Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  Some of the Russians I knew – collected would perhaps be a more exact word to describe my enthusiasm – were very old, with marvellous memories to be harvested; memories stretching back to a Caucasus where even more aged figures had described to them seeing Lermontov cutting a dash among the ton at Kisslovodsk; or telling of a childhood in a family which enjoyed some Court appointment, and I would listen greedily as they told of now forgotten rituals they had glimpsed; of the black and orange uniforms, and plumed hats worn by the Court runners, the Skorohod.

  Their curious loping pace, and the manner in which they bowed, and delivered their message, was peculiar to themselves, traditionally preserved, like the turbaned splendours of the Court Negroes, Scheherazade figures, who had been in service at the Tzar’s palaces for generations, their purpose, it was sometimes said, to perpetuate the dusky personality of Hannibal – the Arab of Peter the Great – the Tzar’s Abyssinian protégé who rose to be a general, studied military science in Paris, married a Russian noblewoman and whose great-grandson was none other than the poet Alexander Pushkin . . .

  Pushkin! To have known him, been loved by him, to have seen him from afar even, was a longing which possessed me entirely, which still sometimes clouds my spirit with a sense of failure, and I comfort myself with the thought that the young Elizabeth Browning was equally consumed by an equally unrealizable dream – to have been Lord Byron’s page. My aspirations were more daring. The Traveller had been right. I should have liked to be Pushkin’s mistress – one of his many, even. In this spirit of exaltation I wasted a great deal of time trying to produce a translation of his love-letters, an undertaking linked with a Russian friend living in New York, and therefore one which became too attenuated, and perished.

  Pro- or anti-Pushkin: this was the yardstick by which I measured nineteenth-century Slav personalities in that nebulous world where so much of myself was centred. This one lent him money: that one patronized him: another set his poems to music . . . The fact that Karl Marx had learned Russian at the age of eighty, in order to be able to read Pushkin in the original was, I thought, automatically enough to make one favourable to Marxist doctrines.

  As to Ivan Turgeniev, he paled beside his kinsman, the less known A. I. Turgeniev, who rose to sublime heights in my estimation because of his devoted friendship with the poet: Moreover, he had come to possess that legendary oriental ring, the Talisman, subject of one of the poet’s autobiographic verses, a gage d’amour which Pushkin had treasured and always worn, being his last link with Princess Eliza Worontzova who had been the love of his youth – of his life, it was said. Turgeniev had in turn treasured this ring, bequeathing it to a relative. But during the convulsions of the Revolution it vanished.

  But then this is in the true tradition of Talismans. Such objects know how to vanish – how to cross frontiers and seas, going where they will, conferring their magic on whom they please. For many years after the Princess gave the Talisman ring to her young lover, whom she was never to see again, his life seemed charmed. His star shone brilliantly; his genius was acknowledged; he escaped, miraculously, a series of foolhardy duels; he won every woman he wanted; and, at last, married the acknowledged beauty of all Moscow: only then, did the magic seem to falter. Nathalie was very young and frivolous, soon becoming a worldly coquette whose extravagance exhausted Pushkin’s nervous and financial resources. But he loved her to distraction. Could the spirit of the Talisman, still obedient to the will of its original donor, have begun to turn away? Eliza Worontzova must have followed the trajectory of Pushkin’s life from afar, first with longing and pride, but gradually with misgiving turning to despair. Perhaps even with jealousy; Pushkin’s love for his tiresome young wife was all-consuming.

  I have never been able to discover whether the poet was wearing the Talisman when he went to the duel at the Black Brook. Had he worn it that day, hoping by its aid to finish off his enemy, the worthless, taunting D’Anthès? I would rather believe that the Talisman knew Pushkin’s life had now become unbearable: that instead of saving his life, preserving him, for further humiliations, for more years of fret and fume, the venom of the Court, the pressure of debts, the frasques of Nathalie, and all the gathering shadows of the years, it chose to speed D’Anthès’s bullet towards him, and so, wing the poet to Parnassus.

  •

  Whether I kept company with some Slav who, seeing the lie of the land, quickly announced he had been brought up at Tzarskoe-Sélo, or others, from a more documented background, who made no such claims, all served to deepen the colours of my mirage. There I saw birches merge with belfries, snowstorms swirling round little wooden izbas and granite palaces; there, under the black skies of a painted Palekh box, gigantic brass samovars puffed like volcanoes, dwarfing the surrounding villages and their blue-domed churches in some topsy-turvy vision recalling an early painting by Chagall at Vitebsk.

  At home I fled the present, and, quite transported, listening perhaps to recordings of an opera by Dargomyjsky or one of Borodin’s divine melodies, undulating from minor to major key and back to the minor again in that manner peculiar to Russian music, I was intolerant of any distraction. Emerging from my limbo-land I would cut in on the soft speeches of my beaux, to pursue my own perspectives, where fantasy, fact, geography and music all merged intoxicatingly.

  ‘Don’t you long to have known Borodin?’ Without waiting for a reply I would rattle on about his descent from the ancient kings of Imeretia; the disordered atmosphere in which he lived, in Moscow, invaded by bodies of students seeking encouragement, by charity organizers seeking support, by friends and relatives from the provinces, all of them taken under Borodin’s large wing: all of them consuming his time, sleeping anywhere, on all the chairs and sofas, asking advice and help, coming between the composer and his creation, more exigent and as indulged as the numbers of adored cats which swarmed about, climbing on the musician’s knees as, all too rarely, he sat at the piano.

  My mind’s eye saw the grey skies and golden, snow-padded domes and rooftops of Moscow, and peered in at the double windows, glimpsing Borodin’s bulky figure. Prince Vladimir’s melting aria sounded in my inner ear. Or was it the record now being played in my own room? I scarcely noticed how restive my admirers were becoming as once again I left their arms for Russia.

  But some Slavs, enjoying the double-strength doses of local colour I provided, capped my anecdotes with others: then all went swimmingly and I hung on their words. They had only to tell of family life as they recalled it in the province of Tver, or Ufa, or anywhere else within the enchanted sphere and I was lost. Listening to them, to that tongue which can sound majestic or earthy, barbaric or tender, but never trivial, they could have been reciting seed catalogues or ships’ tonnage – I was in love. But as the candles paled the Traveller’s shadow fell once more and the suitor, found wanting, was shown the door. After all, the Run-Away Game was best played alone.

  So, wearing the padded khalat he had sent me from Bokhara, its long rainbow silk sleeves dabbling in the kasha and sour cream, and regretting that a bottle of Graves from the local grocer was not one of the Caucasian white wines (even though Gautier had described them as ‘epileptic cocoa’), I re-read Ammalat-Beg for the twentieth time, or, surfacing from Caucasian romance, plunged again into The Chronicles of Bagrovo, returning rapturously to patriarchal Russian life on the estates at Ufa.

  I yearned for it. I was up at dawn, I was wearing a red sarafan, preparing the samovar for the old landowner’s tea, as he sat on the veranda, ruminating, and the morning sun rose golden, over the rich black earth . . . Returning to my own earth, to my little eighteenth-century house on the river at Richmond, to pour myself another tumbler of tea and to watch the reflections from the water shimmering across the panelled walls as the barges chugged past, leaving their wake of glittering ripples lapping to the shores, I would agree with Pierre Loti: le bien être égoiste du chez soi he wrote, seated cross-legged on a divan in his little house at Eyüb, up the Corne d’Or (which wa
s his version of Gallantry Bower) and where, no doubt he watched similar shimmering reflections, as the caïques glided below his windows. Here Loti projected himself into the Turkish ambiance of his choice with an ardour which I understood and emulated.

  But Loti, playing his own variation of the Run-Away Game more than seventy years before, had contrived to surround himself with three ingredients necessary to the proper realization of his dream. First, a withdrawal or temporary cessation of daily life; next, a devoted servant; lastly, the possession of a person who was the embodiment of his national obsession. Aziyadé was only a little Circassian slave but she represented for Loti the Turkish land, people, and way of life which he craved for his own.

  My limbo-land was less successful than Loti’s, being constantly shattered by the telephone, the man who came to read the gas-meter, or the exigencies of the char. Then there was the question of earning one’s living. ‘Can we have your copy by the morning?’ a harassed sub-editor would telephone and, regretfully, I would put aside Lermontov’s Hero of Our Times – his times being, I felt, my own – to spin out a thousand words on Petit-point at Eton, a visit of the Comédie Française, or any other manifestation of current culture.

  As to the passionate companion of my reveries – this revenant, part Traveller, part Mongol rider from the steppes – where was he? While Marie Bashkirtseff, being Russian, saw romance in Anglo-Saxon terms, and invoked Heaven for an English nobleman, I aspired to some wilder image, something no right-minded Diety would have considered conferring. O God, send me Mamai the Tartar, I prayed, Grant me an Uzbeg lover! Let me wake beside the Loved-one in a yurt in Turkestan! Such were, my desires; and it was with a sense of resignation I would abandon them, decking myself, perhaps, for some Anglo-Saxon revel, setting off to dine, if I were lucky, where both the wine and talk was good, or to dance at some night-club where hard liquor took over and the band prevented any attempts at communication.

  Country expeditions were also subjected to my ruling passion. Gravesend was a particularly tantalizing outing, as I combed the water-side pubs for traces of the young Rimsky-Korsakov. When a naval cadet, his ship had been stationed in the Estuary while he was composing part of his first symphony – without a piano. On landing he had rushed to try out his composition on the first piano he could find. We can imagine what sort of a rattle-trap, beer-warped instrument awaited him at any of the seamen’s bars of those days. But I never found so much as a memorial plaque to mark his passing.

  Then, the Portsmouth road took preference over others, because half-an-hour’s drive brought one to Ripley, an inconspicuous little Surrey town made memorable in my eyes by an inn called The Tartar. After the Jolly Wagoner, the Flower in Hand and suchlike, The Tartar struck a mysterious and rather chilling note as if, once, the Kipchak Horde had come streaking across the Hog’s Back, plundering Guildford and sacking Cheam. The pub itself was an uninteresting building and I never discovered the origin of its intriguing name.

  In the matter of reading I was considered affected: my friends accused me of disloyalty when I maintained my preference for Gogol over Dickens. It was not that I denigrated my English heritage, the stature of Dickens, or made futile comparisons: I simply found a keener pleasure in Russian writers. But there was no denying I was swayed topographically. Scenes set beside the Don seemed more enthralling than those placed by the Medway. As a heroine, Bela, the captive Circassian girl dying in the arms of her lover, the splenetic Russian officer, seemed more moving than poor Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  And then, the manner in which the fallen women of Russian fiction so often expiated their sins by following their men and marching eastward – to Siberia – was more understandable, and far more interesting than the contrite but stationary end English authors usually allotted similar characters. As to any number of Dostoievsky’s luminous repentants, I ached for the chance to emulate them, to show my mettle as the Traveller had once suggested I might: to express a great love in such a manner; above all, in such a landscape.

  Thus, succumbing entirely to my passion, I was swept along on this irrational tide. Then, too, my inclinations were sharpened by a prejudice against so many French and German classics. Loathing anything German with inbred, indiscriminate hostility I was only able to enjoy the Romantics such as Hoffmann and Tieck because, although the setting might be nineteenth-century Germany, it was soon transposed into some phantasmagoric or horrific realm. French authors were admirable but alien. I found Proust fidgety, Racine monumental; there was no denying the genius of Flaubert, and it was, I knew, unreasonable prejudice to prefer Anna Karenina to Emma Bovary. But there it was: topography again.

  Scenes of French provincial life inevitably paled beside those which conjured the high skies and still woods which Turgeniev evokes, or scenes peopled with his wan gentry, their pent-up emotions simmering like the great samovar round which the whole household congregated. Even the sordid and lustful Goloviev family which Saltikov-Schredin describes so mercilessly seemed more fascinating, as I imagined them in their painted wooden house, snug in the snows of a long country winter, than anything set in a more familiar zone. Thus the double-distilled clarity of French writers dazzled but did not command me. Their materialism, whether elegant or brutal, always overcame me with a sense of peculiar desolation, which I could not shake off, even in Stendhal’s brilliant company.

  There was, I perceived, a marked kinship between English and Russian writers: an affinity to be traced in both their humorous and tragic vein. Dead Souls can be appreciated by the English reader, just as Alice in Wonderland is treasured by the Russian: yet neither of these wild masterpieces translates well, or is, in general, truly savoured by the logical French. How many of Trollope’s clergy are to be found, transposed, in Leskov’s provinces! Turgeniev’s lyricism, Tolstoy’s profundities – together with his innocence, his grandeur and simplicity – are better perceived I think, by the English reader. Similarly the Russian and English languages inter-translate more justly than either can do when rendered into French. For then, it seems, the key is transposed from minor to major and the basses become tenors. The abiding French preoccupation with form, expressed in their architecture, cuisine, and the social structure of their lives, produces formality, and structures are apt to become strictures. Or so it seems tome.

  Thus, it is with a sense of both adventure and escape, that I plunge for the twentieth time into Aksakov’s Chronicles of Bagrovo. Shivering, for I feel a breath of black frost rise from the page, I read: ‘In the middle of winter in the year 1799 when I was eight years we travelled to Kazan. The cold was terrible . . .’

  Kazan! The fabulous Tartar stronghold on the Volga . . . Now I too am in the sleigh, crouched down among the bear-skins, my eyelashes freezing together. The plumes of snow fly past and the coachman’s great padded bulk rocks dangerously as we hurtle onwards, under a livid sky.

  It is very quiet in my room overlooking the river. Sweet Thames! run softly . . . The swans are drifting past, going with the green tide. The sweet damp smell of the riverside rises to the window where the wistaria twines round the rickety little iron balconies and my adored cats and dogs sprawl together in the sun. But my thoughts are elsewhere, at Bagrovo, in the Bashkir steppes. Harvest-time, saint’s day dances, the serfs, or ‘souls’ are pickling, bottling, scything, spinning . . . it is the same immemorial scene, all Russia, all escape, all my heart.

  I open the Chronicles at random, at the chapter telling of the author’s mother, Sofia Nikolaievna, arriving at Bagrovo as a bride. It is an early summer. The linden trees are reflected in the stream, the Nasjagai, or Swift Pursuer, as it is known to the Tartars and Kchouvass people thereabouts; the black earth of Bagrovo yields splendid crops, oats, barley, wheat: the cattle are sleek, the nighting-gales sound above the songs of the villagers. The bride’s father-in-law, the old tyrant Stepan Mihailovitch, has laid open his granaries to his ‘souls’. ‘Accept it as a gift in God’s name,’ he says, majestically happy at his son’s marriage. The
simple wooden house overflows with family guests and serfs, and I am there.

  I have become Sofia Nikolaievna herself! I am welcomed to my new home by my mother-in-law Arina Vassilievna, in her fur-edged velvet jacket, her head bound in a gold-embroidered silk kerchief. She is a plump and comely figure, padded by her clothes and her flesh, resembling one of those Matrioshka wooden dolls of old Russia. With a rolling gait, she waddles forward and offers me the bread and salt of tradition. Beside her, my father-in-law holds the Blessed Virgin, the Ikon of the House on high. Behind them stands Father Vassilii, chanting in loud tones. ‘Blessed be our God! Who Is, and Was, and Is to be’ . . . I turn to find my husband, but his face is shadowy . . . Blessed be our Russia! Which Is and Was, and Is to be!

  I have reached home.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Everything I saw, or read, ate or thought was tinctured by my infatuation. As once at school, history was still seen through this prism of passion. When I dawdled along the Richmond towpath with my dogs, letting myself out by the blue gate under the fig tree, where the wild ducks waited to be fed (for I too have lived in Paradise, only, as is the habit of mankind, I did not know it, at the time), I would stop before Cholmondeley House which was, I believe, that which Alexander Herzen had occupied soon after his arrival in England in 1852; and thus, in my eyes, sanctified ground. I would look at the little side window giving on to the brick-walled lane, and think: this is where the cabs must have stopped, when that never-ending stream of Revolutionaries arrived, eager for inflammatory talk, sustaining food and hard cash, all of which Herzen could be trusted to provide. What scenes, what talk Cholmondeley House must have known. And now, nearly a century too late, I stood beneath its walls – another exile.