New First Unexpected

LAYING EGGS

I'm really excited to hear about Dubravka Ugrešić's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg being published next month as part of The Myths series--"a long-term global publishing project where some of the world's most respected authors re-tell myths in a manner of their own choosing." Apparently this series has been around for a while. Even Victor Pelevin has a part in it.

 

Baba Yaga is a is a pan-Slavic myth about a witch-like character who flies around on a giant mortar, kidnapping (and presumably eating) small children. She live in, according to Pushkin's fantasy poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, in a "cabin on chicken legs... with no windows and no doors". Baba Yaga herself usually uses the chimney to fly in and out on her mortar. Apparently, according to Russian archaeologits Yefinmenko and Tretyakov (1948), ancient Slavs had a funeral tradition of cremation in huts like this.

 

Incidently, the name Baba Yaga is also used to describe an old, ugly woman, or "crone" in Russian literature.

 

And virtually apropos of nothing, here is the translation I did of a children's poem by Sasha Chernyi that mentions Baba Yaga.

 

The Hyena

The hyena is a vile creature:
With its impudent muzzle
and hide sticking out of its nape.
Its back is all tangled
And it has rusty spots
On each side (What for is not clear).
Its stomach is dirty and bald.
It can be stitched into a lattice--a tail through a leg--
and its eyes are like that woman Baba-Yaga.

SOLZHENITSYN'S SECRET COURIER

Stig Fredrickson, a journalist for TT (the Swedish News Agency) on "How [He] Helped Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Smuggle His Nobel Lecture from the USSR":

During our meeting at Natalya's apartment Solzhenitsyn and I had arranged to try to meet once again, in the underground passage at the Belorussian railway station. In the enlarged version of his literary memoir "The Oak and the Calf", which was published in Moscow in 1996, Solzhenitsyn describes the meeting:

"I had in my pocket a film containing the text of the Nobel speech. We had failed to find any other way of sending it out, and once again, its destination was Sweden. I was standing in an inconspicuous spot; he and his wife Ingrid came strolling along arm in arm: I followed, keeping a gap between us, and Alya came behind me, after first watching out for a while from a different spot to make sure that no one was tailing us. Everything turned out fine, so we caught up with them and the four of us set off at a leisurely pace down the Leningrad Prospect. As we talked, I asked Stig if he would take the film, and he agreed. I handed it over in a dark courtyard. Folk wisdom has it that seeing a pregnant woman means your plans will come to fruition. Well, we had two of them, both our wives were pregnant."

THE MICE ARE BURYING THE CAT

I love this lubok print from the 18th Century. "The Mice are burying the Cat." It's thought to be caricature of Peter the Great's burial. The caption above the cat says, "The Cat of Kazan, the Mind of Astrakhan, the Wisdom of Siberia" -- which itself is a parody of the title of Russian Tsars.

While researching another project, I came across the Russian word lubok, which refers to a variety of Russian folk literature and art such as woodcuts, characterized by simple graphics and narratives derived from oral and written folklore. Apparently, lubok prints were generally used as decoration in houses and bars, but they also come in the form of cheap books. The original lubki were woodcuts, but these were soon mostly replaced with engraving or etching techniques, which enabled the prints to be more detailed and complex. After printing on paper, the picture would be hand-colored with paints. While the prints themselves were typically rather simple, the final product was, like most Russian folk art, surprisingly bright with vivid colors and stark lines. In addition to the images, these prints would include a short story which the image illustrated. Typically, the lubok's artist would include a bit of text covering the majority of the engraving that complemented the illustration. Some consider lubki the predecessors of the modern comic strip. Who am I to say otherwise?

And like comic strips, lubki played an important role in Russia during wartime, particularly during Napoleon's ill-fated Russian campaign when they were used to present Napoleon in a satirical manner while portraying Russian peasants as the heroes of the war--sort of like a political or propaganda comic. Though, like later political comics, they were also used by the artist to criticize his own government. Interestingly, they were all the more popular because Russian censorship laws at the time did not allow satirical magazines to exist. But the Tsar eventually put a stop to more satirical lubki.

WHEN NO ONE IS HOME

All morning long, the moon glows red.
Everyone is gone--I am alone.
And it's excellent! It's wonderful!
It's pretty obvious:
I am the bravest of men.

To look at the moon, my cat Nonsense and I
Climbed up on the bed:
The moon, our brother; the Wind, our uncle--
Now that's an uncle!--
The Stars, our sister; the Sky, our mother...
I sing loudly--loudly!

Loudly--loudly I sing,
So that, in the darkness, the stove
Doesn't blow a ribbon of smoke
For the Bear to climb down to us...

I'm not afraid of rats or the bogyman--
I'll stick a poker in his nose!--
Nor of a lame devil with his walking stick,
Not even vipers--
Not of anybody or anything!

A cloud in the sky has curls,
The curls of a lamb.
I'm not a boy, I'm an elephant,
Or a tiger cub
Dozing in the reeds...

I wait and wait, in vain I wait--
The hand bell has grown silent...
Moon, my brother, red moon...
Clear moon,
Why have you grown so pale.

1921, A children's poem by Sasha Chernyi (From Children's Island, translated by me)

SOVIET SCI-FI MAGATHON

 

While researching another project, I came across this trove of Soviet sci-fi magazine covers at Boing Boing. As a result, no work is getting done today.

INFORMER 001

While researching the Russian dissident writer Yuri Druzhnikov for another project, I came across some information about an interesting case of early Soviet propaganda that sort of reminded me of the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Do remember them? Private Lynch was badly injured when her convoy was ambushed in Iraq in 2003. She was later rescued by American troops from an Iraqi hospital, but the story of her ordeal was changed into a story of great heroism on her part. And Tillman, a former professional football player who joined the Army Rangers after Sept. 11, and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. At first the military said he was killed by enemy fire and even posthumously awarded him the Silver Star. Funny how you don't hear about them anymore. Anyhow...

In 1932, amid Stalin's campaign for the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, a young boy named Pavlik Morozov informed the NKVD--the precursor to the KGB--that his father was an enemy of the state. As a result, the man was arrested and disappeared in the camps. Enemies of the party later killed the boy, whereupon people proclaimed him their hero. Since then, Pavlik Morozov's glory has surpassed the fame of many Russian heroes--and so has his creation myth.

PSYCHO-GOURMET

What Geoff Nicholson is doing at his delicous blog Psycho-Gourmet--"Ruminations on the weirder and wilder shores of food and food culture"--is the sort of the thing I'm after with New First Unexpected. A fairly prolific novelist, Geoff is currently writing a novel in which food figures heavily, as it were. So as he lays the groundwork for his novel, he's been dishing out food-related curios he's come across on the Web or just from his own head. My own projects also serve up their own side dishes that I simply can't digest until my cravings have been satisfied, and it's a shame to let them go to waste.

Here's a nibble from Geoff's Golden Martini of Death post.

Death by martini surely can’t be that rare a phenomenon: it certainly forms part of the plot of Agatha Christie’s novel “Three Act Tragedy” which was published in America as “Murder in Three Acts” and made into a film with that title, starring Tony Curtis and Peter Ustinov.

However, I think we can safely say that the only major American novelist to die as a result of drinking a martini was poor Sherwood Anderson, in 1941. To be strictly accurate it wasn’t drinking the martini itself that killed him, it was swallowing the wooden toothpick that held the olive.

I found the Agatha Christie reference rather coincidental in that I just finished reading Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (originally Murder in the Calais Coach) for some background info for a project I'm currently working on.

Another of Geoff's posts worth noting is Turf's Up, from which I learned a new vocabulary word: "Shrimping."

But thinking about metaphors of food and sex, and thinking also about feet, I remembered two things. One, that in Cockney rhyming slang feet are known as plates of meat. And two, that in the world of foot fetishism, sucking toes is known as shrimping. There you have it: the perfect combination of turf and surf.

WHAT A FRIEND THEY HAD IN JESUS

Narrative Magazine has named my friend Maud Newton's novel excerpt Story of the Week. It's a great piece, which I've had the priviledge of reading already. She’ll be reading from it at Housing Works this Wednesday at an event also featuring new work from Kate Christensen and Lizzie Skurnick.

Here's a bit from "When the Flock Changed":

 

Although Mom ostensibly set herself up as a bird breeder to make money, she rarely sold the babies. There always seemed to be something wrong with the prospective buyer. A nice car signaled that the customer was self-absorbed. Punctuality suggested he was too rushed. Questions about noise revealed intolerance. A good job meant she wouldn’t be around enough. The Lord Himself evidently vetoed the other 60 percent of customers. “Just the sight of that man grieved my heart,” Mom would explain.

Since she refused to sell them, most of the hand-fed birds were returned to the general population, ten or twenty at a time. Not just that, but there were always new varieties to be collected. Australian parakeets. Lovebirds. Exotic finches: strawberry, zebra, Bengalese. Eventually we must have had more than three hundred of them, all eating, shitting, and clamoring for her attention—and for more birdseed.

The close quarters facilitated the spread of avian diseases. Several birds died in an average month, and rather than cart each one to the vet for an autopsy the moment it croaked, Mom stored the bodies in separate clear plastic bags in our extra refrigerator and delivered them to our vet in bulk. Sometimes I’d run out to the laundry room for a Popsicle, and I was in such a hurry I forgot to open the fridge with care. I’d yank the handle, and four dead cockatiels would tumble out, their eyes permanently bulging, their feet twisted into unnatural positions.

But you can’t tell people stories like this, especially not in Brooklyn, when you’re shacked up with a professor and people still can’t fathom, after all these years, what he sees in you. There’s no point in sharing—not unless you’re eager for his colleagues to huddle still more conspicuously in corners, gazing at you over their wineglasses, compiling the latest evidence of your Red American genes, and agreeing in low, but not-low-enough, tones that it’s no wonder you’re so pessimistic and haggard and directionless—still working temp jobs and wearing Snoopy T-shirts at the age of thirty-two. “Lula,” one of your boyfriend’s colleagues will say, “is really quite remarkable. Only rarely does someone go so far with so little.”

A SLAP IN THE FACE

This blog takes it's name from the early Russian Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, a document that I found inspiring when I was back in college, and somewhat goofy and endearing some 15 years later. But I only just noticed that included among the writers that the authors--past heroes of mine: David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladmir Mayakovsky, and Victor Khlebnikov--denegrate in the piece is one of my current favorite poets from Russia's Silver Age, Sasha Chernyi. They call him (along with the Maxim Gorkys, Krupins, Bloks, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Kuzmins, Bunins of the Russian poetry world) nothing but a "tailor," and claim that "From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at [his] insignificance!...Harrumph, I say!

I've been slowly translating several works by Chernyi, including Satires, his first book of poems, and Micky the Fox Terrier's Diary, as well as some children's poems from Children's Island, and I have never found another poet so unlumpinable as "Sasha the Black." He is simultaneously bitter and charming, sweet and creepy, and funny and angry. A bit of a bio I wrote after the jump...

BOURGEOIS FOG

“I’ve just been told about the Krupskaya article. Poor me, poor me! So it’s poverty again? I'm writing a response to Krupskaya. My hands are trembling. I can't sit on my chair; I have to lie down...." [From Diary: 1901-1969: Kornei Chukovsky]

“Chukovitis,” an article by N. K. Krupskaya that appeared in the February 1, 1928, edition of Pravda, characterized the acclaimed children’s writer, critic, and translator Kornei Chukovsky’s “The Crocodile” as “bourgeois fog,” and accused him of “distorting the facts about animals and plants” (anthropomorphism—or, you know, making things cute), of failing to provide a proper class perspective, and of smuggling reactionary ideas into seemingly innocent tales.  Krupskaya, the head of the Soviet GUS Commission on Children’s Literature and Lenin’s widow, also took issue with his Nekrasov studies, going so far as to maintain that “Chukovsky hated Nekrasov.”

It’s not like the “The Crocodile”—in which a cigarette-smoking, German-speaking crocodile strolls down the streets of St. Petersburg—was a new book. It had already been published in 1917, and had reportedly sold some 500,000 copies between then and 1928. Krupskaya’s article came at a time when the story was being prepared for reissue and her office insisted on reading all children’s books before they were released for publication. Nonetheless, as a direct consequence of the article, all of Chukovsky’s works for children were summarily banned.

“I’m forced into silence as a critic, because RAPP [Russian Association of Proletarian Writers] has taken over criticism and they judge by Party card rather than talent. They’ve made me a children’s writer. But the shameful way they’ve treated my children’s books—the persecution, the mockery, the suppression, and finally the censors’ determination to ban them—has forced me to abandon them as well.” [From Diary, 1901-1969: Kornei Chukovsky]

In a letter to the editor appearing in the March 14, 1928, edition of Pravda, Maxim Gorky took issue with Krupskaya’s criticism of Chukovsky’s work, recalling Lenin’s own favorable opinion of Chukovsky as a Nekrasov scholar. According to Gorky, Lenin characterized Chukovsky’s scholarly work as “good and sensible.” The letter halted the baiting of Chukovsky’s book about the great poet, but “the battle over the children’s tale” went on for years.

On a personal note: When I was in college, the instructor of my introductory Russian course, who did not look unlike a young Krupskaya herself, became enraged when she found that none of her American’s pupils had ever heard of Chukovsky’s “The Crocodile,” saying something like: “Even very young Russian children know this tale by heart!” When it was pointed out to her that we were American students in our first Russian course, she said, “It makes no difference—you will learn the story in two weeks!” None of us did.