poem The Lay of Opanas (1926) set in Huliaipole during Makhno’s rule.

10. An allusion to a phrase from the Russian translation of “The Internationale.”

11. From Vladimir Mayakovsky’s narrative poem About That (1923).

12. From Alexander Blok’s narrative poem Retribution (1910–1921).

INTENDING TO LIVE

1. Pavel Milyukov was a liberal politician and one of the leaders of the Constitutional Democratic party in pre-revolutionary Russia. Vitaly Milonov is a contemporary politician best known for his legislative initiatives against the LGBT community. Alexei Navalny is a prominent leader of political protests in the 2010s. The Union of the Russian People was a right-wing nationalist organization active in 1905–1917, which was notorious for its antisemitism. Nashisty are members of the youth organization Nashi (Ours), which was created with the support of Putin’s administration in 2005 and was used over the years as a tool of pro-government youth politics and as an organizer of campaigns targeting political opposition and significant cultural figures.

2. An allusion to Pushkin’s 1834 poem “It’s time, my friend, it’s time!” (“Pora, moi drug, pora!”).

3. Pushkin’s duel, in which he was mortally wounded, took place in the outskirts of St. Petersburg, near the Black River (Chernaya Rechka). One of his last requests before he died, two days after the duel, was for cloudberries.

4. The opening line of a poem by Stanislav Krasovitsky (“Ne sadis’ udobnee”).

5. From Tsvetaeva’s “The New Year’s” (“Novogodnee,” 1927), a poem written shortly after Rilke’s death and addressed to him.

6. An inexact quotation from the story “How Treachery Came to Russia” in Rilke’s Stories of God. Compare the same motif in Spolia (“so what bounds Russia, said the crippled man / you know very well what bounds it, said the crippled man”).

7. An allusion to the biblical epigraph of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (“Vengeance is mine; I will repay”).

8. Pioneers were members of the mass youth organization in the USSR. Reading stories about pioneer heroes from the Second World War period was part of the patriotic education of Soviet children.

9. On Bolotnaya Square, see note 5 to “After the Dead Water.” A pro-government rally on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow on February 4, 2012 was organized as a countermeasure to a wave of anti-government political protests.

10. From Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” (1837), where the phrase is used to juxtapose the generation that, in 1812, fought Napoleon’s army in Russia (bogatyrs, or mythological mighty warriors) and the younger generation to which Lermontov himself belonged.

11. A 1967 Soviet film set during the Russian Civil War.

12. An acronym for “party committee,” which was commonly used in the USSR in reference to committees of the Communist Party that existed in every establishment where people worked or studied.

13. The percent of the people who, according to 2014 polls, did not support the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine.

14. A legendary phrase ascribed to one of the participants in the Decembrist uprising in 1825.

THE MAXIMUM COST OF LIVING

1. Until February 14, 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar, which lagged twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar at the time of Tsvetaeva’s birth. She kept using the Julian calendar in her notebooks and some correspondence until she left Russia in spring 1922. Dates according to the Julian calendar are traditionally marked as “Old Style” in Russian historical references.

2. Guild of Poets—a literary group founded by Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky in 1911.

3. Their birthdays were actually three days apart: September 26 and 29 (Old Style); Efron, born in 1893, was one year younger than Tsvetaeva.

4. An inexact quotation from Karl Peterson’s “The Little Orphan” (“Sirotka,” 1843), a poem for children much anthologized in the nineteenth century.

5. From Boris Pasternak’s poem “About This Verse” (1917).

6. An allusion to Pushkin’s “Inspiration is not for sale, / But you can sell a manuscript” from his “Conversation Between a Bookseller and a Poet” (1824). Translation from Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 197.

7. A phrase from the Russian avant-garde manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912).

8. “Ein Dichter einzig lebt, und dann und wann / kommt, der ihn trägt, dem, der ihn trug, entgegen.” From Rilke’s inscription on a copy of his Duineser Elegien (1923) sent to Tsvetaeva in May 1926. Translation from Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters Summer 1926, trans. Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 81.

9. “On approche, on prend peur, on disparaît. […]

Disparition subite et totale. Lui—disparu. Moi—seule.

Et c’est invariabl la même histoire.

On me laisse. Sans un mot, sans un adieu. On est venu—on ne vient plus. On a écrit—on n’écrit plus.

Et me voilà dans le grand silence, que je ne romps jamais, blessée à mort (ou à vif, ce qui est la même chose) sans avoir jamais rien compris—ni comment ni pourquoi.”

10. “Seulement le petit Marcel m’aurait fait moins souffrir par des manques de sensibilité extérieure—étant d’une autre génération, où chacun cédait sa place à une femme, belle ou laid et où aucun ne restait assis lorsqu’une fem était debout et—oh surt ça!—où aucun ne vous parl, les pieds sur une chaise.”

CONVERSATIONS IN THE REALM OF THE DEAD

1. L. V. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vols. 1–2 (Moscow, 2011).

2. Shaporina was an artist, translator, and the founder, in 1918, of the first Puppet Theater in Soviet Russia.

3. An allusion to Fedor Tiutchev’s poem on the death of Pushkin, “29 January 1837,” where Pushkin is called Russia’s “first love.”

WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE

1. An allusion to Osip Mandelstam’s poem “1 January 1924,” where “the fourth estate” refers to the proletariat whose interests the Bolshevik revolution claimed to protect.

2. An autobiographical character in Konstantin Vaginov’s novel Goat Song (1927).

3. Alisa Poret, Zapiski, risunki, vospominaniia, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2012). The second volume came out in 2017.

4. An allusion to “the cold and gloom of the times to come” from Alexander Blok’s poem “A Voice from the Chorus” (1914).

5. Anna Akhmatova meant her oral memoirs—stories she repeated over the years, without making any changes, to various interlocutors.

6. Translation from ‘I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary’: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms, selected, translated and edited by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 83.

THE LAST HERO

1. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 109.

2. Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 518.

3. Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, 176.

4. Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 144.

5. Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 6–7.

6. Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 217.

7. Susan Sontag, “A Mind in Mourning,” The Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 2000.

8. Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 426, 115, 183, 106, 426.

9. Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 424.

10. Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 119.

11. Sontag, Reborn, 34.

12. Sontag, Reborn, 81.

13. Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (New York: Riverhead, 2011), 87.

14. Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 515.

15. Larry Kramer in an interview to Larry Mass, as quoted in Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 268.

16. Nunez, Sempre Susan, 74.

17. Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 146.

18. Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 447.

19. A modified quotation from her essay on Elias Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” in Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, 183.

20. Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 71.

FROM THAT SIDE

1. See note 7 to the essay “The Last Hero.”

2. In 2006, a Russian translation of Austerlitz was published but went almost unnoticed. It was not until 2015 that the effort to bring Sebald’s work to Russian readers was renewed, with the publication of his book of essays On the Natural History of Destruction. In 2018, Sebald’s novels Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn came out in Russian translation for the first time, and Austerlitz was republished.

3. “Iosif” was Stalin’s first name, and it was given to Soviet children in his honor. The name “Vladlen” derives from “Vladimir Lenin,” and Oktyabrina honors October, the month when the Bolshevik revolution happened.

4. W. G. Sebald, A Place in the Country, trans. Jo Catling (New York: Random House, 2013), 142, 130.

5. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 182–83.

6. A phrase from Maxim Gorky’s novel The Life of Klim Samgin that became proverbial.

7. Sebald, A Place in the Country, 136.

8. Final lines from Osip Mandelstam’s poem “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” (“Ia ne slykhal rasskazov Ossiana,” 1914).

9. W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2005), 137, 157.

10. Sebald, Campo Santo, 160.

11. Sebald, A Place in the Country, 177.

12. W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 2000), 51.

13. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories, 2007), 67.

14. Sebald, Austerlitz, 180.

15. Osip Mandelstam, Selected Essays, trans. Sidney Monas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 181.

16. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996), 3.

17. Sebald, Austerlitz, 3.

18. Sebald, Austerlitz, 112.

19. Sebald uses this term in two of his conversations (with Eleanor Wachtel and with Joseph Cuomo): The Emergence of Memory, 40, 102–103.

20. Sebald, A Place in the Country, 130–31.

21. Sebald, A Place in the Country, 19.

22. Sebald, Campo Santo, 135.

23. Sebald, A Place in the Country, 154.

OVER VENERABLE GRAVES

The title of this essay comes from Pushkin’s poem “When lost in thought I wander beyond the town” (“Kogda za gorodom, zadumchiv, ia brozhu,” 1836). The translation is from Andrew Kahn’s Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 321.

1. From Boris Pasternak’s poem “Star of the Nativity” (1947).

2. From Pushkin’s poem “When down the bustling streets I pass” (“Brozhu li ia vdol’ ulits shumnykh,” 1829). Alexander Pushkin, Selected Lyric Poetry, trans. James Falen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 149.

3. W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 32.

4. Anatoly Fomenko is notorious for his pseudohistorical theory of “New Chronology.”

5. Sebald, Campo Santo, 32.

6. In communal apartments, there would be signs telling visitors how many times to ring the doorbell for each resident so that the right person would answer the door.