Solovyov and Larionov

by Eugene Vodolazkin

  skimpy coat and melting the snow’s crust with their hot

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  fingers. Even so, Solovyov’s room was the primary spot for their intimate relations. The association of their encounters with the train schedule not only brought about a degree of order that was rare in cases like this but also lent them an unexpected Pavlovian nuance: trains passing through the

  station evoked an involuntary erection for Solovyov.

  Now, he sensed an erection unassociated with any railroad

  effect. When Solovyov opened his eyes, he knew he had just woken up. The first thing he saw was Zoya’s unblinking

  gaze directed at him. Solovyov turned over on his stomach.

  With a crocodile-like motion, he raked hot pebbles toward

  himself and squinted again. He realized that this time he

  had woken up as a person able to swim. He certainly did

  like Zoya.

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  Zoya invited Solovyov to her place that evening. He arrived with a bouquet of flowers but knew right away that what

  he had presumed would happen was not to be. There, in

  Zoya’s room, in addition to Solovyov, was the old-fashioned gentleman he had seen the day before, as well as a thin old woman. She was wearing a black hat with the veil folded

  back and black mesh gloves. A few minutes later, the door-

  bell rang and a man with the look of a mighty warrior

  entered. He appeared to be over sixty. Despite his age, biceps of significant size revealed themselves under an untucked, cotton, pensioner’s sort of shirt. Solovyov thought the group seemed worthy of a painting. At first, he just could not

  grasp what, exactly, had gathered such dissimilar people.

  General Larionov had gathered them. This became clear

  when Zoya introduced the attendees to one another. At

  first, Solovyov thought he had misheard. The old woman

  turned out to be Princess Meshcherskaya, although—and

  here, a tinge of apology could be heard in Zoya’s voice—she was not born until after the revolution.

  ‘That never prevented me from being a princess,’ the old

  woman said, before offering her hand to Solovyov.

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  He bent over her extended hand and felt the mesh texture

  of her glove on his lips. He was kissing a princess’s hand (admittedly, any lady’s hand) for the first time in his life. As was the case with the beach, no such opportunity had

  presented itself either in Petersburg or (even more so) near station Kilometer 715.

  The two gentlemen in attendance were the children of

  White Guardsmen that the general had somehow saved

  from death. This circumstance permitted them, as they

  expressed it, to not only deeply revere the general but also to have been born in the first place. Based on several phrases these people uttered, Solovyov concluded that they had

  transferred their love for and devotion to the general on to Zoya, who was a sort of adopted daughter to the deceased,

  even though he had never seen her. This apparently

  comforting circumstance made Solovyov wary. He grew

  definitively upset upon remembering yesterday’s encounter

  with Shulgin (that turned out to be his name). Given the

  terms of his guardianship, something obviously taken very

  seriously, the chances of developing a relationship with Zoya seemed slim.

  Zoya asked Solovyov to help her as she was preparing to

  serve tea. They went to the kitchen, where there stood a

  balding man, five to seven years older than Solovyov. He

  could not be called a fat man in the strictest sense; he was more likely flabby. Slackened. Threatening to either collapse or deflate. Somehow, he was not completely standing, but

  slanted, resting against a firm support behind his back. Zoya nodded at him, barely noticeably, and turned on the gas

  under the teakettle. Solovyov greeted him to avoid awkwardness. Answering ‘hi’ (it was quiet and perhaps even shy),

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  the unknown man disappeared into his own room. Though

  they had never met, Solovyov recognized him immediately:

  this was Taras Kozachenko.

  As they waited for the teakettle to boil, the curious

  Solovyov examined the spacious kitchen where the legendary general had put in an appearance every day over the course of more than half a century.

  ‘This was his table.’

  Zoya pointed at the oilcloth-covered wooden structure

  that Taras had been leaning against. The oilcloth had been finely hacked up (vegetables were chopped there) and stained red from a dried sauce. Next to a glass containing wilted

  dill there lay a whetstone of implausible size, and behind it—as if to illustrate its capabilities—were two knives with unevenly sharpened blades. At the very corner of the table, wrapped in gauze, stood a jar of kombucha with the fungus.

  This was his table.

  Solovyov cautiously bent back the sticky oilcloth and

  touched the surface of the table. He attempted to imagine

  the general wiping this table with a rag. And regulating the flame on a primus stove with fried eggs crackling.

  ‘The general hardly ever cooked,’ Zoya announced.

  According to Zoya, Varvara Petrovna Nezhdanova, who

  was assigned housing in the general’s apartment in 1922,

  helped him with all his household matters. She was a quiet, terse young woman who came to Yalta from Moscow and

  then stayed in Yalta. After finding a job at city hall as a typist, she was given a room in the general’s building.

  ‘I can cook for you,’ Varvara Petrovna said one day.

  ‘Then cook,’ said the general.

  They married two years later.

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  Over tea, Zoya told those in attendance about Solovyov.

  It turned out that Shulgin’s friend, whose surname was

  Nesterenko, already knew of Solovyov. When in Petersburg

  on business, he had gone to a conference at the Institute of Russian History and heard Solovyov’s paper that had made

  such a strong impression on everyone: ‘Studying the Life

  and Activity of General Larionov: Conclusions and

  Outlooks.’ Nesterenko himself had initially been upset that the young researcher’s conclusions had turned out to be far fewer than the general’s true venerators wanted. The abundance of outlooks envisioned in the paper, however,

  compensated for the disappointing situation in the realm of conclusions. In the final reckoning, this permitted Nesterenko to return home feeling almost uplifted.

  In speaking about scholarly topics, they also recalled that the conference ‘General Larionov as Text’ was scheduled to begin a few days later, in Kerch. Neither Shulgin nor

  Nesterenko understood why the conference was being held

  in Kerch rather than Yalta. They listed, at length, grounds for why a conference devoted to the general could only be

  held in Yalta. Displaying unexpectedly practical thinking for a princess, Meshcherskaya suggested that hotel prices were significantly lower in Kerch. At the same time (and here the princess’s erudition in the field of semiotics manifested itself ), she was distressed to acknowledge that, unlike Yalta, Kerch was not a signifying (semiotically speak
ing) place in the general’s life history. In the end, it was the princess who spoke in defense of the conference’s title, parrying attacks from Shulgin and Nesterenko, who bluntly refused to

  imagine General Larionov in text form.

  The conversation livened up even more when the

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  attendees learned that Solovyov planned to speak at the

  conference. Since not everyone (notably Zoya) was able to

  leave Yalta during the days of the conference, they asked

  Solovyov to read his paper in this house. Of course,

  Solovyov—who pushed his cup so abruptly that a bit of tea

  spilled on the tablecloth—did not mind. He considered it

  an honor to read a paper in this company and (here was

  the main thing), in this house. Since he did not have the text of the paper with him at that moment (and it would

  have been strange if he had, confirmed the attendees), they agreed the reading would take place within the next few

  days. It would be difficult to dream of a reading in a more signifying place.

  As for Solovyov’s potential listeners, they had things to

  tell, too. With the exception of Zoya, they had all known

  the general personally and well. The atmosphere Zoya was

  raised in, however, had furnished her with information about the general to such a degree that during their subsequent

  reminiscing about the general over tea, she permitted herself to supplement and even correct the guests’ statements. The Chekhov Museum employee’s wonderful memory made up

  for her absence of personal experience. Based on the stories told by the figures gathered in the general’s home that

  August evening, his post-revolutionary fate unfolded in the following way.

  The general greeted the Reds’ arrival within the walls of

  his own Yalta dacha (Princess Meshcherskaya made a circular motion with her hand, indicating these very walls). This

  was where he lived when he did not need to stay on the

  armored train. The general not only avoided death in a

  surprising way but had not even been evicted from his home.

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  The general was subjected to having additional residents moved into the premises.

  A local Komsomol cell was stationed on the first floor

  of his dacha. In previous times, nobody could have thought this space capable of housing such a number of figures

  wearing pointy, woolen Red Army hats. They straightened

  their uniform shirts and saluted each other when they met

  by the front stoop. On the second floor, one room was

  assigned to the aforementioned Varvara Petrovna, another

  was given to the revolutionary sailor Kuzma Seregin, and

  a third went to the general. Since the second floor had no kitchen, a large room there was modified for the purpose.

  The Larionov family built this house with gothic windows

  in the nineteenth century, during the mid-nineties. Despite the family’s deep army connections, the dacha was built

  using the labor of civilian workers who were paid, furthermore, out of the Larionovs’ own money. Like the majority

  of Yalta dachas, it had only two stories but each was high.

  When the future general stepped over the threshold, he was already at an age when the magical words art nouveau, which his mother uttered in the foyer, were not empty sounds for him. Those two French words had resounded repeatedly in

  Petersburg, too. They accompanied the home’s entire

  construction and his parents uttered them with a special

  sort of progressive facial expression. When showing the

  house to Yaltan neighbors, the general’s parents comported themselves a little like Columbus and, strictly speaking, they had a right to do so: the style was still almost undiscovered, in Yalta as well as the capital.

  The style was unfamiliar to Kuzma Seregin, too, when

  he moved into the general’s house in 1921. Art nouveau

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  turned out to make a dispiriting impression on this repre-

  sentative of the navy. For the first two days of Seregin’s stay in the house he dropped everything (he was a member of

  the Red Navy’s firing squad) and worked on modifying the

  room that had been handed down to him. After rejecting

  the intricate moldings on the ceiling as bourgeois excess, he chiseled them off the ceiling. He painted the oak paneling with gooey green paint and went over the oak parquet

  with it, too, after finding the color interesting. The general observed the clashing styles but kept calm, never once

  rebuking the master of firing squad matters. By comparison with changes across Russia, events in Larionov’s own house could no longer genuinely disturb him.

  Being rowdy by nature, though, Seregin was a bit afraid

  of the general. For him, the general was a phenomenon no

  less alien (and perhaps even more alien) in nature than art nouveau, but he could not proceed with the general as he

  had with the ceiling moldings. Despite his revolutionary

  consciousness and propensity for cocaine, the sailor saw his neighbor first and foremost as a general.

  The Red Navyman’s servile reflex was also reinforced one

  time after he initiated hand-to-hand combat with the general and was quickly knocked off his feet, dragged to the front steps, and dunked in a rain barrel. For some time, he tried to take it out on Varvara Petrovna, who had witnessed the

  event, but he dropped that, too, after seeing the general’s benevolence toward her. He did not calm down for good

  until he quietly enquired at his place of employment as to the prospect of the general becoming an object for the firing squad. So as not to burden his comrades with extra work,

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  to say. He was genuinely surprised when he received a

  categorical refusal; he then began respecting the general

  even more. It was Seregin, incidentally, who was the first to ask the key question of the general’s biography: why was he not shot?

  Seregin lived in the general’s house for seven years. Once caught in the vortex of the revolution, he simply could not return to a tranquil life. His revolutionary consciousness and increased consumption of cocaine pushed him toward

  actions and words (and words are also actions, as Lev B.

  Umansky, a member of the Joint State Political Directorate troika, said) that were unacceptable to the young Soviet

  system of political power. Seregin’s very own firing squad executed the troika’s verdict for Seregin. According to his comrades’ recollections, that was Seregin’s only consolation.

  Umansky, whom the general recognized as the person

  who commanded the Red Armymen during Seregin’s arrest,

  moved into Seregin’s room. As the Red Armymen tied up

  the resistant tenant, Umansky checked the condition of the window frames and doors, and confirmed the exact measurements of the vacated room with Varvara Petrovna. It

  later emerged that Umansky, who did not yet have housing

  in Yalta, did this whenever he conducted an arrest. Seregin was shot on very short notice, so there is no reason to doubt that the accommodations suited him.

  Umansky differed, favorably, from Seregin because he did

  not en
gage in nighttime debauchery. If he brought ladies

  home now and then, he made them take off their shoes

  and handed out slippers he had readied specially. The women were initially from the Komsomol, spirited away from the

  cell on the first floor. Those who slept with him thought

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  that (as an honest person) Umansky should marry them.

  Without involving himself in discussion of his own honesty, he rationally announced that he simply could not marry

  everyone at once, despite his desire to do so.

  Regular scandalous scenes on the second floor caught the

  attention of the cell’s leadership and they began investigating the issue of amoral behavior. Umansky, who had thoroughly chickened out, was forced to go to the cell and explain, in the presence of the Komsomol’s core membership, why

  marriage should be considered an obsolete phenomenon.

  His speech made a fairly good impression on the core

  membership, which was largely composed of males. The

  female portion of the group regarded it with more restraint but could not resolve itself to object openly.

  From that day forward, the Komsomol women did not

  set foot in Umansky’s room. On the one hand, the young

  women in the cell were too offended to go up to the second floor again. On the other, upon reflection, Umansky himself decided to get by with ladies from the embankment: they

  may have been more distant ideologically, but they were

  preferable in terms of their mastery of sexual techniques.

  Unlike the Komsomol women, whose inflexibility thor-

  oughly irritated Umansky, Marxist worldviews did not

  prevent them from kneeling when necessary.

  In fact, out of everyone the general had occasion to see

  in a communal living situation, Umansky was not the worst

  neighbor. During the years Umansky was a flatmate, the

  potent smell of urine (which had appeared when Seregin

  settled into the apartment) disappeared from the bathroom.

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