Dmitry Bavilsky. Ullo, miracle of memory

Ullo, miracle of memory
Jaan Cross. Flight on the spot: Roman / Transl. with est. Elvira Mikhailova. "Friendship of Peoples", 2001, ## 1, 2

Dmitry Bavilsky

Publication date: March 12, 2001

But Cross doesn’t even hide the fact that he’s writing memoirs. In fact. “Flight” is based on transcripts of conversations with a friend who died many years ago, a certain real-life Ullo Paerande. Cross met him in high school, then met him from time to time in different life situations, had conversations that he recorded in a notebook. And now that his friend has died, Cross resurrects him in the novel.

Ullo is an ordinary person who, by the will of fate, had to come into contact with the key moments of Estonian history of the twentieth century. Under some successive prime minister, he served as something like a messenger or secretary, then he went underground, sat for a while and was oppressed by the fascists. But he spent most of his life in a suitcase factory, gluing suitcases. Yeah, you already decided that the theme of Cross’s text is a big story through the eyes of a little man, but, just like me, you were wrong.

This, it seems, is the main advantage of “Flying on the Spot”: it deceives any plot-genre expectations. It begins as a charmingly detailed account of childhood, and then we are drawn into a leisurely description of growing up and manhood. Almost a stylization of an education novel. Then we briefly go over the most important socio-political events of the 30s and 40s, and this also forms a story within a story. A sort of slightly deflated “Red Wheel”. And the ending is a crumpled and colorless story in the spirit of “who are you, old man” from the category of “urban prose”.

Cross avoids not only standard plot devices, but also themes that are natural for texts of this kind. There is no politics here, no curses on the fascist regime or the Bolshevik occupation. The circumstances of Ullo’s personal history are not so important to the author. The vicissitudes of fate of the motherland, sandwiched between equally negative monsters, are also insignificant. The writer does not explore the possibilities of the genre (genres), does not build any special intrigue or chronotope, he simply remembers how it fell on his soul. One bare process: “creak, creak, pen, move the paper...” But it’s still difficult to tear yourself away.

Maybe because the abundance of names and titles with double vowels and consonants looks very esoteric: what do we need Hecuba? A strange, cramped, Kafkaesque clogged little world, any manifestations of which will be a priori alien to our reader. It seems as if everything here in Estonia somehow happens in make-believe. For example, Ullo goes to prison after being denounced by a stamp collector. Well, yes, because of the postage marks. And then, through a happy misunderstanding, it comes out. Fascists, nationalists, Bolsheviks, the Third Opportunity group, a game of independence, a toy radio station, a technician taking baths in the Prime Minister's apartment...

All these events could have happened in reality, or they could have been invented by the author’s sophisticated consciousness. Or they are written out in fantasy on top of existing realities. This is, say, what the novelist Vladimir Sharov does with Russian history. The average reader of "Friendship of Peoples" is unlikely to understand the intricacies of the political structure of Estonia after the First World War or know the classics of local literature - some Alvre Betty or Sang August.

The melancholy, detached manner of narration only contributes to this uncertainty. I remember well a similar effect in Jaan Kross's multi-part novel The Imperial Madman. Only there the events took place in fairly distant times, and the alienation was easily explained by historical perspective. Here the story is about the recent, from the point of view of eternity, past, which is why the density of names and titles includes surnames and toponyms (Tartu, Tammsaare), heard somewhere and once. Or read in the same “Friendship of Peoples”.

So we get something like works of Latin American magical realism - a growing, expanding bush of text, devouring the lives and circumstances of the characters - adjusted for Scandinavian realities, of course. In the Soviet Union, Estonian literature, by the way, was a strange conductor, a chip, a clone of precisely the Latin American folk-fantasy fireworks. Let’s remember the mermaid studies of Enn Vetemaa, or Eme Baekman’s grotesque novel about the institute for the study of free time, or even then the Nobel nominee Jaan Kross, who towered above all of them with his “Michelson’s Immatriculation” and “The Imperial Madman”... We can, of course, talk about traditions Baroque and European satirical literature, about the original mixture of the historical and the fantastic in the culture of the North, but...

Europe is close, and we ourselves seem to be part of Europe. Despite this, Estonians have always seemed something fundamentally different. Foreign. Like Garcia Marquez. Or Fuentes. That some, you know, are strangers, that others... Geography doesn't count. It only reinforces the paradox. So now, when reading “Flying in Place,” you automatically fall into those same feelings of turbulence of 15 years of exposure. And they brightly color the final judgment that arises in my reader’s head.

For in fact, the main theme of Cross's novel is memory. Which is - running, flying, moving in place; a strange substance that makes us us, but at the same time is completely independent and independent of us; slipping through your fingers along with circumstances, drying up along with life. The ordinary-outstanding Ullo had only one special feature - an outstanding memory. Like in Borges's story about the wonderful young man Funes.

But Ullo died. He took with him his phenomenal talent: not so much the ability to remember, but the ability to make friends. Friendship, unlike passion that instantly burns from within, is based on a calm sense of reverse perspective.

The old writer Cross is having a hard time without his old friend Ullo. So he tries to fly in place, resurrecting the departed for a little bit - with a long, long textual effort.

As I write, I remember. I still remember, I hope.

Chelyabinsk