Petrova’s Appendix.

After I finished Vodolazkin, my Russian reading project continued with Varlamov’s pretentiously cynical Мысленный волк [The spiritual wolf] (I gave up), Buida’s family novel Яд и мед [Poison and honey] (unsatisfying), and Zaionchkovsky’s snarky Тимошина проза [Timosha’s prose] (I gave up); at that point I took a look at my Chronology and saw that the next tempting item was Аппендикс [Appendix], a novel by the poet Aleksandra Petrova, who was born in Leningrad but has lived in Rome for decades. It had won the Andrei Bely prize for 2016, and I’m generally fond of poets’ prose; on the other hand, the damn thing was over 800 pages long, and I didn’t really want to take that much time on a book right now. Still, I thought I’d check it out — for one thing, I wanted to find out what the title meant.

As soon as I started reading it, I was won over. The first chapter, Новая легкость Меркурия [Mercury’s new lightness], is a description of a childhood appendectomy; the narrator says she shouldn’t have eaten so much on her twelfth birthday (“But everybody overate!”), describes her nausea and being rushed to the hospital, and continues:

I felt even more sorry for my appendix. They kept telling me “Don’t swallow fruit pits, peel seeds before you put them in your mouth, or else your appendix will become inflamed.” But I secretly devoured not only ordinary cherry pits, but also pages from my favorite books (not for nothing did people say I literally devoured them), pretty beads, bits of earth — in general, anything blameless but beautiful. The idea that all of it was being preserved somewhere, in some unknown pouch inside me, was pleasing to me.

Munchausen’s deer once had a tree grow from a cherry pit right on his head. It is quite possible that there were tree sprouts inside me, too, that might someday grow right through me and spread fragrance over me during my daily activities. Particularly scary or beloved places from fairy tales found themselves inside me, one day to come out in the most unexpected way. The shimmering polished glass beads illuminated the darkness of my insides.
[…]

They cut a piece out of me, even if the course of evolution had rendered it unnecessary. Or rather, it was thought to be unnecessary, but I had long known that if you stood on the other side of a slogan written on a banner, you could read something unimaginable. People most often looked at the world without noticing its polysphericity. Barely out of childhood, we started to look more and more like one another. It was almost always possible to predict the words in adult sentences, starting with the third and sometimes even the second. In this meager world you had to think about preparing a springboard, a bunker, an airship, a nest, or simply learn to run fast. Faster than a scooter, faster than light. It was precisely in the little purse of my appendix that the materials for making flying machines were piled up, that’s where my dowry was. By the power of the things contained in it, it conveyed to me the knowledge that it was not always necessary that the [Soviet] anthem be sung at twelve o’clock at night, that somewhere you didn’t have to politely ask to leave the table, that summer didn’t have to be limited to three months (and even that was approximate). And there weren’t even any months in that world, that is, sometimes there might be one, but as sthnom, or as monthhhsss, or as serpent. But now my holy of holies, my springboard, my flashlight had been put on display in a jar for all to see. My power henceforth abided secretly in some anonymous museum and did not belong to me. The appendix was mine, the beads and pages from the Brothers Grimm inside it were mine, but I had no right to them now. My past life was irrevocably cut off.

In the new one, on the one hand, I started to feel the phantom pains of the amputation of what previously could be relied upon (the confidence of a gambler at the thought of a Swiss bank account or of a hamster tucking grain behind his cheek). On the other, I also felt a new lightness. The loss of baggage helps to build up wings behind one’s back or on one’s sandals, like Mercury.

In general, from now on I had to give up direct hoarding, which could always be tragically interrupted, and build anew, relying only on myself.

The Russian:

Еще больше мне было жаль аппендикса. Мне повторяли: «Не глотай косточки, очищай семечки от кожуры, прежде чем запустишь их в рот, а не то воспалится аппендикс». Я же втайне поглощала не только обыкновенные вишневые косточки, но и страницы любимых книг (и не зря говорили, что я буквально их проглатывала), красивые бусины, кусочки земли – в общем, все неопасное, но прекрасное. Идея того, что это где-то сохраняется, в каком-то неведомом мешочке внутри меня, мне нравилась.

У оленя Мюнхаузена однажды из вишневой косточки прямо на голове выросло дерево. Вполне возможно, и во мне находились ростки деревьев, которые когда-нибудь могли прорасти сквозь и благоухать надо мной во время ежедневных занятий. Особенно страшные или любимые места из сказок оказывались внутри, чтоб когда-нибудь самым неожиданным образом выйти наружу. Мерцающие отшлифованные стекляшки бусин освещали собой тьму моего нутра.
[…]

Они отрезали кусок меня, пусть даже тот, который в ходе эволюции был больше не нужен. Вернее, считалось, что он не нужен, но я уже давно знала, что, если встать с другой стороны написанного на ситце лозунга, можно прочесть нечто невообразимое. Люди чаще всего глядели на мир, не замечая его многосферности. Едва выйдя из детского возраста, мы начинали все более походить один на другого. Почти всегда можно было предсказать слова во фразах взрослых, начиная с третьего, а иногда даже второго. В этом тощем мире необходимо было задуматься об изготовлении трамплина, бункера, дирижабля, гнезда или просто научиться быстро бегать. Быстрее, чем мотороллер и свет. В сумочке моего аппендикса как раз и были сложены материалы для изготовления летательных аппаратов, там было мое приданое. Силой заключенных в ней вещей мне передавалось знание, что вовсе не всегда обязательно, чтобы в двенадцать ночи звучал гимн, что где-то не нужно вежливо проситься выйти из-за стола или ограничивать лето лишь тремя, да и то относительно, месяцами. Да и никаких месяцев в том мире не было, то есть даже иногда один какой-нибудь мог и быть, но как имацясем, или как мессссяц, или как змея. Но вот теперь мое святая святых, мой трамплин, мой фонарик выставили в банке на всеобщее обозрение. Моя сила отныне тайно пребывала в анонимном музее и мне не принадлежала. Аппендикс был мой, бусины и страницы из сказок братьев Гримм внутри него были моими, но я теперь не имела на них права. Прошлая жизнь была бесповоротно отрезана.

В новой, с одной стороны, начались фантомные боли от ампутации того, на что прежде можно было положиться (уверенность азартного игрока при мысли о счете в швейцарском банке или хомяка, засовывающего зерно за щеку). С другой, – я ощутила и новую легкость. Потеря багажа помогает наращиванию крыльев за спиной или на сандалиях, как у Меркурия.

В общем, отныне надо было отказаться от прямого накопительства, которое могло быть всегда трагически прервано, и строиться заново, полагаясь только на себя.

What imagery, and what a start for a book! In this public reading and discussion (well worth watching if you know Russian; she reads the opening chapter and a couple of other longish chunks, and many interesting things are brought up) she says that chapter holds kernels of many of the themes of the book, and also mentions that she learned most about prose from Andrei Bely (which I believe based on what I’ve read, and which also makes her an appropriate winner of the prize). I haven’t gotten much farther into the book — I hate reading long books in electronic form, and I hope I can get my hands on a physical copy somehow — but I can tell you, based on what I’ve read elsewhere and on the bits from her public reading, that it focuses on the lives of a group of people from all over (Africa, Brazil, Romania, etc.), all of whom are migrants of one sort or another (some try to cross the Mediterranean on overcrowded, leaky boats of the kind we keep seeing in the news) and some of whom wind up in the less picturesque parts of Rome. There are bits of various languages tossed in (at one point in the reading, around the 40-minute mark, she brings on an Italian to read the parts in Sicilian dialect, some of which is amusingly obscene), and there are lots of allusions to world literature. In short, it is just the kind of book I like.

Also, I am noticing that the writers inventing new paths for Russian prose, creating new forms and ways of expressing what needs to be said about life and people, are largely women here in the 21st century. The innovative writers of the ’90s, like Pelevin and Sorokin and Buida, have gone somewhat stale with overproduction and repeating themselves, but Alla Gorbunova and Irina Polyanskaya (dead far too young) and now Petrova make me feel that there is always something new and exciting to look forward to. May their tribe increase!

Addendum. Here’s a 2011 interview with Petrova, “Russia, My Blind Mother.”