by Frazier
This situation had created a bottleneck at Chernyshevsk, where traffic backed up like leaves in a storm drain. The place was really just a village beside a large Trans-Siberian Railway train yard, and it offered travelers—who routinely had to wait forty-eight hours before an available transport appeared—almost no lodgings, no bathroom facilities you would want to enter without protective gear, and almost no restaurants. Meanwhile the trucks and cars kept arriving.
We joined the queue of waiting vehicles beside the train station at about two in the afternoon. Asking around, Sergei learned that we would be able to get on a train leaving that night at nine thirty. If I thought I could pleasantly while away the afternoon reading, sketching, and jotting in my notebook, I was mistaken. The misery bubbling up everywhere in Chernyshevsk blotted out any idea of calm. Sitting in the van was difficult because of the heat. The widely strewn trash and garbage guaranteed every person an individual corona of flies. Strange guys in warm-up suits loitered the premises at large and hit on any stranger they saw. Even Sergei and Volodya, when they strolled from the van, had to dodge them. The couple of times I ventured among them I was like a crouton in a goldfish pond. The public bathrooms had overflowed some long time before, so most people who needed them employed instead whatever out-of-the-way or not-so-out-of-the-way corner of Chernyshevsk they could find. The train station itself was devoid of services or information of any sort. Apparently all departure and arrival announcements were relayed solely by word of mouth.
Every fifteen minutes or so, a gang of begging children descended upon the vehicle queue. They rapped on the van’s windows and pleaded and cajoled. One of them was a girl with a scar on her face, close-cropped auburn hair, and surprisingly fashionable hoop earrings. The first time they came, Sergei assembled them around him and gave them a short lecture about the shame of begging compared to the honorability of work. Sergei offered them, instead of a handout, a decent amount of rubles if they would wash our car. The kids loved this idea and went immediately and found a whole slew of cut-off bottle bottoms and other vessels among the ambient trash and filled them at a public tap. Then they washed the car, every inch. In our stuff, Sergei found some rags for them to use for polishing. They polished like demons, climbing all over the van. When they had finished, Sergei examined the work, paid them, and complimented them highly on their job. They ran off, and in fifteen minutes were back begging again.
Late in the afternoon, a train hauling vehicle transports arrived from the east. The transports carried used Japanese cars, most of them Toyotas, with their front ends covered in masking tape, like bandaged noses, to protect them from flying gravel on the road. So far I have not described this important aspect of Siberian trade: throughout the year, but especially in the summer, guys ride the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok, buy used Japanese cars there, and drive the cars west across Siberia for resale. Cargo ships full of these vehicles arrive in Vladivostok all the time. A used car bought in Vladivostok for $2,000 can be resold farther west in Russia for three times that much. The entrepreneurs who drive this long-distance shuttle tend to wear muscle shirts, shiny Adidas sweatpants, and running shoes, and their short, pale haircuts stand up straight in a bristly Russian way. On the road they are easy to recognize by the tape on their vehicles and the fact that they speed like madmen. The faster they finish each round-trip, the more trips they can do and the more money they can make.
One of the drivers debarking in Chernyshevsk told Sergei that this load of cars and drivers had had to wait five days in Magdagachi for transports, and then spent forty-eight hours on the train. In Chernyshevsk, the unloading had to be done one car at a time. Some of the drivers, when they finally did emerge with their vehicles onto the cracked pavement of the Chernyshevsk parking lot, shifted into neutral and raced their engines in automotive howls of liberation or rage. The appearance of each vehicle caused the crowd of begging children to swarm around it. Some drivers honked and yelled at the kids to go away, others rolled their windows partway down and held out little pieces of leftover food. I saw the girl with the hoop earrings trot to a window and snatch the back end of a kielbasa that a driver offered her. At a more aloof distance, but just as attentively, the loitering guys also gathered around.
As the unloading was going on, I thought I’d take advantage of the moment’s distraction to attempt another exploratory stroll of Chernyshevsk. When I walked onto the main street, the latest driver to zoom his vehicle from the parking lot spotted me and pulled over alongside. Hopping out and locking his car, he said, “You are an American, right? I love Americans. America is the best. I’m going to get something to eat. Come and eat with me. We’ll drink vodka and get drunk.” The guy was big, large bellied, bristly haired, and his T-shirt said, in English, KALASHNIKOV: THE GREATEST HITS. Above the words was a picture of a Kalashnikov rifle, and below them a list of the “Greatest Hits,” i.e., wars in which Kalashnikovs have been used. I thought I should accept the guy’s invitation, in the interest of writerly curiosity, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to. I pretended I didn’t understand and wandered away.
In a little memorial grove of pines growing from the scuffed, hard-packed earth beside the station platform, I came upon the village of Chernyshevsk’s main—indeed, only—point of interest. Here a tall statue of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the nineteenth-century writer after whom the village was named, stared broodingly across the train yard. Made of pewter-colored metal and standing perhaps ten feet high, the statue embodied the most heroic of socialist realist styles. Straight Prince Valiant–like hair just past the collar framed the writer’s determined chin, noble nose, and deep-set eyes. He wore a long coat, unbuttoned, over a waistcoat and cravat; his left hand, curled like the hand of a discus thrower in classical Greek statuary, held not a discus but a thick sheaf of manuscript pages. By his aspect one could imagine him waiting forcefully here for a train to take him to the offices of his publisher, where his recently completed oeuvre would be turned in. Adding to the realism was the fact that none among the station’s passersby, even its pigeons, seemed to pay him any mind.
From what I knew about Chernyshevsky I would hardly have pictured him as such a handsome or dynamic-looking guy. He lived from 1828 to 1889, and in 1862 and ’63 he wrote the utopian socialist novel Shto Delat’? (What Is to Be Done?). Next to the Bible, Shto Delat’? was the most widely read book in Russia in the 1870s. Later it would be the favorite novel of both Lenin and Stalin. Its author, the son of an Orthodox priest in the Volga River city of Saratov, wrote it during four months when he was imprisoned in the Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. A mix-up within the censorship bureaucracy allowed it to slip through, and it was published in three installments in Sovremennik (The Contemporary), a St. Petersburg journal. It had already come out as a book by the time the authorities discovered their mistake and banned it.
Shto Delat’? is about liberated women who defy social expectations by living unconventional lives, and who put their politicoeconomic theories into practice by establishing a sewing collective. The novel also has male heroes who are revolutionaries and who interact with these women. One of the male heroes, Rakhmetov, became the basic ideal that every male revolutionary in Russia aspired to be. Here is some sample dialogue:
“You haven’t heard?” he said aloud. “There’s an experiment at putting into practice those principles recently developed by economic science. Do you know about them?”
“Yes, I’ve read something. That must be very interesting and valuable. Can I really take part in it? Where can I find it?”
Scholars say that after Marx and Engels, Chernyshevsky was the writer who had the most influence on the generation that made the Russian Revolution. Many revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century knew the book practically by heart; some even tried to set up collective commercial enterprises like the one in the novel. Lenin said hundreds of people became revolutionaries as a result of reading Shto Delat’? After Lenin’s brother Alexander was executed, Lenin rer
ead the book because it had been among Alexander’s favorites. “[Chernyshevsky] plowed me up more profoundly than anyone else,” Lenin said later. “I sat over [Shto Delat’?] not for several days but for several weeks. Only then did I understand its depth . . . It’s a thing that supplies energy for a whole lifetime.”
Almost unanimously, world literary opinion has disagreed with Lenin’s rave review. Though Chernyshevsky admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy did not like him and rejected his principles. Turgenev and Herzen, both early acquaintances of Chernyshevsky, came to find his writing coarse and simpleminded. In the twentieth century, the philosopher and critic Isaiah Berlin, while acknowledging the “literally epoch-making effect” of Shto Delat’? pronounced it “grotesque as a work of art.”
After being convicted of subversion in 1864, Chernyshevsky was sentenced to seven years of hard labor in Siberia, to be followed by permanent exile. The punishment only enhanced his revolutionary mystique. As the popularity of his book grew with young radicals, a few of the more daring among them set themselves the task of finding its imprisoned author and spiriting him to freedom. In 1875, a student named Hypolite Myshkin almost succeeded in this attempt by impersonating a gendarme sent to convey Chernyshevsky to another prison. Another would-be rescuer was Boleslav Shostakovich, grandfather of the composer. Because of Chernyshevsky’s popularity as a rescue target, the prison authorities moved him from one prison mine to another, and when the time came to exile him, they shipped him to the far north, to the town of Viliusk in Yakutsk province, where he was permitted to move about as long as he stayed within five hundred yards of the stockade.
Prison life had broken Chernyshevsky thoroughly by then. Scurvy, malaria, stomach ulcers, and rheumatism afflicted him. In Siberia he wrote almost nothing of note; even his letters descended into repetition and confusion. His wife visited him only once, for four days, while he was exiled. In accordance with his principles he had wanted her to have complete freedom, and she willingly took him up on the idea. In 1883, his sons succeeded in persuading the government to grant him amnesty, and he was then allowed to return to western Russia. In 1889, gravely ill, he received permission to go back to Saratov, where he died the same year.
Shto Delat’? had been partly a response to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons; in turn, other important books of the time, particularly Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, were written in reply to Shto Delat’? Chernyshevsky’s theories of aesthetics, laid out in two widely read essays, would provide the basis for the Soviet style of writing, painting, sculpture, and cinema that was formally labeled socialist realism during Stalin’s time. Certainly Chernyshevsky played an enormous part in the intellectual turmoil of his era and after. But having read Shto Delat’? I can only say that the title is excellent, but the book goes downhill from there. One of Chernyshevsky’s biographers, trying to give him a fair hearing, nevertheless has to conclude, “He had some grasp on many things, but ultimately, Chernyshevsky’s thought was fudge.” Chernyshevsky’s life illustrates the unfortunate fact that a writer can hope and strive and suffer, and in the end even give his life, for work that turns out to be not good.
Beyond the statue, the platform’s broken asphalt stretched on and on, like those train platforms in movies that people run along while waving goodbye. A few tracks to the side, a line of olive-colored train cars with bars on their doors and windows sat as if waiting to be taken somewhere. In one of the windows, a man wearing a sleeveless undershirt took a drag on a cigarette and looked at me and blew a plume of smoke through the bars. At the platform’s end I left the station and turned onto the main street of the town. When I came to the town’s last house, I cut across an empty field and hiked into the low brown hills that enclosed Chernyshevsk from that angle. Nobody bothered me, and I was much less troubled by flies. Just being able to sit and think without low-grade harassment was a relief. I had brought along my sketchbook and I did a drawing or two. But the worry that the train would suddenly begin loading, and Sergei and Volodya not be able to find me, got me moving again. I walked along the side of the hill until I was close enough to the town center that I could see the vehicle queue. The van was still there, in the same place as before.
I sat down and began another sketch, but in this new spot I stood out more conspicuously, and the begging kids saw me and came bounding up the hill. Closely encircling me, they asked what I was doing. I showed them my drawing, and one of the older boys examined it, looked at the actual scene before us, then back at the drawing. “Pohozhe,” he said, meaning “It looks like it.” Then he and all the others stuck out their hands and demanded, “Dai mne ruble!”
I asked them first to sing me a song, and they sped through a ditty about somebody named Yanni who gets p’yanyi (drunk). Then out came their hands again: “Dai mne ruble!” Inches from my face, each little hand was grimy as a curbstone. I took all the change I had in my pocket and parceled it out, ruble by ruble. At the end one little boy, smaller than the others, did not get a coin. I had to tell him that was all, I had no more. An expression of wrenching, almost grown-up disappointment contorted his kid’s face and he began to weep with large tears and wails of heartfelt misery.
Once the kids had discovered me, they kept coming back and swarming, so I had to return to the van. By then it was almost nine thirty in the evening; Sergei said he thought our train would be loading soon. But at about ten thirty, the stationmaster, a blocky woman with dyed red hair, a dalmatian-spotted blouse, and an orange workman’s vest, appeared among the vehicles and told us all that there would be no train tonight. Nor would there necessarily be one tomorrow, she added with keen enjoyment disguised as nonchalance. The quiet way she savored giving out this disappointing news was a wonder to see. Maybe a train would come along tomorrow night, she speculated; but then again, maybe it would not.
As we considered the prospect of spending the night in Chernyshevsk in the van, Sergei again showed his mastery of difficult situations. By distributing a small amount of cash to the drivers immediately in front of and behind us, he held our place for tomorrow. Then he backed out of the queue, sped away from Chernyshevsk, and found us a place to camp beside a quiet and clear and relatively untrashed stream a few miles outside town. I was so grateful for this smart move that I put aside any beef I had against Sergei. We set up the tents, ate supper by lantern light, and turned in for a good sleep. In the morning I took out my fly rod and caught a couple of little fish in the stream. Volodya made breakfast, then drove to Chernyshevsk to monitor what was going on. He returned in haste, saying the train was about to leave and we must get back there begom—“at a run.”
The train was not about to leave, as it turned out. To my surprise, though, it had arrived. We spent another afternoon in the vehicle queue waiting to load. I had understood that we would be going on a vehicle transport, the usual open-air affair, where we would just sort of hang out like train-hopping hoboes until we reached Magdagachi. But Sergei had something better in mind. There was a guy he had heard about who had his own train car. The guy, a short, dark-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, villainous-looking party, appeared at the loading ramp surrounded by a small entourage. Yes, he did have his own vagon—a long, windowless boxcar with room inside for four ordinary-sized vehicles. This vagon represented the high end of Chernyshevsk vehicle transports. Sergei negotiated to ensure that our van would be one of the lucky four, and the guy agreed, for $200.
For some reason I have never figured out, the $200, which Sergei hurriedly paid so as not to lose the place, seriously upset his economy. After concluding the negotiations, Sergei came to me and cried, “Ty mne dolzhen dvesti dollarov!” (You owe me two hundred dollars!). When I couldn’t understand why this was, he just kept repeating that I owed him $200. Finally I told him to calm himself and handed him ten twenties.
Then our van was locked in the guy’s vagon for a few hours while the train made up its mind about leaving, and we had to fend for ourselves in the Chernyshevsk train station with no vehicle to retreat to.
I just kept moving, strolling and taking evasive action so as not to be swarmed on. Finally we were let into the vagon and it somehow got hooked up to the train; and later, hours later, sprawled in the van, I felt the first few blessed inchings of forward motion. When a conveyance you are riding in fails to move and fails to move, and you hope and pray and apply all your mental powers in an attempt to get it rolling, and it finally does move, that’s one of life’s sweetest feelings. When the train at last left the yards after all that time in Chernyshevsk, I relaxed as if the sedative had finally reached my veins.
Just before we started moving, I happened to look over at Sergei and he was pale and sweating. “I am sick,” he announced. “I have a high fever. I am sick, and I cannot be sick.” With that he took out his sleeping bag and, standing on the rear bumper, unrolled it on the roof of the van. Then he climbed up, got into his sleeping bag, and lay there in the three-foot space between the van’s roof and the ceiling of the vagon. From time to time he shivered so violently that I could feel the shakes in the front seat below him.
The vagon’s luxuries did not include interior lighting. Small planes of daylight came through narrow slots at the top of what might once have been windows; otherwise the space was completely sealed. Once darkness had fallen, everything in the vagon grew dim, except at the front end, where a glow came from an open door. Inside the door, the guy who owned the vagon—its khozyain, as he repeatedly instructed me to call him—occupied a sort of stateroom.