“Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “Ah.”), armed with patience and a tape recorder. If it was all right with him, I explained to Viktor Borisovich, my questions would more or less go in chronological order. That was fine, he grumbled. We began with his youth, the stir caused by the emergence of formalism, the revolution, the war, Persia, the clandestine fight between the different factions of socialist revolutionaries, duels, his escape to Finland, then Berlin, his return to Russia. He would say: “I’ve already written about that” or “I don’t know, I can’t remember anymore.” Or talk about something else entirely. Or out of the blue: “You know how an armored car is made?” and without waiting for my probable “no,” he started going on with obscure information about turrets, machine guns, combat chambers . . . He was still a master of digression. We could continue, he told me, as our first day of work came to a close.
“Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “Again?” “Yes . . .”
That day, I took the flattery approach: “Viktor Borisovich, today you’re an icon, you’ve regained the renown you once had—” He didn’t let me finish. “The only thing I need to be fully appreciated is death. Actually, maybe that’s what other people need, I don’t need anything.” Gathering my courage, I asked about the past: What did he think now, almost forty years later, of his 1931 “Monument to a Scientific Error” in which he recanted formalism? “Important discoveries can come from an error that is opportunely revealed and taken to its logical extremes.” Not another word. Moreover, many of his short, sibylline responses tended toward the aphoristic: “I never had talent, just displaced fury”; “There are only two ways to survive: write for yourself and earn money from some other occupation, or lock yourself in your house and contemplate the meaning of existence. There is no third way. I chose the third.” I wondered whether these were spontaneous quips or if he had a whole repertoire prepared—to impress his audience, to avoid the more uncomfortable questions.
After three days, his elusive store of knowledge began to show itself: he must have gotten tired of playing the role of the angry Patriarch. And his voracious curiosity got the better of his reticence. Now he was the one asking me questions: on the Red Brigades (“Will there be a revolution? God save you!”), on President Pertini, on the Polish Pope . . . And what was the name of that Roman trattoria where he’d gone with that great poet, the one who was also a director? . . . “Sima!” he called his wife, who was usually sitting with us—“What was his name?” “Who, Pasolini?” “That’s it. The trattoria was on one of the central streets, actually it was on a piazza. It was excellent. And I was so astonished: there were open bottles of wine on the shelves and nobody took them. And there wasn’t a single drunk around . . . But you have to know it, it had a beautiful name.” I improvised: “Osteria da Vittorio.” “Vittorio? I think you’re trying to trick poor old Viktor . . .” Then, quoting Pushkin: “It’s not difficult to deceive me! Yet I’m glad to be deceived.” He broke into laughter. While the sheet of ice that held Moscow hostage had reached eighty centimeters, the one between us was finally beginning to crack. I was able to confess my love for his explosive, spare writing (though I didn’t mention that I’d particularly admired it in his early work). The term “parataxis” slipped out of my mouth: “Parataksis? What the devil is that? A pair of taxis? Or basset hounds (taks)?” He laughed some more. “I write short sentences out of laziness . . . And also because they don’t risk being cut by the censors . . . One of them said to me—it must have been 1925, they still published me then—that my work gave them no satisfaction . . . Other writers, however . . .” “About other writers, Viktor Borisovich—what do you think of so-and-so’s latest novel?” “Nothing. Because, among other things, he’s one of my neighbors and he might be able to hear us. You see, a hundred and forty writers live in this building. They put us all together to keep an eye on us more easily. Like in 1984, except that instead of television screens we have elevator patrols . . . You know, I believe I’ll make it to the year 1984 . . . I would like that. I want to live. Even though I’ve lost all my contemporaries . . .”
“Sima” (Shklovsky’s second wife—a diminutive old woman with hunched shoulders and dull eyes; she had been, people said, a stunning woman) began inviting me to have tea afterward; sometimes they even asked me to stay for dinner. Forgetting the interview, and perhaps even me—I switched off the tape recorder for discretion’s sake—Viktor Borisovich gave himself over to his memories. They went back far, to painful places where self-censorship had long dictated the rules; at times his voice would crack or get stuck in his chest only to emerge, with difficulty, in a barely perceptible murmur. And more than once tears came to his eyes.
“In 1933, Gorky decided to show writers and journalists the canal that was going to connect the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, so that they could sing the praises of this great accomplishment of the new Soviet state. A grand, colossal work, a dream of Peter the Great’s, and the new slaves building it were all prisoners, some of them political prisoners. I knew that my brother was among them; I eagerly accepted the invitation to see that ‘creative mission.’ We set off in a group of over a hundred and twenty—illustrious figures and others not so illustrious, practically unknown. They drove us far and wide, encouraged us to talk to the prisoner-workers—mostly common criminals with short sentences to serve. They all claimed to be happy that they could rehabilitate themselves through work. For at least a few weeks, in anticipation of our visit, they had been given more substantial food than their usual meager rations. For us, there was an unbelievable spread—sturgeons with sprigs of parsley in their mouths, roasted pig, sausage, ham, cheese. And bottles of vodka, wine, champagne, Borjomi water. That banquet—while the Great Famine raged in the South—took away my appetite the whole time I was writing for Belomorkanal, a collective work, very instructive . . . But you won’t find it in the library, I don’t even have a copy myself. The book was taken out of circulation as soon as it came out: in the meantime Yagoda had already been taken out and some authors had died as well—not of natural causes, you understand: Jasensky, Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Averbakh . . .
“They only let us see the inmates who had been prepared for the meeting, but with a few trinkets from Moscow I managed to unearth my brother.” “Nikolai?” “What are you talking about! Nikolai was executed in 1919 . . . My brother Vladimir, a great philologist. He knew thirty languages. He translated De vulgari eloquentia. I learned so many things from him. He was a deeply religious man. He knew the camps—he was in Solovki from ’22 to ’25 . . . When they arrested him, in 1929, he was working for Academician Marr. We hadn’t been in contact for ages; he knew he was the object of keen interest on the part of the GPU and didn’t want to put me in jeopardy—you know, with my history. I held back tears when I saw him. I whispered: ‘Do you recognize me?’ ‘No,’ he replied, in a firm voice—he was afraid for me. Or of me? I gave him a pack of cigarettes; he accepted them, he said, for his companions . . . The guard who had escorted me asked: ‘And now, how do you feel after your reunion?’ ‘Like a live fox in a fur shop’ . . . I never found out the day, or even the year, of his death. They arrested him again (for the seventh time) in ’39 and after that I didn’t hear anything. They told me he had been sentenced to ten years in the camp without the right to correspondence: at the time no one dared imagine what was hidden in that sinister phrase. I should have realized—the dead can’t write. He died in 1938—I only found out after he had joined the ranks of the ‘posthumously recovered.’ But I still don’t know where he’s buried.” He took a sip of water. “It’s a horror, isn’t it? Old people crying. It puts me off too.”
“Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “Again?” . . .
Proud that Viktor Borisovich had placed his trust in me, pleased that he addressed me as “Serenochka,” I ventured: “How would you explain why the younger generations consider you a writer, so to speak, of the establishment?” His face drained, his stern and forbidding Dantonesque voice returned, and he shook his cane at me. “Get out of here!” he yelled. That same evening, he called to apologize.
“Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “You’re working today too?” “No, I just have to ask for forgiveness.” The elevator attendant shrugged.
“I wrote so much just to survive. I’ve written mediocre, even