Necropolis by Khodasevich Vladislav

Author:Khodasevich, Vladislav
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO014000, Literary Collections/Russian & Former Soviet Union, FIC019000, Fiction/Literary
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

At the end of his school days, Gershenzon dreamed of enrolling in the philological faculty, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. In the eighties, and even later on, there were only two paths open to philologists: they could either become schoolteachers or, in the best-case scenario, professors. This meant that they would serve in the Ministry of Education. For a Jew, this represented an inevitable road to baptism. Old man Gershenzon was horrified. Mikhail Osipovich was sent away to Germany, where he enrolled in an engineering or technical program at some specialized institute of higher learning. I believe he lasted for about two years there before he couldn’t take it anymore: he sent a petition to the minister of education asking to be admitted to the philological faculty of Moscow University as an auditor. He asked to be admitted as an auditor because he didn’t dare to dream of becoming a student: ethnic quotas dictated that only Jews who had finished gymnasium with a gold medal would be considered, and Gershenzon hadn’t. But then, something happened that bordered on the miraculous: a reply came back from the ministry stating that Gershenzon had been enrolled not as an auditor, but as a fully fledged student. The reason was simple: Jews didn’t tend to enroll in the philological faculty and Mikhail Osipovich’s petition had been the only one they had received from a Jewish person that year: thus, he automatically fulfilled the demographic requirements. However, this stroke of good luck turned out to be a catastrophe for Gershenzon: his father, who was generally dissatisfied with Mikhail Osipovich’s stubbornness, refused to believe that this was a “miracle” and decided that Mikhail Osipovich must have already been baptized. The whole affair ended, if not in a parental curse, then, at any rate, in a complete financial cutoff. His mother scraped together the money for his trip from Kishinyov to Moscow on her own. Gershenzon sallied forth onto the squares of Moscow practically penniless. However, acquaintances arranged some teaching jobs for him. But this gave rise to a fresh catastrophe: in those days, discipline was no laughing matter and students were obliged to have a uniform and at times to wear a sword. Once again, kind people came to the rescue: Gershenzon was given an old student’s frock coat that hung on him like a sack, and a sword, and even…for lack of a uniform greatcoat, he was given a Nikolai overcoat!3 A Nikolai overcoat, light gray, with a beaver-skin collar and a fur cape that fell almost to his knees! It was so extravagantly big on him that: “Can you imagine? I had to carry the tails around in my hands at all times!”

Thus began Gershenzon’s scholarly career and his poverty.

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