Shklovsky: Witness to an Era. Serena Vitale

written text, there was nothing to erase. At the end of The Iliad and The Odyssey there’s nothing but talk of the future. In general, I think, talking about a beginning, middle, and end has nothing to do with art. We can also listen to a writer much closer to us than Homer, the great Chekhov, who says: when you begin writing, when the work is ready, tear out the first two or even five pages and never read them again. He also says: every time, the hero dies or leaves in the end. But that isn’t a true ending. Tolstoy writes that he can’t finish his novels. Why? Because if the character dies, it’s interesting to see how the others survive him, but then the attention would shift to these others. If he leaves, it’s the same thing. And if he marries, that’s where the real story begins, the real conflict. Tolstoy wrote fourteen beginnings for War and Peace. But the novel has no end, because the fact that Natasha has grown old, that she’s no longer so alluring, the fact that Pierre will most likely be deported and she will most likely follow him, all this isn’t an end—the true ending is Russia, the unknown future of Russia.

      So on the one hand, the impossibility of knowing the future makes it so that a writer can’t “finish” his novels; on the other, it seems like the great novels you’ve been talking about contain some sort of prophecy of the future.

      The fact is that the writer “predicts” the future, but doesn’t know what his role in that future will be. He struggles with the future, he’s afraid for himself . . . You see, he has to be very naïve to delude himself into believing he can bring something to a conclusion. And I myself, with all the love I have for novels, I prefer to doze off before the denouement. About epilogues—Thackeray wrote that they’re like the lump of sugar left at the bottom of the cup. That’s it—the conclusion, in the novel, is a cloying additive. It only appears to conclude things. For example, how do the great books end, the great tragedies of Dickens? Abruptly and by chance the man rediscovers his place in society and in life. The illegitimate son is acknowledged by the father, or the hero marries, or receives his inheritance, or leaves for Australia, but it’s just a convention. And the fact that Othello kills Desdemona, yes, of course, that’s the end: it’s Desdemona’s death, it’ll be Othello’s death. But that isn’t the resolution to the theme of fidelity and love.

      So for you, the novel—or poem, or play—is a place where the contradictions of life cannot be resolved.

      That’s precisely it, they can’t be. When I read Kafka, who parodies the irresolvability of the contradictions of life . . .

      In what sense does he parody it?

      He exaggerates it.

      You like Kafka, no?

      I love Kafka. I love Remizov. I love this writer that almost nobody knows, Olga Forsh, who wrote novels and stories based precisely on this impossibility of a final denouement. But that’s another subject. For example, take The Cherry Orchard. All classic novels have the figure of the devoted servant. We Russians knew him from the works of Walter Scott, Pushkin’s, and Tolstoy’s too, though to a lesser extent. But Chekhov ends his play in a very odd way. The serf Firs, alone in the house, says: “They’ve forgotten me.” What does that mean? He too will get out. He won’t be locked in forever. But one of the threads of that type of comedy has been forgotten. The master has one story, the servants another. The fact that in Chekhov the play doesn’t end with Lopakhin’s marriage, in other words, with a happy ending, is in itself surprising, compared to classic stories. But even more surprising is that Chekhov concludes with a man locked in, and he emphasizes it, and how—the sound of a string breaking, silence, then the sound of the axes cutting down the trees in the orchard . . . When an era ends, time sighs, and forms age. You see, we Russians, and you Italians too, we’ve all lived through an unfinished novel. And I don’t know how a novel could end, just as I don’t know what will happen in the world, what the future of Europe will be. The only thing I know is that one must always invent new endings.

      Insofar as the novel has no end, does it therefore reject the idea of death?

      Art always and only deals with life. What do we do in art? We resuscitate life. Man is so busy with life that he forgets to live it. He always says: tomorrow, tomorrow. And that’s the real death. So what is art’s great achievement? Life. A life that can be seen, felt, lived tangibly, a life that one can renounce, just as Othello does, forsaking his dreams of love and glory.