Items related to How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie (Writings from an Unbound...
Synopsis
Published to acclaim in 1977, this controversial novel of ideas follows Konrad Rutkowski - professor of medieval history and former Gestapo officer - as he returns to the scene of his war crimes determined to renounce, or perhaps justify, his Nazi past. In a series of letters to a brother-in-law, Rutkowski lays out his ambivalent reactions to war and unthinkable violence, connecting his own swirling ideas to those of some of the major figures of European thought: Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, and others. But the novel is more than an intellectual meditation. Pekic was himself a frequent political agitator and occasional prisoner, and he drew on his first hand knowledge of police methods and life under totalitarianism to paint a chilling portrait of an intellectual acting as a tool of repression. At the same time he questions whether Rutkowski's ideology puts him outside the philosophical tradition he so admires - or if the line separating it from totalitarianism is not as clear as we like to think.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
BORISLAV PEKIC was born in 1930 in Podgorica, Yugoslavia. Arrested in 1948 for terrorism, armed rebellion, and espionage after the theft of a few typewriters and mimeographs, Pakic spent five years In prison, where he began to write. Constant trouble with the authorities led him to emigrate to London in the early 1970s. His novels include The Houses of Belgrade (1994) and The Time of Miracles (1994), both published by Northwestern University Press. He died of cancer in 1992 in London. STEPHEN M. DICKEY is an assistant professor of Slavic linguistics at the University of Virginia. Ho cotranslated Mesa Selimovic's Death and the Dorvish (Northwestern, 1996). BOGDAN RAKIC is a visiting associate professor of Slavic literature at Indiana-University. He cotranslated Mesa Selimovic's Death and the Dorvish (Northwestern, 1996) and edited In a Foreign Harbor (Slavica, 2000). He is currently working on Borislav Pekic's literary biography.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
HOW TO QUIET A VAMPIRE
A SOTIEBy BORISLAV PEKICNORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Borislav PekicAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-1720-4
Contents
Translators' Foreword................................................................................................ixEditor's Preface.....................................................................................................5PART I: PROFESSOR KONRAD RUTKOWSKI'S LETTERSLetter 1 Why Professor Konrad Rutkowski Vacationed in the Town of D., or Meditations.................................15Letter 2 Parallel Travels, or Matter and Memory......................................................................25Letter 3 SS Standartenfhrer Heinrich Steinbrecher, or Thus Spake Zarathustra........................................33Letter 4 How Steinbrecher Spoke, or Principles of Nature and Grace...................................................43Letter 5 How Steinbrecher Spoke, or A Discourse on Method............................................................52Letter 6 A Dinner in the Mausoleum, or Introduction to Psychoanalysis................................................64Letter 7 An Inherited Captive, or The World as Will and Imagination..................................................75Letter 8 A Granite Legend, or The Meaning of History.................................................................90Letter 9 The Second Life of Adam Trpkovic, or The Phenomenology of the Spirit........................................101Letter 10 The Municipal File Clerk in Person, or Ecce Homo...........................................................115Letter 11 Gustav Frhlich, the Spy from Mannheim, or Essays on Human Reason..........................................128Letter 12 The Worldview of SS Standartenfhrer Heinrich Steinbrecher, or The Decline of the West.....................142Letter 13 Professor Konrad Rutkowski Declares War on Fascism, or Phaedon; or, Of the Soul............................152Letter 14 The Wicked Biography and Malefactions of a Men's Umbrella, or Logical Investigations.......................165Letter 15 How Adam Trpkovic Got into Bed with Miss Lilly Schwartzkopf, or Praise of Folly............................175Letter 16 Steinbrecher's Gambit, or The Apology......................................................................184Letter 17 A Demonstration That There Are No Minor Compromises, or A Debate on Human Nature...........................197Letter 18 Satan's Emissary, or Sic et Non............................................................................212Letter 19 Golgotha in D., or Reason and Existence....................................................................222Letter 20 Right and Left, or Being and Time..........................................................................239Letter 21 Death and Transfiguration, or Being and Nothingness........................................................248Letter 22 The Unusual Illness of Professor Rutkowski, or Creative Evolution..........................................260Letter 23 A Magical Recovery, or Civitates dei.......................................................................276Letter 24 The First Crusade against the Umbrella, or The Rebellious Man..............................................286Letter 25 The Rope and the Stool, or The Poverty of Philosophy.......................................................296Letter 26 How Professor Rutkowski Sold His Soul to the Devil, or Beyond Good and Evil................................305PART II: PROFESSOR KONRAD RUTKOWSKI'S POSTSCRIPTSPostscript 1 The Transcript of the Interrogation of Gustav Frhlich..................................................321Postscript 2 Professor Konrad Rutkowski's Secret Testament, or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus........................350PART III: EDITOR'S NOTES.............................................................................................369Glossary of Selected Terms and Abbreviations.........................................................................409
Chapter One
LETTER 1WHY PROFESSOR KONRAD RUTKOWSKI VACATIONED IN THE TOWN OF D., OR MEDITATIONS
The Mediterranean Coast, 12 Sept. 1965
My dear Hilmar,
You'll probably be surprised by these letters from a proselyte who could never take up the pen in service of anything more recent than the Counterreformation without considerable spiritual effort. I hope they will find their justification in the unnatural (were I not the offspring of an austere, rationalist tradition I'd say supernatural) quality of the events in question. And the fact that I personally "helped those events along" eliminates any doubt about my competence to report on them.
So here I am, Hilmar, in the pit of history. Misled by the pseudodivine indifference of scholarship, we believed that it had been dug for others, and that the task of the historian consisted only in scrupulously labeling and measuring it.
So here I am then, as the people say, in deep shit.
Konrad Rutkowski, Ph.D., professor of medieval history at the University of Heidelberg-nota bene the healthy offspring of our clerical herd sitting at the place of honor at the historical dining table-has been irretrievably thrown from the security of our scholarly watchtower, which we considered to be an untouchable fiefdom and which gave you (and until recently, I fear, me as well) an excuse for a bourgeois life of inhumane indifference and irresponsibility.
And for god's sake, don't try to slip away between points A, B, and ITLITL of one of Hilmar's famous notes! Or to hide behind a convoluted reference from one of the multicolored index cards with which you've lined your thin intellectual skin. The things that make for excitement at our conferences have no value as evidence in this "pit of history." Therefore, I'll give you a friendly piece of advice: If you're going to try to disqualify me on the basis of my admission that I have a personal interest in this affair, as you do with all eyewitnesses whose contrary statements frustrate your wise conclusions, hanging a deadweight of footnotes around their necks-you can toss that worthless little arrow away. Because the real topic of these letters is not the Indian summer of 1965 and some boy-scout vacation adventure of mine, but the wartime September of 1943. Although the people, the city and even my spiritual condition have hardly changed at all, the twenty-two-year interval, filled with my convalescence, studies, university career, and for a while now your sister Sabina (despite your silent disapproval), has nevertheless ensured my wartime memories a position of armed neutrality, if nothing else. A position, by the way, merciless enough to let this case, which I'm hastening to tell to you in a few letters, be objectively reproduced in the spirit of our profession, but, fortunately, kind enough to allow us to draw from it far-reaching instructions for future historical scholarship. If, of course, there will be any after all this.
Indeed, dear Hilmar, it happened that, since this morning, spurred by the ceremonious removal of a canvas from a giant granite monument, my thoughts have flooded out of the old rut of my bourgeois habits and rushed through uncharted mental wildernesses, in a direction no known rudder can steer.
I'm not inviting you to follow me around across the blank spaces of that geographic map. Even if the amazing secret of Adam the municipal file clerk (the subject of what follows) did capture your heart, if you succeeded in unlocking it with me, you wouldn't gain anything from that discovery. As for losses, I don't believe you're mature enough for them. It isn't worthwhile for a historian of our glorious present day to draw morals from the object of his research, because he has neither the time to turn them into reality, nor the power to ensure their application in the future. You, Hilmar, existing alongside your subject, the history of the twentieth century, side by side with its dates, chimeras and delusions, you have no use-neither professional nor personal-for even the wisest conclusion. And I fear the future you're courting has no use for it either. As always, the future will want to cultivate newer delusions of its own; and the fact that they'll indeed be ours and as old as the world itself won't keep any of our great-grandchildren from taking pride in them and wiping their asses in the meantime with your jeremiadesque warnings and bits of advice.
One more thing. Overcome your thief's habit, otherwise known as the exchange of scholarly information, and don't try to pull a bone out of this story for yourself, some meager footnote for your DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY, and to cram Konrad Rutkowski into the three pages of bibliography that end every scholarly study and resemble a police register of burgled and robbed businesses.
Please limit yourself to understanding, and, if possible, not ridiculing my conclusions.
I can already see you frowning and wondering why that idiot Konrad, if his discovery really has any historical significance, doesn't write a scholarly paper instead of bothering you with his private confessions. Well, Hilmar, here's why:
The fear that the weird circumstances of the postwar-not to admit right away the posthumous-life of Adam S. Trpkovic, the municipal file clerk of the Mediterranean city of D., will be maliciously interpreted and that his incredible story (a chronicle of death and postmortem transfiguration, a story, I repeat, not of Adam but of what happened to his otherwise unimportant personage in what's known as the Second World War) will be ascribed a parabolic, universal significance that it doesn't deserve-this fear forces me to hide the truth about him from the public in the deepest gutter of memory, in a world of perpetual imprisonment where our true essence is left to rot. It is a regrettable circumstance that in this particular case I am, by experience and conscious choice, not a storyteller but a scholar-to emphasize my real roots with this dead expression-whose current research interests are focused, as you know, on the relations between the Curia Romana and the Slavic Wislans, who adopted the Christian Gospel in its legitimate Western European interpretation as early as the tenth century and thus became the basic purpose of our ethnic, spiritual, political, and military Drang nach Osten. This circumstance has only strengthened my fears of the public and the misfortune that befalls any being that, lacking the gregarious instincts that have ensured the primacy of the community from the time of our ancestral cave dwellers and provided its loyal members with a comfortable security in exchange for freedom, ventures to challenge its unpredictable behavior.
On the other hand, I could no longer keep quiet either. So I've opted for a compromise-that old, cunning rat gnawing at all great heroic acts. I've decided to tell a story, which is nothing other than the chronology of the devastating effects of such heroism on our lives. That's the reason why I'm writing private letters when you would be publishing a paper that would win you, in addition to scholarly acclaim, a reputation among the most ardent opponents of our turn eastward, those, indeed, who insist that the term "turn" be replaced with the traditional Germanic term "thrust."
Therefore, I ask that you not bandy my discovery about while I'm alive. Afterward you may do whatever you like and whatever your-most often misguided-inspiration tells you to do.
Let me get back to myself. I do promise you that these letters will, in spite of their confessional tone, not be the story of a scholar who's lost confidence in his work, in the purpose of historiography and perhaps history itself, but the story of a provincial scrivener who stumbled into that history like an unsuspecting person falls into a pit dug for others, and who unexpectedly found his purpose and reckoning there.
However, as I am lost when it comes to anything beyond reliable and incontestable facts-because up to now it has been my hope, and this hope alone has redeemed my work, that by studying history I'll come to know the immutable realities of our distant past and not its phantom, protean appearances-the inadequacy of these lines is unavoidable and we must learn to live with it. I'll never be sure that I've stressed this aggravating circumstance enough, both as an excuse for my lack of skill as a storyteller and as an explanation of the inexcusable revulsion I feel for the loathsome person comprising the content of my confession. I'll add as a consolation that this humiliatingly unprofessional excuse, so alien to my monographs, wouldn't be necessary had not the aforementioned Adam (although an isolated and neglected topic of my wartime experience, buried with a few sentimental honors in the mass grave of my memories of the Geheime Staatspolizei) throughout his unjust imprisonment strove to break into the world of Prince Mieszko, which had been conjured up for the prince's coronation in the seventh chapter of my current book, and to proclaim his own misfortune Urbi et Orbi. Not as a reproach or a request for compensation-the impeccable clerk must have known that the administration would compensate him in full-and still less as a call to rebellion, but most likely in the simple hope that his bad luck would be joined by similar misfortunes all over the world, so that when united they would form a brotherhood that wouldn't lack a single kind of suffering, a single form of poverty, a single example of deprivation. In short, they would form a MODEL SOCIETY which in its perfection, definitiveness, and immutability would appear to be the best of all possible worlds: natural and not exceptional, inevitable and not accidental, necessary and not superfluous.
Don't think that Adam's resurrection wasn't natural. It really was. It's in vain that we want misfortunes to be outcast, rejected, refuted. Futile is our wish for adhesion, the mother of chaos, to reign in the world of evil, in the world of the Sorrel Horse. Misfortunes-and here is one more, perhaps the most unbearable-exhibit a mutual magnetic attraction, complement and complete one another like days spent in prison (days that are identical like twins), which move from east to west with deathwatch discipline, from evening's renewed hopes, ambitions, and plans to the sobriety and discouragement of morning. Among misfortunes there holds a cumulative principle, cohesion rules-the mother of order and orderliness. And the short breathers, slipped like a cuckoo's egg in between the evil we've experienced and the evil that awaits us, are announced to us like a crude bait, whose purpose is to keep us in tolerable condition in the name of a still darker torment. This was why my miserable file clerk yearned to join me. Because, Hilmar, I was an unhappy man, no matter how little the gilded aura of my public life pointed to this fact. Adam rushed at me as a ravenous vampire descends on blood. The hawthorn stake of shame, with which I hammered him fast deep down in my subconscious, was not, even according to the magic formulas, enough to quiet him. It only immobilized him. And when, through my inattention, the stake was pulled from his heart, Adam came to collect.
When we decided to spend our vacation on the Mediterranean, your sister Sabina's thriftiness, her northern Altmark habit of getting the most for her money-in our case as much sun as possible-met with wholehearted support from my secret plan to make a pilgrimage to all the locations of my wartime service. While we were choosing our vacation spot, hunched over geographic maps and tourist brochures, I suggested that we set up camp in the town of D. I swear I did this without any noticeable mediation by Adam Trpkovic, except in the extremely condensed form of a stream of prisoners that flowed through the basement of the Sonderkommando der Geheimen Staatspolizei in D., where I was forced to work with much bitterness and inner resistance, as you know. Only this morning did I determine that it was Adam and no one else who dragged me out here, though I still don't know why: to take a cruel revenge or to teach me that real history, which I apparently didn't have a sense for.
Why fool ourselves, Hilmar? Even the best among us never get beyond a more or less conscientious reconstruction of historical facts. But historical facts are the oysters from which time has already extracted its pearls. Despite an abundance of material, we're unable to restore their living innards; we have only the dry, dead shells, leaving beyond our knowledge and perception everything that really happened under those enigmatic ciphers of the past, no matter if it assumed the cruelest forms of suffering, tribulation, and death. However, it is those innards, as I realize only now, that comprise the only relevant content of a real history, which will never be written down.
Hilmar, do you see how much hesitation and disapproval there is in my description of the file clerk's vampirization and his satanic efforts to intrude on my peace of mind and work? Indeed, I intended to finish editing my book on the birth of the Polish state in the Oder and Vistula river basins during the reign of our Oton I. But evidently nothing will come of this. For something like that you need a conception of history as a material in a hard, aggregate state. Adam's transfiguration demonstrated that the true aggregate state of history is gaseous, resembling smoke, which constantly changes form. And when we finally succeed in discerning it, it leaves in our consciousness hardly a single droplet of truth. And under such conditions, what sense is there to even the most conscientious historiography?
Sadly, this isn't the only reason for my idiosyncratic approach to Adam. It might sound sacrilegious, Hilmar, but I can't stand unhappy people. The realization that I number among them does nothing to dispel that animosity. On the contrary, it almost seems to provide more lethal ammunition. (Don't you think that unhappiness has something ugly, renegade, rebellious, sinful, if not demonic about it?) Of course, I'm not indifferent to the suffering of others. I did, after all, receive a Christian upbringing firsthand, so to speak, from my grandfather, the spiritual shepherd of a small evangelical community in southern Banat. But my manifestation of this sensitivity is fairly exclusive. In the presence of suffering I feel a slight intolerance, a nervous indisposition toward the afflicted, instead of sympathizing with him in his misfortune and feeling anger at his tormentors.
Don't try to be witty at my expense, as is your repulsive habit, and to maintain that I joined the police to ensure legitimacy (and perhaps a higher meaning) for that unchristian aspect of my character. I was forced into the Gestapo, because of my extraordinary memory and knowledge of the local language, of which I have proof in my correspondence with the Berlin Central Office at Prinz Albrechtstrasse 8 concerning my transfer to the front.
It's time to mention another one of my qualities, because it had a decisive influence on my attitude toward Adam Trpkovic both during his first life-that is, in 1943-and now, during his second, phantom life. This quality, I should say, is nothing other than the active, albeit unseen flip side of my disgust for misfortune and those it afflicts: just as I lose my temper when I encounter suffering (and I know the comparison is inappropriate), I'm seized by unbridled rage at an otherwise impeccable Latin sentence that contains a shamelessly glaring grammatical or orthographic error. But-and this, take note, is the strange thing with me-my rage is not directed at the real culprit for the slip, the printer, author, or copyist, but at the phrase itself, as if it were guilty for the monstrosity it has acquired. In such cases, I take a rough eraser or a special little knife, similar to a nail file, and erase, scratch, or scrape the mistake from the paper like a scab from skin. I thus return the clumsy freak of the original idea to its virgin appearance. All the books I use are pockmarked throughout with my corrections, and it is only a lack of time and perhaps a fear of embarrassment that keeps me from sneaking from library to library like the raging Spirit of Errata and bringing my reformational mania to its full implementation, taking any and all published books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, textbooks, newspapers and brochures, letters (public and private), annals, memoirs, enactments, petitions, charters, proclamations, manifestos, announcements and declarations, forms and formulas (including mathematical ones, naturally), decrees, laws and minutes, recipes, price lists, records, inscriptions and transcripts, and even the obscenities on the walls of public toilets, and by careful scientific reconstruction restoring to them their only possible, divine appearance. By reminding you that everything which surrounds me is too full of signs of my craze for happier, more harmonious and effective forms, of my painstaking work on objects which the incompetence or negligence of their creators left in the unhappy state of half-completion, I've presented all the relevant aspects of my attitude toward the file clerk's unusual case. I'll let you, as an experienced historical hack, find the appropriate term for my craving for perfection; I personally think it's a primal manifestation of that same reformational desire with which a higher intellect rocks, reams, and turns this world upside down every twenty years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HOW TO QUIET A VAMPIREby BORISLAV PEKIC Copyright © 1977 by Borislav Pekic. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantCan't find the book you're looking for? We'll keep searching for you. If one of our booksellers adds it to AbeBooks, we'll let you know!
Create a Want
