Among the Russians(53)

We ate a simple supper, and went on talking between spoonfuls of unboiled jam—a Russian speciality—and cups of tea. His family joined us. His open-faced wife seemed half his age; his daughter had inherited the Pasternak physiognomy, and promised to be beautiful. But eventually our talk would always return to his father, to his poetry, and to his translations of Shakespeare which had been his only true way of utterance during the purges of the thirties. It was in the European tradition, Zhenya said, that Russia’s true civilization had always lain. To the east loomed Asia, the Mongol memory, barbarism. To the west sprang the fount of humanity, the world in which he placed ‘Pasternak’ as he called him (never ‘my father’), and looked to the future.

We wandered up his drive in the darkening evening. His wife’s voice sounded softly through a bedroom window, reading Pushkin’s fairy tales to their daughter. Beyond the gate the hill where his father was buried had blurred into dusk. (‘Hundreds of people go there—the grave’s covered in flowers even in the worst weather.’) Beside us, in the big house, lights were glowing behind drawn curtains. ‘My brother’s widow lives there now,’ Zhenya said. ‘The house has stayed with our family, rented to us by the Writers’ Union. It’s a strange situation. It’s as if they’re waiting for the time when Pasternak will be reinstated. Then, I believe, the house will become a museum in his memory.’

So Boris Pasternak remains in a limbo somewhere between canonization and disgrace. Soon, for the first time, the journal Novy mir was to publish an article purely in his praise, without reference to his ‘mistakes’—an early sign that he will eventually be rehabilitated through the perverse patriotism by which Russia embraces its choicest men after the embarrassment of their living truth is safely gone.

When I turned south next day, my road was scattered with the memories of writers—Turgenev, Tolstoy, Lermontov—who belonged to the European family of which Zhenya had spoken. The artist in Russia becomes either saint or sacrifice. Above all the writer, inhabiting his private nexus of ideas and freedoms, receives the accolade of persecution. Even the long-dead have had to be redefined, and the nineteenth century giants drummed into line as prophetic Marxists.

‘My belief in a future justice is unshakable’—the words are not Lenin’s but Tchaikovsky’s, lifted out of context and inscribed beneath the composer’s bust in his house at Klin. Soviet visitors pass this absurdity without a smile, barely noticing that their beloved composer—in fact a fervent monarchist—has been shepherded into the ideological fold. Neither his morbid neurosis, nor his homosexuality, are ever mentioned.

But when I stopped in the car-park before Tolstoy’s home of Yasnaya Polyana, more than a hundred miles south of Moscow, the seething crowds reminded me of that Russian passion for literature which can fill a Moscow sports stadium before a poetry reading. The house stood in a country of smooth valleys. Beyond its gate-towers, which had filled the low-born Chekhov with such panic that he turned back from visiting Tolstoy, it rose from its trees in two long storeys skirted by verandahs and balconies—a rambling, habitable mansion of brick and wood. I walked between small lakes shining among willows, and up through copses and orchards. At the entrance families were posing before cameras. They looked solemn and proud, as if a photograph bestowed on them the numen of the place. Inside, we covered our shoes with huge, obligatory slippers, as in a mosque, and shuffled platypus-like over the wooden floors.

Tolstoy spent seventy of his eighty-two years here. The place was his fatherland, he said, his quintessential Russia. The wooden wing in which he was born was dismantled long ago; he sold it off while serving in the Crimean War, and lost the proceeds during two days’ gambling in a God-forsaken artillery battery near Sebastopol. But the house and the wandering parklands are redolent of the childhood of his Recollections, and of the impoverished relations who wove an eccentric family around the high-strung child. Despotic, motherly or half-mad aunts and housekeepers, smelling of resin and urine, mingled in his remembrance with serfs gossiping around the stoves or snoringly asleep in out-of-the-way rooms, with monks, pilgrims and distant cousins who came and went—or stayed for ever. His parents both died in his childhood, leaving themselves perfect in his imagination—his father debonair, genial; his mother (who died before he was two) a powerful and idealized silhouette, ever-loving. But in her place intruded the memory of a fantastical grandmother. Seated in a high-sprung yellow cabriolet harnessed to two serfs, she would ride among hazel trees ordering the footmen to bend the choicest boughs for her picking; and at night, when one of the children shared her bedroom, she lay propped among pillows before her guttering icon-lamp, while a blind servant droned stories to her, until she merged into the dreams of the infant Tolstoy as a parchment-yellow queen on a throne of snow.

In half the rooms of the house tourist guides now declaim in reverential parrot. It is filled with the artefacts of Tolstoy’s maturity and old age: the painted table at which his wife transcribed the endlessly-corrected manuscripts of Anna Karenina from his near-illegible handwriting; the low chair and table where he wrote, his myopic gaze hugging the page; his iron bed; his books—some in ancient Greek, Hebrew, Tartar, Arabic—covered with crayon notes; the thick walls and double doors of the vaulted chamber where he started War and Peace.

Gawping, expectant, we trudged from library to bedroom to study, as if they must yield up some essence of the titan who inhabited them. But they were all but immaterial to him. Ghosts. He grew to hate their luxury, the place itself, his hysterical wife—all but the trees, the memories. A bee-like murmur of sympathy arose from the visitors at the sight of the coarse blouse and floppy hat which he had worn in emulation of his peasants. More than any serf, he wanted to be a man of the people; until at last, in old age, feeling his life a welter of domestic failure and moral dissimilitude, existing at hopeless odds with his own philosophy, he fled his house altogether one night, and died of pneumonia in the stationmaster’s cottage of a tiny village.