tolstaya's "heavenly flame"
and another one for the Lit Seminar:
Tatyana Tolstaya's "Heavenly Flame" is a wonderful blend of poetry, sardonic humor and subtle (and at times not-so-subtle) commentary on society. Her deft prose and keen observations about the paradoxes of human nature give the story a universal resonance. Tolstaya exhibits a strength in characterization on many levels including the ability to both orchestrate the dynamic of a group of characters and to give the reader a deeply internal vision of an individual character - in this case, Korobeinikov, a man who is desperately lonely and eager for approval but loses his single daily hour of solace with friends at a nearby "dacha" when the newly arrived "sculptor" Dmitry Ilych tells the rest of the group a malicious lie about him. There are many aspects one could focus on in discussing Tolstaya's work - her deft use of irony, her brutally clear portraits of human frailty, and her poetic use of symbols, colors, and even place names to show the progression of the story and the transformation or in this case, moral descent of both Olga and the group.
The story starts with a cynical commentary on doctors and soon moves into a pleasant pastoral scene, "It's a nice walk, not hard, a couple of kilometers among hills, through a little birch forest. It's August; the birds aren't singing anymore, but it's pure bliss all the same. The weather's dry, the leaves are turning yellow and dropping off...". The importance of certain words and images introduced in this early passage will become evident later in the story - "the little birch forest," the leaves "turning yellow and dropping off," and the mushroom K. picks on the way to the dacha. It's only a mushroom but, "still a gift. An offering to the house." We're given a positive image of K.'s visit, "Here comes K - he's got a mushroom....everyone feels good, kind of peaceful, like in childhood: the sun shines serenely; the seasons slip by serenely; serenely, with no shouting or panic, autumn draws near. A nice man is coming, carrying a bit of nature. How sweet" [p. 78] We are further told that "they were glad to have him..." [p. 78]. This scene is in stark contrast to that presented on p. 84 "and from the woods comes that vile K., carrying his foul toadstool. Everyone already knows about his treachery, about the mark of Cain on him."
To focus on a single symbol in the story, that of the birch trees, we can see how the choice of a single word changes the resonance, the meaning of each scene showing both Olga's rejection of K. and K.'s loss of his single hour of happiness - the trees are first "a little birch forest" [p.77], "startled, white tree trunks" [p.81], and after Dmitry Ilich's lie, "severe, white tree trunks," an "unsheltering grove. The birch trunks are chilly" [p. 86] and finally, "the hospital-white birch trunks." If we have not already connected the white of the trees with the dreaded white of the sanatorium [p.86], here it is given to us in clear language.
The images of the flame, light and darkness appear throughout the story -
"the pale flame illuminates his yellowish face," "the lights have been turned out" "the black windowpanes" at the sanatorium, the "heavenly flame" on page 84 which is one of K's desperate attempts to entertain his "friends" with a story and because of Dmitry Ilich's lie, Olga thinks, "Your ulcer is a heavenly flame sent down on you as a punishment..." and in the final passage, Olga stands on the porch and watches K. in what we can assume is his final walk from the dacha to the sanatorium "the heavenly flame sweep blindly by, searching out its victim."
There is even the motif of the food - the mushroom which becomes a "foul toadstool," the tea and pound cake which is offered to the guests at the dacha in contrast with K.'s "piece of baked cheese pie, puddle of sour cream," and the "megahertz" which first appears as a lame joke from Olga's husband and is repeated throughout, including a more subtle reference while K. is sitting alone at the sanatorium, "listening closely to the mustard-hot pain somewhere inside him - to the pain that awakens with the darkness and drones, drones like a distant transformer..." [p. 80].
The story of Dolores (kidnapped by little green men) and the jealous husband and his switchblade is used to foreshadow Olga's infidelity - her husband says "just let her try; he'll sharpen his switchblade, too, he won't stand for any of these little men." Then at the bottom of page 80, suddenly we have "Dolores - that is, Olga Mikhailovna" in case we didn't get the parallel.
Olga's ridiculousness is shown in her "plans" for the "little green men," her comments that "it's only natural that people like her; she's considered pretty," her description of why Ilich is "an interesting man" "a sculptor" and his stories (which we're meant to contrast with K.'s stories) which Olga can't manage to iterate beyond a non-story about a headless monument and "well...stuff like that." Immediately, we're shown Dmitry Ilich as a poseur, "No, I'm not Byron, I'm something else," as if a limp, some bad poetry and visiting Greece "for a day and a half on a cruise," equates him with Byron. Olga's description of Dmitry serves both to paint him as ridiculous and shows Olga to be equally worthy of derision. All of this of course, is leading up to Dmitry's lie and betrayal of K. and his subsequent seduction of Olga. We are told that Dmitry "...'went camping' in Siberia for two years, as he puts it, not for any particular reason, naturally--but he doesn't hold a grudge, he believes in destiny and has a sense of humor." We're also told that he is "really a gorgeous man" and the following paragraph argues against this while also showing us Olga's obvious infatuation - "a slightly pockmarked face, yellow hawk eyes, and he wears a smock." He says to Olga, "I must sculpt you." The humor here is obvious.
Dmitry comes to visit (sans mushroom) and they put the kettle on and feed him pound cake. The only gift he brings are his stories and the lie he tells about Korobeinikov. As previously mentioned, as soon as the group has been told the lie, Korobeinikov becomes "vile" and his gift of the mushroom becomes a "foul toadstool." Without any question, the group has accepted Dmitry's story and "Everyone already knows about his (K.'s) treachery, about the mark of Cain on him." He has become a murderer. Olga states that, "She loves truth, what can you do, that's how she is" and yet, once she knows the truth, that her lover has lied out of spite or jealousy or simply mean-spiritedness, still she feels that "it's all over with!" that K. is "soiled" and finally "looks at K. with hatred." (p. 90) She thinks it would be easier if he would simply die, "Honestly, it would be better if he died." Her simple brutality in the story is a brilliant characterization of what is worst in all of us. Despite the humor, the brilliant irony, ultimately, "Heavenly Flame" is a brutal vision of our casual treatment of each other, our easy alliances, and our ultimate weakness and brutality when faced with death and our own mortality.
Additional thoughts on place names in "Heavenly Flame":
With a writer as deft as Tolstaya, each word, each place name brings with it levels of meaning adding to the overall whole. On page 79, K. tells a story about a flying saucer hovering over the city of Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin was born in a small village (Butka) in the Sverdlovsk Oblast. It was over Sverdlovsk that Gary Powers was shot down on May 1, 1960 while on a reconnaissance mission. It was also in this area where the execution of Nicholas II & the Russian Imperial Family took place in July 1918. Perhaps, even more telling, on April 2, 1979, in the city of Sverdlovsk, there was an unusual anthrax outbreak which affected 94 people and killed at least 64 of them. The Soviet government claimed the deaths were caused by intestinal anthrax from tainted meat. However, officials in the Carter administration suspected the outbreak was caused by an accidental release of anthrax spores from a suspected Soviet biological weapons facility located in the city...It wasn't until 13 years later - 1992 - that President Boris Yeltsin admitted, without going into details, that the anthrax outbreak was the result of military activity at the facility...the anthrax airborne leak had been caused by workers at the facility who forgot to replace a filter in an exhaust system. The mistake was realized shortly after, but by then some anthrax spores were released. Alibekov (former 1st deputy chief for Biopreparat - the civilian part of the Soviet biological weapons program) says if the wind had been in the opposite direction that day - toward the city of Sverdlovsk - the death rate could have been in the hundreds of thousands.
Further on in the same scene on page 79, "someone" suggests that little green men would take people from somewhere like "Tyumen or the Matochkin Strait."
Tyumen: 2,144 km east of Moscow. The first Russian town in Siberia, founded in 1586. During WWII, Lenin's body was moved from Moscow to a disguised tomb at the Tyumen Agriculture Institute. Famous people born in Tyumen: Irving Berlin & Rasputin.
Matochkin Strait: covered with ice for most of the year...From 1963 to 1990 about 39 underground nuclear tests took place in a vast array of tunnels and shafts. After 2000, the Russians reactivated the test site by enlarging old tunnels & starting construction work. There are fishing settlements along the strait.
"the skies over Petrozavodsk" [p. 84] the city of Petrozavodsk was founded on 9/11/1703 as an iron foundry for Peter the Great, provided cannons for the Russo-Turkish Wars - in 1773, Catherine the Great named the foundry for Alexander Nevskty (patron saint of the region). In the town are statues of Peter I and Gavrila Derzhavin (Russian poet). There is also a birch copse, where the first church of Petrozavodsk was built in 1703. Nearby is a quarry of red and pink limestone which was used in construction of St. Isaac's Cathedral and Lenin Mausoleum. It is also home to "the oldest spa in Russia founded by Peter I in 1714. the name of the spa is Martsialnye Vody and means 'Waters of Mars'..."
"Berdichev bonesetter" [p.85] Perhaps the most important reference - Berdichev - in the Northern Ukraine, by the end of the 18th C, an important center of Hasidism - in 1861, the 2nd largest Jewish community in the Russian Empire. In early 1919, the Jews of Berdychiv became victims of a pogrom perpetrated by the Ukrainian army. The Soviet authorities closed or destroyed most of the town's synagogues. The Nazi invasion began in 1941, an "extermination" unit was set up in Berdychiv in early July 1941 and a Jewish ghetto was created. It was "liquidated" on October 5, 1941 and all of the inhabitants murdered (est. 38,536 people).
* "The Bones of Berdichev: the life and fate of Vasily Grossman" - prominent Soviet-era writer & journalist. Grossman's descriptions of ethnic cleansing in the Ukraine and Poland, the opening of Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps were some of the first eyewitness accounts - as early as 1943 - of what later became known as the Holocaust. One of his articles was used at the Nuremberg Trials as a document for the prosecution. Grossman, originally an ardent supporter of the 1917 Revolution, became disillusioned with the state, his work was confiscated by the KGB under Krushchev and he was told that his "magnum opus" "Life and Fate" "would not be published for at least 200 years".
Grossman died in 1964 never knowing if his final works, "Life and Fate," and "Forever Flowing" would ever be published.
In one critical reference, it is stated that "Grossman is merciless in describing the dark corners of a human soul." The same, of course, can be said for Tolstaya.
Tatyana Tolstaya's "Heavenly Flame" is a wonderful blend of poetry, sardonic humor and subtle (and at times not-so-subtle) commentary on society. Her deft prose and keen observations about the paradoxes of human nature give the story a universal resonance. Tolstaya exhibits a strength in characterization on many levels including the ability to both orchestrate the dynamic of a group of characters and to give the reader a deeply internal vision of an individual character - in this case, Korobeinikov, a man who is desperately lonely and eager for approval but loses his single daily hour of solace with friends at a nearby "dacha" when the newly arrived "sculptor" Dmitry Ilych tells the rest of the group a malicious lie about him. There are many aspects one could focus on in discussing Tolstaya's work - her deft use of irony, her brutally clear portraits of human frailty, and her poetic use of symbols, colors, and even place names to show the progression of the story and the transformation or in this case, moral descent of both Olga and the group.
The story starts with a cynical commentary on doctors and soon moves into a pleasant pastoral scene, "It's a nice walk, not hard, a couple of kilometers among hills, through a little birch forest. It's August; the birds aren't singing anymore, but it's pure bliss all the same. The weather's dry, the leaves are turning yellow and dropping off...". The importance of certain words and images introduced in this early passage will become evident later in the story - "the little birch forest," the leaves "turning yellow and dropping off," and the mushroom K. picks on the way to the dacha. It's only a mushroom but, "still a gift. An offering to the house." We're given a positive image of K.'s visit, "Here comes K - he's got a mushroom....everyone feels good, kind of peaceful, like in childhood: the sun shines serenely; the seasons slip by serenely; serenely, with no shouting or panic, autumn draws near. A nice man is coming, carrying a bit of nature. How sweet" [p. 78] We are further told that "they were glad to have him..." [p. 78]. This scene is in stark contrast to that presented on p. 84 "and from the woods comes that vile K., carrying his foul toadstool. Everyone already knows about his treachery, about the mark of Cain on him."
To focus on a single symbol in the story, that of the birch trees, we can see how the choice of a single word changes the resonance, the meaning of each scene showing both Olga's rejection of K. and K.'s loss of his single hour of happiness - the trees are first "a little birch forest" [p.77], "startled, white tree trunks" [p.81], and after Dmitry Ilich's lie, "severe, white tree trunks," an "unsheltering grove. The birch trunks are chilly" [p. 86] and finally, "the hospital-white birch trunks." If we have not already connected the white of the trees with the dreaded white of the sanatorium [p.86], here it is given to us in clear language.
The images of the flame, light and darkness appear throughout the story -
"the pale flame illuminates his yellowish face," "the lights have been turned out" "the black windowpanes" at the sanatorium, the "heavenly flame" on page 84 which is one of K's desperate attempts to entertain his "friends" with a story and because of Dmitry Ilich's lie, Olga thinks, "Your ulcer is a heavenly flame sent down on you as a punishment..." and in the final passage, Olga stands on the porch and watches K. in what we can assume is his final walk from the dacha to the sanatorium "the heavenly flame sweep blindly by, searching out its victim."
There is even the motif of the food - the mushroom which becomes a "foul toadstool," the tea and pound cake which is offered to the guests at the dacha in contrast with K.'s "piece of baked cheese pie, puddle of sour cream," and the "megahertz" which first appears as a lame joke from Olga's husband and is repeated throughout, including a more subtle reference while K. is sitting alone at the sanatorium, "listening closely to the mustard-hot pain somewhere inside him - to the pain that awakens with the darkness and drones, drones like a distant transformer..." [p. 80].
The story of Dolores (kidnapped by little green men) and the jealous husband and his switchblade is used to foreshadow Olga's infidelity - her husband says "just let her try; he'll sharpen his switchblade, too, he won't stand for any of these little men." Then at the bottom of page 80, suddenly we have "Dolores - that is, Olga Mikhailovna" in case we didn't get the parallel.
Olga's ridiculousness is shown in her "plans" for the "little green men," her comments that "it's only natural that people like her; she's considered pretty," her description of why Ilich is "an interesting man" "a sculptor" and his stories (which we're meant to contrast with K.'s stories) which Olga can't manage to iterate beyond a non-story about a headless monument and "well...stuff like that." Immediately, we're shown Dmitry Ilich as a poseur, "No, I'm not Byron, I'm something else," as if a limp, some bad poetry and visiting Greece "for a day and a half on a cruise," equates him with Byron. Olga's description of Dmitry serves both to paint him as ridiculous and shows Olga to be equally worthy of derision. All of this of course, is leading up to Dmitry's lie and betrayal of K. and his subsequent seduction of Olga. We are told that Dmitry "...'went camping' in Siberia for two years, as he puts it, not for any particular reason, naturally--but he doesn't hold a grudge, he believes in destiny and has a sense of humor." We're also told that he is "really a gorgeous man" and the following paragraph argues against this while also showing us Olga's obvious infatuation - "a slightly pockmarked face, yellow hawk eyes, and he wears a smock." He says to Olga, "I must sculpt you." The humor here is obvious.
Dmitry comes to visit (sans mushroom) and they put the kettle on and feed him pound cake. The only gift he brings are his stories and the lie he tells about Korobeinikov. As previously mentioned, as soon as the group has been told the lie, Korobeinikov becomes "vile" and his gift of the mushroom becomes a "foul toadstool." Without any question, the group has accepted Dmitry's story and "Everyone already knows about his (K.'s) treachery, about the mark of Cain on him." He has become a murderer. Olga states that, "She loves truth, what can you do, that's how she is" and yet, once she knows the truth, that her lover has lied out of spite or jealousy or simply mean-spiritedness, still she feels that "it's all over with!" that K. is "soiled" and finally "looks at K. with hatred." (p. 90) She thinks it would be easier if he would simply die, "Honestly, it would be better if he died." Her simple brutality in the story is a brilliant characterization of what is worst in all of us. Despite the humor, the brilliant irony, ultimately, "Heavenly Flame" is a brutal vision of our casual treatment of each other, our easy alliances, and our ultimate weakness and brutality when faced with death and our own mortality.
Additional thoughts on place names in "Heavenly Flame":
With a writer as deft as Tolstaya, each word, each place name brings with it levels of meaning adding to the overall whole. On page 79, K. tells a story about a flying saucer hovering over the city of Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin was born in a small village (Butka) in the Sverdlovsk Oblast. It was over Sverdlovsk that Gary Powers was shot down on May 1, 1960 while on a reconnaissance mission. It was also in this area where the execution of Nicholas II & the Russian Imperial Family took place in July 1918. Perhaps, even more telling, on April 2, 1979, in the city of Sverdlovsk, there was an unusual anthrax outbreak which affected 94 people and killed at least 64 of them. The Soviet government claimed the deaths were caused by intestinal anthrax from tainted meat. However, officials in the Carter administration suspected the outbreak was caused by an accidental release of anthrax spores from a suspected Soviet biological weapons facility located in the city...It wasn't until 13 years later - 1992 - that President Boris Yeltsin admitted, without going into details, that the anthrax outbreak was the result of military activity at the facility...the anthrax airborne leak had been caused by workers at the facility who forgot to replace a filter in an exhaust system. The mistake was realized shortly after, but by then some anthrax spores were released. Alibekov (former 1st deputy chief for Biopreparat - the civilian part of the Soviet biological weapons program) says if the wind had been in the opposite direction that day - toward the city of Sverdlovsk - the death rate could have been in the hundreds of thousands.
Further on in the same scene on page 79, "someone" suggests that little green men would take people from somewhere like "Tyumen or the Matochkin Strait."
Tyumen: 2,144 km east of Moscow. The first Russian town in Siberia, founded in 1586. During WWII, Lenin's body was moved from Moscow to a disguised tomb at the Tyumen Agriculture Institute. Famous people born in Tyumen: Irving Berlin & Rasputin.
Matochkin Strait: covered with ice for most of the year...From 1963 to 1990 about 39 underground nuclear tests took place in a vast array of tunnels and shafts. After 2000, the Russians reactivated the test site by enlarging old tunnels & starting construction work. There are fishing settlements along the strait.
"the skies over Petrozavodsk" [p. 84] the city of Petrozavodsk was founded on 9/11/1703 as an iron foundry for Peter the Great, provided cannons for the Russo-Turkish Wars - in 1773, Catherine the Great named the foundry for Alexander Nevskty (patron saint of the region). In the town are statues of Peter I and Gavrila Derzhavin (Russian poet). There is also a birch copse, where the first church of Petrozavodsk was built in 1703. Nearby is a quarry of red and pink limestone which was used in construction of St. Isaac's Cathedral and Lenin Mausoleum. It is also home to "the oldest spa in Russia founded by Peter I in 1714. the name of the spa is Martsialnye Vody and means 'Waters of Mars'..."
"Berdichev bonesetter" [p.85] Perhaps the most important reference - Berdichev - in the Northern Ukraine, by the end of the 18th C, an important center of Hasidism - in 1861, the 2nd largest Jewish community in the Russian Empire. In early 1919, the Jews of Berdychiv became victims of a pogrom perpetrated by the Ukrainian army. The Soviet authorities closed or destroyed most of the town's synagogues. The Nazi invasion began in 1941, an "extermination" unit was set up in Berdychiv in early July 1941 and a Jewish ghetto was created. It was "liquidated" on October 5, 1941 and all of the inhabitants murdered (est. 38,536 people).
* "The Bones of Berdichev: the life and fate of Vasily Grossman" - prominent Soviet-era writer & journalist. Grossman's descriptions of ethnic cleansing in the Ukraine and Poland, the opening of Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps were some of the first eyewitness accounts - as early as 1943 - of what later became known as the Holocaust. One of his articles was used at the Nuremberg Trials as a document for the prosecution. Grossman, originally an ardent supporter of the 1917 Revolution, became disillusioned with the state, his work was confiscated by the KGB under Krushchev and he was told that his "magnum opus" "Life and Fate" "would not be published for at least 200 years".
Grossman died in 1964 never knowing if his final works, "Life and Fate," and "Forever Flowing" would ever be published.
In one critical reference, it is stated that "Grossman is merciless in describing the dark corners of a human soul." The same, of course, can be said for Tolstaya.
posted by hellkittennyc at 9:18 PM
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