NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH AND CAMOUFLAGE RUSSIAN LIBRARY The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising vari- ety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre. Editorial Board: Vsevolod Bagno Dmitry Bak Rosamund Bartlett Caryl Emerson Peter B. Kaufman Mark Lipovetsky Oliver Ready Stephanie Sandler (cid:631)(cid:632)(cid:631) For a list of books in the series, see page 203 N I Y K K S V O O K L H S A E IL A Z U Y N I K O d e L a t r a n s l ffi e l d A T y D u h i t e E b W y b e d V E d i t s s o I u F e n C n a u s O S H WO S T TW O VE EL SL NO V N Columbia University Press New York Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Translation copyright © 2019 Duffield White and Susanne Fusso All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Aleshkovskii, IUz, author. | Fusso, Susanne, editor. | Container of (expression): Aleshkovskii, IUz. Nikolai Nikolaevich. English (White) | Container of (expression): Aleshkovskii, IUz. Maskirovka. English (White) Title: Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage : two novels / Yuz Aleshkovsky ; translated by Duffield White ; edited by Susanne Fusso. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2019. | Series: Russian library Identifiers: LCCN 2018043952 (print) | LCCN 2018047140 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231548458 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231189668 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231189675 (pbk.) Classification: LCC PG3478.L443 (e-book) | LCC PG3478.L443 A2 2019 (print) | DDC 891.73/44—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043952 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich Book design: Lisa Hamm CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction by Susanne Fusso ix NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH 1 CAMOUFLAGE 99 Notes 187 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS T he translator and editor would like to thank Yuz Alesh- kovsky for granting permission to translate these two ground-breaking novels, and for being constantly avail- able for clarifications and explanations of context. We have long enjoyed the supreme privilege of being Yuz’s colleagues and friends, and we are delighted to have been able to play a role in bringing these works to the English-speaking readership. We also thank Irina Aleshkovsky for her invaluable help with questions of trans- lation and interpretation. We are grateful to Priscilla Meyer, Pro- fessor of Russian, Emerita, for bringing Yuz and Irina to Wesleyan and making Aleshkovsky’s work part of our curriculum. Sergei Bunaev provided helpful answers to translation queries. Thanks to Yuz for introducing us to his Moscow friends (Andrei Bitov, Olga Shamborant, Sergei Bocharov, the Fingerovs, the Goreliks, and the Lebedevs), who helped us understand the pleasures of being Nikolai Nikolaevich’s original audience. And thanks to William White for accurately transcribing the translator’s first attempts to speak Aleshkovsky’s wit in English. viii \ Acknowledgments We thank Christine Dunbar of Columbia University Press for her cheerful encouragement and for her hard work in shepherding these novels to publication. Oliver Ready, of the Editorial Board for the Russian Library series, offered detailed comments that helped us greatly improve the introduction and the translation itself. Two anonymous readers also provided excellent suggestions that we have endeavored to incorporate. Allan Berlind, Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Wesleyan, read the introduction and notes with an eye to the discussion of Soviet genetics, and we are grate- ful for his assistance. All remaining errors are of course our own. Thanks also to Victoria Smolkin, Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan, for suggestions on sources about Soviet science. We would also like to thank Jean Findley, Lisa Hamm, Ben Kolstad, and Leslie Kriesel for their expert work on the editing, design, and production of the book. Wesleyan University has provided generous support in the form of sabbatical time and research grants. We thank in particular Marc Eisner, Dean of Social Sciences, and Joyce Jacobsen, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. Our students in courses on twentieth-century Russian literature have reacted enthusiastically to Aleshkovsky’s novels, and to his liv- ing presence, and we thank them for their responsiveness to this translation in its earlier versions. Duffield White would like to thank his wife, Isabel Guy, for her love and support and for sharing her love of literature. Susanne Fusso thanks her husband, Joseph M. Siry, Professor of Art History and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan, for his love and support and for listening to long disquisitions on the subtleties of Russian obscenity. INTRODUCTION SUSANNE FUSSO I was a good-time Charlie, an idler, a lazybones, a gambler, a crook, a hooligan, a scoundrel, a smoker, a street urchin, a bicyclist, a soccer player, a glutton, although I always helped my mother around the house, I was rapturously interested in the mystery of procreation and the relations between the sexes, the organization of the Universe, the origin of the species of plants and animals and the nature of social injustices, and I also managed to read the great works of Pushkin, Dumas, Jules Verne, and Mayne Reid. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that I never in my life sold anyone out or betrayed them. Although of course I managed to perpetrate umpteen little dirty tricks and peccadillos. (cid:2) Yuz Aleshkovsky, “Autobiographical Information” Y uz Aleshkovsky was born in Siberia in 1929, the year of Stalin’s “Great Turn” toward industrialization and col- lectivization. Raised in Moscow, where he recalls that he became acquainted with street obscenities much earlier than he learned about the fairy tales most children read, he endured some of the key experiences of the Soviet century—wartime evacuation,