LITMIR.BIZ

      Foreword

      Most poets aren’t talented. Most writers aren’t outstanding. Take me, for example, neither the former nor the latter, and generally neither here nor there. But one day, I read my grandfather’s diary – my father had it – and this diary shook me. My grandfather wrote it in a dugout during the Winter War of 1939—1940. Of course, he wasn’t a grandfather back then, but practically a boy, just twenty-three years of age. His writing was excellent for a kid with four years of education and an accounting class. He certainly wasn’t a writer, and he never thought about it like that; these were merely some notes a military supply manager kept for himself: nature, subordinates, news. Nothing exceptional. But for me, my grandfather’s life immediately became three-dimensional, and I gained a new perspective on him. An actual poet, like the ones in a school textbook, isn’t a living person. But your father, brother, great-grandfather – it’s personal. How did they overcome their fears? What poetry did they write? Bad, obviously, but what was it? About what? About whom?

      And it’s a pity that millions of people throw away their adolescent poetry; deprive their kids and grandchildren of it. The truth is, all early verses are terrible, even Pushkin’s. The first few volumes of Chekhov’s complete works are utter garbage. And if they’d been ashamed of their earlier work like Khlebnikov, who burned most of his creations, maybe they wouldn’t have become what they have become. I decided to use my poems: stupid, clumsy, imperfect, imitative, and funny, and insert them into equally flawed prose. In case some descendant of mine decides to become a genius, writes a poem or a story, and then comes across his great-grandfather’s book and thinks, huh, I’m not that bad compared to my ancestor, not a Pushkin, not a son of a bitch yet, but halfway there! This would please me in Heaven and maybe help my descendant too. So, dear descendant, please don’t mistake this poetry and prose for good poetry and prose, do not try to imitate it, but learn from the classics, which I couldn’t do due to my laziness and lack of talent. But you can! And if you’d rather not, you may amuse yourself with this funny story. After all, not everyone’s ancestors had a stint inside an asylum. But don’t tell just anyone; I doubt that in a hundred years, society will be any more tolerant towards loonies. My younger self is also no role model. If I’d met myself from back then, a neurotic poet, I would hardly have recognized or liked myself. I’m not sure whether I like myself now, either. That’s why it’s easy for me to write about that funny young fellow. But I’m also happy for him; it’s good that he saw neither his stupidity nor the dangers he avoided; it’s great that he wrote bad poetry but did not do bad things, which is far more common. Because who knows, if he hadn’t met a bear tamer, maybe he would have passed his life locked away in a madhouse… Let us be happy for him as we are for a blind man on a highway, or a sleepwalker on the roof, who always safely returns to his bed, never remembering his nighttime adventures.

      My friends, the roundworms

      I still don’t get how after the mental hazard of high school, I immediately wound up in the barracks, virtually jailed, with rules harsher than in some countries’ prisons. At seventeen, how much conviction can a child have? Most have none, even in their 50s. Somehow I managed to escape my grandfather’s insistent desire to enroll me in the Suvorov Military School; I flat-out refused to as much as visit it. School, girls, books, fishing, skiing – take all this and swap for the black uniform of a Suvorov soldier?! Impossible. But with the academy… my will faltered. All my relatives pressured me: from my grandfather, the general, to my aunt and uncle, who were geneticists. Instigated by my grandfather, they deceived me into thinking I could study biology at the Military Medical Academy since it had better funding. To this day, I don’t know how exactly he bribed them, but their deception worked.

      And yes, I began to study at the Department of Biology at once – specifically, researching the cavity fluid of swine roundworms. I even spoke at a student conference once, my hands blue from Coomassie paint – I stained the cavity fluid with it – and even my forehead smeared with blue: the pigment would not come off no matter how much I tried. At the conference, the head of the department acidly asked whether I had offered my scientific work to Soviet pig farms. Girls from medical school also came to that conference; they were smiling. That’s biology for you. Pig worms were as far from my favorite botany as the reality I faced during the novice fighter boot camp immediately after enrolling. Taking exams outside was even fun, especially when the applicants locked the old biology professor Mr. Tumko inside the summer veranda where we had our exams. He stood there for half the night, knocking softly on the door. Knock-knock – «I’m Professor Tumko. I’m here to conduct your biology exam.» – knock-knock – «I’m Professor Tumko. I’m here to conduct your biology exam.» He continued for several hours while we sat in the bushes cracking up until the patrol released him. It was cruel, but youth is always cruel and stupid.

      Then I got accepted, even though the competition was 19 candidates for one student position. But not all 19 had a grandfather general. Many had. There were marshals, KGB officers, and ministers. But those who just wanted to become military doctors were out of luck. I don’t see how you could enter on your own. There were bright guys, much more intelligent than me, but they always had epaulets and cunning intrigues behind them. And then karma came for us in the form of the novice fighter boot camp, the NFB. In the first days, we understood exactly where we ended up: patrol duties, marching, lockdown, shouting sergeants. Some of the newly accepted students immediately packed their belongings and disappeared. I tried to escape, but 13 relatives came and stood with their chests in my way. Who am I to upset so many people who inexplicably dreamt that I would become a military doctor? Not an ordinary doctor, not a botanist, which was my dream, but specifically a military doctor, and they would grieve it for the rest of their lives if I was not to be an army doctor. Their life would become a nightmare. And I wasn’t that cruel, so I stayed.

      But my soul resisted, and I fell ill – I developed a terrible stitch in my right side. I was hospitalized and stayed in a ward with a sergeant from Angola. His service impressed me very much. At least they didn’t shoot at us during the NFB! But the joys of serving in the USSR army did not excite me, despite the persuasion of my curly-haired roommate. My biliary dyskinesia – apparently psychosomatic – was quickly cured, and I had to return to the vale of sorrow and marching in step. I was saying goodbye to my carefree life, walking along the rows of birches, stroking the rough surface of the trees with my palms, looking sadly at the rare bolete: what use are they to me now? I was far from suicidal, but my past – maybe less than cheerful – life disappeared behind the Military Medical Academy summer camp fence. New friends were getting used to each other, new superiors paralyzed the will, and the brain produced amnesia and anesthesia. And just like that, half-asleep, I spent more than two years.

      Late-night conversations in bed with the brains

      It was nippy in our dorm; even a couple of anatomy textbooks froze to the windowsill. But we warmed up with hot stories about our non-existent sexual exploits. We: Dimka, Sergei, Misha, and I – four cadets at the S.M. Kirov Military Medical Academy. Studying after lights out was forbidden, but we had another retake of the brain anatomy exam in the morning. We borrowed a brined brain, brought it to our dorm, and – carefully placing the brain atop a plastic bag as it oozed brine and left yellowish spots on the sheets – opened the anatomical atlas and took terms pointing at the brain and the atlas. The brain was passed around as needed. One of us read while half-hugging the brain to swiftly cover it with a blanket and drop the atlas on the floor in case someone came in, another quietly

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