The Monkey Link (55 page)

{105}
Based on the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 22. In Marvin Meyer’s translation: “Jesus said to them, ‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female
 
…
then you will enter [the kingdom].’
 
”

{106}
“Manuscripts don’t burn,” says the devil in
The Master and Margarita,
and from a pile of manuscripts he retrieves the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate and Jesus. (The Master himself had burned it, in fear and anger, because he could not publish it in the Soviet Union of the 1920s.)

{107}
Nikolai Gogol, after completing his novel
Dead Souls,
turned to religion and tried to write a sequel depicting a moral, reformed world. He burned his drafts shortly before his death in 1852.

{108}
Adapted from Pushkin’s famous poem “The Prophet” (1826), a grand statement of the poet’s sacred mission to “fire the hearts of men” with God’s word. Untranslatable echoes of the poem are worked into Bitov’s dialogue, for an irreverent comic effect.

{109}
In 356 B.C., in order to immortalize his name, Herostratus set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus (on the night Alexander the Great was born, as it happened).

{110}
Tea brewed so strong as to have a narcotic effect—a concoction favored by prison-camp inmates.

{111}
From Boris Pasternak’s “August,” one of the poems in
Dr. Zhivago
(1955). The Transfiguration of Our Lord, which under the pre-Revolutionarv calendar was observed by the Russian Orthodox Church on August 6. now falls on August 19. The holiday is traditionally associated with the apple harvest.

{112}
The quotation is adapted from a medieval account of Prince Alexander Nevsky’s successful battle to drive the Teutonic Knights from Pskov in 1242. Above the carnage on the bloodied ice of Lake Peipus, the Russian warriors see “God’s army” coming to their aid.