Revolutionist Experiments

...Charms was born m 1905, Vvedensky in 1904 During the '20s they formed a literary group called Oberg Although they issued manifestoes proclaiming their dedication to the Revolution, their notion of revolutionary writing was not what the new regime had m mind They produced humorous pieces that were black and absurdist decadent, if you will In the face of strong official opposition, Oban ultimately disbanded in 1930 Charms and Vvedensky turned to children's stories for a him...

...I am bound by my entire way of life, by all my habits, to the Russia of today I am able to work only for her...

...In 1923 Shklovsky and Miss Toilet went their separate ways, and he petitioned the Soviet government for permission to return Thanks to the intercession of Gorky and Maya-bosky, this was granted In his petition, which is a part of Zoo, Shklovsky wrote "I cannot live in Berlin...

...Vvedensky and Charms rejected...

...The Revolution transformed me, I cannot breathe without it Here one can only suffocate ". Sheldon offers another possible reason for Shklovsky's return, citing Nina Berber ova??s claim that the writer's wife was imprisoned and held hostage after her husband left the country Yet this seems unlikely, if only because Shklovsky was hardly that important a figure...

...In his play, Elizabeth Bam, an innocent woman is wanted by the secret police Her mother turns against her In "Anecdotes About Pushkin's Life," a peasant writes the poet's biography In "The Old Woman," a man goes insane for fear of being accused of murder...

...it had a thin neck He does not deny that he stomped on the dog "But it's simply cynical to accuse me of murdering a dog, when right alongside it, three human beings had been lost I'm not counting the baby...

...The characters include a one-year-old boy, his brothers and sisters who have various last names —rangling in age from 8 to 82, a mother, father, and nurse It is Christmas Eve The play opens with the one-year-old saying, "Will there be Christmas7 Yes, there will be And then suddenly there will not be Suddenly I shall die " The nurse says, "You don't know how to talk yet ". The play continues as a conventional work about a typical Christmas Eve in a Russian home, except that the family seems to have a precocious child Then the nurse murders his sister The parents come home from the theater and pretend to mourn when they hear the news They proceed to make love The nurse is taken to an insane asylum The doctor mutters, "Lord, how awful Everyone around her is insane They are persecuting me They are demoing my dreams They want to shoot me...

...Shklovsky resumed his therapy career in Moscow (Zoo enjoyed five Soviet editions), and recently brought out a collection of cynicism For all the bad days m Berlin, he has at least been able to write and publish Danni Charms and Alexander Vvedensky were not so fortunate Their work and ideas about art were unacceptable to the authorities, and today they are virtually unknown in their country...

...Joining Shklovsky in Bern, either as ?¦migr?¦s or as visitors, were Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovski-sky (who, interestingly enough, was rejected by Miss Triplet??s sister), Alexei Tolstoy, Andrei Bely, Marc Chagall, Ilea Ehrenburg, Ivan Puny (Jean Puny), and Boris Pasternak Shklovsky presents his own view of many of these men in Zoo Here, for example, is his description of Chagall...

...the spit image of the small-town barber Mother-of-pearl buttons on a gaudy vest This man has ridiculously bad taste He transfers the colors of his suit and his small-town romanticism to paintings Marc Chagall does not belong to the world of culture He was born in Vitebsk a small, godforsaken town he managed to remain a Vitebsk an m Paris and St Pete ". When he completed Zoo, Shklovsky sent the manuscript to Gorky, who was then planning a new journal Not without some malice, Gorky said Zoo's best letters were those wanton by Miss Triplet, and suggested that she expand them into book form Thus did her literary career begin...

...Secondly, I was dialog with a corpse " Of course, she was pregnant??yet he did pull the child out of her It was not his fault that the child's head tore off...

...It is not true, the narrator goes on, that he raped Liza Anton ova "First of all, she was not a virgin any more...

...Both writers were arrested m 1941 and disappeared sometime m 1942...

...Revolutionist Experiments Zoo, or Letters Not About Love By Viktor Shklovsky Edited and translated by Richard Sheldon Cornell 164 pp $7 95 Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd, A Literary Discovery Selected works of Danu Liars and Alexander Vvedensky Edited and translated by George Gibran Cornell 208 pp $6 95 Reviewed by Garrick Feldman The Russian colony that formed in Bern after the Revolution was by no means a happy one For men like Viktor Shklovsky the cosmopolitan city was difficult to adjust to, despite the political turmoil at home, he longed to return Adding to the misery of his Berlin days was a love affair with a woman who did not love him, Elsa Toilet, a fellow ?¦migr?¦ who later moved to Pans and married Louis Aragon...

...Both Alay and Russia have rejected Shklovsky and made his life unbearable "At the beginning, when I was still cheerful, you liked me better," he writes to her "That comes from Russia, my dear We walk with a heavy tread But in Russia I was strong, here I have begun to weep ". Zoo is more than a moving evocation of the pain of exile and unrequited love, however, it is also inch with literary history Most Russians in Berlin immediately after the Revolution were conservatives, but m 1922, as Sheldon details, liberals began arriving First came the group connected with the Pans ?¦migr?¦ journal Siena Vichy Others, like Shklovsky, felt it prudent to seek refuge there during the summer, following the trials of Socialist revolutionaries In the fall, liberal ranks swelled again when the Soviets expelled 160 dissident intellectuals...

...Gibran also gives us two of Charms' stories for children They are witty and charming, the type of stature ideal for children Even m these stories, though, Charms retains his sense of absurdity In "A Children's Story," a youngster decides to write a tale "Once upon a time there lived a long," he begins Someone says there already is a story like that and tells it to him Every tune the child begins a new story he is told that it already exists Finally he decides to write about himself "A story has already been written about you Buy Number 7 of the magazine Chizz, and you can read about yourself ". Alexander Vvedensky is represented here with only one work, a play called Christmas at the Ivan-ova' It is a marvelous piece of artistry (Can it be hoped that someone will stage it, along with Charms' plays and sketches7...

...Now, thanks to George Gibran, the serious efforts of these two impressive writers have been rescued He discovered the stories and plays that form Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd while researching the post-1917 Russian avant-garde, they are minor masterpieces, and English-speaking readers should be grateful for Gibran??s enterprise In addition to a helpful introductory essay, he includes the Oban Manifesto Most of Charms' stories are only a few paragraphs long, some merely a few words bean calls them mime-stones They usually start logically and evolve into farce, absurdity and madness In "Vindication," one of Charms' finest pieces, the narrator begins "I don't want to boast But when Vologda hit me m the ear and spat in my eyes, I let him have it in a way he will never forget It was then that I beat him with the little gas stove, yesterday I beat him with the flatiron " And he killed Ayesha, he says, only because he was carried away by the momentum of killing Vologda...

...It is not right that I should live in Berlin...

...Shklovsky's extraordinary epistolary novel, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, consists of letters to his inamorata, addressed as Alay, and seven responses by Miss Toilet herself Now, more than 48 years after it was published in Germany, we have our first English-language edition of the book, ably translated and with an excellent introduction by Richard Sheldon...

...Alay asks the man who loves her not to write to her about love "I do not love you," she says, "and I will not love you I still feel we have much in common " He accepts the sad facts, confining himself to other subjects Berlin, Russia,writers and artists, despair and frustration, "Aleksey Mikhailovich, and his system of hauling water up to the fourth floor in bottles," "the women m a certain Berlin Nacht-lokal [who] know how to hold a fork " He seldom breaks the rule of not writing about love And yet that is what all his letters are about...

...Sanity has no place in Charms' world...

...literary conventions But their work means more to us than that They were witness to a world in which criminals ruled, repression was confused with revolution, and innocents were hauled off in the name of the law...