The Story of a Life

70

Whirlpool

In the course of a few months, Russia said everything that it had kept to itself for centuries. Day and night, from February until the autumn of 1917, the entire country seethed from end to end like one continuous, raucous meeting. Crowds of people shouted in city squares, in front of monuments, in railway stations smelling of chlorine, in factories, villages and markets, and in every courtyard and stairway of every house. Oaths, appeals, denunciations, heated oratory – all this would suddenly be drowned out in furious shouts of ‘Down with him!’ or in hoarse, ecstatic cries of ‘Hurrah!’ The noise rumbled, like the thunder of heavy carts over cobblestones, from street to street.

The meetings in Moscow were particularly heated and inspired. Someone was always being tossed up in the air or pulled down off the Pushkin Monument by the belt of his greatcoat or kissed by men with bristly cheeks or extended a friendly greeting by a pair of calloused hands. An intelligènt had his hat knocked off one minute only to be raised up triumphantly the next by the anonymous crowd. While holding onto his wobbly pince-nez, he hurled curses upon unnamed enemies of Russia’s freedom. All around came frenzied outbursts of clapping that sounded like the drumming of hail on the pavement. Indeed, the spring of 1917 was cold, and hard little balls of hail often covered the young grass along the city’s boulevards.

No one ever asked for permission to speak at these meetings. Everyone assumed they already had it. Front-line soldiers were sure of a ready hearing, as was a Frenchman by the name of Jacques Sadoul, an officer, member of the French Socialist Party, later a communist, who was stranded at the time in Russia. His light blue greatcoat was always moving back and forth between Moscow’s two busiest meeting places – the monuments to Pushkin and Skobelev. Any soldier who claimed to be back from the front was first put through a noisy interrogation: ‘Which front? What division?’ voices shouted from the crowd. ‘What regiment? Who was your regimental commander?’ If the soldier got confused amid the tumult and was slow to answer, someone yelled, ‘The front all right! He’s been defending Khodynka Field right here in Moscow! Get him out of here!’ They would drag him from the rostrum, and the man would be swallowed up by the crowd.

A formidable tactic was needed to win the crowd over and hold its attention. Once, a bearded soldier in a greatcoat as stiff as tree bark climbed up onto the pedestal of the Pushkin Monument. ‘What division? What unit?’ people yelled at him.

The soldier scowled angrily. ‘What are ya all shoutin’ about?’ he roared back. ‘Bet if I looked, I’d find a photograph of Wilhelm in every third man’s pocket. A good half of you are spies! And that’s a fact! Who the hell are you to tell a Russian soldier to shut up?’

That was a formidable tactic. The crowd fell silent.

‘You go and feed lice in the trenches like I have,’ he bellowed, ‘then you can ask questions! Tsarist scum! Bastards! Just because you’ve put on those red ribbons, don’t kid yourselves you’re fooling us. It’s not enough you’re selling us out to the bourgeoisie like we’re a bunch of market chickens, no, you’re gonna pluck us of every last feather too, eh? It’s ’cause of the likes of you there’s treason at the front and all over this rotten land of ours. Comrades, all you soldiers from the front! It’s you I’m talking to now! Do me a favour, don’t let any of those citizens over there leave. Search ’em and check their papers. If anybody’s got anything on him, we’ll deal with him ourselves. We don’t need any government commissar to tell us what we can do! Hurrah!’

The soldier tore off his hat and waved it over his head. There were a few scattered cheers of ‘Hurrah!’ but nothing more. Then an ominous movement started in the crowd – soldiers, linking arms, began to encircle it. Who knows how this would have ended if someone hadn’t thought to notify the Soviet of Deputies, which sent a lorry full of armed workers to restore order.

Gradually, the meetings in the various parts of Moscow assumed their own distinct character. The speakers at the Skobelev Monument were chiefly representatives of the different political parties – from the Kadets and the Popular Socialist Party to the Bolsheviks. The speeches here were heated, but serious. No one was allowed to spout twaddle in front of Skobelev. The moment a speaker tried something like that, the crowd yelled in one voice: ‘To hell with you! You belong over at Taganskaya Square!’ There you could indeed say whatever you had on your mind, be it that Kerenskyfn1 was a converted Jew from the village of Shpola or that the monks at the Donskoy Monastery had been caught hiding a hundred thousand gold roubles in the hollowed-out cores of pickled apples.

One day that spring (it was already May, but no one seemed to have noticed that the ice had gone out on the Moscow River or that the bird-cherries were blooming), I stood in the crowd in front of the Skobelev Monument. A scuffle had broken out between the SRs and the Bolsheviks. All of a sudden, up climbed Rachinsky onto the pedestal. I literally jumped with surprise. I had never before seen Rachinsky in Moscow. He removed his wide-brimmed velours hat, raised his stick with the silver naked mermaid up high, called for silence, and cried out in a voice overflowing with pathos: ‘Black clouds seek to erase the radiant sun of our freedom! Permit me, a poor, humble poet living in a garret, to lift up my indignant voice …’

‘Chuck him in the dump!’ came a clear and determined although rather coarse voice from the crowd.

‘Off to Taganskaya with you!’ the crowd shouted all together. ‘You, up there, whoever’s closest, pull him down!’

‘This is usurpation!’ Rachinsky cried desperately. ‘The voice of the senseless rabble!’

This made no difference, and he was not allowed to go on. Raising his eyes dolefully to the heavens, Rachinsky shrugged his shoulders, and then, preserving his dignity, hopped down from the pedestal and disappeared into the crowd.

The meetings at the Pushkin Monument addressed all sorts of issues but, as it is now popular to say, always remained ‘on a high level’. The speakers here were typically students. I was then working for a different newspaper and had to attend the meetings as part of my job. The meetings revealed the slightest shifts in the mood of Muscovites, and we journalists could always pick up lots of news at them.

My newspaper had the strange name of the Moscow Municipality Gazette. The Moscow municipality no longer existed, nor did any such gazette speaking on its behalf. It’s possible the name came from the fact that the editorial offices had been set up in the building that had once belonged to the Moscow municipal governor on Tverskoy Boulevard. It was a small paper edited by ‘Don Aminado’, a light-minded, carefree poet-journalist. No one knew his real name.

The paper published telegrams with earth-shattering news that arrived from all over the country, a chronicle of Moscow life, and, now and then, orders issued by Dr Kishkin, commissar of the Provisional Government. No one ever even considered carrying out these orders, and so the figure of Dr Kishkin became merely ornamental. He was a dry stick of a man with a greying beard and the eyes of a martyr awaiting the unavoidable end. He went about in an elegant frock coat with silk lapels and a red cockade in his buttonhole.

With each passing day the speeches of the orators became more clearly defined, and from the confusion of slogans and demands two camps began to emerge that reflected the main division within the country: that of the Bolsheviks and workers and that of the Provisional Government’s supporters, mostly the well-intentioned but spineless and distraught intelligentsia. True, not all of the intelligentsia sided with the new government, but most of it did.

The state was disintegrating like a pile of wet sand. The provinces refused to submit to Petrograd’s authority. They lived their own separate life, no one knew how, and struggled with their own seething turmoil. At the front, the army was melting fast. Kerensky dashed about the country, trying to hold it together with his ecstatic eloquence. Lacking clear ideas and conviction, all he could offer instead were pompous phrases, operatic poses and grandiloquent but irrelevant gestures. Thus, he appeared on the parapets of the trenches to harangue thousands of soldiers at the front, never once realising how utterly ridiculous he looked. Once he tore off the epaulettes of a sick, elderly soldier who had refused to return to the trenches and then, pointing authoritatively to the east as though he were a Roman emperor, screamed at the man: ‘You coward! Back to the rear! We will not kill you – your conscience will do that for us!’ He uttered these words in a tragic voice, tears in his eyes, while the soldiers simply turned their backs on him and cursed.

I often encountered this man with his puffy, greenish face, crimson eyelids and thin, greying crew-cut. He walked with headlong speed, forcing his aides to chase after him, and would then stop and turn round just as quickly, frightening them. He carried his wounded right arm in a black sling outside his rumpled field jacket, which lay in pleats across his stomach. Shiny brown leggings creaked and glistened on his long, thin legs.

In a barking staccato, he tossed clipped phrases at the crowd and then paused, as though out of breath. Not only did he love noisy words, he believed in them. He believed they could fly, like a tocsin, out over the agitated country and inspire the people to glory and sacrifice. Having uttered these noisy words, Kerensky would collapse into his armchair, sobbing and shaking, as his aides rushed to give him a sedative. He reeked of essence of valerian like some nervous woman. That smell, which brought to mind the fusty air of old-fashioned apartments, gave him away. Or, at least it did to me at the time. For some reason I was convinced that medicinal smells like this were incompatible with the high calling of a champion of the people.

I soon realised that Kerensky was nothing more than a sick man with a large streak of Dostoevskyism in him. He was an actor who believed in his great messianic calling, unaware he was rushing blindly over a precipice. This hysteric, carried along on the crest of the first wave of the revolution like so much froth, was undoubtedly honest in his aggrandised convictions and his devotion to Russia. Since the days of old Muscovy, Russia has had its share of holy fools, and there was something of them in Kerensky.

I happened to see most of the leaders of the February Revolution. Although I had trouble making sense of the confusing situation of those days, nonetheless I was struck by the disparity of these men. Foreign Minister Milyukov, a lordly professor of history, had nothing in common with Kerensky. His bluish-silver hair looked sterilised and icy, just like the rest of him, all the way down to his every measured, correct word. In those turbulent times, he was like a visitor from some other well-organised, academic planet.

A large herd of soap-box orators appeared overnight. They sprang up like mushrooms after rain. The most important thing was to shout louder than your opponent. Cheap demagoguery found a receptive, well-manured soil. Orators were even imported from abroad. Albert Thomas, French minister of armaments, arrived from Paris. He came to persuade the ‘heroic Russian people’ to remain a loyal ally and stay in the war. A short-legged man with a reddish beard and an elegant frock coat, he displayed in his speeches a peerless example of the art of shrillness and the expressive gesture. I once heard him speak from the balcony of what is now the Moscow Soviet (then the residence of the commissar of the Provisional Government). Thomas spoke in French to a crowd of mostly soldiers and workers from the suburbs. No more than a dozen or so of them could have known the language, but you didn’t need to speak French to understand what Thomas was saying.

Prancing up and down the balcony on his fat little legs, Thomas presented a pantomime of what, in his opinion, would happen to Russia if it left the war. He twisted his moustache like the kaiser’s, he squinted rapaciously, he leapt into the air and grabbed the throat of an imaginary Russia. Holding it in a death grip, he hissed, and trampled and kicked it with his polished boots to the accompaniment of war cries and the snarls of an enraged tiger. Wilhelm’s terrifying dance over the prostrate body of Russia went on for several minutes. Stupefied by this circus act, the crowd held its breath.

Then a hollow sort of roar could be heard building among the crowd. Thomas wiped his red face with a scented handkerchief and with a flick of the wrist put his glossy top hat back on at its usual jaunty angle. He listened to the crowd and smiled. In that roar he was convinced he heard approval.

The roar grew louder, and as it did it grew more threatening, until it reached the point where cries of ‘Shame! Clown! Down with him!’ could be heard, followed by shrill whistling. Someone kindly approached Thomas, took him by the arm, and escorted him off the balcony. Next, out came the Belgian Socialist Vandervelde, a man with an insufferably ascetic face and a clerical coat buttoned to the neck. He started to speak quietly, without intonation, chewing his words with his thin, dry lips. It seemed he wanted to put the crowd to sleep, and it did indeed thin out until only a handful of people were left below the balcony, listening, apparently, out of politeness. Vandervelde said the same thing as Thomas. In a half-hearted way he called for loyalty to ‘our holy military alliance’.

Music could be heard coming from the direction of the Strastnoy Monastery. It grew louder and began to thunder:

From the people we’ve come,

Children of toil, one and all,

‘Fraternal alliance and freedom’

Is our rallying call!

Columns of workers from the Presnya district approached down Tverskaya Street. Banners of red calico fluttered past Vandervelde demanding ‘Peace to the Huts, War on the Palaces!’ and ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ and ‘End the War!’ Vandervelde moved his lips for a few more minutes, then folded up his notes and slowly walked off, leaning not on a stick but his umbrella, neatly rolled and protected by a silk sleeve. None of the workers noticed him. They sang as they walked:

Everything on which the throne stands –

By the workers was it done …

We’ve cast bullets with our hands,

And we’ll fix the bayonet to our gun!

Looking back today, after so many years, on the first months of the revolution, one begins to understand how unstable and filled with a sense of unavoidable impending change they were. The old order had been destroyed. But deep down in our souls, few of us believed that the collapse of the monarchy meant that the revolution was complete. The new February regime was, of course, nothing more than an interlude in Russian history.

Perhaps the transient leaders of the country understood this at the time, and this weakened their resistance to the new future, hostile to them but inevitable, that future announced by Lenin from atop the armoured car outside the Finland station: ‘The dawn of the world socialist revolution has already begun!’ It turned out that all that had been so easily achieved and hastily put together after February was nothing but the very first steps of a new age. This became clear to everyone only much later. At the time, we were only vaguely aware of this. The times were too charged, too many fantastic things were happening every day. We didn’t have the inner strength, or the time, to make sense of history moving at lightning speed. The thunder produced by the collapse of the old world was a continuous roar in our ears. The idyllic generosity of the first days of the revolution faded. Whole worlds crumbled and collapsed into dust.

Nearly the entire intelligentsia – heirs of the great, humanistic Russian tradition of Pushkin and Herzen, Tolstoy and Chekhov – found itself overwhelmed and confused. It became indisputably clear that although the intelligentsia had been capable of creating high spiritual values, it found itself, with few exceptions, powerless to lay the foundations of a new state. Russian culture had largely grown up in the struggle for freedom against autocracy. This struggle had defined the intelligentsia’s thinking, it had set the course for the development of noble aspirations and civic courage. With the old order in ruins, its task was no longer to sow among the people textbook notions of ‘the good, the rational, the eternal’, but to build a new social order, immediately and with their own hands, to govern skilfully this vast and utterly neglected country.

The country’s troubled, almost unimaginable condition could not go on for long. The very survival of the people demanded a clear purpose and a channelling of energies. The establishment of justice and freedom, it turned out, required hard work and even ruthlessness. Such things, we learned, do not come of themselves in response to the clashing of cymbals and the rapturous cheers of the citizens.

These were the first lessons of the revolution. For the first time, the Russian intelligentsia was brought face to face with its own ideals. It was a bitter pill to swallow, and no one could let it pass. The strong downed it and took their place alongside the people. The weak either degenerated or perished. Thus began the long and formidable era of creating a new civic order. But, again, at that time few people had thought these matters through to the end – they were little more than feelings, the first inklings of larger ideas. Most people drifted along with the current of events, wishing just to survive, if only a bit longer, so they might witness the course of history and catch a glimpse of the shore to which Russia would eventually be driven.

As for me, I had greeted the February Revolution with a schoolboy’s delight, even though I was already twenty-five years old. I naïvely believed that overnight this revolution could make us all into better people and turn the bitterest of enemies into friends. I thought that for the sake of the revolution’s incontrovertible gains people would reject the unworthy remnants of the past – all that was mean and shabby and particularly the lust for wealth, national enmity and the oppression of one’s fellow man.

I had always been certain that there was an innate goodness in all of us, a goodness that merely needed to be summoned from the depths of our being. But I soon learned that these starry-eyed notions were little more than dust and ashes. Every day cruel evidence was rubbed in my face that people are not so easily changed and that the revolution had yet to eliminate hatred or distrust. I drove this unpleasant thought away, but it refused to leave and poisoned my happiness. I became increasingly angry. I felt a special anger for those polished, liberal intelligènty who, in my opinion, allowed their ill-will towards the people, over whom they had so recently been in ecstasy, to make them stupider by the day. That did not mean, however, that I was ready to fully embrace the October Revolution. I agreed with much, but much I rejected, especially what seemed to me its contempt for the culture of the past.

Prevented by my idealistic upbringing from whole-heartedly accepting the October Revolution, I lived through the first two or three years not as a participant, but a deeply interested onlooker. Not until 1920 did I realise that there was no other path forward than the one chosen by my people. At once, I felt relief. There followed a time of faith and great hopes. My life gained meaning and purpose, and from then on I devoted it, more or less, to serving the people in the best way I knew how – through my writing. No one can say whether it is better to arrive at conviction through doubt or never to have doubted at all. Regardless, what always seemed to me to be required of everyone in our revolutionary age was a profound commitment to freedom, justice and humanity, together with honesty towards oneself.

The cold spring of 1917 was followed by a sweltering summer. A hot wind blew clouds of torn and crumpled newspapers along the pavements. Almost every day new papers appeared in Moscow, sometimes of the most unusual orientations, such as those of the theosophists or the anarchists, whose slogan was ‘Anarchy breeds order’. Noisy and largely illiterate, most of these papers lasted only a few days. The wind tugged at the posters – accusatory, denunciatory or calming – that covered the walls. The air smelled of printers’ ink and rye bread.

The army had brought the village smell of bread with them. Ignoring Kerensky’s shrill orders, the city filled with soldiers pouring in from the front. Moscow had become a noisy army camp. The streets and squares around the railway stations thronged with soldiers. The harsh smoke from their cheap makhorka cigarettes hung in the air over their makeshift quarters, giving Moscow the aura of a conquered city. The wind scattered flurries of chalky sunflower shells from one end of the square to the other. A red flag, tied to the martially raised bronze sword of Skobelev’s monument, had long since faded in the sun but still waved triumphantly in the wind.

A mantle of dust lay over the city. Yellow street lamps burned sleepily both day and night. No one had remembered to put them out. To reduce the demand for electricity, the government decreed that the clocks be set back. Sunset was now at four o’clock in the afternoon. The whole city was on its feet. Flats stood empty. All night long people talked themselves hoarse at meetings, dragged themselves half asleep through the streets, or sat and argued in the squares and on the pavement. Strangers, thrown together at meetings, became either friends or enemies in an instant. Months had passed since the beginning of the revolution, but the excitement was as great as ever. The anxiety proved exhausting.

I decided to go and visit Mama late that summer. Life in Moscow had worn me out. During all that time I hadn’t managed to read a thing other than a mass of hastily printed pamphlets, which reflected the implacable struggle among the various political parties. I dreamed of doing something impossible, like having the time to reread Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Now, it seemed to me as if the novel had been written a couple of centuries ago. Mama was living with Galya in Polesia, not far from the town of Chernobyl. My Aunt Vera from Kiev had a small estate there, Kopan, and Mama had agreed to live at Kopan and try to make some improvements. Mama loved anything to do with the land. At one time she had even dreamed of having me train to be an agronomist.

I passed through Kiev. Like Moscow, the whole city was one endless, seething meeting. The only difference was that the slogans were shouted in Ukrainian and instead of ‘The Workers’ Marseillaise’ they sang ‘Never Perished Is Ukraine’ and Shevchenko’s ‘My Testament’.

I sailed along the Dnieper and Pripyat to Chernobyl on the Volodya, a small steamer that had lost a good deal of its paint. It was a most conscientious boat. Every now and then the captain, a Ukrainian with a dull moustache and a red ribbon on his chest, clambered up to the bridge and shouted, a smile on his face, through to the engine room: ‘Come on now, Volodya! Give it all you’ve got! Do your part for the revolution!’ And the Volodya did. With all its might, puffing clouds of steam and hurriedly slapping the water with its paddles, it picked up speed. But this didn’t last for long. Soon the paddles once more lazily dipped into the water, and then the good-natured passengers stretched themselves out to rest on the deck, the sweet smell of marsh tea drifted from the banks, and the chirring of the grasshoppers faded into a soothing hum. I, too, dozed on the deck. From here, Moscow seemed nothing more than a strange dream.

It was forty versts by horse and cart through pine forests and heavy sand from Chernobyl to Kopan. The horses plodded along. The wheels creaked, the old harness smelled of tar. The driver, a little old man in a shabby brown coat, kept asking me: ‘Still no news, is there, begging your pardon, of course, back in Moscow when we’ll get the universal permission?’

‘What permission?’

‘For us peasant folk to take the land for ourselves and drive all the masters to the devil with our pitchforks. We’ve heard it said it’s that Kerensky who’s stopping us. We’ll drive a stake through him too if it’s the truth!’

Kopan turned out to be less of a manor and more of a rundown farm. In a clearing in the forest stood a large old farmhouse with a rotting thatched roof and a few ramshackle outbuildings. There wasn’t even a fence. The woods hemmed the house in on all sides. After the commotion of Moscow, I found the soughing of the pines especially majestic and calming.

When we met, Mama’s lips quivered and she choked up, although she managed to hold held back her tears. She threw her arms around me and pressed her grey head to my shoulder. We stood like this for a long time, Mama straining not to cry. She had never clung to me before in this way, as though I were the older of us two, her protector and the only comfort in her unfortunate life. Galya held me tightly by my elbow, tears streaming from under her thick spectacles. She didn’t think to wipe them away. I made a clumsy attempt to comfort Mama. I had thought of her often while I was away, but only now did I understand that life had left her nothing other than her bitter, deeply hidden love for the last two people she still had – Galya and me. It was these few crumbs of love that kept her alive. And it was for the sake of this love that she silently put up with the indignities of her rich relations, the back-breaking work and the complete isolation of these empty forests.

At dusk, Mama mentioned apologetically that it was now no longer possible to get paraffin – even in Chernobyl – so she and Galya spent their evenings by the light of a simple torch made of splintered pine. I had never seen such a thing before and rather liked its bright, crimson light. Picking at the fringe of her shawl with her hands, now dry and rough from working the earth, Mama said tentatively: ‘Kostik, it would be so wonderful if you’d stay here with us for good. These are dangerous times. It’d be good to be together. We’d manage. True, we’ve got nothing to eat but potatoes and lard, but at least we’d have each other. What do you think, Kostik?’

She couldn’t bring herself to look me in the face, and so kept her eyes lowered. I said nothing. Mama placed a fresh pine torch in the iron clamp. Her hands were shaking. ‘Galya and I talked it over,’ she said, not turning round, ‘and if you’re still set on becoming a writer then it doesn’t matter where you live. It’s quiet here. And no one will disturb you.’

I had to say something. ‘I’ll think it over,’ I replied.

Mama came over and stroked my head. ‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said, a sad smile on her face. ‘That’s good. Do that, Kostik, give it some thought.’

No matter how long you live, Russia never ceases to amaze. For me, this amazement began in my childhood and it’s still with me today. I know of no other country so full of surprises and contradictions. I became more convinced of this than ever the day after my arrival in Kopan.

I was telling Mama and Galya about life in Moscow since the revolution when I looked through the window and saw coming out of the woods towards the house an ancient, hunchbacked little monk in a dusty cassock and with a worn skufia on his head. He came in, crossed himself facing the empty corner where the icon should have been, bowed to us, and then asked Mama whether she would take some of his dried mushrooms in exchange for salt for the brethren. He seemed to have stepped out of the Russia from the time before Peter the Great.

Mama had salt. She poured out a quarter of a bag for the monk but didn’t take his mushrooms. In this wooded area, there were more mushrooms than people knew what to do with. She offered the monk tea. He sat at the table, not removing his skull-cap and sipping his tea through a lump of sugar. A few tears trickled down his cheeks, which were as yellow as church candles. He carefully wiped them away with the edge of his cassock and said: ‘So the Lord has granted me to drink tea with sugar one last time before I die. Truly, the Lord has shown me mercy. He has deigned to show pity on my poor cold bones.’

Mama went to fetch something in the next room. I followed and asked her where the monk had appeared from. She said that for ages now there had been a small monastery deep in the woods on the banks of the river Uzh about ten versts from Kopan. Since the revolution, most of the younger monks had left and only a few frail elders remained. ‘You should go and have a look,’ she said. ‘Talk to them. You might find it of interest.’

A few days later I visited the monastery. The woods were dark and cluttered with fallen trees. There, in the middle of the forest with no clearing around, I came upon a tall stockade of blackened logs. I had seen such stockades in paintings of old monastic settlements by Roerichfn2 and Nesterov. I walked along the outside until I came to the gate. It was barred. I knocked for a long time until it was opened by the same monk who had come for salt. I walked into a courtyard overgrown with grass and saw a small crooked church built of rough-hewn pine logs. I felt as though I had stumbled back into ancient Muscovy. Old men could be heard chanting in the church. Now and then a muffled clang came from the belfry.

‘We don’t know if we should ring it or not,’ the monk said to me. ‘We’re afraid. Maybe it will offend the new authorities. So, we ring the bell ever so softly. It wouldn’t even frighten a crow off the belfry it’s so quiet. Do come in.’

We entered the church. No more than three or four candles were burning. Old men in black monastic robes embroidered with white crosses and skulls stood motionless. Their narrow faces glowed like darkened gold in the half-light. There was the slightly bitter smell of burned juniper berries, which the monks used instead of incense.

Overwhelmed by it all, I felt my mind become a confused jumble of impressions and memories – this ancient monastery, the mournful chanting, the wind in the pines, the skulls on the robes, Moscow, the cross on Lëlya’s grave, the lice-infested soldiers in the trenches, the synagogue in Kobrin, the lighthouse in Taganrog, meetings, revolution, ‘La Marseillaise’, Kerensky, ‘Peace to the Huts, War on the Palaces!’ The fantastic, patchwork course of my life seemed like some strange dream. The only constant in it had been the unending expectation of change.

How was I to make sense of it? Was there anything in this chaos I could use for some serious, constructive purpose? And how was I to explain to myself the fact that I could side with the revolution, support the most progressive ideas and love Heine while at the same time feeling completely at home here in this relic of medieval Russia, with the monks’ quivering voices singing of man’s hope for heaven’s blessing, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be’? And why is it whenever I hear those words I recall these lines – ‘My grief lowers its string of fine pearls into the forged coffer …’fn3 The lines from this poem seemed like some contemporary echo of the monks’ chants. I left the monastery and struggled for a long time to make sense of all these things. After that, I liked to visit the monastery whenever I went to fish on the river Uzh. The monks treated me to old mead and cold water.

Newspapers never reached us, so I had to ride all the way to Chernobyl on a horse with a bad leg. I managed to do this only once and brought back with me to Kopan news of the Kornilov affairfn4 and the fall of Riga to the Germans. Mama refused to let me go after that. A mysterious gang had appeared in the woods – either escaped Austrian prisoners of war or convicts released from jail. No one had actually seen the gang, but everyone was on edge.

Time passed. Nothing more had been heard of the gang for a long time, and things quietened down. At the end of the autumn I finally left for Kiev and from there for Moscow. Mama made me promise to return the following spring. By the time I left Polesia, the leaves had dried and turned yellow and the woods were wreathed in mist. A week after my departure, a gang descended on the monastery. The bandits tore up the cells looking for silver, shot all the monks and then set fire to the church. But the centuries had petrified its timber, so the church was only charred and did not burn to the ground.