The House of Government

EPILOGUE

THE HOUSE ON THE EMBANKMENT

Yuri Trifonov kept the promise he had given his friends when he was fourteen years old. He became a writer and dedicated his “lyre” to not forgetting. “Should one remember?” asks the narrator in his last novel, Time and Place. “My God, it’s like asking: ‘Should one live?’ To live and to remember is one and the same thing. You can’t destroy one without destroying the other. Together they make up a verb that has no name.” Trifonov’s life as a writer was a quest for that verb—for himself and on behalf of his generation. To live on and to be remembered was one and the same thing. All houses have histories, but very few have their own historians. The House of Government had Yuri Trifonov.¹

There were different ways to remember. Leonid Leonov’s The Pyramid was a reversal of Bolshevik apocalypticism (and of Leonov’s novels from the 1930s). The Heavenly Warrior is revealed to have been the Beast, but the story of Armageddon is the same; the memory is the mirror image of the prophecy. Yuri Trifonov abandoned prophetic revelations for irony when he was twelve years old (in a story about four boys writing a story). In his last story, written four months before his death on March 28, 1981, the middle-aged narrator goes to Finland and looks back on his time there in the late 1920s, when he was two years old and his father, “torn away from the world revolution,” was head of the Soviet trade mission. All he remembers is the gray sky, some masts, and a chestnut horse. The sky and the masts are the same, and, on his last day in Helsinki, he meets a ninety-four-year-old woman who still remembers his father and the chestnut horse. On the train ride home, he thinks: “The oddest thing is that everything fits into a circle. First there was the horse, and then it appeared again, completely unexpectedly. Everything else is in between.”²

There were different things to remember. Leonid Leonov remembered the catastrophe that Dostoevsky had warned against. Yuri Trifonov remembered “that irreplaceable something that’s called life”: the gray sky, the masts, the chestnut horse, his father, the woman who remembered his father, and many other people and things, some more important than others. The memories he turned into stories consisted of two generations and their worlds: the Revolution and its children. “My father,” says one of his narrators, “went through life marked by 1917. There are people of the late 1920s and people of the mid-1930s, people of the beginning of the war and people of the end of the war. And like my father, they remain such to the end of their lives.” These moments of creation are separated from each other by “gaps, breaks, and lacunae” without which human lives and historical chronicles are unimaginable. “It is like a play: first act, second act, third act, eighteenth act. In each act the characters are slightly changed. But years, decades pass between the acts.”³

Trifonov’s main characters are his contemporaries: the people who went through life marked by their mid-1930s childhood. Act 1 of their story is set in the House of Government, which Trifonov calls “the House on the Embankment” because what matters is the river, not the government. “The air in the courtyards was always damp and the smell of the river penetrated into the rooms.” People who grew up there can leave the house, but not the river. “They swim, carried along by the current, paddling with their hands, farther and farther, faster and faster, day after day, year after year: the shores change, the hills recede, the forests thin out and lose their leaves, the sky darkens, the cold sets in, they have to hurry, hurry—and they no longer have the strength to look back at what lies behind, motionless, like a cloud on the edge of the horizon.”⁴ The current outlives the building; only the embankment is left to connect time to place.

I once lived in that building. No—that building died, disappeared, a long time ago. I lived in another building, but within those same enormous dark-gray fortress-like concrete walls. The apartment house towered over the trivial two-story buildings, private houses, belfries, old factories, and embankments with granite parapets; and the river washed it on both sides. It stood on an island and looked like a ship, unwieldy and ungainly, without masts, rudderless, and without smokestacks, a huge box, an ark, crammed full of people, ready to sail. Where to? No one knew, no one wondered about that. To people who walked down the street past its walls, glimmering with hundreds of small fortress windows, the building seemed indestructible and permanent, like a rock: in thirty years the dark gray color of the walls had not changed.⁵

Seen from the outside, it looked “like an entire city or even an entire country.” Seen from the courtyards, it suggested an intricate hierarchy of entryways, stairways, residents, and apartments that the children could only guess at. The apartments “smelled of carpets and old books,” as well as the river, and contained a variety of rooms, which contained a variety of mysteries. When uncles, aunts, and cousins came over, the grown-ups would sit around the dining-room table under a “giant orange lampshade,” talking “about war, politics, the ancient Hittites, enemies of the people, Schmidt’s polar camp, Karl Radek (who had, until recently, lived in the same entryway), the writer Feuchtwanger, the fact that Málaga had fallen and that the attack had been directed by the German Naval Staff from on board the cruiser Admiral Speer.” In late December, the table would be pushed against the piano to clear a space for the New Year’s tree and the midnight world it promised to reveal. During the rest of the year, the best place for magic was “Father’s study,” which contained a weapons collection and “very beautiful encyclopedias bound in leather, with gold backs and a great number of pictures inside.”⁶

House on the Embankment, childhood drawing by Yuri Trifonov

(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

But the real magic of childhood was the other children, and the real hero of their courtyard adventures was Lyova Fedotov. In The House on the Embankment, he appears as Anton Ovchinnikov:

We used to visit Anton in his dark apartment on the first floor, where the sun never penetrated, where his watercolors, in shades of yellow and blue, hung next to the portraits of composers; where a young man with a shaved head and officer’s insignia on his collar looked out at us from a photograph in a heavy wooden frame on the piano—Anton’s father had died in Central Asia, killed by the Basmachi rebels; where the radio was always on; where in a secret drawer of his desk lay a stack of thick, fifty-five-kopeck school notebooks, every page covered with tiny handwriting; where cockroaches rustled across newspapers in the bathroom (there were cockroaches in all the bathrooms in that section of the building); where in the kitchen we ate cold potatoes sprinkled with salt in between bites of delicious, thickly-sliced black bread; where we laughed, fantasized, reminisced, dreamed, and rejoiced, and always felt happy for some reason, like fools.⁷

The sunniest part of that “sunny, variegated, multifaceted world known as childhood” were the summers at the dacha—“back when people still used to wade across the Moscow River, still used to take the long, red Leyland bus from Theater Square to Serebrianyi Bor, still used to wear India-silk Tolstoy shirts, white linen pants, and canvas shoes, which they rubbed with tooth powder in the evenings so they would look freshly white and release a cloud of white dust with each step the next morning.”⁸ The river that the dacha stood on was the same river that washed the House on the Embankment on both sides, but it took a little while to reach it from the bus stop:

Pine Grove, childhood drawing by Yuri Trifonov (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

The road from the bus stop wound through the pines, past the long-unpainted fences blackened by rain, past the dachas hidden behind lilac bushes, sweetbriar, and elder, their small-paned verandas gleaming through the foliage. You had to walk a long time down the highway until the tarmac ended, and it became a dusty road. On the right, on a little hill, was the pine grove with the large bald spot (in the 1920s a plane had crashed there, and the grove caught fire), and on the left the long line of fences. Behind one of the fences, barely screened by young birches, stood the two-story wooden building that looked less like a dacha than a trading post somewhere in the forests of Canada or a hacienda in the Argentine savannah.⁹

The inside of the house was of little interest. The next stage of the journey was the meadow that separated the house from the river:

Father liked making kites. On Saturdays he used to come to the dacha, and we would stay up late shaving down sticks, cutting paper, gluing, and drawing scary faces on the paper. Early the next morning we would walk out the back gate into the meadow, which stretched all the way to the river, but you could not see the river, just the high opposite bank, the yellow sandy slope, the pines, the cottages, and the belfry of the Lykovo Trinity Church, sticking up from the pines at the highest point of the bank. I would run through the dewy meadow, letting out string, afraid Father might have done something wrong and the kite wouldn’t fly, and it really wouldn’t fly right away, but would trail through the grass for a while, trying to fly, failing, and sinking down, fluttering like a frightened hen, before suddenly, slowly and miraculously, soaring up behind my back, as I ran on and on as fast as I could.¹⁰

Riverbank, with the Lykovo Trinity Belfry, childhood drawing by Yuri Trifonov (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

The final destination was the river, which reappears in story after story, as both beginning and end. The earliest beginnings, and some special occasions, involve the protagonist’s parents. The protagonist could be a first-person narrator, a third-person character, or both (often as a set of doubles):

When Mother took her vacation, usually in August, the three of them would often paddle off in the boat very early in the morning and go somewhere far away—for the whole day. Mornings on the river were cool and quiet, with only a few solitary fishermen in crumpled hats sitting next to their rods and casting disapproving glances in their direction. The sun would rise, and it would get hot. Light pale clouds would appear in the sky; the banks would start filling up with people and the water, with boats. Father would pull up on a sandbar, and the three of them would spend a long time swimming, sunbathing, looking for pretty shells and “Devil’s toenails,” and, if there was no one around, Father would perform funny stunts on the sand, stand on his hands, and might even walk on his hands into the water.¹¹

Trifonovs on the river (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

On regular weekday mornings, the boy would run there by himself, through the garden and down the rocky road to the highway. “After running a hundred and fifty steps or so, he turns into the thin pine forest that stretches along the bank. Here he has to tread carefully again because, under the fallen needles, there might be pinecones, pieces of glass, or treacherous pine roots lying in wait to make him stub his toe. At last he is on the river bluff, and sees the others already there, below: Alyosha in his red trunks, fat Rooster, and Chunya, dark as a little devil. He yells happily to them, waving his arms, and then, with a running start, takes a giant leap onto the sand below.”¹²

It all ended abruptly, with Father’s disappearance. Parts of the pine forest were claimed by new dacha owners. The sandbar and escarpment were washed away after the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal. “His former life crumbled and collapsed like a sandy bank: quietly and suddenly. The bank collapsed. Gone with it were the pine trees, benches, paths strewn with fine gray sand, the white dust, pinecones, cigarette butts, pine needles, the scraps of old bus tickets, condoms, hairpins, and the kopeck coins that had fallen out of the pockets of those who had once embraced here on warm evenings. Everything was swept downstream in the swirl of water.”¹³

The House on the Embankment died, too. “That’s what happens to buildings: we leave them, and they die.” It died because the boys and girls had left. “Some had been killed in the war, some had died from sickness, some had disappeared without a trace, while others, though still alive, had become different people; and if by some magic means those different people were to meet the ones long gone—in their cotton twill shirts and can vas sneakers—they would not know what to say to them.” The tests of will devised by Lyova Fedotov and his fictional doubles had proved both prescient and premature. “The tests came soon enough: there was no need to invent them. They poured down upon us like thick, heavy rain—some were beaten into the ground, some drenched and soaked to the bone, and some drowned in that torrent.”¹⁴

Yuri Trifonov (in the middle) with friends at the dacha (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

■ ■ ■

Act 2 in Trifonov’s chronicle of his generation is set in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when those who had survived the torrent were in their twenties and early thirties. It was a time of “packed rooms and accidental friends,” “crowded communal apartments and narrow couches,” Stalin’s funeral, and Khrushchev’s “thaw.” It was springtime—“that unsettling and opaque season that remained to be deciphered.” The lilacs in Lyalia Telepneva’s garden (in The Long Goodbye) “overwhelmed the dusty, nondescript street” on which her house stood. “Unable to be contained within the confines of the fence, their luxuriant forms spilled over into the street in a frenzy of lilac flesh.” Olga Vasilievna from Another Life wore her hair loose to her shoulders. “It was a dense, luxuriant, dark-auburn thicket, but her forehead was open, round, and clean, without a single wrinkle. It was probably the best year of her entire life, the year of her prime.”¹⁵

The flood that had washed away their childhood continued to carry them along. They fell in and out of love, got married, had children, met in-laws, went to college, got their first jobs, and, in the case of the men, got into fights and wrote their first plays, screenplays, novels, and short stories. The springtime of their lives coincided with the “thaw” in Soviet history. “What had brought about this sudden change in life remained for Lyalia a mystery, nor did she give it much thought. Perhaps the winds in the heavens had shifted direction? Perhaps some place a thousand miles away had been swept by hurricanes? Her late Grandmother used to love the saying: ‘Everything comes at its appointed time.’ And now Lyalia’s time had come—and why not?”¹⁶

Yuri Trifonov (top right, with glasses) with friends at the Literary Institute (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

Yuri (left) and his sister, Tania (second from right), with friends (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

And so they floated on, too keen on what lay ahead to look back at what remained behind. But the faster they floated, the more difficult it became not to look back—at least for those who were paying attention. Fathers were being “rehabilitated” but not restored to history; mothers were coming back as helpless, reproachful strangers; in-laws kept bringing up their own, unfamiliar past; and “men of the past”—men “whose time was up”—were still running construction sites and editorial offices. Khrushchev’s “thaw” was a deliberate but partial recreation of the Stalin revolution. Trifonov’s The Quenching of Thirst (1959–62) contains all the key elements of a First Five-Year-Plan construction novel but is also, typically for the “thaw,” a bildungsroman about a young man whose future remains to be deciphered. He joins in the building of an irrigation canal in the desert, but he is too involved in the pettiness of existence to be a full-fledged participant. He is lost, he fears, “utterly lost,” but the harder he tries to find his way, the more clearly he realizes that he is floating with the current—the very current he is trying to channel. “It pulls me along like a small chip of wood, spinning and tossing me around, flinging me onto the shore, then washing me away again and carrying me further, on and on!” The challenge, he discovers, is not to catch up: the challenge is to be able to stop. And the only way to stop, or at least slow down a bit, is to swim against the current. “To know yourself” means going backward.

Trifonov (left) and friends on the riverbank

(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

The spring—that particular spring—was not about what lay ahead: it was about what remained behind, like a cloud on the edge of the horizon. What remained to be deciphered was the past.¹⁷

■ ■ ■

Act 3 is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the main characters are in their forties and fifties, much farther downstream, ready and not ready “to take stock.” Vadim Glebov, from The House on the Embankment, is balding and fat, “with breasts like a woman’s, flabby thighs, a big paunch and sloping shoulders, which obliged him to have his suits tailor-made instead of buying them off the rack.” He is not from the House on the Embankment, but he visited often enough to betray his friends, teacher, and fiancée. He comes from the Swamp and eventually returns to the Swamp, possibly never having left it. “He wasn’t bad and he wasn’t good; he wasn’t very selfish and he wasn’t very generous”—he was lukewarm, “a nothing person.” He does not choose to betray anyone; he fails to make choices.¹⁸

Aleksandr Antipov, the central character of Time and Place, is not sure about either time or place. He and his wife Tania keep waiting for an apartment of their own, but he doubts they will ever have a home—or have made any choices:

The new cooperative building on the outskirts of Moscow was slowly rising, one floor on top of the other; their children were slowly growing older and setting out for unknown territory; the two halves of the cracked raft, with Antipov on one side and Tania, on the other, were slowly moving apart, and there was no horror on their faces: they went on talking, joking, taking pills, getting annoyed, watching movies, while the wooden halves were quietly drifting apart, because nothing could be stopped and everything kept flowing, moving farther away from one thing and closer to another…. There is no such thing as still water: the kind that seems stagnant is also moving—by evaporating or festering.¹⁹

Antipov falls in love with Tania in the spring of 1951. They separate thirty years later, soon after moving into the new cooperative building on the outskirts of Moscow. Most late-Trifonov plots involve moving into new buildings: applying, queuing, buying, and starting over. The goal is “to furnish one’s life the way one would furnish an apartment,” but all one gets is more furniture. The flood has become a festering swamp, but most people do not know it because they have “unseeing eyes.” Antipov is writing a book about “the fear of seeing,” and Sonia Ganchuk from The House on the Embankment is taken to a special hospital because she is afraid of light. Living in the dark means living without a shadow—not leaving a trace or relying on someone else’s memory. Antipov’s Tania wears glasses and cannot remember what made their spring possible. Everything remains to be deciphered, everything keeps getting postponed, “and everything that got postponed gradually disappeared somewhere—leaked out the way warm air leaks out of the house.”²⁰

Trifonov’s contemporaries, “the children,” are confronted by their parents and grandparents, who care nothing for furniture, take “a broad view of things,” and think of themselves as “makers of history,” not chips caught in its flow. Their time has passed, but they linger on—as a reproach, reminder, and source of worn-out wisdom. Some of the children are not blind—just near-sighted—and they notice that their parents’ asceticism has not prevented them from moving into the House of Government; that “taking a broader view” means interpreting human behavior in accordance with “class theory”; that class theory is applicable in every case except their own; and that “making history” may stand for “typing away in some army’s political department” or serving as purge committee officials. More to the point, taking the broad view seems to stand for an occasional preference for strangers—the stranger the better—over one’s own families. In the case of Aleksandra Prokofievna from Another Life (based on Trifonov’s grandmother, Tatiana Slovatinskaia), the world seems happy to reciprocate. “Her close relatives have no use for her—for good reasons, because her close relatives know exactly what she is like—but strangers respect and even fear her a little.” The same is true of Aron Solts’s double, David Shvarts, whose adopted son despises and mistreats him. “How could David raise a child when he was always busy educating others at commissions, on committees, and at plenums until late in the evening?”²¹

Yuri; his sister, Tania; and their grandmother, Tatiana Slovatinskaia

(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

The parents and grandparents are just as homeless as their children—in the House of Government, in their children’s homes, and in the Home for Party Veterans in Peredelkino. They are just as blind, too. One evening, Gorik, in The Disappearance, notices that his grandmother’s cousin, “Grandmother Vera,” cannot see anything “even with a magnifying glass.” The only difference is that the children are near-sighted and the parents, far-sighted. Both would have failed the “good person” test: the children, because their primary commitment is to themselves and their homes; the parents, because their primary commitment is to those who threaten their families and homes.²²

Neither group casts a shadow. Trifonov’s Old Bolsheviks talk a great deal about the past, but they do not remember. Professor Ganchuk, from The House on the Embankment, does not look back any more than his not-quite-son-in-law, Vadim Glebov. “It wasn’t because the old man’s memory was failing, but because he did not want to remember. He did not find it interesting.” The otherwise blameless Grandfather from The Exchange said once that he “had no interest in whatever lay behind, in his entire incalculably long life.” And Gorik’s Grandmother, in The Disappearance, “never reminisced about anything. She once said something that stunned Gorik: ‘I don’t remember what my real first and last names are. And I don’t care.’” Each generation is blind in its own way, and each one despises the other’s blindness. The parents accuse the children of philistinism and bourgeois acquisitiveness; the children accuse the parents of hypocrisy and arrogance. Both are right—but also, in their blindness, unfair.²³

■ ■ ■

The Revolution ended at home. The surviving revolutionaries and their children and grandchildren were facing each other across the kitchen table, unable to see or listen. Everyone seemed to agree that these were not routine family squabbles or the inevitable fraying of youthful idealism: something much larger had gone wrong. The residents of the House of Government, past and present, were living under a curse. Only those who did not fear the past could discover its origins and perhaps help lift it.

In every one of Trifonov’s novels and novellas there is someone whose job is to remember: a historian, a novelist, a reminiscing narrator (who is usually a historian or a novelist), or a character who is jolted into regaining his eyesight and forced to look back. In The House on the Embankment, the autobiographical narrator, who is a professional historian, remembers seeing Anton Ovchinnikov for the last time in a bakery on Polyanka Street, in late October 1941.

Winter with its freezing temperatures and snow had come early that year, but of course Anton was wearing neither hat nor coat. He said that in two days’ time he and his mother were being evacuated to the Urals, and asked what I thought he should take with him: his diaries, the science-fiction novel he was writing, or the albums of his drawings. His mother had weak arms, so he was the only one who could carry heavy things. His question struck me as absurd. How could anyone be worrying about albums or novels, when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow? Anton drew or wrote something every day. A notebook, folded in two, was sticking out of the pocket of his jacket. He said, “I’ll record our encounter in this bakery, and our entire conversation. Because everything is important for history.”²⁴

Anton is killed in the war. His mother gives his diaries to the narrator just as Roza Lazarevna gave Lyova Fedotov’s diaries to Yuri Trifonov. History—through diaries, father’s studies, and historical novels—is at the center of their childhood. “Recording everything” is the duty of those who have stayed behind and dare look back. But what is important for history? Tania in Time and Place cannot remember the most important things. The historian in It Was a Summer Afternoon memorializes a past that has nothing to do with what the only survivor remembers. Gena Klimuk from Another Life believes that a historian’s job is to identify “historical necessity.” And Olga Vasilievna, who cannot stand Gena Klimuk, imagines history “as an endless line in which epochs, states, great men, kings, generals, and revolutionaries stand tightly pressed together, so that the historian’s task is similar to that of the policeman who, on premier nights, stands by the ticket office of the Progress Movie Theater keeping order—to make sure that the epochs and states do not get mixed up or change places, and that the great men do not cut in line, fight, or try to get a ticket to immortality out of turn.”²⁵

Yuri Trifonov at his old dacha

(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

Those for whom the past is a key to the present think of living and remembering as a single verb. When Grisha Rebrov from The Long Goodbye is accused of not being “rooted in the soil,” he, “for some reason, started talking about his family: how one of his grandmothers had been a Polish political exile; how his great-grandfather had been a serf and his grandfather had been implicated in some student disorders and banished to Siberia; how his other grandmother had taught music in Petersburg; how her father had been born into the soldier class and how Grisha’s own father had taken part in both the First World War and the Civil War although he was by nature a peaceful man who had been a statistician before the Revolution and afterward an economist. And all of this taken together, Grisha shouted excitedly, was the soil, was historical experience, was Russia itself.”²⁶

In Another Life, Olga Vasilievna’s husband, Sergei Troitsky, is a professional historian “who suffers greatly in his policeman’s job” and thinks that historical necessity is “something shapeless and treacherous, like a swamp.” He thinks of history as a search for “a thread that connects the past with an even more remote past, as well as with the future.” He—like Grisha Rebrov and Yuri Trifonov—had “started with his own father, for whose faint memory he felt a great love. He thought of his father as an extraordinary man, which was probably an exaggeration and, in a certain sense, pride.” His father had led him to his grandfather, who had led him to his great-grandfather, who had led him everywhere at once. “He rambled on about his own ancestors, runaway serfs and religious dissenters, who could be traced to a defrocked priest in Penza, who was connected to some settlers who lived in a commune in Saratov, who could be linked to a teacher in the Tura swamps, who produced a future S. Petersburg student who dreamed of change and justice, all of them united by a seething, bubbling urge to dissent.”²⁷

Which threads should one follow? Rebrov and Troitsky are defeated by this question because they are too invested in the present (and too blind as a consequence) to know what they are looking for. But they know where to search. There are times, according to Rebrov, when conscience “flares up” the way diseases do. “At certain times it grows stronger, at other times weaker, depending on—who knows, perhaps on certain explosions of solar matter.” And sometimes it becomes overwhelming. Both are writing books about underground revolutionaries connected to them by the threads of personal and spiritual kinship: about a time on the eve of the Revolution when conscience reached crisis proportions and the urge to dissent became irresistible.

Trifonov’s 1973 novel, Impatience, is the book Rebrov and Troitsky fail to finish. It is a response to Voronsky’s biography of Andrei Zheliabov, which was a response to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It goes back to the People’s Will terrorism of the 1870s in order to document the birth of a new, eagerly apocalyptic successor to Christianity. As one of the characters, the terrorist Aleksandr Mikhailov, puts it, “I was as influenced by the story of the Gospel as I was by the story of William Tell or the Gracchi brothers. And what about ‘the end justifying the means’? Was it invented by the Jesuits? Or by Machiavelli? No, it is contained in Christ’s teachings, in its lining, beneath the pretty exterior.” His goal is to “blow up the accursed Sodom” and lead the people out of their “swamp sleep.” The means include the creation of a fraternal family of true believers and the use of the “everything is permitted” principle in dealing with nonmembers. The result is the explosion of solar matter that will burn the residents of the House on the Embankment and blind their successors.²⁸

■ ■ ■

The impatience of the 1870s begat the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution begat everything that followed. Trifonov’s novel, The Old Man (1978), is about the Civil War, “the time everything began.”²⁹

The chronological present is the same as in The House on the Embankment and Impatience: the hot Moscow summer of 1972. The old man of the title, Pavel Efgrafovich Letunov, lives in an Old Bolshevik dacha settlement. He is surrounded by his children and their spouses, ex-spouses, lovers, children, neighbors, guests, and dogs. He is hard of hearing; they have unseeing eyes. His family is not quite a family; his house is not a home; and his children are involved in a feud over a cottage they may or may not have a right to. “They still live badly,” he imagines telling his wife, Galya, who died five years ago, “a cramped, messy, unsettled existence; they live life not as they want to, but as it happens. They’re unhappy, Galya.” He is unhappy, too—because Galya is not there and his body is failing him, but mostly because he lives in the past, and the past is even more cramped and unsettled than the present. He does not have much time left and thinks that the only reason he has been spared so far is so he can “piece something together, like a vessel from clay shards, and fill it with wine, the sweetest wine, whose name is Truth.” He needs the truth to make sense of his own life and to save his children’s lives from meaninglessness. He believes that the truth got lost when it became inextricably fused with faith, and that its final disappearance had something to do with what happened to Corps Commander Migulin. “Corps Commander Migulin” is a double of Filipp Mironov, the Cossack rebel who defied his Bolshevik commissars, went off to fight for his own socialism, was sentenced to death as a false prophet, spent a night awaiting “imminent, inescapable death,” was pardoned as a matter of political expediency, and then given command of the Second Cavalry Army before being secretly shot in a prison courtyard.³⁰

Letunov’s quest takes the story back to 1919, the year of de-Cossackization, the “Last Battle,” and Migulin’s desertion and trial. Letunov, an eighteen-year-old Bolshevik volunteer at the time, witnesses the conflagration. “Savage is the year, savage the hour over Russia. Like lava it flows, that savage time flooding and burying with fire everything in its path.” The time is fulfilled, “the earth is aflame,” history has run out of patience, and a leatherworker with sleepy little eyes and an absurdly long leather coat promises to “pass through Cossack villages like Carthage” (and does). The flare-up of conscience turns into “savage zeal.”³¹ Everyone and no one is to blame.

My God, were they really so savage: the leatherworker with sleepy little eyes; the Veshenskaia Cossacks, who, that same spring, in a fit of revolutionary enthusiasm, killed off all their officers in one fell swoop and declared themselves supporters of the new regime; the four exhausted Petrograd workers, one Hungarian who barely understood any Russian and three Latvians who had all but forgotten their home country, and who, for years, had been killing, first Germans, then Ukrainian nationalists, and then, in the name of the great idea, enemies of the Revolution? There are the enemies: bearded, with animal hatred in their eyes, barefoot, and in their undershirts; one shouts and shakes his fists; another drops to his knees; while their wives wail on the other side of the fence. And here is the man who has returned from exile, where he was beaten and flogged, an old man at thirty, who, his hopeless lungs bursting, manages to wheeze out: “Death to the enemies of the revolution! Fire!”³²

Were they really so savage? No, claims Letunov, looking back from his dacha settlement. It is the year 1919 that is to blame, not anyone in particular. “And all because of a sort of haste, fear, a mad internal fever: fix, rebuild at once, for all time, for ever and ever!” Some call it “the Vendee”; some, the last and decisive class battle; and one mad seminarian mumbles something about a blazing star falling from the sky (“the name of the star is Wormwood”). Letunov himself—in 1919 and later, as an old man—is unrelenting in his scrutiny of Corps Commander Migulin. “If you could figure out or at least decide for yourself what he was, a lot would become clear.”³³

The matter is to be settled in the fall of 1919, in revolutionary court, with Migulin as defendant, young Letunov as assistant court secretary, and Commissar Janson as chief prosecutor. Janson’s speech in The Old Man is a partial transcript of Smilga’s speech at the Filipp Mironov trial: the eagle of the Revolution has turned out to be a rooster; his vision of socialism is a “semi-Tolstoyan, semi-sentimental melodrama”; there is but one force that “will come out victorious from this terrible, colossal struggle”; and “the litter of petit bourgeois ideology must be swept off the road of the Revolution.” Letunov describes Janson as both a Latvian Bolshevik with Ivar Smilga’s biography and “historical necessity” in the flesh. “He was twenty-eight at the time. But in that sandy-haired, short-legged little man on the rostrum I did not see—no one saw—his youth or his university past or his Baltic origins. It was the icy words of the Revolution speaking, it was the course of events. And one’s spirit froze and one’s hands became rigid. I remember, I remember …”³⁴

And the more the old man Letunov remembers, the more obvious it becomes that he is in the same mold as Glebov and his own children and that he, too, had been swimming in the current, the lava, and the course of events: when the leatherworker with sleepy little eyes talked him into becoming the chairman of the revolutionary tribunal (“I didn’t want it, I tried my best to refuse”); when he agreed to serve as assistant court secretary at the Migulin trial (“a lot of red tape, a lot of papers, names”); and when, “blinded by red foam,” he betrayed himself along with the Revolution by accepting Janson’s story of Migulin’s betrayal of the Revolution. He points to the times, the year, and the lava, and he hopes he has become stronger as a consequence (“Peter, who denied Jesus in the high priest’s courtyard, would later earn his name Petros, meaning ‘rock,’ that is, ‘hard’”). And perhaps he is right: sometimes the current slows down to an imperceptible process of festering and evaporating, and sometimes it is so fast one can hardly think. And of course it is true that he is different from Glebov and so many others because he—like Rebrov and Troitsky—keeps looking back, keeps following the threads, keeps trying to see and to remember.³⁵

But does he know where to look? Late one evening he walks over to see his wife’s old friend, but finds her daughter, Zina, instead. She seems distracted, but he insists on reading a document from his archive. It is Migulin’s description of the night he and his comrades spent in a prison cell before their scheduled execution (the text comes directly from Filipp Mironov’s papers): “Some people are able to look [death] proudly in the eye; others have to muster whatever is left of their spiritual strength to seem calm; no one wants to appear fainthearted. In an attempt to deceive himself and us, for instance, one of our comrades suddenly leaps up and breaks into a dance, his heels drumming faster and faster on the cement floor. But his face is frozen and his eyes so blank it is terrifying for a live person to look into them.” Letunov (“Pavel Evgrafovich”) has forgotten that Zina’s husband is dying and that Zina’s mother, his wife’s old friend, is about to move into the Home for Party Veterans.

“Pavel Evgrafovich …” Zina was looking at him in a strange and disturbing way, her eyes red. “There is something I think you should know: in our life today, with no wars or revolutions … things still happen …”

“What? What did you say?” asked Pavel Evgrafovich.

“I, too, sometimes feel like … breaking into a dance.”³⁶

Zina gets up from her chair and leaves the room. Pavel Evgrafovich waits patiently for her to return, “clasping his file to his chest.” Perhaps it is not the year, after all. Back in 1919, Letunov’s Uncle Shura, based on Trifonov’s father, never accepted the “killing arithmetic” and refused to participate in the Migulin trial because trials were needed to establish the facts, not to serve as “a show rehearsed in advance.” And now, in 1972, some people have time to look back—and look around—and others do not. And the heat is just as terrible, if not worse. “The cast iron was bearing down; the forests were burning, and Moscow was choking to death, suffocating from the haze—dusky blue, charcoal gray, reddish brown, black—different colors at different times—that filled the streets and houses with a slow rolling, blanketing cloud, like a fog or poisonous gas; the smell of burning penetrated everywhere, there was no escaping it; the lakes turned to sandy shallows, the river revealed its rocks, the water barely trickled from the faucets, the birds did not sing; life on this planet had come to an end, killed by the sun.”³⁷

Seasons come and go, and the heat—along with conscience—keeps flaring up and cooling off, day after day, year after year. Letunov senses this, but he belongs to the parents’ generation and he cannot stop looking for final resolutions: a beginning in 1919, when the lava flowed through the Don Region, and an end in the near future, when the smell of burning will disappear once and for all. “Migulin perished because at a fateful moment two streams of hot and cold, two clouds the size of continents—belief and unbelief—had collided in the heavens and produced a discharge of colossal magnitude, and he had been whisked up and carried away by the hurricane-force wind in which hot and cold, belief and unbelief commingled. Displacement always brings on a thunderstorm, and the downpour drenches the earth. This merciless heat will end in a downpour, too. And I shall rejoice in the coolness if I survive.”³⁸

At the end of the novel, and at the end of his life, Letunov goes to see Asya, Migulin’s wife (Trifonov’s version of Filipp Mironov’s Nadezhda). She turns out to be a “mummy-like old woman with shining eyes.” He asks her where Migulin was headed in August 1919. She understands that her answer is very important to him, but all she can say is: “I have never loved anyone so much in my long and wearisome life.’”³⁹

A year later, after Letunov’s death, his son gives his documents to a history graduate student from Rostov who is writing his dissertation on Migulin. The graduate student thinks that there are times when truth and faith become so tightly and inextricably intertwined that it is difficult to sort out which is which, but he believes that he can do it. He sets out for home, but he misses his train because of a sudden downpour. It is not the downpour Letunov was waiting for. It signifies the end of faith—his faith—but it is unlikely to be the last one. The novel ends the same way as The Road to Ocean, except that there is no Ocean, just the rain, and no guide to accompany the historian. “The rain was coming down in a flood. It smelled of ozone. Two little girls had covered themselves with a sheet of clear plastic and were running barefoot over the asphalt.”⁴⁰

■ ■ ■

Sergei Troitsky from Another Life has trouble telling truth from faith and defining the subject of his dissertation. One night, when he and his wife, Olga Vasilievna, are in bed, talking, he suddenly says:

“Do you know why I am having such a hard time?” Barely audibly, he whispered: “Because the threads that stretch out from the past … they are fraught…. Don’t you see? They are really fraught. Don’t you understand?”

She did not understand. “Fraught … with what?”

“What do you mean, with what?” He laughed. She suddenly felt scared: he seemed to be losing his mind. “Nothing breaks off without leaving a trace of some kind…. There is no such thing as a final rupture! Don’t you understand? There has to be a continuation, there must be. It’s so obvious.”⁴¹

It is only after he dies, defeated by his failure to relate to other lives (in the present as well as in the past), that she finally understands. “Every contact with the past meant pain. Yet life is made up of such contacts, for the threads to the past are a thousandfold and each one must be torn out of living flesh, out of a wound. At first she had thought that peace would come when all those threads, down to the tiniest and thinnest, had been broken. It now appeared, however, that this would never be, because the number of threads was infinite. Every object, every familiar person, every thought, every word—every single thing in the world was linked by some thread to him.”⁴²

In one of the final scenes of the novel, Olga Vasilievna has a dream. She and Sergei are gathering mushrooms in the forest, but they are too involved in conversation to notice anything, and there aren’t any mushrooms, anyway. They go deeper and deeper into the forest. The aspens and birches give way to dense spruce thickets, and it grows dark and damp. They walk faster and faster. “Somewhere ahead there was a glimmer of brighter light, a glimpse or two of a glade or a clearing. That was where another life would begin.” They keep going. “The dampness in the air was oppressive, the smell of rotting wood drifted up from the fallen trees and from the bottoms of ravines. Occasionally they had to wade through black swampy water as they walked on and on, talking, enticed by the brightness ahead.” Finally, they come to a green fence, walk along it for a while, find a gate, and ask four men sitting on a bench where the bus stop is. The men say that there is no bus stop, but a woman sitting beside them says that the men are patients from an asylum and offers to show them a shortcut through the woods. They walk for a long time. It grows dark. The woman keeps saying that they are almost there. Suddenly she says: “Here we are.”

They were standing in front of a small woodland swamp. “What’s this?” Olga Vasilievna asked.

“This is the road,” said the woman. “There’s your bus—over there.” She stretched out her arm, pointing to a clump of sedge growing on the far side of the swamp.⁴³

When the literary historian Ralf Schröder asked Trifonov about the meaning of this scene, Trifonov said that, being German, he must remember Faust’s final monologue:

A swamp still skirts the mountain chain

And poisons all the land retrieved;

This marshland I hope yet to drain,

And thus surpass what we achieved.

Faust’s vision of heavenly life on reclaimed land echoes the story of the House of Government, but his conclusion points to “another life,” the one that Olga Vasilievna is attempting to come to terms with.

This is the highest wisdom that I own,

The best that mankind ever knew:

Freedom and life are owned by those alone

Who conquer them each day anew.

Blind and about to die, Faust seems to realize something that Moses and Pavel Letunov never do: that life is not about getting to the other side and stopping time; it is about swimming against the current—even if it means staying in one place. Such, at any rate, is the claim made by the angels who wrest Faust’s soul from Mephistopheles (who cries foul, not without some justification):

Saved is the spirit kingdom’s flower

From evil and the grave:

“Whoever strives with all his power,

We are allowed to save.”⁴⁴

And such is Olga Vasilievna’s realization at the end of Another Life. She conquers each day anew and eventually finds another love. He is middle-aged, married, and often sick. They like to go for walks on a trail that runs through the pine woods along the river. “Moscow had long since surrounded this ancient spot, part village and part dacha settlement, had flowed around it and surged westward, but had somehow not quite swallowed it up: the pine trees were still there, the water-meadow still shimmered in green, and high on a hilltop over the river and above the pines floated the bell tower of the old Spasskoe-Lykovo church, visible from far away on every side.” It was the same belfry that the barefooted little boy used to see as he ran through that same meadow chasing his father’s kite; the same river that flowed eastward into Moscow and washed the House on the Embankment on both sides; the same man coming back to the spot he never left. As Trifonov’s alter ego from The Old Man puts it, “life is a system in which everything, in some mysterious way and according to some higher plan, keeps coming back to form a circle.”⁴⁵

The story of the Revolution’s children does not end in self-immolation or execution. It ends the same way as The Blue Bird, which they saw at the Moscow Art Theater when they were little; the same way as Faust and War and Peace, which their blind parents raised them on; and the same way as Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which they adopted as their Faust. What was a swamp to Trifonov’s father is Trifonov’s life, the only one he has. And what was his father’s House of Government is Trifonov’s home, the one he keeps coming back to. And Trifonov’s home, whatever its particular time and place, will always remain the House on the Embankment—because the river keeps flowing, and the exiles from childhood keep floating downstream or swimming against the current, paddling with their hands, day after day, year after year.

Yuri Trifonov on the riverbank, with the Lykovo Trinity belfry in the background (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

Yuri Trifonov in front of the Lykovo Trinity belfry

(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)