Hippolyte and Cat Roulette

"If I had the power to prevent my own birth, I should certainly have never consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions. However, I have the power to end my existence."


Shortly after this dismal pronouncement, Hippolyte, distraught and delirious, takes a pistol out of his pocket, and in a roulettian scene similar to our previous excerpt from Lermontov's A Hero for Our Time, holds it to his head and pulls the trigger. There is a metallic click, but no shot fires. Hippolyte collapses in a faint and his astonished companions inspect the gun: it was loaded, but the overexcited Hippolyte had forgotten to correctly cap it.


Hippolyte is one of Dostoevsky's many intriguing minor characters. Just eighteen years old, he is consumptive and was recently informed that he has only weeks to live. Indeed, even though he survives this attempted suicide, he dies of the disease not long after in great agitation.


Meanwhile, consumption -- or as it is termed today tuberculosis -- has never been fully eradicated, and Petersburg still shows a fairly high incidence of the disease, especially in especially in prisons. It's also one of the most common causes of death in people with AIDS/HIV -- another group with a high Petersburgian percentage rate.  


Awareness of the problem is increasing, and a friend who works for a charitable organization took me along on an expedition outside the city to deliver powdered milk to new mothers with HIV.  This activity is part of a multi-faceted program aimed at hindering further transmission of the disease. 

Conditions disintegrate pretty rapidly in this suburban outback an hour or so drive from Petersburg’s architecturally magnificent center. 

After crossing the dreary parking area and heading up a desolate, decaying staircase we reached the apartment of one of the program’s recipients. She was out at a temporary job (my friend deemed this a big improvement in the situation) and so we were greeted at the door by Babushka. The cramped apartment housed not only her, Working Mama, and several children -- as usual, the guy, an alcholic and the one originally infected, lived elsewhere and had nothing further to do with the family -- but also eight cats and two dogs.  In the midst of the furried frenzy my friend caustically remarked "It’s rather like a zoo in here.“ 


Babushka, nearing fifty, bedraggled and missing teeth, replied sheepishly, "Yes, but the animals, you can’t let them stay on the street. I have to take them in or they’ll die  We try to give them to other people. I’ve already gotten rid of a few, but these...“


Her voice trailed off, while the winners of the cat roulette variously lounged on the bed or skittered off the walls and one of the canine winners peed on the wooden floor.

A Winner in Cat Roulette

As we headed back to the car, a pack of unkempt dogs loped by (I couldn’t help recalling a brutal film I caught last October at the NYC Russian Film Festival in which marauding hounds devoured jovial Uncle Yuri) and a few unhappy losers of the cat roulette skulked around the battered garbage can.

A Loser in Cat Roulette

Pack of Roving Dogs in Lightly Falling Snow

Shortly thereafter, on the way back to Petersburg we passed another roulette loser.  Evidently a pedestrian (perhaps drunk?) underestimated the amount of time needed to cross the road and was felled by an oncoming car.  His body parts lay strewn on the road, his head smashed red on the wet, black pavement.

[originally published 4 January 2012]