Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  It is only through such timeless hours without pattern that we obtain the essence of a land. But any such moments generally had to be snatched, en route for some significant landmark. While they were nearly always interrupted by the exigencies of transport, time-tables, or the pre-arranged programmes, it was, on occasions, these very things, breaking down, which gave me the unexpected, unscheduled hours for which I longed. But not often enough: it was simply incomprehensible to the official mind that a visitor could wish to contemplate nature – unless on some grandiose, or scenic mountain scale – rather than man’s – preferably contemporary man’s – handiwork.

  This was, no doubt, the result of most visitors being curious to observe Communism, rather than Russia.

  •

  While I continued to seek out the Traveller’s traces, if not with the ardour of my first intoxicated visit, still with enough to preserve much of our double vision, I had now become more selective. I no longer gulped indiscriminately, but began to strengthen my own perspectives, and to the pleasure of sight-seeing added the volupté of choosing the precise moment which I thought best for each place. Thus the pearly early morning light that radiated across the waters of the Gulf of Finland showed Peterhof at its loveliest. Then the ornate Palace with its numerous pavilions and gardens, its cascades and fountains all sparkled with prisms of brilliance in the morning dew, and there were as yet no visitors, so that mine still being the backward glance, it seemed to have slipped again into its past, to be awaiting the serf-gardeners while, within, the riotous court of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna snored off the night’s excesses. But medieval Russia, the monasteries and convents of Donskoie, or Kolomenskoye, in the curve of the river, turreted Novodiévitchy, Great Novgorod should, I thought, ideally be seen in deep snow, in all their austere beauty, with the ravens circling and cawing over the bare trees, black, white and grey, lit by a flash of gold where cupolas and crosses glitter against livid skies.

  Pursuing my theory of the time and place, (I no longer hoped for the loved one with any conviction), midsummer noon seemed best for the great houses round Moscow. Archangelskoye, in the green gloom of its woods, or Ostankino, as once I saw it, with its little church reflected, shimmering in the lake, and unexpectedly animated by a foreground of immemorial rustic figures, rather than the giant pylon which, I am told, now dominates the scene. The people I saw there were figures in a landscape – the women charming, bunchy figures in bright-coloured skirts and aprons, the men still wearing their old-fashioned pink or red roubashkas and high boots. They were scything and tying the swathes, singing their shrill chastoushki. It was a naïve print, one of those Narodni Kartinki such as I had seen on the Traveller’s Paris walls, come to life for my greedy eyes and ears.

  All at once, Conscience stirred. How could I revel in such a scene? How to patronize the living by turning them into stage props. That had been a wicked age of intolerable injustices and inequalities. And penetrating Count Sheremetiev’s country house, now become a museum, I found room after room dedicated to exposing such abuses – particularly those of serfdom. The lovely little pillared theatre and musician’s gallery reminded us that here the more gifted serfs were obliged to perform. (The Count became so infatuated by one of them that he married her and they lived happily ever after, though this is not stressed.) Sometimes, the union of aristocracy and serfdom produced genius: Borodin was the child of a serf-girl and a sixty-year-old Georgian prince, descended from the ancient Kings of Imeritia. The blend of his blood is echoed in his music, where the traditional airs of old Russia sound beside Oriental cadences which range from the Caucasus to the steppes of Central Asia.

  At Ostankino, all the arts had flourished. Long galleries displayed pictures painted by other gifted serfs, in particular a series of remarkable trompe l’oeil paintings. But all these serfs were owned, body and soul, by their master, said Conscience, rapping me sharply, as I thought, for one fleeting moment, how agreeable it might have been to live at Ostankino, attached to such a Maecenas, living rent free on his estates, having no doubt plenty to eat and being trained and encouraged to sing, paint or perform in his orchestra or theatre: in short, to pursue the arts without those harassing pressures of competitive wage-earning known to most of those who pursue the arts today.

  So, wandering through the enfilades of gold and white rooms, treading delicately across the burnished parquets that generations of serf labour had tended, I wondered at what point patronage and dictatorship clashed. And then Conscience nudged again, and Taste, too (for it was a very bad painting), as I was confronted by the celebrated canvas, to some viewers, clou of the whole Gallery, where an unhappy serf mother is depicted as forced by her wicked owner to nourish his thorough-bred greyhound puppies at her breast, while her own infant lies on the straw denied. Conscience won. I could no longer enjoy the illusion which those rustic haymakers had conjured, earlier. They were not happy carefree serfs turning the hay between rehearsals of something Beethoven had composed for their master’s friend, Count Razoumovsky. They were their freed, much more fortunate, progressed descendants. Any moment, now, a collective tractor would lumber up, splendid symbol of such progress, and a lorry would bump them back to their Komsomol Club and a lecture on the rotation of crops. It was all wholly admirable, desirable . . . And yet . . . mine was still an uncontrollably backward glance.

  •

  Whole days; dreaming, unprofitable days of no consequence from Intourist’s brisk viewpoint, were spent in the ancient, high-walled Novodievitchi Convent and its cemetery, a national burial ground where all history, all heartbreaks were centred and where, odd as it may seem, I liked to picnic.

  I love the atmosphere of Russian cemeteries. They have nothing of impersonal atmosphere, either pompous or in the nature of a dumping ground, so often found elsewhere. Russian cemeteries are intimate places which invite a continuity, a keeping of company between living and dead; and for all their professed agnosticism, the government supplies, free, a cross for any mourner that desires to place it on a grave.

  Beyond the convent garden, a path led to the cemetery, a thronged yet peaceful place, bearing great names and small; Dekabrist heroes; great generals; Chekhov; musicians; patriots; a cross section of the whole land. Each grave, in the Russian fashion, was surrounded by a low wooden fence, enclosing it like a little private garden. Here, in each plot, a bench was placed for the mourners to rest beside their departed, while a little lamp glowed at the grave-head. Here, as in so many other ways, one senses the East beneath the Slav. The East too, makes no final, awful severance with death; it is a letting go . . . a separation, rather than an end. Moslems hold cheerful family picnics round the tombs of their dead, often bringing the departed one’s favourite dishes to gratify his shade, while a little hollow in the stone serves as drinking trough for the birds. It seems that the terror of death increases in ratio to its urban surroundings. Death in the fields or the woods is a natural process, but in the city – among bricks and asphalt, under telegraph wires and neon lights – a coffin is an unseemly reminder that all man’s mechanisms fail: Death is dolled-up before being quickly shovelled away, and never, never again allowed to remind the living of their precarious state.

  In the Novodievitchi Convent garden death seemed as inevitable as autumn and, as I threaded up and down the paths, I wondered if, spelling out the names on the headstones, I would at last come on the Traveller’s grave as if, perhaps, he was willing me to that discovery. In a sense, it would not have grieved me. I would rather have imagined him in Siberian earth or the Buriat steppes he loved, under some remote cairn placed there by a Shaman. But the Novodievitchi birch trees sheltering the graves were all Russia, all the land he loved, in their gentle, evening melancholy.

  Overhead the rooks circled and cawed and shuffled among the branches. Through a gap in the old wall I could see the swans moving slowly across the still lake. It was very quiet, very reassuring here. And he says much, who says evening. . . .

  •


  Sometimes I would wake to the sound of storm, with steel rods of rain slanting down over Moscow; not good tourist weather, but that, I thought was the moment best suited to spend in Tolstoy’s Khamovnicheski house, the weather when the countrified square wooden building in the little pereoulok, or side street of an unfashionable quarter of old Moscow, seemed to be more alive, more personal. It was as if the shades of its former inhabitants were all concentrated there, kept indoors by the rain and going about their various occupations, so that I could perhaps catch them unaware. In the yard, the stable door creaked on its hinges and I half expected to see the blunt nose of Tarpan, Tolstoy’s dappled grey, appear over the loose-box. The dog-kennel stood empty but no doubt its occupant was snuffling round the large overgrown garden where in winter Tolstoy and his children skated.

  The rain lashed down and puddles spread over the yard and I entered the dark narrow hallway with a sense of intrusion, for the Curators had restored the house meticulously, strengthening its sense of privacy. There were no other visitors on such a day. Galoshes and cloaks hung by the door as if just removed; on the turn of the stairs a large stuffed bear held a tray of visiting cards between its paws. I turned them idly – Count this, Princess so-and-so, a Marshal of Nobility, distinguished painters, writers, musicians . . . ‘The Shining Ones’ as the family came to describe this élite, as distinct from ‘The Dark, or Shadowed Ones’, the obscure or nameless peasants and labouring men whom Tolstoy encouraged. These were a disturbing, sweaty lot, in their rank sheepskin shoubas; they left muddy footmarks rather than calling cards, and both the Countess and the servants resented such an invasion, for they came at all hours to speak with the Master but naturally did not tip the lackeys who tried to maintain that style to which their mistress clung. Those yellowing slips of pasteboard were eloquent of her way of life, but it was one which her husband sedulously undermined.

  He rose at daybreak, as if to emphasize his solidarity with the workers, roused by the hooters of neighbouring factories where they laboured under such oppression. He then chopped wood and fetched water for the household (none was laid on) often going with a sledge as far afield as the Moskva river. He brewed his own barley coffee, made porridge flavoured with dried mushrooms on a spirit lamp, and enjoyed a vicarious sense of achievement – he, the author of War and Peace – by making his own boots, instructed by the local cobbler. While eschewing luxury he was, in fact, indulging in the most refined of all luxuries – selective simplicity – but then inconsistency was ever part of the giant’s extraordinary nature.

  At last his self-imposed asceticism reached the point where, playing Chopin (he was a good pianist and passionately fond of music, himself), he wrenched himself away from the keyboard crying ‘Ah – the animal!’ his face paling with the force of emotions aroused by the Fourth Ballade.

  Sometimes, however, the senses could not be denied and, although forswearing meat and alcohol, he was still overcome by appetites; for his wife, upon whom his lusty vigour had imposed thirteen pregnancies; and for pickles. Next to his sombre study with its worn leather upholstery deepening the gloom, I found a little stairway, five or six steps, most conveniently leading to a cupboard-like still-room where huge jars of pickles and preserves were ranged, as once they had been stored there from the estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Now they were faithfully replaced by the Curators, a detail of infinite evocation. I was told that Tolstoy would often leave his desk, that rail-topped desk at which he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata, Resurrection, and The Death of Ivan Illyitch, to seek some irresistible mouthful.

  Outside the double windows the rain still lashed down, and I imagined just such an overcast day here fifty or more years earlier; in the schoolgirlish bedrooms of the daughters; one of them, Maria, typing Tolstoy’s manuscripts (her mother had recopied War and Peace by hand seven times); the servants bustling to and from the outside kitchens, and, in that claustrophobic bedroom which this loving and hating couple shared so disastrously, the Countess seated at her desk, doing the accounts, making endless crocheted quilts, or recording in her journal how she dreads another pregnancy, how she fights for the publication rights of her husband’s works, which he is determined to renounce. How she will plead with the Tzar himself to lift the ban on some of her Levovitch’s most provocative writings . . . Poor, pathetic, bewildered, maddening Sonia, clinging, quarrelling, harassing her husband, infuriating him, as he infuriated her, to the point of madness.

  The old house in Moscow speaks of all this most poignantly. Little things, telling of great. The calling cards by which she set such store – the pickle-jars he could not resist . . . I envisaged the giant tiptoeing, like a greedy boy, his home-made boots creaking, as he moved clumsily, guiltily, from a bite of salted cucumber to a spoonful of cherry jam. Sublime and childish Tolstoy! So loving to mankind, so often cruel to his wife. All the tragedy of their lives together is in that bedroom with its two pillows, side by side. ‘I will tell the truth about women when I have one foot in the grave,’ he told Gorky, ‘I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me and say “Do what you will, now.” ’ And Gorky added – ‘He gave a look so wild, so terrifying, that we all fell silent.’

  But such bitterness vanished when he and his wife grieved together over the death of their last-born, the adored little Vanya, a celestial-seeming child, with whom the sixty-year-old Tolstoy would talk on equal terms. He was anguished by this loss, while Sonia railed against God and the whole world, banging her head against the wall, wailing and lamenting. Tolstoy tried to console her with unusual tenderness: but the incorrigible egoist still sounds in a letter of this time: I have never loved Sonia so much as now, and that does me good, he wrote. The family kept Vanitchka’s nursery as a shrine; there were no more children.

  To me, this Moscow house is far more revealing of the whole tragic epic of Tolstoy’s private life, than Yasnaya Polyana. There, Tolstoy was sustained by the country-side he loved. Something of Pan remained in the patriarch. He knew great joy there. But in either house the Countess buzzed noisily, trying to obey the man she adored, to indulge him and protect him from himself and from those she believed were destroying him: and also to preserve the heritage of her children, for she was hysterically possessive. She only achieves the true stature of tragedy at Astapova, the obscure wayside station where the eyes of the world were turned on Tolstoy’s death-bed, while vast crowds assembled there and she, his wife, was locked out, flitting round the station yard, a desperate wraith. When she came too near the house they pulled down the blinds.

  These were some of the thoughts that were in my mind one rainy day as I went through the silent, yet eloquent house where everything told a tale of terrible intimacy. Had a tourist, a foreigner from another world and age, the right to intrude here, I wondered? Had I the right to see so much that his friends and contemporaries never knew?

  Perhaps the veneration in which I held Tolstoy was justification. For me it was not just another visit to another museum – the thing to do: nor did I feel the same degree of emotion exploring Chekhov’s house, Dostoievsky’s, that of the Boyar Romanov, or the Palace of Tzarskoe-Selo, where personal relics of the last Tzar reach the apogee of intimacy. Pushkin’s house? But Pushkin is something apart for me, whom I love, rather than venerate. He is Mercury, to Tolstoy’s Jupiter.

  There were other more collective shrines I visited, poring over them for long hours of speculation, indulging the old yearning to trace my Traveller. The various Museums of the Revolution provided such a hunting ground. Surely, here among the photographs of street battles, of crowds listening to a street orator, I would at last come on one loved face? These blurred, mostly unskilled photographs impaled history with a terrible intensity, catching sweeps of the emptying city, crowds scattering before a cavalry charge, leaders conferring in the lee of an upturned tank. Crowds spellbound by the eloquence of a great leader; crowds looting, laughing; crowds surging across the immensity of the Red Square – each one with a face, a destiny, with features offered
for my microscopic inspection. The camera had transfixed them, waving up at the photographer, lying dead in the snow, or rebuilding their shattered land. But for all my searching, nothing revealed the one face I sought.

  So I would move on, or rather backwards in time, to study perhaps the features of the young Dostoievsky serving his Siberian sentence. He wore uniform and looked comparatively unravaged: it must have been taken after Baron Wrangel had materialized to ameliorate his lot at Semipalatinsk – after his experiences in The House of the Dead. Here was the persecuted Petrashevsky group; here a forlorn street in Chita, where the Dekabrist wives had lived. Siberia! I must reach it! But still the authorities frowned on my request – still, it seemed, people were sent, rather than went, to Siberia. Balked I turned southwards.

  Though hardly reluctantly, with cities such as Kazan, Orenburg or Astrakhan to be achieved. The curiously-flavoured Tartar port of which I had heard so much from both the Traveller and Aunt Eudoxia, during that faraway summer in Corsica, had always lured me. They described it set on the flat, fly-infested sandy banks of the Volga, three miles wide here, where the big river-boats moored and the green bellied melons were stacked, and where fur-capped Tartar fishermen brought in their reeking loads of caviare. Over all rose the pagoda-like Tartar mosques, gaudily painted, and bell-hung, they said.

  Now it was the turn of my mind’s ear; I heard the clear, humming sound of bells – not the bronze tolling of Russian Orthodox Church bells, but something higher in pitch, at once shrill and silvery, a sound that was wholly Asiatic, befitting the fluted roofs and temples from which it issued.

  I was resolved to make the journey to Astrakhan by steamer, down the Volga, from Kazan, another Tartar city enshrined in my mind’s eye as being violently picturesque, and the centre of the old Tartar families, the Mirzas, or Mongol-blooded princes. Kazan, where the young Tolstoy had enrolled at the University to study Oriental languages in preparation for a diplomatic career, the city where both Gorky and Chaliapin had spent some years of their youth, living in the same street, of the poorest quarter, unknown to each other . . . Besides, I had read the most alluring accounts of Kazan by an English author who made the journey in 1852. But Savez-vous ce que c’est de voyager en Russie? Pour un esprit léger, c’est se nourir d’illusions . . . I heard again the Traveller’s maddening, ironic tones, quoting the detestable de Custine. But I remained obstinately nourished on the Englishman’s descriptions and still anticipated some brilliant agglomeration of pagodas and pinnacles, with bright-coloured buildings reflected in the river, all Asiatic splendour, perhaps even outshining Vassilli Blagennoye in their strange and savage beauty, and worthy of this ancient capital of an ancient Kingdom. The inhabitants, I had read, were held to be particularly handsome, the women going about unveiled, wearing their beautiful national costume with particular grace; the well-to-do Tartar ladies enveloped in emerald green taffeta cloaks resembling the Persian woman’s chaddor, their faces splendidly painted, their little flat embroidered caps tinkling with golden ornaments, like the ribboned bouti I had received from the Traveller so long ago. The soft, bright-coloured slippers of the Kazan ladies emerged from bell-shaped skirts hitched over the pantaloons worn by every conventional Moslem woman. ‘Orientalski morals,’ as a Bulgarian Orthodox peasant once remarked to me, ‘Tzigane-Moslem women all wear chalvari. Our women don’t need trousers, to keep virtuous.’