The House of Government
Page 129
The House on the Embankment died, too. “That’s what happens to buildings: we leave them, and they die.” It died because the boys and girls had left. “Some had been killed in the war, some had died from sickness, some had disappeared without a trace, while others, though still alive, had become different people; and if by some magic means those different people were to meet the ones long gone—in their cotton twill shirts and can vas sneakers—they would not know what to say to them.” The tests of will devised by Lyova Fedotov and his fictional doubles had proved both prescient and premature. “The tests came soon enough: there was no need to invent them. They poured down upon us like thick, heavy rain—some were beaten into the ground, some drenched and soaked to the bone, and some drowned in that torrent.”14
Yuri Trifonov (in the middle) with friends at the dacha (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
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Act 2 in Trifonov’s chronicle of his generation is set in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when those who had survived the torrent were in their twenties and early thirties. It was a time of “packed rooms and accidental friends,” “crowded communal apartments and narrow couches,” Stalin’s funeral, and Khrushchev’s “thaw.” It was springtime—“that unsettling and opaque season that remained to be deciphered.” The lilacs in Lyalia Telepneva’s garden (in The Long Goodbye) “overwhelmed the dusty, nondescript street” on which her house stood. “Unable to be contained within the confines of the fence, their luxuriant forms spilled over into the street in a frenzy of lilac flesh.” Olga Vasilievna from Another Life wore her hair loose to her shoulders. “It was a dense, luxuriant, dark-auburn thicket, but her forehead was open, round, and clean, without a single wrinkle. It was probably the best year of her entire life, the year of her prime.”15
The flood that had washed away their childhood continued to carry them along. They fell in and out of love, got married, had children, met in-laws, went to college, got their first jobs, and, in the case of the men, got into fights and wrote their first plays, screenplays, novels, and short stories. The springtime of their lives coincided with the “thaw” in Soviet history. “What had brought about this sudden change in life remained for Lyalia a mystery, nor did she give it much thought. Perhaps the winds in the heavens had shifted direction? Perhaps some place a thousand miles away had been swept by hurricanes? Her late Grandmother used to love the saying: ‘Everything comes at its appointed time.’ And now Lyalia’s time had come—and why not?”16
Yuri Trifonov (top right, with glasses) with friends at the Literary Institute (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
Yuri (left) and his sister, Tania (second from right), with friends (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
And so they floated on, too keen on what lay ahead to look back at what remained behind. But the faster they floated, the more difficult it became not to look back—at least for those who were paying attention. Fathers were being “rehabilitated” but not restored to history; mothers were coming back as helpless, reproachful strangers; in-laws kept bringing up their own, unfamiliar past; and “men of the past”—men “whose time was up”—were still running construction sites and editorial offices. Khrushchev’s “thaw” was a deliberate but partial recreation of the Stalin revolution. Trifonov’s The Quenching of Thirst (1959–62) contains all the key elements of a First Five-Year-Plan construction novel but is also, typically for the “thaw,” a bildungsroman about a young man whose future remains to be deciphered. He joins in the building of an irrigation canal in the desert, but he is too involved in the pettiness of existence to be a full-fledged participant. He is lost, he fears, “utterly lost,” but the harder he tries to find his way, the more clearly he realizes that he is floating with the current—the very current he is trying to channel. “It pulls me along like a small chip of wood, spinning and tossing me around, flinging me onto the shore, then washing me away again and carrying me further, on and on!” The challenge, he discovers, is not to catch up: the challenge is to be able to stop. And the only way to stop, or at least slow down a bit, is to swim against the current. “To know yourself” means going backward.
Trifonov (left) and friends on the riverbank
(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
The spring—that particular spring—was not about what lay ahead: it was about what remained behind, like a cloud on the edge of the horizon. What remained to be deciphered was the past.17
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Act 3 is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the main characters are in their forties and fifties, much farther downstream, ready and not ready “to take stock.” Vadim Glebov, from The House on the Embankment, is balding and fat, “with breasts like a woman’s, flabby thighs, a big paunch and sloping shoulders, which obliged him to have his suits tailor-made instead of buying them off the rack.” He is not from the House on the Embankment, but he visited often enough to betray his friends, teacher, and fiancée. He comes from the Swamp and eventually returns to the Swamp, possibly never having left it. “He wasn’t bad and he wasn’t good; he wasn’t very selfish and he wasn’t very generous”—he was lukewarm, “a nothing person.” He does not choose to betray anyone; he fails to make choices.18
Aleksandr Antipov, the central character of Time and Place, is not sure about either time or place. He and his wife Tania keep waiting for an apartment of their own, but he doubts they will ever have a home—or have made any choices:
The new cooperative building on the outskirts of Moscow was slowly rising, one floor on top of the other; their children were slowly growing older and setting out for unknown territory; the two halves of the cracked raft, with Antipov on one side and Tania, on the other, were slowly moving apart, and there was no horror on their faces: they went on talking, joking, taking pills, getting annoyed, watching movies, while the wooden halves were quietly drifting apart, because nothing could be stopped and everything kept flowing, moving farther away from one thing and closer to another…. There is no such thing as still water: the kind that seems stagnant is also moving—by evaporating or festering.19
Antipov falls in love with Tania in the spring of 1951. They separate thirty years later, soon after moving into the new cooperative building on the outskirts of Moscow. Most late-Trifonov plots involve moving into new buildings: applying, queuing, buying, and starting over. The goal is “to furnish one’s life the way one would furnish an apartment,” but all one gets is more furniture. The flood has become a festering swamp, but most people do not know it because they have “unseeing eyes.” Antipov is writing a book about “the fear of seeing,” and Sonia Ganchuk from The House on the Embankment is taken to a special hospital because she is afraid of light. Living in the dark means living without a shadow—not leaving a trace or relying on someone else’s memory. Antipov’s Tania wears glasses and cannot remember what made their spring possible. Everything remains to be deciphered, everything keeps getting postponed, “and everything that got postponed gradually disappeared somewhere—leaked out the way warm air leaks out of the house.”20
Trifonov’s contemporaries, “the children,” are confronted by their parents and grandparents, who care nothing for furniture, take “a broad view of things,” and think of themselves as “makers of history,” not chips caught in its flow. Their time has passed, but they linger on—as a reproach, reminder, and source of worn-out wisdom. Some of the children are not blind—just near-sighted—and they notice that their parents’ asceticism has not prevented them from moving into the House of Government; that “taking a broader view” means interpreting human behavior in accordance with “class theory”; that class theory is applicable in every case except their own; and that “making history” may stand for “typing away in some army’s political department” or serving as purge committee officials. More to the point, taking the broad view seems to stand for an occasional preference for strangers—the stranger the better—over one’s own families. In the case of Aleksandra Prokofievna from Another Life (based on Trifonov’s grandmother, Tati
ana Slovatinskaia), the world seems happy to reciprocate. “Her close relatives have no use for her—for good reasons, because her close relatives know exactly what she is like—but strangers respect and even fear her a little.” The same is true of Aron Solts’s double, David Shvarts, whose adopted son despises and mistreats him. “How could David raise a child when he was always busy educating others at commissions, on committees, and at plenums until late in the evening?”21
Yuri; his sister, Tania; and their grandmother, Tatiana Slovatinskaia
(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
The parents and grandparents are just as homeless as their children—in the House of Government, in their children’s homes, and in the Home for Party Veterans in Peredelkino. They are just as blind, too. One evening, Gorik, in The Disappearance, notices that his grandmother’s cousin, “Grandmother Vera,” cannot see anything “even with a magnifying glass.” The only difference is that the children are near-sighted and the parents, far-sighted. Both would have failed the “good person” test: the children, because their primary commitment is to themselves and their homes; the parents, because their primary commitment is to those who threaten their families and homes.22
Neither group casts a shadow. Trifonov’s Old Bolsheviks talk a great deal about the past, but they do not remember. Professor Ganchuk, from The House on the Embankment, does not look back any more than his not-quite-son-in-law, Vadim Glebov. “It wasn’t because the old man’s memory was failing, but because he did not want to remember. He did not find it interesting.” The otherwise blameless Grandfather from The Exchange said once that he “had no interest in whatever lay behind, in his entire incalculably long life.” And Gorik’s Grandmother, in The Disappearance, “never reminisced about anything. She once said something that stunned Gorik: ‘I don’t remember what my real first and last names are. And I don’t care.’” Each generation is blind in its own way, and each one despises the other’s blindness. The parents accuse the children of philistinism and bourgeois acquisitiveness; the children accuse the parents of hypocrisy and arrogance. Both are right—but also, in their blindness, unfair.23
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The Revolution ended at home. The surviving revolutionaries and their children and grandchildren were facing each other across the kitchen table, unable to see or listen. Everyone seemed to agree that these were not routine family squabbles or the inevitable fraying of youthful idealism: something much larger had gone wrong. The residents of the House of Government, past and present, were living under a curse. Only those who did not fear the past could discover its origins and perhaps help lift it.
In every one of Trifonov’s novels and novellas there is someone whose job is to remember: a historian, a novelist, a reminiscing narrator (who is usually a historian or a novelist), or a character who is jolted into regaining his eyesight and forced to look back. In The House on the Embankment, the autobiographical narrator, who is a professional historian, remembers seeing Anton Ovchinnikov for the last time in a bakery on Polyanka Street, in late October 1941.
Winter with its freezing temperatures and snow had come early that year, but of course Anton was wearing neither hat nor coat. He said that in two days’ time he and his mother were being evacuated to the Urals, and asked what I thought he should take with him: his diaries, the science-fiction novel he was writing, or the albums of his drawings. His mother had weak arms, so he was the only one who could carry heavy things. His question struck me as absurd. How could anyone be worrying about albums or novels, when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow? Anton drew or wrote something every day. A notebook, folded in two, was sticking out of the pocket of his jacket. He said, “I’ll record our encounter in this bakery, and our entire conversation. Because everything is important for history.”24
Anton is killed in the war. His mother gives his diaries to the narrator just as Roza Lazarevna gave Lyova Fedotov’s diaries to Yuri Trifonov. History—through diaries, father’s studies, and historical novels—is at the center of their childhood. “Recording everything” is the duty of those who have stayed behind and dare look back. But what is important for history? Tania in Time and Place cannot remember the most important things. The historian in It Was a Summer Afternoon memorializes a past that has nothing to do with what the only survivor remembers. Gena Klimuk from Another Life believes that a historian’s job is to identify “historical necessity.” And Olga Vasilievna, who cannot stand Gena Klimuk, imagines history “as an endless line in which epochs, states, great men, kings, generals, and revolutionaries stand tightly pressed together, so that the historian’s task is similar to that of the policeman who, on premier nights, stands by the ticket office of the Progress Movie Theater keeping order—to make sure that the epochs and states do not get mixed up or change places, and that the great men do not cut in line, fight, or try to get a ticket to immortality out of turn.”25
Yuri Trifonov at his old dacha
(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
Those for whom the past is a key to the present think of living and remembering as a single verb. When Grisha Rebrov from The Long Goodbye is accused of not being “rooted in the soil,” he, “for some reason, started talking about his family: how one of his grandmothers had been a Polish political exile; how his great-grandfather had been a serf and his grandfather had been implicated in some student disorders and banished to Siberia; how his other grandmother had taught music in Petersburg; how her father had been born into the soldier class and how Grisha’s own father had taken part in both the First World War and the Civil War although he was by nature a peaceful man who had been a statistician before the Revolution and afterward an economist. And all of this taken together, Grisha shouted excitedly, was the soil, was historical experience, was Russia itself.”26
In Another Life, Olga Vasilievna’s husband, Sergei Troitsky, is a professional historian “who suffers greatly in his policeman’s job” and thinks that historical necessity is “something shapeless and treacherous, like a swamp.” He thinks of history as a search for “a thread that connects the past with an even more remote past, as well as with the future.” He—like Grisha Rebrov and Yuri Trifonov—had “started with his own father, for whose faint memory he felt a great love. He thought of his father as an extraordinary man, which was probably an exaggeration and, in a certain sense, pride.” His father had led him to his grandfather, who had led him to his great-grandfather, who had led him everywhere at once. “He rambled on about his own ancestors, runaway serfs and religious dissenters, who could be traced to a defrocked priest in Penza, who was connected to some settlers who lived in a commune in Saratov, who could be linked to a teacher in the Tura swamps, who produced a future S. Petersburg student who dreamed of change and justice, all of them united by a seething, bubbling urge to dissent.”27
Which threads should one follow? Rebrov and Troitsky are defeated by this question because they are too invested in the present (and too blind as a consequence) to know what they are looking for. But they know where to search. There are times, according to Rebrov, when conscience “flares up” the way diseases do. “At certain times it grows stronger, at other times weaker, depending on—who knows, perhaps on certain explosions of solar matter.” And sometimes it becomes overwhelming. Both are writing books about underground revolutionaries connected to them by the threads of personal and spiritual kinship: about a time on the eve of the Revolution when conscience reached crisis proportions and the urge to dissent became irresistible.
Trifonov’s 1973 novel, Impatience, is the book Rebrov and Troitsky fail to finish. It is a response to Voronsky’s biography of Andrei Zheliabov, which was a response to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It goes back to the People’s Will terrorism of the 1870s in order to document the birth of a new, eagerly apocalyptic successor to Christianity. As one of the characters, the terrorist Aleksandr Mikhailov, puts it, “I was as influenced by the story of the Gospel as I was by the story of William Tell or the Gracchi brothers. And what
about ‘the end justifying the means’? Was it invented by the Jesuits? Or by Machiavelli? No, it is contained in Christ’s teachings, in its lining, beneath the pretty exterior.” His goal is to “blow up the accursed Sodom” and lead the people out of their “swamp sleep.” The means include the creation of a fraternal family of true believers and the use of the “everything is permitted” principle in dealing with nonmembers. The result is the explosion of solar matter that will burn the residents of the House on the Embankment and blind their successors.28
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The impatience of the 1870s begat the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution begat everything that followed. Trifonov’s novel, The Old Man (1978), is about the Civil War, “the time everything began.”29
The chronological present is the same as in The House on the Embankment and Impatience: the hot Moscow summer of 1972. The old man of the title, Pavel Efgrafovich Letunov, lives in an Old Bolshevik dacha settlement. He is surrounded by his children and their spouses, ex-spouses, lovers, children, neighbors, guests, and dogs. He is hard of hearing; they have unseeing eyes. His family is not quite a family; his house is not a home; and his children are involved in a feud over a cottage they may or may not have a right to. “They still live badly,” he imagines telling his wife, Galya, who died five years ago, “a cramped, messy, unsettled existence; they live life not as they want to, but as it happens. They’re unhappy, Galya.” He is unhappy, too—because Galya is not there and his body is failing him, but mostly because he lives in the past, and the past is even more cramped and unsettled than the present. He does not have much time left and thinks that the only reason he has been spared so far is so he can “piece something together, like a vessel from clay shards, and fill it with wine, the sweetest wine, whose name is Truth.” He needs the truth to make sense of his own life and to save his children’s lives from meaninglessness. He believes that the truth got lost when it became inextricably fused with faith, and that its final disappearance had something to do with what happened to Corps Commander Migulin. “Corps Commander Migulin” is a double of Filipp Mironov, the Cossack rebel who defied his Bolshevik commissars, went off to fight for his own socialism, was sentenced to death as a false prophet, spent a night awaiting “imminent, inescapable death,” was pardoned as a matter of political expediency, and then given command of the Second Cavalry Army before being secretly shot in a prison courtyard.30