It invariably happened that having leafed blindly through a long novel or a short story (size played no part in it) he would provide the book with his own ending—usually exactly opposite to the author’s intention. In other words, if, say, Gogol had been a contemporary and Linyov were writing about him, Linyov would remain firmly of the innocent conviction that Hlestakov was indeed the inspector-general. But when, as now, he wrote about poetry, he artlessly employed the device of so-called “inter-quotational footbridges.” His discussion of Koncheyev’s book boiled down to his answering for the author a kind of implied album questionnaire (Your favorite flower? Favorite hero? Which virtue do you prize most?): “The poet,” Linyov wrote of Koncheyev, “likes [there followed a string of quotations, forcibly distorted by their combination and the demands of the accusative case]. He dreads [more bleeding stumps of verse]. He finds solace in—[même jeu]; but on the other hand [three-quarters of a line turned by means of quotes into a flat statement]; at times it seems to him that”—and here Linyov inadvertently extricated something more or less whole:
Days of ripening vines! In the avenues, blue-shaded statues.
The fair heavens that lean on the motherland’s shoulders of snow.
—and it was as if the voice of a violin had suddenly drowned the hum of a patriarchal cretin.
On another table, a little farther, Soviet editions were laid out, and one could bend over the morass of Moscow magazines, over a hell of boredom, and even try to make out the agonizing constriction of capitalized abbreviations, carried like doomed cattle all over Russia and horribly recalling the lettering on freight cars (the banging of their buffers, the clanking, the hunchbacked greaser with a lantern, the piercing melancholy of godforsaken stations, the shudder of Russian rails, infinitely long-distance trains). Between The Star and The Red Lamp (trembling in railway smoke) lay an edition of the Soviet chess magazine 8 × 8.
As Fyodor leafed through it, rejoicing over the human language of the problem diagrams, he noticed a small article with the picture of a thin-bearded old man, glowering over his spectacles; the article was headed “Chernyshevski and Chess.” He thought that this might amuse Alexander Yakovlevich and partly for this reason and partly because in general he liked chess problems he took the magazine; the girl, tearing herself away from Kellerman, “couldn’t say” how much it cost, but knowing that Fyodor was anyway in debt to the shop she indifferently let him go. He went away with the pleasant feeling that he would have some fun at home. Being not only an excellent solver of problems but also being gifted to the highest degree with the ability to compose them, he found therein not only a rest from his literary labors but certain mysterious lessons. As a writer he derived something from the very sterility of these exercises.
A chess composer does not necessarily have to play well. Fyodor was a very indifferent player and played unwillingly. He was fatigued and infuriated by the disharmony between the lack of stamina of his chess thought in the process of the contest and that exclamation-mark-rating brilliance for which it strove. For him the construction of a problem differed from playing in about the same way as a verified sonnet does from the polemics of publicists. The making of such a problem began far from the board (as the making of verse began far from paper) with the body in a horizontal position on the sofa (i.e., when the body becomes a distant, dark blue line: its own horizon) when suddenly, from an inner impulse which was indistinguishable from poetic inspiration, he envisioned a bizarre method of embodying this or that refined idea for a problem (say, the combination of two themes, the Indian and the Bristol—or something completely new).
For some time he delighted with closed eyes in the abstract purity of a plan realized only in his mind’s eye; then he hastily opened his Morocco board and the box of weighty pieces, set them out roughly, on the run, and it immediately became clear that the idea so purely embodied in his brain would demand, here on the board—in order to free it of its thick, carved shell—inconceivable labors, a maximum of mental strain, endless trials and worries, and most of all—that consistent resourcefulness out of which, in the chess sense, truth is constructed. Pondering the alternatives, thus and thus excluding cumbrous constructions, the blots and blanks of support pawns, struggling with duals, he achieved the utmost accuracy of expression, the utmost economy of harmonious forces.
If he had not been certain (as he also was in the case of literary creation) that the realization of the scheme already existed in some other world, from which he transferred it into this one, then the complex and prolonged work on the board would have been an intolerable burden to the mind, since it would have to concede, together with the possibility of realization, the possibility of its impossibility. Little by little the pieces and squares began to come to life and exchange impressions. The crude might of the queen was transformed into refined power, restrained and directed by a system of sparkling levers; the pawns grew cleverer; the knights stepped forth with a Spanish caracole. Everything had acquired sense and at the same time everything was concealed. Every creator is a plotter; and all the pieces impersonating his ideas on the board were here as conspirators and sorcerers. Only in the final instant was their secret spectacularly exposed.
One or two more refining touches, one more verification—and the problem was ready. The key to it, White’s first move, was masked by its apparent absurdity—but it was precisely by the distance between this and the dazzling denouement that one of the problem’s chief merits was measured; and in the way that one piece, as if greased with oil, went smoothly behind another after slipping across the whole field and creeping up under its arm, constituted an almost physical pleasure, the titillating sensation of an ideal fit. Now on the board there shone, like a constellation, a ravishing work of art, a planetarium of thought. Everything here cheered the chess player’s eye: the wit of the threats and defenses, the grace of their interlocked movement, the purity of the mates (so many bullets for exactly so many hearts); every polished piece seemed to be made especially for its square; but perhaps the most fascinating of all was the fine fabric of deceit, the abundance of insidious tries (the refutation of which had its own accessory beauty), and of false trails carefully prepared for the reader.
The third lesson that Friday was with Vasiliev. The editor of the Berlin émigré daily had established relations with an obscure English periodical and now contributed a weekly article to it on the situation in Soviet Russia. Having a smattering of the language, he wrote his article out in rough, with gaps and Russian phrases interspersed, and demanded from Fyodor a literal translation of the usual phrases found in leaders: you’re only young once, wonders never cease, this is a lion and not a dog (Krïlov), troubles never come singly, Peter’s been paid without robbing Paul, jack of all trades, master of none, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, necessity is the mother of invention, it’s only a lover’s tiff, hark at the pot calling the kettle black, birds of a feather flock together, the poor man always gets the blame, it’s no use crying over spilt milk, we need Reform, not reforms.
And very often there occurred the expression “it produced the impression of an exploding bomb.” Fyodor’s task consisted in dictating from Vasiliev’s rough copy Vasiliev’s article in its corrected form direct into the typewriter—this seemed extraordinarily practical to Vasiliev, but actually the dictation was monstrously dragged out as a result of the agonizing pauses. But oddly enough, the method of using old saws and fables turned out to be a condensed way of conveying something of the “moralités” characteristic of all conscious manifestations of the Soviet authorities: reading through the finished article which had seemed rubbish as he dictated it, Fyodor detected under the clumsy translation and the author’s journalistic effects the movement of a logical and forceful idea, which progressed steadily toward its goal—and calmly produced a mate in the corner.
Accompanying him afterwards to the door, Vasiliev with a sudden fierce knitting of his bristly brows said quickly:
“Well, did you see what they have done to Koncheyev? I can imagine how it affected him, what a blow, what a flop.”
“He couldn’t care less, I know that,” replied Fyodor, and an expression of momentary disappointment appeared on Vasiliev’s face.
“Oh, he’s just putting it on,” he retorted resourcefully, cheering up again. “In reality he’s sure to be stunned.”
“I don’t think so,” said Fyodor.
“In any case I’m sincerely grieved for him,” ended Vasiliev, with the look of one who had no wish at all to part with his grief.
Somewhat weary but glad of the fact that his working day was over, Fyodor Konstantinovich boarded a tram and opened his magazine (again that glimpse of Chernyshevski’s inclined face—all I know about him is that he was “a syringe of sulphuric acid,” as Rozanov, I think, says somewhere, and that he wrote the novel What to Do?, which blends in my mind with another social writer’s Whose Fault?). He became absorbed in an examination of the problems and
