Island (Остров)

Our consciences remind us that we have all done things to murder the good in this world. Purity and sainthood have little to do with the existence of the average citizen, and those for whom these sacred terms apply will likely elude our ken. The vast majority of these souls are indeed pure: there is almost nothing to be gained from the material world by adopting such a stance except posthumous recognition, and by that point their true reward will have been bestowed. However you feel about such sacrifice − whether you think it a refuge for the weak and untalented or a bastion of hope for us all − life's comforts and pleasures should not be relinquished by those who seek acknowledgement in their community and beyond. The only persons who should enter upon such deprivation are those whose souls give them no other choice, and it is these desperate shades who will always live in implacable suspicion. They will be chastised for always taking the high road, the hard path, the last sip if there is still left a sipful in the chalice. They will be asked why they cannot deign themselves to be as lowly and fallen as the rest of us. Only rarely do we ask them what their motives might be for such a life − an inquiry which brings us to this extraordinary film.

The film is divided in two, with the first part seemingly lasting a few minutes in reality and a lifetime in the soul of one simple man. That man is Anatoly (Petr Mamonov), a stoker on a Soviet tugboat in the White Sea with one shipmate, his captain Tikhon. The year is 1942, the acme of the Axis powers, and the slow revelation of a German ship and the crooked cross in black, red and white produces the same dread that the Jolly Roger used to have on unfortunate mariners. The German forces storm the ship then grimace at the helpless duo as if disappointed that there is so little to destroy. Tikhon faces certain death with a cigarette and a lewd gesture; Anatoly begs for his life. An understandable display, perhaps, but one that turns into a crime of cowardice that cannot be rewarded because he is dealing with the hounds of hell. As the treacherous hounds break their promise and detonate the ship anyway, Anatoly survives and is washed ashore. He survives but has willingly murdered another human being in exchange for his own life, and for that he will have to pay. 

His penitence we witness thirty-four years later. We find him older, grizzled, almost toothless, on the same shoreline which he feared for a few critical minutes he would never see again. He has become a monk but remained a stoker, and his hands and face are almost never washed. He lives alone, sleeping on his coals, barely eating or drinking out of a filthy porringer, and picking up rocks, the pieces of the world he shattered when he killed his only friend. His hod and wheelbarrow suggest perpetual work, the endless toil of Gehenna, and we constantly see what he sees: the waves of eternity that shall never rise or fall but stay on as the moisture of our own days evaporates. Anatoly sings, prays, and mostly keeps to himself, but there is an element of mischief that implies we are dealing with a holy fool. Holy fools have had their share of limelights in art (perhaps most notably in this novel), but the majority of them remain unexplained or relegated to the contemptuous moniker of "imbecile zealot." Yet Anatoly is no fool; he understands that he has been given a second life in order to repent his sins and help others dispense with theirs. He even writes a petition to the Almighty, impales it on a the mast of a miniature raft and casts it off in prayer for his survival of one more winter. His powers of healing and clairvoyance, a burden even for a person unconcerned with how others view him, do not weigh him down as much as inform his austerity. What good are the vanities of modern existence if only God grants true power? At every turn his colleagues, Father Job (Dmitrii Dyuzhev), and the leader of the monastery, Father Filaret (Viktor Sukhorukov) try to undermine Anatoly. Perhaps because they want him to be a monk, not a saint (although Job suggests that's precisely what he might become), and because all of them need to survive and, in these oppressive Soviet times, martyrs are omnipresent. But they do sense his sins, which he mentions repeatedly and frantically as if they gnawed at him day and night. "Why did Cain kill Abel?" he asks Job, who thinks he is being ridiculed and walks away.

Three stock situations are presented to Anatoly the healer and mystic, and his treatment of the afflicted displays his understanding of what his compunction is supposed to achieve. He is first approached by a woman who is pregnant, a fact which, of course, he knows beforehand. She wants his blessing for a selfish choice, but he advises her to keep the baby, because "no one will want you without the child," so she might as well take comfort in her offspring. He also chases her halfway down the pier back to the mainland with no small ferocity that indicates he is not a willing saint but a conduit. A widow informs him that her husband, also a victim of the Great Patriotic War, has been appearing in her sleep. His blithe response is that her husband never died in Russia but is now dying in France, where he recommends that she travel. His treatment of a mother of a lamed child called Ivan (a tip of the cap to this film by this director of genius) has much the same flavor, a miracle bereft of beatitude, a resplendent exhibition of unfettered will. Anatoly bends off the screen while reciting his prayers for Ivan, and his prayers are neither the maniacal chants of a fanatic nor the rote memorization of someone who has long since lost interest or belief in his rituals. Instead, they are the pleadings of an average man who has an enormous burden on his conscience and is almost embarrassed to ask for a small favor. With the child now walking with a limp, he castigates the mother for leaving immediately for work and recommends that they stay the night for Filaret to bless the boy, adding that, "there is no point to go to work; a pipe has broken and everyone is getting three days' unpaid leave." All these mystical insights are said casually, as one would understate any plain fact, because Anatoly is not a saint but is a vehicle of divine inspiration, as open and legible as the scriptures themselves. Then one final visitor comes to ask for his aid and he knows that this may be the last person he will ever see.

The time period selected was not the most felicitous for the Russian Orthodox Church, but it just so happens to be the heyday of Tarkovsky's masterpieces. Like in Tarkovsky's films, nature here reflects the intricacies of the human soul; God reverts to being the coherent sum of all natural forces, of time, space, and eternity; winter is the discontent of the universe and summer its passion. We look out onto the island and see Anatoly in placid isolation; we are constantly asked to monitor the water as if there one might discern the hideous details of his crime; and the monks who doubt Anatoly also fear the purity that he has embraced. One notices where Anatoly's eyes are directed as Filaret expresses his gratitude for having saved him from his blanket and boots, man's comfort during night and day ("Most sins," quips Anatoly, "nest in bishops' boot tops"). Those eyes are reliving another horror, not the small scare that Filaret received from the smoke-filled hut. And so when Filaret confesses he "was afraid to face death unrepented," we see Anatoly's face glaring straight on at the death he cheated thirty-four years ago. Yet the most important and effective aspect of Island is the personalization of Anatoly's struggle. His is not a tale of glory, nor even of redemption, it is one of mission, of sensing that he was put or allowed to remain on this earth to change it one small step at a time. And while the name choices of Job and Filaret may be ironic in their symbolism, Anatoly's is not. His is the Greek East, the sun that has risen on Christianity, the sun that will never set, the sun that will burn him with the gravity of his crime until he makes amends. And in his wretched life he has probably made more amends than all of us combined.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The most really Stevensonian scenes, in their spirit and spitfire animation, are those which occur first in the prison.

                                                                                                             G. K. Chesterton

When I was in graduate school, one of my professors casually mentioned that he had been named for this writer whom, he implied, he was obliged to hold in high esteem. That he did not particularly care for Stevenson and was instead enamored with Russian writers whom he found infinitely more exotic than a shaggy-haired Scotsman who would suddenly die while mixing an exotic salad in the South Pacific, seems hardly surprising given that Stevenson is often seen as nothing more than a children's writer with success among adults. One of my favorite books as a child was this magical tome, and many of my coevals (but not I, for some reason) reveled in this classic tale whose villain became the name of a chain of budget seafood restaurants. Yet the most famous of Stevenson's creations, and the ones which have passed into common idiom, are the titular characters of this story, even though the two characters are actually the sum of one man. For that reason perhaps has modern criticism been rather harsh with Stevenson: he has been accused in reveling in boys' tales, children's worlds of fancy and monsters and pirates, and for never really developing a serious brand of literature to meet our serious tastes. Indeed, the same mudslinging that is pitched at this bestselling series (which, despite its massive adult readership, is intellectually designed for adolescents) has been the bane of Stevenson scholarship since his premature death in 1894. There have been encomia and anthologies, but few have been gracious or understanding. Maybe his stoic Scots wit lies at the center of this neglect; maybe Stevenson simply did not live long enough to manifest the true signs of his genius. One rather remarkable biography agrees with the first point but not the second.

There are many ways to approach Stevenson's oeuvre, and Chesterton is convinced they are all wrong. "The story of Stevenson," he writes, "was a reaction against an age of pessimism." Stevenson was born at almost precisely the median point between the publication of two books, The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species, that would change our perspective on what it meant to be human; if this were not sufficiently disastrous, Stevenson was also born in Scotland. More than mild chauvinism coats the backhanded compliments that Chesterton hurls at his northern brethren ("A Scotsman is never denationalized"; "There is something shrill, like the skirl of the pipes, about Scottish laughter; occasionally something very nearly insane about Scottish intoxication"; "The Scots are in a conspiracy to praise each other"), and it is this "Presbyterian country, where still rolled the echoes, at least, of the theological thunders of Knox," that framed Stevenson's window on the world. Over his short lifetime Stevenson abandoned his faith to a great extent but retained his categories; in fact, he retained them so strongly as to make any real difference between his rhetoric and that of a Kirk pastor purely one of vocabulary:

Those dry Deists and hard-headed Utilitarians who stalked the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were very obviously the products of the national religious spirit. The Scottish atheists were unmistakable children of the Kirk. And though they often seemed absurdly detached and dehumanised, the world is now rather suffering for want of such dull lucidity.

This detachment, this streamlined austerity, this "economy of detail and suppression of irrelevance which had at last something about it stark and unnatural" – this was how Stevenson built his world that was both varied and thematically coherent. Gone are the comparisons to this writer (whose atmosphere Chesterton aptly describes as "a sort of rich rottenness of decomposition, with something thick and narcotic in the very air," a perfect account of hell), and provided are likenings to no one else because, as it were, Stevenson has no true peer. 

In fact, his combination of childish tenderness and zeal – hence the suppression of irrelevance – with the dark materials of adult interaction could be laughed at as puerile or praised as visionary. Chesterton suggests the latter course, for one very good reason:

But most men know that there is a difference between the intense momentary emotion called up by memory of the loves of youth, and the yet more instantaneous but more perfect pleasure of the memory of childhood. The former is always narrow and individual, piercing the heart like a rapier; but the latter is like a flash of lightning, for one split second revealing a whole varied landscape; it is not the memory of a particular pleasure any more than of a particular pain, but of a whole world that shone with wonder. The first is only a lover remembering love; the second is like a dead man remembering life.

In contrast to so many literary biographies which underscore "real-life" events over the works in the author's library because most every reader can empathize with childhood, adolescence, marriage, heartbreak, children, aging, and even the death of a relative or friend, Chesterton's discusses Stevenson's works with occasional allusions to his life (the exact same biographic method used in this fine study). Stevenson's life is not particularly well-known (a dearth of detail has never stopped an imaginative biographer), and Chesterton farrows no new animalia in this distant kingdom; rather, he begins with "The Myth of Stevenson" and ends with "The Moral of Stevenson," as if a retelling of his life were something like a fable. He explores Edinburgh but makes almost no mention of those Pacific islands; he speaks of style but not in comparison to anyone else's, as if Stevenson's style were a reflection of his unique childhood; he suggests a philosophy of gesture in the sense of a chanson de geste; and he quibbles not unconvincingly over Stevenson's reaction to romance and Romanticism, although Stevenson was undoubtedly a Romantic if a rather meticulous one. And what is most remarkable is how little Stevenson himself is quoted, with one of his more famous lines being clipped into a short phrase.

Chesterton is more interested in Stevenson's books than his life not only because his books were deceptively demanding and literate, but also because for all authors – and especially Stevenson who spent most of his waking hours as a convalescent in the prison of his bedroom – their real life is in their books. Their biographies are not those of ordinary men because to achieve their artistic ends they forsake much of the lowlier stuff life has to offer. In our day and age these activities would include: television, video games, touristic vacations of mindlessly banal but often scenic resorts, magazines, gambling, motorcycles, drugs, hunting, and a variety of expensive, time-consuming, and exhausting sports.  In their stead would come daily reading and writing, long walks, sitting and staring at what nature mankind has left unharmed, talking warmly to loved ones and cherishing each moment as if separation were imminent, laughing at the silliness and fraudulence of the world, and loving what we have and what we might have in the future. But most people would find such a life devoid of intrigue and let it sit, unsurveyed, upon a dusty shelf like so many of Stevenson's works sit now in all the old libraries of the world.  What a mistake that would be.

Rilke, "Abschied"

A work ("Farewell") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

And now I've felt what farewell costs.   
I know it as unwounded, dark, 
And cruel, aflame with beauty's spark,
Shown once and held, then smothered, lost.

Defenseless, I, to look upon
What calls me here, am left behind,
As if all women were unkind, 
Yet small and white, they act as one:

A wave no longer mine, I fear,
A wave again, now faint and slight;
A plum tree which may fade from sight
Just as the cuckoo quits its pier. 

Lik

I suppose I do not quite understand those who are fascinated by comets and craters yet cannot believe in the immortality of the human soul. Now there are many, many shades of my ignorance, to be conquered by my future selves or to be left untouched in some dark corners of this universe; but my lack of understanding has more to do with aim than with substance. To wit, why do we bother? Why be kind to each other if kindness is but a façade for advantage? Why love when all love's labor will be lost? Why laugh or cry when all events and emotions are time, that cruelest of tyrants, simply spotting us treats? Some particularly smug proponents of the five senses' predominance have labeled those who think we are better than fossils and fuels "history deniers." These are the same megaphoning militants who tell us that we should not believe anything that cannot be verified – as if any of history can be "verified" – and we will leave them to their morons, oxy or otherwise. I do not deny history because I believe in moral justice; I, on the contrary, reinforce it. Of all things, natural selection is supposed to adhere so strictly to predetermined laws – laws announced to all, in other words – as to make the determinants of those laws likewise predetermined. (This chain goes back in time to something, one might guess, indeterminate; but the megaphoners claim that's when everything exploded into determinism; better to calm them down before in their red-faced rants they, too, explode.) Nevertheless, we should not limit natural selection to the chameleon or the slowly rising primate. Human souls also have a destiny plotted well in advance by their valor and fortitude, which brings us to a story in this collection.

Our Lik, an acronym for his Christian name Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn, is a humble beast, but one relatively well-evolved. He is an actor by the sheer fact that this profession is the only one which brings him any form of intercourse with the world, much less any income. As we meet him, he is consigned to a minor role in an "ideally idiotic" French drama of the conventional family-conflict-honor mould. The drama is in French, and Lik speaks the language with exactly the suitable Russian swallowing of vowels and stress to imbue the play, appropriately called The Abyss, with the proper dash of foreign flavor. He also begins to understand the role as his sole reality, suggesting that he is not so much an actor as a person bereft of true identity:

It was hard to say, though, whether Lik (the word means "countenance" in Russian and Middle English) possessed genuine theatrical talent or was a man of many indistinct callings who had chosen one of them at random but could just as well have been a painter, jeweler, or ratcatcher. Such a person resembles a room with a number of different doors, among which there is perhaps one that does lead straight into some great garden, into the moonlit depths of a marvelous human night, where the soul discovers the treasure intended for it alone.

On the subject of choice, there are few passages in the English language of greater lucidity or beauty. Lik may not have an outward appearance of genius, but then again most persons who seem at first glance to fit that profile turn out to be blustering frauds. What Lik does possess, however, is the inscrutable sense of himself that accompanies a sensitive soul; he could be an artist of any caliber – an organ grinder, a balalaika player, a street mime – but how he views the world makes him a first-class aesthete. He is most afflicted by what has always tortured the artist – time and its undertow, and the vastness of eternity lapping its waves upon the minute skeleton half-buried on a sandy beach:

The proximity of the sea, whose presence he divined beyond the lemon grove, oppressed him, as if this ample viscously glistening space, with only a membrane of moonlight stretched tight across its surface, was akin to the equally taut vessel of his drumming heart, and, like it, was agonizingly bare, with nothing to separate it from the sky, from the shuffling of human feet and the unbearable pressure of the music playing in a nearby bar.

We also learn that Lik is terminally ill, a coincidence that befits a far lesser work of literature – but there are, as it were, no coincidences in the works of Nabokov. Lik will carry on down his lonely path until a palaver with a fellow lodger reveals an element of our actor's past that we might have suspected all along. And that element is Oleg Petrovich Koldunov.

Koldunov is both Lik's relative and nemesis, one thought long dead. We cannot say too much about Oleg Petrovich, who reenters his miserable cousin's life almost twenty years after he left it, because Koldunov bludgeons us with monologue after monologue, often, it seems, arguing with himself or a past version of Lik. In fact, Koldunov is as loquacious and irritating as Lik is quiet and non-offensive (Lik's "absence from friendly gatherings, instead of being attributed to a lack of sociability .... simply went unnoticed"). There are moments in the narrative's second half when we cannot believe in Oleg Petrovich. That is to say, we don't believe in him as a human being at any point ("it was perfectly obvious he was an idler, a drunk, and a boor"); but soon enough we don't even believe in him as a fictional character. He is so exaggerated and incensed that we get the distinct impression that he might simply be a figment of a very neurotic actor's mind. The few alleged facts we do gather may strangely apply to both him and his cousin:  

Why has life systematically baited me? Why have I been assigned the part of some kind of miserable scoundrel who is spat on by everybody, gypped, bullied, thrown into jail? Here's an example for you: When they were taking me away after a certain incident in Lyon .... you know what they did? They stuck a little hook right here in the live flesh of my neck .... and off the cop led me to the police station, and I floated along like a sleepwalker, because every additional motion made me black out with pain. Well, can you explain why they don't do this to other people and then, all of a sudden, do it to me? Why did my first wife run off with a Circassian? Why did seven people nearly beat me to death in Antwerp in '32 in a small room?

There are other hints strewn amidst the story's increasingly odd second part that allow one to think, if for but a few paragraphs, that we are dealing with a single human soul engaged in internal debate. I am happy to say, however, that this impression is thoroughly demolished by our final scene. Or is it? Do white shoes betoken more than summertime and posh eccentricity? Should we be concerned that since Lik "had accumulated no spiritual treasures, [he] was hardly an interesting prey" for the looming Scythe? Hardly interesting at all. 

Borges, "Adam Cast Forth"

A poem (original title in English) by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Was there a garden or was it a dream?
Myself I asked, in fading light so slow.
And if the past, it comforts me to know,
Now Adam's own and sad, were but sleep's reams,

No realer than a magical, mad hoax
Of God?  All has been rendered imprecise
In memory, that clearest Paradise,
Exist it must, and will endure in hopes.

But not for me.  The stubborn dirt we shift
Has exiled me, red internecine spray
Of Cains and Abels and descendants' dread.
But to have loved remains our greatest gift.

To have been happy and to have touched
The living Garden, if but for one day.