Among the Russians(22)
But she did not listen. She was, in her way, as certain of her truth as an early Bolshevik or an Orthodox bishop (Category Three). Often silences fell between us. Much of the time I felt that she was not in my company at all, nor I in hers. She would close her eyes for long, still minutes, smiling crookedly. It was as if she were swimming underwater—her sustaining habitat—and rose only occasionally to a stratosphere whose harsh air she could not breathe. I must have moved strangely in and out of her subaqueous world. I don’t know how she conceived of me. She only fixed me with the mild, half-focused gaze of a dreamer, and although she spoke so much of happiness there was in this look something witheringly sad and lost. Once she murmured: ‘I can’t talk to adults, I can only talk to children,’ and once: ‘I don’t know who I am.’ And she was still afraid: afraid that my car might be noticed outside her apartment block, afraid to be seen in a restaurant with a foreigner.
In retrospect, she amazed me. Her mysticism, in its denial of the material world, was the purest negation of Communism I ever met. It was also, of course, her way of coping with her brutalized past. She believed herself liberated by it; I felt that it had killed her.
It was, however false or true, the ultimate protest.
3. Early Heartlands
THE WHOLE SKY was filled with rain that August—rain which sieved down in gusts over the roads, blew between the cliff-like apartment blocks and whirled and howled across the fields. It swelled those remote tributaries of the Volga which dawdle down from unnoticeable uplands north of Moscow, and followed me eastward in thinning gasps, then faded away. I drove through the rain-polished light of an invisible sun. A hundred miles east of Moscow, near the town of Vladimir, the sky cracked open into floating lakes of blue, and I entered the watery plains of the Zalesye, the ‘Land Beyond the Forests’, a country of flax and potato farming. It looked gentle and poor.
These lands became the womb of a new Russia in the twelfth century, after the southern princedom of Kiev lost its hold. For seventy years Vladimir itself assumed the mantle of Kiev, before Tartar invasion ravaged them both. The town’s heart is mellow and intimate. It covers a long headland above the valley where the Klyazma and Nerl rivers meet—a green mound blossoming with domes. Many ages of building are sprinkled here—low-built houses in commingled stucco, brick and stone. The drums of a twelfth-century fortified gate loom in the main street, and ramparts of grass-glazed earth heave under old trees.
Vladimir became the premier city of Russia when Andrei the God-Fearing, Grand Prince of Kiev, established it as his princedom and relegated the first and glorious capital to second place. Already, for many years, people had been drifting away from Kiev towards the bleak woodlands of the north. Here, in Russia’s new heartland, arose the cities of her future: Vladimir, Suzdal, Novgorod, Moscow. The trade-softened world of Kiev, which looked towards Byzantium and the Mediterranean, was never to recover.
Andrei was an austere, half-Turkic tyrant. But he left Vladimir beautiful. He built the Assumption Cathedral, as lovely as any in the land, and commemorated his first son, killed in battle by the Bulgars, with a tiny church of near-perfect proportions, dropped like a stone tear on the banks of the Nerl. But in 1174 Andrei was murdered by his nobles in collusion with his wife. His body was thrown to ravening dogs before being retrieved by his court jester. Then, in that familiar tradition by which the Russians revere their powerful rulers, however monstrous, he was canonized and entombed in his great cathedral. His murderers were hunted down, and their corpses, sealed in tarred coffins, were set afloat in the marshes of the Nerl, where they may still be heard groaning on winter nights.
Andrei’s successor Vsevolod—called Big-Nest on account of his myriad children—is remembered in Vladimir for the Dmitriyevsky Cathedral. Tall, almost windowless, it echoes the austere beauty of Andrei’s Cathedral of the Assumption nearby. But whereas the walls of the Assumption rise stark in the glow of their stone, those of the Dmitriyevsky are carved with a seething cacophony of beasts and men. Lions with mask-like, furious faces, rampaging horses, peacocks, demons, eagles—a whole oriental bestiary scrambles and swarms round the windows, dangles between the half-columns, writhes up the dome. High in the pale masonry, Alexander the Great is carried up to heaven by a herd of griffins; King David fingers his harp before an Orphic cluster of listening animals, and I dimly discerned Hercules at work on the Nemean lion. On another wall Vsevolod Big-Nest presents a newly-born son to his family, which attends him in a Soviet-looking queue; while all about them clamours a tempest of vomiting dragons, double-bodied lions, tree-chewing goats and symbolic lambs.
But lower down, the storm is suddenly stilled. Between the half-columns apostles and prophets stand on little cushion-shaped clouds or have levitated to the tops of sculptured trees. They are emblems rather than men. They dangle censers and hold up texts. Together with the pagan hurricane above them, they form a microcosm of the universe of their time: past and present, dark and sacred, seen and unseen.
The nearby Cathedral of the Assumption produces an utterly different effect. For two and a half centuries, until long after Vladimir’s power had passed to Moscow, this was the foremost cathedral in Russia, where her Grand Dukes were crowned. Poised on the plateau’s edge, it overlooks a jig-saw of forest and pasture, where sluggish rivers creep and wander. It is built in the same living white limestone as the Dmitriyevsky, but is grandly beautiful. Its walls rise clean and unearthly to a gold efflorescence of domes shaped like the helms of Slavic warriors. To north and south its seamless facades are decorated only by a few carvings of sleepy lions and women, which look out enigmatically over the rain-soaked valleys. Sheathed in white and helmeted in gold, it emanates a kind of Parsifal purity.