The Story of a Life

27

‘Gentlemen Schoolboys’

Who could have known what was to become of us ‘gentlemen schoolboys’, as Bodyansky called us? What would we youths in our faded caps, always ready for any sort of prank, joke or fight, make of our lives? What, for example, would come of Bulgakov? No one could have known.

Bulgakov was older than me, but I remember well his extraordinary vitality, his ruthless tongue feared by all, and his aura of determination and strength – we felt it in everything he did and said, however trifling. Bulgakov loved tall tales and practical jokes, he loved pulling your leg. He managed to take our tired school life and transform it into a strange world filled with incredible people and events. Any colourless character, such as Supervisor Dolt, once caught up in the circle of Bulgakov’s playful inventiveness, would grow to become something much larger along the lines of a Sobakevich or a Tartarin de Tarascon.fn1 He began to lead a mysterious double life, nothing like the Dolt we knew with his bulbous alcoholic nose, but the hero of absurd and monstrous happenings. With his fictions Bulgakov displaced that real, recognisable world around us and shifted it ever so slightly over the edge into the realm of the phantasmagorical.

After leaving school I didn’t see Bulgakov again until 1924 when he was already an established writer. His connection to Kiev had remained. In his play The Days of the Turbins I recognised our school’s vestibule and Proctor Maxim ‘Cold Water’, that honest and boring old man. I could practically hear the autumn wind rustling our Kiev chestnut trees in the theatre’s wings.

I went to school with several boys who later became well-known writers, actors and playwrights. Kiev has always had a passion for the theatre. Was it an accident that over a short time our school produced so many people who found their way to literature and theatre? I don’t think so. (When we were ‘accidentally’ late to class, Suboch would say to us that there was nothing accidental in life other than death. After uttering this statement, Suboch would give the latecomers the lowest possible passing mark in comportment.) Of course, this was no accident. The reasons for this fact were so many and so difficult to easily discern that we, given our laziness, didn’t want to go to the trouble of looking deeply into matters and preferred to think that it all happened due to some happy coincidence.

We forget those teachers who inculcated in us a love of culture, we forget Kiev’s magnificent theatres, we forget that each and every one of us was enthralled by philosophy and poetry, and we forget that during our youth Chekhov and Tolstoy, Serov and Levitan, Scriabin and Komissarzhevskaya were all still alive.fn2

We forget the revolution of 1905, the student meetings we boys sneaked off to, the adults’ arguments we overheard, and we forget that Kiev had always had its own revolutionary fervour. We forget how we inhaled Plekhanov, Chernyshevskyfn3 and all those revolutionary pamphlets printed on cheap grey paper bearing slogans like ‘Proletarians of the World, Unite!’ and ‘Land and Freedom.’ We read Herzen and Kropotkin, The Communist Manifesto and the novels of the revolutionary Kravchinsky.fn4 Disorderly though it was, this reading bore its fruits.

We forget the famous Idzikovskaya Library on Kreshchatik, the symphony concerts, Kiev’s parks, the bright and crisp autumn days, the noble solemnity of Latin which accompanied us throughout our school years. We forget the Dnieper, the mild foggy winters, and rich, gentle Ukraine which embraced the city with its fields of buckwheat, its thatched roofs and beehives.

It is difficult to say exactly how these many various things influenced us in our youth, but they did. They imposed a distinctive poetic structure on our thoughts and feelings.

We immersed ourselves in reading. Our understanding of Russian literature, with all its classical clarity and depth, came to us later than that of the West. We were young, and Western literature attracted us with its elegance, its calm and its perfection of design. The cool transparency of Mérimée was easier for us than the torments of Dostoevsky. Mérimée, like Flaubert, was as clear as a summer morning, whereas Dostoevsky descended like a thunderstorm and made us run for cover. We found that same freedom from doubt in Dickens, in Hugo and Balzac. It’s possible that the ‘Universal Library’ was responsible for our passion for Western literature. Those cheap little yellow books flooded the bookshops. For twenty kopecks you could read anything from Mont Oriol and Eugénie Grandet, to The Wild Duck or The Charterhouse of Parma. We tore through them all.

For a while we were especially carried away by French poetry – Verlaine, Leconte de Lisle and Théophile Gauthier. We read them in the original and in translation. Their French, at times almost as elusive as some distant scent, at others as hard as steel, cast a magical spell over us. We loved this poetry not only for its melody and vague mistiness, as light as the haze on a spring day, but also since it evoked in us an image of the poets themselves, and of Paris. This poetry was but one of many enchanting things about Paris. Slate roofs, broad boulevards, rain, streetlights, the Pantheon, a rose-coloured night sky over the Seine, and, finally, poetry. Out of such things did we construct our naïve impression of Paris, and it was as inconceivable without poetry as it was without barricades and kisses.

It was not long, however, before this poetry paled for me beside the rich gold mine of the Russian poetic tradition –

The forest sheds its crimson dress,

The frost casts silver upon the withered field …

We grew, and gradually Russian literature, perhaps the greatest in the world, possessed our hearts and relegated the literature of the West to a less prominent though still honoured place.

We are also passionate about painting. There hung in the Assembly Hall a marble plaque of honour with the names engraved in gold lettering of those graduates who had earned some distinction or become famous. Among them was the painter Ge.fn5 We disliked old Ge for his gloomy style and moralising tone. At the time a delayed vogue for Impressionism was taking hold.

My classmate Emma Shmukler was preparing to become an artist. He studied painting under the Kiev impressionist Manievich.fn6 I loved Manievich’s paintings – village huts and gardens, painted in bold strokes, almost as if he worked with a palette knife.

I often visited Shmukler. Theirs was, as we used to say, an artistic home. His father was a well-known physician who often treated patients for free. In his youth he had dreams of becoming an opera singer, but for some reason this did not work out. Nevertheless, opera remained his life’s great passion. Everything in their house spoke of the opera – not only the doctor himself, a heavy-set, clean-shaven man with a booming voice, but the grand piano, the hand-written scores on the stand, the jardinières awaiting floral tributes, the portraits of celebrated singers, and the mother-of-pearl opera glasses. Even the constant noise in the house spoke of the opera. The shouting, the heated arguments – all of it sounded like roulades and recitatives, duets and trios that began at moderato and then swelled from allegro to forte in clashing arias for male, female and children’s voices. There was a distinct melody hidden among all the noise. The Shmuklers’ voices had a clear, free ring to them like bel canto, and they carried out of the flat, echoing through the hall and cascading down the front staircase.

Although I visited their home often, I preferred the small rented room of another classmate, the Pole Fitsovsky. Like me, he lived alone. A stocky boy with a lock of chestnut hair falling down his forehead, he was imperturbable and regarded everything as a pointless fuss. He had a number of eccentricities which upset the teachers. For example, he had a habit of always talking to Stanishevsky, a happy-go-lucky boy who sat next to him, in pure Russian but in such a way no one could understand a word he was saying. The reason was quite simple. Fitsovsky spoke extremely fast and always accented the wrong syllable in every word.

Fitsovsky forced me to learn Esperanto. This language, invented by the Warsaw oculist Zamenhof, had a single merit – it was easy. Many newspapers were published in Esperanto in various countries. What I found interesting in these newspapers were the lists of addresses for people who wished to correspond with others in Esperanto. Inspired by Fitsovsky’s example, I began corresponding with a few Esperantists in Britain, France, Canada and even Uruguay. I sent them picture postcards of Kiev and in return received cards with views of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paris, Montevideo and Quebec. Gradually, I recommended we expand the nature of our correspondence and asked them to send me portraits of writers and illustrated magazines. And so, I received a splendid portrait of Byron from a young English doctor in Manchester and one of Hugo from a young Frenchwoman in Orléans. She was very curious and asked me all sorts of questions – was it true that Russian priests wore vestments made of gold thread and that Russian military officers all spoke French?

We gathered for a little party at Fitsovsky’s every week. We didn’t drink much (we only had enough money for a single bottle of brandy), but still we put on airs of being Lermontov’s hussars – we read poetry, we argued, we gave speeches, we sang. We stayed up until the early hours of the morning, and when the first rays of dawn began to filter through the smoke-filled room, they struck us as the beginning of a remarkable new life waiting for us just outside the door. The best were in springtime when the clear morning air rang with the songs of the birds and our heads were filled with romantic tales.

This remarkable life waiting for us just outside the door was inextricably connected to the theatre.

That year we were all taken with Russian drama and the actress Polevitskaya,fn7 who played the parts of Liza in A Nest of Gentlefolk and Nastasya in The Idiot. We could go to the theatre only with Inspector Bodyansky’s written permission. He allowed us only one chit per week. So we started making forgeries. I got so good at faking Bodyansky’s signature that even he couldn’t tell the forgeries from the real ones when they were confiscated and presented to him by the supervisors. He would yell: ‘I ought to lock you all up! Theatre, theatre, nothing but the theatre! You should be hunched over your Latin texts, not hanging out in the gallery! A bunch of forgers, all of you! You dishonour your well-respected parents!’

We waited for Polevitskaya after the play outside the stage door. Out she came – tall and bright-eyed. She smiled at us and got into her sleigh. The horses shook, rattling their bells. The sound followed them down Nikolaevskaya Street as they disappeared in the snowy depths of the night.

Each of us, our cheeks ablaze, hurried off our separate ways in the heavily falling snow. We slipped on the pavement as we went, bubbling over with a happiness that kept us from falling asleep once home in our beds. It flickered on the walls of my room from the light of the street lamp. It piled up in mounds of snow on the ground. It sang to me all night through my warm sleep with its eternal song of love and sorrow. Sleighs whistled by beneath my window. I heard the heavy gallop of horses through the snow. Who was in such a hurry so late at night? In Lieutenant Romuald’s room a guitar string sounded by itself. Its hum died away slowly, becoming first a silver hair, next a silver cobweb. Then it was silent.

And so I passed that winter, in a state of joyful excitement, the days all a blur. Reality and poetry had become so entwined I could not tell one from the other. I lived then all on my own, surviving on the little I made giving lessons. I had just enough money for food and a few books, but perhaps since I was young, life was never frightening or a burden.