Murderers with kind honest faces are dividing up the bloody body of a sheep they have just killed. A drunk staggers down the road. Here it is—the sinful life of the sinful valley.
And for some reason I feel a little embarrassed by what I have just been thinking. I remember Sasha Chorny’s mocking lines:
To live on a bare peak, to pen simple odes
And requisition bread, wine, and rissoles
From those who live below.[42]
Is the life of a hermit really a manifestation of courage? Can there be courage in withdrawing from life? What about suicide? This too is a withdrawal from life. A retreat into being a hermit forever. Is suicide an act of weakness? Is it a cowardly escape? Maybe not. Sometimes I think that suicide is the very highest strength of a weak man. A man is weak; he has not lived cleanly and purely. And for the sake of his own lost purity, and because of his inability to live as he ought, he chooses to leave life. Is this weakness? I don’t know. But it cannot be easy for a weak man to give up everything he possesses: borshch with haricot beans, wine, the sea, love, the spring sky.
Sometimes suicide seems to be a manifestation of something very different: the desperate act of a capricious person who is used to being spoiled. They cannot bear being denied what they want. And so they withdraw from life, away from their hurt at not being given their share of sweets, away from an irritation that has grown into despair.
Sometimes suicide is the logical act of someone with a great mind. While the stupid and the shortsighted crawl about in the mire of hope and optimism, he or she can see that in front of them is only a bog, a wall, or a precipice.
Sometimes suicide is a manifestation of blindness, of psychological limitation: all that can be seen is a wall. Someone falls into despair and is too shortsighted to see that there is a path, and a door, right beside them.
And suicide is often the consequence of mental illness. For alcoholics and drug addicts, amongst others, the sea and the sun and the green of the grass are obscured by a dry crust of anguish and pain.
These people die of their own accord because the world they live in has been made meaningless. And it is they who have killed it.
Sometimes suicide is loyalty to a cause. What does my own life matter to me now that the great cause I serve has been defeated?
Sometimes suicide is the betrayal of a cause. What does some great cause matter to me now that my beloved, the one I adore, has left me?
But I do understand at least one thing: Suicide is not just an act like any other act. Whether we are talking about the weak or the strong, suicide is a supreme act. Few people, weak or strong, are able to take this terrible step—this last, dreadful, voluntary step.
Twentieth-century hermits do not live in cells or caves; they do not live in the wilderness or in a hut in the forest. And so we imagine that there are no hermits left in the modern civilized world. Really, however, there are a great many of them, more than in the days when Christians were being martyred. Their cells are disguised; they are located in modern cities, in communal apartments, on the streets of Moscow and Kiev. And the hermits themselves work as painters and decorators, or in factories and ministries. They wear smart jackets, autumn coats, and hats made of Astrakhan fur.
But they too have withdrawn from the world. They too are desert hermits—like those heroic ascetics who, long ago, wore torn animal skins and shirts woven from dry grass as they sought for some supreme revelation.
Some of these modern hermits repent before God in the solitude of their cells. Some sing of freedom, love, and beauty in verse they compose in secret. Still others, like the monk in Boris Godunov, write chronicles. What unites all these different groups of people is that their worldly lives do not matter to them; what matters to them are their hours of seclusion, their lives as hermits. All serve their god in secrecy. None aspire to return from the wilderness and tell other people about the illumination that has visited them there.
Our twentieth-century hermits illustrate with exemplary clarity two different qualities that laypeople have always detected in those who have chosen to retire to the wilderness; the laity see something sublime in the lives of hermits, but they also consider them impotent. There is a huge gulf between the fate of the hermit who withdraws from the world in the name of some secret truth and the fate of the prophet who preaches this truth. Communal-apartment hermits, especially, are always aware of this gulf.
A contemporary hermit never even thinks of stepping across this gulf, or anywhere near it. There are many hermits in our modern world, but few prophets and preachers.
Dilijan is a wonderful town. It is not on a railway line; no airport links it to the rest of the world. It is a hermit-town, at least to a degree. Mountains have protected it from modern forms of transport and it is hidden by forest. Its wood and stone houses stand on the slopes of a mountain, amid tall pines. Dilijan is full of silence; it is at once a town, a village, and a dacha settlement.
It is filled with peace. It has retained all that was sweet in a patriarchal past that was far from sweet. It is not hostile to nature; it has trustingly allowed the mountain forest to enter deep inside it. Town and forest live together.
Most of the houses in Dilijan are painted light blue. They are built of wood, but the forest does not seem frightened by this; the garden and orchard trees stand close to their tamed wooden brethren. Fruit in Dilijan is cheap—with no railway, little of it can leave the town. The apples are large, sweet, and juicy. There is a great deal of wine in the bazaar. Cool, cloudy, and opalescent, it is sold in bottles, decanters, mugs, and glasses. There are more sellers here than buyers.
Dilijan is a town you fall in love with at first sight. And your first thought as you fall in love is: “Yes, this is where I must come to heal my soul. Here I can find peace, tranquillity, and silence. Here I can enjoy the charm of the evening mountains, the silent forest and babbling streams.”
None of this, however, is true. The young Lermontov was mistaken when he wrote: “Then the anguish of my soul is stilled. . . . ”[43] The anguish of the human soul is terrible and unquenchable. It is impossible to calm it or escape from it. Quiet country sunsets, the lapping of the eternal sea, and the sweet town of Dilijan are all equally powerless before it. As for Lermontov, he was unable to still the anguish of his soul even at the foot of Mount Mashuk.[44] No outward tranquillity can save you from grinding anguish; no mountain air can cool you when flaming pitch burns your insides; no bloody and gaping wound can be healed by life in the wonderful town of Dilijan. Take my old aunt, Rakhil Semyonovna. Do you think she slept calmly and peacefully here, after being evacuated from Odessa? Or did she lie awake at night weeping? Was Rakhil not weeping for her children? Did she not “refuse to be comforted for her children, because they were not?”[45]
Now we are driving towards the border with Azerbaijan. To our right is a noisy mountain river. To our left are villages brimful of the rustic charm that is so pleasant to admire in passing and which the villagers themselves, in their obstinate determination to move to the city, value so little. Farther on are high hills, then craggy mountains. The forest has come to an end; the hills are covered with prickly grass that has been baked by the summer heat. The crags are precipitous, red or dark brown. But the country will soon flatten out; the mountains will disappear, yielding to the steppe that stretches as far as the Caspian Sea.
Martirosyan points to some steep red cliffs and says that wild bees live there. The cliffs are so steep that no one has ever managed to climb them, and the honey accumulated through the labor of countless generations of mountain bees overflows the crevices in the rock and pours down from above. It is collected by the people who live near the foot of the cliffs.
We choose a place on the bank of the river. Volodya makes a hearth out of some large stones, lights a fire, puts pieces of lamb on skewers, guts the princesses, and washes their bodies in the river. Meanwhile our ladies spread out a tablecloth and place large pebbles along its edges. From their string ba
gs and baskets they take bottles, glasses, fresh herbs, and flatbreads. The clink of knives and forks mingles with the noise of the mountain river.
We sit down around the tablecloth. The trout shashlyk is good; there are places where the princesses’ charred skin has burst and you can see their royal pink bodies. I drink a lot, more than I am used to. But the cognac only makes me feel heavy. My head does not fill with spirit, with a bright haze. Fire does not run through my body; my fingers and ears are still freezing in the cold wind. My nose is running and, though I can’t see it, I know it has gone purple. I eat and drink and keep worrying that the cold wind is making the women drink too, and that two bottles of cognac won’t be enough for us all. At least Volodya isn’t drinking—after all, he’s our driver and it’s a difficult road. But Martirosyan says something to him in Armenian—and Volodya laughs, nods, and downs a small glass. I drink a great deal, but the cognac has no effect. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes you drink a hundred grams and the world is miraculously transformed; everything—both your inner world and the outer world—becomes as clear as a bell. What is secret becomes manifest; masks fall from faces, and every movement someone makes, every human word, is filled with particular meaning and interest. A bland and boring day is imbued with charm; this charm is everywhere, it excites and delights. And your sense of your own self becomes equally special; you are aware of yourself in a way that is deep and strange. These fortunate hundred grams come your way most often in the morning, before lunch.
And sometimes you drink and drink—and become more and more gloomy, as if you are being filled with splinters of broken glass. You feel weighed down. A kind of lazy stupidity takes over your brain and heart; it binds your hands and feet. This is when drivers and mechanics start knife fights. They are in the grip of a terrible rage that emanates from the gut, from a soul overcome by nausea, from arms and legs gripped by anguish.
At times like this, you drink a great deal. You want to force your way into paradise, to escape from the clutch of this groundless despair, this disgust with your own self, the burning resentment you feel against your nearest and dearest, this crazy anxiety and fear, this terrible sense of foreboding.
And when you eventually grasp that the doors of paradise are closed to you, you drink still more. Now all you want is to stupefy yourself, to sleep, to reach the state that will make the ladies say, “He’s made a beast of himself.”
We make our way back in the sunset. The immense evening silence is something we do not so much hear as see. We see it through the coach’s large windows. It is an ocean, and our small trembling vehicle is moving through an ocean of silence, barely troubling its surface.
When we began to climb the loops of the mountain road, the setting sun suddenly lit up dozens of snowy peaks and the sharp white light of day yielded to an improbable wealth of colors and hues. This was extraordinary, beautiful, truly wonderful—the quiet evening, the deep shadow of the valley, and pine trees that seemed black in the twilight while the mountains’ summits and upper slopes turned blue, purple, copper, pink, and red. Each summit had its own particular light, and they all came together to form a single miracle, a miracle it was impossible to look at without deep emotion. In the presence of this excessive beauty I felt close to panic, even to terror. The snowy summits seemed perfect in their rounded contours, against a pale-blue sky, and their colors—vital and clean, simultaneously tender and bright like African flowers, hot, even though they were born of winter sunlight on cold snow—filled the air with a music that did not infringe upon the deep silence. At moments like this, it seems something improbable is about to happen, some radical transformation of people, a transformation of one’s whole internal world and of everything all around. Strangely and sadly, however, this expectation of a profound change engendered in me not only an unbearably happy excitement but also a very different feeling. I wanted this unbearable picture to fade away at once. I wanted these bright colors to yield to the calm of twilight and its dear, familiar ash: Let everything be as it was. There was no need for intolerable change. Let everything remain as usual. I did not want this liberating, bone-breaking newness that was tearing me apart.
This feeling must have sprung from the darkest and most fated—and perhaps most lifesaving—depths of the human soul. A terror shared by all men and all women.
Soon enough, needless to say, my pathetic desire was realized: The African flowers withered. Twilight set in. When we got back to our village, I asked to stop outside the restaurant. I went up to the bar, waited my turn amid the general hubbub, and said, “One hundred and fifty grams, three-star.”
The Armenian barman did not know Russian, but he did, of course, understand me. After I had drunk my cognac, he looked at me questioningly and I ran a finger across the empty glass, just a little way up from the bottom. Once again the barman understood; he poured me another fifty grams.
On the whole, I had achieved my aim: I was now stupefied. When I got back to my room, I undressed quickly, so as not to fall asleep fully clothed, and lay down straightaway, so as not to fall asleep in the chair. Usually I opened the window at night—our good Ivan always kept the boiler very hot and I slept better if the room was cool. Sometimes, through my sleep, I would hear the soft plashing of the stream beneath my window. But this time I did not open the window. Perhaps because of the lack of air, or perhaps because my heart could no longer cope with so much alcohol, I woke up during the night.
Middle-aged and elderly brothers, all of you who like to drink, you probably know what it’s like to wake up in the night after drinking heavily.
Silence. My heart is beating rapidly, anxiously, but I don’t feel any pain. My breathing is not constrained, but my body is covered in cold sweat. All around me is silent. But the absence of any physical pain, the lack of any clear reason for my waking up, is in itself rather alarming. Something must have happened, but what? I want to jump up, to move about, to turn on the light, to open the window—but I feel scared of making the least movement. I’m frightened of coughing, even of looking at the clock on my bedside table. The close night air is filled with a sense of invisible dread. Any moment now, something terrible is going to happen. To ward it off, I need to move, I need to make a loud noise, but I also fear that the least movement I make—even just lifting a finger or turning my head—may bring this terrible thing closer.
When you wake up like this, after drinking heavily, you are seized by a feeling of terrible loneliness. Whether your wife is asleep beside you and you can hear the sound of her breathing or whether there is no one else in the room, you are alone and helpless.
At this point I realized that I was dying. My chest and shoulders were covered in cold sweat. My heart seemed to be beating separately from me; I was breathing evenly, but it felt as if there were no air in my lungs, as if I were breathing only useless nitrogen. I was overcome by mortal anguish. The horror of dying, of the end of life, grew from second to second. There was a terrible sense of lightness about my body—except that it was no longer my body, my only true home, the home of my “I.” My body seemed to be forsaking me, abandoning me. Hands, feet, lungs, heart—all were leaving me. My “I” was no longer present in them; I could no longer sense my fingers from the inside, as I had felt them all through my life, but only from the outside. The indissoluble union of my “I” with my forehead, with my ears, with my knees and my hairy chest had been ruptured. This was terrible. I was becoming something apart; my body was separating from me. I felt my pulse; I held my palms against my cold, clammy forehead, but there was hardly anything of me, hardly anything of my “I” either in these fingers or in the pulse beating beneath these fingers now denying my “I” refuge. Both the cold palm and the cold forehead beneath this palm contained ever less of me; with every second we were growing farther apart. The ineffable union of me and my body—a union in comparison with which the closeness between husband and wife, or between a mother and a beloved child, is nothing—this ineffable unity was being violated. It wa
s as if a river, single since it had sprung out of the ground, had split in two, forking into separate channels, peeling apart into separate layers.
In the sultry darkness—though already almost forsaken by my body, which was still slipping out from me, still slipping away from me—I went on thinking with a terrible clarity about what was happening. I was dying. And what gave rise to this mortal anguish, to this feeling of death, which is so unlike anything in life, was that my “I” was still present, not obscured in any way; it was continuing quite separately from my body. And yet this rejection of me, of my cold clammy chest, of my pitiful damp fingers meant the end of me. It meant something unprecedented: It meant I was being destroyed, once and for all; it meant my death. I had been in those fingers, in those fingernails, in those armpits, in that snuffly nose. But now—and this was what was so terrible—I was no longer present in my fingers, in my armpits, in my navel. I was present only in some disembodied “I”—along with the ocean, with the Great Bear, with April’s blossoming apple trees, with my love for my mother, with my passionate attachment to those dear to me, with my troubled conscience, with the books I have read, with Beethoven’s music and Vertinsky’s and Leshchenko’s songs,[46] with all my sense of shame and my bitter resentments, with my pity for animals, with my hatred of fascism, with the elation I felt on first seeing the sea fifty years ago and on looking, only eight hours ago, at snow-covered mountains, with my memories of fights I got into as a child, with all the wrongs I have wittingly and unwittingly done to others.
And this incorporeal world—this incorporeal universe that had been my “I”—this was perishing because my fingers, my skull, and the muscles of my heart were peeling away from me, slipping out from my “I.” A dark, stifling room was the scene of a cosmic catastrophe; an elderly man was dying, far from his loved ones, somewhere near the Turkish border. As he lay dying, he felt still more anguished because he was so alone. None of his loved ones were with him. There was no one in whose despair he might have found consolation, no one in whose soul, in whose tear-stained eyes his incorporeal world might leave some bitter imprint.
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