1 Cambridge (Essay, 1921)*

There’s a lovely saying: abroad, even the stars are tinny. Isn’t that true? Nature may be beautiful overseas, but it is not ours, and we find it soulless and artificial. One needs to gaze at it persistently to begin to feel it and love it, whereas at first something of the greenhouse wafts from the unfamiliar trees, and all the birds seem as if on springs, and the sunset looks no better than a rather dry watercolor. So I felt when I rode into this provincial little English town, where, like a great soul in a small body, an ancient university lives its proud life. The gothic beauty of its numerous buildings (called colleges) stretches gracefully upward; gold clock-faces glow atop precipitous towers; through gaps in age-old gates decorated with stuccoed crests, rectangles of lawn gleam sunnily green; while opposite these very gates modern shopwindows have their multicolored displays, blasphemous as colored-pencil doodles sketched in the margins of a sacred book.

Back and forth along the narrow streets dart bicycles covered in mud, ringing their bells, motorcycles cackle, and, wherever you look, all around swarm the kings of Cambridge town—the students: their dress ties flicker like striped crossing barriers, their extraordinarily crumpled, sinuous trousers flicker in all shades of gray, from whitish and cloud-colored to wild dark-gray trousers wonderfully matching the color of the neighboring walls.

In the mornings, grabbing notebooks and regulation cloaks in a heap, these doughty lads hurry to their lectures, making their way single file into the lecture halls, sleepily listen to the mumblings of a wise mummy on the rostrum, and, awakening suddenly, signal their approval through the pulsating stamping of their feet when, amid the dull flow of academic speech, a flash of wit splashes like a fish. After lunch, pulling on their lilac, green, and blue jackets, they fly off like crows in peacock feathers to the plush fields where balls will thwack until dusk; or to the river, which flows with Venetian languor past the gray and tawny walls and cast-iron lattices—and then Cambridge empties for a while. The burly policeman yawns, leaning against a lamppost, two old women in funny black hats prattle at the crossing, a shaggy dog snoozes in a rhombus of sunlight….By five o’clock everything wakes up again, crowds throng to the tea shops, where toxically bright pastries glisten on every little table like fly-agaric mushrooms.

Sometimes I sit in a corner and look out on all of these smooth, no doubt very pleasant faces, but somehow always reminding me of a shaving soap advertisement, and then I suddenly become so bored, so weary, that I almost want to howl to break the windows….

There’s a kind of glass wall between them and us Russians. They have their own round and solid world, like a scrupulously colored-in globe. Their souls lack that inspired whirlwind, that throb, that radiance, that dancing frenzy, that anger and tenderness, which carries us, God knows, to what heavens and what abysses. We have moments when the clouds are on our shoulders, the sea knee-high—and our souls roam free! To an Englishman this is incomprehensible, novel, perhaps even alluring. If he does get drunk and riotous, his riotousness is banal and hearty, so that even the observers of order look at him and simply smile, knowing he will never cross a certain line. And on the other hand, not even the headiest drunkenness will make him flow with feeling, bare his chest, throw his hat on the ground….At any time signs of frankness jar him. You might be speaking to a friend about this or that, about strikes and steeplechases, when you ingenuously blurt out that you feel you’d give every drop of blood to see again some bog near Petersburg—but to utter such thoughts is indecent; he’ll look at you as if you’d whistled in church.

It turns out that in Cambridge there’s a whole list of the simplest things that by tradition a student must not do. You shouldn’t, for example, take a rowboat on the river—hire a punt or raft; you shouldn’t wear a hat in the street—the city is ours after all, there’s no need to stand on ceremony; you shouldn’t shake people’s hands, and God forbid you greet a professor—he’ll only smile confusedly, mumble something, stumble. There is no shortage of these rules, and a newcomer will inevitably put his foot in it from time to time. If a wild foreigner nonetheless behaves in his own way, at first people will marvel at him—what an oddball, a barbarian—but then they will start to avoid him, to not recognize him on the street. Sometimes, it is true, a kind soul with a weakness for exotic creatures will come your way, but he will only approach you in a secluded spot, fearfully looking around him, and, having satisfied his curiosity, will disappear forever. This is why, at times, your heart swells with sorrow, feeling that it won’t find a true friend here. And then everything seems dull: the eyeglasses of the nimble old woman whose room you rent, and the room itself, with its dirty-red sofa, gloomy fireplace, absurd little vases on their absurd little shelves, and the sounds rising from the street, the cry of the newspaper boys: Paypa! Paypa!…

But one can get used to anything, adapt, and learn to notice beauty in what’s strange. Wandering on a smoky spring evening around the town, becalmed, you sense that there exists, beyond the speckle and bustle of our life, an altogether different life in Cambridge, the life of beguiling bygones. You know its large, gray eyes pensively and dispassionately look upon the caprices of a new generation, just as a hundred years ago they looked upon that limping, effeminate student Byron, and on his tamed bear, who remembered all too well his native pine forest and that cunning little peasant in fabled Muscovy.

Eight centuries have flown by: the Tatars swooped down like locusts; Ivan thundered; turmoil stirred across old Rus’, like a portentous dream; and then new tsars rose up like golden mists; Peter toiled, hacked with abandon and emerged from the forest into the great wide world;—and here all the while these walls, these towers, stood immutable. And in just the same way, year in, year out, smooth-faced youths gathered to the chiming of the bells in the dining halls, where, just as today, rays of light would stream through the stained glass of the high windows, daubing the tiles with pale amethysts, and these youths would joke around in just the same way, except perhaps that their talk would be fierier, their beer headier….I think about this, as I stroll along the hushed streets on a smoky spring evening. I come out onto the river. I stand for a long time on a little pearl-gray arched bridge, and not far off, another little bridge just like it forms a complete circle with its crisp, charming reflection. Weeping willows, old elms, festively luxuriant chestnut trees rise up here and there, as though embroidered in green silk on the canvas of a fading and tender sky. It smells faintly of lilacs and slimy water….And now bells begin to chime through the whole city….Round, silvery sounds, distant, near, drift by, intercrossing in the sky; and, having hung like a magic net above the crenellated towers for a few moments, they disperse, melt lingeringly, near, distant, into the narrow, misty lanes, into the beautiful night sky, into my heart….And, gazing at the tranquil water, where subtle reflections bloom like designs on porcelain, I begin to think still more deeply, about much, about the whims of fate, about my homeland, and about the fact that my best memories grow older every day, and so far nothing can replace them….