For
almost my entire life, these stories have exerted a powerful pull on
me. When I was growing up, Russia was not only closed, and therefore
mysterious, it was presented as our antithesis: We were free, the
Russians were oppressed; we were good, the Russians were evil. When I
got older and started to read, the situation became more complicated,
because it was from Russia that the best and most intense literature
came: Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,”
Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman.” What sort of a country was this where the
souls were so deep and the spirit so wild? And why was it there
that the thought of the profound inherent injustice of the class
society was transformed into action, first by the revolution of 1917 and
then by the proletariat’s 70-year dictatorship? And why did a beautiful
story about the equality of all human beings end in horror, inhuman
brutality and misery?
Russia
is still an enigmatic country to me. Every day there is news from
Russia — we hear about Putin, about his imprisoned dissidents, about his
meddling in the elections of his rivals — all of it serving the notion
that “Russia” is a singular, comprehensible, clear-cut entity. But what
do the people who live inside of that entity think? What is “Russia” to
them, what are the stories they tell themselves? A hundred years after
the revolution, 25 years after the fall of Communism?
For
years, I have wanted to see Russia with my own eyes, to meet some of
the people who live inside of that entity, to find out what they think
it means to be Russian. That is why, early one morning in October, I
found myself driving from Moscow to Ivan Turgenev’s estate, accompanied
by a photographer and a translator. If I wanted to see what life in
Russia was like, unfiltered by news stories, I couldn’t think of any
better place to start than Turgenev’s world, the countryside that formed
the setting for his first book, “A Sportsman’s Sketches.”
Published
in 1852, “A Sportsman’s Sketches” is a collection of simple stories
about a hunter’s encounters as he wanders around the woods. There is
nothing here of Dostoyevsky’s psychological and emotional savagery and
depth, nor of Tolstoy’s epic complexity or his ability to encapsulate an
entire society with a few strokes; these stories are in all ways
modest, aimless even. A man strolls through the forest with a shotgun
over his shoulder, he exchanges a few words with someone he happens to
meet, possibly shoots a bird or two, possibly spends the night in a barn
on the way home — and that’s it, that’s the whole story. And yet the
book numbers among the greatest works of world literature, largely
because Turgenev gets so close to the world he is describing, the
Russian society of the 1840s. His characters and descriptions do not
lead to anything beyond themselves, they are not in themselves part of a
greater sequence of events, they stand apart from everything — except
the specific time and the place. And it is from there that we experience
the world.
The
landscape we drove through was flat and monotonous, the sky a pale
gray. Sometimes we would pass a rundown gas station, sometimes a small
town would come into view, sometimes the forest would open up into
fields. Then, among all the trees, a little park suddenly turned up on
the right. I saw a black wall and a flame burning.
“What was that?” I said.
“It’s
just a war memorial,” the translator said. Her name was Oksana Brown;
she was a young Russian news producer who sometimes worked as a fixer.
“Oh, no, this is perfect. I want to see it,” I said.
“There
are monuments like this in just about every town in Russia,” she said,
not seeming to understand why I wanted to stop here of all places.
The
photographer, Lynsey Addario, walked around the little park taking
photos on her own while Brown and I stood in front of the black marble
wall and watched the flame fluttering in the breeze. To our right,
another wall, etched with portraits of soldiers, stood next to a
green-painted cannon, its barrel pointing at the gray sky.
“What does the inscription say?” I asked.
“ ‘Your
name is unknown, but your heroic deed is immortal,’ ” Brown said.
“ ‘Eternal honor to the heroes who lost their lives in the fight for the
freedom and independence of our homeland during the Great Patriotic
War.’ ”
Only Westerners, she explained, referred to it as the Second World War.
As
we pulled out onto the road again, I thought about how affecting the
simple flame of the memorial had been. It had rendered the forest
ancient, and on the dead soldiers it had conferred a sort of
immortality, drawing them into the eternal ranks of the fallen. In
reality, death was small and dirty, nothing to aspire to, nothing to
celebrate. But with the aid of this memorial, death had been elevated
from the real world into the ideal. The flame was the agent of this
elevation; it was bound to grimy materiality but reached up into the
pure ether; it moved as if alive, but it was dead.
Gradually, the countryside
became more rolling and then, suddenly, as we reached the top of a
hill, it changed completely: The forest, which for hours had formed a
fence on either side of the road, opened up onto broad, beautiful
plains, at the ends of which walls of trees in all the shades of autumn
marched toward the horizon, and the sky seemed to pull upward, flooding
the scene with light.
So
Turgenev hadn’t exaggerated the beauties of his childhood world, I
thought. Because this was definitely his world that we had come to, this
was the countryside that he had ridden through as a young man and later
described in “A Sportsman’s Sketches” — and it was only half an hour
later that we turned off the highway and drove along a bumpy country
road that brought us first to a village, then to a large enclosed estate
with a parking lot and various small office buildings.
There
was no one around, and it was very quiet. The clouds hung low in the
sky; the air was heavy with moisture and seemed to stop all sound in
midflight. In one corner stood a stone chapel, the feet of its walls
thick with mildew, and about a hundred yards farther on lay what had to
be the main house. I was expecting something grand and monumental,
something like an English stately home, because the Turgenevs were a
noble family, but this was a low, wooden house, painted violet and
covered in intricate carvings.
It aroused no feelings, no breath of history.
I
tried to picture Turgenev coming through the door and striding across
to where we stood, but it was impossible to associate him with us, then
with now.
We
followed a young, bearded and bespectacled guide who explained that
most of the original buildings had been destroyed: These were exact
replicas. Some objects from the writer’s home, though, were exhibited in
the rooms of the house next door to the main building. There were
tables and chairs, pictures and knickknacks, shelves lined with books.
But even though these things were authentic, they did not speak; they
simply sat there mutely, presenting the past.
The
only items that held any real interest were the gun, powder pouch and
game bag that Turgenev used on his hunting trips. They made me think of
Ernest Hemingway, who was inspired by Turgenev’s hunting sketches when
writing “The Nick Adams Stories,” of how he strove to achieve that same
effortless intensity, and may even have done so, but never quite matched
Turgenev’s receptiveness to the world, because he himself stood in the
way of it. And there was a sofa that Tolstoy had sat on; not only were
these two great writers contemporaries, they lived only hours away from
each other. At first they were great friends, but Tolstoy gradually grew
to hate Turgenev and even went so far as to challenge him to a duel.
Turgenev observed the peasants but did not become as directly involved
in their lives as Tolstoy, who delved deeper and deeper into his search
for the essence of the Russian soul, not only practicing the principles
of simplicity and poverty but also holding them up as the ideal for all.
We
walked into the great park outside, where rows of trees ran straight
and long until they met the disorderly forest. There was no one there
but us. The damp, chill air hung motionless between the tree trunks.
“Are there always so few people here?” I asked the guide.
He shook his head vigorously.
“No,
not at all. It’s usually swarming with schoolchildren, they come here
from all over Russia. And next year is the bicentennial of Turgenev’s
birth. That’s why we’re renovating the place. We’ll have lots of
visitors then. But today’s Monday, and it’s October. ...”
He stopped beside a tall tree with a low fence around it.
“This oak tree was planted by Turgenev himself,” he said.
To the right of the tree stood what looked like gravestones.
“What are those?” I asked, pointing to them.
“Those are the graves of soldiers,” the guide told me.
“Here?”
“Yes. They were fighting the Germans during the war, and they fell here.”
When
we drove away shortly afterward, it was the image of those graves that
stayed with me, maybe because the violence they represented had seemed
so unexpected there, in the isolated world of the museum. That and the
two horses we saw lying in the grass, a mare and her foal, black and
glossily beautiful in the moist air.
Before the revolution,
Russia was largely an agrarian society; at the turn of the 20th
century, four out of five Russians were peasants. They were poor,
uneducated, superstitious and illiterate. In many places, the way of
life had hardly changed since the Middle Ages. Leon Trotsky begins his
“History of the Russian Revolution” with the observation that “the
fundamental and most stable feature of Russian history is the slow tempo
of her development, with the economic backwardness, primitiveness of
social forms and low level of culture resulting from it.” In “A People’s
Tragedy,” the British historian Orlando Figes describes a primitive
world in which every aspect of life was governed by a relentless
conformity: Everyone wore the same clothes, everyone’s hair was cut in
the same way, everyone ate from the same bowl, everyone slept in the
same room. “Modesty had very little place in the peasant world,” Figes
writes. “Toilets were in the open air” and “urban doctors were shocked
by the peasant custom of spitting into a person’s eye to get rid of
sties, of feeding children mouth to mouth and of calming baby boys by
sucking on their penis.”
These
depictions of the Russian peasantry in the 19th century as backward and
primitive are not untrue, but they are viewed from a very great
distance and are extremely generalized. Distance, of course, is
necessary; it is the historian’s aid to understanding and explaining
social development, just as it is the politician’s aid to dealing with
social problems. But a similar distance is what allowed the Bolsheviks
to destroy the structure of their society without a thought for the
hundreds of thousands and, eventually, millions who died in the process,
because these were not real people, only “peasants,” viewed from so
high above that all individuality was erased. And if the overall
statistics improved — well, then it had all been worth it.
“A
Sportsman’s Sketches” shows the culture Trotsky and Figes describe, but
from the inside, with no distance. One of the best stories in the book
is about a man returning from the hunt who loses his way and then, in
the darkness, spies two fires burning in a field far below him. It turns
out that a group of boys are camped out, minding the horses. They lie
around the fires, telling stories to pass the time, most of them tales
of supernatural occurrences. Turgenev brings these boys to life, each
with his own distinct appearance and personality, and there is something
deeply moving about the way he portrays them; he takes them so
seriously, according them dignity, and the stories they tell one
another, there in the night, are in themselves incandescent. This is not
the superstitious, reactionary peasant class of the revolutionaries and
the historians; these are five boys, each with a life of his own, woven
from the threads of their language, their culture and the camaraderie
of their campfire.
“A
Sportsman’s Sketches” was by no means a political statement, yet it had
great political impact in Russia in the 1850s, possibly precisely
because, lacking a political or literary agenda, it showed life for what
it was and not for what it symbolized.
At
that time, serfdom still prevailed in Russia, which is to say that the
nobility not only owned the villages on their land, they also owned the
peasants who lived in them. It was, in other words, a form of slavery.
Turgenev’s book did much to stoke the fast-growing criticism of serfdom,
which was abolished nine years later, in 1861, by the progressive Czar
Alexander II. He was assassinated 20 years later, his death witnessed by
his son and grandson, who would become the next two czars, Alexander
III and Nicholas II. It is not unreasonable to imagine that his
assassination was instrumental in turning both of them into reactionary,
anti-liberal autocrats, so opposed to any sort of reform and so intent
on gagging all opposition that eventually revolution became inevitable.
It was dark
when we found the exact spot where Turgenev’s story about the boys took
place. It was called Bezhin Meadow, and it was an old woman who pointed
it out to us. She was dressed in a skirt and head scarf, and she was
working all alone in the middle of the field, gleaning corn from the
stubble, a wheelbarrow by her side.
“Would you like to speak to her?” Addario asked from the back seat.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
“Well, I’d like to take some shots of her anyway,” she said.
Brown
and Addario got out and stepped over to the fence. Brown said something
in Russian; the woman replied. Suddenly I realized that I had to speak
to her, that the museum, the trees and the old books, the things I had
been focusing on so far, represented nothing but my own ideas about the
country I was visiting.
What on earth was I getting myself into?
My
whole view of Russia was based on myths and romantic imagery. What kind
of hubris made me believe that I would be capable of saying something
about the real Russia after a nine-day trip through one tiny corner of
this vast country?
It was like describing a bucket of water in order to say something about the ocean.
I went out and joined them by the fence.
“She says she doesn’t want her picture taken,” Brown said.
“Why not?”
“She says she’s just gathering some corn for her chickens,” she told me. “But this isn’t her field.”
“I see,” I said.
It
was no great crime, though — the corn had already been harvested — and
after a bit of back and forth, the woman agreed to tell us about her
life.
“Ask her where she lives,” Addario said, snapping away. “Ask her what she does. Ask her if she has any family.”
It
appeared that the woman had been born in a small village just down the
road. She had moved to Moscow when she was 15 and lived there until just
a few years ago when she returned to the village to take care of her
mother after her father died.
“When
I was a girl, there were lots of people here,” she said. “It was a
thriving, bustling community, there must have been 15 or 20 families
living there,” she said, pointing to the unpainted cottages farther down
the road. “Now they’ve all moved away.”
“Have you read Turgenev?” I said.
“I’ve read ‘A Sportsman’s Sketches.’ It’s set in this area.”
“Did you like it?”
She smiled for the first time.
“I read it to my grandchildren now.”
“Is it different here now from the way it was when Turgenev wrote about it?”
“The area is the same. But life here is different. It’s very different.”
She
then pointed us in the direction of the meadow, and we walked on. The
trees lining the hill beyond it seemed to soak up the darkness. They
stood there in inky silhouette against the still palely gleaming sky.
There was utter silence, our footsteps the only sound.
Then the cry of a bird in the distance.
The
boys in Turgenev’s story could have been here now, I thought. And their
grandchildren could have risen up against the czar, and their
grandchildren could have been crushed by revolution. I stood watching
and listening, waiting for some sense of connection. Everything around
me was just as it would have been in the 1840s. The trees, the meadow,
the valley, the hills, the twilight, all of it. And yet everything was
different.
The past was in us, I thought, not in the world.
The train to
Kazan stretched for what seemed like miles alongside the platform at
the Moscow station. The green-painted locomotive and the long string of
gray carriages looked like something from wartime. We had a second-class
compartment with four berths, and as the train slowly pulled out of the
station, I took out my book on Lenin, tucked my suitcase under the bed
and settled myself by the window.
The
book, “Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait,” by Victor Sebestyen,
was intriguing. Lenin’s favorite writer was always Turgenev. I found
that strange, because Lenin was one of the most strong-willed men who
ever lived; he was at once zealously one-sided and emotionally evasive,
but nevertheless, throughout his exile, no matter where he happened to
be, in Zurich, London or Paris, he made sure to have Turgenev’s
collected works with him.
I
was reading about Lenin because the places we were going to for the
next seven days had been set up in part with him in mind: In just a few
weeks it would be exactly 100 years since the 1917 October Revolution,
when he almost single-handedly seized power in Russia. We were going to
Kazan, where Lenin studied law and where he was radicalized, and then we
were going to Yekaterinburg, where Czar Nicholas II and his family were
executed in a cellar on Lenin’s order in 1918. That act, in its
ruthless brutality, marked the end of Russia’s old world and the
beginning of its new one. Everything in the old world would be
eradicated to make way for the new; no price was too high and there
would be no way back.
I
desperately wanted a cigarette. Brown said it was against the law to
smoke on the train, but if we just bought something from the crew, a
candy bar or some tea, she was sure they would be able to suggest
something.
After
we finished our tea, I followed Brown through the carriage. Just then
the conductor emerged from her little cubicle. Her face was set and
solemn, grim almost. She opened the door leading to the narrow
passageway between the carriages.
“Smoke here,” she said.
I
stepped out onto the juddering, swaying metal platform, one side of
which was open all the way down to the rails underneath, so the sound of
the thundering wheels filled the tiny space. She shut the door, and I
bent to light a cigarette.
When
I got back, we walked through to the adjoining carriage. This one was
third class: completely open, with bunk beds on both sides, and it was
packed with people. The feet and heads of those sleeping in the top
bunks were only inches away from my face as I went by, and the fact that
they lay completely uncovered made me feel that I was intruding on
something private. But none of the passengers seemed to think anything
of it; they acted as if they were at home in their own living rooms.
Not since the 19th century could any Scandinavian railway carriage have been as crowded, I thought.
We
stopped in front of three women sitting chatting by a window who could
have been in their late 50s. I asked Brown if she could introduce us.
She did, and the three women eyed me attentively and expectantly.
“Where are you going?” I asked them.
“To Izhevsk,” one woman said. “Where they make the Kalashnikovs.”
“And you’ve been in Moscow?”
They nodded.
“What were you doing there?”
They exchanged glances.
“It’s a secret,” she said, smiling. The other two laughed.
Behind me someone said something, and when I turned I saw an old man, probably in his late 70s, grab Addario’s hand and kiss it.
Everyone around us laughed, including Addario.
The woman said something to Brown who smiled.
“What did she say?”
“She said you’re very handsome.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“Are you going to write that down?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But would you ask them if we can come back later and speak to them again?”
By the time
we returned it was pitch-dark outside. The three women were sitting
around a small table with a bowl of nuts between them. The mood was
quieter now, more of the passengers were asleep, the voices of those
still talking were lower.
The
woman who did most of the talking earlier must have given some thought
to what she should say, because she started telling us about herself
before I had even asked a question. Her name was Natalya. Her two
friends were Olga and Zinaida. She told us that she was brought up in an
orphanage, that she could not remember her parents, but that she had a
sister from whom she had been separated and whom she never saw again.
She had been searching for her sister all her life but still didn’t know
where she was.
“In
those days, it was standard practice to split up siblings when they
were taken into care,” she said. “They don’t do that anymore, but that
was the system back then. She was sent to another home. When I grew up, I
went back and got a job in the same home, I thought I might be able to
steal her file and find out where she was. But I didn’t find anything.
So now I’ve written to the producers of a state television program,
which helps to reunite people with lost family members, and I’m waiting
to hear from them. I’m hopeful!”
“When did you write to them?”
“Two years ago.”
It
must have occurred to her as she said this that it didn’t actually
sound very hopeful, because she looked at me and added: “It can be
difficult to trace people, even for their reporters. Sometimes it can
take as many as five years.”
The
steady, rhythmic rumble of the train wheels over the railroad ties
reverberated through the carriage. Now and again the walls were buffeted
by a shift in the air pressure outside, and each time the door next to
us was opened, all the sounds of the train would suddenly rise to an
infernal cacophony of rattling and banging and hissing as the air from
the gap between the carriages swept in.
Natalya
started to talk about her Christian faith. She had visited Israel the
previous year to see the spot where Jesus was crucified.
“I
once prayed for another woman to have a baby,” she said. “And she did.
For myself I prayed for a husband. And then I met this wonderful man!”
The others laughed.
As
the stream of Russian flowed easily, almost dreamily back and forth in
the sleep-drenched compartment, I caught the word “Putin.”
“Did she say something about Putin?” I asked Brown.
“Yes, yes. She says her mother is a great fan of Putin. They’re all fans of Putin.”
“We love our homeland,” Natalya said. “And for the first time we have a Christian president, an Orthodox president.”
She
flipped over a magazine that was on the table to show us the cover. All
the photos on it were of Putin. In one of them, he was stripped to the
waist.
“Do you see that? Could Trump show off his body like that? He’s old. His body is just a lump of lard!”
All three laughed loudly.
“It’s now a hundred years since the revolution. What does that mean to you?”
“We
don’t care about it,” Natalya said. “It’s been a hundred godless years.
They tore down all the churches. They’re being rebuilt now, and we can
go there without being afraid. Here in this city, there’s an icon of the
Virgin Mary. It’s very, very old. When it was found, it was completely
black. Now it’s gradually getting lighter. With every year that passes,
it becomes clearer and clearer.”
When
the interview was over, I headed down the corridor to the tiny space
between the carriages for a smoke. As I opened the door I felt a hand on
my shoulder. I looked around. It was the young, grim-faced conductor.
“No, no,” she said wagging her finger at me. “No smoking anymore.”
What the hell?
I
returned to our compartment and sat down by the window. In the bunks
across from me, Addario and Brown had turned in for the night. About an
hour later, the train stopped, and I peeped out of the window. It was
pitch-black out there, no station to be seen. I got up and went to
investigate. I opened the door onto the space between the carriages, and
there was the conductor, puffing on a cigarette.
“Aha!” I felt like saying. “Gotcha!”
Instead,
I locked eyes with her for a second, just long enough to let her know
that I knew, then I closed the door and went back to my compartment.
There is a
particular pleasure in coming to a city at night, in the dark, with no
idea of how it looks until you wake the next morning and step out onto
the streets, into which — deprived of the gradual acclimatization of
arrival — you feel suddenly thrust.
What sort of city was Kazan?
The
neighborhood in which I found myself was modern and well maintained.
The magnificent mosque, which I had seen from my hotel window when I
woke, was brand new. When I went out for a walk, even the old wooden
kiosk I stood and stared at, which was octagonal with a green metal dome
and a little spire on the top, looked freshly renovated, more like a
reconstruction of the past than a symbol of it.
Kazan,
the capital of Tatarstan, is also the city where Lenin studied law and
was expelled from the university. His father was an official in the
czarist Civil Service, and the young Lenin’s life revolved around
school, literature and chess, which he played at a high level. Then two
things happened that changed everything. First, his father, only 54,
died suddenly from a stroke. And second, his brother Alexander, whom he
idolized, was executed for conspiring to kill the czar.
Alexander
was studying natural sciences at Petersburg University when he became
involved with a revolutionary student cell. To help finance the plot, he
sold a gold medal he had been awarded for his academic work. Lenin had
known nothing about his brother’s revolutionary activities, and until
then he had been totally uninterested in politics. His brother’s
execution changed all that. Not only did he immediately join a
revolutionary cell at the university in Kazan but, as Sebestyen
describes it in his Lenin biography, his whole personality was
transformed. The happiness and high spirits of his early teens vanished,
leaving behind a determined, withdrawn, highly disciplined,
single-minded young man. It seems as though, from the moment he was
expelled, Lenin never looked back: He spent the rest of his life working
for the revolution, a revolution that he could not be sure would ever
actually happen.
And
when it did finally come, he forced it to follow his line. The
Bolsheviks were atheists, and religion was expunged from the whole of
the new Russian state. For three generations, religion was repressed,
until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when it returned with a
vengeance. That was very visible in Kazan. There are nearly 200 national
and ethnic minorities in Russia. The largest of these are the Tatars,
who make up roughly 4 percent of the population. Most of them practice
Islam, and Kazan had, therefore, one of the largest Muslim communities
of any city in Russia.
That
evening I parked our rental car by the curb across the road from the
National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan. It was 6 o’clock, and we
were there to pick up a young woman named Dina Khabibullina, a Tatar and
a practicing Muslim. We had met her earlier that day and talked about
what it was like to belong to a religious and cultural minority in
Russia, and she invited us to her apartment for dinner.
Dina
was 29, we learned, and a postdoc at the Academy of Sciences of the
Republic of Tatarstan. She also worked at the museum and organized tours
to local Tatar attractions. She was six months pregnant.
She
was brought up as a non-Muslim, in a home in which the Tatar culture
was scarcely detectable and where they mainly spoke Russian. When she
was 19, she had a sudden awakening. She converted to Islam and taught
herself Tatar. So did many of her friends.
Had
religion always been there, buried deep in the society, merely biding
its time? Did it fulfill such a powerful need in people that it was
simply indestructible?
“What made you turn to the faith?” I asked her.
“I
was 19, and my father had died,” she said. “The question arose as to
whether he should be buried according to proper Muslim practice. At that
moment I understood that there is an explanation for everything. I
asked myself what I could do for him after his death. And in the
teachings of Islam, it is clearly written: You must give alms to the
poor, perform the hajj and slaughter a he-goat.”
Dina’s
apartment complex appeared to date from the 1950s. The brick buildings,
along narrow roads and surrounded by tall trees, were old and weathered
but beautiful nonetheless, as buildings from bygone eras often are.
She
led us up the stairs to the third floor, where her son, Gizzat, who was
7, was waiting along with her husband and her mother. The boy’s father,
her first husband, was dead, I eventually gathered.
The
apartment was small, consisting of one room in which the adults and the
child all slept, a tiny bathroom and a narrow kitchen. But it was warm
inside, and Dina no longer seemed wary, as she had earlier that day; she
was cheerful and relaxed. After saying goodbye to her mother, who was
not staying for dinner, she went into the kitchen to make dinner while
her husband, Damir Dolotkazin, spread a prayer mat on the living-room
floor and the boy sat on the sofa bed and watched him.
Damir
looked as if he was in his late 20s; he was skinny, with short, dark
hair and intense but gentle eyes. Barefoot, he stood in the corner of
the living room and began to sing. The music, foreign to my ears, filled
the room, and I was struck by the way in which it changed the whole
apartment. Suddenly the mood grew solemn, but with the everyday routine —
Dina cooking, her son on the sofa with his feet dangling, the toy
helicopter on top of the bookcase — still present and alive.
Damir
knelt and bowed down. As he got to his feet again he whispered an
almost silent prayer. Then he rolled up the mat, and the air of
solemnity was gone as abruptly as it had come.
From
the kitchen, Dina called us in. She ladled a clear soup with pearls of
fat, vegetables and chunks of dark meat into our bowls.
The
intensity I had initially seen in Damir’s eyes proved to be, or turned
to, enthusiasm. He ate heartily and willingly answered all my questions.
“Have you always been a Muslim?” I asked him.
“No,
no,” he said. “I was in the army here in Kazan. I was with a security
division that escorted supply troops. I was 18 at the time and a
Christian.” One of his army friends was a Muslim, Damir went on, and “he
taught me what it was about. I thought it was a very strong religion.
Everything is explained in its teachings, including what to do, how to
act.”
There was silence.
“This is very good,” I said. “What sort of meat is it?”
“It’s horse meat,” Damir said.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, oh no.
There
was no choice but to carry on eating; we were their guests, and it
would have been rude not to eat the food they served us.
Damir must have sensed the air of misgiving that suddenly emanated from his guests, because he said:
“But it was a nice horse!”
We laughed.
“What do people in the West think about Russians?” he asked. “Is it just stereotypes?”
“There
are some stereotypes, yes,” I said, biting into a large chunk of meat
while carefully avoiding breathing through my nose, a trick that had got
me through many childhood meals that I found hard to swallow, like
smoked haddock or smoked cod.
“People
think we’re barbarians. It’s very sad. What the politicians say and do
doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with those of us who live here.
There are a lot of good people here, kind souls, and bad people too, of
course. When it comes to politics, nothing has really changed. The
elections are a joke.”
After
dinner, a large tray of Tatar cakes was placed on the table. Damir told
us that he used to be a great soccer fan. But then he corrected
himself.
“Well, I didn’t really like the soccer. I liked the fighting.”
“You were a soccer hooligan?”
“Yes.
I spent three years traveling to soccer matches and fighting. I had
some trouble with the law back then. But I no longer have any contact
with that scene. Now I read instead. I try to read 20 books a year.”
Once
we had eaten and felt that we couldn’t take up any more of their time,
we said our goodbyes and were putting on our coats in the tiny hall when
he came up to me.
“My sister was killed in a plane crash in 2013,” he said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, not knowing what to do with the information.
He
simply nodded, and we shook hands. I felt a great warmth toward him; he
had told me about his life and this, one of the most important events,
couldn’t be left out, even if it didn’t fit the rest of the
conversation. The last thing I saw before the door closed behind us was
the chair in the living room, over which hung a little boy’s suit, a
white shirt and a tie.
The landscape that
opened up to either side of us as we left Kazan was flat and wide. The
yellows and greens of the vegetation gleamed with lush intensity in the
streaming sunlight, and always the Kazanka River was there, sometimes
right alongside the road, sometimes far off, sometimes as wide as a
great lake, sometimes narrowing, but always glittering and shimmering in
the light, in every possible shade of blue.
It
was beautiful, and wild too, although most of the land was cultivated.
Maybe the air of wildness came from the scale, I thought, the very sense
of earthly grandeur aroused as we drove along in our tiny car.
After
a while we stopped at a roadside diner lying out in the middle of a
steppe. We all ordered soup at the counter and sat down at one of the
tables. The four women working there, all white-clad, with red, hot
cheeks, went back and forth between the counter and the kitchen beyond.
Once
we had eaten, we asked one of the waitresses if we could talk to her.
She nodded uncertainly and dried her hands on her apron. She was young,
in her late 20s, and she told us that this was just a temporary job; the
restaurant was part of a chain, and she came in to help out when
someone was sick. There was something reserved and guarded about her,
and when I started asking her about Russia, she shot a glance at the
others before answering.
“Things are better in Russia now,” she said. “The economy is improving, our lives are getting better and better.”
“What
are you saying?” said a man over at the cash register, looking at us.
“Things are worse in Russia! It’s all going downhill! Worse and worse!”
He was big and powerfully built, with close-cropped hair and a pale, flat face.
But he was smiling when he said it.
“No
progress,” he boomed and went to sit down at a table in the center of
the room. I thanked the reserved young woman, who fled into the kitchen,
clearly relieved, as I walked somewhat hesitantly over to the truck
driver.
He looked up at me, with his spoon in his hand.
“Why are you writing about Russia?” he said.
“In
America, the image of Russia has so much to do with Putin and politics.
So we’ve come here to see what life outside of that is like.”
“I’m pleased to meet you!” he said. “Sit down!”
His name was Sergei. He was 44, and he drove a truck carrying cars from a Lada factory to dealers in Kazan.
“I
have to work 16 hours a day to make ends meet,” he said. “If you want
to live, you have to work. In 2004 I slept four hours a day and worked
the rest. Then I had a boss to answer to. Now I work for myself, so at
least I can choose my own routes.”
He looked straight at me as he spoke, always with a glint in his eye. A joke was never far away.
“It’s
the chance of a lifetime, meeting someone like you,” he said with a
laugh. “I got robbed once, would you like to hear about that?”
One
evening, 15 years earlier, he had parked his truck outside Moscow and
was making tea in the cab. The doors were locked. Suddenly the passenger
window was smashed and two men were forcing their way in.
“Luckily
only one of them had a knife,” Sergei said. “The first one opened the
door, the other climbed in and put a cord around my neck. I held him off
with one arm, started the truck and drove it out onto the road to block
it and get help that way. The guy who was trying to choke me was in the
way of the guy with the knife. That’s what saved me. I managed to open
the other door and jump out. Then the guy with the knife stabbed me in
the back. I still have the scar.”
“And they took off with the truck?”
“Yes,
yes. I just wanted to save myself. I walked along the road, but no one
stopped to help. It was hardly surprising, I was half naked and covered
in blood. There was no one at the police station. Eventually I came to a
house where there was a party, I ran in, grabbed some clothes and ran
off again. They found the truck later, abandoned and broken down, minus
the load. And I was arrested for stealing the clothes!”
He
laughed. His face was constantly in motion, his expression changing in
counterpoint to every twist and turn. It was a trait I recognized: He
was a storyteller.
He said his grandfather once claimed that he was a Romanov.
“A Romanov?” I said. “As in the imperial family?”
“Oh, yes. I asked my mother about it, but I have never been able to find out for sure.”
That
was pretty good luck, I thought. Running into a possible descendant of
the czars in a roadside diner in the middle of Russia.
He started to talk about his grandfather.
“He was very strong,” he said, bringing his fist down between us on the table. It was giant.
“His
fist was like two of mine. One time he was going to water a calf. It
was a hot day, and the air was still. The calf was being bothered by a
fly, it kept trying to shake it off.” He raised his head, tossing it
about the way the calf had done. “Its head hit Grandfather. He got mad
and punched the calf and it dropped down dead. One punch. Dead.”
He paused for a moment to let this story sink in, then he laughed.
“I believe that dreams are real,” he said.
“So do I,” I said.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“In
that case I’ll tell you about a dream I had. I added an extra year to
my grandfather’s life in that dream. I had left my father and was living
with my grandfather. I loved him very much. One night I dreamed that
three men in black hats and black clothes — very mysterious, they looked
a little like Georgians — came into our house. They walked right past
me and up to my grandfather. They grabbed hold of him, and he didn’t put
up a fight, he just went with them. I hung on to him and was dragged
along with him, out into the darkness. I couldn’t save him, even though
I’m strong, too. It was hopeless. I started shouting and screaming. One
of the men in black asked, ‘Who’s that shouting and screaming?’ He
spotted me, and then he asked: ‘How long has he got?’ ‘One year,’ said
one of the others, ‘for a few good deeds.’ And then they disappeared.”
The truck driver looked at me.
“One
week later Grandfather was taken into intensive care, he was in a coma.
I said we didn’t need to spend money on doctors, that he would get
better. Five days later he woke up. He lived for exactly one more year.”
Afterward
we stood outside and watched Sergei walk across the forecourt to his
long semitrailer in the sunshine. He turned and waved, clambered in,
started the grumbling engine, put the truck into gear and drove off.
One thing I
most associated with Russia, something I had always wanted to see in
real life, was the archetypal sort of village found in 19th-century
Russian novels and historical photographs. A huddle of wooden cottages,
often unpainted, some wooden fences, some vegetable plots, a few
chickens running around, perhaps a shady grove of trees nearby, a lazily
flowing river, surrounded by endless fields. Many times on this trip, I
saw villages like this in the distance, first on the way to Turgenev’s
estate and later alongside the railroad line to Kazan. So, on this
particular day, when a cluster of houses suddenly appeared just after
the crest of a little hill, right there by the highway, I turned onto
the rutted side road, stopped the car and got out.
The
village seemed deserted except for a solitary old lady, bent over
double working in a vegetable plot. Brown talked with her, and it
appeared that there was a woman living in the village who was 102 years
old.
“Can we meet her?” I said.
Brown asked the woman, who nodded and pointed out the direction.
We
walked over to a bright, blue house with a woman in a head scarf moving
around outside it. In her arms she held a large white hen that was
struggling to get free.
While
Brown talked to her, a young rooster sped by with another in hot
pursuit. The chase ended in a ball of feathers a little farther off.
“We’ve been invited in,” Brown said.
I
stepped over the high threshold and into the hallway. It smelled
slightly sour and musty inside, but it was pleasant and warm. There were
rugs everywhere, both on the floors and on the walls. It felt like
entering a cave.
In the middle of the living room stood a very old woman. As we entered, she turned her head slowly and looked at us.
The
woman who had followed us in bustled past, led the old lady over to a
bed that was pushed up against the wall, sat her down, removed her head
scarf and put on a fresh one, then slipped a pair of leather slippers
onto her feet.
It
was almost as if she were dressing a doll. But the old woman didn’t
seem to mind. She sat perfectly still with her hands in her lap,
watching us.
She
wore a black dress patterned with roses. The white head scarf was big;
it not only covered her head but also fell all the way down her back.
Her name was Minizaitunya Ibyatullina.
I walked over to her and gently shook her hand. It was dry and warm. She said something as she looked up at me.
“She’s speaking Tatar,” Brown said. “I don’t know what she’s saying.”
Minizaitunya
slowly turned her head toward the camera as Addario started taking
photographs of her. Her son, Kasym, stood in the doorway, smiling and
looking on. His wife, whose name was Alfiya, produced a large laminated
photograph from a drawer and handed it to the old woman. It was of a
soldier, and she held it up in front of herself.
This
was a photograph of Minizaitunya’s husband, who died in the war in
1943, in Ukraine. He was a very beautiful man. How odd it must be for
her, I thought, to look at that picture of him, 70 years later, with him
so young and handsome and her now 102.
She didn’t appear to think anything of it. She looked proud, sitting there holding his picture.
It must have been odd for her son too. He was 80, more than twice as old as his father was when he died.
Kasym
had lived in the village all his life. It had been a collective farm
under the Soviet Union. He had worked as a carpenter, he told us. His
mother had also worked all her life.
She said something in a soft voice, and her son bent down to her.
“She says she’s too old to work now,” he said. “She doesn’t have the strength for it.”
“What sort of work did she do?”
“She worked on the collective farm. Milking the cows and other chores.”
Alfiya
came into the living room and invited us to come to the table. She had
been baking while we were there: On the table was a platter holding a
warm flat loaf and several sorts of jam. There were only two chairs, and
there could be no talk of either of them sitting down. The wife poured
tea, the husband presented a large bag of hard candy and when I made no
move to help myself, he took out three pieces and laid them next to my
plate.
From the living room came the sound of soft, slow footsteps.
“The
babushka’s coming!” Alfiya said. Seconds later Minizaitunya appeared in
the doorway. Her son escorted her over to another bed, where she sat
and watched us while we ate.
She
was born in 1915. Russia was still a monarchy then, and Nicholas II
still ruled. So she had seen the old czardom, the revolution, the rise
and fall of the Soviet Union and, now, the new Russia.
Alfiya
put some fresh bread in a bag for us, Kasym gave us some bags of candy,
and each of us was also presented with a small embroidered cloth to
take with us. Even Minizaitunya had gifts for us: a bar of soap for
Brown, scarves for Addario and me.
“All
of the people I grew up with are dead,” she said from her seat on the
bed when we were on our feet and about to leave. “There’s no one left.”
I
never look anyone straight in the eye for more than a few seconds at a
time. I don’t want to intrude on anyone, and maybe I don’t want them to
intrude on me. But once I had shaken everyone’s hand in farewell that
afternoon and was standing there looking at her and she looked back at
me, I thought that I ought to hold her gaze, that I should look into her
eyes. Those eyes that had seen the world during the time of the czars
and seen the world for a hundred years after that.
We
looked at each other for a long time. At first she seemed surprised, as
if she were wondering what I was up to, but then, slowly, she began to
smile, and it was so wonderful, that smile, that there were tears in my
eyes a moment later when we walked out the door and left the house.
The final day
of our journey to Yekaterinburg was a 15-hour drive. Near the end of
the journey, in the middle of a deep forest that was still about an
hour’s drive from the city, I pulled onto a side road, stopped by a
river and smoked a cigarette under the starry sky, right next to what I
guessed was a pulp mill. Addario and Brown were asleep, and I thought
about what lay ahead in the morning. The killing of the czar and his
family in that cellar in Yekaterinburg was an earth-shattering event, a
replay of the French Revolution, but for Lenin it must also have been a
personal matter. He must have been full of hatred as a 17-year-old
wandering through Kazan, hatred of the czar who had executed his
brother, and it is not hard to imagine this personal hatred making him
all the more steely and intransigent. After the revolution in 1917, when
he assumed responsibility for the czar, who was by then in captivity,
he must have thought of his brother, how he could avenge him. And do
what his brother had once tried to do: kill the czar.
A
set of headlights flickered farther in among the trees. I followed them
with my eyes as they drew closer. When the lights lit up the car I was
leaning against, they slowed down. A faint unease welled up inside me. I
had heard stories about violent robberies in the towns nearby. But then
whoever it was sped past. I stepped on my cigarette, got into our car
and drove back onto the main road. It was probably just some bored
teenagers out for a ride, I thought. And you could understand why, out
here where there was nothing but trees and water.
In Yekaterinburg
the next day we drove by a big crowd in a square, several hundred
people carrying flags and shouting. We all turned to look as we passed.
“What are they protesting?” Addario asked.
“There
are demonstrations all over the country today,” Brown said. “In support
of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It’s Putin’s
birthday today.”
“Really?”
I said, but a moment later I had forgotten the demonstration, because
we were approaching the Church on the Blood, which sat on the actual
spot where the legendary czar’s story ended. It also housed something
that, to me, was just as much the stuff of legend — an authentic
Orthodox church service, which, thanks to all the Russian novels I had
read, not least the works of Dostoyevsky, was bathed in a special light.
This was the selfless light of mercy, associated not only with the
highest and richest but also with the lowest and poorest. In
Dostoyevsky’s books, there is something morbid about this light, a
frenzied, exhausting quality, which I have always regarded as typically
Russian. I’ve certainly never observed it anywhere else.
We got out of the car and stood in the rain, looking up at the church.
I
knew right away that I would not be realizing any kind of Dostoyevskian
vision. The church had been built in the traditional style, with
multiple shining domes, but it was clearly brand new. Looking at it gave
me the same strange feeling I had once in Warsaw Old Town, where the
buildings destroyed in World War II, many of which were centuries old,
had been replaced with pristine replicas. It was like flickering through
a glitch in time. The old was not old, the new was not new. So where
were we?
On
the night of July 16, 1918, as the story goes, the czar’s family was
awoken and told that they were being taken to a safer location. They
came down from their rooms and were asked to wait in the cellar. They
had no idea what was about to happen until the guns were raised against
them. The revolutionaries who made up the firing squad were amateurs;
some of them were drunk. The shots hit the family at random, the floor
ran with blood, the air was thick with smoke, there must have been
screaming and banging and confusion, several members of the family lay
bleeding, but alive, on the floor, until they were finally killed with
shots directly to the head. The bodies were then driven out of the town,
and attempts were made to render their faces unrecognizable with acid
before they were thrown down a mine shaft. Some days later, they were
brought up again, transported to a nearby forest and buried there.
The
house was gone, the cellar was gone, the blood and the bodies were
gone. But the Romanovs weren’t gone. In the Church on the Blood, they
had returned, as symbols. Those crazed and bloody minutes, and all that
they represented, had now been subsumed into reliquary forms that
promised the opposite: foresight, structure, harmony, balance.
At
the entrance to the church stood a sculpture of the whole Romanov
family, made in the same heroic-realist style that Soviet artists used
to depict the workers of the 1920s and 1930s. Inside the church hung
icons in which Nicholas II was portrayed in the manner of the Middle
Ages. Almost everything in the church involved a distortion of time. The
ritual and repetition of the services abolished time entirely, linking
the time within that chamber to divine time, which was eternal,
unaffected by life or death, which was always there, which lasted
forever. The czar and his family were lifted into this room, and the
story with which they were associated disappeared, traceless. And yet
Lenin existed in a similar space. Lying embalmed in his mausoleum on Red
Square, his body was real and bound to the moment, but there was
nothing about the body that connected him to the time when he held sway;
he, too, was simultaneously inside and outside time.
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, Joyce wrote. Nowhere was that truer than Russia.
The next morning
at the airport in Yekaterinburg, while I was waiting for my flight back
to Moscow, I looked through the day’s papers on my phone. There had
been demonstrations against Putin and his government in all the major
cities the day before. Particular mention was made of the demonstration
in Yekaterinburg, the one we saw on our way to the church, because the
police detained 24 demonstrators there.
My
first thought was that I should have been there, that this was the
place where it was all happening, that this was what I should have gone
to see in order to present the best possible picture of modern Russia.
Then I thought: no.
Stories
have always held Russia together, and what makes them different from
most other countries’ nation-building stories, perhaps, is the
authoritarian nature of the stories themselves: One story has been
paramount while all that deviate from it have been forbidden. So it was
under the czars, who censored books and newspapers; so it was under
Lenin. And so it still is today — reporters in Russia are regularly
imprisoned and sometimes simply murdered.
And
yet the alternative stories, the ones the authorities did not want to
see gaining a foothold, the ones that told of abuse of power and
oppression, of living in a dictatorship where all hope for the future
was gone — these too had become standardized.
The
demonstration was what the international newspapers reported about
Russia the day before, and their stories confirmed and reinforced the
larger story about a downtrodden people in a totalitarian state. But
behind this reality there was another reality as well. The three lively
women on the train; Dina and Damir, the young couple in Kazan with a
baby on the way; Sergei the truck driver; the old, old woman in the
village and the elderly couple who cared for her — which story about
Russia could contain all of them without, at the same time, drastically
reducing what was unique to each of them?
Turgenev’s
stories could. The characters in them do not lead to anything beyond
themselves. But the world as it is can’t exist without its twin, the
world as we want it to be. Lenin, the oppressor, read Turgenev all
through his life, and Vladimir Putin revealed his love for “A
Sportsman’s Sketches” in an interview from 2011, when he said: “The main
character, in a simple but picturesque and very sympathetic way, tells
stories about people he met while hunting, and their lives. They are a
sort of sketches on Russia’s heartland of the mid-19th century that
provide food for thought and allow us to see our country, its traditions
and national psychology in a new light.”
Later that afternoon,
at a hotel bar in Moscow, I met Sergei Lebedev, a 36-year-old novelist
and journalist who lately had emerged as a civic activist. I was feeling
as curious about the man himself as I was about his writing, as
intrigued by his family background as by his knowledge of the country’s
history. He was born in 1981, I knew, and so was just old enough to have
spent the first part of his childhood in the Soviet Union and his youth
in the chaotic years after its demise. I also knew that he had
originally been a geologist.
“I
was born into a classic Soviet family,” he said once we had taken our
seats at a table near a window looking out onto the street. “Both my
parents were geologists; they were members of the Soviet
intelligentsia.”
He
was short and stocky, with a stubbly beard, and there was something
indomitable about him that made me think about an animal that won’t let
go of something when it gets its teeth into it. Lebedev’s books dealt
with history — it lay like a shadow over everything he wrote — and the
fact that its presence was so powerful suggested that the conflicts and
tensions inherent in it were still unresolved, still had a bearing on
Russian society in obscure yet palpable ways.
Lebedev
told me that everything in his childhood was designed to keep parts of
the past hidden from him. His great-grandfather had, for example, been
an officer in the czar’s army before he switched sides and joined the
Red Army. But in the family’s version of events, he had always worn the
Red Army’s cape with its red star, as if he had been born in 1917 and
there had been nothing before that.
“For
me that was normal,” he said. “To live in an incomplete world. To live
in a world full of holes. With all these questions that could never be
asked.”
The
street outside was lit by the rays of the low October sun and busy with
people strolling through the town on this Sunday afternoon. Many of
them must have had stories similar to Lebedev’s, I thought. There is a
mechanism in people that stops us from talking about bad experiences and
makes us reluctant to stir up the past. But secrets foster a specific
version of reality in which the individual pieces have to be arranged in
a particular way, fitting so neatly together that if just one were to
change position, the whole picture would fall apart. Our identity is
shaped by stories, about our own history, about our family’s history,
about the history of our people or our country. What happens when one of
these identity-shaping stories doesn’t fit? Suddenly you are not who
you thought you were. And then who are you?
I asked him what the narrative in Russia was like now.
“It’s
very strange,” he replied. “First of all, it is important to understand
that the authorities have no single, coherent ideology. They use
elements from all sorts of different fields: If it works, they’ll take
it. They need a smoke screen to hide the fact that they’re nothing but a
bunch of kleptocrats. Take, for example, the name of the United Russia
party. Those words, a ‘united Russia,’ were a slogan of the
counterrevolutionaries, coined in reaction to Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
who wished to establish new, self-governing republics. The current
administration is building a state founded on Soviet nostalgia, but they
have no qualms about appropriating an opposition slogan. And it’s not
the slightest bit controversial.”
He
went on: “With each year that passes they try to reduce the
significance of 1917. They do this because in their ideal version of
events there was no revolution! They are trying to establish an
unbroken link between the czars and Stalin’s Russia. According to the
current narrative, foreign spies and traitors provoked us into killing
one another a hundred years ago. That must never happen again. Therefore
we have to stand together, therefore we must all follow Putin’s banner,
therefore we must forbid all opposition, therefore we must even
sacrifice our civil rights, because it must never happen again. That’s
roughly how it goes.”
Continue reading the main story
Afterward, we walked
across town to the Kremlin. The streets were full of people, the sky
was clear blue and the sun’s rays fell unhindered on the city, bright
where they glinted off windows and car hoods, softer and richer where
they shone on storefronts and walls, roads and pavement, and always with
a fiery tinge to them.
Lebedev
led the way past the Bolshoi Theater, pointing and explaining as we
walked along. The square in front of the theater’s magnificent
neoclassical facade was dominated by several parked police buses and the
police officers and police dogs standing near them.
“Riot
police,” Lebedev said. “There were demonstrations here yesterday, so
they’re worried and want to make sure nothing happens.”
Dense
crowds of people milled around the stalls and the profusion of food and
drink. The mood was light, people were smiling and laughing, children
running around the feet of the adults, the sun shining on faces, and
behind us, stark against the deep blue sky, reared the towers of the
Kremlin.
“It’s
a celebration of the harvest,” Lebedev said. “It’s so typical of Putin
and the government. They invest in nonpolitical events and public
meeting places like this. Here it’s all about pumpkins! They’re trying
to invent new traditions, and this is meant as a display of Russia’s
riches.”
We
continued walking, to Revolution Square, which under the czars was
called Resurrection Square. “As you can see, there’s no trace of the
revolution here,” Lebedev said. “The centenary is hardly being
celebrated at all; certainly there’s no discussion of the violence, the
atrocities. But if you are to understand what happened in this country
in the ’20s and ’30s, you cannot ignore the violence and the horrors of
the five years from 1917 to 1921. You cannot understand why people were
so willing to slaughter one another. There has been a sort of a war
fought over memories in Russia, over what should be remembered and what
should be forgotten. History today is all about symbols, not about
notions of mutual forgiveness and reconciliation.
“But
wait till you see this, in here,” he said, pointing to the entrance to a
metro station. The escalator we stepped onto was steep and long, and in
the underworld to which it carried us, time seemed to have stood still.
Placed
on a series of platforms along the walls were huge, heroic bronze
statues of human figures. The first of them bore rifles and cartridge
belts; these were the revolutionaries. But then came the ordinary
people, men and women, young and old, peasants, fishermen, factory
workers — the whole exquisite, mesmerizing series ending with a child
held aloft, a symbol of the future.
Oh,
it was so full of hope and faith that the knowledge that it was
propaganda no longer mattered, because this was a vision of a life, of a
land, of a future, and it was not untrue, just beautiful.
This,
too, was the revolution, the dream of a better life for all. All the
art from that time shares this same energy, an almost wild optimism, a
sense that this is where it begins. Women are as much in the vanguard as
men, not sexualized or objectivized, but there in their own right. The
artists are experimenting; this is the age of Mayakovsky, Eisenstein,
Kandinsky. As well as killing, violence, ruthlessness, hunger, want,
misery and, in due course, a system that became ossified, closed to the
world, trapped by its own truths. The underground station was the most
beautiful place I saw during my days in Russia, but the beauty could not
be used for anything, bound up as it was with concepts of reality that
no one believed in anymore and that could never, therefore, be realized.
And
yet neither did that make it a lie. The statue of the czar outside the
Church on the Blood was a lie, because it changed the past. These
statues were meant to change the future. The fact that this future was
never realized, that it never came to pass, did not make this
subterranean vision untrue; it just made it vain and beautiful. Few
things are more beautiful than vain hope.
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