The Moscoviad

The
Moscoviad

Yuri
Andrukhovych

Translated
from the Ukrainian

by
Vitaly Chernetsky

Spuyten
Duyvil

New
York City

copyright
© 2006, 2008 Yuri Andrukhovych

©
Juri Andruchowytsch, 2003

All
rights reserved by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main

translation
copyright © 2008 Vitaly Chernetsky

ISBN
978-1-933132-52-5

Cover
photo (C) Slava Mogutin, courtesy of powerHouse Books and Envoy Gallery, NY.

The
publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the Ukrainian
Studies Fund.

Library
of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andrukhovych,
IUrii, 1960-

[Moskoviada.
English]

The
Moscoviad / Yuri Andrukhovych ; translated by Vitaly Chernetsky.

p.
cm.

Includes
bibliographical references and index.

Summary:
Surreal misadventures of a Ukrainian in Moscow during the late times of the
Soviet Empire. Both the protaganist and each character with whom he comes into
contact presents a comedy of universal error that occasionally morphs into a
tale of horror.

ISBN
978-1-933132-52-5 (alk. paper)

I.
Chernetsky, Vitaly. II. Title.

PG3949.1.N296M6713
2007

891.7’934--dc22

2007007333

the
moscoviad

let them this time as well

hunt down nothing that is ours

Hryhori Chubai

You
live on the seventh floor,
having covered the
walls of your room with Cossacks and WUPR
1
officials, from the window you see the roofs and joyless poplar alleys of
Moscow; you can’t see the Ostankino TV tower—it can only be seen from the rooms
on the other side of the building—but its close presence can be sensed every
minute; it radiates something soporific, the viruses of sluggishness and
apathy, which is why in the morning you cannot force yourself to wake up, you
move from one dream to another, as if from one country to another. You sleep
selflessly, most often until eleven o’clock, when the Uzbek guy on the other
side of the wall turns on at full volume spicy Oriental music of the style “one
stick two strings.” Cursing good-naturedly our unfortunate history, the
friendship of the peoples and the 1922 union treaty, you realize that going
back to sleep is ruled out. Especially since the Jewish guy on the other side
of another wall has already returned from a shopping expedition, having bought
for the umpteenth time, say, pantyhose for his innumerable old-testament kin in
Birobidzhan, for all its generations. Now with the righteous feeling of mission
accomplished he will sit down to write new poems in the medieval language
called Yiddish and will indeed write them, seven before lunch and three more in
the afternoon. And all of them will be published in the journal
Sovietish Heymland
as living testimony to the state’s tireless care
for the culture of small peoples.

The Jewish guy on
the other side of the wall is a living and instructive reminder to you, you son
of a bitch, that you too must be doing something—buying pantyhose, writing
poems. Instead you are lying in bed, studying God knows how many times the
portrait of the dictator Petrushevych, while the Oriental music behind the wall
turns ever more passionate and monotonous, it streams on like water in
irrigation canals, it is really a great outing with camels and elephants,
cotton plantations, blues for the hemp mafia.

And you, the
Ukrainian poet Otto von F., you physically sense pangs of conscience eating
away at you, gnawing ever larger holes, so that one day you will walk out into
the dorm hallway already fully transparent, holy, and not a single Kalmyk will
even greet you.

But one can’t do
much about it—your poems must have stayed behind in the atmospheric fields of
Ukraine, while the Moscow fields turned out to be too dense for their
nightingale-like penetration.

In the meantime
the local characters are already filling up the hallway; actually, they are
writers, indeed “from all ends of the Soviet Union,” but for some reason they
resemble not so much creators of literature but its characters. Characters from
potboilers baked according to the blandest recipes of the great realist
tradition.

You distinguish
their writerly voices—and each one of them, according to the letters of
recommendation from the places of previous activity, is “endowed with his/her
own unique voice that cannot be mistaken for any other”; these voices in the
hallway—they tell each other something, they copulate, they say the kettle is
boiling, they sing “dontpoursaltovermywounds,” quote Vysotsky (Zhvanetsky),
2
invite
someone to come over for breakfast, inform that the whore from the distance
learning division (third floor, room 303) spent this night in room 727, and so
forth.

In inviolable
dialectical unity with the voices appear the smells—a bouquet made up of garbage
disposer, hangover, and sperm. Frying pans hiss, buckets and keys clank, doors
slam, for today is Saturday, no lectures, and no bastard will force me to do
something I don’t want to. And may all of them go to hell!

Thus gradually
you enter reality, remembering that the whore from 303 spent the night not in
727, as was mistakenly announced in the hallway, but in 729, that one of the
Chechens (or most likely all of them together) yesterday gave a nice thrashing
in the elevator to the phys. ed. guy, Yasha, that the Russian poet Yezhevikin,
who lives at the opposite end of the dorm, yesterday spoke on TV, for the fifth
time now, and used the word “spirituality” no less than nine times, wiping
eight times with the back of his hand the hangoverish sweat off his brow, that
you should call home, that the session of the Supreme Council
3
will start Tuesday, that the Ukrainian translation of
Sonnets to Orpheus
is possibly the best among those known to you,
that the second year of your Moscow sojourn nears its end and you still have
not visited the beer hall on Fonvizin Street; remembering all these things that
have no connection with each other, as well as a gazillion other things in no
way related to the earlier ones, you nevertheless get up and, having paced back
and forth across the room in your underpants, having contemplated the same lame
landscape outside the window, with the same poplars and dark, heavy rainclouds,
you force yourself to do some morning exercises—one, two—until your muscles
begin to hurt, as if this is the ultimate justification for you, for Moscow,
and, moreover, for your existence in this world. A rather pitiful existence, by
the way, of the kind that Someone Above Us could very well not bother with, were
it not for a few successful lines in several generally unsuccessful poems,
which, naturally, is absolutely not enough for the great national cause.

And here are some
of the earlier mentioned characters. Their voices irritated you so much in the
morning that now you can get even with them, von F. Depict them in the most
acerbic way possible, old man.

Well, enjoy then.
Two women, two flowers from the far provinces of Russia. Two poetesses, or
rather women poets, no, I beg your pardon, two poets, for now in their circles
it is fashionable to repeat after Tsvetaeva-Akhmatova (Horenko?)
4
that the word “poet” has no feminine form; thus I, old pervert that I am,
imagine all these womenfolk with sizeable penises and, most importantly,
testicles down there.

But that’s not
what it’s about. We have two women from the far—and equidistant from
Moscow—Russian lands. Two swans, two ethereal creatures, one of them slightly
over forty, the other slightly under forty. One of them married, the other not,
but I forget which one.

This is the
exposition. Now the development of the action. Both placed too much on this
voracious altar. Each dreamed half her life to get here. To get to Moscow for
an entire two years! To get to Moscow where, doubtlessly, one will at last be
noticed and elevated! To get to Moscow and to stay there forever! To be buried
(cremated) there! To get to Moscow where there are shitloads of generals,
secretaries, foreigners, patriots, ESP’s! And most importantly, bananas aplenty!
. . .

This dream arises
with puberty. And powerfully accompanies one’s entire life.

For this sake
alone it was worth it to go through all the circles of shitty provincial hell.
To intrigue. To make phone calls. To throw dinner parties. To sleep with
impotents.

After many
defeats and desperate acts—it happened! It came true! Both arrive almost
simultaneously, having covered, independently from each other, a sizeable chunk
of the Russian plains. They naturally make acquaintance, no trace of cunningness,
they are genuinely very pleased, for they are the fellow fortunate ones.
Already from the first words they exchange they find out that both have a
weakness for Yesenin, not Pasternak, for Rubtsov, not Brodsky, for misses
polyester dresses with inlays both in the front and in the back, zipped pockets
in the seams, a pleat in the back, with a belt. The same day, filled with the
sweet frisson of anticipation of total changes for the better, both pay a visit
to the Pushkin monument, to lay flowers, just because, for personal reasons.
For both love Pushkin and even consider him the greatest Russian poet and their
teacher. Pushkin pensively examines the toes of his shoes. Below, underneath
him, guys in gray uniforms and black berets pummel some longhaired freemasons
who call themselves “the Democratic Union.” Offended for Pushkin, the gals from
the provinces go back to move into the dormitory.

The dorm
superintendent turned out to be a darkie, although not a bad one, a Daghestani,
and still rather young: well physically developed, broad shoulders, the chest
undoubtedly covered with abundant growth, thirty-four years old, manages to
give each one a wink without the other noticing, the teeth straight, the eyes
brown, Murtaza Ramazanov, or perhaps the other way round, Ramazan Murtazaev.

Ramazan (Murtaza)
lets them pick a room on the seventh floor. Any one of them can be theirs.
There’s a room with the windows opening onto a liquor store, and another
opening onto a greengrocer’s. There’s one with new parquet flooring. One with a
broken window. One near the toilet. Each room is attractive in its own way.

But there is an
option that both take without a moment’s hesitation. This is the so-called
“boot,” two adjoining rooms separated from the rest of the world by a small separate
hallway. Fantastic! They move in and immediately invite each other for tea. And
talk until late in the night about Pushkin, about Yeltsin, recite their own
poems, exchange compliments, then poetry collections published by regional
presses on recycled paper. And not a slightest hint of lesbianism.

Thus we have
approached the climax.

And the
resolution? As time goes on they understand more and more that they have done
something utterly stupid. The “boot” turned out to be a trap. A trap for the
foolish cows who God knows why dragged themselves into this bedlam. Their
greatest misfortune is that they are not yet ripe for group sex. Thus they fail
to seduce either a general or even a Daghestani. And thus, constrained by each
other, they lead an utterly nunnish life, gradually getting angrier and
gritting their teeth, and the former genuine sympathy evolves into a barely
concealed bottomless hatred that grows ever more evident with each passing day.

The night from
Friday to Saturday I dreamt I was having supper with the King of Ukraine,
Olelko the Second (Dovhoruky-Riurikid). The two of us sitting at a pleasantly
set table in a Baroque loggia made of light blue stone, from time to time the
dignified servants appear, mostly Indians or Chinese, with gilded tridents
5
on
their tuxedo lapels, imperceptibly change trays and plates, dishes, knives,
forks, lobster shell crackers, tongs for extracting mollusks, scalpels for
dissecting frogs, and equally imperceptibly, without any noise, they leave. The
view from the loggia is luxurious: the sun is setting somewhere in the clear
waters of a lake, the virgin peaks of the Alps, or, rather, the Pyrenees, shine
with the last evening sparkle. And the king and I sip various exquisite wines,
cognacs, liqueurs, and infusions and prattle about this and that.

“Your Royal
Mercy,” I turn to him, filled with veneration, “Commander and Ruler of
Rus-Ukraine, Grand Duke of Kyiv and Chernihiv, King of Galicia and Volhynia,
Master of Pskov, Peremyshl, and Koziatyn, Duke of Dniprodzerzhynsk, Pervomaysk,
and Illichivsk, Great Khan of Crimea and Izmail, Baron of Berdychiv, of Both
Bukovynas and Bessarabias, and also the Supervisor of New Ascania and Kakhovka,
Archseigneur of the Wild Field and the Black Forest, Hetman and Protector of
the Don, Berdyansk, and Kryvy Rih Cossacks, Sleepless Shepherd of the Hutsuls
and the Boikos, Lord of All the Ukrainian People including the Tatars and the
Pechenegs, and also the Malokhokhols and the Fat-eaters, of all the Moldavians
and the Mankurts that Dwell in Our Land, the Patron and Pastor of the Greater
and Minor Slobozhanshchyna, and also of the Inner and Outer Tmutorokan, heir to
the glorious millennial dynasty, in other words, our glorious and honorable
Monarch, Your Mercy, wouldn’t You like to remain forever in the golden tablets
of universal and human memory?”

“I would indeed,”
says Olelko the Second. “But through which deeds?”

“And through
those deeds,” I answer, “through which all the kings attained eternal unpassable
glory.”

“So perhaps
through wars?” asks Olelko the Second, arching his millennial eyebrows and
wrinkling his aristocratic forehead.

“Even a fool can
do it through wars, my Lord, and a president can.”

“Then through
wise laws and decrees, through just charters and declarations,” guesses Olelko.

“And this too is
crap, Your Mercy, for this the madmen exist, and also the parliamentarians,” I
intrigue him further.

“Then maybe
through young wives and concubines scandalous in number, through loud drinking
bouts and bullish fights, through all-pervasive luxury and gluttony and other
acts of ill repute?”

“And this is not
new, oh Great Ruler, all the same you cannot outdo the commies,” I taunt him
the best I can.

“Don’t torture me
then and tell me, through which deeds?” Olelko the Second says, a little
plaintively, and also commandingly.

A Malay servant
takes away the last plates, a bowl with live, still squeaking, unfinished
oysters, empty Malvasia, Ymiglycos and Kellergeister bottles. Meanwhile an
Ethiopian servant brings candles in bronzed candelabras and an ebony box filled
with the most exquisite cigars. Twilight. Fragrant aromas waft from somewhere
in the Alpine meadows. Below, under the loggia, a fountain, or perhaps a
spring, sings its song. Two little black boys lead by the hands an old blind
bandura-playing minstrel.
6
The king and I light up, and the bandura player
barely audibly touches his strings, sitting on a stone ledge, next to a relief
depicting a dancing faun. The first stars appear in the sky.