Tag Archives: nascosto

Welcome To The Dollhouse

Anatoly Moskvin, a linguist and philologist born in 1966 in Nizhny Novgorod, had earned the unquestioning respect of his fellow academics.
He fluently spoke thirteen languages, and was the author of important studies and academic papers. Great expert of Celtic folklore and of Russian funerary customs, at the age of 45 he was still living with his parents; he refrained from drinking or smoking, collected dolls and it was murmured that he was a virgin. But everybody knows that geniuses are always a little eccentric.

Yet Anatoly Moskvin was hiding a secret. A personal mission he felt he had to accomplish, driven by compassion and love, but one he knew his fellow citizens, not to mention the law, would have deemed crazy.
That very secret was to seal his fate, behind the walls of the mental institute where Anatoly Moskvin now spends his days.

Nizhny Novgorod, capital of the Volga District and the fifth Russian city, is an important cultural centre. In the surroundin areas several hundred graveyards cand be found, and in 2005 Moskvin was assigned the task of recording all the headstones: in two years he visited more than 750 cemeteries.
It was a tough job. Anatoly was forced to walk alone, sometimes for 30 km a day, facing harsh condistions. He had to spend many nights outdoors, drinking from puddles and taking shelter in the abandoned barns of the inhospitable region. One night, caught in the dark, to avoid freezing to death he found no better option than to break in the cemetery burial chamber and sleep in a coffin which was already prepared for next morning’s funeral. When at dawn the gravediggers arrived, they found him sleeping: Anatoly dashed off shouting his excuses – among the general laughter of undertakers who luckily did not chase after him.

The amount of data Mskvin gathered during this endeavour was unprecedented, and the study promised to be “unique” and “priceless”, in the words of those who followed its development. It was never published, but it served as the basis for a long series of articles on the history of Nizhny Novgorod’s cemeteries, published by Moskvin between 2006 and 2010.
But in 2011 the expert’s career ended forever, the day the police showed up to search his home.

Among the 60.000 books in is private library, stacked along the walls and on the floor, between piles of scattered paper and amidst a confusion of objects and documents, the agents found 26 strange, big dolls that gave off an unmistakable foul odor.
These were actually the mummified corpses of 26 little girls, three to 12-year-olds.
Anatoly Moskvin’s secret mission, which lasted for twenty years, had finally been discovered.

Celt druids – as well as Siberian shamans – slept on graves to communicate with the spirits of the deceased. For many years Anatoly did the same. He would lay down on the grave of a recently buried little girl, and speak with her. How are you in that tomb, little angel? Are you cold? Would you like to take a walk?
Some girls answered that they felt alright, and in that case Anatoly shared their happiness.
Other times, the child wept, and expressed the desire to come back to life.
Who would have got the heart to leave them down there, alone and frightened in the darkness of a coffin?

Anatoly studied mummification methods in his books. After exhuming the bodies, he dried them with a mixture of salt and baking soda, hiding them around the cemetery. When they dried out completely, he brought them home and dressed them, providing a bit of thickness to the shrunken limbs with layers of fabric. In some cases he built wax masks, painted with nail polish, to cover their decomposed faces; he bought wigs, bright-colored clothes in the attempt of giving back to those girls their lost beauty.


His elderly parents, who were mostly away from home, did not realize what he was doing. If their son had the hobby of building big puppets, what was wrong with that? Anatoly even disguised one of the bodies as a plush bear.

Moskvin talked to these little bodies he had turned into dolls, he bought them presents. They watched cartoons together, sang songs, held birthday parties.

But he knew this was only a temporary solution. His hope was that science would someday find a way to bring “his” girls back to life – or maybe he himself, during his academic research, could find some ancient black magic spell that would achieve the same effect. Either way, in the meantime, those little girls needed to be comforted and cuddled.

“You can’t imagine it”, said during the trial the mother of one of the girls Moskvin stole from the cemetery and mummified. ”You can’t imagine that somebody would touch the grave of your child, the most holy place in this world for you. We had been visiting the grave of our child for nine years and we had no idea it was empty. Instead, she was in this beast’s apartment. […] For nine years he was living with my mummified daughter in his bedroom. I had her for ten years, he had her for nine.”.

Anatoly replied: “You abandoned your girls in the cold – and I brought them home and warmed them up”.

Charged with desecration of graves and dead bodies, Moskvin faced up to five years in prison; but in 2012 he was declared suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, unfit to stand trial, and thus sentenced for coercitive sanitary treatment. In all probability, he will never get out of the psychiatric institute he’s held in.

The little girls never awoke.

Moskvin’s story is somehow analogue to the ones I told in this series of posts:
L’amore che non muore – I   (Italian only)
L’amore che non muore – II  (Italian only)
L’amore che non muore – III  (English)

Hidden Eros

Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.

(La Rochefoucauld, Reflections, 1665)

We advocate freedom, against any kind of censorship.
And yet today, sex being everywhere, legitimized, we feel we are missing something. There is in fact a strange paradox about eroticism: the need to have a prohibition, in order to transgress it.
“Is sex dirty? Only when it’s being done right“, Woody Allen joked, summarizing how much the orthodox or religious restrictions have actually fostered and given a richer flavor to sexual congresses.

An enlightening example might come from the terrible best-selling books of the past few years: we might wonder why nowadays erotic literature seems to be produced by people who can’t write, for people who can’t read.
The great masterpieces of erotica appeared when it was forbidden to write about sex. Both the author (often a well-known and otherwise respectable writer) and the editor were forced to act in anonimity and, if exposed, could be subjected to a harsh sentence. Dangerous, outlaw literature: it wasn’t written with the purpose of seeling hundreds of thousands of copies, but rather to be sold under the counter to the few who could understand it.
Thus, paradoxically, such a strict censorship granted that the publishing of an erotic work corresponded to a poetic, authorial urgency. Risqué literature, in many cases, represented a necessary and unsuppressible artistic expression. The crossing of a boundary, of a barrier.

Given the current flat landscape, we inevitably look with curiosity (if not a bit of nostalgia) at those times when eroticism had to be carefully concealed from prying eyes.
An original variation of this “sunken” collective imagination are those erotic objects which in France (where they were paricularly popular) are called à système, “with a device”.
They consisted in obscene representations hidden behind a harmless appearance, and could only be seen by those who knew the mechanism, the secret move, the trick to uncover them.

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Some twenty years ago in Chinese restaurants in Italy, liquor at the end of the meal was served in peculiar little cups that had a convex glass base: when the cup was full, the optic distorsion was corrected by the liquid and it was possible to admire, on the bottom, the picture of a half-undressed lady, who became invisible once again as the cup was emptied.
The concept behind the ancient objets à système was the same: simple objects, sometimes common home furnishings, disguising the owners’ unmentionable fantasies from potential guests coming to the house.

The most basic kind of objects à système had false bottoms and secret compartments. Indecent images could be hidden in all sorts of accessories, from snuffboxes to walking canes, from fake cheese cartons to double paintings.

Ivory box, the lid shows a double scene. XIX Century.

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Gioco del domino, in avorio intarsiato alla maniera dei marinai, con tavole erotiche.

Inlaid domino game, in the manner of sailors decorations, with erotic plates.

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Walking stick knob handle.

Paintings with hidden pictures.

A young woman reads a book: if the painting is opened, her improper fantasies are visualized.

Other, slightly more elaborate objects presented a double face: a change of perspective was needed in order to discover their indecent side. A classic example from the beginning of the XX Century are ceramic sculptures or ashtrays which, when turned upside down, held some surprises.

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The monk, a classic erotic figure, is hiding a secret inside the wicker basket on his shoulders.

Double-faced pendant: the woman’s legs can be closed, and on the back a romantic flowered heart takes shape.

Then there were objects featuring a hinge, a device that had to be activated, or removable parts. Some statuettes, such as the beautiful bronzes created by Bergman‘s famous Austrian forgery, were perfect art nouveau decorations, but still concealed a spicy little secret.

 

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The top half of this polichrome ceramic figurine is actually a lid which, once removed, shows the Marquise crouching in the position called de la pisseuse, popularized by an infamous Rembrandt etching.

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Snuffbox, sailor’s sculpture. Here the mechanism causes the soldier’s hat to “fall down”, revealing the true nature of the gallant scene.

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Meerschaum pipe. Upon inserting a pipe cleaner into the chamber, a small lever is activated.

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In time, the artisans came up with ever more creative ideas.
For instance there were decorations composed of two separate figurines, showing a beautiful and chaste young girl in the company of a gallant faun. But it was enough to alter the charachters’ position in order to see the continuation of their affair, and to verify how successful the satyr’s seduction had been.

 

Even more elaborate ruses were devised to disguise these images. The following picture shows a fake book (end of XVIII Century) hiding a secret chest. The spring keys on the bottom allow for the unrolling of a strip which contained seven small risqué scenes, appearing through the oval frame.

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The following figures were a real classic, and with many variations ended up printed on pillboxes, dishes, matchstick boxes, and several other utensiles. At first glance, they don’t look obscene at all; their secret becomes only clear when they are turned uspide down, and the bottom part of the drawing is covered with one hand (you can try it yourself below).

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The medals in the picture below were particularly ingenious. Once again, the images on both sides showed nothing suspicious if examied by the non-initiated. But flipping the medal on its axis caused them to “combine” like the frames of a movie, and to appear together. The results can be easily imagined.

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In closing, here are some surprising Chinese fans.
In his book La magia dei libri (presented in NYC in 2015), Mariano Tomatis reports several historical examples of “hacked books”, which were specifically modified to achieve a conjuring effect. These magic fans work in similar fashion: they sport innocent pictures on both sides, provided that the fan is opened as usual from left to right. But if the fan is opened from right to left, the show gets kinky.

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A feature of these artisan creations, as opposed to classic erotic art, was a constant element of irony. The very concept of these objects appears to be mocking and sardonic.
Think about it: anyone could keep some pornographic works locked up in a safe. But to exhibit them in the living room, before unsuspecting relatives and acquaintances? To put them in plain view, under the nose of your mother-in-law or the visiting reverend?

That was evidently the ultimate pleasure, a real triumph of dissimulation.

Playing card with nude watermark, made visible by placing it in front of a candle.

Such objects have suffered the same loss of meaning afflicting libertine literature; as there is no real reason to produce them anymore, they have become little more than a collector’s curiosity.
And nonetheless they can still help us to better understand the paradox we talked about in the beginning: the objets à système manage to give us a thrill only in the presence of a taboo, only as long as they are supposed to remain under cover, just like the sexual ghosts which according to Freud lie behind the innocuous images we see in our dreams.
Should we interpret these objects as symbols of bourgeois duplicity, of the urge to maintain at all cost an honorable facade? Were they instead an attempt to rebel against the established rules?
And furthermore, are we sure that sexual transgression is so revolutionary as it appears, or does it actually play a conservative social role in regard to the Norm?

Eventually, making sex acceptable and bringing it to light – depriving it of its part of darkness – will not cause our desire to vanish, as desire can always find its way. It probably won’t even impoverish art or literature, which will (hopefully) build new symbolic imagery suitable for a “public domain” eroticism.
The only aspect which is on the brink of extinction is precisely that good old idea of transgression, which also animated these naughty knick-knacks. Taking a look at contemporary conventions on alternative sexuality, it would seem that the fall of taboos has already occurred. In the absence of prohibitions, with no more rules to break, sex is losing its venomous and dangerous character; and yet it is conquering unprecedented serenity and new possibilities of exploration.

So what about us?
We would like to have our cake and eat it too: we advocate freedom, against any kind of censorship, but secretely keep longing for that exquisite frisson of danger and sin.

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The images in this article are for the most part taken from Jean-Pierre Bourgeron, Les Masques d’Eros – Les objets érotiques de collection à système (1985, Editions de l’amateur, Paris).
The extraordinary collection of erotic objects assembled by André Pieyre de Mandiargues (French poet and writer close to the Surrealist movement) was the focus of a short film by Walerian Borowczyk: Une collection particulière (1973) can be seen on YouTube.

Soldati fantasma

La Seconda Guerra Mondiale era finita. Il 2 settembre 1945 entrò formalmente in vigore l’ordine di resa imposto dagli Alleati alle forze armate giapponesi. A tutte le truppe dislocate nei vari avamposti per il controllo del Pacifico vennero diramati dispacci che annunciavano la triste verità: il Giappone aveva perso la guerra, e i soldati avevano l’ordine di consegnare le armi al nemico. Ma, per quanto incredibile possa sembrare, alcuni di questi soldati “rimasero indietro”.

Shoichi Yokoi era stato spedito nell’arcipelago delle Marianne nel 1943. L’anno successivo gli Stati Uniti presero il controllo dell’isola di Guam, sconfiggendo la sua armata, ma Yokoi fuggì e si nascose nella giungla assieme ad altri nove soldati, deciso a resistere fino alla morte all’avanzata delle truppe americane. Passò il tempo, e sette dei suoi nove compagni decisero di separarsi: del gruppo originale, rimasero Yokoi e altri due irriducibili soldati. Alla fine, anche questi ultimi tre decisero di separarsi per motivi di sicurezza, ma continuarono a mantenere i contatti finché un giorno Yokoi scoprì che i suoi due compagni erano morti di fame e stenti. Ma neanche questo bastò a convincerlo a darsi per vinto. Anche una morte solitaria era preferibile alla resa.

Yokoi imparò a cacciare, durante la notte, per non essere avvistato dai nemici. Si preparò abiti con le piante locali, costruì letti di canne, mobili, utensili. Un giorno di gennaio due pescatori che stavano controllando le reti lo avvistarono nei pressi di un fiume. Riuscirono ad avere la meglio, e dopo un breve combattimento riuscirono a catturarlo e a trascinarlo fuori dalla foresta. Era l’anno 1972. Yokoi era rimasto nascosto nella giungla per 28 anni. “Con vergogna, ma sono tornato”, dichiarò al suo rientro in patria, dove venne accolto con i massimi onori. La fotografia del suo primo taglio di capelli in 28 anni apparve su tutti i giornali, e Yokoi divenne una personalità. L’esercito gli riconobbe la paga arretrata in un ammontare di circa 300$.

Ma Yokoi non fu il più tenace dei soldati fantasma giapponesi. Due anni più tardi, nel 1974, nell’isola filipina di Lubang, venne scoperto il rifugio segreto di Hiroo Onoda, ufficiale dell’Esercito imperiale giapponese che si trovava lì dal 1944.

Dopo essere sfuggito all’attacco statunitense nel 1945, Onoda ed altri tre commilitoni si erano nascosti nella giungla, decisi a frenare l’avanzata del nemico ad ogni costo. Il codice etico e guerriero del bushidō impediva loro anche solo di credere che la loro patria, il grande Giappone, si fosse potuto arrendere. Così, nonostante fossero arrivate notizie della fine della guerra, essi non vollero prestarci fede, e anche alcuni volantini furono reputati dei falsi di propaganda degli Alleati. Dopo che un compagno si era arreso e gli altri due erano rimasti uccisi, Onoda continuò da solo la “missione” per quasi trent’anni.

Nel 1974 un giapponese, Norio Suzuki, riuscì infine a scovarlo e a confermargli che la guerra era finita. Onoda si rifiutò di lasciare la sua posizione, dichiarando che avrebbe preso ordini soltanto da un suo superiore. Suzuki tornò in Giappone, con le foto che dimostravano che Onoda era ancora in vita, e riuscì a rintracciare il suo diretto superiore, che nel frattempo si era ritirato a fare il libraio. Così il vecchio maggiore intraprese il viaggio per Lubang, e una volta arrivato in contatto con Onoda lo informò “ufficialmente” della fine delle ostilità, avvenuta 29 anni prima, e gli ordinò di consegnare le armi. Finalmente Onoda si arrese, riconsegnando la divisa, la spada, il suo fucile ancora perfettamente funzionante, 500 munizioni e diverse granate. Ma al suo rientro in patria, la celebrità lo sorprese negativamente; per quanto si guardasse attorno, i valori antichi del Giappone secondo i quali aveva vissuto e per i quali aveva combattuto una personale guerra di trent’anni, ai suoi occhi erano scomparsi. Onoda vive oggi in Brasile, con la moglie e il fratello.

Sette mesi più tardi di Onoda, un ultimo soldato fantasma venne rintracciato a Morotai, in Indonesia. Si trattava di Teruo Nakamura, ma il suo destino sarebbe stato ben diverso da quello degli altri tenaci guerrieri solitari giapponesi. In effetti Nakamura era nato a Taiwan, e non in Giappone. Non parlava né cinese né giapponese; inoltre, non era un ufficiale come Onoda, ma un soldato semplice. Aveva vissuto per trent’anni in una capanna di pochi metri quadri, recintata, nella foresta. Già gravemente malato, visse soltanto quattro anni in seguito al suo ritrovamento. Taiwan e il Giappone si scontrarono a lungo sulla sua vicenda, su questioni di rimborsi e risarcimenti, e l’opinione pubblica si divise sul diverso trattamento riservato ai precedenti soldati fantasma.

Voci relative ad altri avvistamenti di soldati fantasma si sono spinte fino ai giorni nostri, ma spesso si sono rivelate dei falsi, e Nakamura rimane a tutt’oggi l’ultimo “soldato giapponese rimasto indietro” ufficialmente riconosciuto. Eppure, forse, da qualche parte nella giungla, c’è ancora qualche guerriero, ormai ultraottantenne, che scruta l’orizzonte per avvistare le truppe nemiche, e ingaggiare l’eroico combattimento che attende da una vita.

Ecco la pagina di Wikipedia che dettaglia tutti i ritrovamenti dei vari soldati fantasma giapponesi dal 1945 ad oggi.