Chagin, a miracle of memory – Newspaper Kommersant No. 202 (7403) of 10/31/2022

Yevgeny Vodolazkin, author of The Laurus, The Aviator, and Justification of the Island, wrote a novel about the archivist Isidor Chagin. If the hero of the “Aviator” has lost his memory, then Chagin is deprived of the opportunity to forget. Is it possible for a person who remembers everything that really happened to fantasize, whether Chekhov’s melancholy is combined with Gogol’s laughter through tears and where Leta and Evnoya fall, learned from Vodolazkin’s new book Mikhail Prokov.

Evgeny Vodolazkin’s novel begins with the funeral of the protagonist. “… They said goodbye to Chagin in the cemetery ritual hall. Concrete, fungus-infested walls, cracked floor tiles. The cold voice of a funeral worker, a pale, tired woman with a handkerchief in her fist. She stuttered as she read the obituary. She glanced at her paper, then at Isidore and said, not very confidently, that the hands of the deceased smelled of salted sea ropes. Many smiled, because there were no ropes in Isidore’s life. He, generally speaking, seemed like a walking paper clip.

The ropes turn out to be a mistake – a paragraph from someone else’s obituary crept into the text of the farewell speech. In the Chagin obituary, it should have been “the dust of centuries.” There should be no denials about the walking paper clip – this is how the young employees of the archive in which the deceased worked perceived Chagin. One of them, Pavel Meshchersky, becomes the narrator of the first part of the novel and one of its main characters.

“For many years, Chagin appeared at the service at the same time and, as it seemed to me, in the same form. One must think that Chagin changed clothes, but each change repeated the previous one … Once I (a boy, impudent) told Isidore that he needed a black umbrella to complete the image, and he silently nodded. I thought that he was offended, but a few days later Chagin came with just such an umbrella – and did not part with it anymore.

Through the eyes of Pavel, we see Chekhov’s Belikov, but to an outside observer, the protagonist seems more likely to be Akaky Akakievich: the same mockery of young colleagues, the same meekness, the same diligence. But if Bashmachkin appears to the modern reader as something like a high-end copier, then Chagin is a gadget of a newer generation: an improved continuous archiver.

Yes, Vodolazkin knowingly sends his hero to the archive, like strives for like. Chagin is endowed with a phenomenal property – a memory that stores everything in general: any text for which there was time (half a minute is enough) to carefully look at, any series of numbers, any event. The nature of Chagin memory is such that memorization occurs automatically, regardless of the emotions that its owner experiences. In general, this suits him quite well – but some events in life cause him such emotions from which he would like to be freed. Together with the memory of the events that gave rise to them.

What events turned out to be filled with the life of Isidor Chagin? He did not spend all of it in the archive. The novel consists of four parts – “Chagin’s Diary”, “Operation Big Ben”, “Unforgettable” and “Summer and Evnoy”. They represent four periods in the life of the hero, his four incarnations; if desired, they could be called “Adept”, “Agent”, “Actor”, “Archivist”. The first and last tell a tragic story of love, betrayal, loss and new finding. The second and third are strikingly different from them not only in plot, but also in genre: one is like a spy series, the other is like a Latin American melodrama. The hero, seen through the eyes of four different people (the fourth part is epistolary, the narration is again led by Pavel and his beloved girl Nika), again and again confirms his belonging to the human type beloved by Vodolazkin, remaining from youth to old age quiet, gentle and eccentric. But the circumstances in which they manifest these qualities are very, very different.

During the period of apprenticeship, Chagin, yearning for the upcoming separation from Leningrad, agrees to cooperate with the “security service of the city library” and, introduced into the Schliemann circle (which is far from studying the biography of Heinrich Schliemann), informs the authorities about everything that happens at its meetings. Because of what he loses his beloved woman and the will to live. While serving in intelligence, he tries to steal the Codex Sinaiticus sold there by the Bolsheviks from the British Museum. During the period of acting, he demonstrates the wonders of mnemonics and, at the same time, with the help of the few friends he had at that time, tries to forget what happened in the first part (one should not forget about the attempted theft of the manuscript – and it’s quite pious, and, as it turns out in the third part , there is nothing to forget – the whole plot of “Operation ”Big Ben”” is the fruit of a sick fantasy of a former employee of that same library security). Here, too, there is a love drama, but against the background of that one, Schlimann’s, it looks more like an anecdote. And, finally, in the archive and after it – retired far from St. Petersburg – he partly finds what he is looking for.

Thus, the significant events of Chagin’s life are concentrated at the beginning and end of the book. Everything in between is either fiction based on them, or working with an archive: placement, extraction, reformatting, attempts to delete. “Isidore learned to comprehend everything that he remembered. And with what is meaningful, you can say goodbye – so, apparently, considered the memory. She gave away such things easily, leaving herself only a conclusion, a general idea. Chagin acquired the ability to forget, and this became more and more obvious. I don’t know what was the reason for this – is it our game, is it natural age-related phenomena – only he began to forget unexpectedly a lot. In the history of Chagin as a medical phenomenon, the climax is the end of the third part – the poorest in events. In the history of Chagin as a person who loves, betrays and is betrayed, this is the middle of the fourth.

However, this second and seemingly main climax is prevented from being considered such in the full sense by the fact that the development of the action does not lead to it in any way. We can only guess what Chagin experienced after the arrest of the leader of the circle and the collapse of his personal life – Isidor himself never becomes a narrator, and the narrator of the second part is unreliable, mentally ill and unable to delve into the experiences of his ward. And Chagin’s emotions during and after the sudden and decisive end of his acting career, we see only a dotted line and from the side. This creates a strange effect: the basis of the novel is a person’s attempts to get away from the dictates of his own biography, to win the right to oblivion and, as a result, to fiction (in his declining years, Chagin wrote the poem “Odyssey”, where he recounts the events of his life in hexameter, interspersing truth with fiction – and without mentioning betrayal). But at the same time, this biography itself is laid out in fits and starts, in short, optional stitches, as if it were embroidered not on novel fabric, but on the web of social networks.

The enthusiasm of the Leningrad circles for the dreamer and adventurer Schliemann, which in the case of Chagin turns into imitation, if not rivalry – to push through, dig through the thickness of his unfailing memory, invent, dream, believe in a dream, achieve – helps the hero end his life in peace with himself. But if we still talk about rivalry, then the outcome seems more like a draw: Schliemann lost his beloved, but, believing in the Iliad, he found Troy. Chagin believed in himself, returned his beloved and wrote the Odyssey – but where is his Troy? Is it not in the failed abduction of the Codex Sinaiticus? Or is it that from under the multi-ton load of his phenomenal memory, he was still able to extract himself?

The answer can be found in the title of the fourth part. If Leta, which flowed in the ancient Greek underworld, destroyed the memory of committed sins, then Evnoia resurrected memories of good deeds. A person who has been making his way to Leta all his life has very little time left on his way to the second river. But Chagin managed.

Evgeny Vodolazkin. Chagin. M.: Edited by Elena Shubina, 2022