Nostalgia for a Foreign Land: Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel 9781618115294

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Nostalgia for a Foreign Land Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel

Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe and Their Legacy Series Editor Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College) Editorial Board Ilya Altman (Russian Holocaust Center and Russian State University for the Humanities) Karel Berkhoff (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) Jeremy Hicks (Queen Mary University of London) Brian Horowitz (Tulane University) Luba Jurgenson (Universite ParisIV—Sorbonne) Roman Katsman (Bar-Ilan University) Dov-Ber Kerler (Indiana University) Vladimir Khazan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mikhail Krutikov (University of Michigan) Joanna Beata Michlic (Bristol University) Alice Nakhimovsky (Colgate University) Antony Polonsky (Brandeis University) Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University) David Shneer (University of Colorado at Boulder) Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) Leona Toker (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mark Tolts (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Nostalgia for a Foreign Land Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel ROMAN KATSMAN

Boston 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names:  Katsman, Roman, author. Title:  Nostalgia for a foreign land : studies in Russian-language literature in Israel / Roman Katsman. Other titles:  Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and their legacy. Description:  Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2016. Series:  Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and their legacy Identifiers:  LCCN 2016037748 (print) | LCCN 2016041184 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618115287 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781618115294 (e-book) Subjects:  LCSH: Russian literature—Israel—20th century—History and criticism. | Russian literature—Israel—21st century—History and criticism. | Rubina, Dina—Criticism and interpretation. | Zinger, Nekod—Criticism and interpretation. | Mikhaæilichenko, Elizaveta— Criticism and interpretation. | Nesis, ëIìUriæi—Criticism and interpretation. | Yudson, Mikhail—Criticism and interpretation. Classification:  LCC PG3550.I75 K38 2016 (print) | LCC PG3550.I75 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/95694—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037748 ISBN 978-1-61811-528-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-529-4 (electronic) ©Academic Studies Press, 2016 Book design by Kryon Publishing www.kryonpublishing.com On the cover: “Relation Developer,” by Elisheva Nesis. Reproduced by the author’s permission. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

To Tatyana

Contents Acknowledgements.................................................................. vii Preface................................................................................. viii Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window.................... 1 Introduction........................................................................ 5 Carnival and Sincerity..........................................................13 Migration and Neoindigeneity...............................................33 Messiahs, Mothers, and Orphans.......................................... 38 Victims and Heroes............................................................. 55 From Trauma to the Real......................................................74 Origins and Copies............................................................. 82 Fugitives, Nomads, and Pirates........................................... 100 The Metaphysical Leap....................................................... 120 Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism....... 131 The Multilingual Situation.................................................. 131 Lingual Neoeclectism......................................................... 136 Drafts of the Meaning........................................................ 151 A Noble Man of Our Times: The Jerusalem Novels of Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis.................................. 167 Ierusalimsky Dvorianin (a Noble Man of Jerusalem, 1997): an Abortive Gesture of Violence.......................................... 168 I/e_rus.olim (2004): History, Sacrifice, and Network............. 178 Preemptive Revenge (2006): the Other’s Heroism....................222 Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa Na Shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet): The New Language of Metaphysics............................239 A Ladder to the Neoindigeneity.......................................... 241 The Teacher-Student Model of the Metaphysical Leap............ 261 Afterword......................................................................... 271 Works Cited .................................................................... 274 Index ..............................................................................292

Acknowledgments

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y interest in Russian literature written in Israel was not immediate and spontaneous, as one could probably expect. Perhaps, it demanded more distance from the experience of emigration. At last, I learned to recognize the genuine soul of this literature, and there emerged an idea of a book about the metaphysics of Russian-Israeli literature. Thus, I would like to thank, first and foremost, the Israeli writers who dare to write in Russian—both those who are under discussion in this book and those who are not, but definitely could be. My interest would not come to fruition without kind-hearted support and invaluable comments of my colleague scholars—Maxim Shrayer and Dennis Sobolev. I am thankful to the translators and editors who worked on the manuscript: Haim Weitzman, Haya Naor, Ori Weisberg, Sharon Erez, and Athena Lakri. Special thanks go to my friend Yan Mazor—the translator of most of the quotations, exceptionally challenging, from the novels under discussion. This is the opportunity to thank all the team of Academic Studies Press for highly professional work of turning the manuscript into the book. Last but not least, I would like to heartily thank my dear family— my wife Tatyana and my children Anna and Eli—who, for many years, have helped me foster my love to Russian language and literature and bravely endured my experiments with “nostalgia for a foreign land.”

Preface

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riting about the literature written in my own generation, by members of that generation, is akin to walking through a minefield. Each step on seemingly safe ground may explode into countless new and unexpected possibilities. The dangers and pleasures of such a path are even greater when the researcher feels a deep sense of affinity with the writers—immigrants from the former Soviet Union, searching for meaning in their new homeland. In such a case, reading turns into a search for a promised time in a promised space—into pure infinite potential. All that one can say and all that one does say diffuses into the open-endedness of the future; discourse, transcendent to itself in this openness, empties itself out. A paradox emerges: the critic finds himself writing about that which has not yet been written; the desire precedes its object, just as nostalgia for a foreign land precedes its discovery. Only after despairing, at the end of a grueling journey, does he discover that his absurd gesture is nothing but a pale imitation of the gesture of the literature he writes of—the gesture that seeks to reappropriate the possible future indigeneity. A large part of the Russian corpus under discussion here—the writings of those who immigrated to Israel in the 1990s—is Israeli in its content and, even more so, in its search for a hypothetical “Israeliness,” with or without “the Mediterranean note.”1 Their literature realizes the prediction of Alexander Goldstein: their “Russian word in Israel” becomes a homonym of its metropolitan counterpart, “a point where the Identical and the Other meet but do not recognize each other.”2 The authors discussed here are immigrants, but I do not examine their works within the context of émigré literature. This is not only because of the special focus of my study, but also because 1 Alexander Barash, Sredizemnomorskaia nota: Stikhotvoreniia [The Mediterranean note: Poems] (Jerusalem, Moscow: Gesharim, Mosty kultury, 2002). 2 Alexander Goldstein, Rasstavanie s Nartsysom. Opyty pominalnoy ritoriki [Parting from Narcissus: Essays on memorial rhetoric] (Moscow: NLO, 2011), 293.

Preface

of the unique nature of the literature produced by the immigrants of the 1990s and 2000s. The literature of this immigration wave, more than that of the previous wave creates what Dennis Sobolev, in his book Evrei i Evropa, called “the unified geopoetic space” of Russian-language literature in Israel.3 As he writes, this literature is by no means more “émigré literature” than the literature of Russia that, in the last decade of the twentieth century, collectively emigrated from one world to another, and thus its residents possess all the complexes of emigrant. This literature seeks ways to elude the immigrant paradigm. To this end it creates, in its own way, possibilities for a metaphysical leap, a leap beyond the constraints of postmodernism toward a rediscovery of the metaphysical dimension of existence and discourse. Moving beyond posthumanism, this literature seeks to establish a new subject, one that is free, autonomous, and neomodern. As Mikhail Epstein has shown in his book, Slovo i molchanie (Word and silence),4 the method of exposing literary metaphysics is vital for the purpose of discovering what Alexander Blok called literature’s “long thoughts.” “Literary metaphysics” has two meanings: literature as an expression of a metaphysical outlook and literature as an object of metaphysical inquiry. While Sobolev defines Jewish European literature as antimetaphysical,5 one can observe strong metaphysical tendencies in contemporary Russian-language Israeli literature. In this book, the term “metaphysics” is not imparted with any specifically religious meaning. As Grigori Tulchinsky and Mikhail Uvarov put it, nowadays metaphysics cannot be seen as a finished and closed body of knowledge, a conceptual or ideological totality, but rather as the purposeful and rational practice of probing the borders of knowledge—unstable, unpredictable, and uncertain, as questioning that aspires toward a state beyond being (za-bitie).6 3 Dennis Sobolev, Evrei i Evropa [Jews and Europe] (Moscow: Text, 2008), 402. 4 Mikhail Epstein, Slovo i molchanie. Metafizika russkoj literatury [Word and silence: The metaphysics of Russian literature] (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 2006). 5 Sobolev, Jews and Europe, 197-199. 6 Grigori Tulchinsky and Mikhail Uvarov, Perspectivy metafiziki: klassicheskaia i neklassicheskaia metafizika na rubezhe vekov [Perspectives of metaphysics: Classical and nonclassical metaphysics on the edge of centuries] (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2000), 43, 363. Cf. Nicholas Rescher’s realistic view of metaphysics, with the conception of

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This book’s essays reveal four facets of the Russian Israeli literary metaphysics of the 1990s and 2000s. This neometaphysics is comprised of alternating sets of city and language axes—Babylon, the city and the name, reassembled from its ruins. Dina Rubina’s many redeemers and pirates migrate from the deconstruction of memory and identity into their recollection in a maternal source. Nekod Singer’s neoeclecticism progresses into neoromanticism and the rebirth of the authorial subject. The network philosophy of Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis leads them into a historical hyperhumanism that identifies the network with the transcendental source. Mikhail Yudson fashions a new language that marks the transition from total deconstruction to ­multifaceted metanarrative. Other facets may be revealed in the study of the writing of Alexander Goldstein, Dennis Sobolev, Alex Tarn, Victoria Reicher, Yaakov Schechter, Leonid Levinson and Dmitri Deich. These writers, among many others and along with Israel’s Russian and bilingual poets, remain outside the scope of this book, but I will address them in future studies. The history of Russian-language literature in Israel goes back almost a century.7 Its beginnings can be seen in the novels of Abraham Wissotzky (1884–1949), written in the 1920s and 1930s. ­Encompassing hundreds of writers, intellectuals, journalists, and scholars, along limitedness, imperfectness, and fallibility of knowledge (Metaphysics: The Key Issues from a Realistic Perspective [Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2006]). 7 See Roman Timenchik, “Samuil Kruglikov i ego kniga ‘V krasnykh tiskakh’ (Iz istorii russkoy knigi v Izraile)” [Samuel Kruglikov and his book In red vise (On the history of Russian books in Israel)], Ierusalimsky bibliofil [The Jerusalem bibliophile], vol. 1, 51–52 (Jerusalem: Filobiblon, 1999); “Russkoe slovo o Zemle Izrailia” [Russian word on the Land of Israel], Lekhaim 4, no. 168 (2006), www.lechaim.ru/ ARHIV/168/timenchik.htm; “Glaz i slovo” [Eye and word], Lekhaim 8, no. 172 (2006), www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/172/timenchik.htm; Vladimir Khazan and Wolf Moskovich, eds., Russian Word in the Land of Israel. The Jewish Word in Russia (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Center for Slavic Languages and Literatures, 2006); Mikhail Weiskopf, “’Prostye khleboroby’: sionistsky russoism i Sovetskaia Rossiia v russkoiazychnom tvorchestve palestinskogo ‘ishuva’ 1920– 1930 godov” [“Simple grain-growers”: Zionist russoism and the Soviet Russia in Russian-language works of the Palestinian “yeshuv” in 1920–1930], in Eastern European Jewish Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries: Identity and Poetics, ed. Klavdia Smola: 185–190 (Munchen, Berlin, Washington: Verlag Otto Sanger, 2013).

Preface

with journals, newspapers, and publishers, it was also influenced by writers who migrated via Israel to other countries. During this extensive period, the demise of Russian writing in Israel was frequently forecast, but new waves of immigration continuously revived it. The greatest of those waves, those of the 1970s and 1990s, made Israel into the largest center of Russian writing outside the former Soviet Union. Yet, because these two waves differ so vastly from one another, it would be an arduous task to present the literatures they produced as part of a single historical continuum. Roughly, the literature of the 1970s can be characterized as the Russian émigré literature in Israel, whereas that of the 1990s is characterized as Israeli literature written in Russian, despite the latter’s image of being both apolitical and a-Zionist. The difference lies largely in geopolitical and geomental factors. Among these are the collapse of the Soviet Union along with its mentality, globalization, the normalization of transcultural migration, and the harmonization of the relations between Jewish and Russian identities, whether by blurring the difference or by their nonconflictual reinforcement by a new kind of universalism. As with every literary process, these factors are bound up with aesthetic factors—and they attempt to cope with the challenging temptations of postmodernism and the search for new poetic languages. The literature discussed here devotes its long thoughts to the issues that fashion our contemporary spiritual and cultural climate. Such issues include that of the source and copy, as well as the correlation bet­ween personal and historical memory that Rubina explores; the issue of culture and violence and that of the victim and heroism, as discussed by Mikhailichenko and Nesis; the problem of the unity of the subject and of the work, which preoccupies Singer; and the issue of personal repair in relation to the historical collapse that Yudson focuses on. When the complete history of Russian Israeli literature is written, it will have to include the story of its different circles, icons, and wars; but first and foremost, it will include the archaeology of its ideas—the “cursed ­questions” it has wrestled with. I hope my book will contribute to the study of its literary metaphysics.

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Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

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his chapter focuses on the most renowned Russian-language writer in Israel—Dina Rubina. Although Rubina was first published and received literary recognition in the Soviet Union, the bulk of her work, and, in particular, her ten novels discussed here, were written in Israel after she had immigrated in 1990: from Here Comes the Messiah!1 in 1996 to the trilogy Russkaia kanareika (A Russian canary) in 2014–2015.2 Maxim Shrayer included a fragment from Rubina’s Here Comes the Messiah! in his An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, having claimed that “her career is increasingly taking her away from artistic prose and in the direction of popular entertainment.”3 A Russian canary attests to the truthfulness of this claim. On the other hand, being “popular” does not necessarily mean one is “simplistic”; this perception was built on a great deal of misunderstandings in the criticism of 1 Dina Rubina, Here Comes the Messiah!, trans. Daniel M. Jaffe (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2000), originally published as Vot idot Messiia! (Moscow: Ostozhje, 1996). Page numbers throughout this book refer to the 2000 edition. 2 Russkaia kanareika. Zheltukhin [A Russian canary: Zheltukhin] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2015); Russkaia kanareika. Golos [A Russian canary: The voice] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2015); Russkaia kanareika. Bludnyi syn [A Russian canary: Prodigal son] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2015). 3 Maxim D. Shrayer, ed., An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, vol. 2 (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), 1168. 1

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Rubina’s writings—not in the interpretation of the details, but rather on the metaphysical plane of “long thoughts” and “cursed questions.” Along with numerous reviews in periodicals (some of which will be mentioned further), Rubina’s writings have been discussed in several academic publications and dissertations, such as those by Eleonora Shafranskaya, Henrietta Mondry, and Anna Ronell. Shafranskaya discerns many of Rubina’s important themes (“texts,” in her terms) and discusses them in comparative contexts as a part of the writer’s “mythopoetics.”4 However, she reduces the mythopoetics to mythological and folklore motifs, and the interpretation of the central themes has raised numerous questions. The themes of home and the return to one’s origins can be developed by Rubina’s much more complex and dominant idea of the flight from home. The hero-trickster is portrayed as a “fool” in the narrow context of low culture and is differentiated from the hero-artist (except for in one novel, where a combination of the two is discussed as the theme of “genius and evil”). Ronell, too, falls under the spell of Rubina’s overloaded self-interpretation, particularly in her uncritical acceptance of the carnival paradigm—a misleading one when surveyed from the height of the ideological observation of Rubina’s work as a whole.5 These difficulties point to the problem that Mikhail Epstein posed in Word and silence: Rubina herself expresses her “folkloric” and “mythological” sources so abundantly that the metaphysical reading of the unspoken in her writing—the reading of something that is not a “text”—becomes much more sought after. Henrietta Mondry makes a series of interesting observations about Rubina’s corporeal imagination and her “invention of an alternative ethnic Self,” in reference to the Spanish one.6 However, this conception is based on the researcher’s presupposition about Rubina’s consciousness as “an ethnic Other 4 Eleonora Shafranskaya, Sindrom golubki [Dove syndrome] (St. Petersburg: Svoio izdatelstvo, 2012), 21–42, 189–205, 213–226. 5 Anna P. Ronell, “Some Thoughts on Russian-Language Israeli Fiction: Introducing Dina Rubina,” Prooftexts 28, no. 2 (2008): 197–231. 6 Henrietta Mondry, Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, 1880s to 2008 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 188–207.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

in the hostile culture of the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia.” This presupposition originates from the victim mentality and stereotypical figure of the Jew in the late-Soviet period; yet, this vision is quite contrary to Rubina’s harmonizing and indigenous mentality, as well as her dominant attraction to a nonvictimary individual heroism. At the center of all of Rubina’s novels, there is an artist figure in various manifestations—creator, prophet, nomad, criminal, savior, adventurer, avenger, warrior, etc. This figure reveals itself through subjects and symbols, such as victimhood and heroism, exile and destruction, the Holocaust, personal and national memory, migration and indigeneity, the search for identity and return to the source, appropriation of the familial and national heritage, the new Jew and the ten lost tribes, along with Zionism and messianism. The figure of an artist as a metaphysical pirate, an adventurous intellectual, is one of the keys to the overall understanding of Rubina’s novels and perhaps also of her other works, including those not discussed here. Perhaps, this developing and multifaceted figure represents the entire course of Russian literature and the literary thinking of the Big Aliyah of the 1990s in Israel, including writings by Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko, Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson discussed in the other chapters, as well as the works of novelists such as Dennis Sobolev, Alex Tarn, and Yaakov Schechter, which are not discussed in depth in the present volume. The immigrant literature of the Soviet period responded to the challenges of history with the social, cultural, and intellectual protests against the past. Alternatively, post-Soviet Russian-language Israeli literature perceives the challenge as an actual historical and cultural quest. This literature responds to the “cursed” questions of being, justice, freedom, nation, and Jewishness as a living reaction to the changing spaces and landscapes around it, much like in the artistic metaphysics of the Second and Third Aliyahs (except for the fact that translingual dynamics have, in most cases, been replaced by transcultural dynamics). In Rubina’s writings, this process is most vividly embodied in the figure of a pirate who conquers the space, thus translating it into history and reappropriating his cultural heritage and memory in order to construct his new indigeneity. In the analysis below, I attempt to

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reconstruct the development of this figure in Rubina’s novels, not fully consistent with the chronology of their publication, from its most naïve form as an ironic neoromantic messiah, through its maturity in the overcoming of victimhood, to its highest realization in the metaphysical leap out of ghetto—into history. My view of the philosophical evolution of Rubina’s hero has been influenced, to a great extent, by the philosophical anthropology theory of the American scholar, Eric Gans—one of the most original contemporary thinkers. This theory, known as “generative anthropology” or “originary thinking,” revises the main assumptions of Jacques Derrida and René Girard concerning the role of violence and its deferral in rela�tion to the origination of language, culture, and ethics. For Gans, representation first appears as a sign of an “abortive gesture of appropriation” toward the object of desire; this “nonvictim” constitutes the center of the originary scene of the culture’s development from the deferral of violence.7 Gans’s thinking has its own implied hero—quite similar to that of Rubina—the one who rids himself of the victimary and carnival fantasies and sets out on the dangerous adventure of authentic historical existence and cognition—the return to the originary scene and cognition of the origins of symbols, signs, narratives, and names of the language. In one of his most recent works, Gans writes that language is, in “its very essence,” a paradox, “the first word designates, points-to-as significant, a referent that cannot by definition have possessed this status before its designation.”8 This paradox, as any other, exists due to the contradiction between the a-temporal “model-relationship between representation and its object” and the temporal, empirical qualities of the discourse, the narrative. To return to the originary scene of appropriation means to live and apprehend this paradox, this “everyday miracle” of language and representation. This return, one can add, is the 7 Eric Gans, A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art (Aurora: The Davies Group, 2011). 8 Eric Gans, “Language and Paradox,” Chronicle of Love and Resentment 495, August 29, 2015, accessed September 10, 2015, www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw495. htm.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

metaphysical escape from the ghetto of the given, the taken-for-granted, which is the only way to return to history and to appropriate it anew. Rubina’s metaphysical heroes are those who revive and live this paradox, thus embodying the very essence of language, culture, and art. As Alexei Losev put it, in empirical history a hero realizes his or her transcendental purpose, and this is the miracle that constitutes the hero’s myth.9 However, this miracle is also a paradox: the hero realizes the myth, but this myth cannot exist before the hero’s realization. This paradox points to a contradiction between conceptions of myth-as-model and myth-­ as-becoming. The only way to overcome this contradiction is to jump, to board the miracle, the origin—like a pirate. Rubina creates an entire gallery of such jumpers: Ziama jumps into the waters of memory, Lucio— into the pit of his family curse, Dina—into the fiery rays of reality, Katia—into the sins of history, Anna—into the future, Zakhar—into the past, Peter—into love, and Ettingers—into resentment. All of these inhabitants of some version of a piratic schooner left their homes in search of a lost history in a new, foreign homeland.

INTRODUCTION

Dina Rubina was born on September 19, 1953 in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) to a Jewish family from the Ukraine that had come to Tashkent after World War II. In 1971, her first story was published, and until her immigration to Israel in 1990, she published four collections of stories. Since then, Rubina has published dozens of story collections and novellas, ten novels, essays, articles, and interviews. As she has written many times, both in her autobiographical books and in essays and interviews, Tashkent left its imprint on both her personality and her writing: scores of ethnic groups from all parts of the Soviet Union lived in impossible, overcrowded conditions in the narrow streets and decrepit houses of the Uzbeki city, creating a cacophonic bedlam of sounds, colors, faces, and languages.10 Rubina compares Tashkent to Babylon,   9 Alexei Losev, The Dialectics of Myth, trans. Vladimir Marchenkov (New York: Routledge, 2003), 185. 10 Shafranskaya writes about the “Tashkent text,” with the “city carnival” at its core in Dove syndrome, 267–392.

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but it would be more accurate to compare it (and her writings) to the ruins of the Tower of Babel—a site of worldwide catastrophe, in which people wander around (“des tours de Babel,” in Derrida’s terms), desperately searching for some sense of meaning in life.11 Rubina’s novelistic oeuvre in Israel, and the searching of her heroes, can be divided into three periods. The first period includes three novels: Here Comes the Messiah! (2006), The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra, and Syndicate.12 They constitute a quasi-­ biographical cycle about the postemigration experience: the heroine copes with the difficulties of an unknown country and language, searches for a proper job and a place to live, and tries to comprehend the political situation and form her own opinion concerning it. She never stops writing, even while working at a Russian newspaper in the cultural center (matnas) of a small town and, at the same time, at one of the biggest Israeli institutions—the Jewish Agency. Working in this “syndicate” brings her, for the first time since the immigration, back to Moscow. Thus, she finds herself caught in the middle of the atrocities of Arabic terror in Israel and the convulsions of the collapsing Jewish life in Russia. The second period includes four “international” novels: On the sunny side of the street, Leonardo’s handwriting, White dove of Cordova, and Petrushka syndrome.13 Rubina’s heroines wander in the remembered, imagined, and real spaces of Tashkent, Lvov, Prague, Toronto, Madrid, Cordova, Vinnitsa, Guryev, Jerusalem, and other cities all over the world. She tries her hand at different artistic endeavors, but first and 11 In a similar sense, Rubina (in Sindikat. Roman-komiks [Syndicate: Novel-comics] [Moscow: Eksmo, 2004], 354) compares the Syndicate, her literary parallel of the Jewish Agency, to the Tower of Babel and through it, symbolically, to all of Russian Jewry, perhaps even to the entire Jewish Diaspora. 12 Poslednyi kaban iz lesov Pontevedra. Ispanskaia suita [The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra: A Spanish suite] (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 2000, first published Jerusalem: Pilies Studio Publishers, 1998); Sindikat. Roman-komiks [Syndicate: Novel-comics] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2004). 13 Dina Rubina: Na solnechnoy storone ulitsy [On the sunny side of the street] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2006); Pocherk Leonardo [Leonardo’s handwriting] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008); Belaia golubka Kordovy [White dove of Cordova] (2009; Moscow: Eksmo, 2012); Sindrom Petrushki [Petrushka syndrome] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2010).

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

foremost is painting, the art of both Rubina’s father and her husband, Boris Karafëlov. During this period, the heroes’ wanderings take them to the limits of the normative and perceptible world, to the very limits of knowledge and reason. The trilogy, A Russian canary (2015), constitutes a new period. This is a family saga, well rooted both in the Russian past and the Israeli present. The protagonist—a talented singer and a Mossad agent—is much more “Israeli” than the heroes of Rubina’s previous novels. He represents a new generation—those who were brought to Israel as children and grew up as Israelis, still carrying the burden of their Russian culture. This population recently referred to itself as “Generation 1.5.” At the focus is the history of his family, which led him and his young son, a second-generation Israeli, to sing in a concert hall in Jerusalem. Rubina is a mainstream writer and a very popular storyteller. She is greatly admired in Israel, in Russia, and throughout the Russophonic diaspora worldwide. To a certain extent, the charm of her writing stems from its nomadic nature. The author is very attached to her home; in her interviews she often says she would never exchange the Jerusalem landscape for any other: after Jerusalem, everything else is a letdown. Nonetheless, her literary persona, her other self, present in most of her works, is that of a citizen of many countries and cities, and she claims to feel at home in each one. Moreover, many of her novels’ protagonists are true nomads—talented, skilled, and characterized by the obsessive inspiration of traveling.14 While for some writers, assimilation and exile 14 Rubina is not regarded as a Russian author in “exile” nor is she part of the waves of Russian immigrants according to the accepted historiography (Mabel Greta Velis Blinova, “Twentieth Century Russian Literature in Exile,” in Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe, ed. Agnieszka Gutthy [New York: Peter Lang, 2009], 7–20). Nonetheless, this historiography is based on the psychological distinction between enforced exile and voluntary immigration, a distinction that is problematic and rather obscure. On the other hand, in contrast to the tendency in Alvin Rosenfeld’s renowned collection of essays, one could say that Rubina is not uprooted but rather rooted everywhere; nor is her language “nomadic language” (certainly not in her latest novels), the Kafkaesque writing that Norman Manea describes in that collection (Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed., The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008], 3–4). She preserves the language of her country of origin. However, her implied narrator

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serve as the source of their literary fecundity,15 Rubina finds this source in the formation of a new nativity (neoindigeneity),16 the essence of which is a combination of Israeli culture, Jewish identity, and the Russian language. Rubina, unlike many of the (Jewish) immigrant authors who preceded her, is not a writer of multiple diasporas and varying languages but rather a writer of multiple homelands and one language. To a great extent, she is confident in her language because in her work there is none of the problematics of communal identity—just of the Jewish Russian identity, with all the baggage of its historical memory. The nomadic nature of her writing establishes the geographical, linguistical, national, cultural, and geomental multiplicities of narrators and heroes. Rubina’s works are colorful geocultural cognitive maps in which real and imagined borders are engraved in a dense network, and each step of the protagonist, each bit of recollection by the narrator, or every image or thought that arises from the depths of the author’s erudition, entails the crossing of a border. The crossing of a border and an encounter with the self beyond the border is the major motif in Rubina’s writing. This motif is embodied in the image of the mirror, which is at the center of her most nomadic novel, Leonardo’s handwriting (2008). The novel White dove of Cordova (2009) underscores another aspect of this motif: the crossing of a border is not only an existential act of a paradoxical gaze at the truly imagined other is truly a nomad in her soul, a professional nomad, as it were. And, the nomad—in contrast to the immigrant, the exile, or the refugee—is at home everywhere. 15 Michael P. Kramer, “The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics,” in Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, ed. S. Jelen, M. Kramer, and L. Lerner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 16 Neoindigeneity can be viewed as an opposite of the phenomenon that is widely discussed nowadays and can be called neodiasporism or diasporic transnationalism. See the works of Khachig Tölölyan and his fellows: Khachig Tölölyan, Redefining Diasporas: Old Approaches, New Identities—The Armenian Diaspora in an International Context (London: Armenian Institute, 2002); Carolin Alfonso, Waltraud Kokot, and Khachig Tölölyan, eds., Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002). See also Allon Gal, Athena Leoussi, and Anthony D. Smith, eds., The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present (Leiden: Brill, 2010); James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

self, but it is also an act of transgression, a violation of the written laws (as in Syndicate [2004]) and unwritten rules (as in On the sunny side of the street [2006]), the bittersweet sin of the loss of the self and the madness of duality. The crossing of borders creates doubles that constantly duplicate themselves. In this way, Rubina poses the question that can be viewed as the second major motif in all of her writings—that of the original and the copy—inherited from both Romanticism and Modernism. From Plato to Derrida, this question remains at the beating heart of epistemology.17 Thought, imagination, signification—all seem to be a movement from an original to a copy and back, sometimes while traces are erased, sources are lost, or their copies are rejected. Processes of forgetting and “efforts at remembering”18 are based on this movement. These movements establish the literary and cultural time and narrative, and the plots concerning the meaning of life. One can assume that Rubina’s focus on the original/copy issue in her writing stems from them, and of course from her profound ars poetica, autoreflexive interest in the essence of art: the homeland and the alternative homeland, the real identity and the fictitious identity, original works of art and their copies, ideas and their falsifications, doing and imaging (these are several of the forms this question takes in Rubina’s work). At her philosophical core is the problem of faithfulness or responsiveness to the self, to inspiration, to the call of the inner (or the transcendental) voice, to the personal or the historical, familial, dynastic task.19 The essence of the task is to create a copy in order to preserve or establish 17 This issue appears in different forms—mimesis, representation, signification, icon, symbol, etc.—until the “surface thought” of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [London and New York: Continuum, 2004]) aspires to remove it from the agenda within the framework of the struggle against the Western metaphysics, which is led by Derrida from his early works onward (On Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998]). 18 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 56–92. 19 The task, in the sense used by Mikhail Bakhtin—as he received it from Matvei Kagan and Hermann Cohen—is the opposite of given-ness, an ethical act in writing or in any other creative work. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

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the original, and thus realize the self. This is also, for example, the way of the painter and forger, Zakhar, in White dove of Cordova (2009), the Russian adventurer who finds his brother/doppelgänger in the form of the Spanish pirate in the depths of historical memory and in the expanses of European geography. The tension between the original and the copy reaches its apogee in the novel Petrushka syndrome (2010), in which the puppet artist and his partner wife create and destroy their doppelgängers—the puppets—and compete with them in a struggle to control their lives. In their struggle over the original, the memory, and the heritage, the protagonists become pirates. As we shall see, the pirate is the archetype, the fundamental myth20 that unites the main motifs in Rubina’s work. Translation, as a philosophical, literary problem, as well as a geocultural and geomental problem, appears as another fundamental axis in Rubina’s writing. The multiplicity of languages, the direct result of the wanderings of the author and her characters, plays an extremely major role owing to the crisis inherent in it: emigration and the linguistic dangers it entails, especially when the emigrant is a writer and when her autobiographical representative appears in most of her works. Rubina immigrated to Israel when she was a famous, popular author. Her difficulties in acclimatizing, described so vividly in her writing, did not undermine, even momentarily, the centrality of the Russian language. Relinquishing her mother tongue for another language, forgetting the self for the sake of the other, was definitely not an option. Hence, translation was not only necessary for putting down roots in the new environment, but it was also a paradigmatic model of recognition— recognition of the world created anew before the eyes of the author. When Rubina prepares to build her new home in her new homeland, in the linguistic “geography,” the situation is reversed: Rubina’s Hebrew 20 I am using a term borrowed from the scholars of myth, Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov: “Le mythe indo-europeen du dieu de i’orage poursuivant le serpent: reconstruction de schema” [The Indo-European myth of god the thunderer killing the serpent: Reconstruction of the pattern] in Échanges et communications; mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-Strauss à l’occasion de son 60ème anniversaire, vol. 2 (The Hague: Mouton et Cie, 1970), 1180–1206.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

language builds her a new home within the broad expanses of the Russian language. In novels such as Here Comes the Messiah! (1996) and The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998), the author discovers Hebrew and domesticates it in gleeful, carnival-like games, in internal wanderings on a map of the Russian language, in the creation of an abundance of copies, or transcriptions, of the Hebrew, which once again affirms the unchallenged validity of the source. The way in which Rubina perceives the language is therefore the metaphysics of the source. The sanctity of the source requires, enables, and justifies the translation—like the same modus of linguistic nomadism that is the reverse of the modus of striking roots in a foreign language, in another culture. The “professional” nomads, Rubina’s eternal emigrants, such as Peter from Petrushka syndrome (2010) and Anna from Leonardo’s handwriting (2008), are fluent in foreign languages, but their fluency is merely a kind of sporadic, unstable deviation. From this standpoint, it is Anna’s marvelous talent that is representational. She absorbs the foreign language immediately, during conversation with native speakers, and begins to speak freely; however, by the end of the conversation, she totally forgets the newfound language. This is a model of hospitality: Anna “hosts” the foreign language, but only for a brief time, just as she hosts the momentary visions of the futures of people she meets. They are only reflected for a moment in her internal mirrors and are deciphered, like Leonardo’s handwriting, but she herself is the mirror. The mirror is both the source and the copy, and this is the secret of the art and the prophecy, of the wandering and of the translation. As a result of this type of thinking, Rubina’s writing never becomes minor literature, like that defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, never undermines her language, never turns into barks and shouts.21 On the contrary, she translates what could sound like barking and shouting into her language, the mother tongue. She is constantly preoccupied with the translation; thus, she is never cut off from the source. She does not know what nostalgia is, despite the well-known sentimentality 21 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 22.

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and her yearning for the past, flashes of childhood, and the like. This is also the reason why the author’s Jewish origin, and that of her narrators and characters, is not crucial, nor does it need to be constantly affirmed; it is perceived as posing no problem. Like home, the mother tongue, as a precondition for the existence of all the other copies or identities, is something that enables the wandering and the translation. Rubina’s writing does not tend to be ideologically or politically problematic, and even her satires, like Syndicate (2004), do not wage battles in the social arena. Her approach is ironic, almost cynical, but not in any way subversive or militant. However, there is a problem characteristic of all of her works: the passion for life and the unrestrained urge to make the inanimate alive. This urge—which took root in and grew out of the ruins of the Babylon of Tashkent—evokes an indefatigable cultural nomadism, the need to create copy after copy in order to maintain both the source and the passion for the dramatic, magic translation. Thus, translation is not only a basis for understanding, it is also a way for meaning to vanquish the chaos and make something inanimate come alive. Thus, dolls and marionettes turn into human beings, as in Petrushka syndrome (2010), or a community center becomes the court of a Spanish king, as in The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998). However, when a translation imbues things and creatures with life in one language, it conceals and destroys entire worlds in the other language. This is why “translation thinking” entails what can be called a victim mentality: there is always the possibility or danger that the person will “become a marionette,” that a word will become an incomprehensible totem, that the mirrors will break and the music will be silenced. Rubina leads her readers to the edge of this abyss, but madness is once again rejected, life is victorious, and the birth rate is revived, as in Petrushka syndrome (2010); music once again sounds forth from behind snow storms, as in Leonardo’s handwriting (2008), in the memories and letters of the protagonists in love with the prophetess who rises to the heavens on a motorcycle, resembling a chariot of fire. Hence, we can say that Rubina’s works reject the victim mentality, just as she herself rejects the victimhood approach in her political views concerning the existence of the Jewish people in their land. Victimhood is rejected by source

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

thinking: what disappears in the translation is only a copy and is destined to become the source through the magic of literary writing or historical creation. Moreover, the acts of terrorism that harm Rubina’s protagonists in the novels Here Comes the Messiah! (1996) and Syndicate (2004) are perceived as tragic mishaps in the living translation, as disruptions, as noise in the processing of information in the proper magical replacement, as an explosion in the eternal market of the languages of Tashkent. Rubina’s “long thought” proceeds from a carnivalesque model of replacement (of countries, cities, and people) to a metaphysical one. Since this is not a biographical development, but rather one of logic, the analysis will be organized in thematic order, reflecting the inner logic of the spiral movement of the author’s thinking over the course of the years and through her novels.

CARNIVAL AND SINCERITY

In 1996–1997, Rubina published the novel Here Comes the Messiah! (1996) and two collections of stories: Uroki muzyki (The music lessons) and Angel konvojnyj (The convoy angel).22 In 1998, a second novel, The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra: A Spanish Suite, was published. It was the subject of contradictory definitions—as a romantic work of “one of the last romantics of our time,”23 and as an example of “a postmodern dialogue of cultures,” “totally consistent with Derrida’s ideas.”24 Yet, apparently this novel is a testament to the chaotic merging of romanticism and postmodernism in the fin de siècle literary consciousness. The heroine of the novel, an immigrant writer from Russia, witnesses a drama of stormy love, while working in a community center 22 Rubina, Uroki muzyki [The music lessons] (Jerusalem: publisher unknown, 1996); Angel konvoinyi [The convoy angel] (Moscow: Medzhibozh, 1997). 23 Olga Shkarpetkina, “‘Poslednii kaban iz lesov Pontevedra’ Diny Rubonoi” [“The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra” by Dina Rubina], Kultura i iskusstvo, July 20, 2013, accessed June 15, 2014, www.cultandart.ru/prose/48269-poslednij_ kaban_iz_lesov_ pontevedra. 24 Iulia Sergo, “Postmodernistski dialog kultur: obraz Ispanii v romane D. Rubinoi ‘Poslednii kaban iz lesov Pontevedra’” [Postmodern dialogue of cultures: the image of Spain in Dina Rubina’s novel The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra], Filologicheski klass 17 (2007): 49–53.

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in a small town near Jerusalem. In a mad maelstrom of languages and accents, passions and quarrels, songs and dances, she finds her place— the place/no-place of the wandering poet, who returns to her origins and then flees from them. In her literary, somewhat humoristic, manifesto “Ia—ofenia” (I— ofenia), part of the Ich bin nervoso! collection, Rubina defines herself as a troubadour, a nomadic collector and scrounger of the smallest sparks of life.25 Moreover, Dina (the person and the protagonist of this novel), as a writer, is in love with the mad life bubbling all around her, begging to take up residence on the pages of her next book. As Rubina herself admits, jobs like the one at the community center come her way by accident, in the breaks between the books she writes. Rubina says that she is a person without a profession, and she likens writing to giving birth—an image that raises the act of making art to the highest level (in a later novel, Na Verkhnei Maslovke [In Upper Maslovka], this is stated explicitly26). And if writing is giving birth, then the spaces between one piece of writing and another is like a pregnancy—difficult, but filled with the joy of life, expectation, and rejuvenation. Motherhood, creativity, and renewal all entwine in a wild carnival, on the one hand, and in a tragic, erotic Spanish drama on the other—replete with passion and blood, observed by the narrator from the side as a tempestuous flamenco dance. This is not cheap, pseudopopular, theatrical “Spanishism,” an empty simulacrum, because art, if it reflects talent, is always art; passion is always passion if it is ready for sacrifice, whether it bursts forth in the form of European stage settings, as in Lorca’s plays, or of the Purim stage in the Judean desert. The Spanish theme takes shape in this novel and also becomes a major, quite serious theme in White dove of Cordova (2009). In it, too, during a flamenco dance on a small stage, where the narrator just happens to be, the past suddenly links up with the present, memory with reality, just like in the Gypsy romancero or cante jondo 25 Dina Rubina, “Ia—ofenia” [I—ofenia] in Ich bin nervoso! (Moscow: Eksmo, 2006), 12–30. 26 Dina Rubina, Na Verkhney Maslovke [In Upper Maslovka] (Ekaterinburg: U-Faktoria, 2001).

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

brilliantly described in Lorca’s essays. Jewish “Spanishism” engages Rubina’s thought as an axis of a centuries-old transgeographic and translinguistic history, as a sequence of tribulations, love and creation— as a musical suite. The Spanish Suite is the model of Jewish history. The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998) is the only one of Rubina’s novels whose subtitle denotes a musical genre—“A Spanish Suite.” Yet, Rubina, who had a first-rate musical education, has often said that her heart throbs every time she hears the first notes of a musical work and that musical forms are concealed in many of her works. Sometimes, certain musical works become leitmotifs of her books. For example, the song “On the Sunny Side of the Street” from Lew Leslie’s musical International Revue became the name of Rubina’s novel On the sunny side of the street (2006), and Django Reinhardt’s composition “Minor Swing” became the leitmotif of Petrushka syndrome (2010). Rubina’s protagonists hear music, for example “Snow in Venice” in Okna. Zhivopis Borisa Karafëlova (Windows: The painting of Boris Karafëlov),27 or dance to music, often nomadic music—the music of street musicians, gypsy music, popular, jazz, and klezmer. In The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra and later in White dove of Cordova (2009), Spanish music—flamenco, cante jondo—comes to the front of the stage. Musical thinking helps the writer organize the scores of motifs, characters, and plots that fill all of her novels and threaten to shatter their internal unity. In nearly all of her novels, it is possible to discern the elongated trill of two themes in counterpoint that draw closer to one another throughout the work and meet at its end. In The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998), the two themes are Israeli culture (the power struggles in the community center in Maale Adumim) and Spanish culture (love and death, honor and passion—a tragic drama with the participation of four people of Spanish and Argentinian descent, among the crowded stage sets of that community center). The thematic counterpoint imbues Rubina’s writing with a harmonic, 27 Dina Rubina, Okna. Zhivopis Borisa Karafëlova [Windows: The painting of Boris Karafëlov] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2012).

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nonconflictual nature despite all the struggles and crises that her protagonists experience. Her music always remains tonal—the musical, narrative forms closed and rounded. The subtitle from The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra: A Spanish Suite (1998) also refers to the classical genre (although one of the most famous suites, Bergamasque Suite, is by French composer Claude Debussy). A suite (“sequence” in French) is a selection of excerpts that express various moods in various rhythms, which more or less distinctly contrast with one another. Sometimes it is a selection of dances from ballets or operas. A Spanish Suite retains this element, since it is based on types of Spanish dance, inextricably linked to types of popular Spanish Gypsy songs. The most famous composer of Spanish suites is Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909). He absorbed American, Latin American, and impressionist (Debussy) influences, finally turned to Spanish folklore, and was active in the Spanish revival movement, Renacimiento. His series of Spanish suites is dedicated to the cultural heritage of Spanish regions and cities. Rubina’s main title, The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra, is taken from a popular Spanish song and references the city, Pontevedra. In addition, throughout the novel, mottos of parts appear, some taken from Spanish folk songs. Other mottos are taken from medieval collections of songs, such as Cantigas de Santa Maria—“Canticles of Holy Mary” (thirteenth century). Such songs were often written and performed by minstrels—wandering poets, the Spanish equivalent of the French troubadours. However, this particular collection, from which the motto of the first chapter was taken, was the work of the King of Castile, the rich and wise Alfonso, Alfonso X el Sabio (1221–1284). He is at the very center of the comic analogy drawn by Rubina between the Spanish king and his court and the director of the community center, also called Alfonso, and his staff. The mottos from real sources alternate with those taken from semi-imaginary sources or totally fantastic sources, such as that of the first part, signed “Jesus Christ, from a personal conversation” (the narrator’s “personal conversation” with Jesus appears in the body of the novel). This imbues the entire novel with a carnivalesque nature, which grows more intense, particularly thanks to the

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

figure of the community center’s “court jester,” Lucio, the maker of the masks and dolls and the rival of Alfonso, who is finally given a theatrical role in the plot in the last part, which describes the Purim festivities at the center. Early on in the novel, two major themes emerge: suicide and the nomadic artist-clown (minstrel). The two themes merge in the characters of the narrator (Dina) and Lucio—her doppelgänger and brother in talent and profession, creating such authentic copies of reality that they look like the originals. They are both on the verge of losing themselves as artists; the wanderings that led them to the community center are about to destroy them. The “court” of “Alfonso the Wise” (the director of the matnas, the abbreviation for “a center for culture, youth, and sport”) is the shelter on their dangerous journey, but it is also the place where they face the yawning abyss of despair. Rubina presents one of the alternative histories of herself, and of Writer N. and Ziama from the previous novel Here Comes the Messiah! (1996)—the Russian writer who immigrates to Israel and is about to lose the language, i.e., to die. In somewhat broader terms, it is the tragedy of the Russian intellectual, the classic “uprooted,” “superfluous person” of the “lost generation,” caught in the whirlpool of immigration (very much like dozens of heroes in Russian emigrant literature from all over the world). Nonetheless, despite its tragic elements, the novel unquestionably suggests an ironic, parodic approach to the theme of the uprooted immigrant: Dina (the narrator) rapidly fits into life in the vibrant “court”; she takes on the functions of the witness, the chronicler, the minstrel who preserves and sings the myths and epics, and even of the angel who safeguards the soul of her twin Lucio (albeit without very much success). The puppet show, the Gothic play, the illusion of primeval violence has to be realized. Why? Why does the same play about the life of the knights, which Lucio and Alfonso are planning, writing, directing, and acting, have to become the story of their lives, their fate? The answer lies in the context of this mysterious fulfillment—the Purim festival. Every festival dramatizes the ancient originary scene through rituals, simulations, and imitations, which are also the means of actualization

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and initiation. In this sense, every festival dwarfs, lowers, and copies the source. The element of the carnival adds the effect of opposites (high/low, sacred/profane). When this element becomes dominant, it creates the forgetting kind of laughter—laughter that tears reality in two, down the seam between source (the identity) and copy (the disguise), so that the source is forgotten, hence negating the essence of the festival itself. Nonetheless, Purim is only externally carnivalesque; in its essence, it constitutes disguise that requires recollection. Its “carnival-like” reversal only expresses the “reversal” of the historical fates of the Jewish people and of the peoples of the world. The Purimesque reversal is actually a tikkun, a correction; the Purimesque disguise is an indirect, rhetorical declaration of self-realization in the sacred history of the people, in the teleological sequence of the time and the narrative. (In any case, as in the instance of visual art, Judaism does not equip the “carnival” with figures of sanctity, direct or reversed, unlike the carnival in Christianity, with the messianic symbol of the donkey at its center). Thus, the carnivalesque yet serious duel between Alfonso and Lucio at the end of the novel is a ritual of recollecting their identities, pasts, passions, and origins. The purpose of the courtly duel is the exposure of truth and the victory of supreme justice; its outcome is an expression of God’s will. The scene of Alfonso and Lucio is by no means religious; yet, it constitutes a metaphysical sublimation of the rivalry characteristic of the triangle of mimetic desire,28 the gesture of mutuality and reflexivity in which failure and visibility establish the signifier and the culture. Lucio is not prepared to go on living with the lies and masked violence of betrayals and emotional abuse. The carnival of deception, forgetting, and humiliation has to stop; this is the purpose 28 René Girard’s model of mimetic desire presents the individual’s desire for an object as imitation of the other’s desire for the same object, and thus as desire for the other, too. This triangle, “I-Other-Object,” is the reason behind the mimetic violence which, according to Girard, leads to the annihilation of the object. The object, thus consumed by the members of the conflict, becomes a sacrifice and the center of the newly established culture (Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 143ff.)

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

of the “carnival” of recollection and truth, that artistic, magical pathway toward self-fulfillment and the creation of history. Rubina’s story “Vo vratakh tvoikh” (Within thy gates) also ends with Purim, and in it too, the dialectic emotional reversal of the narrator takes place: from the fullness of life to a sense of nonexistence, and from there to a renewed knowledge of belonging to this “small country” through laughter and self-irony: “From my window you can see the cemetery, that’s where I’ll rest someday. ‘Burial in Jerusalem’—that sounds elegant. That’s lovely! That’s definitely carnivalesque.”29 The ambivalence of carnival and anticarnival reflects the fluctuation in the early novels between postmodern and neomodern, neoromantic tendencies. The novel Syndicate (2004) seems to be a satiric, critical parody on postmodern writing and its philosophical elements. In her first three novels, Rubina experiments with poetic devices, often perceived as postmodern: fictitious sources, fragmentation, pastiche, and a collage of various types of discourse. These mostly disappear in her later novels, except for texts narrated by various protagonists in Leonardo’s handwriting (2008) and Petrushka syndrome (2010). However, the importance and uniqueness of these devices lessen over time, especially since from the outset they were not actually postmodern but rather much closer to modernistic aesthetics, with no attempt to innovate or present any kind of artistic program. Instead of perceiving Rubina’s writing as obsolete modernism or unsuccessful postmodernism, it can be seen as a parody of postmodernism, all the more so since it tends toward conservative national ideology, toward the metaphysics of the source, and toward traditional romantic poetics—in brief, very far from the ideals of postmodernism. Moreover, Syndicate (2004) exposes one of the fundamental contradictions of posthumanism: the contradiction between the perception of the infinite complexity of nature (such as the sciences of complexity and chaos or the theory of multidimensionality in mathematics, physics, and astrophysics) and the perception of the infinite simplicity of culture, between the expanding thoughts of the world and 29 Rubina, “Vo vratakh tvoikh” [Within thy gates], in Angel konvoyny, (Moscow: Medzhibozh, 1997), 38.

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the shrinking thoughts of man. If Syndicate (2004) is comics, as its subtitle reads, then it is unsuccessful comics, which shows how impossible it is to regard it as sufficient. It is comics that negates itself and aspires to blow up in a chaotic human explosion. Literature is incapable of not imitating the real complexity of personality. As Stanislaw Lem wrote in his novel Solaris, man needs man. Rubina defined her position in the novella “Kamera naezzhaet” (Close-Up): “The character can be built . . . just as in the days of the Messiah, from one link of the neck, people who have decayed long ago will be resurrected. . . . I have been doing hocus-pocus for many years . . . hocus-pocus, a puppet theater.”30 All of Rubina’s major motifs are concentrated in this “confession”: the creation of the literary character is likened to the rekindling of life, the resurrection of the dead (contrary to the flat surface of the paper); the author is compared to a messiah, while at the same time, he/she is a circus performer and puppeteer, the creator of an alternative reality, a copy. The author is attracted to the original as a hangman is attracted to his victim.31 The perception of the author as a messiah and the character as a victim also dialogues with the novel Here Comes the Messiah! (1996). The perception of the creator/demiurge as an artist operating puppets has ancient mythological roots (for example, Platonic); in Rubina’s case, it is expressed in The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998) and primarily in Petrushka syndrome (2010). In Syndicate (2004), in addition to the narrator’s voice, three additional voices join in, as if in a postmodern polyphony: quotations from the database of public applications to the Syndicate department, which Dina is in charge of (she seems to choose the funniest and most absurd applications to quote); jokes by Petiunia (one of her coworkers), which are not always funny, when they appear in separate excerpts of conversation, like miniature narratives, using a quasi film technique; and finally the sequence of life in Moscow (or what is left of it after all the cuts and replications), which is all suddenly suspended when the 30 Rubina, “Kamera naezzhaet” [Close-Up], in The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra: A Spanish suite (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 2000; first published Moscow: Eksmo, 1998), 300. 31 Ibid.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

phone rings in the private apartment of a madman called Reverdatto, who provides brief interpretations about what’s going on, and whose words are either almost completely devoid of meaning or replete with the cynicism of absurd madness, such as when he sings the words from the Soviet song “Marsh aviatorov” (The airmen march)—“Instead of the heart—the burning motor”—while footage of the Twin Towers cata­ strophe in New York are broadcast on television.32 The narrator explains: “He seems to live in a parallel world.”33 In addition to the main mirrors that reflect the narrator’s state of awareness and the two plot locations—Russia and Israel—the novel splits into several secondary narrative lines, which are also epistemological mirrors that reflect various bits of reality and dream. The consecutive Russian plot is occasionally interrupted by entries made by the narrator in a kind of diary, which she writes in Word on her computer. These entries are labeled “Microsoft Word, desktop, folder rossia, file sindikat.” The nature of the writing in the diary is very intimate, and in it Dina, the narrator, relates her dreams—dreams within the Russian dream, mise en abyme, utterly absurd. Indeed, these dreams seem like a chaotic mixture of real cultural materials, excerpts of quotations, as well as symbols and icons from the world of Soviet and international pop culture. These collages of kitsch and nonsense express the narrator’s pseudoapocalyptic feelings. Here is an excerpt from the diary that arises from her musings about Noy Kleshchatik’s voyage: Yesterday, I even had a dream that Kleshchatik hired an icebreaker. The management recalled all syndics from all of the cities of vast Russia and sealed them off on a ship; they heaved anchors and set off down Russia’s waterways with Claudy on the captain’s bridge, Petiunia as a boatswain, and the rest of the team quite well matched. In the morning I retold Yasha this strange dream, and he straightaway draf­ted a comic strip with Claudy half naked and with an A-shirt wrapped around his head. He looks like a theatrical pirate and announces a 32 Rubina, Syndicate, 394. 33 Ibid., 451.

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project under the code name of “Operation ‘A Cruel Romance’.” At the end of the strip, the icebreaker is shipwrecked, the A-shirt unwraps from Claudy’s head with its tail dangling along his cheek; his expression could compete with that of Laurence of Arabia in its austerity. Fire in the hold. End of the Syndicate.34

Despite the truncation, the narrative multiplicity, the quotations, and the parodies, Rubina’s Syndicate (2004) is still far from postmodernism, Bakhtinian polyphony, or ideological and psychological relativism. On the contrary, all of her dialogue is linked to the narrator’s personality, ideas, and emotions. None of her characters, objects, or bodies and types of discourse receive ethical, ontological, epistemological, or aesthetic autonomy. The fragmentation of the narrative is based on the structured, fragmented nature of the truncating “genres”: diary, dream, joke, telephone ring. One can say that this truncation is classic, completely conventional. Moreover, the distinctiveness—the unequivocal definition of all the types of truncated dialogue and the voices behind them—actually distances Rubina’s writing from the well-known models of postmodernist writing. It would not even be accurate to define her according to the concept of fragmentation. Her writing is closer to the musical harmony of counterpoint and to the classic genre of fugue. It can also be compared to a dynamic, complex, synergetic system in the natural sciences: a closed, self-organizing system of heterogeneous components and processes that work in perfect coordination with themselves and the environment. In the opinion of some scholars, this is a precise definition of a living system and of life itself.35 The vitality of her characters, combined with their emotional complexity and a metaphysical world picture, distances Rubina’s work from posthumanism, bringing it closer to what is known in contemporary art as the “new sincerity” movement. The most consummate example of the rejection of entropic indifference and relativistic cynicism (taken from the narrator’s computerized 34 Ibid., 342. Excerpt translated by Yan Mazor. 35 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Boston, London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980).

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

diary) is the memorial service for the victims of the Holocaust in Minsk; the narrator is swept up by a surge of supposedly unexpected love for those who fell in the past and those standing there in the present, “muttering amen in the face of absolute uncertainty about the very near future.”36 The carnival stops, and the clown removes his mask. Sentimentality takes over the discourse. The narrator knows this and, ashamed, wipes away her tears surreptitiously. Yet, the very transition from comedy to tragedy justifies the new tone, which reveals the sincerity of what is spoken. The new sincerity is rhetorical, sober, and controlled, but that does not mean it is no longer sincere. Moreover, only the rhetorical act can be sincere (or insincere). At the center of this scene of tension between the comic and the tragic is the victim—the saint, absent or concealed, the object of passion and recollection. Only the comic-tragic-sacred can create the divine, magic laughter that establishes an infinite number of new possibilities, can create the laughter-recollection that rejects the laughter-forgetting of the carnival; this laughter that establishes the sincerity and subjectivity emerges from the sincere and abortive gesture of appropriation vis-à-vis the saint-victim, like the gesture of the biblical Uzza towards the Tabernacle. Rubina never completely takes leave of the carnival, but buffoonery always appears in contexts of violence and victimhood, as a sublimation of existential and physical terror or as a return to life that is always perceived as a victory of art. At the end of the novel, the narrator, recovering from her injury in the terror attack in the Mahane Yehudah market,37 returns to the market, now quiet, sad, and grieving. Suddenly, at the entrance to the market, a clown on crutches appears. The market comes back to life, and the narrator recognizes her brother in art and in historical fate.38 Rubina’s first three novels were “in the mode of the carnival,” as the title of her other book reads, in three aspects:39 Here Comes the 36 Rubina, Syndicate, 390. 37 In reality, the attack occurred on April 12, 2002. In it, six people were killed and eighty were injured. 38 Rubina, Syndicate, 556. 39 For the Bakhtin concepts concerning carnival, see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).

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Messiah! (1996)—the chaos and the difficult freedom of the new forms of existence (the multiplicity of possibilities, sin and atonement, and rejuvenation); The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998)— the substitutes, the masks and marionettes that are animated (the opposites: past/present, legend/reality, man/animal); Syndicate (2004)— the satirical farce, which goes hand in hand with the pathetic, existential absurd (intoxication and madness, transgression, the breaching of all boundaries and their redefinition). Moreover, in all three aspects, at the very center of the time and narrative, there is the victim. In all three novels, Rubina worked on a new Tower of Babel, her Israeli one: in the first novel, she built it; in the second, she tested its durability and her ability to inhabit it; and in the third, she destroyed it. In this way, the author completes her comic-satiric project, and in her next novels, with all of their differences, a new tone is evident. First and foremost, it is more autonomous, no longer dependent on genre and parodic trends; it is the tone of the voice of pure artistic sincerity. This tone moves into Rubina’s novel from her short stories. (On the other hand, one can say that the stories and her early novellas breathe a free, spacious, novelistic atmosphere.) From 1990 to 2006, Rubina published about fifteen collections of novellas, stories, and essays. (Some of these were printed more than once in various compilations.) The story “Dvojnaia familiia” (A double surname),40 from the collection by the same name, heralds the fatherhood-motherhood duality as a reflection of the duality or historical alternativeness, which becomes a key theme in On the sunny side of the street (2006). The novella On Upper Maslovka (2001) and the story “Shkola sveta” (School of light), from Kholodnaia vesna v Provanse (A cold spring in Provence), lay the foundation for the character of the artist in the modern world. Stories such as “Gobelen” (Gobelin), “Ternovnik” (Thorn bush), “Dom za zelionoj kalitkoj” (The house behind the green gate), and “Astralnyi poliot dushi na uroke fiziki” (The astral flight of the soul in the physics 40 “Dvojnaia familiia” [A double surname], in Dvojnaia familiia (Moscow: Sovetsky pisatel, 1990).

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

lesson) examine the subject of childhood. Finally, stories such as “Vysokaia voda venetsyantsev” (The high water of the Venetians), “Volshebnye skazki Sharlia Perro” (The marvelous fairytales of Charles Perrault), and “Villa ‘Uteshenie’” (“Consolation” villa) delve deeply into the theme of the sick, suffering, and dying female body. Stories like “Liubka” and “Odin intelligent uselsia na doroge” (An intellectual sat on the road) pave the way for works about the false, caricatured face of the Soviet regime. In 2006, Rubina published the novel On the sunny side of the street. It is a recollection novel, a back-to-the-homeland postimmigration novel (the tragic carnival of immigration, which Rubina announced several years earlier41 had ended, at least as far as she was concerned; however, in this novel too, she continued to grapple with the carnival). In this work, the author breaks out of the brief historical cycle of the aliyah of the 1990s to the open spaces of a wider cycle—the history of the twentieth century, of the Soviet Union, and of World War II and its far-reaching echoes. In brief, this novel is the first of Rubina’s epics. It is injected into the patterns of the family saga, and from this standpoint, it is completely consistent with Rubina’s “familiography” thinking. Its core—the dismantled family as a symbol of the lost generations (a kind of epic screening of Dostoyevsky’s The Adolescent)—is present in all of Rubina’s works that have been published since 2006. While the early novels translate space into the language of time, beginning with this novel, Rubina creates spatial supports for the temporal dynamics. Hence, she inevitably ends up reflecting the built-in tension between space and time. Rubina resists the temptations of modernism, the nouveau roman, magical realism, postmodernism, and posthumanism and invents a narrative model that is historical but not historicistic, personalistic but not psychological, intellectual but not elitist, ideological but not political. After rejecting the two dominant models of the twentieth century—the dismantling of the narrative and subject, as well as multiple narratives and subjects—Rubina turns to

41 Rubina, Pod znakom karnavala [In the mode of carnival] (Jerusalem: Lira, 1999).

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the neomodern model, which is a synergetic, complex, and dynamic narrative system with a human personality at its center. The present novel is the story of two women: the mother, Katia, and the daughter, Vera. As a child, Katia, the daughter of an aristocratic family, was evacuated from Leningrad to Tashkent during World War II. When she grew older, she joined a gang that made and smuggled drugs and became its leader. She gave birth to Vera from her first husband, the leader of a gang of criminals, served time in prison for stabbing her second husband, and died at the end of the novel in Vera’s arms. Vera grows into a gentle, talented girl, becomes a famous artist, marries a German citizen, and emigrates to Germany. At the end of the novel, she divorces her husband and returns to her homeland to say farewell to her dying mother. It is hard to find characters as different from one another as the mother and daughter in this novel—a story of their love-hate relationship. Nonetheless, they share one thing—their memory of the Leningrad past and their lofty family heritage. Besieged Leningrad is the place where the two alternative histories split and are then fulfilled over the next two generations. Katia’s history is an alternative to the possible history of her family, which could have been fulfilled had it not been for the revolution and the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Vera’s history is also an alternative to her mother’s life, as well as the continuation/replacement of the “golden age” of the legendary family history. Thus, the two histories of these women are not only consecutive stories of generations of “fathers and sons,” but are also simultaneous possibilities, two aspects in the portrait of twentieth-century history, a configuration of the discourse of its complex narrative. In On the sunny side of the street (2006), the narrator’s voice breaks down into other voices that join together in a choir that is not a choir: voices emanating from Tashkent, which tell about their city at the narrator’s request. Extracts of monologues taken from letters, recordings, or interviews, supposedly by anonymous Tashkentians, the Jewish nomads dispersed now throughout the world. These monologues unravel the narrative sequence and create that same pseudofragmentary architecture that we saw in Syndicate (2004). It is the baroque architecture of a fugue.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

The narrator needs these voices in order to provide reliable pictures of the city from a far-off time, from before she was born and before she was able to be a reliable historical witness. These varied voices are still being produced by the same organ. Here lies the difference between this novel and the previous one; this one attains a degree of uniformity in multiplicity that was not previously achieved. The simulation of the pseudo postmodern quotation in no way impairs this uniformity; on the contrary, it emphasizes the leitmotif in the variations. The multiplicity of styles of speech, imitation (transliteration) of speech in foreign languages such as Uzbek, a reference to the poetics of the pseudofolkloric Odessa discourse, a combination of Babel and Zhvanetsky (such as the speech of Tzilia the water seller)—all of these turn the novel itself into Tashkent or the Tower of Babel before its destruction (in reality, destroyed in an earthquake in Tashkent on April 26, 1966). Here Rubina achieves the baroque depth in the contrast of light and shadow, something previously not achieved (nor planned) in the rococo trills of Syndicate. Nonetheless, as in Syndicate and earlier novels, on the realistic level or in dreams, the arrow of emotional tension points at a catastrophe at the end of the novel. To a certain extent, this apocalyptic structure is also retained in Rubina’s next novels, although inclined more toward compassion, forgiveness, and redemption. An important part of this movement is the transition from the sociology of migration to the metaphysics of neoindigeneity. This echoes Vera’s artistic perception: “What really disturbed her was the loneliness of the character . . . her dread of the ocean of time, which everyone has to cross alone.”42 These words are the essence of the personalistic (and existentialistic) perception: The gist of art, like the gist of life, is the creation of character, or personality, the formation of the human face, realized vis-à-vis (and contrary to) faceless space-time. Nonetheless, one look at Vera’s aesthetics is expressed in an article by Ditter (her first husband, the German curator and critic), who said: “The artist is fascinated by the carnival of life . . . her paintings are a chorus of Greek masks, translated into the language of 42 Rubina, Sunny side, 134.

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circus minstrels, acrobats, and jugglers.”43 Unquestionably, Rubina is talking here about a certain aspect of her work as well as the work of her husband, the painter Boris Karafëlov. On the other hand, it is also clear that the author is constantly teasing her readers in her theoretical flashes as well, since the narrator stresses that Vera thought Ditter’s article was too sophisticated and also somewhat trivial, although it contained several precise guesses.44 The tension between perception of the face and perception of the mask, between personalism and carnival, is not a coincidence. First of all, it reflects the tension between the artist’s inner experience and the artistic act, the expression. Secondly, it reflects the duality, complexity and ambivalence of art, at least in the way Rubina views herself. The tension between the two perceptions can only be relieved by the assumption that the masks and the carnival are only means, temporary crutches that are meant to melt away in the process of establishing the personality. This integral perception can be defined as mythopoetic, if the myth is, as in Alexei Losev’s terms, the fulfillment of the ideal mask (the transcendental purpose) in empirical (human, complex) history.45 This perception does indeed seem to fit Rubina’s overall corpus, in which carnivalesque elements are adjacent to personalistic elements; they compete with them but also fuel and serve them—precisely according to the dynamic laws of synergetic systems. In any event, the mythopoetic perception also makes it possible to explain the mysterious aspect, the gaze at the “other spaces,” which Ditter discerns in Vera’s art alongside the “amazing dramatism,” when “an outburst of laughter contains within it a sensory shock.”46 This line of the philosophy of art, leading from carnival toward sincerity, continues in Leonardo’s handwriting (2008); in the sorrowful Jewish sounds of the bassoon, Semion hears the voice of his grandfather, for which, he says, he had searched everywhere and could only

43 Ibid., 339. 44 Ibid. 45 In this sense, the term “mythopoesis” is completely different from the same term used by Eleonora Shafranskaya in her work about Rubina, Dove syndrome. 46 Rubina, Sunny side, 342.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

find in the small building of the School of Music.47 Yet another thread connects Semion to his grandfather—the German song “Lili Marlene,” which he hears in the off-key sounds of a music box during his visit to a German city, where his grandfather used to sing in Yiddish, and Semion himself, in Russian, in Joseph Brodsky’s translation.48 Thus, Rubina creates a heterogeneous, yet consecutive, cultural space: the thirties and the present day; Germany and Russia; German, Yiddish and Russian languages; an exiled Jewish Russian poet and a wandering Jewish Russian musician; the music box that wanders through the streets and the noble baroque bassoon. In this space, there is a very compelling carnivalesque dimension that unites high and low, original and copy/translation/distortion, beginning and end. However, we need to keep in mind that despite the striking external aspects, the carnivalesque is rejected here by the underlying anticarnival intention—the effort to recall personal, family and historical memories. As a rule, this scene is the continuation of the series of thoughts or memories about the war and the Holocaust in all of Rubina’s previous novels that appear in the scenes (which generally take place in Germany) in which the narrator or the heroine identifies a Jewish cultural item that has supposedly been stolen—a distant yet clear metonymic or metaphoric echo of the war. Semion’s story ends with a softer version of theft, with the identification of the cultural “theft” as the duplication of the items or copies, which confirms the consecutiveness of the European cultural space: during his tour in a German castle, Semion sees a music box identical to the one that was “in the room of Aunt Frieda in Zhmerinka.”49 The space of theft also includes Russia—both the ancient and the new, until it changes from a historical space to a pure idea. In interviews, Rubina said that the idea of the novel came into her head when she heard about a true occurrence: a musician was stuck in a snow storm in his car, and in order to “heat” his bassoon, he played for hours until he was saved by rescue forces. The novel ends with a picture of Semion playing the bassoon in a snow storm—snow that he believes 47 Rubina, Leonardo’s handwriting, 98. 48 Ibid., 103. 49 Ibid., 105.

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Anna created—until he sinks into a delirium in which Anna comes to him, after which he dies.50 Anna seemingly arises from the music, materializing from the body and sounds of the instrument (already foreshadowed in the scene of their lovemaking in an Italian hotel, when Anna is explicitly likened to a musical instrument).51 This scene, in which the two lovers meet in death, emerges from the Gothic motif of the dance of the dead, which fills it with the melancholy atmosphere of a ballad (the snow, a Nordic symbol, significantly contributes to this atmosphere). About Semion and Anna one cannot say, as Shmuel Yosef Agnon wrote in biblical words about the protagonists of his “Dance of Death”: “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.” On the contrary, they each wander their own paths, and meet, either in Semion’s memories recorded in his letters to her or, the first time, in his delusions. Do these letters reach their destination? Does Anna read them? The last letter is written after Anna has already disappeared. This letter to the vanished reader embodies the essence of the entire series of Semion’s letters. Here he draws close to the character of the author (and Anna—to the character of a muse), and this is another analogy between him and the author herself. These letters, like postcards in On the sunny side of the street (2006), manifest the nature of the writing. White dove of Cordova (2009) is a continuation of the first novels from the standpoint of its overall focus: Jewish history, in particular, as it is embodied in the personal and dynastic histories, in memory and in art. In addition, the novel continues the subject of original/ copy. While in the earlier novels, this subject was rendered mainly in a metaphorical or philosophical sense, here the metaphor is realized: the protagonist of the novel is an artist who copies and forges paintings, namely those whose provenance is fraudulent. Zakhar Cordovin is a genius at creating simulacra who falls victim to his creation. As in the previous novels, there is an innocent victim here, too—Zakhar’s friend-double who is tortured and murdered through no fault of his 50 Ibid., 456–457. 51 Ibid., 397.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

own, when he unknowingly takes Zakhar’s guilt upon himself. From the standpoint of the plot’s nucleus, the novel describes Zakhar’s longtime efforts to find the murderers and avenge the death of his friend—the Christian figure of the innocent lamb. On the historical level, the innocent victim is the suffering, persecuted, exiled and murdered collective Jew, beginning with Zakhar’s distant forefathers— the exiles from Spain, and ending with his close relatives—the victims of the Holocaust and of Stalinist terror. Of course, as is typical of Rubina, history and the philosophy of history are embodied in the relations within the family and the dynasty—in the “familiography” of Cordovera-Cordover-Cordovin. Zakhar’s relative, Semion, adds one detail to the portrait of Zakhar Cordovin, the grandfather: “Although he shot himself, believe me, at the time he was bursting with laughter.”52 Thus, the Jewish hero is the laughing, good-bad clown, the rebel and the collaborator at one and the same time, who sacrifices himself for the sake of his offspring, in some­ thing like a secular “sanctification of the holy name” (for the sake of the tribal, historical transcendentalism of childbearing, but not before he is at the foot of the gallows). The narrator also mentions the “heroic death” of the Ruvim grandfather, who tried to save a woman from the Nazis, but was shot instead.53 The narrator cannot talk about this Jewish Don Quixote without irony. However, underlying the absolute absurdity of his death, there is the passion and hope for repair and redemption. The fact that the “savior” is a persecuted Jew who leaves his hiding place in response to his conscience, and then dies a saintly death—this fact brings the character of the hero closer to the Christian hagiographic model and raises him above the irony to the level of historical, moral pathos. The dynastic pathos, which establishes the family memory, is also implied: family members would show the children, in particular, “the new little robber Zakhar,” the sewer cover that grandfather Ruvim was lying on when he was murdered. Although a carnival myth is created here, if the

52 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 71. 53 Ibid., 73.

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carnival itself is, according to Olga Freidenberg,54 only the other side of sanctity, then the main poetic act here is nonetheless the creation of the comic, ridiculous myth, but only if it is neoromantic and personalistic. Petrushka syndrome (2010) is the apogee of Rubina’s aesthetic thought and the final rejection of posthuman carnival in favor of neomodern and neoromantic humanism. In the novel’s epigraph, the problem of the distinction between the divine fire and the alien fire of human creation resonates in the first description of Liza, from Peter’s vantage point: “My burning bush . . . a masterpiece of the heavenly mechanic.”55 This is not mere rhetoric, but the gaze of the artist, who looks with admiration and envy at the exemplary creation of another artist—“the prime puppet artist.”56 The concept of the biblical revelation and the concept of anthropogenic magic unite in one complex, conflictual consciousness. As in childhood, he sees her as a puppet; he appropriates, abducts and murders her again and again with his every gaze. Thus, the burning bush will be his, and the miracle will become a mere mechanism. The position of the narrator is also a dual one. Her enthusiastic admiration of the master is intermingled with recoiling, even fright, at the sight of the woman-machine. Her justification stems from what also distinguishes her from the mechanical woman of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and from the golem of the Maharal of Prague: she not only arouses love, but is also capable of loving. Although love can be fraudulent, simulated, even technically reproduced, in this case it loses its aura of originality, its unique character. Only a mutual passion between man and the source— such as between the painting and the observer—is true love, living, and human. Rubina projects the problem of “creation/magic” and “source/copy” on aesthetics, on the philosophy of art and even on literary theory, and she conducts a dialogue with mechanical concepts in art. The author often stresses her vital, even animistic concept of the artistic act. Her style, in all its aspects, is characterized by a declarative organic 54 Olga Freidenberg, Poetica siuzheta i zhanra [Poetics of plot and genre] (Moscow: Labirint, 1997), 134–178, 260–299. 55 Rubina, Petrushka Syndrome, 8. 56 Ibid., 200.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

synergism, not necessarily realistic and authoritative, but more in keeping with the dynamics of lyrical dramatics and the effort of remembrance, as if she were struggling with the pains and pleasures of traumas and forgetting. Thus, Rubina rejects what seems to be the opposite of her artistic concept: conceptual, eclectic, mechanical, secondary, and simulacric postmodern writing which, in principle, relinquishes originality and the metaphysics of the source from the outset. Love for the source gives Rubina’s sentimental literature a romantic, metaphysical dimension, but it also adds a sense of intimate closeness to the source, its fragile, melancholy openness as well as man’s openness to the light and warmth that it projects. Perhaps one can say it is the unbearable lightness of its reality and its expression in words, which draws Rubina closer to the new sincerity of contemporary art. And if the centrality of carnival in Rubina’s thinking is questioned, then the conception of migration upon which it is based should also be questioned.

MIGRATION AND NEOINDIGENEITY

The novel Here Comes the Messiah! (1996) opens with the question: “Can Russian literature possibly develop under the conditions of the Middle East?”57 The question, however, remains unanswered, since it is raised during a Russian radio broadcast in Israel, “which was directed at Russia, and therefore no one was listening to it anyway.”58 However, the last twenty years of Russian-language literature in Israel attests to the fact that the answer to the question is “yes.” About two hundred writers and poets write extensive literature in Russian, in a variety of genres, styles and subjects. Nonetheless, the question with which Rubina’s Israeli novel writing begins is still valid, because it is, first and foremost, a question of the audience. Will the young children of the authors, now at the peak of their artistic productivity, read their parents’ works in another ten years? Will people in Russia read and love the distant-yet-near Israeli literature, just as they read and love, for example, Latin American literature; meaning, not as marginal 57 Rubina, Here Comes the Messiah!, 4. 58 Ibid.

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Russian immigrant literature, but as “translated” world literature, in which the “translator” has left untranslatable signs of life of the distant culture in order to preserve a slightly exotic aroma, enigmatic and appealing? Yuri Lotman has written that the untranslatability of different languages is the basis of rhetoric, of every trope and rhetorical figure, of the poetic discourse.59 Whether this general claim is true or not, we can see that Rubina’s writing, like that of other Russian-language writers in Israel, is an attempt to dig into untranslatability, as if she were using a pickaxe of translation, to create the audience that “does not listen”—like that wrinkle or crack in the worldwide literary field, the only place where it is possible to observe the depths of artistic truth. The game of art with death, the enchantment with nothingness bursts forth with the cry of the semicynical soul of the heroine, who in her heart replies to her own chatter on the radio about the “flourishing” of Russian literature in Israel: “What flourishing? The flourishing of what? Let it die in peace.”60 Both this bewilderment and prayer resonate in the heroine’s tragic death, accidental and somewhat farcical, at the end of the novel. The untranslatability, the chaos vanquish her,61 but the writer, another protagonist of the novel and the alter ego of the author, continues to live and create, despite the horrible nightmares of her life. In Syndicate (2004), the enthralled look at Jerusalem determines the narrator’s existential state. It also defines the serious, lofty, almost tragic level that exists alongside the novel’s comic level. It is easy to see this enthrallment, the words of introduction and the entire novel as an expression of the narrator’s guilt feelings about having left her country, her people and her destiny. In addition, it is also easy to perceive her injury in the terrorist attack at the end of the novel as punishment (or 59 Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman (New York: Tauris, 2001), 36–53. 60 Rubina, Here Comes the Messiah!. 61 Leonid Gomberg, “Roman o rasshcheplennom soznanii, ili vozvrashchenie izvestnoi pisatelnitsy R” [A novel about split consciousness, or return of the renowned Writer R], Roza vetrov 3, no. 19, 2002.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

a kind of self-punishment) for this betrayal. The narrator supposedly falls victim to the duality of her personality, which is historically structured; hence, her guilt feelings and punishment are shared by the entire generation, all those who immigrated during the 90s, or perhaps all of the Russians who immigrated to Israel throughout the years. It is not the tragedy of the immigrant, since the immigrant’s gaze is fixed on her new home, but rather the guilt feelings that are rife among those who leave Israel. From this standpoint, Rubina’s novel joins the literature of yeridah (literally “going down,” i.e., leaving the country), broadly represented in modern Israeli literature: Round Trip by Nathan Shaham, The Bat by Aharon Megged, In the Midst of the Affair by Hanoch Bartov, Ha-Yored by Dorit Abusch, Snapshots by Michal Govrin, among many others. The typical divided consciousness, expressed in the split character, was supposedly already evident in the novel Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), as was noted by both Rubina herself, as well as reviewers of her work.62 However, in Rubina’s case, this is apparently not a true split in consciousness. On the contrary, her consciousness, her personality is quite uniform. It is, however, a case of a complex personality and, in addition, the author creates her doubles, which emphasize one facet or another of her personality, each embodying a uniform consciousness—psychologically, ideologically, and existentially. Moreover, the non­con­­flictual nature of this consciousness is one of the major characteristics of her writing. Syndicate has been compared to the works of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Bulgakov.63 However, the uniform, monolithic nature of the narrator’s personality casts doubt on these comparisons, as well as on attempts to depict Rubina as a postmodern writer. One of the harmonizing and neoindigenous factors is the city of Tashkent, which during the war years became a city of exiles, nomads and pirates. This city, as it emerges from the pages of On the sunny side of the street (2006), is not a space, but a city-novel,64 realized in 62 Gomberg, A novel about split consciousness, or return of the renowned Writer R. 63 Mariam Samarkina, “Roman s komiksom” [Romance with comics], accessed June 20, 2014, www.dinarubina.com/critique/samarkina2007.html. 64 Rubina, Sunny side, 369.

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the writing as a novel-city. It is a metaphysical idea directed upward, at the sky, like the Tower of Babel, although it is multilingual rather than monolingual. Hence, it is a kind of reverse reflection of the Tower of Babel: a pure celebration of translation. It is the need and possibility to learn a foreign tongue, to translate and create infinite copies, but also to preserve the original, which ensures the sustainability of this metaphysical city. Unlike the Tower of Babel, this city is not a sign of pride, but rather a sign of modesty, typical of the translator, but also of the source that is saved in the translation. We ought not to forget that this city is a city of refuge during the time of World War II; it is Noah’s Ark65 (like the Syndicate ship), and all of its inhabitants are survivors—and the moderation, the minimization of the metaphysics of their origin stem from this fact. Thus, the destruction of the city in an earthquake is perceived as the opposite of the destruction of the Tower of Babel; namely, as a transition to one (Soviet) language, to one level, to the horizontal, two-dimensional and entropic space. Hence the metaphysical city of the exiles and nomads must be an object of constant concern. This concern is the culture itself, which is meant to ensure the continuity of the memory/ history. The destruction of the city is perceived as an exposure to both historical and psychological danger. Memory is presented in images that alternately decrease and increase in order to avoid, at the same time, pathos and cynicism. Memory is a “heap of junk,” but in it the narrator tries to “feel in the dark” those things she loved, which are “lost in time.”66 Memory is also the theater stage; the narrator’s “childhood heroes” crowd together behind the scenes and demand to go out on stage.67 This is where the colorful, absurd, carnivalesque procession of characters begins, reminiscent of the films of Federico Fellini, for example Amarcord, as the narrator herself notes,68 expelled and ostracized characters: prostitutes, crazy dissidents, alcoholics, students, criminals, all 65 Ibid., 155, 159. 66 Ibid., 195. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 132.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

of them rushing to the beer house “The Pit” (a distant echo of Kuprin’s The Pit and Gorky’s The Lower Depths). They are followed by the conductor—a crazy old man who conducted an invisible orchestra, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, where he lost his entire family.69 After him—the famous female basketball player, “wonder of the city,” who aroused the “fear, pride and disgust” of the people;70 the fire stoker who lived in the furnace room in the narrator’s home and who was, as it turns out after his death, a famous Moscow artist, who was thrown into prison in the days of Stalin’s terror.71 Thus, the picture of the accidental mixture of les misérables, of the “debased and oppressed,” the foreigners and the freaks, becomes the archetype of those lost in time, of the human saved in the effort of remembering—the object of the author’s searches and her writing. Like Fellini (and unlike the postmodern narrators), Rubina’s narrator maintains for herself the place of the nostalgic observer, the noncarnivalesque, who looks on from the side and from the distance of time—with love and compassion for others and for herself. The first three novels center on the character of the (autobiographical) author; the next three move to the writer’s artistic “periphery,” focusing on hunters, musicians, and circus people as well as puppeteers and dancers. In addition, the plots move away from the Israel-Russia axis and span a much longer temporal, historical range. Together with this centrifugal movement, the plots, almost naturally, move further from the autobiographical focus and significantly minimize the Russian-Hebrew (with a touch of Yiddish) diglossia, until this technique, which was quite central in the first three novels, almost completely disappears together with the “carnival immigration” ending.72 The “calamity” of the diglossia has fulfilled its role—processing the trauma of immigration and the writer’s fear of the loss of self. Rubina finds her language and her new tone. The main innovation is not related to style, but rather to the configuration of the discourse: in the choice of subjects and the 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 130. 71 Ibid. 72 Rubina, In the mode of carnival.

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ideas for constructing the plots and the characters. In the next section, I will try to trace the evolution of some of these configurations.

MESSIAHS, MOTHERS, AND ORPHANS

During the years when Rubina was writing Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), the entire Western world was preparing for a supposedly imminent crisis—that of the fin de siècle and the end of the millennium. Without any connection to the Gregorian calendar, the entire Jewish world was shocked to learn that some members of the Chabad Hasidic movement had declared that the Rabbi of Lubavitch, R. Menahem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, was the Messiah. All over Israel, posters were put up bearing pictures of the rabbi and the caption: “Welcome to the King Messiah!” The personalization of the Messiah, along with the sense of the End of Days, constitutes the ironic background of the novel. Scattered throughout its pages are marginal comic characters, competing for the title of messiah. The Jewish myth takes on the form of a simulacrum, at times a type of carnival-like farce, but the comic mask conceals the face of chaos—true and primeval—which arouses real fright and a yearning for true redemption, for a source in whose light the shadows/substitutes will disappear. Therefore, in the final scene when Ziama is accidentally killed by an IDF soldier, the son of the other protagonist, there is not only the jest of chaotic fate, but also anticipation for the war of Gog and Magog, when chaos disassembles and erases itself, the war that heralds the coming of the Messiah. The chaotic outburst of the myth of the messiah in this novel is similar to the outburst of the myth of the ten lost tribes in Syndicate (2004). Here, the chaos takes the form of a bureaucratic simulacrum, also accidental, unexpected, illegal, and depicted according to the Jewish Agency model. However, this satirical coincidence resonates in the narrator’s injury, when a terrorist sets off a bomb in the Mahane Yehudah market in Jerusalem. This makes the myth of the lost tribes—a myth of kingship and destruction—topical and relevant, very serious and sincere, as only a tragic family saga retold every generation to every boy and girl can be. In general, all of Rubina’s novels, steeped in humor, irony and sometimes also cynicism, end with the death of the main

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

protagonists—real or imagined. In The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998), one of the main characters, the sad clown knight, Lucio, dies. The same is true of On the sunny side of the street (2006), with a certain variation. The novel describes the ongoing spiritual death of Katia, the mother of the heroine, whose soul is slowly destroyed through the relentless agony of her cruel fate. In Leonardo’s handwriting (2008), the heroine dies or disappears, and the hero of the novel White dove of Cordova (2009) is murdered. Petrushka syndrome (2010) in its entirety is a perilous walk along the mouth of the abyss—the abyss of madness and the heroine’s transformation into a lifeless marionette-­ golem. The main character of A Russian canary (2015) dies many imagined deaths and is finally blinded by the enemy. These deaths or “deaths” reflect the overwhelming fear that chaos may take over completely, turning Rubina’s novels into the circles of hell of a terrifying human comedy. Unlike Dante’s work, however, Rubina’s comedy is truly comic. The combination of subtle sentimentality and satiric comicality is characteristic of classical Russian literature. Thus, for example, in Here Comes the Messiah! (1996) the description of the intimate relationship between the narrator and Israel, which is likened to the relationship between the nursing mother and the infant at her breast, is offset by the darkly comic description of the relations between Israeli culture and Russian immigrants. Israeli culture in its attitude toward the various immigrations is, therefore, likened to La Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard)—the well-known figure from the fairy tale, included in Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose. The character of the monstrous murderer of women is placed in sharp opposition to the figure of the nursing mother. The gentle feminine aliyahs (waves of immigration) could make a real contribution to the country, but the establishment locks them up, one after another, in a dark dungeon, a sign of dismissive exclusion. The contrast becomes even sharper when the narrator stresses, with painful irony, the oleh’s fear of hunger—a macabre antithesis to the abundance of her milk-full maternal breasts. If the aliyah’s motherhood is the revelation of messianism, then the establishment’s murderous exclusion is revealed as the rejection of the coming of the messiah.

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The coming of the messiah is delayed until the end of the novel. At the end of the day on Yom Kippur, the two main characters meet in a Jerusalem restaurant—Ziama and Writer N., who is writing a novel and looking for a way to end it with an innocent victim. When her son, Shmulik, shoots at the terrorist and mistakenly hits Ziama, Writer N. understands that she has finally found her victim. The encounter between the writer and her protagonist, like that between the Master and Pontius Pilate in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, is a festive event with an apocalyptic or messianic dimension. This is because in it the nomad meets the horizon, the idea meets the reality, the purpose meets historical time, and thus history is justified and redeemed. The novel—the embodiment of the idea of history—finds its justification and its fulfillment in the encounter with reality. Rubina arranges a meeting between the writer and her protagonist in other works as well, such as in On the sunny side of the street (2006), but only here does the encounter so distinctly reveal its ritualistic and magical dimensions, because only here does it touch upon the secret of life and death. Moreover, such an encounter is the very essence of magic, and magic here involves a victim. In the last lines of the novel, Ziama finds the messiah in the form of the grandfather, and his appearance is joined to the ritual of kaparot (penance), held on the eve of Yom Kippur, while at the same time, Ziama is united with Jerusalem. Ziama immerses herself in Jerusalem as people immerse themselves in a mikvah—in all of her nude feminine physicality. She goes back to the springs of time of Jerusalem, as one returns to the water of the mother’s womb, and her personality is realized as the daughter of Zion, literally. She drinks of the waters of Jerusalem as one drinks sacramental wine, which is alluded to in the mention of the vine and the chalice. The last flash of her life is also the last scene of the novel, which is also the case with the unfinished novel of Writer N. It is the moment of sanctification, so essential to endowing history with meaning. Rubina quotes from the well-known verses of the prophet Isaiah, 52:1–9: “Awake, awake; put on your strength, O Zion; put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; from now on there shall no more come to you the uncircumcised and the unclean. Shake

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

yourself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem; loose yourself from the bands of your neck, O captive daughter of Zion. . . . How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace; who brings good news of good, who announces salvation; who says to Zion, Your God reigns! The voice of your watchmen is heard; together shall they sing; for they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord returns to Zion. Break forth into joy, sing together, you ruins of Jerusalem; for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem.” The last lines of the novel echo the lines of ibn Gabirol’s poem, “Shviia bat-tsiyon” (Captive Daughter of Zion), which is suffused with yearning for the messiah and ends with the call: “Here I have seen a son of Yishai” (David the King).73 In Rubina’s work, the Son of David (the Messiah) also dances before God, like David before the Tabernacle or like a Hasidic rabbi. Afterwards, Rubina quotes lines from the prayer recited with the ritual of kaparot, which contains verses from Psalms 107 and Job 32:23–24. Hence, Ziama, the novel’s heroine, saw the son of Yishai, became the daughter of Zion, and joyfully abandoned her captivity for redemption. However, the protagonist—as well as the entire novel—is merely a ritual of the sacrifice of atonement of its author, her substitute who goes to her death. The substitute/copy does not nullify the source, namely the author. On the contrary, it gives meaning to her life, not only in the religious sense, but also in the artistic sense. The protagonist of her novel, her creation, is what makes N. who she is—an author—and establishes the myth by means of which the transcendental purpose of her personality, the demiurgic purpose, i.e., the fact that she is the source, is fulfilled. In this sense, the substitute can also be a type of atonement, but not in the sense of a scapegoat that bears the sins. Atonement is the fulfillment of the transcendental purpose of man in history, the creation of the myth, creation. Some may say that this messianic discourse is nothing but a pathetic, sentimental style intended merely to stress the special nature of the 73 Solomon ibn Gabirol, “Shviia bat-tsiyon” [Captive daughter of Zion], Project Ben-Yehuda, benyehuda.org/rashbag/rashbag307.html.

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family ties, centered on the figure of the grandfather, which is characteristic of most of Rubina’s writing. True, the model in which configurations of ideas are embodied in configurations of family ties, complex to one degree or another, underpins her writing. However, this in no way impairs the ideational texture; it merely points to the source: the dynastic and communal Jewish thinking that begins in the Torah, continues in Hasidic and rabbinical family hagiography, and concludes with the post-Enlightenment ethos, bourgeois or Soviet, of the strong, united Jewish family. In a society void of traditional religiosity, in conditions of nearly total severance from Israel and its historical and geographical significance, belongingness to a family was almost the only element of national identity. It is clear, therefore, why the grandfather, with the few Yiddish phrases still preserved in the granddaughter’s memory, becomes the messiah. For her, messianism is the longed-for translation of “Yerushaloim” to “Jerusalem,” the fulfillment of the name, the wondering to the comprehensible and the explicit, the conversion of the dead sign into a living experience. Besides, if there is anyone in Ziama’s family who is suitable for the role of the mythic cultural hero, it is her grand­ father. In other words, in terms of Jacques Lacan, he embodies the “name of the father;” thus, he is compelled to be embodied in the symbolic order of the redeeming messiah, who protects against hunger and the bullets of terrorists. However, if we want to adhere strictly to the Lacanian model, we can also say that the “real” that hides behind the imaginary and symbolic orders is not connected to the character of the grandfather, to the memory and the past, but is rather manifested in the body of the heroine. And only in it—through it and in the experience of its dissolution—is she realized as the daughter of Zion and the granddaughter of the messiah (the legendary king’s daughter). The “real” is that same wound, the additional hole in the body, through which her blood, which is the true redeemer, is spilled. Her blood spills onto the land and redeems it; it also spills onto the female Arab terrorist, redeeming her as well. Thus, the innocent Jewish victim also redeems Arab femininity—the victim of her “brothers” who threaten her with death. Ziama, whose name is derived from that of her grandfather Zinovy, is also a messiah— the vanished, fleeing, feminine and maternal messiah.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

The strange character of the redheaded boy, the heroine’s neighbor in Syndicate (2004), elicits orphanhood and demonism, thus strengthening the connection between messianism and maternity. The boy set fires in the building where the heroine lived, finally burning down the youth hostel, the rural camp of the Syndicate. Natalia Kuznetsova analyzes the symbolism of fire in the novel and argues that the “angel of fire” symbolizes “the only force capable of opposing the absurdity of the realistic world.” At the same time, she writes that according to Rubina fire is “the metaphor of the Holocaust, which annihilates an entire people, and also the symbol of irreversible destruction, which gives people the sense that there is no escape.”74 Finally, she suggests an analogy between the fire of the angel child and the fire of a bomb explosion in a terrorist attack on Israel.75 To a certain extent, the confusion and contradictions in Kuznetsova’s words reflect the contradictions in the character itself. Here fire is not contrasted with the absurdity of the world but, on the contrary, expresses it. However, Kuznetsova is apparently influenced by the Menippean symbolism of the fire in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which is connected to Wolland and the members of his entourage. The epigraph of the novel is taken from the words of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust: “Part of the Power that would always wish Evil, and always works the Good.” Mephistopheles is “the spirit that always negates.” The words with which the child introduces himself to the narrator seem to be the opposite, and the affirmation, of Mephistopheles’ words: “Bad people slander me, bad people. But I send to all of them light in the soul.”76 The redheaded boy is Lucifer, the bearer of fire, the fallen angel, Satan, “Hillel ben Shahar” who descends to “the sides of the pit” (Isaiah 14:12), and in Rubina, to the sides of the empty pool at the Syndicate hostel in the 74 Natalia Kuznetsova, “Simvolika ognia v romane-komikse Diny Rubinoi ‘Sindikat,’ ili Ob ‘ognennom angele nashego podiezda,’” [Symbolism of fire in the novelcomics by Dina Rubina “Syndicate”], Booknik, March 20, 2008, accessed June 20, 2014,booknik.ru/library/all/simvolika-ognya-v-romane-komikse-diny-rubinoyi-sindikatili-ob-ognennom-angele-nashego-podezda. 75 Rubina, Syndicate, 152. 76 Ibid., 26.

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Moscow suburbs, where the boy ignites his last bonfire.77 Only at the end of the novel, in the narrator’s absurdist dream, does this devil turn into an angel “who wreaks revenge on this world for all of its evils.”78 In Rubina’s writing, unlike Bulgakov’s, the positive, purifying aspect in the character of Satan is not developed, and the boy’s words about “the light in the soul”79 remain nebulous. These words and the character belong to that same worldwide jihad of madness and decomposition that the man in the cemetery in Israel mentions, talking about the impossibility of burying the bodies of people killed by the terrorists’ explosions. The angel of fire is the opposite of the messiah. He is the one who sabotages the very idea of messianism as a purposeful, historical continuity. Nonetheless, it is impossible to ignore the narrator’s attraction to the child, her empathy blended with anxiety, which misled Natalia Kuznetsova. This can only be explained through the concept of messianism itself, in both its aspects. The first aspect is that of motherhood, as we saw in Here Comes the Messiah! (1996). Messianism is the all-embracing motherhood, and certainly it embraces the fallen angel, who embodies the character of the child, for a good reason. Motherhood, not fire, is what redeems and purifies everything, even if it does not forgive. Motherhood is what the child, Moscow, and the world lack. The fire of chaos is the tragedy of human orphanhood (which leads us to Rubina’s topic of family-as-history). The second aspect, linked to the first, is the aesthetic aspect. The narrator is attracted to the child just as the author is attracted to the character, in particular to the negative character, as she puts it. The satanic child is the archetypal negative character, so perfect that it cannot help arousing love (maternal, artistic, messianic) and the desire to imbue him with life, to revive him from the fire like the phoenix or turn him into a salamander who lives inside the fire, thus reuniting life and fire—and hence justifying him. Kuznetsova is right, but only partially. It is true that the fire symbolizes the crematoria of the Holocaust, but this symbolism is countered by the fire of the Israeli sun. The duty of the Syndicate and 77 Ibid., 510. 78 Ibid., 569. 79 Ibid., 26.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

of the narrator, in particular, is to encourage aliyah. Although the description of the Syndicate as a bureaucratic monster recalls, in its cynicism, the fantastic, antiutopian satires of Victor Pelevin, the narrator relates to this role with the utmost seriousness and historical sensitivity. Rubina’s narrator has a mind that does not forget and does not forgive, and her cynicism in describing the complexes of the diaspora Jew is greater (heavier, more serious) than in her description of the Syndicate: “Yes, in Jerusalem the climate was always hotter than in Germany . . . except for those years known to everyone, when in Germany the heating system was so very good.”80 In the novella “Within thy gates” (1997), we find a similar image. One of the protagonists, the husband of the autobiographical narrator, explains why bathhouses are not popular among the Jews: “Possibly we always foresaw that heat which burned half of our nation.”81 The motherhood-orphanhood theme, intertwined with the messiah-­ demon theme, receives a new twist in On the sunny side of the street (2006). As a bildungsroman, this novel is a kind of collage of two coming-of-age plots that partially overlap: about the mother and the daughter. It is no coincidence that Rubina’s mythology places at its center the feminine myth, the myth of the two-way incarnation of mother-daughter, the old woman and the child. In archaic mythologies, as well as in the new European, ecclesiastic mythology, the mother-­daughter incarnation serves as a major symbol of rejuvenation and the life cycle and of the old-new dialectic. Here Rubina finds a new justification for her choice (which seems natural) of feminine protagonists in her writing. From here on, the woman is perceived as the source of eternal vitality and of the infinite possibilities of historical existence that lay a foundation for choice and freedom, thus establishing ethics in history or history as ethics. From the height of humiliated femininity, as in the writing of Boris Pasternak, she is prepared to issue a “claim against history,” in the words of Efrem Baukh.82 As Joseph 80 Ibid., 34. 81 Rubina, “Within thy gates.” 82 Efrem (Efraim) Baukh, Isk istorii [Claim against history] (Moscow, Tel-Aviv: Zakharov, Kniga-Sefer, 2007).

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Brodsky wrote about Marina Tsvetaeva, “The peak of existence should be the ethical position, ethical judgment, and women are far closer to that.”83 As she is wont to do, Rubina builds the story from fragments of real life that reflect and duplicate themselves in memories and dreams. One distinct example is the reflexivity of characters with physical defects in the stories of Katia and Vera: Katia’s lover, Vera’s father, Yuri Kondratievich “a man with seven fingers,” and Vera’s first love, Stasik, the artist on crutches. The corporal defect as represented in art and literature between the two world wars is a well-known symbol of cultural, social, and moral crisis—in brief, of a historical crisis. Here Rubina splits the reality, separating the two protagonists and creating for Stasik an alternative history, which is realized in Vera’s dreams and hallucinations—in which his body is whole and his legs are healthy. The creation of an alternative history is the outcome of Vera’s loving and abundant ability to give. The imagination, the dream, or the metaphysical register of existence in which the personality is fulfilled in its mythic wholeness (Stasik looks like a centaur to Vera)—the multiple possibilities of existence and fulfillment—these emerge from fertile, maternal femininity, which both gives birth and redeems. The origin of the notion of historical alternativity is in ancient vegetal mythology.84 In Katia’s character, this significant potential was fulfilled in a flawed, satanic, transgressive manner. She is at the head of a group of “hashish hunters,”85 and hashish is vegetal in origin (cannabis). Drugs also establish a kind of alternative, imaginary reality, but it is one that lacks a historical dimension; hence, it is barren, empty of love and birth. It is merely a simulacrum, a simulation of life without the real fulfillment of personality. Katia’s character (in her broken, perforated, trampled

83 Joseph Brodsky and Solomon Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim: Literaturnye biografii [Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky: Literary biographies] (Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1997), 43–63. 84 Roman Katsman, Literature, History, Choice (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 20–28. 85 Rubina, On the sunny side of the street, 88.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

generation) is devoid of the register of dreams; hence, fulfillment and correction of the defect are missing. In the series of images of memory, starting with the image of a murderer, the tone of nostalgic sentimentality arises and is stretched, further overcoming the constant irony, until the narrator twice refers to herself as “the ironic foolish old woman,”86 basking in the visions of her childhood and a sense of lost happiness. Time is now depicted not as a murderer, but as a thief, who slowly steals all of her belongings— people, experiences, hasty encounters—her entire life. The narrator is embarrassed in the face of this “forlorn yearning” of childhood memories; in order to contain it, she comes up with another allegory of time and remembrance: she compares herself to a diver who tries to save every “remnant from the sweet, passing Atlantis.”87 The metaphysical city, the anti-Babylonian refuge, sinks into the world like the Titanic— in a catastrophe. Like Agnon, who in Ir u-meloa (The city and the fullness thereof) saves Jewish Buchach, Rubina saves the city of Tashkent and with it the possibility of translation. She does not write a chronicle, nor does she cull or sift the broken pieces of history. Her method is not very different from that of modernism in poetry or even of Gogolian realism, with its long lists in the background of nostalgic, ironic recollection, as the random lists are inserted into concrete, narrative sequences. In Rubina’s case, there is an additional value to her readiness to give up sorting and selecting: it strengthens and deepens the narrator’s gesture of loving and giving, which is carried out in contrast to the gesture of the theft of time, and it also arrests time. The nonselection is an expression of maternal, fertile abundance, of the work of the sacrificially feminine “loving imagination,” since every “dive” places the writer on the boundary of life and death, drawing closer to suicide, to feminine falling/jumping into the depths (the well of memory, the river of time). Here Rubina draws nearer to the great poetry of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, both thematically and emotionally, from the standpoint of the assemblage of motifs and images, and from 86 Ibid., 226. 87 Ibid., 228.

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a poetic standpoint (particularly to Tsvetaeva with her technique of fragmentation and abbreviation, which creates an impression of nonselectively counting and retrieving pictures and statements in a nonchronological manner). Another messianic female character appears in the novel Leonardo’s handwriting—Anna. However, in this novel there is one element that distinguishes it from the previous novels as well as those that followed it: the fantastic element that imbues Rubina’s realism with a magic dimension. What are its causes? What lack is this magic element in the novel compensating for? The first cause is a more external one: the magic dimension compensates for the absence of an autobiographical dimension to the character of Anna the acrobat. Rubina imbues Anna with a small spark of prophecy in order to bring her character closer to that of the creator—lonely, introverted, and genius. The other cause is more substantive: by means of this genius, this gift/curse, the author splits reality, creating an epistemological break, which is necessary to separate the past, present, and future—namely, to establish the narrative time itself. In the earlier novels, Rubina created this split on other planes: I/other, there/ here, art/life, dream/reality. The main character in Rubina’s writing is always split, multiplied, doubled in mirrors. In this novel, the author creates a perfect, ideal, Leonardo-like renaissance character; in order to give her depth of personality and a temporal dimension, she places the mirrors inside the character’s head. As a result, the heroine sees the reflections of the future and the past of other people in the mirror. Her character is not reflected and duplicated in the mirrors; she has no copies/ doubles, she remains the “dark precursor,” in Gilles Deleuze’s terms,88 the invisible, the disappeared. The more she “matures”—is realized— toward the end of the novel, the further she moves into the shadows, until she totally disappears at the end, which is in fact the beginning of the novel and its main riddle, which drives the plot. We can compare Anna’s character to that of Michael in Meir Shalev’s novel Fontanela (Fontanelle)89—a coming-of-age, a magic realism 88 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 146–148. 89 Meir Shalev, Fontanela [Fontanelle] (Tel Aviv: Am oved, 2002).

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

novel whose narrator, the main character, is a man who possesses a spark of prophecy, thanks to a fontanelle that failed to close. Unlike Rubina’s Anna, Michael’s magical character is identified as the narrator and hence is in the narrative spotlight, whole and sunny but at the same time vulnerable, fragile, and weak. His vocal “I” is so dominant that the element of mystery is swallowed up in its loud echoes. Anna, on the other hand, is a sort of renaissance character in a baroque ballad (she is also likened to figures in Rembrandt’s paintings).90 For this reason, she does not have a voice of her own in the novel; she is like an invisible mirror (“transparent from the inside” when she looks into her internal mirrors),91 in which other people are reflected.92 Her character consists, like a puzzle, of the voices of people who loved her, including that of the narrator. She is seemingly illuminated from several places and different directions in weak candlelight, but most of her remains in shadow. This technique is similar to the technique Rubina used in her previous novel, On the sunny side of the street (2006), for the purpose of creating the character of the beloved city. Like the metaphysical city of Tashkent, Anna wavers between presence and absence, between life and death, between memory and forgetting; this fluctuation in itself imparts her with a magic dimension. As in Tashkent, to stay on the “sunny side” of her character requires a great effort—that of recalling, a fertile “loving imagination.” Hence, the narrative fragmentation, the combination of excerpts of stories of different characters from different observation points, this “chorus of voices” (familiar to us from Rubina’s earlier novels) is explained not by a worldview, an ideology, or a genre aesthetic, but rather by the unique nature of Anna’s character. Although Rubina has solid ideological concepts and broad erudition in many spheres of culture, her writing is far more concrete and complex than these concepts, and she always remains very pragmatic in shaping her characters and plots. (In this she resembles Meir Shalev.) The character she creates in the current novel must be loved, attractive, desired, and even 90 Rubina, Leonardo’s handwriting, 101. 91 Ibid., 149. 92 Ibid., 33.

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erotic. Unlike the case in Rubina’s earlier novels and most of her stories, this character must be the sacred center of the physical and metaphysical circus world; hence, in keeping with the author’s anthropological approach, she must be evanescent and elusive, flickering between the lines of her myths. And like a truly mythical heroine, such as a Greek demigoddess or a biblical prophet, she disappears, rising to the heavens on her motorcycle chariot. Anna is an acrobat and aerial artist in a circus. As in the other novels, here too there is the theme of a difficult adolescence: orphanhood, adoption, a foreign environment, adjustment problems, wandering, self-fulfillment, and finally—a mysterious disappearance. Anna tells the future, seeing it in some kind of internal mirror inside her head. Like the mirrors in Velazquez’s paintings, the baroque mystery is concealed in the heart of daily life. In this novel, the mirror is not a psychoanalytical metaphor—it is not Freudian, nor is it apparently Lacanian, but rather an existential metaphor of the nothing at the heart of the something, of the opening to “the world that is beyond the threshold of the essence.”93 It is also a scientific metaphor: according to the theory of antimatter, every neutrino has a mirror-image double; the “mirror-image matter” of “the mirror-image universe”—the “parallel,” “correct” universe in Anna’s view94—is composed of mirror-image particles. The mathematical theory of multiple worlds, proposed by Hugh Everett and developed by David Deutsch, is also mentioned in the novel.95 A mirror is also a legendary, almost trivial metaphor: Simeon, the bassoon player, recalls the mirror in “Snow White,” or in the Russian version “The Legend of the Sleeping Princess and the Seven Knights” by Pushkin.96 The structure of this fairy tale is evident in the plot of the novel: an orphaned girl, a “good” stepfather, a “bad” stepmother; in the fairy tale she is jealous, but in the novel she is suspicious; the beauty and the white skin of the adolescent girl is converted in an 93 94 95 96

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 442. Ibid., 25.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

illuminating mirror inside her head; the flight from home, wandering in the “forest” of the circus art, and of course the seven knights/dwarfs; the men in Anna’s life, none of whom she belongs to—she is their prophet and messiah. Like the sacred, she is closed inside “the glass cupboard.” “The king’s daughter,” Anna, is the eternal child, the oracle, the mirror that reflects the most painful truth of life—the progression of time, the consciousness of one’s finitude, the abyss of forgetfulness. The look into it is the Dionysian gaze of the Nietzschean Greek man into the abyss of knowledge—the origin of Apollonian dreams. Anna also recalls the king’s daughter from the many stories of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov—nomadic, transgressive, searching, inconceivable, the dominant leader—so much like Deborah, the judge and prophetess. In White dove of Cordova (2009), we find another type of messiah. Zakhar Cordovin is the new Chichikov—a picaro, a brilliant rogue, the messiah of the artist-forgers—who resurrects dead souls and also creates new ones. He is a kind of prefiguration of the “future messiah,” the one who creates the “true history” of the forgotten artists.97 Zakhar is not only a simulacrum artist but also a creator of imagined histories. Here, as in the previous works, Rubina’s poetic thought progresses in successive stages of adopting the postmodern element, choosing it, processing it, and overcoming it, while dialectically containing it in the original thinking. After all, Zakhar, in his wanderings through the copies and the forgeries, does arrive at the source—the original painting that contains the source of his origin. This is Rubina’s way of coping with the temptations of the time and fleeting artistic fashions and also— perhaps mainly—with her own “weaknesses” and apprehensions, with the fear related to the total (onetime) seriousness of the source, with the carnivalesque and thanatological charm of chaos and entropy. Rubina and her protagonists do not remain on the level of history as fiction (à la Hayden White),98 but instead undergo a metaphysical shift—toward a knowledge of real history. At the beginning of the 97 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 40. 98 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

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novel, Zakhar is entirely immersed in the consciousness of the demiurge, the creator of worlds, the consciousness of converting the lie into truth, of creating the myth in the Roland Barthes’ sense of the word; namely, presenting the cultural (the artificial) as natural. Zakhar lives in the hubris that as he wields his brush, the forged paintings fill with “the flesh and blood of fate.”99 The metaphysical Eros, whose power enables the orphans of the ghettos to fly toward the baroque light, is totally realized in the character of the mother, in motherhood itself, and is fully expressed in all of its mythic intensity in the novel’s main symbol—the white dove. The biblical significance of the dove—the symbol of the rejuvenation of the Creation, of the Creator’s forgiveness and good will—accords with the Christian symbolism in its material aspect: “The white robes of the Madonna.”100 It all looks as if two histories are taking place in parallel: the history of expulsions, exiles, piracy, murders, and revenge, and the history of births, revivals, love, and forgiveness. They both pass inseparably into the hearts of men and women, but one can say that the former is a history of stealing, and the latter is a history of giving. The white dove is a symbol of absolute giving, an endless source of all living things, that flows from the heart of the world of relative copies/forgeries. Thus, the white dove serves as the secret sign of the presence/absence of the artist, Zakhar Cordovin, in the paintings that he restores or forges, a symbol of the artist-messiah’s unseen soul.101 At a flamenco concert in Cordova, Zakhar not only meets his mother in another incarnation but also meets himself in the Andalusian flamenco cante jondo song, “Where is your legacy?”102 The name of the Spanish dancer is Manuela, and she tells Zakhar a family legend about how two brothers, Zacarias and Manuel, who were persecuted by the Inquisition, became pirates and were forced to separate. Zacarias disappeared, but “one day he will return . . . and here, you have   99 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 50. 100 Ibid. 93. 101 For a discussion of other aspects of the dove symbolism, see Shafranskaya, Dove syndrome, 7–12. 102 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 486.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

returned”—Manuela, who is named after her forefathers, tells Zakhar.103 The romantic motif of “the brother robbers” is intertwined here in the messianic motif, with the expectation of tikkun and its inherent redemption. However, the dead mother does not come back to life, the lost holy chalice does not return, and the brother who returns will die a moment after his return. It would seem that all that remains are doubles, replacements, copies—and the yawning gap between them and the original. The identification of the “deception” is unavoidable. It would seem that all that remains is the Deleuzian Eden of splitting differences and repetitions. However, at the last minute everything turns upside down: Zakhar sees the second chalice, identical to “our legacy,” in Manuela’s home, and now, after he has matured, immigrated to Jerusalem and learned Hebrew, he can read the inscription on the chalice: “On the day of the galleon’s departure, master Raymundo Espinoza filled these two goblets from the sacred bowl of Jerusalem for the dukes of banishment, the brothers Zacarias and Immanuel Cordovera, lest they ever part while exacting their revenge.”104 This was the main purpose of the wandering, of the “carnival-like” immigration—to learn the holy tongue, the language of the history and the symbols, to be able to decipher the dynastic code, the messianic code, the code of tikkun, unification, wholeness. The original exists—it is the metaphysical origin: the sanctity of the Jerusalem chalice, which has remained whole throughout all the transformations and divisions of the matter from which it is made. It is the allegory of the historical memory, the core of the identity. Cordova is “the source and the root, the basis, the spirit, the legacy”105 of the Cordovera dynasty, the allegory of the land of the fathers, the double of the Promised Land, the source and the destiny at which the journey of piratic wandering begins and ends. The pirate has lost his legacy, sold his soul, and when he “can no longer live with it,” he is also the messiah who “appears nevertheless,”106 thus establishing a new life and redeeming his legacy. 103 Ibid., 500. 104 Ibid., 512. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 524.

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Manuela saw Zakhar in this light, and he saw himself this way: he sold the Cordovera painting to the Vatican for a huge sum, and he now regards this money as “our inheritance—our estates, our vineyards, houses, and ships.”107 One historical cycle has ended, and another has begun: several days after Zakhar is murdered by Russian gangsters, his Spanish lover, Pilar, gives birth to identical twins.108 Messianism, then, is not the apocalypse of the end of days, but rather, as in other novels by Rubina, it is motherhood, pregnancy, and birth as a myth of incarnation of the soul and its return home. Through his mother and the mother of his children, Zakhar, like Ulysses, returns to his kingdom. This complex of themes, together with the motif of escape from home that will be discussed later, receives further development in A Russian canary (2015). Gavrila (Hertz) Ettinger and Mukhan, Gulia’s (Ilya’s wife) “vanilla grandfather,” try to escape from their homes, their madness, themselves—although with little success. The mothers flee, disappear, die while the fathers grow old, grow mad, are murdered. In any case, neither the mothers nor the fathers are capable of helping their children, who consequently grow up as orphans, in the real or metaphorical sense. (Even in the case of Ilya and Aya, the perfect father-daughter couple, orphanhood finds its symbolic expression in Aya’s deafness.) Nonetheless, a new motif appears in this novel: barren and lesbian femininity, embodied in the character of Eska (Esfir-Esther), a distant echo of the Liza character in Petrushka syndrome (2010). Flawed motherhood is the center around which the ruins of the new Babylon are organized—familiography or history with or without a messiah. Madness, too, is defined here as “courageous disobedience,” “an evasive leap from the claws of avaricious fate,” “escape from the divine plan.”109 The madman is the metaphysical pirate, the fugitive messiah in hiding. This novel sharpens the problem of victimhood, which will be discussed further in the following section; it is one of the central issues in all of Rubina’s writings. 107 Ibid., 531. 108 Ibid., 537. 109 Rubina, A Russian canary: Zheltukhin, 234.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

VICTIMS AND HEROES

In Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), Dina Rubina’s and Writer N.’s heroine, Ziama—a double and a sister—is the one chosen to be the victim, the substitute, the penitent, to die in that same operation that Writer N. sees on the screen of her imagination. Her tragic death, Shakespearean in its preposterousness, is foreshadowed by the death in Ramallah of the driver, Haim, from the Arab sniper’s bullet. When she learns of this, Ziama reviles the Arabs with the ancient curse she heard from her grandfather. Finally, when her husband returns from his foolish, futile, carnivalesque “act of vengeance,” Ziama gives in and agrees to move to the city “after Yom Kippur.” She does not survive past Yom Kippur, but her death becomes a sign of her reunification with her grandfather, the fulfillment of her magic name in a myth, in which the mythic hero is also forced to fight against something or someone—a monster, an enemy (the one inside and the one outside), thus making the ancient curses of the fathers also valid. A victim is always required. Moreover, the protagonists are afraid of losing their humanity in this war, but not going to war also means losing one’s humanity. Therefore, self-sacrifice is inevitable, the only deed in history that can fulfill the impossible, transcendental complexity of a human being. Culture is a historical task, the creation of deathless life, according to Matvei Kagan, a student of Hermann Cohen—the philosopher who believed the purpose of history was the improvement and development of mankind and who saw the apogee and ideal of this process in the idea of atonement embodied in Yom Kippur.110 Therefore, people like Ziama and her husband do not kill; the curse they utter—“If only we can bury them for seven months”— is an image of violence that replaces and rejects violence, visualizing the death of the other in order to temper the fear of death. This violence and its rejection stages the aborted gesture of appropriation, attended by love and resentment, according to the concepts of Eric Gans, and when its sign is created, it constitutes a mechanism of 110 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1995), 178ff.

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establishing culture and ethics.111 This is also a sign of the return to the source; in the case of Ziama, to the figure and ethos of her grand­ father. In addition, according to the concepts of Hermann Cohen the source is the inception of subjectivity, of knowledge and existence.112 In other words, through her curse Ziama creates a new reality, her new self, resurrects her grandfather, reconnects the time axes, and gives one more turn to the wheel of Jewish history (the enemies are always here!). She does all this while endangering humanness, which ends not by making humanity shallow but, on the contrary, by increasing the complexity of the personality, which opens within itself the possibility of self-sacrifice. In the story “The Gypsy,” the narrator describes an amazing and troubling phenomenon. Since her childhood, everyone who harms her gets hurt in the end, as if being punished for doing evil. She discovers that she belongs to a group of people who serve as bait or as a test subject for all the others, whose knowledge of right and wrong is examined by the heavenly office. Those who are “bait” are under special “supervision,” which can be viewed as either a blessing or a curse. This fickle blessing/curse has loomed over the narrator’s family ever since one of her forefathers married a gypsy fortune-teller. During World War II, when the Nazis were leading her and her daughter to their execution, she cursed them and yelled at them, vowing they “will eat dirt,” and that the families of the victims will be “under supervision” up to the ninth generation. And indeed, all of those Nazis were killed later when an ammunition store blew up. This discovery shocks the narrator and leads her not only to an understanding of her personal fate, but also to an understanding of the meaning of ancient biblical justice: Vehement delight gave me a kick; cruel wind gushed into my throat. Wild, bitter joy was choking me! Here it is—the monstrous, ancient deepest-rooted eye-for-an-eye retaliation! There can be nothing else; everything else is nothing but lies, hypocrisy, addled dull 111 Gans, A New Way of Thinking. 112 Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis [Logic of pure knowledge] (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005), 36.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

blood! “You’ll bite the ground, that’s what you’re gonna do for what you’ve done to my folks!”—I shouted laboring for breath and couldn’t come to my senses.113

Gypsyhood appears as a source of the life force and survival, as boiling blood that cries out for revenge and a war of justice. The only truth in the world is “providence,” that primeval faith, Jewish or Greek, in nous—the wisdom of the universe. The unity of victimhood and the wisdom of providence and redemption are embodied in the figure of the romantic pirate, which sharply distinguishes Rubina’s treatment of the victim theme from that in the works by Grigory Kanovich, for example. Through the family story and the story of her life, the narrator interprets ethics as a concern for the intactness and continuity of the dynastic and national sequence of generations, which gives her an opportunity to express her perception of national identity. The idea of the Jewish people as having been chosen to be a tempting lamb for the wolves takes us to the issue of the victim. As a matter of fact, victimhood is expressed (and not for the first time) as a type of chosenness and is thus replaced by the ethics of the supreme providence: the victim is a criterion for the morality of the others (the “light unto the nations” version). This perception of a mission constitutes theodicy and the justification of suffering and gypsy-like wanderings in exile. The narrator finds a lofty teleological explanation for the “banality of evil.” However, the conclusion of the story is ironic, if not cynical. The explanation is angrily rejected, whether it will be found satisfactory or not. Consequently, the ending of Here Comes the Messiah! (1996) seems somewhat nihilistic. While concepts of providence and belongingness can save history from the banality of evil, nothing can save the accidental from its banality. It is impossible to disappear, to replace, or to justify the victim, because the victim is accidental, and the victim’s innocence is infinite and therefore absolute. This absolute state is so total that it leaves no room for a blessing or a curse, for justice and 113 Dina Rubina, Zyganka [The gypsy] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 87. Translated by Yan Mazor.

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ethics. It puts an end to the intertime, generational, transhistorical gypsy-like wandering of reward and punishment. From this standpoint, this novel does indeed portray a vision of the end of days. It is truly a messianic novel. In The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998), a Russian author searches for her place in the new reality—the new life, culture, literature, and Israeliness. The various immigrant patterns of thought, both positive as well as negative, do not satisfy her because they are apt to dry up the sources of her creativity. They comprise crisis, detachment, and barren victimhood. The bountiful, fertile maternal instinct calls for other means of sublimation, which are more whole, more effective. Like the mythological goddess of fertility, she is incapable of not giving birth, of not turning the inanimate into the animate. It is her fundamental myth—hers in the sense that she lives and creates it at every moment, and that all her other myths are only versions of this fundamental myth. Rubina’s satire looks like epic wonder and sometimes like a circus act, but in any case, this is the nature of art, at least the way she perceives it. It is her way of integrating into Israeli life and Jewish history. The stunt is simple to perform—like the interference of two light sources: the stored light of the mythic, historical past, and the blinding light of the desert of the present. This mechanical interference produces wonderful effects and saves the author from immigrant complexes and the poison of detachment. She does not live the cultural, linguistic, and national dualities as a conflict; on the contrary, they melt away like random counterpoints in the monumental, historical suite that flows from her pen. The family ties hold things together more tightly in this polyphony of times. They are means, ideograms (a kind of “familiogram”) that express the sense of life’s historicity, which makes it possible to turn history into a living environment, like an oikos – house. Rubina’s Jew feels at home and can create everywhere, wherever there is even the smallest vestige of Jewish history. This is the chronotope of ecohistoricity, at the center of which there is a man who feels at home everywhere and at every time, where he is capable of making the effort to recall his minimal historical source. He is a nomad and citizen of the world, but this is due to his historical, dynastic memory-vision.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

In the words of Arseny Tarkovsky, “Live in a house, and it will not fall.”114 In her imagination, instead of the community center’s staff, Dina sees the scene of a royal court, the jester Lucio reminds her of Velasquez’s dwarfs, noblemen, and noblewomen of the court; the guard of the pools and the guard of the armory; physicians, scribes, servants, and the like. She sees herself as a minstrel, a troubadour, a minnesinger, in any event, as a “convert, an outsider.”115 In her mind’s eye, she sees hunting scenes at the courtly estate, one after the other: boar hunting with dogs, hunting with hawks, hunting with beaters. The world of literature and film in which the narrator grew up generously offered her images of hunts. They originate not only in European cultural wealth as plentiful, childish, and innocent but also in that layer of personal associations that brings forth the subject of the hunted victim from the repertoire of the historical memory of the Holocaust. (This code is widespread in Holocaust literature, for example, in the works of Aharon Appelfeld; the motif of the hunt, both in plot and character, that typifies the hostile gentile environment in Europe is striking, for example in the works of Agnon.) This code breaks through the carnivalesque discourse, repulses the Rabelaisian-Bakhtinian laughter, the inverse, sacrilegious, degrading laughter that floats on the surface of the narrator’s words, and exposes the concealed, unrealized possibilities of recollection. This new metamorphosis of laughter into laughter-recollection clears a path to the festival, which is the adaptation—the Jewish sublimation—of the carnival. The historical ecology has dark niches—the memories of exile and persecution. In the story “Coccinelle,”116 the narrator is strolling through a German city, praising the cleanliness and order of the streets and the gates locked against intruders, and staring at the houses and showcases when her thoughts go suddenly inward, wandering to 114 Arseny Tarkovsky, “Zhizn, zhizn” [Life, Life], in Blagoslovennyi svet (St. Petersburg: Severo-zapad, 1993), 265. 115 Rubina, Last wild boar, 55. 116 Rubina, in A cold spring in Provence.

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distant-yet-nearby vistas, and she says to herself, “Dear me, why on Earth are you scrutinizing monograms on this silverware? Why can’t you get the words ‘seized property’ off your mind? Damn it, for what signs, for what names sunk into oblivion are you looking for here, you obstinate, restless, unforgiving soul!?” Later, in a dream, she talks to a coccinelle (transsexual) she met the night before in a café, while he was doing her a massage: —Yes, right here . . . at the nape of my neck . . . I was complaining . . . it’s such torture . . . I keep looking back . . .  —Why? Come on, relax your shoulders . . . sehr gut, that’s right. Why do you keep looking back? —I’m looking for a way out through the courtyard . . . but there is none . . .  —Mein Gott, why would you need one? . . .  —What do you mean—why? To shake off the pursuers!117

A similar scene occurs in the novel Syndicate (2004), followed by a dramatic continuation—a kind of vision of a reviving memory. On a visit to Riga, the narrator goes into a store. After hesitating in front of plates and cups, probably stolen from Holocaust victims, she tries on a hat: I put on the hat—seems it’s called a pillbox hat—and looked at myself in the mirror through the veil. On the opposite wall, a black SS uniform was hanging; obviously, these uniforms were also bought by someone for the fun of it. And then I snapped. Instantly, clearly, and as though it was chiseled out, I SAW in the mirror a soldier knock this hat off the head of some elderly lady with his shoulder stock. The lady, among other people, was driven down Adolf Hitler Street to the Riga Ghetto. I discerned small fibers of her grey coat with sloping shoulders, long raglan sleeves; then I had a chance to see how far 117 Ibid., 133–134.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

away the knocked-off hat rolled and how a soldier’s boot trod on the short veil. I gave a shriek, ripped the hat off my head and put it on the counter with my trembling hand.118

These dynamics of the memory of the Holocaust, the obsessive foreign memory (the reappropriated heritage) of the hunter and the hunted, takes us back to the theme of the victim. A veil of victimhood lies on the narrator’s historical consciousness. She laments the disappearance of Spanish Jewry and European Jewry, in general, as an ancient trauma and as an actual event at one and the same time. Despite the ironic allusion in the title of The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998) to the symbol of everything that is “other,” alien, or not kosher, the word “last” refers to the Jews. Thus, the title recalls the theme of the “last Jew,” known in Hebrew literature from Yoram Kaniuk’s book, in Russian literature from the writing of Leonid Reznick, and in American literature from the work of Noah Gordon. Kaniuk and Reznick’s works belong to the genre of alternative history. Gordon wrote a historical novel about the expulsion from Spain. Whether it is a true history or a possible history, the theme of the last Jew unquestionably encompasses the entire range of meanings of expulsion, exile, destruction, abandonment, and wandering, and yet at the same time, it encompasses the meaning of heroism and survival. The last Jew celebrates his (temporary) victory over death but also signifies the absence of all the Jews that were and are no longer. From this vantage point, this theme adds Rubina’s novel (along with several of her other stories) to holocaust literature, the literature of all of the holocausts of the Jews, those in various times-places that did not conclude with a Purim-like “happy ending.” Like alternative history, Rubina’s double vision creates a possible reality that does not consist mainly of the manifestation of the medieval Spanish layer in Israeli life but rather in the disappearance of this layer. The main tragedy lies not in Lucio’s death and the end of his dynasty but 118 Rubina, Syndicate, 461.

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rather in the end of the history of European Jewry and the forgetting of the Jews in European history, a sort of assimilation of the memory. Thus, for example, in most of Rubina’s writing, we find stories about Jews who left one imprint or another on the cultural life of European communities, but whose memory has not been preserved and is often disdained by their offspring. For example, the young Spanish woman who appears at the end of White dove of Cordova (2009) is not even aware of her Jewish roots; the Dutch woman from the story “Shkola sveta” (School of light) keeps to herself the story of the Jew whom she saved during the war and who later became her husband, the father of her son—a man who looks Jewish and who now works with his mother in a hotel in Delft, Holland.119 These are the last Jews, the lonely pirates “in the reserves.” Historical tragedy becomes entwined with personal tragedy in the figure of Lucio, the brilliant artist and funster who directs his death with all the means at his disposal: acting, disguises, and substitutions—puppets and marionettes. When the narrator visits Lucio’s home, she finds that his puppet—an exact copy of him—has supposedly hung himself in the bath.120 The character of Lucio is the early version of the great marionette artist who will make a more complete appearance in the later novel, Petrushka syndrome (2010). In both novels, the puppet/copy not only threatens to rebel against its creator and replace a real person in his or her real life, thus constituting a source of violence, but in the final analysis also becomes an object of violence. A golem or Frankenstein’s monster must disappear so that human life can pursue its normal course. They must be sacrificed and the creator must become a hangman. The Creator who sacrifices his creatures so that the puppet theater of creation can continue to exist—this is the metaphysical mystery concealed behind the mischievous, audacious stunts carried out by the artist characters in Rubina’s work. Reflecting on history as she creates the story, the narrator tries to understand the meaning of Lucio’s tragic death. As far as she is concerned, his performance was an escape, suicide. Her discourse goes back to the poetic victimhood of ballads and operas, blurring the anthropological 119 Rubina, “Shkola sveta” [School of light], in Kholodnaia vesna v Provanse [A cold spring in Provence], 28-70 (Moscow: Eksmo, 2012). 120 Rubina, Last wild boar, 132.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

mechanism that underlies it. However, ballads and operas also have some anthropological truth: the idea of the victim is always meant to compensate for the mutuality and symmetry of desires and gestures. The police call Lucio’s death an accident, but Dina has her own version: “The tragic hero, clown, juggler, acrobat—he created for himself the ballad of his life, his love, and his death and made sure to closely stick to the plot.”121 Apparently Dina’s imagination misleads her, and she knows that. She, unlike the author, cannot resist the charms of the victims. Lucio is not a victim, just as a tragic hero is not a victim. He is the creator of history, myth, fate, and his own personality. After all is said and done, the reversal from victim to winner is what Purim is all about. And if Lucio is nonetheless a victim, it is only in the sense that in his life and death, he realized the accursed “plot” of his family. On the other hand, this also represents a victory of sorts—that of self-fulfillment and fulfillment of the myth—of appropriating the source anew. In Syndicate (2004), the subject of the terror victim reaches its highest metaphysical level. In one of her dreams, Dina sees the victim’s blood rushing through Jerusalem canals, in which a Noah’s ark is sailing, bringing to the Land of Israel all the lost and now found tribes: An endless stream of my people, my cosmic people, was lining up and ascending the gangway, as wide as a bridge, to a gigantic ship, acting in one endless tragic comic strip. . . . They were heavily followed by all the ten lost tribes of Israel restored by our departments with heart and soul, picked one by one—children, old men and women, idiots and geniuses, impostors and righteous men, staunch supporters and thieving drunkards, academics, caperers, plumbers, and all those who forgot what they were and didn’t have a clue about what they’d become.122

What we see here is the elevation of the blood of victims of terrorist acts to the level of the blood of the Temple altar, the shift of the fires 121 Ibid., 217. 122 Rubina, Syndicate, 569.

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described in the novel in elevators and pools to the level of the fire of the altar and even to the levels of the fire of Abraham’s covenant, the fire of the burning bush, the pillar of fire, and the fire that consumed Nadab and Abihu in reaction to their own strange fire. As in the conclusions of the two previous novels, the narrator searches for a pure victim in order to sanctify the victim, and she finds herself (this time, unlike in Here Comes the Messiah! [1996], without any replacements). In a sort of truly Gogolian, grotesque-pathetic mixture of faces, along with the motifs that are so close to her heart, such as Venice and its canals,123 Rubina sublimates the “tragicomedy,” rises above it—just as we rise above childhood complexes in nightmares—and ascends to the level of the philosophical allegory of the return to the Temple as a source of life and meaning. In retrospect, this justifies the tribulations of history and the pure blood that was shed, restoring the waves of the chaos and the absurd to the level plain of subjectivity, reason, and transcendental purposefulness. Only after the sublimation and catharsis of the vision of the rising sacrificial immigrants can she leave Moscow, return from the dream to reality, and declare: “I have left the novel.”124 The narrator is herself the heroine of the comics, one of the portraits in the gallery of voyagers sailing on the immigration ship—the ship of the survivors, which is also a Noah’s Ark. On the sunny side of the street (2006) suggests another victim figure. From where, from what darkness did the character of Katia emerge? Who are her elder sisters in Russian classical literature? Katia Maslova from Tolstoy’s Resurrection? Katia Kabanova from Ostrovsky’s “The Thunder”? Katerina Izmailova from Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth from the Mtsensk District”? Sonia Marmeladova from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment? Chekhov’s women? Kuprin’s? Rubina’s Katia is far removed from the classic character of the Russian woman. She is not a victim, neither of human and social evil nor of the boring, destructive, everyday routine, nor of fierce passion. In addition, she is far from the great lamenting women of twentieth-century poetry— the lyrical heroines of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. She is closer to the 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., 573.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

biblical Yael, to Judith of the Book of Judith, to Antigone and Medea (less to Phaedra and Didone), but she lacks their heroism and self-sacrifice. She possesses quite a lot of the feminine militancy, vengeful and putatively redeeming, of the Russian revolution. Yet, if this is true, then we should add the features of the Greek goddesses of vengeance, of chthonic nymphs, the children of chaos, such as Medusa Gorgona, the very embodiment of cruel, blind fate. On the other hand, she lacks one other essential feature, common to the messianism of revolutionaries and the fury of the fertile: the zeal of cosmic justice. Thus, we must admit that despite the traditional elements she absorbed, this character is outside the “canonic” circles of classical fictional women. The secret of Katia’s character is that she is a Soviet antiheroine of the type that Soviet literature itself dared not portray. At the same time, she retains the most compressed symbolic core, a black hole (like her stomach, which shrinks, due to the starvation she experienced, and finally rips open) that swallows every bit of meaning and does not release a single beam of light. But, the hole is there inside her, and everything is already in it. She is not a victim, but she is definitely a product of the atrocities of the twentieth century. She embodies the moral tectonic rift—the crisis of modern and postmodern humanism—and the ongoing decline that stems from it. Katia is the heroine who survives. To be more precise, she and her family survive the Bolshevik terrorism, World War II, the destruction after the war, and the late Soviet regime which was entirely fraudulent and rotten to the core; however, her survival doesn’t turn her into a mythic, cultural heroine. On the contrary, it turns her into a chthonic monster, a beastly woman who is hardly capable of any human emotion. She, like all of her generation, was on the verge of death and annihilation, the last evacuation in the sense of the final solution. History took everything from her, and here lies the gist of the moral rupture she embodies: she is incapable of and does not know how to give nor does she want to: “How is it possible to give bread, even one crumb?!”125 125 Rubina, Sunny side, 33.

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The inability to give is also the main difference between her and all the other fictional female characters mentioned above. It is the great break in what was considered the mainstay of the popular Russian ethos: compassion for the debased and the oppressed, as a feminine sublimation of personal and social violence. This is also the essence of the dour Soviet beastly woman, the Greek mask of anger and aggression (and Katia is indeed very violent in the battles over pieces of bread in her childhood, “the murderess and the field”),126 and the demonic other of the extolled Soviet intelligentsia. Her daughter, Vera, is not her direct opposite, because she (along with her friends Stasik and Leonid) embodies the next generation—the new post-Soviet intelligentsia and the introverted, liberated feminism—innocent and creative “with a slight touch of madness.”127 Together with all these traits, her calling card also appears: Vera does not want and is incapable of taking (for example, she refuses to accept a gift from her friend Leonid).128 The existentialist ability to give is perceived as a personalistic element of freedom, beyond any social circumstances and also contrary to them (it is no coincidence that Nikolai Berdyaev is mentioned in the heroes’ subversive conversations, although without any Christian perspective).129 The common portrait of the Soviet and post-Soviet generations is allegorically complemented in the description of Vera’s childish fears—in essence, the fear of a crowd of strangers.130 Fear of abandonment, of getting lost, of one’s own shadow, and of the animal—the psychological, internal animal and the mystic, apocalyptic, satanic animal—or of turning a blind eye to the animal. This is the other side of the introversion and madness, of the Soviet intelligentsia’s aspiration for freedom. The author, in one of her ars poetica sections, bases the work on giving, which fulfills the love that establishes culture.131 Its source is in 126 Ibid., 36. 127 Ibid., 79. 128 Ibid., 52. 129 See, for example, Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. Reginald M. French (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944). 130 Rubina, On the sunny side of the street, 82. 131 Ibid., 207.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

“touching the whole world with the soul,” with a simultaneous presence in all points of space-time, with the ability to play and live an infinite number of possibilities—the quality that establishes ethics and also converts it into aesthetics. The art of the story is underpinned by the philosophy of the possible, in Mikhail Epstein’s terms; art enables that same memory, the gesture of touching and feeling that saves the city, the world. In this gesture, the author touches everything, is present in everything; she disappears, is absent; she sacrifices herself. This sacrifice of memory-love-giving is the foundation of culture and history—of history as the unity of ethics and aesthetics, as the generous multiplicity of possibilities/alternatives. The same dynamics is embodied in the characters and plot of Leonardo’s handwriting (2008) in quite a radical and bold form. Let us consider the last letter from Semion to Anna, the letter that cannot be delivered to its disappeared addressee. The motifs are intertwined with his bassoon, which he said accompanied Anna throughout his life and received its purity of tone from her and his grandfather. His grand­ father worshipped the Bible, which Simeon could not understand, particularly the struggle with God. Now he understands: he conceives of Anna, Jacob, and God as one (he even writes “You” with a capital letter). He again pictures Rembrandt’s painting “Jacob wrestling with the angel”: “Doesn’t Jacob want to look into the illuminating eyes of God, so full of fierce love? Why not? Was he afraid to fail, to disappear, to dissolve into the flow of pleasure? To stop being himself?” Although Semion’s perception differs from Eliezer’s since it is based on struggle, it also centers on the vertical axis of the metaphysical love and the historical self-realization that is within this love or at odds, wrestling with it. Semion’s perception, which compares the upper light with the shadows of the human soul, seems to be dominant in this novel. It centers on the dilemma of mystical union, which is also the dilemma of love, prophecy, art, and personal and historical memory: to be oneself or to dissolve into the infinite. Rubina’s poetics and composition grow out of this dilemma and the impossibility of solving it, hence the unity within the multiple voices, the reflections that endlessly multiply in mirrors, and the abundance of faces and details. Here the writing itself

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is in the space between “the loving imagination” in the individual human soul and the perpetual passion for the totality of existence. This novel is particularly representative in this aspect because it unravels the edges of the entity and allows the heroine, in a true mythic miracle, to escape to the numerous worlds reflected in the parallel mirrors; in doing so, she does not lose herself but rather fulfills herself. Since she is the “god” or the “other,” she does not write—in order to allow others to write her out of love or a struggle. She is an allegory of writing itself. In 2008, when she finished writing Leonardo’s handwriting (2008), Rubina published a “between-the-seasons book,” as she put it: a collection of her interviews under the enigmatic title It hurts only when I laugh. The meaning of the title only becomes clear in the last interview, when the interviewer asks Rubina what her favorite Jewish joke is, and she says: “There’s a pogrom. The attackers crucify the Jew. The next morning the Gentile neighbor sees the Jew and asks him: ‘Chaim, does it hurt?’ and Chaim replies: ‘No, only when I laugh.’”132 That joke is, of course, more than a joke. It is a historiosophical and theological parable; the title that Rubina chose for her book of interviews—a more personal, biographical book—is very binding and, of course, suggests the parallel between the author and the figure of the parable. Actually, the title does not completely correspond to Rubina’s writing: in her works, she laughs a lot, and it is not always laughter tinged with pain. On the other hand, she is a sentimental writer (not necessarily in the cheap sense of the word but in the sense characteristic of a large part of nineteenth-century literature); hence, she also knows how to feel pain and inflict pain without laughing. Nonetheless, the tragicomic parable about the laughing, crucified Jew (implicitly compared to the artist) is somewhat justified, although not in the works that preceded the book of interviews, rather mainly in the novel written immediately after it. Although at the center of the parable there is a motif that runs through all of Rubina’s writing—the motif of the victim (in carnival garb)—only in the next novel, White dove of Cordova (2009), 132 Dina Rubina, Bolno tolko kogda smeius [It hurts only when I laugh] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008).

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

is this motif fully realized in the sphere of historical Jewish-­Christian relations in connection with the artist and art. The Jewish heroism of Zakhar the grandson is his legacy from Zakhar the grandfather. The grandfather changed his family name from Cordovera to Cordovin because “he wanted to be a Russian”133 and was the grandson of the “Sephardi” (although everyone had forgotten what the source of that name was) who arrived in Vinnitsa from Odessa and was a “gazlan,” a thief. This grandfather joins a series of grandfathers who appear in all of Rubina’s novels—the anchor of the family memory and the foundation of the familiography (namely mythic, historical-personalistic-tribal thinking), which here turns out to be a kind of hagiography. Grandfather Zakhar resembles Grandfather Ziama from Here Comes the Messiah! (1996): they both wear the halo of heroism and righteousness, which exists alongside the adaptive (but also adventurous) collaboration with the authorities. These protagonists often face the dilemma of loyalty to the pernicious government or humanism and love (to the family), and they choose the latter. Grandfather Zakhar went even further: when he learned that the NKVD, where he himself was employed, had already decided to arrest him and consequently would also harm his family, he took his own life. The archetype of Rubina’s hero is the Spaniard, man and woman. More precisely, the Spanish Jew—expelled, in exile, wandering, and yet attached to his ancient origin by innumerable, hairlike threads. In Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), people from the large Russian immigration of 1990 were compared to the expelled Jews of Spain; now, thirteen years after that first novel and nineteen years after Rubina’s immigration to Israel, her hero returns to Spain. With this journey of the hero come thoughts (in the combined voice of the protagonist and the narrator) about the fate of Europe—about the medieval Christian-­ Muslim wars and about the return of the Muslims to Europe in the twentieth century.134 Seemingly in passing, the stolen treasures of the Temple are also mentioned, those which the Muslim general Tariq ben 133 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 71. 134 Ibid., 88.

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Ziad was, for some reason, searching for in Toledo, and which were “quite modest, by modern standards,” since there was more gold, silver, and the like in every sunken ship than in the coffers of the Jewish Temple.135 The wars were not waged to conquer territory but rather to appropriate symbols and to fulfill ideas. Hence, when the narrator laments Christian Europe, she once again mentions the Temple.136 Zakhar’s gaze at Toledo is painted in the gloomy hues of the inferno, or the fires of the Inquisition.137 In addition to all its multiple senses, the white dove is also a symbol of the victim or sacrifice, and in this sense the disappearance of the creating artist is self-sacrifice. Zakhar’s friend/double, Andrei, is the pure, innocent victim in the novel, literally and figuratively; hence, the white dove also symbolizes his pure soul and sacrifice. Incidentally, in his appearance Andrei also resembles a white dove: on several occasions the narrator says that he resembles the boy from Mikhail Nesterov’s painting “The Vision to the Youth Bartholomew” (1890). In it, the boy appears like a white patch in the center of a green landscape. He wears a white shirt, his hair is white, and his face is white. The painting depicts a segment from “The Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh” (St. Sergius lived 1314–1392) by Epiphanius the Wise (who died circa 1420), which was one of the most important sources of Russian Orthodox hagiography. In this segment, the boy Bartholomew— Varfolomei in Russian (the future Sergius)—meets the mysterious old man (in the painting, the old man has a halo above his head) who predicts a great future for him. Thus, the white dove, the character of Andrei and Nesterov’s painting, continues to develop Rubina’s thoughts about art and metaphysics. Like Sergius, who was a simple shepherd—and is so depicted in the painting (with biblical and evangelical prefigurations, of course)—Andrei is the son of a seemingly simple Russian family. He lives with his grandmother the “witch” (he is another orphan for Rubina’s family of “grandchildren”), who is not so simple, it transpires. In her youth, she studied art restoration in Warsaw. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid., 120.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

From his grandmother, Andrei inherited the skill of “repairing-repairing,” as they call it. Thus, the artistic act is united with the metaphysical act of tikkun (repair); the flight from the ghetto—with sanctification, the triumph of justice; and the Russian Orthodox hagiography—with Jewish mysticism. We find this configuration of hagiography (about aborted martyr­dom, martyrdom only partially accomplished) and artistic mysticism in the figures of Petrushka syndrome (2010). Particularly, it is inter­ esting to compare Liza’s character with her fiery hair to the character of the redheaded aunt in Meir Shalev’s book Be-veito be-midbar (Alone in the desert).138 In both cases, the woman’s abundant red hair symbolizes suffering, oppressed, and victimized womanhood, although Rubina, unlike Shalev, gives her heroine a happy end (cropped or flawed hair as a symbol of the victim is widespread in literature, and it suffices to mention, for example, Agnon’s “Leilot” [Nights] and the legend of the little mermaid).139 In Shalev’s book, the redheaded woman is not a victim of men but of the other women in her family (they “extinguished” her hair), while the man—Abraham—is only a vehicle for them.140 Abraham the stonemason is an artist, a master, who can make anything out of stone,141 just as Rubina’s Peter can make every figure, even every object, in the form of a puppet and bestow upon them the breath of life.142 Abraham’s longtime, desperate, violent and hopeless love for the red aunt recalls Peter’s love for Liza. Like Peter, Abraham knows how to give life to the inanimate (the stone), and he is privileged to see the restoration of his loved one’s hair in the sunbeams, like the reanimation of the stone in the spray of water and light.143 This is his burning bush, the sacred center, the object of passion and appropriation—so very near and so very inaccessible. Demiurgic vitalism, bound up in mythic personalism, based on the creative love for the source and the anger 138 Meir Shalev, Be-veito be-midbar [Alone in the desert] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1998). 139 Shmuel Yosef Agnon, “Leilot” [Nights], in Al kapot ha-man’ul, 305–315 (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House, 1998), 310. 140 Shalev, Alone in the desert, 43. 141 Ibid., 198. 142 Rubina, Petrushka syndrome, 27. 143 Shalev, Alone in the desert, 213.

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provoked by its nonfulfillment, is common to the worlds of both Rubina and Shalev. In a certain sense, Liza and Peter with their mad love are victims of Liza’s family: her father lost his wife in a card game (many years later, Peter will take his revenge and abduct Liza from his home); she jumped from the balcony and put an end to her life, in front of little Peter. And what is left to him is to see her “curls of fire.”144 Liza, her mother’s double, from whom she inherited her hair and her victimhood, is perceived by Peter from then on through that traumatic picture and the void left behind by death. The image of the fiery hair in the spray of water recurs in the scene in which Peter dances his performance dance with the puppet, Alice, Liza’s double, to the music of Django Reinhardt’s “Minor Swing,” but without Liza and without Alice: “Only the curls of fire . . . in his depraved dance, he caressed the void.”145 The lover has disappeared, her doubles have disappeared, and Peter’s dance, like every dance, becomes a despairing gesture toward her that catches the emptiness.146 Peter says: “From a movement a story is born, from a gesture life is born.”147 The woman—an object of passion and worship in this mystic text—is absent; she is “unconscious”; like a rag doll she lies at his side, and in the hands of the man dancing around her, her soul takes shape from the light of the moon—the soul of Eurydice in the gaze of Orpheus. When, at the end of the novel, Peter dances in the streets of Prague with “the shadow of Alice who has passed away,” he “seemingly makes her dance, raises the spirit from Hades.”148 Peter, who dances with the void that replaces the puppet, which replaces the loved one, looks not only like a mythic hero but also like a clown, an absurd figure, and the narrator does not hesitate to emphasize this dimension.149 On the other hand, he, like his father, is a “tragic clown”:150 the magic 144 Rubina, Petrushka syndrome, 17. 145 Ibid., 28. 146 See: Kristine Santilli, Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language (New York: Routledge, 2002). 147 Rubina, Petrushka syndrome, 50. 148 Ibid., 425. 149 Ibid., 29. 150 Ibid., 335.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

buffoonery, characteristic of a carnival, is offset by a pathetic, erotic mysticism, embodied in two details that recall the Song of Songs: a comparison of hair to “a flock of goats” (4:1) and the figure of the moon (6:10). (The moon also appears in Rubina’s novel as a symbol of feminine despair and death.)151 Consequently, Liza changes; no longer the Prague golem, she is now Agnon’s Gemula; and together with her is the allegory of the Shekhinah; and the void in Peter’s hands becomes the cabalistic Ein Sof. Together with Liza, in Peter’s messianic gesture, her mother is also resurrected, and the dance of the dead turns into a metaphysical flight, resembling the paintings of Chagall or of Karafëlov. In this novel, there is also another line from the victim theme. The puppet/idol, the magical source of fertility, symbolizes the unity of vitality and victimization in the origin of the family to which he belongs; the women of the family, Liza and her mother Yana, were “made” according to this model. This is how Dr. Ziv describes Yana, whom he knew and loved in his youth in Lvov, to Dr. Gorelik: “An angel with hair of fire . . . she looked as if she were doomed to be sacrificed.”152 And it is true that her red hair “symbolizes the sin that is atoned on the gallows,” “the chthonic foundation,” “something from the other world.”153 However, Yana’s character in this excerpt personifies the metaphysics of memory and destiny; the combination of allusions to the ritual of sacrifice and the red hair in this context allude to the red heifer—a symbol and means of purification and sanctification that heralds the messiah. The red gate, illuminated by sunbeams, becomes a halo around the head that turns the “clown” into “a saint burning in the vitrage.”154 Yana/Liza is the angel of history, portending her past in the revelation of the burning bush and her future in the messianic vision, “clear and awesome.” Of course, Yana and Liza are living women with their special, painful life stories, but the guilt mentioned in the excerpt is merely a metaphor of the historical memory and the mythic future memory, a promise of the possibility of tikkun and redemption—both in the metaphysical sense 151 152 153 154

Ibid., 250. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 288. Ibid., 291.

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and in the earthly sense, as in the happy ending of Liza’s story. “The feminine birth-giving puppet”155 of the family, as is typical of Rubina, conjoins motherhood and messianism. The blood in the color red is the blood of the menstruating woman and the blood of the altar.

FROM TRAUMA TO THE REAL

Sacrificial practices are deeply rooted in traumas and the overcoming of them by means of rituals of initiation and transition. These rituals are necessary for opening a metaphysical window into reality, for turning the victimary imagination into the heroic one. Let’s look at a few examples. The first example is from the migration scene in Here Comes the Messiah! (1996). What turns the transition into such a painful, purifying ritual is Writer N.’s sudden associative recollection of the horrifying film in which the hand of a healer pulls a cancerous growth out of a patient’s innards. This internal screening does not represent the symbol of the exilic uprooting or the forgetting of the past since the entire scene is built on an effort at historical remembering. On the contrary, the essence of the screening lies in the way the growth is displayed, the act of making it present, the viewing, the “dubbing” of the trauma for the purpose of healing and purification—catharsis. From here on, it is impossible and unnecessary to forget the sight of the hand removing the growth from among the tissue, and this is what ensures mental health, the acceptance of the wisdom of the universe. This sign symbolizes the act of acknowledging history, the acceptance of personal responsibility for it by the tragic heroine, who is doomed to constantly relive this surgery without anesthetic. (Before this novel was written, this image appeared in the story “Within thy gates” [1997] as a symbol of the existential terror during the travails of immigration, war, economic hardship, and the collapse of all hope.)156 The hand of the surgeon who removes the soul from the body symbolizes not only the trauma itself but also mainly its redeeming knowledge. After all, it is no coincidence that this panic/awareness attack occurs around the time of 155 Ibid., 237. 156 Rubina, “Within thy gates,” 37.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

Purim—a celebration of the reversal of fates and salvation, with the carnival of forgetting/remembering at its center. Following three years working in the Moscow branch of the Jewish Agency (2000–2003), Rubina published Syndicate: Novel-comics (2004). Its subtitle is misleading: the main characters in the novel are in no way stereotypic or flat like the heroes of comics.157 Its epigraph emphasizes the duality of the author’s existence during that period, her personality split between two countries: her true self does not leave Israel, while in Moscow the drawn copy, the double, the golem, the shadow lives and works. In their geographical, psychological, and cultural wanderings, the heroine (an emissary of the Jewish Agency) and her family members are between the hammer and the anvil: between Arab terror in Israel and the apocalyptic madness in Russia. The most significant pair of doubles in the narrator’s (the author’s) life is Russia and Israel: “All of my life in Israel . . . was and still is a blinding reality. Everything that happened to me in Russia, is happening now and will happen—is all a dream.”158 In the Israeli reality, unlike the Russian dream, the characters change; they develop. This is what happens to the narrator’s daughter. On her second vacation in Israel, Dina suddenly notices that her daughter has grown up all at once and, based on the tragic logic of “the blinding reality,” her maturity is measured according to the attacks, the wars, the victims. When she sees the pictures of the victims of terror in the newspaper, she says “almost without any emotion”: “My grooms are dying off.”159 This sparse, dry, macabre sentence completely embodies the tragedy of history: the meanings of the cultural outcome and the natural birthrate, family life, and motherhood are so entwined that they are totally united, and they (always) are face-to-face with danger. (And, as an associative coincidence, added to these words is the notice about the first gay-lesbian march in Jerusalem, “which Jerusalem tried to brush off like an aging lion.”160 In fact, the first Jerusalem parade took place on 157 See Samarkina, “Romance with comics.” 158 Rubina, Syndicate, 72. 159 Ibid., 336. 160 Ibid.

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June 7, 2002.) The recognition of this unity and the recognition of the danger awaiting her—this is her maturity. Rubina translates Judah Halevi’s formula “My heart is in the East, and I in the uttermost West” into a tension between the reality and the dream. This is not the case of an ordinary sense of immigration “split” or dual roots, like that of Leah Goldberg. Rather, it is a more substantial epistemological break, one not even connected to the narrator’s present location. The immigration seems to have opened up an abyss between the past/dream and the present/reality. Russia and Israel are no longer countries, geographical spaces, or even cultures and languages but rather diverse states of consciousness. The narrator’s self-definition is in the time dimension, not the spatial dimension, even while it is negated—so typical of Rubina. However, in this case, this characteristic becomes so extreme, it calls for an explanation. In his Solntse samoubiits (Sun of the suicides),161 Efrem Baukh also compares the homeland to the dream of the immigrants: “There is only one salvation—dream. Dreams in aliyah are the homeland, your youth, sense of life . . . continuation of the happy cruise in the mother’s womb, a reality devoid of any deeds, in its most intense form.”162 The hero of his Zavesa (The veil) also says: “Dreams are another country, even though everything in it is familiar.”163 However, at the time, the protagonist is in prison, and for him, dreams are extracts of memory and substitutes for life. As a rule, Baukh’s novels reflect the layered, double existence of some of the Jews from the Soviet Union: the refuseniks and those who closely followed the history of Israel, for example, during the Six Day War. The hero of the novel suddenly discovers a shared fate—the catastrophes and the victories—with the Jewish people. Undoubtedly, Rubina, who belongs to a younger generation, has a different approach from Baukh’s regressive, reductive approach, viewing the mind not as a room of parallel mirrors but rather as a submarine periscope on an autonomous underwater voyage in which 161 Efrem Baukh, Solntse samoubiits [The sun of suicides], Tel Aviv: Moria, 1994. 162 Ibid., 75. 163 Efrem Baukh, Zavesa [The veil] (Tel Aviv: Kniga-Sefer, 2008), 27.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

Israel is a kind of daydream. For Rubina, Russia is the dream. If we want to explain this approach in Freudian terms—Russia as a surrealistic reflection of the subconscious—we will see that large parts of the Russian way of life presented in Syndicate (Rubina 2004) do not match the schema of the explanation. Perhaps only the child angel of fire, with the traumas and fears connected to him, completely fits the Freudian structure—with the paternal fears and the maternal identification of the narrator. From this standpoint, Dina’s journey to Russia will be perceived as a psychoanalytic attempt to induce her to talk about things she has repressed, a return to the suppressed “territory” of the paternal home. However, the less naïve, Lacanian structure seems more appropriate in this case. Russia-as-a-dream is not a direct reflection of the subconscious but rather an aggregate of signs and statements, some totally random, that belong to the imaginary order. Russia is a dream in the sense that it is imaginary; it is a simulation. It is a screen of shadows or a store of meanings, allusions, associations, and the like. Yet, the shadows are still complex configurations of discourse that arise like illusions or simulacra. Israel, on the other hand, represents the order of the real, the desert of the real. The blinding light of the present, in the narrator’s perception, is the reflection of the light of this desert, which associatively unites with the sunlight of the Judean desert—where Dina lives in Israel—the scenery from which she says she cannot move her gaze nor does she want to. The “blinds” in this sense, according to Lacan, are invisible, impossible. It is the God/Father who can be present, but only through his name, embedded in the imaginary order. In this sense, Rubina’s schema, Russia as a dream and Israel as reality, is also a theological perception. Israel is the divine presence, opposite of which the narrator is compelled to stand face-to-face and be its emissary, like Moses or the messiah. However, the blinded author can archive her testimony only in a book like, for example, Moses or Borges the blind librarian. As far as she is concerned, Russia-as-the-Russianlanguage is the only way to turn the Infinite (God) into signs, to realize the transcendent in the empirical. In a certain sense, this theology is Rubina’s version of the Midrash, according to which the world was

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created on the basis of the heavenly Torah. Israel, with the Hebrew language and its magic letters, is the heavenly Torah, the transcendental model that always blinds; hence, it is not present. Russia is the created, empirical world, and although it is made according to the Hebrew-ideal model, it is made of the only material that the author can command, can grasp, and is not blinded by—the Russian language. Finally, there is another possible explanation for this duality of Russia-dream and Israel-reality. Unquestionably, in this way the author can simultaneously hold on to both worlds—not only on the level of different states of consciousness and different time dimensions but also on the level of different possible histories (parallel or alternative). Rubina’s historical thought refuses to accept the modalities of what is and what ought to be, and instead it adopts the modality of what can be—the modality of the philosophy of the possible.164 In this modality, Rubina’s thinking and writing center on the principle of historical alternativeness, which can be discerned not only in fantastic literature or postmodern literature but also in every narrative historical text on four levels: character, plot, the conception of history, and the conception of historiography.165 The role of historical alternativeness is to create two possible histories, both alive and true to the same extent but belonging to different strata of empirical realization. For example, the dream life of the narrator in Russia is no less real than her actual life in Israel, but as soon as one is realized, the other remains unrealized, by way of the possibility of constant alternativeness. As in the genre of alternative history, the narrator returns, mentally and narratively, again and again, to the same point in the past, the point at which the choice was made and history split, the point of the main bifurcation of her life—her aliyah. The return to the bifurcation point is the key philosophical and poetical mechanism in the establishment of the figure of the narrator, in shaping her unique mentality. From the point of bifurcation, the historical line 164 Mikhail Epstein, Fiilosofiia vozmozhnogo: Modal’nosti v myshlenii i kul’ture [The philosophy of the possible: Modalities in thinking and culture] (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2001). 165 Katsman, Literature, History, Choice, 93ff.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

of life in Russia becomes less real, fragmented, paradoxical. The history in it becomes a carnival, a game of hallucinations and optical illusions, a festival of nonsense and absurdity, both erotic and nightmarish. Hence, the narrator chooses to define it as a dream. In contrast, life in Israel is always illuminated by the blinding noonday sun, that same light of Pan, the ancient god that terrified Nicolai Gogol and imbued his work with a grotesque, tragic, magic, mystic, and hyperrealistic nature. Rubina’s writing is closer to Gogol’s than to that of Chekhov or Bulgakov. If we look at the corpus of her novels as a mental entity and at the character of the collective narrator who stars in them, we will find that for years Rubina has been writing one long, picaresque novel centered on a character like Chichikov, the devil-angel-messiah-artist who redeems dead souls and revives them. In the novel under discussion here, the picaresque dimension grows stronger due to the resemblance between the protagonist, the other protagonists employed by the Syndicate, the Syndicate itself, and the character of Ostap Bender in Dvenadtsat stuliev (The twelve chairs) and the Zolotoy telionok (Little golden calf) by Ilya Ilf and Evgeni Petrov. In Leonardo’s handwriting (2008), Anna, the female Ostap Bender, the “great combinator” of mirrors, knows the truth; she knows what the form of the carnivalesque puppet should be and the “correct” way of writing the letters, even though in the visible world around her they always appear upside down.166 Little Anna “hunts” for the truth and “catches” it by means of the mirror in her head. In the physical sphere, when the little girl succeeds—in a kind of forbidden game that is simultaneously so simple and so complex—in placing two mirrors opposite one another, she dances between them a metaphysical dance that somehow recalls, in its transcendental or existential essence, a Hasidic or Sufi dance that entails casting off all form, losing oneself, madness, or mystical blindness: “Identifying the self in the mirror was always like a free fall for her. She never knew how to unite immediately with her reflection.”167 Knowing the truth, which is the same as knowing the 166 Rubina, Leonardo’s handwriting, 51–52. 167 Ibid., 54.

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future, involves forgetting the self. However, this is not normal negative forgetting, forgetting like an absence of memory. Rather, it is forgetting the fixated self in the present and rediscovering the self as someone who is present at the same time in the future (or in the mirror). At the moment of the revelation, Anna sees the a-temporal world, the world of pure ideas/truths (or possibilities). This revelation lies somewhere between the Platonic madness/inspiration and the Nietzschean madness/intoxication. Language lacks the grammatical tools to express this knowledge; hence, she expresses herself in the language of the child by means of an illogical grammatical error. During her visit to the circus, little Anna sees an acrobat and says to her father, “I know how, too! I know how, too, after many, many days!”168 The perception of prophecy as the unification of all times in human consciousness, as a transgression and an illicit appropriation of time— in particular that of others, a kind of sacred piracy outside of every external chronology, which in this novel finds its mystical expression— is also evident in other novels and stories by Rubina and is apparently typical of her literary and cultural thinking. In Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), the past of the protagonist’s family is revealed and realized again in her present life in Israel; in The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998), the medieval narrative and ethos are realized in the present; Syndicate (2004) presents the thousands of years of Jewish history that vacillates between the reality of the Land of Israel and the dream of exile; On the sunny side of the street (2006) is an urban novel in which the sounds and sights of all times and generations comingle. Even in the later novels, characters are realized in the timeless space of their destiny. Only in Petrushka syndrome (2010) and A Russian canary (2015) does there seem to be a jumping off point into the unknown future: the heroes give birth to a child and thus shake off the family curse, repairing the dynasty and the very chain of time. At the same time, even in a negative act, Rubina affirms the schema of duality of the dynastic generations, and in doing so, she underscores the principle on which the unity of prophetic and piratic themes is based—the principle 168 Ibid., 56.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

of the original/copy. The mimetic Platonic principle, on one hand, contraposes the world of the present with the anthropological mirror of ideas. On the other hand, it contraposes the act of signification in the present with the mirror of the transcendental hypothesis about the originary event of the fulfillment/rejection of the mimetic appetite and desire.169 The duality of the imagined and the real, trauma and prophecy, sometimes takes the dichotomic form of not only countries, such as Russia and Israel, but also of cities. In Petrushka syndrome (2010), the legend of the golem of Prague, together with the city of Prague itself— likened to a theater170 (of puppets) and compared to Lvov and Jerusalem—were chosen as a leitmotif. In Rubina’s work, Jerusalem is a special subject. In Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), it is the city of the creative artists, of the pirates and messiahs. In Syndicate (2004), it is a ghost city, a city of cemeteries and bureaucrats—a fata morgana. In White dove of Cordova (2009), it is the home, the shelter, and the wellspring. In the present novel, it is a place of compassion, healing, and tikkun. The hospital where Liza returns from her madness to reality is in Jerusalem. As in Syndicate (2004), Jerusalem symbolizes the “blinding light of reality” in contrast to the illusionary, theatrical, Kafkaesque, 169 When Eric Gans founds the sign on the hypothesis about the originary scene of violence (A New Way of Thinking), he actually assumes an additional hypothesis about the possibility that the past exists in the present, or in other words, about the appropriation of the present by the past (or the other way around), which constitutes a scene of appetite and violence in its own right. 170 The subject of the city as a theater is widespread in Russian literature, especially in relation to Petersburg, for example, in the works of Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky. See Vladimir Toporov, “Peterburg i ‘Peterburgsky tekst russkoy literatury’” [Petersburg and Petersburg Text in Russian Literature], in Mif. Ritual. Simvol. Obraz. Issledovaniia v oblasti mifopoeticheskogo (Moscow: Progress-Kultura, 2005), 259–367; Lev Losev, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, trans. J. A. Miller (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 1–24. Often in the context of theater and carnival or outside it, Petersburg is likened to Venice— another significant city in Rubina’s works—which now also casts Prague in a carnivalesque light. See also Roman Timenchik, “Peterburg v poezii russkoy emigratsii” [Petersburg in the poetry of Russian emigration], Zvezda 10 (2003), magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2003/10/tim.html; Dmitriy Spivak, Metafizika Peterburga [Metaphysics of Petersburg] (Eko-vektor: 2007); Mikhail Uvarov, Poetika Peterburga [The poetics of Petersburg] (St. Petersburg: Petersburg University Press, 2011).

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insane world of Prague. In A Russian canary (2015), Jerusalem is the home of the lost sons and fathers already blinded by reality. Rubina’s Jerusalem differs from the Jerusalem of Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis’ “extreme history”;171 from the legendary Jerusalem of Denis Sobolev;172 from the “do-it-yourself” Jerusalem of Nekod Singer, where the city is reflected in an endless number of its drafts/doubles in other cities in the world;173 and from dozens of other versions, more or less historical and biographical, of Jerusalem, from Ivan Bunin (“Devil’s Desert”) to Igor Guberman and Alexander Okun.174 If we want to sum up Rubina’s perception of Jerusalem in one image, we can say that she lives in the city the way a wife and mother lives in her home and looks after it—a house with large windows, full of daylight and everyday experiences, even when she remembers the past or worries about the future. Bits of this concept also exist in the representation of other cities, and Rubina usually creates parallels to Jerusalem: Moscow, Toledo, Tashkent, Vinnitsa, Cordova, Lvov, Venice, Kiev, Guryev. This is domestic geography, an ecumene, a map of the childhood homes of the protagonists or of portals leading to them, to their first loves, or to the secrets of their origins. In any case, it is a geography of metaphysical origins, although reflected in their copies.

ORIGINS AND COPIES

The poem that gives the name to the novel The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra (1998) tells about a hunt for a boar, which is fatally wounded.175 Lucio hums the song in Dina’s ear, and when she asks about its content, he tells her about the ancient curse that hangs over 171 Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, I/e_rus.olim, 2004, accessed April 6, 2015, www.lib.ru/RUSS_DETEKTIW/NESIS/je_rus_olim.txt. 172 Dennis Sobolev, Ierusalem [Jerusalem] (Rostov na Donu: Feniks, 2005). 173 Nekod Singer, Chernoviki Ierusalima [Drafts of Jerusalem] (Moscow: Russki Gulliver, 2013). 174 Igor Guberman and Alexander Okun, Putevoditel po strane sionskikh mudretsov [A guide to the land of the Zion sages] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011). On the cities that reflect one another in Russian Israeli poetry, see Nekod Singer, “Arba ha-birot shel ha-shira ha-rusit be-Israel” [Four capitals of Russian poetry in Israel], Nekudataim 5–6, 2004. 175 Rubina, Last wild boar, 74.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

the men in his family. They were in the habit of giving free rein to their desires, and for this they were punished, doomed to be killed by the horns of animals. Dina guesses that Lucio is telling her one of the “wandering plots” that appears throughout history, a version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. She understands he is an artist, a member of the guild she belongs to, and from that moment in their conversation, sentimentality turns into irony, and elegy into farce. The narrator (the author) returns to the conversational track she likes best—a humorous conversation between artist-intellectuals, which combines erudition and inventiveness. World literature becomes that same translation language they both understand.176 The conversation even ends with a real carnivalesque effect: Lucio imitates the expression and sounds of a wild boar. This is followed by a series of pranks and disguises carried out by Lucio, including a courtly, carnivalesque duel between him and Alfonso at the end of the novel. However, Lucio’s death, putatively from the stab of the boar’s horn, puts an end to the carnival, making it impossible to replace the history with an invention, a simulacrum. The suffering, the disasters are links that create the sequence of history, the suite of dismantled times. What binds them tightly together is the victim, the artist-historian who writes this family story with his blood. If history is literature, as Hayden White believes, it is literature whose author sacrifices himself, takes his own life so that his testimony, proof, and reasoning will seem reliable, so that the copy will become the source. From this standpoint, the descent of the narrator to the nether world of the community center is the sacrifice that enables the previous works and those that will follow to make the inanimate animate, to turn the hackneyed, rhetorical topos into historical truth. The dualities and doubles of places, times, and people provide an inexhaustible source of amazement and bewilderment, as well as delight and fear. In Syndicate (2004), the narrator is afraid of her double who looks out at her from the mirror, such as in the scene in which she tries on the black hat (which appears in several of Rubina’s stories and photographs) at the small hat stall on a Jerusalem street. 176 Sergo, “Postmodern dialogue of cultures,” 53.

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It is a Jerusalem motif that permeates the whole novel, symbolizing the home and the unwillingness (inability) to complete the purchase, to depart, to stop the action: “From the mirror a strange woman looks at me. I am a seagull! A seagull!”177 Yet, I would like to reemphasize that this duality does not reflect a divided consciousness. Strangely enough, it actually establishes and affirms the character’s literary wholeness while ironically comparing her to the famous Chekhovian character. The seagull symbolizes the cruelty of blind fate, the illusion of freedom, man’s helplessness in the face of the forces of chaos. The irony of the writer lies in her opposition to every direct—limiting and limited—parallel. She is an artist, and she enlists her doubles to play different roles with ease and virtuosity, without letting the masks become stuck to her face. This is why she emphasizes, twice, that the trip to Moscow (a parodic fulfillment of the helpless yearning of the Chekhovian heroines) is her own act, her decision and only hers— cruel, voluntary, and responsible. This decision is similar (and parallel) to Rubina’s decision to leave Moscow ten years earlier. In the novel Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), this act is likened to surgery without anesthetic. All of the doubles, the narrator’s copies, point to the source—to the wholeness of her playful, laughing personality. One can say that Syndicate (2004), novel-comics-that-are-not-comics, as in Rubina’s previous novel, reflects in miniature the entire corpus of her work—the gallery of copies that are nothing other than one source: the monistic unity of the multiplicity—like the thirty birds that are Simurgh, the king of the birds in Borges’ Ficciones. From this vantage point, the farce and theater of the absurd that dominate the Moscow stage are merely cynical, parodic, alternative copies of the events of historical reality on the Israeli stage—the source. The Moscow theater of the absurd is a kind of house of mirrors, reflecting in one another a sick, unending replication of copies, history mise en abyme. Thus, for example, in this distorted mirror, the historical high tragedy of the Holocaust becomes “the ancient comedy of plazas” 177 Rubina, Syndicate, 15.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

performed by a classic couple, Klara and Savva, activists of the public fund “A Prisoner.”178 This is alternative history, the Victorian-Carolean world behind the mirror, the renaissance-baroque world of the commedia dell’arte and jokester literature, of ships of fools and praises of foolishness, of the dances of devils and the dead. In this world, the comics of Yasha Sokol are created, the caricature of real history. Certainly, this thought/ narrative pattern of Rubina’s completely differs from the nostalgic or antinostalgic pattern so prevalent in immigrant literature. One has to admit, the modality of the possible that characterizes the principle of historical alternativeness is a rather elegant psychocultural solution. The fires in the narrator’s Moscow home can also be viewed as alternative-historical copies, imaginary and imagined, parodies of the “original, true” fires in Israel—Arab acts of terror. For example, one day the narrator returns home and almost catches the fire angel boy in the act: this time he has set fire to the elevator. When she enters the house, her daughter tells her about the terrorist attack at the Dolphinarium.179 In reality, on June 1, 2001, an Arab suicide bomber, Said Hotari from Kalkiliya, blew himself up in the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv; 21 boys and girls were killed, and 120 were wounded. Most of those killed were originally from the Soviet Union. The horrible, blinding “reality” bursts into the glossy alternative history of Moscow and diminishes it, making it no thicker than a page of comics. The Israeli reality doesn’t exactly empty the Russian one of meaning nor does one history turn the other into a simulacrum, but it definitely changes the proportions between the various parts of life, breaks the symmetry between alternative histories, and upsets the entropic balance of the plurality of worlds. The real catastrophe, the true suffering, constitutes the dominant centers of gravity in the world that define the configuration of space-time and determine the laws of “nature.” Tragic death points to the territory of life and leaves all the rest in the “no-man’s-land” of the comics/dream. 178 Ibid., 73. 179 Ibid., 118.

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In Chapter 11, “Israeli Roulette,” the narrator comes to Israel on her first vacation; the first thing she does in her blinding reality is visit the grave of her friend who was killed in a terror attack on a bus in French Hill a week earlier. Rubina is probably referring to the suicide attack that occurred on June 19, 2002, in which 7 people were killed. The narrator underscores the fact that in the same week, “Jerusalem blew up three times,” and at the cemetery in Givat Shaul she sees rows upon rows of fresh graves.180 In fact, on June 18 in an attack on a Number 32 bus in Jerusalem, 19 people were killed. Later, the narrator tells about another attack that occurred while she was on vacation—at a café in the center of Jerusalem—11 were killed, 29 were wounded (Rubina compresses several real events into a dense narrative sequence. In this case, she is apparently referring to a suicide attack that took place at the Moment Café in the center of Jerusalem on March 9, 2002, in which 11 were killed and 64 were wounded). All in all, in 2002, in 47 attacks, 225 people were killed—a peak in the number of attacks and victims since 1993. In this horrible “competition,” the year 2002 is followed by 2003 and 2004. During these three peak years, Rubina was working at the Jewish Agency in Moscow. In 2004, three times the explosions took place at French Hill. The image of “Israeli roulette” precisely reflects the feelings of Israelis during those years. Against this background, the narrator reads the newspaper headlines about the rising wave of anti-Semitism throughout the world.181 As she skims the newspaper, this discourse about Arab terror and the abandonment of Israel by the countries of Europe turns, apparently associatively and randomly, into a discourse about the Holocaust in the cultural context—the discussion about whether Wagner’s music should be played in Israel; as usual, opinion is divided. The Holocaust took place in the past in Europe and became a dream, but in the present, it becomes, or is liable to become, a reality in Israel. Or, a gathering of all the exiles becomes an Israeli reality and also actualizes the diasporic Moscow dream of a search for the lost tribes. Rubina’s greatest fear is that the blinding real-life explosion in 180 Ibid., 151. 181 Ibid., 156.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

Israel will become an illusory explosion from the comics, or that the redemption of Noah’s ark will become the voyage of Noy Kleshchatik’s ship. It is the fear of losing the source, of it being replaced by a copy, the fear that life will be replaced by a simulacrum, that the narrative and time will dissolve, that mentality will be replaced by a “charging of the mentality” (which is the name of one of the offices in Syndicate), and that the community and even the entire people will be replaced by a syndicate. The only replacement/copy that the narrator/author accepts is art, in particular the art of dolls—an allegory of all art that she is so fond of, such as Pushkin’s doll, the work of her friend Marina Moskvina.182 To reject the illusiveness and artificiality of nonexistence, to preserve the separation/abyss between life, the origin, and comics, the copy is the purpose of the dichotomy between the Israeli reality and Moscow dream.183 When the narrator and her family return to Moscow after their vacation in Israel, awash with the memory of terrorist attacks, a fire in her house awaits them—and Dina chokes from the smoke in an asthmatic cough184 in the narrow space between the two alternative historical mirrors, in the gazes of which the entire novel is written. In On the sunny side of the street (2006), the pathway from a copy to the original goes through the author’s/narrator’s thoughts about the essence of her work. The strength/weakness of the author, who sacrifices herself and revives the world, is also called “the loving imagination.”185 As if it were random, as in temporary explosions of unexpected combinations, the author saves living humans from the chaos of forgetting. This is how she defines her task, as she rewrites Marcel Proust’s famous title: “In search of man in time.” Rubina creates the parable of the postcard (perhaps influenced by Derrida’s The Postcard or in memory of Miklós Radnóti’s multilingual cycle of poems, “The Postcards” 182 Ibid., 281. 183 This dichotomy resembles the perception of the diaspora as “life after death” in the writings of immigrant authors such as Henryk Grynberg and Norman Manea (Katarzyna Jerzak, “Exile as Life after Death in the Writings of Henryk Grynberg and Norman Manea,” in The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature, ed. by Alvin H. Rosenfeld [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008], 75–91). 184 Rubina, Syndicate, 167. 185 Rubina, Sunny side, 211.

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[Razgledniča in Serbian], found on his body when it was exhumed from a mass grave and which enabled his identification). When the narrator was a child, she saw an old postcard, a coincidental echo of bygone days, with a picture of a carriage about to fall over, a hand extended from its window, and a sad letter on the back of the card. She was struck by a “tragic realization”: these were all real living people who had disappeared, “and so I too will die someday.” This moves her “to add more and more words around the edges of that postcard whose length is the length of life.” She finally admits that if anything interests her as the years pass her by, it is the relations between man and time; since, in the words of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov, as quoted by the narrator, “God gave man everything except time.”186 So, by means of the postcard sent from the past to the future and from the future to the past, the narrator became aware of death, time, and the source of her writing. Moreover, the postcard sets up a kind of mystical connection, putatively coincidental but actually essential, between the narrator and Vera. The postcard, as is usually the case with Rubina, has a twin— another postcard purchased by Vera after the first one, which she also wanted to buy, had been sold to the narrator.187 The postcard functions as an object of mimetic desire and hence as the “sacred” that establishes the signifier; the sacred as a link to the time-narrative source (the constitutive onetime event) translated into a sign of multiplicity that can be duplicated and transmitted at the same time. The two postcards, like two halves of the shard of the “symbolon,” unite the narrator and her heroine/double at the source of the symbolic memory, at the point where the possibilities of the signifier explode, in a centrifugal movement at the point on the horizon where two parallel lines meet. This duality of the postcard turns out to be no less important for recollection and creation than the message written on it and the act of writing itself. It is a symbol of the shared fate that is merely history, which becomes literature before our very eyes in this very symbol. Like postcards, the 186 Ibid., 216. 187 Ibid., 246.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

history-that-became-literature duplicates and disseminates characters and events; their movement looks chaotic, but it has a dissipative order that ascends and descends, that is the simplest and most complicated in its fractality. For example, in the meeting between Vera and her father, who do not know or recognize each other (as if she were a symbol, a postcard from the past), he vaguely senses that she reminds him of someone.188 Another example of such a “postcard/symbol” is the pendant that belonged to the mother of Misha, Vera’s stepfather. During his childhood when his parents were arrested and murdered, Misha recognized the pendant in the hands of another woman and stole it.189 A failed appropriation and a reappropriation of an object of mimetic desire is a mechanism for establishing memory. In this entire complex composition of motifs—the touching of the world with the soul, the giving love, multiple worlds and possibilities, the victim and the redemption/revival, the search for man in time, the postcard of death and writing—the most interesting and unique thing is their unity. What is lost here is not time but rather man; the transparency of time is only an illusion.190 Hence, time is not the Borgesian “Aleph,” the glowing, infinite singularity, but rather a shabby postcard with faded letters—familiar/strange, visible/disappearing, a palimpsest in which the author writes on the margins of the existing text. However, the poststructuralist terms are also not sufficiently relevant here because of the built-in, all-penetrating personalism of Rubina going so far as to radically revive the writer after his clinical “death,” which becomes an interim stage, a cruel initiation, self-­sacrifice before his revival together with the renewed establishment of the metaphysical, anti-Babylonian city—a memory of the numerous possible worlds. This is the drama and the sensory shock in the author/protagonist duality when they meet at the end of the novel; for a moment, the author/narrator has a “banal thought,” “the dread of writers from time immemorial”: that the protagonist is not the author’s creation but rather 188 Ibid., 320. 189 Ibid., 323. 190 Ibid., 211.

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that the author is the protagonist’s creation.191 The two women laugh, piquing one another tenderly; they resemble one another as if “they were shaped from the same lump of clay.”192 Yet, here this split, this carnivalesque duality merely creates the infinite human depth of two mirrors facing one another. This is also true of the character of Rubina’s city-novel. Every Tashkentian draws from memory a different map of the city, unlike the real map, so that the narrator is amazed by the frightening possibility that perhaps each one lives in an imagined city of his own, in which case the material city actually never existed.193 However, she immediately corrects herself, repulsing the fear of forgetting and illusion: the city did exist and still exists as a metaphysical city, made up of an infinite number of mirror reflections, as a novel being written on the verge of forgetting and an effort at recollection, rowing through “the waters of time” in a “terrible darkness” and through “the sorrow of the world”—with self-deprecation vis-à-vis faces, smells, tastes, noises, and sounds of words arising from memory—until the writer totally disappears.194 This explains Rubina’s aesthetic ambivalence: she is always on the border of the carnivalesque forgetting/nonexistence in order to fight against it, and this is her sacrifice. In any event, Rubina in her typical way, so replete with contradiction, emphasizes that the warmth of the Tashkentian “sunny side of the street” always remains with her. The question of artists’ self-sacrifice, or getting lost between the mirrors of time, of forgetting/memory keeps disturbing Rubina. Leonardo’s handwriting (2008) raises, and perhaps even exacerbates, the source/ copy issue by continuing to work on the motif of the mirror and the exposure of its special case—Leonardo da Vinci’s upside-down handwriting. In the novel, Anna the heroine’s handwriting only serves as a relatively marginal aspect of her character, immersed in the mirrors of time and prophecy. However, since this aspect is in the novel’s title and emphasizes Leonardo’s personality, the presence of the writer is evident; she does not give up any of her aesthetic or cultural preferences—the 191 192 193 194

Ibid., 422. Ibid., 420. Ibid., 423. Ibid., 429.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

mysteries of the writing as an existential core—even when these are seemingly foreign “materials” like the circus. Moreover, she does not relinquish her basic pattern of writing—the bildungsroman (or initiation rites) with a victim at the center, whether the victim mentality is realized or rejected. The mirror symbolizes the unity/duality of the times, the real world, but it is also the world of the dead. When Masha asks Anna, a few days after her adoption, where her mother is, the child answers, “Mama went to the mirror.”195 Undoubtedly, this symbolism of the mirror is quite widespread, almost trite, but in the writing of an author who sees the essence of art in turning pupa into life, the thanatological meaning of the mirror takes on an ambivalent value. The mirror creates copies, namely dead signs; on the other hand, as is characteristic of a synergetic system, only a sign can become a living personality196 in a process of return to the transcendental (hypothetical) source, which is the process, in Losev’s terms, of creating the myth of the development of the magic name, the living organic symbol. The child/mirror is one such symbol. A mirror is not only an abstract symbol but also a physical object, the product of a complicated and lengthy production process, of mathematical thought and sophisticated labor. Despite Masha’s resolute objection, Eliezer teaches Anna to produce mirrors manually and to design complex structures of mirrors.197 In Yaakov Schechter’s novel Astronom (Astronomer), the child Michael is taught by a teacher to process glass, to make a magnifying glass and a telescope.198 Like Rubina’s work, Schechter’s novel can be defined as magical realism, with elements of a parallel and alternative history and with the revelation of a wondrous, mysterious world. It is also based on a dualistic worldview of people doubles: moon people (incidentally, about Anna too, it is said that she “was born from the flight of the moon”)199 who fight against the hostile sun people who 195 Rubina, Leonardo’s handwriting, 38. 196 Roman Katsman, Poetics of Becoming: Dynamic Processes of Mythopoesis in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic Literature, volume 30 of Heidelberg University Publications in Slavistics (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 195–200. 197 Rubina, Leonardo’s handwriting, 75–79. 198 Yaakov Schechter, Astronom [Astronomer] (Rostov-on-Don: Phoenix, 2007). 199 Rubina, Leonardo’s handwriting, 98.

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persecute them. The hero in Schechter’s novel possesses a rare mystical talent: his essence is that of the dragon, while the dragons themselves turn out to be secret guardians of the unity and continuity of the Jewish people from their inception until the present day. Like Rubina’s book, Schechter’s ends with the mysterious death/disappearance of the hero, in a sort of flight or ascension to the heavens, although in Schechter’s book, not on a motorcycle but rather on a kite surfboard. Anna and Michael are not only endowed with magic powers but also with simple handicraft skills and the ability to engage in mathematical thought, which are both required for processing glass and making mirrors and telescopes. We can assume that the source of the similarity of these two novels and of their two main characters is the influence of the Renaissance and baroque cultures. The Renaissance influence is evident, particularly in the way the characters are shaped, the role played by science and technology in their lives, and the diversity of their skills and actions. For example, Michael’s similarity to Leonardo da Vinci is striking, even if only because of his artificial wings or because he is a moon man whose image is reflected and inverted (like Leonardo’s handwriting) and which reflects the light of others. The baroque influence is evident in the way the world surrounding the characters is shaped—the mysterious world of shadows. While Rubina calls to mind Rembrandt, Schechter recalls the other great baroque painter, Jan Vermeer, particularly his painting “The Astronomer.” In each of these novels, the baroque painting becomes its emblem, which embodies that concrete, realistic unity and mystery, the light of knowledge and the shadows of fears and doubts. The two novels are also very similar in their structure: they are composed of excerpts of memories, letters, and manuscripts, alongside the author’s dominant, implied hypernarrative. One of the novel’s plotlines is Anna’s apprenticeship at the workshop of Eliezer, a mathematician and master of mirrors. She meets him for the last time in the United States. Eliezer emigrated to America, but according to her, he never actually left his Kiev.200 His brother Abraham, his terrible, domineering double (in fact, in the Bible, Eliezer 200 Ibid., 411.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

is Abraham’s slave) hates Anna from the first time she comes to their home in Kiev. In her last visit to Eliezer, he is already dead, but his ghost continues to haunt Anna. Anna admits that she is tired, that the “mirrors are fading,” and that “there is nothing to replace the old mirrors.”201 Over the years, she supposedly internalizes the accusing vantage point, i.e., Abraham’s, and out of self-hatred she calls herself a “monster,” a “witch” who spreads fear and brings bad luck.202 Contrary to these epithets, Eliezer says that he has always loved and admired her and saw in her merely his soul, “And perhaps hope for the next world? Perhaps warm regards from the Creator, his smile?”203 The significance of these words does not lie only in Anna’s ambivalence and the internal duality of Anna-the-angel/devil, the demigoddess/ monster, the good/bad witch. In these words spoken by the brilliant Jewish mathematician, the messianic subject comes to the fore. It exists in an embryonic state from the beginning of the novel in the motif of prophecy, but it is not fulfilled until the end. Here Eliezer may be punning with Anna’s name. The Hebrew origin is Hannah, from the Hebrew root hen-hanan, which also means beauty and pleasantness, desire and fondness, as well as supplication and mercy. In any case, in Eliezer’s words, Rubina creates a vertical, metaphysical axis that enables her to overcome the danger of the shallowness of postmodern magical realism. Eliezer shatters the Platonic myth about androgynous love and creates a myth of yearning for the unknown mystic double that is reflected in the mirror and cannot be united with.204 If Anna is a beam of light (perhaps a spark of the cabalistic, Hasidic hidden light) that connects God and man, if she is the hope of redemption, then all of her mirrors and stunts, her acrobatic walk over the abyss and even the circus itself takes on a new meaning: the mystic, existential (to a great extent, Hasidic-Breslovian) metaphor of lifting up sparks, tikkun, and expectation of the Messiah. The meaning of the smile of God, known, for example, from the Talmudic legend of Akhnai’s 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid., 412. 204 Ibid., 251.

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oven, when God says, relating to the sages, “My children have defeated me!” is reversed here, and God appears as a child who tries to attract the attention of the adults with “circus-like” stunts, done with mirrors and lights. This reversal from the Talmudic worldview to the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic cabalistic worldview is typical of Hasidic thought. In Rubina’s novel, Eliezer’s metaphorical parable reflects the messianic, metaphysical subtext. The metaphysical origin is hidden inside an individual, between the prophetic mirrors in the individual’s head, reflecting the future as well as the past as doubles, copies of each other. Rubina developed this idea in another novel, White dove of Cordova (2009). The grandfather and the grandson with identical names, Zakhar Cordovin, are doubles. They themselves—their personalities, lives, and even their names—are merely forged copies, which gradually turn out to be the one original source, thus filled with the “flesh and blood of fate.” It is a legendary story about a poor man who turns out to be a prince. Or, in other words, it is a baroque story, as if it came from the world of Lope de Vega, and is about an anonymous waif who finds his noble roots, true or false. This story is a myth: the realization of the protagonist’s magic name—Cordovin, man of Cordova, the scion of the glorious Cordovera Jewish Spanish dynasty. Zakhar’s nasty piracy, and even his grandfather’s Bolshevik adventures, suddenly reveal their ancient noble origin: the piracy of the Cordovera brothers is a reaction to the expulsion from Spain. There is a mythic perception underlying this story, according to which every man, every fate, is only a copy, a repetition, a reflection of a “dark precursor”—source/not-source, a mysterious flashing deep inside the mirrors, a guess or vague sense of the others. According to this approach, the life of the personality is merely the fulfillment of the transcendental purpose, of the idea. The entire novel is a philosophical exemplum on the structure of being and the modes of cognition (in particular, self-cognition). In this sense, the novel is not only the summation of all of Rubina’s previous novels but is also the paradigmatic case, the model of her creation, especially since the main character is Rubina’s paradigmatic protagonist—the pirate.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

The diffusion of the painter’s and the author’s memories, or of the baroque painter and the Holocaust painter, is typical of Rubina’s relationships with her protagonists and their prototypes, as well as of the relations between the protagonists themselves. Moreover, this trait— the ability to adopt the alien memory, which is actually the ability to imitate the source—appears as the core of the artistic talent. This certainly is true of Zakhar, an artist of copying and a talented painter, who inherited his talent from his forefathers and his mother—an artist of imitations and an expert adept at diffusing life’s impressions and memories, preserving, passing them on, and reviving them. “So that he didn’t succeed in separating in his memory the characters and events from his own childhood and those from his mother’s childhood.”205 On more than one occasion, Rubina equips the protagonists of her novels with various mimicking skills. For example, in Leonardo’s handwriting (2008), Anna is highly skilled at imitating foreign languages. She is capable of talking in a foreign language after only a few minutes of participating in a conversation in that language, although she forgets the language immediately afterward. (In one of her interviews, Rubina points out that she has a similar ability.) Remembering is similar to the living, personalistic learning of a foreign language, and also, as in Karafëlov’s painting, similar to a metaphysical, magic, dreamlike flight of delusional, Chagallian, El Grecoian figures. Zakhar’s skills at remembering and copying spring from the same root as the flying female acrobat’s prophetic skills. Zakhar and Anna’s characters illuminate one another: they are both metaphysical acrobats of foreign memories or prophecies. Moreover, they both fall victim to their acrobatics: one ascended to the skies and disappeared, and the other was shot and fell down dead. The sanctification/tikkun is also an aesthetic revitalization that is characteristic of Rubina’s thinking: “Zakhar’s ability to reconstruct the living from the inanimate.”206 However, this characteristic relates to his ability to create forged documents, cards, and bills. Like a legendary, 205 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 204. 206 Ibid., 322.

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macabre creature with a dual nature, like a werewolf or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Zakhar’s sacred, life-creating art turns out to be the art of producing perfect copies. Like technical clones, they lack the unchallenged moral confidence of birth and the aura of the source, in Walter Benjamin’s terms.207 (The problem of the copy as a lack, as death, will intensify and will be at the center of the next novel Petrushka syndrome (2010) in the character of the woman/doll—a combination of a golem and Galatea.) This act is perceived as a transgression, a betrayal of the source (desecration, alien fire, creative but forbidden magic), even if Zakhar “doesn’t just copy, but knows what he is doing.”208 These are the words of Arcady Bosota, the art collector who is the cause of Andrei’s murder and who becomes Cordovin’s number one enemy. Those are the words of Satan/Mephistopheles, who seduces Zakhar—Faust searching for the secret of life, creating life in a test tube, to sell his soul. This allegory cannot help being ironic, even sarcastic, since Bosota only exploits Cordovin and does not give him anything that he did not have before. Despite his symbolic surname—which means “hooligan” and alludes to the character’s lowly, transgressive, chthonic roots, perhaps even to his folkloric Satan’s hooves—Bosota with his strange beard is more like a satyr than the lord of darkness. However, he is the one who discerned Zakhar’s remarkable talent, the talent of a “life-­ begetter,”209 and the one who called him, with great satisfaction, “a true pirate.”210 His satanic, accidental intuition immediately connects Zakhar to Semion, to the grandfather, to the “Sephardic” Cordovera from Vinnitsa, and to the truly Spanish Zacarias Cordovera. Just as in religious consciousness, all of the commentaries are contained in one letter of the Bible, at the end of the needle that penetrates into the book; thus, one word cleaves time, ties the scattered, nearly lost excerpts of memory together and revives them, and again realizes their personalistic meaning. In this white magic, which is also symbolized by 207 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J.A. Underwood (New York: Prism Key Press, 2012). 208 Ibid., 345. 209 Ibid., 406. 210 Ibid., 352.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

a white dove, Bosota is revealed as a true Mephistopheles, namely as someone who wants to do evil but by accident does good. A symbolic between-time exchange is neither timeless nor ahistorical. On the contrary, it is realized in a multiplicity of alternative histories spread out in that mythological simultaneousness in which various characters are versions of one protagonist. Zakhar Cordovin is a painter and art appraiser in St. Petersburg, but he can also be a Bolshevik and an agent of the NKVD, a pirate from among the Spanish exiles, or a priest in the Temple. This, however, is not because history is an illusion; on the contrary, it is because all of history, all of its links are real at any given moment, skewered by an axis of the living personality in the effort of recollection. Thus, Rita, Zakhar’s mother, was a fencer from Vinnitsa, but she could have been, and indeed was, in the mind of Zakhar, the pirate of history, also a flamenco dancer from Cordova. When he sees a flyer advertising a group of dancers, he is amazed at the similarity between one of the dancers and his mother, and he recalls her photograph from the school carnival when she was in high school and the caption under it: “Rita Cordovina, the Spanish woman.”211 Here in Cordova her myth, her magic name, is realized. In addition, the meaning of “carnival” in Rubina’s perception, which differs from the Rabelaisian-Bakhtinian perception, is revealed. The carnival is not the reversal or forgetting of the self during the timeless festival. Rather, it is the fulfillment (not necessarily a conscious one, as in Rita’s case) of the historical source of the personality, the metaphysical leap of the personality to the possibility of a different, alternative existence, which in hindsight turns out to be the revelation of the truth. (Zakhar says to himself: “It is not possible,” and at once says it again but this time as a question: “Is it not possible?”)212 A carnival, understood in this way, is merely a negation of itself, an anticarnival in which the disguise is the authentic identity. Unquestionably, Rubina’s concept of carnival has developed since In the mode of carnival (1999), but its core has not changed: “carnival” is one of the 211 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 209. 212 Ibid.

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manifestations of the copy, the double, the reflection, the icon, by means of which the nomads/pirates of history seek out their way to the homeland, the treasure, the source. This search is almost synonymous to the revelation of motherhood or the mother-daughter (or son) relationship, deeply connected to personal or messianic salvation. At the center of Petrushka syndrome (2010), as at the center of the familiographical history of Liza and her mother, there is the puppet of the Jewish bartender—a large, wellmade puppet, the “magical” “childbearing” puppet, which contains inside itself another puppet—a small hand puppet, nearly just a rag, Petrushka.213 This Petrushka is one of a series of similar puppets, created by the wandering German puppet maker about a hundred years earlier. He was known for his erotic spells and would leave each of his lovers a gift of such a puppet, and sometimes he would also leave a baby in her belly.214 While the ritual-magic significance of the puppets, of the family pagan idols, is quite clear, the significance of the symbol “a puppetwithin-a-puppet” is not self-evident. The bartender is himself a legendary figure: in European folklore, and in its wake, in Jewish folklore and literature as well, the Jewish tavern is a heterotopos,215 located in the village surroundings. The underworld and the upper world meet here, as they do in the figure of the pirate/trickster. In this sense, the bartender, who hides the clown scoundrel under the traditional respectable façade, is the archetype of the puppet, a kind of inverse simulacrum of the carnivalesque mask that conceals the sacred identity under the defiled guise. The “puppet within a puppet” symbol can also be understood in the context of Rubina’s typical poetics: a poetic of doubles and multiplying reflections. Like two mirrors standing opposite one another (mise en abyme), the two puppets are the blessing and the curse reflected in one another, and they compete over which of them is the origin and which the copy. Petrushka feeds and keeps the bartender in whose “belly” he exists, a kind of ritual eating of the victim, and yet it is the 213 Rubina, Petrushka syndrome, 181. 214 Ibid., 277. 215 See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), 22–27.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

bartender who “gives birth” to Petrushka in a quasi-theogonical act. This mythological model of eating/sacrificing the sons presents the origins of fertility and culture—the two dimensions of history. Elsewhere, Petrushka is called a “fetus”216 as a reminder of the reason for his creation, thereby turning the double puppet into a symbol of the temporality of life and of the process of remembering, closed in upon themselves as if in parallel mirrors but also open to the infinite and to an eternal search for the origin. In Rubina’s writing, the figure of the individual at the heart of this search acquires the romantic features of a noble pirate. Behind the puppet of the bartender is the story of a Jewish curse: sometime in the nineteenth century, a wandering creator of puppets seduced the daughter of the Jewish tavern owner, who cursed him. Since then, in the dynasty of that artist, all of the sons that were born suffered from the Petrushka syndrome. A witch, however, succeeded in breaking the curse; she ordered a puppet to be made in the exact likeness of the bartender and cast a spell on it. After that, redheaded girls were born to the family. The puppet had enough strength for only one daughter, so when another one was born, struggles broke out over the puppet’s wicked behavior, theft, and treachery (as in the case of Visia, Liza’s aunt). The tale of the curse and puppet add a dimension of magical realism to the novel, with the typical vacillation between the rational and mystical perceptions of reality, which turns the novel into the sequel of Leonardo’s handwriting (2008). The magical predicament of the world of puppets (like the world of mirrors in Leonardo’s handwriting) comes to the fore in the encounter between European popular pagan art (puppets, circus) and the Jews and their magic. Anna’s father is the illegitimate son of Wolf Messing (a famous Jewish magician and psychic), born following one of Messing’s trips through the Soviet Union. In the company of two other Jews, Eliezer and Simeon, Anna’s talent is amazingly realized (and gains profound understanding and complete acceptance) in scientific and artistic magic. In the present novel, the bartender’s curse leads to an 216 Rubina, Petrushka syndrome, 192.

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outburst of the puppets’ magical powers. Here, too, the violent encounter between the carnivalesque and the metaphysical is parallel to an illegal encounter between the dynastic sequences of Jews and Gentiles, creating rifts, cracks, and unexpected, illegitimate connections. The world of Zakhar Cordovin in White dove of Cordova is also built around his perception of the “legitimate,” his life and “magic” art, and his proficiency at creating the living from the nonliving; his world turns out to be an entanglement of dynastic slivers produced in the conflict between Jews and Gentiles. At the center of the three novels is the blood curse, which connects the present to the Jewish source in the past. This nonofficial trilogy (Leonardo’s handwriting, White dove of Cordova, and Petrushka syndrome) is dedicated to the conflict between the carnival of art (and science technique) and the metaphysics of the law. It is a trilogy about piracy in the annals of history and blood, and it is about the legendary Jewish revenge. This is the theme that also underpins the trilogy A Russian canary (2015), in which the blood curse is replaced by the blood and metaphysical blessing of voice.

FUGITIVES, NOMADS, AND PIRATES

As if she wants to reveal the source of her nomadic character, Rubina says in the story “The Way Home,” that when she was eight or nine, she ran away from a summer camp for children, which was located outside the city, and came home, astonishing her parents: It seems to me now it was on that night that I grew up. It seems on that night—the night when I returned home below the sky both dreadful and majestic beyond expression—I grasped some important things, namely: that a human being was forever lonely; that a human being was forever unhappy, even if he was really happy at a particular moment; that a human being was capable of opening any window but the main one—the unreachable window-passage to a different world.217 217 Rubina, Windows, 16. Translated by Yan Mazor.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

Her words persuasively delineate the character of Shmulik (Writer N.’s son) from Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), as well as other characters that flee from and drop out of Rubina’s world, such as Anna (Leonardo’s handwriting, 2008) or Zakhar (White dove of Cordova [2009]). Flight is growing up and understanding the self, opening windows/opportunities for fulfilling one’s unknown destiny. However, the last, most important window remains closed; hence, flight is repeated with neurotic compulsiveness, devoid of any hope of completing one’s development to adulthood. This is the meaning of all the late returns to “the paternal home,” in which we can find most of Rubina’s characters. We should also view Shmulik’s last act from this vantage point: he flees again, this time from his empty home, to join his parents at the restaurant; his Chekhovian gun finally shoots; he misses his target but hits the novel’s target (Rubina’s or Writer N.’s). The window is closed, the meaning again evades Shmulik, and he is fated to flee again. Shmulik is the man of coincidence, the man of errors and nonsense, but actually he represents only that same face of chaos that looks out of every one of us. Shmulik plays the lottery, and once thinks he has won big. He runs away from his military base and calls his mother. She travels for hours, angry and confused, certain he is wrong, but deep in her heart she also hopes it’s not a mistake. Rubina’s protagonists are prepared to flee from order and reason as long as the window remains open. Perhaps it is this same “nonsense” that led Rubina to flee from the Soviet Union, and Israel did open its window to her. Thoughts of flight also entail thoughts about the Messiah: possibly among all the doppelgängers of messiahs, false messiahs, and clown messiahs that inundate the pages of the novel, at least one is real. The subject of fleeing and walking is just one of the forms taken by the theme of nomadism, a function or mytheme in the great myth of the nomad, with the element of transgression at its core.218 Transgressors, 218 As is well known, Pierre Bourdieu, Yi-Fu Tuan, and others founded sociocultural and emotional-cultural research on space and movement, as a mode of human existence in the world and as a mechanism for establishing meaning and understanding. In a series of studies, Tim Cresswell, Yi-Fu Tuan’s student, focused on the ideological practices of separation between permissible/appropriate space and forbidden/inappropriate

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pirates, or their various imagined doppelgängers fill the pages of Rubina’s novels, On the sunny side of the street (2006) and White dove of Cordova (2009) more than others. In the latter, out of the author’s love for Spain and Spanish culture, the character of a real pirate appears. In Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), Rubina depicts an entire neighborhood of “pirates”—called “Russian Camp,” in which Writer N. lives. Rubina plays with a translation-without-translation of the Hebrew word shkhuná (neighborhood) and the Russian shkhúna (ship), which have the same pronunciation, apart from the accented syllable: Of course, shkhúna in Russian means “schooner,” so it’s tempting to compare the Machaneh Rusi shchuná with a shkhúna, a genuine sort of buccaneer’s schooner, sailing before the mountain the way a prow’s carved siren sails before a ship, parting the water with her wooden breasts. Yes—a real shchuná-shkhúna’s crew. No, of course it’s not possible to compare the Russian quarter’s intellectuals with the sailors’ rabble that boatswains from pirates’ brigs would assemble in portside taverns of Old Dame England. . . . But nevertheless . . . if you were to glance now and then at this or that shaggy beard, a certain hook-nosed profile could be made out round the corner of a narrow lane; the deck (the land, that is) could reel underfoot, especially on Saturdays, when the Machaneh Rusi schooner-neighborhood space, and on practices related to the transition between these spaces, which he defined as “transgression” and “heretic geography” (In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 7). Cresswell links the transgression in space (and in ideology) to social subversion and opposition (ibid., 163–176). In his opinion, to this very day, the figure of the medieval nomad underpins the marginal figures of nomads, which are, as he claims, central to the modern definition of nomadism, particularly in literature (Cresswell, “The Vagrant/Vagabond: The Curious Career of a Mobile Subject,” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman [Surray: Ashgate, 2011], 239–254). These elements are unquestionably characteristic of Rubina’s Jewish Russian pirate figure. They are, however, balanced in her work by “romantic geography,” in the terms of Yi-Fu Tuan (Yi-Fu Tuan, Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013])— the imagined, sublime geography of emotions and yearning for the lost and the inconceivable, in the spirit of the books of Rafael Sabatini, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Daniel Defoe, frequently mentioned in Rubina’s works.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

crew rendered the holy day its due; when Sabbath songs floated from every home’s flung-open doors, it truly seemed as if the refrain ended with the well-known “Yo-ho-ho! And a bot-tle of rum!” . . . In a word, one wishes for some reason to call the Russian Camp Quarter—as, in fact, they referred to it in the neighborhood—the “Schooner-Neighborhood Machaneh Rusi.” As for style . . . To hell with style!219

The Russian immigrants in Israel resemble a bunch of pirates sailing on an ocean of cultures, languages, and identities in search of a treasure island. The culture pirate in Rubina’s approach is parallel to the functions of the intellectuals known today as a “crafter of culture” or “culture scout.” However, while these terms are connected, the first with work and the second with hunting or warfare, the source of Rubina’s pirate is historical trauma. In the novel White dove of Cordova (2009), one of the protagonists presents a version of the appearance of Jewish Spanish pirates: after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the more daring and desperate among the Jews who lost all their property became pirates, obtained support from the British, and mercilessly robbed the Spanish ships.220 There are characters from Spanish Jewry in most of Rubina’s works, and in each there are the features of a nomad, a pirate and exile in search of the lost treasure, a hoard, the secret of his origin, his source and destiny. Unquestionably for Rubina, the Spanish Jew (pirate or not) has become the incarnation of the eternal Jew. He removes the mask of victimhood; he is coarse and sexy, violent but a pursuer of justice; he does not forgive nor does he forget. He is her “new Jew,” the eternal 219 Rubina, Here Comes the Messiah!, 76–77. 220 The three distinct periods of Jewish piratehood are: the Hasmonean period, the period of the Destruction of the Second Temple (Josephus Flavius, The Jewish War, trans. E. Mary Smallwood [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981]) and the expulsion from Spain (Edward Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom—and Revenge [New York: Anchor 2009]). In one of his tales, Dennis Sobolev mentions pirates of Haifa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (“O piratakh Khaifskogo zaliva” [On the pirates of Haifa Bay], in “Chetyrnadtsat skazok o Khaife” [Fourteen tales on Haifa], Neva 8, 2011, accessed January 25, 2016, magazines.russ.ru/neva/2011/8/so3.html).

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nomadic sabra. So it is no wonder that Zinovy, Ziama’s grandfather, the dancing messiah from the House of David, is depicted as an adventurer, a picaro, a charming rogue, an accomplished, flighty, mythological, cultural figure.221 His character is shaped in a series of stories from the past, told by women who met him by chance or who were his lovers and who cherished the memory of his extraordinary personality. In all these stories, the grandfather is involved in exploits of war, persecution, murders, imprisonment, and the like. He appears in various places, omnipotent and omnipresent, as light-footed as a pagan idol. Wherever he goes, bountiful sexuality and violence go with him. He is one of the nomadic lovers and adventurers who are so plentiful in Rubina’s work, he is one of the prototypes of the new sabra, and he is also her messiah. The nineties gave rise to the figure of the new sabra—instead of the classic Israeli sabra, “the new Jew” that became the “old” one. His collective image emerges from the gallery of characters that inhabit the Russian Camp neighborhood: a new immigrant from Russia; a settler in Judea and Samaria, a citizen of the world; an intellectual who barely manages to eke out a living; an artist and businessman; a cynical, visionary Freemason. Here, in the Judean hills, the Russian immigrants found their treasure island, but woe to them, the treasure has disappeared, so the search for it and the voyage on the waves of the Hebrew language and the Israeli mentality continues; on their way, the new pirates plunder the remains of the armada of the Russian language and culture that they come across. In Rubina’s next novellas and novels, these pirates settle down somewhat, acquire respectable jobs, become important scientists (The high waters of Venetians [1999]), travel throughout the world as artists and experts (White dove of Cordova [2009]), and are even sent back to Russia as representatives of the Jewish Agency (Syndicate [2004]), but they are still pirates from the Russian Camp neighborhood. Before they became pirates in the Jerusalem neighborhood, on the airplane on their way to Israel, the immigrants from Russia underwent 221 Rubina, Here Comes the Messiah!, 180–181.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

an initiation as exiles, victims of fire (which foreshadows the motif of fire and conflagration in Syndicate), and as gypsies—the paradigmatic types of nomads: In charge of their gypsy crowd of the newly homeless was a young man. . . . He spoke Russian with a barbaric accent, one that for some reason horrified Writer N. (She’d understand, considerably later, that these sing-song intonations posing questions with every word, had migrated to Yiddish from ancient Hebrew, and then from Yiddish to the Russian language of Jews in the Pale of Settlement.). . . . And a bitter taste, a terrible, primal bitter taste, Esau’s pottage belch: that’s how we fled from Spain, that’s how we fled from Germany, that’s how we fled from Poland, that’s how we fled . . . that’s how we fled. . . . That’s how I, the One, chose you from among all nations, as my flock, and will begin to drive you, like a flock, from place to place, so you won’t forget and rest contented, and won’t mix with the languages of others. . . . She understood that it was the same from birth to death—she was doomed to being escorted by automatic weapons; and it didn’t matter—whether to the execution pit, or whether to save her life.222

These gypsies, in one act of the historical drama, unite with their other selves from the past—with the exiles from Spain, Germany, Poland (and one can add—Morocco, Iraq, Iran), with exiles sent beyond the Pale of Settlement (even the tones of speech are nomadic here), and with those who led to the killing pits. In the shtetl-like accent of the young Israeli, Writer N. hears the creaking wheels of history, closes (once again) the life cycle of European Jewry (a subject repeated more emphatically in White dove of Cordova, 2009). It doesn’t matter that that cycle never completely closes: the heroine feels as if her path passes through the axis of time. In the next novel, all these Jewish exiles and nomads are to be gathered and led to Israel by the Syndicate’s ships. 222 Rubina, Here Comes the Messiah!, 127–129.

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In Syndicate (2004), in Dina’s diary, her dream is reflected in Yasha’s comics, and its absurdity is endlessly duplicated in parallel mirrors. The Syndicate’s ship only takes on Syndicate employees, and only in order to sink together with them. On the one hand, there is some consolation in the fact that the ideological bureaucracy drowns rather than the immigrants themselves. On the other hand, there is something about these ridiculous seamen that arouses our compassion, even identification: their leader, Klava-Claudy, resembles a “pirate from an operetta.” If, as mentioned above, a pirate is the archetype of the new, nomadic Israeli Jew, the dream, and the comics created in its wake combine in the neopicaresque (or pseudopicare­sque) Israeli romanticism, with neoindigeneity (or pseudo­ indigeneity) at its core, which emerges from the author’s imagination and from the Russian Israeli mentality that is just taking shape. The comics, as one might expect, present a parodic and ironic look at this Romanticism, but the self-irony, so characteristic of Rubina, expresses her affection for her object, blended with a mature, sober view of its essence.Starting with Leonardo’s handwriting (2008), Rubina’s protagonists become younger and consequently post-Soviet; hence, they are released from having to choose a “homeland” and become freer in their travels. This freedom of movement also has an immanent, professional basis: the protagonists of Leonardo’s handwriting, Petrushka syndrome (2010), and A Russian canary (2015) belong to the performance arts—the circus, puppet theater, and singing—and the protagonist of White dove of Cordova (2009) is not only an artist but also a world-renowned examiner and assessor of paintings, which requires him to travel frequently throughout the world. However, in the nomadism of the later novels, one can observe the same traits that stands out in the earlier novels: the piracy blended with clownery; the yearning for popular culture (if not the stylistic affinity to it), for the art of squares and streets; and the desire to identify with a minstrel, a troubadour (although this is not actually aesthetically and biographically fulfilled). Semion, the bassoon player (Leonardo’s handwriting [2008]), is an artist and nomad, the double of all of Rubina’s characters of artists and

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

of the author herself. He is much older than Anna, and his childhood stories enable Rubina, in this novel as well, to cover the period of life in the Soviet Union during the post-war years and the fifties—the period of the author’s own childhood. In this way, the novel resonates with the previous one, On the sunny side of the street (2006). It also has a miniature double of Tashkent—the city of Guryev in Kazakhstan, to which Semion’s family arrived after the war. The city is likened to the legendary city of Baghdad, and the multinationalism and multilingualism of Tashkent is translated here into a simpler and yet more radical form of liminality: the city is on the border between Europe and Asia.223 It is the breeding ground for smugglers, the pirates of the culture. In his letters to Anna, Semion, like the narrator in Rubina’s earlier novels, particularly the one in Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), is attached to the memory of his beloved grandfather—a transgressive, lofty figure at one and the same time, in the mold of the intellectual/ pirate, who flees to freedom and thus fulfills himself: All this despite the fact that he didn’t finish his heder—had to leave because he didn’t get along with the melamed who hit him for asking questions. Later on, Grandfather never burdened himself with any wisdom that he could have learned by rote from treatises written ages ago. Besides, he was a breadwinner for his younger sisters. Long story short, he was a highly cultured person with just three grades of heder education behind him. However, he had such an inner freedom of the kind I’ve never seen ever after in anyone but you, my child.224

Hence, the surprising comparison between the grandfather and Anna is not accidental, not only because she is a daring, wandering circus performer, but also because in the ideational, atemporal world in which she lives, she also gains a degree of freedom which normal mortals have no access to (although, toward the end of the novel she 223 Rubina, Leonardo’s handwriting, 91. 224 Ibid., 94–95. Translated by Yan Mazor.

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feels enslaved to her curse of prophecy and only has a sense of release the instant before she jumps from the bridge on her motorcycle).225 When Semion looks at Anna’s face, he cannot turn his gaze away from the sight of the unknown, abysmal freedom in which he is united with his loved one and his grandfather, since in this eternal freedom there is neither time nor death. In Semion’s gaze and in his love, there is the same nostalgia that drives his love for the bassoon, which unites his Jewishness and his musical talent. This is what his teacher has to say: “When this people [the Jews] see that vocal sorrow is so necessary in order to extract real music from a bassoon, they sing only about what was and cannot be revived.”226 The baffling death/disappearance of the Master (Anna and Semion fill this role together) together with his/her lover recalls the magic drama of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (the influence of this novel, which is quite piratic, is mentioned many times by Rubina’s critics, particularly in discussions about the novel Syndicate [2004]). The juggler, the troubadour, the wandering trapeze artist dies so that her wandering will end, her suffering will be over, and she will finally get some rest. For Rubina, the end of wandering is also the end of the spiritual and historical exile—the end of the bassoon’s exile, of the voice of the grandfathers and fathers embodied in it, of the Jewish sorrow, of the sorrow of the Wandering Jew. About these wanderings, Semion writes in one of his letters: “You see, at the time of Nazi occupation, Grandfather with both his daughters found himself in the Zhmerinka ghetto, and that’s where I was born. By the sheer logic of plot development, a person born in a ghetto is doomed to crisscross the globe out of fear of being incarcerated somewhere even for one day longer than his soul can endure.”227 Thus, the ghetto is the reason for the piratic wandering (this motif will recur with greater intensity in the next novel, which treats the subject of the artist and art). History, the life of the individual, and the 225 Ibid., 432. 226 Ibid., 97. 227 Ibid., 235–236.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

plot are one; they have the same logic—the logic of realizing free individuality, of overcoming slavery. Semion’s semi-ironic observation attests to the need to find a source of wandering and thus also to point to its possibly eschatological end, even if it comes to an end only in death. Anna, unlike Semion, may have succeeded in achieving this freedom in her life, and this is the most striking trait of her character—the character/mirror in which the “eternal Jew” is reflected as “the eternal motorcyclist.”228 The victim of the “land of robbers” sees himself reflected in the mirror as a citizen of the “world of pirates.” Rubina cannot conceal her attraction to the figure of the pirate, so prevalent in all of her works, the attraction that often becomes the attraction of the victim to the executioner. In Anna’s attraction to wandering, to the figure of the pirate, another detail is added that makes the character ambivalent: carefreeness—indifference to the material world. In this way, the character of the righteous robber is born: the wandering stunt master, the angel (as Anna has been called) who rises and falls. From this standpoint, Anna’s character becomes somewhat similar to the character of the angel/devil boy from Syndicate (2004), and together they embody the power of the creating/destroying chaos. The trace of masculinity in the “eternal motorcyclist” (and the unfeminine plasticity of her body, which is stressed several times) further underscores this similarity. Nonetheless, the piratic character also changes over the years of Rubina’s writing, and the novels attest to this more than anything else: it is born out of wonderment and somewhat decadent self-irony (Here Comes the Messiah! [1996]), is transformed into a carnival and farce (The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra [1998]), and from there to the cynical absurd (Syndicate [2004]). After this point, it is seemingly reborn and begins to rise, to mature again, into dramatic naturalism (On the sunny side of the street [2006]) and then to magical realism in Leonardo’s handwriting (2008). In the next novel, White dove of Cordova (2009), this character reaches romantic and tragic psychological maturity; in Petrushka syndrome (2010), the piratic character will once again show signs of decadence by putting on the 228 Ibid., 300.

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heavy, refined robe of baroque or neoromantic mannerism, and yet it will not lose the dimensions of tragedy and magic psychological drama. In A Russian canary (2015), the pirate theme will be refreshed and simplified once again within the detective-spy story, stylized as a historical tragicomedy. In White dove of Cordova (2009), the subject of Jewish pirates receives a historical basis. In 2009, the same year this novel was published, Edward Kritzler’s book The Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean came out. Rubina refers to the book in Zakhar’s conversation with Ilan, his historian friend.229 I have already mentioned why the character of the pirate was selected to star in Rubina’s fundamental myth: nomadism, transgression, liminality, romanticism, victimhood—all these traits bring Rubina’s narrators closer to their imagined self-­ images, namely the character of the wandering artist, the troubadour-­clown of courts or squares. Yet, the question remains: what is the place of the figure of the pirate in creating the affinity between the copy and the original? The present novel answers this question. The piracy is created here due to the severance from the origin—the expulsion, the exile; hence, its metaphysical purpose is to return to the origin, to restore the lost “assets.” It is not difficult to discern in this model the cabalistic concept of the broken vessels and the gathering of the sparks. If so, then the special Jewish piracy that so entices Rubina is revealed as the metaphysics of the tikkun, i.e., it inversely becomes righteousness. In addition, it is impossible to overlook the other manifestation of this model: the Bolshevik idea of “appropriating the appropriators” or simply “stealing the stolen,” which is presented as social and historical justice; or in Marxist terms, overcoming the “appropriation of the means of production” (the expulsion) is only the way to achieve tikkun and return to the origin (after all, it is no coincidence that Cordovin the grandfather is a Bolshevik). The fact that the expelled Jews, the Cordovera, are not “proletarians” but rather belong to the aristocracy in class and finance reinforces the self-irony of this model, so typical of Rubina. The 229 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 358.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

irony becomes even stronger when Zakhar learns, as in a famous tale, that throughout his life a real treasure was right under his nose—in his house in Vinnitsa in a large gray bag used to cover a barrel, in which his grandfather had hidden paintings by the greatest artists of the twentieth century—Picasso, Modigliani, Falk, Vlaminck, Braque, and others.230 Underlying this sad irony is the fact that the piracy is a crack, a sign of trauma, the violence that repels and at the same time reflects the memory of past violence. Like the Petrushka syndrome, namely, the sick, uncontrollable convulsion, it signifies the loss of self-control, the “dropping out” of history. From this standpoint, pirates are a violent parallel of Marranos, the forced converts among the Jews of Spain: the victim wears his hangman’s mask in order to survive and (secretly) preserve the link to his origin but, at the same time, he or she places that link at risk, places the origin on the brink of forgetfulness—and himself on the brink of annihilation. Hence, the ambivalence of the figure of the pirate, and Rubina very effectively utilizes it to shape the new, modern Jewish character. This character gazes into the abyss of the truth in the Dionysian intoxication of assimilation and chaos, but in his Apollonian dream, he now sees the beautiful forms, at once both tragic and festive, of the fate of his people, which now seems to him to be his own. The piracy is the dream in which the victim becomes a hero—the one who endangers and sacrifices himself—not through suicide or sanctification of God’s name but rather in a struggle and survival throughout the generations. This is the diaspora, exile, eternal Jew in the guise of the hero of the European, Greek-pagan epic. (Christianity combines heroism with victimhood, and Jesus’s epiphany began with his execution as a criminal.) Rubina succeeds in creating the character of the heroic Jew who overcomes his victimhood in a nonreligious, transgressive self-sacrifice—the intoxicated, dreaming hero.231 On the other hand, Rubina’s pirate hero is neither a typical Nietzschean hero (and this is how he differs from figures of the new Jew in 230 Ibid., 405. 231 Naum Weiman has been desperately searching for this character in his Khanaanskie khroniki [Canaanite chronicles] (St. Petersburg: Inapress, 2000) and Shchel obetovania [The slot of promise] (Moscow: NLO, 2012).

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Hebrew literature) nor a fighter, nor a terrorist. He is a master ­scoundrel, a picaro aristocrat, a hooligan intellectual, who reserves the right to carry a weapon and use it (Zakhar’s revolver); however, his hand holds only the paint brush or the pen and does not destroy but rather creates. Zakhar’s gun, which appears in the beginning, never shoots in the end. The others shoot and kill, and they also kill him in the scene of romantic heroism at the end of the novel. Rubina manages to create an ideal, ironic Jewish hero who is not a figure of “the uprooted”; on the contrary, his piratic umbilical cord remains connected to his Jewish historical source, and at the same time, he is separated from it by the course of history itself: the perfect, harmonious unity of the diasporic and Israeli facets of the modern Jew. Many coincidences distanced Zakhar from his origin (such as the loss of the kiddush cup and the loss of his mother). However, many other coincidences led him back later (such as finding the twin kiddush cup and finding his mother’s double). The coincidences here are not an external melodramatic machination but rather the footsteps of the march of history, the combination of what is lost and what is found. And here, piracy (the magic, alchemical piracy à la Zakhar Cordovin, which turns the original into a copy and also the copy into the original) is the precondition for this march. In the consciousness of the protagonist (and of the narrator), Spain appears as a ruined land, the sunken Atlantis, a dying civilization. However, its originary symbols are still alive or awaiting revival, and it seems that, in this light, the return to Spain, Zakhar’s piratic journey, takes on the meaning of a quest for the lost treasures/symbols, for the Jewish source. Zakhar will find two kinds of treasures: the work of art, which represents one of his forefathers, and a woman who resembles his mother. Zakhar’s “wild piratic imagination” gives rise to the image of the Menorah of the Temple gathering dust in the basements of the Vatican, and he begins to concoct plots to steal it, for “isn’t it just, to restore the stolen to its home?”232 On the other hand, Zakhar is the one who finally sells his forefathers’ creation—the painting of Zacarias Cordovera in the style of El Greco—to the Vatican as a painting by 232 Ibid., 247.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

El Greco himself. In other words, he again robs his home (although he also regrets doing so). In addition, the silver kiddush cup, “our legacy” which Grandfather Zakhar ordered to be kept as the apple of his eye, is also linked to a legend, claiming that it was among the treasures of the First Temple, smuggled out during the siege of Nebuchadnezzar by a priest, the father of the Cordovera dynasty.233 Zakhar sells this chalice, symbol of the legacy of the priesthood and the sacred, when he needs a few coins—once again robbing himself, always remaining with heavy guilt feelings and a debt that can never be repaid. The mythological world picture of the Cordovera-Cordovin dynasty looks like bits of statements whose meaning is unknown to the protagonists, such as the kiddush cup with the Hebrew inscription, or whose reference does not seem reliable to them, such as the inscription, also in Hebrew, on the great-grandfather’s tombstone, Cordovera the Sephardi: “Here lies the Commandant, major of the civil guard on the Island of Curacao, consul of the Netherlands in Uruguay.”234 Simeon and the young Zakhar ponder the matter. Simeon is certain that the instruction in the “scoundrel’s” will to engrave such words on his tombstone, as well as his claim that his forefathers were pirates, are just a lie, clowning, a disgrace.235 He cannot know what Zakhar will discover much later, that the Jewish Spanish pirates did sail in Dutch ships and with the Dutch came to the Antilles islands, one of which was Curacao.236 The young Zakhar finds this amusing, and since he cannot read Hebrew, he can only discern the symbol that connects the tombstone with the kiddush cup—a picture of a ship upon the waves. The Hebrew language appears as a sort of mysterious code, connecting the symbols of the memory that are dispersed throughout the world: the tombstone in Vinnitsa, the kiddush cup in St. Petersburg, and the twin cup in Spain. The dismantled memory only reflects the dismantled history, but the holy language keeps it whole with the paper clips of words that are waiting to be said and to gain the belief of those who say them when the 233 Ibid., 355. 234 Ibid., 345. 235 Ibid. 236 Ibid., 356.

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myths turn from fiction into truth. Still, even if the meaning of the symbols is not known, they retain their function: Zakhar’s aunt Zhuka received the kiddush cup as “our legacy” from her father, and Zakhar sold the cup. As a result, Zhuka laments the loss as a real tragedy, and a deep wound of guilt opens in Zakhar’s heart. He partially paid his debt of the guilt after selling a Cordovera painting to the Vatican Museum by signing his own painting with the name “Zacarias Cordovera.”237 This guilt and his guilt over the death of his friend Andrei miraculously join together and become one.238 The sale of the legacy is not only a betrayal (likened to the betrayal of a friend); in addition, it signifies the loss of memory, historical amnesia, which can be remedied only through the new struggle over the lost legacy, which under the new conditions can exist only as piracy. Thus, it appears that Zakhar’s story represents a pattern of personal/social behavior: the creation of symbols of the legacy as a result of expulsion or exile— loss of the symbols and dissolution of the memory—repentance—search (not necessarily conscious) for the lost symbols—formation of the memory and reappropriation of the legacy (or part of it). At both the beginning and the end of this move, there is the violence, the cultural deterritorialization, the piracy of the hangmen and the victims.239 Zakhar’s tragic death at the end of the novel shows that it is impossible to reglue the shards of history (just as it is impossible to escape one’s destiny), but the shards can shift their orbit—the symbol of the legacy as myths in the personal gravitational field of the family/dynasty. This is Rubina’s dominant model of historical thought. This model does not move in one direction or along one continuum. It is a nonlinear model of symbolic replacement—of names and works, myths and appropriations, concealments and revelations, treasures and journeys, debts and repayments—spread out over time and space. 237 Ibid., 436. 238 Ibid., 431. 239 Another instance of this piracy, described in the novel, is the theft of works of art as loot during World War II, when the looters (simple Russian soldiers, in this case) were often completely unaware of the value of the works (Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 380).

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

Both of the main heroes of Petrushka syndrome (2010) are pirates. In his childhood, Peter fell in love with Liza, an infant girl who was like an amazing doll, and abducted her. At the other end of the axis of time, Liza abducts Peter’s puppet. The lost symbol, the puppet/ amulet is, in fact, the stolen symbol. In this novel, the Faustian (and its other manifestation, the origin/copy) theme, as well as the messianic ars poetica, are intertwined with the theme of the pirate/righteous person, the victimhood, and the tikkun. Dr. Gorelik, the Jerusalem psychiatrist, the author of the writings that were inserted between excerpts of the plot sequence, formulates the question that seems to have been one of the major questions in Rubina’s work since her first novel: “Which of the two is the victim?”240 Liza appears in the role of the executioner when she “murders” her artificial double, the golem, the supposedly innocent victim.241 From this standpoint, the novel continues the anthropological and historical thinking that characterized the early novels. It is impossible to overlook the fact that the double character of Liza/Alice continues the tradition of suffering femininity in Russian literature, such as in its direct parallel Poor Liza by Nicolai Karamzin, which is intertwined in the legendary tradition of the girl/witch or the king’s bewitched daughter, like in the Alice books by Lewis Carroll. It is well known that in Rubina’s writing, cities are real personages. For her, a city is not only a home, the mother’s bosom, a magic portal, and theater stage, but also a piratic port—the axis of the world in which all the roads intersect, where everything can happen, where, through the chaotic movement of the pirate souls in the world, suddenly order and sense can emerge. When Peter and Liza come to the city of Volzhskiy near Samara, to the home of Aunt Visia, who several days earlier had passed away, to Peter everything looks “too dolled up.” He also calls himself “the puppet man,” and shows his friend Silva the figure of the pirate Silver from Treasure Island, the puppet that he once operated in one of the theaters in Russia.242 In this “dollhouse,” Silva gives him 240 Ibid., 61. 241 Ibid., 416. 242 Rubina, Petrushka syndrome, 84–87.

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the bartender puppet, the same amulet that supposedly guarded the source of the family’s fertility, the house sprite. The puppet had disappeared many years before; now it turns out that Visia the “pirate” had abducted it when she ran away after the death of her sister, Liza’s mother. Peter, another pirate who had been looking for the puppet all those years, found it in Visia’s house on the banks of the Volga River. Thus, the treasure is found, the lost symbol, or more precisely the stolen symbol in a city or an island of the pirates. There is an intimate, inner, substantive link between a pirate and a puppet. They both belong to the underworld, to the forbidden; they both embody the violence of expulsion and exclusion, the rejection of humaneness, and also tikkun, revenge, justice, and resurrection. Pirate Petrushka is “not good and not bad, not dead and not alive. . . . He is a trickster! The eternal creature from the underworld. He is a scoundrel, an agitator. Everything is permitted him: both from the heavens as well as under the earth.”243 Liza’s father is also assigned to the underworld;244 Peter’s father was also such a pirate trickster. Perhaps we could say that all fathers, including the grandfathers, in Rubina’s novels are pirates from whom the sons and daughters inherit mainly their artistic and magical skills. On the basis of this character, Rubina creates a complete chronotope: the wandering sinner, always absent from the narrative present, who constitutes a reference point for the thoughts and actions of others, who passed down to his offspring the dynastic, tribal, historical, and metaphysical legacy—for good or bad. Romka, also known as Roman, Peter’s father, was a violent man who beat his wife, once abducted his son, and was a nomad who, time after time, left his home and returned. The blood of “an imprisoned Italian” roared through his veins, “a quiet Ossetian that the grandfather had brought from an unknown place…and who knows who else.”245 The father was the first puppet and the first puppeteer in Peter’s life; he was not only a man/puppet (a pirate/puppet) himself, but he also 243 Ibid., 118–119. 244 Ibid., 350. 245 Ibid., 99.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

“knew how to make a toy from everything and bring it to life.”246 Later Peter “revived” his father; he created his marionette, and it participated in many plays. The father’s artificial hand, which he didn’t use, was one of the child’s first theatrical experiences. With that hand, Peter would frighten his classmates. Afterwards, his father would hit him with it, and the boy was mesmerized by the sight of the living/dead hand, flying through the room247—the pirate hand, the magical hand of Midas, the hand of the artist-magician whose touch makes everything come to life. Three recent novels by Rubina were published one after the other, as a trilogy, A Russian canary (2015) with the subtitles Zheltukhin, The Voice, and The Prodigal Son. In these books as well, the characters of nomads and escapees, Spaniards and gypsies, wandering artists and scoundrels, appear alongside the motifs of transgressive, suffering, and redemptive fatherhood and motherhood. In A Russian canary: Zheltukhin (2015), there is the character of Tatyana, Ilya’s mother, who was an obsessive escapist in her youth. From one of these escapes, she returns with her child248—another expression of combined metaphysical escape, transgression, and motherhood. Ilya’s daughter, Aya, also runs away from home several times, until she leaves it entirely for the sake of the nomadic life of a photographer—artist and pirate. On her journeys, she tests the boundaries of the lawful and encounters other “pirates,” such as Raul who “worked as a pirate,” taking on the character of Captain Silver and bringing tourists to lonely islands in the Andaman Sea249—a distant echo of the “pirates from an operetta” in the dreams of the narrator in Syndicate (2004). Aya draws closer to the character of the pirate as the story advances to the second book, and the dimensions of transgression and tikkun (as reappropriation) are added to the dimension of the wandering: her hands, the hands of the deaf woman, “were yearning to affirm something, to correct something,

246 Ibid., 98. 247 Ibid., 102–104. 248 Rubina, A Russian canary: Zheltukhin, 64. 249 Ibid., 278.

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to add, to decorate . . . to steal.”250 Just as Anna in Leonardo’s handwriting (2008) was endowed with the ability to prophesy, Aya’s deafness (even their names are similar) was “endowed” to her, “like an aristocratic title, for the deeper dive . . . like that of pearl divers.”251 The central hero of the trilogy is a Jewish pirate—Leon Ettinger, the (almost) last representative of the Ettinger line, the brilliant Israeli singer and the murderous Mossad agent. In his “most dangerous odysseys,” he is transfigured into the characters of his relatives.252 The narrator immediately raises a possibility that explains Ettinger’s strange behavior and links him to other of Rubina’s piratic characters, such as Zakhar Cordovin in White dove of Cordova (2009): perhaps this obsession to be transfigured into his late relatives is nothing but the desire to surround himself with the ephemeral simulacrum of a large family?253 Leon received his Jewish pirate genes from his mother, Vladka, who was in the habit of decorating her life stories with “facts” from the lives of pirates254—myths she created and introduced, totally spontaneously, into rhythmic speech and mellifluous rhyme. This folksy, epic poetess served as that vessel in which Ettinger’s blood was preserved and transmitted—also in a “piratic” manner, since her grandmother, Stesha, the adopted servant in the Ettinger home, who on three occasions is linked to the biblical Tamar,255 and who in her womb hoarded, appropriated, and preserved the semen of the patriarch Great Ettinger and his son Yakov. This example compels one to think in “piratic” terms about other biblical figures such as Jacob, Ruth, and David who safeguarded their “lawful” seed using illegal or borderline methods. In general, the story of the Ettinger dynasty of singers is remarkably similar to the story of the house of David, the royal house, the house of the poet of Psalms, the builder of Jerusalem (the home of the last Ettingers), whose symbol and that of the tribe of Judah is a lion, like 250 Rubina, A Russian canary: Golos, 367. 251 Ibid., 383. 252 Ibid., 213. 253 Ibid. 254 Ibid., 451. 255 Ibid., 114, 211, 473.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

the name of Leon, the Jerusalemite who “lives the lives of the members of his family” and epitomizes his city and its historical mode of existence. In the second book of the trilogy A Russian canary: The voice (2015), this conception achieves its pure embodiment. Every family, even the foreign, imagined, or illusory, is a dissipative pattern, according to the concepts of the theory of chaos: a cloud of unstable order arises and disappears within the chaos of the times. The violence of history, always turned against the family, arouses the archaic passion—the passion of blood revenge. Like the heroine of the story “The Gypsy” mentioned above, Leon Ettinger clings to “the thirst of the ancient ritual of bloodshed”256 the moment he hears that someone has harmed the family in which he grew up as if he were an orphan. This family (as the paradigmatic family) is piratic not only because it is dismantled, exiled, nomadic, unlawful—namely, a family of eternal orphans—but also because it is always robbed in the whirlpool of history and is forced to search for and reappropriate its stolen symbolic assets, motivated by the ancient passion for justice, the passion for order in the sea of entropy. This is how it is with “small” families (and with “large” families as well), as in the scene in which Leon feels “the rush of blood in his throat” when he sits in front of the terrorist he has just caught—that same Arab who extended his blood-smeared palms out of the window of the house in Ramallah, where the rabid crowd slaughtered the two Israeli reservist soldiers who had taken the wrong road. (Rubina, as always, bases this on a real-life event: the lynching in Ramallah on October 12, 2000, but she changes the name of the murderer.) The family continuity is piratic because it is doomed to incessantly search for its vanished origin and for the justice that has been trampled on throughout its history. The gypsy line also continues with the “naval gypsies,” the characters, who settle on the Andaman islands. In the opinion of one of the protagonists, there are two versions of their origin: according to one, they came from Malaysia;257 according to the other, they are the descendants 256 Ibid., 90. 257 Ibid., 380. The reference is to the Austronesian ethnic group known as Moken (or Chao Ley).

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of the Portuguese pirates. Thus, another of Rubina’s circles is closed, when this line meets the line of the Jewish pirates from the novel White dove of Cordova (2009). The apotheosis of the theme of the wandering sinner who regains his legacy is the theme of the prodigal son in the trilogy (and perhaps in all of Rubina’s novels, sometimes metaphorically), and it is fully realized in the third novel, A Russian canary: Prodigal son (2015). Through one of the minor characters, the gifted young composer, Rubina tells the Hasidic version of the parable of the prodigal son. In his very long wanderings, the son forgets his mother tongue, and upon his return he cannot ask the servants to call for his father; out of desperation, he shouts, and his blind father recognizes his voice. The voice of the son, according to the composer, is the voice of sin and evil, but it is also the voice of the shofar on the Jewish New Year—the voice of regret and repentance. This parable is the rationale of the entire trilogy about the voice, about the Russian canary: the voice is the symbol of the exile, the wandering, the return to the legacy, and redemption. The triangular structure of the trilogy is similar to the triangular structure of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, although it is not parallel to it since it is not as linear and hierarchical as Dante’s work is. The three sides of the triangle, duplicated fractally in each of Rubina’s works are transgression (and loss of self), wandering, and self-appropriation. This is the “real,” in Lacan’s terms, which is expressed in images and in figures of piracy. This triangle is also the mold in which all of Rubina’s familiographies are written. These are stories of pirates struggling over the continuity of their legacies and the lives of their dynasties against all historical odds.

THE METAPHYSICAL LEAP

From White dove of Cordova (2009) to the present, all of the themes discussed above unite in the idea of a type of metaphysical leap, escape, or flight. Although this idea is also found in one or another form in Rubina’s previous works, it has only recently been shaped as a consistent chronotope that imbues a personage with all the following features

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

(as discerned above): noncarnivalesque, neoindigenous, messianic, and a postvictimary and posttraumatic pirate metaphysically fighting for his or her origin and heritage. For Rubina, the metaphysical leap is not an act of escapism, despair, or faith but rather an attempt to revolt against the enslaving givenness and murderous time. In one of the small restaurants in the Jewish quarter in Toledo, Zakhar came across a painting in the style of El Greco from 1600. The artist is Zacarias Cordovera, and the painting is of “some saint, monk, priest?”258 The painting contains all the characteristics of the El Greco school, but in this novel the European baroque, and El Greco’s baroque in particular, has features of Eastern (Byzantine) art, on the one hand, and is linked on the other hand to Jewish culture and history in a surprising way. This is how Zakhar explains his view to his friend a few minutes before his marvelous encounter with the painting: “In El Greco’s paintings, the figures are nailed to the canvas and enslaved to the imposed pattern of movement. That is the thinking of a painter of icons or . . . an artist in a ghetto, when there is only one way out—up. And the vitality in the faces of the figures is the vitality of the Faiyum portraits.”259 While the comparison of El Greco to iconic art and to the Faiyum portraits is not surprising, the mention of “the ghetto artist” seems not only surprising but also alien to the present context. However, at second glance, what is common to the artistic phenomena mentioned by the protagonist becomes obvious: the metaphysical leap beyond the shackles of life and death. The icon is the clearest of them all; it is the very epitome of a symbol, representing what cannot be represented. The portraits from Faiyum are death masks attached to mummy cases in Roman Egypt in the first to third centuries. By means of a special technique, an extraordinary impression of realism and vitality was achieved. Using this comparison, Zakhar turns all of El Greco’s figures, the mythological as well as the realistic, into shadows, ghosts, dead/ alive pupa. The “ghetto artist” enters Zakhar’s discourse associatively; but unquestionably, from the author’s viewpoint, he is the significant 258 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 146. 259 Ibid., 53.

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center of this brief lecture, especially since the lecture appears in the background of the Jewish quarter in the Spanish city—after Spain and all of Europe was portrayed as almost a land of the dead, arising from the flames of the historical apocalypse. The line connecting the Inquisition to the Holocaust is the axis around which Zakhar Cordovin’s thinking revolves, a reflection of the thinking of Zacarias Cordovera— the ghetto artist, student of El Greco, whose art seemingly casts a new light on the essence of his teacher’s art. Like other Rubina’s protagonists who feel the unexplained panic of an animal hunted in the serene streets of contemporary Germany, Cordovin feels a similar sense in the streets of Toledo during the festive religious Holy Week processions: “An unexplained dread passed through the roots of his hair . . . he had already seen all of this . . . he was compelled to flee, to disappear at once.”260 Cordovin’s comment about the art of the ghettos is brilliant, even if it is neither accurate nor grounded. For many years, Elena Makarova— Israeli educator, author, and curator, originally from the Soviet Union—has collected and studied ghetto art. She holds exhibitions and writes the catalogues for Peretz Beda Mayer and Fritz Haendel,261 designer of the theater in the Terezin ghetto,262 Franz Peter Kien,263 and others. Her major educational and philosophical catalogue projects include an exhibition of the paintings of the children of the Terezin ghetto and the biography of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,264 the artist who organized and taught the children, collected their drawings, and placed them in safe hands before she was sent to Auschwitz and killed. It is true that one can find some paintings in the style of El Greco among the works of the ghetto artists, particularly in the work of Peretz 260 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 457. 261 Elena Makarova, Kartis aliia le-gan eden [A ticket to Eden] (Ein Kharod: Verba, 2007). 262 Elena Makarova, Le-khaiey ha-khaim [To the life of the living] (Jerusalem: Verba, 2001). 263 See Elena Makarova and Ira Rabin, Franz Peter Kien (1919–1944) (Prague: Petr Oswald Publishers, 2009). 264 Elena Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Los Angeles: Tallfellow/Every Picture Press, 2001.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

Beda Mayer, such as his “The Trio of Clowns” (Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art), and similar elements are evident in some of the children’s drawings. The main point, however, is that the metaphysics of ghetto art draws on the metaphysics of baroque art and vice versa. It is the metaphysics of the “inspiration of the light” that warmed Eleazar when he was resurrected, the light of the children that warmed Dicker-­Brandeis in the ghetto.265 Dicker-Brandeis, the Bauhaus artist, a student of Johannes Itten, speaks to the children of the ghetto about Rembrandt: “He is not afraid to go into a dark room, because he believes there is a source of light.”266 The movement that pulls the figures upward in El Greco’s paintings and in the painting of the fictitious baroquean ghetto artist, Zacarias Cordovera, is a movement of tikkun, correction of the world, the messianic yearning for the star of both the cabalistic as well as the existential redemption. Thus, as if incidentally, the messianic subject is revealed again, now entwined with the Hasidic motifs of a spiritual descent, thus facilitating an ascent and the gathering of the sparks. And perhaps even primarily, there is the subject of the victim: the torments of Job, the expelled, Wandering Jew in the horizontal space, redeemed from the shackles of his physical existence as he ascends to the heavens in the chariot of light. Behind the upward movement of the Holocaust figures is the memory of the smoke stacks of the extermination camps, and behind them are the halls of the Inquisition, imbuing the baroquean aesthetic and El Greco’s unique style with new meaning—both topical and apocalyptic, in keeping with Zakhar’s mood who, now on his Spanish journey, is like Ulysses who descends to Hell to meet his mother, Tiresias, and other mythological ancestors. This character of Zakhar/Zacarias, Ulysses/Bloom in Rubina’s version, has a prototype—the husband of the writer, the artist Boris Karafëlov (born 1946). One phase of Karafëlov’s life (1969–1976) takes place in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, Cordovin’s place of birth. In 2007– 2010, he produces a series of paintings on Spanish topics that resonate 265 Elena Makarova, Fridl. Dokumentalny roman [Friedl: A documentary novel] (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 2000), 114. 266 Ibid., 116.

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in Rubina’s novel and seem to illustrate it (which is also typical of his other works and stems from the joint trips taken by the painter and his wife): “Toledo” (2007), “Cordova, Seneca Square” (2009), “A Night in Toledo” (2009), “A Flamenco Dancer” (2009), “The Teahouse in Cordova” (2009), and “Recollecting Toledo” (2010). In his recent paintings, such as “Recollecting Toledo,” Karafëlov introduces elements from the composition and physical plasticity of El Greco, Chagall, and Matisse; one can see in them that same yearning of the “ghetto artist” for a metaphysical flight heavenward. Rita, Zakhar’s mother, resembles Anna from Leonardo’s handwriting and several of Rubina’s other metaphysical wanderers and fliers: she is coarse, impudent, brave, and self-reliant. She flees from her wedding and her home and returns when she wishes. She is a strong personality and an athlete. She is like a volcano of desire, and she, according to the narrator, is not able to coordinate her desires and the circumstances of time and place.267 This description can apply to many of Rubina’s protagonists, especially those among them who are metaphysical acrobats. Rita is also such an acrobat. Like Anna she does not know her father; like Anna she sees dreams (and is even likened to the biblical Joseph); like Anna she attracts men like a magnet and does not remain with any one of them for very long; like Anna she engages in a European sport—medieval fencing; and like Anna she falls victim to her special powers and dies young. So, the metaphysical jump rests on the diving board of orphanhood, that orphanhood of the ghettos about which Zakhar Cordovin speaks and which is driven by the force of desire, by Eros. This Eros (also evident in Zakhar), based solely on Plato’s theory, drives thinking, doing, and creating, and the three are embodied in the work of recollection—likened to the work of the correction/reconstruction of the paintings268—in the diffusion and unification of the foreign memories. Note that the name “Zakhar(ia)” originally (in Hebrew) signifies memory of God.

267 Rubina, White dove of Cordova, 213. 268 Ibid., 295.

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In Petrushka syndrome (2010), the chronotope or the complex of conceptions, motifs, and plot-personage features—united here under the name of the metaphysical leap—takes the form of the Faustian idea. The theme of Faust, as is well known, is not just another theme in the thematic range of Western literature, but rather it is a key one, a cultural, epistemological paradigm. Oswald Spengler, in his Decline of the West, even chose the figure of Faust as a symbol of European culture—a symbol of the mentality that views the universe as a mathematical infinite space-time.269 The German scholar erred in most of his cultural and historical deductions, which mainly reflect his racist preferences and his fantastic imagination. In basing a complex phenomenon on a single principle, he was indeed a faithful son of the modernist zeitgeist. However, Spengler did unquestionably contribute to a better understanding of what it is that drives the Western artist: the creation of life outside of nature (or, in other words, projecting the infinite, natural space-time, with its powers of creation, on to cultural activity and the figure of the creating man, who thus becomes a Creator). However, the Faustian soul of Western man becomes a hostage of this mission; filled with despair and disappointment, it goes wandering among the various forces of creation and the creatures that are not whole—they are failed attempts to create the living, and hence have been abandoned to roam in the cold air of space. This is the madness of Western man, the subject of Rubina’s novel, in which Faust is Mephistopheles, the hero and simultaneously the marionette in the hands of the hero.270 In the course of our discussion of Rubina’s novels, we have often stressed the theme of turning the inanimate into the animate. This is the purpose of art and the destiny of man, but it is also the greatest satanic temptation for man, in particular for the artist. The tension between these two aspects grows from novel to novel, until in White dove of Cordova (2009), it becomes the foundation of the tragic plot and hero, with the cathartic release and the death of the hero at the end. The tragic catharsis provides a type of harmonization and reconciliation, 269 Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, an abridged edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 201–225. 270 Rubina, Petrushka syndrome, 268.

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but it does not dissipate the value-laden tension. Moreover, its reflection of the conflict actually exacerbates the conflict in recurrent imagination. In Petrushka syndrome (2010), it reaches a new level of crisis: it leads to madness. In the earlier novels, several mad characters appeared on the margins of the plot. In this novel, one of the two main characters, Liza, suffers from a severe psychosis—a schizoaffective disorder.271 (The psychiatrist believes that Peter may be suffering from partial autism272and, in general, regards an obsession with the world of puppets as a mental disorder).273 In Liza’s sick mind, the golem/Galatea threatens to take her place in life. At the same time, another golem, a small doll, is the family talisman that brings its wives the blessing of a healthy birth. As in the earlier novel, the wanderings of the Faustian souls of the novel’s protagonists are nothing other than a search for the lost-treasure symbol, the source of natural fertility. Thus, Faustian messianism unites with motherhood and brings the forces of creation back to nature. This has two implications: the madness is rejected, and the continuity of the historical memory, embodied as always in Rubina’s writing in the familiography, is saved from chaos and insanity. The novel’s plot—which, as usual in Rubina’s work, is spread over different time planes—is the story of the longtime love of Peter, the genius puppeteer, for Liza. After their son is born with Petrushka syndrome (Angelman syndrome) and dies shortly thereafter, Liza’s mind becomes deranged and she is hospitalized several times in a hospital in Israel (Kfar Shaul in Jerusalem). Owing to her illness, Peter’s famous show was cancelled. When Liza learned that Peter had started performing the show again without her participation but with her puppet/double, Alice, she destroyed the puppet. At the same time, Peter found the blessing puppet of Liza’s family, which had been lost many years earlier, and finally a healthy baby girl—Liza’s living double— is born to the couple. As far as its intertextual configuration is concerned, the novel deviates from the context of widespread modern literature (particularly 271 Ibid., 30. 272 Ibid., 39. 273 Ibid., 58.

Dina Rubina: The Steps to the Metaphysical Window

the modernist and the popular) about puppets, golems, living machines, and the like and extends over the range of meanings of thousands of years of Western civilization. This pretension is already reflected in the book’s epigraph in a quotation from the Pseudo-Clementine literature, a corpus of stories or religious novels from the second century AD, erroneously attributed to Pope Clement I from the first century AD. The corpus is composed of two parts, “Homilies” and “Recognitions.” The epigraph is taken from the second part, book 2, paragraph 2.15. It relates to the character of Simon Magus, the gnostic who is mentioned in the New Testament and is known for his confrontations with the apostle Peter (who has the same name as the hero of the novel). The lines quoted in the epigraph immediately present the Faustian subject in the context of the competition with the Creator and the murder (the sin, the innocent victim), as a social projection of this competition: Once, turning air into water and water into blood, then condensing blood into flesh by my power, I created a human being, a boy, having thus created something more noble than the work of the Creator, as the latter created man out of earth, while I did so out of air, which is by far more difficult. That’s when we understood that he (Simon Magus) was talking about the boy who he killed and whose soul he took into service.274

Large parts of “Recognitions” are devoted to the competition between Simon and Peter. Here, the cultural crisis at the center of the novel is declared—the conflict between the creation and the magic, between the legal and the transgressive, the struggle over the soul of the artist and over the essence of the creation, or even over the essence of faith and miracle. At one point, Peter the puppeteer is likened to Jesus who brings Eleazar back to life.275 Peter is Simon Magus, St. Peter, and the sinner, heretic, and clown (Petrushka), all at the same time— but also, he is the foundation stone (peter) of the building of faith, the 274 Ibid., 5. Translated by Yan Mazor. 275 Ibid., 326.

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saint raising his hands to heaven in prayer—each hand crowned by a puppet—with this prayer, which is also a game, actually turning him into “another man,” full of vitality, creativity and power.276 Moreover, Peter is also that same artificial child whose soul was taken in the service of the magician. He is Mephistopheles, Faust, and the homunculus at the same time;277 he is the “puppet of God led with innumerable threads of good and bad,” and the “endless thread of gold,” “laced through the heart, stretched between his head and the heavens.”278 The greatest artist is himself the most wonderful artistic creation, which amuses the Creator “in His vast solitude.”279 The power of art can be interpreted as witchcraft or intuition, or as an identity between the two,280 but in any case the conflict between two world pictures—that of the shadow and that of the light—is unavoidable. In Jewish concepts, this is a crisis of creation and passion as idolatry or “strange fire.” Peter’s love for Liza is transgressive—and not because he abducted her. On the contrary, the later abduction of Liza from her father’s home is likened to an escape from the ghetto,281 and in Rubina’s symbolic language, this reflects a metaphysical leap, a magic/mythic flight (and really, like the flight of the Gogolian witch, Liza rides on Peter’s back). The crisis was resolved because Peter appropriated Liza’s soul,282 putatively “murdered” her, turning her into a puppet (and of course, without that magic reversal, the abduction would not have been possible, since only an object can be appropriated). The crisis was created when, as in the novel’s epigraph, the transgressive, subversive appropriation is presented as a creation. This crisis, and not the collapse of Liza’s personality due to her loss, is the real—personal, cultural, and poetic—madness. Drafts of Jerusalem by Nekod Singer portrays an example of this same crisis, observed in a kind of inverse mirror. In one of the book’s 276 Ibid., 41. Translated by Yan Mazor. 277 Ibid., 411–412. 278 Ibid., 425. 279 Ibid. 280 Ibid., 289. 281 Ibid., 349. 282 Ibid., 60.

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novellas, the narrator finds an Italian wooden puppet in a trash can. Its/ his name is Armata Pierrotti, a combination of a variété artist from Fellini’s film, a French street theater personage, and the clown’s mask from the Commedia dell Arte. His name is a version of Pierrot, namely Pierre, Peter, Petrushka. The puppet is alive, speaks, sings, and dances, and at the end of the story, he dies.283 As a simple, bedraggled puppet, he looks like the very opposite of Peter’s well-kept, elaborate puppets, but what they have in common is the need to hide from the eyes of strangers, as well as the fact that they are not alive without the presence of the master—the artist (in Rubina) or the child (in Singer). (Nonetheless, Peter’s puppet theater can also be said to start with a broken puppet—this is how he sees his father’s amputated hand—and ends with the broken puppet, Alice.)284 The two of them belong to the mysterious and forbidden world; their art is in any case a transgression, and they must both die in the end. The “abduction” of the soul must be temporary and cannot replace the real work or the Creation. However, for Singer, this idea is only one neoromantic element within the eclectic mixture of styles, while for Rubina, it is raised to the level of a philosophical, aesthetic parable. Singer lowers his characters to the level of rubbish (the narrator who finds the puppet was working at the time as a garbage collector) and places them at the margins of society, even below its underbelly. This is an allegory—based on the theories of cultural criticism and poststructuralism—of the potential of human power and vitality in the processed cultural “waste” that is excluded, thrown away, hidden. In contrast, Rubina places the satanic/divine puppet-artist at the metaphysical center of integrative culture. And, since this puppet is the source of fertility, the metaphysical leap is identified with giving birth, motherhood, and dynastic continuity—the theme that has been most boldly represented in the trilogy, A Russian canary (2015). Here, as in Petrushka syndrome (2010), the continuity can magically be accomplished through only one person, who is thus simultaneously Faust and Mephistopheles, a creator and a creature. 283 Nekod Singer, Drafts of Jerusalem, 76–78. 284 Rubina, Petrushka syndrome, 94.

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The dynastic chain of the “House of Ettinger” is always preserved thanks to one man. It is chaotic, unstable, fragile; yet, all of its people “existed, and with the meaning of their lives they filled the name of the generation.”285 In other words, even in our unsettled time, a time putatively without metaphysics and teleological idealism, familiography is still mythology, the creation and development of the magic name. It is the magic of turning the dead into the living, illusion into reality. In her recent trilogy, Rubina sums up her conception, already expressed in her earlier novels, that we can define as the model of the piratic, unlawful family that metaphysically, miraculously survives in history. The voice, the central symbol and motif of the trilogy, is the symbol of the prodigal son, and implicitly, of metaphysical piracy. It is the murderer and the avenger: the canary from the Zheltukhin dynasty is the one who assisted in identifying the spy, Günther, who for many years acted against Israel and murdered Leon’s agents in Jerusalem, while Leon is the one who murdered Günther in opposition to the plans of the Mossad. Leon was taken prisoner, tortured, and finally one of his captors put out his eyes. However, in the end, like the prodigal son, Leon returns to Jerusalem, and his radiant voice cuts through the darkness. At the same time, he becomes the blind father, and here, in Jerusalem, he sings an oratorio, “Prodigal Son,” together with his little son Gavrila, the new “Great Ettinger.” Both as son and as father, Leon regains his symbolic and biological legacy, which is personal, familial, and national, and he rebuilds it, imbuing it with new life. With this act of piratic, neoindigenous, and nonvictimary reappropriation of the legacy, by which Rubina concludes her trilogy, we can conclude our discussion of her oeuvre. Her “long thought” proceeds from carnival, trauma, and migration to the revitalizing imagination of motherhood (fatherhood), heroism, and metaphysical escape from ghetto mentality. Her hero fluctuates between Messiah and prodigal son, the creator and the magician, while always remaining a pirate. This line of thought reflects significant tendencies in the Russian-language literature in Israel of the 1990s and 2000s. In the three following chapters, we will consider the other relevant and substantial lines of thoughts. 285 Rubina, A Russian canary: Zheltukhin, 213.

C HAPT ER

TWO

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism* THE MULTILINGUAL SITUATION Nekod Singer occupies a unique place in the Russian-language literature in Israel, belonging simultaneously to several “risk-taking groups”—avant-garde, intellectual, bilingual, and migrant. His writing transcends genres, styles, and philosophies, and it reaches the hearts of a wide audience, standing between the extremes of the monolingual intellectual elitism of Alexander Goldstein and the multilingual encyclopedic universalism of Mikhail Yudson. Singer’s writing emerges, in his words, from the abortive transition between dream and reality, between times and places, and it is realized as a transition between languages: This transition from dreams into reality within cognizance of the place where I intended to thoroughly settle in, planned to spend all the days allotted to me in this world of reality—it turned out to be a transition from one lingual reality into another. . . . This process that seemed so important to me could now be called transfusion from a sieve. . . . Behind every perception of place and time, a no less real perception of illusiveness of the former perception was * This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 70, 2: 66–79. 131

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beginning to appear, as if it were in a dream incorporated in reality.286

For Singer, the transition between languages is an existential, anthropological, and aesthetic problem that has been likened to crossing the River Sambatyon287 and to a ritual in which going beyond languages and toward understanding is accomplished by going beyond time into eternity.288 In any sense, it is necessary for understanding Singer’s multiple imaginary worlds and poetics. In this chapter, only several steps can be made toward answering the question of the dream/reality, Russian-Hebrew (un)translatability of Singer’s writing. After a few theoretical notes, I present a short comparative case study on his works in two languages, trying to answer the question: what is the real meaning and achievement of this supposedly abortive gesture toward the multiplicity of languages? Arguably, most of the world’s population has generally been proficient in more than one language.289 Some scholars maintain that, as a result, most authors throughout history have been translingual; that is to say, they write in more than one language (ambilinguals) or in languages other than their native ones (monolingual translinguals). This went without saying during the classical and medieval periods when literature was generally written in literary languages like Greek, Latin, and Arabic. However, as has been widely noted, this is even truer of the modern age. Modernism is “a literature of exile, a project of psychic if not geographical dislocation.”290 Furthermore, hermeneutic and social theory propose that every expression and literary work is, by nature, a translation.291 286 Nekod Singer, Drafts of Jerusalem, 7. Translations from Singer’s books hereafter are by Yan Mazor (authorized by the author). 287 Zali Gurevitch, Nekod Singer, and Gali-Dana Singer, “Rega Mesuyam” [A certain moment], Nekudataim 1 (2001). Hereafter, all the quotations from the journal Dvoetochie (in Russian) and its twin Nekudataim (in Hebrew) are taken from dvoetochie. wordpress.com and nekudataim.wordpress.com. 288 Karin Schneider and Friedemann Derschmidt, “Institut ritualov i obriadov” [The Institute for rituals and rites], interview with Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer, Dvoetochie 8 (2006). 289 Steven G. Kelman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 6. 290 Ibid. 291 For a theoretical survey of this subject, see Kelman, The Translingual Imagination, 6.

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

However, literary bilingualism, especially its most salient manifestation—self-translation—has not yet received the theoretic scrutiny it deserves, neither in literary nor in translation studies. When it is discussed at all, it is usually considered an anomaly, as a consequence of the Romantic ideal of the mother tongue.292 This ideal is the source of the binary distinctions of author/translator, source language/target language, and domestic culture/foreign culture. It is a model that assumes, as Newtonian physics does, an absolute frame of reference, a single native language, while disregarding how communities and individuals are increasingly, in rapidly metamorphosing environments, acquiring other languages.293 This paradigm has been subverted by a “counter-Romantic revolt”294 propelled, in part, by postcolonialism, diasporism, and globalization.295 A new bilingualism has come into being that signals a shift in the understanding of the relation between literature, language, and subjectivity. It is a paradigm that subverts the ostensible identities of language and reality and of language and nation or people. Its appearance has been accompanied by sociolinguistic theories.296 Opposition to this paradigm remains strong partly because of a scholarly reluctance to see multilingualism as the norm but also because of the monolingual structure of the study of literature in academia.297 Furthermore, exclusion and marginalization deriving from social, political, and educational problems prevents its acceptance, even in developed Western countries.298 These 292 Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson, The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation (Manchester, UK and Kinderhook, NY: St. Jerome Publishing, 2007), 3. 293 Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 294 Yael S. Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer: Gabriel Preil and the Tradition of Jewish Literary Bilingualism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1986), 7. 295 On the link between these trends and literature and translation, see Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer. 296 Here are just a few: “languages in contact” (Uriel Weinreich) and “interlanguage” (Larry Selinker); terms like “symbiotic polysystem” (Itamar Even-Zohar), “polylinguism” (Benjamin Harshav), “interculture” (Anthony Pym), “stereoscopic reading” (Marilyn Gaddis Rose), and “colingual effect” (Hokenson and Munson). 297 Jahan Ramazani, “A Transnational Poetics,” American Literary History 18, vol. 2 (2006): 332–59. 298 Sharon V. Chappell and Christian Faltis, The Arts and Emergent Bilingual Youth (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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break down academic globalization and the development of a culture of translation,299 although many studies, from George Steiner’s to that of Werner Sollors, have prepared the way for this change of perspective.300 Nowadays, monolingualism is perceived as not only unnatural, undesirable, and unnecessary but actually impossible.301 Bilingualism is not a deviation from, or a special case of, monolingualism; it is the norm302 that constitutes the basis of a free and creative individual and society.303 Nowhere are bilingualism and translingualism more pronounced than in Jewish literature, in the West as well as the East,304 and particularly in Jewish Russian literature during its two-century history.305 A perception of rift and remoteness makes way for one of 299 David Bleich, “Globalization, Translation, and the University Tradition,” New Literary History 39, vol. 3 (2008): 497–517. 300 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 301 Michael Holquist, “What is the Onthological Status of Bilingualism?” in Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, ed. Doris Sommer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21–34. 302 Ibid., 33. 303 Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). Bilingualism and its literature are taken as a given in current discussions of emigration; global diasporas (Robin Cohen); transnational neodiasporism (Khachig Tölölyan); and new cosmopolitanism, one that is ambivalent, complex, indefinite and unexpected (Ulrich Beck). 304 Samuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (Lanham: University Press of America, 1990); David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000); Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). This is no less the case regarding the relationship between Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew in North Africa (Joseph Chetrit, Lashon u-maagareiha lashon u-maarageiha [Language and its reservoirs and textures] [Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2009]). 305 See Shrayer, Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, xxiii-lx; about writers who emigrated from Russia, including those who went to Israel, see vol. 2, 933–1184. The scholarly literature about Jewish Russian literature and culture is too extensive to be referred to here even briefly. To mention only a few of the recent publication, see Leonid Katsis and Helen Tolstoy, eds., Jewishness in Russian Culture (Leiden and

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continuity, cultural transmission and creative two-way fertilization, and a view of the border as an alternative cultural space.306 Nekod Singer emphasizes that Hebrew poetry, today as in the Middle Ages, differs from the poetry of other languages in that it was shaped by poets whose native language was not Hebrew.307 As he notes, “the process of transfusion of new poetic power from the outside continues until today.”308 The question of the “uniqueness of poets who came to Hebrew from other languages” and of “the special value of their contribution”309 still exists. And besides, in research about Jewish literature, especially contemporary Israeli literature (in part, Russian-Hebrew), the affinity between bilingualism and

Boston: Brill, 2014); Rina Lapidus, Young Jewish Poets Who Fell as Soviet Soldiers in the Second World War (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Maxim D. Shrayer, I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013); Klavdia Smola, ed., Eastern European Jewish Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries: Identity and Poetics (München, Berlin, Washington: Verlag Otto Sanger, 2013); Helen Tolstoy, Bednyj rytsar. Intellektualnoe stranstvie Akima Volynskogo [A poor knight: The intellectual journey of Akim Volynsky] (Moscow and Jerusalem: Mosty kultury, 2013); Brian Horowitz, Russian Idea— Jewish Presence: Essays on Russian-Jewish Intellectual Life (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013); Leonid Katsis, Smena paradigm i smena Paradigmy [The change of paradigms and of the Paradigm] (Moscow: RGGU, 2012); Rina Lapidus, Jewish Women Writers in the Soviet Union (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 306 Rachel Seelig, “The Middleman: Ludwig Strauss’s German-Hebrew Bilingualism,” Prooftexts 33, vol. 1 (2013): 76–104. 307 See also Rina Lapidus, Between Snow and Desert Heat: Russian Influences on Hebrew Literature, 1870–1970 (New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003). 308 Nekod Singer, “I vyrval greshny moy iazyk” [And he tore out my sinful tongue] December 12, 2007, accessed August 22, 2014, booknik.ru/today/all/i-vyrval-greshnyyi-moyi-yazyk). An example is Yehuda Amihai’s Hebrew-German bilingualism in his contacts with Paul Celan. See Na’ama Rokem, “German-Hebrew Encounters in the Poetry and Correspondence of Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan,” Prooftexts 30, vol. 1 (2010): 97–127. Singer says that this process clearly works in the opposite direction as well because “we (the Jews) were Europe itself, part of its living body” (Nekod Singer, “Evr-opa, ili Pochemu ja ne khozhu v evreiskie muzei,” March 3, 2007, accessed August 22, 2014, booknik.ru/today/all/ evr-opa-ili-pochemu-ya-ne-hoju-v-evreyiskie-muzei). 309 Singer, “And he tore out my sinful tongue.”

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the philosophy of art has not been examined sufficiently.310 However, the multicultural and multilingual Israeli literature has recently attracted more and more attention.311

LINGUAL NEOECLECTISM 310 In his book about Jewish literature, written in non-Jewish languages, Gershon Shaked did not include Israeli Jewish literature in non-Jewish languages. Rather, he focused on Jewish German and Jewish American literature and on dichotomies like “majority-minority,” “language of the host country—language of the ethnicity” (Gershon Shaked, Zehut [Identity] [Haifa: University of Haifa Press, 2006]). Dan Miron has doubts about the centrality of bilingualism in the study of Jewish literature, as part of his criticism of Dov Sadan’s conception of a literature of the Jewish people (Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000], 362–364). He develops a “new literary thinking” regarding both the history of bilingual writers and the historical proximity of monolingual writers, especially during the Haskalah and modern periods (Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010]). On the other hand, his vertical and horizontal sequence concepts are close to those same concepts in bilingualism theory and translation (Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution [Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993]), inasmuch as Miron’s transition from “old” thinking to “new” thinking is similar to the transition from what he calls the medieval model of culture to the post-medieval model (Karlheinz Stierle, “Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation,” in Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds., The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996], 55–67; Hokenson and Munson, The Bilingual Text). Shahar Pinsker’s research, despite its transcultural and modernist point of view, focuses on Hebrew fiction in Europe without associating it with the multilingual context (Shachar M. Pinsker, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010]). 311 To mention only the most recent publications, see the works by Klavdia Smola, who observes the reinvention of the Jewish poetics in contemporary literature: “The Reinvention of the Promised Land: Utopian Space and Time in the Soviet Jewish Exodus Literature,” East European Jewish Affairs 45, no. 1 (2015), 79–108; “Contemporary Russian-Jewish Literature and the Reinventing of Jewish Poetics,” in Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages, ed. Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman, and Ber Kotlerman, 612–643 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). For a recently published review, see Adia Mendelson-Maoz, Multiculturalism in Israel: Literary Perspectives (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2014), 159–198. Mendelson-Maoz raises the most crucial and complicated questions about Russian literature in Israel: the choice of language, the dilemma of the Russian or Jewish diaspora, and the problems of isolation and integration.

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In an interview, Nekod Singer once said: “I really love playing with different languages, visual and literary, Russian and foreign. . . . New languages grant a familiar text additional dimensions, and aid in a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of shades of world literature.”312 This is very much characteristic of Nekod Singer’s conception of art, as a painter, writer, translator, and editor. Born in 1960 and living in Jerusalem since 1988, Nekod Singer is one of the very few bilingual authors writing in Israel today in both Russian and Hebrew. Nekod Singer’s wife, Gali-Dana Singer, is another Russian-Hebrew bilingual author. Nekod is her collaborator and coeditor of the Russian-Hebrew literary journal Dvoetochie/Nekudataim,313 which has been published in Russian since 1995314 and in Hebrew as well since 2001. They have published some of their works in this journal, but most works have been published in other periodicals and collections.315 312 Nekod Singer, “Zritel stanovitsa eksponatom v liubykh usloviiakh” [Audience becomes an exhibit in any case], interview with Lina Goncharskaia, February 13, 2014, accessed August 8, 2014, www.culbyt.com/article/textid:203. 313 In 1994–1995, they edited the Russian-language journal I.O. and, beginning in 1997, edited six issues of the Russian-language children’s periodical Tochka, tochka, zapiataia [Dot, dot, comma]. 314 Issues 1–5, 1995, were produced along with a third editor (and publisher), Israel Maler. 315 Nekod Singer has regularly published stories and articles on the Russian Jewish literary website booknik.ru, where he also authors a column called “In Those Days, In Our Times: What Hebrew Newspapers Wrote about a Hundred Years Ago,” and a column on Jerusalem—holidays, exhibitions, symbolism, and historical sites (often accompanied by Gali-Dana Singer’s photographs). A number of these stories were later included in his novel Drafts of Jerusalem. He has also published in the web and printed Russian-language Jewish journal Lehaim. Several of his stories are also included in volumes of the fantasy anthology Russkie inorodnye skazki [Russian extra-folktales] (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2003–2010) and in Chainaia kniga [Tea book] ed. Max Frei (a pseudonym for Svetlana Martynchik and Igor Stiopin, as well as the collective title for their literary projects and numerous publications) (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2008). A chapter from Bilety v kasse [Tickets at the box office] (Moscow, Jerusalem: Mosty/Gesharim, 2006) was included in the Hebrew anthology Rukhot ha-ref’aim shel Israel [Ghosts of Israel, 2003] (Margarita Shklovsky and Marina Groselraner, eds. [Tel Aviv: Yediot akhronot, 2003]). The Singers have also published in the avant-garde Russian-language Israeli journal Solnechnoe

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The early issues of Dvoetochie/Nekudataim in Hebrew featured articles and interviews by Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer about poets and translators. The pieces plumb the nature of translingualism. Their decision to put out a periodical in Hebrew seems not to have been an easy one, and not only for practical reasons. The problem of making the transition to engage in literary writing in a foreign language is a daunting one in terms of fluency, cultural competence, metaliteracy and critical facility. In the first issue’s editors’ note, they wrote: Let us try to see in terms of a colon316—a period, and better two, one above the other. One of them can be the reflection of the other, but there will always be an intriguing ambiguity—which one? Together they offer a two-way mirror between writing from right to left and writing from left to right, as between “two parts of a sentence fragments that are almost independent and complete,” and with special care they will reflect precisely this “almost,” and as such will, as it were, indicate to you, dear readers, where the body (of the text) is and where its reflection, where the source and where the translation, rewriting, interpretation or perhaps some other form of commentary or confiscation. . . . The theme that unites this issue and future issues is the intersection of the Jewish, Israeli, and Russian cultures in all their varied versions.317

This “almost,” as the motto of the entire Hebrew Nekudataim project and as a symbol of both the hope and the despair that translingualism offers, signals the optimistic contingency of betweenness, but also the pessimism of romantic nostalgia, and even of existential angst.318 spletenie, which came out from 1997 to 2004 under the editorship of Mikhail Weisskopf and Evgeny Soshkin. 316 The Hebrew word nekudataim means “colon,” the punctuation mark, or literally “a pair of dots.” 317 Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer, “Dvar ha-orkhim” [Preface by the editors], Nekudataim 1, 2001. 318 This “almost” is also expressed in Singer’s “wavy” self-image as an immigrant in a foreign, but familiar, land. In an interview with Gabriel Levin, he noted: “It’s not seniority that is decisive. After a year in Israel, you feel Israeli in every way, and

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When the journal’s seventh issue appeared in 2011, ten years after the appearance of the first issue, and after a six-year break, the editors griped about the difficulties of publishing a Hebrew periodical, telling their readers that “we cannot promise you and ourselves either regularity or high frequency in the publication of Nekudataim, but we intend to carry on.”319 By this time, they no longer wrote about the intersection of cultures, instead stressing the journal’s neoromantic character. The change is not due to fatigue, disappointment, or exhaustion of the subject (although all this is certainly possible) but is principally due to an ideological, if not poetic, shift, as evidenced by the Singers’ works in recent years, at least as regards their critical conception. The editors reveal a sort of blind spot that more than anything else testifies to the fundamentally organic nature of this progressing change. The Singers see no contradiction between romanticism, which is profoundly bound up with modern nationalism and its evocation of a single national language, and the multiculturalism that arose as a response to national-linguistic romanticism. It could be, however, that then twenty-five more years go by and suddenly you are a foreigner, and not to a small extent. And perhaps in a few more years there will be another reversal” (Gabriel Levin, interview with Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer, “Gam kirva ve-gam hazara” [Closeness and estrangement], Nekudataim 11–12, 2014). The first issue of Nekudataim in 1995 included an article by Gad Grezin (a pseudonym used by GaliDana Singer), entitled “Zemli obetovannoy frukty” [The fruits of the promised land] (Dvoetochie 1, 1995), conveying the wondrous experience of nearness of the Israeli and Soviet cultures, mixed with an “almost” complete sense of family continuity. In one of his own articles, Singer compared his first encounter with Israeli life with the flash of divine light that hits one eye, half-blinding the person or artist. This partial blindness liberates him. The article takes the form of a commentary on Exodus 21:26, “And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, and destroy it; he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake.” It was in this way, Singer writes, that he shook off two illusions about art—that art is an imitation of life (like seeing with two eyes) and that art is purely conceptual, forbidding any sort of image (full blindness). In this half-joking, half-serious way, Singer relates how he found his own artistic path between the negative and the developed photograph that is almost reality (Nekod Singer, “O chastichnoy slepote i svobode tvorchestva” [On partial blindness and freedom of creation], April 6, 2010, accessed August 20, 2014, booknik.ru/today/all/o-chastichnoyi-slepote-i-svobodetvorchestva). 319 Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer, “Dvar ha‘Orkhim.”

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their translingual transition was completed toward 2011, and their bilingual awareness reached such a level of maturity and normalization that they could permit themselves to return to the source that lies beyond geographic, linguistic, national, or ideological constraints, something indefinable that exists only in time—Mandelstam’s “noise of time.”320 Even the very concept of Russian Israeli literature has been rejected.321 No matter whether the first or second conjecture is the right 320 In Dvoetochie 24 (Spring 2015) Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer proclaimed in their preface “Proshchanye, zapreshchayushchee skorb” [The farewell that forbids mourning] that they were going to close the journal: “So the time came, when it finally occurred to the editors to see what happens if they just stay away as much as they can and turn the journal almost into a jour-nal, a chronicle; make it what is called in Hebrew ketav-‘et, that is a writing of time or handwriting of time. So this is exactly such an installment. The editors’ voices are intentionally muffled, so as to let the reader listen—if not to the voice of time, then, at least, to its buzz. The editors listened to it, too, and it seemed to them that the time was ripe for them to bid farewell to their editorship.” The phrase “buzz of time” (“gul vremeni”) recalls the unfulfilled program, mentioned in 2006 in Tickets at the box office: “Whom is this author trying to deceive? Perhaps, only an outright mindbending babble, language of birds and beasts, inarticulate delirium, sounds uttered by a deaf-mute person can somehow express the buzz of time adequately” (N. Singer, 416). 321 As the editors of Dvoetochie/Nekudataim, concealing themselves behind the penname Nega Grezina, they write: “Dvoetochie has never fostered the myth of Russian Israeli literature. If, as a result of the editors’ games and efforts, some readers have received this impression, it is because the journal has always sought, and found, thank God, such brilliant and special writers, such that all these sworn individualists have felt themselves to be at home in this company. Of all popular wisdom, the editors have most profoundly assimilated a single instruction: ‘Do not sit among the fools.’ If you wish, you may read that as ‘the Jerusalem School’” (“Dvoetochie sleva napravo i sprava nalevo” [Colon from left to right and from right to left], Dvoetochie 15, 2010). The editors are not precise here. The “popular wisdom” they cite is a quote from Psalms 1:1, and they give it a somewhat biased translation that blurs the clownlike nature of the fools, even if in somewhat archaic literary Russian; as in English, a fool is also a clown. “Nega Grezina” mocks the journal’s readers, despite her semiacademic style, because both theoretically and practically, the journal’s character is profoundly clownish and carnivalesque. She refers to a passage by Gali-Dana Singer to the effect that “the regional poetic school” of “Israeli literature in the Russian language,” if that exists at all “in the internet age,” is more a political than a poetic fact (Gali-Dana Singer, “O geografii poezii” [On geography of poetry], 1, 2007, accessed August 15, 2014, www.litkarta.ru/projects/vozdukh/ issues/2007-1/ventilator). The denial of the coherence of Russian Israeli literature has been expressed by such writers as David Markish (“Israilsko-russkaya literatura ili russko-izrailskie pisateli” [Israeli-­Russian literature or Russian-Israeli writers],

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one, the move looks like an attempt or desire to circumvent, if not overcome, the linguocentric and pan-ideological dominance of the final decades of the twentieth century. Dvoetochie/Nekudataim demonstrates a slow, neomodern, dialectic swing back to the neoromantic and translingual and transcultural unity observable in Europe in the first two decades of the previous century, like the Paris school in painting and the Odessa and Vienna schools of Jewish literature. The metamorphosis can also be seen in Nekod Singer’s literary writings. Tickets at the box office (2006) exhausts the memoir, but it disintegrates the narrative into a state of molecular plasma. In contrast, Lehaim 1, no. 105, January 2001, accessed August 9, 2015, www.lechaim.ru/ ARHIV/105/markish.htm). Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that in the first three issues of Dvoetochie in Russian, in 1995, Israel Maler, then one of the journal’s editors and its publisher, wrote an article on Russian literature in Israel, entitled “In the bosom of the stepmotherland: Three stages in the principal cycle of development of Russian-language literature under Israeli conditions (in the years 1950–1990)” (Azriel Shonberg [Maler’s pseudonym], “Na lone machekhi zemli,” Dvoetochie 1–3, 1995, accessed October 11, 2015). On the other hand, this publication fits the journal’s character. The somewhat satirical style of the article is diametrically opposed to the quasi-academic nature of its title; indeed, the article reads more like a parody of the well-known pieces by Mikhail Gendelev on “Russian-language literature of Israel,” in which he sought to define and categorize this writing into three stylistic-ideological groups (“Literaturnyi pasians russkogo Izraila” [Literary solitaire of Russian Israel], 22, October 1986, accessed October 8, 2015, Mikhail Gendelev, gendelev.org/proza/o-literature/132-literaturnyj-pasyans-russkogo-izrailya.html and “Russkojazychnaia literatura Izraila” [Russian-language Literature of Israel] Obitaemy ostrov 1, April 1991, accessed October 8, 2015, Mikhail Gendelev, gendelev. org/proza/o-literature/370-literatura-doklad.html). Both of Gendelev’s articles are replete with irony and self-irony; this attitude of most Russian artists and writers in Israel to themselves and all attempts to categorize themselves are typical. This can be seen as the heritage of the Soviet intelligentsia. In parallel, a debate is currently in progress in the United States over whether current writing by Jews from the Soviet Union is Jewish literature, or Jewish American, or American of Russian tradition, or Jewish Russian (Mikhail Krutikov, “Constructing Jewish Identity in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” in Jewish Life after the USSR, ed. Zvi Y. Gitelman, Musya Glants, and Marshall I. Goldman, 252–274 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003]), or “translingual and transcultural Russian Jewish literature written in American English” (Adrian Wanner, “Russian Jews as American Writers: A New Paradigm for Jewish Multiculturalism?” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 37, no. 2 [2012], 157–176). See also Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).

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Drafts of Jerusalem (2013), published ten years later, and despite being in the nature of a simulacrum, aspires to the nostalgic plasticity of a complete, autonomous story. Nekod Singer’s deconstructed Novosibirsk has turned into a reconstructed, although multiple, Jerusalem.322 Multilingualism is fundamental to Nekod Singer’s aesthetic methods, first of all, to neoeclecticism, both in writing and in painting. On his personal website, Singer writes: In 1991, together with Gali-Dana Singer, I wrote “The Manifesto of Neoeclecticism,”323 and since then I have constantly been breaking the laws of this radical art movement and dismissing myself from it. Nevertheless, my approach remains rather close to the basic principle of Neoeclecticism—the proximity of consciousness with its sub-laws: the unity and the struggle of the protagonists, the conversion of a quality into quackery and a quandary, and the reflection of reflections.324

Nekod Singer’s multilingualism indeed seems to be integral to his avant-garde eclecticism.325 He states a number of times that at the foundation of Russian neoeclecticism in Israel, at least in poetry, stands Henri Volokhonsky, a poet, writer, and translator born in Leningrad in 1936 who immigrated to Israel in 1973 and left Israel for Germany in 1985.326 Yet, Nekod Singer’s conception of the artist drifts in the direction of neomodernism, viewed as the return to the pre-posthuman situation in art, philosophy, and anthropology, in the spirit of Jürgen Habermas’s reservations about postmodernism. This movement reflects the dynamic currently evident in art and literature, the move from the 322 In a completely different style, Rubina has gone a similar way: from the destroyed Tashkent to the built-up Jerusalem, dispersed in dozens of cities/drafts. 323 In Russian: Obitayemyi Ostrov 3, 1991; in Hebrew: Dimuy 5–6, 1992; Ev 1, 1993. 324 Nekod Singer, “Meet Nekod,” undated, accessed August 8, 2014, Nekodsinger. blogspot.co.il/p/after-i-was-born-in-1960-in-novosibirsk.html. 325 The same seems to be true concerning Gali-Dana Singer’s poetry. See Mendelson-­ Maoz, Multiculturalism in Israel, 197–199. 326 Nekod Singer, “Mizrakh karov—mizrakh rakhok” [Near East—Far East], Nekudataim 2 (2001).

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rejection of subjectivity and individuality (in particular, that of the author) in conceptual art to their reconstitution, even in conceptual art itself, like that produced by Nekod Singer. For him, giving up the choice of a single language grows out of an ideology expressed in all the areas in which he works. Just as his art exhibits fragments of different cultures and different periods, mythical images and self-portraits reflecting off each other in the picture field, and just as in his writing, historical and biographical passages are suspended within the narrative space like doubles, copies, imitations, or drafts that endlessly multiply. So, the totality of his work constitutes a kind of virtual conceptual performance of a multiplicity of languages that play with each other, replace one another, and translate and do not translate each other. It is like an installation that actualizes Jacques Derrida’s idea of the ruins of Babylon. Just as fragments of multilingualism and Derridan multitranslatability are united under a single rubric, Babylon, so Nekod Singer’s entire installation is united in the artist’s personality, in his personal mythopoesis, with the myth understood—as Alexei Losev has it—as a revealed magical name or as the actualization of the transcendent purpose of the personality in empirical history.327 The writer’s true countenance is prominent in all of his work, that countenance which, according to Emmanuel Levinas,328 requires making room for plurality, dialogue, and for the ethical act of reading.329 Nekod Singer’s multilingualism is neither a natural 327 Losev, The Dialectics of Myth, 185–188. 328 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985). 329 Jacques Derrida’s article “Chto takoe poeziia” [What is poetry?] appeared in Russian translation in issues 3–4 of Dvoetochie (trans. Gali-Dana Singer and Yoel Regev, 2002). According to Derrida, poetry is a departure from the self, a dangerous transition into the language of the other, given the impossibility or proscription of translation, which is vital, but as desirable as death. It is the fear of an automobile accident, the feeling felt by a hedgehog crossing a busy street, an open wound in the heart. This article, which defines translingualism as the essence of poetry, seems to share the opinion of the journal’s editors. In an interview with the Singers, Gabriel Levin says: “It turned out that poetry is what Celan calls en route—on the way. I like that concept very much . . . I don’t know where it leads. And for me it turns out that poetry is also a way of getting out of my ‘I’ and with the help of a multiplicity of voices to express something that is really inside of me.” Gali-Dana Singer adds: “And thus translation is also part of the journey” (Levin,

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phenomenon (that is, dependent on the circumstances of his birth) nor a social one (growing, for example, out of his experience of immigration). Rather, it is a purely ethical-cultural act, a conceptual choice. As Harold Schimmel put it in a purely romantic manner in his interview in Nekudataim, to move to another language is like returning to one’s childhood.330 For this reason, it can serve as a vessel, as a literary-philosophical method of constituting subjectivity and truth, as a kind of dissipative structure331 within the chaos of world history, culture, and memory. Here is a fragment for illustration—the opening paragraph of the chapter “Terra Meridiana” in Tickets at the box office: In them Soviet steppes under the sun—our pony brides-and-grooms used to sing—Semyon Budyonny used to ride his day-mare. Yes, there used to be times. . . . The sun rose, rainbows shone, and the “morning painted with its gentle light” the walls of the not so ancient CPSU committee building, spilt its pure colors unadulterated with skepticism, brought with the fresh wind blowing from the crop fields of Khwarezm onto the kolkhoz market counters, flowerbeds of The First-of-May Park. The sun spread-eagled its beams around the world from inside a humdrum opera-and-ballet theater, birds sang, bun-like Siberian beauties smiled and sang along with their winged friends—something about some Gardens that Once Were in Blossom. The sun kept striking down on young pioneers and peonies they were carrying, while going to school mit groys kheyshek, oh yes. Sunsets were glowing, bonfires were “Closeness and estrangement”). Yet, Nekod Singer rejects the same aspect of postmodernism, in which the boundary between the subject and object of culture is expunged, and art loses its element of aesthetics, proficiency and wise artistic craft and becomes its own opposite—the non-doing of non-art. See, for example, Singer’s essay on Alexander Green, written under one of his pseudonyms, Z. Zhukhovitsky (“Art-programma Pigua da Shapono ili Stary novy tzirk” [The art program of Pigua da Shapono, or The old new circus], Dvoetochie 11, 2007). 330 Harold Schimmel, “Le-tzorekh shirato” [For the sake of his poetry], interviewed by Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer, Nekudataim 3–4, 2002. 331 A concept of dissipative structure is borrowed from Ilya Prigogine’s nonlinear thermodynamics. See Ilya Prigogin and Isabelle Stengers, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 66 ff.

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kindled in forests and groves—all that was happening in the days of yore. However, whether it was a storm of hostile propaganda or a conspiracy of the Chelyuskinites—go figure what is to blame, but everything got covered with a thick layer of snow, iced over with stagnation, so the great glaciation was back and a quiet cold war returned. Residents of the New Siberia city enjoy winter all year round, and there is no escape, all the world lies under the snow. Denmark is a prison, and the snow queen—d’you know?—runs the show; Hellygypt is a necropolis, our lot went there on a trip, quite a spooky place! Here, at least, everything is quiet, as if we were in a snowdrift, thank oodness!332

Nekod Singer’s writing displays a wide use of diglossia—that is, the use of words or lone sentences from a foreign language in a text written in a base language. Hebrew diglossia is a common phenomenon in Russian literature written in Israel. For example, during Rubina’s early period in the country (1990–2004), abundant playful, ironic diglossia characterized her writing and even served as a basis for her understanding of immigration and the study of a foreign language as carnival.333 For Nekod Singer, diglossia, like bilingualism, is no carnival, at least not in the Bakhtinian-Rabelaisian sense—its masks do not hide, 332 “В стране совейской полудённой, — пели конюхи-понивожатые, — Семен Михайлович Буденный скакал на сивом кобыле. Эх, было время! И солнце всходило, и радуга цвела, красила нежным цветом стены Центрального горисполкома, выплескивала свои незамутненные скепсисом чистые цвета, принесенные свежим ветром с полей Хорезма, на лотки колхозного рынка, на клумбы Первомайского сквера, орлило дневное светило над миром в сером храме оперы и балета, пели птицы, сдобно улыбались сибирячки, подпевая пернатым друзьям, мол, один раз в год сады цветут, припекало пионеров с пионами, ойф дер припечек, пылали закаты, сияли жарки-огоньки в перелесках, все было когда-то. Но студеные вихри враждебной пропаганды ли, заговор ли челюскинцев, поди разберись — только занесло все белым снегом наглухо, сковало льдами застойными, вернулось великое оледенение, тихая, холодная война. Зима в городе новой Сибири круглый год, и никуда ты не денешься — весь мир под снегом, Дания — тюрьма, у их, слышь, снежная королева всем заправляем, Ебипет — город мертвых, наши в турпоездке видали, жуть. У нас хоть тихо, как в сугробе, слава те, осподи” (Singer, Tickets at the box office, 112–113). Translated by Yan Mazor. 333 Dina Rubina, In the mode of carnival.

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overturn, or desecrate, but rather the masks present the truth and the human self, although with a lot of irony, as for example, in the following fragment from the chapter “Foreign language (which one?)” in Tickets at the box office: Not so long ago, a young woman from the local city newspaper was asking questions about Russian literature—Pushkin, Tolestoy, Brodetsky, ve-kol ha-tarbut hamefo’eret shelakhem. . . . I told her that to me it was now as exotic as Indochina, where rainforests teemed with herds of long extinct mastodons. We were talking about various subtleties for more than an hour. Next week I said to myself: “Why don’t you take a look at that paper?” And so I did, and what did I see? Exactly, my own Moorman phiz with a comment: “Singer says that Russia is a country of elephants.” It’s damn hard to translate from foreign languages into other foreign languages.334

In contrast with posthumanism, Nekod Singer’s bilingual installations lead from the mechanical to the human, and sometimes to the sentimental and neoromantic. Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer describe issue 7, 2011 of Nekudataim as neoromantic, and even go so far as to say that this is the line taken by the entire journal.335 Nekod Singer’s multilingualism and diglossia thus play a more profound role than the carnivalesque and the playful. Through them, the artist expresses gestures of love and longing for the historical and personal source. In his own words, he performs “actions whose purpose is to appropriate the copyright for chaos around [him].”336 Therefore, in contradiction to the expectation based on Derrida’s Babylonian conception, Nekod 334 “Тут не так давно из городской газеты девушка вопросы задавала насчет русской литературы — Пушкин, Тольстой, Бродецки вэколь атарбут амефуэрэт шелахем. . . . Это, сказал я ей, такая же экзотика сегодня для меня, как Индокитай, где во влажных джунглях бродят стада давно уже вымерших мастодонтов. Проговорили мы с ней о разных тонкостях не менее часа. А на следующей неделе я в газетку-то глядь — а там моя бесерменская физиономия и подпись внизу: “Зингер заявляет: Россия — страна слонов”. Дьявольски трудно переводить с одних иностранных языков на другие” (Singer, Tickets at the box office, 419). 335 Gali-Dana Singer and Nekod Singer, “Preface by the editors.” 336 Singer, Drafts of Jerusalem, 294.

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

Singer’s work is metaphysical.337 One manifestation of the neoromantic and metaphysical is the element of magical realism evident in most of Singer’s literary texts as well as in his paintings.338 In the multiplicity of untranslatable languages, Yuri Lotman sees the essence of rhetoric and poetics, including the essence of the process of creating meaning.339 Singer’s writing in his two artistic languages, Russian and Hebrew (with evocations of others as well) is so embedded in the vocabularies, syntaxes, semantics, cultures, and associations of these languages as to be untranslatable, even though the artist is constantly engaging in translation. Each one creates a possible alternative world of its own, so that the space of his creation, in which these worlds meet, reveals itself to be a single complex metaphor—that of history (or memory) as an alternative multiple history, or that of some theories of modern physics, according to which infinite universes exist in parallel. Alternative history is generally presented as a phenomenon of postmodern thinking,340 but it has also been suggested that it is rooted in primeval mythology and constitutes a model of thinking,

337 See also Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, “Lzheusery o lzheuzerakh” [False users on false users], LiveJournal, July 12, 2007, accessed November 16, 2014, l-u.livejournal.com/228782.html. 338 On Singer’s attitude toward magical realism, especially with regard to the work of Erich Brauer, see “Podlinnye tsveta Arika Brauera” [Authentic colors of Erich Brauer], booknik.ru, May 29, 2007, accessed August 22, 2014, booknik.ru/today/ all/podlinnye-tsveta-arika-brauyera. Singer writes: “Brauer was one of those who brought me to Israel. . . . Viennese fantastical realism was a fundamentally Jewish movement. . . . It is based on that Jewish and visionary mysticism involving the Jewish attraction to Orientalism. Our entire country is nothing but the history of Jewish magical realism of Viennese provenance, and it would have remained on paper if not for the Yemenites, lost in oriental ornaments, and other real, legendary Jewish tribes.” Compare this to Alexander Goldstein’s statement that “Zionism is a really persuasive practice of magical-theurgical art” (Pamiati pafosa [In memory of pathos] [Moscow: NLO, 2009], 116). See also Goldstein’s statements cited by Naum Weiman: “Zionism is art”; “Zionism is conceptualism” (Weiman, The slot of promise, 38, 43). 339 Lotman, “Rhetoric as a Mechanism of Meaning-Generation,” in Universe of the Mind, 36–53. 340 Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent OH: The Kent State University Press, 2001), 2–5.

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imagination, and narrative based on metaphysical and humanistic assumptions.341 Nekod Singer’s work testifies to the second view. The Singers’ articles in Dvoetochie/Nekudataim exhibit the influence of the “philosophy of surface” of Gilles Deleuze, especially those written in cooperation with a philosopher specializing in Deleuze’s thinking, Yoel Regev, but also in those Singer has authored on his own. However, Nekod Singer’s works, both literary and visual, reflect vertical movement to the source, even if it is, in Deleuze’s terminology, a “dark precursor.”342 In accordance with this line of thought, bilingualism plays a special role. The oscillation between Russian and Hebrew reveals itself as a fluctuation between elements of the metaphor, between different possibilities for existence of unequal semiotic value that unite into a new synthesis of meaning and possibility. This is neither the sum of its parts, the translation between them, nor the reflection of both. Such semiotic and aesthetic perception makes it possible for Singer to avoid having his works classified as minor literature that nibbles away at language like a mouse or barks like a dog.343 Here, for example, is a fragment (one of many) of a translational play that demonstrates how the language, overloaded with elements of minority, does not turn into the language of minor literature, as though the abundance of these elements extinguishes itself. The scene presents the dialogue between V. I. Lenin, during his imaginary visit in the Holy Land, and a train worker: —Comgade Kats,—said the visitor, while shaking the host’s rough hand,—I geally appgeciate the gailway wogkegs. Men of steel! Yelizagov, Aliluyev! —True, Vladimir Il’ich, shyly agreed Kats,—But typically . . . What, for example, does the last name “Aliluyev” mean? What kind of a clerical last name is that? “Allelu-ia,” “allelu-ia,” Vladimir Il’ich! “Praise the Lord!”—that’s what it means. Take

341 Katsman, Literature, History, Choice, 58–67. 342 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 145ff. 343 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 26–27.

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

Yelizarov, another example: “El’azar,” do you see? “El’azar,” it means “God helped.”344

This is the case even if the subject is his Hebrew texts written as an immigrant from the Soviet Union (as opposed to “major” Hebrew literature).345 This may be the unique feature of the post-Soviet immigrant literature of the 1990s, especially in contrast with that of the 1970s generation—it does not meet the criteria of either minor or immigrant literature. Students of current Russian literature generally refuse to perceive it as a new wave of the century-old phenomenon of Russian émigré literature. To a great extent, it is major literature, just as the multihistoricity of Nekod Singer’s visual and narrative images derives from a single source of historical personality—the artist that creates a metaphor can clearly be seen behind the “quackery and quandary.” Two other kinds of literary games that Nekod Singer plays to some extent, as part of his and Gali-Dana Singer’s multilingual program, deserve mention: writing under a pseudonym and pseudotranslation. We know of at least two pseudonyms that Nekod Singer

344 “ — Я, товагищ Кац, — сказал гость, пожимая мозолистую руку хозяина, — агхи ценю железнодогожных габочих. Железные люди! Елизагов, Алилуев! — Так оно и есть, Владимир Ильич, — стеснительно согласился Кац. — Но что характерно . . . Что, скажу к примеру, означает фамилия Алилуев? Что такое есть эта поповская фамилия? Аллилу йа, аллилу йа, Владимир Ильич! Славьте господа . . . Вот ведь оно что. А к примеру скажем, Елизаров? Эль азар, изволите видеть, эль азар. Бог помог” (Singer, Drafts of Jerusalem, 258). 345 Singer has also written, however, under the pseudonym “N. Mushkin,” a parodic language-deconstructing text in the style of avant-garde futuristic writers like Velimir Khlebnikov and Igor Terenteyev, to whom the text is dedicated (N. Mushkin, “K voprosu o palestinofilskikh nastroeniiakh v poezii Igoria Terentyeva” [On the question of Palestinophile tendencies in Igor Terentyev’s poetry], Dvoetochie 2). The style of this double of Singer’s is characteristic of humoristic and playful intertextual poetic dereconstructivism (N. Mushkin, “Liudi, gady, zhizn” [People, vipers, life], Dvoetochie [Antologiia], 2000), but this writing displays such a large measure of freedom, both from Russian and Israeli character, that it can be defined, not without some irony, as “bi-major.” Singer sees in some of the poetry of Saveli Grinberg, whom he admires, the unification of futurism and postmodernism (Nekod Singer, “No god v dogon,” booknik.ru, January 30, 2014, accessed August 19, 2014, booknik.ru/today/all/no-god-vdogon).

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uses: N. Mushkin and Z. Zhukhovitzky (Zhukhovsky).346 The pseudonym, Nega Grezina, is used jointly by Nekod and Gali-Dana Singer. In the work he publishes in Hebrew, Nekod Singer does not, to the best of my knowledge, use pennames. A number of issues of Dvoetochie/Nekudataim feature what are presented as translations of unknown works by famous writers, such as G. K. Chesterton.347 Later, a series of pseudotranslations took form, united by a common thread—they all relate to the Land of Israel; their plots take place there and chronicle real or imagined visits to the country. In the end, this series was integrated into Drafts of Jerusalem, published in 2013. Nekod Singer has published around twenty works in Dvoetochie/ Nekudataim, including sections from novels, stories, articles, and interviews (in cooperation with Gali-Dana) with authors, poets, composers, painters, and philosophers. Before 2013, Nekod Singer’s magnum opus was a novel in Russian, a “bio-auto-graphy,” Tickets at the box office, published in 2006. In the first Hebrew edition of Nekudataim, Nekod Singer included several chapters of this book, labeled “the author’s Hebrew version.” In 2003, a somewhat shortened version of the same material was included in the anthology Ghosts of Israel, labeled “From the Russian: Nekod Singer.” In an interview he gave to Lina Goncharskaya, published on February 13, 2014, Singer explained: L.G.: To the best of my knowledge, your Hebrew novel will soon be published? N.S.: The Hebrew novel was written a long time ago. Moreover, about two-thirds of it has already been published in pieces and shreds as individual stories in various periodicals. A similar thing happened with Drafts of Jerusalem in Russian: as stories and essays, they were tested over many years in journals and anthologies. Now the question is: when will the Hebrew novel be published as a 346 In his novel, Drafts of Jerusalem (142), Singer cites these as names of the narrator’s relatives who appear as characters in his story. 347 Nekudataim 2, 1995.

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

complete book, as it was written? I hope very soon, in our time. It is, in fact, a bio-auto-graphy entirely rewritten in another language, what I once termed an attempt to tell Papuans about Eskimos, in a Papuan language that simply has no words for half of the Eskimos’ concepts. It’s not like translating a Russian novel into Hebrew. The composition here is entirely different, a lot of different connotations, different language games, different reflections. However, many plot lines are repeated.348

Until now, the Hebrew novel still has not come out, so we need to make do with the passages that have been published and with other texts by Nekod Singer.349 The distinction he makes in the interview quoted above is clear—his Hebrew work is not a translation from Russian but a real expression of bilingualism. In the pages that follow, I will examine the justice of this distinction, which bases bilingualism on the nontranslatability of the languages, on the confusion and incredulity that emerges from the encounter of different cultures, and on “quackery and quandary” as a solution to this confusion.350

DRAFTS OF THE MEANING

Tickets at the box office (2006) is an avant-garde, absurd, grotesque caricature; a fragmentary, multilayered “novel”; and at the same time, a nostalgic, neoromantic quasi-memoir. It is composed of jumbled fragments of three types of discourse: memoir scenes mostly about family, school, university, and everyday city life; quotes from literary and cultural texts (both popular and “high”) of the Soviet Union in the 348 Singer, “Audience becomes an exhibit in any case.” 349 After this book was completed, the Hebrew novel has been published in digital edition. See Singer, Kartisim be-kupa [Tickets at the box office] (http://indiebook. co.il/shop. 2016). 350 Singer’s statement in the interview is intended to promote the bilingualism of the writer and his book, and in so doing, returns to help shape his conception. This is an important mechanism in bilingual literatures (Shlomo Berger, “An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650–1800,” Book History 7 [2004]: 31–61).

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1970s; and observational, loving, meditative streams of consciousness that seek to create rhetoric, poetic analogies between the particles of the chaos of history and memory. All of these come together to form a “Pentateuch,” five books differently composed. The first is “Train,” a fantastic journey by the “Jewish Battalion” in Novosibirsk, setting out for war against the “Israeli aggressor.” The second is “Zoo,” a trip involving the narrator’s younger double’s participation in an animal care club. The third is “Opera,” structured according to the conventions of that genre, constructed out of experiences from one of the narrator’s odd jobs. Fourth is “Concert,” built on the conventions of this genre, using childhood memories of music studies and concerts at the municipal conservatory. The fifth section is “Exam,” on school exams in literature, physics, mathematics, and other subjects, written in associative hallucinatory segments. The composition thus rather naïvely covers the five central channels, five fundamental childhood experiences, which have molded the narrator’s personality. This is a school-like pseudo bildungsroman, which ends with pseudo exams. The complexity is evident in the musical-journey composition of each section, in the free and sophisticated integration of different types of discourse. The entire novel appears as a sort of highly-developed utterance by a talented and scholarly Soviet boy, one who belongs to the same generation as the writer—the generation of sunset of the U.S.S.R. and its ideological gods, the generation of irony and cynicism, of naïve individualism and imitative passion for world culture, a generation of elitism and intellectual intimidation. Here is a characteristic and, to a great extent, an ars-poetica type of fragment: Novel is a son of freedom. It doesn’t give a damn about anything around him, wants to forget about the obtrusive lugubrious rhythm, to fly on and on while being by its own internal combustion engine. Take dead people, for example. There is hardly anything to contain the soul, but look at them—they’re dead set on getting inside the book, ‘cause they simply smell neoromanticism. . . . Just look at them, resonating from right under the ground: “Deep down in a Siberian

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

mine / Your Edwin Drood will be just fine. . . . It’s a hint at the impossibility of an accomplished plot in a post-Dickensian novel. Everyone’s jiving everyone.351

Of the three types of materials that make up the novel, the first is barely translatable while the second is not translatable at all. More precisely, they are not culturally translatable—linguistically, translation is not difficult. The narrator speaks in quotes and pastiches naturally and with an endearing ease, not in a postmodern way, but simply as a habit acquired in the cultural environment in which he grew up—a world centered on a cult of literature and art, in which a person was valued by his ability to play with quotations and words, to create parodies and simulations: “Wi-ide is my Motherland! And there, in a dream, when you wake up, it is as if you dreamt it; take a look from the sidelines, imagine folks, that this is just a text, a lousy one, full of literary reminiscences from various and sundry texts that the so-called world culture imposes upon you.”352 It was a world of eclectic conceptual performance, outside the boundaries of currents and genres. Singer, the novel’s protagonist, says: “Twenty or twenty-five years from now, the pastimes of our youth will become so fashionable that the generation’s great thinkers and their parrots will entirely cease to use things for their own sake and will reach the inevitable conclusion that the question of copyright is no longer current because language, according to Stalin, is no longer the founda351 “Роман — дитя свободы. Он хочет плевать на всё вокруг, выбиваться из назойливого похоронного ритма, лететь всё дальше и дальше на движетеле собственного внутреннего возгорания. Возьмем покойников. Ну в чем, казалось бы, душа держится, а ведь, поди ж ты, и они рвутся на страницы книги, носом чуют: неоромантизм. . . . Куда там — прямо из-под почвы ухает: Во глубине сибирских руд / Не пропадет твой Эдвин Друд. . . . Намекает на невозможность завершенной фабулы в постдиккенсовском романе. Стёб да стёб кругом” (Singer, Tickets at the box office, 335). 352 “Широка-а страна, моя родная. А там, во сне, когда проснешься, словно все только снится, глянешь со стороны, представишь себе, что это — лишь текст, текстец, полный, братцы, реминисценций, литературных реминисценций из различных прочих текстов, которые вам навязывает так называемая мировая культура” (Singer, Tickets at the box office, 11).

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tion nor the superstructure, but rather just a means of communication, that is, public property.”353 Leaving aside the cynical remark about Stalin, including a hint to his “linguistic” work, this passage explains the doubts Singer had and the decisions he made after his immigration to Israel, the cultural habit that became a worldview and a creative method impelling him to carry on with the same sort of discourse in his new environment and in its new language. After all, literature emerges not in a natural language but rather in a metalinguistic or even a bilingual, artificial construct that has nothing of “the authenticity and freshness of experience.”354 It is transcendental with relation to language, just as culture is transcendent of nature even though it is made of nature’s materials. Singer aspires to actualize this superlanguage (translanguage). Thus, we have his Hebrew text, a novel about an “assimilating and confounding intelligentsia.”355 A comparison of the Russian and Hebrew versions reveals six types of changes, all of them typical of adequate translation and, in particular, of self-translation: • • • • • •

Elision Addition (generally used for the purpose of clarity, revelation of sources, and cultural coordination) Replacement (omission followed by addition) Cultural harmonization (a specific case of replacement) Indication of the source of a quote (a common specific case of addition) Footnotes that serve these other changes356

353 Nekod Singer, “Kartisim be-kupa” [Tickets at the box office], in Rukhot Refa’im shel Israel, 237. 354 Ibid. 355 Ibid., 238. 356 In the Hebrew book, there are no footnotes.

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

Several examples appear below. The references to the Russian and Hebrew versions357 are given in brackets in the text. A literal translation from the Russian or an explanation of the context appears in brackets, followed by an explanation of the change made in Hebrew and an attempt to explain its meaning and allusiveness in yet a third language, English. The context of the examples below is given only to the extent needed for their understanding. The wider context of the novel is not relevant to the present discussion, but the reader is certainly encouraged to read the novel in Russian before considering this part of the discussion.

Elision:

• “Iz pod myshki shineli № 5” (8) (From the armpit of overcoat No. 5). In Russian, some wordplay does not transfer to Hebrew—the Russian word for overcoat used here is shinel, which plays with the name of the perfume Chanel No. 5. The Hebrew version omits the reference and reads simply “From the armpit of his coat” (229).

Addition:

• “Frantzuzik” (13) (Little Frenchman). In Hebrew, this becomes “‘shabby Frenchman,’ as Shlonsky said” (233). “Ne spalos khudozhnikam v plenu u bezvremenia” (The artists did not drowse in the captivity of beyond time). In Hebrew, this becomes “All these Tolstoys, you understand, they did not drowse, they did not drowse in the captivity of stagnation, those Pasternaks” (234). • “Da kakoy eto, prostite, Novosibirsk?” (22) (What sort of Novosibirsk is this, excuse me?). In Hebrew, Singer precedes his translation of the phrase with a colloquial Hebrew idiom, based on one of the Bible’s tales about the prophet Elisha, which translates literally as “no bears and no forest,” and the

357 Ibid.

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idiomatic meaning of which might be best translated into English as “no way!” or “nonsense!” (241). • “Nosy originalnye” (23) (Original noses). In Hebrew, Singer writes “long noses, as is said [in the Bible]” and then adds a pun related to a phrase from the attributes of God that appear in Exodus (34:6): “long-suffering and abundant of jaw” (rather than “long-suffering and abundant in goodness”) (242). Singer uses a Hebrew homonym af, meaning both nose and anger. • “Ja dazhe v komsomol ne vstupal!” (25) (I didn’t even ask to be accepted into the Komsomol!). Here Nekod Singer inserts a Yiddish expression, nach a mal (again), into the middle of the sentence, so that its sense becomes “I didn’t even ask, I’m telling you again, to be accepted into the Komsomol!”

Replacement:

• “Vezdekhodom, minomiotom” (13) (In an amphibious vehicle, by mortar) is replaced by “In an APC, via cd” (233). • “Po-japonski, kanava takiyama” (15) (In Japanese, the Takayama Channel). The Russian is a pun, as the Japanese place-name “Takayama” sounds like the Russian taki yama “a real pit,” “indeed a pit.” • “Dedushka . . . bormochet: ‘Chtob ja tak zhil’” (25) (Grandpa . . . mutters “I should live so long.”) In the Hebrew version, Grandpa mutters a phrase with the same meaning, but in Yiddish rather than Russian: “Zal ich azoy leben” (243). • “Zhidovskoe bezobraziie” (25) (Jewboy uproar) becomes “Jewish noise” (244).

Cultural Harmonization

• “Portfel-diplomat” (8) (A diplomatic briefcase) becomes “A James Bond briefcase,” this being the way briefcases are referred to in Hebrew (“James Bond” being necessary because the Hebrew word tik denotes everything from a schoolbag to a purse to a small suitcase) (229).

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

• “Vykrest” (13) (The convert to Christianity) becomes, referring to Jesus, “The village heretic” (233). • “Kulturno-istorichesky seminar” (16) (The cultural-historical seminar) becomes in Hebrew “The department of Jewish philosophy” (235). • “Posejavshy buriu . . . pozhniot donner-vetter” (16) (He who sows a storm . . . will reap thunder weather). In the Russian phrase, the last two words are in Yiddish. “Thunder weather” is a literal translation, but in German and Yiddish the expression, donnerwetter, is an exclamation meaning “by gosh!” or “wow!” Furthermore, in Russian wetter means wind. So, in the Hebrew version, Singer enlarges this to “will reap thunderbolts and lighting flashes” and adds a footnote with the Hebrew translation of these words (235).358 • “Stishok o tom, chto ‘spizdurili u nas burzhui Begina, kak my kogda-to Begina u nikh’” (17) (The refrain that goes “the bourgeoisie stole Begin from us, just as we once stole him from them”). In Hebrew this becomes “Bialikovsky’s fascinating poem, ‘under fire the bourgeoisie fled from Borges, just as Borges had previously fled from the bourgeoisie’” (237). This is a case of harmonization, a parodic pastiche of lines from Mayakovsky’s poem “At the Top of My Voice,” in which people flee from the bourgeoisie. Menachem Begin’s name is, in Russian, paronymous with the word for “flight” or “run.” Singer replaces Begin with Borges so as to preserve the paronym—as written in Hebrew, Borkhes, the Argentinean writer’s name contains the root of the verb “to flee,” boreah. Mayakovsky becomes Bialik, to whose name the Russian suffix -sky is added.

Indication of the Source of a Quote • “Liubliu zdorovyj russkij kholod” (14) (I love a healthy Russian chill). In Hebrew Singer adds, “What cynicism, Mr. Pushkin!” 358 As mentioned above, in the book the footnotes have been eliminated.

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This is also a paronymous pun, as the Hebrew words for “chill” and “cynical” sound alike: tsina-tsini (234). • “Liubliu shinel krasnoarmejskoj skladki” (14) (I like a Red-­ Army-style overcoat). Singer adds “that a moth can destroy, Comrade Mandelstam!” (234). • “Tuchki nebesnye” (23) (Sky clouds). Singer puts it in quotes and adds an explanation, “‘Sky clouds’ of all sorts, as Lermontov once wrote.” Another quote from Lermontov comes later in the passage, to which, in the Hebrew version, is appended a footnote with a precise citation (241). This brief and limited comparison shows that the Hebrew version of the Russian text, at least in the initial stages of the work, does not differ greatly from the standard type of self-translation. It is certainly not a new and independent work. New passages in the Hebrew version of Tickets at the box office (2006) are added as details to the conceptual installation of the Russian version and to Nekod Singer’s total oeuvre. They appear as a sort of inflated major-key diglossia, in an expressionist spirit, reaching the level of pervasive bilingualism. As such, they create the sort of metaphysical dualism spoken of by Mikhailichenko and Nesis (see above).359 Most of the changes are aimed at cultural harmonization and the clarification of sources, replacing isolated elements of the pastiche, of intertext, and world play so that these will not lose their effectiveness. All these are entirely acceptable changes in some schools of translation. What a standard translation cannot allow itself is brazen additions to the text. As such, Nekod Singer’s self-translation obtains a special aura, an innovative dimension that distances itself from the source, through the addition of Yiddish expressions. This triglossia is common, to a greater or lesser extent, in Hebrew literature and in Jewish Russian literature. The Yiddish register helps create wordplay 359 The same is true of Singer’s essays, which appear in both Russian and Hebrew in Nekudataim. Furthermore, the Russian texts in this periodical (as in Drafts of Jerusalem [2013]) also display Hebrew diglossia. Compare, for example, Nekod Singer, “Blizhnij vostok—Dalnij vostok” [Near East—Far East], Dvoetochie, 2001.

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

and parody and, in the end, contributes to raising the text’s linguistic eclecticism and references to a higher level of complexity—a Russian milieu with Israeli allusions, Hebrew with Russian, Yiddish and even Arabic diglossia (as when, for example, Nekod Singer uses the Arabic word sheitan, demon, in preference to the Hebrew equivalent, shed [240]). Singer’s language is not that of minor literature; he does not organically unify with the Hebrew language. In his literary “installation,” as in his visual art, the author’s face stands out, as if his text speaks with a heavy accent. However, as the book in Hebrew testifies, Nekod Singer has recently moved to the deeper differentiation between writing in the two languages. This manuscript, along with his essays originally written in Hebrew, enables one to talk about his real bilingualism, and not only self-­translation. Eclectic and transtextual games, pastiches and collages, pseudotranslations and pseudographs reach their height in Drafts of Jerusalem (2013), where everything seems to be a constituting/deconstructing “ritual of open doors”360 of identity, a kind of Permanent Breakfast361 in the textual and figurative space. This rituality is not postmodernist, but rather neomodernist. It is a simulacrum, but not more so than any ritual is a simulacrum. And it is entirely sincere, just as every ritual must be for it to be effective.362 It is meant to create a structure (even if it is a dissipative one) of cultural, personal and artistic life at transition points between and above languages. 360 Theo Dorgan, “O poeticheskikh festivaliakh i poeticheskikh ritualakh [On festivals of poetry and poetic rituals], interview with Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer, Dvoetochie 8, 2006. 361 Schneider and Derschmidt, “The institute for rituals and rites.” See also www. permanentbreakfast.org. According to ritesinstitute.org (accessed November 6, 2014), “Ritesinstitute is an independend [sic] studio of two artists and curators from Vienna/Austria, who also work as artists and researchers. For twelve years, they have been doing collaborative art, research projects, and open-space artwork installations. Friedemann Derschmidt, born 1969, studied art in Vienna, and is employed in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as a lecturer and researcher for Videoart. Karin Schneider, born 1969, studied history and was the staffpossition [sic] of art-education (2000–2007) in the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna (MUMOK). She now works as a researcher in the field of museum communications [sic].” 362 John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 39–52.

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Let us now compare the Russian and Hebrew versions of the story “Treasure” (in Russian, “Klad”; in Hebrew, “Matmon”).363 In 2013, the story, with minor changes, was included in Drafts of Jerusalem. The Hebrew version appeared in Nekudataim 7 (2011)—that is, some eight years following the publication of the Russian original and of the Hebrew text from Tickets at the box office (2006) discussed above. In this case, unlike the previous one, no translator is credited, nor is the author cited as the translator. Thus, either in error or in play, the translation appeared as an original work by Nekod Singer in Hebrew. The chapter that appears in Drafts of Jerusalem includes some of the changes that were made while the work was being translated into Hebrew; thus, in a certain sense, it can be viewed as a translation from Hebrew back to Russian, in accordance with the basic conception of Dvoetochie/ Nekudataim. The story has two parts. The first centers on a royal weaver named Kokot, who lives in Prague. In 1505, Joseph, the eternal Wandering Jew,364 appears to him and reveals the location of a treasure that Kokot’s forebears accumulated and hid in his house. Ever since Joseph’s refusal to help Jesus, he has been doomed to wander the earth, but he is also charged with revealing the locations of treasures to the poor. 363 Nekod Singer, “Klad” [Treasure], in Russkie inorodnye skazki [Russian extrafolktales], ed. Max Frei (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2003); translated into Hebrew (translator not identified, most probably by the author) as “Matmon” (in Nekudataim 7 [2011]); translated into English from Hebrew by the author with Gabriel Levin as “Treasure” (accessed December 3, 2015, www.jewishfiction.net/index.php/ publisher/articleview/frmArticleID/263). 364 Nekod Singer uses this character and motif on many occasions. In Tickets at the box office (2006), he even puts together an entire battalion of immortal Jews, puts them on a train, and sends them around the Novosibirsk microcosm. For further discussion of this subject, see his articles in booknik.ru (Nekod Singer, “Fakty o vechnom zhide” [Facts about the Wandering Jew], May 31, 2012, accessed August 20, 2014, booknik.ru/today/facts/fakty-o-vechnom-jide.) It goes without saying that the figure of the “wandering Jew” is the archetype of the translinguistic and transcultural Jew. In this myth, as in that of the Tower of Babel, multiplicity is a punishment for hubris, which is constructed as uniformity, self-sufficiency, a failure to go outside the self and parsimony. Cf. also the chapter “Lakedem” in Dennis Sobolev’s novel Jerusalem (2005).

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

In the second part of the story, we meet a Czech woman, Martina Kokotova. When World War II ends, Kokotova suffers from partial amnesia. Depending on the information conveyed to her by others, she realizes that she is, according to all signs, a Jew who was rescued from her hiding place. She decides to go to Palestine and assumes the name Ruth Israeli. In Jerusalem, she meets Joseph, the eternal Jew. He recognizes her and tells her what her real name is. He also reveals the hiding place of the treasure left to him by his Yemenite companion before her death. This would seem to complete Joseph’s mission, and he passes away. When Ruth opens the Yemenite woman’s treasure box, she finds only old personal documents that are of no use to her. Here are a few examples of differences between the two versions, the earlier Russian and the Hebrew (the differences between the two Russian versions are also emphasized). The references correspond to the Russian version in Drafts of Jerusalem (2013); the Hebrew version in Nekudataim is not paginated.

Elision

• “Ruth reshila otpravitsa ‘putiom vsej ploti’ v Evrejskoe agenstvo” (236). Earlier version: “Ruth reshila otpravitsa v Evrejskoe agenstvo, po vyrazheniiu storozha, ‘putiom vsej ploti’” (Ruth decided to go to the Jewish Agency, so the guard said, the way of all flesh.) The Hebrew version omits the last phrase, “Ruth decided to go to the Funds building, to the Jewish Agency.” • “Staryj gorod okazalsia v rukakh korolia Iordanii, vmeste s ulochkoj, na kotoroj prezhde raspolagalas lavka sapozhnika” (240). Earlier version: “Staryj gorod okazalsia v rukakh korolia Iordanii vmeste s via Doloroza, na kotoroj prezhde raspolagalas lavochka sapozhnika” (The Old City, along with the Via Dolorosa, remained in the hands of the King of Jordan, and therein also the place where the shoemaker’s store once stood.) In Hebrew: “The Old City remained in the hands of the King of Jordan, and therein the place where the shoemaker’s store once stood.”

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Addition

• “Ob etikh kibutznikakh” (232) (Regarding those kibbutzniks). In Hebrew: “Regarding those kibbutzniks who called the exhausted immigrants olim and ma’apilim.” The first of the Hebrew words literally means “ascenders,” and is the term used in Jewish and Zionist parlance to designate immigrants to the Land of Israel; the second, in the modern Zionist/Israeli lexicon, refers to “illegal immigrants,” those Jews who arrived in Israel in the 1930s and 1940s by evading and circumventing British strictures restricting the number of Jews allowed into Palestine. • “Ne tolko o kibutznikakh, no dazhe i obo vsekh immigrantakh” (233) (Not only about the kibbutzniks but also about all the immigrants). In Hebrew: “Not only about the kibbutzniks but also about all thirty-six illegal immigrants (ma’apilim).” The number thirty-six is significant here—according to Jewish legend, in every generation thirty-six righteous people live, without whom the world would be destroyed. • In the earlier version: “Legendy o tkache Kokote i Vechnom Zhide Yozefe” (Tales of Kokot the weaver and Joseph, the eternal Jew.) In the later Russian version and in Hebrew: “This is the tale of Kokot the weaver and Joesph, the Wandering Jew. We will learn something, but really just a very little, only about this young woman, although the life stories of each and every one of the others is no less fascinating than the story of her life, and the number thirty-six also awakens within us a vague tangency of concepts [in Russian—poriadkom zavorazhivaet nas i intriguet]” (233). • “My ne stanem bolshe vspominat pro kibutz Deganiia” (234) (We will no longer mention Kibbutz Degania.) “Therefore, we will no longer mention Degania, neither Degania A nor Degania B.” • “Stanete podozrevat ego” (236) (And you will begin to suspect him.) “And you will begin, God forbid, to suspect him.”

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

• “Tzeloe desiatiletie on muchilsia etoj tajnoj” (239) (This secret tortured him for an entire decade). “This secret tortured him for an entire decade, and each of those years had four seasons: autumn, winter, spring, and summer, and while you can get through spring and summer relatively pleasantly, winter and summer in Jerusalem are intolerable and last forever.” • Earlier version: “Mozhet byt, zoloto, mozhet byt, dragotzennye kamni ” (238). (There may well be gold there, and perhaps gems. ) • “Stremiashchiesa soedinitsa s takim zhe beskonechnym mnozhestvom zvukov, slov i smyslov. ” (239) (Aspiring to connect with another infinite abundance of words and meanings )

Replacement

• “Predusmotritelnymi anglosaksami” (232) (The Anglo-Saxons, ready for anything.) In Hebrew: “The considerate British.” • “Otpravilas v Ierusalim” (234) (Traveled to Jerusalem.) In Hebrew: “traveled to the city of Zion.” • “Ubirajsia podobru-pozdorovu” (236) (Go while you’re still alive.) In Hebrew: “Go on, get out of here.” The Hebrew combines an Arabic exclamation adopted by Hebrew with a biblical phrase associated with the Patriarch Abraham, “lech lecha,” “Get thee out.” • “Kivat i poddakivat rasskazchiku” (241) (To nod and concur with the author.) In Hebrew: “To concur and respond to the author with ‘amen.’” • “Ot illustratsii, na kotoroj neizvestno chto izobrazheno” (242) (The illustration in which you can’t see what’s been drawn in.) In Hebrew: “With the illustration that keeps its secret.”

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In this translation, Nekod Singer comes close to his declared goal of real bilingualism, organic writing within the Hebrew cultural space (the Russian Israeli cultural space, when it comes to the later Russian version). Of course, in contrast with the previous text we considered, here the universal European Israeli subject offers an easier way of adapting cultural materials—the author has almost no need to engage in cultural harmonization. The few replacements and, in particular, the many additions, are not absolutely necessary and testify more to the author’s homing in on Jewish and Israeli culture and on his desire to make a place for this sense of home (characteristic of all the stories in Drafts of Jerusalem [2013]). Some of the changes testify to a desire for simplicity, the motives for which are not always clear. This can be seen, for example, when the author removes the expression “the way of all flesh,” an expression referring to death (or sometimes corruption) that originally comes from Hebrew and which appears in the Bible in the form of “the way of the earth” ( Joshua 23:14; I Kings 2:2). The expression is charged with intertextuality, referring, for example, to well-known works by Anna Akhmatova and Samuel Butler. In Nekod Singer’s text, it adds an infernal connotation, ironically likening walking through Jerusalem’s streets and markets to a descent into hell and an epic, mythic journey. However, the expression may have seemed too obvious to Singer, inappropriate to the context and to the story’s overall style. If this is the case, the right term might not be simplicity, but rather economy—a classic sign of fluency of expression, self-­ confidence, and a high level of mastery of the material, appropriate to a successful translingual transition. In any case, “Treasure,” like all Singer’s Jerusalem stories and like the act of gathering these stories into a single Jerusalem book, is clear evidence of the increasing dominance of the transcultural trend and to Singer’s coming into his own as an Israeli writer. In sum, it could be said that Nekod Singer’s transition to Hebrew by way of self-translation shows that he has put down roots in the Hebrew language and culture, but this has not led him to fashion a new style. In his Hebrew writing, Singer to a large extent preserves the

Nekod Singer’s Novels: Between Eclectism and Bilingualism*

aesthetics and poetics of his original Russian works and plays the same linguistic and stylistic games, sometimes changing the content for the purpose of cultural harmonization. Despite this, the transition displays signs of stylistic normalization, and a great part of the tonal and intertextual wealth of the Russian text gets lost. Only bilingual and bicultural readers can access it, but it seems doubtful as to whether such readers constitute a large portion of his target audience for the Hebrew versions. Only such readers can connect Singer’s Hebrew text to his eclectic literary landscape. The picture revealed by such a stereoscopic view is richer than the Russian text: Jews allow themselves to play with Yiddish expressions; Israeli characters are more like Israelis; caricatures of Jewish epics suddenly (and funnily) reveal biblical depths. “The cultural-historical seminar” becomes in Hebrew “the department of Jewish philosophy,” so that Singer not only Judaizes the story but also alludes to the “nationality” of humanist scholarly discourse in Russia. Likewise, the British in the Hebrew text are Anglo-Saxons in Russian, thus framing the British-Jewish conflict of the period of illegal immigration and the War of Independence as part of a comprehensive and profound cultural dispute of historical proportions. Singer’s conceptual literary collage or “installation” thus gains new translingual, transcultural, and transhistorical dimensions and, as a result, new facets of meaning. I should note, however, that this may well change as Singer continues to write in Hebrew. To conclude this discussion, which by no means exhausts the subject, I will mention Nekod Singer’s article on Savely Grinberg, written for Grinberg’s book of poems in Hebrew translation Be-du-ir (In the dual city).365 He refers to Gali-Dana Singer’s statement that “the language of poetry, humanity’s proto-language, is the first language of every poet, and faithfulness to it is much more important than linguistic categorization.”366 There must be thus a second language and perhaps other languages as well. This means that bilingualism is part of the nature of poetry, not only bilingual or translingual poetry and not only eclectic, 365 Savely Grinberg, Be-du-ir [In the dual city], trans. Gali-Dana Singer (Raanana: Even Hoshen, 2014). 366 Nekod Singer, “Hu atzmo” [He himself], Nekudataim 11–12 (2014).

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modern, postmodern, or neomodern poetry. This view certainly seems romantic or, at any rate, it does not contradict the romantic philosophy of language. Singer points to the idea of the “bi-city,” parallel, it would seem, to bilingualism. Jerusalem is growing in two directions—up and down, and on the steps of this vertical (we might also add metaphysical) axis, the poet is meant to pass (transire): “And thus one needs first to descend as low as possible and only then to take off for the skies. The change of levels is vital for the poet in his search for a real point of view, so as not to be trampled, not to be flattened, in order to overcome the generations-old opposition of low and high. In this way one achieves, instead of chaos and a mixture of languages, a logos-language, a language of poetry parallel to the language of creation, which is beyond literary Russian or spoken Hebrew.”367 This metaphysical line, opposed to the Derridan line, does not appear here coincidentally or out of philosophical eclecticism. It would seem that for Nekod Singer and the heroes of his essay, the translingual movement is identical to the metaphysical movement, to the establishment of the transcendental subject and its lyric voice, which always speaks in two languages or above languages. This insight is more important to them than all philosophical and ideological dividers. Bilingualism remains logocentric, and the poet, who is bilingual par excellence, remains a magician who creates and destroys worlds, cities, and towers by means of his mythical language.

367 Ibid.

C HAPT ER

THR EE

A Noble Man of Our Times: The Jerusalem Novels of Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis

E

lizaveta Mikhailichenko (Elisheva Nesis) and Yury Nesis emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel in 1990. During the four years preceding her move, Mikhailichenko, born in 1962, published two books of poetry, a prose work, Garmoniia po Deribasovu (Harmony according to Deribasov),368 which she coauthored with Yury Nesis (born in 1953), and another prose work written together with Nesis and Sergei Dolgov, Triokhkoliosnyi velosiped (The tricycle).369 She continued to publish after her arrival in Israel—fifteen poetry collections of her own, along with novels, short stories, plays and film scripts written in collaboration with Yury Nesis.370 In Israel, they have published their writing mostly as digital literature and sometimes in printed periodicals.371 In 368 Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, Garmoniia po Deribasovu [Harmony according to Deribasov] (Stavropol: Stavropolskoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo, 1990). 369 Elizaveta Mikhailichenko, Yury Nesis, and Sergei Dolgov, Triokhkoliosny velosiped [The tricycle] (Stavropol: Stavropolskoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo, 1987). 370 See the website of Mikhailichenko and Nesis: www.angelfire.com/sk/nesis. 371 See Mikhailichenko and Nesis’s “Ierusalimsky sindrom,” Solnechnoe spletenie, 7 (1999), 55–64; “Neformat,” “Seksagonalnaia kaytarama ili liubovnyi magendavid,” Setevaia slovestnost (2000), www.netslova.ru/michailichenko_nesis/sexagon.html; 167

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this chapter, I will focus on their most enigmatic novels, which constitute what can be called the Jerusalem cycle: Ierusalimsky dvorianin (A noble man of Jerusalem), I/e_rus.olim, and ZY (Preemptive Revenge).372

IERUSALIMSKY DVORIANIN (A NOBLE MAN OF JERUSALEM, 1997): AN ABORTIVE GESTURE OF VIOLENCE

This novel, the first in the Jerusalem cycle, is located at the meeting point of two traditions. On one hand is the lyrical-grotesque satire of Venedikt Yerofeyev’s prose poem Moskow-Petushki (alternately translated as Moscow to the end of the line and Moscow stations), with its angels revealing themselves in alcoholic fumes, and with its “accursed questions” dipped in the mundane loathsomeness, devoid of meaning, of daily existence. On the other hand is the existentialist tradition of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Camus, with its focus on the problems of transgression and conscience, of heroism and sacrifice, of the power of life and the weakness of humanity. What bridges these traditions is, in Grigory Pomeranz’s terms, the “openness to the abyss.”373 The Nesises’ novella melds this with the aspect of an additional neoromantic and neoindigenous “abyss”: the fragility and liminality of national existence as a personal difficulty, the re-rooting of the self in the Land of Israel, and the human soul as a “Povestka v Venetsiiu. Nizhnie noty,” Setevaia slovestnost (2002), www.netslova.ru/ michailichenko_nesis/povestka.html; “Slepoy i suka,” Setevaia slovestnost (2003), www. netslova.ru/michailichenko_nesis/slepoy.html; Vecherny gondolier, 148, 150 (2005).     Mikhailichenko (poetry): Lavka iazykov (1997–2000), www.vladivostok.com/ speaking_in_tongues/elizabeth.html; Ierusalimsky zhurnal, 7 (2001), 41–46; Setevaia slovestnost (2003), www.netslova.ru/mihaylichenko/gotika.html; Vecherny gondolier, 164 (2009); REFLECT . . . КУАДУСЕШЩТ, 38 (2011), polutona.ru/?show=reflect&number=38; 22 (Dvadtsat dva), 174, 177 (2015), www.sunround.com/ club/22.htm; Dvoetochie 24 (2015). Yury Nesis: “Vozvrashchaias v srednevekovie, ne zabudte vziat zubnuiu shchiotku,” REFLECT . . . КУАДУСЕШЩТ, 38 (2011), polutona.ru/?show=reflect&number=38. 372 Elizaveta Mikhailichenko, and Yury Nesis, Ierusalimsky dvorianin [A noble man of Jerusalem] (Jerusalem: Dixi, 1997); ЗЫ (ZY, 2006, lit.lib.ru/m/mihajlichenko_e_i/ ps_lib.shtml, translated into English by Ethan Bien as Preemptive Revenge, 2013, Kindle edition). 373 Grigory Pomeranz, Otkrytost bezdne. Etiudy o Dostoevskom [Openness to the abyss: Essays on Dostoevsky] (New York: Liberty Publishing House, 1989), 239–262.

A Noble Man of Our Times

battlefield between political good and evil. With the Nesises, the political manifests as existential, but not in the Deleuzian sense, as is characteristic in minor literatures; and not in Brian Massumi’s sense of syncopation between what is remembered and what is not seen; and not, or not only, in the Barthesian sense of zero degree writing. The political manifests in the personalistic sense as a unification of historical awareness with personal testimonial knowledge,374 and with anthropological thought regarding the establishment of culture in violence, or in the abortion of violence, and in sacrifice or its substitution.375 From this perspective, the novella evolves from the historical/mythological paradigm of the binding of Isaac. At the same time, the political-ethical, apocalyptic, and rebellious pathos brings it close to the genre of prophetic admonishment, albeit in a pseudo-carnivalesque, Purim style. The protagonist of the novella, Ilya, is a new immigrant from Russia (three years in Israel)—“the Chagallesque Jewish fool, who hesitantly sneaks into the celestial Jerusalem.”376 There he meets his guardian angel, who appears as a speaking monkey, for “both angels and monkeys preceded humans, the former according to Judaism and the latter according to Darwin.”377 The monkey is a drinker who never gets drunk, a self-confident sort and a bit cynical. Over the course of one day, the eve of Purim, the two make the rounds of bars and restaurants, drink heavily and engage in interminable conversations about Arab terror, the policies of Yitzhak Rabin, and similar matters. As expected and, according to the protagonist, as is accepted among “the Russians” on Purim,378 the difference between Mordechai and Haman, between good and evil, between reality and illusion, and between the pathetic and the comic becomes 374 See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post–Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). 375 See the works of Eric Gans and René Girard repeatedly mentioned in this book. 376 The work was published in two versions: as printed book and electronically (without stable pagination). The references in this chapter consist of the page numbers in the printed version, and in brackets—the chapter numbers and paragraph numbers within the chapters according to the electronic version. Here: Mikhailichenko and Nesis, A noble man of Jerusalem, 13 (2, para. 31). Quotations from the novel hereafter are translated by Yan Mazor. 377 Ibid., 180 (15, para. 99). 378 Ibid., 96 (12, para. 1).

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blurred—both in the political life of Israel and in Ilya’s private life. Little by little, shadows of his past, his friends from University, surround him. One is Ton, his friend and partner in a game in which they had passed themselves off as KGB agents. They pretended to recruit new agents to a spy network and gathered incriminating information on their friends. When things became too complicated, Ton suggested that they actually reveal themselves to the KGB, hand over the archive they had compiled, and begin working for them. Ilya did not agree, and after Ton made off with the archive, he planned to murder Ton. Yunna, Ilya’s beloved, called the plan off; in any case Ilya, being a weak and indecisive person, most likely would not have succeeded in pulling it off anyway. In the end, it became clear that Ton was actually connected to the KGB and evidently remains so to this day. Another friend of theirs married Yunna, but later he committed suicide, and now Yunna lives in Jerusalem with her soldier son. While visiting her on this night of Purim, Ilya steals the soldier’s gun and travels to Hebron in order to commit a terror attack on the Arabs. On the way there, he meets another friend of his who informs him that the area is closed, due to Baruch Goldstein’s attack on the Cave of Machpelah (which enables precise dating of the novella’s plot to February 24–25, 1994). “The Jewish Hero” does not materialize; he gives thanks to The Lord and remains alone. However, from another viewpoint, the story is a kind of alternative history of Baruch Goldstein himself. Like most stories set in mythological cities, such as Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Agnon’s Only Yesterday, this one opens with the protagonist’s arrival in the city, which establishes the wandering and picaresque quality of the novella as a whole. Additionally, keeping faith with the tradition of urban myths, the city functions as a protagonist. Jerusalem is thus granted an unforgettable depiction: “Here the joint of time is closed, and Vij of the genic memory lifts his eyelid.”379 This comparison of Jerusalem to the memory, and comparison of memory to the legendary hero of Gogol’s well-known story, presents the city as a primeval, chthonic monster that rises from the earth in order to pierce the “cultural” hero’s consciousness with a gaze that breaks through the 379 Ibid., 13 (2, para. 30).

A Noble Man of Our Times

encircling border, the division between life and death (much like in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman). The man of Jerusalem, like the protagonist of Gogol’s story, can no longer remain inside the defensive circle of untouchability and incomprehensibility. The Nietzschean abyss crumbles beneath his feet: remembrance (both personal and national) appears like a kind of danse macabre, a blood wedding between the living and the dead. In Jerusalem, the individual meets his origin face-to-face at the cost of self-sacrifice. The closing of the temporal circuit—remembrance, eternal return, and the absurd yet bold stance with regard to the self/other—is the value that exceeds even the value of life. This hierarchy is the basis of the new nobility, the ethical basis of “the noble men” of Jerusalem, the anti-carnival turn (or actualization of the metaphor) of the antisemitic moniker “the Jerusalem baron”. The Russian concept of dvorianin (the noble man) is connected to the royal court, but it receives new meaning in Jerusalem: the man of the Holy Temple’s courtyard. Just as Agnon perceived himself as a Levite who should be singing psalms on the steps of the Holy Temple, or as Rubina’s protagonists identify with their ancestor Sephardic Jewish pirates or courtiers of the Spanish monarchy, so the Nesises’ protagonist recalls being a man of the Holy Temple or, in cabalistic terms, recalls being the son of a king. And like people of the true sacred nobility, like Lev Myshkin, Yitzhak Kumer, and Zakhar Cordovin, the protagonist of the Nesises’ novella is fated to be a victim. However, this time, the historical tragedy returns as a farce or, from a different, more pathetic perspective, as the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22): fate chooses a different sacrifice. As in the biblical story, whoever is not chosen as the sacrifice is chosen to create history. This is ancient humor and wisdom: the originary scene of violence is necessary for the establishment of culture, but if the sacrifice is not substituted, there will be no history. The offering of the sacrifice must become a gesture of simulated aggression—something that constitutes the foundation of all laughter.380 The sacrifice that isn’t realized is liable to turn into a picaro, a clown, and a wanderer—and this is what 380 See Alexander Kozintsev, The Mirror of Laughter, trans. Richard P. Martin (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 196–200.

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happens to the protagonist of the novella. Yet, this is nothing more than the anti-heroic rhetoric that reveals the anthropological mechanism for the establishment of the subject and memory, no less than the rhetoric of tragedy. For the picaro on his journey, like the mythological hero on his journey to the underworld or to his home, there is a sidekick, a doppelgänger or a brother. This time, it is the monkey-angel, who recalls the angel-that-is-not-an-angel from Etgar Keret’s “Hole in the Wall”— “just a liar with wings” who “has fun” together with the protagonist, and who appears and disappears without forewarning.381 When Senya, Ilya’s friend, sees this strange pair and mentions a music box,382 we recall a different monkey, the monkey of Rabbi Hillel from Agnon’s “Kisuy ha-dam” (The coverage of blood), the owner of a music box from which can be heard the singing of the sons of Korah from Hell.383 What links these two works is not just the setting in Jerusalem and the primeval magic of the holy city, but also that which establishes this sanctity: the sacrifice. The monkey-angel represents the thinking of the possible, and it can be anything, for it is the “divine clay”384 and “the talking bush,”385 or the possibility of epiphany and redemption as an answer to Ilya’s prayer at the Western Wall upon his immigration to Israel: “I arrived,”386 he writes on a note, as if this were Moses’ prayer upon his arrival at Mount Sinai or Mount Nebo. The appearance of the monkey is a miracle “in the city that is the world’s umbilical cord and in which the Jews did not distinguish between miracle and reality.”387 This is the point of bifurcation, the singularity, the big bang of possibilities of existence, and therefore it can be anything: “The alien, 381 Etgar Keret, “Hole in the Wall,” trans. Miriam Shlesinger, in Missing Kissinger: 28–31 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 31. 382 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, A noble man of Jerusalem, 27 (4, para. 12). 383 Shmuel Yosef Agnon, “Kisuy ha-dam” [The coverage of blood], in Lefanim min ha-khoma [Within the wall], 55–113 (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House, 2001), 60. 384 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, A noble man of Jerusalem, 55 (8, para. 23). 385 Ibid., 126 (12, para. 220). 386 Ibid., 71 (9, para. 60). 387 Ibid., 72 (9, para. 64).

A Noble Man of Our Times

cyborg, vampire reeducated to drink alcohol, a golem from the laboratories of the winery corporation.”388 His appearance splits reality apart, opening an epistemological crack that fills up with fairy tale creatures that arise from the depths of the mythological imagination with one purpose: to indicate the way to realize the transcendental purpose of the personality, the borders of subjectivity, to dialectically mark the identity of the hero. This is what he means when he says: “This farce spawn was my last and final chance for my personality’s fixation, if not revelation, which has eluded me during all these smooth years.”389 This crack runs the entire length of reality, duplicates subjects, objects, and relations between them, revealing in this their problematics. The primary focus of this problematics is the relations between contemporary Israel and its perception by immigrants. Ilya, embarrassed by the euphoria around the “peace process,” says: “We came for a different Israel, not the one in which we currently find ourselves.”390 One after another, the parables relate the hopeless “peace process” according to the protagonist, and in their depths a penetrating cultural critique is found. As an anthropological critique regarding the loss of a crucial foundation that is important to the structure of human existence, this critique also indicates the boundaries of the territory in which the transcendent can reveal in history: “In this traffic jam caused by fear of a bag of garbage, we wanted peace even more, but believed in it even less.”391 The complex of the Israel “where we currently find ourselves,” which prevents the miracle of the realization of the personality, is expressed symbolically in the “fear of a bag of garbage.” This isn’t merely a symbol of neurotic hysteria or paranoia. This fear paralyzes and destroys, diminishes and inverts as in a carnival (as was mentioned above, these events take place on Purim eve), the heroic-sacrificial

388 Ibid., 29 (4, para. 31). 389 Ibid., 49 (7, para. 5). 390 Ibid., 41 (6, para. 18). 391 Ibid., 40 (6, para. 4).

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relations between the human and the earth,392 between subject and object, which were supposed to serve as the basis for a new, longed for, and expected indigeneity. One cannot “be born into the past,” into the soil, without the mythological courage of self-negation, of unification with the soil as with “the skin of a wild ass”—La Peau de Chagrin (Balzac)—the skin of grief.393 The worry always remains that the birth will not succeed, and that all of us will be “stillborn.”394 Fear of the bag of garbage is a phantom sacrifice, a simulacrum, its cynical, carnivalesque simulation: the remains of the torn objects that replace the dissected body of the sacrifice, the stench of a garbage heap in place of Abraham’s covenant between the bits and pieces. This carnival transforms the ceremony of the atonement of the scapegoat. The goat, which symbolizes the moral refuse of the community, sticks out its tongue in mockery and remains standing in the center of the social sphere—like a bag of garbage that induces fear. This is fear of the problem that does not consent to be solved, the victory of desublimation. Therefore, this fear paralyzes passion, the passion of self-realization, the other, and the soil. The bag of garbage is discarded next to the marketplace, and here one can also see the inversion of healthy and full relations with the earth as the source of fertility and of life, and their substitution with “rotten tomatoes.”395 The power of the State strafes the sack of rottenness with bullets because it imagines a bomb in place of the garbage, magically producing this bomb with its own hands from the remains of its own corrupt and defective fertility, which is nullified and degraded. The carnival has turned history itself into a sack of disgusting garbage. Ilya’s friend, Arye Gelman, author of “the scientific-socialist book” entitled The Masada Complex,396 is recalled in the novella. The fear of the bag of garbage seems like a case of the “Masada complex” but is actually its opposite: the disappointment of the unrealized hero, the 392 Ibid., 103 (12, para. 42). 393 Ibid., 108 (12, para. 78). 394 Ibid., 173 (15, para. 27). 395 Ibid., 39 (6, para. 2). 396 Ibid., 66 (9, para. 11).

A Noble Man of Our Times

paranoid fear of the hunted animal, of the eternal soldier surrounded by enemies, the choice of self-sacrifice instead of capitulation to conformism, of honor instead of life. To sum up, this “complex” becomes the unique trait of Israeli “nobility,” of Jerusalem’s “noble men.” The “Masada complex” seems counterpragmatic. Like every complex and every act of heroism, it disturbs the routine that erases all opposition and all uniqueness, as in the Roman legions. However, this mythological scene of the hero killing himself stands in opposition to the carnivalesque scene of the “hero” who shoots garbage. These scenes belong to opposing symbolic orders. The second scene is a caricature of the “Masada complex,” staged by “the healthy”: a simulation of violence that is intended, according to a new military-political strategy, to prevent physical violence. Every complex looks funny from an external perspective, one of the uninvolved, “enlightened” and “healthy.” However, in the complete absence of complexes, we have only the mechanical knowledge of the computer. The complex extends between two types of disengagement from life, two modes of loss of personality: the machine and insanity. Everything known as human grows in the expanse between them. The posthumanist and transhumanist delusion is a vision of life without complexes, a vision of a harmonious “new human,” a perfect citizen of a perfect state. This is the “purist” vision of every totalitarian society— Platonic, communist, or fascist. The shooting of the garbage is a wicked caricature, but one that is both bold and precise, of shooting complexes because of a neurotic aspiration to cleanliness, which is neurotic in and of itself. This cleaning up does not take meaning from the human (for “there is no meaning”), but from life itself: We are not robots and can live despite the teeth of logic. . . . A human lives among people, not among ideas! We are tied to life by emotions, feelings, honor, duty, love. . . . And they make life meaningful at least. At least a subjective feeling of meaningfulness. And this feeling is, to some extent, identical to a psychic norm. For us, the people.397 397 Ibid., 76 (9, para. 94).

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The “Masada complex” is the other side of the drive to defend life when, according to Andrei Sakharov, who is mentioned here several times, the most moral choice is revealed as the most pragmatic choice. This is not because of a natural morality, which is nothing but the most abstract morality, but because of a paradox; as Ilya says, “it is impossible to live with honor if, from the beginning, readiness to sacrifice life, for whatever cause, is nullified.”398 Life becomes a carnival of self-forgetting, and the way is lost. Purim, as a symbol of national renewal, becomes Belshazzar’s feast, a symbol of punishment, of dismantling, and of downfall, with the prophetic inscription on the wall, which in the Nesises’ version appears as “MENE, TEKEL, PERES,”399 meaning the name of Shimon Peres, then foreign minister in Rabin’s government. Life in Israel turns into a “feast in a time of plague,” “as if we are gorging and drinking from the Temple vessels at Belshazzar’s feast.”400 Ilya attempts to take the heroic duty of self-sacrifice upon himself, as a rejection of victimhood. For, in his opinion, if the nation develops the psychology of victimhood, it will prove its end. Israel lacks a class that perceives honor as a higher value than life (as with knights, courtiers, and samurai) and whose self-sacrifice is destined to save the country from the ensnaring temptation to victimhood.401 As a matter of fact, Ilya is incorrect: there are still “knights” in Israel. However, this does not, in and of itself, prevent the development of a psychology of victimhood. On the other hand, this psychology does not necessarily lead to destruction. On the contrary, it connects the victim to its executioner in a kind of Stockholm syndrome or similar mechanism, therefore giving the entire structure dynamic stability. Additionally, many nations of “knights” ended their historical trajectories without the aid of any victim psychology, not to mention states, regimes, and elite classes, like the samurai in Japan or the Russian aristocracy. Therefore, Ilya’s cultural critique seems inappropriate. However, in one thing, he is theoretically correct: victimhood constantly reconstitutes 398 Ibid., 106 (12, para. 69). 399 Ibid., 126 (12, para. 223). 400 Ibid., 146 (13, para. 136). 401 Ibid., 196 (16, para. 42).

A Noble Man of Our Times

and replicates the scene of violence and prevents any possibility of deferring it. Over and over, the victim nation is imagined by itself and by others as the center of attention and an object of desire, as the source, cause, and guilty party chosen to take responsibility for being a victim— its responsibility for “firstness,” in Gans’s terms.402 This is the reason that over and over the sacrifice is dissected and eaten by others, who aspire, on one hand, to be like him and, on the other hand, to throw off the yoke of responsibility. In this sense, this paradoxical executioner psychology is truly identical to the feudal psychology of knights and samurai—the psychology of service. Vassals serve their lord (the sacred center) but do not forget for a moment the possibility that they might turn themselves into a lord. This is what transforms the lord into a permanent object of desire, worship and sacral violence. This is the fate of every aristocratic society, in contrast to Jewish ecclesiastical meritocratic society. Ilya’s attraction to the feudal aristocratic model is anchored in the general orientation of the novel—neoindigeneity: the ethos of bonds of blood, descent, service, and sacrifice intended to root the human anew in the soil. Soil—the soil of the Land of Israel—is for Ilya the lord, the sacred, and the principal sacrifice. Ilya, “the noble man” of Jerusalem, proceeds along the edge of the abyss. Twice in his life he has taken a gun in his hand and schemed to commit murder, and twice his schemes were stymied and deferred, his sacrifice not desired. Each time, a different “ram” was chosen. In the novel I/e_rus.olim (2004), the extreme transgression of taking and sacrificing life is realized in the form of ritual murders, which float like nightmarish phantasms in the consciousness held sway by the Jerusalem syndrome. In the end, in the third novel of the cycle, the murder will transpire in a paradoxical form of “preemptive revenge” in the name of political justice. Murder is not only a structural principle that organizes the central subject of these works, but the symbol and myth of the establishment of humanity and the victory of life. This is true regardless of whether murder is merely a possibility, as in the first novel, an 402 Gans, “On Firstness,” in The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, ed. Adam Katz (Aurora: The Davis Group, 2007), 41–52.

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uncontrollable givenness, as in the second novel, or an ethical imperative, as in the third novel. In their anthropological laboratory, the Nesises probe, without systemic precision of course, all three philosophical modes of human opening to the abyss: the possible (what may occur), the given (what is), and the normative (that which ought to be). In the second novel, this existential experiment is called “the historical extreme.” In the first novel, it is intoxication and a game; in the second, it is insanity and a game; and in the third, it is bewilderment and a game. Throughout the cycle, existential “opening to the abyss” springs from historical-political, tragic bewilderment in the context of the Israeli reality from the Oslo Accords through the Gaza Disengagement: the surrender of Israel to Muslim terrorism and the drying up of the nation’s sources of life. The “personal extreme” is the response and attempt to repair the “extremeness of the State” in the political sphere, whether conceived geographically, historically, or ethically, either in the media or in the virtual sphere, as in the second novel.

I/E_RUS.OLIM (2004): HISTORY, SACRIFICE, AND NETWORK

In I/e_rus.olim, the main character, Jerusalem, is identified with the virtual network, and the network—with civilization. I will argue that net-thought is intertwined here in the thought of the origin and the search for new indigeneity, as the two kinds of thought unite in a game of historical extreme—the most dangerous and illuminating way to revive and actualize the historical memory. The Nesises write against the background of postmodern and conceptual art, cultural and linguistic games and the avant-garde, eclecticism and fragmentation, the shattering of narrative and decadent mythopoetics, all of which serve as reference points and cultural memory. It is a negative gesture, and the writers preserve this negativity in the “Netneism manifesto,” written by Allergen the cat, one of their virtual protagonists.403 The term “Netneism” is a coinage based on 403 Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, “Postmodernism? Net, netneism!” [Postmodernism? No, netneism!], Russkii zhurnal, March 16, 2003, accessed December 7, 2014, www.guelman.ru/culture/reviews/2003-03-21/allergen160303.

A Noble Man of Our Times

“net,” as in “network,” but also on the Russian words for “no,”nyet and ne, so that it can be understood as “no-no-ism,” or the advance negation of any closed conceptual framework. Nevertheless, the manifesto presents a clear view—it points to a transition from posthumanism to what it terms “hyperhumanism.”404 The avatar engages in role playing to actualize his individuality and to search for the truth. The carnival becomes a Renaissance scuole centered on creativity, thought, and freedom. This view can be perceived as a kind of neomodernism or virtual individualism, but a more precise definition would be metaphysical personalism. This view is grounded in the larger context of a return to the naïve mythopoesis of the mid-twentieth century, just prior to the postmodern turn, and it is a kind of attempt to repair the convoluted paths of history. This may also explain the kinship between this view and historical counterfactual thinking,405 possibilism, and the theory of possible worlds,406and the new sincerity art.407 On the one hand, the Nesises’ protagonists, like web surfers, are sunk in “the joy of Brownian movement” in the city, in text, and in history (which is unpredictable, chaotic movement).408 On the other hand, coincidences and chance Printed version: Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis (as Kot Allergen), V realnosti docherney. Stikhi kota Allergena [In the daughterly reality: Poems by Allergen the cat] (St. Petersburg: Gelikon Plus, 2001), 5–6. 404 Not to be confused with neohumanism, such as in spiritual philosophy; see Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (Shrii Shrii Anandamurti), The Liberation of Intellect: Neohumanism (Kolkata: Ananda Marga Publications, 1982). 405 On the counterfactual (alternative) history, see Hellekson, The Alternate History; Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Fredric Jameson, “History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick,” in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 363–383; Katsman, Literature, History, Choice. 406 See Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Lubomír Doležel, Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 407 See also Epstein, The philosophy of the possible; Nicholas Rescher, A Theory of Possibility: A Constructivistic and Conceptualistic Account of Possible Individuals and Possible Worlds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975). 408 The book exists only in electronic format without pagination. Therefore, the references consist of division number (I or II), part number, the title of the chapter, and the number of the paragraph. When the chapter titles are names, they are sometimes repeated within the same part. In these cases, they will be

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meetings are like diving in search of “the divine sparks that long ago sank into the souls of human beings.” Every chance “link” can reveal itself to be an illumination in which it will be possible to identify “the precise, only moment given to us to distinguish between the human and other creatures—the moment of choice . . . to understand what is given to me this day and what I owe to tomorrow.”409 Indeed, the network in which the authors and their characters live is one of personalist chaos, in which a person reveals his purpose and realizes his freedom. Time gets back in joint, the human face emerges from this chaos, and cabalistic sparks ascend to repair the world. The poetics is based not on the mask as camouflage and the deceptive simulacrum but rather on the persona as a rhetorical expression and invention understood as affecting an individual’s and culture’s development.410 This thinking aspires to understand history by overcoming both historical relativism and determinism. The imagination grows out of the awareness of miracles,411 not tricks and techniques. The philosophical, poetical method of Mikhailichenko and Nesis consists of creating a virtual network personality, which becomes the origin of thought and writing, the idea and hypothesis of any picture of reality. The world and text viewed through the network become network. However, the same origin initiates the process of myth-creation—the realization of the personality’s transcendental purpose in empirical history, thus creating “hyperhuman,” “netneistic” consciousness, and turning the network back into the “hyper-real” world, however, not in Baudrillard’s sense of word.412 In I/e_rus.olim, this dynamic is found in the basis of the historical memory and its extreme surfing, which followed by the sequence numbers of their appearance (for instance, David-2). Here: Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 4, Vspomni Galinu, the last para.). 409 Ibid. (II, 4, David-2, para. 4). 410 See Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 411 As mentioned above, in the Alexei Losev personalist theory of myth, a miracle is defined as a realization of the transcendent purpose of a personality in the empirical history (The Dialectics of Myth, 185–186). 412 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–3.

A Noble Man of Our Times

produces the new, virtual-mythical indigeneity of the characters—Israeli immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Here, as in any semiotic and cultural mechanism, what unites the transcendental and the immanent is the sacrifice that, under the influence of the Jerusalem syndrome’s intoxication, becomes the sacral center of the network and myth, memory and the Land, avatar and sphinx. The virtual novel, I/e_rus.olim (2004), recounts the Jerusalem adventures of five companions from their school days413—Bella, David, Grisha the painter, Cynologist, and the nouveau tycoon Lin. Other central figures in the story are their new friends, Ortik and Lea; a red-coated cat named Allergen who is a distant relative of Bulgakov’s Behemoth the cat; and a pair of writers who are doubles of the authors, whose names appear as ©,414 and who resemble, in a rather parodic and ironic manner, both the Master and Margarita, and Wolland with his retinue. The novel is framed as the recollections of Jerusalem’s stones, beginning when, as a reminiscence of the well-known Bulgakov’s phrase, wine is spilled on them and then licked up by a kitten that is later picked up by David. It ends when David kills the cat at the end. David sabotages Grisha’s project of painting all one thousand of King Solomon’s wives. David cannot shake off his conviction that a monster, something like a cross between a lion and a sphinx, is roaming the 413 Mikhailichenko and Nesis also use the theme-plot of schoolmates’ adventures in other stories: “Akhmatovskaia kultura,” ili “Ne lozhi mne na ushi pastu!” [“The Akhmatovian culture,” or “Don’t put pasta on my ears!”] and its sequel Neformat [Nonformat]. In these Israeli detective stories, the past school years of the dramatis personae serve as the main cultural and psychological motivation for their mutual gathering and activities. On one hand, this framework continues the Soviet ethos of the school friendship; on the other hand, the confusion of the schoolmates’ melodrama, the detective story, and magical realism, as in the Jerusalem novels of the Nesises, differs from both Soviet and Russian Israeli detective traditions (compared to Alex Tarn and Daniel Kluger, for example) and looks more like a parody of the British, American, and Israeli children detective and fantasy literature (compared to the Harry Potter series, for example). 414 In Russian, the letter “c” is read as the phoneme “s,” the letter that appears twice in the family name Nesis (Несис). Furthermore, the name © hints at the problem of authority and “the death of the author” in poststructuralism and postmodernism. Finally, it also embodies the 2,500-year-old philosophical problem of copy and original.

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streets of Jerusalem, seeking victims. In the meantime, Lin resolves to finance a mystical-genetic project conjured up by one of the group’s friends, Ortik. Ortik intends to map the genome of the Messiah and engineer his birth. Lin freezes his sperm and writes in his will that Bella will receive the inheritance if she gives birth to his child. No one knows that she is already pregnant (from David or Lin). In another storyline, the authors devote themselves to writing about the network and to discussions in which they create a new virtual character, Allergen the cat-poet, who quickly becomes hugely popular. The companions also have a hobby—playing a game they call “Historical Extreme.” They assume paramilitary roles or simply go on journeys based on biblical stories that take place in Jerusalem. During one of these journeys, a woman is mysteriously murdered. Attempts are also made on the lives of Bella and her friend Leah, David’s girlfriend. David accelerates the search for a sacrificial victim, and in the end finds one—Allergen, the red cat, his virtual avatar. The story lines interweave and develop and the suspense builds, up until the novel’s tragic denouement—David murders the cat and is killed himself adjacent to the Western Wall before the eyes of his helpless friends. The Nesises put avatars of themselves into their novel, a pair of writers designated as © who, in turn, create the virtual persona of Allergen. Allergen crafts a theory of virtual reality and online poetry. He writes that the nature of netneism lies in the total liberation of creativity from physical and social constraints and from the self.415 The book is not a manifesto of netneism. On the contrary, this manifesto drowns in the novel’s sea of irony, madness, and messianic pseudomysticism.416 The novel is placed in the middle of conflict between the promise of redemption and false messianism, the desire for eternity and paraecclesiastical economy of cheap sanctity-for-all.417 The vision of liberation from the self 415 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 9, David-1, para. 39ff). 416 Compare to other Russian-language Israeli works with messianic and pseudomessianic themes, such as Liudi koda [Men of code] by Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2006), Rubina’s Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), and especially Rubina’s Syndicate (2004). 417 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 9, David-1, para. 68).

A Noble Man of Our Times

is perceived as the possibility of freedom and infinite self-actualization, but also as a satanic temptation of the Pied Piper who mesmerizes rats with his flute. Using a game as a temptation, the cat pushes culture off the rails of purposefulness into the void of meaninglessness; at the same time, he himself acts with a purpose of his own.418 Yet, this anxious, paranoid possibility is also undermined by melancholy irony. Not because liberation is impossible or dangerous, but rather, the problem, the trap, is that under the conditions of schizophrenia—of the network and the antinetwork type—netneism immediately becomes a new “ism,” a philosophic notion in the best case and a political-ideological one in the worst. However, what is perhaps even sadder is that in this sense, the online network is no different from the other ideological “networks,” whether idealist, dualist, enlightened, or romantic—that are critiqued in the Nesises’ works. Furthermore, this critique itself, both cultural and literary, is simply one more network that sets a trap for the final promise of freedom. The lure of the virtual world is the temptation of Mephistopheles, a proposal to sell one’s soul to the network and become an avatar.419 As with Rubina, this Faustian leitmotif, along with others such as the golem, the double, the homunculus, and the doll, constitutes the romantic psychocultural kernel of this ostensibly postmodern writing.420 In the digital age, everything and everyone turns into a mirage, a fantasy reproduced ad nauseam on endlessly multiplying networks of networks that reflect each other like mise en abyme. Only one thing remains concrete, real, and undigitized—the living personality that creates, lives, and thinks the networks. This is the essence of personalism, and it constitutes the foundation of the Nesises’ neomythopoetic metaphysical doctrine, the last refuge from irony. Mikhailichenko and Nesis’s personal website offers “A brief biography of Allergen the virtual cat,” entitled “The netneist poet.” It relates that he was “born on September 16, 1999” and “underwent his next

418 Ibid. (II, 9, David-2, para. 59). 419 Ibid. (II, 9, David-1, para. 57). 420 See especially Rubina’s Petrushka syndrome (2010).

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netneistic reincarnation on May 1, 2005.”421 He lives in Israel; his coat is “defiant red” and his personality “Levantine.” The authors explain: “Actually, the dear cat was conceived not so much as a virtual personality, but rather as a literary-exploratory method of groping for the truth or, in the scheme of things, for the creation of our sphinx novel I/e_rus.olim (2004), in which he, dear, is one of the main characters.”422 The Russian word dorogoy (dear) is the key to understanding the direction of the search for truth. The Nesises play with the word and refer to as if it were a transliteration of the Hebrew phrase “dor o goy,” meaning “generation or nation.” This is the principal question faced by this Jerusalem cat, and the existential question of Jewish Jerusalem consciousness: “To what do you belong? Your generation or your nation? To what are you loyal— your time or your kind? What is your mission—to conquer a place in time or a territory for your tribe?”423 This dichotomy formulates Jewish thinking about particularism (tribalism, nationalism) and universalism, tradition, and assimilation, as well as continuity and contiguity in the Jewish cultural and literary history.424 Network activity, posts, and conversations on LiveJournal, are all directed at the writing of the novel. (The cat drawings by Mikhailichenko should also be added to this, but they require a separate discussion.) They raise two questions: what literary-philosophical method is being used here? And, what happens when a virtual character becomes a character in a novel? The virtual character cannot and does not want to remain in the network’s entropic, anonymous limbo—he aspires to be 421 “Allergen’s Journal” remains active at the time of this writing (August 6, 2014), see allergen.livejournal.com. 422 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, “Kratkaia avtobiografiia virtualnogo kota Allergena” [A short autobiography of Allergen the virtual cat], Ierusalimskii sindrom. Ofitsialnaia stranitsa Elizavety Mikhailichenko, Yuryia Nesisa i izdatelstava Dixi-Jerusalem, accessed August 6, 2014, www.angelfire.com/sk/nesis/images/kot.htm. 423 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 5, David-1, para. 11). 424 This pair of concepts is the title of Dan Miron’s book From Continuity to Contiguity, which reflects the main dilemma of the Jewish historiography. For a general discussion, see Svante Lundgren, Particularism and Universalism in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: Global Publications, Binghamton University, 2001); Aaron W. Hughes, Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

A Noble Man of Our Times

embodied in a living personality. This means that the character wishes to become part of a narrative, a chronotope. Existence in a story enables the creation of a world, a myth, a symbol, an organism.425 In this sense, every story, even in the prenetwork era, is the actualization of a virtual character formed in the consciousness of his creator as his avatar, as a perfect and free double at the height of his humanity, as a transcendental subjectivity that actualizes his transcendental purpose. Thus, Allergen the cat is “thought” or “thinking” itself, the pure reason that constitutes the source of the created—the familiar world of knowledge. The network models the human brain, a Platonic ideal world of potential, pure possibility, the Torah as the blueprint of the created world. It is no coincidence that pure reason becomes actualized in a novel rather than some other kind of text. The modern novel was born along with modern idealism, Kant’s critical idealism, and with the same purpose—to create, simultaneously, the modern transcendental and historical subject. This subject can be individual (a personality) or collective (a nation). In either case, it constitutes itself in the thinking of its origin and foundation. A novel is “thought” personified in the body of history. The theology of the novel is fundamentally Christian; more precisely, this theology is constructed as a syllogism that justifies Greek mimesis with the help of Jewish redemption. In other words, the God (or idea) is embodied in matter and self-sacrifices in order to create or redeem the world. Moreover, this theology is connected to the Jewish mystical concept of tzimtzum or “contraction,” which turns the novel into a microcosm not only of the world but also of the creator. The novel is the magic crystal that harbors within it the secret of creation—the creation of man and the creation of space-time—and the secret of the sacrifice as a means of creation. René Girard has demonstrated the connection between the novel and the theology and anthropology of the sacrifice, and Eric Gans has turned this hypothesis into a linguistic and semiotic method.426 The appearance of a 425 According to Alexei Losev, a symbol is a living organism, and this involves the understanding of myth as the infusing of life into all (The Dialectics of Myth, 166–167). 426 See René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Y. Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); Eric Gans,

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novel like the Nesises’ at the beginning of the t­wenty-first century reinforces the presumption that we are poised at the peak of the novel’s and romanticism’s return to the forefront of the cultural stage. This being the case, it is no coincidence that, at the center of the Nesises’ novel on Jerusalem and on immigrants from the U.S.S.R., the character of the sacrificial victim stands as a subject and idea. This is not just because Jerusalem is a city of sacrifices or because the nomadic neophyte immigrants, in Hebrew olim, or ascenders (to the land and to the sacrifice), are the “natural,” organic factors of the “history allergy.”427 The person who ascends and becomes a sacrifice is the cat, the virtual character that becomes actualized in the novel. The transcendental subject, the embodiment of the network-reason, the idea, is the one actualized in the martyr myth. The impression received in reading the novel is that events could not have happened otherwise. The cat is a miniature of the lion, the symbol of Jerusalem, of the tribe of Judah, of kingship and Messiah. Yet, in the novel, the lion is also a symbol of poetry because Allergen is an Internet poet. The romantic image of the poet as a martyr is united here with reason and idea. This union produces the image of the genius who differs from the romantic genius only in the surroundings in which it comes into existence—at the nexus of the network and the novel. The symbolic series “poet-genius-kingmessiah” leads to the transfiguration/disappearance of the subject/ victim. The cat returns to the anonymity of the network as to the ocean of mystical unity; the subject returns to its origin, and the origin— historical thinking—begins anew. It cannot begin in any other way since the thinking, as was already mentioned above, is the thinking of the origin,428 meaning the thinking of the victim. The connection between the virtual character and this literary character in the novel also works in the opposite direction. The cat character in the novel brings with him the baggage of his creation outside the novel, that is, in the “reality” of the network. Poems, essays, and correspondence in Internet forums create a context that is not only the intertext or The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981). 427 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (I, 7, David-2, para. 73). 428 See Cohen, Logic of pure knowledge, 36.

A Noble Man of Our Times

the source of the novel, but also the novel and the works external to it are constructed within a unified space of invention on the network, especially as the novel itself was published on the Internet. They are parts of a single work. In this way, the novel itself becomes the continuation and reproduction of the network. As in a matrix, doubles of the authors and their cat, the “real” cat, live in the novel. According to the storyline, the writers who are the novel’s protagonists create the virtual character of the Internet cat—a network within a network. Dialectically, however, the network, being both reproducing and negating, counteracts itself or, to be more precise, its own virtuality. The matrix becomes the “desert of reality,” and the postmodern novel is shown to be pseudo magic-realistic and pseudobiographical. The authors return to reality, even if it is a “daughter reality,” as the cat refers to it in this poem:429 Burning in depression of the autumn blaze— A deed the rabble delights in. For me, however, it’s too formulaic, As I live in a daughter reality.430

However, this is not the need for vulgar and schematic mimesis but rather for the historical-empirical actualization of a persona, of a transcendental and purposeful subject. In other words, it is the need for the creation of a myth. The novel/myth, like a generic Allergen, causes an allergy to history on the network. It creates temporality by means of the creation of a plot: What is our life? Delirium, of course, But one that has a storyline.431 429 All the poems cited here were published on the Internet: Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, “Poeticheskoe nasledie virtualnogo kota Allergena” [Poetic heritage of Allergen the virtual cat], accessed August 31, 2014. lit.lib.ru/m/ mihajlichenko_e_i/text_0140.shtml. See also V realnosti docherney. Stikhi kota Allergena [In the daughterly reality: Poems by Allergen the cat] (St. Petersburg: Gelikon Plus, 2001). All the texts by the Nesises are translated by Yan Mazor. 430 Excerpt from “My–ryzhye” [We’re the red]. 431 Excerpt from “Neuravnoveshennoe” [Things unbalanced].

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Time is the plot of the journey, the adventure of the nomadic cat, the trickster and picaro, the mythical, eternal voyager in the trash heap of history: But the soul is always coated with a thick layer of vagabond dust From all roads, dumps, and times!432

The “daughter reality” created by the virtual-ideal novel is far from being abstract and rational, scientific, and pure, just as myth, according to Losev, is neither a scheme nor a template: Cats don’t have friends, but are united By feathers, claws, by glory and by luck. The Muses of the humanities give way To those of passions, rage, and lamentation.433

Furthermore, the nature of the network, its words, creativity, birth, and history are all founded on a single principle, the culture instinct; netneism is life itself: Any being, if passionate and alive, Wishes to procreate in words, in poems, offspring, too. I love this passionate netneism By light of day, of lantern, and in dusk.434 An artisan by day, By night I’m a recreator.435

In a typical mythopoetic gesture, the entire world—space and time—is likened to a cat (for example, the sun and the autumn are like a cat with red fur), and via the cat, to the network. The virtual cat is a 432 433 434 435

Excerpt from “Kupanie ryzhego kota” [Bathing of a red cat]. Excerpt from “Zastolnaia pesn” [Drinking song]. Excerpt from “Netneistovoe” [Pas-passionate]. Excerpt from “Snova na arene” [Back into the arena].

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text that seeks to end with a period, even as the nullity that comes after the end appears as a multiplicity of periods: I feel like a period At the end of the text. And then . . .436

In another poem, the cat, by this time almost suffering an allergic attack out of passion and jealously, seeks to bolster the unity of myth, life, and history. He puts the following words in the mouth of the biblical Rebecca, as she sends Jacob instead of Esau into the tent of the elderly Isaac: Lies, treachery, and blood—these underlie All miracles!437

History is actualized in costume, in a “circus and ring,” in “clowning and posing” (“Snova na arene” [Again on the arena]), in the fabrication of “cardboard scenery,” by theft, transgression, and the annulment of taboos, as in “Krasnoe i chiornoye” (Red and black): There, in the tent, Yitzhak was dying— The last sphinx gone blind. The first hack was thus engineered, And the world hung up.438

This witty versification, which bridges over thousands of years of history—Yitzhak (Isaac) and khak (hack)—likens the world to a computer. The establishment of history, which is not possible without the hacking of the primogeniture code, is identical to its end in the systemic collapse, the eternal apocalypse. Jacob is Allergen, the virus of history. More precisely, Jacob/Allergen-the-cat is what causes the world to break out in the allergic reaction that is history. Instead of sphinxes, 436 Excerpt from “Ne boysia” [Don’t be afraid]. 437 Excerpt from “Kotologiia” [Catology]. 438 Excerpt from “Kotologiia” [Catology].

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the symbol of eternity, we have cats, the symbols of time. However, paradoxically, the historical world is likened to a stuck computer. At the center of the foundational myth is a built-in, organic, constitutive bug. The computer game produces a sick symmetry between creator and creation and erases the boundary between them. In the endless reflections of parallel mirrors (mise en abyme), the game cannot end; the child can never be separated from the parent: The game’s umbilical cord Sweeps the ground, bleeding. Other worlds are cut open By the swing of a hangman’s axe.439

The creator of the game (that is, the computer user who creates an avatar) appears as a hangman, but if he is also the created character, he is the victim as well. Sin and blood are thus not only metaphors. The blade of the hack slices through the player, the theater turns into real life, and the mask becomes the face, a moral imperative and responsibility that, epistemologically, obliges each side: One must feel the integrity Of body, warmth, and deeds.440

I/e_rus.olim (2004) accords with the demands of network multiplicity. Like a sort of fractal Rashomon,441 it sets in motion further sets of microstories, which recount the story from the points of view of the various protagonists (the cat being one of them). The fragmentation is, however, bogus, as the stories are all placed within a unified fictional sequence.442 439 Excerpt from “Netneistovoe” [Pas-passionate]. 440 Excerpt from “Osennee” [The Autumnal]. 441 This awkward term combines the genre of multiple witnesses of the same event from different points of view (after one of Akutagawa’s stories) with the concept from the theory of chaos, meaning duplicating the same pattern on all levels of scale. The resulting term signifies multiple viewpoints drowned in the network’s iterative order. 442 Compare to the real fragmentation, and fragmentation as an idea and a feature of world and knowledge in Dennis Sobolev’s Jerusalem (2005).

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Here is how one of the major characters, David, describes the novel’s title: Ierusalim—that’s how this city’s name is normally spelled in Russian. I’m somewhat perplexed by the two letters at the beginning. Attempts were made to spell it “Erusalim” and “Irusalim,” but it didn’t take hold. . . . Both of these prefixes inevitably point to the Internet. For some reason, it seems to me that if the city itself were asked to spell its name in Russian, then it would come up with something like I/e_rus.olim, because Jerusalem is the Internet, and we, Russian olim, live undoubtedly virtual lives inside it. It holds, however, not for all of us. Ierusalim becomes Internet after apprenticeship, when its hypertext can be read. And then stones turn into links and hurl you onto the sites of the network woven out of time.443

This network flowing with information is compared with the Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey.444 Hypertextual Jerusalem is contrasted with the sequential textuality of European cities such as Paris, London, and St. Petersburg. They are visual, not virtual. They can be browsed, read each day in serial, like a classic novel, but they are devoid of the intoxicating “vibration of the active hyperlink.”445 Jerusalem is a brain with simultaneous logical and schizophrenic progressions (or sometimes, in the words of the authors ©, schizocynical),446 “the sick soul of humanity in the white straitjacket of Jerusalem stone.”447 This seems to be the novel’s dominant view, but it should nevertheless not be attributed to the authors. It is too simplistic and one-sided, medieval in its egocentric metaphor, so opposed to the essence of the network. This view seems to emerge directly from the Jerusalem syndrome that has taken hold of David’s tormented soul. Clearly, it 443 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 1, David, para. 1). 444 Ibid. (II, 7, Cat-1, para. 25). 445 Ibid. 446 Ibid. (II, 1, David, para. 62). 447 Ibid. (II, 1, David, para. 10).

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unjustifiably excludes the nature of the network, the hypertextuality and truncated multidimensionality of Europe’s large cities and their narratives. Furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that David’s view, and his ability to develop and implement it, has grown up against the background of his European cultural education. Likewise, Jerusalem’s network character is rather contingent, just like its roads and paths. David says as much himself, and he would certainly be cognizant of the contradiction in his words, except that at this moment his train of thought sets off on one of its schizophrenic walks around the city network. Jerusalem is not an apparatus, but rather a living organism; it is not an answer to spiritual searching but rather an enigma. Here, the world beyond the window and the world beyond the computer monitor reflect each other—in the Jerusalem streets, religious Jews converse in Yiddish and Arabic; on the network, avatars in the form of “literary Negroes” and cats speak Russian, but they speak an argot that Bella-Rachel, who watches both in parallel, cannot understand at all, making her feel like the captain of the sinking ship of reality.448 She senses the fracture between the generation (that exists on the network) and the nation (her forefathers, beyond the window of her room), but both are foreign to her, as only a foreign language can sound when spoken by people close to one, as foreign as a mask covering a familiar face. This is the schizophrenic consciousness of the new indigeneity, network nomadism. The communicative and hermeneutic act is no longer anchored in understanding as identification of the familiar, but rather in the shift to a new and alienated site of the work of remembering. Like Rubina’s protagonists, Bella sees her forefathers on Jerusalem’s streets.449 On the other hand, with the Nesises, the gesture of appropriation that seeks to grab reality by the tail of memory fails even more than it does in Rubina’s work. Her nomads find their forefathers amongst historical pirates, while the Nesises’ nomads see their images in the virtual pirates of the network. Web surfing is motivated by wanderlust, the drive to seek and appropriate new lands. The risk of such a move 448 Ibid. (II, 7, Bella-5, para. 60). 449 See particularly Here Comes the Messiah! (1996).

A Noble Man of Our Times

turns it into a legendary, romantic sea voyage, like the adventure stories from the Age of Discovery. In this manner, web surfers become pirates or conquistadores, conquerors, and raiders, although they are not very successful ones since they have no chance at all of reaching land, not to mention of taking control of it. This network “piracy” or “colonialism” is a metaphor for the indigeneity that takes form in the consciousness of Bella/Rachel staring out her window in Jerusalem. Once again, ­Rubina’s work serves as a basis for comparison. She devoted an entire book to the subject of windows. In her writing, as in the paintings of her husband Boris Karafëlov, windows are necessary so that one can stare through them at the figures of clowns and dancers or flying creatures. The window is made so that one can sit by it, on the boundary between here and there, as a symbol of alienation/identification and the metaphysical leap, the magical flight. Websites, like city streets, are fashioned out of the “airways” of luftmenschen—flying pirates. Those who live in Jerusalem are homeless because this city is the abode of God.450 To be homeless is to be metaphysically indigenous to Jerusalem. This new indigeneity requires and produces new mythology. In their subtitle, the authors label this Jerusalem novel a “sphinx novel.” This definition points to the novel’s principal, constitutive virtual persona, the monstrous figure of the cat-man. According to the novel’s mythology, the sphinx is a lion who, at God’s command, banished humankind from the Garden of Eden; he ate human flesh; was punished by being transformed into a half-lion, half-man; and banished himself from Paradise. The first sphinx found eternal rest embracing the Foundation Stone, the stone which, according to Jewish tradition, lies under the Temple and was the point from which the world was created, and the place where the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem meet. The name of this first sphinx was Jerusalem. The shattering of this myth creates the axis of historical time, the past; yet, at the same time, it also eradicates the present.451 Allergen the cat, the novel’s hero, is the city’s cat and the face of the sphinx. He walks along fences and the walls of the Old 450 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 8, David-1, para. 25). 451 Ibid., (II, 6, Cat-1, para. 11).

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City, like the wall of existence, waiting for the day in which he will be called on to serve as a sacrifice for the purpose of repair (tikkun), for this is his destiny, even if he himself cannot speak of it except via cynical parody.452 He is the “Yom Kippur cat.”453 The novel is intended to debug the lives of its readers, to integrate their software into the great chain of code that is life.454 Thus, both the sphinx and Allergen the cat are figures that overcome victim mentality and thought by way of the seriocomic experience of the sacrifice and its deferral. According to the novel’s deconstructed mythology, the binding of Isaac awakened the lion element in his heart. He turned into a sphinx that almost killed Abraham, but the angel halted his raised paw. Since that “disgrace of nonsacrifice,” there has been a covenant between the sphinxes and God,455 but human beings stole their birthright, and now all the sphinxes are dead. The uncompleted sacrifice, the failed act of constituting the sign and culture, rejects violence only for a time, for it summons the victim to the scaffold. The monster must die in order to redeem the world. This follows the same mythological logic according to which the sphinx cannot die without being reborn, because it is born of the supreme metaphysical power as its actualization, symbol, and substitute. The metaphysical nature of the sphinx’s duality is also symbolized by another myth of Allergen’s, according to which the Sabbath was granted to cats at the same time that the six weekdays were granted to humanity. On the Sabbath, even humans receive an additional soul, thus becoming dual creatures, like the sphinx. In honor of this duality they light two candles, eat two challot, and so on.456 The Rabbinic concept of the additional soul serves not only as the mythopoesis of the cat, but also as the pseudoromantic myth of the binary code by which the computer 452 Ibid. (II, 5, Cat, para. 22). 453 Ibid. (II, 6, ©, para. 47). 454 Despite the different ideological and poetic backgrounds, the Nesises’ Yom Kippur ethos is much like that of Dina Rubina. For example, in Here Comes the Messiah! (1996), the story has the same punchline—the sin offering of a perfect and pure innocent, and it takes place on the night after Yom Kippur. 455 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 6, Cat-1, para. 25). 456 Ibid. (II, 11, Cat, para. 3).

A Noble Man of Our Times

and network operate—one/zero, the presence/absence of the soul—and the longing that results from it. Every duality, including the mathematical-technical one of the network, derives from the split in reality and in the subject. Furthermore, the split in reality cannot come from reality itself, but rather it requires an external, transcendental force and signifies this force. This is the force that distinguishes between the sacred and the profane. Without the duality of chaos and order in the universe, of the God and beast in man—as without pregnancy and motherhood— there can be no life.457 Sacrifice is also a duality between the sacrificing person and the sacrifice itself and is thus a renewal of life. At the end of the novel, the sphinx is reborn from the unification of David and Allergen through an act of sacrifice. This same monster logic produces a technique of self-interpretation. The texts of the novel’s protagonists interpret each other. This technique, which in fact lies at the basis of dialogue or any other act of communication (and in particular constitutes the nucleus of the novel as a genre), is revealed and interpreted here as an almost perverted, if not schizophrenic, compositional and communications trick. This pseudoavant-garde gesture portrays the novel as an autopoetic installation, which dubs with Talmudic discourse the Jerusalem-monster, unconscious of the protagonists and the novel itself. In this way, the Jerusalem indigeneity of the protagonists is indirectly affirmed, even though it remains multifarious, translingual, and networked. For example, when David interprets the cat’s poem on Jacob and Esau, he discovers that the name Jacob appears in its modern Russian form, Yakov (Яков), rather than the archaic Iakov (Иаков). In his view, the cat has appropriated the initial letter I in order to deprive him of the right to Jerusalem and the Internet; in Russian, both of these words also begin with I (Ierusalim/Internet, Иерусалим/Интернет).458 The cat has left this right only to Isaac, the ancient sphinx of his mythology. This use of autointerpretation not only justifies the novel’s multiplicity of voices, and not only reveals the psychotic nature of this multiplicity, but it also 457 Ibid. (II, 12, David-2, para. 6ff). 458 Ibid. (II, 6, David-2, para. 11–59).

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justifies the very existence of a Jerusalem novel in Russian, the alternative indigenous language. Not only the Russian language but also Russian culture is positioned as an alternative cosmos. The cosmos, too, is created through the character’s autointerpretation, which is nothing but a pseudoprefiguration or actualization of the intertext. When the pregnant Bella changes her name to Rachel, she suddenly discovers that she is none other than the biblical Rachel (identification with a mythical character is a common phenomenon, of course): It was I who stole the domestic idols—I burdened my donkey with books; with reminiscences; with audio cassettes; with ice-cold air that breaks you apart when you jump out of the house into the early morning; with such foreign-to-Hebrew—but such familiar—names; with the lifeless wind of the Moscow Metro station; with the white nights of St. Petersburg; with cozy rattling of an empty streetcar; with squeaks of a wooden rickety staircase in a summer house; with wind-driven candy wrappers; with whining in front of the locked door of one’s parents’ house.459

The novel heralds a new, transgressive, indigenous, explicitly nativnyi (native) consciousness,460 one bound up with theft, flight, and nomadism in the creation of a new magic name (myth). This consciousness does not contradict that of the network; the sacrifice—as the dismembering of the subject into multiple schizophrenic, autointerpreting voices—repairs the “disgrace of nonsacrifice,” completes the gesture of cultural appropriation (of the city, symbol, and sacred), and creates the network. The network has not only a present but also a past, a source and history, even if in the form (and at the cost) of a shattered myth. The separate voices aspire to regain their monstrous unity, to return to their mythical source; thus, the network is a configuration of discourse that not only dismembers and separates but also connects and unites. For example, at the end of the novel, the cat returns to the home where, at the beginning, he tasted wine from the 459 Ibid. (II, 7, Bella-2, para. 84). 460 Ibid. (II, 6, Cat-2, para. 4).

A Noble Man of Our Times

stones of Jerusalem and was “abducted” by David. Longing to be a kitten again, he lies on the laps of Bella and Leah. His feelings seem to be directed toward that of the fetuses in their bellies, and his voice becomes much like David’s.461 The voices of other protagonists, such as Cynologist and the cat, merge and blend.462 On the one hand, this is not surprising because the cat is the network and the global brain, pure reason. On the other hand, in the background there is always the possibility that this unity is only one of many alternative possibilities, one of the schizophrenic hallucinations that make up the wretched, imprisoned consciousness of the Jerusalem syndrome. The major characters, the voices in the novel, do not create and are not meant to create the polyphony of a choir. On the contrary, they join together in a monstrous, fantastic, mythic, neurotic (if not surrealistic) collage that recalls the paintings of Elizaveta Mikhailichenko, in which images and shapes flow and spill into each other,463 and the eclectic paintings of Nekod Singer. Yet, as much as the novel is a sphinx, the city of which the novel speaks is even more a sphinx: Jerusalem as a monster, a riddle and solution, and a center of oedipal tragedy and a possibility of its cathartic release. In any case, “it is impossible simply to live in this city.”464 The sense of neurotic messianism is exemplified by the title of Chapter One, “The Jerusalem Syndrome.” Not only do the characters suffer from it, but so do the city’s very stones: The city was built for sacrifices. . . . Its residents sleep, eat, love upon its unused altar. . . . The wine was flowing down and being absorbed by the porous stone, uncovering its relief. The stone was avidly 461 Ibid. (II, 6, Cat-2, para. 1ff). 462 Ibid. (II, 7, Cynologist-1, para. 57ff). 463 See David’s account after picking up the cat from the street: “David’s white T–shirt was quickly drenched with dirt, wine, and sweat; a loathsome red stain appeared right over his heart. Taken together with David’s discolored face, which sort of resembled that of a corpse, it looked pretty creepy. On top of that, the head of a cat with a crazed, drunk expression protruded over the neckline of the T–shirt, along with David’s own neck—a chimera if there ever was one” (ibid., [I, 1, Grisha-2, para. 2]). The sphinx had killed the man and taken his place. 464 Ibid. (I, 4, David-2, para. 52).

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flaring its nostrils; its surface was turning from whitish and dusty into dirty-humid and dark-satiated. The stone was recollecting. . . . People around, once again—owners of wine and blood. And the source of the blood. Lubricant of the creation, overheating, smoking, and worn out.465

At the beginning of the novel, the stone whose memory is the novel’s story begins to remember; this ends at the end of the novel, after “the sphinx”—that is the man (David) merged with the cat (Allergen)— is sacrificed and dies on Temple Mount, and the stones there imbibe the blood and forget themselves, losing consciousness, but they do not find rest.466 The memory of the sphinx’s body, imprinted on Jerusalem’s stones, records the riddle of history and its solution. Gluttony and satiation recall their ancient ritual source. Biological life, everyday life, is included in the metaphysical, idealistic sphere of history. At its transcendental origin is the memory of the vacant altar—the symbol of the double sacrifice, the sacrifice made on the altar, and the altar itself as a victim of the destruction. This double signifier recreates the hypothetical primal act of violence, the originary scene in Girard and Gans’s model: violence toward the sacrifice replaced by violence toward the signifier of the sacrifice. But in any case, violence never ends, it is only postponed, such that its memory and realization, love and anger—in Gans’s terms—exist simultaneously. The picture of the universe, giving off the smoke of the Holocausts of all ages, revolves around the memory of Jerusalem as the source (“If I forget thee . . .”), a picture of the empty center of culture that stands in utter contradiction to the thinking of the network. The novel’s opening sequence is reminiscent of the scene of the stone’s resurrection in Alone in the Desert (1998), a work by Meir Shalev, and may have been influenced by it. In fact, the two works have a more profound connection: both are mythical novels of magical realism, with both the realism and the magic being tied to the memory of matter. In Shalev’s novel, it becomes the work’s central idea and 465 Ibid. (I, 1, preface, para. 1–3). 466 Ibid. (II, 12, ©-3, para. 39).

A Noble Man of Our Times

organizing principle. Despite a few postmodern elements (especially in the later novels), Shalev’s writing does not challenge metaphysical logocentrism. On the contrary, the classic mythological plasticity of the stone’s resurrection in water or wine recreates it and develops it in the messianic-sacrificial, teleological-romantic direction. How does network thinking accord with originary thinking? Cities are always built upon ruins and cemeteries: Can you see?—I nodded at the inconspicuous dust-covered little fountain, no longer shooting water—That’s how everything is built in Jerusalem—the Second Temple gravestone at the base, crusaders’ arc above. The little fountain was built in by Suleiman the Magnificent. . . . That is how our lives in Jerusalem are built—of disparate parts from various pasts that were given a new lease on life.467

History is writing that erases writing. Broad city squares and magnificent parks stand on the former sites of guillotines and slaughterhouses. Temples are built on the ruins of other temples in an effort to obliterate the memories of the old ones and repress the past, but memory resuscitates them and places them in the virtual space of consciousness. If the causal connection between past and present is forbidden in the present discourse, and if the physical link is invisible as a result of the effort to obliterate memory, then the only possible connection is a virtual one— on the network which, at the same time, turns out to be metaphysical. The transcendental source is the source of network thinking; network thinking, under particular discursive circumstances, is the only possible and permissible way to think about history. This is especially true of Jerusalem, as “in this eternal city, every future remains a past.”468 All history is thus created simultaneously; only thus is it possible at all. This kind of thinking is evident in the Nesises’ novel. The extreme historical game is fundamentally connected to the memory of the destruction. It is a game because it replaces and 467 Ibid. (I, 1, Bella-4, para. 5–6). 468 Ibid. (I, 5, David-1, para. 15).

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mimics a reality that is not in the presence of a new historical reality. It is extreme for the same reason: when the protagonists set out for a nighttime adventure in Zedekiah’s Cave, their sense of danger and extreme sport derives from their consciousness of the transhistorical destruction—the destruction of the Temple during the reign of King Zedekiah, reflected in the current destruction and the danger in which the Jewish inhabitants of the Muslim quarter live.469 Every such outing is in fact a visit to a cemetery, which turns the adventure into a macabre, gothic novella. The choice of destination—Zedekiah’s Cave—is, of course, not accidental. It evokes the tragic story of King Zedekiah’s flight from the Babylonians and the collapse of the Judean kingdom as one of the central stories in Western history and literature. The truth is, however, that each site and each path in Jerusalem leads to destruction. Destruction is the paradigm of history itself and thus of the network thinking at the basis of history. In its connectivity, a network connects scattered ruins but leaves them separated. It thus compensates for destruction at the same time that it constitutes a compressed symbol of the destruction. Every move to a different site on the network involves forgetting and excluding the previous site. This is the principal danger of such a move, like Zedekiah’s move from Jerusalem to Jericho—the loss of control, of hierarchy, of order. Switches along the historical and social network links are a flight from kingship. Thus, when Zedekiah is captured, the Babylonians do to him what Oedipus did to himself when he lost his kingdom—they blind and exile him. This is not just a castration—in terms of the network, the event is equivalent to closing a window on a computer screen without any certainty that a new window will open. All that connects to websites is the link, a short stretch of hypertext, but it might always be a “dead link.” This is not an error or a bug, but rather contingency (and thus danger) built into connectivity, into the network’s moves—the possibility of an empty window from which nothing can be seen, of an opening that is not open, of a screen that looks black to the king.

469 Ibid. (I, 5, Bella-2, para. 29ff).

A Noble Man of Our Times

This is what turns a historical act into an extreme adventure. Even if all the links don’t hang in the air but rather are recorded in a system file—a symbol of historical narrative—as with myths, there can be no certainty that they are indeed linked to each other. So, for example, on their night journey to Zedekiah’s Cave, the protagonists encounter an elderly ultra-Orthodox Jew walking alone on the streets of the Jewish quarter: “A crazed look of bulging eyes. Dirt-splattered fringes trailing down his pants like a rabid dog’s saliva.”470 What is the source of this strange, grotesque, and surprising image? Does it come from the mad dog in Agnon’s Only Yesterday, another novel of immigration, set in part in Jerusalem? It is hard to say. Whatever the case, even if this intertextual “link” works, it is not necessary but rather contingent. Moreover, the contingent link is the essence of another “extreme sport”—the mystical quest in David’s insane consciousness that is caught in the Jerusalem syndrome, the “extreme” of sacrificial death for both martyr and persecutor. History is viewed as a network, but a network is also viewed as history. This explains the existential plight of the individual. The novel’s central characters are childhood friends, from the same class at school. Now they are in Jerusalem and one of them, Bella, experiences the existential alienation so characteristic of immigrants at the “middle of our life path”: “Cynologist quipped that the last time the present company had drunk some pop wine together was in the foyer of Grisha’s house. But now we’re outside—outside the foyer, childhood, city renamed, country fallen apart, each other, ourselves. . . . We all are no longer ‘we,’ but for some reason, we came here. . . . What for? And what is the rest for?”471 Like Leningrad, which expunged its name to become St. Petersburg, which expunged its name to become Petrograd, which expunged its name to become Leningrad, Jerusalem has expunged/ inscribed its past. New names/myths rise on the ruins of the old. Cities and lands, like human beings, step outside themselves and are no longer identical to themselves. This leave-taking, or exit, creates the same 470 Ibid. (I, 5, Bella-2, para. 52). 471 Ibid. (I, 1, Bella-1, para. 25–26).

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duality and multiplicity of moments of historical time that can coexist only in the form of an epistemic network. Bella’s feeling of alienation and self-alienation reflects “schizophrenia,” in the postmodern network sense that is, at the same time, romantic and existential, and which has no meaning without the concept of the subject-personality as a source. Meaning is defined by the “difference and repetition” of a series of signs on the network, but consciousness asks “what for?” and the web surfer remains forever outside the network, transcendental to it and to every difference or repetition. This transcendence enables us to imagine the network as history. Bella’s words in the passage mentioned above reverberate in other things she says: “My schoolmate’s face materialized before me with a gloomy but broad smile right here, in the center of Jerusalem’s Old City. It could not be real, but it was.”472 Jerusalem is an alternative/ parallel city, hallucinated and ecstatic, a drug-city that creates a different sort of consciousness that strips the ego of itself, an addiction that cannot be overcome.473 So Grisha says: “I like being a guest in my own home. In my own time. In my own body.”474 This sense of alienation from here-and-now can signify existential anxiety or hidden, almost forbidden pleasure, as in the case of Grisha. Whatever the case, it signifies a split in reality and the creation of an alternative/parallel historical multiplicity. This sense of being “a guest of oneself” is a version of the theme of the Wandering Jew, the eternal nomad; it is also a version of the theme “I go forth toward myself,” which can even have a catastrophic connotation, as in Agnon.475 Yet, the split in the subject that this involves is an apparatus for constituting the subject; similarly, breaking biological determinism is a condition for creating history. History, all of it, is always an alternative history, just as in the rhetorical act every myth is always a deviation from another myth. Story and discourse are born by breaking the monolith of silence. Speech requires 472 Ibid. (I, 1, Bella-2, para. 29). 473 Ibid. (I, 6, Bella-1, para. 45). 474 Ibid. (I, 1, Grisha-3, para. 2). 475 See Yaniv Hagbi, Language, Absence, Play: Judaism and Superstructuralism in the Poetics of S. Y. Agnon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009).

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the speaker to step outside himself and his identity and, thus, be in more than one place—the exact opposite of the stillness of a historical archive. What exists is that which is not in its proper place. In other words, that which hosts itself, in a temporary and almost random way, is what is redeemed. Such autohospitality is the essence of the signification, according to the metaphysical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, who in Time and the Other constructs the existence of the self on the existence of the other.476 This metaphysics is also the basics of the novel’s dialogic nature, which can be monologic as well, but it cannot but aspire to the infinity of reflections in the two parallel mirrors of thinking—the same infinity chosen by Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West as the central characteristic of Faustian European civilization. The Faust theme—that of the double, the copy, the other—is thus also tied to the issue of existential alienation and nomadic immigration literature. The Faust theme also reflects the experience of “the reality that cannot be but is,” the experience of the purely and truly possible, infinite (because it is) unrealized. In other words, the experience of “me hosting myself” is the Faustian, European foundation myth that constitutes the nucleus of the novelistic narrative that is central to European culture. It is also the nucleus of the nomadic, questing ethos that constitutes the novelistic narrative in all its possible chronotopes, including those described by Bakhtin and those that were not. It has already been said of the classical novel that all its characters are really one. However, the novel under discussion here offers a chronotope that is more characteristic of the modern antinovel, and it has its own uniqueness: the protagonist taking form on his own network as a contingent, historic network. Such networks extend within and around characters and sometimes merge with one another. Grisha’s internal personality network is bound up with the network of his drawings, and since the drawings are of the characters, sites, and historical subjects that appear in the novel, these two networks are bound up with the historical network. Grisha seems to try (fruitlessly) to capture time in the network: “On 476 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).

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my historical canvasses, I caught time; I donned garments of the respective epochs; I charmed my endowment, as though it were a snake. The time, however, passed by the street magician on the roadside, without even casting a fleeting glance at him, without slowing down.”477 When Grisha’s gesture of appropriating time fails, he merges into the network that commodifies time—he, as David puts it, “steals the past from King Solomon” by taking part in the smuggling and sale of archaeological artifacts from the Temple Mount.478 “He robs the city so as to buy a shroud with his ill-gotten earnings.”479 This tangle of networks merges into the network of relationships among the protagonists, and between their relationships as models of the paintings and the painted protagonists. Finally, it creates a network from their ideas, political opinions, the reality of Jerusalem today, and its almost-secret subterranean archaeological life. The novel’s protagonists call surfing this inconceivable network of networks “extreme history,” likening it to an extreme sport. The protagonists go on adventure hikes to historical sites, both physical and virtual. For this purpose, they wear magic shoes made by a “mad Jewish shoemaker” from Jerusalem, shoes that sound like they come from the pages of Borges or Pavić: “Shoes like these can remind, stylize, change [their wearer], and lead to entirely different paths.”480 On one of these outings, as a kind of “spiritual exercise,”481 David and Grisha descend to the Gihon Spring below Jerusalem’s walls dressed as King David and his chieftain Joab, on their way to capture Jebus, as Jerusalem was then known.482 The risk involved in this “extreme” game involves more than its players going to dangerous places. It also includes the blurring of the psychocultural boundaries between the heroes of the novel and their doubles from other times—that is, other places in the network, such as between Grisha and his paintings of women, on the one hand, and King Solomon and his harem on the other. This blurring of 477 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 9, Grisha, para. 1). 478 Ibid. (II, 9, David-2, para. 79). 479 Ibid. (II, 10, David, para. 4). 480 Ibid. (I, 1, Grisha-3, para. 12). 481 Ibid. (I, 2, Miau!, para. 30). 482 Ibid. (I, 2, David-1, para. 8). Cf. the role-playing game in Sobolev’s Jerusalem, 348–360.

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boundaries also has a classical source—the blurring of the boundary between a person and the protagonist of a story, like that between the creator and his creation, thus reminding of The Master and Margarita. Grisha the painter calls himself “the Jerusalem master,” and one cannot but see the allusion to Bulgakov’s novel, especially as one of the storylines in it takes place in ancient Jerusalem. It is also one of the only examples of an imagined Jerusalem as a presence in modern Russian literature. It could be thought of as one of the first network novels (in the essential, not technical sense, of course). Probably no other book has wielded more influence on the generation that became active in the 1980s, when Bulgakov’s novel was reissued in the Soviet Union after decades of suppression. In addition, it made a profound impression on other figures in Russian-language Israeli fiction. We can easily see its footprints, for example, in the work of Dina Rubina and Nekod Singer. Its greatest influence is evident in the widespread theme (or mytheme) of the revival of history and narrative, making them present and actualized, when their price is making the artist a sacrifice. The creator must make room for his work, just as God must make room for the created world. Dualism comes into being and is immediately canceled out dialectically in a gesture of erasing the boundary or, more precisely, turning the boundary into that of the work’s—the narrative’s living space. David says of his and his companions’ “historical extreme sport” that “it had all that was needed to be a good adventure. A peripeteia, a climax, catharsis, and even an epilogue. It was all there in abundance— experiences and adrenalin, play and not-play.”483 This boundary between play and not-play pervades the entire network, with the sacrificial victim at its center. The novel’s leitmotif is the search for a sacrifice and the imagining of its dismemberment, the chase, and human transformation into an animal hunted by the great satanic beast.484 It appears suddenly, under the influence of David’s half-crazed mind, but even more surprising is the feeling that the appearance of the motif is no surprise. It has not 483 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (I, 2, David-2, para. 3). 484 Ibid. (I, 1, Bella-5, para. 20ff).

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been prepared for by the plot’s structure or the nature of the characters, or by the novel’s fabric of motifs and symbols. The Jerusalem syndrome shows itself to be a sufficient explanation of the madness and of what may be defined as the “sacrificial passion,” the anxious ecstasy that produces the originary mythic scene of violence, the attempt to prevent the abortion of the ostensibly designated sacrifice. Jerusalem’s stones and mythical sites, such as the Valley of Hinnom, serve as a sufficient (and perhaps even surfeit) backdrop to the tragedy. Within his psychosis, David senses how the city-lion awakens and that the time when the revelations of the prophets will come to be is drawing close. Even the cynical Bella absorbs some of the animal-like unrest that saturates the text, which in this passage displays the features of a gothic, grotesque thriller. However, her cynicism and self-irony save not only her and her companion from the temptation to be a sacrifice—they save the text from stylistic failure. In this gothic novella, they are but readers, actors in a theater of the absurd485 who sometimes enter too deeply into their roles. If they are victims, it is only of a raving delirium, and this hallucination ends as suddenly as it began. It is the suddenness of the opening and closing of windows on websites; the noir micronovel comes to an end with a single click and in its place appears a comment window. Style and discourse shift in response to changes in mood, rather than vice versa, but, this being a network, the abandoned styles never disappear—they remain in parallel dimensions. The characters can never cease to be potential sacrificial victims—they can only postpone the sacrifice. At first, a nameless man is murdered in the Valley of Hinnom. Then Martha is murdered in Zedekiah’s Cave. Leah the psychiatrist, David’s lover, is slashed by the claws of a mysterious beast and badly injured. David saves her, and she tells only him that she was attacked by a lion, whose shadow she saw. David’s paranoid mind sees this as a conspiracy: a mystical monster in the form of a lion, somehow a composite of numerous cats into which it dissolves in flight, is roaming Jerusalem, seeking human victims. With a kind of black humor, David 485 Ibid. (I, 1, Bella-5, para. 80).

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calls it the Thousand Bodies Project, a parallel to Grisha’s Thousand Wives of King Solomon project.486 The city of David and Solomon consumes its inhabitants,487 but the murder victims are not really appropriate for this role, as David sees it; for example, Leah is not a first-born child designated to be offered to God. However, with a little work, he is able to bend the facts to fit his concept. Grisha has painted portraits of Martha and Leah as part of his project, and David thinks this is the reason they have been killed. In other words, anyone who plays at being a historical double becomes a victim. Why? The virtual game, and perhaps art as a whole, is a deadly mirror, a passage in the world of the dead. This symbolic motif, not very original in and of itself, here serves the fantastical-philosophical chronotope of a wormhole in time, part of a concept of interlocking parallel worlds. The game, or painting, produces a surfeit of meaning, an inflation of being in one of the worlds, automatically creating a deficiency or hole in another world. This exchange of surfeit and deficiency is not neutral; it is perceived by those who experience it as a transgression. As such, it is bound up with guilt feelings and sometimes even self-punishment. The motif of creation as a sin is deeply rooted, manifesting itself in the proscription against creating a graven image. More deeply, it produces the ancient taboo against self-fertilization (androgyneity) and against fertilization of one’s source—that is, the taboo against sexual relations with one’s mother. Anthropologically, this taboo derives from the originary scene of the triangle of mimetic desire, in Girard’s terms—competition between the men of the tribe, between fathers and sons, and a specific case of the latter, the competition between the god (totem) and man. The rejection of violence in this scene is what constitutes culture and ethics, but it demands placing the sacrifice in the center, while at the same time concealing (whether by dismembering it or, according to Gans, by replacing it with a linguistic sign). The primal sacrifice is that object or deed, body or gesture, which constitutes the surfeit of 486 Ibid. (I, 7, David-2, para. 55). 487 Ibid. (I, 7, David-2, para. 181).

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being—the competition between parallel worlds is rejected only by repairing the inequality between them, an amputation of the protruding organ, castration (which is the reason why the phallus often functions as a totem and as a symbolic sacrifice). Thus, also in I/e_rus.olim (2004), someone must die—human beings or their portraits. This is the logic that motivates David. He thrusts a knife into Grisha’s hand and burns his paintings of women in order to halt his project (in parallel, Lin, the father of the designated messiah, is murdered, which arrests the project’s mystical aspect). This serves as an offering meant to assuage the wrath of the gods, to balance the cosmic forces, to counterbalance the curse of history and the blessing of repair and redemption. In David’s view, and in accordance with the Babylonian Talmud,488 the multiplicity of women in King Solomon’s harem is the cause of the collapse and dismemberment of his kingdom: “Because of his wives’ pagan worship, the great lion of wrath was released, the kingdom fell apart, and the ten tribes were lost.”489 David calls this catastrophe—this transgressive surfeit of being, in which one kingdom becomes two—the “allergization of history.” It is not pagan worship itself but rather the creation of surfeit/duplication (the net multiplication of doubles) that is the allergen, which in large quantities is liable to cause “anaphylactic shock” to occur in history.490 Jerusalem constantly totters on the edge of such shock. When it approaches, the cat feels it as the contrary movement of millstones: the fossilized sky and the city revolve around the Foundation Stone on the Temple Mount. The millstones grind both humans and cats, until the upper firmament entirely expunges the lower firmament—the city.491 This is the apocalypse in Allergen’s mythology, an upside-down reflection of David’s sacrificial mythology. David and the cat serve as the two electrodes of a virtual device, a kind of seismograph that records the tremors of geocultural and metaphysical strata. This device is the 488 Sanhedrin 21b. 489 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (I, 7, David-2, para. 96). 490 Ibid. (I, 7, David-2, para. 107). 491 Ibid. (II, 10, Cat-1, para. 1–3).

A Noble Man of Our Times

web, a spider’s lair with the sphinx at its center, the network. The medieval image of the cosmic millstones grows out of a perception of our times as a new Middle Ages, in which the altar in the Temple is replaced by the millstone of foreign, alienated history (although crushing and grinding were part of the Temple ritual). Human beings are brought as sacrifices because, in the absence of a Temple, they cannot be replaced by animals.492 In the end, the movement of the millstones halts, the Sphinx is resurrected, and the city is redeemed, after which it makes a new sacrifice—Jerusalem is shaken by a new terror attack. As the cat says, netneism is but an artificial kidney that cannot prolong the Sphinx’s life by much.493 It all seems as if the Nesises create their own allergenic apocalypse only in order to present the network as an eschatological contingent security network in which redemption is possible, but not guaranteed. The network demands human sacrifices, but it also restores the human, personal dimension to history and thus, at least for a limited period of time, replaces the paradigm of the stones with one of the living organisms, the machine with the ethical and free personality. It may well be that the reference to kidneys is not a random reference to an often-transplanted organ. In Hebrew, the kidney, kilya, is associated with moral sensibility—the expression musar kelayot means “remorse.” The network thus becomes the incarnation of the ethical indeterminacy of historical individualism. Here everything is possible, and responsibility is thus imposed on the individual. As in the Kantian view, freedom means responsibility. Responsibility, however, means self-constitution and, at the same time, sacrifice of the self. The constitution of life is bound up with danger to life, and the reverse. In the midst of a deadly attack, terror gives way to the laughter of Jerusalem’s young people, to humor—black, but redemptive and reviving.494 The allergenic apocalypse is thus a new eschatological myth. An eschatological myth takes form around the sacrificial victim, the cat, intended to explain its purpose. An indeterminate number of 492 Ibid. (II, 10, Cat-2, para. 3). 493 Ibid. (II, 10, Cat-2, para. 4). 494 Ibid. (II, 10, ©-2, para. 101).

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red cats incarnate themselves as the Red Lion, the priest, and sacrificial victim rolled into one: [People] are so much hardened in sin that only the best of them would be able to purify themselves and this—only by using the ashes of the Red Heifer. However, when the Heifer comes to our world, there would hardly be anyone worthy of offering it up as a sacrifice. And then the world would get stuck, and time would stop. The Red Lion was granted to prevent this from happening. The Red Lion would lie in ambush under the altar and wait for someone worthy of the Heifer’s immolation. The Lion waits till the very last moment, but if no one is up for the task, it leaps out from under the altar and kills the Heifer just a second before the world gets stuck—in order to stop it from being halted. The world would in any case drown in the Red Blood, but at least ruins would remain.495

To his astonishment and pride, Allergen the cat discovers that he has become a Red Cat, of the flesh of the Red Lion—the Messiah— whose ancestor was the Golden Cat, the “Allergenic” version of the Golden Calf.496 This knowledge comes to him as he turns into a computer network. He now lives not only in the physical world and within his limited conscious mind, but also in the virtual world of information, within an infinite structure of knowledge. This incarnation parallels the discovery of faith in the human heart, except in the cat’s case, the heart lacks the proper pathos—venomously ironic, he compares the network in his head to “an endless garbage dump of information.”497 What differentiates between the cat and the omniscient God is the act of creation, and this act is meant to actualize itself in the sacrifice that will redeem the world or, to be more precise, build it from its ruins. In this theological-cosmological flicker of destruction and creation, one can make out the flicker of the informational code: zero-one. It’s all very simple: the world is destroyed and created, turned off and turned on at 495 Ibid. (II, 4, Cat-1, para. 21–24). 496 Ibid. (II, 7, Cat-1, para. 15ff). 497 Ibid. (II, 4, Cat-2, para. 6).

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any given moment—anywhere, anytime. The mathematical algorithm from the field of information and computer science is a reflection of the ancient, dualistic cabalistic mystery. Alongside the theme of the victim, and seemingly separate from it, another theme develops—that of the Messiah. Bella ostensibly bears in her womb the designated Messiah-child, part of the biblical genetic engineering project aimed at discovering the Messiah’s genome. In the passage that follows Bella’s jokes, but concealed behind her irony and cynicism, is the passion (as embodied in Christian discourse) that displaces the meaning-creating energy of the sacrificial altar into the teleology of sacred history: Oh God, give me some water. And I’ll bear your child in exchange—a Messiah—and I will become that broad, the Mary named Bella. Well, God, how can you ask “What for?” To vanquish pigheaded chaos—to slice through it with bright meaning. To perform a cesarean section on the darkness and engender hope in the form of a genetic schizoid, in the form of a little Messiah. And I want to be his biological mother. Because I like when things that happen to me take on meaning, and I want to make this meaning to get as close as possible to the peak of sacrality. Oh God, what am I talking about! I’m already carrying the Messiah!498

The sacrifice appears as a central motif in the works of two other Russian-language Israeli writers as well—Dina Rubina and Naum Weiman. In Rubina’s works, the messianic dimension is prominent, while in Weiman’s case the emphasis is on personal and cultural heroism. The Nesises use of the sacrifice motif is closer to that of Rubina in one important aspect—it involves a dramatic disguise, one that borders on the grotesque and the carnival. The network game is a masquerade in which the mask does not hide one’s real self but, on the contrary, actualizes the player’s own myth. So the writers © put it paradoxically: “On the network everything is as in life. It’s a chronic carnival, written in 498 Ibid. (I, 6, Bella-1, para. 59).

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the form of a play.”499 However, it is an anticarnivalesque carnival, similar to the eclectic carnival of half-transparent masks in the works of Nekod Singer. Grisha also says as much: “In that tattered circus who knows what happened that is real, authentic history and life.”500 Yet, while Singer, like Rubina and Weiman, orbits around the neoromantic and neomodernist gravitational center, the Nesises remain hostage to network thinking and thus to disguise. The sacrificial victim is an integral part of the carnival, as it is of every ritual. Every carnival has a sacred element,501 just as every ritual has an element of humor.502 The device of substitution, inherent in any ritual, is simply disguise, a game of parallel, linked identities built into the simultaneity of consciousness. The sacred is a transcendent identity unequal to itself, in its passion for impossible empirical realization; it is an explosion of unrealized possibilities that are thus seen as extremely true and real. In this sense, it could be said that the consciousness of the sacred is the epistemological (and perhaps theological) kernel of the network. Here, as at the Delphic shrine, the believer dons a ritual mask in order to know himself. The network is a temple. This is the new paradigm, replacing earlier ones that sought to produce alternatives to the temple of faith—temples of reason, knowledge, and enlightenment, temples of art and romance, and the mechanical temple of modernism. In this new temple, each individual plays the role of both priest and sacrifice, as well as other roles. Grisha speaks of David’s aptitude for incarnation in a role: “It’s not connected to the game, he simply becomes another, and these series of incarnations are long and stop for no reason or simply out of foolishness.”503 Despite the carnival 499 Ibid. (II, 1, Cat-2, para. 85). 500 Ibid. (I, 3, Grisha, para. 6). 501 See Freidenberg, Poetics of plot and genre, 134–178, 260–299 and Freidenberg, “Proiskhozhdenie parodii” [The origin of parody], in Trudy po znakovym sistemam [Studies in signs systems], vol. 6 (Tartu: Tartu State University, 1973), 490–497. 502 See Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, in The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 279–295. 503 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (I, 4, Grisha-1, para. 6).

A Noble Man of Our Times

connotation of the word “foolishness,” Grisha’s statement rejects the carnivalesque—Historical Extreme sport is a fairly serious matter. Furthermore, according to an approving Grisha, David has no sense of humor; thus, their adventures and disguises do not belong to what Bakhtin called “the popular culture of laughter;” rather, they have to do with what can be called “the culture of the possible.” Anything can happen, and anyone can be anyone, not because life is a carnival but the opposite—because of Jerusalem’s unique mystical union, and because this possibilism enables one, in Leibnitz’s manner, to proclaim this world the best of all possible worlds: “While living in this city, everyone becomes everything, and all he can do is just state the obvious and watch his transformations. And consider it the best of whatever is possible for a human being.”504 The writer couple—Anat and Max, the dissimilar doubles of Mikhailichenko and Nesis—in a sense, constitute the basic component of the temple, the network, the computer, and the text. This is one of the word and letter games the authors play, although it is not possible to render it in English. In Russian, Nesis reads Не-С-и-С (No-S-and-S or No-C-and-C). The name thus contains a pair of S’s; the first one is preceded, as it were, by a minus sign, designating “no,” while the second is preceded by a plus sign—the illogical syllogism of conjunction “and” of two opposed sentences. Negative and positive, feminine and masculine, anima and animus, no and yes, original and reproduction— all are united in this name. This is the computer’s language of 0s and 1s, the “binary state” of the writer-couple. “Every change in their relation can produce irrevocable results,” we are told, but “the balance between them is [also] stable.”505 They are compared to the two valves of a bivalve mollusk shell, between which “is deposited the energy of joint creation, emerging between them as solely a text.”506 All is written in the binary language of the computer-mollusk—the text and the universe. 504 Ibid. (I, 7, David-2, para. 185). 505 Ibid. (I, 4, David-2, para. 4). 506 Ibid.

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It is to the home of this couple—the nonlinear dynamic system, the human text-producing computer—that David brings a stray kitten with red fur. The kitten will find a home with © as well as a virtual double on the network, and at the end of the novel, he will become a sacrifice. From the start, Max compares the cat to a “brand new text,”507 marking the unity of the text, the network, and the sacrifice dynamics. The kitten lives in the pantheist and pantextual pannetwork as the embodiment of its own secret—as the sphinx. Notably, the process is reversed here—rather than a human being querying the network, the network riddles the human being. This happens not only on the computer network but also, for example, on the telephone network, which is referred to as “pure magic,” with an incoming call or text message likened to the casting of lots or putting a question to the Urim and Tumim, the oracle contained in the breastplate of the Temple’s Great Cohen.508 This signifies the contingency of communication and understanding, as in Derrida’s concept of the postcard.509 The query/response or search/results relationship prevails between the writers © and the real world, and the medium in which the search takes place is language. Language is meant to provide answers to the riddles posed by the real world. Most of ©’s time is devoted to surfing the web suspended between words and things. This process is exemplified in translation, and it is in translation that it reaches the height of suspense and power, producing the thrill of discovery and innovation. Translation is the beating heart, the central server of the network, its unseen source. In one of their searches, the authors discover one of the Hebrew terms for “curb,” a pair of words that translates as “tongue [language] of the stone.” They are amused and astounded by the possibilities for word games, such as “stones’ language” and “language stone.”510 Jerusalem’s stones thus become the network and language itself. The network is first and foremost a language, the combinatorial 507 Ibid. (I, 4, David-2, para. 23). 508 Ibid. (I, 4, David-2, para. 42). 509 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 510 Ibid. (II, 1, Cat-1, para. 89).

A Noble Man of Our Times

grammar (in Chomsky’s terms) of reality and mind, a choice among many possibilities. Language is the network because it is always a translation—the translation of the act of choice into the chosen meaning, of putting together the puzzle of stones—into the character it constructs. Jerusalem—the riddle-city, the network-city—is built out of stone language or its curb-tongue stones, but this is how every text is constructed, poetic texts in particular. Jerusalem is thus a poetic creation that dictates strict conditions of life and writing to the writers who live there. They must endlessly contend with it, their images and symbols vying with the images and symbols encoded in the names scattered around the city—the names of streets, neighborhoods, buildings, and historical sites—the artistic nature of which is fully revealed in the translingual translational space. The translation is not just from Hebrew to Russian and back; in a certain sense, every writer in Jerusalem is no more than a translator of the city’s language into other tongues. In this sense, Jerusalem symbolizes the source—the origin and the final goal of every translation and every writing.511 Jerusalem’s metaphysical presence—sacred or heavenly Jerusalem—grants all language a metaphysical dimension, thus undermining the network and surface thinking of the Deleuzian kind. To be more precise, it testifies to the fact that network thinking and combinatorial perception do not necessarily lead to relativism and the refutation of the metaphysics of the origin. Multilingualism and translationalism, playfulness and alternativeness, simply expose their fundamental impulses—passion for Jerusalem and its stones, desire, the determined inner need to decipher the city, to read it, to dissolve the language of its stones in other languages, so as to “surf” its sidewalks and roads undisturbed. Jerusalem is thus depicted as the antipode of Babylon, and the possibility of translation contained within it as the antipode of the destruction of Derrida’s Tower of Babel. Furthermore, in the romantic Jerusalem night, under the influence of “Jerusalem’s impudent stars,” the writers © find themselves in an almost deterministic 511 Cf. Nekod Singer’s view of this in his Drafts of Jerusalem (2013), where all the world’s cities are, in a sense, rough drafts of Jerusalem, while at the same time more real than the ideal they aspire to.

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frame of mind, bound up with multiplicity and possibilism in such a natural and buoyant way as to be nearly unbearable: The new southern moon, lazily reclining like the man of the house, was anticipating the fullness of life and body. Under his narrow, childlike face facing toward the future, it somehow seemed that the firmament was extending itself into a universe of omnipresent coincidences and possibilities—just like the Jerusalem stars, impertinent in their ubiquity; it somehow seemed that, in fact, one only had to look around and start living in the direction one liked. And everything would come true, as it must. Because if the starry sky exists above us, then the laws of harmony must ever apply, must spread, must suppress everything that stirs, thinks, and feels.512

Moreover, these “laws of harmony,” with or without the ironic quotation marks, acquit the virtual world as well. At about midpoint in the novel, the authors © create the virtual Allergen the cat in a literary forum. This act is presented in a flexible and dramatic way: they grab the cat by the nape of his neck and cast him into “this crowd.”513 The cat breaches the boundary of the computer monitor and finds himself on the other side, in the virtual world, like Alice beyond the looking glass. From this point onward, this virtual world is perceived from two points of view—that of the writers ©, who compose the cat’s text in the forum, and that of the cat, who tells the readers about his experiences and adventures in this fantastical mirror-image world. From here on out, it becomes clear that the cat’s monologues up until this point were spoken by the virtual cat. The result is a loop: the text creates the network that creates the text. Such is the paradox of creation and of language: the artist does not exist prior to his art; a person does not speak a language, but rather the language speaks in/ through the person. The authors of the novel arrive at the Kantian solution (and dead end): the cat (the idea, the network, the virtual, true and possible space-time) exists a priori as the authors’ source of subjectivity and consciousness, and the cat’s “projection” 512 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 1, ©, last para.). 513 Ibid. (II, 2, Cat, para. 1).

A Noble Man of Our Times

onto the network actualizes him in experience, that is, in empirical history, as an icon and thus returns it to its source. The casting of the cat into the network is the projector’s light of consciousness, a gesture of thinking and creation. The Nesises’ Kantian cat unites, as the Sphinx does, knowledge, desire, and beauty. The cat’s poetry grows out of this unity. Of course, the cat himself does not know where he gets all his knowledge and talent from, because he is “no more” than the gaze of the authors © or, more precisely, the tracks of that gaze’s impact on the screen of experience. It is from such tracks that the network is composed, and they also actualize the possibilities in what seems to be reality. This actualization is itself no more than mythopoesis, founded on miracle. It is no coincidence that the Kantian miracle instantiates in the creative production of ©—the couple’s two-part, bivalve structure is like an incubator constructed specially for human or even divine creation. This is the magic by which a grain of sand becomes a pearl, “turning chance into miracle.”514 The miracle is also symbolized by the cat, in the act of the cat being cast into the network. His source is transcendent, purposefully ideal, but its contingent and possibilist actualization is unpredictable and nonlinear. The red cat’s consciousness splits, as does the consciousness of anyone who participates in an Internet forum under a moniker. In the case of the cat, however, the metaphor is actualized—the split is deep, schizophrenic. From this point onward, his conversation includes alien snatches of memory, quoted from unknown sources. These are unfamiliar voices, but without any indication of polyphony. This is a state of illness that the cat himself defines as “an upset brain.”515 Via this illness, the cat seems to become one with the computer. He suddenly understands, like Agnon’s dog, Balak (Only Yesterday),516 that it is the world around him that is mad, not him. “They took me by the nape of the neck and cast me into a sick world,” he says.517 He understands that it is the city itself that did this. The cat symbolizes the forlorn and caring consciousness caught in the 514 Ibid. (II, 3, David-1, para. 3). 515 Ibid. (II, 3, David-1, para. 82). 516 Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Only Yesterday, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 483ff. 517 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, I/e_rus.olim (II, 3, David-1, para. 82).

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network of knowledge-history, who is, as Heidegger conceived it, thrown (Geworfen) into the world.518 The Heideggerian “being-in-the-world” means “being-in-the-network.” However, in contrast to Heidegger, this fact of having been cast into the world is not perceived in the novel as an existential state, but rather as an illness. There is another crack in this actualization of the Heideggerian concept of having been thrown into the world—the undermining of the home. The home of © is violated from the moment its door opens to a Jerusalem street cat. The crack widens as the cat comes and goes as it wishes, without any loyalty to the home, until he defecates on the couch’s slipcover—a symbolic act that leads formally to his punishment, the act of grabbing him by the nape of the neck and casting it out. This muddling of the zones in the cat’s life leads directly to a muddling of existential spheres, in general—authentic and virtual, transcendental and immanent. Moreover, the cat-city-network is a muddling of the cat himself. David calls the soiled slipcover a plashchanitza, the shroud or robe in which Jesus was wrapped, the Shroud of Turin. At this point, the muddle is no longer just a muddle, but a miracle, a union of the heavenly and the mundane (the ontological and the ontic, the software and the hardware) of the cat’s personality. And it is the cat who, in the end, will be the sacrificed so that the home and the world can endure. This is what is going on in David’s feverish brain, on the basis of the philosophical, artistic views of the authors ©, as he constructs his theology of the network. It constitutes itself and justifies itself by means of the sacrifice; the virtual character, despite the pagan mythology that envelops it, is built fundamentally on the basis of Christian theology, on the idea of the incarnation and suicide of God as a messianic avatar. The purpose is redemption—the establishment and resurrection of the network. Incarnation, the change in the divine nature becomes an expression of love, of which the sacrifice is a condition. This love is the same Eros that causes the growth and spread of the network—cosmic avatars connected by lines of libidinous-informational energy. 518 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1953, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 131.

A Noble Man of Our Times

This is a pseudo-Platonic cosmos in which information is the object of desire; the subject (the self) cannot be distinguished from the object, and the other subject is no different from the self because it is made up of the same desire. Only self-sacrifice redeems this cosmos, while at the same time it is transforming the economy of free exchange of information desire into an ethic, an economy of hierarchical values. It resembles the transition from market to supermarket—the grotesque, fossilized, dead model of the network. This transition, like the transformation of atomic energy to mechanical energy, cannot transpire without an explosion. The network’s sacrificial victim absorbs most of the force of the explosion and, in doing so, protects the consumers of the “supermarket chain” from the shock of the loss of desire. The customers construe this as an expression of love. Network love conceals the painful truth, just as the Apollonian dream conceals Dionysian intoxication. Platonic Eros turns upside-down; on the network, the truth is no longer the goal of desire. Instead, the object is the goal of (imagined, alien) desire. Instead of an erotic, even if abortive, gesture toward the object of desire, we get the mechanical gesture of an avatar—animation instead of life. In this cosmology, myths are the code, the language in which the cosmic computer software is written. The binary 0-1 code (nonexistence/existence, destruction/creation) is the basis not only of all the cosmological computer programs but also of anthropological programs. First and foremost among the latter is ethics—permitted/forbidden, good/evil. When David adopts this idea, he conceives the possibility of the coming of a virtual messiah.519 This basic code creates the impression of binary dominance in the universe. However, it should not be forgotten that the myth of the 0-1 pair is but a development of the initial unity that precedes it, a unity that has a variety of names—a magical name, a symbol, a source, the Big Bang, pure possibility, the heavenly Torah, infinity. The quantum cloud of possibilities—in which wave and matter are one, wherein that which is and that which is not are subsumed by the uncertainty principle—precedes to its miraculous 519 Ibid. (II, 11, Cynologist, para. 72).

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actualization in word and experience. This may be the network’s most precise, mythical mathematical model. The Nesises’ poetics searches tirelessly for new metaphors for this model, motherhood—or more precisely, pregnancy—being one of the main ones. The pregnant woman is the basic cell, the model of the network, the foundation myth from which the anthropology of the network grows. There are several pregnancies in the novel: Bella and Leah’s, that of the cat whelping in a cave in west Jerusalem, and finally the virtual pregnancy of the pair of authors ©, in whose seashell-womb the cat/grain-of-sand turns into Allergen the pearl. All of these pregnancies are unified by their uncertain paternity and the destiny of the child. Bella might be impregnated by Lin, not directly but via cabalistic genetic engineering, and her baby might well be the Messiah. Yet, Lin is not the baby’s father, although no one knows who is.520 The connection between © and Allergen the virtual cat and his texts remains in doubt throughout the novel; the cat, like Gogol’s nose, receives autonomy. In the end, a number of people write in his name: the authors © lend the cat to Bella—both the physical and the virtual cat521—and Cynologist hacks the cat’s password in the forum and, together with David, writes in his name. Furthermore, Leah’s patients act in the network under Allergen’s name, under her guidance, as part of their psychotherapy (as well as in an effort to influence David indirectly). Leah becomes pregnant by David, but David fears that the Sphinx, not he, is the real father, and that the fetus is a sphinx or a cat. It is not even certain whether Leah will give birth to the baby, as she considers the possibility of an abortion. One thing is clear to her and the others: “Whatever was growing within her wanted very much to live.”522 This being the case, the basic unit of the network-myth is not binary, nor even triadic (fathermother-child). It is rather a cloud of possibilities, unstable and indeterminate. The motif of motherhood plays a unique role in this perception, and its centrality is similar to the use of the same motif by Rubina. Furthermore, both in Rubina’s work and in that of the Nesises, motherhood is connected to messianism and to the aesthetic, mythic subject of the 520 Ibid. (II, 9, David-1, para. 151). 521 Ibid. (II, 12, ©-1, para. 23). 522 Ibid. (II, 9, David-1, para. 24).

A Noble Man of Our Times

transformation of the inanimate into the animate. The more messianism is perceived as contingent or problematic, the more motherhood takes on a tragic cast—or at the very least, a state of existential anxiety—leading to the tragedy at the end. At the novel’s end, with the double sacrifice of David and Allergen, sacrificial blood is spilled on the stones of Jerusalem as if on an altar, and the recollection narrated by the stones, which began with the spilling of wine at the beginning of the novel, reaches its end. The Nesises close the circle, and the meaning of the novel becomes clear. The spilling of blood, like the spilling of wine or semen, does not necessarily lead to “the victory of life and meaning” over chaos.523 Remembrance, as a return to a source and an extreme sport in the networks of history, does not promise redemption. It is only the beginning of the struggle for life that is the network novel’s raison d’être: “It’s not so easy to cope with the sprouting of veins; they grow, creep, and seize every opportunity for existence, every glimpse of it—to fill with living red warmth.”524 The transformation of the stones’ “veins” into a picture of the living body’s blood vessels, which represent “existential logic” in the face of the fear of chaos525 remains beyond the novel as a pure, unrealized possibility. An analogy between living veins and the network also remains beyond the novel; however, we may presume that this analogical triad—stone/body/network—is the novel’s fundamental idea and point of reference. At the center of this mythical scheme lies the personality, the subject-object of sacrifice. The network nature of the city-universe-consciousness does not deconstruct it but, on the contrary, serves as an old/new anthropological model of its constitution. From the time of Platonic idealism, existence has been perceived as a virtual network connecting a large number of avatars, themselves consolidations of energy, material embodiments of the network of ideas. In ancient idealistic terms, virtual means true and eternal, and experience is simply perceived as a mimesis-realization of the virtual. If this is 523 Ibid. (II, 12, ©-4, para. 40). 524 Ibid. 525 Ibid.

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true, is current culture and thought fundamentally different from that of our predecessors? According to this novel, the network culture is etched in the stones of the eternal city and seeks to resurrect them with the blood of sacrifice. To conclude, one can say that despite their resistance to any isms (their “netneism” conception), Mikhailichenko and Nesis’s writing is rooted in certain philosophical-historical and cultural-anthropological premises: the conception of history as a network, which turns to the location for extreme games of remembrance, myth-creation, and searching for the metaphysical origin and neoindigeneity. The homogeneity of the network is interrupted by the establishing of the sacral center and the sacrifice. This establishing takes place simultaneously in the historical past, in a new myth, and in a living (“hyperhuman”) personality of a creator who is both thinker and author. The works of Mikhailichenko and Nesis represent a point that may be called “the metaphysical turn” in the Russian-language literature of Israel in the 2000s.

PREEMPTIVE REVENGE (2006): THE OTHER’S HEROISM

The final novel in Mikhailichenko and Nesis’s Jerusalem cycle shifts the metaphysics of sacrifice into new territory—that which comes “after.” In terms of plot, this novel is anchored, like its predecessors, in actual events: the beginning of the novel is set in the summer of 2005, as the government prepares to execute the disengagement and transfer of Jews from Gaza; the middle of the novel is set in January 2006 when Ariel Sharon enters a coma; and the end of the novel is set during the transfer of the Jewish settlement Amona and the uproar over the caricatures of Muhammad in January–February of 2006. However, as a futuristic anthropological laboratory, the novel is presented with an eschatological perspective: its title in Russian is ZY, which means “postscript,” which is abbreviated as P.S.; on the keyboard, the key “P” matches “З” in Cyrillic and “S” matches “Ы.” This is the writing that is after the writing, writing that is dedicated, as the epigraph says, “in memory of future victims.”526 As a “postscript” 526 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, Preemptive Revenge. The novel exists in electronic form only. Therefore, references include chapter numbers and paragraph numbers.

A Noble Man of Our Times

to the previous novel, which now becomes the text “itself,” the present novel projects its virtual network along a timeline. This novel projects the “historical extreme”—which, in the previous novel, was the essence of Israeli Jerusalemite existence-writing—into the future, into the possible or contingent that comes after the existence/writing of a subject. Beyond the body, beyond the writing, beyond memory—this is the place of the postscript, PS, ZY. The memory of the future, the possible, the contingent is the empty memory, but its emptiness enables it to be filled up with new meaning—to create a new myth. The memory of what might not be realized is the eschatological shadow of the memory of past destruction, of the contingency of history that was indeed realized. Thus, the alternative historical continuum is created: “I drank the dregs of the wine to what remained of my health. / I gave the last of my fervor for what remained of my hope. / I cannot say for sure that this country is cursed, / Honey flows with the milk, and the milk might curdle.”527 The political crisis in Israel is not only revealed in the novel, but it is realized in the poetics of self-sacrifice, of the exit from the self in the transcendent, postscriptural movement. The mythopoetic gesture “in memory of future victims” occurs as what Brian Massumi calls “the syncopation of the present”—the swallowing up of a beat of present tense, the expanse in which the political blossoms. Massumi raises this concept in order to characterize the remarks of the mayor of New York at a memorial ceremony for the victims of the atrocity of the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001: “We remember what we do not see.”528 However, in Massumi’s analysis, the context of victims and terrorists disappears, and the essay turns into an argument about the modern doctrine of war. The absence of the victims of Islamic terrorism from the philosopher’s discussion is so conspicuous that it also deserves to be analyzed as a “syncopation,” the swallowing of a beat, a moment of silence in which his politics blossoms. The Nesises’ novel seems as if it were written in order to fill this silence, to make present the virtual victims, 527 Ibid. (epigraph to Part 1). 528 Brian Massumi, “Perception Attack: Brief on War Time,” Theory & Event 13, no. 3, 2010, accessed September 16, 2015, muse.jhu.edu.

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whether victims of Islamic terror or victims of imaginary, abortive Jewish gestures of violence. Ephraim Levitan, the novel’s protagonist, dedicates his life, according to him, to the “struggle with chaos.”529 When his reason and soul can no longer stand the absurdity of Israeli politics, in regard to everything related to the conflict with the Muslims, he develops a network devoted to “preemptive revenge,” through his Internet forum. He cultivates hatred in his soul, which then informs the figure of Wolfy (Volchok)—an imaginary figure or an avatar of a wolf cub that grows into a mature and independent wolf, similar to the monkey-angel and to Allergen the cat of the previous novels. Ephraim develops a virtual affair, intellectual and “business-like,” with Maria. In the beginning, Ephraim initiates and plans several murders, to be committed by members of his underground “network” in revenge for the suffering of other “network members” (Maria is the first of his “recruiters”). However, his principal purpose is a mega-attack: the murder of 66 (later on the number grows to 120) left-wing journalists on a single day, planned to take place on Purim. However, two political and media events occur in the same period, which force him to postpone until Independence Day Eve: the evacuation of Amona and the publication of caricatures of Muhammad in Danish newspapers. In the meantime, Maria who has been passing herself off as Ephraim’s daughter Ksenia, whom he has never seen, arrives in Israel and moves into his home. Ephraim and his friend Constantine both fall in love with her. When it becomes known to Ephraim that Maria is not, in fact, his daughter Ksenia, they vow to act on their love. As the two embrace, Constantine bursts into their apartment. Constantine’s intense blows cripple Ephraim: his spine is broken, he cannot move or speak; he is paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. From now on, he and his life, insured for a million shekels, are in the hands of his friends and relatives. Constantine promises to continue Ephraim’s work, although instead of being motivated by philosophy and hatred 529 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, Preemptive Revenge (1, para. 7).

A Noble Man of Our Times

he is motivated by financial return as he opens a firm of mercenaries—assassins for hire. Ephraim experiences Israel’s distress, as it appears to him to be like his own personal distress, like an existentialist in the face of the absurd, in the face of death. He sees himself, as in a particular version of the messianic Jerusalem syndrome, like someone who chose to save his nation and his country, like “Samson the hero or the donkey’s jawbone in his hand.”530 The images he creates in order to describe this distress lack all irony or inner duality. His personality is at one with itself and its conceptions; it is far from the vision of the tearing and loss experienced by immigrants, as described by Edward Said, and of the energetic optimism of “the diasporic transparent irony,” as described by Julia Kristeva in her book Strangers to Ourselves.531 In the style of “meditations over the open grave,” Ephraim contemplates the tragic historical bewilderment of Israel’s fate and that of himself as if they are one, and it seems that symbols of burial are planting him deep into the soil, thus producing his neoindigenous mythology: My old people (or the smaller/better part of them) had suddenly crawled up from the grave, snatched up the shovels, and chased the gravediggers away. Now, two generations later, my people sit, like me, at the grave, only the grave they sit at is open and they are mesmerized, staring into the damp chill. Sitting with my people at the open grave, I naturally became part of “our death” and easily grasped the nefarious logic of what was at hand. “Die, die,” they urged me/Israel, surrounding us. Finely and tastefully dressed, pale-skinned, with the bright eyes of graduates of prestigious universities . . .. And I? Did I, seeing through myself, come to mourn myself? No. No way! 530 Ibid. (37, para. 5). 531 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

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I had no intention of dying. The vindictive stubbornness of life seethed inside me. I was a warrior.532

The hero’s downfall, his failure to become “the warrior” at the end of the novel, creates the same irony that Ephraim’s pathetic perspective lacks. The supreme warrior descends from the realm of history and the cynical mercenary rises in his place. Moreover, this downfall and Ephraim’s situation in the aftermath, his loss of control over his movements and humanity, reveal him in a comic, if not satiric and grotesque, light. Only at the end of the novel do the authors come to the aid of the reader, drowning in moral and ideological dilemmas. He is like the biblical hero Samson, shorn of his hair, blinded, and bound in paralyzing chains; yet, he does not even have the opportunity to kill himself along with the Philistines and their gods. Ephraim falls victim not to history, as he would have liked, but to the romantic extreme of his Internet affair with Maria/Delilah. The protagonist’s failure to achieve heroic status, abortion of the gesture of violence and its deferral is the paradigm of the Nesises’ Jerusalem cycle. Ilya infiltrates enemy territory through alcoholic fumes, in order to make war on “the enemy,” but someone else gets there first; David sinks into the delusions of the Jerusalem syndrome and yearns for a true sacrifice, but everything ends in the murder of a cat and the cat’s death on the Temple Mount; Ephraim unifies the two previous characters, both in the grip of the “Masada complex” and that of the Jerusalem syndrome, along with his obsession with “the noble man” chosen by Jewish history. This is an elegy to the failed transgressive, suffering, and passionate warrior. Ephraim’s story raises a question that appears as the disturbing aporetic kernel of the novel: does the tragicomic downfall at end of the novel call Ephraim’s anarchistic, antisocial opinions into question, or have they perhaps already been called into question from the perspective of normality? The philosophy of war of the Nesises’ unaccomplished warriors, whether based on preemptive revenge or the idea of honor as the highest value, is based on self-sacrifice outside of a state framework 532 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, Preemptive Revenge (4, para. 5–17).

A Noble Man of Our Times

or that of organized religion. Each man feels himself alone in a futile war against chaos (Ephraim), evil (David), and the absurd (Ilya)— robbed and betrayed by the state—and thus he seeks justice in the soil, in the powers of indigeneity, trapped in the underworld, in hell, in the grave. From the Freudian perspective, this is an expression of the paradoxical passion, of Eros and Thanatos, at one and the same time as with the warriors who saw themselves as already dead when they set out for battle. With regard to the Nesises’ neoindigenous heroes, this consciousness holds even more, for the spilling of blood and the death of noble servants (the samurai) is understood as the formation of a new Abrahamic covenant with the soil of the Land of Israel. The Trumpeldorean Israeli mythology that “it’s good to die for our country” is mixed together here with the mythology of Masada, and both are folded into the Russian mythology of conceptual murder—as a means of regret and redemption—as expressed in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The passionate, apocalyptic philosophy leads to the downfall of the sacrificial hero as its necessary and central foundation. Its comic expressions also have, as mentioned above, a known precedent in the modern Russian classic: Venedikt Yerofeyev’s Moscow-Petushki. The entire imaginary journey of Yerofeyev’s drunken hero is thoroughly transgressive, and at the end of the journey, he is crucified by demons/angels. The difference between him and the Nesises’ protagonists is that the latter attempt to take the law and weaponry into their own hands. They are “the redundant people,” the ones “torn loose,” those who refuse to give in. They are the rebellious antiheroes, those aspiring to revive heroism together with their return to the soil. Without a doubt, this is a rebellion against normality—the normality of an absurd world, and the Internet is part of this. Apparently, only the second novel in the trilogy is involved in Internet thinking. The authors composing the novel and the writers/ protagonists join together to create the image of the virtual cat—the poet, the scoundrel, and the victim. In the course of the discussion, we see that Internet thinking and the thinking of the victim converge at two points. First, in terms of form, every move from one node to another in the network depends upon the exchange and forgetting of a previous

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contact—its sacrifice and disappearance for the sake of the continuity of the plot’s time line and that of history. Secondly, in terms of content, as every victim in disappearance creates an invisible bond with a metaphysical source; so, too, every pressing of a hyperlink spins an invisible thread that connects to a transcendental-historical subject of the network, which therefore turns into the double of consciousness. This networking and victimhood arise from the neurotic, emotional structure that originates in an originary traumatic scene. Like the “Masada complex,” the scene of sacrificial violence (the virtual past, as it were) creates such a vacuum that it nullifies the present and transforms it into a “hyperlink” to the sacrificial goal (the virtual future, as it were). Fear of violence causes its deferral, which takes the shape of a flight from the site of the past to the site of the future. However, because this future is only a reflection of the past, this flight continues endlessly from place to place. This is how the “Masada complex” is formed, as a feeling of Bertha, Ephraim’s old neighbor, that one is trapped between the enemies,533 or as in the works of Aharon Appelfeld or Dina Rubina, as the feeling of a hunted animal. This complex is isomorphic of obsessive Internet surfing, of virtual life. Both are bound to the foundation of time and of subjectivity by means of the creation of substitutes and avatars, the economy of passages and “apparitions,” out of repression of the trauma of every link/victim as a historical syncopation, the swallowing of the present. This syncopation creates the space that enables the remembrance of the transcendental source— that which is beyond any and every Internet link, and that which without it the link is no link: it is this that presses the button and clicks the link. The network, which perceives itself as autonomous in its dreams, recalls the personality that breathes in its breath and necessarily comes from without. In addition, it also recalls the theological anthropological structure of creation that lies at the basis of its existence. The syncopation creates the metaphysical dimension both of victimhood and of the network. And in the end, the activity in the Internet is grasped, at least by Ephraim, as 533 Mikhailichenko, and Nesis, Preemptive Revenge (18, para. 47).

A Noble Man of Our Times

a “sacrifice of souls/emotions.”534 Internet surfers, the members of the forum, Ephraim’s “Hasidic court,”535 all sacrifice their spirits, their emotions, their creative energy—not to a digital Moloch but to their own personalities with all their complexes and neuroses, to the uniqueness of their individuality, their freedom, and their love. This is the goal of every sacrificial ritual—to win the love of the gods as a condition of human existence, meaning an ethical existence that is free and responsible. From another angle, the ritual of sacrifice is also a mechanism of remembrance of the past and future. There is no ethics without memory and no memory without nondisclosure of the truth. The “Masada complex,” like every complex, preserves the difficult truth of labor pains and the maturation of violence (for example, the birth of the State of Israel); it demands “sacrifice of souls/emotions” in order for the subject to blossom from it and to continue to exist, so that “the sharp stones of history” won’t become “smooth pebbles of official bureaucracy.”536 Therefore, it turns out that network thinking bears possibilities that the surface and rhizome thinkers, such as Deleuze and Massumi, could not or did not want to envision—first and foremost, the metaphysical breakthrough that is not merely one of the possibilities but it is the basis and the condition of the existence of network thinking. The Nesises’ novels envision and demonstrate this insight. The universal revolutionary left reveals its rootedness in the nationalist conservative right; this is not surprising if we look at political history from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution. The authors point to the common ground of the political left and right, tying the two ends together through the language familiar to both left and right: terror. Ephraim’s childhood cult figure was Ivan Kaliayev, the Russian revolutionary and terrorist who, on February 4, 1905, murdered Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, governor of Moscow. Ephraim compares terrorists to the pirate figures remembered from childhood stories (in this he resembles Rubina’s protagonists). He even offers a culturological explanation for this attraction to these transgressive protagonists: “It’s 534 Ibid. (8, para. 5). 535 Ibid. 536 Ibid. (18, para. 48).

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strange, [what] spiritual creatures we develop without God inside us, in that internal space usually intended for religious-mystical fillings.”537 The sacrifice is found in the midst of this “internal space”: “We won’t be sacrificing our lives for the sake of our honor. We’ll be sacrificing both.”538 Ephraim justifies himself by means of a demagogic pseudomoral play with concepts. He rejects the killing of innocents or even random “collateral killing.” Yet, who can determine whose guilt deserves the penalty of death? Either no one can or any one can, since the judge, like the executioner, is nothing but a “social functionary” and, as such, is not a moral functionary.539 Ephraim comforts himself with the difference between him and the Islamic terrorist: “Islamic terrorists are spammers of death. And we must find the exact address.”540 This situation, in which everyone can be the judge, creates an infinite web of individualistic intentions and desires, unexpected and constantly changing. They are not random in the sense of classical physics, but they are indeed random in the sense of modern physics’ chaos theory. Terror, as a “universal language” in the Chomskian sense, is an open, dynamic, and horizontal combinatorial set of nonhierarchical, contingent, nonlinear, and nonobligatory connections and links. Terror, like the Internet, can link anything to anything—any place to the force of any bomb, any person to any force of guilt. Thus, the network (underground, revolutionary, etc.) has always been not only the most comfortable and secure form of existence for terrorism since well before the Internet, but the network is also its embodiment. The sacrificial substitution of the human with an avatar, and of the present with the future, nullifies existence. The entire world is pronounced the “desert of reality” in advance, marked by deceit and corruption, the stronghold of sin and apostasy (or alienation and exploitation, in Marxist terms), and therefore the world is sentenced to destruction, or already considered as a ruin—as dead. Terror is a language without logos, a network 537 Ibid. (22, para. 42). 538 Ibid. (27, para. 39). 539 Ibid. (26, para. 8). 540 Ibid. (27, para. 41).

A Noble Man of Our Times

of signifiers without a signified, of simulacra that share a referent: the void. Terror is network minus metaphysics. In order for this subtraction to operate, all its components must appear in one field, contiguous and homogenous, of the “numbers”—in a group. The Nesises’ works concern themselves with the definition of this group and with the “mathematical operations” within it. The divisions, which philosophy and doxa established between the network, metaphysics, and terror melt away when confronting the bewildering, tragic history that takes the shape of absurd politics. In this confrontation, the Nesises’ protagonists develop what one might call the “nobility syndrome,” an agnostic version of martyrdom. This differs from secular Zionism as well as from national-religious Zionism. In an idealistic but neither religious nor “soil-bound” (pochvennichesky) way, and nor in the “Mediterranean note” style, it is determined to create a new, European Russian type of existence for the Jew upon the Land of Israel. By chance, Ephraim reads the poem that Constantine (Cockeye) has written, and he likes it: “The earth rests on three whales: / On the deeds of heroes. / On the prayers of believers. / On the toasts of drunkards.” Cockeye had made a rather graceful allusion to the well-known Hasidic mantra, intentionally or not I did not know. But all the sincerity of the modern world was concentrated in that tripod. The main theme, of course, was prayer/sincerity. Heroes pray with deeds and alcoholics—toasts. It doesn’t matter that the heroes are insane (the normal heroes have all passed on).541

If we ignore the fact that the author of the “poem” is a murderer, sadist, and alcoholic, and that the person who is reading it is an unsuccessful terrorist, we see that these lines touch upon the essence of the “neomodern condition.” This condition is characterized by the fact that human action once again receives ethical status, thus redeeming the subject from destruction, transforming it into a unique personality. 541 Ibid. (7, para. 15–16).

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Myth is thus resurrected as the basic mode of the Western narrative’s existence. Myth establishes anew the transcendental dimension of the universe; in its intersection with the ethical dimension, the figure of the righteous one is born, with prayer as a foundational narrative or myth of an image of the world that grows from the media-oriented essence of contemporary existence. This prayer, as Ephraim stresses, is not another religious ritual or a media-driven expression of religiosity but an explication or translation of the figure of sincerity into a metaphysical language. Sincerity is the condition, the call, the internal demand, without which the ethos of courage and the ethics of action have no currency. Sincerity presupposes and establishes the existence of the subject, of prayer and any responsible discourse, such as an oath. This new sincerity is anchored in the old traditions of critical, penetrating, bellicose rhetoric that begins in the reproaches of the prophets and in “parrhesiastic” addresses of the public men of Greece,542 through Renaissance humanists, and up to the futurists, the philosophical-pedagogical conception of Bauhaus, avant-garde and Soviet nonconformism. The drunkards in Constantine’s verses hint, of course, to the humanist satire of Francois Rabelais, specifically with regard to the cult of the bottle in Gargantua and Pantagruel, of the drunkards, the righteous, and the warriors. The comparison of the Nesises’ trilogy to Rabelais’ pentalogy proves useful. The Nesises refer their readers to the same naïve Renaissance humanism that neither compromises the perfection and harmonious unity of the human nor accepts dualisms such as individual/ society, soul/body, and the like. This is as opposed to new mutations of humanism, such as post-, neo-, and transhumanism, which aspire to substitute a machine, text, information, or function for the human. As mentioned, in the manifesto of Netneism the Nesises define their perspective as hyperhumanism. In the Jerusalem trilogy, it appears as a radical critique of the hypocrisy and corruption of the Israeli elite, similar to Rabelais’ critique of the Church, as a naïve struggle for the sake of sincerity, uprightness, and justice in culture and politics, and thus in the making of history. The choice of a critical viewpoint of “insane heroes”— the drunkards and the scoundrels—after “the normal heroes have all 542 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001).

A Noble Man of Our Times

passed on” is an established method that is frequently employed for good reason in picaresque and pseudopicaresque literature like the Nesises’ works. If we perceive the drunken and insane protagonists as Rabelaisian-­ carnivalesque figures, and if we view the carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense of an inversion of structures for the sake of the renewal of life and reconfirmation of fundamental social values, we will be able to reduce the abortive terrorism in the trilogy to a normative generic schema: a writer-humanist creates a carnivalesque-transgressive plot in order to expose that which is distorted and damaged and to embark toward a better world, a new human, a new heaven and land. However, it’s doubtful that such a reduction will do justice to the Nesises’ works. Their hyperhumanism differs from classical humanism in that it elevates the dignity of the sincere, heroic personality above the value of life, above pragmatism and common sense, on the one hand, and above utopian visions, on the other, both those of leftists and of rightists, above every attempt to make the human happy by force. Moreover, the Nesises’ “noble man” is the antithesis of the Nietzschean Übermensch: he is the small man who tries, again and again without success, to fill the empty void that remains in modern culture due to the disappearance of the impeccable truth teller, the one of “fearless speech,” the knight without fear, the samurai serving his country. This ethos has found explicit expression in modern popular culture as well, for instance in Hollywood films that glorify “the simple man” who takes the law into his own hands in order to defend his honor and the honor of his family, country, or planet. Although the Nesises’ “simple warriors” are more complex and deeper in their mentality, emotions, and culture than these Hollywood figures, and although their adventures do not end well, their fundamental myth approaches the fundamental American myth, at the center of which stands an armed man who defends his personal honor and that of his group, and the fruits of his labor from the soil and from culture. The righteous-drunkard-warrior embarks on a “clash of civilizations” between “us and our enemies.”543 The authors perform a parodic demonization of the enemy; for in the postmythopoetic era demonization, 543 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, Preemptive Revenge (7, para. 23).

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like in every mythic-binary act, one can no longer be sufficiently naïve to be merely political. I am talking not only about the clash of civilizations of the “West” and the “East”—concepts that, as Samuel Huntington emphasized, have already lost their geopolitical currency— but also about a war between different anthropological models that are also different patterns of thought: two optics, two different epistemes that are separated not by a crack but by the bottomless abyss: This means that one civilization (“Us”) exists in the realm of double meaning/complex concepts. We are used to this and aren’t even aware of this double meaning. The other (“The Enemy”) is a civilization based on crude, unequivocal, and earthbound concepts. They feel our double meanings quite acutely. These days, interaction between civilizations resembles the flexible reed sheared off by the machete. In this scenario, “we” are doomed. “They” always bend the end of “our” double meaning towards whatever unambiguously defined meaning that “they” need. “They” are unencumbered by ambiguity of meaning/double meaning/pluralization; they despise vacillation and consider it a shameful illness that makes one feeble/ weak. . . . I belonged to the civilization that sees double, that balances on a tightrope and must lean left and right, back and forth to maintain its balance. . . . When preoccupied with one’s own balance, one must concentrate only on his own sensations and cannot fully engage in anything else. One must avoid discomfort, never looking down, left, or right. One easily accepts a conceptual framework for the world from any hand that reaches out to him. He will even be happy to need no longer to conceptualize the borders of his path and will be happy to have someone else do that for him, instead of him, as he walks the wire. Here’s an important bit, Wolfy: no one seems to care where the tightrope goes and what it is tied to. Most people consider these facts irrelevant.544

544 Ibid. (7, para. 24–27).

A Noble Man of Our Times

As understood in connection to the Israeli-(Western)-Arab conflict, this anthropological philosophy appears quite simplistic, ignoring the multivalent complexity of Muslim culture, focusing only on its political “machete,” which slashes at the “thinking reed” of the Western cogito. This rhetoric, which awakens compassion for this delicate “reed” and for the dancing tightrope walker of Western culture, was nevertheless unbalanced, if not mistaken, if only historically. The “enemy” himself is almost completely absent in the Nesises’ works, and the “reed” collapses underneath its weight. Therefore, the two-dimensional political picture of the world necessarily remains ironic and satiric, not to say feuilletonistic in a sense. From a three-dimensional perspective, the Nesises’ anthropological philosophy describes the war, the front of which is in the heart of every culture and even every human. Ephraim emphasizes this himself: “I double every line of demarcation: with one line I divide humanity, and with the other I split myself.”545 As in Dostoevsky, every battle, like the battle between good and evil, takes place first and foremost in the human soul. Ephraim creates a parable about antinomy between pluralistic intellectualism, the Hamletian trembling of thought, and the totalitarian power of conceptual uniformity. The paradoxical point in this parable is the insight regarding the cognitive cultural implications of pluralistic thought: the human, sunk in his pluralistic games of proliferating meanings, begins to lose interest in his surroundings and becomes disoriented. Next, he becomes excessively occupied with a quest for balance between contradictory conceptions and preventing discomfort (that is, with his realization as “politically correct”). He then ceases to contemplate and accepts a prefabricated worldview offered by the strategists (political, intellectual, image-making, etc.); in the end, he loses every idea of, and interest in, the purpose of his thought and its engagement. This intellectualism (pluralistic and relativistic) does not lead to inaction, as with Hamlet, but is revealed in opposition to itself—as an act without thought or reflection, as a perfectly self-balancing schizophrenic machine. The 545 Ibid. (7, para. 22).

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border between the “us” and the “enemies” crosses, therefore, not in the divisions between civilizations, cultures, and nations or states, for this border is not linear at all, but rather takes on the form of a network—a global network made out of a basic binary “one-zero” code of ethics, whether the human has or lacks free choice. The border passes between “to persuade” and “to force,” between rhetoric and power. The solipsism of the Western tightrope walker is testimony to the fact that relativism, no less than determinism, leads to a loss of free choice. Thus, the true dilemma is not between the former and the latter but rather between both of them and ethical personalism, whether it actually takes on the form of pragmatic individualism or the form of idealistic subjectivism. For Ephraim, like for Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, the final test of free choice and of humanity is self-sacrifice. During his visit to Masada, Ephraim identifies with the warriors who killed their family members, and this identification fills him with “other’s heroism.”546 Yet, the idea of stabbing himself to death terrifies him: this is “against nature,” “the mechanism should not engage with itself.”547 Behind Ephraim’s selfironizing, there lies not only the “natural” drive to survive and the intelligent man of culture’s lack of heart, but also the contradiction between the essence of personalism (classic and modern are one and the same) and self-wounding. The body remains the last fortress of the self, the infrastructure for switching masks/personae in the cosmic drama. The unseen depth of the body is Derrida’s chora, the dark, inhuman, and meaningless source in which humanity is inscribed. When Ephraim does not find support for his existence in the illuminated and enlightened world, he grabs hold of a primeval cosmogenic myth, as well as the most severe tribal taboo: creation/destruction of the self of God, creation through androgynous self-fertilization, the prohibition on killing the self (the father) and fertilizing the self (the mother). The irony, and perhaps also the paradox, is that this self-prohibition does not bring Ephraim closer to the machine, but on the contrary, it represents a way to overcome 546 Ibid. (38, para. 84). 547 Ibid.

A Noble Man of Our Times

the ideological solipsism, self-contentment, and the systemic closure actually characteristic of machines, even if they are living machines.548 The human remains human as long as it is capable of governing itself by means of the thinking self, when the thinking self is an incomprehensible and untouchable transcendental source whom one is not allowed to “engage with.” This is the Kantian lesson upon which Dostoevsky’s metaphysical critique of Kirilov is based. Moreover, this is also the lesson that Ephraim is required to learn at the end of the novel when, in tragic irony, his body is injured, not through self-sacrifice but as a result of chance or by accident. The others “engage with” his “mechanism” and exploit the network that he created to accomplish another’s goals. The “other’s heroism” exceeds all control, ruins the body that bore it, and turns on itself. The authors present a parable through this train of thought—one that doesn’t lack contradictions and sharp turns—regarding the fate of every ideological fanaticism and every ideology of terror, a parable about their hyperandrogynous and hyperincestuous essence. The love between Ephraim and Maria/Ksenia at the end of the novel is not incestuous (for Maria is not truly his daughter Ksenia), but it appears as such in the eyes of others as a result of their underground carnivalesque masquerade. This shift or doubling reveals the “drama of misunderstanding” of every revolutionary or terrorist: he thinks that he loves the other (the God, the oppressed, the proletariat, freedom, etc.), but from a social perspective he is merely a dangerous visionary who loves only his vision and blows up his world, together with himself and his beloved. This is the source of the proud pose behind “a prophet is not without honor except in his own town,” the source of the “single righteous man in Sodom” and of the excommunicated teacher. As stated above, in the eyes of those around him, he actually appears as the embodiment of Sodom. He thinks that “we are a civilization of donations and a civilization of victims. This displeases me, so my donations are your victims.”549 Yet, society is not able to consider him other than 548 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Boston, London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980). 549 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, Preemptive Revenge (39, para. 7).

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as a kind of obsessive and violent sex maniac, a crazy dog. This parable sums up the personal stories of all the Nesises’ unrealized “warriors” in the Jerusalem cycle: with these androgynes of terrorism, the powers of fertility and creativity close in on themselves; therefore, they are incapable and perhaps not even designated to be realized from the start. Contact with reality is liable to wreck their sweet, autoerotic fantasy, diluted by the bitterness of misunderstanding and ostracism. David is imprisoned in his insanity, Ilya in his intoxication, and Ephraim in his paralysis. Even if their conceptions are correct, these heroes are only capable of irrigating the bosom of the earth with their seed, in the old/ new quest to mate with it, a quest for a new indigenous life.

C HAPT ER

FOUR

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet): The New Language of Metaphysics

M

ikhail Yudson’s opus magnum, the novel Lestnitsa na shkaf (The ladder to the cabinet) is an encyclopedia of neodiasporic nomadism, of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, an archive of wandering outcasts.550 It is a chaotic catalogue of a post-Soviet culture, mirrored in the mind of an intellectual with zero tolerance and unadulterated contempt for the vulgarity, hypocrisy, and insipidness of any sort of mob. It is a multilinear and omnidirectional history of the Soviet Russian generation of the longue durée of the 1980s–1990s, encoded in a crumbling mosaic of microhistories. Klavdia Smola sees this novel as an exemplary postmodern, deconstructive, and antitotalitarian post-­ Soviet retrofuture dystopia. She shows how archaic lingual and ideo­logical matrixes unite with modern ones in a boundless hybrid or rhizome. Her discussion of the first two parts of the novel leads to the conclusion about the ironic and tragic sense of the main metaphor—the ladder to the cabinet—meaning the absence of transcendental transition, ascendance, and salvation.551 Mikhail Sidorov emphasizes the 550 Mikhail Yudson, Lestnitsa na shkaf [The ladder to the cabinet] (Moscow: Zebra E, 2013). 551 Klavdia Smola, “Archaische Sprache der Diktatur: Hybride Texturen der neuen russischen Dystopien” [Archaic language of dictatorship: Hybrid textures of the new Russian dystopias], Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 74 (2014), 303–328.

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“civilizational conflicts” between postmodernism and Russian Ortho­dox religion in the first part of the book, and “medieval Islamism,” in the third part.552 I will argue that in the novel, the postmodern rhizomal multiplicity is determined by the metanarrative of the metaphysical ladder to the transcendental origin and new indigeneity. This complexity or synergy of contradictory intentions and philosophical vectors, the redundancy of utopic and dystopian topoi, creates new geocultural and narrative topography: the deterministic chaotic mechanism for producing the phenomena of post-posthumanism, which serve as crossbars of the ladder to the new humanism of the recent neomodernism. Ilya, the novel’s protagonist, is the distant and luckier descendant of Isaac Babel’s Ilya, as if thrown into the pages of Joycelike writing: “the son of the rabbi” of the new epoch, in whose bag the pages of the Song of Songs and the revolutionary leaflets, the portraits of Lenin and Maimonides, and innumerous other pages and images have been piled together, but who succeeded at last, after almost a hundred years of training, to climb on a horse—meaning, to overcome victimary psychology and earn the title of a new hero of our times. This is not an émigré or exilic hero, and the novel does not belong to what is known as émigré literature. The novel does not only focus on the emigrant experience. Although partly written from the viewpoint of an emigrant, it does not solely reflect the emigrant or exile mentality. The novel’s epigraph expresses its paradoxical character: “Skazka dlia emigrantov v triokh chastiakh” (A fairy tale for emigrants in three parts). A fairy tale may compensate for what lacks in reality and in readers. This character of the novel enables one to focus on other aspects of Yudson’s novel without dwelling upon the theoretical issues of émigré literature or comparing the novel to its postrevolutionary and Soviet waves, which could constitute a subject for another research.

552 Mikhail Sidorov, “Tsunami soznaniia” [A tsunami of consciousness], 22 (Dvadtsat dva) 176 (2015), 212–219.

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

A LADDER TO THE NEOINDIGENEITY 1

Mikhail Yudson was born in Volgograd in 1956 and immigrated to Israel in 1999. He is the author of many stories, articles, essays, and critical pieces,553 as well as a single novel.554 Yudson’s novel towers like Everest over the rest of his writing, as do the seminal works of other novelists, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fé. Like these great works, The ladder to the cabinet describes the journey of a “hero of our times” through a world of books, a sea of quotations, between allusions and associations, and in a fog of hallucinations, dreams, and fantasies. Yudson’s hero inhabits a dystopian multiverse of parallel and alternative histories; his adventures retell the eternal tale of the Wandering Jew, the nomad. Indeed, the novel’s language is replete with wordplay, diglossia, and neologisms cobbled together out of pieces of different languages. The novel is a kind of humorous multilingual phrasebook for an imaginary virtual immigrant. This multiplicity is augmented by different Russian registers and even jargons (including spurious ones fabricated by the author) and varying styles of discourse, such as those of tourist guidebooks and parodies of the mannerisms of famous writers. The ladder to the cabinet is much like the well-known novels of Milorad Pavić Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel and Landscape Painted with Tea. It resembles the first of these in that it is tricultural, full of floating quotations, popular and intellectual, and connected in a chaotic-deterministic structure of knowledge. Like the second, it is also a quest, a search for the scattered and dismembered roots of a personality and identity, a story that harvests and gathers these fragments and then 553 Yudson’s works were published in the journals Znamia, Neva, Vremia iskat, Ierusalimsky zhurnal, 22, and Artikl’. 554 Recently, Yudson has published fragments from his new novel in progress. See “Sviortyvanie. Otryvok iz romana ‘Mozgovoy’” [Clotting: A fragment from the novel Mozgovoy], Artikl’ 26, 2015, accessed January 29, 2016, sunround.com/club/ journals/26judson.htm.

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redisseminates and replants them, each in turn. Like Pavić’s Balkan heroes, Yudson’s protagonist occurs simultaneously in all places and all times of the virtual world network of a total literary-historical library, the Aleph of Jorge Luis Borges. Yudson’s writing is a new Library of Babylon.555 Structured within the novel’s geography—Russia, Germany, and Israel, which magically seem to be congruent with each other—are the Five Books of Moses (in the German part) and the four seasons, although not in their natural order (in the Israeli part). Furthermore, the different languages, especially Russian and Hebrew, are intermeshed. In this way space, time, language, and the library are united into a transnational and transcultural configuration that may be defined as neoindigenous history: that which views its center and its tragic bewilderment556 in the “person-place” relation and aspires to redefine it. The “trans” configuration of the novel’s structure and language partially reflects and contradicts the imagery that finds its place in the book’s title, the ladder, which has a clear metaphysical meaning (which 555 Yudson’s characterization of another Russian-language Israeli author, Alexander Goldstein (1957–2006), serves well to describe his own work: “When you get under the vaults of books by Goldstein, where staircases and doors of pages intertwine and crumble, like in Escher’s paintings, there is an impression that the text at hand was created by none other than a creature with a different set of eyes, as well as ears and nostrils (some sort of Argus rearranging his glasses with a Goldstein-like movement). Truly, ‘one must have new ears for new music,’ say we with a whistle, quoting the mad interviewer of Zarathustra. It is good to read Goldstein while walking, on a small fire, relishingly crunching it, rolling it in the mouth, savoring its tasty bits, having litmus shivers down your spine (‘chills of delight,’ a brand-ironed sign of quality), and attaching little wingies to Cyrillic goldi-scripts. Insensitively, while condescending to the dyslexic and the disabled, he introduces his reader to his circle of reading (to the textual manure), initiates him into it; well, ‘circle’ is not the word for it: these are entire tiers of hexagonal galleries of the Library of Babylon” (Mikhail Yudson, “Igra v Go, ili Argus” [Go game, or Argus], Znamia 7, 2006). All the translations from Russian in this chapter are by Yan Mazor. 556 “Tragic bewilderment” is the concept of Matvei Kagan, which connects his philosophy of history with his insights in poetics and literary theory. See Matvei Kagan, “Nedoumennye motivy v tvorchestve Pushkina” [The motifs of bewilderment in Pushkin’s works], in O khode istorii [On the course of history], ed. Vitali Makhlin (Moscow: Jazyki slavianskoi kultury, 2004), 593–627.

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

I will further discuss below). Moreover, the novel was written and published in the form of a ladder—rung after rung—and is, at this point, divided into two sections. The first includes the Russian and German parts, Parts One and Two of the novel, with Part Two ending with the dateline “December 1996–April 1998, Volgograd, Nuremberg, Moscow.” The novel’s first version, which contained only these two parts, was first published by Gelikon Plus in 2003 and then was reissued by OGI in 2005. New Israeli chapters of The ladder to the cabinet appeared in 2013 in the Russian-language Israeli journal Artikl’ (Yudson is a member of the journal’s editorial board). The entire book, in the form of a one-volume trilogy, was then published by the Moscow publishing house Zebra E. The Israeli section ends with the dateline “July 2002–January 2010, Tel Aviv.” The ladder image might have seemed ironic had the composition and publication of the novel not taken seventeen years, turning it into the writer’s own ladder up to his cabinet. The image of a ladder up to a cabinet is taken from an episode from the tales told about Leo Tolstoy that are mentioned in Yudson’s novel. At Yasnaya Poliana, Tolstoy founded a school for the local peasant children. After they were grown, the pupils would often relate how Tolstoy had liked to laugh and joke with them; for example, he would place a little girl on a high cabinet so that all the others would envy her.557 Tolstoy’s love of children became legendary and a major subject of popular jokes, among them the famous literary jokes of Daniil Kharms. This spirit of fun is clearly woven into Yudson’s humorous and grotesque novel, but there is a more sublime aspect of the image—the ladder up to the cabinet is the ladder of self-realization and of moral and spiritual fulfillment. In his essay “The First Step,” Tolstoy develops his view of the ladder, which does not necessarily offer a means of ascent but rather expresses the need to begin one’s ascent from the first rung: All moral teachings set up that ladder which, as Chinese wisdom has it, reaches from earth to heaven, the ascent of which can only be 557 Lidia Chukovskaia, “Shkola v ‘Iasnoi’” [The school in Iasnaia (Poliana)], Druzhnye rebiata 4, April 1945.

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accomplished by starting from the lowest step. As in the teaching of the Brahmins, Buddhists, and Confucians, so also in the teaching of the Greek sages, the steps were fixed, and a superior step could not be attained without the lower one having been previously taken. All the moral teachers of mankind, religious and nonreligious alike, have admitted the necessity of a definite order of succession in the attainment of the qualities essential to a righteous life. The necessity for this sequence lies in the very essence of things, and therefore, it would seem, ought to be recognized by everyone.558

The good life, according to Tolstoy, is a life without violence, fully observing the command “Thou shalt not murder.” The first step in this direction, he argues, is vegetarianism, the cause the article seems to promote. In any case, violence is the subject at the center of Yudson’s novel, in which violence is a way of life, a form of existence, an ideology, the quotidian practical politics of all the dystopian societies it describes, both on the popular and the institutional level. The ascent of the ladder to the cabinet is thus a flight from violence, persecution, oppression, and exploitation from all the terrors of history that deprive man of freedom, the foundation of his humanity. In addition to the ethical and social aspects of the ladder, there is a metaphysical aspect as well. It is Jacob’s ladder,559 a symbol of the meta­ physical leap, revelation, election, prophecy, “so that all the others would envy her.” It is the ladder reaching to heaven, to the celestial Jerusalem, the steps leading up to the Temple.560 The novel’s protagonist, a Jew from Moscow named Ilya, tries to climb this ladder; however, rather than being an object of envy, he is surrounded by enmity. In this context, the novel’s allusion to Tolstoy’s ethics seems especially ironic: not only does ascending the ladder not liberate from violence—it escalates violence. The very mention of Tolstoyan, 558 Lev Tolstoy, “Pervaia stupen” [The first step], in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90 tomakh [Complete works in 90 volumes], vol. 29 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1958), 57–85. 559 Yudson, The ladder to the cabinet, 250. 560 Ibid., 254.

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

nonviolent resistance to evil simply serves to highlight how irrelevant this ideal is. On the other hand, it would not be correct to say that the novel is replete with hatred and sacrilege, as Dmitry Bykov argued in an article that has been included as an afterword in the 2013 edition.561 This being the case, what can be the basis for the metaphysical leap, why do we envy the hero?

2

Beyond the Yudson novel’s totally relativistic irony, fragmentary nature, and the fundamentally quotationalist nature of its language, one can find a manifestly modernist substrate—the creation of a new language, and classical novelistic, mythic, folkloric unity of the narrative and character in a quest chronotope of self-proving and self-­ realization. In this sense, the high ladder is the ladder to the gallows—to the center of the stage that constitutes the center of culture, in which the renunciation of violence toward the victim establishes the signifier and language, ethics, and humanity. The protagonist’s metaphysical leap thus depends on his refusal to be a sacrificial victim, on his blocking of violence, and his flight from the stage of victimization. The Jewish hero blocks the violence of the anti-Semitic hangman and casts off the role of victim. The new language thus created, which permeates the novel, the ceaseless mutter of the narrator and the characters, is a magical formula that enables and signifies the rejection of violence. It would seem that as long as new words are created, violence is frustrated. The victim jumps up on top of the cabinet and is redeemed with the help of his playful chatter. From there, on top of his cabinet, the hero is free to fill his discourse with whatever content he wishes, with no fear of any form of terror—neither Russian, German, nor Arab physical terror, nor the intellectual terror of that or another ideology. The victim casts off his status as victim, his fears and guilt, by the act of calling things by their true and new names, sincerely and naïvely. As the circle of 561 Dmitry Bykov, “Posleslovie” [Afterword], in Yudson, The ladder to the cabinet, 554–558.

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Ilya’s journeys widens from Part One through Part Three, the circle of the new language he creates also broadens. The more complex the new language becomes, the more the mumble of the protagonists becomes less comprehensible; the effect of this innovation, of this de-automatism, is strengthened and the informative and poetic power of the text increases. The freedom of the writer also grows. This process is the ascent of the ladder to the cabinet, and the ascent of the metaphysical ladder to­ward a miracle—the realization of the transcendental purpose of the personality. It is an ascent toward freedom. Creation of a new language, in addition to being a metaphysical act of transcendence of victimization, is a social and cognitive act. The book’s new Russian language, especially in Part Three, contains a large number of Hebrew words written in Russian transliteration, conjugated in accordance with Russian grammatical forms. Another smaller group of words are puns on Russian words that liken them to Hebrew words, and thus change their meaning. Cognitively, these language games commit fairly heavy violence against normal cognitive processes— although such violence is characteristic of any poetic text562—and lead Yudson’s novel toward avant-garde aesthetics. Yudson has taken such games much further than any other Russian-language writer in Israel. He disproves the common presumption that playing with Hebrew-Russian diglossia is something akin to an adolescent affection, displayed by writers in the initial years following their immigration, especially by those who came in the 1990s. This device has been perceived as a naïve, neurotic, manic, or depressive urge for innovation, an attempt to create a signature style. On this account, it grows out of the attempt to find a home in the new (Israeli) culture or, alternatively, an attempt to domesticate the old (Russian) culture. It is a carnival attempt to resuscitate the writer’s life or justify the “carnival” turn taken by the author’s life and work. As mentioned above, Rubina is an example of this—her first 562 See Reuven Tsur’s conception of poetics as cognitive violence in his book Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2008).

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

three novels written in Israel are nearly boundless in their diglossia and, in parallel, she develops her theory of the carnivalesque nature of gaining a foreign language.563 However, in her later novels diglossia disappears almost entirely. For Yudson, diglossia and language games are not an illness to be overcome. They are the very essence of his poetic language.

3

Yudson’s work places his (Russian Jewish Israeli) community at the center of Russian culture and places within it his protagonist’s search for a homeland and for meaning in his life. The asymmetry between the major and minor cultures evident in Yudson’s writing could be perceived as apologetics for immigration to Israel or even as Zionist propaganda. The novel’s third part, which chronicles Ilya’s adventures in Israel and which makes overt and politically incorrect comparisons between, for example, the Israeli and Russian armies, can seem like a mirror image of Parts One and Two, an unambiguous and partisan ideological utopia or idealization, but the truth is different. The story about the “Middle Eastern Republic,” (BVR—Blizhnevostochnaia respublika) is an alternative or futuristic historical fantasy, just like the book’s first two parts. Yudson’s allegorical fantasy of Israel is grotesque, absurd, and ironic; comic and tragic; critical and nostalgic—just like his fantasies of Russia and Germany. In each of these cases, the fantasy highlights and magnifies in a hypercarnival way the foundation myth of the country in question, its constitutive complex, the topoi and doxa on which the popular images of nations are constructed. Yudson places the “little man,” the defeated picaro, or the wandering exile on the psychoanalytic couch and analyzes different parts of him, different identities of his collective unconscious, as if it actually exists. He dramatizes these nightmares of identity, which hallucinate about one another. The novel’s principal chronotope could be described as follows: the adventures of a wandering warrior, who undergoes a gradual initiation, 563 See Rubina, In the mode of carnival.

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one full of phases and transitions, toward self-realization—from sporadic, transgressive fighting as a sacrificial victim rebelling against his victimization (in Parts One and Two, a period that becomes his past and memory) to the methodical and institutionalized fighting of self-sacrifice (in Part Three, the eternal present). The chronotope of Russia as a dream past and of Israel as present reality is typical of the literature produced by Russian immigrants to Israel.564 In Yudson’s novel, as noted, the two levels of space-time are not reality, but dream. The eternal present unites the mythic past with the political present; for example, the narrator indicates several times that he and his friends in the Middle Eastern Republic eat manna. One could thus say that the narrator is the dreaming warrior, or a dreamer who sees himself in his dream as a warrior, first as an exploited victim, later as a soldier and guard, a dreamy knight, a Don Quixote who fights different types of windmills.565 The hero’s army uniform is much like the vestments of the Temple priests.566 The novel is thus best assigned to a genre of historical-futurist fantasy, with neoromantic, neomodern, and neoindigenous characteristics. Mikhail Yudson creates open metaphors that enable almost unrestricted freedom. When he describes, in Part One, the horrors of life in the future Russia, the Jewish Russian myth enters into a complex and multifarious interrelationship with the space of historical possibilities. As a Jew, Ilya is persecuted and beaten, but he also knows how to fight and defend himself; he knows how to handle weapons and, most importantly, he is the heir to Raskolnikov’s hatchet, and with it—to the dilemma of power and conscience. He is a teacher by profession, but he also learns the art of survival from his pupils. The new Russian Orthodox ideology celebrates its victory in Russia. The Jews almost entirely disap564 See, for example, Rubina’s Syndicate (2004) that was discussed above. 565 As in Mikhailichenko and Nesis’s Jerusalem novels, in particular A noble man of Jerusalem (1997), Yudson’s The ladder to the cabinet (2013) is the story of the formation of a new “noble man” who seeks to find a place for himself in the noble “courtyard,” in its military, rural, Hasidic, and Temple senses. Mikhail Sidorov noted that the Strugatsky brothers’ famous warriors (from The Inhabited Island and The Doomed City) were possible sources of Yudson’s protagonist (Sidorov, A tsunami of consciousness). 566 Yudson, The ladder to the cabinet, 282.

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

pear, and yet, the sense that they have entirely taken over Russia only increases. The memories of wars against the Jews flood popular consciousness. The new Russian discourse is replete with Jewish linguistic residues; the hero’s physical existence begins to come apart or is frozen in eternal snows; yet, his desire burns and his path is paved with longing and forbidden loves. The world around him sinks into pollution, sin, and violence, but he survives as the last moral philosopher. In this regard, Yudson’s novel is no more dystopian or Russo-phobic than Crime and Punishment. A Jew enters into a reaction with Russian historical imagination and thinking, creating anxious and erotic phantasms that are, to a large extent, oedipal—the Jew is the victim of the violence committed by the Russian collective “father” but also the lover of the great, collective Mother Russia. In Part Two, the Jewish myth functions in a different way, as that of a Wandering Jew, the victim of the Germans. In accordance with the “Holocaust and heroism” prototype, the writer creates the reprehensible ghetto ethos, a cannibal camp, and then dismantles it, creating the ethos of a fantastical Jewish underground and sending his protagonist to risk his life on a secret mission, which reveals itself as an opening for the revival and continuity of Israeli life in Part Three. The German section is demonstratively antierotic and thus effusively thanatographic. It presents the inner hell of the modern Jewish soul—the nightmare that the Holocaust will revive. Behind the back of the Germans’ external and formal remorse, a new and menacing Jew-hatred appears. However, another dimension of the German Jewish myth reveals itself in light of the fact that the Jews who have immigrated to Germany of their own volition are also those who work the night shifts at the Germans’ cannibal factories—they gorge on themselves, and in this they are no different than the Germans. Ilya objects to the shtetl psychology of a self-imposed ghetto no less than he opposes the German Ordnung and the experiments the Germans conduct, as it were, on children.

4

The Jewish myth of the twentieth century undergoes a mutation in the novel: a Russian intellectual, victim of Russian Orthodox

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anti-Semitism, an immigrant and victim of Western anti-Semitism, an underground warrior, an icon of national revival in the Land of Israel, an Israeli functionary, one of the elders of Zion. In Part Three, Israel seems beloved and pleasant, vexing and dangerous, violent and aggressive, humane and considerate. It elicits both pride and revulsion; it is both sublime and contemptible. One could say that, in Part Three, Israel appears as a utopia characterized by ethical ambiguity while, in Parts One and Two, Russia and Germany appear as dystopias characterized by ethical certainty. The protagonist-narrator exchanges the victim’s certainty—that justice is on his side—for the qualms of the warrior, exchanges physical peril for an existential threat, the freedom of the wanderer for the discipline demanded of a citizen and soldier, and ethical solipsism-escapism for neoindigenous metaphysics. At the same time, the discourse here seems like an especially complex configuration of types of irony and the rhetoric of sincerity.567 Behind a layer of irony and satire, of carnival even, there is an inkling of a thin stratum of the sincerity of the hoped-for realization of the subject. This sincerity has, built into it, a sheer irony of self-criticism, testifying to the fact that the alienation brought on by immigration has been overcome and life renewed within both the carnival and pathos of neoindigeneity. The rhetoric of sincerity, with its integral irony, is a game and sanctification, entertainment, and self-realization. In these manifestations, it is equally characteristic of a Russian intellectual and an Israeli warrior, whether these figures are satirical or pathetic. Yudson’s writing resembles that of Victor Pelevin—mythological imagination mixed with wild futurism, a pessimist view, and nihilism regarding society and culture. There is also the combination of pseudoarchaic fantasy, technological science fiction, and the invention of new 567 On the rhetoric of sincerity, see the following relatively recent works: Roman Katsman, “Nevua ktana”: kenut ve-retorika be-Ir u-meloa shel Agnon [“A small prophecy”: Sincerity and rhetoric in Agnon’s Ir u-meloa] (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2013); Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel E. Smith, eds., The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). See also the classical work of Henry Peyre, Literature and Sincerity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963).

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

symbolic languages, word games, and neologisms. Likewise, they share an ontology of illusion and a concept of the instability and elusiveness of existence. All Pelevin’s works undermine ontological certainty, which has its source largely in the inspiration Pelevin receives from Buddhist philosophy. Yudson takes a different approach—one that is, to a certain extent, braver and more perilous: he undercuts the stability of the perceived world without offering any philosophical backing for it, whether Buddhist, cabalistic, or anything else. For example, at the end of the novel, the “garden” turns out to be a polluted and fairly prosaic desert; the hospital where Ilya finds himself after he is wounded turns out to be a rickety shack, and the futuristic and complicated scientific apparatus there turns out to be props made of cardboard. The world around the protagonist seems to be a show put on for his sole viewing, examination, and education. The human faces around him, which at first seem real and convincing, turn out to be masks that preserve the secrets of the figure’s identities and the enigma of a carnival world that refuses to show its face. The stereotypical characters are meant as allegories, seemingly one-dimensional heroes of the type found in comics, but they have deeper levels than are visible at first glance. For Yudson, the existential carnival needs no justification or philosophical underpinning—it is a given, the substrate of existence. Perceptions are lies, but there is no world beyond them, not in Ilya’s blurry and confused mind nor in the positivist nature studied by science. In this sense, Yudson’s work is heir to the illusionary worlds of Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll. The background to the comparison with Pelevin is the difference between Yudson’s novel and other modern Russian dystopias—such as Dmitry Bykov’s Evakuator (Evacuator), Kys’ (The Slynx) by Tatyana Tolstaya, and Metro 2033 (2034, 2035) by Dmitry Glukhovsky—­ which depict Russia’s future after one or another historical catastrophe. Yudson creates a world that is a distorted, grotesque reflection of our world and uses a new language to describe it. He does not need to fabricate new catastrophes—the world is already a disaster. In the best tradition of Gogol, the writer sees the “pig faces” behind the smooth countenance of European and Israeli society. He sees

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destruction and degeneracy where the rest of us see technological progress; he sees hatred, fear, and a thirst for blood instead of nationalism and populism and instead of liberalism and political correctness. His novel remains a biography despite its fantastical form. Unlike utopias or dystopias, uchronia or allohistory, Yudson’s world lies in the here and now, but the author creates a new topography, a map that uses a unique cartographic language that also leads to the invention of new mathematical, physical, social, and psychological languages. Rabelais, Gogol, Kafka, Calvino, Pavić, and Pelevin are the great topographers and topologists of Western literature, and Yudson seems to be following in their footsteps. Tzvetan Todorov’s well-known theory of fantastic literature begins with the assumption of a bifurcation of vision and movement between reality and phantasm, between what is and what can or cannot be.568 Yudson’s text represents the world that exists by means of a possible language and a mythological imagination of the impossible. Pavić similarly creates his imaginary worlds and fantastic body languages.569 Yudson is thus much closer to him than to Tolstaya, despite the many neologisms that fill her novel mentioned above. Rabelais creates an imaginary space in which realistic and fantastical characters live together and sometimes even merge. Yudson is thus closer to him than to Bykov or Pelevin, not to mention Orwell or Bradbury. This tendency reflects a general inclination toward classical, Renaissance and baroque humanism in Russian-language Israeli literature. The work closest to Yudson’s novel is Nekod Singer’s Tickets at the box office (2006). They share a biographical background, an interrupted integration of memories and fantasies, a wealth of quotes, and a rich and sophisticated pastiche (what makes Yudson’s unique is the addition of linguistic pastiche to a pastiche of quotations). Like Singer and other members of his generation, Yudson has inherited his passion and taste for quotation 568 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). 569 Roman Katsman, “Anthropoetic Gesture: A Key to Milorad Pavić’s Poetics (Landscape Painted with Tea),” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 12, 2005, accessed January 30, 2016, www.utoronto.ca/tsq/12/katsman12.shtml.

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

and linguistic games from the young Russian intelligentsia of the waning of the Soviet Union—the 1970s and 1980s. If Singer’s novels are barely translatable and demand a complete cultural makeover, Yudson’s writing is completely impossible to render in another language. His language is a true utopia (or “discursive dystopia,” in Klavdia Smola’s terms of subversion of the power’s discourse),570 an impossible combinatorics of vocabulary and grammar from different languages. Yudson’s text is poetry in every respect. Here is an example from a Pesach seder scene in Part Three. One of the diners is a famous poet named Yalla Bo (the name is Hebrew slang for “come on”), author of a monumental work called “Derekh Zuz” (in Hebrew, literally, “way move”)—probably, a humorous double of the Chinese Taoist poet of the eighth century Li Bai (Li Po): As tradition has it, they devoured the food quickly, avidly, energetically— ­ ­ imitating eXod-mas eve, ardent-heartened travel arrangements— hastily gorged fried potatoes along with the fire bird, while tearing off the turkey gobs of food (only dead Hykie doesn’t love fast eating!). . . . Proud he is! Look what trouble Shems have stirred up on the basis made of words, the entire world’s revolving round Egypt-escapists! Their derekh is their heder, their clay is their Book, their silo is their stylus.571

The drunker the participants in this Russian Passover feast get, the more discombobulated their conversation becomes: “So you’re a gianter. . . . No, stand like a mountain . . . however . . . Olim-po-po . . . lived here, climbed there . . . Gar kan—thew! Nostalgia for the foreign 570 Smola, “Archaic language of dictatorship.” 571 “Кушали по традиции стремительно, жадно, энергично — имитируя сочельник Изхода, лихорадостные сборы в дорогу — с поспешностью жрали жар-картошку с жар-птицей, откромсывая от индюка кусищи пищи (только мертвый парх не любит быстрой еды!) . . . Горд он! Замесили Шемы глину на словесном молоке — свет стоит столбом и клином на Изходном Ходоке! . . . Дерех — их хедер, глина — их Книга, силос — их стилос” (Yudson, The ladder to the cabinet, 361–365).

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land . . . Pan Thai Gru—El! Mein Sweet Gott! Not Abrams, but just Brahms or krible-krable-bums and then on to rebbe, rubble rabelais.”572 Such writing is built on the nonnormative and transgressive deconstruction, distortion, and reconstruction of words, symbols, sources, sounds, and tones—an impossible and infinite combinatorics that alienates the familiar and familiarizes the alien. This verbal, poetic volcano is connected to a single source—the need for indigenization or the need for cultures and languages (like Russian and Israeli Hebrew) for mutual indigenization. This need is central to the literature produced by Israel’s Russian-language writers. Yudson’s carnival aesthetics, the laughter that sometimes casts off all restraint, cannot hide its pathetic kernel, which is well-expressed by the paradoxical expression from the passage above: “nostalgia for a foreign land.” The foreign land could be Russia or Israel, Russian culture or Jewish culture. The speech of Yalla Bo is an insane jumble of snatches of Jewish and Christian discourse; in this sense, it serves to indigenize Christianity on Jewish soil. Nevertheless, his language is Russian, meaning that Jewish culture, together with the Christian culture domesticated within it, undergoes repeated indigenization in Russian culture. Yet, this is already a new Russian culture—Russian Israeli, replete with Hebrew words and expressions and Israeli experience. Here, Russian neodiasporism unites with Israeli neoindigeneity. As in Singer’s work, Yudson’s complex, multidirectional indigeneity uses a multilingual, eclectic poetics, pastiche and palimpsest, translation and transliteration games as a means of expressing and embodying its essence. In Singer’s writing, translingualism is a goal in and of itself, built into his conceptualism and expressed in the writer’s self-translation into Hebrew. In Yudson’s work, it is no more than a means of expressing ideas and changing states of consciousness or mood. It is a way of streaming the intellectual “muttering” that constitutes the major part of the book, especially in Part Three. 572 “ — А ты, значит, великанец . . . нет, стой горой, а впрочем . . . Олим-по-по . . . жил тут влез здесь . . . Гар кан—тю! . . . Ностальгия по чужбине . . . Боженьки мои! Пан, та грю — Эль! Готеню! — Не абрам-брамс-эль — бочонок бумс! — курс к ребе, к гребле, к рабле” (ibid., 373).

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

One thing that happens in Part Three is that the author’s aesthetic finds expression and its relations to other aesthetic views from the vantage point of the poet Yalla Bo, the narrator, and other protagonists. To a certain extent, the novel’s language is conceptual. Each playful multilingual and multitranslatable combination of words is a kind of miniature conceptual installation, but the overarching concept, as with Singer, crosses the boundaries of modernist and postmodernist doctrines.

5

The point of origin for the philosophy of literature expressed here is the view of The Book, that is, the Hebrew Bible. This book reconfigures the brain, distorting it to fit the mathematical-energetic distortion of the universe itself. The human being becomes “a shepherd of numbers and hunter of words”: “Broaden the dictionary! Verbal suggestion, manipulative semantics, healthy doses of connotative asymmetry.”573 Nevertheless, the poet and his interlocutor, Breadwinner, express their disappointment at the “boring” Book: Monotonotheism! Trivially, mitsraishly, shrunkenly. Redneckisms.  .  .  .  No words, just letters, but even they are disconnected. . . . Secondary-detail debris. . . . Pencil scratch. . . .  Chernozyom with many a worm, post-compost. Plant singing. . . .  Willow (c)Ho(i)reb! Household notes, instructions. . . . Countryside reporter! Comprehensible art!574

It is with this poetic “biblical criticism” (full of self-irony) that Yalla Bo begins his speech on the nature of literature. The text is perceived as a crossword puzzle, rethought as “crucified words” (krestoslov), meant not as betrayal (predat’) of the teacher, but as a transmission (peredat’) of the 573 Ibid., 385. 574 “Монотоннотеизм! Тривиально, мицраешно, усохло. Отсохизмы. . . . Слов нет, одни буквы, и те сбивчивы . . . Засоренность второстепенными деталями . . . Черновые записи  .  .  .  Чернозем с червями, посткомпост  . . . . Пенье растений  .  .  .  Хор ив! Хозяйственные пометки, указания . . . Селькор! Понятное искусство!” (ibid., 386).

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truth, “biography-making.” As in the nouveau roman, “author, die today, and I—tomorrow.” Yalla Bo’s speech is unwieldy and full of contradictions or perhaps his style is simply paradoxical, but one idea is clear and prominent: “the death of the author” is not a disappearance. On the contrary, it is the same act of sacrifice, the same labor through which the writer is born, lives, sacrifices himself to his language, and is resurrected: The drover, father Balaam, claimed that to speak nothing on one’s own behalf is the angels’ privilege. And you, the nonfeathered folk, should plough with your mouths, dance behind the plough with your organs of speech, while wearily moving your inflexible tongue. . . .  A true poet is a thinking stylus; he is possessed with voices from the books and utters their important fluctuations. Waking up from the spindle prick.575

These games involving words, letters, religions, and cultures suggest a view of writing as plowing the soil with one’s mouth or as shaping clay. The furrowing of the tongue becomes one with the furrowing of the ground by the blades of a plow, and the turning of the magical spindle with its killing and awakening powers unites with the mythical incarnation and apotheosis of Jesus of Galilee. The author is both plowman and sacrifice, Theseus and the Minotaur.576 Books are not meant for “the understanding of amoebas,” so all interpretations of books, including of the Book of Books, are like bagels. The bagel’s hole is the most desirable part, as it is all that remains after the bagel is eaten. The role of the writer, then, is not to publish, but “to bagelish” (obublikovat), to dance with the scroll after it is written, “meta-sow the eternal discord in front of nincompoops in order to drive it home to the piglets, to 575 “Погонщик о. Валаам утверждал, что ничего не говорить от себя — преимущество ангелов. А нам, непернатым, ртом пахать надо, плясать за сохой органами речи, устало ворочая неподатливый язык . . . Истинный пиит есть мыслящий стилос, он одержим книжными голосами и издает их важные колебания. Пробуждаясь от укола веретена (ibid., 386–387). 576 Ibid., 387.

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

lexically gnaw at them. Turn, noah, with your front to the Forester! Look at your father, ham!”577 The conception of Yalla Bo reflects a paradoxical historical process: fifty years of the height of poststructuralist philosophy—of the doctrine of the death of the author, of the development of the posthumanism or transhumanism idea—has ultimately led to the reemergence of neoindigenous and neopersonalist neomythology, to the conclusion of a “new testament” between writers and their readers, to the victory of the (author’s) icon over iconoclasm. The “spots of meaning” that the pen/ stylus leaves in its wake, like the Hebrew letter beit in bereshit (“beginning”),578 the first word of the Bible, begins the reading of the text anew, engendering the joy of the Torah—the holiday of Simhat Torah—again and again. In any case, at the end of the work, the inside of the vessel will remain empty.579 However, the author wants the reader to identify and remember him via the traces he left in the clay and in the ground. More than anything else, he wants the clay and the soil to remember him, the touch of his fingers, teeth, limbs—that is, the stylus, his unique style. This neoindigenous process leads the reader back to the primal-romantic source; thus, the motifs of the forest and the father appear in the text (perhaps in association with Goethe’s “Erlkönig”), with the forest also representing discourse, speech, or even mumbling (in Russian лес-ляс, forest-mumbling); perhaps this is Baudelaire’s forest of symbols. The figures of Noah and his son Ham also appear in an amusing Russian pun, where the name “Noah” (Noy) is also the word for “whine,” and “Ham” is homophonous with the word for “cad.” The images and characters from the biblical flood augment the view of art as the neoindigenous and neoromantic metahistorical dimension of the cycle of generations and eras, of eternal return and renewal.

577 “Тесеять раздобвечное перед этими раздолбаями, чтобы проняло поросят, дабы дошло, проточило лексически. Встань к лясу передом, ной! Взгляни на отца своего, хам!” (ibid.). 578 Ibid. 579 Ibid.

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Nevertheless, as the poet Yalla Bo says, there will be no other books but this Book. Next to it, all other books look like comics, like inflated balloons of prose that trickle meaning into ears. Yalla Bo’s feverish muttering completes his rhetorical cycle and returns to its beginning—this time, by offering an unreadable book, a supersurfeit, as an exemplar of reading. Instead of pointless wisdom and inane innovations, instead of professors’ fabricated whims and thoughts, instead of the individual nonsense endlessly spouted by craft or science, instead of the endless whirl of producing meaningless commentary and eating it tastelessly, we must carefully rewrite the book: Industriously dawdling away one’s time, dragging one’s feet under the lid of the entire pot of associations and alliterational timpani, while tenderly editing style (oh, these insertions seen through little dangling legs of the illuminated initials!), while fondly encircling whirly hooks and thinking of the inexhaustibility of bug-like letters and of their internal structure—what revolves around what, what stick is near what circle. Not thinking of the grammar but of the hidden harmony, as it is in the double—“sacred”— shekel that there are just 22 grams—oh, the vibrations of its copper!—as many as the letter-elements. . . . Reading upon eyelessness—let us do justice, turn a phrase, and return whatever belongs to the library.580

The author is portrayed here as a picturesque combination of scribe, Torah scholar, Borges the librarian, and Pierre Menard, who writes a new Don Quixote that is identical to the original but different 580 “Трудолюбиво филонить, тянуть волынку под сурдинку разливанных ассоциаций и аллитерационных литавр — ласково правя стиль (о, вставки сквозь свисающие с верхних полок ножки буквиц!), любовно обводя вихреватые крючки, думая о неисчерпаемости жукоподобных букв и об их внутреннем строении — что там вокруг чего вращается, какая палочка вблизи какого кружочка. Не о грамматике помышляя, но о припрятанной гармонии, ибо в двойном — ‘священном’ — шекеле как раз двадцать два грамма — о, вибрации его меди! — столько же и буквэлементов. . . . Чтение же на безглазье—отдадим должное, ввернем свое, вернем библиотечное” (ibid., 388–389).

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

in meaning. How does this figure compare with the unique stylist and the dancing cabalist that appear in the previous quoted passages? Whether this contradiction is resolved or remains an insolvable aporia, it is important to Yudson to create continuity of narrative, personality, and idea between two competing views—the romantic-­ personalist (and metaphysical) and the postmodern (and posthu­manistic). Even if these views are incompatible, they exist simultaneously in the writing-reading space, and there is no way of choosing or preferring one to the other. This nonchoice suits the spirit of the book as a whole, which speaks on all levels (as well as the neomodern eclectic spirit, like that of Nekod Singer): the nonchoice between homeland and foreign country, between Russian and Hebrew, between translation and transliteration, between action and nonaction, between climbing up to the top of the cabinet and coming down. Yudson’s writing (and views) encompasses everything, loves everything, and this is not because of his total selfishness; on the contrary, it stems from the humility and meekness of a true intellectual. Yudson’s view does not seek to harmonize contradictory elements, or parallel universes, or strange states of consciousness (as is characteristic, for example, of Rubina’s). Nevertheless, it remains on the level of mechanical eclecticism. Yudson seeks to draw order out of chaos, even if it comes in the form of dissipative structures that ascend and descend, come together and come apart. Yudson’s chaos is deterministic, or at least the author hopes that the chaos will discover order sooner or later. The continuity of this novel, constructed from parts that are very different from each other, is built on this hidden, secret, and most cherished expectation. The hope persists even though Yudson’s writing itself was not continuous, nor was there a unified intention guiding it. Multiple intentions that alter and evolve lead to an affinity between Yudson’s writing and the novels of Nekod Singer. Just as Mikhailichenko and Nesis, in their novel I/e_rus.olim (2004), locate the transcendental origin in Jerusalem’s stones and those stones’ memories, and just as Nekod Singer finds unity of his subjects in the consciousness of the artist, so too does Yudson find a foundation and defense for the unity of his writing in the form of the Jewish

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book (such as the Bible, Talmud, and Rashi’s commentaries), which serves as a mirror opposite his own novel. This position is as prideful as it is sincere and humble. This is why Yalla Bo’s speech on art ends with an epileptic seizure, erasing the distinctions between these two moral extremes. The artist is reduced to a body in the throes of uncontrollable convulsions, a golem, or perhaps the seizure raises him to the level of a prophet, a priest, a messenger, an oracle—it is all the same. Nevertheless, the writer’s ironic presentation of this figure and his orations—through Yalla Bo to all philosophizing about art—reaches its climax and becomes sarcasm with a dash of compassion: the poet who “can join together primal letters, make chains of words, create and destroy”581 cannot even control his own body. However, just before the convulsion hits, Yalla Bo makes a last pronouncement, which seems to sum up his view of the purpose of art: “I was endowed by the supreme forces with the capability to revive characters—to make them get out from under the book cover, as if having magically removed the gravestone, so that the dug up earth emits its smell.”582 This view is closer to the Romantic-metaphysical rather than the posthumanistic extreme of the aesthetic aporia of Yalla Bo. It may well be, on the other hand, that the view rebuffs aporia and, along with it, the validity of the dichotomies of which it is composed. The view presents as its goal the abrogation of the difference between the Bible and nouveau roman, between the constitution of the subject and the death of the author. Neither has any meaning without the primal-messianic magic of the constitution of life, of coming out of the earth and returning to the earth, in the form of a neoindigenous birth. This is the image of writing as plowing the earth that appears in Yalla Bo’s speech, which links to the image of the opening of tombs at the end of the speech. To write—that is, to plow—means to give life and to remember. 581 Yudson, The ladder to the cabinet, 393. 582 “Мне свыше дано оживлять персонажи — чтобы вылезали из-под обложки, вроде как сдвинув магийно плиту, и запах шел сырой разрытой земли” (ibid.).

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

THE TEACHER-STUDENT MODEL OF THE METAPHYSICAL LEAP 6

Remembrance is the thread with which Yudson stitches together the disparate passages of his novel. In the middle of the third, Israeli section, there is an internal novella, a legend, as the narrator calls it,583 describing Ilya’s last adventure in Russia and explaining how he fled and reached Israel. The narrator seeks an epic, mythic justification for the move. The victim narrative that appears in the first, Russian, part of the book—the protagonist’s flight from persecution and the tribulations of the exile—no long seem sufficient. This fairy tale is dreamlike, like those of Dina Rubina and Nekod Singer about Russia. It testifies to the rise of a new wave of memories and a “nostalgia for the foreign land,” of the recurring need to cope with nostalgia. In Chapters One and Two of Part Three, which recount the hero’s arrival in the Middle Eastern Republic and his service in the guard battalions, his country of origin is barely mentioned. A groundswell of nostalgia gradually builds up in Chapters Three and Four, when Ilya (now called Il) works as a steward (stolnik) in an undefined office, and then, in the final chapter, transfers to the university and becomes a “sage.” For Yudson, this internal novella fills in not only the psychological and moral void left open by the act of leaving the land of one’s birth, but it also fills in the narrative lacuna created by the unexplained hiatus between the first novel (Parts One and Two) and the second (comprising Part Three). This lacuna, this temporal short-circuit, cries out, like a trauma, open wound or a father’s name, to be repaired, to be filled with continuity and remembrance. In Lacanian terms, the imaginary once again calls out to be presented via symbols so that it will not be overly burned in the desert of the real—that is, Israel’s reality. The symbolic is embodied in a new myth called “Povest vremennykh zim” (Tale of bygone winters), a parody of Russian literature’s twelfth-century foundation epic, Povest vremennykh let (Tale of bygone 583 Ibid., 417.

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years). The author’s wordplay in the title of his epic is not all that original or funny—the word for years (leta) is paronymous with the word for “summer” (leto) and the declension “of summer” and “of years” is identical (let). In the title, the author replaces “summers” with “winters.” In the context of the novel, however, this pun is reinforced. Russia is referred to here as Kolymoskva; the word is a combination of Moscow and Kolyma, the latter a Siberian river and the location of Stalin’s infamous gulags. The change involved empties the story’s title of its chronicle-like, temporal meaning and gives it a standing outside of time. Moreover, it creates a sense of frozen, static time since the expression povest vremennykh zim, “tale of bygone winters,” can also be understood as “story of the winters of time.” Within the dystopia of the protagonist’s life in Russia, a “gate” opens into utopia. The students in Ilya’s class from Part One have grown up; now, they not only save their former teacher from a mob’s persecution and mistreatment, from wanderings, from the monsters and bands of thieves and murderers that swarm in the snows of Kolymoskva, but they also pamper him in a perfect parallel world they have created for him and prepare him for his move to other lands. Ilya’s wandering through the underworld is not much different from the descents to Hades of mythological heroes,584 just as his stay in the parallel world of his students is very similar to purgatory, even though the Middle Eastern Republic, where he ends up, is manifestly neither paradise nor hell. Ilya’s students create the parallel world and gate for their teacher. In Nekod Singer’s Tickets at the box office (2006), the author places his double, along with his classmates, in a Russian environment that is fantasy but also based in reality. They also become his comrades in an imagined term of military service. In the Nesises’ novels A noble man of Jerusalem (1997) and I/e_rus.olim (2004), the main characters are also classmates, although they act in a different phase of their lives, as adults in Israel. Whether the class serves as a context for dreams and 584 Sidorov hints to this by calling the novel “Odyssey” and “Il’iada” (“Tsunami soznaniia” [A tsunami of consciousness]).

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

memories, as in Singer, or as a Russian Israeli social context, it is fairly clear that it functions as a life raft in the stormy sea of immigration and as an optimal environment for communication, the exchange of ideas, spiritual and emotional life, and self-realization. In contrast, in Yudson’s novel this role is played by the hero’s students. This, of course, has a biographical background—Yudson is a teacher of math by profession and worked for a time in a school. However, there are also fundamental reasons why the author chose the teacher-student relationship as an almost constitutive plot element and as one of the central organizing principles in the construction of his book-library. Furthermore, this relationship appears in an almost carnivalesque reversal of roles, with the teacher as the student of his pupils.

7

In his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987), Jacques Derrida examines a drawing by Matthew Paris depicting Socrates and Plato. The former, seated, is writing, while the latter stands behind his teacher’s back and seems to be dictating to him and telling him what to write. Plato’s figure is smaller than that of Socrates, but his gesture, posture, and expression seem sterner than that of Socrates, even far more aggressive than we would expect. Derrida wondered about the depth to which this “pair of old men” lies in our consciousness. Of course, it was Plato, not Socrates, who was the writer, and his writing created the character of Socrates. Plato was not Socrates’ teacher but vice versa; however, Derrida sees profound symbolism in the artist’s “inaccuracy,” in this role-reversal of teacher and students, speaker and writer. Writing and reading, like learning and teaching, are social, cultural, and psychological functions, not behaviors. Totalitarian, stern, unambiguous speech is the “voice” of the teacher. In this case, it is the later Plato who “stands behind” and with phallic, metaphysical force appropriates or penetrates, thus perpetuating and fertilizing his teacher’s open, subversive, deconstructive, multifarious legacy—this being, according to Derrida, the nature of writing. This is the reason why in Yudson’s novel the imagined space in which the students rescue, enrich, and coach their teacher for the

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future is called the “Cathedra.” The novel later provides an account of Ilya’s trip to the university where he joins the circle of “sages;” all this, of course, is done in an hallucinatory, absurd way. Still, utopia’s cathedra is unique and different—it realizes the fantasy of a paradise of relations with students, in which the protagonist-teacher’s love flowers, as does his belligerence. He can allow himself to be weak and vulnerable but, at the same time, also mature and self-confident, to be refined yet also brutal and vulgar. Unlike other places in the novel, Ilya’s ideal topos is neither that of the victim nor the executioner. That dichotomy has no validity here because it runs in opposition to the configuration of the teacher-student ethos. To put it another way, this configuration saves the hero and the discourse from the trap of victimization, which demands a permanent object for violence and sacralization. Unexpectedly, in this topos the protagonist’s “Jewishness” loses its fateful significance and his students never mention it; the anti-Semitic perspective of the Jews’ power and weakness is also lost. It is precisely here—in the configuration of asymmetrical, hierarchical relations between teacher and student— that the ethic of mutuality and symmetry that Eric Gans speaks of finally wins out. This is the only ethic that can lead to the rejection rather than the perpetuation of violence, as in Girard’s hypothetical originary scene of culture with a sacrifice-victim-scapegoat at its center. At one stage of his life in this paradise, after accustoming himself to riding on horses, he turns into a centaur. This is a complete reversal of the Jew-on-a-horse drama of Isaac Babel’s Konarmiia, which is mentioned in the novel.585 Ilya begins to ask questions and receive answers, which returns him to the concepts of the book, parallel worlds, and the ladder to the top of the cabinet: “We are, so to speak, in the same Book, but on a different page, my dear Ilya Borisovich,—Savel’ich explained sedately,—if you puncture pages with a needle, then you’ll get a ‘wicket,’ a hole, a passage leading back and forth. . . . From under

585 Yudson, The ladder to the cabinet, 463.

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

the backstairs—the frost of steps of apprenticeship was floging them!— onto the Cabinet.”586 The ladder up to the cabinet is a chronotope—the principle of homology between the organization of the plot and the actualization of the personality, in particular, the metaphysical leap from initiation and learning to redemption. Books in general and the Bible in particular are the embodied structure of the universe, the magical revelation that enables the leap. The passage through the gate—between the pages and words that are also worlds—is knowledge, which the novel’s mythical hero seeks. The cathedra is the liminal but also ideal topos, unifying the structures of knowledge and society, the platonic dream that was actualized in the Jewish community’s governance—a “cathedrocracy,” the rule of teachers and scholars. It is also the type of parallel, alternative, utopian world best-suited to human beings. The Jewish culture of study-knowledge is exemplified by a needle that pierces the pages of a book and, in doing so, not only creates openings and gates for escape or salvation but also turns chaos into order, chance into law. Furthermore, it does this without the deterministic, positivistic, or mechanical fetters of classical science. The scholar’s free gesture strikes the hermeneutic point in every place, while dissipative structures of meaning and narrative sequences, of ethics, and of mythology rise and fall in accordance with the interpreter’s will, wisdom, and sensibility. Deterministic chaos, in the terms of modern science, is to be found at the heart of the “human principle,”587 which organizes the multiverse in the form of a metaphysical ladder.

8

The metaphysical ladder, the cathedra, and initiation into it are essential for escape from the “great winter” approaching the Moskvalym (which is Kolymoskva, that is, Russia): “The Giants’ Winter from the 586 Мы, Илья Борисыч, как бы в той же Книге, только на другой странице, — степенно объяснял Савельич. — Вот если иглой страницы проколоть — это и будет “калитка”. Дыра туда-обратно. . . . Из-под черной лестницы — драл мороз ступеней ученичества! — на Шкаф” (ibid., 465–466). 587 Ibid.

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legends. . . . The slow time will come—everything will shrink and freeze, every movement will stop. Terminus of the matter. A Harsh Winter, which is real ad absurdum, is drawing near. Entropy is in its own right already now—its messengers are showing up.”588 Winter is a partly natural and partly social phenomenon. The ability to produce, multiply, and preserve meaning is in danger of vanishing. That is why initiation and passage are so important, as well as borders and passages, ascents and descents of the ladder, travel between countries, descents into hell, entries and egresses through gates—they battle entropy. Such journeys and passages are not unidirectional. More precisely, the ascent and descent of the ladder is also open to interpretation. Ilya’s career as a “steward” ends when his eating and drinking companions suddenly reveal their true faces—they belong to a cult of “returnees”:589 “The MER project is closed. . . . Just Go Home! This is not a symbol but an aspiration for eXod-mas backward! . . . The Tritemple will soon crumble.”590 The ascent and descent from the ladder is interpreted as immigration to (in Hebrew, aliyah, literally “ascent”) and emigration from (yeridah, literally “descent”) Israel. In the final analysis, even a “reverse exodus” is an attempt to fight entropy, as is the post-Zionist or postnational idea, according to which the project of the Israeli state is about to, or should, end. The metaphysics of Jacob’s dream is used to justify this idea. Like a mirror, it reflects the nation-constituting significance of the exodus, but this mirror image is also a way of fighting entropy and creating meaning. From the point of view of the members of the cult, chaos is in fact located inside rather than outside the borders of the Middle Eastern Republic. The existence of the ladder and the possibility of vertical (metaphysical) movement are more important than the direction of movement. Neodiasporism, expressed in the 588 “Великанская Зима из легенд . . . Наступит медленное время — все сожмется, застынет и прекратит движение. Конечная остановка материи. Надвигается настоящая до абсурда Суровая Зима. Уже сейчас — энтропия в своем праве — появляются ее гонцы, Зима их выслала вперед — Новые” (ibid., 475). 589 Ibid., 486. 590 “Проект БВР закрыт . . . Уходить Домой! Это не символ, а стремление к . . . Изход назад! . . . Скоро вот Трихрам рухнет” (ibid., 486–487).

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

passage quoted above, is simply a mirror image, a carnival double of neoindigeneity. The essential dilemma between falling into hell under the ruins of the Third Temple in Israel, on the one hand, and sinking into snow stained with Russia’s blood591 is metaphysical, just as the concepts of “home” and “homecoming,” in this case, do not express much cultural content. In other words, there are not many things that connect the members of the cult to Russia. Rather, they express a romantic yearning, a pursuit of the inconceivable emptiness, or as they themselves put it, “not a symbol but an aspiration for . . . .” Another point of view on Russia and the approaching winter is that of the sages, a group of wise men that parodies the Elders of Zion, which Ilya joins after the cabal of returnees is arrested by the Halakhic Guard. The prototype of these sages is the established Israeli, a scion of the early waves of immigration that built the country. Like them, his roots lie in Russia, but his vector of desire is directed not toward Kolymoskva but rather toward the Middle Eastern Republic: “The tousled Kolymoskva never lost its grip, having been tenaciously ingrained in their pores, having left tattooed splotches and deposits of stakes, and its silver dust remains under their nails—Sh-lye-locks!”592 Paradoxically, in this depiction the sages sound more Russian than the returnees. This incisive insight cries out for comment, as does the comparison of the sages of Zion with Shakespeare’s Shylock, the image of the tattoo, and that of the silver dust under their fingernails. The old-timers possess a much broader cultural memory than the returnees. The former, born in the 1940s, are the parents of the latter, the generation born in the 1960s. The older generation has much greater historical experience. They remember Russia in times when the winter that everyone is predicting did not seem threatening—they “hear [about it] and laugh.”593 They believe more in the durability and survival of Russia 591 Ibid., 486. 592 “Колымосква взъерошенная не выветрилась из них, упорно въевшись в поры, оставив татуированные разводы и отложения колов, и под ногтями ее серебряная пыль — Щейлоки!” (ibid., 517). 593 Ibid.

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than do the younger people. This brings the old-timers closer to Russia, but at a price: they are hugely critical and extremely cynical in their view of it. Nothing can happen to Russia because Russia never changes. This tough, stoic position, along with the imaginary tattoos that Russian culture has inscribed on their bodies, turns them into something in the nature of prisoners (an allusion to the Prisoners of Zion, Zionist Jews who were persecuted and sometimes even imprisoned by the Soviet authorities because of their demand to immigrate to Israel). And who knows the prison better than the prisoners on the inside? Who feels the closeness of a bitter, somber kind to it, akin to the Stockholm syndrome, if not the prisoners themselves? Finally, the corporal paradigm of anti-Semitic discourse can hardly keep from referring to the classic drama of Shylock the Jew who, as it were, purchases the flesh of a gentile. The plotting of the Elders of Zion, the curse of Mammon—the reverse side of the curse of the ostracized race—still presides over the Christian world. The cursed Jew who rejected the gospel of Jesus eats his flesh—not to be sanctified but rather to defile the sacred. And yet, with this sacrificial “gluttony,” the Jew becomes party to the mystery, even if cloaked in the fool’s carnival garb. This is the secret of the affinity the sages feel for Russia—a profound but pathetic intimacy, felt despite the narrator’s irony and self-irony. Furthermore, the cosmology of the sages emerges out of the snows of Russia and the image of concentration camps are scattered around it: “Please understand, the world is camp-like. . . . The world is the true camp.”594 The image of the world as a concentration camp or prison has its roots in, on the one hand, the literature of the Russian “thaw” of the 1960s, particularly in the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, and on the other hand in Christian and Jewish eschatology, which sees this world (and the physical body) as merely a passageway, prison, or façade leading to the next world. Thus, it is only in some measure ironic when the speakers in the novel mention the Apostle Paul and the Messiah. The Messiah is the commutation of the prisoners’ sentences, and the ingathering of the exiles is the 594 “Вы поймите, мир — лагообразен . . . Mир — и есть истинный лагерь” (ibid., 537).

Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The Ladder to the Cabinet)

assembly of all the prisoners for their final inspection. Paul becomes Gogol’s Chichikov, the redeemer of dead souls.595 As such, Kolymoskva as a metaphor loses its national and geographical specificity and becomes a mythological and epistemological category that also characterizes the people of the Middle Eastern Republic. It becomes an almost universal complex, a gestalt: “You see, Kolymoskva has been lying in the attic storage of our consciousness for many years. . . . And so has the winter bandaged with snow—on that very spot. Toys in cotton wool. . . . Sowed a dragon inside themselves, that is, lost it, shoved it somewhere like rubber, having forgotten it.”596 This comes from the mythical intertext (Evgeny Shvarts’s play The Dragon) and from the context of the New Year celebrations. Both suggest an eternal return, inevitable and impossible. It is a real return—not like that of the returnees; because it leads to self-understanding, to the origin and discovery of the painful, unfathomable truth, leading to disabusal from illusions. The novel ends with an apocalyptic-Messianic vision in which pain and joy blend. Only the destruction of the world can save it; only the shedding of the husk, the burning of the skin, will bring resurrection. To destroy the world is tantamount to creating it; out of the fire is born the reviving ash. The key role in this belongs to Israel—it is the black hole, the gravitation of universal edginess that compresses it into a point, into a singularity that may be embodied in the Hebrew letter yud (“‘”), symbolizing the name of God, People of Israel, and its Land, as well as a singularity, a fetus, a new birth.597 Yet, at any minute it is liable to explode in a big bang of reason and open a window to leave-taking—a new exodus from Egypt.598 The motifs of modern science, of Russian mythology, of Mikhail Bulgakov, midrashim, and cabala, all unite into a theological-political view in which the fate of 595 Ibid., 538–539. 596 “Понимаете, Колымосква много лет лежит на антресолях нашего сознания . . . И зима, забинтованная снегом — там же. Игрушки в вате. . . . Посеяли дракона в себе — в смысле, потеряли, запихнули куда-то резиново, забыв” (ibid., 543). 597 Sidorov, “A tsunami of consciousness.” 598 Yudson, The ladder to the cabinet, 450.

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the word or logos is tied up with the fate of Israel. A picture of letters of fire is presented to the reader, letters that burn as they are written, and their burning itself is God, Jewish meaning and existence—the undying phoenix. Flight is the dominant motif in the novel’s final pages. In its last lines, the phoenix, the letter yud, and the word Yud unite—this latter in the sense of “Jew” and the first, paternal, part of the author’s name, Yud-son, meaning “son of the Jew” or “son of Judah” or “son of the letter yud” (or one can say, in the spirit of Yudson’s word games—“a son, dream in Russian, of Yud”). However, the form of the letter yud is also that of the inverted comma that opens and closes a quoted text. The closing of the quotation marks, like the conclusion of a successful Freudian session, one that has succeeded in turning a trauma into a memory-speech and in placing it within the punctuation marks that set it off, leaves a sense of acceptance and completion, of the optimism of perpetuation and the memory of the visible, supple creation that is characteristic only of myths and poetry: “But the Yud’ comma that flew up is eternal and indelible.”599 Despite the barriers of the paradigms of diasporic, transnational, migrant, minor, nomadic, dystopian, allohistoric, and postmodern literatures, Mikhail Yudson created his unique “polylingual” epos. The ladder to the cabinet (2013) is incomparable with anything ever produced in Russian-language Israeli literature. A key to its poetics can be found in discourse that constantly produces new forms of life and possible worlds, every facet of which possesses its own ideological topography, its own mythology. Yudson’s method consists in turning this multiplicity into the ladder stairs of metaphysical ascension to the origin, be it as minimal as the letter yud, when topos (place), mythos (individual), and logos (language) are united in the nontotalitarian unity. The destiny of a man-comma is to transcend onto the text line and enter the eternity, to become the first letter of the Name of God.

599 “Но вечна и нестираема вспорхнувшая запятая Юд’” (ibid., 553).

Afterword

I

doubt whether it is possible to summarize in a few words a research study that encompasses twenty years of literary works, five writers, and sixteen novels. Therefore, I won’t attempt to do so. It is also doubtful whether any single study can truly reflect an accurate picture of Russian-language literature in Israel. As I write these lines, other authors are achieving more and more exposure, such as Elena Minkina-­ Taycher, whose fourth novel, The Rebinder Effect, has won the praises of both readers and critics. The new writings of still others, such as Alexander Ilichevsky and Igor Gelbach, who immigrated to Israel over the past few years, will most likely also soon contribute to changing the picture. The artificial limitedness of the corpus of works is unavoidable and, in our case, necessary: firstly, because the immigration from the U.S.S.R. in the 1990s was significantly different from all other previous waves of Russian immigration; and secondly, because the Russian or Russian Jewish literature written in Israel differs from its sister literatures written in other countries. Many of the writers of this aliyah were not included in this book and, as I said, I hope to make up for this in my future studies. This being the case, I will attempt to briefly describe the features of the literature discussed here—not in order to summarize the current study but in order to sketch the basic lines for the next study. Many have tried to capture the essence of the nature of Russian-­ language literature in Israel—in thematic, stylistic-cultural, geographic, and national terms. Others became frustrated or simply gave up on, from the beginning, the need to find a unifying property for political or 271

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aesthetic reasons. I will also attempt to make a modest contribution, as far as the findings of my study allow and as far as is fitting to the goals of the method of the “metaphysics of literature,” as Mikhail Epstein defines it. I will begin by emphasizing that my conclusions relate only to the genre of the novel—a genre that, according to most researchers, cannot but reflect the nature of the culture in its attempt to define itself and conduct a dialogue with other cultures. Therefore, the novel of the aliyah of the 1990s can be characterized by the following basic features. At the center is the figure of a warrior, an adventurer, a wanderer in the historical, geographic, or virtual space. Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis’s concept of “extreme history” well describes the psychocultural core of the figure. The hero is driven by the search for the transcendental origin/purpose of historical existence; in other words, he is a mythical hero in a “chaos of history,” in the terms of Dennis Sobolev’s favorite locution. This motivation is in the basis of any ideology which can be found in the novels under discussion, but it is not ideological per se. The quest involves an imaginary transgression, expressed in an abortive gesture of appropriation and violence. According to the generative anthropology of Eric Gans, this gesture of nonviolence serves as a mechanism for the origination of signs, ethics, and a new culture. The gesture allows for the establishing of a unified neoindigenous consciousness in the dismantled historical-cultural networks—existential, national, and political. This neoromantic unity breaches the despair of total alienation and reveals itself in “nostalgia for a foreign land,” in the paradoxical words of Mikhail Yudson. This is the consciousness of a subject who perceives himself or herself outside of the simple binary dichotomy of victim-executioner, as well as outside of the postmodern relativistic rhetoric and the deterministic rhetoric of historicism. He or she does not indulge in the politics of either the “game of signifiers” or “historical necessity,” but instead tries to get rid of them. In an attempt to unify all these elements, a new myth is created— the rebirth of the neoindigenous hero; this mythopoesis is meant to express the abortion and rejection of historical violence. The neoindigeneity—in the new country, the new language, the new mentality—is a realization of the dream of a generation that grew up in the world of the

Afterword

Soviet simulacra and the magical realism of the world of literature. Life in Israel, like writing in Israel, is perceived as an artistic and conceptual project, a megaperformance—more real than the reality itself—geared toward liberating the world from the control of illusion and simulation, to finally bring history face-to-face with truth. Researchers are just beginning to draw initial general conclusions about the literature produced by the migrants of the 1990s. We can look forward to broad research focusing on all aspects of its poetics as well as its other facets. I hope to see further developments in the discussion about the “long thoughts” of this literature—the discussion that the current book hopes to become a part of.

273

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291

Index A

Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, 30, 47, 59, 71, 73, 170–172, 201, 217 Akhmatova, Anna, 47, 64, 81n170, 164 Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke, 190n441 Albéniz, Isaac, 16 Alfonso X el Sabio, King, 16 Alighieri, Dante, 39, 120 aliyahs (waves of immigration), 3, 25, 39, 45, 76–78, 266 Aliyah of the 1990s, 3, 25, 271–272 Alone in the Desert (Meir Shalev), 198 Amichai, Yehuda, 135n308 Amnuel, Pesakh (Pavel), 182n416 Angel konvojnyj (The convoy angel), 13 anti–Semitism, 86, 239, 245, 250, 264, 268 Appelfeld, Aharon, 59, 228 Astronom (Yaakov Schechter), 91–92 Austin, John L., 159n362 Auto da Fé (Elias Canetti), 241 autopoesis, 22, 237

B

Babel, Isaac, 27 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9n19, 22, 59, 97, 146, 203, 213, 233 Balzac, Honoré de, 174 Barash, Alexander, viii Barthes, Roland, 52, 169 The Bat (Aharon Megged), 35 Bataille, Georges, 212n502 Baudrillard, Jean, 180 Baukh, Efrem, 45, 76 Benjamin, Walter, 96 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 66 Borges, Jorge Luis, 77, 84, 89, 157, 204, 242, 258 Bourdieu, Pierre, 101 Bradbury, Ray, 252 Brauer, Erich, 147n338 Brodsky, Joseph, 29, 45–46, 81n170 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 35, 40, 43–44, 79, 108, 181, 205, 241, 269 Bunin, Ivan, 82 Bykov, Dmitry, 245, 251–252

C

Camus, Albert, 168

Canetti, Elias, 241 carnival, 13–33, 37–38, 53, 59, 73, 79, 83, 97, 100, 109, 130, 145, 173–174, 176, 179, 211–213, 246, 250–251, 254 Carroll, Lewis, 115, 251 Celan, Paul, 135n308, 143 Chabad Hasidic movement, 38 Chagall, Mark, 73, 95, 124, 169 Chekhov, Anton, 35, 64, 79, 84, 101 Chomsky, Noam, 215, 230 Chukovskaia, Lidia, 243n557 Clement, the Pope, 127 Cohen, Hermann, 9n19, 55–56, 134n303, 186n428

D

Decline of the West, The (Oswald Spengler), 125, 203 Defoe, Daniel, 102 Deleuze, Gilles, 9n17, 11, 48, 148, 229 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 6, 9, 13, 87–88, 143, 143, 147, 166, 214–215, 236, 263 Derschmidt, Friedemann, 132n288, 159n361 Deutsch, David, 50 Dicker–Brandeis, Friedl, 122–123 Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel and Landscape Painted with Tea (Milorad Pavić), 241 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 120 Dorgan, Theo, 159n360 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 25, 35, 64, 168, 170, 227, 235–237 Dvoetochie/Nekudataim, 132, 137–144, 148–150, 158–160, 168

E

El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos), 95, 112–113, 121–124 Epstein, Mikhail, ix, 2, 67, 78n164, 179n407, 272 Everett, Hugh, 50 extreme history, concept of, 82, 204, 272

F

Fellini, Federico, 36 Fontanela (Meir Shalev), 48–49 Foucault, Michel, 98n215, 232n542 Freidenberg, Olga, 32, 212n501 Freud, Sigmund, 50, 77, 227, 270

Index

G

Gans, Eric, 4, 55, 81n169, 169n375, 177, 185, 198, 207, 264, 272 paradox of language and representation, 4–5 Gelbach, Igor, 271 Gendelev, Mikhail, 141n321 Girard, René, 4, 18n28, 169n375, 185, 198, 207, 264 Glukhovsky, Dmitry, 251 Gogol, Nicolai, 47, 64, 79, 128, 170–171, 220, 251–252, 269 Goldberg, Leah, 76 Goldstein, Alexander, viii, x, 131147n338, 242n555 Gordon, Noah, 61 Gorky, Maxim, 37 Green, Alexander, 144n329 Grinberg, Saveli, 149n345, 165 Grynberg, Henryk, 87n183 Guattari, Felix, 11 Guberman, Igor, 82

H

Haendel, Fritz, 122 Halevi, Judah, 76 Hasidism, 38, 41–42, 79, 93–94, 120, 123, 229, 231, 248n565 Ha–Yored (Dorit Abusch), 35 Hebrew Nekudataim project, 138–139 Heidegger, Martin, 218 Here Comes the Messiah!, 1, 6, 13, 17, 33, 35, 38, 74, 80, 84, 102. see also Rubina’s writing, analysis divided consciousness, 35 Jerusalem symbolism, 81 myth in, 38–39 personalization of the Messiah, 38 pirates in, 107–109 victims and heroes, 55–58, 64, 69–71 Holocaust, 23, 29, 31, 43–44, 59–61, 84, 86, 95, 122–123, 198, 249

I

Ibn Gabirol, Solomon, 32, 41 Ierusalimsky dvorianin (A noble man of Jerusalem), 168–178. see also I/e_rus. olim; Preemptive Revenge (ZY) carnival, 174, 176 “Masada complex,” 174–176, 228 “opening to the abyss,” 178 victimhood, 176–177 I/e_rus.olim, 178–222, 262. see also Ierusalimsky dvorianin (A noble man of Jerusalem); Preemptive Revenge (ZY)

alternative/parallel historical multiplicity, 202 character David, 181–182, 191–192, 197, 201, 206–207 “daughter reality,” 187–188 demands of network multiplicity, 190, 195 dualities and doubles, 181, 185, 187, 193–195, 197–198, 204–205, 207 eschatological contingent security network, 209–210 genome mapping project, 182 gesture of appropriation, 192 Grisha’s personality network, 203–204 historical-empirical actualization of a persona, 187–188 history as a network, conception of, 189–190, 199, 201–202, 222 Jerusalem Syndrome, 177, 181, 191, 197, 201, 206 Kantian solution in, 216–217 main character Jerusalem, 178, 186, 206, 208, 215 motif of creation as a sin, 207 motif of motherhood, 220–221 Netneism manifesto, 178–179 network thinking, 199–200, 227–228 query/response or search/results relationship, 214 sacrifice motif and sacrificial victim, 207–212, 214, 218, 221 sphinx’s duality in, 193–195, 197–198, 209 symbol of alienation/identification, 193, 202–203 theme-plot of schoolmates’ adventures, 181n413 virtual character, Allergen the cat-poet, 182–187, 193–194, 216 virtual network of personality, 180–181 immigration, 7n14, 17, 37, 39, 53, 64, 69, 74, 76, 144–145, 154, 165, 172, 201, 203, 246–247, 250, 263, 266–267, 271, 273 Ilf, Ilya, 79 Ilichevsky, Alexander, 271 International Revue (Lew Leslie), 15 In the Midst of the Affair (Hanoch Bartov), 35 Itten, Johannes, 123

J

The Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (Edward Kritzler), 110 Jewish Russian identity, 8 Jewish “Spanishism,” 14–15 Josephus Flavius, 103n220 Joyce, James, 241

293

Index

294

K

Kafka, Franz, 7n14, 81, 251–252 Kagan, Matvei, 9n19, 55, 242n556 Kaliayev, Ivan, 229 Kaniuk, Yoram, 61 Kanovich, Grigory, 57 Kant, Immanuel, 185, 209, 216–217, 237 kaparot (penance), 40 Karafëlov, Boris, 7, 15, 28, 73, 95, 123–124, 193 Karamzin, Nicolai, 115 Keret, Etgar, 172 Kien, Franz Peter, 122 Kluger, Daniel, 181n413 Kristeva, Julia, 225 Kuprin, Alexander, 37, 64

L

Lacan, Jacques, 42, 50, 77, 120, 261 The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra: A Spanish Suite, 6, 13–19, 39, 80, 109. see also Rubina’s writing, analysis carnival and anticarnival, mode of, 17–19, 23–24 death in, 39 Israeli culture and Spanish culture, 15–16 mottos from Spanish folk songs, 16–17 musical genre, 15 suicide and nomadic artist-clown (minstrel) themes, 17 suites, 16 theme of the “last Jew,” 58–60 theme of the uprooted immigrant, 17 victims and heroes, 58–60 Lem, Stanislaw, 20 Lenin, Vladimir, 148–149, 240 Leonardo’s handwriting, 6, 8, 11–12, 28–29, 39, 100, 109, 118. see also Rubina’s writing, analysis Anna’s apprenticeship at the workshop of Eliezer, 92–94 death in, 39 messianic female character of, 48–51 metaphysical wanderers and fliers, 124 mirrors as motif, 8, 11–12, 21, 48–51, 79 nomadism in, 106–107 sanctification/tikkun duality, 95–96, 110 symbolism of the mirror, 90–91 Leskov, Nikolai, 64 Lestnitsa na shkaf (The ladder to the cabinet), 239 apocalyptic–Messianic vision, 269 ascent and descent of the ladder, 266–267 cathedra and sages, 264–269 conception of Yalla Bo, 255–260

ethical and social aspects of the ladder, 244–245 first version, 243 geography structure in, 242 horrors of life in the future Russia, 248–249 image of a ladder up to a cabinet, 243 Jewish myth functions, 249–250 Kolymoskva as a metaphor, 269 principal chronotope of, 247–248 protagonist’s metaphysical leap, 244–245, 261–270 structure and language, 242 use of diglossia, 246–247 violence in, 244–246 Levin, Gabriel, 138n318, 143n329, 160n363 Levinas, Emmanuel, 143, 203 Losev, Alexei, 5, 28, 91, 143, 180n411, 185n425, 188 Lotman, Yuri, 34, 147

M

madness, 9, 12, 21, 24, 39, 44, 54, 66, 75, 79–81, 125–126, 128, 182, 206 Maharal of Prague (Judah Loew ben Bezalel), 32 Makarova, Elena, 122–123 Maler, Israel, 141n321 Mandelstam, Osip, 81n170, 140 Manea, Norman, 87n183 The Man without Qualities (Robert Musil), 241 Markish, David, 141n321 Massumi, Brian, 169, 223, 229 The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov), 40, 108, 241 Maturana, Humberto R., 22n35, 237n548 Mayer, Peretz Beda, 122 messianism/messianic motif, 3, 18, 44–45, 73, 93–94, 115, 121, 123, 182, 199, 211, 260, 269 connection between motherhood and, 43–44, 73–74, 98, 220 Faustian, 126 God as a messianic avatar, 218 Jerusalem syndrome, 221, 225 in Leonardo’s handwriting, 48–51 in The Master and Margarita, 40 in White dove of Cordova, 51–54 neurotic, 197 of revolutionaries, 65 Messing, Wolf, 99 metaphysical leap, 4, 97, 120–130, 193 Lestnitsa na shkaf (The ladder to the cabinet), 244–245, 261–270 metaphysics of literature, 70, 203, 215, 231, 266, 272 of ghetto art, 123 of law, 100 of memory and destiny, 73

Index of neoindigeneity, 27, 250 of sacrifice, 222 of source, 11, 19, 33, 36 of tikkun, 110 Mikhailichenko, Elizaveta (Elisheva Nesis), 3, 82, 167, 272. see also Ierusalimsky dvorianin (A noble man of Jerusalem); I/e_rus.olim; Preemptive Revenge (ZY) Garmoniia po Deribasovu (Harmony according to Deribasov), 167 Minkina–Taycher, Elena, 271 mirrors, as motif, 8, 11–12, 21, 48–51, 67–68, 76, 79, 84, 87, 90–94, 98–99, 106, 190, 203 Moscow-Petushki (Venedikt Yerofeyev), 168, 227 multilingualism, 107, 133, 142–143, 146, 215 Musil, Robert, 241 mythopoetics/mythopoesis, 2, 28n45, 143, 178–179, 183, 188, 194, 217, 223, 272

N

Nahman of Breslov, rabbi, 51, 88, 93 Na Verkhnei Maslovke (In Upper Maslovka), 14 neoindigeneity, 8, 27, 33–38, 106, 177, 222, 241–260, 267, 272 Nesis, Yury, 3, 82, 167. see also Ierusalimsky dvorianin (A noble man of Jerusalem); I/e_rus.olim; Preemptive Revenge (ZY) Nesterov, Mikhail, 70 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51, 80, 111, 168, 171, 233

O

Okun, Alexander, 82 On the sunny side of the street, 6, 24–28, 35–36, 39, 80, 102, 107, 109. see also Rubina’s writing, analysis as back-to-the-homeland postimmigration novel, 25 character of the beloved city, 49 death in, 39 monologues, 26 motherhood-orphanhood theme, 45 original/copy motif, 87–88 postcard motif, 88–89 reflection and duplication of fragments of life, 46–49 ritualistic and magical dimensions, 40–42 styles of speech, imitation (transliteration) of speech, 27–28 victims and heroes, 64–66 originary thinking, 4, 199 Orwell, George, 252 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 64

P

Pasternak, Boris, 45 Pavić, Milorad, 204, 241–242, 252 Pelevin, Victor, 45, 250–252

Petrov, Evgeni, 79 Petrushka syndrome, 6, 10–12, 15, 32–33, 39, 80, 100, 109, 111. see also Rubina’s writing, analysis barren and lesbian femininity motif, 54 character of the woman/doll, 96–97 configuration of hagiography and artistic mysticism, 71 cultural crisis at the center of the novel, 127–129 death in, 39 legend of the golem of Prague, 81 link between a pirate and a puppet, 115–117 madness, 126 metaphysical wanderers and fliers, 125 nomadism in, 106 novel’s plot, 126–127 position of the narrator, 32 puppet/copy motif, 62 “puppet within a puppet” symbol, 98–100 victims and heroes, 71–74 Plato, 9, 20, 80, 93, 124, 175, 185, 219, 221, 263 Polanyi, Michael, 169n374 Pomeranz, Grigory, 168 postmodern thinking, 147 post-Soviet Russian-language Israeli literature, 3 Preemptive Revenge (ZY), 222–238. see also Ierusalimsky dvorianin (A noble man of Jerusalem); I/e_rus.olim anthropological philosophy of war, 234–235 comparison of terrorists to pirate figures, 229–230 context of victims and terrorists, 223–226 hyperhumanism in, 232–233 parodic demonization of the enemy, 231–234 pluralistic intellectualism, 235 sacrifice motif, 229–230, 236–237 terror in, 230–231 Prigogin, Ilya, 144n331 Proust, Marcel, 87 Purim festival, 14, 17–19, 61, 63, 75, 169–170, 173, 176, 224 Pushkin, Alexander, 50, 87, 146, 157, 171

R

Rabelais, Francois, 59, 97, 146, 232–233, 252 Radnóti, Miklós, 87 The Rebinder Effect (Elena Minkina-­ Taycher), 271 Reicher, Victoria, x Reinhardt, Django, 15, 72 Rembrandt van Rijn, 49, 67, 92, 123 Reznick, Leonid, 61

295

296

Index Round Trip (Nathan Shaham), 35 Rubina’s writing, analysis, 205. see also Here Comes the Messiah!; Leonardo’s handwriting; On the sunny side of the street; Petrushka syndrome; Russkaia kanareika (A Russian canary); The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra: A Spanish Suite; White dove of Cordova Angel konvojnyj (The convoy angel), 13 attachment to home, 7 author/protagonist duality, 80–81, 89–94 “between-the-seasons book,” 68 border as a motif, 8–9 collections published, 24–25 comedy, 39 concept of carnival, 97–98 creation/magic motif, 11, 13, 15, 19, 27, 30, 32 dreams, 21–22, 76–78 “familiography” thinking, 25 fugitives, nomads, and pirates, 100–120 hero-trickster, portrayal of, 2 idea of a type of metaphysical leap, escape, or flight, 120–130 image of “Israeli roulette,” 86–87 Israeli culture and Spanish culture, themes of, 15 Jewish piracy, 110–118 “Kamera naezzhaet” (Close–Up), 20 motherhood-orphanhood theme, 44–45 musical works, 13–15 myth of the messiah, 39 mythopoetic perception, 28 Na Verkhnei Maslovke (In Upper Maslovka), 14 nomadic nature of writing, 8 original/copy motif, 9–10, 30, 32, 82–100 passion for life and making inanimate come alive, 12 poetic victimhood of ballads and operas, 62–63 Renaissance influence, 91 role of historical alternativeness, 78–79 schema of duality of the dynastic generations, 80–81 sentimental literature of, 33 themes of home and the return to one’s origins, 2 thought/ narrative pattern, 85–88 thoughts or memories about war and Holocaust, 29 translation and perception of language, 10–12

traumas and rituals of initiation and transition, 74–82 Uroki muzyki (The music lessons), 13 violence and victimhood, contexts of, 4, 12–13, 23 writing style, 8, 10–16, 19, 22, 37 Russian-Hebrew diglossia, 37, 145–146, 246 Russian-language literature in Israel, 33–34, 130–131, 140, 205, 246, 252, 270–271 Russkaia kanareika (A Russian canary), 1, 7, 39, 80, 100, 110. see also Rubina’s writing, analysis death in, 39 escape motif, 54 gypsy line, 119–120 nomadism in, 106 pirates in, 117–118

S

Sabatini, Rafael, 102 Said, Edward, 225 Schechter, Yaakov, xi, 3, 91–92 Schimmel, Harold, 144 Schneider, Karin, 132n288, 159n361 Second and Third Aliyahs, 3 self–translation, 133, 154, 158–159, 164, 254 Sergius of Radonezh, St., 70 Shakespeare, William, 55, 267 Shalamov, Varlam, 268 Shalev, Meir, 48–49, 71–72, 198–199Shrayer, Maxim, 1, 134n305, 135n305 Shvarts, Evgeny, 269 Sidorov, Mikhail, 239 Singer, Gali–Dana, 132, 137–140, 142–144, 146, 149–150, 159n360, 165 Singer, Nekod, 3, 137n315, 150, 197 attitude toward magical realism, 147n338 conception of the artist, 142–143 Drafts of Jerusalem, 128–129, 142, 164 as editor of Dvoetochie/Nekudataim, 140n321 expression of bilingualism, 145–146, 148, 151, 159, 164–166 kinds of literary games, 149–150 lingual neoeclectism, 137–151 multilingualism of, 142 multilingual situation in writing, 131–136, 146–147 published works, 137n315, 142, 150 Russian and Hebrew versions of works. see translation of works semiotic and aesthetic perception, 148 Tickets at the box office, 141–142, 144, 146, 150–152, 160n364, 262 translingualism, 138, 254

Index use of diglossia in writing, 145–146 visual and narrative images, 149 Snapshots (Michal Govrin), 35 Sobolev, Dennis, ix–x, 3, 82, 103n220, 160n364, 190n442, 204n482, 272 Sollors, Werner, 134 Solntse samoubiits (Efrem Baukh), 76 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 268 Spanish suites, 16. see also The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra: A Spanish Suite Steiner, George, 134 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 102 Syndicate, 6, 12–13, 19–24, 26–27, 34–35, 84. see also Rubina’s writing, analysis contexts of violence and victimhood, 23 dualities and doubles of places, times, and people, 83–84 fragmentation of the narrative, 22 ideals of postmodernism, 19–20 Jerusalem symbolism, 81–84 Jewish exiles and nomads, 105–106 Jewish history, 80 memory of the Holocaust, 60–61 narrator’s existential state in, 34 Russia-as-a-dream, 77–78 symbolism of fire, 43–44 terror victim, 63–64 two plot locations, 21 victimhood, 60–61

T

Tales of Mother Goose (Charles Perrault), 39 Tarn, Alex, x, 3, 181n413 Tarkovsky, Arseny, 59 Time and the Other (Emmanuel Levinas), 203 Todorov, Tzvetan, 252 Tolstaya, Tatyana, 251–252 Tolstoy, Leo, 64, 243–244 Tower of Babel, 6, 24, 27, 36, 160n364, 215 translation of works, 153–166 addition, 155–156, 162–163 cultural harmonization, 156–157 elision, 155, 161 indication of the source of a quote, 157–161 replacement, 156, 163 translation thinking, 12 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 46–48, 64 Tulchinsky, Grigori, ix tzimtzum, 185

U

Uroki muzyki (The music lessons), 13 Uvarov, Mikhail, ix

V

Varela, Francisco J., 22n35, 237n548 Vega, Lope de, 94 Velazquez, Diego, 50 Vermeer, Jan, 91 Volokhonsky, Henri, 142

W

Wagner, Richard, 86 Warsaw ghetto, 37 Weiman, Naum, 111n231, 147n338, 211–212 White dove of Cordova, 6, 8, 10, 14–15, 30–33, 39, 81, 100, 102, 109. see also Rubina’s writing, analysis appearance of Jewish Spanish pirates, 103–104 death in, 39 focus on Jewish history, 30–31 foundation of the tragic plot and hero, 125–126 messiah as the artist-forger, 51–54 metaphysical wanderers and fliers, 120–124 nomadism in, 106 romantic motif of “the brother robbers,” 53 Spanish theme, 14–15, 52–53 sphere of historical Jewish-Christian relations, 68–69 Zakhar’s piratic journey, 110–114, 118 White, Hayden, 51, 83

Y

yeridah, 35 Yerofeyev, Venedikt, 168, 227 Yi–Fu Tuan, 101 Yudson, Mikhail, 3, 241, 272. see also Lestnitsa na shkaf (The ladder to the cabinet) allegorical fantasy of Israel, 247 carnival aesthetics, 246, 250–251, 254 language, 253 means of expressing ideas, 254 metaphors, 248–249 writing style, 250–251, 259–260

Z

Zhvanetsky, Mikhail, 27, 240, 264

297

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