Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Vladik Kuznetsov

Stargorodians are a special tribe. While it is unlikely that anyone has ever taken it upon themselves to determine the exact number of emigrants from Stargorod, it is well known that Moscow and Leningrad are constantly receiving large numbers of former Stargorodians, and one can reasonably believe this process to have begun long before the Great October Revolution. Later, the flow of Stargorodians increased quite a bit in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, which significantly curtailed our ancient town’s native population. But it feels unseemly to talk about it; after all, the whole country knew of Stargorodians’ heroism – among the likes of Lyonya Golikov and Marat Kasey, young pioneers everywhere revered Billyakhut Maxuddinova, whose deeds on the Black Shore of the lake won her first a Hero of the Soviet Union star and later an honorable seat at the Professional Unions’ Association of the Russian Federation.

Indeed, we should not talk about those whose faces are familiar to every schoolchild; let us rather turn to the unknown and the forgotten. Their name is legion, and restoring their memory is an honorable pursuit, undertaken, in particular, by the Red Scouts of School No. 2 of Stargorod’s Left-bank district. Their displays present for public consumption much that is instructive and curious; hence we shall refer any members of the public who find themselves at leisure and with an interest in local history to the modest, cottonwood-shaded building of the school on Vera Zasulich street.

We, however, shall tell a tale of another hero – a hero of our own time.

The old man Kuznetsov was still young when he broke away from the despicable world of Stargorod’s pre-revolutionary stockyards into which he’d been born, and signed up for the Red Army. From that distant but romantic period of his life, he retained for the rest of his days a special affection for the color green, discipline and the principle of unitary authority as embodied in the chain of command. Kuznetsov retired into the rank of an infantry Colonel, felt no desire to return to his forgotten hometown of Stargorod, and instead was perfectly happy to settle in the small town of Lyubertsy, where the garrison allotted him an apartment, to be used in perpetuity by Kuznetsov and his descendants. History has not preserved any information as to the whereabouts of the old man’s only daughter, Svetlana, lost to the immense expanse of our land; one could well have doubted the very fact of said daughter’s existence, were it not for little Vladik, left in his grandparents’ care. Grandmother Kuznetsova died a mere three weeks before her grandson’s high school graduation, and was buried in the Lyubertsy town cemetery without a church service – something her husband, the old Red Army veteran insisted upon. Vladik, who was considered a wunderkind in the school, was deeply affected by his grandmother’s death, but nonetheless graduated with the Gold Medal which, combined with his unimpeachable proletarian pedigree, gave him a free pass to the alma mater – the History Department at Moscow State University named for Mikhail Lomonosov.

Much like the provincial boy who lent his name to the university, Vladik Kuznetsov arrived at the department in humble attire: he wore sturdy green pants that looked like they’d been re-cut from his grandfather’s, an army-issue officer’s shirt without shoulder straps but with two capacious pockets filled with sharpened pencils, a fountain pen with regulation black ink, a thick plastic comb and a military-discount railway pass for the Moscow-Lyubertsy line. Unlike his more comfortable local classmates, Vladik lived on his 55-ruble stipend (which included a 15-ruble bonus for his perfect grades) and had a crystal clear idea of what he wanted. While the snobs around him debauched themselves in decadent luxury and skipped classes, instead laying siege to the One-Armed Man pub, Vladik methodically studied Latin and prepared to write his thesis on Cato the Elder and his tract De Agri Cultura.

Many readers, of course, will be familiar with this work as well as the biography of its author, a luminary of Ancient Rome. For those whom circumstances have prevented, thus far, from reading Cornelius Nepos’ Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae or Plutarch’s Lives, we offer here the plain but exhaustive entry from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (2nd edition, v. 20, p. 383):

Cato, Marcus Porcius (not to be confused with Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, commonly known as Cato the Younger) (234-149 BC) – one of the great Roman politicians and writers. He came from a wealthy plebeian family, from the city of Tusculum. In 199 BC was elected Aedile, in 198 BC – Praetor to Spain where he suppressed an uprising of the local tribes. During the war with the Syrian King Antioch III, C. secured for his countrymen the victory in the 191 BC battle at Thermopylae (not to be confused with the one fought by King Leonid and 300 Spartans). In 184 BC, he was elected Censor. Once in a Senatorial position, C. defended the aristocracy and its privileges; he held significant real estate and liquid assets. C. became the voice of those nobles who had made the transition to new forms of estate management by organizing large, slave-labor-based latifundia aimed at producing surplus for the marketplace. All his actions aimed at promoting an active foreign policy and the expansion of the Roman conquests. C. advocated for destroying Carthage – Rome’s major trade competitor. Being, at the same time, a representative of conservative views, he introduced strict anti-luxury laws and fought the growing influence of the Greek culture.

C. is also a major figure of Ancient Roman prose. He was fluent in Greek and well acquainted with Greek culture, in particular the works of Thucydides and Xenophon. C.’s most significant work was The Origins, which relates the history not only of Rome but also of other Latin cities. Of his many speeches, only fragments have survived. The tract De Agri Cultura is another complete work; it contains fundamental information about contemporary economy and agriculture.

We shall admit that we were not among the lucky few who had an opportunity to leaf through the young historian Kuznetsov’s thesis; rather, we watched from the shadows. We cheered from the sidelines. Kuznetsov’s work (415 pages long!) drew immediate attention from the department’s senior professoriate and, submitted to the contest for student research, rightly won Vladik first place and a special gift: a copy of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was widely available in bookstores at the time. In any case, we are not in a position to judge the merit of Vladik’s work, but we do know for certain, from Vladik’s close friends, that no work of such length, exhaustiveness, and, most importantly, elegance – nothing written in such a vivid, lively, elegant style so uncommon among our homegrown historians – has been produced by a student ever since the department’s founding. People saw a great future for Vladik; the old Latin professor, Dr. Troitsky, recognized Vladik publicly, before the entire class that had so much trouble memorizing Exegi monumentum (The Odes of Horace, book 3), for his virtuosic command of the toothache-inducing but eminently useful Latin. “Ab uno disce omnes” (from one, learn all) Vladik’s classmates said in the hallways, expressing their respect. “Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur” (anything said in Latin seems more profound) Vladik answered, dazzling the class with his erudition and blushing ferociously.

We don’t know whether Vladik’s hero, Marcus Porcius Cato, also possessed the gift of turning his countenance a healthy rosy color at the drop of a hat, but he can be presumed, with a great degree of certainty, to have undergone physical training of the same exacting standards as Vladik’s. The young Kuznetsov, who has been taught that every man is a master of his fate, and that mens sana in corpore sano, followed every prescription of the old Colonel to the letter, and these, rumor had it, included running six miles every day in full combat gear, which in peacetime was replaced by a special set of bricks loaded into a backpack on Vladik’s back. It was clear that Vladik intended to live, like his Ancient Roman hero, to be eighty-five – no more, no less.

Gaining a certain degree of fame among his classmates did nothing to check Vladik’s passionate pursuit of achievement. Even his appearance – his very image as the fans of Western borrowings would call it – dramatically set Kuznetsov apart from the rest of his jeans-wearing, sloppy-looking cohort. Always trim, although not at all tall; always in perfectly ironed grandfather’s trousers and a clean shirt with a narrow officer’s tie, with his hair cropped short, and with a pair of plain, wire-rimmed glasses and his unchanging fake-leather briefcase of immense capacity, even in winter Vladik did not wear anything that was not absolutely necessary. Once, during the ferocious frosts of ‘75, he was seen in a simple gray sport coat with neatly stitched leather elbow patches.

During the annual September trip to the vegetable warehouse, where the students were used as cheap labor to help with the harvest, Vladik always stood post at the packing machine, and while others found countless excuses to go check the fruit room, he spent his shift filling sacks with wet potatoes, the sight of which invariably prompted him to lament the poor storage conditions and, sometimes, express his personal, deeply held belief:

“My grandfather,” he might say to a really close friend, “did not fight the war so that some little thief from Armenia could nickel-and-dime the Empire.”

The warehouse manager, as chance would have it, was a stunningly handsome Armenian who got his start in the History Department in Yerevan, but later traded his humanitarian bona fides for a Moscow degree in Food Technology.

“All my friends are now PhDs,” he would tell the students. “But I’ve no regrets. I’ve been here three years – and I’m driving my third car.”

We must also mention that, back in those archaic times – the mid-70s – even the most critically-minded students who may have been reading The Gulag Archipelago on the sly and occasionally tuned in, for lack of better things to do, to the Voice of America broadcasts, were not nearly as politicized as they are today. Sure, you could easily tell who was opposed to the regime, but things never went beyond a political joke or two. Neither were Moscow’s suburbs as stratified and divided as they have become: Lyubertsy, for example, was yet to produce its famous tribe of body-builders. We do believe – and let it be noted that we are the first to formulate this historical hypothesis – that it was Vladik Kuznetsov himself who planted the seed of this Schwarzenegger movement on one particular occasion, especially when one recalls that, in addition to running, Vladik also lifted weights according to a unique method developed, again, by his legendary grandfather.

The occasion was this. Vladik was always gallant. He was gallant to a fault and without any ulterior motives. One night, he and a friend were going home after classes, and came upon the following unattractive scene next to the Dawn movie theater: A gorilla from among the local thugs who even back then were considered dangerous, stood at the steps to the movie theater next to a person of female gender and, without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, asked, “So what, bitch, are we going or not?”

That is how his question was related to us – verbatim.

Pushing his friend aside, Vladik rushed to the gorilla, and the sidewalk, we should mention, is quite a ways off from the steps of the theater, so the gorilla had plenty of time to consider Vladik’s approach. Vladik’s intentions, however, were so unexpected, that the gorilla felt compelled to move his cigarette from the right corner of his chapped mouth to the left. Vladik slammed on the breaks right before the guy, and, breathing hard, demanded, “Apologize to the lady right this minute!”

The king of thugs – and the gorilla happened to be the notorious Grammar, may he rest in peace – made a step back and said to no one in particular, “I be killing him now.”

The jab followed swiftly and caught Vladik on the bridge of his nose. Awash in blood, Vladik quickly got up and ran up to Grammar again.

“I repeat, you must apologize!” he demanded again, his voice breaking into a single extended sob.

“Naw,” Grammar said, utterly confused. “I be killing him now for real.”

He hit again and knocked Vladik down, but even that did not stop Kuznetsov. After he went down the fourth time, the presumably offended female party saw fit to interfere: she took Grammar by the arm, half-hugging his shoulder to contain his zeal, and said, “Let’s go now, or else you might kill him for real.”

“All right,” Grammar said, and they left.

Vladik shouted after them – he still demanded an apology.

The person who told us this story swore that he remembered the face of a curious boy who happened to be hanging out on the scene, and many years later recognized him in the picture that accompanied a long article about the “Lyuberneggers” in Ogonyok: the protruding ears and the particular shape of the superciliary arch, he said, left no doubt about it.

But let us return to Vladik’s first year at the University. Aside from his general physical stamina, his disdain for luxury, his persistence and motivation, Vladik was known for his humble Stargorodian roots.

“All my ancestors plowed land,” he liked to say.

This insistence on rustic roots, which, admittedly, does not fit very well with the apocryphal narrative of the old man’s split from the stockyard, has become such an integral part of Vladik’s public persona that we feel it is perfectly legitimate to include his illuminating biography in our series of true life stories of the brilliant and ordinary people associated with Stargorod in one way or another.

As is frequently the case, Vladik was derailed by love. Cupid, that pesky, bare-assed troublemaker, took aim at Vladik right after the first exam session. Admittedly, he was not alone in his misery; moreover, consumed by his work on Cato the Elder, Vladik was the last of his classmates to become aware of the Varya K. phenomenon – by the time he finally noticed her, others had already had time to get over the charming yet unyielding art historian. Even the sailor Dyakovenko, blown from the North Sea Fleet decks into the marble halls by the stormy winds of the night-school quota enrollment, once, being significantly inebriated, complained to his friend Zhenya Rayev who came from distant Usol-Sibirsk, “I took her by the ass once, and you know how she hissed! That’s a rotten shrew right there, but I’d still do her.”

“True that, Sailor – she’s out of our league, that one,” Zhenya Rayev thoughtfully agreed.

After reaching this remarkable conclusion, the two friends set out for the dorms of the Soils Biology Department, where their visit produced a legendary series of events with broken windows and their pursuit of Aunt Klava the door-lady, performed naked and with a fire-extinguisher that had been previously discharged into the wall. The events, naturally, engendered quite a stir; in the aftermath, sailor Dyakovenko, since he was not involved in the unauthorized handling of fire-fighting equipment, got off with a reprimand, and Zhenya Rayev, to his own stunned glee, was expelled and sent back to his native Usol-Sibirsk, where we lost track of him forever.

Still, because we do not want to resort to citing, on rather questionable grounds, the even-more questionable fetish of liberal intellectuals, Dr. Freud, we will simply say: It was all Varenka K.’s fault.

She came from an old Moscow aristocratic family, whose name resonated just so with her given name – the simple Russian Varvara – which had become rare by the late 50s and was loaded, of course, with secret anti-Bolshevik sentiment, but which today has lost, unfortunately, its signifier. We, much to our own chagrin, do find ourselves employing, on occasion, the high-flying academese, not – as we’re sure our reader will understand – due to any shortcoming of our magnificent native tongue, but rather compelled by our stubborn pursuit of the resulting musicality), the name, then, which in our own time... But you already know what’s going on, without all this scholastic nonsense, don’t you?

Varenka K. Her hair redder than a flame, trim, athletic, a brilliant gymnast, a bit of a ballerina – she was a creature that captivated the imagination and tempted the heart with coy green eyes, and, of course, she was fluent in French and played the piano. With a memory like a steel trap and her awesome natural talent, she beat Vladik 17 times in a row at Word Squares and thrice at Battleships one day when she ended up sitting next to him during a History of the Communist Party lecture.

Vladik was cut to the quick. Varenka was triumphant. Vladik followed her about like a puppy-dog. He carried her book-bag. Yes, exactly like a fifth-grader. He helped her into her coat. He pawed at the ground and haunted her large, professorial home until dark (and later). He was never allowed inside.

Was he truly suffering? At the time, several hypotheses circulated among his classmates; there were some who, because they envied him, said Vladik was merely seeking more cheap popularity, but we believe otherwise. Especially when one remembers the countless pages of Kuznetsov’s love poems that were passed around the class and, of course, landed in Varenka’s pretty hands. Did you notice that their initials were the same? This, for some reason, inspired in Vladik great confidence.

The number of poems rose in geometric progression. Sharp-tongued aesthetes found special delight in “Oh, you, whose hair is a fire’s blaze” in which “blaze” rhymed with “craze,” “maze,” “braise,” and “malaise,” as well as “Like a general, valiant on the eve of battle,” and the late-period “Oh, Roman courtesans...” (It is worth noting here that Vladik appears to have possessed the gift of foretelling: Varenka, after she married Vittorio Macini, a left-wing radical, now lives in Rome where, rumor has it, she teaches Russian grammar at the Jesuit collegium.) Sailor Dyakovenko was one of the sympathetic few, and found his poems pretty but worthless.

“She won’t give you any, mate, trust me,” he would say to Vladik, suggesting he instead come along to visit the soil biology girls.

Vladik refused every time, and instead went straight to his post outside his Muse’s windows. He appeared not to notice when people made fun of him. He knew how to handle public opinion and worked at it patiently, until everyone, or almost everyone, got accustomed to seeing things his way. So it was that when another lost soul replaced him outside Varenka’s windows – someone from mechanical mathematics, who was equipped with his father’s Volga, and was also, to be fair, eventually discarded without ever having been allowed inside the house – most of the class mourned together with Vladik.

That’s when Kuznetsov threw himself into his work, buried himself alive in the library with Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura and produced the above-mentioned four hundred and fifteen brilliant pages.

✵ ✵ ✵

The summer after Kuznetsov’s first year passed in the shadow of The Newspaper Story.

Vladik’s class was sent to an archaeological dig, where, according to witness testimony, Vladik had earned the honorable moniker “Bulldozer” for his incomparable ability to raze, stratum after stratum, ancient grave mounds. There was no job that he would refuse. He enjoyed climbing the piles of dirt and moving more dirt by shovelfuls, and it was there, in the trench one day that Vladik, lost in the rhythm of the work, brought his shovel down on his bare foot and sliced off a bit of skin. This happened in the middle of a workday, so there were plenty of witnesses. There was very little blood, but it must have been Vladik’s own sudden, treacherous negligence that frightened, or rather, stunned him. At first, as was his custom, Kuznetsov blushed red like a poppy, but in almost the same instant he began to turn pale, then completely white, and then he suddenly fainted. This disgusting weakness lasted mere seconds, but it was enough for Vladik to bear its shame forever. His resilience, his vigor, his stamina – all that failed him, and, utterly destroyed, he fled into the bushes and, it appears, even cried bitterly, because when he came out at the end of the day to board the truck back to the base-camp, Kuznetsov was described as having puffy eyes, bright purple cheeks, and a beaten-down expression.

From that moment, a new Vladik Kuznetsov begins.

From that day on, no one, not even sailor Dyakovenko who was a professional at the art of drinking, could ever outdrink Vladik Kuznetsov. By the end of the summer, Vladik’s face acquired a distinct purple tinge, but that was it; every morning, Vladik rose before dawn, brushed his teeth, did a series of stretching exercises and went on his run. His hangover was purged by sweat, and afterwards Vladik swung his shovel just as methodically as before; only now he was really careful about his feet and wore his grandfather’s cow-hide boots. Vladik’s special affection for military style was not the same as the contemporary fashion fad indulged by his classmates: for them, uniforms were stylish only in a kitschy way, worn with a special carelessness that made the wearer resemble a carousing hussar. Vladik would not have any of it. When he put on his green shirt, it was also with a belt and a shoulder-belt; he was a whiz with foot-cloths (he thought socks a decadence), and, since the day of his shameful bloodletting, did not part with the heavy boots that his frugal grandfather had shod with cavalry-issue metal horseshoe taps.

Over a drink, Vladik liked to talk about the victories of the Russian military: aside from his dearly beloved Romans, he also admired Suvorov and reserved a special place in his heart for Marshal Zhukov, under whose command Vladik’s own grandfather had the honor of serving. All this did not prevent Vladik from respecting Hitler as well; he even developed a peculiar way of greeting people by raising his arm from the shoulder, almost Nazi-like, with the invariable accompaniment of a resounding “Hi!” This behavior, naturally, only increased Vladik’s scandalous popularity, but he remained democratic and drank with everyone. Since he was often the last man left standing, Vladik didn’t mind cleaning up, until one day, sweeping the evidence of yet another party into a piece of paper he had found, Vladik made a mistake. We must mention that the head of the expedition was Professor Lokotov – a pedantic bore of a man, who had been wounded tragically in the Great War. On May 9, 1945, a snotty Hitler-Jugend kid shot Lokotov’s tank with a Faustpatrone, killing his crew and leaving the future Professor one-armed. The injury made Lokotov anti-social, but it must have done wonders for his scholarly diligence, and by the mid-70s the old soldier had attained the rank of Professor, managed his own research group, and gained special fame in the academic community for his insistence on replacing, in his articles, the foreign borrowing “ceramics” with the simpler and more resonant phrase “broken pots.”

So, Vladik, highly intoxicated but still securely vertical, was taking out the trash. Right at the street door (the students were housed in the village school) he lost his focus for a moment and almost fell on top of Professor Lokotov, who was entering. Drops of red goo from the leftovers of sardines in tomato sauce, a non-negotiable item on the student menu, fell onto the Professor’s trousers. An empty bottle dropped from Vladik’s grasp and hit Lokotov painfully on the foot. Vladik hastened to retreat, but was instantly trapped by the enraged archaeologist.

“What is this? What is it?” the former tank commander shoved Vladik’s bundle of trash into his face. The paper into which Vladik had wrapped everything turned out to have been a school display; a picture of Lenin in the center had been pierced with a knife (Vladik recalled he sliced an onion there earlier) and the Leader of the Proletariat was smeared all over with the same red goo.

What happened next stunned everyone. Vladik – who may have been irked by the rough treatment, or insulted at being cornered like that, or perhaps simply not in the right mood – suddenly shoved the broken-pot luminary away and said, loud and clear:

“Fuck off, old man...”

The old soldier, we must admit, lost his bearings for an instant and gave in. Vladik bolted through the opening, thundered out the door, and fled to his cot accompanied by the angry clicking of his heel pads on the brick floor.

As a result, there was a personal complaint about the behavior of Komsomol member Kuznetsov. The History Department’s Komsomol Committee, however, was well acquainted with Professor Lokotov; they had been dealing with the professor’s personal complaints for years – he never came back from an expedition without a whole stack of them. It was, in fact, only the professor’s reputation with the Committee that saved Vladik from being expelled; he got off with a reprimand.

Kuznetsov responded with words that are not fit to print, expressing his disdain for such Komsomol nonsense.

The whole story appeared to have been the final blow to Vladik’s already shaky commitment to science. Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder, who lived so many centuries ago, was cast into oblivion once again. Instead, Vladik was consumed by the idea of creating his own political party. He already had the greeting and the uniform; his ideology was a mix of Cato’s sense of entitlement, austerity and directness and Suvorov’s patriotism, with a dose of Nazi-smacking intolerance for Jews and Armenians. The latter sentiment was something Vladik developed following the advice of sailor Dyakovenko, who by then had transferred to the History of the Communist Party Department. Dyakovenko never made a secret of his intention to go back to the North Fleet after graduation: with his blue buoy of a diploma he fully expected to find a cushy political gig.

Vladik did not want a cushy gig. Vladik chose to fight. While he respected his grandfather’s lessons deeply, he was heard, in his inner circle, bemoaning the fact that the old man had not quite seen the things the way they were. Vladik was not satisfied by merely speaking truth to power; as every true Russian, he cared about the oppressed masses and dreamed of liberation, while he continued to plan for his radically new party.

Vladik acquired a pair of bodyguards: Kolya Bolshoi and a guy named Footmanov from a once-noble family. No one knew where he found them; the three held court at the University’s tap room and proselytized there without fear (and this was mid-70s, not today!), sometimes using their fists to make their arguments stick. Kolya Bolshoi’s fists, we must observe, were as big as his last name.

What was keeping Vladik at the University at this point? It seemed there was one more thing he wanted – the military course, despised by everyone else. That’s just the kind of man Vladik was – forever swimming against the flow, driven and stubborn.

Another story comes to mind.

A group of students led by Major Borodin, a well-known liberal, who had once aimed high but got burned (and was, people said, to remain a Major forever), an excellent military translator who had even been seen reading Salinger in the original on a subway train on his way to work – this group of students was ready to take in another class full of Major’s stories about his adventures around the world. The students had developed a sure method for getting the Major to talk. Whenever they were supposed to be memorizing something incredibly boring about the American Minuteman or Polaris missiles, one of Major’s favorites would raise his hand and ask, for example:

“Comrade Major, would you happen to know – can you see a submarine from a plane?”

Major Borodin would lean back on his chair and study his audience. When he was satisfied that indeed, everyone wanted to hear the answer, he would begin, “The Red Sea is home to a unique genus of giant sea-shells (here he would fire off an unpronounceable Latin name). If you are sailing, let’s say, a small storm-boat, the shape of one of these sea shells looks very much like the contour of an enemy submarine at periscope depth, as seen from, let’s say, a patrol helicopter.”

On the day in question, things were proceeding as usual: the rapt audience was listening to the Major expounding on the distinguishing features of Ethiopian women (as compared to Somalis), when, at a rather important point, the lecture was interrupted by the measured thumping of someone marching in the hallway. The noise seemed to be approaching. The tactful Major Borodin allowed his face to acquire the look of a gourmand surreptitiously surveying the dinner table, to make sure that indeed, his roast snails have been served without the garlic-and-marjoram sauce. The thunder outside, meanwhile, climaxed in the command, “Halt!” followed by a distinct clack of heels snapped together. Then, Vladik’s deep voice rumbled forth from behind the door:

“Permission to enter, Comrade Major!”

Major Borodin lifted himself from his chair just a bit, and, glancing at the door with growing alarm, replied almost according to the Manual, “Enter, granted.”

A strong arm opened the door; Vladik entered – no, rather, Vladik filled the frame, closed the door behind himself neatly, then marched, heels clacking, the 15 feet from the door to the lecturer’s desk and stood to attention.

“Permission to address, Comrade Major!”

“Yes, of course. Go ahead,” Borodin said, making it clear he had no desire to continue this game.

“Comrade Major. Comrade Lieutenant Colonel Peredisty asked that I inform you that your spouse has called. She requested you call home subsequent to finishing the class. Permission to leave?”

“Thank you. You may go.”

Only when the thunder of Vladik’s boots faded completely at the far end of the hallway, did the Major dare ask, “Who was that?”

“Kuznetsov!” the class barked back as one.

“Well, well,” the Major said, shaking his head, and continued his instruction.

✵ ✵ ✵

We could tell many, many more stories like that about Vladik, but that’s the tragedy of our situation – we cannot, no matter how tempted we might be to do so, allow our narrative to slip into anecdotal levity; we are here to convey true information about a historical person, and we must pursue our goal with the seriousness it commands. Thus, we shall attempt to be brief. Vladik’s biography, however, is rich in uncommon incidents and occurrences; we have a myriad to draw upon, and it would be impossible not to tell you about the training camp.

What wealth of amazing folklore has come out of that venerable summer institution, the military reserve training camp where students earn their officers’ stripes and prove their mettle! Take just one song, the immortal We are for Peace, but Our Guns Keep Reminding Us We’re Soldiers – this alone, a tune born somewhere in a deep trench to the accompaniment of the approaching IFV of the ‘blue’ team... Oh the songs, the old songs – they are all parts of the system.

But let us return to Vladik. Let us recall the story of Vladik being late to the training camp. He had both the right and the permission to be late! He and a group of his ancient-history colleagues was dispatched to strengthen the ties of Socialist Internationalism with theater students in Leipzig. The occasion was so important that the military department gave our guys permission to report to training three days late, but of course Vladik could not tolerate that. Instead, he snuck away from the Leipzig train and made his way back to the training camp, at its location in the middle of nowhere in the country. He wanted to be there on time. He was in such a hurry, he didn’t even stop to visit his grandfather or to look for a barber; instead, he shaved his head himself, with a safe razor, balancing in front of the tiny mirror in the rickety toilet of the village train. He didn’t have any water either. Try to repeat this Spartan feat! Vladik Kuznetsov’s head, when he arrived to camp, looked like... Suffice it to say that when sailor Dyakovenko, in the midst of the barracks’ howling mirth, took it upon himself to finish the job, the old sea wolf’s hand shook as it came near Vladik’s head and there was cold terror in the big man’s eyes, terror mixed with disgust and deep pity. Vladik ground his teeth, but didn’t make a sound; the sailor’s hand shook, but did not make any new cuts – it was surprisingly gentle, that calloused hand.

But on, on with our story – we can feel you begin to doubt the veracity of our claims, dear reader, but there are witnesses, a whole battalion of them, more! For word of Vladik’s determined pursuit of the mailman position spread far beyond his own battalion – everyone at camp knew it. Everyone knew Vladik rose first, before dawn, and ran to the camp’s gate, so that he could pick up the rolled-up newspapers and run them back to the officers’ quarters. He did this because – if you haven’t guessed it already – the mailman’s job came with a rank, and Vladik longed for the right to put a lance-corporal’s stripe on his new shoulder-straps and become equal with the camp’s veterans. It didn’t matter to him that after the training everyone would receive their lieutenant stars; Vladik did as his grandfather taught him, and who could blame him? Who wouldn’t admire his persistence and resilience, so uncommon among young people today? Stargorodians are a special tribe, you know?

And the story with the General? The General who came to inspect Vladik’s camp; the General for whose arrival the whole division had been preparing for two days and two nights straight? Vladik spent both those days, the hottest mid-afternoon shifts standing watch at the entrance checkpoint – Vladik volunteered for this, he felt compelled to bear his share of the soldier’s burden. He did it because he dreamed of being noticed. His dreams kept him at the checkpoint, until – alas! – his stomach played a dirty trick on him, and Vladik had to ask someone else to take his place so that he could dash off. He was gone a mere five minutes, no longer, but it was enough. Vladik had to watch from the bushes as the General’s convoy pulled up, and as the General, surrounded with his retinue of officers, conversed with Arthur Melkonyan, the weasely Armenian who’d agreed to relieve Vladik from his post because he’d lost to sailor Dyakovenko the night before and had to take Dyakovenko’s midday turn at the checkpoint. Vladik watched from the bushes and, according to witness accounts, chewed his nails.

Someone reported Vladik’s suffering to the higher-ups, and the Drill Sergeant singled Vladik out at the final parade, so on the train home Vladik was a bit overexcited.

And what about the time Vladik punished Academician Kombatov’s boxer? That’s a Greek tragedy right there! In his last year at the university, Vladik adopted a homeless mutt he’d found next to the One-Armed Man pub one day. The little dog was a comical creature, accustomed to lapping up beer from unfinished bottles left behind by kind patrons of the establishment; he could also stand on his back legs and do a few other tricks, and must have been tangentially related to poodles. Nonetheless, Vladik gave the dog a manly name, Ace. Those who tried to puppy-talk to Ace and address the little thing as Acey or Asik, were cut off at the spot by Kuznetsov’s powerful throaty roar, “The dog’s name is Ace. Is that clear?”

Following this, Kolya Bolshoi usually popped up from behind Vladik’s back and everything ended peacefully, or not – depending on the circumstances.

So Ace became Vladik’s faithful companion, following his owner everywhere in his mincing gait and waiting for him patiently on the lawn of the Humanities’ Building until he returned from class. Man and dog were inseparable. They rode the train to Lyubertsy together; Vladik fashioned himself a special backpack for the express purpose of transporting Ace. Ace’s shaggy face, popping out of the backpack, looked so endearing that everyone around fell under his spell, and no one, ever, had a single unflattering thing to say about the friendly little mutt.

And then a terrible thing happened.

One day, Vladik was walking next to Moscow State University’s main building with Ace, as usual, trotting at his side. On a parallel course with them, but in the opposite direction, Academician Kombatov was walking his dog, a boxer named Prana. The Academician was credited with founding Soviet Indology, which he did by tracing the Slavic people’s roots to ancient Hindustan. Kombatov found rich evidence in support of his theories; we refer those with a more-than-passing interest in this question to the full list of Academician Kombatov’s publications available from the commemorative edition of Academician Kombatov: 80 Years of Soviet Indology. Nothing at the scene foretold disaster. The men and their dogs aligned; suddenly and without any warning, Academician Kombatov’s giant boxer rushed at poor Ace, and – imagine! – snapped the little dog’s front paw in half. Vladik, as eyewitnesses told us, didn’t lose a second. He dashed to the university’s fence, ripped out a cast-iron rod (whether it was loose or badly attached, we don’t know) and, wielding it like the Roman legionnaire he’d been brought up to emulate, struck the Academician’s dog, piercing it through and causing it to expire on the spot, in the shocked Academician’s arms. Then Kombatov had to run for his life, abandoning his pet’s lifeless body on the scene – Vladik, like a heavily-armed hoplite swinging a bloody spear, pursued him to his door. Later, in a fit of righteous vengeance, the spear smashed an innocent telephone booth.

What else can we say? Vladik had enough of his wits about him to evade the police, and Ace was gone when Vladik came back for him, so the little mutt’s ultimate fate remains unknown. We only know that Vladik took the loss of his companion very hard and for a while nurtured plans of setting the Academician’s dacha on fire.

It was a rough year for Vladik. Right before his thesis defense, his old grandfather passed away in a veterans’ hospital. Vladik was left without a soul in the world, alone in the two-room apartment in Lyubertsy. His grandfather’s death affected him deeply; that summer, he built a memorial marker on the grave, topped with the Red Star, as is proper for veterans of all Soviet battles. There was no priest, of course, but still, for some reason, Vladik requested prayers to be said for 40 days straight at the church in Vagankovo Cemetery. Vladik defended his thesis and graduated, but only ‘just’ – people said, he drank heavily after his grandfather’s death. He was assigned to the Lyubertsy school,²² and worked there for a few months, but was eventually fired on the grounds of “professional ineptitude,” a charge painfully familiar to any free thinker at the time.

After that, Vladik’s track grows cold. Someone who’d seen him told us that Vladik wanted to volunteer for the war in Afghanistan – he went to the recruitment office, suggesting his own plan of combat operations, but did not pass the medical exam. He somehow survived, year after year; he never worked as a historian. In the early days of perestroika, he was seen at Pushkin Square – alone, surrounded by a mob, arguing with the pressing human mass. People saw him, but were afraid to approach him.

The last person who can be reliably said to have spoken to Vladik Kuznetsov was Kolya Bolshoi, who is now Deputy Facilities Director at the Tretyakov Gallery. If one believes his account, which resulted from a visit to the Church of Assumption, in Vishnyaki (actually, Kolya usually goes to All Saints in Sokolovsk, but his mother-in-law lives in Vishnyaki), Vladik works there as a bell-ringer.

He has grown gaunt and pale; he wears a plain jacket and his apparently indestructible boots, does not shave, has let his hair grow long, and drinks only within reason (by Kolya’s own definition). He is planning to go to the monastery city of Pechora, to learn ancient bell-ringing from its masters.

22. In the Soviet system, university graduates were often assigned to hard-to-fill jobs according to their specialty.