Chapter 3.

(Book: TEXT COUNTER TEXT)

BEFORE AND AFTER “AFTER THE BALL”:

VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF COURTSHIP, CORPSES, AND CULTURE

Although Tolstoy’s story1 derives its title from what happened “after the ball,” it consists of two episodes. The first, “at the ball,” is, in fact, the longer one, but functionally it serves as a foil to the second (“From that one night, or rather that one morning onwards my whole life changed”). This bi-partition was reflected in the draft title: “the story about a ball and through the gauntlet” (34: 552) and is crucial to the structure we will explore in this chapter.

Before.

At the ball, the narrator-protagonist Ivan Vasil’evich, an average young aristocrat of the 1840s (“[I]n our university at that time there were no philosophical circles and no theories, we were simply young”), dances and falls more and more in love with Varen’ka. The ‘rules, or laws,’ of the ball are repeatedly stressed. The hero fails to ‘legitimately’ secure the mazurka with his beloved (“According to the rules [_po zakonu, lit. “the law”]… I didn’t dance the mazurka with her”), because a rival has beaten him to her while he was busy outfitting himself with gloves. Another rule concerns the choice of partner by guessing his/her emblem, or “quality” (kachestvo). Such appurtenances of ballroom etiquette as the girl’s glove and fan become the souvenir symbols of the heroes’ highly ‘cultural’ love.

The motif of ‘gloves’ appears already in Tolstoy’s Childhood (1852), in Ch. 21, “Before the Mazurka” (!), where the young Nikolen’ka lacks the appropriate kid gloves, is publicly shamed by his grandmother for the old torn glove he intends to wear dancing, but eventually befriends the charming Sonechka and is accepted by the ballroom company. In the subsequent chapters, “Mazurka” and “After the Mazurka” (!), the ‘glove’ theme continues, and there also appear the motifs of guessing the dancing partner’s “quality’, of blind infatuation, and the heroine’s being driven away in a carriage. Striking parallels abound also in the unfinished story “A Christmas Eve” (“Sviatochnaia noch’”, 1853; 3: 241-65; see Zhdanov 1971: 100): the young hero is at a ball and in love with a beauty, dances a mazurka with her as if in a dream, keeps a similar souvenir, and is initiated into adult company.

The ‘glove’ and its ‘legalistic’ connotations, are further reinforced as Varen’ka’s father prepares to dance with her:

“[H]e… took his sword out of its sheath and handed it to an obliging young man… Then, pulling a suede glove onto his right hand, he said with a smile, ‘Everything according to the rules [po zakony, lit. ‘law’].”

The cultural symbolism of the provincial ball goes even further and higher up: from ‘legal’ to ‘regal.’ The hostess, the wife of the marshal of the province, resembles the pictures of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna; the girl’s father is a Nicholas I look-alike.

“He had… a white upswept moustache a la Nicholas I… [and] the highly disciplined manner of an old campaigner under Nicholas [nikolaevskoi vypravki].”

His tallness and military bearing are echoed by Varenka’s “majestic” stature (the epithet was several times omitted and restored in the drafts [Zhdanov 1971: 101]) and her

“regal look [, which]… would have frightened people away from her, had it not been for the tender… smile on her lips and in her brilliant, captivating eyes…”

This “had it not been for” is very characteristic. The cultural atmosphere of the ball is pronouncedly ‘benign’. Everybody admires Varen’ka and her father, while the father and others smilingly approve of the heroes’ mutual attraction. The ‘imperial’ hostess is emblematized by the bare shoulders (lit. “shoulders and bosom”) of the fun-loving eighteenth-century czarina. The heroes mostly dance together, and even when dancing with others, smile only at each other. Moreover, the ‘rules’ themselves are sometimes bent for their benefit (“She wold come boldly forward across the whole length of the room straight to me, and I would jump up without waiting for an invitation…”) and downright violated: after dancing with his daughter, the colonel leads her up to the narrator and insists he should dance with her, although “I said I was not herpartner.”

The couple’s love in the cultural lap of benevolent society expands to encompass the whole world. First, the protagonist’s love and adoration of Varen’ka envelop the father, who is linked to her both by similarity, in looks, especially the smile (“[T]he same tender, merry smile as radiated from his daughter sparkled in his eyes and on his lips”), and by contiguity, as they dance together (“I couldn’t help uniting the two of them in a single overwhelming feeling of affection”). They are evidently one of those Tolstoy families sharing physical and psychological features; one of the draft titles was “Daughter and Father” (34:550).2 The good feeling spreads to include others, among them the protagonist’s rival:

“I loved the hostess with her… Elizabethan neckline, and her husband, and her uests, and her servants, and even Anisimov, the engineer, who was sulking because of me.” “I embraced the whole world with my love… [E]ven though I seemed to be infinitely happy, my happiness continued to grow.3.”

This excess of love’s quantity is, of course, a hubristic flaw of the protagonist. Another is the quality of his love–perfectly ideal and “unearthly”:

“I was not only cheerful and contented, I was happy, I was blissful, I was good, I was not myself, but some otherworldly being , ignorant of evil and capable only of good.”

His passion is pointedly incorporeal, as he thinks away his own and hisbeloved’s bodies:

“‘I waltzed with her over and over again and could not feel my body.’–‘What do you mean…? When you put your arms around her waist I think you must have felt a lot, not only your own body, but hers too,’ said one of the guests…’– ‘… The more passiontely I was in love, the less physical [bestelesnee lit. “the more bodiless”] she became for me. Today you… undress the women you love, for me, though,… the object of my love was always clad in bronze [bronzovye odezhdy, lit. “bronze garments”]. Far from undressing, we strove, like the good son of Noah, to cover up their nakedness.”4

The “bronze garments” do not only symbolize the hero’s ‘platonism.’ They also reflect his willing and total acceptance of conventions–in a metaphoric epitome of all the kid and suede gloves, Varen’ka’s satin shoes, the father’s touchingly cheap calfskin boots, etc. (in fact, the association of man’s identity with the cut of his boots preoccupied already the protagonist of Youth [Ch. 31, “Comme il faut”]). The function of these and other items of clothing is precisely to “cover up the nudity,” blinding Man to the starkly naked unconventional Truth. An additional comment on this “cover-up” is inherent in the Noah metaphor, which invokes once again the Varen’ka-colonel affinity, stressing the fixation on the father figure and the institutions it represents.

After

With all this hubris stacked against him, the hero is rightly “afraid… that something might spoil [his] happiness” (245). The mechanism of excess5 prevents him from sleep, drives him outdoors and to his beloved’s house, and makes him witness the ugly gauntlet-running supervised by the colonel. The scene, which makes the hero fall out of love and change spiritually (abandoning any socially meaningful career), forms a negative replica of the ball-room episode. (The photographic metaphor is all the more justified as the heroine’s white dress and other ‘white’ motifs give way to black uniforms.) This, too, is a conventional social gathering, in fact, a law-enforcing procedure (punishment of a deserter) that takes the form of a specially arranged sequence of movements to music,–in a musical counterpoint deliberately played up by Tolstoy.

Approaching Varen’ka’s house, the hero heard “the sound of pipe and drum. My heart still sang, and now and again I could still hear the tune of the mazurka. But this was some other kind of music, cruel and harsh [nekhoroshaia, lit. “not-good”].”

The similarity of the two episodes is enhanced by the presence of both the hero (with his 1st-person account) and the colonel. The narrative dwells upon the colonel’s familiar appearance and the “suede-gloved hand,” with which he now hits a weakling soldier on the face for failing to flog properly. Another plot rhyme links Varen’ka and the flogged Tatar, who are the centers of attention (of the narrator, as well as all present) in the two scenes; and, like Varen’ka, the Tatar, too, is led up to the hero by the colonel as the danse macabre approaches.

The common features of the two scenes now display their ominous underside: the music is “nekhoroshaia,” “not good”; deviations from the ‘law’ are no longer tolerated but severely punished (both in the case of the deserter and the weak flogger); the colonel’s upright bearing and gloves now express arrogant cruelty; the smile is gone from his ruddy face; on seeing the hero, he “pretended he didn’t know” him. The most striking reversal involves the motif of ‘(in)corporeality.’ While the body of the beautiful Varen’ka remained covered and ignored, the Tatar’s frightful body is half-naked from the start (“something terrible coming towards me… a man stripped to the waist”). The “jerking body” rivets the narrator’s attention, and an epiphany takes place–characteristically, despite the hero’s reluctance to see and believe, and therefore in a defamiliarized manner:

“Once the column had passed where I was standiing I caught a glimpse… of the prisoner’s back. It was something so motley, wet, red, and unreal, I could not believe it was the body of a man” (p. 248).

To make the reversal complete, at this point the hero gets to “feel” not only the other’s body, but his own as well, getting nauseous to the point of vomiting:

“[M]y heart had become so full with an almost physical anguish, that… it seemed as if my stomach were about to heave and purge itself of all the horror…” (p. 249).

Thus, exposure to crude reality laid bare undoes the disembodied, conventional, societal love, which fails to deliver on its promise to embrace the whole world, including its dark side. But the story is a soft-sell: the narrator suspends general judgment about good and evil (“Well, do you think I decided there and then that what I had seen was evil? Not at all”), making only a personal choice and somewhat naively conceding that the colonel might know something that would justify the cruelty.6

The hero’s spiritual conversion has distinctly Tolstoyan overtones, relevant to the problematic of the ‘body.’ The ball is given “on the last day of Shrove-tide”; consequently, the flogging falls on the first day of Lent. This timing, geared to significant dates of the Christian and pre-Christian calendar, highlights the ritualistic aspects of the story,–not unlike “A Christmas Eve,” which explicitly plays with the genre of Christmas tale. For Tolstoy, the Shrove-tide ball connotes false merriment and denial of corporeality by an “unearthly” hero.

The only ‘sensuous’ presence at the ball is the hostess with her “plump elderly [lit. “old”] white shoulders and bosom bare.” Thus, the sexual aspect of societal rituals seems to be deemphasized here–unlike, say, in “The Kreutzer Sonata.”

Accordingly, the revelation of ‘carnal knowledge’ through the body of the punished soldier that takes place in the time of Lent, i. e. of mortification of flesh and, more generally, of the passions of Christ, is distinctly un-carnivalesque (in the Bakhtinian sense) and piously Christian.

The flogged man kept uttering some words, which the hero made out only when the gauntlet party came closer: “Have mercy, brothers.”7. Also, a bystanding blacksmith said: “Oh, Lord”; and it was for ‘merciful hitting’ that the colonel brutally attacked a soldier. (The “puny” soldier “patted” the victim [ mazal], unlike the other “brothers [, who] had no mercy,” but whether he did so deliberately remains unclear.) Thus, in a replay of the Calvary, the colonel reconfirms his ‘imperial’ (Caesar’s = Nicholas I’s) stance, as opposed to the ‘godliness’ of the tortured Christ-like body and the compassion shown by the weakling soldier, the blacksmith, and the narrator. Moreover, since in this configuration the Tatar functions as Varen’ka’s counterpart, the scene can be said to emblematize the replacement of societal love with love for a suffering Christ.

In the drafts Tolstoy tried to individualize the flogged man but ended up presenting him as a generic “man stripped to the waist” (Zhdanov 1971: 104-05)–in accordance with the universality of the _Ecce homo theme. Tolstoy’s emphasis on the ‘natural, i. e. anti-cultural, nakedness’ of the flogged body should not be taken at face value: although physically bared, semiotically it is clothed in cultural garb–that of the Christian myth. Like Pierre, Tolstoy (and his narrator in the story) seems doomed forever to rend the “bronze garments” of convention after convention only to take every subsequent painted matreshka-doll for an absolute embodiment ‘naturalness.’

Such a finale is characteristic of late Tolstoy, i. e. man and writer whose conflict with official institutions involved a virtual rejection of marriage, including his own. The closure neatly reintegrates the narrator’s naive idealism, platonism, body-covering, unearthly kindness, and universal love (including love of his “enemy” Anisimov). This idealism, undermined, as it were, by the plot, lends psychological credibility to the protagonist’s eventual conversion.8 Tolstoy seems to imply that the unearthly kindness and love, misused and exploited by the pagan/pharisaical conventional ‘culture-and-family,’ do have a place in true Christianity.

Standard interpretations of “After the Ball” (e. g., Trostnikov 1965, Zhdanov 1971) stress the Tolstoyan denunciation of the czarist establishment as based on hypocrisy and violence. The story is aligned with such publicistic texts as “Nicholas the Stick” and “For What?” Critics have shown how this political message is served by the rhetorical symmetry of the episodes at and after the ball, and by the father-daughter similarities. They have pointed out some of the negative elements apparent already in the ballroom scene (e. g. the “Elizabethan” hostess). The protagonist’s romantic love for Varen’ka, however, has remained above suspicion, despite the fact that the denouement holds her responsible for her father’s cruelty. For instance, Zhdanov, having noted how the word “majestic” links Varen’ka to the colonel, fails to see in it an ominous foreshadowing and states that “Varen’ka’s portrayal is one-dimensional, without shadows” (1971: 101). The contrast between the two episodes has been analyzed quite thoroughly from the formal point of view,9 without, however, affecting the accepted thematization along the familiar political lines.

While including the traditional interpretation, my analysis strives to refine and enrich it by pinpointing additional expressive nuances. Where it differs and becomes a virtual rereading is in isolating the motifs of ‘cultural conventions,’ ‘(in)corporeality,’ ‘nakedness vs. covering-up,’ and ‘worldly love-and-marriage vs. Christian love,’ in tracing the plot rhymes and othernarrative techniques used to elaborate these themes, and in drawing on Tolstoy’s entire oeuvre to corroborate the relevance of the suggested new thematization. A further broadening of perspective, prompted by these new semes, would place this short story in the context of the age-old topos of ‘love, death, and culture,’ found already at the origins of the genre.

Over the centuries, the themes of ‘love’ and ‘death’ have been treated and evaluated in various ways, finding themselves on various sides of the ‘nature/culture’ opposition. The heroine of Petronius’ “The Ephesus Widow” starts out ‘hyper-cultural’ in her sanctified loyalty to her deceased husband, lying in state; she then desacralizes every convention by giving her own passionate body and even her husband’s dead one in exchange for sex with a stranger (Shcheglov 1970). Medieval courtly love to the point of death was self-sacrificially platonic, i. e. programmatically cultural. Classicism sharply contraposed love to the civic, i. e. cultural, duty, and the conflict usually led to tragic death. “Natural” Sentimentalist love in the graveyard challenged existing cultural conventions, while the Romantics developed a clearly anti-social cult of love and death and Pushkin explored the manifold hybrids of the two (Zholkovsky 1984a: 159-78). Realism brought a sobering reappraisal of Romantic stereotypes, but they died hard, lingering in the works of a Turgenev and even a Dostoevsky.

It took a late Tolstoy to demythologize ‘cultured love’ by opposing it–in a stark reversal of the Romantic argumentum ad mortuum–to ‘death’s body.’ To subvert the myth of ‘love as culture’s way of overcoming death,’ Tolstoy switched the order of episodes: if “The Ephesus Widow” opens with a picture of death and ascetic mourning and proceeds to sexual ecstasy, “After the Ball” starts with love and ends with its refutation at the sight of a tortured body. This narrative formula (and the various structural and stylistic subtleties that flesh it out), along with the open-ended composition, Hemingwayesque avant la lettre, which culminates with the protagonist’s emotional shock and ends with his “leaving town” (like in “The Killers”), seem to be Tolstoy’s original contribution to the art of story-telling.

Tolstoy’s stance is not “realistic” in some privileged sense, nor should the previous treatments of the theme be dismissed as mere “stereotypes.” In what follows I examine two later Russian texts that are based on the same hypogram–‘love as culture’s way of overcoming death’–and treat it in ways both similar to and different from “After the Ball.” The intertextual links thus established are in all probability purely typological. It is, therefore, all the more interesting to see how, in the absence of direct influence, the openly anti-cultural posture of the nineteenth-century iconoclast was developed and then reversed during the Soviet period.

In light of the discussion in Chapter 2, the possibility of finding a Zoshchenko variation on the paradigm of Tolstoy’s story should not come as a surprise, and, indeed, one is provided by “Lady with Flowers.”10 Zoshchenko liked borrowing famous titles for his comic stories with a different–opposite or unrelated–content (see Ch. 2, Note 11). He consistently subverted the values and conventions of high literature, arguing that one could not go on writing as if “nothing had happened in our country” (1940: 335). The title, topos, and some details of “Lady with Flowers” point to Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” (a title also used by Zoshchenko), to La dame aux camelias (Dama s kameliiami in Russian) by A. Dumas-fils, to Chekhov’s “Lady with a Lapdog,” Turgenev’s “A Quiet Spot (The Backwater)”11 and, in a widening circle, to Lermontov’s “Taman’,” Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Blok’s beautiful ladies (in particular, “The Unknown Lady”), to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and many others. In fact, the entire romantic love-and-death myth is targeted, as the narrator states bluntly that the story is about

“how one day through an unfortunate accident it became definitely clear that all kinds of mysticism, idealisticism, various unearthly loves and so on and the like are just bull and nonsensism. And that in life, only a real materialist approach is valid and, unfortunately, nothing more.”

Several common motifs make “After the Ball” a relevant point of reference for “Lady with Flowers”: it is, so to speak, in the direction of Tolstoy’s story (and beyond) that Zoshchenko reworks his “Poor Liza” hypogram, “reshaping” it according to the ‘before–after’ formula.

Before

“Lady with Flowers” tells, with many a good-naturedly cynical “philosophical” digression, the story of an old-time intelligentsia couple, living out, in deliberate isolation from the Soviet environment, the dream of ideal romantic love. They rent a dacha in Otradnoe,12 where the wife is given to typically romantic pastimes:

“In a word, here was this poetic person, capable of smelling the whole day long flowers and nasturtiums or sitting cozily on the bank and gazing into the distance, as if there is something definite there, like fruits or sausage.”13

Her husband, an engineer, lives only for the moments he spends with his wife. Leaving for his work in Leningrad, he blows her kisses from the steamboat; returning, he brings presents, embraces her, and talks about his love. The narrator finds all this “disgusting.”

The husband complains about “crude reality,” performs no social work, and is nostalgic for the idealistic values of the past:

“He, in a word, liked the past bourgeois life with all kinds of little pillows, consomme and so on”; “I, says he, am a person of profound intellectuality, for me, says he, it is accessible to understand many mystical and abstract pictures of my childhood… I, says he, was brought up on many beautiful things and bagatelles, I understand subtle love and do not see anything decent in crude embraces… I, says he,… only take into consideration spiritual life and the needs of my heart…”

The ‘reactionary and idealistic’ complex includes ignoring the physical aspect of life. The husband despises “crude embraces,” the wife walks “on thin intelligentsia legs,” “does not ask for food,” and never smiles: even when given presents, she will only “frown her little nose.” As for her “habit of bathing,” it is an idle and effete, rather than athletic, pastime, and the verb used by the narrator is pointedly kupat’sia, “bathe,” rather than plavat’, “swim,” which latter she is fatally no good at. Other characteristic appurtenances of the ancien way of life are, according to the naive “proletarian” narrator, the useless, expensive or simply foreign-name objects: “bagatelles,” “consomme_,” “cute little _peignoir,” “smartly dressed” (cf. The glove motif in Tolstoy), etc.

In a word, the couple represents the ‘dead culture’ of the past, and, without fail, death is what happens next. The lady wanted to go bathing,

“went out after the rain on her little French heels–and fell.” “Of course, had she worked out… in due time, she… would have swum up. But as it is, with her flowers and all, as soon as she took a dip–she went down all the way to the bottom, without resisting Nature.”

The narrator considers and dismisses the probability of suicide, but, archetypally, the woman is as suicidal as any mermaid-aux-camelias heroine, of which she is a caricature. The absence of a specific cause of death–unlike Ophelia or poor Liza, she is loved, not abandoned,–mockingly underscores the point.

Her death shifts the focus to the hero, whose love now attains its graveyard apex:

“I loved her with a completely unearthly love, and my only job now, says he, is to find her, to get in touch with her remains and to bury her in a decent little grave, and to keep visiting that little grave every Saturday in order to spiritually communicate with her and have otherworldly conversations.”

Zoshchenko spoofs the ‘unearthly’ topos (the word “nezemnaia” is the same as in “After the Ball”), lumping together poor Liza’s or Klara Milich’s posthumous haunting of the hero, poetic (e. g. Pushkinian) conversations beyond the grave, river-dragging (e. g. in Turgenev’s “A Quiet Spot”), sentimentalist grave-tending, planned here in advance. All this is told in the habitual Zoshchenkovian stylistic jumble, well-intentioned but pathetically semi-literate.

After

Of course, the most important things happen in the presence of the body, which is at first looked for in vain. The engineer offers a reward, grieves on at the dacha, and a month later fishermen find the disfigured corpse. The hero hurries to the side of his beloved: “he went up to his former girlfriend and stopped near her.” The description of the dead body as a living person “revives” it, setting it up for the ensuing desacralization.

“The engineer… bent over… and here a complete grimace of disgust disfigured his intelligentsia lips. With the tip of his boot he turned over the face of the drowned lady”

and left in revulsion, having payed the fishermen an extra five rubles “to somehow bury her by themselves at the local cemetery.”

Confronted with the ‘body’ (the word telo recurs several times), the hero reverses himself completely, renouncing his love and interest in the grave and beyond. Also, contrary to the generic expectations but in accordance with the narrator’s posture of deflating all mysticism, the dead beloved fails to haunt the hero. In fact, it is now that he finally “betrays” her with another woman:

“And recently they saw him–he was going down the street with some lady. He was leading her gentle like by her elbow and was insinuating something interesting to her.”

……This is, of course, a complete reversal of, say, “Poor Liza,” where betrayal causes suicide, which in turn enables Liza to reclaim, from beyond the grave, Erast’s loyalty. The ‘haunting woman’ syndrome in Russian literature began with Liza’s sketchily outlined posthumous emotional impact on Erast; in Pushkin’s “The Mermaid,” it took the form of physical aggression (attempts to drown the seducer, later spoofed in Lermontov’s “Taman’”); Dostoevsky’s Nastas’ia Filippovna succeeded in morally destroying all guilty and innocent males alike–already in this world (Matich 1987: 55); finally, in Blok, the femme fatale attained the peak of domination over the male persona–to literally to get the boot in the denouement of Zoshchenko’s story.

Like Tolstoy, Zoshchenko plays up the hero’s dread of the disfigured body, implying that ‘unearthly spirituality’ means a reluctance to face the down-to-earth facts of life. The shunning of the body was foreshadowed by the engineer’s escapist ignoring of “crude reality” and “crude embraces.”

“A v nastoiashchei tekushchei zhizni on nichego, krome grubogo, ne videl i svoiu lichnost’ ot vsego otvorachival”; “… i ne vizhu nichego prilichnogo v grubykh ob”iatiiakh.”

…..Remarkably, the plot’s macabre transition from ‘idealism’ to ‘materialism’ is echoed by a parallel shift in the representation of the social environment. In the beginning, the hero’s ‘”wrong” spirituality’ is contrasted with the down-to-earth and even crude, but ‘”correctly” idealistic’ Soviet values (social work, workouts, writing articles, etc.). In the end, however, Soviet ‘materialism,’ which provides the supposedly positive contrast to the ugly denouement of the love story, is downright crass. The fishermen, in a variation of graveside humor, mistake the hero’s departure for avoidance of payment:

“And, hey, what about the money–the money he dangled like, and now, look, he is splitting, never mind that he is a former intelligent with a cap on and all!”

Zoshchenko’s fishermen fill the role of ‘epiphanic witnesses,’ analogous to that of the God-fearing blacksmith in “After the Ball.” Their talk of money is clearly not beyond culture: rather, it represents the new set of values. As for their being, of all trades, fishermen, but of a human body, not the soul, it may be correlated with the story’s cynical tenor and contrasted with the Christian ending of “After the Ball.” In a sense, the fishermen leave the hero looking less repugnant; although he shows no compassion, at least he does betray some emotion: “He bowed his head and whispered to himself: ‘Yes, that is her’.”

What is, then, the balance of Zoshchenko’s message? Writing after the Revolution and from behind its looking-glass, Zoshchenko takes Tolstoy’s anti-cultural stance to an ambiguous extreme (see Ch. 2). His heroes belong to a culture that is suppressed and gone, not the dominant one, and the open debunking of the former is supplemented with a skaz-type subversion of the latter. No positive characters–except, as the saying goes, laughter itself–appear in the story, and the picture gets increasingly grimmer towards the end.

On a deeper level, Zoshchenko endows his heroes with his own traumas (the husband, who is “fortyish,” is approximately the writer’s age): preoccupation with childhood memories, fear of/ attraction to water, problems with eating, anxiety about/ overcompensatory interest in sex, femininity, and ostentatious clothing. The fear of excessive pretensions, possessions, and culture seems to have haunted Zoshchenko from his infancy. In his psycho-autobiography Before Sunrise,14 there is an episode where little Misha and his sisters flee from a storm. When his elder sister reproaches him for losing his bunch of flowers (!), he replies: “With such a storm, who needs bunches of flowers?” (Zoshchenko 1974: 111). These words are emblematic of the writer’s bleak view of culture at the time of Revolution and anticipate the philosophical pronouncements in “Lady with Flowers”:

“Let them see in how much unnecessary stuff they have wrapped themselves”; “in life, only a real materialist approach is valid and, unfortunately, nothing more.”

 

Strictly speaking, our next variation on courtship-and-corpses belongs to a different literary genre: Ginzburg’s “Paradise under the Microscope” is a chapter from the second part of her memoirs.15

Journey into the Whirlwind (1967) and Within the Whirlwind (1981) tell the enthralling story of an idealistic Communist’s survival in the Gulag thanks to her exceptional vitality, spiritual integrity, and good luck. In a sense, the book is an uplifting idyll, portraying the triumph of the human spirit and culture over tremendous odds–a harmony of all positive elements against the backdrop of horror and suffering. The chapter in question, although purportedly non-fictional, exhibits so high a degree of literary organization that it can be analyzed as a short story in its own right, alongside those of Tolstoy and Zoshchenko.

Before

The paradise placed under the microscope is a tolerable spot in the Gulag, the Taskan food processing plant, where the narrator-heroine is a nurse and thus a member of a humane circle of the camp’s medics; the circle is headed by Dr. Walter–German, Catholic, a “jolly saint”, and Ginzburg’s second husband-to-be.

Death is an everyday experience here. The prisoners are “almost otherwordly figures,” and the medics’ job is “directed toward preventing deaths during working hours.” Food is a matter of life and death:

“The inhabitants of Taskan were unlike those of the real paradise up above in that their thoughts never strayed from their daily bread.” Deaths were “concealed from the authorities… so that the deceased’s bread ration [paika] would keep coming.” To claim it, “[s]ometimes they even paraded the corpse at roll call, placing him in the back row, propping him up with their shoulders on either side, and replying for him to the question about his personal data.”

And yet, this life on the brink of death is governed by ‘laws.’ The doctors save the slave-laborers so they could die ‘legitimately.’

“People were supposed [polozheno–Ginzburg’s italics] to die in infirmary beds,… If someone were to fall into a snowdrift, you could look for hours, you would have to raise alarm for an escaped prisoner, and you’d have to account for the occurrence.”

As for the dead man’s ration, it can be bequeathed to a friend, and this unwritten rule is solemnly upheld and enforced by the prisoner community.

“Such bequests were often made in my presence; I have even acted as a sort of notary… These bequests were strictly observed. General condemnation and sometimes physical reprisal were meted out to those jackals who looked for a chance to steal a dying man’s bread ration.”

Along with such fundamentals of culture as ‘laws,’ the elitist circle also has access to spiritual nourishment in the form of ‘books’ (which the doctor obtains from the free citizens he treats) and ‘intellectual dialogues.’

The paramedic “Confucius lived up to his nickname by developing various arguments to prove the unprovable, for example, that joy and sorrow were… one and the same thing because both were transitory.”

A redeeming role is also played by ‘memory,’ developed in the tragi-comic episode with the Kazakh prisoner Baigildeev. He kept forgetting the name of his article of the penal code (i. e. the one according to which he had been convicted) and “was as pleased as a little child” when the roll-calling guard, nick-named Beast (Zver’), supplied it (“ASMC,”–abbr. for “Anti-Soviet Military Conspiracy”).

The narrator’s and the doctor’s trips into the woods for medicinal herbs (i. e. flowers!) produce a synthesis of their nascent love, humanistic culture, and union with nature:

“The brief flowering of the taiga… awoke in us an almost forgotten delight [lit. “tenderness”] in the world around us,… in the elegant flowers of the willow herb, which resembled tall-stemmed purple goblets [!]. The doctor… named it in three languages: Russian, German, Latin.”

The mention of Latin, which foreshadows the role that language will play in the plot, also connotes the doctor’s extraordinary spiritual powers. The doctor becomes not only the heroine’s husband but also her priestly guide, who converts her to Christianity. He mediates between this world and the other (this was ironically prefigured by the convicts’ “otherworldliness”), gains the heroine’s love by listening to her stories about her dead son and teaches her how to care for others.

“He was the only person to whom I could talk about Alyosha. He somehow steered our conversation so that there seemed to be no difference between those who had departed and we who were still on earth… [T]his helped to soften… the constant pain. Sometimes the doctor would… mention my suffering in connection with our … everyday concerns. ‘You must take the occasion to go and look after Sergei… in the second ward… For Alyosha’s sake…’”

It is, therefore, in a highly ‘cultural’ way that the relationship develops.

“The doctor went about his courtship with old-fashioned courtesy and gentleness. He told me about his childhood.16 He told me about his scientific hypotheses. He patiently endured the torrents of poetry that I launched at him. When it was no longer possible to be silent, his declaration of love was not in oral but in written form.”

The arrival of the love letter forms a major plot event: it is motivated by the doctor’s absence (a trip to a distant camp site), and takes place at the very moment when the heroine is treating her son’s miraculously convalescing double Sergei. And–ostensibly, for conspiratorial reasons–the letter is in Latin. The heroine can barely understand Latin (she knows some French), but is anyway moved by the “high-flown, almost bombastic words: ‘Amor mea, mea vita, mea spes’.” This perfect fusion of love and culture is all the more striking as it reshapes the famous Levin-Kitty declaration of love by initials, which was pointedly anti-conventional and anti-symbolic.17

At night she composes her answer–alas, in Russian, but in verse (germinating from the immaculate trochees of the doctor’s Latin incantation) and in classical Roman terms:

“How beautiful is the Capitol! What wonderful old stone!/ A perfect day, a happy day, and now we are alone./ The bad is clean forgotten beneath the sky’s blue rays,/ You whisper, ‘amor mea, mea vita, mea spes.’/ Life is sweet, I ask you and ask again, my dove,/ Only in Latin, always in Latin, speak to me of love.”

This response echoes the doctor’s use of a special, ultra-cultured language and connotes culture not only by its literariness, written as it is in verse, but also by its intertextual strategy. The heroine’s poem is a reworking of a specific source: Akhmatova’s “My heart beats calmly, steadily…” (“Serdtse b’etsia rovno, merno…”), a vintage specimen of stoical self-healing by recourse to memory and culture.18

But even borrowing from such a kindred ‘cultural’ spirit, Ginzburg has to make a significant change–for the idyllic. In Akhmatova, the declaration of freedom: “You are free, I am free” (_Ty svoboden, ia svobodna) means putting a good, stoical, and culturally acceptable, face on broken love. In Ginzburg’s paraphrase, the same words imply release from the camps. As for love, it remains unquestioned: love, culture and the heroes are in league, not in conflict.

After.

At this high point the idyll is brutally shattered.

In the middle of the night the heroine is summoned to the hospital ward and ordered to save the life of a convict and identify the meat in his bowl. She feels like vomiting: the meat is human, the prisoner, a cannibal. He has murdered a fellow zek (to be sure, one earlier saved by Dr. Walter) and has been secretly cooking parts of his body–in a macabre counterpoint to the ‘lawful’ and friendly use of corpses (to get extra rations) in the beginning of the chapter.

…..The prisoner’s name, Kulesh, which in Russian means “simple grub with meat,’ adds a probably unintended but powerful irony to the episode.

The author–and History–have upped the ante: in Tolstoy we had a tortured live body, in Zoshchenko, a desecrated corpse, and now the epiphany takes the form of peering into a pot of human flesh. The disciplinary officer (nachal’nik rezhima) takes the grotesque even further.

Cracking a black humor joke that links directly (if figuratively) the corpse with the heroine, he says to the murderer: “What are you goggling at the medic for…? She’d doubtless make more tender cutlets…, is that it?…”

For protection from this horror the narrative turns to ‘culture.’ The prisoner must be cured in order to be tried and executed–in a replay of the irony of camp medicine mentioned earlier in the chapter. Except that now the narrator-heroine finds herself identifying with the jailers, albeit reluctantly and ambivalently:

“I felt so ill, physically and mentally, that I could hardly stand on my feet. Were we to save him so that he could be shot?… Why not let him die there and then…? I caught myself thinking that for the first time in all these years… I was perhaps closer to the bosses than to a prisoner… I had something in common with the disciplinary officer: we both felt the same revulsion toward the two-legged wolf who had overstepped the bounds of what is human.”

The ‘wolf’ metaphor was foreshadowed by the “jackals” who would not honor ration bequests. Incidentally, it does not carry as absolute a conviction as the narrator assumes: Tolstoy the author of “The Strider” and Pil’niak the author of Machines and Wolves might well take the side of the wolf against the humans and their conventions (cf. Chs. 2 and 7). Indeed, Ginzburg’s stance differs remarkably from “After the Ball”. There, the ‘benign’ aristocratic culture was successfully subverted by the body it victimized; in Ginzburg, the ‘benign laws’ of the Gulag community are unexpectedly upheld, while the dead body is laid at the door of an isolated criminal, not the cultural establishment.

Confronted with the ‘body,’ the heroine reacts very much like the protagonists of Tolstoy and Zoshchenko:

“I looked into the pot and could hardly refrain from retching. The fibers of this meat were minute, unlike anything I was accustomed to seeing” (p. 123-24).

She is about to renounce her pro-culture stance, when the reversal of the familiar paradigm takes place. Next morning the doctor returns and addresses the heroine for the first time by the intimate 2nd person singular ty“(see the Russian version, 1985: 106). This TY, capitalized and placed at the end of the chapter as literally its last word, is a clear reference to the Russian arbiter of culture, love, and death–Pushkin19 lends additional force to the doctor’s concluding words. He assures her that one can face the facts: “[D]on’t despair. True, man has a beast in him [cf. the nickname of the brutal guard, Zver‘ –A. Zh.], but the beast cannot triumph over man in the end” (p. 125). Love and culture join hands against the cadaverous antibody. In fact, the doctor, in true Enlightenment spirit, has from the start advocated sober scrutiny of reality–in words that gave the chapter its title: “I see that you need to take a closer look at our paradise–under the microscope.”

The role of the ‘epiphanic witness,’ however, devolves to the disciplinary officer–the doctor gets to pronounce his verdict after him, in accordance with the narrative’s strategy of rewriting crude reality in cultural terms. Writing is, indeed, crucial to Ginzburg’s text, which belongs to the neo-romantic/ modernist tradition that casts the Writer as protagonist. Hence the proliferation of cultural activities in the story: correspondence, verse writing, addressing a convict (the messenger and a suspected informer) in the style of A. Dumas-pere (“Tell the duke there will be no answer…. Good night, viscount”), and other literary reminiscences, all of which lends this writing a romance-like or even fairytale-like aura.

The variations on the topos have come almost full circle. Tolstoy shook the foundations of officially sanctioned love, which is rooted in violence done to Nature’s and Christ’s body. Zoshchenko, writing amidst cultural ruins, exaggerated Tolstoy’s deadly (virtually avant-gardist) critique of old values and extended it, ambivalently, to the new, without offering anything positive in their place. Shocked back into the cultural fold by the wildest avant-garde nightmares come true (in fact, according to Groys 1988, Stalinism _was a runaway version of the Russian avant-garde), Ginzburg sought to reclaim the traditional values of love _and culture, reintegrating them with Nature, Christianity, and even official authority,–in a kind of blueprint for post-Soviet Russia.

Characteristically, the harsher the reality confronted by the text, the more defensive the discourse chosen for its portrayal. Tolstoy probes the (half-)dead body with realistic seriousness; Zoshchenko takes refuge from the desecrated corpse in heartless comism; Ginzburg shields herself from cannibalism with the rose-colored glasses of an idyll. And, of course, such an ideal harmony is open to–almost sets itself up for–a new round of deconstruction and post-modernist mock remythologizing.20

Instead of seeking out the latest reverberations of this paradigm, let us try to follow the historical clock in the opposite direction. So far, the discussion has concentrated on the ‘cultural’ issues overtly thematized in the texts. However, as has been mentioned, the courtship-and-corpse motif boasts venerable literary lineage; the ever intriguing question in such cases is, naturally, whether and in what way the time-hallowed hypogram, dormant underneath the text’s surface structure, is relevant to its interpretation.21 Often hypogrammatic analysis is invited by the text itself, some of whose elements remain unaccounted for by the straightforward reading and thus offer clues to the covert archaic layers of meaning.

Indeed, the reading of “After the Ball” outlined in section 1 could be accepted as fairly exhaustive were it not for its overly simplistic black-and-white moralism. The story itself leaves a more ambiguous and disturbing impression, especially when perceived in a wider context. Does the story of “love that began to wane from that very day” (p. 250) reflect in any way the septuagenarian Tolstoy’s views not only on corporal punishment and official culture, but on love and marriage as well? How does the plot straddling Shrove-tide and Lent correlate with Tolstoy’s complicated religiosity? Can the perfect symmetry of courtship and punishment episodes be purely rhetorical? Love and violence do form a natural pair, but then why are they juxtaposed in so oblique a manner? If the soldier’s tortured body replaces and lays bare for the hero that of his beloved, what are we to make of such an unexpected resolution of the story’s erotic, as well as narrative, tension? And what subliminal interpretations would account for the reverse projection of the violence done to the Tatar onto the colonel’s dancing with his daughter? Such loose ends strengthen the intuitive feeling that In any case, Tolstoy’s short masterpiece about love and death must have rich archetypal underpinnings – unlike such fictionalized denunciations of corporal punishment as Nikolai Leskov’s “The Sentry” (1887)22 or Tolstoy’s own pamphlets against the same, and very much like his other late fiction.

An insight into the hidden workings of “After the Ball” is furnished by the already mentioned “A Christmas Eve” (see Note 3).

In that story, the protagonist’s ballroom infatuation with a young countess is followed by a visit to a brothel, where he loses his virginity in the arms of a prostitute, the countess’s double (3: 265). The plot is similar to “After the Ball”, with the difference that the hero’s initiation into worldly customs and carnal knowledge occurs on one and the same plane–amorous. The initiation theme is underscored by the hero’s interest in “joining the adult society” and by the guidance he gets, both at the ball and in the brothel, from his elders, intent on “debauching” him.

The idea of ‘initiation’ is clearly germane to the problematic of “After the Ball,” with its focus on learning “what they [the colonel and the powers that be in general] knew,” on cultural stereotypes, religious calendar, and the ritual of punishment. The atmosphere of fairytale irreality and participation in mysterious rites is reinforced by the motifs of ‘sleepless night’ and ‘intoxication’ (first with love and then with alcohol), as well as by the figure (prominent in Slavic folklore) of the ‘blacksmith’ who guides the hero through the unknown place. Taking the fairytale metaphor seriously, we could try to reread the story–so to speak, with Propp’s The Historical Roots of the Folktale in hand.23

In that 1946 book Propp undertook a thematic interpretation of his earlier,”formalist” Morphology of the Folktale (1971 [1928]) by mapping its purely syntagmatic formulae onto the archaic structures reflected in myths and initiation and wedding rituals. Parallel work has been conducted in the West (by Claude Levy-Strauss, Georges Dundes, Georges Dumezil and others), while Propp’s Soviet followers established the ‘wedding’ theme as the dominant of the fairy-tale paradigm (see Meletinsky 1958, 1970, Meletinskii et al. 1969, Levinton 1970a, b, 1975a, b, Baiburin and Levinton 1972). Propp was also an early practitioner of the mythological approach to literary texts, namely, to Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle in light of Greek folklore (see Propp 1976, Edmunds 1985).

Let us then look for whatever “historical roots” may hide beneath the “morphology” of Tolstoy’s story.

6. “After the Ball” as folktale.24

The hypogram

The colonel’s similarity with the Emperor and Varen’ka’s “regality” can be said to typify the initial fairytale situation of a king with an eligible princess to give away. Her hand is claimed by an Ivan (Vasil’evich), to whom, before disappearing, she leaves her–so to speak, Firebird’s–feather. He becomes restless and leaves home in search of the princess. Transportation to the faraway, “thirtieth,” kingdom is often achieved by flying, in particular, after metamorphosis into a bird; cf. in “After the Ball,” the feather and the hero’s perception of himself as “an unearthly being.” Sometimes the trip takes place during sleep; note the nighttime setting and the hero’s altered state. In the otherworldly journey the hero is assisted by a helper(-donor), e. g. a forest creature called Copper Forehead (Mednyi Lob), which is halfway between the Firebird and the blacksmith, and in some tales, simply by a blacksmith (!).

The faraway kingdom represents the other world and at the same time the territory of the bride’s tribe. It is an open space with the king’s palace in the middle–just like the colonel’s quarters by the parade ground. The faraway kingdom is also associated with the sun; cf. the shining eyes of the father and daughter and the fact that the flogging takes place at daybreak. The hero’s exploits are often performed to the magic sounds of flutes and drums (!).

The actions of the folktale hero are a reflection of wedding rituals. He must be tested by the king and his daughter, and one major type of princess tries to destroy the pretender to her hand.25 What makes Varen’ka amazon-like is her similarity to her warrior father, her tallness, “bony physique,” and “thin, pointed [lit “sharp”] elbows”; in fact, her “frightening” regality sounds like a replica of the “frightening away” of suitors by the princess as described by Propp (1946: 284). Furtermore, the feather links Varen’ka to the Firebird, i. e. the bride-villain; the Russian word kostliavyi’, “bony,” has associates her with the hostile donor of Russian folktales, Bab-Yaga, Kostianaia Noga (lit. “… the Bony Leg”); while the “bronze garments” would fit the proverbial bellicose virgin (bogatyr’-devitsa) of Russian folklore. The ‘bronze’ element is also in accord with the presence of the blacksmith, a figure endowed by folklore with magic powers, in particular, in the matrimonial sphere: he is asked “to forge the crown, the ring, the staff [bulava] for the wedding, and the wedding itself”; the blacksmith also has such sacerdotal funcions as forging the tongue and voice (Ivanov and Toporov 1974: 88-89).

To qualify for marriage, the hero was supposed to pass tests, and, being traditionally passive, he had them performed for him by magic helpers; thus in “After the Ball”, the blacksmith, the colonel, and the floggers leave the reluctant but enthralled observer-hero only with the emotional experiencing of the scene. Among pre-wedding tasks was that of becoming invisible–echoed in the story by the colonel’s failure to “see” the hero. The folkloric hero was also asked to recognize the bride even in disguise, in animal shape or skin (especially in the tales about the lecherous father, of which presently), a task related to the elimination of ‘false brides’ and to the custom of mummery; in “After the Ball” this is paralleled by the ‘clothing’ motifs (from gloves all the way to bronze garments) and the substitution of the Tatar for Varen’ka.

Wedding-night tests had the twofold function of ascertaining the hero’s ability to tame the bride both sexually and socially.26 The bride’s attempts to strangle or otherwise harm the hero challenged his sexual power, symbolically reifying the fear of vagina dentata. To enforce defloration the hero’s helper flogged the princess with three kinds of switches, or rods (prut’ia); note in “After the Ball” the colonel’s order to “bring fresh rods” (p. 249). On the social level, the taming certified the hero’s control over the princess and her kin/ tribe and foreshadowed his eventual coronation (sometimes accompanied by the killing of the old king/father).

The motif of wedding-night violence27 is close to the folkloric motif of battle. Sigurd, on his first encounter with his future bride, slashes her breast with a sword.

“The swordstroke is a euphemism of possessing…, defloration…, a substitute of marriage… In the forest…, Sigurd sees… a wall of shields (cf. the the forest house with a fence in Russian folktales) and a fully armed warrior. Removing the warrior’s helmet, he discovers that before him is a woman. ‘She was in armor, and the armor fitted her so tightly as if it had grown one with the body. And he slashed the armor open from the neck aperture all the way down’” (Levinton 1975a: 84-85; he also mentions a similar Russian plot, Sviatogor’s marriage).

 

In “After the Ball this is literally or figuratively paralleled by the military formation, the bronze garments, and their slashing open in the flogging scene.28 In fact, the treatment of the bride as described in the verbal part of Russian wedding rituals bears resemblance to certain manoeuvers of the folkloric battle, e. g.:

“tearing the adversary in half [na-poly] in bylinas… Such tearing up is quite natural, especially in light of the well-known magic tale motif: the helper cuts the bride in half, cleans her insides of ‘evil ones’ [_ot ‘gadov’], then puts her together again and revives her” (Baiburin and Levinton 1972: 73).

Pre-wedding tests also included the branding of the hero by the bride and other ways of mixing the blood of the two partners.

As for the princess’s relations with the king, they often imply incest. The lecherous father may try to marry his own daughter (Motif T411 according to Aarne-Thompson [Thompson 1977: 499]) and/or act as the protagonist’s testing adversary and the deflorator of the bride; these functions can also be filled by the bride’s other totemic ancestors. The ancestor figure appears in folktales in the guise of magician, dragon, Koshchei, etc., who sexually possesses the princess and is routinely killed in the course of the tests. Of special relevance to “After the Ball” is the tale of “The Danced-Out Shoes.”

“The maiden absents herself at night and… returns with her shoes danced to pieces. She is offered in marriage to the man who can solve the mystery of her conduct. She has succeeded in giving a narcotic to all those who have tried to follow her, but the hero refuses to drink and accompanies her on a magic underground journey. [H]e… make[s] himself invisible,… is able to observe her when she dances with the supernatural being” and to claim the princess. (Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 306 [Thompson 1977: 34]).

In addition to the obvious parallels in “After the Ball,” let us only mention Varen’ka’s promise of quadrille after supper, “if they don’t take me away,” which, in turn, is reminiscent of Childhood, Chs. 20, 23, where the desirable Sonechka Valakhina is spectacularly unwrapped from and wrapped back into her furs as she arrives to and is taken away from the party.

Along with wedding motifs, prominent among the folktale’s “historical roots” are initiation tests; in fact, as Propp, Meletinsky et al., and others have stressed, the two groups have much in common and often overlap in folktales and even more so in literature. The process of initiation into the tribe’s sacred lore (cf. Ivan Vasil’evich’s attempts to learn “what they knew”) took place to the sounds of magical instruments (esp. flutes) and involved prohibition to sleep (cf. the hero’s insomnia), poisoning, and temporary madness (cf. the hero’s intoxication and nausea as he tries to make sense of the flogging). The initiates underwent temporary death (cf. the physical state of the victim and the hero’s shock). One of the tools used for ritual killing was a “deadly shirt” (rubashka na smert’).29 On returning to normal life the initiates could forget their names and stop recognizing their parents; cf. Ivan Vasil’evich’s dropping out of the entire official culture. Initiation was administered by the donor, i. e. the folktale counterpart of the tribe’s elders and magicians; note in “After the Ball” the hero’s passive fascination with the colonel both at the ball and on the parade ground, which is reminiscent of the hero’s initiation by adults in “A Christmas Eve.

Conversion.

Parallels with the folktale as a repository of archaic codes do not in themselves determine a definitive interpretation of the text. Much depends on the privileging of either wedding or initiation motifs and the way these fit into the story’s structure and the recurrent patterns of Tolstoy’s oeuvre.

Under the ‘wedding’ construction, “After the Ball” appears to express a subliminal, but intense, fear of the sensuous body, defloration, vagina dentata. Censure of sex, even in marriage, was characteristic of late Tolstoy. In the opinion of Pozdnyshev (“The Kreutzer Sonata”), marriage is institutionalized debauchery, marriage proponents are pagan “priests [zhretsy] of science” and “sorcerers” [volkhvy]. Developing the pagan analogy, he says that with the social position of women

“it is as if cannibals fattenned their captives to be eaten and at the same time declared that they were concerned about their prisoners’ rights and freedom,” wherefore continence and even virginity are advisable (Ch. 13; 1968b:149).

According to late Tolstoy, conjugal and, in general, sexual love generates mutual hatred, violence, and eventually homicide. In “The Kreutzer Sonata” the outcome is murder, in “The Devil” and Anna Karenina, suicide, in “Father Sergius,” self-mutilation (the hero hacks off his own finger) symbolizing self-castration (dactylotomy was also a form of initiation and pre-wedding mixing of blood). The equation of carnal love with murder controls the narrative of Vronskii’s and Anna’s first tryst, in which, incidentally, the “dead body” and “spiritual nakedness,” are very prominent.

“He felt what a murderer must feel when looking at the body he has deprived of life… [i. e.] their love, the first period of their love…. The shame she felt at her spiritual nakedness communicated itself to him. But in spite of the murderer’s horror of the body of his victim, the body must be cut in pieces and hidden away, and he must make use of what he had obtained by murder. Then as the murderer desperately [lit. “angrily”] throws himself on the body, as though with passion, and drags it and hacks it, so Vronskii covered her face and shoulders with kisses” (I, 2, 11; 1968a: 135-36).

To be sure, in Anna Karenina the murder metaphor is deployed against adultery, but, in fact, as early as in “A Christmas Eve,” any marriage not based on pure love was denounced as debauchery and voluntary mutual deception. Small wonder then that in its hidden depths “After the Ball” seems to read as a rejection of the violence underlying all marriage, of which gauntlet-running serves as an apt hyperbole. Its pagan cruelty (recall Pozdnyshev’s reference to cannibals) has its ethnographic counterparts in ritual cannibalism and mutilation during rites of passage.

The relevance of these archetypal motifs to late Tosltoy’s fiction is further confirmed by the “Posthumous Papers of the Elder Fedor Kuzmich” (1905),30 where the same cluster reappears in explicit form.

Czar Alexander I leaves the throne to become a monk, motivated by his schocke dreaction to a gauntlet-running, which he associates with his ambivalence toward married life and sex: “Still more terrible was it to be with… my wife. We were supposed to be spending a second honeymoon [!], but it was a hell in forms of respectability… [T]he murder of that beauty–the spiteful Nastasia… had aroused desire [lit. “lust”] in me, and I could not sleep all night… [T]he thought of the murdered, voluptiously beautiful Nastasia and of the soldier’s body being lashed by rods, merged into one stimulating sensation” (Tolstoy 1935: 388-90).

Many details coincide with “After the Ball”: first encounter with gauntlet-running on an early morning; sounds of drum and flute; punishment for desertion; thre victim’s back and “hopeless jerking”; the observer-protagonist’s nausea; his readiness to “admit that my whole life… were bad, and … to abandon everything, go away, and disappear” (p. 391). In fact, that is what he does, having passed through the state of quasi-death–by “pretend[ing] to be ill and dying” (p. 394) and having replaced his own “corpse” with that of the soldier flogged to death. Later on, as an elder, he comes to the conclusion that “this approach to death, is the only reasonable wish a man can have… a release from passions and temptations of that spiritual element that dwells in every man” (p. 408), and also that “chastity is better than marriage.”

To return to “After the Ball,” in the wedding-oriented scheme of things, the flogged Tatar stands in for the bride, while the colonel plays the role of the helper taming the bride cum hostile ancestor-deflorator (esp. in view of the colonel’s dancing with Varen’ka). All this additionally dramatizes the alienation of the protagonist from the “totemic culture” of Nicholas I’s “tribe” he is expected to join. Incidentally, since the colonel administers the flogging not personally, but through his soldiers, he, too, qualifies as a bridegroom.

The ‘imperial incest’ has interesting parallels in other Tolstoy texts.

In “Father Sergius,” Nicholas I, like Varen’ka’s father at the ball, continues smiling to the protagonist and conferring his approval on the marriage which his behavior (his affair with the bride) has effectively ruined.

In War and Peace, the Kuragins combine incest (implied, between Helene and Anatole) with amoral politicking and careerism, while the old Count Rostov’s connivance in the (abortive) seduction of Natasha by Anatole is presented in a benevolent light. Varen’ka can thus be seen as Natasha transposed, by an increasingly misogynous Tolstoy, into the Kuragin family.

Should we, on the other hand, opt for the “initiation” reading, the distribution of roles would be somewhat different. The flogged soldier would symbolically represent the protagonist himself; in some archaic rituals, for instance, captive slaves were killed instead of initiates, a practice reflected in magic tales (Propp 1946: 79-80). The colonel would in turn act as the magician-ancestor supervising the initiation (in folktale terms, the magic tester-donor). Indeed, Ivan Vasil’evich is linked to the Tatar in several ways: emotionally, by the compassion he feels; plotwise, by the shared motif of shunning military service; and, in the system of characters, by the intermediate figure of the soldier who “pats” the deserter and is then himself beaten. Empathizing with the flogged Tatar, the protagonist gradually passes, as it were, from the class of victimizers (i. e. the colonel and his daughter) to that of victims.

A similar identification of the observer-protagonist with the victim is quite explicit in the “Posthumous Notes…,” where it is reified in the motif of corpse substitution.

“That man was I: he was my double… well known… on account of his likeness to me. They used jokingly to call him Alexander II… I ought myself to have been in the place of that wretched man… I… saw him or or myself–I could not tell which of us was I” (pp. 391-92).

An additional tour de force is achieved by fusing this cluster of roles with the ‘imperial’ figure (colonel = Nicholas = Alexander):

“I… had… often sanctioned that form of punishment… I had evidently been recognized… My… feeling was that I ought to approve of what was being done to this double of mine; or… at least acknowledge that it was the proper thing to do, but I could not” (pp. 390-91).

The last words are an almost exact replica of Ivan Vasil’evich’s pondering of “what the colonel knew.”

Under either construction–be it wedding or initiation–the protagonist of “After the Ball” fails the test. As a bridegroom, he refuses to approve of the taming and enjoy its fruits by marrying the ‘princess.’ As an initiate warrior, he withdraws from the cruel rite of passage, does not learn “what they knew,” and stays away from the military service. Principled rejection of the establishment and its social institutions was characteristic of late Tolstoy and many of his characters: Father Sergius, Pozdnyshev, Prince Nekhliudov, Alexander I. Therefore, for the narrator-protagonist, the flunking of the rites of passage is far from being a defeat; in his own way, he does triumph over the colonel and his daughter. How?

Interesting light is shed on this problem by Father Sergius’s reasons for entering the monastery:

“[H]e felt that God’s call… transcended all other considerations… By becoming a monk he showed contempt for all that seemed most important to others and had seemed so to him while he was in service, and he now ascended a height from which he could look down on those he had formerly envied” (i. e. The circle of his former fiance_e and the Emperor himself; Ch. I; 1968b: 307).

The protagonist of “After the Ball” is less vain, but Tolstoy does let him “lord it over” the princess and her father by endowing him with the power of narration. In fact, the hero’s spiritual conversion is matched, in the structure of the story, by a literary ‘conversion’ (in the sense of Riffaterre 1978), of which the failure-turned-victory is a clear-cut case. Conversion, i. e. a textually well-grounded reinterpretation of existing cultural hypograms, is crucial to literary dynamics and deserves attention here.

This radical rereading of the gauntlet scene is naturalized by drawing on several latent possibilities.

(i) The Tolstoyan refusal to identify with cruelty and violence, in particular, with the harsh disciplining of the “bride,” is legitimized as a redefinition of the traditional passivity of the folkloric hero.

(ii) Folklore also offers partial precedents for what Tolstoy develops into a total renunciation of marriage: sometimes the folktale hero, after passing the tests, goes into hiding (but is later found and brought to the wedding); in epic texts, the marriage may effectively fail to materialize, which is accompanied by the loss of the acquired sacred knowledge. Potential subversion of marriage is also implicit in the motif of false brides, whose rejection is now applied to the heroine as well. The revision of the cruel custom may also be prompted by the view of the bridegroom as a “destroyer” (pogubitel’), voiced, in the course of the wedding ritual, by the bride.

(iii) Christian reinterpretation of wedding-ritual violence is a tendency evidenced by such Slavic customs as that of hitting with a branch (switch, rod), sometimes performed on the last Sunday of Lent. Hitting young girls, the boys uttered the same verbal formulae that “are… used during preparations for the first wedding night… In some cases the [pagan meaning of the ritual] is lost under the influence of Christian perceptions” (N. I. Tolstoi 1982: 63, 67).

(iv) The element of ‘torture’ was shared by wedding tests and initiation rituals, of which the corporal punishment of children and soldiers is a surviving vestige; it was also an integral part of the custom of scapegoating and thus a pagan prototype of the martyrdom of Christ. Thus, rereading ‘torture’ in a Christian key by siding with the victim, Tolstoy follows the well-known pattern of reforms of ritual codes, recurrent in the history of religion (e. g. the replacement of human sacrifices with animal ones, reflected in the story of Abraham and Isaac).

(v) The ‘Christian’ labeling of the transformation relies on extant folkloric, i. e. pagan, motifs: for instance, the pivotal reference to “Lord” is entrusted to the blacksmith, whom folklore portrays as a dragon-slayer and possessor of sacred and poetic powers.31

7. Conclusion

Thus, “After the Ball” can be seen as looking both forward to its Soviet-era refractions and back to a folkloric formulation (and subsequent literary reformulations) of the underlying topos. Against the background of this “genre memory,” Tolstoy manages, within the laconic limits of a short story, to enact a symbolic transition from the paganism of official culture to his own version of Christianity. In the context of the Silver Age preoccupation with unconventional syntheses of various cultural models, in particular, pagan and Christian, Tolstoy’s solution stands out as pointedly ascetic. As far as this chapter’s focus on themes and variations is concerned, the archaic substratum tapped (whether deliberately or unconsciously) by Tolstoy seems to have been successfully channeled into its new use: to root the overt message of the story (established in section 1) in the deeper levels of literary structure by equating marriage with flogging and culture, with pagan cruelty. If there is any surplus ideological value accruing from this operation, it may consist in those misogynist, homosexual, and sadistic elements injected in the narrative, albeit subliminally and under repression, by the archaic hypogram and typical of late Tolstoy’s life and works.

In “Lady with Flowers”, both the story’s declared theme and its less obvious personal authorial purport have interesting archetypal counterparts. The heroine is a kind of sleeping beauty,32 or rather Eurydice, who has to be reclaimed from the netherworld. On the way there, her “prince” has to pay the Charon-like fishermen (their mistrust may be correlated with Orpheus’ non-payment). In fact, she is dead from the start (she does not eat or smile) and accordingly divided by water from her husband, who leaves for work by boat (cf. Zoshchenko’s fear of water as confessed in Before Sunrise). Having found her, he, instead of redeeming her with a kiss and taking her with him, rejects her and blithely returns to the other shore alone, thus reversing the story’s archaic hypogram. As in Tolstoy, this conversion serves to reinforce the story’s explicit–if ambiguous–cultural message.

Ginzburg’s memoirs read as adventures of a Cinderella in distress, who is lost in the forest, at the mercy of evil “step-mothers” (the female camp commandants in other chapters), but eventually finds her Prince-Charming, alias good sorcerer, to whom she is an apprentice; in her quest she is helped by (the spirit of) her fairy “god-mother”–Akhmatova. More or less overt, these fairy-tale motifs lead us further down into the hidden archaic underpinnings of the plot.

The core motif of the pot of human flesh combines at least two such elements.

–On the one hand, it symbolically represents the dead body of the bridegroom (hence the doctor’s absence), awaiting magical rebirth (hence his prompt return). Initiation and wedding rituals included various types of blood-letting, cutting, roasting, and dismemberment of young males (supposed to endow them, among other things, with a magic knowledge of animal languages) and, on occasion, females, whence the possibility of the heroine-to-meatloaves metamorphosis. The performance of these acts of mutilation could be entrusted to other agents (slaves, villains, ogres, animal-helpers). In this connection, the wolf, with whom the cannibal convict is equated, can be seen as the totem of the hero or heroine, especially in light of the positive image of the “grey wolf” in Russian folklore.

–On the other hand, by identifying correctly the meat in the pot, the heroine (unlike Tolstoy’s and Zoshchenko’s protagonists) does pass the test. Among initiation and pre-wedding tests for the bride were the tasting and cooking of food and handling of the oven; pots and other crockery were also prominent in wedding rituals and their literary reflections (Propp 1946, Freidenberg 1936).

The joint effect of the two motifs is, again, to provide a powerful subliminal accompaniment to the text’s explicit agenda. Only this time around the task is pointedly affirmative: rehabilitation of marriage, culture, and society. Verging as it does on the idyllic, such a discourse can only profit from an infusion of some bad blood from archaic rituals.

To conclude: The three texts are linked by their overt agenda of problematizing ‘love as culture’s way of overcoming death.’ They treat this common topos differently, in response to the different cultural-political situations. The texts’ overt messages are supported and enriched by the archaic hypograms they tap, update, and convert each in their own ways.

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NOTES

1.”After the Ball” was written in 1903 and published posthumously in 1911, see Tolstoy 1928-58, 34: 116-25 (commentary: 550-3). I am using (and sometimes amending) the Lesley Chamberlain translation (Richards ed. 1981: 239-50); an alternative translation is by McDuff (Tolstoy 1985: 255-66).

2. More specifically, the old Count Rostov and Natasha may be ironically recycled here; see Natasha’s keen identification with the Count as he dances Daniel Cooper with Mar’ia Dmitrievna and also her Russian dancing in Otradnoe with the “Uncle” (Norton Chs. I, 10, and VII, 7); for the negative connotations see papa angrily replacing the uncouth Nikolen’ka in the mazurka in Childhood (Ch. 22).

3. A similar emotional flooding takes place in “A Christmas Eve” (3: 53; Zhdanov 1971: 100). Ivan Vasil’evich’s love for the father and the entire high society has parallels in Nikolai Rostov’s feelings at the Emperor Alexander’s review of troops (II, 7). Both, as well as the debutante Natasha’s feelings at her first ball (VI, 9), are discussed as cases of “intoxicated conscioiusness” by Gustafson (1986: 362). See also the feelings of the title character of “Father Sergius” (1898; publ. 1912) as a young man toward the Emperor Nicholas and the emphasis on the protagonist’s integration into the society represented by his fiancee and the imperial father figure, both of whom he adores.

4. Cf. in “Father Sergius”: “He was particularly in love that day, but did not experience any sexual desire for her. On the contrary he regarded her with tender adoration as something unattainable” (Tolstoy 1968b: 304).

5. On plot reversals of the “Overdoing” type see Shcheglov and Zholkovsky 1987: 137.

6. This acquiescence in the overruling power of conventions is reminscent of Pierre’s attitude towards the goings-on in the antechamber of the dying Count Bezukhov (“this all had to be”; 1966: 80); cf. Ch. 2, Note 3).

7. “Brattsy, pomiloserduite“; the translation misses the subtle ungrammaticality of the verb form, conveying the Tatar’s accent. Tolstoy’s drafts show a hesitation between an even more pronounced garbling and the norm (Zhdanov 1971: 106, 250).

8. In “Father Sergius” the hero’s leaving worldly life and military career to enter a monastery (upon his discovery of his fiancee’s affair with the Emperor; cf. Varen’ka’s dancing with her father) has a less saintly motivation: success in whatever sphere.

9. Odintsov (1969) identified the techniques that set in relief the flogging scene. It is (i) presented in a sort of close-up–without references to the compositional frame (the aged protagonist’s sharing his cautionary tale with the 1900s’ youth in a drawing-room); (ii) narrated as a single “perfective” event unfolding before the protagonist’s eyes (as opposed to the sketch of a typical ball featuring imperfective verbs that connote recurrence); and in general, (iii) written in a more energetic, “main-verb,” style.

10. “Dama s tsvetami,” see Zoshchenko 1946: 45-52; a modified version, “Rasskaz pro damu s tsvetami,” appeared in Golubaia kniga (“The Sky-Blue Book”; 1934), see Zoshchenko 1987, 3: 250-255. There seems to be no English translation.

11. See Turgenev 1950: 681-751; the Russian title is “Zatish’e”; on Zoshchenko’s

special grudge against Turgenev see Ch. 2, Note 2.

12. This toponym, lit. “The Joyous,” is not an innocent one: in addition to Natasha

Rostova (see Note 2), The Idiot’s Nastas’ia Filippovna, too, has had some idyllic moments on an estate of that name.

13. This may be a jab at Blok’s lines: “And I see a spell-bound shore/ And a spell-bound distance” (in “The Unknown Lady”); on Zoshchenko’s Blok connection see Ch. 2, section 4; on the “uncrowning” of Blok’s beautiful and unknown ladies by the young Zoshchenko see also Vera Zoshchenko 1981: 84.

14. For attempts to interpret Zoshchenko’s literary texts in light of his self-psychoanalysis see Hanson 1989 and Zholkovsky 1987a,b, 1988.

15. See Ginzburg 1981: 119-25, 1985b [1977]: 99-106; for the first part of the memoirs, see Ginzburg 1985a, 1967.

16. Cf. the engineer’s preoccupation with his childhood in “Lady with Flowers”.

17. See Anna Karenina, I, 4, 13 (1968a: 361-62); for a semiotic reading of that episode see Pomorska 1981: 389.

18. For the Russian text and literal translation see Akhmatova 1990: 354-57. In the original, the poem (and the heroine’s variation) are in trochaic tetrameters. On the structure of Akhmatova’s poem see Shcheglov 1986d: 175-203.

19. See his “Ty i Vy”: “The empty vy with a cordial ty/ She replaced in a slip of the tongue…”).

20. Cf. Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandria, narrated by the absolute ruler of Russia (the ultimate nachal’nik rezhima) in the ‘over-cultured’ style of the Silver Age, with corpses and necrophiliac loves galore.

21. In fact, already “The Ephesus Widow” exemplifies a contradiction between overt and covert meanings: in contrast to its explicit message, exposing the widow’s ‘anti-cultural’ behavior, on the archetypal level the story enacts the culturally valuable carnivalesque equation of life and death, of the deceased husband and his living double, of sacrilege and ritualistic renewal (Freidenberg 1936).

22. See Graham: 364-85; for an analysis of the story see O’Toole 1982: 11-20.

23. Without committing an intertextual version of the intentional fallacy, we may note Tolstoy’s intimate working command of Russian folklore.

24. In what follows, I use the terms “folktale,” “fairy tale,” and “magic tale”indiscriminately as equivalents of Propp’s _volshebnaia skazka.

25. Folklorists stress the bride’s ambivalence and her links to the villain, as well

as the cannibalism among the hero’s future in-laws.

26. Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” goes back to the same archaic cluster (Freidenberg 1936).

27. See Elizarenkova and Syrkin 1964: 72 (wedding as murder); Baiburin and Levinton: 1972: 70-71 (phallic and punitive role of the bridegroom’s whip and the best man’s staff; marriage as violence done to the bride).

28. Levinton (1975a: 85-86) also notes the links between Sigurd’s engagement to Brunhilde and their initiation into sacred omniscience, as well as between the falling through of their marriage plans and Sigurd’s intoxication with the treacherous wine of oblivion.

29. Cf. Levin’s problems with the shirt that almost cancelled the wedding (Anna Karenina, II, 5, 3; 1968a: 408) and the ‘gloves etc.’ motif in “After the Ball.”

30. Publ. 1912 (with omissions), 1918 (in full); see Tosltoy 1928-58, 36: 59-74, commentary 584-9; Engl. version: Tolstoy 1935: 385-411.

31. Ivanov and Toporov 1974: 88-90. The blacksmith’s affinity with poetry makes him a sort of authorial presence; cf. above the narrator’s triumph over the colonel.

32. Note that one of the underlying fairytale plots in “After the Ball” is Tale Type 410, “The Sleeping Beauty (Thompson 1977: 96).