The Story of a Life

33

Instructors of the Humanities

Shulgin, our Russian literature teacher, an elegant old man with a luxuriant white beard and blue eyes, was known for one unusual personal trait: he simply could not stand nonsensical remarks. If he heard the least bit of foolishness, he immediately flew into a rage. He went red in the face, grabbed textbooks and tore them to shreds or, clenching his fists, shook them in the face of some terrified schoolboy with such ferocity that you could hear his round cufflinks clank violently: ‘You! Yes, you! Get out, now! Please, go! Get out!’

These fits were followed by complete exhaustion. He was ill, of course. We knew it, and so did the teachers and the supervisors. If a fit went on too long, Platon Fëdorovich tiptoed into the classroom, took Shulgin gently by the shoulders and led him to the teachers’ common room. There he was revived with essence of valerian.

By nature Shulgin was a gentle and kind old man. His understanding of Russian literature was primitive and uninspiring. His system of handing out marks was haphazard. All the younger boys had to do to improve a poor mark was to cry on his shoulder. One day in class Shulgin had us write an essay on the hackneyed theme of ‘Feminine Types in the Works of Turgenev’. Unexpectedly, Gudim, a cheeky and affected boy whose hands were always smeared with ink, cried out: ‘The parrots have returned and just landed on the boulevard!’

It was the kind of nonsense calculated to drive Shulgin mad. The fit began that instant. Shulgin grabbed Gudim and shook him so hard that the boy’s head started bouncing off the wall behind his desk. Next, he tore at Gudim’s uniform, ripping off the gold buttons in the process.

Matusevich held Shulgin’s arms while another boy ran off to get Platon Fëdorovich. Shulgin sat down on a desk, clutched his head and sobbed. For many of us the sight was too much, and we raised the lids of our desks and hid. A frightened Inspector Varsapont and Platon Fëdorovich appeared, and together they took Shulgin away. The room was deadly quiet. Stanishevsky stood up. He was very pale. He walked slowly over to Gudim and said: ‘You bastard! Get out of here now! Or you’re dead. Understand?’

Gudim gave him a wicked grin and didn’t move from his desk. Stanishevsky grabbed him by the front of his uniform, pulled him up and then threw him on the floor. Gudim got up. The classroom remained silent.

‘Understand?’ Stanishevsky repeated.

Gudim walked unsteadily to the door. He stopped before leaving. He wanted to say something but saw our cold, angry looks. Dropping his head, he slunk out. He never came back. He couldn’t have even if he wanted to – the school’s moral code was ruthless. No exceptions were made. Gudim’s parents removed him from the gymnasium and sent him to Valker’s Technical School, a refuge for hooligans and idlers.

Shulgin also never came back. He was ill for a long time, but even after he recovered his doctors forbade him from teaching. Sometimes we ran into him in Nikolaevskaya Square. He liked to sit there and sun himself, resting his chin on the pommel of his walking stick while children played on the sand around him. We always bowed to Shulgin, but he just looked at us with terror in his eyes and said nothing.

We had no better luck with our next Russian literature teacher. Trostyansky was a tall, conceited man with a pale face. According to him, all Russia’s writers could be divided into two categories – decent men worthy of study and lower-class seditionists whose wasted talent was to be pitied and best not spoken of. Trostyansky annoyed us. In the essays we wrote for him we overthrew his gods and elevated his villains. Smiling politely, he tried to explain to us in a quiet voice that we were mistaken and gave us low marks.

Trostyansky was replaced by Selikhanovich, who taught psychology as well as Russian literature. He looked like the poet Bryusovfn1 and wore a black frock coat buttoned up to his chin. He was a sensitive and talented man. He ‘washed’ Russian literature before us just like expert art restorers wash old paintings. He cleaned away the dust and grime of decades’ worth of inaccurate interpretations, classroom boredom, clichés and petty judgements. Many of us were shocked at what we now saw before us – here was a literature of magnificent colours, of profound meaning, of rare truth the likes of which we had never noticed before.

We learned a great deal from Selikhanovich, and not only Russian literature. He introduced us to the Renaissance, to nineteenth-century European philosophy, to the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen and to the poetry of The Lay of Igor, whose Old Slavonic text we had up until then just mindlessly memorised for our examinations.

Selikhanovich had rare descriptive powers. He talked about the most complex philosophical theories in such a way that made them clear and easily grasped, and he filled one with wonder at the enormous powers of the human mind. Philosophers, writers, scholars and poets, whose names had meant nothing to us other than a string of dates and ‘Services to Humanity’ to be memorised, became living people. Selikhanovich showed us that they had never existed on their own but had belonged to concrete historical epochs.

In his lectures on Gogol, Selikhanovich conjured up for us the Rome of his time – its streets, hills and ruins, its artists and carnivals, its very air and the blue of its sky. A line of amazing men and women all connected to Rome and its history paraded before our eyes, brought to life by a magic power that was both simple and available to everyone. This power was nothing other than knowledge, passion and imagination.

We passed from one epoch to another, from one interesting place to another. Through the study of literature, Selikhanovich took us everywhere – from the armouries of Tula to the Cossack outposts on the border with Dagestan, from a drizzly autumn day at Boldino to the orphanages and debtors’ prisons of Dickensian England, from the markets of Paris to Chopin’s sick bed in an ancient monastery on the island of Majorca, and even to lonely Taman where the sea wind rustled through the fields of maize.

We loved learning about the lives of those writers who had taught us so much about our country and the world and our notions of beauty – Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Herzen, Ryleev,fn2 Chekhov, Dickens, Balzac and so many others. All this knowledge filled us with pride in the power of the human spirit and of art.

Along the way, Selikhanovich taught us other things as well, such as manners and tact. He liked to pose problems. ‘A few people are sitting in a room,’ he once said. ‘All the chairs are occupied. A woman walks in. You can see she’s been crying. What should a gentleman do?’

We replied that he must of course get up and offer her his chair.

‘And what would someone who was both polite and tactful do?’ he asked.

We had no idea.

‘Give her the chair with its back to the light so her eyes aren’t so clearly visible,’ said Selikhanovich.

What astonished me about Selikhanovich was what he said upon learning of my wish to become a writer: ‘Do you have the perseverance for it?’

I hadn’t thought of it as a necessary trait in being a writer. Later I learned that he had been right.

One day he stopped me in the corridor and said: ‘Come to Balmont’s lecture tomorrow.fn3 It’s imperative that if you want to write prose you must know poetry as well.’

I went to Balmont’s lecture. The title was ‘Poetry as Magic’. It was hot and crowded inside the Merchants’ Assembly. The candles of two bronze candelabras burned on a small table covered with a green velvet cloth.

Balmont came out. He was wearing a frock coat with a flowing silk tie. A humble camomile peeped out of the hole on his lapel. His thinning yellowish hair fell in soft curls around his collar. He fixed his eyes on a point over our heads in a manner that was both mysterious and haughty. Balmont was no longer a young man. He spoke in a slow, leisurely voice. After every sentence he paused and listened to his own words, like a pianist with a foot on the loud pedal listening to the vibration of a chord.

After the interval Balmont recited some of his verse. It seemed to me that his poems contained all that wondrous musicality of the Russian language –

In the deserted woods, a cuckoo cries tenderly,

So full of longing, of strangeness, the sound of its entreaty.

Springtime, to me, at once mournful and happy,

And the beauty of this world an unexpected glory.

He spoke with his small reddish beard pointed up to the ceiling, and his words broke over the auditorium in waves –

Like some distant patter of feet, I catch a murmur outside my window,

A strange, unintelligible whispering – the whispering of raindrops.

Balmont finished. The pendants of the chandeliers vibrated from the applause. He raised a hand, and everyone fell silent. ‘I am going to read to you “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe,’ he said. ‘But first I want to tell you a story which shows how fate is, at times, kind to us poets. When Poe died and was buried in Baltimore, his relatives erected an unbelievably heavy tombstone over his grave. These God-fearing Quakers, so it seems, wanted to be certain that the poet’s rebellious spirit remained in the grave and had no chance of coming back to disturb the peace of honest hard-working Americans. But when they placed this stone on Poe’s grave, it broke. And so it lies there to this very day, and every spring pansies grow in the cracks of this stone.’

Balmont began to read ‘The Raven’. The gloomy splendour of the poem filled the hall. It was as if we had magically left Kiev for some dark, snow-covered plain buffeted by a howling wind. The iron clang of ‘Nevermore’ fell into the emptiness of that night like the striking of a tower clock.

‘Nevermore!’ His mind could not accept it. Nevermore? Would Virginia nevermore walk the earth and would she nevermore knock lightly, shyly on the heavy door? Would there nevermore be youth, love and happiness? ‘Nevermore!’ cawed the raven, and this little forgotten man, this great American poet, shrank from loneliness in his worn armchair and looked with the eyes of a sick child into the cold abyss.

All my life I have been grateful to Selikhanovich for awakening my love of poetry. It was poetry that revealed to me the richness of language. In verse words were reborn, they acquired their full power. The enormous world of poetic imagery entered into my consciousness as if a blindfold had been removed from my eyes.

While Selikhanovich was introducing us to literature and philosophy, old man Klyachin was opening our eyes to the history of western Europe. Thin, with a bulging Adam’s apple, screwed-up and rather weak eyes, always unshaven and his frock coat unbuttoned, Klyachin spoke in a hoarse voice. He spat out his words in quick, short bursts, like lumps of clay, which he used to create lifelike statues of Danton, Babeuf, Marat, Napoleon, Louis-Philippe, Gambetta. We could hear the indignation in his throat when he talked about the coup of 9 Thermidor or the treachery of Thiers. He would get so carried away he’d light a cigarette and then catch himself and immediately put it out on the closest desk.

Klyachin was an authority on the French Revolution. That a school like ours even tolerated such a teacher was something of a mystery. Sometimes he became so overcome with emotion it seemed that he had forgotten he was talking to a group of schoolboys and not the deputies of the National Convention. He was a living anachronism and at the same time the most progressive of all our teachers. At times he seemed to us to be the last of the Montagnards – an ancient creature who had miraculously lived to a hundred and ended up in Kiev. Somehow, he had escaped the guillotine and death in the swamps of Guyana and not lost an ounce of his burning fervour.

Once in a while Klyachin was too tired to talk about the revolution, and so he talked to us about Paris in those times – the streets and buildings, the type of lamps they used to light the squares at night, what the women wore, the songs sung by the common folk, what the newspapers looked like. Hearing him talk, many of us wished we could go back a hundred years and see for ourselves those great events which he had described to us.