Danila Davydov – The Telescope

Friday, October 28, 2011 — Damian Kelleher

Danila Davydov – The Telescope

Ippelman was extremely lucky. The explosion killed everybody on the bus, the driver, the passengers, everybody except him.

Extremely lucky, yes, but not complete unharmed – apart from minor scratches he seems to have become blinded, perhaps, he reasons, from tiny shards of glass. Ippelman, the protagonist of Russian author Danila Davydov's The Telescope, is a man by turns lucid and insane, succumbing over time to the severity of his experience and his injuries in a story that becomes increasingly odd as he becomes convinced that aliens – space invaders, much like those found in the video game – have taken over his country.

The story opens dramatically, as quoted above. The next seven pages are all a single paragraph, affirming the constrictive nature both of Ippelman's blindness and his circumstances. He wanders along the highway after the explosion, stumbling in the direction, he hopes, of the nearby town. His blindness doesn't go away, which leaves him at the mercy first of some unknown man, who stops his car and kicks him down into a ditch, and then Lyokha, a young boy whose grandmother left a day ago, and who displays strange, puppy-like affections.

Granny's done for, Lyokha said, coming into the barn, want some sausage before they get here? Before who get here? You know, them. What do you mean them? The enemies. Come on, tell me what you heard. Well, they said it was a war.

A war! Here Ippelman's mind begins to fracture. Without any substantive introspection he assumes that aliens must be the cause of his ills:

He began picturing all kinds of horrors, perhaps even an alien invasion, but not really, lazily, the way he might think back over the latest episode of some low-budget soap opera in bed, just to get bored and fall asleep.

Lazily, yes, but the feeling that aliens have taken over sticks, and much of the rest of Ippelman's increasingly paranoid thoughts centre around an alien invasion. Later:

Ippelman unintentionally found himself picturing an armada of space invaders, the armada rather than the invaders themselves, because now he was thinking even big individual aliens seemed insignificant compared to a whole galactic flotilla.

Lyokha considers Ippelman to be great fun; the boy helps where he can, but what Ippelman really needs is an adult to reassure him as to what is going on and to transport him to a hospital. But Lyokha is who he has, and that must do – the two follow one another into the madness of Ippelman's alien fantasy:

it's a takeover, you see, a takeover from space, it's a very simple plan, nobody will believe it's happening until they're here as large as life, taking over everything, and it's only then that people will start coming to their senses, but by then it will be too late...I think they've grabbed everything already, I mean, all the major urban centres, they've taken everything into their control.

His evidence? Slight. Ippleman once found an undiscovered planet with his telescope. The planet was named Ippelman, much to his (and, now, Lyokha's, delight). And that's it – the rest is his mind racing with the impenetrability of what has occurred to him.

And then something interesting occurs. Davydov keeps the narrative within the same, all-encompassing paragraph, but he has Ippelman taken away by orderlies (implied to be Chinese, though this isn't certain), and then the perspective shifts from Ippelman to Lyokha. Suddenly, Lyokha's granny, who had disappeared and was presumed dead from aliens, is berating the child for not milking cows. Lyokha asks about an alien invasion and is rebuked, and then he races to to the barn, where, “hidden under the hay, was that thing that looked like he didn't know what”. And the story ends.

What has happened, here? The sudden shift in perspective for the last twelve lines of the story jars us out of the context of Ippelman's plight. We wonder, now, if he was real at all, and just what the “thing” in the barn is. Has the story instead been a creation entirely in Lyokha's mind? Has he extrapolated Ippelman from the “thing” (a telescope?) found in the barn? An alien invasion is, we must admit, more of a child's fantasy than an adult's, even one as injured as Ippelman.

The Telescope ends curiously, it forces us to return to the start in order to read the story again in search of clues as to why the perspective would so dramatically shift. Everything seems in order, except for the overall fantasy of the situation, which builds so gradually that we don't realise exactly how bizarre it becomes until we read the story again. It's quite a feat, and leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Was Ippelman real? The boy? Anything at all, or nothing? Ippelman's character, comprised of sobs and grand gestures and emphatic emotions, recalls the great characters from Dostoevsky, who make everything large and portentuous. But they never involve space invaders. Curious.

Telescope by Danila Davydov is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2012

Author	Danila Davydov
Title	The Telescope
Translator	Arch Tait
Nationality	Russian
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond (AU)

Index

You are here

Danila Davydov – The Telescope

Danila Davydov – The Telescope

See Also