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  Praise for Dubravka Ugresic

  “An astonishingly perceptive, elegantly witty, utterly original exploration of the age-old question ‘How Do Stories Come About.’”—Alberto Manguel

  “It is a book of ideas, of losses, of love and sorrow, of wars and migration: it is a book, in other words, perfect for our 21st century.”—Micheline Marcom

  “Ugresic is also affecting and eloquent, in part because within her quirky, aggressively sweet plot she achieves moments of profundity and evokes the stoicism innate in such moments.”—Mary Gaitskill

  “Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.”—Washington Post

  “As long as some, like Ugresic, who can write well, do, there will be hope for the future.”—New Criterion

  “Ugresic’s wit is bound by no preconceived purposes, and once the story takes off, a wild freedom of association and adventurous discernment is set in motion. . . . Ugresic dissects the social world.”—World Literature Today

  “Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.”—New York Times

  “Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives.”—Charles Simic

  “A unique tone of voice, a madcap wit and a lively sense of the absurd. Ingenious.”—Marina Warner

  Also by Dubravka Ugresic

  FICTION

  Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

  The Ministry of Pain

  Lend Me Your Character

  The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

  Fording the Stream of Consciousness

  In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories

  ESSAYS

  Europe in Sepia

  Karaoke Culture

  Nobody’s Home

  Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia

  The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays

  Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream

  “Part One” translated by David Williams

  “Part Two” through “Part Six” translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

  Copyright © 2017 by Dubravka Ugresic

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Ellen Elias-Bursać & David Williams

  First edition, 2018

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-77-9

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  Contents

  PART ONE

  A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written

  PART TWO

  A Balancing Art

  PART THREE

  The Devil’s Garden

  PART FOUR

  The Theocritus Adventure

  PART FIVE

  Little Miss Footnote

  PART SIX

  The Fox’s Widow

  PART ONE

  A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written

  The real literary fun begins the moment a story slips an author’s control, when it starts behaving like a rotating lawn sprinkler, firing off every which way; when grass begins to sprout not because of any moisture, but out of thirst for a near source of moisture.

  —I. Ferris, The Magnificent Art of Translating Life into a Story and Vice Versa

  1.

  How do stories come to be written? I’m sure many writers ask themselves the question, though most avoid an answer. Why? Maybe it’s because they don’t know what they’d say. Or maybe it’s because they’re afraid they’ll end up sounding like the doctor who only uses Latin terms with his patients (the ranks of whom are, admittedly, ever thinner!), wanting to parade his superiority (when was that ever in doubt?) and keep them in an inferior position (one they can’t escape even if they wanted to). Maybe this explains why writers prefer to shrug their shoulders, leaving readers with the belief that stories grow like weeds. And perhaps that’s for the better. Because if you collected the many thoughts writers have ventured on how stories come to be written, you’d end up with an anthology of inanities. And the more obvious the inanity, the more acolytes the writer wins. Take the global literary star who babbles on about how his moment of creative epiphany arrived during a baseball game. As the ball flew through the air, at that very moment, he realized he was to write a novel. So when he got home, he sat down at his desk, took pen in hand, and he’s never looked back.

  The Russian writer Boris Pilnyak begins his “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written” (which stretches to all of a dozen pages) with a short line about how in Tokyo he “quite by chance” met the writer Tagaki.* As relayed to Pilnyak by a third party, Tagaki had won fame on the back of a novel in which he describes a “European woman,” a Russian. Had Pilnyak not come across the repatriation request of Sophia Vasilyevna Gnedikh-Tagaki in the archive of the Soviet consulate in the Japanese city of K., Tagaki would have slipped his memory forever.†

  Pilnyak’s host, Comrade Dzhurba, a secretary at the consulate, takes Pilnyak into the mountains above the city to show him a temple to the fox. “The fox is the totem of cunning and betrayal; if the spirit of the fox enters a person, then that person’s tribe is accursed,” writes Pilnyak. The temple is located in a grove of cedars, on a stone cliff that falls to the sea, and houses an altar on which foxes take their rest. From there, in the eerie quiet, a view of the mountain range and ocean unfolds. In this sacred place, Pilnyak poses the question of how stories come to be written.

  The temple of the fox and the autobiography of Sophia Vasilyevna Gnedikh-Tagaki (which Comrade Dzhurba makes available to the writer) inspire Pilnyak to commit pen to paper. It is thus we learn that Sophia finished her schooling in Vladivostok in order that she might become a teacher “until she could find a suitor” (Pilnyak’s aside); that she was “exactly like thousands of other girls in old Russia” (Pilnyak’s aside); that she was “as silly as poetry can be silly, and it is right for an eighteen-year-old to be silly” (again, Pilnyak’s aside). Her biography piques Pilnyak’s interest from “the moment when the boat docked at Port Tsuruga. It is a short and unusual biography, distinguishing her from thousands of provincial Russian women.” These women’s biographies were “as identical as two peas: first love, injured innocence, happiness, a husband, a child for posterity, and very little else.”

  How on earth did this young woman from Vladivostok find herself on a boat sailing for Tsuruga? Using fragments of Sophia’s autobiography, Pilnyak fills in details of her life in Vladivostok in the twenties of the previous century. Sophia rents a room in a house where the Japanese officer Tagaki also has lodgings. According to Sophia’s autobiography, Tagaki “took two baths a day, wore silk underwear and pajamas at night.” Tagaki speaks Russian, but his l comes out as an r, which sounds rather strange, particularly when he reads Russian poetry aloud. Something akin to the night smerred sweetry . . .

  Although Japanese Army regulations forbid officers from marrying foreigners, Tagaki proposes to Sophia “in the style of Turgenev.”‡

  Before his departure for Japan—the Russians are about to sweep into Vladivostok—Tagaki leaves Sophia a list of instructions and money for her to follow him.§

  Sophia makes the voyage from Vladivostok to Tsuruga, where she is detained by the Japanese border police and questioned about her relationship with Tagaki. She confesses t
heir engagement, and the police eventually question Tagaki himself, suggesting that he call off the engagement and return Sophia to Vladivostok, which he refuses. Instead, he puts Sophia on a train for Osaka, where his brother is to collect her and take her to his village, to his familial home. Having put himself at the disposal of the military police, Tagaki’s case is soon favorably resolved: he will be discharged from the army and sentenced to two years banishment, which he is to serve in his village, in his father’s house, “concealed by flowers and greenery.”

  The newlyweds spend their time in sweet seclusion, their nights filled with tumultuous physical passion, their days in peaceful and unhindered routine. Tagaki is pleasant, yet reticent, and prefers to spend his days sequestered in his study.

  “She loved, respected, and feared her husband: she respected him because he was omnipotent, courteous, taciturn and knew everything, loved and feared him for his passion, which burned her out, subdued her utterly, left her powerless, but not him,” writes Pilnyak. Although she knows little about her husband, marital life agrees with Sophia. When Tagaki’s banishment officially ends, the young couple remains in the village. And then suddenly, journalists, photographers, and the like spoil their seclusion . . . And it is thus that Sophia discovers the secret of her husband’s daily withdrawal into his study: in those two or three years, Tagaki had written a novel.

  She isn’t able to read Tagaki’s novel. She requests he tell her something of it, yet he remains evasive. With the novel’s success, their life changes; they have servants to prepare their rice, a private chauffeur drives Sophia to a nearby town to go shopping. Tagaki’s father “bowed to his son’s wife with even greater respect than she offered him,” and Sophia begins to enjoy the fame of her husband’s unread novel.

  She learns of the novel’s content when they are visited by “the correspondent of a city newspaper” who speaks Russian. Tagaki has devoted the entire novel to her, describing their every moment together. The journalist serves to bring her in front of a mirror, where she “saw herself coming to life on paper. It was not important that the novel described in clinical detail how she shuddered in passion and how there was a turmoil in her belly. The frightening part—the part that frightened her—began after this. She came to realize that her whole life and every single detail in it was material for observation and that her husband was spying on her at every moment of her life; this is the point at which her fear began and became the cruel accompaniment of everything she did and experienced.”

  Pilnyak asserts, and it is up to us whether we believe him, that the sections of this “rather silly” woman’s autobiography devoted to her childhood and schooling in Vladivostok are a complete bore, while those in which she describes life with her husband contain “authentic words of simplicity and clarity.” Whether or not this is indeed the case, Sophia gives up “the rank of a famous writer’s wife, love, and the touching jasper days,” and requests return to her homeland, to Vladivostok.

  “And that is all.

  “She . . . lived out her autobiography and I wrote her biography. He . . . wrote a splendid novel.

  “It is not for me to judge other people, but to reflect about everything and, among other things, about how stories come to be written.

  “The fox is the totem of cunning and treachery. If the spirit of the fox enters a person, then that person’s tribe is accursed. The fox is the writer’s totem.”

  Whether Tagaki or Sophia ever existed is hard for us to know. Whatever the case, not for a second does it occur to the reader that the Russian consulate in the city of K., the story of Sophia, her request for repatriation, and the writer Tagaki are, in fact, invented. The reader remains struck by the story’s cruel veracity, by the power of a short biography made up of two betrayals: the first committed by the writer Tagaki; the second, propelled by the same creative impulse, by the writer Pilnyak.

  2.

  In mythology and folklore the fox’s symbolic semantic field presupposes cunning, betrayal, wile, sycophancy, deceit, mendacity, hypocrisy, duplicity, selfishness, sneakiness, arrogance, avarice, corruption, carnality, vindictiveness, and reclusiveness. In myth and folktale the fox is most often associated with a “lowdown” enterprise. The fox meets frequently with affliction, and is thus consigned to loserdom, its personal attributes preventing contiguity with higher mythological beings. In any symbolic reading, the fox is situated among the lowly mythological kin. In Japanese mythology, the fox is the messenger of Inari Ōkami, the Japanese totem of fertility and rice; as a messenger the fox is located in human orbit, in the earthly sphere, while “higher” realms, the divine or the spiritual, remain out of reach.

  Among Native Americans, the first nation peoples of Canada, and Siberian and other Eskimos, the legend is widespread of the indigent whom a fox visits every morning, shedding its pelt and becoming a woman. On discovering the secret, the indigent hides the pelt, and the woman becomes his wife. When the woman eventually finds the pelt, she again takes the form of a fox and leaves him forever.

  In both western and eastern imaginations the fox is invariably a trickster, a shyster, yet also appears as a demon, a witch, an “evil bride” or—as in Chinese mythology—the animal form of a deceased human soul. In western folklore, the fox is invariably gendered male (Reineke, Reynard, Renart, Reinaert), and in eastern, female. In Chinese (huli jing), Japanese (kitsune), and Korean (kumiho) mythology, the fox is a master of transformation and the art of illusion, a symbol of the death-dealing female Eros, a female demon. In Japanese mythology, kitsune have different statuses: the fox can be a commonplace wild fox (nogitsune) or become a myobu, a divine fox, for which it must wait a thousand years. The tail announces a fox’s status within the hierarchy: the most powerful have nine.

  All told, it seems that Pilnyak was right; there is much that qualifies the fox as totem of the traitorous literary guild.

  3.

  Who is Boris Pilnyak?

  The photographs of a handsome man with thin, round glasses on his nose, dressed in a fine suit to which a butterfly broach is pinned, dandy through and through, in no way conform to the “western” image of a Russian revolutionary writer. Yet Pilnyak was such: a Russian revolutionary writer.

  His real surname is Vogau (Pilnyak a pseudonym), the son of Volga Germans, his childhood and early youth spent in the Russian provinces. One of the most prolific writers of his time, his opus is broad in genre and style. His creative diapason ranges from traditional and documentary prose (with discernible traces of both naturalism and “primitivism”), to reportage, travelogue, the “written-to-order” socialist realist novel, and modernist “ornamental prose,” the best example of which is his masterpiece, The Naked Year.

  Pilnyak was loved and hated, famous and influential, his literary style imitated by many. He was widely translated into foreign languages, and free to travel to places of which others could only dream, including Germany, England, China, Japan, the United States, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, and Mongolia . . . His “Japanese cycle” includes the travelogues The Roots of the Japanese Sun, Rocks and Roots, and “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written.”** To America he devoted the book Okay! An American Novel.†† Pilnyak also devoted a book to England, the collection of short stories English Tales, and a work to China entitled Chinese Diary.

  Perhaps because many women have a weakness for writers, women loved Pilnyak, Russian women in particular, it seems. He married three times. With his first wife, Maria Sokolova, a doctor at Kolomna Hospital, he had two children. His second wife was an actress at the Maly Theater in Moscow, the beauty Olga Scherbinovskaia; and his third, the actress and film director, Kira Andronikashvili. With her he had a son, Boris. He owned an almost unbelievable two cars (he brought an American Ford back to the Soviet Union!), and enjoyed the use of a spacious dacha at Peredelkino, the famous writers’ colony near Moscow.

  Pilnyak’s bibliography is substantial. Apart from the classic The Naked Year, his other significant works include Mach
ines and Wolves and The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea. His story “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon,” about the murder of communist leader Mikhail Frunze, provoked a scandal. It was alleged that doctors acting on Stalin’s orders had poisoned Frunze with an overdose of chloroform.

  Pilnyak was a close friend of Yevgeny Zamyatin. Zamyatin, an engineer in the Russian Imperial Navy who wrote in his spare time, is the author of the most powerful words a writer has ever dispatched to his executioner. In a letter to Stalin seeking permission to leave the Soviet Union (permission that Stalin, persuaded by Maxim Gorky, granted), Zamyatin wrote: “True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”

  Zamyatin’s novel We (published in English in 1924) has been plagiarized by many writers, George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) among them. Only Kurt Vonnegut publicly admitted his debt, others preferring to engage in finger pointing (Orwell at Huxley, for example). Happiness in emigration proved elusive to Zamyatin: he spent a miserable six years in Paris, dying of a heart attack in 1937, the same year Boris Pilnyak was arrested. It seems that Stalin’s bullet, which mowed down so many Russian writers of the era, refused to bypass Zamyatin’s heart, even though Zamyatin had taken shelter well out of range. This, however, is not a story about Zamyatin, but one about how stories come to be written.

  4.

  “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written” was composed in 1926. My mother was born the same year. That year, many things took place that one could link with my mother’s biography. I, however, prefer to imagine the existence of a poetic connection between Pilnyak’s story and my mother’s.