Apricot Jam: And Other Stories

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  And yet, somehow, there wasn’t much grieving.

  Could that really be?

  It was the past. All of it, every trace, had vanished somewhere.

  In January ‘32 the students were sent out on teaching practice. But a lot of the village schools stood empty because of the collectivization and the famine—there weren’t any school kids left. Nastya’s assignment was to the Tsyurupa Children’s Village on the former estate of General Brusilov. The children were from Kharkov, but since it was easy for the local peasants to get here, they brought in their starving children and then went back home to die. (In fact, there were even cases of cannibalism in some villages.) Many of the little boys in the orphanage were so emaciated they had become “wetters”—they couldn’t hold their urine. They were fed barely enough to stay alive, and they fought over every scrap of food and clothing they were given. In the spring, the kids from the city, not knowing any better, would pick the wrong sort of grasses to eat and poison themselves on henbane. An ex-soldier ran the Children’s Village, and he would go around in a service jacket and breeches, strict, straight-backed, always insisting on good order everywhere and in everything. (He had a pretty wife who would come out from the city, yet he began paying visits to Nastya. There was something about her that drew in the men.)

  In May they returned to Kharkov for their final exams. Nastya had a classmate, Emma, who was already married and came from a well-off family. She could have easily gone to the very best institute, but for some reason she had come to this one. One day in May—Nastya knew nothing about this and only later figured it out—the Civil War hero, Viktor Nikolaevich Zadorozhny, came from Moscow to Kharkov on business. He knew Emma from somewhere and sent her a note to arrange a meeting— “I’m waiting to hear from you.” The messenger thoughtlessly delivered it when her husband was there, and Emma had to read it aloud. But, laughing, she read out that Zadorozhny was looking for her classmate but didn’t know her address. While her husband watched, she wrote down where and when to find Nastya. But then she had no chance to slip away from her husband in time to warn Nastya. Zadorozhny got the note and was surprised, but went to Nastya’s at once and invited her out to the boulevard and sat with her beneath a fragrant acacia.

  Zadorozhny was tall and slim, also in a service jacket and breeches, but he had only one arm: the Cossacks had cut off his other one at the elbow during the Civil War. (It was as if they knew who he was. He loved to tell the story of the times before the revolution when he and the strikers, expecting the Cossacks to come and run them off, would put a harrow, teeth upwards, on the road. The galloping Cossacks would fall and be injured along with their horses.) He had been a party member since 1917 and was now studying at the Industrial Academy of the Central Committee.

  Barely able to pull herself together from the surprise of it all and still unaware of what had brought about this meeting, Nastya, in a simple white blouse with greenish stripes, suddenly decided that he was in her power and she was not going to let him go.

  Fortune was smiling on him: they chatted for half an hour, and then he invited her to come to his hotel that same evening. And she went, of course, knowing that after that he wouldn’t abandon her.

  And, sure enough, in the morning he told her that he was taking her back to Moscow. (The next day he tried to pass it off to Emma as a joke, but she was furious at Nastya.)

  He spent a few more days in Kharkov. Nastya didn’t tell him about Yulka at once, but he accepted the child as well and would take her along. She still had her final exams, but they had already promised to send her for advanced study at the Institute for Shevchenko Studies. Viktor only laughed: he was Ukrainian himself, but he didn’t think much of the Ukrainian language.

  Getting out to Moscow—or anywhere else—was impossible: no one could buy a ticket without a lot of papers with official stamps and approvals. But within a month, Zadorozhny arrived with all the necessary papers, and he took Nastya and Yulka out of the starving, almost dying city. Luck was with them.

  And in one of the first shop windows in Moscow Nastya caught sight of some white rolls! For only ten kopecks! A mirage . . . Her head whirled and she felt sick to her stomach. This was a different country entirely.

  But the students’ residence of the Industrial Academy turned out to be even more amazing: no more “shared” rooms with cots for four, six, or ten people. Each door from the corridor led into a tiny anteroom with two doors leading to different rooms. A married couple lived in the room next door, while Zadorozhny himself had a large room, and now he’d come back with his trophies. A little cot had already been set up for Yulka.

  Viktor told her that Stalin’s wife was also studying at the Industrial Academy. The Academy cafeteria was a good one. And there was a clean kindergarten with good food.

  There was one more mysterious object in the room: a small electrical apparatus that cooled the things inside. You could keep your fresh food in it—sausage, ham, butter.

  And you could eat whenever you felt like it!

  ~ * ~

  2

  Nastenka had spent her childhood in Moscow—the old Moscow, on a little street near the Pure Ponds. The German War had not yet begun when she had already learned to read, and then Papa gave her permission to borrow any books she wished from his shelves. The colorful spines of the books were like a flower garden! The writers’ names themselves were a flower garden, and their verses, poems, and stories were like a flower garden. In a few years she had begun to tackle novels as well. Tatyana Larina and Lisa Kalitina and Vasily Shibanov and Gerasim and Anton the Wretched and the little boy, Vlas, hauling a cartload of brushwood—all of them stood before her as if alive, right next to her; she could see them in the flesh and hear their voices. She was also taking German lessons with Madame and already reading “The Tale of the Nibelungs,” Schiller’s poetry, the sufferings of young Werther, and they, too, were also clear and vivid, though still some distance away, while the heroes of the Russian books were right beside her, her dear friends or her enemies. Gripped by this second life of hers, she was unaware of the hungry years in Moscow.

  Just before the revolution, Nastenka entered a classical high school, one of the best in Moscow. By some miracle this school remained open not only through the revolution but even for a few years in Soviet times. It was still called a gimnaziya as before, and the previous instructors were still there, one of them being the ashen-haired Maria Feofanovna, who taught literature. She opened the world of literature to all her students, but Nastenka went much farther than anyone else. She learned to look at books in a new way—not just to live with the characters but to live constantly with the author: What was he feeling when he wrote that? How did he regard his characters? Was he the sole master of their lives, or were they independent of him? How did he organize this scene or that one, and what words and phrases did he choose in doing so?

  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 be
autiful 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 they 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 c
lass 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.