St Petersburg полностью

Lectures, conferences, debates, readings, laughter, curses, more laughter, arguments, sometimes wild arguments—about Cervantes, chicken pox, Dostoyevsky, cholera, roast chicken … oh, yes: about roast chicken. I remember that Zoshchenko once said that roast chickens must have learned to fly very well, since you can’t seem to catch any at all nowadays.76

As Shklovsky recalled, “We sailed, talking, we were still young.” Being on the Crazy Ship, it was impossible to avoid mutual influence: everyone lived openly in close quarters, the “passengers” reading their latest works to one another; everyone knew who was working on what and how everyone was evolving. It was a marathon literary workshop of numerous talented individuals in close professional interaction. Typically, Mandelstam knew many of Zoshchenko’s short stories by heart, as if they were poems.

This attitude toward Zoshchenko’s prose as if it were “high Biblical lyricism” (Chukovsky’s expression) seems paradoxical in view of Zoshchenko’s style and protagonists. But the Petersburg connoisseurs had an acute awareness of Zoshchenko’s ties to the works of Gogol and the early Dostoyevsky. In Zoshchenko’s novella The Nanny Goat, the petty clerk Zabezhkin goes out onto Nevsky Prospect “out of curiosity: after all, there was a variety of people, and the stores had god only knows what, and it was funny to read what people were eating in which restaurant.” In his imagination, Zabezhkin, in an allusion to Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect, saves a lady in a black dress and veil from some hooligans; she turns out to be the daughter of

some trust’s director. Or even simpler: A little old intellectual is walking along. And suddenly falls. As from dizziness. Zabezhkin says to him … “Oh, oh, where do you live?” … “A coach!” … “Hold him up!” … And the little old man, may a mosquito fly up his nose, is an American citizen…. “Here,” he’ll say, “here’s a trillion rubles for you, Zabezhkin.”

This evokes the classic passage from Gogol: “But even stranger are the things that happen on Nevsky Prospect. O, don’t trust that Nevsky Prospect! I always wrap my cape more tightly around me when I walk on it and I try not to look at all at the objects I come across. It’s all deceit, all dreams, it’s all not what it seems!”

Zoshchenko’s affection for the Nevsky Prospect sung by Gogol is broken by the prism of parody. This is the alienation described by Shklovsky. The alienation effect is achieved by an intentionally infantile tone of the narrative. And Mandelstam, who according to Akhmatova regarded Zoshchenko very highly, used the same method in his prose work about Petersburg in the 1920s, called The Noise of Time. Mandelstam described “the grandeur of a military capital as seen through the glowing eyes of a five-year-old” (as Akhmatova put it).

With the years Zoshchenko’s prose became more and more “transparent,” moving in that sense from Gogol to Pushkin. The basic elements of Pushkin’s prose Zoshchenko once defined as “entertainment, brevity and clarity of narration, extreme grace of form, and irony.” Undoubtedly, this is also Zoshchenko’s secret self-description, as well as that of the new Petersburg prose as a whole.

A writer who surpassed Zoshchenko in a desire for simplicity and laconic writing was Leonid Dobychin, a remote and lonely man who managed to produce three small books before vanishing in 1936 after a vicious critical campaign against him for his “formalism” (he is believed to have committed suicide). Dobychin’s works, which were greatly esteemed among Leningrad writers, were met with hostility by the critics as collections of “man-in-the-street gossip, foul anecdotes, and operetta episodes.” A critic reviewing Dobychin’s book fumed, “The streets of Leningrad are filled with various people, most of whom are healthy, life-loving and energetic builders of socialism, but the author writes: ‘Gnats bustled.’”77

Dobychin’s stories were formed of short, “naked” sentences: “They were breaking into stores. It reeked of oil. Rooks with twigs in their beaks flew up.” The narrative constantly breaks off; the halting rhythm emphasizes the horror and dislocation in which Dobychin’s characters find themselves—petty clerks terrified by the Soviet regime and desperately trying to adjust to it. Memories of the old life flash through their distorted imaginations like ugly visions:

“In Petersburg I saw someone once,” said the round-cheeked Suslova, dreamily staring at the cups (one had the Winter Palace, the other the Admiralty Spire). “I don’t know, maybe it was the empress herself: I was walking past the palace and suddenly a carriage pulls up, a lady leaps out and flutters into the entry way.”

“Maybe it was the housekeeper with the shopping,” replied Kozlova.