Solovyov and Larionov

2

Solovyov traveled south the very next day, on a train from St. Petersburg to Simferopol. Needless to say, trains were not the young historian’s usual means of transportation. His life had taken shape in such a way that anyone capable of reading palms would have seen a railroad line parallel to Solovyov’s lifeline. The trains that streaked past the small station called Kilometer 715 were the first to reveal to him the existence of a large and fancy world beyond the station’s limits.

Solovyov’s first recollections of smells and sounds were attached to the railroad. Locomotive whistles woke him up in the mornings and the rhythmic clacking of wheels lulled him to sleep at night. His bed vibrated slightly when trains went by and his ceiling was streaked with the reflections of the lights in the compartments. As he dropped off to sleep, he stopped distinguishing exactly where that smooth but loud movement was coming from—here or outside. The iron knobs at the head of his bed jingled rhythmically and the bed slowly gathered speed, carrying Solovyov off to cheerful childhood dreams.

Solovyov learned to read using the placards on long-distance trains. It is worth noting that it was the trains’ swiftness that brought about his speed-reading skills, which later eased his perusal of publications about the general: those publications were just as numerous as they were fantastic. It was from those same placards that Solovyov first learned of the existence of a series of cities to which the rails under his own windows ran, leading due north on one side and due south on the other. The station called Kilometer 715 lay in the middle of the world.

Solovyov watched the trains with Leeza Larionova. After walking up the steps to the platform, they would sit down on a bench that had lost its color long ago and begin their observations. They loved it when the long-distance trains reduced their speed near the station. Then they could discern not only the placards but also rolled-up mattresses on bunks, tea glasses in special metal holders, and—most important of all—passengers who represented the mysterious world from which the train had come. It was not that they were glad for the trains because they were longing for a world unfamiliar to them; more likely, the very idea of ‘long-distance’ captivated them.

Their regard for the electric local trains and freight trains that occasionally streaked past the station was calmer. The people on the locals were more or less familiar to them, but as far as the freight trains went, well, there were no people on them at all. These were the longest and dullest of trains. They consisted of tank cars filled with oil, flatcars burdened with lumber, or just closed-up boxcars.

By a very early age, Solovyov knew the schedule for all the trains that went by the station. This information, which some might think capable of becoming a useless burden, played a considerable role in the future historian’s life. For one thing, Solovyov was inculcated with a taste for valid knowledge—this may be why the young historian’s regard for the mythology surrounding General Larionov was subsequently so unforgiving—from the very beginning of his conscious life. For another, a faultless mastery of the schedule cultivated in Solovyov a heightened perception of time, a real necessity for a genuine historian. The schedule used numbers that were never round. Nowhere in those figures were there approximate denotations such as after lunch, in the first half of the day, or around midnight. There were only 13:31, 14:09, 15:27. These unkempt fringes of time were as tousled as existence itself and possessed a very specific sort of beauty: the beauty of verity.

Solovyov’s mastery of the schedule was not accidental. His mother worked as a controller at a crossing adjacent to the station. And though there was not much of anything to control there (the crossing could go unintersected by cars or trucks for days), Solovyov’s mother would lower the crossing gate three minutes before any train appeared, put on her uniform jacket, and step out onto the control booth’s little balcony. There was something captain-like in her unnaturally straight figure, her motionlessness, and her stern facial features. Sometimes the din of a train would wake Solovyov up in the middle of the night and he would look out the window at his mother. Her resolute standing, baton raised, held him spellbound. It was like that, in profile, that she imprinted herself upon his memory, amidst the train’s rumbling and its flickering lights. When Solovyov read later about churches in abandoned northern villages and how a priest in that area ministered to an empty church, he thought that referred to his mother, too. Her selfless service, without any visible goal, continued, unvarying, like the sunrise. Regardless of changes in government, time of day, or weather conditions.

It was weather conditions, however, that turned out to be fatal for her. One frosty winter night, she was chilled to the bone and contracted pneumonia. She initially treated it with vodka and honey. From time to time, her mother, granny Solovyova, would take the baton and head out to substitute for her daughter at the crossing. Some time later, when the patient became worse, the old woman massaged her back and chest, spreading the suffocating smell of turpentine through the house. A few days later, Solovyov’s mother announced unexpectedly that she was dying. Exaggeration was not the norm in his family, so the old woman grew worried. There was no point in sending to the nearest village, since there was nobody there but a drunken doctor’s assistant. The old woman ran to the control booth to stop a train. Solovyov’s mother died, but the old woman kept on waving her daughter’s baton. Not one train stopped.

The trains almost never stopped anyway. Only rarely, predominantly in the summer, when the tracks were overloaded, did trains pull up to the station, sighing heavily. The carriage attendants would step out onto the pock-marked slabs of the platform as if they owned the place. Behind them were fat men in T-shirts and women in tight-fitting exercise pants. And more rarely, children. Children were usually allowed no further than the vestibule, where they burst from their pensive grandmothers’ hands. Adults smoked, drank beer straight from the bottle, and crushed mosquitoes with resounding slaps. When the children managed to make it to the platform, little Solovyov would run off, but continue to follow the proceedings from the bushes. During those moments, he was not the only one keeping an eye on the train that had arrived: the six houses surrounding the station were all eyes and ears, too. The residents pressed themselves against windows, stood in doorways, or cast quick glances at the arrivals as they pretended to dig in their kitchen gardens. It was not the done thing to walk up to the platform.

Only Solovyov’s mother—when she was alive—was within sight of the passengers. The passengers, whose appearance seemed even more idle when compared with the railway worker’s focused, solemn standing, made no attempt to call out to her. It was obvious right away that this motionlessness was of a specific type. Paying no attention to the passengers, Solovyov’s mother gazed at the point where the rails met, as if watching for the arrival of her impending death. When reading later about the elderly general’s famous gaze, Solovyov imagined it without the slightest effort. He remembered the way his mother had looked into the distance.

Solovyov’s grandmother did not watch in that same way. Gazes into the distance were not really characteristic of her. Most often, she would sit, propping up her cheek with the palm of her hand and looking straight ahead. She outlived her daughter by several years and died not long before Solovyov graduated from high school. Her death pushed him to move to Petersburg. It was in Petersburg that he first heard about General Larionov.

Broadly speaking, it was not accidental that both Solovyov and Larionov were children of railroad workers. Perhaps it was exactly this that determined certain similar characteristics, despite all their external differences. Railroad workers in Russia have a special mission because the role of the railroad in our country is not the same as in other places. The time that we spend traveling is measured in days. That time is enough not only for a good conversation but—in successful cases—even for making marriage plans. What marriage could be planned on the Munich–Berlin express in seats lined up one after the other, with radio jacks in the armrests? Most likely, none.

People who are somehow involved with the railroad are all predominantly even-tempered and unhurried. They know about conquering an expanse. These people know how to listen to the sound of the even clatter of wheels and will never start rushing around: they understand that they still have time. This is why the most serious of foreigners also choose a week or two, once a year, to take a ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway. There is little need to mention that these people resolutely prefer a train to an airplane, other than for transatlantic situations, at any rate. The Americans leave them no choice at all.

General Larionov’s father had no choice, either. Airplanes were simply not flying at the time he decided to associate his life with the railroad. Strictly speaking, at that time, even the railroad itself had not yet become a truly day-to-day matter. Using it demanded of passengers not only a certain degree of courage but also a progressive mindset. Possessing these qualities in full measure, Larionov, director of the railroad department, spent half of his on-duty hours on wheels. He was entitled to use a special first-class lounge carriage that was hitched to the end of the train. It was in that carriage that he would set off to Crimea, for his vacation. As a scrupulous person, the department director paid for his family’s passage in that carriage, notwithstanding the persuasion of railroad employees who considered that his privileges should extend to his family. The governess rode in second class on the same train and the servants in third. This latter circumstance served later as cause for various forms of speculation and even conclusions regarding the openly undemocratic character of relationships within the Larionov household.

In answer to accusations of that sort, one might cite the opinion of Ieronim A. Ratsimor, who pointed out in his 1992 article ‘Sprouts of Democracy in the Russian Military Environment from the Late 19th to Early 20th Centuries’, that, for a number of reasons, class ideology prevailed over democratic ideology at the end of the nineteenth century. Ratsimor also put forth the supposition that democracy is not a universal concept and is generally not obligatory for characterizing all times and peoples. When established in countries not prepared for it, democracy is capable of bearing the saddest of fruits. According to the historian’s convictions, the distinctness of Russia’s class divide regulated social relationships far more effectively than democratic procedures. Using material from the general’s biography, he convincingly demonstrated that, while still a pupil and junior cadet, Larionov was obligated to ride second class but after becoming a senior cadet, he could only ride third since senior cadets were already considered to have attained a low army rank and were not admitted into the two other classes.

Less radical points of view were also expressed with regard to democracy in the Larionov family. The graduate student Kalyuzhny surmised, verbally, that the defining traits of the seating arrangements of those riding south were determined not so much by the opinion of Larionov, department director, as by the presence at the station of the elder General Larionov, who was allegedly incapable of coming to terms with scorn for Russia’s class divide. The latter man was, to be sure, known for his conservatism, which he expressed in part through a disdainful regard for the railroad. To him, the realm of the railroad seemed unworthy of their family line—in the veteran’s watery eyes, it presented something akin to a circus attraction. Only the post of department director brought a certain seriousness to his grandson’s work and partially reconciled the old man with this odd choice of profession. And though the hero of the Battle of Borodino considered train travel inappropriate for himself, he invariably came to the train station at Tsarskoe Selo to see his family off on their travels. As he made his way along the row of carriages on his peg leg, he would stop by the locomotive with unexpected timidity and spend a long while watching the steam bursting out of the boilers. Then he would shrug his shoulders for effect, hurriedly make the sign of the cross over his family members, and resolutely hobble toward the exit, an echo resonating under the station’s metal arches. One might suppose the last thing on his mind at those moments was the passengers’ seating arrangements.

Those trips were preserved in the future general’s memory as one of the brightest pages of his childhood. In Notes for an Autobiography, which Dupont found and published, General Larionov describes in detail the railroad journeys of his childhood. The carriage itself evoked the greatest delight for him; with brass handles polished to a shine, oak paneling, and—most importantly—a glass rear wall that displayed the entire expanse of road already traveled. To the juvenile Larionov, it seemed as if the carriage at their disposal was a giant spider capable of producing two steel threads that ran out from under it at high speed and converged on the horizon.

The child was particularly keen on watching sunsets that lent enchanting colors to the forest on both sides of the railroad bed. The colors dimmed with every minute and the trees darkened, approaching the railroad bed ever closer. For the future general, who had first-hand familiarity with Russian folk tales, the train’s motion was reminiscent of an escape from a spellbound forest. Clutching at the nickel handle on the bunk, he anxiously observed the rocking of fir crowns, from which, to his mind, it would be most opportune for an unseen adversary to attack. Only after some time had passed, when it was completely dark and the small glass wall had begun reflecting the carriage’s cozy luxury, would the child calm down, unclench his numbed fingers, and let go of the nickel handle. General Larionov caught himself making that motion later, when he let go of a handle on the hatch of an armored train one summer evening in 1920. The scent of wormwood wafted from a stilled field. Sudden silence had replaced the sounds of battle, with the only exception being the brooding metallic noises that carried from somewhere below, deep underneath the carriage and inaccessible to the eye.

His Crimean battles ended just as abruptly as they had begun. These battles took place while traveling and were just as unpredictable as the movements of the general’s armored train around Crimea. Larionov was often reproached—justifiably so, one must deem, albeit with a certain qualification—for excessive use of railroad transportation. The qualification is the fact that the railroad network in Crimea is not overly developed to this day. As is common knowledge, central Crimea is linked to only three cities on the coast: Kerch, Sevastopol, and Yevpatoria. It thus follows that the general’s excessiveness, even in the worst case, could have had only an extremely limited character.

There did exist, however, a positive side to the general’s predilection. Constrained by the lack of railroad track, General Larionov actively worked toward its construction. Even in his pre-Crimean period, he put together a narrow-gauge railroad in the forest near Kiev, as a test. He entered Crimea’s railway history first and foremost as the person who built a fully fledged railroad bed from Dzhankoy to Yushun.

The general’s childhood impressions turned out to be so strong that he even chose an armored carriage as his place of residence in Crimea. A host of legends has formed about that carriage, but all that is known and confirmed documentarily is that it was home to four birds (a crane, a crow, a raven, and a starling) and that Alexander Vertinsky visited the hospitable carriage and sang the well-known anti-war song ‘I Don’t Know Who Needs That And Why’ for the general. According to Alexei Ravenov’s In the Blue Train Carriage, those present said General Larionov’s distinctive, unearthly gaze was noticeable even then; it was reflected, in particular, in the photograph from 1964 that reminded historian Solovyov of his deceased mother’s gaze.

Solovyov thought back to that gaze yet again as he was speeding past railroad crossings, booths, and controllers with batons. He was standing by an open train window, the curtain flittering to his right like a bird that had been shot. Sunlight illuminated waves of fine hair along his arm, which felt the window frame’s metallic coolness. Solovyov thought the hairs were coarsening in the sweltering August wind, that their bright glistening was a sign of a gradual transformation to copper. He pressed his lips to the hairs for a minute, as if to assess their wiriness, but they turned out to be surprisingly soft.

Solovyov was a most genuine passenger of long-distance trains. He drank tea from a glass in a metal holder without pulling out the spoon, went to the lavatory with a towel on his shoulder, and sauntered around stations in a Petersburg University T-shirt. But the important thing was that he was riding in a compartment carriage for the first time in his life. After closing the compartment door for the night, he took a passing, admiring glance at his reflection in the mirror. The bulbs from the light in the lower bunk were reflected behind his back, too, as were some bottles with little plastic cups on them, a taciturn gentleman in a tracksuit, and two young female students. In short, there was everything that created the railroad’s aching coziness; a brief unity before parting forever. As he lay down in his upper bunk, Solovyov enjoyed listening to the students’ whispers. He did not even notice himself falling asleep.

He was awoken by light falling across his face. The train was standing still. Solovyov’s window was under a station streetlamp. Slowly, so as not to awaken the sleepers, he lowered the snug-fitting window and a warm, night breeze wafted into the compartment. A central Russian breeze, it abstractly occurred to Solovyov, who did not know where the train had stopped. The name of the deserted station was hidden in the darkness: apparently, it was a lone streetlamp burning in the window. But the lack of people in that expanse was illusory. In the depths of the station, where window glass meekly gleamed against the building’s dark contours, a quiet conversation was taking its course between two people. After sliding into the shaded part of his bunk, Solovyov discerned their unmoving figures on a bench, facing one another. He saw, in their bentness and in their chins that rested on their hands, something extraordinarily familiar that he could not, however, call to mind.

They were having a conversation that was utterly connected to the place in which the train was standing. The people they were naming were undoubtedly known only here and the details mentioned were also not likely to be understood without the preliminaries of living here a long time, but even so, Solovyov was unable to shake off an agonizing sense of déjà vu. In an attempt to determine where he had seen these same figures, Solovyov recalled all the stations and substations he had ever traveled through, but nothing similar came to mind. It turned out that situations varied at each of the stations he had seen. There were completely different people sitting everywhere (and even, perhaps, at the very same time), and it followed from that, in turn, that if the train were to stop at one hundred stations during the night, he would hear one hundred different stories. The diversity of existence made his head spin.

Meanwhile, the talkers fell silent. The one sitting on the right took out cigarettes, which he shared with his conversation partner. Two small fires appeared in the dark, one after the other, bringing to mind the lights at a crossing.

‘That’s all crap,’ said the one sitting on the left.

Solovyov suddenly recalled where he’d seen figures like these. They were chimeras from Notre-Dame Cathedral, on the cover of a history textbook.

The train arrived in Simferopol at three o’clock the following afternoon. It was raining in the Crimean capital. The rain had most likely just begun—steam was still rising from the hot pavement. Solovyov purchased a trolleybus ticket to Yalta after a short wait at the ticket window. He decided to travel between the two cities using this unusual trolleybus connection, perhaps the only one in the world. The route from Simferopol to Yalta had surprised even General Larionov in his time: he lived to see the launch of the trolleybus route, and, by then, nothing had surprised him in a long time. His fantasies, which were historically limited to the railroad, had never hinted at the possibility of an intercity connection of this sort.

The general remembered carriage connections (the office was located on the first floor of the Oreanda Hotel) perfectly, just as he remembered carriages with rubber tires and the changing of horses in Alushta. He did not immediately grasp why the trolleybus had become a replacement for all that. He was soberly aware that, unlike the railroad, a trolleybus line was not suitable for transferring heavy armaments or any significant number of troops. Even so, despite the absence of strategic significance for the trolleybus line, the general began regarding the innovation fairly positively after all and rode the trolleybus to Gurzuf one spring.

After the trolleybus had driven up, Solovyov settled into a window seat in the back row, in keeping with the ticket he had purchased. Passengers entered through the front door and heaped their luggage up on the back platform, resting it against a door that was not open for boarding. The passengers on the trollybus were almost entirely vacationers. They reclined noisily in their seats and wiped away sweat with the edges of their T-shirts. The only exception, by all indications, was a workingman with a girl who was about ten. They sat near Solovyov and had almost no belongings.

Despite the rain, the stuffiness had not subsided. It eased only when the trolleybus left the city and worked up a speed that was unexpected for such a vehicle. As if on command, the florid nylon curtains were pulled out the windows and knocked against the glass from the other side. This synchronized flapping lent the trolleybus a festive, somehow even nuptial, look. As the trolleybus climbed Chongarsky Pass, the workingman’s daughter began feeling nauseous. Her father took a match out of a box and suggested she put it in her mouth. This folk remedy proved ineffective. The little girl looked at the match, then at the calloused fingers extracting it from the box, and vomited.

The weather changed completely after Chongarsky Pass. The rain clouds remained beyond the northern side of the ridge and the sun beat through the windshield of the trolleybus as it began its careful descent along the winding mountain road. Nature did everything it could to stun Solovyov that day. The sun, which replaced the rain so suddenly, was not simply shining in a flawlessly blue sky. Both the sun and the sky were reflected, mirror-like, somewhere far below, like an unending mosaic that shimmered through the cypress trees floating in the windows. That was how Solovyov saw the sea for the first time.

Needless to say, General Larionov’s childhood reminiscences—which were found in an émigré’s archives and published by the very same Dupont—were already known to Solovyov by this time. Despite the fragmentariness of the text and the author’s stated intention to touch on his more mature years—this was the basis for Dupont’s confidence that the subsequent chapters which had been lost still existed—it is here that a description of the general’s first encounter with the sea is preserved. It follows from that description that the future commander’s family also traveled from Simferopol, although even then the opportunity existed to arrive in Sevastopol by rail and ride from there along the coast to Yalta.

Five-year-old Larionov managed to remember that his family was traveling in carriages with two springs. He remembered the word springs very well because he repeated it the whole way (as has been noted already, the child did not speak until he was three and a half years old, but he vigorously made up for lost time afterwards). The younger Larionov’s carriage was driven by an elderly Tatar, a handsome, smartly dressed man whose mastery of Russian was, without exception, inferior to all his passengers. Being sociable by nature, he reacted animatedly to the word springs and leaned on the coach box each time, showing the location of the spring with his whip handle. The coachman remained like that in the memoirist’s consciousness: inclined to the side with fine drops of sweat on his forehead and a benevolent smile.

Like Solovyov, the future general was surprised by the sharp change in the weather at Chongarsky Pass. The published notes also reference flecks of sunlight playing on the waves and viewed through the slow motion of cypresses. Special mention was given to the freshness of a wind, blowing not from dusty roadside groves but from that chilly turquoise expanse where the sky imperceptibly came together with the water. His mother’s light dress, locks of his English governess’s fair hair, and multicolored ribbons braided into the horse’s mane fluttered in the wind.

The general’s associative memory also forces him to speak of a piercing wind on Chongarsky Pass on November 1, 1920, when Crimea’s remaining defenders retreated to the ports, worn out after one-sided battles. According to Dupont’s supposition, a more detailed description of the evacuation was located in the part of the reminiscences that has not reached us. A faint hint cast by the general in passing, which may be seen as an intention to return to a theme he had broached superficially, speaks in favor of that. The general touches on those November events only because when watching from blizzardy Chongar as the White Army retreated (it was whiter than ever at that moment), by Larionov’s own admission he saw nothing but two landaus descending, in a leisurely fashion, toward the sea.

The trolleybus turned along the shore. Now the passengers not only saw the sea but sensed its briny freshness, too. At the request of the police, all cars on the highway stopped twice to let government motorcades through. The preoccupied faces of those government ministers were more likely guessed at than seen in cars rushing past at vast speeds. They were riding to their holidays and thinking about the significant decline of the peninsula’s funding. This manifested itself most of all in the condition of the palaces of the Russian aristocracy. The condition of the roads was no better, though. The summer sun and winter rain, coupled with the process of erosion, had produced a multitude of ruts and cracks in the Crimean roads. If the cracks had been patched up anywhere, it was on the government highway, though even that repair was only partial, or so Solovyov surmised, jolting in his seat every now and then.

The sun was already hiding behind Mount Ai-Petri when they pulled in to Yalta. A cloud had drifted across the mountain’s peak, where it was mingling with rays that shone so unusually straight that they appeared to be beams from a spotlight. Mountains clustered around the station from three sides, leaving open only a boulevard that ran toward the sea. An evening freshness was already beginning to make itself felt in Yalta, along with a restlessness that touched Solovyov’s heart. A sense of light alarm. The ancient feeling of a person about to spend the night in an unfamiliar place.

Solovyov stepped off the trolleybus and found himself surrounded by women. They vied with one another to offer him lodging and there were so many possibilities that the young historian felt lost. He could choose between a bed, a private room, or a cottage. He was invited to stay near the Spartacus movie theater, by the Chekhov museum, and even on Leningrad Street. Solovyov did not know the city. Pressured by the agitated landladies, he agonized over the location of his future lodging. The Petersburg graduate student’s soul leaned toward being Chekhov’s neighbor, but that offer was for an entire cottage that even his whole stipend would not cover. ‘Leningrad Street’ sounded unacceptable given that the city’s original name had been returned. After some wavering, he settled on the Spartacus movie theater: the proposed apartment was right next door, on Palmiro Togliatti Street.

Solovyov remembered how Nadezhda Nikiforovna had solemnly taken Giovagnoli’s novel Spartacus from a shelf that her cameo ring had touched and presented the book to him. In the course of subsequent discussion of the book, it emerged that Nadezhda Nikiforovna—like the adolescent Solovyov—had shed tears over make-believe, too, and turned out to sympathize with the gladiator very much. This had decisively strengthened Solovyov’s decision to enter into marriage with her. As far as Palmiro Togliatti went, Solovyov appreciated his lovely name despite suspecting him of communist ties.

Solovyov and the woman rode to the Spartacus by trolleybus. They crossed the road and ended up on Togliatti Street, which was narrow, quiet, and green. Solovyov liked the courtyard where his lodging was located. Just like the street name, everything about it was Italian: the terraces that had been added on and the intricate stairs that led up to them, the clotheslines hanging between the windows, and the branchy plane tree that was over everything. This, at any rate, was how Solovyov imagined Italy to be.

As he walked up a steep wooden staircase behind his hostess, he examined her unshaven legs. Those legs (like Solovyov’s legs, too) elicited from the steps a knocking, creaking, and squeaking of unbelievable force. The deafening stairs spawned in the young man’s mind the image of a huge out-of-tune instrument. After walking along a terrace covered with flower pots, Solovyov and his guide ended up in a dusky hallway. Once Solovyov’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he discerned several gas burners and thought he had landed in a communal apartment. It truly had once been a communal apartment but it had managed to separate itself from Solovyov’s lodgings through complex architectural solutions. The entry was hidden behind a small ledge in the wall, making it invisible at first glance. The woman took a key from her purse, winked at Solovyov, and opened the door.

The apartment consisted of two connected rooms and a glassed-in veranda. The door to the far room turned out to be locked. Solovyov was told there were things in there that the owners did not intend for lodgers to use. The first room, which led to the veranda, was at his full disposal. The veranda was also the kitchen, with a stove, counter, and cabinet containing dishes. In the far corner of the veranda was a structure reminiscent of a telephone booth covered with plywood.

‘It’s the bathroom,’ said his escort, flushing the water to prove her point.

She wrote down Solovyov’s passport information, took money for two weeks in advance, and disappeared through the door, winking just as enigmatically as she had earlier. When her clomping footsteps had faded, Solovyov flicked the door lock from the inside and began unpacking his things. He took his swimsuit out of his travel bag right away and put it on. Then he pulled out a towel and neatly placed it in a small rucksack. He shoved the key he had received into his shorts pocket and looked around. He was completely prepared for his first encounter with the sea.