According to Nina, it was very Russian, that tendency to elevate all problems from the level of the comprehensible by means of an expression mystique. “Maybe it’s that spirituality I miss most,” Nina said, and burst into laughter. Long paragraphs, pseudo-philosophical and incomprehensible but very passionate, or a single unexpected word that reverses the trivial sense of the conversation. When you’ve stopped speaking Russian and then hear Russians talking, you don’t understand anything. Even the most precise of its concrete comments would always have enigmatic derivations that ended up being incomprehensible. The ultimate result of this kind of message, independent of the precision with which it is articulated, was that it elevated the meaning so far above everyday usage that the meaning would disappear completely. That explained the tendency among Russian writers—Gogol or Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn—to sermonize and go off on religious digressions. The language itself leads them down that hole, she said, smiling.
This tendency of the Russian language toward mystical expression was a kind of ontological defect that didn’t appear in other Indo-European languages. Verbs for action and subjective perception, carried over into their extraverbal usage, were rigorously coherent in practice in Slavic languages. The essential problem was that there were no terms in Russian for the typology of Western thoughts and feelings. Everything is passionate and extreme. It’s impossible to say good afternoon without it sounding like a threat. That’s why it’s so difficult to translate Russian and why Nabokov foundered in his catastrophic translation of Pushkin. He was arrogant, a sentimentalist, and believed that a literal translation of Eugene Onegin could convey the emotional inflections of Russian poetry. Impossible! You have to read Russian in order to hear that mysterious, mystical music.
“Tolstoy is our greatest writer because he struggled against that debility of the language, and it was through that struggle,” Nina said, “that he discovered ostranenie. That magical little word has no translation, but we might say distancing, estrangement, even the unheimlich, like Freud, or defamiliarization. A distortion that alters the trivial sense to reveal the clear light of the Russian language. Tolstoy used it, making it visible. He was an exceptional writer, yet his style is full of difficulties; it has nothing of elegance, and many have criticized it and accused him of writing badly, and he did write badly—he was no Turgenev—because he was seeking to disrupt that metaphysical scourge of the vernacular language. He transformed the way Russian is written. Without Tolstoy it would be impossible to conceive of Mandelstam, or Akhmatova, or Shklovsky. He gave form to that method, that light, that fine eye, the visual detail that speaks without saying that spiritual burden.”
When he was struggling against the sorrow of death, Tolstoy wrote an account of the execution of a poor peasant, an arsonist. The gallows, the executioner, the pallid face of the man about to be hanged, the poignancy of the situation. Tolstoy, in contrast to what any other journalist would have done, paused over the description of a servant who carried a bucket of soapy water to moisten the hangman’s noose so that it would slip more easily around the victim’s neck. That detail extinguished all metaphysics and made you feel the bureaucratic horror of the execution better than any emotional invocation, à la Dostoevsky, of the humiliated and the aggrieved.
Nina was smoking and drinking tea, one cigarette after another and one greenish cup after another from the silver samovar. She’d paused by the window, and the light illuminated her slightly bluish hair. Tolstoy struggled against the indomitable, diabolical depths of his mother tongue, describing the tiny details that survived beneath its metaphysical crust, and in that way he avoided the trap of the obscure, religious profundity of the language. His true disciple was Wittgenstein! What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
She’d paused by the window and remained quiet, as though enacting with her silence what she was trying to tell me. The winter light entered softly through the window. Squirrels ran to and fro along the frozen ground of the park in search of something to eat.
“The squirrels thrive here because there aren’t any stray dogs,” said Nina. “They should import street dogs.”
2
I couldn’t stop thinking about the empty hotel room, the neutral arrangement of furniture and objects, Ida’s tulle scarf, a reddish shadow covering the nightstand. A hotel obsession! Ida, stepping naked from the bathroom, nubile, her pubis, her soft hips. One afternoon, obsessing over these images that came back to me with the clarity of dreams, I drove the car out of the garage, took a few turns around town, crossed through the woods, and got on Route One heading back to the Hyatt Hotel. In the bar the pianist was still playing Ellington tunes (“Sweet Georgia Brown”), and I went up to the sixth floor to spend the night in a room like all the others. There was nowhere else I could feel safe, and
