Byzantium Endures - [Pyat Quartet 01]

by Michael Moorcock

  By the time the Summer Vacation came I was ready for a holiday. With Kolya, Hippolyte, a girl who called herself ’Gloria’, after the English fashion (though she was Polish), and a couple of ’poets’, we visited the Summer Gardens and broad quays of the Neva, took the rare steamer up the river, enjoyed picnics on the banks, or lunches at those magnificent wooden establishments on several floors, not unlike Swiss ski-lodges, which catered for the steamer-trade and by now were pleased to welcome any sort of customer.

  Empty of the haut-monde, St Petersburg filled up with wounded soldiers and sailors, with nurses on leave from the Front who sought consolation in the arms of healthy civilians (there were all too few of us left). This wealth of femininity even distracted agitators like Lunarcharsky, who became Commissar of Education under Lenin, or Onipko, the notorious anarchist, who had helped spark the abortive 1905 revolution. For obvious reasons these were ineligible for the army. Happily, Kolya had few intimates in this latter group, though the proprietor of The Wandering Dog (one Boris Pronin who saw himself as a kind of Russian Rudolphe Salis, of Chat Noir fame), seemed only too pleased to welcome these incendiaries, bombs and all!

  I should make it clear here that I was no hypocrite. I aired my own views frequently and often found others who supported me, particularly amongst the ‘Pan-Slavic’ group. Even those who disagreed seemed to treat me with the best possible humour. If I had not had the lesson of my father, I might have been caught up in their infantile enthusiasm for destruction and change. I drank absinthe in the company of beautiful whores. My compatriots were revolutionaries, vagabonds, poets. They nicknamed me The Professor or The Mad Scientist and bought me more wine and listened to me as few have listened to me since. These same people were to survive the Revolution only at the expense of their humour, their irony, their very souls. They became the grey men of Lenin and his successors. Some died early - Blok and Grin - and did not live to see the destructive consequences of their foolish hopes. Most, like Mandelstam, were to see all their visions decay, all their hope fade, all their courage and generosity become a weapon turned against them to insult and degrade them. This was, indeed, the last year of their Revolution, that year of 1916, for their enthusiasm lay in the dream of Utopia, not in the reality which was to trap me as much as it trapped them. I was lucky to escape. Some (Mayakovski, for instance) escaped only through suicide.

  The Wandering Dog was closed by the police, but the bohemian life continued. The War appeared to be improving and victories were reported. British armoured cars and Russian Cossacks plunged through the mud of Galicia and forced the Uhlans and the Austrian infantry to retreat. But bread became harder to obtain. The lines of miserable working people, their faces shaded by caps and shawls, as if in mourning, became familiar irritations: to the poets who spoke of the pathos of it, to the revolutionaries who foretold the risings, to the ordinary middle-class public, called in Russian slang the ‘boorzhoo’, who had become increasingly the prey of thieves robbing them of their groceries and their money. The War was draining us. They should have spent money on food and distributed it free. Then we might have averted Chaos. But the Tsar’s ministers were too obsessed with War, and the revolutionaries actually wanted people to starve so they would rise. The boorzhoo could think only of their own families; they had been called upon to give up everything to help with the War, to supply the soldiers at the Front. There is no need here to go into the whys and wherefores of the Revolution. Too many émigrés; too many historians; too many Bolshevik revisers-of-the-past have done that already. We have had a thousand versions of Ten Days That Shook The World. Perhaps we should have at least ten versions of A Thousand Books That Bored The World. I shall not add to all that. What happened, happened. We did not really believe it would happen, though so many warned of it. Poetry, when it becomes reality, rarely pleases anyone, least of all the poets.

  Pronin opened a new establishment called Prival Komendiantoff (The Retreat of the Harlequinade). It is difficult to translate the exact sense of the name. Comedian’s Halt, perhaps. We all found it very appropriate and praised Pronin when he appeared, leading a mangy mongrel by a piece of ribbon (‘all that is left of the Dog’) and promising that this establishment would be even finer than the last. It was certainly more elaborate. Negro boys dressed to look as if they had come from the Court of Haroun-el-Raschid served at the tables. Murals of a blatantly radical nature covered the walls and ceilings. From the walls stared negro masks, the lighting issuing from their eye-sockets. The same negro band played the same raucous music whenever we were not having to listen to another new poet or ‘petite chanteuse’, or watching the posturings of some Pierrot mime while a horse-faced woman in a long purple dress droned on about the moon. Black female impersonators sang jazz songs. Female impersonators were the rage of Café Society. At odds with all this avant-gardism were girls in peasant costume; table-cloths made of bright peasant hand-woven fabrics; ‘folk-art’ ceramics, to remind us that this was, after all, Russia; that we were not Frenchmen or even Germans. The cellos groaned and the mime-artistes twisted their silly bodies into parodies of the human form. The jazz-band wailed. The little songstresses sang in tiny, toneless voices about the death of birds and mayflies. We talked and drank and whored. Sometimes it would be dawn before I (nowadays wearing a velvet jacket, red Ukrainian boots, riding trousers and a Cossack shirt) would stagger out into morning sunshine over the Field of Mars.

  Here, colourful soldiers still paraded above the heads of our ‘menagerie’ which, as usual, was in a series of cellars. Hussars and streltsi trotted and marched in polished leather, in carefully brushed serge, in brass and gold braid, and we would wander past, some of us hardly able to stand, staring in astonishment at these vestiges of the old world. We would be moved along by policemen who seemed, more frequently, to share our attitudes. Futurists would pause in their constant bickerings with Acmeists (there were as many opposing artistic camps as there were political). Social Revolutionaries would stop in mid-sentence in an argument with Tolstoyans and watch open-mouthed as a band struck up or a column of blue-coated, red-hatted soldiers wheeled and turned to the sound of patriotic marches. I was infected by the general cynicism. I think there was hardly anyone in Petrograd by that time who was not. I think if we had stumbled out of The Harlequinade one morning and seen German troops parading, we should scarcely have noticed. If we had noticed we should not have cared. The artists would have announced the coming of the Germans as the first sign of a ‘new age’ in Art. The revolutionaries would have said this was a sure sign the people would rise up at any moment. The cynics would have said that German efficiency was better than Russian incompetence. And that would have been the end of it. We half-believed that this strange dream would continue until we all died the early, romantic deaths we expected to die in a sufficiently distant future. Nobody took anything very seriously, I think, except Kolya, who, with Tolstoi, had faith in the natural divinity of the human spirit. My faith was in the triumph of Man’s ingenuity over all the vicissitudes of nature, including human nature. Both of us, I am sure, were as guilty as everyone of adding to the rhetoric of despair. It was easy to be smart and drink champagne and toast the triumph of the working-class. One forgot the slow transformation taking place everywhere. St Petersburg, an unnatural city, easily blockaded, cut off from her supplies by virtue of her physical geography, pretended to herself she was not under siege and that Victory was a month or two away. By the autumn, when it seemed we were completely beaten, as we had been beaten by the Japanese at Port Arthur, the fashionable carriages were fewer than ever in the Nevski. Merchants and landowners saw Moscow as a safer wintering place than Peter. And Kolya, with some amusement, quoted Kipling, of whom he was also very fond;

  The captains and the kings depart!

  Rome, he said, was being evacuated, for the Hun again threatened. ‘Byzantium! Byzantium!’ he sang, as he escorted me home in his carriage one late-August morning. ‘They are all fleeing East. Wait until the Tsar goes to Mo
scow, Dimka. Then you will know it is the end of us.’

  ‘The Tsar will never give up the capital.’

  ‘The Tsar scarcely occupies it now. How often have you seen the Royal Standard flying over the Winter Palace?’

  ‘Tsarskoe Selo is not too far from the centre,’ I reminded him.

  ‘There’s no proof he’s there. The rumours are that he, his family, Rasputin, are already packing their bags and plan to stay with the Kaiser. They’re related, after all.’

  Our carriage stopped at an intersection as a marching column of cadets went past. The drums rolled, the trumpets blared, the fifes piped and the cadets moved as one creature. Kolya smiled sadly. He was as usual dressed all in black. The only white was the white of his hair beneath his hat. The paleness of his face was relieved by his slightly pinkish eyes. He put his chin upon his fist and shrugged. ‘Did you know I was once a cadet, Dimka?’

  ‘I suppose you must have been.’ It was natural for a member of the aristocracy to attend a military school.

  ‘I ran away. When I was fifteen. I ran away to Paris because I wished to meet poets. I met a good many charlatans and was seduced by a few of them, men and women. But I don’t think I met a single poet until I returned to Peter! Now all the Russian poets, all the artists, all the impresarios, are going to Paris! Is that an irony? Should we follow them, Dimka?’

  ‘The Germans will be beaten soon,’ I said. ‘The newspapers are confident. They haven’t been so confident for ages.’

  ‘A sure sign of impending defeat!’ He laughed.

  ‘Our allies won’t let it happen. England, France, Italy - even Japan - will come to help.’

  ‘They are no better off than we are. The Germans have all but taken Paris.’

  ‘Then we had better stay here,’ I said.

  ‘Until the War is over, at least. You should be reading only German science and philosophy and I should be studying Goethe. I shall go to - where? - Munich? Or study with the Moravian Brothers, as George Meredith did. There I shall become a proper, mystical German intellectual. In the new German Empire - the Holy Roman Empire - we shall become good Goths. We shall forget Paris. Paris and Petersburg alike will be provincial towns. Berlin will become the capital of the world. Art will flourish there, nurtured by our Russian genius, as it flourished in Berlin before the War. We will be like the Chinese, Dimka, and let ourselves be conquered, only to conquer secretly by means of our superior culture, our Slavic heritage. No longer shall we imitate the French and the English and the Italians. We shall become the architects of the new Empire. We shall present plans for a Kremlin in Berlin and our very energy and freshness will impress the German Caesar so that in time everything will take on a Russian tinge. Why should we worry about military victory when our greatest weapon lies in our Slavic genius! And you, Dimka, will show the world what Russian science can accomplish, because you are Russian at heart. As Russian as me!’

  I presumed he was referring to my Ukrainian background. Sometimes he could make mysterious pronouncements which completely confused me. But I was never able to interrupt Count Nicholai Petroff in these soliloquies and rarely saw any point in trying. It was like listening to inspiring music. To interrupt him would have been like interrupting our Russian hymns, like shouting a contradiction in the Alexander Nevski Cathedral in the middle of a Kyrie Eleison or Pomychlayu deny a Strachnya. For all his absorption of foreign poets, his admiration of the foreign artists displayed by Shchukin and Morosoff, those two bizarre art-collecting figures, my friend was wholly Russian. He was the spirit of an incredible rediscovery of the Slavic soul which had begun in the nineteenth century. It would have continued well into the twentieth if it had not been aborted by little men with little Western ideas from Germany and America and England, carried by that carrier of all political diseases, the ubiquitous Jew. No wonder that the old Pale of Settlement was the most fought-over area of the Empire during the Civil War.

  By September Kolya and I were possibly the closest we had ever been. I had returned to school to continue the impression of an attentive student. St Petersburg began to smell not of apathy any longer, but of fear. It was tangible, even as I travelled into the suburbs on the tram. Neighbour was beginning to distrust neighbour. Gangs of pinch-faced men in black coats and hats moved between factory and working-class suburb with a silence holding more menace than complaint. Madame Zinovieff became harsher in her criticism of me, of the girls and their fiancés, of the urban world in general. On my monthly visit to Mr Green I was warned to ‘tread carefully’ and advised to purchase a money-belt in which to keep my allowance. He said that Uncle Semya had written to him to ask him how my studies went. I said extremely well. I was bound to jump a year in my next class. Mr Green said I must soon use my gift for languages and my ‘knowledge of machinery’ to pay a visit abroad for Uncle Semya who was considering importing farm-machinery. I asked for more details. Mr Green would tell me nothing more, save that my education ‘would be put to some use at last’. Did Uncle Semya have a job waiting for me when I left the Polytechnic? I enjoyed the prospect of going abroad.

  As if to counter the fear in the city, the military displays became grander. Golden banners, portraits of the Tsar, rattling drums, shrilling trumpets daily filled the city. The National Anthem was played on every possible occasion. It was at this time, to escape the empty display, that I took to wandering about the docks, a book under my arm, looking at the ships and gear which would begin to disappear as the Neva froze. I wondered where Uncle Semya was sending me. I watched the donkeys hauling fish from the little sailing boats. I admired the steam-launches with their short funnels and strange, busy motion. Beyond them the great ironclads and the few passenger ships of the Baltic Shipping Company lay at anchor, a picture of tranquillity, or stasis. Sometimes a wild, banshee wail would come from one or another of the ships. Occasionally it was possible to watch an old-fashioned brig or schooner in full sail, leaving perhaps for Finland or Norway, or even heading out towards England. I was sure that England would be my own destination. It was not more than two or three days away from here.

  Surrounded by the bustle, the creak of the hauling gear, the putter of the engines, the shouts of the dockers, I found peace. The docks stretched for miles along the Neva. They were one of the few areas not radiating that peculiar atmosphere of terror found everywhere but in the bohemian cafés.

  Yet even some of those girls, whose apartments I visited, no longer offered me quite the retreat and escape I had first found. They seemed neither so warm, so carefree nor so soft. The apartments themselves were as comfortable, cut off from the outside world; they still swam with the scent of Quelques Fleurs and were draped with Japanese silks and white towels. The girls broke the unspoken pact, and referred increasingly to their nervousness. Women are more sensitive to the Zeitgeist. They are the first to consider emigration during troubled times and they are nearly always right. They are the first to warn of treachery and cowardice in our ranks. They have this sensitivity, I believe, because they have more to lose than men. Sadly, I was too young to appreciate the feelings of these various Cassandras. I became, instead, impatient with them. I gave up sleeping with intellectuals and girls of good breeding. I sought the company of ordinary whores whose job was to mollify, to console, to keep the world at bay. I think quite a few of us dropped the beauties we had once courted and contented ourselves with brainless, good-natured creatures whose paint, dyes, cheap furs and cheaper satins became increasingly attractive as we grew tired of thinking. Thought meant considering the world and its war. The world was too full of fear to be any longer palatable. Because of this mood, I suspect, my second encounter with Mrs Cornelius did not develop into an amorous affair.

  I had heard of the ‘magnificent English beauty’, a favourite of Lunarcharsky and Savinkoff and their radicals, but I had not associated her with the girl I had helped briefly in Odessa. The revolutionaries had their own haunts. It was those with literary or artistic pretensions who appeared infrequently
at The Harlequinade.

  On 5 September 1916, I saw her again. She was the only female at a table where bespectacled, mad-eyed men in ill-fitting European jackets plotted the reorganisation of the poetry industry. She seemed more than a little drunk. She was dressed in a beautifully cut and simple blue gown. On her blonde hair was a small hat of a kind just becoming fashionable. It matched her dress. It had a cream ostrich feather following the line of her hair and neck, half-curling under her chin. She was drinking the Georgian champagne we were all by that time substituting for the real thing, but she gave every appearance of relishing it. In a holder blending the colours of her hat and her feather, she smoked a Turkish cigarette. Her skirts were lifted a little so that her sheer silk stockings were revealed above blue suede boots. She was the only woman in the café who gave any appearance of enjoying herself. All the others wore the painted smile of the harlot or the nervous grin of the intellectual. I was sure she would not recognise me as I raised a hand. She frowned, sat back, asked something of her fiercely-arguing companion (Lunarcharsky, I think: he had one of those goatee beards they all wore). He looked up, glanced in my direction, shook his head and returned to the fray. I lifted an eyebrow and smiled. She grinned, saluting me with a glass of champagne. I heard her familiar tones drifting through the general din: