The Fairy Tellers, page 21
In the indictment, Ivan was described as ‘a man of an extremely socialist direction, an enemy of the existing order’. Anti-establishment, anti-monarchist, socialist, atheist, critic of reforms, advocate of mass literacy: he may have been all these things, but he wasn’t as active a revolutionary as Ishutin or Karakozov, and in Gayevsky he benefitted from a spirited defence (‘he displayed the greatest passion in defending my cause’, as Ivan recalled, adding that ‘it is to his zeal that I owe my life’). Of all the conspirators, only Karakozov was executed (the death sentence pronounced against Ishutin was commuted to transportation at the last moment, when he was standing on the scaffold with the noose around his neck). But the penal judgment wasn’t much of a reprieve. Ivan was sentenced to exile in ‘the furthest places in Siberia’. Leonilla, brought to visit him one last time, offered to accompany him, with a touching loyalty that Ivan didn’t hesitate to spurn. Neither her refusal to give the authorities any incriminating evidence against him nor the fact that she was pregnant could move him, and so she was left to raise their child alone and disappear into history’s shadows; Ivan, meanwhile, found himself in a prisoners’ convoy on the ‘Iron Road’ to Siberia.
The immediate impact of the case was a subsidence of the rights won during the decade of reform. In May 1866, a month after the assassination attempt, Tsar Alexander signed into law his ‘Commitment to the protection of the Russian people from false and harmful doctrines that, lest their promulgation be halted, might in time shake the foundations of society’. Or, to put it another way: no more ‘Alexander the Liberator’. In a crackdown that would be known as ‘the White Terror’, journalists were arrested, progressive publications like The Russian Word and Contemporary were closed down, bookshops were sifted for incendiary material, access to archives was restricted and any form of ‘nihilist’ fashion outlawed. ‘Every day,’ wrote one of Ivan’s acquaintances, a journalist called Grigory Eliseev, ‘news arrived that this or that literary man had been taken during the night’.
For the scholar Claudia Verhoeven, ‘Terrorism virtually emerged from the Russian autocracy’s mishandling of April 4, 1866 . . . When over the course of the next decade this specter began to haunt, first, the Russian empire, and, thereafter, the rest of the world, the form in which it did so was directly determined by the government’s earliest representation of Karakozov’s unprecedented political challenge.’ By this definition, the man who wandered the villages of Russia searching for ancient tales of wonder had transformed into a central cog in the invention of a very modern phenomenon: terrorism.
To a Land of Broken Souls
‘So this is the transportation,’ wrote Ivan, ‘I thought, today, you get a typhoid fever and tomorrow you’re transported to the other world.’
Setting out to nineteenth-century Siberia was nobody’s idea of a journey to paradise. In October snowfall, two convoys left St Petersburg with six prisoners each, two policemen for each convict and a senior officer per convoy. Travelling relentlessly, pausing only for a few hours’ rest each day, the prisoners were billeted to ‘the meanest rooms’ in the towns where they broke up their journey. Crossing a land of frost-glazed fields and ashen hills, where the rivers were grey worms wriggling out of the cocoons of low-hanging snow clouds, they spent their nights shivering under scanty cloaks, lying on bare ground under broken windows rattled by the wind. Some days passed without anything to eat, and when a sympathetic guard went to ferret out some food, his senior officer reprimanded him: ‘If they starve, it’s none of your business.’
With his health already dicey, Ivan fell ill before they reached the eastern Siberian headquarters of Irkutsk. He was carried into hospital by his fellow convicts and given a purgative. Never the sturdiest physical specimen, now he was little more than a walking skeleton, a twenty-four-year-old drained of all youthful vigour. But he was still treated as a menace, ‘a sort of hero’, as he put it, ‘capable of exterminating a whole detachment with a single punch’. When officers came to transport him to his final destination, they had to be discouraged by an official from putting him in chains, and he was searched for any dangerous weapons. Separated from his fellow convicts, who were sent to the Merchinsk mines near Lake Baikal, Ivan was driven across the permafrost towards one of the remotest spots in Siberia. One of the officers insisted his fate was ‘worse than forced labour’.
‘Few of my readers,’ wrote Ivan, ‘have seen anything more deserted than the route that goes from Irkutsk to Yakutsk.’ Due to the prisoner’s reputation, his Cossack guards were supposed to have their swords bared. In the end they kept them sheathed because the frost was so severe it would have damaged the steel. In the final part of the journey, Ivan was accompanied to the remote habitation of Verkhoyansk by a local apparatchik, Trofimov, who reported with some surprise on the prisoner’s high spirits: ‘Khudiakov was cheerful and sang nearly all the time; only approaching Verkhoyansk did he start displaying some fatigue.’
It was a sign of Ivan’s increasingly erratic state of mind. His memoir ends with his arrival in Verkhoyansk, leaving little ambiguity about his fragile condition:
To live with the cows, to suffer hunger . . . to have, not more than once a year, any news of your dear parents and most intimate friends, waiting for entire months and to see nothing coming at the end of this time; at last, to think of the terrible evils of the fatherland . . . the man capable of feeling will understand what terrible feelings must accompany my life . . .
In Verkhoyansk, he found himself in a community of just 164 people, along with a priest, a nurse and a policeman. He was billeted with a local family, living in austere simplicity in their yurt. He would remain there for the next eight years.
Dispiriting though his surroundings were, and despite occasional bouts of depression, those early years of exile inspired a surprising renewal. Without political activities to distract him, Ivan threw himself back into folklore. It took him just a year to master the Yakut language. Over time, he compiled a Yakuti–Russian dictionary, listened to local storytellers, wrote down folk tales, songs, riddles, proverbs and the Yakuti epic, and produced a study of Yakuti culture that is still valued by ethnographers today.
‘ “Say-sing a tale,” they say to the storyteller,’ he noted. ‘And the storyteller begins to sing and speak a whole epic in which many gods, devils and heroes are mentioned; the descriptions of various places are extremely detailed . . .’ He was struck by the precision and stamina of the Yakuti storytellers, noting they told fairy tales ‘even more vividly than Russian storytellers’ and describing a storytelling contest between two champion bards who ‘sang and spoke for a whole day, and their voices grew louder and louder until at last they both fell exhausted and fell in a deep sleep.’
How dumbfounded his detractors would have been to see this peddler of ‘malicious thinkings’ producing valuable work at the hellish extremity of Russia. Along with his cultural projects, Ivan set up a school and a meteorological station (which enabled him to confirm that he was living in the coldest town on earth – he recorded a temperature of minus 63.2 degrees Celsius in December 1868).
I find it moving to read about these activities. They show a troubled misfit refusing to be defined by his political misadventures, refusing to let his curiosity be stifled, still asking questions in spite of all the knocks he’d taken. But his intellectual activities only tell a part of the story. They were the last flarings of an embattled mind on which depression was exerting an ever-tightening hold.
In the spring of 1869, when Ivan had been in Verkhoyansk for two years, a worrying change was noticed. According to a man called Gorokhov, a parish clerk who became one of Ivan’s closest acquaintances, ‘he suddenly became taciturn and gloomy, sat silently and struck down all our suggestions with refusals’. Increasingly erratic, unable to sleep, losing his appetite, Ivan was drawing renewed attention from the authorities. On 23 March 1871 the chief of police in Verkhoyansk reported that he suffered from ‘mild insanity’, adding that ‘his illness is increasing more and more’.
Ivan needed help. But suspicion was so deeply entrenched among the authorities, they held off making a decision. The governor general of Siberia was wary that he might be faking his illness with the aim of ‘loosening suspicion over him and then even escaping’. Only in December 1873 did the governor general request permission from the Third Section to move him to Irkutsk. Although this was granted, it took another eight months before anything was done.
‘Khudiakov’s mental capacity is out of order,’ declared the inspecting physician on 31 August 1874. In a more detailed report, the same doctor recorded: ‘he starts without any reason on long and endless discourses on various subjects . . . he has a fairly good memory of names and events, and he speaks not without meaning, but in the presentation of thoughts there is no consistency and clarity’ and he ‘sometimes expresses obvious absurdities’.
In July 1875 Ivan arrived in Irkutsk and was installed in the ward for the mentally ill at the Kuznetsovsky Hospital. He filled his days writing obsessively, following a method he had devised, from right to left and sometimes from the bottom of the page to the top. His mother was allowed to visit, and those meetings must have been precious, if painful on both sides. She had been appealing for access to her son ever since he was sentenced; sadly, she was in poor health herself, and died a few months after his arrival in Irkutsk. Another visitor, who left a rare testimonial, was a fellow revolutionary exile, N. P. Goncharov. He reported ‘the appearance of a primitive creature . . . words, without getting stuck, rushed intensely in the disorderly chaos. Everything black, gloomy, flooded his once bright thoughts’.
Hallucinations had become commonplace. Ivan cried out at night, haunted by visions of his mother’s suffering eyes; at other times he was heard repeating words from his trial. He remained in the mental ward for just over a year until he died on 19 September 1876, aged thirty-four. His body was dumped, alongside a couple of corpses from the hospital’s anatomy theatre, into an unmarked grave, in the part of the cemetery reserved for criminals and vagrants.
And so it goes . . . An active, creative life swallowed by insanity at the worst end of Siberia. Not everybody comes back from Baba Yaga’s hut with treasure; some bring back fire that burns them up. As Baba Yaga herself warns, ‘if people are too inquisitive, I eat them’. Ivan Khudiakov was somebody who asked a lot of questions, and didn’t always know what to do with the answers. He lived during an information revolution – and as with other ages when information becomes available on an unprecedented scale, the suspicion of the authorities was marshalled against it. Ivan believed that information and knowledge should be available to everybody, which is why he wrote his Tutorial for Beginners to Learn to Read and Write. He didn’t collect tales from the past because of antiquarian or romantic motivations; nor was he particularly driven by nationalistic zeal, or a desire to heap up pots of money. ‘All the people who taught the books of Khudiakov in the public schools,’ wrote the revolutionary activist German Lopatin shortly after Ivan’s death, ‘unanimously assured me of their extraordinary success and the extraordinary love with which both young and adult students treated these books.’
This is a partisan view, for Lopatin knew Ivan and shared his political vision. But a notice in the Russian Geographical Society’s report for 1863 offers a more detached perspective. Recommending a medal for Ivan’s collection of folk riddles, N. V. Kalachev wrote: ‘This commission was fulfilled by Khudiakov with that distinctness and love in the task which distinguishes his own editions . . . To Mr Khudiakov’s credit we can add that the same ardent love for his subject leads him, despite his meagre funds, to undertake travel across Russia every summer.’
It’s a crying shame – and it’s also shameful – that these institutions didn’t do more to support his talents. All too often, he was pushed aside by the cultural gatekeepers he encountered – library directors, lecturers, university rectors. More than any of the nineteenth-century story collectors whose fame would far exceed his own, Ivan’s story collecting was a raw engagement with the oral traditions in which those tales were created. Across Europe, other folklorists were harvesting tales from oral sources, increasingly alert to the voices and lives of the people who told their tales: collectors like Emmanuel Cosquin, who picked up stories from a village in Lorraine, transmitting them unedited, much like Ivan (and publishing them in 1860, the same year as Ivan’s first collection). They were responding to the growing awareness of the unwritten cultural treasures stored for many centuries in places that had been ignored by the elites.
Spurred by the growth of nationalist consciousness and socialist philosophy, this awareness would ripple across the century. Slavic activists like the Czech author Karel Jaromír Erben harnessed folk tales as part of a wider campaign for political autonomy; left-wing thinkers in Britain, such as William Morris, C. Allen Clarke and Keir Hardie (who would found the Labour Party at the turn of the twentieth century) composed their own fairy tales, recognising their subversive and didactic potential.
In the context of these wider activities, Ivan’s achievement wasn’t unique. But there was an authentic intensity to his work and life that deserves particular attention. His Tutorial was key to this: he wasn’t simply taking the fruit of the folk to display it to the elites; he strove to show that fruit to the people who’d grown it, to celebrate their culture with them.
The great twentieth-century folklorist Vladimir Propp described Ivan’s Great Russian Fairy Tales as ‘the first major collection of folk tales taken straight from the people’s mouth’. That was certainly the case in Russia, where he paved the way for later folklore collectors. Amongst these were the remarkable mathematician and actress Olga Ozarovskaya, who, when she wasn’t teaching drama in her studio in Moscow in the 1910s and 1920s, roamed the countryside collecting folk tales; and the ill-fated Nikolai Onchukov, who travelled thousands of miles by sleigh, horse and foot, collecting stories in the early years of the twentieth century, but who crashed against state obstacles and after multiple arrests died in a labour camp. When it came to the skazki, Ivan provided a blueprint, it turned out: not only for methodology but also for the tragic lives of many of their collectors.
Fairy tale history has produced many eccentrics, but few as contradictory as Ivan. He’s the teller who shows us how dangerous fairy telling can be. The image of Ivan in Siberia, his mind going to pieces, haunts me. It shows that even for fairy tellers – especially for fairy tellers! – the world is far from cosy. And, notably, he isn’t the last fairy-telling madman we’ll be meeting on this trail.
But at least we know Ivan’s story, told in his own words, however badly it disintegrated towards the end. Now it’s time to turn to the most enigmatic of our fairy tellers – the one furthest away in time and, for Western readers, in place. The skazki pull the fairy tale out of its Western comfort zone, but now we’re stretching even further. South from the Siberian tundra we travel, as if we’re sitting on Ivan the Fool’s magic carpet, floating over the steppes of Central Asia, over the Pamir Mountains and the Karakoram, alighting in the Himalayas in the Valley of Kashmir, where the sub-zero winter temperatures force the locals to squeeze their heads inside woollen hats as thick and ear-flapped as the ones in Siberia. There’s a key difference, however: we’re turning away from hell, swinging up, up, up, with a storyteller who understood the pits of the earth but could gaze unblinkingly at the heavens.
PART SIX
A Valley Haunted by Demons
Those who drink from the immortality of this story shall have their obstacles removed and shall be prosperous and Shiva’s grace will bestow godliness on them, even as they live here on earth.
Somadeva, The Ocean of the Streams of Story (circa 1070 AD)
The Tale of the Golden City
‘Whoever has seen the Golden City,’ announces a palace warden, ‘may claim the princess’s hand in marriage.’
It’s a bewitching prospect for a gambler called Saktideva, so he decides to try his luck. But he’s never actually seen the Golden City and he’s unable to pull off his scam – the king’s daughter knows he’s lying and has him booted out of the palace. In that case, Saktideva decides, he’s going to find this mysterious city and show them all. So off he sets, directed by a forest hermit to seek out a king of fishermen in the middle of the ocean. The ship he boards is torn apart in a storm and he’s swallowed by a giant fish. Which turns out to be fortuitous. The fish is cut open and he’s greeted by the very man he’s been seeking – the king of the fishermen.
Not that his new friend knows the location of the Golden City – but he’s eager to help Saktideva in his search. So they voyage together, sailing past a giant banyan tree growing out of the sea. But their ship is blown into a whirlpool and everybody is sucked under, except for Saktideva, who clings to a branch of the banyan tree and hauls himself into its canopy. There he rests in despair, until he hears a magical talking bird telling its fellow birds about the Golden City. Here is his chance, so he hides himself in its feathers and is carried to the very place he has yearned for.
At last! Clambering off the bird’s back, he’s surrounded by pillars of precious stones and golden walls. A beautiful princess presides over the Golden City, and decides to marry him. All she has to do is check with her father, in a faraway forest. She leaves Saktideva in the palace, warning him not to visit the middle terrace. Which, as soon as she’s gone, is exactly what he does.
A shocking discovery awaits: three dead princesses are lying in the middle terrace. One of them Saktideva recognises: the princess who kicked him out of the palace back home. He’s musing on these discoveries beside a lake when he’s buffeted into the water by a horse; and on pulling himself out, he finds himself back in his home city.
