Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  He looked like Petrograd itself—dying but still mustering the strength to discuss Pushkin’s inner freedom and the stifling effects of the new bureaucracy. Yes, he was saying it right out, that the literary bureaucrats and the hounds of Proletcult were our rabble, no different than in Pushkin’s time, wanting to use poetry for outer ends, rather than allowing the poet the inner freedom he required. They demanded he be useful, that he enlighten the hearts of his fellow men. “As Pushkin simply puts it: they demand the poet sweep garbage off the street.”

  You could hear the grumbling from certain sections of the audience.

  The rabble didn’t understand the poet’s gift, he explained, and were thus unable to enjoy the fruits of his labor. They demanded that the poet serve the same thing they served—the outside world. In fact, they felt threatened by his inner freedom. Felt that somehow it diminished them. They instinctively sensed that the testing of hearts by poetry had no bearing on the achievement of goals in the outside world.

  Were they following his argument? Part of me hoped he’d lost them, but another part wanted to cheer. My heart was beating wildly. I could hardly stand to watch him up on that high wire.

  The poet’s job was not to get through to every blockhead, he explained. Poetry would choose, because it called to those who could hear it. And no censorship in the world could stop this election. Elitist, anachronistic…I could see the Proletcultists taking notes, scribbling objections. But great art called to what was great in men.

  He argued that the poet had been sapped by all the boorish attempts to use him, to censor him, to make him sweep the streets, so to speak, and the culture was crippled along with it. “Pushkin died not from D’Anthès’s bullet but from suffocation…The poet dies because he is stifled; life has lost its meaning.” Now he was speaking in the present tense—not of Pushkin but of the poet. Him. Us. At this very moment these things were being decided by people also in this room. The poets and the rabble alike—propagandists, cultural bureaucrats, the insensible hand of the state. “Let those bureaucrats who plan to direct poetry through their own channels, violating its secret freedom and hindering it in fulfilling its mysterious mission, beware of an even worse name.” Dictator. Murderer. Assassin. Plague.

  The audience applauded a long time. Each one of us applauded in order to recapture our own inner freedom, our own courage. In applauding Blok, we were signing our names to his speech. The silence of the Proletcult faction and the leftists underscored the power of what had just occurred. No one had died, no troops stormed down the aisles of the House of Writers. But a line had been drawn. And the vulgarians found themselves in a tiny minority. Some of them, abashed, even clapped softly. Although I overheard two disapproving leather-clad writers muttering. “The author of ‘The Twelve.’ I’m amazed to see him turn around like this.”

  But “The Twelve” was the sound of the revolution, not a political tract. Blok was a poet, not a tool or mouthpiece. He was saying there was no air, that people like these apparatchiks were taking it all. It wasn’t just the workers who were getting tired of the airlessness.

  Kuzmin also spoke that night, and Eikhenbaum, but it was hard to think of anything but Blok. Akhmatova seemed to take strength with every word, her transparence becoming corporeal. Perhaps she would come back to us, perhaps she too was finding her inner freedom and would begin to sing again.

  Back at the House of Arts, Anton and I lay in bed, huddling for warmth, snow piling up on the windows, going over Blok’s speech point by point, committing it to memory. My face against his dirty neck, I thought about the secret freedom of creation. Not to corral an opinion and express it with subservient words, but just as Anton had once said about my blackbird poem, how the language itself gave birth to it all. I kept wondering whether I could be included in rabble. I had too easily agreed with Gorky, art being for the elevation of the people. Here was the core of the disagreement between Gorky and Blok. Now I understood how dismayed Blok must have been with my description of teaching the workers to write, his kind offer to enroll in my class notwithstanding. But clearly Blok had confessed his own sin, all our sin, against the spirit of poetry’s inner freedom. To think—Anton was closer to Blok than I was. Poetry was a mystery, with its own purpose that had nothing to do with the outside world. You either believed in it or you didn’t.

  Following Blok’s astonishing speech, the House of Arts’ new journal, Dom Iskusstv, published an essay by Zamyatin called “I Am Afraid” that was even more direct. Zamyatin, a prose writer, addressed the question of art’s value and the role of cultural establishments in the revolution. He bluntly argued a clear link between the absence of quality literature and the lack of a free press, the difficulties of life and the meddling of the regime. He concluded that the regime’s tendency to orthodoxy was giving birth to a new generation of court poets and toadies, which would stifle the dreamer and heretic who created art. He lamented that writers of genuine literature were being hounded into silence.

  The elders were standing up to the firing squad with everything they had: dignity, intellect, the last bit of defiance left in their starving bodies.

  Three days later, a cheer ran through the House when we read that Lunacharsky, head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had given in on the issue of control in the publishing houses, allowing for a measure of independent action in the press. The government would not be telling us what to publish. Were the independent newspapers going to come back? A crack was growing. We could see daylight.

  Oksana was the last to arrive for the morning editorial meeting of our own new journal, Anvil. We ran it like a conventional journal. Perhaps someday, when there was paper again—if there ever was paper again—it would be a printed journal. There was still snow on her coat. She removed her scarf, shook it out, sat down on the bed. Six of us already sat crowded into Anton’s odd-shaped room with its floor-level window: Arseny Grodetsky, bright-eyed, his fair hair still showing the tracks of a comb wielded by his doting mother, with whom he still lived—though he spent so much time in the House of Arts he qualified as an unofficial member. Sasha Orlovsky, representing the visual arts, reviews of shows and upcoming events. Oksana, Nikita Nikulin, Petya. Dmitry Tereshenko, unshaven, rumpled and barely awake, wearing a turtleneck and felt slippers. Shklovsky had volunteered to be on our board, as had Bely, though neither of them came to the meetings.

  Oksana’s cheeks were tipped with frost, she rubbed them and they turned fiery red. “There’s a huge protest happening on Vasilievsky Island. I’d say there were a thousand people.”

  “Where?” Petya and I both asked.

  “I think it’s the docks,” she said.

  Everything the Vikzhel men had said came swimming into my mind. A demonstration, a thousand workers! The structure was shaking, listing. Something important was unfolding out there, and we would not read about it in Pravda. I stood, buttoned my sheepskin.

  Anton looked up at me, as if huge demonstrations were just another kind of weather. “Where are you going?”

  “I need to see what’s going on.”

  “This is what’s going on.” He slapped our sheaf of poems with the back of his hand. “This”—he waved the pages at me—“is a fight to the death, for the future of the mind. What was all that about the mission of the poet? The inner freedom you’ve been on about since Blok spoke? The poet who has no interest in the affairs of the world, lya lya fa fa?”

  Did it make me rabble? Less than a poet, because I wanted to know what was happening on Vasilievsky? A thousand people were demonstrating. Knowing the severity with which the Cheka could put it down—this could be the beginning of another revolution. The outer world would always exist, and would affect all of us, poets and citizens alike. I wasn’t about to ignore it, even if Blok made a speech. Anton was a man of limitless opinions, but he went rigid whenever he was called upon to interact with concrete reality. Was that inner freedom or just plain cowardice? “I’m going. Anyone
wants to come with me, they’re welcome.”

  “I’m not getting arrested over rations at the pipe factory.” He held up the sheaf of pages that would be our first Anvil. “This is my revolution.”

  Oksana’s gray eyes grew worried, the circles under them were deep charcoal smudges. “There’s going to be trouble, you can just feel it. What are you going to do, give a speech?”

  “Petya?” He lived on Vasilievsky. He was in his third year at university.

  “I just got here, I didn’t see anything. Anyway I’ve got Chukovsky’s studio after this.”

  I looked over at Tereshenko. “How about you?”

  He yawned, scratched his head over his ear. “Sorry. Committee meeting over at the Poets’ Guild.”

  No one wanted to know what would become of a thousand workers demonstrating against the Bolsheviks? “Well, the hell with all of you.” I wrapped my scarf around my neck and fitted the fox-fur hat to my head.

  Arseny piped up. “Hey, I’ll go. I was just a kid in ’17. I missed everything.”

  Now Anton scowled, twitched, crossed his legs and recrossed them. Somehow the idea that Arseny Grodetsky would have the nerve to go with me roused his competitive nature. “Oh, all right,” he said angrily. “Damn you both. Somebody’s got to look after you.” He dumped the pages into Tereshenko’s lap and unfolded his long legs. “But I’m warning you, if there’s any shooting, I’m not waiting around to see if we’re among the casualties. Agreed?”

  “Ladno,” I said. Agreed.

  We struggled against the heavy wind and blowing snow, Anton cursing the whole way, onto the Nikolaevsky Bridge—now known as the Lieutenant Schmidt. I couldn’t resist looking back at the yellow mansion where Kolya and I had made love so long ago. Its yellow walls only a slight creamy blur through the scrim of swirling snow. Here I’d stood that day, watching the Cheka search the house, the diamond stickpin in my coat. It must be a busy time for them now, strikes were unfolding all over town. What would they do with the demonstrators? Who was it who told me An army is at its most dangerous in retreat? I knew we wouldn’t see anything in the papers, except blame laid at the feet of the usual suspects, the SRs and Mensheviks, anarchists, counterrevolutionary agitators.

  The half-mile bridge with its icy panels of arched-necked seahorses gave way to the familiar embankment. We walked toward the shabby end of the island, past the Seventeenth Line, where Varvara had lived, and into the factory quarter. Up on Bolshoy Prospect, we saw an enormous gathering, mostly women, protesting in the falling snow. Signs read BREAD AND BOOTS, TROUBETSKOY STRIKE COMMITTEE, DOWN WITH THE BOSSES, LEATHERWORKERS’ UNION, SOVIETS WITHOUT COMMUNISTS, and even ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, NOT TO POLITICAL PARTIES, along with a couple of less-progressive notes, like DOWN WITH COMMUNISTS AND JEWS.

  “So much for your egalitarians.” Anton’s nose was red with cold. He sniffled, wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Is that supposed to excite us about their demands?”

  We got closer to hear a speaker, a man in a brimmed hat shouting to the crowd, telling them to hold firm, that this was their country and they had a right to express their demands. On the border of the crowd, I saw a squat figure of a woman among a group of somber workingmen, wrapped in an old fur. Something about her was familiar…Then I recognized—the Flea! I pushed my way over to her—“Comrade Goldman! Comrade Goldman!” I jumped and waved.

  She squinted at me from behind her little round glasses, trying to remember who I was. I came closer. “It’s Marina!” I caught myself before I shouted We met at Gorky’s! Who knew who was watching us now. “Aura Sands’s friend, remember?” The steam of my breath clouded my view of her, but I’d seen a face no longer ardent, not the woman I’d met over tea at the Kronverksky apartment. All the fire seemed to have gone out of her. The air around her was dense with worry. She looked ten years older. “Oh yes, the poet.” Now her expression sweetened. Her round glasses were frosting over. She took my gloved hand, patting it as if it were a small dog. “I remember your poem. About bees—honey coming out of the holes in the switchboard. I think of it every time I make a telephone call. Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?”

  “At least one.” My father’s, to be exact.

  I introduced her to Anton and Arseny. Neither of them had any idea who she was, but Anton seemed relieved that this middle-aged woman was here. If she thought it was safe, how dangerous could it be? I didn’t want to tell him that Red Emma, the famous anarchist, was more dangerous than fifty union organizers.

  “The Troubetskoy Works is on strike,” she explained under the shouting of the speaker, leaning close. “All they want is an increase in rations and a pair of boots. There was a shipment of shoes in the shops this morning—but for party members only. It was clearly a provocation. The Petro-Soviet refuses to negotiate until they go back to work. Now they’ve got the leather factory out, and the Laferm Cigarette women. It’s getting bigger by the minute.”

  I stamped my boots to keep the blood in my feet—even Aura’s good boots could not prevent them from turning to stone. The size of the crowd! A bold assembly of the determined and the desperate, bundled in their ragged black and brown coats and scarves and caps. “Now the Bolsheviks will have to listen.”

  “They don’t have to do anything,” Anton said.

  “You’re the anarchist.” It was just occurring to Arseny whom we were talking to. “The American. Emma Goldman. Goldman and Berkman.” He glowed with the contact with revolutionary royalty. The revolution he’d missed was giving way to one he was going to witness.

  “We just got back from Moscow,” Emma said, her frizzy gray hair sticking out from her oversized tam. “Me and Sasha. The Democratic Center and the Workers’ Opposition have been crushed.”

  I felt it like a punch in the gut.

  “Lenin’s never going to let the workers dictate to the party.” She sighed, hopeless. So different from the peppery rebel I’d met that day in Gorky’s apartment. “They’ve put themselves in a corner now, bungling everything from top to bottom. So arrogant, they just keep making it worse. We’re trying to help negotiate with the strike committees.” Her comrades were watching us. They looked just as worried as she did. “Trying to keep people from getting hurt. But it’s going from bad to worse and of course the party doesn’t need any help from us.” The anarchists. She indicated the crowd, a sign: ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, NOT TO POLITICAL PARTIES.

  Anton shivered in his old coat and cap. “Seen enough? I’m not going to stand here all day. I have things to do.”

  “Are you going to speak?” I asked Goldman. We had to stay for that.

  “An American anarchist speaking out against the Bolsheviks?” She snorted, shook her head. “They’d just blame us, say it was us inciting the workers. They wouldn’t even let us print a funeral pamphlet for Peter Kropotkin.”

  Kropotkin, the famous Russian anarchist, formerly a prince. “He died? I didn’t hear anything about it.”

  “He was like a father to me,” she said. “The kindest man.”

  Like a father. Just a phrase people used, but that specific order of ordinary words had the power of a blow. They struck me in the throat, tears welled, only to freeze in my eyes.

  “In Moscow, five thousand people came for his funeral. We laid him out in the Trade Union Hall. But they’re terrified of anything becoming a nexus for protest.”

  Something was happening in the crowd. People were shouting. We were shoved this way and that. “Here they come!” Arseny said, pointing back to the river.

  We turned and saw the companies of gray-uniformed kursanty, Bolshevik cadets, marching up from the bridge, rifles over their shoulders, bayonets attached. Women approached them, trying to speak to them. “Join us, boys. We’re your mothers, your sisters.” “All we want is boots, and bread.” “Join us.”

  The boys were on edge, clearly terrified at the size of the crowd. They shouted at people to disperse. Boys seventeen, eighteen years old telling starving workers what to do. Didn’t
they know what the revolution had been about? I remembered the soldiers who fired on the workers at Znamenskaya Square—it was starting all over again. “By order of the Petro-Soviet, we command you all to return to work.” Brandishing their rifles. The workers yelled at them to go back to school, blow their noses, run back to Moscow. The demonstrators began to push them, throwing snowballs, then rocks. Women even grabbed for their rifles. The boys fought back, one shot over the heads of the crowd, up into the swirling snow.

  “There it is. We’re going,” Anton said, grabbing my arm. Yes, I could not live through Znamenskaya Square again. I saw that dead student on the ground, his blood in the snow. I had no more lives to spare.

  Part of me wanted to stay and see the outcome regardless of the danger, but Anton had my arm and was pulling me through the crowd. I took hold of Arseny, who kept turning to watch the boys no older than he in cadets’ uniforms. Shouts of “Disperse!” and “Down with the Communists!” filled the air, and shots. We ran, arm in arm. The people swirled around us like snow.

  We reached the embankment on the Vasilievsky side and began moving back in the direction of the bridge as workers pushed the other way, toward the sound of the rifle fire.

  “Can’t go that way.” It was Emma, at my elbow, her face red and sweaty from running. She pointed toward the bridge. Soldiers coming across—Red troops with rifles on their shoulders. It was crazy, unthinkable. Red troops coming to put down a workers’ protest. I would not have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. We could hear them, faintly, through the snow, their commissars haranguing them. “Get a good look,” she said. “This isn’t about Communism, or the good of the people. This is a state protecting itself against the people, as it always does. Power protects itself.” We climbed down onto the ice, and began crossing the Neva, passing longshoremen coming toward us from the Admiralty docks.