The Story of a Life

40

‘Here Lives Nobody’

On Professor Gilyarov’s front door hung a brass plate with an inscription: ‘Here Lives Nobody’.

Gilyarov lectured on the history of philosophy to the students of Kiev University. Grey-haired, bearded and wearing a baggy, shiny jacket covered in tobacco ash, he would hurry up to the rostrum, grabbing hold of its edges with his knotty hands, and begin to speak in a dull, inarticulate, almost reluctant voice. Outside the windows of the auditorium, it appeared as if the gilded gardens of Kiev were on fire. Autumn in Kiev dragged on for a long time. Our southern summer amassed so much warm sun, so much greenery and so much scent in its city parks that it was loath to say goodbye to this bounty and make way for the approaching autumn. Almost every year, summer would wreak havoc on the calendar and delay its departure.

As soon as Gilyarov began to speak, we students were lost to the world around us. We followed the professor’s vague mumbling, transfixed by the miracle of the human mind. Gilyarov revealed it to us slowly, almost angrily. Entire epochs called out to one another across the centuries in his lectures. We could not escape the sensation that one could not divide the great flow of human thought into discrete blocks, that it was impossible to tell where philosophy stops and poetry begins, and where poetry merges into regular, everyday life. Sometimes Gilyarov would pull out of the bulging pocket of his jacket a small volume of poetry with an owl – the bird of wisdom – embossed on its cover and read a few lines, as a way to prove some philosophical point:

Should our sun forget today

Its path and lose its way,

Some madman would have his say,

Conjuring up a whole new world the very next day.

Once in a while the bristles on his cheeks would stand up and Gilyarov’s squinty eyes would laugh. This usually happened when he talked about learning to know ourselves. After these lectures I would be filled with a belief in the infinite power of the human mind. Gilyarov would yell at us. He commanded us not to bury our potential in the ground. We must work on ourselves like the devil to develop all that lay inside us. We must become like the experienced conductor who knows how to elicit every possible sound from his orchestra and can force even the most stubborn musician to play his instrument to the fullest. ‘Man’, Gilyarov liked to say, ‘must give meaning to life, he must enrich and beautify it.’

Gilyarov’s idealism was tainted with bitterness and a perpetual regret about its gradual decay. Among the many of his sayings that have stayed with me is the one about ‘idealism’s last sunset and its deathbed ideas’. This old professor, who looked a good deal like Émile Zola, had nothing but contempt for the prosperous bourgeoisie and the liberal intelligentsia of the day. Thus the brass plate on his door with its acknowledgement of man’s worthlessness. We understood, of course, that Gilyarov had hung it specifically to annoy his respectable neighbours. Gilyarov was always talking about one’s obligation to enrich life. But we did not know how, exactly, this was to be done. Fairly quickly I came to the conclusion that in my case this meant trying to express as deeply as possible my sincere kinship with the Russian people. But how? In what way? When I thought about it, it seemed to me that the truest path must lie in becoming a writer. It was then that I realised that the only possible road in life for me was writing, that writing was my only way forward.

It was at that moment that my adult life began – often difficult, occasionally joyous – but always restless and so varied and changing that it’s easy to get lost when trying to remember it all. My youth had begun with my final years at the gymnasium, and it ended with the First World War. It ended, in other words, sooner than it should have. But then my generation was fated to experience enough wars, coups, trials, hopes, troubles and joys to last several generations of our forefathers. In the amount of time it takes Jupiter to orbit the sun, we had experienced so much that just thinking about it makes my heart ache. Our progeny will, of course, envy us for having taken part in and witnessed such monumental events.

The university was the centre of all progressive thinking in the city. Like most of the new students, I was at first shy and nervous and at a loss when meeting the older students, especially those so-called ‘eternal’ ones. These bearded men in their shabby, unbuttoned coats looked upon us first-year students as mindless puppies. What’s more, I simply could not get used to the fact that, unlike at the gymnasium, attendance at lectures was not mandatory and one could just as easily sit at home reading a book or spend the day out enjoying the city without fear of punishment. I gradually grew accustomed to the university and came to love it. It wasn’t the lectures I loved, or the professors (there weren’t many good ones), but the nature of university life itself. The lectures went on, in their own way, in the classrooms, while the turbulent and noisy life of the students went on in its own way, independent of the lectures, in the university’s long, dark hallways. All day long, the hallways echoed with arguments, meetings were held here, associations came together, factions formed, all under thick clouds of tobacco smoke.

It was here I first learned about the violent disagreements among the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, about the Bundists, the Dashnaks, Ukrainian nationalists and the Paole Zion party.fn1 Despite their differences, all of them would come together to confront a common foe – the so-called White Shirts, members of the Academic Union, a Black Hundreds group. Quarrels with the White Shirts often led to physical brawls, especially when students from the Caucasus were involved.

In the boiling intensity of these passions one could already feel the approach of some new era. It seemed strange that just a few steps away from all this passion, behind the doors of the lecture halls, respected, elderly professors were lecturing in quiet boredom about the trading practices of the Hanseatic League or comparative linguistics. In those years before the First World War many people sensed the coming of the storm, but they could not foresee the violence it would unleash on the earth. The air was thick and heavy then in Russia, and in much of the world, as it is before a storm. But the storm had yet to break, and this gave those with little foresight a feeling of calm. Alarm signals were sounding in the morning mist around Kiev like flashes of light from a distant yet approaching storm – striking workers, arrests and exile, endless proclamations. But it took a sensitive ear to make out behind all this the threatening rumble of the storm itself. This is why its first deafening crash in the summer of 1914 with the outbreak of the war stunned everyone.

After leaving school we all soon lost track of each other even though we had sworn this would never happen. First came the war, followed by the revolution, and since then I have seen hardly any of my classmates. The cheerful Stanishevsky disappeared somewhere, along with the home-grown philosopher Fitsovsky, the reserved Shmukler, the sluggish Matusevich and the birdlike Bulgakov.

I was living in Kiev. Mama, Galya and my brother Dima, a student of the Technological Institute, were in Moscow. My other brother, Borya, was also in Kiev, but we almost never saw each other. He had married a short, plump woman, who went around in a lavender Japanese kimono embroidered with cranes. Borya spent his days hunched over his designs for concrete bridges. His dark room, with its imitation oak wallpaper, smelled of fixative. The floor was sticky with paint. Photographs of the international beauty Lina Cavalieri were pinned to the wall.

Borya did not approve of my interest in philosophy and literature. ‘You must find your place in this world,’ he liked to say. ‘You’re a dreamer, just like Papa. Entertaining people is not serious business.’ He thought literature was merely for people’s entertainment. I did not want to argue with him. I guarded my passion for literature from others’ disapproval, and for this reason I stopped going to see Borya.

I was still living with our grandmother in the leafy Kievan suburb of Lukyanovka in a wing of the house deep in the garden. My room was filled with pots of fuchsias. I spent my days reading to the point of exhaustion. To get a bit of air, I would go out into the garden in the evening. The autumn air was cold and clear, and the stars shone through the barren trees. At first Grandmother would get cross and call me back inside, but then she got used to it and left me in peace. She would only say that I was just wasting my time, and this would inevitably lead to an attack of galloping consumption. But what could Grandmother do with my new friends? What could she object to about Pushkin or Heine, Fet or Leconte de Lisle, Dickens or Lermontov?

In the end, Grandmother washed her hands of me. She would sit in her room, light her lamp with its pink glass shade shaped like a large tulip, and lose herself in one of the infinite number of novels by Kraszewski. And I recalled the poet’s lines: ‘Only at night, like a call from the heart, / Do the stars’ golden eyelashes sparkle in the dark.’fn2 To me it seemed the earth was a repository for a great many treasures not unlike those golden eyelashes of the stars. I believed that life was preparing for me many fascinating things – encounters, loves, joys and sorrows, and shocks, and this premonition was the great happiness of my youth. What was to be, only the future could tell.

‘And now,’ as actors of old used to say to the audience before the play began, ‘we shall present to you various incidents from real life and we shall try to make you reflect upon them, to make you laugh, and to make you cry.’