The Reader Travels

So I went with my mother and sister-in-law to see Topol’s farewell tour of Fiddler on the Roof in Dallas two months ago, and at the end of the show, the sister said, “I didn’t remember that the ending was so depressing.” Well, yeah.

Her brother had told her before we left for the show that the story was about events that triggered the start of the Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel. She just looked at him funny like he was making it all up, probably because he makes up a lot of things and she can never really tell if he’s serious or not.

He’s literally the boy who cried wolf as most of his tall tales end with some sort of wolf attack, which he fends off with his masterful powers of Dan-fu. She should have known that since there were no wolves in this story, that he probably knew what he was talking about.

Anyway, the story ends with a big long road trip that somehow wends its way to Jerusalem. The end. Oh, did I mention I met a hot Israeli chick on the airplane to London? I told her I was going down to Houston for a Jewish wedding next month. It was only a five hour drive, I said. She had to comment that a five hour drive would take you all the way from one end of her country to the other.

Amazing how they were spread out all over the world and now they can just hop in the car and be there in less than a day, only dodging a little gunfire along the way.

When we left our travels, we were in Russia with Dostoevsky, whose most famous novel is Crime and Punishment, about a young hoodlum in St. Petersburg, who commits crimes and is punished.

If I wasn’t a Web site programmer, I might like to teach English literature. I’ve thought about topics for papers where the students might be challenged to read and compare similar books like 1984 and Brave New World, or Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five.

One of those combinations could be Crime and Punishment and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which is about a young hoodlum in Chicago, who incidentally commits crimes and is punished.

Wright was a card-carrying Communist in his youth, and he had a thing for Russia and similarities between the plight of the Russian working class and that of African Americans. I tend to think that Native Son is somewhat of a tribute to Dostoevsky’s famous novel. I don’t know if Wright intended it as such, but I like to think of it that way.

They are both powerful works. The St. Petersburg tale traps you in the mind of a murderer, raging with mania and guilt, while the Chicago tale steps outside of the mind, just to let you watch and observe the crimes and the necessary punishments. We watch as life happens to Bigger Thomas, whose world on the south side of Chicago is out of control, and when he takes control for a brief moment, he abuses that control and loses it forever.

Needless to say, Native Son is not something you want to read during the hectic month of December, but it might be a challenge for the new year. If you haven’t read it, you should know, it’s a lot easier to get into than Ulysses. It’s just seriously heavy.

Christmas carols keep me from being a big humbug, and Christmas makes me think of Christianity, which makes me think of The Bible, which makes me think of blood and gore, which appeals to my morbid side. Is that wrong?

Our local suburban arts center hosted an open house last week with a Russian Christmas theme. All the schools decorated a Christmas tree with Russian imagery, and children painted pictures of Russian dolls and such. There were cookies and balloons for the kids, and old ladies tap dancing in little red Santa’s helper dresses, admittedly fun for all ages.

Beyond the middle school artwork, there were a number of authentic Russian icons painted on canvas and wood and etched on metal. The best icon was the dark face of Jesus raised on what looked like a wooden window shutter. The name of it had something to do with not being created by human hands, like it was one of those miracle pictures that just appears on a wall or a window overnight. Like the face of the Madonna that appears on a tortilla (see Off the Map). It must have been carved and painted, but it did have an ethereal effect, and it was really spooky to think of it as being created by the hands of god or an angel.

But my second favorite icon was all about the violence. It was the head of John the Baptist on a bloody platter. There are lots of such images in the Russian Orthodox tradition. I don’t know what it is, I just think there’s a lot of power and poignance in this type of stuff. Like the image of Jesus nailed to the cross. The idea is to cringe and say, “Whoah!”

Then there was this painting, which a friend posted on The Arcadian Bookroom’s art discussion. It’s Giotto di Bondone’s fresco called Massacre of Innocents, all about what happened shortly after Jesus was born. It’s one more example of biblical gore for all to enjoy (”endure” rhymes better, but it’s really not what I wanted to say).

I may be going to hell… But I’ll go there singing Christmas songs.

In George Bird’s translation of Dostoevsky’s The Double, there’s a scene in the beginning of the story where the hero is described as being “as pleased as Punch.” My first instinct was to blurt out, “What?”

I thought to myself, why would Mr. Bird translate the Russian story into English cliches? I mean, how cheesy is that? But when I started researching it, I found that Punch and Judy are characters known by Russians and Britons, Germans and Italians alike.

Dostoevsky was most certainly comparing Mr. Golyadkin to that crazy little paranoid puppet. The Double even had a character (who could very well have been one of Mr. Golyadkin’s personalities) named Petruschka, which just so happens to be Punch’s alias whenever he tours Russia.

Punch and Judy puppet shows are not what you’d call politically correct, what with all that raunchiness and violence. Sadly, it’s just not funny to beat up your wife anymore, not even with Punch’s signature slap stick. Despite all the political correctness, it’s good to know there are still “professors” of Punch and Judy puppet shows in most of the English speaking nations of the world.

In Gogol’s Ukranian short story “”St. John’s Eve,” he describes a particular beautiful girl as “a dark-browed daughter.” It made me think of similar descriptions of beautiful girls in Arabian Nights.

The really pretty girls in Scheherazade’s tales had faces that looked like the moon and one long, black eyebrow atop their eyes. Ukraine is fairly close to the Muslim world with Turkey sharing the Black Sea to the south. They could very well have shared similar ideas of beauty.

Sir Richard Burton’s notes in the back of his translation of Arabian Nights give a little thought to the joined brow. It seems that in Burton’s time, the Arab world saw it as a sign of distinction and beauty. But in the western world people thought it was the sign of being a werewolf or possibly a vampire.

And just so you know, according to Wikipedia, the word “unibrow” has officially made it into the dictionary, but the technical term is “synophrys.” Who wants to talk about a “synophrys,” though? Not me.

Gogol and Dostoevsky both mention serfs in their stories, these people on the fringe of society. So I had to surf the Web and read up on Ukranian and Russian feudal history. Travels don’t always lead to other books. They often lead to the peripheral knowledge that can be garnered from the wonders of Wikipedia.

It seems the Ukranians had a tradition of turning peasants into proud soldiers. To be a Cossack was much better than being a slave to the man. In the translation I read of Gogol’s story “Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich,” the narration speaks disparagingly of a domineering woman who “registered her husband as a peasant.”

I’d have to read more than Wikipedia to truly understand what he meant by that. I mean, was registering someone to be a peasant like signing him up for welfare, putting him on the dole? Was it meant to say she was lazy, selling away her family’s dignity and independence? Was it meant to say that her act was a social castration of her husband? And what exactly was the process? What kind of paperwork did one fill out? Or maybe “register” is the simplest translation for something we don’t really have words for in English?

Do you know?

Russian writers aren’t always known for their comedy, what with all that cold and bleary bleakness, oppressed masses and Communist revolt. But Nikolai Gogol’s short stories are truly fun and kooky, especially the stories set in Ukraine.

I was speaking with a friend of a friend from one of those former Soviet countries, and I was asking her which Gogol stories were her favorite. She liked the crazy Ukrainian stories too. She tried to tell me the name of her favorite, but she didn’t know how to translate it into English. Apparently, no one else does either, so they don’t even try. It’s simply “Viy,” and it has shape-shifting witches and young seminary students getting drunk and forgetting what mischief they got themselves into the night before.

Gogol’s Ukranian tales are stories of devils and witches and sorcerers, trickery and tom-foolery. The devil can steal the moon and put it in his pocket to make the night so dark, a man doesn’t know which house is his. He can shrink another man and put him in his pocket and fly him from the country to the capitol for a meeting with the czarina, and get him back before sunrise.

With a world like this, anything can happen.

It’s running. If you hurry, you can catch it.

My allergies have been so bad all my life, I didn’t even realize I had inherited my mother’s intense sense of smell until I was in my twenties. I started going to an allergy doctor because I thought I might be allergic to my fiance’, and like that gray cat that went so well with my mauve carpet, I didn’t want to give him up, despite the infernal itch.

The steroid nose sprays are like magic potion. Suddenly there’s this incredibly vibrant and colorful world around me. I don’t know if I’m reading minds or just smelling the messages in the air. No more anosmatic Annie. The nose is alive.

Sigmund Freud had a lot of theories, one of which was that a person’s sense of smell plays a part in sexual orientation. And Nikolai Gogol shared with us the tale of a runaway nose that left a man’s face of its own volition, making a nuissance of itself all over St. Petersburg. It dressed in a trench coat and disguised itself as a high level official. It’s a very powerful thing this nose.

The Namesake took me on a journey from India to New England and back to India, and when I put the book down, it guided me forward to Russia.

Gogol’s parents moved from India to the United States, landing in the Boston area, where Gogol’s father taught school. Their early adventures include a small drama around the naming of their son, exploring the Bengali traditions and failing at them in this foreign place.

Because Gogol’s father is a huge fan of Russian literature, he names his son after his favorite author, Nikolai Gogol. The novel makes several references to the Russian’s famous short story, “The Overcoat.” So, of course, that was the next stop for my journey.

I read “The Overcoat” looking for a connection between the two stories. What I found was a brief exploration of Russian child naming traditions with the hero’s mother also failing to follow them. Like Gogol Ganguli, Akaky Akakievich had a hard time fitting in too.

So be careful what you name your child, my friends. You could end up like Sonny and Cher, naming their child Chastity, as if they never wanted her to ever have sex with men. They got what they asked for, right?

The scene is St. Petersburg in the mid 1800s. A clerk works in a meaningless job sporting delusions of grandeur. Everyone in his office is talking about him, and everyone is out to get him.

One thing you can say about Fyodor Dostoevsky, he can really get into the mind of the mentally ill. I recently read The Double, and I felt like I had to wash the crazy off of me every time I picked up the book. But I couldn’t stop picking it up.

The story is written in first person, so you can hear every insane thought the clerk is thinking. He is the quintessential paranoid schizophrenic, and you’re just along for the ride.

But maybe he’s not just paranoid. Maybe everyone is out to get him. Maybe I’m the one who’s losing it.