#sergei lebedev

[dk-thrive]

Left alone, I turned into a greedy, indiscriminate seeker of knowledge.

Left alone, I turned into a greedy, indiscriminate seeker of knowledge. My hunger for interests and desires, my search for the heights of impressions, for feeling the meaning of existence spurred by the dreariness of life around me gave my search a savagery. I raced around the apartment, opening adult books at random, marauding through dictionaries, mastering mysterious-sounding terms and concepts, stealing art books, committing paintings to memory—without any idea of subject or meaning, like a nomad filling saddlebags with booty that seems valuable—things that might change him in the future. I was given a very small interval to create myself out of the only materials available to me; if I didn’t manage it then, I never would.

~ Sergei Lebedev, The Year of the Comet. Translated by Antonina Bouis (New Vessel Press. February 14, 2017)

[dk-thrive]

the thick strong sinews were able to stop the blades

Some evenings—because meat patties, kotlety, were always cooked for dinner—Father took out the heavy meat grinder and attached it firmly to the table edge. Mother pushed the meat, thoroughly cleaned, through the neck. But it got stuck anyway, tendons wrapping around the blades, stalling the mechanism. Father took it apart and rinsed it, and then they started again; the ground meat was passed through a second time, and sometimes even a third. There was something unbearably dreary in this struggle with the meat, which seemed to be taking posthumous revenge. Second-grade, and not very fresh, the beef set an example: the thick strong sinews were able to stop the blades—so one must grow sinews instead of muscles. That was more reliable than counting on spirit and heroism. You need the sinewy strength of a dying man, whom torturers will tire of beating, they will scrape their knuckles on him and give up. You have to grow up like that, not so much brave or strong as tough and unsuitable for dividing up, sinewy and cartilaginous so that your meat blocks the knives; so that life struggles with you and finally leaves you alone. ~ Sergei Lebedev, The Year of the Comet. Translated by Antonina Bouis (New Vessel Press. February 14, 2017)

[dk-thrive]

color? form? weight? application?—setting them up in pairs, one balancing the other to achieve a harmonic state known only to him

Father was hypersensitive about order. Every item on his desk at home looked as if it had been placed there by someone obsessed by geometry, a paranoiac of right angles, who could detect even one degree of misalignment. It was the ultimate arrangement, as if each time he left he might not come back and therefore assembled his things so that he might remember them forever. […] As a development of his desire for order, he had an almost painful preference for symmetry. He kept trying to restore a disturbed inner balance, placing spoon and fork equidistant from his plate, setting the toothbrush mugs in the corners of the bathroom shelf, putting books in piles, performing numerous tiny operations with objects according to unknown principles—color? form? weight? application?—setting them up in pairs, one balancing the other to achieve a harmonic state known only to him. He sought stability, steadfastness in daily life, sought it with such force that you guessed an unconscious fear behind it. Born in the war and four years old when it ended with Japan’s capitulation, Father must have developed a fear of history’s catastrophic nature, preferring times with no extreme characteristics, either positive or negative. ~ Sergei Lebedev, The Year of the Comet. Translated by Antonina Bouis (New Vessel Press. February 14, 2017)

[dk-thrive]

I wondered “Who am I? Who am I?”—testing the solidity of the silence

The skill of dealing with time and darkness was given to me by my grandmother Tanya. Setting aside my homework, I sat with her at the kitchen table, picking through buckwheat, rice, and wheat; chaff to the left, grain to the right, separating the clean from the unclean. Sometimes she said, as if to herself, that with every year the grains were getting dirtier, and her fingers flew, accustomed to small work—darning, knitting, copyediting, and setting type. [...] 

Picking through the grains with numbing fingers, pondering the significance of Grandmother’s silence, I would suddenly feel the weakness and baselessness of my own life, as if it were a random oversight of fate, and I wondered “Who am I? Who am I?”—testing the solidity of the silence.

~ Sergei Lebedev, The Year of the Comet. Translated by Antonina Bouis (New Vessel Press. February 14, 2017)

[dk-thrive]

disharmony was closer and more understandable than harmony

My feelings, my ability to feel, were fashioned by that underground blow. I had trouble understanding anything to do with stability, immutability, and firmness, even though I wanted those states I could not achieve; disharmony was closer and more understandable than harmony. When I took walks in the city, I was attracted by old houses, sinking and decrepit. Cracks in walls and windows, cracks on the sidewalk which children sometimes try to avoid, cracks in the marble siding of the metro joined into a complex network for me, as if the entire world was tormented by secret tensions. [...] Objects that had lost their companions—a single mitten, a shoe left alone while the other was being repaired, a domino dropped in the playground—called me to understand how they lived in their insufficiency. [...}

But I was certain: yes, the world was built on discord, yes, my sensations were truthful, in the way that the sensation of the nearness of bad weather, of high pressure, of electrically charged air before a storm was truthful.

~ Sergei Lebedev, “The Year of the Comet” translated by Antonina W. Bouis (New Vessel Press; February 14, 2017)

[dk-thrive]

the apple blossoms smelled of the bonfires, and it seemed that it was the fragrance of the stars, the fragrance of promise

I grew up together with the dacha apple trees and lived half the year by the apple calendar; I remember my childhood when the spring frosts occurred, and bonfires were lit in all the orchards, the light frosty fog mixing with smoke hugging the windless ground, and the trembling, flowing, warmed air enveloped the trees, protecting the buds. On a cold night smells unleash their invisible fans, but on a night like that the apple blossoms smelled of the bonfires, and it seemed that it was the fragrance of the stars, the fragrance of promise.

~ Sergei Lebedev, Oblivion. Translated by Antonina Bouis (New Vessel Press. 2016)

[dk-thrive]

the trees were cut down for the sake of the word

Sergei Lebedev, Oblivion. Translated by Antonina Bouis (New Vessel Press. 2016)

[dk-thrive]

I did not know what to think of life, of nature

I did not know what to think of life, of nature, which creates with equal thoroughness both the tender jay and the predatory pterodactyl.

~ Sergei Lebedev, Oblivion. Translated by Antonina Bouis (New Vessel Press. 2016)