The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Yuri Trifonov

  Nothing special happened at school except for getting punched in the eye during a fight. A whole ton of blood came out! I couldn’t open my eye for two days and didn’t go to school. It’s still black and not completely healed. But I did manage to read Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don and Virgin Soil Upturned, Hugo’s Les misérables, Daniel’s “Yulis,” Gogol’s “The Nose” and “Rome,” and Ernest von Hesse’s scholarly work, China and the Chinese. Very interesting.

  On the 23rd I saw A Little Negro and a Monkey at the Children’s Theater—a ridiculous piece of melodrama! Disgusting!

  Right now I am writing “A Cro-Magnon Icarus,” a story about life in the Aurignacian period.14

  “Yulis,” by the Yiddish writer Mark Daniel, was a story about the Civil War in Vilnius. It was probably given to Yuri by his grandmother, Tatiana Slovatinskaia, who had grown up and converted to Bolshevism there. A Little Negro and a Monkey was a play that Natalia Sats cowrote with her first husband, S. G. Rozanov, and directed in her theater, to great acclaim. It was the story of an African boy and his friend, a monkey, who gets sold to a European circus. With help from some sailors with red stars on their caps, they become reunited in Leningrad and are finally able to return to Africa, where they organize young-pioneer detachments. The Cro-Magnon story was one of four that Yuri wrote about prehistory; the three others were “Diplodocus,” “Dukhalli,” and “Toxodon Platensis.” He also wrote richly illustrated papers about history and geography (for school and for his own pleasure and edification). His most ambitious school project was a Pushkin album, which he, with his mother’s help, prepared for the Pushkin anniversary celebrations in January 1937 (at the age of eleven).15 A version of this episode appears in Trifonov’s novel, Disappearance:

  Yuri Trifonov

  Gorik spent his evenings putting together an album: as a gift to the school literature society and an item for the Pushkin exhibition (and in the desperate hope of taking first prize for it). Into a large “Spiral-bound Sketchbook” he pasted portraits, pictures, illustrations clipped from magazines, newspapers, and even, when his mother wasn’t looking, several books and carefully copied out, in India ink and block letters, the best-known poems. For instance: “I have erected to myself a monument not of human making”—and right next to it a picture depicting the Pushkin monument on Tverskoy Boulevard clipped from the newspaper For Industrialization, which his father subscribed to. Unfortunately, all the newspaper clippings had yellowed from the glue, which had seeped through.16

  According to his sister, Tania, Yuri’s album did win a school prize and was included in the citywide exhibition of the best work devoted to Pushkin. In the novel, however, what mattered most to the main character and made him feel so bad was that he was not among the top three. “The first prize had gone to a boy from the eighth grade for a clay figurine entitled ‘Young Comrade Stalin Reading Pushkin,’ the second prize had been awarded to a girl who had used silver threads to embroider a pillow cover with a picture inspired by ‘The Tale of Tsar Saltan,’ and the third prize had been taken by Lyonia Karas—a fine friend, working on the sly and concealing it from everybody!—for a portrait in colored pencil of Pushkin’s friend, Küchelbecker (it’s true, though, the portrait was amazing, the best at the exhibit).”17

  Yuri and Tania Trifonov

  But Yuri’s greatest passion was writing. When he was twelve, he joined Moscow’s House of Pioneers, which had opened a year earlier in the building of the recently disbanded Society of Old Bolsheviks. In the diary entry for November 2, 1938, he remembered the previous year. “That House was so interesting that I was ready to go there every day. First I joined the geography club and then switched to literature. Those were wonderful evenings sitting around the large table discussing one of our stories and being transported to the heavens by our conversations. We quoted thousands of writers, from Homer to Kataev. Our teacher, the editor in chief of the Young Pioneer magazine, Comrade Ivanter, used to explain our mistakes to us in such an interesting way that it was truly a school where you could learn a great deal.”18

  Perhaps as a result of what he learned in the House of Pioneers, Yuri became dissatisfied with his prehistoric fiction. “I want to write a simple, funny story, not some rubbish about Diplodocus, Cro-Magnon man, Dukhalli, and other monsters. A simple story—that’s what I’m aiming for!” His first such story was disguised as a diary entry for November 2, 1938. His closest House of Government friends were Lyova Fedotov, Misha Korshunov, and Oleg Salkovsky. Oleg (who lived in Apt. 443, right under the Korshunovs) had once told Yuri that Misha and Lyova were secretly working on a short story “about an Italian engineer who invents a special device and goes to Spain to join the Republicans, but is seduced by a fascist singer from Milan’s La Scala opera theater, who steals the device.” Yuri and Oleg decided to retaliate by writing a story of their own. Yuri came up with a “devilishly simple” plot in the manner of Jules Verne, “about a young man who goes on vacation to a collective farm in the Altai Mountains and hears about a forest spirit. I am not going to describe it all, but I will tell you that the forest spirit turns out to be a gigantic bat.” After several early drafts, they ran out of steam and watched helplessly as their rivals locked themselves up in Misha’s apartment until 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. each night. Finally, Yuri had an idea:

  “Oleg!’ I yelled at the top of my voice and grabbed him by the sleeve. “Eureka! I have an idea! Let’s make this into a story the young man tells his fellow engineers sometime later. We’ll call it “Gray Hair.” Someone will ask him “so, why is your hair gray?” and then he’ll tell the story. At the end, no one will believe him, but just at that moment the gigantic bat will fly overhead.”

  “Perfect!” exclaimed Oleg.

  They wrote some more—together, separately, and together again, with little success—until one day Yuri’s telephone rang. It was Lyova, who revealed that he and Misha had had a falling out over the role of the Italian opera singer. Relieved, Yuri called Oleg, but he was not home: he had gone over to Misha’s. “Thus ended that particular literary rivalry. Everything returned to normal. Lyova would come to my place and look at butterflies and different kinds of bugs and insects, while Oleg went to Misha’s, and they would talk about the pleasant weather, two fools named Yuri and Lyova, and Nadia Kretova’s face in the window.”

  Yuri had graduated from scientific-adventure stories to framed scientific-adventure stories to an elaborately designed “simple” story about boys writing scientific-adventure stories, framed and unframed. The narrator was Yuri Trifonov, who was also a thirteen-year-old diary keeper: “This story just happened to me, of its own accord. I decided to call it ‘The Rivals.’ If I were to read it to the characters themselves, they would find a few details added by me. And they would be right: I have added some details. But the core idea, the actual events did take place on Planet Earth, in the Solar System, Eastern Hemisphere, Europe, USSR, Moscow, No. 2 Serafimovich Street, also known as the House of Government, to four unnamed youth. They all harbored literary ambitions, and still do.” They were literary creations twice over—as Yuri’s characters and as four binge readers from the House of Government, on Serafimovich Street.19

  Drawing of a desk by Yuri Trifonov (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

  ■ ■ ■

  By all accounts, the most extraordinary, and thus the most typical, of Yuri’s House of Government contemporaries was his friend and fellow author, Lyova Fedotov, the son of the Russian peasant, American worker, Trenton Prison inmate, Central Asian collectivizer, proletarian writer, and machine-tractor-station political chairman, Fedor Fedotov. In 1933, when Fedor’s body was found in a marsh not far from the state farm he was managing, Lyova was ten years old. He was living in a small first-floor apartment (Apt. 262) with his mother, Roza Lazarevna Markus, a costume maker at the Moscow Youth Theater. Lyova, according to Yuri Trifonov, “was short and swarthy, with a slightly Mongol face and golden Slavic hair”:

  From boy
hood on he strove passionately and eagerly to improve himself in every possible way, quickly devouring all the sciences, all the arts, all books, all music, and all the world—as if he were afraid of running out of time. At the age of twelve, he seemed to live with the sense of having very little time and an awful lot to accomplish….

  He was interested in many sciences, especially mineralogy, paleontology, and oceanography; drew very well—his watercolors were exhibited at art shows and published in the Young Pioneer magazine; loved classical music and wrote novels in thick, cloth-bound notebooks. I first got into this tedious business of novel writing because of Lyova. He also tried to toughen himself physically: walking around in shorts and no coat in the winter, learning judo holds, and, despite various congenital defects—bad eyesight, minor deafness, and flat feet—working hard to prepare himself for distant travels and geographical discoveries.20

  Once, Yuri and Lyova had a contest to see who could draw a better elephant. Oleg, who served as referee, decided in Lyova’s favor. (Yuri was better at chess, though. “We were excited by the players’ extraordinary names,” he wrote. “Eliscases, Lilienthal, Levenfish … They sounded as exotically beautiful as ones like Honduras or Salvador, for example.”) When Lyova was eleven, he won second prize at the Moscow Schoolchildren’s Art Exhibition (and received an easel with oil paints and a palette). One of the judges, a woman from the Tretyakov Gallery, became a lifelong friend and patron. He studied art at the House of Pioneers (where Yuri studied literature) and at the Central House for the Artistic Education of Children (where he met his close friend Zhenia Gurov). He drew pictures for the school newspaper and sketches for the House of Government’s Children’s Club theater decorations, but he preferred the thematic “series” and “albums” he prepared as part of his school assignments or as independent projects based on his reading. Included among them were “Italy,” “Ukraine,” “Zoology, “Mineralogy,” “Oceanography,” “Marine Animals,” and “The Ice Age.” “Once,” wrote Mikhail (Misha) Korshunov, “he showed up with a roll of white wallpaper. That was certainly a first: a roll of wallpaper instead of the usual briefcase. He rolled it out the full length of the hall and then ordered me to stand on one end, so it wouldn’t curl up, while he stood on the other. Painted all along it were prehistoric animals moving through ancient forests, seas, and swamps, under the title ‘The Earth’s Chronicle.’ ‘What a monster I’ve created!’ he said with satisfaction.”21

  Lyova Fedotov

  Lyova Fedotov’s drawings

  His collection of “series” (he distinguished between albums with illustrated text and series made up of single drawings) included one on dinosaurs, one on “the little church,” one “on the growth of the Palace of Soviets, beginning with the Cathedral of Christ the Savior that once stood there, through the completed Palace” (as Lyova put it in his diary), and one portrait gallery of great musicians. Lyova had demonstrated his musical talent very early, in 1925, during the October Revolution celebration, when he was still living with both his parents, Fedor and Roza, in the First House of Soviets (the National Hotel) in a room facing Tverskaia. “We were sitting on the balcony,” Roza remembered, “and down below people were singing and dancing, and the accordion was playing … and, suddenly, Lyova repeated it all exactly: ‘We Are Blacksmiths’ and ‘When My Mother Was Seeing Me off to the Red Army.’ He was two years old, and hadn’t really started talking yet, but he sang it all perfectly.” Ten years later, she managed to buy him a piano. “After Fedor’s death, things were financially very difficult for Lyova and me, very difficult. But I decided to buy him a piano, come what may. I began selling my husband’s things through a consignment store and putting the money into a bank account. When I had saved five thousand rubles, I found a Rönisch concert piano through a newspaper ad, so he could practice at home.” Lyova took private lessons from the composer Modest Nikolaevich Rober, whom he greatly admired and, in his diary, referred to as “my teacher.” He practiced regularly at home, but tried not to do it in his mother’s presence because she suspected that he preferred improvisation to homework. She need not have worried: he did spend some time picking out his favorite opera arias, but his goal was accuracy, not ornamentation. “You should have seen his desk,” she said fifty years later, conceding the point and addressing a different age:

  You would never have guessed it was a child’s desk. It was like the desk of … of some kind of professor. There were always lots of books … and each book had a bookmark. He would sit there and write. He had a herbarium … you should have seen it … he would make a tiny cut in the page and carefully insert the stem … so the flower would lie nice and flat … and he’d write out its name in Latin. And the stamps? He didn’t glue them in … he had these tiny tweezers … and he’d use the tweezers … never his fingers … to pick up each stamp and place it very carefully into a special album. He also collected minerals…. He had a box with niches … each little niche was lined with cotton … and in each one was a mineral. Right next to it would be a cardboard label with the mineral’s name … and not just the name, but also the type, cleavage and fracture, hardness … that’s how particular he was.22

  Lyova Fedotov’s drawings

  He worked on himself by not wearing gloves in the winter, not wasting time playing cards, and not drinking wine or champagne (even on New Year’s Eve). He worked on his spelling and literary style by copying out War and Peace by hand. He tried to embrace the world by regimenting his life as much as possible. In the same diary entry in which he complained about his mother’s expectations, he attempted to manage his own. “What have I accomplished this summer? Drawn the Little Church series, but even that is not finished. Did not travel incognito to Zvenigorod, did not finish my papers … That’s a shame!” He listed only special projects (Zvenigorod was famous for its monastery and cathedral founded in the fourteenth century), not any of the things he did as a matter of course. “He was capable of sitting at his desk from morning till night and staying occupied,” according to his mother. “Writing. Or drawing. Or arranging his stamps. Or with his herbariums, or other things.”23

  I never saw him just sitting and doing nothing. If he was sitting, he was reading. His father was the same way—wherever he went, he always had a book with him. When they put him in Trenton Prison in America in 1917—he was sentenced to ten years—in his cell there, he said, there was one narrow beam of sunlight coming down from above. He used to follow that beam around with his book and read. Lyova read all the time, too. Whenever we took the streetcar, he would always read standing up. You know that little area up at the front right behind the driver? That’s where Lyova always used to stand. He never sat down. Let others who find it hard to stand sit down, he used to say.24

  Lyova vowed to accomplish more the following summer and sealed his pledge with a reference to Giovagnioli’s Spartacus: “May Jupiter favor me in this undertaking!” As he wrote a few weeks later, after coming home from the first day of his last year in school (1940),

  When I got home I immediately remembered the plan of action I had devised last year and decided to renew it on paper straight away in order to have the pleasure of renewing it in practice as soon as possible….

  First, I included homework, then my walks, Little Church series, Ukraine album, music, short story, and diary. I jotted it all down on a clean sheet of paper. The homework, of course, would always get fit in, and the walks, whenever possible; I could finish the series when school quit piling up on me, and when I did finish, I’d replace it in the plan with my “Italy” presentation; I’d be working on “Ukraine” along with the series; music would always be there, and I’d start working on my short story again as soon as I finished my letter to Raya, which I needed to do as quickly as possible (I’d have done it right away, if school weren’t poisoning my existence); and finally, the diary, too, would always get written. I preserved the old plan along with the new one.

  In order to test myself, I decided to spend today, the first
day of school, according to my plan. So that’s what I did. I managed to make progress on the Little Church drawing and redo the cover of “Ukraine” to make it easier for me to color in later. I wasn’t able to get any writing done on my short story today—there was no point in spending only a few moments on it. To write, I need both inspiration and concentration.25

  In his earlier lament about his lack of productivity over the summer, Lyova did not mention his diary. In fact, that entry (August 29, 1940) was at the beginning of Notebook XIII. (He wrote his diary entries in numbered notebooks.) The previous surviving notebook, Notebook V, ends on December 8. That means that over the course of nine months, including the unproductive summer, Lyova had completed seven notebooks (in tiny script and with no margins or blank spaces, judging by the appearance of nos. V and XIII). He wrote as he read, and he read as he wrote, and he lived through what he read and wrote in an ever-tightening dog-chase-tail race for the fullness of time and limitless self-awareness. He embodied the age of “great planners and future geometers” in which, as Leonid Leonov suggested at the first Writers’ Congress, every hero was his own author and every event was its own chronicle. For two years, Lyova had been dreaming of going to Leningrad, the city of perfect architecture. On December 5, 1939, he and his mother finally talked about buying the tickets: