The Russians are coming! Well, really, theyve already arrived. In Provenance, I mean. I'm going to trace the imaginaries of Russian wrtiers, from Gogol to Shalamov, as they seek to comprehend the plenty and want of human living. Take Gogol as a first guide. I've been reading his Ukrainian tales, which he collected in several volumes between 1831 and 1835. He writes of fantastic happenings and ordinary moments, all in a prose at once transparent and mystifying. Clear, because the person or event or object stands right in front of the reader; strange, because the meaning of a character or occurance or thing eludes the reader. All of these wonderfully scrambled elements make for a path into the world of Provenance.
Take his extraordinary story, "Old World Landowners." Gogol gives us abundance. The scene is a small estate in Little Russia, the characters the sorts of human beings who find themselves bound to the land, sometimes voluntarily, as in the masters, sometimes involuntarily, as in the serfs. Gogol wants the reader to experience the careless management that somehow cultivates plenty: "These worthy rulers, the steward and the headman, thought it quite unnecessary to bring all the flour into the master's own barn and that half was enough; in the end, even that half that was delivered was either moldy or damp and had been rejected at the fair. But, however much the steward and the headman stole, however much everyone in the household stuffed his face, from the housekeeper to the pigs, who consumed a terrible quantity of plums and apples, and often shoved the trees with their snouts to shake down a whole rain of fruit; however much the sparrows and crows pecked up; however much all the household people took as presents to their kin in others villages, even stealing old linen and yarn from the storerooms, all of which returned to the universal source, that is, the tavern; however much visitors, their phlegmatic coachment and lackeys stole -- the blessed earth produced everything in such abundance, and Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna needed so little, that all this terrible plundering seemed to go entirely unnoticed in their management."
An overflowing of grain and vegetables and fruit springing from an earth lightly and heedlessly tended! Gogol engages my imagination with the juxtaposition of the housekeeper and the pig, both stuffing their faces with plums. And so I am suddenly seized with a longing for this abundance and a recoiling from this waste.
That contrary feeling is what I mean by "the scrambled elements" that draw me into the world of Provenance.
Time for a breakfast of scrambled eggs and salsa verde.
