by David Szalay
I have become a secretive, dishonest person, unable to speak openly. I do not have my own thoughts. I find myself parroting things that are foreign to me. Pretending to be healthy and optimistic in what I say, when I’m not.
Though she was terrified of being ‘unmasked’, she often fantasised about it as something that would liberate her, since she would then be able to speak ‘sincerely and truthfully’ to ‘people who understand that my whole life is a lie’. These ‘people’, the people to whom she would be able to speak sincerely and truthfully, the people who would understand, were the NKVD.
Early one morning in January 1937 she and her mother were woken by a knock on the door. A police officer was there. They let him in and he searched the room. He did not say what he was looking for. Whatever it was he did not seem to find it. Then he said to Yefrosinya that she should come with him to the police station ‘just for a few minutes’. She went. At nightfall there was still no sign of her.
Every morning long lines formed at the information office of the Moscow militia. Nadya stood there from four o’clock. It was snowing. Then it stopped. At eight it started to get light. When it was finally her turn at the small window, some time in the mid-afternoon, the official was unable to tell her where her mother was. In the end she managed to track her down to a Moscow prison and went to visit her there. Yefrosinya told her that she had been sentenced to eight years for using false identity papers.
She had always excelled in her school work. Now, at the Second Medical Institute, the elite university where she had won a place the previous year, her work was ‘mediocre’, something linked in her mind with her psychological problems. The truth is, I am a pessimistic, negative person. She wondered, not very seriously, whether to kill herself. Instead, in the summer of 1937, at the end of her first year at the institute, she married one of her teachers. He had been pursuing her for some time, having seen her sitting near the front in his lectures. A few men had been mentioned previously in her journal (On the 27th I went skating with Alyosha on the skating rink of the Central House of the Red Army …) but Lozovsky was the first to be written about at length. After turning down several more extravagant offers, she went to the cinema with him. Went to the cinema with M. A film called Modern Times. She said she had thought films were ‘stupid’ but that this one had been ‘interesting’. Over tea in the Palace of Scientists, Lozovsky told her about Charlie Chaplin and California. Then he drove her home. Things went on like this for some time. Films, the theatre, tea. They wrote letters to each other. You should stop hiding your feelings and emotions, he wrote in February, in a letter which she transcribed to her journal. You are lonely, and that is because you want very much, but are not willing to give anything in return.
In the late thirties, Lozovsky had a moustache. Aleksandr knows this from the photographs that were found in the house at Metelyev Log. In those photographs it was possible to see the extent to which her life must have been transformed when she married him. (The very existence of so many photographs, of course, was evidence of this.) Lozovsky’s flat was quiet, light, with parquet floors and space for an imported piano. He was one of the intellectual luminaries of the Soviet Union – a sort of prodigy, not yet forty and the head of the Second Medical Institute, winner of a Stalin Prize and 50,000 roubles in the year of his wedding. (Nadya’s mother had earned 2,400 roubles a year as a janitor.) He was handsome, athletic – there were photos of him in tennis whites, and showing off on skates – and he lived a life of extreme privilege. Foreign tailoring, perfumed soap, special food packages. Weekends at the house in Uspenskoye, skiing and skating in the winter. Visits to the Barvikha sanatorium. Summer holidays in the Crimea, where the Academy of Sciences maintained the Gaspra estate for its most eminent members.
She still studied at the institute, took the tram there, had lunch in the student dining hall. In 1940 she qualified as a doctor – with high marks, she exaggerated when she said her work was ‘mediocre’ – and started to practise. In 1941, they moved to Sverdlovsk. Her journal entries of those years, far fewer than previously, are no more than short notes of events – Suvorovs to dinner, Sent parcel to Mama – and even these end in 1944, when they moved to Metelyev Log. There is one more entry, written in pencil on the final page of the journal and undated.
I am by nature a pessimistic person. I do not have a naturally progressive or optimistic – ‘proletarian’ – spirit. Of course, I know I should be working, should be trying to be of use to people. I just don’t seem to have the strength. The strength of spirit more than the physical strength. Life often seems meaningless to me. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say? Here it’s easier to ignore that. You can lose sight of it when you spend so much time alone, when you spend so much time in nature. Maybe that’s why I like it here. It’s only because I’ve failed so totally elsewhere that I like it here. It’s a matter of weakness, of withdrawal, surrender, failure. I know that. For weeks at a time, I am able to ignore this. Then I wake up in the middle of the night, and I know that’s what it is. At those moments I wonder whether I should kill myself straight away, without hesitation, without letting myself think my way out of it. My whole life seems such a sad and stupid waste.
It frightens me to think how much time has passed. When I think of the past, I think, ‘If I’d known then I’d end up like this …’ There’s something so sad about that thought.
I must stop this now. I can’t stand the sound of this stupid voice prattling in my head. All it shows is what a mess I’ve made of my life.
When he read this for the first time in 1948, lying on the chaise longue in his office, he felt that it was addressed to him personally, that it was a plea for his help, and he hoped that he would be able to help her, psychologically and politically as well as practically. That, he now understands, was naïve.
And what would it mean in practice anyway?
A lot of talk. He did not tell her that he had read her journal. Instead he used his own life as an example. He told her that his father had been a kulak. (Very few people knew this – only those who had known him since his school-days.) Psychology was not necessarily hereditary. He told her a story he had told no one else. In 1920 – or was it 1921? – one afternoon in September, he and his father had dug a pit in a spinney a few versts from the village. A pit for a hiding place. It was narrow at the top and wider further down, like a jug, and they dried the earth with smoke from smouldering straw. To dig the pit and dry it took two whole days. Then they lowered sacks of grain and potatoes in, laid more straw on top and plugged the entrance with wet, sticky soil. Though he did not understand exactly why they were doing this – he was only eight years old – he felt very proud of his father. It was obvious from his satisfied smile that he – they! – had outsmarted someone. Even Ivan did not know about that. At the time, he told her, he had thought that his life would be more or less identical to his father’s. Everyone had it in them to escape the past. He himself was proof of it. And since it was possible, it was also necessary. Not that it was easy.
He told her the story of Zinaida Denisevskaya. She was one of the teachers at the school in Basmanovo where he went until he left for Sverdlovsk in 1924. Later, she also moved to Sverdlovsk, and worked first in the city library, and then as a scientist at an experimental poultry farm in the suburbs. She was, he said, a typical product of the pre-Revolutionary provincial intelligentsia. Unlike the other teacher at the Basmanovo school, Yevdokimov, she was not a Communist. At first she sympathised with the Revolution as a liberal, but soon she found that the Bolshevik state offended her petit bourgeois sensibilities – her father had been the headmaster of a private girls’ school. The pupils sensed the tension between herself and Yevdokimov on this point. She was physically frail but she had a strong will and she did not want him to teach them to be little Bolsheviks. She wanted to make them in her own image – that is, the image of the bourgeois liberal, something out of Chekhov, the worried doctor, the conscience-stricken schoolteacher. To Aleksandr, sh
e always seemed sad – a small woman in a straw hat, with a sharp face, and a sharp tongue. Then, in the summer of 1924, she got ill. He was not sure what it was – perhaps yellow fever. She stopped teaching. They were told that she was dying, and when he left for Sverdlovsk in September, he thought that she was dead.
He was therefore surprised to see her name on a list in the city morgue years later, in 1937. He found out when the funeral was, and went. It was her. She had survived yellow fever in 1924, and died of leukaemia in 1937. There were only two of them at the funeral, himself and a young female teacher from the Urals Agricultural Institute, where Denisevskaya had been working when she died. He wanted to know what had happened to her since Basmanovo so he went to the institute to look at her possessions. There, he found her diaries, thousands of pages of them.
In 1925, when she moved to Sverdlovsk and found work at the city library, she was very lonely. The main thing I lack is love, she wrote. That is why I have nothing to write about. Eventually, in the late twenties, she moved to the experimental poultry farm, where she lived and worked for most of the rest of her life. Initially she hated it there. She described it as a ‘swamp’, the only ‘island of civilisation’ the home of the director and his wife, the Ferdinandovs, where she had her small room. When these people were transferred to a veterinary institute in Sverdlovsk she wrote that she was losing her only friends, and with them her only pleasures in life, their piano playing and educated talk. However, in time she started to value her younger fellow workers more. She noted their strength of mind, practical orientation and unshakeable optimism. Of her new assistant, Antonina, she said, She is a new type, intensely living, some sort of new woman. And a few months later: She is the true heir to what I valued and loved about the Russian intelligentsia. When she visited the Ferdinandovs in Sverdlovsk, she found that the old warmth was no longer there. I am amazed by their narrow personal outlook on life. If there is no white bread or no white cloth it means life is terrible. The fact that other people’s lives have improved is not taken into account. They sneer at everything, speak ironically about everything. It’s tiresome, this endless hostility towards everything.
She was then in the midst of a love affair, possibly the first and only one of her life. Her lover, Alyosha, was twenty years younger than she was. When it started, in the autumn of 1929, she was forty and he was twenty. In December, he left to study in Moscow, and they wrote letters to each other. Alyosha wrote that he still loved her and that she meant everything to him. To prove it, he said that he was unable to stop masturbating when he thought of her. She found his earthiness off-putting. Her letters to him were patronising. She lectured him on the infinite distance that separated his ‘physiological urges’ from ‘spiritual love’. In these letters, Aleksandr heard the voice of the Denisevskaya he had known himself, the village schoolteacher. This, for instance: For once in your life please write me a sensible, detailed, sincere letter. Only this will decide what form our relations assume in the future. Don’t rush, it would be better to write the letter over several days. In writing to each other, Alyosha used the formal pronoun, she the informal.
When he visited her the next summer, she wrote in her diary that she found him tedious, with nothing interesting to say about Moscow. When he left she wrote, I miss him extremely. She did not see him for more than a year. Then, one day in the summer of 1931, he proposed to her. She turned him down. The way he nods when he says goodbye, his maladroitness, his way of speaking – it makes me want to weep for him, and for me. That was in her diary. To him she wrote, It is very painful to say this but, although you are sincere and pure, you are not as I would like you to be.
In October, he proposed again. They were married. He was by then a party official and often away. She wrote him long letters. I am older than you and therefore more demanding in love than you are. I want more sincere feelings, more profound joys, more mutual nurturing than the two of us are experiencing … He wrote her short notes and postcards. He doesn’t know how to love, she said. She ended the marriage in 1933. Later, thinking about it, she said that Alyosha was a man of the modern style, and what she wanted from him was therefore historically impossible. From this historical perspective, she saw that she had misunderstood him, that his idiom, which she had thought an obstacle to personal expression and intimacy, was in fact his natural language, the sober and factual language of modern times. She started to see herself, too, in this historical perspective – I have found a new world for me in Marxism – positioned between the obsolete old world and the emerging new one, part of neither. This, she said, explained her lifelong loneliness.
In the last years of her life, she was a fervent supporter of the kolkhoz system. Of one such farm she said, I was there for only five days but it seemed that I saw a new world. I know that in different places different things are happening – including some terrible things – but it makes me so happy to know that mankind has set out on the right path. We will have a new life, and new people. Even then she wrestled with the legacy of her education, and she still felt unable to march with the new generation. This was not just a metaphor. She longed to take part in the marches and parades that she saw – or, isolated on the farm as she was, more often heard on the radio. On May Day 1936, she wrote, Yesterday I was sad that I knew no one I could visit for the holiday, but today I was among my own family – on Red Square in Moscow, at the People’s Palace in Voronezh, in Baku, Kiev and other places. For the whole day I have been in touch with the holiday through the radio. For the whole day I have not felt alone.
In February 1937, she was transferred from the farm to the Urals Agricultural Institute in Sverdlovsk, where she lectured on subjects such as ‘the dialectics of the poultry egg’. Her workload was heavy, and her health was poor. Then on May Day she celebrated with students and teachers from all over the city, and for the first time in her life she marched in the parade.
Yesterday – an evening meeting in the barracks. Today – the parade. Exhaustion hampers my feelings of joy. But more important is the sense of merging with everybody who celebrated this day. All of us, our institute, all the other institutes, the workers’ faculties and schools, all the workers, all the Red Army soldiers, all of us – were one. We all marched together – with the same songs and thoughts. This time I did not see the ‘face of the people’, because I myself was part of it, I was a drop in the sea, I was forming the ‘1st of May’, and wasn’t just an onlooker. I’m extremely tired. First we waited for three hours, then we marched quickly. I almost got sick. I hardly managed to get home but I am happy to have done this. Perhaps this was the first and last time I will participate in a parade.
When she took part in this parade Denisevskaya was dying. She died only a few months later, and this is one of the final entries in her diary. Aleksandr sent it to the Sverdlovsk Library, with this note: Please find enclosed the diary of Zinaida Denisevskaya, who once worked at your library. I think it is worth preserving for posterity. It is the story of a lifelong struggle, with loneliness, with social isolation, with political error. However, when you read the final entries your heart overflows with joy. You see how the face of this person lights up, the face of a Soviet person, who was deeply passionate about educating the liberated people, the makers of a new life – and finally, in the supreme moment of her own existence, on May Day 1937, she herself was one of them, and she made a new life.
When he went to see her in the flat on Karl Libknekht Street, the talk often moved to politics, history, philosophy. Sometimes it was very earnest. Sometimes it had the quality of intellectual play – like her husband, she enjoyed this, and took the sparring seriously. Usually she made tea. They sat at Shtern’s table, sipping this tea and trying to find the tone – easy, flowing, languorous, with no particular purpose, full of silences – that had made the endless wet afternoons at Metelyev Log what they were. When he thought of those afternoons, he thought of her leaning on the pine dresser, smoking, her face turned to the windows, and the smoke from
her papirosa swimming listlessly towards them. The rain falling steadily. Time was so extended, so open-ended. There seemed to be no sort of external pressure at all.
In Sverdlovsk, when he went to see her, it was not like that. Not that it was tense or stilted. It was not. It simply lacked the sense of taking place in an isolated oxbow of time. No-particular-purpose did not seem as permissible as it had in the oxbow. Silences seemed to be minor problems when someone would eventually leave, when time was limited, when they were together not simply because that was how things inescapably were, but with a specific intention – though sometimes, sitting there, it was not obvious to him what that intention was. Sometimes, when the silence settled, even for only a few seconds, while she sat opposite him, smoke wreathing her tired face, he would think, What am I doing here? I’ll leave when I’ve finished this tea. And even look forward to leaving. Then the silence would pass – someone would say something – and two hours later he would still be there.
Once or twice a week he took her to the baths, signing her in to the First Department, and waiting for her in the foyer afterwards, his skin still tingling from the banya. Waiting there, he was always nervous – as he was wherever he went with her – that someone he knew would see him, so he waited to the side, near one of the pillars, shielding his face with a newspaper. Not that he had anything to hide. It was then that they usually went to the Ural for lunch. There too he worried that they would be seen. He always asked for the same table, near the kitchen, and sat with his back to the room, not suspecting that the waitress serving them their soup and kotleta was more of a threat to his secret – though what in fact was secret? – than the procuracy official he vaguely knew who was lunching with a judge at the window table.
He walked her to Karl Libknekht Street after lunch. It took ten minutes. Those walks, in the pale autumn light, were melancholy. The afternoons were noticeably shortening. The sunlight shone through thinning trees. He left her at the door of the house, and went on to the MGB offices on his own.