Are people still reading Sasha Sokolov? I surely hope so! Few novels have entered me so deeply as his A School for Fools. (When I recently left Russia after 30 years, I left behind an enormous library, taking with me only a couple dozen books – A School for Fools was one of them – the only novel.) The essay that follows below is a good, old-fashioned scholarly article. It was written at the request of D. Barton Johnson, who was putting together a special issue of Canadian-American Slavic Studies devoted to Sokolov’s work. Johnson reached out to me because he had seen and liked a Russian-language essay on Sokolov and Andrei Bitov that I published in 1986 in the Israel-based journal 22. As I was doing the work of scanning and re-editing the article, I discovered that a Russian-language quote was garbled in the printed version. I correct that error here, so we can actually say that this is the first full and correct version of this article to appear in published form. That may not be grounds for fireworks, but it’s pleasing to me.
JOHN FREEDMAN
Harvard University
MEMORY, IMAGINATION AND THE LIBERATING FORCE OF LITERATURE IN SASHA SOKOLOV’S A SCHOOL FOR FOOLS
Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 21, Nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1987), 265-278.
“I know how you love to make up different stories, when I’m talking to you I invent a lot too.”—The narrator(s) of A School for Fools [1]
Gogol’, an apparent ancestor of Sasha Sokolov, once said the secret of success for any writer was merely to “describe a room and a street that were familiar to him.” [2] Perhaps thinking along similar lines, Andrei Bitov’s narrator in Pushkin House tells us, ‘And if a man has wisdom of heart, and he wants to inform the world about what is on his mind, then he will inevitably possess the talent of the word if only he believes in himself.” [3] Of course, despite their seductive simplicity, such comments probably do more to mystify the creative process than to clarify it. But each writer in his own way points to the simplicity and the personal conviction that must lie at the heart of good writing. Both writers also implicitly indicate the unlimited panorama which inevitably opens up before any writer who contemplates creating a work of imaginative literature. Ultimately, the possibilities of a literary work are endless since writing is limited only by the writer’s imagination and his powers of observation.
Discussions of Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Foolshave heretofore tended to focus on that novel’s complexities, and rightly so. It is, after all, a profoundly puzzling work whose beauty at times seems to rise mysteriously out of its contradictions. But Vladimir Nabokov’s cryptic, oft-quoted characterization of the work as “charming, tragic and touching” appears upon reflection to be highly judicious, for despite the novel’s complexity, the feeling with which a reader is left upon finishing it is one of warmth and profound understanding rather than puzzlement. Despite the false starts, the loose ends, the deliberate mystifications, the baffling interchange of narrative voices, and the unexpected transformations of one character into another, the “wisdom of heart” displayed by the young schizophrenic narrator remains constant throughout and sets the tone of the work.
A School for Fools is an anti-intellectual work in that its revelations almost always derive from the realm of the senses. The narrator’s power of insight lies in his unique vision of the world, which is the result of his own particular mental deficiency. His capacities of perception, intuition and imagination (concepts which are inextricably linked) are highly developed, even if his powers of rational reasoning are not. Describing a morning meeting with his imagined lover Veta, he recalls hearing “the uncut grass growing on the lawns,” and the sounds of “a blind man wearing dark glasses, the lenses of which reflected the dusty foliage of the weeping acacias and the scudding clouds. . .” (E158/R116). He can hear two old men talking through an open window, and he even remembers that the subject of their conversation was the New Orleans fire of 1882. Whether such observations are the product of memory or of imagination is beside the point; to refer once again to Bitov’s formulation, the young narrator has something to tell, and he tells it well, believing in himself. Describing what he experiences when out for a walk, the narrator says he easily finds “things and phenomena, both in his surroundings and his memory, which he loves to think about, but which cannot be memorized. He continues, “No one is capable of memorizing: the sound of rain, the aroma of night violets, premonition and many other things” (E158/R116). It is the immediate perceptions themselves—most often prompted by a concrete, sensual experience—that he is compelled to relate. Their role in any sort of a larger, interconnected reality is of secondary importance.
Time and again the narrator proves himself to be the possessor of an abundantly resourceful, imaginative mind, yet when he asks the author’s leave to tell one more story at the end of the novel, he is unable to form the necessary words to set his tale in motion. Only when the author prompts him with the meaningless phrase “and then” is he able to proceed. The novel itself begins in a similar fashion as he struggles to find the proper words to begin his narrative: “All right, but how do you begin, what words do you use?” (E11/R7). This question immediately leads him to form a clumsy syntactical construction (“the station pond”) which occupies his attention until he finds a satisfactory variant (“the pond near the station”). Having settled the ticklish problem of language, and more importantly, having set the wheels of narrative in motion, he is ready to tell his story. Still, however, he hesitates and decides a few words of explanation about the station itself are necessary. We see here in miniature the narrative method which is employed throughout the work: An insignificant beginning gives rise to an observation which in turn leads to a digression. Starting with nothing but “a room and a familiar street,” as Gogol’ put it, the narrator spins a complex tale from a modest beginning.
A recurrent element in the narrator’s construction of his story is his constant elaboration of motifs, images and ideas. At one point he appears to be sitting at his desk at home, where he attracts his father’s attention by shrieking. The boy’s attention—and visions—drift until he fixes on the image of a garment, which he tentatively identifies as a robe. The robe is then referred to as an overcoat, an overcoat with no lining, a lining with no overcoat, then just a light coat. However, he offers, if this garment is white, it may in fact be a light medical frock or perhaps a scientist’s laboratory jacket (E138-9/R100-1). This bouncing from one image to another, the narrative expansion based entirely on a single starter image, is typical of the narrator’s style. As the short passage develops, the reader and narrator are joined together as witnesses of a world in which, appropriately enough, reality bears a striking resemblance to the time of day Sokolov refers to in the title of his second novel Between Dog and Wolf, that is, that period when the powers of perception are diminished by the confounding mix of daylight and dusk when a dog may appear to be a wolf or a wolf a dog. The diminished ability of one’s perceptions to function properly in this transitional period is roughly equivalent to the narrator’s inexact ability properly to define the coat. This allows for the expansion of the image into several different possibilities: It may be the robe of his father who has entered his room to find out why he is screaming; it may be Dr. Zauze attending to him at the hospital; or it may be Acatov in his laboratory jacket. By the time we learn that it is, in fact, Acatov (or at least that the narrator has decided to conjure Acatov in his memory to the exclusion of the other possibilities), the reader has had the opportunity to share in an unfolding cognitive process similar to the narrator’s, where meaning emerges rather than exists, and every eventuality is possible at any given moment. Whether all this is imagined or not is irrelevant. [4] The literary fact exists and we have had the opportunity, if only briefly, to experience simultaneously several different possibilities.
The ultimate significance of such digressions is to expand the scope of the narrative to the furthest possible degree. The boy’s narrative, and ultimately the text of A School for Fools, exists primarily to realize the greatest number of possibilities and to fill in the gaps which exist in what he terms his selective memory. The possible, then, is grist for the literary mill, which in turn creates literary possibilities outside the narrow realm of “reality.” At the heart of such digressions are the possibilities of imagination and of literature. The émigré Russian critics Petr Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis put it nicely when they wrote in reference to A School for Fools, “Reality respectfully and quietly made way for literature, enabling the creation of a unique book in which the literary game and the writer’s style are everything.” [5] In effect, if it can be imagined, it can be literature, and consequently, if it can be literature, it can become real, if only as an element of a literary text.
The narrator’s basic need to fill empty spaces is expressed repeatedly throughout the novel and is exemplified by his need to shout into empty barrels and by his hypersensitivity to empty rooms. This probably also extends to his sexual frustrations, which may in a sense be the ultimate need to fill an empty space, both physically and emotionally. In essence, the narrator’s need to tell stories, to talk, to fill the silence of his mind, is merely one more manifestation of his fear of anything resembling a vacuum. This need, or even obsession, is exemplified by an instance following one of Savl’s soliloquies in which the teacher begins to suspect that he is dead. His young student, the narrator, reports: “He fell silent, his voice no longer filled the emptiness of space, and the sounds of the evening city became more distinct” (My italics. E171/R125). Incapable of tolerating total silence, his acute senses of hearing and observation immediately move to fill the void left by Savl, and he proceeds to describe in exhaustive detail all that he can hear or imagine hearing.
The interconnection of the narrator’s sense of identity, his sexual urge, his fear of empty places, his impulse to scream, and his impulse to invent stories is illustrated by a visit he pays to Acatov, the father of his beloved Veta, and in whose company—for obvious reasons—he is almost always recognizably agitated. Inspired by Saul’s exhortation to shout intoxicatedly, the narrator contemplates his next action:
“The fire barrel beckons you with its emptiness: this emptiness, and the stillness abiding in the garden and the house and the barrel, soon became unbearable for you, a person who is energetic, decisive and efficient. That’s why you don’t want to reflect further on what to shout into the barrel—you shout the first thing that comes into your head: I’m Nymphea, Nymphea!—you shout. And the barrel overflows with your incomparable voice, releasing its surfeit into the beautiful dacha sky, towards the tops of the pines—and the voice rolls over the stuffy dacha mansards and attics. . .” (E137/R100).
The narrator’s voice, pouring forth the intoxicated sounds of his assumed name like an ejaculation into the barrel, continues to rise up and roll away above a litany of local objects and places. This filling of the barrel with the sound of his name, which spills out over the rim and permeates the entire neighborhood, reaffirms his identity by both statement and deed. [6] It is by the act of narration, of making stories, that he is able to reaffirm his identity when he is not attempting to do so by shouting.
It has often been pointed out that the notions of time and reality are two of the novel’s central themes. Related to these notions— and perhaps even more crucial to the function of the text—is the nature of the perceptive faculties themselves, through which time and reality are processed. At various times the narrator defines the fundamental difference between his own perceptive skills and those of this father, who is one of the most common, realistic figures in the novel, and therefore most antithetical to the narrator. Describing his own all-inclusive, limitless manner of perception, the narrator says, “as I usually do when no one hinders my thinking, I simply thought about everything I saw” (E67/R47), while his father, he tells us, “sees only what he sees” (E138/R101). This critical difference between the way the boy and his father perceive the world makes their worlds fundamentally different from one another. The narrator’s ability to “simply think about everything he sees” gives rise to the streams of what appear on the surface to be only tangentially connected images and thoughts which form the basis of his liberated, imaginary world.
The narrator’s all-accommodating attitude towards reality enables him to transform time into something fluid and pliant, freed from its traditional linear constraints, and to incorporate several potential realities into one, as he does with the incident of the indeterminate coat. It also provides for striking images which in more traditional literature we might be satisfied to describe as metaphorical speech.[7] Take, for example, the narrator’s presentation of an encounter with Savl, who is responding to one of the narrator’s outbursts of screaming. Savl, recounting that the narrator’s scream had induced the school’s deaf-mute old stoker to rise up and shout “bacilli” three times, tells of the force which accompanied the outburst: “And so vast was his anger, and so powerful his passion, that the fire in the furnaces was extinguished by his bellow” (E136/R99). This is not Pil’niak’s ornamental prose or Olesha’s vision “through the wrong end of the binoculars,” [8] or even Bulgakov’s devilish fantasy, although it is probably not wrong to say that these and similar writers have had an impact on Sokolov’s literary sensibility. This is not “real” in any traditional sense, yet neither is it a mere fantastic image. If it is a metaphor, the reference remains obscure. But the beauty it evokes is immediate and the image it provides is concrete. It acquires the lilting simplicity of a folkloric description which the reader accepts unquestioningly, without pretense or prejudice. There is no need to look for the “real” event which gave rise to the image: Did the deaf-mute in his anger stand up and punctuate his statements by blowing out the fire? Did he exhale forcefully while yelling in such a way as to make a flame flicker and even go out? Was it, in fact, an act of physical violence alone which caused the fire to be extinguished and which Savl remembers so vividly that he has fabricated the memory of an actual sound? After all, the source of the bellow, a deaf-mute, is presumably incapable of speaking. But such suppositions trivialize the image contained in the phrase itself, which demands to be accepted as self-contained and non-referential. Sokolov’s choice of a schizophrenic as narrator fundamentally alters our reception of the images he supplies.
Immediately following this incident, Savl tells of students holding playing cards that turn into the leaves of a forest willow. Is the “real” basis for this image a reflection in a mirror or a window? Perhaps, but in the context of the narrative’s inner logic, such speculation at least misses the point, if it does not border on nonsense, for ultimately this is not what the text brings to its reader. What it does bring is something infinitely more simple and direct. In the end, this is no more a mere story about a schizophrenic, or the disease of schizophrenia, than Moby Dick is a story about a whale. It is rather an exercise in how a schizophrenic sensibility can expand the literary process to include new observations of reality, and, more narrowly, to expand literature’s ability to see.
Frequently the narrator’s war with himself causes each manifestation of his personality to remember the same incident differently. For example, we may consider the instance where the narrator attempts to recall whether or not Savl said anything when he gave him the book that so displeased the boy’s father. The primary narrator, the more schizoid and rebellious of the two, insists that he did, while the more normal half, who occasionally exhibits an effort to “heal” himself by merging with his more unruly half according to the orders of Dr. Zauze, insists that he did not (E63-4/R44-5). While this brief incident has no impact on the narrative as a whole, and certainly does not affect the plot, it is emblematic of the way the narrative can mushroom into something larger and more complex at any moment, rushing in to fill any void that might exist. In effect, the reader is left contemplating four different possibilities of the event, all of which must be considered equally legitimate. [9] Whether or not Savl said anything is of no importance to the story, but since the question is raised in the narrative, we must assume that it has some function. I suggest that the function is to emphasize that the truth of the event becomes moot and what we are left with is the literary fact that is printed on the page. It is no longer a question of whether or not the teacher said anything; the narrated fact that he did or he did not is a literary product which engages the reader. That this false start leads us nowhere is unimportant, for it is exemplary of those instances in the novel when just such a multiple version of a remembered occurrence does lead us into a new digressive tale. Fred Moody takes steps toward explaining this when he writes that “both aspects of the narrator’s personality are simultaneously ignorant and cognizant of episodes that appear to be presented as the attempts of one knowledgeable voice to answer the questions of his uninformed alter ego.” [10] Such a formulation is true when viewed on the level of character and plot development; the linear development of the story, however, is of limited importance in this work. The device’s ultimate significance is rather to be found in its literary function as a narrative-inducing element.
The narrator repeatedly responds to internal and external stimuli which suggest mini-narratives to him. A walk through town brings him into contact with a series of signs in store windows, some of which encourage him to elaborate a story, some of which elicit no response from him. The sign over a movie theater, obviously reprocessed through the narrator’s faulty or selective memory, MOVIE-LEAFFALL-THEATER, induces him to tell of a visit he will someday make there with Veta. The next sign he comes across, BICYCLE RENTAL, is the source of another extended digression which relates the story of a pretty blonde, a newly-married clerk, who compliments Veta and the narrator on what a fine couple they make. As the scene develops, Veta invites the clerk to have tea with them sometime, and she accepts, proposing to bring a cake and some truffles (E160-1/R117-8). This digression, like most throughout the work, consists almost entirely of finely-observed details which have little or nothing to do with the incident or stimulus which gave rise to the story in the first place. While the novel as a whole is nearly plotless, the numerous plots of the stories told by the narrator are very intricate indeed, as are the lyrical descriptive passages which are intertwined with them. The seemingly meaningless trivia of reality—such as storefront signs—serve as springboards which catapult the narrator into a world of imagination which is so possible and so real for him that it becomes his only reality. The way in which certain store signs strike a receptive note with the narrator, while others do not, gives the reader a glimpse into the way his selective memory functions.
Similar to the stimulus of signs, and the device of the dueling narrators mentioned previously, is the narrator’s penchant for fixing on a word or a sound, which provides him an opportunity to expand something of insignificance into something of literary significance. We have already discussed the way in which the undefined perception of a coat provides the narrator with the opportunity to broaden the impact of his narrative. We may take as a further example the narrator’s recollections of seeing a young girl come to the pond near his parents’ dacha. He describes how she would come, swim and wash her dog. But having begun with this short list of activities, he is unable to refrain from continuing the narrative chain. His digression consists of a seemingly endless string of minute, insignificant details of daily existence which the girl, who during the course of the digression matures into a woman, will encounter or repeat over the years of her life (E68-9/R48-9). Many of the activities she engages in are clearly suggested to the narrator by experiences he has had and which he works into the narrative thread elsewhere under different guises, while many of the activities appear to be random fabrications. As with all the other digressions in the novel, this one about the girl develops from a mix of remembered and imagined events. He brings the story full-cirele when he ends the list by telling how she remembers coming to the pond, swimming and washing her dog.
The structure of this narrative segment emphasizes once again the cyclical, non-linear nature of time and of human existence. Not only does the girl of the digression return to the beginning point, but the narrator too, having completed this specific foray into story-making, returns to the point at which he had begun. He will now continue on until his narrative thread once again brings him back to a familiar point. D. Barton Johnson has astutely noted that the narrative of A School for Fools is structured paradigmatically rather than syntagmatically. [11] That is to say that the narrative as a whole—the novel itself—is built in a series of recurring images and events, rather than on a linear, consequential development of plot. Something as simple as the notion of chalk, for instance, acquires significance as it is repeatedly reintroduced into the narrative by the student narrator in different contexts. A mere partial list of the references to the word “chalk” will reveal that it is: a piece of chalk which a railroad commission marks train cars with (E46/R32); an instrument for making graffiti (E46/R32); the name of a train station (E44/R31); a schoolroom utensil (E186/R137); a girl in a fairy tale made of chalk (E145/R106); a morning that smells of chalk (E175/R128). The assistant principal of the special school, Tinbergen, is also said to be made of chalk (E168/R123), as are the students themselves (E185/R137). Keeping in mind the artistic credos of Gogol’ and Bitov, to which we referred above, we can easily arrive at an understanding of why this particular image recurs so frequently. It is an object well-known to the narrator and it is something dear to his heart because for him it has the pleasant connotations of his beloved teacher Pavel/Savl Petrovich and of his school, which provides the setting for such a large part of his life experience. Thus, it is possible to determine the psychological motivation for much of the novel’s content.
The novel’s primary focus and most important function, however, is literary and not psychological. This idea is borne out by taking note of the recurring images that continually reappear in new contexts throughout the work. If one fails to do this, the “stories written on the veranda” that form chapter 2 may at first blush appear to be unmotivated insertions into the text. Although it is true that they are structured somewhat differently from the rest of the text (they are more literary in a traditional sense, i.e., short stories presented in a linear fashion), they should not be considered separate from the narrative flow as a whole. Most of the major characters, events and images in them have counterparts in the rest of the narrative. One of the more obvious examples is the tale AS ALWAYS ON SUNDAY, which tells the story of a prosecutor with a white countenance who reads a newspaper and cannot stand relatives. The same description of the narrator’s father can be found elsewhere in the novel (Compare E81/R58 and E64/R45). In the independent story from chapter 2 the prosecutor’s wife has a lock and key put on the dacha’s outhouse, which anticipates a slightly different instance when the narrator’s mother is unable to find the key to the padlock on the gate of the cemetery where his grandmother is buried. Similarly, in the “veranda story” the prosecutor’s wife uses a special shovel to clean the outhouse, anticipating the moment when the narrator’s mother is said to clean her mother’s grave with a shovel. Probably not coincidentally, both of these entirely separate narratives take place on a Sunday (Compare E79-81/R56-8 and E124-5/R89-90). Similar parallels can be shown to exist between other of the “veranda stories” and those passages which occur in the body of the novel.
Thus, the “stories written on the veranda” are merely further elaborations or expansions of ideas close to the narrator. But as independent tales which have been extracted from the flow of his thought process, and which have been given a more traditional, literary structure, they seem more obscure than the narratives he develops elsewhere in context. The stories, then, serve to indicate the narrator’s literary pretensions; literary creation offers the schizophrenic young boy the perfect escape from the confines of the world he inhabits. This suggests to the reader that the narration itself, the telling of the tale, is the foremost function of the text, while the actual stories which are told are of secondary significance. Once the reader recognizes the cyclical, repetitive nature of the text, he may stop searching for plot clues and linear developments and appreciate the beauty and merits of each individual instance as it passes. More often than not, if something is missed the first time around, it will return again later.
At times the content of the narrative merges with its execution, giving rise to a highly poetic prose. We may take as an example a conversation between the narrator and Savl which is interrupted by the sound of music emanating from somewhere else in the school. As the effect of the music becomes stronger, the narrator’s speech becomes infected with a rhythmic, musical repetition of sound, which is unfortunately lost in translation:
“Но среди голосов, иполнявших кантату, среди голосов, ничего не значивших и ничего не стоивших, среди голосов, свивавшихся в бестолковый, бессмысленный, безголосый шумный клубок шума, среди голосов обреченных на безвестность, среди голосов немыслимо заурядных и фальшивых, был голос явившийся нам воплощением чистоты, силы и смертельной торжественной горечи” (R127).
(But amid the voices performing this cantata, among the voices which meant nothing and were worth nothing, among the voices mingling in that senseless, meaningless, voiceless noisy clot of sound, among voices doomed to oblivion, among the incredibly commonplace and off-key voices, there was one voice which came to us as the embodiment of purity, strength and triumphant mortal grief) (E173).
The continual repetition of the sibilants “sh,” “shch,” “ch,” “s,” and “z” does as much to convey the notion of music as does the meaning of the words themselves. The musical moment comes to a crescendo when the narrator describes the quality of the one voice which rose above the common din, in a manner reminiscent of biblical prose: [12] “. . . pel golos bel, bel golos byl, plyl golos, golos plyl i taial, byl golos tal” (R127) (“. . . the voice sang white, white was the voice, buoyant the voice, buoyant and melting, melted the voice” [E173]). The obvious merging of stylistic technique with semantic content forces the reader to recognize that the story line is only one of several elements of the narrative, and at moments such as these, its role is a minor one.
Although occasionally it has been observed that there is something curiously un-Russian about A School for Fools, several commentators have also pointed out the novel’s debt to the Russian literary tradition, primarily to Pushkin and Gogol’. [13] This is not a contradiction, for both stances, it seems to me, have validity. And the truth of the paradox is also the proof of Sokolov’s uniqueness. There are, in fact, frequent textual references to other Russian works, and as in Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls, digressions are a crucial, and pervasive, element in Sokolov’s novel.
But, in fact, this is where Sokolov’s first novel parts company with the majority of works in the Russian tradition. His meticulous play with the intertwining notions of memory, imagination, identity, and literature is far more elaborate than that which can be observed even in Pushkin and Gogol’, and it is far more conspicuous than that which we find in other contemporary Russian writers, with the possible exception of Andrei Bitov. In the contemporary Slavic world, we are more accustomed to seeing these techniques among such writers of Central Europe as Wislawa Szymborska and Tadeusz Konwicki of Poland, and Milan Kundera of Czechoslovakia, where the tradition of the avant-garde is more deeply ingrained. In Western Europe and Latin America, writers such as Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have long been recognized masters of this style, and in American letters Gilbert Sorrentino is a good example of a writer who brings the themes of imagination, story-telling and identity to the forefront. Thus, while the complex structure and fractured narrative delivery of A School for Fools may in some ways be an example of a late Russian flowering of the surrealist novel, [14] it is equally important to point out its affinities with more modern trends in the contemporary literary world. Like all of these writers, Sokolov requires that his reader assume an active role in the task of reading, which itself becomes a part of the creative process. The result is that literature is revealed to be a two-way process in which the reader’s and the writer’s tasks are of equal importance.
Sokolov’s affinity with these modern writers is certainly one of the reasons why he, more than any Russian writer apart from Nabokov, seems to have transcended the limits of his national tradition. Written while the author worked as a game-keeper along the Volga River, A School for Fools is probably not the product of direct influence from any of these corners, but rather an example of a unique writer who sought to describe something near to his heart. In doing so, Sokolov produced a work that exhibits literature’s ability to transcend the limits of reality by tapping into the rich creative possibilities of imagination and memory.
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* I wish to acknowledge the contribution made to this article by my colleague Hallie Anne White, whose numerous critical comments were indispensable to me. Naturally, I alone am responsible for any faulty logic which may remain.
1. All quotations from the text are from Carl. R. Proffer’s translation and will be followed by references to both the English (A School for Fools [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977]), and Russian texts (Shkola dlia durakov [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 2nd, corrected ed. 1983)), i.e., (Exx/Rxx). Reference for the epigraph: (E57/R40). I will retain the spellings of the translation at all times, i.e., “”Acatov” rather than “Akatov,”” while I will adhere to scholarly transliteration for all other reference to Russian names and texts.
2. Boris Eikhenbaum cites these words reported by Pavel Annenkov on page 270 in “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ is Made,” in Gogol’ from the Twentieth Century, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 269-91.
3. Andrei Bitov, Pushkinskii dom (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978), p. 140. My translation.
4. The indications are strong that the vast majority of what makes up the schizophrenic’s narrative is imagined. He says at the end of the novel in reference to his classmate Rosa Windova, “. . . possibly such a girl never existed, and we invented her ourselves, just like everything else in the world” (E227/R168).
5. Petr Vail’, Aleksandr Genis, Sovremennaia russkaia proza (Ann Arbor: Ermitazh, 1982), p. 163. My translation.
6. Note that the cathartic and self-reaffirming effect that this scream has for the narrator is lost in translation. Whereas prior to this outburst, each of the narrator’s screams has been rendered merely as “a-a-a-a-a!” (or occasionally as “0-0-0!” [E114-5/R83-4], this particular scream is actually the echo of the boy’s shouting “I’m Nymphea!” [la – Nimfeia!). The result is that the careening sounds break down into something similar to several consecutive first-person pronouns (ia), followed by the usual rendition of the narrator’s primal scream. This cluster of “Ia – Nimfeia!” with the broken down vocalic string would appear to bolster the idea that the boy closely identifies himself both with the beauty of the flower, nymphea, and with the pain and sexual release of the primal scream, “a-a-a-a!”
7. In fact, in a fine article about narrative and discourse, Cynthia Simmons notes that the narrator of Sokolov’s novel “conveys major themes or concerns of the novel metaphorically” (See page 87 of “Cohesion and Coherence in Pathological Discourse and Its Literary Representation in Sasha Sokolov’s Skola dlja durakov,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, 33 [1986], 71-96.) In essence, however, Simmons and I are not in disagreement; while Simmons is primarily concerned with the impact of a schizophrenic sensibility on the language and structure of verbal or written communications, my focus here is on the literary text’s use of a schizophrenic sensibility to “improve” upon reality—i.e., to expand its possibilities—by violating its basic laws.
8. I refer to Nils Ake Nilsson’s formulation in his article, “Through the Wrong End of Binoculars: An Introduction of Jurij Olesa,” in Major Soviet Writers, ed. Edward J. Brown (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 254-79.
9. This is a device which is similarly used by Andrei Bitov in his novel Pushkinskii dom. In this work, the far more consciously literary narrator purposefully creates what he calls “versions and variants” of the same event. While the motivation for multiple versions of a single event is different in A School for Fools, the end result—that the possibilities of reality, and literature, are greatly expanded—is similar. For some elaboration of this idea, see my essay “Iskrivlenie real’nosti i vremeni v poiske istiny v romanakh ‘’Pushkinskii dom’ i ‘Shkola dlia durakov’ (Nenauchnyi ocherk),” 22, No. 48 (1986), pp. 201-10.
10. Fred Moody, “Madness and the Pattern of Freedom in Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 16 (1979), p. 13.
11. See D. Barton Johnson, “A Structural Analysis of Sasha Sokolov’s School for Fools: A Paradigmatic Novel,” Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, eds. Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eekman (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1980), pp. 212-15.
12. This passage bears a striking phonetic and rhythmic resemblance to the opening of the Gospel according to John: “V nachale bylo Slovo, i Slovo bylo u Boga, i Slovo bylo Bog” (“in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”).
13. Alexandra H. Karriker’s fine review of A School for Fools (“Double Vision: Sasha Sokolov’s School for Fools,” World Literature Today, 53, No. 4 (1979), 610-14) briefly points out references to Olesha, Belyi, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Pushkin, Gogol’, and the byliny. Alexander Boguslawski (“Sokolov’s School for Fools: An Escape From Socialist Realism,” Slavic and East European Jornal, 28, No. 1 [1983], 91-97) has shown the novel’s response to Socialist Realism, while others have noted the similarity with Pushkin and Gogol’ in passing. The topic of Russian affinities in Sokolov’s work has yet to be explored systematically.
14. Johnson, “A Structural Analysis,” p. 215.
I’m not quite sure why I was asked to contribute this program note to Valery Fokin’s production of A Hotel Room in the Town of NN, which ran at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in the early summer of 1999. It probably came about because I had written a preview piece on it for The New York Times shortly before. Why that commission came about I’m not sure either – although I suspect that Fokin or his composer Alexander Bakshi put my name on the table. In any case I was happy to do this little essay because I loved this piece of theater to death. It stood at the beginning of a really good run of Fokin shows in Moscow, and it has always stood out in my memory as one of the finest productions of that era. (It was originally staged in 1994 in a large open space in the middle of the Manege exhibition hall next to the Kremlin.) Back then I still shared a special myopia with the general field of Moscow critics and reviewers – none of us then realized the extent to which the music of Alexander Bakshi determined what I called Fokin’s “total environment” productions. In my meagre defense I can at least say I did not ignore Bakshi’s contributions entirely – as though they didn’t exist at all – as most writers then did. Be very careful about imagining a history of theater based on a work’s contemporary reviews!
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