at the switchboard on New Year’s Eve), I got through to an Italian journalist friend who was in town. Surprised, he asked me how much I had drunk (if I’d been calling from Italy, it would have been well after midnight); he listened when I asked him for help, using “butterfly code”: I-fi am-fam in-fin big-fig trou-fruh ble-full, etc. The thought of a decoder trying to understand the secret language of my childhood made me smile, despite my aches and my hunger.
The next morning my room was host to a real parade. First, the doctor. “Well, what have you been doing, you’re one big bruise. You drink too much. Stay in bed for at least two days and put some ice on your hip and thigh.” Then it was the man in the gray coat’s turn: “Technical assistance. I have to fix the phone.” “But it works just fine!” “That was the order. If you could please leave the room for a moment.” I revealed what bandages I could. “Don’t worry, I won’t look.” But I did: he casually unscrewed the receiver, inspected it, took something out, put something else in . . . The butterfly language must have made some ears burn. Third, my Italian friend arrived. “Let’s go to the foreigners’ hospital,” he limited himself to saying, and on the way (“you can talk, the car is safe”) he listened to my story. He had been in Russia for ten years and had never heard of anything like that happening . . . And to a foreigner . . . “Is your room clean?” “Spotless.” “Then be careful, something’s up. As soon as you get back to your hotel, don’t leave your room. They could slip drugs into one of your books, in a drawer. And leave as soon as you can.” He had a friend at Alitalia who could change my ticket. After the doctor’s visit (just two cracked ribs and some contusions on my left leg), he took me back to the Pekin and made sure that nobody had paid me a visit while I was out.
Shklovsky called. Afanasy had gone over to apologize; the car had run out of fuel and he’d gotten stuck outside of town. “You can imagine—he smelled like Tsar Nicholas’ wine cellar. But he didn’t get off scot free, I whacked him with my cane . . .” He thanked me for getting Sima home safe and sound and ordered me not to come see him for at least two days, so I could rest and get better.
I grabbed my brightest, shiniest sweater, went out, locked the door, and with clear tape I attached two hairs, crossed, over the keyhole (which I’d seen in a spy film). A bribed waitress brought me provisions for two days. On January 3, after pulling out two more of my hairs, I went back to Shklovsky’s for what would be, I announced, our last conversation: I had to go back to Italy—serious family problems—but I had gathered enough material . . . The pained look of those two was touching. When his wife left the room to prepare the tea, Viktor Borisovich said to me: “You’re terrified, Serenochka, I know that look in your eyes very well. I have for fifty years. You don’t have to tell me anything, but for the love of God, leave, go back to Italy. Nadezhda Mandelstam once said that we were living in a torture chamber. Today I call it an operating room. Every day they give us the anesthetic of fear, an ether that paralyzes the soul.”
The morning of January 4, Afanasy drove me to the airport. Queasy again, with a few more bandages than before, I remained silent the whole ride. Once we reached Table no. 1 he pulled out his own identification and mine. The Petenky and Vovochky pounced on us like starved vultures. Afanasy’s eyes bulged, the employee at Table 1 paled. A Petenka gestured for me to open my suitcase, then to follow him to a room where I was met by a woman in uniform. Once the door was closed, the policewoman (?) said to me politely: “Please, if you’re hiding something—jewelry, drugs, papers—tell me, I don’t want to have to search you.” I emptied my pockets and my purse. That didn’t convince her. “Since you don’t want to cooperate, please remove your clothes.” Later, the same woman took me to passport check and from there to the exit; my bags, she explained, would be returned to me on the plane.
I was alone on the bus and on the ramp. On the plane I was greeted by the sarcastic applause of the other passengers, who had been waiting over four hours on the runway. The flight attendant quickly ushered me to first class—empty, or emptied, for the occasion.
Back home, I found a piece of paper in my suitcase with a pencil sketch of my hair dryer and four pages on which someone had diligently copied the names up to “B” from my address book, including their phone numbers and addresses. Careless, the KGB! And what a disappointment: everything by hand, no photocopies . . . Even the legendary KGB, I now realized, suffered the inexorable constraints of the Soviet defitsit.
2003. Vladimir Voynovich’s “Dossier n. 34840” is made public:
“ . . . After that nobody touched me again, physically, but there were assaults on those who came to see me, even on those who didn’t. The Italian Slavicist Serena Vitali [sic] was the guest of my neighbor Viktor Shklovsky, and when she left and got on a trolleybus, she was hit in the head with something heavy wrapped in a newspaper. During the attack they said to her: “If you see Voynovich one more time, we’ll finish you off.’”
Was Voynovich—ever since Private Chonkin, in open battle with the regime—the real reason for my little (you know, word travels, information gets exaggerated . . .) mishap? Out of respect for the much more vicious attacks others went through, due to my now firm disbelief in a logic to violence, out of laziness, ultimately, I never asked to see my file when the Lubyanka opened its archives. The Petenky and Vovochky? I can see them now, bodyguards for some powerful nouveau riche. Or perhaps they have gotten rich themselves and they ride around in black six-door limousines. Or they scrape by with the modest pension afforded even the most idiotic KGBists, no longer of use to anybody . . .
SERENA VITALE, 2010
ON THE INFINITY OF THE NOVEL. ART HAS NEITHER BEGINNING, MIDDLE, NOR END. EPILOGUES ARE CLOYING LEFTOVERS. ART DEALS ALWAYS AND ONLY WITH LIFE.
My first question, Viktor Borisovich, is not so much about what you’ve written as it is about what you haven’t written. Why is it that in these last two decades, which have seen such a massive revival of your activity as a literary critic and historian, you’ve never—or certainly very rarely—commented on the themes or problems of contemporary Soviet literature?
I’m guilty, I admit. I don’t work much on contemporary literature. To tell the truth, I haven’t been crazy about what I have read. But, I repeat, the fault is mine. I hope to take on this task, at least in part, to remedy this lack, in my next book, which will have a great title, taken from Tolstoy: Energy of Delusion. The fact is that new, contemporary material will always pile up and then slip away, whereas the classics don’t go anywhere, they endure. Please, you be the interpreter of my excuses for the Italian public, but this time too I’m going to limit myself to talking about literary material that’s generally known, that has become the patrimony of all humankind. One author who I worked a lot on, for example, is Boccaccio. My book also came out in Italian. What did I want to say, and what do I still stand by today? Essentially this: art derives from the fact that man is marked by contradictions. And in art these contradictions can be resolved more or less favorably, but completely favorably—that’s impossible. You know why I can’t bear to read Dante’s Paradiso? Because I believe that, normally, novels cannot be finished. Look at the beginning of Aristotle’s Poetics: “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” With that, of course, I agree. But let’s try to apply this concept to art. Let’s take our literature, Russian literature. It struggles to comprehend the world, and the world has no end. In War and Peace, Pierre’s nephew Nikolenka has a dream. Right at the end of the novel. He dreams of him and Pierre at the head of an enormous army made of white lines fluttering in the air like spiderwebs. Glory is before them, the same as those threads. At a certain point, the threads begin to go slack, to tangle.
