rbadac (October 6, 1999)...a literary discussion masquerading as a travelogue. This is a tad long (about 6000 words/10 printed pages); rbadac recommends you print it out for now, and read it later at your leisure, with a nice cup of tea.Don't worry about copyrights. There is not another place in the universe where this would be of any use to anyone, besides here. And *that's* a whole separate debate.
The Excursion
Filing out of the club after an excellent lunch, we boarded the omnibus in a festive mood. Cracking good idea this was, to have guided tours of the very stamping grounds of the great supernatural authors ! And easy, too-- most of the time we never went far; last week we'd driven all of six blocks to see where Arthur Machen stayed in his little room, drinking his tea and smoking his tobacco, and catching fleas by brushing treacle on newspapers. The week before had been a double-header, when we had seen the town dwellings of both Henry James *and* Edith Wharton. All quite jolly, and a welcome diversion from smoke-filled parlours and ergonomically- faulty wingbacks. Several hoped we'd have a jaunt in the country soon, perhaps out in Kent where all those other authors were born, so that they could bring their guns and get a bit of shooting in.
This possibility was indeed anticipated when the bus took the road out of London, and there was an animated buzz of speculation as to our proposed point of arrival. Would it be a haunted bridge, a magic well? de la Mare's cottage, or E.F. Benson's house in Rye? Didn't Lord Dunsany have a tavern out here somewhere?
'Who's driving this week?' called out Sir William Aye, O.B.E., who was ready for action and had his jodhpurs on. Necks craned to look. There was a screen concealing the steerage, and a sign on it that said, "NO TALKING TO THE DRIVER."
'Appears it's to be a surprise,' answered Lord Randolph Pound-Sterling. 'Suppose we'll find out when we get there.'
Naturally this gave the excursion an even more mysterious air, and theories flew hot and heavy for some minutes. 'Oh, for God's sake,' muttered Lady Pagston-Hathaway. 'Somebody go find out who's driving this damned thing.'
Fitz-James O'Brian McNaughton-Cross crept forward and lifted a corner of the screen. Foul-smelling smoke from a cheap cigar rolled out from underneath it. A familiar apelike figure hunched over the wheel.
'Criminy, it's that rotter rbadac-- !!' he cried, in a dismay that was echoed by everyone on the bus. That selfsame personage turned to regard us with a leer. 'I see the conventional safeguards of privacy are wasted on this lot,' he observed. Quickly donning a gas mask, he twisted the valve on a tank he had secreted in the cab with him.
Some of us tried to rush the front, but to no avail. The gas did its work instantaneously.
When we awoke, the windows were edged with frost, and the passing landscape was a bleak, rime-covered waste. It was as cold as charity. Our teeth were chattering, despite the horsehair blankets someone had thrown over us while we were unconscious; when we sought to draw them closer around us, we found that we were each of us handcuffed to our seats.
Howls of protest and heartfelt curses ! Upon our rude awakening rbadac peered around the screen, grinning evilly. On his head was a huge fur hat.
'Welcome to the land of Gogol !' he said.
My heart sank. Farewell, English countryside, farewell tight little island. Already I longed for it desperately, knowing it was far, far away. Shanghaied as shamefully as the hungover new crew of an East Indian Dutch packer we had been, and rbadac had driven us to Russia.
We drove through coniferous Carelian forest, past expansive and icy marshlands populated by noisy black terns. We passed elk and reindeer. We passed cows. On our left, a thatch-roofed hut came into view, from the chimney of which oily black smoke poured. Outside it, two or three disconsolate locals stood motionless, like *matryoshkas*, and watched us rumble past.
'Look, a Red Lodge !' exclaimed Wilfred, Earl of Barnett, who was immediately shouted down.
Not long after, rbadac indicated with a sweep of his hand the domes and spires of a vast darkling city that sprawled across the approaching horizon.
' "The window through which Russia looks out onto Europe." Our destination, ladies and gentlemen,' he announced. And there it was, the Palmyra of the North, *nee* Petrograd, *nee* Leningrad, and only recently rechristened with its original name.
St. Petersburg.
'Nikolai Gogol, 1809-1852, was one of the greatest figures of Russian literature,' rbadac droned through the loudspeaker system as we crossed the Neva River. 'After working as a government clerk, he made an unsuccessful attempt at acting, after which he became a writer. He won quick fame with his EVENINGS ON A FARM NEAR DIKANKA (1831-32), and continued his career with the collections MIRGOROD and ARABESQUES (both 1835), several plays, and his novel, DEAD SOULS (1841). His short stories are regarded as some of the best examples of the form. He was admired by Pushkin, Nabokov, and Dostoevsky, who--'
'I HATE YOU !!' screamed Robert Suggs-Biddle. 'Turn up the heat !!'
'-- who, speaking of himself and his literary companions, said, "We have all come from under 'The Overcoat' ". How many of you knew it was a ghost story?'
A few raised their hands, or tried to. rbadac suppressed a snicker. 'Sorry,' he said, tossing the keys back to J. Maxwell Sullivan-Gilbert. 'When you get uncuffed, come up here and drive, will you? I can't give an effective presentation from behind the wheel.'
Nor could he effectively defend himself from our ire, as became evident when, while the rest of us freed ourselves, rbadac produced a pistol. 'No hard feelings I hope. None of you had papers, so I had to pass you all off as Islamic terrorist prisoners. So, how many ghosts in 'The Overcoat'? One, or two?'
He showed slides, of featureless government offices, of snuffboxes and shoes, of inkwells and insects; periodically he would show a slide which seemed to be nothing but a picture of an incredibly large fist. He played Borodin and Mussorgsky, and belabored us with obscure questions while we shivered in our blankets. We detested rbadac's 'immersion' techniques; the most salient point we could glean from our seminar on 'The Overcoat' was that we all needed one badly.
Max drove us into St. Petersburg. I confess the initial sight of it completely took our collective breath away, and for the present we forgot the underhanded machinations that had brought us there.
The city, built on several islands connected by literally hundreds of bridges, is a riot of sumptious palaces, monuments, statuary, wrought-iron, brooding columnar buildings, mosaics, icons, and Russian, Italianate, and Art Nouveau architecture. There is simply nothing like it anywhere else on earth.
The lecture over for the time being, rbadac handed out a hidden cache of Russian Army Surplus uniform coats and caps he had apparently procured in exchange for several cartons of Chesterfields. They cost us yet another pompous quote. ' "The aspect of St. Petersburg," said Olympe Audoard, "is more conducive of astonishment than admiration...if it is not quite perfectly beautiful, it is none the less completely strange." '
The wardrobe change was, all things considered, a welcome one; dressed as we were, there was a reduced likelihood of our being stopped for identification by the usual authorities, though there was now the slight possibility we might all end up in Chechnya.
We stopped on the Nevsky Prospekt, the most elegant and renowned avenue in the city. Here was the teeming heart of St. Petersburg, for tourists and residents alike; everything was here, shops, restaurants, hotels, bookstores, museums, theatres-- and all steeped in centuries of the Russian's tempestuous legacy. Nevertheless, while we ambled and gawked at the myriad sights and sounds of this historical thoroughfare, rbadac pursued us like a blackfly.
'Gogol lived just up that street,' he whined. 'That's where he wrote TARAS BULBA. There's his publisher's. There's his favorite cafe. There's the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library. All the literati hung out there, Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, all the rest.'
We stood in awe before the unbelievably fantastic Church of the Spilt Blood, and marvelled at its multi-colored onion domes and Byzantine construction. The Griboedov Canal. Kazan Square. The Stroganov Palace. The immense Russian Museum. All these, and it was just what was on or near the Nevsky Prospekt, just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. St. Petersburg was full of things like that.
It wasn't until we were settled in the dining room of the Grand Hotel Europe, well-fed with roast goose, cabbage rolls, lentil soup, *blinis*, smoked salmon, chilled red and black caviar, champagne, and what was indisputably the last word in vodka, that we paid much attention to what rbadac said, and then only because it was his treat.
' "St. John's Eve" was his first published story. Petrus is in love with Pidorka, but he can't marry her without money. He lets himself be drawn into an unholy pact with Basavriuk (Satan), who tempts him with wealth to commit a ghastly sacrifice.'
'A typically moralistic horror story,' I said, 'illustrating the unsoundness of the Faustian bargain. That's what it's about.'
'That's what it *appears* to be about,' countered rbadac. 'But if it were, why would it contain all the seemingly irrelevant detail? the unrelated wedding story in which the aunt gets splashed with vodka and set afire? the roast lamb that comes back to life on its plate? the crying devil at the end--?'
I was beginning to lose patience with this nit-picking. 'Folkloristic window-dressing, digressions, local color, call it what you like. It was his first story ! What does it matter?' I helped myself to another *blini* and caviar. 'You seem to disagree with the Faust interpretation. What do *you* think it's about?'
'I don't know,' rbadac answered glumly. He seemed lost for a moment. 'I think it's about last year's snow,' he said finally.
I rolled my eyes. The waiter came over, and rbadac said, '*Shchiot, pazhalusta.*' He withdrew, and returned with the check. rbadac pulled out a wad of rubles big enough to choke a Cossack's favorite battle horse and paid the tab. Several of us stared.
'You dirty capitalist,' said Paul Montgomery-Leone. 'Where did you get all that dough?'
'Just a small deposit I'm supposed to make at a Manhattan bank later this month,' rbadac answered, grinning. 'I get a commission.'
The Russian Museum is home to over 380,000 paintings and *objets d'art*, but we were only permitted to look at one of them for any length of time. 'Never mind that,' rbadac insisted, pulling a knot of us away from a wonderful Marc Chagall canvas. 'What we want is over here.'
I was fully prepared to argue the point that so far rbadac had not failed to successfully avoid any semblance to what the rest of us wanted, but of course I never got the chance. We were dragged in a group to cluster around a painting tucked away down a dim hall off the main concourse.
It was a portrait of a man, with a bronze-colored face, haggard, with high cheekbones, in an Oriental-looking robe. The staring eyes appeared alive, burning with some dreadful inner aspect, and seemed to follow you about the room.
The total effect of the painting gave us a queasy feeling. We looked at it, and each other, nervously, as if we had suddenly been revealed in some unsavory practice without our knowing it, or had had our minds read without permission.
We barely heard the words rbadac was reading from a dingy, dog-eared notebook: 'Better to endure all the bitternesses of possible persecution than cause even the shadow of persecution for someone else. Save the purity of your soul. He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else. Another will be forgiven much, but to him it will not be forgiven. A man who leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes. For on everyday clothes the spots do not show.'
He shut the book and motioned toward the exit. Shaking ourselves out of our trance, we went that way.
'The story was in ARABESQUES, but Gogol rewrote it and changed the ending. The new version was published in 1842. In the first one, the portrait transforms into an insignificant landscape. This was a segue from the second ending.
'The portrait is of the Devil, the realism with which it was done Gogol claims is not Art. The passage I read was the advice of the artist to his son to keep his motive pure. Gogol is beginning to apply these constraints to his own work. But is *that* Art? this seeking of a moral justification? And does your answer change if that was *really* the Devil?'
We passed outside, and it was night, but not night. At around sixty degrees North latitude, the sun only just dips below the horizon, and actual darkness only lasts about an hour. The rest of the night is a diffuse, glowing twilight, the 'unconsummated dusk' of Pushkin.
We didn't see rbadac for most of the next day. Ah, the tears I shed. Taped to the doors of our hotel rooms we all found the same note: 'Join you later. Your interpreters are downstairs.'
And of course he couldn't just leave it at that. The note went on: 'Nabokov said, "Reading his stories, one is apt to become Gogolized...and to see elements of his universe in the normal world..."
We thought we'd find the interpreters in the lobby or the dining room, but we saw no one who seemed to fit that description, nor did anyone approach us-- at any rate, they were not in evidence. After some struggle, we managed to parlay our desire for coffee and breakfast to the waiter, who spoke a minimum of tourist English, and we sat around the table discussing the previous day's events.
'Hold on,' said Dan MacLore, who was doodling on a napkin. 'I'm about to make a major orthographic breakthrough.' He was transposing the word 'Cthulhu' into the Cyrillic alphabet. Later, he decided it must already be that way, and proceeded to attempt to change it back again.
'I wonder if we would have come voluntarily,' said Stephen Whyse-Valiant, who seemed bemused by the whole affair. He found Gogol intriguing; moreover, rbadac had left him a Knopf Travel Guide to St. Petersburg, which we passed around.
'Hey, I wanna go to the Kunstkammer,' said Sir John Pelancaster. 'Look, that's where they keep Peter the Great's Cabinet of Curiosities.' He indicated the page to some of us, who blanched visibly. 'Ecch,' said Mark Owingsborough. 'Pickled fetuses and two-headed calves. I'm trying to eat breakfast, do you mind?'
'It's a valid point,' I admitted to Stephen. 'Even if it doesn't justify kidnapping. I mean, how many of you have actually *read* Gogol?'
Grinning, Dylan and Lucky held up their Norton editions. Bloody Canadians. They didn't seem to mind the cold, either. 'You can borrow mine if you like,' said Dylan. 'I've already finished, and started on Kafka.'
Christopher Roden-Track eyed the battered book disparagingly. He said, 'Gogol is due for a new hardcover release of his collected works, I'm bound.'
'You are?' replied his wife Barbara. 'Well, then, maybe we should release *you*.'
After some debate, we finally left the hotel, with an eye to finding a cab driver or a conventional tour guide to help us out, when we were accosted on the Prospekt by two young girls in *babushkas* who shouted and waved at us to stop. 'Hi ! Hi ! Are you the group from London? We're your interpreters !'
One of them giggled uncontrollably at the sight of us. 'What? What?' the other remonstrated her, barely able to control her own amusement. They bounded up, all smiles and ferret-like perkiness. 'We're exchange students from Chicago,' the second one said. 'This is Midge, and I'm Fidele. We're going to show you the sights ! C'mon, we've got a carriage over here !'
They hopped away, and we followed, dumbfounded. We were led to a rather plain-looking conveyance hitched to a pair of ragged-looking mares. Midge was holding the door open for us. 'Get in ! Get in !' she enthused, and though it was obvious the thing wouldn't hold four of us, much less twenty or so, we made an attempt to comply.
Don't ask me how it was, but somehow every one of us was soon seated within. The interior was fit for a Czar, and featured velvet-covered seats, Tiffany lamps, arched windows with mahogany trim, a CD player, a 15" Sony TV, a cellular phone, and a fully-stocked wet bar. With pretzels.
'Nice, huh?' said Fidele, peeping round the door. 'Real Viennese workmanship.' Midge giggled again. 'What? What?' cried Fidele, and they slammed the door on us.
The CD player immediately began playing Alexander Glazunov's 'Stenka Rasin,' and the carriage lurched forward.
It was a grand ride, though the scenery whipped past at an alarming clip. Those horses were a damned sight more capable than I would ever have believed possible. Some of us made use of the phone to call relatives and friends back in London, and each successive tinny 'You're WHERE--??' we heard on the other end was good for a fresh explosion of mirth.
I'm afraid the rest of the morning and afternoon was a blur. We got to see Pelancaster's Oddities and a hundred other things: Catherine the Great's palace of Tsarskoe Selo, the Peterhof Fountains, the Admiralty... we thought the Russian Museum was huge, but the Hermitage was four times its size, and as richly-supplied as the Louvre. It was overwhelming.
I couldn't help suspecting, however, that there was something about our guides that wasn't quite right. Passing locals who observed us talking to them looked at us quizzically and smiled. Certain others, like the sausage and fish vendors, glared at Midge and Fidele whenever they came near; one actually waved a stick at them and shouted something incomprehensible that they declined to translate. 'He's always giving us trouble,' said Midge, then to the irate vendor: '*Otstan ot menia !*'
Oddly too, in nearly every instance when we stopped, whether at a market or a cafe or a Winter Palace, Midge and Fidele, after briefing us on the place, invariably hung back from actually entering. When I asked them about this, they mumbled something about 'not being allowed in.' Then they would immediately begin some private conversation about the merits of some passing young man or other; and after a succession of giggles and 'what? what?'s, their absence could hardly be considered a tragedy.
Eventually we were bound hotelward again, totally exhausted. Lord Robert Kunatherton idly changed channels on the TV: a cooking show, some bizarre cartoons, a broadcast of Eisenstein's 'The Battleship Potemkin,' a lackluster news report showing a crowd milling about in Kazan Square--
'Bollocks !' Lord Robert blurted suddenly. 'It's rbadac--!!'
And there on the screen he was, in a gold-embroidered uniform with a large, stand-up collar, chamois leather breeches, a sword at his side and a plumed hat, getting out of a carriage and going into Kazan Cathedral.
We pressed him on this when he showed up later at dinner, which was at the *Dvorianskoye gnezdo*, next to the Mariinsky Theatre; he was, predictably, uninformative. 'You guys watch too much TV,' he smiled. 'It interferes with your capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality.' When asked where he dug up our giggling guides, Midge and Fidele, he laughed outright. ' "Exchange students from Chicago" ?! That's a good one !! Those lying bitches !!'
Then it was off to the Mariinsky, and a performance of Prokofiev's THE FIERY ANGEL, from the novel by Valery Bryusov, delirium from start to finish. Even in Russian the story was simple to follow. I felt sorry for Ruprecht, unwitting pawn in Renata's lunatic pursuit of her angel Madiel/Count Heinrich. It brought to mind similar pursuits, equally as mad; our own, to understand Gogol, and Gogol's own, to understand himself. I had been taking notes from the book I borrowed from Dylan, and I finally thought I had something to say about our author.
'Edgar Allan Poe was almost a perfect contemporary of Gogol,' rbadac pointed out as we left the theatre. 'both born in 1809, with Gogol outliving him by about three years, and publishing ARABESQUES five years before Poe's own similarly-titled collection.
'Throughout his stories, the age of 42 seems to have special significance to his characters. Major Kovalev in 'The Nose' dallies with a girl, but uses the excuse of not getting married until he is exactly 42. It is also the age of Poprishkin, the insane clerk in 'Diary Of A Madman.' It is the implied age of other characters who are described as having reached 'a certain maturity.' It is the age of Gogol's own death, just days before his 43rd birthday.'
'All very interesting,' I interjected. 'I've discovered some interesting facts about Gogol myself. Would you care to hear them?'
'By all means,' rbadac replied.
I had the floor, and I resolved to make the most of it. 'In the first place, Gogol was a cheat. The Ukraine about which he wrote in DIKANKA never existed. It was strictly the popular version the public wanted at the time, no more real than the Old West of a Hollywood western. And there is strong evidence he was racked with guilt about it. He died raving mad of a fever brought on by fasting, while he was basically doing penance for having written any of this. He burned his drafts of the second part of DEAD SOULS, not once but twice.
' 'The Overcoat' made everyone think he was a champion of the little man, and the liberals embraced him, but he wasn't that at all-- he only cared about them insofar as their lives created drama for his stories, but he advocated no reforms. He was a complete conservative who believed in the sanctity of the throne, and felt that the system of serfdom was the correct and proper state of society.
'When he realized how his works had been perceived, he published a book of essays on what he really thought. The critic Belinsky slammed him for being a reactionary. He wrote his 'Letter To Gogol' from his deathbed, calling him 'a preacher of the whip, an apostle of ignorance, a defender of obscurantism, and a panegyrist of Tartar customs.' The letter was suppressed by the authorities, and Dostoevsky was arrested and deported to Siberia for reading it aloud at a radical meeting. The same Dostoevsky who supposedly admired him,' I could not resist adding. 'The government turned its back on Gogol later. He did such a poor job of explaining himself they told him to mind his own business and leave politics to people who knew about it.
'And Nabokov rejected all the fantastic tales as juvenalia. For him, Gogol was 'The Overcoat,' the first part of DEAD SOULS, and his play, 'The Inspector General,' and that was it.'
I stopped. rbadac was smiling, and I didn't like it.
'All of that is true,' he said. 'Belinsky constantly took him to task for his quality of the 'needless fantastic.' Gogol simply did not have the social consciousness anyone wanted of him. Or the gravity, as far as Nabokov was concerned, though that didn't stop him from writing an entire book about Gogol.
'He was as much of a dandy as the *nouveau-riche* characters in his stories, just as tortured as Chartkov in 'The Portrait,' just as put upon as Akaky Akakievich in 'The Overcoat.' Did you know that his own nose was enormously long? He could touch it to his chin. He used to do it to make children laugh.
'His plotting is haphazard, his logic is spiderwebs, his characters parodies, his points nonexistant. I don't think he had the slightest idea what he was doing. I think he pissed off a lot of critics and drove great writers crazy because they couldn't figure out what his agenda ultimately was. I think he drove himself crazy trying to figure it out himself. I find it tragic and hilarious and amazing that neither he nor the rest of them could just let it be, and I feel he is of tremendous importance because of this.
'Poe's last words were "Lord help my poor soul." You know what Gogol's last words were?
' "Somebody get me a ladder" '
rbadac paused, waiting, but no one had any comment. Comment about what? The whole issue was becoming more and more tenuous by the minute. Going round and round Gogol, it seemed all we had attained was disorientation.
'You wanna see something *really* scary?' he said at last.
St. Petersburg was already over 200 years old at the time of the Revolution. During the Soviet era, its cemeteries were left to grow wild; ivy completely obscures many of the older graves, and near-natural conditions prevail, so that the red fox has made these places its habitat, as if they were small forests. Tree sparrows and flycatchers linger in the stately Russian elms, and feast on wild raspberries among the ruined tombstones.
One can imagine how picturesque all this would be in the early afternoon, the wan sun squeezing through the elms to fall on rich green leaf and blanched white stone, the foliage bristling with wildlife, the pleasant chirp of birds, the quiet pastoral...
But noooooooo. *We* were going there *at night.*
The romance of such a cemetery flees in Slavic twilight, when one may not care to see white shapes thrust from the murk, and no bird sings, except perhaps a hooded crow (whose voice can hardly be called singing); when the rustle in the underbrush is considerably less welcome, and the wild raspberries might as well be drops of blood.
'Do you know the story "Viy"?' rbadac asked. He pronounced it 'You.'
A fox barked. 'We're gonna die out here,' someone said, and someone else said, 'Shut up, shut up, shut up. I saw that damn movie.'
We plunged on, following rbadac and his stupid oil lantern. All that pre-laundered cash he had, and he was too cheap to buy us flashlights, the bastard.
'No doubt somebody's watching us right now,' said D. Wayne O'Lawson, 'wondering what the hell the Russian Army is doing, stomping around in a graveyard in the middle of the night. They probably think we're exhuming Anastasia, to put her in a glass case next to Lenin.'
I tripped on a headstone and went sprawling. A vole stared me in the face. He winked at me before taking off to disappear in the ivy.
Presently we came to a dismal little wooden church with three cone-shaped cupolas, grown black with age, and adorned with green lichen. The door creaked on its iron hinges as we entered.
Inside there were candles, which rbadac lit, illuminating painted icons behind them, flaking gilt; and, as the light increased, there, lying in the middle of the floor opposite the altar, we saw a long, black coffin.
The coffin was open.
And there was a corpse inside.
'No. No. No. No. No,' babbled young Todd, the Coleman's Mustard heir, who had to be shushed, before we all got started doing the same thing. rbadac was drawing a large circle on the floor over by the nave, ornamented with strange characters.
'Khoma Brut is a philosopher and a seminarian who runs afoul of an old woman who is giving shelter to him and his two traveling companions one night,' rbadac intoned. 'She is a witch. She rides him like a broomstick, but then he gets the upper hand and rides *her*.' A nasty chuckle. 'Rides her until she dies. And lo, she is become a beautiful young woman.'
'Back at the seminary, Khoma is ordered to go to a Cossack camp and read prayers for three nights over the dead body of the chieftain's daughter. He must stay in the church each night until dawn, no matter what happens.
'See ya.' And the door closed. The candle flames fluttered. rbadac was gone.
'Shit !' we yelled, and sprang to the door.
Locked.
The jambox he left in the niche over the altar began playing Gyorgi Ligeti. And we couldn't reach it to turn it off.
Do *you* know the story, "Viy"? You? You? I can't remember how it ends. Maybe it doesn't have an ending.
I can't remember that night either, only bits that I'm afraid to look at. She got up, you know, that dead girl in the coffin. Got up and walked around with her eyes shut and her arms outstretched, all blue from being dead.
But even when she opened her eyes, she couldn't see us. We were in the circle, was why. She gnashed her teeth and looked for us, came right up to the line of the circle; and when she couldn't find us, she lay back down in her coffin. And the coffin rose up and flew around the church.
Now my hair is all white, and I'm only 42, but I have to tell you, Viy is not a legend. Gogol made that up. He said it was a Ukrainian folk tale, but he lied.
She was the witch, of course, and she gurgled incantations with her twitching dead mouth, horrible, horrible. She called on all the demons of Hell. The whirlwind shattered the glass of the windows and blew open the door, and in they came.
That gibbering cadaver shrieked at them to find us, but they couldn't-- repulsive wings and scratching nails, they couldn't cross the circle, not even the enormous monster that filled the whole width of a wall in its tangle of hair like a forest, or the other thing like a huge bubble that hung in the air, with a thousand claws and scorpion stings extending from its center, the clods of black earth hanging from them...
And the rotted corpse of the witch, her breath stinking of the grave, rasped: 'Bring Viy ! Go get VIY !'
Please don't make me think it. He trod heavily, stumbling at every step. He had an iron face. The demons supported His earth-clotted body under Its arms.
His eyelids hung down to the very ground.
And He called for the demons to raise them, so that He could see, so that He could find us.
None of us heard the cock crow. When we came to, we were on the bus going home.
rbadac was at the wheel, guffawing. 'Pussies !! Fainted dead away !! One lousy night in a haunted church with a dead body, and you all fold like cheap lawn chairs !!'
He had several thicknesses of chicken wire around him this time, and it was a good thing he did.
'I'm getting notes from your mothers next time ! Ha ha ha ha !! Hey, if we ever go back, maybe you'd better stick to the Faberge eggs, huh? Good God !! Bring your plastic underpants, too !! Hee hee hee !! What a bunch of sissies !!'
There was more, but why bother? It's tedious in this world. I succeeded in getting hold of a walking-stick and, even with the wire, I managed to give him a pretty nasty poke in the head; and if he hadn't been driving, I'd have done a good deal more than that.
The End
oOo
Max (October 7, 1999)
> We didn't see rbadac for most of the next day. Ah, the tears I shed.I don't know whether I should compliment you on the perversity of your imagination or worry that you have too much time on your hands. I believe your suggestion that we're all Anglophiles is perhaps a bit exaggerated. While it's been a while, I have read my Gogol. In any event, Cook's would never run a tour like this.
Max
(Who should never drive a bus, let alone a car, not even in Russia.)oOo
Randy Money (October 8, 1999)
I was rather affected by being made a Lord and given my very own hyphenated name. Bless you, my son. If I could knight you, I would.Randolph
(the higher priced Randy, who has read some Gogol, though no where near enough)oOo
John Pelan (October 8, 1999)
> I don't know whether I should compliment you on the perversity of your
> imagination or worry that you have too much time on your hands.Possibly both, I should think...
> I believe your suggestion that we're all Anglophiles is perhaps a bit
> exagerated.Indeed. While I may have a fondness for works of writers from my ancestral Ireland; I'm also quite partial to the gloomy Russians...
> While it's been a while, I have read my Gogol. In any event, Cook's
> would never run a tour like this.No, Cook's would never, but perhaps we can prevail upon rbadac to organize such an event... And for anyone that HASN'T been "Gogoled", it is amazing how inexpensive his Collected Tales & Plays is in later printings.
John (Who has his own Cabinet of Curiousities, thank you very much.)
oOo
Gene-Michael Higney (October 9, 1999)
Hello Mr Pelan: Just wanted to add that I've recommended Gogol to some younger fans of dark fiction who liked Poppy Brite (who is terrific) but said they were not interested in reading "those old guys". They were surprised to find him quite accessible and interesting. Score one for the Masters.
Best regards,
Gene-Michael HigneyoOo
John Pelan (October 9, 1999)
> Score one for the Masters.Nicely done, sir! It's actually quite gratifying to see that many of our customers for Silver Salamander Press cross over and pick up the Midnight House, Ash-Tree Press, and Charon House books too... I've yet to have anyone that I've convinced to read R. Murray Gilchrist, Frederick Cowles, Edward Lucas White, etc. complain afterward. World Horror Convention in Atlanta was very encouraging as I shared a table with Larry Creasey of Charon House with the folks from the Gargadillo on the other side of us, most of the people that purchased books bought from all three of us. It wasn't at all uncommon to see someone stop and buy the new Ketchum novella and then pick up the White and Gilchrist volumes as well as Simon Clark's debut collection.
Pretty much convinced me that readers in the genre are now athirst for the good stuff and willing to expend a bit more effort in tracking it down. Another dealer that was there did very well with Ash-Tree Press titles as well as his stock of British imports.
World Horror in Seattle 2001 ought to be a lot of fun, we'll have to get rbadac up here to organize a suitable tour...
John
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rbadac (October 9, 1999)
I'm NOT driving !!Thanks to all who read and were Gogolized; actually the Wingback Club device was responsible for the Anglophility, and not any tendency here. And that is itself a genre joke, as good an excuse as any to go to Russia for a change.
And yes, I do have too much time on my hands. But better this than getting into trouble, eh?
rbadac
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