Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

This is why, he said, for all their apparent advantages — no ethical oversight to trouble the scientists, a virtually inexhaustible supply of donor bodies — the early experiments were doomed to failure. Even with every word of Stalin’s writings coded, the results were insufficiently robust to produce what he called ‘a functioning proxy complex’.

The experiment of 1951 created a prototype so monstrous that it earned Malevin ten years in the Gulag — rescinded under Khrushchev — and caused the programme to be mothballed indefinitely.

Malevin told me he knew the project was in trouble even before the crazed and truculent mankurt came round from anaesthesia. He said the impossibility of the scientists’ task stemmed from the fact that huge areas of human life are simply not represented in the dictator’s writings. They had coded the work in minute detail, but vast tracts of the proxy complex were blank, existential nullities, like the conscience of a psychopath.

As soon as the golem became conscious, it began to attack one of the scientists. Captain Gennadi Hubov, a hero of Stalingrad, was present at the first experiment. While the others stood watching in horror, Hubov calmly drew his gun and shot the golem dead. For this perceived crime, Hubov was himself executed. In his official report on the tests, Malevin blamed the failure on fatal shortcomings in the coding process. All work on the project ceased.

The arctic sun had dipped below the horizon. It was around midnight. Malevin took sips from a glass of warm milk to soothe a stomach ulcer.

I mentioned his mismatched eyes.

‘The doctors say it’s a birthmark,’ he said. ‘But my grandmother said I was blessed by God. Not for myself, unfortunately. But to bring good fortune to others.’

‘Is that why you chose science?’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’ Suddenly he looked tired, but I didn’t want our conversation to end. I asked him what had set him on this path, what was the inspiration — I used the English word — for his work?

He said that for as long as he could remember, he had been fascinated by repetition, by the way human beings tell the same stories about themselves over and over again.

In his first writings, he had posited that these retellings and recurrences are some of the ways that consciousness undertakes repairs on itself. The human personality as he imagined it was a highly embattled construct: assailed from without by an infinite array of sense-data, attacked from within by a collection of centripetal and contradictory drives and impulses. It constantly needs to groom and restore its sense of integrity. Repetition, he said, is a simple and non-invasive version of the Procedure.

For obvious reasons, neither Malevin nor anyone else in the old Soviet Union was ever allowed to write about the theological implications of his work, but Malevin told me that he believed that the individuated personality was already one step towards a kind of deadness. You couldn’t deny our physical separateness from one another, he said, but he felt there was a state before personality, when the pre-verbal sensorium is fully open to the world. The analogy he used was a camera body with no lens attached: light flooding into it. Of course, with nothing to focus the light, the experience is irrational, but, Malevin maintained, closer to the actual energetic state of reality. At this point, he said, the analogy breaks down: there’s no way our individuated consciousness can grasp the notion that the camera and the light are actually identical, or that we are a seamless part of the out-there. We can’t get there in words, because the job of words is to construct the fiction of our separate identity.

It was as much as I could do to follow him. Listening to Malevin, my Russian, perfectly adequate for a host of day-to-day uses, was like an old locomotive being driven far beyond its tolerance: rivets bursting off the boiler, everything overheating, and yet pounding forward with an exhilarating sensation of speed.

I woke up the next day in my hotel room in Arkhangelsk. Out on the chilly water, a man was fishing in a tiny boat. I longed to be home. At breakfast, a table of Swedish engineers next to me were eating plates of buckwheat porridge and cold meat. I caught the train back to Moscow at lunchtime and arrived the following day.

With hours to kill before my next meeting with Vera, I went to Tolstoy’s old house on Prechistenka. I saw the shoes the writer had made himself, his bicycle. I thought of all the people and experiences that made Tolstoy Tolstoy. How would you code all that? And if you did, who would you get? The priapic soldier and nobleman, exercising his droit de seigneur upon the serfs on his estate? The writer and paterfamilias of the middle years? The bearded guru of the late ones, who had sublimated his vast ego to the quest for Christ-like perfection? How could you fashion those layers from his words alone, and yet have each one riven with all his authentically human inconsistencies — that old man writing in his final year and experiencing a flash of recollection as he remembers his adored peasant lover: ‘to think that Aksinia is still alive!’ Could you really inscribe all that in a fresh carcass?

Malevin had seemed to be suggesting that there was a spiritual dimension to the work. One phrase in particular stayed with me. Struggling to understand him, I had tried to paraphrase what he was saying and he shook his head impatiently. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s much simpler. We are the masks God made to know itself!’

I remembered how his eyes had glittered in the half-dark as he nodded with pleasure at the exactness of his words. ‘ Vot tak.’ That’s how it is.

*

Vera was waiting for me outside the brand new Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. We walked across the footbridge over the Moscow River past girls in summer dresses.

‘You spoke to Yurii Olegovich? He told you about the 1951 experiment?’

I said he had.

‘Yurii Olegovich and I do not agree about the significance of that experiment,’ she said. ‘Malevin provided only the theoretical basis for the procedure that bears his name. My personal belief is that whatever they made in 1951, it wasn’t a true proxy complex. Tell me this: a natural philosopher attaches swan’s wings to his arms and plunges to his death from a belfry. This shows what? That flight is impossible? Absolutely not. You understand me? In the Soviet Union of the 1940s and ’50s, developments in the west, advances in computing, the Turing Test: these things were still unknown to them. Who knows what shortcuts those terrified men took?’

On the other side of the river, the huge brick structure that I remembered as the Red October chocolate factory had been redeveloped into an urban playground for rich young Russians. It was full of bars and restaurants. We found a gallery cafe that was big and airy enough for us to be isolated from the other customers. Vera chose a table near the entrance, where a giant sculpture of a melted iPod was showing images from Soviet propaganda films. I helped her off with her coat and we both ordered herbal tea.

‘Tell me something,’ I said. ‘How did you get mixed up in this?’

She said nothing until the waitress was out of sight, then she leaned forward and began speaking in a low voice. She explained that she had held an academic position in the Soviet equivalent of artificial intelligence, but had left it in the early 1990s when it became impossible to live on the official salary.

‘It was a very chaotic time for my country,’ she said. ‘Many top scientists were leaving Russia. They were experts in very sensitive areas of study. For example, Ken Alibek, the chief of the Soviet biological weapons programme, went to the US. There were many, many such instances. Can you imagine? If there is no future for him here, what hope is there for a simple academic?