Winter 2013 - Origin
In researching the life of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam for one of the stories in my second book, Someone Else, I came across the name of one of his wife’s friends, Anna Ivanovna Kuznechikaya. It’s an unusual name and I wondered for a time if it was in fact real. “Kuznechik” is the Russian word for grasshopper, and means, literally, “little smith”; grasshoppers, the language quaintly suggests, are just such tiny smiths, working away with hammer and anvil as their profession demands. It would be interesting, I thought, to take each man apart into his animals and then come to a thorough agreement with them. Because what an astonishing hierarchy there is among animals, and the truth is, as Elias Canetti has remarked, we see them according to how we stole their qualities.
