He had never seen a naked woman, either. Why would two proper, well-educated ladies, his mother and grandmother, take a notion to start undressing in front of him? But Sanya could guess what women were about—the breasts under the dress, the dark nest below the stomach. This naked man, his friend and classmate Ilya, surprised him much more—with a pang, Sanya sensed that he was not, and never would be, like his friend. Portraits of naked women—Sanya had seen many of them in museums and in art books—for some reason did not awaken such confusion and excitement in him as the nakedness of a man. He felt he might faint from the crudeness and power of it.
He had almost finished reading War and Peace, and the female shades didn’t move him in the least—Natasha, with her silly enthusiasms, Princess Liza with her short upper lip, Princess Marya, whose unattractiveness was stressed throughout; but the men … They were magnificent—their strength, generosity, their wit and intelligence, their nobility and sense of honor. Now, looking into Ilya’s face, he tried to figure out which of these magnificent men his friend resembled. No, certainly not the dry, aristocratic Bolkonsky; nor the fat, intelligent Bezukhov. And not the wonderful Petya Rostov, beloved by all. Not Nikolay, either, of course … Most likely it was Dolokhov.
* * *
Maria Fedorovna, Ilya’s mother, had been sitting on a chair by the door to the apartment for two days running. They didn’t have a telephone yet, and Anna Alexandrovna couldn’t inform her that her son was alive. It was terrifying, and too dangerous, to venture out onto the streets. And, in any case, crossing the streetcar tracks at the intersection of Chistoprudny Boulevard and Maroseyka was impossible because of the military and police cordons blocking the path.
A pall of fear hung over the city—an ancient terror, familiar from Greek tragedy and myth, enveloped it, drowning it in its black waters, the kind of terror that visits one only in dreams, in childhood nightmares, a terror that rises up from the bottom of the soul. It was as though some underground deposit had ruptured, and was now threatening all human life.
Borya Rakhmanov’s parents were also sitting, paralyzed with fear. It was impossible to reach the police, the hospital, or the morgue. All the lines were busy.
They would find Borya only four days later, among the bodies lying in the snow next to the overflowing Lefortovo Morgue. They would identify him by the laundry mark on the shirt—Galina Borisovna Rakhmanova never washed white shirts herself, preferring to take them to the cleaners. There was one other number on the hand of her dead son, written in violet ink: 1421.
These people, the victims of the stampede, were buried quietly, in secret. No one counted them a second time, and only the number on Borya’s hand witnessed to the fact that there had been no fewer than fourteen hundred of them.
No wreath from Borya’s school was laid on his grave. There were no flowers to be had in those days, anyway—all of them had been lavished on the Great Leader. During those terrible days, one other person died, a private death at home—the composer Sergei Prokofiev. This went completely unnoticed.
Of all Ilya’s photographs, only two came out. As he had suspected, the light was insufficient. But apart from the official images of the coffin in the Hall of Columns, which appeared in all the papers, no other photographs of that event existed.
THE LORLs
On Wednesdays, Victor Yulievich would make the rounds of Moscow with the LORLs (as they called themselves) in tow. Like some latter-day Pied Piper blowing on his flute, he would lead them out of their poor, sick time into a world where thought labored and lived, a world of freedom, and music, and the other arts. This is where it had all happened, right here, behind these very windows!
Their peregrinations through literary Moscow had a wonderfully chaotic character. On what was once called Gendrikov Lane, they looked into the courtyard of a building where Mayakovsky was rumored (mistakenly) to have shot himself. From there they walked down Dzerzhinsky Street, formerly Lubyanka, to the Sretensky Gates. This renaming of Moscow streets disturbed Victor Yulievich, and he always called them by their original names when he was with his students.
They walked down the boulevards to Pushkin Square, where their teacher showed them the house of Famusov, and they stopped at all the addresses associated with Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin: the houses of Vyazemsky and Nashchokin, and the house where Yogel’s dancing classes were held. This was where Pushkin had first seen the young Natalia, who would later become his wife.
“Tverskoy is the oldest of the boulevards. At one time it was just called the Boulevard. There was only one. They call it the Boulevard Ring, but there is no ring, and never was. It’s a semicircle. It runs down to the river. All the boulevards are built on the place where the stone walls of Bely Gorod, the White City, once stood.”
From Pushkin Square they would pick out some unfamiliar route to explore. They walked through Bogoslovsky Lane to Trekhprudny, to the house where the poet Marina Tsvetaeva had lived. Or they would take Tverskoy and Nikitsky Boulevards to the Arbat, and cross Malaya Molchanovka near the little house where Lermontov had lived. Passing through Sobachya Square they found themselves in front of Scriabin’s last apartment. This was where he played, and people still alive today attended his private recitals at home. The students asked questions, and the names stuck in their memories. They ambled through the city without any preconceived plan, and it was impossible to imagine anything better than these aimless pilgrimages of discovery.
Victor Yulievich spent long hours in the library preparing for these outings, digging through old books and scouting for rare tidbits of information. In the History Library, he discovered rich deposits of handwritten memoirs, photographs, and letters. Some of the materials, judging by the library’s records, had never before been examined. He came across a great deal of valuable and intriguing information. He was surprised to learn that many, if not all, of the notable people of the nineteenth century, while living very disparate lives, were related by blood. Certain far-flung clans were intimately intertwined by birth, like a tree with myriad branches. Letters from before the Revolution constantly witnessed to this remarkable web of kinship, and all these connections, as well as family disputes and quarrels and mésalliances, were transformed in Tolstoy’s novels into something larger, greater, than just a family chronicle. It’s like the Russian Bible, thought Victor Yulievich.
Like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, Victor Yulievich was tied by every strand of hair to the ground of Russian culture, and these ties extended to the boys, who were acquiring the taste, growing accustomed to this dusty, papery, ephemeral nourishment.
With the group of boys he would walk down Gorky Street, past Eliseevsky’s, the finest grocery store in the capital, telling his LORLs about Zinaida Alexandrovna Volkonskaya, who had owned this palatial house before its reconstruction.
“She held a literary salon, famous all over Moscow, and all of Moscow’s high society would gather here. Writers, artists, musicians, and professors would all attend, among them Pushkin. Not long ago I came upon an interesting document in the library—a report from Colonel Bibikov dated 1826, in which it was spelled out in black and white: ‘I keep a close eye on the writer Pushkin, insofar as possible. The homes he visits most frequently are the homes of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, Prince Vyazemsky, former minister Dmitriev, and Prosecutor Zhikharev. Conversations there revolve primarily around literature.’ You understand what this means, don’t you?”
Ilya was the first to respond. “What’s there to understand? They were spying on him.”
“Precisely. Because all through the ages there have been people who want to ‘revolve primarily around literature.’ Like all of us here!” The teacher laughed. “And then there are the Colonel Bibikovs, who are charged with keeping a close eye on them. Yes, such are the times.”
He hadn’t said anything in particular, but hovered just on the brink of it. He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to
escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.
“Literature is the only thing that allows us to survive, the only thing that helps us to reconcile ourselves to the time we live in,” Victor Yulievich told his charges.
Everyone agreed eagerly. Only Sanya had his doubts—what about music?
From listening closely to Mozart and Chopin, he had grasped that there was another dimension quite distinct from literature, a dimension into which his grandmother, then Liza and his music teacher, Evgenia Danilovna, had initiated him. This was the place he had escaped to every day after school, when his hand was still whole and intact. But even now, with his mangled fingers, he had not parted ways with music—he listened to it constantly, picked out melodies on occasion. How could he play, without the use of two fingers? He wasn’t going to fool himself.
For Mikha, these literary journeys were also a form of escape—from his dreary aunt Genya, with her trivial concerns—and a flight into a rarified atmosphere inhabited by noble men and beautiful women.
Ilya didn’t miss a single one of these walks through the city, either. He had set his own task—to document all the events and compile reports accompanied by photographs. Some of these reports were stored at Victor Yulievich’s home, and the others in Ilya’s closet.
* * *
More than a decade would pass before the degenerate heir of Colonel Bibikov, Colonel Chibikov (the immortal Gogol grins each time such echoes in nomenclature spring up), would get his hands on the childhood archive, and fifty more years would pass until an Institute for Central and East European Studies, in a small German town with a fairytale name, would register this archive under a seven-digit number with a forward slash, and the archive would pass into the hands of another one of the LORLs, also a student of Victor Yulievich’s, but a year younger, for safekeeping.
Getting to know these Moscow boys after his experience at the village school, Victor Yulievich again returned to his musings about childhood. He lacked knowledge of the subject, so he began reading scholarly works on the matter.
He managed to get access to semiforbidden books on child psychology, from Freud, whose books stood gathering dust on the bookshelves of the major libraries, to Vygotsky, whose books had been withdrawn from circulation and placed in restricted-access collections. Victor found almost all Vygotsky’s published works in the home of one of his friends, whose grandmother had been fired when the subject of “pedology” had come under fire from above. She had learned to knit sweaters to get by, but she guarded all of Vygotsky’s books like rare treasures, only allowing a select few to read them—and that without “borrowing rights.” Victor Yulievich came on Sunday morning and sat until evening, with a few leisurely breaks for traditional Moscow-style tea-drinking.
Everything he read was very intriguing, but put too great an emphasis on “scholarliness.” Matters that were self-evident, like the well-known fact that adolescent boys stop respecting their parents, become irritable and argumentative, experience heightened sexual curiosity, and that all of this is the result of the hormonal storm assaulting the body, were presented as discoveries. The author’s explanations and interpretations sometimes seemed to Victor Yulievich to be purely speculative and unfounded.
He didn’t find what he was seeking. He had come across a very important notion in his reading of Tolstoy, who called this tormented period “the wilderness of adolescence.” Tolstoy came closest of all to describing what he saw in his agitated, disheveled students. There came a moment when they seemed to lose everything that had accumulated in them until that time, and life seemed to start anew. But not all of them were able to find a way out of the wilderness; a significant number of them remained lost in it forever.
Victor Yulievich’s sole interlocutor on this subject was Mishka Kolesnik, his neighborhood friend from childhood. Mishka was a war invalid, a biologist and an intrepid homespun philosopher. He listened attentively, but couldn’t abide long-winded deliberation. He interrupted Victor Yulievich, grumbling, “Yes, go on, go on. I get the point.” He tried to hasten his friend’s train of thought, interjecting strange, at first incomprehensible observations and comments—which were in fact the articulation of a biological perspective.
Victor Yulievich gradually grew accustomed to his interlocutor’s unusual thought processes, and was gripped by the idea of the universalism of knowledge toward which the lame Kolesnik was pushing him. He was the one who introduced Victor, an inveterate man of letters, to the principles of evolution, the one who enlightened him on the conflict between the theories of Lamarck and Darwin, and even elaborated on such technical particulars as metamorphosis, neoteny, and chromosomal heredity.
Now, when he reflected on his growing boys, he observed how close their maturation processes were to the metamorphosis that insects undergo.
Small babies with unformed minds, human larvae, devour whatever food comes their way—they suck, munch, and swallow ideas and impressions at random, and then pupate; and within their cocoons everything falls into place in the required order—reflexes are developed and refined, skills are learned, initial impressions of the world are mastered. But how many cocoons perish without reaching the final phase of growth, never bursting the seams and releasing the butterfly within? Anima, anima, little soul … colorful and airborne, a short-lived marvel. And how many of them remain larvae until their very death, never realizing that their maturity has eluded them.
Vygotsky discussed the differences between the process of habit-formation and the unfolding of interests. But Victor Yulievich saw the picture otherwise—he observed in his pupils the unfolding of wings, and the meanings and designs imprinted on them. But why did some, like insects with a full cycle of development, undergo metamorphosis, while others did not?
Victor Yulievich sensed almost physically these moments when the horny covering of the chrysalis bursts apart. He heard the flutter and rustle of wings, and was filled with happiness, like a midwife attending a birth.
But for some reason this metamorphosis didn’t occur in all of his pupils, or even most of them, but rather in the minority. What was the essence of this process? The awakening of a moral sensibility? Yes, of course. But why did it happen in some, and not in others? Is there some kind of mysterious module of transition: a ritual, or rite? Or perhaps Homo sapiens, rational man, also undergoes a phenomenon similar to neoteny, which is observed in worms, insects, and amphibians—when the ability to reproduce appears not in mature specimens, but already in the larval stages? And then the immature organism spawns analogous larvae, which will in their turn never mature.
“Naturally, this is only a metaphor. I understand that my adolescents are, physiologically, full-grown beings. Imagos, so to speak,” he said for Kolesnik’s benefit. But Kolesnik grasped the idea at once and needed no interpretations.
Kolesnik raised his thick, arched eyebrows, and drawing out his Rs, spoke with feigned amazement.
“Well, Mr. Littérateur, you’ve certainly grown wiser during the last five-year plan. But can you provide a definition of the imago, the ‘mature’ person? What are the criteria for ‘maturity’?”
Victor Yulievich thought about it. “Not simply the ability to reproduce. Responsibility for one’s actions, perhaps? Independence? A degree of self-awareness?”
“Those are qualitative criteria, not quantitative,” Kolesnik said, jabbing him with his finger. “Look what you end up with: initiation—some indeterminate thing—and responsibility—how do you measure it? So, according to you, the human larva becomes an imago as the result of some process of initiation?”
Victor Yulievich pressed on. “You admit, Mishka, that we live in a society of larvae—immature human beings, adolescents disguised as adults?”
“There is something to that. I’ll think about it,” Kolesnik said. “The question you pose is purely anthropological, and modern anthropology is in a period of stagnation, which is a problem. But, indeed, some element of neoteny can be observed.”
/> * * *
Victor Yulievich combed through the pages of a stack of books. He was searching for the coming-of-age ritual he had in mind.
He found descriptions of all manner of rituals—those connected with sexual maturity, with a change in social status, with entering a select community of warriors, shamans, or wizards. He kept looking for something that touched upon the moment when the wildness and rudeness of youth underwent an instantaneous transformation into a cultured state, into mature adult existence. Of course, one could consider the graduation ceremony of European universities, when the newly educated youth are swathed in robes and silly hats, to be this kind of rite of passage. But weren’t they the very people—doctors, psychologists, and engineers—who devised that most rational system of enslavement and extermination of human beings, the Third Reich? The volume of knowledge digested did not guarantee moral maturity. No, that wasn’t the answer, either.
Although his reading failed to provide direct answers, it was fruitful nonetheless. He learned to discern the outlines of ancient rites and rituals distorted beyond recognition, watered down or taken to extremes, in the rules and customs of contemporary Soviet life. Even the induction of Pioneers into the fold, accompanied by oaths and a change of attire, was a parody of some sort of ancient initiation rite. True, these were not the new white robes of the ancient Christians, not the aprons of the Masonic order, but a simple red kerchief tied around the neck. Still, the connection was not far to seek.
When he had come to the bottom of his small mountain of books, he turned again to the Russian classics—the source of authority he trusted implicitly. He reread Tolstoy’s Childhood. Boyhood. Youth, Herzen’s My Life and Thoughts, and Aksakov’s The Childhood Years of Grandson Bagrov. To these he added Kropotkin’s Notes of a Revolutionary and Maxim Gorky’s trilogy, which already fell outside the bounds of Russian literature’s Golden Age, and describe the sense of injury in the childish psyche at the absolute injustice and cruelty of the world, and how this can awaken compassion and empathy.
The Big Green Tent Page 8