Among the Russians(42)
But in the intervals, suddenly sedate, they ambulated anti-clockwise arm in arm along the carpet of the upper vestibule. Now that the lights were up, their faces had returned to vacancy. One could not have guessed that five minutes earlier, released by the darkness into that wordless ritual of grace and strength, they had left behind all constraints and emptied their souls.
I visited Pushkin’s home in the city’s heart—a modest, first-storey apartment where the poet was brought back mortally wounded in January 1837, after fighting a duel against a French emigré with whom his wife was probably in love. He took a day and two nights to die, while gangrene spread in his wound. Then for two days the common people of St Petersburg flooded through the house in spontaneous tribute.
The place is still a shrine. Its guides speak in tones of hushed melancholy. His desk is scattered with papers as he left it; the waistcoat and gloves in which he duelled are devoutly preserved; the couch where he died remains.
Pushkin’s protean output embraced almost every literary form, and he created the very language of modern Russian poetry. It was he, too, who sensed some phantasmagoric strain in Leningrad. In The Bronze Horseman he conceived of Peter the Great’s statue waking to life and pursuing men through moonlit streets. The very size of Leningrad’s buildings and the resonant spaces between them, the long parks and only distantly contained squares, seem still to invite this nightmare. Now Pushkin has become national property. The number of his statues is exceeded only by those of Lenin. In every town through which he travelled a monument commemorates him. His liberal views were suspect in his day—he attacked serfdom—and many of his works were circulated in samizdat. So Communism has easily enrolled him as a rebel and posthumous ‘man of the people’. His dissipations (like those of Yesenin) are minimized by Soviet critics, and his bawdier writings are suppressed altogether. For no nation persecutes and honours its writers as the Russians do. They go on hounding and recreating them long after their deaths, and enclose them at last in a proud and myopic love.
In Dostoevsky’s apartment in a poorer quarter of the city, where the great novelist lived for two years until his death in 1881, the reshaping of the past continues. Much is made of his fake execution for alleged political intrigue against the tsars—he was reprieved as he faced the firing-squad—and of his exile to Siberia. But his deep religious and monarchical traditionalism is clouded over.
His home has been tenderly reconstituted from photographs, relics and memories. Before arriving, I had found it hard to envisage that tormented prophet living anywhere at all. But here were the books which he had read to his children, his tobacco box, his icon, a love-note from his daughter. And here the weak and faded-looking epileptic, working at night under the stimulus of countless cups of bitter tea, completed The Brothers Karamazov: an integration, perhaps, of his own divided soul.
Lost in the suburbs, I approached a building site where a gang of labourers was shovelling rubble into a cart, and tapped one of them on the shoulder to ask the way. Under its dented helmet the face which turned to mine was framed by long earrings and dashed with lipstick. She was a delicate blonde. The others turned too, chattering in soprano voices.
It was their slenderness, I suppose, which surprised me, since I had long grown used to those sad, androgynous-looking women who sweep the streets and mend the roads. Equality of the sexes is Marxist dogma. But on the building site in front of me, typically, the foreman and the crane-operator were men, and the labourers women.
I must have looked surprised at the blonde builder, because she was grinning at me. When I asked her why she undertook such work, she frowned and pulled off her helmet, releasing a torrent of hair. Momentarily I expected her to reiterate some Party slogan about building the Motherland.
But she said: ‘Why? Because it’s so damn boring staying at home, that’s why. What else would I do?’
I drove out with Lucia to the Yekaterinsky Palace, whose gold and azure body stretches above its parklands for a thousand feet. Lucia wielded unashamed blat. At her touch doorkeepers and museum directors unbent, and we entered parts of the palace usually unseen. It was nearly gutted during the war, but was being restored with the finest and most accurate materials. No other nation on earth has spent so much care and expertise in preserving its aristocratic heritage as Russia has. We walked through an enfilade of dazzling rooms. Almost everything we looked at was new, but the illusion was perfect, so scrupulous, so rich and so sensitive was their resurrection.
But in the nearby palace of Pavlovsk, the baroque funfair of the mid-eighteenth century grinds to a decorous halt. The Yekaterinsky Palace flaunts it charms to the sky, but Pavlovsk is a gentleman (a proper little dacha, said Lucia delightedly). It hangs back in the English informality of its gardens. Here, among temples and pavilions and a river cultured into canals and lakes, the emperor Paul held tedious court with his parsimonious wife—and Lucia and I were trapped by a thunderstorm. Slowly at first, then heavier, the rain came filtering through the thick weft of oak leaves above us, plastered our hair and dribbled down our cheeks. Finally it settled into a long, disconsolate roar. It hit us in huge drops out of the trees and seemed to fall on unprotected skin.
Lucia, in a blouse already drenched, was smiling all over her face. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, ‘it’s fun.’ And when the tempest was at its height, with her hair flattened and mascara bleeding comically down her cheeks, she shouted like a schoolgirl: ‘Race you to the car!’