The Humorless Ladies of Border Control by Franz Nicolay Read Free Book Online

Mandelstam’s exile “a chaotic deposit of poor, small houses, wildly scattered over the ravines and hillsides,” according to the poet Victor Krivulin.
    Mandelstam may have chosen Voronezh as a kind of “macabre pun,” a black joke on his situation: Voron means “raven”—“the vans in which the arrested were transported were called by the people ‘black ravens’ . . . or ‘little ravens’ ( voronki ),” Krivulin explained—and a nosh is a homicidal robber’s knife. Mandelstam ended one of his first poems in exile: “ Voronezh—blazh’, Voronezh—voron, nosh ” (Voronezh—you are a whim, Voronezh—you are a raven and a knife).
    Mandelstam lived in “the sleepy, sleight-tracked town/Half-town, half-mounted-shore” for three years of poverty and isolation with his wife, Nadezhda. (At one point, his translators Richard and Elizabeth McKane relate, he “resorted . . . to reading his latest poems on the telephone to his NKVD . . . surveillance person.”) He was visited by fellow poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote about the encounter in her poem “Voronezh”: “In the room of the exiled poet/Fear and the Muse stand duty in turn.” A collection of poems, The Voronezh Notebooks , was published only decades after Mandelstam’s death, reconstituted by Nadezhda, Akhmatova, and others from poor copies, scraps, and memory.
    He was allowed to return from exile in 1937, only to be rearrested the following year. “Happy poverty. . . . Those winter days [in Voronezh] with all their troubles were the greatest and last happiness to be granted us in life,” Nadezhda remembered in her last known letter to her husband. Mandelstam died in December 1938, on a train bound for a Siberian labor camp.
    We were picked up in Voronezh by a young punk who worked in market research at an orthopedics company. The talk turned immediately to politics: “Anyone who can think hates Putin. He is just like Lukashenko,” the anachronistic Belarusian dictator.
    We were caught in the choking traffic that we would come to find is the hallmark of second-tier Russian cities. “I have old car. 1985 Lada. Don’t be afraid!” He pulled a heart-stopping maneuver and gestured to the car in front of him: “A new Lada!”
    â€œAre the new Ladas better?”
    â€œI think no.” As if on cue, the driver in the new Lada killed his engine in the middle of the street, got out, and opened the hood with a frown.
    Our host and his dozen friends took us past a bronze statue of the “Russian Bob Dylan,” Vladimir Vysotsky 4 4 —shirtless with a vest!—and to dinner in a mall at a cavernous establishment that resembled a Medieval Times, with wood-hewn communal tables and heavy benches. Its incoherent decor included taxidermied bears, a mural of wolves playing cards, servers dressed in medieval bodices and jerkins, Brazilian carnival footage playing on TV screens in every corner, and pizza. It was called something that roughly, and roughly accurately, translated as “Confusion Pub.”
    Vysotsky was probably the best known of the bardy (“bards”), an explosion of singer-songwriters in the 1970s who considered themselves poets and spokesmen for a life of individuality, camaraderie, and authenticity. Their unpolished performances of avtorskaya pesnya (a term musicologist J. Martin Daughtry translates as “author’s songs” or “auteur songs”) were widely bootlegged on homemade LPs scratched into x-ray plates—at the time, the most convenient source of hard plastic. These were colloquially called “rock on bones” ( rok na kostiakh ) or “rock on ribs” ( rok na rebrakh ).
    The show was in a basement indie cinema with theater seating. It was sweaty as a banya and there was no booze for the crowd, so, despite the show being sold out, the mood was subdued. One