[In the following excerpt, Borden explores the influences of a short story by H. G. Wells on Olesha's work.]

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Oliver Sacks describes the case of Mrs. O'C., who was born in Ireland and had lost both parents before the age of five (125-27). All alone she had been sent to America to live with a forbidding maiden aunt. She had no conscious memory of her parents, of Ireland, of what she considered “home,” of what she all her life called her “lost childhood.” Dr. Sacks notes that this loss of her “earliest, most precious years of life” had always caused Mrs. O'C. to feel a “keen and painful sadness”: “She had often tried, but never succeeded, to recapture her lost and forgotten childhood memories.” When in her eighties, Mrs. O'C. one night experienced a vivid nostalgic dream of this childhood, accompanied by the Irish songs she had heard in those earliest years. The loud songs, however, did not stop when Mrs. O'C. awoke. In fact the songs continued to play in her head for several days—often loudly enough to drown out external noise. Dr. Sacks concluded that this phenomenon resulted from a small thrombosis or infarction—not unlike an epileptic seizure—in the right temporal lobe which had activated musical memory traces in the cerebral cortex. Mrs. O'C. could see and, with difficulty, hear through her hallucinations. She remarked at the time:

I know you're there Dr. Sacks. I know I'm an old woman with a stroke in an old people's home, but I feel I'm a child in Ireland again—I feel my mother's arms, I see her, I hear her voice singing.

(130)

Referring to clinical studies in which similar epileptic hallucinations have been artificially induced, Dr. Sacks notes that such experiences are never fantasies, but “are always memories, and memories of the most precise and vivid kind” whose “extraordinary and consistent detail … exceed anything which could be recalled by ordinary memory” and which, moreover, are “accompanied by the emotions which accompanied the original experience” (130).

When the stroke resolved and the songs disappeared, Mrs. O'C. admitted that she missed them: “It was like being given back … my childhood again.” It was, she said, “like the opening of a door—a door which had been stubbornly closed all my life.” Sacks tells her that her nostalgia reminds him of a poignant story of H. G. Wells, “The Door in the Wall.” When told the story, she exclaimed, “That's it. That captures the mood, the feeling, entirely. But my door was real. My door leads to the lost and forgotten past” (127).

For the generation of Russian writers born at the turn of the twentieth century, “childhood” was lost in a spectacularly wrenching way, not entirely dissimilar to that of Mrs. O'C. Beginning with the First World War, a confluence of events truncated the childhood experience of that generation just as it destroyed—literally; for some, metaphorically, for others—that “Russia” where childhood had been set. For several of this generation's leading writers nostalgia for childhood became a predominant theme of both their life and their art. The works of Jurij Oleša, Valentin Kataev and Vladimir Nabokov reveal a lifelong pattern of attempts—sometimes passionate and obsessive, sometimes self-consciously ironical—to recapture or escape to what had been lost in childhood Russia. Unlike Mrs. O'C., however, who effected a neurogenic “return” in old age, Oleša, Kataev and Nabokov could effect a lifetime of “returns” through artistic imagination, and could find a metaphor for that process directly from lost childhood itself. The generation of Oleša, Kataev and Nabokov was raised on the tales of H. G. Wells, and these particular writers remembered the classic “The Door in the Wall” (1906), cited by Dr. Sacks, very well. With this story, Wells furnished an archetype for the experience of paradise lost: of a world of magical dimensions, extraordinary lights, ineffable joy, and a special, estranged vision. At the same time, the author of The Time Machine introduced a seminal metaphor for the recovery of that lost paradise: the little green door in the wall itself—a sort of time machine through which these writers voyage back to the land of inspiration and imagination, to a sense of timelessness, wholeness and immediacy of experience.¹ The green door becomes a passageway for a writer like Oleša to escape the threats of adult, Soviet life; for a Kataev to reverse the ideological treadmill of Time, Forward!; for a Nabokov to flee the pošlost' of causal and mortal existence. In the green door, Oleša, Kataev and Nabokov also find a metaphor for that almost transcendent re-experiencing of childhood—similar to that caused by Mrs. O'C.'s seizure—which these writers associated with the experience of artistic inspiration. This study examines several of the numerous appearances the Wellsian green door in the wall makes in the works of Oleša, Kataev, and Nabokov, and suggests the increasingly complex functions this image assumes.

The topic of H. G. Wells' place in Russian literature has been raised frequently, but developed minimally, and largely with respect to the works of Zamjatin, Bulgakov, and Kuprin.² Lack of attention to Wells' presence in the works of Kataev, and especially of Oleša and Nabokov is surprising, considering those writers' own efforts to call attention to this connection. Kataev, for instance, openly parodies the Wellsian science fiction adventure novel with his 1924 work Erendorf Island (Ostrov Erendorf). In My Diamond Crown (Almaznyj moj venec), Kataev wonders if scholars have noted the “enormous” influence of Wells on Majakovskij, “the author of ‘The Bathhouse,’ with its ‘time machine,’ and of narrative poems which nearly always are fantastic” (101). In Kataev's satirical portrait of Lenin, The Little Iron Door in the Wall (Malen'kaja železnaja dver' v stene, 1964), not merely the title of Wells' “The Door in the Wall” but many of its motifs are simultaneously parodied and lyrically evoked. Nabokov, acting like a public relations manager for Wells, goes out of his way in five separate interviews between 1964 and 1971 to single him out as an underappreciated writer, better than “any of his contemporaries.”³ In one article Nabokov firmly rejects all his interviewer's attempts to ascribe to his art others' influence: not Borges, not Joyce, certainly not Gogol'; Pushkin, “in a way, but no more than Tolstoy and Turgenev were influenced by the pride and purity of Pushkin's art.” But when the interviewer then curiously follows up by asking “Anyone else?”—as if Nabokov had acknowledged any influence—Nabokov answers, significantly (and one should recall that all Nabokov's interviews involved written answers to written questions … no spontaneity, no mistakes were possible): “H. G. Wells, a great artist, was my favorite writer when I was a boy” (Strong Opinions, 103). Jurij Oleša, in his No Day Without a Line (Ni dnja bez stročki), devotes more attention to H. G. Wells than to any other artist, going so far as to say, “All my life he was my favorite author” (Izbrannoe, 540). This only confirms what Oleša had said twenty years earlier, in 1935, when he described Wells as the writer in whom he found “something closest to myself, something of my own,” calling Wells a “genuinely great writer” and admitting that “the summer coloring of Envy comes from Wells, who “fell into my hands” in childhood (“Olesha Talks,” 80). While Oleša cites The Invisible Man as the primary Wells influence on Envy (Zavist'), I would contend that the true archetype for the sunlit images of “paradise” in Oleša's art, what Elizabeth Beaujour calls those “rare fleeting” “moments of well-being and blessedness … bathed in light and associated with clear air, bright colors, and unfettered movement,” is the story “The Door in the Wall.”⁴

Misinterpretation of Wells' work was a habit of Oleša's. The most intriguing aspect of his tribute to Wells in No Day Without a Line, in fact, is the consistency with which he mistells such Wells works as The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. This pattern of imposing his own sensibilities and neuroses on Wells' characters, and of interpolating scenes from his own works into Wells' offers an untapped source for the study of Oleša's artistic imagination. For present purposes, I will restrict myself to his recollection of “The Door in the Wall,” quoted here in full:

He has a story (“The Green Gate”) about a man who, one day in childhood, having opened a green gate met along his path, found himself in an ineffably beautiful garden, where on a blossoming lawn a pantheress played with a ball … Although this happened in early childhood, at the dawn of life, still the memory of the wonderful garden so possessed the spirit of the hero that despite the passage of years, he still searches for that green gate. Now he is already a mature man having attained a high position (he's a minister!), but the ideal to which his soul constantly returns is the dream of finding that gate. One day it seems to him that he sees it … There it is, there's the door! He opens it, steps—but beyond the gate there is no garden with a pantheress playing on a lawn—there's darkness! It turns out that he has stepped into an excavation pit and fallen.

The story, consequently, is about the conflict between the pure strivings of youth and the subsequent fall, or whatever, into the bondage of a daily routine which forces one to lose that purity …

(Izbrannoe, 541)

Oleša's conclusion offers a particularly unconvincing reading of the actual story, and his recounting of specific details is neither complete nor accurate. He leaves out, for example, the fact that the child, Lionel Wallace, who discovers the enchanted garden is a lonely, unhappy, precocious child raised by a demanding, cold father; that the garden is behind a green door in a white wall, not behind a “gate”; that the garden is populated not merely by a “pantheress,” but by two panthers, a girl in green, several additional playmates, and a “grass-covered court” where “delightful games are played”; that the light, air and color of the place are paradisical—luminous, penetrating and mellow; that—just as Mrs. O'C. described it—“In the instance of coming into it one was exquisitely glad … it was … an enchanted garden … And somehow it was just like coming home”; that the child is expelled from his garden paradise when he insists on seeing “what happens next” in a magical book with “living pages” which illustrate his life up to the point where he discovers the garden door; that this Wallace on several occasions in his later life encounters the door again by chance, but that each time he has some pressing engagement that prevents his stopping; that, as he tells the narrator three days before his death, he has encountered the door three times in this one year, and that the temptation to enter it has become overwhelming. After Wallace's body is found in the pit, the narrator speculates that in the dark Wallace mistook the fence for a white wall and that the unfastened door “awakened some memory.” He speculates whether there ever was a green door or whether Wallace was blessed with some abnormal gift which permitted contact with another, more beautiful world. And, in fact, he may have returned to that world after all, while we in this one can only see his departure as a tragic, accidental fall into a pit.

Despite its flaws, Oleša's telling of the story contains all the key ingredients for his own psychological and literary purposes. He builds his literary evocations of this archetype upon the following basic motifs from the story: the notion that there exists a childhood paradise; that there exists a passageway through which one can return to that childhood paradise; that this passageway is green; that the paradise is “ineffable” to a large degree, but that what can be described includes the presence of exotic animals, a girl in green, a special “translucent” yet “penetrating and mellower light,” a “quality of translucent reality,” an enclosed grass-covered court in which children play delightful games, and the fact that the character often yearns to return to this paradise, but the responsibilities and vanities of adolescent and adult reality always somehow prevent this return so that, until the end, it becomes but a longing, the “garden that has haunted all his life.” Of particular note is the fact that Oleša incorrectly recalls the title of the story as “The Green Gate” (“Zelenaja kalitka”) rather than “The Door in the Wall,” since green becomes throughout Oleša's works the color associated with childhood, happiness, paradise and grace. All the motifs and general themes cited here from Wells' story appear again and again in Oleša's work.

If Oleša draws his images of paradise from the Wells archetype, it is precisely because that story embodied as no other Oleša's relationship to childhood. Oleša was obsessed with childhood. He believed that creation was largely the tapping and resurrection of childhood visions. In a 1935 interview, Oleša claimed:

Childhood impressions play an enormous part in the formation of the artistic intellect … The ability to see the world as if for the first time is the characteristic of the poet. And this ability comes after all from childhood, when a man really does see the world for the first time.

(“Olesha Talks,” 77-8)

His art, in fact, reflects the mind of one who took literally the Formalists' notion of “seeing the world anew, as would a child.” It was a constant longing, backwards look into a time of spontaneity, bright colors and well-being.⁵

Oleša's literary universe in the late 1920s and early 1930s was defined thematically by a concern for finding in the new social order a place for those whose values developed in the now obsolete and despised prerevolutionary bourgeois society. Throughout his works, sensitive, often immature characters are confronted by threatening facts of adult reality, be it sexual rejection or the monopoly rule of Marxist and Newtonian law or the world of Soviet “plans” and hostile technology. Certainly the possibility of at least some temporary escape must be offered to such characters as Kavalerov and Ivan Babičev of Envy, Fedja of “The Cherry Pit” (“Višnevaja kostočka”), Šuvalov of “Love” (“Ljubov'”), and the children of the stories “Human Material” (“Čelovečeskij material”) and “I Look into the Past” (“Ja smotrju v prošloe”)—particularly since these characters in part represent Oleša's own ideological quandary. And it should come as no surprise that the means and destination provided for that “escape”—childhood—should be that very concept and condition from which these characters obsolete values derived and from which their creator's art originated. Oleša's art, therefore, both describes its origins as a “return” to childhood, and provides an “escape” to childhood as the lone alternative to its thematic complications.

Possibilities for “escape” in Oleša's world are provided by metaphorical “portals” through which short visits to ideal worlds—paradises identified with childhood—may be made.⁶ Such portals may take the form of childlike estranged modes of perception; of vision as “through the wrong end of binoculars,” in street mirrors, in circus acrobatics where the apparent violation of physical laws is celebrated, in whimsical, nonutilitarian metaphors, in dreams of infant-like security. Often, however, these “doors” are created by direct allusion to the Wellsian archetype, built upon clusters of images taken directly from “The Door in the Wall.” While most appearances of such doors are too dependent on specific textual matrices to explicate in this context, a brief look at two examples, one taken from Oleša's fiction, the other from his actual life, suggest the pattern.⁷

In the novel Envy, the crisis point in Kavalerov's and Ivan Babičev's struggle against the forces of the new world arises when they discover that the lost “paradise” of supposedly “old” values they have championed in fact still exists. Unfortunately for them, this paradise exists as part of that new society they despise. Ivan's and Kavalerov's final slide into indifference is precipitated by the discovery that not only is the Eden behind the “green door” very much alive in the new world, but it is really only they who have been expelled from that paradisical garden. The discovery takes place on that Sunday morning when Ivan takes Kavalerov to “see” Valja.

These four pages (of Part II, Section 7) are constructed almost exclusively from that cluster of images revolving around the Wellsian “green door” and the idea of a childhood paradise. Repeated mention is made of the special quality of the light that morning. Allusions are made to various passageways of the Wellsian archetype, such as the “gap [prolet] between two buildings” where there is a “large mass of light … thick, almost solid.” Next, predictably, comes garden imagery, as the two stop “to admire a blossoming hedge” (recall the “blossoming lawn” in Oleša's retelling of the Wells story). Kavalerov and Ivan next climb a stairway to a porch, which Oleša explicitly establishes as part of this “childhood paradise” we are entering—not even forgetting the “exotic” animals: “Everything here was designed for happy childhood. It was the sort of porch one associates with rabbits.” From this porch, one thing catches Kavalerov's attention, and his thoughts return to it obsessively: there lies below a “terribly green little space” (“strašno zelenaja ploščadka”). Perhaps in this “terrible greenness” Kavalerov has intuited that “paradise” lies not far away, for

Kavalerov's attention remained there, on the broken windowpane over the lawn. Why? After all, as yet nothing surprising had transpired before his eyes … It was simply that the lawn's greenness was unexpectedly pleasant, sweet and cool to the eye after the usual courtyard. In all likelihood, he only later convinced himself that the lawn's enchantment had captivated him so powerfully right off.

(Envy and Other Works, 101)

Looking at this “enchanted lawn,” Kavalerov discovers that “What had struck him as a lawn [lužajka] turned out to be a small courtyard overgrown with grass.” Kavalerov also intuits here that this “paradise” may not be accessible to him. Surveying the nearby rooftops, he notices a “child's ball, irretrievably lost when it had … rolled into a gutter.” This “irretrievably lost” object from childhood encapsulates Kavalerov's fears that his own metaphorical “childhood” may be irretrievably lost. After all, he too had been rolled into a gutter at the start of this novel. This ball in fact might be the same one Oleša remembers the pantheress playing with in Wells' childhood garden.

Oleša now ties this scene almost explicitly to the “green door” archetype:

They descended. In the stone wall that separated the big courtyard from the little one—the large, boring, empty courtyard from the mysterious little lawn—there was a breach (breš) … Through the embrasure they saw everything.

(Envy and Other Works, 102)

On the one side of the wall, there is the large, empty, boring world of adult reality. On the other side, the enchanted “mysterious” garden. But Kavalerov and Ivan cannot even temporarily enter this paradise through the breach in the wall. They can only look. Paradise already is occupied. As in Wells' garden, fantastic creatures play here: Volodja Makarov and Valja are high-jumping. Just as in Wells' story, “children are playing delightful games in a grass-covered court.” In other terms, Ivan and Kavalerov have discovered their lost Eden existing in the midst of Soviet society, and in that enchanted garden they discover the new Adam and Eve.⁸

While Oleša's art demonstrates an understanding that one cannot go “home” again to the paradise beyond the green door, he seems to have retained this illusion in his engagements with the practical world. In his “Speech to the First Congress of Soviet Writers,” Oleša defends his “right to preserve the colors of (his) youth” (Envy and Other Works, 216). He defends an artistic vision derived from childhood and described through the eyes of characters such as Kavalerov. He discusses the quandary faced by an artist who finds himself in a society which considers his particular talents “useless and vulgar,” “nothing but beggarliness.” To describe his plight, he will write a story about a beggar who roams the countryside aimlessly, finding himself one day by a half-collapsed wall in which he discovers an archway through which are visible “extraordinary plants … Perhaps there are some goats grazing.” Attracted by this enchanted garden, the beggar steps through the archway in the wall and discovers that youth magically has been returned to him:

Youth has suddenly and for some unknown reason come back to me … I need nothing: all my doubts, all my torments are gone … I wanted to write a story like this. And I have come to the conclusion that my greatest wish is the right to preserve the colors of my youth, the freshness of my vision, to defend that vision from assertions that it is not needed, from accusations that it is vulgar and worthless.

(Envy and Other Works, 216)

Oleša goes on to make the point that he is an artist for the very reason that he can “return” to childhood. His final point, the ostensible purpose of his speech, is that in order to revitalize his art and make it useful, he will attempt to find in his youth points in common with, and of benefit to, the youth of the new Soviet society: “Such is the recapturing of youth” (Envy and Other Works, 219).

Oleša thus uses the same idea—the return to youth/childhood—to describe both that artistic vision of his condemned as invalid by Soviet critics and that method by which he plans to make his art acceptable to them. The image which he uses to describe both his former “failures” as a Soviet writer and the promise of future “success”—passage through the enchanted archway in the wall back to his youth—clearly is taken from Wells' story. In fact, Oleša's projected story is really just a rather deluded retelling of “The Door in the Wall.”

… H. G. Wells captured and held the Russian public's imagination in a way unequaled on his native soil. While his popularity and influence at the turn of the century was enormous, it was in the 1920s, when a generation of writers raised on his stories reached maturity, that his true impact was felt. His futuristic imaginings, fascination with technology, enthusiasm for building a utopian future here and now, all matched the official spirit of the Soviet 1920s. It is supremely ironic, then, that one of his biggest legacies in Russian letters became the paradigm for lost paradise, for the quixotic search for lost happiness and peace, and for the dangers inherent in trying to retrieve what is irretrievably lost. What began as a romantic dream of childhood ended in the disillusionment with what adult reality had offered. Rather than celebrate the campaign to build real time machines or moon rockets in their art, this generation of writers built little green doors to attempt to escape back to childhood.

Notes

1. That “bright green doors” may be an archetype originating and extending far beyond Wells is suggested by a comment Samuel Taylor Coleridge made (In “Lecture IX” of The Lectures of 1811-1812) regarding Miranda's early childhood memories in Shakespeare's The Tempest: “In general, our remembrances of early life arise from vivid colours, especially if we have seen them in motion; for instance, persons when grown up will remember a bright green door, seen when they were quite young” (II, 134). The “door” by itself as metaphor for memory's time travel pervades world literature, and hardly qualifies as evidence for a link between Wells and Russian literature. Likewise, literature which defines “childhood” as the experience of a garden “paradise” is not uncommon, particularly in the industrialized West (see Coe, and Marinelli.) In Russian literature, the tradition/myth of the “happy childhood,” set in nature's garden, originates with Tolstoy, as Andrew Baruch Wachtel argues in The Battle for Childhood. Richard F. Gustafson in Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger (29-30), argues that the image of the “garden” lies at the heart of Tolstoy's elaboration—in Childhood (Detstvo, 1852)—of his own childhood experience and definition of self. Of the three Russian authors examined here, Nabokov most obviously continues the Tolstoyan “childhood” tradition. The present study, however, seeks to establish a Wells connection to the Russian “childhood” by examining various explanations of specifically Wellsian images and motifs, drawn from “The Door in the Wall.”

2. Articles on Wells' place in Russian literature include: Leland Fetzer, “H.G. Wells' First Russian Admirer” [Kuprin], Foundation, 11-12: 39-48; Christine Rydel, “Bulgakov and H. G. Wells,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, 15 (1976): 293-311; Christine A. Rydel, “Russia in the Shadows and Wells in the Dark,” Michigan Academician, 18 (1986, summer): 393-410; Clarence Lindsay, “H.G. Wells, Viktor Shklovsky, and Paul deMan: The Subversion of Romanticism,” in The Scope of the Fantastic, ed. Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce, 125-33 (Westport, Conn.: 1985); Christopher Collins, “Zamyatin, Wells and the Utopian Tradition,” Slavic and East European Review, 44, no. 103 (July 1966): 351-60; William Hutchings, “Structure and Design in a Soviet Dystopia: H. G. Wells, Constructivism, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We,” Journal of Modern Literature, 9(1) (1981-1982): 81-102; C. Moody, “Zamyatin's We and English Antiutopian Fiction,” Unisa English Studies 14, i: 24-33; N. Berberova, “Anglijskie predki Vladimira Nabokova,” Novyj žurnal, kn. 167 (1987): 191-205; George Kalbouss, “Russian Symbolism Breaking Away: Sologub's Legend in Creation,” Perspectives in Contemporary Literature, 8 (1982): 115-21; Didier Machu, “Look at the Harlequins!: L'etrange cas du docteur Moreau,” Revue Francaise D'Etudes Americaines, 14 (1982): 245-256.

3. Nabokov champions Wells' art in five interviews, all republished in Strong Opinions. These include Alvin Toffler's interview for Playboy in January 1964 (Strong Opinions, 42); Herbert Gold and George A. Plimpton's interview in The Paris Review, October 1967 (SO, 100 and 103); Martha Duffy and R. Z. Sheppard's Time interview of May 23, 1969 (SO, 126-27); Philip Oakes' interview for The Sunday Times, June 22, 1969 (SO, 139); and Alfred Appel's interview in the 1971 issue of Novel, A Forum on Fiction (Brown University, Providence, R.I.) (SO, 175).

4. Beaujour reaches a similar conclusion about the specific influence of Wells on Oleša:

   From time to time the characters in Olesha's works do achieve moments of well-being and blessedness. Such moments of fulfillment are rare, fleeting, and always given a similar setting: one bathed in light and associated with clear air, bright colors, and unfettered movement.

   Olesha's own image of an archetypal paradise is also of this kind. Characteristically, it is a literary image, linked to a myth of childhood as the source of all purity to which one longs to return. It is the image of the garden in H. G. Wells' “The Door in the Wall.”

   (58)

5. In perhaps his most direct statement on literary method, Oleša wrote in No Day Without a Line:

   I write as if I were looking backward. I don't create, shading, structuring, pondering; I remember. It is as though what I had intended to write had already been written. Written, and then had somehow fallen apart, and I want to gather the fragments again into a whole.

   (Izbrannoe, 370)

   In another passage of No Day Without a Line, Oleša describes his writing as “attempts to restore life [vosstanovit' žizn']”: “I desperately want to restore it sensually” (Izbrannoe, 359). For a detailed examination of this subject, see Borden, “The Magic and the Politics of Childhood,” 34-194.

6. Čudakova similarly notes the widespread presence in Oleša's works of “wide-open doors” with masses of light or darkness defining some sort of space beyond them. While she attaches no specific significance to this phenomenon, she does observe that “from these dark spaces, these abysses, endlessly emerge [vyplyvajut] childhood memories” (93).

7. In “The Cherry Pit” (1929), Fedja first effects an escape from a failed adult situation (romantic rejection) to an “invisible land” closely associated with childhood archetypes by means of the cherry pit, which he has left in his mouth “out of childhood habit.” Subsequent escapes to the invisible land evoke a chain of Wellsian images which include passageways beyond which Fedja encounters gardens, green spaces, brilliant lights and fantastic creatures. In “Love” (1929), Šuvalov temporarily escapes the conflict between the world he perceives under the influence of love and that world dictated by Marxist materialist philosophy and Newtonian law. He finds his metaphorical “green door” near the threshold of sleep, “close to childhood sensations,” and wakes to an enchanted world full, in his new child-like perceptions, of fantastic creatures. Kavalerov's attempted escapes to childhood in Envy (via sleep; via dreams; via tricks of vision; via his relationships with both Babičevs and with Anečka and her bed, etc.) are too numerous to recount. Other metaphorical “escapes” through metaphorical “green doors” associated with childhood are found in “Aldebaran” (1931) and “I Look into the Past” (1928). A nightmare variant (with an illusory door painted onto a wall) occurs in “Notes of a Writer.” For a discussion of the full range of these various “doors of escape,” see Borden, “The Magic and the Politics of Childhood,” 135 ff.

8. In response to an earlier version of this paper, Ronald LeBlanc suggested that “the child's ball irretrievably lost … when it had rolled into a gutter” might be linked with the soccer ball Kavalerov finds himself unable to touch when it is kicked into the stands during the soccer match in Envy, and comes to rest directly at his feet. The combination of these two scenes, both involving games played by others on bright green lawns, convince Kavalerov that he is not invited to “play” in the new Soviet world. For a close examination of the latter scene, see Ronald D. LeBlanc, “The Soccer Match in Envy,” Slavic and East European Journal, 32 (1988): 55-71.

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