As soon as Munchausen is settled in London, he begins giving dinner parties, pressing the local fogs into service, and filling his guests’ heads full of them “more deftly than an expert milkmaid decanting her ware into canisters.”

When not receiving, the baron rambles through Kensington Gardens, past the statue of Peter Pan “who never existed,” then up Piccadilly and along the Strand to “the most nonexistent of all”: to God. Inside St. Paul’s he often gazes at a particular pair of allegorical figures and engages a lay brother in this ritual exchange:

“What is that?”

“A true representation of Truth and Falsehood, sir.”

“And which one of them is Truth?” The baron squints.

“If I may say so, sir, that one.”

“The last time, as I recall, you said that one was Falsehood.”

Is it any wonder then that Munchausen should reverence not Saint Paul, not a conventional saint, but Saint Nobody? Or Nemo, as he was called in the eleventh century when he apparently sprang from the impudent head of an intractable French monk named Radulfus Glaber. Radulfus had the idea of treating the Latin word nemo (nobody, no man) in biblical and classical texts as a proper noun. His superhuman Nemo is not bound by the usual constraints. “All those endless stingy and gloomy negatives—‘no one can,’ ‘no one knows,’ ‘no one must,’ ‘no one dares,’ ” writes Mikhail Bakhtin, “become giddy affirmatives: ‘Nemo can,’ ‘Nemo knows,’ ‘Nemo must,’ ‘Nemo dares.’ ”[6]

The baron’s London idyll comes abruptly to an end when he agrees to return to Russia. Undercover. Kronstadt and other uprisings have prompted Lenin to announce his New Economic Policy, a temporary return to private trade. At the same time, he is tackling what Maxim Gorky ruefully termed “the annihilation of the intelligentsia in our illiterate and uncultured country.”[7] The so-called dreamer in the Kremlin is especially exercised about the professors and writers: “counterrevolutionaries all.”[8]

The religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, for instance. From the very start Berdyaev perceived “the Bolsheviks’ moral deformity”; he rejected their image “both aesthetically and ethically.”[9] In February 1920 he was arrested and interrogated by Dzerzhinsky himself. The interrogation turned into a forty-five-minute lecture by Berdyaev on his religious, philosophical, and moral opposition to communism. His candor clearly disarmed the head of the Cheka. The philosopher was freed and delivered to his frigid apartment on Maly Vlasevsky where the small stove was sometimes fueled with sticks of ancestral furniture. All the same, it didn’t so much heat the apartment as fill it with smoke.

It was there, in the spring of 1922, that Berdyaev received a tall, unknown writer from Kiev in search of work and a room: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Berdyaev could help with neither: his life in Moscow was by then too tenuous. In September the philosopher found himself forced to board a ship to the West along with two dozen other leading lights. Krzhizhanovsky found a room on the Arbat and began fighting for the printed existence of his unorthodox phantasms at odds with the times—to little or no avail. In 1927, as Soviet Russia prepared to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, he was closeted with his much loved Munchausen. For the baron, Krzhizhanovsky fought hardest of all.

—JOANNE TURNBULL

1. Rudolf Raspe and others, The Singular Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a definitive text edited by John Carswell and illustrated by Fritz Kredel (New York: The Heritage Press, 1952), 4.

2. Ibid., 16–17.

3. St. Petersburg (1914–1924).

4. “The Fog of Petrograd,” The New York Times, March 12, 1921.

5. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If ”: A System of Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, translated by C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), xlvii.

6. M. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1990, 2nd edition), 458.

7. Letter to Alexei Rykov, July 1, 1922, in Pisma i documenty: 1917–1922 (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2014).

8. Letter to Felix Dzerzhinsky, May 19, 1922, in Vysylka vmesto rasstrela: 1921–1923 (Moscow: Russky put, 2005).

9. N. A. Berdyaev, Samopoznanie (Moscow: Kniga, 1991), 229.

THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN

1. EVERY BARON HAS HIS FLIGHTS OF FANCY

A PASSERBY cut across Alexanderplatz* and stretched out a hand toward the faceted panes of an entrance door. But just then from the star of in-streaming streets came the crying mouths of newspaper boys:

“Rebellion in Kronstadt!”*

“End of the Bolsheviks!”

The passerby, shoulders hunched against the spring chill, thrust a hand into a pocket: his fingers fumbled from seam to seam—damn!—not a pfennig. He dashed open the door.

Now he sprang up the length of a long runner; leaping after him, taking the stairs two at a time, came muddy footprints.

On reaching the first landing: “Who shall I say is calling?”

“Tell the baron: the poet Unding.”*

The manservant eyed the caller—from his shabby boots to the crumpled crown of his ginger fedora—and asked again, “Who?”

“Ernst Unding.”

“One minute.”

His footsteps retreated—then returned; his voice betrayed genuine surprise.

“The baron will see you in his study. Pray come up.”

“Ah, Unding.”

“Munchausen.”

Their palms met.

“Now then. Come and sit by the fire.”

No matter how one looked at it, guest and host bore little resemblance to one another: side by side—soles to the fender—were a pair of impeccable patent-leather pumps and the muddy boots we have already met; side by side—leaning back in Gothic armchairs—were a long, clean-shaven face with hooded eyes and fine aristocratic nose versus a jowly face with red button nose and prickly-lashed pupils under tufts of draggled hair.

The two sat for a minute watching the dance of blue and scarlet sparks in the grate.

“The cigars are on that side table,” the baron said at length.

His guest extended a hand: after it crept a striped and crumpled cuff. The lid of the cigar box clicked open—then came the chirring of the clipper against dried leaves, then wreathes of fragrant gray smoke.

The baron squinted slightly at the pulsating flame.

“We Germans have not learned how to deal even with smoke.