The Letter Killers Club (18 page)

Notker the Stammerer:
Notker Balbulus (c. 840–912), composer, music teacher, poet, and Benedictine monk at the Abbey of St. Gall. “Notker's fame is in the Sequences, the vers libre of the Middle Ages, first composed to help the monks to carry in their minds the endless modulations of the Alleluia. The long vowels were intended, say the liturgists, to express that ineffable exultation when the heart is too full for speech; but Notker confesses frankly that he could never remember them himself … He founded the most famous school of sequences.” Waddell, 77–78.

contrapuntists of the Netherlands:
A Flemish school of composition whose chief exponents included Guillaume Dufay (1397–1474), Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410–1497), Josquin Despres (c. 1440–1521), and Orlando di Lasso (1532–1594).

square neumes:
Symbols in the plainsong notation of the Roman Catholic Church; used from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries.

celeste pedal:
A soft pedal that mutes the strings of a piano by interposing a strip of felt between the hammers and the strings.

mixolydian mode:
The seventh of eight scales (or modes) of medieval church music.

intervals:
The relative difference in pitch between two simultaneous or successive notes or tones.

atekstalis:
A method (or rule) according to which a text is found and fitted to a piece of music after it has been composed.

Library of St. Ambrose in Milan:
The Biblioteca Ambrosiana, founded circa 1605; it acquired dozens of manuscripts from the Benedictine monastery of Bobbio.

two books not content to have their fate:
Pro captu lectoris, habent sua fata libelli
(According to the reader's capacity, books have their fate); from De syllabis, a verse work on the formation of syllables by Terentianus Maurus (late second century), Latin poet and grammarian; the manuscript was discovered in 1493 at Bobbio.

Vulgate:
See note for page 46 on Saint Jerome.

“Behold my servant, whom I have chosen …”:
Matthew 12:18.

“He shall not strive, nor cry …”:
Matthew 12:19.

“O Lord, thou son of David …”:
Matthew 15:22–23.

“And when he was accused of the chief priests …”:
Matthew 27: 12–14.

“But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote …”:
John 8:6.

“And he withdrew himself into the wilderness …”:
Luke 5:16.

“But Jesus held his peace”:
Matthew 26:63.

the old ideomotor principle:
Described in 1852 by the English physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter as “the involuntary response made by the muscles to ideas with which the mind may be possessed when the directing power of the will is in abeyance.”

innervation:
The stimulation of an organ by its nerves; the supply of nerve force from a nerve center to an organ or part by means of nerves.

the brain's efferent system:
A system bearing or conducting outward from the brain; conveying nervous impulses from a nerve center to an effector.

hemiplegia:
Paralysis of one lateral half of the body or part of it.

experimentum crucis:
A critical experiment, one that can determine whether or not a certain hypothesis is correct; the term was first used by the English philosopher Francis bacon in Novum Organum (1620).

peripheral nerves:
Nerves that link the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) to the rest of the body. Peripheral nerves are autonomic (regulating involuntary actions, such as heartbeat), sensory (receiving external stimuli via sense receptors), or motor (relaxing and contracting muscles).

neuritis:
Inflammation of a nerve or nerves.

chemotaxis:
Orientation or movement of cells or organisms in relation to chemical agents.

Mendel:
Gregor Johann Mendel (1822–1884), Austrian botanist and Augustinian monk whose cross-pollination of garden pea plants allowed him to derive the basic laws of heredity.

nodes of Ranvier:
Periodic gaps in the insulating sheath (myelin) on the axon of nerve fibers that promote the rapid conduction of nerve impulses; discovered by the French pathologist and anatomist Louisantoine Ranvier (1835–1922).

neurofibril:
One of a system of many minute fibrils in a nerve cell.

meninges:
The three membranes enveloping the brain.

saprophytes:
Any vegetable organism that lives on decayed organic matter.

neurilemma:
The delicate outer sheath of a nerve fiber.

“innate ideas”:
The theory that certain pieces of knowledge exist in us from (or before) birth; it was used by Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) to argue for the existence of God. He reasoned that the idea of an infinite being, God, could not occur in a finite human mind and so must have been put there by God himself. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke rejected the widely accepted theory of innate ideas, which soon fell out of favor.

tattered Cartesian ghosts:
see note above on innate ideas.

sympathetic-system fibers:
Fibers in the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary functions.

doctrine of free will:
The doctrine that we as conscious human beings are able to make choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will.

determinism:
The view that all events have causes or are entirely determined by preceding events, not by the exercise of the will, not arbitrarily or chaotically.

a third Kantian form of sensibility:
In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant distinguishes three a priori conditions, or “forms,” that knowledge is necessarily subject to: forms of sensibility (time and space), forms of understanding (twelve categories), and forms of reason.

etiolated:
Grown in the absence of sunlight: blanched.

what Fichte called a “pure reader”:
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), German philosopher. In Characteristics of the Present Age (Lecture VI), Fichte refers to a “pure reader” who reads and reads to keep up with all that is being written, but without ever considering what he has read. This sort of mindless reading, says Fichte, becomes an addiction like tobacco-smoking. The pure reader “reads only to read and live reading.”

taler:
Any one of numerous large coins issued by various German states from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

syllogisms:
Logical arguments consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion (as in “every virtue is laudable; kindness is a virtue; therefore kindness is laudable”).

Saint Augustine:
Early Christian church father and philosopher (354– 430). In On the Free Choice of the Will, Augustine argues that what sets man apart from beast is his ability to choose freely; God gave man free choice of the will so that he might choose to lead an upright life.

Aristotle teaches us to distinguish the highest purpose, entelechy, from incidental or subordinate co-purposes:
In The Nicomachean Ethics (fourth century
BC
), Aristotle describes the highest purpose as an end in itself: “If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.” (Translated by W. D. Ross)

Thomas Aquinas:
Italian philosopher and Scholastic theologian (c. 1225–1274). In Summa Theologica, which applies Aristotelian logic to Christian doctrine, Aquinas calls the soul a substantial form. The substantial (or essential) form causes a thing to exist absolutely, whereas the accidental form (e.g., color, shape, condition) does not.

the other
, 
τό ἑτερον
, as Plato expressed it: In Plato's Theaetetus (360
BC
), Socrates says, “If thinking is talking to oneself, no one speaking and thinking of two objects … will say and think that the one is the other of them.”

“not that which goeth into the mouth …”
: Matthew 15:11.

Panchatantra:
A collection of Indian fables in Sanskrit (c. fifth century), in five (pañca) books (tantra), supposedly compiled for the edification of a king's three sons. Though most of the characters are animals, several tales revolve around four Brahmin friends whose adventures illustrate the advantages of common sense over erudition.

Camaldulan:
Member of a monastic order founded in the early eleventh century by a Benedictine ascetic and named for the desolate place in the Apennine Mountains near Arezzo (Campus Maldoli) where the order's main monastery stood.

the syllogisms of the great Stagirite:
Aristotle (384–322
BC
), born at Stagira. In Prior Analytics, Aristotle defines a syllogism as an argument in which certain things being stated (the premises), something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so (the conclusion).

Averroes:
The name used in the West for Spanish-born Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126–1198); his most important writings are his long explications of Aristotle.

Erigena:
Johannes Scotus (c. 825–c. 870), Irish-born Neoplatonist and Greek scholar. In On the Division of Nature, he divides all that exists (“Nature”) into four forms: (1) what creates and is not created (God), (2) what creates and is created (the divine idea mediating between God and the world), (3) what is created but does not create (the world as a manifestation of divine ideas and God himself ), (4) what neither creates nor is created (God as the ultimate Purpose of all things).

“By goose!”
: A Greek euphemism (
ksain
) for “by Zeus” (
Zain
).

Horace:
Roman lyric poet (65–8
BC
).

Catullus:
Roman lyric poet (87–c. 54
BC
).

Hero and Leander:
In Greek mythology, a pair of lovers separated by the Hellespont; every night Leander swam across it to be with Hero. One stormy night he was drowned; Hero found his body and flung herself into the sea.

Pyramus and Thisbe:
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a pair of would-be lovers separated by parental opposition and the wall between their two houses; the two spoke to each other in secret through a crack in the wall.

Sappho and Phaon:
Legend says that Sappho, the poet (b. 612
BC
) and native of Lesbos, threw herself into the sea for unrequited love of the beautiful youth Phaon.

Ruth and Boaz:
Ruth 2:5–12.

Naso's captivating
Ars amandi: Or Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) by Ovid (full name Publius Ovidius naso), the Roman poet (43
BC
–
AD
17).

Duns Scotus:
John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), scholastic theologian born in Scotland or Ulster. Duns Scotus, who believed in free will, claimed that “nothing other than the will is the complete (or total) cause of the act of willing.”

Crossing their staffs, the three tie them together to make a cross:
Presumably a Lorraine cross with two crossbars.

tablinum:
A room or alcove between the atrium and the peristyle of a Roman house for the storing of family records.

a copper obol:
An ancient Greek coin; in classical mythology, the fare charged by Charon to ferry spirits of the dead across the river Acheron.

sesterce:
An ancient Roman coin.

evil larvae:
Or lemures. In classical mythology, malignant spirits and ghosts of the wicked dead that had not received a proper burial.

Hades:
In classical mythology, the god of the dead.

Juno:
In classical mythology, the Queen of Heaven and special protectress of women.

the famous, divinely croaking Acheron frogs hymned by Euripides and Aristophanes:
In Aristophanes's comedy The Frogs (405
BC
), the amphibian chorus provides what may be the play's best-known lines: “Brekekekek, ko-ak, ko-ak, Brekekekek, ko-ak, ko-ak!” The Frogs poked fun at Euripides, the tragic playwright who had recently died. There are no frogs in the works of Euripides.

Here—I'm giving the words back; all except one: life:
This last line of The Letter Killers Club (Klub ubiits bukv), as per Krzhizhanovsky's corrected typescript in the Russian State Archives (RGALI f. 2280, op. 1, ed. khr. 11), does not appear in his Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works). Other discrepancies in the published Russian text of Klub ubiits bukv are too minor to list here.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

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www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1993 by Éditions Verdier

Translation copyright © 2012 by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov

Introduction copyright ©2012 by Caryl Emerson

All rights reserved.

First published in French as
Le Club des tueurs de lettres
by Éditions Verdier, 1993

Cover photograph: © Cédric Delsaux,
55, Chernobyl 8, Classroom
(detail), from
Nous Resterons sur Terre

Cover design: Katy Homans