Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  We had reached the Gulf of Finland and suddenly the island fortress of Cronstadt rose out of a pearly haze, nebulous, its silhouette veiled in mist, and I remembered how those few of my old Russian friends who took milk in their tea always asked for it ‘Kronstadstki’ – with the merest dash of milk, only enough to cloud the clear tea, as now, a haze clouded the transparent northern air.

  Soon our ship was edging past timber yards, stacked high, where huge rafts of lashed tree trunks were being poled along by young men wearing the picturesque red roubashka of tradition. Here in the U.S.S.R., were the Selifan and Grishka of my reading! That they were members of some Collective Timbermen’s Union, that their wives and sweethearts were Shock Brigade workers, did not affect their superficial likeness to the eternal Russian peasant of my mind’s eye, a character that I enjoyed on aesthetic grounds. This was something I could never explain to the new generation of Russians I now encountered. They suspected me of patronage, or some profound admiration for a Tzarist past, based on its political rather than picturesque aspects. So purely superficial a point of view as mine they could not, of course, comprehend, much less condone. At that time, they saw all literary or historic associations politically – or subjectively – as subjectively as I saw their country.

  Hanging over the ship’s rail, indulging in my customary nostalgic flights, I had not noticed how the silhouette of Leningrad had emerged from the milky haze to spread across the wide horizon in all its splendour. There was the great bronze dome of the St. Isaak Cathedral, there the spires of the Peter and Paul fortress and the Admiralty. The Bronze Horseman, the Winter Palace, the Nevsky Prospekt, Pushkin’s city, Dostoievsky’s city, the city of Peter the Great . . . Was I at last stepping into this passionately desired scene? This was a journey into my heart’s desire as well as my mind’s eye, the consummation of a double-visioned longing – my own and that of the Traveller. I looked down over the ship’s rail, at the prosaic Customs shed and across to the distant city, and knew that each thing I saw would recall him to me, as he had so often recalled them for me.

  In this mood of exaltation it was unfortunate that my first sacramental-seeming step on Russian earth was taken unperceived (not that I should have gone to the lengths of those fervent souls who, we are told, landing in America, so often fling themselves down to embrace the soil). Nevertheless it was, for me, a solemn moment which should have been charged with emotion had I not been searching at the bottom of my handbag for my keys while holding my passport in my teeth. Nor do I recall much of the long drive into the city, nor of the hotel, nor of my vast bedroom crowded with frowzy fin de siècle comfort, a darkly canopied bed and even a grand piano (locked). I have a vague recollection of a particularly sustaining breakfast-tray – tea, horse-meat and caviare, which stood me in good stead on my long lunchless excursions.

  I had soon discovered that to return to the hotel for lunch was to spend most of the afternoon in the dining-room, ‘in alternate uproar and sad peace’, for the food was good but the service had that timelessness associated with the East. No complaints, no pleading affected the beaming gold-toothed Tartar waiters: Sichass! Sichass! they promised; At once! and disappeared, so that I was able to sharpen my appetite between the bortsch and the golubtsi of dinner by a walk; in Moscow, to the Kremlin’s crimson walls, but first, in Leningrad, to the Winter Palace, with ample time to indulge my mind’s eye by standing before its sullen bulk, shuttered and still, as I romanticized what has remained to me one of the most dramatic images of the Tzar’s city. Every night, from sunset to sunrise, I had read somewhere, squadrons of mounted Cossack guards used to defile ‘like moonlight spectres’, circling the palace, hour after hour, the tramp of their horses’ hooves muffled by deep snow as this ghostly patrol ringed the building where, nevertheless, bombs were sometimes planted (under the Imperial dinner-table on one occasion) and an atmosphere of tension always prevailed. Although it was now a museum, impersonal and mute, and the vast square before it deserted but for a lone pedestrian plodding homeward across its immensity, some sinister spell remained, some aura of tension, of brooding malevolence still prevailed. It had never been a particularly happy or fortunate place and the last two Tzars had preferred to live elsewhere.

  •

  While outwardly coming and going among the few other tourist groups, I was at the same time keeping company with a shade, now playing a more positive version of the Run-Away Game, stepping into the very scenes I had known by heart for so many years, willing myself there. Thus nothing appeared unfamiliar to me, whether in the quarters of former splendour or those sad, straggling outskirts beyond the Moscow Gate, among the asylums, the cattle markets and the railway yards. Empty streets and overcrowded houses were everywhere apparent; tufts of grass and weeds sprouted along many of the finest thoroughfares, and peering in at the windows of the more splendid houses of Millionaya, I could see the lofty rooms divided up among several families, their washing strung between the unlit crystal chandeliers. Yet my sense of home-coming was not diminished. The present was a Kronstadtski haze, barely veiling that glowing past I sought to recapture.

  As my nostalgia gathered momentum, I was sometimes aware of unspoken criticism among the officials of tourist organizations. They appreciated my enthusiasm (and stamina), and recognized that my awareness of so much of their past was uncommon for a foreigner but, they inferred, I must surely want to see more examples of progress? In vain they would offer me factory tours, suggest outings to collective farms and other splendid achievements. I admired their efforts and long-term plans wholeheartedly – but how explain to them that I could not concentrate on the present or the future with such a past around me–and such a revenant beside me? Theoretically, ideologically, I looked forward. Aesthetically, emotionally, I looked back. It was due to no promptings on the part of my accompanying shadow, that I cherished those illusions de Custine despised. My tastes and knowledge had already crystallized into a specialized mould – Russia of the nineteenth century – which remained my first interest and which, many years later, led me to write the life and times of the Imam Shamyl.

  Thus, going between the museums of Leningrad and Moscow, I sought out all I could of this particular era, setting it above larger sweeps of history or more celebrated tourist shrines. The Gallery of Field Marshals in the Winter Palace claimed me before the Rembrandts in the Hermitage. Rembrandt could be seen in other countries; only here could I find the likeness of Field Marshal Prince Bariatinsky, who received Shamyl’s sword of submission at Gounib; only here find Kutuzov, Yermolov or Bagration, whom I felt I knew personally, as well as I knew Natasha or Prince Andrei, from reading War and Peace.

  Only here could I find Brullov’s dashing portraits or Alexiev’s meticulous perspectives, for which he was dubbed the Canaletto of the North. Only here find Nesterov’s Holy Russia, or so many charming genre paintings so little known outside Russia – Venezianov’s peasants; a street scene by Schredovsky, where impudent young workmen jostle self-important merchants. Narrative painting, theatre, rather than art, but telling a tale which fascinated me. Scenes of bourgeois life, full of archness or bathos; old maids coquetting with pot-bellied majors, spied on by tittering families; a young widow mourning by an ikon-lit empty bed. (Their contemporaries, in England, were such canvases as The Last Day in the Old Home, The Awakened Conscience, or Too Late.) But even Fedotov’s scenes of swarming family life set in Beidermeyer interiors reflected some essentially national quality – the Russia of their moment. An extreme note was apparent: there was some overwhelming theatricality, something grotesque, or even sinister, compared to the calm of similar scenes rendered by German Romantic painters.

  Only a frontier away, domesticity was presented very differently. In Dresden or Munich we see Caspar David Friedrich’s quiet maidens at their embroidery; or Runge’s solitary figures playing Schumann on the flute in prim attics, while contented women sit at flower-stocked windows peeling vegetables . . . Der Stille Garten . . . Not so in Russia: a feckles
s, reckless mood invades each interior, however stuffy. I found it infinitely revealing: it was as if the painters shared something of Gogol’s bitter and chaotic inspiration.

  The works of these Russian artists were generally neglected – even by the Russian public. Whole rooms of these treasures remained unvisited, snubbed by them, and certainly snubbed by the tourists who appeared magnetized by the great collections of French Impressionists.

  In Moscow, on my first visit, one of the many beautiful old houses was then arranged as a military museum, with archives and pictorial documentation set out to show nineteenth-century Russian campaigns. Here the romantic figure of the exiled poet Lermontov was seen in a purely military context as the daring young Lieutenant mentioned in dispatches; here Tolstoy was a dandified young officer off to the Crimean wars (but having received his baptism of fire earlier, in the Caucasian wars). Here was Griboyedov, not presented as the author of Woe Through Wit, but seen as the diplomat who negotiated the treaty of Turkmentchai with the Persians, who were later to run him to death in the Russian Legation at Teheran. And here was Pushkin’s self-portrait at the storming of Kars, a monkey-like, tall-hatted figure enveloped in a bourka and riding a bony nag. Among the warriors, so many men of letters.

  But then this side-stepping had always prevailed in Russia and derived from the rigid caste system of tchin, which enclosed each man in his special grade and uniform, as a tchinovnik, or civil servant. The hierarchy of the tchin was as strict as the gold-laced uniforms, in mounting degrees of splendour, from the modest Registrar of College to Titular Counsellor (recalling Gogol’s play, Revizor, The Government Inspector), to Counsellor of College, Court, State; and then – pure Gogol this – True Counsellor of College, as if all the former ranks were so many puffed-up inventions. The system had been founded by Peter the Great and was taken from a method of Swedish administration where each Ministry or Department of State was designated a College. The tchin reached its apogee during the reign of Nicholas I, who particularly rejoiced in its exactitude; it remained, in slightly decreasing force, until the Revolution; thus we see the anomaly of so many writers and musicians being officially nominated otherwise. Borodin the chemist; Moussorgsky an officer in the Preobajensky regiment. Gogol and Griboyedov sharpening their quill pens in Government Ministries. Pushkin appointed Gentleman-in-Waiting (chiefly to insure his beautiful wife’s presence at Court) and, in the mind of the Emperor, no doubt, to classify him within the limits of his grade, rather than in the limitless glory of his poetic reputation. It was, said Authority, absolutely essential to belong to some definite category – thus Anton Rubinstein, applying for a passport and describing himself as ‘musician’ was sharply told that this was not listed as a profession. Since Rubinstein had somehow avoided any other occupation, Authority was at last compelled to describe him as ‘son of merchant of Second Guild’.

  I had hoped to visit Mihailovskoye, Pushkin’s estate where he spent a lonely winter exiled from the capital and his friends, snowed-up, in the company of his old nianya, Arina Rodianovna, with whom he had found inspiration for some of his loveliest work. But this expedition seemed unaccountably difficult and I had to content myself with an excursion, undertaken in a mood of gloomy reverence, to the Black Brook, where D’Anthès’ bullet had awaited the poet. Nearer at hand, his little house on the Moika canal, with its sombre library facing inwards on to an equally sombre courtyard, was much as it had been the day he died there, being meticulously preserved as a national shrine.

  ‘Good-bye my friends,’ breathed the poet, his eyes fixed on his beloved books . . . ‘Life is over’ were his last words. Had I read Zhukhovsky’s poignant description of that scene, or was it the Traveller’s voice that told me, once again, as I hung over the bronze death-mask? There was no trace on those calm features of the sufferings that had racked Pushkin’s last hours and it was very quiet in the little house, yet it seemed to vibrate with the agonized cries that were wrung from the poet during his thirty-six hours of dying. The afternoon was overcast and the room felt very cold. Outside the window, the courtyard was already stacked high with firewood for the winter stoves – those tall white porcelain stoves which, in varying degrees of elegance or functionalism, have always been an integral part of the Russian interior. Beside the firewood a solitary crow was pecking abstractedly at a tattered cabbage leaf.

  ‘Come away, Pussinka,’ I seemed to hear the Traveller say, and as I went out I was crying – for a poet I would never know and a man I had lost.

  •

  So he led me, by way of memories and monuments, great occasions and mean streets, through the history of his country. History is the people’s memory – but to remember one has to know, wrote S. S. Smirnov. Together the Traveller and I would linger in the Senate Square, honouring the Dekabrist cause, recalling with our double vision the heart-breaking events of that icy grey December day in 1825.

  In lighter mood we took ourselves off to the convent of Smolny, glutting ourselves on its sumptuous blue and gold beauty – Rastrelli’s legacy; and I would imagine myself one of the Noble Young Ladies cribbed there in such incongruously Spartan simplicity. Russian excess and counterpoint again: the pupils emerged from this strict convent-like atmosphere, to be plunged almost overnight, into the glittering intrigues of the Court, or the extravagant life lived by the beau monde of St. Petersburg. Then the Traveller recalled me to larger issues again. Lenin had made Smolny his headquarters during the first decisive weeks of the Revolution. From here he had issued his famous call to battle. Where once the demoiselles had practised court curtsies and perfected their French, he sat in lonely responsibility issuing manifestos, drawing up his strategic plans for the 1917 coup d’état.

  The city assumed varying aspects, according to the mood of my unseen companion. At times it seemed to be St. Petersburg, at others Leningrad and, at moments, Petrograd, as perhaps it had been the last time he was there, I imagined. When I walked along the Court Quay, a pygmy figure below the stupendous façade of the Winter Palace (where a staff of eleven thousand persons was once employed) I saw it as St. Petersburg, with the Palace of the Tzars as a setting for unimaginable splendours, Court rituals and an implacable protocol, which nevertheless remained unshaken by the frequent detonation of terrorists’ bombs. Or I would wonder from which balcony that hopeful, exploited mass of simple people led, or misled, by Father Gapon, had expected the Tzar, their little Father, to emerge and listen to their wrongs, before the Cossacks shot them down and the Tzar, unknowing it seems, spent one of his pleasant family evenings, at Tzarskoe-Selo.

  I turned towards more sugared images of the Palace. To my inner-eye, the stairways were always lined with the Empress’s Negro pages, traditional reminders of Hannibal, Peter the Great’s Abyssinian protégé. Marbles glowed and crystals shimmered perpetually. Ladies-in-waiting were always trailing five-yard crimson velvet and ermine trains, their veils flowing from high jewelled kakoshniks; while another Emperor, my favourite, Alexander II, ‘Liberator of the Serfs’, in a white and gold Hussar uniform trimmed with sable, was followed by his suite, also in the white and gold of the Chevalier Gardes, perpetually pacing through the stately measures of the Polonaise, forever opening a Court Ball to the strains of Glinka’s A Life for the Tzar.

  More factually, I also saw the city as Leningrad; no more pomp but much glory as a triumphant anchorage for the Cruiser Aurora, riding there on the grey choppy waters, at once menacing and reassuring, lying symbolically between Palace and Fortress, and dominating both. And then I understood the surge of pride which infused the revolutionaries when the city fell to them – at last!

  Sitting in a pale-blue hung box at the Mariinsky Theatre among an outing of Collective Truck Drivers of the Ukraine, listening to Shostakovich’s opera based on Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, hearing Katerina Ismailovna singing her last, blood-curdling aria among the Siberian prisoners, as she leaps to her death dragging her rival with her, I remembered the Traveller’s accounts of the branded brodyagas,
vagrants and prisoners he had known in his youth, in the villages and settlements around Baïkal. I was no longer aware of operatic values, for I was deep in Siberia, but as Shostakovitch’s music took on even more intensity, I felt the Traveller’s presence as something tangible. I knew how he felt about Leskov’s terrible tale – but how was he liking this production, this music? (Some years later Stalin and Molotov were, mysteriously, to condemn it as derogatory to Soviet prestige.) I had only to turn my head to see the Traveller seated at the back of the box, half-hidden, his Chinese-bald pate light against the shadows. So strong was this impression that I did not turn – there would be time to talk when it was over. This was a new opera – new to both of us – there would be much to discuss. But when the curtain fell, he was no longer there. Only the echoes of his voice remained, telling of the Siberian prisoners such as he himself had known.

  And so it was, on this, my first visit to the U.S.S.R. and others I was to make later, where, in the cities or the country, along the gorges of the Georgian Military Highway, at an Uzbek market in Samarkand, in the foothills of the Pamirs, beside the silky rivers, or in the deep forests, all spoke to me of him, as he had so often spoken of them to me.