But what of the Roman Mob? They follow Fortune, as always, and hate whoever she Condemns. If Nortia, as the Etruscans called her, had favoured Etruscan Sejanus; if the old Emperor had been surreptitiously Smothered; that same crowd in a moment would have hailed Their new Augustus. They shed their sense of responsibility Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, Bread and circuses. Juvenal, The Satires, Satire X, The Emptiness Of Power
In Russia “circuses hold to the high standards of what, in this country, deserves to be called an art form.” When I think of circuses the famous Russian writer and dissident Andrei Sinyavsky comes to mind. Under the pen name Abram Tertz he wrote five short stories (Fantastic Stories ) of which my favorite is At The Circus. I have quoted extensively from the story and added a few comments. Quotes are in italics.
The music crashed out again. A dazzling light flashed on and two acrobats, sisters who were as strong as bears, performed an act called “the acrobatic dance.” They rode on each other in a standing position and upside down, driving their red heels into each other’s brawny shoulders, and executed exotic sequences of every possible kind with arms as thick as legs and legs as thick as torsos. Their bodies, prodigiously splayed, were steaming.
Then a whole family of jugglers, consisting of a man and wife with four children, leaped into the ring. They did uncanny gyrations in the air, while Dad, who was the chief juggler and had trained them, squinted his eyes at the bridge of his nose and stuck in his mouth a stick with a nickel-plated disk, placing on it a bottle labeled “Zhigulyovskoye Beer,” and on the bottle a glass, and on top of that—first an umbrella, then a dish, and finally two decanters containing real water on top of the dish. For what must have been more than half a minute he held all this in his teeth and didn’t spill anything.
But all were outshone by a performer called the Manipulator, a sort of genteel little intellectual of foreign appearance. He had jet-black hair with a part as smooth as if he’d had the bare patch cut out by an electric razor run along a ruler. Below it he had a mustache and the complete outfit—a natty little tie, patent-leather shoes.
He went up with an innocent air to a lady and extracted a live white mouse from her hat; then a second, a third, and so on, until there were nine of them. The lady looked as if she was about to faint. “Oh dear,” she said, “I can’t stand any more of it,” and asked for water to calm her nerves.
He then ran up to her escort on the right side and seized him carefully by the nose, with two fingers, like a barber. With his unoccupied left hand he took a wineglass out of his pocket and held it up to the light so that everyone could see that it was really empty. Then, with an abrupt move, he pinched the man’s nose, and out poured a fizzy, golden soft drink into the wineglass. without spilling a drop, he offered it politely to the lady, who drank it with pleasure and said, “Merci,” while everyone around laughed and clapped their hands in delight.
As soon as the audience was silent the Manipulator turned to the ring and in a rude voice asked the man from whom he had just drawn the soft drink, “Tell me quickly, my man, what’s the time by your watch?”
The man put a hand to his vest, but there was nothing there, and the Manipulator, tensing himself slightly, spat out his gold watch into the ring. Then he returned the other people’s things in the same way—one got back a wallet, another a cigarette case, and a third some unconsidered trifle like a penknife or a comb—all the things he’d managed to extract during his performance. He even pinched an old man’s bank book and an article for private feminine use out of a secret pocket and he returned everything to its destination amid general applause, so great an artist was he!
At the Circus is the story of Konstantin Petrovich, an electrician fed up with his own lack of skill and with everything–having to climb up and down walls for days on end like a lunatic and unscrew blown fuses with no other pleasures in life except movies and girls. Konstantin imagines himself a magician like the Manipulator in the circus. As he walks out of the circus he encounters a hell of a fellow in a fur-lined coat who is in a heated conversation with someone–it wasn’t clear who. The man’s eyes were blue with green flecks, were focused on something distant and he paid not the slightest attention to Konstantin.
What seems like a magical trick ensues almost as if Konstantin is unaware of what is happening. The story briefly switches to the first person.
The fur coat flung its fluffy interior even wider apart, while the broad-chested, double-breasted jacket opened up by itself, and all this occurred like magic, without human intervention … I catch my breath and my pulse moves into my fingers. They tick in time with the encircled heart which beats in the other man’s breast–near the inner pocket, and it jumps out neatly onto my palm without suspecting the switch or having an inkling of my exciting, otherworldly presence. And now with a single sweep of the hand I perform a miracle–a fat wad of money flies through the air like a bird and settles under my shirt … You’ll think that I’m some writer, performer, or sports celebrity. But all I am is a conjurer-manipulator. Let’s get acquainted. Greetings!
This theft changes Konstantin’s life. He becomes a regular at the Kiev Restaurant where brilliantined waiters rush from the inner depths, exclaiming in staccato voices like gunshots, “Coming, coming, coming, sir!”
When the full picture of the half-tipsy restaurant suddenly revealed itself distinctly to Konstantin Petrovich’s gaze, he felt in the depths of his soul (somewhere in the core of the spine) a sweet, piercing quiver that set his hair in motion. As if he was walking along a wire a hundred feet high, and, though the walls were tottering and threatening to collapse, he walked on with a light, measured, elastic stride, perfectly evenly, in a straight line. The audience was watching intently, holding its breath and placing its hope in you as in God: “Konstantin, don’t betray us! Konstantin Petrovich, don’t let us down! Show them what’s what!”
And you must, absolutely must put something on for them–some kind of salto mortale or other stupendous trick …
At the Kiev Restaurant Konstantin makes friends with a certain sad man (Solomon Moiseyevich), elderly and modestly dressed, who, incidentally, was Jewish, though an alcoholic, and maintained on his emaciated chest a decorous dark blue bow tie as a sign that he had received a higher education.
Konstantin and Solomon discuss human nature, Russia, the Russian spirit, God, the soul and so on. Konstantin cries about his sorrows and failures. Solomon listens then says “Don’t carry on like that, Konstantin. Let’s have a drink instead. And let’s move on quickly to less gloomy topics.”
Solomon kept repeating delightedly that the church originated in the circus, and that nothing was more important to the Russian people than tricks and miracles.
The two end up in a bath house where Konstantin frolics with a girl called Tamara. They meet up with Konstantin’s friend Lyoshka who’d been disabled in the war and whose favorite phrase is “A sapper makes only one mistake.”
Lyoshka convinces Konstantin to join in a robbery of an apartment thought to be vacant. Unfortunately there is an occupant who turns out to be the Manipulator from the circus. Konstantin panics and shoots the Manipulator by accident. This leads to a trial, conviction and sentence of twenty years.
One fine morning Konstantin was walking unhurriedly to work in a column of people who, like himself, had been roughly used by fate. Konstantin mesmerized by the beauty of the scene in the forest around him, attempts to escape.
Suddenly against the background of this peaceful landscape a disturbance occurred. An old jailer threw down his half-soaked cigarette and emitted a terrified howl. “Stop! Stop or I fire!”
But Konstantin was already hurtling over hillocks and humps, pushing off from the soft earth with his sinewy legs. The wind played serenely about his animated face. Far away could be seen the mauve forest–eternal refuge of legendary highwaymen.
Konstantin beheld an expanse suffused with electric light and miles of wire extended beneath the vault of a worldwide circus. And the farther he flew away from the initial point of his escape, the more joyous and alarmed did his spirits become. He was gripped by a feeling akin to inspiration, which made every vein leap and cavort, and, in its cavorting, await the outflow of that extraneous and magnanimous supernatural power that hurls one into the air in a mighty leap, the highest and easiest in your lightweight life.
Ever nearer and nearer … Now it would hurl him up … now he would show them …
Konstantin leaped, turned over, and, performing the long-awaited somersault, fell, shot through the head, face downward on the ground.
What is it about this story from seventy years ago (1955) that draws me in with such fervor today? Fiction, good fiction, is the same objective reality as reality is. There can be as many meanings as there are readers sometimes emphasizing one thing, sometimes exaggerating another, sometimes turning meaning upside down.
When writers are tried and imprisoned in the Soviet Union for their books, and Western writers come to their defense and ask the powers that be in the Soviet Union how they can put writers on trial, the authorities have only one excuse to offer: “What kind of writers are they! They aren’t writers, they’re criminals!” When I heard this for the first time, I must confess that I experienced not humiliation, but a feeling of profound inner satisfaction. I should think so! Art is equated with crime. And not even with political crime, but rather with common crime. Art is equated with theft and murder. That means it’s worth something! It’s reality! And perhaps in fact—art, all art is crime? A crime against society. Against life itself…. So what is it—art? And what is the good and evil in it? (Abram Tertz, Art and Reality}
Today all around us we are experiencing a distorted revival of the Russian Revolution that ended the tsardom and elevated communism to the world stage. As in a mad dream we are surrounded by “phantasmagorical art … an art in which the grotesque will replace descriptions of ordinary life” and our vision is clouded. We have shed our sense of responsibility as so aptly stated by Juvenal “for two things only: bread and circuses.” In the current iteration Stalin came first (the cult leader). Then he brought on his Lenin (the intellectual, the engineer) but the results will fail as they did before because:
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” (Lord Acton)
NOTES:
In his first work, On Socialist Realism, Abram Tertz wrote: “Right now I put my hope in a phantasmagorical art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, an art in which the grotesque will replace realistic descriptions of ordinary life. Such an art would best correspond to the spirit of our time.”
Who and what was Abram Tertz, Sinyavsky’s pen name? “I can see him as if it were just yesterday,” Sinyavsky writes with pride, “a crook, a cardshark, a real son of a bitch, his hands in his pants pockets, his mustache stringy, his cap snapped down over his eyes, walking with a light step…. He’ll steal, but he’ll croak before he’ll squeal.”