UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

[For reasons unknown, I have wasted more words on a particular Russian writer than on any other living word-monger. That Russian writer is Pyetr Turgidovsky. Here Heidi Kohlenberg gets to grips with the man himself - and with his most famous novel, 'The Lunatic'.  Further reading follows...]

Last night I attended the launch of yet another literary magazine. The vol-au-vents were high-class: the enterprise will collapse within the year. In the end, it’s just an excuse for a good party; a rare opportunity for those who spend the majority of their time drinking in the latest offering from Kirios Quebec to drink in the latest offering from France’s finest vineyards, and to share the latest news from the literary world. Who is Hoçe stalking now? Has anyone actually finished reading Gdansk Haunting? What the hell is Donna Devoni wearing? And, of course, this year’s enduring conversation creator: What do you make of Georgy Riecke’s List of Great European novels?

As usual, it takes an hour or so to recover from the wreckage of this latter discussion, which has left at least half a dozen honoured guests with crimson faces, a couple of critics with black eyes and poor Henri Ossan-Ossaf with yet another broken leg (how does he manage it?) The atmosphere is now as tense as a tightrope. And so, to lighten the mood, up pops a literary critic with an amusing story from his/her early years in the job. It is increasingly rare to find a literary critic that has not in store some hilarious tale of his/her early days in the business, from squirrels attacking lap-tops to the customary yarn about an interview with an author of whose work you have never read a word. The good old days! You might argue that it is impossible to get anywhere without having such a story. I know several people who have been driven to make one up, for fear that they work never succeed without one. Fortunately, I have no such needs. My dinner-party anecdote is not only amusing, but true as well. And if the rate of last night’s laughs is anything to go by, it’s a ripping good yarn.

Several years ago I was working as a junior reviewer for Groping for Allusions. Though the journal has undoubtedly fallen on hard times of late, those were very much golden days. Javé de Lasse, Peggy Grounter and the inimitable Georgy Riecke formed the backbone of what was a gloriously progressive magazine, well able to attract articles by figures as highly rated as the art historian D H Laven and cultural polyglot Franz Ludo. Now of course, with de Lasse, Grounter and Riecke all pursuing variously successful personal projects, Groping for Allusions struggles to print articles by the likes of Jon Gvennersson. But the project ought not to be forgotten. It was, briefly, great. And I was, briefly, proud to be involved.

Indeed, I had barely worked there three weeks before I suffered from an acute outbreak of pride. Up to then, I had contributed a mere two reviews, no more than three hundred words on books of decidedly lesser quality. Progress, I suspected, would be sluggish. Then I was given what appeared to be the opportunity of a lifetime. I was scheduled to take an interview with one of the greatest European novelists; a master of modern Russian prose; the incomparable Pyetr Turgidovsky. Was it a mistake? Grounter assured me that it was not. It was instead a unique prospect, though also one that I began to look forward to with a mixture of enthusiasm and fear. On the one hand, it was a great pleasure to be granted a conversation with the author of novel as good as The Lunatic; on the other, I had once heard it said that Turgidovsky was a famous misanthrope. Yet what did I expect from a writer? Proper literary critics ought not to be scared of misanthropes or misogynists, criminals or crackpots, sadists or scholars. I ought to receive the honour with grace.

Nevertheless, my suspicions continued to be aroused. Was it an honour at all? To the best of my knowledge, Turgidovsky had never been interviewed for a literary journal before. Idly I presumed that this was because Turgidovsky, like many writers (most notably Ivan Zech) was in the habit of turning down interviews, but had accepted this one on account of the magazines great standing. On the contrary, the exclusiveness of the interview was not due to good fortune. In fact, the reason that Turgidovsky had never before given an interview was because he’d never been asked for one. I soon discovered why this might have been the case.

The interview took place in a cellar-turned-café in Geneva, where Turgidovsky owns a small flat; a retreat from his main base in St. Petersburg, as well as the place where he wrote the majority of The Lunatic. The author turned up half an hour late, but with the merest twitch of an eyebrow managed to make me feel as if it was my fault. He wore a black suit over a black shirt, completed by a black tie. Both his socks and shoes were black, and though it was a warm summery day, he carried with him a large black umbrella. The only change in shade about his person was provided by the ghostly whiteness of his gaunt face and the long fingers that poked out of his sleeves like luminous strip lights. On a good day, I thought, this man might resemble Rasputin.

I knew, yet, that appearances can be deceptive. As a young woman in the literary world I had already learnt that the handsomest writers invariably own the iciest of hearts – might not the opposite be true also? Might Pyetr Turgidovsky, for all his resemblances to a serial rapist, turn out to be a genial character instead, full to the brim with the milk of human kindness?

Any such hopes sank quicker than Alan B Wightche on a deflated dinghy. If Pyetr Turgidovsky’s undernourished frame was ever replete with milk, it was undoubtedly of the sour variety, complete with ample globules of malodorous mould. There would be a greater chance of finding warmth in a school radiator than in this despondent individual. Given the choice to interview him again, or spend a day reading cheap Spanish fiction with a warthog lying on my face, I’d go for The Sulky Senorita and a face full of pig crap every time.

At the time, however, I was young and idealistic. Forget the man, I thought. You’re not writing for the Sunday supplement, but a literary journal. Concentrate on his work. Ignore the skull-like face and gorgon’s stare, and remind yourself of all the wonders contained within The Lunatic: the elegiac prose, the frenetic plotline, the transfixing characters and, above all, the subtle post-Chekhovian comedy. Ah yes! The comedy!

Time to start the interview.

‘Your book is funny’ I said, hoping to get things going with a few light observations.

Turgidovsky sipped his treacly black coffee, a look of displeasure spread over every inch of his sickly visage. ‘No it isn’t’ he replied, forthwith. ‘My book is desperate’.

‘Sure’ I said, refusing to be beaten quite so easily. ‘But desperation is funny’.

‘No it isn’t’ answered the Russian. ‘Desperation is desperate’.

‘Maybe’ I conceded. ‘But it can also make us laugh’.

He seemed to think about this, before saying ‘It doesn’t make me laugh’.

I pretended to scribble down notes in my folder.

‘Have you even read my book?’ he asked.

Great start, I thought.

Of course, in my hurry to start our discussion, I had overlooked one of the most formative passages in The Lunatic, in which the authorial voice takes a break from describing the various shenanigans of his characters in order to instruct his readers as to the nature of his creation, putting forth a philosophy not dissimilar to that which Turgidovsky had just thrown my way. I had always hoped that this interjection was ironic; now I came to understand that it most definitely was not. At the stage in which this authorial interpolation appears, the reader might be excused for rather enjoying his or herself, feeling warmth for the characters; growing to appreciation the absurd humour of the various situations. The reasoning behind Turgidovsky’s interruption lies his desire to suck up the traces of this enjoyment and spit it back in our faces. The earnestness of this need, however, is not easily detectable (I am certainly not the first person to suppose that the passage might be delicately ironic). Indeed, despite Turgidovsky’s protestations, The Lunatic is still and will no doubt continue to be thought of in terms with which he would not readily agree. So, though I would not have dared at the time to protest against the will of the grim writer, I will not hesitate now to enforce a sentiment expressed earlier.

The Lunatic is a funny book. Regardless of whether Turgidovsky laughs at it himself or whether he wants us to laugh at it, there is no denying the simple truth of the matter. Amongst the tributaries of stories that pierce the landscape of this great novel, humour can be found. Not jokes, not punch lines, nor any of the common comic set pieces. This is humour of a darker kind, riddled with the bullet holes of absurdity and sprinkled with throat-clogging truisms, revealing together the tattered corpse of humanity in all of its hilarious desperation. Also, in the liberal use of allusions to works by other Russian writers, there is a discernible sense of fun, as if Turgidovsky is mocking their despondency, though in reality it may appear that he is the most miserable Russian novelist of them all.

Excepting chapter fourteen – the aforementioned authorial interruption – and the last chapter – where the author returns briefly, just to make sure that we haven’t lapsed into enjoyment again – The Lunatic is a circular narrative, following various incongruous dilemmas faced by five inhabitants of twentieth century St. Petersburg. The first character we meet is a woman called Anna, who is stalking a young man that she believes to be the reincarnation of Anton Chekhov. She does not know exactly why she thinks that this is the case, but attributes it to a mixture of ‘gut feeling’ and the fact that the man in question has a ‘sensitive nose’. That the man is clearly a soldier appears to have no effect on her conviction.

Is she a lunatic? We are not told. Before we have time to convince ourselves that she is indeed as mad as a fruit pie, the narrative moves on to its second subject who, it turns out, is the same young soldier, harbouring problems of his own. He has – poor chap – fallen in love; not with the solid figure of some comely Russian beauty, but with a woman he has never seen and desires merely on the basis of her cough, which can be heard several times throughout a recording of Shostakovich’s second piano sonata.

Is he a lunatic? It may be so. And yet, before we are allowed to witness how long this peculiar obsession of his will last, we have moved on again; not, as we suppose, to the coughing woman, but to the pianist. He at first appears to be a relatively sane personality, though soon enough a misfortunate occurs which allows us to see him in a different light. On the morning of a concert in which he is scheduled to play the same sonata, he awakes to find his left hand missing. When he leaves the house, he sees the hand passing by in an expensive car with a beautiful woman. When he arrives at the concert-hall to cancel the show, he finds the hand playing French music in front of a packed house. Having already lost his hand, the poor Russian is now obliged to listen to a concerto by Maurice Ravel. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the man is arrested on returning home, excused of breaking into a library and ripping pages from old copies of Pushkin. These crimes, of course, were committed by his absent left hand, which has now conveniently returned to its former position, making it rather hard for the man to deny involvement. The long and fragmented conversation that ensues between the ‘guilty’ pianist and the officer (who for no particular reason is kitted out in a dressing-gown) is one of the most entertaining passages in the book. The following excerpt captures the mood very well, as the pianist tries to argue his way out of the strange circumstances in which he has found himself:

‘Oh please. Why would I do such a thing? I have nothing against Pushkin’

‘Nothing against Pushkin, eh?’ said the officer, meaningfully.

‘Nothing at all. I rather like him, in fact.’

‘You rather like him, eh?’

‘Yes indeed’ said the troubled pianist.

‘What would you say you liked about him?’

‘Well, his poetry mainly…’

‘What about his poetry?’

All he could remember was an exam question he’d been given at school which asked ‘Was Pushkin a psychologist?’; a question he hadn’t even answered (he went for ‘Was Tolstoy an airhead?’) ‘I don’t know’ he said, at last ‘The psychological bits, I guess’

‘The psychological bits?’

‘Yeah, sure’

‘What do you like about the psychological bits?’

‘I don’t know. They’re kind of… well… psychological. If you know what I mean’

‘I know exactly what you don’t mean’ said the officer, confusing him. ‘Now, would you please explain how it is you came to lose your hand?’

‘I don’t know. I woke up, and it was no longer there!’

The officer frowned, sneezed and wiped his fat nose.

‘What exactly do you mean by psychological?’ he asked.

The prevailing tone is a passage such as this is comic, light and amusingly absurd: character traits which bear absolutely no resemblance to the author I interviewed, though it is quite possible that he would see the excerpt above in an entirely different light. Words of which I know him to be fond – ‘pitiful’, ‘tragic’ and ‘empty’ – would suffice. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to find that the chapter that follows the consistently droll conversation between the pianist and the officer is the infamous chapter fourteen, in which all three of these words appear several times.

I shall return to chapter fourteen shortly. Firstly, to tie up the ends of the narrative, which the author does not quite abandon (though it would surprise no one if he did). True to form, we are not allowed to follow the fate of the pianist and know not whether he was arrested, or whether he was able to prove that he could not be responsible for his own hand on occasions that it left his body (an interesting moral dilemma which Turgidovsky shows some reluctance to dissect). Instead, we delve into the life of the dressing-gown glad officer who, as I have neglected to point out thus far, has been handicapped by somewhat of a chronic sneezing problem, the solution to which he cannot find, though his inept doctor has recommended a caviar based diet. Suspecting that his surgeon has shares in the sturgeon egg trade (the prince of misery engaging in light wordplay?) he has decided that his only hope lies in his old family doctor, who lives in Moscow, a city for which, in the tradition of certain sisters, the police officer yearns. Indeed, it has long been the officers hope to get a transfer to the Moscow police department; a procedure that is relatively standard, but has in this case been held up by removal of a secretary from the central office of the St. Petersburg branch. The story switches immediately to this secretary who, it turns out, is about to start her first day in a mental asylum, making her the first character in the novel to be officially recognised by the system as being a true ‘lunatic’, though unsurprisingly she seems in many ways the most sane, aside from her belief that she is an international cricketer (a particular surprising type of delusion for a Russian). In the asylum she meets a conglomeration of bizarre personalities, many of which seem to be lifted from other people’s books, often with seemingly ironic modifications. They include an idiotic prince, a bitter baker, an axe-wielding old woman, a train-driving prostitute and a cherry-obsessed doctor. Their inclusion in the narrative, however, serves little discernible purpose. One senses at this point that the author has almost lost interest in his own story. Possibly realising this himself, he draws it to a swift conclusion, introducing as his final character the woman with which he started the story. As to whether she is joining the other inmates of the asylum or whether she is there in some sort of professional capacity, we are never told.

So is she a lunatic? Of course she is. In Turgidovsky’s world, we are all lunatics. The use of the definite article in the title is simply a joke prodding us towards the conclusion that the novel contains a single definite lunatic, pushing us thence to the realisation that everyone in the story is a potential lunatic, before finishing us off with the author’s assertion in the final chapter that everyone is a definite lunatic. But we must not confuse our two meanings of the word ‘funny’. For Turgidovsky, madness or lunacy is not to be laughed at. Since we are all lunatics, laughter is therefore banished from the world altogether. The author himself claims to have laughed only once in his life, and that by mistake (he also remembers an instance sometime in the 1960s when for no good reason he produced a smile). His philosophy, accordingly, is one of unremitting pessimism. This is all very well for some, but his attempts to lure his readers onto the same unhappy path are surely misguided. In his efforts to get his readers thinking in one way, he is much more likely to drive them in the opposite direction. Chapter fourteen opens with the following sentence:

‘Stop feeling sorry for these people. They are idiots. They are dreamers. They deserve all that they get. Their lives are neither amusing nor of any value. They are worthless souls.’

As my personal experience with Turgidovsky has taught me, these opinions are not only put forth candidly, but are to a certain extent toned down. In conversation, the Russian has a rare ability to make a sentence like ‘they are worthless souls’ sound like an example of naïve romanticism. Indeed, though many have criticised him for including chapter fourteen within his novel, his only concerns are that the incriminating passage is ‘too soft and too short’. The fact that I put forward the idea that the book was ‘funny’ merely cemented his judgment on this matter. As the author sees it, the purpose of chapter fourteen is to assure readers that to think of the book as funny is fundamentally mistaken. Nonetheless, if literary theory tells us anything, it is that the author is never in charge. Turgidovsky’s pernicious desire to make clear his philosophies suggest that he is either in the wrong job or going about his present job in entirely the wrong way.

Turgidovsky has not always been a novelist. He worked for almost fifteen years as a civil servant in St. Petersburg, before becoming a school teacher in his late forties. After five years in this job he was sacked for ‘malpractice’ and accused of following what was described as an ‘unflinchingly pessimistic teaching program’ which he is said to have based on the maxims that ‘hope is futile’ and ‘we are all mad, no joke’ – sentences which all of his pupils were expected to copy out onto the blackboard at the start of every school day. Appealing against his discharge, Turgidovsky argued that such methods were strictly in keeping with the Russian tradition and that anyone who thought otherwise was unpatriotic, worthless and weak-willed. ‘Anyone who tries to instil in our youth any kind of hope is backward’ he later claimed, shortly before his appeal was quashed, adding to it a stream of personal philosophies which confirmed him as unemployable, except perhaps in pest control or, as it turned out, as a novelist (On his return he is said to have written a letter to the school, thanking them for sacking him and apologising for his appeal, adding that their behaviour had helped him to crystallise his pessimistic outlook. It made perfect sense to him that the state wouldn’t allow him to warn children of the great miseries that would befall them.)

Banned from Russian schools, Turgidovsky’s program of pure pessimism continued unabated in The Lunatic, the book which he wrote whilst travelling around Europe, with very little money in his pocket and finished shortly after his return to St. Petersburg. Considering the circumstances, it is not surprising that the book should be of the more miserable variety, though it does seem unlikely that the author’s outlook could be in any way more depressing that it already was. As to the source of this bottomless pit of woe, I can offer no answers. Turgidovsky’s refusal to talk about his childhood is, however, informative, as is the fact that, when I persisted to ask him questions relating to his parents; he threatened to scoop out my heart with a spoon (yet another incident that combined to make that first interview a wholly memorable one).

There are still questions left unanswered. First and foremost – that which I have flirted with throughout this review – is the question of humour and style. If Turgidovsky was so obsessed with instilling in his readers a sense of utter despondency, why are huge swaths of the book written in a rather cool, albeit blackly comic manner? Does he intend to lure us into enjoying ourselves in the hope of machine gunning all our hopes at the end of the book, or is he secretly less of a manic depressive than he appears to be? If the former is true, why then does he fail to crush our fun – is it because most people would rather laugh than face facts, or because his treatise against doing so is put so earnestly that it simply can’t be taken seriously? And at the bottom of all of this, the ultimate question – regardless of authorial intentions, what does The Lunatic offer us? Does it preach pessimism with any success?

A tentative ‘yes’ may suffice. Repellent as a personality, with ill-conceived ideas concerning approaches to literature, Turgidovsky has at least created a novel that may well entertain against his wishes, but does not quite fail to frighten in some small measure. For where chapter fourteen fails to turn a readers mind, the much shorter final chapter holds within it a greater power, as it rattles off a string of deliberate misquotations in a spirit of the eternal killjoy. The negativity of the last paragraph is glorious in its gloom, re-invoking the ghost of Chekhov before slapping this spectre in the face, damning the late greater writer for his fatal sparks of hopefulness in mankind, which the modern novelist declines to share:

‘We shall not find peace, we shall not hear the angels. If we see the sky sparkling with diamonds, it shall signal the end of the world, and we shall certainly die. Can you not hear the river? It is the Neva that flows through St. Petersburg. It is called the Neva and it says ‘Never’. Never, never, never. You shall never have it. Neva.’

This passage also invokes memories of my fateful interview: a desperate event in my life which, very appropriately, raises many laughs in retrospect (there’s no denying it – desperation is hilarious). Emerging from that dark cellar café in Geneva, I felt somewhat as though I had been mentally raped. At the same time, I felt a feeling somewhat akin to that you get after having eaten a square meal. My immediate thoughts were of a few moments nearing the end of the interview, when I asked Turgidovsky whether there was any truth in the rumours that he was once arrested for crashing a funeral party.

‘It is certainly true’ he said, without remorse. ‘It has long been a habit of mine’.

‘So you still do it?’

He fell silent. I decided to change tack.

‘Why do you do it?’ I asked. ‘Do you enjoy funeral parties?’

‘Oh no’ he said. ‘I never enjoy anything’

‘Oh’ I said

‘But I am drawn to them nevertheless’ he admitted.

‘Right’.

‘The food is bad, but the misery, the misery is very edible’

‘Oh’ I said.

Review by Heidi Kohlenberg

Further Reading:

All Things Turgidovsky

The Turgidovsky Archive