Thirteen Coats

By Evgenii Belodubrovskii

Evgenii Belodubrovskii's Thirteen Coats is a recollection and meditation on Leningrad–St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion to the present.
Russia's twentieth century traumas––two world wars and the long civil war that endured from the October Revolution in 1918 until Stalin's death in1953 (we can include the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Terror and Gulag as part of this long civil war).
Numbers empty tragedy of meaning. Stalin noted that one death is a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths is a statistic. If there is a big picture, perhaps it is contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism that enumerates the tens of millions murdered in the name of that twentieth century religion of Communism.
If there is any sense to be made of the madness, it will be in the single individual story. Longevity tables suggest an American will on average live ninety-three years. Self-medicating trauma with alcohol, drugs and tobacco, my Russian male cohort has now been dead ten years, his statistical lifespan fifty-three years. Memorial is a Russian movement to tell the story of Russia's twentieth century tragedy one death and one story at a time. Here, perhaps, there is some hope for Russia's recovery rather than in longing for its 'Black Book' greatness.
I have long studied the country and its culture, though until 1989, I only observed Russia and Russians as if through fogged binoculars. Although my academic background taught me the statistics of mass murder, I now hear the stories.
Evgenii is a friend whose wise counsel about the Russian soul illuminates my stories. However, I would be his friend whether his counsel were wise or not. Here is an anecdote. It is late summer 2010. He, his wife and two daughters are visiting the third daughter, a graduate student at the UW Madison. We meet for ice cream at a custard stand. His wife and daughters listen to Zhenya and me yak. He cascades Petersburg-accented Russian upon me like Dostoevskij's Marmeladov. When he pronounced, as fathers are wont to do, his daughters rolled their eyes. "Faaather!" The gesture––that awful daughter eye movement that deflates the self-important father––rendered Evgenii an ally. I have three daughters of my own.
Though our daughters unite us, Evgenii and I are in a sense of utterly different worlds. If one can apply the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to a nation, certainly Russia has earned it. Evgenii Belodubrovskii and his generation struggle to translate trauma into narrative, to convert nightmare into story. Here is one attempt.
The Petersburg Russian dialect Evgenii Belodubrovksii writes is difficult to translate. Sergei Kotlar, who translates my novels into Russian, did the difficult first draft, after which I worked to balance Russian melody with American meaning. Evgenii's meaning is more poetic than factual, the key to the text perhaps resides in the remark he makes in his text:
...Once, in a small 1916 Petrograd magazine, I came across a note - a review of the thin book by Tsiolkovsky "In Defense of the Aeronaut." There was a lot of mumbo-jumbo about imagination and the author and outer space and other provincial meanderings, but the ending line was brilliant––"He wanders round about the truth!"
So there it is, my friends. You can laugh, or not, but it describes us wanderers, the truth-prospectors.
Robert E. Townsend (November 2013, Rovinj, Croatia)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liar's Path Publishing
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310007132

Evgenii Belodubrovskii

Blockade survivor... Evgenii Belodubrovskii’s Thirteen Coats is a recollection and meditation on Leningrad, Russia from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion and three-year blockade to the St. Petersburg present. Russia’s twentieth century traumas––two world wars and a civil war––the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Terror and the Gulag slave labor camps––which endured until Stalin’s death (1953). Evgenii Belodubrovskii and his Russian peers born during and after WWII have come of age in a world that Americans can hardly imagine. If one can apply the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to nations, certainly it applies to Russia. An American male can expect to live into my nineties. His Russian cohort has already been dead a decade, his life expectency fifty three years, his trauma self-medicated––vodka, cigarettes and drugs. Evgenii struggles to translate this trauma into narrative.

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Thirteen Coats

A meditation on St. Petersburg (1946-2011)

Evgenii B. Belodubrovskii

Copyright Evgenii Belodubrovskii

Published by Liars Path Publishing at Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Liars Path Publishing

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Book Layout © 2014 BookDesignTemplates.com

Translation by Sergei Kotlar and Robert E. Townsend

Edited by Robert E. Townsend

Cover by Patrice A. Naparstek

Thirteen Coats/ Evgenii B. Belodubrovskii. -- 1st ed.

To my daughters

The overcoat Chekhov wore when he traveled around Sakhalin somehow retained his shape. It is surprising how much his (close-laced buttoned) boots resemble him.

G.M Kozintsev letter, Yalta, to Evgenii Shvartsy, Leningrad, June 1955

I am not what you imagined, he continued, lowering his gaze. I am not some French De Forge, but rather I am Dubrovskij.

A.C. Pushkin. Dubrovskij, Leningrad. Gosizdat,1949, Vol. 1, chapter 13. Figures drawn by B. Kusmodieva. A present from my mother on the occasion of my 13th birthday (12 April 1953)

EDITOR'S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

Evgenii Belodubrovskii's Thirteen Coats is a recollection and meditation on Leningrad–St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion to the present.

Russia's twentieth century traumas––two world wars and the long civil war that endured from the October Revolution in 1918 until Stalin's death in1953 (we can include the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Terror and Gulag as part of this long civil war).

Numbers empty tragedy of meaning. Stalin noted that one death is a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths is a statistic. If there is a big picture, perhaps it is contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism that enumerates the tens of millions murdered in the name of that twentieth century religion of Communism.

If there is any sense to be made of the madness, it will be in the single individual story. Longevity tables suggest an American will on average live ninety-three years. Self-medicating trauma with alcohol, drugs and tobacco, my Russian male cohort has now been dead ten years, his statistical lifespan fifty-three years. Memorial is a Russian movement to tell the story of Russia's twentieth century tragedy one death and one story at a time. Here, perhaps, there is some hope for Russia's recovery rather than in longing for its 'Black Book' greatness.

I have long studied the country and its culture, though until 1989, I only observed Russia and Russians as if through fogged binoculars. Although my academic background taught me the statistics of mass murder, I now hear the stories.

Evgenii is a friend whose wise counsel about the Russian soul illuminates my stories. However, I would be his friend whether his counsel were wise or not. Here is an anecdote. It is late summer 2010. He, his wife and two daughters are visiting the third daughter, a graduate student at the UW Madison. We meet for ice cream at a custard stand. His wife and daughters listen to Zhenya and me yak. He cascades Petersburg-accented Russian upon me like Dostoevskij's Marmeladov. When he pronounced, as fathers are wont to do, his daughters rolled their eyes. Faaather! The gesture––that awful daughter eye movement that deflates the self-important father––rendered Evgenii an ally. I have three daughters of my own.

Though our daughters unite us, Evgenii and I are in a sense of utterly different worlds. If one can apply the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to a nation, certainly Russia has earned it. Evgenii Belodubrovskii and his generation struggle to translate trauma into narrative, to convert nightmare into story. Here is one attempt.

The Petersburg Russian dialect Evgenii Belodubrovksii writes is difficult to translate. Sergei Kotlar, who translates my novels into Russian, did the difficult first draft, after which I worked to balance Russian melody with American meaning. Evgenii's meaning is more poetic than factual, the key to the text perhaps resides in the remark he makes in his text:

...Once, in a small 1916 Petrograd magazine, I came across a note - a review of the thin book by Tsiolkovsky In Defense of the Aeronaut. There was a lot of mumbo-jumbo about imagination and the author and outer space and other provincial meanderings, but the ending line was brilliant––He wanders round about the truth!

So there it is, my friends. You can laugh, or not, but it describes us wanderers, the truth-prospectors.

Robert E. Townsend (November 2013, Rovinj, Croatia)

FORWARD

I REMEMBER THEM ALL

Yes! I remember all my overcoats. I start with my first 'favorite'–– canvas 'snake strap' belt and buckle––that I wore that fall of my earliest malchikovoye childhood.i I was known in the courtyard as Pushkin.ii (they said I resembled the youthful poet in his earliest pictures. He, a first-born like myself, was bright-eyed and curly-haired (or rather hairy)). I was especially proud of the overcoat after they had sewn shiny round girly buttons on it in place of the original brown ones, which were lost running around the neighboring yards, woodsheds, basements, roofs and attics during children's games.

Ah, my neighborhood––The Demutov Inn, the Dutch church and on the opposite side of the street, the Stroganov Palace with its pink and white classical cupola. There were the stout columns of the house of the Polish gentleman Kossikovski, where in the early 1920s he established the Disk (House of the Arts). Here, the Seraphian Brothers, the writer and fabulist, Evgenii Zamyatin, Nikolai Gumilev (The Singing Conch), and the Lozin translation studio made their start. Mandelstam lived here. My favorite author, Alexander Grin, author of Red Sails, lived under the staircase on Eliseev Courtyard. The walls remember their guests.

Ah, enough of it, I am not the only such lucky one. Once, five or six years ago, after one of journalist Anna Vsemirnova's radio broadcasts Wind through the Window, in which I had some bit part, someone, voice unrecognized, phoned me at home. Pushkin! Zhen'ka! Can it be you, was it you yesterday speaking about (Alexander) Grin...The one from our apartment house on the second floor... and they gave your last name!

'Bam!' She slammed the receiver down. The dear woman was so giddy with happiness for me and for our entire courtyard that she forgot to say whom she was. To look for her now would be like looking for the wind in the willows. The time she had wasted searching for me in the telephone book and what it cost her would have been no small sum at today's prices.

I recognized her the second time she called. It was Firka Borisovna Lyutina (apartment 120, second archway). Firka, a pianist and doctor of Field Geology, gray-haired from childhood, had attended our Public School 208, in ninth grade when I was in the seventh. Firka's mother and my own had almost the same names––my mother's name was Lina; hers, Lida––but I always considered them namesakes. Firka moved to a walk-up on the first floor on Dostoevsky Street, where she died. (I by chance discovered this recently from neighbors whom I barely knew living in the neighboring apartment #40 on the Moika River). She had neither children nor family and lived alone. She had graduated with a degree in mining Geology; she didn't need a family as she was always in the field prospecting for diamonds (She was herself bright, like a diamond).

The overcoats of my life (if you don't count the current ones which aren't so cool) were of the classic number thirteeniii like the number of tobacco pipesiv in Ilya Ehrenburg's well-known story, or the number of wives that poet of poets, Igor Vasilyevich Lotaryov (Severyanin)v – Count Yevgraf – had (I recall the line, "This is