‘That’s in revenge for the throne,’ Dunya whispered to Solovyov.
Kvasha was already standing at the lectern. He had dark skin and closely cut hair; he was fairly gloomy. After asking to be forgiven for playing with words, he began by saying that his innovation—the paper was called ‘General Larionov as Holy Fool’—had its own tradition. Needless to say, he was referring to Alexander Ya. Petrov-Pokhabnik’s article, ‘The General’s Holy Foolishness’, published back in 1932 in The Phenomenology of Holy Foolishness.
This article listed some of the general’s traits and actions that did not fit with the usual accepted notions of army life overall, or with the officer corps’ upper echelon, in particular. Among other things, there were references to the general’s recurrent conversations with horses, his pathological (in the author’s opinion) passion for railroad transport, and also the four birds (crane, raven, swallow, and starling) that lived in the general’s train car, something witnesses had confirmed; some were cited in Alexei Ravenov’s article ‘The Blue Train Carriage.’ Beyond those facts, there were also veiled allusions regarding certain allegedly strange orders from the general immediately before the Reds captured Yalta. Nothing concrete was said about these orders except that Larionov’s subordinates were extraordinarily surprised to hear them. It was apparently at this time that the term ‘holy fool’ was first applied to the general.
Kvasha began his criticism of Petrov-Pokhabnik’s work by offering details from the author’s biography. Kvasha had managed to ascertain that before Petrov-Pokhabnik evacuated from Crimea, he had been registered as holding the position of stableman (Kvasha was of the opinion that this may explain Petrov-Pokhabnik’s jealousy toward the general’s conversations with horses, as well as his obvious distaste for railroad transport) in the army entrusted to the general, after which, following his move from Constantinople to Prague, he made a living writing out clean copies of works by the Prague Linguistic Circle. Having grown accustomed to the process of making copies, Petrov-Pokhabnik himself did not even realize he was writing his first paper on the informational structure of sentences, evoking Roman Jakobson’s unfeigned amazement. Petrov-Pokhabnik was forced to leave the circle in the early 1930s as a result of his openly Saussurean understanding of the problems of synchrony and diachrony. Members of the circle were prepared to forgive him anything at all, just not following Ferdinand de Saussure.
It was during that same period—while making a clean copy of a collection of articles, The Phenomenology of Holy Foolishness—that the former stableman would prepare and submit his piece about the general for the collection. As a person who gave his all to his material, Petrov-Pokhabnik himself began holyfooling it a bit, too. He would walk Prague’s streets barefoot in any season—something people there still recall—and shock passers-by with announcements about how there had simply not been any truly scientific studies of holy foolishness until his. Sometimes he tossed stones at the windows of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
Oddly enough, Kvasha’s primary grievance with his predecessor was that he did not understand the phenomenology of holy foolishness. His predecessor’s infatuation with holy fools’ external attributes (this infatuation manifested itself, among other things, in the curses Petrov-Pokhabnik addressed to his opponents) meant he could not gain genuine insight into holy foolishness as an occurrence. From Kvasha’s point of view, by focusing on the eccentric side of the matter, Petrov-Pokhabnik did not discern the foremost aspect of holy foolishness: the spiritual sense.
Alongside this was the Prague researcher’s misunderstanding of several Church Slavonic texts. After all, noted the unrelenting Kvasha, Petrov-Pokhabnik’s previous line of work did not assume his familiarity with Church Slavonic. Kvasha himself knew the language perfectly, which allowed him to not only quote Church Slavonic texts with ease but also to fully understand them. After briefly touching upon the history of the study of holy foolishness as a whole, referencing myriad articles from around the world, Kvasha appealed for the most important points to be stressed, and then moved on to examine an issue related to the general.
Kvasha did not deny elements of holy foolishness in the general’s behavior. Beyond that, he showed—basing his discussion on research into the hagiography of holy fools—that the general’s contemporaries’ recollections about him were often rooted in ancient Russian examples. For the presenter, one of the key points of this juxtaposition was the description of holy foolishness as being dead for the world. ‘“The hagiographical hero”,’ Kvasha read, bringing his glasses to his eyes to read from Tatyana Rudi’s ‘On the Topic of the Hagiography of Holy Fools’, ‘withdraws from the everyday situation, from life in his “native” society, and shifts into another society or—from the point of view of that previous society—into an “alien” one, as if he has ceased to exist for it (the previous society) and has thus shifted within it to the status of “dead”.’ After finishing the quotation from Rudi’s article, the researcher offered eloquent examples of how the general left his society.
First and foremost, he addressed statements about the birds staying in the train car with the general and mentioned, as a parallel, a story (from the Kiev Caves Patericon) about Isaac of the Kiev Caves, in which an incident with a raven served to push Isaac into becoming a holy fool. The presenter, however, answered in the negative regarding whether the general’s holy foolishness began with the appearance of the aforementioned birds in the train car.
Continuing the avian theme, Kvasha also recalled parallels that were closer to the general, both in terms of time and line of work. He had in mind facts from the biography of Russian Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov, who did not consider it disgraceful to crow like a rooster in cases of objective necessity. And so, after announcing for all to hear that he would attack the Poles under Kosćiuszko’s command at the first rooster’s crowing, he misled them (the Poles). In fact, the field marshal himself cock-a-doodle-doo’d that evening, without waiting for the morning roosters. He also flapped his arms against his sides, striving for an external resemblance to a bird. His troops marched out at twilight and thoroughly routed the enemy. Under more tranquil circumstances, the great commander was known to wake his soldiers with a cock-a-doodle-doo.
Beyond that—and this was the closest parallel to the general’s behavior—at Great Lent, Suvorov ordered that one room in his house be strewn with sand, then he arranged potted firs and pines there and let in birds. The birds were released into the wild after Easter, upon the arrival of warm weather.
Needless to say, the presenter mentioned the general’s infamous conversations with horses, something Petrov-Pokhabnik had examined in his day, too. Kvasha considered his predecessor’s coverage of this topic detailed but tendentious.
Kvasha also acknowledged that the general’s ride on a cart with a load of sand along the frozen Sivash was not exactly traditional for the upper echelons of the officer corps. Despite the ride being explainable—to verify the ice’s strength—the method itself could not but provoke questions.