Communication Is Literally Impossible

An Ode to Footnotes, and a Review of Vanya Bagaev's Tulubaikaporia

Dear Republic,

ROL stalwart Denise S. Robbins is back in our pages, reviewing Vanya Bagaev / vanechka buymybookovich's new, well, book. The Republic is closing in on itself, but man, it's never felt so large.

-ROL

COMMUNICATION IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE

The Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon are among the most remote communities in the world. They speak a language isolate: a language with no known connection to any other spoken language on earth. In the 1970s, they were studied at length by the linguist Daniel Everett, who hoped to a) learn their fascinating language and b) convert them to Christianity. But while Everett was successful with the former, he was deeply unsuccessful with the latter. The Pirahã told Everett that if they had not seen Jesus, and Everett had not seen Jesus, they weren’t interested in any stories about Jesus.

Everett claimed this was due to the structure of their language, which uses suffixes to determine if knowledge is gathered via hearsay, observation, or deduction. The story of Jesus Christ is hearsay of hearsay; the story goes so far back there is no clear connection between those events and now. And so, the Pirahã were incapable of caring about Jesus or any creator. In fact, the Pirahã were so staunch in their belief, or lack of belief in Jesus, that they not only refused to be converted, but they eventually convinced Everett to reject Jesus Christ and Christianity, divorcing his missionary Christian wife and leaving his kids in the process. Was it all because of grammar?

Proponents of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might say “yes.” (Or “oui” or “sí” or maybe כֵּן.) The idea is that language shapes the way we think. There is a “strong” and a “weak” form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The strong form is called “linguistic determinism” and suggests that language determines what’s possible for someone to think. For example, linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asserted that the Hopi had no conception of time because their language had no vocabulary or grammar for it. He based this on conversations with one Hopi guy and a brief field visit. And it was proven super wrong—a different linguist spent more time in the field and came out with a bookful of Hopi references to time called Hopi Time, with hundreds of examples for temporal relations.

Many such cases of the “strong” version of Sapir-Whorf have collapsed under scrutiny. Consider that some words exist in certain languages but not others, like the German word “schadenfreude.” Just because the word doesn’t exist in English doesn’t mean we can’t understand it: someone merely has to explain it means “the pleasure that comes from learning of someone else’s pain.” An evil, guilty pleasure. It simply takes longer to explain. As with the case of the Pirahã? It may have just been a cultural norm that came first, and the language was secondary, adding on suffixes as needed, and removing tenses when they were no longer necessary. The worldview could have come before or concurrently with the language. Everett didn’t renounce Jesus simply because he learned a new language, given that he didn’t forget the old one; he renounced Jesus because he was convinced.

Efficiency is at the core of the “weak” form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as “linguistic relativism.” Instead of language determining our brain in a rigid pattern, it primes us to be more receptive to certain ideas and to process them more quickly. And, in fact, this has been proven true in some cases. For instance, Russians and Greeks each have two different terms for the color blue—dark blue and light blue—and consider these two completely separate colors, not different hues of the same color. As a result, according to multiple studies, Russian and Greek speakers are marginally faster at distinguishing between the two shades of blue than English speakers are. But English speakers are still able to tell them apart. It just takes them longer. Speed is the key. A minor difference, but a real one, that potentially points to something bigger overall about the way our brain processes information, when enough of these tiny decision times add up. So it’s not impossible to understand someone who speaks a different language; it simply takes more time to understand them.

Language has power. The question is, how much power? The simple act of conversation between one person and another requires a translation, even if they’re speaking the same language. Each person wants to be understood. And each person is living inside a different frame of reference. Sharing a language can help bridge the gap, reduce the friction of understanding, but sometimes that’s not enough. Beyond the language, there’s a cultural context that needs to be translated.

Tulubaikaporia is a Love Letter to Translation

Author Vanya Bagaev maintains two Substack personas: the Russian “vanechka” and the Londonite “Vanya Bagaev.” His new book Tulubaikaporia is—the book website claims—written by the Russian vanechka and translated by the Londonite Bagaev. Yet there is no way to purchase the “original” in Russian. The book was translated before publication, as essential to publication, translating the Russian mind into the English language.

The book is about a fictitious village called Tulubaika (which is based on his own Russian home village also supposedly called Tulubaika—unclear if this is true). In the book, Tulubaika doesn’t appear on a map and the travel options to get there are limited and difficult. “There’re fields around and nothing else,” one character describes. “We have a few small houses and we have orchid gardens.” And it’s vanishing. Its people are moving away, the village is disappearing, and “the only way to save it,” the author writes, “is to transform it from a physical object into a mythological one, so that the number of people who possess a memory of Tulubaika and experience towards it even the most minimal nostalgic thought might grow, and so Tulubaika, degenerating from real reality, is — by way of various literary somersaults — reborn in the reality of literature.”

Some of the stories in Tulubaikaporia (called “episodes,” which Bagaev is posting one by one on his Substack) take place in Tulubaika proper, but many take place on the outskirts, on the way in or out, or somewhere else entirely. And yet they all revolve around it. A standout from the collection is episode two, “Lingus Venus.” The story is all about translation. In a nondescript European city, a generic man meets a Tulubaikan woman. She wants him to take an undisclosed pill, to let go, to fly. He wants to stay grounded, to understand. He’s losing his head. He listens to nearby cicadas and goes on a long narrative rant about them, culminating in: “You feel what the world really is, described in the cicadian tongue.”

Then he asks her to translate this rant, hundreds of words about cicadas, and she provides one word in return: “kaiabtuluulbaiakkatu.” Her date, impressed, wants to learn her language, but she shoots this down. “Maybe you can learn it but you still won’t be able to really think in it, I mean, ‘really’. You’ll still count in your own tongue, your dreams and subconscious will use it to talk to you.”

Despite what I would say to you, there will always be so much more of me that you can never see, there’ll always be so much more of what I can never translate, and even if I can, you will never be able to understand it. You would be looking at this image I spend so much effort to create and I will spend my life translating to you all my emotions and feelings. Even after you “learn the words”, you’ll never see my innermost self, who is a far more interesting person, by the way, she’s very funny.

Among the highlights of the book are the plentiful translation footnotes. For instance, he explains that even though the stories are translated from Russian to English, the heroine of this story says the Russian “Da” (да), meaning “yes” in Russian, “to emphasise our heroine’s ‘otherworldliness’.”

There are also multiple footnotes about the Russian idea of “truth.” Bagaev notes that “‘Istina’ (истина) is Russian for ‘truth’, in a literal sense, though semantically it stands further from simply ‘the factual/empirical truth’, closer to ‘the absolute / transcendent / metaphysical truth’ ... Nabokov considered it one of the untranslatable Russian words.”

Elsewhere, in episode seven of the book, “Psychophysiological responses to bus time dilation,” Bagaev explains in a footnote why he spells the word “trü” with an umlaut: to mimic Russian slang, which sometimes spells “true” as “yруъ.” That final letter, the hard sign (ъ), isn’t necessary, he explains, but adding it adds “an exaggerated intensity and authenticity.”

Footnotes like these are perhaps more specific than the average reader may feel necessary (and if so, they can simply conveniently skip them), but they also comprise the book’s richest territory. This specificity gets at the tiny differences between languages that eventually add up to a different frame of reference, like the ability to distinguish between different types of truth. In addition to the footnotes, Bagaev has been posting “extras” that go even further into the tiny details of each episode. The insistence on footnotes and follow-ups shows that the author is doing what the heroine of “Lingus Venus” refuses to try: translating the narrative’s emotions and feelings as fully as possible, even if it takes (much) longer to get there.

Like David Oistrakh Playing Faintly on the Radio

Books are one way into the cultural context of another language. Music is another. In a way, it requires no translation. Music is beyond words, with instruments and melodies creating patterns and textures that—if done right—speak straight to the soul.

And yet serious musicians can devote their entire lives to studying the nuances and complexities of a single piece. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma has recorded full albums of the Bach cello suites three different times throughout his life and continues to showcase them on tour. I imagine a thousand footnotes in his mind about what each note has to say about the composer’s intention, and even more footnotes about each choice he makes in terms of speed and tone and bowing and why he’s making them. The “umlaut” of the note provides intensity and authenticity, like Bagaev’s umlauts in “trü.”

Bach’s cello suites are notoriously bare, without annotations or instructions on bowing, dynamics, or even tempo. Much of the orchestral music of that time was similarly bare. They simply weren’t needed: musicians followed the established norms and conventions of the time, and compositions often didn’t stray outside of that. As composers began to break free of the norms and experiment with tone and tempo, as in the Romanticist era, this changed. The scores became filled with composer notes and instructions, as the feeling of the piece became essential. A new set of conventions was formed around annotation in scores. Dolce for sweetly, Cantabile for singingly, Sotto Voce for subdued, and so on. Sibelius wrote “Hallelujah!” at the end of his second symphony.

Modernist composer Paul Wiancko takes his notes to the next level. For example, his piece “LIFT” includes these notes: “Like the first raindrops before a downpour.” “Like a rusted swingset.” “Like an electronic glitch.” And, for the lead violin at this spot: “Like Oistrakh playing faintly on the radio.”

David Oistrakh was one of the twentieth century’s most famous violinists. A child prodigy who was born in Odessa in 1908, nine years before the Russian Revolution, he started playing at three years old and held his first concert at age six. As an adult, he was described as “big” even though he clocked in at just five foot six—it was his overwhelming stage presence, his effortless, flawless musicianship, that made him more than a man.

He was also Jewish in a land of antisemitism. Pogroms were common around Odessa while he was living there, particularly in the late 1910s. When the Soviets took power and rampant antisemitism continued, he had to hold his tongue and pledge his wholehearted allegiance to the state. He still “thought in Yiddish” but lived in terror, claiming to have seen many of his neighbors taken away by the secret police. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich said the Soviets forced Oistrakh to “have two faces, to think in one way and to appear in another.” Rostropovich was bolder. Rostropovich spoke what he thought. He sheltered and publicly defended the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, and other books exposing the horrors of the Gulag prison system. Rostropovich also smuggled the score of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony—set to a poem that began with a condemnation of Soviet indifference to the Babi Yar Jewish massacre—out of the USSR in his cello case.

And Rostropovich and Oistrakh were good friends until Oistrakh sold him out.

When the Soviets got fed up with the outspoken cellist, they forced Oistrakh to sign a letter of condemnation. Oistrakh took Rostropovich aside the day before it was published and confessed. “I can only plead with you to understand, and have the courage to forgive me.” And he was forgiven. Or at least understood. Rostropovich said later about the incident: “Music was all we had left … a kind of opening, a window to the sun, to fresh air, to life.”

Many agreed that Oistrakh did what he had to do in order to survive and to keep playing music and share this music with the world. Oistrakh became an ambassador, playing all over the globe. He had a close partnership with the composer Shostakovich, who composed three major violin works just for him.

Oistrakh worked throughout his life with the Soviet regime, with a system that took away his neighbors and looked away from Jewish massacres. He did this for the love of music that many around the world fell in love with in turn. He became so well-known he appeared often on the radio, becoming part of the household din. Music playing softly in the background, somehow sweeter after a lifetime of fear.

Do you need to know this story to enjoy Wiancko’s weird and wonderful music? No. The goal is for the musician to communicate this, but to do so, they need to understand the context. If the musician succeeds, as a listener, I should take in the complicated feeling of triumph and survival in a corrupt world. But it makes the piece more understandable to know the story of David Oistrakh. Once you do, you can hear the echoes of his very own violin.

Speed, once again, is the issue here. One sentence evokes his entire story. If there were a specific word to communicate this feeling, that would be even more efficient. But to understand the emotional texture that Wiancko was trying to communicate, the listener should know the story.

We Will Never Understand

In 2023, the author Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love postponed the publication of her novel The Snow Forest. She’d faced widespread backlash simply because it took place in Russia. This was one year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Critics said it was wrong to have any positive depiction of Russia during such a time. The novel would have been set in Soviet-era Siberia, featuring a group of Russians isolating in the wilderness to escape the government. To me this does not sound like a ringing endorsement of Russian governance. (Gilbert never returned to the book. Instead she published a memoir about getting her dying girlfriend addicted to drugs and plotting her murder and leaving her on her deathbed. Somehow she didn’t worry about the backlash from that!) But why, during such a divisive time, would we reject books that attempt to understand the Russian mind?

There is not enough paper in the world to tell every story about the Russian people and their land. The Gulag Archipelago spans thousands of pages full of suffering. Oistrakh is not mentioned; his story isn’t sad enough. Even though the Gulag system was shut down more than sixty years ago, it still shapes the cultural consciousness. A hundred years of fear and suffering and it is all connected. Solzhenitsyn—who wrote Gulag—was sheltered by the cellist Rostropovich, who was condemned by Oistrakh, who was beloved by Shostakovich, who was the teacher of Rostropovich, and whose symphony was smuggled out by him, and who wrote music about the Jewish spirit until Oistrakh warned him against it, and who is mentioned many times in Bagaev’s Tulubaikaporia, for example: “Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 was composed in Dresden in 1960 over just three days under what historians politely describe as ‘intense emotional distress’.” Art in this era comes from a complicated set of emotions, and it points to a new complicated set of emotions, and learning the history, even through annotations, helps make this understandable.

Who Invented Empathy?

The word “empathy” wasn’t coined in English until 1908. But the idea existed before the word. During the Enlightenment, the “empathy novel” began to be explored in earnest. In particular, epistolary novels with many differing perspectives became popular. These novels were meant for the reader to feel the emotions and pain of others, even people who weren’t likable.

So even if people theoretically understood the concept of “empathy,” it took bookfuls of stories to help them experience it. Empathy, after all, requires feeling, as opposed to sympathy. Sympathy is when you feel for something, rather, with empathy, feel with something. Language may not determine what you can or can’t think, but it does help show what’s possible.

This becomes literal in the realm of mathematics and science. There’s a quote in the math world (though no one seems to know the origin): “good mathematicians prove theorems, great mathematicians come up with conjectures, and the greatest mathematicians come up with definitions.” Ancient mathematics was remarkably inefficient; it had to be carried out through words and diagrams rather than the modern symbols we know today. Once they created new languages with shared notation, math could do more and go further, like plotting algebraic equations into geometric forms and vice versa. One of the greatest breakthroughs in thermodynamics was not coming up with how to measure temperature, but what exactly temperature “is.” Once you understand that it’s the average kinetic energy of particles in a system, you can come up with tools to measure this that account for things like air pressure and humidity and so on. The shared definition allows for speed and specificity that would be hard to find otherwise.

In the Enlightenment, rather than tell a tale that put forth a simple moral, the novel began to explore the human mind in a more vigorous way, thereby helping the readers understand that they, too, can break out of their own frame of reference. The Enlightenment was a time when anything seemed possible, all preexisting ideas were up for debate. The “other” became necessary to understand. This is the novel’s most urgent task.

A final passage from Bagaev’s story “Lingus Venus,” when the two main characters fall for each other:

The words, the real words composed of morphemes with attached hints of meanings and history of the evolution of hundreds of tongues, have ceased to exist, dispersed into individual sounds, and these sounds, in turn, have dissolved into the air like vapour billowing from an air humidifier, and instead of them there now exist only glances, touches, emotions, laughs, the smell of hormones and alcohol, basil and garlic stuck between teeth, the waves of twisted electricity hopping joyfully from neuron to neuron, from brain to brain, liberated, given to themselves. Words are no longer necessary, necessity itself is unnecessary; it simply is, everything simply is.

The goal of communication is to get to this point: a converging, a place where words aren’t needed, the space between people disappears, time doesn’t exist. One mind is simply understood by another. And yet we need language to get there. There is a gulf between us and we could all use more footnotes.

Denise S. Robbins is the author of The Unmapping. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer whose stories have appeared in literary journals including The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, and many more. She writes on Substack about noticing things.

Photo of David Oistrakh