The Return of Munchausen by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Author:Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-68137-029-3
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

11

Restoration of the Soviet economy has begun slowly, imperceptibly, exactly like their northern spring, which scarcely manages to push new leaf buds through the bare icy skin of branches. If I remember correctly, it all began with the beams that people began casting out of each other’s eyes. In the past they had been loath to notice even the motes,* but necessity makes us sharp-sighted: soon the supply of beams hauled out of people’s pupils was such that one could set about building. On the city outskirts, now here, now there, log huts began to appear, residential cooperatives sprang up, and overall things began to improve.

Saplings were planted along the boulevards (of the old trees there remained only stumps) and made to grow quickly by a simple, but ingenious means: to each little tree they attached one end of a rope; the other end was attached to a pulley, and the tree was pulled up until it reached the prewar height. Within a few weeks, the bare boulevards were thick with shade trees and arrayed as of yore.

Quantities of posters placarded on all the walls and fences edified passersby with bits of practical advice, such as SINCE A FISH ROTS FROM THE HEAD DOWN, EAT IT FROM THE TAIL UP* or SAVE YOUR SOLES, WALK ON YOUR HANDS.* I cannot remember them all. Competing with the posters were playbills announcing extravagant productions and popular entertainments. Swept up in this wave, I could not remain a passive spectator and proposed various projects of my own design. Thus it was that I, while consultant to a Moscow theater director, advised him to stage Gogol’s Inspector General* on my grand scale, so to speak, in a Munchausenian manner that would turn everything upside down,* beginning with the title.

The play, as we envisaged it, would be called Thirty Thousand Messengers: the main plot would shift from the individual to the masses;* the main characters would be the poor souls who slaved as messengers for that cruel exploiter, the Petersburg minister Khlestakov. He drives them hard, causing packages to rain down on their heads until one day they organize, decide to strike, and stop delivering. Meanwhile, Khlestakov is making love to the beautiful wife of either a cabinet governor or kitchen gardener, I forget which. He sends her a letter by the first messenger fixing a rendezvous for that evening in the kitchen garden (as is the custom in Russia); but the striking messenger does not deliver the letter. Khlestakov waits all night in the garden, then returns, rather nettled, to his ministry and sends a second letter to the same effect to the same address by the second messenger. With the same result. The second, the third, the thousandth, the thousand and first all fail him. Khlestakov waits every night in the kitchen garden for three long years without result, but also without abandoning hope of winning the heart of his stand-offish lady love. He grows old and thin, but goes doggedly on sending her letters by messenger: the 1,450th, the 1,451st, the 2,000th.

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