Gadfly in Russia : A Story of Travel, History, People, and Places

Part Three A Nest of Gentlefolk 1968

9 November

Could it have been a case of ‘come home, all is forgiven’? Whatever it was, Ruth and I were invited to attend the 150th Anniversary Celebrations of the birth of Ivan Turgenev. The prospect of going to Russia again was too good to miss. I had just published Love in the Environs of Voronezh, as well as a book of stories called Guzman, Go Home. Whatever else was in progress could wait awhile.

Another English writer in the group was James Aldridge, whom we had met at the Hampstead house of Ella Winter and Donald Ogden Stewart. His 600-page novel The Diplomat, set in the Persian region of Azerbaijan just after the Second World War, had long been popular in the Soviet Union.

We waited in the airport terminal for our luggage, till despondently realising that one of the suitcases was not going to come on to the carousel, a new experience for us — up to that time. I had visions of it being motored to the Moscow flat of a fence who would sell the contents at one of the street markets. Or it was already being loaded on to a plane for disposal in Irkutsk. Scarves and heavy sweaters were in it, and God knew what else, so it would be hard to endure the winter temperatures without them.

Oksana, with her expressive all-knowing eyes, tried to put us at our ease. ‘Don’t worry. The case will come to your hotel in the morning. But now we must leave, because the others are already waiting in the bus.’

At least we’d had the sense to wear our Russian fur hats, though the first touch of outside air was a knifely shock to the skin. The rest of those on board were mainly writers from communist countries, or from Latin America.

Soon after being installed in one of the 3,000 rooms of the new Hotel Rossiya, George came to welcome us. As always full of life’s enjoyments, he kissed Ruth’s hand like a true cavalier. And then, in his Georgian prince manner, he telephoned room service and asked them to bring champagne and caviar, aware of course that it would be paid for by the state.

We invited him to join us at dinner but he said, with the wink of an amateur conspirator, that he had a date with someone who would never forgive him if he let her down.

Sunday, 10 November

The missing suitcase did not turn up as had been promised, so we entreated long suffering and by now worried Oksana to do her best and make sure it did before we froze to death. Meanwhile we put on all the clothes we had and walked up Gorki Street with James Aldridge, glad to have a companion who knew more Russian than we did.

Back at the hotel there was still no sign of the suitcase, and I (laughingly) told Oksana in the evening that there soon would be if large notices were displayed at the airport explaining, in no uncertain terms, that unless it was found, and quickly, we would perish from the cold, and then a few baggage handlers would be sent to Siberia — or shot.

Monday, 11 November

After breakfast Oksana telephoned from the lobby saying a car was waiting to take us to the airport, where we could identify our case. Did that mean it had been found? She couldn’t be sure, but on arrival we were shown into a room with other missing luggage stacked around the walls.

Ruth spotted ours right away and, on making sure no one had opened it, we produced the identifying docket, signed several forms in at least triplicate, and had it sent to the car.

Tuesday, 12 November

Chairman Skobelev, head of the Turgenev celebrations, asked if I would give a short speech from the stage of the Bolshoi, where the proceedings were to be officially opened. Mr Brezhnev would be there, and many other Soviet notables.

When I agreed to do it Oksana said I should write the speech beforehand and then show it to her. They were taking no chances. I scribbled some notes, and borrowed a typewriter from the hotel, to make the text plain for reading.

I put in a few remarks from my talk of the previous year, and of course also mentioned what a great novelist Turgenev had been, and how he had lived at a time when it was comparatively easy to travel in and out of Russia, which should be possible for writers today. The latter part of this sentence was something that, under the circumstances, could not be used, since Mr Brezhnev might not approve. I had expected as much, though was told that the rest would pass all right. As a guest I agreed to the cut, but at least won a little that was worth saying. The speech was put into Russian by George.

Other delegates spoke — everything simultaneously translated — and from my position on the stage I took in the greyish unmoving features of Brezhnev in his box, seemingly bored by whatever was said, though later he enjoyed and applauded the dramatic excerpts from Turgenev’s works, as well as the singing and dancing.

Wednesday, 13 November

Nothing was too much trouble to keep foreign guests busy and content. Those who made sure the hospitality was as well arranged as possible — such as Oksana — deserved our thanks. I told myself that the price to be paid was never onerous, on being asked to talk at the Writers’ Union on Turgenev’s novels, where I was careful to get in what had not been possible at the Bolshoi.

Their response was to say that foreign travel was not as impossible as I imagined, because Soviet writers — such as Mikhail Sholokhov and Yevgeny Yevtushenko — were often allowed abroad to give lectures and readings. This I well knew, having met them at various times in London, but I didn’t consider it enough, because they were only let out under stringent conditions. I felt sorry for Oksana, who had to do all the interpreting.

George came with us to the savings bank — no difficulty for me this time — to help me take out 800 roubles from my account, which left 969 still there and never collected.

As I was folding the notes George met one of his former professors, a dignified smartly dressed elderly man carrying the inevitable briefcase and wearing spectacles. It was interesting to see so much deference, bowing and hand kissing on George’s part, though he seemed to have enduring respect and affection for the old man who was very happy to receive it.

Ruth and I passed the evening with the well-known poet Rimma Kazakova at the Writers’ Club, and spent some hours talking with her about the current situation.

Thursday, 14 November

We obtained transit visas for our return journey at the Polish consulate, and did the same business at the office of the German Democratic Republic. Our plan was to go home by overlanding to Holland, for the experience of a long train journey.

We then went to Maxim Gorki’s house on Kachalova Street, where he had lived from 1931 until his death in 1936. I had read many of his works, but found the last novel Klim Samgin impossible to get into. The suspicion had always been that he hadn’t died a natural death, but was poisoned on Stalin’s orders for being too outspoken against the regime — though Gorki had nevertheless supported the slave-labour project of the White Sea Canal in the 1920s.

It was an opulent residence for a writer who endured such poverty as a child and young man, comfortable and elegantly furnished in the art deco style, with many artefacts and pictures of his time. The writing desk seemed still to be glowing with use. He also had a museum to himself on Vorovska Street, in a building put up for Prince Gagarin in 1820, where books and manuscripts and much else was on show, but there was no time to see it.

At the Tetryakov gallery, the first time for us, we concentrated on seventeenth-century icons and the landscapes of Levitan. The gallery was presented to the city in 1892 by the brothers Pavel and Sergei Tetryakov, who were patrons and connoisseurs. Ten years later they gave another fifteen hundred items, and by 1914 it housed four thousand, thus earning an asterisk in Baedeker. It now had fifty thousand paintings and sculptures, which made it a good place for the study of Russian art.

In the afternoon I kept an appointment for an interview at the hotel, but forgot what it was for no sooner had it ended. We managed half an hour’s sleep, then attended the theatre with the rest of the Turgenev group. A late party at Valentina Ivasheva’s went well because she seemed to have forgiven me for my outspokenness of the previous year.

Friday, 15 November

I was shown around a ‘typical’ Soviet school at which children learned foreign languages. Neatly dressed and smiling pupils unselfconsciously spoke a few words in clear English.

When they wanted to know what jobs I’d done in my life I mentioned that of wireless operator, which interested them more than anything else. Followed by a lady teacher I was shown into a room full of radio equipment, and very good it was. They communicated, by shortwave voice and telegraphy, with amateur clubs throughout the Soviet Union. One wall was decorated by colourful QSL (receipt of signal) cards, some from places beyond the borders of their country.

Ruth and I lunched at the Writers’ Club with Boris Polevoi, editor of the influential magazine Yunost (devoted to youth). He it was who, in 1960, had taken a chance on publishing Colleagues by Vasily Aksyonov, a novel unlike any that had so far appeared in the USSR, and for that reason it became immensely popular. One knew from this that Polevoi was very much a liberal as far as new writing was concerned.

Wounds from the war had left his features slightly distorted, especially about the eyes, but he rarely failed to put on a smile when speaking. It was obvious that he worried much, and though times might be easier it was still a fight to publish what he wanted.

On my last visit to Moscow I had been told that Pasternak’s great novel Dr Zhivago would shortly be published in Russia.

‘And so we all hoped,’ Polevoi said, ‘and still do hope, because I’d be delighted to publish it in my magazine. What else can I say?’ Students we met later at the university were in much the same mind.

Forty-five minutes before midnight a special train left from the Kursk station for Orel 239 miles to the south. The delegation would see places written about in Turgenev’s novels, and the house where he had lived. Several carriages were taken up by members of the Writers’ Union and other officials connected to the anniversary. Some brought their secretaries, or girlfriends and, in a few cases, their wives.

The further from Moscow the more the company relaxed, till the train seemed to have been hired for nothing less than a wild party. Ruth and I contributed a bottle of White Horse whisky, bought from a Beriozka or hard-currency shop, which the half dozen in our compartment began guzzling even before the lights of the conurbation fell behind. They had supplies of their own, especially vodka, but also Georgian wines and good things to eat.

The engine with its large red star pulsated through the dark spaces, the jollification in our carriage making a place unconnected to any other, with the clinking of glasses, laughter, and the merry compliance of the girls. Much food and booze passed between the cabins, fuelling a party in the good old Russian mode. Handshakes and backslaps for foreigners, a constant plying of liquor, and kisses for the smart and agreeable young women — even for the not so young — went on through the night.

Those in compartments who didn’t care to enjoy the beverages were mostly ladies from Latin America, wanting to discuss literature or the world political situation, though how they were able to, with such fraternal comings and goings along the corridors was hard to say. The only way to be at home in any country was to drink with those who lived there, and most needed no second telling to join in, which soon put levels of self-indulgence to the test.

Saturday, 16 November

At one o’clock in the morning, with no diminishment of uproar, the train halted at a station so that goods wagons could rattle through a junction further south. The stop promised to be long and, fresh air being needed after so much carousing, I stepped on to a long empty platform thinly coated with ice.

In only a jacket, but warmed by vodka, I thoughtlessly propelled myself into a delightful slide of fifty or so yards. It was an exhilarating motion, more a reversion to childhood, as I scooted with arms spread to achieve an even longer lap, sailing like a bird from one end of the train to the other.

Unaware of providing a spectacle, till hearing applause from the windows, I might have gone on with such madcapping all night, or until I dropped, but a shriek from the engine alerted me to get back on board. The inconvenience of being left alone in the unlit space of Mother Russia made me realise that I would either freeze to death on the icy platform, or have to fend for myself among astonished people, if I could find them, who would so little know what to make of me that I would soon enough not know what to make of myself, even if I didn’t already.

Leaping for the steps as the wheels squeaked into movement, my berserker antics came to an end, as did the party soon afterwards.

Shaken from a half sleep at six o’clock in Orel, and persuaded from the litter of cups, bottles, cigarette stubs and paper bags, we were led like a gaggle of walking wounded to a bus which took us to a hotel in the city.

All everyone needed was sleep, but after breakfast we were marched back to our transport, which took us to lay flowers on the Turgenev monument, then to scenes in the district described in A Nest of Gentlefolk and A Sportsman’s Sketches. How much we would remember was hard to say.

Still zombie-like, we filed through the Turgenev Museum, opened for the centenary of his birth in 1918. He was the first Russian novelist to be widely known and appreciated throughout Western Europe in the nineteenth century. Most of the furniture had been brought from his country place at Spasskoye Litovinovo, while the desk and chair of his Paris study was as if waiting for him to come in from dawdling in the garden and get to work. Glass sheltered copies of translations and first editions, and works of art adorned the walls. It was fascinating to hear that the rooms had been recreated exactly as those in his country house. The Karelian birchwood and walnut Russian Empire-style furniture was made by serf craftsmen, and I hoped they had been well treated for having such skills.

Most of us began to stagger by the time we came out of the Museum of Painting, and welcomed the half hour’s rest after lunch, but then for the benefit of French visitors we had to see a street named after the Normandy — Niemen squadron which had fought for the Russians in the liberation of Orel. Afterwards we went to a meeting with students to talk about Turgenev’s life and works.

At the end of the evening concert half a dozen students joined Ruth and myself saying they would like to take us on a walk around the town. We had the feeling that they didn’t care to be seen too openly going off with us. It was late, achingly cold, and mostly dark beyond the city lights.

Some of the group may have intended to become writers, for they complained about the number of editors, publishers’ committees, scholars, and even more sinister people who demanded to see and approve an author’s manuscript before it could be given the go-ahead for printing. Luckily some magazine editors fought courageously to bring out good and often controversial work (they mentioned Boris Polevoi) which then appeared in book form, since they were already popular.

We reminded them of Solzhenitsyn, Yevtushenko, Aksyonov and others, which surely showed that things had changed from the bad old days. That was true enough, they said, but your information is not up to date, because the lid is coming down again, and times are going to be more difficult.

It was cathartic for them to talk, the discussion going on through several winding miles of glum suburban areas. Whenever the lights of the town centre showed in the distance we assumed the perambulation was coming to an end, but we were steered away so that the talk could continue. There were no complaints. In fact we were flattered at having been chosen from the delegation to broach such issues.

We were still answering questions after midnight, about the lives of writers in the West. I said that while it might seem ideal to those in countries where novelists and poets were galled by the system, in the so-called Free World there were more subtle forms of censorship. It was unofficial, but publishers and editors could turn down a book whose subject matter they decided was distasteful, on the assumption that the reading public wasn’t yet ready for it, or for reasons impossible to fathom. At least that had been the situation until recently, especially with film scripts. Now it was more of a lottery to get a book into print, but there was always a chance, because not all publishers thought alike. Still, I admitted, things really were changing, and it was nowhere near as bad as in the Soviet Union.

They eventually pointed out our hotel across the square, and thanked us with firm handshakes on saying goodbye. We wondered what our long talk-about had meant to them, and whether they would remember it.

Sunday, 17 November

The bus took us fifty miles northeast on a stretch of road George and I had motored along in 1967, unrecognised now because the nondescript country to either side was monochromed with snow. Beyond Mtsensk a bust of Turgenev and a finger post indicated the way to Spasskoye Litovinovo, the estate where the writer was exiled by the Tsar in 1852 for writing a laudatory obituary of Gogol.

Under a line of birch trees flocks of snow like mice made of cotton wool parted from the occasional branch and melted into the ground. The plain wooden house, where Rudin was written, burned down in 1906, but was later rebuilt to look as it had in 1881, when Turgenev saw it for the last time.

It was a large house, a nest of gentlefolk, painted white, with several columns along a railed terrace, but as our feet were coldly wet (or wetly cold: we couldn’t decide) we were satisfied with a glimpse of the outside, knowing that the best exhibits were in Orel.

The bus took us to the station buffet in Mtsensk for lunch, hats and overcoats coming off at the abrupt change from bitter cold to the heat of warm stoves, turning us into a merry gang, as if a lever had been pulled over us on going through the door. The large windows gave much light, and the half dozen at each table watched kerchiefed and robust women in white aprons come from the kitchen with bowls of steaming boiled potatoes, platters of gherkins, dishes of soured cream, soused herring, slices of black bread, plates of butter squares and, to send it down, quantities of ice-cold vodka. No sooner had a bottle been emptied another took its place until, going by shouts and laughter loud enough to burst the windows, we seemed back in the atmosphere of the train from Moscow. The serving women showed delight at our appetites, as they replaced dishes devoured with the gusto of the starving.

Even the demure ladies from South America were coached to take a little vodka, for medicinal purposes of course, and they also were soon quite lively and red at the cheeks. Half an hour later it was plain that all we had eaten so far was only the first part, which I had thought of as being an excellent meal in itself, and more satisfying than any to be had in an expensive London restaurant, though cold and hunger, and plenty of vodka, may have distorted my judgement.

There were many nodding heads on the coach to Orel, but in the afternoon we were treated to a film show about the Red Army defeating the Germans in the war, and the subsequent liberation of Orel. More than half the town was destroyed in the fighting. The Krupskaya Library, founded in 1843, had been plundered and burned but was rebuilt and now housed half a million books.

Orel was the first big town to be liberated, and was given an artillery salute in Moscow. I recalled listening to many others on the wireless in our living room, as the Red Army went on its way to Berlin.

It was dark by the time we filed into the train for Moscow, a trip more subdued than on the journey down.

Monday, 18 November

After breakfast in the hotel we packed our cases for departure in the evening. But our stint wasn’t finished yet. There was a meeting at Foreign Literature Magazine, to talk about what had been seen and enjoyed in Orel. Tanya Kudraevzeva took us to lunch at her flat, where we met her beautiful daughter, who danced with the Bolshoi. And just when we thought there would be nothing to do for the rest of the day we were asked to give an interview which went on for over an hour.

George and Oksana came to put us on the train for the Polish frontier at Brest Litovsk, the first stage of 2,000 miles back to London. We thanked her for having made our ten days so pleasant, then told George, wanting Oksana to hear, that we expected him to be in London soon, somehow or other. He could rely on us feasting him well, as we talked about old times.

‘There’s nothing I would like better,’ he said, ‘and I’ll do all I can to keep the appointment.’

‘We’ll find a way,’ Oksana told us.

Placenames familiar from looking at maps during the war were passed unseen: Vyazma, Smolensk, Minsk, Baranovichi, and I thought how interesting it would be to put up for a few days at each and see the sights, mix with people in the streets. But our throughway tickets wouldn’t allow it, and in any case we were tired, wanting only to get home — even though we had taken the slow way to go about it. The train bounded along swiftly enough, every turn of the wheels taking us closer to Holland.

It was so black outside that the train might well have been stationary. There were hardly any other passengers, and we sat on our own in the restaurant car for a mediocre meal. Moscow seemed months behind, everything we had seen and done gone in the mist. London was still an enormous distance away, though we longed to be there.

At Brest Litovsk, known for its treaty in 1918, when Lenin did a deal with the Germans and let down the Allies, though I don’t suppose he could have done much else under the circumstances, we were ordered out of the train and told to show our passports at a nearby office. That done, we roamed the half-lit platforms looking for a place to have coffee. There wasn’t one. In Baedeker’s time there had been ‘a very fair’ railway restaurant, but travellers were better catered for in those days.

Back where the train should have been, it wasn’t. The vacant space was disturbing. Imagination works overtime when faced with the possibility of misfortune. Our visas said we were to enter Poland on a specific day, which meant within an hour or two, so where was the bloody train?

There was no one to ask, even supposing we could make our meaning clear. When we tried to get to another platform a soldier signalled us to go back. Maybe if the train had been full the desolation wouldn’t have been so intimidating. I regretted again having been too idle to learn more Russian. And why had we been so foolish as to leave the carriage? The train seemed to have gone without us, and the passport office was in darkness. There was no one to ask about our plight. We had been given to understand — or had we? — that there would be at least an hour’s wait. Our luggage was still on board, which didn’t bear thinking about, so we tried not to or, being in a state of gloom, couldn’t.

Then I remembered that the wheels of the train had to be changed to the West European gauge, but that was something I assumed would be done at the platform by a crew of dwarfish cloth-capped men tinkering musically with hammers between swigs of vodka. I didn’t realise the train had to be shunted to marshalling yards and the work done there. Half an hour later we saw the carriages parked further up the platform, so were spared the inconvenience of a few forlorn days in the fortress town of Brest Litovsk.

Tuesday, 19 November

At dawn the train pulled us over a long bridge into Warsaw, though we were too far north to see anything of the city. The Polish landscape beyond was misty and nondescript in its wintry cabbage-field gloom. A couple of books still unread saved us from riffling through a rack at the end of the carriage holding copies of the Daily Worker and Humanité, and booklets of tedious argument about the ideological differences between Russia and China.

We had slept little in our bunks, so at dusk it seemed to have been dusk all the way through Poland. We stretched out early, but shortly afterwards the flashlight of Polish border guards dazzled us, and we showed our passports. Half an hour later soldiers of the German Democratic Republic barked for the same reason. Then the somewhat less brusque West German police wanted to know who was coming into their country. Another sleepless night.

I suppose we must have gone through Berlin, but I don’t remember, though the lights of the world were gradually turned on for our locomotive’s race to the Dutch frontier — where we encountered two more sets of border police. Since leaving Moscow we’d had nothing to eat except the evening meal on the train twenty-four hours before, and our provisions basket was empty. There’d never been much in it anyway. In Moscow we’d been too busy to think of stocking up, and in any case didn’t know where to shop. Delicious meals with plenty of pleasant wine would be frequent on such a grand international express, or so we had thought. Luckily a railway-employed woman at the end of the carriage brewed lemon tea on a stove in her cubicle, whenever we wanted it.

After breakfast at the Hook we dawdled an hour or so before getting on a ship for Harwich. The sea was bleak and grey — and bloody rough — but we’d had the foresight to book a cabin, so the crossing went easily. We were home by eight in the evening.

In Moscow we were given a heavy metal medallion with the head of Turgenev stamped on it, very useful as a paperweight, and to remind us of a country we weren’t to see again for thirty-six years. Much happened in that time to George Andjaparidze, which affected my relationship with the Soviet Union.