Russka: The Novel of Russia

by Edward Rutherfurd

  Russka

  EDWARD RUTHURFURD

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Also by Edward Ruthurfurd

  Preface

  Names and Pronunciation

  Summary

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Family tree

  Forest and Steppe

  The River

  The Tatar

  The Icon

  Ivan

  The Cossack

  Peter

  Catherine

  The Duel

  Fathers and Sons

  Revolution

  Coda

  Epilogue

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Epub ISBN 9781409039631

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  Published by Arrow Books in 1992

  20

  Copyright © Edward Rutherfurd 1991

  The right of Edward Rutherfurd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Century

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099635208

  This book is respectfully dedicated

  to those now rebuilding the monastic

  community of Optina Pustyn.

  RUSSKA

  Edward Rutherfurd was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and educated at Cambridge University and Stanford University in California. His first book, Sarum was based on the history of Salisbury. London, Russka,The Forest, Dublin, Ireland Awakening and New York all draw on finely researched details of social history. Edward Rutherford has spent much of the last 30 years living in New York and Conneticut. He has an American wife and two American educated children and has served on a New York co-op board.

  Also by Edward Ruthurfurd

  Sarum

  London

  The Forest

  Dublin

  Ireland Awakening

  New York

  PREFACE

  RUSSKA the PLACE

  The two settlements named Russka in this story – the first in the south and its successor in the north – are both imaginary, although a small town bearing this name did once exist elsewhere in former times. Each of these imaginary Russkas is an amalgam of features drawn from their respective regions. In the northern Russka, where the principal action is set, the old town and monastery somewhat resemble, on a smaller scale, the ancient city of Suzdal, where part of the book was written. The magic springs I saw by the old fortress of Izborsk, in the north-west. The Bobrov country house is not unlike the country estate of the Pushkin family.

  RUSSKA the NOVEL

  Russka is a historical novel. All the families of Bobrov, Suvorin, Romanov, Ivanov, Karpenko, Popov, and the character Pinegin are fictitious. But in following their stories down the centuries, I have set them among people and events that did exist, or could have done.

  For many reasons, despite the ever growing fascination with Russia in the west, the history and geography of this huge and sweeping land are only slightly familiar to most readers. Insofar as possible therefore, I have tried to provide a historical framework for the reader that I hope will be informative without being burdensome. Here and there I have allowed myself some very small telescoping of events to simplify the narrative, but none, I believe, that does violence to history.

  In an attempt to convey something of the astonishing richness and the special character of Russian culture, I have felt free to draw extensively from the wealth of Russian folklore and literature. The result, for better or worse, is certainly my own; but it is my hope that those familiar with these subjects may find that they recognise some old friends in these pages.

  NAMES AND PRONUNCIATION

  There is no agreed system for writing Russian words in English. In each case I have therefore chosen what I believe to be the most familiar, or that most currently used.

  In cases where place names change, I have again used my own judgement. For nineteenth century Vilna, in Lithuania, I have used today’s more familiar Vilnius. Present day Istanbul remains Constantinople throughout the narrative.

  The placing of the stress on Russian words is notoriously confusing. Readers may care to know that the correct stressing for the main families in the story is as follows:

  Bobróv Románov Ivánov

  Suvórin Karpénko Popóv

  Abrámovich Pinégin

  There is one other peculiarity of Russian transliteration: sometimes the letter written e is pronounced o as if of, or yo as in your. Certain important words and names that appear in the book are therefore pronounced as follows:

  chernozem – chernozyóm Potemkin – Potyómkin

  Pugachev – Pugachóv Rublev – Rublyóv

  SUMMARY

  This book was written in the period 1987–91, in the course of which I visited Russia upon numerous occasions totalling many months. Travelling individually, I was able, besides my stays in Moscow and Leningrad, to visit the north-west as far as Kizhi, the Baltic, the ring of medieval cities around Moscow, Kiev, Chernigov and the Ukraine. My southern travels also took in Odessa, the Crimea, the Cossack country of the Don, the Caucasus Mountains, and the desert cities of Khiva and Samarkand. Thanks to friends I was able to visit the town of Gus chrustalnyi, in the region where the fictional northern Russka is set. The Writers Union also kindly took me to the ancient city of Riazan (Ryazan) and the still older site of the former city, destroyed by the Mongols – a haunting experience.

  But most important of all was the day when, thanks to the Writers Union, I visited the recently reconstituted monastery of Optina Pustyn. We arrived, as it happened, just after the monks had discovered the remains of the famous nineteenth-century elder, Father Ambrose, which event was being celebrated the morning when we arrived. It was an event of great simplicity, but one which, I like to think, vouchsafed an outsider a precious glimpse of the real Russia – and which convinced me, once and for all, that if we hope to understand anything of this extraordinary country’s present and possible future, it is of great importance to delve, as far as we may, into her past.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Doctor Lindsey Hughes of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, and to Miss Cathy Potter of Yale University and the University of Wisconsin who between them read the entire manuscript of this book and corrected errors. Any errors that remain, however, are mine and mine alone.

  Thanks are also due to Professor Paul Bushkovitch, of Yale Uni
versity, who set me upon my path.

  I am most grateful to Mr E. Kasinec and the staff of the Slavonic Division of the New York Public Library; to the staff of the Butler Library at the University of Columbia; and to the staff of the London Library for their unfailing help and courtesy. Special thanks are also due to the staff at the Synod of Bishops Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, New York, and the staff at St Vladimir’s Seminary, Crestwood, who helped me to obtain many books.

  Thanks are also due to Mr John Roberts, who kindly provided me with helpful contacts and to Mr Vladimir Stabnikov of the Writers Union in Moscow, who greatly facilitated my travels in Russia and gave much useful advice and encouragement. I am grateful also to the staff of the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad who so kindly arranged private tours for me.

  There are also many other people, too numerous to mention here, both in the west and in the USSR who, in a private capacity, gave me great help and hospitality for which I shall always be very grateful.

  I am most fortunate in having an agent, Gill Coleridge, and two editors, Betty Prashker of Crown Publishers and Rosie Cheetham of Century, whose patience, encouragement and unstinting help made this book possible.

  I am deeply grateful to my wife Susan for her kindness and patience during the long process of this book’s gestation. And once again, special thanks are due to Alison Borthwick for her expert map.

  Finally, I should like to express a special debt to the Archimandrite and monks of the monastic community of Optina Pustyn, for affording me an unforgettable glimpse of Russia.

  Forest and Steppe

  AD 180

  The steppe was quiet that night. So was the forest.

  Softly the wind moved over the land.

  In the hut – one of six that nestled together in the little hamlet by the river – the sleeping mother lay with her child.

  She had no sense of danger.

  High in the starlit summer sky, pale clouds passed from time to time, drifting in a leisurely procession, glowing softly in the reflection of a crescent moon that rode to the south.

  Like horsemen they came from the east with their billowing white canopies, from who knew what endless steppes – sweeping majestically over the little collection of huts by the river’s edge and continuing their journey behind the hamlet over the dark forest which, very likely, was also without end.

  The hamlet lay on the south-eastern bank of the stream. There, the woods of oak and lime, pine and birch, grew thinner, gradually giving way to glades and the broad stretches of open grassland that were the edges of the mighty steppe. Across the small river, on the north-west bank, the forest was thick, dark and unbroken.

  The three families who inhabited the place had arrived five summers before, and finding there an ancient, deserted earthwork enclosure overgrown with scrub, had cleared it, put up a wooden palisade on the low earth wall, and built half a dozen huts inside. Nearby, two large fields cut untidy swathes into the trees. Further into the woods, a messy patchwork of smaller clearings appeared.

  A few hundred yards downstream, the land on both sides became marshy, and remained so for a couple of miles.

  Softly the wind moved over the land. It caressed the tops of the trees, so that the light undersides of the leaves shimmered pale in the starlight. The waters of the winding river and the marsh glimmered in the woods.

  There were few sounds except for the gentle stirring of the leaves. Here and there, the sound of small animals, or of the deer quietly walking, might be heard. At a certain point near the marsh, against the monotonous background of the frogs’ croaking, an attentive ear might have picked up the crackling sounds of a bear making its way along the wood’s edge. But by the hamlet, the only sound was that of the leaves, and the intermittent rustle as the breeze stroked the long field of barley, sending a ripple like a momentary shiver down its length.

  The wind moved, yet did not move. For sometimes the field stood still, or swayed in another direction, as though the wind from the east had paused, lazily, before brushing the ripened barley once again.

  It was the year AD 180 – and yet it was not. That is to say, although future times would give to this year such a number, as yet the Christian calendar was not in use. Far south, in the Roman province of Judea where Jesus of Nazareth had lived, learned Jewish rabbis had calculated that it was the year 3940 AM. It was also the one hundred and tenth year since the destruction of Jerusalem. Elsewhere in the mighty Roman Empire, it was the twentieth and last year of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, also the first year of the single rule of Commodus. In Persia it was the year 491 of the Seleucid era.

  What year was it here then, in the tiny hamlet at the forest’s edge? So far as history is aware, it was not any year. It was five years since the last village elder died. The huge systems of numbering familiar to the civilized world, and kept in written texts, were unknown here. Even if they had been known, they would have been meaningless.

  For this was the land that would one day be known as Russia.

  Softly the wind moved over the land.

  She lay with her little boy. The worrying thoughts of the day before had passed from her mind in sleep like the pale clouds receding over the forest behind the river. She slept at peace.

  There were twelve people sleeping in the hut. Five of them, including Lebed and her child, lay on the broad shelf that ran across the room over the big stove. On this warm summer night the stove was unlit. The air was thick with the sweet, earthy smell – not unpleasant – of folk who have worked all day in the field harvesting. To this was added the fresh scent of grasses carried in by the breeze through the square, open frame of the window.

  She lay at one end of the wooden shelf – a lowly position – because she was the most junior of her husband’s wives. She was twenty-seven, no longer young. Her face was broad and her body had already developed a stocky roundness at the hips. Her thick fair hair had slid over the edge of the shelf.

  Beside her, in the curve of her plump arm, lay a little boy of five. She had had other children before him, but they had died, and so he was all she possessed.

  She had been fifteen when she married and she had always known that her husband had only taken her because she was strong: she was there to work. But she had few complaints. He was not unkind. Still a tall, good-looking man at forty, his weather-beaten face had something soft, even wistful, about it and usually when he saw her, his light blue eyes would gleam with a gentle, mocking amusement as he called: ‘Here comes my Mordvinian.’

  With him, it was a term of affection. With the others, however, it was not.

  For Lebed was not a full member of the tribe. To her husband’s clan she was a half-breed: after all, what was her mother – one of the forest folk? A Mordvinian?

  Since time began, the forests and marshes that stretched northwards for hundreds of miles had contained the scattered tribes of Finno-Ugrian peoples to which her mother’s tribe belonged. Broad-faced, Mongoloid folk with yellowish skins, they hunted and fished in those huge, deserted regions, living a primitive existence in their little huts and pit dwellings. At the solstice, they would stand in a circle and sing, in a high, harsh, nasal chant to the pale sun who, as one travelled further north, would scarcely show his face in winter and in summer would deny the earth her nightly rest as he bathed the land in a long, white twilight and made the horizon tremble with pale flashes.

  In recent times, her husband’s people – fair-skinned folk, speaking a Slavic tongue – had been sending out little colonies east and north into this forest. Some of these, like her husband’s clan, cultivated fields and kept cattle. When these Slavs and the primitive Finns encountered each other in those vast regions, there was seldom any conflict. There was land and hunting enough for ten thousand times their numbers. Marriages like her mother’s took place. But the settlers of the hamlet looked down upon the forest folk all the same.

  It was her husband’s joke to call her by the name not of her mother’s little tribe, but of th
e great tribe of Mordvinians that lay far to the north. It made her sound more foreign, even though she was half pure Slav. It was gently mocking. And, she reflected sadly, it reminded the rest of the clan to look down on her.

  Especially her mother-in-law. For nearly thirteen years her large, powerful figure had loomed over Lebed’s life like a threatening cloudbank in the sky. Sometimes, for days at a time, the other woman’s leonine face with its big, heavy cheeks would seem to be serene, even friendly. But then some small mistake on Lebed’s part – a spindle dropped, sour cream spilt – would call forth a thundering rage. The other women of the house would be silent, either looking down at the floor or watching her furtively. And she knew that they were glad – both that they had escaped and that the anger was falling on her, the outsider. After the burst of rage, her mother-in-law would abruptly tell her to get back to work and then turn to the rest of them with a shrug.

  ‘What can you expect from a poor Mordvinian?’

  It was bearable, but her own family made it harder. Both her parents had died the previous year, leaving only her and a younger brother. And it was he who had made her weep the day before.

  He meant no harm. But he was always in trouble with the village elder. His broad, slightly foolish face was always smiling, even when he was drunk, and he seemed to have only two desires in life – to hunt and to please his little nephew.

  ‘Kiy doesn’t need you,’ she would tell him, ‘and nor do I if you won’t obey the elder.’ But it was useless. He hated the work in the fields, would disappear for days into the forest without permission – while the villagers muttered about him angrily – and then she would suddenly see his strong, square form come striding back, with a dozen pelts hanging from his belt and his habitual, foolish smile on his face. The elder would curse him and her mother-in-law would look at her with renewed disgust, as if it were her fault.