Late last month I realized that I had never read Irina Polyanskaya’s second novel, Читающая вода [(The) reading water; Water that reads], and decided to remedy the omission (see my previous post about Polyanskaya). As so often happens, I’m not sure what to say about it or even how I feel about it, and I’m posting in part to try to figure that out (and in part, of course, to provide even a brief and inadequate account of a novel by a major writer that is otherwise, as far as I can tell, unmentioned in English). It was first published in Novy Mir in Oct.-Nov. 1999, and came out as a book in 2001, but I can’t find any reviews even in Russian. I don’t think it’s an especially good novel, but it’s well written and worth reading, especially for a fan of Polyanskaya or for someone interested in early Soviet cinema.
It takes the form of a first-person narration by Tanya, a grad student who wants to write about a famous old director called Vikentii Petrovich (his last name is never given); here are the first few sentences, so you can get an idea of the style (the translation is, of course, mine):
My task was to turn him inside out and transmute this headstrong man, a natural and highly experienced hunter, into game, into food for the mind, material for an article, a dissertation, a book, etc., which at first seemed to me unlikely to be realized. I understood that a great deal, if not everything, depended on my quickness of wit, because this man was spoiled by fame, capricious, arrogant, as befits a classic. I already knew that he was not accustomed to treating the writing public with much consideration, and therefore I took certain measures to ensure that he would not immediately recognize me among his students, who were somewhat younger than I. Heightening the youthfulness of my make-up, I pulled on faded jeans and tied my hair into a ponytail with an elastic band…
Моей задачей было вывернуть его наизнанку и превратить этого своенравного человека, прирожденного и многоопытного охотника, в дичь, в пищу для ума, в материал для статьи, диссертации, книги etc., что представлялось мне на первых порах малоосуществимым. Я понимала, что от моей расторопности зависело многое, если не все, потому что человек этот был избалован славой, капризен, спесив, как и подобает классику. Я уже знала, что он не привык церемониться с пишущей публикой, и поэтому предприняла кое-какие меры для того, чтобы он не сразу опознал меня среди своих студентов, которых я была немногим старше. Усилив свой молодежный макияж, натянула потертые джинсы, собрала волосы в хвост резинкой на затылке…
Eventually she introduces herself, he asks her out, and they begin the dance of mutual seduction so (over-)familiar in academic literature — the reader expects that the story will involve the consequences of the unequal affair for her young life. Not so: instead the novel becomes a long series of reminiscences and judgments on the part of Vikentii Petrovich, with only occasional reminders of the fictional context (“… and then we met at Pushkin Square and he began telling me about the time when…”). A great deal of ground is covered, from the pre-revolutionary period through the life and death of Stalin (who watches movies with Molotov, Khrushchev, Voroshilov, etc.), with much discussion of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko (called “Sashko”), and other directors, as well as actors, musical styles, and so on. In other words, this is a novel of ideas. Now, I am a fan of such novels, which range from Middlemarch to Norman Rush’s Mating (see this post), but what is essential is that the ideas be embedded in a convincing tissue of novelistic narration, with memorable characters who are not just vessels for the ideas. Here that is not the case — it’s like Polyanskaya had a bunch of thoughts about acting and movies she wanted to get off her chest (she herself studied acting in her youth) and decided to put them in the mouth of an invented director. It makes for good reading, but not a good novel.
As for the odd title: the director has a flask in which he dissolved the remains of his film masterpiece, Boris Godunov, which was destroyed in the 1930s at the orders of the Party, and every time he drinks a toast at a public function he adds a couple of drops from the flask to his vodka; in the end, he leaves it to Tanya. Is the water reading his movie? You be the judge.
I’ll finish with a few bits that hint at the greatness of her third and, alas, last novel Горизонт событий [Event horizon], with its abandonment of straightforward plot and its embrace of poetic connections:
Yes, Sashko knew how to deal with death, like Rubens with form; the Rubensian fullness of life is achieved by the death of the hero in Earth. In this film, Eisenstein writes, he is the only one of us who is free from form. “The rest of us are like a caravan of camels under the heavy load of form.”
Да, Сашко умел обращаться со смертью, как Рубенс с формой, рубенсовской полноты жизни достигает смерть героя в «Земле». В этом фильме, пишет Эйзенштейн, он — единственный из нас, кто свободен от формы. «Мы, остальные, — как караван верблюдов под тяжким грузом формы».
Firecrackers exploded above the audience, who left the hall in indignation, showering them from head to toe with colored confetti. And for a long time they shook out of their heads the memory of the fireworks performance The Inspector General… The last tiny whorl of this confetti must have been discovered in the pocket of her jacket by Elsa Triolet just before the occupation of Paris by the Germans…
Над зрителями, которые в негодовании покидали зал, взрывали шутихи, осыпающие их с головы до ног цветным конфетти. И долго они еще вытряхивали из своей головы воспоминание о фейерверочном спектакле «Ревизор»… Последний, должно быть, крохотный кружок этого конфетти обнаружила в кармане своего жакета Эльза Триоле перед самой оккупацией Парижа немцами…
I am the only one who was ready, with the power of my imagination, to flesh out this suspension, this silvery pollen, the light ashes of the past, still knocking in his heart. So why doesn’t he sign away the ashes scattered in the field in my favor, make me the executor of the treasures buried in the ground! He must know how often people take for reality only its physical expression, which has appearance, taste, smell, and color, and fail to take into account the blue shadow that it casts beyond the bounds of the visible.
Я — единственная, кто готов был силой своего воображения облечь плотью эту взвесь, эту серебристую пыльцу, легкий пепел прошлого, до сих пор стучащий ему в сердце. Так почему бы ему не отписать развеянный в поле прах в мою пользу, не сделать меня душеприказчицей зарытых в землю сокровищ! Ему ли не знать, как часто люди принимают за реальность лишь ее физическое выражение, имеющее вид, вкус, запах и цвет, а ту голубую тень, которую она отбрасывает за пределы видимого, никак не берут в расчет.
…We see a drop of rain swelling on the window glass of an old mansion near Kursk. It grows, becomes round, expands, floods the screen like the waters of a global deluge. It passes through underground rivers and times like an invisible being and again glistens on a sharp leaf of sweet clover… and that house near Kursk is long gone, it was bombed by the Germans in the winter of ’43. But death, clouding the visual world, is powerless in the face of this chiaroscuro on a piece of celluloid…
…Мы видим каплю дождя, взбухающую на оконном стекле старинного особняка под Курском. Она растет, округляется, ширится, затопляет экран, как воды всемирного потопа. Она проходит сквозь подземные реки и времена невидимкой и снова поблескивает на остром листочке донника… а того дома под Курском давно нет, его разбомбили немцы зимой сорок третьего. Но смерть, заволакивающая визуальный мир, бессильна перед этой светотенью на куске целлулоида…
And one odd bit I don’t know how to interpret is this:
“All rivers flow into the sea,” he said. “My river is more modest — the Oredezh… A dacha village called Siverskaya. We lived there in the summer next door to the Minister of the Court Frederiks, who, in addition to a luxurious house, had plots of land on the other side of the river, near a windmill. But there’s no point in my mentioning the mill; it was, of course, already removed from the landscape of your childhood, but it’s a pity…”
«Все реки впадают в море, — сказал он. — Моя речка поскромнее — Оредеж… Дачное местечко под названием Сиверская. Мы жили там летом по соседству с министром двора Фредериксом, который, кроме роскошного дома, имел участки земли на другом берегу реки, у ветряной мельницы. Впрочем, мельницу я упомянул напрасно, из пейзажа вашего детства она была уже, конечно, удалена, а жаль… »
This must be a reference to Nabokov, whose memoirs enlarge luxuriantly on his childhood summer months spent in their family dacha Vyra in exactly that location… but why?
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