Listomania, Or Catalog as Technique (With Examples from Poetry and Prose, Classical and Modern, Western and Russian)

Los Angeles, CA, USA(Лос-Анджелес, США)

One of the staple quotables from Vasilii Aksenov's The Island of Crimea (Ostrov Krym, written in 1979, published 1981, English translation by Michel Heim, 1983; very much in the news as we speak in 2014) is the list of goods the protagonist Andrei Luchnikov failed to bring along to the 1970s' Moscow from Paris.

«Не купил: двойных бритвенных лезвий, цветной пленки для мини-фото, кубиков со вспышками, джазовых пластинок, пены для бритья, длинных носков, джинсов -- о, Боже! -- вечное советское заклятье -- джинсы! -- маек с надписями, беговых туфель, женских сапог, горных лыж, слуховых аппаратов, „водолазок“, лифчиков с трусиками, шерстяных колготок, костяных шпилек, свитеров из ангоры и кашмира, таблеток алка зельцер, переходников для магнитофонов, бумажных салфеток, талька для припудривания укромных местечек, липкой ленты „скоч“, да и виски „скоч“, тоника, джина, вермута, чернил для ручек „паркер“ и „монблан“, кожаных курток, кассет для диктофонов, шерстяного белья, дубленок, зимних ботинок, зонтиков с кнопками, перчаток, сухих специй, кухонных календарей, тампекса для менструаций, фломастеров, цветных ниток, губной помады, аппаратов hi-fi, лака для ногтей и смывки, смывки для лака -- ведь сколько уже подчеркивалось насчет смывки! -- обруча для волос, противозачаточных пилюль и детского питания, презервативов и сосок для грудных, тройной вакцины для собаки, противоблошиного ошейника, газовых пистолетов, игры „Монополь“, выключателей с реостатами, кофемолок, кофеварок, задымленных очков, настенных открывалок для консервов, цветных пленок на стол, фотоаппаратов „поляроид“, огнетушителей для машины, кассетника для машины, насадки STR для моторного масла, газовых баллонов для зажигалок и самих зажигалок с пьезокристаллом, клеенки для ванны -- с колечками! -- часов „кварц“, галогенных фар, вязаных галстуков, журналов „Vogue“, „Playboy“, „Downbeat“, замши, замши и чего-нибудь из жратвы...»

“Failed to buy double razor blades, color film for mini-photos, flash-bulbs, jazz records, shaving cream, long socks, jeans -- Oh, God! The eternal Soviet swear word jeans! -- T-shirts with logos, running shoes, women's boots, downhill skis, sound systems, skivvies, bras and panties, woolen pantyhose, ivory hairpins, angora and cashmere sweaters, Alka- Seltzer tablets, power cables for tape-recorders, pa per napkins, talcum powder for secluded spots, Scotch tape and Scotch whisky, tonic, gin, vermouth, ink for Parker and Mont Blanc pens, leather jackets, Dictaphone cassettes, woolen underwear, sheepskin coats, winter boots, foldaway umbrellas, gloves, dried spices, kitchen calendars, tampons, flow-masters, colored thread, lipstick, hi-fi apparatus, nail polish and nail polish remover -- how this was underlined! -- hair-bands, contraceptive pills and children's food, condoms and teats for babies' bottles, triple vaccines for dogs, a flea collar, air pistols, Monopoly games, electric switches and rheostats, coffee grinders, coffee urns, dark glasses, wall-mounted can openers, colored stick-on veneers for tables, Polaroid cameras, car fire extinguishers, car cassette players, STP nozzles for auto grease, gas cylinders for cigarette lighters and piezo-electric lighters, shower curtains with rings, quartz watches, halogen headlamps, knitted ties, Vogue, Playboy, Downbeat, ssuede leather, and any kind of food he could lay his hands on.”

The list is of historical and ethnographic interest but rather long, deploying as it does about 200 words and over 70 items. It is hard to read through the end, -- which, of course, is not necessarily bad. The progenitor of all such catalogs, the list of Achaean ships in Canto II of the Iliad, is way longer (around 300 hexameter verses). Small wonder Osip Mandel'shtam confessed reaching only its middle. There exists a respectable set of studies of Homeric and similar catalogs and, most recently, an impressive piece on Russian literary catalogs with special reference to the poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin by Stanislav Shvabrin (Svabrin 2011). In light of this scholarship, I was enticed to look at the traditional roots of Aksyonov's list of desirabilia. Homer's catalog is not just a list but a list of lists, and it inventories not so much ships as the names of the commanders from different areas of Greece and the nameless soldiers led by them, whose numbers are suggested by the number of vessels. The readability of this catalog has been debated since Aristotle, the argument hinging on the role it can be shown to play in the narrative design of the entire epic (and I'll skip this).

Be that as it may, the catalog remains a huge chunk of static, un-emplotted material, -- unlike the portrayal of Achilles' shield in Canto XVII, which was glorified by Lessing for presenting not merely a picturesque list of ornaments but rather the story of its manufacture by Hephaestus.

A history of creating -- rather than a list of the created -- opens the Bible (postdating the Iliad by only a couple of centuries). Heaven, earth, day, night, land, water, grass, trees and so on -- all the way to man, are shown emerging in a six-stage narrative of their creation.

In Homer, unlike Mandel'shtam's very dynamic picture:

...Сей длинный выводок, сей поезд журавлиный,

Что над Элладою когда-то поднялся,

Как журавлиный клин в чужие рубежи --

На головах царей божественная пена --

Куда плывете вы? <...>

И море, и Гомер -- все движется любовью <...>

(Мандельштам, «Бессонница. Гомер. Тугие паруса...»),

the ships do not fly or sail, but are simply listed as having arrived.

1. To be sure, the literary value of a catalog cannot be confined to its dynamism. Inserting a catalog into a literary text is a special case of the splicing “Operation Intertext”. It involves an interaction of the main, literary, text with an “alien” object: a quote from the classics, description of a painting (ekphrasis), a philosophical paradigm, a fragment of non-fiction To be sure, in actual literary practice, the catalog that is to be “inserted” in the text is quite often not brought in “from the outside” but rather, like everything else there, is created by the author and thus is also a literary artefact. But for the sake of presentation I allow myself this oversimplifica-tion -- similar to the way in narrative studies the “story” (the Russian Formalists' fabula) is often considered as “raw material” subject to compositional reworking that turns it into “discourse” (siuzhet), whereas in fact it is also a product of certain creative devices.. The mechanism of such transplantation includes a range of options: from a mere copying of the inserted piece to its radical reformatting. Literary appropriation of a catalog (= a specimen of nonliterary, everyday, business prose) creates tension between loyalty (naive or deliberate) to its extant parameters and their purposeful transformation. The length, order and uniformity of practical inventories are welcome in their literary versions, as they help create a semantic halo of memory and authenticity, but as a rule, they need further, fictional, “fine-tuning”.

The “memory” element is well served by the very principle of itemizing, preferably exhaustive: the longer the list, the more convincing it is. In texts designed for oral performance, the mnemonic aspect plays a special role. As human memory prefers storing narratives, rather than inventories, delivering catalogical passages is much harder than retelling even complicated plots; as a result, these passages become a sort of high-wire act. They require the use of special mnemonic techniques, thus enriching the text with additional artistic patterns -- semantic, narrative, spatial, phonetic etc. (Minchin 1996).

As for the aura of authenticity, literary catalogs owe it to the same diligent enumeration, claiming, as it were, no artistic boldness or narrative interest. However, such a lack may conflict with the desirability of entertainment value, -- a contradiction that generates a variety of artistic solutions. The linear order inherent in catalogs is quite welcome in poetic texts, as it fits naturally their “successive” format, to use Iurii Tynianov's signature formula (suktsessivnost ' stikhovogo riada); it also helps with verse's mnemonic function. It is more of a problem for prose and other storytelling genres, which have had to develop multiple techniques of narrativizing their lists.

In turn, the uniformity, that is, the initial equality of listed items, potentially contradicts the task of promoting the catalog's “sponsor”. There are various gradations of hierarchical orientation toward the top. For instance, Homer's ships are, of course, geared to the victory over Troy, but their list is quite extensive and thus horizontal. On the other hand, each verse of Ezekiel's biblical “Lament over Tyre” either glorifies Tyre's greatness or prophesies its fall See Ch. 27 of the Biblical Book of Ezekiel (6^th c. BCE), another early and influential specimen of catalogical (cum naval) discourse.. Verticality reaches its maximum in those texts where the listed items are not simply subordinated to the one at the top (as its possessions, tools or other attributes), but are its inalienable characteristics, manifestations, names. Such are the multiple names of gods and titles of monarchs, e.g.:

Титулатура Николая II

«Император и Самодержец Всероссийский, Московский, Киевский, Владимирский, Новгородский, Царь Казанский, Царь Астраханский, Царь Польский, Царь Сибирский, Царь Херсониса Таврического, Царь Грузинский, Великий Князь Финляндский и прочая, и прочая, и прочая».

(Nicolas II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, of Moscow, Kiev...)

Scholars distinguish between simple lists and more detailed, so to speak, annotated, catalogs proper. I would also separate “real” lists/catalogs from other enumerative constructions widely used in literature. The ones I'll be focusing on are characterized by:

— countability, that is, a clear tendency to exhaust the entire set;

— use of numerals and proper names;

— mention of a written or otherwise compiled and physically existing inventory;

— foregrounding of its textuality, verbal nature, i.e. its role as “a text inside a text”;

— and dialogic presentation, emphasizing the status of a list as a social document.

As we proceed to consider samples of literary catalogs, we will be paying attention to the paradoxical reconfiguration of their main parameters, that is, the way

— enumeration mutates into narrative;

— factography turns virtual and fictional;

— the horizontal becomes vertical;

— and the purely informational is textualised, so that matter-of-fact data about persons and objects begin to look like a collection of exotic appellations.

2. Among Russian classics, Gogol is known for having styled himself as a Homer.

3. Taras Bulba, his attempt at a national epic, abounds in catalog sequences, whose memorial character is often emphasized by the motif of death in battle. In Dead Souls, some catalog passages sound quasi-Homeric, for instance the list of Sobakevich's dead serfs in Chapter V. The nostalgic memorial note is trumpeted ironically as Sobakevich, trying to inflate the price, extolls their virtues. Eventually it comes to the actual writing out of the list and commenting on its physical and textual characteristics. Haggling over the dead's professional merits and monetary value transforms a mere list onto a protracted comic scene.

4. A famous, strictly female list is “The Ballad of the Ladies of Yore” by Francois Villon. This catalog of names associated with legendary stories about love and death basically sticks to the enumerative pattern. To narrativise it at least in part, the poet introduces a series of refrains -- rhetorical questions he asks and answers himself (Where...? -- Alas, where...?), simulating a sort of a roll call. This involves the reader in interactive participation and enhances the credibility of the discourse, which is delivered in the modest format of shared sorrowful meditation. The credibility of the list is also certified by the indisputable cultural status of the stories/legends and the social prestige of their heroines (goddesses and queens). As for the note of memorial nostalgia, it naturally emanates from the temporal gap in dealing with figures of a distant past plus the cruelty of the fate that befell them even then. This central theme of martyrdom clearly dominates the rather diverse list.

5. A quite different catalog of women is the so-called Don Juan list that appears in Mozart's Don Giovanni (libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte).

The catalog of the protagonist's amorous conquests is sung by his trusted valet Leporello and addressed to one of the abandoned women, Elvira. In many ways the catalog is quite traditional: it features 5 toponyms and 5 respective numerals, totaling 1865 females, 16 types (peasant girls... a blonde... a plump one... a debutante), and 11 additional features crowned with the most generic twelfth (skirt wearing).

The list is clearly vertical and remarkably includes no proper names (of women) -- only categories. This plays into the image of Don Juan, who is after sheer numbers and variety as tokens of his power, and lends the structure of the catalog an innovatively impersonal, anonymous character. The catalog is physically embodied in an impressive text object (questo non picciol libro [this not minuscule book]), compiled by Leporello and shown to Elvira in response to her reproaches. As a result, it is not so much declaimed monologically as enacted dialogically, which is particularly appropriate in a work for the stage.

The list is also animated by its gradually increasing structural complexity. It begins with impersonal numbers, proceeds to social categories of women, then to the types of their assets (like the wintertime advantages of fatties); also mentioned is the protagonist's metatextual care for constantly increasing the length of the list.

The structural development is accompanied by a sequence of three different musical sections of the aria. Joseph Losey, in the film-opera “Don Giovanni” he directed (1979), found a felicitous spatial counterpart to these effects. The mise-en-scene features Leporello and his assistants carrying heavy scrolls which they gradually roll down the steps of castle's wide external staircase. Elvira follows the scrolls, now reading the text, now covering her face in despair.

In this way, the dramatic and musical dynamisation of the list is supported by its graphic spatialization. The Don Juan list has a Homeric prototype: the catalog of the former lovers of Zeus which he includes in his declaration of love for Hera {Iliad, Canto XIV). Her acceptance of this strange courtship is skilfully naturalized -- not so much by the list's being strictly virtual (all the affairs are in the past), but above all by the fact that it is Hera that is slyly seducing her husband in order to distract him while Poseidon assists the Achaeans.

6. A Don Juan list narrativized into a short story format underlies the plot of Nabokov's “Skazka” (1930; “Nursery Tale”, 1975). The protagonist, Erwin, encounters the Devil in the shape of a middle-aged German woman who tells him he can have all the women he can “collect” in a day, provided the number is odd. By midnight he has exactly a dozen, then makes the point of adding the thirteenth only to discover that she is the same as the very first one and so has to admit defeat.

The catalogical skeleton of the story is obvious. It comprises:

— formation of a virtual harem with numeric parameters;

— abundance of numeric objects (a dial with four hands; a street and a streetcar, both involving numbers);

— fixation on other numbers, in particular archetypal ones (a dozen and a baker's/ devil's (chertova) dozen.

Plots based on a gradual unfolding of a list are a common type of narrative. The list can be a set of similar characters (Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie, “The Darling” by Chekhov) or of similar inanimate objects (“Six Napoleons” by Conan Doyle, The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov).

7. Next come lists of role models. We can begin with the genre of genealogy, dating back all the way to the epic and biblical tradition, in particular, the Gospel genealogies of Jesus. Pushkin authored two specimens of the genre, Moia rodoslovnaia (My genealogy) and Ezerskii, both saturated with toponyms and names of the protagonist's ancestors and other historical figures. Then there are the lists of cultural heroes or their works, mostly books, which influenced a literary character. Seek approval from the elect, but on the contrary, condescendingly accepts classics such as Pushkin and Nekrasov into the inner circle of his LEF buddies. At the same time, a number of “outsiders” are blatantly deleted from the encyclopedia. Thus, Mayakovsky, who started out by tampering with the encyclopedia's alphabetical order, i.e. its verbal aspect, proceeds to revising its backbone -- the list of entries (словник).

8. From metaliterary catalogs, let us now move to metalinguistic ones, those that foreground the verbal aspect of the inventory.

Chekhov's «Свадьба с генералом» (“Wedding with a General”) reads like a naval phrasebook. The focus is once again on ships, however, this time not on realia, but on verbal formulas. The text is saturated with terms for sailors' specialized functions, parts of the rigging and respective actions. The sheer quantity of these items is complemented by the density of the professional lexicon, which calls for commentaries, which in turn lead to nonsensical repetitions of the exotic terms. This makes the pile-up of barbarisms even more comic and concentrates attention on the mnemonic and meta-verbal motifs: the ex-admiral emphasizes the need to understand every minor term and remember every command verbatim. In a sense, we are exposed live to one of those feats of memory that are characteristic of the oral performance of ancient catalog passages. Enhancing the effect is the puzzling -- tongue twisting -- phonetic similarity of many of the borrowed terms (марсы, марсовые, марсели, брамсели, бом-брамсели, бом-брам-брасы, брасопятся). The theme of memory is treated both comically (as the forgetful old man keeps saying дай Бог память [God grant me memory]), and with touching nostalgia (as he longs for the past: В старину все просто было; Пла... Плачу... Рад [In olden times it was all simple; Cry...crying... Glad]).

9. A plethora of verbal lists is found in Ilf and Petrov, whose interest in catalogs lies at the intersection of their two recurrent motifs: mocking Soviet bureaucratic culture and parodying linguistic clichйs. The two are often combined, for example, in Polykhayev's universal stamp, which is a materialized set of directives cast in stone -- typographic ink, and in the parodic lessons Ostap Bender gives the foreign specialist:

«-- Шрайбен, шриб, гешрибен. Писать. Понимаете? <...> Мы, вы, они, оне пишут жалобы и кладут в сей ящик <...> И никто их не вынимает. Вынимать! Я не вынимаю, ты не вынимаешь...» [The verb to write, see? <...> We, you, they write complaints and put in this box <...> And nobody takes them out. To take out. I do not take out, you do not take out...).

But a metalinguistic list can also be indifferent to the theme of bureaucracy, as, for instance, the 30-word long vocabulary of Ellochka Shchukina.

10. To return to lists of real items, so far we have discussed only lists of persons -- military men, lovers, poets. But along with those, texts often feature the heroes' geographical -- toponymical -- coordinates and surrounding objects: in Homer, ships, horses, fields; in Gogol, coaches, stoves, boots and other products of Sobakevich's dead serfs; in Prutkov, the symbolic attributes of the greats.

A major group of listable objects comprises accessories of everyday human use. A hilarious case is the list of anus-wipers in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (Book One, Chapter 13). It features 64 kinds, some just listed, some developed into annotations or even mini-plots, and topped off at the end by the utensil Gargantua finds to be the best: a fluffy gosling. The comic effect is achieved, of course, by a carnivalesque parody of epic catalogs. A widespread type are loading lists for various transportation vehicles, predominantly ships, of course. Each of the four parts of Gulliver's Travels begins with the protagonist leaving England and ends with his return, so that, overall, he goes through at least eight major departures. But Jonathan Swift indulges in a loading protocol only once, when Gulliver is to sail home from Blefuscu.

“I stored the boat with the carcasses of a hundred oxen, and three hundred sheep, with bread and drink proportionable, and as much meat ready dressed as four hundred cooks could provide. I took with me six cows and two bulls alive, with as many ewes and rams, intending to carry them into my own country, and propagate the breed. And to feed them on board, I had a good bundle of hay, and a bag of corn. I would gladly have taken a dozen of the natives, but this was a thing the emperor would by no means permit; and, besides a diligent search into my pockets, his majesty engaged my honor “not to carry away any of his subjects, although with their own consent and desire.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (Chapter VIII). The scale of the list (one hundred... three hundred... four hundred...) is justified by the miniscule size of the cattle (which will help Gulliver to convince his compatriots of the veracity of his story).

A long delay also precedes the appearance of a loading list in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Prior to his main shipwreck, Robinson undertakes several voyages, which are not inventoried. It is only in Chapter 6 that a catalog appears, unfolding gradually as Robinson looks for and finds various useful items on board the semi-sunken ship and transfers them onto his raft to take to the island.

“My raft was now strong enough <...> My next care was what to load it with <...> I got three of the seamen's chests, which I <...> lowered <...> down upon my raft; the first of these I filled with provisions -- viz. bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat's flesh <...> and a little remainder of European corn <...> some barley and wheat <...> As for liquors, I found several cases of bottles <...> and, in all, about five or six gallons of rack <...>

The tide beg[a]n to flow <...> and I had the mortification to see my coat, shirt, and waistcoat <...> swim away. As for my breeches <...> I swam on board in them and my stockings <...> I had others things which my eye was more upon -- as, first, tools to work with <...> After long searching <...> I found out the carpenter's chest <...>

My next care was for some ammunition and arms. There were two very good fowling- pieces in the great cabin, and two pistols. These I secured first, with some powder-horns and a small bag of shot, and two old rusty swords <...> There were three barrels of powder <...> two of them dry <...> the third had taken water <...> And now I thought myself pretty well freighted <...> and began to think how I should get to shore with them”.

Both ship lists are pointedly borderline -- and thus smack of virtuality -- as they hover between the worlds of the Lilliputians and Robinson's compatriots, the ship and the uninhabited island, presence and absence, life and death, reality and fiction. Overall, the list is rather abstract: even the members of Noah's family are not named personally, but referred to by their terms of kinship. And the animals are mentioned only at the level of classes, not particular species; most prominent are numerals (twos and sevens).

11. Another traditional type of catalog is a list of goods offered/ordered as a purchase, gift, ransom. Such lists are usually presented and repeated only to be rejected. Sometimes the order itself begins with a formulaic rejection, as, for instance, in Sergei Aksakov's «Аленький цветочек» (The Scarlet Flower), where, incidentally, the coveted objects are заморские, from overseas. First, the oldest sister rejects a standard set of gifts, and then each of the younger ones in succession rejects the previous sister's list and offers her own.

The motif of a gift/ransom list also goes back to the Iliad, Canto IX, where Agamemnon decides to appease Achilles with gifts. He sends him a list of them with Odysseus, but Achilles rejects it. Agamemnon's list boasts many of the typical parameters of a catalog: the verb “to count, enumerate”, and several numerals; toponyms and other proper names; a ship to carry the stuff. Compared to most later gift lists, this one dazzles by including women (among them not only the future Trojan captives but also some of Agamemnon's own daughters) and entire cities. Literary catalogs can also use as their sources other types of registers: train schedules, passenger lists, library catalogs, restaurant menus, class registers etc.

12. As far as menus are concerned, worth mentioning are: the class list format was used by Nabokov in Lolita (I, 11). Humbert Humbert discovers Lolita's class list on the back of a USA map (a bow to the geographical motif) and engages in a close reading of this poem, its semitranslucent mystery and the semantic and onomastic connotations of a dozen of the forty names. Nabokov succeeded in provoking a prolific industry of scholarly commentaries to the list, impressive, but of course not authorized, thus creating an additional virtual counterpoint to the quasi-documentary register.

13. In Soviet literature, the virtual aspect of catalogs gained a new poignancy owing to a sweeping loss of cultural wealth and creature comforts in the course and aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. An early example of a list of losses was Mikhail Kuzmin's 1922 poem «„А это -- хулиганская“, -- сказала...» (And this one is a hooligan's, -- she said...). In it, the poet recalls with bittersweet nostalgia a number of pre-revolutionary realities. The poem features: a set of Russian imperial toponyms; memories of the past; a collector's taste for the names of objects; and an embodied catalog (Страницы из «Всего Петербурга» ... за 1913 год [Pages from `All of Petersburg' [a phone directory]... for the year 1913]). A similar case is the inventory of Vorobianinov's chairs and other such lists which are physically there in the form of ордера (orders) accumulated by the registrar Korobeinikov in Ilf and Petrov's Twelve Chairs (1927). Prominent is also the element of meta-verbal attention to exotic names, naturalized by the alphabetical structure of the archive:

«-- Есть буква В, -- охотно отозвался Коробейников. -- Сейчас. Вм, Вн, Вориц- кий <...> Воробьянинов, Ипполит Матвеевич» (-- Here is letter V, -- willingly responded Korobeinikov. -- Vм, Vn, Voritsky... Vorobyaninov, Ippolit Matveevich). homeric russian catalog literary

Four years later a list of vanished, scarce, defitsitnyi values informs Mandel'shtam poem

Я пью за военные астры, за все, чем корили меня:

За барскую шубу, за астму, за желчь петербургского дня.

За музыку сосен савойских, Полей Елисейских бензин,

За розы в кабине рольс-ройса и масло парижских картин.

Я пью за бискайские волны, за сливок альпийских кувшин,

За рыжую спесь англичанок и дальних колоний хинин,

Я пью, но еще не придумал -- из двух выбираю одно --

Душистое асти-спуманте иль папского замка вино...

Cataloging is prompted by the poet's invariant motifs of separation from and longing for world values, their obsessive contemplation and mental leafing through. The nostalgic theme finds an ingenious expression in a pointed demarcation of borders: historical (as at first, in the footsteps of Kuzmin, the values listed are pre-revolutionary) and then geographical (the list that follows is of foreign values). Nostalgic collectors of pre-revolutionary artefacts are at the center of the novels of Konstantin Vaginov, beginning with his 1928 Kozlinaiapesn' (The Goat Song). Their collections and catalogs are desperately virtual, as the men are bent on preserving such evanescent values as old-time culinary recipes or completely ephemeral objects like dreams or scraps of human nails; sometimes the men themselves disdain their bizarre collections. A likely classic prototype of such catalogs of losses was the list of Peter Grinev's stolen belongings submitted to Pugachev by Savel'ich. «В это время <...> вижу <...> мой Савельич подходит к Пугачеву и подает ему лист бумаги <...> -- Это что? -- спросил важно Пугачев. -- Прочитай, так изводишь увидеть <...> Пугачев принял бумагу и долго рассматривал с видом значительным. -- Что ты так мудрено пишешь? <...> Наши светлые очи не могут тут ничего разобрать. Где мой обер-секретарь? <...> Читай вслух <...>

Я чрезвычайно любопытствовал узнать, о чем дядька мой вздумал писать Пугачеву. Обер-секретарь <...> стал по складам читать следующее: -- Два халата, миткалевый и шелковый полосатый, на шесть рублей. -- Это что значит? -- сказал, нахмурясь, Пугачев. -- Прикажи читать далее, -- отвечал спокойно Савельич <...> -- Мундир из тонкого зеленого сукна на семь рублей. Штаны белые суконные на пять рублей. Двенадцать рубах полотняных голландских с манжетами <...> Погребец с чайною посудою <...>

-- Это, батюшка <...> реестр барскому добру, раскраденному злодеями... -- Какими злодеями? -- спросил грозно Пугачев. -- Виноват <...> Злодеи не злодеи, а твои ребята <...> порастаскали <...> Прикажи уж дочитать. -- Дочитывай <...> -- Одеяло ситцевое, другое тафтяное на хлопчатой бумаге четыре рубля. Шуба лисья, крытая алым ратином, 40 рублей. Еще заячий тулупчик, пожалованный твоей милости <...> 15 рублей.

-- Это что еще! <...> -- вскричал [Пугачев], выхватя бумагу из рук секретаря и бросив ее в лицо Савельичу <...> Заячий тулуп! <...> Да <...> я с тебя живого кожу велю содрать на тулупы <...>

[Но] Пугачев был, видно, в припадке великодушия <...> Я остался на площади один с Савельичем. Дядька мой держал в руках свой реестр <...> -- Смейся, сударь, <...> смейся; а как придется нам сызнова заводиться всем хозяйством, так посмотрим, смешно ли будет». The episode boasts a number of rhetorical effects: a defamiliarized perception of its unfolding by Grinev the narrator; the handing over of an actual list; the twists and turns of its reading (featuring manifestations of Pugachev's thinly disguised illiteracy); and, to top it off, the inclusion of the famous hare skin coat, which was given to Pugachev, not stolen by his underlings, thus firmly rooting Savel'ich's petition in the core plot of The Captain's Daughter. Its ironic invoice style -- “Two dressing gowns, one cotton, the other striped silk, six roubles... One uniform of fine green cloth, seven roubles; one pair trousers, white cloth, five roubles; twelve shirts of Holland shirting, with cuffs, ten roubles; one box with tea service, two-and-a-half roubles...”

(Pushkin, The Daughter of the Commandant, transl. Mrs. Milne Home) -- is pressed in the service of portraying irrevocable losses in the midst of a social upheaval.

14. The theme of defitsit, or manmade scarcity, flourished in the dissident literature of the so-called period of Soviet stagnation. By combining two extant catalog formats, the nostalgic and the trade/gift ones, often with an “overseas” flavor, the popular motif of an order for a supply of imported goods (списка-заказа на привоз дефицитных товаров) was created.