Pontograph

2023

On the edge of a sultry summer dusk, as the blazing sun sank behind the rooftops of Moscow’s high-rises, three men stepped out onto the sun-warmed granite of the sidewalk near Patriarch’s Ponds.

The first of them, a man of about fifty, carried a motorcycle helmet under one arm. Lean and bald, he wore blue jeans and a snow-white shirt through which the patterns of his tattoos showed. His clean-shaven face was furnished with dark Ray-Ban sunglasses.

The second, a broad-shouldered, tousle-haired blond of about twenty-five, wore a gray Vse Putem T-shirt printed with the portrait of the guarantor of Russian independence, black jeans, and brown sneakers.

The third stood out in a bright red polo. A sea-green baseball cap bearing the inscription BOG DAN made a show of concealing a generous bald patch, while his face was graced with a scruffy little beard, trimmed any which way.

The bald man with the helmet was none other than the author of the text fate has placed in your hands: the writer and traveler Maxim Privezentsev.

My young companion, whose T-shirt displayed the triumph of stability over reason, was named Gleb Ivanovich Zapletin. His chief and incontestable achievement in life was that a nimble spermatozoon had developed into the beloved and only offspring of Ivan Ivanych, a prominent official and a not-so-prominent oligarch.

The owner of the scruffy beard was introduced by Gleb as a hereditary magician and psychic, widely known in the narrow bohemian circles of those who had not left after the February events: Bogdan Popov.

“BogDan POPoff,” I read on the expensive business card the bearded man handed me at the same time as his handshake.

“Hotter than the Emirates,” Bogdan pronounced, and pointedly wiped his brow on the sleeve of his polo, leaving a crimson, greasy stain on the red fabric.

I decided to keep up this little exchange of social pleasantries between near-strangers by talking about the weather, especially since the heat in those days really was appalling. The cobblestones and the facades of the capital’s buildings, freshly renovated by the caring hand of the city governor, were melting under the rays of the merciless June sun.

“Moscow’s stuck in its usual uncertainty: yesterday it poured all day, and today it’s been steaming since morning.”

Bogdan gave a restrained smirk, while Gleb sighed—whether at my remark or merely into the air.

My bike and their car had been left two blocks from Patriki, by the Bulgakov House, and we made our unhurried way on foot to the entrance of Davidoff Club Moscow—Gleb’s favorite cigar club, as he had informed me several times during the walk.

Inside Davidoff it was deceptively respectable, cool with air-conditioning, sparsely populated; it smelled of expensive tobacco, and an intimate half-darkness prevailed. Muffled jazz, soft carpets, and costly furniture invited conversation on the loftiest subjects.

“Russian literature is in the shitter,” Gleb observed weightily the moment we had settled at a cozy table in the corner. “I don’t think anyone would argue with that. My father thinks otherwise, but he’s incompetent in matters of writing.”

“You mean Ivan Ivanych?” I clarified, just in case, as I lit my cigar.

“Well, of course, Max. Father loves to read, but alas, he doesn’t see the fundamental problems. One can always do the usual thing—turn a blind eye, say the old plots have exhausted themselves and the new ones haven’t yet taken shape... But that’s only the surface of it. Trite provincial stories don’t interest me in the slightest.”

I shifted my gaze from the match flame lighting my cigar to Gleb and, with a touch of embarrassment, asked for clarification, hoping to get my bearings in the gentlemen’s literary coordinates.

“So you want to write on eternal themes while avoiding Polti’s thirty-six dramatic situations? And even Borges’s Four Cycles?”

For a moment, a copy of Pushkin’s death mask froze on Gleb’s face. Zapletin Jr. looked at me intently, then at Bogdan, who was rapidly typing something into his phone.

I pictured the sorcerer frantically googling Polti and Borges, and smiled to myself.

“You could put it that way,” Gleb said slowly, unable to come up with anything better. “But Bogdan can probably explain it in more detail. I’m more of a man of the printed word, you know, than the spoken one.”

The hereditary sorcerer brightened, placed his phone face-down on the table and, after taking a sip of mineral water from a tiny bottle, said:

“You see, Maxim... Plot in literature isn’t actually the main thing. More than that, I may surprise you here, but a writer’s talent doesn’t matter either.”

At that point I began to suspect that fate had brought me together with two very strange people. Then again, I didn’t have much choice. I had agreed to meet the young “literary scholars” at the delicate request of Ivan Ivanych, conveyed through a mutual acquaintance:

“Long story short, tell Max to meet with my Gleb and get himself attached to his project. After that we’ll consider his IOU settled.”

Knowing Zapletin Sr.’s manner of expressing “requests” to those beneath him, I was certain the messenger had considerably prettified Ivan Ivanovich’s will—at the very least removing the obscenities and the epithets describing my true place on this earth. Though, to be fair, I remembered that, too: it was precisely this habit of expressing “requests” clearly and unambiguously that, many years earlier, had decided the outcome of the war with my deranged, curly-haired developer partner in my favor.

“You fucking owe me now,” Ivan Ivanych had said warmly back then. “Not money, don’t shit yourself. Life, the bitch, is a fucking complicated thing. When the time comes, I’ll come to you with a request. Until then, live it up. Enjoy yourself.”

And now, in the summer of 2023, Zapletin Sr. had reminded me of that little debt.

I’ll have to pay it, I thought sadly, and, settling more comfortably in my seat, asked Bogdan and Gleb:

“Gentlemen, forgive my curiosity, but may I ask what books you’ve written?”

“None so far, but that isn’t important,” the sorcerer replied imperturbably. “Many people are inclined to deceive themselves with talk of natural talent. In reality, all a writer’s ‘talent’ amounts to is knowledge of a special literary code. Have you ever wondered why contemporary authors are so much alike?”

“Because they’re all contemporaries?” I ventured.

“No, no,” Bogdan said with a touching smile. “The point is that they all use one pitiful little fragment of the code. But for true greatness, you need the whole code, in its entirety.”

The waitress, a sweet-looking girl, brought Gleb a large latte and set it on the table, but he didn’t so much as blink—he was listening intently to Bogdan.

“Strange,” I said. “I’ve been studying literature for ten years, and not once have I heard any experienced teacher, or any eminent colleague of the pen, mention the existence of some special code.”

And, to dot the i’s, I added:

“You must have heard from your parents how, back in the late nineties, everyone in Russia was buying and selling red mercury, though no one had ever seen it? Well, that’s about how I feel about theories like this—of the unknown and the mighty.”

“Actually, no one is asking you to believe,” Gleb cut in. “Bogdan is simply leading up to the matter for which we invited you here. And as for ‘I believe,’ ‘I don’t believe’... People don’t believe in God because they say good morning to Him every day by the front door.”

Gleb spoke seriously, even with a hint of offense, and I understood: these guys would not let up until they had poured their entire staggering theory over me. To speed up the literary sermon at least a little, I turned to Bogdan.

“You said contemporary writers don’t use the whole code. Why is that?”

“The thing is, during the 1917 revolution, the greater part of the code was lost.” Bogdan sighed heavily. “Those who knew it either disappeared into the whirlpool of the revolution and the Gulag, or fled into exile, and there, working as doormen and tailors, passed it on to the future geniuses of European literature... or else, out of vanity, hid it from everyone.”

“I see,” I drawled. “And you, I take it, know how to restore this code?”

Bogdan smirked into his scraggly beard and, glancing furtively around, said—far more quietly than Al Jarreau’s “So Good,” pouring from the speakers, would allow:

“Yes. I can commune with the spirits of the great writers whose ancestors handed the code down to them.”

Since the magus’s whisper was swallowed by the music, at first I thought I had misheard. When the meaning of what he had said finally caught up with me, I thought sadly:

“Yes, Ivan Ivanych, you’d have been better off taking the debt in cash!”

The black rectangle of the expensive door and the glowing “Exit” sign above it beckoned with the simple solution of ending the meeting, but when has our age ever supplied simple solutions?

“Interesting. Very interesting,” I mumbled with feigned curiosity, dragging my gaze away from the exit. “And writers of which century of Russian literature can you commune with? The Golden Age? Or perhaps the Silver Age?”

“Both!” Bogdan answered proudly, breaking into a smile.

At that moment—perhaps from surprise—my cigar went out.

Silently thanking the tobacco gods for the chance to hide the inner laughter tearing me apart, I leisurely relit the vitola, meanwhile adjusting my face into a proper poker expression with an abstract yet personal thought: “Max, what if they diagnose you with testicular cancer today?”

Once the cigar was going again, I made a show of looking around—as though afraid competitors might be eavesdropping—and said almost in a whisper:

“Magnificent. But still, allow me to ask: with such colossal knowledge, why do you need me?”

Bogdan and Gleb exchanged eloquent glances—evidently deciding that I was finally getting the point and that we could move on to the essence of the matter.

“The point is, one must commune with spirits only in the places where they spent a long time—where they lived and worked,” Bogdan confided, with the air of a man addressing the Nobel Committee, and, spreading his arms with a sigh, added:

“But unfortunately, in Russia, that is exceedingly difficult.”

“Forgive me for being dense, but I don’t quite follow: why is it exceedingly difficult here? Not the ‘living’ part, that I understand, but…”

I faltered. Getting the phrase “communing with the spirits of writers” out of my mouth proved hellishly difficult, but, nearly collapsing into a “heh-heh-heh,” I managed it:

“…but surely you want to commune… with the spirits of Russian writers? And where did they spend more time than here, in Russia?”

Bogdan nodded.

“You’re right. But the problem is that in their homeland, the spirits reveal only part of the code.”

Once again I had to spend a moment thinking about testicular cancer. Then, taking a greedy drag and blowing the smoke toward the ceiling, I said:

“Right, right. I think I understand. It’s like in the joke, isn’t it? Either it was stolen, or it broke… or they forgot it.”

Gleb winced and said with a sigh:

“No, it’s somewhat more complicated. Some spirits are slightly lost in time and are afraid to speak because of tsarist censorship. Others remember the Soviet articles on treason against the Motherland. The most, shall we say, advanced spirits are afraid of being posthumously declared foreign agents and having the requisite disclaimer stamped on every one of their books…”

I looked at Gleb and couldn’t tell whether he was serious or joking. But when I turned to Bogdan and saw how intently he was listening, how he was nodding in agreement with the “arguments” of Ivan Ivanych’s son, I understood: this was all perfectly serious.

Apparently my reaction did not escape Bogdan, because he immediately came in after his “boss”:

“Of course, all this may be nothing but excuses. The spirits of departed writers can be mischievous. It’s possible that some of them simply haven’t retained the necessary fragments of the code. But some are genuinely afraid that, besides being labeled foreign agents, the authorities might start demolishing their memorial sites—their house museums, so to speak—and putting up offices or luxury apartment blocks in their place.”

“I see. And what, in your opinion, is the way out of this situation?” I asked, anticipating another astonishing turn of logic.

“Based on my extensive experience, spirits speak frankly only where they face no danger, not even potential danger,” Bogdan continued. “Where they feel free, at ease, if you’ll allow the expression.”

The mage glanced sideways at Gleb, who gave a grave nod.

“I am, of course, referring to Europe,” the psychic concluded.

“These aren’t exactly the most favorable times for travel, of course, and Russians abroad are not, to put it mildly, particularly welcome,” Gleb said with a sigh. “But we, alas, cannot wait until everything around us is Russia. Here, have a look—I jotted this down in my spare time.”

He placed a list on the table and pushed it toward me.

“Here I’ve listed European cities and the writers who lived and worked in them, the ones most interesting to me.”

After running my eyes down the list, I asked:

“So you need help putting together an itinerary?”

“Not exactly,” said Bogdan.

He shifted his gaze to Gleb, who reluctantly explained:

“The thing is, there’s no one to send to Europe except Bogdan. I’ve been banned from leaving the country lately. I’ve tried all sorts of ways to sort it out, to get around it—nothing yet. And even if I did manage it, there wouldn’t be much point: Bogdan says the spirits are too arrogant. They need, you see, a Russian writer who’s written at least a few books. To someone like that they might still deign to descend and reveal the secret of the code.”

“And all they ever do with me is chatter about the Masons and the imminent fall of the regime in Russia,” Bogdan complained. “That’s what they say: Nicholas will soon be overthrown! Completely out of step with the times!”

“So it turns out the mage is our… so to speak… the ink with which… the collective hand of the masters of the past… writes upon the page of the writer of the future—there!” Zapletin Jr. joyfully “formulated.” “Obviously, it’s all superstition. But how do you explain to these old fogeys that I write social media posts instead of books only because I don’t want to waste myself in vain without the code?”

“And by the way, do any drafts of these books actually exist?” I asked, barely holding back my laughter. “Or is there no point even starting without the code?”

“You wound me! For instance, I’ve already chosen a pen name. Daddy’s image-makers did their best—Gleb Prostoy!”

He looked at me intently, expecting delighted understanding to dawn in my eyes. But at that moment I was busy inventing a new fatal diagnosis for myself, since cancer had already stopped working. Realizing that I was apparently slow and not catching the allusions, Zapletin Jr. smiled graciously and said, with playful emphasis:

“Gleb Prostoy—Lev Tolstoy. Get it?”

The only thing I wanted to get at that moment was the end of a cigar into his eye, but I restrained myself, because in the smoke hanging over the table the scowling visage of Ivan Ivanych briefly emerged. Zapletin Sr., like a disembodied spirit, seemed to be watching our conversation and hissing threateningly into my ear: “Just you try it, you bastard!”

Struggling to get a grip on myself, I buried a dozen quips along the lines of “bread’s a bore,” “coffin’s empty,” “hump’s a cyst,” “forest’s dense”—and forced out with difficulty:

“‘Leo Tolstoy—Gleb the Unstory’—now that’s a real branding gambit, Gleb. Checkmate, so to speak, Artemy Lebedev.”

“A-a-ah, so my old man told you, did he?” Gleb drawled, disappointed. “That was actually Tyoma’s idea.”

“Shut it, you bitch!” Ivan Ivanych’s ghost hissed menacingly in my ear, and I steadfastly obeyed.

And Gleb, failing to register the cringe of the “branding gambit,” calmly continued:

“In short, while the spirits are waiting for books from me, I’m waiting for the code from them. A kind of stalemate. And time is running out. So I need a Russian writer who’ll travel around the ‘places of power’ of the classic writers with Bogdan and write down the code I get from them. You fit the role perfectly.”

Gleb looked at me intently across the table. Apparently he expected me to ask what exactly this “perfection” of mine consisted of. But I just sat there in silence and didn’t even blink, since my eyes were wide from the endless stream of nonsense.

Getting no question out of me, Gleb continued:

“First of all, you’re not especially well known.”

I nodded slowly.

“Secondly, you write so-so, unfashionably, and you won’t be able to use the code properly anyway: you simply won’t understand what’s what in it.”

I nodded again.

“And third, and most important: even now, in these troubled Russophobic times, you can travel freely around Europe.”

“Last year’s Paris–Tobolsk rally was something else,” Bogdan put in. “Back when nobody could get out of the RF without a proper scramble.”

Gleb peered at me questioningly through the cigar smoke.

“So? Are you in? And what will your time cost me?”

I thought it over. Sitting in front of me were two spectacular numbskulls. One was the spoiled son of a rich and influential man capable of making life hell for any pro-Russian. The other was an advanced “oliga-friend,” a.k.a. “friend of the oligarch,” who had clearly turned the rich kid’s brains to mush.

Rushing to an answer was definitely not the play.

“You’ve made it all a bit complicated,” I said at last. “Europe, spirits, a literary code... In my ignorance, I’d assumed writing was work and education, hundreds of books read, a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words. And, in the end, life experience and a coherent philosophical position.”

“That’s normal, Max,” Gleb assured me fervently. “A lot of people are just as mistaken. And that’s why Russian literature...”

“Is up shit creek? Yes, yes, I remember. But I don’t quite understand why I have to answer right this minute. What’s the rush?”

“The rush?” Gleb frowned.

“Well, you said time was running out. What did you mean by that?”

“I meant that once I have the literary code, I’ll still have time to write plenty of great things that will make me properly famous. Against the backdrop of our literary swamp, that won’t be hard at all.”

Gleb looked so arrogant that I physically wanted to bring him down from heaven to earth. But the ghost of Zapletin Sr. was already communicating with me at full strength, no mages required, and would not allow me to display an honest and principled civic position. Explaining my fear to myself in the usual way, with that convenient word “compromise,” I decided to push back just a little. Leaning forward, I asked:

“Doesn’t it seem to you, Gleb, that recognition and hype are more the province of airport thrillers? Whereas real literature is for the chosen few. And only time will judge whether a writer was any good; and if he wasn’t, time will most likely erase his ‘trash’ from the literary context.”

“Then let it erase it,” Gleb said with a shrug. “What’s the problem? I live here and now, and eternity is something so... distant and intangible.”

“And besides, why deliberately put anything aside for eternity?” Bogdan added, backing up the client. “When you can get your share of fame and success right here and now. All you need to do is assemble the literary code and start writing correctly.”

“So what do you say?” Gleb asked again, impatiently. “Are you in?”

Now he and Bogdan were both looking at me with a strange mixture of irritation and hope. As if they had no other options. And maybe that was exactly the case—if, before me, they’d collected rejections from other writers who met Zapletin Jr.’s criterion of perfection, until the old man remembered my IOU.

My first impulse was to send the charlatan and the rich idiot packing—preferably to the nearest library—and then explain to Ivan Ivanych that the only thing that could help his offspring with this project was a good doctor. But I dismissed that thought, because another one had replaced it, far more interesting.

“Why not write a book about this?” I imagined something like a blurb:

Writer-biker and psychic mage BogDan POPoff set out on a journey through the European haunts of the great Russian writers, hoping to commune with the spirits of the dead classics and recover the literary code lost a hundred years ago—the code capable of turning even the lowliest graphomaniac into a famous author.

Besides, I went on musing, if Gleb and I shook on it right now, it would let me settle my debt to Ivan Ivanych, which was no small thing in itself.

And, of course, there was the chance to have some fun.

I asked the waitress for a pen and began writing a number on a napkin. With every new zero, Gleb’s pomposity slid further toward bewilderment. And when a euro sign appeared at the end, the future lord of the literary code and the seasoned mage stared at each other in confusion, as if both had just been diagnosed with cancer at the same time. Holding the pause long enough for the literary theorists to absorb “the number of the ideal writer,” I said, with a serious face:

“I propose a wager.”

Gleb raised an eyebrow.

“I’m in, but I’m betting this literary code won’t help you write a masterpiece and become famous. So if, within a year of our journey through the European sites of the Russian classics, you haven’t become a renowned writer with a worldwide bestseller to your name, you pay this amount. If everything goes according to your plan, you owe me nothing. Nothing, that is, except the travel expenses.”

It took Gleb about a minute to recover and to grasp that the number, large as it was, was not an invoice payable on the spot. Then Ivan Ivanych’s offspring broke into a smug smile.

“Consider yourself already beaten, Max.”

“In that case, I trust your lawyers will have no trouble drawing up the contract.”

“No problem. Everything will be ready in two days.”

Bogdan watched us, thoughtfully scratching his unkempt beard.

He was probably thinking, too, that this summer really was going to be hotter than in the Emirates.

2023

Our conversation with Gleb Zapletin and his magical aide, Bogdan Popoff, at the cigar club—about the fate of Russian literature—turned out to be not only absurd, but, in its own way, useful: it piqued my curiosity. However strange and delirious the idea of a universal literary code seemed to me, I understood that once you have waded into a story, you have to swallow it by the spoonful.

Every lie lies on a bed of truth. And the more truth there is in it, the easier it is to sell any lie.

So I decided to look at the history of Russian literature from another angle—to try to find the moment when the myth of the code could first have appeared. This was not, of course, a case like *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, where the date of the “fake’s” first publication is known. With the code, everything was far more mysterious; but, as they say, if you don’t ask, you won’t get an answer. Fortunately, today there is someone to ask.

Where once a person seeking knowledge went to a library and spent hours poring over books, in our day there is a simpler solution: a neural network. Even if it has not yet learned to produce literary prose, who, if not she—the sovereign of terabytes of knowledge—could answer any question quickly and comprehensively, however complex?

But whether I had muddled my prompt, or whether the subject brushed up against the borderlands of creativity, plunging artificial intelligence into an artificial coma, the Bing neural network, when given my query, “When could the literary code have originated in Russia?”, first, quite unexpectedly, sent me to Pushkin’s *Lukomorye*. And only when I separately clarified that I was interested in the “code,” not the “cat,” did the neural network go straight to the origins of the Russian language.

Russian literature was an offshoot of the great trunk of Greek writing. In the tenth century, the first bud reached Russia from Constantinople alongside Orthodoxy—in the form of translations of Holy Scripture and the liturgies, intended to promote Byzantine Orthodoxy. The written language of ancient Rus', known as Church Slavonic, was based on a Bulgarian dialect and was used not only by Russians, but also by Romanians and the Southern Slavs. The Slavic language was raised to literary status through the efforts of Cyril and Methodius—from Glagolitic to Cyrillic—and absorbed much from Greek. In essence, Church Slavonic was originally an artificial creation, devised for a single purpose: translating church books from the more developed Greek language. By the fourteenth century, through the efforts of Serbian and Bulgarian scribes, Muscovite Rus' had acquired a written language—a form of Church Slavonic in which Holy Scripture and the liturgies were rendered with the greatest fidelity to the Greek. At the same time, Russian princes were developing other forms of writing, closer to the spoken tongues of their respective regions. By the end of the fifteenth century, the official language of the empire—Russian—had become the language of the Moscow Prikaz, and by then it differed from the literary, written language as much as was humanly possible. Yet Russian was not used for literary purposes: the first recorded attempt came only in the second half of the seventeenth century, with Protopope Avvakum. The reason, in the view of the renowned literary scholar Svyatopolk-Mirsky, was rather prosaic: writing in ancient Rus' was not recognized as a legitimate occupation. Writers, in fact, did not really exist; there were only so-called “scribes.” Reading was considered an honorable pursuit, but people read chiefly sacred books and edifying theological anthologies; there was no need to write new books, let alone works of fiction. In the Middle Ages, in the West as in Russia, it was customary for monks—the most educated and literate people—to copy existing books. Partly for this reason, printing reached Russia late: the first book was printed in Moscow only in 1564. Over the following decades, because printers were scarce and printing expensive, only the most important books were published—the Bible, liturgies, ecclesiastical statutes. Only under Catherine did the proportion of handwritten books begin to decline...

Judging by the neural network’s answer, the literary code was to be found in the Bible—after all, it was the Bible that had been copied since ancient times and continues to be copied to this day. And not merely because it had no competitors. The Bible is powerful precisely as a work of literature: it tells stories with masterful skill, stories for every taste and every shade, and all the plots we continue to tell today rest, in one way or another, on what was laid down in the Bible, though they take on the coloring of the time and place in which their authors live.

But such an answer could scarcely have satisfied Gleb, who dreamed of acquiring some universal template and was prepared, to that end, to send me and his magical consultant on a tour of Europe. Learning from books apparently struck Zapletin Jr. as something long, tedious, and dull.

A week after the contract with Gleb was signed, Bogdan invited me to what he called, with a smirk over the phone, a “trial session of literary magic.” Together with the two code-seekers, we met in the same parking lot by the Bulgakov House at Patriarch’s Ponds. This time, though, we were headed not for the cigar club but for the celebrated writer’s apartment-museum.

“From a metaphysical standpoint, today is an exceptionally auspicious day for our first séance,” Bogdan declared pompously after I parked my bike beside their jeep and joined him and Gleb.

“Here?” I asked, taken aback.

Bogdan nodded happily. A huge black backpack bulged on his back, presumably stuffed with occult paraphernalia.

For a moment, I vividly imagined us brazenly storming the museum, locking ourselves in Mikhail Afanasyevich’s study, and, while Gleb held the door against the guards, Bogdan and I conducting a session with the afterlife.

Fortunately—or unfortunately—the psychic immediately explained.

“A former client of mine lives here. Zhorik. I helped him out a lot back in the day—for a cut, I supplied him with otherworldly insider information gleaned from communing with American spirits at the Fed and the SEC, so he could make forecasts for securities trading. The moment I called, Zhorik volunteered to arrange everything himself.”

“Well, then, shall we?” Gleb asked impatiently, looking expectantly at the psychic.

Relishing his role as master of the situation, Popoff the mage marched up to the heavy entrance door, punched in the apartment number on the intercom, and pressed the call button.

A muffled, rattling trill sounded from inside, followed by a brisk, thin voice:

“Whassup?”

“It’s me, Bogdan.”

“Oh! Good, good. Come in, bro!”

The intercom squeaked like a hungry chick, and Bogdan pulled the door open and ducked inside first.

When we entered the stairwell, a guy of about twenty-five stood in the doorway of one of the ground-floor apartments. He had a jet-black mohawk and wore a tight pink T-shirt and beige breeches.

Zhorik looked wildly out of place in a building like this. Once, it had housed the Soviet intelligentsia, settled there by the authorities in what had formerly been a tenement building. If memory served, Sergey Brin’s parents—the parents of Google’s founder—had once lived here. In New Russia, though, only the wealthy could afford an apartment in the neighborhood: prices around Patriki were beyond anyone who wasn’t carving up the state budget, trading on stock-market insider information, or marrying the daughter of some Russian celestial.

Bogdan’s friend had probably made his fortune on precisely the insider information the mage had mentioned. At the very least, I couldn’t imagine Zhorik in some official’s office, haggling passionately over the next kickback, or standing at the altar with the “princess” daughter of an FSB general.

The only question was: how much of it had been Bogdan’s doing?..

Judging by the radiant smile Zhorik bestowed on our mage—a great deal indeed.

“Bogda-a-an!” Zhorik cried joyfully. “Bro! And the day started off pretty good, like, I woke up at seven, and then I thought, I’ll just lie here a little longer, you know? Alarm goes off, click, and I pass right out. For half an hour. No, forty minutes, even! Anyway, I was seriously thinking we wouldn’t make it, and here we are, damn!!! Can’t even believe it. So happy! You can see that, right?”

Zhorik glanced at Gleb, but Gleb merely looked away wearily.

"Entirely mutual, bro," the psychic said warmly, drawing his friend’s attention back. "How’s things?"

"By your prayers." Zhorik chuckled. "Everything’s awesome, bro. Well, more precisely, not everything, but I’m working toward it. Remember how—oh, and are these your friends? Hi there, hi. I’m Zhorik."

He shook my hand, and Gleb’s twice over—probably from an excess of feeling—and then offered:

"If you want, I could give you a little tour first."

Gleb wrinkled his nose contemptuously, and Bogdan, noticing this, hastily said:

"Zhorik. There’s no time for trifles. Did you get everything ready?"

"Ugh, yesterday was a whole thing! I leave the house, I’m walking, I’ve already tapped my card at the metro, and then I’m like—oh man, I don’t have my phone... I thought maybe I lost it on the way? Anyway, went back, and it’s all good, it was on the charger."

Bogdan sniffed and asked with timid hope:

"I mean the Bulgakov apartment."

"A-a-ah! Yeah, that’s all good too. I bought up all the entry tickets for that day. Plus I squared it with the director, documentary shoot about Bulgakov, I say, we’ll show Sergey Vasilyevich in the best light..."

"I think it’s Mikhail Afanasyevich," Bogdan corrected mechanically.

"Yeah? Ah, doesn’t matter. Point is, the director—he’s totally cool. Down for anything! Any promo among the youth—go ahead, Mikhail Afanasyevich always supports it!"

Zhorik’s amphetamine-fueled speech trip left me mildly bewildered. For some reason I recalled Chichvarkin and the unforgettable proverb: "Tell me who your friend is, and I’ll tell you who you are."

"All right, all right, we get it. Lead on!" Bogdan cut him off and adjusted the backpack strap sliding off his shoulder.

Zhorik nodded and bounded up the stairs to the fourth floor, to the famous Apartment No. 50. Striding past the dense tangles of graffiti with which grateful admirers of Bulgakov’s work had adorned the walls, Bogdan’s friend enthusiastically recounted how that night he’d had a nightmare that he was caught in the rain, and the rain just wouldn’t stop and flooded all of Moscow up to the roof of the tallest building.

"Damn heat," Zhorik concluded his story with a punchline, and, flinging open the door, was the first to tumble into Mikhail Afanasyevich’s apartment.

By the table that served as a reception desk, a lady of Balzacian age—evidently the ticket-taker—and a portly man in an unbuttoned jacket, which by now would hardly close over him, were talking about something in low voices. Catching sight of Zhorik, the portly man beamed and extended his hand:

— Zhora! My dear friend! Come in. We’ve been waiting for you! Perhaps some tea, coffee? Shall I tell you a bit about—

— Boris Semyonovich, come on now, that’s enough, — Zhorik cut him off familiarly, shaking the pudgy hand.

The corpulent man hastily pressed a finger to his lips and whispered:

— I’m going, I’m going!

Then he shot a stern look at the ticket-taker and wagged a finger at her.

— Marya Ivanovna? Every assistance! And don’t let anyone in!

The ticket-taker immediately nodded, like a bobblehead dog on the dashboard of some cheap Russian car, and gave Zhorik a friendly smile. He paid no attention to Marya Ivanovna’s efforts and led us through the narrow corridors of "The Evil Apartment" toward Bulgakov’s study, playing tour guide along the way.

“And this, as far as I understand it, is where they had dinner... What a painting, eh? Saw one just like it in the underpass on Kosmonavtov... Look at that enormous window, those curtains. Must’ve taken them a year to sew them for this place...”

But every time his half-suppressed urge to share his knowledge broke through, it met Gleb’s cold stare and Bogdan’s irritated rebuke:

“Not now, Zhor... Please. Don’t. I already asked you!”

At last we entered a room with a large window and a writing desk. On it stood an antique typewriter and an old paperweight; stacks of handwritten pages and time-worn folders, an inkwell, a gilded pen, a pocket watch, and a cigarette case, likewise battered by time. A black leather chair had been pulled up to the desk.

“And this is Mikhail Afanasyevich’s study,” Zhorik announced. “Here on the desk, just as you asked, I’ve gathered all his personal effects. Everything I could find.”

“Thanks, Zhorik,” Bogdan muttered, surveying Bulgakov’s memorial objects laid out among the papers like a vulture. “We’ll take it from here.”

“Whatever you say. Have fun, guys,” our guide said with a smile, backing out of the room. Then he closed the double doors behind him.

In the corner of the study stood a massive bookcase. I went over to it, ran my eyes along the spines, and was surprised to notice, among the others, a slim volume by Svyatopolk-Mirsky—the very name the neural net had cited in its text only recently. The surname was, to put it mildly, uncommon, so I could hardly be mistaken.

Taking the book off the shelf felt rude, but the coincidence was too intriguing. I decided to look into Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s history later and find out what his book might be doing in Bulgakov’s study.

My musings were interrupted by the sound of a key turning in the lock. I looked at Bogdan in surprise.

“Did he just lock us in?”

“Of course. We don’t need some curious caretaker barging in at the height of the séance with a ‘So, how are things going in here?’”

Bogdan glanced sidelong at Gleb, who nodded in confirmation.

“We don’t need any extra eyes or ears.”

“Right. Naturally. The literary code must not leak beyond the confines of this room,” I said, barely holding back the sarcasm. “And what now?”

Bogdan set his backpack down on Bulgakov’s desk with a shameless thud and said with importance:

“I’ll need about fifteen minutes to prepare. If anyone has anything urgent—calls, messages—get it done now. After that, all phones have to be switched off and wrapped in plastic film, so no photos, no voice recorders, no calls. Spirits find that incredibly irritating.”

“And how long will this communication with the spirit of Mikhail Afanasyevich take?” I asked.

“Considering writers aren’t big on chatter, not long. ‘It’s all in my books’ is the standard answer from any of them. So I’d say the old man will hold out twenty minutes tops. But that’s not guaranteed. Plus the caretaker may start asking questions—why Zhorik locked the study and what for. So... don’t distract us for now. We need to make sure we get everything done in time.”

Bogdan began pulling various séance-related accessories from his backpack: candles, multicolored stones... My eye was caught by a strange board engraved with letters of the Old Russian alphabet and fitted with a flexible arm whose steel “beak” could reach any point on its surface.

“What sort of artifact is this?” I couldn’t help asking.

"An alphabet pantograph, late nineteenth century," Bogdan said over his shoulder. "You'll see it in action soon enough. For now, don't distract me. This is... delicate work."

Bogdan bent over the table, while Gleb and I withdrew to the window.

"Do you think anything will come of this?" I asked the younger Zapletin.

"I don't know." Gleb shrugged. "To be honest, I don't have a lot of faith in Bulgakov. It feels as if he just wrote whatever came into his head, any old way. So I figure whatever he knew about the code was sketchy at best."

"Really? I'd have thought the opposite. If anyone could know some sort of literary code, it would be Mikhail Afanasyevich."

"Oh, come on," Gleb waved me off. "Then why didn't he use it in his lifetime? All his fame came posthumously, which means he didn't know any code. Logical?"

"From that angle, probably," I said, barely suppressing a smile.

"Then again, even if I happen to be wrong for some bizarre reason, Bulgakov still probably won't say a thing here in Moscow. He'll be worried about his house-museum. They'll slap some sedition charge on the place and turn it into a nightclub or an underground poker den—prime location, after all. I doubt Bulgakov wants that."

"Then why did we set all this up today?" I asked, surprised.

"What do you mean? I need us to rehearse everything here, so I can relax. And, you know, make sure everything in Europe goes off without a hitch, without a snag, heh-heh."

Just then Gleb's phone rang—so loudly that Bogdan, startled, dropped something heavy onto the table. The younger Zapletin, paying it no mind, pressed the phone to his ear and said, briskly:

"Yes, Dad? Yes, we're here." Gleb glanced at me. "He's with me. Where's he going to go now..."

I could practically hear the voice on the other end bark, "That's right, goddammit," and I flinched despite myself.

And what interest did Ivan Ivanych have in this mystical project? Had the elder Zapletin suddenly taken to believing in the spirit world in his old age? Impossible. But there was clearly some interest—otherwise it was strange that a hard-bitten oligarch would keep such a close finger on the pulse of his son's bizarre venture.

The moment Gleb was done with his father, Bogdan called us "to the table," then crossed to the window and drew the heavy curtains.

The room sank into half-darkness. The only light now came from three enormous candles on the table, and in the triangle between them lay Bulgakov's cigarette case.

"Aren't you afraid of burning this whole place to hell?" I asked quietly, watching Bogdan.

He didn't so much as raise an eyebrow, so absorbed was he in the process. Running his eyes over the alphabet pantograph, Bogdan placed his hand on its steel "beak," shut his eyes, and intoned:

"Mikhail Afanasyevich, we—the writer Maxim Privesentsev, Gleb Zapletin, and I..."

"Prostoy," Ivan Ivanych's scion interjected, for no apparent reason.

"Gleb Prostoy," Bogdan corrected himself. "We summon you to converse."

For a while nothing happened, and then Bogdan shuddered from head to toe... and froze, saying not a word.

Gleb shot me a questioning look. I understood that the hour of my debut star turn had come, sighed inwardly, and opened our show:

"Mikhail Afanasyevich—are you here with us?"

The "beak" in Bogdan's hand darted to the letters D and A.

“I’m glad you’ve seen fit to grace us with your presence,” I went on, barely holding back the sarcasm. “We’d like to discuss the literary code with you—the foundation of everything… You do know what I mean, don’t you?”

A pause—as if the “spirit” were deciding whether to share anything with mere mortals—and then the same letters again: D and A.

“Could you perhaps share with us the fragments of this code that are known to you?”

Bogdan froze again—perhaps considering how to turn the letters O, P, A, and Zh into the literary code for all time—and then suddenly spoke in a voice that wasn’t his own:

“What makes you think, Maxim, that I would speak of such matters in places so close to the Kremlin spires? Such an opinion of my frivolity is so profoundly offensive that I might end our conversation here and now… but perhaps I shall grant you one more chance, in view of your inexperience in communicating with the world beyond the grave. Am I correct in assuming this is your first conversation with forces beyond the bounds of life?”

“Well, yes. So far I’ve only had dealings with the boundless forces of real life,” I answered with a crooked grin.

Bogdan was speaking with unexpected floridness, and it threw me a little. Then I remembered how much money he must have riding on this project and pictured him the night before our meeting, sitting up late, composing the speech and hammering it into his head. With his experience selling myths to rich people for real money, preparing something like this would have been child’s play.

“If you are so eager to find the code, you would do better to seek an audience with the spirit of my colleague, Dostoevsky,” Bogdan explained in the “other” voice. “On Nevsky Prospect there is a place of memory… one need only find… where the connection lies…”

Someone knocked at the door, and Bogdan started, swayed, let the “beak” slip from his hands, and bumped the table. It trembled, the candles went out, and the study was plunged into darkness.

“Occupied!” Gleb snapped.

Footsteps sounded behind the door, as if someone were hurrying away.

Bogdan opened his eyes and looked at me in surprise.

“Did it work?” he whispered.

I narrowed my eyes.

“You don’t know?”

“Bogdan was in a trance,” Gleb explained patiently. “Of course he doesn’t remember anything. What did Bulgakov say about Nevsky in Petersburg?”

“That on Nevsky there’s a memorial place connected with Dostoevsky, where his spirit can speak with us.”

“So we need to go to Petersburg,” Bogdan said, packing the séance paraphernalia back into his backpack. “And at Dostoevsky’s favorite place on Nevsky, try to learn something from him about the code. I suppose that’s the idea.”

“You see, Max, what we were talking about?” Gleb said with a sigh. “Even a freedom-loving soul like Bulgakov doesn’t dare share the literary code while he’s in Russia.”

*Or Bogdan simply wants a free trip around Europe*, I thought, watching the magician wipe his sweaty forehead with his sleeve out of habit and take a sip of mineral water from a small bottle.

“But why does Bulgakov’s spirit send us to Petersburg and not straight to, say, Paris?” I asked, keeping my gaze fixed on the psychic.

“Because Bulgakov’s spirit was speaking to us in Moscow, not Baden-Baden,” Gleb explained. “He practically said so himself! One wrong word, and his Bad Apartment ends up with tasteful European renovations. In the capital, you can only recommend ideologically friendly places—and sending someone to Europe for answers is practically treason these days.”

“Well, at least that seems to be how he sees it,” Bogdan added hastily. “And in the northern capital the European spirit is stronger: the border’s close, after all. Perhaps Dostoevsky really will tell us more. In that case, we might be able to shorten our European itinerary. Right?”

Gleb nodded at once.

Visibly pleased with himself, Bogdan slowly freed his phone from its cellophane prison and dialed Zhorik.

“Yeah, we’re done here. Come on in, we’ll be waiting.”

He slipped the phone into his pocket, turned to me, and asked:

“Well, Max? What do you think?”

“Interesting,” I admitted. “Only it’s strange he never once said, ‘You can find all that in my books.’”

“What do you mean?” Bogdan frowned.

“Well, before the session you said all writers retreat into their books when they don’t want to answer. Strange that Bulgakov didn’t, don’t you think?”

The psychic was slightly wrong-footed by the question, but luckily for him, at that very moment a key turned in the lock behind me. The hinges creaked, and Zhorik stuck his head inside.

“So? How did it go? Everything work out?”

“More or less,” Bogdan replied, not very confidently. “Though somebody certainly managed to throw a spanner in the works.”

“Sorry, bro — the ticket lady watches the whole place like a hawk. She thinks this is her apartment and we’re just guests,” Zhorik said, bowing his head with exaggerated solemnity. “If we need to come back, I’ll stand guard at the door so she’s not left alone... you know... as they say. You get me.”

“Deal,” said Bogdan.

He zipped up his backpack and, together with Zhorik, was the first to hurry out of the Bulgakov House. Gleb followed them. I brought up the rear, thinking how simply and yet elegantly today’s little performance had been staged.

I couldn’t know for sure, but for some reason I was almost convinced it had been Zhorik himself knocking on our door, by prior arrangement with the psychic mage, to keep the “session” from dragging on: the longer it went, the greater the risk of giving themselves away to Gleb over some trivial slip even Bogdan wouldn’t be able to explain.

I wondered whether Gleb would come with us to Petersburg. Or would one trial session at Bulgakov’s be enough for him?

And what would happen in Europe? Would Bogdan offer me a cut? Or keep playing his role?

Either way, this strange business of searching for something that didn’t exist still promised to be interesting.

A mystical comedy starring Bogdan the mage seemed guaranteed to provide an unforgettable ride through this sweltering, tedious summer.

On the way home from the session, it occurred to me that, for the full experience, I needed to become more than a passive extra in this production — I needed to direct at least part of it. To that end, I decided to immerse myself more deeply in the material: to study the places and the fates of the writers before listening to Popoff’s patter at future sessions.

The first location and the first literary genius had already been chosen, and from now on, clearly, Bogdan would be calling the shots. Given that the younger Zapletin had a project with an open budget, where the number of sessions and their cost were limited only by the mage’s imagination, I considered Popoff’s comedy a fairly shrewd piece of dramaturgy, created for a single spectator — who also happened to be its executive sponsor.

Since Bogdan’s first choice in this odyssey of code-hunting had fallen on Fyodor Mikhailovich, when I got home I tried to dig deeper into the subject of “Petersburg in Dostoevsky’s work,” but treacherous Google served up a stack of cookie-cutter articles I’d known since school.

The AI, however, generated a long and rather curious text in which I once again found a reference to an article by Svyatopolk-Mirsky. Staring at the screen, I couldn’t help remembering the old saying: if someone calls you a horse once, punch him in the face; the second time, think it over; the third time, go and buy yourself a saddle.

Since that peculiar surname had surfaced three times in the space of a single day, I decided such a coincidence of puzzle pieces might well be a sign — and set off to fetch the saddle... or rather, the information.

All I had to do was type “Svyatopolk-Mirsky” into a search engine, and it was immediately clear that the man’s fate was every bit as remarkable as his name.

Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky, son of the Minister of Internal Affairs of tsarist Russia, had served as an officer and fought in the Civil War under Kolchak. Later he emigrated, lived in Poland, Greece, and England, then abruptly changed colors and returned to the Soviets under the sobriquet “the Red Prince”—a moniker worthy of any comic-book hero. The “Prince’s” most celebrated work was *A History of Russian Literature from the Earliest Times to 1925*, a book Nabokov praised with great fervor—and one that, though originally written in English, appeared in Russian only in the 1990s, and even then in something resembling samizdat.

Wading through the torrent of links the World Wide Web had thrown up on my computer, I stumbled across a highly diverting resource called *Svyatopolk-Vsemirsky: A Neuro-Literary Scholar*.

Once I had taken a proper look around the site, I realized that certain unnamed—unnamed in the most literal sense, since there was not a single mention of its creators—developers had not merely gathered information about the “Red Prince,” but had reconstructed his digital persona by means of a neural network built expressly for the purpose.

The homepage greeted me with the following words:

“A most pleasant day to you! Delighted to have you as my guest. Do ask me any questions that pop into your head—I shall do my best to answer them all. Though preferably about literature, if you don’t mind!

Yours most sincerely, Svyatopolk-Vsemirsky.”

Below was a text input field. After a moment’s thought, I typed:

“What is your view of Bulgakov?”

The reply was not long in coming—and proved far more intriguing, and far more substantial, than I could ever have anticipated.

2023. Alternative 1936.

//ChatVSEMIRSKIY

Title: Bulgakov, Literary Code

In the 1930s, Moscow—the majestic, restless heart of the USSR—became the unwitting witness to a strange dance of history. Its streets had exchanged the rhythms of pre-revolutionary life for the eerie symphony of communism and chaos.

Shadows of the past still loomed like specters, but Moscow was already another creature: a chameleon city, cloaked in the crimson hues of Bolshevik ideology. Opulent tsarist architecture had been repurposed for the proletariat; the imperial sheen was blown clean from the facades of old buildings by the harsh wind of change.

In the midst of this transformation, Muscovites fashioned a future out of whatever lay to hand, as best they could. Proletarians, intelligentsia, artists, party apparatchiks—all were woven into a tapestry of paradoxes. In a single city square one might meet the ardor of a true believer, the coarse suspicion of a zealous propagandist, and the vacant stare of an exhausted skeptic.

The Arbat, Moscow’s historic artery, pulsed with a vivid, unmistakable energy. Along the walls of buildings papered with communist slogans, street vendors hawked, with ferocious zeal, anything that could be turned into money, as if searching in this modest trade for familiar, half-forgotten fragments of the past. As before, the smell of fresh bread and borscht hung in the air, but now that familiar metropolitan spirit carried a new note: the ambient tang of proletarian disorder.

Moscow evenings were swathed in the dim glow of streetlamps, their light casting anxious, restless shadows over the cobblestones. At clandestine gatherings, whispered voices weighed the fate of the motherland, traded grim stories of fellow citizens, and spun intrigues. The works of Marx and Lenin were held up against the reality that had grown from their theoretical soil, while the night air carried NEP-era traces of forbidden jazz—a rebellious counterpoint to the symphony of the state.

Jazz!

And above it all, like a sentinel, stood the Kremlin—the embodiment of all-consuming imperial power and ambition. Its crimson towers, their brick battlements thrust toward the sky, served as an eternal reminder of the dictatorship of power. Yet even inside its palatial halls, trampled under soldiers’ boots, people whispered of secrets. Alliances were forged there, and human fates were changed with a single stroke of the pen.

It was that “emergency hour” when past and present collided head-on at full speed, like two armored trains. Ideology and reality were still wrestling for supremacy, while in the dim corners of the jazz clubs that had once dotted Moscow’s map, the spirit of rebellion had already found its voice. The mournful wail of the saxophone and the piercing cry of the trumpet screamed defiance, belonging equally to merchants, bandits, and intelligentsia—sounds that transcended language and politics. In those hazy, smoke-filled rooms, jazz offered solace and freedom to all who hungered for both, defying the conformity of Stalin’s regime.

Joseph Stalin — a rootless thug who had risen to lead a gang of revolutionary adventurers — cast a long, sinister shadow over Moscow and the whole Soviet Union. His presence was everywhere, his power beyond question, his paranoia almost tangible. Arrests had become a nightly requiem: even the most innocent murmur of dissent, the faintest suspicion of disloyalty, could bring that ominous knock at the door. The labyrinthine streets of Moscow bore witness to the disappearance of those who dared, openly, to question the humanity of the new age — swallowed whole by the insatiable maw of the secret police.

In the midst of this imperial-proletarian upheaval, literature was both weapon and refuge. Ink ran into letters on the page like the lifeblood of a society wrestling with its own identity. Writers and poets moved on tiptoe along the razor’s edge between artistic expression and political danger, hiding their words inside metaphors and allegories, waiting for those who could decipher their secret meaning.

Those were the real thirties, the golden age of the “merry life.” As if someone had pried open the gates of hell inside a burial vault and let music burst into the graveyard silence.

Jazz.

Jazz was practically everywhere.

Jazz gave us a sense of freedom — us, living in that taut, strained world of the 1930s. Jazz bestowed what Stalin had called the “merry life.” After all, until a Black Maria came for you or one of your own, you could very well enjoy yourself — work, stroll, have a drink, watch a film, or read a book.

The last two items on that list are, of course, no accident. The so-called “merry life” in the Union was the responsibility, among others, of Bulgakov and Erdman.

I became acquainted with the work of both almost as soon as I returned to the Soviet Union. Back then, the USSR was producing quite a few wonderful, lighthearted films that had precious little to do with totalitarianism as such. *Jolly Fellows*, *The Feast of St. Jorgen*, *Circus* — the list could go on for some time, but I think it would be pointless to waste your invaluable time on it. These days, all of it is easily Googled.

Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.

Now, about the comedies. The darlings of the Soviet establishment in those days were the stars of the comic genre: the director Grigory Alexandrov, the actress Lyubov Orlova, and the magnificent composer Isaak Dunayevsky. Each of them had Stalin Prizes to their name, and each was adored both by the “status elite” and, for lack of any other “stars,” by “ordinary Soviet people.”

All the more remarkable, then, that Mikhail Afanasyevich was denied such attention. Then again, he wrote and joked about other things, and in another way — which, most likely, was the chief reason for his “lack of success.” By 1930, when Bulgakov was already working as a director at the Central Theater of Working-Class Youth — TRAM, as it was commonly known — his works were scarcely being published at all, and his plays were being removed from theater repertoires. *Flight* was personally banned by Stalin in 1929. *The Days of the Turbins* and *The Crimson Island* were banned almost by inertia.

Such was the TRAM-TRAM-TRAM of it all.

Worst of all, the *Literary Encyclopedia*, published around the same time — and with which, fortunately, I have nothing whatsoever to do — declared of Bulgakov that “he was unable either to appreciate the passing of the old or to understand the building of the new.” The people’s victory, it claimed, brought him no joy; he merely accepted it with “the great ache of submission.”

In March 1930, Mikhail Afanasyevich wrote to his brother Nikolai in Paris, complaining of wretched affairs and dwindling stores. Around the same time, nearer April, Bulgakov decided to send a letter to the Soviet government. In it he pleaded openly: either grant me the right to leave, to emigrate, that is, or allow me to work at the Moscow Art Theatre.

On April 18, Stalin himself telephoned Mikhail Afanasyevich and firmly advised the playwright to apply to the theatre’s management for a position at the MAT, where Bulgakov eventually served as an assistant director until 1936 — hardly a glittering triumph, of course, but under the circumstances it felt like one.

At the time it was my comrade Gorky who interceded for Bulgakov — he even wrote to Stalin, saying that Soviet critics had conjured an anti-Soviet play out of *The Days of the Turbins*, when in fact the play was nothing of the sort. And yet Gorky kept his distance from Bulgakov — which was logical enough, at least in an official letter to hell. At the same time, Gorky was right to point out that Bulgakov was a gifted writer, and the Union did not have so many of those that it made sense to turn him into a martyr to an idea. Then came the obligatory passage for the period: “An enemy must either be destroyed or re-educated, and this one I propose to re-educate.”

And the heart of the matter: “no means of livelihood.” And the proposed solution: Bulgakov supposedly longs for a meeting with Stalin.

Presumably for the sake of more rapid re-education.

But was Bulgakov ever re-educated?

If you remember the episode in *The Master and Margarita* with the ape jazz — of course not...

The AI-generated answer to my query went on at length after that, but I stopped reading to catch my breath. Perhaps I simply needed to tear myself away from the text, which was drawing me into some unknown atmosphere of the thirties, wrapping itself around me like a cocoon there in the study. Perhaps that mad blend of past and future, reality and fantasy, was weaving too gaudy a canvas to take in all at once.

I wonder how many truly sound conclusions a neural network of this sort can draw from a mixture of false and true facts?

I lit a cigar and, having restored my sense of the present, went on reading, my eyes fixed on the computer screen.

...Isn’t this episode from *The Master and Margarita* — to borrow a word today’s young people are so fond of — a cosplay of the scene in *Jolly Fellows* where the musicians, dressed in rags and soaked to the skin, dance?

Their antics are repulsive.

And their jazz is virtuosic.

Is this not a ball at Woland’s court? Utter scoundrels playing exquisite music...

And it is not the only episode in the book that reads like a clone of a scene from Alexandrov’s film.

The orchestra of a hundred and fifty, the call-and-response of the literary variety show, the arrival of a foreign artist — all of it is there in *Jolly Fellows*.

The musicians’ brawl — Woland’s ball again.

At this point, I think, there is no use arguing.

Many years later, I suppose, it must be almost impossible to imagine that all this — *Jolly Fellows*, *The Master and Margarita*, Stalin — belonged to one and the same era, the 1930s.

But I saw it with what were, for all intents and purposes, my own eyes, and I can attest: that is how it was.

With only one reservation: all of it was dancing at the edge of an abyss. And if Alexandrov’s films seemed to be trying to shield us from it with their own bodies, fending off, with grimaces and dances, the heart-rending spectacle of hell gaping open, then Bulgakov, in *The Master and Margarita*, seemed, on the contrary, to tear aside the great canopy stretched over the bottomless pit that led to the very heart of the Inferno.

But who was parodying whom, you will surely ask? Judging by the chronology, it would appear that Bulgakov wrote his masterpiece under the influence of Alexandrov’s films.

In reality, matters proved a little more complicated.

In 1936, still under the spell of the excerpts from *The Master and Margarita* that I had managed to read in samizdat, I found myself, at the invitation of the screenwriter Sergey Yermolinsky, at a reception where, among others, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was present. Yermolinsky led me into a hall dominated by a long table laden with food and drink. The dozens of guests in the room would, from time to time, drift over to help themselves to whatever took their fancy. Bulgakov proved to be one of these pilgrims. Twirling a glass of vodka between his fingers, the writer — judging by the intent expression on his face — was surveying the spread in search of a suitable zakuska. He grimaced at the herring among the dishes, clearly not to his taste, but did not disdain a lightly salted pickle.

I could not let such a moment pass. Snatching a glass from the table, I approached Mikhail Afanasyevich and ventured, cautiously:

“Could anything be more fitting than a little vodka on a Friday evening?”

Bulgakov shot me a sidelong glance, clinked his glass against mine, and then, with a mocking smile, pronounced sententiously:

“Vodka is the enemy, the savings bank is our friend! And so we mercilessly annihilate the vodka!”

And he tossed it back at once.

I seconded the joke and drained my glass in one gulp. It scorched me all the way down to the liver. I was no friend of vodka, I confess, but for the sake of such an acquaintance, a drink was hardly a sin.

Bulgakov set his glass on the table and looked me over.

“Have we met?”

“Not yet,” I replied, offering my hand. “Dmitry Petrovich Vsemirsky, literary scholar and critic. But I recognized you at once — forgive me, Mikhail Afanasyevich.”

“Well, well.” Bulgakov smirked. “So I am acquiring a reputation in literary circles, am I?”

“Oh, come now, no false modesty. I’ve read excerpts from your novel *The Master and Margarita*. I hope that one day I shall be able to read the whole thing — it is so compelling, and so utterly original!”

“Indeed.” On hearing that I had read his excerpts, Bulgakov looked astonished — boundlessly, genuinely astonished. “And where, may I ask, did you come across excerpts from my novel?”

“Samizdat,” I answered evasively. “I can no longer recall from whom those drafts reached me, but it was marvellous, truly. Who inspired all those extraordinary episodes — Woland’s ball, for instance? Alexandrov?”

“Alexandrov...” Bulgakov muttered, with a little laugh. “Alexandrov, of course, is quite the... creator.”

He glanced around, as if searching the room for the director. But as far as I knew, only screenwriters and writers had gathered here—people whose virtuosity lay in words rather than in the camera, though no doubt the two tribes overlapped considerably. I remembered the playwright Yermolinsky once letting slip that real conversation required people who thought in words, not pictures. And now I could see for myself that there was something in it: the guests, breaking into little knots with glasses and plates in hand, were talking animatedly of this and that. Snatches reached my ear: *revolution, literature, hero, conflict, drama*—each word seeming to describe yet another story or play by someone in the room.

Meanwhile, Mikhail Afanasyevich, briefly pursing his lips as if tasting the word *conflict* for himself, said:

“Let us forget Alexandrov for the moment, Dmitry Petrovich. As for my drafts… The material had been accumulating for quite some time. It began when, in the early thirties, I became friends with William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Moscow…”

And Bulgakov told me about clandestine meetings in smoke-filled apartments and dimly lit clubs crawling with Stalin’s watchful NKVD agents. About their conversations—between the ambassador of a foreign, alien, capitalist country and a Russian writer who, to the very end, never quite became Soviet. Bullitt adored *The Days of the Turbins*; Bulgakov wanted, at the very least, to be published in America and Europe, and, at the very most, to leave for good.

But that does not mean their every meeting came down to the same refrain: *so when, when will it happen?* They lived in Moscow in the thirties, where the inquiring human spirit, like a jazz improvisation, went on seeking meaning and beauty amid the dissonance of the age and the surrounding “bleakness.”

“We simply saw this world differently from most people living in the capital,” Bulgakov said, as if by way of explanation. “Each in his own way, but above all—on our own terms, not *as we were told*. And so it interested us to compare our impressions of Moscow, of the Union, of life in general, if only to make sure we had not gone mad. And then, about a year ago, there was a reception at Spaso House, which showed just how different Bullitt’s and the Americans’ view of Soviet people was from our own view of ourselves.”

On April 23, 1935, Spaso House—the industrialist Vtorov’s magnificent mansion on the Arbat—hosted a most curious reception, attended by “the five hundred most important people in Moscow,” everyone except Stalin. The Americans, as hosts, made an honest effort to enjoy themselves and amuse their guests, but with only modest success. The Bolshevik intellectuals Bukharin, Bubnov, and Radek were already on the downward slope of their political careers, wondering what awaited them after the fall. Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Budyonny—the high command of the Soviet Army—were by then already hostages to the double game of Soviet and German intelligence. And the theatrical elite had forgotten how to enjoy life altogether, existing in a state of perpetual anticipation of groundless punishment—swift or agonizingly drawn out, depending on one’s luck.

That evening, at Bullitt’s instigation, the guests were to assemble at midnight. They danced in the columned hall, washed in colored spotlights, and marveled at the fluttering birds. In the corners of the room, visitors stopped in astonishment before pens with kids, sheep, and bear cubs. By the tall windows stood cages of roosters, which at three in the morning suddenly broke into raucous crowing, proclaiming the dawn.

The ball’s “dress code,” as people say nowadays, deserves a word of its own.

“My wife called the whole thing *style russe*,” Bulgakov added with a crooked grin. “Everyone but the military men wore tails. I didn’t own a tailcoat, so I put on a black suit. My wife wore a dark blue dress with pale pink flowers. The Bolsheviks were the funniest of all. Bukharin turned up in some old-fashioned frock coat, Radek in tourist get-up, if you can imagine it. Bubnov had apparently been presented with a brand-new military uniform by the valiant Red Guards. There was also a well-known informer in diplomatic Moscow — a certain Baron Steiger. He had squeezed himself into a tailcoat too. But the longest tailcoat belonged to the conductor — it reached all the way to his heels!”

In short, by Mikhail Afanasyevich’s own account, the spectacle was remarkable for its sheer absurdity.

Curiously, Bullitt’s embassy “party,” which he himself called the “Spring Festival,” caused quite a stir among Moscow’s beau monde. Bullitt even wrote to President Roosevelt afterward: “It was a very successful reception, very dignified and at the same time gay... Probably the best here since the Revolution. We obtained a thousand tulips from Helsinki, forced a great many birch trees to bud ahead of time, and set up at one end of the dining room a sort of kolkhoz with peasants playing the accordion, dancers, and all sorts of baby things — birds, kids, and a pair of small bear cubs.”

Watching Mikhail Afanasyevich hold forth, with unmistakable delight, about the Spring Festival, I could not help wondering how an ordinary Soviet citizen would have reacted if, after a long, exhausting shift at the factory, he had happened upon the “workers of the revolution” letting themselves go in the company of the American ambassador — dancing, say, with bear cubs to the wheeze of an accordion.

I imagine the proletarian would first have frozen in stupefaction, then worked himself into a rage over “idlers, parasites, and the ‘new bourgeoisie’”... but then, of course, he would have “understood and forgiven.” He would have put that wild revelry down to a well-earned rest after the grueling labor of steering so vast a machine as the Soviet Union... and in the end he would have blamed himself for his own faint-heartedness.

As always.

The conclusion struck me as rather clever, but I was too shy to share it with Bulgakov. Meanwhile, in the middle of his anecdote, he had poured himself another glass and, having finished the story about Bullitt, tossed it back. Seizing the pause, I asked eagerly:

“And Alexandrov? Was he there too? At the ball?”

“What is it about this Alexandrov that has got so under your skin?” Bulgakov winced — whether at the vodka or at the question, it was hard to tell. “Alexandrov, for that matter, didn’t dream up all those marvelous scenes on his own either. I would go so far as to say he didn’t dream them up at all. It all began, back then, with the text. Everything always begins with the text — you and I, of all people, ought to know that.”

Mikhail Afanasyevich gave a meaningful glance off to one side, and, following it, I noticed a gaunt, gloomy-looking man.

“Forgive me, but I don’t recognize him,” I admitted.

“That’s Nikolai Erdman,” Bulgakov whispered. “One of the screenwriters of *Jolly Fellows* — and an old friend of mine.”

The words struck me like a thunderbolt.

So that was the secret!

That was where *The Master* and *Jolly Fellows* had a common root!…

But why couldn’t I remember seeing his name in the credits?…

Deciding it must simply be a trick of my own selective memory, I let the question go.

“They’ve only just come back to Moscow — he and Mass, the other screenwriter,” Mikhail Afanasyevich went on.

“Where were they? On location?”

Bulgakov looked at me with mournful irony and said quietly:

“More like gathering material. You truly haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” I asked cautiously.

Mikhail Afanasyevich paused, evidently weighing how far he could trust me. Then, in a voice lower still:

“In 1933, they were arrested right there in Gagra, in the middle of shooting *Jolly Fellows*.”

“But… what for?” I stammered.

“For satirical verses and fables.”

“Now I understand why their names were cut from the credits,” I said grimly.

“Exactly. The screenwriters each got three years’ exile, and only now have they been allowed to return to Moscow. And even that won’t be for long.”

“Why?”

“Because they won’t be seeing housing here for years to come,” Mikhail Afanasyevich said with heavy emphasis. “Whereas Alexandrov has no such problems. Took all the credit for the film, lined his shelves with awards, and that was the end of it. Though the script was much better than what ended up on the screen.”

“Really?”

“Well, you’ll have to take my word for it.” Bulgakov smirked. “The plot is far more intricate, more interesting — and more logical, for that matter. Why? Because Erdman is a far better dramatist than Alexandrov. Kolya, if you’ll pardon the expression, knows a certain literary code…”

“A literary code?” I said, astonished. “What on earth is that?”

“You tell me.” Mikhail Afanasyevich’s smile widened. “You’re the literary scholar!”

Naturally, I parried with a joke and tried to draw out what Bulgakov meant, but he deftly changed the subject, and not long after that disappeared from the evening altogether — taking Erdman with him.

All I was left with from that encounter was the habit of chasing vodka with a half-sour pickle, and a lingering bewilderment: what, exactly, was this mysterious “literary code”?..

I reread the neural network’s generated answer several times. One question kept turning over in my head: *What was this text supposed to be?* The utterly preposterous yarn spun by the artificial intelligence about a meeting between Bulgakov and “Vsemirsky” (in reality, from the little I had managed to piece together about Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s biography, he had never once crossed paths with the author of *The Master and Margarita*) struck me as more believable than many an authentic memoir by the writers and statesmen who had actually lived through those years.

What made it still more intriguing was how neatly the whole business of that notorious literary code fitted into it. In effect, “Vsemirsky” had unwittingly confirmed my hunch: if the code really did exist, its only possible bearer could have been Bulgakov.

But that was merely another round of what if, what if.

I tried pressing the neural network with follow-up questions, but all I got was Vsemirsky suggesting I “wait until tomorrow—too many requests from your end. We are still in the development phase. We appreciate your understanding!”

Her limitations were somewhat disconcerting, but I decided to push on with the experiment anyway—after the trip to Petersburg and my “encounter with Dostoevsky.” Then I could compare impressions afterward.