Among the Russians(14)
These men reigned, as their first Communist successors did, convinced of their divinely ordained mission, and of the degeneracy of other peoples. When they died they were entombed in the Cathedral of Saint Michael the Archangel, lying cheek-by-jowl in white sarcophagi. Above them on wall and pillar, their frescoed portraits still gaze with hieratic sadness out of an age both uneasily present and irretrievably remote. Their obsession with size is perfectly familiar. Beside the great belfry the hugest bell in the world lies useless and unhoisted, weighing over two hundred tons and splintered by too-quick cooling in an accidental fire. Nearby an elephantine cannon—the largest calibre barrel on earth—gapes northward in hollow megalomania. It was never fired.
Familiar, too, is the jingoistic disdain yet uneasy admiration accorded to foreign nations. Half Cathedral Square is the work of Italian architects, and the czars themselves were crowned on the ivory-pannelled throne of Western craftsmen. Yet at state receptions the tsar sat within reach of two jugs of water and a towel, with which he cleansed his hands after the touch of European ambassadors. Far into the seventeenth century his soldiers, mounted on unshod geldings, fought in dripping chain mail and helmets spired like Burmese pagodas, wielding poleaxes and six-pronged battle-maces or firing Tartar bows and arrows.
In the vaulted dimness of their chambers, imperial banquets proceeded with bucolic ceremonial. More than seven hundred nobles and ambassadors might feast off gold plate at one session, attended by a legion of servants who changed their apparel three times in the course of a meal. The whole court, with the baptised scions of the Tartar kings, sat at monastic benches in silk caftans or brocade and velvetcoats lined with sable and polar fox. Avuncular beards gushed over cloth-of-gold stomachs. A gurgle of malmsey and Greek wine sounded in torchlit recesses. Then the boyars’ greedy fingers fumbled for the knives and spoons which dangled unhygienically at their girdles, and the tsar himself would ritually poke the roast swan’s meat and despatch succulent joints to those whom he favoured. Drunken oblivion was the end and purpose of all feasting. ‘For making people tipsy is here an honour and sign of esteem,’ wrote the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire ruefully, ‘The man who is not put under the table holds himself ill respected.’
Again and again, into the borrowed Byzantine forms of a building or a ceremony, something mystesrious and illogical intrudes. St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square was built by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate his capture of the Tartar stronghold of Kazan in 1552, and belongs to a world of peasant woodcarving. At first I wondered if it were not merely a jumble of lunatic baubles. But it is, in fact, immensely complex, with a turbulent harmony of its own. Legend has it that Ivan the Terrible put out the eyes of the architects who conceived it, so that they should never repeat such a building. It emanates a mad brilliance.
The tent-like spire of its central shrine bursts upward clean through the canons of Western architecture, and around it the domes of eight smaller chapels are tossed into the air on a farrago of drums. It is less like a composite cathedral than a camp of Tartar yurts around the pavilion of its khan. The taller domes rise from angular turrets on a rumpus of buttresses, the lesser go twirling up in overlapping tiers of blind windows, then taper to stalks from which the cupolas explode into bulbous turbans topped by golden crosses. They twist and bounce and multiply in bursts of architectural merriment. Some are striated in barley-sugar clusters, others ribbed like cantaloup melons or coils of whipped cream, still others armoured in pineapple spikes, orange and green, red and white. It is the work of inspired peasants—a petrified juggling feat in which all the balls are in the air at once. Classical form is submerged by a rush of colour and detail. A hundred fanciful shapes and pigments jostle and yell. Yet all this sky-searching riot implies no unease, no Gothic hankering. Rather the cathedral is like some organic growth, a fantastical steppeland plant which is not reaching to the heavens at all, but is upside down—bulbs and roots waving in sky-blue soil.
Olga had lost her husband five years before, and lived with a bored daughter in one of those faceless apartment blocks which ring the northern suburbs of Moscow. A chance introduction from England led me to her doorbell, which I pressed with misgiving. She had dressed up to meet me: a squat, middle-aged widow. In my memory her face has now resolved into a few exaggerated landmarks—lipstick, spectacles, black cropped hair. Even at the time, her features struck me with the empty emphasis of a clown.
She had a problem knowing what to do with me. We sat in uncomfortable chairs at either end of a sideboard, and sipped thimblefuls of brandy with genteel murmurings about life. By Soviet standards she had clearly once been rich. Her husband’s collection of icons glowed on one wall in isolated distinction. The apartment she inhabited belonged to a co-operative block—an unusual system. She would have paid for the ownership of her flat in three years’ time, she said. But since her husband’s death, life had been hard; now she worked in the local library—for money, and for something to do.
She was intensely nervous with me, as if I were posing her unspoken questions and embarrassments. Her painted toes wriggled in their sandals. Occasionally she would pick chocolate truffles from a box between us, replace them; or toy with some matches, but did not smoke. She was typical, I later felt, of a small minority of Muscovites who tried to live with Western refinement but had neither the means nor the aptitude. The whole apartment spelt a comfortless pretension. A strip of carpet dribbled down the room’s centre between chunks of modern furniture, while a chandelier and some ormolued lamps lit the surrounding bareness with baleful affectation.