Pula, Chroatia, 4.12.2024

30th Book Fair(y) in Istria

19:00 – DHB, Crveni salon

Slavic Garden

Mihail Šiškin: MOJA RUSIJA (TIM Press)

Participants: Mihail Šiškin, Ivana Peruško

THE WHITE MARBLE BOAT

An Essay

In the end of the 19th century, all the countries competed for who could build the most battleships. This seemed to be the most important achievment, owning the most battleships.

Empress Cixi ruled in China back then. Her advisers explained to her the importance of building an armored fleet, and she instituted a fleet tax on all Chinese provinces. A huge sum of 30 million of Liang silver was collected. The empress ordered that this money be used to build just one boat of white marble. It was exhibited on the lake in her Summer Palace. There were held regular tea ceremonies, and it was beautiful.

Cixi was laughed at all around the world. It really did seem stupid to spend the national treasure not on guns and armor, but on something beautiful. Even nowadays this seems stupid and worthless to most of humanity.

My grandmother was not an empress, but a simple peasant woman from Tambov region who had only finished three grades of primary school. She did not take seriously those things – poetry and art – that were the most important in the world to me during my adolescence and youth. She wanted me to pursue a serious profession, not poetry. I remember how eager I was as a high school student to share my absolute happiness – my first poetry publication – with my grandmother, and how she sighed heavily, pitying me: “Well, it’s better than being with hooligans in the neighborhood…” She wished me well, of course. My grandmother had a big ugly mole over her lip. She always tried to cover it with a hand.

There was very little room for beauty in her life. Her husband, my grandfather Mikhail Shishkin, was arrested in 1930 during collectivization. He was not a „kulak.“ But he was indignant: “Why are you taking our only cow from us? How will I feed my two children?” My grandmother was left alone with two small children, and when my father had to fill out the endless questionnaires, instead of writing “my father is an enemy of the people,” would write “my father has died.“

And all his life he lived in fear that his deception would be revealed.

I was named after that Mikhail. In the old photo they are young. Her mole above her lip is still quite small. She is wearing a straw summer hat, not at all peasant-like. Maybe the photographer in the studio gave the fancy hat to her for the shooting? My grandma is somehow awkwardly holding her hat with her hand, as if she is afraid that the wind will blow it away. And my grandfather looks like I did when I was thirty years younger.

As she got older, my grandmother began to go a little crazy, getting confused in time. She went blind and spent her last years of life in a small room with her son, my father, sitting all day in the dark. I tried to call her when I had time. I shouted into the phone so she could hear better:

– Grandma, hello, it’s me – Misha!

– Misha? –  she repeated fearfully. – Who is it? What Misha?

She probably recalled that day [when her husband was arrested], and it must have seemed to her that they had come to arrest her husband again, and she began to shout into the phone:

– Misha! Where are they taking you? Please do not take him! Let him go! What are you doing!

I would try to interrupt her and calm her down:

Grandma, it’s me, your Misha! Calm down!

But she did not listen to me and screamed, trying to rescue her husband:

– Let him go! What have we done to you? Let him go! Misha! Misha!

Grandma didn’t read anything of what I wrote. Maybe she simply wasn’t able to read my prose fiction. What I wrote back then was not for the “mass reader.“ And what I wrote later was not for the „mass reader“ either. I still could not explain to her why my work was so important. She understood the importance of writing a letter to someone, for instance. But writing prose, addessed nowhere, was an excessive indulgence for her, an empty pastime.

And I did not try to explain anything to her. She would not understand that I, too, actually keep writing the same letter all the time, a letter that no one needs and that no one is expecting.

A book is a letter addressed to someone who may not have been born yet. But this letter must be written, because only unwritten letters never reach the addressee. It wasn‘t only my grandmother who believed that literature was a worthless exercise. Those who agree with her are in fact the vast majority of humanity. You need to earn money for your family, but serious literature does not earn much. Writers, of course, consider themselves important, but from the perspective of others it is funny to hear how they talk about themselves, about books, and about literature all the time with such a pretense.

Literature is a loser.

Even the greatest books cannot make the world better in the slightest. Do you really think that if someone reads a good book they become a better person?

Do you think that those who summoned my country into the bright future while at the same time issuing orders for the execution of priests, the sinking of barges with hostages, those who orchestrated the great Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, those who killed my grandfather – do you think they did not read the Russian classics? The great Russian literature is a great loser. When the time came for serious decisions – what did they, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev do to help prevent the fall of the country into the GULAG? They helped several generations to survive the GULAG. This is what Russian literature is indeed capable of.

The great German literature could not stop the Germans who rapturously followed their führer to the catastrophe. These last few years — with the annexation of Crimea, which became our Sudetenland, with the war in Ukraine – I feel very strongly what German writers must have felt at the end of the 1930s.

The impotence of the book. The helplessness of literature. One can imagine what Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse felt in those years, what Stefan Zweig had thought in Brazil before committing suicide.  After all, among those masses that rapturously followed the führer into the abyss, there were their readers. For what, for whom did they write?

For whom does one write, draw, compose music if real art cannot rely on one’s viewer, reader or listener?

When you write a book you cannot rely on the reader because no matter what you write there will always be someone who will say that you have saved literature, a hundred people will say that it is impossible to read your nonsense, and the rest of humanity will never find out about your book anyway.

As for the question of who needs another new book – after all, millions of new books appear around the world every year – there is only one honest answer: no one needs it.

And it is only this that is literature’s strength. Not weakness, but strength.

An airplane flies not because it relies upon the air. We studied all of this at school. You cannot rely on the air – the airplane will fall to the ground. An airplane flies because over its wings a vacuum is formed, and it draws the airplane into the sky.

In order to get off the ground and take flight, real literature does not rely on the reading public, but gets sucked into the sky.

Grandma was an unsurpassed master of baking various figures, fantastical animals. I remember how I liked to watch her knead the dough and shape it. She allowed me to knead the dough as well – how delightfully malleable and soft it was! But I could only ever make little deformities, whereas she shaped wonderful creatures, her fancy knew no bounds.

In those marvelous moments she also became empress, ruler of the dough and created her own world from it.

It is too late now to explain anything to her, but now I would at least try. And maybe it is not too late. And it was never too late and never will be. You need to explain after all why what you are doing is so important.

I would tell her, you see, grandma, art is just like dough, only a very special kind. This dough is made up of time. When you knead it with your hands, it is malleable and soft. And you can form whatever you like. And whatever you form will become real. Just like that white marble boat. Where now are all the battleships ever created? And the boat of the empress Cixi is still to this day sailing somewhere where they never reached, where they could not reach. You see, grandma, I would say to her, when you write, you can find yourself in any time and any place. It only seems that I am here and now. In reality I am in the kitchen of our house in Udel’naia, which has been demolished long ago. It is strange that the house does not exist but its walls are simply bursting from the most delicious smell in the world – this is the first batch of rolls baking in the oven.

And we are sitting at the table, white from the spilled flour, and we are also all covered in flour, and are molding other animals from the dough. Your hands are nimble, quick. It can’t be that these hands no longer exist, here they are, planting raisin-eyes into a small dough ball.

And at the same time, I am now on that very boat of white marble. The wind has rippled up the imperial lake, waterlilies are swaying in the water, and these waves make it seem like the boat is moving. There are many people on board, and you hear speech in many languages. Suddenly gusts of wind rise up. Someone’s light summer hat gets lifted and carried away. Everyone laughs, points at the hat sailing toward the waterlilies. This is that very hat from the photograph. And you, so very young, you also laugh, gather up your windblown hair, and the mole above your lip is still very small.

And there, hugging you, sheltering you from the gusts of wind, is my grandpa, so like me in my youth. And everyone is still alive.

And I know where that white marble boat is sailing.

And I am taking all of you with me.