Between crying and laughing

Essay on the singing of jackals in the Caucasus Mountains

Traveling around the Caucasus, Russian and Soviet writers often became listeners to the nightly performances of the jackal tribe. Animal voices - most often, but not always! — made a depressing impression on writers. Philologist Sergei Shishkov discusses the reception of canis aureus singing and the metaphorical wealth of characters in the animal kingdom.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Charlotte. These people sing terribly... ugh! Like jackals.
A.P. Chekhov. Cherry Orchard

Konstantin Vaginov, when he was treated in a sanatorium in Abkhazia in 1932, wrote to N.K. Chukovsky: “I lie a lot, go to the neighboring village, drink young wine (very rarely) <...>. Sometimes I'm freezing, sometimes I'm basking in the sun. At night I listen to the singing of jackals, they sing, it seems to me, pleasantly.”

But it seems that Vaginov is the only Russian writer who evaluates the singing of jackals positively. At the same time, this is not to say that he was unmusical - on the contrary, his novels are filled with passages that speak of the high level of the author’s musical culture, take even the casually thrown phrase “Lully was a kitchen boy for the Chevalier de Guise,” which precedes an interesting analysis of the general properties of the music of the French composer Lully, or a fragment about the siren-like sound of the strings of a piano, when the performer plays with one hand on the strings under the soundboard, as on harp. Almost with the same thoroughness with which the music of Lully is analyzed in Bambocada, the music of jackal choirs is also considered there and almost immediately after Lully. Vaginov, being an esthete prone to nuance, specifically emphasizes that complex and rich polyphony is inherent specifically in the jackals of Abkhazia; the same animals in Dagestan and Georgia do not do anything similar, but it is in the Abkhaz outback that you can listen to a real concert: “The old jackals begin their wild melody with a bassy, ​​drawn-out howl; They are echoed by discordant, squeaky young jackals. The character of the music is diversified by the rest of the jackals, who, imitating dogs, support the chorus.” Let us add on our own that sometimes, listening to a frog choir on a nearby pond, you feel almost like you are in a Garnier opera. The toads, excited in the spring, produce quartets that ascend in complexity of harmonies to some of the favorite passages from Don Giovanni.

The singing of jackals becomes the main theme of one of Nikolai Zabolotsky’s poems, written in the 1950s, when the period of persecution and camps ended for him, and he could, like Dante, say “and here we came out to see the stars again,” looking with horror at the circles of the Gulag hell lying behind, in which his friends remained “in wide hats, long jackets, with notebooks of their poems.” At this time, Zabolotsky rested a lot and worked in the south - in Georgia, in the Crimea. This poem belongs to this period of his work, in which, with the usual fear of the late Zabolotsky to seem banal and with rare force, the southern night is recreated. The poem contrasts a bright sanatorium with high columns and the green dots of a jackal's eyes flashing around on the hills. Cowardly and harmless to Soviet citizens vacationing in a sanatorium, jackals howl desperately and selflessly at night, raising their muzzles to the sky:

And now we’re crying and screaming
The heavenly zenith is filled.
Moon with mother-of-pearl disk
He looks fearfully into the thicket.

And he sees: crowding one after another
And raised their faces to the sky,
Jackals sit in a semicircle
Behind the dark leaves of grass.

What are they howling and crying about?
Who are they cursing?
Below them looms by the sea
A dazzling row of columns.

There is a world of golden radiance,
There is life there, incomprehensible to them...
Aren't these bright buildings
Do they curse with their cry?

Reading these lines, for some reason it is impossible to get rid of the feeling that Zabolotsky is hinting at emigrants who, having left their homeland, denigrate the Soviet system in the Western press. Poems written in 1954. The second wave of emigration passed, but the representatives of the first were not that old yet. Did Western radio voices, famous in later years, already exist at that time? Did anyone in the USSR listen to them in 1954, immediately after Stalin's death? It’s difficult to say, but the figurative system of the poem almost forcefully pushes us towards this idea.

In Zabolotsky we find, perhaps, the most detailed and poetic description of jackal singing, a description in which, together with a hostile attitude towards it, merges a hidden question: why does it disturb the soul so much, what does it hide? Why is it given to human hearing?

In the previous literary tradition, the singing of jackals earned the reputation of something nasty, disgusting in sound. Or at least unpleasantly disturbing.

Lermontov’s “Mtsyri” is rather neutral, but later served as a source of literary cliche:

Sometimes there is a jackal in the gorge
Screamed and cried like a child.

The lament from Lermontov reaches Tolstoy, who certainly knows first-hand the singing of jackals: “The soldiers fell silent. You could only hear the wind moving high above the heads of the tops of the trees. Suddenly, because of this incessant quiet rustling, the howling, squealing, crying, and laughter of jackals was heard” (Hadji Murat).

And finally, in Bulgakov’s “Fatal Eggs,” the mouthpiece “laughs and cries like a jackal.”

Pushkin also mentions Caucasian jackals in the first chapter of “Travel to Arzrum”, describing one of the night crossings: “the jackals howled, the animals in that direction were ordinary.” He does not comment on the musical merits of the howl, subsequently noting only that the fleas that lived on the sofa in the room allocated to him for the night were both fiercer and more dangerous than jackals.

In a slightly different aspect, not related to music, the jackal theme appears in “The Queen of Spades”. Mikhail Bezrodny, discussing in his commentary to this work the meaning of Chekalinsky’s surname (the owner of the casino where Hermann gambles), compares it with the Caucasian word for jackal: “chekalka”. And this hidden meaning of the surname, according to the commentator, is further manifested in the comparison of Hermann with a tiger - before his visit to the countess, Hermann “trembled like a tiger, waiting for the appointed time.” The contrast between Hermann the tiger and Chekalinsky the jackal, according to Bezrodny, is not accidental, but is embedded in the work at a symbolic level. And here, as a pretext, perhaps the source of Pushkin’s thought, Bezrodny calls the book of Fr. Iakinfa [N. A. Bichurin] “Description of Zhungaria and Eastern Turkistan”, published in St. Petersburg in 1829. It says about the relationship between tigers and jackals: “in the mountains where jackals are found, tigers also leave from there.”

Father Iakinf (Bichurin) was the head of the Russian mission, forgotten during the Napoleonic wars in China, and the first Russian sinologist. Left without funding, the monks starved, drank, went crazy, sold church property and gave Beijing harlots church items (for example, an orarion, which the girl he gifted used as a belt). Father Iakinthos, although he was not an example of moral fortitude, did not fool around with harlots, but walked around Beijing with a Chinese teacher, pointed his finger at an object, learned its name, and asked to write down the hieroglyph. The fact was that, as Bichurin discovered, the Russian mission not only did not speak Chinese, but also did not have the necessary books. They studied simpler Mongolian and Manchu under the guise of Chinese. Father Iakinthos took up the matter with the zeal of a true pioneering genius. But he also did not forget about morality to the best of his ability: having fallen into the hands of a harlot and apparently used by her as a belt of Venus, he bought the orarion and burned it, not allowing blasphemy. During the thirteen years spent in China, Bichurin successfully studied the language, created a dictionary, translated many Chinese treatises, transported a six-pound library from Beijing on a caravan of camels, and upon returning to St. Petersburg he was exiled to Valaam for life - the church court charged him with greater interest and greater zeal for science than for faith and preaching, as well as some other violations, such as wearing a precious stone from a miter on a Chinese cap and similar pranks. Thanks to the efforts of members of the Rumyantsev circle, who realized the significance of his personality, three years later he was released from exile. Returning to St. Petersburg, Father Iakinf published his works and moved in secular salons, including communicating with Pushkin, giving him his books. “Description of Eastern Turkestan” was published in 1829 and could well have been read by Pushkin. This is a compilation of translations of ancient Chinese land-descriptive treatises with the addition of our own information, written in a delightfully refined and whimsical language, reminiscent of the language of the works of Gan Bao and Pu Song Ling. Thus, despite the surprise of Bezrodny’s assumption at first glance, it cannot be ruled out that the symbolic confrontation between the tiger-Hermann and the jackal-Chekalinsky could have been deliberately introduced by Pushkin, especially since in his commentary Bezrodny, using other examples, quite convincingly shows the high degree of symbolic permeation of Pushkin’s text as a whole. If this is so, then the symbolism of Pushkin’s text here delights with its, frankly, tiger-like grace: Hermann, before going to the gambling house, walks impatiently like a tiger (walking like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour), but on the way to realizing his dream he will meet a jackal - Chekalinsky, who kidnaps his prey at the last moment.

The jackal has indeed earned an unpleasant reputation; it has become a symbol of certain human qualities that are characterized negatively. But nature lovers say that this animal is smart, cunning, and also has “moral” virtues: jackals, they say, form pairs for life, showing one of the examples of monogamy characteristic of animals, and show remarkable intelligence in hunting strategy, etc. Bichurin also writes about a special and successful hunting strategy in the mentioned essay, noting that jackals go in a chain and attack in a group, here “no animal can escape,” hence the remark that even tigers avoid jackals.

In general, it can be noted that perhaps what seems to us morality is nothing more than biological predetermination? Conventionally, there are people who, like jackals or swans, form pairs for life, and there are those who, like bears, are plucked and abandoned - thank you for not eating the bear cubs for lunch. And then there are the wren birds, which live in five families and sing merrily all day long, with their tails in the air. The animal world amazes us not only with its diversity of morals, but also with its ability to reflect the world of human qualities, like a huge mirror. We are all about two arms and two legs, but both physically and intellectually the distances between two individuals of our species are possible no less than between an ant and a lion, a bacterium and an elephant. This paradox has always been a source of inspiration for poets, and the whole venerable genre of fable has worked on it. A venerable genre, the luminaries of which Sumarokov and his student Khvostov were very significant for the poetics of Zabolotsky, who was inspired by the funny naivety and good-natured rudeness of poets half-forgotten in the Silver Age.