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“Whenever I see someone, I want to hit them in the face” – Daniil Kharms

Daniil Kharms was an early Soviet writer who died, with a little help from the Party’s security apparatus, in 1942. Before that, his work for children allowed him – for a time – not to starve to death. That we have his stories and poems for adults is thanks to the hard work of brave men and women who held onto his notebooks until a better age arrived. What follows is a short piece I stumbled upon recently by him which made me pause, and some suggestions as to its interpretation. The translation is my own.

[186]

Whenever I see someone, I want to hit them in the face. It’s so nice to get them in the mug.

I am sitting in my room and doing nothing.

Now here comes someone for a cup of tea, I hear them knocking at the door. “Come in!” I tell them. He comes in and says “Hello! So good that I caught you at home.” I give him one in the face then kick him in the crotch with my boot. My guest falls on his back in terrible pain. Now I go for the eyes with my heel. Let me tell you, that ought to teach a man not to come by without being invited!

Here’s another way it happens: I offer the guest a cup of tea. The guest agrees, sits at the table, drinks his tea, and starts to tell some story. I act as if I’m listening really intently, nod my head, go “oh” and “ah”, look all surprised and laugh away. The guest, flattered by my attention, gets more and more into his story.

I calmly pour myself a full mug of boiling water and throw it in my guest’s face. He jumps to his feet and clutches at his skin. I just say to him: “My soul has run out of good deeds. Get out of here!” And I push him out of the door.

1939/1940. Russian original here.

Kharms’ work initially did nothing for me when I first encountered it at Cambridge. The stories are, on the surface and quite possibly also underneath it too, absurd and meaningless. But I was lucky enough to have a professor who was able to help me appreciate why these short little things – the one I have translated is somewhat representative in length, style, and content – can in fact be quite subversive and full of meanings for those who seek them.

In this story, we have a man who likes hitting people. “It’s so nice” to hit them, he tells us. He hits two people in the story, and not just in the face. That appears all there is to it.

What can we say about this? Let’s begin with the narrator. He seems an odd one. First, he enjoys this violence. He does not seem to have any idea of the pain he might be causing. At the same time, he is quite aware of social cues, as we see him “nod” and “look all surprised”, mimicking a normal person to achieve a particular goal – enticing his speaker to continue with their story. Beyond just his hitting people, he has a distorted idea of right and wrong, or even appropriate and inappropriate, as his ostensible reason for the violence is either annoyance at people arriving without arranging the meeting beforehand, or else the exhaustion of his goodwill.

The narrator is recognisably a human being, but not “like us”. His easy tolerance of violence and his strange ideas of propriety are probably the keys to unlocking the deeper meaning here. The Soviet government, as part of its attempts to radically reformulate society during its early years, imagined creating a new type of human being – the New Soviet Man. Strong, healthy, intelligent, and fiercely adherent to Communist ideals, they/he would be responsible for ensuring the USSR’s success along with the spread of revolution around the world.

By the time Kharms wrote this piece in 1940, the experiment had failed, and over a million people were living in the Gulag. We can read the narrator as the monstrous creation that results when we try to change a human being from what is “natural”.

We can also, of course, think of the narrator as the kind of creature that war produces. Kharms was arrested because of alleged anti-war sentiments, expressing the desire to punch in the face any mobilisation officer that tried to recruit him. (We see a certain similarity in gesture here to the story). War, too, makes us less human, and more easily violent, while bringing a strange set of norms whose infraction leads to disproportionate violence. Either way, what we see is a situation in which violence is normal, funny even (you should,at the very least, have chuckled while you read the piece). This is not, we must reflect, a particularly healthy situation. Something must have gone wrong to produce it.

Here’s another thought. Perhaps the narrator is a civil servant, not a private individual. He is part of a big, frightening, Soviet bureaucracy. People come to the state, which Stalinist propaganda imagined as a big family, trusting that it will protect them and “listen” to their stories and problems. But instead, in many cases, the state reacted with inexplicable violence against those people who had trusted it, arresting, beating, and exiling them. The phrase I translated as “without being invited” could be written more literally as “being called”, which to me suggests a waiting room at a miserable municipal office, a thing of which I have had more than enough experience in the Former Soviet Union. In this reading, the guests have assumed they have rights that the authorities, in actual fact, do not grant them.

Daniil Kharms is one of those writers whose appearance and writings seem well matched

And what to make of the narrator’s words about the soul – “My soul has run out of good deeds”, or perhaps alternatively out of “virtues”? It’s startling to see goodness reduced to a transaction that you do until you run out of energy. This may be so in real life, but we like to hope that it is not true and that, instead, we are always capable of doing good. As noted above, we can read this phrase as indicating the narrator’s monstrous loss of humanity caused by the state or war. But can we not also read it as something unnerving – as a statement that understands human nature all too well?

See, the narrator knows how to manipulate his audience to get them to tell a story. Perhaps the problem here is that he knows also that we are only good so long as we have the strength for it. In this, he seems rather more honest than the rest of us. Don’t we all, from time to time, get annoyed at an unexpected guest? And maybe occasionally we may think to ourselves that a slap or a mug of tea in the face may hasten their departure and get us a bit of peace and quiet. We are restraining ourselves, pretending to be good, while just getting frustrated inside. Our narrator meanwhile just lets it all out and speaks his truth. Well, it’s not good, but perhaps the narrator’s blatant disregard for social norms, as can so often happen, makes us consider our own unthinking adherence to them?

Anyway, there is no obvious answer to the question of what this story means. I found it shocking and funny when I stumbled upon it. But there is plenty to think about, even though it is short. I’d be interested to hear any interpretations I may have missed in the comments.

Two Days in Trieste

Of course, I wanted to stop at Trieste, not Venice, on the way to visit my brother in Slovenia. Venice, even discounting my having been there once before, is the more familiar city, even if you haven’t yet visited. It is the habitual inspirer. I, who have barely any interest in travel literature, know of at least three serious writers who were besotted with the place. Venice is the home of schemes, daggers in the dark, and romance of a certain sort. But it is also a place that you can picture, that you know already, and so you know that even if you do go there you probably won’t be able to see it through the fog left by so many images, so many cliches, all those things that clog the brain.

I wanted to see Trieste instead. This was Joyce’s home, his place of exile – he wrote Portrait and most of Dubliners and much of Ulysses here. But more than Joyce, I wanted to see the ghosts of Austria-Hungry. More so even than Vienna, I thought that Trieste, the port city purpose-built by the Austrians to cater to their imperial and maritime ambitions and filled with Austrians, Jews, and Italians, surrounded by villages speaking mostly Slovenian, would be the place where the traces of that multi-ethnic medley would be most visible. Traces, memories carved into brickwork perhaps, but nothing more – I knew I could only ask so much.

Leaving the city after the first night, on a bus to Ljubljana, you rise up onto the karst – the hard rocks that mountainously surround the city and are covered with a dense thickness of green pines. From up there the view back down to the city, provided the twists and turns of the road have spared you seasicknesss and allow you to look back the way you came, in my mind is more than anything else reminiscent of the south of Crimea, which I visited two years ago. There too a mountainous forested landscape, rising above a civilized beach community with pretentions to Europeanness, with its promenades and serious stony buildings. Nowadays few foreigners visit Yalta or Alupka, and those that did would find a past as badly distorted as the dreadful statue inspired by Chekhov’s “Lady and the Little Dog” which blights the boardwalk.

Trieste was the Austrians’ port, its window to the East just as Saint Petersburg was Russia’s window to the West. The Baron Revoltella, whose museum-house is the main touristic attraction within Trieste’s city limits, was the largest private shareholder of the Suez Canal, and a noted Egyptophile. The first ship to pass through the Canal, before even its official opening, flew the flag of Trieste. Venice was wrest from the Austrians in the course of the Risorgimento, but Trieste miraculously survived until the empire itself collapsed at the end of the First World War. Returned to Italy, it no longer had any purpose and began a long decline that I suppose continues to this day.

There were only two trains in the train station the morning I left Trieste for second time, on the way back. It was as if the station itself were trying to tell me that this place is a dead end. Once trains ran to Vienna, via Ljubljana (then Laibach) and Graz; to Salzburg and Munich via Undine; to Prague via Gorizia; and southward to Pola, today’s Pula, at the bottom of the Istrian peninsula. Now the southern station is closed, half the northern one is bricked up, and only the tracks along the waterfront remind us that once this place was really alive, pulsing with imperial energy, and the hustle and bustle of world trade.

What remains? A beautiful square, some equally beautiful buildings, a pier. And the atmosphere, of course. Jan Morris, in her Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, which I picked up in a local bookshop, calls it “a city made for exiles.” And there is something in that. Trieste was built for a world that no longer exists, for a country that no longer exists. No matter how much tourism and research, the city’s main contributions these days, may attempt to rejuvenate it, or its authority over the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, this city still seems to sit waiting for the return of the country that gave it purpose. It seems to be waiting to go home. Any exile finding herself in Trieste would know the feeling well.

The view towards the sea from the Piazza Unita d’Italia, once Piazza Grande

Besides Joyce, we might know his local friend Italo Svevo, author of the novel Zeno’s Conscience, about a man attempting to quit smoking. As a neurotic novel from the early 1900s, it fits rather comfortably into the other literature that the dying Viennese empire was producing at the time – all depressed people, dispossessed people, and people dislocated from reality. A wander round the art gallery that occupies the same building as the Revoltella Museum reveals that literature was not the only area in which Trieste seemed to live under the influence of Vienna. Cartoons, illustrations and paintings, all seem to be by someone – Egon Schiele or Klimt or any other more famous Austrian – anyone, in short, other than who they actually are by: native Triestinos who had studied in the same places, whether Munich or Vienna, at around the same time. This is rather startling, yet another push towards disorientation. We can no longer trust ourselves.

Trieste is not a big city. Like Vienna, the collapse of the Empire left it in a death spiral that it took time to recover from. It is a planned city, so walking around it is not difficult. There is only a single canal, the Canal Grande, and as it is covered with bridges and surrounded by cafes, it is unlikely to impress. But more than I remember Venice doing, Trieste has inspired me. There is something disconcerting by all these buildings, whose original purpose has been lost, standing so confidently around as if someone forgot to tell them their party is over. Everything seems alright, but clearly is not. I do not mean that the city is in decline, because those days have passed – now Trieste is quietly successful and a lovely place to visit. I mean that the city seems to tell two contradictory stories, making it every bit as schizophrenic as the modernisms that once argued amongst themselves at its literary cafes.

Saint Petersburg is also a great city that has lost its way. Wonderful, awe-inspiring, magnificent, today it is also dilapidated, poorly kept, and falling apart. In its visible decay it mimics its sad decline from Imperial capital into the place where Muscovite businessmen keep their mistresses. But this makes Petersburg, and its story, rather simple. Trieste is not like this. It is a fantastical city, like Gogol’s Petersburg, because it seems incapable of speaking straight to us. Even its truths it speaks with a wry smile. And so out of its paltry collection of old buildings and oversized squares it goads us into imagining something more. That’s what makes it exhilarating.

The Revoltella Museum is the best thing in the city, although I might be saying that because it’s pretty much the only museum in the city. Baron Revoltella was born in Venice, but spent most of his life in Trieste, building a business empire on the mainstays of 19^th century capitalism – speculating in grain and other goods. His house is closer to a palace, with a sublime trickling fountain at the foot of the winding stair up to his receiving rooms and his private quarters, the latter of which is unsubtly filled with paintings of coquettish women, sleeping girls, and all sorts of other paintings which would only be vaguely excusable in the home of a committed bachelor.

With Revoltella’s success, and the Slovene inscriptions we might catch site of on the walls of the odd building, and the docks and their ghostly bustle, we might allow ourselves the comfort of imagining that Trieste was a successful Mitteleuropan melting pot – the primary delusion of those of us who suffer nostalgia for the Austrian Empire. Morris’s book is interesting because it complicates that picture without destroying it entirely. Trieste’s growth came off the various privileges that were granted it by the Habsburgs, including relative religious freedom for the Jewish merchants who went there. There is a Serbian and a Greek Orthodox Church, a synagogue of course, and plenty of other places of worship. At one point or other, an awful lot of different people must have been comfortable here.

But then the nationalisms came, and things were ruined. The Italian irredentists wanted Trieste, and disaffected youths started throwing bombs about. In miniature, Trieste reflected the fate of the 19^th century nation, with its collapse into ethnic disharmony. The 20^th century only made things worse, as the Italians were finally granted the city in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1919. Mussolini began a process of Italianization, with predictable results for the non-Italians who had thought of the city as their home. Then the Nazis came, and Trieste became the only extermination camp on Italian soil. And with that, another people, another part of Trieste’s colour and vibrancy, was annihilated. Nowadays the Slovenes are allowed their schools and their language, but after the Second World War ended Trieste was briefly a free zone, contested by the Yugoslavs and the Allies, filled with spies and excitement, before being returned to Italy to bubble away, working out what to do with itself.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is filled with this melancholy note – its subject matter, naturally, is contagious. It was nationalism that broke Trieste, as it broke Odessa and indeed Crimea’s southern shore (Stalin also played his part in the case of the latter), and Morris does not conceal her hatred of it. There was a time when Trieste was every bit as comfortably multicultural as Vienna was – it had been under Habsburg rule since 1382, after all. And were it not for that poisonous idea, no doubt it would have been under some kind of Habsburg rule for many years longer than reality allowed. Joyce left Trieste after it went over to Italy – something had departed the city, some kind of magic – and went back to Switzerland, that most unnationalistic of places.

In Trieste now we have only these ideas and these memories. We can have our gelatos and our pasta dishes – I had some octopus on mine and was not sick afterwards, which with seafood I always count as a success – and we can sit in the sun, watching the waveless Adriatic at the end of the Piazza Unita d’Italia, once Piazza Grande. We are exiles from that past Trieste and what it meant. We have come too late. It comes in our heads to represent a world and time that seems, at least sometimes, preferable to our own. But it is a world that is inaccessible. All we can do is learn about it, live and walk its streets, and with a bit of luck we will draw closer to the ghost of what once was here. We cannot cross over, but we can reach the border, we can see its forms through the haze beyond the barbed wire fence, and for an exile even that is an immense comfort.

Trieste is special not because it has a history – for any number of Italian cities reek of the stuff. It is special because it has an idea, a fantastical past image of itself that seems close enough to still have practical value. Rome of course bespeaks another Rome, but what in that world of gladiators and slaves can seem to offer us a home? Cosmopolitan Trieste, with its transients and its exiles, its artists and its capitalists, seems to say that everyone is welcome, would be welcome, if only it still lived. And so we sit imagining, inspired by what remains. And that is the true magic of the city – its hidden world, its hope.

Orlando Figes – The Europeans

I cannot think of any book or other piece of culture, written or produced in the nineteenth century, which is not enriched and enlivened by reading Orlando Figes’ The Europeans. It is magisterial, dazzling, and breath-taking. With every page another brick is added to that great edifice that is nineteenth-century European culture, we learn some new name or other detail, another colour is added to the painting which portrays in a vividness that leaves even the greatest realist author red-faced and shaking with jealousy, the world as it once was, the hopes it had.

This is a work of history, with three individuals at its centre. Pauline Viardot was a great opera singer; her husband Louis was a great scholar, activist, and collector; and her lover and friend Ivan Turgenev was not just a writer but the foremost figure promoting the cultural exchange between European nations in the arts. Through their stories and the history that surrounds them, Figes details pretty much everything worth knowing about the (high) cultural development of the 19^th century. We learn of changes in the publishing business, the rivalries of opera houses, the development of gambling in spa towns, the growth of tourism and the creation of guidebooks, and much more besides.

Structurally, The Europeans is a halfway house between the creative and brilliant biographies of Richard Holmes and the barrage of facts we might associate with history proper. Whereas Holmes tends to prioritise people over facts – I rarely feel I learn that much when I read him – Figes goes into much more detail on the latter, so that his recreations are much less vivid, even as their world is much more so. Each chapter is for the most part thematically linked, whether it be the topic of leisure and spas, or the English and their formality, so that even though at times Figes can seem to be adding a random aside on this or that topic, nevertheless it all fits into a wider picture.

And this picture is culture: “Europe as a space of cultural transfers, translations and exchanges crossing national boundaries, out of which a “European culture” – an international synthesis of artistic forms, ideas, and styles – would come into existence and distinguish Europe from the broader world.” Kenneth Clark once wrote that all the world’s great artistic leaps have come in periods of increased internationalism, and Figes’ story takes us into one of those. Beyond the Viardots and Turgenev, the real hero of the narrative has wheels and races along a metal road – it is none other than the steam train.

In Figes’ view, the railway can be held partly responsible for almost all the great changes of Europe’s nineteenth century. How did the Revolutions of 1848 spread like wildfire? Because people were able to travel quickly, bringing news from one place to the next. International railways turned towns like Baden-Baden into equally international cosmopolitan centres. They allowed for musical and theatrical groups to cover a much wider geographical range than they had previously, thus leaving them better positioned to negotiate contracts. Pauline sang in all the major European capitals during her career, for example, and even spent a season across the Atlantic in the United States. They also shaped Europe’s touristic map, as package tours first developed in this period, and bulk-buying tickets on the railway was one way that people like Thomas Cook were able to turn a profit. Figes even goes so far as to suggest that the short story as a form developed out of the railways, as people wanted something shorter to ride on their journeys. This seems a stretch too far, but it’s hard to overstate the railways’ importance.

Much as with Holmes’ The Age of Wonder, which I wrote about recently, we learn about the little inventions that brought major changes – the railway being unable to cover every manifestation of progress in this century. We learn that painters were able to paint en plein air for the first time because of the invention of tin tubes for their oil paints – previously they were stored in animal skins and would dry out for anything longer than the most preliminary of sketches. We also learn about photography and the way that it impacted literature and the other arts, or the advent of mass printing music.

However, with that all said, the main inventions were not technological, but capitalistic. Music became popular not only because of the piano but also because of sheet music. A situation developed where popular sheet music motivated people to go to watch the original performances, which in turn motivated more people to buy the scores. The Europeans is full of such symbiotic relationships. At the same time, we are introduced to countless crafty businessmen who develop in embryonic form many of the things we might take for granted about marketing and advertising today. In a world without international copyright or performance rights, authors and composers had to take ingenious steps to secure themselves an income.

One of the major underlying narrative strands concerns the shifting fortunes of cosmopolitanism in the century. We can see this through the example of the German-born Jewish composer Meyerbeer, who was naturalised as a Frenchman and at ease in both countries. Later on, there came Wagner, whose antisemitism is the stuff of legend and whose music and self-presentation were all designed to make himself as German as possible. “I am the most German of all of them, I am the German spirit”, he wrote in his diary. Next to Wagner, another nationalist figure was Dostoevsky, whom we meet acting like an ass at the gambling salons, but even the great cosmopolitan Turgenev himself temporarily falls into patriotic fervour at the time of the Crimean War. We would do well to remember that war is not a thing that lends itself to rational feelings, and Turgenev later regretted his emotions.

If once the railway had allowed internationalism to flourish, and places like Baden-Baden to develop into highly cosmopolitan centres, it also played its part in destroying that same world. Part of the reason the Prussians under Bismarck were able to wage war so effectively was due to their masterful logistic exploitation of train tracks to shift personnel and materiel towards the front. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which left Germany unified, also marked the end of the world of the spas. The French now shunned places like Baden-Baden, which were subsumed into the new Reich. The Viardots and Turgenev, who had lived there happily, were forced to sell up and leave in the hostile environment that formed after Germany’s victory.

Still, as I said, these things ebb and flow. The Berne Convention of 1886 established international copyright; the socialists conducted their Internationals; the International Red Cross and women’s liberation movements all grew after this period – internationalism returned, just as nationalism would a little later.

The lives at the centre of this story are well chosen, not just because they were artistic and connected to many of the cultural developments that Figes discusses in The Europeans. Rather, they are well-chosen because they were, in the truest sense, heroes of a cosmopolitan, European culture. Turgenev’s library had books in nine languages. His love letters to Pauline, and hers to him, switched language to German whenever anything saucy needed to be written, because Louis could not understand that language. They lived in what is now Germany, the United Kingdom, and France; and Turgenev obviously grew up in Russia. Through their travels, they saw all of Europe and a great many Europeans. All the great musical names, all the artists, all the writers, knew them and visited them. Turgenev and Pauline in particular were vital in establishing Russian culture in Germany and France, and those cultures in Russia.

But all this does leave us asking what it actually means, this Europeanness? Figes follows a show-don’t-tell approach, giving us a view of what it looks like more than a prescriptive definition. He notes that for Turgenev, “the “Europe” he inhabited was an international civilization, a Republic of Letters based on the Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, and democracy”. This chimes with Paul Valéry’s view that European culture is a “shared inheritance” based on “a desire for understanding and exchange”, or Stefan Zweig’s that it is “a supranational realm of humanism”. In short, it is a world of cultural interchange and growth in shared values, that sees what binds us more than what drives us apart. There is no space in this world for a God-bearing people, as Dostoevsky saw his own to be. There is only space for people themselves.

On my census form last year, I wrote that I was European, as well as British and Scottish and English. I meant it seriously. I have been to eleven countries inside Europe, which I admit is a poor total, but I have every intention of visiting them all. I speak, badly, more languages than just my own. (We learn in The Europeans about the shocking cultural isolation of even the most educated Brits. Plus ca change). But more importantly, I feel a bond with these people, all of them, who are trapped on the same stretch of rock as myself. The nitty-gritty of it, the religious and geographical and political questions, are honestly unimportant. Like Turgenev, Europeanness is a set of values which I can feel, even if I am merely projecting my own views. It is a culture where I feel at home, far more than I do even in American literature, to which I am no stranger.

If I go in search of ideals, it is a European one that I find closest to my heart, not a British one. Cosmopolitan, welcoming, intelligent, dutiful, open. These are important things to me, more so than the stuffiness and seriousness and coolness that I associate with my own country. Just as it is important to me to travel, to wander this continent, to learn its languages, to meet its people. The European project is an individual project just as much as it is a political one (about which one can disagree). I must make myself European, and one thing I hope this blog will become is a statement of those painful efforts. I am grateful for Orlando Figes’ work not because it shows a world that is better than our own – because it certainly wasn’t, as his saddening section on women composers easily demonstrates – but because it provides the hope and strength needed to act in the service of the ideals its heroes believed in. Reading it, we can all become Europeans.