Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics

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VOLUME 59

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sslp Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture

Henrietta Mondry

LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: the monument to Pavlov’s dog in St Petersburg (1935), photographed by Peter Campbell. On the initiative of Pavlov a monument to a dog was installed near the department of Physiology, in the garden of the Institute of experimental medicine, to pay a tribute to the dog’s unselfish service to biological science. Sculptor: Bespalov.

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To my son Ary for his love of dogs

One is not obliged to love dogs, but it is advisable to ponder over the meaning of some dog stories. – Ilya Ehrenburg People, Years, Life. 1966

Contents

Preface: Vladimir Durov’s dog story: A thematic capsule xv

Introduction 1 Dog stories 3 How to approach the dog stories in Russian culture 10 Examining dog stories 20 Chapter structure 27

PART ONE: EXPLORING CRUELTY, INJUSTICE, AND THE SHIFTING HIERARCHIES BETWEEN DOGS AND HUMANS

Chapter 1. When dogs were more expensive than people 31 The rich man’s dogs and the poor man’s honour: Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Dubrovskii’ 39 Dostoevsky’s sadistic landlords, villainous muzhiks, and animal and serf abuse in The Brothers Karamazov 46 A populist writer on serfdom and the dog breastfeeding plot: Vladimir Korolenko’s ‘On a Cloudy Day’ 53 The phantasmagorical world of dogs, dog killers and serf women in Velimir Khlebnikov’s ‘The Night before the Soviets’ 57

Chapter 2. ‘The Children’s Hour’: Cruelty to dogs 79 The functions of dogs vis-à-vis children in The Brothers Karamazov 81 Choosing the life of abuse: Chekhov’s ‘Kashtanka’ 93 Alexander Kuprin: girl dreams of an elephant, a good boy and a bad boy, and the dog in ‘The White Poodle’ 104 What do the real ‘children’s hour’ dog stories teach us? 112

Chapter 3. Degradation narratives: Dogs and humans in social and moral transformation 117 Degradation or elevation? Transformation into a dog language-reading madman: Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman 118 The picaresque tradition and social transformation: Petr Furman’s Transformation of a dog 127 viii Contents

Animal commune after the October Revolution: Boris Pilnyak’s ‘A Dog’s Life: The Vicissitudes of Destiny’ 135 Times of famine – from socio-economic transformation to dog-eating degradation: A Dog’s Destiny 137 Moral degradation in Soviet times: Dog meat for dogs in the Leningrad siege 144

PART TWO: EXPLORING EMOTIONAL NEEDS: DOGS AND THEIR UNDERDOG PARTNERS

Chapter 4. The fate of dogs in partnerships with the marginalised Other 149 Ivan Turgenev’s dogs and the politics of sexual transgression 152 Alexander Kuprin’s racialised dogs and scapegoats in ‘Gambrinus’ 170 White companion dogs and their fair ladies: Zamiatin and Chekhov 180

Chapter 5. Dogs and inmates in prison and Gulags: Writing and re-writing the humanistic canon 189 Ethnographic take on dogs in prison: Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead 191 Varlam Shalamov’s prison ‘Bitch Tamara’ 203 A guard’s story: Sergei Dovlatov’s dog eaters 209

PART THREE: DOGS IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY

Chapter 6. Dogs and their masters in police and prison service: 1960s-1980s 217 Dogs and socialism with a human face: ‘Mukhtar’ by Izrail’ Metter 219 Dogs and socialism without a human face: Georgii Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog 230 Prison guard dogs as nobody’s dogs in Sergei Dovlatov’s The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard 242

Chapter 7. The cult of the border guard dogs 249 Nikita Karatsupa and the cult of the border guard dogs 252

Contents ix

High Stalinism of the 1930s and the making of an iconic dog in Dzhulbars 256 On the edge of the border of Stalinism and post-Stalinism: Frontier Post in the Mountains 260 Closing the Decade of Developed Socialism: the 1970s and The Border Guard Dog Alyi 264 From the defence of the Soviets to the defence of Russian borders 270 2010: The centenary of Karatsupa’s birth and the return of the cult of the Russian border guard dog 273

PART FOUR: TRANSITIONS, TRANSFORMATIONS, TRANSGRESSIONS

Chapter 8. The hunter’s dog as hunted: White Bim Black Ear as the cult event of the Stagnation Era, 1970s-1980s 281 Cryptic code of canine genealogy: The Bible, Moses, Leo Tolstoy and cynology 284 Nostalgia for the past: the Russian forest, the aristocrat hunter and his dog 291 Animal symbolism of the Other in the 1970s: dogs versus cats 299 The blackness of White Bim and the whiteness of the hunted animals in the Village Prose 302 No hunting dogs: the post-Soviet parody in Peculiarities of the National Hunt 306

Chapter 9. Transformation narratives: physical, metaphysical, scientific 309 Woman-dog physical transfiguration in Fedor Sologub’s ‘The White Dog’ 311 The metaphysics of physical dog-human transformations in A Dog’s Destiny 319 Organ donation: a human liver for a dog? Maiakovskii’s ‘How I became a dog’ 330 Scientific or metaphysical transformation? Surgical experiments in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog 336 Towards Pavlov’s dogs 352 Postmodern dog-human transformation in the post-Soviet era: Oleg Kulik as Pavlov’s dog in the 1990s 353

x Contents

Cosmic dogs in a post-Soviet parody: Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra 359

Chapter 10. Sleeping with the animal: boundary crossing in life and art (from pre-Revolutionary modernism to post-Soviet postmodernism) 363 From Vasily Rozanov’s future of the Russian family to Kulik’s ‘Family of the Future’ 365 Nina Perebeeva’s human-dog family in Vladimir Tiul’kin’s Not About Dogs 377

Conclusion: Dogs are ‘good to think’ 381 The future dogs of the twenty-second century 385

Bibliography 391

Index 423

Illustrations

Taxidermic dog Zapiataika xviii Oprichnik with a dog’s head attached to the saddle 7 Ivan Izhakevich. ‘The Exchange of Serfs for Dogs’, 1926 32 Nikolai Kasatkin. ‘Serf-actress exiled to breastfeed puppies’, 1911 36 The dog that Vladimir Durov thought he had killed, 1929 87 Viktor Borisov-Musatov. ‘Boy with a Dog’, 1895 92 Shooting of a mad dog, from Derkachev’s The Dog, 1883 114 Dog rescuing a child in England, from Derkachev’s The Dog 116 Pavel Fedotov. ‘An Aristocrat’s Breakfast’, 1849 130 When dogs were sold for meat; 1920s photograph 143 Vladimir Tsesler. City sculpture ‘Mu-mu’, Amsterdam 162 Contemporary city sculpture to Mumu in St Petersburg 169 Karatsupa’s search dog Indus, later named Ingus, 1935 255 The dog Dzulbars from the film Dzulbars, 1935 260 Briukhonenko’s experiment; Iskry nauki, 1928 338 Monument to ‘Pavlov’s dog’, St Petersburg, 1934 357 Monument to Laika, Moscow, 2008 359 Rozanov’s illustration of an Ancient Egyptian image 369

A Note on Transliteration

In translating Russian, I have used the Library of Congress system, except for personal names commonly used in English, such as ‘Alexander Pushkin’ and ‘Leo Tolstoy’. In bibliographical references, however, I have used the conventional transliteration of personal names.

Preface Vladimir Durov’s dog story: A thematic capsule

Every Russian knows the name of the famous circus animal trainer Vladimir Durov (1863-1934). Everybody who goes to the circus to watch the clowns and trained animals thinks of Durov; every Russian circus and animal-training show is eager to proclaim its lineage from Durov. Durov’s elevated status is based on his reputation as a friend to all animals and as an operator who used kindness to make them do his bidding. Indeed, Durov is the father of a humane method of animal training. His brand of education using love and patience (Russian and Soviet animal trainers have institutionalised his name as a brand) has produced extraordinary results.1 Durov left a significant body of written material from which his method of training animals has been disseminated. He was the author of an autobiographical book Moi zveri (My Animals, 1929)2 and various scientific texts.3 The latter are based on his experiments on animals in what he termed ‘zoopsychology’. These experiments were made jointly by Durov and biological scientists and physicians of the time, including the famous psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev (1857- 1927).4 The variety of animal species with which Durov worked was very broad, from rats to elephants, but his favourite animals were

1 Leonid Geller, “Brat’ia Durovy kak kul’turnaia mashina”, in Zveri i ikh reprezentatsii v russkoi kul’ture. Eds Leonid Geller and Anastasiia Vinogradova de la Fortel, St Petersburg: Baltiiskie sezony, 2010, 326-341. 2 Vladimir Durov, Moi zveri. Berlin, 1929. In English Vladimir Durov, My Circus Animals. Trans. John Cournos, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1936. 3 Vladimir Durov, Dressirovka zhivotnykh. Psikhologicheskie nabliudeniia nad zhivotnymi. Novoe v zoopsikhologii. Moscow: Mospolitgraf, 1923. Vladimir Du- rov, Moi chetveronogie i pernatye druz’ia. Zoopsikhologicheskii ocherk. Moscow: Tipografiia K. Men’shikov, 1914. 4 Bekhterev posited the existence of hypnotic influence between nervous individuals and animals. His Institute for Brain Research engaged Durov in hypnotic experiments on trained dogs. See Ann Kleimola, “A Legacy of Kindness: V.L. Durov’s Revolutionary Approach to Animal Training”, in Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History. Eds Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 2010, 164-177. xvi Political Animals dogs. He saw them as his friends, as the species closest to human beings. He even conducted hypnotism experiments on dogs in the same way that hypnotism was used on humans. For Durov, the correlation between humans and dogs was an established fact. The introductory story in My Animals is dedicated to a dog. It describes a dog that Durov, when a teenager, mistakenly thought he had killed. As such, it is a belated confession of an ‘almost’ murder. The episode had a profound impact on him as a teenager and shaped the rest of his life. He dedicated his career to animals, dogs in particular. Durov’s short story encapsulates the problematics of dog representations in Russian culture. It also encapsulates the thematic focus of this book. As such, it serves as a perfect ‘prolegomena’ for my narrative. Durov recalls that in his days as a cadet he belonged to a group of boys who patronised a dog called Zhuchka, a common name for a common dog. The boys saved scraps of food from their lunches and dinners for Zhuchka, a dog as homeless as the young Durov himself. Orphaned from the age of five, Durov was shipped off to cadet school and made many attempts to run away to join the circus. The dog Zhuchka was ‘nobody’s dog’ and lived off the charity of those around her. She lived with the school caretaker who one day got himself his own dog. In order to get rid of Zhuchka he splashed her with boiling water, searing off the dog’s fur and skin in the process.5 The boys decided to take revenge on the caretaker for his cruelty. The plot they devised demonstrates the psychology of the perception of the dog- human relationship. They decided that the best way to punish the caretaker was to kill his new dog. Durov was asked to carry out the execution. He took the unsuspecting dog to a nearby barrack, strangled it and tried to hang it from the ceiling. This failed and the dog fell on to the ground. It was still alive and looked at Durov with eyes full of tears and pain. Durov then decided to finish the dog off by throwing a stone at it. When the stone hit something soft Durov thought it was the dog. At this stage he fainted from fear and did not regain consciousness until two weeks later when he awoke in hospital. Nobody dared to talk to him about the ‘killed’ dog out of fear of inflicting more trauma. The profoundly shattered Durov would have given his own

5 On cruelty to animals see Arnold Arluke, Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006.

Preface xvii life in order to bring the dog back to life. One day, however, he saw the ‘killed’ dog alive and sitting next to the caretaker. The dog recognised Durov and wagged its tail in a friendly fashion. The episode overwhelmed the teenage Durov and compelled him to consider the meaning of human-animal relations. He concluded that animals are kinder and better than humans, and that humans perceive pets like dogs as belongings and do not see them in their own right. The ‘human’ expression of suffering in the dog’s eyes taught Durov that dogs have souls. Belonging to the confessional genre of memoir, Durov’s story represents a traumatic event from his past. Subscribing to a genre known for its blurred boundaries between fact and fiction,6 Durov’s autobiographical story serves as an example of a representational narrative. The dogs that he describes are thus representational dogs. With memory as a negotiating agency between real fact and various discursive formations, Durov’s story serves as an example of the dog narrative in Russian culture. It is a conglomerate of themes informing Russian cultural and literary discourses about dogs, discourses which Durov absorbed and to which he himself made a significant contribution. Among his friends were such writers as Anton Chekhov and Alexander Kuprin, who wrote some of the most celebrated dog stories in Russian literature. The question of whether a dog possesses of a soul relates to the complex mythological layer of dog symbolism in Russian and Slav cultures and is one of the leitmotifs of my study. Durov’s experimental work with dogs, undertaken with the leading scientists of his time, contributed to the perception, utilisation, and representation of this animal in twentieth-century and contemporary Russian culture. The choice of dogs as experimental animals for reanimation experiments (from 1925) and space exploration rests not only on scientific thought but also on a symbiosis of scientific and metaphysical futurity. This extra-textual layer vis-à-vis Durov’s dog story is very relevant for his memoirs and also for the focus of my book. I give a reading to the narratives and motifs encapsulated in Durov’s story: they are part

6 On theorising the representation of tragic events in memoirs see Michael Bern- stein, Forgone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Berkeley: California UP, 1994. xviii Political Animals of the Russian cultural canon and here they are discussed for the first time as part of a dog-thematic continuum in Russian culture.

Taxidermic dog Zapiataika on whom Durov conducted his telepathic suggestion experiments. Moscow, Ugolok Durova.

Introduction

We [my dog and I] are the same; in each of us there burns and shines the same trembling spark. – Ivan Turgenev. ‘The Dog’. 18781

The dog is modern Russian culture’s most representative and most political animal.2 This unique function stems from the position assigned to it by this culture in the correlation between humans and animals. It is enough to mention such iconic names as Pavlov’s dogs and the cosmic dogs Laika, Belka and Strelka to demonstrate this point.3 These dogs were used as substitutes for humans; they were sacrificed not just in the name of science but in the name of Russian science and Soviet politics.4 Biological scientist Ivan Pavlov trans-

1 I.S. Turgenev, “Sobaka”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Mos- cow: Nauka, 1982, Vol. X, 129-130. In English see Ivan Turgenev, “The Dog”, in Dream Tales and Prose Poems. Trans. Constance Garnett, New York: Macmillan Company, 1920, 17. Unless otherwise stated all translations are my own. 2 Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson maintain that ‘the animal most frequently associated with Russian identity is, of course, the bear’. See “Introduction”, in Other Animals, 4. While the bear is an important totemic animal in Russian traditional culture, this view of ‘Russian identity’ is taken from a Western vantage point. When the Soviet Union made the bear into an emblem of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow it returned the Western gaze albeit in a kitsch form. Also see Jane Costlow, “‘For the bear to come to your threshold’: Human-Bear Encounters in Late Imperial Russian Writing”, in Other Animals, 77-94. 3 On Pavlov’s laboratory see Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Exper- iment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. 4 On cosmic dogs see Amy Nelson, “The Legacy of Laika: Celebrity, Sacrifice and the Soviet Space Dogs”, in Beastly Natures: Human-Animal Relations at the Crossroads of Cultural and Environmental History. Ed. Dorothee Brantz, Char- lottesville: Virginia UP, 2010, 204-224. Western reaction to these dogs being left to die in outer space was in stark contrast to the perception of their fate inside Russia. Raised in the tradition of institutionalised animal protection, the British RSPCA staged mass demonstrations in protest at the exploitation of Laika, Belka and Strelka. 2 Political Animals formed the dog into a gastric juice production factory, reducing it to the function of a machine. Yet, the infamous reanimation experiments on a dog’s severed head in the mid-1920s were perceived by the scientific community and the public alike as a step towards the possibility of immortality and resurrection, and some saw it as a means for understanding the relationship between body and soul.5 Paradoxically, the cosmic dogs’ journey to the stratosphere propelled them into the domain of celestial beings. It gave them an immortality that could be understood metaphorically but also literally.6 Indeed, a contemporary Russian children’s song refers to the dog as a ‘higher being’, thus endowing it with a soul.7 The dog’s body in modern Russian culture is a site where body politics and politics are played out and where culture and nature, the sacred and the obscene, come together. This is exemplified in the futuristic performances of Oleg Kulik, the most subversive performance artist in Russia today and founder of the political Animal Par- ty.8 Known for his provocative impersonations and representations of Pavlov’s dog, he also uses his performances to suggest fathering/ mothering a dog/human offspring from his female dog partner with the help of science. The dog as a cultural construct incorporates various contra- dictions. Different representations invest the dog with multiple, often paradoxical meanings – moral, social and philosophical. These meanings are represented in both overt and covert ways, at times through the use of one of the oldest languages of allusion and the oldest language pertaining to animals, the Aesopian language. This book aims to unveil the multiple meanings of representations of dogs in Russian

5 Nikolai Krementsov, “Off with your heads: isolated organs in early Soviet science and fiction”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sci- ences XL/2 (2009), 87-100. 6 A poem inscribed on the monument to Laika in front of the Institute of Military Medicine in Moscow, opened in 2008, states: ‘She burned down in the name of science/ Having remained forever a star’ (‘I radi nauki sgorela/ ostavshis’ naveki zvezdoi’). V. Zapriagaev, “Velikaia Laika”. Pamiatnik Laike pered Institutom Voennoi Meditsiny, Moscow. Pamiatnik sobake Laike/Moscowwalks.ru 7 Iurii Etnin and Evgenii Krylatov, “Predannei sobaki netu sushchestva”, in Pri- kliucheniia elektronika. Dir. Konstantin Bromberg, screenplay Evgenii Veltisov. Odesskaia kinostudiia, 1979. 8 On the Animal Party Manifesto see Oleg Kulik, Mila Bredikhina, “Politicheskoe zhivotnoe obrashchaetsia k vam”, Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal 11 (1996), 58-59.

Introduction 3 discourse starting from the nineteenth century. The overarching thematic focus is the dynamics of correlation between humans and dogs in the spheres of literature, film and other cultural productions and formations. Various thematic clusters are viewed in their relation to historical contexts, intertextual links and cultural beliefs. Human- animal scholars identify the early years of the nineteenth century as the beginning of the development of new insights into, and new attitudes towards, animals.9 Such attitudes made possible the emergence of the awareness of animal rights and created narratives that contributed to the unfolding cultural history of human-animal relations.10 This study follows the same conceptual chronological framework.

Dog stories

For members of the Russian cultural milieu, stories about dogs came mainly from the Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary canon.11 Famous and celebrated writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov and Alexander Kuprin dedicated their stories to dogs and their interactions with humans. In most of these stories dogs go through extraordinary adventures and their lives are full of hardships and injustices. Some of these stories have sad endings: Turgenev’s foundling dog Mumu is drowned in the river (‘Mumu’, 1854); Che- khov’s Kashtanka is treated cruelly by her masters (‘Kashtanka’, 1887); in Gavriil Troepol’skii’s cult novella of the 1970s a pedigree dog finds itself in a sealed van disturbingly reminiscent of the mobile gas trucks used by the Nazis in Eastern Europe at the beginning of World War II to kill Jews. Other stories have happy endings, most predictably a dog’s lucky escape to loving and deserving owners. The

9 See Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 10 Keith Tester and Steve Baker adopt Foucault’s definition of Western epistemes in relation to the history of the perception of animals. Keith Tester, Animals and So- ciety: The Humanity of Animal Rights. London: Routledge, 1991. Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, Representation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993. 11 The editors of the first volume of a themed journal of Russian culture chose the theme of dogs. See Chteniia: The Hearts of Dogs. Ed. Tamara Eidelman, I/1 (2008).

4 Political Animals veteran police dog in the 1960s’ classic Come here, Mukhtar! by Iz- rail’ Metter is officially put into retirement under the state pension. In some stories men return the loyalty of their dogs. In Kuprin’s ‘The White Poodle’ (1903) the rich parents of a spoilt boy appropriate a poor boy’s dog, and the poor boy risks his life to rescue his dog. In this scenario the paradigm of the dog as man’s best friend is inverted into a plot depicting the boy as the dog’s best friend. In all of these stories dogs are better than humans, and in some they are better than spoilt rich children. Each of these stories has a didactic purpose: they illustrate a sense of justice, gratitude, loyalty and fidelity. They teach that good people love dogs, that bad people do them harm and that to love dogs is to be a good person. They instruct as to how to distinguish between good and evil, how to sympathise and empathise with dogs and other underdogs. The dog in these stories can be characterised by Jacques Derrida’s definition of this animal as ‘the fraternal allegory of social poverty, of the excluded, the marginal, the “homeless”’ (143).12 These stories are fine examples of the social, moral and philosophical values of Russian classical literature. For this reason many of them have been made into film adaptations, thus achieving a broader circulation and making a stronger impact as a result of the more graphic filmic text.13 The knowledge acquired from this representational canon is often in stark contrast to the reality of the street: the capture and sale of stray dogs for meat in the post-Revolutionary great famine of the 1920s; the disappearance of dogs from the streets of Leningrad during the siege of World War II; homeless and hungry dogs roaming through city streets in the post-Perestroika era; parental bans on children touching dogs in the fear that they will be bitten or attacked; the

12 Jacques Derrida, Given Time. Counterfeit Money. Trans. P. Kamuf. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992, Vol. I. 13 Another way to popularise dog narratives is to make them into songs. One example is Iunna Morits’s poem ‘Sobaka byvaet kusachei’ (‘The dog can bite’), put to music in the cartoon film Bol’shoi sekret dlia malen’koi kompanii (1979), dir. Iu- lii Kalisher, composer Sergei Nikitin. The song became very popular and is now available on Internet websites performed by various singers. Of note is the poem’s didactic line ‘the dog can bite only because of the dog’s life’ (‘sobaka byvaet kusachei tol’ko ot zhizni sobach’ei’) in the memorable refrain of the song. Iu. Morits, “Sobaka byvaet kusachei”, Dvigaite ushami (dlia detei ot 5 do 500 let). Moscow: Rosmen, 2003, 3-4.

Introduction 5 practice in rural areas and less urbane parts of cities of keeping dogs on chains. Dogs can signal danger, unpredictability and even treachery (in his 1939 story ‘Smoke in the Forest’ the odious Soviet children’s writer Arkadii Gaidar suggests that untrained dogs cannot be trusted, as they can be politically subversive and so be used to aid the anti- Soviet enemy).14 Parents use dogs to alert their children to the dangers of the outside world. By prompting reactions necessary for human survival, dogs demarcate the line between the safety of the inner domain and the dangers of the outer. There is yet another sphere of the human-dog encounter that incorporates representations of different breeds of dogs. This is the realm of the heroic and the disciplined: the trusted police dog ready to rescue the good (‘our’ people) and to identify and impede the enemy. In stories and films about war and international border conflicts the same breed of dog can serve two warring parties, so dividing dogs into those that are with Us and those that are with Them. This situation leads to another binary opposition which creates a conflation between Us and our dogs. The idea that the same kind of dog can be good or bad depending on its owner contains a paradox embedded in the para- digmatics of the dog itself: on the one hand dogs are essentialised as people, they are either inherently good or bad; on the other hand the very fact that the same breed of dog – such as the German shepherd, much-used by police and the military – can be good if it serves Us and bad if it serves our enemy shifts the emphasis to the role of environment and conditioning. The new Soviet state responded to this problem by developing not only its own methods of training service dogs, but also its own ‘national’ breed. The German shepherd was eventually redeveloped and renamed the East European shepherd reflecting all the ideological and symbolic connotations encoded in the name. Na- ture against nurture, determinism against progress, hereditary and genetics against the environment – these themes are at the core of the problematics of human – animal encounters. Dogs’ loyalty as a complex political category finds the most graphic example in the symbolism of the dog during the reign of Ivan

14 See a discussion of Gaidar’s ‘Dym v lesu’ in Aleksandr Kuliapin, Ol’ga Skubach, “Vernyi Brut: sobaki v literature i kul’ture totalitarizma”, in Utopiia zverinosti ili reprezentatsiia zhivotnykh v russkoi kul’ture. Ed. Leonid Geller, Lausanne: Kolo, 2007, 115-126.

6 Political Animals the Terrible in sixteenth-century Russia. His marauding squads of Oprichnik police used the figure of the dog as their symbol. Loyal to the Tsar, they represented terror in bodily form to the opposition. They sometimes carried severed dogs’ heads tucked into the saddles of their horses.15 In this form the dog’s head paralleled the human head, thus delineating the convergence of human and dog. While the sniffing dogs represented the police, the decapitated dogs represented the opposition groups, not the perpetrators of police action but the victims. This multivalent image embodies the inherent duality of dog symbolism, as dogs become part of the play for power that is represented by the authorities, the national state and the community. But there is another dimension lurking here – the mythological substratum of the supernatural domain, linked to eschatological beliefs in the afterlife. The cut-off head is a marker of death but also of the afterlife. In its ability to continue instilling horror after physical death, the severed dog’s head demonstrates the paradox of the sealed and yet pene- trable borders between life and death. To this must be added the perception of the Oprichniks as devils incarnate, in line with one mythological substratum of the dog in Russian culture – the dog can be the incarnation of the Devil. Loyalty and treachery, obedience and cruelty, demarcation and the crossing of boundaries – all these features are part of the symbolism of the dog. Some dogs have become stable archetypes in the Aesopian language of allusion in Russia. Such is the case of Ivan Krylov’s Mos’ka, a small dog from the verse fable ‘Slon i Mos’ka’ (‘Elephant and Mos- ka’, 1808). It is a short tale in verse about a small she-dog who dares to bark at an elephant who in turn hardly notices her pathetic high- pitched bark. The theme of this fable is the over-estimation of one’s power in relation to a truly important individual. During his invasion of Russia in 1812 Napoleon was identified as the small dog Mos’ka while mighty Russia was the white elephant.16 The moral was clearly defined within an historical context: a small Frenchman, Napoleon, is no match for the powerful and astute Russian general Kutuzov. In his

15 Of importance for my argument is the culture’s desire to preserve the belief that Oprichniks carried dogs’ heads. For a discussion see Charles J. Halperin, “Did Ivan IV’s Oprichniks Carry Dogs’ Heads on Their Horses?”, Canadian-American Slavic Studies XLVI/1 (2012), 40-67. 16 See N.L. Stepanov, “Krylov”, in I.A. Krylov, Sochineniia. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955, Vol. I, 5-38.

Introduction 7

17th century engraving depicting Oprichnik with a dog’s head attached to the saddle.

post-Revolutionary attack on his political opposition, Lenin used the same fable as de-contextualised political allusion and as a means of polemics. In his programmatic ‘Ocherednye zadachi sovetskoi vlasti’ (‘The Recurrent Tasks of the Soviet Power’, 1918) he compares the Mensheviks to the Krylovian dog Mos’ka:

Let the Mos’kas of the bourgeois society, from Belorussov to Martov, yelp and bark […]. This is what Mos’kas are for, so that they can bark at the proletarian elephant. Let them bark. We shall follow our own path (233)17

This passage encapsulates the use of Aesopian language in Rus- sian cultural discourse. It functions as a literary allusion but it also

17 See V.I. Lenin, “Ocherednye zadachi sovetskoi vlasti”, in Sochineniia. Moscow: Partiinoe izdatel’stvo, 1934, Vol. VI.

8 Political Animals contains hidden political polemics. The meaning is both covert and overt depending on the recipient’s sensitivity.18 In this particular case the concealed message is based on the phonetic association between Mos’ka, the dog’s name, and the diminutive form of Mosia, short for Moisei (Moses), so hinting at Martov’s Jewish ethnicity. The little Krylovian Mos’ka emerges as a little Menshevik Jew who dares to bark at the Great Russian (white) elephant. This example, taken from the text of as artful a master of Aesopian language as Lenin, serves to illustrate the multiple interpretative possibilities of this device. Preten- sion of innocence or playing dumb is a strong component of this art.19 Attitudes towards dogs as a construct of the Russian high culture continued to shape attitudes towards dogs in the Soviet Union at the time of developed socialism. The ideological ‘thaw’ of the late 1950s to 1960s saw the emergence of stories which showed ordinary Soviet citizens’ hostile attitudes towards dogs on the basis that these animals were a luxury that only the spoiled élite could afford. For the masses, pedigree and decorative dogs were seen as a sign of privilege, a whim of the wealthy and educated in the supposedly classless Soviet society.20 In Eastern Europe the 1960s was a decade marked by the notion of ‘socialism with a human face’. In Russia the proponents of this movement, such as Ilya Ehrenburg and Izrail’ Metter, wrote stories that can be called ‘socialism with a dog’s face’. Dog-themed stories and films from the 1960s and 1970s often depict a divide between the intelligentsia and the masses. They demonstrate that, in the perception of the Soviet majority, fancy dogs were markers of the intelligentsia’s arrogance and their separation from the people. During these two decades a humane attitude towards dogs and a desire to have a dog as a companion acted as a form of cultural continuity with nineteenth- century Russian gentry literature. The idea of a special bond between a cultured person and a dog was thus (re)established. When the cultured minority became a subject of attack and persecution by the ‘proletarian’ majority, it became synonymous with the idea of the

18 The foundational text on how polemics and parody function in Russian literature is Iu. Tynianov. “Dostoevskii i Gogol’ (k teorii parodii)”, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino. Moscow: izd-vo Nauka, 1977, 198-227. 19 Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998. 20 See a discussion in Il’ia Erenburg, Liudi, Gody, Zhizn’. Books 5 and 6. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966, 289-290.

Introduction 9 underdog. At this level the parallelism between human and dog may be seen as a metaphor for a variety of forms of prejudice and persecution: social and political, racial and ethnic, sexual and gender-based.21 The dog as the eternal underdog thus emblematised many forms of politics, including body politics. Because of harsh censorship constrains in tsarist Russia and in the Soviet Union, writers often used children’s and quasi-children’s literature as means to pass subversive messages. Children’s literature is suitable for this function because the society endows it with imagi- native and fantasy-driven qualities, often removed from reality. For this reason writers have often used children’s stories as a form of coded, Aesopian language for adults.22 While children’s literature was a controlled field in the Soviet Union, paradoxically many books published by ‘Children’s Literature Publishing House’ (‘Izdatel’stvo Detskaia literatura’) often served the function of dodging political censorship, and some of dog stories analysed in my book represent this substratum of juvenile literature.23 Despite the political cataclysms separating the two centuries, the themes being censored and tabooed in Russian culture throughout nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain remarkably stable. The lack of open and honest debate on the political and economic situation; ethnic tensions, patriotism, and nationalism; issues of body politics related to sexuality and the life of the procreative (i.e. animal) body; child education and the tension between inborn (quasi-animal) traits and the influence of conditioning and the environment; evolutionary versus conceptionalist views; positivism and esotericism – all these

21 On gender stereotypes and somatophobia see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. On conflation of race and gender see Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger. Eds Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995. 22 A nineteenth century example of a children’s animal story with coded political subtext is ‘Chernaia kuritsa’: in the 1820s it contained veiled pro-Decembrist agenda. See Ben Hellman, “Zagadka chernoi kuritsy, ili vzgliad v podzemel’e An- tona Pogorel’skogo”, in Slavica Helsingiensia 20. Eds P. Pessonen and J. Hei- nonen, Helsinki: Helsinki UP, 2000, 111-119. 23 Iunna Morits’s book’s title is illustrative of this phenomenon: Dvigaite ushami (dlia detei ot 5 do 500 let) – Move your ears (for children between 5 and 500 years old), 2003. See a discussion on censorship in children’s literature in Herman Nikolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature: 1917-1991. Lanham: Rowman & Lit- tlefield, 1997, especially on 176-177, 217.

10 Political Animals themes, culturally linked to the thematics of dogs, show signs of continuity from the nineteenth century to the present. These themes form the core of this book.

How to approach the dog stories in Russian culture

Dogs in folk beliefs: tell and conceal

Russian scholars of semiotics have identified the parallelism between dogs and humans as one of the main paradigms of Russian culture.24 Yet, in order to establish the culture-specific aspects of the theme, a brief transcultural overview of the dog-human motif is in order. An- thropologist David Gordon White, in his important study of dog-man mythologies across cultures, Myths of the Dog-Man (1991), notes the implicit parallelism between man and dog.25 This parallelism is based on a set of paradoxes and ambiguities linked to the notions of human and animal, nature and culture and, most importantly, nature and supernature:

Ultimately, the dog, with its ambiguous roles and cultural values, its constant presence in human experience coupled with its nearness to the feral world, is the alter ego of man himself, a reflection of both human culture and human savagery. Symbolically, the dog is the animal pivot of the human universe, lurking at the threshold between wilderness and domestication and all of the valences that these ideal poles of experience hold. There is much of man in his dogs, much of the dog in us, and behind this, much of the wolf in both the dog and man. And, there is some of the Dog-Man in god. (15)

White notes that according to a great number of myths, especially those from Central Asia, the first creatures that God placed on the earth were man and dog. Moreover, in a great number of cultures the pastoral, cynegetic and protective role of the dog is extended beyond the world of the living into the world of the dead. Psychopomps,

24 B.A. Uspenskii, “Religiozno-mifologicheskii aspekt russkoi ekspressivnoi frazeologii”, in Semiotics and the History of Culture. Eds Morris Halle et al, Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1988. 25 David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991.

Introduction 11 guardians of the gates to hell, and the souls of the dead themselves are often depicted as canine. The dog’s place thus lies between one world and another. In In- do-European traditions, the dog guards many celestial and temporal thresholds, so becoming an eschatological animal. Moreover, the dog can even belong to the celestial sphere, as is suggested by the constel- lations Canis Major and Canis Minor, and the Egyptian dog-star Sirius (Sothys). In V.V. Ivanov’s (1977) assessment of various sayings across Eurasian languages, dogs were used as sacrificial animals, their murder being regarded as a substitute for the death of the enemy who lost in a ritual game. The human-dog parallelism in these beliefs is further linked to the domain of life and death. The dog acquires supernatural qualities that can be positive but also negative for humans.26 The ambiguities of dog symbolism – fear of this animal’s supernatural powers and the desire to rely on its help – gave rise to Christianity’s cautious and unfriendly attitude towards the dog. Vari- ants of the dog-headed Saint Christopher motif across cultures serve to illustrate Christianity’s anxieties vis-à-vis the powers of the dog. This saint, known as the man who carried the child Christ across a river, was born with the head of the dog. Heathen by birth, he wanted to have the power of speech in order to be able to evangelise. God sent an angel who blew on his mouth and gave him the power of speech. Christianity thus sought to incorporate the special powers of the dog- head, to make it serve the purposes of the new religion. While St Christopher’s canine head is a constant theme in East- ern iconography and hagiography, in Western traditions he is rarely depicted with a dog’s head. White notes that the main function of this Saint’s representational images is to free the worshipper from a state of sin in death through the gaze. The presence of the dog’s head must have endowed the Orthodox icons with additional magic powers in the eyes of the worshippers. The persistence of the image of this Saint as cynocephalic in the iconography of the Eastern churches right up to the nineteenth century, compared to its earlier disappearance in many places of worship in the West, serves as an important point of differ-

26 V.V. Ivanov, “Drevnebalkanskii i obshcheindoevropeiskii tekst mifa o geroe- ubiitse psa i evraziiskie paralleli”, Slavianskoe i balkanskoe iazykoznanie IV (1977), 181-213.

12 Political Animals ence between the two traditions’ attitudes towards the special powers of this dog-headed Saint. It is plausible to suggest that the phenomenon of dvoeverie, pagan-Christian ‘dual faith’, contributed to the lin- gering presence of the dog-headed Saint in Russian culture while Christianity’s struggle against pagan beliefs can similarly explain more suspicious attitudes towards the powers of the dog. Of even bigger relevance to this study is the role that the construct of this animal played in the body politics across cultures. It is symptomatic of the dog’s alterity that at the moment of St Christo- pher’s baptism his skin changes colour from black to white. A further example of human-dog parallelism is found in the construct of the hybrid Dog-Man creature in popular imagination across cultures. This mythological construct illustrates various paradoxes associated with the ambiguities of the dog. White shows that this hybrid, while more human than the domesticated dog, is non-human in the sense that it belongs to an ‘Other’ or foreign race. Notably, societies’ exiles, those who were expelled and who went into a self-imposed exile, become synonymous with the groups of Dog-Men across cultures. This book includes examples of cultural representations of dogs and (quasi-) hybrids as outcasts, most commonly in situations where members of high culture associate themselves with dogs as subaltern outsiders. Russian writers’ sympathy towards dogs stems to a large degree from this association, while in other cases writers exhibit fear of dog/human hybridity as a form of anomalous monstrosity. This is especially the case in representations of scientific experiments on dogs. Starting from the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific experiments on these animals are often represented as a paradox of hope and fear. This paradox comprises the desire to find a way to overcome death and mortality and the concurrent fear of challenging and so offending God. As such, God can be in the dog itself or dog can be barred from God’s domain. Moreover, choosing dogs for scientific experiments is in itself a stark example of culture’s use of the dog as a passage to immortality. Indeed, when Russian men of science play God, they choose dog. In discussing Russian folk culture, Russian scholar Boris Uspensky described the ‘correlation of dog and human’ (‘sootnesen-

Introduction 13 nost’ sobaki i cheloveka’, 276) as its main dog paradigm.27 Both Igor Smirnov and Uspensky showed that this parallelism can manifest in either convergence or juxtaposition.28 It exists in culture as part of the paradox of the rejection/acceptance of similarities and differences. Proverbs and sayings, tales, songs and other ethnographic material dating back to early times testify that the dog was a totemic animal in most pre-Christian Slav cultures. Church clerics juxtaposed the new Christian faith to pagan beliefs by using the imagery of dogs as symbols of the unchristian world. Dogs and dogs’ language (laianie) were used to represent various religious and ethnic Others: Jews, Gypsies, Muslims and Catholics.29 Dog behaviour was a marker of ungodly behaviour: excessive sexuality, sexual transgressions such as incest and bestiality, idleness, deviousness and subversive talk. Indeed, the famed Russian obscenity mat – ‘eb(i) mat’’ has at its core the notion that ‘a dog fucked your/mine/his/her/their mother’. Various grammatical versions of this mat, with the dog as the subject of coitus, attest to the sacral symbolism of the dog dating back to the cult of the mother- soil in need of fertilisation by semen in order to continue its life- giving function. Over time this expression moved from the sacral to the obscene and the word ‘dog’ disappeared from the saying. The resulting lacuna symbolises a taboo and testifies to the original sacral meaning of the phrase. The phrase was most likely used as a form of zaklinanie, a magic incantation. Indeed, the way in which it is used and uttered by speakers of Russian today testifies to this aspect of its nature: it is spoken not so much to express anger but to create and demarcate an intimate inner circle of quasi-co-believers, of Us, in a given social situation.

27 B.A. Uspenskii, “Religiozno-mifologicheskii aspekt russkoi ekspressivnoi frazeologii”, 197-302. 28 I.P. Smirnov, “Mesto ‘mifopoeticheskogo’ podkhoda k literaturnomu proizvedeniiu sredi drugikh tolkovanii teksta (o stikhotvorenii Maiakovskogo ‘Vot tak ia sdelalsia sobakoi’)”, Mif. Fol’klor. Literatura. Leningrad: Nauka, 1978, 186-203. Also I.P. Smirnov, Diakhronicheskie transformatsii literaturnykh zhanrov i motivov. Wien: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1981, Vol. IV. 29 On the survival of the ethnocentric dichotomies in traditional Slavic cultures, and in application to ‘zhidovskaia vera’ (‘Jewish/Yid faith’) in particular see O.V. Be- lova, Etnokul’turnye stereotipy v slavianskoi narodnoi traditsii. Moscow: Indrik, 2005, 84-90.

14 Political Animals

Traditionally in Russian culture dogs are not given Christian names; that is, names from the Russian Orthodox name canon. The famous nineteenth-century Russian ethnographer Vladimir Dal’ notes the saying, ‘Greshno sobaku klikat’ chelovecheskim imenem’ – ‘It is sinful to give a dog a human name’.30 Unlike cats, dogs were viewed as ‘unclean’ animals both in the literal (body) and in the figurative (soul) sense. Touching a dog meant defilement. Dogs, again unlike cats, were not allowed into churches. Moreover, dogs had to live outside houses, as houses were considered to be clean Christian places. A church that had been entered by a dog had to be purified though prayer. Dog meat was forbidden for consumption – further evidence of the cultic and sacral meaning of this animal. The sacral nature of the dog as a totem and taboo animal underpins the embedded ambivalence that has survived in Russian culture till the present. Proverbs along the lines of ‘to eat a dog’ (‘s”est’ sobaku’) in contemporary language mean to have extraordinary, expert knowledge, but they are also testament to an earlier time when dog parts were eaten as part of magic rituals. Uspensky notes that the symbolism and imagery of dogs in Russian folk culture represents a paradoxical conglomerate of the sacral and the obscene.31 These are the domain of the oral tradition, once used in healing utterances and representative of the sphere of witchcraft and sorcery, surviving today in sayings and proverbs. Dog symbolism was related at times to the realm of sexual prohibitions and fantasies; sometimes it was manifested in exorcisms. On occasion parts of the animal body, such as dog hair, were used as charms or as an ingredient in folk medicine. In folkloristic material, represented by oral stories and fairy-tales, dogs are interchangeable with wolves. Unlike the attitudes towards dogs displayed in the newly found gentility of the gentry and educated classes in the nineteenth century, these dogs are not man’s best friends. Rather they are representative of dark forces, to be feared for their physical strength but also for their super-

30 Vladimir Dal’, “Sobaka”, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka. Mos- cow: Russkii iazyk, 1980, Vol. IV, 250-252, 251. 31 B.A. Uspenskii, “Religiozno-mifologicheskii aspekt russkoi ekspressivnoi frazeologii”, in Semiotics and the History of Culture. Eds Morris Halle et al, Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1988, 197-302.

Introduction 15 natural powers.32 It is my contention that this mythopoetic material often informs the hidden substratum of the creative representation of dogs in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and other cultural productions.33 Pushed into the underground in non- ethnographic texts, it forms the basis of subtexts within more realist narratives. In some cases the mythological and the sacral enrich the representations of dogs in these texts; in others, they present material which in printed form was not publishable for reasons of censorship. In nineteenth-century Russian high culture there emerged a new sensibility in attitudes towards dogs.34 Derived from the Westernisa- tion of the gentry and educated classes, and imitating Western modes of everyday life and behaviour, it revealed marked differences from the imagery of dogs in folk culture with its characteristic mistrust of dogs and fear of these animals. Yet, the traditional imagery continues to generate subversive narratives in the present post-Soviet Russia of the twenty-first century. One of the aims of this study is to unveil the politics of the incorporation of the symbolic into representations of dogs.

Dog story thematics: a comparative perspective

It can be argued that the dog has been made into a political animal in broader European literary discourse. In addition, in European literary tradition, the dog is also a philosophical animal. What defines the political nature of the dog in Russian literature in relation to its West- ern counterparts? The Aesopian tradition in Russian literature in regards to the dog motif is in itself a phenomenon that Russian literature shares with its European counterpart. For European literature this source is the world of classical Antiquity. However, this tradition entered Russian high culture indirectly and much later, beginning in the eighteenth century and culminating in the fables of Ivan Krylov. In

32 For the motif of the demonic nature of the dog across cultures see Barbara Allen Woods, The Devil in the Dog Form: A Partial Type-Index of Devil Legends. Berkeley: California UP, 1959. 33 On the legacy of animal symbolism in modern literature and world culture see Bruce Ross, The Inheritance of Animal Symbols in Modern Literature and World Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. 34 Margarita Odesskaia, “Ruzh’e ili lira: Okhotnichii rasskaz v russkoi literature XIX veka”, Voprosy literatury 3 (1998), 239-252.

16 Political Animals

Europe this Aesopian line was reworked by the seventeenth-century French fable writer Jean de La Fontaine, and it was by this route that it entered Russian high culture.35 From here it encountered the anthropomorphic tradition of Russian folk tales. Within this concrete historical context, it created unique culture-and time-specific productions. In his comparative study Varieties of Literary Thematics (1983) Theodore Ziolkowski devotes a chapter to the formation of the dog motif in European literatures.36 He calls the chapter ‘Talking Dogs: The Caninization of Literature’. In it he demonstrates that the dog is the most philosophical and in some ways the most politically subversive animal in European literary tradition. Moreover, the dog became the most represented animal in modern European literature at the end of the nineteenth century. In line with my argument on the Aesopian use of the dog in politically subversive material, Ziolkowski focuses on the tradition of using the dog motif to convey various complex tropes of transgression, subversion and parody in European literatures. Indeed, what can better emblematise the subversive nature of the dog both as the animal and as a construct than the phenomenon of the Cynics (the word ‘cynic’ derives from the Ancient Greek kynikos meaning ‘dog-like’)? The dog became both a philosophical and a political animal in European culture as a result of Classical Antiquity assigning intelligence and wisdom to this animal. The parodic line associated with dog discourse can be traced back to Menippus the Cynic. This tradition re-entered European literature when it was redis- covered during the Renaissance. Importantly, at this time the tradition of the dialogues of Lucian involving philosophical dogs provided a vehicle for the re-evaluation of religion and society by the humanists. Significantly for the argument in this book, the dogs’ ability to speak was explained by magic in the main text of the time, Cymbalum Mun- di (1537). Thus, the symbiotic complex of paradoxes such as the subversion of dominant religious beliefs and the affirmation of magic are strongly pronounced in this literary representation of the dog. Moreo- ver, the dogs’ ability to talk is based on the parallelism between the human and the dog, while the canine point of view enables humans to

35 See William E. Brown, A History of 18th Century Russian Literature. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. 36 Theodore Ziolkowski, Varieties of Literary Thematics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

Introduction 17 look critically at human affairs. This form of dog representation was picked up by Cervantes and later by the German romantic E.T.A. Hoffmann whose Account of the Most Recent Fortunes of the Dog Berganza (1814) became one of the most influential texts in both Rus- sian and Western European literary representations of philosophical dogs. Hoffmann’s parody of the very literary conventions that he exploits in this dog story marks it as a multi-political narrative. He makes it clear through allusion and irony that the text is dealing not with just another talking dog but with Cervantes’ dog Berganza. Hoffmann’s dog story characteristically conceals a complex array of hidden polemics, both political and literary: it exposes politics of literature and thus makes the dog thematics part of contemporaneous literary struggle. Russian writers like Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov were influenced by this Hoffmannesque tradition, as will become clearer later in this book. Of special relevance is the parallelism between the dog and the Other underdog – in Hoffmann’s case, the Jew. In Hoffmann’s story the dog Berganza is cursed to become immortal and therefore to roam the earth forever like the Wandering Jew. Elsewhere, Gogol’s talking dogs and Bulgakov’s dog in their inner monologues satirise the societal norms, but they also become linked to the thematics of the minoritarian Other: the authorial closet homosexual in the case of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman; the hybrid in the case of Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. In addition, Bulgakov’s story enters into polemics with his contemporary writers, whose ideological, philosophical and aesthetic values he rejected. The dog stories across European and Russian literature are thus used not only to convey the meaning of what is said but also how it is said. Kafka’s use of the talking dog thematics in his ‘Investigations of a Dog’ (1922) has to be viewed as an example of a Western Jewish writer turning to the representation of dogs as a way to show the metaphysical blindness of humans and animals. His dog is concerned about ‘the race of dogs’; the parallelism between the human ethnocentricity and canine clannishness is disturbingly clear. In post-Holocaust Russia Jewish writers chose the parallelism between dogs and underdogs to convey their concerns at Russian ethnocentricity. In Kafka’s complex dog story the dog expresses an irrational faith in a supernatural being, Lufthunde. The motif finds its parallel in Vladimov’s Faith- ful Ruslan, published in the 1970s when this writer (ironically for

18 Political Animals

Kafka’s case) immigrated to Germany in his search for freedom of expression.37 The dogs in this story also want to believe in a higher being, but this higher being is a Master – a strong Soviet man modelled on the Stalinist ideal of a strong leader. The use of the dog to express forbidden material, coded messages and hidden meanings is more pronounced in Russian culture in the period under investigation. This is due to political and social circumstances separating societies. The fate of the Russian nation under autocratic regimes, Soviet social experiments, the fate of real dogs during the famines, and in ideologically motivated scientific experiments established a major point of difference in the construction of this human-animal parallelism in Russia compared with Western discourse. Russian writers prefer to see themselves on the dog divide of the ‘us-them’ dichotomy, due to the special status that non-odious writers occupy in Russian society. The desire to be associated with dogs as underdogs to express their political and ideological position is another defining feature of the dog narratives of this period. The late coming of Christianity to Russia and the survival of the ‘dual faith’ well into the twentieth century in folk beliefs are further important contributing factors to the differences in treatment and representation of dogs in cultural material. Whereas Western dog stories had echoes of surviving beliefs in dogs’ magical powers (notably Goethe’s Faust and the work of Hoffmann), Russian culture produced dog stories that created a symbiosis of magic and science. The materialist component of eschatology, linked to dog thematics, that at times conceals superstitions is a resultant defining feature of Russian literature and culture. According to Iurii Lotman and Uspensky the new in Russian culture often results from the transformation of the old in ‘a process of turning it inside out’ (33).38 Thus, ‘repeated transformations can lead to the regeneration of archaic forms’ (33). It is in these transformations that stable cultural formations are revealed. They also state

37 For censorship and Vladimov’s story see Karel Kynel, “Vladimov’s Dog”. Index on Censorship XVI/8 (1987), 26-29. 38 I extend the chronological boundaries of the scheme. See Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspensky, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture: to the End of the Eighteenth Century”, in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History. Trans. Alex- ander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985, 30-66.

Introduction 19 that the binary models are a characteristic feature of the dynamics of Russian culture. My investigation shows that the dynamics of oppositions turn out to be particularly complex in the construction and representation of dogs in Russian cultural material.39 On the one hand Russian culture’s somatophobia, which is based on the binarism between soul and body, results in the conflation of the gendered, racialised or sexed body with the animal body.40 In this way dogs and other underdogs become objects of dislike and projections of self-hatred. On the other hand the notion of dogs’ special nature generates curiosity and the desire to discover that, which constitutes its secret. While Russian culture shares with the Western one Cartesian dualisms privileging mind over body and spirit over matter, 41 the Bol- shevik revolution of 1917 ushered in a new interpretation of materiality, which also had a bearing on the human-animal correlation. Christian and quasi-Christian somatophobia was reinterpreted during the early years of Soviet culture, and the distrust of nature together with the desire to improve the physical body and the mind/spirit drove scientific experiments on animals, and dogs in particular. The prevalent ethos of the time was characterised by the ‘Promethean theurgy’,

39 On animals in Russian culture see Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History. Eds Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 2010. This volume sets the main four themes in animal representation: utopianism, scientific experiments and their ideological meaning, class issues and change in human-animal hierarchies at the times of political upheavals (to be further discussed in the Conclusion of my book). Zveri i ikh reprezentatsii v russkoi kul’ture. Eds Leonid Geller and Anastasiia Vinogradova de la Fortel, St Peters- burg: Baltiiskie sezony, 2010, contains a number of case studies that have different theoretical underpinning. Utopiia zverinosti ili reprezentatsiia zhivotnykh v russkoi kul’ture. Ed. Leonid Geller, Lausanne-Drohobycz: Kolo, 2007; the volume deals with aspects of utopian impulse in animal representation. Themes of ecology and environmental issues are covered in Understanding Russian Nature: Representations, Values and Concepts. Eds Arja Rosenholm and Sari Autio- Sarasmo, Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, 2005. Peasant culture’s understanding of generation and progeneration is examined in Henrietta Mondry, “What’s in an ‘Incubator Chicken’? Gleb Uspensky on Hens, Eggs, and the Mystery of Generation”, Slavic and East European Journal XLVII/2 (2003), 211-226. 40 On Cartesian binarisms and somatophobia of women’s and animals’ bodies see Carol Adams, Neither man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defence of Animals. New York: Continuum, 1995. 41 D.A. Oakley, Brain and Mind. London: Taylor and Francis, 1985.

20 Political Animals the idea that humanity must create its own destiny, including the conquest of death.42 While dogs were used for various scientific experiments in other European laboratories for ‘practical’ reasons such as their availability and compact size,43 the choice of dogs for transformative experiments in Russia has additional connotations in light of their perceived dual nature. At this point the dynamics of human-dog correlation fits Lotman and Uspensky’s model of culture’s transformation and ‘regeneration of the archaic’ in an ‘inside out’ way.

Examining dog stories

This study explores the paradox of the similarity and Otherness of dogs based on the mechanisms of projection, victimisation and compassion, and the desire to form human-animal assemblages and even to become-animal.44 Its approach is thematic and chronological. The book is underpinned by theories from body politics and human-animal studies. Scholars have noted that, when we write about the history of animals, we are confronted by a number of methodological problems. A major feature of writing about animal history is that one is writing about representations of animals.45 The material that is studied is the

42 I borrow the term ‘Promethean theurgy’ from George L. Kline, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1968. 43 Claude Bernard’s Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory (1873) was the standard textbook that advocated vivisection of dogs for advancement in human medicine. 44 Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophre- nia. Trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987. 45 The central text that shows that animals have become signs, images and representations is: John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”, About Looking. New York. Vintage. 1980, 1-26. On the construct of human-animal hierarchies in Christian Europe see Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1994. Various important case studies on representations of animals in history and art are found in Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. For excellent case studies of human-animal interactions across Western cultures see Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History. Eds Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, New York: Routledge, 1997. On postmodern theories on the visual aspects of animal representation see Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, Representation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993. For radical thinking on the politics of animals who have no future under human domination see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation. New York: New York Review Books, 1990. On sociological aspects of human-animals rela-

Introduction 21 material that is composed by humans because animals do not have a ‘language’, they do not write documents and they do not leave other textual evidence. The representation of animals is therefore always invested with human subjectivities; when we study discourses about animals we learn about the attitudes towards animals at a particular time and by a particular author or a particular group. The representation of dogs and other animals is always culture- and class-specific; it signifies the estate, class, gender and ethnicity of those who contribute to the social history of animals and/or give representational accounts of animals. Whether taking part in a social movement to protect dogs or engaging in the depiction of dogs, people often use dogs as sites of subjectivity. Self-interest is often a part of these investments. Coral Lansbury’s formative book The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (1985) demonstrates that when groups of people create protectionist movements in support of dogs they sometimes do so on the basis of their association with a particular form of abuse that these animals undergo in a given time in a given society.46 The case of the twice-vivisected brown dog gave rise to a feminist movement and activated the support of workers. Both groups regarded the use of dogs for vivisection as a metaphor for their own social position. Women saw the pornographic aspects of the display of the animal body by vivisectionists as a trope for their own place in society. The poor masses associated themselves with the dog’s body because, as a rule, it was the corpses of homeless paupers that ended up on the dissection tables in morgues and were used by unscrupulous anatomists to conduct scientific experiments. In Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (1993) Steve Baker notes that culture does not allow unmediated access to animals themselves.47 In What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (2008) Philip Arm- strong states that novelists, scientists and scholars cannot access or reproduce what other animals mean on their own terms: ‘Humans can only represent animals’ experiences through the mediation of cultural encoding, a reshaping according to our own intentions, attitudes, and

tions see Theorizing Animals: Re-thinking Humanimal Relations. Eds Nik Taylor and Tania Signal, Human-Animal Studies, Leiden: Brill, 2011. 46 Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Ed- wardian England. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. 47 Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, Representation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993.

22 Political Animals preconceptions’ (3).48 As with any study of the representation of animals, this study takes into account the phenomenon in which the discursive representation of dogs often erases the real animal. As Erica Fudge notes in her 2002 essay, when ‘the dog is a representation of the human; it is not, paradoxically, a dog’ (7). 49 While this book explores a culture-specific material, it shows both continuity and change in the representation of, and attitudes towards, the dog. It thus combines the diachronic and the synchronic. As Fudge argues, the application to animal studies of Saussure’s notion that meaning can only be made through difference leads to the conclusion that the animal is meaningful only when understood in relation to the human. The same formula applies to the meaning of being human. Yet, the examination of representations of animals is a valid contribution to our understanding of other species. As Fudge puts it: ‘the movement from material to rhetorical, from real to discursive animal’ (10) often shows that ‘humans are undoing their own status even as they claim they are strengthening it’ (11). In Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation (2002) John Simons makes an important point in his defence of anthropomorphism as a representational strategy. He asserts that anthropomorphism ‘is perhaps the most powerful, important and multifaceted tool for development of a discourse’ which might make a contribution to the end of discrimination against all species, human and non-human, in the ‘world in which literature is generated and which it reflects’ (139).50 In the context of my book, those who create narratives about dogs want to understand not only these animals but also humans. Some use their texts to teach others to understand humans through an understanding of what they are not: animals, and they often provoca- tively invert the ‘inside out’ dichotomy. Others explore the notion of being human as part of being human animal. Some erect boundaries, some shift and displace them and some dismantle them altogether. While ‘political animals’ is a cultural formation, it has been affected

48 Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2008. 49 Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals”, in Repre- senting Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 3-19. 50 John Simons, Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002.

Introduction 23 by the materiality of animals and their relationships with humans.51 Like any animals, dogs can be viewed as political non-human agency because, in the words of human-animal geographers Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, ‘they destabilize, transgress or even resist our human orderings […]’(5).52 As mentioned earlier I have chosen the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to reflect on the emergence of a new epistemology in relation to animals in European discourse. Mikhail Bakhtin’s little-known 1940s notes about the representation of animals in European realism in the nineteenth century attest that he was thinking of that period as being characterised by a particular conceptualisation of animals in terms of human correlations and relations. Bakhtin’s much-used notion of the grotesque and carnivalesque body that celebrates the lower, ‘animal’ human body relates mainly to the culture of the Renaissance. While Bakhtin saw the survival of the carnivalesque in various substrata of modern culture, his theorisings of animal-human relations in the nineteenth-century capitalist period reveal new themes and tendencies. In his thoughts on the representations of animals in the writings of Flaubert, entitled ‘O Flobere’ (‘About Flaubert’, 1940s),53 Bakhtin defines the nineteenth century as a period that expressed a new attitude towards the animal. He attributes this change to the rise of the middle classes with their consumer- ist attitudes towards food and products; the loss of a symbolic and mythopoetic worldview and new sets of knowledge received from other, formerly not widely disseminated philosophical systems such as Buddhism and Schopenhauer’s ideas. Bakhtin’s notes are sketchy; he did not develop them in full. Nevertheless some points are clear and can be interpreted with relative certainty. With the rise of a self- assured worldview and the egotistic lifestyles of the middle classes ‘humanity became shameless’(131) in its attitude towards animals, exploiting animals as products in an unrestrained drive for consumption. The loss of the mythological worldview that endowed animals with sacred aspects led to the loss of fear of, and respect for, animals.

51 See a discussion is Simons, Ibid., 85-87. 52 Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies in Human-Animal Relations. Eds Chris Philo, Chris Wilbert, London: Routledge. 2000. 53 M.M. Bakhtin, “O Flobere”, in Sobranie sochinenii. Moscow: IMLI, Russkie slovari, 1997, Vol. V, 130-138.

24 Political Animals

He describes this as the loss of ‘cosmic fear and cosmic memory’ (131). His allusion to Buddha’s self-sacrifice in order to save the life of a dove functions as a reminder that animals are endowed with souls. The notion of incarnation stresses the non-hierarchical relationship between human and animal essences: souls and spirits. The removal of a reductive attitude towards animals creates the possibility of a new relationship and correlation between humans and animals. Bakhtin’s reference to Schopenhauer in this context may relate to Schopenhauer’s incorporation of Buddhist notions of the afterlife into his philosophy. Bakhtin’s interest in Buddhism in application to the theme of human-animal relations in Russian realist prose is not completely surprising. Leo Tolstoy’s vegetarianism54 was partly indebted to his interest in Schopenhauer and ‘Eastern’ religions, including Buddhism. Russian writers, including Ivan Bunin and Ivan Sokolov- Mikitov (whose dog stories will be analysed later) were indebted to Buddhist and quasi-Buddhist notions of animal/human sameness. When Tolstoy reflected on the status of the persecuted and underprivileged human Other, the Jews during the pogroms, he chose a parable about a powerful king of Assyria who dreamed that he lost his privileges and became a persecuted animal, just like those he shot during his hunts. When the king woke up from his nightmare he was a reformed person with no interest in blood sports. Being in the animal’s skin, becoming-animal, had taught him to understand the suffering of the persecuted.55 The moral of this story has deep Buddhist underpinnings: ‘Do you understand that the warriors put to death were also you? And not warriors only, but the animals which you slew when hunting and ate at your feast were also you. […] You can only improve life in yourself by destroying the barriers that divide your life from that of others, and by considering others as yourself, and loving them’ (290). Tolstoy wrote the story for a collection of stories written by Russian writers in defence of the victims of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the bloodiest pogrom of the 1900s.

54 Ronald D. LeBlanc, Slavic Sins of Flesh: Food, Sex, And Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction. Durham: New Hampshire UP, 2009. 55 Leo Tolstoy, “Esarhaddon, King of Assyria”, in Twenty-Three Tales by Leo Tol- stoy. Trans. Mr. and Mrs. Aylmer Maude, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1928, 284-290. Lev Tolstoi, “Assiriiskii tsar’ Asarkhadon”, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964, Vol. XIV, 18-22.

Introduction 25

The awareness that different cultures shape different patterns of thinking and behaviour towards animals and disempowered humans finds its reflection in Vasily Rozanov’s 1903 article ‘O milosti k zhivotnym’ (‘On Mercy Towards Animals’).56 He sees the roots of cruelty to animals in contemporary Russian society in European culture’s loss of seeing the monistic sameness of humans and animals. Rozanov responds to the two different reports published in the newspaper Novoe vremia on 21 May, 1903: a case of skinning dogs and horses alive on an industrialised scale in a Russian village of the Chernigov district, and a case when people in a town in Crimea decided to allow the working animals to rest on Sundays.57 Rozanov interprets the benevolent attitudes in Crimea as a result of the influence of Judaic and Muslim traditions among the local Caraites and Tatars, and refers to the Old Testament as a source of the idea that domesticated animals are granted Sabbath on a par with people. He formulates a view that European cultures lost the understanding of ‘consanguity’ (‘edinokrovnost’) (172) between humans and animals. This loss leads by proxy to the loss of respect for human lives as manifested in murders, suicides and continuous killings of people at wars and in political unrests. Rozanov’s thinking on human-animal correlation across cultures will be explored in various parts of this book. Returning to Bakhtin’s juxtaposition of European and alternative worldviews, of relevance to my study is his idea that European realist prose writers such as Flaubert and Turgenev were central in promoting a new thinking about human-animal relations. For Bakhtin one example of this new sensibility is Turgenev’s story about the drowned dog Mumu. These observations further support the conceptual and chronological framework of my book. As a reflection of the centrality of literature as a formative agent in Russian culture, I have chosen literary texts as the main primary source for this investigation. Film is the other important medium used by twentieth-century Russian culture as a means of expression.

56 V.V. Rozanov, “O milosti k zhivotnym”, Novyi put’ (June 1903), 170-174. 57 The letters to the editor appeared in Novoe vremia No. 9773, 21 May 1903; frag- ments were reprinted in Novyi’ put’, Ibid. One letter had a title “Vopiiushchee varvarstvo”, it was written by V. Timorev and described the practices of skinning dogs and horses alive in the village Tuligolovy of Chernigov district. Another letter was entitled “Otdykh dlia zhivotnykh” and described the event in Tavrichesk district in Staryi Krym.

26 Political Animals

The scientific experiments of Pavlov, for example, are a source for intertextual responses and allusion. Indeed, literature and other arts distil various scientific and medical experiments and enter into a relationship of polemics with scientific and quasi-scientific narratives. Songs, paintings and sculptures also enter into interpretative relationships with the main dog narratives produced by Russian intellectual thought and oral folk material, and I use them as examples in various parts of my book. The post-Soviet decade gave rise to the emergence of a radical- ly new representation of the human-dog correlation. With the emergence of the syncretistic genre of postmodern performance, Oleg Kulik (b. 1961) shocked Russian and international audiences with his provocative enactments and displays of human/animal assemblages and his impersonation of Pavlov’s dogs. His performance art provides the most recent illustration of the resurrection of utopian pathos after utopia was declared dead in early post-Soviet culture. As a demonstra- tion of trans-utopianism in application to the dog topos in Russian culture, his projects are discussed in the last chapters of this book. While I construct thematic grouping I am cognizant of the fact that all such groupings have fuzzy borders. The relationships between some of these clusters can be best described as sharing common features in terms of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance.58 Advanced by Wittgenstein in his influential Philosophical Investigations (1953) the notion of family resemblance suggests that various clusters can have common features that are not shared by every individual member of the group. This approach to categories does not undermine binarisms and paradoxes inherent in the fundamental construct of dogs and underdogs as Others. It helps to understand how culture configures, mediates and tries to resolve these paradoxes. It makes it possible to show the dog as the cultural construct of intersections in the politics of class, estate, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability, and, paradoxically, of Arcadian and Utopian dreams and scientific deeds.

58 See the much quoted formulation in paragraph 67: “[…] we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (30). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978.

Introduction 27

Chapter structure

The book is structured in thematic clusters each of which is organised chronologically. I have grouped these main themes into four parts comprising ten chapters. Part One explores those works that attend to the shift in dog-human hierarchies during the times of serfdom and that problematise instances of cruelty towards people and dogs. It also explores the philosophical and psychological dimensions of children’s cruelty to these animals. It then examines the parallelism in human and dog lives as a result of the shift in fortunes. Part Two examines the role of dogs in relation to the emotional needs of people, and concentrates on narratives of partnership between dogs and various disempowered humans. The unifying feature of these narratives is that dogs end up being victimised by the intervening outside agency, or, in some cases, by the human partner under the pressure of those in power. I examine the dynamics of these relationships in the following settings: the mundane, and the extreme situations of political violence and within prison camps. In Part Three I examine the phenomenon of the creation of the cult of Soviet dogs in service to their country: dogs in the police service, prison camp guard dogs and border guard dogs. I also examine the dissident counter-narratives that reacted to the politi- calisation of dogs in Soviet propaganda discourse. In Part Four I group together various narratives of transition, transformation and transgression. This kind of transformation material shows the symbiotic nature of metaphysical and scientific transformation themes. As stated earlier, this categorisation is done with the recognition that all of these divisions have fluid boundaries. The Conclusion explicates the porous and often synthetic nature of the dog-human project, and demonstrates that the dog continues to be configured as a ‘political animal’ in both patriotic discourse and the latest dystopian visions of Russia’s future. While the book systematises dog representation material, it consciously avoids being a kaleidoscopic catalogue of dog stories.59 Nor is the book a dictionary or anthology of writers and artists who depict dogs in their work. Rather, it is a book about those dog stories

59 For an extended list of dog stories in Russian literature see Christopher J. Syrnyk, Dog as Device: The Russian ‘Canis Litterarum’. MA thesis, University of Ore- gon, 1998.

28 Political Animals which, following Ilya Ehrenburg’s wise dictum, are worth pondering over.

Part One

Exploring cruelty, injustice, and the shifting hierarchies between dogs and humans

Chapter 1 When dogs were more expensive than people

There are monsters who give borzoi puppies to their peasant women for breastfeeding. – Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, from a letter to Nicholas I. 18251

The declaration that, during the days of serfdom, the life of a master’s dog was valued above that of a serf is one of the most favoured rhetorical devices used in the condemnation of serfdom. The pairing of the landlord with his dog is a stable topos; it has been reflected upon and parodied within Russian literature in its various manifestations. One of the most common targets of criticism are the excesses of the relationship, by which a pedigree hound has a better life than a peasant serf or, in some cases, impoverished gentry. Historically serfs’ lives were cheaper than those of cattle and purebred dogs in respect to both their market value and the subjective perception of their masters.2 Comparisons between animals and humans generally reflect the accepted hierarchy related to these two categories. As Joyce Salisbury demonstrates, the hierarchical norm established by the Christian church determined a clear boundary between humans and animals. The resulting hierarchy placed animals at the bottom of the scale, followed by children and then women, with men taking a position at the top of the symbolic ladder.3 This pattern applies to Christian cultures throughout Europe, including Eastern Europe.4 This model implies that, in the hierarchical structure, humans (Christians) must be superi- or to animals. This overall view accepts the supremacy of human

1 Dekabristy. Moscow-Leningrad, 1951, 512. 2 L.P. Sabaneev, Sobaki okhotnich’i: Borzye i gonchie. Moscow: Terra, 1992. Reprint of Sabaneev’s book published in 1896. 3 Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1994. 4 O.V. Belova, Slavianskii bestiarii: slovar’ nazvanii i simvoliki. Moscow: Indrik, 2001. 32 Political Animals agency as either God-given or, in the case of atheistic ideologies, as the result of evolutionary dialectics. In the context of Russian democratic and Soviet thought this structure is particularly intriguing. Ac- cording to the doctrine of Marxist dialectics, historiography should not approach any phenomenon outside the concrete historical situation. Yet the acceptance of this human-animal hierarchy as static subverts the very notion of historicity.

Ivan Izhakevich’s (1864-1962) painting ‘Krepostnykh meniaiut na sobak’ (‘The Exchange of Serfs for Dogs’), 1926 depicts a group of serfs to be bar- tered for three pedigree hounds.

The Marxist approach to the division between humans and animals has been held partly responsible for the ecological problems of twentieth-century Eastern Europe.5 The Communist Manifesto expressed the view that societies for the protection of animals were yet another bourgeois invention falling into the category of ‘conservative’ or ‘bourgeois’ socialism. As such, they worked against the proletariat.6 This view implies that there can be no society in which the lives of animals are more expensive than, or equal to, those of humans. Yet, fictional genres such as science fiction and horror films enlist phan-

5 See Kathleen Kete, “Animals and Ideology: The Politics of Animal Protection in Europe”, in Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002, 19-34. 6 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition. Intro. Eric Hobsbawm, London: Verso, 1998.

When dogs were more expensive than people 33 tasmic scenarios based on the reversal of these hierarchies, depicting societies in which humans are subordinate to various ‘ruling’ animals.7 Moreover, Russian literature and utopian thought contain examples of the dismantlement of hierarchies of subordination and the fantasies of brotherly and harmonious relationships between people and animals. Texts from the nineteenth century onwards that focus on the theme of the low value of the life of a serf compared to that of an animal typically use dogs as the emblematic animal. It is thus the dog that serves as the referent and demarcates the difference between humans and animals. As a rhetorical site of comparison it paradoxically also implies features of commonality. In this way the embedded dual- ism aligns with the main archetype of the representation of the dog in Russian culture – that of correlation between the human and the dog. This chapter demonstrates the chronological development of the theme of social injustice as depicted via the notion of the ‘upside down’ hierarchy between dogs and underprivileged people in Russian cultural productions. It also contains examples of the utopian futuristic quest for brotherly love between animals and people of all classes. The most striking example of such inverted hierarchies between humans and dogs in the classed perception of Russian landlords during serfdom was the practice of forcing serf women to breastfeed puppies. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that this was a common practice, rather than excessive and isolated incidents, the practice did exist. So outrageous was this idea that it impressed the imagination of Russian writers, poets and painters who used the practice as a discursive formation. On the subject of the cruelty of landlords and gentry to serfs, noted historian Richard Pipes wittily remarked that it would be wrong to judge the treatment of serfs by the behaviour of a few sadistic members of the gentry, in the same way that it would be wrong to judge Victorian London on the basis of Jack the Ripper’s crimes.8 Historical facts related to this practice were, however, used as rhetorical devices in the struggle against the institution of serfdom. Following his incarceration at the Peter and Paul

7 Giant animals in Jules Verne’s fiction; in cult Hollywood films Tarantula (1955), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), or Empire of the Ants (1977). 8 See a discussion in Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime. London: Wei- denfeld and Nickolson, 1974, 152.

34 Political Animals

Fortress, Decembrist poet and writer A.A. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii (1797-1837) wrote to Nicholas I:

Negroes on plantations are happier than many Russian peasant serfs at the hands of landlords. To separate a family and to sell its members to different owners, to deflower maidens, to debauch peasant wives – all this is done regularly. […] There are monsters who give borzoi puppies to their peasant women for breastfeeding. (512)9

Of special relevance to the fictionalisation of this motif is the fact that Bestzuhev-Marlinskii was the first person in Russian literature to refer to this practice in his writing.10 In his story ‘Zamok Eizen’ (‘Eisen Castle’), he refers to this motif for censorship reasons in relation to a story about a cruel medieval German, Baron von Eisen. Yet within the fictional story the writer also implies an historical origin for this act. He maintains that the event was registered in the Livonian Chronicles. He, however, made up the story and attributed it to the Chronicles. In the case of the Decembrist writer, politics and fiction meet in a rhetorical gesture, the aim of which was to fight serfdom as an institution. The historical actuality of the forced breastfeeding of dogs during serfdom is reflected in V.I. Semevskii’s book Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Ekateriny II (Peasants during the Reign of Catherine II, 1903).11 It describes the historical testimonial of a landlord who ‘ordered to burn with coals the soles of his serf’s feet because he drowned two of the landlord’s puppies which the serf’s wife was ordered to breastfeed’ (199). So striking to the imagination was the image of a dog being breastfed by women serfs that, during the 50th anniversary celebrating the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1911, the painter Nikolai Kasat- kin (1859-1930) made a special painting of this subject. It was entitled ‘Krepostnaia aktrisa v opale, soslannaia na koniushniu kormit’ svoei

9 Dekabristy. Moscow-Leningrad, 1951. 10 Of historical interest is an American paediatrics textbook’s advice for pregnant women to prepare nipples for breastfeeding ‘by the application of a young, but sufficiently strong puppy to the breasts’. William Dewees, A Treatise on the Physical and Medical Treatment of Children, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: H.C. Carey and I. Lea, 1826, 47. 11 V.I. Semevskii, Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Ekateriny II. St Petersburg, 1903.

When dogs were more expensive than people 35 grud’iu broshennykh shcheniat: Talant i tsepi rabstva’ (‘Disgraced serf-actress sent to the stables to breastfeed abandoned puppies: talent and the chains of serfdom’). The watercolour version was printed in the calendar ‘The Great Reform. 19 February 1861-1911’. The oil version of the painting was exhibited in the 14th Peredvizhniki Exhibi- tion in 1916 with the shorter title ‘Krepostnaia aktrisa, soslannaia kormit’ shcheniat’ (‘Serf-actress exiled to breastfeed puppies’).12 The irony of the painting is that it is also exploitative of the naked woman, so integrating elements of sensationalism and pornography into the social message of critical realist art. The painting highlights the woman’s bare breasts, exhibited in the foreground, while the tiny puppy is not very well visible. The beautiful woman’s breasts, contrasted in their whiteness to her scarlet red dress, become the focus of the painting. In the context of the intellectual trends in Russian art of the 1910s, a decade characterised by an interest in decadence, the painting can be interpreted as both critical of the gentry’s degeneracy, and exploitative of the voyeuristic gaze of the public.13 The exploitative subject of Kasatkin’s painting was used for propaganda purposes in the Soviet Union. In 1931 the Museum of Revolution (Muzei Revoliutsii Soiuza SSR) produced postcards with the reproduction of Kasatkin’s painting. The postcards were entitled ‘Krepostnaia aktrisa v opale, kormiashchaia grud’iu barskogo shchen- ka’ (‘Disgraced serf-actress breastfeeding master’s puppy’). Notably, this title was printed on the back of the cards in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Armenian and Arabic. The back of the postcard mentions the print run of 15, 000 copies. The painting itself was slightly modified: the dress covers part of the actress’s breasts, but the voyeuristic aspect of the painting remains intact. The postcard was aimed to incite the feelings of class antagonism, but it also served as an attractive cover art that exploits female body. This postcard features today at an Internet site, and various comments suggest that members of contemporary Russian public do not believe in the historical reality of forced breastfeeding of puppies by female serfs.14

12 K.A. Sitnik, Nikolai Alekseevich Kasatkin. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo. Moscow: Is- kusstvo, 1955, 390. 13 On decadence in Silver Age see Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin De Siecle. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2005. 14 Oleg Gonozov, “Udalili zhenskuiu grud’”. www.proza.ru/2009/09/15/537.

36 Political Animals

Nikolai Kasatkin. ‘Serf-actress exiled to breastfeed puppies’ (1911), depicts a beautiful serf-woman made to breastfeed puppies as a form of punishment and humiliation.

The motif of breastfed puppies became especially politicised immediately after the October Revolution and during the Civil War. Poet and playwright Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893-1930) used it in his political art; in his propagandistic graphic-text publication (or agitlubok) ‘Skazka o dezertire’ (‘Fairy-tale about a deserter’, 1921) he writes, ‘And remembered Sileverst the tortures of serfdom / And his wife in the master’s house / Breastfeeding the master’s bitch’ (60- 61).15 The first edition of this tale had illustrations by Maiakovskii, including a drawing depicting the breastfeeding of a puppy.16 The motif of the forced breastfeeding of dogs and the rebellious reaction by male serfs against their master oppressors developed into the genre of the oral anecdote, with various people claiming such a

15 V.V. Maiakovskii, “Skazka o dezertire”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955, Vol. II, 60-61. 16 The illustrated edition had a long title in the tradition of Russian folk wooden print books: “Rasskaz o dezertire, ustroivshemsia nedurnen’ko, i o tom, kakaia uchast’ postigla ego samogo i sem’iu shkurnika” (“A story about a deserter, who got himself a good place, and about the fate that caught up with this traitor and his family”).

When dogs were more expensive than people 37 story as an episode of their familial past. A variant of the story featured as late as 1983 in an interview given by hero of the Soviet Union G.I. Ivashkevich for the Pravda newspaper.17 Ivashkevich used the story to illustrate the class-conscious leanings of his great-grandfather. He maintained that his great-grandparents’ landlord one day brought in some borzoi puppies in a basket and asked the wife to breastfeed them. His explanation was that the bitch had died and that the puppies would otherwise starve to death. The peasant grabbed the basket of puppies and smashed it against the floor. When the landlord went to take the revolver from the wall in order to shoot the rebellious serf, Ivashkevich’s great-grandfather swiftly grabbed the gun out of the master’s hands and shot the master. He then allegedly put his family on to a horse-drawn cart and escaped without penalty. Ivashkevich’s undeniably fictionalised account nevertheless serves as an example of the mythological status of this plot. It is possible that within family traditions the story was passed orally from generation to generation, as proof of the heroic nature of esteemed ancestors. The function of this plot as a mystification narrative was clear to some writers who distilled it into their narratives. The two best-known examples are Vla- dimir Korolenko’s ‘On a Cloudy Day’ (1896) and Velimir Khlebnikov’s ‘The Night before the Soviets’ (1921), both of which will be examined in this chapter. In terms of the intertextuality of this plot, it is relevant to mention that Khlebnikov was familiar with Korolenko’s story. A disturbing motif related to the shifting hierarchies between landlords’ hounds and serf-children is evident in the story of a general who punishes a serf-boy for wounding his favourite hound by order- ing his dogs to hunt the boy down. An account of this was published in Alexander Herzen’s émigré journal ‘Kolokol’ (‘The Bell’) in 1860 – notably a year before the official emancipation of serfs was decreed by Alexander II. The story, a serf’s testimonial entitled ‘Po chasti pomeshchich’ego psoliubiia’ (‘Regarding the landlords’ love of dogs’),18 was published in Russia in the magazine Russkii vestnik (Russian Messenger) in 1877, after the emancipation of serfs. Dosto- evsky (1821-1881) distilled this plot in his 1880 novel The Brothers

17 See G. Iakovlev’s interview in Pravda, 3 July 1983. Quoted in R.V. Duganov, Velimir Khlebnikov: Priroda tvorchestva. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990, 251. 18 A. Gertsen, “Po chasti pomeshchich’ego psoliubiia”, Kolokol 74 (1860), 3-5.

38 Political Animals

Karamazov in which he framed it not as a social issue but as an example of human sadism and the manifestation of evil in this world. Two categories of dogs have been politicised: small house-dogs (komnatnaia sobaka) and hunting dogs such as hounds and borzois. While the small dogs were associated with the leisure of the privileged classes, borzois and hounds were hated by the peasants through their association with their powerful masters. Borzois in particular were implicated in Russian literary narratives related to the high value placed on landlords’ hounds compared to that of serfs and serf- children. The noted Russian nineteenth-century authority on hunting dogs and editor of the journal Priroda i okota (Nature and Hunt) in the 1870s-1880s, Leonid Sabaneev, wrote about the political status of this breed in France after the Revolution.19 He noted that borzois almost became extinct in France because they were destroyed by the lower classes as a means of avenging all the suffering that the landlords and their dog hunts had caused the peasants. Borzois and the French gentry were conflated as class enemies. In the dichotomy between serfs and landlords’ dogs studied in this chapter, it is again the borzoi that is classed as an enemy. This chapter focuses on the representations of the distorted values and hierarchies within the world of Russian landlords and gentry who considered the lives of their purebred dogs to be of higher value than those of some humans. The texts examined represent a variety of political, poetic and philosophical approaches to this theme, from Alexander Pushkin’s story ‘Dubrovskii’ (1833) which weaves the thematics of the dog/human hierarchy into an exploration of the relationship between a rich and impoverished gentry, to Dostoevsky’s incorporation of the motif of cruelty to a peasant child by a deranged general who punishes the child for wounding his prized hound in The Brothers Karamazov, to the populist pathos of Korolenko’s story ‘On a Cloudy Day’ (1896), and finally to Khlebnikov’s modernist work ‘The Night before the Soviets’ (1921) that effectively links the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

19 L.P. Sabaneev, Sobaki okhotnich’i: Borzye i gonchie. Moscow: Terra, 1992.

When dogs were more expensive than people 39

The rich man’s dogs and the poor man’s honour: Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Dubrovskii’

Alexander Pushkin’s (1799-1837) unfinished story ‘Dubrovskii’20 is perhaps the most influential text in terms of introducing modern Rus- sian readers to the theme of Russian gentry treating their pedigree dogs better than their serfs. The story was studied as part of the Soviet school curriculum and even today school children of the approximate age of eleven read the text as an example of nineteenth-century Rus- sian social injustices and the form of rebellion which these injustices created.21 The story was not published during Pushkin’s lifetime for reasons of censorship. It was first published, with significant dele- tions, in 1841 in the complete edition of his works. The plot of the story describes a romantic rebel vigilante, the young gentleman Vladimir Dubrovskii, who avenges the early death of his noble father. The death was the result of the humiliating treatment of this impoverished aristocrat by his rich and powerful landlord friend Kirila Troekurov. Both landlords had been good neighbours for years in spite of the differences in their financial affairs. While Troekurov treated the rest of his neighbours with boorishness and arrogance, he made an exception for his friend Dubrovskii. Troekurov has an impressive kennel with some 500 dogs. He takes special pride in his pedigree hounds and borzois, and personally oversees the selection of puppies from every litter. In one such episode Troekurov chooses the two best puppies and orders the rest of the litter to be drowned. His kennel is kept in exceptional order: it is clean and spacious, and there is even a hospital for sick dogs. He frequently shows off his kennel to visitors and it is during one such occasion that the conflict between Troekurov and Dubrovskii occurs. This conflict is instigated by Dubrovskii’s comment that he doubts whether Troekurov’s peasants live as well as his dogs. One of Troekurov’s servants rudely tells Dubrovskii that the dogs in his master’s kennels have better lives than some of the poor gentry. Everybody present

20 A.S. Pushkin, “Dubrovskii”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow: izd-vo Akademiia nauk 1957, Vol. VI, 215-316. 21 Russkaia literatura: uchebnik dlia 6-go klassa. Moscow: izd-vo Prosveshchenie, 1979.

40 Political Animals accepts the statement as a joke, even though the suggestion could apply to each of them. Dubrovskii, however, takes it as a personal insult and silently leaves. In his usual boorish way Troekurov tries to pressure him into resuming their friendship, but Dubrovskii is determined to get satisfaction. He demands that the serf who insulted him be brought to his estate for justice, arguing that it is up to him to decide whether to pardon or punish him. Although impoverished, Dubrovskii comes from an old line of aristocratic families and, in accordance with the mentality of that class, is firm in keeping the boundaries between serfs and masters intact. The exchange between the two landowners contains important historical information about the power-broking between neighbouring landlords: it was customary for rich landlord’s peasants, who relied on the support of their powerful master, to mis- behave in the neighbouring lands of poorer members of the gentry.22 The moment Troekurov’s serfs learn about the conflict they start steal- ing wood from Dubrovskii’s forests. Troekurov’s revenge is merciless. His love-hate feelings for Dubrovskii are manifested in his desire to bring his neighbour to his knees. He fabricates a story that Dubrovskii’s estate was bought by a member of his family some time in the past. The corrupt court decides to dispossess old Dubrovskii who becomes temporarily insane as a result of the shock. The court scene in which the verdict is made is framed in the context of the dog subplot. Dubrovskii begins to hallu- cinate, imagining dogs running amok in a church. The imagery is striking in terms of dog thematics in Russian culture:

Get out of here, the tribe of Ham! […] This is unheard of – to let dogs into the church, into God’s house! Dogs are running all over the church. I will teach you a lesson …. (234)

That Dubrovskii’s nightmare materialises in visions of dogs is psychologically motivated: dogs become symbolic because it is in the attitude towards them that the shift in centuries-old master-serf hierarchies has taken place. Now poor gentry such as Dubrovskii find them-

22 Pushkin used real life documents about the court case of 1832 and included the text of the court document in his story. See B.V. Tomashevskii, “Primechaniia”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow: izd-vo Akademiia nauk, 1957, Vol. VI, 771.

When dogs were more expensive than people 41 selves on the same side of the dichotomy as serfs. As such, Dubrov- skii is on the opposite side of the dogs, unlike his rich neighbour. But there is another important symbolic meaning encoded in Dubrovskii’s hallucination, a denotation rooted in the dog symbolism in Russian folk belief. Ethnographers have noted that there existed in Muscovy a special decree that required a prayer to be said if a dog happened to run into a church. This ritual was aimed at cleansing the house of the Lord from the presence of evil forces.23 The law was cancelled as part of the Patriarch Nikon’s reforms of the seventeenth century but, according to Boris Uspensky, echoes of the prohibition survived in belief systems.24 If a dog entered a peasant house or if a bitch gave birth to puppies in such a house then that house was cleansed – prayers were said and, in some parts of Russia, the stove dismantled.25 These customs were driven by the belief that the Church and house are sacred places and that it is impossible to reach God in the presence of the unclean powers represented by dog. Pushkin thus reveals ethno- graphically valuable knowledge in his depiction of dog thematics in the subplot of the conflict between the two landowners. The ethnographic approach in relation to dog emblematics is further pursued in this story through the introduction of cat symbolism. As in the case of dogs, the cat functions on two levels: the animal is depicted in its own right and in its representational or symbolic function. When the old Dubrovskii dies of a heart attack his son, the young Dubrovskii, decides to burn down the house in his determina- tion not to let the enemy, Troekurov, get possession of the family home. Present in the house are members of the jury who had dispos- sessed his father. The young Dubrovskii arranges for his serf, the blacksmith Arkhip, to set the house on fire. While Dubrovskii asks the smith to open the front door of the house, thus providing the judges with a chance to escape, the smith decides to lock the door without telling Dubrovskii.26 This episode in which the manor house is set on

23 “Decree to cleanse Church in case a dog runs inside the church, or if an infidel enters it”. “Chin na ochishchenie tserkvi, esli pes vskochit v tserkov’, ili iz nevernykh kto voidet”. Quoted in Uspenskii, 290. 24 B.A. Uspenskii, “Religiozno-mifologicheskii aspekt russkoi ekspressivnoi frazeologii”, 197-302. 25 S.I. Smirnov, Drevnerusskii dukhovnik. Issledovanie po istorii tserkovnogo byta. Moscow, 1913, 274. 26 Debreczeny questions Dubrovskii’s intent to allow the clerks to escape. See Paul

42 Political Animals fire has received numerous comments, all of them stressing that Push- kin elaborated on a common form of rebellion against landlords.27 Setting fire to manor houses was an act of revenge frequently practised by peasants in protest against their cruel masters. Yet, commentators have not noted the importance of the animal theme in this episode: the blacksmith Arkhip (a precursor to Pushkin’s later rebels such as historical Yemelyan Pugachev), while showing cruelty towards the law officers, acts humanely towards the cat. The poor animal is sitting on the roof of the house when the fire begins to engulf the building. Arkhip saves the cat, at great risk of being burnt. My contention is that in this episode Pushkin introduces an animal theme that functions as a counter-narrative to the symbolism of the dog. What can be more emblematic of difference than the archetypal difference between dogs and cats? When the house is set on fire people notice a cat trapped on top of the roof. The reaction to this sight is telling and indicates that Pushkin invested this episode with multiple meanings. It can be seen as an ethnographic scene: the peasant children regard the cat that is about to be burned alive as an entertaining spectacle – they laugh at it as it runs up and down the burning roof and makes desperate pleading sounds. Arkhip, however, heroically saves the cat. He climbs to the roof and brings the animal down in a scene that is clearly politically subversive: while the blacksmith saves the cat, the members of the corrupt jury are burned alive inside the house. Their souls are clearly not of concern to Arkhip who shows a class attitude towards official legal procedures, despised as they are by the simple folk. In addition, Pushkin reveals Arkhip’s motive in showing that, for him, the cat is ‘God’s living creature’ (255). The cat saving-scene is enacted against the backdrop of children laughing at its sufferings. For the children, the cat’s behaviour is as much an entertaining spectacle as the burning house itself. The blacksmith calls them ‘little devils’ (‘beseniata’, 255) and makes the following indicative statement: ‘What are you laughing at, little devils. Don’t you fear God? – one of God’s creatures is suffering and you fools think it is funny’ (255).

Debreczeny, The Other Pushkin. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1983. 27 D.D. Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put’ Pushkina. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1967. Iu.M. Lotman, Pushkin. St Petersburg: Iskusstvo SPB, 1995.

When dogs were more expensive than people 43

The theme of children’s cruelty to pets will be addressed later in the book. In this episode such behaviour functions as an example of unchristian behaviour explained by their lack of religious knowledge. Of importance in this context is the implication that, unlike the unchristian behaviour of the children, cats are quasi-Christian animals endowed with souls. What is the function of this episode if viewed as a juxtaposition between the treatment of dogs and that of cats? If cats have souls and are God’s living creatures, are dogs not? Dogs fall into the domain of gentry estate and culture and, vis-à-vis peasant culture, are aligned with the hostile Other. But dogs can also be treated cruelly by their gentry owners: they regularly go through the process of selection and most of the newly born, high-pedigree puppies are killed. Who prays for their lost souls? The gentry or the peasants? Pushkin’s story does not provide evidence of such sympathy. The answer might lie in the fact that, from the point of view of the peasants, pedigree dogs are not what the blacksmith terms ‘God’s creatures’. Indeed, the process of ‘unnatural’ selection which dogs undergo as part of breeding generally (and on Troekurov’s estate in particular) may exclude them, in the perception of the peasants, from the category of ‘God’s creatures’. Rather, they are creatures of men’s manipulation, men who are hostile in terms of class and estate.28 This gives dogs a different ontological status from cats. I stated earlier that cats have a different symbolic status in Russian folk beliefs from that of dogs. Unlike dogs, cats are given ‘Russian’ names, Vas’ka for male cats and Mashka for female cats being the most common.29 This commonality is in line with the commonality of names among peasants and reflects cats’ different status in culture from that of dogs. Unlike dogs, cats are also allowed to live in churches and houses. Indeed, in the episode under analysis the cat is a part of a Christian house and those who are burning to death inside are representative of the evil forces that have to be destroyed. The cat and its soul are saved.

28 Harriet Ritvo observes: “Even the dog’s body proclaimed its profound subversiveness to human will. It was the most physically malleable of animals, the one whose shape and size changed most readily in response to the whims of breeders”. Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 21. 29 D. Nikol’skii, “O proiskhozhdenii i smysle sobstvennykh imen nekotorykh zhivotnykh”, Filologicheskie zapiski 4 (1900), 1-7.

44 Political Animals

The fact that Pushkin chooses a comparison with a dog’s life to represent an ultimate insult signifies the symbolic overtones of dog thematics. The core of the conflict is not only an insult made to a member of the Russian gentry by the serf of a richer landlord, nor is it simply a social protest by peasants against their lords. It also relates to the symbolism of the dog itself. The common school interpretation of the story as a manifestation of social conflict and an example of Pushkin’s interest in matters of social justice has influenced the understanding of the story by Rus- sian readers.30 Iurii Lotman stresses that, while in ‘Dubrovskii’ Push- kin expressed his anti-government feelings by entertaining the idea of a patriarchal bond between side-lined gentry, such as the Dubrovskiis, and serfs, he soon adopted a more positive view of the tsar and a negative attitude towards the government apparatus.31 The fact that Push- kin associated himself with the old and impoverished gentry explains his sympathy for the Dubrovskiis. Lotman notes too that it would be an oversimplification to interpret the rebellious behaviour of the young Dubrovskii solely as a form of social protest. The inclusion of this story in the school curriculum helped to embed in children’s minds the striking idea that dogs could live better than people. From this a number of associations were created. First, the link between the old world landlords’ excessive extravagance and pedigree dogs was firmly established as a manifestation of wealth and unreasonable behaviour, with dog ownership symptomatic of the whims and privileges of the upper classes. Bad landlords and pedigree dogs thus formed a conglomerate, with no distinction between the cruelty of the bad human and the angry dog. Secondly, the story conveyed the idea that being compared to a dog could be reductive and humiliating. Absent from these associations, however, was the ethnographic specificity of the animal subplot. Pushkin presented Troeku- rov as a thoroughly Russian member of the gentry. Described by Pushkin as an ‘old world Russian master’ (217) and a self-righteous tyrant, Troekurov embodied a cruelty presented by Pushkin as a typically Russian form of tyranny. The story thus addresses multiple elements of specificity within Russian cultural formations. Pushkin

30 See Russkaia literatura: uchebnik dlia 6-go klassa. Moscow: izd-vo Prosvesh- chenie, 1979. 31 Iu.M. Lotman, Pushkin. St Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1995.

When dogs were more expensive than people 45 similarly explores the ‘Russianness’ of the reasons behind the serfs’ dislike of dogs. These reasons relate to folk beliefs and prejudices which are as entrenched within society as issues of class and estate hierarchies. This culture-specific substratum of ‘Dubrovskii’ was typically missed in the latest film adaptation of the story. Made in 1989, in the year before the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, the film Dubrov- skii32 reflects Glasnost-era freedoms of expression, such as that of Russian Orthodox faith and religion, but does not tackle the cultural anxiety around dogs. The film presents young Dubrovskii as a Chris- tian believer and, in relation to the arson attack on the house full of law clerks, as an innocent. While the film depicts the class hatred of the serf who locks the door and then sets the house on fire, it excludes the episode depicting the rescue of the cat by that same serf. The film also fails to explore old Dubrovskii’s utterings about dogs as unchristian forces in the scene where he hallucinates about dogs inside the church. The whole layer of dog symbolism in the story is thus missed. Lotman described ‘Dubrovskii’ as ‘an enigmatic story’ (‘zaga- dochnaia povest’’, 16). I suggest that the difference in attitude towards dogs and cats by lords (good and bad) and serfs helps us to understand Pushkin’s politics. While he was famously afraid of the cruelty implicit in a Russian revolt, in the cat-saving episode he found a way to portray the humane side of the rebellious serf. In doing so he displayed his knowledge of folk beliefs. While the catalyst of the conflict between the two landlords in this story is the tendency of Russian landlords to privilege pedigree dogs over their serfs, Pushkin shifts the focus of this conflict towards the sense of pride of the poor gentry. Here Pushkin shows authorial sympathy for the poor landlord by demonstrating the man’s belief in the unclean nature of dogs, a belief typical of the peasant classes.33 While Pushkin clearly shared the humanistic sentiments of his enlightened contemporaries, such as Bestu- zhev-Marlinskii, he did not develop the plot of the tendency by the privileged classes to treat their dogs better than serfs. He left ‘Dubrov-

32 Dubrovskii. Dir. V. Nikiforov, screenplay E. Grigor’ev and O. Nikich, Bela- rus’film for Gosteleradio, 1989. 33 On the theme of money in Pushkin’s work see A.V. Anikin. Muza i mamona: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie motivy u Pushkina. Moscow: Mysl’, 1989. Also Caryl Emerson, “Pushkin’s Drama”, in Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Ed. Andrew Kahn, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006, 57-75.

46 Political Animals skii’ unfinished when he moved to his study of the historical revolt by Yemelyan Pugachev, an event later depicted in ‘Captain’s Daughter’. But his exposé of the role of dogs in master-serf animosities takes into account the hidden substratum of simple people’s views on dogs and … cats.

Dostoevsky’s sadistic landlords, villainous muzhiks, and animal and serf abuse in The Brothers Karamazov

The juxtaposition of the treatment of expensive pedigree dogs and peasant serfs by the gentry was best actualised in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.34 Characteristic of this writer’s dramatic mode, the author narrates a story about the sadistic murder of a peasant boy who was torn to pieces by hounds on the order of a rich general. Dos- toevsky indicates his story’s genealogical relationship to Pushkin’s dog subplot. In the novel, the story about the general’s hounds and the serf boy is retold by Ivan Karamazov who claims that he had recently read it in one of the periodicals called either Archive or Antiquities (Starina).35 The story allegedly took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the same time that Pushkin’s story was written. Ivan is thus both retelling the actual historical events that he learned from a periodical and making apparent the intertextual link to Push- kin’s narrative. He notes that, at the time the event took place, there were many very rich landlords with huge kennels who treated their dogs better than their poor gentry neighbours and various hangers-on. The last detail is a clear intertextual link to the plot of ‘Dubrovskii’. While retaining the moral pathos and emotional strength of Pushkin’s story, Ivan shifts the meaning of the theme of justice and pay-back for the crime to the level of Christian theology. Whereas Pushkin’s young Dubrovskii avenged his father in the mode of the romantic rebel, in Dostoevsky’s story the relationship between the offender and the victim is problematised on a number of levels: social and class injustice,

34 F.M. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1976, Vols. XIV and XV. 35 Dostoevsky refers here to two journals: Russkii Arkhiv published between 1863 and 1917 and Russkaia starina published between 1870 and 1918. Both of these monthly periodicals published material on Russian history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See L.P. Grossman, Seminarii po Dostoevskomu. Materialy, bibliografiia i kommentarii. Moscow Petrograd: GIZ, 1922.

When dogs were more expensive than people 47 the existence of evil as examined within a philosophical framework, and challenges to the Christian concept of forgiveness and theodicy.36 The disturbing story that Ivan recounts is a tale about a rich and powerful retired general who punishes a serf boy when he learns that the boy wounded the leg of one of his most valued hounds. Ivan makes a comment about the historical circumstances at the time that this event took place, thus presenting the general as a product of his time and society. Yet the story is more than a criticism of the system of serfdom. While this system produced the way of thinking that valued the life of an expensive pedigree dog over that of a serf, the theme of social injustice in accordance with Dostoevsky’s polyphonic poetics lies on the surface layer of the text.37 In a manner characteristic of Dostoevsky’s exploration of human sadism in this novel, the story of the general and the boy is framed as a narrative of the sadistic enjoyment of the punishment of the weak by the strong and powerful. The general orders that the child, who is eight years old, be undressed. He then makes the child run and orders his servants to unleash the pack of borzoi dogs. The dogs tear the boy to pieces. The boy’s nakedness contributes to the sadistic dimensions of this story. Making his mother watch the scene is another manifestation of the general’s sadism. In staging this scene as a spectacle the general means to use it as a lesson to his serfs, further adding to the story’s disturbing effect. As a punishment for his crime, the general is put under guardianship – the discrepancy between the crime and punishment is stark. Ivan Karamazov, an atheist and a rationalist, uses this tale in order to test the limits of the Christian notion of forgiveness. And indeed, it achieves its aim – Ivan’s brother Alesha, a Christian believer, exclaims at the end of this story that the general had to be shot. Although Alesha later revokes this response, his spontaneous reaction testifies to the discrepancy between ‘natural’ moral judgment and the learned Christian construct. Leonid Grossman has investigated the sources of the story of the general and the savage killing of the child.38 He found that a story

36 Nina Perlina, Varieties of Poetic Utterance: Quotation in ‘The Brothers Karama- zov’. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. 37 On polyphony in Dostoevsky see M.M. Bakhtin, “Problemy poetiki Dosto- evskogo”, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2002, Vol. VI. 38 Leonid Grossman, “Poslednii roman Dostoevskogo”, in F.M. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy. Moscow: GIHL, 1935, Vol. I, 3-51.

48 Political Animals about a boy hounded on a landlord’s orders was published in the journal Russkii vestnik (Russian Messenger) No. 9, 1877 under the rubric ‘Vospominaniia krepostnogo’ (‘Memoirs of a serf’):39

A serf boy did something silly: he threw a stone at the dog and wounded its leg. The dog was from the landlord’s kennel. The landlord noticed this and ordered his people to punish the boy. The next day he ordered a hunt. The boy was brought to the place where the hunt was to take place. He ordered the boy to be undressed and to make him run naked so that the dogs could hound him down. But the borzois would only run up to the boy, sniff him but would not touch him. The boy’s mother ran to the scene from behind the forest, she grabbed the boy and wanted to take him away. They tore her away from the boy and brought her back to the village. They let the dogs out once more! The mother became insane and died on the third day. (554)

Of special relevance in the serf’s testimonial is the fact that the dogs were not interested in hounding the boy down. This suggests they were not taught to hound children. In this ‘real life’ event there is no evidence of the child’s death; he does not get torn to pieces by the borzois. The borzois in a hunting situation were taught not to ‘eat’ and not to tear apart the prey. The probability of borzois tearing the boy apart is unlikely. Dostoevsky’s contemporary readers from the upper classes had a knowledge of hunting conventions with borzois (psovaia okhota)40. They would have known that Ivan fictionalised the plot. In the serf’s account the borzois are not to blame, the landlord is. In Dos- toevsky’s fictionalised account the dogs are implicated as participants of the crime. This goes against the logic of Ivan’s original argument that human sadism is a unique feature not found among animals. He notes earlier that in nature wild animals like tigers tear apart their victims because they are driven by hunger. Animals do not have a sadistic drive, people do. Admittedly, borzois are not ‘wild animals’ like tigers. They are to a large degree a product of human-administered

39 Quoted in G. Fridlender et al, “Primechaniia”, in F.M. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1976, Vol. XV, 554. 40 See L.P. Sabaneev, Sobaki okhotnich’i: borzye i gonchie. Moscow: Terra, 1992. He published parts of his book in this journal Priroda i okhota in 1878-1881, during Dostoevsky’s life.

When dogs were more expensive than people 49 breeding and selection. Yet, they have been bred and trained to perform definite tasks during the hunt, and their task is to run after the prey till the prey gets exhausted, to prostrate the prey and to neck-hold it until the hunter’s arrival on a horse. It is pertinent here to present a quick overview of attitudes towards the hunt by Dostoevsky’s contemporary writers. In her discussion on the depiction of hunting experiences by Russian gentry writers from this period, Margarita Odesskaia shows the development of a schema from a positive evaluation of this activity to a gradual criticism of the hunt by the end of the century.41 In Russia the sub-genre of hunting stories saw its high point in the 1840-1850s when various periodicals dedicated to the subject appeared on the market. During this time the stylistics of narrative changes from dry sport-like report- age of hunting procedures to a more lyrical and philosophical discourse. Within such sketches there appear expressive descriptions of nature and some ethnographic details about the characters of the people involved. Patriotic writers were quick to criticise the hunting fashion as a form of Anglomania in imitation of all things English. In his 1845 article ‘Sport, okhota’ (‘Sport, hunt’), published in the Slavo- phile journal Moskvitianin (Muscovite), Alexei Khomiakov enters into polemics with the views on the hunt espoused by Napoleon Reutt, editor of the specialised journal Zhurnal konnozavodstva i okhoty (Journal of Horse-breeding and the Hunt).42 He asserts that Russians are on a higher level of intellectual developmental than the English and therefore they should not imitate them in engaging with the hunt. Writers such as Ivan Turgenev and Ivan Aksakov treated the hunt as a form of engagement with nature. Nurtured by the ideas of Natur- philosophie, they believed that they were an integral part of the natural life cycle. In accepting their own death as part of the natural order of things, they saw the death of animals as part of the same cycle. From this philosophical perspective, dogs become a necessary attribute of the gentleman hunter who develops a special relationship with these animals. Because the human and the animal world are all part of the same natural cycle, dogs are seen as much part of the human world

41 Margarita Odesskaia, “Ruzh’e ili lira: Okhotnichii rasskaz v russkoi literature XIX veka”, Voprosy literatury 3 (May-June 1998), 239-252. 42 Aleksei Khomiakov, “Sport, okhota”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Moscow: Tipografiia P. Bakhmeteva, 1861, Vol. I, 434-444.

50 Political Animals as they are a part of nature. This attitude to the hunt had changed sharply by the 1880s. With the death of established writers such as Turgenev, and with Leo Tolstoy undergoing a personal crisis of faith and embracing vegetarianism, the new generation of writers preaches a new ethos in its attitude towards the hunt. Anton Chekhov and Alex- ander Kuprin among others did not see harmony between nature and human world. Rather they condemned the hunt as a form of public execution of the weak by the strong.43 The reader of The Brothers Karamazov in 1880 thus was not likely to be sympathetic to the general’s passion for hunting and his extensive dog kennel. Of special significance in Dostoevsky’s story is the fact that the account of the savage reprisal against the serf boy is presented in the novel as an example of a form of sadism that Ivan Karamazov classifies as a ‘Rusizm’ (‘Russianness’, 221), a national psychological trait of character. One story that epitomises this sadistic streak is the tale of animal abuse by an uneducated Russian muzhik. In a highly emotive scene, the muzhik beats the horse’s meek eyes. In this context the abuse of animals by the uneducated classes is dramatised in a way that is no less emotive than the story of the general’s dogs attacking the serf child. Both episodes represent Russian realia, but while the dog narrative is a story from the past the abuse of the horse by the peasant muzhik is related to contemporary Russian society. Dostoevsky establishes a structural symmetry that in turn creates a class balance: gener- als and muzhiks abuse those who are weak and defenceless. In his journalistic Diary of a Writer (1876) Dostoevsky explores the subject of animal cruelty.44 In a paragraph devoted to a discussion of the aims of the Russian Society for Animal Protection (Rossiiskoe obshchestvo pokrovitel’stva zhivotnym) he suggests a link between animal abuse and human psychology. He notes that Russian children learn through witnessing repellent behaviour. They see, for example, a muzhik beating a horse on its eyes because it is stuck in a mud and cannot pull an unrealistically heavy load. The irrationality of such an act is underlined by the fact that the horse is the source of the

43 Chekhov’s and Kuprin’s works are analysed in this book in connection with the typology of the substitute narrative and children’s cruelty to animals. 44 F.M. Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia. Ianvar’ 1876. Glava 3”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1981, Vol. VII, 26-31.

When dogs were more expensive than people 51 muzhik’s livelihood. These pictures ‘bestialise [zveriat] the human and have a demoralising effect on him, especially on children’ (26). Dostoevsky chooses this episode in his journalistic account as a manifestation of the cruelty of the uneducated classes towards animals. In The Brothers Karamazov the horse abuse episode also functions as a manifestation of a typically Russian scene. In the Diary of a Writer article, cruelty to animals by uneducated muzhiks is linked to acts of family violence. Cruelty to animals and to people is presented as a feature of the uneducated classes. In the novel, the general’s love for his dogs is a class-specific phenomenon and a reminder of a by- gone era. His cruelty to a child is the result of distorted values. In the 1876 article on issues of animal protection Dostoevsky appeals to the Society to set priorities right: to address issues of animal abuse but also to focus on issues of family violence. He maintains that the So- ciety’s call for a humane way of putting street dogs to sleep through the use of chloroform should be a secondary concern in comparison to cases of animal abuse and family violence. In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan uses the story of the general’s dogs and the serf-child as one of the tales intended to challenge Chris- tianity’s tenets of forgiveness. He evokes in his interlocutor a sense of moral justice. The stories that he narrates have one common theme – the abuse of innocents: a horse that is beaten by a merciless owner who forces it to work when it can no longer do so; children who are abused by their own parents;45 children and women abused by Turks who kill and rape Slav mothers and children because they derive a special enjoyment out of such debasement. These stories explore the psychological notion of sadistic satisfaction as a driving force behind the abuse of the weak by the strong. Children, women and animals such as horses are grouped into the category of the defenceless and the innocent. The general and the boy story is the last in a sequence of stories of child abuse, its dramatic impact resulting from the death of the child. The shift in the accepted hierarchies between animals and humans also plays a part in the impact of this story. The general’s sadism influences Alesha’s emotional response: the general had to be shot. The death of the child and the fact that a dog could be considered

45 Dostoevsky uses the real life event of the abuse of a child by her parents in the novel in reference to the case of S.L. Kronenberg. He also described it in his Dia- ry of a Writer, February 1876. It will be further discussed in the next chapter.

52 Political Animals more valuable than a human are the factors that nuance Dostoevsky’s dramatisation compared with the original serf’s story. The outcome is a demonisation not only of the general but also of dogs. The general’s behaviour can be interpreted as pathological, an exception from the rule, but so powerful is Ivan’s rhetoric that he manages to present the story as a challenge to the Christian notion of forgiveness. In this novel all the stories about animal and child abuse are framed as arguments and counterarguments on the subject of theodicy: they question the existence of God vis-à-vis the existence of evil in this world.46 Does God exist and what sort of God is He if such horrors are allowed to take place? The choice of a child victim also raises theological questions related to the notion of inborn sin. Why should innocent children be punishable? Is every human being sinful by birth? Even children who have not yet had carnal knowledge? Should Christians forgive the general and other offenders? While the dogs in the story play a secondary role, do they function as agents of evil? Dostoevsky’s incorporation of the motifs of animal and child abuse into his novel problematises these themes on psychological and theological levels, using ‘real life’ events that were reported in the media as issues related to the social and economic environment. Reports on the cruel treatment of horses by coachmen, for example, were discussed in the Russian press in the 1860s.47 Before it was published in Russkii vestnik (Russian Messenger) in 1877 the story of the general’s hounds and the boy was published as a version of a serf’s testimonial in Alexander Herzen’s émigré journal Kolokol in 1860.48 As discussed earlier, the story appeared just a year before the emancipation of the serfs in a journal run by political exiles in London, and was meant to emblematise the system of serfdom. In Dostoevsky’s representation of

46 Nikolai Berdiaev, Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo. Paris: YMCA Press, 1968. 47 Dostoevskii incorporated this episode in Crime and Punishment. The cases of abuse of horses by coachmen were discussed in the newspaper Golos, No. 3, 15 March 1865. Nekrasov’s poem ‘Do sumerek’ (1859) is also a source of this motif in Dostoevsky’s two novels. See G. Fridlender et al, “Primechaniia”, in F.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1981, Vol. VII, 369. 48 A. Gertsen, “Po chasti pomeshchich’ego psoliubiia”, Kolokol 74 (1860). See G. Fridlender et al. “Primechaniia”, in F.M. Dostoevskii. Brat’ia Karamazovy. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1976, Vol. XV, 554.

When dogs were more expensive than people 53 this story the general’s evil is judged in conjunction with the evil of the muzhik who beats the horse on its meek eyes. In keeping with his well-formulated polemical statement that evil in human nature hides much deeper than socialists normally assume, he places evil not only in the social and economic environment but firmly in the realm of the human psyche. Dostoevsky’s use of the dog motif in The Brothers Karamazov in connection with problematics of the Christian faith and, as will be shown later, carnal knowledge and sexuality is poignant. It testifies to the survival of the symbolic substratum linked to this animal in Rus- sian culture. The novel also confirms the status of the dog as a political animal (in the chapter on children’s cruelty towards animals I ad- address a horrific episode in this novel of a child’s cruelty towards a dog). In the polyphonic world of Dostoevsky’s poetics,49 the borzois are not the only dogs in this novel, and for every argument there is a counter-argument and a counter-narrative.

A populist writer on serfdom and the dog breastfeeding plot: Vladimir Korolenko’s ‘On a Cloudy Day’

As with any populist writer, Vladimir Korolenko (1853-1921) ex- celled in the genre of the sketch.50 His story about the tyrannical excesses of landlords, manifested in the treatment of serfs below that afforded to animals, is subtitled ‘ocherk’, a sketch. The intent of the written sketch was to depict reality as it was, without exaggeration. It became the preferable mode of narrative for populist writers working to influence the reading public through descriptions of the hardships of peasant life.51 Korolenko’s sketch ‘V oblachnyi den’’ (‘On a Cloudy Day’)52 contains a dramatic episode that is so horrid that it needed to be subtitled ‘sketch’ to convince the reader of the reality of

49 M.M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2002, Vol. VI. 50 See Henrietta Mondry, Pisateli-narodniki i evrei (Gleb Uspenskii i Korolenko). St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2005. 51 See a discussion in Henrietta Mondry, Pure, Strong and Sexless: the Peasant Woman’s Body and Gleb Uspensky. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 52 V.G. Korolenko, “V oblachnyi den’”, in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: izd-vo Pravda, 1971, Vol. III, 256-292.

54 Political Animals the events. This episode is built on the plot of women serfs being forced by their landlord to breastfeed pedigree puppies. The story describes the murder of an old-world tyrannical master by his serfs in revenge for his cruel punishment of a servant who smothered his two pedigree puppies. The landlord had given the puppies to the servant’s wife to breastfeed on a par with her own newborn baby. The servant rebels against this treatment of his wife who, in fear of punishment, feeds the puppies first and leaves her own son waiting for his turn. The baby is often left hungry because the puppies have taken all the milk.53 The woman’s physical suffering is enormous since the puppies have small sharp teeth. Peasants from the neighbouring villages note that this situation cannot be legal. Their reasoning is based on the notion that the feeding of animals by women is not be allowed by God. On this basis they conclude that there can be no man- made law to force women to feed animals. The angry husband of the serf woman accepts this reasoning and decides to take matters into his own hands. In order to get rid of the puppies he smothers them. He then pretends that they have died a natural death. The master’s dog- keepers visit the puppies in the morning only to discover their two cold bodies. The master immediately understands that they have been killed and plans a cruel revenge. He orders a pot of thick oat porridge to be boiled for his hounds. He then calls the guilty father in and shows him the bodies of the two dead puppies. He then strikes the serf, making sure that he falls with his head into the pot of boiling porridge. The peasant husband’s protest is motivated by his indignation that his child is being treated as inferior to the animals. When he is called to his master to explain the fate of the puppies he makes a short

53 The physiological reality of this reasoning can be confirmed by an experiment done in connection with the famous episode in American literature in John Stein- beck’s The Grapes of Wrath where an exhausted woman breastfeeds an adult man from starvation. The calorific value of breast milk is 70 per 100 ml of milk. This quantity meets the requirements of the average newborn infant, but hardly of an adult. In application to the Russian serf women breastfeeding their own newborn and puppies the masters must have supplied women with additional food for them to be able to produce enough milk – something that will be obliquely reflected in Khlebnikov’s poem. On the investigation of the physiological plausibility of Steinbeck’s episode see John Sutherland, Curiosities of Literature. London: Arrow Books, 2009, 14-15.

When dogs were more expensive than people 55 speech. He maintains that, although peasant children are poor, they nevertheless are God-given and have souls. Moreover, he describes the contact of the puppies with his wife’s breasts as an act of contamination. Dogs ‘defile’ (289), he says, a woman’s breasts. He finishes his speech with the slogan: ‘Serf folk are stupid [for not rebelling against their masters]: all of you should be strangled!’ (289). The plural construction of the pronoun ‘you’ suggests that it is both the masters and their dogs that should be strangled. While the act of strangling the puppies functions as a metaphor for the disposal of masters, it is also a metaphor for revolt. But this revolt is motivated not only by class oppression but also by the concept of what constitutes a God- given creature: a child has a soul, a dog does not. It thus reflects the peasant’s vision of the universe, of the hierarchies of nature and beyond, in an expression of folk theology and eschatology. Although the emphasis of Korolenko’s story is on class injustices, he nevertheless enters the domain of folk beliefs about dogs. The ceremonial manner in which the master arranges his punishment as a spectacle expresses a degree of calculated sadism. He calls in his dogs that are lying in a circle in expectation of their meal. He puts the two bodies of the dead puppies on a linen cloth to demonstrate his respect for their lives. The punishment of the servant is similarly arranged as a ritual to satisfy not only his own anger but also the imagined anger of his dogs. Dogs are thus elevated to the level of masters, over and above that of serfs. But the old landlord oversteps the boundary. One of his servants who looks after the dogs happens to be the brother of the boiled man. He and other witnesses rebel against this heinous deed and kill the master. The family keeps this episode a secret – the official version is that the man left for Europe and died there of old age. The story is narrated by a coachman who is reminiscing about the days of serfdom. It is narrated in the form of skaz and includes all the lexical and stylistic characteristics of an uneducated person’s language.54 The coachman’s interlocutor is a young and pleasant woman, a relative of the landlord. She knows another version of the landlord’s life, one that does not include the episode of the breastfeeding of the

54 M. Ia. Poliakov, “Velimir Khlebnikov: mirovozzrenie i poetika”, in Velimir Khlebnikov. Tvoreniia. Ed. M. Ia. Poliakov, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986, 5- 35.

56 Political Animals puppies or her relative’s murder. It is a version related to her by her nanny and includes quite a romantic image of the landlord. According to this account he was a remarkably handsome young man in St Pe- tersburg who had an unhappy love affair with a society woman. As a result of this failed romance he withdrew to the country and lived there as a hermit. Either out of spite or love he married his own serf girl who was a rare beauty. When she started a love affair with a local man he sent him to the army and subsequently found the strength to forgive his wife. She, however, ran away with an officer. The landlord then developed a great love for animals and started a kennel. During the emancipation of serfs he had an unpleasant episode with his peasants and left for abroad where he died. The young woman knows him only by a portrait that depicts a man with dark burning eyes and a misanthropic expression. His hatred of humankind was explained by his unfortunate private life. This alternative narrative serves to demonstrate that dark and embarrassing episodes in gentry family histories were kept secret. History in this regard is but a representation of events, and the moral message remains a matter of interpretation by a subjective narrator. This variant puts into doubt the more gruesome version told by the peasant narrator and in this way serves as a shield against censorship. Because the coachman’s story has a disturbing effect on the young woman, her father complains to an officer during a stopover night in a hotel. To negate the factuality of the coachman’s story an officer calls him ‘skazochnik’ (291), an inventor of fairy- tales. The peasant narrative has its definite logic and implicit rationalisation of events; it has both cause and effect. As an explanation for the cruel landlord’s later behaviour in using women serfs to breastfeed the prized puppies he relates the story of the landlord’s marriage to a serf girl who later ran away with an officer. He then explains how the landlord decided to start a huge kennel with some ten pedigree bitches whose puppies he gave to various women serfs on his estate, who had babies on the breast at the time, to breastfeed. From this it would follow that the landlord thus found a way to avenge his humiliation at the hands of a serf woman by making his female serfs serve as de-facto mothers of dogs, or bitches, thus punishing by proxy all of her kind. However, the peasant narrator appears to be oblivious of the meaning of this personal motivation. In his evaluation, the landlord’s behaviour is an example of the tyranny implicit in the institution of

When dogs were more expensive than people 57 serfdom. Parallelism between women and bitches and babies and puppies are offensive to servants who see in it as the utmost dehumanisa- tion of their kind. But another layer of parallelism implies not just social or class issues. The coded message implicit in the actions of the landlord is about fidelity and loyalty in the relations between sexes. This is the domain of gender stereotypes and not only class and social injustices, for the puppies that are born as the sons/daughters of bitches are provided with an opportunity to be sons/daughters of ‘real’ human bitches. It is possible that Korolenko, in his dedication to the cause of the people, chose to downplay this sarcastic substratum of the landlord’s behaviour, but the fact that the sensitive young descendant of the landlord sees signs of suffering in his portrait is significant. It not only indicates her romanticisation of her familial past, but it also provides an opportunity for another interpretation of his cruelty. It creates a psychological nexus between suffering and cruelty, thus broadening the social thematics of the dog plot. Korolenko first made notes on this plot during his travels in the south of Russia, from Nizhnii Novgorod to Arzamas, in 1890. He heard the story from a coachman and later published it in the progres- sive journal Russkoe bogatstvo. In this first version in order to avoid the constraints of censorship he gave the story a subtitle: ‘From an unwritten novel’ (before it could be published as ‘a sketch’). The pre- tence that the story was fiction rather than a real life event made the horrid plot more passable. The coachman is called a teller of fairy- tales so this plot, fantastic in its cruelty, would be perceived as a fable with an educational moral rather than a byl’, an epic narrative of real life events. His skaz-style narrative, however, gives the story the formal characteristics of a byl’. The reader for whom the populist writer Korolenko wrote the story had to decide whether it was truth or fiction, a sketch or an ‘unwritten novel’.

The phantasmagorical world of dogs, dog killers and serf women in Velimir Khlebnikov’s ‘The Night before the Soviets’

The original title of Velimir Khlebnikov’s (1885-1922) long poem ‘Noch’ pered Sovetami’ (‘The Night before the Soviets’, 1921) was ‘Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom’, or ‘The Night before Christmas’, an

58 Political Animals exact copy of Gogol’s famous fairy-tale.55 The reason for giving this poem a title which stresses the phantasmatic and surreal can be viewed as the same as that in Korolenko’s narrative, since it deals with the same phantasmatic – in its unimaginable cruelty – plot: a landlord forcing a serf woman to breastfeed a pedigree puppy. The overt political purpose of the narrative is similar to that of Korolen- ko’s story: to portray the emergence of class consciousness in the peasant classes. The crucial difference between the two stories is in historical chronology – Khlebnikov’s poem was written after the Oc- tober 1917 Revolution, in 1921, hence its changed title, ‘The Night before the Soviets’, e.g. before the liberation from class oppression. Another fundamental difference relates to Khlebnikov’s attitude to human-animal correlation. Khlebnikov is viewed as one of the twentieth century creators and followers of epic poetry.56 His poems relate to the genre of the Russian epic byliny – long poems that were transmitted mainly orally in the times of Old Rus’. Byliny as an epic genre supposedly mixes historical facts and fantasy. They have their own conception of time that does not match ‘real life’ time span. Heroes typically have longer lives than ‘real’ people, and they develop much slower or much faster than people in ‘real’ life. ‘The Night before the Soviets’ presents a combination of time dimensions: it has intertextual links to Korolen- ko’s story as well as esoteric, supra-time features.57 It also has biographical references to Khlebnikov’s own family. The poem expresses continuity with Korolenko’s work via the biography of Khlebnikov’s mother. Like Korolenko, a well-born member of the gentry, she was involved in the populist movement. Her cousin, A.D. Mikhailov was a member of the terrorist organisation Narodnaia volia (The People’s Will), and as a young girl she courageously visited him in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg where he was imprisoned. She carried letters from Mikhailov to the famous populist revolutionary Vera Figner. She thus contributed to the same cause as Korolenko and to a broader cause that ushered in the October Revolution.

55 Velimir Khlebnikov, “Noch’ pered sovetami”, in Tvoreniia. Ed. M. Ia. Poliakov, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986, 294-306. 56 Vladimir Markov, The Longer Poems of Velimir Khlebnikov. Berkeley: Califor- nia UP, 1962. 57 See R.V. Duganov, Velimir Khlebnikov: Priroda tvorchestva. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990.

When dogs were more expensive than people 59

Because of his mother’s participation in the populist movement, Khlebnikov’s poem chooses women protagonists as the narrator and addressee of the dog subplot. The narrator is an old servant peasant woman and the addressee her landlady from the educated classes. Before the Revolution an old serf woman’s class anger towards her mistress was expressed by the refrain ‘They will hang you soon!’(294, 295, 303). This refrain represents both a warning and a threat, demonstrating the mixture of fear and hatred felt by an old serf towards her mistress. In Khlebnikov’s poem the peasant woman relates the story of her grandmother, so presenting her version of the family history. She puts it into the broader context of the imminent Revolution and the removal of the oppressors. If in Korolenko’s story the episode relates to the history of the gentry family with the recipient of the story being a relative of the guilty landlord, then in Khlebnikov’s poem the dog subplot is narrated by a member of the victim’s family. As in Korolenko’s story, the addressee is an educated woman with sympathetic views on peasants. One chapter of the poem is dedicated to the dog subplot. The difference in attitude towards dogs by masters and serfs defines the class difference. The plot is built on two literary sources – Korolen- ko’s story with the motif of the breastfeeding of puppies and Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem ‘Psovaia okhota’ (‘Dogs hunt’, 1847).58 Nekrasov’s parodic piece was intended as a polemic against the gentry’s hunting culture. Indeed, it epitomises gentry male culture’s obsession with dogs and hunting. Significantly, Nekrasov’s poem has an epigraph from N. Reutt’s book with an identical title that contains praise for this activity. The epigraph praises the positive impact of the hunt on physical and psychological well-being. Nekrasov is sarcastic towards this glorification of the hunt and exposes it as trendy behaviour of the idle classes in need of a ‘healthy’ sporty lifestyle. Although the long poem is written in verse, Khlebnikov shows continuity with Korolenko’s story by choosing the skaz-form of narrative for the subplot of the breastfeeding of puppies. Khlebnikov’s experimental poetics combines skaz and periphrasis.59 Because the

58 N.A. Nekrasov, “Psovaia okhota”, in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh. Lenin- grad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1967, Vol. I, 108. 59 On Khlebnikov’s poetic language see Willem Weststeijn, Velimir Chlebnikov and the Development of Poetical Language in Russian Symbolism and Futurism. Am-

60 Political Animals storyteller is an old serf woman, Khlebnikov expresses not only class but also gender-specific stylistic peculiarities of peasant speech. This mode of narrative is in line with Khlebnikov’s general awareness of the gender-specific topic of the narrative – the victimhood of women peasants is clearly defined. The narrative has elements of lamentation; its lachrymose character is expressed by the regular mention of the shedding of tears by the unfortunate victim, the human ‘mother’ of the dog. It echoes the syntactic and stylistic peculiarities of the Russian epic tradition.60

An old woman’s schizophrenic account of a dog story

The dog subplot has two main themes: the landlord’s love of dogs and his use of peasant women to breastfeed the puppies of his pedigree hounds. The dogs’ participation in the hunt is described through the eyes of the same peasant baba who narrates the dog stories. Her description of the winter hunt for hares exemplifies the poetic language of the Russian oral genre. It makes use of repetitions, refrains and colourful epithets that function as a stable formation aimed at convey- ing the supra-temporal existence of the laws of nature and human relations: the landlord is typically important and cruel; dogs in the hunt are synonymous with their masters; the white hare is the symbol of innocent victimhood; the winter landscape sanctifies nature. The epithets and comparisons given to the dogs are symbolic of their role as representations of dark forces: in the sleek blackness of their shiny fur they are compared to eels. ‘Serpents’ such as snakes and eels are interchangeable with dogs in Slav folk imagination; both stand for demonic powers and serve as a representation of the Devil in the cultural domain of syncretism and ‘dual faith’.61 The landlord’s custom of giving puppies to women for breastfeeding is similarly described on two levels: as part of a real life event and as the domain of the symbolic and mythological. Both function on the notion of the correlation of the human and the dog and the dynam-

sterdam: Rodopi, 1983. 60 Dmitrii Likhachev, Razvitie russkoi literatury X-XVII vekov. Leningrad: Nauka, 1973. 61 O.V. Belova, Slavianskii bestiarii: slovar’ nazvanii i simvoliki. Moscow: Indrik, 2001.

When dogs were more expensive than people 61 ics of rejection and acceptance. Thus, in the retelling by the woman narrator, when the landlord supplies a puppy to peasant women for feeding he refers to it as ‘a little daughter’ or ‘a little son’. This type of narrative creates a certain ambivalence about the authorship of these terms. The result of this confusion widens the interpretative possibilities: if the old woman calls puppies ‘daughters’ and ‘sons’ she shows a certain kindness to nature; if the landlord calls them by these names he shows his perception of peasants as animals; in this case the peasant woman uses the terms of human kinship sarcastically and with an attitude of class indignation. Elements of ambivalence are further presented in the description of the relationship between the landlord and the beautiful woman serf to whom he gives a male puppy to feed. Before she became a widow with a baby boy she was a famous beauty with all the canoni- cal features of epic folk narratives: her blond plait is long and thick; her complexion is fair; she is of strong build; she has a powerful voice and her singing ability wins her many admirers.62 Her sex appeal is implied in her complimentary comparison to a cow – a comparative device that was a stable feature in the poetics of the Russian oral folk tradition. During her walks in the woods she comes across the landlord. Surrounded by his borzoi dogs and hounds, he presents her with a silver coin. In this account the landlord is described as dexterous and handsome in his mature masculinity, as denoted by his grey mous- tache. In the context of this scene the narrator notes that the landlord is a great lover of dogs. The scene is open to many interpretative possibilities: it is full of hints and implications of a possible relationship between the landlord and the peasant beauty. One obvious clue is contained in the detail of the gift of the silver coin. Dogs in this scene do not present hostile forces: they are part of the gentry’s entourage during his forest rides. The landlord has a large kennel and often gives puppies to peasant women to ‘bring up’ as their own and to feed them with their milk. The narrator notes that, for the landlord, dogs are an expensive form of entertainment. At this stage the narrative is not highly critical of the landlord whose address to the peasant women is given in first person narrative:

62 I. Smirnov, Slavianskie etnicheskie traditsii. Moscow: Nauka, 1974.

62 Political Animals

Hei, you, beauty, Here is for you a son or a daughter, Be a native mother to him. Bring up your landlord’s dog. (297)

Take care and love him, He will be a grateful son to you. (297-298)

Grammatical mistakes in the concurrent use of personal pronouns – ‘him’ instead of ‘him and her’, for example – contribute to the reader’s confusion: given in quotation marks as part of the landlord’s speech these words nevertheless betray the true author of the narrative – the peasant woman. The landlord pays in silver for this fostering of his puppies, and in one place the old woman reminisces about him with the reverence accorded to a dearly departed. This confusion can be interpreted as an expression of the woman’s realisation that there are two subjective agencies involved in the understanding of the situation. One is the young dog-feeding peasant woman who represents the physical suffering incurred in feeding a sharp-toothed puppy; the other is the landlord with his understanding of the situation. From his point of view he does not do her harm. He uses the woman’s services and pays for them. The gender politics is present in this narrative by implication – if peasants see ‘a cow’ in a strong healthy woman, why should the gentleman not have the same conception of the lactating bodily functions of her kind?

Dog/human hybridity through contamination by bodily fluids

The ambivalences of this narrative are an integral part of the duality of the symbolism of the dog in Russian folk culture. The old woman narrator gives both cursing epithets to the puppy and loving ones. The positive epithets are based on the correlation between a dog and a human, or a puppy and a child. Among them are ‘synochek- shchenochek’ (‘son-puppy’, 300) based on the phonetic likeness of the two words and ‘a silk cucyk’ (300). In relation to the word ‘cucyk’ ethnographers have pointed out that this nickname is given by peasants to both puppies and children in some regions of Russia.63 In the

63 ‘Ciuca’ as sobaka corresponds to ‘cicik’ or ‘ciucik’ as child. These nicknames

When dogs were more expensive than people 63 poem the puppy is even referred to as ‘golubok’ or ‘little dove’ (300), a particularly striking epithet in the context of the dove’s positive symbolism in folk culture. On the negative side the old woman refers to the puppy as ‘a crab’ who pierces the serf woman’s breast with his ‘black claws’ (301). The old woman’s language uses epithets that are borrowed from Old Russian oral epic narratives: woman’s breasts, for example, are compared with two white swans. It is these breasts that the puppy spoils with his sharp teeth. The narrative thus switches from symbolic imagery to the real life situation without making clear distinctions. When the narrator says that the puppy spoils the breastfeeding woman’s blood, the actuality of the event is given a realistic mode. And yet, as is always the case with any narrative of pollution, the spoiling of blood functions also on the symbolic level. In the real life scenario the young woman becomes very thin, loses her beauty and changes beyond recognition. Her body is a site of physical and emotional suffering. But it is also a site of symbolic change imposed by the contact with an unclean force, as the dog in her subculture would have been perceived. Mary Douglas’ anthropological work Purity and Danger establishes that any form of physical contact that supposedly spoils a physical organism has the second meaning of symbolic pollution. In this case spoilt or poisoned blood is a trope for symbolic pollution.64 It is not in vain that the village peasants start referring to her as ‘Sobakevna’ (‘Dog-evna’) – a nickname denoting her as part of a dog’s clan. That other peasants ostracise the young woman is itself remarkable evidence of dog symbolism in peasant culture. It is also evidence of the symbolic meaning of the change which the woman’s body undergoes. If the forced breastfeeding of puppies by young women was a common custom in the life of a Russian country estate before the abolishment of serfdom in the middle of the nineteenth century, then why do peasants ostracise the serf woman? After all, she was one of their own kind and compassion towards her as one of their own humiliated folk should be strong, yet this ostracism does not serve as evidence of such sentiments. This

were still in use in 1978 in the Poles’e region of central Russia. See Boris Uspen- skii, 276. 64 Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1984.

64 Political Animals reaction certainly does not have any features of class resistance against the despotic landowner. Rather, the conflict relates to the field of the symbolic. The logic functioning here is that the young woman’s body has been transformed into something other than a human body; it has been contaminated by dog fluids. Breastfeeding can be perceived as a two-way exchange of fluids: mother’s milk comes out of the breast into the suckling’s mouth and saliva comes out of the suckling’s mouth and finds its way through the openings in the nipples. This two-way exchange of bodily fluids implicit in any activity within the domain of sexuality and procreation is a stable image in folk mythologies.65 It reflects a deep fear of contamination of the purity of the family or clan. The psychological fear of adultery and infidelity con- verges with this fear of hybridisation and impurity. Both hide under the rhetoric of the danger of acquiring illness via the physical exchange of fluids. In the case of the dog-breastfeeding Sobakevna, the dog’s fluids as a biological substance have, in the implied perception of the peasants, a transforming effect on the woman’s body. They hybridise it into something un-human, something physically becoming-Dog. This situation means that, if she were to produce another child, he or she would no longer be a human child but a hybrid. Moreover, on the level of the symbolic, her post-contact body is not only un-human but also unchristian. Anybody who is of Dog’s clan is an unchristian Oth- er. This reasoning is based on the idea that once the body is contaminated it stays impure. The gender politics turn strongly against female sexuality in this type of reasoning. The same gender bias is expressed in the religious notion of the contamination of the body. Historically, male priests performed the role of freeing the body for possession. In Russia the history of the exorcism of evil spirits from the possessed, klikushi, attests that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, there were more registered female cases of possession by evil spirits than there were male cases. Statis- tics shows that the worst affected group was women in the sexually active age between twenty and forty.66 This culture-specific example

65 Francoise Heritier, Two Sisters and Their Mother: An Anthropology of Incest. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Zone Books, 1999. 66 Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches and Demons in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2001.

When dogs were more expensive than people 65 attests that the anxiety around sexuality was a primary factor in the construct of female possession at the time. A young breastfeeding woman, marred by her contact with the unclean dog, falls into the typology of possession by unclean forces. It is only logical that she is ostracised by the rest of the peasant community and turns to drinking. This symbolic perspective sheds light on the dénouement of the dog subplot narrative. The story culminates in the son’s act of revenge on behalf of the dog-breastfeeding woman. He strangles the dog and hangs it in front of the landlord’s window. In spite of its intent to highlight the dehumanising treatment of serfs by their masters and their subsequent revolt, this ending has many ‘fantastic’ qualities with strong symbolic connotations. One striking feature of this episode is the son’s ability to perform such an act, both in terms of motive and execution. There is no indication of his age when he strangles and hangs the dog. How physically strong does a boy have to be to perform such an act? It is one thing to throw a stone at a dog; it is another to strangle a grown dog and hang it up high in front of a window. Clearly, there are problems with the logistics of this act. To make a dramatic display out of a hanged dog is an act of powerful tactical strategy that puts a question mark on the probability of the act. The reader knows that the son of the woman was breastfed simultaneously with the puppy and there is information that relates to the dog’s age. The reader is informed that the puppy grew up into a handsome, strong and dexterous dog. This makes it possible to approximate the boy’s age in relation to the age of the dog. Given that the dog is still young and strong and is taken to hunt, the boy cannot be more than eight years of age at most. This makes it difficult for the reader to accept the explanation given by the old woman narrator who frames the boy’s act as a reaction to the humiliation of serfs being treated as animals. Although the poem as a whole is presented as a narrative about the inevitability of revolution by those who had been treated as sub-humans by their masters for centuries, the incongruity of the boy’s deed in relation to his age indicates that there is a hidden subtext in the narrative. The implausibility of the age serves as an estrangement device that captures the reader’s attention and indicates a hidden meaning. On one hand, the concept of time can be viewed in the context of the poetics of the Russian oral epic narrative. In this case the concept of time acquires different characteristics from those found in the

66 Political Animals realist narrative. Time is not a measure of the reality of the event.67 The reader thus descends into the world of the mythic representation of the dog theme. Moreover, the relationship between the son and the dog parallels that of milk brothers, a Russian concept denoting the kinship between two children who were breastfed by the same woman. The woman, in turn, can be viewed as their molochnaia mat’, ‘milk mother’.68 But approached from the vantage of the dog-human correlation, the son of the woman is by proxy the son of a bitch, sukin syn.69 By symmetry, while the son has been hybridised into a dog, the dog has been hybridised into a human. There is striking textual evidence for this process of canine humanisation:

And Letai grew up nice, Getting more and more handsome from day to day! Always alert, Stately, lean, tall, slender! Order Letai, and he jumps over you And kisses you in a dog way! (301)

This adoration of the physical beauty of the dog Letai (‘Flying dog’) has distinct anthropomorphic connotations. Lexical choices such as statnyi, stroinyi are used as descriptions of humans, not animals. The expression ‘getting more and more handsome from day to day’ is a stable refrain of the oral folk narrative and is normally applied to handsome young men and women. Moreover, the dog is described as extremely intelligent and could even be taught to read, had there been dog books. This passage with its praise of the dog is immediately followed by the description of it being strangled and hung. Here the choice of lexis indicates the treacherous character of the act: on a dark

67 V.M. Zhirmunskii, Teoriia literatury. Poetika. Stilistika. Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1977. 68 There is a strong idealised narrative of the special bond that existed between peasant women as wet nurses and gentry’s children during the time of serfdom. Fictionalised accounts of these relationships reflect an honorary status which wet nurses enjoyed in some families after the children grew up. See a discussion in Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. London: The Penguin Press, 2002. 69 In Duganov’s reading the boy and the dog become ‘molochnye brat’ia’ (‘milk brothers’) which is a unifying act of sameness of animals and humans in nature in line with Khlebnikov’s worldview. See Duganov, 276.

When dogs were more expensive than people 67 day the boy lies in watch for the dog, catches it, strangles it and hangs it in front of the landlord’s window. The landlord orders that he be flogged. The boy survives. The story-teller – the old woman – is the daughter of the flogged boy. For her, this story is a manifestation of the dehumanising treatment inflicted by the old regime on the peasants. Forced ‘kinship’ (‘kumovstvo’, 302) with dogs is the epitome of peasant suffering and humiliation. The hanging dog is a display of class hatred; it is also a symbol of the kind of end which the peasants wish upon their masters:

In front of the master’s window Canine spawn is hanging. Where is its dexterous jump? “Let the masters die together with it, It is time to dig the grave for them”. (302)

The call to dig the graves for the masters is given in quotation marks to indicate its slogan-like character. The dead dog is a metaphor for the approaching death of the landlord, the end of that regime. The parallelism between the dog and the master is firmly re-established. The hanging of the dog is in strict parallelism with the poem’s refrain, given in first person narrative as addressed by the servant woman to her mistress: ‘Trouble is on its way. You will soon hang.’ The peasant woman’s protest against social oppression is expressed via the dog theme narrative. The dog subplot functions as a background to her warning to her mistress of the forthcoming revenge. The reality of the motif of peasant women breastfeeding puppies was accepted, at least by one of Khlebnikov’s noted contemporaries. The writer and critic Prince Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky wrote in 1935 that the poem describes the terrible heritage of Russia’s past.70 The fact that an aristocrat accepted the motif as an historical truth is telling. Yet, it has to be noted that Sviatopolk-Mirsky had returned to the Soviet Union from years of living abroad and received the nickname Red Prince. His eagerness to accept the plot as reality is probably a feature of political pressures of the 1930s when the plot was reanimated and recycled through the issue of 15,000 copies of the postcard with Kasatkin’s painting. Duganov notes in his interpretation of the dog subplot in the poem, that the dog breastfeeding motif be-

70 D.S. Mirskii, Literaturnaia gazeta, November 15 (1935). Quoted in Markov, 169.

68 Political Animals came a form of mythology.71 In Duganov’s interpretation the second meaning of the dog-subplot has a mythopoetic nature. He detects pagan rites and Christian passion in the scene with the woman, her child and the puppy. Indeed, in the passage quoted above there is a layer that reflects the mythological interpretation of the dog. The epithet ‘Otrod’e pes’e’ can mean ‘canine tribe’, so delineating Russian culture’s association of dogs with hostile forces.72 This word formation can relate to various stigmatised groups of people and is not used in reference to animals other than dogs. This signifies a special status that this animal occupies among other, non-totemic animals. The word ‘otrod’e’ (derivative of semantically neuter ‘rod’ – tribe, clan or ‘race’) denotes an evil tribe or a group of people united by common blood; it often refers to the Devil’s progeny. This notion of genealogy is central to this epithet. In this context it expresses the old peasant woman’s anxiety around the issue of kinship with dogs. It is important to her to express what is by no means obvious: that the dog was actually a dog, and not half-dog and half-human. And, by the law of parallelism that functions strongly in the Russian epic tradition, it is equally important to denote that the boy who killed the dog was himself not a hybrid but a human. I suggest that Khlebnikov’s dog slayer and the male/boy hero motif exhibits strong links with the traditional medieval epic ‘The Vseslav Epos’. The Vseslav plot survived in Russian oral tradition from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. The hero of the byliny is a prince who was born as the result of a serpent’s violation of his princely mother. The boy, Volkh Vseslav’evich, grows extremely fast and from a young age has extraordinary physical strength and quick wit. More importantly for the purpose of comparison with Khlebnikov’s poem, Volkh Vseslav’evich of the epic tradition is a hybrid in that he is a werewolf endowed with supernatural powers. His hybridity manifests itself in his ability to turn into a wolf and other animals, including a bright falcon in line with the Russian epic tradition. As a werewolf, Volkh has the duality of the hunter and the

71 R.V. Duganov, Velimir Khlebnikov: Priroda tvorchestva. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990. 72 ‘Otrod’e pes’e’ is a poetic variant of ‘pes’e otrod’e’ or ‘pesii rod’. Vladimir Dal’ in his Dictionary of the Spoken Russian Language of the Nineteenth Century gives the ‘pesii rod’ variant. See “Pes” in Vladimir Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, Vol. III, 105.

When dogs were more expensive than people 69 hunted. Roman Jakobson and Marc Szeftel demonstrate the genetic connection of the Vseslav stories in the byliny with the Primary Chronicle,73 a text that was familiar to Khlebnikov. But where does the avenger motif come from? In the Russian epic tradition of the Vseslav story Volkh does not avenge the rape of his mother. However, this motif is found in the Serbian variant of the Vseslav story. The Serbian ‘Fiery Dragon Wolf’ boy is born from a human mother and a dragon. He also becomes a werewolf but, unlike the Russian epic hero, he kills his dragon father. It is noteworthy that the motif of the blood vengeance taken by the dragon’s son on his own father is sup- pressed in the Russian epic tradition.74 Khlebnikov’s take on the revenge of the mother by a quasi-hybrid boy-dog-man bogatyr has echoes of the common Slavic folktales. The well-known interchangeability of werewolves with dogs, snakes and dragons in Slavic folktales attests to the symbolic duality of these animals. The woman- narrator thus synthesises and improvises the dog/wolf motifs of the Vseslav epos oral tradition while omitting the dragon motif. Her creativity grounds the narrative in the ideological and historical context of her time. The boy-man-bogatyr avenges the violation of his mother’s body by the dog: breastfeeding the puppy would have to be seen as a form of violation and penetration of the serf woman’s body. By killing his quasi-sibling dog he slays the incarnation of the evil forces, although his own magic-like physical strength might be the result of his kinship with this animal. The fantastic and historical aspects of the old woman’s tale find their expression in the history of the title of Khlebnikov’s poem: the change from ‘The Night before Christmas’ to ‘The Night before the Soviets’. According to folk customs, in the night before Christmas various predictions and premonitions are articulated through a set of magic acts and incantations. The old woman’s narrative crosses boundaries between the real and the fantastic. At the same time the fate-predicting magic acts during the night before Christmas are a manifestation of the survival of pagan beliefs under Christianity. The

73 Roman Jakobson and Marc Szeftel, “The Vseslav Epos”, in Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings IV. The Hague: Mouton, 1966, 301-368. 74 On the point of suppression of the blood vengeance motif see Roman Jakobson and Gojko Ruzhichich, “The Serbian Zmaj Ognjeni Vuk and the Russian Vseslav Epos”, in Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings IV, The Hague: Mouton, 1966, 369-379.

70 Political Animals attitude towards dogs is one such cultural construct that is saturated with pagan beliefs. One remnant of the times in which the dog was regarded as a totemic tribal animal is the belief in the existence of a dog-headed people. Regarded as children of women’s coitus with male dogs, they were often imagined as having human upper bodies and dog’s lower bodies. Their sexuality is thus represented by dog’s physiology and anatomy. Ethnographers have registered such beliefs among Russian peasant communities as late as the end of the nineteenth century.75 The act of murdering a ‘sibling’ dog is thus an act of ‘dual faith’ – paganism and Christianity – driven as it is by a Christian aversion to the sexed/animal body and the pagan belief in the totemic origins of kinship units. The old woman, the daughter of the man who was a member of the dog-human family, desires a total separation from an embarrassing past. She wants a new beginning, a new future, but does Khlebnikov himself as the author of the poem share this vision of the future?

Dogs, mother of dog/god and Khlebnikov’s futurity

At this stage a further set of questions is in order. What is Khlebni- kov’s ‘class’ standing in relation to attitudes towards dogs? As a futurist, did his vision of the future conceptualise a society with set boundaries between species? What new relationship was there to emerge between members of the animal kingdom and humans? Khlebnikov was careful to present the dog narrative in the skaz and periphrasis form to express the class distance that separates him from the narrator. Indeed, the story is also about the fate of a puppy that learns to love his human family – mother and brother. The dog’s love of people is valorised in striking detail: he jumps to embrace people and to kiss them in his doggy way. The dog has been bred and trained to hunt hares. He does people no harm. Due to the specific way he has been raised he is hybridised and humanised. What he discovers instead is the treachery of his own ‘brother’. Was the boy/man Cain to his dog brother? Is harmony possible in nature without people accepting animals as their kin? This set of questions is implicit in the poem.

75 On Polkan (half-man, half-dog) see A.N. Veselovskii, “Iz istorii romana i povesti”, in Materialy i issledovaniia. St Petersburg: Otdelenie ORIAS, 1888, 11- 54.

When dogs were more expensive than people 71

Khlebnikov had a profound knowledge of folk mythology. As one of the most experimental of Russian modernist poets he invented a new concept of time. Osip Mandelshtam called him ‘an idiotic Ein- stein’ who could not work out differences in distances separating objects in time and space.76 His long poem ‘The Night before the Soviets’ creates continuity in time and establishes causal relations which do not exist in the ‘real’ world. His interest in the non- Euclidian geometry of Lobachevsky can explain his poetics of parallel universes in this poem. According to Lobachevsky’s theory two parallel lines can meet at the end, somewhere in the limitless universe.77 Accordingly, in this poem real and epic characters can exist in parallel universes and yet converge at some point. They can be taken as real, in which case the poem has social and political meaning, but they can also be taken as epically static, so becoming the conveyers of the symbolic and the mythic. The characters – an old serf woman, a young woman, a dog, a man who kills the dog, the dog’s master and by proxy his own ‘father’– can be understood as characters from the world of Russian epic tales. They function out of time and space, even as they are endowed with a sense of historicity – hence the relevance of the night before the Revolution of 1917. As a great admirer of the anarchic Russian spirit, Khlebnikov was fond of historical Russian rebels such as the seventeenth-century Cossack Stepan Razin and his eighteenth-century counterpart Yemelyan Pugachev. In this context his boy/man who publicly executes the dog stands as an emblem of Russian anarchic revolt against the oppressors. The dog’s murder by hanging replicates the execution of rebels undertaken by the Tsarist authorities. The hanging of the dog by the serf boy/man is in line with the poem’s refrain about the imminent hanging of the mistress and all masters ‘tomorrow’, e.g. after the Soviets’ coming to power. Simulta- neously, the shift in time and space in the hanging motif transgresses historical confinement and endows it with symbolic meaning.78 For a futurist writer and theorist like Khlebnikov futurity was a programmatic question. His vision of the future had a utopian charac-

76 Osip Mandel’shtam, “Buria i natisk”, Russkoe iskusstvo. 1923, Vol. I, 81. 77 Khlebnikov studied Lobachevsky’s geometry as a student at Kazan University. He incorporated the geometer’s ideas in his longer poems. See Markov. 78 Markov writes about Khlebnikov’s imagery and composition being based on a ‘shift’ in the habitual and the familiar, on the mixing of heterogeneous elements.

72 Political Animals ter. Could man’s cruelty and lack of brotherly feeling towards animals appeal to his vision of the future? The future had to be different from the past and present, it had to be based on brotherly love. The man who kills his brother dog demonstrates his inability to love it as a ‘jun- ior brother’ – as Khlebnikov’s contemporary, Russian poet Sergei Esenin, called animals in 1924.79 While Khlebnikov’s attraction to the rebel spirit of the oppressed in Russian history might explain his depiction of the hanging of the dog, there is much more to this episode than the expression of class struggle. The overall negative attitude towards the dog/symbol among the peasant classes reflects Khlebnikov’s understanding of Russian folk poetry, songs, fairy-tales and epics. It also reflects his noted knowledge of the work of nineteenth-century ethnographers Alexander Potebnia and Alexander Afanasiev. Yet, his concept of the future incorporated mythological imagery with a utopian vision, much favoured by him, of future societies based on brotherly love. His utopianism was strongly grounded in contemporary intellectual trends. It included a strong quest to conquer physical death and to achieve immortality by means of the scientific efforts of a united humankind. Such a utopian vision of immortality included the animal kingdom. This vision was shared by most of the poets of the futurist orientation. Based on the teachings in Nikolai Fedorov’s (1828-1903) Philosophy of the Common Task (1906),80 the desire to conquer death was intrinsically linked to the need to be pro-active, altruistic and non- discriminatory.81 To achieve immortality one first had to educate the underprivileged, including the peasant classes. It is only through the united efforts of educated people that science could learn how to bring animals to the state of humans. Dogs occupy a special place in mythology and folk beliefs, and their correlation with humans should put them among the first candidates towards the achievement of such a state of equality. Khlebnikov was one of the generation who dreamed

79 Sergei Esenin, “My teper’ ukhodim ponemnogu”, in Stikhotvoreniia v dvukh tomakh. Moscow: Khud. lit. 1955, Vol. II, 202-203, 202. Esenin also identifies himself with the dog in “Sukin Syn” (“The Son of a Bitch”) (1924). 80 1906 is the year of the publication of the first part of Fedorov’s Filosofiia obshchego dela. See S.G. Semenova, “N.F. Fedorov i ego filosofskoe nasledie”, in N.F. Fedorov, Sochineniia. Moscow: izd-vo Mysl’, 1982, 5-52. 81 N.F. Fedorov, Sochineniia. Moscow: izd-vo Mysl’, 1982.

When dogs were more expensive than people 73 of a society in which humans and animals would have equal value in a life without end.82 Did his dream of brotherhood include dogs? Khlebnikov’s vision of paradise based on the co-existence of animals and humans is most overtly expressed in the long poem ‘La- domir’. Written in 1920 it was conceived in 1919 when Khlebnikov stayed in a psychiatric clinic. It is during this time that he told his friend, professor of psychiatry, V.Ia. Anfimov, that he had special links with animals due to his various states in previous lives.83 While science is given power in the new society of ‘Ladomir’, the society is based on a reunion between man and nature. He proclaims ‘freedom for horses and equal rights for cows’ (289).84 Industrial cosmism is resolved into a pastoral society. Death is conquered. Love reigns supreme. The image of a dog finds its way into this poem, working in correlation with a member of the gentry. The dog, the landlord and the maiden form a peculiar triangle. The maiden was seduced in the times of serfdom by her master. Khlebnikov invites her to stage an act of revenge against the oppressor. His suggestion is to kiss with her tubercular lips both the master and the chained dog. Her kiss must first infect the former oppressor with tuberculosis. Her second kiss must touch the dog’s mouth covered by saliva. She must then kiss the master again, this time infecting him with another set of bacteria. By then she would have infected the dog with her tubercular germs. The mad dog’s saliva becomes a weapon against the master. Her own consumptive germs have been seeded into the bodies of the master and the dog. This image of bacterial war against the former oppressors pairs the master and the dog. The image of blending and the exchange of human and animal bodily fluids echoes the breastfeeding scene from ‘The Night before the Soviets’. In this work, the suckling puppy’s saliva runs down the young serf woman’s breast, thus contaminating her body. The motif of the accumulation of the dog’s saliva in the continuum of the two poems indicates the theme’s importance in Khlebnikov’s imagination.

82 See a discussion in Irene Masing-Delic, “Zabolotsky’s The Triumph of Agricul- ture: Satire or Utopia?”, The Russian Review XLII/4 (1983), 360-376. 83 Anfimov shared Khlebnikov’s interests in cosmic dimensions of the human psyche. See his “Khlebnikov v 1919 godu”, in Arabist. Khlebnikoved. Chelovek. Moscow: Gumanitarii, 2007, 298-310. 84 Velimir Khlebnikov, “Ladomir”, in Tvoreniia. Ed. M. Ia. Poliakov, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986, 281-294.

74 Political Animals

In ‘Ladomir’ the notion of the maid kissing the man and the dog has strong sexual connotations in view of the fact that her former oppressor is also her former seducer. In Khlebnikov’s imagination the dog is linked to the sphere of sexuality. This is the case in both of the two long poems under discussion. The image of the young woman kissing the master and the dog implies a correlation between the man and the dog. It suggests that both of them can function interchangeably as partners to a woman. The image also contains a paradox: by kissing the master and the chained dog the sick woman can pass her tubercular germs onto them. But her kiss can be interpreted not only as an act of vengeance but also as that of ultimate humiliation, and in application to a dog’s saliva-covered mouth, the kiss is a gesture of overcoming disgust, a gesture in the tradition of St Francis of Assisi who did not feel scatological disgust vis-à-vis the animal world. As such, it stands as an emblem of forgiveness and reconciliation. In ‘La- domir’, with its discontinuous string of verses, this paradox remains unresolved. The narrator calls the maiden to ‘kiss the enemy until he will disappear’ (281). Khlebnikov uses the word ‘ischeznet’ which means to disappear and to perish, but it is not clear whether he wants the enemy to be annihilated physically or to be reformed by love. Is there a place in Khlebnikov’s utopia for chained dogs and former masters? The pairing of the dog and the landlord in the context of sexual practices between serf women and masters forms an intertextual link with the poem ‘The Night before the Soviets’. The hidden substratum of Khlebnikov’s psyche and the sacral and obscene layers of folk mythology are reflected in the dog thematics. The dog in Khlebnikov’s poems is a political animal, firmly associated with the theme of serfdom and masters exploiting their serfs sexually. In ‘Ladomir’ the dog as a symbolic animal also finds its way in- to utopian visions of the future in the image of the Constellation Canis Major. In the new space and time realia within the earth-cosmos continuum it is possible to make a trip to this stellar canine figure. In mentioning the Constellation Canis Major twice in the poem as a des- tination for interplanetary travel, Khlebnikov clearly ascribes this animal with special esoteric qualities. The theme of women breastfeeding dogs in ‘The Night before the Soviets’ has a reverse counterpart in ‘Ladomir’. Among the scenes depicting harmony between humans and animals there is a fragment alluding to a human baby suckling at a goat’s udder. This image pre-

When dogs were more expensive than people 75 cedes the lines about the newly acquired animal rights of cows and horses:

I idut liudi, idut zveri. Na bogorody sovremennits. (289)

And humans are marching, animals are marching To the god-deliveries by female contemporaries.

This striking imagery is expressed in a difficult and confusing use of the genitive construction: whose childbirth is it?85 The neolo- gism ‘bogorody’ adds to the interpretative challenge. Bogorody consists of two roots: bog – god and rody – childbirth. It also relates to the noun Mother of God, Bogorod-itsa, but is given in plural, suggesting that all contemporary women subscribe to the rank of mothers of gods. Are the newly born in this utopian society no longer human but supra-human? If yes, then who are they? Do they have new post- human bodies? Or does the scene evoke total equality between animal and human females in their equally important task of birth-giving? Whatever the answers to these questions are, this cross-species fantasy collapses boundaries between humans, animals and gods. In a harmonious society humans and animals live together. They give birth to offspring who will not die – they give birth to the immortal ones, the ‘gods’. The act of child delivery is an act of ‘bogorody’ – giving birth to immortals. Can we assume that in this society women no longer breastfeed babies? Do animals like goats help to rear (post)human children? Is it not possible to imagine that women might repay them in kind? Contemporary evolutionary biologist Rosemary Rodd argues that the agency of female nurturing played a major role in the animal domestication, especially wolves and lambs: ‘Before milk-producing animals were domesticated, human milk was the only suitable food available for raising very young wolf pups or lambs away from their own mothers’ (228).86 In her interpretation, there is nothing abnormal in such close human-animal relationships. Khlebnikov’s utopian vi-

85 For a discussion of Khlebnikov’s inventive language see Vladimir Feshchenko, “Breakthrough the Languages: Velimir Chlebnikov’s ‘Language Husbandry’ and Life-Creation”, Russian Literature LXIX/ 2/3/4 (2011), 259-290. 86 Rosemary Rodd, Biology, Ethics, and Animals. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

76 Political Animals sions are thus grounded in Arcadian visions with strong evolutionary underpinnings. With culture and class specific prejudices removed, new types of human-animal relations do not have to be political narratives of power, domination and exploitation. In this new society the lives of animals and humans have equal value.87 Whether dogs fall into the category of ‘animals’ is not clear. Have they metamorphosed into cosmic atoms and particles making up the Constellation Canis Major? ‘Dog’ in the utopian future is more than the dog in Khlebnikov’s views on Russian history and the revolutionary present. In the political situation of ‘here and now’ the dog is a compromised figure through its association with the old world’s masters. In Alexander Blok’s famous poem ‘The Twelve’ (1918) the dog represents the old world that is afraid of the future.88 In it the revolutionary present is linked to the future by the figures of twelve soldiers – new apostles of the new dawn. Jesus Christ himself leads the twelve red soldiers into the better tomorrow. A dog follows this procession. If Khlebnikov’s futuristic procession of humans and animals does not include dogs it is probably because dogs already are in the paradise. While all the texts analysed in this chapter deal with the question of the social evils of serfdom, they employ the correlation of the dog and the human for multiple aims. Thus, the theme that unites the narratives of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Khlebnikov is that of the cruelty of children towards animals – the theme to be explored in the next chapter. In ‘Dubrovskii’, while cats are endowed with souls as God’s living creatures, children cannot empathise with their physical suffering. Dostoevsky’s dogs are made to hound down a child by a cruel general, but why did the child throw a stone at a dog in the first place? In Khlebnikov the murder of the dog by his ‘sibling’ child/man has strong allusions to the betrayal of Cain of his brother. In this way the theme has strong connections with the expulsion narrative of ‘Paradise Lost’. The murder of one’s ‘brother’ is one of the acts that will hinder the establishment of a new Paradise. People will have to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the nature.

87 Noteworthy is Duganov’s view that “in Sobakevna we have a reflection of ancient mythological complex of the Great Mother of all the living or the Goddess with many names”. Duganov, 283. 88 A. Blok, “Dvenadtsat’”, in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980, Vol II, 313-326.

When dogs were more expensive than people 77

In Pushkin’s ‘Dubrovskii’, while peasant children are still in the state of barbaric ignorance, yet they have been obliquely taught a lesson in radicalism: they have learned that it is acceptable to set alight a human enemy but not acceptable to burn an innocent animal. The question is whether these children have lost their innocence through the exposure to this act of inter-gentry vendetta and class revolt from the serf who set the house on fire? It is quite clear that the simple people have no sympathy for the judges burned in the house. Have the children been taught to displace their inborn cruel instincts from the animal Other to the targeted class Other? While Khlebnikov was an admirer of the revolts led by Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev, Pushkin was horrified by their cruelty and the potential consequences of Russian mass anger.89 For Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Khlebnikov, children are not born with the moral imperative. Dostoevsky and Khlebnikov were both influenced by Fedorov’s religious scientific utopia and Lobachevsky’s geometry; their vision of the future was based on the strong desire of harmony and brotherhood.90 The theme of children’s cruelty in its link to dog thematics will be further developed in the next chapter, ‘The Children’s Hour’. The Fedorovian influence will be discussed in connection with dog-human scientific and metaphysical transformation narratives.

89 John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971. 90 See a discussion on Khlebnikov’s utopianism in L. Geller, “Predislovie: Zhivotnye v reprezentatsii”, in Utopiia zverinosti, 10.

Chapter 2 ‘The Children’s Hour’: Cruelty to dogs

The priest had a dog. And he loved it. It ate a piece of meat. He killed it. – Russian nursery rhyme

The title of this chapter alludes to the Hollywood film ‘The Children’s Hour’ (1961) based on the 1934 play by Lillian Hellman who in turn wrote it around a real life event in Scotland.1 Produced after the end of the 1950s, a decade closely orientated to family values, this film overturned the perception of children as innocent creatures in matters of human sexuality. It shows pre-teen girls in a private boarding school orchestrating a major intrigue against their two schoolmistresses by accusing them of having a lesbian relationship. The well-read girls observe and collect pieces of evidence that lead them to conclude that the schoolmistresses have romantic leanings towards one another. This launches a series of events that lead to an innocent woman’s suicide. The title of the film encapsulates the double irony of children’s ability to penetrate the secrets of sexual attraction and to plot a major intrigue. The film also challenges adult naïveté, prompting its viewers to reconsider their assumptions of childhood innocence. This chapter examines stories from the Russian literary canon that educate adults on the subject of children’s wickedness through the narratalogical use of a dog. Most of these stories are not written for children; in some of those cases when they did become part of juvenilia this happened by default. The texts chosen for analysis in this chapter include episodes that contain manifestations of the sadistic or unkind treatment of dogs by children. Some relate to children’s sexuality through contacts with dogs and other animals. Others reveal in-

1 The Children’s Hour. Dir. William Wyler, screenplay John M. Hayes, USA, 1961. 80 Political Animals stances of extreme cruelty: in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov a boy feeds a hungry street dog with bread into which he has put a pin;2 Anton Chekhov in his short story ‘Kashtanka’ (1887) describes a boy who tortures a female dog by feeding it a piece of meat that is attached to a string which he then pulls out of its stomach.3 Alexander Kuprin’s (1870-1938) ‘The White Poodle’ (1908) draws our attention to class differentiation amongst children in the story of a spoilt rich boy selfishly possessive of the working dog belonging to a working boy. Although the rich boy does not torture the dog physically, his unkind nature makes the dog suffer. In ‘The Elephant’ (1907), Kuprin enters into the world of a child’s unconscious, the world defined by Freud as a child’s ‘sexual life’.4 Behavioural psychologists note that the majority of children who abuse insects or small pets do so as part of the process of learning about the world: how the spider is put together, what separate parts of an insect will do if not connected to the whole; whether a bird can fly if a wing is torn off, and so on.5 Data on criminal adults, however, suggest that a significant number of killers abused pets in their childhood. Russian literature, in the case of the authors analysed in this chapter, has produced motifs that recognise these behavioural patterns and drives in children. In The Brothers Karamazov children learn about the world by observing dogs’ sexual behaviour: this is regarded as part of the ‘normal’ learning process. Yet, in the same novel and in Chekhov’s story ‘Kashtanka’, children abuse dogs in a way that can be classified as zoo-sadism. These texts are thus directed at adults to alert them to children’s potential sadistic inclinations and to promote a more realistic psychology-based attitude towards children. At the end of this chapter I analyse a little-known collection of children’s stories about dogs: Sobaka: rasskazy o sobakakh (The Dog: Stories about Dogs, 1883) as an example of an educational counter-narrative to the

2 F.M. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, Vols. XIV and XV, 1976. 3 A.P. Chekhov, “Kashtanka”, in Sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh. Mos- cow: izd-vo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955, Vol. V, 452-472. 4 Sigmund Freud, “The Archaic Features and Infantilism of Dreams”, in Introduc- tory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James and Alix Strachey, The Penguin Freud Library, London: Penguin Books, 1991, Vol. I, 235-250. 5 Arnold Arluke, Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves. Phila- delphia: Temple UP, 2006.

The Children’s Hour 81 adult literature about the abuse of dogs by children. Aimed at child readers, the volume uses examples of cruel behaviour by adults towards dogs and horses as a way to educate children on how not to behave. The pedagogical and ontological pathos of the volume clearly excludes the existence of inborn cruelty and evil in children.

The functions of dogs vis-à-vis children in The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov includes two powerful narratives involving dog thematics in relation to human cruelty: in the first story, as discussed in the previous chapter, the general orders his dogs to kill a boy who wounds one of his favourite hounds; in the other, a different boy almost kills a dog by feeding it bread containing a hidden pin. In the polyphonic world of Dostoevsky’s prose these scenarios do not stand in a relationship of complete opposition. Rather, they share some features of family resemblance. In the subplot of the general and his hounds the boy is not completely innocent, yet the incongruity between the act of childish mis- behaviour and the punishment that follows renders the episode an example of injustice. A reader’s sense of justice rests on the notion of rationality and balance, which this narrative offends. The reader responds by turning against the general and what he represents: the system, limitless and unreasoned power, and tyranny. But if the punishment had been mild, in the form of verbal communication with a didactic purpose, the reader’s sympathies would have shifted and the boy would then have been the object of indignation. Indeed, is it rea- sonable to throw stones at animals? On this level the subplot related to the general’s hounds versus the child demands a different emotional response, because of the disclosure of these new layers of meaning: why are children cruel to small animals? Is the continuation of violence reliant on such learned behaviour? Is it ‘natural’ to offend those that are smaller than we are? Does every victim become a perpetrator? Do some children have inborn qualities of cruelty and sadistic leanings? This set of questions finds an answer in the second dog subplot in the novel, the story of a dog that is almost killed by a boy but is quasi-resurrected to teach him a lesson. The lesson has the philosophi-

82 Political Animals cal depth of Dostoevsky’s universe, or what Viacheslav Ivanov describes as ‘Dostoevsky’s metaphysics of childhood’ (95).6 What is the role that Dostoevsky assigned to dogs within the problematics of the metaphysics of childhood? The story of the general and his hounds’ slaughter of an eight-year-old boy functions as a narrative based on the theological notion of the innocence of children. As was stated earlier, in his quest to reflect on the subject of theodicy Ivan Karamazov uses this story as proof of the lack of justice in God’s world.7 He consciously embeds the notion of the boy’s innocence in the metaphysical narrative that asserts that children are innocent because they do not have carnal knowledge. The motif of child innocence in association with human sexuality is further developed in the novel. This tabooed topic is intricately woven into a wider dog subplot, with dogs functioning as sites of childhood education about sexuality in nature. The function of dogs is thus both symbolic and realistic. In this novel Dostoevsky explores various manifestations of human sexuality: old men’s lechery; the son’s oedipal hatred of his father; the desire by close blood relatives for the same women; sadistic and masochistic compensations for sexual desire. As Victor Terras notes, the story about children within The Brothers Karamazov ‘mirrors the adult world and so makes its meaning clearer’ (62).8 Im- portantly, adolescent sexuality shows the same sadistic-masochistic complex as that of the adult characters – a complex famously noted by Freud in his essay ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’.9 Thus, Liza Khokhla- kova dreams of torturing children while her sexual fantasy centres around her wish to be tormented and tortured. Dostoevsky’s interest in child delinquency and sexuality developed during the years when he was contemplating a new novel, which was to become The Brothers Karamazov. This is evidenced by his description of a visit to a juvenile boys’ colony in 1875: in Diary of a Writer, January 1876, he

6 Viacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky. New York: The Noonday Press, 1971. 7 Lisa Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996. 8 Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion. Wisconsin: Madison UP, 2002. 9 Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974, Vol. XXI, 175-196.

The Children’s Hour 83 notes that he asked the director of the colony whether the young inmates (who ranged from seven to seventeen years of age) were subject to onanism, which he euphemistically describes as ‘well-known de- praved children’s habits [izvestnye detskie porochnye privychki]’ (19).10 Furthermore, in his Diary of a Writer of February 1876 he explores the notion of child sexuality in the context of parents’ abusive treatment of children in connection with the Kronenberg affair (or Kroneberg in Dostoevsky’s spelling), in which a seven-year-old girl, Mariia Kronenberg, was regularly beaten by her father for the ‘secret vice’.11 Susanne Fusso demonstrates that Dostoevsky was indignant at the medical expert’s cold estimation of the girl’s masturbation as an illness.12 Fusso notes that, while he reflected on issues of children’s sexuality, the writer’s faith in the inborn goodness of children remained dear to him. Noteworthy for the purpose of my investigation, the two accounts pertaining to children (January and February 1876) in the Diary of a Writer are separated by an article on the abuse of animals (January 1876), notably the bad example set by adults beating their horses in public and the impact this has on children who witness such violent behaviour. Furthermore, in the very first January entry of the Diary of a Writer, preceding the article on Dostoevsky’s visit to the juvenile colony, Dostoevsky notes definite sexual overtones in children’s costumes and dances in Christmas parties for rich children. He notes that they mimic adults’ dances, which he defines as a process of concealment of sexual desire, thus implying that adults are responsible for sexualising innocent children (some of whom are as young as three). Evident in these texts is Dostoevsky’s search for the reasons for the loss of innocence in children, his scope of problematics ranging from the social to the psychological and the ontological. All these issues are problematised in The Brothers Karamazov in which he weaves his thoughts on children’s psychology and their ontological resonance in relation to matters of good and evil into his animal – and

10 F.M. Dostoevskii, “Koloniia maloletnikh prestupnikov. Dnevnik pisatelia za 1876 god”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1981, Vol. XXII, 17-26, 19. 11 F.M. Dostoevskii, “Po povodu dela Kroneberga. Dnevnik pisatelia za 1876 god”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1981, Vol. XXII, 50-73. 12 Susanne Fusso, Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2006.

84 Political Animals particularly dog – subplots. He uses child-dog relations as a litmus test to measure children’s goodness and innocence. In so doing he gives the role of dogs an important ontological status.

Zhuchka-Perezvon: a resurrected dog

In the Dostoevskian universe the idea of children’s innate goodness is challenged in the subplot about a dog called Zhuchka-Perezvon.13 It is a story about an eight-year-old boy called Iliusha who feeds the street dog Zhuchka with bread in which a sharp pin is hidden. The same person who kills the old Karamazov, the lackey Smerdiakov, teaches the boy this appalling ‘trick’. Iliusha sees how the dog runs away squealing in pain, and thinks that he has killed the dog. Although the responsibility of this act rests on the adult Smerdiakov, the boy has deep feelings of remorse and cannot forgive himself for committing such an act. We learn that Smerdiakov had sadistic inclinations as a small child – he tortured animals. An illegitimate child, he grew up to become the murderer of his own father. The sadistic adult teaches a child to commit a sadistic act, but Iliusha repents, thus giving a sign of hope for humanity and the possibility of harmony in this world. Il- iusha is consumptive and the events of his story, including the humiliation of his father, the cruel bullying he suffers because of the poverty of his attire and his own ‘killing’ of the dog Zhuchka, contribute to the quick development of his illness. In a precocious understanding of the laws of natural justice, Iliusha believes that his imminent death is God’s punishment for his ‘murder’ of the dog. The dog, however, has not died. Aware of Iliusha’s guilt-driven suffering, Kolya Krasotkin, one of the boys from the school, searches for the dog, finds it and shows it to Iliusha before the boy’s death. Kolya is a teenager of almost fourteen years and a popular figure among the schoolboys. He had previously patronised Iliusha, and Il- iusha adores him in return. Dostoevsky demonstrates in detail the psychological nuances of the dynamics of relationships between boys of school age. These relationships are marked by the paradoxes of attachment and betrayal, subordination and rebellion, selfishness and

13 Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion. Wisconsin: Madison UP, 2002. Terras noticed that this enigmatic dog is of indeterminate sex, since Zhuchka is a feminine noun and Perezvon is masculine. In fact, Zhuchka is a unisex name.

The Children’s Hour 85 sacrifice, love and hatred. In one extreme episode Iliusha puts a small knife into Kolya’s thigh as a manifestation of his passionate feelings towards the boy, the need for his friendship and protection and a punishment for demonstrative indifference. Kolya, on the other hand, finds the dog Zhuchka and hides it in his house without letting anybody know that the dog is still alive. His motivation for keeping the dog undisclosed can be explained as the result of conflicting impulses: love for Iliusha and a desire to prolong his suffering. A month goes by before he finally shows Zhuchka to Iliusha. The timing for this act is carefully chosen – the dog is delivered to Iliusha on the boy’s deathbed. Kolya’s motivations and strategies are complex and express the paradox of good and evil in human souls, even children’s souls. During this month Kolya teaches the dog various tricks that are designed to lead to the animal’s transformation from Zhuchka to Pe- rezvon. The street dog is taught to stand on its hind legs, jump for food, and stay still in wait for a command. As a result the mutt evolves into a trained and well-fed dog. In response to this strict training, the dog develops a great love for his new master. This motif establishes a parallelism between human and dog behaviour which prepares the reader for the most astonishing parallelism between the dog and human yet – that of analogous eschatological possibilities for dogs and people. One of the tricks that the dog masters is to pretend to be dead. He lies in a state of ‘death’ and on the command of his master rises in all the splendour of his vivacity. The act is allegorical of resurrection: the dog not only gets to his feet but also ‘rises’ from the dead. The dog’s change of name extends this symbolic transformation of the earthly into a heavenly body. Zhuchka’s new name, Perezvon, has ecclesiastical connotations: it refers to the church-bell sound performed in the glory of God. Kolya notes twice in the text that Perez- von is an old Slavic word, an allusion to pagan times. In this way Perezvon is symbolic not only of the Christian notion of resurrection of the spirit but also of the quasi-pagan cults of the resurrection of the flesh.14 Dostoevsky chose the dog to personify this religious syncretism: an animal with a totemic function in Slav cults.

14 On pagan folk beliefs about resurrection and the relationships between children and parents see V.E. Vetlovskaia, “Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo v svete literaturnykh i fol’klornykh parallelei”, in Mif. Fol’klor. Literatura. Leningrad: Nauka, 1978, 81-114.

86 Political Animals

The use of dogs as material for eschatological theorising is further reinforced by the introduction of a small pedigree puppy into the story of Zhuchka-Perezvon and Iliusha’s death. In order to relieve the boy’s suffering at the ‘death’ of Zhuchka, the boy’s father brings him a puppy, a true pedigree dog. But, charming as the little puppy is, it only evokes further suffering in Iliusha, reminding him as it does of his cruelty towards Zhuchka. I suggest that the puppy fails to satisfy Iliusha’s needs on another, more important level – that of the concept of the afterlife. Indeed, the pedigree puppy stands as a metaphor for selected, manipulated procreation. As an artificially-bred animal it is emblematic of man’s interference in the sphere of creation. Signifi- cantly, Zhuchka is a mutt, a street dog, and the result of ‘natural’ procreative animal behaviour. On the level of procreation/ death/immortality the puppy emblematises scientific understandings of quasi-immortality achieved through the life of future generations. Dostoevsky found this atheistic concept of quasi-immortality unacceptable for a number of reasons, one of which was his conviction that without expectations of personal salvation humanity would sink into crime and injustice.15 Iliusha’s behaviour as a little ‘criminal’ who could have killed a dog illustrates the psychological workings of this principle. The puppy fails to compensate for the ‘dead’ Zhuchka, not only for psychological reasons but also because it represents a trope for the wrong kind of immortality – a form of immortality that does not conquer the physical death of an individual but suggests continuity of life through progeneration. The immortality and afterlife desired by Iliusha is the physical, literal immortality of the flesh. Such a desire can be satisfied only by the actual resurrection of Zhuchka into Perez- von. The power to understand this need and perform the miracle of transformation is given to the teenage boy Kolya Krasotkin in an illustration of Dostoevsky’s hope for the future generation’s ability to create a harmonious society based on trust in literal physical resurrection in the afterlife.

15 Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition. Eds George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

The Children’s Hour 87

Drawing of the dog that Vladimir Durov thought he had killed. My Animals, 1929.

In the context of the subplot of Iliusha, the dog becomes an allegory for the boy’s afterlife. Having seen the ‘resurrected’ dog, the eight-year-old Iliusha finds it easier to conceive of his own death. Not only he is rid of the guilt and fear of God’s punishment for the murder of the dog, but he also departs to the next world with the ‘knowledge’ of his own future resurrection in the flesh. The boy dies in a state of total reconciliation with the other boys and in an ecstasy of mutual

88 Political Animals love. They all agree that his departure is a temporary parting and that they will all meet again in the next life and live in love and total harmony. The Zhuchka-Perezvon metamorphosis propels the dog into an eschatological domain. Dostoevsky’s own theorisings about the immortality of the spirit and resurrection of the flesh achieved their utmost expression in The Brothers Karamazov, his last novel. While the novel remained unfinished at the time of his death, it is still the clear- est reflection of his interest in the literal physical resurrection of the body. Influenced by the thinking of Nikolai Fedorov, Dostoevsky eagerly embraced the idea of the possibility of the physical resurrection of the body. The fact that he used a dog for the first, albeit quasi- physical resurrection in the flesh suggests that he had considered the symbolic meaning of this animal. Such a representation is not without precedent in Dostoevsky’s writings. In Insulted and Injured (1861) he had already depicted a mysterious dog that, like his phantom-like master, is at least eighty years old – an age, that dogs never reach, as the narrator acknowledges. The dog is described as a site of ‘something phantasmic and bewitched’ (‘fantasticheskoe, zakoldovannoe’, 171).16 The parallelism between the immortal dog’s owner and the equally immortal dog in this context is given an intertextual referent by the narrator himself in relation to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Gothic tales. More- over, the dog could be an incarnation of a devil or a man, such as Mephistopheles. Whereas in Insulted and Injured Dostoevsky was working within the tradition of romantic mystery tales, in his last novel he chose to explore the Fedorovian and Christian notions of immortality. In the Zhuchka-Perezvon subplot the dog-boy parallelism is symbolic of Christian resurrection and immortality (with elements of traditional beliefs), since the ‘active love’ propagated by Fedorov’s teachings not only symbolically resurrects Zhuchka but also redeems the boy. To achieve this Fedorovian ‘common task’ children have to choose the path of love for all living matter as represented by dogs.

16 F.M. Dostoevskii, “Unizhennye i oskorblennye”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1972, Vol. III, 169-442.

The Children’s Hour 89

Dog sexuality and riddles of human procreation

The connection between dogs and the sphere of procreation and sexuality, especially in the context of children’s subconscious impulses, is one of the most striking features of Dostoevsky’s exploration of these thematics. Another striking feature of the dog subplot is that it is framed as a narrative about children’s sexuality and their ability to be cruel not only to others but also to themselves. Just as adults have the ‘perverse’ need to suffer and make others suffer, so too do children. In his desire to draw attention to children’s curiosity about matters of sexuality and procreation, Dostoevsky chose dogs to demonstrate the ‘natural’ side of animal sexuality. While Zhuchka-Perezvon is a symbol of the physical resurrection of the animal/human body it is also shown as an ordinary street dog displaying ordinary canine behaviour. Like any other mutt, it picks up information about other dogs in the habitual way, i.e. by sniffing. In a novel devoted to the demon- stration of many manifestations of the power of sexual passion, Dos- toevsky also attempts to make Christian views on the life of all living creatures less ascetic. The elder Zosima issues pantheistic pro- nouncements justifying the natural life of all living creatures through the insistence that God intended all living beings to love each other, to live in harmony and to rejoice in this earthly world. Zosima thus re- interprets the Christian understanding of the life of the human/animal body as less ascetic, a position that prompted Russian Orthodox rigor- ist Konstantin Leontiev to describe Dostoevsky’s religion as ‘pink Christianity’.17 The subplot of the boys ‘learning’ about the immortality of the body via the emblematic meaning of the dog Zhuchka-Perezvon’s supposed resurrection is linked to the themes of childbirth and human and animal sexuality. As pointed out earlier, the pedigree puppy stands as an illustration of procreation and sexuality in relation to dog breeding as opposed to nature. In another episode Dostoevsky uses a street dog’s behaviour to illustrate the manner in which sexuality manifests itself in the natural world. Dostoevsky demonstrates that children get their lessons in sexuality and procreation from observing animals. Thus, when Kolya and another boy take Perezvon to Iliusha

17 K.N. Leont’ev, Analiz, stil’ i veianie: o romanakh gr. L.N. Tolstogo. Brown University, Slavic Reprint III, Providence: Brown UP, 1968, 89.

90 Political Animals to redeem him of his feelings of guilt, the dog behaves in a very ordinary way: he joins in with other dogs in sniffing each other’s private parts. That sniffing is related to dogs’ copulation procedure is quite clear to the teenage Kolya. The sexual connotation of the dogs’ behaviour is described euphemistically, as part of a scene in which ‘dogs sniff at each other in accordance to dogs’ rules’ (473). In Russian the lexeme ‘obniukhivat’sia’ or ‘sniukhivat’sia’ – to sniff or smell one another – is a euphemism for two people entering an intimate relationship. Kolya shows a very mundane attitude towards the dogs’ sniffing tendencies and expresses his knowledge of the sexual aspects of this process as part of ‘the natural world’. Dostoevsky then uses this teenage boy to articulate his views on ‘laws of nature’:

[This law of nature] is not funny, you are being incorrect. There is nothing funny in nature, whatever the human being with his prejudices might be saying. Had the dogs had the ability to criticize and speak then they would have discovered lots of things that are laughable about people. There are many more silly things going on in the social relations between humans who are dogs’ masters […] I am a socialist. (473)

Kolya explains that being a socialist means having free morals and free beliefs about marriage and sexual relationships.18 Dostoevsky demonstrates that political and sexual developments occur in teenag- ers in tandem – Kolya, we are told, borrowed his thoughts from another young boy. Ivan Turgenev’s peasant boys in ‘Bezhin Meadow’ (1852) make a revealing comparison with these urban boys and especially the ‘socialist’ Kolya vis-à-vis the thematics of interaction with dogs.19 This celebrated story from A Huntsman’s Sketches won Turgenev a reputation for its very sympathetic description of Russian peasant boys at the times of serfdom. Especially spirited and talented is a fourteen year old boy Pavlusha, who is the main storyteller in this sketch. His age makes him a counterpart of Kolya, albeit in a different time and social milieu. Pavlusha tells other boys comprising the group of

18 Here Dostoevsky is polemical towards new theories on marriage proposed by radical intellectuals. See Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 19 I.S. Turgenev, “Bezhin lug”, in Zapiski okhotnika. Moscow: Nauka, 1991, 61-75.

The Children’s Hour 91 herd-keepers stories about unusual events based on folk beliefs in forest spirits. These boys have two dogs, Zhuchka and Seryi, and in a charming scene of bonding Pavlusha rests his arm on one of the dogs while the dog responds with love and gratitude for this gesture of trust. While Turgenev promotes the idea of the harmonious integration of the peasant boys with nature, he also demonstrates the boys’ amal- gamation of mythopoetic beliefs into their worldview. Dostoevsky’s city boys and Kolya in particular are confused by atheistic ideas; they are divorced from the holistic views of nature and themselves as part of a bigger cosmos. Without respect for the spiritual side of nature they are prone to sadistic behaviour towards both humans and dogs. One of the moral issues arising in the children-dog thematics in The Brothers Karamazov is the view that it is impossible to eliminate bad impulses, even in children. This belief is manifested in the stone- throwing motif, a motif present in Ivan Karamazov’s story about the general’s punishment of the boy who threw the stone at his favourite hound. Indeed, the question of why the boy performed this act is not answered in Ivan’s story. Ivan focuses on the general’s cruelty, but was not the boy who threw the stone unkind? Dostoevsky picks up the stone-throwing motif in the final episode of the novel, after the funeral of the little boy Iliusha. In accordance with his wish the boys put crumbs of bread onto his grave in order to attract birds. This touching wish is an expression of Iliusha’s thoughts about his existence after death. He imagines that as he lies in the grave the sound of birds singing will cheer him up. Dostoevsky intended this image to serve as a sign of hope for the physical resurrection of the body. Iliusha’s friends do what he asked and leave breadcrumbs on the frozen soil of his grave. On the way back from the funeral the boys see a flock of sparrows flying in the direction of the grave. This scene should serve as reassurance of Iliusha’s wish, yet one boy cannot resist the impulse to grab a stone and throw it into the flock of flying birds. Dostoevsky notes that, like all the other boys, this boy was cry- ing after the funeral. Although obviously aggrieved by the death of another small boy, he nevertheless throws a stone at the birds. How should one understand this behaviour? Should his act be interpreted as a manifestation of his fury at Iliusha’s death and disbelief in the afterlife? Should it be interpreted as a prank, as something that boys do out of impulse and that cannot be controlled even by the feelings of reverence and sorrow after a funeral? Does it mean that there will always

92 Political Animals be another ‘Other’, a ready substitute for a former victim? Yesterday it was a dog, today a sparrow, tomorrow some other helpless creature. Should it be interpreted as a manifestation of the deeply seated evil in human nature? In Dostoevsky’s polyphonic world all these questions are implicitly encoded in this disturbing act.

Viktor Borisov-Musatov’s (1870-1905) Impressionist ‘Mal’chik s sobakoi’ (‘Boy with a Dog’, 1895) integrates the boy and the dog with nature.

Why do children do such cruel things? Is it possible to overcome impulses? Since impulses can be good or evil, should this state of things be considered normal? Children as well as adults are driven by contradictory emotions and impulses which range from love to hatred, sadism to altruism, egotism to self-sacrifice: do humans share these impulses with the animal world? Dostoevsky’s dog thematics

The Children’s Hour 93 serve as educational material about children, not for children, teaching adults to recognise evil impulses in children and to develop a less naïve view of them. The theme of the friendship between children and dogs adds a new dimension to this. Yet he also exposes children’s ability to torture small animals and those who are smaller than themselves, paving the way for a psychological re-reading of the unques- tionable goodness of children, which will find its reflection in the later psychoanalytical thought.20 He explores children’s ability to do evil in the theological context of the paradoxical co-existence of good and evil in the human soul. Dogs do more than provide children with the knowledge about nature’s way. They are the site of this polyphonic exploration of aspects of psychology, theology and eschatology. They constitute the symbolic link between the past and future.21

Choosing the life of abuse: Chekhov’s ‘Kashtanka’ (‘The Little Chestnut’)

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) is the Russian writer most famously associated with the word ‘dog’ due to the visibility of this animal in probably his best known story, ‘Lady with the dog’ (‘Dama s sobachkoi’, 1899), to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 in connection with emotional substitution narratives. Imbued with the sobriety and cynicism of a biological scientist, Chekhov was not a children’s author. Indeed, even when Chekhov did write about children he wrote for adults. Like Dostoevsky, who dedicated chapters to boys and about boys, Chekhov wrote about boys’ adventures, but these stories were not meant for young adult readers. His story ‘Boys’ (‘Mal’chiki’, 1887) was written in the same year as the story ‘The Little Chestnut’ (‘Kashtanka’), about the small she-dog of that name. Both stories have boys as protagonists but neither is entirely suitable for young audiences. When ‘Boys’ was first published in a newspaper version it did not

20 Ivan Ermakov noted children’s sadism in this novel in his psychoanalytical studies of Dostoevsky in the 1920s. See his Psikhoanaliz literatury: Pushkin, Gogol’, Dostoevskii. Moscow: NLO, 1999. 21 This eschatological link to animal cruelty is echoed in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward (1967). In one of the final scenes the dying hero visits the zoo where he sees a blind ape harmed by a visitor who threw tobacco into its eyes. The throwing of harmful objects at an animal is a likely allusion to Dosto- evsky’s novel.

94 Political Animals contain the scene in which the young protagonists attempt to run away to North America after reading Thomas Mayne Reid’s adventure stories. Censorship of the time deemed it a bad example to show teenag- ers conspiring to run away from home. In this story the family dog is an episodic character loyal to all the members of the family. This domesticated animal does not have a need to run away into the wilderness, unlike the romantically inspired boys. It is significant to the focus of this discussion that the boys’ desire for adventure is in part motivated by a sexual fantasy – their imaginary plot ends up in a triumph of fabulous wealth in the gold mines of America and marriage to extraordinary beauties. Although ‘Kashtanka’ is included in anthologies of children’s stories, its pedagogic message is controversial, as the story has complex moral messages that go far beyond children’s understanding. When Chekhov first submitted the story to a publisher he referred to it as a ‘fairy-tale’ (‘skazka’). He reworked it several times, adding more chapters and, in its final version, gave it the subtitle ‘story’, ‘rasskaz’. This change of genre and the strong philosophical underpinning of the final version reflect the change in intended readership. It also reflects the author’s intent about the moral effect of his story and its general reception. Being pessimistic and sad in its ending, like most of Che- khov’s stories, it did not suit young audiences. Indeed, one of the first commentators of this story noted that there was something unsatisfac- tory and unfinished about the story’s ending.22 However, it remains one of the most important stories about the life of animals in captivity to have been produced by an author within the Russian literary canon. According to the memoirs of his contemporaries, Chekhov was a fan of the circus and, during the 1880s, never missed a performance of the Moscow Circus.23 He was a friend of Vladimir Durov. He also wrote reviews of those circus performances that he attended. Clown tricks appealed to his sense of humour and he established a reputation as a writer of funny stories under the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte (he signed ‘Kashtanka’ with this pseudonym). Durov’s book My Ani-

22 See the opinion of Iakov Polonskii in K.N. Polonskaia, “Primechaniia”, in A.P. Chekhov, Sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh. Moscow: izd-vo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955, Vol. V, 501-502. 23 L. Gavrilenko, “Chekhov and the Circus”, in The Soviet Circus: A Collection of Articles. Trans. Fainna Glagoleva, Ed. Alexander Lipovsky, Moscow: Progress, 1967, 24-30.

The Children’s Hour 95 mals (1929), in the chapter ‘My first trained dog Kashtanka’, explains how he gave Chekhov the plot for ‘Kashtanka’ on the basis of a real life occurrence that happened to him.24 He had once, he explains, found a chestnut-coloured dog leaning against the door of his apartment. He took the dog in and trained it as a circus animal. The dog previously belonged to a cabinet-maker. During a performance one day the animal recognised his old master who was at the circus at the time. Durov did not want to return the dog to the cabinet-maker because he had invested a lot of time and effort in the training of the animal. A court hearing was arranged. When the judge heard that the cabinet-maker had tried to bargain a good price with Durov, he made the decision to give the dog back to Durov. For the cabinet-maker the dog was simply a means to wheedle money out of Durov. In Durov’s version Kashtanka stayed with him all her life and made a splendid career in the circus. But Chekhov, in re-writing the ending of the story, has Kashtanka leave her new master and the circus for the old master. While Durov’s story contains no reference to the mistreatment of this dog by the previous owner, Chekhov’s story develops the theme of dog abuse and the reaction to such abuse. Durov’s account contains the premise that a dog can respond with love and forgiveness even to those who cause it harm. Chekhov, however, endows the notion of forgiveness with gender specificity. Durov’s dog’s name was Kashtanka. While Chekhov kept this name as the dog’s original name, he gave her a ‘second name’, Tetka. This nickname has strong sexed connotations. This story has multiple dog-related thematics: the professional training of animals for use in circuses; animal-keeping by irresponsible individuals; children’s torture of animals; the ability of animals to respond with love to those who mistreat and torture them; bitch- specific behaviour and gender politics. On the last two themes the subplots indicate a parallelism between humans and dogs. The plot is built on the peripeteia of the small she-dog Kashtanka who is lost by her drunken master. This master is a carpenter by profession and something of a philosophising drunkard who likes to recite religious incantations. He recites one such incantation twice, at the beginning of the story and at the end. This positioning of the refrain gives it an important structural prominence and presents a narrative strategy

24 V.L. Durov, Moi zveri. Berlin: Izdanie Z. Kaganskogo, 1929.

96 Political Animals aimed at attracting attention to the special significance of this utterance. Significantly for the focus of this investigation, the citation refers to humans being born in sin even in the mother’s womb:

In sin my mother bore me! Ah, sins, sins! Here now we are walking along the street and looking at the street lamps, but when we die, we shall burn in a fiery Gehenna… (458)

Kashtanka is the passive addressee of this drunken theologising. The fact that she is a she-dog adds a gender-specific meaning to the carpenter’s moralising. As a bitch Kashtanka represents reproduction in nature and serves as an allegory of the base nature of conception and procreation which humans and animals have in common. It is in this gender-specific mode that the carpenter’s superior attitude to his dog is depicted. He humiliates her by saying that she is ‘an insect of a creature, and nothing else’ (458). His conceptualisation of the place that the bitch occupies in the hierarchy of species is both comical and serious – a typical manifestation of Chekhovian humour.25 It is comical because it is a parody of scientific philosophising in the mouth of an uneducated and drunken tradesman. It is serious because of the degrading treatment of a female dog that is related to both gender politics and speciesism. As a non-pedigree dog and a she-dog, Kashtanka is vulnerable to the prejudices typical of simple folk subculture. The carpenter defines Kashtanka’s position in relation not only to other animals but also to human beings. He makes a statement that is amusing and alarmingly serious: ‘Beside a man, you are much the same as a joiner beside a cabinet-maker’ (458). Being a cabinet-maker himself, he boasts of his superiority over this mutt-bitch, so creating a comic effect that somewhat truncates the ‘philosophical’ implications of his statement. As with his statement ‘In sin my mother bore me’, this assertion will be repeated verbatim at the end of the story and will serve as its moral: simple uneducated people such as carpenters loathe, she-dogs because for them they are the incarnation of sin and

25 On the necessity to read Chekhov’s works microscopically see Savelii Sendero- vich. Chekhov s glazu na glaz: istoriia odnoi oderzhimosti A.P. Chekhova. St Pe- tersburg: ‘Dmitrii Bulanin’, 1994.

The Children’s Hour 97 representative of female sexuality. He also despises them in the same way as he despises the female sex. Chekhov uses various stylistic devices to demonstrate that Kashtanka is a silent substitute for his non-existent wife. When the carpenter curses the dog, the choice of his expression is particularly telling: ‘May you drop dead, you, Cholera’ (458). The gender of the word ‘Cholera’’ is feminine in Russian, the dog is cursed as a female animal and as a substitute for a female. The carpenter’s abusive behaviour towards Kashtanka is also demonstrated in his total neglect of the dog: he does not feed her adequately and, while he drinks in taverns, she is given only a few pieces of dry sausage skin. She nevertheless follows him everywhere. The man’s treatment of Kashtanka epitomises the typical attitude of a rough uneducated tradesman to dogs and, by proxy, to women. Certainly, there is a meaningful absence of a wife in this story. The use of a void, as well as silence and any form of absence, is a potent device in Chekhov’s poetics.26 Such an absence is always invested with meaning. In this story it implies misogyny, cruelty towards female species and women.27 The reader assumes that the carpenter does not have a wife because any woman would have run away from him. Indeed, the narrator’s remark – ‘If she had been a human being she would have certainly thought: “No, it is impossible to live like this! I must shoot myself!”’ (454) – serves as a potent example of the abuse that animals undergo as substitutes for ‘absent’ humans. Kashtanka’s sex is clearly an important marker of inferiority. The carpenter’s arrogant cruelty towards the dog is also a manifestation of a particular class attitude towards dogs. The drunken tradesman treats the dog in a way typical for his social strata. The suggestion that different classes display different attitudes towards dogs becomes part of the story’s main moralistic themes. After the drunken carpenter loses Kashtanka the dog is picked up by a man of gentlemanly appearance who shows kindness to her. Kashtanka ends

26 Aleksandr Chudakov, Poetika Chekhova. Moscow: Nauka, 1971. Igor’ Sukhikh, Problemy poetiki A.P. Chekhova. Leningrad: izd-vo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1987. 27 On the theme of women in Chekhov see Carolina de Maeg-Soep, Chekhov and Women: Women in the Life and Work of Chekhov. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1987.

98 Political Animals up in the hands of a professional circus clown and animal trainer. The second part of the story deals with her life in this new environment. The difference in attitude to Kashtanka is immediately manifested by her finder’s different aesthetic judgment of her appearance. The gentleman finds her attractive and appealing. He remarks on her reddish ‘chestnut’ colouring and finds her resemblance to a fox im- posing. Since the new master does not know the dog’s name he decides to call her Tetka. As a generic nickname Tetka is in line with the gender theme of this dog story. Tetka is a derivative of Tetia, ‘Aunt’ or ‘Auntie’. It indicates family kinship and is normally given in Rus- sian (as it is English) to any familiar grown up woman by children. The new nickname valorises the she-dog’s personification of female sex. The derogative connotations of Tetka rather than neutral Tetia can be explained by the new owner’s professional take on the dog – a funny name is more suitable for animals in circus. The name however is loaded with somewhat derogatory misogynist connotations. Che- khov clearly thought carefully about the symbolism of the dog’s name. The other pets in the new master’s animal collection include an indifferent cat, a white goose and a cheerful pig. The cat and the goose occupy a room in the house while the pig lives in a different abode. Fittingly, all three animals have ‘Christian’ Russian Orthodox names and patronymics: the goose is Ivan Ivanych, the cat is Fyodor Timo- feich, the pig is Khavronia Ivanovna, while the dog Kashtanka is given a generic female nickname. In this detail Chekhov demonstrates characteristic knowledge of folk customs (one of his most important rules was to be factually correct: he always asked professionals to check on the correctness of his depictions of realia with which he was not fully familiar). Kashtanka’s new master is a hard worker. As a professional trainer and a circus clown he spends long hours training his animals. He teaches Kashtanka a few tricks from the circus repertory and the small dog turns out to be quite talented. The new tricks which her professional master teaches her are in sharp contrast to the type of training which she received from the son of her carpenter-master. In her previous home Kashtanka was tortured by the boy Fediushka, and Chekhov shows that the dog had learned to accept this abusive treatment as normal. He gives a disturbing description of the types of tricks which the boy performed on Kashtanka:

The Children’s Hour 99

He forced her to do such tricks that made her see a green colour in her eyes from pain and made her limbs ache. He would make her walk on her hind legs, use her as a bell, that is to shake her violently by the tail so that she squealed and barked, and give her tobacco to sniff… The following trick was particularly agonising: Fediushka would tie a piece of meat to a thread and give it to Kashtanka, and then, when she had swallowed it, he would, with a loud laugh, pull it back again up from her stomach and the more lurid were these reminiscences the more loudly and miserably Kashtanka whined. (456)

This description is unsettling for a number of reasons, the most disturbing being the boy’s sadism and Kashtanka’s reaction to the memory of those sadistic tricks. Chekhov makes the boy’s trick of penetration more overt through the nature of Kashtanka’s erotic dream. In the wake of her nostalgic memories this consolatory dream makes apparent the sexed nature of the dog’s desires for an encounter with her former tormen- tor:

But soon the warmth of the room and tiredness overpowered the sad- ness. She fell asleep. In her imagination [she saw…] a furry old black poodle who she had seen earlier today on the street. It had a spot in his eye and bits of fur near his nose. Fediushka with a chisel in his hands ran after the poodle, but then suddenly he was covered by shaggy fur, barked cheerfully and emerged next to Kashtanka. He and Kashtanka sniffed at each other’s noses in a friendly way and ran along the street… (456)

Chekhov ends this erotic dream with the punctuation ‘…’, denoting the open interpretative possibilities for the end of this encounter between the ‘dog’ Fediushka and Kashtanka. ‘Sniffing at each other’s noses’ is a euphemism for sniffing at each other’s private parts – something that dogs indeed do when they greet one another (Dosto- evsky’s Kolya in The Brothers Karamazov was quite explicit that his knowledge of animal and human sexuality was gleaned from observing this habit in dogs). Chekhov wrote ‘Kashtanka’ during a borderline time in his career when he switched from being a writer of comic stories to being a ‘serious’ professional writer. His techniques of humour and satire were much indebted to Gogol. A sensitive reader familiar with

100 Political Animals

Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ would have been able to decipher the concealed meaning of the nose as a euphemism for male private parts. The shape of Fediushka’s instrument – the chisel – is also metonymic of penis. The story thus uses the dog narrative as an Aesopian cipher to conceal/express sexual thematics. Kashtanka’s wish for a ‘friendly’ furry partner can be explained as a desire to escape the torments of the human ‘friend’ Fediushka. If Fediushka were to become a dog, he would love her in a ‘natural’ way, without cruelty. The boy’s sadistic tricks show a degree of perverse sophistication28 that provokes consideration not only of animal suffering but also of the sadistic enjoyment which the child derives from inflicting pain. In Leonid Geller’s observation, Kashtanka’s combined experience of pain and longing for the orchestrator of that pain stands as a metaphor for the paradox of love.29 The disturbing effect is valorised by the implied parallelism between the behaviour of human and animal female species. If as a she-dog Kashtanka can have fond memories of sadistic treatment and still long for her tormentors, then is it not true that this type of behaviour is also characteristic of women? In Kashtanka’s dream she longs for a friendly partner, yet in her conscious life she shows longing for a life of abuse. The parallel-

28 There may be a parodic undercurrent to this ‘experiment’ with the dog’s stomach. Chekhov as a physician might have been familiar with scientific experiments conducted on dogs by teasing them with food in order to elicit gastric juices. These experiments were done from 1850. Famous scientists such as Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) ‘teased’ dogs with food as part of his experiments. Wundt’s work was studied by medical students in Russia. It is also likely that Ivan Pav- lov’s experiments on dogs’ gastric juices were known to Chekhov by the time he wrote “Kashtanka”. Chekhov subscribed to the professional journal Vrach (Doc- tor) which included reports on physiological experiments conducted in the Medi- cal Surgical Academy where Pavlov worked in the 1870s. Of special relevance is the fact that Pavlov published the results of his physiological experiments on digestive glands in a work that preceded “Kashtanka”: “On the Reflexive Inhibi- tions of Salivation” (1877) and “The Secretory Nerve of the Gastric Gland of the Dog” (1889), the year that Chekhov wrote “Kashtanka”. Chekhov might have been drawing a parallel between the zoo-sadism of a child and the accepted sadism of scientific methods. On scientific experiments that teased dogs with meat see Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. 29 Leonid Geller, “Sobach’e schast’e, ili nesterpimaia tiazhest’ utopii: O Kashtanke Chekhova”, Modernites russes 5. Le Bonheur dans la modernite. Ed. J-C. Lanne, Lyon: Centre A. Hirondelle, Universite Jean-Moulin, 2004, 123-128.

The Children’s Hour 101 ism between the behaviour of a female dog and that of a woman explores the psychology of female species: human and non-human. As such, it functions in parallel to folk wisdom that maintains ‘Ne b’et – ne liubit’ – ‘If he does not beat me it means that he does not love me’ – a common refrain in Russian colloquial discourse on the concept of love in marital relationships among simple people.30 Chekhov explored this motif in his stories devoted to family relationships in peasant families.31 This ‘perverse’ attitude functions on the notion that physical punishment is not only a form of control but also an expression of the most passionate of all emotions – that of love. The notion of control here functions in a distorted sense – the feeling of love is so strong that the husband cannot control his emotions and, as a result, expresses them in beating his wife. While Dostoevsky was an expert at revealing the paradoxical nature of human passions in the form of self-laceration, the rationalist Chekhov ridiculed any manifestation of irrational behaviour. In his case the imagery of a female dog missing her tormentors is a case study of female nature. The implied parallelism between the woman and the she-dog is further re-enforced by the use of the pronoun ‘she’, in line with the Russian grammatical rule that animates should be referred to by animate pronouns – ‘he’, ‘she’ but not ‘it’. The dog’s ability to dream is a further act of anthropo- morphisation. Kashtanka’s love for, and loyalty to, her former master- tormentors overpowers her new life with the animal trainer. Her eventual return to them is dramatised by the circumstances under which it takes place. One day the new master decides to use Kashtanka in a circus performance. She performs the tricks extremely well and could clearly have a career in circus, were it not for her sentimentality. On the day of Kashtanka’s debut her former masters, the carpenter and his son, are in the audience. When they recognise Kashtanka and call her, she loses her senses and runs to them. This ironic ending holds a sad moral: she-dogs show irrational sentimentality to their tormentors.

30 Another proverb in the context of nineteenth century marital relationships is “Kogo liubliu, togo b’iu”. See “A se grekhi zlye, smertnye...”. Russkaia semeinaia i seksual’naia kul’tura glazami istorikov, etnografov, literatorov, fol’kloristov, pravovedov i bogoslovov XIX – nachala XX veka. Ed. N.L. Pushkareva, Moscow: Ladomir, 2004, Vol. III, 319. 31 Henrietta Mondry, “Peasant women’s sexualities in the writings of Gleb Uspen- skii and Anton Chekhov”, Essays in Poetics XXXI/2 (2006), 258-272.

102 Political Animals

That Kashtanka abandons her circus master with all the comforts he provides can be interpreted as her preference for a lazy passive life over that of a working dog.32 In Chekhov’s later works the view that work is a way to make this life meaningful became a prominent leit- motif. In the dog story this motif in application to Kashtanka’s chosen path is given an allegorical meaning. Her new hard-working master taught her how to live an honest life, but she joins the old masters and the world of drunkenness and oblivion. The story ends with the drunken master citing the same refrain as at the beginning of the story to epitomise the vicious cycle in which Kashtanka is caught:

You, Kashtanka, are an insect of a creature, and nothing else. Beside a man, you are much the same as a joiner beside a cabinet-maker. (473)

This unchanging refrain stands as a marker of Kashtanka’s future life as one mired in abuse. The story concludes with a philosophical statement generalising the nature of the relationship between dogs and their human masters: Kashtanka looked at the master’s and Fediushka’s backs, and it seemed to her that she was following them for ages and was glad that there had not been a break for a minute in her life. (472)

This ending scene has strong resemblance to Darwin’s views on dogs expressed in his The Descent of Man: ‘Our domestic dogs are descended from wolves and jackals, and though they may not have gained in cunningness, may have lost in wariness and suspicion, yet they have progressed in certain moral qualities, such as in affection, trustworthiness, temper, and probably in general intelligence’ (457).33 Kashtanka’s behaviour towards her original masters reveals many of these features. Chekhov’s choice of a female dog gives rise to the gender- specific questions in the context of Darwinian evolution. Does this final scene imply that female dogs have been following their male

32 These feminist overtones are supported by Chekhov’s later autobiographical account. When he was married to the actress Olga Knipper and was ailing from tuberculosis he was adamant that she should not leave the theatre profession for his sake. 33 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man. New York: Modern Library, n.d.

The Children’s Hour 103 tormentors willingly for ages: is this the law of nature? Is it a manifestation of conditioned behaviour that can potentially change with changes in conditioning itself? Does this law of nature apply more to female dogs than to other species? Does the same pattern apply to human females? According to Durov’s memoirs, Chekhov was keen to participate in the telepathic sessions in which Durov hypnotised dogs and made them perform various acts. Durov worked with the psychiatrist Bekhterev on these experiments, and he was also keen to conduct them among his circle of friends. He describes an episode during a boat trip when Chekhov was part of one of these dog mental suggestion episodes. Reacting to a glance by Durov, a particularly gifted dog, called Zapiataika, came up to Chekhov and took off his famous pince-nez. Chekhov was impressed and successfully under- took further mental suggestion experiments with Zapiataika thus showing his belief in the possibility to influence these animals. Chekhov may have started ‘Kashtanka’ as a fairy-tale but he ended up writing a story about sadistic males: adults and a boy who abuse and molest a female dog. He re-wrote the ‘real life’ story of Durov’s circus dog in line with his own interest in the biological drives of animal and human behaviour in general, and gender-related behaviour in particular. Chekhov’s changes to Durov’s Kashtanka story are centred around the dog’s sex. As noted earlier, while Che- khov kept Durov’s dog’s original name, Kashtanka, his selection of the second name – Tetka – is telling in terms of its association with gender-specificity. In 1883 he planned to write a research thesis entitled ‘History of sexual authority’ (‘Istoriia polovogo avtoriteta’).34 His interest in this subject was inspired by Darwin’s The Origins of Spe- cies, translated into Russian in 1871. Chekhov intended his thesis to combine aspects of zoology, anthropology and the history of science and medicine. In this thesis he wanted to express his belief in Darwin- ian evolution. Analogies and parallelisms between animals and humans were given special focus within his understanding of the sexual instinct across species. His dog story ‘Kashtanka’ needs to be read in

34 On the racialised and sexed body in Chekhov see Henrietta Mondry, Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.

104 Political Animals the context of sexism based on the scientific prejudices of his time.35 However, his personal quest was to improve ‘given’ nature via education, upbringing and culture. Chekhov drew a connection between the trainability of animals and this hope to change human nature. In 1892 he wrote:

As a result of differences in climate, brains, energy, tastes, age, opinions equality among people is never possible. One must view the inequality as a law of nature. But we can make the inequality unnoticeable, as we do with rain or bears. In this respect a lot will be done by upbringing and culture. After all one scientist had achieved that a cat, a moth, a merlin and a sparrow ate from the same plate. (16)36

Of special significance in this note is that Chekhov omitted dogs from his list of animals. For Chekhov evidently the dog’s proximity to human nature was the result of centuries of human interference in aspects of breeding and conditioning; ‘Dog’ is thus a site where nature and culture meet. Kashtanka’s case shows how the dog became a victim of the wrong kind of ‘culture’.

Alexander Kuprin: girl dreams of an elephant, a good boy and a bad boy, and the dog in ‘The White Poodle’

Alexander Kuprin’s ‘Belyi pudel’’ (1908) is sometimes classified as part of his juvenilia,37 especially alongside his well-known story ‘The Elephant’ (‘Slon’)38 about a sick girl who wants to be shown an elephant and whose recovery entirely depends on the fulfilment of this

35 Chekhov was influenced by the deterministic views of Claude Bernard in spite of his trust in the role of the environment. See M.B. Mirskii, Doktor Chekhov. Mos- cow: Nauka, 2003. 36 A.P. Chekhov, Zapisnye knizhki A.P. Chekhova. Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv, GAKhN, 1927. 37 Nickolas Luker is of the opinion that these stories were not written for children. See Nickolas Luker, Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. 38 See for instance the English translation of both stories: Aleksandr Kuprin, The White Poodle and The Elephant. Trans. Musia Rebourn, London: Hutchinson’s Books, 1947.

The Children’s Hour 105 wish.39 While the focus of this study is the representation of dogs rather than animals in general, it is plausible to give an interpretation of both these stories in order to define the differences and similarities in the representation of different animals. The result of this reading will show that the white poodle is a more political animal than the elephant – a situation in line with the main thesis of my book. In ‘The White Poodle’ the dog, the pet of a poor busker-boy, becomes the victim of a spoilt child and his rich family; the social pathos of this story is important. The situation is different in ‘The Elephant’. In this story the social message is absent. In both stories Kuprin explores the notion of the healing effect that pets and animals can have on children. In ‘The White Poodle’ the rich boy’s upbringing made the bond between the boy and the dog impossible. In ‘The Elephant’ the contact with the animal has a healing effect on the child. The healing is underpinned by strong psychoanalytical connotations. The girl who wants to see a real life elephant is a kind and a likable child, as are the adults who surround her – the family doctor, her parents and, not least, the German animal trainer from the circus. The girl wakes up remembering her dream of a real life elephant. She tells her parents that she would like to have such an elephant. When they get her an electric toy-elephant she insists that she wants to see a real one. She reminds her father that he has not fulfilled his promise to take her to the animal menagerie. In order to cure the girl of her apathy the father resorts to an almost surreal deal in line with the surreal world of the girl’s dream: he will ask the circus trainer of the elephant to bring the animal to his house for his ailing daughter. The elephant, Tommy, is brought to the wealthy girl’s house and performs friendly tricks. He takes part in a game suggested by the girl: the elephant is a father, she is the mother and her dolls are their children. The girl is delighted and falls asleep from exhaustion. The portly German animal trainer then takes the elephant back to the menagerie. The next morning the girl wakes up healthy and happy. Her sudden recovery explains the psychological underpinning of her illness – the melancholy of a wealthy but over-protected child. Kuprin slips in a motif that is quasi-psychoanalytical. The narrator mentions

39 A.I. Kuprin, “Belyi pudel’”, in Izbrannye sochineniia. Moscow: OGIZ, 1947, 303-317. A.I. Kuprin, “Slon”, in Izbrannye sochineniia. Moscow: OGIZ, 1947, 318-321.

106 Political Animals that the girl dreamed that night that she married the elephant and that they had children together, lots of small baby elephants. To truncate the ‘sexological’ reading of this episode, the narrator establishes a symmetry: the elephant also had a dream that night, about the kind little girl and all the delicious cakes that she gave him. The fact that the child and the elephant both had dreams serves as an equaliser between humans and animals. The fact that they both had gratifying dreams attests to the similitude of the emotional needs of humans and animals. Kuprin’s choice of babies and sweets as symbolic signifiers in the dreams show an astonishing similarity to medical and pedagogical literature on children’s sexuality40 and Freudian psychoanalysis. The collection Pedagogicheskii sbornik (1871), published by the Cen- tral Board of Military Educational Institutions, contained an extensive article that propagated a commonly-held belief that the excessive enjoyment of sweets is both a sign and aetiology of children’s ‘secret vice’.41 This link between sweets and sexuality found its reflection in Freudian thought. In Freud’s analysis of hysteria in the case study of a young woman, he describes the girl’s penchant for sweets as a form of gratification of libidinal needs.42 Freud’s reasoning in terms of substitution and sublimation allowed him to move away from a simplistic link between desire and practice. Kuprin would have been aware of such theories. Freud’s The Interpretations of Dreams (1900) was translated into Russian in 1904 – four years before Kuprin’s story. Freudian psychoanalysis was known among intellectuals in Russia’s leading cities, including Odessa in the 1900s where Kuprin spent much time during that decade.43 Dreams in Freud’s interpretation are

40 See Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. 41 One example is V. Ditman, “Tainyi porok”, Pedagogicheskii sbornik, izdavaemyi pri Glavnom upravlenii voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii. 1871, Bk. 3 (March), 367- 375; bk. 4 (April), 551-556; bk. 5 (May) 654-663. 42 Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria. Trans. James and Alix Strachey, The Pen- guin Freud Library, London: Penguin Books, 1991, Vol. III. 43 Freud’s work had a following in Russia already in the 1900s, especially in Odes- sa, the third largest city in the Russian Empire at the time. Russian Jewish psychiatrist Moses Wolf (1878-1971) came to practice in Odessa in 1909 after he lost his chair in a Berlin clinic due to his psychoanalytical views. Kuprin spent a lot of time in this city and had a wide variety of friends due to his democratic leanings. He must have heard of the main tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis in

The Children’s Hour 107 the depositories of the residue of what has happened during the day, but also of unconscious desires. Not everything that happens during the day is pathogenic, and not all dreams contain pathogenic material. Without repression and conversion of trauma into a somatic field there is no neurosis or other form of psychic condition. On ‘wish- fulfilment’ Freud noted: ‘undistorted wish-fulfilment dreams are prin- cipally found in children […]’ (588).44 In Kuprin’s tale the girl’s world of the unconscious allows her to play with the elephant a ‘father, mother and babies’ game (what Russian children call dochki- materi: ‘mothers-daughters’) and dream of the elephant. Some initial trauma (such as her father’s failure to keep his promise) produced the pathological manifestation of melancholia. Her first dream contains both the aetiology of her illness and suggests the cure. The cure is derived from wish-fulfilment – to be in contact with the object of desire, the animal. Her second dream contains a mixture of fantasy and the real life events of the previous day, when she met with the elephant and played with it the kind of game she would play with a male in her adult life.45 Kuprin thus exposes the psychological implications of ‘the lack’ in a child’s world. In terms of the plausibility of having children with the male elephant, the girl follows a child’s logic that in Freud’s interpretation does not recognise the barrier between humans and animals in their choice of a love object. In ‘The Archaic Features and Infantilism of Dreams’ (1915/1916) Freud notes that it is “an untenable error to deny that children have a sexual life and that sexuality only begins at puber- ty with the maturation of the genitals’ (245). Children’s sexual life, he writes:

[…] differs at many points from what is later regarded as normal. What in adult life is described as ‘perverse’ differs from the normal in these respects: first, by disregarding the barrier of species (the gulf between men and animals), secondly, by overstepping the barrier of dis-

Odessa. On the history of psychoanalysis in Russia see Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii. Moscow: Gnosis, 1994. 44 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James and Alix Strachey, New York: Avon Books, 1998. 45 The elephant’s obvious phallic symbolism is expressed in Slavic belief that the elephant denotes the fall of Adam and Eve. See O.V. Belova, Slavianskii bestiarii: slovar’ nazvanii i simvoliki. Moscow: Indrik, 2001.

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gust […] None of these barriers existed from the beginning; they were only gradually erected in the course of development and education. Small children are free of them. They recognise no frightful gulf between human beings and animals; the arrogance with which men separate themselves from animals does not emerge until later. (245)46

The notion of parallelism between the elephant’s and the girl’s dreams (the symmetry between sweets and having babies) contains a manifestation of compatibility between the psyche of animals and humans. As a friend of Durov, Kuprin knew that he was involved in acts of hypnotism on animals. Durov also believed that animals have dreams. The notion of hypnotism was in itself a borrowing from the psychoanalytical methodology practised by psychiatrists in Russia from the end of the nineteenth century.47 Durov’s claims related to the success of his sessions of hypnotism on dogs are in themselves proof and testimony of the psychic and mental compatibility between humans and animals such as dogs, and yet another form of correlation between humans and dogs/animals. This story reflects Kuprin’s love for the circus and trained animals, and his ardent enthusiasm for Durov’s trade as a clown performer and an animal trainer. This love for the circus and trained animals is also reflected in the story ‘The White Poodle’. The story’s main protagonists are a trio of wandering performers: an old grandfather, his twelve-year-old grandson and their trained white poodle. The grandfather is a former peasant who became a wandering organ- grinder; the boy performs acrobatic numbers; and they both supervise the tricks of the poodle Arto. The dog in this family of wandering buskers is a working companion and a loyal friend – his skills help the group to survive. Their relationship is based on equity: people and dog eat the same kind of food – bread, feta cheese – and drink water from the same source. The plot of the story is simple: the trio earn their money by performing for the rich inhabitants of holiday villas in Crimea during the

46 Sigmund Freud, “The Archaic Features and Infantilism of Dreams”, in Introduc- tory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James and Alix Strachey, The Penguin Freud Library, London: Penguin Books, 1991, Vol. I, 235-250. 47 On the cultural history of psychiatry in Russia see Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930. Balti- more: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.

The Children’s Hour 109 summer months. In one instance they stop by a particularly luxurious villa where they encounter a histrionic ‘performance’ by a spoilt rich boy in front of his mother, doctor, English governess, two Russian nannies, a butler and a gardener. The spoilt rich boy shouts ‘bad’ words; he kicks and screams while his distraught mother is unable to pacify him. When the boy suddenly notices the poodle Arto as part of the trio in his garden, he instantaneously invents the price for stopping his tantrum – he demands that the dog be given to him. At this stage the dog becomes the object of the rich boy’s capri- cious desire. It also becomes a tradable object: the boy’s mother offers an absurdly large sum of money for the dog. She starts by suggesting ten thousand roubles then moves to an offer of forty thousand. The relative market value of this sum of money is made clear in the story: one can start a grocery shop for this amount of money. Yet, the penni- less grandfather refuses to sell the dog. In his uneducated Russian he explains that the dog is not for sale because he helps him to make a living. Expressing an honest but poor man’s pride, he notes that not everything can be bought. This sententious statement defines his position as an ethical person who is able to give a moral lesson to the rich. For his grandson the behaviour of the rich boy is a total novelty – he sincerely asks his grandfather whether the boy is not mad. The dog peripeteia motif is introduced through the subplot of the dog being stolen by the gardener of the estate, who is keen to please his mistress. For the gardener the dog is not worth more than a dime, and his common sense approach to the offer to buy the dog typifies the common attitude towards this animal. Kuprin shows that, as artists, the buskers have a different attitude towards the dog. To them Arto is an animal that, through training, has become their equal. Kuprin thus takes a Durovian position and implies that it is through the experience of teaching a dog that humans learn about the similarities between them and animals. The fact that the grandfather, who trained the dog, is from the peasant class does not have a prevailing influence on how he conceptualises this animal. By becoming an artist, even such a poor one as an organ- grinder, the former peasant exhibits sensibilities that are noble and that differentiate him from the class to which he was born. The stolen poodle Arto spends less than one night at the villa. The courageous boy-gymnast saves the dog from captivity during the night by climbing over an estate wall covered by broken glass. He

110 Political Animals works out where the dog is being kept by following its sounds. The dog is tied up in the cellar, and when it starts to make a greeting noise the gardener beats it. The fact that the dog is not kept in the main house suggests that the spoilt boy has lost interest in it or that his mother did not want to keep the dog for sanitary reasons. In a manner that is not dissimilar to Chekhov’s ‘Kashtanka’, Kuprin’s narrative challenges the notion that children are kind to animals. In Chekhov’s work a poor boy is cruel to a dog; in Kuprin’s story the spoilt boy does not care for the dog. For him this animal has the function of a toy in which he soon loses interest. Contrary to the animal as a toy device is the situation in ‘The Elephant’. Here the small girl wants a ‘real’ animal, not a toy one – she is given an electric elephant as a way to distract her from her desire to see the real one. It is only through the playful contact with the real elephant that she is cured of her psychological apathy. Both of Kuprin’s stories feature trained, performing animals that create a two-way emotional traffic between children and themselves. They form a bond that has an emotional and psychological healing effect on the children. A sporty, working boy who interacts with his dog on an everyday basis thinks of the rich boy’s histrionics as a manifestation of madness. Kuprin echoes Durov’s views that animals, dogs in particular, have an emotionally healthy effect on humans. The ‘children’s stories’ about trained working animals express Kuprin’s views on art as an elevating form of activity – the circus for him is a performing art. The old man in ‘The White Poodle’ might be a simple peasant, but he is an artist and his attitude towards the dog is that of a free-spirited man. These stories also express Kuprin’s thoughts on the psychologically healing effect that art and ‘arty’ animals have on children and adults. The mother of the rich boy in ‘The White Poodle’ is described as beautiful but somewhat sickly. The girl in ‘The Elephant’ is ill and in need of healing. The rich boy might be spoilt, but the father’s absence is suggested as a possible reason for his troublesome behaviour. Kuprin’s introduction of medical motifs into the two children’s stories about animals is not accidental. Both Kuprin and Chekhov were viewed by contemporaries, including the famous psychiatrist Ivan

The Children’s Hour 111

Sikorskii, as writers who created literature that reflected the psycho- pathology of life in contemporary Russian society.48 Kuprin’s interest in the psychological underpinnings of illness is evident in these two stories. He knew that Durov took part in experiments involving animal hypnotism under the supervision of the famous psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev. Bekhterev used dogs in his treatment of catatonic patients – he gave them small dogs to touch and caress, and this physical contact with small animals made the patients more lucid and conscious of their actions. In ‘The Wonderful Doctor’ (‘Chudesnyi doktor’), another children-centred story written at the same time as ‘The White Poo- dle’ and ‘The Elephant’, Kuprin describes a real-life occurrence in which the famous professor of medicine Nikolai Pirogov (1810-1881) saved the life of a child from a poor family.49 Pirogov is told by a man in the street that his child is dying at home from hunger and illness. Pirogov immediately insists to be taken to the child and his visit results in the child’s cure. Written in the tradition of a Christmas carol – the event happens on a frosty winter night with Pirogov purchasing presents for children – Pirogov’s visit is described as a miracle, compared to a visit by ‘an angel’ (332). The story has a happy ending: the father of the family finds a job soon after the doctor’s visit, and the mother of the child and the child are cured. Pirogov was not only an outstanding surgeon but also a public figure who advocated for free medical help for the poor and members of national minorities. He was an educationalist and a pedagogue, and it is not by accident that Kuprin chose to represent him in his non-fiction story about a sick poor child. The pedagogical pathos of Kuprin’s children’s stories is obvious, his trust in the educational role of animals is directed not only at a juvenile audience but also at an adult readership.50 His interest in matters pertaining to the unhealthy body and mind was symptomatic of the times. Ivan Bunin explained the phenomenal success of

48 See I.A. Sikorskii, “Uspekhi russkogo khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva: Rech’ v torzhestvennom zasedanii II-go s’’ezda otechestvennykh psikhiatrov v Kieve”, Voprosy nervno-psikhiatricheskoi meditsiny 3 (1905), 497-504. 49 A.I. Kuprin, “Chudesnyi doktor”, in Izbrannye sochineniia. Moscow: OGIZ, 1947, 328-333. 50 On contemporary studies on therapeutic role of children’s contacts with animals see Nikki Evans, Claire Gray, “The Practice and Ethics of Animal-assisted Ther- apy with Children and Young People: Is It Enough That We Don’t Eat Our Co- workers?”, British Journal of Social Work XLII/4 (2012), 600-617.

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Kuprin’s work by his ability to respond to the trends and moods of the time.51 The attitude towards animals, particularly dogs, in the context of Russian modernity served as a barometer of how society regarded itself. Kuprin’s animal children’s stories are to be read not only during the children’s hour.

What do the real ‘children’s hour’ dog stories teach us?

If writers like Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Kuprin used the theme of dog-children relations to encourage adults to reconsider their views on the innocence of children, then some stories aimed at children used adult cruelty towards animals – and dogs in particular – to foster children’s positive attitude towards these animals. The 1883 volume of stories about dogs, Sobaka: rasskazy o sobakakh (The Dog: Stories about Dogs) by a publisher specialising in children’s books and text books provides an example of this approach.52 The volume, authored by I. Derkachev, is a collection of short poems, fictional stories and real-life tales devoted entirely to children’s familiarisation with dog breeds, behaviour and characteristics and the role they play in human lives. The real life stories describe cases of clever dogs saving the lives of small children. While dogs are praised as the most dedicated human companions, Derkachev’s overall explanation of canine traits of character allows the individual psychological attributes of dogs to emerge. His explanations are built on parallelism and correlation between the psychological features of humans and dogs. The author maintains that there are greedy, spoilt, angry and aggressive dogs. He explains these traits of character as a result of the way in which they were raised by humans. In the same way that unpleasant human characteristics are the result of bad upbringing, he argues, people and the environment have to be held accountable for bad character traits among dogs. Derkachev makes the assumption that these acquired characteristics can be transferred to future generations of dogs. Through his didactics he places primary responsibility for dog behaviour on training, upbringing and education, thus laying the blame for

51 Ivan Bunin, “Kuprin”, in Sobranie sochinenii. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988, Vol. VI, 252-264. 52 I. Derkachev, Sobaka: rasskazy, anekdoty, basni i stikhotvoreniia o sobakakh. Moscow: izdanie A.D. Stupina, 1883.

The Children’s Hour 113 the bad character of some dogs entirely on humans. These characteristics are identical to those of humans. Derkachev’s narrative also contains a note on an ethnographic culture-specific prejudice against dog. He claims that some people consider dogs to be ‘unclean animals’ (‘nechistaia tvar’’, 8) – a claim clearly aimed at the dark beliefs of the uneducated. While most of the short poems and stories are dedicated to the habits and external characteristics of various popular breeds of dogs (borzois, bulldogs, Pomeranians, dachshunds, Newfoundlands), some tales give examples of human cruelty towards animals. These tales provide a stark contrast to the stories of dogs saving children’s lives. The two stories in question are particularly striking. One relates to the topic of ‘mad dogs’; another deals with the case of a dog defending an innocent horse that is being beaten by a merciless owner. The first story about rabies explains the dangers posed by so called ‘mad dogs’ (‘beshenye sobaki’, 6) to people, especially children, in rural areas. It issues a warning that such dogs on a rampage can bite small children. However, his explanation of the aetiology of the illness (sometimes called ‘vodoboiazn’ or ‘hydrophobia’) puts the blame on the maltreatment of dogs by humans in rural areas. In such rural outposts dogs are habitually chained in spots where they are exposed to the baking-hot sun, without water. This inhumane treatment of dogs by simple folk is presented as the reason why dogs acquire the illness of hydrophobia or madness (beshenstvo). A pictorial illustration to this story depicts a peasant with a rifle shooting at a dog in close proximity. The dog is significantly walking away from the man, and the man shoots it in the back. The composition of the drawing valorises the sense of human treachery towards the animal: a child looking at the picture would see that the dog, rather than attacking the man, was walking away from him. The depiction of a man shooting a retreating dog in the back prompts children to question the moral justification of this act of killing. The picture also shows the village and illustrates the story’s point about the occurrence of ‘mad dog’ illness in rural communities. At the same time it also exposes the fate of dogs in rural areas at the hands of uneducated people.

114 Political Animals

Unnecessary shooting of a ‘mad dog’, from Derkachev’s The Dog, 1883.

The second story exposing human cruelty to animals is called ‘Sobaka zastupnitsa’ (‘The Defender Dog’). It laconically conveys the didactic message of animal solidarity and dogs’ sense of moral justice:

Once an estate manager came to town. Having stopped at the local lodging place, he began to beat his horse horribly. The dog who lived at the lodge saw this. It obviously was hard for it to observe this cruel treatment of the horse. It carefully approached the estate manager from the back and bit him on his leg so strongly that the man could not regain his senses for a long time, especially because he did not expect such an act from a very peaceful dog. Having avenged the tor- mentor of the horse in this manner, the dog returned to its place. What is it: just an incident or a conscious act [obdumannyi postupok]? (10)

In noting the year of the publication of the book, 1883, one can assume that the plot of the abuse of the horse resonated in the context of the ongoing public debate in the press about the common practice of horse abuse. This topic had found its way into Dostoevsky’s work, including his Diary of a Writer, and references to gruesome acts of animal abuse in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov The Children’s Hour 115 are clearly in operation in this children’s story. Dostoevsky’s warnings about the bad example to children inherent in such acts of abuse find confirmation in the main moral of Derkachev’s stories about cruelty to animals. In this collection the author boldly chose to present examples of cruel behaviour by adults as a way to educate children on moral issues. There are no stories of children abusing dogs in this collection. His educationalist stance thus ignores aspects of inborn cruelty in humans: for Derkachev, bad behaviour is acquired by humans and dogs that mimic these human traits. The final sentence of ‘The Defender Dog’ teaches children that dogs have a sense of moral justice. This description of the peaceful nature of the dog excludes any reference to canine aggression. Rather, it suggests that dogs have an inborn sense of justice and are capable of making a conscious decision as to when it should be applied. The dog is thus granted its own agency and, as an active defender of other, more defenceless animals, it has a supreme status among animals that serve humans. The fact that Alexei Stupin’s children’s books use dogs as educational animals in matters of moral justice and human-animal relations serves as a further illustration of the political nature of these animals in Russian culture.53 While his stories acknowledge the commonality of bad character traits among people and dogs, they ascribe only humans with cruelty. In line with Dostoevsky’s notion that, unlike humans, the animal world is not familiar with cruelty, these books teach children to become better humans than some adults. In order to do this, children must emulate dogs rather than adults.

53 In 1884 Stupin published Derkachev’s book on cats to parallel that on dogs. In this collection of the cat stories, however, no cases of cat abuse are described; no parallelism between human and cat nature is established. See I. Derkachev, Koshka: rasskazy, anekdoty, basni i stikhotvoreniia o koshkakh. Moscow: izdanie A.D. Stupina, 1884.

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Dog rescuing a child in England; illustration from Derkachev’s book

Chapter 3 Degradation narratives: Dogs and humans in social and moral transformation

The poor man is a dog of society. – Jacques Derrida. 19921

During the famine of the Revolution all my dogs had to be poisoned so that Tatars and Bulgarians would not eat them. – Marina Tsvetaeva. 19322

The idea of parallelism between humans and dogs finds its expression in the similitude of suffering that humans undergo in response to socio-economic degradation. At such times humans’ lives and fortunes change in such a way that they embark on a life that calls for comparisons with the proverbial dog’s life. When a human becomes an underdog due to changing circumstances, he or she starts discovering and reflecting on the similarities between the two species. The social and economic degradation of a human can transform the life of that person to that of a street dog. A person in such a situation who finds a good guardian and serves him or her in exchange for financial favours parallels the dog who has a good master or mistress. Similarly, if this person is promoted, demoted or dropped from favour, his or her life parallels that of a dog in such circumstances. But how does this shift in status and fortune affect the moral outlook of the degraded person? At this juncture comparisons between human and animal nature come into play and humans show themselves to be more treacherous than dogs. The enquiry into human social and economic degradation often leads to an exploration of moral degradation as part of this process of

1 Jacques Derrida, Given Time. Counterfeit Money. Trans. P. Kamuf, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992, Vol. I, 143. 2 Marina Tsvetaeva, “Zhivoe o zhivom”, in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984, Vol. II, 218. 118 Political Animals transformation. In terms of moral downfall the human-dog correlation often exposes human nature as inferior to that of an animal. This chapter focuses on a form of degradation narrative based on parallelism between the economic and quasi-social transformations of dogs and people resulting from such a shift in fortune. The chapter discusses both well-known and formerly unstudied or little-known works. It gives a theme-focused reading of Nikolai Gogol’s famous Diary of a Madman (1835) and the relatively unknown work by Petr Furman (1816-1856), Prevrashchenie sobaki: Stat’ia iz neobyknovennoi estestvennoi istorii, posviashchennaia vsem liubiteliam i liubitel’nitsam filosofii, prirody i sobak (Transformation of a dog: an article from an unusual natural history dedicated to all the lovers of philosophy, nature and dogs (1849). It then looks at Boris Pilnyak’s post-Revolutionary allegory ‘A Dog’s Life: The Vicissitudes of Des- tiny’ (1919) and also examines little studied stories by a group of important modernist writers who put together the volume A Dog’s Destiny (1922) while living in emigration in Berlin after the October Revolution. It also covers Ilya Ehrenburg’s reflections on human degradation vis-à-vis dogs in the time of the Leningrad Siege during World War II. The overarching theme of this chapter is the changes in human behaviour during extreme negative circumstances based on parallelism with dogs. These changes include the descent into madness; descent into dog-eating during times of famine after the October Revolution and during World War II.

Degradation or elevation? Transformation into a dog language- reading madman: Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman

In Diary of a Madman Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), one of most enigmatic writers of the nineteenth-century, frames the theme of social degradation of his hero as a result of his descent into madness, thus making it part of a surreal reality. The first main sign of madness is manifested by the hero’s ability to understand the talking and corresponding dogs. The realm of madness is narrated in the first person.3 This madman hero has been traditionally interpreted as a victim of his

3 N.V. Gogol’, “Zapiski sumasshedshego” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. St Pe- tersburg: Izdanie tovarishchestva M.O. Vol’f, 1913, 123-135.

Degradation narratives 119 social ambitions.4 His low social status and modest income stand in the way of his romantic longings for his boss’s daughter. This social degradation and his subsequent descent into madness lead to his incarceration in a lunatic asylum. But the hidden substratum of this text conceals the sublimated desires and fears of the subaltern author.5 A Ukrainian and a closet homosexual, Gogol had good reason to explore the realm of punishable alterity, and the abusive treatment of an incar- cerated madman in 1830s’ Russia establishes a strong parallelism between the treatment of people and dogs. While dogs themselves do not undergo degrading transformation in this text, the hero does. And although Gogol gives his hero the unattractive surname Poprishchin (phonetically cognate with the noun ‘pimples’) and the status of an ordinary clerk in a government department, this descent into madness is elevation if viewed within the typology of the European Romantic tradition that privileges extra-ordinariness above the banality. A blend of parody, satire and tragedy in the mode of the grotesque, Diary of a Madman is a quintessential example of Gogol’s poetics and worldview. His ‘little hero’, who endures beatings and other forms of abuse in the lunatic asylum, does end up leading a life that is worse than that of a dog, or, in terms of the plot, worse than the life of the two spoilt she-dogs whose language he starts to understand. His desire for an unattainable love object, in combination with his envy and jealousy, causes him to withdraw into a world of fantasy. The object of his love, the Head of Department’s daughter, pays him no attention because of his low social rank, while his master does not communicate with him because he deems the scribe too unimportant for conversation. It is at this stage that Poprishchin suddenly starts to understand the language of the two dogs. These small dogs have better access to the world of masters and mistresses than the scribe, and their conversations and written correspondence becomes Poprishchin’s sole source of information about this socially superior realm. What he learns from this discourse contributes to his mental breakdown and his irreversible descent into delusions of grandeur. In his inside-out world of psychosis, the humiliation of being unnoticed and ridiculed leads to

4 Paul Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997, 126. 5 For a psychoanalytical reading see I.D. Ermakov, Ocherki po analizu tvorchestva N.V. Gogolia. Moscow: Gosizdat, 1924.

120 Political Animals fantasies of greatness. Poprishchin’s megalomania presents itself in his conviction that he is the ‘missing Spanish king Ferdinand’ (129). At this juncture of his madness he becomes committed to the asylum. Being beaten by stick-wielding medical attendants creates a parallelism with the way dogs are treated by humans,6 and so completes the transformation. Gogol’s influence on the course of Russian literature is second to none. He is considered to be the founder of the tradition named after him, the ‘Gogolian school’. The limitations of this term notwithstanding, the Gogolian trend is defined by the satirical exposure of the social ills of Russian society at the time of serfdom and the strict class divide. He is credited with the dominance of tendentiousness in Rus- sian literature and its concern for social injustices. But his writing goes far beyond the boundaries of critical realism.7 It influenced various creative ‘deviations’ in Russian literature, notably the grotesque, the fantastic and the surreal. He is also one of the most influential and gifted employers of the transformation narrative in nineteenth-century Russian literature. His use of Ukrainian folk and fairy-tale motifs and his incorporation of the Gothic tradition of haunting is saturated with transformations. His use of the Devil in his ‘own’ physical embodiment as well as in other guises attests to his belief in the possibilities of metamorphosis and physical transformation. His devils turn into pigs, his maidens turn into witches. The Cossack father in A Terrible Vengeance (1835) has transformatory powers that turn him into an old hunchbacked sorcerer lusting after his own daughter. The Nose (1835) is built on the picaresque adventures of a human nose which turns into an independent being, the sexual overtones of the nose as a trope for the penis covertly encoded in the text.8 All of these metamorphosing characters are linked to aspects of human sexuality and calls of the flesh.9

6 Richard Peace, The Enigma of Gogol. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. 7 Iurii Mann, Poetika Gogolia: Variatsii k teme. Moscow: “Coda”, 1996. 8 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions, 1944. 9 For a rewarding discussion see Konstantin Mochul’skii, Dukhovnyi put’ Gogolia. Paris: YMCA Press, 1934.

Degradation narratives 121

Sexuality and the she-dogs’ secrets

The functions of the two female dogs in Poprishchin’s transformation from an ordinary clerk into a madman in Diary of a Madman are varied, but the most striking theme of the dog-human correlation is linked to the sphere of sexuality. While this correlation serves as a comic device, it also conceals issues of body politics. It is for this reason that the hero refers to dogs as being more clever than humans and even being ‘extraordinary politicians’ (‘chrezvychaino politiki’, 126). This hidden serious layer of the human-dog correlation helps to transform the comic into the tragic, and to transfigure the satirical ‘visible laughter’ narrative into the intimately Gogolian mode of ‘invisible tears’ concealed from the world (formulated in his Dead Souls, 1842). Poprishchin’s sexual frustrations are structurally and semantically linked to the subplot of the two she-dogs, Madgie and Fidel. From the dogs’ conversations and letters he learns of his love object’s low opinion of him. He learns that she ridicules his low social status and his physical appearance (an opinion shared by the dogs). He also discovers that she is aware of his feelings for her and that she intends to get married to a well-born man. The written correspondence between the dogs is dominated by matters of sexuality. Poprishchin learns about his love object’s suitors, her preference for a dark and handsome high-ranking officer and, finally, the planned wedding. In parallel to the mistress’s love life Poprishchin also learns about the female dogs’ sex life: courtship by male dogs and the preference for noble-looking dogs over cross-breeds. An increase in canine sexual drive in spring is also revealed in a letter written by one of the dogs. For Poprishchin this dog world, exposed in written language, is a projection of his unfulfilled dreams. While dogs’ sexual freedoms make the idea of transformation into a dog world more desirable, he reacts to their correspondence with expressions of disgust: ‘What filth!’ (127). The resulting repression of his own desires leads to his final mental breakdown. In his case the transformation from sexual repression to sexual liberation can occur only in a state of madness; a state in which he starts to understand the language of dogs and a state which society penalises. Commentators have noted that Gogol depict-

122 Political Animals ed Poprishchin as burdened by frustrated sexuality.10 He badly wants to learn from the lady’s pet dog things that happen in the boudoir and the bedroom, the world that he describes as ‘paradise’. A recurring entry in Poprishchin’s diary is, ‘Mostly lay on the bed’ (126, 127, 129). ‘On the bed’ rather than ‘in bed’ (‘v krovati’) gives this statement an ambivalent meaning: it reveals the hero’s day-dreaming habits and especially his dreams about the young woman. In line with the Aesopian tradition of concealment, Gogol invests Poprishchin’s transformation into a madman with a deeply personal subtext. While many later commentators examined what was considered to be Gogol’s non-normative sexuality,11 Cesare Lombroso was one of the first international representatives of the medical profession to make a connection between Gogol as a man of genius and his sexuality. It is suggestive that in The Man of Genius (1872)12 Lombroso describes Gogol as a madman, a writer given to masturbation after a failed love affair:

Nicolai Vasilyevitch Gogol (born 1809) after suffering from an unhappy love affair, gave himself up for many years to unrestrained onanism, and became eventually a great novelist. (99)

Lombroso clearly makes a connection between Gogol’s frustrated sexuality and the expression it finds in his writings. Of relevance to the theme of Gogol’s sexual ‘vices’ is Poprishchin’s choice of the word ‘filth’ in response to the dogs’ discussion on sex. It is known that before his death Gogol discussed his sexual leanings with Father Matthew. This obscurantist priest used the expression ‘inner filth’ (‘vnutrenniaia nechistota’, 275)13 to describe Gogol’s latent homosexuality. A further biographical detail confirms the association between a madman in a lunatic asylum and Gogol’s inner worries

10 For references to literature that reads sexual substratum of Gogol’s work see Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Out from under Gogol’s Overcoat: A Psychoanalytic Study. Ann Arbor. MI: Ardis, 1982. 11 See Henrietta Mondry, “Orientalizing the Orientalizer: The Case of Nikolai Gogol’”, in Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature. Bloomington: Slavica, 2010, 61-79. 12 Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. 13 See Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976.

Degradation narratives 123 about his alterity. When Gogol tried to escape the harsh ascetic regime prescribed by Father Matthew, he took a cab and had himself driven to a Moscow mental institution, the Hospital of the Transfiguration. Gogol’s intention was to talk to a famous madman who resided at the hospital, the holy idiot Ivan Koreisha. Koreisha was regarded by Mus- covites as a prophet and seer. Gogol never garnered enough courage to enter the hospital, but his decision to go to the mental institution can be viewed not only as a desire to seek wisdom from Koreisha but also as a result of the belief that he might find more understanding among the residents of this institution and that, perhaps, as a latent homosexual he ‘belonged’ in this institution. When Gogol was questioned by a doctor before his death whether he indulged in sexual ‘self-abuse’, his response was negative.14 Did Gogol share his father-confessor’s view that onanism is a sin? Or did he share the medical view of the time that this practice was a sign of pathology? Gogol chose the dog subplot to express his hero’s sexual frustrations because of the role which culture assigns to these animals. Dogs’ sexual behaviour in full public view is an expression of open and unrestrained sex, in contrast to the suppression of sexual desires by people. The Russian word kobel’ for a male dog also denotes a ‘stud’, thus epitomising strong sexual potency, while the word for a female dog, suka, ‘bitch’ alludes to voracious sexual appetites and selfishness. But Gogol also encoded his own personal script into the narrative of forbidden sexual desires, concealed and tabooed urges. Is ‘normative’ sexuality a human construct? And if dogs can engage in sexual practices that are considered to be abnormal for humans, how ‘unnatural’ are these practices? Indeed, perhaps it is better to be a dog than a human – especially if one is a homosexual. While the she-dogs in Diary of a Madman function in parallel to the female object of Poprishchin’s desire, Gogol also expresses his interest in the role of dogs as objects of sensual needs. The dog Madgie writes in her letter that her mistress is madly in love with her and that she kisses and caresses her. Gogol thus ridicules the upper- class predilection for toy dogs while at the same time introducing the

14 For a detailed account see Simon Karlinsky, Ibid.

124 Political Animals notion of a dog as a substitute for a missing sexual partner.15 In so doing he proffers an acceptable way to express sensual needs which culture deems ‘normative’ but which could be interpreted as perverse.16 However, the function of dogs as political animals is not only to normalise sexual taboos, but also to aid the hero’s transformation from a comic to a tragic figure.

Dog language: acquiring the Aesopian gift

Although Poprishchin thinks that he understands dogs because they speak human language, Sven Spieker noted that his ability to understand this language stems from his own status in the society as that between man and dog.17 His sudden gift to understand the canine discourse de facto means that he started to understand the language of dogs. This gift of understanding and reading the language of animals makes Poprishchin a quasi-Aesopian hero. The ‘historical’ Aesop was ugly and originally did not possess the gift of speech. Gods granted him the gift of understanding animal languages. Poprishchin is incapable of speaking in the presence of those who are above him socially. His equal lack of ability to speak coherently to the young woman he lusts for is also noted in the text and can be interpreted as a further sign of muteness. This inability to use human language is linked to his low social status. When he discovers that dogs can write grammatical-

15 In paintings, Gogol’s contemporary artist, Pavel Fedotov (1815-1852) satirised this topic in his two works: “Konchina Fidel’ki” (“Fidel’ka’s Demise”) and “Posledstviia konchiny Fidel’ki” (“The Consequences of Fidel’ka’s Demise”) (1844), The Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow. In both works the life of the fancy lapdog Fidel’ka is more important than the lives of the house servants and the painter himself who is invited to paint the ailing dog’s portrait. Importantly for the subtext of Gogol’s tale, Fedotov depicts himself as a painter in this picture. A poor man, the painter has to depict the dog in a flattering way. In Viktor Shklov- skii’s interpretation, Fedotov’s satire of the status of lapdogs in wealthy families goes beyond social criticism. Thus, the mistress of the house values her dog more than her own husband and children. The two paintings establish a complex inter- relation between the lives of dogs and people, both privileged and underprivileged. See Viktor Shklovskii, Fedotov. Moscow: ZhZL, 1965. 16 For ‘closet’ homosexuality see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: California UP, 1990. 17 Sven Spieker, “Writing the Underdog: Canine Discourse in Gogol’s Zapiski Sumasshedshego and its Pretexts”, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 28 (1991), 41-56.

Degradation narratives 125 ly correct Russian language he notes that he thought only gentry had the ability to write correctly. On this level of the text, language as a tool of social mobility and a marker of class purity is the target of Gogol’s social satire.18 On the Aesopian level, however, related to the ‘historical’ Aesop narrative, Poprishchin’s ability to understand canine discourse is a sign of his extra-ordinariness. Although what he learns drives him mad, his transformative ability to understand dog/animal language elevates his status. In the tradition of European Romanticism extra-ordinary heroes succumb to madness as a sign of their entry into the world of the chosen ones: poets, prophets, seers. Significantly, medical sciences in the later nineteenth century took note of this connection and pathologised creative personalities: in The Man of Genius Lombroso selects poets and prophets to represent madness. Poprishchin’s surname might phonetically relate to ‘pimple’, (pryshch or prishch), but it also is a derivative of the noun ‘popri- shche’ – a creative, artistic pursuit. Although he is a scribe and not a writer, the word ‘to write’ appears nineteen times in the text and its derivatives like ‘a writer’ another twenty-two times – a strong indication of Gogol’s albeit parodic authorial association with his hero. For a socially humble person like Poprishchin the world of dreams is the only arena for creative expression. Indeed, his favourite pastime to lie on his bed in his free time is also a form of rich fantasy life. Maybe he has a creative potential that he cannot express in the conditions of Tsar Nicholas’s I Russia of the 1830s – why otherwise would Gogol conclude his text with a lyrical passage written in his own, unmistakeably lucid authorial voice? In it Gogol warmly and compassionately describes his hero as Russia’s son calling in vain for his mother to save him from abuse by the asylum’s medical attendants. This cry for help is full of tears that conceal Gogol’s own tears. To counter the self-exposure as a confessing author he, however, finishes this lyrical passage by a comic sentence that refers to the pimple under the nose of an Algerian prince. This estrangement device paradoxically accen- tuates his authorial anxiety around the exposure of his intimate thoughts to the readers.

18 On the importance of the theme of writing in this story see Richard Gregg, “Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’: The Fallible Scribe and the Sinister Bulge”, Slav- ic and East European Journal XLIII/3 (1999), 439-451.

126 Political Animals

Poprishchin’s lamentation depicts a troika of horses that has the power to take him far away from the asylum with its tightly sealed doors and, implicitly, from Russia itself with its tightly guarded borders. Fittingly, he cries for the troika to take him flying over Italy, Gogol’s favourite country with its pagan gods and, dear to Gogol’s heart, its Catholicism. The transformation of a troika of horses into a flying one brings to mind Pegasus, the legendary horse of pagan mythology. In the Russia of Nicholas I what other walk of life is available for people who are not cut out for government work, who want to embark on artistic pursuits? Prison, madhouse, self-imposed exile or, as concealed and ciphered in Aesopian language, the retreat into the world of dreams. Writing is something that the madman and the dogs share with writers, and in this way Gogol covertly establishes his kinship with this category of ‘subspecies’. In his delirium on his deathbed Gogol famously asked for a ladder. The popular interpretation of this is that he thought that he was in hell, as a result of the pain inflicted by senseless doctors’ treatments. He wanted to escape – hence a ladder. Gogol used the image of a ladder coming down to earth from heaven to save people in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). The ladder is also a metaphor for the climbing steps of Russia’s social bureaucracy which he ridiculed and exposed (paradoxically he also came to appreciate the structural importance of this bureaucracy in relation to the workings of the autocratic society). By failing to climb the career ladder his madman hero who started to understand dog language paradoxically made a journey upwards, thus turning the degradation narrative into that of elevation. A contemporary psychiatrist and ethologist team, Katcher and Beck suggest that in modern societies the pet can be considered a therapeutic clown, a kind of Id on four legs.19 Dogs represent the urges and habits that civilisation makes impossible. They settle disputes with their teeth, break sexual taboos, lick themselves in public, think through smelling, eat in a gluttonous manner, and sleep in people’s beds. It is quite evident that Gogol employed this mechanism of representing both the madman and the dogs as therapeutic clowns not only for the benefits of comic relief for his readership but also for his own needs.

19 Alan Beck, Aaron Katcher, New Perspectives on Our Lives with Companion Animals. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1983.

Degradation narratives 127

The picaresque tradition and social transformation: Petr Furman’s Transformation of a dog

The title of Petr Furman’s20 Transformation of a dog: an article from an unusual natural history dedicated to all the lovers of philosophy, nature and dogs reads like a pastiche.21 With an epigraph taken from the encyclopaedic Natural History by French natural scientist Count de Buffon (1707-1788), the title implies a parody on scientific treatis- es. While the long title might be anachronistic for mid nineteenth- century literature, it is also reminiscent of the titles of dog stories from earlier European literature, such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nachricht von den neuesten schicksalen des Hundes Berganza (1814). Gogol similarly owed a debt to Hoffmann’s tale about the dog Berganza in a number of ways, including the motif of dogs writing letters to one another.22 Moreover, at the end of Hoffmann’s tale Berganza describes the kind of people who end up in a hospice: one of them is a dreamer with a plan to pay off the King of Spain’s debt. Of relevance to the human/dog transformation narratives is Berganza’s discovery, as told by a sorceress, that he is the son of a witch put under a curse by her jealous colleague. Instead of being born human, Berganza has been ejected into the dog world. Gogol borrowed from Hoffmann the transformation aspect of this dog plot and developed the poetics of the fantastic and the grotesque in the inner world of the madman. While he applied physical transformation between devil/human/animal in various other texts, in Diary of a Madman he problematised the dog subplot as a complex ‘social’ transformation. He did not, however, link this transformation narrative with the picaresque tradition of dog narratives in European literature.23 Furman did make this link between social transformation and the picaresque: over sixteen episodes his cross-bred dog is caught in a process of perpetual change of fortunes

20 On Furman see “Petr Romanovich Furman”, in Russkii biograficheskii slovar’. Ed. A.A. Polovtsov, St Petersburg, 1901, Vol. ‘Faber-Tsialkovskii’, 253-254. 21 P. Furman, “Prevrashchenie sobaki: Stat’ia iz neobyknovennoi estestvennoi istorii, posviashchennaia vsem liubiteliam i liubitel’nitsam filosofii, prirody i sobak”, Syn Otechestva 4 (1849), 1-134. 22 T.S. Lindstrom, Nikolay Gogol. New York: Twayne, 1974. 23 For a comparative reading of these texts see Ross Chambers, “The Artist as a Performing Dog”, Comparative Literature XXIII/4 (1971), 312-324. 128 Political Animals as a result of its adventures (as will be explained, the pronoun ‘it’ is applicable in relation to this text). This depiction of the dog’s adventures allows Furman to give an exposé of the life of the Russian capital city in all its social diversity. The various names given by the dog’s owners reflect their social and educational status. The dog’s first name is chosen by a boy apprentice to a shoemaker. This name is determined by the white colour of the puppy’s fur: Belka from belyi meaning white. The boy saves the puppy’s life but the episode does not reflect his kindness. He chooses this puppy out of a litter of seven born to a dog who lives in the yard only because he believes that, if all her puppies are taken away, the bitch will go mad. When the remaining six puppies are sold to a glove maker he makes sure the seventh remains with the mother so as to avoid the consequences of having a mad dog in the yard. Belka is given the chance to survive but its life will be full of hardship and suffering as a result of human cruelty. As well as a mad poet, the dog’s owners include a middle-class bachelor in pursuit of a rich widow who plans to give her the dog as a present. He buys the dog from a professional dog-handler who makes a living by grooming cross-breds and selling them as high pedigree dogs. In a comic episode the former Belka, now transformed into a white Mal- tese, loses its tail, thus exposing its ‘real’ breed. Needless to say, the rich widow expels the dog and calls off her engagement to her suitor. Left to live on the streets, the dog learns to take care of itself in a way suggestive of humans in similar circumstances: by becoming a skilled thief. A nasty German organ-grinder tricks the dog into joining him in his performance acts by giving it a loaf of white bread. The cruel man beats the dog while training it to perform various antics, and makes it pull the heavy organ by harnessing it as one would a horse. After es- caping from the organ-grinder the dog finds itself again in the hands of the former dog groomer who again re-models it into a pedigree dog – this time a poodle. The dog is sold for a princely sum to an aristocratic young man who attacks the dog when in a bad mood. The social status of the dog’s owners has no bearing on their treatment of it: all acts of maltreatment are unmotivated and illogical. A milkman beats it for licking a drop of spilled milk on the pavement; the mother of the rich widow throws tobacco into its eyes. Furman observes the similarities between people and dogs in the way they treat those most in need with cruel persecution: when the dog falls sick and weak it is attacked by stray dogs; even the dog’s own mother Degradation narratives 129 does not recognise it. Finally, the dog crawls under the carriage and lies motionless. A nearby street sweeper considers using the dog’s skin to make a pair of boots but the dog mysteriously disappears. The parallelism between people and dogs culminates in the final episode in the dog’s life. At this stage the dog has the vulgar name Shavka, a generic nickname given to dogs of no consequence. Shavka is picked up from the street by a strange-looking man whose worn appearance is similar to that of the dog. By this time the dog has lost an eye as the result of an attack by the organ-grinder’s parrot; the man also has only one eye. The dog’s fur is patchy; the man’s hair has the texture of dog’s fur and his head has bald patches. The dog has a broken leg as a result of a carriage accident; the man limps. The man takes the dog to his home and from this moment the reader realises that not everything is as it seems. With all the surprise revelations of a mystery novel, the man turns out to be an aristocrat with refined tastes and education. Once he changes his street rags for his own fine clothes the dog does not recognise him. The correlation between man and dog is played out in the parallel effect of grooming on dogs and people.24 The man’s disguise as a vagrant allows him to lead a double life. He presents his house and yard as a poor dwelling to complete the mas- querade. Inside, however, his private quarters boast a fine interior complete with elegant furnishings and other expensive items. He lives as a pariah as a result of his deliberate withdrawal from the high society to which he had belonged. His life as a self-confessed misanthrope is a response to his unhappy marriage to a society woman and her infidelity. He explains to the dog that he chose it as a substitute for a missing person. When the maid asks whether the dog has a name, he suggests they call it Misanthrope. He clearly perceives the dog as his double. The maid finds it difficult to pronounce the word Misanthrope and calls the dog Anthrope, much to the delight of the master who perceives it as a pun for anthropos, ‘human’ in Greek. The pun valorises the master’s view of humankind as no different from dogs; it also stresses similarities in dog and human degradation.

24 In paintings, Pavel Fedotov famously explored the parallelism in grooming between an aristocratic man and his dog in “Zavtrak aristokrata” (1849) which was notably created in the same year as the publication of Furman’s story. The Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.

130 Political Animals

Pavel Fedotov’s ‘An Aristocrat’s Breakfast’ (1849). The aristocratic man has curl-paper in his hair while his poodle has a fancy curly fur cut. The aristocrat saves money on his food (hence the painting’s title) but pays attention to his and his dog’s grooming as markers of prestige and high status in society.

But the self-styled misanthrope turns out to be kind and humane. He makes his maid take good care of the dog and treats the dog’s broken leg. Their life of seclusion is interrupted by the arrival of a letter from the man’s lovely daughter and ailing wife. The letter has a cathartic effect on the man’s cultivated hatred of humankind. He decides to return to his family, to their manor house, and dedicate his life to saving his ailing wife from certain death. This decision is the result of yet another cathartic event that takes place while the hero is

Degradation narratives 131 deeply perturbed by the news from his family. The dog Shavka saves his life by defending him from an attack by a mad dog. Shavka heroically bites the attacker on the neck. Shattered by this act of self- sacrifice, the man decides to return to his family and forgive his wife for her former infidelity. The dog’s love for the man thus serves as a catalyst in his decision to re-evaluate his feelings. The former misanthrope turns into a kind and loving family man. The dog’s adventures however are not over. Amongst the crowd that witness the mad dog’s attack is a retired veterinarian. He expresses concern over Shavka’s health, in view of him biting a mad dog. The grateful master promises the veterinarian a fortune for saving his beloved dog’s life. The veterinarian takes the dog away for a few weeks then returns it to the house where the master now resides happily with his family. The master’s wife makes a remarkable recovery and the whole family is happy to receive the dog that saved the master’s life. The veterinarian is paid regular fees to look after Shavka. However, the reader’s expectations of a happy ending for the noble family and the heroic dog are not met. In an unexpected turn of events the veterinarian diagnoses in Shavka certain disturbing symptoms such as the fear of water. He suggests isolating the dog. This further aggravates Shavka’s mental state and the dog protests when left in a closed room. The veterinarian diagnoses ‘mad dog’ illness and suggests shooting the dog on the spot. Out of kindness the master shoots Shavka in the heart. The story ends with an ironic statement that parodies sententious moralising about the love between a human and an animal:

O Love, love that is unselfish, pure, based on self-sacrifice! Not only the love of a human to his kind, but also towards speechless animals, or the other way around. You are wonderful, elevating, touching! Compare it with ugly, disgusting hatred, and you will arrive to your own conclusion. (134)

Furman is sarcastic in his depiction of peoples’ ability to love and to be grateful. The master’s final act towards his dog is flawed in two main ways. First, he relies on the opinion of the retired veterinarian without applying his own common sense – any dog placed in solitary confinement would develop withdrawal symptoms and protest. Nor does the master question the professional credentials of the retired veterinarian. Secondly, he accepts the received wisdom that one has to

132 Political Animals kill an animal in a particular way so that it will not suffer. Shooting the dog in the heart is a parodic metaphor of love, alluding to Cupid’s arrows aimed at the heart in the classical allegory of love. This trope would have been familiar to Furman’s contemporaries raised on Ba- roque art and literature. None of the humans who come into contact with the dog is capable of ‘elevating’ love or gratitude. Love, courage and gratitude exist in the dog’s heart, not the hearts of humans. People use the dog in accordance with their needs: economic, as in the case of traders, buskers and the veterinarian; as part of social convention, as in the case of the rich widow; emotional, in the use of the dog as a substitute for a missing object of love; and psychological, as a vent for human aggression – this last category has no class or age boundaries since both rich and poor, children and adults, beat the dog. Special attention should be given here to the concept of a ‘mad dog’ in Russian. Unlike the generic English notion of a ‘mad dog’, the Russian word beshenaia in beshenaia sobaka (mad dog) is related to the word besy, meaning devil or possessed. A mad dog is thus a possessed dog, a concept that denotes not only a medical condition but also a supra-natural state. The mad dog possessed by spirits or illness exposes the mythic beliefs related to this animal. In Furman’s text the phenomenon of a dog going mad is used twice. In the first instance the puppy is spared because it is believed that his mother will go mad if all her puppies are taken away. The word vzbesitsia is used in its two meanings: literally, in terms of being mad or possessed; and metaphorically, in terms of being mad with anger. The second time this word is applied to describe Shavka’s behaviour is when the dog protests against solitary confinement. This compositional symmetry frames the life of Shavka – spared in order to save its mother from becoming mad, Shavka is made mad through treatment by an incom- petent veterinarian. The structural symmetry suggests a similarity between the veterinarian and the illiterate apprentice boy Vas’ka who saved the dog’s life when it was a puppy. Both have the same degree of ‘competence’ – the veterinarian’s medical knowledge and the illiterate boy’s superstitions are exposed by Furman as equally nonsensi- cal. His subtitle, ‘An article from an unusual natural history’, similarly ridicules the medical profession. As far as natural science is concerned, Furman also parodies the views of Count de Buffon. The excerpt he chooses from de Buffon’s text as an epigraph to his text states, ‘because there are no intermedi- Degradation narratives 133 ate creatures between rational ones and creatures who are not rational, it becomes obvious that a human in its nature is completely different from animals’ (1). Furman enters into polemics with Buffon’s opinion on the difference between animals and humans in connection with Buffon’s views on dreams. While Buffon does not deny the fact that animals have dreams, he nevertheless makes a distinction between animals and humans in the perception of dreams. Buffon further notes that animals do not have memory because they do not have a concept of time – an argument that Furman finds so feeble that he puts two questions marks next to it in the text: ‘??’ (66). Furman does not accept Buffon’s argument that humans are aware of the difference between reality and dreams while animals are not. Such criticism of Buffon’s views becomes most apparent in Furman’s second epigraph, placed after the French excerpt from Buffon. It is given in Russian and in a style that forms a stark contrast to the pretentious scientific-philosophical discourse of Buffon. The second paragraph of this epigraph contains four commands given to dogs in training sessions: ‘Kushe!... Isi!... Pil’!.. Aport!... Sir, the dog understands everything, like a human’ (1). This pseudo-quotation is signed ‘Anthrope, the Dog lover’. Furman’s juxtaposition of the two epigraphs with two different opinions on the correlation between humans and animals reduces ad absurdum the opinions of the learned natural scientist. In the text Furman ironically refers to Buffon as ‘a scientist who studied nature clad in laced cuffs’ (66). One of the intriguing features of the dog’s transformations in Furman’s tale is the lack of a clear definition of the sex of the dog. The reader does not know whether the dog is male or female. The names that are given to the dog are feminine, masculine or gender- neutral: Belka and Belochka (feminine), Amishka (both), Fidele (indeterminate as a foreign borrowing), Protezhe (neutral), Kartush (indeterminate as a foreign name), Trezor (masculine) and Shavka (a generic feminine noun that could be applied to both male and female dogs). While the function of the dog’s name in this tale is to reflect the social status assigned to it by its respective owners, the dog’s ‘temporary’ sex also reflects the needs of its owners. Thus, the teenaged boy Vas’ka who gives the puppy its first name, Belka, to reflect its white colour, tenderly calls it the feminine Belochka after the dog starts looking attractive as a result of its grooming. This tender feminine

134 Political Animals nickname, however, is followed by masculine words: ‘kakoi krasavets’ (‘what a he-beauty’). The dog’s last guise in which he dies is male, as reflected in the name Trezor. This confusion over the dog’s sex should be viewed as deliberate. On the one hand it is a consequence of the fact that the Russian noun sobaka is of feminine gender, on the other hand it is created by the multi-gendered names given to the dog. This situation can serve a number of purposes: as an effective comic device; as a manifestation of indifference towards victimised Others who do not have identifying individual features; and as a projection of the overt and covert needs of the respective owner. The change of the dog’s sex is thus yet another part of its metamorphoses. Furman’s story reflects the perception of this animal in contemporary society. More importantly, his story contains a conglomerate of motifs in the representation of dogs that will be developed in Russian discourse. It also provides a few historical facts related to the treatment of dogs in society: the use of dog skin and fur by the lower classes in the manufacture of warm items of clothing, and the lower classes’ involvement in dog trading and ‘scams’ such as the grooming and trimming of dogs to make them pass for pedigree dogs. On the level of the plot the story deals with the notion of parallelism between humans and dogs in terms of social degradation, the role of the environment in shaping character and the acquisition of skills needed for survival. It exposes beliefs associated with dog mythology that link dogs to demonic forces and obliquely exposes prejudices and superstitions linked to such beliefs. It also expresses distrust in science and medicine – the story includes a metaphoric resurrection of the dog from the dead. Gogol and Furman’s texts contributed to various forms of human and dog transformations: real and imaginary, superficial and deep, true and pretended, social and psychological, existential and metaphysical – all are linked to the notion of the correlation between humans and dogs. These themes form various intersections, and while this chapter focuses primarily on social and moral transformations, Chapter 9 groups together those stories that are concerned with the intersections of dog/human physical-metaphysical-scientific transfig- urations and transmutations.

Degradation narratives 135

Animal commune after the October Revolution: Boris Pilnyak’s ‘A Dog’s Life: The Vicissitudes of Destiny’

Social and economic degradation transformation narratives became more common following the October Revolution. With masses of people losing their homes and livelihoods, with hunger raging during the time of the Civil War and with the famine of the 1920s, the similarities between the lives of people and of dogs formed a poignant parable. The transformation of the rich and famous into the poor and the destitute, of privilege and importance into infamy and degradation, of life on the estate to the homeless wanderings of a life in exile – all these transmutations brought to life the narrative of parallelism between human and dog destiny. ‘A dog’s life’ became the metaphor for the life of Russia’s privileged classes. But does social degradation lead to moral degradation? In most cases it does. A modernist writer Boris Pilnyak (1894-1941) responded to the changing political reality with his fable ‘A Dog’s Life: The Vicissi- tudes of Destiny’ (1919). The tale can be read as an allegory of the prevailing ethos of the Revolutionary times – one has to earn one’s own living by honest work. The tale depicts the vicissitudes of a dog from pre- to post-Revolutionary period. In line with the Furmanian tradition of the plot of the dog’s social transformation, the nameless puppy changes his name from Malysh (The Little One) to Sharik, and then to Stek. The names are emblematic of the social situation of his masters, but in every situation the dog is abused and mistreated. His life in the first instance is saved only because a yardman who takes him to be drowned in the river, gets drunk. He leaves the puppy under his seat in the tavern, and the tavern owner passes the puppy to his son Mit’ka with the words: ‘Here is a little one for you. Beat him coming and going’ (274).25The theme of children’s cruelty to dogs finds its reflection in the tale, and both Mit’ka and children in general show signs of zoo-sadism towards the dog. Thus, Mit’ka enjoys fastening a piece of paper to Malysh’s tail and blowing tobacco smoke into his nose. ‘Not once, but many times, boys threw stones at him’ (280).

25 Boris Pilnyak, “A Dog’s Life: The Vicissitudes of Destiny” in Mahogany and Other Stories. Trans. and ed. Vera T. Reck and Michael Green, Ardis: Ann Ar- bor, 1993, 273-284.

136 Political Animals

Malysh runs away from the tavern owner and his son. He ends up being picked up by an artist who calls him Sharik, but who forgets to feed him for three days. Sharik then eats the oil paint in the studio, and the artist gives him a beating. Pilnyak thus suggests that even bohemians abuse dogs in the same way as uneducated classes. When Sharik runs away he gets accepted by a group of pedigree dogs who belong to an old aristocratic countess. While she adores her six dogs her lackeys abuse them behind her back. They hate the dogs for the good life which they enjoy, and beat them savagely, calling them ‘pigs’ bastards’ and ‘scum’s spawn’ (282), while they call the countess ‘Dog Mummy’, thus exhibiting a range of stereotypes associated with the prejudice against dogs in folk culture. At this stage the dog is called Stek to denote the irony of being made into a pedigree dog with a foreign-sounding name, which, however, does not save him from being beaten by the lackeys. While other animals like a cat and a rat do not suffer persecution, the dog is shown to be an eternal scapegoat: during World War I he is called a German and assaulted, and during the Revolution he is labelled as a bourgeois and chased away from his mistress’s house. The dog ends up in an animal commune, organised by a wise tomcat who teaches that ‘the most valuable thing in life is freedom’ (276). On the surface layer, this fable is an allegory of the social transformation with the dog and his animal friends starting a new communal life. This scenario, however, is not entirely optimistic, because the animals have to withdraw into the forest and live away from the humans:

And they left the people where class struggle was uppermost and went into a field and toward the wood. In the woods they built a little house. The rat cooked. The tomcat and Malysh toiled in the sweat of their brows getting provisions. Soon they were joined by other dogs, rats, chickens, and one duck. They all were free, and they toiled from morning till night.

And in the evening they sat around a common table, drank tea, ate bread procured by brotherly hands, and talked about principles. (285)

This ending of the fable has to be read in the Aesopian tradition. While it may appear to be a happy one, the important message is Degradation narratives 137 that animals are safe only when they live separately from people. This animal liberation scenario is pessimistic, because it shows that while there can be cross-species communication, the communication between humans and animals cannot take place even after the Revolu- tion. Animals accept communal living naturally, they do not need to have a class education whereas Mit’ka and people like him join the revolutionaries and maraud and persecute innocent animal-lovers like the old countess. Michael Green views this ‘happy commune of animals’ as a ‘widely idealistic picture of life as it could be in Russia after the revolution’ (13),26 but as further responses to post- Revolutionary social transformations attest, there is no future for dogs in the years of political upheavals.

Times of famine – from socio-economic transformation to dog- eating degradation: A Dog’s Destiny

The situation of moral degradation after the October Revolution was acknowledged by the 1922 publication in Berlin of Sobach’ia dolia: Peterburgskii sbornik rasskazov (A Dog’s Destiny: Petersburg collection of stories), a collected volume of stories devoted to the lives of dogs.27 The volume was organised by Alexei Remizov (1877-1957), the writer with whom Pilnyak and other young modernists were associated. The title of the volume emphasises the book’s link to St Pe- tersburg, Russia’s cultural capital before the Revolution. This connection has a number of meanings. It proclaims that the stories describe life in Russia’s capital city which, to many émigré readers, is the very life from which they had fled. The title also makes a historical connection with the tradition of nineteenth-century classical Rus- sian literature, especially with the critical tradition. The authors who participate in the collective volume declare their lineage to this tradition of Russian literature that registered and exposed the social ills of society despite the constraints of censorship. Admittedly, for a volume published outside of Soviet Russia in 1922, problems of censorship did not apply – at least not in application to the criticism of Bolshevik Russia. But the St Petersburg text also exposes the hidden life of the city, the life that takes place outside the hours of daylight. Interest in

26 Michael Green, “Introduction” in Mahogany and Other Stories, 1-14. 27 Sobach’ia dolia. Peterburgskii sbornik rasskazov, Berlin: Slovo, 1922.

138 Political Animals human psychology and pathology, criminal activities, the world of the surreal, the fantastic and the grotesque – all these features of the classical tradition are embodied in the St Petersburg text. The stories in the collection use the dog plot to develop various aspects of this cultural overview, from the exposure of the social ills of the city to the bizarre and obscene. Two stories in A Dog’s Destiny use the trope of parallelism in the degrading transformation of dogs from good families and their owners from a life of privilege to one of misery, as depravation and hunger followed the Bolsheviks’ coming to power after the October Revolution: V. Iretskii’s ‘Sobach’ia zhizn’’ (‘Dogs’ Life’, 1919) and Viacheslav Shishkov’s ‘Azor’ (‘Poodle Azor’, 1921). Characteristic for both stories is people’s maltreatment of their formerly loved animals during this time of hunger and famine. Most strikingly, both stories feature humans killing and consuming dogs. This subplot helps to complete the transformation of Christian people into quasi- cannibals. In ‘Dogs’ Life’ the female dog Laika’s attitude towards her master undergoes a change from adoration to disgust and hatred. While Laika retains her dignity in spite of the changes brought on by the Revolution, her master sinks into a state of physical and moral degradation. Where Laika used to worship her master as a god, with the change of economic and social conditions this master becomes a god fallen from his pedestal. This image functions as a metaphor for the fallen gods of pre-Revolutionary Russia. The proletariat now wor- ships new gods, and Laika’s behaviour in her search for new gods echoes that of the Russian masses. Laika is quick to equate her master’s behaviour with dogs’ behaviour, and it is this realisation of ‘sameness’ that makes the dog reconsider the godly status of her master:

Yes, the Revolution did not happen in vain. It shook Laika’s strong belief in the invincibility of gods and made her re-evaluate the whole Olympus of dogs. Laika first of all understood that the master of the house is not a strong and powerful god, but a cowardly nonentity […] The only reason why he does not wag his tail is that people do not have tails.

Degradation narratives 139

In other words, the master started to resemble a dog too much to remain a god. And Laika overthrew him. (25)28

Hunger transforms the master into a hunter, but instead of em- barking on a conventional hunt he resorts to making traps for sparrows. The master’s moral degradation achieves its apogee when he cooks and eats Laika’s puppies. When Laika’s motherly instinct makes her attack the man who killed her puppies, her master brutally kicks her and breaks her spine. The transformation of the master into a murderer is complete. Laika accepts death as the only escape from the world of betrayal. Having lost her faith in humans/gods, the dog’s life has no meaning. The eponymous poodle Azor in Shishkov’s tale29 meets a similar death – in the wake of the peripeteia and social decline caused by the Revolution he ends up in the Soviet police quarters where he is brutally beaten to death by men in heavy boots. Azor’s decline parallels the social and economic decline of the family of his mistress – an old lady, a barynia. Whereas Azor lived in luxury before the Revolution, famine forces the old mistress to stop caring for her dog. The parallelism in the decline of the mistress and her dog Azor is presented in humorous tones at the beginning of the story: both lose their lustre and gradually become ill-nourished and on the verge of collapse. Azor’s recourse to begging does not last long when the same people who once supplied the dog with morsels of food throw hot water over him. Azor’s earlier good life becomes just a memory, part of the world of dreams. Azor is quickly marked as a class Other by the new order. When Red Army soldiers come to the old mistress’s apartment in search of signs of sabotage, Azor defends his mistress. He attacks a man with a rifle, but is beaten and loses some teeth. The soldiers give the dog such epithets as ‘Black’, ‘counter-revolutionary’ and ‘little devil’ (46), thus bestowing on him characteristics at the core of folk and class prejudices against dogs. The Red Army soldiers hate the dog in an essentialist way. He is not only the epitome of the class Other for

28 All quotations are from the stories included in the volume Sobach’ia dolia: Pe- terburgskii sbornik rasskazov. Berlin: Slovo, 1922. 29 Viacheslav Shishkov was Remizov’s pupil. See Greta Slobin, Remizov’s Fiction, 1900-1921. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 1991.

140 Political Animals them; he is also an incarnation of the devil, and a non-Russian Other. The narrator twice refers to Azor’s eyes as reminiscent of the black and white eyes of a ‘black African’. Their hatred of Azor is determined not only by political differences but by the deeper substratum of folk beliefs. Notably, Azor’s life is threatened by those members of Russian society who do not wield political or military power. They come from the ranks of the hungry and the declassed – those who form the bottom layer of society, who have not joined the new order and who are driven not by class-consciousness but by the survival instinct. In his wanderings through the city Azor is almost caught by a man who ‘farms’ stray dogs: he catches them, feeds them, and then feeds his family with the dog meat. This disturbing scene reflects the reality of city life at the time of famine:

The man called the white dog, touched her and pushed her away. – Thin like a board. Too old. He called Azor and felt his sides, stomach, backside for a long time. – With some feeding up it is a possibility. Azor jumped away. That man was strange. Azor turned around and growled. The man often quarrelled with his wife. They even beat each other. The children cried. Azor saw all that. – You stupid woman! Even physiologists eat it. – Go away. You are a Russian Orthodox Christian, not a physiologist… I will leave you, will leave you… – What am I to do if I am used to eating mammal meat [mlekopitaiushchaia pishcha]. Must I pack up? The man preferred fat dogs, those that were thin he fed till a certain time there in the apartment. Later his wife was reconciled to it, the children got used to it and acquired a taste for it. And when he used to return with the bag behind his back in which something alive was moving, the children shouted: – Daddy, I want to have the head, the head…. (57)

Azor senses that he is not going to survive. As a result of starvation he passes blood on the stairs of the apartment block. The House Committee decides to poison him, but two small dogs eat the poison meant for Azor and die. These dogs belonged to an important Soviet man who works in one of the new forestry organisations, the name of which is expressed in a typically long abbreviation. In a manner befit- Degradation narratives 141 ting the new Soviet man, he phones the police department to get them to remove Azor. The scene of Azor’s treatment by the police is evocative of a typical raid performed by the Soviet punitive brigades. Azor is treated as an enemy of the people. He is led away and subjected to a reprisal (‘rasprava’, 58). The reprisal is savage. This scene is disturbing in its brutal sadism. When Azor sees the revolver pointed at him he attacks it. At this stage all those present in the police department start beating the dog with their heavy boots. Broken, the dog uses his last strength to crawl to the door of his apartment where he bleeds to death. These two stories demonstrate the transformation of new Russia into a society of savages. Through their victimhood, dogs become synonymous with those who are the victims of the new order. But the transformation of Russians into savages is marked not only by the brutal treatment of dogs but also through the symbolic function of food. The anthropological interpretation of laws dividing animals into pure and impure in Leviticus and Deuteronomy in the Old Testament stresses the symbolic nature of these categories. Since God created all living creatures on Earth and created them to his liking there can be no abominable animals per se. What defines some animals as unclean is their unsuitability for human consumption. As Mary Douglas explains in Leviticus as Literature (1999):

The animal taken into the body by eating corresponds to that which is offered on the altar by fire; what is disallowed for the one is disallowed for the other; what harms the one harms the other. One thing that Leviticus never says, however, is that it is bad for the health of the body to eat any of the forbidden animals. (134)30

The difference between pure and impure animals and their ‘meat’ lies within the domain of the religious and the ethical. It is not a matter of physiology. Fittingly, when in Shishkov’s ‘Azor’ the ‘strange’ man says that even physiologists state that dog meat is suitable for consumption, he makes an atheistic statement based on a new materialist ideology. In contrast to this materialist script, the dietary laws in the Old Testament operate differently. Land animals are divided into pure and impure in the symbolic and ethical field. As such,

30 Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

142 Political Animals these laws are a cultural and religious construct. The man’s wife understands the religious value of the laws on eating forbidden animal meats: as she says, ‘You are a Russian Orthodox Christian, not a physiologist’ (57). In their depiction of dog-eating Russian people, both émigré writers use the notion of purity as a way to represent the transformation of religious God-fearing people into savages. Dietary habits create a symbolic divide between cultures and nationalities. The Soviet dog- meat-eating man is no longer part of the same entity as those Russians who continue to live by the laws of the Scriptures. For anti-Soviet writers, Soviet dog-eating people become the Other. Their transformation into barbarism is defined by their refusal to adhere to the same laws of ethics. The use of the word ‘physiologist’ is an ironic reference to the most famous physiologist of the 1920s – Ivan Pavlov and his experiments with dogs. Pavlov indeed was both a product and a creator of dog/human transformation discourse in Russia. His experiments function as a metatext in cultural productions about dogs. This function of Pavlov’s experiments will be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 9. Noteworthy in the context of the symbolic field of dog-eating degradation during the post-Revolutionary famine is Marina Tsvetae- va’s observation which I have chosen as the epigraph for this chapter. Tsvetaeva describes the non-Russian ethnic and religious minorities (Bulgarians and Muslim Tatars) indulging in degrading dog-eating practices during this time. She wrote her text Zhivoe o zhivom (A Liv- ing Word About A Living Man) as a memoir while living in emigration in Paris in 1932. She did not herself witness instances of dog-eating in Crimea. Rather, she retells a witness’s account. Her choice of non- Russians as those who resort to such a degraded practice indicates the symbolic content of the dog-eating taboo. Tsvetaeva’s nostalgia for and geographical distance from (Soviet) Russia in the 1930s would have played a role in her decision not to expose Russians as dog- eaters during the time of famine. When she did return to Russia she tragically ended her life by suicide in order to escape socio-economic and moral degradation. There is an uncanny and a deliberate correlation between her choice to voluntarily end the life of degradation and the choice that her poet friends made for her dogs in the post- Revolutionary years. In 1941 circumstances brought her to a town in the Tatar Republic where after ten days of residence she took her own life. The folk expression originating in medieval times of the Tatar- Degradation narratives 143

Mongolian yoke links Tatars to dogs: ‘Dog Tatar’ (Sobaka Tatarin), and Tsvetaeva was aware of this expression.31 Mythopoetic imagination does not differentiate between Crimean and Kama River Tatars. The horror of the first year of World War II must have brought to mind the dog-eating scenario.

Photograph taken in the 1920s during the great famine when dogs were sold for meat.

31 On historical origins of this expression see Roman Jakobson, “Sobaka Kalin Tsar’”, in Selected Writings IV. The Hague: Mouton, 1966, 64-81.

144 Political Animals

Moral degradation in Soviet times: dog meat for dogs in the Leningrad siege

Soviet writer and war-time journalist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) turns to the theme of dog meat-eating ‘cannibalism’ as a feature of famine during the siege of Leningrad, 1941-1944. In his memoirs People, Years, Life (1966) he recalls seeing a poster after World War II: ‘Exhibition of service dogs and dogs who survived the siege of Leningrad’ (289).32 Ehrenburg states that only fifteen dogs survived the 900-day siege. These dogs belonged to old ladies who shared their tiny bread rations with their beloved pets. He narrates the story of two dogs who belonged to the writer Ilya A. Gruzdev, Maxim Gorky’s biographer. Gruzdev had two poodles, Urs and Kus. During the Len- ingrad siege Gruzdev shot Urs and fed Kus with Ur’s meat. Ehrenburg states that Kus survived but became suspicious of people and acquired a gloomy character. Ehrenburg contrasts this episode with the story of the behaviour of Urs and Kus during the first months of the siege when Gruzdev’s wife left a block of bread unattended. The two dogs sat next to the bread, dripping with saliva, but they did not touch it. Ehrenburg concludes that hungry dogs exercise more restraint than people. It is at this juncture of his memoirs that he makes the statement that I have chosen as an epigraph for this book: ‘One is not obliged to love dogs, but it is advisable to ponder over the meaning of some dog stories’ (290). Ehrenburg might be idealising the old-world ladies or he might be using them as emblematic of an old noble world when people and dogs shared loyalty to one another. He notes that he had been criticised for paying too much attention to dogs in his memoirs. In the 1960s this habit was called ‘barskie zamashki’ – ‘high and mighty manners’ (289). This comment has an important historical value. It serves as evidence of the continuity in Russian culture of the pairing of ‘dog and master’, of the notion that the ownership of dogs is a privileged person’s whim. The 1920s’ stories, however, show that, while the old world ladies were not prepared to sacrifice their pets, they still suffered degradation. Uncombed and untidy, a pale copy of her former well-

32 Il’ia Erenburg, Liudi, Gody, Zhizn’. Books 5 and 6, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966. Degradation narratives 145 presented self, the old landlady in ‘Azor’ becomes emblematic of the old world that is as repulsive as the new world order. Most importantly, Ehrenburg’s narrative of the two poodles, Urs and Kus, stands as a code for the degrading descent of humans into cannibalism. One dog’s survival by eating another dog’s meat is a thinly concealed parable of people who survive by eating human flesh. By disclosing the story of a real life dog eating the meat of another real life dog, Ehrenburg challenges a major taboo of official Soviet historiography – that of cannibalism during the siege. He knew the person who made his dog eat another dog’s meat. There were witnesses of cannibalism in Leningrad at the time of the siege. Their stories were not told during Ehrenburg’s lifetime and these witnesses had to wait till the collapse of the Soviet Union to break this taboo subject. Ehrenburg makes his own contribution to the Petersburg/Leningrad text by disclosing the horrors of human degradation and transformation into the world of moral transgression. The implied question is: If eating another dog’s flesh changes the psychology of a dog, what does eating another human’s flesh do to that person? The 1920s’ stories present the eating of dog meat by humans as a sign of transformation into an ungodly society. That act in itself was an abomination. Yet, such acts were common knowledge in the 1920s. During the Thaw of the 1960s Ehrenburg uses the dog stories to challenge the Soviet regime for withholding information from contemporaries that could be used for the moral education of future generations. It is the meaning of these dog stories – about dogs and their Aesopian equiva- lents – that Ehrenburg wants the Soviet society ‘to ponder over’. Brought up and educated with an understanding of Judaism, Eh- renburg survived pogroms in Ukraine during the post-Revolutionary Civil War.33 A contemporary of the authors who contributed to the 1922 volume A Dog’s Destiny, he also witnessed atrocities committed by Nazis against the civilians during World War II. Moreover, he co- edited The Black Book of Russian Jewry, a collection of testimonials about the extermination of Jews in occupied territories by German Nazis and their collaborators.34 He knew more than many of his Soviet

33 Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: the Lives and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg. New York: Basic Books, 1996. 34 Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. Trans. and ed. David Patterson, New Brunswick NJ: Transaction, 2003.

146 Political Animals contemporaries about the extent of degradation among humans in wartime. This knowledge made him rethink notions of ‘animality’. Man, he believed, was the cruellest, indeed the only cruel animal in nature. In addition, more than most of his non-Jewish Soviet readers of the mid-1960s, Ehrenburg understood the notion of kosher food as based on the Laws of Leviticus. For him the dog meat-eating motif carried yet another important meaning – the abandonment of the moral codes of the Old Testament with its Ten Commandments. His appeal to the reader to ponder over some of the dog stories was unmistakeably related to the boundless degradation transformations of a human animal into a creature from Hell. The additional aspects of the symbolic meaning of dog-eating will be further explored in this book in connection with the criminal underworld. The important fact is that this theme became part of dog narratives in Russian culture. In post-Soviet realia the dog-human transformation achieved its most provocative embodiments in the work of contemporary artist Oleg Kulik, who became world-famous for his performance as Pav- lov’s dog in the 1990s. It is noteworthy that the first interpretations of Kulik’s performances centred on their social-economic meaning. The kind of degradation that an artist undergoes when he ‘lives like’ a dog was read as a form of political satire on post-Soviet life. His dog performances were interpreted in line with the narrative thematics of the ‘dog-like life’ led by people in the new economic realities. The transformation of a human into a dog was presented in this figurative interpretation. But Kulik’s dog impersonations are more than a response to moral, social and economic degradation transformations: they relate to ontological and material aspects of human-animal correlation. Later in this book I explore the paradox of scientific and eschatological human-animal transformation narratives. Kulik’s intentionally porous postmodern project is better discussed in the context of these narratives that break physical human-animal boundaries. Part Two Exploring emotional needs: Dogs and their underdog partners

Chapter 4 The fate of dogs in partnerships with the marginalised Other

I would like to be your cover, Or your bed dog.1 – Alexander Pushkin. 1820

Yid, Pole and the dog – all have the same faith. [Zhid, liakh i sobaka – vse vera odnaka.] – Ukrainian proverb2

This chapter focuses on the representation of the role and fate of small dogs in emotional partnerships with people in a disempowered position due to ethnicity, gender, class discrimination and/or physical handicap. These stories have in common the presence of a small whitish dog – a domesticated animal used as an embodiment of the disempowerment of its master or mistress. While some of these stories form a transtextual continuum, they deal with different historical epochs and different situations. What unites them is the parallelism between the minority status of their heroes and heroines and the insignificance of their dogs. In most of these stories the heroes and heroines are the victims of hostile attitudes and violent acts, both towards them and their dogs. I begin with the classic tale ‘Mumu’ by Ivan Turgenev (1852) which became a metatext in Russian culture in the thematics of parallelism between the social oppression of people and that of dogs.3 I proceed to Alexander Kuprin’s story ‘Gambrinus’ (1907) which creates a parallelism between a Jewish man, Sashka, and his dog Bel-

1 See A.S. Pushkin, “Nimfodore Semenovoi”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow: izd-vo Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1957, Vol. I, 408. 2 Quoted in B.A. Uspenskii, 277. Original in M. Nomis. Ukrains’ki prikazki, prisliv’ia i take inshe. Zbirniki O.V. Markovicha i drugikh. St Petersburg, 1864. No. 8098. 3 Briggs asserts that in spite of Turgenev’s well-recorded love of dogs, ‘Mumu’ is not about dogs. A.D.P. Briggs, “One Man and His Dogs: An Anniversary Tribute to Ivan Turgenev”, Irish Slavonic Studies 14 (1993), 1-20. 150 Political Animals ka – a small female dog that functions as an emotional companion and a ‘substitute’ for an absent female partner in a role both similar and different to that assigned to Mumu in the life of the handicapped Gerasim in Turgenev’s story. Continuing with the theme of the dog as a companion for a marginalised person, I move to two stories in which a small dog fills the vacuum left by an absent male partner, thus reversing the gender scheme: both Anton Chekhov’s famous ‘Lady with the dog’ (1899) and Evgeny Zamiatin’s little-known ‘The Land Sur- veyor’ (1918) focus on the pairing of a young woman from the educated classes and her small white dog. While Chekhov’s story is apolitical, Zamiatin’s text builds on the theme of the ‘lady with a dog’ in the context of the new political situation of the first twelve months following the October Revolution of 1917. With the exception of Chekhov’s ‘Lady with the dog’ all these stories reveal the ability of the Russian villain to inflict violence on weak and innocent victims, be they human or animal. They also explore not only social, but also psychological dimensions of acts of violence (human to human, human to animal) that sometimes mas- querade as political protest. My reading adds new dimensions to the class-based interpretations of Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’ by showing that the victim can transfer his anger to the innocent animal partner, the very object of his affection. While the societal and political issues are at the core of the unhappy endings of these small dogs4 and, in most cases, their partners, these stories explore complex structures of relationships between the marginalised humans, their pet dogs and those who are in the position of power to influence these relationships. Prejudice against dogs and subaltern humans stems both from a range of stereotypes and folk beliefs and superstitions, and writers often use this material in a subversive way, using and reworking it into the mode of Aesopian language. Marginalised male heroes in ‘Mumu’ and ‘Gambrinus’ have common features with the ‘historical’ Greek Aesop of the 5th century B.C. Aesop was allegedly a former serf and a mute, and Gerasim shares this typology with him. Like Sashka the Jew, Aesop was con-

4 Mumu is described as white with black spots. Dogs and the marginalised Other 151 structed by European culture as not ‘white’.5 I noted earlier that in the case of Gogol’s madman, this hero’s likeness to the legendary Aesop allows us to read him in a serious light rather than as a caricature. Features of family resemblance with Aesop create elevating parallels between underdogs and animals also in Turgenev’s and Kuprin’s texts. Like Aesop, these characters are situated between man and beast, and the writers show that this indefinite status is yet another source of discrimination against them. All four writers (Turgenev, Kuprin, Chekhov and Zamiatin) use Aesopian language for two purposes: to communicate the message of parallelism between humans and animals; and to both conceal and pass ciphered messages of moral, political and otherwise subversive or tabooed nature. The prototypical small dog in the tradition of Russian Aesopian fables is Krylov’s famed Mos’ka from ‘Elephant and Mos’ka’ (1808). As stated in the Introduction, Mos’ka represents a small powerless creature of no consequence but which nevertheless has delusions of power. The small dogs analysed in this chapter share with Mos’ka the state of disempowerment. Although familiar with Krylov’s fable, the writers under discussion altered the values of this original satirical script. In their stories the white dogs become the heroines and heroes for the very qualities which Krylov held up for ridicule in his description of Mos’ka – their smallness, their disempowerment and their marginalisation. In doing so they effectively reverted to the ‘original’ Aesopian language of Aesop’s fables: little Mos’kas, be they (wo)men, Jews or animals, must have their rights.6 The small dogs in the stories under discussion are the victims of what Peter Singer in his Animal Liberation calls speciesism – in line with sexism and racism, this process constructs characteristics which

5 See Francois Lissarrague, “Aesop, Between Man and Beast: Ancient Portraits and Illustrations”, in Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art. Ed. Beth Cohen, Leiden: Brill, 2000, 174-203. 6 On the Russian-Jewish dog theme see Joseph Sherman and Henrietta Mondry, “Russian dogs and Jewish Russians: Reading Israel Joshua Singer’s ‘Liuk’ in a Russian Literary Context”, Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History XX/3 (2000), 290-317. 152 Political Animals are the signal of discrimination.7 Scholars have demonstrated that Nazism reorganised the hierarchies not only between human races but also between animals as well as between humans and animals.8 Thus Aryans and German shepherds (bred to embody the spirit of National Socialism) were placed higher in the system of values than other dogs, animals and ‘subhuman’ races. Although Turgenev’s Mumu is of an identified Spaniel breed, her unknown parenthood and the fact that she was originally found in the mud put her into the category of rejects. While she is an example of the conflation of sexism and estate speciesism, her counterpart Belka in Kuprin’s story represents the convergence of speciesism, sexism and racism. In Chekhov’s story the nameless dog is emblematic of sexism, and in Zamiatin’s story the white fox terrier embodies the intersection of foreignness and the ‘overturned’ class Other.

Ivan Turgenev’s dogs and the politics of sexual transgression

Censorship played an important role in the conception of Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’. Turgenev (1818-1883) wrote this story in 1852 while incar- cerated in a police cell on the tsar’s orders for publishing an article on Gogol’s death that expressed the author’s democratic leanings. While he was fed well in prison and was even allowed to have visitors, his choice of a plot for ‘Mumu’ and his use of Aesopian language are both related to the prevailing climate of censorship. He uses this language to convey covert references to his traumatic experience on a number of levels. Parallelism with the lives of animals as evident in ‘Mumu’ is an inevitable thought for a captive pacing up and down a caged space. There are also allusions to a more personal form of repression. The tsar was not the only agent of Turgenev’s suffering; there was also his mother, a despotic and sadistic old-world aristocratic landowner. Indeed, the ‘Mumu’ plot is based on a real life occurrence in which she was a participant. Turgenev’s mother was a rich and powerful woman who conducted her estate as a mini-court mod-

7 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation. New York: New York Review Books, 1990. Also on the term see Richard Ryder, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes To- wards Speciesism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 8 Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. Dogs and the marginalised Other 153 elled on the Imperial court.9 Although she was surrounded by numerous serfs and servants, there remained one role that she did not dele- gate – the corporal punishment of her sons. She also psychologically abused her two sons until they were well into their adult years. It was only with her death that Turgenev gained financial independence and the freedom to choose a lifestyle that suited his artistic personality. Turgenev’s trauma thus functions on the level of repression, which finds its expression through creative writing and his employment of Aesopian language. He adopts a style of writing that effectively sublimates his repression: his dislike of his mother is generalised as the hatred of the oppressive system of which she was a product. Yet social protest is not the only message of the story and not the most important one. There is evidence to suggest that the real life story of his mother and the mute serf is not only about the master-serf relationship. Turgenev’s cousin on his father’s side gives a description of Gerasim’s prototype serf Andrei in her unpublished memoirs. Ac- cording to this account he was an extraordinarily handsome man – ‘krasavets’ – with dark blond hair and blue eyes and of impressive physique and strength.10 This mute serf remained loyal to Turgenev’s mother and did not leave the family’s Spasskoe estate. That a female relative significantly from Turgenev’s father’s side of the family should go into such a detailed description of the male serf is in itself a marker of concealed meaning. The Aesopian language used in ‘Mu- mu’ reveals and conceals varied tabooed and forbidden material. It must be borne in mind that the master-serf relationship in this story is as openly discussed as it was in Zapiski okhotnika (A Huntsman’s Sketches, 1852), which passed through censorship controls with remarkable ease.11 Furthermore, an obvious exposure of the master-serf relationship can be seen as a strategy to conceal more problematic material conveyed on deeper layers of the text. As part of the Russian and Soviet primary school curriculum, ‘Mumu’ has been taught as a story that gives voice to the writer’s criticism of the cruelty of landlords and his sympathy for simple peas-

9 See Boris Zaitsev, Zhizn’ Turgeneva. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1949. 10 See E.N. Konusevich, Vospominaniia. Leninskaia Biblioteka, Fond 306, karton 3, ed. khraneniia13. 11 See Frank Friedeberg Seeley, Turgenev: A Reading of his Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

154 Political Animals ants.12 In the story the deaf mute peasant Gerasim is forced to kill the only creature in the world that brings him happiness, his dog Mumu. This dog is as much the victim of the oppressor’s despotic will as is Gerasim himself. In this traditional reading Gerasim’s final act of drowning his little dog in the river is a manifestation of the cruelty of the lady of the manor rather than his own. The parallelism between the fate of Mumu and Gerasim is thus firmly established. The most important hidden message of the story, believed to be understood by generations of Russian and Soviet readers, is that Mumu ‘represents’ the suffering of the oppressed classes. Post-Soviet responses to this story as presented in various forms of discourse reveal the continuous fascination with the Gerasim-Mumu relationship. They attest that culture has not resolved the meaning of the story or fully explored the hidden layers of the Aesopian moral. At the end of the story, for example, Gerasim survives. Although he is supposed to be forgiven for his passive act of obedience, due to the broader rules of the political system of serfdom, his act of murder has not been resolved by generations of Russian readers. The contemporary Russian pop song still repetitively asks this question: ‘Zachem Gerasim utopil Mu-mu? Ia ne poimu, ia ne poimu’ (‘Why did Gerasim drown Mumu? I do not understand, I do not understand’).13 It has been made clear in scholarly literature and in reader- response discourses that the obvious ‘moral’ of the story, that both Gerasim and Mumu are the victims of serfdom, is not the most important message of the tale. The fact that Gerasim is not only a victim but also a villain complicates the tale. Turgenev’s poetics, characterised by Costlow as ‘worlds within worlds’,14 also employed Aesopian language to convey messages related to displaced erotic desires, emotional needs and forbidden pleasures without attracting the attention of the censors. For instance, in recognition of the coded language of dog thematics in Russian culture, Kolotaev’s psychoanalytical reading of ‘Mumu’ proposes the presence of an Oedipal theme in the Gerasim-

12 On role of Russian literature in Soviet education see Felicity O’Dell, Socialisa- tion Through Children’s Literature: The Soviet Example. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978. 13 Aleksei Kortenev, “Zachem Gerasim utopil Mu-Mu. Ne Legendy russkogo shansona”, www.youtube.com/watchru=6wxgihl255. Accessed 15 December 2011. 14 Jane T. Costlow, Worlds Within Worlds: the Novels of Ivan Turgenev. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Dogs and the marginalised Other 155

Mumu relationship, with Gerasim experiencing a form of Oedipal love towards the little dog.15

The sacral and the obscene in Turgenev’s dog thematics

Turgenev’s other dog-themed narrative, his burlesque story ‘Sobaka’ (‘The Dog’, 1864), ridicules folk prejudices against dogs as unclean forces and at the same time introduces a sexual motif into the dog subplot.16 In his highly informative examination of the subtexts of this story Sander Brouwer observes that the subplot connects the character of the hysterical woman to the dog motif in an association that is also evident in ‘Mumu’.17 Moreover, the dog subplots in both stories carry sexual connotations. The pastiche tone of ‘Sobaka’ ridicules and inverts superstitious folk beliefs that associate dogs with the demonic sphere.18 The vision of a nameless dog under the hero’s bed represents a good omen and helps to save the hero’s life after a wise man interprets these visions as a warning that the hero is in danger. While the sage does not explain this danger, he advises the hero to purchase a dog. This dog, named Trezor, saves the hero not only from an attack by a mad dog but also from marriage to a hysterical woman. The nameless dog that hides under the bed (referred to as sobaka – a noun of feminine gender) is at first regarded by the narrator as a manifestation of the supernatural (‘sverkh”estestvennoe’, 30). Notably, when the narrator wants to be rid of the sounds made by the supernatural dog-creature, he first pays a visit to an Old Believer who expresses his belief that dogs are an incarnation of demonic forces. Dogs, he maintains, should not be kept in the same room as Christian icons that depict the Mother of God, thus confirming the prejudice against this animal among Russian folk. The focus on the image of the Mother of God vis-à-vis the dog is itself

15 V. Kolotaev, Poetika destruktivnogo erosa. Moscow: Gnozis, 2001. 16 Turgenev showed his knowledge of folk beliefs in dogs as unclean beings in Fathers and Sons: Bazarov’s mother ‘considered crickets and dogs as unclean animals’. I.S. Turgenev, “Ottsy i deti”, in Sochineniia. Moscow: Nauka, 1978, Vol. VII, 113. 17 Sander Brouwer, “Turgenev’s Sobaka or: the Failure of Myth”, Essays in Poetics XIX/1 (1994), 58-83. 18 I.S. Turgenev, “Sobaka”, in Sem’ia vurdalaka. Russkaia misticheskaia proza. Omsk: Knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1993, 30-44.

156 Political Animals a potent hint of the inappropriateness of the presence of the dog in the company of the Virgin, in that it valorises the sexed connotations of the dog symbolism. The dog in this conversation is referred to as a male (‘pes’). The dog creature that hides under the bachelor’s bed is equally described in subversively sexed terms. Referred to as a hairy, itchy and scratchy sobaka, it functions as a concealed projection of the male narrator’s erotic desire and a substitute for an absent sexual partner. The function of the male dog Trezor is also linked to the sphere of sexuality: this dog prevents the marriage between his bachelor master and an hysterical woman who demands that the dog be shot for fear that she may be infected by rabies (or possibly because she wants to destroy the friendship between the man and his dog). Brouwer notes that her name, Nimfodora Semenonva, is a borrowing from Al- exander Pushkin’s erotic epigram ‘To Nimfodora Semenova’ (1820) in which he offers his amorous services as a ‘postel’naia sobachka’ (‘bed dog’, 408) to the addressee.19 The name of Turgenev’s heroine forms an intertextual connection with Pushkin’s text on the level of literary allusion and reveals Aesopian-type multiplicity in its meanings. The etymological link between ‘Nimfodora’ and ‘nymph’ is coincidental in Pushkin’s work, in which the addressee was a real-life person with this name. In ‘Sobaka’, however, this association functions on the level of Aesopian language, concealing the sexual subtext of the plot (in one episode in the story she is addressed as ‘Nimfoch- ka’, ‘Nymphet’). Turgenev did explore the motif of the repression, displacement and sublimation of erotic desires of despotic older women in power. Leonid Livak demonstrates that Turgenev transferred his own gender- and sexuality-related anxieties to the feminised ethnic Other in his story ‘Zhid’ (‘Jew’), thus reflecting his enduring fear of his powerful and despotic mother.20 His well-documented terror of this tyrannical old woman suggests that he did need the complexities of the Aesopian language to express his irreverent thoughts about the imagined intimate sphere of her life, hence his interest in the psychological drives

19 See A.S. Pushkin, “Nimfodore Semenovoi”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, Moscow: izd-vo Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1957, Vol. I, 408. 20 Leonid Livak, The Jewish Persona in European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Dogs and the marginalised Other 157 of threatening old landladies in his ‘dog stories’. In a preamble to the dog plot in ‘Sobaka’ the male protagonists gossip about women. The narrator of the dog story describes a clever chap who found a way to pacify his unruly mother-in-law, suggesting a liaison between the younger man and the older and more powerful woman. While copulation with a mother-in-law constitutes incest in terms of Church laws, dogs have no such barriers of behaviour, and here the Aesopian language manifests itself on a number of levels, concealing and revealing the tabooed and censored material. On the hidden level of parallelisms the dogs in ‘Sobaka’ and ‘Mumu’ are associated with transgressions. On the surface layer of both texts there exists the ridicule of old superstitions and criticism of the tyrannical behaviour of old-world landladies towards their serfs. The deeper, more complex layers embedded within Aesopian language relate to the domain of taboo, the sacred and the obscene. According to the influential literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, Turgenev was primarily an ethnographer – indeed, at the beginning of his career he worked under the leading ethnographer Vladimir Dal’ in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.21 As was noted in the Introduction, Boris Uspensky explains that, in East Slav cults, the role of the dog motif in the sphere of tabooed material related to sexuality, as evidenced by its reflection in swear-words. He notes that the implied subject in all variants of the ‘eb tvoiu mat’’ (‘fuck your mother’) expression is the dog.22 While the pronoun can vary from the second person to the first or third person, the implication of the dog as the subject is constant. On various layers of archaic depth ‘Mother’ has various functions: as a substitute for Mother Earth in pagan cults; as the mother of God in Christianity; or simply as any woman. The dog motif in Slav mythology is associated with transgressive and tabooed sexual behaviour and is linked to the dual sphere of the sacral and the obscene. In ‘Sobaka’ the phantasmagoric dog hiding under the male hero’s bed at night is an expression of the realm of the sacral and the obscene, exposed by Turgenev via the mode of Aesopian language. Trezor’s gender, on the contrary, is clearly defined, and it is in his capacity as a male pes, the concealed subject of the ‘eb tvoiu mat’’

21 See Boris Zaitsev, Zhizn’ Turgeneva. 22 B.A. Uspenskii, “Religiozno-mifologicheskii aspekt russkoi ekspressivnoi frazeologii”, 197-302.

158 Political Animals expression, that he evokes a hysterical reaction in Nimfochka. Regard- ing a depiction of this type of behaviour in literature, Lotman points out that Pushkin had previously used the depiction of hysterical fits in women as a form of sexual excitation.23

Serfs and she-dogs as objects of desire

In ‘Mumu’ Turgenev centres his attention on the she-dog, placing her within the sphere of forbidden pleasures and sexual desires.24 In this story the old widowed estate-owner’s fondness of Gerasim is based on his large build and fabled physical might. Turgenev describes Gerasim’s impressive stature at the beginning of his tale. The reader is invited to participate in a voyeuristic experience in admiring Gerasim’s ‘long and hard muscles’ ‘moving up and down’ like a lever (264). The lady of the estate is kindly disposed to Gerasim – Turgenev uses the word ‘zhalovala’ (269), an expression that has connotations of sentimental attachment.25 And indeed it is plausible that one of the reasons why she dislikes Mumu is because she is jealous of Gerasim’s attention to the small dog. By this stage she has already married off the object of Gerasim’s love, Tatiana, to a notoriously lazy drunkard. She did it despite or rather because of her knowledge of Gerasim’s fondness for the young woman. Mumu spends a lot of time in Gerasim’s bed, either with him or on her own while he is at work. She is a sexed animal, a sort of Pushkinian ‘postel’naia sobachka’. Gerasim’s handicap as a mute does not prevent him from communi- cating with Mumu.26 On the contrary, his disability puts him on a similar level of Otherness beyond that traditionally defined by social estate and class. In combination with class-related issues, which will be explored later, the Aesopian language conceals the sexual overtones and innuendoes of the story, including the mistress’s latent lust for the strong and healthy man – a lust which she herself probably does not rationalise. Because her desire functions on the level of the

23 Iu.M. Lotman, Roman A.S. Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin”: Kommentarii. Lenin- grad: Prosveshchenie, 1980. 24 All quotations are from I.S. Turgenev, “Mumu”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh. Moscow: izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963, Vol. V, 264- 292. 25 See his stories of the same period: “Breter” (1847) and “Postoialyi dvor” (1852). 26 The dog’s name Mumu corresponds to the sounds that Gerasim can make.

Dogs and the marginalised Other 159 repressed unconscious it is sublimated into jealousy towards the she- dog. Had she been rational, she would not have responded so hysteri- cally to Mumu’s bark: Mumu was an excellent guard dog and would protect her house well. Yet she prefers the old and useless male dog Volchok. Even Gerasim’s initial discovery of Mumu – he finds her abandoned in the river – relates to the sphere of sexuality and the practice of disposing of unwanted babies. It builds strong parallels between animal and human procreation. Clearly someone had wanted to drown the unwanted puppy. The drowning of a dog or a cat was (and is) common practice in rural Russia. This act was paralleled by the most common form of infanticide: the drowning of aborted embryos or of newly-born babies by peasant women who could not afford to feed another child, who had to destroy the evidence of an extra-marital liaison, or who were afraid of their landlords’ wrath.27 On the parallelism between babies and puppies Boris Uspensky notes that this correlation is expressed lexically in various regional dialects, where children and puppies share the same nicknames: ciucia and ciucik (as the reader might recall, this was evident in Khlebnikov’s poem ‘The Night before the Soviets’). In this regard, the drowned anthropomorphised Mumu, herself an object of Gerasim’s ‘transgressive’ and displaced love, functions as a symbol of sinful liaison, in parallel to drowned infants.28

Encoding autobiographical forbidden pleasures

The hidden layers related to the theme of forbidden love and desire in the plot of ‘Mumu’ are varied. Turgenev gave one of his favourite lapdogs the nickname Bubul’ka. This name is phonetically linked to babul’ka, the intimate word for a woman, baba. The serf who bore Turgenev an illegitimate child was a timid blond woman Avdotiia whom Turgenev’s mother expelled from the estate on discovering the liaison and Avdotiia’s pregnancy. While Turgenev provided for her

27 Populist writer Gleb Uspensky in his sketches about village life described this practice of infanticide. See Henrietta Mondry, Pure, Strong and Sexless: the Peasant Woman’s Body and Gleb Uspensky. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 28 Brouwer notes that Gerasim “learned to ‘need’ a woman, or her surrogate, a dog” (137). Sander Brouwer, Character in the Short Prose of Ivan Sergeevich Turge- nev. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1996.

160 Political Animals and took care of his daughter for the rest of his life, the liaison was a typical example of Russian gentry-serfdom culture. Although this particular liaison did not result in abortion or infanticide, the more usual scenario would be that which was encoded in the hidden language of ‘Mumu’. Moreover, Turgenev’s description of Mumu as a ‘Spanish breed’ (‘Ispanskoi porody’, 268) with big expressive eyes, rather than the more appropriate ‘Spaniel’, may be a ciphered reference to Turgenev’s real-life love object, the famous Spanish soprano Pauline Garcia Viardot. Contemporaneous descriptions of Viardot habitually emphasise her passionate dark eyes. Turgenev’s mother’s jealousy of her, based in part on Viardot’s Spanish origins, is well documented: she famously called her ‘an accursed Gypsy’ and blamed her for Turgenev’s departure from Russia in 1847.29

Interpreting sacral and secret desires

The initial dislike by the lady of the estate for Mumu brings together the undercurrents of erotic desire and the belief in the supernatural. On the morning of the day on which she later has her ‘episode’ with Mumu she has her fortune told. The cards reveal four jacks – a sign of good luck in love which puts her in a positive mood. It is while she is still in this happy frame of mind that she first encounters Mumu. Her first impulse is to caress the dog then, after Mumu rejects her advances, she turns against her: the wretched dog accepts Gerasim’s caresses but barks at her attempt to touch her. Feeling rejected in her offerings of love, particularly after her positive frame of mind prompted by the fortune-telling cards, she decides to have the dog sent away. Mumu is taken away and sold to a new owner, but she manages to return to Gerasim. When the estate-owner finds Mumu again she asks a woman companion to ensure that her wish to have the dog removed from the estate is fulfilled. This companion’s name is emblematic of love: she is called Liubov’ Luibimovna, Love Lovena. The tautological gro- tesqueness of this name and patronymic indicates the hidden substratum of the dog-plot: transgressive and forbidden erotic desires. The fact that barynia’s mood was set by the prophecy of the cards brings

29 See I.V. Grevs, Istoriia odnoi liubvi: I.S. Turgenev i Polina Viardo. Minsk: ‘Uni- versitetskoe’, 1993, Reprint edition. Dogs and the marginalised Other 161 together the two themes hidden in the Aesopian language of the dog thematics: erotic material and belief in the supernatural. It is symptomatic that with the fall of censorship in post-Soviet Russia the sexual themes of Mumu were unveiled in various discourses, including within the story’s cinematic interpretation. The idea that Mumu is a substitute for a female companion was made graphic in the post-Soviet film Mu-mu by Iurii Grymov (1998).30 The motif of the old woman’s jealousy of Gerasim’s female dog functions in parallel to her jealousy of Tatiana; for her, Gerasim is akin to Lady Chatterley’s lover: seductively strong in his masculinity and pleasant in appearance. However, unlike D.H. Lawrence’s young English aristocrat, the Russian barynia represses and displaces her lust for Gerasim. She finds an outlet for her feelings through her sadistic behaviour towards him, his girlfriend and his dog. The film makes apparent the hidden motive of her behaviour, thus exposing the concealed theme conveyed by Turgenev through the use of Aesopian language. The scenes in which Gerasim plays with Mumu are blatantly erotic: in one such scene Gerasim lies on his back on the grass fondling the little dog lying on top of him. The sexual imagery is provocative because it signals two transgressions in terms of Church laws: animal/human contact; and a female on top of a male in the act of copulation. The Church strictly forbade and executed penance for both kinds of behaviour.31 Noteworthy in terms of Aesopian ambivalences is a contemporary sculpture of Mumu by Vladimir Tsesler (b.1951) on display in Amsterdam. This public work depicts her as a dog with a shiny fish- like tail.32 The tail also resembles mermaid’s tails, similar to that of the seductive water nymphs, or Rusalki, of Russian folklore. The sculpture’s iconicity suggests the erotic nature of Gerasim’s relationship with Mumu, but it also tries to resolve the unhappy ending of the story: if Mumu had a fish tail she would not have drowned. This more positive ending embodies a harsh criticism of Gerasim’s act. As a re-

30 Mu-mu. Dir. Iurii Grymov, Mosfil’m, 1998. In the Soviet film Mumu Gerasim undergoes transformation from a passive serf to a near-rebel. Mumu. Dir. Anatolii Bobrovskii, Mosfilm, 1959. 31 See Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. 32 Vladimir Tsesler, Mumu. http://kilgor-trutt.livejournal.com/594269html. Ac- cessed 10 January 2012.

162 Political Animals writing of the murder narrative, it is a potent testimonial to the controversial and multilayered ‘moral’ of the story. The sculpture represents Mumu as a mythological composite creature. As such, it serves as an illustration of Levi-Straussian notion of myth-building: the material that culture cannot resolve it turns into a myth.

Vladimir Tsesler. City sculpture ‘Mu-mu’, Amsterdam.

The heroic celibacy of dog-killers

The ambivalence encoded in the ending of ‘Mumu’ should be viewed as an intended strategy of the author, expressing erotic and class- related issues in Aesopian language. The Gerasim who survives after his peripeteia with the two women and the she-dog is the Gerasim who, according to the narrator, no longer needs the love of women or animals. The narrator explains this in conjunction with a reference to Gerasim’s large physical build and strength: people around say that he does not need a dog to protect his house because of his strength and lack of material possessions. In this context the dog is presented as a Dogs and the marginalised Other 163 functional animal whose job it is to guard and protect. Yet Turgenev assigned another function to the dog in this story. This function becomes more clear when he conveys people’s opinion of Gerasim as a bobyl’, a celibate bachelor. Of importance here is the accent on the state of living without emotional attachments. In this context the kind of dog no longer required by Gerasim is not an ordinary kind fulfilling ordinary requirements. Rather, the dogs for which Gerasim no longer has a need are the Other dogs, the displaced objects of love and desire. The narrator makes a remarkable claim that Gerasim still lives among us, the readers. Frost noted that this claim gives this character the status of an epic collective hero.33 Other commentators, notably Somoff noted that ‘Mumu’ is a tale about the need for love.34 Frost’s point that the story’s ending is reminiscent of epic fable-like narratives suggests that the narrator wants to emphasise that Gerasim still lives among the people as a folk hero. His fabled strength as a bogatyr, or legendary warrior, continues to be retold within Russian communities. Importantly for the focus of my discussion, in this new state of folk heroism he does not need women or animals in his life. In this reading Gerasim lives among ‘us’ because he was able to prevail over the power of sexual desire, thus becoming a true fabled bogatyr of the folk epic. In this interpretation his epic status is linked to his asexual asceticism: he overcomes the need for sexual love by killing the animal-object of his desire. In committing this act he also kills the beast-within in an act of symbolic self-castration.35

The Sten’ka Razin scenario and the crossing of the river: politics and ethnography

Gerasim is a collective hero not only because he represents the all- suffering Russian muzhiks but also, as Frost notes, because of his cruelty. I propose that the drowning of Mumu functions as a meta- narrative of the story of the famous Cossack leader Sten’ka Razin. Gerasim’s final act towards Mumu echoes a chapter from Razin’s life

33 Edgar. L. Frost, “Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’ and the Absence of Love”, Slavic and East European Journal XXXI/2 (1987), 171-186. 34 Victoria Somoff, “No Need for Dogs or Women: Muteness in Turgenev’s ‘Mu- mu’”, Russian Literature LXVIII, III/4 (2010), 502- 520. 35 Sergei Zimovets, “Sobach’ia zhizn’”, in Molchanie Gerasima: psikhoanaliticheskie i filosofskie esse o russkoi kul’ture. Moscow: Gnosis, 1996, 9-24.

164 Political Animals as explained in the famous folk song ‘Iz-za ostrova na strezhen’’. The song describes how this Russian bandit-rebel drowned a captive Per- sian princess whom he had just ‘married’. Razin threw her from his boat into the river after succumbing to the pressures of his comrades. The drunken brigands were jealous of his attention to the woman and accused him of wasting energy on her (‘Nas na babu promenial’ – ‘You abandoned us for a woman’). Razin deemed it politically expe- dient to give in to such peer pressure in the same way that Gerasim succumbs to the pressures of his estate-owner and his fellow serfs. It is noteworthy that Turgenev overtly uses the imagery of Razin’s disposal of his victim in his impressionistic story ‘Prizraki’ (‘Phantoms’, 1864), in a scene of utmost brutality. In this episode, the narrator hears the moan and the splash of a body that is being thrown into the river Volga.36 He condemns the violence of Razin’s revolt as characterised by the villains’ exclamations that attest to the evident pleasure which they derive from their murderous activities: ‘Beat! Hang! Drown! Cut! It’s a pleasure! It’s a pleasure! [Liubo! Liubo!]’ (18). The detail that this quasi-historical Sten’ka Razin uses the word ‘dog’ (‘pes’, 18) as a swear-word is noteworthy.37 Importantly, Turgenev’s narrator articu- lates his fear of Razin in class terms, ‘as gentry and landowner’ (19). The political message of the drowning of the princess meta- narrative is supplemented by ethnographic substratum. The original folksong describes Razin’s act as a gift to the Great Russian River Volga, thus conceptualising his act as a sacrificial pagan rite. The drowning of the princess is a complex act in which wedding ceremony and sacrificial rites intertwine to embody a form of ethnographic ‘Russianness’. Significant is the fact that in Pushkin’s ‘Pesni o Sten’ke Razine’ (‘Songs of Sten’ka Razin’, 1826) Razin throws the

36 I.S. Turgenev, “Prizraki”, in Sem’ia vurdalaka. Russkaia misticheskaia proza. Omsk: Knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1993, 3-29. The political thematics are connected to the ethnographic belief system. The dying narrator witnesses this scene when he travels back in time with his woman-phantom partner. He crosses the river with her in the air. The two motifs of a symbolic wedding and death and the crossing of the river are linked here. The river is an ‘upside down’ equivalent of the sky in related East Slav folk beliefs. See A.A. Potebnia, “Pereprava cherez reku kak predstavlenie braka”, in Simvol i mif v narodnoi kul’ture. Moscow: La- birint, 2000, 419-432. 37 On the expression ‘You dog!’ see Charles J. Halperin, “‘You dog!’ Ivan IV’s Canine Invective”, in Rusistika Ruslana Skrynnikova. Budapest-Volgograd, 2011, 76-95. Dogs and the marginalised Other 165 princess into the river as a sacrificial gift to the mighty river, so echoing the interpretation of this act in the original song. As explained by Lotman, Pushkin’s text also reflects the folk vision of the duality of the wedding ceremony and its opposite, the funeral.38 ‘Pesni’ were not published in Pushkin’s lifetime as a result of the prevailing rules of censorship. In this case the ethnographic material was considered to be politically dangerous because it portrayed unchristian, unruly and uncontrollable behaviour. While Pushkin concealed the ethnographic symbolism within Aesopian language to smuggle in the embedded political message, in this case the censors succeeded in decoding the veiled meaning. In Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’ Gerasim’s killing of his beloved dog is framed as a ceremony of sacrifice/self-sacrifice. On the level of sacrifice as gift-giving, he returns Mumu to the river, having found her there in the first place as the river’s gift to him. In addition, the episode echoes the wedding/funeral dual symbolism of the Sten’ka Razin narrative. This symbolism is embedded in the act of crossing a river – an act which, as shown in Potebnia’s ethnographic study of 186739 of Russian folk wedding songs and poetry, symbolises both wedding ceremonies and funerals. This duality is based on the belief that at weddings there is always presence of dark demonic forces, thus creating a link between weddings and funerals. The encoded paradox of the wedding/funeral duality is supported by textual evidence. Gerasim’s ambivalence suggests that he is at least considering the idea of running away with Mumu to freedom, hence a symbolic wedding. There is also evidence that he contemplates a double funeral by killing not only Mumu but also himself. The sign language he uses to convey his plans to remove Mumu from the estate indicates this intention: he beats himself on the chest and draws an imaginary loop over his own neck. In one possible reading, joining a loved one in death is a form of symbolic wedding. In another, Gerasim’s decision to kill Mumu prompts the notion of the funeral as the reverse of a wedding, an anti- wedding. On the way to the river he grabs two bricks, thus suggesting the double nature of both the double murder and the wedding/funeral

38 Lotman uses Potebnia’s ethnographic essay of 1867. See Iu.M. Lotman, Roman A.S. Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin”: Kommentarii. Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1980. 39 See A.A. Potebnia, “Pereprava cherez reku kak predstavlenie braka”.

166 Political Animals symbolism. The ceremonial aspect of this act is underlined by the fact that, when he leaves with Mumu, he wears his best outfit (‘prazdnichnyi kaftan’, 289), in accordance with the Russian custom in which peasants dress in their best clothes for wedding and funerals and are buried in these clothes. Indeed, the serf who secretly follows Gerasim and watches him depart in the boat with Mumu develops the theory that both the man and the dog drowned together in the river. The tension of this wedding/funeral paradox is present in the description of Gerasim’s final decision to go to the river and drown his dog. This decision is made suddenly (‘vdrug’, 288), and his act of drowning the dog is preceded by an expression of ‘pained anger’ (‘boleznennoe ozloblenie’, 289) on his face. The word ‘boleznennoe’ suggests the pathologically irrational or demonic nature of this impulse. This irrational act of murder is symbolically a double murder: in killing the object of his love he also destroys part of himself. Hence the symbolism of tying two bricks to Mumu. His metaphorical rebirth manifests itself in his becoming an epic and legendary hero. It is a holiday, a prazdnik for which it is only fitting to wear a ‘holiday kaftan’, ‘prazdnichnyi kaftan’.

Politics of the story’s moral

The new, post-murder Gerasim is described as having a ‘stone-like face’, further evidence of his transformation into an epic hero. He has thus metaphorically metamorphosed into a statue or a sculpture, fit for an epic hero. This transformed Gerasim continues to live among the readers of current and future generations, transgressing space and time. Indeed, the contemporary pop song ‘Zachem Gerasim utopil Mumu’ confirms his legendary status – the song ends with the words: ‘In every respectable family the legend about Mumu lives on’. Gerasim lives on in the song as an anti-hero, with a ‘sadist’s eyes and executioner’s hands’ (‘glaza sadista i ruki palacha’). This stone-like character should not be read merely as yet another example of the need for compassion towards the handicapped (as expressed in Korolenko’s ‘Blind Musician’). Rather, Gerasim should be regarded as a figure of warning and distrust, a sphinx to represent the riddle of the Russian character with its unpredictability Dogs and the marginalised Other 167 and stikhiinost’ (spontaneous protest).40 In suddenly turning on an innocent creature he has more in common with Pushkin’s famous description of the ‘senseless and pitiless’ acts of Russian peasant-style revolts than with the passively obedient actions of victims.41 The unpredictability and irrationality of this type of peasant rebellion is grounded in a social history of abuse and humiliation. As capable of cruelty towards she-dogs as Sten’ka Razin was towards a (foreign) woman and many other innocent victims, Gerasim is the product of a specific culture, both a victim and a perpetrator. His disability is explored in the context of ethnography and, to a lesser degree, class. Placed by folk culture between man and beast, regarded by other peasants as an unclean force (‘devil’, ‘leshii’, ‘kikimora’ – demonic forest spirits, 269, 270, 271), Gerasim murders his double, the creature who, in the perception of this culture, is also an unclean animal. In this regard he is as much a conveyer of prejudice as he is a target of prejudice. Of note is that contemporaries saw ‘Mumu’ in line with Mel’nikov-Pecherskii’s ethnographic stories, and Turgenev’s other work of the period explored the representation of various ethnographic types.42 For example, in ‘Postoialyi dvor’ (‘An Inn’), written in the same year as ‘Mumu’, Turgenev explores another paradoxical character typology through the reaction of a muzhik to the betrayal by his widowed barynia. She dispossesses him of his house for the sake of another worker whom she now favours. Instead of turning against the oppressor, the muzhik turns against the perceived source of his trouble – the rival peasant. The muzhik first attempts to burn down the rival’s house and kill him; he then withdraws and becomes a wandering holy man. Some of the hidden layers of the ethnographic and psychological underpinnings of Gerasim’s character were made overt in one of the most daring postmodernist texts – in Sasha Sokolov’s (b. 1943)

40 In his notes of the 1940s Bakhtin classifies Gerasim’s behaviour to Mumu as treachery – the dog is naïve, trustful of Gerasim, even waves her tail in the episode of drowning. See M.M. Bakhtin, “O Flobere”, in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1997, Vol. V, 130-137. 41 For Pushkin, ‘Sten’ka Razin was Pugachev of his time’. See A.S. Pushkin, “S.A.Sobolevskomu, 9 Sentiabria 1834”, in Pis’ma. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow: izd-vo Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1958, Vol. X, 513. 42 L.N. Nazarova, “K istorii tvorchestva: I.S. Turgenev 50-60-kh godov”, in Orlov- skii sbornik. 1960, 130-137.

168 Political Animals

Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom (Between Dog and Wolf) (1980).43 Written in emigration by the artist who for years tried to escape from the Sovi- et Union in the 1970s, this highly stylised and complex text depicts a small proto-Russian nation living in the indefinite time in the Volga region.44 The hero of the novel is a one-legged handicapped drunkard who becomes a grotesque allegory of disability resultant from senseless violence prevalent among the members of this community. Disa- bled – with missing limbs, blind, deaf and dumb, they use heavy crutches in their fights. In one parodic episode game-keepers confis- cate the disabled man’s wooden crutches because he uses them to beat a female hound called Mumu. The title of the novel refers to the time of the day when it is impossible to see clearly, and when real and imaginary blur (in Latin inter canem et lupum). The disabled man killed a dog whom he had taken for a wolf in the dark of the forest. The cruelty of the handicapped male towards dogs, the literary allusion to Turgenev’s dog Mumu, and the conflation of dogs and wolves bring together realist prose narrative and mythopoetic imagery in this postmodernist collage. Paradoxically, this notoriously difficult text makes bare the hidden layers of the Gerasim-Mumu relationship showing the cruelty of an impaired man to dogs. Fittingly, Pugachev makes an appearance in the text, made recognisable through the description as a literary personage in Pushkin’s historical tale The Captain’s Daugh- ter. This device establishes a parallelism between the disabled killer of Mumu and the absent literary prototype Gerasim, and at the same time invites the reader to make a connection between the literary characters and real historical prototypes (such as Pugachev and Razin, amongst others). Those are to be found among the ‘real’ Russian people, and as a result violence gets typified as a culture-specific feature. Sasha Sokolov started his work on Between Dog and Wolf in 1975 in the Soviet Union where for censorship reasons his writings could not be published. In this pastiche, he problematised violence, disability and cruelty as a metaphor for the Russian people and society. Although grotesque, the imagery creates a parallelism between the vulnerable human and animal body.

43 Sasha Sokolov, Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom. Moscow: Ogoniok-Variant, 1990. 44 On this text and the title as a realised metaphor see Elena Kravchenko, The Prose of Sasha Sokolov: Reflections on/of the Real. London: MHRA, 2013. Dogs and the marginalised Other 169

In a broad sense, Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’ makes a link between cruelty to animals and bad behaviour to humans. The history of animal protection movement in England shows that in the nineteenth century ill-treatment of animals and bad behaviour were associated with lower classes.45 We saw that Dostoevsky made the same association in his Diary of a Writer when he described the cases of cruelty to horses by coachmen. Turgenev’s complicated story condemns mistreatment of serfs, disabled people and animals, but it also shows the lower class’s cruelty to animals and bad behaviour towards each other. It is thus with good reason that the British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent a wreath to place on Turgenev’s grave when he died in 1883. The inscription read: ‘To the author of Moo- moo’.

Contemporary city sculpture to Mumu in Turgenevsky Street, St Petersburg, depicting the dog’s devotion. Gerasim’s empty boots emblematise cruelty, but they also represent the possibility that it was Gerasim who did not return home while Mumu survived.

45 See a discussion in Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 132-133. 170 Political Animals

Alexander Kuprin’s racialised dogs and scapegoats in ‘Gambrinus’

Towards the end of Turgenev’s life many peasants had become thugs and pogromshchiks. While Turgenev himself was too physically weak to respond to the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881,46 Kuprin chose to depict a stone-faced muzhik smashing the skull of a little she-dog in his story depicting pogroms in the 1900s. The posthumous publication of Kuprin’s pre-Revolutionary stories in Soviet Russia was partly possible thanks to his return to the Soviet Union from emigration in 1937, just one year before his death.47 His use of Aesopian language played an important role in this process. Ironically, this feature of his writing helped it to avoid the constraints of pre-Revolutionary and Soviet censorship alike. Kuprin’s acclaimed story ‘Gambrinus’ focuses on the rights of marginalised ethnic Others and animals.48 It uses the multi-levelled mode of Aesopian language to allude to the political events in Russia in the 1900s, when the Government was actively involved in the insti- gation of anti-Jewish violence which resulted in pogroms in a number of southern cities, including Kishinev and Odessa. While the story is often discussed as an expression of sympathy by a Russian writer towards Jews,49 the wider aim of Kuprin’s use of Aesopian language needs to be unveiled. The eponymous tavern ‘Gambrinus’ is situated

46 See Elena Katz, “Turgenev and the ‘Jewish Question’”, in Turgenev: Art, Ideolo- gy and Legacy. Eds Robert Reed and Joe Andrew, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010, 169-188. 47 On Kuprin’s return to the Soviet Russia when he was in a sorry state of senility see Ivan Bunin, “Kuprin”, in Sobranie sochinenii. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988, Vol. VI, 252-264. 48 Kuprin’s love of animals became legendary during his lifetime. Among his dog stories are “Sobach’e schast’e” (“Dog’s Happiness”, 1896) which humorously depicts conversations among various dogs captured in a city pound; “Barbos and Zhulka” (1897) which describes the heroic deed of a tiny dog and the loyalty between two dogs; and “Zaviraika” (1928), written after his emigration about his hunting dog who rescued another dog caught in a trap in a winter forest. See Ale- ksandr Kuprin, “Sobach’e schast’e”, in Sobranie sochinenii. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1957, Vol. I, 491-499. Aleksandr Kuprin, “Barbos i Zhul’ka”, in Sobranie sochinenii. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1957, Vol. II, 152-156. Aleksandr Kuprin, “Zaviraika”, in Sobranie sochinenii. Mos- cow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958, Vol. V, 726-736. 49 See Elena Katz, “Turgenev and the ‘Jewish Question’”. Dogs and the marginalised Other 171 in a déclassé part of Odessa and its popularity is due entirely to its musician, the Jewish fiddler Sashka. In this narrative Kuprin makes a conscious break from the petty and political stereotypes of a Jewish man: Sashka is not a middle class man but a free artist; he is not greedy but indiscriminately generous; he has no family obligations (he is an orphan); and he serves in the Russian Army during the Russo- Japanese War. The latter is particularly important because the Tsarist propaganda of the Black Hundreds circulated rumours claiming that international Jewry financed the Japanese during the War in order to bring down Russia in revenge for the anti-Jewish pogroms.50 It is believed that Kuprin based Sashka the Musician on a historical figure, and among the names suggested is that of Shendel’ Pevzner (1866-1954) who was a virtuoso musician in the tavern ‘Gambrinus’.51 Notably, he survived the Odessa Pogrom of 1905, and this historical factuality makes the political message of Kuprin’s story even stronger. The search for a historical prototype of Sashka in itself links the story to Aesopian fables that synthesise myth and quasi- reality. Kuprin’s ‘Gambrinus’ immortalised the tavern and Sashka, turning them into one of Odessa’s most celebrated myths.52 The tavern ’Gambrinus’ still exists in Odessa today, and the city erected a monument to Sashka the Musician in 2001.53 In Kuprin’s story the international clientele of this port tavern admire the virtuoso musician for his musical gifts and his ability to improvise melodies of various nationalities and ethnicities, as well as for his indiscriminate generosity. His uncanny ability to express the soul of every national melody, from pro-democracy British hymns and France’s ‘La Marseillaise’ to black African American tunes, extends beyond the stereotype of Jewish cosmopolitanism and musicality.

50 Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Eds John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 51 See Aleksandr Kamennyi, Odessa- kto est’ kto. Odessa: OKFA, 1999, 197. Kon- stantin Paustovskii suggested another name: Aaron Moiseevich Gol’dshtein. See K.G. Paustovskii, Vremia bol’shikh ozhidanii. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1960, 149. 52 See a discussion in Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. 53 See the monument to Sashka made by the distinguished sculptor of Ukraine, P. Kniazik: http://odessa.glo.ua/cultura/skulpturnaya_kompoziciya_ sash- ke_muzykantu. html 172 Political Animals

Such skill is linked to Sashka’s animality. Kuprin repeatedly describes his face, each time stressing its physical similarity to that of an ape: ‘naruzhnost’ oblezloi obez’iany’ (‘the appearance of a mangy monkey’, 334); ‘obez’ian’e litso’ (‘monkey-like face’, 335).54 Moreover, the shape of his skull is flatter towards the back and his eyebrows, we are told, sit low over his eyes. This link to the animal kingdom is further reinforced by Sashka’s companion, a little white she-dog called Belka. This dog has clear similarities with Russian Jewish women, both in her name (Sashka often calls her Belin’ka or Bela) and in her fiery black eyes. Belka spends almost all of her time sitting on Sash- ka’s lap. She reacts differently to different kinds of music, responding to both the mood of the musician and the music. When Sashka plays Jewish melodies his face becomes serious as does Belka’s. Belka thus functions as an animal companion to the ape-like Sashka, and a suitable emotional companion to Sashka the Jew man. In this story the notion of crossing borders between human and animal opens a new interpretation to the expression of Otherness. Animality as expressed through the likeness of the Jewish Sashka to an ape is given a positive value: paradoxically Sashka is human because he is ape-like and belongs to a large collective. His ability to cross boundaries between ethnic groups through musical performance is in itself a manifestation of homogeneity between species. His aptitude for impersonation through the refined language of musical art is not limited to the evocation of the ‘national’ essence of various ethnic groups, be they Greeks, Turks, Ukrainians, English, Germans, Aus- tralians or Africans. Sashka’s virtuosity expresses itself also in his ability to use his violin to make various animal sounds. On this level he truly resorts to the language of animals in the original meaning of Aesopian language. Just as Sashka’s physical ugliness evokes the physical features of Aesop, his gift parallels that of the legendary storyteller who understood animals’ language and crossed species. There is a scene in ‘Gambrinus’ which problematises Sashka’s ability ‘to make’ animal language as an anti-logocentric statement. In order to promote Sashka’s musical virtuosity a client of the tavern invites a professor of music to visit the venue and witness Sashka’s extraordinary skill as a musician. Sashka is aware of the professor’s

54 A.I. Kuprin, “Gambrinus”, in Izbrannye sochineniia. Moscow: OGIZ, 1947, 333- 345.

Dogs and the marginalised Other 173 visit and, when the guest arrives, he begins to extract animal sounds from his violin: ‘miaukat’’, ‘bleiat’’, ‘revet’’ (‘to mew’, ‘to bleat’ and ‘to roar’, 337). The professor takes offence at Sashka’s behaviour, which he describes as clownish. This scene challenges hierarchies between human art and animal sounds and human and animal ‘languages’, and simply humans and animals as established by high culture and academic thinking. The moral of Kuprin’s Aesopian message is that the languages of animals are as expressive as human languages and that they have overarching universality: it is not in vain that the multi-ethnic and international visitors to the tavern ‘Gambrinus’ understand the languages of cats, sheep and cows. The tavern in the port of Odessa with its sailors of all colours and creeds is an equalising microcosm in its transgressed boundaries and abolished hierarchies. The implication of Sashka’s animal act is that there is no such a thing as Russian cats, Australian sheep or German cows – animal species speak the same language independent of the geographical locality or the nationality of their owners. Or don’t they?

Racialised dogs and anti-Jewish pogroms

The challenge to this microcosm is not limited to the professor’s une- quivocal dismissal of Sashka’s evident skills. Kuprin includes a disturbing scene in which a pogromshchik smashes the skull of Sashka’s dog, Belka. The blood-thirsty villain wants to attack Sashka on the street of Odessa during the pogrom. He yells, ‘Zhi-id! Bei zhida! V krrov!’ (‘Yi-id! Beat the Yid! Into blood!’, 342). One passer-by recognises Sashka as the Sashka of the tavern ‘Gambrinus’, and stops the man from attacking him. But the enraged pogromshchik notices the little white dog at Sashka’s feet. This pogromshchik has an uncanny similarity with Turgenev’s Gerasim in that he is a stone-like figure – indeed, he is a ‘kamenshchik’, a stonemason by profession. Kuprin describes the following act of slaughter as a pathological reaction not dissimilar to Gerasim’s ‘boleznennoe ozloblenie’; the sudden nature of the impulse is expressed by the same word, ‘vdrug’ (‘suddenly’), and signifies the alarmingly typical irrational behaviour:

He smiled like an idiot, spat and wiped his nose with his hand. But suddenly [vdrug] he caught sight of a nervous small dog who trembled and clung to Sashka’s legs. He quickly grabbed the dog by her hind

174 Political Animals

legs [nogi], raised her high, smashed her head against the stones of the pavement and ran away. He ran […] with his eyes round and white with madness. The brain from Belochka’s head splashed onto Sash- ka’s boots. (343)

The ‘raising her high’ detail is particularly telling because it is a verbatim allusion to both Gerasim’s handling of Mumu and Sten’ka Razin’s handling of the princess before throwing them into the river. Kuprin describes the pogromshchik as a typical member of the violent crowd on a rampage, a crowd that in its irrationality cannot be stopped and that potentially could kill anybody in its way, including, claims the narrator, an Orthodox priest. This evaluation of the crowd’s behaviour does not erase its antisemitic impulse. It explains that, for the time being, the violence is directed against an ethnic and ‘animal’ Other, but that it could easily turn against any other Other, including the Russian upper classes or the clergy. Kuprin clearly presents this violent behaviour as unchristian. In this highly disturbing pogrom scene domestic animals do have nationality: Sashka’s dog is killed by a pogromshchik not only as Sashka’s substitute, but also in her own animal right as the companion of a Jewish man and as a ‘Jewish’ dog. Relevant are Boris Uspensky’s observations that East Slavic folk prejudices against dogs as unclean animals function on the basis of their conflation with non-Christians, Jews in particular.55 The Ukrainian proverb ‘Zhid, liakh i sobaka – vse vera odnaka’ (‘Yid, Pole and dog – all have the same faith’) has variants across East Slav folklore.56 The pairing of a musician and a dog also has deep symbolic meaning in the context of the Russian Chris- tian tradition. Russian Orthodox Church rhetoric used the conflation of dogs’ language and music as a manifestation of unchristian behaviour.57 Playing music, dancing and using obscene language created a single semantic field of anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox behaviour. ‘Unchristian’ could mean pagan or Jewish or any other stigmatised faith against which the Orthodoxy defined itself in its power struggle

55 See Boris Uspenskii, 202-206. 56 See M. Nomis 1864: No. 8098. 57 Uspensky shows this by examining 16th and 17th century official decrees by the Head of the Trinity Ipatiev Monastery, Patriarch Daniil’s written instruction. See Uspenskii, 204.

Dogs and the marginalised Other 175 against the survival of pagan folk beliefs.58 If we take into consideration that the official Church and state rhetoric for centuries conflated dog language (laianie) with swear-words and Jewish language, and that it saw them as a manifestation of the Devil, then the link between Jewish musicians and dogs becomes more overt and the hidden layer of the dog subplot in Kuprin’s story becomes more clear. This conflation of Jews, dogs and the Devil is one of many driving forces in the pogrom situation in the Pale of Settlement, especially in the southern city of Odessa. The Aesopian language used in this story functions on a number of primary, allegorical and metaphoric levels. ‘Gambrinus’ was written the year before Kuprin wrote ‘Sulamif’’ (‘Shulamit’), a story inspired by the Song of Songs and closely based on this Old Testament story. Kuprin studied the Old Testament thoroughly during this year and it is possible that the idea of including pets and animals in a family circle by Ancient Hebrews left an impression on him. Indeed, the treatment of pets and farm animals in the Old Testament is ‘humane’: farm animals are left to rest on the Sabbath and the maltreatment of animals by enemies marked a boundary between righteous God- fearing Israelites and the barbarians.59 When enemies attack the tribes of Israel they destroy not only people but also their animals. Animals are thus divided into Us and Them, and have markings of the ethnic Other. The Old Testament subtext in ‘Gambrinus’ can be regarded as the usage of Aesopian language as literary allusion. There are no descriptions of the Odessa pogrom in this story apart from this brief fragment – Kuprin does not write an essay in the style of Korolenko’s ‘Dom No. 13’, composed as a journalistic investigation in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.60 While Korolenko’s ocherk problematises the psychology of a pogrom conducted by neighbours who have been sharing the same city space for years, Kuprin’s narrator states that Sashka did not attract the attention of the pogromshchiks on the streets of Odessa for some time. This is mainly because of his ‘funny ape-like face’ (342) and the fact that he

58 The belief in ‘Jewish heretic Perun’ that conflates pagan gods with Judaism survived till late. See N. N. Pokrovskii, “Ispoved’ altaiskogo krest’ianina”, in Pamiatniki kul’tury: Novye otkrytiia. Leningrad: Nauka, 1979, 52. 59 See Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 60 V.G. Korolenko, “Dom No. 13”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. St Petersburg, 1814, 241-256.

176 Political Animals does not experience fear and therefore does not emit an aura of fear. It is thus Sashka’s quasi-animality that saves him from the ravaging villains: a form of animality which Kuprin polemically rewrites by assigning it with a positive value. In this rewriting Kuprin challenges staple antisemitic stereotypes which ascribe to Jews such negative markers of animality as emitting specific smells and physically resembling animals.61 Kuprin uses the animal trope on two levels: as the political language of allusion and, in Sashka as human-animal, as confirmation of Sashka’s humane nature. He thus provides a different evaluative sign to the notion of animality. Importantly, the pog- romshschik who kills Belka is compared to an automaton with eyes that express a form of madness. Kuprin avoids comparisons of the pogromshchik’s behaviour to that of an animal herd – being like an animal in this new set of hierarchies is to be moral, ‘human’ and humane. Kuprin’s construction of a nexus between the perception of human performers such as Sashka, and animals pre-empts the much- discussed conflation of jesters and animals in the influential Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.62 These authors argue that the psychology of the pogrom with its culmination in high modernity in the Holocaust has its roots in the anthropomorphic mythology introduced into cultural discourse at the time of the Enlightenment. They group human jesters and animals into a category that forms the projected construct of Otherness to the human:

Animals are only remembered when the few remaining specimens, few counterparts of the medieval jester, perish in excruciating pain. (251)

Becoming-animal and the new vocal/instrumental art

The logocentricity of the professor who calls Sashka ‘a jester’ for his imitation of animal languages is as much a contribution to the psychology of the pogrom as the smashing of Belka’s skull. Jews, animals and jesters form one category of hated Others. After the killing

61 See Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body. London: Routledge, 1991. 62 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming, New York: Continuum, 1999. Dogs and the marginalised Other 177 of Belka, Sashka is arrested on false charges laid by police informants. During his imprisonment he is tortured and permanently disfigured. His left arm and hand are broken so he is no longer able to use his violin to speak the language of animals understood both by humans and animals. But Sashka’s torturers do not break his spirit. He invents a new, whistling-type instrument, and the nature of this instrument is emblematic. On the level of ‘dog – Jew’ parallelism his whistle stands as a quasi-historical reference to those official Christian church decrees that single out playing this type of musical instrument as a typical unchristian behaviour. Uspensky’s study mentions polemical ecclesiastical documents which create a nexus between swearing as dog barking (laianie) and playing such whistling instruments as gudki, sopeli, svireli – a range of pipe-like instruments that are made from tree cuttings or wood.63 These instruments were typically associated with pagan rites, the latter often conflated with Jewish/Judaic behaviour that converged in the dog symbolism.64 This historical factuality makes an association between Sashka’s instrument and the dog domain even stronger. Kuprin’s text subverts the stereotype of the Jew, the dog and other underdogs. It celebrates new sounds that Sashka makes out of his new instrument. Kuprin describes these sounds as ‘a language yet not comprehensible to the friends of ‘Gambrinus’, or to Sashka himself’ (344). This ending epitomises the use of Aesopian language as an allegory concealing a political message that had to be buried at the deepest layer. In its aphoristic form it serves as a moral, thus echoing the function of Aesop’s fables. But Kuprin’s use of Aesopian language also evinces the search for an ideal universal language of communication which crosses boundaries and which will be understood by humans and animals alike. Kuprin depicts the organic qualities of Sashka’s new instrument, stressing its almost physiological likeness to a natural organism.

63 Uspensky discusses musical instruments in the context of swear-words and dogs’ language. See “Religiozno-mifologicheskii aspect”, 204. On this link in church literature see Vasilii Zhmakin, Mitropolit Daniil i ego sochineniia, Moscow, 1881, 558-559, 567. 64 Recently, Gura’s study on animal symbolism among Slavs shows the conflation of animals with pagan/Jewish and, when necessary, Greek Other. The Church used this conflation for polemical purposes. See Aleksandr Gura, Simvolika zhivotnykh v slavianskoi narodnoi traditsii, Moscow: Indrik, 2007, 10.

178 Political Animals

The instrument has ‘a branch’ or ‘an appendage’ – one and the same word in Russian (‘otrostok’, 344). When Sashka puts this ‘appendage’-like instrument to his mouth he produces new and wonderful sounds. Animals in Aesop’s fables speak a language that makes them similar to humans. This new-found ability of Sashka to produce sounds in his mouth functions as a creation of a new syncretic language. The sounds of this language are more a product of his human/animal body than those of the instrument. The shape of Sashka’s instrument vis-à-vis the human body carries a variety of symbolic connotations. Ethnomusicologists observe that the shapes of musical instruments have historically correlated with the shape of a human body. If viewed from this perspective it is plausible to note that, while his former instrument, the violin, was created in the shape of a human body, his new instrument enhances his use of his animal body.65 Sash- ka’s becoming-handicapped is a state of becoming-animal, becoming- human and becoming other-than-human. In forming an assemblage with his new instrument Sashka’s transformation can be viewed as an enactment of the process of becoming Other in the meaning proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus they suggest that the state of becoming-animal helps to achieve a change of identity, including that of the gendered, racialised, ethnic self.66 The becoming-animal concept is not so much about ‘what it is’ but ‘what it does’. Contemporary art has embraced this concept and has long been engaged in experimentations with various assemblages which represent the transformation intrinsic to the state of becoming-Other, becoming-animal, resulting in becoming neither human nor animal.67 Fittingly, the final aphoristical- ly formulated message of ‘Gambrinus’ is, ‘One can mutilate a human being, but one cannot destroy art.’ (344). In both these stories the political message requiring concealment relates to the criticism of the Russian muzhik, and not just the

65 On whistling instruments in relation to the human body in a Russian ethno- musical context see Ol’ga Velichkina, “Muzykal’nyi instrument i chelovecheskoe telo (iz materialov russkogo fol’klora)”, in Telo v russkoi kul’ture. Eds G.I. Ka- bakova and I. Kon, Moscow: NLO, 2005, 161-176. 66 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizo- phrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987. 67 See Steve Baker, “What Does Becoming-animal Look Like?”, in Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002, 67-98. Dogs and the marginalised Other 179 social system which created him. In terms of an author’s popularity, at the time of both ‘Mumu’ and ‘Gambrinus’ it was more acceptable to be critical of the system than of the muzhiks. In regard to these two stories the issue of censorship has to be viewed in conjunction with self-censorship. The official politics around anti-Jewish violence in the 1900s was complex,68 hence Kuprin’s decision to base his representation of human victimhood on a process of parallelism between cruelty towards the ethnic Other and that enacted against animals. A friend of Vladimir Durov, known for his kindness to animals, Kuprin was famous for his love of dogs and horses, while his awareness of ethnic differences was part of his own family history. His mother was a Tatar princess and Kuprin was proud of his Tatar roots. Ivan Bunin, who knew Kuprin well, mentions in his memoirs that Kuprin sported a bright Eastern-style skullcap and was keen to underline his ‘Eastern’ origins. While this behaviour can be attributed to image-creation, it also reflects Kuprin’s interest in ethnicity. His democratic leanings are evident in his regular attendance at Odessa taverns and restaurants known for their multi-ethnic clientele. He knew personally many of the Jewish musicians who performed at these places and the Jewish customers who frequented the tavern as they waited for the results of the stock market exchange. Bunin notes that Kuprin had a remarkable sense of politics. Whether his sympathetic depiction of the Jew Sashka and his dog Belka was a matter of political convenience depends on the political leaning of the group of people to which Kuprin wanted to belong. One thing is sure – they were not members of the Black Hun- dreds or their sympathisers. As a parallel event to that of the Jew and his dog in Odessa, Du- rov describes a chilling episode that shows his understanding that anti- Jewish prejudice is based on the same emotion of repulsion as that which drives the prejudice against unliked animals such as rats. In My Animals (1929) Durov describes a forced act of sanitation that took place in the Jewish quarters in Odessa. This event, witnessed by Du- rov, was conducted by the police. In fear of cholera and the plague epidemic police raided the streets and houses of poor Jews, caught rats

68 Unlike the pogroms of 1881, the pogroms of 1900s were provoked and instigated by the right-wing elements from the secret police paid by the government. See Klier and Lambroza.

180 Political Animals and burned them alive. The police also confiscated the shabby belongings of Jewish households and threw them into fire. Durov’s comments reflect his understanding that both rats and Jews were the innocent victims of a prejudice dictated by ignorance of rats as animals and Jews as people. He defends rats from the reputation of being ‘dirty’ and maintains that, in his training of these animals, he noticed how clean they were in their daily grooming routines. Durov places the blame for the rats’ reputation on the human inclina- tion to leave rubbish lying around for rats to scavenge. He creates a parallelism between the treatment of rats and the portrayal of Jews as vermin and exposes the underlying reason for this prejudice – human ignorance and lack of education. During his lifetime Turgenev was ostracised by both the political left and the right for his creation of various ‘types’ of contemporaries in his prose. As with Aesop, whose moralistic tales served to educate the public, in ‘Sobaka’ he exposed prejudices of the ignorant against dogs; in ‘Mumu’ he chose to humanise his readers by evoking compassion for small powerless she-dogs and underdogs. In terms of political authorial investment, Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’ served as a warning against irrational violent behaviour which can turn against any Other. This message had special historical meaning in Kuprin’s time. Kuprin’s ‘Gambrinus’ conveys an overt warning against irrational behaviour which can turn against any Other, be it disempowered creatures, ethnic subalterns or the Russian upper classes.

White companion dogs and their fair ladies: Zamiatin and Chekhov

This message came to realisation in the first post-Revolutionary year of 1918, in two stories with dog subplots by Evgeny Zamiatin: ‘Zem- lemer’ (‘The Land Surveyor’) and ‘Spodruchnitsa greshnykh’ (‘A Sinners’ Accomplice’). In both stories Zamiatin (1884-1937) depicts the post-Revolutionary anarchic behaviour of Russian peasants and workers as a manifestation of their greed for power and the result of folk prejudices. These uneducated thugs are not driven by class- consciousness, of which they have little understanding. They destroy the manor houses of Russian landlords and appropriate material belongings in thoughtless acts of rebellion that evoke the actions of Sten’ka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev. Among their victims are peo-

Dogs and the marginalised Other 181 ple and dogs. In relation to the latter their treatment is motivated by deep-seated prejudices and superstitions. In ‘A Sinners’ Accomplice’ Zamiatin describes a plan by a bunch of self-appointed pseudo- revolutionary expropriators of private property to rob a convent.69 The subsequent murder of a guard and his dog is a conglomeration of folk superstitions and the anarchic violence directed at the guard dog:

They climbed up to the fence. There they saw a red bonfire, and next to the bonfire they saw a red dog, pacing up and down; and they saw a red man who sat embracing his knees, his rifle between his knees. – Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God… says Zinovey Lukich with his yellow head, false deformity and a simulated humpback. – We are going for a visit to the Mother Superior to ask her for some firewood… But we are late… Shush, shush, doggie. Here, little doggie! God bless you, doggie, what’s the matter with you? – Quiet, Belka, sit! […] Zinovey Lukich started knitting a sinister spider’s web around the dog Belka, the web so thin that it cannot be seen with eyes. He was talking about a general’s dog, and about a dog of Saint Seraphim of Sarovsk: about how the dog defiled with its excrement the church porch, and how the Saint killed the dog that very instant with the holy crosier. And then he said that once in the Nilo- Stolobenskii Monastery a male dog swallowed the Eucharist and in- stantly its mug turned into a human face, and the dog started to talk… […] The dog said: Russian Orthodo… Orthodoxy…. (336-337)

While the muzhik Zinovey Lukich recounts his dog tales from his repertoire of folk superstitions, his accomplice attacks the guard and kills the dog Belka with his knife. Having gotten away from the guard and the dog, the muzhiks are able to scale the monastery wall and pursue their plans. The dog tales narrated by the muzhik represent the two main motifs of folk beliefs concerning dogs: the unchristian nature of dogs and their ability to transform themselves into humans. As a guard of the monastery walls the dog Belka represents a counter- narrative to these folk superstitions. By protecting the monastery Bel- ka guards Christian holy territory: it is the muzhiks who are the unho- ly invaders of this sanctuary. Zamiatin’s writing style follows that of

69 Evgenii Zamiatin, “Spodruchnitsa greshnykh”, in Izbrannye proizvedeniia. Mos- cow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989, 336-342.

182 Political Animals skaz, the oral narrative tradition made popular by Leskov and Alexei Remizov under whose influence Zamiatin was in this period of his writing. The story reflects Zamiatin’s ethnographic interests in the behaviour of Russian peasants in the anarchic situation of the post- Revolutionary years. Seemingly paradoxical motifs represent a symbiotic model of the beliefs and behaviour of Russian muzhiks who run amok – Christian faith, pagan superstitions and a quest for violence in the name of religious and social justice that masks the desire for the appropriation of private property. Written in the same year, ‘The Land Surveyor’ also includes an episode of a muzhik’s violent behaviour towards a dog. The dog story is framed as a substitution narrative, as in the case of other stories discussed in this chapter. The dog in this story is a small white dog belonging to the lady-owner of an estate to be sub-divided by the Revolutionary authorities. Both the owner and her dog become victims of the anarchic behaviour of the muzhiks. This plot builds on the motif of a dog as the substitute for a missing romantic partner. This pairing echoes Anton Chekhov’s ‘Lady with the dog’ (1899), a metatext in relation to the dog-substitution topos. In this story a rather featureless young woman cuts a recognisable figure in the holiday town of Yalta as a result of her constant companion – a white lapdog. Her pairing with this dog represents her loneliness. Gurov, a narcissistic man from Moscow on the lookout for an easy conquest, recognises the dynamics and begins to court the young woman by being nice and ‘flirtatious’ to her dog.70 The holiday romance grows into a fully- fledged extra-marital relationship, based on the protagonists’ mutual need to fill an apparent gap in their lives. Although married, they are both looking for romantic love outside of marriage. The lapdog serves as a marker of this lack in the woman’s emotional world, and as the plot develops we recognise a similar lack in the inner world of the hero. Originally a cynical philanderer with a predatory attitude towards women, the hero grows into a more humane character through his relationship with the lady with a lapdog.71 Significantly, in terms of the pattern of prejudice towards women and animals, the hero ini-

70 See Robert L. Jackson, “Evoliutsiia v rasskaze ‘Dama s sobachkoi’”, Russian Language Journal 171-173 (1998), 51-59. 71 Virginia Llewellyn-Smith, Anton Chekhov and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Dogs and the marginalised Other 183 tially holds on to the view that women are a ‘lower race’ (395). He outgrows this essentialistic view by becoming attached to the heroine in a way that duplicates the attachment of the lapdog to her mistress and vice versa. The implication is that women, men and dogs share the same emotional needs and that their roles in emotional partnerships are interchangeable. Keeping in mind that Chekhov was a qualified physician with a strong scholarly interest in Darwinian evolution and the mechanism of sexual selection, in this story he invites a Darwinian interpretation of the parallelism between the lady and her lapdog. Both are fair and rather bland in appearance. These physical features are given a signi- fying role in their stark contrast to the dark-haired, dark-browed wife of the male protagonist, Gurov. While this woman is presented as demanding and manly in her manners and appearance, the blondness of the lady with the lapdog is indicative of her meek and submissive nature – attributes that may have prompted Gurov to choose her as a sexual partner. Gurov selected her in spite of – or perhaps thanks to – her being so remarkably unremarkable in appearance. He is depicted as having striking features. It is when his hair begins to go gray and he starts to lose his lustre as a sexual predator that he becomes attracted to the lady with the lapdog. To emphasise this narcissistic need of his male character, Chekhov describes a scene in which Gurov looks at himself in a mirror while reflecting on his growing attachment to, and love for, the lady with the lapdog. The parallelism between the submissiveness of the woman and the emblematically domesticated dog – a Pomeranian – adds the evolutionary dimension to this story. Che- khov evidently never abandoned his interest in the sexual selection of species expressed in his unfinished master’s thesis ‘A History of Sex Authority’.72 The dog in this story has a supplementary function vis-à-vis the mistress. Indeed, this pet falls into the thematics of a lapdog in a middle-class boudoir. It symbolises the mistress’s loneliness and sexual frustrations and her need to love and to be loved. Although referred to by the word of the feminine gender, sobachka, the dog is male. As Julie de Sherbinin observes, the dog becomes a marker of the male

72 I.M. Geizer, Chekhov i meditsina. Moscow: Medgiz, 1954. Also V. Romanenko, Chekhov i nauka. Khar’kov: Khar’kovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1962.

184 Political Animals phallic obsession with the heroine.73 The dog’s breed is denoted in Russian by the German borrowing ‘Shpits’ (Spitz). De Sherbinin stresses that this word is also associated with the Russian calqued word for ‘peak’ or ‘spire’, thus accentuating the sexed associations of the lapdog and the hero’s drive towards the heroine. The story also emphasises the libidinal nature of the desire to live. Without it his protagonists would age rapidly and lose all interest in life. As unremarkable as the lady with the lapdog is, she nevertheless fulfils this biologically motivated function in the protagonist’s life. Robert L. Jackson insightfully notes that the dog disappears later in the story, once the protagonists have moved past their erotic adventure and into the spiritual maturity of a deeper relationship.74 While the dog is emblematic of sexual desire, it is also a substitute for what is missing in the emotional life of the heroine. Once the heroine is romantically and sexually fulfilled she no longer has or needs a dog. Written to depict the needs and sensibilities of the educated classes, this story became the classic text in its ability to convey the psychological need for romantic involvement and sexual drive. The lapdog’s seemingly episodic role nevertheless makes this nameless dog one of the most famous dogs in Russian literature due to the pairing ‘lady with a dog’.75 The story became one of the most important markers of sensibilities of the final decade of nineteenth-century Rus- sian culture. With the changes ushered in by the Russian Revolution of 1917, this story became symbolic of the melancholy of the era, emblematised by the chopping down of the cherry orchard in Che- khov’s last play. In evoking the pair of a ‘lady and her white dog’ in ‘The Land Surveyor’76 Zamiatin builds on the plot of a dog as a companion to meet the emotional and romantic needs of a Russian woman from the educated classes. The social and political environment had changed

73 Julie W. de Sherbinin, “The Poetics of Middle Ground: Revisiting ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’”, in Chekhov: Poetics. Hermeneutics. Thematics. Ed. J. Douglas Clayton, Ottawa: The Slavic Research Group at the University of Otta- wa, 2006, 179-192. 74 Robert. L. Jackson, “Evoliutsiia v rasskaze ‘Dama s sobachkoi’”. 75 Sasha Sokolov uses this pairing as a symbol of boredom and ordinary life in Shkola dlia durakov. Moscow: Ogoniok-Variant, 1990. 76 Evgenii Zamiatin, “Zemlemer”, in Izbrannye proizvedeniia. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989, 326-336.

Dogs and the marginalised Other 185 drastically. In contrast to the privileged lives of Chekhov’s educated classes in 1899, in Zamiatin’s violent and apocalyptic times such classes are paying for their former luxuries with their lives. Within the anarchic drive of the first post-Revolutionary year the ‘educated woman and her dog’ pairing falls prey to peasants and workers turned thugs. Zamiatin establishes a line of typological continuity both with ‘Lady with the dog’, ‘Mumu’ and, obliquely, with ‘Gambrinus’, in the latter case via the theme of a pogromshchik’s anarchic violence. In ‘The Land Surveyor’ a small white dog becomes the target of a ‘joke’ played on him by a perpetually drunk and violent worker. The actions of this man are as sporadic and opportunistic as those of the villain who killed Belka in the pogrom scene depicted in ‘Gambrinus’. In ‘Gambrinus’ the profession of a thug was a stonemason, in Zamiatin’s ‘The Land Surveyor’ the dog-hater is a labourer whose odd jobs include the painting of house roofs. He chooses the dog for his violent act as a substitute for the lady of the estate, in the same way that Belka was chosen as a substitute for the Jew Sashka. The dog in ‘The Land Surveyor’ is a fox terrier named Funtik, a Russified name from funt – ‘a pound’ in English.77 The name is ‘foreign’ in keeping with the Russian tradition of not giving Orthodox Christian names to dogs. To the Russian uneducated mob the dog is doubly foreign – in his breed and in his name. Zamiatin endows the dog’s white coat with special significance – he mentions twice in the text that the colour of the white fur was ‘kipuche-belyi’ (‘pristine- white’). This degree of whiteness is normally achieved by boiling linen. The whiteness of Funtik’s fur is paralleled by the whiteness of his mistress’s white silk dress, her pure nature and virginity, all of which are further valorised by the description of her sparkling sky- blue eyes. The depiction of the violent act against Funtik shows that the act is both sporadic and calculated:

And Mitry shouted to the lads: – Catch it, brothers! Catch the landowner’s dog! The lads stopped picking their noses, opened their arms wide, rushed to catch Funtik in such a hurry that the dust rose up. Mitry stood with his hands on his hips, roaring with laughter, and winked to someone with his right eye.

77 It also means ‘paper-cone’ in colloquial Russian, and is also linked to ‘pound’.

186 Political Animals

The lads dragged Funtik in […] Mitry was standing where he had been painting the roof of the house. And suddenly he decided to make a joke. He lowered the bucket with green paint. – Throw the dog into the bucket, lads, why not! Throw it into the bucket, paint it! They painted Funtik the green colour and let it go. Looking horrible, blinded, green, Funtik nevertheless dragged himself home and hid under the table in the dining room. (329-330)

In this story Zamiatin makes apparent the hostility of Russian uneducated folk towards the pedigree dog as in ‘A Sinner’s Accom- plice’. The act of drowning the white dog in the thick oil paint en- codes a number of violent scripts. It stands as a trope for a public execution in which the dog is the substitute for the temporarily spared woman owner – in the perception of the muzhiks Funtik is first and foremost the ‘landlady’s dog’. In this guise the dog is a victim as a classed Other. His forced change of colour from white to dark green emblematises this assault on his pedigree origins as well as the assault on purity. This act functions on the level of parallelism with the virginal white-attired lady owner. The change of texture of the dog’s coat from silky fur to a slimy and stinking mass is symbolic of the forced degradation through which the classed Other becomes one of the lowly masses. The throwing of the dog into liquid also fulfils the function of a forced conversion by baptism, albeit in an inverted manner. It is both a parody of Christian baptism and a reference to the dog’s unchristian origins. In addition, the submerging of a small white dog functions as an intertextual link with the drowned dog Mumu. The dog Funtik dies and his owner’s manor house is ransacked then burned down during a rampage by the same drunken mob. On the level of romantic and sexual needs Funtik’s place is not substituted by a relationship with a male partner. The lady’s longing for a romantic involvement with a land surveyor, who was working with the muzhiks in the planned subdivision of her property, is not consummated in a relationship. The reason for this is the land surveyor’s own insecurity, notably explained by his fear to expose his weak and disproportionate body. Zamiatin describes his body as that of a spider topped with a handsome man’s head. The dichotomy between the head and the body is marked by the animalistic imagery attached to the body. The head takes over the animal and this Cartesian split dictates the rationality of Dogs and the marginalised Other 187 the land surveyor’s behaviour. Zamiatin’s documented distrust in mathematical science is evident in this story. Had the land surveyor not allowed his handsome big head with its mathematical mind to take over his small insect-like body, perhaps the destiny of the landowner and the white dog could have been different. With a male protector in the house, perhaps the muzhik Mitry would not have dared to ‘make a joke’. In his work the land surveyor could have made a deal with the expropriators of the woman’s estate. But he was shown not to like the dog – in the economic style of Zamiatin’s short story, he kicks it from the path when the dog is in his way. A man with an insect-like body and a big head who is ashamed of his own ‘animal’ body does not like the dog. This is a potent symbol of somatophobia expressed through the dislike of animals. He departs, leaving the young woman in the room of the monastery hotel. From an open window of this room she can see her manor house burning. Zamiatin brings together motifs of sexual frustrations, anarchic violence and the victimhood of a class Other and her small white dog. This dog becomes the symbol of an era in Russia’s history that has come to an end. The green paint which causes the dog’s death will re- emerge as the colour of the boundary Wall in Zamiatin’s 1921 novel We. In this work the colour green represents the border between the dystopian world of mathematical inhumanity and the world of chaos. In ‘Lady with the dog’ the wall that surrounds her house is grey, a colour used by Chekhov to represent a mundane and boring life that is not worth leading. Romance is needed to escape the suffocating atmosphere behind the grey wall where the lady and her lapdog lived identically meaningless lives. Behind these grey walls small white dogs function as emotional companions, thus contributing to the psychological health of those who need them. The automaton-like people behind Zamiatin’s green wall no longer need animals as friends because they no longer have emotional needs. All class, race and handicapped Others have been made obsolete in this brave new world. Automaton-like humans do not need companion animals. As contemporary sociologist Adrian Franklin points out, ‘people may have always liked animals but history teaches us that they like them in profoundly different ways under different historical con-

188 Political Animals ditions’ (33).78 All the stories in this chapter show an understanding of this specificity. Prejudices by uneducated classes driven by folk beliefs form an intersection with class-hatred and hatred of the ethnic, gendered or disabled Other. Another important common feature is the culture’s ambivalence and antipathy towards emotional relationships with dogs as pets. Here pets are often equated with human substitutes. Sociologist Leslie Irvine calls this stigmatisation ‘the deficiency hypothesis’.79 She notes that the devaluing of emotional responses to animals as irrational, sentimental or absurd has religious, economic and even scientific roots. While all four stories problematise religious, social and economic backgrounds of prejudices, Chekhov’s story expresses awareness of the role played by scientific taxonomies in the formation of gender stereotypes and prejudices against species and subspecies. Irvine also notes that a fondness for animals is sometimes stigmatised as a perversity, and the writers addressed this form of prejudice both explicitly and implicitly. Sociological research also shows that abused individuals can transfer their anger to pets, and while Gerasim’s behaviour falls into this pattern, Turgenev grounds the problematics in a specific cultural, social and historical context. The writers themselves project, sublimate and try to resolve emotional and psychological complexities of inter-human and cross-species relationships. But most importantly, they abhor any form of violence against the marginalised humans and their companion animals. All of these stories use Aesopian language to conceal and convey multilayered messages. They are addressed to different recipients with different degree of erudition and experience. They rely on subjectivities of perception; they reveal in order to conceal and conceal in order to reveal; they manifest the degree of cunningness required of human and other animals in nature who have to hide and seek in order to survive. These textual small whitish dogs have been eliminated – many were bred to be human companions, and all were bred to be man’s best friend. Sadly, except for Chekhov’s ‘apolitical’ lapdog, no other small whitish dog has survived.

78 Adrian Franklin, Animals in Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity. London: SAGE Publications, 1999. 79 Leslie Irvine, If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004, 6, 18-22.

Chapter 5 Dogs and inmates in prison and Gulags: Writing and re-writing the humanistic canon

In that world people fought with sharpened rasps, ate dogs, tattooed their faces and raped goats. – Sergei Dovlatov. The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard. 19821

This chapter focuses on the representation of dogs in the renowned Russian and Soviet prison notes: Fedor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1860); Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (1959); and Sergei Dovlatov’s The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard (1982). The dogs here often share the fates of prisoners, and many inmates identify themselves with these animals. This dog narrative is autobiographical; it is different from the representation of the prison guard dog typology where dogs are positioned on the side of the controlling power. Contemporary medical, psychological and sociological studies demonstrate the direct physiological benefits and stress- buffering effects of close bonds and relationships with animals in general and dogs in particular.2 Animal-assisted activities today offer a form of human-companion animal social support for marginalised individuals and this entails visits of suitably trained dogs to prisons. In the culture-specific world of Russian prison narratives not every human can establish therapeutic ties with dogs. As the most famous prisoner in the Russian literary canon, Dos- toevsky left a legacy not only in the form of prison narrative, represented by his Notes from the House of the Dead, but also in his creation of a paradigm for the representation of dogs in prisons and criminal colonies. Both the genre and the thematics of the fate of animals and dogs in prison narratives form transtextuality in Russian

1 Sergei Dovlatov, “Zona”, in Sobranie prozy v trekh tomakh. St Petersburg: Lim- buss-press, 1995, Vol. I, 35-36. 2 Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal Companionship. Eds Alan Beck, Aaron Katcher, West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1996. 190 Political Animals literature. Many subsequent narratives enter into a relationship with Dostoevsky’s work on the basis of influence, polemics and allusion. In Soviet penal narratives related to the Gulag and the prison camp, a dialogic relationship with Dostoevsky’s text constitutes a political subtext for this type of censored material.3 The language of allusion has been identified as a marker of such Russian and Soviet prison narratives.4 The thematics of dogs within this type of narrative fulfils its archetypal function based on the concealment and revealment of material around which a culture and society create an atmosphere of silence. In the texts discussed in this chapter dogs within prison camp walls meet the emotional needs of prisoners. They are companions and contribute to prisoners’ psychological wellbeing, but they can also serve as victims of disrespectful treatment and abuse, depending on the character of the criminals. Among political prisoners dogs are treated as friends, while hardened criminals in Soviet prison camps do not treat dogs as special animals because they have no respect for human beings – with no trust in human friendship a relationship comprising respect towards dogs and other small animals is not possible. Mikhail Bakhtin characterises the emotion of love in the form of pity towards dogs and other small animals as a manifestation of the first step in any dialogic relationship.5 In the prison notes analysed in this chapter, only political prisoners and the educated classes are capable of expressing this form of relationship with dogs in prison. This implies that only they have a need for a dialogical relationship with an animal as an Other and/or as the Self. Bakhtin notes that animals are naively trustful of people who abuse this trust through treachery. This theme will resonate in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century prison notes.

3 David J. Galloway, “Polemical Allusions in Russian Gulag Prose”, Slavic and East European Journal LI/3 (2007), 535-552. 4 Thomas Venclova, “Prison as Communicative Phenomenon: The Literature of Gulag”, Comparative Civilizations Review Vol. II (Spring 1979), 63-75. 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, “O Flobere”, in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1997, Vol. V, 130-137. For a discussion of dogs’ loyalty to humans in this text see Sergei Zenkin, “Zoologicheskii predel kul’tury: Bakhtin, Flober i drugie”, in Zveri i ikh reprezentatsii v russkoi kul’ture. Eds Leonid Gel- ler and Anastasiia Vinogradova de la Fortel, St Petersburg: Baltiiskie sezony, 2010, 205-219. Dogs in prison 191

Relevant to this chapter is Bakhtin’s explanation of vegetarianism as a manifestation of this love/pity for living creatures. In some of the texts analysed in this chapter, prisoners kill dogs to gain material advantage from selling their meat, fur and skins. Writers give various interpretations to these acts. A shocking case involving the consumption of dog meat occurs in a Soviet prison camp, significantly not by hungry prisoners but by hardened criminals who can afford to buy delicacies missing from the prison diet. Their dog-meat-eating ritual dehumanises them and, in a Bakhtinian sense, puts them on a lower hierarchical level of cultural evolution than so-called primitive societies.6 In Dovlatov’s text this translates into a critique of the lowly state of Soviet man and, by extension, Soviet civilisation.

Ethnographic take on dogs in prison: Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead

Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead is written in the first person narrative from the perspective of an educated gentleman called Alexander Gorianchikov.7 As characteristic of the new border genre that sits between diary, memoir and documentary fiction, this text serves as a fount of factual information to its reader.8 Indeed, contemporaries learned about the everyday realities of the prison camp in a specific geographical location, Siberia, from this text. In this context Notes from the House of the Dead was conceived and received as a form of ethnographic narrative. It contains not only descriptions of the local people and their customs but also a societal microcosm comprising various ethnic and religious groups of the Russian Empire. Poles, Chechens, Tatars, Lezgins, Yakuts, Jews, Gypsies, Old Believers – all

6 Bakhtin does not have a reductionist opinion of the so-called primitive thinking in primitive societies and is in polemics with the opinions of some early twentieth-century anthropologists like Levi-Brule. See S.G. Bocharov, L.A. Gogotish- vili, “O Flobere: Kommentrii”, in Mikhail Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1997, Vol. V, 492-507. 7 F.M. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz Mertvogo Doma, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1972, Vol. IV. 8 Morson developed the notion of boundary genre in Dostoevsky’s work, especially his Diary of a Writer. See Garry Saul Morson, Boundaries of Genre: Dostoev- sky’s Diary of a Writer and the Tradition of Literary Utopia. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.

192 Political Animals have at least one representative in Dostoevsky’s penal colony. De- scriptions of their religious and ethnic customs, such as prayers, proverbs and sayings, folk beliefs, clothing and tastes in food, are catalogued in order to satisfy readers’ curiosity and their search for the exotic. Many of these representations reflect ethnic stereotypes of the time – and Dostoevsky was criticised for contributing to the representation of stereotypes of Jews, Gypsies and other national minorities.9 The Chechen is fierce, the Jew Bumshtein has his genealogy in the ridiculous figure of Gogol’s Yankel, the young Tatar-boy Ali has a sentimental disposition which the narrator characterises as typically Muslim. Animals occupy a similar place in this text, in line with traditional expectations of the ethnographic narrative. There is a chapter devoted entirely to ‘Animals in Prison’ which includes descriptions of various species. Dogs occupy the most prominent place in response to the personal needs of the narrator. As a quasi-ethnographer Dostoev- sky records the difference in attitude towards dogs among representatives of various groups of people: peasants, craftsmen, bosses in charge of prison. Attitudes towards dogs and relationships with these animals form the object of his interest. He theorises on the relationship between dogs and humans, thus demonstrating a significant knowledge of folk beliefs. Dostoevsky’s narrator Gorianchikov’s attitude towards dogs is one of the many markers defining his difference in terms of class and as the cultural Other in relation to the mass of prisoners. As a nobleman he likes dogs; typical of his class, he regards them as his best friends. As a prisoner, he also identifies with dogs. At the same time he is ostracised by the main mass of prisoners because of the unbridgeable social divide that separated the gentry from the peasant classes in Russia in the 1850s. He regrets the fact that the other prisoners do not relate to him as one of their own, in spite of the otherwise uniform structure of the prison collective. The autobiographical narrator notes that, no matter what part of Russia simple folk come from, they all belong to the same culture and form a single collective. His desire to be accepted by this collective remains unfulfilled throughout his stay in prison. The gap is unbridgeable and he remains not a participant but an observer. This situation in relation to the prisoners’ collective parallels the position of an ethnographer or anthropologist

9 David Goldshtein, Dostoevsky and the Jews. Austin: Texas UP, 1981. Dogs in prison 193 who exists on the margins of the ‘exotic’ society that he studies. Not accepted as one of the group, he is left to make assumptions and de- ductions about the symbolism of the customs that he observes. One of the first examples of Dostoevsky’s ethnographic approach is his observation that ‘Simple people consider the dog to be an unclean animal’ (189). This formulation could have been taken directly from the pages of Vladimir Dal’’s ethnographic research study familiar to the reader by now. Another important example of his understanding of the dog thematic is his use of the expressive saying ‘sobach’e miaso’ (‘dog’s meat’), a type of swear-word. Related to the sacral and obscene, this saying is used as a polyvalent exclamation in a situation where one could just as easily use other dog-related verbal expressions, such as the famed mat. The origins of this stable expression go back to the time when the dog was a totemic animal and dog meat had a special sacred meaning. Having since lost its relationship to the actual animal, the dog, on the conscious level, this expression is now used by simple folk to express a range of emotions from amaze- ment to total satisfaction and joy. A prisoner who utters this saying does so to describe the behaviour of an eagle, for example, suddenly given its freedom. Used in this highly emotive situation it represents the expressive meaning of the saying. While the simple folk who use this expression are unlikely to be aware of the ritualistic underpinning of this expression, Dostoevsky the researcher is fully cognisant of the complex dynamics underlying attitudes by simple people towards various kinds of animals, including dogs. Dostoevsky collected a range of ethnographic material while in prison and made notes in his hand-written ‘Siberian notebook’ (‘Sibirskaia tetrad’). The many colourful – and cryptic – folk expressions include sayings about dogs.10 One of these of particular interest because of its rarity (it is not registered in Dal’’s proverbs about dogs) relates to the theme of death and funeral repast, thus exposing the sacral connotations of the dog motif: ‘I did not know that you are still alive. I have already celebrated the funeral feast – I threw some two tens of stones to the dogs’ (235). This uttering is a form of jocular exchange by one prisoner to another. In this context it means that the man could not care less about his mate’s disappearance. Dostoevsky’s

10 F.M. Dostoevskii, “Sibirskaia tetrad’”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, 1972, Vol. IV, 235-249.

194 Political Animals attention was drawn to this saying because of its hidden meaning. Do dogs function as counterparts to the worthless friend who does not deserve the expense of real ritual food? Or is the meaning more complex? Does one feed stones to dogs as a mock ceremony aimed at satisfying their hunger for death, so bringing the life-death cycle to an end? What is the symbolic meaning of the ‘two tens’ of stones? What is apparent is that the link between funeral rites and dogs certainly captured Dostoevsky’s imagination. The stone-throwing motif will be re-written into an act of throwing stones at dogs in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. In this novel Dostoevsky endows this act with theological and eschatological meaning. In his ‘Siberian notebook’ the expression represents a remnant of the dog cult in pagan rites and rituals, the meaning of which is unrealised in contemporary usage. In Notes from the House of the Dead the taboo nature of dogs is made apparent in the fact that, when prisoners kill dogs in order to use their skin or fur to make clothing and footwear, they never eat the dog meat. The narrator describes the ditch in which prisoners throw away the carcasses, and the offensive smell that comes from the rotting dog remains during the warm months of the year. While dog meat is not used by prisoners for human consumption, the meat of the prison billy-goat is regarded as suitable for eating: when a prison major demands that the animal be destroyed, prisoners slaughter the goat and sell the meat. Part of the meat ends up in a collective stew. The narrator tastes the goat meat and admits that it is tasty. This valuable ethnographic and anthropological insight underlines the existence of categories between various types of animals. It serves as a quasi- Leviticus code of folk categories of clean and unclean meat, with dogs belonging to the category of the unclean. The anthropological meaning of this grouping relates to the totemic and tabooed aspects of the dog. Prisoners do not consider it a sacrilege to eat goat meat, in spite of the fact that it was their ‘commensal associate’ (51), as anthropologist Edmund Leach describes animals that live in close proximity to humans.11 It has to be noted that the goat is a clean animal in the Old Testament, the book that Dostoevsky studied very carefully while in prison.

11 Edmund Leach, “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, in New Directions in the Study of Language. Ed. Eric H. Lenne- berg, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964, 23-64.

Dogs in prison 195

The categorisation and grouping of animals is clearly at the centre of the narrator’s interest. Indeed, just as his ethnic portraits are informed by existing stereotypes, he also depicts uneducated people’s views of various animals as stereotypical and static in folk culture. Eagles represent freedom, geese represent courage, a donkey represents a sexed animal (and is therefore castrated by the prisoners), the horse is loved for aesthetic and practical reasons, and dogs are treated with no respect.

Dog Trezorka and the love of a cruel major

Social divides are an important part of this narrative. Dostoevsky’s theory of pochvennichestvo (a religious back-to-the-soil grassroots concept) was born out of his contact with simple people and his reconsideration of his past as a social rebel. One of the first stories he hears on arrival is a tale about a prison major and his poodle Trezorka. The Trezorka story embodies the class divide and manifests the hatred that prisoners feel towards their masters. The major is particularly disliked by the prisoners because of his unreasonable cruelty. One prisoner even attempts to kill him after his sadistic treatment of other inmates. The cruel major has only one creature that he loves – his poodle Trezorka. When Trezorka falls ill he becomes desperate and turns to a prisoner who has a reputation as a maverick veterinarian. Although the prisoner does not have any formal education, he has wide experience and an uncanny ability to treat animals. The narrator tells the story as he heard it from the prisoner himself. When the man comes to the major’s house to see the ailing Trezorka, he finds the dog recumbent on a white cushion. He ascertains that the dog’s condition is treatable but tells the major that it is too late to save the dog. The dog dies the next day much to the major’s distress. The prisoner makes a conscious decision not to help the dog as a form of punishment of the major. Gorianchikov, however, does not sympathise with the prisoner and laments the man’s cruelty towards the dog. He describes him as a Siberian muzhik, capable and clever, and yet with a cunning attitude towards the educated classes. The muzhik’s boast that he could have saved the dog through the letting of blood also leaves the reader in doubt of his veterinary abilities. This story of the treatment of the poodle Trezorka is not simply a tale of simple people’s dislike of the ‘master and his dog’ pairing; it is also a story of the

196 Political Animals subversive capabilities of simple folk and their ability to show calculated cruelty. In this case the dog is an innocent victim not only by proxy but also as a result of the Siberian peasant’s attitude towards dogs. The Trezorka story has further psychological significance in terms of the cruel major’s love for his dog. Dostoevsky’s account of this emotional attachment is complicated by one cryptic sentence: ‘It was common knowledge he was under the full control of his batman [denshchik] Fedka’ (28). This sentence appears as part of a description of the major’s despotic demands on his prisoners and his love for the dog as if the dog was his son. In the context of this love and his sadistic treatment of male prisoners, this sentence resonates as a ciphered message hinting at the major’s homosexual leanings. The narrator describes him as a person who has some talents but whose good inclinations manifest themselves ‘in a distorted form ‘–’v iskoverkannom vide’ (28). The word ‘iskoverkannyi’ is polyvalent and can be used as a more polite form of ‘perverted’. In this usage it suggests a link to an aberrant form of sexuality. The major loves his dog in order to fulfil a psychological need which the dominant culture taboos. Dostoevsky the psychologist finds numerous objects for investigation among the prison population and the story of the major’s love for his dog is one such case study. Indeed, it is one of the most cryptic of dog-related subplots in his writing. Of relevance is the medical profession’s pathologisation of love of animals which was synthesised in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s work. He was well known in Russia in the 1870s, although his work built on the medical opinions of the previous two decades. His views were disseminated through his lectures and in publications of his work, the most famous of which is Psy- chopathia Sexualis (Polovaia psikhopatiia, 1886). Enormously influential, this work describes cases of animals being used as substitute objects of love in forms of sexual perversion. He grouped homosexuality (described as sodomy) and sexual encounters with animals in one chapter entitled ‘Sexual deviations: Sodomy’.12 Dostoevsky’s descriptions of the major’s behaviour contain hints of the cruel man’s non- normative interest in the intimate life of prisoners: one of his bizarre habits is to break into the barracks in the middle of the night when prisoners are asleep and punish them the next morning for sleeping in

12 Richard Krafft-Ebing, Polovaia psikhopatiia. Moscow: Respublika, 1996.

Dogs in prison 197 an incorrect posture (according to the major’s self-invented rules, the correct way to sleep is on the right side, and not on the left side or on the stomach). Dostoevsky’s narrator gives this example of the major’s behaviour as a manifestation of the despotic demands placed on prisoners, yet readers in search of a reason for the major’s behaviour will also find evidence of an ‘unhealthy’ interest in the nightlife of the male prisoners. In this context the story of the major’s dog becomes yet another case study of the human psyche within the distorting environment of prison life. On this level the dog subplot expresses a hidden meaning in line with the characteristic use of Aesopian language in animal narratives.

Dog Belka and Christian love

Apart from the major, the only other person in prison who requires a dog companion is the narrator himself. The only unifying link between the cruel representative of prison authority and the political prisoner is that they both belong to the educated classes. This connection is expressed in the typology of attitudes towards dogs: the phenomenon of dogs as pets is associated with the sensibilities of the educated classes; for simple folk, especially in Siberia, dogs are part of the economic realities. The lonely narrator finds his only emotional consolation in his encounters with dogs. He describes this relationship as ‘friendship’ (189) and puts it in sharp contrast to the total lack of emotional attachment shown to dogs by the other prisoners. The prisoners tolerate the dog Sharik that lives in the prison, but show no real interest in the creature. Admittedly they do not treat the dog with cruelty; most of the time they simply ignore him. Gorianchikov, in contrast, feels the need to communicate with the dog, and the dog responds with love and affection. There is a definite parallelism between Gorianchikov’s need for acceptance and warmth from the prisoners and the dog Sharik’s need for similar signs of support. The narrator notes that ‘during many years the dog had not evoked any warmth from anybody apart for me’ (189). Folk beliefs in the unclean nature of dogs put them in a separate category, in the same way that the gentry and educated classes are put into a category apart from the rest of the population with no hope of successfully crossing these boundaries. Dostoevsky’s narrator under-

198 Political Animals stands that simple people are actively involved in the construction of the Otherness of dogs. When Otherness is defined in terms of class and the estate, the situation is reciprocal between peasants and the gentry who both want to demarcate boundaries. Folk culture is old, rich and diverse and simple folk function within its borders with no need to aspire to a more sophisticated level of high culture. For Dos- toevsky this realisation becomes the basis for his theory on the importance on living on the soil, in the same way that it became a foundation for Slavophile thinking. Some populists such as Gleb Uspensky came to understand that all the reforming attempts to change peasant thinking in matters of economic relations failed because of the strength of these traditional belief systems.13 The story of the she-dog Belka in Notes from the House of the Dead introduces the theme of the invalid dog and contains strong anthropomorphic and theological reflections. Belka is permanently dam- aged from a previous accident that broke her back and left her disfigured: her body is distorted, her skin is scabby and her eyes ooze pus. The narrator introduces Belka as ‘a strange creature’ (‘sozdanie’, 191). The word sozdanie is literally ‘creation’ and has direct links with the notion of Biblical creation. ‘Creature’ in Russian could be denoted by the word sushchestvo, yet the narrator chooses the more elevating Biblical word. The dog is a higher being because it is a creation of the Almighty. Belka’s story draws a parallel between attitudes towards crippled and disfigured people and those shown towards equally disabled animals – both the prisoners and the other dogs show disgust towards Belka as a result of her physical ugliness. The conglomeration of features that make this dog repugnant serves as an allegory for the suffering of living creatures in a world created by God. As an animal her affliction also serves as a reminder that all creatures are created by God, thus transforming this motif into a Christian narrative of suffering, mercy and love. The poor dog tries in vain to please humans and her canine counterparts. Prisoners loath her and push her away with their boots while the other dogs do not touch her because of her total submissiveness – Belka lies on her back with her paws up in a canine stance of defeat and submission. The narrator

13 Gleb Uspensky called it “the power of soil”. Henrietta Mondry, Pure, Strong and Sexless: the Peasant Woman’s Body and Gleb Uspensky. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Dogs in prison 199 formulates this thought as a philosophical maxim with an allegorical underpinning: ‘Dogs like submissiveness and meekness among their own kind’ (‘smirenie i pokornost’’, 190). This formulation by a political prisoner functions not only as a psychological observation but also as a social comment. On the level of societal structure and psychology, dogs and people function in a similar way. In spite of Belka’s survival strategies she ends up being torn apart by the other dogs. Clearly the impulse to destroy the weak and the fallen is strong in the animal kingdom, but does the human animal differ in attitudes towards the weak? As well as exploring the psychology that drives hurtful impulses towards the weak, Dostoevsky develops a theological framework for the infliction of pain and suffering. In opposition to the Christian idea of loving those most in need, Dostoevsky reveals the paradox of the human desire not to love but to hurt the weak. Animals fall into this category. Among all the prisoners Dostoevsky’s autobiographical narrator is the only one to show mercy towards the crippled dog. He alone is not too disgusted to touch the animal and caresses her out of pity. In the context of Dostoevsky’s later writings, this subplot of touching the skin of a sick and ‘unclean’ body functions as an allusion to the New Testament narrative of Christ’s willingness to ‘cleanse’ a leper. In Matthew 8:1-4 Christ heals a leper by touching him with his hand. This deed, emblematic of the New Testament ethos, came to symbolise a new attitude towards uncleanness and illness. At the end of this scene Christ tells the leper to show the results of his deed to the Mosaic priest, thus establishing a new attitude towards lepers in terms of understanding illness and sin vis-à-vis the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, as made evident in the description of laws concerning the ceremonial treatment of healed lepers in Leviticus 13 and 14, lep- rosy is understood as both an illness and a sin. By showing a new, tactile attitude towards lepers Christ declares a new sensibility towards the sick and other ‘unclean’ persons, sinners. In presenting his autobiographical narrator as the only person in prison who touches the scabby dog’s skin – the very locus of this illness and the trope of lep- rosy – Dostoevsky introduces a theological motif into the dog thematic. The narrator’s behaviour is described as Christian in contrast to the non-Christian behaviour of the other prisoners. The convergence of illness and sin in the notion of physical and symbolic ‘uncleanness’ works as a parallel between human sinners

200 Political Animals and scabby dogs, and underlines the correlation between people and dogs. As God’s creation the dog Belka has a soul. She responds to Gorianchikov’s touches and caresses with a reciprocal display of affection. Belka is clearly capable of love and gratitude, and Dostoev- sky’s narrator is capable of understanding the dog’s ‘language’. In the Belka subplot there are also the beginnings of the pantheistic leanings developed in Dostoevsky’s last and unfinished novel The Brothers Karamazov through the teachings of Father Zosima as a complement to Christian theology. Fittingly, it is in this novel that Dostoevsky’s philosophical hero, Ivan Karamazov, tells the story of the Christian Saint John the Grateful (Ioann Milostivyi) and the leper whom the saint warms with his own body – even breathing into the hungry man’s mouth in order to warm him up – in spite of the terrible stench coming from the stranger’s rotting body. In terms of Christian theology the saint’s lack of disgust for this decaying body with its contagious illness serves as an example of self-sacrificial love for fellow human beings. For Ivan it is an example of Christian hypocri- sy: the saint is acting from his selfish desire to inflict suffering upon himself for the purpose of personal salvation. In Notes from the House of the Dead Gorianchikov’s desire to touch the mangy creature of God can be interpreted as a manifestation of a conscious self-reflecting strategy to show Christian behaviour as a form of repentance. He does it for the dog and also for himself, to reinforce his sense of hope and the possibility of harmony in this world. If Belka’s mangy fur represents the site of difference between Christian and non-Christian attitudes to animal suffering, then the beautiful healthy fur of two other dogs in Notes from the House of the Dead is invested with another point of difference between the narrator and the other prisoners. The beautiful fur of these dogs makes them objects of economic and professional interest to the prisoners. Many of the captives were shoemakers by occupation and used dog skin and fur habitually in their trade. Gorianchikov’s own dog Kul’tiapka falls victim to this trade. Having been raised by Gorianchikov since he was a puppy, Kul’tiapka disappears one day without trace. A shoemaker, we are told, liked its light grey fur and used it to make a pair of woman’s boots which he sold to the wife of a bookkeeper. The artisan shows the boots to Gorianchikov in a matter-of-fact manner. Dostoev- sky suggests that the difference in attitude towards dogs lies in differences in class: it is inconceivable to a tradesman that one can have an Dogs in prison 201 emotional attachment to a dog. His narrator tells the story without expressing emotion, as if it is just a routine activity in the life of a prison tradesman. Had it not been for the excellent quality of the dog’s fur, Kul’tiapka probably would not have been noticed by the shoemaker.

The dog that was sold for 30 silver coins

Because dog fur and dog skin are used in Siberia for making human apparel Gorianchikov-the-ethnographer restrains from making moralising judgements. This is not the case when he invests another story about a dog killed for its fur with symbolic meaning. Indeed, the absence in this story of a description of the disposal of the dead dog shifts the emphasis from occupational activities within Siberian prisons and the economic relations between prisoners and the outside world. On the surface this second story is not much different from the previous one – it too deals with the case of using dog skin and fur by professional tanners and shoemakers. But whereas in the first story Kul’tiapka was a foundling mutt whom Gorianchikov made into a pet in the prison environment, in the second story the dog is a handsome pedigree dog sold to prisoners by a lackey who stole it from his lawful owners. This difference is invested with allegorical meaning. To maintain the supply of raw material needed to make skin and fur products, prisoners often procure their own dogs, some of which are sold to them by local people. In one such case a lackey sells a dog for 30 silver kopecks. This sum of money serves as an allusion to the Biblical narrative, since it is analogous to the payment which Judas received for his betrayal of Jesus. The fact that the dog is a good breed and that it is betrayed by the very man whom the dog’s owners chose to look after it gives a moral underpinning to the story. The indignant narrator describes the dog as intelligent and sensitive; the dog intuitively knows that his fate depends on the mercy of his captors and tries to ingratiate himself with them, but to no avail. The narrator witnesses the dog’s attempts at meaningful communication with the prisoners. Their indifference demonstrates that they do not invest the dog with emotions. The narrator leaves the scene before the prisoners strangle the dog by hanging. This dog narrative parallels the biographical facts from the life of Dostoevsky, hence the narrator’s strong identification with the no-

202 Political Animals ble dog. It is because of somebody’s betrayal for the sake of monetary reward that Dostoevsky ended up in prison. Dostoevsky was sent to a Siberian prison after he was betrayed by an informer for his participation in gatherings of the secret Petrashevsky society.14 The secret circle, named after its leader, regularly met to discuss the need for social reform and the abolition of serfdom and autocracy. Most members of this group were members of the educated classes. Dostoevsky associated the aspirations of the young rebels in this group with the figure of Jesus Christ: he believed that, had Jesus been alive in Russia in the 1840s, he would have been part of the activities aimed at instituting principles of social justice. The informer, who was on the payroll of the secret police, played the role of Judas vis-à-vis the members of this inner circle. On a less personal level, Dostoevsky also approaches the fate of dogs in prison as an ethnographer. He describes various customs including the treatment of dogs. Simple folk have emotional ‘tactile’ needs, but they express them not on dogs but on other animals such as horses and billy goats. Touching a dog is not practised, in line with folk beliefs that deem the dog, as previously noted, to be an unclean animal. Apart from Gorianchikov there are no instances of prisoners developing an emotional attachment to any of the dogs. Dogs do not serve as substitute objects to meet the need to caress and touch warm and soft matter. Other animals fulfil this function. For Gorianchikov, however, this need is an expression of his class sensibilities, as reflected too in the story of the major and his poodle Trezorka. Some advanced medics at the end of the nineteenth century, including psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev, used dogs to treat patients. In Notes from the House of the Dead Dostoevsky explores the healing function of pets and regrets that prison authorities do not allow pet- keeping in prisons. In a narrative about human suffering, punishment and the ineffectiveness of the system to reform criminals, this theme of animal power is linked to humanist ideology. In his search for alternative ways of reforming prisoners Dostoevsky’s narrator arrives at the idea of the healing power of pets which will be explored both by science and social sciences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

14 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1858. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

Dogs in prison 203

Varlam Shalamov’s prison ‘Bitch Tamara’

Varlam Shalamov’s (1907-1982) famous prison narrative Kolyma Tales contains the story ‘Suka Tamara’ (‘Bitch Tamara’).15 It stands in an intertextual relationship with Dostoevsky’s treatment of the dog theme in Notes from the House of the Dead. The she-dog in this story meets the same end as the dogs adopted by Dostoevsky’s narrator, suggesting a continuity in the inmates’ cruelty in Russian penal colonies and prisons. But Shalamov’s narrative frames this story as a polemical dialogue with Dostoevsky’s views on the Russian character. As a Gulag survivor Shalamov claims that he did not meet good people among criminals. While Dostoevsky chose to isolate himself in prison from political prisoners and to later present criminals as intrinsically good people, Shalamov deliberately challenges Dostoevsky’s view in his narrative.16 Dostoevsky famously claimed that the Russian penal system had absorbed probably the most talented representatives of the Russian people.17 Shalamov rejects this view on the grounds that it gave rise to an uncritical and distorted veneration of Russian- ness.18 In Shalamov’s story a Jewish man finds, saves and adopts a dog, and then a Russian man kills her. The foundling dog in this tale is of the Yakut breed developed to pull sleds across snow. The geographical attributes of her breed indicate the ethnic dimensions of the narrative. Shalamov notes that Moisei Moiseevich Kuznetsov is a Jew. In explaining the evidence for this postulation he shows considerable cultural knowledge of Jewish customs. He notes that Moisei Moi- seevich’s orphan status can be assumed from the fact that his name and patronymic are identical. Jewish custom does not allow the names of living parents to be given to their children – indeed, it is a form of taboo linked to the belief that the life of the living person must not be threatened by passing it on via the medium of name-giving to another

15 V.T. Shalamov, “Suka Tamara”, in Sobranie sochinenii, Moscow: Vagrius, 1998, Vol. I, 56-61. In English Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales. Trans. John Glad, New York: Penguin Books, 1994. 16 On this point see Galloway. 17 Lev Shestov, Filosofiia tragedii. Dostoevskii i Nitshe. St Petersburg: Tipografiia M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1903. 18 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000.

204 Political Animals human being. This custom falls into the domain of the sacral and faith in the afterlife. Within this subtext Kuznetsov’s act of saving the bitch acquires a humanist meaning linked to Judaism and religiosity. The observation of Jewish law contributes to the respectful and humane treatment of nature. The dog Tamara happens to be pregnant – she is the seat for future life. The Old Testament’s respect for the multiplicity of life and propagation is emblematised by the pregnant bitch with her multiple puppies about to be born. The nameless foundling-bitch is given a woman’s name, Tama- ra. Notably, this name is part of Eastern Orthodox Georgian canon – St Tamara was a canonised Georgian medieval princess. A popular Russian name in the 1950s, the name reflects the prisoners’ emotional needs.19 All the prisoners treat the dog and her six puppies with touching affection. Tamara shows similar love and affection to the prisoners, who win her trust through the love they show to her puppies. The tragic event of her death is brought about by the dog’s immediate dislike of a visiting prison guard, a man called Nazarov. In charge of a search party for a group of runaway prisoners, he spends the night near the compound where Tamara and her puppies live. She reacts to this perceived threat by attacking the guard. This makes him furious and he shoots her down before hurriedly leaving. Some of the prisoners try to avenge Tamara’s death and run after him, but they are stopped by their seniors. Fate intervenes, however, and Tamara’s death is avenged. Although a good skier, Nazarov falls on to the sharp stump of a broken tree covered by snow and dies instantaneously. He is discovered two days later hanging on the tree with the sharp stem going through his body. Shalamov suggests that his death came as a result of the prisoners’ anger. How otherwise would an experienced skier have fallen on to a snow-covered stump? The dog’s death is thus mystically avenged by the forces of justice.

The dog’s skin and the dog killer’s body on display

The prisoners make a skin out of the killed dog and put it on the wall. What is the meaning of this display? This act mirrors the final fate of the she-dog in Dostoevsky’s narrative, although in Dostoevsky’s story the people who kill the dog make the skin as a purely practical en-

19 A.V. Speranskaia, Sovremennyi slovar’ lichnykh imen. Moscow: Airis, 2005. Dogs in prison 205 deavour. In Shalamov’s story the dog killer has no practical use for the dead dog, nor can his act be justified as a result of necessity or the struggle for survival which justify the actions of Dostoevsky’s prisoners. In Shalamov’s tale, the act of turning the dog skin into an exhibit serves as an expression of the multiple needs of the prisoners – emotional, aesthetic and spiritual. Attached to a cold prison wall, the skin serves as a piece of memorabilia, a reminder of the much-loved animal. As an adornment it supplies prisoners with a vision of beauty within the otherwise bare surroundings of the barracks. As a hanging on the wall it stands as a substitute for a piece of art or an object of religious worship. This quasi-icon crosses boundaries between religions in the same way that the real animal served as a common object of love and attachment for the prison’s multi-ethnic population. In reciprocating the prisoners’ love the dog becomes a locus for all- encompassing manifestations of the human and animal need for the sublime. In the form of an artefact – the displayed skin – the dog is now an expression of elevating spirituality to the population of spectators/prisoners.20 This notion of the dog skin as a display is paralleled by the description of the visual effect of the body of the dog-killer. Shalamov notes that Nazarov’s frozen body is pinioned on the stump of the tree in the pose of a runner, resembling a figure from a battlefield diorama. This potent description emphasises the visual symbolism of the body as a display, and is underpinned by the absurdity of this display itself and what it symbolises. As a display in the middle of the taiga or bo- real forest it serves no function because there are no human spectators; the symbolic field of vision that is needed for the return of the gaze does not exist. The comparison with figures displayed in frozen mo- tion in dioramas depicting battle scenes renders the death of this dog- killer meaningless. What kind of mission did he have? Who did he fight against? With no real enemies in the Gulags he was pursuing an imaginary and artificially created enemy in the guise of run-away prisoners. His own frozen body now displays the idea of ‘being on the run’ from a crime really committed, that of killing a living creature,

20 On the emotional complexities such as longing and desire, linked to the preservation of a favourite pet’s skin see Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 2012.

206 Political Animals the Yakutian dog Tamara. The dog-killer’s body thus displays anti- behaviour in all its complex symbolism. The symbolic meaning of the dog skin is further manifested in the idea of the usefulness of an animal’s life. The skin is assigned both an iconic and a utilitarian function. The prisoners eventually give the dog skin to the man who distributes labour tasks. In this capacity the skin functions as a form of payment for his help in assigning prisoners easier tasks and so increasing their chance of survival. The dog skin thus ends up with the same function as that of the dog itself in a nineteenth-century prison narrative – to help people survive in the harsh conditions. The logic in operation here is akin to the moral of Leo Tolstoy’s story of a horse, ‘Holstomer’ (‘Strider’, 1885); that is, that dead animal carcasses and skins have more value than the remains of the useless people who drove them to their death, and that animals are inherently more moral by being useful to other animals and humans not only in life but also in death.21 In ‘Holstomer’ a she-wolf eats the dead horse’s carcass and feeds her litter with the regurgitated horse flesh and bones. Holstomer’s skin is then sold to a tanner and will be used by people. Like the good-for-nothing owner of Holstomer, who lives a meaningless and empty life, Nazarov’s corpse is frozen in the taiga forest and remains untouched by animals. This significant detail suggests that Shalamov problematises the sphere of human and dog’s remains. Tamara’s skin will be turned into a pair of gloves, the Siberi- an sobachiny. If approached from an anthropological perspective, her skin has a definite totemic meaning in this proximity to the human body in which the sobachiny gloves are to be used. Designed with the fur on the outside these gloves work to protect humans not only from cold but also from evil – the magical meaning of dog fur is cryptically present here. Dog’s fur is a well-known amulet among Siberian people and is shared by various Slav cultures.22 The encoded message of Shalamov’s story thus has eschatological overtones. When animals such as dogs die in Russian prisons their remains continue to serve

21 Andrea Rossing, “Lev Tolstoy and the Freedom to Choose One’s Own Path”, Journal of Critical Animal Studies I/2 (2007), 1-18. 22 Of note is Esenin’s “Give me your paw for luck, Jim” (252) in “Sobake Kachalo- va” (1925), Stikhotvoreniia v dvukh tomakh, 252-253. Born to the peasant class, Esenin was well familiar with superstitions and belief systems related to dogs. Dogs in prison 207 humans, and they continue to accomplish deeds of love, loyalty and fidelity even after their deaths. Apart from the materialist view, which gives meaning to the existence of the animal in the world vis-à-vis the cycle of life and death, a further mystical underlayer is implied in the demise of the guard and the horse in the two stories. It has to be noted that it is a she-wolf that eats the horse’s remains in Tolstoy’s ‘Holstomer’. Wolves and dog are interchangeable in Russian folklore. In some cultic rituals across Sibe- rian and other Eastern Mongolian cultures human corpses are given to dogs to be devoured as a form of securing the survival of human souls.23 If dogs do not eat the corpse then the suspicion arises that the deceased must have been a wicked individual, since the dogs (and birds) refuse to touch that person’s body. By not devouring the corpse the dogs refuse to secure the dead person’s transit into the afterlife. The fact that the guard’s body remained untouched by wolves and birds in the frozen taiga forest is a sure indication that the man was wicked. It is fitting that Shalamov’s story is set in Siberian forests – the domain of the Mongolian people among whom this belief is to be found. In line with this logic, in Tolstoy’s story the horse has thus been given passage to the afterlife while her owner is denied this privilege. A wicked man has a worse end than a noble animal. Another important mystical subtext in the dog Tamara’s death motif is cryptically expressed in the meaning of her encounter with the prison guard. The dog intuitively identifies him as an enemy, and the fact of his death following so quickly after her own attests to the uncanny influence that she continues to have after death. Does her spirit continue to cleanse the dark forces of evil of which the guard is an incarnation? Certainly in this way, even in the sphere of the supernatural, she continues to serve ‘good’ people. In this regard dogs represent the agency of good in the fight against the dark forces incarnated in humans. Shalamov’s female dog Tamara continues to be part of life, both in the totemic representation of her flesh and in spirit. Dogs do, we are led to believe, have souls. This story’s provocative title is built on parallelism between humans and dogs – ‘Bitch Tamara’ could indeed be an epithet for an unfaithful woman. Shalamov explains that Moisei Moiseevich ended

23 M.O. Howey covers this cult of the ‘Necrophagous Dog’ in The Cults of the Dog. Rochford: The C.W. Daniel Company Limited, 1972.

208 Political Animals up in the Gulag as a result of a letter of denunciation written by his own wife. Being half his age she wanted to be rid of him and a letter of denunciation served the purpose more surely and safely than arse- nic. In relation to the story’s title she is the ‘real’ bitch while the bitch dog Tamara is a loving mother and faithful pet. People in their anthropomorphic quest project human vices on to animals. In this narrative humans of both male and female gender are acknowledged as the most cruel, devious and destructive of both humans and animals. It has to be noted that Shalamov’s views on natural justice are different from those of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.24 Shalamov criticised Solzhenitsyn’s rationalisation of evil for creating a false sense of equilibrium.25 Nota- bly, Solzhenitsyn in Gulag Archipelago distinguishes between police and guard dogs and those dogs that protect private property of civilians.26 His own attitude towards dogs is representative of popular utilitarian view of this animal – he is mainly accepting of dogs who help people in their day to day activities.27 Solzhenitsyn’s parallelisms between people in prisons and dogs are manifested in scattered utterings, and they express prisoners’ resentment at being treated like proverbial dogs. Yet, in his Cancer Ward the senseless killing of a dog belonging to an elderly couple, the Kadmins, is strongly emblematic of man’s inhumanity.28In this respect it is noteworthy that Shalamov chose the dog subplot to represent instances of natural and supernatural justice.

24 In his “Nobel Lecture” Solzhenitsyn stressed that the artist must perceive the harmony of the world even “at the lower depth of existence – in poverty, in prison, and in illness” (5). See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Nobel Lecture on Liter- ature (1972)”, in East Meets West. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. 25 On Shalamov’s views on literature see Varlam Shalamov, “O literature”, Voprosy literatury 5 (1989), 225-248. 26 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag 1918-1956: opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniia. I-II. Paris: YMCA Press, 1973. 27 On utilitarian attitudes to working dogs in the USSR see Amy Nelson, “A Hearth For a Dog: The Paradoxes of Soviet Pet Keeping”, in Borders of Socialism: Pri- vate Spheres in Soviet Russia. Ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 123-144. 28 On animals in Solzhenitsyn see Robert Porter, “Animal Magic in Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin and Voynovich”, The Modern Language Review LXXXII/3 (1987), 673-684. Dogs in prison 209

A guard’s story: Sergei Dovlatov’s dog eaters

The popular dissident writer Sergei Dovlatov’s (1941-1990) The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard distances itself from the prison memoirs written by former political prisoners. Dovlatov states in his introductory passage that his attitude towards the camp differs markedly from that of such writers as Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov not only because of his status as a guard rather than as a prisoner but also because Dovlatov describes a camp populated by hardened criminals rather than political prisoners. He also declares that his existential position is different: ‘Solzhenitsyn thought that camps were hell, I believe that hell is inside the people themselves’ (28). In another note, written clearly by the author rather than an authorial persona reliant on his memory, Dovlatov refers to his conversations with Shalamov. Dovlatov disagrees with Shalamov’s notorious hatred of prisons, claiming that he learned to appreciate the creativity of prisoners, their use of argot being just one example of a stylistic virtuosity that has its own set forms. He gives a sharp and insightful analysis of the lexis and syntax of the Russian swear-words (mat), comparing it to the form of oral skaz mastered by such a stylist of Russian prose as Alexei Remizov29 whose stories on dogs are analysed in Chapter 9 in a discussion on transformation narratives. In making these statements Dovlatov positions himself as a tolerant ethnographer and a scholar of cultural anthropology. In this way his position is akin to that of Dosto- evsky’s narrator Gorianchikov in Notes from the House of the Dead, also mentioned by Dovlatov in one of his observations. Dovlatov’s statement that he is cautious not to imitate Shalamov, and his mention of the famous authors who preceded him in the composition of prison notes, serve as evidence of his thorough knowledge of these texts. This position of continuation and demarcation of difference is evident in the dog-related subplot in The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard. While the story is about a dog that is eaten by prisoners, Dovlatov the prison guard narrates his tale in a different stylistic and philosophical key from his predecessors. He resists dividing the world

29 In Joseph Brodsky’s definition Dovlatov was first of all a remarkable stylist. Iosif Brodskii, “O Serezhe Dovlatove (‘Mir urodliv, i liudi grustny’)”, in Sobranie prozy v trekh tomakh. St Petersburg: Limbuss-press, 1995, Vol. III, 355-363.

210 Political Animals of the ‘Zone’ into Us and Them or creating a barrier of difference between those outside and those inside the prison. In his story a pedigree black spaniel belonging to an officer To- kar is caught and eaten by prisoners. Dovlatov is invited to take part in the meal without knowing what kind of meat he is eating. Significant- ly, this treacherous joke played on Dovlatov takes place while he is absorbed in humanitarian thoughts about the prisoners who are having a pleasant and cosy social gathering. His naïve and banal thoughts about the ‘influence of a bad environment’ (128) on criminals who are essentially nice people are shattered by the realisation that the fried meat he has just eaten was dog meat. And not just from any dog. He learns that he has eaten the flesh of Broshka, the dog belonging to his superior. Dovlatov thus frames the dog-meat-eating story within a number of transgressions: dietary, coupled with the strong symbolic meaning of religious transgression as an abomination; and disciplinary – the dog belonged to his superior officer. From the symbolic perspective of the partaking of food with a group of inmates, Dovlatov becomes one of the criminals. This act reflects Dovlatov’s underlying philosophical approach to his conceptualisation of the ‘Zone’ as a space that is no different from the rest of the country. If every prison guard and officer is as much a criminal as the criminals themselves, then it is only fitting that, as a guard, Dovlatov commits the same ‘dietary crime’ as the criminals. Moreover, the prisoners ask Dovlatov to tell the captain about the fate of his dog. The hidden reason for their choice is both sadistic and pragmatic. They achieve a double goal: to punish Dovlatov in his capacity as an outsider, a camp guard, and to reduce him to their own level. They rationalise their choice of Dovla- tov as the messenger of such horrid news by pointing to his well- known eloquence. They argue that, as the most educated among the prison guards, he should be the one to deliver the news. Dovlatov is not the only guard who takes part in the communal dog meat meal. Another guard, Fidel, is also present. He uses this situation as an opportunity to mock Dovlatov’s talent as a note-taker, and in front of the prisoners implicates him in writing informant notes to the camp authorities. Dovlatov attacks the insulting colleague. By doing so he responds to the provocation in a way that duplicates the typical reaction of prison inmates to insults. This episode is meant to further erase the boundaries between criminals and prison guards. Both have the same aggressive impulses, both defend their honour, both know when

Dogs in prison 211 they are confronted by life-threatening situations. The implications of accusations of informing are dire for both prisoners and prison guards. Dovlatov the writer finds an ingenious solution to the impossible task of reporting the news to the dog’s owner, Captain Tokar – Tokar conveniently appears as a deus ex machina from classical drama to resolve the problem. The captain’s reaction to the fate of his dog creates an anti-climax that reduces the dramatic situation to a comic level. He whispers to Dovlatov in a suddenly aged old-man’s husky voice: ‘I will deduct the payment from them. I paid 30 roubles for the dog’ (130). The ‘conspiracy’ to defile the prison guard and to punish the captain by killing his beloved dog fails. The reason for this again is that the prison guards and the high-ranking officer are no different from the criminals themselves. The symbolic number ‘30’ in the ‘30 roubles’ alludes again to the treacherous 30 silver coins which Judas received as the traitor of Jesus Christ. Moreover, the 30 roubles is an intertextual allusion to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead – the 30 silver coins paid by a prisoner for the stolen and betrayed pedigree dog. In both Dovlatov’s and Dostoevsky’s prison notes a link is established between Christ and dog through this oblique allusion to the New Testament. Significantly, in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead a servant was responsible for selling the dog. The dog belonged to an extra-textual ‘absent’ master. In Dovla- tov’s story the owner of the dog is a high-ranking officer. While he does not sell his dog or do it any harm, he betrays its memory. By displaying mercantile thoughts on the news of his dog’s blasphemous death he marks himself as one of a group of Godless traitors. The narrative logic implies that there is no moral difference between criminals and the Soviet official, they both betray the dog as they would betray Jesus Christ. The use of dog meat for consumption by prisoners has a symbolic meaning. Earlier in the text Dovlatov mentions that the prisoners are fed adequately. This rules out the need for any additional food. The consumption of dog meat is thus not a matter of survival; it is a symbolic act. As such, it embodies deliberate transgressions of the norm. It also becomes a political act against the captain who is so attached to his dog. This dog-eating episode signals a difference between Shalamov’s prison notes that rationalise the prisoners’ use of a

212 Political Animals dog skin. For them it was a matter of survival. For Dovlatov’s prisoners the dog-eating act stresses their deliberate embrace of abjectness. In Dostoevsky’s prison notes criminals eat goat meat but they do not eat dog meat. In Dovlatov’s prison notes criminals eat dogs and rape goats. Also they kill and they tattoo their faces. This ‘world’ (35) is described in the sentence that I have chosen as the epigraph for this chapter. Dovlatov includes in this one sentence the whole set of acts prohibited in the Old Testament: to kill, to sodomise, to eat ‘unclean’ meat, to make permanent decorations on the skin. All these transgressions function on the symbolic level that anthropologists explain as ways in which the ancient Israelites defined themselves from the God- less Others.30 Such prohibitions erected borders between the righteous communal Selves and the abominable Others. In Dostoevsky’s prison camp the Russian muzhiks who kill nevertheless preserve a sense of religiosity, a sense of Christ. In the logic that Dostoevsky ascribes to them through their becoming-criminal and becoming-sinners they show their understanding of Christ as an all-suffering and all- forgiving God-man. Their hopes to be forgiven by Christ give them spiritual strength to withstand the punishment, which they equate with Christ’s own suffering. Unlike Dovlatov’s Soviet criminals Dostoev- sky’s criminals do not transgress any of the prohibitions listed in Le- viticus such as eating unclean food, practising sodomy or tattooing the face. According to Edmund Leach, the eating of dog meat does not fall into the category of ‘consciously tabooed substances’ (31).31 Foods such as pork for Hebrews or beef for Brahmins are prohibited but are still recognised as possible food. Dog meat is classed as one of a number of edible substances ‘that by culture and language are not recognised as food at all.’ These substances are ‘unconsciously tabooed.’ (31). This second category relates to the close association between humans and animals. Dogs, in the perception of the English, are part of a close circle as expressed in colloquialisms that claim that ‘man and dog may be thought of as beings of the same kind’ (32), that they are companions and that ‘dog is man’s best friend’. On the other

30 Jacob Milgrom, “The Biblical Diet Laws as an Ethical System”, Interpretations 17 (1963), 288-301. 31 Leach, “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”.

Dogs in prison 213 hand man and food are antithetical categories. Man is not food, so dog cannot be food either. Russian culture and language recognise dog meat as non-food. In Russian culture the same view of the dog exists as that which is reflected in the English sayings and again, man is not food. In Dovla- tov’s world of the ‘Zone’ this set of taboos does not apply because it functions as a separate world, a realm that he terms ‘That world’. Human beings are not friends to one another, dogs are not men’s friends and are not thought of as beings of ‘the same kind’. They are not treated as companions; they can be eaten and killed. Their role as substitute is marked by a minus sign – they are substitutes for objects of abuse. In being the victims of rape other animals, such as goats32 also fall into this category of negative substitutes. The ‘Zone’ is anti- culture. Sociologist Adrian Franklin notes that pet-keeping patterns and practices can be explained by ontological insecurities, and pets like dogs are kept as companions in lieu of a variety of human relations. Studies show that pets are most commonly kept by those who have recently suffered some kind of social crisis or by lonely people. How- ever, people extend care and humanity towards pets not simply because they fulfil ‘surrogate human roles’ (86).33 Dostoevsky’s autobiographical hero and Shalamov’s inmates all fall into the categories outlined in this sociological research, and the writers measure the inmates’ humanity by their ability to interact with dogs and other pets. Not everybody needs the ontological and therapeutic engagement with animals in the texts examined here. Dostoevsky chose the attitude towards dogs as a demarcation line between educated classes and the peasant class. As a self-styled ethnographer he understood that rules, prejudices and conventions are of cultural and social origin. He did not describe cases of abominable behaviour among prisoners such as dog-eating or sodomy. For his narrative in the 1860s this could have been the result of self- censorship. His representation of sadistic behaviour allowed the reader to complete the possible abominations by applying his or her imagina-

32 Leach classifies goats in contemporary English culture as being similar to pets. Goats live close to human households and therefore also constitute the ‘unconscious taboo’ category. 33 Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures.

214 Political Animals tion. Dovlatov’s text did not have to be censored. It demonstrates that it is only when writers can openly write about tabooed topics such as dog-meat-eating, male homosexuality and sex with animals that the dog becomes a dog in Russian literature. Dovlatov was able to write such literature only after he had left ‘the zone of the Soviet Union’ and settled in New York.34 For this reason the small black dog, the pedigree spaniel, is the only true victim in Dovlatov’s ‘Zone’. Dovlatov’s position as a neither an outsider nor an insider of the prison camp zone is symmetrically represented by two different dog- related themes. One deals with the treatment of the unfortunate dog Broshka which the prisoners abduct and eat. The dog, however, is also a site of the moral degradation of his owner, the Soviet official. An- other theme relates to service dogs that are shown to be equally hostile to their handlers and to prisoners. These dogs’ attitude reflects Dovla- tov’s position vis-à-vis the ‘Zone’ and the Soviet Union. The next chapter will focus on the representation of dogs in police and camp guard service in the 1960s. Although some episodes in Dovlatov’s The Zone were written in the 1960s, the book as a whole also belongs to the year of its publication, 1982. I categorise the themes of the prison service dogs within the context of the intellectual trends of the 1960s and 1980s. In terms of the function of dog thematics in Russian literature and culture, it is highly illustrative that a dog plot was chosen to depict, represent and fight against political censorship in the 1960s. The 1970s and 1980s were marked by the rise of dissident activism, one of the major manifestations of which was the struggle by intellectuals to force the State to loosen censorship constraints. Another feature of the dissident movement was the emergence of the émigré dissident culture in the 1970s-1980s. Dissident discourse made good use of dog thematics.

34 Dovlatov referred to the Soviet Union as the Big Zone. See Sergei Dovlatov, “SSSR – Bol’shaia zona”, Novyi Amerikanets 72, (July 5-11, 1981), 20-22. Part Three Dogs in the service of their country

Chapter 6 Dogs and their masters in police and prison service: 1960s- 1980s

[The dog] Ruslan is that ‘ideal hero’ […], that knight of communism seeking to serve not from fear but from conscience. – Abram Tertz. 19801

The decade of the 1960s produced the cult story ‘Mukhtar’ by Izrail’ Metter (1909-1996) about the Soviet police dog of that name. The success of the story and its film adaptation Ko mne, Mukhtar! (Come here, Mukhtar!, 1965), was based on one fundamentally new idea – that a service dog who had been incapacitated during his service deserves to be taken care of in old age. The idea that society should take care of animals after they have been in service was shockingly new in its promotion of a new kind of morality. ‘Mukhtar’ demonstrates the high moral stance of a dog handler working in the Soviet police, compared to the more mechanistic approach taken by other dog handlers. While the story gives a positive image to Soviet police at large, it also exposes some individuals in service as uneducated and unsuitable to train dogs. This decade also served as a platform for a dissident movement that rose in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these dissident intellectuals were writers. One remarkable representative of this group, Georgii Vladimov (1931-2003), produced another most celebrated story of a dog in this decade, the novella Vernyi Ruslan: istoriia karaul’noi sobaki (Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog, 1963-1965).2 While Metter’s story was published in the Soviet Union and made into a film

1 Abram Tertz, “Beasts and Men”, The New York Review of Books 24 January, XXVI/21 (1980), 1. 2 Georgii Vladimov, Vernyi Ruslan: istoriia karaul’noi sobaki. Frankfurt/Main: Posev, 1981. In English translation: Georgi Vladimov, Faithful Ruslan: The Story of a Guard Dog. Trans. by Michael Glenny, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. 218 Political Animals shortly after it was written, the destiny of Vladimov’s story was markedly different. Circulated illicitly in self-published samizdat form in the 1970s, it was one of the sharpest critiques of the Soviet Gulag or prison camp system. Because the samizdat manuscript did not give the author’s name many readers erroneously considered it to be penned by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in Germany in 1975. The reforms of Glasnost and the nearing collapse of the Soviet Union made the publication of the story and the making of a film adaptation possible in 1990.3 Both Metter and Vladimov achieved the status of celebrities as a result of the phenomenal success of their dog stories, and in both stories the dogs are represented by the German shepherd breed.4 But there are major differences. Whereas Metter’s story advocates a new humanistic way of training police dogs, Vladimov’s story shows the crippling and distorting effect that human training has on such dogs. Whereas Metter advocates the responsible care of service dogs after the end of their service life, Vladimov’s story shows that Soviet Gulag dog handlers killed their service dogs once the animals were no longer able to perform their duties. In the first story the dog is humanised by a handler; in the second story the inhumane handler de/humanises the dog. In Metter’s story people working in the police can be good and bad. In Vladimov’s story there are no good people on either side of the barbed wired fence: in Russia’s Gulags no one remains uncontam- inated by cruelty. From Vladimov’s literary perspective dogs and people have distorted psyches; people lose their humanity; loyalties are perverted and destroyed; and humans betray those whom they train to love and obey: their dogs. Another important dissident writer and journalist to reflect on the dog theme in Russian prisons of the 1960s was Sergei Dovlatov. As was mentioned in the previous chapter, Dovlatov wrote some episodes of his later book, The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard, in the 1960s. The book was published in 1982 when Dovlatov was an émigré in New York. Although police dogs appear as episodic charac-

3 Vernyi Ruslan. Dir. Vladimir Khmel’nitskii. Fest-Zemlia, TPO. 1990. 4 In a fascinating forum on Faithful Ruslan a professional cynologist Natalia Kar- lusheva states that Ruslan was a German shepherd, which, she stresses, is the same as East European shepherd. She also describes Vladimov’s depiction of specially trained guard dogs as very accurate. Petr Vail’, “Geroi vremeni. Vernyi Ruslan”. Radio svoboda. Archive.svoboda.org/programs/cicles/hero/07.asp Dogs in police and prison service 219 ters in this story, Dovlatov’s text makes an important contribution to the theme of police dogs on service in Soviet criminal camps. His placement of police dogs in the grey zone between criminals and prison guards breaks the dichotomy between the world inside the prison and that outside. In this chapter I will explore the representation of dogs in service as depicted by these three authors, all of whom problematise issues linked to ethnic identity and national character in their dog stories. The period of the 1960s to the 1980s was marked by the rise of official antisemitism in the Soviet Union. This was paralleled by increasing Russian self-assertiveness both in official discourse and dissident movements.5 Metter, Vladimov and Dovlatov use their police dog narratives to express their views on overt and covert aspects of the political agendas of the dominant culture and various subcultures in operation during this period. In Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archi- pelago police dogs have clever and angry faces; they are hostile to prisoners and are part of the oppressive system. However, as Andrea Rossing McDowell observes, ‘the guard dogs never occupy the centre stage of the narrative’ (242).6For this reason this chapter does not address this text.

Dogs and socialism with a human face: ‘Mukhtar’ by Izrail’ Metter

The story ‘Mukhtar’ and the film adaptation provide valuable material for the study of censorship in the Soviet Union.7 The hero of both, the German shepherd dog Mukhtar, is a truly political dog in the context of Soviet society in the 1960s. The author invests the dog plot with ethical and societal problems. Through the peripeteia of a dog’s life the author introduces material that allows him to explore a cluster of ethical issues relating to various layers of Soviet society. The dog Mukhtar’s difficult working life as a police dog allows the author to expose episodes of dishonest and criminal behaviour by Soviet citi-

5 See John Klier, “Outline of Russian-Jewish History: 1954-2001”, in An Antholo- gy of Jewish-Russian Literature. Volume 2:1953-2001. Ed. Maxim D. Shrayer, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2007, 1199-1206. 6 Andrea Rossing McDowell, Situating the Beast, 242. 7 I. Metter, “Mukhtar”, in Raznye sud’by. Povesti i rasskazy. Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1973, 262-318. Come here, Mukhtar! Dir. Semyen Tumanov, Mosfilm, 1965.

220 Political Animals zens. The phenomenal success of both the story and the film is due to the main idea which this narrative promotes: that a dog that has had a hard and honest life working for the state police should be taken care of in his old age by this institution. Metter approaches the topic of society’s responsibility towards working animals from an ethical perspective. The idea that working animals, such as police dogs, should not be put to death after they have become too old to perform their duties appealed to the sensibilities of the audience. This idea was based on a simple parallelism: if Soviet society takes care of its citizens in their old age by providing them with pensions, then it should do the same for Other former ‘servicemen’ like police dogs. This logic is reversible: the society that refuses to take care of service animals in their old age may decide that old people are not worth looking after. Metter’s dog narrative is an attack on the extremes of Soviet- style dehumanising utilitarianism. The parallelism between dogs and humans aims to raise the audience’s awareness of their attitudes to, and treatment of, dogs. It exposes the survival of folk prejudices against dogs among the masses. It promotes education and ethical humanism. In its form and message it is a socialist realist narrative with an optimistic conclusion. But not everything that Metter criticises lies on the surface layer of this text. This dog narrative conceals hidden messages of political content that the author is anxious to pass on to a receptive reader. This signalled material relates to Metter’s personal experience as a subaltern in Soviet society, a Soviet Jew.

From Murat to Mukhtar: What’s in a name?

Metter was in Leningrad during the siege of World War II. He worked on the radio station and wrote satirical anti-Nazi items. Success came after the publication of his Mukhtar story under the title ‘Murat’ in the most prestigious literary journal, Novyi mir. After the success of the film adaptation he acquired international recognition. The novella was translated into a number of European languages and the author received Italy’s esteemed Grinzane Cavour Prize for literature in 1992, so putting his name next to that of Alberto Moravia. Yet in his own country he has been marginalised because of his Jewish origins.8 Alt-

8 On his Jewish identity see Metter’s Rodoslovnaia, written in the 1980s. Izrail Metter, “From Pedigree”, in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Volume

Dogs in police and prison service 221 hough a Leningrad siege survivor, he was made to feel an outsider in his own country. His first name, Izrail’ – Israel in English – was a constant marker of his ethnicity. In the 1960s when the film adaptation was made, a decade marked by overt anti-Zionist campaigns that camouflaged their antisemitic underpinnings, the name Izrail’ became not only a stigmatised marker of Jewishness but also the marker of association with contemporary Israel, eponymous as it was with the state of Israel – a country and people to which the Soviet Union was openly hostile because of its politics of pro-Arab countries. When his work was published in the 1960s and 1970s his first name was not printed in full – only the initial ‘I’ as in ‘I. Metter’ was given. The fact that Metter did not Russify his name speaks about his uncompromising position vis-à-vis Soviet antisemitism. He is one of a group of Soviet Jewish authors who represent the growth of Jewish self- awareness during the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s when it was overtly under attack. The name of the dog Mukhtar, however, did undergo a change in a process that emblematises the role of the name as a marker of alterity. Scholars have studied the history of applications for changes of surnames in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.9 All requests were motivated by one major factor – people who carried ‘wrong’ surnames were targeted by officials and common folk alike because they were identified as subaltern. Jews and members of other national and religious minorities often applied to the authorities for permission to change their first names and surnames into neutral ‘Russian’ sounding names and surnames. Such requests were considered a matter of major importance both in the Imperial Russia of the nineteenth century and in the Soviet Union. Initially the Tsar himself was the only person with the power to grant permission to have a name changed, while in Soviet Russia in the 1960s an appeal to change a Jewish name into a non-Jewish name could only be granted by the supreme authorities. It is highly ironic for the theme of this book that among

2:1953-2001. Ed. Maxim D. Shrayer, Trans. Richard Sheldon, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2007, 896-902. Also see Rita Genzeleva, Puti evreiskogo samosoznaniia: Vasilii Grossman, Izrail’ Metter, Boris Iampol’skii, Ruf’ Zernova. Jerusalem: Ge- sharim, 1999. 9 Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010. Benzion Munitz, “Identifying Jewish Names in Russia”, Soviet Jewish Affairs III (1972), 66-75.

222 Political Animals historical applications made to change a surname there were people with the names Sobakin (Dog), Sobachkina (She-dog), Sukin (Bitch) – all of whom complained that their surnames caused them humiliation.10 There was one applicant whose surname was Dog-killer (Ubiisobaka). The etymology of such surnames is highly telling in regard to the history of the perception of dogs in Russian culture. The question ‘What’s in a name?’, so important in the history of prejudice, applies to the dog name used in Metter’s story and the film adaptation. The name Mukhtar replaced the original name, Murat.11 How different is Murat from Mukhtar? Murat is a common name among the Turkic ethnicities of the Soviet Union. Most of these nationalities are traditionally Islamic. When Metter gave his dog the name of Murat he acted in accordance with Russian cultural tradition that dictated that dogs should not have Orthodox ‘Christian’ names. The proverb, as the reader of this book knows, formulates this custom as ‘Not to give a dog a human name’. As this adage suggests, dogs can only be given the names of those who are foreign and who thus fall into the category of ‘sub-human’. This proverb is based on a concept that reflects the nation’s xenophobia and prejudice towards the ethnic and religious Other. By calling his dog Murat Metter introduces the theme and problematics of ethnicity. The change of name from Turkic Murat to Arabic Mukhtar still preserves the cultural tradition of giving dogs non-Christian names. Although Mukhtar (‘Chosen’ in Arabic) is used as a first name and surname in Arabic countries, as well as in Turkey and Cyprus, this name was deemed to be more politically correct than the Turkic names because of the ethnic composition of the Soviet Union. That a more neutral but still Asiatic Mukhtar was deemed necessary for the novella to be adapted into the mass medium of a film illustrates the pervasive role of censorship in issues related to nationality and ethnicity. It is also evidence of the use of Aesopian language in order to convey politically subversive material as denoted through the representation of the dog in the 1960s. After the release of the film

10 Andrew Verner, “What’s in a Name? Of Dog-Killers, Jews and Rasputin”, Slavic Review LIII/4 (1994), 1046-1070, 1052. 11 I. Vinogradov, “O povestiakh i rasskazakh”, in I. Metter, Raznye sud’by. Povesti i rasskazy. Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1973, 3-10. Dogs in police and prison service 223 the subsequent publication of the novella used Mukhtar, and not Mu- rat, as the dog’s name. The title of the story was changed accordingly. This change of name into a more ethnically neutral form is paralleled in the story by the history of the change of the name of the dog’s breed. In the novella Mukhtar is a German shepherd. The name of the breed has a clear ethnic pointer: ‘German’. It also has a political connotation in the context of World War II – Nazi policy venerated this breed as superior not only to other breeds of dogs but also to humans, namely non-Aryans. As was pointed out previously in this book, German shepherds became synonymous with Aryans in the racial taxonomy of the Nazis.12 The Soviets were developing their own variant of the breed. Metter makes use of this situation in order to indicate the political changes taking place in the Soviet Union. His narrator explains that after World War II the name of the breed was changed in the USSR from German shepherd to East European shepherd to demarcate a difference between the enemy and the Soviet people. By the time the breed was accepted to serve in the Soviet police force its official name was East European shepherd. The narrator notes that as the years passed the name of the East European shepherd breed reverted to German shepherd. Along with other dogs of this breed Mukhtar was reclassified accordingly. Historically, Cynology Council of the Ministry of Agriculture of the USSR officially ap- proved the breed in 1964. The new breed shows traces of laika DNA and thus emblematises quasi-Eurasian genes.13 When ‘Mukhtar’ was written, there were uncertainties about the official status of the new breed. Metter’s sensitivity to the issue of the renaming of the dog breed has not only political but also personal connotations. In this particular example the renaming of the dog breed is symbolically underpinned by the notion of ethnicity. While his narrator explains that changes in international affairs motivated the return to the original name of the breed, the secondary meaning is related to the issues of ethnicity and the internal politics. The parallel between dogs and eth-

12 On the ethics of the dog-human relation in the context of Levinas’ experiences at the hands of the Nazis see Bob Plant, “Welcoming dogs: Levinas and the ‘animal question’”, Philosophy and Social Criticism XXXVII/49 (2011), 36-71. 13 On the history of East European shepherds see Ol’ga Levshakova, “Angely- khraniteli: O poiskovo-spasatel’noi sluzhbe”, Drug: Zhurnal dlia liubitelei sobak 7/8 (2001), 42-45.

224 Political Animals nic underdogs becomes revealed in the emblematics of the ‘foreign’ dog breed and foreign names.

The moral shallowness of the Soviet people

‘Mukhtar’ broadly represents the general mood of the Thaw era, offer- ing the reader a critical account of aspects of Soviet reality in a decade that was marked by de-Stalinisation. Published in 1960, Metter’s novella opens a new decade. In so doing it represents a brave attempt to discuss issues related to the imperfections and shortcomings of Soviet society. That Metter used the story of a dog to address these issues reaffirms the link between dog thematics and politics. The opening scene of this story takes place in 1950 – Metter gives this precise year to indicate the last years of Stalin’s regime that would come to an end in 1953 with the dictator’s death. The first scene of the story is provocative and confronts the reader with a set of gripping questions. The Leningrad police receive a telephone call from a train station official asking them to remove a stray dog from one of the empty train compartments. The police officer on duty is at first reluctant to intervene but, after a conversation with an experienced dog handler, he agrees to send him to remove the dog. On arrival at the scene the handler, Glazychev, is confronted by a histrionic performance by a woman worker who insists that the dog be shot. Metter artfully emphasises the woman’s over-reaction. She exagger- ates the impact of the dog’s presence in the train and pathologises the dog, calling him ‘mad’. This panicked response has an effect on other members of the crowd who are also in a state of fear. The scene is established with a crowd of people ready to persecute one dog, alle- gorically epitomising the misbalance of power as the dog, under threat by a disproportionately large group of people, becomes an emblem of unjust persecution. While the crowd represents hostile and irrational forces Glazychev represents calmness and reason. He approaches the dog in line with professional methods of pacifying animals and in no time manages to put a collar over his neck. The narrator notes that Glazychev speaks to the dog in a tone that is ‘remarkably composed and respectful’ (265). From this moment the dog falls into the capable and humane hands of a professional trainer. Metter’s modus operandi in this novella is to expose the ills of Soviet citizens through satire and to try and change society via educa-

Dogs in police and prison service 225 tion. His depiction of the crowd of Soviet people is the first of a number of critical episodes aimed at exposing the faults and failures of this society. Written in line with the pathos of the Thaw era, the scene shows the group of Soviet workers in an unflattering light. The woman worker is cruel and uneducated. The group of spectators shows no signs of compassion towards the animal and no one challenges the woman worker’s call to kill the ‘enemy’. This call to shoot the dog sounds like an obsolete slogan to kill the target on the spot – hardly an appropriate action in a time of peace. The workers are clearly ignorant of notions of animal rights and animal suffering. The only person who verbally expresses pity for the dog paradoxically is the young woman who started the panic in the first place: she locks herself in the toilet and is afraid to leave because of the dog. While the young woman may be less aggressive than the older generation, she shares with the other spectators their fear of dogs. There is an intergenerational continuity in the culture of ignorance here that was not conquered by the Soviet system of education in relation to animals and animal rights. The group of Soviet workers is not the only layer of society that lacks humane feelings towards the dog. The German shepherd dog ended up in the train compartment because he was abandoned there by his mistress. As the wife of a high-ranking officer, this woman belongs to the privileged stratum of Soviet society. Metter describes her with clinical precision, presenting her as a typical wife of a well- placed husband and an example of the new, overtly bourgeois Soviet ‘middle class’ seeking the good life through marriage. She is corpu- lent and well-groomed and she wears expensive furs. Her arrogance manifests itself in the utmost cynicism with which she approaches life. When she is approached by the police she declares that she abandoned the dog on purpose, as she was inconvenienced by having a large animal in her apartment. She wants her home to be clean and tidy. She also maintains that she is anxious about the safety of her small children. This subplot of squeamishness in regard to dogs relates allegor- ically to the discourse of purity and danger. It functions as a parody of prejudices and superstitions shared by simple folk and ‘middle class wives’. Fittingly, when Glazychev takes Mukhtar to his clean and shiny apartment his wife shows a similar dislike of the dog. She is afraid that the dog will attack their child and is concerned about the dog’s threat to hygiene. These ‘urbane’ women who live in apartments

226 Political Animals clearly do not want to have dogs because they believe them to be dirty and unsanitary. Their less educated counterparts, as discussed previously, continue to think of dogs as unclean animals on the more symbolic level. While the author depicts these typical reactions to the dog in order to expose the level of ignorance shared by various strata of So- viet society, the plot of the story consists of a succession of episodes related to Mukhtar’s training and working career as a police dog. All of these episodes expose moral vices and criminal offences of Soviet citizens. (Metter, however, considered the achievement of his story to lie in its proposition that private and state property were of equal value; indeed, he had to insist that this idea be passed by the censors during work on the film adaptation of the story.)

Polemics with Pavlovian legacy in dog training

While the role of a dog in police service is to help find various criminal offenders, the more telling educational material vis-à-vis the dog thematics is contained in the pages describing the dog training. Met- ter’s narrative presents two types of trainers and two types of training approaches. One trainer uses a strictly ‘scientific’, mechanical form of training in line with Ivan Pavlov’s system. Another, Glazychev, represents a new level of humanism in polemics with this more mechanical treatment of dogs. The author’s sympathies are overtly on the side of Glazychev, whose humane treatment of Mukhtar goes as far as to secure a place for him in the police kennels even after the dog becomes unsuitable for police work. The scientific formalist trainer follows the Pavlovian paradigm. His dictum is ‘Dogs do not have love, they have reflexes. Reflexes have to be conditioned’ (273). To express his authorial antipathy towards the Pavlovian trainer Metter shows him as an informant on his colleagues. He does not conduct open discussions about various methods of training, but turns it into a battlefield of ideologies. He presents the differences between Pavlovian views on dog training and the views expressed by Western authors as a juxtaposition between Russian and non-Russian. For him Western authors form one hostile category. The approach to dog training thus becomes a matter of Rus- sian patriotism and politics. Dogs in police and prison service 227

While Glazychev is an intuitive humanist, the chief veterinarian of the Leningrad police dog training kennels is a theoretician. He is critical of Pavlov’s views on dog psychology and insists that dogs understand human language and are offended if people insult them. Indeed, he regards the representation of dogs in literature as an equally valid source of knowledge. In particular, he refers to Jack London’s writing as a useful source of knowledge about dogs. This use of an Irish American writer as a source of knowledge for training a Soviet dog is subversive.14 The ‘Pavlovian’ dog handler writes a report on the veterinarian. Fittingly, the report states that the veterinarian calls this particular breed German shepherd instead of East European shepherd. He thus accuses the veterinarian of lacking patriotism and having pro- Western sympathies. In overstating the veterinarian’s subversiveness this report functions in parallel with the exaggerated reaction of the crowd of Soviet workers at the train depot. Just as these workers turn the dog’s presence on the train into a major incident, so the nasty dog handler politicises the veterinarian’s opinions on dog psychology. Metter exposes the formalistic dog handler’s ignorance by having him mistake Jack London’s writing for scientific material. The uneducated dog handler admits that he resents being told to improve his education by reading and maintains that it is difficult for him because he has only had a primary school education. Metter is critical of the policy of promoting uneducated people into positions of responsibility, and implies that the socialist system still clearly has a lot to achieve. He focuses on issues related to moral and ethical education that can be achieved through reading world literature with its more humanistic pathos. This anti-scientific stance promotes pan-human values and Metter clearly intends to contribute to world literature in relation to the subject of dogs with the primary aim being to educate the contemporary Russian reader. This moral educational goal reaches its apogee in the novella’s conclusion. Mukhtar’s long and honest career comes to an end when he captures a dangerous criminal. The criminal possesses a gun and he uses it to defend himself against the dog. While the dog survives he

14 Jack London’s work was translated into Russian, and in the 1950s a full edition of his works was published in the Soviet Union. His stories appealed to the Sovi- et spirit of the conquest of nature. Metter, however, finds in London the theme of the respect of animal nature.

228 Political Animals loses his fitness to be a police dog. Glazychev’s patient efforts to rehabilitate the dog physically do not succeed, and the special evaluation committee declares Mukhtar unsuitable for police work. His handler starts a campaign to find a retirement home for Mukhtar within the police kennels. He has to fight the opposition and he does find support among high-ranking police officials. A petition is sent to Moscow explaining Mukhtar’s achievements. The wording of the petition refers to Mukhtar’s case as if he was a serviceman wounded on duty. The letter contains a calculation showing that, during the six years of service, the dog saved the country one million and seven hundred roubles. It then budgets the dog’s keep at some four roubles a day. The tone of the letter is official. The underlying approach is to make a case for Mukhtar as it would be made for a person in the service of the police. The letter is received favourably in Moscow and Mukhtar is officially granted permission to spend his old age in the police kennels with sufficient funding to cover his lodgings and food. Metter wrote in his later years that the idea that it is necessary to care for service dogs in their old age came to him during a visit to the Leningrad Museum of Criminal Investigations in 1959. During this visit he saw a taxidermic exhibit of a police dog called Sultan.15 The writing next to the dusty stuffed animal explained that, in his ten years of police service, the dog took part in five thousand crime- busting operations and helped to recover stolen property to the sum of three million roubles. Metter recalled that he could not individualise the dog’s life on the basis of this description. It was only when a museum attendant told him that the dog had not been taken care of in his old age that he was moved by Sultan’s story. At this point he saw the parallel between the lives of animals and humans.

How Soviet society cares for its elderly, both people and dogs: Kantian moral imperatives

Metter’s objective is to measure society’s ethical maturity by testing how it treats the elderly via its treatment of animals. The story raises the issue of the need to abandon military-style cruelty and to nurture humanistic gentility. The dog handler Glazychev represents this new attitude in contrast with the old. There are others, however, who look

15 I.M. Metter, Sobaki. Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1982.

Dogs in police and prison service 229 at Mukhtar as a hanger-on who wastes the State’s money. Fittingly, the person who calls the invalid dog Mukhtar a ‘darmoed’ (parasite, sponger) tells the dog that his fur would make a fabulous jacket. In post-Holocaust realia the image of an old dog’s body being utilised for its fur has definite allegorical connotations. In concentration camps the first to be gassed were the old and the weak. Where the cult of the young and the strong is established, society is in danger of following the same path as Nazi Germany. Metter’s logic in regard to human responsibility towards working animals finds its parallel in Kantian ethics, in particular in the reasoning found in Immanuel Kant’s Lectures on Ethics. Kant maintained that humans have duties towards animals, and people’s humanity is measured by their attitude towards animals.16 His reasoning is built on the analogy between humans and animals:

Animal nature has analogies to human nature and by doing our duties to animals in respect of manifestations which correspond to manifestations of human nature, we indirectly do our duty towards humanity. Thus, if a dog served his master long and faithfully, his service, on the analogy of human service, deserves reward. (137) 17

In this novella Metter demonstrates that Mukhtar’s nature is analogous to human nature. He shows episodes depicting the dog’s ‘human’ emotional reactions. Mukhtar loved his former mistress, who betrayed him by first abandoning him on the train and then by trading him in to the police for one hundred and twenty roubles. When she comes to visit him some time later he tears her expensive coat and pretends not to recognise her. This act of revenge receives praise from his handler Glazychev – proof that both dogs and people do not like being betrayed by those they love. Mukhtar’s jealousy of his handler’s family shows that, as a manifestation of love, jealousy is an emotion shared by dogs and humans. When Mukhtar is sent to a dangerous assignment to stop a gun-wielding criminal, Glazychev is willing to risk his own life to save the dog in a further manifestation of the direct

16 See Lara Denis, “Kant’s Conception of Duties regarding Animals: Reconstruc- tion and Reconsideration”, History of Philosophy Quarterly VII/4 (2000), 405- 423. 17 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics. Eds Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind. Trans. Peter Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, 137.

230 Political Animals mutuality of feelings of loyalty and love in humans and dogs. Finally, when Mukhtar is old, the young dogs relate to him with the arrogance characteristic of young people’s attitude towards the old:

The young trainee dogs contemptuously looked at this old, weak, stiff- legged dog without knowing anything about his life, and wondered what was the purpose of him still limping around in this glorious world. (318)

The analogy between dog and human life manifests itself here in the way society treats the old. A moral society has an obligation to look after its older citizens, and Metter broadens the concept of such citizenship to include Mukhtar. As a dog who honestly served society and contributed to its well-being, Mukhtar is a powerful object of readers’ empathy.

Dogs and socialism without a human face: Georgii Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog

Georgii Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog depicts a society that does not function on Kantian moral imperatives and does not have respect either for the animals who serve it or for humans. Metter’s novella did not question the moral aspects of dog training for police service; rather, it accepted society’s need to have trained animals to help to catch dangerous offenders. For Vladimov the notion of training guard dogs and search dogs by the Soviet police is in itself immoral. Police dog trainers and prison dog handlers are the representation of human evil and cruelty, and their methods of training distort dogs’ true nature. Human trainers, he believed, change and pervert all the good natural impulses with which these animals are born. They exploit dogs’ ability to love their masters. They put them through dressage which makes them hate the enemy and love and obey their masters. If in Metter’s ‘Mukhtar’ the bond between the dog handler and Mukhtar is based on mutual love and loyalty, then in Vla- dimov’s dissident text dog handlers deceitfully betray their dogs. They train them to love their masters while they themselves do not love them in return. They hate the dogs for the very emotions and skills they trained in them.

Dogs in police and prison service 231

Vladimov’s story is a political allegory of the psychology of the subordination of the masses by evil tyrants. His prison camp is an allegory for Soviet Russia, his dog trainers and dogs are the allegories for Soviet people, and the dog Ruslan emblematises the Russian people as one subset of the multi-ethnic entity of the Soviet people. The plot of the story is simple and yet strikingly original: one morning a profound change takes place in the life of the guard dog Ruslan. He wakes up and is taken for a walk by his trainer to discover that the gates of the prison camp are wide open and that there are no prisoners left in the camp.18 Suddenly Ruslan and his handler are left without a duty to fulfil. With all the prison guards and prisoners gone and the camp closed and disbanded, there is no need for guard dogs. The dog handlers are ordered to shoot their dogs before departing to their places of origin, and Ruslan’s handler takes him out the prison gates in order to do just this. By accident Ruslan’s life is spared: the driver of a bog tractor arrives to demolish and level the barracks in order to make space for a new paper mill. The camp is situated in the middle of the Siberian taiga and prisoners have been used as tree fellers to supply the country with timber. The tractor driver enters into conversation with the prison guard dog handler and distracts his attention. The handler decides to let Ruslan go free. From that moment Ruslan begins his new life. Driven both by inertia and trained reflexes he continues to live a life of imaginary service. Every day he shows up at the train station in accordance with his former occupation, in which he was trained to guard columns of newly arrived prisoners and catch any runaways. In this new life he lives in a nearby village, caring for himself. Trained to take food only from his masters, the dog learns to hunt in the nearby forest. He continues this life of imaginary service, waiting for the return of his master and the runaway prisoners. The dog cannot conceive that the prisoners have been allowed to leave forever and is sure that they will be either caught or will return of their own free will. This assumption is based on the dog’s experience in the camp: all runaway prisoners returned sooner or later because there

18 See a discussion on the theme in Vladimov in connection with the historical situation in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall when service dogs such as border guard dogs became obsolete in Andrea Rossing McDowell, Situating the Beast: The Role of Animal Imagery in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russian Literature. Indiana University, PhD thesis, 2001.

232 Political Animals was no way out of the taiga forests. No escapee could survive the harsh conditions of the Siberian wild and no villager from the nearby settlement would dare to hide a runaway. Driven by this faith in the eventual return of the prisoners, Ruslan one day finds his former master. The episode describing Ruslan’s encounter with his old master is one of the most emotionally disturbing scenes in the story. The master is sitting in an eatery in the village when Ruslan approaches him. Ruslan is ecstatic and full of love for his master. But the master shows his contempt for the dog. He abuses Ruslan by forcing into his mouth bread thickly covered with mustard. This violent and cruel act symbolises the master’s own weakness. Now that he is no longer in command of the lives of hundreds of prisoners he chooses the dog as an object for his cruel behaviour. Accustomed to humiliating those who are in no position to respond to such abuse, the former prison guard chooses his own dog as a victim. Unlike in ‘Mukhtar’, in Vladimov’s story dog handlers betray their dogs. The inhumanity of this group is manifested in their contempt for humans and dogs alike. In this episode Ruslan discovers for the first time that his master does not love him, and his worldview falls apart. This sudden discovery has a cathartic effect and Ruslan starts thinking in flashbacks on the meaning of his life. While he continues to go to the train station for the expected arrival of new prisoners, he spends increasingly more time in the forest. In the natural environment of the woods he experiences visions of his life: flashbacks from his puppy days and reminiscences of various episodes in the life of the guard dogs. Notably, he dreams not only about episodes that did not take place in his ‘real’ life but also about remnants of some distant supra-real times. Despite Ruslan’s gradual self-discovery of his true pre-trained self, the call to serve does not leave him. Because of this call Ruslan is incapable of changing his life. While he could join the animals of the forest and so become free, he nevertheless is driven by the urge to serve. This responsibility to service is as strong as the call of nature and he sublimates and suppresses his natural desires in the name of duty. In Freudian terminology Ruslan lives ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, but while Freud maintained that the drive to live beyond the pleasure principle is not exclusively the result of a civilising upbring- Dogs in police and prison service 233 ing but rather a fascinating phenomenon of human nature,19 in Ruslan’s case the situation is different. His need to serve and work is the result of his training, a process which included the infliction of pain and episodes of punishment and reward. Ruslan’s need to serve and to live beyond the pleasure principle is, therefore, the result of human intervention. And it is this need to serve, engraved on the dog’s psyche, that leads to Ruslan’s death. The episode describing Ruslan’s end, in which the narrative reaches its climax, is gruesome. One day a group of people arrives at the railway station and various former guard dogs, including Ruslan, rejoice in having their expectations finally fulfilled. In their minds they perceive the newly arrived people to be prisoners in need of being guarded and escorted to the camp. In reality, the arrivals are en- thusiasts who have come to work on the new paper mill. The dogs round them up into a column and drive them towards the village. At this stage the arrivals do not consider themselves to be in any danger and do not understand the meaning of the dogs’ behaviour. Tragedy strikes when some of the unsuspecting arrivals stray away from the column to stop in the town to have a drink or something to eat. It is then that the former prison dogs attack them one by one. During the resulting skirmish Ruslan is cruelly and lethally wounded by men from the group, who show extraordinary brutality in their fight with the dogs. They beat Ruslan with a spade, break his spine and leave him to die in a ditch. No humans try to save the wounded dog’s life: no village residents, no former prison guards (some of whom are still in the village) and no one from the newly arrived group of young en- thusiasts. Other dogs who knew Ruslan previously try to help him by licking his wounds and defending him from the attacks of the other dogs, but no human shows compassion. The narrator comments that, had Ruslan not been disappointed in human beings, he might have made an effort to stay alive. He could have tried to save his life by resorting to means known to dogs: he could have found healing plants and he could have been helped to heal by the enzymes contained in the saliva of other dogs who licked his wounds. Vladimov makes it clear that, even as a crippled dog, Ruslan still has a choice between

19 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, in On Metaphysics. The Pen- guin Freud Library, Trans. and ed. by James Strachey, London: Penguin Books, 1991, Vol. XI, 269-408.

234 Political Animals survival and death. He chooses death as a result of his shattering discovery: that people, including his master, do not love him. Ruslan’s decision to die demonstrates that dogs can exercise will and make decisions between life and death. It also suggests that the meaning of a dog’s life is in its pairing with a human. For Ruslan, this meaning has been destroyed. On the allegorical level Ruslan’s betrayal by humans functions as the betrayal of the Russian people by their leaders. Like dogs, Soviet people were conditioned to love their masters. But do humans have the ability to understand that they have been tricked into love in order to be used, abused and deceived?

Genetic subtext: Russianness in humans and dogs

In Vladimov’s story the dog’s name carries ethno-allegorical connotations: the word Ruslan, morphologically dividable into Rus-lan, is phonetically linked to ‘Russian land’.20 Vladimov endows the dog with the epithet neistovyi (furious), a feature of his character that sets him apart from the other dogs in the prison kennels. Vladimov uses the word isstuplenie to describe the expression in Ruslan’s eyes. This word has connotations of uncompromising and ecstatic fanaticism, and is often used to describe religious fanatics. In relation to a flawed Soviet Russian national character, the word isstuplennyi can describe a perverted pseudo-religious fanaticism.21 Ruslan’s religion is Slu- zhba, Service with a capital S. In line with the Russian custom not to give dogs Russian Orthodox names, the other dogs have foreign names ranging from the Latin Rex and Alma to the pseudo-foreign Ingus. It has to be remembered that Ingus is a phonetically-similar renaming of the original name – Indus, a Hindu, that his master trainer Nikita Karatsupa (1910-1994) gave to the dog when it was a puppy (Karatsupa and Ingus will be discussed in detail in the next chapter in connection with the border guard dogs). This contrast stresses the allegorical nature of Ruslan’s name and character. Every guard dog

20 Abram Tertz (Andrei Siniavskii) notes that his name connotes ‘brave Russian knight’. 21 Vladimov’s targeting of national character through the representation of dogs is paralleled in Guenter Grass’s Dog Years (1963), written almost at the same time as Vladimov’s work. Grass’s black dogs Perkun, Sentra, Harras and Prinz are depicted in negative terms as allegories of the history of the German nation. G. Grass, Dog Years. New York: Mariner Books, 1989. Dogs in police and prison service 235 has its unique set of characteristics that distinguishes it from other dogs of the same breed. While Ruslan’s primary drive is fury and fanaticism, other dogs’ main characteristics range from the desire to provoke a fight to the ability to lead astray. All guard dogs come from special police kennels where they are bred specifically for the police service. But not all the puppies in a litter are considered by the dog handlers to be useful. Typically, out of a litter of five only one puppy is chosen to become a trainee. The handler looks for one main character trait in the new-born pups: ferocity. The Russian word for this characteristic is zloi, a multivalent word the meaning of which ranges from vicious to ferocious. Ruslan was chosen by his handler because he demonstrated this ability to be vicious, and his four brothers and sisters were rejected because they did not show enough of this quality. Rejected puppies in the police kennels share the same fate as unwanted puppies in professional kennels: they are drowned. Ruslan’s mother was given other puppies to feed, all of whom were chosen on the basis of their ferocity. When Ruslan is betrayed by his keepers and battered by people who represent life on both sides of the barbed wire, he acquires a philosophical understanding of why his mother did not fight for the lives of her own puppies when they were taken away to be drowned. Ruslan concludes that she realised that death was better than the dog life to which the surviving dogs were to be subjected by humans. Coupled with this, the death of her own progeny was a bless- ing. When animals accept the death of their own progeny as a better option than being dependent on humans, when nature wants to commit acts of self-destruction in order to avoid the life which humans force on it, then society becomes a manifestation of inhumanity. If the natural instinct of a mother animal is subdued by the animal’s reasoning about the nature of humans, then animals become humanised and humans ‘animalised’.22 Vladimov’s text considers the perverse logic of this and concludes that the death of human-bred animals is the only path to animal liberation – this long before Peter Singer’s chilling conclusions on animal liberation. The main feature of Vladimov’s narrative is manifested through the lack of clear separation of Ruslan’s thinking between human logic

22 See Lev Anninskii, “Heart of a Dog? Observations on the Prose of Georgii Vla- dimov”, Soviet Studies in Literature XXVII/4 (1991), 44-61.

236 Political Animals and animal logic. Vladimov expresses Ruslan’s thoughts through the voice of a narrator, but this does not take away the reality of the dog’s ability to think, reason and reflect. While Ruslan does not talk, he nevertheless thinks in processes that are reasoned and logical, although his sensations and his emotional and corporeal needs are those of a dog. Vladimov has Ruslan dream and think in flashbacks, as markers of the dog’s ability to remember. This phenomenon aligns dogs to humans, negating the idea that dogs do not dream because they have no language (and that only humans dream because they do have language). Yet, Ruslan is first and foremost a dog in his own dog right, and the allegorical connotations which he carries do not de- animalise him. Important as they are to carry the Aesopian message of the story, his thoughts and behaviour bridge the gap between human and animal. In the ideal pastoral Arcadia of the past, Dog and Man constituted a pair: they existed side by side in a relationship of trust and loyalty; they were part of nature and yet they were more than nature. This ideal bond has been broken and perverted by society. There are as few dogs as there are humans left in this world who are capable of this sort of love. Those that are carry this propensity in their genes. While Ruslan has visions of this Arcadian past in his dreams, there is one dog born with this genetic code who carries it in his conscious life. While Ruslan starts having these visions only after he undergoes a spiritual rebirth following his realisation of his master’s betrayal, this other dog, Ingus, realises his genetic potential while still within the prison environment. He is the only dog not to become corrupted by his training; the only dog whose sense of justice is not perverted by the processes of conditioning applied by professional prison dog handlers. In an allegorical reading of the dogs in this story, Abram Tertz regards Ingus as a member of the intelligentsia and in ‘some sense the author’, Vladimov.23 Of special relevance is Tertz’s usage of the term ‘intelligentsia’ rather than ‘Russian intelligentsia’, thus valorising the cosmopolitan and non-ethnocentric understanding of the concept.

23 Abram Tertz, “Liudi i zveri”, Voprosy literatury 1 (1990), 61-86, 62. Dogs in police and prison service 237

The non-Russian genetic and non-Pavlovian training alternatives

This dog has a historical prototype, and Vladimov includes a special footnote to supply this information. Ingus comes from a distinguished breed that produced many champions, and this notion of quasi- ethnicity plays an important part in his personality. In his footnote Vladimov explains that Ingus was raised by the famous dog-trainer, Kamil Ikramov. He is the son of a famous mother who gave birth to the dogs used by a celebrated border guard, the Ukrainian-born Kar- atsupa. Vladimov’s footnote gives his narrative the quality of a sketch, valorising the actuality of his story. While the political message and the moral didacticism of the story have Aesopian connotations, both dogs and humans in the story function in their own right as real animals and humans. The notion of inborn qualities of character and the emphasis on essentiality and hereditary characteristics have both allegorical and material meanings. On an allegorical level they serve to show the ‘Russianness’ of Ruslan’s patterns of thinking and behaviour and those of the majority of the story’s human characters. On the level of philosophical conceptualisations of animal and human nature they are also essentialist. In parallel to Ingus’s noble ancestry, there is a professional dog breeder and trainer from a fine and noble family. This dog trainer is not a member of the prison staff, and Vladimov provides a short account of his background. He comes from several generations of breeders and trainers – this in itself sets him apart from the rest of the dog handlers and prison guards. Educated and refined, he has his own method of dog training. He demonstrates to the dogs all the movements that he wants them to repeat, imitating dog behaviour as part of this process. He stands on his four ‘legs’ and makes sounds that imitate those made by dogs. In this way he blurs the boundaries between humans and dogs. He transforms himself into a dog and the dogs in imitating him, learn the synthesis of human/dog blended behaviour. The special bond that exists between this dog trainer and Ingus further establishes the parallelism between a refined human born into a good family and a fine dog born of good parents. The trainer’s appreciation of Ingus’s special nature is based on his awareness of the intellectual gifts and character that the dog has genet- ically inherited, thus affirming the notion of inherited characteristics. The trainer’s method of training animals is akin to those used by Vla- dimir Durov, discussed previously in this book. In his book My Ani-

238 Political Animals mals Durov describes the hours he spent showing his animals what he wanted them to do. He considered that animals’ natural ability to imitate one another can and does cross species. His use of patience, hard work, rewards and his clear affection for his dogs were in stark contrast to methods involving the infliction of pain as practised by his contemporaries both in the Soviet Union and beyond. Durov was critical of such cruel methods and advocated love and reward as the only truly effective ways to train animals. His book contains stories of failed attempts to achieve results by inflicting pain on animals, in which the animals protest and refuse to cooperate. Sometimes they rebel. In Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog the situation is more complicated. Dog psychology, Vladimov suggests, can be perverted. Trickery and the infliction of pain are shown to be widely used practices and highly effective methods of conditioning these animals. The results of this conditioning are impossible to undo on the level of the conscious or of the subconscious. All prison guards share a common name in the eyes of the dogs: master. All masters share the same physical characteristics which can be described as genetic. The typology is supra-national. It is not based on ethnic markers; rather, the taxonomic features signify certain mental and psychological characteristics:

Ruslan noticed a long time ago that masters’ faces in their variety have something in common. The face could be broad or narrow, it could be pale or olive, but it had a firm and split chin, tightly pressed lips and a smallish nose; cheekbones were tightly covered by skin, and eyes were direct and piercing. It was difficult to guess whether these eyes are angry or laughing, but they could look straight into others’ eyes and command orders. (40)

Ruslan tries to understand this typology by applying the taxonomies from the world of dog breeding. He realises that dogs are chosen for service from special kennels; he knows that street dogs cannot become enlisted as service dogs. The source of the supply of the ‘masters’ or prison guards remains a mystery to Ruslan precisely because he applies dog-breeding categories to human guards. The implied answer to this riddle lies in the fact that, unlike well-bred dogs, the ‘masters’ have no breeding. Their commonality can be viewed as the commonality of those who have no breed – a paradox that Ruslan

Dogs in police and prison service 239 cannot comprehend. He was taught to view masters as exemplars of human physical beauty; his aesthetic taste has been conditioned to admire and appreciate this type of beauty. He will not be able to change his taste in matters of male appearance until the end of his life: such is the consequence of the method of training to which he has been subjected. Physical features are combined with expressions of power, a lack of mercy and brutal inflexibility. This aesthetic ideal indicates features of commonality between guards that are recognisable amongst various oppressive regimes. Their trans-national features bespeak a psychological type characterised by limited intellectual abilities. It is for this type of master that every guard dog is willing to sacrifice his life. Why does Vladimov have Ruslan develop a non-ethnic typology that homogenises masters as a breed apart? This can be explained by the author’s search for new categories. It indicates Vladimov’s own categorisation of people that has nothing to do with the xenophobic framework of ethnic stereotyping. While Ruslan is brought up to think of himself as a Russian, Vladimov, who exists outside the bounds of the text, is multi-ethnic. Born as Georgii Nikolaevich Volosevich of a Jewish mother and a father of mixed Polish and Belarusian origin in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, he was confronted by ethnic prejudice early in his life. His mother was arrested and sent to a camp in Siberia as part of the antisemitic campaign conducted by Stalin against Jews in the aftermath of Holocaust. With Vladimov’s multi-ethnic background, he could not embody the stereotype of the physical typology associated with any one particular ethnicity. His own ethnic hybridity rendered the possibility of ethnic typology absurd. Hybridity destroys the construct of permanence and therefore the identifiable physical features and mental characteristics ascribed to an ethnic type. Hence the ways in which Ruslan categorises the common features of masters. He mixes up such ‘racial’ markers as the colour of the skin, the shape of the face and the colour of the eyes, and instead suggests other signs of homogeneity. He proposes the existence of a different kind of homogeneity and of a different set of common features that are based on sameness achieved by inner disposition and training. Ruslan as a dog cannot understand where this breed comes from and Vladimov’s device is to leave the question unanswered – if the dog cannot comprehend, how can a human? On the other hand, if treated as a rhetorical question, it does not need an answer – it is implied that the reader

240 Political Animals knows only too well where the breed of those who become masters come from. If breeding and genes in dogs make a major difference, as in the case of Ingus, then it is plausible to suggest that masters are born to be what they are. Like dogs, people are born to be noble or vicious. If in dogs the quality of viciousness is an inborn and desirable characteristic, then what are the qualities that the breed of masters are born with? Furthermore, if dogs are trained to perform the duties of a service dog, do the masters similarly undergo training? And, if so, who trains them? These are the implied questions that the reader is invited to ask. The ultimate master of the country is of course Stalin, who was nicknamed Master, Khoziain, by those who were not brainwashed or blinded by their unconditional love for their leader. The nickname Khozian is in itself an example of an alternative quasi-Aesopian word used to avoid political persecution. As is often the case with an overt allusion, the intention is to send a signal to the ‘full-knowing reader’.24 The Soviet reader understands that the allegory in operation here is Stalin’s Russia, its citizens and the distorting effect that ideological brainwashing has on its people. It is after Stalin’s death that the camps are closed down and masters and dogs lose their jobs. But the dictator’s legacy lives on until the generation of brainwashed and psychologically deformed people and ‘dogs’ die out. Ruslan is one of the first to die. But the strength of Vladimov’s story lies not in its allegorical use of dog thematics alone, but also in the psychological validity with which he describes the dynamics between dogs’ nature and the results of their training. It is the crippling effect of human influence, and the irreversible impact of this training, that is at the core of Vladimov’s investigation. It is as if Vladimov has the Old Testament story of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt as an intertext: the generation of slaves has to die in order to achieve the spiritual rebirth of the nation. The difference here is that there is no equivalent of Moses among the nation of Gulags. The question that needs to be asked in the context of ethnic and non-ethnic typology is ‘How Russian is Ruslan?’ His name makes him a prototypical Russian. But has he always been Russian? Vladi- mov makes sure to mention that Ruslan’s pedigree includes dogs of

24 I take this term from Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998.

Dogs in police and prison service 241 the laika breed that used to run freely in Siberian taiga domains. In his ‘conscious’ life Ruslan is Russian dog. But when he has visions of the past that did not happen to him in this life, was he still called Ruslan? Probably not. When Vladimov describes the distant past in which dogs and their human masters co-existed in nature he depicts a man with distinctly Mongolian facial features, such as narrow eyes. Is it possible that being made into a Russian is the equivalent of being made into a brainwashed creature with a distorted psyche? 25 The answer may lie in the intertextual allusion in the story’s title. On the level of the allegory, the title of ‘Vernyi Ruslan’ echoes the title of ‘Vernyi Trezor’, ‘Faithful Trezor’ (1885) by Mikhail Saltykov- Shchedrin. In it this famous writer-satirist caricatures the Russian peasants’ submissiveness to their masters. The dog Trezor takes all the beatings and humiliations from his masters with gratitude, and thinks of his chain as a reward. When he becomes too old to be useful, the master orders him to be drowned. ‘Faithful Trezor’ is a fable, and the dog is a clear allegory of Russian lower classes. It can also be read as an allegory of the ‘national character’. Vladimov’s text is a complex investigation into psychological correlations between humans and dogs, and it asks questions that both relate to and transcend a concrete historical situation. The ‘Russianness’ of his Faithful Ruslan, however, is an important aspect of this text. Ruslan dies at the end of the story because he realises that his trust in human masters has been betrayed. Vladimov presents his death as a partial suicide – the dog could have tried to make an effort to survive. Other dogs, including his former mate Alma, try to heal his wounds, but with his spine broken the dog decides not to continue to live. The broken spine is symptomatic. On the level of metaphor it emblematises a broken will and broken principles. The people who break his spine are those new arrivals at the station that Ruslan and the other dogs endeavoured to guard. They are meant to represent the new wave of Russian citizens working to change the system; they arrive to build something constructive in the place of the former Gulag. Many of them are educated, almost all of them are young. They are supposed to epitomise the enthusiasm of the post-Stalin campaign to conquer virgin lands and to build new cities in Siberia. However, these

25 See M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Faithful Tresor”, in Fables. Trans. Vera Volkhovsky. London: Chatto and Windus, 1941, 82-91.

242 Political Animals supposed messengers of hope turn out to be murderers when they defend themselves from the attacking dogs. There are no good people in this grim story. There is no escape for Ruslan. In the wilderness of Jack London’s North America sometimes good people help dogs and save them from the abuse of moral delinquents. Within the prison camp the only person who understands Ruslan and defends both the dogs and the prisoners is the well-born dog-trainer. But he ends up becoming ‘barking-mad’. After a staged attack on the prisoners by the guards this trainer, the only noble character among all the employees of the prison camp, goes insane. Wit- nessing the massacre of the innocents by the prison bosses triggers the escape to the world of insanity. His madness manifests itself in his attempts to communicate in the language of dogs. As a dissident script this madness can be read as emblematic of those rebels who were proclaimed clinically mad by the regime and put into lunatic asylums. The quasi-regression of the story’s most noble character to a state of trying to talk in the language of dogs is a politically-loaded allegory. It indicates the impossibility of expressing honest and noble feelings and opinions in human – Russian – language in the Soviet Union. The only language left for those is the language of dogs – the ultimate underdogs of the human masters.

Prison guard dogs as nobody’s dogs in Sergei Dovlatov’s The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard

As referred to in the previous chapter, Sergei Dovlatov’s The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard is written by a self-reflective narrator whose formal position vis-à-vis prisons is marked by the ambivalent occupational status of a conscript.26 The structure of the text is punctuated by his letters written in the USA – a strategy that further widens the temporal-spatial gap between ‘here and now’ and ‘there and then’.27 When Dovlatov worked as a prison guard between 1962 and 1965 it was not a matter of choice. Like any Soviet man in the age of military service he was conscripted into three years of compulsory

26 On narrative strategies in Dovlatov see Ekaterina Young, Sergei Dovlatov and his Narrative Masks. Chicago: Northwestern UP, 2009. 27 See Karen Ryan-Hayes, “Narrative Strategies in the Works of Sergej Dovlatov”, Russian Literature Journal XVI/153 (1992), 155-178. Dogs in police and prison service 243 service in the Soviet Army. He was sent to serve as a prison guard in a prison for hardened criminals in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Repub- lic in the North. As a former student who had studied Finnish philolo- gy in Leningrad University for two and a half years, Dovlatov was one of the more educated soldiers to serve in the capacity of a prison guard. He did not finish writing his prison notes till the early 1980s when he finally managed to have them published under the title The Zone by specialist American publisher Ardis in 1982. As stated earlier, Dovlatov’s position as neither a prisoner nor a prison guard gives his narrator a perspective that is distinct from that of an insider or outsider. Dovlatov’s unique positioning of the Self reflects the conclusion he arrived at as a result of the three years’ experience as a conscript: as a soldier in Soviet Army service he shared with the prisoners the status of forced labourer; yet as a guard whose duty it was to over- see law and order among the prison inmates, he belonged to the world of the prison authorities. This dual status is reflected in his characterisation of the prison guard dogs. This characterisation departs significantly from the glorification of Metter’s Mukhtar and the harsh categorisations of Vladimov’s Ruslan. While Metter and Vladimov both, paradoxically, emphasise the love that Mukhtar and Ruslan have for their handlers, Dovlatov’s dogs love nobody. In Metter’s whole- hearted approval of Mukhtar’s heroic deeds and Vladimov’s categori- cal condemnation of Ruslan’s acts both these writers present a world in which dogs must belong to only one side of the dividing wall. Dovlatov’s prison zone in comparison is wider than the binary worlds of Mukhtar and Ruslan. This is dictated by Dovlatov’s own authorial worldview that conceptualises ‘the zone’ as a paradoxical space that does and does not have a sharply defined border. The walls are both impenetrable and non-existent as a result of the Soviet system as a whole, and the people within the prison walls are little different from those outside the wall. ‘The zone’ is thus more than a walled camp territory; it is clearly a metaphor for the Soviet Union and its citizens who cannot leave its borders. Hence the position of the prison guard dogs:

Behind the barracks dogs barked in a muffled way in the kennels. These German shepherds have been trained by Volikov and Pakhapil. For months they have been training these dogs to hate people in striped pea-jackets. Nevertheless, these hungry dogs also growled at

244 Political Animals

soldiers in green uniforms. They also growled at seniors dressed in officers’ overcoats. And even at the officers themselves. They even growled at Volikov and Pakhapil – those who trained them. (44)28

And:

– They will soon throw me out of here, said Volikov. – The dogs have gone out of their minds. I had put Alma to the post. A prisoner walks pass, and the dog waves its tail at him. But it throws itself at the soldier. It becomes completely wild. It does not even wish to recognise me. I now feed this scum through the hole. (109)

The prison guard dogs’ lack of loyalty towards anybody reflects Dovlatov’s own authorial attitude towards the prison and his occupation as a conscripted guard, towards the Soviet Union which he would leave in 1978, and towards the patriotic discourse that created a cult of the police dog on service to the country. Importantly, he subverts the notion of loyalty that arises as a result of the special bond that is supposed to emerge between the dog and its handler. Given a chance, these dogs would tear apart their handlers. They are as far removed from the Mukhtars of the world as they are from the Ruslans. Notably, the name of the dog Alma is a cross-reference to the eponymous dog in Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog, the female dog who tries to save the dying Ruslan by licking his wounds. Dovla- tov thus establishes an intertextual link to Vladimov’s story. It is known that Metter taught Dovlatov to write fiction in the 1960s, when Dovlatov attended the writing course at the Leningrad branch of the Soviet Writers’ Union.29 Yet, Dovlatov’s prison service dogs do not have Mukhtar’s loyalty or his subordination to his handler. This is based in part on the nature of the handlers, which is shown to be no different from that of the prison inmates. Dovlatov’s depiction of the unruly nature of prison guard dogs is paralleled in this narrative by his own authorial self-discovery that occurred during his contact with criminals. His discovery of his own

28 Sergei Dovlatov, “Zona”, in Sobranie prozy v trekh tomakh. St Petersburg: Lim- buss-press, 1995, Vol. I, 25-173. 29 See “Sergei Dovlatov”, in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Volume 2:1953-2001. Ed. Maxim D. Shrayer, Trans. Richard Sheldon, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2007, 1014-1015.

Dogs in police and prison service 245 free-willed spirit, a kind of unruly quest for freedom, is shared by some of the criminals. Dovlatov proclaims that he sensed his own likeness in the criminal Gurin, a hardened dare-devil who refuses to work, preferring to stage a hunger strike rather than perform forced labour. Intelligent and aware of his ‘rights’, Gurin refuses to subordinate himself to Dovlatov’s narrative persona – he even puts a knife through the narrator’s ribs in an act that demonstrates the psychology of the love-hate relationship that Dovlatov develops with this criminal. The fact that Dovlatov wrote his prison notes in emigration as a free agent who left the Soviet Union and crossed the ocean in search of a land of freedom endorses this affinity with the free-spirited criminal. Gurin is tattooed and lean; his aura, writes Dovlatov, smells of the sea air and the ocean winds – a clear metaphor for freedom. That Dovlatov conceived of the notion that this ‘free air of freedom’ lies not outside the prison zone but outside the zone of the Soviet Union is expressed in a recurrent sentence uttered by an Estonian conscript: ‘A true Estonian should live in Canada’. Repeated a number of times, this sentence fulfils not only a comic function but also that of political subversion. It hints at the sizable Estonian diaspora community that grew in Canada as a result of the Soviet occupation of Estonia. Fit- tingly for a parallelism between a minoritarian Other and a dog, this Estonian conscript speaks to his dog only in Estonian. This annoys a Russian officer who claims it spoils guard dogs: ‘You will order the dog – come here! But it will reply – ‘nicht versteh!’ (65). The use of the German language as a substitute for Estonian is politically loaded. German as the demonised language of the ultimate international enemy – ‘nicht versteh’ being corrupt German – represents the equation that the Russian Soviet man makes between Estonians and alien hostile forces. It also hints at the collaboration between Estonians and Nazis during World War II. The implied danger of using Estonian as a language of dog instruction is that it may be used to pass subversive instructions to the dog in communiqués that are not understood by the authorities. This situation serves as a trope for paranoia underpinned by the fear of the ethnic Other. While the instruction of a dog in the Estonian language is satirised, the political subtext of this exercise relates to the serious implications of having a multi-ethnic community of conscripts.

246 Political Animals

These prison guards are not fictionalised as in Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog, in which all the guards look identical in a trope of homogeneity that implies quasi-cloning in a giant Soviet incubator. In Dovlatov’s world there is no ethnic or quasi-ethnic homogeny – his ‘zone’ is inhabited by representatives of national minorities amongst both the prisoners and the prison guards. His own multi-ethnic background (Armenian mother, Jewish father) finds a reflection in this work. It renders him a sensitive observer of ethnic stereotypes and prejudices in operation in the ‘zone’. His prison guard dogs both share and subvert these quasi-ethnic statehoods – hence the Estonian-understanding German shepherd. The Estonian guard’s favourite dog’s name is the exotic Persian or Armenian Garun, not the Russian Ruslan. By giving a favourite dog of the Esto- nian guard an Armenian name Dovlatov adds a comic dimension to the politically loaded situation. He ciphers his own Armenian background into the name of the dog, thus subverting all claims of blood purity among people and dogs.30 This narrative reflects the new intellectual climate of the dissident émigré subculture of the 1980s, a climate that was markedly different from the historical decade of the 1960s when Metter’s ‘Come here, Mukhtar!’ and Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog were written. Metter’s original dog’s name, Murat, denoting his non-Russian ethnicity, was meant to emblematise the Soviet state’s neglect of the loyal service of non-Russian, particularly Jewish, national minorities. Furthermore, Vladimov’s ideal dog is Ingus rather than Ruslan. Dovlatov’s multi-ethnic background also finds an expression in his émigré narrative. While his The Zone was dedicated to his experience as a guard in the 1960s, the text itself was completed in emigration, whereas Vladimov’s was written in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Vladimov’s association with Russocentric émigrés after his later emigration to West Germany puts this author into the different environment of Russian culture abroad in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. Dovlatov, by contrast, belonged to the mainly Jewish

30 Dovlatov authored a story ‘Glasha’ about his fox-terrier dog of the same name. Glasha is a typical Russian peasant woman’s name from Glafira – a name registered in the Eastern Orthodox canon. This dog immigrated with Dovlatov and his family to the USA. The dog’s name is subversive of the folk tradition not to give dogs ‘Christian’ names. For an English translation of this story see Sergei Dovla- tov, “Glasha”, Chteniia: The Hearts of Dogs. I/1 (2008), 30-38. Dogs in police and prison service 247

‘third wave’ emigration that settled mostly in the USA, where it created its own subculture that he skilfully described in his various stories.31 While both Dovlatov and Vladimov functioned inside their respective émigré cultures, their different surroundings gave rise to divergent views on matters of Russianness.32 Vladimov’s dog Ruslan understands Russian, Dovlatov’s dog Garun understands Estonian. With the dismantlement of the Soviet Union in 1990, German shepherds in the police service in the new successor states of the former Soviet Union had to learn new languages of instruction. Many had to be given new names – mainly to reflect newly invented ethnic identi- ties.33 The next chapter will examine representation of dogs who defend the country’s borders, old and new.

31 Sergei Dovlatov, “Interview, Pisatel’ v emigratsii”, in Sobranie prozy v trekh tomakh. St Petersburg: Limbuss-press, 1995, Vol. III, 341-347. 32 It has to be stressed that Vladimov had a very high opinion of Dovlatov’s prose. See A.Iu. Ar’ev, “Nasha malen’kaia zhizn’”, in Sergei Dovlatov, Sobranie prozy v trekh tomakh. St Petersburg: Limbuss-press, 1995, Vol. I, 5-25. 33 Following the success of the film, Mukhtar has become a common name for German shepherds in police service. In an article in the popular weekly magazine Ogoniok the journalist uses the name Mukhtar to denote all police and military service dogs. The article describes special protective gear for dogs in the service of the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), FSB (Federal Security Bureau), border guards and customs officers. It states that it costs US$10,000 to train a service dog. See Ol’ga Rozmakhova, “Nariad dlia Mukhtara”, Ogoniok 36, (3-9 Septem- ber 2007), 3. Similarly a dog called Mukhtar is the hero of the TV series ‘Vozvrashchenie Mukhtara’ (‘The Return of Mukhtar’), dedicated to police dogs fighting crime in post-Soviet Russia. Started in 2004 on NTV it remains an ongoing serial. ‘Vozvrashchenie Mukhtara’, Dir. Vladimir Zlatoustovskii, producer Pavel Korchagin, Kit-Media, NTV channel. From 2004.

Chapter 7 The cult of the border guard dogs

Here, like nowhere else, they honour […] the watchful golden cocker- els […] and the vigilant border patrol dogs Ingus and Dzhulbars. – Mikhail Bezrodnyi. 1995-20001

The protection of the borders of the native country, the Motherland, has become one of the most important themes of Russian cultural discourse and representation since the Stalin era. It survived the disintegration of the Soviet Union and made a staunch return in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In order to protect the borders, border guards need specially trained dogs. Consequently, with the rise of the cult of the country’s border guards,2 there also rose the cult of the border guard dog. Since the 1930s the borders of a country have been treated as more than a political and geographical phenomenon: they have acquired a strong symbolic significance.3 In Russian culture the idea of the Mother Homeland or Rodina-mat’ has acquired a special symbolic embodiment as a result of the allegorical meaning of the Motherland concept. This was traditionally personified as a woman-mother, but the new Soviet mythology extended the embodied dimensions of the cultural construct of the Motherland to include the image of a bride. This new construct, crystallised in the mid-1930s, was iterated in a song in the cult film Circus in 1936. The famous song became known as ‘Song of the Motherland’ (‘Pesnia o Rodine’), also known by its

1 Mikhail Bezrodnyi, “Fragmenta”, Trans. Maxim D. Shrayer. In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Volume 2:1953-2001. Ed. Maxim D. Shrayer, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2007, 1151. 2 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. 3rd edition, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2000. 3 On the cult of pogranichnik, an NKVD border guard in the culture of Stalinism, see James von Geldern, “The Centre of the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geog- raphy in the Mass Culture of the 1930s”, in New Directions in Soviet History. Ed. Stephen White, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992, 62-80. 250 Political Animals first line, ‘Broad is my homeland’ (‘Shiroka strana moia rodnaia’).4 Written and composed by the productive dyad of poet Vasilii Lebe- dev-Kumach (1898-1949) and composer Isaak Dunaevskii (1900- 1955), the song reflects the political atmosphere of the 1930s. With the Civil War raging in Spain and international tensions rising, the song expresses contemporaneous concerns surrounding the defence of Russia’s borders. It describes the country as stretching from Moscow to the eastern borders, from the mountains in the south to the seas in the north. Such a spacious homeland, idealised as a place of freedom and communal ownership by its people, is presented as more than a geographical entity. Comparisons are drawn between love for the country and love for mothers and brides. Wide and mighty in size, the Motherland demands surveillance and protection. Dunaevskii explained in later years that it took a long time for him and Lebedev- Kumach to complete the final version of the song.5 Special attention had to be given to the choice of wording, including the use of the word Rodina or Motherland. Because the notion of the Motherland had already been used for patriotic purposes by pre-Revolutionary and anti-Revolutionary discourses, the poet and the composer hesitated to use it in a song devoted to the Soviet Motherland. The incorporation of the image of the young bride must have served as a point of difference between the old concept of the Motherland and the new Soviet concept. The popular song constructed and reflected this dual image of two types of women in need of protection:

But we will frown sternly If the enemy will want to break us We love our Motherland like a bride, We protect her like a tender mother.

No surovo brovi my nasupim, Esli vrag zakhochet nas slomit’, Kak nevestu, Rodinu my liubim, Berezhem, kak laskovuiu mat’.

4 Tsirk. Dir. Grigorii Aleksandrov, screenplay Grigorii Aleksandrov, cinematography by Vladimir Nil’sen and Boris Petrov. Mosfil’m, 1936. 5 L. Shkolnik, Isaak Dunaevskii: vol’nyi veter tvorchestva. http://chtoby-pomnili. com/page.php?id=357. Accessed 2 January 2012. Border guard dogs 251

This new image of the Rodina is made explicit in the film through the performance of the song by the actors. The line ‘We love our Motherland like a bride’ is sung by a young and handsome male actor who gives a meaningful glance to the young beautiful heroine played by the star of the Soviet screen, Liubov Orlova. The male actor is blond, tall, and strong – unmistakeably of Slavic appearance. The woman is a white American with a coloured child – both will be inte- grated into the Soviet family albeit under the patronage of a Slavic man. The embodiment of the image of the Motherland as a woman in need of protection was thus firmly achieved through the media of the film and the song.6 The song by itself was immensely popular. It served as the unofficial state anthem of the Soviet Union until an official anthem was introduced in 1943, and it was never dropped from the repertory of Soviet popular culture. Within the extended image of the Motherland, as epitomised in the lyrics of this song, the Rodina-woman had to be protected from evil-doers.7 Those who wanted to inflict damage to the body of the Motherland came from both within and without its borders: the enemy was among ‘us’ and at the same time among ‘them’. In various times in the history of the Soviet Empire emphasis has shifted from the enemy inside its borders to the enemy outside. The eastern and southern borders of the Soviet Empire, with their harsh and wild geographical features, were treated as especially vulnerable – it is not in vain that the song identifies the area as ‘Southern mountains’. Sparsely populated with difficult terrain inhabited by ‘Oriental’ non-Slavic peoples, these mountainous borders were considered to be the most susceptible to invasion.8 As the Soviet Empire increased its economic and political investments in the eastern territories, attention was also paid to its bor-

6 One view is that Stalin’s image as the avuncular patriarch somewhat sublimated the erotic and the sexual aspects of the relationships between male and female heroes in the Soviet cinema of the Stalin era. See Richard Taylor, “‘But Eastward, Look, the Land is Brighter!’: Toward a Topography of Utopia in the Stalinist Musical”, in The Landscape of Stalinism. Eds Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, Seattle: Washington UP, 2003, 201-218. 7 See Hans Guenther, “‘Broad is My Motherland’: The Mother Archetype in the Soviet Mass Song”, in The Landscape of Stalinism, 77-95. 8 Von Geldern notes that there are no black or coloured people in the words of ‘Song of the Motherland’. Although the plot of the film Circus, in which the song was first sung, juxtaposes the Soviet multinational family with American racism, the words of the song do not pay tribute to the theme of ethnic diversity. 252 Political Animals ders in these regions, especially to its borders with such ‘wild’ countries as Iran, India and Afghanistan. The impenetrable mountains with their treacherous passes covered in ice and fast rivers personified not only wild nature but also the character of the local inhabitants. Native tribes on both sides of these borders were considered primitive, brut- ish, in need of reform, education and remodelling. The local people, united by religion, language and customs, made these borders porous and the borderline fluid: the enemy here could come from within and beyond the border. Reflecting the special vigilance deemed to be required to protect the borders of this region, the allegorical body of the Motherland acquired especially strong metaphoric meaning in these geographical locales. Like the female body, vulnerable to violation by wild and untamed local ‘savages’, the borders of the Motherland could also be violated. While the idea of threatened violation of one’s mother would not have had sexual connotations because of cultural taboos, the idea of the potential abuse of a young virginal woman-bride at the hands of the enemy clearly suggested the dangers of sexual violation. It is noteworthy that ‘border’ in Russian is a noun of feminine gender, granitsa. To ensure the borders were impenetrable was the task of every Soviet soldier on service as a border guard. Every border guard needs a border guard dog. Accordingly, Soviet discourse created heroes among the border guard dogs. At the height of the formation of the mythology of the Motherland’s borders, in the 1930s, the special cult of the border guard dog emerged. In this chapter I investigate this cult as it has evolved over the last eighty years through the lens of five Russian films and a memoir of the famous border guard: Dzhulbars (1935), Frontier Post in the Mountains (1953), The Border Guard Dog Alyi (1979), A Hot Spot (1998), Nikita Karatsupa’s memoir The Notes of a Pathfinder (1998) and the documentary Nikita Karatsupa: a Legendary Pathfinder (2010).

Nikita Karatsupa and the cult of the border guard dogs

The cult of the border guard dog was emblematised by the image of the famous border guard dog Ingus and his trainer, Ukrainian-born Nikita Karatsupa (1910-1994), featured on Soviet currency from the Border guard dogs 253 late 1930s to 1947 (well after the end of the World War II).9 Karatsu- pa established a family of specially bred dogs allegedly descended from that most celebrated progenitor, Ingus. They formed a dynasty of champion dogs famed for their heroic deeds at those borders manifested by the interception of enemies who wanted to violate the borders from both directions: from within and from outside.10 Karatsupa’s greatest achievements took place in the geographical territories of the Russian Far East and Central Asia with their characteristic mountainous terrain – the border landscape most frequently represented in films about borders and border guards from the 1930s through to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the most recent conflicts in Chechnya and Caucasus. The borders of the Motherland had to be protected by heroic masculine Russian/Slavic men and their dogs. The duo of the guard and his dog was firmly established in opposition to the non-Slavic male. If the Russian border guard and his dog represented self-control and discipline, the non-Russian offender at the border, the Other, represented deception, cunning and treachery. In this menagerie the dog became anthropomorphised, while the enemy was animalised. In his memoir Zapiski sledopyta Karatsupa gives an account of the rise of the border guard dogs and their special training during the early years of his career in the 1920s and 1930s.11 Karatsupa maintains that awareness of the pivotal role that dogs were able to play in tracking intruders did not emerge for some time and even then only as a result of the evidence provided by those dogs trained by him (dogs trained by Karatsupa repeatedly achieved the highest results). In 1965 Karatsupa’s success and hard work in this field earned him the highest award in the USSR, that of Hero of the Soviet Union. Karatsupa notes that when he started his career as a border guard in the 1920s the situation with patrol sniffer dogs was unsatis- factory. He gives two main reasons for this: the lack of appropriate breeds suited for this service; and the lack of professional trainers due to the lack of a dog-training tradition in Russia. As a result of this

9 “Karatsupa, N.F”, in Sovetskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. Moscow: Izdanie sovetskoi entsiklopedii, 1981, 1911. 10 On spies in the discourse of Stalinism see Evgeny Dobrenko, “The Art of Social Navigation. The Cultural Topography of the Stalin Era”, in The Landscape of Stalinism. Eds Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, Seattle: Washington UP, 2003, 163-200. 11 N. F. Karatsupa, Zapiski sledopyta. Moscow: Granitsa, 1998. 254 Political Animals state of affairs dogs, dog trainers and textbooks on service dog training were all imported from Germany. This situation was deemed inadequate and, by the beginning of the 1930s, a new national school of border guard dog training was in place through a special decree introduced in 1927 by the OGPU, the All-Union State Political Board. By this time Karatsupa was working in the Russian Far East, in the mountainous region favoured by Soviet film-makers focusing on border conflicts. It took almost ten years for the Russian service dog kennels to breed a substantial number of pedigree East European (German) shepherd dogs. Karatsupa refers to German shepherd dogs as both ‘Ger- man shepherds’ and ‘East European shepherds’, thus revealing the political aspect of the name of this breed. For a decade border guards used cross-breeds (‘metis’, 19), including laika crosses. Karatsupa’s legendary dog Ingus was a cross; he maintained that this dog’s stellar performance was the result of his method of training through love and patience. In contrast to the more popular opinion that German shepherd dogs were most suitable for service as border guard dogs, Kar- atsupa’s success in training his cross-bred dog is as much a reflection of the close relationship, almost brotherhood, between him and Ingus as it is part of the debate on dog breeds and pedigree status. Karatsu- pa, himself an orphan, found Ingus as a puppy cowering under bridge. He cared for the young dog, sharing his own food rations and hiding the unregistered dog from the military authorities until it was able to prove its worth on duty. Karatsupa’s opinion, that the professional dog breeding of border guard dogs was key to success, put an emphasis on familial continuity. This notion reflects the subculture of Soviet border guards which created an ethos of continuity through blood lineage. This ethos remains unchanged in post-Soviet Russia today. The contemporary song ‘Pogranzastava’ (‘Border guard post’) claims that today’s border guards protect Russia’s borders in the same way as did their fathers and grandfathers.12 Border guards and border guard dogs thus form an exclusive group based not only on commonality of roles but also on commonality of blood. The parallelism between border guards and

12 See Oleg Gazmanov, “Pogranzastava”, 5 kanal, 23.02.2011. The song was recorded on the Day of the Borderguards celebrated on February 23. www. youtube.com/watch/v=QN1nqygD31A. Accessed 10 January 2012. Border guard dogs 255 border guard dogs is established through this notion of exclusivity and breeding.

Karatsupa’s search dog Indus, later named Ingus, wounded during a fight with a Japanese Manchurian Detachment. 12 October 1935.

One of the defining features of Karatsupa’s style of training was the establishment of a relationship based on total trust between a 256 Political Animals trainer and his dog. This relationship echoed the institution of marriage in that sacrifice was expected from both sides and mutual endur- ance was expected through good times and bad until death did part the two. Within this relationship it was not only the man who served as the guide – the trainer had as much to learn as the dog. In Karatsupa’s narrative the reciprocity and parallelism between the dog-handling border guard and the working dog is strongly established. One of the most telling examples of this paradigm is Karatsupa’s story about young men sniffing each other’s caps and learning to identify different scents. Man had to learn to be animal or to at least acknowledge his animal part.

High Stalinism of the 1930s and the making of an iconic dog in Dzhulbars

The 1935 film Dzhulbars has as its title the name of the house-dog who made a transition to border guard.13 The geographical location of the film is the Pamir Mountains in the newly annexed area which became the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, inhabited by ethnic Muslim people speaking the Farsi language.14 The opening scenes show spec- tacular and picturesque landscapes reminiscent of the expanding mountainous ranges favoured by American western films. In parallel to the narrative of conquest and the control of untamed territories, the protagonists of this film are divided into two camps: the Russian soldiers patrolling the borders and local non-white people. These locals live by their own laws. As presented in this film they are treacherous and subversive, following alien ways grounded in indigenous culture. The film represents the factually accurate resistance of local clansmen to Sovietisation. The reasons for this resistance are rooted in cultural and religious beliefs, marital laws and the resentment to forced collec- tivisation of private property. Embedded in centuries-old Islamic and tribal heritage based on ancient feudal customs, the local heads of the clans do not want to give up their power. Having made their living from raiding and taxing trade caravans passing through their territory,

13 Dzhul’bars. Dir.Vladimir Shneiderov, screenplay El’ Registan and Vladimir Shneiderov, cinematography Aleksandr Shelenkov, Mezhrabpofil’m, 1935. 14 On the notion of space and frontier in Dzhulbars see Emma Widdis, “Border: the aesthetic of conquest in Soviet cinema of the 1930s”, European Studies IV (2000), 401-411. Border guard dogs 257 many of the anti-Soviet rebels resort to pirate activities and attacks on passing caravans. This mode of operation renders them criminals under the new Soviet rules. Their attitude towards the local population and everyday customs are as unscrupulous and savage as are the means of their trade. Young women and old men are shown to have become the victims of the unreformed feudal ways of the resisting tribesmen, known as basmachi. The film incorporates an example of this in the villainous harassment of a young woman and her old and physically weak grandfather. The guard dog Dzhulbars is a saviour dog within the film’s two plot lines: he defends both the borders of the Motherland and the body of his mistress, the young and beautiful Ta- jik girl. The story of Dzhulbars is an early version of the border guard dog narrative. Although it captures well the dynamics of the defence of the land, as the embodiment of a woman in need of protection, and the protection of a real woman’s body, the dog that protects them both has not been trained as a border guard dog. The dog in this story was originally a domesticated hunting dog raised by the old grandfather. Due to the dog’s natural instinct to protect the property of his master as well as his master himself, the dog protects the young woman, the granddaughter. While the film emphasises the protection of the country’s borders, the story’s plot shows the dog first of all as a natural protector of his master and his house. His abilities as an excellent hunting dog and loyal watchdog make him a good search dog. It is in this capacity that the dog makes a transition to the role of a protector of the country. With the rigorous training provided by the Rus- sian/Slavic border guard Tkachenko (whose Ukrainian surname is a possible tribute to Karatsupa) the dog becomes a first class professional protector of the homeland. With the extension of the notion of the ‘home’ into that of the ‘homeland’, dogs become ardent protectors of the country’s borders. The dog Dzulbars thus becomes a personification of the success of the Soviet ‘internal colonization’.15 Due to the geographical locale of the narrative, the body of the homeland is represented by the young Tajik woman who lives with her grandfather, an honest hunter. Although she is supposed to be local she nevertheless functions as a warning of what might happen to the body of the Russian woman if the enemy is allowed to triumph.

15 On the term ‘internal colonization’, see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. 258 Political Animals

The film suggests that the honour of the girl is in danger – she personifies the female body desired by Oriental men and her body is the object of lust for a local tribesman. It also suggests a link between the dog’s desire to protect the young maiden’s body and his subsequent defence of the borders of the Motherland. In both cases, the perpetrators are the untamed ‘Oriental’ non-Slavic men. This personification of the homeland by a non-Russian woman is highly symbolic. On the level of allegory it suggests that the Soviet homeland has grown in geographical dimensions to incorporate women of various nationalities: it is not only Russian women but women of other nationalities and ethnicities that need to be protected. But while the pool of women has expanded to incorporate non-Slavic women in need of protection, the men who protect the women remain ostensibly Slavic. In the film the defender of the Tajik woman is a Russian border guard, while those who present a threat are Oriental men. The scenario of the Imperial Orientalist expansionism operates in the film on the level of the body politics. Non-Slavic women (and feeble old men) are incorporated into the new Soviet Imperial family, but non-Slavic quasi-Oriental men are presented as the Other. While Russian men and their dogs both protect and rescue women from the lascivious savages, the Oriental Other occupies a place below that of the dog. The hierarchy that is created shows dogs as inherently and naturally moral, and Oriental men as lower animals. Dog becomes anthropomorphised in relation to Oriental men who are in turn zoo- morphised. The gender script of Soviet Imperial expansionism is remarkably consistent with Russian Orientalist assimilation narratives. While native women are shown to be in need of protection from their brutal men, they are ready to reform and adjust to the new cultural norms of the dominant culture. In this case the Russian men perform a role associated with European and ‘white’ society, while the women are eager to give themselves over to the civilising stewardship of these men. Based on sexual fantasies of female submission and Russian supremacy over the sexual powers of the ‘Oriental men’, the assimila- tory narrative constructs the notion of the supremacy of Russian masculinity.16 The fact that the Tajik girl sacrifices her own personal safety for the sake of the Motherland is symbolically ritualised

16 Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Border guard dogs 259 through her gift of her dog Dzhulbars into the service of the guard patrols. Having fallen in love with the Russian man whose job it is to protect the borders of the Motherland, she makes an astonishing transformation into an ideologically mature citizen, putting her life in danger of the violent abuse of the lascivious ‘Oriental’ men by giving away her protector dog. The implication is that she has become part of the patriotic discourse of self-sacrifice for the sake of the wellbeing of the Motherland. The dog Dzhulbars is both a gift to the Russian border guard and a gift to the Motherland in need of protection. The dog becomes the site of love transference and the sublimated physical love of the heroine. For Tkachenko the entrusted dog performs a number of symbolic functions. As a creature of nature the dog personifies the Tajik girl herself who, in Tkachenko’s hands, metamorphoses from nature to civilisation, from instinct to rationality. Through training and exercise the dog is changed into a ‘rational’ animal. This serves as a parallelism to the civilising training that the native Tajik girl could receive at the hands of the Russian trainer. Viewed against the alternative path, i.e. marriage to a local man and the fulfilment of traditional female roles in this Islamic feudal society, the prospect of entering into marriage with a Slavic man is a road to educated enlightenment and freedom and the elevation to Soviet womanhood. The transformation of the dog Dzhulbars functions here as an analogy of the potential transformation of a native girl entering the Soviet family. The dog is an example of the successful Sovietisation of the country’s periphery. 260 Political Animals

The dog Dzulbars from the film Dzulbars (1935) stands on top of the Tajik man in a victorious pose symbolic of the subjugation of the indigenous tribesmen.

On the edge of the border of Stalinism and post-Stalinism: Frontier Post in the Mountains

Zastava v gorakh (Frontier Post in the Mountains, 1953) is another important Soviet film that deals with the defence of the country’s borders and the role which animals, such as dogs and horses, perform in this duty.17 In the first scenes the film positions itself in its thematic relation to Dzhulbars – children in the border guard station say that they repeatedly viewed Dzhulbars during the winter season. The geographical location of the border in the film is the same as in Dzhulb-

17 Zastava v gorakh. Dir. Konstantin Iudin, screenplay Mikhail Volpin and Nikolai Erdman, 1953. Border guard dogs 261 ars, the mountainous border with Afghanistan. The enemy in this film is represented by people on the ‘other side’ of the river that separates the USSR from its south-eastern neighbour. This ‘enemy from the outside’ consists of bands of local tribesmen who are being manipulated by the Americans. The enemy thus is two-fold: the Muslim tribesmen and the Western capitalists who want to provoke a border conflict between the tribesmen and the Soviet military. This film represents a new development in the theme of the animal in service at the borders of a country, in that while the Soviet border guards rely on trained dogs, carrier pigeons and horses to perform their duty, the main emphasis is put on human intelligence. The main animal hero in the film is a horse called Orlik. While both the dog and the horse are instrumental in helping to intercept two Ameri- can spies, the horse is given a more prominent role due to the place that this animal occupies in the life and activities of the indigenous people. Both the dog and the horse help to detain two important spies who have crossed the Soviet border. These spies are Americans mas- querading as members of an archaeological party working on the Af- ghan side of the mountains. The narrative establishes the similarity of the horse and the dog in their response to human training: at the beginning of the film the soldier who trains the horse, Orlik, notes that the animal responds to love and care in the same way as the dogs. This statement serves to endorse the value of a method of training based on a sense of humanity. It also establishes continuity with the Karatsupa- Durov method of training animals. In contrast to this humane training of dogs and horses as used by Soviet men, the film incorporates a scene showing a fierce dogfight as part of the entertainment of the wild Muslim tribesmen. This tribal gathering of men dressed in striped gowns and bright turbans, take pleasure in the dogfight as if it were a sport, thus showing a stark disparity between these apparently cruel and primitive people and the Soviet soldiers. The Soviet soldiers on duty are represented by a Russian and a Ukrainian – two Slavic nationalities (and yet another tribute to Karatsupa’s origins) and a further contrast to the Oriental tribesmen and the American spies. The Russian and the Ukrainian border guards are both on duty when an earthquake strikes. They find themselves in a cave, their exit blocked by fallen rocks, while the horse Orlik and the German shepherd dog Vulkan are outside the cave entrance. The soldiers make a small opening in the cave and order Orlik to go back to the station so 262 Political Animals that the horse may show others the way to where the two soldiers are trapped inside the cave. The two soldiers also use the opening to send a carrier pigeon with a note attached to its leg which gives the exact details of the cave’s location. The dog remains waiting outside the blocked cave. Even from inside the cave the two soldiers continue to carry out their duties. They push their rifles through small holes in the wall of fallen rock and manage to stop a suspicious looking man who attempts to cross the path that leads to the border crossing. The man’s progress is thwarted by the guard dog Vulkan, who remains on duty while his masters are trapped in the cave. The man attempting to cross the border is found to be an important American spy. The horse’s adventures are multiple and more varied, but her most heroic deed is similar to that of the dog Vulkan. The horse survives many dramatic episodes including being captured by bandits. Her final triumph is manifested by her loyalty to the Soviet soldier who trained her. This soldier captures one of the spies and ties him to the horse. When he is fatally shot by another spy, he manages to whisper an order to the horse to go to the border station. The horse obeys, delivering the spy on her back to the guard station. The Soviet border guards and commanding officers subsequently unveil a major international capitalist plot against the Soviet Union, the purpose of which is to start a new world war. This plot, aimed at discrediting the Soviet Union as a peace-loving country through the deployment of neighbouring uneducated ‘Oriental’ tribal people, is apparently fuelled by Western concern over the increasing popularity of socialism in capitalist countries. Frontier Post in the Mountains was made in the year of Stalin’s death. At one point the camera zooms in on Stalin’s portrait on the wall of the room where the interrogation of the American spies takes place. One of the spies is a geologist by profession. Why does he pretend to be an archaeologist? The implied answer is that Western capitalists are prospecting for deposits of precious metals and are trying to ascertain whether such deposits exist on Soviet territory. This is the important spy-scientist that the border guard dog Vulkan helps to intercept. In keeping a watchful eye on the spy in the mountains, Vulkan serves the function of the legendary dog Cerberus. The narrative of the country’s gold and the enemy who wants to steal it was a popular Border guard dogs 263 theme of the Stalin era.18 In helping to intercept and guard one such enemy, a spy from the United States of America, the dog Vulkan makes a contribution of strategic importance to his country. While the plot of this film incorporates the thematics of the co- operation between the Soviet Army and animals in the service, it does not grant dogs or horses a key role in dealing with the border-crossing enemy. This is explained by a change in the concept of the enemy following World War II. In the years between 1947 and his death in 1953, Stalin started a number of complex campaigns against groups he marked as enemies.19 Those involved in subversive activities, he believed, could be living within the Soviet Union while being in the service of international capitalists. As the enemy became more smart and devious, cunning investigators were needed to untangle such complex intrigues. It was thus no longer enough to rely on the intuition and intelligence of service animals like trained dogs. In order to intercept an enemy on the border and his contacts within the country, more sophisticated intelligence was needed. Indeed, in Frontier Post in the Mountains every soldier expresses logical arguments as to how to solve the emerging situation. No decisions are made by intuition: senior investigators and interrogators elucidate impressive arguments built on mathematical precision and formal logic. That it is not sufficient to rely on animals in service is encapsulated in an episode with the carrier pigeon. When the two soldiers trapped in the cave send a pigeon with a message attached to its leg to the station, the pigeon does not arrive safely. It is attacked and eaten by a mighty mountain eagle. Only feathers remain. The note in the capsule is later discovered by pure chance. The delay allows the enemy more time to prepare an attack on the border.20 To rely on nature was thus not an acceptable option. Strong ar- gumentative logics and scientific precision marked the work of senior

18 Those who were involved in illicit activities in gold smuggling were depicted as representatives of non-Slavic ethnicities: Jews, Georgians and Tajiks. See Nikolai Mitrokhin, “Evrei, gruziny, kulaki i zoloto Strany Sovetov”, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie LXXX/4 (2007), 195-220. 19 Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Also Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctors’ Plot. London: John Murray, 2003. 20 This episode is in sharp contrast to the 1937 film Granitsa na zamke (The Border is locked) in which the trained border guard dog Grim successfully delivers the important note. Granitsa na zamke, Dir. Vasilii Zhuravlev, screenplay M. Dol- gopolov, Soiuzdetfil’m, 1937. 264 Political Animals officers and investigators, while the use of staged court trials and the cult of the persecutor rendered the work of service animals such as dogs secondary though still important. It is perhaps for this reason that the image of the guard dog disappeared from Soviet currency in 1947, the year that Stalin unleashed his campaign against rootless cosmopol- itans and started his scaremongering rhetoric of the threat of a third world war.21

Closing the Decade of Developed Socialism: the 1970s and The Border Guard Dog Alyi

The 1979 film The Border Guard Dog Alyi (Pogranichnyi pes Alyi)22 echoes a number of motifs from Dzhulbars and Frontier Post in the Mountains. In this film the guarded border is evocative of the Pamir mountains border used in Dzhulbars and Frontier Post in the Moun- tains. But unlike these two classics the mountains and the exact geographical location in The Border Guard Dog Alyi are shrouded by the secrecy of anonymity.23 The job of deciphering the geographical location is left to the imagination of the viewer. In the situation of 1979 an informed viewer would have associated such a mountainous region with the Tajikistan-Afghanistan region. Soviet troops officially invad- ed Afghanistan in December 1979. The anonymity of the mountains is overt not only because of the political situation of 1979. The unmistakably exotic landscape of the mountain ranges also bespeaks distant non-European lands. In the context of iconic border guard films this mountainous terrain can be perceived as border regions in Tajikistan or even the Caucasus. Not only does the territory remain unnamed, so too does the ethnicity of the two perpetrators who travel over the mountains and violate the border. Dark and vaguely Asiatic, the two men, coming from the other side of the mountain separating Russia from its neighbour, could represent one of a number of different ethnic groups from the Caucasus to Pamir. Their purpose is likely to be political – they do not carry any merchandise that would identify them as traders or smugglers.

21 On the theme of cosmopolitanism, antisemitism and xenophobia in Soviet film see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 22 Pogranichnyi pes Alyi. Dir. Vladimir Golovanov, screenplay Iulii Fait, 1979. Based on the story by Iu. Koval’. 23 The real geographical location of the film was Tajikistan on the Afghan border. Border guard dogs 265

This film was made in the aftermath of the phenomenal success of Gavriil Troepol’skii’s film adaptation White Bim Black Ear (1977) – to be analysed later in the book. It also has features of commonality with another highly successful police dog film, Come here, Mukhtar! (1965) discussed in the previous chapter. Both have numerous scenes of dog training and drilling exercises, and both represent the special relationship developed between a dog handler and his dog. The progress made by Soviet society from the time of Mukhtar is emblematised in The Border Guard Dog Alyi by an all-prevailing methodology of patience and respect in dog training. Dog trainers are new army recruits who are guided by wise and friendly officers. In a further sign of the humane treatment of dogs, all are routinely checked by a veterinarian to make sure their health is in order and that they are fit yet not over-exercised. If in Come here, Mukhtar! the dog trainer Glazychev is an exception from the more formalistic disciplinarianism in dog training, then in The Border Guard Dog Alyi the atmosphere of humanism and camaraderie prevails. Officers are humane and friendly, and the soldiers form a tight brotherly community not only among themselves but also with their respective dogs. There is clearly a special bond between each trainer and his dog and all the trainers are young soldiers full of enthusiasm. In serving as border guards as part of Soviet Army service, dog handlers were not professional guards but rather trainees. They started with a pair of dogs which they were given for the purposes of training. This increased the bond between the men and their dogs as they all had to learn together. While the film shows a group of soldiers and dogs, it focuses on one young soldier and his dog, Alyi. The pair forms a close bond thanks to the special qualities of the soldier. This hero shares intertextual features with other iconic dog-themed productions. The first marker of his relationship to other such productions is his place of birth: he comes from the town of Kaluga, the same place where the dog White Bim Black Ear was born and where the film of that name was screened. His surname, Koshkin, derives from the word koshka, cat. This indicates his somewhat timid nature in comparison with the more ferocious temperament of dogs. Significantly he is not Kotov, a male cat, but Koshkin, denoting a more feminine nature.24 The physi-

24 Relevant to the symbolism of she-cat as denoting female gender is the Russian proverb registered by Vladimir Dal’: “Woman and cat [koshka] are for the hut, 266 Political Animals cal appearance of the actor reveals no signs of exaggerated strength and masculinity. He is of average build, he is smiling and friendly, and he projects the peaceful emotions of a person who does not need to domineer. The animalistic surname paradoxically makes him more humane. All these features make him a successful dog trainer, and his dog turns out to be one of the most promising service dogs of the team. In this way The Border Guard Dog Alyi promotes a new type of masculinity, far removed from the sturdy masculinity of the border guards in the films of the Stalin era. Young and enthusiastic, Koshkin trains his dog as a friend, on the basis of the similarity of their respective status as young trainees about to undertake an important task. Like the other dog handlers in the army, Koshkin is allowed to choose a name for his dog. The name has to start with the letter A in order to make it easy to identify the dog’s age (all dogs given to the new soldiers were born in the same year). Koshkin chooses the name Alyi to denote the colour of the dog’s tongue. Like the other dogs being trained as border guard dogs Alyi is an East European shepherd.25 The word to describe the colour of the animal’s tongue is krasnyi, red. However, Koshkin chooses a more romantic synonym alyi, meaning red or scarlet. This name comes from a repertory of Russian literature and puts the marker of flesh on a different level. On the surface it is a politically correct name related to the colour of the Revolution and in keeping with official Soviet iconography. On the level of subtext, however, alyi alludes to cultural associations of a different kind, suggesting a symbolism steeped in more subjective, intimate connotations. It evokes the use of the word in the 1922 romantic story The Scarlet Sails by Alexander Grin and in the fairy-tale The Scarlet Flower, written by nineteenth-century writer Sergei Aksa- kov. In both these tales alyi, scarlet, has a dual meaning: it is associated with the longing for the sublime and the beautiful, but it is also an expression of romantic yearning and sublimated desire. Moreover, the word alyi is phonetically close to ‘Ala’/’Alla’, one of the most popular contemporary Russian women’s names.26 Such a choice of name dis-

muzhik and dog are for the outdoors”. V. Dal’, “Koshka”, in Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, Vol. II, 182. 25 The word ovcharka (shepherd dog) is commonly used to avoid a differentiation between the two closely related breeds. 26 A.V. Speranskaia, Sovremennyi slovar’ lichnykh imen.

Border guard dogs 267 closes the complex emotional needs of a young dog handler in the military service and the multifarious roles fulfilled by a dog in the life of its handler. It endows the dog with a spirituality that brings him closer to his human master and at the same time situates the animal as a companion (the subversive representation of dogs in service as ‘substitute’ companions will be discussed in more detail in the last chapter). The dog and his soldier handler are clearly friends. Koshkin an- thropomorphises the dog consistently through various key episodes in the film. Like his counterpart Glazychev from Come here, Mukhtar!, he is programmatically anti-Pavlovian as he believes in treating the dog in the same way as he would treat a human. Such conduct is particularly apparent in an episode in which the dog becomes wet while crossing the river. Koshkin does not leave him to dry in the cold air but takes off his own shirt and uses that to dry the dog. This behaviour is in line with a Russian proverb about friendship between people: ‘one shares with one’s friend the only shirt one has left’. In this situation Koshkin does just that – he is prepared to freeze in order to save his dog-friend from freezing. This relationship of friendship is based on the notion of sacrifice, and Koshkin crosses the boundary between humans and animals by including a dog in the domain of equals. Whereas Pavlovian experiments as well as other scientific and service ventures were based on the notion of the sacrifice of dogs for the bet- terment of the human condition, Koshkin breaks apart this notion. His relationship with the dog is based on the idea of mutual sacrifice, in line with the ethos of friendship between two people. The official attitude towards methods of dog training has changed significantly from the controversies of the era of Mukhtar’s training by the Soviet Police. The professional army personnel in charge of the guard dog training operation have adopted methods based on a relationship of trust between the handler and his dog. This method relies on the notion that humans and animals share identical emotions and, as a result, the same ethical imperatives. While in Georgii Vladimov’s tragic story, Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog, the faithful dog Ruslan is deceived by the handler into believing that he is truly loved, in The Border Guard Dog Alyi this emotional bond is authentic and mutual. In building a relationship based on trust and love the handler succeeds in developing reciprocal support between the human and the animal. There is only one exception to this otherwise positive training process. One dog handler does not manage 268 Political Animals to build this mutual friendship, because he does not treat the dog as an equal during the training sessions. Against the rules he uses force during such sessions.27 When it comes to the test trial, the dog wants to run away from the operation site. The army authorities interpret this behaviour as the fault of the handler, rather than the dog. The handler is dismissed from service as a border guard. Similarly, having been taught to mistrust its trainer the dog cannot be retrained as a border guard dog. The shift in emphasis from physical force to intelligence is one of the main themes of The Border Guard Dog Alyi. Koshkin finds time to teach his dog not only the routine tricks required by the border guard dog but also more ‘homely’ tricks. One such trick unrelated to a border guard dog’s official training turns out to be unexpectedly useful in a critical episode on the border. In preparation for a New Year’s celebration Koshkin teaches the dog to pull a cord in order to activate the ringing of a bell. The soldiers attending the party applaud the dog’s trick. Later, in a dramatic episode in which Koshkin and Alyi try to stop two culprits from crossing the border, both the handler and his dog are wounded. The dog has been shot and lies motionless, effectively dying on duty, while Koshkin has been incapacitated by a strong blow. One of the criminals climbs up the mountain which demarcates the border between the USSR and the neighbouring country. He has just a few steps to make in order to reach the top of the mountain and cross the border when Koshkin repeats the word that he had taught Alyi in order to pull the string attached to a bell. The dog uses his last strength and breath to grab the criminal’s mountaineering rope with his mouth and pull it, so bringing the man tumbling down from the top of the cliff to his death.

27 This is in sharp contrast to the view propagated in the 1939 film Vysokaia nagrada (A High Reward) admittedly not by a professional dog trainer but by an important professor of aeronautics who teaches his young pioneer son that border guard dogs have to be conditioned to be angry. In one episode the boy disciplines the dog by hitting him with a leather belt. He trains three German shepherd dogs as part of the school’s programme to foster dogs for border guard service. The film was made by the children’s film studio in line with ideological agendas of the Stalin era. Vysokaia nagrada, Dir. Evgenii Shneider, screenplay Igor’ Savchenko. Soiuzdetfil’m, 1939. For a discussion of Soviet children’s spy films see Alexander Prokhorov, “Arresting Development: A Brief History of Soviet Cinema for Children and Adolescents”, in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, Eds Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova, New York: Routledge, 2013, 129-151. Border guard dogs 269

Contrary to the viewer’s expectations the film has a happy ending: the dog Alyi is saved by doctors and rejoins Koshkin. The last scene of the film has strong connotations of return, rebirth and secular eschatology. It takes place in spring, among the flowering almond trees. Koshkin stands with a group of his comrades in a sanatorium, recuperating from his wounds. Alyi has just been brought to him as a surprise by his mates. Like Koshkin himself, the dog is covered by a bandage but his movements are quick, demonstrating that his wounds are not serious. Both the man and the dog are reunited in the recupera- tive atmosphere of the sanatorium, suggestive of a secular optimism inspired by a trust in the achievements of Soviet medicine. The rebirth of nature as indicated by the spring blossoms stands as a symbol of secular eschatology, paralleling the quasi-resurrection of the dog Alyi. While Alyi’s recovery is a triumph of science and medicine, his apparent resurrection has another, more hidden meaning, in line with the Aesopian tradition of using dog thematics to convey politically or ideologically subversive messages. A manifestation of the special function of the dog’s death is conveyed in its multiple replaying within the text of the film. The structural positioning is in itself an indication of the special importance of the scene. The scene in which Alyi lies dead, surrounded by a group of mourning soldiers, is shown as a flashback a number of times throughout the film. Repeated in this way it punctuates the narrative as a reminder that there will be a sad ending to the story. The viewer is prepared to expect the ‘sacrificial’ scenario of the dog different from the life scenario of the Soviet border guard. This mode serves as a device to take the viewer through the process of imminent grief to the shock of emotional relief. Prepared for the pessimistic ending, a scenario carefully staged as an example of the im- minence of death, the viewer discovers that death can be conquered, that literal and physical resurrection is possible. The dog is the site and the sight of resurrection, of overcoming death. That this quasi- resurrection could be achieved by medical resuscitation is a possible explanation of the dog’s return to life. The general vitality of dogs, a stereotypical attribute of dogs in this film, is another ‘logical’ explanation for Alyi’s apparent resurrection. But the multiple showing of the scene of the lifeless dog’s body lying at the centre of a crowd of mourners serves as a reminder that the dog was ‘actually’ dead. This duality of belief and disbelief allows the viewer the choice as to whether or not to believe in the dog’s physical resurrection. 270 Political Animals

Based on the strong anthropomorphic parallelism between dogs and humans, the story of the dead dog’s return to life helps to smuggle the theme of resurrection into a film set during a time of developed socialism at the very end of the 1970s. The next decade, characterised by the reforms of Glasnost and Perestroika, will see supernatural phenomena, with an emphasis on resurrection, the afterlife and the occult, take centre stage in Russian popular culture. It is not surprising therefore that the 1970s closes with a very different kind of border guard dog – a dog that alludes to the notion of resurrection. From the viewpoint of Soviet politics, the release in 1979 of The Border Guard Dog Alyi, a film about the USSR’s south-eastern borders and the ‘enemy’, signified a major event as Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. The geographical terrain shown in the film is not identified but, as discussed, generically represents the mountainous regions that could be the Caucasus or Pamir. The film uses the subplot of the border crossing by the enemy at the time of the earthquake as an intertextual indicator of the thematic and geographical similarities with the 1953 film Frontier Post in the Mountains. The fact that the more recent film shows a new kind of a hero, one less reliant on physical strength than on his wits, indicates the new political situation at the end of the 1970s. The political realities of the Afghan wars had demonstrated that the use of force and physical dexterity alone was not effective. The optimistic end of the film does not coincide with the scenario of the real war in Afghanistan with its high Soviet death toll that was revealed only with Glasnost reforms, notably in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Tsinkovye mal’chiki (Zinky Boys) (1990).

From the defence of the Soviets to the defence of Russian borders

The 1980s ushered in the reforms which resulted in the dismantlement of the USSR. The borders of the Motherland contracted and the south- eastern borders which were guarded by Dzhulbars and Alyi withdrew to those of pre-Imperial maps. The concept of the ‘new abroad’ emerged to denote this new geopolitical situation. Yesterday’s inner republics became today’s hostile states. The Caucasus and Pamir regions remained the most dangerous conflict zones, and the Russian Federation had military confrontations with states like Georgia and Chechnya. The generic ‘darkies’ from Russia’s south-eastern borders emblematise the ethnic hostile Other. They are both the enemy within and outside. They are accused of staging attacks in Moscow, thus Border guard dogs 271 acting as terrorists. They are shown to relocate their subversive activities into the heart of the Russian, no longer Soviet, Motherland. When they seek employment in the Russian Federation local people treat them with disdain, openly displaying racialist attitudes. In some instances they fall prey to local criminals. Their fluid status as people of the ‘former republics’ of the Soviet Union rewrites the concept of the border guards and border guard dogs. It is for this reason that popular representations of the interception of trespassers in the new post- Soviet world centre on the realm of scientific engineering and bio- technologies.28 In the works of popular pulp fiction writers, the enemy produces new composite monsters consisting of hybrid combinations of various species. In this new phantasmagorical discourse of popular culture the German shepherds and Siberian laikas become obsolete creatures.29 The 1998 film Goriachaia tochka (A Hot Spot) typifies this departure from the standard filmic pairing of the border guard and his dog.30 The theme of the film is the defence of Russian borders from Afghan weapons and narcotics. There is a conspicuous absence of dogs in the working life of the Russian border guard. The focus changes from the ‘border guard and his dog’ to the ‘border guard and his technology’. Helicopters and weaponry become the border guard’s best friends. The association of Russian border guards and their ‘Rus- sian’ dogs is transformed to the level of the symbolic. Afghan Mus- lims (including a former Russian paratrooper who converts to Islam and becomes a traitor of his country) call Russians ‘dogs’. In parallel to this description, a Russian service woman captive is called ‘such- ka’, a bitch. While the topos of the Russian woman at danger of attack by ‘darkies’ continues in this film – a dark man in ethnic clothes attempts to rape her – this woman is trained in combat warfare. The iconicity of Russianness in the physical representation of Russian women continues in this film: the woman is played by a robust blond typical of the iconic images in World War II posters of Russian women in need of protection. Although she is trained to defend herself, she still needs the help of a Russian man. The dark man in ethnic clothes

28 On hybrid monsters see Aleksandr Prokhanov, Teplokhod ‘Iosif Brodskii’. Ekate- rinburg: Ul’tra kul’tura, 2006. 29 The dog Alyi in the film was played by the dog Brut, a winner of the All Country Championship of Service Dogs. His official title in Russian was ‘Vsesoiuznyi ab- soliutnyi chempion sorevnovaniia sluzhebnykh sobak’. 30 Goriachaia tochka. Dir. Ivan Solovov, 1998. 272 Political Animals is large and strong, and by sheer weight he can overpower the Russian woman. But there is no dog to help her against this attack. The Rus- sian man, Captain Larionov, a border guard and veteran who had fought in Afghanistan, fulfils the role of the irreplaceable Russian man who saves her from imminent rape. Again, the protection of the borders of Russia and the body of the Russian woman are linked together. This irreplaceable male hero is now celibate. Although married in the past, he has dedicated his life to the love of his country, Russia. In conversation with a very attractive blond Russian woman – another professional fighter – he describes his love of Russia as the only kind of love that he has time for. The topos of sublimation of sexual desires for the sake of the protection of the Motherland continues throughout the film, but the sublimation no longer involves transference to the brotherly love for a dog. The rejected young woman, in all her seductive bodily beauty, stands in the rain – a metaphor for cooling her sexual desire in the cold and purifying water from heaven. While the sexual and gender-based aspects of the relationship between the border guard and his dog will be addressed in detail in the last chapter of this book, it is important to stress here that in the 1998 film, Russian border guards no longer have to rely on the help of dogs. The nicknames ‘dogs’ and ‘bitches’ in the context of this film embody more than that stable description of infidels as ‘dogs’ as used by Is- lamists. While calling Russians ‘dogs’ is meant as an insult to Russian (Christian) ethnicity, this nickname acquires an additional meaning in the context of the border guard topos. It is not in vain that a former Russian paratrooper now Islamic collaborator gives them this insulting name. With his broader symbolic associative field, he describes Russian border guards as ‘dogs’ and ‘bitches’ in a manner that is both culture-specific and topos-specific. His hatred should be interpreted not as that of a new convert to Islam expressing his abhorrence for ‘Christian and Russian dogs’, but rather as his hatred of Russian border guards as a breed of their own. For him, the parallelism between a border guard and his dog has factual underpinning – after all, Russian border guards had established the dynasties of quasi-Russian ethnic dogs. In this film from the late 1990s, however, border guards are depicted as supermen, thus echoing the stylistics of Western films by now familiar to Russian audiences. The hero of the film represents a class of border guard that embodies the powers and superpowers of the animal aided by machinery and technology. This border guard no Border guard dogs 273 longer needs a dog, because he incorporates all the powers of dogs and super-humans. In this manner the finest specimen of the border guard31 becomes as powerful as dogs in the national symbolic imagination.

2010: The Centenary of Karatsupa’s birth and the return of the cult of the Russian border guard dog

In 2010 the Russian Federal Security bureau (FSB) made a documentary film to celebrate the centenary of the birth of border guard Kar- atsupa. Nikita Karatsupa: a Legendary Pathfinder (Nikita Karatsupa: sledopyt iz legendy)32 includes interviews with Karatsupa and clips from films on the topic of border guards and border guard dogs. Most importantly, it establishes an ideological continuity in the tradition of the training of border guard dogs. It affirms the concept of the Soviet system of training border guard dogs as well as police and army service dogs. When Karatsupa died in 1994, the prevalent discourse about the dismantling of the Soviet borders was antagonistic to Karatsupa and his service. As a symbol of the USSR’s staunch defence of its borders Karatsupa became a target of attack and criticism aimed at unveiling the expansionist and colonial project of the Soviet Empire. Directed at the subjugation of the natives of newly appropriated spaces and the construction of impenetrable borders in previously linguistically and culturally porous locales, Karatsupa’s heroic deeds were seen to represent the aggressive and ruthless oppression of nations adjoined to the Soviet Union. Both Karatsupa and his border guard dogs thus became a symbol of brutal force. Indeed, with his dogs trained to bite deeply the hands of weapon-wielding perpetrators, the dogs were seen as savage attackers of human life. The new documentary, made twenty years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, reveals a different political and ideological discourse. Unlike the mid-1990s, the year of 2010 represents an era marked by the firm return to patriotic ideology. Russian self- assertiveness, nationalism and pride in the Soviet Russo-centric past

31 His superior officer in the film refers to this hero as a member of the ‘Golden stock’. 32 Nikita Karatsupa: sledopyt iz legendy. Dir. and screenplay Vadim Gasanov, FSB, Lex film for VGTRK, 2010. 274 Political Animals permeate the narrative of the film. The documentary celebrates both Russian patriotism and the cult of the Russian border guard and the Russian service dog. The documentary shows a number of rare historical shots of dog training in the 1930s. The drilling of the puppies starts at the very early stages in their lives and continues during their years as mature dogs. It also shows shots of kennels situated on the Manchurian border with China. In line with Karatsupa’s memoir, the documentary narrative explains that in post-Revolutionary Soviet Russia the need emerged to breed ‘our own’ dogs rather than relying on imported puppies from Germany. It states that the need also arose for a Soviet methodology of dog training, one that would be different from the foreign, German methodology, and that Russian text books on service dog training were required to be written. Furthermore, to valorise the patriotic line of the army dog-breeding discourse, the film establishes a direct genealogical continuity between the service dogs trained by Karatsupa in the 1930s and the dogs on service in Russia today. Vari- ous high-ranking army officers repeat this point in their interviews. The narrative of the genetic homogeneity of border guard dogs on service today creates a quasi-racialist discourse related to the ‘ethnic’ purity of Russian-bred dogs. Since the pairing of the Russian border guard and his dog remains a stable ideological construct, the notion of the genealogical homogeneity of the dogs transfers to the border guards themselves. This symmetry and parallelism establishes the notion of the ethnic and familial uniformity of Russian guards. This imagery bears a direct relation to the motif of the likeness of prison guards in Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog. But whereas Vladimov presented the grotesque nature of this image in order to criticise totalitarian society and the citizens who created it, in the documentary of 2010 this motif is glorified. The notion of mono- lithic similitude is at the core of the patriotic ideology promoted by the film-makers. (Online access to this film is free of charge on the Miradox website.) In interviews in the documentary army personnel maintain that the methods of dog training have not changed since Kar- atsupa’s times. Continuity is thus established both in the Sovi- et/Russian professional training tradition as well as in genealogy. Russian border guards are linked by the commonality of blood in the same way that Russian army and police dogs are linked. Notably, interviews are given by Karatsupa’s son, who is an Army colonel in the Border guards today. The happy Soviet family might have fallen Border guard dogs 275 apart, but the happy Russian family continues. The task of the members of this family is to protect their territory. Katerina Clark notes examples of biological continuity in the representations of border guards in 1930s’ discourse.33 In one instance, when a border guard was killed he was subsequently replaced by his biological (Russian) brother. It is my contention that this trope is echoed in the notion of familial continuity among Russian border guard dogs. The typology of the genealogical lineage of border guard dogs functions in line with the discourse of the pseudo-Soviet, in reality the ethnic Russian, his family and the country’s borders. The interviews screened in this film maintain that Russia’s borders today are in need of protection to no lesser extent than they were in Soviet times. Foreign spies, contrabandists and illicit traders are seen as constant challenges to the sanctity of Russia’s borders. To protect these borders Russian guards need Russian-bred and Russian- trained dogs.34 One of the most telling claims made by the military personnel is the assertion that science and engineering are not advanced enough to produce a device that could replace dogs’ olfactory abilities. The dog as a creation of nature is more perfect than any human-engineered device. Russian scientists in service to the military maintain that for another hundred years science will not be able to invent an instrument that could match the ‘dog’s nose’. Taken in the context of Pavlovian dissections of dogs’ bodies, this statement has quasi-metaphysical connotations. To proclaim dogs to be nature’s perfect creations invests nature itself with metaphysical dimensions. The cult of the border guard and the police dog continues to be nurtured and protected by members of the Russian military and security apparatus.35 Although popular culture in its post-modernist heteroglossia challenges the very notion of the genetic purity of animals, serious institutional military discourse maintains the notion of the physical and genetic integrity of the animal body. Although popular culture creates composite creatures based on genetic modifications

33 Katerina Clark. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. 3rd edition, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2000. 34 Of note are patriotic feature films like Streliaushchie gory (2010) and Tikhaia zastava (2011) where Russian border guards get killed because they do not have trained dogs.

276 Political Animals and scientific experimentations, Federal Security organs propagate the idea of controlled and guarded animal husbandry. While in popular culture the body of the Motherland personified by Russian women is assaulted, raped and even dismembered by non-Russian male perpetrators, the military complex continues to promulgate the embodied sacrosanct image of the Motherland. This concept is encapsulated by the formulation of the country’s borders in the FSB documentary of 2010 as ‘the sacred and untouchable borders of the Motherland’.36 The taxidermic body of the legendary border guard dog Ingus is on display in the Museum of the Border Guard Division of the Rus- sian Army, Muzei pogranichnykh voisk, in Moscow. It is commonly known that the name of the legendary dog was changed for reasons of political correctness: the name Ingus was posthumously conferred as a replacement for the original name Indus (meaning Hindu) in response to changes in the Soviet Union’s policies towards Nehru’s India in particular and the international community in general.37 The taxi- dermied Ingus was the fifth generation Ingus. Moscow experts made him into a taxidermic exhibit in 1963 after an unsuccessful operation. Physicians could not save the dog’s life. He died as a hero from wounds that had been inflicted by the enemy. Ingus’s status as the father of the family of Russian border guard dogs functions in parallel to the mythology of the unity of the Soviet/Russian family. Indeed, his preserved body (without organs) has survived the transition from the Soviet family to the Russian family. In the context of the Soviet tradition of preservation of embalmed bodies emblematised by Lenin’s body in the Kremlin Mausoleum, it waits to be resurrected either by the magic of scientific cloning, the magic of arcane sciences or through the promise of the Second Coming.38 The preserved body thus has conquered mortality through the multivalent interpretations to which a dead/undead body is exposed.39 The claim that the role of the

36 The original Russian wording is “Granitsy Rodiny sviashchenny i neprikosno- venny”. See Nikita Karatsupa: sledopyt iz legendy. Dir. Vadim Tarasov, FSB. Lex film for VGTRK, 2010. 37 Karatsupa does not write about this re-naming episode in his memoir, thus continuing the line of self-censorship even in the post-Soviet 1990s. 38 On conflation of the occult and science in Soviet and post-Soviet culture see The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. 39 On Lenin as an embodied cult of immortality and the history of the embalming of his body see Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cam- Border guard dogs 277 border guard and police dogs will remain unchanged in twenty-first century Russia must be taken in the context of this broader mythology – a mythology that forms one of the main leitmotifs of this book.

bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House, 1993.

Part Four Transitions, transformations, transgressions

Chapter 8 The hunter’s dog as hunted: White Bim Black Ear as the cult event of the Stagnation Era, 1970s-1980s

Perhaps the dog cursed people for distorting his body, for making his legs short and his neck long and weak. But he loved the girl […]. Is it just? – Ruvim Frayerman, Wild Dog Dingo. 19391

The publication of the story White Bim Black Ear by Gavriil Troepol’skii (1905-1995) was one of the most important cultural events of the 1970s.2 The subsequent film adaptation became one of the cult films of the 1970s-1980s. The story has as its title the name of the dog Bim, which embodies the allegorical and Aesopian potential of the dog narrative. The full name of the dog and the title of the story allude to the binarism between the black and white colours of the dog’s fur. It establishes an emblematic meaning related to matters of racialism and genetic essentialism. Indeed, body politics of alterity is a subtext of the story and it signals its presence already in the title. In its marked departure from the narratives about dogs on official state service, this 1970s’ dog story introduces a distinctly new narrative into the thematics of dogs in Soviet culture. Troepol’skii focuses on the ordinary and private life of a dog and his peripeteia in a society that shows itself to be hostile and cruel. The only members of the Soviet public that show kindness to the dog, a setter, are the dog’s aging master and children. Both the retired elderly master and the small children fit into the category of disempowered members of society. Together with the persecuted dog they represent the margins of society. The inhumane treatment of the dog, in particular the dog’s death from suffocation in a hermetically sealed animal patrol van, is a

1 Ruvim Fraierman, Dikaia sobaka Dingo, ili povest’ o pervoi liubvi. Minsk: Iu- natsva, 1986, 76. 2 Gavriil Troepol’skii, Belyi Bim Chernoe Ukho. Moscow: Ekonomika, 1981. First published by Detskaia literatura in 1976. 282 Political Animals shameful indictment of the cruelty and lack of compassion shown by the contemporary Soviet public. The dog’s suffering and death also serves as an allegory of the fate of all persecuted and marginalised creatures, human and non-human. In keeping with the Aesopian mode of dog narratives, Troepol’skii’s biography is inscribed into the subtext of this story of a marginalised albino animal but, as with any polemical subtext, it constitutes a coded language which is readable on both macro and micro levels. The latter one is decipherable only by those in the know. Born before the October Revolution, Troepol’skii was the son of an Ortho- dox priest. Following the separation of the church from the state in Soviet Russia, priests and their children were frequently harassed. As the son of a priest Troepol’skii belonged to a group that was persecuted or, in milder cases, mistrusted by the Soviet authorities. The story’s adaptation into a cult film in 1977 subdued this subversive political subtext.3 The film valorised those parts of the story that reflected the cultural trends of the 1970s, namely the quest to return to nature and the desire to expose the shallow philistinism, indifference and self- centredness of city dwellers.4 In line with the literary themes of this decade, the story’s strong didactic pathos is revealed in the loss of human compassion and moral direction. While the story’s plot weaves these themes into the dog perepitea narrative on the surface layer of the text, it also has a subversive subtext. The story’s curious hybridity manifests itself in the symbiosis of Russophilic symbols and a criticism of the limitations of this type of Soviet discourse. The story makes use of markers of the new Russian nationalism in vogue during this decade, which found its expression via the sentimentalisation and lyrical resurrection of such Russian national symbols as the forest, small villages, a love of nature and the animal world – all these features become components of the master narrative and an expression of this new kind of nationalism. Represented by the Village Prose writers, this form of Russianness was the flavour of the 1970s, a trend

3 Belyi Bim Chernoe ukho. Dir. S. Rostotskii, screenplay S. Rostotskii. Kinostudiia imeni Gor’kogo, Moscow, 1977. 4 See Kathleen F. Parthe, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Also Deming Brown, Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.

White Bim Black Ear 283 clearly patronised by those in power.5 Troepol’skii’s own professional background as an agronomist made his kinship to the Village Prose writers appear even more pronounced. This kinship is yet another reason why his story and the subsequent film adaptation won him high state awards and recognitions, including the Lenin Prize in 1980. In the light of these facts, White Bim Black Ear was taken to fit the officially patronised master narrative. My reading of this story’s deeper layers, as well as a comparison with the changes made to its major symbols in the film, will lay bare its subversive aspects. The main protagonist of the story, Ivan Ivanovich, is a writer, a keeper of the traditions of Russian literary culture represented by the gentry writers of the nineteenth century. If one of the extremes of Village Prose writing and the intellectual fashion that it inspired was the glorification of simple folk, often uneducated but endowed with Russian spirituality because of their knowledge of traditional culture, then Ivan Ivanovich is a representative of the Russian intelligentsia.6 His name and patronymic attest to his ethnic Russianness. In his love for nature, hunting and hunting dogs, he subscribes to the very specific literary tradition of the Russian classics of the nineteenth century. His hunting dog, however, becomes the hunted – not by animals but by human beings, Soviet citizens whom the Brezhnev era celebrated as members of a humane and just society. The Scottish setter puppy of the title was initially isolated from the rest of the litter on the grounds of his unusual colouring. The narrator decides to purchase the dog. He understands that being predominantly white rather than black with dark brown markings, the dog is an albino, yet, he decides to look for the genealogy of setters that would ‘justify’ the pedigree dog’s unusual colouring. Troepol’skii’s subversive strategy becomes clear if we take into account that he gives this Scottish setter the colouring of English setter: white with elements of black. As an owner of an English setter in real life, Troepol’skii knew the difference in colouring between the two types. By giving the Scottish setter the physical characteristics of English setter he enters

5 Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “The Search for Russian Identity in Con- temporary Soviet Russian Literature”, in Ethnic Russia in the USSR: the Dilem- ma of Dominance. Ed. Edward Allworth, New York: Pergamon, 1980, 95-105. 6 See Philippa Lewis, “Peasant Nostalgia in Contemporary Russian Literature”, Soviet Studies XXVIII/4 (1976), 548-569. Also Lev Anninskii and V. Kozhinov “Moda na prostonarodnost’”, Kodry 3 (1971), 132.

284 Political Animals into a game with his readership, targeting an informed reader who will receive the signal and look for deeper subversive meanings of the story.7 Indeed, the first chapter of the story abounds with references to material that official Soviet culture had censored and tabooed: the Holy Bible; the story of Moses and the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; racial stereotypes. It makes use of symbols such as the Bible, European paintings and paintings of Russian royalty in order to convey the hidden meaning of the political message. The story of the dog’s adventures is framed by the introduction and the ending, both of which are similarly imbued with the concealed messages. The allegorical possibilities of Aesopian language are thus set within the structural framework of the story. Without these signals at the beginning and at the end of the story, the narrative could be read simply as an adventure narrative of a dog who suffered from the cruelty and complacency of a society that had lost a human face. But the symbols and allegories at the beginning of the story not only determine the Aesopian reading of its ending but also lay out a reading of the story that raises and responds to one fundamental question: why are certain dogs and underdogs categorised and marginalised as inferior by the dominant group?

Cryptic code of canine genealogy: The Bible, Moses, Leo Tolstoy and cynology

The opening episode describes the handling of the young puppy Bim by his master. The master’s room contains shelves filled with numerous books, and the puppy’s exploration of his new habitat starts with his discovery of this literary cache. The puppy happens to damage an abridged version of the Bible – The Bible for Believers and Non- believers – and the master pushes the dog’s nose against the book so as to teach him not to commit such an act again. The puppy is thus conditioned to understand that books are sacrosanct. As the narrator states, ‘Bim received his first moral lesson via The Bible for Believers and Non-believers’ (6). This episode’s structural importance as an opening prolegomena to the story points to its special significance.

7 Russian bloggers today still discuss the cynological paradox of Bim’s origins trying to explain why Troepol’skii made ‘a mistake’. See http://otvet.mail.ru/ question/55180712

White Bim Black Ear 285

The Holy Bible was not published in the Soviet Union. As it was impossible to obtain a copy of either the Old or the New Testa- ment, the only source of scatterings of Biblical knowledge was atheistic literature. The 1960s decade produced the book The Bible for Believers and Non-believers (Bibliia dlia veruiushchikh i neveruiushchikh) (1962) and it is this book that the narrator in White Bim Black Ear treasures and obliquely refers to as a source of moral knowledge.8 The choice of this book is in itself highly provocative because it attests both to the moral importance of the information contained in the Scriptures and to the historical validity of this information – why otherwise should the writer have this book? If the Biblical stories were but a collection of fairy-tales then it would be senseless to look for historical information in it. The narrator’s use of the Bible as a source of knowledge challenges the Russocentrism of the 1970s which promoted folk beliefs, tales and chronicles which, although they had Christian connotations, obscured the significance of the Scriptures. Within this historical and intellectual climate Troepol’skii’s emphasis on the Bible as a source of knowledge serves as a political polemic against these new intellectual trends. The episode that brings the Bible to the forefront of the story’s hidden subtext is followed by a number of discussions that valorise the polemical intent of this episode. The reader is informed that the writer researches the history of the setter breed after his puppy is declared ‘degenerative’ in terms of cynology.9 The writer had previously saved the dog from death by drowning – the breeder had marked him for death because the colour of his fur, white with a tint of black rather than black, rendered the puppy a ‘degenerate’ (‘vyrozhdenie’, 7). This loaded term calls for readers’ attention. As a belief and a term ‘degeneration’ has race- specific connotations in the history of race in Western culture. Indeed, the word ‘degeneration’ has been applied to Jews since Jewish physician Max Nordau first used the term at the turn of the last century (although Nordau intended the notion of degeneration to have a social rather than ethnic and racial meaning, from the fin-de-siècle it was

8 Emel’ian Iaroslavskii, Bibliia dlia veruiushchikh i neveruiushchikh. Moscow: Gos. izd-vo politicheskoi literatury, 1962. 9 ‘No po zakonam kinologii belyi okras, v konkretnom sluchae, schitaetsia priznakom vyrozhdeniia’. Belyi Bim Chernoe ukho, 7.

286 Political Animals paradoxically applied to Jews).10 Nazi rhetoric made special use of the term in application to Jews, using it as a justification for the policy of extermination of this ‘race’ alongside Gypsies and homosexuals. Cynology (kinologiia) in Russian is a morphologically symmet- rical construction to raceology (rasologiia). In Troepol’skii’s sequence of discussion the words ‘kinologiia’ and ‘degeneration’, as well as the notion of the extermination of the degenerate and ‘anoma- lously coloured’ (9) puppy occur straight after the symbolic reference to the Bible. For the reader accustomed to the Aesopian language of allusion mastered by Russian realist prose, this proximity signifies a hidden connection, a link between degenerate dogs and underdogs both of whom fall outside the dominant mainstream group. The reader understands that Troepol’skii is writing a dog story that smuggles in the motif of the persecution of underdogs on the basis of race, religion and creed. As the story of a dog as the genetic Other, because of Bim’s difference in colour, it ensures that the identity of this Other in the context of the Soviet realia of the 1970s is understandable to the informed reader. In dealing with the concept of an ancient breed Troepol’skii creates a further parallelism between Jews as the ultimate Other and the ancestors of the dog Bim. He investigates the presence of dogs similar to Bim in appearance in the sixteenth-century painting ‘Moses striking the rock’ by Italian master Leandro Bassano (1557-1622). The painting belongs to the Louvre but the writer sees it at an exhibition in Moscow. The painting portrays the scene from the Old Testa- ment in which Moses responds to the complaining Israelites in the desert during their exodus from Egypt. The work abounds with representations of various animals, including farm animals in need of water. But Troepol’skii focuses on the pictorial representation of the two dogs that occupy a prominent place in the painting’s composition. He identifies these dogs as setters belonging to Moses. In search of an explanation for the presence of the white and black colours in Bim’s coat the narrator notes that the dogs in Bassano’s painting are white with black patches. The narrator is keen to establish genealogy between the rejected puppy Bim and Moses’s dogs as well as between

10 For a good exposé of this theme see Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: California UP, 1997.

White Bim Black Ear 287 his puppy and the dogs that served as prototypes for Bassano some four hundred years previously. This rich ancestry symbolises the ancient origins of a particular group of kin, be it a nation or a people. The narrator ironically remarks that the claim of ancient genealogical roots is not likely to save his dog Bim from being regarded as an anomaly. On the contrary, the logic in operation demands that the older the origins the more weighty are the ‘accusations of atavism and inferiority’ (8). This aphoristic statement is an example of Aesopian language: its double meaning is reinforced not only by the content of the phrase but also by its particular placement in the narrative sequence. Its proximity to the historical figure of Moses and to the episode from the Bible serves to indicate its relevance to discussions surrounding the persecution of a minority group. In his search for an explanation for the combination of white and black in Bim’s coat the narrator finds descriptions of famous setters in Russian history. These descriptions link these dogs to famous historical personalities, including writers Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin and Leo Tolstoy as well as Emperor Alexander III. Such links to Mo- ses, the Romanovs and aristocrats Kobylin and Count Tolstoy are viewed as problematic in terms of censorship and ideological domi- nants. The narrator gives an ironic account of the unacceptability of the dog’s lineage in relation to famous historical figures who owned dogs with similar colourings:

What can be used as defence of Bim in the case of a possible argument? Moses has to be excluded for obvious reasons. Sukhovo- Kobylin falls out because of the time factor and in the matter of colouring. This leaves Leo Tolstoy: a) he is closer in terms of time; b) his dog’s father was black and mother red. Everything fits. But his father, the black one, was from the Imperial lineage, and here is the impedi- ment. Whichever way one looks it is better to be silent about the search for the origins of Bim’s blood. Accordingly, the cynologists will classify Bim in accordance with the genealogy of Bim’s father and mother in line with their laws. This is how it goes: if there is no white dog in the genealogy – end of the matter. And Tolstoy is of no consequence. And they are right. Indeed, anybody can claim the origins of their dog from Leo Tolstoy’s dogs. From this one can claim the origins from L.N. Tolstoy himself. Truly, we have many Tolstoys

288 Political Animals

among us! A horrific number of Tolstoys have emerged, a dizzying amount. (10)

The narrator reduces arguments about genealogical lineage ad absurdum. He satirises the current literary scene by alluding to the inflated number of professional writers in the Soviet Union. Their claim to belong to the best traditions of Russian national literature is also an object of authorial criticism. The formulation for the impossibility of including Moses in this line of historical personalities is particularly revealing. It stands as an example of the overt and covert use of Aesopian language. Certainly the 1970s’ reader would have understood the meaning of the void, the blank spot that signifies a political taboo. It points to a conspiracy of silence with all the participants paradoxically knowing the reasons for the taboo and what is being tabooed. Here, dog and underdog create the semantics of the tabooed object. In this way the dog once more fulfils its symbolic function on the coded level of the given culture. The crypto-Biblical subtext in White Bim Black Ear sometimes springs boldly into the surface layer of the text. In the description of Bim’s need to care for himself in his retreat in the forest, a predicament resulting from his persecution by humans, the dog starts looking for natural healing remedies in order to sustain himself. This instinc- tual knowledge is present in the dog and helps him to survive. A similar motif is present in Georgii Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog, discussed previously, and a number of dogs in the writings of Jack London survive in the forest because of their regression to a state of wildness. In the work of London and Vladimov this call of the wild is framed as a general call of all pre-domesticated animals. In the case of Bim, Troepol’skii gives a much more precise historical setting: he explains Bim’s instinct for survival through the experience of his predecessors at the time of the prophet Moses. Troepol’skii’s Aesopian code thus reveals and conceals:

Bim wandered in the forest. God only knows how it became known to him that garlic contains three percent iodine? Nobody has an answer to this question. One can only guess that during these difficult two days before his death the experience of his ancient ancestors was revealed to him. It was programmed from many centuries ago, from the times of Moses. And this too was nature’s miracle! (99)

White Bim Black Ear 289

From a dog painted by a sixteenth-century Italian master as part of his representation of the story of Moses, Bim makes a transition to a dog whose predecessors actually lived at the time of Moses. Bim thus becomes a crypto-Biblical dog. While he does not proclaim himself to be a Christian believer Troepol’skii wants his reader to take the Scriptures, and Biblical history in general, seriously; certainly, the values that he disseminates are based on his knowledge of the Scrip- tures and Biblical history and it is these multiple messages that are played out in the dog narrative through Aesopian language. In contrast to the service dog master plot, Troepol’skii’s dog is initiated through a lesson learned literally from the Bible. The lesson is moral and the knowledge acquired relates to the prohibition of unacceptable acts. The message is clear: knowledge of right and wrong is to be gained from the Bible with its Ten Commandments.

The polyphony of political meanings of Aesopian language

The political message associated with the Aesopian use of the theme of Moses and the ancient Israelites is not limited to the issue of prejudice against the marginalised Other. Troepol’skii smuggles into his narrative an important passage from the Bible by way of a quotation from the official Soviet presentation of some Biblical stories, The Bible for Believers and Non-believers. The passage from the Bible relates to the ancient Israelites’ complaints about the lack of food and drink as they journeyed across the desert. Troepol’skii uses the passage as a parable for people’s preference for enslavement over freedom because enslavement carries the promise of food and water. This episode serves as a powerful allegory of the situation in the Soviet Union in which the state was depriving its citizens of democratic freedoms in exchange for meeting their basic needs. The presence of the two dogs in the Bassano painting also carries a politically loaded interpretation: the dogs symbolise ‘loyalty, hope and future’ (8) while the ungrateful people are ready to betray Moses. The notion of ‘hope and future’ is especially politically subversive, because it creates an opposition between the present and the past. It is a daring hint at the imperfect present of contemporary Soviet reality. The concept of the future can be interpreted as a component of

290 Political Animals

Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’.11 Chronotope embodies the dialectical relationship between space and time, and shows that in some periods of historical representation either the notion of time or the notion of space predominates. In the reality of the 1970s the future was determined to be perfectly in line with the idea of progress. Communism was viewed as the next stage of developed socialism. To address the notion of hope and the future within the framework of a discussion on enslavement, in terms of meeting people’s basic needs in exchange for democratic freedoms, subverts the concept of communism. The hidden message promotes the hope that a communist future will not ma- terialise, the Biblical narrative in the interpretation of Bassano’s ‘Moses striking the rock’ serving as a warning against a future of complete authoritarian enslavement through the provision of material basics. The two dogs are the symbols of political freedom and wisdom – they can distinguish the real prophets from the false ones. Troepol’skii’s use of Aesopian language in the above example stands an illustration of the most successful use of this device in Rus- sian realist prose. His text can be taken at face value and, as such, be in line with the ideology of the dominant cultural discourse. No censor can object to a declaration that dogs symbolise loyalty to their masters. Moreover, the declaration of hope for a brighter future is an integral part of the optimistic philosophy of dialectical materialism. Even the notion of the ungrateful Israelites obsessed with bread is in line with the anti-Jewish stereotype of the materialistic Jew. The authorial irony, however, is directed at the educated and sophisticated reader. This reader is sensitive to innuendo because he or she was brought up on a cultural tradition that used texts to convey multiple and contradictory meanings. When Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov presented the performance of miracles as a means of enslaving the masses he was writing about the Catholic Inquisition in Spain. The hidden meaning of his text, however, was in polemics not only with the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church but also with the socialists of the 1870s.12 Dostoevsky warns that it is they who would come to power and enslave people by taking care of their basic needs. They

11 M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, in The Dialog- ic Imagination. Austin: Texas UP, 1981, 84-258. 12 See a discussion in Konstantin Mochul’skii, Dostoevsky: zhizn’ i tvorchestvo. Paris: YMCA. 1980.

White Bim Black Ear 291 would quench the people’s thirst and satisfy their hunger but they would also take freedom in exchange for meeting these basic requirements. Troepol’skii’s reader is also a reader of Dostoevsky. This reader has the sophistication required to decipher the hidden meanings of Troepol’skii’s intertextual allusion to the famous chapter about the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. The Moses-Christ parallelism is also a well-established continuum between the Old Testa- ment and the New Testament.

Nostalgia for the past: the Russian forest, the aristocrat hunter and his dog

The mass popularity of White Bim Black Ear as a story and a film is explained by the two main features of the narrative: the story’s exposé of the ills of contemporary Soviet society and its nostalgia for a past based on Russian rather than Soviet ideals. In line with the dominant discourse of the 1970s – the Village Prose master narrative – the values of old Russia are to be found away from the city: in the villages, in rural Russia. Here, time converts into space. The chronotope takes the dog Bim in his adventures into a different time value by removing him from an urban area and placing him in a forest and village. This chronotope is characteristic of the Village Prose of the period – it is not necessary to move far away from the big city in space in order to arrive at a place representing a different time, a place where the village and its inhabitants stand in stark moral contrast to the city dwellers. White Bim Black Ear repeats this plot. During the first four years of Bim’s life his master takes him regularly to the forest to teach the dog to hunt. This forest is situated in the central region of Russia, in an area where Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev had their estates. Both writers were passionate huntsmen and both reflected their passion for hunting in their works – Turge- nev’s A Huntsman’s Sketches brought him literary fame. Before Tol- stoy’s later conversion to vegetarianism, he depicted his passion for hunting in Anna Karenina. Both writers recorded their hunting expeditions in their diaries and private correspondence. The geographical locale of Bim and his master’s hunting expeditions correspond to the places where both these writers hunted. This corresponding location establishes corresponding values and aspirations between the professional writer-narrator and the nineteenth-century writers. Both mem-

292 Political Animals bers of Russia’s landed gentry, Turgenev and Tolstoy’s hunting expeditions were a distinctly aristocratic pastime. With their strict codes of behaviour they were part of a culture that contemporary Russocentric Soviet culture of the 1970s held in high esteem. The juxtaposition of Soviet and Russian moral values lay at the core of this nostalgia. As a cultural construct, such nostalgia created its own iconicity, including the cult of the Russian forest, the Russian village with its simple inhabitants and the intrinsically moral values of village people. The idealisation of nineteenth-century literary classics was an integral part of this nostalgia. To hunt like Turgenev and Tolstoy was to engage in a ritual that would create a cultural continuity between the past and the present. Hence Ivan Ivanovich’s and Bim’s hunting excursions into the forest. But the hunt itself does not offend the sensibilities of nature- lovers. There are no scenes of bloodshed; no big game is being hunted down. Rather, the narrative glorifies the beauty of nature and Bim’s master shoots exclusively those birds that are familiar to the Russian reader from the pages of Russian literature. Many gentry class writers recorded their shooting of woodcocks (val’dshnep), wild ducks and other small fowl rather than large mammals.13 This fact in itself serves as a reason why their hunting expeditions do not offend the sensibilities of the modern reader. Bim’s master trains Bim to help him hunt these same literary, textual birds – val’dshnepy – thus establishing his literary genealogy with these nineteenth-century writers. In his search for Bim’s genetic predecessors described in the first chapter of the story, the narrator refers to the book Sobaki (Dogs) by the nineteenth-century authority on dogs, zoologist Leonid Sabaneev (1844-1898). As was stated in Chapter 1, Sabaneev’s book contains valuable information on Russian hunting dogs and describes their history in relation to their owners. From Sabaneev’s book Troepol’skii gleaned information on Tolstoy’s and Turgenev’s dogs and their hunting expeditions, information used in the lengthy descriptions of Bim’s hunting lessons in the forest. Troepol’skii’s choice of a setter as his canine hero is clearly based on his knowledge of the historical dogs owned by Turgenev and Tolstoy as well as on setters as literary characters. Tolstoy had a setter and there are setter dogs in

13 See Andrew Durkin, Sergei Aksakov and Russian Pastoral. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1983.

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Turgenev’s celebrated novel Fathers and Sons (1862). These red setters (as Irish setters were called) are given a symbolic prominence in the novel as they appear in the main protagonist Bazarov’s dream just before his death. Scholars have commented on the connection between these dogs and the real life dogs of Turgenev as well as on the special function of these dogs in their relevance to Turgenev’s philosophy of death. From a former hunter the atheist and scientist Bazarov becomes the hunted, finally accepting death after being rejected by a woman.14 Thomas Hodge interprets this episode as a manifestation of Turgenev’s views on nature and death: nature does not create a hierarchy between various creatures; rather, humans and animals are all alike and nature works only to create a balance between all living creatures.15 Setters are thus a literary, textualised breed in the history of nineteenth-century Russian high culture. It is the nostalgia and idealisation of this culture that marks the hunting theme of the book White Bim Black Ear. Sabaneev’s book taught that field sport demands an extraordinarily close relationship between a highly skilled hunter and an excep- tionally intelligent dog. It is this relationship that Troepol’skii’s Ivan Ivanovich builds with Bim. Ivan Ivanovich shares with his historical predecessors, the gentry writers of the nineteenth century, the expert and specialist knowledge of the hunter-writer. An episode in this narrative, in which an inadequate hunter takes Bim on a hunting expedi- tion to the forest, has a strong allegorical underpinning. This episode occurs when Bim is sold to a farmer. Then a nasty, plebeian hunter borrows Bim from his new owner in order to go hunting, but he gives Bim misleading and incorrect commands. Bim cannot obey these crude commands and is beaten by the man. This crude man personifies a flawed and brutal attitude towards nature, the forest and its inhabitants.16 He represents the new Soviet man who has not been

14 Jane Costlow parallels Bazarov to the Actaeon myth of antiquity, where the man gets turned into a stag before being torn apart by his own dogs on the command of the vengeful Diana. See Worlds Within Worlds. 15 Thomas Hodge, “The ‘Hunter in Terror of Hunters’: A Cynegetic Reading of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children”, Slavic and East European Journal LI/3 (2007), 453-473. 16 In “Ermolai i mel’nichikha” from Zapiski okhotnika Turgenev depicts the peasant hunting guide Ermolai as indifferent to his dog Valetka’s needs: he never feeds

294 Political Animals taught the proper way to hunt as was practised by albeit idealised aristocratic sportsmen with their monistic respect for nature and its Rus- sian microcosm, the forest. In her study of hunting stories in nineteenth-century Russian literature, quoted in Chapter 1 of my book, Odesskaia describes this attitude towards nature, manifested in the type of hunting which Troepol’skii promotes, as part of the ‘spiritual culture’ of the times:17

Hunting by that time had become not only the possession of the nobleman’s estate, but also a part of spiritual culture […] alongside the urban literature that was forming […] there also took shape a gentry literature that cultivated the ideas of naturalness and closeness to nature, that idealized the peasant primordially connected to earth and embodying the principle of nature. Hunting, which imitates both a field of battle and a dramatic stage, was for the nobleman not simply a game that provided an outlet for his natural passion, but also […] placed him face to face with nature, returning him to primordial sensations of the world’s wholeness. (243)

While the Village Prose trends of the 1970s continued to glorify the Russian peasant as a source of primordial wholeness, Troepol’skii makes a distinction between the educated writer and hunter Ivan Iva- novich and a rude hunter. Uneducated and unfeeling, this hunter is emblematic of the sorry state of the Soviet man. In this representation Troepol’skii challenges the simplistic village-city divide favoured by the Russocentric Village Prose narrative: there are good and bad people to be found, he suggests, both in urban and rural Russia. Troepol’skii emphasises continuity in knowledge and education rather than simplistic binarisms, but his glorification of nature, of the forest, is a feature of commonality with the dominant narrative of the 1970s.

The sorry state of Soviet ecology

In White Bim Black Ear nostalgia for the idealised Garden of Eden of Russia’s past as represented by Russian gentry culture is brought into

the dog and believes that since a dog is a clever beast it can find food for itself. He, however, never beats the dog. 17 Margarita Odesskaia, “Ruzh’e ili lira: Okhotnichii rasskaz v russkoi literature XIX veka”, 239-252.

White Bim Black Ear 295 stark contrast with the existing ecology of Russian wildlife of the 1970s. The hunt for a few wild birds in a perceived noble tradition of Russian high culture is contrasted by the irresponsible mass extermination of wildlife in the Soviet Union. Pages of descriptions of the beauty of the flora and fauna of the Russian forest are punctuated by references to past excesses in the treatment of wildlife. Passages that deal with these issues are overtly critical of Soviet governance in relation to ecology:

There was a decree of the Society of the hunters to eradicate magpies as harmful. This was supported by the findings of biologists. All hunters killed magpies with a clear conscience. There was also an order about hawks. They were also killed. The same happened to wolves. They have been almost eradicated. They paid three hundred roubles for a dead wolf. For the claws of magpies either five kopeks, or fifty – I cannot remember exactly. (29)

The ecological concern of the writer extends beyond the rhetoric about the lamentable state of wildlife protection in contemporary society.18 Troepol’skii frames his discussion of the mistakes made in the control of wildlife within a discourse on the mass extermination of particular species – what he calls ‘long experiments with death’ (29). Of note is the fact that magpies, wolves and dogs are all categorised as unclean animals in Russian traditional culture, and hawks are interchangeable with wolves in Russian epic byliny.19 The use of Aesopian language through animal symbolism continues to underpin this text in parallel with real concerns about the fate of animals at the hands of human beings. The victimisation of one particular species is central to Troepol’skii’s contribution to discussions on the moral responsibility of humans towards animals. His authorial subjectivity in lamenting the poor state of the ecology at the time distinguishes his narrative from the general trend of 1970s’ literature. While mainstream Village Prose literature concerned itself with the Russianness of nature and species, Troepol’skii focussed on the targeted victims selected almost

18 On Soviet ecology at the time see Zeev Wolfson (Boris Kamarov), Unichtozhenie prirody. Frankfurt: Posev, 1978. Also his on post-Soviet ecology: The Geography of Survival: Ecology in the post-Soviet Era. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. 19 On wolves and magpies see Aleksandr Gura, Simvolika zhivotnykh v slavianskoi narodnoi traditsii, 122, 556.

296 Political Animals ritualistically for eradication. The symbolic and ritualistic aspect in the choice of the victim is at the centre of this writer’s dog narrative. The reference to financial rewards, paid by the authorities to individuals for their murderous activities, contributes to the allegorical reading of this motif.

Representing evil: the dog’s adventures and the end

Bim’s misfortunes and the series of adventures that lead to his death begin with his master’s hospitalisation. The four-year-old dog is left with a neighbour, an old woman who cannot handle the dog. Bim is eager to find his master and from the moment he starts looking for his master his distressing adventures start. As in many runaway dog adventure narrative, the dog ends up in the hands of people who either want to abuse him or are sincerely trying to help him. This plot provides an exposé of society. Among those who want to help Bim are children from the neighbourhood and a village family. This peasant family is portrayed as hard-working and just, and they treat Bim fair- ly. The peasant buys Bim from a driver who previously stole the dog. While Bim stays in his family, he makes a natural transition to a working ‘shepherd’ dog. The hard-working peasant family treats him with respect, in line with this social group’s positive attitude to working dogs. Among those who want to harm and betray Bim are the parents of city children and unscrupulous individuals who want to gain economic advantage from handling him. Following the dog adventure plot, the dog is sold by an unscrupulous person into quasi-slavery; he is stolen by another villainous person and abused; and he is robbed by a collector of dog collars (his silver identification medallion turns out to be a valuable collector’s item). There is no happy ending in this dog’s adventure story – there are not enough good people in the Sovi- et society to help the dog escape persecution and traps. The only happy times in Bim’s life are the days when his master took him for walks in the woods, treating him as a true setter. His experience in the village is positive because he is in contact with nature and other animals. When the city children want to help Bim, their parents betray their children’s trust. They drive the dog into the forest and tie him to a tree.

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In line with Jack London’s stories and Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan, Bim finds sanctuary from human persecution in the woods. But his desire to find his master leads him into town again where people catch him and put into a closed vehicle. His death in the sealed van from suffocation is evocative of the Nazi death ‘gas wagons’ and gas chambers:

Bim lay with his nose pressed against the door. His lips and nostrils were torn by the iron lining. His front claws were full of blood… He scratched into the last door of his life for a long time. He scratched till the last breath. He asked for so little! He asked for freedom and trust. (122)

While the dog’s adventures follow the plot line of an adventure narrative, the motivation for the dog’s persecution and means of victimisation are concrete and period- and-culture-specific, reflecting as they do patterns of behaviour in 1970s’ Russian society. The allegorical function of this dog narrative is particularly evident in the motif of persecution. Bim’s death in an animal patrol vehicle that takes stray dogs away differs from the common motif explored in many dog stories. Normally, stray dogs end up in such animal control vehicles because they are unfortunate enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The professional dog-catcher patrols the streets, ridding them of any stray or ‘mad’ dogs because of the fear of disease or attacks on humans.20 This is not the case in White Bim Black Ear. Bim is systematically hounded by a nasty old woman who spreads rumours about Bim being dangerous and ‘mad’ (64). She makes written sub- missions to the militia demanding that stray dogs such as Bim be removed from the streets of the neighbourhood because they are public hazards. Concrete social phenomena from Soviet life in the 1970s acquire a symbolic dimension in this dog narrative. Troepol’skii casts a light on one of the more peculiar aspects of Soviet life: Soviet citizens’ self-righteous reports to the authorities and the press about the lives of private individuals – or, in this narrative, a dog. Reporting and

20 Kuprin deals with this plot in a humorous way and makes many of the caught dogs escape in “Sobach’e schast’e” (“Dog’s Happiness”, 1896).

298 Political Animals discussions in the media about supposedly dangerous elements is an allusion to the Stalinist past with its mass denunciations of enemies of the people. In the 1970s this phenomenon existed in a more petty and shallow form, but the sentiment of hatred of the Other that underpins the psychology of reporting remains a permanent feature of this phenomenon. The woman who reports Bim epitomises this creation of Soviet society: someone who believes in her right as a citizen to in- form on those whom she considers ‘dangerous elements’ (66). The woman is shown to be uneducated and uncultured, manipulative and deceitful. A pensioner on State pension support, she considers buying cheap produce from peasants and selling them at the Sunday market at exorbitant profit. Unlike the honest, hard-working old women of the village, this old woman is a dishonest city dweller who takes advantage of food shortages in the system. She refers to herself as a ‘So- vetskaia zhenshchina’ (41), a Soviet woman, and operates on the belief that it is the duty of every Soviet citizen to report on suspicious behaviour or events. Troepol’skii exposes her hatred as irrational. The objects of her hate and persecution are people of high education and moral standing, the intelligentsia, and helpless animals, namely dogs. The pairing of intelligentsia and dogs into one group symbolically reinforces the opposition between the dog and Russian plebs who irrationally hate dogs just as they irrationally hate the ethnic and class Other (the spiteful woman is not alone – petitions are signed by some twelve citizens asking for the stray and dangerously mad dog to be removed from the neighbourhood). Bim’s death is the direct result of the ‘Soviet woman’s’ conniv- ance and manipulation. When the animal patrol vehicle arrives in the neighbourhood she makes false statements about Bim: she declares the dog to be her own property, she lies that he is mad and that he ran away, and she claims that she wrote many times to the authorities asking them to remove the dog. The two members of the animal patrol distrust the woman but are obliged to put Bim into the van and drive him to the city pound. The description of the city pound is evocative of a concentration camp. In line with Adorno’s dictum that after the Holocaust it is no longer possible to relate to the slaughter house without thinking of the mass exterminations of Jews, Troepol’skii’s description of the animal shelter turns it into a symbol of mass extermination of the animal Other:

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Dark grey and covered with iron the van drove out of town and turned into a yard of a stand-alone house surrounded by a high wall. Above the gate there was a signboard reading “Entry forbidden – health haz- ard”. This was the place of quarantine where mad dogs were brought and burned into ashes. This was where stray dogs ended up who were treated as possible spreaders of epidemics. These ones were not burned – rather they were used for scientific purposes or else they were skinned. Other animals infected with infectious diseases were treated here: horses, for instance, were given medicine till their last hour. Horses were exterminated only if they were ill with glanders. This, however, is a very rare illness because there are hardly any horses left – so there are no animals left to have this illness. (116)

Animal symbolism of the Other in the 1970s: dogs versus cats

Following its serialised publication in a journal, the first edition of the book was produced by the Children’s Literature Publishing House. Was this a form of educational shock therapy for a juvenile audience? Certainly animal rights messages carry parallel associations with the horrors of Nazi extermination camps with their well-recorded scientific experimentations and the dehumanising use of human skin for industrial purposes. The choice of particular species – dogs and what’s left of horses – as victims in the pound contributes to the allegorical reading of this passage. Cats for instance are not mentioned. Why are these animals excluded? If, in looking at the metaphoric possibilities, cats are symbolic of deceit, dishonesty, cunning and self-serving compromise, why is it that those species that high culture has venerated – dogs and horses – are the victims of the Soviet pound and those who instigated their capture and imprisonment? Why is it that dogs’ ill- nesses are considered to be incurable? It is pertinent that some subcultures of political opposition in the 1970s chose the cat to represent that which it hates. In the context of symbolism attached to various animals in this decade, cats fall into the category of an animal that represents the Soviet form of cunning and deceit and whose habits represent survival in the conditions created in and by the Soviet Union. The popular song by Soviet bard Evgeny Kliachkin (1934-1994), ‘Strashnee koshki zveria net’ (‘There is no more horrible animal than the cat’, 1968) epitomises the traits of characteristics needed to survive in the conditions of the 1970s: philis-

300 Political Animals tinism, complacency, opportunism.21 Moreover, Kliachkin describes the uniformity of faces and facial expressions of the groups that he describes as ‘cats’. The typology of being uniformly identical contrasts with the symbolism of Troepol’skii’s white dog with a black patch on his ear. The black patch is symbolic of being not part of the homogenous mass. In terms of the dog-cat dichotomy, noteworthy is Kliachkin’s categorisation of prison warders as ‘cats’. Kliachkin emi- grated to Israel in 1990. His best songs reflect the trends of protest by the intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. This subculture of opposition to the Soviet regime identifies itself with the Other. In the symbolic dog-cat dichotomy those in opposition are underdogs and therefore expressly anti ‘cat’.

The dog’s death as a moral catharsis

After Bim’s death his master takes him from the pound to the forest in which Bim had hunted and which had provided the dog with his last shelter from human persecution. The dog’s burial, in the forest under a tree, has the characteristics of a hero’s burial: his master fires four shots into the air to correspond to the age of the deceased dog. Bim is thus buried as a martyr and a hero, as somebody whose life serves as an example for future generations. His burial stresses the symbolic meaning of his life and death; indeed, it is another ‘children’s story’ for adults. Bim’s death leads to the spiritual rebirth of the little boy’s parents who betrayed their son’s trust and took the dog away from the apartment and left him tied to the tree in the forest. The didactic value of the dog story is interspersed with hidden meanings. Bim’s death is hidden from the two boys who loved him and looked after him while he was alive. The boys are told that Bim went far away and is probably fine in his new home. Bim’s master intends to share his new puppy with one of these boys who lives in the neighbourhood. He also gives a German shepherd puppy dog (ovcharka) as a present to the other boy who loved and cared for Bim – the boy from the village where Bim found temporary refuge. The two boys – one from the city, the other from the village – signify the harmonious future of Russian society. While the intellectual trend as set by the Village Prose writers was to seek the ideals of rural Russia,

21 E. Kliachkin, “Strashnee koshki zveria net”. Kliachkin.bard.ru/main/php

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Troepol’skii proposes his own scenario, related to the dominant intellectual trends but at the same time distinct. The reader remembers that the all-Russian name of the main protagonist of the story is Ivan Iva- novich. The fact that his first name is identical to his patronymic, is more than a tribute to all things Russian, as was in vogue in the 1970s. It also represents continuity among generations. The gift of the puppies to the two Russian boys is similarly symbolic of the passing of moral knowledge from the older generation to the younger one. The story contains a message of hope that the new generation of sons will grow up to be morally superior to the lost generation of fathers. As a quasi-grandfather, the narrator secures the passing of a different code of conduct and morality to the new generation. The story ends in springtime. Traditional Russian Christian culture links spring with spiritual and physical resurrection. In White Bim Black Ear spring signifies hope for a better future for Russia and the Russian people. Vaguely expressed optimism permeates the conclud- ing pages of the story:

The spring will definitely come. And snowdrops will arrive… In Rus- sia you have winters and springs. This is what our Russia is like: it must have winters and springs. (126)

The writer alludes here to the political history of Russia, punctuated by periods of reaction and liberal thaws. The analogy between the cycles of seasons in nature and the cycles of life and death in the animal and human worlds can be interpreted both as an atheistic message and as a religious one. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov the dog Zhuchka-Perezvon symbolises resurrection from death. While the boys at the burial of little Iliusha (see Chapter 2) are confronted by the reality of death, they also receive hope for resurrection and immortality. In White Bim Black Ear Soviet boys are kept away from the knowledge of the dog’s death. There is no definite eschatology in this dog narrative. Admittedly, Soviet boys are kind to the dog Bim. They do not have sadistic impulses. Brutality is an adult phenomenon rooted in a different kind of evil – the evil of philistinism and indifference. Such a petty evil represents the sorry state of the Soviet man of the 1970s. In order to drive away such evil, Russia needs a new social and political spring.

302 Political Animals

The description of the new setter puppy who replaces Bim is thought-provoking: ‘The new puppy, also called Bim, pedigree, of a typical colouring of an English setter’ (127). The notion of a ‘typical colouring’ is the marker of a subversive script. Why does Ivan Iva- novich choose a puppy that will not stand out from the norm? Is this a message of the inevitability of compromise?

The blackness of White Bim and the whiteness of the hunted animals of the Village Prose

The nuances in the symbolism of White Bim Black Ear – present both in the story and in the title – become particularly overt when compared with the titles of other landmark publications of the 1970s: Bo- ris Vasil’ev’s Don’t Shoot at White Swans! (1973) and Chingiz Aitmatov’s The White Steamer (1970). In these works the shooting of animals serves as the ultimate manifestation of the moral degradation of the Soviet man. Vasil’ev’s novel is a quintessential example of 1970s’ Russocentric Village Prose with its theme of the end of innocence when the city comes to the village. The white swans fall victim to the barbarity of the urbanites who are depicted as the product of a godless Soviet civilisation. While not Russocentric, Aitmatov’s story nevertheless bears all the features of 1970s’ Village Prose motifs. It takes place in the remote Central Asian Republic. In spite of its idyllic natural environment, the place and its native people have not escaped the demoralising influence of depravity and corruption. The story is a critical manifestation of how such moral degradation affects even the old generation of Kyrgyz people who traditionally were linked to the world of nature. The grandfather of an idealistic boy leads a group of city hunters to a place where they kill the sacred deer – an animal with legendary status among the Kyrgyz people. In both stories the animals – the white swans and the totemic deer – are shot. The heroes of these narratives, who dream of the whiteness of swans and a white steamer to take them away, also perish. The offenders fatally beat the man who defends the white swans; the young boy in search of a white steamer commits suicide. The tragic deaths of the symbolic animals are linked with the death of innocents. While White Bim Black Ear shares a number of themes with these two iconic texts of the 1970s, it has an important point of difference. In these two texts, the colour white stands for the ideal of inno-

White Bim Black Ear 303 cence. But whiteness as a colour was also appropriated by the Russo- centrist discourse of the 1970s: the white Russian winter, the (re)constructed whiteness of Russian pre-Petrine churches, white swans – all are symbolic of moral purity and spirituality. The point of distinction that marks White Bim Black Ear from these narratives is the symbolism encoded in his unusual colouring. White Bim’s whiteness is spoiled by the black spot – even as an albino he is provocative- ly multi-coloured. Moreover, his colouring inverts the white-black dichotomy. Had he been born all black he would have been more acceptable in terms of cynology. He is thus not only marred by the black spot, but becomes a symbol of relativity of colour symbolism. Some- times being naturally white, as in albino, can make one fall out of the main group. Sometimes being black among the predominantly white species causes ostracism. The Russian expression ‘white crow’ (‘belaia vorona’) vis-à-vis the English ‘black sheep’ makes this relativity clear: the meaning is the same. The story White Bim Black Ear both conforms to and subverts the dominant discourse of the 1970s. It paradoxically employs its markers and critiques them. This nationalistic discourse was infa- mously saturated with an antisemitic agenda. In their extreme manifestation of Russocentrism, Village Prose writers presented Jews as elements alien to Russian spirituality.22 Bim’s colouring becomes a metonym for a persecuted minority. In the case of Troepol’skii this could mean a Christian believer like his priest father, or the son of a priest who is tainted by an unfavourable background or ‘pedigree’, or any other ‘black sheep’ or ‘white crow’. Brought up with an understanding of the continuity between the Old and New Testaments, educated to appreciate the more inclusive concept of Judeo-Christian moral values, Troepol’skii creates a polyvalent text that avoids the limitations of the dominant Russophilism of the 1970s.23 His text promotes universal rather than Russophilic moral values. In this regard the story becomes a precursor of the dominant rhetoric of ‘ob- shchechelovecheskie tsennosti’ (‘universal moral values’) promoted

22 See Maxim Shrayer, “Anti-Semitism and the Decline of Russian Village Prose”, The Partisan Review 9 (2000), 474-485. 23 On censorship and official patronising of nationalistic tendencies of Village Prose writers in the 1970s and 1980s see Carl R. Proffer, “Russian Writing and Border Guards: Twenty-five Years of the New Isolationism”, in The Widows of Russia and Other Writing. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1987, 142-159.

304 Political Animals during the 1980s’ Glasnost and Perestroika’s reforms. White Bim Black Ear demonstrates that it is only through the measured combination of the covert and the overt that the Aesopian language fulfils its multiple interpretative possibilities. The film adaptation of 1977 was a phenomenal commercial success – in the first cinematic release it was seen by some twenty million people in the USSR.24 In 1978 it was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film. The author of the screen adaptation and the film director, Stanislav Rostotskii, however made changes to the religious message of the original story. As a result, the film departs significantly from the polyphonic multiplicity of hidden meanings of the text. Most importantly it valorises the Russophilic narrative. The film becomes a film about Ivan Ivanovich and his love for Russian nature and Russia’s past, emblematised by his love of the hunting dog. The Russian writer represents continuity in Russian culture. His values, habits and worldview reflect the symbolic world of the Russian past in need of being returned. The Judeo-Christian underpinning of Troepol’skii’s story is rewritten into a neo-pagan and Christian symbiosis, thus making the film conform to the Village Prose ideology of the epoch.25 The film’s stylistics incorporates the main symbolism of this nationalistic discourse: white snow, white birches, and white churches represent the Russianness of nature and the faith. There is no mention of Moses of the Bible and of the painting of the Italian master in relation to Bim’s genealogy. When Bim dies he is buried under the three white birches sharing one root, which emblematises the pagan- Christian symbolism (birch being a pagan image, and number three being part of Christian emblematics). Ivan Ivanovich fires not four shots to commemorate the dog’s death as in the book but three, thus further emphasising the Christian emblematics. Significantly, the new setter puppy who replaces Bim is white, whereas the novel does not specify his colouring.26 In the film’s iconicity the dog came to represent the victimhood of the Russian nation and the hope for its more radiant future.

24 Belyi Bim Chernoe Ukho. Dir. Stanislav Rostotskii, screenplay S. Rostotskii, Moscow: kinostudiia imeni Gor’kogo, 1977. 25 On nationalism of neopaganism in contemporary Russia see Viktor Shnilerman, Russkoe rodoverie: neoiazychestvo i natsionalizm v sovremennoi Rossii. Mos- cow: Bibleisko-bogoslovskii institut, 2012. 26 In the film Bim is ‘played’ by an English setter.

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Troepol’skii’s focus on the dog’s pedigree and his colour as the reason for his marginalisation is a form of criticism of political trends of the Soviet society in the 1970s. These trends prevailed in the 1980s till such time as Glasnost reforms brought in ‘the alternative thinking’. This, however, did not mean the weakening of Russocentrism, as it became even more overt with the democratic censorship reforms.27 Admittedly, marginalised groups changed with societal changes, and Russia’s old and disabled became the most disadvantaged cross- section of the post-socialist society in the 1990s. As an underdog narrative the story appeals to various groups that identify their problems with the suffering and persecution of White Bim Black Ear. Yet, Troepol’skii’s subversive messages were directed at his contemporaries. A comparison with Iurii Kazakov’s (1927-1982) popular story Arktur – gonchii pes (Arcturus the Hunting Hound) (1958) illustrates this point. Written at the time of the Thaw, Kazakov also chose to depict the fate of society’s marginalised in the dog character.28 The pedigree black dog is born blind, and this handicap becomes the source of his being abandoned by people. Yet, the blind dog is not persecuted by people, people simply do not take care of him. When finally found and taken care by an elderly doctor, he later becomes an excellent hunting dog. As in White Bim Black Ear the autobiographical narrator is a writer who develops a special rapport with this dog during his visits to the countryside. The doctor gives the blind dog a highly symbolic name – Arcturus – the name of the bright star in the Northern celestial hemisphere. This excellent hunting dog dies in the forest as a result of an accident – being blind he runs into a sharp tree branch and bleeds to death. While this story raises the issue of marginalisation as a result of handicap, it shows the Russian society as a kinder place than in White Bim Black Ear. Kazakov’s story depicts a form of marginalisation that is more in line with Metter’s call to look after the aged and disabled. While building on the parallelism between a writer and a dog, Ka-

27 See Vadim Rossman, Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2002. 28 Iurii Kazakov, Arktur – gonchii pes. Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1966. The film was made in mid 1990s. Arktur – gonchii pes. Dir. Galina Samoilova, screenplay Vladislav Mushtaev, RTR, 1995.

306 Political Animals zakov’s and Troepol’skii’s stories deal with different forms of prejudice. Notably, in Troepol’skii’s story the ‘handicap’ is a cultural construct. This latter motif in turn is a feature of resemblance with Metter’s Mukhtar where the culture’s prejudices against the Other lead to the change of not only one dog’s name, but of the whole breed of dogs. White Bim Black Ear’s sufferings embody the persecution stemming from the definite political trends of the decade when the story was written. The colour symbolism thus acquires specific political connotations in the 1970s era.

No hunting dogs: the post-Soviet parody in Peculiarities of the National Hunt

In the first five years of the post-Soviet decade nostalgia for pre- Revolutionary gentrified culture spawned the parodic film Osobennos- ti natsional’noi okhoty (Peculiarities of the National Hunt, 1995) by Alexander Rogozhkin.29 It became as much an iconic film of the 1990s as White Bim Black Ear was of the 1970s and 1980s. This burlesque film depicts the sorry state of post-Soviet Russian nature. The so-called traditional Russian hunt cannot take place because there is no wild game left in the Russian forests. Fittingly, the hunting group does not have dogs. The symmetry between the lack of wild game and that of hunting dogs signifies the destruction not only of nature but also of cultural traditions such as hunting with borzois. The film’s structure illuminates the difference between the behaviour of the contemporary hunting group and the hunting scenes of pre-Revolutionary times. The borzois and other hounds are depicted only in flashback scenes of a hunt performed by Russian aristocrats. Here a wolf hunt is undertaken in a highly regimental and ritualised manner: the hounds and borzois pursue the wolf, then the chief hunter jumps from his horse and ties the wild animal up. Notably, the wolf is not killed. It is taken away to be put into a tamed environment. Today’s post-Soviet Russian hunters have no idea how to hunt or respect the environment. They use dynamite for fishing; the only ‘animals’ in the forest are a stray cow and a bizarre hairy creature on two legs. The parodic qualities of this latter man-in-disguise are valorised by the unconvincing

29 Osobennosti natsional’noi okhoty. Dir. A. Rogozhkin, screenplay A. Rogozhkin, Lenfil’m-Roskomkino, 1995.

White Bim Black Ear 307 hairy costume that he sports. The viewer can extrapolate that the man who masquerades as an animal is either somebody on the run or somebody who pulls a trick on the hunting party. The hunting party is paid for by a foreigner, a Finn who comes to Russia to research the traditional Russian hunt. The group of Russian hunters comprise individuals representing various ‘Soviet’ types and professions, but they all are perpetually drunk and show a remarkable lack of practical skill or sporting aptitude. In this way they symbolise the degradation of the Russian men. The film nostalgically implies that the real sportsmen of Turgenev and Tolstoy’s time no longer exist. The borzois, as well as the whole institution of the dog hunt, live only in the past. Significant- ly for the focus of this investigation on representational aspects of the dog, the borzois and the aristocratic hunt continue to exist only in discursive form: in the pages of surviving books and illustrations. To draw attention to the lack of hunting dogs and noble hunting parties the camera closes in on a book entitled Tsarskaia okhota (The Tsar’s Hunt). The magnificently illustrated old tome lies on a desk, its title embossed in golden letters. Inside illustrations show people dressed in elaborate costumes and with splendidly groomed hunting dogs.30 The traditional Russian borzois and hounds are thus portrayed as emblems of past Russia. While Troepol’skii expresses the hope that the pedigree puppies will ennoble future generations of Russians through establishing their links with the traditions of the past, the author of Peculiarities of the National Hunt, Alexander Rogozhkin, shows that this was definitely not the case in the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The next chapter examines the development of the idea of physical, mystical and scientific transformations between humans and dogs from pre-Soviet to post-Soviet times. The dream of the possibility of real transformation and transmutation might have been ridiculed at some points, but it functions as one of the stable cultural formations. As such, it remains as powerful and as controversial an idea as the Arcadian dream of harmony in nature that existed in Russia’s past.

30 One known book with wonderful illustrations is Nikolai Kutepov, Velikoknia- zheskaia i tsarskaia okhota, 4 vols. St Petersburg. 1896-1911. The four volumes contain lavish reproductions of paintings by V. Vasnetsov, I. Repin, V. Surikov and V. Serov, among others.

308 Political Animals

Human-dog correlation is the locus where the Arcadian and the Uto- pian meet in futuristic thinking and deeds.

Chapter 9 Transformation narratives: physical, metaphysical, scientific

Do not beat the dog. It too was human once. – Russian proverb

Various Russian cultural theorists and ethnographers have found evidence in oral material of the idea that dogs were human in previous lives.1 In his collection of Russian sayings Vladimir Dal’ registered the proverb: ‘Do not beat the dog. It too was human once’.2 Boris Uspensky notes that in Ukrainian and Belarusian folk beliefs there is a variant of this proverb that not only testifies to the dog’s former human hypostasis but also takes it a step further in the direction of eschatology: Dog was a human in paradise who served as a gatekeeper but was expelled by God for telling lies.3 Many of these ideas include the notion of transformation and transmutation between human and animal. They endow the dog with a human soul and they contain the uncanny possibility of the transformation of a dog back into a human. The dog thus belongs to the sphere of metaphysics. It can have an afterlife and it is not known in what form its body will function in this afterlife, dog or human. This schema can be reversed: the transformation of a human into a dog becomes another possibility within the many unknown and unexplainable phenomena that can happen to a human being. Whether material or philosophical, metaphysical or scientific, dog-human parallelism or transformation is an enduring metaphor. Whether physical or metaphysical such transformation can function on the level of reality, through science, or on the levels of pseudo-

1 See B.A. Uspenskii passim; D.K. Zelenin. Ocherki russkoi mifologii. Petrograd, 1916. 2 Vladimir Dal’, “Sobaka”, in Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, Vol. IV, 251. 3 B.A. Uspenskii, “Religiozno-mifologicheskii aspekt russkoi ekspressivnoi frazeologii”, 197-302. 310 Political Animals science and quasi-religious belief. The variety of transformation possibilities between humans and dogs is reflected and represented in modern Russian culture, especially in its most developed form – literature. As Igor Smirnov demonstrates in his Diachronic Transfor- mations of Literary Genres and Motifs (1981), the role of context in a literary work is particularly illustrative in texts that explore the human-dog transformation thematic.4 Such texts, including Vladimir Maiakovskii’s poem ‘How I became a dog’ (1915), draw on the multiplicity of cultural context. They include contemporary literary texts, texts from classic Russian and world literature, and material drawn from mythology, fairy-tales and folk beliefs. This chapter explores two main types of dog/human transformation narratives as well as their intersections. The first type of transformation functions as a metaphor for metaphysical transformation. In this category the dog as subject can be physically transformed into a human or a human can be transformed into a dog. This category of narrative is based on the idea of the mystical origin of dogs, often superior to that of humans, or on the notion of the transmutation of the soul, whereby dogs and humans share the same cosmology. The second kind of transformation narrative also builds on the idea of physical transfiguration. In this category the dog becomes the object of a scientific experiment. This plot relates to the Frankensteinian narrative which acquires realistic dimensions following the medical and scientific experiments made on dogs at the end of the nineteenth and through the twentieth century. This form of transformation achieved its apogee in Russian culture and society through the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. This Nobel Prize-winning scientist had a major impact on the reception of dogs in turn-of-the-century Russian discourse within the spheres of science, philosophy and literature. The 1920s reanimation experiments on dogs’ heads also found its reflection in literature, but only Pavlov’s dogs and cosmic dogs of the 1950s and 1960s became stable discursive formations.5 The symbiotic idea of metaphysical and scientific corporeal transformation culminated in Nikolai Fedorov’s Philosophy of the Common Task, and various writ-

4 I.P. Smirnov, Diakhronicheskie transformatsii literaturnykh zhanrov i motivov. Wien: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1981, Vol. IV. 5 On the link between scientific experiments and literature in the 1920s see Nikolai Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Transformation narratives 311 ers tried to apply his views also to the animal kingdom. Another influential philosopher of Russian fin-de-siècle, Vasily Rozanov (1856- 1919), promoted the idea of divine corporeality of both humans and animals. His influence on the representation of dogs and other animals needs to be explored. This chapter examines in chronological and thematic order the main representations of these types of dog and human transformation narratives as found in symbolist, futurist, pre-and-post-Revolutionary polemical and parodic texts, as well as in post-Soviet postmodern pastiches and performance acts.

Woman-dog physical transfiguration in Fedor Sologub’s ‘The White Dog’

In his discussion of human-animal transformation narratives Igor Smirnov coins the term ‘pre-text’ (‘pretekst’), a compound noun com- bining ‘previous’ text and ‘text’. Fedor Sologub’s ‘The White Dog’ (1908)6 is one such ‘pre-text’ in the development of the human-dog transformation narrative. Sologub’s (1863-1927) status as a cult figure of the Russian Silver Age and wider pre-Revolutionary society is only one of the factors that warrant this story the status of a pre-text in transformation thematics. It also has to be borne in mind that Sologub serialised some of his stories written between 1897 and 1908 under the title ‘Kniga prevrashchenii’ (‘The Book of Transformations’).7 Sologub’s symbolist text ‘The White Dog’ can be classified as a type of werewolf transformation narrative. The plot focuses on the physical and reversible transformation of a woman, Aleksandra Ivanovna, into a dog. At night she takes the shape of a dog (in this story sobaka, dog, is an unmistakably female creature). During the day she is cognisant of her ‘true’ dog essence, which she manages to hide from her associates. The woman belongs to a humble social group – she is the supervisor of a team of seamstresses. In an ironic twist of plot one of the women in the workshop rebukes her constant criticism as a form of barking. The dog analogy is not a figure of speech, nor a comparison, but an unwitting exposé of the real physical

6 Fedor Sologub, “Belaia sobaka”, in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Mos- cow: NPK ‘Intelvak’, 2001, Vol. II, 378-383. 7 Fedor Sologub, “Kniga prevrashchenii”, in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: NPK ‘Intelvak’, 2001, Vol. III, 395-542. 312 Political Animals essence of the ‘dog’ woman. Told in a direct, child-like manner by the young child-like woman Tanechka, this characteristic acquires particularly symbolic connotations. It is both sinister, being in line with Sologub’s many demonic children characters, and surreal in its nightmare-like exposure of the hidden truth:

– You, Aleksandra Ivanovna, are a real dog [sobaka]. Aleksandra Ivanovna got offended. You are a dog [sobaka] yourself! – she shouted at Tanechka. Tanechka sat and continued to sew. Interrupting her work from time to time she said in a quiet manner: – You always bark… Dog [sobaka] you are… Your mug is that of a dog… And you have dog’s ears. And your tail is untidy… The madam will soon throw you out, because you are a vicious dog, dog [pes] Barbos.’ (379)

Your paws are too short… Barbos barks and bites… Need to buy a muzzle. (379)

The confusion in the gender of the ‘dog essence’ of Aleksandra Ivanovna – the pan-Slavic ‘pes’ is a noun of masculine gender and applies only to male dogs – is intentional. When Tanechka talks about Aleksandra’s dog essence, she uses the word ‘sobaka’ (feminine gender). She then switches to a comparison to Barbos, a common male dog name, to denote the vicious nature of the dog/woman. The shift from ‘sobaka’ to ‘pes’, from female dog to male, is a narrative strategy to confuse the real and the surreal, the literal meaning of ‘dog’ as an essence of the woman and, in its comparison with vicious generic male dogs like Barbos, as a trope. Surreal and real have no dividing line in Sologub’s poetics. It appears, however, that Aleksandra Ivanovna is a real dog inside. The revelation of her true nature is gradually made apparent to the reader. The reader learns from her inner monologue that she was not startled when Tanechka discovered her true nature. Rather, she regards the comments of the young woman as an encroachment on her privacy. For her, everyone shows signs of being an animal of one kind or another: some display features similar to those of snakes, others are similar to foxes. Aleksandra Ivanovna notes that she does not ‘investigate’ (380) what kind of animals other people resemble. Her only concern is that being a dog should not be treated as inferior: ‘Why should a dog be worse than anybody else?’ (380). Transformation narratives 313

This problematical approach to Aleksandra’s dog nature testifies to Sologub’s awareness of the dog as a persecuted and underprivileged animal and, as such, defines the story of the woman-dog transformation as a culture-specific narrative. The real/surreal plot develops through the merging of fairy-tale-like and realistic episodes. To prove her point about other people’s animal essences Aleksandra Ivanovna approaches an old woman neighbour whose appearance is described in detail: dark skin, black eyes, clad in a black dress, the voice of an old crow. When asked by Aleksandra Ivanovna whether she is indeed a crow, the old woman replies in the affirmative. More- over, in an allusion to the folk belief motif of crows bringing death through ‘crowing’ – nakarkat’ – the old woman ‘crows’ at Aleksandra Ivanovna.8 The crow-woman’s crowing brings either the prophecy of the death of Aleksandra Ivanovna or death itself. And death does catch up with her while she is in her quasi-guise as a white dog. When night arrives and the full moon appears in the sky, Aleksandra Ivanovna follows the call of her true nature, undresses and runs outside to howl at the moon. She lies down near the bathhouse – a traditional habitat for demonic forces in Russian folk beliefs – and gazes at the moon as she continues to howl.9 A muzhik with piggish eyes, low forehead and a black beard waits in the dark for the big white howling dog to appear. He has his nephew with him who repeatedly crosses himself because he regards the dog to be an unclean power, a change- ling or werewolf (‘oboroten’’, 382). The muzhik shoots at the white dog who then ‘pretends’ to be a wounded naked woman running away into the darkness. The two men drop to the ground and start howling in fear. Sologub intentionally makes it difficult for the reader to discern between the woman and the dog. The woman’s response to the call of the moon is described as an atavistic call of nature that still resonates within her. In the darkness of the night the woman looks like a large white dog: her long hair running down her back is like that of a dog, the woman’s posture as she lies down in the grass is like that of an animal. Sologub’s text reflects a number of motifs linked to dog mythology in Russian culture, including the view of a dog as an unclean

8 On crow in Slavic folk beliefs see A. Gura, Simvolika zhivotnykh, 530. 9 On the bathhouse motif in this story see P. Pollock Brodsky, “The Beast Behind the Bath-house: ‘Belaia sobaka’ as a Microcosm of Sologub’s Universe”, Slavic and East European Journal XXVII/1 (1983), 57-67. 314 Political Animals demonic animal and the conflation of a woman with a dog, thus indicating the sexed nature of the animal. It also valorises the oversexed essence of women. Sologub’s own position vis-à-vis this dog essence is expressed through the symbolic use of colour. The symbolism of black and white is used in the juxtaposition of the black nature of the muzhik with his black spade-shaped beard and the white nature of the dog/woman.10 Sologub is sympathetic towards the dog and not towards the muzhik. If anybody represents dark demonic forces it is the crow-woman, who sends death to the dog/woman probably because the dog/woman discovered her ‘true’ crow-nature. White in Sologub’s universe is the colour of virginity, which is in turn paradoxically linked to death. In ‘The White Birch’ (1909) he uses a white birch tree, Berezka, to represent a virgin, in keeping with traditional Russian folk beliefs. In ‘White Mother’ (1898) a white woman who leaves a white sugar egg for a boy during Easter represents a virgin spirit. In both stories the white heroines, the virgin and the tree, die.11 In the former story a teenage boy is driven by his languid attraction to the slender white birch on his family estate. The event happens in spring, the time of year when the sexual call in nature is the strongest. The boy touches and caresses the tree in an animistic act representative of cultures that endow trees with souls. The birch responds with similar yearning for physical contact with the boy by producing sweet juice – a metaphor for bodily secretions in humans. In a manner characteristic of Sologub’s poetics no line is drawn between reality and dreams: two bodies die lying on the grass as a result of an ecstatic embrace; two essences intertwine to quench a passionate longing for death. The longing for death and the fear of death are the driving forces of nature: both in humans and in plants. The symbolism of white and black is intertwined to reflect this worldview. In the final analysis, the white dog is a white-skinned woman who feels the atavistic call of nature in a form that testifies to her former guise as a dog: she responds to the call of the moon; she is driven by desires that are identified as the call of her former nature:

10 Of relevance is the view that simple Russian folk have fear of white dogs. See Maria Leach, God Had a Dog: Folklore of the Dog. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1961. 11 Fedor Sologub, “Belaia mama”, in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: NPK ‘Intelvak’, 2001, Vol. I, 449-459. Transformation narratives 315

The moon appeared, full, bright like then and like there, over the wide empty steppe, the birthplace of the wild and the free who howl because of the ancient earthly yearning. It was the same as there and then. And in the same way as then, the yearning eyes shone, and the heart contracted in a yearning way; the heart that in the cities did not forget about the wide spaces of the steppes; and the throat contracted from the desire of a wild howl. She started to undress, but what for? She could not fall asleep anyway. (380)

The woman runs to lie down on the grass. Her call of the wild can be interpreted as a call of the flesh, hence this act of cooling her body on the grass. But it is also a call from a celestial, higher sphere, as the moon affects the woman’s inner essence, rehabilitating the body of dog and woman, re-establishing the animal body that yearns for something higher than what Earth with its earthly yearning (‘zemnaia toska’) has to offer. This existential melancholy is presented as an attribute shared by women and dogs. The imagery is both transformational and symbiotic – it is zooanthropomorphic – and in this context relates to the cosmology of reincarnation. In his 1904 article ‘Ras- skazy tainovidtsa’ (‘Stories by a seer of mysteries’) Viacheslav Ivanov, a learned writer and thinker and a contemporary of Sologub, likened his worldview to animism, characteristic of the mythological thinking of ancient societies.12 Ivanov interpreted this animism and mythic thinking as a step forward, rather than backward, in its understanding of nature, life and death – an understanding that places human life in a cosmic dimension. Of special relevance to the transformation narrative is Ivanov’s claim that this animistic mythological worldview is in line with the contemporaneous ‘science of overall resurrection’ (‘vseozhivleniia’, 720). ‘Vseozhivlenie’ means the resurrection of everybody and everything – it does not privilege humans over animals or any other organic matter found in nature, including plants. The transformation motif is both serious and parodic. It is parodic in relation to the superstitions of the uneducated muzhiks who are depicted as villainous murderers of a woman whom they believe to be a werewolf. Sologub differentiates his own worldview from the

12 Viacheslav Ivanov, “Rasskazy tainovidtsa” in Fedor Sologub, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: NPK ‘Intelvak’, 2001, Vol. III, 720-723. 316 Political Animals dark superstitions of the peasants. His views on the reincarnation of souls were influenced by a variety of esoteric doctrines and philosophical systems distilled by the syncretistic subculture of the Silver Age. In his story the heart is the seat of a common dog/human essence. His dog-human transformation is as symbiotic as his poetics: fairy-tales co-exist with realist episodes; there is no distinction between human, animal and plant essences; there are no hierarchies or boundaries within the context of the cosmological worldview. In line with the erotic orientation of the body politics of the Russian Silver Age, Sologub’s representation of the dog/woman has intended pornographic features:

The fur on the body was so short that from a distance the dog looked completely naked, and her skin had a matt shine under the moon, and she looked like a naked woman who howls like a dog while lying in the grass. (383)

In her memoirs about Sologub, writer Nadezhda Teffi identifies ‘the howl’ as one of the markers of pornographic and erotic tendencies in his work.13 She contextualises these tendencies within the overall decadence of the epoch. Sologub’s exploration of the notion of the sexed body of the dog is certainly relevant to the focus of this book. The hybridisation of woman/dog features is an element of the symbiotic transformation that removes hierarchies between the animal and human body. Feminist critics have noted that metaphorically animali- sation functions both as the figure of female oppression and liberalisa- tion. As part of what Susan Sontag calls ‘pornographic imagination’ the heroine’s sexuality demonstrates that sex is the arena most averse to humanist taming.14 Pornographic imagination is born as a need to articulate this impossible taming. Sologub literalises this idea about untamed nature of human/animal sexuality through the metamorphic device and the thematics of species. In addition, the metaphoric fall from humanity expresses women’s cultural alterity within the dynamics of biological power. Jeanette-Gaudet notes that ‘the literary trope of metamorphosis explicitly illustrates the radical re-organisation of the female body by sociosymbolic structures in which it is enmeshed’

13 Nadezhda Teffi, “Fedor Sologub”, in Fedor Sologub, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: NPK ‘Intelvak’, 2001, Vol. VI, 484-498. 14 Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination”, in Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel, London: Penguin, 1979, 83-118. Transformation narratives 317

(183).15 The woman/dog image thus has wider implications than a tribute to the pornographic trends of the era. It is true that representations of composite creatures like the centaur (a man with a horse’s lower body) were a common feature of pornographic imagery,16 but, erotic connotations notwithstanding, Sologub’s woman/dog is also a cosmic creature who gazes at the moon as a celestial body.17 The muzhik who kills her expresses a complex set of phobias and superstitions: misogyny and fear of dogs are conflated in his overall prejudice against ‘unchristian’ creatures. ‘The White Dog’ can thus be classified as a gender-specific body-politics narrative, an intersection of sex, gender and speciesism. The crossing of species in Sologub also relates to his interest in Buddhism. His interest in death has been attributed to Buddhist influences. In 1907 the symbolist writer and theoretician Andrei Bely described Sologub’s search for Nirvana as indicative of the writer’s Russian spirit.18 This opinion testifies to the intellectual interest of the time in searching for Asiatic features in the Russian landscape, mentality and psyche. Bely maintained that Sologub identified Buddhist elements in the Russian landscape and its people. The Buddhist theme is relevant to the interpretation of ‘The White Dog’. The motif of the bird/woman, dog/woman and humans who are foxes and snakes clearly echoes Buddhist notions of the reincarnation of souls that ignore boundaries between species. ‘The White Dog’ exhibits common features with other metaphysical and, in Smirnov’s view, scientific transformation narratives published after this story. The story stands as a ‘pre-text’ (thematically

15 Jeanette Gaudet, “Dishing the Dirt: Metamorphosis in Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes”, Women in French Studies 9 (2001), 181-192. 16 On history of sexuality see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1922. Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination of Russia’s Fin De Siecle, Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2005. Diskursy telesnosti i erotizma v literature i kul’ture: Epokha modernizma. Ed. Denis Ioffe, Moscow: Ladomir, 2008. 17 Esenin’s “Pesn’ o sobake” (1915) narrates the sad drowning of seven newly-born puppies by a peasant, and importantly for the notion of the dog cosmology the bitch howls at the moon because she sees it as one of her puppies: “pokazalsia ei mesiats nad khatoi odnim iz shchenkov” (99). Sergei Esenin, “Pesn’ o sobake”, in Stikhotvoreniia v dvukh tomakh, 99-100. 18 Andrei Belyi, “Istlevaiushchie lichiny”, in Fedor Sologub, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow: NPK ‘Intelvak’, 2001, Vol. I, 647-649. 318 Political Animals and in some cases stylistically19) to the stories of Alexei Remizov, Evgeny Zamiatin, Ivan Bunin and Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, to be analysed further in this chapter. It is congenial to the cosmological aspects of the dog-human transformation thematics that these stories explore.

Human and dog transformations after the October Revolution

As was stated earlier in the book, transformation narratives became more common following the October Revolution. The transformations that humans and dogs undergo range from social to physiological and mystical. In line with the Gogolian tradition the diapason of transformation in these tales also ranges from the comic to the tragic, from the serious to the parodic. Some stories in the 1922 collective volume A Dog’s Destiny: A Petersburg collection of stories, discussed in the chapter on social and moral degradation narratives, deal with physical and metaphysical transformations within the realm of the tragic and the comic. Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous Heart of a Dog (1925) – to be analysed later – builds on this tradition but adds to it the theme of scientific experimentation on dogs.20 Because his story was written in Russia, not in emigration, he had to resort to the emblematics and symbolism of Aesopian language in order to have his story published. In this story various transformation themes from the Revolutionary epoch achieve synthesis: science and religion, society and metaphysics – all are explored in a parodic and yet serious mode. But its engagement with scientific transformational experiments on dogs marks this text apart from the stories included in the volume A Dog’s Desti- ny. I will proceed by examining the varieties of physical and mystical dog-human transformations in the three stories in the above volume, thus mapping out the background for the later transformation narratives.

19 Stylistic similarities between Sologub and Remizov are expressed in their incorporation of folk beliefs and mythology into their narratives, both thematically and formally. They both use lexis and syntax of various folk narrative genres. 20 Mikhail Zolotonosov, “’Rodilis’ vtororozhden’em tainym…’ (Mikhail Bulgakov: pozitsiia pisatelia i dvizhenie vremeni)”, Voprosy literatury 4 (1989), 149-205. Transformation narratives 319

The metaphysics of physical dog-human transformations in A Dog’s Destiny

Among the six stories included in the collective volume A Dog’s Des- tiny, three have mystical underpinnings, two of which deal with the theme of physical transformation between dogs and humans. These three are Alexei Remizov’s eponymous ‘Sobach’ia dolia’ (‘A Dog’s Destiny’, 1910), Evgeny Zamiatin’s ‘Glaza’ (‘Eyes’, 1918) and Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov’s ‘Voi’ (‘Howl’). Remizov and Sokolov-Mikitov lived in Berlin in 1921, a year before the volume was published. Iron- ically, Sokolov-Mikitov returned to Soviet Russia in 1922 despite warnings from other émigré writers about the harsh reception that he would receive from the Bolsheviks.21 None of the three mystical stories relates directly to the historical events of the time; some were written before the Revolution. However, their placement in a volume containing stories with a direct link to the Revolution and post- Revolutionary society creates a context in which they are read as part of this political and historical background. This is especially the case with the two stories by Remizov which frame the volume: the opening story ‘A Dog’s Destiny’ and the closing story ‘Nakhodka’ (‘Discov- ery’, 1921). ‘Discovery’ has a subversive function in its ridicule of Soviet reality. With its multi-layered subtext it parodies both the superstitions linked to the dog in Russian culture and new Soviet atheism.

Alexei Remizov’s ‘A Dog’s Destiny’

Remizov’s ‘A Dog’s Destiny’ was originally published as part of the collection Posolon’ (Sunward). In a characteristic style, the author retells and imitates oral folk narratives.22 The story engages with folk

21 Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov on his return to Russia continued with his adventures as a sailor and explorer by taking part in O. Shmidt’s Arctic expeditions of 1921-1930. He wrote mainly about nature. While he was influenced by Remizov, Chekhov, Bunin and Kuprin, his writing of the Soviet era is categorised next to that of Mikhail Prishvin and Konstantin Paustovskii – apolitical writers of nature. See E.N. Vasil’eva, Tvorchestvo I.S. Sokolova-Mikitova: novyi vzgliad. Uchebnoe posobie. Tver’: Tverskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2006. Also: Vospominaniia ob I.S. Sokolove-Mikitove. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1984. 22 On the style of Remizov’s prose between 1900 and 1921 see Greta Slobin, Remi- zov’s Fiction, 1900-1921. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 1991. 320 Political Animals beliefs that allude to the special powers of dogs. Based on the idea of the origins of hunger and want on Earth, the story creates a parallelism between the lives of dogs and humans, both of whom have to live in a state of shortages and lack. This situation is presented as the status quo in a post-paradise-like existence: it is the result of God’s will, based on His decision to spare ungrateful people from extinction. Ac- cording to these ancient beliefs, Dog stopped God’s wrath and saved humanity. Since then humans and dogs have shared the same destiny, called ‘A Dog’s Destiny’. In a typically apocryphal plot the story describes people’s un- charitable treatment of a wanderer who asks a peasant woman for bread. This occurs during a time of plenty on Earth, when there is more than enough food to go around and when food is often wasted. The unchristian behaviour of the people is emblematised by the potent symbol of a peasant woman wiping a dirty spot with a fat pancake, which she then demonstratively throws at the wanderer. Importantly, the dirty spot that the woman cleans with the pancake was left by a cat. The duo of the cat and the pagan pancake – a symbol of pagan deification of the sun – creates an unchristian context for the peasant society. Indeed, the wanderer reflects, ‘From so much wealth people became Satanic’ (8). In an unexpected twist, the dog is put not in the demonic sphere but in the Christian one. It is the dog, Belka, who saves people from hunger by appealing to God. God decides to punish people by sending natural disasters that destroy the grain. When Belka starts howling from hunger God responds to the dog’s tears and creates a grain called ‘dog’s grain’ (‘sobachii kolos’): ‘From that time people eat dog’s destiny. Our destiny is dog’s (8). Remizov plays with the polysemy of the word ‘dolia’: both ‘destiny’ and ‘an allocation’. In this tale both denotations of the word are applicable and mutually explain the meaning of the story. ‘Allocation’ suggests there is just enough to survive, it is type of allocation that creates the life of a dog: bare minimum and the constant desire for more. ‘Destiny’, as we have seen, explains the vital connection between humans and dogs. In linking cats to the pagan sphere and dogs to the Christian one,23 Remizov re-writes those folk beliefs that focus on dogs’ dark

23 In “Pes Bogatyr’” (“Dog Bogatyr”, 1912), Remizov explores the dog’s ability to influence his peasant master’s psyche after the dog is killed by wolves as a result of his master’s betrayal. The story builds on pagan folk beliefs. A.M. Remizov, Transformation narratives 321 nature. The story thus sets the tone for the volume: it relates to the transformation narrative because it brings dogs on to the level of humans. It transforms the dog from an animal demonised by superstition into an animal dear to God. As a parable it has a moral meaning: it shifts the emphasis from the centrality of man as God’s main creation to that of an animal. Subversively for Russian peasant beliefs, this animal is a dog. Remizov transforms the dog from a demonic animal into a creature beloved by God. The dog is endowed with ‘supernatural’ powers, not of darkness but of light: thanks to the dog’s tears God makes the sun shine again upon the earth.

Buddhist influences in Evgeny Zamiatin’s ‘The Eyes’ and Ivan Bunin’s ‘Chang’s Dreams’

Zamiatin’s ‘The Eyes’ is a short piece that can be characterised in terms of genre as a poem in prose. Lyrical in its pathos, emotional and expressive, the story is a lamentation about the sorry state of the dog whose inner soul can be read through its eyes. There is nothing in the dog’s behaviour that speaks of a link with metaphysical spheres, but it is through the expression of the animal’s eyes that this connection can be established. Zamiatin’s narrator opens and closes the story with quasi-homiletic statements about the dog’s former life as a human and its future return to the physical state of a human being. It is this state – being human – that Zamiatin’s narrator holds in high esteem as preferable to the state of being a dog. The narrative is both reductive in relation to the dog/human dichotomy and also elevating. On the one hand Zamiatin’s narrator compliments the dog for being wiser than humans because of its antiquity, on the other he sees the dog’s bright future in its transformation back to the state of being human. In the opening passage we read:

You have no words: you can only squeal when they beat you; yelp yourself hoarse when your master orders you; and howl at nights at the green, bitter moon. But your eyes… why do you have such wonderful eyes? You raise your eyes upwards, you gaze into my very inner depths, and I know: you are ancient, wise, wiser than we are. I know: you were hu-

“Pes-Bogatyr’”, in Dokuka i balagur’e. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1976, 240-245. 322 Political Animals

man once, and you will be human again. But when will it happen? (11)

And in the closing passage:

You have no words. You can only squeal when they beat you; gnaw noisily at somebody on your master’s orders; and howl at night at the green, bitter moon. But why do you have such wonderful eyes? And in the eyes, at their bottom, you have such a human sorrowful wisdom? I know – you were human once, and you will be human again. But when will it happen? When will I no longer dare to tell you: – You are a dog. (15)

The dog’s lack of language is seen as a major reason for its lowly status. In Zamiatin’s narrative there is no parallelism between the mute state of an artist and that of a dog. If poets and philosophers, like the ancient cynics, saw the inability to express oneself as a feature of commonality between them and dogs, a feature that could be privileged as a sign of being chosen, Zamiatin does not register this notion. For him, the dog’s return to the state of being human warrants the return of the gift of human language. The story seemingly privileges human over animal, human speech over animal sounds, and puts the human into the centre of the rational universe.24 Transformation into a human is desired, not feared. Dog is a derogative name. Yet, the transformation motif embodies a paradox: on the one hand it essentialises dogs as dogs while on the other it suggests that they have vestiges of human nature. Whose atavistic essence makes dogs wise, wiser than contemporary man? Zamiatin’s way of dealing with the dog-human transmutation creates a rhetorically loaded lyricism that points to the importance of the motif of the dog-human correlation. This text criticises what it conceptualises as dogs’ traits of character, mainly their slavish subordination to humans, their lack of protest and their total dependence on humans for support. It is in this theme of subordination and the lack of initiative that it is possible to see the seeds of Zamiatin’s future novel We (1921). However, in We Zamiatin does question the victory of rationality and regulatory laws

24 For a discussion of evolutionary biology in We see Brett Cooke, Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin’s We. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2002. Transformation narratives 323 over human/animal nature – the very state that he desires the dog to achieve in its transformation into a human in ‘The Eyes’. If taken out of the confining continuum of the collected volume A Dog’s Destiny, the transmutation of the dog-human ‘soul’ in ‘The Eyes’ can be read as an intertext to Ivan Bunin’s acclaimed ‘Sny Changa’ (‘Chang’s Dreams’, 1916).25 It has to be noted that Za- miatin’s text is much more political, because of the demand it puts on the dog to shake off certain slavish traits of character. In line with Bunin’s (1870-1953) widely apolitical writing of the period, ‘Chang’s Dreams’ deals with the eternal issues of love and betrayal. The hero’s life changes sharply when, in response to the betrayal of his beloved wife, he tries to shoot her. As a result of this crime of passion he undergoes great social degradation. The control of desire, want and lust become the philosophical underpinning of this tale. In this story Bunin explores Eastern philosophical systems, specifically Buddhist and Taoist teachings on the achievement of inner harmony. Bunin developed an interest in these non-theistic systems of belief as the result of a journey to the Far East: it is not in vain that he makes his protagonist the captain of a ship that travels to these regions. In the story the captain buys a dog from the Chinese owner. He calls the dog Chang to reflect his Chinese origins. The plot of the story shows the parallel destinies of the captain and his dog as seen through the dog’s dream. The device of a dream is in itself a marker of the quasi-Taoist attitude towards life as something fleeting and undetermined, something that passes as in a dream. Chang’s dreams are flashbacks to the past that he shared with the captain, and his state of awakening reflects their shared situation today. Chang’s dreams are further induced by alcohol – the captain, now an alcoholic, gives his dog vodka to drink on a regular basis. This helps Chang sleep for extended periods of time and to dream. His dreams have the same function for him as for the captain who also sleeps a lot in an effort to withdraw from grim reality. The fact that the dog has dreams at all creates a further parallelism between the captain and his dog. One morning the captain does not wake up – he dies in his sleep and Chang is taken by the captain’s good friend, an artist. Chang is as much a philosopher as the captain was – both try to understand the meaning of life, both look for an alternative path.

25 Ivan Bunin, “Sny Changa”, in Sobranie sochinenii. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988, Vol. IV, 107-120. 324 Political Animals

Inspired by the Buddhist concepts of Nirvana and reincarnation and the Taoist concepts of the dissolution of boundaries between organic and inorganic matter, Bunin creates a new metaphysical basis for the human-dog correlation. For Chang this life on Earth is only one of many guises that the dog has taken and will still take. The story starts with the statement that proclaims the narrator’s philosophical credo: ‘Isn’t it all the same of whom we speak? Everyone who has lived on earth is worthy of attention’ (107). The narrator notes in one place that the captain’s heart and the dog’s heart beat in the same way because there is no difference between the heart of a dog and that of a human. The dog’s memory is seen as an inexplicable insight into eter- nity. Chang’s ability to love the captain after the captain’s death similarly testifies that ‘the world has no end and no beginning, and no entry point for death’ (120). ‘Chang’s Dreams’ combines elements of various kinds of transformation including social degradation and the belief in actual transmutation between humans and animals. What marks this narrative is a mutuality between humans and dogs. This mutuality has a systemic philosophical underpinning. With their hearts being equal, their eyes expressing the same emotions, and their dreams signalling the same hope for the afterlife, the transformation between man and dog does not have to take place – according to the belief system implicit in this text their mutuality is a given. Bunin’s choice of a dog as a metaphysical animal might have been rooted in Russian culture, but he chose an ‘exotic’ set of belief systems to realise the dream of sameness between man and dog. His story has to be viewed as an intertext to Zamiatin’s ‘The Eyes’ in the thematics of the metaphysical correlation/transmutation between human and dog. Zamiatin will come back to the quasi-Buddhist and monist notion of transmutation in We where notably the pair of animal yellow eyes will make a comeback: ‘I, the sun, the old woman, the worm- wood, the yellow eyes – we are all one, we were firmly connected by veins of some sort, and through those veins runs one communal, tem- pestuous, majestic blood’ (82).26 Fittingly, in this novel the statue of Buddha represents the world of unconscious desires which the dystopian society cannot eradicate. The juices of life sapping from Bud- dha’s statue emblematise both nature’s essence and the immortality of

26 E. Zamiatin, We. Transl. Natasha Randall, New York: Modern Library, 2006. Transformation narratives 325 the body. In this context, it is striking that Zamiatin chooses dog (or wolf) to represent the mammal with whom the man shares his blood.

Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov and Nikolai Fedorov: the two models of hatred of death

The collective volume’s other metaphysical transformation narrative, ‘Howl’ by Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov (1892-1975), is a short text in the form of a monologue. Like Zamiatin’s ‘The Eyes’ it can be classified as a poem in prose because of the pathos and lyricism of its style. The monologue gives voice to the inner thoughts of a person who ‘reminisces’ about his state as an animal in a former life. In this regard it stands as an example of the literal transformation of an animal into a human. The human’s comments on his former state as an animal are heavily influenced by the stories of Jack London, such as Call of the Wild and White Fang. They echo London’s view of the animal world as both physically and morally superior to that of humans. Sokolov-Mikitov spent the years of the Bolshevik Revolution wandering the globe in pursuit of adventure. He returned to the Soviet Union and became a writer of nature.27 The animal in ‘Howl’ is not specifically identified as a dog. It could be a wolf. The fact that it was included in A Dog’s Destiny suggests that it is either a dog or a wolf. The story thus reflects the conflation of the wolf and the dog in the mythology of the Russian imagination. The reader knows by now that in folk beliefs and fairy-tales wolves and dogs are interchangeable and can carry the same functions: both are chthonic animals that can travel to the afterlife and have special abilities for transformation (such as the werewolf myth in broader European folklore):

Once I was not a human. My soul was simple and primeval like the earth’s breath. Instead of hands I had strong paws covered by dark- grey fur; instead of a human face I had an animal face, and instead of human eyes I had eyes that shone in the dark. (19)

In Sokolov-Mikitov’s schema the animal world is based on a tripartite system of values: to satisfy hunger; to hate death; to enjoy sex in the open. To obtain food and a sexual partner are the two main concerns of the animal. To be ashamed of weakness that culminates in

27 Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, Po okhotnichim tropam. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1956. 326 Political Animals death leads to a hatred of death. Nature is opposed to civilisation, which has created a cult of death and placed the corpse in a privileged position. It has tabooed sex and surrounded it by feelings of shame. In Sokolov-Mikitov’s schema civilisation inverts the principles of private and public. The notions of public burial and secretive sexual coitus are in direct opposition to the animal behaviour. Human beings in his view have thus transformed the animal order into an inverted world of human civilisation. Sokolov-Mikitov’s criticism of funeral processions as a public display relates to a hatred of death that became a particular feature of cultural discourse in turn-of-the-century Russia. Some of the most influential thinkers of the period proclaimed the cult of death as the main obstacle in the development of contemporary society. Philoso- pher and writer Vasily Rozanov criticised Christianity for its worship of the corpse. Nikolai Fedorov proclaimed the conquest of death to be a ‘common task’ in which all his contemporaries had to actively engage. His Philosophy of the Common Task gave a concrete programme of action centred on the scientific conquest of death followed by the literal physical resurrection of all the generations of the dead. As was pointed out previously in this book, Fedorov’s pathos was one of the most influential trends of Russian thought at the time, and when it comes to transformation narratives his influence can be considered a main source. Although Fedorov’s philosophy puts humans at the centre of the universe, he maintained that humans had a responsibility towards animals as well as to the rest of the natural world. Man had to transform nature in order to create a paradise on earth; man’s stewardship of animals was a major responsibility. But in order to conquer death human beings had to stop procreating. In fact, they had to stop behaving as animals or as part of nature in general. In his Philosophy of the Common Task he expresses harsh criticism of the prevailing social trend to want to become part of nature. He considered this cult of naturalness to be a new form of paganism and an obstacle to putting an end to death. For Fedorov, death was a link in the chain in the workings of blind nature, on a par with procreation. To imitate the animal world is not to conquer death:

The law ‘follow nature’ contains a demand to subordinate a rational being to an irrational one. To follow nature means to partake in sexual selection, in natural selection, e.g. to fight for the female species. It Transformation narratives 327

means to fight for survival and to accept all the consequences of this struggle, such as aging and death. It means to obey blind force. (120)28

In Fedorov’s Common Task people had to create space to ac- commodate resurrected generations of people. With the shortage of space on Earth they had to expand into the cosmos. Expansion into the cosmic space and the ‘colonisation’ of new planets was thus the task and the answer to this problem of the shortage of space. This happens when death is conquered and procreation is put to an end.29 In ‘Howl’ animals loathe death but accept the instinct for procreation. Sokolov- Mikitov here endorses what Fedorov describes as the ‘follow nature’ attitude to human life. Yet his animals have a quest for the metaphysical, for super-nature. This is evident in two statements made by the human/animal narrator:

But why is it that, when at night from the thick greenery of the forest stars appeared in the sky, our pack gazed at them in bewitchment [za- vorozhenno] and our animal hearts shrank? (19)

Now I am a human […] But why is it that the stars make my heart shrink in the same way as then? Now I do not howl looking at the stars. I am madly silent. But my silence is like a howl. (20)

The mesmerising effect that the stars in the sky have on both the animal (dog or wolf) and the human testify to the existence of a soul in both human and non-human animals. This existence can be the result of transmutation between, and reincarnation of, the human/animal soul. It is in the state of an animal that the human is said to have a ‘primeval soul’ (19). In post-Fedorovian space the expectant gazing at the sky by both the dog/wolf and the human can be interpreted as their shared quest for immortality. If viewed as a polemic against Fedorov’s teachings, Sokolov-Mikitov points to the necessity

28 N.F. Fedorov, Sochineniia. Moscow: Mysl’, 1982. 29 Here is an example of Fedorov’s physiology and cosmology of resurrection: ‘For resurrection it is sufficient to study molecular structure of particles; but because they are scattered in the space of the Solar System and possibly in other galaxies, they still need to be collected; this means that the problem of resurrection is telluric-solar and even telluric-cosmic.’ Ibid., 421. 328 Political Animals of resolving the question of the physical resurrection of animals, especially of such metaphysical animals as dogs and wolves.

Alexei Remizov’s subversive dog Discovery

At this stage it is necessary to comment on Alexei Remizov’s scatological dog story ‘Discovery’, the last story in A Dog’s Destiny. It was noted earlier that Remizov’s stories frame the volume, so giving it an elliptic composition. If ‘A Dog’s Destiny’ was based on a folk belief that links dogs with God, then the 1921 story ‘Discovery’ is a parodic text meant to ridicule the new Soviet reality. Written in the year that Remizov left Russia and settled in Berlin before moving on to Paris, it reflects the politically subversive mood of the writer. But it also highlights major points and themes made in the other five stories included in the volume (two of them were analysed in Chapter 3 of this book). The parodic qualities of this text are embodied in its title: ‘Na- khodka’, a word for something that is discovered, is the name of the dog. But the matter that is ‘discovered’ after the dog is left locked in a room for ten days is dog shit. The man who leaves the dog has to go away for a duty trip. He is the new type of Soviet worker – poorly educated and underqualified, he struggles with his job as a sort of accountant because of his poor knowledge of arithmetic. This anecdo- tal situation sets the tone of the story: an accountant who cannot count is a parody of the new Soviet professional class. Because he has to leave Discovery for ten days, he leaves ten pieces of bread, each weighing one pound, in the kitchen. When he returns to the apartment, his neighbours criticise him for leaving a dog locked in a room for ten days. The neighbours knew about the dog’s presence in the room because of the sounds of the bells attached to Discovery’s collar. The accountant, with the food-related name Iaichkin (Eggie), justifies his actions by explaining that he left ten equal pieces of bread for the dog and that that should have met Discovery’s needs. After he settles the quarrel with his neighbours, he chastises his dog for eating all the bread in one go. After this he collects the dog shit from the floor, empties it into an empty box and weighs it on the scales. Much to his astonishment the shit weighs 20 pounds. He tries to work out how is it possible mathematically: to make 20 out of 10. The sentence, ‘This was above any kind of accountability and could not be registered’ (70) makes clear the target of Remizov’s satire. He shows the Soviet sys- Transformation narratives 329 tem of bureaucracy and accountability to be absurd because it relies on uneducated and grotesquely moronic staff. In terms of its political satire the story relates to the two other stories in the volume, ‘Dog’s Life’ and ‘Azor’, that weave the dog abuse subplot into a narrative of social transformations at the time of political upheaval. But ‘Discovery’ has also a parodic relationship to the stories of physical transformation: it reduces the eschatological mysteries of dog transformation to the level of scatology. Indeed, the dog’s body produces the very matter of scatology: excrement. The dog’s body is thus a medium of transformation: from bread into shit. And while the rationing of bread is yet another political detail that relates to the historical reality in Soviet Russia, the bread acquires further meaning in the story’s contextual relationship to other pieces in the volume. Bread as a God-given grain is explored in the folktale plot of ‘A Dog’s Destiny’. But the transformation of bread into excrement is the result of bodily functions common to humans and dogs. A parallelism between human and dog bodies is thus established on the level of physiological processes. In his story Remizov most likely parodies Pavlov’s scientific experiments on dogs. It is known that Pavlov used bells to make his dogs salivate when they were fed in order to make them produce digestive juices. Pavlov’s experiments with dogs on the level of physiology related to the digestive system. His use of bells was ridiculed by his contemporaries since he used various other ways to condition dogs, including the application of electric shocks. Remizov’s use of the detail of the bells in his story is a likely allusion to Pavlov’s experiments. The very focus of the famous physiologist’s experiments with dogs – the digestive system – is also at the centre of this plot. Does Remizov simultaneously parody his mystically inclined co-contributors’ fantasies of human-dog physical transformations? He contributed to the volume two didactic stories: one apocryphal, the other satirical and grotesque. Both subvert and valorise aspects of parallelism between the human and the dog in Russian discourse. As emblematised by the transformation of spirit/bread into matter/shit, together with the other stories’ transformations of human into dog and dog into human, they also show an understanding of the binary oppositions that function on the level of myth and cultural symbolism.

330 Political Animals

Organ donation: a human liver for a dog? Maiakovskii’s ‘How I became a dog’

The celebrated futurist poet Vladimir Maiakovskii made a noted contribution to the human-dog transformation narrative with his poem ‘Vot tak ia stal sobakoi’ – ‘How I became a dog’. Written in the first person, the poet’s transformation into a dog takes place on the streets of a large city. All the signs of a werewolf-like physical metamorphosis are there: first the canine fang, then fur on the face and the sudden appearance of the tail. He then falls onto all fours and starts barking. From the appearance of bodily parts to the loss of human language and the acquisition of a bark the poet progressively turns into a dog, as seen in these lines from the poem as translated by Bernard Mears:30

‘A tail! He’s got a tail!’ I feel it and am rooted to the spot. More blatant than my canine teeth, I never noticed it as I ran home. The enormous tail of a dog Is waving behind my back, Protruding from beneath my jacket. So what can I do now? Someone shouted, summoning a crowd. First and second came, and the third and fourth. Elbowing the old woman aside. She crossed herself And screamed out: ‘He’s a devil!’ […] I went down on all fours And barked at them like this: ‘Row! Ruff! Rough!’ (244-245)

The poem highlights all the main aspects of the reception of the dog in Russian culture: simple people’s conflation of the dog with the devil; perceptions of dogs as unchristian animals; and the perception of dogs as sexed animals. In terms of Russian literature’s investment in the dog theme, the poem builds on the notion of the lonely artist’s affinity with the status of dogs in human society. The immersion into

30 V. Maiakovskii, “How I became a dog”, in 20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel. Compiled by Evgeny Evtushenko, Eds Albert G. Todd and Max Hay- ward, New York: Nan A. Talese, 1993, 244-245. Transformation narratives 331 the world of nature underpins the metamorphosis of the poet into a dog. Maiakovskii’s interpretation of his aggression as a marker of his alignment with the animal domain is a recurring autobiographical feature of this poem. As was noted by Igor Smirnov, Maiakovskii linked his aggressive nature to that of the animal kingdom – in some instances, dogs in particular. He also made a connection between his frequent states of depressive existential hypochondria (‘toska’, 122) and dogs’ tears.31 Maiakovskii’s daringly erotic imagery in his love poem ‘Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva’ makes an explicit link between his sexual desire and dogs’ sexuality. In a further manifestation of his self-conflation with a dog he humorously signed his name as ‘Pup’ (‘shchen’). In his reading of this poem Smirnov stresses its significance as a text rich in literary allusions and mythopoetic subtexts in relation to the dog-human transformation theme. Smirnov mentions the relevance of various folkloric material, already known to the reader of this book; Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and works from world literature such as Hoffmann’s adventures of the dog Berganza. In addition, he draws a connection between the poet’s transformation into a dog and the view held by the ancient cynics of the parallelism between a philosopher and a dog. Cynics considered the socially underprivileged to be superior to ordinary people but akin to the street dogs with whom they shared their life style. This was one of the reasons why cynics compared themselves to dogs. Philosophers were thus at the opposite end of the social spectrum from ordinary citizens. The juxtaposition between the poet and the crowd is pronounced in Maiakovskii’s poem. Significantly, it is the crowd that is characterised as ferocious.32 There is one level of the physical transformation of Maiakov- skii’s lyrical hero into a dog that needs to be contextualised in terms of this poet’s interest in physical immortality. This interest leads us back to Fedorov’s Philosophy of the Common Task. Maiakovskii’s interest in physical resurrection was influenced by Fedorov’s ideas about the molecular recomposition of particles of dead bodies buried in the earth. Maiakovskii expressed this interest in his later poems ‘Pro eto’ (‘That’s what’) and ‘Klop’ (‘Bed bug’). While Fedorov’s

31 I.P. Smirnov, “Mesto ‘mifopoeticheskogo’ podkhoda”, 122. 32 The motifs of the loneliness of the true artist, and the conflation of an artist with a dog were in vogue during the 1910s, as seen in the institution of the café named ‘Brodiachaia sobaka’ (Stray Dog) in St Petersburg. 332 Political Animals resurrection model was anthropocentric, he also mentioned that the molecules of decomposing animals remain present in the earth. In order not to lose human molecules he urged his readers to start a collective effort to find, gather and recompose the molecules still found in the soil sooner than later. But how does animal resurrection relate to the scientific recomposition of molecules found in soil? Is there a gap in his ‘common task’? Fedorov was openly critical of ideas and beliefs related to physical transmutation and reincarnation between humans and animals because he was critical of ‘animal’ nature per se and animal nature in humans. Referring to Buddha’s transformation into a rat and a pig, he was critical of the Buddhist notion of transformation. He also viewed the imitation of animals as a fashionable but objectionable intellectual trend of his time:

A passion that took possession over a part of the intelligentsia lately to imitate animals, to erase the differences between an animal and a human, impairs sober views about the essence of human society. […] The principal core of the matter does not change whether we accept that animals already have in them everything that humans have or whether humans still have everything that animals have. The followers of the first hypothesis argue that humans do not have to leave the animal state; that the difference between humans and animals is quan- titative and not qualitative. They argue that humans have the same means to progress as animals: heredity, struggle for survival, sexual selection, etc. This means that progress takes place unconsciously. The second view […] maintains that the task of the human is to get rid of all that is animal in them, all that is unconscious [bessoznatel’noe]. (395)

While Fedorov does not deny the animal aspects of humans, he does not want to accept that humans have to have an animal nature. The way out of this ‘zoology’ (395) is through scientific endeavour and sexual celibacy combined with Christian morality. Fedorov characterised the intellectual and artistic trends of his time as a new phase in paganism ‘marked by the transition of ancient classical pagan anthropomorphism into zoomorphism’ (396). It is against this trend that his philosophy of the Common Task was directed. At the same time he also created a hierarchy among plants and animals that privileged animals and gave them the chance to progress along a ‘conscious’ path. He based this idea on the observation that in plants the organs of Transformation narratives 333 procreation occupy a prime position while in animals they are more hidden. In animals, he maintained, the act of procreation loses its pre- dominant significance – this is illustrated by the positioning of the head and other ‘organs of consciousness’ (396) at the most prominent part of the body. He argued that the time would come when animals will achieve a higher status of development and presumably no longer procreate ‘if the progress will continue in the right direction when consciousness and action will replace birth and procreation’ (396). Maiakovskii’s transformation into a dog, in relation to Fedo- rov’s general critical treatment of animal nature, is problematic. In his transformation he clearly falls into the category of those intellectuals that Fedorov criticised as ‘zoomorphic’ (396). However, if read in the context of folk beliefs about dogs as metaphysical animals, Maiakov- skii’s transformation into a dog might be a way to stay close to the domain of the afterlife. While the metaphoric meanings of this transformation – the solitude of the poet, the relationship of the poet to the crowd, the view of poetic language as a form of doggerel – can be linked to the general predicament of an artist, the actual physical transformation into a dog is contextually linked to cultural belief systems. Dog mythology is an important culture-specific component in Maiakovskii’s physical transformation. Fedorov’s views on the human/animal dichotomy in relation to the ‘common task’ concerning the conquest of death, physical immortality and the resurrection of the dead turn out to be problematic for Russian intellectuals. The reader of this book knows by now that Maiakovskii was not alone in the quest to include animals in the new immortal society. Dogs feature prominently in this context. Thus his contemporary, the futurist artist Vasily Chekrygin (1897-1922), included a dog in one of his paintings inspired by Fedorov’s ideas on resurrection. This painting ‘Nachalo vnekhramovogo deistviia’ (‘The beginning of extra- ecclesiastical activity’) (1921/1922) in the series ‘Voskreshenie mertvykh’ (‘Resurrecting the dead’) depicts a group of people searching for the remains of the dead in the soil.33 It includes a dog who takes part in the activity, thus making his contribution to ‘the common task’. Similarly, as Irene Masing-Delic demonstrates, Nikolai Zabo- lotskii’s longer poem The Triumph of Agriculture (1933) portrays

33 His paintings can be viewed in Elena Murina, Vasilii Rakitin, Vasilii Nikolaevich Chekrygin. Moscow: RA, 2005. 334 Political Animals animals on the scientific path leading to the conquest of death.34 In this way the poem also expresses its Fedorovian influence. Masing- Delic states that in Fedorovian teaching the gap between humans and animals is not unbridgeable, because the animal realm has not attained its final form. In Zabolotskii’s poem animals are gathered in an ‘animal institute’ where a wolf studies the stars through an iron micro- scope. The choice of a wolf, an animal used interchangeably with dogs in its role as a scientifically enlightened animal, is telling. In its correlation with humans, the dog/wolf is man’s nearest animal. The ‘institute’ of the poem studies chemistry. Masing-Delic suggests that this area of research may centre on the causes of death and how these can be eliminated with the help of chemistry. She draws a comparison between this theme and Maiakovskii’s trust in ‘chemical resurrection’ (369) in ‘That’s What’. In the poem ‘That’s What’ (1923) Maiakovskii expresses his desire to include animals in the resurrected world. He writes about an act of resurrection which he hopes will be achieved in the thirtieth century. He visualises it as the work of a ‘wide-browed, quiet chemist’ in ‘a workshop of human resurrections’ (258).35 Relevant to my discussion on animals and specifically dogs is the fact that in this poem about his own resurrection Maiakovskii remembers the afterlife of dogs. When he begs to be chosen for resurrection and selects possible occupations in his new resurrected life he suggests that he would like to be a keeper of animals. In an astonishing statement he suggests he would be happy to donate his own organs to feed a dog:

I love animals. If I see a little doggie – There’s one at the baker’s shop - with a bare patch, I’m ready to pluck out my own liver. I don’t mind, sweetie, eat! (259)

34 Irene Masing-Delic, “Zabolotsky’s The Triumph of Agriculture: Satire or Uto- pia?”, The Russian Review XLII/4 (1983), 360-376. 35 V. Maiakovskii, “From Pro eto”, Trans. Daniel Weissbort, in 20th Century Rus- sian Poetry: Silver and Steel. Compiled by Evgeny Evtushenko, Eds Albert G. Todd and Max Hayward, New York: Nan A. Talese, 1993, 257-261. Transformation narratives 335

While the dog’s depiction as malnourished and in need of care is in keeping with the theme of dog suffering in the 1920s, its function in the poem relates to the theme of resurrection. Is the poet’s offer of his vital organ to the dog a form of sacrifice? Does he love animals only because ‘they are alive’, as his partner Lilia Brik suggested in her memoirs,36 or also because they are God’s creatures? When he addresses himself to ‘the quiet chemist’, does he mean God? The description of the chemist as ‘wide-browed’ is suggestive of the Old Testament God whom culture represents as a patriarch. Was the God of Creation not a chemist when he worked with clay? According to Fedorov’s teachings, soil contains particles and molecules needed for the reconstruction of bodies in the future resurrection of flesh. Is Maiakovskii trying to impress the Almighty/chemist so that he might be selected for resurrection? Does the sacrifice of a liver count as a form of ritual sacrifice to please the Almighty? Does he share the belief that dogs are God’s chosen animal (as Remizov did)? Or does he make a creative leap to exotic beliefs according to which to be devoured by dogs is a way to secure immortality? The reader of this book is by now familiar with dog cults that use the dog’s body as a temporary place of habitation for the body and soul of the deceased. Found among Asiatic people of Eastern Eurasia, variants of this belief use the dog as a resurrectory animal.37 The choice of liver as an organ becomes highly symptomatic in this context: the liver is viewed as the seat of life in various beliefs and divination rites across traditional cultures. By feeding his liver to the dog Maiakovskii secures his own physical resurrection – the dog will devour the liver and keep the seat of human life within his own body. He will deliver this nucleus of the poet’s life to the next world. This belief differs from the Buddhist reincarnation system in that it extends beyond the notion of transmutation and reappearance in different guises to emphasise the possibility of the afterlife of the self. As such, it would have had an additional appeal to Maiakovskii as a man of his time. Perhaps Maiakovskii combines irony with pathos, parody with seriousness, in a way that allows him to cover all the possible scenarios of physical resurrection. This mode of discourse was advanced by one of the most original and influential thinkers and writers of Russian modernism, Vasily Rozanov, who wanted to secure his own pass to

36 L. Brik, “Iz vospominanii”, Druzhba narodov 3 (1989), 20-200, 191. 37 See M.O. Howey, passim. 336 Political Animals the afterlife. In order to secure all scenarios he both rejected and accepted the God of the Old Testament and Jesus Christ. When it came to matters of resurrection and immortality, Rozanov wanted to leave open the various scenarios that go with the resurrection beliefs of pagan Ancient Egyptians, monotheistic Ancient Israelites and trinitarian Christians. The turn-of-the-century Russian Jewish existential philosopher Mikhail Gershenzon characterised this approach as ‘just in case’.38 Considering Fedorov’s influence on Maiakovskii’s quest for resurrection, it would be naïve to think that the poet ignored completely the religious underpinnings of Fedorov’s philosophy. In his writing the Fedorovian influence intertwines with the mythopoetic stratum of the belief in the special status of dogs. Moreover, his creative imagination makes links with dog cults across cultures.

Scientific or metaphysical transformation? Surgical experiments in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog

Fedorov’s influence on the culture of Russian modernism and broader Russian intellectual and scientific thought is significant.39 Fedorov made an appeal to the scientific community in his Philosophy of the Common Task and called on scientists of his day to work towards making immortality and resurrection a reality. He asked them to engage in experiments, to collect data related to ancestors, and to ar- range an international conference of physiologists and psychologists to share their findings. Although Fedorov urged natural science and medicine ‘to move from conducting laboratory, pharmaceutical- therapeutic experiments’ ‘to the utilisation of the telluric-solar and psycho-physiological force controlled by nature’ (289),40 biomedical scientific research was conducted in laboratories. Fedorov’s call was understood by various personalities in various ways, and experimental biological scientists and medical researchers conducted their experi-

38 Henrietta Mondry, Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature. Bloomington: Slavica, 2010. 39 See Michael Hagemeister, “‘Unser Koerper muss unser Werk sein’: Beherr- schung der Natur und Ueberwindung des Todes in russischen Projekten des fruehen 20. Jahrhunderts”, Die Neue Menschheit. Biopolitische Utopien in Russ- land zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eds Michael Hagemeister and Boris Groys, Frankfurt: Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 2005, 19-67. 40 N.F. Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchego dela. Reprint. London: Gregg, 1970. Transformation narratives 337 ments on animals.41 Dogs were central to Pavlov’s experiments. This in itself is an ironic result of the notion of the correlation between humans and dogs that emerged in Russian cultural beliefs. After the Revolution experimental scientists, writers and creative artists actively engaged in making dreams come true, and this meant the dream of abolishing death and achieving eternal life. While Fedorov’s ideas had an enduring effect on Russian intellectual thought, after the Revolu- tion official discourse proclaimed science as a new religion.42 This, however, did not mean that members of the Party elite did not use Fedorov’s ideas. Thus, in 1928 to mark the Centenary of his birth Izvestiia published an article reporting that Mikhail Kalinin quoted Fedorov in his recent speech at the VTsIK (All-Union Central Execu- tive Committee) meeting.43 The quotation referred to the impossibility to obtain freedom without gaining full control over nature, and was used in the context of the plan to develop socialism. In the heteroglossia of the 1920s some writers declared their impatience to achieve immortality in a manifesto published in Izvesti- ia in January 1922. The group called itself Biocosmists-Immortalists, and they announced a new ideology based on ‘the notion of personality that grows in its strength and creativity until it grounds itself in immortality and cosmos’ (29).44 Biomedical scientists conducted experiments on rejuvenation, anabiosis (freezing and thawing), and reanimation on animals like dogs, monkeys and even cattle. They also widely experimented on rejuvenation of humans by transplantations of animal sex glands, and on reanimation of tissues taken from cadavers. A biocosmist poet Alexander Iaroslavsky even dedicated a short poem to this latter experiment in the journal Bessmertie (Immortality) in 1922.45

41 Vladimir Bekhterev, O lokalizatsii soznatel’noi deiatel’nosti u zhivotnykh i cheloveka. St Petersburg: izd-vo K.L. Ritter, 1896. 42 The synthetic nature of Russian futurity and Cosmism is made clear in George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. 43 A. Gornostaev, “N.F. Fedorov”, Izvestiia (29 December 1928), 1. 44 Quoted in Nikolai Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments, 29. 45 This short poem about flowers of immortality growing in the scientist’s laboratory was published at the end of Nikolai Kravkov’s article “Dannye i perspektivy po ozhivleniiu tkanei umershikh”, Bessmertie 1 (1922), 1-10, quoted in Kremen- tsov, Revolutionary Experiments, 211. 338 Political Animals

Depiction of Briukhonenko’s experiment on the front page of Iskry nauki. May 1928.

Transformation narratives 339

It was, however, the ‘reanimation’ of a dog’s head that became a truly public display.46 In 1925 a young doctor, Sergei Briukhonenko (1890-1960), made the successful experiment on the reanimation of a dog’s severed head. The experiment was publicised in the press from 1926 and public demonstrations were organised. Various state agencies provided generous support for the researcher’s experiments. In the analysis of Nikolai Krementsov ‘the Soviet public became fasci- nated rather than dismayed by the severed heads of dogs supported by the intricate apparatuses, which gazed at them from the pages of daily newspapers and popular magazines’ (88).47 Mikhail Bulgakov (1891- 1940) was a contemporary of this culture obsessed with the matters of rejuvenation and conquest of death. In the context of the epoch’s preoccupation with the scientific correlation between animals and humans, one of the most prominent literary responses was his Heart of a Dog. Devoted to the scientific transformation of a dog into a human, Bulgakov’s story is a point of intersection for a wide range of motifs and subtexts related to dog-human parallelism and transformation.48 The story’s Frankenstein-type plot of an experiment gone wrong conveys a moral message about the unpredictability of experiments in which man tries to play God. A famous authority on rejuvenation, Professor Preobrazhenskii, conducts a surgical experiment on a street dog called Sharik. In this operation he goes one step further than his previous rejuvenation operations: in the past he had rejuvenated humans by implanting the ovaries and testes of apes (male to male, female to female).49 In the operation on the male dog Preobrazhenskii simultaneously implants the human male testes and a human hypophysis or pituitary gland. The alleged aim of the experiment is to discov-

46 Krementsov describes an unsuccessful anabiosis experiment on a puppy at the Belorussian Agricultural Institute. See Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments, 88. 47 Nikolai Krementsov, “Off with your heads: isolated organs in early Soviet science and fiction”, 87-100. 48 My reading of the story is congenial to Yvonne Howell’s view that centres on scientific rather than political aspects of the story. See Yvonne Howell, “Eugen- ics, Rejuvenation, and Bulgakov’s Journey into the Heart of Dogness”, Slavic Review LXV/3 (2006), 544-562. 49 To meet the demand in the 1920s the Sukhumi Institute of Experimental Endo- crinology started breeding monkeys. The Sukhumi station became a main source of monkey glands for rejuvenation operations. See Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments, 139. 340 Political Animals er the function of the hypophysis. Although the result of the operation is unexpected, technically the experiment is a scientific success in achieving the transformation of the dog into a man, Sharikov.50 Its medical execution is perfect. However, the individual who emerges from the dog is socially unacceptable to the professor and his inner circle. As a result of the impossible character of Sharikov and a series of episodes involving his anti-social behaviour, the professor decides to reverse the experiment and turn him back into a dog. The medical wizard performs yet another operation on the new individual and re- verses the transformation. The unlikable Sharikov will become the likable Sharik. The main irony of the experiment is the fact that the organs implanted into Sharik and responsible for his transformation into a man come from a debased proletarian drunkard called Klim. The question emerges: has the resultant individual inherited his bad psychological traits of character from the dog or from the human? This underlying question contributes to the story’s comedic side. Most commentators agree that the worst features of the new man are derived from the ignorant proletarian whose organs were implanted into the dog.51 The professor himself arrives at this conclusion. The mistake that he made was that he did not study the ‘biography’ of the dead man whom he had obtained for his experiment. Killed in a drunken brawl, this individual was a thief and an anti-social vulgarian. The political satire contained in this story is explicit, and for this reason Heart of a Dog was not published in the Soviet Union during Bulgakov’s life. It took the reforms of Glasnost in the late 1980s for the story to reach its Rus- sian readership. Then when it was widely read in the 1980s and 1990s, it became a subject of polemics and was used by various warring fac- tions of intellectuals. Democratic circles used Sharikov as emblematic of the vulgar homo Soveticus, while Russian patriots and nationalists took offence at being equated with ‘Sharikov’s children’.52 In an open

50 Andrei Rogachevskii makes this point in “Sobachii intertekst: ot Petra Furmana k Mikhailu Bulgakovu”, Slavica Gandensia 21 (1994), 119-129. 51 Susanne Fusso, “Failures of Transformation in Sobach’e serdtse”, in Slavic and East European Journal. XXXIII/3 (1989), 386-399. Peter Doyle, “Bulgakov’s Satirical View of Revolution in Rokovye iatsa and Sobach’e serdtse”, Canadian Slavonic Papers XX/4 (1978), 475-486. 52 See Andrei Chernov, “Deti Sharikova”, Ogoniok 3 (1989), 30-31. Transformation narratives 341 letter written by this group of writers in 1990,53 the infamous ‘Letter of Russia’s writers’, its 74 signatories used this expression to illustrate the contemporary Russophobic discourse of the time. They interpreted the expression ‘Sharikov’s children’ as a derogative marker of Rus- sian ethnicity.54 The plot of Bulgakov’s story has a family resemblance to the social degradation transformation narratives of the 1922 volume A Dog’s Destiny: it depicts a street dog Sharik in the streets of a post- Revolutionary city.55 The hungry dog is abused by people in the same way that the poodle Azor is in Shishkov’s story: they pour hot water over the dog in order to chase it away. Dogs in ‘Azor’ are lured in and fed, in order to be eaten; in Heart of a Dog Sharik is similarly lured in by the professor, in order to be fed and used for a sinister purpose – an experimental operation that was meant to lead to the dog’s death. The life of a dog in a post-Revolutionary city and the changes in the dog’s fortunes drive the social and picaresque levels of this narrative. The experiment contains two levels of polemics against atheism: it parodies ungodly science as well as followers of the fashionable belief in the possibility of immortality through scientific means alone. Com- mentators have noted that the target of Bulgakov’s parody in Heart of a Dog was Maiakovskii’s loudly proclaimed belief in this form of resurrection.56 Yet various ambiguities in Bulgakov’s text point to him taking scientific experiments seriously. They also point at a hidden non-scientific agenda of the experiment.

53 “Pis’mo pisatelei Rossii. V Tsentral’nyi komitet KPSS”, Literaturnaia Rossiia (2 March 1990). The letter was debated widely in the press. On this letter see Liah Greenfeld, “The closing of the Russian mind”, New Republic Feb.5 (1990), 30- 34. 54 Igor Shafarevich was the main proponent of the idea of an anti-Russian conspiracy among Western and some Russian and Russian Jewish intellectuals. He coined the word Russophobia and argued that hatred against Russia had strong essentialist components and is in fact hatred of the Russian people as an ethnic entity. See Igor Shafarevich, “Rusofobiia: desiat’ let spustia”, Nash sovremennik 12 (1991), 124-139. 55 Andrei Rogachevskii, “Sobachii intertekst: ot Petra Furmana k Mikhailu Bulga- kovu”, Slavica Gandensia 21 (1994), 119-129. 56 See A.K. Zholkovskii, Iu.K. Shcheglov, Mir avtora i struktura teksta: stat’i o russkoi literature. Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage, 1986. E.A. Iablokov, “Oni soshlis’”, in Mikhail Bulgakov i Vladimir Maiakovskii: dialog satirikov. Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1994, 5-58. 342 Political Animals

The surname of the professor who performs the marvellous operation is emblematic of the dual nature of the transformation experiment: scientific and yet quasi magico-religious. Preobrazhenskii means ‘Transformer’ from ‘preobrazhat’’, to transform and to change. The word’s root – ‘obraz’ – is from ecclesiastical vocabulary and means ‘image’, as in the Biblical story of the Creation when God creates a man in his own image. Indeed, at one point in Bulgakov’s text his medical assistant calls him ‘a creator’ (‘tvorets’, 103).57 The experiment is thus intrinsically related to blasphemy and punishment for playing God. Nevertheless, polemics against scientific atheistic experimentation should be taken as part of the complex thematic interrelations in the story.58 In line with Aesopian narratives the story has many morals. One of them is a warning against scientific experimentation on humans and animals that may lead to the creation of new living organisms (this ties in with his other story, ‘Rokovye iatsa’ – ‘Fateful Eggs’). The subtitle of Heart of a Dog hints at its moral: ‘Chudovishchnaia istoriia’ – ‘Monstrous story’. The word ‘chudovishchnaia’ contains a double meaning: ‘chudo’ is a miracle normally seen in a positive context, as in the Christian myth of miraculous conception, but chudovishche in Russian means monster. The story is about a monstrosity born, and not only in the Frankensteinian way. During the first stages of the transformation the professor’s assistant calls him a Faust, and his creation, a homunculus. This is one of a number of transtextual references to scientific experiments which are underpinned by human arrogance and the desire to replace God. There is a portrait of the zoologist-pathologist Ivan Mechnikov (1845-1916) in the professor’s apartment.59 The professor himself is not only referred to as Faust but is also compared to a vampire, thus evoking the notion of transformation that involves many guises, including the supernatural: a creature by night and a different creature by day; peri-

57 All quotations from this novella are from Mikhail Bulgakov, “Sobach’e serdtse”, in Iz luchshikh proizvedenii, Moscow: Izofaks, 1993, 57-148. 58 Zolotonosov suggests N.K. Kol’tsov as one of the historical prototypes of Preobrazhenskii. Kol’tsov published his work in the Russian journal of eugenics Russkii evgenicheskii zhurnal in 1922-1924. Krementsov asserts that Ivan Pavlov was one of Preobrazhenskii’s prototypes. See Krementsov, 240. 59 Highly symbolic is the otherwise comic attack by the dog Sharik on the stuffed owl that stands next to Mechnikov’s portrait that also gets broken by the dog. Any form of experimentation on the animal body is evaluated as negative via this spontaneous behaviour of the dog who has an instant dislike of the two orna- ments: the stuffed owl and the medical scientist’s photographic image. Transformation narratives 343 odic resurrection at night; immortality that is neither dead nor alive: the state of being undead. Indeed, the nature of the professor’s experiment has to do not only with the transformation of a dog into a human but also with the hybridisation of human and animal. In this way it goes one step further than the physical transformation of an animal into a human. The mixing of organs of different species is at the core of the experiment. This in itself is a theological and ethical issue. In addition to many objectionable sides of the experiment, this mixing of human-animal matter is the target of Bulgakov’s polemics. The fact that human and animal organs are compatible and yet not identical is one of the paradoxes of the story that needs to be investigated. As such, its theme relates to notions of separation, purity and danger as encoded in the Old Testament. The son of a professor of theology, Bulgakov demonstrated in his other writings, notably his most important novel, The Master and Margarita (1937), a deep knowledge of the Scriptures and an understanding of theological arguments.60 In Leviticus as Litera- ture Mary Douglas interprets the prohibition to mix various organic matter, as laid down in Leviticus, as a form of respect for God’s categorisation of different matter. The ban on mixing animal flesh with the mother’s milk explains the ban on mixing dairy and meat products. The ruling not to mix linen and wool fibre in one fabric functions on the same logic in relation to plants that were meant to grow separately in nature. Douglas maintains that respect for the multiplicity of species as God’s creations underpins the ethos and logics of the Old Testament’s dislike of mixing different organic matter. There is evidence in Heart of a Dog that Bulgakov paid due attention to these notions of separation and hybridisation. There is one episodic character in the story who appears at various times in the apartment in which the experiments are conducted. This character is part of the team of new Soviet authorities who periodically try to appropriate one of the rooms of the professor’s luxurious apartment – a motif that represents the new post-Revolutionary social realia. The professor immediately treats this person with suspicion and asks ‘him’ to identify ‘his’ sex. The young man turns out to be a woman, and Bulgakov repeatedly describes this person as ‘a young man who is a

60 See a discussion on Bulgakov’s Christianity in relation to his father’s views in Edythe C. Haber, “The Lamp with the Green Shade: Mikhail Bulgakov and His Father”, The Russian Review XLIV/4 (1985), 333-350. 344 Political Animals woman’ (74, 75, 127) and as a ‘young man-woman’ (146). This satirical stylistic device has more than one purpose. While it parodies the new gender policy under Soviet rule, it also stresses the duality, the composite nature, of this person. Significantly, ‘the young man who is a woman’ is not described as a woman dressed as a man, nor as a woman who has any concrete physical features or details of accoutre- ment that is gender-related. In fact, there is no description of what it is that makes the professor to identify ‘him’ as a ‘her’. This suggests that the subject under the professor’s and the author’s scrutiny is not gender but sex/uality. It takes the sharp eye of a medic to notice the difference. When the professor inquires about the young man’s sex s/he blushes.61 The uncertain or mixed sex of the young person functions in parallel to the uncertain dual essence of the man/dog Sharikov – a dog with a human testes and human hypophysis grown into a hybrid creature whose primary essence is debated by the two scientists: the professor and his assistant. While the logistics of the operation suggests that the resultant product is a dog-turned-human, the specimen loses most of its canine qualities and acquires human ones. While the plebeian nature of the human donor makes Sharikov into a hateful and con- niving individual, he is also driven by some dog-inherited instincts.62 The humorous depiction of his hatred of cats is one of these. The notion of hybridity thus lies at the heart of this experiment. Sharikov as a composite creature is a monster not only morally but also physically. The young man is neither he nor she, but both; Sharikov is neither a man nor a dog, but both. Both echo one another and signal Bulgakov’s preoccupation with the notion of hybrid and composite ‘creatures’.

The mystery of Ancient Egypt: Preobrazhenskii, the River Nile, and Vasily Rozanov’s sacred animals

Among the many epithets that Bulgakov gives Preobrazhenskii, ‘zhrets’ (92, 94, 97) – ‘priest’ is most noteworthy. In Russian this word is applied specifically to priests in pagan cults and religions; it is

61 The 1920s transformative experiments included those that focused on sex change. Chickens were used for these types of experiments. See Krementsov. 62 A.C. Wright suggests that in Bulgakov’s works humans and animals are interre- lated. A.C. Wright, “Animals and Animal Imagery in M.A. Bulgakov”, Zeitschrift Fuer Slawistik XXXVI/2 (1991), 220-228. Transformation narratives 345 commonly used for a priest in the temple of Ancient Egypt. The word establishes a link with another important allusion to Egypt, Verdi’s opera Aida. One of the professor’s peculiarities is to sing his favourite motif from this opera. Indeed, Aida is the only opera that he never fails to attend.63 When he concentrates, he hums the same passage from Aida, and because of its repetition it produces a comic effect. This passage is ‘K beregam sviashchennym Nila’ – ‘To the sacred shores of the river Nile’ (92, 96, 103, 131, 148). Bulgakov gives this passage a structural and compositional prominence which signals the significance of the words. Apart from their comic effect and their illustration of the professor’s appreciation of high art such as opera, the words, I suggest, have a meaning that relates to the nature of the experiment as well as the final aim of the professor’s further experiments. Preobrazhenskii sings this refrain during and at the end of the first operation on the dog when he is described as ‘a priest dressed in white’ (92). It is notable that in the opera the choir of priests sings this song. The story ends with professor holding a brain in his hand and stubbornly cutting into it in search of an answer to a question known only to him. While engaged in these surgical manipulations he sings again, ‘To the sacred shores of the river Nile …’. He repeats this passage twice during his final dissection of the brain preserved in forma- lin64. With this line the story ends. The final ellipsis denotes indefinite continuity, the implication being that experiments on transformation are not over. Why does this ‘grey-haired wizard’ (81) think about Egypt during his experiments on transformation? Why does he repeat the sentence as a religious incantation? The meaning of the song ‘To the

63 It is known that Aida was Bulgakov’s favourite opera. However, its role in Heart of a Dog is more than just a playful autobiographical reference. He uses the mention of Aida being performed in Kiev in the novel Belaia gvardiia (1925) as an autobiographical context to define the life of educated classes in postrevolution- ary Kiev. Its role in Heart of a Dog is much more cryptic. Losev notes that Bul- gakov removed a reference to the love aria in Aida from his dog story. On the autobiographical and textological details see Viktor Losev, “Primechaniia” in Mikhail Bulgakov, Iz luchshikh proizvedenii, 601-667, 603. 64 In my 1996 article on the story I noted the ‘upside down’ motif in implants done by Preobrazhenskii: Bulgakov uses the same word ‘pridatok’ (‘appendage’) for the sexual gland and for the brain hypophysis, conflating/reversing the upper and lower body in a Bakhtinian carnivalesque mode. See Henrietta Mondry, “Beyond Scientific Transformation in Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog”, Australian Sla- vonic and East European Studies X/2 (1996), 1-10. 346 Political Animals sacred shores of the river Nile’ has strong eschatological overtones and suggests the mythology of departing to the world of the dead and beyond.65 The choice of Egypt explains something important about the aim of his experiments, even if this aim is not consciously clear to him. The psychological evocation of this sentence makes it a quasi- Freudian slip – he might have chosen this passage as his favourite refrain from the opera to accompany his experiments without realising the reason for it, the very reason that drives his desires. He continues to search for something that goes beyond his experiments on rejuvenation – he states earlier in the text that he is more interested in eugenics and the improvement of human nature than in rejuvenation. He also confesses that, after his disappointment with the results of the Sharik/Sharikov experiment, he is no longer interested in eugenics – he argues that geniuses can be born of ordinary women. If the inspira- tion of Professor Preobrazhenskii’s experiments is to achieve something that goes beyond these aims, then it would be logical to assume that his experiments are linked to resurrection and immortality. After all, he quasi-resurrected the dog Sharik who had already had a near- death vision of ‘dogs beyond the grave’ (‘zagrobnye psy’) (93) during the initial operation, and whose face was ‘lifeless’ (96) at one stage. Significantly, the dogs beyond the grave in Sharik’s vision are ‘very cheerful’ and, in a telling image ‘they sit in the boats in the lake’ (93). This image is highly suggestive of Ancient mythologies of crossing the river between the worlds of the living and the dead. In Egyptian mythology animals were also included into these eschatological boat journeys across the river Nile.66 The fact that the dogs are pink and cheerful is a parodic image of achieved immortality and resurrection. Indeed, in the context of the song, the soul (and the body) of the departed might travel down the sacred shores of the river Nile but it is not the final journey; rather it is a journey to the afterlife.

65 Krementsov notes that the continuing line of the song “Gods will show the way”, has religious connotations and Bulgakov omits it for censorship reasons. See Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments. 66 Egyptian mythology was widely popularised in the 1910s by Rozanov’s illustrated works on Ancient Egypt in various periodicals, and by a number of important translated works of Egyptologists, such as G. Maspero, Egipet. Moscow: izd. Problemy estetiki, 1915. D.G. Brested (J.H. Breasted), Istoriia Egipta s drevneishikh vremen do persidskogo zavoevaniia. Moscow, 1915. On religious beliefs in Ancient Egypt see Rosalie David, Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. London: The Penguin Books, 2002. Transformation narratives 347

The view that Ancient Egypt is the civilisation that gave birth to the idea of physical resurrection and the afterlife was strongly propagated by Vasily Rozanov, the thinker who developed theories of body politics, sexuality and metaphysics. While Fedorov rejected sexuality and procreation, Rozanov wrote about the mystical nature of sexuality. While Fedorov created boundaries between animals and conscious moral life, Rozanov erased borders between humans and animals. He chose Egypt as an example of a civilisation that included animals in the domain of metaphysics and the afterlife. He stressed that animals, humans and gods were part of the same sacred continuum. For him, composite creatures that had body parts of humans and animals exemplified the metaphysical essence of organic matter.67 He venerated hybrid and composite creatures and stressed that the crossing of species boundaries created sacred and metaphysical bodies. One of his most risqué fantasies linked to animal-human engagement was the fantasy of sexual contact between humans and animals – to be further discussed in the next chapter. These fantasies included sexual contacts with heavenly bodies. With sexuality being given a mystical function, the fantasy of resurrection was found in cross-species contact. Ancient Egypt, he believed, knew the secret of immortality, but after that secret was lost one had to look for it in the remains of that culture. Pic- torial representations of composite creatures were one such source that needed to be deciphered. His 1916 book Vozrozhdaiushchiisia Egipet (Resurrecting Egypt) contained numerous illustrations of artefacts representing composite creatures, that he meticulously collected and copied from libraries in Moscow and St Petersburg.68 Rozanov was particularly interested in Anubis, the dog-headed god of Ancient Egypt. Like professional anthropologists,69 he understood that Ancient Egyptian gods were believed to be manifest in animals. In this regard Anubis, depicted as dog-headed or jackal-headed, or a dog or jackal, was not a deified animal but the god manifest in the living dog or jackal. Notably, in pictorial representations, Anubis holds a set of scales with the heart of the newly departed on one side, and the feather on the other. The heart had to be lighter than the feath-

67 Henrietta Mondry, “Beyond the Boundary: Vasilii Rozanov and the Animal Body”, Slavic and East European Journal XLIII/4 (1999), 651-673. 68 V.V. Rozanov. Vozrozhdaiushchiisia Egipet. Moscow: Respublika, 2002. 69 Maria Leach, God Had a Dog: Folklore of the Dog. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1961. 348 Political Animals er for the departed to enter the domain of the afterlife. In line with Ancient Egyptian eschatology, the heart was by far more important organ than the brain. In the making of mummies, the heart and the liver were often preserved and put inside the body, while the brain was discarded. The belief in the centrality of the heart forms one of the polemical meanings of Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog.70 Does Preobrazhenskii make a mistake by placing importance on the brain – in line with the interests of his contemporary science in reanimation of dogs’ heads? But he also places an enormous importance on sex hormones, and this preoccupation reflects not only his contemporary science but also contemporary metaphysical thought, exemplified by Rozanov’s writing. The allusions to Egypt in the story make the Rozanovian subtext more overt, and read together they shed light on the unclear and hidden aspects of Preobrazhenskii’s experiments. Thus, Rozanov’s views can explain one unresolved technical detail in Preobrazhenskii’s transformative surgery. In the original operation the dog is implanted with an hypophysis and the male semen-containing organ. When the reverse operation takes place and the man Sharikov is re-transformed back into a dog, the operation is performed only on the head. There is mention of the wide scar on the head after the reverse operation and, in the only reminder of his former state as ‘man’ Sharikov, the dog suffers from headaches. There is no mention of the fresh scar at the bottom of the dog’s stomach, although during the first operation the incision was made in the dog’s abdominal zone to implant the testes. This suggests that the removal of the secretion implant was not necessary to achieve the re-transformation of a man into a dog. What is the reason for this? It cannot be a matter of Bulgakov simply forgetting to mention this detail. The comic implication of this detail is that there is no difference between the man’s and the dog’s testes. But there are many layers to this puzzle that relate to quasi-scientific and magico- religious themes of this transformative surgery. The answer might lie in Rozanov’s philosophy of sexuality. He believed that sexuality is something that humans, animals and God(s) shared. He went as far as to suggest that human genitalia are of cosmic nature, that sexual organs are metaphysical and sacred in their very nature – as sacred as

70 Bulgakov changed the original title “Sobach’e schast’e” (“Dog’s Happiness”) into “Sobach’e serdtse”. Nevertheless the heart motif is the most covert one in the story. Transformation narratives 349 the sacred shores of the river Nile in Preobrazhenskii’s humming song. Both Fedorov and Rozanov dealt with concepts of cosmology and cosmogony, resurrection and immortality; both had respect for the human physical body.71 But while Fedorov worked against sexuality in humans and animals, Rozanov endowed sexuality with a sacred meaning. Fedorov wanted to conquer sexual drives, Rozanov made them into a cult. Fedorov saw in procreation an obstacle to resurrection, for Rozanov procreation was a sacred task in line with Old Tes- tament pathos. The post-human dog Sharik continues to be kept by Preobra- zhenskii in his apartment. Will he perform another experiment on this ‘dog’? The supposed reversal of the dog to his pre-operational state is not complete. With the implanted organ that produces human sexual secretion Sharik becomes a composite creature. What are the consequences of the dog having a human sexual secretory organ in relation to Fedorovian and Rozanovian models of resurrection? According to Rozanov human and animal reproductive organs are of cosmic nature. In line with this typology, there is no need to remove the human implant, because both animal and human sexual systems come from the ‘same source’. As such the dog proves the compatibility of human- animal sexualities; his quasi-hybridity also links him to the composite sacred human/animal deities worshipped in Ancient Egypt. Albeit parodic, he is still an embodiment of the ‘sacred’ animal from ‘the sacred shores of the river Nile’. In the Fedorovian model the dog’s body with the capacity for human sexual secretion is on the path of progress. According to his hierarchical model human reproductive organs have progressed further than those of animals towards the desired state of ‘consciousness’, while animals’ reproductive systems are at a higher stage of evolutionary development than the reproductive organs of plants. According to the logic of the Fedorovian and Roza- novian models there is no need to remove the male sexual secretion organ from the dog. Is this why Preobrazhenskii continues his search by operating on the brain rather than the organs of sexual secretion?

71 There are two ironic references to cosmos in Bulgakov’s story indicating that the word combinations and the notion were in wide use in the 1920s. See “sovety kosmicheskogo masshtaba i kosmicheskoi zhe gluposti” in “Sobach’e serdtse”, 124. 350 Political Animals

The brain will either dominate and overcome the sexual drive (Fedo- rov’s model) or be in full harmony with it (Rozanov’s model). In the context of his contemporaries’ infatuation with the idea of atheistic resurrection Bulgakov makes an overt statement. In the midst of professional polemics with the much-disliked (by him) representatives of avant-garde art – including futurists like Maiakovskii – he states that he is quite happy to lie in a grave in the twenty-first century while his rival, a famous theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold will be resurrected.72 The aim of the joke is not only to laugh at futurist art that supposedly was a century ahead of its time. The joke also serves to comment on their supposedly profound difference in beliefs about immortality and resurrection. By stating that he is happy to have his remains in a grave a hundred years after his death Bulgakov am- biguously expresses both his belief and disbelief in the Second Com- ing. At the same time he does not reject the Fedorovian notion of the resurrection – to have one’s remains in a marked grave is one way to secure physical resurrection, the kind of resurrection that involves a recomposition of the molecules and particles found in the soil by generations of sons. Intact, his bodily remains would have a double chance of being resurrected: either in the Christian sense or in the Fedorovian scientific/Christian way. Of note is the fact that Bulgakov chooses to stay in the soil rather than to be frozen in anabiosis – a trendy idea in experimental biology of the time. Being preserved in soil corresponds to the Fedorovian synthetic model of resurrection. Although there is no need for dogs’ organs in this scenario, the role of science is not to be entirely rejected. There is evidence that Bulgakov took scientific experiments on reanimation of dogs’ heads seriously. In it known that in 1933 he visited Briukhonenko’s laboratory.73 While this visit might have resulted in his anti-atheist polemics in The Master and Margarita, it is likely that he did not want to exclude the possibility of immortality achieved by scientific methods.74 Paradoxically, by covering more than one possibility for resurrection, Bulgakov comes closer to his political and aesthetic oppo- nents, including Maiakovskii. Moreover, he acts in line with the

72 M. Bulgakov, “Stolitsa v bloknote: Otryvok“, in Mikhail Bulgakov i Vladimir Maiakovskii: dialog satirikov. Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1994, 60-63. 73 E. Bulgakova, M. Bulgakov, Dnevnik Mastera i Margarity, Moscow: Vagrius, 2003. 74 In this novel atheist Berlioz’s head gets cut off in a prophesised accident. Transformation narratives 351

Rozanovian model of syncretism characterised as ‘just in case’, mentioned earlier. When Rozanov died in 1919 Mikhail Gershenzon spread the rumour that, on his deathbed, Rozanov asked for a cross, a copy of the Old Testament and a phallic Egyptian statuette.75 Preobra- zhenskii is portrayed as an Old Testament patriarch, a miracle- working wizard (kudesnik), and a priest in an Ancient temple as well as a man of science. The stakes of this scientific transformation are higher than science. Notably, debates around the popularity of Roza- nov’s ideas in the 1920s achieved high publicity when Leon Trotsky published in Petrogradskaia Pravda (21 September 1922) his article ‘Mistitsizm i kanonizatsiia Rozanova’ (‘Mysticism and the canonisation of Rozanov’).76 In it Trotsky attacked contemporary intellectuals’ heightened interest in Rozanov’s philosophy of sexuality, because of its non-scientific methods.77 Bulgakov can’t have been unaware of this intellectual trend when he was writing his story with its comic and parodic dealings with sex hormones. Rozanov’s focus on sexuality was viewed by many of his contemporaries as a form of obsession, and we should not exclude the possibility that this found a parodic and polemical reflection in Preobrazhenskii’s activities. A telling example is his spending obsessively five years on the extraction of sex hor- mone from hypophysis (sic!)78 – an allegory for assigning sexuality a primary (head) place in the lives of humans and animals. In Heart of a Dog Rozanov’s views received if not ‘canonisation’, then ‘caninisa- tion’. The reason why Bulgakov chose a dog for his human-animal transformation experiment relates to a number of factors: the special place which this animal occupied in the experiments of Russian scientists, the variety of literary thematics linked to it by writers, and the broader mythology of the human-dog correlation in Russian culture.79 The influential and fashionable thinkers’ preoccupation with the mys-

75 Henrietta Mondry, Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature, Bloomington: Slavica, 2010. 76 L.D. Trotskii, “Mistitsizm i kanonizatsiia Rozanova”, in V.V. Rozanov: Pro et Contra. Eds D.K. Burlaka et al, St Petersburg: izd-vo RKhgi, 1995, 318-321. 77 Trotsky juxtaposed Rozanov’s views to those of the Vienna School of Psychoa- nalysis, which he evaluated positively because they were systemic and atheistic. 78 “[…] iz gipofiza vytiazhku polovogo gormona”, “Sobach’e serdtse”, 134. 79 Preobrazhenskii routinely dissected rabbits. He also used monkeys’ testes as implants for rejuvenation. Yet, for his animal-human transformation operation he notably chose a dog. 352 Political Animals tery of human-animal correlations also provided a context for this paradoxical transformation. As a medical doctor by education and the son of a professor of theology, Bulgakov was well-placed to make the dog transformation into a symbiosis of science and metaphysics.80

Towards Pavlov’s dogs

Bulgakov’s Professor Preobrazhenskii talks a great deal about the importance of correct food intake. He is depicted as a gourmet who pays great attention to gastronomic matters such as the choice of food, food combinations and the correct temperature for serving dishes. This sub-theme conveys the fact that he belongs to the cultured classes.81 But he also gives a medical underpinning to his gastronomic chats, explaining the effect that various foods have on the gastric functions of a body. His gastronomic interests function as a contextual allusion to Pavlov’s gastric experiments with dogs. While Pavlov is remembered in contemporary political discourse as the father of ‘brain-washing’ techniques, his first experiments on dogs were dedicated to physiological gastric conditions. While Bulgakov made genetic engineering the focus of Preobrazhenskii’s experiments, Preobrazhenskii’s knowledge of gastric digestive systems relates to Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. Pavlov’s laboratory was recently called a ‘Physiology Factory’ by science historian Daniel Todes (2002). While his laboratory system shared some features with those of other physiologists, it was also the result of institutional resources and his ‘scientific-managerial vision’ (XV).82 Pavlov’s laboratory marketed a product called the ‘natural gastric juice of the dog’. In terms of the human-dog transformation narrative this has astonishing relevance. The laboratory drew this gastric juice from laboratory dogs and sold it as a remedy for dyspepsia.

80 Alexei Tolstoi in his comedy Fabrika molodosti used the plot of dog and human rejuvenations only by scientific means – anabiosis and electricity. The experiments are performed in a Moscow communal apartment by an often drunk inventor Prishchemikhin, and attract attention of an American film mogul who offers him a huge sum of money to relocate him and his equipment to the USA. Aleksei Tolstoi, Fabrika molodosti. Paris: izdanie avtora, 1928. 81 See Ronald D. LeBlanc, “Feeding a Poor Dog a Bone: The Quest for Nourish- ment in Bulgakov’s Sobach’e serdtse”, The Russian Review LII/1 (1993), 58-78. 82 Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, La- boratory Enterprise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Transformation narratives 353

The intake of this gastric fluid by a human has fairy-tale-like connotations of transformation. The liquid functions like an elixir that is precious and difficult to procure. The fact that it originates from an animal gives it a further magic quality. Dogs’ gastric juice thus becomes a site where scientific and magical dreams converge. The fact that to achieve this ‘magic potion’ a large collective of scholars and workers was involved becomes a metaphor for the Fedorovian Com- mon Task. The contemporary scientific world viewed Pavlov’s laboratory achievements not as his own but rather as the work of the entire group of employees. Todes stresses that the Karolinska Institute’s Nobel Prize Committee for Physiology and Medicine took some time to decide that the products of Pavlov’s laboratory were indeed Pav- lov’s individual achievements. In 1904 the Institute made him the first physiologist to be awarded the prize. Pavlov’s laboratory and its experiments stand, however, as an example of a collective and centrally co-ordinated scientific enterprise. It is not difficult to see echoes of Fedorov’s vision of the Common Task come to partial realisation in Pavlov’s ‘Physiology factory’. Parodic and polemical allusions to Pavlov’s dogs in Soviet and post-Soviet discourse incorporate the physiological side of Pavlov’s experiments. Contemporary performance artist Oleg Kulik incorporates into his act various aspects of Pavlov’s physiological experiments. While for Kulik the notion of psychological conditioning is important as part of Soviet experiments in the ideological brainwashing of citizens, the primary function of Pavlov’s experiments remains an integral part of his project.

Postmodern dog-human transformation in the post-Soviet era: Oleg Kulik as Pavlov’s dog in the 1990s

The discursive formation of dog-human transformation achieved its most provocative embodiments in the acts of performance artist Oleg Kulik, scandalously known world-wide for playing the role of Pav- lov’s dog in the 1990s. As was stated earlier, Kulik’s art is highly politicised; he even founded his own political party, the Animal Party. He explained the meaning of his ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ performances in the Manifesta that accompanied his shows in Western venues.83 These

83 Manifesta 1. Catalogue for the exhibition in Rotterdam 9 June-19 August 1996. Ed Mirjam Beerman, Amsterdam: Manifesta, 1996. 354 Political Animals acts allude not only to social transformation but also to scientific and physical transformation. His project is the enactment of a paradox, because it both subverts and reinforces the notion of physical transformation between humans and dogs. The programme accompanying one of his performances staged in Rotterdam states that ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ is based on Pavlov’s experiments with dogs.84 The performance is described as scientific-artistic. The artist, the reader is told, will place himself in a physical space reminiscent of Pavlov’s laboratory. He will base his action on chronic experimentation and the problem of the correlation of psychic activity with physiological processes that take place in the cortex of the brain. The aim of the action is to consciously refuse the status of human being and to rehabilitate the artist’s natural essence. Kulik, the reader is informed, will attempt to apprehend himself as a reflexive rather than a reflective being. During the experiment the artist will stand on all fours, eat dog food and refrain from using human language. Kulik’s statement about the rehabilitation of animal nature is clearly anti-Cartesian. It is monistic and it challenges somatophobic tendencies built on the binarism of the flesh and the soul. In application to dog symbolism this binarism manifests itself both at the symbolic and the overt levels of cultural productions. Kulik’s art has common features with the theorisings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the notion of becoming-animal. Becoming-animal, they note in their work Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature, is a creative and experimental process which undoes the whole ‘anthropocentric entourage’ of the individuated subject (36).85 On this level Kulik’s performance is streamlined with Western trends in art and in human- animal studies. Yet, Kulik’s experiments are also culture-specific. His becoming-dog is an act of culmination of the transformation narratives developed in Russian culture. It is a conglomerate of the main themes of transformation: from social and economic to scientific and utopian. Performed in a post-utopian period in Russian history and culture, the

84 Gesine Drews-Sylla, “The Human Dog Oleg Kulik’s Grotesque Post-Soviet Animalistic Performance”, in Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Cul- ture and History. Eds Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 2010, 234-252. 85 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986. Transformation narratives 355 act both incorporates and parodies the transformations that dogs and humans had to undergo. In terms of human-dog and dog-human transformation narratives, Sergei Zimovets asserts in his essays on Russian culture, ‘The main principle of the functioning of political power in Russia is the law of ambivalent unconscious acts of transformation of animal into human and the reduction of human to animal (21).86 Zimovets compares the architecture of the laboratory in which Pavlov conducted his experiments on dogs to the concept of the panopticon, allowing for the observation of inmates by a prison guard, in an inverted form: many viewers involved in the observation of one animal. He asserts that, as a physiologist, Pavlov aimed for the transformation of living matter: the marking of space occupied by animals as based on the visible/invisible dichotomy; the juxtaposition of the anatomical topos of animals with the topos of technological instruments; the insertion of instruments into the animal anatomy with the aim to make the invisible visible. In this respect Pavlov preached ‘new physiological thinking’ (21) by inserting into an animal a window through which the physiologist could observe the workings of the animal organism. The ‘window’ in this reading is similar to the Foucauldian panopticon, a means of achievement of total control through constant observation in order to retain power. The animal body as a substitute site of experimentation for the human body achieved the status of sacrificial victim in Pavlov’s theory on types of nervous activity. Kulik is a sculptor by training, and his enactments of Pavlov’s dog, I suggest, can be viewed as a reanimation transformation of sculpture into a living body. Interpreted in this way his acts show a subversive intent on an additional level: they enter into polemics with the memorial sculptures to Pavlov’s laboratory dogs. Kulik’s acts were performed in various public spaces in main cities across the world, monuments to Pavlov’s dogs are also placed in carefully chosen public spaces in Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities across Russia and the former Soviet Republics. Pavlov’s dogs as well as other celebrated sacrificed dogs were given the status of heroes, and Pavlov himself commissioned a monument to his laboratory dogs ‘Pamiatnik sobake’ in 1934. It has four inscriptions authored by him, ranging from the two descriptions of the dogs’ cooperative acts that

86 Sergei Zimovets, “Sobach’ia zhizn’”, in Molchanie Gerasima: psikhoanaliticheskie i filosofskie esse o russkoi kul’ture. Moscow: Gnosis, 1996, 9-24. 356 Political Animals had helped the experiments to the two notes of recognition of their service. The inscription on the front of the monument says: ‘Let the dog, man’s best helper and friend from prehistoric times be sacrificed for science, but our dignity obliges us to make sure that it always happens without unnecessary torment [muchitel’stva].’ On the back of the monument it says: ‘The dog […] serves the experimenter with notice- able joy for many years and some even for his whole life.’87 Of special note is that the monument was made from an alloy at the Factory of Visual Campaigning and Propaganda (Kombinat nagliadnoi agitatsii i propagandy). The immediate occasion was the International Congress of physiologists scheduled to take place in Moscow and Leningrad in August 1935. In addition, Pavlov thought that this form of gratitude could impress the British antivivisectionist lobby. The emblematics of this monument, however, has deeper significance. As any ‘intentional commemorative monument’, it signifies a complex set of meanings. According to Alois Riegl’s classification such monuments transcend time.88 In addition, the stylistics of the monuments to the laboratory dogs placed in cityscapes of Moscow and Leningrad resembles that of a cemetery gravestone sculpture put into urban landscape. Mikhail Yampolsky identifies this intrusion of the thematics of cemeteries into city spaces as creation of monuments that are ‘subject to intensified sacralisation’ (112).89 In the context of Soviet totalitarian art, the monuments are not so much meant to imitate a person or an animal as ‘to express the idea of [...] extrahuman temporality’ (98). As such they create sacralised zones and serve as ‘utopian preserve of the future where the time will not flow’ (98). The sacral and utopian thus come together in this complex signification of dogs in intentionally commemorative monuments.

87 Iu. Golikov, T. Grekova, “Neobychainyi pamiatnik”, Istoriia Peterburga VI/16 (2003), 46-48. 88 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin”, Oppositions 25 (1982), 21-51. 89 Mikhail Yampolsky, “In the Shadow of Monuments: Notes on Iconoclasm and Time”, in Soviet Hieroglyphics. Ed. Nancy Condee, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995, 93-113. Transformation narratives 357

Monument ‘Sobake Pavlova’ (‘To Pavlov’s Dog’, 1934), Leningrad- St Petersburg.

Pavlov’s dogs paved the way for the use of dogs in space exploration. Laika the dog became a symbol of sacrifice and human achievement.90 In parallel to the human heroes she also was represented in memorial monuments. Commentators noted that Sputnik 5 with the dogs Belka and Strelka also had other animals aboard, such as a rabbit, rats and mice, and while Belka and Strelka’s taxidermic bodies are on display in two glass cases at Moscow’s Memorial Museum of Astronautics, other animals did not receive an acknowledgment as celebrities in the form of taxidermic displays or memorial monu-

90 Amy Nelson, “The Legacy of Laika”. 358 Political Animals ments.91 The utopian spaces thus secured the entry to the future only to dogs and their heroic human correlations who were also represented in monuments either with the dogs (the monument to Pavlov and his dog in Moscow), or on their own. Having converted space into time these utopian preserves transcend time. The inscription on the latest monument to Laika (2008) confirms this space/time utopianism by stating that ‘this simple Russian dog’ will remain a star forever.92 Her being a star conceptually blends literal and figurative meanings – celebrity and star in the sky – thus giving an intentionally ambiguous message associated with these heroic sacrificial dogs. These sacral monuments can be viewed as metaphors for multiple transformations: magico-religious dynamics encoded in the memorial stone symbolism; Stalinist alchemy of ‘flesh to metal’; conversion of space into time with no limits – all of which transcend mortality. Moreover, they are aimed at having a transformatory effect on the spectator who is invited to return the gaze to the sacral zone as (an idol) worshipper. Kulik’s acts challenge and revert the sacralisation in these official displays by using his body to convert sacral to obscene. In relation to the monuments in sculpture, his acts transform stone and metal into vulnerable human-animal flesh. In relation to taxidermic body displays, his acts expose the main irony of the ‘art and science of taxidermy’ that the animal has to be killed in order to be resurrected to life.93

91 Poliquin notes that both dogs are posed gazing upwards towards the sky. Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. Pennsyl- vania: Pennsylvania UP, 2012. 92 V. Zapriagaev, “Velikaia Laika”. Pamiatnik Laike pered Institutom Voennoi Meditsiny, Moscow. Pamiatnik sobake Laike/Moscowwalks.ru 93 See a discussion in Jane Desmond, “Displaying Death, Animating Life: Changing Fictions of ‘Liveness’ from Taxidermy to Animatronics”, in Representing Ani- mals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002, 159-179. Transformation narratives 359

Monument to Laika in Moscow, in front of the Military Medical Institute, 2008.

Cosmic dogs in a post-Soviet parody: Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra

Scientific experiments on dogs sent into the cosmos were subject to postmodernist parody in the 1990s cult novel Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin (b. 1962). The novel is dedicated to ‘the Heroes of the Soviet Cosmos’. It is a phantasmagorical and hallucinatory quasi-science fiction story told by a narrator who, as a Soviet child, dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut. When his dream is realised he becomes part of a violent establishment controlled by state security forces. Hence his invented name Omon, a homonym of OMON which is in turn an ac- ronym for a special branch of the Russian militia.94 The cosmic dog Laika is portrayed as a parodic collage of icons and signifiers of the Soviet era. The historical Laika burned in the atmosphere in the sputnik in 1957, Belka and Strelka returned to earth in 1960, while Pchel- ka and Mushka perished during the flight in the same year. Pelevin shows no reverence towards Laika, his task is to subvert Soviet iconicity:

94 OMON is an abbreviation for Otriad Mestnogo Osobogo Naznacheniia. 360 Political Animals

I heard a low whine, filled with hatred, coming from the corner of the [secret] room, and when I looked I saw a dog sitting up on its hind legs in front of a dark-blue bowl with a picture of a rocket on it. It was a very old husky, with eyes that were completely red, but more astonishing to me than its eyes was the light-green uniform jacket that covered its body, with the epaulettes of a major-general and two orders of Lenin on the chest. ‘Let me introduce you,’ said the Flight Leader, catching my eye. ‘Comrade Laika. The first Soviet cosmonaut. Her parents, by the way, were colleagues of ours. They worked in the security branch too, but up in the north.’ (94)95

The parallelism between Laika and the humans is based on their mutual genealogies, presented here in a highly parodic manner. The ancestors of both dogs and people were engaged in secret service. Soviets created dynasties of dogs who became members of the inner circle. Pelevin’s Laika is a symbiosis of a literary allusion and a real life dog. She is a living organism with physiological functions as evidenced by her ‘pissing all over the place’ (94) much to the irritation of the servicemen who have to clean after her. Hateful and spiteful, Laika is depicted as an unlikable dog, one that has been deformed by human experiments. An anthropomorphic project of the Soviets was the creation of a dog in their own likeness. Sporting a military uniform and decorated by orders of Lenin, this dog is yet another failure of substitution. Her habit of urinating on the floor defines the limits of human training of animals. Her aged appearance creates a parallel with the senile and geriatric members of the Soviet Politburo. Pelevin’s narrative about the absurdities of Soviet atheistic cosmos exploration is subverted by the presence of the eschatological counter-narrative. This counter-narrative is devoted to an alternative belief system in cosmology that is linked to Ancient Egypt. More importantly, this link reveals the meaning of Ancient Egyptian composite animal/human/god creatures as a transtextual phenomenon. The hero Omon decides to choose a second name for himself. He chooses Ra because he likes the pictorial representation of this falcon-headed god found in a book in his aunt’s personal library about various world religious beliefs. Since nobody can tell him which god is the most important, he chooses Ra because the falcon head of this deity is rem-

95 Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra. Trans. Andrew Bromfield, New York: A New Direc- tion Book, 1994. Transformation narratives 361 iniscent of the Soviet pilots and cosmonauts who were nicknamed falcons [sokol in Russian]. If man is made in god’s image, the boy decides to be made in the image of the god Ra. This parodic explanation of the choice of the falcon god Ra has eschatological references. In the Rozanovian tradition a composite creature like Ra breaks down boundaries between animal and human bodies and, through the connection with the divine sphere, rehabilitates both human animal bodies and animal bodies. In relation to transformation narratives in the context of cosmic experiments, Pelevin thought not only about the role played by experimental dogs such as Laika but also about the immortality of these dogs and other animals. The passage from the book on world religions that Omon copies reflects beliefs in immortality and the eschatological role of the river Nile:

In the morning Ra, illuminating the earth, sails along the heavenly Nile on the barque Manjet; in the evening he transfers to the barque Mesektet and descends into the Underworld where he does battle with the forces of darkness as he sails along the nether Nile; and in the morning he reappears on the horizon. (68-69)

In the Soviet boy’s dream of becoming a cosmonaut the eschatological implications of this project are made clear. Among other things Pelevin’s treatment of the river Nile in the context of transformations by a falcon-headed hybrid god Ra lays bare the eschatological connotations of Preobrazhenskii’s refrain ‘To the sacred shores of the river Nile’. The transformation narrative in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog involved dog-human-dog transformation. In Pelevin’s post- Soviet text dogs have been appropriated by Soviet discourse and through this process themselves become compromised. Hence Pele- vin’s overt dislike of Laika and by implication other ‘Soviet’ dogs whose names became part of the pantheon of Soviet heroes. His character’s fascination with hybrid creatures from the Ancient Egyptian pantheon reflects Pelevin’s search for alternative gods to worship and alternative heroes to imitate. The choice of falcon-headed Ra rather than a dog-headed Anubis (favoured by Rozanov) can be explained not only by the focus on the cosmic project. The Soviet experiments on dogs made them a patriotic discursive formation and in the first post-Soviet decade Pelevin chose to expose this myth in the image of the unlikable Laika. 362 Political Animals

In relation to cosmic experiments with dogs, Sergei Zimovets notes that when in 1961 dogs Chernushka and Zvezdochka were sent into space (before the first cosmonaut Gagarin) they had in the space- craft’s cabins a mannequin to represent a human being. The dogs’ physiological functioning – their blood levels, heartbeat and defeca- tion – functioned in the place of the speechless cosmonauts- mannequins. While at first glance the human mannequins look like the prosthesis of an animal next to the dog-cosmonauts, on a deeper level the role of the animal is as a prosthetic to the anthropological parame- ters of the human-mannequins. It is on the basis of this example that Zimovets identifies the paradox underlying the notion of power in Russian culture: the transformation of animal into human and the reduction of human into animal. The next chapter will address the apogee of fantasy and science in the correlation between dogs and humans – giving birth to a human/dog hybrid.

Chapter 10 Sleeping with the animal: boundary crossing in life and art (from pre-Revolutionary modernism to post-Soviet postmodernism)

And I myself want to touch the balls of Apises, not to mention that I want to kiss them. – Vasily Rozanov. 19181

This chapter groups together narratives that overtly address possibilities of intimate cross-species relations such as sensual acts, sexual love and living together as a non-patriarchal and non-hierarchical family. It examines Oleg Kulik’s post-modernist projects in the context of contemporary thinking on human-animal relations and compares his subversive acts to Vasily Rozanov’s modernist quasi- archaeological thought. It ends with Vladimir Tiul’kin’s documentary Not About Dogs (2010) which tells the real life story of Nina Perebeeva who lived with dozens of dogs in her house as a family. When, in the 1960s, the Soviet poet and important member of the literary establishment Alexander Tvardovskii reproached Ilya Eh- renburg for writing with sentimentality about dogs, he used the word ‘epatirovat’’ (90).2 In Russian this French borrowing denotes ‘provocative behaviour in public’. Tvardovskii claimed that to express a liking for domestic dogs incited public displeasure. Ehrenburg started his career as an avant-garde writer. He was involved in groups that attracted the most eccentric personalities of Russian modernism in the 1920s. In those days he shared the programmatic position of the futur-

1 V.V. Rozanov, Pis’mo E. Gollerbakhu. 8 October 1918, in Izbrannoe. Munich: A. Neimanis, 1970, 550. 2 Polevoi, I. Erenburgu, “Iz perepiski”, Iunost’ 7 (1986), 90. On attitude to dogs as pets in the USSR see Amy Nelson, “A Hearth For a Dog: The Paradoxes of Sovi- et Pet Keeping”. 364 Political Animals ists like Maiakovskii, expressed as ‘a slap in the face of public’s taste’.3 In the decade following the dismantlement of the Soviet Union in the 1990s a slap in the face of public taste was made by the performance artist Oleg Kulik. As discussed in the previous chapter, his performances broke down the boundaries between the artist’s own human body and the body of the dog. While Ehrenburg dared to express his sympathy for dogs, Kulik actively demonstrated his love of dogs. He went so far as to enact scenes of physical love-making with his dog(s). Performed at the close of two centuries of Russian cultural representations of parallelism and correlation between humans and dogs, Kulik’s art was the most challenging dog-event of the 1990s.4 In his postmodern performance acts Kulik de-taboos and de- mythologises serious dog discourse.5 The fact that he chose interactions with dogs to shock the post-Soviet public and so challenge cultural and political norms is in itself an illustration of the special place that dog symbolism occupies in Russian discourse. One of the major taboos that Kulik breaks in regard to the relationship between man and dog is in the sphere of sexuality. In the 1990s he organised a travelling exhibition of his work, including photographs that showed him engaged in sexual contact with dogs.6 This contact included pretending to perform oral sex on a dog and being penetrated by a male dog from behind.7 This was exhibited as a video in various overseas galleries and art exhibitions.8 The intention of these acts is to create multiple transgressions that emphasise a parallelism between humans and dogs.

3 Poshchechina obshhestvennomu vkusu is the title of the Futurists Manifesto printed in Moscow in 1912. 4 Of note is the growth of pedigree dog keeping in Moscow in post-Soviet times. On this trend see Adele M. Barker, “Pet Life in the New Russia”, in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev. Ed. Adele Marie Barker, Durham: Duke UP, 1999, 266-277. 5 In his interview Kulik does not classify his art as postmodern on the basis that his performance work is ‘serious’ as opposed to being a parody or pastiche. See Dmitrii Bavil’skii, Skotomizatsiia: Dialogi s Olegom Kulikom. Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2004. 6 Oleg Kulik, Selected Performances. Video documentation, Moscow, 1994-1997. Also Oleg Kulik, Oleg Kulik: Art Animal. Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 2001. 7 See images on csw.art.pl/new/2000/kulik_e.html. Accessed 5 March 2012. 8 Dmitrii Bavil’skii, Skotomizatsiia: Dialogi s Olegom Kulikom.

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While Kulik included other animals in his performances, for his staged (quasi)-sexual encounters he chose dogs. The question of the choice of the dog is important. How culture-specific is Kulik’s choice of a dog as the animal? Western performance artist Carolee Schnee- mann chose cats for her staged acts.9 Her famous installation Infinity kisses, 1981-1988, consisted of 140 self-shot 35mm photographs. Her feminist and anti-phallocentric project celebrates the sensual pleasure achieved by a woman’s body not from contact with a male body but from contact with cats. This work challenges a number of binaries and boundaries, particularly the borders between the non-human animal body and the human animal body. Kulik notably chose not a cat but a dog to enact his project. Female cats in traditional and contemporary Russian popular culture are associated with female sexuality and procreation (koshka, she-cat, is a pejorative description of a sexed woman);10 consequently, the feline essence does not carry the same meaning to Kulik as to the American performance artist. One of the reasons for this is the difference in the sex of the performer. The woman-artist uses her physical contact with her cat as a metaphor not only for animal/human encounters but also for same-sex relationships. If cats are the markers of female sensuality and sexuality, then her act becomes a metaphor for a lesbian act (from a Russian cultural perspective). In the case of Kulik, dogs represent a wide transgressive field. When he chooses to enact pleasurable sexual acts with dogs of both sexes he breaks the taboo about male-to-male relationship simultaneously with the human-animal contact. Both acts transgress and challenge Leviticus prohibitions.

From Vasily Rozanov’s future of the Russian family to Kulik’s ‘Family of the Future’

The Russian church canons were very specific about punishments for sexual contacts between people and domestic animals. The Orthodox

9 Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings. Ed. Bruce Mcpherson, New York: Documentexts, 1979. For an interpretation of her work see Steve Baker, “What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like?”, in Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002, 67-98. 10 Dal’ registered saying ‘He who likes she-cats will love his wife’. V. Dal’, “Koshka”, in Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, Vol. II, 182.

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Church classified bestiality as a serious sin. The nineteenth-century canons stipulated punishment for sexual use of a variety of animals, including dogs.11 They prescribed 3 years of penance and 300 days of bowing for sexual use of small inedible animals. The animals involved in these sinful acts were to be killed. While Kulik might have not been familiar with the Orthodox canon, his fin-de-siècle counterpart, Vasily Rozanov, was well versed in the rules of Orthodoxy. Challenging Christianity’s concept of the body was central to his project, in the same way as challenging dominant controlling Soviet discourse is key to Kulik’s acts. The reader of this book knows that Rozanov developed a discourse aimed at breaking sexual boundaries between humans and animals. However, characteristic of the epoch’s preoccupation with metaphysics, Rozanov regarded animal-human sexual contact as a way to achieve a union that would link the earthly and the cosmic, thus making the mortal immortal.12 As was discussed earlier, in his syncretistic search for immortal bodies Rozanov found examples of animal-human sexual contact in various sources including in pagan antiquity and Ancient Egypt in particular. In Resurrecting Egypt he muses on the Ancient Egyptian cults of hybrid god-human-animals, trying to unveil the mysteries of the after-life and immortality.13 In this text he also confesses that he conducted his own experiments with physical contact with animals. He describes how he tried to caress and sexually stimulate a female cat, and how he fondled the bottom of the stomach of a hen in search of her eggs. For Rozanov, as stated in the previous chapter, transgressing the boundaries between humans and animals meant crossing the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical. In this work he claims that the female cat responded fully to his advances. He explains that he wanted to understand whether coitus between an animal and a human was possible, not just

11 See texts collected in “A se grekhi zlye, smertnye…”. Liubov’, erotika i seksual’naia etika v doindustrial’noi Rossii (X – pervaia polovina XIX v.): Teksty i issledovaniia. Ed. N.L. Pushkareva, Moscow: Ladomir, 1999. Esp. 109-110. Also see A. Almazov, Tainaia ispoved’ Pravoslavnoi vostochnoi tserkvi. Prilozheniia. Moscow: Palomnik, 1995, Vol. III, 209. (Reprint of the 1894 edition published by Odessa: Shtab Odesskogo voennogo okruga) 12 Henrietta Mondry, “Beyond the Boundary: Vasilii Rozanov and the Animal Body”, Slavic and East European Journal XLIII/4 (1999), 651-673. 13 V.V. Rozanov, Vozrozhdaiushchiisia Egipet. Moscow: Respublika, 2002.

Sleeping with the animal 367 as a symbolic expression of unity that produces super-natural, composite creatures, but in physical reality.14 One of Rozanov’s mottoes was ‘Look for God in animals’, a belief that he espoused in his important tract on the improvement of the Russian family, ‘Family and religion’ (1903).15 Rozanov believed that the future of the Russian family depended on its successful rein- tegration of the animal aspects of human life – engagement between family members based on warmth and physical contact. In his portrayal of such an ideal family in ‘Deti Egipetskie’ (‘Children of Egypt’) (1905),16 he includes physical contact between humans and animals as part of this vision:

There the human beings lay in the ‘middle places’ between the animals that were a little older and a little younger, between animals a little heavier than they are and those a little lighter. And in these ‘middle places’ they were as warm as warm could be. And now they did not know which male and female offspring were born of them and which were born of cows, lambs, pigs. (421)

Rozanov maintained that the Ancient Egyptians recognised in animals a ‘side’ or aspect that remains closed to contemporary Euro- pean civilisation.17 Their ability to respond to human caresses was one way for animals to achieve ‘humanisation’ (249).18

14 Rozanov’s phylogenetic visions have similarities with Jungian archetypes theories, especially as applied to animals such as wolves by Robert Eisler in the 1940s. See Robert Eisler, Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. 15 V.V. Rozanov, Semeinyi vopros v Rossii. Moscow: Respublika, 2004. 16 V.V. Rozanov, “Deti Egipetskie”, in V mire neiasnogo i nereshennogo. Moscow: Respublika, 1995, 420-423. 17 Rozanov also noted the difference between the Western and the Russian Church- es’ attitudes to animals. He expressed this view in the travelogue “Italian Impres- sions” (1901) basing his opinion on observations made during his travels in Italy, Austria and Germany. See Henrietta Mondry, “Beyond the Boundary”, 651-673. On animal saints in Western Christian popular church art and hagiographies see Laura Hobgood-Oster, “Holy Dogs and Asses: Stories Told through Animal Saints”, in What Are the Animals to Us? Approaches from Science, Religion, Folklore, and Art, Ed. Dave Aftandilian, Knoxville: Tennessee UP, 2007, 189- 204. 18 V.V. Rozanov, Vozrozhdaiushchiisia Egipet, 249.

368 Political Animals

While Kulik’s ‘Pavlovian dog’ act refers to animal abuse by science and human abuse by the Soviet totalitarian experiment, his ‘Family of the Future’ project (1997) echoes Rozanov’s monistic views on nature. The room which Kulik arranges in accordance to the needs of the future family can be viewed as a reference to Rozanov’s views on the need to ‘animalise’ the Russian family. This idea was part of Rozanov’s programme to save the Russian family from disintegration as the result of Christianity’s anti-sexual morality. In his constant references to the Old Testament as a counter-narrative to Christianity’s asceticism, Rozanov tries to understand why God created humans and animals on different days. He argues that the mystery of separation is lost to us. Advancing his argument about the metaphysical nature of sexuality he notes that animals’ souls can be viewed as a link to metaphysical sexuality, and he named one Egyptian drawing depicting a pregnant composite woman-animal, ‘Future’.19 In line with the Russian modernist preoccupation with syncretism, his project was based on material taken from Ancient Egypt, the Old Testament and Greek and Roman sculpture. His ‘primary’ material was thus not Russian. Kulik’s referential field of animal manipulation is both different and more politicised. For this reason he chose a dog for his acts. In Rozanov’s rehabilitation project animals were important for breaking binarisms between soul and body, as a means to counter the somatophobia of Russian culture. From his point of view, animals had to be shown to have souls in order to destroy the prejudice against the ‘animal nature’ construct – both in its literal meaning and as a concept. By the time Kulik embarked on his project to rehabilitate the animal and to rethink the human, the dog was the most representative and represented animal in Russian and Soviet culture. Kulik’s dog project is as much the result of the Soviet experiment with Russian history and its people as it is with dog experimentation: the making of the New Soviet Man involved experiments on both dogs and people.

19 V.V. Rozanov, Vozrozhdaiushchiisia Egipet, 73.

Sleeping with the animal 369

Rozanov’s illustration of the Ancient Egyptian image which he called ‘Bu- dushchee’.

Unlike Rozanov, Kulik does not intend to wait for the return of Arcadian times for gods, people and animals to be able to mingle together. However, he is interested in having cross-species children. He admits that scientific help is needed to achieve such a hybrid. In one of his interviews he expresses a desire to father/mother such a progeny:

370 Political Animals

The appearance will be that of a human, but his/her perception of the world and some of the reactions will be from a dog. The correlation can be calculated. (8)20

In enacting sexual contact with a dog and in stating a desire to father/mother progeny with a dog, Kulik references post-human ethics and aesthetics. He clearly treats his own body as post-human, and the dog’s body as post-animal. With advances in modern bio-engineering Kulik’s hybrid theory does not need to exclude Utopian or Arcadian thought. He is specific in his detail of the execution of the project to give birth to his dog/human offspring. His plan is to produce an em- bryo based on an artificially created egg that would then be fertilised with the dog’s sperm. Kulik intentionally goes further than Deleuze and Guattari’s theorisings on becoming-animal in art. His project is more than art – it is a political action. In Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus the interpretation of the act of becoming-animal stresses that it is a relationship of alliance rather than of filiation: ‘There is a block of becoming that snaps the wasp and the orchid but from which no wasp- orchid can ever descend’ (238).21 They use the term ‘involution’ to describe this relationship of alliance. Involution helps to rethink the body. Kulik’s ‘alliances’ with dogs take his project further than an art project aimed at rethinking simplistic binary thought. His desire to create hybrid human/dog progeny is an experiment based on science. As such, it creates a paradox: it reinforces the power of science while also subverting Russian scientific experiments on dogs. This is in line with the paradigm of Russian and Soviet scientific experiments on dogs that both confirmed and rejected similarities between dogs and humans. Kulik’s performances can also be viewed as a form of re- demption for the ‘sins’ and abuse of this species in Russian and Soviet science. At the same time, his desire to give birth to the ‘firstborn’ man/dog is grounded in the Soviet quasi-utopian dream of the creation of the perfect ‘New Man’, albeit in a subversive postmodernist mode. The paradoxical nature of Kulik’s project is encapsulated in his neol-

20 Vladimir Potapov, “Interv’iu s Olegom Kulikom (Vladimir Potapov, Oleg Kulik)”, Nedelia 31 (1997), 8. 21 Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizo- phrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987.

Sleeping with the animal 371 ogism ‘Zoophrenia’. The cosmic context of Russian and Soviet thought is evident in the definition of this concept: ‘Zoophrenia will unite people and animals in a coalition for a better noosphere’ (107).22 In her interpretation of Kulik’s experimental actions Gesine Drews-Sylla points out that the word ‘noosphere’ is taken from the vocabulary of the father of Soviet cosmic science Vladimir Vernad- sky.23 It has to be remembered that Vernadsky in turn was influenced by the utopian philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov. In Kulik’s project physics and metaphysics are brought together to give birth to a new hybrid. Rozanov’s metaphysical animal/human/god hybrids embodied the secret to which the key has yet to be found. Kulik’s ‘firstborn’ man/dog is a major step forward in the realisation of the dreams of these Russian thinkers, albeit in post-human and ‘post-animal era’.24 Kulik’s art is not only trend-specific in terms of the body politics of postmodernist discourse. As a parody and a pastiche of Soviet and Russian cultural idioms it is also culture-specific. It targets the icons produced by this culture, from the scientific experiments of Ivan Pavlov to the iconic symbols as communicated through literary and filmic texts. His erotic encounters with the dogs and the inclusion of dogs in the family of the future exposes the tabooed layer of Russian paremiological material, including swear-words. At this point the reader will recall that the absent subject of the obscenity ‘Fuck your mother’ is the dog. Post-Soviet filmic interpretations of the hidden sexual substratum in the man-woman-dog relationship made explicit this subtext of Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’. Kulik’s project co-ordinates a wide range of references. The pathos of his project is paradoxical, but even this reflects the paradoxical nature of dog representation in Rus- sian culture. While he parodies Pavlovian experiments on dogs he at the same time endorses scientific endeavour. This is especially evident in his project to be the first human to give birth to a dog/human hy-

22 Manifesta 1. Catalogue for the exhibition in Rotterdam 9 June-19 August 1996. Ed. Mirjam Beerman, Amsterdam: Manifesta, 1996. 23 Gesine Drews-Sylla, “The Human Dog Oleg Kulik’s Grotesque Post-Soviet Animalistic Performance”, in Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Cul- ture and History. Eds Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 2010, 234-252. 24 Baker uses this term in his discussion of post-human and post-animal acts in contemporary Western art. See Steve Baker, Artist/Animal. Minneapolis: Minne- sota UP, 2013, 226-238.

372 Political Animals brid. At the same time he equates his own body to that of a dog by allowing it to be subjected to experimentation. Kulik clearly works within the culture-specific paradigm of the correlation between human and dog.

Dog as de-sexed partner in the all-male family of Russian border guards

Commentators on the representation of masculinity in totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union have noted the effects of de- masculinisation which the cult of a strong leader has on the representation of male roles. In Soviet literature and film even the most heroic male figures, such as border guards and soldiers, are represented as uninterested in matters of sex. If the patriarch of the country, such as Stalin, is viewed as the father of the family, and if Motherland Rodina is an embodiment of the mother, then to defend the Motherland one has to sublimate one’s sexual drives in order not to be involved in the fantasy of incest.25 In relation to the Rodina aspect of a young woman, the male soldier has to sublimate his libidinal drive in order to save this vigour for the defence of his country. Soviet male heroes might have been depicted in masculine roles but their sexual energy had to be sublimated for the sake of a more important spiritual deed. The lack of representation of erotic activities by Soviet/Russian men can thus be explained by the call to help build a better future for the country. What role do dogs play in this de-masculinised discourse? The work of Kulik is one graphic and parodic example of the many layers of the construct of the man/dog relationship, including such taboos as man/dog sexual relations. In his 2004 Interviews with Dmitrii Bavil’skii Kulik openly talks about the sensual pleasure that humans derive from caressing animals. He also talks about his experience with a male dog who performed a sexual act on Kulik’s naked body. Sexual contact between animals and humans, he maintains, should be viewed as possible in the same way that homosexual contact should be treated as an acceptable way to express love.

25 See John Haynes, New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.

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Kulik’s work combines post-Soviet subversiveness with the conceptual subversiveness of postmodern art. It exposes the hidden substratum of ideological tropes of Socialism including the dyad of the heroic serviceman and his heroic dog. It has been observed that the depiction of border guards makes an important contribution to the representation of masculinity.26 As exemplary sons in the Great Soviet Family, they point in the direction of idealised masculinity. Yet, this masculinity is truncated; it is often represented as youthful and therefore is infantilised. Hans Guenther notes that the infantilisation of society is a characteristic tendency of totalitarian regimes.27 The sublimation and transference of the libidinal drives of Soviet border guards onto their personal dog (or horse) is a motif that needs to be investigated. In the border guard and border guard dog narratives analysed earlier, the repeated presence of an affectionate couple, of a man and his dog, is striking. In Nikita Karatsupa’s memoir The Notes of a Pathfinder a border guard and his dog form a stable couple. The man shows love and total devotion to his dog and as a result the dog responds with identical feelings. As with a wedded couple, infidelity in this relationship is unacceptable. Although the underlying sentiment of the border guard/guard dog relationship is that of camaraderie, warmer emotions are involved. Taking personal care of the dog’s hygiene, for example, implies a very intimate relationship between the two. In Karatsupa’s memoir, the absence of any romance between border guards and members of the female sex is meaningful. The dog is a replacement for the absent female partner. The substitution of a female partner by a dog (or a horse) is a prominent feature of ‘The Border Guard Dog Alyi’ and ‘Frontier Post in the Mountains’. In these films all the young males’ feelings of love and tenderness are directed towards their respective animals. This sublimation of sexual love and transference onto a dog in the border guard and guard dog pairing implies a state of temporary celibacy. As long as a man is a border guard, his only duty is to his Motherland.

26 John Haynes, Ibid. 27 Hans Guenther, “Wise Father Stalin and his Family in Soviet Cinema”, Trans. Julia Trubikhina in Socialist Realism Without Shores. Eds Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, Durham: Duke UP, 1997, 178-189.

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The all-male brotherhood of the border station is particularly prominent in the 1979 film ‘The Border Guard Dog Alyi’. Even the traditionally female role of a cook is taken by a male soldier. This all- men monastery-like atmosphere is further reinforced by the sex of the dog Alyi, implying that no female animals are kept in this ‘monastery’. This situation clearly called for a parody, and it arrived in the dissident literature in the 1970s in Yuz Aleshkovsky’s Nikolai Niko- laevich: a science fiction story. The text blends together border guard and his dog duo with the transgressive sex-related experimentation. In it the protagonist is made into a sperm donor in a Soviet research laboratory, and his best friend, who used to be an international swindler before the Soviet borders were sealed, blames the border guard Kar- atsupa and his dog Ingus for putting an end to his international career.28 Although episodic, the mention of Nikita Karatsupa and Ingus in the context of experiments with genetics is representative of the project of human and animal engineering in the Soviet Union.29 The multiplication of dogs into a dynasty is emblematic of the creation of robust humans identical in their desire to serve their country. The main protagonist is chosen as a sperm donor because of the special strength and quantity of his sperm. His name and patronymic, Nikolai Nikolaevich, denotes the notion of fathering children who would be identical to one another. Fittingly, the experiments with genetic engineering have the conquest of the cosmos as their aim. Human sperm is treated in the laboratory with the aim to create human cells that will then be transplanted to other planets. Numerous identical Nikolai Ni- kolaevichs could populate the universe. In terms of the theme of dynasties of Soviet dogs, Nikolai Nikolaevich can be viewed as a forefather of a whole dynasty of Soviet men and women of the future who will be bred in the same way as Ingus’s progeny. Kulik’s art overtly suggests that the dog as sexual partner or as erotic love object does not have to function as a human substitute but

28 Yuz Aleshkovskii, “Nikolai Nikolaevich”, in Nikolai Nikolaevich i Maskirovka. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980, 1-70. 29 On genetics in the USSR see Valerii Soifer, Vlast’ i nauka: istoriia razgroma genetiki v SSSR. Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage, 1989. On eugenics in Russia and the USSR see Mark Adams, “Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940”, in The Wellborn Sci- ence: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia. Ed. Mark Adams, Ox- ford: Oxford UP, 1990, 160-187.

Sleeping with the animal 375 can be a partner/object in its own right, just as a man may be to another man the object not of brotherly love but of sexual love.30 While the morality of the former is considered vastly more transgressive than the latter, in both cases social, cultural and religious prohibitions on choice of sex partner have been erased.

Corporeal heavenly creatures

Kulik’s subversive project challenges the duality of the obscene and the sacred contained in the symbolism of the dog. His project is two- fold: political and, on a subterranean level, symbolic. Boris Uspen- sky’s view that culture has retained the archaic levels of the dog taboo and totemism in its lexicon of swear-words points to the duality of the relationship between the sacred and profane. In his essay on the anthropological aspects of language Edmund Leach famously used dog symbolism to demonstrate how the dynamics between the profane and the sacred operate in English culture.31 In this essay he uses the example of the inversion between the words ‘God’ and ‘dog’ in the expression ‘dog collar’, referring to a detail in a priest’s gown, to show the totemic and sacred nature of the dog in English culture. As a relic from the archaic past this metathesis points to the dynamics between the sacred and the profane, totem and taboo. Obscene expressions frequently point in the direction of formerly sacred objects and the profane nature of various surviving expressions like ‘son of a bitch’ indicate the former sacredness of the dog. In the Interviews Kulik maintains that animals and humans have souls, and that the way to understand the human body as a ‘heavenly creature’ (‘bozhestvennoe sozdanie’, 129) lies paradoxically in understanding it as an animal body. His claim ‘I flirt not only with low spheres but also with the divine ones’ (148) encapsulates the important substratum of dog symbolism. Kulik retrieves this element of duality out of the deep layers of cultural expression and brandishes it in the face of contemporary Russian and Western consumers of culture.

30 On the role of the viewer’s gaze in visual art see The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality. Eds John Caughie, Annette Kuhn and Mandy Merck, Lon- don: Routledge, 1992. 31 Edmund Leach, “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, in New Directions in the Study of Language. Ed. Eric H. Lenne- berg, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964, 23-64.

376 Political Animals

Anat Pick recently (2011) coined the term ‘creaturely poetics’ to define a new non-anthropocentric understanding of both humans and animals as creatures.32 She maintains that aspects of religiosity that are implied in the commonality of creaturely attitudes are helpful. Religiosity in this respect refers to the admission that both humans and animals were created by God. This understanding of creatures is aimed at getting rid of the reductionist connotations of the concept ‘creature’ as it is used in contemporary discourse. When Kulik talks about humans and animals as heavenly creatures he stresses that being embodied does not mean to be less ‘heavenly’. In terms of cross-species discourse Rozanov created ‘creaturely poetics’ as an Arcadian trip to the past, to the space and time of pre anthropocentric human ethics and aesthetics. Kulik’s acts are calculat- ingly post-human because he is familiar with the present shifts of paradigms in thinking about humans, post-humans and animals. His projects took place at the same time when Western culture generated representational narratives about cross-species emotional and sexual contacts. Of particular relevance to his projects are two texts written in the 1990s: Peter Hoeg’s The Woman and the Ape (1996) and Anne Haverty’s One Day as a Tiger (1997).33 Hoeg’s novel depicted sexual love between a man, the new Director of London Zoo, and a female ape. For the ape Madalene humans become non-human when they enter the reproductive chain. Anne Haverty’s novel came out in the aftermath of the ‘successful’ scientific cloning experiment that created the sheep Dolly in 1996 (d. 2003). It explored the deep emotional attachment of a man to a female sheep Missy. The novel challenged scientific engineering by making the sheep Missy sickly as a result of the use of human genes in the process of her creation. She is a product of border-crossing technology, and the human/non-human border is treated as a porous biological space. Kulik’s projects incorporate features of contemporary thinking about cross-species interrelations. His desire to see the divine side of animals adds to the paradox inherent in his project to become a parent of cross-species offspring with the help

32 Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. 33 Peter Hoeg, The Woman and the Ape, London: The Harvill Press, 1996. Anne Haverty, One Day as a Tiger, London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. For a discussion of these novels see Simons, 163-167.

Sleeping with the animal 377 of technologies. In contrast to these two last texts, his choice of dogs for his enactments of cross-species sexual love and procreation is especially notable.

Nina Perebeeva’s human-dog family in Vladimir Tiul’kin’s Not About Dogs

Rozanov and Kulik wanted to achieve a shift in human-animal relations through the notion of the family. For their Arcadian and Utopian visions of human/animal futurity they chose the family unit as the site in which to play out their creaturely fantasies. A recent documentary narrating the life of a woman who took dogs into her family challenges human-dog relations in the post-Soviet epoch. Directed by Vladi- mir Tiul’kin, Ne pro sobak (Not About dogs, 2010) investigates a more recent shift in the dog/human paradigm.34 As a documentary about real people and dogs it relocates the human/animal relationship and correlation from the domain of the symbolic to that of the real.35 Yet, the film also makes use of cultural iconicity that enriches its ‘creaturely’ representational field. The documentary focuses on the only dog refuge in Kazakh- stan. It is run by two Russian women – Nina Perebeeva (1944-2007) and her old mother. On her tiny pensioner’s income, Perebeeva looked after up to 120 dogs at a time for thirty years both during the Soviet and post-Soviet times when Kazakhstan became an independent state. The film shows the women in day-to-day contact with the large number of dogs that they have adopted and which they treat as part of their family. They clean up after them, feed them, caress them, hold them on their laps. This portrayal of family life inclusive of dogs lacks the sensationalism and commercialism of Rozanov’s and Kulik’s projects. While the dogs go about their daily activities in their own, doggish ways, the women live their lives in the most ordinary and matter-of- fact fashion: they clean up the dogs’ poo as they would do in caring for small children or sick and ailing adults; they cook for them and feed them; they lay clean sheets of newspapers on the floor. They go about these daily activities under the constant sounds of the dogs

34 Ne pro sobak. Dir. Vladimir Tiul’kin, Kovcheg studio, Alma-Ata, 2010. 35 On animal gaze in film see Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward A Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2000.

378 Political Animals without any sign of irritation. In so doing they transgress the barriers between humans and dogs as separate species. The women’s lives, shared with the dogs as if they were all members of an extended family, challenge the notion of the Oedipal animal as advanced by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Their often-quoted attack on humans’ treatment of pets as members of their family is critical of this form of human/animal relationship because it is based on the principles of propriety, clannishness and a protectionist economy. In Perebeeva’s case, the dogs are adopted as members of the family, they are neither pets nor wild animals. As such, the dog refuge effectively rewrites the whole notion of the family. If Rozanov’s and Kulik’s projects are imaginatively futuristic, then Tiul’kin’s film is about the reality of the here and now. If Roza- nov looked for God in the animals of antiquity and Kulik conceptual- ised humans and animals as heavenly creatures, then Perebeeva’s life with the dogs is a manifestation of her recognition of God in dogs. While Rozanov blamed the asceticism of Christianity for taking God away from the animal domain and Kulik spoke about religiosity without concrete religious denominations, Perebeeva sees her care for the dogs as a Christian act. A Russian Orthodox believer, she interprets the Biblical commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ as applicable to any form of animal life. Similarly, she extends the Christian dictum about treating others as one would oneself to include the animal world. The film’s sequence of scenes set in the house and the church shows the women and the church choir singing God-praising prayers while the dogs perform their whining singing at home. The parallelism between the human and dog vocal abilities expresses parallelism between the two species, so producing ‘creaturely’ aesthetics. Tiul’kin’s documentary shows, albeit in a singular case, a Rus- sian Orthodox believer who has found a way to include dogs in the domain of her personal Christian faith. Perebeeva keeps the dogs in her house; they excrete, multiply and die in her dwelling place; she pronounces her daily Christian prayers in the presence of her dogs. Moreover, her dogs defecate in a house that has Christian icons and images of God on the walls. This nexus of scatology and eschatology emblematises the paradox of this animal in Russian culture. Perebeeva de-taboos culture-specific superstitions and prejudices against the dogs. Based on self-sacrifice and a lack of disgust for the scatological

Sleeping with the animal 379 animal life, her life links hagiographic and apocryphal narratives. In saving dogs from the dog-catcher she undertakes multiple acts of mercy. At the same time, less fortunate dogs in being beaten, killed and skinned by the treacherous dog-catcher, parallel the tormented heroes of Judaic (Rabbi Akiva) and Christian martyrdom tales.36 At one point, the camera creates a nexus between the tears in the eyes of the suffering Christ as represented on the icon and the suffering eyes of real-life dogs. Is it possible that Tiul’kin found in Perebeeva a saintly Russian figure who, like the Catholic Saint Francis of Assisi, bridged the gap between humans and animals? Yet, her case is additionally complicated because it presents ‘a border-case’ in terms of the culture-specific iconicity and current trends in animal protection laws in cases of ‘animal hoarding’. Audi- ences familiar with Russian culture will notice that she shares common features with the iurodivyi, the Holy Fool whom the culture has constructed as a saintly figure bordering on ‘madness’.37 In those parts of the world where strict controls are in place to monitor animal keeping on a massive scale by individuals she would be classified as ‘an animal hoarder’.38 Her own vulnerability in relation to how she might have been treated by various law enforcing authorities makes her correlation with dogs even stronger: being isolated from the pack/family, sanitised, given to new ownership/put into the care, recondi- tioned/treated for psychological/mental disorder. Her typological links with the Holy Fool figure create a further parallelism between her and dogs: Holy Fools were viewed as a combination of nature – unspoilt and untouched by culture and civilisation – and supernature, as being chosen by God. They were feared for their powers of divination and ostracised, and they lived on the margins of society. They also subverted that which was orthodox and official. As such, Perebeeva embodies the same paradox as the dog/underdog. The association with the Holy Fool typology is further reinforced by the syncretism of her faith. While she thinks of herself as a Christian believer, her Christian faith is creative and subjective, as exemplified by the prayer that she

36 On Jewish martyrdom and human-animal relations after the Holocaust see Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce. London: Abacus, 1987. 37 On Holy Fools see Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 372-374. 38 See a discussion in Leslie Irvine, If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connec- tion with Animals, 19. Also see Animal Law.Com. International Institute for An- imal Law. www.animallaw.com/Animalhoarding.htm

380 Political Animals invents: ‘Defend me, dog, when I will be called upon at the Day of Last Judgment’. The fact that the animal is a dog attests to the exemplary and disturbingly uneasy place which it occupies in Russian culture. In his attempt to write a Christian theology of compassion for animals, On God and Dogs, Stephen Webb puts forward a view that the animals who depend on humans will be included in God’s final embrace of the world. 39 He argues that God must love what people love, and in the midst of such infinite love, the differences between humans and animals begin to diminish. Domesticated animals like dogs are part of this configuration of love, submissiveness and dependence. He notes that the Hebrew Scriptures insist that one of the blessings of wisdom is to stand in peace even with the wild animals (Job 5:22-23), and believer leaps into the eschatological future as paradise lost. This paradise is a garden with peaceful and domesticated animals of which dog is the most representative. The title of Tiul’kin’s film Not About Dogs should be understood in the context of human/animal relations and correlation that bridge the sphere of physics and metaphysics. The paradigm shift can take place only when people start thinking about animals as their equals.40 Whereas Kulik’s family of the future is a post-human project, Tiul’kin’s project is about showing what it means to be human. Released in 2010 the film symbolically closed the first decade of the twenty-first century by inviting every individual to re-think what it means to be human. He shows that being vulnerable is one of the important shared features between humans and animals. While Fedo- rov’s philosophy of the ‘common task’ relied on a collective effort, Tiul’kin’s film shows that the road to any form of collective effort is long. There is, after all, only one Perebeeva in the whole of the geo- graphically vast country of Kazakhstan. It is ironic that the cosmodromes Kapustin Yar and Baikanur from which the cosmic dogs were sent into space are situated near and in this former Soviet Republic.

39 On Christian theology and compassion for animals see Stephen H. Webb, On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 40 John. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy Gutmann, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

Conclusion Dogs are ‘good to think’

My original impulse to write a book on the representation of dogs in Russian culture was inspired by Boris Uspensky’s work on the construction of this animal in traditional culture. Hidden layers that form taboo, sacral and the obscene in culture in relation to themes of life and death, procreation and sexuality, afterlife and immortality are all present in Russian folk beliefs and sayings about dogs. Traditional culture’s perception of this animal as an ‘Outsider’ further triggered my interest in the parallelism between dogs and Other underdogs that culture marginalises. The construct of the dog as Other is paradoxical, because of the culture’s simultaneous notion of parallelism between humans and dogs. I then decided to search for this set of motifs in Russian literature from its ‘Golden Age’, the nineteenth century, and have discovered that they form a cluster which in a variety of combinations underpins most of the representations of this animal in cultural narratives up till now. The thematic clusters have fuzzy borders, and as every chapter in this book demonstrates, almost all representations of the dog have some common features. These shared features are akin to Wittgensteinian family resemblances, where categories can be connected by a series of overlapping similarities although no one feature is common to all. The chapters make this porous typology clear, but the most telling example of family resemblance is Kazakov’s dog Arcturus. This blind dog with the nickname of the bright star in the Northern hemisphere sky is connected to the dog typology through the celestial allusion. While there are no other blind dogs investigated in this book, the link between dogs and the other worlds, both above and below, are shared by many dog subtexts. Arcturus’s disability, in turn, is a shared feature with Gerasim from ‘Mumu’, Sashka from ‘Gam- brinus’, and the old retired working dog Mukhtar. His status of a disabled underdog thus links him to the shared subplots and subtexts of many dog stories. 382 Political Animals

The subplot of dogs as human companions is another shared feature. Writers and artists often use this pairing to expose and subvert a wide range of societal issues. Human-dog companionship is ridiculed as a fashionable behaviour of the idle and privileged classes, and it is also used as a political protest discourse against the uncultured and uneducated majority in Russian and Soviet society. The subplot also allows explorations of psychological and emotional needs of people across classes, genders and ethnicities. It is used by the official discourse in the ideological pairing of servicemen and service dogs, and this tandem is parodied in order to expose the exploitative side of this relationship. It is also exposed as part of the discourse of power, control and dominance. As far as the binary opposition ‘us-them’ is concerned, Russian writers, filmmakers, performing and creative artists often position themselves on the dog side of the dichotomy so as to express their own family resemblance to dogs. They express themselves as the underdogs of the society, but also as philosophical talking dogs who subvert, provoke and parody things that society and culture want to censor, disguise, taboo and forbid. To paraphrase the famous political slogan of the Soviet times: ‘Those who are not with us – are against us’ operates for the non-odious representatives of educated classes as: ‘Those who are against dogs are not with us’. Attitude towards dogs is a definite litmus test for being politically, ethically and morally uncompromising, and in all the cases, for being human. The dog thus has emerged as the most represented and representative animal in modern Russian culture. To rephrase Claude Levi- Strauss’s much quoted formulation: animals are ‘good to think’ (89),1 Russian culture considers dogs good to think. My book has demonstrated that dog is the locus of intersections of species-class-race- ethnicity-sex-gender-sexuality-disability, the meeting place of the cultural history of body politics and human-animal relations.2 But it is also the site of intersections of dreams about the future, expressed in oral folk culture and by writers and artists, thinkers and scientists of modern times. The dog is thus a paradoxical embodiment of Russian eschatological thought.

1 Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism. Boston: Beacon, 1963, 89. 2 See “Minding Animals Bulletin” No. 19. www.mindinganimals.com

Conclusion 383

Scholars have commented on the dominant presence that animals occupy in Russian utopian thought and impulses.3 Basing their conclusions on case studies examining a wide range of animals in a much wider chronological framework than is the focus of my book, Costlow and Nelson noted that, together with utopianism, human society’s preoccupation with class antagonisms is another theme where animals feature prominently. 4 Animals also occupy a significant place in discourses of the exploitation of the physiological roots of human and animal behaviour and the ideological implications of these activities. They also noted that the theme of human-animal hierarchies becomes prominent in times of revolutionary upheavals, social transformation, or disintegration. My book has demonstrated a porous nature of thematic categories linked to the dog representations, especially in narratives of transformation, underpinned by the quest for futurity. By this quest I understand not only ideas on how to improve society but also the individual and collective desires for a future that goes beyond this realm. Dreams and thoughts about futurity involve a search for immortality that is achieved by scientific methods or/ and by synthetic transformative means. Leonid Geller noted that both philosophers like Nikolai Fedorov and also scientists like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), the father of Russian cosmonautics, included rational animals in their visions of futurity. But the very nature of cosmism has magico-religious elements, as, in Hagemeister’s elucida- tion, its ‘underlying belief in the omnipotence of science and technology is rooted in the idea of the magic power of (occult) knowledge’ (187).5 Many writers and artists contributed to these ideas and visions, and were inspired by them. One telling illustration of the synthetic nature of the whole dog project is the fact that Vladimir Durov chose dogs for telepathic mental suggestions thus displaying features of mysticism in conjunction with scientific methods.6 Various examples in my book have shown that the dog mediates the Promethean and the Theurgist impulses and their representations. As such, it metaphorical-

3 Geller, Utopiia zverinosti, 10; Costlow and Nelson Other Animals, 7. 4 Costlow and Nelson, Other Animals, 7-8. 5 Michael Hagemeister, “Russian Cosmism in the 1920s and Today”, in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, 185-202, 187. 6 Kleimola uses the word ‘mysticism’ (170) when discussing Durov’s ‘mental suggestion’ technique. Ann Kleimola, “A Legacy of Kindness: V.L. Durov’s Revolutionary Approach to Animal Training”, in Other Animals. 164-177, 170.

384 Political Animals ly crosses borders between the materialist and idealist domains in a way that parallels its image as a creature that crosses borders between this and the other worlds. Boris Uspensky’s notion of the correlation between humans and dogs finds its expression in the discourse on futurity, and continues to generate and regenerate representational narratives.7 In pretending not to believe in the God-given miracle of resurrection, the culture modelled itself on this dream of humankind and effectively ‘took matters into its own hands’. ‘We cannot wait for favours from nature. It is our task to take them from it,’ said one of the founding fathers of Russian horticulture, Ivan Michurin (1855-1936). This saying became a popular slogan in Soviet times.8 Yet, as with many often-repeated utterings, Soviet slogans were in themselves related to magico-religious incantations and proved the synthetic nature of these grand projects.9 Experiments on animals were considered instrumental in the achievement of man-made miracles intended to improve nature’s imperfect creations. Dogs, from Pavlov’s and Bri- ukhonenko’s laboratory animals to Laika, Belka and Strelka flying into the cosmos, marked out a map for the conquest of death here on Earth and ‘out there’ in the New Heaven of the limitless universe. Sadly, even Durov’s zoopsychology contributed to the discourse of animal exploitation.10 His 1923 book Dressirovka zhivotnykh. Novoe v zoopsikhologii (Animal Training: New about

7 It has to be stressed that Russian contemporary oral culture continues to use actively proverbs and sayings about dogs, and is productive in creating new expressions. Expressions like “Pavlovian dog” and titles of recent popular songs (cf. “Propala sobaka”, 1979) have acquired proverbial meaning, and are now listed in the latest dictionaries. See 55 entries containing the word “sobaka” in V.M. Mokienko et al, in Bol’shoi slovar’ russkikh poslovits, Moscow: OLMA Media Grupp, 2010. Also V.M. Mokienko et al, “Sobaka”, in Bol’shoi slovar’ russkikh pogovorok, Moscow: OLMA Media Grupp, 2007, 626-628. 8 For an interpretation of Michurin’s ideas see Mikhail Epshtein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1995. 9 On the link between Soviet slogans and magic speech see Bernice Glatzer Rosen- thal, “Political Implications of the Early Twentieth-Century Occult Revival”, in The Occult in Russian Thought and Culture, 379-418. 10 On Durov as a friend of animals see E. Dvinskii, Ugolok imeni V.L. Durova. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1956. For information on current activities in ‘Durov’s Corner’ see: www.ugolokdurova.ru

Conclusion 385

Zoopsychology)11, reveals a sinister side of utopianism based on human-animal correlation. His descriptions of the utilitarian use of the knowledge of animal psychology are a chilling parallel to Stalinist notions of human engineering:

The time will arrive when people with the help of the descriptions of my methods will be able to evoke in animals’ minds various notions in accordance to people’s wishes. They will be able to make animals recollect these notions, and to experience emotions at the time that suits people. (304)

From humans influencing animals, Durov switches to special machines of the future that will influence human thought. Evolution, he suggests, will be assisted by new technologies. Durov is equally enthusiastic about the power of hypnotism that he himself practised on animals and about the supposed effect of machines on the human brain. It is not possible, he believes, for an organism to resist such influences. The aim, he claims, is to create ‘better thoughts and better ideas in humans, so that in the future there is no place left for negative ideas that go against the interests of the masses or of big collectives, or against all the international working classes’ (306).

The future dogs of the twenty-second century

Significantly, towards the end of the Soviet Union era, dystopian science fiction turns to the representation of dogs to discredit human arrogance in relation to the animal world. The brothers Strugatsky invent a new nation of dogs in the novel, written at the time when ‘developed socialism’ started showing signs of distress in the wake of the 1980s decade.12 In their celebrated work Zhuk v muraveinike (Bee- tle in the Anthill, 1979), the most advanced extra-terrestrial creatures intellectually and emotionally are dogs, forming as they do a nation of

11 Vladimir Durov, Dressirovka zhivotnykh. Psikhologicheskie nabliudeniia nad zhivotnymi. Novoe v zoopsikhologii. Moscow: Mospolitgraf, 1923. 12 Y. Howell, Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Stru- gatsky. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

386 Political Animals golovany (head-creatures).13 These dogs of the twenty-second century speak a number of foreign languages and are the most rational and moral galactic inhabitants of the surviving civilisations. One representative of the golovany is in charge of his nation’s temporary mission on Earth. His name is Shchekn, a derivative of shchenok, puppy. Shchekn is a metathesis of Shchenk. As such, it parallels the structure of the English God-dog metathesis. The reader will recall that Ed- mund Leach viewed the meaning of this metathesis as a sign of the dog’s special status as a tabooed and sacred creature, one that is opposite to God and yet as powerful as His opposite – the Devil, the Other – and ultimately as powerful as God Himself. In the novel the humanoids and humans are inferior to these advanced dogs, whose thoughts are a riddle to the zoopsychologist Lev Abalkin. Information about Shchekn’s mission on Earth is not acces- sible (Durov’s methods of manipulating and readings the thoughts of dogs [and people] would be powerless in this situation). While still a friend of the human Abalkin, Shchekn is no longer in a position of dependency on the humans. His knowledge is superior to that of the humans and the humanoids; he possesses knowledge that in critical situations saves the lives of the humans. The Golovany disapprove of the human desire to conquer new spaces and so make the same ecological disasters as they have done on the planet Earth. Could they be the progeny of the former Earth dogs that were propelled into cosmos by the humans? Significantly, Shchekn refuses to believe in the atheistic thought suggested by one of the Russian-speaking humans that there is no future after death. Shchekn talks about the past with Abal- kin, showing that he is familiar with life on Earth. Could it be that the dogs who had left the planet Earth have now returned with superior knowledge that might eventually save the planet and its human population? In the philosophical fiction of futurity, dogs’ extra-natural powers combined with their moral superiority over humans might, it seems, save the planet. At the end of the novel the human zoopsychologist, the friend of animals, dies. The nation of dogs survives because it does not live on the planet Earth. Whether these dogs origi- nated on Earth and were propelled out of it, or whether they had ar-

13 Arkadii Strugatskii, Boris Strugatskii, “Zhuk v muraveinike”, in Miry Brat’ev Strugatskikh. Moscow: Terra Fantastica, 1999, 175-384. Arkadii Strugatsky, Bo- ris Strugatsky, Beetle In The Anthill. London: Macmillan, 1980.

Conclusion 387 rived here a long time ago from another place in the galaxy in order to become a quasi-sacrificial animal to the humans, in either scenario humans will no longer be manipulating dogs. Fittingly, in Tatyana Tolstaya’s post-Soviet futuristic dystopian novel Kys’ (The Slynx) (2000) the only surviving animals who preserve their pre-catastrophe nature live in forests and do not come into contact with affected humans.14 Animals who live with humans mu- tate and form a different entity. The novel’s chief creature Slynx is a composite between a cat and a lynx (kot and rys’: k/ys’). In terms of the novel’s political statement it is highly symbolic that this unpleasant mutant belongs to a feline rather than canine species. The Blast that causes this post-Apocalyptic mutation is a man-made disaster. Another futuristic dystopia, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik (2006) gives the proleptic image of Russia in the twenty- second century. The future of the dogs, evoked in the imagery based on the past, is grim and in line with the main paradigms of the perception and representation of this animal in Russian culture. Strikingly, the novel uses the historical image of the Oprichniks’ dogs’ severed heads as an enduring symbol of the despotism and barbarism of Rus- sian society.15 The new monarch’s agents attach dogs’ heads to their cars, paralleling the way in which the Oprichniks of Ivan the Terrible times attached dogs’ heads on sticks to their horses. These future elites manifest their wealth by having big houses with borzois in the kennels, but the image of severed dogs’ heads ostensibly represents their brutality. While these severed heads instil horror in the population, they also stand for the victimhood of dogs, since a new dog-head is required every day to adorn the car. This complex image becomes a telling allegory of physical torture of those in political opposition, by the Oprichniks who violate and mutilate in scenes of utmost cruelty. It thus epitomises the culture’s continuous correlation between the man and the dog. There is another hidden meaning of the dogs’ severed heads at play here: the Oprichniks of the future are superstitious, and they live in the society that abandoned atheist ideology and returned to the obscurantism of darker ages, albeit in the time of technological advancement. This futuristic police do not need to have service dogs to fight the enemy, but instead use the iconicity of the dog as a cultur-

14 Tat’iana Tolstaia, Kys’. Moscow: Podkova, ‘Inostranka’, 2000. 15 Vladimir Sorokin, Den’ oprichnika, Moscow: Zakharov, 2006.

388 Political Animals al construct as a political weapon. Ironically, in this Russia of the future, Oleg Kulik’s dog art is pushed into the oppositional underground, and in a futuristic twist the puppies of this famous artist man- dog now transmit material ‘on the body liberation discourse’ (144) on a dedicated underground radio channel. With elements of parody and allusion, bringing together sacral and obscene, the dog emblematics in this futuristic dystopia is in line with the complex and paradoxical meanings which Russian culture assigns to this animal.16 As far as the lives of ‘real’ dogs are concerned, they are shown to be victims of humans: chained to guard the house of the Oprichnik; killed by the fast car of a powerful member of the inner circle; decapitated for symbolic purposes. Thus dogs in Russia of the twenty-second century have not escaped human exploitation and abuse. In this proleptic futurity dogs remain ‘political animals’.17 Indeed, my book has demonstrated that contrary to the animal (and human) liberation discourse of anti-totalitarian futurity, the official conservative patriotic discourse continues to keep the dog in human bondage. Police service and border guard dog discourse promulgates the cult of the dog as an irreplaceable animal in the twenty-first century. It presents dogs as ideal working machines created by nature. With the right training, the dogs’ abilities cannot be replaced by sophisticated equipment or machinery. This claim is substantiated by scientific findings. However, the dynasties of Soviet and post- Soviet dogs are the product of human selection on the basis of the

16 In his interview at Stanford University of 19 October 2011 Sorokin gave a political reading to the homosexual orgy scene by the Oprichniks. He compared it to the fostered homosexual encounters among the SS members in Nazi Germany. The new Oprichniks thus become a quasi-cultic brotherhood. “Reading by the writer in residence, Vladimir Sorokin, 19 October 2011”. Vimeo.com/41378638. 17 The publication history of Sorokin’s book in Russian and in English translation illustrates the dissonance between the iconicity of the dog as the most representative animal in Russian culture and the Western perception of Russia’s most iconic animal as the bear. I mentioned this phenomenon in a footnote in the Introduc- tion. Thus, the first original Russian edition of Day of the Oprichnik, Den’ oprichnika (2006) has the severed dog-head and a broomstick on its cover in line with the historical imagery. However, the cover of the book in the English translation (2011) depicts a bear, suggesting that the decision to market the book in the English-speaking world was made on the basis of the view that barbaric Rus- sia is best represented by the image of the bear. See Vladimir Sorokin, Day of the Oprichnik, Trans. Jamey Gambrell. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Conclusion 389 animals’ willingness to serve their masters. The implication is that these service dogs form a family, or a nation of Russian dogs. Their exclusivity thus rests in their quasi-Russianness. (This is another reason why Indus had to be immortalised as Ingus.) When patriotic discourse honours heroic service dogs through taxidermic preservation, it blends the materialist drive for a better future with aspects of nativist mysticism. As such, it continues the Soviet Durovian tradition of correlation between the human and the dog, with dogs serving humans for the better future of a particular group of people in its desire to achieve hegemony. It is with good reason that the brothers Strugatsky’s anti- totalitarian futurity represents dogs as a separate nation in its own right. The dog nation is no longer used, misused or abused by humans. It can choose who it wants to help and protect. While humans might still need the help of dogs, dogs no longer need the help of humans. Contemporary research in cognitive sciences demonstrates that dogs have astonishing human-like social skills.18 This is the result of the history of domestication of this animal – the process of selection by humans privileged the dogs that were the most well-disposed towards them. The paradox of the dog liberation scenario in the Strugat- skys’ futurity is based on dogs’ total isolation from humans, which is symbolised by their relocation to a different planet. In this science fiction scenario dogs have thus achieved that stage of animal liberation that controversially guarantees the animals’ survival and future only by ensuring that they have full autonomy from human beings. This post-utopian futurity situation may open a new paradigm in dog- human relations, when post-humans will have to communicate with post-human dogs. The question to ponder over is whether dogs will become post-dog dogs. Is this a dog story worth reflecting on?

18 Brian Hare and Michael Tomasello, “Human-like social skills in dogs?”, Trends in Cognitive Science IX/9 (2005), 439-444.

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Filmography and television episodes

Arktur – gonchii pes. 1995. Dir. Galina Samoilova, screenplay Vladislav Mushtaev. RTR. Belyi Bim Chernoe ukho. 1977. Dir. S. Rostotskii, screenplay S. Ros- totskii. Kinostudiia imeni Gor’kogo. Moscow. Bol’shoi sekret dlia malen’koi kompanii. 1979. Dir. Iu. Kalisher, screenplay Iu. Morits. Soiuzmul’tfil’m. Dubrovskii. 1989. Dir. V. Nikiforov, screenplay E. Grigor’ev, O. Ni- kich. Belarus’fil’m for Gosteleradio. Dzhul’bars. 1935. Dir. Vladimir Shneiderov, screenplay El’ Registan, Vladimir Shneiderov. Mezhrabpofil’m. Etnin, Iurii, Evgenii Krylatov. 1979. Song ‘Predannei sobaki netu sushchestva’ in Prikliucheniia elektronika. Dir. Konstantin Bromberg, screenplay Evgenii Veltisov. Odesskaia kinostudiia. Gazmanov, Oleg. Song ‘Pogranzastava’. Celebrations of the Red Ar- my Day on 23 February 2011. 5-yi kanal. Goriachaia tochka. 1998. Dir. Ivan Solovov, producers Vladimir Zhechkov, Vladimir Grigor’ev. Prem’er Fil’m. Granitsa na zamke. 1937. Dir. Vasilii Zhuravlev, screenplay Mikhail Dolgopolov. Soiuzdetfil’m. Ko mne, Mukhtar! 1965. Dir. Semyen Tumanov, screenplay Izrail’ Metter. Mosfil’m. Kulik, Oleg. 1994-1997. Selected Performances. Video documentation. Moscow. Mumu. 1959. Dir. Anatolii Bobrovskii, Evgenii Teterin, screenplay Khrisanf Khersonskii. Mosfil’m. Mu-mu. 1998. Dir. Iurii Grymov, screenpay Yirii Grymov. Mosfil’m. Ne pro sobak. 2010. Dir. Vladimir Tiul’kin. Kovcheg studio. Alma- Ata. Nikita Karatsupa: sledopyt iz legendy. 2010. Dir. Vadim Gasanov, screenplay Vadim Gasanov. FSB. Lex film for VGTRK. Osobennosti natsional’noi okhoty. 1995. Dir. A. Rogozhkin, screenplay A. Rogozhkin. Lenfil’m-Roskomkino. 420 Political Animals

Pogranichnyi pes Alyi. 1979. Dir. Vladimir Golovanov, screenplay Iulii Fait. Kinostudiia imeni Gor’kogo. Moscow. Streliaiushchie gory. 2010. Dir. Rustam Urazaev, screenplay Gennadii Anan’ev et al. Forvard-Fil’m. The Children’s Hour. 1961. Dir. William Wyler, screenplay John M. Hayes. Hollywood. Tikhaia zastava. 2011. Dir. Sergei Makhovikov. Screenplay Sergei Makhovikov. Mosfil’m. Tsirk.1936. Dir. Grigorii Aleksandrov, screenplay Grigorii Aleksan- drov. Mosfil’m. Vernyi Ruslan. 1990. Dir. Vladimir Khmel’nitskii, screenplay Vladi- mir Khmel’nitskii. Fest-Zemlia. TPO. Vozvrashchenie Mukhtara. 2004. Dir. Vladimir Zlatoustovskii, producer Pavel Korchagin. Kit-Media. NTV channel. Vysokaia nagrada. 1939. Dir. Evgenii Shneider, screenplay Igor’ Savchenko. Soiuzdetfil’m. Zastava v gorakh. 1953. Dir. Konstantin Iudin, screenplay Mikhail Volpin, Nikolai Erdman. Mosfil’m.

Internet websites

Animal Law.Com. International Institute for Animal Law. Online at: www.animallaw.com/Animalhoarding.htm Gonozov, Oleg. ‘Udalili zhenskuiu grud’’. Online at: www.proza.ru/2009/09/15/537 ‘Pamiatnik Sashke muzykantu’. On line at: http://odessa.glo.ua/cultura/skulpturnaya_kompoziciya_sashke_ muzykantu.html Kliachkin, Evgenii. ’Strashnee koshki zveria net’. Online at: Olo- lo/fm/search/Evgenii+Kliachkin+/strashnee+koshki+zveria+net Kliachkin.bard.ru/main/php Kortenev, Aleksei. ‘Zachem Gerasim utopil Mu-Mu’. Ne Legendy russkogo shansona. Online at: www.youtube.com/watchru=6wxgihl255 Khripoun, Serge. 1997. ‘Empire Bites Back: Oleg Kulik’s Canine Performance and Deitch Projects’. Things Review. Online at: http://old.thing.net.ttreview/aprrev97.10.html/ Lam, Alla, Vladimir Shainskii. 1979. ‘Propala sobaka’. Online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbklh6nzpa4 Bibliography 421

‘Reading by the writer in residence, Vladimir Sorokin, 19 October 2011’. Stanford University. Online at: Vimeo.com/41378638 ‘Setter Belyi Bim Chernoe ukho’. Online at: http://otvet.mail.ru/question/55180712 Shkolnik, L. ‘Isaak Dunaevskii: vol’nyi veter tvorchestva’. Online at: http://chtoby-pomnili.com/page.php?id=357 Tsesler, Vladimir. ‘Mumu’. Online at: http://kilgor-trutt.livejournal.com/594269html ‘Ugolok Dedushki Durova’. Online at: www.ugolokdurova.ru Vail’, Petr. ‘Geroi vremeni. Vernyi Ruslan’. Radio svoboda. Online at: Archive.svoboda.org/programs/cicles/hero/07.asp Zapriagaev, V. ‘Velikaia Laika’. Online at: Pamiatnik sobake Laike/moscowwalks.ru

Index

Aesop 124, historical 150-151, ancient civilisations, Greece 16, Aesopian fables 151, lan- Greek and Roman sculpture guage 2, 6, 8, 9, 236, 237, 369, Greek Aesop 150, 284, 286, 287, gift 124, ci- Egypt, dog-star Sothys 11, pher 100, tradition 15, 269, Moses and exodus of Israel- 279, mode of narrative 282 ites from Egypt 284, 286, agriculture 223, 333 and paganism 336, and allegory, of social poverty 4, of Preobrazhenskii in Bulga- love 132, of social transfor- kov’s ‘Heart of a Dog’ 344, mation with the dog 136, of and Rozanov 344-345, and disability 168, of Russian experiments on transfor- lower classes in ‘Faithful mation 345, and resurrection Trezor’ 241, of the language 346-347, and cross-species of dogs 242, of physical tor- contacts 348, and Anubis ture 387 347, pagan gods 347, 366, allusion, language of 2, in Rus- human/animal deities 348, sia 6, literary 7, 76, 85, 156, eschatology 348 in Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’ 174, animal hoarder 379, laws on in Kuprin’s ‘Gambrinus’175, animal hoarding 379 in Soviet penal colonies 190, animality 146, in Kuprin 172, to the New Testament 199, 176, and the Jew 176, and 211, to Biblical narratives vulnerability in literature 376 200, to Buddha 24, in Dosto- animals, Chthonic 325, animal evsky 211, to the Stalinist face 325, domesticated 10, past 298, to Pavlov’s exper- 12, 25, 75, 94, 102, 149, 174, iments 329, 352-353, to 183, 257, 364, 365, 380, 389, Egypt 345, 348, to Verdi’s pre-domestication 288, be- opera Aida 345, and irony haviour 326, experiments on 17, and intertextual responses 337-339, 341-353, animal 26, overt 240, intertextual rights 3, 22, 75, 151, 170, 241 225, 299, in therapeutic roles 110, 126, 190, 213, as shock

424 Political Animals

therapy 299, as sacral, ob- belief systems 206, 324, dogs as scene and taboo 2, 13-14, 63, totemic animals in Slav cults 82, 123, 142, 145, 153, 157, 1, 13, 85, in Dal’ 14, 193, to- 194, 196, 203, 212-214, 326, temic functions 70,194, 206, 364, 371, 375, 378, 382, 386, 207, 302, 375; dog-headed 388; wild 10, wild dog Dingo people 70 281 Biocosmists-Immortalists and anthropocentrism 332, 354, 376 experiments on animals 337 anthropomorphism, in Russian birch, as a Russian iconic tree folk tales 16, as representa- 304, as an anthropomorphic tional strategy 22, in Khleb- image 314 nikov 66, in Dostoevsky 101, bird symbolism of, in Dostoev- 198, in Turgenev 159, 176, in sky 80, 91, as eschatological Shalamov 208, in Karatsupa animal in parallel to dogs 253, in the border guard 207, and Soviet ecological films of the 1970s 267, in problems 292, 295, textual Metter 270, and zoomor- 292, in Buddhism 295 phism 315, as a Soviet pro- blood, sports 24, beliefs regard- ject 360 ing breastfeeding puppies 63, anti-Jewish violence 170, 171, and vengeance 69, and vio- and dog’s murder in ‘Gam- lence 173, purity of in dogs brinus’ 170, and racialised and people 247, 254, 287, dogs 173, and animals paral- commonality in police and lelism 179, and stereotypes guard dogs 274 of animals 290 borzois, and breastfeeding 31, antivivisection, and Ivan Pav- 37, as hunting dogs hated by lov’s experiment 356 peasants 38, 48, in Pushkin’s Arcadian dreams 26, and evolu- ‘Dubrovskii’ 39, in Dostoev- tionary underpinnings 76, sky’s The Brothers Karama- and dogs’ dreams 236, and zov 47-48, 53, 61, in harmony in nature in Faithful Troepol’skii’s White Bim Ruslan 308, people and ani- 306, in Tolstoy 307, in mals and gods 369, and Uto- Rogozhkin’s film Peculiari- pia 370, and futurity 376, ties of the National hunt 307, 377 in Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik 387 bear, as a Russian totem 1, as an Buddhism, and Schopenhauer iconic animal 388, in Che- 23, in Bakhtin 23-24, in So- khov 104 logub 317, in Zamiatin and

Index 425

Bunin 312-323, human- clone, cloning in Dovlatov 246, animal transmutation 324, magic and scientific 276, of human-animal reincarnation sheep Dolly 376 325 cosmism, industrial and animals Byliny 58, ‘The Vseslav Epos’ 73, 383, and cosmogony in 68, dogs interchangeable Rozanov 349 with wolves 295 crow, proverbs and symbolism in Russian culture 303, 313- cannibalism, and dog meat- 314 eating in the 1920s 138, during the siege of Leningrad deer, as totemic animal 302 144, 145 degeneracy 35, of a puppy 285, capitalism, in Bakhtin’s criti- in Nordau 285, and animal cism of disrespect for ani- cruelty 296 mals 23, criticism of in display, diorama and human and Soviet times 262 -263 animal bodies display 205, Cartesian dualisms 19, 186, and taxidermic dogs in museums: animal nature 354 Zapiataika 18, Sultan 228, cat, cat-saving in Pushkin 45, Ingus 276, Strelka 357; of anti-cat discourse in Evgeny Lenin’s body in Mausoleum Kliachkin’s song in the 276, of memorial monuments 1970s 299-300 to dogs 355, 356-358 Christianity, attitude to dogs 11, dog-headed saint Christopher 12, dog-headed saint and 11-12, dog-headed people 70, struggle against paganism 12, dog-headed god Anubis in and dual faith in Russia 18, Ancient Egypt 347, 361 69, 70, and the concept of the dog-killers, in prison in Dosto- animal body in Fedorov 326, evsky’s Notes from the in Rozanov 326, 378, in House of the Dead 194, in Kulik 368, in Tiul’kin’s Not Shalamov’s ‘Bitch Tamara’ about Dogs 377-379 205-206, in Solzhenitsyn’s circus, and trained animals in Cancer Ward 93, in Dovla- Durov 15, 94, dog Zhuchka tov’s The Zone 189, 210 16, dog Kashtanka in Che- domestication, of wolves and khov 94-105, in Kuprin’s dogs and breastfeeding 75, ‘White Poodle’ and ‘Gam- and selection 389 brinus’ 105-110 Enlightenment and animals 176

426 Political Animals environment, in the Soviet Un- gastric juices and experiments ion 306, in Village Prose on dogs 2, 100, 352, 353 writing 302 gender, conflation with the ani- eschatology and human-animal mal body 19, intersections correlation 18, 55, 93, 269, with 21, 26, 178, 272, 312, 309, 376, in Ancient Egypt 317, 344, 382, politics and 348 speciesism 95, 96, linked to ethnicity, and dog’s symbolism Darwinian evolution in Che- 26, 149, 179, 221-223, 237, khov 98, 102, stereotypes 57, 239, 246, and dog’s nick- 62-64, 97, 103, 133, 150, name 272, of enemies 264 156, 157, 183, 188 evolution, versus conceptionalist genetic engineering in Bulgakov views 9, 385, in animals and 352, in Aleshkovsky 374 plants 349, evolutionary bi- gentry culture and dogs 49, 61, ology 322 in Khlebnikov 59, in Korolenko 58, in Pushkin 32, fairy-tales and dogs 14, 94, 103, 39-40, 43, 44, 73, in Turge- 120, 266, 285, 313, 316, in nev 160, 164, in Dostoevsky Khlebnikov 56, and skaz 57, 45-46, 192, 197-198, in and Gogol 72, and folk be- White Bim 283, 292-294, pa- liefs 310 rodic in Gogol 125, French feminism 9, 19, stereotypes of gentry 38 feminine and dogs in Dosto- goat, in anthropology as ‘com- evsky 84, in Kashtanka 97, mensal associate’ 194, 213, general 133, 134, 155, 183, in Dostoevsky and Dovla- 252, 265, 312 tov’s prison notes 202, 212 Frankensteinian, plot 339, 342, narrative 310 Holocaust and animal suffering future, futurism and animals 70, issues 17, 298, 379, in Ador- 71, 311, in Maiakovskii 330, no 176, in Metter 229, in 350, in Chekrygin’s paintings Vladimov 239 333, futurity and dogs 70-71, hormones, parodic in animal 76, 308, 377, 383, 384, 386, experiments 348, 351 389, and dystopia in humanism 220, 226, 265 Tolstaya’s The Slynx 387, in hunt, hunting in Russia 38, criti- Sorokin’s Day of the Oprich- cism of in Tolstoy 24, in nik 387, in Kulik’s perfor- Herzen 37, in Turgenev and mance acts 380 Aksakov 49, in Dostoevsky 48, 50, in Khlebnikov 60, 68-

Index 427

70, in Nekrasov 59, 90, 139, 72, 327, in Maiakovskii 333, in Village Prose 302-303, in in Bulgakov 336, 341, 346, White Bim 291, in Peculiari- 350, in Ancient Egypt and ties of the National Hunt 306 Rozanov 347, 366, in Pelevin hybridity human/dog 370, hu- and Ancient Egypt 361, in man/animal/god in Ancient Bunin’s ‘Chang’s Dreams’ Egypt 366, 371, in Bulgakov and Buddhism and Taoism 17, 343-344, 349, in Pelevin 321, 323-324 361, in Rozanov 347, in fu- instinct, survival 140, 288, for turity 369, woman/dog in So- procreation across species logub 316, ethnic in 103, 327, 344, natural 139, Vladimov 239, woman/dog 235, 257, 259, cruel 77 and boy/dog in Khlebnikov Israel, emigration to 300, An- 62-63, 66, 68-70 cient Israelites in White Bim hydrophobia, rabies, mad dog, in 284, 286, 289-290, Exodus Khlebnikov 73, in Furman 240, contemporary in Met- 113-114, in Derkachev 128, ter’s times 221, Leviticus 131-132, in Turgenev 155, in 212 White Bim 297, 298-299 hypnotism, in Durov’s telepathic Judaism, animals and laws 145, and mental suggestions to an- 204 imals 15, 103, 108, 111, 385 Lenin, Lenin Order and the dog icon, iconicity, Christian icons Laika in Pelevin’s Omon Ra 11, 155, 378, of St Christo- 360, Lenin Prize for pher 11, cultural iconicity Troepol’skii’s White Bim 292, 377, 379, of the dog 283, and Aesopian language 206, 256, 264, 265, 304, 371, 6-7, his body in the Kremlin 387, of the dog skin 206, of Mausoleum 276 the bear 388, subversive iconicity 359, iconoclasm magpie, symbolism in beliefs 356, of Russianness 266, 271 295, extermination in Soviet immortality metaphorical and times in White Bim 295 literal, experiments on dogs, Marxist approach to divisions Laika 2, experiments and between humans and animals thoughts in the 1920s 2, 337, 32, dialectics 32 383, in folk beliefs 12, 381, masculinity, in Khlebnikov 61, in Zhuchka-Perezvon in Dos- in Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’ 161, toevsky 88-89, in Fedorov and dog impersonations of

428 Political Animals

Kulik 373, border guard and Nazism 3, and dog breed 152, border guard dogs narratives 223, rhetoric 289, allusions 258, 266, 372 to in White Bim 297, 299, pa- medicine, and Pavlov’s experi- rodic rituals in Sorokin’s Day ments 353, and dog vivisec- of the Oprichnik 388 tion 20, science and medicine 134, triumph in Border Oprichnik, severed dog’s head Guard Dog Alyi 269, in Bul- as a symbol 6, 7, in Sorokin gakov’s Heart of a Dog 336, 388 and Chekhov 103 memorial monuments to dogs pets, and farm animals in Old 355-358 Testament 175, in sociology memory, dog’s 24, 133, 139, 188, pets and children’s cru- 324 elty in Pushkin 43, pets and metamorphosis, into cosmic human cruelty in the 1920s atoms 76, of Zhuchka to Pe- stories 144, in Chekhov and rezvon in The Brothers Kuprin 98, in Dostoevsky Karamazov 88, into madness 197, 202, anthropological in Gogol 120, of dog in Fur- definition 213, pet keeping in man 134, poet into dog in the USSR 364, 378 Maiakovskii 331, to the philosophy, Schopenhauer 24, werewolf 330, human/animal Bakhtin 24, Fedorov’s Phi- 316, from nature to civilisa- losophy of the Common Task tion in Dzhulbars 72, 310, 325, 326, 332, 371, modernism, Russian 335, 336, 380, natural of de Buffon 364 127, dialectical materialism monkey, in scientific and medi- 290, Turgenev’s philosophy cal experiments 337, 339, of death 293, Rozanov’s phi- 351 losophy of sexuality 348-351 monster, Sharikov in Bulgakov physiology, and dog’s anatomy 342, 344, hybrid monsters in 70, 141, and cosmology in Prokhanov’s fiction 271 Fedorov 327, and Ivan Pav- mysticism 351, 383, 389 lov’s experiments on digestive system 352, 353, nationalism, Russian self- Committee for Physiology assertiveness 9, and neopa- and Medicine 353 ganism 304, in the Village pogroms, and animal victim- Prose writing 282, in border hood connections, in Tol- guard narratives 273 stoy’s ‘Esarhaddon, King of

Index 429

Assyria’ 24, during the Civil of Odessa in Durov’s My An- War 145, in Kuprin’s ‘Gam- imals 179-180 brinus’ 170, in 0dessa 171, rationality, in Cartesian split and dogs as victims 173, 186, from instinct to rational- 174-176 ity in border guard dogs 259, post-human, post-humanist 75, in Zamiatin’s We 322, in the 349, in Kulik 370, 376, in readership of The Brothers Rozanov 371, in futurity 389 Karamazov 81, irrationality postmodernism, and visual rep- of peasant revolts 167, in resentations of animals 20, in Sasha Sokolov’s Between performance acts by Kulik Dog and Wolf 168, in 26, 353, 371, 373; in texts by Gerasim’s act in ‘Mumu’ 174 Sasha Sokolov 167, 168, and realism, European 23, critical pastiche 311, and parody realism 120, realistic canon 359, 364 xvii, 3-4, 80, 94, 189 psychology, human and animal resurrection, literal and scien- xv, xvi, Dostoevsky on 50, tific of dogs 2, literal and 83, 199, psychology of evil metaphoric, in Furman 134, 93, in Chekhov 80, 101, in in Border guard dog Alyi Ehrenburg 145, of pogroms 269, in Village Prose writing in Korolenko and Kuprin and White Bim 282, 301, of 175, in Adorno 176, in Pav- Zhuchka-Perezvon in The lov 227, in Vladimov 231, in Brothers Karamazov 85-86, Dovlatov 245, of reporting in 88, 89, 301, of dogs and White Bim 298 children in Dostoevsky 91, in Sologub’s ‘White Dog’ 315, race, racialism, racism, and gen- in Fedorov’s Common Task der 9, in Chekhov 183, dogs 326, 327, 332, in Maiakov- as Other 12, 68, in Kafka 17, skii 331, 333, 334, 336, 341, intersections with class, gen- in Chekrygin’s painting ‘The der, disability 26, 187, 382, Beginning of extra- Aryans and German shep- ecclesiastical activity’ 333, in herds in Nazi Germany 152, Bulgakov’s ‘Heart of a Dog’ 286, as dog degeneracy in 341-343, 346, in Rozanovian White Bim 285 model of animals in Ancient rat, in Pilnyak’s animal com- Egypt 347, 348, in Bulga- mune 136, burning of rats by kov’s polemics with Meyer- police in the Jewish quarter hold 350; and Russian horticulture 384

430 Political Animals revolution, and effects on the ence 18, men of science play lives of dogs, in Maiakov- God 12, science fiction 32, skii’s ‘Fairy-tale about a de- and education in the 1920s serter’ 36, in Khlebnikov’s 72-73, 310, history of 103, ‘The Night before the Sovi- medical science in the 19th c. ets’ 59, in Blok’s ‘The and Lombroso 125, natural in Twelve’ 76, in Pilnyak’s ‘A Buffon 132, mathematical Dog’s Life’ 135, 136, in 137, social 202, future sci- Tsvetaeva’s A Living Word ence 202, arcane 276, pseudo About A Living Man 118, 310, and reanimation in Bul- 142, in A Dog’s Destiny 137- gakov 348-351, of taxidermy 145, in Zamiatin’s ‘The Land 358, and totalitarianism 369, Surveyor’ 150, 181, 182, cosmic science of Vernadsky 184; the French revolution 38 371, omnipotence in Tsiol- kovsky 383, cognitive 389 saint, dog-headed St Christopher science fiction, and horror films 11, 12, St Seraphim of Sa- 32, in Pelevin 359, in Alesh- rovsk as dog killer in Za- kovsky 374, dystopian in miatin 181, 182, St John the Strugatsky, Tolstaya and So- Grateful in Dostoevsky 200, rokin 385-389 201; St Tamara in Shala- sculpture, and dogs 26, to Mumu mov’s ‘Bitch Tamara’ 204, 161, 162, 169, Gerasim in St Francis of Assisi and ‘Mumu’ 166, reanimated in Tiul’kin’s film Not about Kulik’s acts 355, memorial Dogs 379, animal saints 402 monuments 355, 356-358, satire, and parallels with dog’s ancient 368 life of ethnic Other in the sexuality, and animal body 9, Soviet Union in Metter 99, 53, 64, 74, intersections with with closet homosexual and 26, anxiety around 65, and ethnic Other in Gogol 125, dog’s physiology 70, chil- dog’s life as satire on the dren’s 79, 82, 83, 89, female post-Soviet life in Kulik 146, and dog in ‘Kashtanka’ 97, in 1920’s in Remizov’s vol- 99, in Russian folk beliefs ume 328-329, political, ex- 365, Freud’s views in ‘Ar- plicit in ‘Heart of a Dog’ 340 chaic features’ 106, 107, in science, and cosmic dog sacri- Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Mad- fice 1, Pavlov’s dog and sac- man’ 121-122, in Turgenev’s rifice for science 356, parody ‘Sobaka’ 156, in Slav belief on in Kulik 2, magic and sci- systems 157-159, in Dosto-

Index 431

evsky’s Notes from the Taoism, in ‘Chang’s Dreams’ House of the Dead 196, in 303-304 Dovlatov’s The Zone 245, taxidermy, dog Zapiataika 18, and ‘pornographic imagina- dog Sultan 228, dog Ingus tion’ in ‘White Dog’ 316, 276, dog Strelka 357, in rela- Maiakovskii as ‘shchen’ 331, tion to Kulik’s acts 358, de- and body politics of Fedorov construction of 389 and Rozanov 347-348, in taxonomy, gender stereotypes Rozanov 348-351, 368, 381; 188, racial 223, scientific in transgressive and parodic in Chekhov 238 Kulik’s acts 364, 375, in traditional culture, 283, dogs as Shneemann’s Infinity Kisses unclean animals 113, 154, 364 174, 226, 295, in Dal’ 141, sheep, language of in ‘Gambri- interchangeability with ani- nus’ 173, ‘black sheep’ in mals 295, 335, dogs as out- White Bim, clone Dolly 376, siders 2, 381, correlation clone Missy in Haverty’s between dogs and humans in One Day as a Tiger 376 Uspensky 12,15, in Smirnov space exploration and experi- 13 mental dogs 17, Laika 357- urban, and dog keeping 5, in The 358, Kapustin Yar and Brothers Karamazov 90, in Baikanur Cosmodromes 380, ‘Come here, Mukhtar!’ 225, in Fedorov’s cosmism 327, in White Bim 291, landscape Chernushka and Zvezdochka and memorial monuments to 362 dogs 356, versus rural in the sparrow, victim of children’s Village Prose 302 cruelty in The Brothers Karamazov 91-92, in Che- Utopia, Utopian dreams and khov’s ideas on training in animal representation 19, and nature 104, as victims of Arcadian 26, in futurism 33, hunger in the 1920s 139 religious and scientific in Fe- speciesism 151 dorov 72, in Khlebnikov 74, swans, white, symbolism in the 76-77, 308 Village Prose writing of Bo- ris Vasil’ev 302, in folk vampire, Professor Preobrazhen- symbolism in Khlebnikov skii in ‘Heart of a Dog’ 342 302 vegetarianism, in Bakhtin 191, in Tolstoy 24, 50, and hunt 291

432 Political Animals

Village Prose writing and Rus- zoo in Hoeg’s The Woman and sian nature 282-283, 303-304 the Ape 376 vivisection 21, antivivisection- zoopsychology in Durov xv, ism in Britain 356 384, 385, zoopsychologist Abalkin in Beetle in the Ant- werewolf, conflation with dogs hill 386 in Slavic folklore 59, in ‘The zoo-sadism, in The Brothers Vseslav Epos’ and Khlebni- Karamazov and ‘Kashtanka’ kov 69, myth in European 80, 100, in Pilnyak’s ‘A folklore 325, in Maiakov- Dog’s Life’ 135 skii’s ‘How I became a dog’ 330, in Sologub’s ‘White Dog’ 311, 313 wolves, conflated with dogs 59, in Peculiarities of the Na- tional Hunt 306, in ‘Hol- stomer’ 206, 207, as victims of Soviet environmental policy 295

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