Later we found out that my father, alarmed by my absence in such a storm, saw our misadventure with the strangers’ sailboat through his binoculars and hurriedly notified the lifeguard station. There we were spotted through a telescope and a longboat with hardy oarsmen was sent to save us. But then they noticed that we, totally unaware of it, were struggling toward a sandy spit, though at a snail’s pace. The promise of deliverance was becoming a reality. That’s how it came out. But finally when it came to jumping into the shallow water and pulling the boat ashore, I discovered that my arms hung loosely at my sides like ropes and, God help me, were totally useless. This was a reaction to what I had just lived through. Apparently for the last couple of dozen minutes I was functioning not on muscle strength, but purely on nerves which made the physically impossible possible. Later we had many other water-borne adventures. We were older, stronger, and more experienced, and when a moriana was not overly violent we would go out and test our skills in struggle
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with it. I owe much to the river, magnificent in its quiet flow and terrible in its violence. Those who were raised by the river gradually developed an acuity of vision, a sureness of gesture, the strength of muscles, cool-headedness, self-confidence, and the habit of not fearing danger but looking it straight in the eye. In the generation of children that grew up on it, the river, in its image and likeness, instilled an elemental sense of stubborn and unsubmissive will. Some of this was bequeathed to me, for which I am eternally grateful. What would have become of me without the river?
But it was not only the river that drew us. It also opened before us the vistas of constantly new adventures on shore.
It was good, having jumped out of a boat, to stretch one’s legs on the meadowy left bank, to wander without a predetermined goal, to go wherever your gaze and imagination took you. There would be thickets of willows where one would rouse all sorts of game; the sudden splash of a fish in a marshy lake grown thick with water lilies; further on, hayfields through which one had to proceed cautiously because they were the domain of proud and irate Ukrainian settlers, whom we called Cossacks, and who did not want their grass trampled. Sometimes there would spread before us a fantastic world: a solid sea of grass stretching as far as the eye could see. It was the tall and silvery feather grass, now slightly rippling and sparkling but suddenly roiled by the wind with gusts moving on it in broad and deep waves as if on a real sea.
And how many unexpected encounters did the steppe hide. Sometimes a herd of swine would rise up, wild and protected by no one except battle-scarred, tusked boars who would turn even our most feisty dogs to immediate and shameful flight. There would also be enormous, heavy steppe birds, bustards, resembling wild turkeys. To become airborne they had to run for a good stretch along the steppe and acquire the inertia of movement much as today’s airplanes. But the steppe’s most magical power was in its sheer vast-ness, the space that caught your breath, and pulled you to itself as sometimes you are pulled, even against your will, by an abyss or a whirlpool. At the same time, these wide-open spaces gave birth to an indescribable and unforgettable sense of free action and a yearning for yet-to-be experienced and boundless opportunities.
Who can describe a spring or summer day in the steppe, heavily soaked with the aroma of wildflowers and grasses, made soft and tender by the hot caresses of the sun. The spring air and the sweet aromas would make us weak and drunk with pleasure. We would stagger and collapse under the shade of bushes in order to replace this dreamy life with the dreams of sleep. The steppe, indeed, is a fervid fairy-tale of nature. Taste once its scented breath and your soul will forever hear its call which will not be silenced or erased by the many years you may spend away from it.
Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga
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I and the companions of my childhood years were not destiny’s favorites. Rather, we were its stepchildren. My life in my father’s house was no better and generally not much worse than the lives of my peers.
My father was born into a family of serfs and as a boy helped his elders in all the common peasant labors. Even in deep old age he loved to show off his skill at mowing. And he did mow like a master. But his father, my grandfather (whom I, the youngest, had never seen), upon gaining his freedom made a firm decision to free his son from the onerous fate of a peasant. So my father was sent away to a district four-year vocational school. Having successfully finished the course of study, he received grandfather’s blessing to enter the tsar’s service, in an extremely responsible position yet, that of a junior assistant to the clerk of the district treasury. Beginning with that, he slowly, gradually and patiently rose up the ladder of the service hierarchy to clerk, head clerk, aide to the manager, bookkeeper, manager, and finally at the age of forty, district treasurer, the highest pinnacle of his service anthill.
In parallel to his responsibilities he ascended the Table of Ranks. He dreamt of receiving the Order of St. Vladimir, which would have made him a squire of the gentry. And he did achieve it along with the rank of Collegiate Counselor, which upon retirement was reduced to State Counselor and thus kept him from being addressed as “your excellency.”
By all the signs, he married successfully and happily. The only meaningful memories of our mother were preserved only by the eldest of us, Vladimir, who was ten when she died. I was the youngest and last. Some of mother’s favorite books were preserved after her death. They revealed her to be unusually cultivated for our backwater. These books belonged to the vanguard literature of her time, the sixties and early 1870’s. There were also copies The Russian Word, The Cause, The Spark and an occasional issue of Herzen’s The Bell [politically progressive or radical publications].
Once I found an item which our stepmother accidentally left on the table, but I was too young to appreciate it. It was, as I later understood, a traditional old album of the kind common in Pushkin’s time. I was struck by its unusual calligraphy which could have only been produced by a soft goose quill of earlier days, with its exquisite alternation of fine lines and bold strokes, with its dandyish and ornate signatures, some of which were works of art in their own right.
My eldest brother and sister later revealed that they had found evidence of mother’s familiarity with literature in the album. But the album was not in our hands for long. Our stepmother noticed its disappearance and grew very angry when she found us poring over it. She took it away from us and we never saw it again.
My father’s level of education was not very high. However, in a provincial backwater he stood out above the average. In his forties, as I remember him
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Chapter One
best, he was the “soul of society” in the full meaning of that phrase. He was expansive in nature, hospitable and good-natured. He loved to receive and entertain guests, and many people seeing a “light in his window” would drop by, seeking comfort and relief from their cares. He was accomplished and agile with a billiard cue, a hunting rifle, and the fishing rod. He was considered a professor of whist and “preference” [a card game generically similar to whist and bridge].
In societal issues, he had not advanced very far. But he was absolutely firm on one issue: land ultimately was to be turned over to the peasants, for they were the true children of the earth with true filial love. The gentry was on the land for vain and self-indulgent reasons. They defiled the land, making it a means of oppressing the peasant. They stuck out between the peasant and the land as superfluous and useless, and getting rid of them would constitute a venerable act. It was clear that this attitude was deeply seated in his consciousness, ingested with the milk of his mother, showing the imprint of his rural origin. He never covered up the deficiencies of his education nor his lack of good manners and all that which was considered good breeding. He loved to repeat—whether from a sense of self-abasement or from plebeian pride—that he was “a peasant, a peasant born, and would die a peasant.”
Though my parents’ natures we
re different, their family life flowed smoothly, except that my mother’s health was jeopardized by frequent pregnancies. Along with us who had lived, she had given birth to several (either three or four) children who had been carried off by various childhood diseases. Her general health was poor, and she died leaving father five children, the oldest of whom was nine and the youngest, myself, about one. Because of my young age, I could not comprehend the magnitude of our loss. But my older siblings were crushed by our orphaned and neglected state. [In Russian culture the loss of even one parent makes a child an orphan; the loss of both makes one a total, “all-around” orphan, a kruglyi sirota.]
Father totally lost his presence of mind from grief and was almost driven to drink. His lapses at work nearly cost him his job. Close to despair, he finally barely surmounted it. He had to leave the locale where everything reminded him of his irreparable loss, but the children could not be left without a mother’s care. The only thing to do was to remarry. They found him a bride suitable for a man of years and burdened by a brood of children. The bride, an aging virgin, was a thrifty, rather pushy cleric’s daughter. According to my brother and sisters, she was attentive and kind to us early in the marriage until the appearance of her own child.
As more and more of her own children appeared (she had five or six by the time I left home), all girls, she became transformed into the classic stepmother of gloomy Russian songs and fairy-tales. She developed enmity to-
Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga
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ward everything associated with our mother. One by one, mother’s albums began to disappear, including the one which contained her girlhood diary. Then she began to transfer mother’s books to the attic, where they were doomed to become food for mice. Father had no time to read these books, and she herself did not have the habit or interest. Next came the turn of the photographs of the deceased, removed by herself in our presence. This was not a manifestation of jealousy. This was the desire to reign in the household autocratically, rather than be a substitute for the one who had reigned there previously. Everything that reminded her of “that one” filled her heart with a malevolent vexation. And we, “her” children, were also constant, living reminders of “that one.” And we were to pay for it dearly.
Soon she was to deliver a very cruel blow; to turn out of our home our beloved, quiet nurturer and constant intercessor—our grandmother. She was meek and timid, but whenever she saw one of us being unduly punished, she would grab the victim and rush him off into the children’s room. No one could get her to change her behavior. The worst thing was that we could not help but notice the systematic efforts to get grandmother to leave of her own accord. Petty harassment, poisoning every minute of her life, carping, malevolent tricks, constant fault finding, demeaning reproaches, calumnies, mockery—all were used to effect. Grandmother would weep silently with increasing frequency and so would we, huddled around her, understanding each other without speaking a word. We did not weep only because of grandmother’s injuries, but also because we realized, contrary to our young years, that falsehood and evil were stronger than truth and goodness. We wept bitterly, lamenting and not comprehending how father could not see or understand anything. In his distance from us, he was our highest authority. Whenever he came down to us from his invisible but undoubted heights, he was good, kind, joyous and strong, and his smile would warm us like the smile of the sun illuminating the bleakness of our being.
Those of us who were older understood everything in the simplest of terms: a new, relatively young wife was able to twist her middle-aged husband around her finger.
She convinced father that it was in grandmother’s best interest to leave the cramped house which swarmed with kids. And he, with his usual good will and clear conscience, took up the task. He recalled that he had some distant relatives, a quiet, childless couple of modest means. For a small honorarium it cordially took in life’s old veteran. Everything seemed to have worked out for the best. But there was one thing that father overlooked. After grandmother had constantly been told that she was good for nothing, the exile from our home totally crushed her as ultimate evidence of her uselessness. “There now, no one needs me and I’m being sent away to die,” she murmured at our
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Chapter One
farewells, her voice muffled by the lump in her throat. Nor did father notice what she had been for us and what a loss this was. We had been orphaned a second time.
I was the youngest and, without grandmother, the most defenseless. But it did not turn out that way. I was a boy and had certain resources which my sisters did not have. Father’s passion for angling, its peace and quietude, grew with the years. I would easily keep up with him, a can of first-class earthworms on the ready, a landing net for the chance big fish, and a basket for what we caught. Later, gladdening the heart of my sire, I became a skilled angler myself.
Life in our household began to stabilize through an uneasy compromise. The matter was greatly aided by an unexpected inheritance: a two-story wooden house. And so there came into being “the bi-cameral system” as we jokingly referred to it later as adults. The upper chamber comprised father, stepmother, and her children. The lower chamber was us and the servants except for the cook. We rarely came together, almost only for dinner, which was a tense and tedious ritual. Supper for the lower chamber was a separate affair. It was modest and always the same—cold boiled buckwheat and an earthenware tureen of milk (we had our own milking cow). The upper chamber had its guests: the so-called “local intelligentsia.” It was made up of the public notary, a lawyer, the excise tax man, two doctors, the police chief, the district attorney, and later, the head of the district council. They would hold their sessions at card tables and fill their intermissions with hors d’oeuvre and “liquid” refreshment. We stood “in opposition” to such goings on, especially to the head of the district council because he had married a recent graduate of the girl’s high school with whom I imagined myself to be in love, though the very word was for me a pale and bookish abstraction.
The shift from education at home to a boarding school one was an epochal change in the life of the young generation of a middle-class provincial family. And it lay in my life as a new and special geological stratum. The shift threw me from rural and backwater Kamyshin to the regional capital of Saratov [a major city on the Volga]. At that time, Saratov already had a quite decent and presentable city-center built around an excellent boulevard which, due to the predominance of a particular kind of tree, was called The Lindens. When the linden trees were in bloom, the boulevard was suffused with a most tender aroma. The Lindens were intersected by a network of four or five major streets with an abundance of very decent stores. “The kind that Moscow would not be ashamed of,” in the words of one of my landladies. The liveliest of these streets, resembling the German [foreigners] quarter in pre-Petrine Russia was of course called Nemetskaia [German] Street. During World War
Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga
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I the city council, embarrassed by the name, changed it to honor General Sko-belev [a hero of the 1877–78 Turkish wars]. After 1917 the spirit of the times changed its name to Revolution Street.
But as one moved toward the periphery, the city’s glitter became increasingly lusterless. It was initially replaced by the usual provincial ordinariness of buildings and streets. Further on, the ordinariness changed to shabbiness, which came to a low point in the neighborhood of Gorki: primitive huts of the urban poor who made a living by some indeterminate means.
On this general background the recently built center resembled an errant piece of elegant brocade brightly sewn into the worn clothes of a poor person. Of course, the center was the object of special attention by the city council which represented the merchants and property owners while the outlying areas were totally neglected.
A part of this beautiful brocade piece was our boarding school. It seemed that the rest of the city had not yet fully become accustomed
to its existence, especially to the glistening buttons of its uniform overcoats which, beneath the dim street lights, resembled those of military officers. The resemblance was further enhanced by the intricate cockades on our hats. As an upper-classman, I had numerous comical incidents because of this confusion. Occasionally in the evening on some out-of-the-way street we would encounter a bunch of soldiers. Their tipsy and loud talk would suddenly go quiet, their figures would straighten, and they would begin to march in step as they readied themselves for a stiff-bodied, snappy salute and to “devour the officers with their eyes.” But suddenly, having seen things clearly, they would roar with laughter and chastise each other for spotting “an officer who was nothing more than boarding school crap.” Sometimes threats would be sent in our direction and sometimes the dark gray overcoats would threaten to take their chagrin out on us with their fists.
The Russian Century Page 3