Nastenka fell in love with Maria Feofanovna and dreamed of becoming like her: when she grew up, this was just how she would teach and explain Russian literature to children, making sure that they learned to love memorizing poetry, that they read the plays aloud in class and performed excerpts on the school stage on special evenings. (Maria Feofanovna herself gave Nastenka a good deal of attention and encouraged her enthusiasm.) Nastenka had not yet developed a crush on any boy, but how she loved everything that was literature! It was an entire, enormous, organic world, more vivid than the reality that flowed around her.
When she finished school, she hoped to enter Moscow University, in what remained of the former Faculty of History and Philology. Her father, Dmitry Ivanych, an epidemiologist and a great lover of Chekhov, also encouraged her in her choice.
But then came the misfortune: he was transferred to work in Rostov Oblast and they had to leave Moscow at a time when Nastenka, at sixteen, had only one year of school remaining. (True, Maria Feofanovna was no longer allowed to teach, being regarded as ideologically outmoded.)
Moscow! There could be no city more beautiful than Moscow, a place that had been formed not by the lifeless plan of some architect but by the active lives of many thousands over the course of centuries. Its boulevards and its two ring roads, its noisy, colorful streets, and its crookedly wandering lanes and grassy courtyards in which people lived their separate lives, its sky filled with the many voices of bells ringing in every pitch and timbre. Moscow, with its Kremlin, its Rumiantsev Library, its famous university, and its Conservatory.
It was true that they received quite a decent apartment in Rostov and, by the standards of the day, even a very good one. It was on the second floor, with large windows overlooking quiet Pushkin Street that also had a boulevard running along its middle. Yet the city itself seemed utterly foreign, not Russian, because of its multiracial population and, in particular, because of its corrupted language: the sounds of the local speech were distorted, and the stresses on words were not right. She made no friends at school, and the whole atmosphere there was also harsh and foreign. Another horrid thing was that she had to join the Komsomol to have any chance of getting into a university or institute. Awake and asleep, Nastenka was haunted by pictures of Moscow. She was quite prepared to live in a student residence, so long as it was at Moscow University.
On the wall of the Rostov apartment, just as in her Moscow one, Nastenka had assembled about two dozen portraits of Russian writers. From them she sought to fortify that truth in which she had grown up and which had become somehow obscured and thrust aside in the new, chaotic reality around her. The portrait of Nekrasov dying in his bed particularly tore her heart. She loved him fiercely for his unfailing response to the tribulations of the people.
And now—was there some sinister resemblance to Nekrasov here?—her father had come down with a severe cold after a trip along the Don in foul autumn weather. He developed pneumonia, and that developed into tuberculosis. The very word was terrifying (as were the terrible posters about tuberculosis in the clinic waiting rooms). How many lives had it already carried away? Even Chekhov’s. There were no medicines to treat it. Now he needed a better climate. Should they move once more? But he hadn’t the money or the strength to do it. This accursed city! The whole move here had been disastrous. Icy northeast winds blew through Rostov even into April. It was so painful to look into her father’s eyes: Did he know even better than she did? And was he preparing himself within?
How could she now go to Moscow University? To make matters worse, doctors had forbidden him to take up any private practice. Her father’s strength was failing in any case. And so she had to enroll here in Rostov, in a Faculty of Literature, but one in a pedagogical institute (that was soon renamed the Industrial-Pedagogical Institute).
But did Russian literature still remain the center of Nastenka’s life? Well, not really. Somehow she couldn’t recognize the literature of the past in what was now being laid out before her in the lectures. Though they did acknowledge, in passing, the musicality of Pushkin’s poetry (but never mentioned the transparent clarity of his perception of the world), they insistently pointed out that he expressed the mindset and ideology of the mid-level landowners during the incipient crisis of Russian feudalism: this meant the portrayal of well-being on the feudal estate and the fear of peasant revolution, as vividly depicted in The Captain’s Daughter.
It seemed more like some form of algebra than literature, and wherever had poor Pushkin vanished?
Her class was filled mostly with girls, some of them not at all stupid. And she could see that this or that one was troubled to learn that poets and writers did not create their works guided by free inspiration: though the writers themselves might have been unaware of it, unwittingly but objectively they were fulfilling someone else’s social command. One had to have a sharp eye here to perceive what lay beneath the surface. Yet the institute girls never openly expressed any disagreement with the lectures to one another: either this was simply not the common practice or—more likely—it was something quite risky.
And how boring it all was! How could one live on this? Where were those radiant faces she had known?
Nastenka now had to cram into her head that Ostrovsky also reflected the process of decay of the feudal, serf-owning system and its displacement by developing industrial capitalism, and that his identification with that system had cast him back to the camp of reactionary Slavophilism. And this whole dark kingdom had best been penetrated by Dobroliubov’s ray of light.
The bit about Dobroliubov—well, that was gospel.
The boys in the class were basically stumblebums who appeared to have entered this faculty simply by accident. But then there was Shurik Gen—impulsive, quick-witted, a bundle of energy with jet-black hair and eyes full of expression. Now, he was in his proper place here! A natural leader who excelled in his studies, he immediately became the Komsomol organizer. And in discussions outside of class, which were now becoming frequent, he brought in a vital stream of literature that they had not yet taken up in their program. This was the literature of today, turbulent and filled with furious struggle among various literary groupings. How can anyone turn his back on the contemporary world? (And, indeed, why should one try to avoid it?) As it turned out, there were many groups that had already burned themselves out or grown shallow over these years—but the Smithy, Vagranka, Lef, October—“These are all on our side of the literary trenches.”
“But,” his voice rang out, “our ideological antipodes aren’t simply sleeping. Take the Fellow Travelers: these writers are our enemies of yesterday and the corpses of tomorrow. They are reactionaries at the core, and they slanderously distort the revolution. And they’re all the more dangerous the more skillfully they do it. Literature, though, isn’t some object of enjoyment, it’s a battlefield. All these Pilnyaks and Akhmatovas and their kin, all these Serapion Brothers and wretched little Scorpios must either be forced to fall into line with proletarian literature or be swept aside with an iron broom; there’s no room for compromise. We mustn’t let the trenches of our literary position be overgrown with thistles! And we, the youth—all we Children of October—must also help establish a single communist line in literature. Despite the way some of these melancholic scribblers have tried to frighten us, the basic spirit of our new beginnings is vigor, not despair!”
Shurik always spoke out with such passion and heat that no one could match him. His classmates were left speechless. He simply drew everyone along in his wake. To say that these discussions were interesting wasn’t enough; they provided a connection with living life; whole new currents, previously unknown, flowed from them. Nastenka was one of the most dedicated listeners among his audience, and she spent more and more time asking him questions after the others had gone.
And it was true: one couldn’t live only on the literature of the past, one had to hearken to what was happening today. Real life was flowing around them in a vigorous stream, and th
ey had to enter into it.
How did Shurik know all these things? When had he found the time to soak it all up? As it emerged, he had wasted no time even in the last years of his high school. While there, he had even made his way through the yellow-, green- and crimson-colored anthologies of the Futurists, then through LEF (“Lef or bluff?”), then through Komfut (communist futurism), and the Litfront (all of them searing his heart) and had already become a dedicated On Guardist while at his school desk. (And in fact the journal On Literary Guard was right there in the institute’s library, but no one bothered to peer into it or take a deep breath of its heady spirit.)
“None of these Fellow Travelers should even be allowed to exist,” Shurik would shoot back. “You’re either an ally or an enemy! Just look at what they most value: the subtlety of their emotions. But what is decisive is not the writer’s heart, it’s his outlook on life. And we value a writer not because of what and how he experiences life but by his role in our proletarian movement. Psychologism only gets in the way of our triumphant movement forward. But what they call ‘reincarnation into a character’ only deadens one’s class consciousness. One can say that the revolution in literature hasn’t yet truly begun. After the revolution we need not just new words but even new letters for them! Even the periods and commas of the past become repulsive.”
This was positively staggering! It made your head spin. Yet how transported he became by all this fervor, this unyielding conviction.
As for the lectures, they moved along the clearly specified paths laid out by the stolid textbooks of Kogan and Friche. They wrote in similar fashion: Shakespeare was a poet of kings and lords; do we have any use for him? And all these Onegins and Bolkonskys, are they not our total class aliens?
That may be so, yet they certainly knew how to love in those days!
There was no way to maintain a sustained argument against Kogan, however: he couldn’t have constructed all these many things on utter nonsense. Surely there was a genuine historical and social basis for them?
Month by month, it seemed, her father’s eyes occupied more and more space on his face and expressed more and more meaning. So much depth and suffering and wisdom had accumulated in them! He seemed to acquire a profound understanding as he detached himself from life. Yet she didn’t dare say it aloud: Was this part of his passing over? Had he already crossed some sort of threshold? His face had yellowed, he had grown utterly gaunt, and his gray moustache had lost its resilience and now drooped as if it had been pasted on.
How terribly he coughed, and for such a long time, tearing away not only at his own breast but those of his wife and his daughter as well. The sense of grief now never left their home; it had become permanent. But when she came to the institute, her mind was filled with other thoughts. Since childhood Nastenka had been closer to her father than her mother, and she always loved to tell him everything; and now everything that absorbed her outside the home was so new and so disconcerting.
He would listen to her. He showed no surprise but only looked, looked at her through those eyes that had become so large and which, month by month, ever more clearly expressed the inevitability of loss—that was their dominant expression.
He would stroke her head (now he was always in bed, propped up on thick pillows). Sometimes, using his ebbing strength to breathe and speak, he would reply that the acquisition of any form of knowledge is a long and far from straightforward process and that which his daughter had now learned would also pass; she would still look at things in ever new ways, and there was no limit to the depths of human life.
She was growing ever closer to Shurik, and nothing and no one other than he could bring Nastya the very breath of the Era, as hot as Rostov’s torrid summer wind. He felt it so strongly, and he conveyed it with such vital power! He had already published things in the regional newspaper The Hammer; he never missed an opportunity to speak in class or at institute gatherings or rallies and literary debates; between classes he gladly shared his ideas with his friends and, most of all, with Nastenka, whom he had begun to walk home. (He came from a good family, the son of an important lawyer, and never treated girls with the coarse boorishness that was becoming the norm.)
Now he admitted that the On Guardists had been in error when they took the side of Trotsky during a party debate, but they had admitted their mistake and corrected themselves. And even before the Shakhty Affair, he boldly declared: “We are proud to be labeled literary Chekists, proud that our enemies call us informers!” Now he was entirely consumed with the struggle against Polonsky-ism, against Voronsky-ism, against the literary group Pereval that had descended to the point of neo-Slavophilism, of kulak humanism, of “love for man in general,” of “the beauty of the universal man.” At last the Literary Section of the Communist Academy sentenced Voronsky-ism to liquidation. But the enemies multiplied: simultaneously, there was a struggle against Pereverzevism. Those people—though they were correct in understanding that the author’s personality, biography, and literary predecessors had no significance whatsoever in his work and that his system of imagery stemmed from the system of production—still overdid it in arguing that every author was a writer only of his own class, and that a proletarian writer could not describe a bourgeois. And this was certainly a leftist deviation.
After the walk home he and Nastenka kissed in the semidarkness—and sometimes under a full moon—on Pushkin Boulevard, about twenty paces across from the window behind which her father lay, coughing his life away.
But Shurik was now insisting, more and more assertively, on taking their relationship right to its final point. She put him off, imploring him. She yielded as much as she could, but still, there was a limit!
In fact, did marriage really exist these days? It might as well have been abolished. When people came to an arrangement, they went to the registry office, and many of them never bothered with that and simply got together and then separated without bothering to register.
But Shurik demanded: Either, or! Either that or a breakup.
She was wounded by his stubborn refusal to be swayed. She wept in his arms and begged him to wait.
Absolutely not!
But she was not yet prepared to let him have his way about this.
On one of these intensely painful evenings, he brusquely and emphatically broke up with her.
In class in the days that followed he made a point of showing his indifference and avoided her.
How her heart ached!
She loved him and she revered him. But still, she couldn’t . . .
How long would her suffering have gone on? And how far would it have gone? But at this point her father began living out his final days.
Now each day and each week before the numbing cold of parting were numbered; soon the final thread that linked the consciousness and the purpose of the three of you would slip from your caring fingers, and you and Mama would be left here, while he, forever, would . . .
The full sense of emptiness set in after the funeral (her mother was a believer, but there was not a single church or a single priest left in the city of four million; a religious funeral was a very risky thing in any case). Her mother grew wrinkled; she weakened and lost all her vitality. It happened so quickly that Nastenka felt somehow older and more responsible. Mama now could offer her no guidance.
As for Shurik, once he had broken with her, he made no move to restore their previous relations. He had a will of iron.
At the end of winter the graduates were being given their job assignments, and now Nastenka held out for a place in Rostov. She had nowhere else to go. And she got her place.
That last summer, nervous about her coming encounter with the fortyodd young minds that would be entrusted to her, Nastenka spent a lot of time in the library. She worked through the Encyclopedia of Literature that was just now being published, the methodological journal of the Directorate of Education of the Russian Republic, and various other journals filled with critical essays. She filled in the gaps i
n what she had learned earlier from Shurik, and all those things, to be sure, were being published everywhere. You needed only the time to read and summarize them.
As for Shurik, he went to Moscow for good. He’d been given a job in some publishing house. Back to that beautiful Moscow that she’d left behind and now would never recover . . .
Yet it was better that he had gone.
You could reach the library by taking the narrow Nikolaevsky Lane that dropped down through the ravine that was there in those days, or you could go more directly through the city park. The park had many things to offer. There was a straight and level central pathway from which the ground sloped downward on both sides to little squares with flowerbeds and fountains. A band shell where there were free classical music concerts in summer stood on the hills on one side, and on the other side was a summer restaurant where a tiny variety band played irritating music.
Nastenka’s face was rather broad, and her figure was nothing special, but her eyes were filled with an amazing radiance and she had a smile that simply captured people’s hearts, as she was often told and was well aware.
During her years at the institute there would be parties with the kids from other faculties, and if they could get some gramophone records they would dance the foxtrot and the tango (and though older people generally denounced such things, the dances were something that was ours! ). Now she and the one or two girlfriends she had left in Rostov would go to the city park in the evenings; the young people who knew each other would pair off and slip away along the dark pathways to find some privacy. (Once you’ve become a teacher, though, there’ll be no more of such foolery.) The surprising thing was that every single boy behaved crudely, with a complete lack of sensitivity. None of them could understand the slow, gradual development of feelings. All of the boys had accepted the notorious and opportunistic slogan, “Forget about the cherry blossoms.” People said with conviction that love was nothing more than “some bourgeois gimmick.” One of the characters in some new play expressed it like this: “I need a woman, so why can’t you do me this favor, as a comrade and a Komsomol girl?”
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