'Perhaps I’m Getting This Mixed Up with Gogol'

I like writers who know many things, often wildly varied, from high culture and low, and enjoy sharing them with readers. Robert Burton is such a writer. So is Guy Davenport. Another, less well known, is Aldo Buzzi (1910-2009), an unclassifiable Italian essayist, architect, food enthusiast, filmmaker and Saul Steinberg’s closest friend. Three of his books, all brief, are available in English: Journey to the Land of Flies and Other Travels (trans. Ann Goldstein, 1996), A Weakness for Almost Everything (trans. Goldstein, 1999), and The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets  (trans. Guido Waldman, 2005).

My favorite is the first, in particular the essay "Chekhov in Sondrio." It’s a love song to Russian culture, especially literature, a virtual mosaic of quotations from Chekhov, Bulgakov, Gogol, Turgenev, Mayakovsky, Gorky, Tolstoy, Mandelstam, Blok, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Goncharov, Nabokov and others. Not to mislead: There’s nothing dry or pedantic about Buzzi. He’s the most charming of writers. Here is the opening paragraph:

“In Milan many years ago, among the trees of our ‘Summer Garden,’ there was a Russian isba (a log house). I remember the great logs of dark wood, the veranda, where an old maidservant (perhaps I’m getting this mixed up with Gogol) welcomed guests with a deep bow. It was not far from the zoo, where a Siberian wolf paced continually from one corner to the other of its cage, hoping obstinately to find a hole through which to go out into the steppe of Milan. A crow landed on the meadow, as Chekhov says, ‘before planting itself on its feet, leaped a few times . . .’”

Buzzi obligingly supplies footnotes. The Chekhov allusion is from the 1886 story “A Nightmare,” though Constance Garnett translates crow as rook. To give the reader a sense of Buzzi’s sensibility – a more inclusive term than “style” – I’ll cite another passage a few pages later:

“Chekhov also concerned himself with toilets. It is well known, he says, that the Russians hold this type of comfort in disdain. ‘In the villages there are no toilets at all; in monasteries, at fairs, in inns, and in every type of industry . . . they are absolutely disgusting.’ In Siberia the toilet was nothing more than a big stick: for defense against wolves.”

The passage closely quotes and paraphrases Sakhalin Island (trans. Brian Reeve, Oneworld Classics, 2007), based on the eleven-week, 4,000-mile journey by train, horse-drawn carriage and river steamer Chekhov made to the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. He published his findings in book form in 1895. In Chap. 5, Dr. Chekhov devotes a page-long paragraph to latrines and the prisoners’ “natural requirements”– not a trivial subject in a time and place frequently plagued by cholera epidemics. Here’s a sample:

“In our country villages, there are absolutely no latrines . . . The Russian carries his contempt for the latrine with him to Siberia as well. From the history of penal servitude it may be seen that latrines everywhere in prisons have been the source of suffocating stenches and fevers, and that the prison population and administration have easily reconciled themselves to this.”

One could readily acquire a respectable education in Russian literature and hygiene by reading Buzzi’s essay, consulting the footnotes and pursuing the cited works – and have a marvelous time doing so.