unexpectedly from my memory, and as my thought processes developed, they led me to places I could not have imagined. The sense of what happened is best conveyed by a Soviet song I used to hear at the very dawn of my days (my mother had a standing joke that its last line was a reference to Brezhnevâs memoirs about World War Two):
Today I shall rise before dawn
And walk through the wide, wide field â
Something has started in my memory,
I remember everything that happened not to me â¦
At first this process was extremely unpleasant. Ideas familiar from childhood blossomed with new angles I had not known before, or at least had not thought of. It all happened quite suddenly, resembling one of those cognitive chain reactions when random impressions bring to the surface a long-forgotten dream that instantly infuses everything around with a special meaning. I already knew that similar hallucinations can be symptoms of schizophrenia. But as the days went by the world grew more and more interesting; I soon lost my fear and eventually began to take pleasure in what was happening to my mind.
For example, I was in a taxi one day going along Warsaw Prospect. I happened to look up and see an image of a bear on the wall of a building â the emblem of the âUnited Russiaâ party. It suddenly came to me that the Russian word for bear â â medved â â is not in fact the true name for the animal but a substitute. The primeval Slavs invented it because they were afraid that uttering the animalâs real name â â ber â â might inadvertently bring one into the house. And the literal meaning of the word â medved â is itself revealing: âthe one who is after the honeyâ. This thought sequence took place so quickly that at the moment when the true meaning shone blindingly through the emblem of the victorious bureaucracy, the taxi was still approaching the wall. I began to laugh, and the driver, thinking I was expressing pleasure in the song that was playing at the time, stretched out his hand to the radio in order to increase the volume â¦
The main problem I found at the beginning was that I lost my former verbal orientation. Until memory succeeded in restoring order to my ability to focus, I could completely lose my way. A synoptic became a sinful optician; a xenophobe someone allergic to the ubiquitous TV celebrity Xenia Sobchak; a patriarch a patriotic oligarch. A prima donna turned into an old lady smelling of Prima cigarettes, and an enfant terrible â Tsar Ivan IV at a tender age. But the most radical of my distorted insights was this: I interpreted âPetro-â not as relating to the city and palaces founded by Peter the Great but as indicating a link to the oil industry. In accordance with this, âPetrodvoretsâ signified not the great Peterhof Palace on the shores of the Gulf of Finland but the sumptuous offices of an oil company. Mayakovskyâs well-known First World War line âIn that never-to-be-forgotten hour / Our Petersburg became Petrogradâ was transmogrified into a prophecy â a bitter one, but true.
This confusion extended to foreign words, for example the expression âGay Prideâ. I remembered that in English âprideâ was the name given to a social grouping of lions, and before the lights came on in my memory to illuminate the wordâs primary meaning, the quality of âbeing proudâ, I imagined a pride of homosexuals (presumably refugees from homophobic regions of Europe) roaming the African savannah: two lop-eared senior males lying in the parched grass near a desiccated tree surveying the expanse of prairie and now and again languidly flexing their muscles; a slightly younger male pumping his triceps in the shade of the baobab tree while around him frisk and frolic the young cubs, irritating their grown-up companion with their fussing and squeaking until with a roar he sends them
Today I shall rise before dawn
And walk through the wide, wide field â
Something has started in my memory,
I remember everything that happened not to me â¦
At first this process was extremely unpleasant. Ideas familiar from childhood blossomed with new angles I had not known before, or at least had not thought of. It all happened quite suddenly, resembling one of those cognitive chain reactions when random impressions bring to the surface a long-forgotten dream that instantly infuses everything around with a special meaning. I already knew that similar hallucinations can be symptoms of schizophrenia. But as the days went by the world grew more and more interesting; I soon lost my fear and eventually began to take pleasure in what was happening to my mind.
For example, I was in a taxi one day going along Warsaw Prospect. I happened to look up and see an image of a bear on the wall of a building â the emblem of the âUnited Russiaâ party. It suddenly came to me that the Russian word for bear â â medved â â is not in fact the true name for the animal but a substitute. The primeval Slavs invented it because they were afraid that uttering the animalâs real name â â ber â â might inadvertently bring one into the house. And the literal meaning of the word â medved â is itself revealing: âthe one who is after the honeyâ. This thought sequence took place so quickly that at the moment when the true meaning shone blindingly through the emblem of the victorious bureaucracy, the taxi was still approaching the wall. I began to laugh, and the driver, thinking I was expressing pleasure in the song that was playing at the time, stretched out his hand to the radio in order to increase the volume â¦
The main problem I found at the beginning was that I lost my former verbal orientation. Until memory succeeded in restoring order to my ability to focus, I could completely lose my way. A synoptic became a sinful optician; a xenophobe someone allergic to the ubiquitous TV celebrity Xenia Sobchak; a patriarch a patriotic oligarch. A prima donna turned into an old lady smelling of Prima cigarettes, and an enfant terrible â Tsar Ivan IV at a tender age. But the most radical of my distorted insights was this: I interpreted âPetro-â not as relating to the city and palaces founded by Peter the Great but as indicating a link to the oil industry. In accordance with this, âPetrodvoretsâ signified not the great Peterhof Palace on the shores of the Gulf of Finland but the sumptuous offices of an oil company. Mayakovskyâs well-known First World War line âIn that never-to-be-forgotten hour / Our Petersburg became Petrogradâ was transmogrified into a prophecy â a bitter one, but true.
This confusion extended to foreign words, for example the expression âGay Prideâ. I remembered that in English âprideâ was the name given to a social grouping of lions, and before the lights came on in my memory to illuminate the wordâs primary meaning, the quality of âbeing proudâ, I imagined a pride of homosexuals (presumably refugees from homophobic regions of Europe) roaming the African savannah: two lop-eared senior males lying in the parched grass near a desiccated tree surveying the expanse of prairie and now and again languidly flexing their muscles; a slightly younger male pumping his triceps in the shade of the baobab tree while around him frisk and frolic the young cubs, irritating their grown-up companion with their fussing and squeaking until with a roar he sends them
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