Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  Only Siberia eluded me – eluded us, rather. Was the Traveller’s desire not strong enough to will us there? Or had he known it too well – under some particular stress? Siberia remained unobtainable. No train ran, just then, I was told. No permits were being issued . . . The climate was bad. There was no suitable accommodation at present, said the Authorities. And just why did I want to go there, they pressed, having as yet little experience of people wishing to go to Siberia for pleasure.

  •

  Along the Nevsky Prospekt a few decrepit droshkies still plied for hire, the hoary izvostchik, or coachman, still wearing the grotesquely padded full-skirted coat of tradition. In the greying contemporary scene this note of local colour stood out like an exclamation mark emphasizing the passing of the picturesque.

  Riding in one of these droshkies, watching the façade of some recognized building loom up suddenly from behind the coachman’s spreading bulk, was as I had imagined it (although my mind’s eye saw him wearing the yamstchik’s traditional velvet coat and peacock-feather cap). Tram rides were not at all the same thing for, apart from suffocating loads and my uncertainty over tickets and destinations, trams had not been the Traveller’s means of moving about the city and it seemed his shade hung back from this experiment in collective transport. He had used traineaux, droshkies or troïkas; which latter I should have preferred, but there were no troïkas left in the city. There never had been many; they were for the country-side, or driving to the Islands. When I came on the place by the Fontanka canal where I knew they used to stand for hire, there was nothing but a street-vendor’s stall offering little glasses of sbiten, a sickly drink.

  Very well then, a droshky will have to do. Now I am living the Run-Away Game. Settling myself on the cracked leather seats of a rattle-trap vehicle I move over to make room for the Traveller, for of course he is beside me. I know this route well, by the map and by my heart, too. Across the city is the station from which trains run to Western Europe. This is the route the Traveller used to take when he came to see us in London. But now things have gone into reverse. Now he is leaving St. Petersburg for London, but I am no longer pleading to accompany him, for I am here, in the latitude and longitude of my heart. I shall wave good-bye without that anguished longing and sense of frustration I used to experience when he left England for Siberia. I shall wait for him quite contentedly; nor shall I be tracing his imagined journey in my atlas.

  When he returns he will be bringing me presents, souvenirs of his travels, as he always did. Only now, the caviare, the Bokharan khalat or the three-tailed standard of a Mongol chief will be transposed into other terms – a Stilton cheese instead of caviare, a Jaeger dressing-gown for the Bokharan khalat and a Briggs umbrella in place of the Mongol chieftain’s standard. No doubt a fair exchange if I can see them through Russian eyes.

  So, as the droshky rattles along, my inner ear listens to the old song of the coachmen, ‘Down Peterskaya Street’.

  ‘Drive on! Drive anywhere!’ I tell the izvostchik wildly. He turns round and gives me a soft look. In old Russia fools were always indulged, were ‘holy fools’ when he was young. Now I, the Traveller’s companion – mistress – wife – my status is never quite clear – am driving into the heart of the Run-Away Game once more. We are away! There is no telling where, for all Petersburg lies before us and now I am heading towards those places which once I could only reach through a picture frame.

  ‘Remember,’ the Traveller admonishes me once more, ‘St. Petersburg is Russian – but it is not Russia.’ No matter. The sun shines. To Oranienbaum, along the wide tree-shaded road once lined with coquettish little datchas and fine houses, to the palace built by Menshikov, the high-flying pie-seller who rose to become Prime Minister, the all-powerful lover of Peter the Great’s widow, the first Empress Catherine, before he fell from glory to suffer Siberian exile. Now the fine houses are boarded up, the datchas deserted. But I do not notice the present. I am in another moment of time. We have brought a picnic, rastegai, fish patties, Pojarsky cotletki, syr, a white cheese, and a bottle of the celebrated greenish-coloured wine from Georgia. We do not know famine in my dream-Russia and, in this haze of well-being, we shall explore the little Chinese house and Catherine the Great’s pavilion, the Damski Domik.

  Now it is night – a winter’s night of absolute, snowbound silence. How quiet these streets, crowded, yet muffled in hard snow, the traineaux brushing noiselessly, smoothly across the whiteness. We are in a troïka, off to the Islands, racing over the ice, for the Neva is frozen solid and the floating boat-bridges have been removed, as they are each winter. We are huddled against the wind which bears down on us from the Arctic. The yamstchik calls to his horses. Gaïda troïka! Gaïda troïka! the old song comes back to me as we race into the darkness, bells jingling. Seized by this intoxication of speed, le vertige de la vitesse which grips every Russian, I am still remembering the niceties of Russian as propounded by the Traveller: ‘remember, a droshky driver is an izvostchik, a troïka is driven by a yamstchik.’ Gaïda troïka! We are racing through the birch woods to a little restaurant where, much later, the Tziganes will sing for us until morning. And in memory of a night in Passy I shall ask for The Black Shawl.

  Now we are wandering through the warren of booths that make up the Gostinny Dvor, the huge covered bazaar behind the Nevsky Prospekt where, it seems, anything in the world can be bought, and one whole section is devoted to the sale of ikons, jewelled ones, peasant ones, old, new . . . glittering, fusty, naïve, haunting . . . God in our Midst. I want only Russian goods; embroidered leather slippers from Torjok, amethysts from the Urals, little carved wooden toys, or rainbow silks woven by the Uzbeks. Perhaps we shall decide on more domestic purchases, and go to the street markets behind the Haymarket, where Dostoievsky sets the scene for Crime and Punishment and where the best sturgeon is to be had. For now I have become a prideful housewife, making a koulibiak as good, or better, than at Palkin’s traktir (or so the Traveller says). We both prefer the real Russian dishes of these modest traktirs to the international cuisine of more sophisticated restaurants. But best of all we like to dine at home, in our apartment overlooking the Fontanka which, I am so often told, recalls the canals of Venice.

  But I am content that it is Petersburg, in all its strange, sad, northern beauty. Across the rooftops I can see the immense bronze dome of the Kazan Cathedral and part of the sweep of its gigantic colonnade. Everything about the Kazan Cathedral is heroic, gargantuan – a place of worship for giants, for the legendary Bogatyri, no less, so that the merely human trophies, banners won in battle by Kutuzov and his regiments in 1812, seem dolls’ delights, no more. By their immensity, both the Isaak and the Kazan Cathedrals remind us that this people’s lusty physical appetites were matched by the fervour of their mystical piety. Today, these buildings look like colossal paper-weights pinning down the long vistas of this sprawling city.

  Yet sometimes, in some lights, the city’s monumental masonry appeared as insubstantial as so many soap bubbles. Vaporous wisps of cloud merged with the mists that rose from the canals or drifted in from the open expanses of the Neva, so that the massive façade of the Admiralty, like the towering Alexander column or the scattered palaces, emerged and retreated through the mists, phantoms of glory.

  This northern capital – St. Petersburg – Petrograd – Leningrad, call it what you will, had none of the stocky materialism of Moscow, so deep-rooted in the earth. St. Petersburg rose from a miasmic swamp, commanded by the will of one man, ‘built on a territory destined by nature to be the patrimony of wolves and bears’; but for all its violently-willed beauty and immensity I had the impression that the city about which I walked could dissolve into its mists, or sink into the waters from which it had risen, without the earth in which Moscow was rooted recording the least tremor nor the country as a whole being even aware of its passing.

  Only in its gigantic conception did Leningrad proclaim its Russian origin, for it was scaled to those infinite Asiatic horizons ove
r which the country spread. ‘Nothing is little, or moderate in Russia. If the land is not one of miracles it is today a land of giants.’ De Custine, again; but not having the last word, let a Russian, Prince Wolkonsky, his contemporary, have that: ‘Russia,’ he wrote, ‘is an immense edifice appearing European, ornamented by a European façade: but inside furnished and administered in an Asiatic fashion. The great majority of Russian administrators are disguised as Europeans, but proceed in the exercise of their functions en Tartare.’

  How much that verdict applies today would be difficult to say. As I write, contemporary U.S.S.R. must surely appear a land of miraculous achievement, especially when we consider its past, and the devastations of World War Two. But I fancy many fundamental Slavic, or Asiatic characteristics remained unchanged by even the most determined applications of progress. And the people are not depleted by the multiplying superficialities of our civilization.

  •

  Sometimes, in my wanderings about Leningrad or Moscow – and later in other Russian cities too – I felt myself impelled towards a certain quarter or street, without knowing why and, equally without any specific reason, would find myself peering in at a window or a courtyard, searching, it seemed, for some person or episode which eluded me, as if the shade of that other self that had, I believed, been Russian (or was it the Traveller operating through me?) was now able to revisit through my present self, some place which had once been of significance to one of us. Thus, between my own desires and these other promptings, I covered a great deal of ground, generally outside the tourist orbit.

  There were certain lodestar points to which I always returned. The railway station ranked very high among these. In Moscow I would sometimes hire a taxi and with voluptuous deliberation pronounce the magic formula: Na Yaroslavski Voxal! To the Siberian Station! There, like a Peri at the Gates of Paradise, I would stand disconsolate before the florid Kurhaus façade – portal of bliss – through which scurrying crowds surged, dragging their bundles, their children, samovars and lumpy sacks of provisions, for that long, long journey it seemed I could not make. Puffs of steam and the wail of the engines eager to be off merged with the pandemonium of the main hall. Away beyond the barriers I could see the high, curiously shaped funnel typical of Russian engines. Then, as I gazed, they shunted majestically out of sight while I strained my eyes, lover-like, for a last glimpse. At the ticket-office endless queues were inching up; but each person presented a pass which alone entitled them to a ticket, to the right to travel eastwards into that mysterious, withheld land of my desires.

  The Tzar Nicholas I had distrusted innovations such as railways, holding they were likely to foster unrest (a view shared by his contemporary, the Duke of Wellington who held they would only encourage the working classes to move about needlessly). Perhaps this view was still shared by the Soviet authorities, for it seemed déplacements were generally discouraged.

  Since I had no pass I would sadly turn back to my waiting taxi. The chauffeur was usually dozing across the passenger seats, surrounded by husks of semitchki – those dried sun-flower seeds which the Slav peoples nibble in such untidy quantities. He would spring awake, smile widely, a disarming, and usually silver-capped smile, and thrust a twist of paper containing the remaining semitchki at me. Nibbling and spitting out the husks (an occupation traditionally known as ‘Siberian conversation’), we would drive back to the hotel companionably. But in the cracked mirror above his head I would see him eyeing me with a puzzled expression. Foreign ladies going all across town to the Siberian Station just to stand there and stare were to be humoured – but returned quickly to the Intourist Bureau.

  •

  If I had felt myself entirely at home in Leningrad, because I seemed to know St. Petersburg so well, my first impression of Moscow was of violent impact – a feeling so intense that, seeing the Kremlin for the first time, I wanted to swallow it in one great gulp. This was the real blood and bones of Russia – of Muscovy, of Pushkin’s Golden-Headed Moscow: ‘In Moscow’, wrote A. Ostrovsky ‘all that is the true Russia becomes more understandable, more valued.’

  The Kremlin! What words can conjure up this fabulous conglomeration of palaces, churches, prisons, treasure-houses, belfries, gilded cupolas, pinnacles and crimson walls? Its terror, its legends, its loveliness are like nothing else in all the world. No life, I felt, would be long enough to know it in all its aspects. Seeing it rising, sumptuous and barbaric, archetypal Russia, shimmering above the grey waters of the Moskva river, my degree of possessive, lovers’ greed was such that my mouth watered.

  Over the years the Kremlin’s beauty has never staled for me. No other building or site compares and, for me, it remains the eighth wonder of the world. In snow, in sun, by dawn or twilight, it is incomparably lovely; most proudly beautiful, as I recall it through a snow-storm, from a window across the river; most heart-breakingly lovely at dusk, on an autumn evening, from within its walls.

  On later visits I often went there expressly to savour that last quiet hour when the sight-seeing crowds had left, and settling myself on the steps of the Ivan Velikii bell tower, I could watch the drama of a long northern afterglow fading slowly, lemon against the golden domes, fading, greenish and luminous, behind the covey of little cupolas above the diminutive Cathedral of the Redeemer Behind the Golden Railing. These cupolas are long-necked and graceful in form, like strange birds come to rest on the roof, and in the stillness of twilight, as I turned to go, I fancied I might hear them scuffling, bird-like, settling themselves for the night, perched there, among the giant Byzantine eagles of history.

  Thus, returning to my hotel, from a concert or a theatre, although marvelling at the spectacle of Shock Brigades toiling under arc lamps, strong square figures of the future moving purposefully among the cement mixers, swarming about the scaffolding of the huge building then under construction, I always tended to double back from my place in the admiring crowd for a last midnight glimpse of the Kremlin’s crimson walls and turrets.

  A splendid disregard for scale or generally accepted proportion prevails in much of old Russian architecture. Stumpy pillars, squat arches, chunky, dwarf-sized doors, give a violently national flavour; yet the whole remains harmonious. Perhaps there is some affinity with the square, rather short-legged moujik types of the past, and the race, as a whole, who, however well built, do not have the attenuation of some others. This same thickness, this solidity and sense of being rooted in the earth, is found in their most grandiose monuments. It even affects the Italianate compositions of imported architects: for the better, to my way of thinking, for it imparts strength to what might otherwise become merely ornate. At Peterhof, as for example in the ‘Coat of Arms’ wing, the domed roof is disproportionately large above the Dutch-flavoured palace: the gilded cupola tops it like a monstrous salt-cellar; it is a toy, with something of a toy’s clumsy charm.

  In Moscow, the domes and pinnacles of the Kremlin used, until the advent of sky-scraper buildings, to tower over the city. But like the pineapple and onion domes of the neighbouring Vassilii Blagennoye Cathedral (‘La Mosquée’, to Napoleon, aware of Russia’s Asiatic undertones), they rise stockily, from hugely planted bases, so square, so squatly arched that they belie the height above.

  Curiously, this same essential chunkiness is expressed triumphantly in one of their newest buildings, the Palace of Congress, within the Kremlin complex, where the seemingly low, thick pillars of the foyer delude the eye by their actual height. The whole effect is of the utmost felicity, uniting an entirely contemporary idiom with the traditional, purely national sense of four-square strength.

  I love the sense of intimacy which this obtains: I find it at once reassuring and comprehensible. Cosy, is perhaps the exact word, the one which comes to my mind when I recall Kolomenskoye, or the Zagorsk Monastery, or the old churches along the Don. To me, they speak of ‘God in our Midst’, like the Ikon of the House; something at once mystic and personal, as in mosques, unlike Gothic or Romanesque cathedrals, which
remain remote, being essays in logical piety, while Baroque and Rococo are worldly variations on the same theme.

  •

  Beneath its majesty, its contradictory air of intimacy, the Kremlin also strikes a sinister note, recalling many terrors. The Tartar invaders first planted their horse-tail standards there in 1382 (kremel is the Tartar word for fortress). In the nineteenth century alone, five unhappy Tzars were crowned within its walls. Of those five, one died, or vanished under mysterious circumstances; one was believed to have taken poison, to end the miseries of defeat in battle; one was blown to pieces by terrorists; the last was shot down in a Siberian cellar. Later, the Kremlin Trials continued the darkness of legend and fact.

  Yet the Kremlin could reveal a softer side. It was here that Tolstoy came with beating heart to woo the young Sonia Behrs. Her father was installed there as a doctor attached to the administration. His large, gay, carefree family was crammed into pinched quarters dominated by the splendours of medieval Russia massed around them. It has always seemed to me particularly fitting that Tolstoy, the supreme Russian genius, should have found the embodiment of all his happiness, and later, all his bitterness, within the Kremlin, in the heart of Moscow, at the heart of all Russia.

  •

  When I made my first rapturous steps in the U.S.S.R. an agreeable lack of regimentation prevailed among the Intourist organizations. By that I do not mean that they were inefficient, but they were less prepared to organize pre-digested tours. Tourists were something new. Very few had fixed notions of what they wished to see or ought to see. Thus personal preferences, for those who had them such as myself, were studied, though not always encouraged. And no one else, they assured me, asked to go to Siberia.

  I recall travelling back from Moscow for a second spell in Leningrad, an all-night journey, without a ticket – something absolutely unimaginable at that time, for the ticket was part of a strip of vouchers which included hotel bookings, and food tickets too. In my prevailing state of exaltation I had lost the lot. My alarm was such, for I feared my stay might be curtailed, that I contrived, by looking both outraged and business-like in a briskly Anglo-Saxon way, to infer it must be the Tourist Bureau themselves who had mislaid the vouchers. Their goodwill being only equalled by their doubts as to their own efficiency, they accepted the charge without protest and reissued the vital papers. Such laissez-aller would not be so likely today, although generous impulses are just as apparent. So wholeheartedly did the authorities blame themselves in this instance that, when I was back home in London and the original ticket was revealed in the lining of my suitcase, I became a prey to remorse, to that voluptuous longing to confess which is one of the most deep-seated impulses of the Slav nature.