-,“. . . Amo, et cupio, et te solum diligo, et sine te jam vivere nequeo: et caetera quis mulieres et alios inducunt, et suas testantur affectionaes.” For some reason this ironic phrase from Apuleius’s Golden Ass had stuck firmly in Gleb’s mind. It wasn’t so much that at certain moments in his life he had felt like Lucius, transformed into an ass (although that had happened), just that the strength of Vera’s love, expressed in actions and in words, overflowed the bounds of understanding, making him doubt the reality of what he experienced here, where their happiness intertwined with the general misery.
“This kind of thing doesn’t happen,” many would have said in his place. “It’s undeserved,” Gleb told himself. It was as if he had forgotten that what was happening had been earned through years of mistakes and failures, with a host of false moves.
Gleb, like any truly happy man, did not realize what an extreme condition he was in, or how rarely it was experienced in such plenitude. All around there was destruction and war, with the future growing increasingly uncertain. Within, there was the intensity of life and the full scope of its significance. The former seemed like a shadow that had suddenly fallen away, and now, as if recovered from an illness, Gleb walked in a shadowless, sunny space that belonged to neither the autumn nor the city, that was filled with chirping and whistling and flooded with light, encircled by trees that were swayed not by the blasts of bombs and artillery shells but the keen Baltic wind, and the October wind sang with the full-chested breath of the springtime, swirling up the best in him.
“But, when all is said and done, if we are to quote the Romans, then Martial is also right when he asserts that ‘wild beasts do not know how to lie,’ for now that all the divisions have been removed, we have become precisely wild beasts, left to our own devices, released from the bombed zoo to roam the city at will.
“If only I could have expressed what I was experiencing in music, or, as a last resort, in words. The counterpoint of the music sounding ecstatically within me was a realization that this feeling was doomed to destruction, although now it filled the complete sweep of the horizon and the entire vertical scope of the sky—but my words are too precise and dry, sifting, not in a sunny wind, but in a dry rustle through the fingers seeking to catch them.”
To express what he was feeling, Gleb could only choose from the words of others, and the concordance of his inner condition with the mood of all those whose verbal magic he had admired for so long, especially in the days of his youth, only convinced him of the vanity of any attempts to express his feelings in an individual idiom.
Take Arsenii Tatishchev—where was he now, having abandoned our Petrograd, in what distant lands was he wandering? Was he still alive? That almost square little volume, Lightsound, published in 1922 on poor paper, with print that rubbed off at the first careless touch, contained acutely sunny lines like this—despite the circumstances in which Tatishchev had composed them:
Better I should see you thus:
in angelic essence, in radiance open to the sunlight,
lowering a foot into water, unclenching into air a hand,
on which there shall be traced a sign,
disclosing vision
through the earth-stems of breathing,
through the lyre-stringed external.
Stay somewhere close to me, where elbow can be folded
into elbow, and if there be shadow, it is shadows’
light-scissors,
eyes of radiance, faces of sound . . .
Gleb knew that he could never have written anything like that.
He remembered very clearly how, at a reading in a Petropolis that was half-starved—as it was now—given to a crowd muffled in filthy cast-offs, who listened with rapt admiration, a certain Iosif Krik and Rodion Narodov, publishers of the bombastic little journal Impact, who more than anything resembled a pair of back-row grammar-school pupils giving the district inspector a hard time, had been sadistically stubborn in accusing Tatishchev of handling verse too formally, of being a bourgeois charlatan, of allowing an antirevolutionary domination of the free line by rhyme and meter. Their wretched Impact was filled with syrupy, high-flown, rhetorical “free reflections,” from among which Gleb could remember something about a dead crow being kicked by an extremely jolly sailor. What could Tatishchev, distinguished by the fine military bearing of his figure, wrapped in a greatcoat that gave no warmth against his own inward chill, with his forehead bisected by a lightning-bolt scar, possibly have conveyed to this audience?
But Krik and Narodov would have seemed the very model of integrity in comparison with those who came after them.
All those Young Communists conscripted into literature, music, and other areas—where had they been swept away by the somber-black storm of the thirties, which they themselves had invoked?
Now that a new hurricane had blown in, now that even those who had previously swept away such fanatical devotees of radical rhetoric had themselves been swept away, a time of genuine, not merely verbal, renewal had returned, Gleb tried to convince himself. And Vera was the personified elemental spirit of the authenticity for which Gleb had yearned so long in the stiflingly Hoffmanesque prewar atmosphere of a city that was half-Petropolis, half-Leningrad.
True, they didn’t see each other as often as he would have liked. They were constrained by the life of a city under siege, with mechanically regular artillery bombardments, air raids, and imminent starvation, when simply spending rationing coupons required an intense daily effort. But public transport was still running, there was still electricity, the telephone worked. And the genuinely cold weather was still a long way off.
Gleb also knew that, once in a while, Georgii Beklemishev was allowed home on leave but, strangely, he didn’t feel jealous at all.
Vera mentioned once that her period was very late, but Gleb had heard from friends that this had already happened to their wives and girlfriends—owing to the nervous stress of the first weeks of the siege. Every attempt to clarify their feelings only culminated in flinging the two of them together even more intensely. And now, after this intimacy that had swept away all divisions, Gleb once again asked Vera the question that was tormenting him.
He didn’t understand that Vera had already made her choice— that she had no right to refuse her husband sympathy and comfort, but that this meant absolutely nothing. On every visit home, Georgii Beklemishev sensed her greater remoteness. For him, the dying of their relationship was muted by his impressions of a life restricted to the barracks, while for Vera it was eclipsed by the irrepressible feeling that engrossed her, body and soul.
An inauthentic life was making way for an authentic, earnest one. But Georgii and Vera Beklemishev were entering that life by different roads.
Had not Gleb himself wanted, twenty years ago, to start over again with a clean slate? Had he not renounced the name of a glorious line of poets and priests—Alfani—one branch of which had even flourished on Baltic shores, in favor of the shrilly post-futuristic and, to certain austere tastes, overly aggressive and uncompromising name of Alpha? Was not he himself a creation of the great rift between the old, which was already past, and the new, which was now advancing implacably? Gleb used these, or similar exalted and rhetorical terms, to explain his own feelings to himself, as if he were seeking a justification for them, as if something still required clarification and justification. In actual fact, he was simply borne along by the current, and did not fully understand its force and direction.
From Gleb’s notebook:
Mark came. Knowing my fondness for antiquity, he showed me some photographs taken in September on the roof of the Hermitage on one of the rare cloudless days—while a women’s voluntary fire brigade was on duty up there.
Absolutely unpremeditated, like everything in our city, but for all that no less reminiscent of an antique cameo, this conjunction of fire helmets, battered and scratched as a consequence of the bombings and rubble-clearing, but still vibrantly gleaming in the sun, locks of hair curling out from under the helmets, the firewomen’s clothing—tight-fitting tarpaulin overalls with wide belts—and their gazes, straining out through the smoky air, over Palace Square and its proud column, over the vases and sculptures round the perimeter of the roof, past the tram creeping toward St. Isaac’s, over the horses of the General HQ building, toward the west, with its constant threat of an air raid.
Dressed as if for a Syracusan coin:
a firewoman in a helmet, ringed with dolphins,
columns and sculptures, planes and sunshine,
in a drifting crown of flak-cannon bursts.
Vera’s profiles are simply superb: I didn’t even know she was in that team. “You can keep them—I think you rather like that Beklemisheva girl, don’t you?”
I declined, being discreet. This was already more than I should hear in the context of our ostensibly restrained friendship.
He says they probably won’t take photographs for the newspaper—they’re more by way of photos for the historian, who will “gaze and envy.”
But I think this: the sinking-heart moment
just before the final and most terrible blow—
the sun not yet willing to darken
in the face of the day-locusts’ rustling wings.
According to data from the civil register office, the number of people living in the city of Leningrad and the districts administratively subordinate to it (including Kronstadt) was as follows:
|
in September 1941 |
– |
2,450, 639 |
|
in October 1941 |
– |
2,915,169 |
|
in November 1941 |
– |
2,485,947 |
According to centralized data, the number of food-rationing cards issued to the population was:
in September 1941—2,377,600, including 35.1% of the total to workers and Engineering and Technical Personnel, 18.4% to office workers, 28.3% to dependents, 18.2% to children;
in October 1941—2,371,300, including 34.5% to workers and E and T Personnel, 16.7% to office workers, 30.2% to dependents, 18.6% to children;
in November 1941—3,384,400, including 34.5% to workers and E and T Personnel, 15.6% to office workers, 31.1% to dependents, 18.9% to children.
The daily ration allowance of bread was:
from 2 to 12 September 1941—600 grams for workers and E and T Personnel, 400 grams for office workers, 300 grams for dependents, 330 grams for children below the age of 12;
from 13 September to 13 October—400 grams for workers and E and T Personnel, 200 grams for office workers, 200 grams for dependents, 200 grams for children under the age of 12;
from 13 October to 20 November—300 grams for workers and E and T Personnel, 150 grams for office workers, 150 grams for dependents, 150 grams for children under the age of 12;
from 20 November to 25 December—250 grams for workers and E and T Personnel, 125 grams for office workers, 125 grams for dependents, 125 grams for children under the age of 12.
Fyodor Chetvertinsky to Julius Pokorny:
Esteemed colleague,
A strange business, when even the post to Vasilievsky Island and the Petrograd Side takes an eternity to arrive, that I should get the idea of writing to you. War and Fire (our Russian ogon—that same mighty Agni who holds sway in the nether regions of the earth) do not separate us, but unite us, who are on opposite sides of the blazing storm. And since you and I, dear colleague, are not Kshatriyas, but sages, our work, our spell possesses, so to speak, a supreme, all-embracing power. Exceptional circumstances set aside all superfluities. Therefore, permit me, in writing from here, in this city firmly secured with a lock of iron, to Belgium, with its lace-and-lilies decorations, to address you not as “Herr Doktor Professor,” but “Julius.” I hope this familiarity will not anger you.
You must agree that the invention of the wheel—which, according to your classification, is victoriously proclaimed by the proto-root *kwékwlo-/*kwol-o- —has not been of any great benefit to the Indo-Europeans.
On this same wheel
several of the tribes that have deviated from the general
meaning,
having trundled and rattled across Belgium with their
motorized divisions,
have reached the outskirts of the most wonderful of all cities
created by Russians, the name of which the Romanovs,
at a time predating the skirmish
with our present adversaries
were quick, with their Germanophile understanding,
to translate as “Petrograd.”
I categorically object: you were born in Prague,
there is no need to explain to you that burg(h) derives, not
from a word for “city,”
but from a fortified, exalted, radiant—*bhere-,
bheros- —place.
And we shall be that Rocky Shore
on which they will shatter.
To the west is the ocean, and we are an embankment, land.
After all, we are not Russian lokhi, spotted salmon,
—a fish of the common Indo-European proto-homeland—
splashing in their rivers,
or beeches (buk in Russian—could that be where it’s from?)
rustling around their Prussian Königsberg,
They will yet be humbled
by our stout oaks.
But if you and I are right, the third thing,
after the salmon and the beech,
that language preserves from the maternal landscape is
the Proto-Indo-European *sneig
-,
which, to some, is memory,
but to us—as snow, our sneg—a shield and comrade,
who will be our trusty armor.
And, arrayed in this snow’s freezing cold,
armed with the power of thunderbolts,
seated, like our steppeland forebears,
on fleet steeds (*e
-s)
we shall fuck
(*
bh- —now there is a most ancient root,
and clearer than ever to us now!)
our foes
until we ram them back
up into the maternal vulva,
into the womb of their fear (*pīzdā-, as you write it).
Yes, yes. All the way up the cunt.
So there! Such shall be the fate
of all degenerates.
And our foe still dares speak
of your and our ‘inferiority’!
I should also like to observe that, having found ourselves
in the Finno-Ugrian marshes,
in the swamps of a neighboring world, amid its overflowing
rivers,
not only have we stood firm,
but with a “wave of the hand” from our leader, immortalized
as a bronze idol,
whose equestrian monument—
which is only seemly for tribesmen of the Eurasian plain—
we have ritually covered with earth (dry, sandy)
and even shielded with planks,
and round him raised up the stone citadel of “Piterburkh,”
with a royal burial-mound (now!) at its center,
but also, despite the siege, we still gaze proudly round
at the boundless, flat, amicable east,
at the free and open north,
and at the south, from whence we came,
and, of course, at the presently hostile west and northwest.
It is precisely now that we, our language, our power, our
memory must hold out
—the fate of a continent
and the fundamentals common
to the Indo-Europeans of its expanses is being decided.
We shall assuredly endure,
because we are closer to the roots,
we are freer, we are more wholesome.
We simply cannot perish.
Our neighbors, the Finns
are already playing it safe—taking the city by storm is not for
them.
But even the Germans, when they are pounded
by the thousand thousand hooves
of the Russian avalanches that they have called down on
themselves,
after all the storms that will sweep over them,
will be needed—yes, yes, they will be needed!
—and not as enemies trampled into the dust,
but—and do not be surprised, Julius—
as allies.
Only first let them string up on the trees they revere
—beeches?—very well, let it be beeches!—
which grow in Eastern, kindred, Baltic Prussia—
all their buffoons.
Let them scrape off themselves
all that poisonous stuff, all the cultural corruption,
and stand shoulder-to-shoulder
in the common cause of establishing
a common Lebensraum.
But that will be later, Julius,
much later. First—the disgrace of defeat.
For after all, a language is predictive, it is all there.
including our inevitable
victory.
I remain yours etc.,
Fyodor Svyatopolk-Chetvertinsky
Not having previously been inclined to versification, and being given to a rather ponderous and stubborn mode of thought, Fyodor Stanislavovich felt pleased: the letter had turned out nothing at all like an article on linguistics and sounded like a perfectly genuine poem.
Georgii Beklemishev to Yulia Antonovna Beklemiksheva in Saratov (checked by the military censor):
Dear Mama!
Good to hear that you have settled in at the new place: things will be quieter for you there.
Everything’s secure here. We battle on with a firm belief in speedy victory over the Hitlerite invaders. Thanks to the wise concern shown by the command and the city authorities, firm norms have been established for food allowances. When leave is permitted, I go home on a tram. The cold weather has come early, and it has been snowing since 12 October! The power is still on and our glorious Leningrad water supply is working. It has been suggested that, on an individual basis, people should lay in a supply of plywood to replace broken windows (so far not a single one in our rooms has been damaged by shrapnel or bomb blasts) and also fuel for heating during what is clearly going to be a very cold winter.
After managing to sell Uncle Kolya’s series of engravings of the El Djem amphitheater and the Roman ruins at Dougga, I bought a welded metal stove at the market, especially for the winter cold. I feel bad about the prints, but now the sun of North Africa will warm Vera and our entire Beklemishev lair in an entirely material sense. I am in a profoundly combative mood.
The only strain is with Vera: we are drifting apart. She is no longer as quick-tempered as she was before you left in August, and outwardly everything is fine: we get on together amicably, Vera is benignly affectionate and even, in a blank sort of way, resigned to our new circumstances. But only outwardly. You were right when you told me that not every beautiful arrangement can genuinely enhance and adorn a life, and Vera, it seems to me now, was precisely such an arrangement, a graft onto the Beklemishev way of life that has failed to take. What is in her heart is a mystery to me. I love her, of course, very much, but I think it is safer for Vera and better for my peace of mind if she joins you, and then—after our speedy victory—we shall see.
My rather poor—I realize that now—painting, all those imitations of the cubists or the fauves, stripy orange hippopotami on the Bank Bridge, bathed in blue light and besieged by dogs with wings of fire, now seem absolutely ludicrous in comparison with the immense, unifying cause propelling us all forward, and so following the imminent conclusion—I truly believe it is imminent—of this war, I am hardly likely to take up the brush again.
Dear Mama, I hope always to hear that you are in good health. Don’t worry too much about me, and I shall feel better for the knowledge of your encompassing warmth and affection.
I kiss you.
Your loving son,
Second lieutenant
Georgii Beklemishev
Gleb knew Yulia Beklemisheva slightly from the second half of the 1910s. Recalling this made Gleb realize that he was no longer young himself.
The wife of a well-known financier, she hailed from one of the Volga provinces: her father was a middling sort of land owner there and Beklemisheva regarded her husband Vasilii Mikhailovich’s business affairs and acquaintances with a certain disdain, as if she didn’t notice that they provided her with an extremely luxurious life, and even in speaking of Beklemishev’s most important business partner, the venerable Afanasii Svyatogorsky (his rather odd grandson, also Afanasii, was known to Gleb as the composer of the esoterically cacophonous or, as Afanasii junior called it, “ultrachromatic” music to his Concluding Spectacle, which he had written in imitation of Scriabin)—when speaking of grandfather Svyatogorsky behind his back, she always called even him a “crook” and a “shyster” (it was probably well deserved). However, she could discuss with relish and at great length the details of the Beklemishevs’ genealogy and the consanguinity of her husband’s ancestors with illustrious princely families.
In her eyes, possessing a title and pedigree was enough to brand anyone as “cultured.” This could not be explained away as the result of her provincial-backwater upbringing. It was a fundamental trait of her general outlook.
She often alluded with pride to her growing son Georges, the “new Beklemishev,” emphasizing that the heir had a considerable talent for languages and drawing, and in that, as far as his character was concerned, he mostly took after her. As usual in such cases, Yulia Antonovna passed over in silence the fact that he had inherited some of his traits from the Beklemishev side—the financier’s brother, Nikolai Mikhailovich, was a rather good engraver and had traveled widely and frequently in the Mediterranean.
When the Provisional Government came to power, Vasilii Mikhailovich, realizing that the end of his life of luxury was near at hand, decided to have one last fling. Without informing his wife, in the summer of 1917 he purchased a magnificent mansion in Moscow, designed by Schechtel and artistically furnished with his brother Nikolai’s assistance, and moved into it with his long-standing girlfriend, a singer from the Yar restaurant, whom he had previously only visited occasionally. Yulia Antonovna reacted to her husband’s decampment in predictable fashion: how could anyone exchange Petersburg for mercantile Moscow and a wife of noble blood (Yulia Antonovna’s own genealogy remained a mystery to Gleb) for a rootless gypsy girl?
It was strange, but this melodramatic affair, as well other stories about the Beklemishev family, had lodged firmly in Gleb’s memory—most likely because that was the time when he and the Svyatopolk-Chetvertinskys became close.
It was in their spacious and hospitable home that Gleb first saw Yulia. Despite the revolutionary times, the Svyatopolk-Chetvertinskys carried on living in the same grand style as before: they had an automobile and servants, and they did not begrudge themselves the expenditure of substantial sums of money on gourmandizing and other extravagances of various kinds, such as supporting an entire publishing house, at which the manager, editor, and—frequently—proofreader was Sergei Stanislavovich Chetvertinsky, who was five years older than Gleb and had dropped the aristocratic “Svyatopolk” from their double-barreled name, together with the aristocratic title of “prince,” when he was still a student. Sergei’s brother, Fyodor, was a linguist and a bit of a philosopher. They both thought about things in more or less the same way. They saw what was happening as a clarification of the foundations of Russian reality, the return of the current to its proper, direct course.
The Chetvertinskys combined Little Russian gourmandizing with a certain un-aristocratic and very definitely un-Petersburgian sociability. Gleb, who visited their home at first on publishing business (Sergei had invited him to manage the scholarly section of his enterprise), soon began to feel a distinct need for the kind of company—so intelligent, lively, and free, distinguished by its breadth of political and cultural outlook, comfortable but by no means lordly—that no other house could provide for him. Beklemishev’s grass widow, who also became a frequent visitor, had quite definite designs on Sergei.
Eventually Sergei confessed to Gleb that, for all of Yulia’s superficial attractiveness, and her sculptural proportions (these features were later passed on to her son), she palpably “lacked fire,” and not even her genealogical folly could compensate for the inner “brittleness” of a twenty-seven-year-old woman exhausted by her solitary state.
No serious relationship developed and Yulia Beklemisheva eventually disappeared (to surface later in the role of Vera’s mother-in-law). The fate of her runaway husband remained unclear. The former financier was apparently arrested by the Bolsheviks, and then released to set the banking system in order, after which he asked to be allowed to leave the country—at that point Vasilii Mikhailovich’s tracks had been lost to sight. His scandalous departure from the family probably saved the Beklemishevs from persecution. Perhaps other circumstances, unknown to Gleb, also intervened—the kind it was not done to speak of aloud.
But Gleb was not in the least surprised when he heard from Vera that after war was declared, Yulia Antonovna started turning the subject of conversation to how, at last, “Europeans will come and put things in order in Ingermanland, and now everything will be the way it used to be.” And he was even less surprised when, before the bombing had begun and the long-awaited “coming of the Europeans” had taken place, mother Beklemisheva made haste to evacuate the area, or simply ran away, while things were being “put in order,” to her relatives in the Volga region. The “coming of the Europeans” could take its course, but nothing must threaten Yulia Beklemisheva’s personal safety.
The city really was reverting to the wild, regressing to its primordial swampy state. Whether this was good or bad was hard to say. Fyodor Chetvertinsky, who remembered very clearly the first reversion to the wild that had occurred between 1919 and 1922, saw something cyclical in this, a reminder to the inhabitants of “Petrograd (vulgo Finnopolis),” as a certain nineteenth-century wit used to call the city, of the kind of ground on which it was constructed—after the manner of seismic shocks in tectonically unstable regions.
By virtue of his cast of mind, Fyodor Chetvertinsky himself was interested in linguistic ground (it’s all in the language!), the percolation of Indo-European meanings into the Finno-Ugrian substratum that was taking place even before the Russians, inspired by the vision of Peter I, decided to build their most important city here. Chetvertinsky’s intention was to fathom the objective laws of those semantic references to nature that had shaken the foundations of the beautifully constructed ensemble, the rhythm, as he called it in his own thoughts, of reminders “of what was here before.”
And what was here before?
A point of intersection between Finno-Ugrian and Baltic, Slavic and Germanic, a place where words and meanings were exchanged, and also, later, rites and goods, customs and faith.
Here the Hanseatic League, which included our Novgorod, became the Russian “crowd” and “folk,” which is to say kansa: trading gold was called kulta, sweet honey (the Russian myod— which refers to mead as well as the gift of the bees) had the affectionate name of mesi, and the name for the ruling prince— the kuning or “konung”—was kuningas. The family (Russian semya) or seim—the general council of the Balts—became heimo; our Russian word for “apple,” yabloko, shifted northward, sounded like apila, and signified “clover.” But the rye (rozh in Russian) or ruis, set seed as it ripened, and the leaves (Russian listy) of both trees and books—lehti—rustled in the wind, and any huge Finno-Ugrian ogor (“eel”—in Russian ugor), or ankerias in the local tongue, slithered through the waters of the long lake or järvi (Russian yar—“ravine”); or—if they were sea eels—through the shallow waters of the Baltic, to Yura, the slightly salty (suola!) meri (in Russian morie—“sea”). These were words understood by both sides, a common stratum in the foundations of the city, a solid layer in the boggy delta.
But in that case, Fyodor Stanislavovich said to himself, we should have eaten Finnish victuals. But which ones? Lingonberry jelly. Oh, blissful delicacy for the ravenously hungry! Lokh-salmon in its own sauce, graavi lohi, or—in the dialect more comprehensible to the Finn—lohi omassa liemessään? The recipe is simple: take the sliced fish and add salt, sugar, pepper, dill, and brandy (if there isn’t any, then Armenian cognac); marinate in this mixture for twelve hours.
“And there’s also a rather good salad, one of those that our cook used to prepare—rassol,” Chetvertinsky heard someone reply, and discovered that he was standing at the exit from the Public Library in Cathy’s Garden, beside a short, poorly shaved individual in a threadbare, dirty coat with a bundle of books under his arm. “You boil potatoes, carrots, and beetroot, add a pickled cucumber and an onion, chop everything finely and dress it with cream, vinegar, and sugar-beet syrup . . .”
“What’s Finnish about that? It’s simply our Russian vinegret.”
“The Finnish part is the herring.”
“Yes, interesting. Bye-bye!”—and Chetvertinsky set off across October 25 Prospect toward the boarded-up Yeliseev Grocery Store. Trying to suppress thoughts of food, in which even a simple little salad appeared as a magical, fairy-tale dish—potatoes! carrots! beetroot! onions! ravishing fish!—he started drawing together his fragmentary thoughts about the particular and the general, about the tectonic jousting of intellectual plates, colliding with each other in ways that set his head spinning and the ground sliding out from under his feet.
The family crest of the Chetvertinskys—of the Orthodox, primordial branch, which had never intermarried with the bloodthirsty Viking Riurikoviches or the Germanized Romanovs—was St. George on horseback, impaling the dragon writhing under his mount’s hooves. As a linguist, as a man given to generalizations, Fyodor Stanislavovich realized what stood behind this profound image preserved for centuries:
Lightning discharges of atmospheric
forces granting breath, dilating soul and spirit,
wreaking havoc with those other forces,
who get under the hooves of the fearless nomads,
kings of the fecund continent, mounted Kshatriyas,
those eternally subverting and invading,
poisoning consciousness with the accursed bane of “cultured”
resignation,
banishing us from the Eden of potent, vigorous life
(which is immortality, for it knows no end, and fears it not).
Doubt, inaction, and negation,
opposing honor, faith, action, fidelity.
And although Fyodor Stanislavovich’s own path was somewhat different—understanding, and through understanding, the conservation of wisdom and its millennial truths—he felt infinite respect for the Kshatriya-warrior, guarding the peace of the earth, and the noble-ploughman, sowing this earth with seeds and meanings. For him, everything that was happening, especially the war, was a stripping-bare of the eternal triad of wisdom-fearlessness-labor—the scouring away, like hard scum, of all else. We have no need for boundless doubting and questioning of the nature of things, if this nature is given to us in direct, lived experience and action. Let it be laid bare even further, down to the very foundations, through what is happening to us. Does not the temptation of the serpent lie in questioning what is already clear? Is this not the sin of Adam and Eve? We have taken it as the beginning of our history, we accept it—but even our history must come to an end sometime.
Let everything that is happening, Chetvertinsky continued thinking, lead to the release—with a thrust of a metaphorical spear—of the sun of light, the sun of truth. And the ruin, the destruction of my body, your body, our common body will not be terrible, for it will lay the foundation of a new world.
A sudden suspicion occurred to him: then is not the sacrifice of all who are now imprisoned in the besieged city, our destruction, precisely a ritual sacrifice, and therefore inescapable in the laying of a new foundation? And what is there to fear in this—after all, we’re all going to die anyway. “And I myself, completing and expressing the thoughts of my brother Sergei, and in a sense living out his life in our city—am not I, metaphorically at least, his murderer? Romulus sacrificing Remus in the name of the Fourth, eternal, and everlasting Rome?” As yet, Chetvertinsky didn’t have an answer to this final question.
The back of beyond, on Vasilievsky Island, where Vera lived, was of no interest to anyone but local residents even before the war, and since the air raids began, the Germans had taken no interest in it either, unwilling to make the effort to shell this sector on any kind of regular basis. Since public transport to the area was operating regularly and efficiently—the immense Leonov Tram Depot was close by—Vera’s “isolation” there could be regarded as a blessing.
At least, Gleb tried to persuade himself that this was so. Accustomed to solitude, after so many years, he even accepted the frequent separations from his beloved—which would have been unthinkable if Vera lived in the central area of the city— as inevitable. There was nothing left for Vera to do but console herself with the thought that she only needed to step onto the running board of the number 4 tram and, if all went well (i.e., if no air raid or artillery bombardment siren was sounded), in about twenty minutes she would be near Uritsky Square, at the very beginning of October 25 Prospect, where she could easily change to the number 24 or 34, and there in front of her would be the door of the dear, precious apartment on Labor Square, her genuine, not merely formal home, where her entire being reverberated to her happy heartbeat.
To imagine herself setting off for there, not in a jangling fish tank—clattering past the extinguished torch beacons at the Stock Exchange, across the Bridge of the Republic, with its always dazzling panorama of Peter the Great’s collegia buildings and the Admiralty, all greatly improved in appearance over this autumn, then passing the Hermitage, where Vera still worked—to imagine herself traveling there not in a tram but instead clattering her heels over the fine early snow for an hour and a half, along the lines, as the island’s streets were called, from west to east, turning to take a shortcut along Vera Slutskaya Street onto Proletarian Victory Prospect, and from there a right turn toward Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge—no, despite all the changes, this was something she could not yet do.
From Gleb’s notebook:
12 November 1941
The music of the blockade:
Tchaikovsky on the radio,
during the shelling and bombing—
a metronome (heartbeat), and then a fanfare (the all clear).
Today at the piano from early morning—
it’s Sunday, after all,
not a working day for many at the Zubov Institute—
to the ten-minute knocking of the metronome
(and exploding shells)—
I played the score of Askold Radziwiłł’s “Hymn to Perun.”
The “Hymn” once made a strong impression on me.
And Askold himself—skinny and nervous—
Astounded me with a titanic power,
which seemed to exist apart from his
physical being
and the absurd name
given to him
by his music-loving father,
in honor of his favorite opera—
fancy calling your son after Verstovsky’s Grave!
No, the composer of the “Hymn” resembled least of all,
that rowdy soldier,
killed in a feud by a Varangian prince,
but there was a palpable whiff
of Faustian harmonies,
something only part-Slavonic.
No surprise, then, that another Radziwiłł,
whose score for Faust
was approved by Goethe,
was a relative of his.
I remember too how Savromatov—
high-spirited, white-toothed,
savagely audacious—
and I dismantled this “Hymn”
into its component parts,
then screwed it back together
into the motley-colored “Sunthunder.”
Now that a genuine abyss
has gaped open within and without,
it’s not “Sunthunder,”
or the tectonic shift
of “Hymn to Perun” that moves me,
but a force
that exorcises the avalanche,
that draws the elements into itself
and transforms them
alchemically
into the gold of keen-edged feeling—
say, Tchaikovsky’s Manfred
sounding continuously from the speaker.
And where is N. N. Savromatov now?
Under a brilliant, sunny sky
in Tbilisi? Alma-Ata?
Composing martial music
far away from the war?
There has been no news from Nikander for a long time.
And Radziwiłł—is he in Paris?
In New York? In Rio de Janeiro?
When leaving, he played me in farewell
his newly composed pieces—
laconic in the Japanese style—
“Utterances” for an ensemble of soloists
(voice, three instruments—the set of instruments can vary).
It was the same “Hymn to Perun,”
compressed and desiccated, penned into little cells of sound.
Let us reply to that farewell performance,
not in notes, but in words
about our great and famous deeds,
also in the Japanese manner:
Snow falls, trolleybuses creep along
They have taken Klodt’s horses
down off the Anichkov Bridge.
A shell has smashed the railings
with the seahorses and nereids.
Enemy at the gates!
Strange,
before, I used to think I was an art historian,
but here I sit now, writing something like verse, a kind of music.
Mark believed
he was a writer,
he had a quite decent book at the printer
about Savromatov (I helped him with his research),
and now he turns out to be a colossal talent
in photography—incisive vision, the ability
to halt the moment as it becomes myth!
Khlebnikov of the visual image.
What is astounding is not this,
but the supreme excitation
of consciousness strained to the limit
in the vice grip of catastrophe.
15 November
I also ran into Mordovtsev (a relative of the novelist). He was walking along Garden Street with an aimless, smoldering look in his eyes, beard in disarray, and a substantially sunken stomach. Where to?—That’s obvious. It was a quiet day: there was almost no shelling. Mordovtsev was carrying a little lapdog, trembling with fright. “How are you getting on, Alexei Petrovich?” He started as he walked along and then, recognizing me, gave a slightly guilty smile: apparently in anticipation of a satisfying supper. Just to be on the safe side he stuffed the little dog inside his coat and kept pushing its head back in all the time as we talked.
“Getting by as best we can, Gleb Vladimirovich.”—“And how’s your research on Finno-Ugrian antiquity?” During the Finnish campaign Mordovtsev had discovered quite a lot of Moksha in himself and developed a keen interest in animism, and was hoping to make use of it after the Red Army’s successful advance on Helsingfors, where Mordovtsev believed that the post of Head of Folklore was awaiting him at the central university of the future Finnish republic of the USSR. At that same time, the winter of 1939–1940, he gave a paper at the Art Institute
about two Finno-Ugrian
heroes in the Russian epics—
Ilya Muromets, both lethargic and idle,
and reinforced in this by the Orthodox religion
(this was a pointed jibe),
and his fortunate rival Tövkse the pagan,
who settled among seven oaks
regarded as sacred by the Slavs,
taking possession of them
and thereby blocking Ilya the contemplative’s
route from the forested, Moksha, Oka-Don region
across the steppe to troubled Kiev,
while knocking the lummox-hero out of his saddle with a
mere whistle—
he was known to his Russian neighbors by the name
of Nightingale the Robber.
From the same lecture I learned that the Absheron Regiment
soldier, Platon Karataev,
calm, suffering without grief, warmhearted, unhasting,
is an incarnation of the Moksha world outlook
(the tartarized Karatais are related to the Mokshas),
that there were numerous Mokshas in Attila’s army
during the sacking of Rome,
that subsequently there was an alliance between Mokshas
and Volga Sarmatians,
and that the name of the Erzyans, close to the Mokshas,
goes back
to the Sarmatian arsan, meaning “courage.”
It turned out that the Russians’ rivals in the struggle for the
legacy
of the departing lords of the Eurasian plain—the
Sarmatians—
were Finno-Ugrians who whistled like nightingales
in the wild Ryazan (Erzyan),
Muromian,
Meshcheran,
Upper Volga forests,
which even Genghis Khan’s forces feared to enter,
and their wild, lawless whistle,
which somehow did not tally well with Alexei Petrovich—
reserved in manner, although giving free rein to his fantasies,
red-cheeked, life-loving, and law-abiding,
certainly more Karataev’s heir than the Nightingale’s—
this whistling was heard
even in the remote corners of the continent.
It had to be admitted that all this contained a fair dose of typically ingenious intelligentsia wit, but it struck a deep chord even in me. “You’re joking, of course!” my chance-met acquaintance said, frowning. “Oh, no indeed. Look how much invaluable material there is in everyday reality: little by little we are returning to the pre-Petrine paradise, to ‘the refuge of the wretched Finn.’”— “You know, I don’t have any time now. I hope we shall succeed in crushing the loathsome Finno-Germanic reptile that has reduced us . . .”—a gesture in the direction of the trembling dog’s head that had stuck itself out of his coat again—“. . . to such unheard-of, one might say, abomination. Farewell!” I was clearly distracting him from something he had been looking forward to for a long time. I refrained from raising the question of whether it was worthy for the descendants of the wild Nightingale Odikhmantievich to sink to the level of hunting domestic pets. “As you wish, Alexei Petrovich, I hope we shall see each other again.”—“We are all in God’s hands” (the recent former pagan crossed himself).
I am very hungry. Always, under any circumstances. Even making entries in this notebook doesn’t distract me from thoughts that are clearly obsessive.
I’m starving!