Letunov’s quest takes the story back to 1919, the year of de-Cossackization, the “Last Battle,” and Migulin’s desertion and trial. Letunov, an eighteen-year-old Bolshevik volunteer at the time, witnesses the conflagration. “Savage is the year, savage the hour over Russia. Like lava it flows, that savage time flooding and burying with fire everything in its path.” The time is fulfilled, “the earth is aflame,” history has run out of patience, and a leatherworker with sleepy little eyes and an absurdly long leather coat promises to “pass through Cossack villages like Carthage” (and does). The flare-up of conscience turns into “savage zeal.”31 Everyone and no one is to blame.
My God, were they really so savage: the leatherworker with sleepy little eyes; the Veshenskaia Cossacks, who, that same spring, in a fit of revolutionary enthusiasm, killed off all their officers in one fell swoop and declared themselves supporters of the new regime; the four exhausted Petrograd workers, one Hungarian who barely understood any Russian and three Latvians who had all but forgotten their home country, and who, for years, had been killing, first Germans, then Ukrainian nationalists, and then, in the name of the great idea, enemies of the Revolution? There are the enemies: bearded, with animal hatred in their eyes, barefoot, and in their undershirts; one shouts and shakes his fists; another drops to his knees; while their wives wail on the other side of the fence. And here is the man who has returned from exile, where he was beaten and flogged, an old man at thirty, who, his hopeless lungs bursting, manages to wheeze out: “Death to the enemies of the revolution! Fire!”32
Were they really so savage? No, claims Letunov, looking back from his dacha settlement. It is the year 1919 that is to blame, not anyone in particular. “And all because of a sort of haste, fear, a mad internal fever: fix, rebuild at once, for all time, for ever and ever!” Some call it “the Vendee”; some, the last and decisive class battle; and one mad seminarian mumbles something about a blazing star falling from the sky (“the name of the star is Wormwood”). Letunov himself—in 1919 and later, as an old man—is unrelenting in his scrutiny of Corps Commander Migulin. “If you could figure out or at least decide for yourself what he was, a lot would become clear.”33
The matter is to be settled in the fall of 1919, in revolutionary court, with Migulin as defendant, young Letunov as assistant court secretary, and Commissar Janson as chief prosecutor. Janson’s speech in The Old Man is a partial transcript of Smilga’s speech at the Filipp Mironov trial: the eagle of the Revolution has turned out to be a rooster; his vision of socialism is a “semi-Tolstoyan, semi-sentimental melodrama”; there is but one force that “will come out victorious from this terrible, colossal struggle”; and “the litter of petit bourgeois ideology must be swept off the road of the Revolution.” Letunov describes Janson as both a Latvian Bolshevik with Ivar Smilga’s biography and “historical necessity” in the flesh. “He was twenty-eight at the time. But in that sandy-haired, short-legged little man on the rostrum I did not see—no one saw—his youth or his university past or his Baltic origins. It was the icy words of the Revolution speaking, it was the course of events. And one’s spirit froze and one’s hands became rigid. I remember, I remember …”34
And the more the old man Letunov remembers, the more obvious it becomes that he is in the same mold as Glebov and his own children and that he, too, had been swimming in the current, the lava, and the course of events: when the leatherworker with sleepy little eyes talked him into becoming the chairman of the revolutionary tribunal (“I didn’t want it, I tried my best to refuse”); when he agreed to serve as assistant court secretary at the Migulin trial (“a lot of red tape, a lot of papers, names”); and when, “blinded by red foam,” he betrayed himself along with the Revolution by accepting Janson’s story of Migulin’s betrayal of the Revolution. He points to the times, the year, and the lava, and he hopes he has become stronger as a consequence (“Peter, who denied Jesus in the high priest’s courtyard, would later earn his name Petros, meaning ‘rock,’ that is, ‘hard’”). And perhaps he is right: sometimes the current slows down to an imperceptible process of festering and evaporating, and sometimes it is so fast one can hardly think. And of course it is true that he is different from Glebov and so many others because he—like Rebrov and Troitsky—keeps looking back, keeps following the threads, keeps trying to see and to remember.35
But does he know where to look? Late one evening he walks over to see his wife’s old friend, but finds her daughter, Zina, instead. She seems distracted, but he insists on reading a document from his archive. It is Migulin’s description of the night he and his comrades spent in a prison cell before their scheduled execution (the text comes directly from Filipp Mironov’s papers): “Some people are able to look [death] proudly in the eye; others have to muster whatever is left of their spiritual strength to seem calm; no one wants to appear fainthearted. In an attempt to deceive himself and us, for instance, one of our comrades suddenly leaps up and breaks into a dance, his heels drumming faster and faster on the cement floor. But his face is frozen and his eyes so blank it is terrifying for a live person to look into them.” Letunov (“Pavel Evgrafovich”) has forgotten that Zina’s husband is dying and that Zina’s mother, his wife’s old friend, is about to move into the Home for Party Veterans.
“Pavel Evgrafovich …” Zina was looking at him in a strange and disturbing way, her eyes red. “There is something I think you should know: in our life today, with no wars or revolutions … things still happen …”
“What? What did you say?” asked Pavel Evgrafovich.
“I, too, sometimes feel like … breaking into a dance.”36
Zina gets up from her chair and leaves the room. Pavel Evgrafovich waits patiently for her to return, “clasping his file to his chest.” Perhaps it is not the year, after all. Back in 1919, Letunov’s Uncle Shura, based on Trifonov’s father, never accepted the “killing arithmetic” and refused to participate in the Migulin trial because trials were needed to establish the facts, not to serve as “a show rehearsed in advance.” And now, in 1972, some people have time to look back—and look around—and others do not. And the heat is just as terrible, if not worse. “The cast iron was bearing down; the forests were burning, and Moscow was choking to death, suffocating from the haze—dusky blue, charcoal gray, reddish brown, black—different colors at different times—that filled the streets and houses with a slow rolling, blanketing cloud, like a fog or poisonous gas; the smell of burning penetrated everywhere, there was no escaping it; the lakes turned to sandy shallows, the river revealed its rocks, the water barely trickled from the faucets, the birds did not sing; life on this planet had come to an end, killed by the sun.”37
Seasons come and go, and the heat—along with conscience—keeps flaring up and cooling off, day after day, year after year. Letunov senses this, but he belongs to the parents’ generation and he cannot stop looking for final resolutions: a beginning in 1919, when the lava flowed through the Don Region, and an end in the near future, when the smell of burning will disappear once and for all. “Migulin perished because at a fateful moment two streams of hot and cold, two clouds the size of continents—belief and unbelief—had collided in the heavens and produced a discharge of colossal magnitude, and he had been whisked up and carried away by the hurricane-force wind in which hot and cold, belief and unbelief commingled. Displacement always brings on a thunderstorm, and the downpour drenches the earth. This merciless heat will end in a downpour, too. And I shall rejoice in the coolness if I survive.”38
At the end of the novel, and at the end of his life, Letunov goes to see Asya, Migulin’s wife (Trifonov’s version of Filipp Mironov’s Nadezhda). She turns out to be a “mummy-like old woman with shining eyes.” He asks her where Migulin was headed in August 1919. She understands that her answer is very important to him, but all she can say is: “I have never loved anyone so much in my long and wearisome life.’”39
A year later, after Letunov’s death, his son gives his documents to a history gra
duate student from Rostov who is writing his dissertation on Migulin. The graduate student thinks that there are times when truth and faith become so tightly and inextricably intertwined that it is difficult to sort out which is which, but he believes that he can do it. He sets out for home, but he misses his train because of a sudden downpour. It is not the downpour Letunov was waiting for. It signifies the end of faith—his faith—but it is unlikely to be the last one. The novel ends the same way as The Road to Ocean, except that there is no Ocean, just the rain, and no guide to accompany the historian. “The rain was coming down in a flood. It smelled of ozone. Two little girls had covered themselves with a sheet of clear plastic and were running barefoot over the asphalt.”40
■ ■ ■
Sergei Troitsky from Another Life has trouble telling truth from faith and defining the subject of his dissertation. One night, when he and his wife, Olga Vasilievna, are in bed, talking, he suddenly says:
“Do you know why I am having such a hard time?” Barely audibly, he whispered: “Because the threads that stretch out from the past … they are fraught…. Don’t you see? They are really fraught. Don’t you understand?”
She did not understand. “Fraught … with what?”
“What do you mean, with what?” He laughed. She suddenly felt scared: he seemed to be losing his mind. “Nothing breaks off without leaving a trace of some kind…. There is no such thing as a final rupture! Don’t you understand? There has to be a continuation, there must be. It’s so obvious.”41
It is only after he dies, defeated by his failure to relate to other lives (in the present as well as in the past), that she finally understands. “Every contact with the past meant pain. Yet life is made up of such contacts, for the threads to the past are a thousandfold and each one must be torn out of living flesh, out of a wound. At first she had thought that peace would come when all those threads, down to the tiniest and thinnest, had been broken. It now appeared, however, that this would never be, because the number of threads was infinite. Every object, every familiar person, every thought, every word—every single thing in the world was linked by some thread to him.”42
In one of the final scenes of the novel, Olga Vasilievna has a dream. She and Sergei are gathering mushrooms in the forest, but they are too involved in conversation to notice anything, and there aren’t any mushrooms, anyway. They go deeper and deeper into the forest. The aspens and birches give way to dense spruce thickets, and it grows dark and damp. They walk faster and faster. “Somewhere ahead there was a glimmer of brighter light, a glimpse or two of a glade or a clearing. That was where another life would begin.” They keep going. “The dampness in the air was oppressive, the smell of rotting wood drifted up from the fallen trees and from the bottoms of ravines. Occasionally they had to wade through black swampy water as they walked on and on, talking, enticed by the brightness ahead.” Finally, they come to a green fence, walk along it for a while, find a gate, and ask four men sitting on a bench where the bus stop is. The men say that there is no bus stop, but a woman sitting beside them says that the men are patients from an asylum and offers to show them a shortcut through the woods. They walk for a long time. It grows dark. The woman keeps saying that they are almost there. Suddenly she says: “Here we are.”
They were standing in front of a small woodland swamp. “What’s this?” Olga Vasilievna asked.
“This is the road,” said the woman. “There’s your bus—over there.” She stretched out her arm, pointing to a clump of sedge growing on the far side of the swamp.43
When the literary historian Ralf Schröder asked Trifonov about the meaning of this scene, Trifonov said that, being German, he must remember Faust’s final monologue:
A swamp still skirts the mountain chain
And poisons all the land retrieved;
This marshland I hope yet to drain,
And thus surpass what we achieved.
Faust’s vision of heavenly life on reclaimed land echoes the story of the House of Government, but his conclusion points to “another life,” the one that Olga Vasilievna is attempting to come to terms with.
This is the highest wisdom that I own,
The best that mankind ever knew:
Freedom and life are owned by those alone
Who conquer them each day anew.
Blind and about to die, Faust seems to realize something that Moses and Pavel Letunov never do: that life is not about getting to the other side and stopping time; it is about swimming against the current—even if it means staying in one place. Such, at any rate, is the claim made by the angels who wrest Faust’s soul from Mephistopheles (who cries foul, not without some justification):
Saved is the spirit kingdom’s flower
From evil and the grave:
“Whoever strives with all his power,
We are allowed to save.”44
And such is Olga Vasilievna’s realization at the end of Another Life. She conquers each day anew and eventually finds another love. He is middle-aged, married, and often sick. They like to go for walks on a trail that runs through the pine woods along the river. “Moscow had long since surrounded this ancient spot, part village and part dacha settlement, had flowed around it and surged westward, but had somehow not quite swallowed it up: the pine trees were still there, the water-meadow still shimmered in green, and high on a hilltop over the river and above the pines floated the bell tower of the old Spasskoe-Lykovo church, visible from far away on every side.” It was the same belfry that the barefooted little boy used to see as he ran through that same meadow chasing his father’s kite; the same river that flowed eastward into Moscow and washed the House on the Embankment on both sides; the same man coming back to the spot he never left. As Trifonov’s alter ego from The Old Man puts it, “life is a system in which everything, in some mysterious way and according to some higher plan, keeps coming back to form a circle.”45
The story of the Revolution’s children does not end in self-immolation or execution. It ends the same way as The Blue Bird, which they saw at the Moscow Art Theater when they were little; the same way as Faust and War and Peace, which their blind parents raised them on; and the same way as Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which they adopted as their Faust. What was a swamp to Trifonov’s father is Trifonov’s life, the only one he has. And what was his father’s House of Government is Trifonov’s home, the one he keeps coming back to. And Trifonov’s home, whatever its particular time and place, will always remain the House on the Embankment—because the river keeps flowing, and the exiles from childhood keep floating downstream or swimming against the current, paddling with their hands, day after day, year after year.
Yuri Trifonov on the riverbank, with the Lykovo Trinity belfry in the background (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
Yuri Trifonov in front of the Lykovo Trinity belfry
(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
APPENDIX
PARTIAL LIST OF LEASEHOLDERS
The following is a list of House of Government leaseholders most prominently featured in this book. Entries include selected positions and occupations and names of dependents who lived in the House.
Adoratsky, Vladimir Viktorovich (b. 1878), director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute at the Party Central Committee. Apt. 93.
■ His wife, Serafima Mikhailovna (b. 1878).
■ Their daughter, Varvara (b. 1904).
Arosev, Aleksandr Yakovlevich (b. 1890), military leader of the Bolshevik uprising in Moscow in October 1917; chairman of the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of Ukraine; deputy director of the Lenin Institute; ambassador to Lithuania and Czechoslovakia; chairman of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries (VOKS). Diarist, memoirist, novelist, short-story writer. Apts. 103 and 104.
■ His daughters, Natalia (b. 1919), Elena (b. 1923), and Olga (b. 1925).
■ His second wife, Gertrude Freund (b. 1909), Czechoslovak citizen, dance teacher.
■ Their son, Dmitry (b. 1934).
Berman, Matvei Davydovich (b. 1898), head of the Gulag; people’s commissar of communications. Apt. 141.
Bogachev, Serafim Yakovlevich (b. 1909), secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol (Young Communist League). Apt. 65.
■ His wife, Lydia Aleksandrovna Kozlova (b. 1909).
■ Their daughter, Natalia (b. 1937).
Bogutsky, Vatslav Antonovich (Waclaw Bogucki, b. 1884), representative of the Communist Party of Poland at the Comintern Executive Committee; chairman of the Central Committee of the Trade Union of Communications Workers. Apt. 342.
■ His wife, Mikhalina Iosifovna Novitskaia (Michalina Nowicka, b. 1896), librarian at the Lenin Institute.
■ Their son, Vladimir (b. 1924).
Butenko, Konstantin Ivanovich (b. 1901), director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant; deputy people’s commissar of heavy industry. Apt. 141.
■ His wife, Sofia Aleksandrovna (b. 1904), leader of the All-Union Movement of Wives of Managers and Engineers Working in Heavy Industry.
■ Their adopted daughter (Sofia’s niece), Tamara Nikolaevna Romanova.
The House of Government Page 130
