“Well, I did buy myself some cloth for a jacket, and that’s all I got out of it.”
* * *
Last year’s rusty leaves, and the young grass pushing through them in the first days of its life: little green files, tiny oar blades, green-gold spearheads, the velvety grayness of spreading wormwood.
* * *
A drunken Cossack to his love for the occasion: “I love women more than any other cattle!”
* * *
Zinaida: “Easter week. People are passing my windows on their way back from the service. They’re all carrying candles flickering in the light breeze, I can hear laughter, their faces are cheerful and animated. And I stand at the window with darkness in my soul, and cold and death at the bottom of it. I can’t respond to their live emotion.”
* * *
Letter from Aleksandr: “They’ve taken it into their heads to build a sawmill to produce railroad ties and firewood. Everything costs the earth, there are no workers—neither carpenters nor bricklayers. You can’t get anything, for love or money. To military and Zemgor establishments prices are no object, they’re the ones who inflate them. Yesterday I tried to hire laborers to dig a well for the factory. They wanted 500 rubles to take out six cubic sazhens.* Now the inspector is trying to speed up construction of a narrow-gauge line to the storehouse at the mill. But there are no roads, and we have to bring in sand, ballast, and rails from thirty-five versts away, because they were ordered for Belye Berega, not our station. It’s terribly heavy work, but it has to be done. And all this time the Germans have had the use of the enormous forests in our western provinces—while we’re without railroad ties.”
He also writes: “I’ve been given thirty-seven POWs. Now I’ve got my work cut out trying to feed them, find them clothes and shoes and work, and make it worth their while. I don’t suppose Russian prisoners over there get looked after like this.”
* * *
“I was a sergeant major, with a black mustache, a white body, and an easygoing nature. And she—there wasn’t enough of her to spit on, she was no bigger than a thimble … And while I was still in the army, she presented me with a …”
* * *
Morning in the forest. Gnats buzzing quietly around my ear. At infrequent intervals a grasshopper chirrups. Cocks crow across the river. All is green, rustling. Not a thought in my head, just this yearning: if only some woman would come my way …
* * *
“The other day they brought a German officer in, wounded, and the women gathered around. One old woman says, ‘I could scratch your eyes out, you ugly German pig! I’ve lost two sons because of you!’ He can speak Russian, and says, ‘I’ve got children of my own, old lady, and I didn’t leave them because I wanted to.’ And he burst out crying.”
* * *
My brother writes: “The way our building work’s going, it’s like watching steam rise from wet shit. Orders come pouring in from all sides. They don’t give you time to turn around. All the same, in spite of wartime difficulties, more work, two or three times more, has been done in the state forests than at ordinary times, and processing has expanded.
“I’m very pleased with the prisoners. I’ll have them making hay for the work horses.”
* * *
Zina: “We must move either toward or away from each other. I put no value on any other sort of relationship, and wouldn’t want to keep it up …” Eternal loving enemies (man and woman).
* * *
Sweat stains on the back of a mower’s dark blue shirt, like patches of black cloth.
* * *
Grass has to be cut nice and easy, like eating pancakes with warm cream.
* * *
A cabby: “My oldest son went to school for one winter, started reading well, but, being poor, I put him to sausage making with my brother-in-law. The brother-in-law works in a sausage shop. I gave him my little girl as well, to mind the children.”
“Does he treat them well?”
“Not too bad, only they’ve stopped believing in God. It isn’t just eating meat on fast days, they’ve stopped believing altogether. I talk about God to them, and they say, ‘What I earn I’ve got, but God won’t help me. There’s nothing up there.’ I say, ‘What about nature, then?’ ‘There’s no such thing as nature either!’ ‘Rubbish, nature does exist and somebody great must be in charge. If your father and mother hadn’t given birth to you, how would you have come into the world?’
“I come out just about nightfall, have a nap on the box, and back to work again. Stable one horse and harness up another.”
* * *
29 July 1916. On the embankment, at the pearly hour of a white night, a red sunset, warm, the Neva all silvery, soldiers, girls, men in jackets, men in Russian shirts, women with shawls over their shoulders. Snatches of conversation reach me.
A woman’s voice: “My husband’s in the army and my lover’s in the army …” A masculine baritone: “Squeeze the rich, they’ve got spirits and cognac, and we have to drink rat poison at two rubles a time, only you can’t even get that” … “They won’t give our sort a job these days—women have taken over all along the shore. Women get three rubles a day unloading wood.”
* * *
The “Litany of Grigori, New Horse Thief,” is going the rounds:
“Rejoice, O profanation of the Church of Christ … Rejoice, defilement of the Synod … Rejoice, Grigori, great polluter …”
* * *
My brother: “Ordinary people are getting so out of hand … no sense of decency, no conscience. Everybody and everything is in a hopeless state of confusion. People rush around grabbing all they can and doing as little as possible. Even the prisoners of war have taken their cue from our folks and started slacking.”
* * *
The contractor charges us two and a half rubles a day for a Chinese laborer, and pays him sixty kopecks. He’s the only one who knows Chinese.
* * *
Zina makes no distinction between “great” and “small” deeds. Each person, she says, has a certain fund of moral strength and everyone who uses his strength to the full has performed a great deed. All such people are equals, although to the outside world their actions are incommensurate.
Can she be right?
* * *
Children’s voices springing like sparks from dry kindling.
* * *
“Five kopecks for a cabbage like that?”
“I’m asking five but might settle for four.”
“What about the official price list?”
The assessor pokes the cabbages contemptuously. His gaze is icy. The woman is silent.
A compassionate voice from the crowd speaks up for the woman: “Well, if we were people with book learning, sir … but we’re steppe people, not readers and writers … We’ve heard there’s this ‘ficial price list, but what it amounts to we don’t know … We’re like blind people.”
“It applies to all basic necessities. The fixed price for cabbage is forty kopecks a pood. What do you think the list is for?”
“Only we’ve never, ever, sold it by weight, but by the head. Where would I get a scale? I’ve made your good lady a present of one head as it is. Cabbage as pure as a teardrop.”
A buzz of voices in the crowd: “If there’s a list it must be for everything, your honor. But calico, say, you can’t get near it …” “And what about matches? And kerosene?”
The peasant women got cheeky: “You water them all summer—and you’d soon know what a hundred hairpins cost! I’m not voting for your price list!”
* * *
The fixed-price list had made a discreet appearance in the village market. It was pasted up on a fence near the toilets and that was that. Those who needed to knew it by heart already.
The Cossack farmer couldn’t understand why customers who used to haggle till they were blue in the face suddenly chose what they wanted without a word.
“Carp, maybe? Or have you got wild carp?”
“
Yes, your worship. Here you are, must be around five pounds. Or maybe this one …”
“Weigh them!”
“You want both?”
“Weigh both of them!”
The Cossack weighs them on his scale, the purchaser puts them in his basket without asking the price, counts out seventy-four kopecks, and hands them to the Cossack without a word.
“Sir! What’s this supposed to be?” the Cossack asks in amazement, holding on his upturned palm some of those scraps of grubby paper that pass for money nowadays.
“That’s the fixed price, my dear fellow,” the customer says, aiming his finger at the fence. “Take a look yourself, if you can read.”
“Give me my fish back!” the Cossack yells, tossing the notes into the customer’s basket. “You could get a bellyache eating it at the fixed price!”
“What if I shout for a policeman?”
“Shout all you like, but hand the fish over!”
Four hands latched on to the basket …
* * *
In Ust-Medveditskaya a box of matches costs as much as forty kopecks. All prices are rising steeply.
My brother: Bryansk was always expensive, but now the traders have kicked over the traces. Prices rise every day. Some goods go into hiding periodically and reappear at very much higher prices. What next? The blame for it all rests with the government, no doubt about that—it is waging a systematic struggle against Russian society on behalf of Germany. We can look forward to something still more shameful and disgraceful—the betrayal of our allies. Revolution is unavoidable. And will be very bloody. The whole thing is horrible …
* * *
She was hopping on one foot in the moonlight. “I’ve missed you so!” But I hadn’t come …
* * *
The soaring cost of living isn’t just a matter of high prices—it goes with a particular state of mind, a universal dread. If things are worse today than yesterday, what will they be like tomorrow? It’s a peculiar feeling of despairing defenselessness that comes over you whenever you buy something in the market. Unmanageable prices throttle you. Invisible people, enormously rich already, are concealing goods somewhere nearby, behind that stone wall perhaps, and choking every last kopeck out of you! Outraged, you imagine that these profiteers, these sharks, are encouraged by the government and have the police in their pay. What other explanation can any ordinary person find for the government’s failure to curb these highway robbers? It’s impossible to believe that there’s no food to be had in Russia, Russia always has plenty, so why is there none in the shops? Obviously they’re concealing it to fleece the customer. This and nothing else is what people most resent about the government.
* * *
25 October. Cavalry General Pokotilo has issued an order forbidding anyone to carry printed material, notebooks, or even private correspondence across the frontier. What are we coming to!
* * *
Cabby: “We keep on asking for freedom but never think of our duties. There’s this professor, a chemist, they’re a family of eight, their only servant is an old woman who gets up at five and goes to bed at midnight, they think nothing of it. And they’re the ones who’re crying out for freedom.”
As we pass the Church of St. Michael the Archangel: “The heavenly warrior. I read a book about him. Seems funny, those wars. Why would spirits need to fight? They did, though.”
* “Pockmarked” in Russian. [Trans.]
*Sazhen: A unit of length equal to 1.89 yards. [Trans.]
[16]
He had called himself an “essayist”—“writer” was how he really thought of himself, but he was too shy to say so. To the nonliterary ear, that of this colonel, say, who, it seemed, read neither newspapers nor magazines, and perhaps not even books, and who had never come across the name Fyodor Kovynev, “writer” would sound ludicrously pretentious. And anyway, Kovynev was an essayist. For nearly twenty years now, he had eagerly and indiscriminately devoured with his eyes and ears everything around him, beginning with and delighting above all in his native village, seizing on every oddity of speech and thought, and promptly consigning it in his minute, oblique handwriting to the latest of innumerable notebooks. His notebooks became, as it were, the receptacle of his spiritual life, so that if he had lost them he would have been robbed of his whole past and of any real reason for living. The content of these books did not, however, languish unused. Whenever Kovynev was not observing he felt compelled to process this material and make it available to others.
This was the pattern of his life. He took notes not for himself but so that others, and especially his Don Cossacks, could see and hear and learn it all. But he garnered so much that it threatened to burst the bulging leather covers of his notebooks, leaving him barely time enough to transfer material by the spadeful to manuscript pages, giving no thought to structure, adding explanations and fresh recollections … The result could only be called “essays” or “sketches.”
What better and quicker way to relieve your soul of an importunate burden than by tirelessly taking notes, writing them up in sketches, and sending them to your editor? But when the pressure was eased, when after a while there were vacant hours to leaf through those sketches, you sighed and admitted to yourself that they were perhaps too long and too many. Arrange those rough notes more patiently, combine them differently, hunched over your desk in a sudden happy fit of inspiration, and you could see for yourself that what you had written had much more sparkle. It was something you could call a “story” or “novella.”
It was like making sunflower oil; you had to crush the seeds, press them, drain them over and over again. Or like processing timber. What people need most is simple firewood, but once you’ve supplied them with that, and there’s plenty of wood left and you know that, secretly, you’re no mere woodcutter but a carpenter—then your calling is to bend patiently over the lathe, shaving and smoothing and grooving until the work you’ve put into it is worth more than the wood you started with. Then people will tear themselves away from the very warmest of stoves and come looking for your work.
But you have an inborn need to pour out your heart: in a green gully between plowed fields, buds burst on the bushes and their golden dust rises to the trilling of skylarks … or, at the funeral of a soldier, the whole ritual, at once mournful and stirring, the time-honored songs they sing—you want to convey the way they sing, and indeed to quote all the words, because no one who is not a Don Cossack knows them … and in your eagerness to find room for this scene from Cossack life, you forget what you had set out to say, so that your narrative overflows like the spring floods of the Don and the Medveditsa … and your editors complain about the number of pages.
Like all beginners, Kovynev had waited a long time for recognition. His fragments had floated almost unnoticed on the journalistic sea, and he was over thirty when his first volume of stories, Cossack Themes, appeared. Then Korolenko, no less, had singled him out as a specialist on the Don region, and the doors and covers of Russkoye Bogatstvo opened wide for him. Suddenly—for one sweet moment!—he had believed in himself! Had he, then, reached his peak? No, this was only the beginning. He was commissioned, and begged, and expected to produce … things somehow different, and more and more different, from what welled up in his heart. Editors and critics found his descriptions of flowering ravines and clouds floating over the Don very charming, but wanted him to speak up for justice and freedom. If Cossacks it must be, let him write about the abominable uses to which they were put by the oppressor—otherwise Cossackdom would look like a reactionary theme. Or else he could write on other subjects of importance to the editors, such as Stolypin’s cruel experiment at the expense of the peasant—the breaking up of communal land into small farms. Or, for that matter, on anything in which love of freedom was vividly expressed.
What made them think that Fyodor Dmitrich needed to be prodded? That his own ideas were any different? He too felt strongly that the use of Cossacks for punitive purposes besmirched thei
r honor. He had seen for himself, and could write about, unsuccessful small farmers on the steppes along the Volga. He himself had done three months in the Kresty jail—just the sort of thing the public liked to hear about! Well, he was free to write about anything at all, but no socially significant episode must escape his keen writer’s eye, even if it was only the high-handedness of a railway policeman or the money-grabbing schemes of a greedy priest. Then again, after so many years as a high school teacher, what a brilliant light he could shed on that revolting character, the obtusely conformist monarchist pedagogue, who might well harbor an unclean passion for schoolgirls, and surreptitiously lend money at usurious rates of interest.
And indeed Kovynev, who had seen a great deal and surmised much more, wrote about it all in the manner expected of him and glided smoothly along the journalistic road, winning public recognition, though sometimes taken to task for depicting intellectuals as spiritually impotent, flimsy creatures. (Which was fair enough, because, as Fyodor Dmitrich ruefully admitted to himself, although he was one of them he had no great understanding of intellectuals.) And again and again, he indulged himself by returning to his tales of Cossack life.
The literary circles were complimentary, but sales were poor—book buyers did not seem to know his name. He would walk up to a counter and feel furious—there lay a volume by F. Kovynev, its cover discolored by sunlight and warped by heat. Obviously unsalable … and he would silently curse them all: “So, gentlemen, God damn you all to hell, you don’t want to know the song in a Cossack heart.”
Kovynev was known to Glazunovskaya, his native village—known as a “mocker.” He was known to bookish people on the Don, who regarded him as their bard. But Russia as a whole, in all its immensity, did not want to know about Kovynev.
And who, of all people, could impress on you the extent of your failure with a special cruelty that you could not endure? Tell you that the leisurely lyricism of which you were so fond—all those buds and skylarks and old-world ditties—was a long-winded bore. That those repetitious descriptions of the Don steppe ruined the whole structure of the work, that the author’s best phrases, those of which he was particularly proud—sorrow decked in the beauty of a quietly dying sunset, the heart like a bird with a wounded wing, and rapture flickering out like a tremulous spark—were not the high points of stylistic beauty but so much literary garbage—it was shameful to see it over Kovynev’s name. Strangely, it was not Korolenko, nor any of his famous colleagues on Russkoye Bogatstvo, who would say this, no, but an impertinent little girl in Tambov. A former pupil of his, Zina Altanskaya, who owed whatever understanding of literature she had to him, had started saying such things in letters. (Schoolgirls! You can’t say that only some Black Hundreder and village usurer of a schoolteacher cherishes an unclean passion for them. Can any normal teacher of the male sex remain indifferent to, refuse to discriminate between, those thirty girlish faces turned toward him in the top class? How can he help secretly feeling a special liking for one or another as he collects her exercise book or takes back the chalk from her whitened fingers—and wondering, “What if one of these days …?”)
November 1916 Page 28