Of Navoi’s three famous love poems, Dilorom told me the most about Layli and Majnun: the ill-fated romance between a young boy named Qays and his schoolmate Layli, who belongs to a rival clan. Driven mad by his forbidden love, Qays transforms into Majnun, the Madman. His heart falls to pieces like a pomegranate. Roaming the streets and bazaars, he recites poetry about the affliction that has doomed him to a life of misery. Majnun’s father swallows his family pride and asks Layli’s father to let the young people marry. But Layli’s father doesn’t want his daughter to marry a crazy person with a pomegranate heart. He replies that Majnun should be taken to the Black Stone of Kaaba, to be cured of his love. Instead, Majnun goes to Layli’s tent and beats himself with stones.
When Majnun’s father finally does take the unhappy boy to Kaaba, Majnun is unable to pray for the love to be removed from his heart. “You torment me with this love, but I don’t say, ‘liberate me from it and make me like other people.’ Instead I ask for more. Whatever color you made Love to be, I want to be that color, too,” he tells God. He recites a poem about the characters in Layli’s name. One letter has dots over it, representing nails driven into his body; another, C-shaped letter hangs around his neck; a third letter, shaped like a mountain range, symbolizes the mountains that are sitting on his heart. Majnun lurks outside Layli’s tent writing her long letters: “Take the muscles out of my body and make a leash for your little dog!” Layli is given in marriage to a rich clansman, who takes her far away. Day and night she clutches a knife, poised to kill herself if he tries to touch her.
Majnun goes into the desert, forgets human language, and acquires the language of gazelles. The gazelles are beautiful, with big sad eyes just like Layli’s. Majnun paces like a drunken lion, recites ghazals,* wastes away. In the Arabic script, which omits vowels, gazelle and ghazal have the same spelling: the language of gazelles is thus a figure for poetic language. Dilorom told me that another homonym for gazelle and ghazal is a word meaning “eyelid”; hence a famous line from one of Navoi’s ghazals: “I sweep the floor at your feet with my eyelashes.”
In the desert, Majnun also befriends lions, monkeys, deer, snakes, foxes, and some kind of bird that sometimes carries letters for him. It is difficult not to be impressed by the richness of animal life in the Old Uzbek deserts. In one story a hero perishes by killing so many stags that their blood soaks the desert floor and awakens a swamp that swallows him up, together with his hunting entourage and his beautiful Chinese bride.
Years pass, and Layli’s husband dies of a heart attack. She calls Majnun to her, but someone tells her that Majnun is sick and probably won’t come. In fact he isn’t especially sick, and rushes to her side, but by the time he gets there, she has died of grief. He sees her body laid out for the funeral, lies next to her, and dies.
Some Eastern scholars believe that Romeo and Juliet was informed by a Latin translation of Layli and Majnun. How else to explain all the shared features: star-crossed lovers from feuding families, heroes who make journeys into exile, poetic orations over heroines’ corpses? Shakespeare scholars object that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have read Layli and Majnun in any language, that his sources are known to have been French and Italian—and that, as for unhappy families, star-crossed lovers, and exiled heroes, they are simply universal.
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* In languages with vowel harmony, every word typically contains either “back vowels” (in Turkish, a, i, o, u) or “front vowels” (e, i, ö, ü), but not both. There are multiple forms of every declension and verb tense to match the different kinds of vowels.
* What Is to Be Done? and Who Is to Blame? were influential nineteenth-century political novels by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Alexander Herzen.
* The ghazal is a short lyric form of Persian origin, consisting of rhymed couplets, usually on the subject of romantic love and religious mysticism.
The House of Ice
In 1703, Peter the Great decided to build a new imperial capital. As the location, he chose a semi-inhabited morass on the Gulf of Finland, which not only was ruled by his enemy the king of Sweden, but was frozen solid five months of the year and subject to flooding the rest of the time. Over seven hundred thousand serfs, soldiers, convicts, and Swedish prisoners were conscripted to clear the forests, level the hills, dig canals, drain the wetlands, and drive sixteen-foot-long oaken piles into the ground. For want of shovels, the workers dug up dirt with their bare hands and carried it away in their shirts. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation, cholera, and fatigue. “I doubt one could find a battle in military history that led to the death of more soldiers than the number of laborers who died in Petersburg,” wrote the historian Klyuchevsky, who characterized the city as “a big cemetery.”
This cemetery, which eventually became one of the world’s most beautiful cities, is presided over by the Bronze Horseman: a monument of Peter the Great astride a rearing steed, apparently about to leap off a cliff into the Neva. The monument, cast by Falconet in 1782 on the orders of Catherine the Great, was immortalized by Alexander Pushkin in “The Bronze Horseman”: a poem dramatizing the great flood of 1824 as the revenge of the elements against the tsar. When Pushkin’s hero, a poor clerk called Evgeny, curses the “fatal will” of him who caused a city to spring up from the sea, the Bronze Horseman leaps off his pedestal and pursues him through the streets, driving him mad.
Falconet’s monument and Pushkin’s poem are the two linchpins of the so-called myth of St. Petersburg. Like all myths, the myth of St. Petersburg is a selective construction. Here is something you won’t find in it. In the winter of 1740, Peter the Great’s niece, Anna Ioannovna, commissioned a sculpture bigger, stranger, and more immediately menacing than the Bronze Horseman: a massive ice palace, built for the wedding of two court jesters who were forced to spend their nuptial night inside. Just as Catherine’s Bronze Horseman catalyzed a celebrated poem by Pushkin, so did Anna’s monument inspire a literary production of its own: The House of Ice, a cloak-and-dagger romance by Pushkin’s contemporary Ivan Lazhechnikov, in which the ice palace serves as the hub of a vast political conspiracy linking a network of historical and fictional personages, including a diminutive black secretary who periodically reads aloud from his translation of Machiavelli.
I first found out about Lazhechnikov’s House of Ice from my classmate Luba, who read it while researching her dissertation, and instantly became convinced that she and I had to bring this work—which had apparently never been published in English—to the American people. Recalling our earlier experiences cotranslating some particularly abstruse and belligerent essays on film by Kasimir Malevich, I said something to the effect that translation jobs always made me want to jump out a window.
“But this would be nothing like last time,” said Luba, who had already identified a grant we could apply for. “You’ll really like Lazhechnikov. The main character has a black secretary who follows him everywhere.”
“Is the book narrated by the black secretary?” I asked warily. I was working at that time on a typology of “narrating sidekicks,” and was interested in squires, valets, and secretaries.