Solovyov and Larionov

by Eugene Vodolazkin

  9

  The general’s parents sent him to the Second Cadet Corps

  at the age of ten. We will acknowledge the anachronism of

  the previous sentence and leave it at that. In some sense, he was already a general as a ten-year-old because strictly (although nonhistorically) speaking, he was always a general.

  Who could have dared imagine him as anything other than

  a general? Dupont had already posed that question in her

  day. And—in the article ‘This Is Not Today’s Tribe’—she

  answered in her characteristically uncompromising manner:

  nobody.

  In dictating to Nina Fedorovna his recollections of the

  years of his life at the Second Corps, the general emphasized that the gold stitching on the black uniforms at that educational institution was somewhat thinner than in other corps (the First, the Nikolaevsky, and even the Alexandersky, for example), not to mention that the trousers for the Second

  Corps’ cadets, unlike those for many other corps, were dark blue, not black. The general also pointed out that later,

  when weapons handling was introduced in the combatant

  companies, the Second Corps was given the right to carry

  dragoon sabers on sword belts as the guards did.

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  They rose early, at six in the morning. To a horn. That

  was fine in summer, during the white nights, but it was

  intolerable in winter. In summer, the future general rose a half hour before reveille so he could greet the horn fully conscious, in order not to let it horn in on his sweetest

  morning dreams. That did not work out in winter. He could

  not bear to leave a bed warmed during the night and plunge into the bedroom’s penetrating cold. The temperature never rose above ten degrees there, that was the rule. In the late nineteenth century, it was not recommended that young

  men sleep in warm quarters.

  They washed in cold water to the waist and that was a

  little worse than the horn. They went out on the platz in

  just woolen jackets. In any weather. It is possible that this Spartan training drew cadet Larionov’s attention to King

  Leonidas’s feat. The opposite, however, cannot be ruled out, either: that the Spartan king’s feat reconciled Larionov to such a harsh routine. What does remain a fact is that both the Spartan training, and the cadet’s extensive familiarity with the course of battle, came in very, very handy for him during his mature years.

  When he walked outside for morning formations,

  Larionov would try not to notice the snowflakes melting

  underneath his collar. He thought about how the Spartans—

  who, generally speaking, were connoisseurs of

  difficulty—did not have a problem like the Russian cold.

  Larionov would lift his head from time to time and look at his classmates huddled in the darkness of the December

  platz. They were small, not awake, and covered in bits of

  ice. In the glint of the gaslights, only the insignias on their hats, polished to glimmering, and their red noses, were

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  visible. Their eyes watered from the prickly morning wind

  and from sleep that had not passed. The difficulties did not break them. On the contrary, they nourished them,

  tempering body and spirit. They grew into strong fellows

  and genuine officers. ‘They have all died,’ the general wrote over one line.

  Cadet Lanskoy had a special place in the general’s life

  at that time. The general obviously singled out this hand-

  some and, judging from the description, arrogant boy in

  his reminiscences. Cadets Larionov and Lanskoy stuck

  together for several years. Their relations were not friendship in the usual sense. Lanskoy did absolutely nothing to bring about or, later, strengthen those relations. His contribution to the friendship was that he permitted himself to be admired.

  In some certain way, Lanskoy was worth admiring. He

  was possibly the best student of all, without making visible efforts. He pronounced his answers softly and even,

  somehow, condescendingly. This annoyed the teachers, but

  there was nothing to find fault in. His audacity was reck-

  less. On a dare, he swam under the ice of the Zhdanovka

  River, from one hole in the ice to another. Despite very

  strict rules, he sometimes left the corps’ billeting before bedtime and returned toward morning, through the

  window.

  One time, cadet Larionov escaped with him. After

  changing into civilian clothes, they rambled around

  snow-covered Petersburg for half the night. Larionov felt

  absolutely wretched about it. Violating discipline felt like genuine betrayal to him. He himself would have been hard

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  doubt that betrayal had come to pass. Around 2:30, the

  cadets dropped in at a tavern and ordered a half-glass of

  vodka each. They managed to return unnoticed that night

  but in the morning Larionov, who had never before been

  sick, got sick. His temperature rose. He was hit with the

  chills. Tears streamed from his eyes. They were tears of

  repentance but nobody knew that. Nobody but Lanskoy.

  He visited Larionov at the infirmary on the third day and

  said, ‘Larionov, you’re a decent person. You’re sick from

  violating the routine. You shouldn’t have escaped with me.’

  Cadet Larionov expected his friend to visit him again but

  that did not happen. After Larionov’s release from the infirmary, Lanskoy greeted him from afar. Larionov nodded and

  did not even approach him. They fell out of touch after

  graduating from the corps.

  The majority of subjects (other than languages) were

  taught at the corps by military men. Cadets were supposed

  to have six lessons a day, followed by horseback riding and drill training. At first, riding devoured almost all Larionov’s attention. It is likely that this is the age that should be considered the beginning of the general’s long conversations with horses, something referred to in the literature (such as cavalry commander Semyon Budyonny’s A Good Attitude Toward Horses) multiple times.

  After familiarizing himself with the events at Thermo-

  pylae, tactics became another of the boy’s favorite subjects.

  When he read those lines, Solovyov recalled a pencil sketch of a battle map that he had discovered in a Petersburg

  archive. By comparing the document with analo gous

  sketches—at least eighteen battle maps of Thermopylae

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  without a doubt, that it belonged to the future general.

  The particular interest of that discovery consisted not only in the drawing being the earliest of those known but also that Leonidas himself was depicted in the upper right-hand corner of the sheet, in a general’s epaulets and with a

  two-headed eagle on his chest.

  Among non-military subjects, Larionov liked dance.

  Considering the child’s overall mentality, this passion might appear somewhat unexpected, but that was only at first

  glance. Unlike their successors, in those days Ru
ssian officers loved to dance and did so capably. The Russian officers’

  corps was very refined. Their well-balanced development—

  this was exactly what the cadets of the Second Corps were

  striving for—supposed more than manliness. It supposed

  elegance, too.

  On top of all that, the cadet’s attitude toward dance was

  affected by a statement from the corps’ charter that had

  been framed and placed in the dance hall. According to

  Gurkovsky’s The Cadet Corps of the Russian Empire, the note held that the system for teaching dance was developed by

  a French dance school and took into consideration grace

  and beauty as well as the human body’s possibilities for

  expressing itself, both when resting and when moving. This text was the first to direct Larionov’s attention to the human figure’s plentiful possibilities.

  The child also had a weakness for extracurricular reading.

  A housefather conducted this, reading classic Russian literature aloud to his charges. After noting Larionov’s interest in reading—as well as the cadet’s exemplary pronunciation—the housefather often instructed the boy to read aloud. The

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  his eyes with his hand, and listen to his pupil’s reading. He would bob his head approvingly in time with the reading,

  which would have given the impression of absorbed attention had the bobbing not been implausibly rhythmic. Sometimes

  a faint whistle would sound from his inflated nostrils, through a brush of coarse hair. They read Pushkin’s Poltava, Lermonotov’s Borodino, and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, but everyone especially liked Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors.

  The whistling would cease at the first lines of the

  Zhukovsky. Absolute silence, though, came with a later

  stanza: ‘Our Figner, dressed as an old man, enters / The

  enemy camp in the dead of night; / Steals like a shadow

  among their tents, / Sees everything there with his sharp

  eyes . . .’ Over all, just ‘Our Figner, dressed as an old man’

  would have been enough, on its own, to attract attention,

  pronounced as it was almost as one word. And he was

  stealing in, too, among tents . . .

  In 1894, Larionov allegedly read aloud the short story

  ‘Surgery’, which his father had brought for him. Accustomed to Russian classics, the housefather woke up but did not

  interrupt the cadet. The housefather liked the story, thanks to his own experience in dentistry. Upon learning that

  Chekhov was the author of the work, he wrote a letter to

  Lev Tolstoy, asking him if Anton Chekhov was a classic.

  Tolstoy did not answer. It should be concluded from this

  that in 1894 Chekhov was not yet a classic. Construction

  had not even begun on his Yalta home.

  The reading repertoire for the wards of the Second Cadet

  Corps was not limited to the aforementioned works,

  however. Under their mattresses, hiding from their house-

  father’s eyes, were novels by Madame Genlis, verses from

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  Mister Barkov, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? —all copied out in the cadets’ distinct hands. When the elderly general recalled those years, he expressed admiration in the fact of copying Chernyshevsky’s novel. It was not just the copying but also the very reading of that thing that seemed like some sort of feat to him. From the memoirist’s point of view, Russian letters had never generated a more helpless text.

  The old housefather discovered those books during an

  inspection of the cadets’ bedroom. After lengthy convincing by his students, he left them Madame de Genlis. In the end, he even agreed to turn a blind eye to Barkov. But he simply could not reconcile himself with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s

  work: the very mention of that surname sent him into a fit of rage. He threatened to expel from the corps and court

  martial the boy who had copied the novel. His identity could not be established then (it is possible that nobody wanted to), but the general knew it well. He considered it possible to mention only eight decades later, when there was no

  longer any threat to the copyist. He was cadet Lanskoy.

  The housefather’s reaction was explainable. The Second

  Cadet Corps felt a share of responsibility in everything

  concerning Chernyshevsky. He had entered the corps as a tutor in 1853, while preparing his master’s dissertation. It is unlikely that this particular circumstance served as the beginning of all his troubles, but speaking purely chronologically—there is no getting around this—that circumstance preceded his troubles.

  Temporal as well as spatial patterns were later established, too.

  Colonel Pazukhin, the ballistics instructor, drew wide-

  spread attention to the fact that the key points in the city for this writer and democrat fell along a single straight line. The 580VV_txt.indd 159

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  Second Cadet Corps (place of work)  No. 7, Zhdanovskaya

  Embankment (place of residence)  Peter and Paul Fortress

  (place of imprisonment) 

  Mytinskaya Square (place of

  mock civil execution). In becoming familiar with these

  patterns, cadet Larionov could not have known that, by virtue of the connectedness of everything on earth, historian

  Solovyov—a researcher studying General Larionov’s battles

  with the consequences of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s work—

  would rent a room on that very same straight line (No. 11, Zhdanovskaya Embankment). This method for structuring

  thoughts, which was far from simple, forced Solovyov to tear himself away from the text and look at the sail of a distant yacht. A moment later he was reading again.

  Entering the corps did not at all signify that the future

  general was isolated from the outside world. After passing an exam for his ability to salute and stand at attention, he was granted the right to go outside. Like cadets of other

  corps, the wards of the Second Corps had but one limitation: they were prohibited from walking on the sunny side of

  Nevsky Prospekt. It is possible that this prohibition was seen as a part of their Spartan education, as a necessary measure for acquainting the cadets with the shady side of life.

  Sometimes the cadets were taken to the theater. These

  outings were a real holiday for them. Their time did not

  yet possess contemporary entertainment opportunities.

  Theater, which has now receded into the realm of the elite, was at the vanguard of the nineteenth century’s entertainment industry. As a means for education, theater was considered a mixed blessing or—depending upon the type

  of show—even dangerous. The theater was closed for Great

  Lent.

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  At the cadet corps, the preferred theater was the

  Alexandrinsky and the preferred show was Alexander

  Ostrovsky’s The Storm. According to the future general’s calculations, the cadets went to see The Storm sixteen times during his years of schooling. Such an obvious preference

  for one play over all others was explained by the housefa-

  ther’s personal biases. His sympathy for Katerina manifested itself so visibly at the theater that those around him would begin to turn to look
at him. From the very first line of the show, the aging soldier would sit, grasping at the armrests of his seat. Indignant at Boris’s spinelessness, he would

  crumple his peaked army cap and hit himself on the knee

  with it. During Kabanikha’s monologues, he would lift his

  own huge fist and, slowly, with a despairing grimace, sink it into the loge’s raspberry-colored velvet. When Katerina said, ‘Why is it that people can’t fly!’ the housemaster’s facial features would collapse immediately and he would

  cover his face with his hands, then begin sobbing as loudly as if he were baying. The civilian audience, who had already long been looking into the hall rather than the stage, would fall silent in respect. They were shaken by the Russian

  Army’s sentimentality.

  Larionov returned home during school vacations. Oddly

  enough, his parents’ attempts to spoil the child brought him no joy whatsoever. He visited sweet shops primarily out of filial obedience and, to the surprise of those around him, did not exhibit his previous enjoyment when washing down

  airy éclairs with orangeade. It seemed to him (and this was the whole point) that with conduct such as this, he was

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  training, washing with ice-cold water, and wakeups before

  the morning horn. All that reconciled the cadet with visits to the sweet shop was that, generally speaking, the food at the corps was pretty good. According to those in command,

  food limitations were not part of a Spartan-style education.

  Future officers needed to eat well.

  Larionov’s parents’ non-military conversations seemed

  strange to the boy. He heard vagary and something uncon-

  vincing in the tone of their conversations, though the

  topics under discussion agitated him very much at the

  time, despite (or perhaps because of ?) their civilian nature.

  And so the cadet recalled discussions of the life philosophy of their distant relative Baroness von Kruger, who had

  entered into marriage four times. They had talked about

  the baroness in the family before, too, but this grew more frequent when she entered into new marriages. At the