Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  ‘Such a delightful couple!’

  ‘How can you be so aggravating?’ said my mother.

  ‘Praise where praise is due,’ he replied. ‘I used to see them when they were exiled to Minusinsk. It was a dull hole – right up in the middle of Siberia. His talk was first-rate. So was her cooking,’ he added, on an after-thought. ‘I was very grateful.’

  When my worldly Aunt Ethel spoke sharply of the improbability of good cooking among anarchists, he had his answer ready.

  ‘Don’t imagine the Devil doesn’t know how to eat well. I’ve no doubt Faust seduced Marguerite with lobster soufflés. And if you imagine the wilder parts of Siberia were not full of temptation – let me tell you, life among the Yakutes was considered more immoral than in Bucharest.’

  What he himself was doing in Minusinsk we never discovered.

  •

  When I was fourteen, ‘twice seven – double Magic!’ said the Traveller, he gave me my first samovar, a squat brass affair, which I found rather complicated to manage; but it had come from him and it was the unchanging symbol of Russia – of ‘All the Russias’ I craved – that he had made me crave, so I mastered the business of charcoal and boiling water, and was rewarded by its purring sound. However, soft, this purring of the samovar always seems to dominate the room, bestowing an unequalled sense of companionship and reassurance. It is something so dear to the Russian heart that few will journey without it; even now, in the sternly purposeful pattern of their lives, some board trains or planes with their samovar to bring them the comfort no electric kettle or thermos flask could do.

  About this time I acquired a treasure which has remained one of my most cherished possessions: Murray’s Guide Book for Russia, 1893. The time and the place. This fat little crimson book, crammed with what have now become romantic and inaccurate statements, has remained my favourite bedside reading. Now, as in my schoolroom, I open the overcrowded pages, to read, with a sense of intoxicating excitement:

  KOURSK. 20 mins. stop. Buffet. Station 3 versts from town. 50,000 inhabitants. 23 churches. 5 convents. Bogoroditsky-Znamensky (Apparition of the Virgin) commemorates retreat of Polish Hetman Jolkevski, 1612. Situated at confluence of rivers Koura and Touskara. Surrounded by fertile lands. Centre for water melons which are exported as far as Chinese frontier. Celebrated Fair of Koursk held annually, 10th week after Easter. Cathedral (numerous interesting ikons). Hotel Poltoratsky (single rooms 4 roubles per day). Restaurant recommended for petit déjeuner. Public garden Demidov (band Wednesdays and Saturday evening in summer). Headquarters of the District Governor and Seat of the Bishop, Many public buildings include Lunatic Asylum and House of Correction. Bottled or mineral water advised.

  Now although on first reading, this and other similar statements might not appear of great significance, they were so, to me. Koursk! I yearned for it. Koursk, where the Russians used to say the nightingales sang twelve different songs . . . Perhaps destiny was priming me for that remote future when I should marry Romain Kacew, or Gary, as he became known, a naturalized Frenchman whose Russian roots sprang from the Owczinsky family of Koursk.

  Or was it simply that I found every entry magical, whether telling of train timetables to Baku, the contents of the Hermitage, or the Fair at Nijni-Novgorod if it conjured the landscape of my mind’s eye – the landscape of my heart’s desire?

  •

  While I achieved the Russia of my imagination through the Traveller he too was able, through my childish enthusiasm, my credulity, to reach again a Russia he had lost – or perhaps, had never even known, as he described it. Looking back, I think he too was taking journeys into the mind’s eye to reach the heart’s desire. Some atavistic craving for a memory or an echo of a faraway land, long gone, drew him.

  He too had his spells and magic formulae, and sometimes, holding my hand in both his own as if it were a talisman, his eyes clouding into that inward-turning stare which meant he was ‘thinking Russia’, he would repeat a traditional Siberian song with its haunting refrain:

  Who the lone Traveller, come to my door?

  Lonely no more.

  Come at last, to the door of my nursery, he was lonely no more.

  •

  When the Traveller reappeared among us he simply resumed his place in our house and lives, rebuffing all questions with his usual skill. I was never able to assess, properly, my parents’ attitude towards him. My father appeared to enjoy his company, but in a detached manner: observing the dramatic exits and entrances and the highly-flavoured monologues as from a seat in the stalls. My mother was less detached. She listened spellbound, but sometimes seemed oddly unsympathetic, especially concerning Siberia.

  ‘It must have been so inconvenient – I really don’t know what he liked about it,’ she would say, as she wrestled with a shopping list, or the day’s menus. I asked her once, why she had not gone to Russia – long ago, when she first knew the Traveller, and was grown up and free to go anywhere she liked.

  ‘One is never really free,’ was her enigmatic reply. But it did not satisfy me, for I had begun to discover that my mother rather enjoyed restrictions: they saved her the strain of making adventurous decisions. Ill-health, lack of money, her duty to others, all these things gradually became her allies: she had opted for quiet.

  Now there were my overflowing bookshelves to be discussed. The original Siberian collection had expanded impressively, boasting rarities such as Revelations of Siberia by a banished Lady, 1852, or Gilmour of the Mongols, besides numbers of less localized subjects, spreading south to Gogol’s Ukraine and the romanticized Caucasus of Bestoujev-Marlinsky’s tales. The Traveller eyed them with his usual, impassivity.

  ‘Ammalat Beg? En Esclavage chez les Tartares? Dear me! You should read Leskov and Perchersky-Melnikov if you want to penetrate the real old Russia,’ he said, ‘Golovliev, too, and Herzen is one of the most interesting of all our writers. An Olympian figure . . . Did you know he was forbidden in my youth? Our censorship was particularly thorough. Lenin was very much influenced by Herzen I believe . . . A great mind – a very great man . . .’ He lapsed into silence, his shoulders hunched, his eyes staring blankly with that curious gaze that always baffled me.

  ‘A great man? Lenin? Not Lenin surely,’ shrilled Mademoiselle Lavisse, a sniffling pinched little Dieppoise who came twice a week to coach me in French and arithmetic, subjects for which I showed no aptitude.

  The Traveller shrugged:

  ‘It’s a matter of opinion; it’s from where you stand, what you have to lose or gain,’

  He stared out of the window morosely, watching the well-heeled passers-by, and uniformed nannies pushing immaculate prams, their pink-faced occupants brandishing expensive toys, cheerful-looking dogs following nicely to heel.

  He pointed an accusing finger at me.

  ‘It’s all according, as your nanny used to say. You have much to lose, here . . . We – most of us in Russia – had much to gain. Even at that price . . . And don’t forget, we were at least four hundred years behind you Europeans,’ he continued, once again ranging himself and his race in Asia.

  It was one of the few occasions I had heard him speak politically and it was quite wasted in the schoolroom.

  ‘Where is my tea?’ he demanded, and, watching us – his serfs – scuttle round, he assumed an air of complacent anticipation. When the ritual of the glass of tea and the spoonful of cherry jam was achieved, he was persuaded to talk of Siberia. Again, of those wastes by which he knew me to be possessed.

  But now he told how they were streaked by long lines of émigrés, dispossessed White Russians, who fell back, retreating day by day farther East, before the Red tide. They trudged, they came in carts, on horseback, or however they could. The Trans-Siberian’s last run East had been in 1917, but the dispossessed had struggled on for years, across this landscape of desolation. The little Siberian towns had never offered much, except space – and quiet: in some, you could hear your watch ticking in the main street at noon, it was so
still; and so dull that anyone receiving a telegram was expected to circulate it as reading matter – distraction. Puddles as big as ponds, lowering skies, dust or mud, a fly-blown shop or two, a little green-domed church and a street lined with ramshackle wooden houses dominated by one yellow plaster-building, police headquarters: such was the scene. Now the gendarmerie stood empty, its doors flapping, the Imperial eagle, its symbol of authority, defaced by some passing band of liberated convicts.

  The new order took a long while to reach Siberia; at that time, it was still forming in Moscow. Meanwhile, the dispossessed were still moving eastwards; their ranks decimated by famine or typhus. Some fell by the way, some stayed: Generals turned keepers of slipshod wayside inns, their daughters plying for hire among the flotsam of adventurers, Chinese merchants, or the ragged, untamed bands of former prisoners that the Revolution had freed but who had not yet been organized or utilized by the new Russia. Some of the émigrés reached China and the outer world with their jewels, obtained Nansen passports and a new life. Some reached the frontiers with nothing, to become taxi-drivers, or waiters, or just princes, bringing that rank to an almost professional status. These Russians were the first of that legion of émigrés who were to become the twentieth century’s problem and shame: displaced persons whose lot we have now become accustomed to accept as inevitable.

  ‘The emigration – the mass exodus of the immediate post-war period – was a unique chapter in Russian history,’ wrote the Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna. The exiles fled North – to Finland; East – to Siberia and beyond. Over a million made that particular migration. They went westward, too, to the Polish frontier and South to the Black Sea, and Turkey. Military and civilians were evacuated together. Chaos, despair, bewilderment, disease and terror – these were the exiles’ lot. A British cruiser took off the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna and her suite. Suddenly there were three hundred thousand sick and destitute Russians flooding into Constantinople. English, French and American Missions struggled to relieve the misery. Epidemics raged, typhus took hold. Spanish influenza decimated the exhausted masses, who lacked food, clothing, shelter . . . The Traveller told of all this.

  In 1920, the last stand of anti-Bolshevik forces was crushed in the Caucasus and the Crimea. Now, entire military units streamed into Turkey; sixty thousand or more of these battered and hopeless men were evacuated to Gallipoli alone. Cholera spread. Those who survived were centred round General Wrangel who, with his disbanded Kuban Cossacks, held firm beside them throughout the time they were waiting to be absorbed into the Balkan countries, or to scrape a living farther afield. All of them now fought new, more bitter battles of unemployment and disillusion. Groups of men from the same regiment would find work as a whole unit – as miners or agricultural workers. One such military unit was in Paris, where I was later to know some of them. They retained all the discipline and dash of their regiment, forming colonies, living in barrack-like wooden huts, in the railway yards, working as porters, or freight men.

  ‘As long as they don’t become signal-men, or engine drivers,’ said the Traveller dourly, He had no faith in his compatriots’ mechanical abilities. I have sometimes wondered, since, how he would have responded to the scientific and mechanical triumphs of a later generation of Russians – of Soviet citizens.

  •

  While one of the Traveller’s voices was denouncing the horrors of the Revolution, where, it seemed, many of his friends had perished in terrible circumstances, he spoke glowingly of Revolutionary ideals, and pointedly avoided the society of the more aristocratic émigrés. Those who turned their titles to profit and married, because of them, into security, and flourished, aroused the Traveller’s particular fury. One such nobleman had shown a particular understanding of London’s credulity, for having wed the daughter of a vastly wealthy man of business, he proceeded to acquire two Russian bodyguards whom he was careful to dress up in dashing Cossack uniform. They accompanied him everywhere and were to be seen standing, with arms folded impressively, behind his chair at dinner parties (one can imagine their effect, below-stairs, on susceptible parlour-maids), or flanking him in his box at the theatre. Such flamboyance, said the Traveller, would have been almost out of place for any Romanov and was certainly nothing to which the prince in question was accustomed in Russia, for he was a minor princeling, mentioned somewhere in the hierarchy of the Livre de Velours, though scarcely ranking a Cossack bodyguard. But his effect in London society was electric, which was what he intended, after all.

  This was the sort of opportunism against which the Traveller always railed. Such princes and their kind had brought down the country, he said; and he would set-to, attacking the Court and Government for the last hundred years, ranging from the soured glories of Alexander I’s last years through the despotism of Nicholas I’s reign to Alexander II’s abortive liberalism, Alexander III’s reactionary rule, and finally, to the cumulative disasters, the inertia and ineptitude of the last Romanov, the irresponsibility of his family circle, and the Court in general. ‘Why, the all-powerful top-crust in Russia had no sense of moral obligation, as your landowners possess. They thought only of one thing – their pleasures. It wasn’t arrogance – you English have the monopoly of that. You are all born sahibs, colonizing the rest of us. No, it was something quite different among the Russians. No laws existed for the princes – only their whims. There were a few exceptions, of course; Prince Kropotkin was one – so was Prince Khilkhov, who once worked as a linesman on your Trans-Sib. But you see why the revolution had to come.’

  There was another circle of the Russian emigration to which the Traveller sometimes took me, and where he was generally in a gentler vein. This was the intelligentsia, a shabby, brilliant lot who still believed in liberalism, still quoted Herzen. They congregated in frowzy basements or A.B.C. tea rooms, smoking and coughing furiously. They, just as much as the aristocrats, were survivors from another world: but my obsession, my reading, made it possible for me to follow them a certain distance into their Slav world. They were at home in many languages and cultures and would talk to me of Plato or Peter Schlemil, the Golem, and Gamlet, as they pronounced the gloomy Dane. And I would question them about the Russian autocrat who spoke only in verse, and forced his entire household to reply in kind: or the Guards officer who used to walk about St. Petersburg exercising his pet wolf: or I would beg them to recite me some of Lermontov’s Demon, which theme (the illicit passion of a Dark Spirit for a pearly-pure young girl), I found indescribably romantic. I did not question them on Siberia – that was something apart, between the Traveller and myself.

  The exiles displayed a remarkably wide knowledge of the most specialized kinds of English literature, discussing the Paston Letters, the works of John Stuart Mill, Alice in Wonderland or the Restoration poets. Chatterton they admired particularly, and they spoke of him as a martyr. Perhaps it was the attic death-bed which struck a familiar chord. They talked among themselves in French, but I observed that whenever it was a question of politics (which it was, more often than not) they reverted to their mother tongue, as if no other could express the urgency of this theme. Besides, as the Traveller reminded me, it was always a mark of the best-educated Russians to be able to speak such pure Russian: generally, it was considered chic to speak French and German – English too, proving your nursery had been ruled by an English nanny – the height of snobbery – but Russian was apt to be of the careless, ill-educated kind, culled from the servants, with no great value set upon it.

  I was always intrigued by the vitality of their voices, in contrast to their wan faces; yet the barely perceptible play of emotions across these immobile masks lifted the most unintelligible exchanges to the realms of some dramatic spectacle.

  Wan or not, they showed extraordinary stamina. Both work and play were attacked with wholehearted emotion. Their lives were hard. The men scraped along on tutoring or translating; the women took in sewing or worked in small restaurants or private houses. They had reached England at the firs
t moments of its economic upheaval when, after the First World War, the disagreeable phenomenon of a domestic shortage was beginning. English women had tasted economic independence working in munition factories or on the land, and never again would they willingly go back into domestic service. Thus the era of the daily-help dawned. Never again were there to be basements full of ill-considered and unquestioning slaveys (the British version of serfs). Upstairs, distracted housewives struggled to keep up appearances in antiquated, inconvenient houses. In such households, many of the Russian women found work which, in the main, they were as unfitted to do as their employer. But both were glad of the arrangement.

  I knew that the Traveller admired the unquenched courage of these émigrés, but he also deplored the intellectuals’ inherent political ineffectuality. He enjoyed baiting them, denouncing Tolstoy, and Gorki too, as hypocrites – monstrous poseurs. With relish, he would quote Lenin on Tolstoy:

  ‘A Tolstoian is a snivelling, worn-out hysteric known as a Russian intellectual, who beats his breast, publicly announcing that he is bad – disgusting – but that he is working to achieve perfection, having renounced meat in favour of rice.’

  This never failed to irritate them, for they generally admired Tolstoy, had renounced meat from motives of economy, and one and all abhorred Lenin. Having scored his point, the Traveller would resume his baiting, condemning writers who engaged in politics.

  ‘Tolstoy, the seigneur of Yasnaya Polyana – Gorki, enjoying the view of the Bay of Naples – both of them carrying-on about political and agrarian reforms? Bah! Neither of them meant a word they wrote by the end . . . when the soap-box had taken over. Littérature engagée. It ruined them as artists. It always does. “The meaning of poetry should be poetry – nothing more,” as Pushkin said. Politics are not a fit subject for literature.’

  He was impatient of the interminable political discussions which were the intelligentsias’ breath of life, and had no sympathy with those of them who saw the Revolution as a temporary state of affairs, or those others who planned to follow Marshal Pilsudski on his white horse, riding into Russia, believing they would reconquer it for themselves.