The Faculty of Useless Knowledge () is a novel by Yury Dombrovsky about the fate of Russian intelligentsia in the era of the Great Purge, written in 1964–1975. It completes a kind of dialogue begun by the novel The Guardian of Antiquities (published in 1964 in Novy Mir). The novel was dedicated to Dombrovsky's Novy Mir editor Anna Samoilovna Berser and published by YMCA Press in Paris; according to the popular version, the publication was the cause of Dombrovsky's death (possibly murder). In the USSR it was published in 1988.
Synopsis
The novel takes place in the summer of 1937 in the city of Almaty. The protagonist of the novel, Georgy Nikolaevich Zybin, is a thirty-year-old historian and an employee of the ethnographic museum. For a long time Zybin has tried to live besides his epoch, not penetrating into the essence of events occurring around: arrests, public judicial processes and propagandistic hysteria. An authentic European humanist, Zybin cannot accept the socially obscuring and making total savages of people. Zybin sees himself as an irreplaceable fragment of a disappearing culture, on whom its fate depends, and he cannot reconcile himself with its demise and with the fact that the culture becomes a "faculty of unnecessary things". Being in a state of delirium at night, Zybin talks to Stalin: "What if you are right and the world will survive and prosper. Then the mind, conscience, goodness, humanity and everything that has been forged for thousands of years and was considered the goal of the existence of mankind, is worth nothing. To save the world, you need iron and flamethrowers, stone cellars and people with guns ... And I, and people like me, will have to fall to your boots like to an icon."
Zybin persuades himself to live "in a right way", meaning: "quietly, imperceptibly, don't push anyone, don't hurt, don't anger" – "I am the keeper of antiquities, that's it!", he tells himself. His life is externally safe. Beautiful Clara, an employee of the museum, is secretly in love with him. The director of the museum, a former Red commander, treats him with caring respect. The director warns Zybin: "Don't be partisan – be polite". An old man who works as a museum carpenter, is his faithful drinking companion. One day, Kornilov, a young scientist who was expelled from Moscow, appears in the museum. To Zybin, he is a man of his own breed – by fate and education.
But events are beginning to unfold with catastrophic acceleration. The old man Rodionov, an amateur archaeologist and a former partisan, confident in his services to the authorities, comes with his "discovery" – he demands to start excavations of the ancient capital in a place he will point out. Zybin knows that resisting the power of aggressive ignorance is pointless and dangerous, but still he resists. In the museum, he bickers in vain with the illiterate but ideologically savvy Zoya Mikhailovna. Zybin writes to a local newspaper quite neutral (so he thinks) notes about culture, but even for these he is reprimanded by Dyupova, the academic secretary of the local library. Dyupova says that the author did not reflect the work of librarians to serve the masses of workers and students.
Zybin is restless. He gets involved in an anecdotal story. A bloated newspaper hype about a giant boa allegedly living in the collective farm "Mountain Giant" threatens to break the life of brigadier Potapov. "Lawyers on vacation" are going to the collective farm. Accidentally, they meet a car on a night road that takes Zybin to the "lawyers", where it is explained to him that Potapov is an agent of German intelligence, and the story with the snake is a "cleverly conceived diversion". That same night, having met with Potapov, who is hiding, Zybin tries to help him. The foreman was able to find and kill the "boa", which turned out to be a very big runner. Together, they bring a bag with the killed snake to the museum, which gives the brigadier's last hope for salvation.
