Listening to smart conversations is a pleasure. Journalist Maria Slonim asks writer Alexander Ilichevsky what it’s like to be an analyst in literature, why the element of language exists beyond borders, and what we learn about ourselves as we move through space.
Maria Slonim: When I started reading you, I was struck by the huge palette of colors that you generously throw away. You have everything about what life tastes like, smells like color and smells. The first thing that hooked me was familiar landscapes — Tarusa, Aleksin. You not only describe, but also try to realize?
Alexander Ilichevsky: It’s not just about curiosity, it’s about the questions that arise when you look at the landscape. The pleasure that the landscape gives you, you are trying to somehow decipher. When you look at a work of art, a work of life, a human body, the pleasure of contemplation is rationalized. The pleasure of contemplating the female body can, for example, be explained by an instinct awakening in you. And when you look at a landscape, it is completely incomprehensible where the atavistic desire to know this landscape comes from, to move into it, to understand how this landscape subjugates you.
M.S.: That is, you are trying to be reflected in the landscape. You write that «it’s all about the ability of the landscape to reflect the face, the soul, some human substance», that the secret lies in the ability to look into yourself through the landscape1.
A.I .: Alexey Parshchikov, my favorite poet and teacher, said that the eye is a part of the brain that is taken out into the open air. By itself, the processing power of the optic nerve (and its neural network occupies almost a fifth of the brain) obliges our consciousness to do a lot. What the retina captures, more than anything else, shapes our personality.
Alexey Parshchikov said that the eye is a part of the brain taken out into the open air
For art, the procedure of perceptual analysis is a common thing: when you try to figure out what gives you pleasure, this analysis can enhance aesthetic pleasure. All philology springs from this moment of heightened enjoyment. Literature wonderfully provides all sorts of ways to demonstrate that a person is at least half a landscape.
M.S.: Yes, you have everything about a person against the backdrop of a landscape, inside him.
A.I .: Once such a wild thought arose that our pleasure in the landscape is part of the pleasure of the Creator, which he received when looking at his creation. But a person created “in the image and likeness” in principle tends to review and enjoy what he has done.
M.S.: Your scientific background and throw into literature. You not only write intuitively, but also try to apply the approach of a scientist.
A.I .: Scientific education is a serious help in broadening one’s horizons; and when the outlook is wide enough, then many interesting things can be discovered, if only out of curiosity. But literature is more than that. For me, this is not quite a catchy moment. I distinctly remember the first time I read Brodsky. It was on the balcony of our five-story Khrushchev in the Moscow region, my father returned from work, brought the number of «Spark»: «Look, here our guy was given the Nobel Prize.»
At that time I was sitting and reading Field Theory, the second volume of Landau and Livshitz. I remember how reluctantly I reacted to the words of my father, but I took the magazine to inquire about what these humanitarians came up with. I studied at the Kolmogorov boarding school at Moscow State University. And there we developed a persistent disregard for the humanities, including chemistry for some reason. In general, I looked at Brodsky with displeasure, but stumbled upon the line: “… A hawk overhead, like a square root from a bottomless, as before prayer, sky …”
I thought: if the poet knows something about square roots, then it would be worth taking a closer look at him. Something about the Roman Elegies hooked me, I started reading and found that the semantic space that I had when reading Field Theory was in some strange way of the same nature as reading poetry. There is a term in mathematics that is suitable for describing such a correspondence of the different nature of spaces: isomorphism. And this case stuck in my memory, that’s why I forced myself to pay attention to Brodsky.
Student groups gathered and discussed Brodsky’s poems. I went there and was silent, because everything I heard there, I really didn’t like it.
Further options for pampering have already begun. Student groups gathered and discussed Brodsky’s poems. I went there and was silent, because everything I heard there, I did not like it terribly. And then I decided to play a trick on these «philologists». I wrote a poem, imitating Brodsky, and slipped it to them for discussion. And they seriously began to think about this nonsense and argue about it. I listened to them for about ten minutes and said that this was all bullshit and was written on the knee a couple of hours ago. That’s where it all started with this silliness.
M.S.: Travel plays a huge role in your life and books. You have a hero — a traveler, a wanderer, always looking. As are you. What are you looking for? Or are you running away?
A.I .: All my movements were quite intuitive. When I first went abroad, it was not even a decision, but a forced movement. Academician Lev Gorkov, head of our group at the L. D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka, once gathered us and said: “If you want to do science, then you should try to go to a postgraduate course abroad.” So I didn’t have many options.
M.S.: What year is this?
A.I .: 91st. While I was in graduate school in Israel, my parents left for America. I needed to reunite with them. And then I also had no choice. And on my own, I made the decision to move twice — in 1999, when I decided to return to Russia (it seemed to me that now is the time to build a new society), and in 2013, when I decided to leave for Israel. What am I looking for?
Man is, after all, a social being. Whatever an introvert he may be, he is still a product of language, and language is a product of society
I am looking for some kind of natural existence, I am trying to correlate my idea of the future with the future that the community of people I have chosen for neighborhood and cooperation has (or does not have). After all, man is, after all, a social being. Whatever an introvert he may be, he is still a product of language, and language is a product of society. And here without options: the value of a person is the value of a language.
M.S.: All these trips, moving, multilingualism… Previously, this was considered emigration. Now it is no longer possible to say that you are an emigre writer. What were Nabokov, Konrad …
A.I .: In no case. Now the situation is completely different. Brodsky was absolutely right: a person should live where he sees daily signs written in the language in which he himself writes. All other existence is unnatural. But in 1972 there was no internet. Now signs have become different: everything you need for life is now posted on the Web — on blogs, on news sites.
Borders have been erased, cultural borders have certainly ceased to coincide with geographical ones. In general, this is why I do not have an urgent need to learn how to write in Hebrew. When I arrived in California in 1992, I tried to write in English a year later. Of course, I would be pleased if I was translated into Hebrew, but the Israelis are not interested in what is written in Russian, and this is largely the correct attitude.
M.S.: Speaking of the internet and social media. Your book «Right to Left»: I read excerpts from it on FB, and it’s amazing, because at first there were posts, but it turned out to be a book.
A.I .: There are books that cause fierce delight; this has always been for me «The Roadside Dog» by Czesław Miłosz. He has small texts, each one per page. And I thought that it would be nice to do something in this direction, especially now short texts have become a natural genre. I partially wrote this book on my blog, «run in» it. But, of course, there was still compositional work, and it was serious. A blog as a writing tool is effective, but that’s only half the battle.
M.S.: I absolutely love this book. It consists of stories, thoughts, notes, but merges into, as you said, a symphony …
A.I .: Yes, the experiment was unexpected for me. Literature, in general, is a kind of ship in the middle of the element — language. And this ship sails best with the bowsprit perpendicular to the wave front. Consequently, the course depends not only on the navigator, but also on the whim of the elements. Otherwise, it is impossible to make literature become a mold of time: only the element of language is capable of absorbing it, time.
M.S.: My acquaintance with you began with the landscapes that I recognized, and then you showed me Israel … Then I saw how you not only with your eyes, but also with your feet feel the landscape of Israel and its history. Remember when we raced to see the mountains at sunset?
A.I .: In those parts, in Samaria, I was recently shown one amazing mountain. The view from her is such that it hurts her teeth. There are so many different plans for the mountain ranges that when the sun goes down and the light falls at a low angle, you can see how these plans begin to differ in hue. In front of you is a ruddy peach Cezanne, he is falling apart into chunks of shadows, the shadows from the mountains are really rushing through the gorges in the last seconds. From that mountain by a signal fire — to another mountain, and so on to Mesopotamia — information about life in Jerusalem was transmitted to Babylon, where the Jewish exiles languished.
M.S.: We then got back a little late to the sunset.
A.I .: Yes, the most precious seconds, all landscape photographers try to capture this moment. All our travels could be called «hunting for the sunset.» I recalled the story connected with our Symbolists Andrei Bely and Sergei Solovyov, the nephew of the great philosopher, they had the idea to follow the sun as much as they could. There is a road, there is no road, all the time you have to follow the sun.
Once Sergei Solovyov got up from his chair on the dacha veranda — and really went after the sun, he was gone for three days, and Andrei Bely ran through the forests, looking for him
Once Sergei Solovyov got up from his chair on the dacha veranda — and really went after the sun, he was gone for three days, and Andrei Bely ran through the forests, looking for him. I always remember this story when I stand at sunset. There is such a hunting expression — «to stand on the traction» …
M.S.: One of your heroes, a physicist, in my opinion, says in his notes about Armenia: “Maybe he should stay here forever?” You are moving all the time. Can you imagine that you would stay somewhere forever? And he continued to write.
A.I .: I just recently had this idea. I often go hiking in Israel and one day I found a place that just feels really good for me. I come there and understand that this is home. But you can’t build houses there. You can only put up a tent there, since this is a nature reserve, so the dream of a house still remains unrealizable. It reminds me of a story about how, in Tarusa, on the banks of the Oka, a stone appeared on which was carved: “Marina Tsvetaeva would like to lie here.”
1 The story «Bonfire» in the collection of A. Ilichevsky «Swimmer» (AST, Astrel, Edited by Elena Shubina, 2010).