Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair: God of Life
On first reading, Maidenhair stymies the reader, but in a good way for it challenges the reader to engage itself. Since Maidenhair is like a whirling merry-go-round the real problem for the reader is to grab hold and not let go until he has become one with the whirling! In order to gingerly approach the whirling merry-go-round, I begin by briefly introducing Mikhail Shishkin and then supplying a general overview of the novel itself—guided in my interpretation by a few statements of Shishkin. “Interpreting” is a felicitous description for what I shall be doing with this novel because, as we shall see, its protagonist is a translator/interpreter—as was Shishkin himself.
Mikhail Shishkin was born in Moscow in 1961. He attended Moscow State Pedagogical Institute where he studied English and German. After graduation he worked as a street sweeper, road worker, journalist, schoolteacher, and translator. In 1993 he published his first fiction, a short story entitled “Calligraphy Lesson.” Since 1993 he has published four novels—One Night Befalls Us All, The Taking of Izmail (1999), Maidenhair (2005), and in 2010 Pismovnik or Letter-Book. Even though his works have been translated into various European languages with the exception of a short story (“Calligraphy Lesson”), it was not until 2012 (Maidenhair) and 2013 (Pismovnik—Letter-Book—translated as The Light and the Dark) that the English reading public could read his last two novels; the first two novels have not been translated into English. He has won major prizes in Russia and elsewhere: The Russian Booker Prize in 2000 for The Taking of Izmail, National Best-Seller Prize (2006), International Literature Award (2011 German translation) for Maidenhair, and Big Book Award (2006) for Pismovnik (Letter Book).
For a number of years, Shishkin has lived abroad, first in Switzerland as a translator in a Swiss agency that interviewed asylum seekers from former Soviet republics and satellite nations and lately in Berlin. Although he has lived abroad for a number of years, he frequently travels back to Russia. The experience of living abroad provided him a broader perspective on being a Russian writer, and when questioned about being an émigré Russian writer, he asserted that the view that a Russian writer cannot live without being constantly immersed in the Russian language is a view promoted by leaders and tyrants, not writers. In fact, he says, Gogol’s Dead Souls—that most Russian of novels—was written in Rome, Switzerland, and Paris—three venues for the stories told in Maidenhair.
Earlier this year, Shishkin withdrew his prior commitment to participate as a representative of Russian writers in Book Expo America 2013 because he refused to be the voice of a Russia in which power has been seized by a corrupt regime. In his statement of withdrawal he asserted that:
“A country where a corrupt criminal regime seized power, where the government is a pyramid scheme, where elections have turned into a farce, where the courts serve the authorities and not the law, where there are political prisoners, where state television has been turned to prostitution, where imposters adopt senseless laws in droves, returning everyone to the middle ages—that country cannot be my Russia. I cannot and will not take part in the official delegation representing Russia.”
“I should and will represent a different Russia, my Russia, a country free of imposters, a country with government structures that defend not the right to corruption but the right to personhood, a country with a free press, free elections, and free people.”[1]
Existentially, Shishkin’s work arises from his questioning of childhood experience. In an interview with Anna Griboedova for the Russkiy Mir Foundation, Shishkin answers the question of why he writes:
“For me, writing is like an attempt to answer the questions that I asked myself as a child. Once I was walking along with my grandmother, and on the side of the road we saw a dead cat. And my grandmother went home, got a shovel and returned. And when she buried it on the side of the road, I suddenly realized that I too will someday die… And grandmother will die, and all the people that I love and that love me will die someday. And what can one do about this? And ever since I have been asking myself: is it possible to fight death?”[2]
Shishkin has found an answer to this question—“is it possible to fight death?”— in writing, for it is in writing that he seeks to immortalize his experience.
It seems that words are these small pieces of eternity from which you can build a wall against death. And you start to think of them as protection from death, and it seems that the writers of books have found this loophole into immortality. But as a person changes, so do his answers to these very same questions. At 16 years of age, even before writing anything, I was sure that writing was the path for me to overcome my own death. But then at some point in time I came to realize that this won’t save me from death. Words, like a ship, promise to take you with them into eternity. But the ship sails off at night, and it turns out that the words attain immortality, but you remain there on shore.[3]
Thus words, according to Shishkin, provide the writer with an immortality that is accessible to readers who live ages after the writer. On the other hand, Shishkin is skeptical about finding words that can immortalize the writer. In his Harriman Magazine interview, he asserts that:
“Everything real, everything important that happens with us is beyond words. Words are traitors. Not a single one is to be trusted. The writer starts with an understanding of the futility of words, with a recognition of the impossibility of conveying in words that which exist outside of words.. . . All my books are about that which cannot be conveyed in words. And this point, it seems, is not limited to Russian, but applies to language in general.”[4]
And in a reading at Columbia University[5] he prefaced his reading with the comment that he has struggled with his language all his life and that sometimes he wins, but most of the time it wins. But like the Oroch character, Daphnis, in the Gesuchsteller story of Daphnis and Chloe (see below), he is moved to search for the secret to immortality, or in Voegelin’s terminology, he is moved to the quest, to the search—even though words are not sufficient for articulating the experience. Hence, Shishkin tells the many stories found in Maidenhair.
Maidenhair: An Overview
Maidenhair is a “polyvocal” tour de force. Its 506 page text has no chapters, and thus no chapter titles. It derives what formal–typographical structure it has by the insertion of an extra line space to separate sections from each other even though some of the voices that speak within given sections are variable, sometimes antiphonal, and sometimes even unidentifiable. Even though the voices that speak within each section are variable (with some exceptions)[6] there is an identifiable narrative source for each section. In my second reading I counted 43 discrete sections with six “identifiable” narrative sources: the interpreter’s voice—directly or in letters to his estranged son Nebuchadnezzasaurus (9 §§, 27pp), the interpreter’s reports of Q & A sessions (10 §§, 174pp), an omniscient third person narrator (9 §§, 75pp), Isabella Dimitrievna’s interpolated diary/notebook entries (10 §§, 206pp), excerpts from Xenophon’s Anabasis (2 §§, 8pp), and an unidentifiable narrator in a lost notebook in one section (§41, 14pp). The interpreter, Shishkin’s protagonist—who writes (letters to his son), records Q & A sessions even though Peter Fischer asks the questions, and interpolates texts (Isabella’s diary or excerpts from Xenophon’s Anabasis)—is the source of the narration except where he is the focus of the narration as an omniscient narrator tells his story. The setting of the novel is the “chancellery for refugees in the defense ministry of paradise” in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.[7] The interpreter is responsible for translating the interviews conducted by Peter—the emperor of this chancellery and “the master of fates”—of the Gesuchstellers (seekers of asylum) from the various former republics (or satellites) of the Soviet Union, “Empire” for Shishkin.[8]
Simply put, Maidenhair is a book of stories—the Question and Answer sections tell the stories of the Gesuchstellers, the interpreter’s letters to Nebuchadnezzasaurus tell his own story to his estranged son, Xenophon tells the story of the Helene mercenaries, Isabella tells the story of her life (she lives to be 100), and the omniscient narrator tells the story of the interpreter’s life. Virtually every narrative source tells a story or part of a story that continues in other sections. About a quarter of the way through the book, however, the following exchange between the “master of fates” and a Gesuchsteller occurs:
Question: The story is the hand, and you’re the mitt. Stories change you like mitts. You have to understand that stories are living beings.
Answer: What about us?
Question: There is no you yet. Look: blank sheets of paper.
Answer: But look, I’ve arrived. I’m sitting here. I’m looking out the snow-covered window. The storm’s died down. Everything is whiter than white. I see photographs on the wall: he’s got someone by the gills. Some kind of bizarre map. I can’t even make out the continents’ outlines. It’s not a map; it’s a little hedgehog. It’s squeezed in between the wild strawberry and whortleberry bushes and the berries were speared on its needles.
Question: No really, there’s no one here yet.
Answer: What do you mean no one? Then whose shadow is this? You see? . . .
Question: Wrong . . . None of this is the real thing. Your story is the groom and you’re the bride. Stories choose the person and start wandering.
Answer: I see.[9]
In essence, however, the novel is Shishkin’s story, for as he says:
“all of my heroes are me. I pluck myself into various characters primarily based on age: the young man who is struggling to figure things out, the adult who is similar to who I am now and the old man that I may become someday. All male heroes are a unified ‘I’, and all female heroes are my perception of a woman. So all of my books are intertwined, leaving only the boundary between man and woman. And in all my novels there are really only two heroes—he and she.”[10]
The trick for a reader is to discern how all of the stories blend and complement each other and what the stories collectively tell us. This is not an easy task, nor is the collective meaning easily demonstrated, for even after a good-faith attempt to articulate how the various stories meld into one another, I am left with the conviction that my understanding is dependent upon what the various stories evoked in me. As Shishkin knows that words often fail in writing, I too know that words can fail. They are necessary both to the writer’s and the literary critic’s enterprise but ultimately the most important elements of life escape encapsulation in those necessary but insufficient words.
One of the chief difficulties in interpreting this novel is the density of the text itself, saturated as it is with literary allusions in addition to insights contained in the stories themselves. Shishkin writes both from within the tradition of great Russian literature[11] as well as western literature. He mentions many Russian writers, including Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, and Turgenev; refers specifically to works like The Inspector General; and alludes to other stories like Gogol’s “The Nose” or to characters from Gogol’s Inspector General. Dante, Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, and Xenophon are specifically mentioned, while names of characters are drawn from Longus (Daphnis and Chloe), the medieval cycle of tales (Tristan and Iseult, styled Tristan and Isolde by Shishkin) , and The Old Testament. Finally, many of the stories are fantastical in nature, a characteristic that reminds one of Bulgakov’s as well as Gogol’s work. In one interview he states, “we all stand as a group at the feet of Tolstoy.”[12]
In addition to his allusions to various Russian writers and works, Shishkin chooses names for the characters in his stories that are allusive. For example, as we have already seen he writes new stories for ancient characters—Daphnis and Chloe, Tristan and Isolde, and Nebuchadnezzasaurus. A central character in the interpreter’s own story is Galpetra, his childhood teacher. The name itself is a conflation of Galina—a variant of Helen in Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian and the feminine form of Galen that alludes to Galene, a Nereid mermaid and goddess of calm seas—and Petrovna, an obvious allusion to the feminine form of Peter, the rock upon which Christ built his church.
While his focus is upon people, he draws his stories from a polyglot, multi-cultural Russia. There are Gesuchstellers who tell their stories in the Question & Answer sections from Chechnya, Eastern Siberia (Orochs and Tungus, more on which later), Lithuania, and Romania. Isabella Dmitrievna, whose diary and notebooks are interpolated into the text by the interpreter, her commissioned biographer, comes from an aristocratic family. She becomes a famous singer whose life and career span Tsarist and Soviet eras. Moreover, Isabella reads 17th century French writers like Madeleine de Scudéry (who kept a salon and wrote The Story of Sapho) and Ninon de l’Enclôs. She also reads (and interpolates into her own notebook) excerpts from Marie Bashkirtseva, a Ukrainian who lived in Paris. Galpetra, the interpreter’s teacher and a central character, is a Ukrainian who reveres the Polish hero Janusz Korczak (a pseudonym of Henryk Goldszmidt, a pediatrician who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto and later refused to abandon children as they were led into the gas chamber at Treblinka).[13] By drawing sources from these varied regions of the Russian/Soviet Empire, Shishkin establishes a representative nation of people. Commenting on his approach to writing as a Russian émigré, he asserted that:
“When I lived in Russia, I was first and foremost interested in people, and I did not write about the country. But if I write about life, then I write about life in Russia. But when you leave Russia you come to understand that life there is not the entire world. It is only a small piece of an enormous world. And perhaps it is not the largest or the most important piece.”
“I don’t think you need to write about Russia or about exotic Russian problems. You should write about people. Regardless of where you live, you should write about people and all their problems, which will be the same in Russia and in any other country.”[14]
Seeking that which we all seek—“Inside,” he says, “we’re all similar: we fear death and want love. All true texts, films, plays, have the same plot: the transformation of reality, which is made up of cruelty and death, into warmth and light”[15]—Shishkin’s palette becomes humanity in its various cultural hues.
Voegelin’s Time of the Tale: A Framework for Understanding Maidenhair
On August 13, 1964, Voegelin wrote to Heilman from Munich that:
“There was a point in my Salzburg lecture that might interest you as an historian of literature: The basic form of myth, the ‘tale’ in the widest sense, including the epic as well as the dramatic account of happenings, has a specific time, immanent to the tale, whose specific character consists in the ability to combine human, cosmic and divine elements into one story. I have called it, already in Order and History, the Time of the Tale. It expresses the experience of Being (that embraces all sorts of reality, the cosmos) in flux. This Tale with its Time seems to me the primary literary forms, peculiar to cosmological civilizations. Primary in the sense, that it precedes all literary form developed under conditions of differentiating experiences: If man becomes differentiated with any degree of autonomy from the cosmic context, then, and only then, will develop specifically human forms of literature: The story of human events, lyric, empirical history, the drama and tragedy of human action, the meditative dialogue in the Platonic sense, etc. Underlying all later, differentiated forms, however, there remains the basic Tale which expresses Being in flux.”[16]
Three foci that emerge from Voegelin’s letter to Heilman are relevant for our understanding of Maidenhair. To wit: (1) the relation between myth, Time of the Tale, and other literary forms, (2) the Time of the Tale and Being in flux, and (3) the persistence of the Time of the Tale after the differentiation of insights into other complex structures of reality. I am especially interested in how the Time of the Tale as a symbol characterizes Maidenhair and how Maidenhair symbolizes the persistence of myth after the differentiation of insights into other complex structures of reality that arise from philosophy and revelation.
The Time of the Tale is integrally bound up with myths, that is, works of imagination that symbolize the experiences of human beings in cosmological civilizations. In “In Search of the Ground” (1965), Voegelin asserted that “All art, if it is any good, is some sort of myth in the sense that it becomes what I call a cosmion, a reflection of the unity of the cosmos as a whole. . . It’s much closer to cosmological thinking than anything else.”[17] For Voegelin, literature—both in terms of its experiential origins as well as imaginative symbolization—is generically related to myth. That he understood a work of art as a cosmion reflecting the “unity of the cosmos as a whole” clearly connects it with a cosmological style of truth and myth that are both rooted in compact experiences of reality—the primary cosmic experience.
He understood Time of the Tale to be the primary literary form in two senses: primary as prior to other literary forms and primary as foundational to and underlying all later literary forms that result from human understanding of differentiated reality. The latter is particularly important for understanding Maidenhair as a novel insofar as its mythical, self-contained, cosmion style underpins the differentiations that permit the writing of the “specifically human forms of literature.” What Shishkin accomplishes is the writing of a novel with a mythical flavor after man becomes differentiated with “a degree of autonomy from the cosmic context.” Only when the tale being told combines human, cosmic, and divine elements does it approach the status of myth or the Tale with its Time that is out of time.
Time in the Tale of Maidenhair
That Maidenhair represents a symbolic Time of the Tale written after the differentiation of insights into reality achieved by philosophy and Christianity can be partially supported by focusing (1) upon how “time” is handled in various stories, and (2) how Shishkin’s use of multiple creation stories projects the time of the novel out of the linear, chronological time of the world, or rather out of a time that occurs within the world after the creation of the world that occurs outside of and prior to human memory.
In the final section, the omniscient narrator writing in the voice of Isabella, asserts that:
“Everything is always happening simultaneously. Here you are writing this line now, while I’m reading it. Here you are putting a period at the end of this sentence, while I reach it at the very same time. It’s not a matter of hands on the clock! They can be moved forward and back. It’s a matter of time zones. Steps of the dial. Everything is happening simultaneously, it’s just that the hands have gone every which way on all the clocks.”[18]
An unidentifiable narrator in a lost notebook presents another, yet similar, perspective on the simultaneity of time. He writes: “Time is literal. Here I am writing this line, and my life is longer by these letters, but the life of whoever is now reading them is shorter.”[19] The writer here gives himself a longer lifespan than the reader by virtue of having written his notebook. Thus we glimpse an “immortality within time” that transcends the living and dying of individual human beings. That the reader participates in the immortality within time of the written word is attested to by the way in which Shishkin uses Xenophon in his story telling.
In Section 34 (pp. 302-309) an omniscient narrator describes Xenophon’s leading his Hellenes through what is presently Romania (Wallachia) in which a war with the Russians is being fought. The Hellenes are being followed closely by their enemies and many Chechens living in the aul (fortified mountain village) of Khaibakh are being slaughtered by a “Muntenian voivode by the name of Gveshiani.”[20] The voivode sent to Moscow a list of 67 names and ages ranging from newborn to 110 along with the familial relationship of those persons he had directed to be burned. Some Chechens, especially the elders and young people, escaped the massacre and went up into the snow-covered mountains:
All of a sudden those walking in front looked down and saw lights where the valley began. Fires were burning directly on the snow, and men were sleeping around them. It was the Hellenes.
The aul’s inhabitants went to them and asked whether they could warm themselves by the fires and get something to eat. The Greeks shared what little they had with the Chechens. Xenophon explained as best he could to these frozen, weary, starving people, who did not understand the Hellenic speech, that he was leading his Greeks to the sea. “Thalassa!” Xenophon pointed seaward for the elders. “Thalassa!”
And in the morning they headed out together to continue on their way.[21]
In yet another vein one of the Gesuchstellers asserts: “There is no past life. Life is one . . .” [22]
Isabella, in an undated notebook entry written long after the events recorded there, supplies not only a series of memories from her days at the Bilinskaya School, but also reflections on remembering, time, memories and the present. She says that she even remembers her cloakroom number and then asks:
But why do I remember it? . . . My home doesn’t even exist. Nothing I once had now exists. No one and nothing.
Or maybe it does. Here it is, before my eyes, the auditorium on the second floor where the windows’ reflections can snake so over the parquet floor.[23]
Recalling the attendance at concerts with her family, she writes that she already loves the audience, “not just for their future love of me even, but just because. I love them, and that’s that.” She adds:
There is no past, but if it were to be told, the words could stretch out for days on end, or maybe just the opposite, and entire years could be crammed into a few letters.
I come home happy and proud of myself with a report card noting my promotion to the next grade.
And again a report about my promotion.
And again.
Memories have no date, time, or age. I remember my friend, the beautiful Lyalya, teaching me to kiss.[24]
Although it is not possible in this venue to explicate completely and fully how Maidenhair constitutes a “Time of the Tale” in a time after the symbolic differentiations in human consciousness achieved by Greek philosophy and Christianity, I think it possible to illustrate this with several story lines in Maidenhair that point toward its nature as a many storied story that approaches a mythical symbolization insofar as it constitutes in its entirety a cosmion.[25]
To this end, I single out several stories that recall cosmic, human and divine strands in the composite story of Maidenhair. First, there is the Gesuchsteller story that presents the Oroch cosmology and creation story; second, the diary/notebook entries of Isabella Dmitrievna tell her life’s story; and third, Galpetra’s story—interwoven with that of the interpreter—extending from the time that she was the interpreter’s zoology and botany teacher to her final valedictory delivered in the Eternal City and recorded by the omniscient narrator.
The Mytho-Cosmological Story of the Orochs
The Oroch story represents the strongest mytho-cosmological component of the novel for it harkens back in time to the animistic cosmology of a disappearing group of people and extends in space to the far reaches of eastern Russian Siberia.[26] Questioned by Peter Fischer, the master of fates, a Gesuchsteller tells his story of being pursued by Chechen bankers after they had shaken down the bank from which he had borrowed money and extorted payments from him in a classic loan-sharking scheme. Fischer asks whether the owners of the bank were Orochs or Tunguses. When the answer is Orochs, he asks, “What did you know about these people?” to which the Gesuchsteller answers by telling their creation story.
Answer: . . . . They believe the first woman fell into a lair and later gave birth to two children, a cub and a boy. The two brothers grew up and one killed the other and that was the beginning of the world. When that boy grew up, he became a hunter.
Question: What happened after?
Answer: Then a huge elk stole the sun, and the hunter went after him to recover it.
Question: Did he?
Answer: No. I mean, yes. They went very far away. The elk, anyway, runs across the sky with the sun in its teeth. But it keeps coming back. Moebius put the sky together his own special way. And the Milky Way is the hunter’s ski track. There, up above, they travel on skis, too. There are ski tracks all across the sky. The hunter travels in a circle, first along the visible, and then along the invisible side of the Moebius sky. There are three worlds: upper, winter, and lower, which is the most important one, the mlyvo. When the upper people cut animal hides for shoes and clothing, the scraps fall on the ground and turn into foxes, hares, and squirrels. The upper people hold people’s souls by threads, the upper trees the trees’, and the grasses the grasses’. If this thread breaks for any reason, the person falls ill and dies, the tree dries up, and the grass withers. The way to the upper world lies through an opening in the sky, and nyangnya sangarin is the North Star. In the lower world, the mlyvo, life differs in no way from earthly life: the same winter, only the sun shines when it’s night on earth, and the moon when it’s day. The winter passes into the mlyvo, or rather, it is the person leaving for the mlyvo who takes the winter along with him. There people live the same winter life—they hunt, they fish, they make sledges, they repair harnesses, they sew clothes. They marry when the spouse who remains on earth enters into marriage; they bear children, fall ill, and die, that is, they are born again here, having awakened as a man or woman in the middle of winter. In the mlyvo everything is and isn’t the same. A living person there is invisible to those here and his words are mistaken for the crackling of the hearth. (122-23)
When the Gesuchsteller identifies himself as a Tungus, Fischer asks: “What kind of beginning of the world do you have?” He answers that they too have two brothers even though in the beginning there was only water. One brother sculpted the Tunguses and the other the Orochs. The lower invisible world, the mlyvo, remains the same. But two people woke up in the middle of winter as Daphnis—a Tungus—and Chloe—an Oroch. The Gesuchsteller proceeds to tell a long, fantastical story, similar in general terms to Longus’s story of Daphnis and Chloë (4th or 5th century A.D.) of how Dahpnis and Chloe overcome their separation in infancy and eventually find love with each other.[27] The Gesuchsteller comments on the story that “No one has ever avoided love and no one ever will, as long as there is beauty and eyes to behold it.”[28]
Isabella Dmitrievna’s Love of Life
That the mythical Oroch story of Daphnis and Chloe centers around their love of each other points to the central theme of Isabella Dmitrievna’s story as interpolated by the interpreter into the novel. Her story, written in the conventional narrative style of diary and notebook entries (including quotations from books that she was reading at the time of the entries), accounts for a bit over 40% of the novel’s volume and recounts her life from childhood school days to old age and eventually to her death—perhaps beyond if one of the unidentified voices in the final section is hers (and I think it is). Her life spans pre-World War I Tsarist Russia into the post-Soviet era (this is undeterminable from the narrative, dates and chronology being mostly unimportant for Shishkin novel). We only know that Isabella lived to be 100.[29] One of her loves goes off to World War I and is killed and her brother is killed in another unidentified war. The span of her life is thus filled with wars—both world and civil.
The essence of Isabella’s life story is love and from her earliest entries as a schoolgirl, she writes about her awakening as a person to love. In an entry dated October 20, 1915 she writes about what she learns from her acting teacher, Nina Nikolaevna. “And she explained to me all about Khlestakov. It’s all very simple! I hadn’t fallen in love with any Khlestakov but with Petersburg, that far-off, genuine life! Not even Petersburg, really, but simply with my love. I was in love with love. How clear everything was suddenly!”[30] Isabella has many loves throughout her life, from schoolgirl crushes, to her teenage love who goes off to war and is killed, to a husband who gives her a child while they are living in Paris, and to young workers when she is old. Throughout her diary and notebooks she tells the stories of these loves.
Also, throughout her writing we are given glimpses of her ideas about love, ideas derived from writers that she is reading at the time. Here are a few samples:
“Love is an unknown that comes from an unknown place and ends at an unknown time.”[31]
~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Love is a traitor that scratches us until we bleed, even if one simply wanted to play.”[32]
~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Dreaming of her current love, Zhenya, in November 1914 Isabella quotes Song of Solomon 5:2.]. “I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.”[33]
Isabella’s notebooks, however, contain more than accounts of the loves throughout her life, for the entries also convey a sense of how her life is formed by her being “in love with love.”
From her Aunt Olya, she learns that we must “fall in love with this life” and “marry everything—the tree, the sky, books, and all the people in the world, the pretty flower, even this frosty air coming through the pane!”[34] And having recognized that we must “fall in love with this life,” Isabella replies to Masha, her housekeeper, who had admonished her for feeding a stray dog since she could not feed all strays.
Since you can’t—because you can’t—you have to feed the one you can. This one.
It’s like with happiness. Since everyone can’t be happy anyway, whoever can be happy right now, should. You have to be happy today, right now, no matter what. Someone said there can’t be a heaven if there’s a hell. …True enjoyment of life can only be felt if you’ve known suffering. What would the leftovers from our soup be to this mongrel if it hadn’t had a whiff of hunger?
It’s always been this way. Someone’s head is being cut off, while two people in the crowd on the square in front of the scaffold are knowing first love . . . It will always be thus! It should be thus! . . . The more intense the unhappiness for some somewhere, the more intensely and keenly others should be happy. They should love more intensely, too. To balance out the world, so it doesn’t flip over, like a boat.[35] (474, §42).
The Interpreter and Galpetra: Galpetra’s Final Lesson
The interpreter’s story is interwoven with that of his teacher, Galpetra. Galina Petrovna was called Galpetra by her students, a conflated name that melds together references to Helen, Galen the nymph, and Peter, the rock upon which Christ built his church. The interpreter remembers Galpetra from his school days and encounters her while in Rome, the Eternal City. This interwoven story that culminates in the final section of the novel combines various voices—some of which are identifiable by content or style—into a beautifully written reflection on many themes of the previous stories.
Galpetra is introduced early in the book when the omniscient narrator writes:
In the wee hours the interpreter woke up bathed in sweat and with a pounding heart: he had dreamed of Galina Petrovna—except the boys all called her Galpetra, out of sheer meanness—and it had all come back to him—the lesson, the blackboard—as if all these decades lived had never been. He lay there looking at their brightening ceiling and returned to himself, clutching his heart.
Why be afraid of her now?[36]
In a letter to his son, the interpreter provides a more complete picture of Galpetra. After admonishing his son for not wanting to go to school, he adds: who does? But on the other hand, he says, “you will have something to remember.”[37]
He then asserts:
Even if you don’t want to remember, you will. Trust me. It’s always like that with the past.
For instance, take Galpetra, whom I mentioned in one of my previous letters. So many years have passed, and I don’t even know whether she’s alive, but she’s still here the same as ever.[38]
We learn that Galpetra teaches botany and zoology and that she lined the windowsills of the classroom with every possible plant. She knew the Latin name of each one and was always repeating, “Plants are living, but they’re named in a dead language. There, you see, in a southern climate these are weeds and grow anywhere, but here it’s a houseplant. Without human love and warmth they won’t survive our winter.”
All that remained of her lessons was that there were flowering plants and cryptogamic ones.
There! I remembered. But why does an interpreter need to remember all that?[39]
What does the interpreter remember in his dream that thrusts him into his schoolboy fear? Why does he remember his teacher and what she taught? Galpetra, it turns out however, not only taught botany and zoology, but was also assigned to teach a course in anti-religious propaganda. She nattered on about how God had been thought up by clerics to make it easier to confuse naïve, uneducated people, that Judgment Day had been invented in order to permit people to sin themselves but forbid others, and everything she was supposed to say in those lessons.
“Only old women can believe in God,” Galpetra used to say. “Christianity is a religion of slaves and suicides. There is no afterlife, nor could there be. Everything living dies, and resurrection is impossible. It’s simple logic. If there is a God, then there is no death, and if there is death, then there is no God.”[40] The interpreter “who had known since childhood that there wasn’t a God” and who “agonized over his pimples, early hirsuteness, and dislike and fear of death,” however, could not overcome his feeling that it was nevertheless “very important to find Him.”[41]
In the final section prior to the interpreter meeting Galpetra in the streets of Rome, Shishkin uses many voices—unnamed Gesuchstellers and Isabella in addition to Galpetra, insofar as I can tell—to reflect upon many themes of the novel itself to include the resurrection, the nature of the soul, and the nature of divinity. In an important passage that prefigures Galpetra’s apology to the interpreter and her discourse on Maidenhair, a series of Questions and Answers are embedded in the dense narrative.
Question: How many gods are there by rights? Answer: Seven hundred seventy-seven. Question: And even more correctly, how many? Answer: One hundred fifty. Question: But in fact? Answer: One. Question: Tell the truth! Answer: Less than one. [42]
When the interpreter finally meets Galpetra in the Eternal City, he experiences a different Galpetra. Does she exist in the interpreter’s present? Or does she exist only in his reflective memory that has “no date, time, or age” where “things are always happening simultaneously”? At any rate, Galpetra apologizes, and delivers her valedictory lesson:
“I beg forgiveness for telling you that there is no proof of God. A pack of lies. A miracle is proof. Death is a miracle. I’m going to die. What other proof does anyone need? That’s just the way they draw him, with a beard and a mantle. In fact, he might not be a menacing old man on the Friday clouds in the water supply but a vacationer roaming the Baltic beach with a matchbox. . . . Or the salesgirl . . . . Or the bungler himself. But more than likely it’s neither one nor the other nor even a third. It’s something very simple, some kind of grass. Green, green grass. Just growing. Lowering roots into every crack. People once knew it was a god from the cryptogamic family, but later they forgot. Now they survey temple ruins and miss the point: the temples merely marked where a sacred hill or grove was, after all, the menacing old men, vacationers, and bunglers lived in the treetops, wind, and grass, not in the altars. It’s all about the green, green grass. If people stop believing in a primal god, he doesn’t disappear, he just goes to live off on his own, unobtrusively, invisibly. Remember the house built for all gods? Since everything is happening simultaneously, then even now you’re walking with her—whether with scars on her legs or not, it doesn’t matter—down the via Pastini and then you come out on the piazza Rotonda, and there is the temple of temples [the Pantheon] squeezed in on all sides by architectural ragamuffins. . . Only you can’t see him right away. You have to go out. Let’s go. I’ll show you. . .”
Galpetra says that she will:
show you the most important thing, right here, where the side and back brick walls are, and then all of a sudden, a cliff of pink limestone, and on it, column capitals, frieze fragments with dolphins, and all of it dressed in moss and healed over, see, by a god, something light and curly. For us, this is a house plant, otherwise it wouldn’t survive, without human warmth, but here it’s a weed. So you see, this is in a dead language, signifying something alive: Adiantum capillus veneris. Venus hair, genus Adiantum. Maidenhair. God of life.
The wind barely stirring nods
yes yes, that’s true: this is my temple, my land, my wind, my life. The greenest of grasses. It grew here before your Eternal City and will grow here after.
The Maidenhair speaks:
“And those beards in mantles who dreamed up the wanton conception, draw and sculpt them all you like. I will grow through all your canvases and break through all your marble. I am on every ruin in the Forum and under every brick under phlox. And my pollen is where you can’t see me. I have been and will be where I am not. I am where you are. You are on the piazza Colonna—and so am I. . .”[43]
Below the marble statues symbolizing the Greek heritage and between the cracks of the pink limestone of syncretic Rome, grows the “Adiantum capillus veneris, the Maidenhair, God of life.” And it is this “less than one” true god, the primal god that does not go away just because it is no longer worshipped. It is this primal god that forever undergirds the Eternal City. “It grew before your Eternal City and will grow here after.” (Emphasis added) It is the Maidenhair growing in harmony with the wind and the land and life that carries the eternal in Shishkin’s Time of the Tale.
In a final embrace of humanity, Galpetra expresses her faith as she instructs an Oroch to go home to his children:
“‘But you have to live, you have Zhenechka, Alyosha, and Vitenka. I’ll run for you.’ The Oroch is astounded. ‘But you aren’t a Jew!’ [The Oroch is now identified with the Jew.] The other smiles in reply: ‘Don’t you know that in the kingdom of King Mateusz there is no Hellene, there is no Jew? You go on home, have your supper, turn on the television, play with your children, read to them about Urfin Jus and his wooden soldiers at bedtime and then set your alarm and go peacefully to sleep, and I will run for all of you. For the Jews, the Sarmatians, the Orochs, the Tungus, the emperors, the philosophers. Well, go on, they’re waiting for you at home!’” . . .[44]
Finally Galpetra runs down the Corso with the Jews shouting: “Wait, take me with you to run for everyone, let’s run together.!”[45]
The novel ends with a lonely guide raising high her umbrella “with a kerchief attached the color of dawn” and calling out: “Where are you? Follow me! I’ll show you the green, green grass.”[46]
By Way of Conclusion: A Personal Note
I hope that you will forgive me this personal intrusion if I relate a passage from the final section of Maidenhair and connect it with a recent event in my life. Earlier, you will recall, I quoted Shishkin as saying in an interview that “Inside, we’re all similar: we fear death and want love. All true texts, films, plays, have the same plot: the transformation of reality, which is made up of cruelty and death, into warmth and light.” Is Maidenhair a “true text?” Does it transform “reality, which is made up of cruelty and death, into warmth and light?” This is the crucial question, isn’t it? And I believe that it does.
In the past 2 years, three of our friends have died. When Steven died in late July 2013 I had been working assiduously on this novel, trying to make sense of its complexity and write about it. I had read and re-read the 27 pages of the last section, but could not existentially grasp the meaning in the following passage from Galpetra’s apology. She says to the interpreter, her former student, “I beg forgiveness for telling you that there is no proof of God. A pack of lies. A miracle is proof. Death is a miracle. I’m going to die. What other proof does anyone need?” Death, a miracle? This passage disturbed me deeply and I could not grasp existentially how Death is a miracle.
When I attended the memorial service of my friend Steven, I was great with Death, and still mystified by this passage. The memorial service was organized so that his friends could remember and recount their encounters with Steven. Steven died after a long bout—about a year and half—with kidney cancer. When it came time for his wife Maureen to speak, one of the things she said was that in the last six months of his life Steven had said that he was the happiest he had ever been. A bolt of understanding hit me. Yes, of course, Death is the miracle that forces us to embrace our life and in those last months of his life, Steven had fully embraced his life. As Isabella’s Aunt Olya advised her, we must “fall in love with this life” and “marry everything—the tree, the sky, books, and all the people in the world, the pretty flower, even this frosty air coming through the pane!” The mystery, the miracle is life: our life—mine and yours. Peter Fischer responds to a Gesuchsteller’s question: What do you mean, what’s the mystery?
The only mystery is that you came into the world at all. Everyone is amazed by immaculate conception, and no one believes in it, but a sinful one doesn’t surprise anyone. Now there’s a mystery: everything has already been, but you haven’t yet, and here you are. And afterward, once again, you’ll never be. Everything else is known.[47]
When I told my wife Polly about this bolt of understanding hitting me, she replied (forgive me if I get the exact words incorrect): ‘Of course, you already knew this.’ Wow! I did? As I reflected on her response, I began to understand two things. First, we forget what we know and sometimes we forget “what should not be forgotten”—to quote Voegelin from his Preface “In Remembrance of Things Past” to the Niemeyer translation of Anamnesis. And, second, that true literature can always remind us of that which should not be forgotten if we will open ourselves to the magic of its evocative power.
I would like to end by quoting the epigraph with which Shishkin opens his wonderful, beautiful novel that is called Maidenhair.
And your ashes will be called, and will be told:
“Return that which does not belong to you;
Reveal what you have kept to this time.”
For by the word was the world created, and by the word shall we be resurrected.
—Revelation of Baruch ben Neriah. 4, XLII
Addenum
Baruch ben Neriah was the scribe, disciple, secretary, and friend of the prophet Jeremiah and witnessed the siege of Jerusalem in 587-586 BCE.
The plant Maidenhair, according to The Complete Burke’s Backyard, has a Lazarus quality that means “with the right care, it can come back to life from what looks like certain death.” It has elsewhere been called a “master of resurrection.” (from a review by Christiane Craig posted on musciandliterature.org/2013.
Notes
[1] Mikhail Shishkin, Open Letter “To the Federal Agency for the Press and Mass Communications and the International Office of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center,” February 27, 2013. Accessed at theamericanreader.com. July 17, 2013.
[2] Mikhail Shishkin, “The Idea Behind Letter-Book Came To Me Overnight.” Interview. November 30, 2011. Page 2 of 4. Russkiymir.ru. Accessed 7/17/2013
[3] Mikhail Shishkin, “The Idea Behind Letter-Book came to me overnight.” Interview. November 30, 2011. Page 2 of 4. Accessible at Russkiymir. Accessed 7/17/2013.
[4] Bradley Gorski, “An Interview with Mikhail Shishkin,” Harriman Magazine, Summer 2013, 40. Accessed July 17, 2013 at harriman.columbia.edu/harriman-magazine.
[5] “A Reading and a Conversation with his Translator”, April 12, 2013, accessible on YouTube. Search “Mikhail Shishkin: A Reading and conversation with his Translator.” Running time is 1:11:48.
[6] In the case of one section (“Question and Answer”), the “voices” are identified and organized only by “Question” and “Answer” and in another (Isabella Dimitrievna’s diary/notebook) by dated and undated entries separated by a simple asterisk.
[7] Mikhail Shishkin, Maidenhair, trans. Marian Schwartz (Rochester, N.Y.: Open Letter—University of Rochester literary translation press, 2012), 14, 10. Kreuzlingen is an interesting choice for the present setting, i.e., the location of the agency where asylum seekers enter Switzerland, of the novel because it was where an “incident” (or rather a non-event) occurred between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. It has been argued by some that this non-event, called “the Kreuzlingen gesture” by Jung, led to the break between Freud and Jung. According to Martin S. Fiebert, “Freud deceived Jung regarding the nature of his sudden visit to Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland in May, 1912. (Kreuzlingen is about forty miles from Jung’s house in Zurich.) Freud did not make specific arrangements to see Jung, who in turn, was hurt and upset at what he perceived to be Freud’s avoidance of him.” In Martin S. Fiebert, Sex, Lies and Letters: A Sample of Significant Deceptions in the Freud/Jung Relationship, Dissertation Abstract, California State University at Long Beach. Accessed on July 21, 2013 at http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/freud.htm
[8]In an interview, Shishkin says, “The twentieth century locked Russian history into a Mobius strip. The country turns out to be an empire every time it tries to build a democratic society, introduce elections, parliament, a republic.” Bradley Gorski, An Interview with Mikhail Shishkin, Harriman Magazine, 43. accessed on line at Columbia University.
[9] Maidenhair, 120-121.
[10] Mikhail Shishkin, “The Idea Behind Letter-Book Came to Me Overnight,” interview with Anna Briboedova, page 3 of 4, at russkiymir.ru. Accessed 7/17/2013
[11] Shishkin identifies his work with what he calls “true literature.” “True literature circulated through the country like blood through a body. Russian reading is like a transfusion….my writers back in Soviet times save me, in the literal meaning of that word. And those whom I do not count as my own, the official Soviet writers whom they made us read in school and in college, poisoned me…And that’s how it’s always been in Russia, because under any regime the first thing to go is human dignity. It’s the same today. And I’m afraid it’ll be that way forever. It’s bad for people, good for literature.” Bradley Gorski, “An Interview with Mikhail Shishkin,” Harriman Magazine, Summer 2013, 39-43. Accessed July 17, 2013 at harriman.columbia.edu/harriman-magazine.
[12] Mikhail Shishkin, “PW Talks with Mikhail Shishkin,” March 26, 2012. Accessed July 16, 2013 at publishersweekly.com.
[13] He is the author of King Matt the First (King Mateusz), a children’s book. This book is mentioned in the final section of the book, a passage spoken in the voice—it seems—of Galpetra, as a vehicle for indicating the universality of humanity.
[14] Ibid., page 1 of 4.
[15] Mikhail Shishkin, Harriman Magazine, Summer 2013, 41.
[16] Embry, ed. A Friendship in Letters, Letter 103, p. 223.
[17] Eric Voegelin, “In Search of the Ground,” in Published Essays, 1953-1965, ed. Ellis Sandoz Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 11: 240.)
[18] Maidenhair. 497.
[19] Maidenhair. 442.
[20] Maidenhair. 305. That there was a massacre at Kahibakh seems to be true. That there was a Mikhail Gveshiani that ordered it seems to be true. Insofar as I can discover he was either a colonel or a general with the NKVD OR he was a Chechen warlord. Maybe he was both? Some reports indicate that 700 people were herded into a barn and burned.
[21] Maidenhair. 309. The omniscient narrator’s story is confusing for the geography of Wallachia and Chechnya are conflated. The story in this section harkens back to the story told by a Gesuchsteller who seeks asylum from Wallachia where a voivode (warlord) there ordered many of his people burned in an edifice especially built to fete them with food and drink. Maidenhair. §11, pp. 18-19. This conflation and overlapping stories are immaterial, however, to Shishkin’s story telling for as one Gesuchsteller says: “Those speaking may be fictitious, but what they say is real. Truth lies only where it is concealed. Fine, the people aren’t real but the stories, oh, the stories are! . . . We become what gets written in the transcript. The words. You have to understand. The divine idea of the river is the river itself.” Maidenhair. 24.
[22] Maidenhair, 319.
[23] Maidenhair, 159.
[24] Maidenhair, 170.
[25] When asked in an interview where his next novel comes from after he has finished one, Shishkin replied: “A novel appears out of a black hole, out of failure, from some sort of bottomless barrel that you fall into after finishing your previous text. A novel begins from a feeling of complete mediocrity, from the sense that you have been used. In the previous novel you created the Cosmos, but you cannot create the Cosmos again.” [russkiymir.ru. p. 3 of 4]
[26] The Orochi people (self-identified as Nani) constitute a small part of the Tungusic language group. In the 2002 census there were only 686 Orochs in Russia. In the 19th century some of these people migrated to Sakhalin Island where they seem to be called now, Nivkhi. According to Bruce Grant in his book, In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), these people have, for the most part, lost touch with their cultural cosmology, a cosmology upon which Shishkin draws for this story line. Incidentally, while the main component of this mytho-cosmological story occurs in one Question & Answer section (§21) it reappears in other and varied sections.
[27] Another creation story is told by a Gesuchsteller who is obviously a soldier about his commanding officer named Gray who spits and creates worlds. Maidenhair, Section 32, pp. 258-287.Although I do not have the time or space to elaborate on this creation story with its arrogance, vulgarity, and brutality, I think that the Oroch story could be contrasted with this story as an example of how stories are mitts that shape us. In the case of the Oroch story separated persons “intended” for each other (like the story of Aristophanes in his paean to eros in Plato’s Symposium) eventually find love in their reuniting. This story comes out of love (and peace?) while the Gray story comes out of war and violence. Here I am reminded that Shishkin held Tolstoy is highest esteem as a writer, for “we all [as writers] sit at the feet of Tolstoy.”
[28] Maidenhair, 124. Shishkin here juxtaposes and blends two cultural traditions—Oroch cosmology from the recent (but ancient, how far back past?) with Roman mytho-cosmology in the story of Daphnis and Chloe by Longus. Of course, Daphnis appears even earlier in Greek mythology as a Sicilian shepherd who invented pastoral poetry. This is yet another demonstration of Shishkin’s building his story through a syncretic-allusive style in which persons and events occur simultaneously. In the last section of the novel we read what seems to be in the voice of Isabella: “Before that I just couldn’t understand how all this could be happening to me simultaneously. Here you are writing this line now, while I’m reading it. Here you are putting a period at the end of this sentence, while I reach it at the very same time. It’s not a matter of hands on the clock! They can be moved forward and back. It’s a matter of time zones. Steps of the dial. Everything is happening simultaneously, it’s just that the hands have gone every which way on all the clocks.” Maidenhair, 497.
[29] Maidenhair. 103.
[30] Maidenhair.236-237. Emphasis added.
[31] Maidenhair. Footnote 16, 201. In the text Isabella quotes Madeleine de Scudéry in French.
[32] Maidenhair. Footnote 19, 203. In the text Isabella quotes Ninon de l’Enclôs in French.
[33] Maidenhair. 210.
[34] Maidenhair. 175-176.
[35] Maidenhair. 474.
[36] Maidenhair, 26.
[37] Maidenhair, 176.
[38] Maidenhair, 176.
[39] Maidenhair, 176.
[40] Maidenhair, 193-194.
[41] Maidenhair, 193.
[42] Maidenhair, 496.
[43] Maidenhair, 498-500.
[44] Maidenhair, 501-502. King Mateusz is a children’s book written by Galpetra’s favorite hero, Janusz Korczak. Cf. footnote 12 above. Urfin Jus is the title character of the novel Urfin Jus and his Wooden Soldiers by Alexander Melentyevich Volkov in 1963.
[45] Maidenhair, 506. As nearly as I can determine the running of the Jews refers to a parade in which Jewish prisoners were displayed in 71 A.D. celebrating Vespasian’s destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
[46] Maidenhair, 506.
[47] Maidenhair, 49-50.
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