How I Ate the Dog part three

So why so many ellipses, random pauses, etc., in Grishkovets’s play?  Because it’s a monologue told by the author himself, and the author affects this homespun, natural style of speech to better match the material.  He assumes a self-deprecating, earnest tone, as if you’re a trusted friend to whom he’s telling his musings and half-baked childhood dreams that all the same are significant in the human sense, since we all have such musings and dreams, only we never voice them.  Plus, much of the dialogue is improvised, so Grishkovets keeps the whole thing completely free-flowing and conversational, and the written version with its many ellipses reflects this.

And just a sidenote: Russian Island is no joke.  The whole of this island, which Japan still contends is part of its territory, is given over to the Russian navy.  In 1993, four sailors starved to death there after a greedy officer hoarded food supplies.

How I Ate the Dog
Yevgenii Grishkovets

continued…

This is exactly like, well…. Like…. Remember, 15 to 17 years ago they were showing, with great pomp, and before that everyone was talking, saying that for the first time in the movie theatres of the country there was a real horror film, “Legend about a Dinosaur.”  Tickets were decidedly impossible to buy; they were showing the film for two weeks in movie theatres with large screens.  At the ticket offices was a crowd…  I went three days in a row, stood idle for an hour, and, having been convinced that today, alas… I went to the theatre exit and waited for the end of the showing.  From the lobby you could hear a little bit of especially loud music and something else…  Then the people came out, and I looked at their faces.  They had seen it…!  They had already experienced it!  They came out and in some way differed from everyone else, they moved, as it were, slowly, as in video clips, carrying a knowledge that was unknown to me, that I also would attain, that I feared, but that which I must…, without fail.  But they had already lived through something, they already knew….  I wanted to see this in their eyes….  I respected them and understood that I couldn’t even talk to them….  Then, on Friday, I myself watched the film….  Well, there you go, watched it…. and left… and went home…

But there it was more serious business, here it was….  It’s like, you know….  You’re walking to school, it’s dark because it’s winter.  Everything really familiar, all the noises bother you.  Well, there’s this little path through the snow, trees, snow.  In front of you loom up other wretches, some mothers pulling their torpid first-graders.  Snow, branches, cold.  You’re walking like this, so that your hands don’t touch your mittens, and through the trees and the snow on the second floor gleam three windows.  They gleam with such a venomous, peculiar light.  This is the room for Russian class.  And now there will be two periods of Russian right off the bat…….   And you’re walking, but this is worse of all, this sorrow, this is intolerable…

And of course you learned everything, your homework is done, and, in general, there’s nothing to fear.  But….  Those three windows….  And through your head passes different plans of how you might avoid this, and thoughts about how it would be awesome, if…, or about what the guys from School 48 said, how they….  But you walk….  Horror….  It’s just you also know that the teacher hates you.  No, not because you’re this way or that.  Just because she really doesn’t like you.  You still don’t even guess that people can not love you, because you’re still….  Ooooohhhh…

We traveled onward…. Past Baikal.  It took a long time to pass Baikal, then we traveled some more…  The city of Ulan-Ude.

It’s curious when some Muscovite tells some foreigner: “Yes… Baikal – our pride, this lake is the biggest, deepest, there’s such and such a percentage of the world’s freshwater, there’s fish…!”

What Baikal?  It’s farther away than Africa…. A lot farther….  And schoolkids in Khabarovsk write essays in ninth grade about “Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg.”  What St. Petersburg?  What are you talking about?  A seven-hour time difference between these cities, and birch trees…, many…, many…, many birch trees.

Incidentally, if you pronounce the word “many” (“mnogo”) many times (“mnogo,” “mnogo,” “mnogo”…), then it will break up into sounds and lose its meaning…, and it’s that way with any word.  Names especially quickly break up….  Well, that’s how it is…

We asked the sailors about what it was like to serve, well, in the sense that….  Well, as it were… scary or not, whether strong….  Well, you understand….  But we asked, as it were, without any particular interest, kind of like….  And they said: “Noooo, now serving is alright, Boy Scout camp, totally fine, no one’s fingers will…, don’t piss yourself.  Now, when we served, that was….  Back then it was, yeah…  Seryoga, you tell them now, Boy Scout camp.  Noooo, totally fine…  Only, the main thing is, don’t wind up on Russian Island, and then it’s fine…

I somehow immediately remembered and worried: “Okay, so the main thing is, don’t wind up on Russian Island, because it’s not worth it to wind up there, and if you don’t wind up there, everything will be fine.”  But for some reason, we didn’t really believe that everything would be fine.  We arrived in Vladivostok early in the morning, it was still entirely dark, and fog hung in the air…, not even fog, but kind of little bitty rain, but so small that it doesn’t fall, but literally hangs in the air.  It was surprisingly brightly light by the floodlights of the train station and the port, which in Vladivostoke are next to each other, and tremendously cold.  But I didn’t end up seeing Vladivostok in the daytime, already three hours later they were taking me on a boat to Russian Island.

Pause.

How I Ate the Dog part two

If you’ve ever been on a Russian train, you’ll know that Grishkovets gets it exactly right, from the wood-burning tea urn by the wagon conductor’s cabin to the sleepy Russian who without fail remarks on the monotonous beauty of continental Russia and its birches.  The train is still the most important form of transportation in Russia, even though it takes over a week to cross the country this way.  I’ve spent at most two-and-a-half days on a Russian train in one stretch, but I can picture what an eternity seven would be … so you really have to note how strong the dread of the unknown that pervades the author’s imminent entry into naval service is, that he would rejoice in each little stop …

How I Ate the Dog
Yevgenii Grishkovets

continued…

I remember how we traveled seven days from the “Taiga” station to the Vladivostok station on a passenger/mail train.  We traveled slowly, stood at each crossing, and I was grateful to the railroad workers for these tiny delays….  We were going…, and interestingly, you could be going anywhere, to the east, to the south, to the north, and the whole time it would be the exact same scenery, in the sense that, it changes, of course, but the feeling remains that it’s the exact same: This means not very thickly growing birch trees, those uniformly spaced white-black trees, everywhere….  Well, in general, the kind of scenery, looking at which a Russian is obligated to say: “My God… what beauty!”  It happens like this: The Russian has woken up, comes out from the sleeping compartment into the corridor of the wagon, on his shoulders hangs a towel, like so, in his hand a toothbrush with toothpaste already on it, he’s a bit blinded by the morning light (in the compartment it had been very dark), he stops at the window, like so, holding onto the handrail.  In the corridor the rattle of the train is stronger.  Someone draws water from the tea urn.  The train: tuduk-tuk-tuk, tuduk-tuk-tuk.  The person who has just woken up: “Ssssoooo, where are we by now?”  The person with hot water in his mug, swaying with concentration, slowly walking and because of this swaying even more, says: “Who knows…”

The person who has just woken up: “Yeah?! Well, all the same, what beauty…!” Tuduk-tuk-tuk, tuduk-tuk-tuk…

Two sailors took us, they wore white dress uniforms and really looked after their appearance.  Both were short, one had a moustache that he really loved and obviously was very proud of, you couldn’t make it out immediately, but if you so desired, it wasn’t hard to count all the tiny hairs he had on his upper lip, and the other was, I for some reason recall, from Tambov, he was bowlegged and right about here he wore a medal “For faraway deployment.”  They got out at every station and walked around the platform with an old cassette player, glancing to the sides, meaning – Are they looking at us or not?  Aha…they’re looking!  Very good!  I was surprised at the time by how their sailor hats stayed on the back of their heads, it was obvious that they should have fallen off, but they stayed on, all the same…. Without any sense of idiotic metaphor, they hung like haloes….  I only found out later, how they stayed on… sailor hats.  And that there’s no secret, they simply stay on, and that’s it.

The sailors were entertaining….  We came up to them with questions about how it is, and they gladly told us how…: “Well, we went through La Pérouse Strait, then we went to Cam Ranh, we stopped there…, then we went to New Zealand and they didn’t let us come ashore, but in Australia they let us come ashore, but only the officers went and…”

And I was thinking: “Geeeeee whiz… After all I studied English in school…  Why?”  Well, there were countries where they speak this language, there was Europe, well somewhere there… Paris, London, you know, Amsterdam, there were those, and leave it at all that.  What’s it to me?  They sometimes vaguely disturbed you in that they nevertheless kind of existed…, but they didn’t draw out any concrete desire.  The world was huge, like in a book….

And these sailors had been, my God, in Australia, New Zealand….  And the same awaits me, just put me in that same uniform….  And little by little, already quickly, the train takes us to Vladivostok, and there is still a little left – and some sort of sea, some sort of countries….  Reluctance!!!!  Because even though I didn’t know anything concrete, I suspected that, well, of course, it wasn’t quite that simple, Australia, New Zealand, and still some other place like that, the essential of what I didn’t want to know, of what I was afraid, of what I was very afraid  and what would very soon come up… without fail….

How I Ate the Dog part one

How I Ate the Dog

A monodrama

Roles:

Narrator – A young man between 30 and 40 years, dressed in a sailor’s uniform, more often holds his sailor’s hat in hand, sometimes wears it on his head.

One may add personal stories and observations to the text.  Those moments that one especially doesn’t like may be skipped.  It is advisable to recount this story in more than an hour, but less than an hour-and-a-half.

On the stage is a lot of tackle, various maritime affects, a bucket of water and a rag.  In the center sits a chair.

Narrator.

There occur such moments in life, well, for example, you arrive home a little later than you promised, meaning you promised to come at nine, but you came at 11: You didn’t call, didn’t warn in advance, and, well, you come in, start to apologize, well, it’s no use…. And they tell you, “Oh, and of course you went drinking, you’re drunk.”  But you weren’t drinking, that is, not at all!  And you say, “No way, mom (or anyone else), God be with you, I didn’t have anything to drink…” and something to this effect.  And suddenly you have a thought, you clearly understand that you’re behaving yourself like you’re drunk, that is, the more you explain yourself, the more you become indignant, the more you appear to be drunk, moreover you already understand this, but all the same you can never do anything about it.  “Well, admit that you were drinking and  go to bed, why get worked up,” they say.  “But I wasn’t drinking, I wasn’t…” you grumble through your teeth, wave your hand and actually go to bed, and there’s nothing else to do about it.  And no one to get mad at, since it’s exactly as if you’re drunk…

I say this so that it will be understood that I myself don’t understand the reasons why I’m going to tell all of this now; it seems that there are many reasons, but as soon as you name one of them, you understand that it’s not the right reason, or it’s not a fundamental reason, or whatever…. That is, we’ll consider that everything that I recount, I’m recounting without a reason, well, and you… you’re listening for the reason that you came to listen, or simply because there already isn’t anywhere else to go, or for some other reason of your own.  I don’t know….

I’ll talk about a person who is no more now, who already doesn’t exist, in the sense that he existed before, but now he ceased to exist, but besides me no one noticed this.  And when I reminisce about him or talk about him, I say, “I thought… or I said”….  And I remember all this in detail, what he did, how he lived, what he thought, I remember why he did this or that, well, good thing, or, more often, bad thing….  I even become embarrassed for him, even though I distinctly understand that it wasn’t me.  No, not me.  In the sense that for everyone who knows me and knew me it was me, but actually that “I” who’s now saying this is a different person, and that one is no more and has no chance of appearing again….  In short, I ended up having to serve three years in the Pacific fleet….  That’s what kind of person this was.

Pause.

Come learn how he ate the dog

I’m back to deliver on my promise to start posting translations of Russian authors who are hard to find in English, and our first likely lad is Yevgenii Grishkovets (also transliterated “Yevgeni Grishkovetz”). This contemporary writer has basically made a career of selling memoirs, in many of his works drawing extensively on his experiences growing up in the heart of Siberia, serving in the navy and returning to Russia after traveling the world.

I first read his memoir “Reki” because it’s relatively doable Russian for a non-native, and I’ve just finished reading the equally autobiographical “How I Ate the Dog,” a monologue performed by Grishkovets himself that enjoyed a near-perpetual tour of Russian theatres in the early aughts. It’s been said that this work divided Russian theatre into two eras: before Grishkovets and after Grishkovets. While I wouldn’t go that far, it certainly is unique, a kind of novel-meets-theatre bit that features extensive improvisation and add-ins by the author during live performance. Here we get Grishkovets at his finest; the experiences of his navy service and childhood recounted in the monologue are not unusual or even eventful, but the way Grishkovets tells them, they take on the thoughtful yet folksy tone of an armchair philosopher’s musings, only the result is  spellbinding rather than pretentious.

The next couple of posts will feature a translation of this seminal work, which remains relatively unknown in the non-Russian speaking West, as far as I can tell. Conveying the author’s idiosyncratic humor and semantic wit will be difficult; even the title can be contentious and has been translated alternately as “How I Ate A Dog” (there are no articles in Russian). I have chosen to translate it “How I Ate the Dog” because the title references a Russian expression meaning to acquire or demonstrate mastery of a skill, which becomes  a play on words at one point in the monologue.

Depicting Grishkovets’s talent as a performer will of course be impossible. For those interested in also seeing the onstage dynamic, plenty of clips can be found online.

Your Honour, Madame Farewell

"High culture meets hooliganism": Taping a bottle of champagne in Puskin's hand.

I’ve left St. Petersburg after a year there and 15 months in Russia.  What did I learn?  That Russia’s an arbitrary, unpredictable and sometimes mean place, but that’s why we love it  It’s the Wild East, the big vacation from the Western banality that suffocates like a drawn-out waterboarding.  It’s simultaneously a refined culture that is breathtaking in the beauty of its everyday manifestations; high culture meets hooliganism.

My last day was a lesson in these contradictions: In the afternoon, I raced a bunch of drunken Russians down a river on blow-up dolls in the 2009 “Bubble Baba Challenge.”  Then before I left for the airport at 3 a.m., we followed Russian tradition and sat down for a moment of silence, airplane be damned.  It’s the second time I’ve left, and the second time this moment of silence has buoyed me up before the coming storm.

In Russia, I love the bold people, the contradictory culture.  I love sovok.   I love the angry cashier ladies.  And I even love the language, kind of like how a dog owner loves his mangy pooch even when it shits on the carpet every day.

Of course, back in America it’s very … nice.  A lady in the airport saw me breaking my fist on the bank of pay phones and offered me her cellphone: “Good karma,” she said.  Boring, but nice.

Even though my Russia dream has died its inevitable first death, the blog won’t be going the way of the Dodo.  I’ll be focusing on translations of Russian literature and music, reviews of Russian movies, and bits of Russian current events that may elsewhere be overlooked.

I’ll soon be back in Russia, or at least the former Soviet Union, but until then, I take my leave with these lines from Bulat Otkudzhava’s song “Vashe blagorodiye”:

“Your Honour, Madame Farewell,
We are kinsfolk of old, what a thing to see.
The letter’s in the envelope, wait, don’t worry,
I’m not fortunate in death, but in love I will be lucky.”

Sovok

"A one-percent increase in productive labor by the workers of the preparation section will result in 660 pairs of semimanufactured product in excess of the plan per 24 hour period."

See the rest of the post about our exploration of the “Krasniy Treygol’nik” (“Red Triangle”) shoe factory here.

Summer Garden closed this summer

Here’s another Alexander Belinky photo, this one from inside the Summer Garden, which has been closed all summer due to “technical reasons.”  Absolutely ludicrous and unexcusable, to shut down a landmark like the Summer Garden — where Raskolnikov pondered the murder of the pawnbroker in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment — for the best months of the year.  I mean, it had only just opened after Petersburg’s long, cold winter.  Even if you’re going to renovate statues or something, you can at least lest visitors to the city, who won’t have another chance, wander the paths or at least see a small part of the garden.

People who park their cars in glass houses shouldn’t … build them in Russia

Over at the hilarifying blog English Russia, they’re raving in their endearing, barely grammatical English about how new “multistory automated parking garages” are going to save the commuter’s hell of Moscow from its dearth of available parking.

On paper, this idea makes sense.  Too much sense.  Nobody comes to Russia for convenient parking.  That’s like going to a biker bar for a Blueberry mojito.  Russia is supposed to be impenetrable, foreboding and crude, a kind of embodiment of shiny-happy American customer service’s worst nightmare.  It’s supposed to be illogical.

Needless to say, I was immediately against the idea the minute I heard it. Western capitalization of post-Soviet Russia almost turned Moscow into a McDonalds and may still yet, but its inexorable flow toward a smiley face-plastered future was luckily perverted by Russia’s prickly and brutal illogicality.

Of course, there’s still a good chance this sheer illogicality — I would say zaniness, if that didn’t bring to mind a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon instead of eternal, purposeless misery — may still wipe the pimple of this parking garage idea off Moscow’s greasy face.  Just looking at the complex gears required to raise and slot the cars into their parking spaces, it’s easy to imagine some drunken idiot jamming his Lada in like a well-placed wrench. Or figuring out how to overload the thing, bribing the supposedly competent “operator” to let him fit an extra car in, then another, until the whole “steklyashka” comes crashing down like a house of cards.  Or paying someone to shoot up a rival mob boss’s car on the third tier — I mean, the thing’s made out of glass for chrissakes!

In downtown London — wait, “Moscow-on-the-Thames” has already been overrun by the half-a-million Russians, let’s say somewhere a bit blander, like Toronto — this idea would undoubtedly take off, and probably earn some environmental credits from the government or something in the meantime.  But in Russia it’s just not meant to be, and I hope Moscow spits the first of these glass houses out like a rotten tooth.

Ninth of May (Victory Day) Photo

Alexander Belinky, the St. Petersburg Times staff photographer, gave me some of his best photos from over the years, which I will be putting up time to time on Eagle and the Bear. I’m leaving St. Petersburg in two weeks after a solid year here, and what better way to say goodbye to this city of light and darkness, neo-Classicism and “Sovok” (any form of the massive, quietly decaying body of detritus the Soviet Union left behind) than with photos like this one, taken on the elegant Palace Square during a Victory Day celebration in the early 1990’s. The regal, 18th-century General Headquarters building and the turquoise Winter Palace, where the Bolsheviks came to power by overthrowing the provisional government in October (November by the Western calendar) 1917, is obscured by a giant billboard of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Into Georgia (and Back Out Again)

Apologies for the absence; I’ve been traveling in Georgia, that mysterious little post-Soviet Eden on the Black Sea. And as post-Soviet things tend to do, the republic is slowly crumbling, from pockmarked, torn-up stretches of sidewalk on Rustaveli Avenue, the main street of Tbilisi and the most important street in the country, to the Tbilisi metro, which in form looks like a rundown mimicry of the St. Petersburg metro and in size resembles a model train set. But the food is delicious, even the alcohol, which ranges from red wine to the stiff Georgian white wine, a de facto hard liquor, to the grape-based vodka “cha cha.”

And the people are the friendliest I’ve met so far in the former Soviet Union, priding themselves on their maxim, “Guests are a gift from God,” and inviting this traveler into their homes on more than one occasion.

In short, a charming place, which is why it’s hard to watch as its already scarce territory is sliced away by Russia, which has played on Abkhazia’s half-baked dreams of independence and poured its settlers and then its troops into South Ossetia in August 2008. These troops have yet to withdraw from the new swaths of territory they conquered.

The August war is never far from mind. On Rustaveli, there’s still folks living in tent-like “cells” to protest the rule of Misha Saakashvili, who is either loved or hated by each citizen of Georgia in his turn. An American government employee I met in Tbilisi blamed Saakashvili for the August 2008 war, saying he had misinterpreted signals from Washington and gotten overexcited to win back his country’s territory, but also noted that the Georgians don’t have anyone better to lead them at the moment.

When I went to Georgia in the second week of July, word was that a new war was soon to break out …