Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  Mopping her eyes, she made the sign of the cross towards the old postcard, for, to Madame Sapojnikov, any recollection of the Imperial Family was sacred.

  Shifting from foot to foot (the fittings were protracted), I tried to turn her thoughts to happier times – to life in Kiev, her childhood’s home. Kiev dried her tears and, recalling those faraway scenes, she waxed lyrical. Through her eyes I saw the gold-starred cupolas of its monasteries and cathedrals shimmering under a Ukrainian sun, fruit blossom hanging heavy over the low-fenced gardens, the white dust of acacia flowers powdering the quiet streets: starlight and moon-light glowing brighter there than anywhere else . . . This was the region of Gogol’s May Night, of Evenings on the Farm at Dikanka, tales that were always my bedside reading and now I followed Madame Sapojnikov into her childhood, sharing her longings.

  ‘How happy we were then! Everything was so beautiful in those days,’ she said. An expression of surprise, of shock, even, gathered on her face as she looked round the mean room to which she was committed. But she turned back to her work with resolution, fitting the waist-line with rheumatic but still skilful fingers. ‘In the evenings,’ she went on, with equal resolution, ‘Papa played the violin. Two or three friends used to join him. I remember they often played Schubert . . . We children were allowed to stay up late and listen. We sat round the table and Mama lit the samovar. Whichever of us had been best at lessons that day was allowed an extra spoonful of jam. Mama made a most delicious preserve from white raspberries. They grew in our garden, beyond the lilac hedge where Agrafina used to hang out the washing . . . I can still see our pinafores on the line . . . we wore pinafores, pink cotton ones. Children don’t wear them any more. At Easter we had new dresses for the Easter night service – Mama too. Ours were always white silk. We looked forward to Easter night all the year. Papa used to give each of us a little golden egg to hang on a chain round our necks. By the time I was fifteen I had a whole necklace.’

  As she described the innocent tenor of their lives, so different to the provincial splendours Madame Marmeladov wished to recapture, tears ran down her kind old face, set now forever in a cast of sadness. But her eyes retained a look of youth. They were the trustful puzzled eyes of an animal alone in an incomprehensible world. Madame Sapojnikov had never acquired the carapace of cynicism. Indeed, I think few Russians do. It is foreign to their nature. They may, particularly when drunk, adopt a cynical tone: but it remains a matter of words rather than actions. In the nineteenth-century spleen and cynicism were the hall-mark of breeding among men of fashion, and Eugène Onegin was their prototype, while Lermontov not only continued the Pushkinian tradition by his Hero of Our Times but lived out his own brief life in this wastrel’s pattern.

  Russian women, however, were otherwise; were, in both fact and fiction, essentially limpid, loving-soft and guileless: the Traveller had always said so and, as I came to know them, I found it true.

  •

  In spite of all the Russian links and echoes which Paris offered, I could never come to love it. I had many friends there – but I did not love it for itself. Its noblest vistas, most magnificent possessions or wise old grey houses along the Seine left me unmoved. Its spirit was Cartesian: its scepticism, materialism and rationalism were antipathetic to me: and I took comfort from reflecting that I was not alone in this point of view, which appeared so singular to most others.

  Tolstoy had been critical of both Paris and the French. There is no poetry in this people, he wrote, and in his journal, during a brief stay in the city he noted:

  Horrible life! Horrible town. Recapitulation of the day. Saw several men of letters, one of whom asked me if one could reach Russia overland! No doubt he took Russia for an island.

  As a detached observer, I came and went unmoved about Paris, something I have since learned to appreciate greatly, for to be involved, to mind too much about coming or going from a place, can be as demanding as human involvements. My roots had been planted in London, but had flowered into an unlikely Slav blooming. No Latin shoots ever flourished there. Even when, years ahead, I was to become French by marriage, I could not adapt myself to Paris as I did so easily in Balkan or Slav cities. And if I have always been aware of some faint, yet persistent atavistic memory pulling me towards all things Russian, as though once I lived a life in some Russian city in happy disorder, so also, I am aware of some vague unease in Paris; as if perhaps yet another life was lived there in well-ordered unhappiness.

  The only part of Paris to which I returned with that sense of participation so necessary to the true enjoyment and comprehension of a city, was a strongly-flavoured Arab quarter behind the Mosque, where, once again, I could fancy myself somewhere else – in this case nearer to North Africa, which was then a new horizon of pleasure. Beginning at the Place Contrescarpe, the Rue Mouffetard plunged down towards the Boulevard Arago. This narrow winding street was curiously cheerful; in spite of the sombre tinge of its ancient, scrofulous-looking houses it seemed lit by an African sun. The various shop windows were so many souks. Near its end an alley-way led to one particularly evocative small square, being tufted with catelpa trees but to me entirely Slav in its evocation.

  Here a peeling yellow plaster building was advertised as BAINS DES ARCHEVÉQUES. BAINS DES PIEDS. DOUCHES. This conjured up a vision I much enjoyed. Here, I envisaged a dim vaporous interior, that of the traditional Russian steam-baths, where moujik and master alike stewed away their sins. These vapour baths were first introduced into both Russia and Turkey (where they became the hammam), by the migratory Asiatic tribes; they were the custom of a people living in the saddle, generally in arid country, or so the Traveller said. The Bains des Archevêques can have had little in common with either of these more exotic institutions but, I suppose, Orthodoxy catching me unawares, I had at first sight confused Archevêques with Archimandrite. At any rate, the image was fixed for ever. I saw eddies of steam puffing and swirling to reveal, not some flagellant’s voluptuous indulgences, monkish expiation, or the traditional Russian peasant’s method of stimulating circulation by lashing themselves with birch twigs, but a gathering of solemn-faced long-haired bearded clergy, the black-veiled, black robed figures of the Orthodox church. Or perhaps the Phanariot priests of old Constantinople? They were sitting ranged side by side, as if at some solemn oecumenical conference, but with their feet plunged in steaming tubs of hot water.

  Here, I decided, were the Brothers of some remote Russian monastery; a back-biting sly lot most likely, yet I loved to conjure them, for the Russia they conjured around themselves; silent white wastes; a whiteness, and stillness broken only by the crows that strutted outside the barred windows of the Monastery . . . black, flapping birds, whose cawing sounded in my ears, above the clattering present of the Rue Mouffetard.

  Perhaps it was not quite fair to berate Paris for being itself, when it was just that quality which I found so alien that roused me to take refuge in the flights of fancy I enjoyed? Which sent me speeding to the Hermitage of Krasny Yar? No such flights could be arrived at in London; it was too bound up with my roots, my memories and my daily life.

  In London, each street or house had its own mythology, was peopled with its own phantoms and the figures of history and literature which were my heritage and which I could neither ignore, nor convert. As a Londoner born, I felt the city imposing itself, obstinately refusing any imaginative transpositions, while at its gentlest, it lulled rather than stimulated. And then, in spite of myself, in spite of my perpetual cravings for the strange or the exotic, I loved its insularity. I loved it, or I left it; but I did not try to transpose it.

  Paris was otherwise; it provided the irritant which my imagination needed to take flight. Perhaps this is the quality so often referred to as stimulating; ‘Paris is so stimulating,’ say its admiring visitors. Perhaps, had I been living in a city more congenial to me personally, one where exoticism prevailed such as Istanbul or Isfahan, my mind would have grown lazy, staying where it was, satiated by actuality,
having no wish to take off into some intangible realm of fancy. Yet when later I came to know those particular cities, I never found them stultifying. Limited, yes; but that is another thing. Paris, by the force of its French logic, imposes its own conventions, in varying degrees, or interpretations, so that you must concur or take imaginative flight, as I did, skulking about its streets and boulevards, yet indulging in what Wordsworth describes as ‘the inward eye that is the bliss of solitude.’

  •

  My richer friends knew that I loved Russian food and sometimes they would take me to the now vanished Kornilov’s, for a feast; or to boîtes de nuit where a desperate gaiety prevailed, everything now become as ersatz as the flabby blinii, and the artificial-satin roubashkas worn by anxious-faced men, who sang with mechanical abandon in the many languages learned from their tutors, so long ago, in the big houses where they grew up. They sang in French, Spanish, Italian or German, as well as the expected Russian airs; and, year by year, their voices became more colourless and their embroidered shirts more gaudy, till at last, sequins flashed in the limelight that followed them through the exhausting antics of some national dance, and I felt shame for them.

  In the humbler kind of Russian restaurants I preferred, there was sometimes, besides a more genuine kind of cuisine, an old tzigane lingering on, playing, however poorly, my favourite songs. Such restaurants were dark caverns of nostalgia and regrets; and yet, of pleasure.

  In Russian Paris there were a considerable number of small food shops where every imaginable Russian speciality could be obtained, something the exiles of London had been unable to achieve. (At that moment exotic products and foreign foods were little in demand there: it took World War Two and massed Continental holidays to widen the British public’s gastronomic horizons.) Passy was the quarter where the best Russian foodstuffs were to be found, for it was here the more prosperous émigrés congregated, and here I came on regular pilgrimages.

  No lover ever waited below the window of his adored with more longing, with a more ardent wish to unite, than I, loitering outside the Russian grocers. Flattened against the glass, I would gaze spell-bound at the delicacies within; bublitchki, great slabs of sturgeon, the noble koulibiak, feathery dill, pyramids of Easter pashka and the curious wooden moulds in which this rich dish is made. Entering, I would spin out my more modest purchases, in order to breathe the unmistakable, spicy-sour flavour of Russia, a compound of cabbage, salted fish, and poppy seeds.

  I would dawdle over the evocative merchandise listening to the deep, dark voices of the Russian customers. The simplest household orders were music to my ears, though applied to the émigrés, the words simple or household did not ring quite true. They were seldom simple or, if they were, then they were unlikely to possess a household of their own, being generally part of someone else’s.

  But within this, whatever its style, they lived in their own nomadic fashion, taking with them wherever they went that sense of impermanence, of the tent, even though garnished by the extravagances that are so characteristic of them as a race (volcanoes, extinct, quiescent or in eruption).

  So, looking and listening, I spun out my purchases, deliberating between a jar of dill pickles, some kasha, or a loaf of that close-textured white bread – manna no less – from the Boulangerie Moscovite, sprinkled with poppy seeds, and to me, a thousand times more evocative of Russia than the celebrated black loaf. I generally came away with a packet of Caravan tea which, although it tasted like hay, was irresistible on account of its wrapping paper. Across a yellow desert a camel caravan plodded towards a Chinese trading post backed by a blue pagoda. Coolies scuttled about, ant-like, unloading the tea boxes, while a scarlet sun sank behind a yellow horizon. Kiakhta Tea Company said the label, in Russian and I ached to have known the little frontier town at that depicted, quintessential moment, before lorries, telephones and the twentieth century were imposed on even the confines of the Gobi Desert.

  The last echoes of that Russia were fading fast now; but the longer I dawdled among the Russian groceries, counting over my change, talking with the proprietor, the more I could hear of those diminishing cadences, those Slav voices, dwindling, sounding fainter every year, but still speaking the classic language of their past, as distinct, to the alerted ear, as the spelling, vocabulary and typography of pre-Revolutionary Russia differs from that of the U.S.S.R. today.

  Into this outpost of Russian traditionalism, few of the Soviet Embassy personnel penetrated. I believe some of their more trusted Chancery staff were occasionally to be seen there but they were not communicative, and did not dally. There was one aged, shuffling figure who intrigued me particularly. She was the typical baboushka, a cotton handkerchief tied round her head, a short padded jacket over her shoulders and an expression of innocence on her potato-like face. She had escaped from the Revolution with the family into which her mother had been born a serf, and her attitude to the Princess, her mistress, was still serf-like in its abnegation.

  For many years now she had toiled, receiving preposterously low wages; but as she spent nothing, even this pittance had mounted up, until at last the Princess found it worth while to borrow the lot. After some years this had still not been repaid, and her friends at the shop were urging her to claim its repayment. Every time she came in, they pressed her to know if this had been done. The mere idea seemed an affront to her.

  ‘Ah! There’s a real Princess for you!’ she would say, shaking her head, penniless and imposed upon but happy, finding it the proper way for a Princess to behave: the way she had been brought up to believe they should; and happy too that, in exile, the familiar pattern should continue. She would never have to learn anything about equality. She knew her place, and so did the Princess.

  These ageing figures from that other world preserved a strict sense of protocol, which nothing – exile, impoverishment, or the years – could stifle. Near the Russian Cathedral there was a café which I particularly enjoyed: it was, I think, called the Café des Ambassadeurs. Here a number of White Russians used to congregate, solemnly nominating each other Governors and high officials of various Russian provinces. Upon the death of one of their rank, further solemn meetings were held to nominate a successor to this unrealizable post, ratified over a coup de blanc.

  CHAPTER XVII

  In those last years before the war engulfed us in 1939 there was still some time left to chase the will-o’-the-wisp of happiness. ‘But why should you expect to be happy?’ a Russian had once asked me, looking genuinely puzzled. Until then, happiness had always seemed a desirable state, something to be hoped for, worked for, and ultimately achieved . . . Happy ever after. I had not yet realized its illogical and transitory nature, nor the fact that it could be simplified, or reduced; a matter of food for the hungry, a cessation of pain for the stricken. Happiness, for me, was still contained in this hallucinatory vision of someone else’s Russia which I wished for my own.

  Although the Trans-Siberian journey – unalloyed bliss, in my eyes – was not to come my way for many years, I believed that one day I would possess it in all its five thousand miles. Gradually it had assumed for me the mystery and power of the alchemist’s Arcanum – that inner secret or remedy for which they searched their whole lives through. Meanwhile, there was much else of ‘all the Russias’ (or the U.S.S.R. to those of a more contemporary mind) which I continued to devour whenever it was economically possible, now playing the Run-Away Game in terms of hard cash. Most people, I observed, visited Russia to see Communism: but I still went to see Russia – or rather that of the Traveller’s Tales. And now, I set my heart on provincial scenes; Voronej, Uglitch, Tula . . . Why Novotcherkassk? Because of the Hetman Platoff and his Don Cossacks. Why Mtsensk? Because of Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of that province, now become doubly obsessive by virtue of Shostakovitch’s music. Kalouga? Because of the Imam Shamyl’s years of exile there. Kazbek for Lermontov’s grave, Odessa for Pushkin’s sojourn there, and for the battleship Potemkin too: Nijni-Novgorod, as I still called it, f
or Gorky’s childhood, rather than the Fair, since I came to love this writer increasingly over the years, and through him, to love and understand something of an eternal Russia where each age overlapped, leading towards one that was all new, yet eternal . . . That promised land of the soul, that land we call Russia – it is Gorky who has evoked it, expressed it the best, wrote the poet Alexander Blok.

  Thus by books, as well as dreams or travels, I absorbed my promised land . . . Thus, the Ukraine for love of Gogol’s Dikanka, for Roussalka and the Fair at Sorotchinsk; Great Novgorod, because of its early history, its churches. Thus the settings of fact and fiction and legend all merged in my mind’s eye, confusing what I had read and what I actually saw, often a grey scene, but all of it ‘All the Russias’ that were the landscape of my heart, peopled by a race which I instinctively loved.

  Yet in all my journeys about Russia, one thing eluded me: the countryside. I was never able to have my fill of aimless wandering – of just dawdling. In the U.S.S.R. journeys were arranged with some specific view. However difficult it might be to achieve an outlying city, a dilapidated monastery, or not-yet-restored monument (for once convinced of their historic and artistic worth, the Soviets were unsparing in expense and skill to preserve, or lovingly restore their heritage) it seemed almost impossible to achieve a week or two going nowhere in particular – just drifting. Wandering all day in a forest, listening to its soft sounds, following a stream Roussalka might have haunted, sitting on a bench beneath the giant sunflowers of an Ukrainian village or watching the clouds massing over the limitless steppe country, as Turgeniev describes them . . . these objectives seemed difficult to explain.