The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (10 page)

“He is not Chinese!” shouted a depressed-looking historian.

Everyone turned and looked at him.

“I don’t think he’s really Chinese,” the historian repeated.

“He does look—different,” said Lidiya.

“Maybe he is a Uighur,” Zalevsky suggested.

“Wha-a-at?”

“A Uighur, a Uighur, a Uighur.”

“When I asked the other Chinese what his religion was,” continued the first scholar, “he said to me, ‘My religion is Isaac Babel.’ ”

“Very strange,” said the historian.

Everyone turned to Lidiya Babel, as if awaiting some response. “It’s an interesting thing,” she said slowly. “I once
knew a man who married a German woman, and they went to China and photographed Chinese children. Their pictures were put in a book, and published: a book of photographs of Chinese children. But the really interesting thing is that when they asked the man what kind of women he preferred, he would always say: ‘Oh, ethereal—like a butterfly.’ But when you saw the German woman—she was completely round.”

There was a long pause.

“Ah, yes,” said the symbolist finally. “ ‘The eternal disjuncture between reality and the dream.’ ”

“Completely round,” repeated Lidiya Babel. “Whereas later, she ate nothing but cucumbers and black caviar, and now she’s altogether thin. Of course, this was when black caviar in Russia sold for next to nothing.”

I felt a strange feeling, close to panic. What if that was it, the thing that only she could tell us?

Inside the conference hall, the Chinese filmmakers sat at a long table in front of a flickering screen. The screenwriter smiled and made eye contact with everyone who came in. The director stared impassively into the back corner of the room. I wondered what he was thinking about, and whether he was really a Uighur.

“I used to be a student here at Stanford,” the screenwriter began. “Right here. I used to study computer programming. I used to work all night in the computer cluster next door. Then I took a creative writing class to learn how to write stories. There, my teacher assigned Isaac Babel’s story ‘My First Goose.’ This story changed my life.”

I was amazed anew at the varieties of human experience: to think we had both read the same story under such similar circumstances, and it had had such different effects on us.

“Babel was like the father to me,” continued the screenwriter. “I consider myself Babel’s son. Therefore, Nathalie and Lidiya are my sisters.” Something in the air suggested that not everyone in the audience had followed him in these logical steps. “Today I was able to shake hands with Nathalie, Lidiya, and Pirozhkova. I feel that I touched Babel’s hand. I hope Babel is up there watching us right now!”

Next, the director gave a short address in Chinese, and the screenwriter translated. “I had the foundations of my existence rocked by Isaac Babel’s
Red Cavalry
. His prose is so concise.” The director gave a little nod when he heard the English word “concise.” He went on to express his admiration of Babel’s deep understanding of the relationship between men and horses. He himself was a horseman, and had filmed the movie known as the first Chinese Western. He had made films in all genres, including action, war, and family.

“I am so grateful because here I met Babel scholars from all over the world and the universe,” the address concluded. “I saw so much passion! I can’t show you my film of Isaac Babel’s
Red Cavalry
, because I haven’t made it yet. Instead I will show you some of my film, the first Chinese Western,
Swordsmen in Double Flag Town
. Then you will see how I feel about horses, and maybe you will understand how I feel about Isaac Babel.”

The DVD was inserted into somebody’s laptop and projected onto a big screen. The sound didn’t work. Yellow dunes flashed silently by, a desert, the galloping legs of a horse, a row of Chinese characters. “
Swordsmen in Double Flag Town
!” cried the director, flinging out one arm. These were the first words he had spoken in English.

Later that night, Matej and I met at the picnic tables outside the housing complex. The world had changed two years’
worth since the biography class. I had moved from the apartment across from the Safeway to a studio on campus. Matej now bought his Winston Lights from Australia, instead of from the American Indians. Matej had brought four bottles of beer—three for him and one for me—and I told him my story about the two Chinese, about their gratitude for having met scholars from all over the world, and the universe. “I think I saw one of them this afternoon,” Matej said. “I saw one scholar, who was from the world, talking to another scholar, who was from elsewhere in the universe.”

The subject of interplanetary visitors reminded me to tell Matej about Cooper’s plan to simultaneously resolve the West Coast population boom and the Sputnik crisis by exporting Californians to the moon.

“What—like Nikolai Fyodorov?” Matej riposted.

I had forgotten all about Nikolai Fyodorov, the influential Russian philosopher who declared the future tasks of mankind to be the abolishment of death, the universal resurrection of all dead people, and the colonization of outer space (so the resurrected people would have somewhere to live).

Fyodorov published almost nothing in his lifetime. He worked as a librarian in Moscow, where his visitors included both the aging Lev Tolstoy and the teenage Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who, in 1903—the year of Fyodorov’s death—mathematically proved the possibility of spaceflight. Tsiolkovsky went on to become the “grandfather of Soviet cosmonautics,” and Soviet cosmonautics was Cooper’s bête noire: “So there really is a path from Fyodorov to Cooper!” I concluded.

“If there wasn’t, you would find one anyway,” Matej replied. “You remind me of a Croatian proverb: the snow falls, not in order to cover the hill, but in order that the beast can leave its tracks.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, it’s kind of an enigmatic proverb.”

We talked then about Matej’s current object of study: something called “the problem of the person.” The problem, Matej explained, was that personhood is revealed and constituted by action, such that the whole person is always present in every action—and yet the person isn’t “exhausted” by any single action, or even by the sum of all her actions. The action of writing “My First Goose,” for example, expresses Babel’s whole person (it isn’t the case that only part of Babel wrote “My First Goose,” while part of him remained uninvolved); nonetheless, neither “My First Goose,” nor even the sum total of Babel’s writings, express everything about him as a person.

“One way of putting it is like this,” Matej said. “When you’re in love with someone, what exactly is it you love?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s just it, you see—you love . . .
the person
.”

The person is never exhausted by his actions: there is always something left over. But what is that precious remainder—where do you find it?

Reflecting upon the problem of the person, I was brought to mind of a novel I had always liked, but never quite understood: Ivan Goncharov’s
Oblomov
(1859), the story of a man so incapable of action or decision-making that he doesn’t get off his sofa for the whole of part 1. In the first chapter, Oblomov receives various visitors who are active in different spheres of human activity. In all these forms of activity, Oblomov deplores the absence of “the person.” A socialite rushes in, talks of balls, dinner parties, and
tableaux vivants
, and then rushes away, exclaiming that he has ten calls to make. “Ten visits in one day,” Oblomov marvels. “Is this a life? Where is the person in all this?” And he rolls over, glad that he can stay put on his sofa, “safeguarding his peace and his human dignity.”

The second visitor, a former colleague from the civil service, tells Oblomov about his recent promotion to department head, his new privileges and responsibilities. “In time he’ll be a big shot and reach a high rank,” Oblomov muses. “That’s what we call a career! But how little of the person it requires: his mind, his will, his feelings aren’t needed.” Stretching out his limbs, Oblomov feels proud that he doesn’t have any reports to write, and that here on the sofa there is “ample scope both for his feelings and his imagination.”

I saw now that the problem of the person was the key to Oblomov’s laziness. So loath is Oblomov to be reduced to the mere sum of his actions that he decides to systematically
not act
—thereby to reveal more fully his true person, and bask in it unadulterated.

Oblomov’s third visitor, a critic, arrives in rapture over the invention of literary realism. “All the hidden wires are exposed, all the rungs of the social ladder are carefully examined,” he gushes. “Every category of fallen woman is analyzed—French, German, Finnish, and all the others . . . it’s all so true to life!” Oblomov not only refuses to read any realist works, but becomes almost impassioned. “Where is the person in all this? . . . They describe a thief or a prostitute, but forget the person, or are incapable of depicting him . . . The person, I demand the person!” he shouts.

Thinking over the problem of the person in the context of literary realism, I remembered a sentence from Babel’s diary that I had initially taken as a joke: “What is this gluttonous, pitiful, tall youth, with his soft voice, droopy soul, and sharp mind?” It wasn’t a joke—the question was where, in these characteristics, was the person?
What
was the person? In a speech in 1936, Babel described a change in his view of literary production: formerly, he had believed that the events of their time were so unusual and so surprising that all
he had to do was write them down and “they would speak for themselves,” but this literature of “objectivism” had turned out “uninteresting.” “In my work there had been no person,” Babel concluded. “The person had escaped himself.” Three years later, the NKVD took him in, and didn’t let him finish. The person had escaped for good.

The conversation with Matej turned to the way people are formed by their influences, by the fatal roles of others in their lives. I remember saying that I didn’t believe Babel when he described Maupassant as the most significant of his literary influences.

“I suppose you have some other influence in mind?”

“Well . . . Cervantes.” My latest theory was based on Babel’s incorporation into one of his stories of various elements from the biography of Cervantes, who had worked for seven years as a bookkeeper for the Spanish Armada.

“My fear when I listen to you,” Matej said finally, “is you remind me of this German philosopher.” This German, Leo Strauss, had written a commentary to Western philosophy, arguing that all the greatest philosophers had felt it necessary to encrypt their real ideas. In the commentary, Strauss took it as his mission to reveal the Other Plato, the Other Hobbes, the Other Spinoza, all saying things that Plato and Hobbes and Spinoza had left unspoken.

“A lot of the ideas he attributes to Spinoza are interesting,” Matej said, “but if Spinoza really thought those things, why didn’t he say so?”

As he spoke these words, two figures approached through the darkness: Fishkin and Skywalker.

“Elif!” said Skywalker. “Just the person we wanted to see. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” said Fishkin unhappily.

“Fishkin has something to tell you. Doesn’t he?”

“Yes.” Fishkin took a deep breath. “Remember how I said yesterday that Zalevsky gave me the finger? Well, actually it happened d-differently . . .” He trailed off.

“Ye-e-s?” Skywalker prompted.

“Actually,” Fishkin said, “I gave
him
the finger. I had finally found a parking spot and was about to pull in—when all of a sudden this car came speeding from the opposite direction and stole my spot. Naturally, I gave the guy the finger. Then he gave me the finger, and I saw it was Zalevsky. Then I drove away. I meant to tell you the truth yesterday. But when I said Zalevsky gave me the finger, you were like, ‘Oh my God, what a monster!’—I just couldn’t tell you I did it first.”

A straightforward relationship to factual truth never was one of Babel’s top priorities. “I was a boy who told lies,” begins one of the Childhood stories: “This came from reading.” A later story about reading, “Guy de Maupassant,” ends with a largely incorrect retelling of Édouard de Maynial’s biography of Maupassant: “Having achieved fame, he cut his throat at the age of forty, bled profusely, but lived. They locked him in a madhouse. He crawled about on all fours and ate his own excrement . . .” Contemporary Babel scholarship has shown that “neither Maynial nor any other biographer has Maupassant walking on all fours or eating his excrement”; the image appears to be borrowed from either
Nana
(Count Muffat crawls at Nana’s feet, thinking of saints who “eat their own excrement”) or
Madame Bovary
(a reference to Voltaire on his deathbed, “devouring his own excrement”). In “Guy de Maupassant,” Babel mentions neither Voltaire nor Zola nor Flaubert—except to claim that Maupassant’s mother is Flaubert’s cousin: a false rumor explicitly controverted by Maynial.

Was Babel trying to establish the independence of the person from his deeds—the independence of Maupassant, the person, from his factually accurate biography? Was it about the “premonition of truth” being more true than historical fact?

Walking back to my apartment, I passed the laundry room. Warm, detergent-scented air gusted from vents near the floor and a stereo in the open window was playing Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”:
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
.