Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me

NEW LIFE

It was not long after the war with Japan.[1] Forty-five years ago. An extraordinary time, and it comes back to me in bits and pieces, as if somebody had shuffled the pages of a diary, mixing up the tragic entries with stories so ridiculous that one can only shrug in disbelief. Did all that really happen? Was life really like that? Were other people, were we ourselves, really like that?

But yes, that is exactly how it was.

Russia had swung to the left overnight. There was unrest among the students, there were strikes among the workers, and even old generals could be heard snorting about the disgraceful way the country was being run, and making sharp criticisms of the Tsar himself.

Sometimes all this became the stuff of farce. In Saratov, the Chief of Police joined up with Topuridze—a revolutionary who had just married a millionairess—to publish a legally authorized Marxist newspaper.[2] Things could hardly have got more absurd.

The Petersburg intelligentsia took keen delight in the new political climate. One of our theatres put on The Green Cockatoo[3]—a previously censored play about the French Revolution. Journalists wrote satirical pieces undermining the establishment, poets wrote revolutionary verses and actors declaimed them on stage to enthusiastic applause.

The university and the technological institute were temporarily closed, and political meetings took place in their buildings. Ordinary, respectable city folk would wander quite freely into these meetings, draw inspiration from the shouts of “Hear, hear!” and “Down with this! Down with that!”—still a novelty at the time—and take any number of half-baked, badly formulated ideas back home to their friends and families.

New illustrated journals appeared: one, edited by Shebuev, was called the Machine Gun.[4] The cover of one issue, if I remember correctly, was adorned by a bloody handprint. These publications took the place of the respectable Wheatfield[5] and sold out quickly, bought eagerly by a rather surprising readership.

I remember once, at my mother’s house, meeting one of her old friends, the widow of an important dignitary. This dignitary had been a friend of Katkov and a diehard conservative of the type we later came to call “bison”.[6]

“I should like to read the Machine Gun,” said this dignitary’s widow, for some reason pronouncing the dreadful word not with a “u” but with a clipped “e”: “Machine Gen”. “But I don’t dare buy it myself, and I don’t like to send Yegor out to get it. I feel Yegor doesn’t approve of the latest tendencies.”

Yegor was her old manservant.

There was also an occasion when my uncle and I were at my mother’s. This uncle had been close to the royal court and, when we were children, he had often brought us sweets from the Tsar’s table (which was quite the done thing back then). The sweets were made by the Tsar’s own confectioner, and were in white wrappers with trimmed edges. We had chewed on them with awe. Now, pointing at me, my mother said to my uncle, “This young lady mixes with socialists.”

It was as if she were talking about some savage she had seen devouring a raw partridge, feathers and all. Something rather revolting—yet still impressive.

“Now there’ll be trouble,” I thought.

But to my surprise, there was nothing of the kind.

My uncle smiled archly: “Well, my dear,” he said, “young people must move with the times.”

This was the last thing I had expected.

So how was it I began to move with the times?

In our circle of friends there was a certain K.P.,[7] the son of a senator. Much to his father’s chagrin, he was closely involved with the Social Democrats.[8] He was a restless soul, torn between Lenin’s pamphlet “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”[9] and the poems of Balmont.

“You really must go and see Lenin in Geneva,”[10] he would say to me.

“Why Lenin? Why should I go and see Lenin?”

“Why? To study with him. That’s just what you need.”

At that point I had only just started to publish my work. My articles and sketches were being published in the Stock Exchange Gazette,[11] a paper devoted mainly to castigating the city fathers—those who had managed to grab for themselves a piece of the public “pie”. I was contributing to this castigation. One of the popular topics of the day was a plan by the city governor, Lelyanov, to fill in the Catherine Canal.[12] I had written a verse fable entitled “Lelyanov and the Canal”:

The Tsar was against Lelyanov’s plan, so he very much liked my fable. The paper’s editor, Stanislav Propper, was “rewarded by a smile from his majesty”, and added an extra two kopecks to my fee. In those days the only journalist who could command the legendary fee of ten kopecks was Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. In short, a brilliant career lay ahead of me. What did I have to learn from Lenin?

But K.P. was not easily put off. First he introduced me to a mysterious character called Valeria Ivanovna—though I soon discovered that this was an alias. She appeared to be in her thirties, she had a tired-looking face and she wore a pince-nez. She would often ask if she could bring along some interesting acquaintance. Among those she then brought along were Lev Kamenev, Alexander Bogdanov, Martyn Mandelstam, Alexander Finn-Yenotaevsky and Alexandra Kollontai.

Her friends paid me little attention. For the most part, they talked among themselves about things like congresses, resolutions and “co-optations”, of which I was entirely ignorant. They liked to repeat the phrase “iron resolve”, and they liked to abuse some people they called “Mensheviks” and to quote Engels, who had argued that armed revolt on the streets of a modern city was inconceivable.[13] They were evidently on a very friendly footing with one another—they all addressed one another as “comrade”.

Once they brought along an absolutely ordinary working-class man. They called him “comrade” too. Comrade Yefim. He said very little—and then, after a few visits, he disappeared. I heard somebody mention, in passing, that he had been arrested.

A few months later Yefim came back, completely transformed, in a new, pale suit and bright yellow gloves. He sat with his hands raised and his fingers spread.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“I don’t want to get my gloves dirty. I’ve been dressed as a bourgeois, so as not to attract attention.”

It was a most unfortunate camouflage. Now his appearance was so picturesque that it was impossible not to look at him.

“So you’ve been in prison?” I asked. “Was it hard?”

“No, not particularly.” And then, with a sudden, good-natured smile: “At Christmas they gave us roast gooses.”

But I should not have been surprised by Yefim’s fancy dress. Very soon, events were to convince me that it was not as silly as it had seemed to my inexperienced eye.

Valeria Ivanovna left the country for a couple of months. She came back dressed in a bright red blouse.

“Why are you got up like that?” I asked.

It turned out that she had entered the country on a false passport made out in the name of a sixteen-year-old girl with no education. The comrades had decided that by putting a bright red blouse on a middle-aged woman with a pince-nez and the weary face of an intellectual, they would transform her into an illiterate young teenager. And they had been right. The border guards had believed the story, and Valeria Ivanovna had arrived safely in Petersburg in her red blouse.

Later, at the time when the newspaper New Life was being published,[14] Lenin would hide from the police using a still more artful method. Every time he left the editorial office he would simply turn up the collar of his coat. And not once was he recognized by the agents of the secret police, even though he was, of course, under surveillance.

People began to arrive from abroad. Mainly from Switzerland. There were more of the same conversations. They all criticized the Mensheviks, and they often spoke of Plekhanov, though for some reason they always called him “Plekanov”.

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s how you say it in Switzerland.”

Many of them would tell me proudly that Plekhanov was from an old aristocratic family. For some reason they all found this very gratifying. I had the impression that Plekhanov had got under their skin in some way, that they were very anxious to convince him of something and that they were afraid he would abandon them.

The one member of the group who stood out was Alexandra Kollontai. She was a young, very beautiful society lady, always elegantly dressed, with a coquettish habit of wrinkling her nose. I recall how she once began a speech to a women’s congress with the words, “I don’t know what language to use in order to make myself understood to the bourgeois women here.”

And there she was on the platform, wearing a magnificent velvet dress with a mirror pendant on a golden chain that hung to her knees.

I noticed that all the comrades were very proud of Kollontai’s elegance. At one point she was arrested, I don’t remember exactly when or why, and the newspapers reported that she had taken fourteen pairs of shoes with her to prison. The comrades would repeat this number with reverence, lowering their voices. In exactly the same way as when they were speaking of “Plekanov’s” aristocratic lineage.

Once Kollontai invited us to her house. Valeria Ivanovna led us up the back staircase. This took us straight into the kitchen, where the astonished cook asked:

“Who are you looking for?”

“We’ve come to see Comr… to see Kollontai.”

“But what made you use the back stairs? Please go through to her study.”

Valeria Ivanovna appeared to have taken it entirely for granted that comrade Kollontai’s room was in the servants’ quarters.

When we entered the spacious, beautifully furnished study, we were greeted by Kollontai’s friend, Finn-Yenotaevsky, a tall dark man with a pointed face and hair like a bush of Austrian broom. Each of the curly dark hairs on his head grew in a distinct spiral, and one half-expected these spirals to chime together in the wind.

We were served tea and biscuits, just as you might expect in any well-to-do household, but then it was back to the same old conversations: the Mensheviks… as Engels said… iron resolve… Plekanov… Plekanov… Plekanov… Mensheviks… co-optation.

It was all extraordinarily dull. They were always picking over some trivial bone of contention: perhaps someone had been abroad and brought back some senseless Party gossip; or someone had drawn caricatures of the Mensheviks, which provoked childish amusement among the bearded Marxists with their “iron resolve”. And all the while, hardened agents provocateurs, whose role only came to light many years later, were strolling about happily in their midst.[15]

They talked about how the Mensheviks were accusing Lenin of having “pocketed ten francs intended for Menshevik use” (“pocketed”—that was the word the Mensheviks were using). Abroad, the Mensheviks were interrupting speeches by the Bolsheviks, caterwauling when Lunacharsky appeared in public, and had even tried to run off with a cash box full of admission money, which the Bolsheviks had defended with their fists.

All these conversations were of no interest to anyone not directly involved, and did nothing to inspire respect. There was no talk of Russia’s fate—of her past or future. These people seemed entirely unconcerned by everything that had aroused the indignation of earlier generations of revolutionaries; they had no interest in the principles for which earlier generations had been willing to pay with their lives. Life simply passed them by. Often some important event, a strike in a big factory or some other major disturbance, would take them completely unawares. They would quickly send their men to the scene, but of course, their men would arrive too late. In this way they failed to anticipate the importance of Father Gapon’s movement,[16] and remained blind to much else besides—failures that would later be a source of embarrassment to them.

Real life held no interest for these people. They were up to their ears in their congresses, co-optations and resolutions.

But there was one thoroughly bourgeois character, Pyotr Rumyantsev. Cheerful, witty, a ladies’ man and a lover of good food, he often went to the “Vienna” literary restaurant and liked to tell amusing stories about his comrades. How he fitted in among these other comrades was hard to understand; it was equally hard to believe in his iron resolve.

“One of our ships has sunk with a cargo of arms,” he would announce cheerfully. “Bad news, I’m afraid.” Then he would add with a sigh, “Let’s go and have a good breakfast at the ‘Vienna’. The workers’ movement still needs our strength.”

What could we do? If our strength was still needed, then we needed to keep it up. Far be it from us to shirk our civic responsibilities.

Finn-Yenotaevsky was someone I saw only occasionally. But once he appeared unexpectedly with some strange news.

“Tomorrow there will be a mass demonstration by the proletariat. We’re setting up a first-aid station in the editorial office of Life Questions[17] on Saperny Lane. There will be a medical orderly there, and materials for bandaging the dead and wounded.”

I was somewhat taken aback. Why were they planning to bandage the dead?

But Finn-Yenotaevsky saw nothing odd about any of this. He fumbled in his wallet and pulled out ten roubles.

“This is for your expenses. Be at the first-aid station at three o’clock sharp. In addition, I’d like you to go to Liteyny Street, to house number five, and tell Dr Prunkin that he must be in Saperny Lane, in the editorial office of Life Questions, at three o’clock sharp, without fail. Don’t forget now, and don’t mix anything up. Prunkin, Liteyny, ten—I mean, five. Prunkin Street.”

“And what did you say the ten roubles are for?”

“For expenses.”

“And will K.P. be there too?”

“He should be. So don’t forget, don’t mix anything up. And be punctual. We need discipline, my friends, or everything will be ruined! So. Five o’clock sharp—to Dr Liteyny. Don’t write anything down. You need to remember it.”

And he dashed off, his spirals chiming.

I knew the editorial staff of Life Questions and had even been invited to work on the paper. As far as I remember, the editors were Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov (Father Sergius as he later became). Our friend Georgy Chulkov was the secretary and Alexei Remizov was the business manager. Remizov’s wife, Serafima Pavlovna, proofread the manuscripts. In short, they were people I knew. I remember Berdyaev once saying to me, “So you’re keeping company with the Bolsheviks, are you? I’d advise you to stay away from them. I know that crowd. We were in exile together. I wouldn’t have any dealings with them if I were you.”

As I was not exactly having “dealings” with them, Berdyaev’s warning had not bothered me.

Now, however, an undeniably Bolshevik first-aid station was to be set up in Berdyaev’s editorial office. If it was being organized by Finn-Yenotaevsky, there was no doubt about its Bolshevik credentials. Or was Finn-Yenotaevsky merely acting in the capacity of a member of some medical committee for the bandaging of dead people? I was reassured by the thought that K.P. would be there. He would explain everything to me. It was all a little strange, of course, but there was no going back now. I had ten roubles in my hand and an important mission to carry out. I had to act.

I went to Liteyny Street.

But it turned out that there was no doctor to be found—neither at number five, nor at number ten. I made enquiries, thinking there might be a doctor who wasn’t called Prunkin. Or a Prunkin who wasn’t a doctor. But there was no one at all. No doctor—and no Prunkin. I returned home quite dismayed.

For the first time in my life, the proletariat had entrusted me with an important mission, and I had achieved nothing. If my aristocratic elders and betters ever found out, they would look on me with scorn. Only one thing reassured me—my old friend K.P. would be at the first-aid station too. He would protect me.

The following morning I listened out carefully—was there any shooting to be heard? No, there was nothing. It was all quiet. At three o’clock sharp (“Discipline, my friends, above all!”) I entered the building. At the door of the editorial office I ran into K.P.

“Well?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Nothing. Nothing and nobody.”

A girl came in, carrying a packet of hygroscopic cotton wool. She sat there for five minutes and then went away again, taking the cotton wool with her.

The next day, Finn-Yenotaevsky appeared.

“You know,” I said, “I couldn’t find any doctor at all on Liteyny Street, either at number five or at number ten.”

“You couldn’t?” he said, without the least surprise. “Well, you won’t help us bring about the revolution. Give me back the ten roubles.”

“So, if I had found a doctor, you’d have brought about a revolution?”

But he just gave a toss of his spirals and dashed off.

“I’m sick of all your friends,” I said to K.P. “Can’t we put them off somehow?”

“Wait a little longer,” he replied. “Lenin will be here soon. Only don’t tell a soul. He’s coming illegally. Once he’s here, things will get interesting. Do please wait a little.”

And so I began waiting for Lenin.

Maxim Gorky came to me with a request.

He told me he often received communications from the provinces, which were of interest only to himself and his friends, and of no interest whatsoever to anybody else. At that time, anyone receiving too much correspondence was liable to attract the attentions of the police, and then their letters would be intercepted and begin to go missing. However, if the correspondence was sent to an editorial office, it wouldn’t attract any attention at all. The head of the provincial affairs desk at the Stock Exchange Gazette was a man of very liberal views by the name of Linyov.[18] I was to ask Linyov for a favour: not to print any letters he received from the provinces in which the date was underlined twice. Apparently, the contents of these letters (which were quite innocuous and, actually, pure fabrication) were intended only for Gorky and his friends. Instead of printing the letters, Linyov was to pass them to me, as I often came in to the editorial office. And then Gorky’s friends would pick them up from me.

It was all quite clear and simple.

Linyov was happy to oblige.

This Linyov was a man who didn’t do things by halves. He had an extravagant head of hair and a beard that seemed to ripple in the breeze.

“I appeal to Gogol’s Russia, to Dostoevsky’s Russia. I ask them ‘Where are we heading?’” he would say. “But I get no answer.”

It was too bad that he got no answer from either Gogol’s or Dostoevsky’s Russia, but he took no offence, and went on repeating his impossible question.

Anyway, Linyov agreed, and even gave his word that he would always do everything he possibly could to help Gorky’s friends. Presently, Linyov passed me two or three letters with the dates underlined. A gentleman who claimed to be “from Gorky” came and took them away. The letters seemed to be utterly trivial: “Students at the Kursk Seminary are complaining that they have been given spoilt meat.” “The Taganrog school building is in need of repair, but it is impossible to get a housing repair grant.”

Then, all of a sudden, the letters stopped. The “gentleman from Gorky” arrived, very agitated. He and his friends knew that an important letter had been dispatched the week before, and that Linyov hadn’t passed it on. In general, letters had started to go missing. What was going on? They had to get to the bottom of things immediately.

“Have there been any letters?” I asked Linyov.

“Of course there have,” said Linyov, “As it happens, they were extremely interesting. As an experienced observer of provincial life, I simply had to print the material.”

“But you were warned that it was all pure fabrication,” I said. “How could you print it? Now you’ll get complaints!”

“I’m already getting complaints. However, as an experienced observer… anyway, it’s over now. There haven’t been any more letters.”

I looked into his tray. The first thing I saw was a letter with the date underlined.

“What about this?” I asked. “And here’s another, and another.”

“Oh, those!” His manner was blasé. “You can have them. I’ve used them already.”

Later that day I passed on the letters to the “gentleman from Gorky”. He was overjoyed and then, to my surprise, he asked for a candle. He lit the candle, and began to heat the letter over the flame.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What do you think I’m doing? I’m developing it.”

So that was what was going on! Between the lines of the letter, yellow words began to appear. Familiar words: “co-optation”, “mandate”, “Mensheviks”.

Three days later, Linyov rushed in. His hair was on end, his coat gaping open, and he had the face of a man who has just jumped off a cliff into the sea.

He was shouting, “I have a daughter! I may not have seen her for fifteen years, but I’m a father, I’ll have you know.”

“What’s happened to your daughter?”

“I’ll tell you what’s happened to her,” he said. “Her only father is about to be ruined by you and your friends. Make no mistake! Those letters! Gorky will drag me to the guillotine!”

“Don’t take on so. We don’t have the guillotine here. We’re not in France.”

“It makes no difference. You tell Gorky from me that I have a daughter!”

I promised I would pass on the message, and Linyov rushed off again, forgetting his briefcase and gloves.

I told the “gentleman from Gorky”, and that was the end of the matter.

For some time now there had been talk in literary circles of the need to start a newspaper. The poet Minsky had been granted the necessary permission,[19] but he had no money. Some capitalist showed up and arranged a meeting, to which our friend K.P., who knew him, was invited. Although the plans being discussed were quite innocuous, suddenly the police burst in and arrested everybody. Nobody had done anything wrong, but the police dealt with them very harshly. Those arrested were taken to Marshal Baroch, who was well known for his bully-boy tactics. He yelled, stamped his feet and threatened to let them all rot in jail. K.P. replied, calmly, “That’s fine, but I need to make a call to my father.”

“Call him! Feel free!” yelled Baroch. “And I’ll let him know just what sort of a son he has. He’d better watch out, too!”

In those days, you had to give the number to a switchboard operator who would put you through. When K.P. gave the girl his father’s number, Marshal Baroch gave a start.

“Is that Senator P.’s apartment?” K.P. asked over the phone.

Baroch jumped to his feet.

“Igor, is that you?” continued K.P. “Could you tell father that I’ve been arrested and that Marshall Baroch is acting the fool?”

Marshall Baroch didn’t say a word. Shamefaced, he slunk out of the room.

K.P. was released that day. The others were kept for three days.

That was the last we saw of the capitalist, and the dream of starting a newspaper was dashed.

But then fresh hope dawned. Gorky began talks with Minsky. Getting permission to start a new paper was difficult; it was easier to try to make use of the permission already granted to Minsky. Gorky found the money, and Minsky was to be the editor. The literary section would include Gorky, Zinaida Gippius (both as a poet and as a literary critic, under the pseudonym “Anton the Extreme”) and myself. The paper would take its political direction from the Social Democrats, under the leadership of Lenin. Rumyantsev was to be editorial secretary and the managing editor would be Litvinov, whom we all nicknamed Papasha (“Daddy”).

Our future secretary found a superb building on Nevsky Prospekt for our editorial office, with a grand entrance onto the street and a uniformed doorman. Everybody was very excited.

Minsky found the slogan “Workers of the World Unite” a great source of inspiration. Realizing that the phrase was pleasingly metrical, he composed an anthem:

This anthem was printed in the first edition of the paper, which was called New Life.

New Life aroused a great deal of interest. The first issue went on sale at a price of three roubles. All the copies were snapped up almost immediately, that same evening. Our political directors were jubilant. They thought that they were the reason for the paper’s success.

“Our comrades, the workers, have shown their support!”

Sadly, the workers had in fact remained loyal to the Petersburg Gazette, which was printed on a special type of paper ideal for rolling cigarettes. It was the intelligentsia, needless to say, that was interested in our new paper. They were intrigued by the novelty of a collaboration between the Social Democrats and the Decadents (Minsky and Gippius), not to mention Gorky.

Strange characters began to appear in our magnificent editorial office. They whispered in corners and exchanged meaningful looks with one another.

No one in the world of journalism knew who these people were. Even the king of Russian reporters, Lvov-Klyachko, who knew literally everyone and everything, could only look at them and shrug. It seemed that they were there at the invitation of Rumyantsev. But when we asked him who they were, he smiled slyly and said, “Wait and see.”

These new people had not actually begun to work; they were merely conferring, making preparations.

And then who should turn up but my old friend Yefim, the same Yefim who, while languishing in a tsarist jail, had eaten goose for Christmas. Or, as he put it, “gooses”.

Yefim, smiling bashfully, announced that he had an idea for a political article.

“So far I’ve only got as far as the title: ‘Plehve and his Slaves’.[21] I’d like to get it printed as soon as possible.”

“So where is the article?”

“Well I need a bit more time to think up the article itself.”

A man by the name of Gukovsky appeared too. He opened his gap-toothed mouth wide and tapped on his gums with a fingernail. “Scurvy,” he declared proudly.

From this, everyone was supposed to gather that he had spent time in exile; that he had suffered for his ideas.

We were also joined by someone called Gusev, who had just arrived from abroad. Somebody said that he “had a top-notch singing voice”. All these men were more or less alike. They even spoke in the same way: curling their lips ironically and leaving their sentences unfinished.

I was asked to write something satirical for the paper.

At the time there was a lot of talk about Dmitry Trepov.[22] I no longer remember what position he held, but he was certainly someone very important; hence he was dubbed Patron—a name which, of course, also means “Bullet”. During the suppression of a recent riot[23] he had given soldiers the order to fire and “to spare no bullet”. Soon afterwards, he had been removed from his post.

The editors decided that I should mark this occasion.

I wrote a rhyme called “Bullet and the bullets”:

My rhyme was typeset at once and was supposed to come out the following day.

But it didn’t appear.

What was going on?

Some Gusev or Gukovsky popped out from one of the side rooms and explained, “I asked them to hold back your poem. I wasn’t sure if it’s correct to rhyme ‘recall it’ with ‘bullet’. It will need to be discussed at an editorial meeting.”

I went to see Rumyantsev.

“Pyotr Petrovich, we can’t afford to delay. In a day or two, every newspaper in town will have come up with the same joke. We won’t be able to print it then.”

Rumyantsev ran off to the typesetters and the poem appeared the following day. And by evening, the joke about “Bullet and the bullets” was being repeated everywhere: on the streets, in trams, in clubs, in parlours, at student meetings. I would have liked to have had a word with the expert on poetry who had kept back my poem. However, all the newcomers were so like one another that I was afraid I might get the wrong man, and upset somebody entirely innocent.

“Don’t bother,” said Rumyantsev. “He knows anyway. He only held back your poem to show that he’s an important person around here, that his word means something.”

“But who is he?” I asked. “Is he a writer? How does he come to be such an expert on rhyme? And in any case, it says in the contract that ‘they’ are supposed to keep to the political section. If you know who did it, tell him there are one or two things I’d like to change too in their political editorials.”

He laughed. “That would certainly liven up the paper,” he said. “Interest has been falling off lately.”

But actually, interest in the paper was not falling off.

We had had some interest from Moscow. Valery Bryusov had sent us a short story. Minsky had received a letter from Andrei Bely. The literary section was getting very lively.

There was a lot of talk at the time about new social developments, but it was difficult to detect any general trend. At salons, people discussed the government’s actions. People who were themselves of low social status were saying things like: “Those workers and tradesmen are stirring things up. There’s no satisfying that lot.”

In the hairdresser’s one day, a big, strapping woman with red cheeks, the owner of a horse cab yard, was sitting beside me having her hair set. She was saying to the hairdresser, “You know what, Monsewer, I’m that scared these days, I can’t even leave the house.”

“Why ever not?” asked the hairdresser.

“Well, everyone’s saying the antilligentsia is about to cop it. It’s scaring the living daylights out of me…”

In the house of a certain governor’s wife I met a Baroness O. She had been brought to Russia by Zinaida Gippius.

“Why don’t you have a Carmagnole?”[24] she was saying. “It’s a lovely, cheerful revolutionary song for the triumphant people to dance to. I can write the music and one of your poets can write the words. I love writing music. I’ve already written two romances: one about a Turkish pasha in love, and the other about a queen in love. Now I can write a Carmagnole. So don’t forget, now. Have a word with your poet friends.”

In the dark corners of the editorial office there was much whispering, and the rustling of strange documents—little groups of cockroaches waving their whiskers.

Rumyantsev strode boldly about the office, like an animal-tamer in a circus. He was very pleased with all his staff, and was now waiting impatiently for Lenin’s arrival, so that he could boast to him about how well he had set everything up. He was the object of disapproving whispers from the cockroaches in their corners, but he took no notice of this and only chuckled roguishly. Watching him, you would think he was merely playing at being a Bolshevik, and enjoying himself immensely. Yet he had, in his day, spent time in exile (albeit not in Siberia, but in Oryol).[25] He had translated Marx and was seen by the Bolsheviks as a powerful force in the world of literature. He barely said a word to the whisperers in the corners and sometimes even nodded in their direction and gave us a knowing wink.

But there was an odd mood in the editorial office. It was tense, unfriendly and awkward. Minsky was particularly anxious. He was the chief editor, the paper was authorized in his name, and yet he was not even being shown the political articles. Gorky was no longer coming in to the office. It seemed he had left the city.

“Wait and see,” Rumyantsev tried to reassure everybody. “Soon Lenin will be here and everything will be sorted out.”

I walked about the office, quietly singing, “The master is coming, the master will sort it all out.”[26]

Rumyantsev was right.

The master did come.

And he did sort it all out.

Sitting in reception were Rumyantsev and two other men. One of them I recognized as one of our whisperers, but the other was new to me. The new man was plain and rather plump with a large lower jaw, a prominent forehead with thinning hair, small, crafty eyes and jutting cheekbones. He was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, explaining something to Rumyantsev very emphatically. Rumyantsev kept spreading his hands in dismay and shrugging his shoulders. He was clearly put out.

The whisperer was devouring this newcomer with his eyes, nodding at his every word and even bobbing up and down impatiently on his chair.

When I came in, the conversation immediately broke off. Rumyantsev introduced me and the newcomer said amiably, “Yes, yes, I know” (not that there was really much to know).

Rumyantsev did not tell me the man’s name. Clearly I was expected to know already.

“Vladimir Ilyich is unhappy with our premises,” said Rumyantsev.

Ah! Vladimir Ilyich! The man himself!

“The premises are excellent,” Lenin interrupted. “But not for our editorial office. What on earth gave you the idea of having our office on Nevsky Prospekt? And to have such a grand doorman on duty! No ordinary working man would have the courage to walk past a figure like him. And your diarists are no use at all. You must have diaries written by workers…”

“It’s anyone’s guess what they’d come up with,” Rumyantsev said crossly.

“It doesn’t matter. Of course it will be badly written and incoherent, but that isn’t important. We can take a piece, work on it, correct it and publish it. And then the workers will know it’s their paper.”

I thought of Yefim and his “Plehve and his Slaves”.

“And will the workers be writing the literary reviews and the theatre and opera reviews, too?” I asked.

“Nowadays we don’t need theatre. Nor do we need music. We don’t need any articles about art or culture of any sort. The only way we can connect with the masses is by publishing diaries written by workers. Your much-touted Lvov gives us nothing but ministerial gossip. He is quite surplus to requirements.”

Poor Rumyantsev. He had been so proud to have lured Klyachko-Lvov, the king of reporters, to his paper.

Klyachko was an extraordinary reporter. His exploits were legendary. Once, apparently, he had sat under the table in the office of the Home Secretary during a closed meeting. The next day, an account of this meeting appeared in Klyachko’s paper in the section called “Rumours”. It caused panic among those at the top. How could the reporter have found all this out? Who had let the information slip? Or had a bribe of several thousand changed hands? But then, that was a monstrous suggestion! For some time, people tried to identify the guilty party—and they, of course, got nowhere. The guilty party was the footman, who had received a hefty tip from Klyachko for hiding him under the green baize.

According to another story, Klyachko had once interviewed a certain dignitary who was preparing an important state project. The man refused to tell Klyachko anything at all definite. He restricted himself to very general comments, all the time stroking a manuscript that lay in front of him on the table. The dignitary was in a hurry to get to a meeting and Klyachko obligingly offered to take him there. As he was leaving, Klyachko suddenly realized he had left his briefcase behind in the office. The dignitary was already seated in the carriage, and Klyachko had his foot on the step when, with a sudden start, he said, “My briefcase! Goodness! I’ve left my briefcase behind!”

And off he dashed, back into the house.

In full view of the startled doorman, he burst into the study, and grabbed not only his briefcase but also the manuscript that was lying on the table.

An hour later, after he had had a quick look through the manuscript, he went back to the statesman’s house and said to the doorman, “Your master said I was to put these papers on his table myself.”

The next day the statesman was astonished to see a general outline of his project in the papers: “I gave very evasive answers to all that reporter’s questions. He must have the most extraordinary nose for a story.”

And Lenin was proposing to dismiss this king of reporters, Klyachko-Lvov, sought after by every paper. To replace him with what? With Yefim and his Plehves and Slaves.

“Might I ask?” I said to Lenin. “Is the entire literary section surplus to requirements, in your opinion?”

“Speaking quite frankly, yes. But wait a bit. Carry on as you are, and we’ll soon reorganize everything.”

The reorganization began at once. It began with the premises. Carpenters appeared, carrying lengths of wood, and began to divide each room into several compartments.

The result was a cross between a beehive and a menagerie: a maze of dark corners, cages and stables. Some cubicles were the size of stalls meant for a single horse, while others were still more cramped, like cages for smaller animals—foxes, for instance. And the partitions were so close that, had there been bars, visitors might have poked the animals with their umbrellas, or perhaps even plucked up the courage to stroke them. In some of these cubicles there was neither a desk nor a chair, only a bare light bulb on a wire.

A great number of new people appeared. All of them unknown to us and all of them alike. The ones who stood out were Martyn Mandelstam, who was interesting and intelligent, Alexander Bogdanov, who was a little dull but generally highly thought of, and Lev Kamenev who was fond of literature, or who, at any rate, acknowledged its right to exist. But these men hardly ever came into the editorial office; they were, I think, exclusively occupied with Party business. All the others would congregate in little groups in the stables with their heads facing one another, like sheep in a snowstorm. At the centre of every group there was always a piece of paper held in somebody’s hand. Everybody would be stabbing at it with their fingers and muttering under their breath. Either they were struggling to get to the bottom of something, or they were all keeping tabs on one another.

A strange office indeed.

The only room untouched was the large room used for editorial meetings.

The way these meetings were conducted was also somewhat absurd. People who had nothing to do with the newspaper would come along and stand between the chairs and the wall, shrugging their shoulders and making ironical long faces, even when the question under discussion was perfectly simple and there was nothing to be ironical about: should we, for instance, print the names of deceased people in small print, or in regular type?

At one of these meetings we were told that a certain Faresov (a Populist, apparently) had just appeared. He would like to work for the newspaper.

“Anyone have any objections to Faresov?” asked Lenin.

Nobody did.

“Well, I can’t say I like him myself,” I said. “But that, of course, is neither here nor there.”

“I see,” said Lenin. “Well, since Nadezhda Alexandrovna doesn’t like him for some reason, I suggest we forget about him. Tell him we’re busy now.”

My goodness, what a gentleman! Who would have thought it?

“See how important your opinion is to him!” K.P said to me in a whisper.

“I think this is just an excuse to get rid of Faresov,” I said.

Lenin, who was sitting next to me, squinted at me out of his narrow, crafty eyes and laughed.

Meanwhile, life in the city went on as usual.

Young journalists courted young female revolutionaries who had just returned from abroad.

There was one woman (I think she was called Gradusova, though I don’t remember for sure) who carried grenades around in her muff. The staff of the bourgeois Stock Exchange Gazette were captivated by her.

“She dresses elegantly, she goes to the hairdresser, and all the time she’s carrying bombs wrapped up in her muff. Well, say what you like, but she’s certainly an original! And always so calm and natural, with a smile on her face—she’s an absolute darling!”

There were collections to raise money for weapons.

Absolute and original darlings like this Gradusova made the rounds of newspaper offices and high-class theatres asking coquettishly for donations towards the purchase of weapons.

One rich actress reacted to an appeal of this sort in a very businesslike fashion. She donated twenty roubles, but asked for a receipt: “If revolutionaries come to rob my apartment, I can show them I did my bit for their cause. Then they’ll leave me in peace.”

Gusev came to see me, but I refused to collect money myself. I have no understanding of that sort of thing and no idea how to go about it. It so happened that an English journalist from The Times was visiting me just then. This journalist laughed, and gave Gusev a ten-rouble gold coin. Gusev put the loot in a large paper bag which had once held biscuits from the Chuev Bakers. So far he’d collected a grand total of three one-rouble notes and a twenty kopeck coin.

Not long after this, I had another amusing encounter with this same Gusev.

My bourgeois friends took me out one evening for an after-theatre dinner, in an expensive restaurant with music and a cabaret. The clientele was wealthy—everyone was drinking champagne.

And suddenly, not far away from us, I saw a young girl who looked completely out of place there. Her face was covered in thick white make-up and she was gaudily dressed—she could have been Sonia Marmeladova on her way back from the Haymarket.[27] And next to her, behind a silver ice bucket with a bottle of champagne in it, I caught a glimpse of a familiar face. It peeped out for a moment, then disappeared. I didn’t even manage to make out who it was, but one of my companions said, “There’s a man over there who’s very interested in you. Third table along. He keeps sneaking looks at you.”

I turned round suddenly and found myself looking right at Gusev. It was he who’d been hiding from me behind the bottle. He tried to hide again but, realizing that I had spotted him, decided to take the initiative. He came over to our table, red in the face, perspiring and embarrassed: “You see, this is the sort of den of iniquity I have to hide out in from time to time…”

“You poor thing,” I sighed. “I understand you only too well. We’ve all taken the decision to hide out here, too. To think what we’re forced to endure. Music, ballet, Neapolitan songs. It’s unbearable.”

He blushed an even deeper red, made a snuffling noise, and left.

A piece of literary criticism by “Anton the Extreme” (Zinaida Gippius) was not published. And a review of a new play also failed to appear.

Why?

“Lenin says it’s of no interest to the working-class reader,” we were told. “The working-class reader has no interest in literature and does not go to the theatre.”

I asked Lenin about this.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s right. Now is not the time.”

“But workers aren’t the only readers of our paper.”

“Maybe so, but they’re the only readers we’re interested in.”

“But don’t you think that, if you get rid of the entire literature section, the paper will lose a lot of subscribers? And then you’ll lose money. Anyway, if you turn the paper into some Party rag, you’ll be shut down before you know it. So long as big literary names continue to appear, the censors won’t look at the paper too closely: these literary names are your camouflage. But if you lose them, everybody will be able to see that the paper is simply a Party rag: you’ll be shut down in no time.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Lenin. “If this scheme fails, we’ll just think up something else.”

“I see—so no theatre, then, and no music!”

Meanwhile Gukovsky, who was also present, kept nodding his agreement with Lenin.

I went to talk to Rumyantsev.

“Pyotr Petrovich,” I said, “your paper will be shut down.”

“Well you must try and get him to see sense. After all, we have responsibilities to our literary staff. We have a contract. The official authorization for the paper is in Minsky’s name. We can’t oust Minsky from the editorial committee. There’d be the most appalling literary scandal.”

As I was coming out of the editorial office, I saw Gukovsky. He was going through the post.

“Excellent,” he said. “Tickets for the opera. My wife adores music. We’ll definitely go.”

I stopped him. “No no, my friend, you won’t be going anywhere. That would be absolutely incompatible with the iron resolve now required of you. If there are no theatre reviews in the paper, the staff have no right to enjoy free theatre tickets. You did, after all, agree with Vladimir Ilyich just now when he said that we don’t need music or literature any more. You’ve got to be more consistent. So—what you and I must jointly do is to take these vile inducements to unprincipled time-wasting and simply tear them up.”

I put the tickets one on top of the other and calmly ripped them in half and then in half again. Only half an hour later, needless to say, I felt cross with myself for treating him so meanly. Why shouldn’t the man have gone to the opera with his wife to see Eugene Onegin? It might have done him good. Of course he was in awe of Lenin. Of course he was afraid of Lenin and felt he had to agree with Lenin’s every word—but he was still a human being! He wanted to listen to music. And he loved his wife. Why had I been so spiteful? Really I should get him some tickets and send them to him anonymously, with a little note: “I hear you’re fond of music.” But no, that would only scare him: he would wonder what was going on and what people were saying about him. A man like him should, of course, have nothing whatever to do with the opera! That wouldn’t be a Bolshevik step forward—it would be two whole steps back…[28] Still, all in all, the episode left a bad taste in my mouth. If they sent us any more tickets, I thought, I would definitely slip them into Gukovsky’s stable.

Lenin was living in Petersburg illegally. He was, of course, under official surveillance. There was no doubt about that. Nevertheless, he would come into the office, quite freely, day after day, simply turning up the collar of his coat when he left so as not to be recognized. And not one of the gumshoes on duty ever asked any questions about this character who was so keen to cover up his chin.

The mood of those days was bucolic; the lion lay down with the lamb.

When I became aware of the relationship between Lenin and his fellow Party-members, I began to pay closer attention to him.

His appearance was unprepossessing. Slightly balding, rather short, untidily dressed, he could have been a minor official from some remote local council. There was nothing about him to suggest a future dictator. There was no suggestion of passionate fervour. He spoke and gave orders just as if he were simply going about his job like anyone else, as if he himself found it boring—but then, that was life.

He was very simple in his manner. He didn’t pose. People generally pose because they want others to like them, because they yearn for beauty. Lenin had no feeling for beauty whatsoever, in anything. Lunacharsky acted the part of a “squire” and a poet. Rumyantsev fancied himself as an eagle. The whisperers were all Robespierres and Marats, even though they would all tuck their tails between their legs in the presence of Lenin.

They were all posing.

Lenin always spoke to these Marats in a friendly, good-natured way, carefully explaining anything they were slow to understand. And they would thank him warmly for enlightening them: “What on earth were we thinking of ? It’s so simple. Thank you!”

And in this way, acting the part of a good-natured comrade, Lenin gradually took everyone in hand and led them along his straight and narrow line—always the shortest distance between two points. And not one of these people was close or dear to him. They were no more than the material from which he pulled out threads for his own cloth.

People referred to Lenin simply as “he”:

“Is he here?”

“Is he still coming? Didn’t he ask you about it?”

Everybody else was “they”.

He didn’t single out anybody in particular. He just kept a keen watch, with his narrow, Mongolian eyes, to see who could be used, and how.

One man might be good at slipping across borders on a fake passport—he would be sent on a mission abroad. Another might be good at public speaking—he would be sent to speak at political rallies. A third was good at deciphering letters, while a fourth was good at exciting a crowd—he knew how to shout loudly and wave his arms about. And there were others who were good at putting together little articles based on the thoughts of Vladimir Ilyich.

As an orator, Lenin did not carry the crowd with him; he did not set a crowd on fire, or whip it up into a frenzy. He was not like Kerensky, who could make a crowd fall in love with him and shed tears of ecstasy; I myself witnessed such tears in the eyes of soldiers and workers as they showered Kerensky’s car with flowers on Marinsky Square. Lenin simply battered away with a blunt instrument at the darkest corner of people’s souls, where greed, spite and cruelty lay hidden. He would batter away and get the answer he wanted:

“Yes, we’ll loot and pillage—and murder too!”

Naturally, he had no friends and no favourites. He didn’t see anybody as a human being. And he had a fairly low opinion of human nature. As far as I could see, he considered everyone to be capable of treachery for the sake of personal gain. A man was good only insofar as he was necessary to the cause. And if he wasn’t necessary—to hell with him. Anyone harmful or even just inconvenient could be done away with—and this would be carried out calmly and sensibly, without malice. Even amicably. Lenin didn’t even seem to look on himself as a human being—he was merely a servant of a political idea. Possessed maniacs of this kind are truly terrifying.

But, as they say, history’s victors are never judged. Or, as somebody once said in response to these words, “They may not be judged, but they do often get strung up without a trial.”

It was rumoured that the Black Hundreds[29] from the “Tearoom of the Russian People”[30] were planning a pogrom[31] against New Life. Apparently they had made a list of all the paper’s staff and found out their addresses. They had already decided on the night when they would do the rounds of our apartments and finish off the lot of us.

Everybody had decided not to go home that night. I had been issued with strict instructions to go somewhere else. But, as it turned out, I went to the theatre that evening, and then went on to dine with friends. I didn’t get home until about five o’clock in the morning.

I decided that if the Black Hundreds were planning to kill me, they’d had all night for it—and it wasn’t the kind of thing one did in the morning. I asked the doorman if anyone had called. No, no one at all. And that was that. The next day it turned out that none of the staff had had any trouble.

Nevertheless, for quite other reasons, there was a general sense of anxiety in our office.

Rumyantsev told us that Lenin was demanding we break our contract with Minsky, take over the paper entirely and make it into a Party organ. Rumyantsev thought this would be wrong and was not agreeing to it. It was Minsky who had been granted permission for the paper and it was he who was the chief editor. What on earth would the literary world think of us?

“I don’t give a damn about your literary circles,” said Lenin. “The thrones of tsars are toppling—and your only concern seems to be the propriety of our conduct towards a few writers.”

“But it was me who signed the contract,” protested Rumyantsev.

“And it’ll be me who tears it up,” said Lenin.

But before tearing up that ill-fated contract, he wrote an article in New Life that terrified us all. As far as I remember, it was something about the nationalization of land.[32] Minsky was given an official reprimand. He came into the office very shaken indeed.

“I’m the editor in chief and you tell me nothing about the articles you are including. One more article like that—and I could be sent into exile.”

Minsky’s wife, the poet Ludmila Vilkina, also came into the office. “I’m frightened,” she said. “What if my husband does get sent to Siberia? He wouldn’t survive—he has a weak chest.”

In response to this entirely reasonable fear, we heard a snigger: “Oh, it’s not so bad as all that in Siberia! There’s a bracing climate out there in Siberia—(here there was another snigger). It’s just what he needs!”

It was all very nasty. Not for one moment had Minsky imagined he would be treated like this.

It was K.P. who came to his rescue.

“Go abroad immediately,” he said.

“But they might not let me out of the country.”

“I’ll give you my internal passport. But don’t waste a moment.”

A few days later, Minsky came into the office to say goodbye. He showed us the brand new external passport he had just obtained. On the English page[33] was written “gentleman” (K.P. was from a noble family).

“Look,” he laughed. “Now I’m a real gentleman—with official papers to prove it.”

Minsky left the country shortly after this, and the entire literary section soon resigned too. We asked for our names to be removed from the list of contributors. There was no point in us staying with the paper any longer.

Predictably enough, the paper soon closed down.

Lenin turned up the collar of his coat even farther and, still apparently unnoticed, left the country for several years.

When he came back, it was in the sealed railway carriage.[34]

RASPUTIN

There are people who are remarkable because of their talent, intelligence or public standing, people whom you often meet and whom you know well. You have an accurate sense of what these people are like, but all the same they pass through your life in a blur, as if your psychic lens can never quite focus on them, and your memory of them always remains vague. There’s nothing you can say about them that everyone doesn’t already know. They were tall or they were short; they were married; they were affable or arrogant, unassuming or ambitious; they lived in some place or other and they saw a lot of so-and-so. The blurred negatives of the amateur photographer. You can look all you like, but you still don’t know whether you’re looking at a little girl or a ram.

The person I want to talk about flashed by in a mere two brief encounters. But how firmly and vividly his character is etched into my memory, as if with a fine needle.

And this isn’t simply because he was so very famous. In my life I’ve met many famous people, people who have truly earned their renown. Nor is it because he played such a tragic role in the fate of Russia. No. This man was unique, one of a kind, like a character out of a novel; he lived in legend, he died in legend, and his memory is cloaked in legend.

A semi-literate peasant and a counsellor to the Tsar, a hardened sinner and a man of prayer, a shape-shifter with the name of God on his lips.

They called him cunning. Was there really nothing to him but cunning?

I shall tell you about my two brief encounters with him.

The end of a Petersburg winter. Neurasthenia.

Rather than starting a new day, morning merely continues the grey, long-drawn-out evening of the day before.

Through the plate glass of the large bay window I can see out onto the street, where a warrant officer is teaching new recruits to poke bayonets into a scarecrow. The recruits have grey, damp-chilled faces. A despondent-looking woman with a sack stops and stares at them.

What could be more dismal?

The telephone rings.

“Who is it?”

“Rozanov.”

In my surprise, I ask again. Yes, it’s Rozanov.

He is very cryptic. “Has Izmailov said anything to you? Has he invited you? Have you accepted?”

“No, I haven’t seen Izmailov and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So he hasn’t yet spoken to you. I can’t say anything over the telephone. But please, please do accept. If you don’t go, I won’t either.”

“For heaven’s sake, what are you talking about?”

“He’ll explain everything. It’s not something we can talk about on the telephone.”

There was a click on the line. We had been disconnected.

This was all very unexpected and strange. Vasily Rozanov was not someone I saw a lot of. Nor was Izmailov. And the combination of Rozanov and Izmailov also seemed odd. What was all this about? And why wouldn’t Rozanov go to some place unless I went too?

I rang the editorial department of the Stock Exchange Gazette, where Izmailov worked. It was too early; no one was there.

But I didn’t have to wait long. About two hours later Izmailov rang me.

“There is the possibility of a very interesting meeting… Unfortunately, there’s nothing more I can say over the telephone… Maybe you can guess?”

I most certainly could not guess. We agreed that he should come round and explain everything.

He arrived.

“Have you still not guessed who we’re talking about?”

Izmailov was thin, all in black, and in dark glasses; he looked as if he had been sketched in black ink. His voice was hollow. All rather weird and sinister.

Izmailov truly was weird. He lived in the grounds of the Smolensk cemetery, where his father had once been a priest. He practised black magic, loved telling stories about sorcery, and he knew charms and spells. Thin, pale and black, with a thin strip of bright red mouth, he looked like a vampire.

“So you really don’t understand?” he asked with a grin. “You don’t know who it is we can’t discuss over the telephone?”

“Kaiser Wilhelm perhaps?”

Izmailov looked through his dark glasses at the two doors into my study—and then, over his glasses, at me.

“Rasputin.”

“Ah!”

“Here in Petersburg there’s a publisher. Filippov—perhaps you’ve heard of him? No? Well, anyway, there is. Rasputin goes to see him quite often; he dines with him. For some reason he’s really quite friendly with him. Filippov also regularly entertains Manuilov, who has a certain reputation in literary circles. Do you know him?”

Manuilov was someone I had come across a few times. He was one of those “companion fish” that are part of the entourage of great writers or artistic figures. At one point he had worshipped Kuprin, then he had moved over to Leonid Andreyev. Then he had quietened down and seemed to disappear altogether. Now he had resurfaced.

“This Manuilov,” said Izmailov, “has suggested to Filippov that he should ask round some writers who’d like to get a glimpse of Rasputin. Just a few people, carefully chosen so there’s no one superfluous and no chance of any unpleasant surprises. Only recently a friend of mine happened to be in the company of Rasputin—and someone covertly took a photograph. Worse still—they sent this photograph to a magazine. ‘Rasputin,’ the caption read, ‘among his friends and admirers.’ But my friend is a prominent public figure; he’s a serious man, perfectly respectable. He can’t stand Rasputin and he feels he’ll never get over the disgrace of this photograph—of being immortalized amid this picturesque crowd. Which is why, to avoid any unpleasantness of this kind, I’ve made it a condition that there should be no superfluous guests. Filippov has given his promise, and this morning Manuilov came over and showed me the guest list. One of the writers is Rozanov, and Rozanov insists that you absolutely must be there. Without you, he says, the whole thing will be a waste of time. Evidently he has a plan of some kind.”

“What on earth can this plan be?” I asked. “Maybe I should stay at home. Although I would, I admit, be curious to get a glimpse of Rasputin.”

“Precisely. How could anyone not be curious? One wants to see for oneself whether he really is someone significant in his own right or whether he’s just a tool—someone being exploited by clever people for their own ends. Let’s take a chance and go. We won’t stay long and we’ll keep together. Like it or not, he’s someone who’ll be in the history books. If we miss this chance, we may never get another.”

“Just so long as he doesn’t think we’re trying to get something out of him.”

“I don’t think he will. The host has promised not to let on that we’re writers. Apparently Rasputin doesn’t like writers. He’s afraid of them. So no one will be telling him this little detail. This is in our interests too. We want Rasputin to feel completely at ease—as if among friends. Because if he feels he’s got to start posturing, the evening will be a complete waste of time. So, we’ll be going, will we? Tomorrow late—not before ten. Rasputin never turns up any earlier. If he’s held up at the palace and can’t come, Filippov promises to ring and let us all know.”

“This is all very strange. And I’ve never even met the host.”

“I don’t know him either, not personally—nor does Rozanov. But he’s someone well known. And he’s a perfectly decent fellow. So, we’re agreed: tomorrow at ten.”

I had glimpsed Rasputin once before. In a train. He must have been on his way east, to visit his home village in Siberia. He was in a first-class compartment. With his entourage: a little man who was something like a secretary to him, a woman of a certain age with her daughter, and Madame V——, a lady-in-waiting to the Tsaritsa.[1]

It was very hot and the compartment doors were wide open. Rasputin was presiding over tea—with a tin teapot, dried bread rings and lumps of sugar on the side. He was wearing a pink calico smock over his trousers, wiping his forehead and neck with an embroidered towel and talking rather peevishly, with a broad Siberian accent.

“Dearie! Go and fetch us some more hot water! Hot water, I said, go and get us some. The tea’s right stewed but they didn’t even give us any hot water. And where is the strainer? Annushka, where’ve you gone and hidden the strainer? Annushka! The strainer—where is it? Oh, what a muddler you are!”

In the evening of the day Izmailov had come round—that is, the day before I was due to meet Rasputin—I went to a rather large dinner party at the home of some friends.

The mirror above the dining-room fireplace was adorned with a sign that read: “In this house we do not talk about Rasputin.”

I’d seen signs like this in a number of other houses. But this time, because I was going to be seeing him the next day, there was no one in the world I wanted to talk about more than Rasputin. And so, slowly and loudly, I read out: “In this house we do not talk about Ras-pu-tin.”

Sitting diagonally across from me was a thin, tense, angular lady. She quickly looked round, glanced at me, then at the sign, then back at me again. As if she wanted to say something.

“Who’s that?” I asked my neighbour.

“Madame E——,” he replied. “She’s a lady-in-waiting. Daughter of the E——” He named someone then very well known. “Know who I mean?”

“Yes.”

After dinner this lady sat down beside me. I knew she’d been really wanting to talk to me—ever since I’d read out that sign. But all she could do was prattle in a scatterbrained way about literature. Clearly she didn’t know how to turn the conversation to the subject that interested her.

I decided to help her out.

“Have you seen the sign over the fireplace? Funny, isn’t it? The Bryanchaninovs have one just like it.”

She immediately came to life.

“Yes, indeed. I really don’t understand. Why shouldn’t we talk about Rasputin?”

“Probably because people are talking about him too much. Everyone’s bored with the subject…”

“Bored?” She seemed almost scared. “How could anyone find him boring? You’re not going to say that, are you? Don’t you find Rasputin fascinating?”

“Have you ever met him?” I asked.

“Who? Him? You mean—Rasputin?”

And suddenly she was all fidgety and flustered. Gasping. Red blotches appeared on her thin, pale cheeks.

“Rasputin? Yes… a very little… a few times. He feels he absolutely has to get to know me. They say this will be very, very interesting. Do you know, when he stares at me, my heart begins to pound in the most alarming way… It’s astonishing. I’ve seen him three times, I think, at friends’. The last time he suddenly came right up close and said, ‘Why so shy, you little waif ? You be sure to come and see me—yes, mind you do!’ I was completely at a loss. I said I didn’t know, that I couldn’t… And then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You shall come. Understand? Yes, you absolutely shall!’ And the way he said ‘shall’ so commandingly, with such authority, it was as if this had already been decided on high and Rasputin was in the know. Do you understand what I mean? It was as if, to him, my fate were an open book. He sees it, he knows it. I’m sure you understand I would never call on him, but the lady whose house I met him at said I really must, that plenty of women of our station call on him, and that there’s nothing in the least untoward about it. But still… I… I shan’t…”

This “I shan’t” she almost squealed. She looked as if she were about to give a hysterical shriek and start weeping.

I could hardly believe it! A mild-mannered lady, mousy and thin, and she looked as if she were at least thirty-five. And yet she had suddenly, shamelessly, lost all self-control at the mere mention of Rasputin, that peasant in a pink calico smock whom I had heard ordering “Annushka” to look for the tea strainer…

The lady of the house came over to where we were sitting and asked us a question. And without replying, probably without even hearing her, Madame E——got up and with a jerky, angular gait went over to the mirror to powder her nose.

All the next day I was unable to put this twitching, bewitched lady-in-waiting out of my mind.

It was unnerving and horrible.

The hysteria around the name of Rasputin was making me feel a kind of moral nausea.

I realized, of course, that a lot of the talk about him was petty, foolish invention, but nonetheless I felt there was something real behind all these tales, that they sprang from some weird, genuine, living source.

In the afternoon Izmailov rang again and confirmed the invitation. He promised that Rasputin would definitely be there. And he passed on a request from Rozanov that I should wear something “a bit glamorous”—so Rasputin would think he was just talking to an ordinary “laydee” and the thought that I might be a writer wouldn’t so much as enter his head.

This demand for “a bit of glamour” greatly amused me.

“Rozanov seems determined to cast me in the role of some biblical Judith or Delilah. I’ll make a hash of it, I’m afraid—I haven’t the talents of either an actor or an agent provocateur. All I’ll do is mess things up.”

“Let’s just play it by ear,” Izmailov said reassuringly. “Shall I send someone over to fetch you?”

I declined, as I was dining with friends, and was going to be dropped off after the meal.

That evening, as I was dressing, I tried to imagine a peasant’s idea of “a bit of glamour”. I put on a pair of gold shoes, and some gold rings and earrings. I’d have felt embarrassed to deck myself out any more flashily. It wasn’t as if I was going to be able to explain to all and sundry that this was glamour on demand!

At my friends’ dinner table, this time without any wiles on my part, the conversation turned to Rasputin. (People evidently had good reason to put injunctions up over their fireplaces.)

As always, there were stories about espionage, about Germans bribing Russian officials, about sums of money finding their way via the elder[2] into particular pockets and about court intrigues, the threads of which were all in Rasputin’s hands.

Even the “black automobile” got linked with the name of Rasputin.

The “black automobile” remains a mystery to this day. Several nights running this car had roared across the Field of Mars, sped over the Palace Bridge and disappeared into the unknown. Shots had been fired from inside the car. Passers-by had been wounded.

“It’s Rasputin’s doing,” people were saying. “Who else?”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“He profits from everything black, evil and incomprehensible. Everything that sows discord and panic. And there’s nothing he can’t explain to his own advantage when he needs to.”

These were strange conversations. But these were strange times, and so no one was especially surprised. Although the events soon to unfold swept the “black automobile” right out of our minds. All too soon we would have other things to think about.

But at the time, at dinner, we talked about all these things. First and foremost, people were astonished by Rasputin’s extraordinary brazenness. Razumov, who was then the director of the Department of Mines, indignantly related how one of his provincial officials had come to him with a request for a transfer. And to support his case, he had held out a piece of paper on which Rasputin—whom Razumov had never even met—had scrawled:

“Can you imagine? The cheek of it! The brazen cheek of it! And there are a great many ministers who say they’ve received little notes like this. And all too many of them just do as he asks—though they don’t, of course, admit as much. I’ve even been told I was reckless to be getting so angry, because he would hear about it. It was vile. Can you imagine it? ‘Dearie’! As for the fine fellow who turned up with the note, I showed him what a ‘Dearie’ I can be! I’m told he flew down the stairs four at a time. And he had seemed like such a respectable man—as well as being a rather eminent engineer.”

“Yes,” said someone else, “I’ve heard about any number of these ‘Dearie’ recommendations, but this is the first time I’ve heard about one not being granted. People get all indignant, but they don’t feel able to refuse the man. ‘He’s vindictive,’ they say, ‘a vindictive peasant.’”

Sometime after ten o’clock I arrived at Filippov’s.

Our host greeted me in the hall. After saying in a friendly way that we’d already met once before, he showed me into his study.

“Your friends arrived some time ago.”

In the small, smoke-filled room were some half a dozen people.

Rozanov was looking bored and disgruntled. Izmailov appeared strained, as if trying to make out that everything was going fine when really it wasn’t.

Manuilov was standing close to the doorway, looking as if he felt entirely at home. Two or three people I didn’t know were sitting silently on the divan. And then there was Rasputin. Dressed in a black woollen Russian kaftan and tall patent leather boots, he was fidgeting anxiously, squirming about in his chair. One of his shoulders kept twitching.

Lean and wiry and rather tall, he had a straggly beard and a thin face that appeared to have been gathered up into a long fleshy nose. His close-set, prickly, glittering little eyes were peering out furtively from under strands of greasy hair. I think these eyes were grey. The way they glittered, it was hard to be sure. Restless eyes. Whenever he said something, he would look round the whole group, his eyes pricking each person in turn, as if to say, “Have I given you something to think about? Are you satisfied? Have I surprised you?”

I felt at once that he was rather preoccupied, confused, even embarrassed. He was posturing.

“Yes, yes,” he was saying. “I wish to go back as soon as possible, to Tobolsk. I wish to pray. My little village is a good place to pray. God hears people’s prayers there.”

And then he studied each of us in turn, his eyes keenly pricking each one of us from under his greasy locks.

“But here in your city nothing’s right. It’s not possible to pray in this city. It’s very hard when you can’t pray. Very hard.”

And again he looked round anxiously, right into everyone’s faces, right into their eyes.

We were introduced. As had been agreed, my fellow scribes did not let on who I really was.

He studied me, as if thinking, “Who is this woman?”

There was a general sense of both tedium and tension—not what we wanted at all. Something in Rasputin’s manner—maybe his general unease, maybe his concern about the impression his words were making—suggested that somehow he knew who we were. It seemed we might have been given away. Imagining himself to be surrounded by “enemies from the press”, Rasputin had assumed the posture of a man of prayer.

They say he really did have a great deal to put up with from journalists. The papers were always full of sly insinuations of every kind. After a few drinks with his cronies, Rasputin was supposed to have divulged interesting details about the personal lives of people in the very highest places. Whether this was true or just newspaper sensationalism, I don’t know. But I do know that there were two levels of security around Rasputin: one set of guards whom he knew about and who protected him from attempts on his life; another set whom he was supposed not to know about and who kept track of whom he was talking to and whether or not he was saying anything he shouldn’t. Just who was responsible for this second set of guards I can’t say for certain, but I suspect it was someone who wanted to undermine Rasputin’s credibility at court.

He had keen senses, and some animal instinct told him he was surrounded. Not knowing where the enemy lay, he was on the alert, his eyes quietly darting everywhere…

I was infected by my friends’ discomfort. It felt tedious and rather awkward to be sitting in the house of a stranger and listening to Rasputin straining to come out with spiritually edifying pronouncements that interested none of us. It was as if he were being tested and was afraid of failing.

I wanted to go home.

Rozanov got to his feet. He took me aside and whispered, “We’re banking on dinner. There’s still a chance of him opening up. Filippov and I have agreed that you must sit beside him. And we’ll be close by. You’ll get him talking. He’s not going to talk freely to us—he’s a ladies’ man. Get him to speak about the erotic. This could be really something—it’s a chance we must make the most of. We could end up having a most interesting conversation.”

Rozanov would happily discuss erotic matters with anyone under the sun, so it was hardly a surprise that he should be so eager to discuss them with Rasputin. After all, what didn’t they say about Rasputin? He was a hypnotist and a mesmerist, at once a flagellant and a lustful satyr, both a saint and a man possessed by demons.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”

Turning around, I encountered two eyes as sharp as needles. Our surreptitious conversation had obviously disturbed Rasputin.

With a twitch of the shoulder, he turned away.

We were invited to the table.

I was seated at one corner. To my left sat Rozanov and Izmailov. To my right, at the end of the table, Rasputin.

There turned out to be around a dozen other guests: an elderly lady with a self-important air (“She’s the one who goes everywhere with him,” someone whispered to me); a harassed-looking gentleman, who hurriedly got a beautiful young lady to sit on Rasputin’s right (this young lady was dressed to the nines—certainly more than “a bit glamorous”—but the look on her face was crushed and hopeless, quite out of keeping with her attire); and at the other end of the table were some strange-looking musicians, with a guitar, an accordion and a tambourine—as if this were a village wedding.

Filippov came over to us, pouring out wine and handing round hors d’oeuvres. In a low voice I asked about the beautiful lady and the musicians.

The musicians, it turned out, were a requirement—Grisha sometimes liked to get up and dance, and only what they played would do. They also played at the Yusupovs’.

“They’re very good. Quite unique. In a moment you’ll hear for yourself.” As for the beautiful lady, Filippov explained that her husband (the harassed-looking gentleman) was having a difficult time at work. It was an unpleasant and complicated situation that could only be sorted out with the help of the elder. And so this gentleman was seizing every possible opportunity to meet Rasputin, taking his wife along with him and seating her beside Rasputin in the hope that sooner or later he would take notice of her.

“He’s been trying for two months now, but Grisha acts as if he doesn’t even see them. He can be strange and obstinate.”

Rasputin was drinking a great deal and very quickly. Suddenly he leant towards me and whispered, “Why aren’t you drinking, eh? Drink. God will forgive you. Drink.”

“I don’t care for wine, that’s why I’m not drinking.”

He looked at me mistrustfully.

“Nonsense! Drink. I’m telling you: God will forgive you. He will forgive you. God will forgive you many things. Drink!”

“But I’m telling you I’d rather not. You don’t want me to force myself to drink, do you?”

“What’s he saying?” whispered Rozanov on my left. “Make him talk louder. Ask him again, to make him talk louder. Otherwise I can’t hear.”

“But it’s nothing interesting. He’s just trying to get me to drink.”

“Get him to talk about matters erotic. God Almighty! Do you really not know how to get a man to talk?”

This was beginning to seem funny.

“Stop going on at me! What am I? An agent provocateur? Anyway, why should I go to all this trouble for you?”

I turned away from Rozanov. Rasputin’s sharp, watchful eyes pricked into me.

“So you don’t want to drink? You are a stubborn one! I’m telling you to drink—and you won’t.”

And with a quick and obviously practised movement he quietly reached up and touched my shoulder. Like a hypnotist using touch to direct the current of his will. It was as deliberate as that.

From his intent look I could see he knew exactly what he was doing. And I remembered the lady-in-waiting and her hysterical babbling: And then he put his hand on my shoulder and said so commandingly, with such authority…

So it was like that, was it? Evidently Grisha had a set routine. Raising my eyebrows in surprise, I glanced at him and smiled coolly.

A spasm went through his shoulder and he let out a quiet moan. Quickly and angrily he turned away from me, as if once and for all. But a moment later he was leaning towards me again.

“You may be laughing,” he said, “but do you know what your eyes are saying? Your eyes are sad. Go on, you can tell me—is he making you suffer badly? Why don’t you say anything? Don’t you know we all love sweet tears, a woman’s sweet tears. Do you understand? I know everything.”

I was delighted for Rozanov. The conversation was evidently turning to matters erotic.

“What is it you know?” I asked loudly, on purpose, so that Rasputin, too, would raise his voice, as people often unwittingly do.

Once again, though, he spoke very softly.

“I know how love can make one person force another to suffer. And I know how necessary it can be to make someone suffer. But I don’t want you to suffer. Understand?”

“I can’t hear a thing!” came Rozanov’s cross voice, from my left.

“Be patient!” I whispered.

Rasputin went on.

“What’s that ring on your hand? What stone is it?”

“It’s an amethyst.”

“Well, that’ll do. Hold your hand out to me under the table so no one can see. Then I’ll breathe on the ring and warm it… The breath of my soul will make you feel better.”

I passed him the ring.

“Oh, why did you have to take it off? That was for me to do. You don’t understand…”

But I had understood only too well. Which was why I’d taken it off myself.

Covering his mouth with his napkin, he breathed onto the ring and quietly slid it onto my finger.

“There. When you come and see me, I’ll tell you many things you don’t know.”

“But what if I don’t come?” I asked, once again remembering the hysterical lady-in-waiting.

Here he was, Rasputin in his element. The mysterious voice, the intense expression, the commanding words—all this was a tried and tested method. But if so, then it was all rather naive and straightforward. Or, perhaps, his fame as a sorcerer, soothsayer and favourite of the Tsar really did kindle within people a particular blend of curiosity and fear, a keen desire to participate in this weird mystery. It was like looking through a microscope at some species of beetle. I could see the monstrous hairy legs, the giant maw—but I knew it was really just a little insect.

“Not come to me? No, you shall come. You shall come to me.”

And again he quickly reached up and quietly touched my shoulder. I calmly moved aside and said, “No, I shan’t.”

And again a spasm went through his shoulder and he let out a low moan. Each time he sensed that his power, the current of his will, was not penetrating me and was meeting resistance, he experienced physical pain. (This was my impression at the time—and it was confirmed later.) And in this there was no pretence, as he was evidently trying to conceal both the spasms in his shoulder and his strange, low groan.

No, this was not a straightforward business at all. Howling inside him was a black beast… There was much we did not know.

“Ask him about Vyrubova,” whispered Rozanov. “Ask him about everyone. Get him to tell you everything. And please get him to speak up.”

Rasputin gave Rozanov a sideways look from under his greasy locks.

“What’s that fellow whispering about?”

Rozanov held his glass out towards Rasputin and said, “I was wanting to clink glasses.”

Izmailov held his glass out, too.

Rasputin looked at them both warily, looked away, then looked back again.

Suddenly Izmailov asked, “Tell me, have you ever tried your hand at writing?”

Who, apart from a writer, would think to ask such a question?

“Now and again,” replied Rasputin without the least surprise. “Even quite a few times.”

And he beckoned to a young man sitting at the other end of the table.

“Dearie! Bring me the pages with my poems that you just tapped out on that little typing machine.”

“Dearie” darted off and came back with the pages.

Rasputin handed them around. Everyone reached out. There were a lot of these typed pages, enough for all of us. We began to read.

It turned out to be a prose poem, in the style of the Song of Songs and obscurely amorous. I can still remember the lines: “Fine and high are the mountains. But my love is higher and finer yet, because love is God.”

But that seems to have been the only passage that made any sense. Everything else was just a jumble of words.

As I was reading, the author kept looking around restlessly, trying to see what impression his work was making.

“Very good,” I said.

He brightened.

“Dearie! Give us a clean sheet, I’ll write something for her myself.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

I said.

He chewed for a long time on his pencil. Then, in a barely decipherable peasant scrawl, he wrote:

The basic pattern of Rasputin’s magic charms was clear enough: love, and God will forgive you.

But why should such an inoffensive maxim as this cause his ladies to collapse in fits of ecstasy? Why had that lady-in-waiting got into such a state?

This was no simple matter.

I studied the awkwardly scrawled letters and the signature below: “Grigory”.

What power this signature held. I knew of a case where this scrawl of seven letters had recalled a man who had been sentenced to forced labour and was already on his way to Siberia.

And it seemed likely that this same signature could, just as easily, transport a man there…

“You should hang on to that autograph,” said Rozanov. “It’s quite something.”

It did in fact stay in my possession for a long time. In Paris, some six years ago, I found it in an old briefcase and gave it to J.W. Bienstock, the author of a book about Rasputin in French.

Rasputin really was only semi-literate; writing even a few words was hard work for him. This made me think of the forest-warden in our home village—the man whose job had been to catch poachers and supervise the spring floating of timber. I remembered the little bills he used to write: “Tren to dacha and bak fife ru” (five roubles).

Rasputin was also strikingly like this man in physical appearance. Perhaps that’s why his words and general presence failed to excite the least mystical awe in me. “God is love, you shall come” and so on. That “fife ru”, which I couldn’t get out of my head, was constantly in the way…

Suddenly our host came up, looking very concerned.

“The palace is on the line.”

Rasputin left the room.

The palace evidently knew exactly where Rasputin was to be found. Probably, they always did.

Taking advantage of Rasputin’s absence, Rozanov began lecturing me, advising me how best to steer the conversation on to all kinds of interesting topics.

“And do please get him to talk about the Khlysts[3] and their rites. Find out whether it’s all true, and if so, how it’s all organized and whether it’s possible, say, to attend.”

“Get him to invite you, and then you can bring us along, too.”

I agreed willingly. This truly would be interesting.

But Rasputin didn’t come back. Our host said he had been summoned urgently to Tsarskoye Selo[4]—even though it was past midnight—but that, as he was leaving, Rasputin had asked him to tell me he would definitely be coming back.

“Don’t let her go,” said Filippov, repeating Rasputin’s words. “Have her wait for me. I’ll be back.”

Needless to say no one waited. Our group, at least, left as soon as we had finished eating.

Everyone I told about the evening showed a quite extraordinary degree of interest. They wanted to know the elder’s every word, and they wanted me to describe every detail of his appearance. Most of all, they wanted to know if they could get themselves invited to Filippov’s, too.

“What kind of impression did he make on you?”

“No very strong impression,” I replied. “But I can’t say I liked him.”

People were advising me to make the most of this connection. One never knows what the future holds in store, and Rasputin was certainly a force to be reckoned with. He toppled ministers and he shuffled courtiers as if they were a pack of cards. His displeasure was feared more than the wrath of the Tsar.

There was talk about clandestine German overtures being made via Rasputin to Alexandra Fyodorovna. With the help of prayer and hypnotic suggestion he was, apparently, directing our military strategy.

“Don’t go on the offensive before such and such a date—or the Tsarevich will be taken ill.”

Rasputin seemed to me to lack the steadiness needed to manage any kind of political strategy. He was too twitchy, too easily distracted, too confused in every way. Most likely he accepted bribes and got involved in plots and deals without really thinking things through or weighing up the consequences. He himself was being carried away by the very force he was trying to control. I don’t know what he was like at the beginning of his trajectory, but by the time I met him, he was already adrift. He had lost himself; it was as if he were being swept away by a whirlwind, by a tornado. As if in delirium, he kept repeating the words: “God… prayer… wine”. He was confused; he had no idea what he was doing. He was in torment, writhing about, throwing himself into his dancing with a despairing howl—as if to retrieve some treasure left behind in a burning house. This satanic dancing of his was something I witnessed later…

I was told he used to gather his society ladies together in a bathhouse and—“to break their pride and teach them humility”—make them bathe his feet. I don’t know whether this is true, but it’s not impossible. At that time, in that atmosphere of hysteria, even the most idiotic flight of fancy seemed plausible.

Was he really a mesmerist? I once spoke to someone who had seriously studied hypnotism, mesmerism and mind control.

I told him about that strange gesture of Rasputin’s, the way he would quickly reach out and touch someone and how a spasm would go through his shoulder when he felt his hypnotic command was meeting resistance.

“You really don’t know?” he asked in surprise. “Mesmerists always make that kind of physical contact. It’s how they transmit the current of their will. And when this current is blocked, then it rebounds upon the mesmerist. The more powerful a wave the mesmerist sends out, the more powerful the current that flows back. You say he was very persistent, which suggests he was using all his strength. That’s why the return current struck him with such force; that’s why he was writhing and moaning. It sounds as if he was suffering real pain as he struggled to control the backlash. Everything you describe is entirely typical.”

Three or four days after this dinner, Izmailov rang me a second time.

“Filippov is begging us to have dinner with him again. Last time Rasputin had to leave almost straight away; he’d barely had time to look about him. This time Filippov assures us that it will all be a great deal more interesting.”

Apparently Manuilov had dropped in on Izmailov. He’d been very insistent (almost like some kind of impresario!) and had shown Izmailov the final guest list: all respectable people who knew how to behave. There was no need to worry.

“Just once more,” Izmailov said to me. “This time our conversation with him will be a lot more fruitful. Maybe we’ll get him to say something really interesting. He truly is someone out of the ordinary. Let’s go.”

I agreed.

This time I arrived later. Everyone had been at the table for some time.

There were many more people than the first time. All of the previous guests were there—as were the musicians. Rasputin was sitting in the same place. Everyone was talking politely, as if they were invited there regularly. No one was looking at Rasputin; it was as if his presence were of no consequence to them at all. And yet the truth was all too obvious: most of the guests did not know one another and, although they now seemed too timid to do anything at all, there was only one reason why they had come. They wanted to have a look at Rasputin, to find out about him, to talk to him.

Rasputin had removed his outer garment and was sitting in a stiff taffeta shirt, worn outside his trousers. It was a glaring pink, and it had an embroidered collar, buttoned on one side.

His face was tense and tired; he looked ashen. His prickly eyes were deeply sunken. He’d all but turned his back on the lawyer’s glamorously dressed wife, who was again sitting next to him. My own place, on his other side, was still free.

“Ah! There she is,” he said with a sudden twitch. “Well, come and sit down. I’ve been waiting. Why did you run off last time? I came back—and where were you? Drink! What’s the matter? I’m telling you—drink! God will forgive you.”

Rozanov and Izmailov were also in the same places as before.

Rasputin leant over towards me.

“I’ve missed you. I’ve been pining for you.”

“Nonsense. You’re just saying that to be nice,” I said loudly. “Why don’t you tell me something interesting instead? Is it true you organize Khlyst rituals?”

“Khlyst rituals? Here? Here in the city?”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Who’s told you that?” he asked uneasily. “Who? Did he say he was there himself ? Did he see for himself ? Or just hear rumours?”

“I’m afraid I can’t remember who it was.”

“You can’t remember? My clever girl, why don’t you come along and see me? I’ll tell you many things you don’t know. You wouldn’t have English blood, would you?”

“No, I’m completely Russian.”

“There’s something English about your little face. I have a princess in Moscow and she has an English face, too. Yes, I’m going to drop everything and go to Moscow.”

“What about Vyrubova?” I asked, rather irrelevantly—for Rozanov’s sake.

“Vyrubova? No, not Vyrubova. She has a round face, not an English one. Vyrubova is my little one. I’ll tell you how it is: some of my flock are little ones and some are something else. I’m not going to lie to you, this is the truth.”

Suddenly Izmailov found his courage. “And… the Tsaritsa?” he asked in a choked voice. “Alexandra Fyodorovna?”

The boldness of the question rather alarmed me. But, to my surprise, Rasputin replied very calmly, “The Tsaritsa? She’s ailing. Her breast ails her. I lay my hand upon her and I pray. I pray well. And my prayer always makes her better. She’s ailing. I must pray for her and her little ones.” And then he muttered, “It’s bad… bad…”

“What’s bad?”

“No, it’s nothing… We must pray. They are good little ones…”

I recall reading in the newspapers, at the beginning of the revolution, about the “filthy correspondence between the elder and the depraved princesses”—correspondence that it was “quite inconceivable to publish”. Sometime later, however, these letters were published. And they went something like this: “Dear Grisha, please pray that I’ll be a good student.” “Dear Grisha, I’ve been a good girl all week long and obeyed Papa and Mama…”

“We must pray,” Rasputin went on muttering.

“Do you know Madame E——?” I asked.

“The one with the little pointed face? I think I’ve glimpsed her here and there. But it’s you I want to come along and see me. You’ll get to meet everyone and I’ll tell you all about them.”

“Why should I come along? It’ll only make them all cross.”

“Make who cross?”

“Your ladies. They don’t know me; I’m a complete stranger to them. They’re not going to be pleased to see me.”

“They wouldn’t dare!” He beat the table with his fist. “No, not in my house. In my house everyone is happy—God’s grace descends on everyone. If I say, ‘Bathe my feet!’, they’ll do as I say and then drink the water. In my house everything is godly. Obedience, grace, humility and love.”

“See? They bathe your feet. No, you’ll be better off without me.”

“You shall come. I’ll send for you.”

“Has everyone really come when you’ve sent for them?”

“No one’s refused yet.”

Apparently quite forgotten, the lawyer’s wife sitting on the other side of Rasputin was hungrily and tenaciously listening to our conversation.

From time to time, noticing me looking at her, she would give me an ingratiating smile. Her husband kept whispering to her and drinking to my health.

“You ought to invite the young lady to your right,” I said to Rasputin. “She’s lovely!”

Hearing my words, she looked up at me with frightened, grateful eyes. She even paled a little as she waited for his response. Rasputin glanced at her, quickly turned away and said loudly, “She’s a stupid bitch!”

Everyone pretended they hadn’t heard.

I turned to Rozanov.

“For the love of God,” he said, “get him to talk about the Khlysts. Try again.”

But I’d completely lost interest in talking to Rasputin. He seemed to be drunk. Our host kept coming up and pouring him wine, saying, “This is for you, Grisha. It’s your favourite.”

Rasputin kept drinking, jerking his head about, twitching and muttering something.

“I’m finding it very hard to talk to him,” I said to Rozanov. “Why don’t you and Izmailov try? Maybe we can all four of us have a conversation!”

“It won’t work. It’s a very intimate, mysterious subject. And he’s shown he trusts you…”

“What’s him over there whispering about?” interrupted Rasputin. “Him that writes for New Times?”[5]

So much for our being incognito.

“What makes you think he’s a writer?” I asked. “Someone must have misinformed you… Before you know it, they’ll be saying I’m a writer, too.”

“I think they said you’re from the Russian Word,” he replied calmly. “But it’s all the same to me.”

“Who told you that?”

“I’m afraid I can’t remember,” he said, pointedly repeating my own words when he’d asked who had told me about the Khlysts.

He had clearly remembered my evasiveness, and now he was paying me back in kind: “I’m afraid I can’t remember!”

Who had given us away? Hadn’t we been promised complete anonymity? It was all very strange.

After all, it wasn’t as if we’d gone out of our way to meet the elder. We had been invited. We had been offered the opportunity to meet him and, what’s more, we’d been told to keep quiet about who we were because “Grisha doesn’t like journalists”—because he avoids talking to them and always does all he can to keep away from them.

Now it appeared that Rasputin knew very well who we were. And not only was he not avoiding us but he was even trying to draw us into a closer acquaintance.

Who was calling the shots? Had Manuilov orchestrated all this—for reasons we didn’t know? Or did the elder have some cunning scheme of his own? Or had someone just blurted out our real names by mistake?

It was all very insalubrious. What was truly going on was anyone’s guess.

And what did I know about all these dinner companions of ours? Which of them was from the secret police? Which would soon be sentenced to forced labour? Which might be a German agent? And which of them had lured us here? Which member of this upright company was hoping to use us for their own ends? Was Rasputin the weaver of this web—or the one being caught in it? Who was betraying whom?

“He knows who we are,” I whispered to Rozanov.

Rozanov looked at me in astonishment. He and Izmailov began whispering together.

Just then the musicians struck up. The accordion began a dance tune, the guitar twanged, the tambourine jingled. Rasputin leapt to his feet—so abruptly that he knocked his chair over. He darted off as if someone were calling to him. Once he was some way from the table (it was a large room), he suddenly began to skip and dance. He thrust a knee forward, shook his beard about and circled round and round. His face looked tense and bewildered. His movements were frenzied; he was always ahead of the music, as if unable to stop…

Everyone leapt up. They stood around him to watch. “Dearie”, the one who had gone to fetch the poems, turned pale. His eyes bulged. He squatted down on his haunches and began clapping his hands. “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Go! Go! Go!”

And no one was laughing. They watched as if in fear and—certainly—very, very seriously.

The spectacle was so weird, so wild, that it made you want to let out a howl and hurl yourself into the circle, to leap and whirl alongside him for as long as you had the strength.

The faces all around were looking ever paler, ever more intent. There was a charge in the air, as if everyone was expecting something… Any moment!

“How can anyone still doubt it?” said Rozanov from behind me. “He’s a Khlyst!”

Rasputin was now leaping about like a goat. Mouth hanging open, skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, locks of hair whipping across the sunken sockets of his eyes, he was dreadful to behold. His pink shirt was billowing out behind him like a balloon.

“Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!” went “Dearie”, continuing to clap.

All of a sudden Rasputin stopped. Just like that. And the music broke off, as if that is what the musicians had intended all along.

Rasputin collapsed into an armchair and looked all around. His eyes were no longer pricking people; they seemed vacant, bewildered.

“Dearie” hastily gave him a glass of wine. I went through into the drawing room and told Izmailov I wanted to leave.

“Sit down for a moment and get your breath back,” Izmailov replied.

The air was stifling. It was making my heart pound and my hands tremble.

“No,” said Izmailov. “It’s not hot in here. It’s just your nerves.”

“Please, don’t go,” begged Rozanov. “Now you can get him to invite you to one of his rituals. There’ll be no difficulty now!”

By now most of the guests had come through and were sitting around the edges of the room, as if in anticipation of some sort of performance. The beautiful woman came in, too, her husband holding her by the arm. She was walking with her head bowed; I thought she was weeping.

I stood up.

“Don’t go,” said Rozanov.

I shook my head and went out towards the hall. Out of the dining room came Rasputin. Blocking my path, he took my elbow.

“Wait a moment and let me tell you something. And mind you listen well. You see how many people there are all around us? A lot of people, right? A lot of people—and no one at all. Just me and you—and no one else. There isn’t anyone else standing here, just me and you. And I’m saying to you: come to me! I’m pining for you to come. I’m pining so badly I could throw myself down on the ground before you!”

His shoulder went into spasms and he let out a moan.

And it was all so ludicrous, both the way we were standing in the middle of the room together and the painfully serious way he was speaking…

I had to do something to lighten the atmosphere.

Rozanov came up to us. Pretending he was just passing by, he pricked up his ears. I started to laugh. Pointing at him, I said to Rasputin, “But he won’t let me.”

“Don’t you listen to that degenerate—you come along. And don’t bring him with you, we can do without him. Rasputin may only be a peasant, but don’t you turn up your nose at him. For them I love I build stone palaces. Haven’t you heard?”

“No,” I replied, “I haven’t.”

“You’re lying, my clever girl, you have heard. I can build stone palaces. You’ll see. I can do many things. But for the love of God, just come to me, the sooner the better. We’ll pray together. Why wait? You see, everyone wants to kill me. As soon as I step outside, I look all around me: where are they, where are their ugly mugs? Yes, they want to kill me. Well, so what! The fools don’t understand who I am. A sorcerer? Maybe I am. They burn sorcerers, so let them burn me. But there’s one thing they don’t understand: if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia. Remember, my clever girl: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia. They’ll bury us together.”

He stood there in the middle of the room, thin and black—a gnarled tree, withered and scorched.

“And it will be the end of Russia… the end of Russia…”

With his trembling hand crooked upwards, he looked like Chaliapin singing the role of the miller in Dvořák’s Rusalka. At this moment he appeared dreadful and completely mad.

“Ah? Are you going? Well if you’re going, then go. But just you remember… Remember.”

As we made our way back from Filippov’s, Rozanov said that I really ought to go and visit Rasputin: if I refused an invitation coveted by so many, he would almost certainly find it suspicious.

“We’ll all go there together,” he assured me, “and we’ll leave together.”

I replied that there was something in the atmosphere around Rasputin I found deeply revolting. The grovelling, the collective hysteria—and at the same time the machinations of something dark, something very dark and beyond our knowledge. One could get sucked into this filthy mire—and never be able to climb out of it. It was revolting and joyless, and the revulsion I felt entirely negated any interest I might have in these people’s “weird mysteries”.

The pitiful, distressed face of the young woman who was being thrust so shamelessly by her lawyer husband at a drunken peasant—it was the stuff of nightmares, I was seeing it in my dreams. But he must have had many such women—women about whom he shouted, banging his fist on the table, that “they wouldn’t dare” and that they were “happy with everything”.

“It’s revolting,” I went on. “Truly horrifying! I’m frightened! And wasn’t it strange, later on, how insistent he was about my going to see him?”

“He’s not accustomed to rejection.”

“Well, my guess is that it’s all a lot simpler. I think it’s because of the Russian Word. He may make out that he doesn’t attach any significance to my work there, but you know as well as I do how afraid he is of the press and how he tries to ingratiate himself with it. Maybe he’s decided to lure me into becoming one of his myrrh-bearing women.[6] So that I’ll write whatever he wants me to write, at his dictation. After all, he does all of his politicking through women. Just think what a trump card he would have in his hands. I think he’s got it all figured out very well indeed. He’s cunning.”

Several days after this dinner I had a telephone call from a lady I knew. She reproached me for not coming to a party she had given the evening before and that I’d promised to attend.

I had completely forgotten about this party.

“Vyrubova was there,” said the lady. “She was waiting for you. She very much wants to meet you, and I had promised her you would be there. I’m terribly, terribly upset you couldn’t come.”

“Aha!” I thought. “Messages from the ‘other world’. What can she want of me?”

That she was a messenger from that “other world” I didn’t doubt for a moment. Two more days went by.

An old friend dropped in on me. She was very flustered.

“S——is going to have a big party. She’s called round a couple of times in person, but you weren’t at home. She came to see me earlier today and made me promise to take you with me.”

I was rather surprised by S——’s persistence, as I didn’t know her so very well. She wasn’t hoping to get me to give some kind of a reading, was she? That was the last thing I wanted. I expressed my misgivings.

“Oh no,” my friend assured me. “I promise you that she has no hidden designs. S——is simply very fond of you and would like to see you. Anyway, it should be a very enjoyable evening. There won’t be many guests, just friends, because they can’t put on grand balls now, not while we’re at war. That would be in poor taste. There will be no one there who shouldn’t be there—no one superfluous. They’re people who know how to give a good party.”

We arrived after eleven.

There were a lot of people. Among the tail coats and evening dresses were a number of figures in identical black or light-blue domino masks. They were the only ones in fancy dress; it was clear they had come as a group.

My friend took me by the arm and led me to our hostess: “Well, here she is. See? I’ve brought her with me.”

A Gypsy was singing in the large ballroom. Short and slight, she was wearing a high-necked dress of shining silk. Her head was thrown back and her dusky face an emblem of suffering as she sang the words:

“Just wait a moment,” the hostess whispered to me. “She’s almost finished.”

And she went on standing beside me, evidently looking around for someone.

“Now we can go.”

She took my hand and led me across the ballroom, still looking.

Then we entered a small, dimly lit sitting room. There was no one there. The hostess seated me on a sofa. “I’ll be back in a moment. Please don’t go anywhere.”

She did indeed come back in a moment, together with a figure in a black mask.

“This mysterious figure will keep you entertained,” said S——with a laugh. “Please wait for me here.”

The black figure sat down beside me and looked silently at me through narrow eye slits.

“You don’t know me,” it murmured at last, “but I desperately need to speak to you.”

It was not a voice I had heard before, but something about its intonations was familiar. It was the same quivering, hysterical tone in which that lady-in-waiting had spoken of Rasputin.

I peered at the woman sitting beside me. No, this wasn’t Madame E——. Madame E——was petite. This lady was very tall. She spoke with a faint lisp, like all of our high society ladies who as children begin speaking English before Russian.

“I know everything,” the unknown woman began edgily. “On Thursday you’re going to a certain house.”

“No,” I replied in surprise. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She grew terribly flustered. “Why don’t you tell me the truth? Why? I know everything.”

“Where is it you think I’m going?” I asked.

“There. His place.”

“I don’t understand a thing.”

“Do you mean to test me? All right, I’ll say it. On Thursday you’re going to… to… Rasputin’s.”

“What makes you think that? No one has asked me.”

The lady fell silent.

“You may not have received the invitation yet… but you soon will. It’s already been decided.”

“But why does this matter so much to you?” I asked. “Perhaps you could tell me your name?”

“I haven’t put on this idiotic mask only to go and tell you my name. And as far as you’re concerned, my name is of no importance. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that on Thursday you’re going to be there.”

“I have no intention of going to Rasputin’s,” I replied calmly. “Of that I can assure you.”

“Ah!”

She suddenly leant forward and, with hands tightly encased in black gloves, seized hold of my arm.

“No, you’re joking! You will be going! Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because it’s of no interest to me.”

“And you won’t change your mind?”

“No.”

Her shoulders began to tremble. I thought she was weeping.

“I thought you were someone sincere,” she whispered.

I was at a loss.

“What is it you want from me? Does it upset you that I won’t be going? I don’t understand a thing.”

She seized hold of my arm again.

“I implore you by everything you hold sacred—please refuse the invitation. We have to get him to cancel this evening. He mustn’t leave Tsarskoye on Thursday. We mustn’t let him—or something terrible will happen.”

She muttered something, her shoulders quivering.

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me,” I said. “But if it will make you feel any better, then please believe me: I give you my word of honour that I won’t go. In three days’ time I’m going to Moscow.”

Again her shoulders began to tremble, and again I thought she was weeping.

“Thank you, my dear one, thank you…”

She quickly bent over and kissed my hand.

Then she jumped up and left.

“No, that can’t have been Vyrubova,” I thought, remembering how Vyrubova had wanted to see me at that party I hadn’t gone to. “No, it wasn’t her. Vyrubova is quite plump, and anyway, she limps. It wasn’t her.”

I found our hostess.

“Who was that masked lady you just brought to me?”

The hostess seemed rather put out.

“How would I know? She was wearing a mask.”

While we were at dinner the masked figures seemed to disappear. Or perhaps they had all just taken off their fancy dress.

I spent a long time studying the faces I didn’t know, looking for the lips that had kissed my hand…

Sitting at the far end of the table were three musicians: guitar, accordion and tambourine. The very same three musicians. Rasputin’s musicians. Here was a link… a thread.

The next day Izmailov came over. He was terribly upset.

“Something awful has happened. Here. Read this.” And he handed me a newspaper.

In it I read that Rasputin had begun frequenting a literary circle where, over a bottle of wine, he would tell entertaining stories of all kinds about extremely high-ranking figures.

“And that’s not the worst of it,” said Izmailov. “Filippov came over today and said he’d had an unexpected summons from the secret police, who wanted to know just which literary figures had been to his house and precisely what Rasputin had talked about. Filippov was threatened with exile from Petersburg. But the most astonishing and horrible thing of all is that, there on the interrogator’s desk, he could clearly see the guest list, in Manuilov’s own hand.”

“You’re not saying Manuilov works for the secret police, are you?”[7]

“There’s no knowing whether it was him or another of Filippov’s guests. In any case, we’ve got to be very careful. Even if they don’t interrogate us, they’ll be following us. No doubt about that. So if Rasputin writes to you or summons you by telephone, you’d better not respond. Although he doesn’t know your address, and he’s unlikely to have remembered your last name.”

“So much for the holy man’s mystical secrets! I feel sorry for Rozanov. What a dull, prosaic ending…”

“Madam, some joker’s been telephoning. He’s rung twice, wanting to speak to you,” said my maid, laughing.

“What do you mean, ‘some joker’?”

“Well, when I ask, ‘Who’s calling?’ he says, ‘Rasputin’. It’s somebody playing the fool.”

“Listen, Ksyusha, if this man carries on playing the fool, be sure to tell him I’ve gone away, and for a long time. Understand?”

I soon left Petersburg. I never saw Rasputin again.

Later, when I read in the papers that his corpse had been burnt, the man I saw in my mind’s eye was that black, bent, terrible sorcerer:

“Burn me? Let them. But there’s one thing they don’t know: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.”

“Remember me then! Remember me!”

I did.

WE ARE STILL LIVING

Everything is cold and awful. The electricity is only on for five hours a day. There’s no firewood. The buildings are barely heated. These great hulks of stone, six-storeys high, are now so icy that they seem to breathe out cold as you walk past.

And there’s something new to be seen on the streets: the bourgeoisie are now shovelling snow and selling newspapers.

Nothing, it seems, can unsettle these people.

The ladies have run up special outfits for working outside: peasant-style jackets and sheepskin coats—tulups and zipuns.[1] Dressmakers call these new costumes “façon touloup and façon zipoun à la street-sweeper” and charge through the nose for them.

Those Bolsheviks in the Smolny are a crafty lot.[2] They’ve decreed that every woman under forty must report for snow-shovelling duty. What woman is fool enough to tell the whole world she’s over forty? So far, not a single one has owned up. Instead, they’ve all been throwing themselves into the fray. It’s rumoured that many women have tried to bribe the housing committees into putting them on the roster for snow-shovelling. The committees’ response is:

“Go on then, if you’re sure it won’t finish you off.”

The bourgeois selling newspapers are quite happy with their lot. Most of them are ex-army officers.

They sell the evening papers. They stand on Nevsky Prospekt and call out their wares in cheerful, ringing tones. Hearing the cry of a seasoned newspaper-seller, you turn round and, to your surprise, see the kangaroo-fur[3] collar of a former officer and find yourself looking into a pair of intelligent eyes.

The real newspaper-sellers don’t like this: “This business isn’t for the likes of you.”

To which the officer will reply, “And is that any business of yours?”

These bourgeois newspaper-sellers are happy. They earn fifteen roubles a day (more than they could have earned in their wildest dreams) and what’s more, they don’t have to get up early in the morning.

It’s good to be out on the street in the daytime. In the centre of town there is almost no robbing or looting. In shop windows you sometimes come across relics of hoary antiquity: teacups and shirt collars. Or you might catch sight of a little sign: “The latest thing—Stockings!” In bookshops you will find—(ha ha)—books and novels. There was indeed a time when people read novels about young ladies called Vera who sat around all day struggling to understand their true identities. Just look at these Veras now!

Yes, the streets are not bad at all in the daytime. Especially if you just stand still. Walking anywhere is impossible. Even the cabmen’s horses have trouble negotiating the great blocks of ice, the mountains of snow and the quiet valleys between them. But if you just stand still, it’s really not too bad.

“And where are you off to in such a hurry?”

“Home.”

“Why bother? If you go back home, you might get your throat cut.”

They say the city will empty out soon—half the population will have left. A new decree states that all looters and criminals must leave the city immediately.

A lot of people are jealous: all the trouble you have to go to in order to get permission to travel and now, all of a sudden, the door is wide open, if you please.

And the government’s generosity to the looters is unlikely to stop there. Disbanding this army of bandits will take more than one day. The looters are going to need some help to obey the decree.

First of all, the government should lay on special trains, with the time and route specified: “First Looters’ Express”; “Looters’ Train B”; “Looters’ Medical”; “Looters’ Supply Train” (because, after all, looters have to eat too); “Kislovodsk Looters’ Train”; “Deluxe Looters’ Express”. Or simplest of all, suspend all passenger and goods trains, and arrange a “Looters’ Week”.

Otherwise nothing will come of it.

For the time being, “due to the lack of transport”, the robbers go on robbing.

If several robbers attack one passer-by, this is called the “socialization of capital”.[4]

But if one person attacks several passers-by, this is ideologically unsound and is called “capitalist individualization”.[5]

Apparently a set of rules has been published, stating which streets may be walked along at which time.

Although, it has to be said, there are some streets that should not be walked along at any time.

During the last pogrom,[6] a service was being held in the church on Voskresensky Prospect. As the service was ending, there was the sound of shooting out in the street. A report was sent to the Smolny, following which a guard was dispatched to escort the congregation and the clergy back to their homes.

I don’t imagine that the clergy felt entirely comfortable to be availing themselves of the services of the Bolsheviks.

“If you would be so good as to accompany me home, dear brother-anathema.”[7]

Each member of the clergy was seen to his door by four anathemas.

For some time now there’s been no shooting at all. It’s very quiet. This unaccustomed silence makes our ears ring.

It’s dark. And it’s cold.

“It’s a dog’s life, my dear chap,” I heard a man on the tram complaining. His ears were stuffed with cotton wool. “A dog’s life. You run around all day like a dog, sniffing about for a bone. You grab your bone and drag it home. You snarl at anyone who tries to take it. You gnaw at it, wrap the leftovers in some rags and bury them, just like a dog, so no one can take them. And then again, at night, you sit at your gate like a dog, guarding your house—that is, if you still have bread in the house to guard: the third of an ounce that remains from your four-ounce ration of bread made from straw.”[8]

Not long ago, a man got a splinter in his tongue from the bread. His tongue swelled up and he died. People had a good laugh. And he chose the wrong time, too. The very next day he could have got an egg on his ration card.

All that was a long time ago, needless to say. About ten days ago. Now it sounds like some fairy story.

The only people who can get eggs now are children. Four children are entitled to one egg between them, once a year.

That’s how we live. A lot of people are starting to think that we aren’t living, but quite simply dying. But then, when people are very hungry and very cold, and unhappy into the bargain, it’s probably all too easy for them to imagine they’re dying.

On the other hand…

Dear God, if it’s all the same to you, let us die a warm death.

THE GADARENE SWINE

There are not many of them, of these refugees from Sovietdom. A small group of people with nothing in common; a small motley herd huddled by the cliff’s edge before the final leap. Creatures of different breeds and with coats of different colours, entirely alien to one another, with natures that have perhaps always been mutually antagonistic, they have wandered off together and collectively refer to themselves as “we”. They have wandered off for no purpose, for no reason. Why?

The legend of the country of the Gadarenes comes to mind. Men possessed by demons came out from among the tombs, and Christ healed them by driving the demons into a herd of swine, and the swine plunged from a cliff and drowned.

Herds of a single animal are rare in the East. More often they are mixed. And in the herd of Gadarene swine there were evidently some meek, frightened sheep. Seeing the crazed swine hurtling along, these sheep took to their heels too.

“Is that our lot?”

“Yes, they’re running for it!”

And the meek sheep plunged down after the swine and they all perished together.

Had dialogue been possible in the course of this mad dash, it might have resembled what we’ve been hearing so often in recent days:

“Why are we running?” ask the meek.

“Everyone’s running.”

“Where are we running to?”

“Wherever everyone else is running.”

“What are we doing with them? They’re not our kind of people. We shouldn’t be here with them. Maybe we ought to have stayed where we were. Where the men possessed by demons were coming out from the tombs. What are we doing? We’ve lost our way, we don’t know what we’re…”

But the swine running alongside them know very well what they’re doing. They egg the meek on, grunting “Culture! We’re running towards culture! We’ve got money sewn into the soles of our shoes. We’ve got diamonds stuck up our noses. Culture! Culture! Yes, we must save our culture!”

They hurtle on. Still on the run, they speculate. They buy up, they buy back, they sell on. They peddle rumours. The fleshy disc at the end of a pig’s snout may only look like a five-kopek coin, but the swine are selling them now for a hundred roubles.

“Culture! We’re saving culture! For the sake of culture!”

“How very strange!” say the meek. “‘Culture’ is our kind of word. It’s a word we use ourselves. But now it sounds all wrong. Who is it you’re running away from?”

“The Bolsheviks.”

“How very strange!” the meek say sadly. “Because we’re running away from the Bolsheviks, too.”

If the swine are fleeing the Bolsheviks, then it seems that the meek should have stayed behind.

But they’re in headlong flight. There’s no time to think anything through.

They are indeed all running away from the Bolsheviks. But the crazed swine are escaping from Bolshevik truth, from socialist principles, from equality and justice, while the meek and frightened are escaping from untruth, from Bolshevism’s black reality, from terror, injustice and violence.

“What was there for me to do back there?” asks one of the meek. “I’m a professor of international law. I could only have died of hunger.”

Indeed, what is there for a professor of international law to do—a man whose professional concern is the inviolability of principles that no longer exist? What use is he now? All he can do is give off an air of international law. And now he’s on the run. During the brief stops he hurries about, trying to find someone in need of his international law. Sometimes he even finds a bit of work and manages to give a few lectures. But then the crazed swine break loose and sweep him along behind them.

“We have to run. Everyone is running.”

Out-of-work lawyers, journalists, artists, actors and public figures—they’re all on the run.

“Maybe we should have stayed behind and fought?”

Fought? But how? Make wonderful speeches when there’s no one to hear them? Write powerful articles that there’s nowhere to publish?

“And who should we have fought against?”

Should an impassioned knight enter into combat with a windmill, then—and please remember this—the windmill will always win. Even though this certainly does not mean—and please remember this too—that the windmill is right.

They’re running. They’re in torment, full of doubt, and they’re on the run.

Alongside them, grunting and snorting and not doubting anything, are the speculators, former gendarmes, former Black Hundreds[1] and a variety of other former scoundrels. Former though they may be, these groups retain their particularities.

There are heroic natures who stride joyfully and passionately through blood and fire towards—ta-rum-pum-pum!—a new life!

And there are tender natures who are willing, with no less joy and no less passion, to sacrifice their lives for what is most wonderful and unique, but without the ta-rum-pum-pum. With a prayer rather than a drum roll.

Wild screams and bloodshed extinguish all light and colour from their souls. Their energy fades and their resources vanish. The rivulet of blood glimpsed in the morning at the gates of the commissariat, a rivulet creeping slowly across the pavement, cuts across the road of life for ever. It’s impossible to step over it.

It’s impossible to go any farther. Impossible to do anything but turn and run.

And so these tender natures run.

The rivulet of blood has cut them off for ever, and they shall never return.

Then there are the more everyday people, those who are neither good nor bad but entirely average, the all too real people who make up the bulk of what we call humanity. The ones for whom science and art, comfort and culture, religion and laws were created. Neither heroes nor scoundrels—in a word, just plain ordinary people.

To exist without the everyday, to hang in the air without any familiar footing—with no sure, firm earthly footing—is something only heroes and madmen can do.

A “normal person” needs the trappings of life, life’s earthly flesh—that is, the everyday.

Where there’s no religion, no law, no conventions, no settled routine (even if only the routine of a prison or a penal camp), an ordinary, everyday person cannot exist.

At first he’ll try to adapt. Deprived of his breakfast roll, he’ll eat bread; deprived of bread, he’ll settle for husks full of grit; deprived of husks, he’ll eat rotten herring—but he’ll eat all of this with the same look on his face and the same attitude as if he were eating his usual breakfast roll.

But what if there’s nothing to eat at all? He loses his way, his light fades, the colours of life turn pale for him.

Now and then there’s a brief flicker from some tremulous beam of light.

“Apparently they take bribes too! Did you know? Have you heard?”

The happy news takes wing, travelling by word of mouth—a promise of life, like “Christ is Risen!”

Bribery! The everyday, the routine, a way of life we know as our own! Something earthly and solid!

But bribery alone does not allow you to settle down and thrive.

You must run. In pursuit of your daily bread in the biblical sense of the word: food, clothing, shelter, and labour that provides these things and law that protects them.

Children must acquire the knowledge needed for work, and people of mature years must apply this knowledge to the business of everyday life.

So it has always been, and it cannot of course be otherwise.

There are heady days in the history of nations—days that have to be lived through, but that one can’t go on living in for ever.

“Enough carousing—time to get down to work.”

Does this mean, then, that we have to do things in some new way? What time should we go to work? What time should we have lunch? Which school should we prepare the children for? We’re ordinary people, the levers, belts, screws, wheels and drives of a vast machine; we’re the core, the very thick of humanity—what do you want us to do?

“We want you to do all manner of foolish things. Instead of screws we’ll have belts, we’ll use belts to screw in nuts. And levers instead of wheels. And a wheel will do the job of a belt. Impossible? Outdated prejudice! At the sharp end of a bayonet, nothing is impossible. A theology professor can bake gingerbread and a porter give lectures on aesthetics. A surgeon can sweep the street and a laundress preside over the courtroom.”

“We’re afraid! We can’t do it, we don’t know how. A porter lecturing on aesthetics may believe in the value of what he is doing, but a professor baking gingerbread knows only too well that his gingerbread may be anything under the sun—but it certainly isn’t gingerbread.”

Take to your heels! Run!

Somewhere over there… in Kiev… in Yekaterinburg… in Odessa… some place where children are studying and people are working, it’ll still be possible to live a little… For the time being.

And so on they run.

But they are few and they are becoming fewer still. They’re growing weak, falling by the wayside. They’re running after a way of life that is itself on the run.

And now that the motley herd has wandered onto the Gadarene cliff for its final leap, we can see how very small it is. It could be gathered up into some little ark and sent out to sea. But there the seven unclean pairs would devour the seven clean pairs and then die of overeating.[2]

And the souls of the clean would weep over the dead ark:

“It grieves us to have suffered the same fate as the unclean, to have died together with them on the ark.”

Yes, my dears. There’s not much you can do about it. You’ll all die together. Some from eating, some from being eaten. But “impartial history” will make no distinction. You will all be numbered together.

“And the entire herd plunged from the cliff and drowned.”