Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  •

  The Russia which drew me especially, above the high drama and bright colours of more general images, was that patriarchal pattern which eschewed the Frenchified ways of the capital and was divided between country estates and old houses in Moscow. There was something generous, large and simple here, like the Russian land, having nothing of the corruption of life in the capital: or so it seemed to me, reading descriptions of it in the memoirs and novels of the period.

  In spite of the monstrous injustices of serfdom there were still a few contented peasants: all depended on the character of their owner. The principle was wrong: but in practice (such as on the estates of Princess Dashkov, a benign despot) it sometimes worked well enough. This patriarchal tempo possessed an ample concept of time and space. Hurry, that nagging misery, was unknown, both to the age and the nation. The big houses were closely allied to, and dependent on, the land. They were enclosed, self-dependent units. Their carpenters made beautiful furniture from timber grown and seasoned on the estates. Their pastry-cooks made delicacies using flour threshed from their own wheat; they had their own ploughmen, blacksmiths, horse-doctors and piano tuners, even; their innumerable maidservants and seamstresses worked over linen spun in the long winter evenings, from their own crops of flax. Grooms and coachmen were by the dozen: forty lackeys were not considered an extravagance, some of them doubling as musicians, fiddling far into the night when the Barin wished, for they were unquestioningly at his command – all of them his serfs.

  ‘No wonder you long for that sort of life – for of course you see yourself as the Barinya,’ the Traveller had once remarked, when I sulked, as domestic shortages were already beginning to overshadow English households.

  I had been detailed to wash up for the third day in succession, since the daily help had once again failed to appear. (‘It’s me legs, Doctor says. I come over ever so queer Sunday. I couldn’t say when I’ll be back,’ she had said when cornered, queueing outside the Majestic, to see The Loves of Dracula.) Thus I sloshed tepid water over the crockery and thought of those Russian households where the absence of one, or even ten domestics would have caused no inconvenience. Such abundance, however much organization it demanded – and there was this, even in the feckless Russian way – must have spelled an unimaginable degree of comfort. Besides domestics, almost all requirements were to hand; the coiffeur, to curl one’s hair, the priest, to save one’s soul, a lectrice to save one’s eyes, and French and German tutors to strike a note of European culture. There were, besides a dame de compagnie, the bailiff and the steward, that curious being, indispensable adjunct to all Russian households of standing – the prejivalka —

  The place of the prejivalka (its exact meaning is parasite) was peculiar to old Russia. She was a kind of self-effacing busy-body, confidante, and sometimes, spy. By origin, she was perhaps an impoverished gentlewoman grown old in the family service, who knew all its secrets, and was at the beck and call of everyone, patronized by the masters and despised by the domestics. Her status was never as clearly defined as that of the nianya, nor was she so loved and privileged. She had to show considerable souplesse, for she might be called on to act as go-between, carrying billets-doux from her mistress to the French tutor, or the son of the house to the young governess; or to clean out the old Barinya’s bird-cages; to scold the children for playing too noisily; to check the cook’s accounts or smuggle out a baby born in the housemaids’ attics . . . She was a buffer between all this concentration of people. It was a thankless life: yet she belonged. She, the arid old maid, had a place, however small, in the surging pattern of family life. She had her arm-chair, usually in the wide, warm hall, from where she was aware of all that was going on, for good or ill. She was part of the pattern. It was not the pinched, lonely end compassed by a bed-sitter, which would be the lot of her counterpart, in Western Europe, today. Or, for that matter, as a unit in a State-run old people’s home, Russia’s present solution to the problem.

  The spacious life of these Moscow landowners has been described by many Russian writers. In his Memoirs Prince Kropotkin tells of the bi-annual exodus of such households; in the spring, from Moscow to the country: in the autumn, returning to winter in the city. Such moves required elaborate planning. The steward left well ahead with a skeleton staff and a number of carts laden with stores; the family following later, in their lumbering coach, stocked with provisions for the route. Returning from the estates, in autumn, they would bring sacks of flour, honey, sides of home-cured bacon, a bear’s ham, fiery home-brewed liqueurs, pickles and jams. And in the spring, when the ice had melted, the whole caravan set off once more, crowding the courtyard before the town house and, at last, winding down the narrow Moscow streets as, one by one, the big houses emptied, making across the steppe country and the forests, to set up all over again in some remote province. It was a rhythm which stilled some of that nomadic craving inbred in the Slav.

  There was nothing especially beautiful or luxurious in most of these country houses, but there was taste. To every one of splendour, such as Archangelskoye, the Yussoupov palace, or that Woronince which encompassed Liszt for so many years, there were a hundred simple places, long, low, welcoming houses, with their classic pillared portico and wide veranda overlooking gardens sheltered by alleys of sweet-smelling lime trees, acacia and lilac. The land usually sloped to a river, for in the ennui of these seldom-visited provinces, a water-way was as likely to provide distraction as a highway. All around lay woods merging with profound forests, the horizon broken only by the belfry of the village church. Halcyon scenes and innocent pleasures were here: mushroom picking, carp fishing, or picnics in the woods to visit some renowned hermit, or an immeasurably old bee-keeper who shared his life with an amiable bear . . . home-made music or a game of Preference by candlelight, this was the tenor of such a life.

  Yet the menacing shadow of Nicholas I fell even here, disrupting the quiet, blighting the defenceless villagers. When his military levies descended demanding a number of men for enlistment there was no redress. Not even the most protective landowner dared defy them. Twenty-five years was the term of service then, and knowing what that implied – floggings for the slightest dismeanour, or on the whim of their commanding officer, and the appalling living conditions in the army, some peasants killed themselves sooner than be taken. Once conscripted, they were clapped in irons to avoid escapes, while the lamentations and wailings around them were of a community grieving for those whom they would most likely never see again. On the rare occasions of a serfs’ revolt, the Emperor Nicholas knew how to deal with it. His generals flogged to death every fifth or tenth man and laid waste to the village, so that those who remained were forced to go begging for bread in neighbouring provinces.

  Was this the Russia for which I hankered? Only because, as the Traveller reminded me, I saw it from the Barinya’s position of privilege. But had I been a serf? ‘As to the poverty I saw in certain villages, especially those belonging to the Imperial family, no words would be adequate to describe the misery,’ wrote Prince Kropotkin, an emotional observer, but a man who came, very early, to understand and appreciate not only the Russian peasants’ goodness, but his abilities and potentials. He had been cared for by his peasant nianya Vassilisa, poorest of the poor, who loved the neglected motherless little boy like her own. He was to repay her affection by a whole life devoted to bettering the peasants’ lot. ‘Few know what treasures of goodness are found in the hearts of Russian peasants, even after centuries of the most cruel oppression which might well have embittered them,’ he wrote.

  •

  Although with the years my love and knowledge of all things Russian deepened, I could never acquire ease in the language. I understood most of what was said to me, but reading remained a fearful effort. I could write the Kyrillic characters quite quickly and rather incorrectly. A good pronunciation and absolutely no grammar was, and remains, my condition. Thus, on the journeys I at last began to make to Russia and the researches into
which I plunged, many years later, preparing my biography of the Imam Shamyl, it was not enough to scrape along in petit nègre. The nuances always eluded me or had to be distilled, phrase by phrase, through an interpreter, so that when working I was in a permanent state of frustration.

  Even though I have never been able to tear down these barriers of language, I felt, and feel, assimilated, and I am gratified when, as so often, my most exasperated Russian friends (to whom the acquisition of a new language never requires more than two or three months’ application), concede that they regard me as one of themselves. Ona Russkaya dousha, they say – she is a Russian soul; no compliment could be dearer to me. Sometimes they twit me for my excessive longings, as the Traveller used to do, and I remember how he would call me ‘Charlotte Russe’.

  There is a picture by Koustodiev of which I am particularly fond, for it represents a way of life, of vanished Russian provincial life which remains, for me, wholly desirable.

  A quality of lyric materialism pervades this picture. It is a dream world given over to the senses – to the appetites; a world of flesh embedded in comforts; an ample world. It is a summer’s evening in some provincial town. The day’s work is done. The setting sun strikes low over the blue belfries and cupolas. A balcony occupies the foreground, and this balcony, shaded by heavy-leaved trees, appears to be entirely occupied by one spreading figure, that of a young woman. Let us call her Praskovia Stepanovna. She is seated at a loaded tea-table, a massive, well-shaped arm propped on the table, a plump hand balancing a saucer of tea. She is the vast, cushioned archetypal woman of Russia – or rather, the Russia of the nineteenth century merchants.

  She is the wife of some such well-to-do man, and taking her ease. Her large, rather pudding-face expresses a bovine beatitude. Praskovia Stepanovna wants for nothing. She lives well; her household duties are not heavy; there are young girls and old women to pickle the cucumber, salt the fish, stone the cherries for jam, wash the linen and wax the floors. Praskovia Stepanovna commands them all with easygoing authority. She does not nag, nor rack herself with emotions; she does not even think. Thus she is never nervous or tired. Angst is unknown to her. Basically, she remains a supine Asiatic woman. Everything is God’s will. He has ordained this good table at which she feasts. It is His bounty. Dominating the table, as massive as she, stands the samovar. The bublitchki, the raspberry preserves, and the sumptuous melon, its rosy flesh as inviting as her own vast and melting bosom, so generously displayed, are all His work. It is the feast of life. Praskovia Stepanovna simmers in content. She will sit there munching and sipping till late, till her husband or her lover joins her, till the summer night darkens at last and it is time to cross herself before the ikon of the house and go to bed. Ss’Bogom! – with God! In this latitude of the senses, of an old picture, of an imagined, vanished world, I long to be.

  •

  I think it was Nietzsche, seeing Russia through the eyes of Dostoievsky, who described the race as ‘volcanoes, either extinct, quiescent or in a state of eruption’. And so they seemed to my English friends. They simply could not comprehend the degrees of emotion, the depths of gloom, the elation and the apathy which successively gripped both the characters of Russian fiction and the Russians they came to know personally, whether of the Dispersal or more rarely, those few who arrived in London as members of the Corps Diplomatique or governmental missions. At that time the latter were rarely encountered save in the watchful confines of officialdom; but already, in the comparatively short time Soviet dictums had prevailed, a change was apparent; a curious note of moderation, of discipline had sounded. The more chaotic life led by the earlier émigrés was closer to preconceived English notions of Slav turbulence and, also, to the characters of Russian fiction which they often condemned. In his Memoirs, Sir Osbert Sitwell quotes a fellow-countryman as having returned a copy of some Russian classic, remarking that none of it would have happened if the characters had been to an English public school.

  In all the Russians I encountered I sensed something dynamic rather than nervous, revitalizing rather than devitalizing; their uproars did not exhaust me, perhaps because I was never bored by them, although it must be admitted that, among them, I lived far beyond my emotional means. It was as if I had found, in them, a force de la nature, an affinity with the earth and its fundamentals (apparent even in a wan group of basement dwellers) which my own urbanized and generally over-sophisticated race had lost. It was a quality which my system craved with a drug addict’s intensity.

  I was, in short, a renegade, biologically as well as intellectually and emotionally.

  •

  Among those whom I had first encountered in Paris, so long ago, in the Traveller’s circle, and whose friendship I was to treasure till his death, was the theatrical director Feodor Komisarjevsky. There were many ways in which he recalled the Traveller. The same egg-bald, Asiatic skull, the same profound knowledge of the arts and, beneath the façade of a blasé international rake, the same sense of desolation, of the expatriate patriot. Neither of these men should ever have left Russia for, fundamentally, whatever they achieved outside it was to them unreal. With Komisarjevsky I could ‘talk Russia’; with him, had I not felt it disloyal, I could have re-created the Run-Away Game. He too loved the genre paintings of Venezianov or Fedotov; portraits by Kiprensky, as well as prints in the idiom of Images d’Epinal. Here haloed Orthodox saints opposed lively devils, or fleshy beauties surged out of their chemises, lolling on sofas, tickling the paws of sleek cats, while serf-girls in turn tickled their feet – bliss, in the idiom of the peasant – such naïve aspects of old Russia Komisarjevsky savoured particularly. We shared a passion for Ostrovsky’s provincial dramas and the long-vanished way of life they represented, and together we looked backwards.

  His father, an opera singer, had gone to fight for Garibaldi and died in Rome, and so, by way of the many legends of Russian émigrés in the Eternal City, there was Gogol’s tormented life there as a further point of interest, thus, a circuitous return to Russia. We had many friends in common among the exiles in Paris and when, one day, he carelessly produced two young sons, although younger than Sergei or Kamran, and appeared as vaguely disposed towards them as the Traveller had been to his own, I had the impression my life had gone into reverse, towards the Corsican idyll. A new one now began. Komisarjevsky was a past-master in the art of pleasing. ‘You must be the only woman in England to read Bestoujef-Marlinksy’s tales,’ he would say, and no wooing phrases could have sounded softer to my ears. ‘All the same, you really are far too Slav for me,’ he would add, watching me leave for my ritualistic outing to the Russian mass on Saturday evenings. Too Slav? In a mood of content I went on my way.

  Even my devotions, never a matter of profound conviction, continued à la Russe. But then I remained primarily influenced by aesthetic considerations. After the Church of England worship I had barely glimpsed in my childhood, Russian church rituals continued to lure me, appearing as splendidly dramatic as their setting. I coquetted with Orthodox dogma, falling back before more specialized theological intricacies, believing I preferred Orthodoxy to all other creeds. But what I really liked was its visual or, perhaps, its sensual appeal. The gold-crowned priests appearing from and disappearing behind the gilded iconostas, were to me so many theatrical figures making their exits and entrances. There was, too, something dramatic, sinister even, and infinitely alluring in the darkness, lit by a sudden blaze of candlelight glittering over the jewelled ikons, Their brooding narrowed eyes seemed to follow my restless, secular progress with something of the Traveller’s same sidelong ironic glance. I trespassed there, and they knew it.

  Yet something, among all these Byzantine splendours, spoke to me as no Gothic cathedral could do. Just as in London, the Russian Church in Victoria, a disaffected chapel I believe, or the more intimate atmosphere of the little Russian chapel at Barons Court, was poor substitute for the Cathedral in the Rue Daru (and this, in its turn, was as nothing compared to the Russian churche
s I came to know, elsewhere, in the Balkans and Russia itself), I never crossed the threshold of that pallid chapel re-consecrated to Orthodoxy, without the same heady waft of incense catching me by the throat, and transporting me to some visionary realm peopled with the crow-like figures of Leskov’s clergy, or black-wimpled nuns and bearded boyars, massed, as in the Coronation scene from Boris Goudenov – pure theatre – while the rolling deep voices of the choir chanted their traditional responses, humble and despairing. Gospodi pomiloe, Gospodi pomiloe . . . Lord have mercy . . . O Lord have mercy . . .

  Komisarjevsky understood how my taste for dramatic effects, for the theatre of stylization such as he knew so marvellously how to create, was gratified by the settings and rituals of the Orthodox Church.

  ‘Full house?’ he would ask slyly when we met later for dinner.

  PART FIVE

  THE JOURNEY BEGUN

  . . . travelling, everywhere intent upon following, as though it were a strain of fugitive music, the perpetual tradition of the past.

  Edmund Gosse

  CHAPTER XIV

  It was inevitable that, sooner or later, I would reach Russia, and in the early thirties I did so, owing to the generosity of an English admirer who, finding bouquets and soft speeches had not won me and hoping, perhaps, to lay the Slav ghost by realities, offered a return ticket to the U.S.S.R. while tactfully declining to accompany me on this emotional pilgrimage. The manner of my first visit to Russia was not strictly in accordance with my secret longings for it was a controlled programme, beginning with Leningrad, rather than Moscow, or Novgorod.

  ‘St. Petersburg is Russian – but it is not Russia,’ the Traveller had said. But it was the first step. Such a journey was not then fashionable, being only undertaken by the daring few. If I remember rightly, we embarked on a Soviet cargo-boat at Tower Bridge and made for the Baltic by way of Kiel, coasting Sweden and the former Hanseatic ports. We were abjured (by those who had not made the trip), to take bath plugs, insecticides and every kind of patent medicine, all of which I was fortunate enough to find unnecessary. Every evening the crew played chess, listening to Russian folk music on an old gramophone planted in the place of honour below the portraits of Lenin and Felix Dzerjinsky which graced Red Corner, their mess. The bunks were hard, the food indifferent, and none of the lavatory doors closed properly, but it was a lovely voyage made sweet by the smiling personnel, made intoxicating by the air which blew from the north, smelling of snow and ice and dark forests – Russia.