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It will be completely dry. Dry as a cough.

During the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, to tell an anecdote meant to relate an interesting fact about something.

For instance, to relate that the Krupp factory is currently building a diesel engine with 2,000 horsepower in one cylinder would have been, from the viewpoint of that time, an anecdote. An anecdotal story, from the viewpoint of that time, was also a story consisting of separate facts tenuously connected. There were even such things as philosophical anecdotes.

Wit—the unexpected denouement, for instance—had no place in the anecdote of that time. Now we describe an anecdote as a short novella with a denouement. From our viewpoint, to ask after hearing an anecdote, “But what happened next?” is an absurdity, but then that is the viewpoint of our time.

In the old days, one anecdotal fact was normally followed by another. In the old anecdote, one responded above all to the attractiveness of the fact, to the material, whereas in the modern anecdote we respond mainly to the structure.

This conflict—or, rather, the alternation—of perception from one aspect of work to another—can be traced easily.

I have no desire to be witty.

I have no desire to construct a plot.

I am going to write about things and thoughts.

To compile quotations.

The time has changed course once again and the word “anecdote,” once applied to a witty story, will so on be defined in terms of the various facts being printed in the this-and-that columns of the newspapers. Each separate moment of a play is becoming a separate, self-contained entity. Structure is usually missing. When it does creep into a piece of work, it is promptly killed; moreover, the crime goes unnoticed by the public. And the crime is pointless: the victim is already dead. The interest in the adventure novel which we are now witnessing does not contradict the thought just expressed. What we have in the adventure novel is a type of “stringing” in which there is no orientation toward the connecting thread.

At the present time, we perceive memoirs as literature; we respond to them as something esthetic.

This is clearly not due to interest in the revolution, because people are avid to read even memoirs having absolutely nothing to do with the revolutionary epoch.

It goes without saying that plot-oriented prose still exists and will continue to exist, but it has been consigned to the attic.


ABOUT A RED ELEPHANT

“Red elephant, my son would be lost without you. I’m letting you into my book ahead of the others to keep them in your place.”

The red elephant is squeaking. All rubber toys are supposed to squeak; why else would air come out?

And so, Brehm notwithstanding, the red elephant is squeaking. And I, perched high in my nest above the Arbat, am writing.

No bird could scale these heights without huffing and puffing. Here in my nest, I have learned not to be longwinded.

My son is laughing.

He started laughing the first time he saw a horse; he thought it was doing four legs and a long nose just for fun.

We cranked out various shapes, but we speak in one voice when pressure is applied.

“Red elephant, step aside. I want to see life seriously and to say something to it in a voice not filtered through a squeaker.”

Here ends the feuilleton.

I WRITE ABOUT HOW OBJECTIVE REALITY DETERMINES CONSCIOUSNESS, WHILE THE CONSCIENCE REMAINS IN DISARRAY


All his life, Mark Twain wrote double letters: one he sent and the other he wrote for himself—and there he wrote what he thought.

Pushkin, too, wrote rough drafts of his letters.

The last days of autumn. They echo with the sound of the leaves withering in the lanes called Skatertny, Chashnikovy, Khlebny. (It sounds like someone sweeping out rejected manuscripts). Someone is playing a violin, too. I have no right to keep quiet about that.

Caught in the green arc of the streetlamps, the streets march in formation beside me.

I sing plaintively as I go:

No, you surely are not dear to me
Those who care are not like that.

Editorial offices have plywood partitions. Thoughts that are hide-bound. After those sessions, it was always a relief to get outside.

I am leaking like a frayed rubber hose. The book will be called



THIRD FACTORY

First of all, I have a job at the third factory of Goskino.

Second of all, the name isn’t hard to explain. The first factory was my family and school. The second was Opoyaz.

And the third—is processing me at this very moment.



Maybe it’s all right to make him stand in line for things. Maybe it’s all right for him to work outside his specialty.

That’s not the elephant squeaking—that is my voice.

The time cannot be mistaken; the time cannot have wronged me.

It’s wrong to say: “The whole squad is out of step except for one ensign.” I want to speak with my time, to understand its voice. Right now, for example, it’s hard for me to write, because the normal length for an article will soon be reached.

But chance is crucial to art. The dimensions of a book have always been dictated to an author.

The marketplace gave a writer his voice.

A work of literature lives on material. Don Quixote and The Minor owe their existence to unfreedom.

It is impossible to exclude certain material; necessity creates works of literature. I need the freedom to work from my own plans; freedom is needed if the material is to be bared. I don’t want to be told that I have to make bentwood chairs out of rocks. At this moment, I need time and a reader. I want to write about unfreedom, about the royalties paid by Smirdin, about the influence of journals on literature, about the third factory—life. We (Opoyaz) are not cowards and we do not bend before wind pressure. We love the wind of revolution. Air moving a hundred kilometers an hour exerts pressure. When a car slows down to seventy-five kph, the pressure drops. That is unbearable. Nature abhors a vacuum. Full speed ahead.

And let me cultivate my own garden. It’s wrong for everyone to sow wheat. I am unable to squeak like the elephant.

It’s wrong to coddle art. We have nothing in common with the gold-tipped Abram Efros.

This is just about all.