The House of Government

22

THE NEW MEN

The House of Government children were pure and exuberant Uriels with no old world to confront. They had inherited a happy childhood; their job was to read nonstop and “work on themselves” as they—and their country—grew into adulthood-as-immortality. They did spontaneously and together what Tania Miagkova was attempting to do in her “political isolator” (except that they had no more need for Das Kapital).

Boris Ivanov, “the Baker,” and his wife, Elena Yakovlevna Zlatkina, had three children: a daughter, Galina, and two sons, the “hooligan” Anatoly and the eldest, Volodia, whom Galina described as “good-looking, intelligent, and self-disciplined.” Volodia liked acting and kept a diary (a task he found difficult but necessary). In an entry from April 14, 1937, when he was seventeen years old, he described his morning’s activities: looking out the window to see how the reconstruction of the Big Stone Bridge was going, “washing up” in the bathroom (probably bending over the bathtub, splashing water over his back and shoulders, and rubbing himself dry with a towel, as was the custom), making his bed, and reading the newspaper over breakfast, “beginning with the events in Spain,” which he summed up in his diary: “Today the Republicans have once again pushed back the rebels and the German and Italian interventionists on all fronts. On the central front, in the Casa de Campo Park, the Republicans have taken some of the rebel positions, and the commander of the defense of Madrid, General Miaja, has called on the rebels in the University City to surrender. The Republicans are doing a great job beating the interventionists! After that I read about other events happening abroad and in our country.”¹

After graduating from school, Volodia went to work at the Research Institute of the Fishing Industry. In early 1938, he responded to the Party’s appeal for more Komsomol volunteers in the Far East, and in July 1938, set out for Kamchatka. The trip took three months: outside of Blagoveshchensk, the Trans-Siberian Railway was shut down for four days because of flooding on the Zeya, and in Vladivostok, there was a month-long wait for a ship to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. As Volodia wrote in a letter home, “You must know from the newspapers about the provocation of the Japanese militarists, and here, in Vladivostok, the indignation that our people feel toward the Japanese aggressors can be felt very strongly. And so, in connection with these events, the steamers, which have to pass by the Japanese Islands, are being detained in Vladivostok until further notice.” (Another reason for the delay may have been the arrival of large numbers of new prisoners, who needed to be shipped to labor camps in Kolyma.) After another month of waiting in Petropavlovsk, he caught a steamer to the Kikhchik Fishery on the west coast of Kamchatka, where he was going to work in the chemistry lab.

Volodia Ivanov, drawing of the view from his apartment

Volodia Ivanov, 1936

For a very, very long time, we traveled with no water and no bread. I was elected by all the passengers as their representative, which meant that I had the following responsibilities: first, to try to get water, and, second, to procure bread and, in general, deal with all the problems, of which there were many on that ship because it was designed to transport cargo and not passengers. But the worst part was the storm. You cannot even begin to imagine what a terrible sight it was with the ship rocking, the waves washing over it and carrying into the sea whatever had not been attached or tied down in advance, the passengers all sick—but don’t think that I was sick, too. No, I held up bravely, and the sea had no effect on me whatsoever. And so we arrived in Kikhchik with the storm.²

Life in Kikhchik was hard. “It’s not so nice here in Kamchatka because it’s cold and there’s nothing to eat,” he wrote to his parents. “It keeps snowing, and the wind blows with such force that the roofs of some of the buildings fly off, and when you step outside, it takes a lot of strength and energy just to walk a few steps.” He suffered from colds, boils, fevers, toothaches, and exhaustion, and his eyes hurt from the bright sun. His salary was high, but he did not receive it regularly, and whatever he did receive he spent on food. His parents kept asking for money, and he gave them his “word as a Komsomol” that he would start sending it as soon as he could. “I feel terrible when I think that Mother and Galya do not have coats, but I can’t send the money now because my salary has been delayed, so I don’t have a coat either and have been walking around in a leather jacket.” The trick was to remain optimistic. “Right now, our store is as empty as a desert. There are no suits, no coats, no socks, and no underwear, but I don’t get depressed because I know that soon we’ll have everything.” He continued to keep a diary and practice self-restraint. “What do the local people do?” he wrote in a letter, apparently in response to a question from his parents. “The local residents, although of course not all of them, are mostly engaged in drinking. They drink pure alcohol, which costs 50 rubles a liter, or make moonshine, but not the kind of moonshine you have in Moscow; it’s a much stronger brew. You probably think that I have learned to drink alcohol and moonshine here, but I swear on my Komsomol honor that I have not had a single drop of either alcohol or moonshine.”³

No one had said it was going to be easy. “Overcoming difficulties” and “conquering nature” was at the heart of the Bolshevik ethos and of Volodia’s own education, in and out of school. What mattered was that “the fishery workers are showing unprecedented rates of labor productivity and that Kamchatka as a whole is growing and getting stronger: new workers’ settlements are being built, new refrigerators are being set up, and, in the not too distant future, Kamchatka will be connected to the ‘Mainland’ by a railroad from Petropavlovsk to Khabarovsk.” His own life, with or without a coat, had to be measured against the life of the entire Soviet Union and in conjunction with the lives of his fellow volunteers, his fishery coworkers, and his family, which had contributed to his education and served as a microcosm of Soviet society: “Listen, Mom [he wrote on October 3, 1939], Galya tells me that you’re worried about me. I ask you not to be anxious about this, for I am living and working well and cheerfully, and I’m glad to be working here in Kamchatka because I can feel the eyes of the whole country on the Far East and that makes me glad and fills me with joy, so you shouldn’t worry, but instead be proud that your son is living and working on Kamchatka for the good of the USSR.”⁴

His younger brother was also doing his part as a future scientist: “Let Anatoly study, and when he finishes his studies, let him build airplanes that will be capable of flying from Moscow to our remote but beloved Kamchatka.” His sister was working on the music front: “Galya must have become a true piano virtuoso by now, playing day and night. That is very good!” His own contribution had proceeded along several lines at once. He had completed a three-month political agitator’s course, become a candidate member of the Party, worked hard at the fishery (even when “the blizzard howls, the snow keeps falling, and it’s scary to step outside”), and continued to “work assiduously on himself” by reading the Short Course of the History of the Party. He also continued to write regularly to his family and to act in the local theater, hoping to reach the “Artistic Olympics” in Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok.⁵

His family was as firmly attached to his country as Kamchatka was to Moscow (the eight-hour time difference notwithstanding). As he wrote to his parents on March 10, 1939, “Today, when the whole country is rejoicing on the day of the opening of the Eighteenth Congress of the VKP(b), I write to you, my loved ones…. As a gift to the Eighteenth Congress of the VKP(b), our Young Workers’ Theater has prepared Furmanov’s play Mutiny, and so, today, at 8 p.m. local time and noon Moscow time, we will walk out on stage in order to represent, before the eyes of our spectators, the struggle of the Red Army in 1920.”⁶

Another important date that year had not been foreseen by Volodia and his family. On September 17, 1939, they learned of the Red Army’s entry into Poland. “All the people of Kamchatka, who are an inalienable part of the Soviet people, have met Comrade Molotov’s speech with such enthusiasm that the rallies that have been taking place at all the fisheries have been full of devotion to our government, with the residents of Kamchatka saying that, if necessary, they will give their lives in defense of their country and expressing their support for the policy of the Soviet government, which has taken under its protection our class brothers, the Ukrainians and Belorussians.”⁷

Molotov had spoken of “blood brothers,” not “class brothers,” but Volodia, raised in the faith that had brought his Russian-peasant father and Jewish-seamstress mother together, does not seem to have noticed. Shortly before, he had received an offer to become a full-time Komsomol official (the assistant political secretary for the Komsomol in the political department of the Kamchatka Corporation), but he had a more exciting prospect. “First of all, I can give you some very good news: I am going to serve in the Red Army, this year’s draft has assigned me to the armored troops of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army until further notice, and it gives me great pleasure to know that I am fit and that I am going to join the ranks of our glorious Red Army.”⁸

■ ■ ■

As the oldest of three children, Volodia Ivanov had important family responsibilities. He wrote to Galina and Anatoly with advice, encouragement, and an occasional reprimand, and knew that he was expected to help his “barely literate and politically underdeveloped” parents in matters practical, political, and ideological. Valia Osinsky’s role in his family was quite different. According to his sister, Svetlana, “our parents adored him, especially our father, who did not conceal his preference for his youngest son, never regretted spending time with him, did a lot to educate him, and took him along on his trips around the country.” The Osinskys were not just much better off than the Ivanovs—as former “students,” they subscribed to the intelligentsia belief that child rearing was primarily about passing on “cultural achievements” and intellectual passions (along with the faith, which they shared with the Ivanovs but increasingly left up to the schools). In June 1934, Osinsky took Valia, who was eleven at the time, to a rest home with him. On June 22, he wrote to Anna Shaternikova:

It’s good that I have brought little Valia here with me because I have to spend time with him instead of working, and he helps me relax without ever getting in the way—he’s such a sweet, well-read, and smart little boy. I like him very much. We have been reading Belinsky together, in the following way: first I assign him an article to read, then we read it together, then he takes notes on the article (naive and a bit clumsy, but he is just learning how to write). After that he reads the next article. Also, every night before his bedtime, I read one chapter from Heine’s Deutschland to him (the only thing by Heine that we could find in German here). He likes Heine very much (some of the poems he has read here in Russian), and once, when I mentioned something about Heine’s old age and death, he said: “I think Heine could never be old,” thus characterizing Heine very accurately. He, of course especially liked this demand:

Yes, fresh peas for everyone

as soon as the pods have burst.

Heaven we’ll leave to the angels, and

the sparrows, who had it first….

I had thought that he read plays without much critical discernment (here he’s read Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Molière, Hauptmann, and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and The Pillars of Society—he’s a fast reader, but, amazingly enough, seems to remember everything), but no: while reading Belinsky’s article on Woe from Wit, which has a negative reference to Molière as an overly cerebral writer who gives us unconvincing, tendentiously caricatured types and droning bores, Valia suddenly grew animated and began agreeing with Belinsky, citing examples and elaborating on his argument. Actually, I don’t like Molière either and have never been able to read him.

You understand, of course, that I am reading with him in the secret hope of making him a writer, something he will probably end up becoming in any case, of his own volition. But I want him to be my successor in the family business, or “N. O. II,” as he’ll need to sign his work. That’s why we’ve been reading Belinsky—my spiritual father, and Heinrich Heine—the friend and comrade of my ideological grandparents, Dr. Marx and General Engels.⁹

Valia’s favorite part from Heine’s Deutschland came shortly after the stanza about building heaven on earth, which Sverdlov liked to sing. “N.O.” was the way Osinsky signed his own work. Marx and Engels were Valia’s and Volodia’s ideological grandparents whose work was almost always too early to read. (Just a few months earlier, Hubert L’Hoste, who was the same age as Valia, had finally confessed to Maria Osten that he had never read Marx because his father would not let him. “‘He was absolutely right!’ said Maria. ‘It is too early for you to read Marx.’”) Osinsky’s plan was to introduce Valia to his ideological grandparents in three or four years. Meanwhile, he wondered if Valia had enough intensity (“I mean lyrical intensity of a very particular kind: the lyricism of the beautiful in man’s best strivings”) and whether he was “acerbic enough.” N.O.II was “more good-natured” than N.O.I, according to the latter. He shared his father’s romantic intellectualism, but not his “uncompromising, red justice.”¹⁰

Valia’s sister, Svetlana, described Valia as a “pure soul,” a “kind, sweet boy,” and “a tender son and brother.” They had an older brother, Dima (Vadim), born in 1912, and a cousin, Rem Smirnov, who was the same age as Valia and had been living with them since his father’s arrest in 1927. According to Svetlana,

All of our relatives loved Valia, and he loved all of them: Grandma and all of our aunts. When we were little, we used to fight terribly, and he would hurl himself at me, fists flailing and crying with frustration. I liked to tease him—for his absentmindedness and his stutter. Poor Valia! He had developed a stutter after having scarlet fever as a baby, and no one had been able to cure him. For some reason, his agonizing attempts—he would lower his head and splutter and gesticulate wildly—used to irritate me, even later, after we became friends, and our childhood fights were a thing of the past.

Valia’s absolutely favorite pastime was reading. Rem and I also liked to read, but no one could compare to him. He would wrap himself up in some kind of incredible rags—such as an old, tattered blanket, for instance—and curl up in some remote corner, and just read and read.¹¹

Valia Osinsky at the dacha (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

■ ■ ■

Yuri Trifonov, the son of Valentin Trifonov and Evgenia Lurye, was a writer as well as a reader. He wrote his first short story on October 11, 1934, when he was nine years old.

The Aero-Elephant.

It took place in America, in the city of Denver. Jim was walking to the tavern. He was walking and daydreaming. Suddenly the earth gave way under his feet and he fell into the land of the aero-elephant.

To be continued.¹²

The story’s style and location came from the adventure stories in Valentin Trifonov’s library. A flying elephant machine must have seemed fitting three months after the world’s heaviest airplane, the Maksim Gorky, beat a world record by lifting a fifteen-ton load. (It is not likely that Yuri would have read Kataev’s Time Forward! before the age of nine, and neither The Road to Ocean nor Disney’s Dumbo had been released yet.) The next installment came on December 29:

The Aero-Elephant. Part 2.

… As soon as he felt his feet touch the ground, he looked up and saw 20 men standing near him and one of them had a revolver and was aiming it at him. Jim looked coolly at the revolver, but then one of them asked:

“Who are you?”

“I’m Jim—from Philadelphia.”

“How did you get here?”

“I fell in.”

“We’re not going to let you out of here.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll find out later, but now follow me.”

He led Jim down the long corridors until he finally brought him to a room with some kind of metal contraption in it (this was the aero-elephant).¹³

Yuri, according to a classmate, Artem Yaroslav (the nephew of the Soviet Control Committee official and former “Rightist,” A. I. Dogadov), “reminded me a bit of a bear cub: thick and stocky with shaggy brown hair, he looked like a forest creature…. He always wore some kind of velvet or corduroy jacket, knickers, and had large glasses, which was fairly unusual for the time.” He kept a diary, collected coins and stamps, ranked writers and characters (“D’Artagnan’s got nothing on Edmond Dantès!!!”), dreamed of running away to South America, acted in school theater productions, went to movies (“Saw Lenin in October. A wonderful movie! Excellent! Magnificent! Ideal! Superb! Terrific! Very good! Exceptional!”), worked on himself by lifting his father’s weights, and, of course, “read nonstop.” In January 1938, when he was twelve, he spent ten days at the dacha, skiing with his friends (as he later wrote in his diary). “While at the dacha, I read Thyl Ulenspiegel, Hugo’s Hans of Iceland, Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, and Gautier’s Captain Fracasse. It would have been nice to spend another ten days at the dacha.” He could not stay at the dacha because he had to go back to school. Three weeks later, he wrote:

Yuri Trifonov

Nothing special happened at school except for getting punched in the eye during a fight. A whole ton of blood came out! I couldn’t open my eye for two days and didn’t go to school. It’s still black and not completely healed. But I did manage to read Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don and Virgin Soil Upturned, Hugo’s Les misérables, Daniel’s “Yulis,” Gogol’s “The Nose” and “Rome,” and Ernest von Hesse’s scholarly work, China and the Chinese. Very interesting.

On the 23rd I saw A Little Negro and a Monkey at the Children’s Theater—a ridiculous piece of melodrama! Disgusting!

Right now I am writing “A Cro-Magnon Icarus,” a story about life in the Aurignacian period.¹⁴

“Yulis,” by the Yiddish writer Mark Daniel, was a story about the Civil War in Vilnius. It was probably given to Yuri by his grandmother, Tatiana Slovatinskaia, who had grown up and converted to Bolshevism there. A Little Negro and a Monkey was a play that Natalia Sats cowrote with her first husband, S. G. Rozanov, and directed in her theater, to great acclaim. It was the story of an African boy and his friend, a monkey, who gets sold to a European circus. With help from some sailors with red stars on their caps, they become reunited in Leningrad and are finally able to return to Africa, where they organize young-pioneer detachments. The Cro-Magnon story was one of four that Yuri wrote about prehistory; the three others were “Diplodocus,” “Dukhalli,” and “Toxodon Platensis.” He also wrote richly illustrated papers about history and geography (for school and for his own pleasure and edification). His most ambitious school project was a Pushkin album, which he, with his mother’s help, prepared for the Pushkin anniversary celebrations in January 1937 (at the age of eleven).¹⁵ A version of this episode appears in Trifonov’s novel, Disappearance:

Yuri Trifonov

Gorik spent his evenings putting together an album: as a gift to the school literature society and an item for the Pushkin exhibition (and in the desperate hope of taking first prize for it). Into a large “Spiral-bound Sketchbook” he pasted portraits, pictures, illustrations clipped from magazines, newspapers, and even, when his mother wasn’t looking, several books and carefully copied out, in India ink and block letters, the best-known poems. For instance: “I have erected to myself a monument not of human making”—and right next to it a picture depicting the Pushkin monument on Tverskoy Boulevard clipped from the newspaper For Industrialization, which his father subscribed to. Unfortunately, all the newspaper clippings had yellowed from the glue, which had seeped through.¹⁶

According to his sister, Tania, Yuri’s album did win a school prize and was included in the citywide exhibition of the best work devoted to Pushkin. In the novel, however, what mattered most to the main character and made him feel so bad was that he was not among the top three. “The first prize had gone to a boy from the eighth grade for a clay figurine entitled ‘Young Comrade Stalin Reading Pushkin,’ the second prize had been awarded to a girl who had used silver threads to embroider a pillow cover with a picture inspired by ‘The Tale of Tsar Saltan,’ and the third prize had been taken by Lyonia Karas—a fine friend, working on the sly and concealing it from everybody!—for a portrait in colored pencil of Pushkin’s friend, Küchelbecker (it’s true, though, the portrait was amazing, the best at the exhibit).”¹⁷

Yuri and Tania Trifonov

But Yuri’s greatest passion was writing. When he was twelve, he joined Moscow’s House of Pioneers, which had opened a year earlier in the building of the recently disbanded Society of Old Bolsheviks. In the diary entry for November 2, 1938, he remembered the previous year. “That House was so interesting that I was ready to go there every day. First I joined the geography club and then switched to literature. Those were wonderful evenings sitting around the large table discussing one of our stories and being transported to the heavens by our conversations. We quoted thousands of writers, from Homer to Kataev. Our teacher, the editor in chief of the Young Pioneer magazine, Comrade Ivanter, used to explain our mistakes to us in such an interesting way that it was truly a school where you could learn a great deal.”¹⁸

Perhaps as a result of what he learned in the House of Pioneers, Yuri became dissatisfied with his prehistoric fiction. “I want to write a simple, funny story, not some rubbish about Diplodocus, Cro-Magnon man, Dukhalli, and other monsters. A simple story—that’s what I’m aiming for!” His first such story was disguised as a diary entry for November 2, 1938. His closest House of Government friends were Lyova Fedotov, Misha Korshunov, and Oleg Salkovsky. Oleg (who lived in Apt. 443, right under the Korshunovs) had once told Yuri that Misha and Lyova were secretly working on a short story “about an Italian engineer who invents a special device and goes to Spain to join the Republicans, but is seduced by a fascist singer from Milan’s La Scala opera theater, who steals the device.” Yuri and Oleg decided to retaliate by writing a story of their own. Yuri came up with a “devilishly simple” plot in the manner of Jules Verne, “about a young man who goes on vacation to a collective farm in the Altai Mountains and hears about a forest spirit. I am not going to describe it all, but I will tell you that the forest spirit turns out to be a gigantic bat.” After several early drafts, they ran out of steam and watched helplessly as their rivals locked themselves up in Misha’s apartment until 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. each night. Finally, Yuri had an idea:

“Oleg!’ I yelled at the top of my voice and grabbed him by the sleeve. “Eureka! I have an idea! Let’s make this into a story the young man tells his fellow engineers sometime later. We’ll call it “Gray Hair.” Someone will ask him “so, why is your hair gray?” and then he’ll tell the story. At the end, no one will believe him, but just at that moment the gigantic bat will fly overhead.”

“Perfect!” exclaimed Oleg.

They wrote some more—together, separately, and together again, with little success—until one day Yuri’s telephone rang. It was Lyova, who revealed that he and Misha had had a falling out over the role of the Italian opera singer. Relieved, Yuri called Oleg, but he was not home: he had gone over to Misha’s. “Thus ended that particular literary rivalry. Everything returned to normal. Lyova would come to my place and look at butterflies and different kinds of bugs and insects, while Oleg went to Misha’s, and they would talk about the pleasant weather, two fools named Yuri and Lyova, and Nadia Kretova’s face in the window.”

Yuri had graduated from scientific-adventure stories to framed scientific-adventure stories to an elaborately designed “simple” story about boys writing scientific-adventure stories, framed and unframed. The narrator was Yuri Trifonov, who was also a thirteen-year-old diary keeper: “This story just happened to me, of its own accord. I decided to call it ‘The Rivals.’ If I were to read it to the characters themselves, they would find a few details added by me. And they would be right: I have added some details. But the core idea, the actual events did take place on Planet Earth, in the Solar System, Eastern Hemisphere, Europe, USSR, Moscow, No. 2 Serafimovich Street, also known as the House of Government, to four unnamed youth. They all harbored literary ambitions, and still do.” They were literary creations twice over—as Yuri’s characters and as four binge readers from the House of Government, on Serafimovich Street.¹⁹

Drawing of a desk by Yuri Trifonov (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

■ ■ ■

By all accounts, the most extraordinary, and thus the most typical, of Yuri’s House of Government contemporaries was his friend and fellow author, Lyova Fedotov, the son of the Russian peasant, American worker, Trenton Prison inmate, Central Asian collectivizer, proletarian writer, and machine-tractor-station political chairman, Fedor Fedotov. In 1933, when Fedor’s body was found in a marsh not far from the state farm he was managing, Lyova was ten years old. He was living in a small first-floor apartment (Apt. 262) with his mother, Roza Lazarevna Markus, a costume maker at the Moscow Youth Theater. Lyova, according to Yuri Trifonov, “was short and swarthy, with a slightly Mongol face and golden Slavic hair”:

From boyhood on he strove passionately and eagerly to improve himself in every possible way, quickly devouring all the sciences, all the arts, all books, all music, and all the world—as if he were afraid of running out of time. At the age of twelve, he seemed to live with the sense of having very little time and an awful lot to accomplish….

He was interested in many sciences, especially mineralogy, paleontology, and oceanography; drew very well—his watercolors were exhibited at art shows and published in the Young Pioneer magazine; loved classical music and wrote novels in thick, cloth-bound notebooks. I first got into this tedious business of novel writing because of Lyova. He also tried to toughen himself physically: walking around in shorts and no coat in the winter, learning judo holds, and, despite various congenital defects—bad eyesight, minor deafness, and flat feet—working hard to prepare himself for distant travels and geographical discoveries.²⁰

Once, Yuri and Lyova had a contest to see who could draw a better elephant. Oleg, who served as referee, decided in Lyova’s favor. (Yuri was better at chess, though. “We were excited by the players’ extraordinary names,” he wrote. “Eliscases, Lilienthal, Levenfish … They sounded as exotically beautiful as ones like Honduras or Salvador, for example.”) When Lyova was eleven, he won second prize at the Moscow Schoolchildren’s Art Exhibition (and received an easel with oil paints and a palette). One of the judges, a woman from the Tretyakov Gallery, became a lifelong friend and patron. He studied art at the House of Pioneers (where Yuri studied literature) and at the Central House for the Artistic Education of Children (where he met his close friend Zhenia Gurov). He drew pictures for the school newspaper and sketches for the House of Government’s Children’s Club theater decorations, but he preferred the thematic “series” and “albums” he prepared as part of his school assignments or as independent projects based on his reading. Included among them were “Italy,” “Ukraine,” “Zoology, “Mineralogy,” “Oceanography,” “Marine Animals,” and “The Ice Age.” “Once,” wrote Mikhail (Misha) Korshunov, “he showed up with a roll of white wallpaper. That was certainly a first: a roll of wallpaper instead of the usual briefcase. He rolled it out the full length of the hall and then ordered me to stand on one end, so it wouldn’t curl up, while he stood on the other. Painted all along it were prehistoric animals moving through ancient forests, seas, and swamps, under the title ‘The Earth’s Chronicle.’ ‘What a monster I’ve created!’ he said with satisfaction.”²¹

Lyova Fedotov

Lyova Fedotov’s drawings

His collection of “series” (he distinguished between albums with illustrated text and series made up of single drawings) included one on dinosaurs, one on “the little church,” one “on the growth of the Palace of Soviets, beginning with the Cathedral of Christ the Savior that once stood there, through the completed Palace” (as Lyova put it in his diary), and one portrait gallery of great musicians. Lyova had demonstrated his musical talent very early, in 1925, during the October Revolution celebration, when he was still living with both his parents, Fedor and Roza, in the First House of Soviets (the National Hotel) in a room facing Tverskaia. “We were sitting on the balcony,” Roza remembered, “and down below people were singing and dancing, and the accordion was playing … and, suddenly, Lyova repeated it all exactly: ‘We Are Blacksmiths’ and ‘When My Mother Was Seeing Me off to the Red Army.’ He was two years old, and hadn’t really started talking yet, but he sang it all perfectly.” Ten years later, she managed to buy him a piano. “After Fedor’s death, things were financially very difficult for Lyova and me, very difficult. But I decided to buy him a piano, come what may. I began selling my husband’s things through a consignment store and putting the money into a bank account. When I had saved five thousand rubles, I found a Rönisch concert piano through a newspaper ad, so he could practice at home.” Lyova took private lessons from the composer Modest Nikolaevich Rober, whom he greatly admired and, in his diary, referred to as “my teacher.” He practiced regularly at home, but tried not to do it in his mother’s presence because she suspected that he preferred improvisation to homework. She need not have worried: he did spend some time picking out his favorite opera arias, but his goal was accuracy, not ornamentation. “You should have seen his desk,” she said fifty years later, conceding the point and addressing a different age:

You would never have guessed it was a child’s desk. It was like the desk of … of some kind of professor. There were always lots of books … and each book had a bookmark. He would sit there and write. He had a herbarium … you should have seen it … he would make a tiny cut in the page and carefully insert the stem … so the flower would lie nice and flat … and he’d write out its name in Latin. And the stamps? He didn’t glue them in … he had these tiny tweezers … and he’d use the tweezers … never his fingers … to pick up each stamp and place it very carefully into a special album. He also collected minerals…. He had a box with niches … each little niche was lined with cotton … and in each one was a mineral. Right next to it would be a cardboard label with the mineral’s name … and not just the name, but also the type, cleavage and fracture, hardness … that’s how particular he was.²²

Lyova Fedotov’s drawings

He worked on himself by not wearing gloves in the winter, not wasting time playing cards, and not drinking wine or champagne (even on New Year’s Eve). He worked on his spelling and literary style by copying out War and Peace by hand. He tried to embrace the world by regimenting his life as much as possible. In the same diary entry in which he complained about his mother’s expectations, he attempted to manage his own. “What have I accomplished this summer? Drawn the Little Church series, but even that is not finished. Did not travel incognito to Zvenigorod, did not finish my papers … That’s a shame!” He listed only special projects (Zvenigorod was famous for its monastery and cathedral founded in the fourteenth century), not any of the things he did as a matter of course. “He was capable of sitting at his desk from morning till night and staying occupied,” according to his mother. “Writing. Or drawing. Or arranging his stamps. Or with his herbariums, or other things.”²³

I never saw him just sitting and doing nothing. If he was sitting, he was reading. His father was the same way—wherever he went, he always had a book with him. When they put him in Trenton Prison in America in 1917—he was sentenced to ten years—in his cell there, he said, there was one narrow beam of sunlight coming down from above. He used to follow that beam around with his book and read. Lyova read all the time, too. Whenever we took the streetcar, he would always read standing up. You know that little area up at the front right behind the driver? That’s where Lyova always used to stand. He never sat down. Let others who find it hard to stand sit down, he used to say.²⁴

Lyova vowed to accomplish more the following summer and sealed his pledge with a reference to Giovagnioli’s Spartacus: “May Jupiter favor me in this undertaking!” As he wrote a few weeks later, after coming home from the first day of his last year in school (1940),

When I got home I immediately remembered the plan of action I had devised last year and decided to renew it on paper straight away in order to have the pleasure of renewing it in practice as soon as possible….

First, I included homework, then my walks, Little Church series, Ukraine album, music, short story, and diary. I jotted it all down on a clean sheet of paper. The homework, of course, would always get fit in, and the walks, whenever possible; I could finish the series when school quit piling up on me, and when I did finish, I’d replace it in the plan with my “Italy” presentation; I’d be working on “Ukraine” along with the series; music would always be there, and I’d start working on my short story again as soon as I finished my letter to Raya, which I needed to do as quickly as possible (I’d have done it right away, if school weren’t poisoning my existence); and finally, the diary, too, would always get written. I preserved the old plan along with the new one.

In order to test myself, I decided to spend today, the first day of school, according to my plan. So that’s what I did. I managed to make progress on the Little Church drawing and redo the cover of “Ukraine” to make it easier for me to color in later. I wasn’t able to get any writing done on my short story today—there was no point in spending only a few moments on it. To write, I need both inspiration and concentration.²⁵

In his earlier lament about his lack of productivity over the summer, Lyova did not mention his diary. In fact, that entry (August 29, 1940) was at the beginning of Notebook XIII. (He wrote his diary entries in numbered notebooks.) The previous surviving notebook, Notebook V, ends on December 8. That means that over the course of nine months, including the unproductive summer, Lyova had completed seven notebooks (in tiny script and with no margins or blank spaces, judging by the appearance of nos. V and XIII). He wrote as he read, and he read as he wrote, and he lived through what he read and wrote in an ever-tightening dog-chase-tail race for the fullness of time and limitless self-awareness. He embodied the age of “great planners and future geometers” in which, as Leonid Leonov suggested at the first Writers’ Congress, every hero was his own author and every event was its own chronicle. For two years, Lyova had been dreaming of going to Leningrad, the city of perfect architecture. On December 5, 1939, he and his mother finally talked about buying the tickets:

“I’ll have to record this conversation in my diary,” I said. “It is precisely these kinds of details that make up an event such as my trip to Leningrad. Yes, I’ll definitely write it all down. And I’ll also write down what I just said … That would be original. And I’ll write down what I just said as well!”

“Enough,” my mother interrupted me. “Or it will never end.”

“You’re wrong: the end has come,” I said. And with that, the day ceased to exist.²⁶

A month earlier, he had written a one hundred–page entry, in which he attempted to provide a complete record of November 5, 1939. He called it “A Day in My Life” and wanted to read it aloud to his music teacher, Modest Nikolaevich, but there was not enough time, so he read the November 6 entry instead. He probably did not know of Tolstoy’s similar undertaking eighty-eight years earlier (or he would have said so: he was a scrupulous observer of scholarly conventions); either way, Lyova seems to have been more insistent on the circularity of the action-reflection process. According to his friend from the Central House for the Artistic Education of Children, Zhenia Gurov, every time they met, Lyova would play the triumphal march from Verdi’s Aida, read aloud a new chapter from his novel, The Underground Treasure (“Jules Verne’s influence was obvious”), “and then read out the diary entry about our previous meeting.”²⁷

The idea was to compress cause and effect into a single present. Two days after the conversation with his mother about how writing follows events, Lyova had a different conversation about how events follow writing. “Salo” was Oleg Salkovsky’s nickname, and “Mishka” (also known as “Mikhikus”) was Misha Korshunov:

Today during history in our crowded little classroom, Salo leaned over and whispered conspiratorially:

“Would you like to join Mishka and me? Only you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“Okay, okay! What’s up?”

“You know the church near our building? The Maliuta Skuratov one?

“Yeah?”

“Mishka and I discovered a vault there, which leads into some underground passages … some really narrow ones! We’ve already been in them. You’re in the middle of writing The Underground Treasure, so you should find it very interesting.”²⁸

Misha and Oleg described their previous trip to the dungeon, which had ended prematurely because they did not have a flashlight or the right clothes. “As I listened,” Lyova continues, “my curiosity grew … as I pictured the dark, gloomy tunnels—damp and low, the sinister rooms with mold-covered walls, the underground passages and wells … until my patience and imagination were exhausted. I could hardly believe that I would soon get to see it all in real life. In short, I reached a point of extreme tension. Mere words cannot begin to express what I felt.”²⁹ But he was, above all, a scholar and chronicler. He pulled himself together and had Misha and Oleg draw maps of the dungeon independently of each other, to make sure they were telling the truth. Then he took charge:

“You know, Mishka,” I said. “I think we should introduce a few changes to this underground expedition. You and Oleg went there the first time just out of curiosity, but now I’d like to propose bringing along a pencil and notebook in order to sketch some things down there, record our route, as well as all of our conversations, and to make an accurate map of the passages. This may all prove useful later from a scientific point of view.

“That sounds good,” agreed Mikhikus. “Since you keep a diary, you can record all of our observations. And since you know how to draw, you can be in charge of that, too, okay?”

“Sure, I can do that. And you know what else?” I said. “We should definitely record our first words after we enter the vault. That will be both interesting for us later on and very original. Is that clear? Our exact words say as soon as we find ourselves underground? We’ll need to record them all afterward, so we don’t forget. We’ll find some kind of little room or alcove where we can sit and record them all. But probably first, you’ll ask me—either you or Salo: “So, Lyova, what do you think?” And I’ll probably answer: “Hmm, not bad at all!”

“You’re right, that would be interesting to record,” said Mikhikus. “Our very first words down there! That’s perfect!”

“I’ll record that in my diary, too,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“All the things we’ve just been saying. It’s precisely on such conversations that this expedition of ours is based, so I’ll record them all. And these words just now—I’ll record them, too! And these! And the next … and the next!

“You could keep going on like that forever,” said Mishka. “And these … and the next!”

“I’m not a fool,” I said. “I’m definitely going to record the words you just said in my diary, and I’m not kidding either.”

“And will you record what you just said to me?”

“You can’t spoil kasha with butter. And words can’t hurt you,” I said. And I’ll record that, too!”³⁰

And he did. On the day of the expedition (December 8, 1939), his equipment included his notebook, a pencil, a pair of compasses, and a flashlight. Victoria (Tora) Terekhova, the daughter of Roman Terekhov, was supposed to provide the batteries, but did not, so they had to use candles, which were more appropriate to the occasion, in any case. They also brought some matches, rope, and, on Lyova’s insistence, a weighted string to measure the depth of the wells. They made it through two interconnected vaults and into a winding underground tunnel, but had to turn back after several turns because the passage became too narrow. Lyova, who went first because he was the thinnest and most determined, had to be pulled back out with the rope. His step-by-step account ends at the entrance to the last tunnel. The next notebook has been lost, but the story is familiar: “I didn’t see no di’monds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them there, anyway; and he said there was A-rabs there, too, and elephants and things. I said, why couldn’t we see them, then? He said if I warn’t so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking.”³¹

One of the two sacred objects Lyova kept in memory of his father was the “American watch” with the engraving “to Fred from Red” (his father’s friend, fellow tramp, and revolutionary, “Red” Williams). The other was a copy of Huckleberry Finn his father had given him on his tenth birthday, with the inscription, “To my little lion cub from the wild man. F. 10.1.33.” (“Lyova” is the diminutive for “Lev,” the Russian version of Leo, or “lion”). What Don Quixote was to chivalry romances, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were to Don Quixote, and what Tom and Huck were to Don Quixote, Lyova and his friends were to Tom and Huck. In Mark Twain’s story, Sancho takes over as both the narrator and central character (and, for a while, turns into Don Quixote). In Kafka’s parable, “The Truth about Sancho Panza,” Don Quixote becomes Sancho’s dream. In Lunacharsky’s 1922 play, Don Quixote Unbound, he is banned from the “Promised Land” because of his refusal to kill for the Revolution. In Platonov’s Chevengur, he kills “precisely but hastily” until he is killed himself (when he charges the four enemy horsemen). In Lyova’s diary, Don Quixote is back in charge (because he has learned how to make dreams a reality). Misha Korshunov is a joker and a trickster; Oleg’s Salkovsky is Salo (“Lard”); Lyova leads the way and tells the story. “My candle flared up just in time: at that moment Salo put his hand with the burning candle through the small opening of the door and, grunting, managed to squeeze through. His massive bulk took up the entire space of the door, so that all we could see was the lower part of his body and his feet sliding helplessly on the floor.”³²

Once, Lyova’s cousin Raya asked him if he knew what he wanted to do when he grew up. “I told her that at one point, as she well knew, I had taken up—and even now would never forget—history, astronomy, biology, geology, and geography, but that gradually some of these subjects had begun to capture my interest more than others, and that two had now taken the lead: geology, in the form of mineralogy and paleontology, and biology, in the form of zoology. ‘And now it remains to be seen,’ I said, ‘which will prevail in the end.’” The final decision depended on a combination of inspiration (which could not be hurried) and rational choice. Lyova was greatly impressed by his Uncle Isaak’s idea that “in nature, there are no devious stratagems: everything in it is simple, as long as you know how to discover and decipher its laws.” Also, as Lyova explained to Zhenia Gurov’s mother, “A painter can’t have a lab on the side just to do some science every once in a while, but for drawing, all a scientist who works in a lab needs is some paper, paints, and brushes.”³³

Cousin Raya, Uncle Isaak, and Zhenia Gurov’s mother were not the only adults with whom Lyova discussed his future and his scholarly interests. He had close personal and intellectual relations with his teachers (principally Modest Nikolaevich Rober, but also David Yakovlevich Raikhin and two other teachers from School No. 19), his friends’ mothers (the fathers were usually not around), and, in particular, his many relatives, with whom he corresponded regularly and whose visits he awaited anxiously and documented religiously. His decision to record his life as fully as possible was inspired by a visit, in August 1939, from his Leningrad relatives: Cousin Raya (Raisa Samoilovna Fishman), her husband Monya (Emmanuil Grigorievich Fishman, a cellist and professor at the Leningrad Conservatory), and their daughter Nora, whom Lyova called Trovatore, after Verdi’s opera. “Those were some of the happiest days of my life, but I was foolish enough not to record them in my diary. So now they have vanished without a trace. It was that summer that Raya invited me to visit them in Leningrad during the winter break. How I regret now that I did not record everything about their stay in Moscow!”³⁴

Lyova Fedotov, To the Memory of Lyova Fedotov and Some Joint Underground Adventures

Lyova Fedotov, The Entrance to the Dungeon Was Walled Up with Bricks

Emmanuil had asked him then if he was going to describe their visit in his diary, but Lyova had answered that it was not remarkable enough. “Oh what a monstrous mistake that was! Today I blame myself bitterly for not having recorded such beautiful hours of my life as our Leningrad relatives’ visit. But not to worry! When I go to Leningrad in the winter, I’ll describe the entire trip in great detail. I can already picture the train compartment, the dim lamps, the darkness outside, the reflection of the berths in the window, and the sound of the wheels carrying me to Leningrad. Yes, there will be some happy moments in the future—though still a long way off.”³⁵

Lyova’s mother’s large, close, upwardly mobile Jewish family provided, along with teachers and friends, a vital link between Apt. 262 and the wider world of history, discovery, and socialism. Raya, Emmanuil, and Trovatore had come to Moscow to attend the opening of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. The exhibition’s function was to demonstrate the achievements of collectivized agriculture and—through the arrangement and appearance of its visitors, buildings, and statues—the achievement of an All-Union Gemeinschaft. What was a hope and a work in progress for Tania Miagkova was a reality for Lyova Fedotov. “Hail to the Exhibition!” he wrote on November 27. “Thanks to it, we have an extra opportunity to see our relatives, who are scattered across the many cities of the European part of the USSR.”³⁶

The USSR was one large House of Government that brought families together. All Soviets were part of one large family. Lyova’s next diary entry was for November 28, 1939: “Tonight I listened with great interest to a radio show about the Kirov Museum in Leningrad. It described the museum’s objects, which tell the story of the complex and beautiful life of our unforgettable Sergei Mironovich Kirov. It is clear that it is a very valuable and interesting museum. In short, that show made me think, and I decided that I would definitely visit that museum during my trip to Leningrad. I will be sure to share with my reader my impressions of this manifestation of the life of one of the most important revolutionaries of our era.”³⁷

“The reader” was Lyova’s omnipresent contemporary and constant interlocutor. So was the voice of the radio, which Lyova never turned off:³⁸

After that I was fortunate to hear a newscast about the official note from the Soviet Government to the Government of Finland protesting the provocative firing on Soviet troops. I found the Finnish Government’s response outrageous. It turns out that the Finns are denying their crime. Who ever heard of a country’s troops staging target practice in full view of the troops of a bordering state? And yet, that is exactly what the Finns are saying…. Their arrogance has no limits! It’s monstrous! And they even dare to threaten our Leningrad! Leningrad is a major port and has always belonged to us, so, therefore, we will be the ones to decide how to ensure its security, and we will not allow these Finnish oafs to interfere in our internal affairs! Let them take a look at their own country first. They will see some truly awful things. But they refuse to do this. Concerned with their own pockets and the interests of England and France, they ignore the suffering of their own people. But they will pay for it soon enough! Yes, they will! With their unwise and extraordinarily foolish policy of preparing for war with the USSR, they are hastening the arrival of the day of reckoning. The Finnish people will not allow them to threaten the USSR—the only hope and defender of the exploited masses of the world.

I was very glad to hear the response of our wise Government, which unmasked the whole pathetic gang of Finnish scoundrels and executioners. Let justice prevail!

After that I began working on my next “Italy” drawing, while listening to Verdi’s opera Un ballo in maschera. I cannot add anything to my previous reflections on this opera at present, so I will wait and do it the next time. In my drawing I depicted the Mediterranean seabed covered with corals, which the Italians harvest in large quantities and use to make jewelry and small decorative pieces.

And that is how the day ended.³⁹

The ever-present radio brought news, pleasure, and instruction while bringing people closer together. The next day Lyova and Modest Nikolaevich had a long discussion about Verdi. After that Lyova read him the previous day’s entry from his diary and asked:

“So, what do you think of Finland’s latest antics?”

“They’ll live to regret it,” said M.N. “It’s too bad the people have to suffer, but we’ll teach those wolves a lesson!”

“They certainly deserve one,” I said.

“We’ll give them one they won’t soon forget,” added M.N.

Then I began playing for him.⁴⁰

The next morning the Soviet Union attacked Finland. In school, Lyova ran into his friend, Izia Bortian.

“I know,” he said. “Our planes have already destroyed two Finnish airports, one in Helsinki and one in Viipuri.”

“I look at the map,” I said, “and think about how small but feisty Finland is. It must be counting on England.”

“But how can England help?” said Izia. “The best route is through the Baltic Sea, but that route is closed off because of Germany. England is at war with Germany, so they won’t allow them through.”

“That’s true!” I exclaimed. “Actually England can’t handle Germany even with France, and here they are talking about attacking us through Finland. They’re clearly biting off more than they can chew. Just look at the antiwar movement there. It will double in strength if England starts a war against the USSR because the English exploited masses won’t allow their country to turn against the only socialist country in the world.”

“That’s exactly right,” confirmed Izia.⁴¹

At home that afternoon, Lyova read the Pravda editorial about the fifth anniversary of the assassination of S. M. Kirov:

It has now been exactly five years since the vile, cowardly hand of an enemy treacherously pointed the barrel of a gun at our comrade and pulled the trigger. What a good person Kirov was! A very good person! Yes, I will definitely visit his museum when I go to Leningrad!

Today’s paper also included the text of a radio intercept: “The Appeal of the Communist Party of Finland to the Finnish Workers.” I read it straight through. Very well said! Very plainly and clearly! I hope that it will be understood by every worker, every peasant, every intellectual, and every soldier. I believe that after reading the appeal, the Finnish soldiers must immediately rise up against their dim-witted rulers, who are leading them to certain death in the war against the Soviet Union.⁴²

Lyova Fedotov, drawing of troops in battle

Lyova Fedotov, Venice

He spent the rest of the day working on the chapter on the Italian colonies for his “Italy” report.

No sooner had I sketched a view of the Libyan desert than, at exactly 6 p.m., the newscast came on. I put the radio receiver on my desk and began listening with my mother. I won’t go into great detail here, but will summarize what we heard. We heard about how the mutton-headed government of White Guardist Finland, after hearing that the Soviet troops had crossed the border, had panicked and all its members resigned. Serves you right, you scoundrels! And whose fault is it? Your own! Whatever possessed you to embark on such a nefarious adventure? Oh, that’s it! The English! Right, now it’s clear to me as two plus two equals four. Of course! And to top it off, many of the soldiers in the Finnish army, having understood the appeal of the Communist Party, have risen up against their hapless government. The working people have also risen up in revolt and are refusing to fight against the Soviet Union. In the town of Terijoki, in eastern Finland, a people’s government of a new Democratic Republic of Finland has already been formed, headed by Otto Kuusinen. The war against the USSR is over! It began this morning at 3 a.m. and ended this afternoon. So now it’s a war inside Finland, a civil war, a war between two governments—the new government of a free Finland and the dark, scary “government” of Tanner, who replaced Cajander and Erkko after they fled. It seems to have been the most remarkably short war in history, for it lasted for no more than half a day!⁴³

The war lasted three and a half months. After the signing of the peace treaty between the Soviet Union and Finland in March 1940, Otto Kuusinen’s government was disbanded, and he was made chairman of the newly formed Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic. His permanent address was Apt. 19 in the House of Government, on the tenth floor of Entryway 1. For Lyova, the greatest casualty of the war was his long-awaited trip to Leningrad. He had been there before, but not by himself. He kept hoping that the hostilities would end before the school vacations, but they did not, so he postponed the trip until the next winter break and spent the year of 1940 preparing for it.

Lyova Fedotov’s drawings

His other passion was Verdi’s Aida. He knew it by heart, played it regularly, and discussed it repeatedly with his mother, friends, and teachers. On August 27, 1940, he went to see it at the Bolshoi Theater Annex:

The conductor, Melik-Pashaev, a short, dark-haired man with a round head, receding chin, and squinting eyes behind glasses, gently stepped up onto the podium and lifted his arms….

From the moment I heard the first notes of the violin, I felt as if I were in a fever dream. The overture was wonderful. Melik elicited a warm, lush sound with bright overtones from his orchestra. The prayer was very well conducted. The priests sang almost inaudibly, barely opening their mouths, creating a sense of majesty that made a tremendous impression on me. I listened to Ramfis’s arioso, of course, with eyes wide open.

In short, I spent most of the time just watching the orchestra and the conductor! The arrival of the prisoners, the aria of the imprisoned Amonasro, and the funereal chorus of the priests worked their magic on me, as always. I tried hard to grasp the rhythm and tempo of the chorus so I could learn to play it better…. The Chorus of the People didn’t actually live up to its name because that melody was sung more by the priests surrounding Radames and Amneris, and not by the crowd. I have to give those bloodthirsty priests their due: the best choruses certainly belong to them.⁴⁴

He had a great deal more to say—about the work as a whole and about particular arias, choruses, duets, instruments, and performers. On the whole, he found Melik-Pashaev’s version superior to Lev Shteinberg’s (“the orchestra sounded mellower and more together”). Aida was his “music school,” especially with regard to orchestration. But it was its emotional effect that mattered the most: “It’s impossible to describe the state I was in this evening after the performance. First, for some reason, I took the sugar bowl back to the bathroom instead of the kitchen. Then I turned off the light as I was leaving the room, even though Lilya and my mother were still sitting at the table. At one point, I spent a long time vigorously stirring my tea, forgetting that I hadn’t put a single grain of sugar into it. And, finally, to top it all off, instead of making my bed as usual, I dragged the whole pile of sheets and blankets over to the couch and spread them out there!”⁴⁵

Lyova Fedotov, Giuseppe Verdi

A week later he went to see Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila at the Bolshoi, but, contrary to Modest Nikolaevich’s prediction, was not able to forget Aida, except “for a moment” during Chernomor’s march. The following week, on September 10, Aida was broadcast on the radio. “Channel 2” on Lyova’s radio receiver was not working, so he went over to Misha Korshunov’s apartment:

It is hard for me to describe my emotions when I am listening to or watching the scene in which the Ethiopian prisoners are led in. When I hear this passage, I begin to shiver all over like a poor little puppy caught out in the rain. I cannot listen calmly to that scene. Is it not a heartrending moment when the humiliated, chained prisoners appear before the pharaoh, and Aida, seeing her father, the Ethiopian ruler Amonasro, among them, rushes toward him, lamenting her orphaned Fatherland? And Amonasro roughly grabs her and whispers to her not to give him away! Yes, that is one of the best scenes in the opera.⁴⁶

On October 10, many months of study, reflection, and careful listening resulted in an unexpected triumph:

Something extraordinary happened today! I’m not sure why, but when I got home from school, I was consumed by the overwhelming desire to play the march from Aida. I generally like to play it only when I’m in the right mood and try never to sit down to play it without desire or emotion. There was no one else at home, and I felt completely uninhibited. I put all my emotions into the march and played it the way it should be played, with all of its numerous complex shades and so forth. Normally it seems to come out sounding rather monotonous and shapeless when I play, but today I can honestly say that, because of the extraordinary desire I had to play it, it did not sound bad. I wish I could always play it like that.⁴⁷

On November 3, Aida was broadcast again. On November 9, Lyova told his friend Zhenia, who was also going to Leningrad, that he had conceived the extraordinary idea of combining his two dreams into one: to conduct the entire opera in his mind on the train. “Just remember,” I said. “No matter what the conditions—whether we stand the whole way, sit, or lie down—I am going to conduct the whole of Aida from beginning to end. Won’t that be interesting? Isn’t it an amazing idea?”⁴⁸

He spent the next month and a half reading about the “former Petersburg,” talking to Zhenia “about the upcoming blissful days in Leningrad,” and rehearsing different parts of the opera. “Scene after scene kept flowing through my mind, and no one could tell that I was now rehearsing the scene by the Nile where the furious Amonasro curses his daughter, Radames unwittingly betrays his country, as well as some other heartrending moments since I was lying quietly on the couch, as if taking a nap.”⁴⁹

The plan, as he explained to Zhenia, was to take the night train and spend the first four hours conducting Aida. Zhenia worried that it might be too long, but Lyova explained that he wanted to conduct the entire opera because he had never done it before, and he wanted to combine his personal premiere with “such a wonderful event as a trip to Leningrad.”⁵⁰

“The main thing is that it won’t be hard for me at all! Playing or singing is actually a lot harder! For those, you need to move your hands or strain your vocal cords, but for this you can be completely still—you can sit without moving, and the piece, since you know it well, just flows through your head, and all you have to do is listen. Besides, the rhythmic sound of the train will make it even easier to imagine the sound of the singers and the orchestra. And there will be no one to prevent me from seeing the opera in my mind and picturing all the scenes and characters, which means that I’ll get to experience Aida one more time in all its glory, and I’ll get to experience it the way I interpret it, since this time, I’ll be directing it myself. I’ll finally be able to correct all the defects introduced by our theaters in the Annex production!”

“I see what you mean!,” said Zhenia. “That will be very interesting for you!”⁵¹

Lyova and Zhenia were not able to get tickets for the same train. Lyova’s (no. 22, smoking car no. 12) was departing on December 31, at 1:00 a.m.

Finally, the day had come.

That evening I collected all the things on my list. Next to my suitcase, I put a pack of white drawing cards (I didn’t have a proper sketchbook), some color pencils, my diary notebooks with descriptions of our adventures under the Little Church and summer break, my notes and textbook for German, the finished drawings from the Little Church series, and even the game the reader knows as “To the Moon,” in order to play it occasionally with Nora. True, in my absence, my mother had already managed to stuff a huge pile of shirts and underwear into my tiny suitcase, but nevertheless, I decided that my diary and drawing things should have priority.⁵²

Lyova’s mother came home from work around 9:00 p.m. “The time was ticking away.” She packed his suitcase. He wrote about his day in his diary. Finally, he put on his light fall coat (he refused to wear winter clothes), galoshes, and fur hat (a concession to his mother), and they walked out the door. “I almost hesitate to describe the feelings that were churning around inside me at that moment. The reader, I hope, will know what I mean. The courtyard was empty and, since it was close to midnight, one of the street lights had been turned off. The darkened windows of the buildings made the walls of the house appear gloomy and blank. It was a beautiful winter night. The stars seemed to shimmer in the black-blue sky. The snow that covered the lawns and sidewalks looked like shiny white sugar frosting in the dark. The crisp air filled my lungs, invigorating my soul.”⁵³

They walked across the bridge to the Metro station and rode to Railway Station Square. “On the square the winter night seemed even colder: the lights of the cars and streetcars intersected across the snowy carpet, and the station buildings looked like bright steamships tied up at the dock.” They walked past the “crowds of people scurrying to and fro and groups of porters standing by, chatting and waiting patiently,” found the right train, and walked down the platform to his car. He showed his ticket to the conductor, who was holding a flashlight, and climbed in. “The passageway was full of people trying to shove their bags onto the upper bunks, so it was not easy to get through. Blue ribbons of tobacco smoke swirled around the flickering orange ceiling lights.” His seat was occupied, but he found a better one in the corner by the door, across from the service compartment, ran out to say good-bye to his mother, rushed back to his spot, “which, fortunately, hadn’t been taken,” and sank “into the deep, dark shadow” thrown by the overhanging bunk. “I sat calmly watching the crowds of people passing by with their heavy loads—screaming, cursing, swearing, and calling each other names. Among them were some choice exhibits from the ‘Museum of Curses,’ which, fortunately, does not actually exist. I could also hear muffled laughter, conversations, and instructions as people settled into their places with their luggage. There were so many smokers in the car that everything was soon half hidden behind a ghostly blue veil.”⁵⁴

Suddenly “there was a jerk and a clank, and then, a soft knocking sound accompanied by a slow, even rocking motion.” Someone said that the train was moving. “The knocking grew faster, and soon the train picked up speed.” The conductors went into the service room and closed the door behind them.

I sat motionless in my dark corner, convinced there was no better spot in the entire car.

Thoughts kept running through my head. It’s hard to even say what I was thinking. I could scarcely believe I was on my way to Leningrad, having become so used to only dreaming about it. It felt as if the train were heading somewhere into the unknown rather than to the city I had been longing to see all this time. The people around me were traveling to Leningrad, that I knew for certain, but I was traveling to some other place. My destination seemed divine, otherworldly. I simply could not comprehend that tomorrow I would be seeing the streets of Leningrad, the Neva, and St. Isaac’s, as well as my dear relations, Raya, Monya, and Trovatore. “Yes, all these people on the train are traveling to Leningrad,” I thought, “but I—I am traveling into the unknown!” And yet some strange, new, solemn feeling kept telling me that it was all a reality. It’s true, I swear! I felt as if I were caught up in a dream or reverie.⁵⁵

Most of the passengers had settled in. A large man who had been standing in the aisle talking to Lyova’s neighbor returned to his seat.

Finally, the moment had arrived when I could begin to fulfill my dream—to perform Aida. At first, I could hear only the march in my head, then I repeated it, but I wasn’t up for doing it a third time. In order to become accustomed to my surroundings, I went through both marches from Il Trovatore and then stopped there. The rhythmic knocking of the wheels helped tremendously in achieving a clear and correct sound from my imaginary singers and orchestra. I kept postponing the beginning of the opera because I wanted to savor this moment of bliss and could not quite yet bring myself to commence with the prelude to Aida.⁵⁶

Then one of his neighbors began to eat, and he decided to follow suit. When he was finished, he pulled out the postcard his mother had given him and, using his suitcase as a desk, wrote that the train had just passed Klin and that he was doing well and would describe the rest of the journey when he got to Leningrad. He put the postcard in his coat pocket and prepared to begin.

The car was finally quiet. The voices had faded, the tumult long subsided, and the air was filled with nothing but clouds of blue smoke.

“Time to begin,” I thought. In my mind’s eye I pictured the opera house, the rows of armchairs, the curtain…. The lights went out, and Aida began. Musical themes followed one upon another…. It was true theater, which even the company of such sad characters couldn’t ruin. At the end of act 1, I knew that an hour and five minutes or so had already gone by since the beginning of the performance.

Most of the people in the car were asleep, and the service door opened only during infrequent stops. My neighbor was already asleep, and I was not far behind. I propped my suitcase against the wall and decided to take a little nap before the opera’s second act.

It didn’t take long to fall asleep. My thoughts grew hazy, and I didn’t wake up until the train jolted, and I heard the railwayman telling someone that this was Bologoe. The conductor took his flashlight and went into the vestibule. I was so exhausted that I entered the world of dreams once more without waiting for the train’s departure. I heard someone saying it was very late, someone else agreeing, a door slamming somewhere, someone whistling in his sleep…. Time passed, and I once more fell sound asleep.

When I woke up, I saw that it was still dark and that the inside of the train looked the same. Everyone around me was still sleeping. I could see the first rays of the winter dawn through the frosted patterns on the windows. The sun was beginning to rise! Along with the sun, a new feeling was rising within me. Before that moment, I had grown used to the haze, shadows, and pale lamplight inside the car, but the new day’s rays penetrating the frozen windows reminded me again that I was on my way to the long-awaited city of Leningrad.⁵⁷

He conducted the second act, “with its march, dances, and scenes of captive Ethiopians”; ate breakfast in his corner; watched “a bunch of peasant women with screaming five-year-olds” get on at Malaia Vishera; and, “to the accompaniment of chit-chatting women and kids jumping up and down and getting in the way of standing passengers,” finished the opera.

Suddenly, people were beginning to move. I looked around me. Outside my window I could see the flickering tracks, pillars of smoke, red walls of the train sheds, some green and blue train cars, and a line of locomotives. We were approaching Leningrad. Everyone was already packed, and, standing next to us, near the door to the vestibule, was a small cluster of heavily-laden people. The train began to slow down …

“Oh my goodness!” I thought, standing up at the same time as the village gossips. “Can it really be true? I can’t believe it!” I could feel a terrifying wave of happiness rising up inside of me.

I heard the wheels clank and the sound of metal, a blast of freezing air hit my face … and the train stopped!⁵⁸