V–A–C Sreda online magazine concludes its three-month programme dedicated to memory and its relationship to history, archives, and nostalgia.
In this issue, we publish a text by Dmitry Bezuglov, translator and lecturer at Shaninka. The author examines how the fairy-tale incantation “Go I know not whither, and fetch I know not what” materialised in two episodes of KVN and reshaped the reality of live television time.
What comes to the fore is not the familiar format of the game itself, but the very possibility of a miracle happening on air: in 1964, the unexpected appearance of a test pilot on stage; in 2004, the transformation of a stereotypical gopnik into a reader of Pasternak. As in a genuine fairytale, time here unfolds and contracts as the phrase sets in motion wondrous transformations: of the protagonist, of the audience, and of the television format itself.
In 1964 and 2004, on the live show Club of the Merry and Quick-Witted [known by the acronym “KVN” in Russian], two miracles took place. Both times, they were witnessed by one and the same person—the television presenter Alexander Maslyakov. And both times, they were preceded by one and the same phrase: “Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What.”
In the fairytale recorded by the folklorist Alexander Afanasyev, this well-known phrase bodes death: the hero is deliberately sent on a knowingly impossible mission in the hope that he will never return. Yet on television, the phrase launched a series of fairytale transformations. What kind of transformations? First of all, this depended on how much time was given to the broadcast: in 1964, the editors of KVN built the absolute time of the fairytale into an hour of live television, and a test pilot appeared on the screens of the Soviet Union, telling a tale of magical rescue… In 2004, this same phrase was used in the “Warm-up” section of KVN by Kolyan, the mascot of the Perm “Parma” team, who applied it to himself. In this text, I will take a forty-year journey to examine how KVN contestants variously found fairytale miracle, lasting 30 and 3600 seconds of airtime.
In May of 2004, the second quarter final of the KVN Higher League took place in Moscow. Four teams took part, among them Perm’s “Parma.” The programme was hosted by the then constant Alexander Vasilievich Maslyakov the Elder. A clip from the game, posted on the official KVN YouTube channel and titled “Warm-up with Kolyan” has, at the time of writing, garnered nearly 13 million views.
Kolyan is a character from the “Parma” team. He’s a “tough guy” who speaks with a characteristic drawl, as though pushing the words out from his chest; he moves as though testing the air with his knees and chest before pushing through and attacking. The thumbs of his hands are constantly twitching and clicking, and his head is tightly encircled by a dark sports hat with white stripes along the edge. Kolyan himself is dressed in a fluttering tracksuit. Six years later, his character would become the hero of the Real Lads series, familiar to many television viewers.
But let’s come back to 2004. Kolyan comes up to the microphone and says: “So this is my story.” The camera cuts to a medium shot, focusing on his sullen face: “My younger little sister comes up to me and says: Kolya-a-a-a, go to the library, bring me Pa-ster-nak!” Kolyan literally pushes out the surname of the prose writer and poet, with the stress on “nak!” A laugh rolls through the hall. Kolyan’s look becomes a slightly fiercer, and he adds with emphasis: “A question! Do you really need to tell me that, huh? Go I know not whither,—he is interrupted by an approving hum—and fetch I know not what.” The timer starts: the presenter Alexander Maslyakov the Elder smiles and says reassuringly: “Don’t worry, Nikolai, you have thirty seconds to catch your breath.” His competitors have the same amount of time to find a merry and quick-witted answer.
Of the four teams participating in the competition, only two decide to answer. The contestants are in a trap. The question posed by Kolyan is not “generative,” it doesn’t make way for good jokes. The answers of the other contestants elicit only half-hearted laughter—they are founded on the image of the ‘gopnik’ [slang Russian term for a thug] successfully presented to players and spectators. So successfully, apparently, that before the eyes of many in the hall, apparently, familiarly-frightening courtyard acquaintances drifted by, as it were springing by chance from an unattended hat.
And when Alexander Maslyakov, calmly resting his elbow on the table, asks: “And will there be something from you?”—Kolyan turns the joke around. Nervously clicking his fingers, he repeats his question and falls silent… “No, well, this is how it should be said—Go I know not whither and fetch I know not what…” A pause follows.
Maslyakov looks with intrigue at Kolyan, who, eyes half-closed, with his previous thuggish vigour, but hesitantly and awkwardly, begins to mutter: “Snow, snow the whole world over, Sweeping it, end to end. The candle burned on the table, the candle burned. And two shoes dropped with a thud to the floor, and waxen tears dropped from candle to dress.” Then the strength of the text as it were breaks through Kolyan. (Let us recall that these are lines from the poem “Winter Night” from Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago). Kolyan timidly takes off his hat, crumples it in his hands, and then, as if suddenly confident, straightens himself and continues: “and the man’s fate was broken. I will not return Pasternak to the library.”
The hall erupts into applause, Maslyakov smiles, Kolyan trembles.
Kolyan transforms the fairytale phrase: in the “original”—or classical—version the hero journeys beyond the bounds of the Earth, in order… not to return at all. But Kolyan’s adventures on air are founded on play with stereotype: they catch out the viewer certain that for the “gopnik,” the library will remain a place beyond the known universe. Kolyan not only reaches the library, but finds and literally appropriates Pasternak’s text. Moreover, Kolyan recognises the audacity of his action, adding: “I will not return Pasternak to the library.” On this imaginary map are depicted both the repository of knowledge (the library) and Pasternak, who had confidently taken his place in the pantheon of great writers (certainly as of 2004).
At first glance, it might seem that by the end of the “Warm-up” Kolyan (Nikolai for Maslyakov) hasn’t changed a bit. But his character has been altered. The fairytale transformation happens because he fulfils the unfulfillable task—he allows the low to meet the high and the “gopnik” to reach the library.
“Warm-up with Kolyan” is a miracle, but it also has a twin-miracle, one that took place exactly forty years before it on the first KVN game hosted by Maslyakov, and which lasted not 30 seconds, but 3600. Then, Maslyakov was not yet Maslyakov the Elder, but Maslyakov the Only, and was only twenty-three (one year older than Kolyan). The miracle was launched by that same phrase “go I know not whither,” breaking through the air time, and took place on KVN during a time when a consensus regarding Pasternak did not yet exist, but place for a miracle remained on air.
The ninth of November 1961 saw the first broadcast of the Club of the Merry and Quick-Witted in history. Two student teams, each numbering eleven people, competed in contests which, in contrast to the contemporary version of the game, required monologues from the perspective of chemical elements and the assembly of food processors live on air. In many ways, it was the simplicity of the show that caught the attention of viewers: literally, here were people slightly older than you, agonisingly—yet also compellingly—improvising on stage, competing to see who can be funnier and more vivid. The show was conceived by three friends in collaboration with the youth editorial staff of the Central Television: Albert Akselrod, a doctor; Mikhail Yakovlev, an engineer; and Sergey Muratov, a journalist. The editor Elena Galperina invited them to create a programme that would show viewers living Soviet youth—improvising, energetic, and quick-witted.
The creators of the game belonged to the “Thaw” generation, which the historian Vladislav Zubok called the “children of Zhivago,” that is, those who were formed reading the disgraced novel. After Pasternak’s work was nominated for the Nobel Prize, the writer was subjected to harassment, from which he did not recover: he died in May of 1960. The lines which Kolyan reads from the stage in 2004—as we remember, the first and fifth quatrains of “Winter Night,” from Yuri Zhivago’s notebook of poems—were read in the 1960s in samizdat. For that generation, the Club of the Merry and Quick-Witted was a chance to see youth ready to think live on air. Granted, they couldn’t read the poems of Pasternak to television viewers, but they could do something else… Improvise.
In its third year, KVN was transferred to the first channel of Central Television, which was broadcast throughout the Soviet Union. It was then that they invited a new host—Alexander Maslyakov—to pair with Svetlana Zhiltsova. By that time, the Club of the Merry and Quick-Witted had already become one of the most popular programmes on Soviet television. As the captain of the Riga team Yuri Radzievsky recalled in 2022: “The entire country watched KVN. City streets emptied during the broadcast, viewers tried to plan their birthdays, weddings, outdoor parties of any importance so as not to miss them on television.”
The first game of the new season with the new host took place in the Palace on the Yauza, then known as the Teletheatre. Imagine: the hall for eight hundred people with red seats, the jury sitting on a balcony festooned in velvet. On stage are the pair of hosts: the young Maslyakov in a dark suit, the smiling Zhiltsova in a blouse and skirt. The teams playing are the Moscow Aviation Institute—eleven young men in football jerseys—and the Moscow Institute of Transport—strapping students in serious suits. In their greeting, the Moscow Aviation Institute team sing in chorus, tightly clutching footballs under their arms: “Let’s have the opening of the season, of spring, of football, of KVN!” Forty years later, Kolyan found himself on a similar stage—without the balls, but also in a tracksuit.
Svetlana Zhiltsova announces a new contest: two participants from each team are given a car and exactly an hour—those very 3600 seconds. The task: “Go I know not whither, and fetch I know not what. The only requirement is to bring back something worthy of KVN.” A pair of participants from each team perplexedly approach Zhiltsova. This was early KVN—it wasn’t rehearsed “from start to finish,” and players knew almost nothing about what awaited them. In the appointed hour, they really had to produce something that could be presented to the viewers in the hall and on the screen.
The contest followed the structure of the folktale “Go I Know Not Whiter and Fetch I Know Not What.” In that fairytale, the Tsar condemns the royal hunter to a series of trials, the most difficult of which is the trial of the unknown.
The motivation of the Tsar is simple: to get rid of the hunter in order to get his wife. The phrase places the hero between death from a clear threat (the sword) and death from an unclear one, located outside usual space and time.
The creators of KVN took the phrase from the fairytale, but excluded the existential threat: the players were not threatened with death. More terrifying was the possibility of making a blunder on air, to go I know not whither and fetch nothing at all. The strength of the contest was in the fact that the absolute fairytale time coincided with the uninterrupted programme time. As the author of the contest Alexander Shuster put it, “this contest was planned as the culmination of the scenario. Something like the “dead” circus number under drum roll or the explosion of a pyrotechnic cartridge under the seats of the spectators during the production… This, in journalistic jargon, “was the nail.”
The volunteers dispersed in the cars. Valentin Livshits, a participant from the Moscow Aviation Institute, remembers how he asked the chauffeur to drive along the Garden ring—round and round—until the solution came to him… The solution came in the twentieth minute: “the high-rise building on Vosstaniya [now Kudrinskaya Square—ed.]—that’s the House of Polar Pilots!” On arriving, Livshits and his partner asked the concierge to tell them which of the pilots was at home. To their delight, the concierge, by an absolutely fairytale coincidence, had been watching KVN, and recognising them, suggested the right candidate… The chosen pilot, urged on by his wife, could not refuse the aviators.
Livshits and his partner Vladimir Khromov returned 59 minutes later, confidently walked over to the microphone and announced: “Honoured Test Pilot of the USSR, laureate of the USSR State Prize… Honoured Master of Sports, All-Union category judge… Hero of the Soviet Union, Sergey Nikolaevich Anokhin.”
Anokhin came out on stage—a balding, modest, middle-aged man, in a uniform overflowing with medals on the breast. The hall erupted into a standing ovation. Vladimir Khromov announced that Anokhin would tell a story that would show the members of the club what quick-wittedness was, masterfully connecting the appearance of Anokhin (I know not what) with the set task (fetch the KVN club something worthy of presentation at KVN). The hero was clearly nervous and began the story in a roundabout way: “Quick-wittedness is characteristic of people in the aviation professions. I want to recall events that took place long ago. During the war, we were carrying out aviation technology trials…”
What took place afterwards was a turn akin to the turn in Kolyan’s story. Here too “man’s fate was almost broken”: Anokhin, stumbling slightly, began to speak about 1942, when he worked on aviation trials with the engineer Lev Salko, also a graduate of the Moscow Aviation Institute. They were trialing the transport of a car by a heavy bomber. Lev was overseeing the process, and checked the connection of the car to the plane. Becoming distracted, he ignored the requirement to clear the field and found himself beside the car that was being pulled by the accelerating aircraft. Observers realised that a person had remained on the airfield, but cancelling the take off was already impossible. Salko got scared, got into the car, and hoped that the bomber wouldn’t drop him. Anokhin, who was observing the flight, had already sent rescue brigades to search for the missing person. Periodically, the camera moved between Anokhin and the hall: students listened tensely to the pilot, the cameramen moved from row to row, capturing the perplexed faces of students who were most likely born the very year this story took place.
Citing Salko, Anokhin concluded: “When I was sitting in the car, it seemed to me that the button had been pressed, and I was already falling. At the moment of the plane’s landing, I felt the impact. I thought I had fallen, and whether I was alive or not alive wasn’t clear to me. Then I breathed a little and understood that everything had ended happily.”
The hall erupted into applause.
The fairytale phrase, contained in an hour of air time, produced a miracle—an oral history of the war, told by a participant in it. “I know not whither” turned out to be the high-rise on Vosstaniya “I know not what” a person who had lived through an impossible rescue.
Forty years later that same phrase, compressed into thirty seconds, would transform a Perm “gopnik,” who rolls up to the microphone and says: “So this is my story.”
An absolute fairytale.