Suvorov's Science of Victory

By Lina Zeldovich

Александр Васильевич Суворов

Said to be one of the few commanders in history who never lost a battle, Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov (Александр Васильевич Суворов) had waged wars on nearly every nation that shared borders with the Russian empire. From Turks to Prussians and from Swedes to French, Suvorov had a spectacular and surprisingly long military career for someone who spent his life on the frontline.

No one in his family expected little Sasha Suvorov to become a soldier. A sickly child who spent much of his time in bed, Alexander was deemed unfit for a military career by his father.  Vasiliy Suvorov, a senator and a general-in-chief, knew the army reality all too well, and didn’t think his frail offspring could withstand the hardship. But, captivated by the battle strategies and tactics, Sasha devoted his time to studying the works of renowned historians and military figures – from Plutarch to Cornelius Nepos to Julius Caesar. Determined to join the army despite his ailments and his father, he put himself through vigorous exercise to improve his health and his strength.  

When Sasha was 12, he met General Hannibal, a Russian military commander most known for being a great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, the famous poet. Taken by the young lad, who, in addition to his fascination with martial arts also spoke French, German, Italian, and Polish, Hannibal convinced Suvorov senior to let his unwavering offspring pursue his passion.

And true passion it was. Alexander Suvorov spent more than 50 years of his life on the battlefield. He made a colonel by 33, a general-major before turning 40, and a field marshal a few years later. He led the Russian troops through many a battles in their war with the Ottoman Empire, took part in the famous siege of Ochakov, and won a great victory in a clash at the river Rymnik, for which Catherine the Great bestowed on him the title of Count Rymniksky. In terms of awards and insignia, Suvorov earned pounds of medals and a slew of regalia–from Military Order of Empress Maria Theresa to Alexander Nevsky, and a couple of pages worth of titles: Count of Rymnik, Prince of Sardinia and even Count of the Holy Roman Empire. His last title, which he earned at the age of 70, was generalissimo, the highest military rank possible.

In between marches and sieges, Suvorov penned The Science of Victory, a manual on how to do it right, in style and with flare, which has been used as the holy bible of combat stratagem by a few generations of militants. He coined a few famous sayings venerably recited by Russians to this day, literally and figuratively: "What’s tough in training is easy in a battle" and "Perish yourself but rescue your comrade!"  

Alas, at the end of his career, Suvorov fell out of favor with the royals: Catherine the Great’s son Paul I took offence at the warrior’s sharp tongue. After a few years of forced retirement, Suvorov was called to lead the troops against Napoleon but despite his burning wish never met him in a battle. He is, however, famous for crossing the Alps in winter, a maneuver historically achieved only by Hannibal. Alas, the move was not to wage a spectacular attack on the French but to save the greatly outnumbered Russian troops. Still, that was the maneuver that netted Suvorov his title of the fourth generalissimo of Russia, only days before his death. He never rested on his hard-earned laurels–Tsar Paul, true to his dislike of the old soldier, skipped the ceremony. (Vasily Surikov later painted the legendary Suvorov’s Troops Crossing the Alps, now in the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow.)

Warrior’s luck wasn’t as favorable to Suvorov's son, Arkadiy, who followed his father’s footsteps into the military stardom. Fighting the Turks where the undefeated patriarch did twenty years earlier, he drowned in the very river Rymnik that had brought his father so much fame.

Words

I’ve always loved words. Never being a physically strong child, I preferred reading to running and contemplating the power of verbs, nouns, and adjectives to frolicking with my schoolmates. Words could encourage or scare, engage or estrange, make one feel loved or miserable. Words could heal, and words could hurt. Words could empower, and words could destroy. Words could make me live lives I would have never been able to experience otherwise.

Words made me curious. I liked playing with them, stringing them into sentences and rhyming them into poems. Even as a child, I realized Russian was made for poetry, much like Italian. The sounds rhymed effortlessly and fell into an easy cadence. Sometimes when I came across an especially beautifully sentence or a flawless verse, I’d stare at it and re-read it over and over, trying to decipher its mystery. Often I couldn’t quite tell what its secret was – but I could instinctively feel it.

While Russian was the primary language of my childhood, I was also exposed to Tatar, which is very similar to Turkish, and Yiddish which is akin to German. My two best childhood friends spoke Tatar and I picked up bits and pieces of it while we played together. My parents used Yiddish as their code lingo when they didn’t want my brother and me to know something, so I inevitably had to learn what they were hiding. While I never became fluent and can’t converse in either language, the linguistic enlightening periodically dawns on me when I visit foreign lands. In Istanbul, having spotted a store sign “Kitaplar,” I immediately knew it was a bookstore: kitap means book and the suffix —lar made it plural. In a Vienna bistro, I heard a familiar word a young mom admonished her boy with – Essen! It brought back childhood memories. Nicht essen my grandmother used to complain to my parents about my fastidious eating habits. “She doesn’t eat!”

While I love to travel, so can words. Words wander from one language to another and from one dialect to the next, sometimes changing the spelling or shifting their meaning. The German butterbrot (butterbread, or bread with butter) transformed into the Russian – “бутерброд” – a sandwich that could be made with any ingredient such as bologna or cheese. While looking for an air tram on Montmartre, I knew I was heading in the right direction once I saw the sign that read “Funikuler,” which is фуникулёр in Russian. (Interestingly enough, my husband knew the English word funicular, but the different spelling totally threw him off!) The Turkish kaftan – which originated from the Persian خفتان for the cloak buttoned down the front, with full sleeves, reaching to the ankles –  came to describe a loose Russian cardigan worn by men at the beginning of the last century. And on my trip to Jordan, I was absolutely surprised to find out that the name of Petra’s treasury, Al Khazne, was homophonic to the Russian казна – which translates as a tsar’s assets. 

But perhaps the most interesting transformation happened to the German word blatt when it found its way to the Soviet Union. Literally, blatt means paper, a piece of paper, or an official document one needs to produce to prove or receive something. During hard economic times in Russia, food and goods were rationed so that in order to get extras, people needed official papers given either for exceptional achievements or due to personal connections, often improper. Eventually, the word blatt took on the meaning of those special personal connections that got one more than an average citizen could hope for: better food, fancier clothes, access to special stores, and even trips abroad. “They have blatt,” would be said of a family that managed to get a vacation in a fashionable Black Sea resort. If someone suddenly popped up on the top of an apartment waiting list, people would gossip, “He’s got blatt in the Building Department.” At sixteen, I spoke to my parents about a potential medical degree to hear them say, “You can’t get into medical school without blatt.”

The most intense and expansive linguistic effort I ever made was my two-month study for the GRE. I had to learn close to 3,000 words, many of which I’d never heard before or didn’t know their less common meanings. I went through the list diligently, typing the words, definitions, and examples onto index cards. I memorized 50 to 100 words a day, adding them to the collection. Twice a week, I went through the entire stack, shuffling and dealing it like a croupier (a French word that originated from “croupe” or “croup,” means “rider on the croup of a horse”). Some words got burnt into my gray matter, some vanished as if I forgot to press the “save” button, but I vowed to deal my linguistic pack once a month, to keep it as current as I could. The writing power it gave me was too indulging to lose. Words can be addictive. Did you know that?

Burning The Images

I didn’t have to do much research when I wrote Inescapable Presence, my first novel – an international suspense set in Russia and New York. My behind-the-Iron-Curtain upbringing gave me enough inspiration and command over the Novosibirsk settings of the late eighties, when food shortages created long lines in supermarkets, and the promised Communist utopia lost its credibility amongst its most fervent supporters.

The memories of Russian winters, as savage as they could be beautiful, were still so vivid in my mind, my fingers and toes were freezing when I wrote about snowstorms, blizzards, and icy paths leading through an old park. The American part wasn’t that hard either – by then I’ve lived in New York for ten years. Since my next two novels were set mostly in Brooklyn, my sources of inspiration lay outside my doors and windows. Sometimes I wandered around searching for a street corner that would look just right for my character to abandon a car. Sometimes I’d be out on a quest for the subway station that would only have one exit onto a dark street. Once I spent a few days trying to discover a good place to dump a body. Not that I ever had to dispose of a corpse, but the villain in my book needed to.

The settings for Death by Scheherezade’s Veil, a bellydancing murder mystery, which delves into Turkish culture and traditions, were inspired by Astoria, a Queens neighborhood across the East River from Manhattan, dubbed the United Nations of New York City for its diverse ethnic populace. A mix of Eastern European, Asian, Greek, Arabic, and everything in between, Astoria offered plenty of Middle Eastern settings, from mosque minarets to hookah bars, and from the Islamic fashion stores to bellydancing nightclubs.

When I wanted an easy trip to the Middle East, I walked a dozen blocks to an area unofficially called Little Egypt where Turkish coffee was strong and silty, baklavas were sweet and nutty, and the store signs were jotted in the cryptic weave. I had to remember to dress modestly and tie up my long unruly hair – out of respect for the locals. It was easy to depict Astoria. What I found harder to deliver, was the mindset and psyche of its inhabitants, which I was trying to explain while maintaining the delicate balance between the old-fashioned concepts of Islamic family and honor, which many people in our modern Western society would find hard to perceive.

Whenever I travel, especially to the Middle East, my favorite destination, it is the people that interest me the most. I want to know what they are thinking and why, what makes them happy or angry, and whether their smiles are genuine or simply polite. I want to know what they consider beautiful versus ugly, courteous versus rude, and right versus wrong. I want to know how different they are from the other cultures I know – or how similar. For me, being able to place my reader inside my character’s mind is vital. While a setting is something I always try to memorize in every detail, it’s people I ponder the most.

Interestingly enough, I’ve never been a picture-snapping tourist; some of my trips landed amazingly few photos. I find the results of my camerawork lacking depth so I prefer to create multi-dimensional images of my own. I would stand on an unpaved street and look around, taking in everything I can, and then close my eyes to burn the imagine in my memory: a mouthwatering aroma of shawarma cooked by a street vendor to the right, a donkey braying on the left, the taste of dust in my mouth, which permeates the air in dry deserty climates, a child climbing a tree and an old grandma sizing me up, trying to figure out whether I may cast an evil eye on her beloved grandchild.

When I am back in my house, curling up in my favorite chair with a cup of tea next to me, this is how I will restore the picture so I can write it: I will close my eyes again and summon the grandma, the boy, and the donkey from my memory – until I can taste the dust, smell the meat, and sense the old woman’s gaze, so palpable I can feel a light chill running down my back...

Lina’s Story: Every Book Holds an Adventure

I read since I was able to recognize letters. I wrote since I was able to join Russian syllables into words. And I traveled since I was old enough to imagine.

I was one of those kids who read a book a day and even more, if my parents forgot to turn the lights off for the night. I read at dinner, covering the book with the tablecloth. I read with a flashlight under the blanket, and I read underneath my school desk while the rest of the class listened to the teacher. I was already ahead of the game, so while my classmates recited the Russian alphabet, I devoured The Adventures of Thomas Sawyer in translation, hiding it beneath my fat ABC hardcover – without the slightest idea that one day I would be able to read the original in English. 
When my grade moved onto three-word sentences, I moved onto The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

To me, the books and adventures were one and the same. Every book held an adventure, a travel to foreign lands, a journey to the alternate universe, a voyage to a magical land that could only exist between the covers worn out from use – and inside my imagination. The best books were always those that kidnapped me entirely and left me nostalgic after ending too soon. The characters with whom I had just flown through time and space, escaped narrow deaths, and discovered life in parallel galaxies, were gone once the story was over. Then I would pick up a pen and think up new adventures for them – all by myself. 

Growing up in an oppressive society caused many fears, but there was one thing that never intimidated me: a blank piece of paper. Winters were long and time was plenty in the cold snowy city of Kazan, four hundred miles northeast of Moscow. Founded by Tatars – the descendants of Mongolians who shared Turkish roots and language, and later conquered by Ivan the Terrible, my city nested in a cultural niche of its own.

A trip from Russia to New York amounted to twenty hours. A journey into the American culture took twenty years. Somehow, somewhere, I realized that besides writing literature and poetry, I also liked writing crime stories. Maybe it was my childhood desire to see evil being punished or maybe it was because my first English books were mysteries. And since many of them finished too soon, I picked up my computer and started typing my own stories in the language I couldn’t quite speak at the time.

My first novel, Inescapable Presence, set partly in Russia and partly in United States, is an international suspense, set in the early nineties during the failed KGB putsch. The second one, Painstalker, a medical and forensic murder mystery, features Dave Higgins, a half-Irish, half-Jewish, Brooklyn NYPD detective, on the search for a deranged lunatic, killing young women for their ovaries. Dave retires and becomes a private investigator in E-Predators, a sequel and a Clockwork Orange-like thriller for the Internet age. In it, Dave must trace a web-based gang of four sociopathic young men who break into one community’s homes. Lastly, Death by Scheherazade’s Veil, is a bellydance mystery set in Astoria, New York, in which Sasha, a young aspiring dancer, and her two friends embark on solving a murder of their beloved bellydance teacher, a crime deeply rooted in the Turkish cultures and traditions.

Where do I get my ideas? I haven’t quite figured that out. I hear voices in my head. They tell me stories. I write them down. Do you? Tell me!