I am not a Russian scholar, nor do I speak, read, or write Russian to any real extent. I have tried to translate the Russian and read the texts in English that I needed to write the narrative. Translations of poems from the Russians Blok and Valentina Sinkevich appeared in the print versions of The Pittsburgh Quarterly -- Winter 1992; Winter 1993.

The fiction (or is it the comedy?) of The Vulture and the Mother had its origin in the real life and work of the Russian poet, Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921). I was compelled as a writer to make something of all that I found so profound (silly): Blok's brief but heroic existence, his love (unfounded -- his country killed him) for Russia, the exquisite music of his verses (only Russian language adepts need apply), his monumental epoch (World War I, The Russian Revolution, The Russian Civil War). Found/New York 1978-1989.

Rather than fictionalize Blok and his contemporaries, I chose to center the book on a character for whom Blok would have been a hero. So Blok in the book is forever a character not acting but whose spirit is acted upon. Rather than use Blok's city of Petrograd, the city of Pushkin and modern capital of the Bolsheviks, I much rather preferred the ancient capital of Moscow, with its pagan influences, and the specter of Tsar Ivan IV, the Terrible.

So the character of Dmitri Dumatskoy was born (written 1995-1997 in Johnstown, Pa.). His surname is derived from the Russian verb to think. He would be a devotee of Blok's poetry and a scholar working within the Kremlin. A solitary figure, Dmitri would spend most of his time immersed in the inner machinations of his own thoughts, rather than in the physical world, where he was his mother's son, a soldier, husband and father (tragic flaw?). Dmitri's descent to the lower depths of Moscow society is too hard to read without laughing.

The novel's title is from Blok's 1916 poem, The Vulture (Korshun). He presents his beloved country as a dying baby, relying on its mother's sustenance, while the vulture patiently prescribes circles in the sky, drawing out its prey. Dmitri Dumatskoy is that doomed thing between the vulture and the mother.

Much of the action turns on the Tsar Ivan the Terrible library, its history, the search for it, its discovery, and the effect of it on many of the characters, particularly Dmitri, his wife Zina, and the double agent, Uchitelnitsky. In fact, Ivan's library has no real historical validity. Most accounts of it I read suggested that the library was "rumored" to exist. I fabricated this motif from the historical rumor.

The Supernatural (once stepping on the stage results are ridiculous), common to much of Russian literature, permeates the book. Characters are virtually devastated by this phenomenon, which enhances the power of all the evil: The Faustian V.V. Podly, Dmitri, Zina, their son, Sasha, Anya and Ivan Drugo.

Or it might be that Dmitri's overactive, overwrought thought processes are the source of this phenomenon and the creator of a set of chapters that have this mark?

The novel begins when Dmitri returns to Moscow by train from Blok's funeral in Petrograd 8/10/21.

The novel ends when Anya Drugo falls into the sleep of peace one night in Siberia.
LH./06