Soviet literature – Biblioklept

Previously on Blue Lard…

The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be very clear, I strongly recommend entering Blue Lard cold.

We left off right before the gross abject center of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in gross abject translation by Max Lawton). The midpoint is a strange short story, “The Indigo Pill” (by one Nikolai Buryak, author of The Flood). “The Indigo Pill” is the textual tissue between Blue Lard’s warped lobes, a segue that marries opera and shit, champagne and piss. Buryak’s setting (which is to say, of course, Sorokin’s setting) is the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow sometime in an alternate 1950s—one that is, presumably, an alternate version of the alternate 1950s Moscow the second half of Blue Lard will deliver.

But “The Indigo Pill” is really about a romantic date. Our first-person narrator will escort his belle to Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin. How might one dress for the Bolshoi?

I am wearing a lightweight ultramarine diving suit. The mask is shifted back on my head. Freshly fallen snow crunches beneath my lead soles.

Our country’s main theater is brightly illuminated. All around it are people in diving suits of every possible color and shape. I ascend the steps, stand to the left of the second and third columns, and look at my waterproof watch. 7:22. No Masha.

Don’t worry! Masha’s just a minute or two late. Our young (oldish) lovers will have plenty of time to enter the airlock and descend into the theater, the seat of post-war Soviet big-C Culture:

The hall of the Bolshoi Theater constitutes the primary sump of the Moscow sewage system. Those who are superficially familiar with fecal culture suppose the contents of a sewer system to be a thick, impenetrable mass of excrement. This is not even remotely the case. Excrement makes up only twenty percent of its contents. The rest is liquid. Though this liquid is murky, it is still possible to survey the entire hall with enough lighting––from the floor spread with carpets to the ceiling with its famous chandelier.

(By now you, sweet dear reader, know if the Blue Lard is your particular flavor or not, right?)

Sorokin’s Buryak’s “Indigo Pill” episode ends in textuality: “the Bolshoi opens like a fat book, letters running and jumping, I swallow my own head and wake up.” Again, Blue Lard is writing about writing, writing as a kind of living (or at least counter-history/future). This metatextuality evinces in one of the stranger paragraphs in a novel full of strange paragraphs—a very short paragraph, which begins right after “I swallow my own head and wake up”:

Night.

Must go piss blood. Then make myself a coffee. And disdainfully recall my own ordinary life.

The lines are presumably, at least in the text proper, the final words of Nikolai Buryak reading his story “The Indigo Pill” over a loudspeaker to the Earth-Fuckers. But might they also be an authorial intrusion from Sorokin himself who, even if he may not piss blood (or prepare coffee, for that matter), shows a disdain for “ordinary life” in his fiction? Or not.

We transition back to the Earth-Fuckers who, in a time-travel sequence worthy of the Golden Age of Looney Tunes, explode a giant-testicled babe to deliver a package of iced blue lard (and Blue Lard; and us, the readers) to Sexy Swingin’ Moscow in the Spring of 1954! We land at a “celebratory concert dedicated to the opening of the All-Russian House of Free Love” in the Bolshoi Theater.

In a novel full of twists and turns, the next few pages of Blue Lard are especially challenging. Sorokin offers up an alternate post-war USSR history radiating decadence. Of course he does not follow the “rules” of sci-fi, whereby we might be treated to exposition (or at least a brief overview) that explains the alternate timeline we are about to navigate. Instead, the transition into Blue Lard’s second half is alarming, vivid, and very funny.

A “great Russian bard” delivers a song to the Bolshoi audience from a massive pink granite bathtub “filled with a translucent jellylike substance” (he’s tub-bound from a “pathological softening of bone matter.” The audience is moved by the drama of the bard’s song, but it’s soon interrupted by the interposition of the Earth-Fuckers’ time traveling blue lard in the form of a “semi-transparent funnel about the size of a person.” Luckily Joseph Stalin’s top lieutenants are in attendance to calm the audience and take control of the situation.

The first time I read Blue Lard I went through it stunned and guffawing, jogging in places to keep up and not lingering too long for fear of getting left behind. I didn’t pick up on the significance of that year, 1954–a whole year after Stalin’s historical death in March of 1954. Rereading Blue Lard, I took the time to apply the paltry bits of Soviet history I recalled and to index the various Politburo members who show up in this section.

The predominant of these Politburo ministers is Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. The historical Beria was responsible for purges and other crimes against humanity; some historians conjecture that Beria poisoned Stalin; Beria was executed in the summer of ’53 after Khruschev’s coup. He was also a serial rapist.

Beria explains the rude intrusion of the funnel to the aghast theatergoers:

“This is the so-called ice cone sent to us from the not-too-distant future by the Order of the Earth-Fuckers of Russia. The order will be formed from numerous smaller sects of Earth-Fuckers in 2012. In 2028, some members of the order will settle in Eastern Siberia, on Bald Mountain, in dungeons in which there is evidence of the settlements of Siberian Zoroastrians, descendants of a small sect that… it seems… fled from the great Achaemenid Empire to the north at the end of the sixth century BC. They slowly ended up in the taiga, between the two Tunguskas, then on to Bald Mountain, into the granite of which they successfully burrowed over the course of four centuries. Why? They were searching for the so-called Underground Sun, the rays of which, according to their belief system, would destroy the difference between good and evil and return the human race to a heavenly state. The Siberian Zoroastrians invented a time machine capable of sending small objects into the past. One of those objects is what you see here.”

Wait, didn’t I say this section of the novel eschewed exposition? Because that’s a lovely exposition dump there, friends!

Beria continues his exposition—if we believe it!—assuring his audience that the theater-crashing “ice cone” will likely be the last one: the Siberian Zoroastrians possessed but three time travel devices. These Earth-Fuckers blew their first load in “the summer of 1908 near Torzhok… Inside of it was a book bound in buckskin describing the history and structure of the Order. Nikolai II’s talentless government considered it to be a prank.” Again, in rereading Blue Lard more slowly and deliberately, I was attenuated enough to see the obvious cue here; namely, the Earth-Fuckers precipitated the Tunguska Event. (Blue Lard is a brother book then to Pynchon’s Against the Day.)

Beria’s audience demands to know what was in the second cone, which “destroyed a train going from Moscow to Vladivostok on July twenty-ninth, 1937.” Beria informs them the cargo “was the body of a half-human, half-animal being. A six-year-old boy with horns, hooves, and a tail. There was a tattoo on his forehead that said: ‘A Babe of the Whorish World.'” Beria helpfully adds that the corpse was pickled and then hidden.

Beria’s audience then asks the question of Blue Lard’s second half “And where is Comrade Stalin?”

And where’s Stalin? We’ll meet him in a few pages. More to come.

I surprised myself by picking up and rapidly reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 Soviet satire The Heart of a Dog this week. I read Michael Glenny’s translation (Harcourt Brace, 1968) at a quick clip, finding the novel propulsive and zany. I didn’t know anything about the plot beforehand, which I think helped me to enjoy the novel all the more. I liked The Heart of a Dog more than Bulgakov’s posthumously-published classic, The Master and Margarita. I had a rough idea of Master’s plot, whereas my ignorance of the events in The Heart of a Dog allowed me to ride along its zany track without loaded expectations. Perhaps this first paragraph is a way of saying: The Heart of a Dog is a quick, fun, funny read, probably better read without too much foregrounding.

A bit of foregrounding—not too much—The Heart of a Dog begins with the sad howl of a street mutt in Moscow. We’ll first get to know this dog as Sharik, and then later Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov. Sharik opens the novel: “Ooow-ow-ooow-owow! Oh, look at me, I’m dying.” The line is prescient and ironic: Our pup will, in time, be reborn as a human. The basic plot of The Heart of a Dog is a riff on Frankenstein. Eminent surgeon (and vocal critic of the Communist Party) Dr. Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky finds the poor beast and restores him to the fattest health. Dr. Phil’s scheme though is a bit nefarious though. The not-quite-mad scientist, securing a thief’s corpse, trepans his poor dog’s skull and inserts the rogue’s pituitary gland. He then transplants the human’s testicles into the dog. Hormones and testes turn Sharik into a terrible shape-shifting speechifying brute, a mannerless boor who cannot be trained and who will not abstain from vodka. In time, Sharik (in the guise of Poligraf Poligrafovich) makes Dr. Phil’s life hell, leading the brief novel to its zany climax.

As with The Master and Margarita, I’m sure there was a lot that I missed in The Heart of a Dog. Undoubtedly, some of Bulgakov’s allusive jokes and jabs couldn’t land on my ignorant skull. What did come through though was a mean-but-fun satirical streak, a howling and yapping and biting at power, groupthink, philistinism, and hypocrisy. I liked the book.

I’ve just now (after having written that paragraph) gone back and read Michael Glenny’s April 1968 introduction to the novel (I always skip prefaces and intros). His final paragraph is far finer analysis than I can muster—but I can share it with you:

Like all the best satire, The Heart of a Dog can be read and relished in several ways: On one level it is a comic story of splendid absurdity; it also pokes fun at the discomforts, shortages, and anomalies of life in the Moscow of the twenties. But it has more profound meanings. It is a fierce parable about the Russian Revolution. The “dog” of the story is the Russian people, brutalized and exploited for centuries—treated, in fact, like animals instead of human beings. The weird surgeon, a specialist in rejuvenation (for “rejuvenation” read “revolution”), is the embodiment of the Communist Party—perhaps of Lenin himself—and the drastic transplant operation that he performs in order to transform the dog into the simulacrum of a human being is the revolution itself. In the story this modern Frankenstein is so appalled by the unredeemable beastliness of the creature he has conjured up that he reverses the process and turns his “new man” back into a dog. With this ending Bulgakov implies that he would like to see the whole ghastly experiment of the Revolution canceled out; unfortunately, successful revolutionaries, even when they realize their mistake, cannot reverse history by a stroke of the pen as an artist can with his fictional creatures. The bitter message is that the Russian intelligentsia, which made the Revolution, is hence-forth doomed to live with—and eventually be ruled by—the crude, unstable, and potentially brutal race of hominids—homo sovieticus—which it has called into being. Bulgakov saw the Revolution as a hideously misguided attempt to achieve the impossible—to change humankind. Man is brutish by nature, and “Soviet man,” he warns, is little more than a lout who has been led to believe he is the very pinnacle of creation. The results of giving power to such men will be disastrous; in fact, Stalin’s terror was carried out ten years later by exactly the sort of callous, brutal cretins that Bulgakov satirizes in this grimly prophetic story.