Andrey Baldin, translated from Russian by Anna Aslanyan
Extracted from
Point Extended
Literary Travels: Karamzin and Pushkin
XVIII
His next letter is titled “The Packet Boat”. At last Nikolay Karamzin is at sea. It won't last long; the
French shore has hardly disappeared when the English coast starts shaping up in the fog ahead.
Never mind: God bless the voyage! This is the remedy for any (time) sickness – apart from,
perhaps, the seasickness.
What is time seasickness? Turmoil, followed by a revolution; the country is seasick – it is
disgorging its own history.
The passengers of the packet boat are suffering; Karamzin remains vivacious – or unwilling
to admit that he, too, is unwell. No, he doesn't seem to present himself in a flattering light. He
thinks himself insusceptible to the ailment – at that particular moment time cruises around his body
without commotion or turmoil.
The same is true of his account of England: it's smooth and vivacious. The Channel crossing
has cooled down his soul, setting off his thoughts at a steady pace. The French literary lesson boils
down to the necessity for a Russian writer to master the skill of bringing his prose into focus.
An event is the centre of a narrative. After watching fateful passions in Paris, Nikolay
Mikhailovich wants – this tendency is to stay with him for the rest of his life – to link literary events
to death and blood, no less. Death brings on a full stop – a point that cannot be erased from
memory. This point can be at the end of a story, its middle or its beginning, or even beyond it, but it
will still remain the hidden centre of the narrative.
*
An Englishman has a different image of a point, one that's easily understood: an island in the sea.
The most significant point of all is the main island, his island, the merry kingdom, the Good Ole'
England. What has death got to do with it? The English are systematic, their story is, first and
foremost, a good narration (a journey along a road that is a line of words, running smoothly).
Moreover, they whip the words along, beating them on the first syllable to make them run faster. It's
different with the French: they sit down on the last syllable, reining the word in, prancing rather
than speaking.
Soon Karamzin got accustomed to England and found a lot of useful things there – despite
all his critical attitude. I praise the English, although my praise is as cold as they are.
And the first praise goes to Greenwich, the most important idea, composition-wise,
conceived by the English. Here is a wonder town! The zero meridian has not been drawn through it
yet, this is to come much later, a hundred years from now. However, the persevering islanders have
already determined that here in Greenwich lies the centre of space – or, to be more precise, the
centre of maritime space, its most significant point. Greenwich is the most significant maritime
event, prose of the world unfolding around it – once again, to be more precise, “maritime” prose, in
other words, that defining time as the sea.
They, the islanders, stood their ground, putting Greenwich in the centre of the world. How
was it done? In a systematic, persevering, practical way – the English way. A hospital for sailors,
the veterans of the Royal Navy, was founded in Greenwich. Karamzin's visit to Greenwich became
the highlight of his stay in England. He was amazed, most of all, by the spectacle of the glorious
sailors' life. Here they live in prosperity and happiness. The hospital is set up in a way reminiscent
of a museum celebrating maritime achievements, full of maps and bronze globes and winged
victories, etc.
A museum! A point not only in space, but also in time. The sailors in Greenwich – and, with
them, everyone in England – have grasped this point firmly. And they have won! It is here that the
zero meridian – the meridiem, or central, line, the world's axis of symmetry – has drawn itself.
In the 19th century, the ship island called England firmly put itself on the zero meridian, or
the origin, taming the flow of foreign waters, harnessing time, making it turn the wheels of its
engine.
*
While Paris strives to win “now”, London wants to reign “here”. This is the main aim of its
grammatical construction.
*
England has taught Karamzin not to be afeared of the sea, that untamed space, unembraceable to
anyone's gaze, which puzzled – saddened – him so much in Palanga (what do you do with the sea?
how do you draw lines on the sea?). It's quite simple: you have to use ships to bring it into focus,
link it together with routes, each of them, with its clearly marked beginning and end, a plot in itself,
a novella ready to read.
The sea is possible as a form of language (rather than riot).
Nikolay Mikhailovich no longer fears the sea now, nor any kind of moving mass – quite the
contrary, he seeks it now. My philosophy is strengthened, as it were, by the sight of human
worldliness; when by myself, I, on the contrary, often find my thoughts dwelling on earthly futility.
After that you travel through his letters from England – extremely long ones at that! – as if
you were a reading machine, so English in its image and likeness.
England, like France, takes up about three months of his time, a school term. By the end of
his wanderings Karamzin has settled into a rhythm, the states of motion and rest regularly
interchanging. Likewise, his prose has “settled into a rhythm”; the amount of things seen has found
itself a proper measure, narrated on paper.
He has finally learned to travel (to conjugate the word with the space). Time to go home.
XIX
Karamzin describes his return in “The Sea”, a short novella. At first glance, this is yet another
letter, one of his last (inside it, as if in a ship's hold, another short letter is hidden, unnumbered, also
titled “The Sea”). But this letter is special: the first experience of a new way to pack the text –
hence the short piece inside – it is a letter in a letter, containing the story of one Maria.
In this doubled – a letter in a letter – story, Karamzin's writerly discoveries start
accumulating.
The sea forms the background to the narrative (this will come in handy in Moscow, the
capital of the sea of land). As for the event, death has to play its role: after France, with its tricks
and whirlwinds, he accepts no other filling for a story. Death as a point, a full stop where time halts.
Love – it definitely has to be there, Nikolay Mikhailovich will need no prompts to guess this
much.
So, a maritime story about love and death. The plot is as short as a German travel fairy tale
(a romantic one).
Part one, that sealed inside the inner letter – this is not yet a story, just a miniature of a story,
its parts not yet connected, as if an aspiring writer has been given a construction set. A girl by the
name of Maria, born in London, leaves for America with her father, who dies there, while she longs
to go back to England, to her beloved, her fiancé, of whom she hasn't had any news in all that time.
She boards a ship, and it puts out to sea (of time). Maria can't wait to get to London, but falls ill
during the voyage and dies in fever; instead of burying her they throw her into the sea.
She vanishes in water – and in time. Let us remember this water ending.
Now for the second part of the story, the one contained in the bigger letter that envelops the
smaller one. Nikolay Mikhailovich boards a ship in London – the same one poor Maria died on
board of, and from which she was thrown overboard – to sail to Russia. He is taken to poor Maria's
cabin, shown her bed, more akin to a coffin (no wonder!), the same bedlinen and furniture still
there, and invited to lie in this bed to go back home.
What a twist! With this twist, the story gains a truly literary space. The very space that, at
one and the same time, divides and connects the thought and the word, places the author before a
mirror in which he can see a “gospel” sample for his prose – which space we observe from the very
beginning of these notes, trying to keep our distance from “the picture that draws itself”. The allseeing Karamzin finds himself in the middle of his own story about love and death, in the company
of the coffin bed, not knowing how the story will end. In all likelihood, according to all the genre
rules, it has to end with the author's death.
Thus, suspended in front of the unknown, in sight of a likely death, Karamzin becomes a
writer. Why does he seal one letter inside the other? Probably in case he dies en route home. Then,
even if he died, Maria's and his own story could find its reader.
His ship, having crossed several seas between London and Kronstadt, has reached the shore.
The account of this voyage makes up the contents of the bigger letter, “The Sea”. The smaller letter
hidden inside meant that, throughout the whole journey, Karamzin kept thinking of Maria, who had
perished.
This “sealed” thought of a death just happened accompanies all the vicissitudes of his journey
– which wasn't easy, it was seriously dangerous. There was everything: calms and storms and
seasickness, which had finally caught up with Karamzin, waves sweeping over the board, the time
the ship nearly wrecked off the Danish shore, when the crew showed themselves such good lads,
and even the episode when a drunken boatswain was punished after almost sinking the ship. It's all
right, even dying at sea is a jolly affair if you are in the company of the English! This truly is their
element.
Thank God, the traveller survived. His story, on this occasion, remained unfinished – thanks be
to Lord, fateful events never came together – but the deed was done. The nature of the sea, the
amorphous swarming of time were conquered by Karamzin's literary composition. His doubled
letter contained all the necessary components of a true story.
The traveller is doubly jolly. First, he has survived, secondly, the sea beast of time has been
vanquished – by his own opus, by his prose.
This is what his prose should be like. Fleeting, travelling, watching itself, never for a minute
leaving the reader indifferently calm; possessed of proper space, air-filled time, a distance between
Maria and Nikolay, between “then” and “now”.
A wonderful trifle, separate from the corpus of letters, a letter with an enclosure, a dispatch
from the dead Maria in one's bosom.
*
That's it, that's enough, he's back in Russia! Out of the swamp of the Gulf of Finland, as if out of the
abyss of some different time (is that not so? out of the Russian abyss), the city of Kronstadt is
rising, dark, wet and angular. Because of the city's small size, the outer angles of the fortress are
inverted and push the passer-by, now in his side, now in his back. The houses are cramped inside,
and so is one's soul.
I stop everyone and ask them questions, merely so that I can speak Russian and hear Russian
people. You know that a city worse than Kronstadt is hard to find, but to me it's dear! One can call
the local inn a beggar's hostel, but I find it jolly!
Karamzin is back – the space of his language is here, it's just like Kronstadt, dark and wet,
half-Russian, half-German, generally somewhat chaotic, but Karamzin can already see clearly what
it can be lit with, how this chaos can be linked to the word.