The Story of a Life

69

A Raw February

In Moscow I went straight from the station to the headquarters of the Union of Cities. The first person I ran into there was Kedrin. We were so pleased to see each other after so long that we kissed. Kedrin had been sent to Moscow from Minsk on business. I told him I wanted to rejoin the unit.

‘That’s a tricky matter,’ he said. ‘Let me see what I can find out.’

He left to see what he could do and was gone a long time. When he finally came back, he told me with an air of mystery that at present nothing could be done to help. Morale in the army was quite unsettled, it was a tense time, and it would be better to avoid any trouble at the front. That was the opinion of the union’s leadership. I was deeply upset. Kedrin removed his glasses, cleaned them, and then put them back on and looked at me closely.

‘Don’t get down,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll find you some work. Romanin showed me that piece of yours, “Blue Overcoats”. You can write.’

He wrote a letter recommending me to an acquaintance of his who worked in the editorial office of a Moscow newspaper. I went immediately and was met in a dusty room by a bald man with the face of an old actor. He was sitting behind a desk buried under galleys. Seated across from him in a heavy armchair was a fat little man with the silver moustache of a Zaporozhian Cossack dressed in a grey long-waisted coat and a lambskin hat. There was a wily twinkle in his eyes. He could have been Taras Bulba himself.fn1

The bald man read Kedrin’s letter and said: ‘So, I see there’s still some life in that old dog yet! Just a moment.’ With that he shoved Kedrin’s letter under a pile of galleys and went on with his writing.

Taras Bulba pulled a silver snuffbox out of his coat pocket, tapped it with a finger, opened it and then, with a quick conspiratorial wink, offered it to me. ‘Please, have some! General Skobelev himself presented it to me after Plevna.’

I said no, thank you. Taras Bulba deftly sprinkled some snuff onto his thumbnail, snorted it up his nose and let out a deafening sneeze. There was a smell of dried cherries. The bald man didn’t pay Taras Bulba the slightest attention. Taras Bulba nodded in the direction of Baldy as he gave me another wink, picked up a horseshoe being used as a paperweight on some galleys, and then proceeded to bend it straight. At this, Baldy looked up. ‘That’s an old trick!’ he said. ‘That won’t get me to change my mind. There’s a war on – no advances!’

‘You’ve got a visitor,’ said Taras Bulba, pointing to me. ‘All I was trying to do was remind you of that fact. Nothing more.’

‘Well, all right then,’ he said reluctantly and gave me a look. ‘Let’s see. Tell us, who are you then? Oh, by the way, I’m Mikhail Alexandrovich, and this’, here he pointed to Taras Bulba, ‘is the king of Moscow reporters – the poet, former wrestler, actor, connoisseur of local slums and bosom-friend of Chekhov and Kuprin,fn2 the famous ‘Uncle Gilyai’, the one and only Vladimir Alexeevich Gilyarovsky.’fn3

I didn’t know what to say.

‘Ignore him. I don’t bite!’ said Gilyarovsky, noticing my unease. He shook my hand so hard he nearly crushed my knuckles. He got up and started towards the door but stopped, nodded at me and said: ‘I believe in him.’ With that Gilyarovsky walked out, humming a tune.

Baldy hired me, told me how fortunate I was, and said: ‘These are perilous times, fraught with uncertainties. It appears we’re about to witness Russia’s second “Time of Troubles”.fn4 Things appear calm on the surface, but underneath the country’s boiling, and the tighter the government tries to screw down the lid, the bigger will be the explosion. We need to keep an eye on this simmering pot. We need to know what Moscow is thinking and talking about. What are people saying in the theatres, at home, at the markets and in the factories, in the banyas and on the trams? What are the workers saying, the cabbies, cobblers, milkmaids, actors, merchants, engineers, students, professors, soldiers and writers? That’s going to be your job. For now, and then we’ll see.’

That same day I took a small room in Granatny Lane, the very street where I had been born twenty-three years earlier.

I noticed that Russians spoke most freely in trains and taverns. So, I began my work on the loud, smoke-filled suburban lines that extended up to sixty versts from Moscow. I would buy a return ticket and ride to the end of the line and back. I managed to visit a good many towns around Moscow and quickly became convinced that the city was surrounded by an ancient, moss-covered Russia about which few of even the oldest Muscovites had any idea.

The backwoods started just fifty versts from the city – brigand-infested forests, impassable roads, tumbledown settlements, rotting old churches besieged by holy fools, starving horses covered in their own excrement, brawling drunks, graveyards with broken crosses, peasants living alongside their sheep, snotty children, savage monasteries, rubbish-strewn markets shrill with squealing pigs and vile cursing – nothing but decay, poverty and thieving wherever you looked.

And throughout the whole of this land, where the wind whistled in the bare branches of the birch trees, you could hear the harsh, stifled weeping of women. Soldiers’ mothers, wives, sisters and brides. They wept quietly, hopelessly, as though no one and nothing could ease their grief.

So did this land lie waiting for winter – palisades of young firs black against the crimson of the dying autumn sunsets, the crackly first ice, as fine as sugar, the smoke of frozen villages drifting over the fields. Never before had Blok’s lines seemed so prophetic:

My Russia, my life, are we to languish together?

Yoked to the Tsar and Siberia, to Yermak and prison …

I listened to endless conversations – drunk and sober, meek and desperate, resigned and angry – and the one thing they had in common was the hope for peace so that the soldiers could come home from the war and life would become less of a struggle, for without this there was nothing left to do except to die a hungry death. It seemed as if all the people’s anger had been gathered out there, to the west, in the army. The village was waiting for this anger to roll back like the tide, smashing their hateful old way of life and sweeping away their wretched existence, so that the peasant and the craftsman, the factory hand and the worker could finally have power over the land. Then life would truly begin. Then every hand would itch for work, and such a ringing of saws, axes and hammers would erupt across the country that not even the clanging of every single bell could drown it out.

Humans are curious creatures. I saw in these places around Moscow a reflection of the misfortune that had befallen all Russia, but one thing filled me with a secret joy – my discovery of the astonishingly vivid and direct language of the people. Turgenev’s words that such a language could only be given to a mighty people no longer sounded like an exaggeration, but a simple truth.fn5

Things were different in Moscow. Some people vainly argued about how to solve the crisis, others knew how and prepared for it in silence, and still others simply got rich. Rapacious profiteers operated on a massive scale. The most prominent of them was perhaps the Siberian industrialist Vtorov, a sort of Lopakhin from Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, magnified a thousand-fold.fn6

Over this enormous swirling hive of anxiety lay the shadow of Rasputin. Never before in all Russian history had an illiterate swindler, horse-thief and kulak come to St Petersburg in search of easy profit and become overnight practically the autocrat of the country, the ruler of its fate, the right hand of the tsar, and the possessor of his own harem of court beauties. Imperial Petersburg – the haughty Petersburg of aristocrats, cabinet ministers, courtiers and generals – lay down at his feet like some beaten dog hoping for a scrap from his master’s table. The country had never known such humiliation and shame. Fateful times were upon us. Weary of the suspense, everyone awaited the dénouement.

It came at last. It began with Rasputin’s murder. They tossed his body into a hole in the ice of the Malaya Nevka River. Tough as the proverbial horse-thief, Rasputin had been poisoned, shot and drowned. According to the doctors, his heart had kept on beating for a few minutes even after he went down into the icy water.

In Moscow, everything was happening at once. Thousands of Uzbeks in green robes were marched under armed guard through the streets. An uprising in central Asia had been crushed, and the Uzbeks were being forcibly driven to Murmansk to die after completing the construction of the Arctic railway. Their silver-embroidered black skullcaps were dusted with the first dry snow of the year. The procession lasted for several days.

Refugees from Poland, the Baltic territories and Belorussia poured into Moscow. Their quick, sibilant accents could be heard more and more amid the sing-song speech of the locals. Old Jews with the appearance of rabbis walked the streets of Moscow, sheltering from the snow under their umbrellas. Symbolist poets, having lost all connection to reality, sang of the pale ghosts of passion and the fires of otherworldly lusts. Amid the general confusion of ideas and sentiments, no one paid them any attention. People didn’t have any time for them by now.

Work back at the newspaper never slowed down, and we were busy day and night. We spent every free minute in the editorial office, arguing, shouting and waiting for what was to come next. Worrisome rumours arrived from Petrograd. Visitors described grumbling bread queues, brief, angry demonstrations in the streets and squares, and unrest in the factories.

Not long after Rasputin’s murder, Baldy called for me. ‘Here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I like your pieces. You have a way of capturing something … something of the popular mood. So, I’ve come up with the idea of sending you out to some God-forsaken province and you can report back on what’s on the minds of people out in Turgenev’s Russia.’

I agreed, and together we discussed where I might go to find the most out-of-the-way place that wasn’t too far from Moscow. The well-known theatre critic and Chekhov specialist Yury Sobolev, the gentlest of men whom everyone called simply Yurochka, both to his face and behind his back, sat in on our discussions.

‘Chekhov wrote that for him the little village of Yefremov in Tula province best personified Russia’s backwater,’ said Yurochka. ‘It’s not far from Yelets. By the way, it’s Turgenev country too. Yefremov is on the Krasivaya Mecha River. Remember ‘Kasyan from Krasivaya Mecha’?fn7 That’s where you should go.’

I arrived in Yefremov at night and sat until dawn in the station’s cold buffet. It was painted a dirty mauve and served nothing but lukewarm tea. The paraffin lamps smoked. A bearded policeman with jangling spurs patrolled the station. He gave me a suspicious look every time he passed by. As soon as it was light, I took a droshky to the town’s only hotel. In the drab light of a winter morning, the town looked startlingly small and shabby. The brick prison house, the distillery with its tall, thin iron chimney, the scowling church, the rows of identical little houses (stone on the bottom, timber on top), and the weary glow of the street lamps produced a depressing effect. The only structure of possible interest was a row of market stalls which had been adorned with a few columns and archways that spoke vaguely of the past. Jackdaws circled in the dank air. The streets stank of fresh horse manure.

‘So that’s it?’ I said to the driver. ‘Not much to look at.’

‘And why should you look at it?’ he said indifferently. ‘No one comes here to have a look around. This ain’t Moscow.’

‘So, what do they come for?’

‘For grain and apples. We used to have the richest grain exchanges around. The merchants had a turnover of hundreds of thousands. Our apples are still among the best. Antonovkas, they’re called. If you’re interested, you should go to the village of Bogovo, not far from here. I can take you myself. Even in winter they’ve got all the apples you could want.’

The hotel was dark and quiet. My room was dark too, even though it faced the street, but at least it was warm. The sour smell of cabbage soup and samovar smoke wafted up from the restaurant. The pock-marked boy from the front desk wouldn’t leave my room and stood there staring at me, his mouth hanging open, as though in amazement. No doubt he was having trouble figuring out what on earth had brought me to Yefremov. I showed him to the door. He took no offence and stopped on the way out to say: ‘You needn’t think … Why, we had a colonel staying with us the other day. And now there’s a fortune teller from Moscow. Madame Troma! Skinny as a cat. Smokes three packets of Ira cigarettes a day. Rings on every finger – diamonds, all of them. We have something going on here all the time. There’ll be dancing downstairs tonight. The owner’s always arranging things. It brings in some extra money. He’s quite a man!’

Finally, he left. I hadn’t slept since leaving Moscow and so was glad to get undressed and into bed. It had been some time since I had felt so tired. I was still shivering from the cold and didn’t care to move or speak. The last thing I need is to get ill in this awful hole, I thought to myself. The idea of being ill reminded me of what I was always trying to forget – my loneliness. Mama and Galya far away. Romanin off at the front. Lëlya dead. There was no one I could turn to for help if I were ill or in trouble. No one! Hundreds of people had walked in and out of my life, but none of them had stayed. It was painful and unjust. Or at least that’s what I thought.

I fell asleep. I dreamed of a row of telegraph poles stretching out across a snowy plain. I awoke, but as soon as I fell back to sleep the dream returned – the same unbroken plain and the same telegraph poles, one after another stretching off into the unknown for some mysterious reason. This happened several times. In my dream I knew perfectly well that they were leading nowhere, that there were no cities or villages up ahead, only more snow and the dreary emptiness of the winter cold.

I was awakened for good by a feeling that someone was nudging my bed. I opened my eyes and, my mind still full of cobwebs, heard what sounded like the rollicking brass clang of a fire-brigade band. The windows were rattling. A big bass drum banged away with cheerful persistence. The dance had begun. I got dressed and went downstairs. This was an excellent opportunity to have my first look at the Yefremovites.

In a poorly lit room with a low ceiling, beads of condensation dripped from the walls. A band thundered away. Girls with tense expressions sat on squeaky chairs and fanned themselves with their kerchiefs. In the middle of the empty floor a haggard man in a worn coat was performing a Russian dance. His long, melon-shaped head was covered with bristly grey hair. He was clearly drunk, but danced with skill and flair, leaping, kicking and shouting: ‘Ekh, Nyurka, come stop your scoldin’, you know it’s you I want to be holdin’!’ The doorways were crowded with men, all of them rather old, except for a few sickly youths with long necks and watery eyes. Clearly, they were ‘white-chit boys’, unfit for military service.

Sitting nonchalantly, one leg crossed over the other, in a prominent spot in the room, next to a bony woman who looked as though black bugles had been glued all over her body (I guessed this must be the fortune teller), was a snub-nosed man with a reddish imperial and long hair that fell to the collar of his checked raglan coat. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat and held on his lap a walking stick with a silver knob in the shape of a naked mermaid splayed out on a cresting wave. A bored smile on his face, the man twirled the cane as he surveyed the room through his small pince-nez. Upon seeing me, he got up and, careful to avoid the dancer, crossed the room.

‘A thousand apologies!’ he said, removing his hat with a theatrical flourish. ‘I see from the hotel register that you are a writer, a rare bird in these parts. And so, please permit me, being myself what I like to call a “confrère of the quill”, to introduce myself – I am Princess Daydream.’

I was dumbfounded. He smiled smugly.

‘You never thought you would run into me in the back of beyond, did you? My dear mother lives here. I often come to visit her from Moscow. I find it to be a balm for body and soul.’

Princess Daydream! Of course. I had often run across the signature in cheap women’s magazines at end of the ‘Answers to Our Lady Readers’ Questions’ section. With expert knowledge and a rather perfumed sentimentality, Princess Daydream gave advice on the trickiest and most intimate questions: How do you win the love of a blond stranger? What do you do with an unfaithful husband? What is platonic love? How do you cure yourself of blackheads and chlorosis?

‘My real name’, he said, ‘is Miguel Rachinsky. Allow me to introduce you to another guest to our town, the famous fortune teller Madame Adelaide Tarasovna Troma.’ He introduced me to the bony woman. She held out a claw sparkling with paste diamonds, looked me over insouciantly, and said in a raspy voice: ‘Oh, such a fortunate young man! Oh, a marvellous future awaits you. You were born under a lucky star.’

She was about to say something more, but started coughing uncontrollably, pressing a black lace handkerchief to her mouth. Her whole body shook, and she doubled over. Through her low neckline I caught sight of her sharp collarbone and emaciated breasts. Madame Troma could not stop coughing and had to leave the room.

Miguel Rachinsky invited me for a bottle of wine in the restaurant. As we drank, he told me all there was to know about Yefremov. He began by telling me that the drunk man was the local undertaker, a gifted dancer hired by the proprietor ‘to entertain’ the guests and help get them out onto the dance floor. Otherwise, the girls would just sit there like bumps on a log all evening, waving their kerchiefs and blushing. The men would just lurk in the doorways and then leave for home, confused as to what the whole point of the exercise had been, while a few of them would head to the buffet to drink and brawl until morning.

According to him, the town lacked any sort of ‘cultural intelligentsia’, except for Rachinsky himself and two others: Osipenko, a young man who taught Russian literature at the girls’ school, and Bunin, an official in the excise department and a brother of the famous writer. But Bunin was unsociable; his only interest was sorcery – anything to do with charms, incantations and spells.

After that first meeting, I saw Rachinsky every day and came to realise that his main problem was a pathological weakness for banality, conceit and the cheap pose. He was, of course, silly, or more exactly naïve, but kind and obliging by nature. He felt very sorry for the fortune teller, who had been deserted by her husband and was ill with tuberculosis. She boarded with Rachinsky’s mother, and he had insisted that she prepare special meals with extra fat for the woman. He had apparently read somewhere that consumptives need lots of fat ‘to lubricate their lungs’.

His banality was incorrigible. Even in our conversations about politics and the situation in Russia, Rachinsky always loved to attempt brilliant displays of wit with his dubious expressions. Discussing Rasputin, he once said that the man’s character had displayed ‘a cynicism that ascended to a state of grace’. He shed bad verse and feeble epigrams like a moulting cat. At home, however, he was an attentive host. The better I got to know him, the more I pitied this slightly insane character.

He suggested that I also board at his mother’s, and this saved my life since the only restaurant in town, at the hotel, was a foul-smelling pothouse. I accepted his offer and was pleasantly surprised when I first arrived to find that his mother, a retired schoolteacher, was a most charming and intelligent elderly woman. She regarded her dear Misha (‘Miguel’ did not exist at home) as obviously unbalanced and was hurt by his clothes and affectations but still she treated him with great tenderness. It was the tenderness of a mother whose son is a freak.

The three of us – the fortune teller, Osipenko and I – met daily for dinner at the Rachinskys’. The schoolteacher turned out to be a fiery young man, clever and energetic. He loved to argue, was fanatical about literature, and wouldn’t tolerate any of Rachinsky’s ‘aesthetic quips’. Put in his place, Rachinsky could only grin with embarrassment and polish his pince-nez. He never dared to argue with the schoolteacher.

The fortune teller sat wrapped up in her shawl and did not say a word. She only liked to talk to Rachinsky’s mother, Varvara Petrovna, and then only if the men couldn’t hear them. It seems she was ashamed of her line of work and often arrived with tear-stained eyes. All I knew was that she had been born in St Petersburg and her former husband was a lawyer. When she wasn’t telling fortunes, she helped the doctors and nurses in the hospital tending to the wounded. The hospital was just a temporary operation that had been set up in the local parish school.

I decided to pay a visit to the nearby village of Bogovo to see how the peasants were getting by and what they wanted. Bogovo stood on the banks of the Krasivaya Mecha, made famous by Turgenev. The river was covered with ice and snow, except where the black water rushed through the mill-race. Melting icicles dropped into the water with a loud ping. The first February thaw had arrived, bringing with it a wet fog, blustery winds and the smell of smoke.

In Bogovo I had an encounter that at first struck me as simply curious, but a few days later revealed to me a larger symbolic significance. The peasants of Bogovo, just like all the peasants around Moscow, wanted one thing – an end to the war. No one knew what would come next, but everyone was certain that once it was over, life would not go back to the way it had been. With the war over, justice would at long last be restored.

‘The trouble is, no one knows what justice is!’ the village cobbler, a hollow-chested little man, said to me. ‘Travel all over Russia, ask everyone what it is, and you’ll see that they all have their own notion of justice. It’s different in every village! But if you could take all these notions and mix them together, then you’d come up with a single shared idea of justice, an all-Russian truth and justice, if you like.’

‘So, what’s your local truth and justice?’ I asked.

‘It’s right over there!’ said the cobbler, pointing at a hill across the river. There, surrounded by a scruffy old orchard, stood a rundown manor house. Although not large, it boasted the features of the Empire style so popular with the nobility during the reign of Alexander I – a façade with peeling columns; tall, narrow windows with half-moon pediments; two low semi-circular wings; and a broken wrought-iron gate of exceptional beauty.

‘Will you please explain to me’, I asked, ‘what that old house has to do with your local idea of justice?’

‘Just go over there, go and meet the master, then you’ll understand. See for yourself, who you think has the right to that house, and garden, and the five acres of land it sits on. Mind you, the master’s a bit barmy. That’d be Shuisky. Goes about in rags. It’s unlikely he’d let you in to talk. You’ll need to think up some sort of story first.’

‘What kind of story?’

‘Tell him you want to rent his dacha for the summer. You’ve come to talk over the details.’

I walked up to the house along a path largely hidden beneath the snow. The windows were boarded up with old rotting planks. The front porch was thick with snowdrifts. I walked around to the back and found a little door covered with torn felt. I knocked hard. The house was deathly quiet. ‘It’s empty,’ I said to myself, ‘no one lives here.’ Just then the door flew open. Standing there was a wizened old man in a black quilted dressing gown riddled with holes and belted with a towel. A little silk cap sat perched on his head. His face was swathed in a dirty bandage, from which tufts of cotton wool, brown from iodine, stuck out like whiskers.

The old man gave me an angry look with his bright blue eyes and asked in a high-pitched voice: ‘What can I do for you, sir?’

I told him exactly what the cobbler had suggested.

‘You’re not a relation of the Bunins?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘No, certainly not!’

‘Then come in.’

He led me to what must have been the only inhabited room in the house. It was littered with rags and rubbish. A small iron stove in the middle of the room glowed with heat. Each gust of wind blew the smoke back down the chimney and into the room. In the corner I spied a magnificent round stove made of glazed Dutch tiles. Nearly half the tiles were missing, and the little holes were full of dusty medicine phials, yellowed paper bags and rotten, worm-infested apples. Over a trestle bed covered with a mangy sheepskin hung the portrait of a woman in a heavy gilt frame. She wore a gossamer pale blue dress and had white powdered hair and the same blue eyes as the old man. I had the feeling that I had somehow ended up back in Gogol’s Russia of the early nineteenth century.

‘Are you a nobleman?’ the old man asked.

I said yes, I was. It seemed like the only thing to say.

‘As for your present occupation, I don’t have the slightest interest,’ he said. ‘They’ve invented such outlandish ones you can’t make head or tail of them. Would you believe there’s now something called an Assessor of Statutory Prices? Pure rot! It’s these Romanovs, I tell you. I’ll let you the dacha for the summer, but only on one condition: that you don’t keep a goat. I had that Bunin here three years ago. A most dubious character. A real Judas! He brought goats with him, and they had a fine time nibbling on my apple trees.’

‘The writer Bunin?’ I asked.

‘No, his brother, the tax collector. The writer’s been here too. A bit more respectable than his brother the official, but I’ll tell you, I don’t see what he has to be so conceited about either. Petty gentry, nothing more!’

I decided to defend Bunin in terms the old man would understand. ‘Come now,’ I said, ‘the Bunins are an old noble clan.’

‘Old?’ he asked derisively. He shook his head and shot me a look that said I was a hopeless dimwit. ‘Old? Well, don’t you forget we’re older. My family’s listed in the Velvet Book.fn8 Had you learned your Russian history you would know just how ancient my family is.’

Only then did I recall that the cobbler had told me the old man’s name – Shuisky. Was it really possible that before me stood the last of the Princes Shuisky, one of whom had been a tsar? Good Lord!

‘I’ll charge you fifty roubles for the entire summer,’ he went on. ‘I know that’s a lot, but I’ve got a lot of expenses. My wife and I separated last year. The old witch is now living in Yefremov, and I have to send her ten roubles or so every now and then. It’s just a waste. She turns round and gives it to her lovers. Hanging from an aspen tree would be too good for her.’

‘How old is she?’ I asked.

‘In her seventies,’ said Shuisky, angrily. ‘As for your staying here, we’ll sign a detailed contract. It’s the only way.’

I agreed. I had the feeling I was witnessing a rare piece of theatre. Shuisky removed a thick yellow piece of paper embossed with a two-headed eagle from a torn folder, picked up a quill, sharpened it with a broken pen-knife, and dipped it in a bottle of iodine.

‘Damn! That ridiculous fool Vasilisa never puts anything back in its place.’

Vasilisa, so I learned later, was an old woman from Bogovo who used to help make the communion bread in the local church. She came to Shuisky’s twice a week to do a bit of tidying, chop firewood and prepare his porridge.

Shuisky found the jar of Metamorphosis face cream in which he kept the ink and started writing, still grumbling about what the world had come to: ‘The Russian language has gone to hell. Ridiculous new-fangled words right and left. Might as well be speaking Tatar. Everywhere you look, nothing but more of that Romanov nonsense. And they say Nikolashka has invited some depraved man to dine with him at his table. Thinks he’s a tsar! Hah! He’s no tsar, he’s a little mama’s boy!’

‘Why do you wrap your face in cotton wool?’ I asked.

‘I rub iodine on it, so naturally I have to wrap it up with cotton wool.’

‘But why?’

‘For my nerves,’ Shuisky said curtly. ‘Here you are. Read it and then sign your name at the bottom.’

He handed me the piece of paper written in a neat, old-fashioned hand. There was a long list of conditions for my living on the rundown estate. I particularly remember the first clause: ‘I, the undersigned Paustovsky, do promise not to avail myself of any fruit from the orchard, it being understood that said orchard, and the fruit therein, has been let to Gavriushka Sitnikov, smallholder of the town of Yefremov.’

I signed the utterly useless document and asked about the deposit. It made no sense to hand over money for a house I never intended to live in, but I had to play my role through to the end.

‘Deposit? What are you talking about?’ Shuisky snapped. ‘What sort of nobleman mentions such a thing? We’ll settle up when you come back. My regards to you. I’m sick and so won’t show you out. See to it you shut the door firmly behind you.’

I walked back to Yefremov. The farther away I got from Bogovo, the more bizarre this encounter with Shuisky seemed. Upon my return Varvara Petrovna confirmed that the old man truly was the last Prince Shuisky. True, he had a son, but about forty years ago he had sold him for ten thousand roubles to a childless Polish magnate. The Pole needed an heir so that after his death his vast wealth would not be divided up among his distant relations, and his crafty personal secretary had found for him a young boy of excellent lineage to purchase and adopt.

A light snow was falling. The oil lamp hissed softly. I remained at the Rachinskys’ after dinner, reading Sergeev-Tsensky’s The Sorrow of the Fields.fn9 Rachinsky sat at the dinner table writing his advice to women readers. After he had put down a few lines, he would lean back in his chair and read them to himself, a satisfied smile spreading across his face. Varvara Petrovna knitted, and the fortune teller, huddled up in an armchair, sat quietly lost in thought and staring at the diamonds on her fingers.

All of a sudden there was a loud knocking on the window. We jumped. The knocking was so fast and agitated that I knew something had happened. Rachinsky went to open the door. Varvara Petrovna crossed herself. The fortune teller was the only one of us who didn’t move. Osipenko burst into the room wearing a hat and coat and not bothering to take off his snow-boots.

‘There’s revolution in Petrograd!’ he shouted. ‘The government’s been overthrown!’

His voice broke. He collapsed into a chair and burst into tears. For a moment there was nothing but silence. The only sound was Osipenko sobbing like a child. My heart was pounding. I choked and felt tears rolling down my cheeks.

Rachinsky grabbed Osipenko by the shoulder. ‘When? How? Tell us!’ he cried.

‘Here … here …’ Osipenko muttered, pulling a long strip of ticker tape from his coat pocket. ‘I’ve come straight from the telegraph office … It’s all right here …’

I took it from him and began to read out loud the proclamation of the Provisional Government. My hands were shaking. At last! The entire country had known for months that something like this was coming, but it had happened so fast and unexpectedly. But out here, in sleepy, forgotten Yefremov, there were no signs of revolution. Moscow newspapers were few and arrived three days late. Barking dogs and the banging of the watchman’s clappers were the only sounds at night in the high street. It was easy to think that nothing had changed here since the sixteenth century – that there was no railway, no telegraph, no war, no Moscow, no history.

And yet here it was – revolution! My mind was a confused whirl of ideas, but one thing was clear: something tremendous had begun, something that no one and nothing had the power to stop. The great event that people had been awaiting for over a century had now happened, now, on this day, one that had begun just like every other.

‘What should we do?’ Osipenko asked, quivering with nervous energy. ‘We’ve got to do something at once.’

Rachinsky then said something for which all his failings could be forgiven: ‘We’ve got to print copies of the proclamation and post them up around town. And then get in touch with Moscow. Let’s go!’

The three of us – Osipenko, Rachinsky and I – headed out. Only Varvara Petrovna and the fortune teller stayed at home. As we were leaving, Rachinsky’s mother stood in front of the icons, crossing herself and repeating over and over, ‘At last, dear God! At last, dear God!’ The fortune teller sat as motionless as before.

A man came running towards us down the empty street. In the dim light of the street lamp I could see that he was barefoot and without a hat or coat. In one hand he held a cobbler’s boot tree. He threw himself upon us. ‘Good people!’ he screamed and then grabbed me by the arm. ‘Have you heard? There’s no more tsar! Now there’s only Russia!’ He gave each one of us a hearty kiss and ran off down the street, sobbing and muttering to himself.

‘What’s wrong with us?’ said Osipenko. ‘Why haven’t we congratulated each other?’ We stopped and exchanged hearty kisses ourselves. Rachinsky then headed to the telegraph office to await news from Petrograd and Moscow, while Osipenko and I went to find the little out-of-the-way printer’s shop that made all the advertisements, government notices and orders of the military governor. It was closed. We were trying to break the lock when a man with the key came bustling up, opened the door and turned on the light. He was the town’s only typesetter and printer. We never found out how he happened to be in the area at that moment.

‘Let’s go, start sorting!’ I said.

I dictated the text of the proclamation to the typesetter. He sorted the type, stopping now and then to wipe the tears from his eyes. Soon we received another message – an order from Nekrasov, the Provisional Government’s minister of transport, addressed to every Russian to stop the emperor’s train wherever it was.

Events in Russia were moving with the speed of an avalanche.

I read the first copy of the proclamation. The letters jumped and blurred before my eyes. The printer’s office was now full of people who had somehow heard that we were printing leaflets about the revolution. They grabbed handfuls of them and ran out to post them on walls, fences and lamp-posts around town. It was one o’clock in the morning, when Yefremov was usually fast asleep. Suddenly, at this ungodly hour, the cathedral bell rang out. It chimed once, twice and then a third time. It went on and on, growing faster and louder, its peals waking the entire town. Soon it was joined by the bells of the many neighbouring churches.

Lights went on in windows throughout Yefremov. People poured onto the streets, not bothering to shut their doors behind them. Strangers wept and embraced each other. From the railway station came the sharp, jubilant whistling of locomotives. Somewhere from deep among the crowded street, voices rose, softly at first, then louder and louder, singing ‘The Workers’ Marseillaise’:

Let us denounce the old world,

Let us shake its dust from our feet!

The ringing sounds of a brass band joined in with the choir of voices for the chorus:

Rise up, working people, and join together!

Arise against our enemies, hungry brother!

Let the people’s cry for vengeance be heard!

Forward! Forward! Forward! Forward! Forward!

On a table smeared with printer’s ink, Osipenko wrote the first Order of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Yefremov. No one had set up such a committee. No one knew who its members were, for one simple reason: there was no such committee. Osipenko had merely decided to take matters into his own hands and improvise:

Pending the appointment of new civic authorities by the government of liberated Russia, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Yefremov calls upon all citizens to remain calm and orders as follows:

The administration of the urban and rural districts will be the responsibility of the District Executive Board led by its chairman, Citizen Kushelëv.

Citizen Kushelëv is hereby named Government Commissar until further notice.

Police and gendarmerie will immediately surrender their arms to the District Executive Board.

A People’s Militia will be formed to ensure order in the streets.

The work of all government departments and private businesses will continue.

The garrison quartered in Yefremov will take the oath of allegiance to the new government following the example set by the garrisons of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities across Russia.

Rachinsky, exhausted and pale yet resolute, turned up at the printer’s office at dawn. He now had an enormous red bow on his coat. Approaching the table, he threw down a policeman’s hat and a holstered Nagant revolver. The railway workers had disarmed the bearded policeman and Rachinsky, who had witnessed it, had brought these back as trophies to the revolutionary committee.

Rachinsky was then followed by a tall, white-haired man with a gentle, confused expression – the new commissar of the Provisional Government, Kushelëv. He never even asked how he had been appointed to this important position. A new proclamation was quickly put out with his signature congratulating the town’s inhabitants on Russia’s liberation from centuries of oppression. A meeting of representatives of every social class and organisation was set for one o’clock that day to discuss urgent matters in light of the recent events. After signing the proclamation, Kushelëv wept. Never in my life have I seen so many tears of joy as in those days.

His daughter, a tall, shy girl in a short coat and a shawl, had come with him. As he was signing the document, she stroked his head and said in a quivering voice: ‘Calm down, Papa, there’s no need to get so overwrought.’ As a young man Kushelëv had spent ten years in exile in the far north for his membership of a revolutionary students’ group.

We entered into a period of happy days full of noise and confusion. A general meeting open to all citizens continued around the clock at the office of the District Executive Board. The board was renamed the Convention. Its office steamed with the breath of hundreds. Red flags fluttered in the February wind. Villagers poured into town for the latest news and directives. ‘When will there be word about land for the peasants?’ they asked. The streets around the board’s office were crowded with carts and littered with straw. Everywhere, people were debating and arguing about land, compensation and peace. Elderly men with red armbands and revolvers on their belts – the People’s Militia – patrolled the road junctions. Staggering news kept arriving. Nicholas had abdicated the throne at the railway station in Pskov. Passenger rail traffic throughout the entire country had been stopped.

Prayers were said in Yefremov’s churches for the new government. Convicts were released from prison, schools were closed, and excited pupils ran about the town delivering the commissar’s orders and notices. On the fifth or sixth day I met my cobbler friend from Bogovo. He told me that upon learning of the revolution, Shuisky had begun preparing to move into town. He put a ladder up to his tiled stove, climbed to the top, pulled out a bag of gold coins, climbed down, fell, and died that evening. The cobbler had come to hand Shuisky’s money over to the commissar of the Provisional Government.

It seemed as though the town and its people had been transformed. Russia had found its voice and begun to speak. Even in tongue-tied Yefremov inspiring orators appeared out of nowhere. Most of them were railway workers. They reduced the listening women to tears. Gone were the cowed, sullen expressions. The faces of the people of Yefremov looked younger, their eyes shone with goodness and the joy of a new beginning. They were no longer subjects. They were citizens now. And as though by decree, the weather was fine. The days were sunny, the flags snapped in the warm breeze, and white clouds sailed joyfully over the town. You could feel the breath of early spring all around you, in the heavy blue shadows and in the raw nights alive with the noise of people.

I was dazed, intoxicated. I could not imagine what would happen next. I longed to head back to Moscow, but the trains had stopped running.

‘Wait,’ Osipenko said to me, ‘this is only the beginning of great things to come for Russia. Try to keep a cool head and a warm heart. You need to preserve your strength.’

Commissar Kushelëv signed a pass for me and I left for Moscow on the first possible train. No one saw me off. There was no time for that now. The train was slow. I couldn’t sleep. I sat thinking about the past few years, going over them in my mind month by month and trying to locate some unifying thread to my life. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t. There was one thing that I did know for certain. I had never once during these years given any thought to my comfort or material well-being. I had known only one passion – to become a writer. Now, travelling that night on the train to Moscow, I became aware that I was at last at the point of being able to put into words what I understood by beauty and justice, to express and to communicate to others my perception of life, my vision of human happiness, dignity and freedom. This, I realised, was my life’s purpose. Only now was I able to see it clearly.

I didn’t know what would come next. But I knew that I would continue to strive with all my strength to become a writer. This would be my way of serving my people, of loving our magical language and our remarkable land. I would work as long as I could hold a pen and my heart, overflowing with the beauty of life, was still beating.

At dawn on a misty March day, I finally arrived in Moscow, this jubilant, seething, harrowing city. I had long believed that life held out before me the promise of many remarkable things – joys, struggles, loves, sorrows and tragedies – and this presentiment had been the great happiness of my youth. Then I could not be certain the promise would be fulfilled. Now, time had proved me right.