The Story of a Life

43

To One Side of the War

Now that almost half a century has passed since the First World War, I think of those still relatively recent days as a distant past, as if shrouded in the mists of legend. A thunderous century seems to lie in between, splitting our lives in two. Everything has shifted. Everything has moved, as though displaced by a sudden blow. Now we are amused by what we once considered important. We are indulgent towards our former thoughtlessness and towards our inability to make sense of life’s cunning designs, of our relationships and of our own selves. Now we think of everything prior to 1917 as our childhood, even though by then the men and women of my generation were already in their twenties.

The war of 1914 did not possess our consciousness so completely as would all that was to come later. In Russia at that time there was a margin of life that continued off to one side of the war. The hall of the Polytechnical Museum filled to bursting every time the Futurists or Igor Severyanin performed. Everyone was fascinated with Rabindranath Tagore. The Moscow Arts Theatre convulsed with agony as it searched for a new Hamlet. In Moscow, the ‘literary Wednesdays’ continued at the home of the writer Teleshov, although the writers at these gatherings rarely discussed the war. Religious philosophy, God-seeking, symbolism, calls to revive Hellenic philosophy – all this coexisted with progressive revolutionary thought and sought to win over converts.

My family belonged to the middling stratum of the intelligentsia. My father was a statistician. Like most statisticians of the time, Father had been a liberal. From my earliest childhood I heard Father and his friends talk about freedom, about the inevitability of revolution, and about the wretched condition of the people. These discussions invariably took place over tea at the dining room table, and every time Mama would alert the men with her eyes to the presence of us children as she said to Father: ‘Georgy, you’re getting carried away, as always.’

To me, ‘the people’, those suffering, beaten-down millions, meant the peasants. I had heard little of the workers. In our circles one rarely used the term ‘the proletariat’. Sometimes people spoke of ‘artisans’ and ‘factory hands’, and these words conjured up for me the industrial outskirts of Kiev, crowded barracks and strikes.

Every time I heard these words – ‘the proletariat’ and ‘the working class’ – for some reason I had the impression that the only proletariat in Russia was to be found in sooty Petrograd, and then only in a few enormous factories, such as the Putilov or Obukhov steel works. Such naïve childish notions and my passion for literature meant that up until the February Revolution I didn’t know the first thing about the revolutionary movement.

The word ‘revolutionary’ meant nothing more to me than someone terribly brave, unbending and selfless. Not that I had been completely ignorant of the revolutionary movement in my youth. I had witnessed the events of 1905, knew well the details of the December uprising in Moscow, the story of the Moscow–Kazan Railway, and the mutinies on the battleships Potëmkin and Ochakov, and I bowed my head before Lieutenant Schmidt. Nevertheless, it was chiefly the romance of it all that excited me – the secret underground printing presses, dynamite, infernal machines, escapes from Siberian exile, fiery speeches. As for the larger significance, I had nothing but a vague notion that could be summed up as ‘the struggle for freedom’.

I lived with these ideas up until the outbreak of war in 1914. Only then did I begin to comprehend the larger social forces at work in Russia. In 1914, Moscow was far away from the front. The only reminders of the war were the great many wounded men in brown hospital gowns wandering about the city and women in mourning. One evening I got up the courage to attend one of the ‘literary Wednesdays’. The writers met in an old mansion in a quiet lane near Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street. I took a seat in the back row and didn’t get up until the end of the evening. I was afraid someone would notice and ask me to leave, just like some ticketless passenger, even though I was surrounded by a number of young men and women no different to myself. They all behaved as if they belonged there, which only made me feel more out of place.

My face was hot – I had never been this close to real writers before. I could not shake off the thought that even though they were all dressed in ordinary clothes and spoke the same words as all the rest of us mere mortals, still an enormous gulf separated us. This gulf was called talent, a mastery over ideas, images and words – everything, in short, that at the time I believed to be a kind of magic. I looked upon each and every one of these writers as the direct heirs of Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy, the appointed guardians of the traditions of Russian literature.

Back then I could not accept Pushkin’s words that writers and poets were at times the greatest scoundrels in the world. I was unable to separate the author from his body of work. And so it was with equal excitement that I gazed at Alexei Tolstoy’s coachman’s haircut, at the tousled head of Ivan Shmelëv, who looked like a land surveyor, at the meek face of Zaitsev and at the icy Bunin, who was reading his story ‘The Psalm’ in a monotone.fn1

I had hoped to see Maxim Gorky at this ‘Wednesday’, but he wasn’t there. Sitting next to me was a consumptive old man who appeared to be made up entirely of wrinkles. He coughed the whole time into a dark handkerchief and his eyes glistened – he apparently had a fever. He was following every word spoken by the writers seated before us on a platform and would turn to me, saying: ‘Oh, isn’t Russia wonderful! Oh, just wonderful!’

We left together. He lived out beyond Presnenskaya Square, in the same direction as me, and so we walked along side by side. A grey moon shone through the bare trees. Frozen leaves crunched under our feet. Light from the windows fell on my companion’s pork-pie astrakhan hat. It turned out he was a typesetter at Sytin’s.fn2 His name was Yelisey Sverchkov.

‘I was born in the provinces,’ he said, stopping for a minute to cough. ‘In the town of Kashin. I always wanted to be a writer, but I don’t have the skill for it. Words simply don’t come to me. I have a good feel for words, you might say, I know their nuances, their subtleties, but I can’t marshal them into any proper order. There are many meanings hidden in every word, and it’s the writer’s job to place one word next to another in just such a way, my young man, that it will strike the right note in the reader’s heart. That’s where talent comes in. Inspiration! A writer doesn’t search for words, doesn’t select them – he seizes on the necessary word in an instant, just as a typesetter grabs the necessary letter from his tray without having to look. And once he’s put it there, not even the devil himself could make him give it up, for if he did the entire beautiful edifice would come crashing down.’

‘Have you tried to write?’ I asked the typesetter.

‘I’ve tried and tried. And I’m still trying. But it’s no use. I have this habit – on my days off I visit either the Tretyakov or the Rumyantsev Gallery. I pick one painting I like and look at it and try to place myself inside it, as if I were a participant in what’s being depicted. Take, for example, Savrasov’s The Rooks Have Come Back.fn3 Or Levitan’s March. My entire childhood is captured in Savrasov’s painting. A slushy Russian spring, puddles, a cold wind, low clouds, wet fences. Levitan’s March is another kind of spring, although still unmistakably ours, truly very Russian – a bright blue sky over the trees, and the drip-drip of thawing snow and melting icicles, a ray of sunshine in every drop of water as it falls from the roof. I see it all so clearly. And then I go home and try to recreate with words in my notebook everything I’ve seen, to paint, as it were, with words just as the artist paints with umber and sienna and cobalt. I want the reader to have an image in his head that corresponds exactly with the painting, as if he’d seen it himself. I want him to smell the manure, if you’ll excuse me, and hear the rooks. I have done more than a hundred of these descriptions. I showed them a while ago to a writer – I’m not going to say who. I was so nervous. It was embarrassing. He read them and said: “Yes, it’s quite literary, and the grammar’s fine, but what’s the point? I’d rather go and look at the paintings myself than read your descriptions of them. What made you want to try to compete with Savrasov, Levitan or Korovin?fn4 They knew what they were doing. You’re not going to teach them anything.”

‘I tried to explain: “Well, I had this idea of developing the written word to such a point that it would have a visual effect on the reader, just like the way an artist uses paint on a canvas.”

‘“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

‘With that I walked away. Still, I did learn one thing: I have no talent for writing! It’s a pity, but true. If I did, I’m certain I could create some amazing works.’

I accompanied the typesetter home. He lived at the back of a narrow courtyard that was piled high with rusty old bedsteads. There was a bedstead manufactory in one of the building’s wings. Sverchkov asked me to come and visit sometime and then added: ‘I live here surrounded by beds, yet I sleep on a broken-down old trestle board. These here are all old. They were donated. They’ll be fixed up and distributed to military hospitals. On account of the war. I don’t understand this war. It’s the result of a lack of basic friendship among people. If ordinary people like us just got together and said in one voice “No!”, well, that would put an end to all this bloody business. That’s my dream – that someone will come along and teach us how to be friends. Is it possible there’s no one on earth who could do that?’

He rapped on a little window. No one responded, but I heard a woman burst into angry sobs.

‘She doesn’t understand!’ sighed Sverchkov. ‘The weaker sex. I’ve got no more than a year to live, but she just doesn’t understand. You’ll have to excuse me, young man.’

I said goodbye and left. It was so quiet out on Bolshaya Presnya Street that you could hear the yawns of the night watchmen. The tiled shopfronts of Chichkin’s and Blandov’s dairies, one white, the other blue, gleamed softly in the lamplight. Whenever Chichkin opened one of his white-tiled shops, Blandov was sure to open a blue-tiled shop just opposite in the hope of stealing his customers.

Everyone was already asleep at home. Even Zakharov’s room was dark. I went to my room and lay down on the floor. The gaslight outside shone faintly through my window.

I lay there thinking about the typesetter from Kashin. My thoughts didn’t upset me, rather they brought with them a feeling of peace. It was clear there were so many exceptionally talented men and women in this country. No one knew how many of them there were scattered about in Russia’s towns and villages. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? How much thought, energy and time they gave to improving, enriching, celebrating and glorifying their country.

The typesetter had been right, of course – you could perform miracles with the Russian language. There was nothing in our experience, no thought or sensation, that couldn’t be expressed in Russian. Music, colours, light, the rustling shadows of gardens, the ambiguity of dreams, the rumbling of storms, the whisper of children, the crash of waves along the beach – for all this and more we could find in our language the exact expression.

It’s easy to think in the city at night, when the only sounds are the distant whistling of trains or the occasional clatter of a passing droshky over the cobblestones. I got up, went over to the window and stood staring for a long time at the Zoological Garden. It looked like a giant black island surrounded by the dimly lit streets of Moscow. I turned round and saw a patch of white on the table. I thought it must be a note from Mama. I picked it up, lit a match and read the uneven lines of a telegram from Kiev:

Posted to sapper unit leaving for western front address to follow will write more when able don’t worry kisses to you Galya Kostik Borya

So now Borya was off as well! I was suddenly overcome with shame. Why had I felt so superior to him? Just because of my woolly attraction to art? Not having written a single worthwhile line, for some reason I already considered myself among the elect. I had laughed at his room, his concrete bridges, his down-to-earth philosophy. But what was funny about it? At least he was honest. He worked like an ox, never lied and never dodged his obligations. So what if he preferred Henryk Sienkiewicz to Chekhov? Was there some sin in this? I, who had been such an enemy of other people’s prejudices, had fallen under the sway of the pettiest of prejudices.

I lit a second match and read the telegram once more. I wondered: why had Mama not waited up for me instead of leaving the telegram on my table? Why? Could it be because she knew what I thought of Borya, and she couldn’t bear to see it written on my face at such a difficult moment?

I got dressed and went to see Mama. She was not asleep. I sat down next to her and stroked her dry grey hair, at a loss as to how I might try to comfort her. She cried softly so as not to wake Galya.

I realised then how cruel and unjust young people can be, even if their heads are filled with lofty ideas.

Mama didn’t fall asleep until dawn. I went back to my room, put on my conductor’s uniform, grabbed my empty satchel and tiptoed out. A dim light filtered through the dirty windows onto the stairs. I picked my way down through the old tomcats that lay splayed out asleep on the steps. Two-wheeled hospital carts, with red crosses painted on their green tarpaulins, rumbled down Bolshaya Gruzinsksya Street on their way to the Brestsky goods station. Crinkly dry leaves from the lilac trees in the Zoological Garden were being driven along the pavement. Big drops of a heavy morning rain began to fall, drumming on the carts’ roofs and drenching the dusty leaves.