The Story of a Life

18

The Red Lantern

I lit the small red lantern. It had an oil lamp inside, and the lantern’s red glass cast a crimson light on the dusty rubbish along the shelves lining the narrow box room. I had begun to develop my father’s photographs. Father had a small Kodak. He loved to take pictures, but the film canisters would end up lying around for months in a box in his desk drawer. Before every large holiday, the house was cleaned from top to bottom, and Mama would take out the canisters and give them to me to develop.

I enjoyed the work since I never could guess what would appear on the negatives. I also liked the fact that no one, not even Mama, dared to enter the room until I was done. I was cut off from the world. The usual household sounds – the clattering of plates, the chiming of clocks, the piercing voice of our maid Liza – were barely audible inside the room.

A papier-mâché mask hung on the wall. It was the mask of a clown with a snub nose and big, puffy cheeks that reminded me of pinecones. A reddish tuft of oakum poked out from under a small white top hat cocked on its head. In the red glow of the lantern the mask came to life. The clown peered down into the black basin where the film lay in the developer. He even winked at me. He smelled of paste. Sometimes our flat would become utterly quiet – as happens even in the noisiest of families. In those moments I couldn’t stand being alone with the clown in the narrow room. Little by little I began to study his character. I knew that the clown liked making fun of people, that nothing in life was sacred to him, and that in the end he would have his revenge on us for keeping him in the box room for his entire life. At times it even seemed to me that the clown was so bored by the silence that he would actually mutter something to himself or even sing a strange little song:

’Twas on a Sunday that the hens swallowed the cock whole, While nonsense sat mute on the fence mixing jam in a bottomless bowl.

But all I had to do was open the box room’s door and let in the bluish daylight, and in an instant the clown was dead and covered with dust.

This time it was my father who brought me several canisters and asked me to develop them. He had just returned from a trip to Moscow. It was the beginning of January 1906. My father had been in Moscow in the final days of the December uprising. He told us about the barricades in Presnya, the armed bands of revolutionaries and the artillery fire. Despite the failure of the uprising, my father returned home excited and invigorated. He was fully certain that just beyond the horizon lay the moment when all Russia would rise up and seize its long-awaited freedom.

‘Do your best job with these,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some photographs in here of Moscow that are of historical significance. Thing is I just don’t remember which canister they’re in.’

The canisters were identical. My father hadn’t bothered to mark them. I had no choice but to develop them one by one and see what I might find. There were no photographs of Moscow on the first roll, just a few pictures of a small, thin man in a short jacket and bow-tie. He was standing next to a wall with a long, narrow painting hanging on it. For a long time I couldn’t make anything out on this painting. Eventually, I saw an emaciated, hook-nosed face with enormous, sad eyes. The face was ringed with bird feathers.

My father asked from the other side of the door: ‘Well? Any Moscow photographs?’

‘Not yet. Just some old man standing next to a painting on a wall.’

‘That’s Vrubel, of course! Don’t you remember him? Be sure not to overdevelop it.’

None of the painting’s details came out. Just the face and some of the feathers.

‘I really want that photograph,’ said my father. ‘That’s his Demon.’

Father left. Then I remembered how he had once said to Mama over breakfast that Mikhail Alexandrovich Vrubel had come to Kiev for a few days and had asked Father to visit him at his hotel.

‘I don’t understand your fascination with Vrubel,’ Mama said. ‘He’s just another one of those Decadents! All those obsessed artists frighten me.’

Nevertheless, my father went to see Vrubel and took me with him. We entered the hotel near the Golden Gate and went up to the fourth floor. The hallway had that hotel morning smell of eau-de-Cologne and coffee. My father knocked on a low door. A thin man in a worn jacket opened the door. His face, hair and eyes were of the same colour as his jacket – grey with yellowish flecks. This was Vrubel, the artist.

‘Who’s this young subject?’ he asked, gripping me firmly by the chin. ‘Your son? This boy was practically made to be painted.’

He took my father by the arm and led him to a table. I looked timidly around the room. It was a garret. A few watercolours were pinned to the dark wallpaper. Vrubel poured my father and himself a brandy, which he quickly drank before getting up and pacing about the room. The heels of his shoes clicked loudly on the parquet. I noticed his heels were very high. My father made some compliment about the watercolours.

‘Junk!’ Vrubel replied. He stopped pacing about the room and sat back down at the table. ‘I’ve been nothing but a bundle of nerves lately, like some squirrel in a cage,’ he said. ‘I’m making myself sick. Georgy Maximovich, what do you say we go to Lukyanovka?’

‘To St Cyril’s Church?’

‘Yes. I want to look at my work there. I’ve completely forgotten it.’

Father agreed. The three of us took a droshky to Lukyanovka. We rode for a long time down the endless Lvovskaya Street and then the just as endless Dorogozhitskaya Street. Vrubel and my father smoked. I watched Vrubel and felt sorry for him. He twitched and jerked the whole time. His eyes darted about aimlessly, he spoke incoherently, he lit one cigarette after another and then threw them out of the droshky without bothering to smoke them. My father spoke to him gently as to a child. We got out of the droshky near the Fëdorovskaya Church and then walked through the streets and gardens of Lukyanovka. We came out to the edge of a ravine. From here the road zigzagged down to the bottom, where we could make out the small cupola of St Cyril’s Church.

‘Let’s sit for a while,’ Vrubel suggested.

We sat down on the dirty grass growing along the side of the road. The sky over the Dnieper was a dull blue.

‘I’m in a bad way, Georgy Maximovich,’ said Vrubel, slapping his flabby cheek and laughing. ‘I’m tired of dragging around this disgusting shell of mine.’

Obviously, I didn’t understand what Vrubel meant by this, and I never would have remembered this conversation if my father had not recounted it to Mama, and then to Uncle Kolya, and a few acquaintances as well, and if they had all not felt so sorry for Vrubel.

Inside the church Vrubel examined his frescos in silence. They looked to me as if they had been moulded out of pieces of blue, red and yellow clay. I couldn’t believe that this skinny little man could have painted such large images on the church walls.

‘Now that’s painting!’ Vrubel exclaimed as we left the church.

I was shocked that Father reacted calmly to these words and even agreed with Vrubel when he never allowed me or my brothers to say a single boastful word. So when we parted with Vrubel on Reitarskaya Street, I told my father that I didn’t like him.

‘Why?’ Father asked.

‘He’s a braggart.’

‘You little fool!’ said Father, slapping me on the back. ‘Stand up straight!’

‘Why am I a fool?’ I asked, offended.

‘First of all,’ he said, ‘you need to know that Vrubel is a great artist. Someday you’ll realise this. Second, you also need to know he’s sick. He’s mentally unbalanced. Finally, you need to know one golden rule – never make a hasty judgement of someone. If you do, you’re sure to regret it later. Now stop slouching once and for all! I didn’t say anything the least bit insulting.’

Even after I had developed the photograph it was difficult to make out anything in the painting behind Vrubel’s back. All I knew was that it was called The Demon.

I saw the painting for the first time much later, in the winter of 1911, in the Tretyakov Gallery. Icy clouds hung in the Moscow air. Steam poured from the swinging doors of the taverns. Amid this cosy winter scene, the city’s boulevards encased in snow and ice, its windows frosted with rime and tinged with the greenish glow of gaslights, Vrubel’s painting sparkled like a blue diamond, like some jewel from the icy peaks of the Caucasus. It hung in the gallery as if alive and absorbed the entire space into its cold beauty and its grandeur of human longing. I stood before The Demon Downcast for a long time. Slowly it began to dawn on me that the contemplation of such paintings not only produced visual pleasure but evoked from the depths of one’s consciousness thoughts and ideas of whose existence one had never even been aware.

I thought of Lermontov. I imagined him walking into the Tretyakov Gallery, his spurs softly jangling, casually tossing his grey coat to the attendant in the vestibule’s cloakroom, and then stopping to stare at The Demon Downcast with his gloomy eyes. It was he who wrote those bitter words about himself: ‘Like the flame of a shooting star in the night sky, I am of no use to this world.’ But my God, how wrong he was! How the world needs the brief flames of shooting stars, for man does not live by bread alone. He considered himself a captive of the world. He wasted the passion of his soul in the desert. But the desert blossomed after this and was brought to life by the power of his poetry, by his anger, his anguish and his knowledge of joy. For it was he, after all, who shyly confessed: ‘From under the bush, a silvery lily of the valley nods her head in friendship.’ And who knows, maybe the biting, rarefied air of the mountain heights, sprinkled with the demon’s blood, also holds a faint hint of the scent of that welcoming woodland flower. And Lermontov, like that downcast demon, was perhaps just a child denied what he so desperately sought from life: freedom, justice and love.

‘Well, found any Moscow photos yet?’ Father asked once more from behind the door.

His voice brought me out of my reverie. I started to develop the next roll and forgot about Vrubel. Images of Moscow streets and small houses covered in snow began to appear. Low barricades constructed out of barrels, boards, rocks and shop signs blocked the streets. Civilians holding rifles and revolvers stood next to the barricades. Then came images of tall buildings damaged by shells, the Gorbaty Bridge, the Zoological Garden clouded by dense smoke, bullet-riddled tavern signs, overturned trams. Everything was obscured by the winter haze, and nothing I did helped. No developer could dispel this haze and lend sharpness to the photographs. But the haze captured the atmosphere of the uprising most effectively. It was as if the photographs gave off a whiff of gunpowder and smoke.

Uprising! The word sounded so strange in the seemingly patriarchal Moscow of those days. I had read stories about the Indian Mutiny, I knew about the uprising of the Commune in Paris, the Decembrists’ Rebellion, but the Moscow uprising seemed to me the most powerful and the most romantic. I got out a map of Moscow. Father showed me the places where the fighting had taken place and where the barricades had been erected – Chistye Prudy, Samotëka, Kudrinskaya Square, Malaya and Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Streets, Presnya and Gorbaty Bridge. These names have held a special fascination for me ever since as places that became historically significant in my own lifetime. Everything associated with the uprising became important – the icy Moscow winter, the tea houses where the rebels met, the intermingling of elements of ancient Moscow with the new era signalled by the uprising. Droshky drivers in their ragged old cloth coats, the gilded biscuits over the bakers’ shops, the street vendors with their hot pies, and then amid all this – the whistling of bullets, the rushing about of armed men, the flash of steel revolvers, red flags and the words of ‘The Song of Warsaw’ – ‘Assailed by hostile whirlwinds on all sides, oppressed most sinisterly by dark forces …’ In all of it there was the poetry of struggle and the breath of freedom, which though approaching still lay shrouded in fog like a winter’s dawn. And there was courage and faith and hope. Across the enormous expanse of the country, Russians followed the glow of the fires in Presnya and awaited the victory of the rebels. The uprising was like a winter storm – a harbinger of future whirlwinds and purifying upheavals. Today I can describe the elevated mood that seized me at the time, but back then I could only feel but not explain it.

The following day I made prints of all the photographs and gave them to my father. It was dark outside, and the lamp burned in his study. The light fell on the familiar objects on his desk – the steel steam-engine model, the statuette of Pushkin with his curly whiskers and the stacks of satirical revolutionary magazines – there were many of them in those days. Most prominent of all, standing in the place of honour, was a picture postcard with a portrait of Lieutenant Schmidt in a black cloak fastened with lion-head clasps.fn1 Father lay on the sofa reading a newspaper. He looked at all the photographs and said: ‘An incredible country! Vrubel and an uprising! All here living together side by side like neighbours, and all leading to one thing.’

‘To what?’

‘It’s all leading to a better future. You’ll see a great many interesting things in your life, Kostik. If, that is, you grow up to become an interesting person.’