In the lower grades street adventures were an everyday occurrence. The mere sight of our school uniforms and cockades with the school’s initials on them provoked the street kids into bloody challenges. The school’s initials, S.G. [Saratov Gimnazium], were stupidly and maliciously decoded [in Russian] as “blue beef.” The reddish-blue hue of rancid beef is familiar to everyone. Therefore, the provocative question, “Hey, you, stinkin’ blue beef, how much a pound?” had the effect that a gauntlet thrown at the feet of a medieval knight would have had. In order to preserve his honor the knight had to pick up the glove and unsheathe his sword. With us the ritual was to roll up one’s sleeves and fight for the honor of the school until one of the combatants was knocked off his feet or himself fell to the ground: the convention was not to hit someone who was down. The younger schoolboys who usually were waylaid by gangs while walking home from school would form groups and fight
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Chapter One
their way homeward by going “wall against wall.” Both sides had outstanding fighters, their Hectors, Ajaxes and Achilleses.
I also took part in this ancient internecine strife which had been legitimated by tradition. My old Kamyshin habits pulled me to the banks of the Volga where I would go on Sundays or other holidays. I had to slip out of the house unnoticed for this, while everyone was only beginning to rise. It was a great pleasure to get to the water, observe the fishermen, watch the loading and unloading of barges, to mingle with the sawmill workers, to listen to the engaging, boastful tales of the Galakhov boys—hoboes who had received their name from the merchant Galakhov and his flophouse. Among them one occasionally encountered self-made raconteurs who were true masters of the word. When one of them would talk, it was as if he were weaving multicolored silks. After grandmother’s tales and songs, it was here that I found an endless spring of authentic language of the people: fresh, strong, and juicy as an Antonov apple, extraordinarily rich in imagery and laced with maxims, proverbs, and sayings.
But an even greater curiosity was roused in me by two types of people. The first were wayfarers, collectors of funds for church buildings, defrocked priests and deacons, pilgrims who traveled from one place to another and had been to almost all the famous monasteries which preserved the relics of the righteous and had miracle-working icons. Among such people there were also zealous sectarians seeking “the city of God and absolute faith.” The second group consisted of hoboes who maintained their existence by whatever means they could, including petty thievery when times were hard. They turned to thievery, especially in late autumn, to ensure for themselves a winter’s warmth and food in the local jail. Later, when Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths created a public sensation, I remained indifferent to it. All his male types were not new to me. The memory of my teen-age years was filled with them.
Having lost my mother at an early age, I grew up virtually abandoned by my stepmother. And though she came from a clerical family, I received no religious education in the spirit of the Orthodox church. I took a discarded child’s primer on the Old Testament to be a collection of fairy tales about a serpent which spoke the human tongue, of prophetic dreams of pharaohs, of the sea which parted before a procession of fugitives, of the miraculous survival of youths in a lion’s den and in a scorching oven, of a stone from a boy’s sling which brought down the invincible giant Goliath.
Later, when promoted from the elementary grades in school to the middle ones, I had my personal period of mystic-religious enthusiasms and secret, solitary, prayerful ecstasies. But they developed on their own, having ripened in the secret corner of a growing child’s consciousness prematurely intent on
Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga
17
becoming a young man. All this had no connection with the Orthodox church but rather had points of contact with the Tolstoyism of the intelligentsia and the god-seeking of the common folk.
There was not even a hint of a university in Saratov. For higher education, one had to go either to distant Kazan or all the way to “the second capital,” Moscow. There was one gimnazium [a classical high school] for men and one for women, a vocational high school, a finishing school for girls of the nobility, a pedagogical institute, a school for doctors’ assistants [paramedics], and in the nearby countryside, an agricultural school. In all, a smallish number for a city that called itself the capital of the Volga region. However, along with the official institutions of learning where the provincial “fruits of enlightenment” were cultivated there was another place of learning. By some odd quirk it was located in a corner of the Commercial Club, a venue for gatherings of the landed nobility, grand banquets, and balls. Though it had no official standing, it served as a magnet for all the local students. It was a rather substantial library under the supervision of Valerian Aleksandrovich Balmashev, a political exile under government surveillance. His charm and kind attention enabled him to gradually transform the book-loving young people into students of an informal and liberating self-education.
I grew to self-awareness at the end of the 1880’s. It was an uncommonly dreary time, without a single bright moment of political struggle. In a revolutionary sense, society was completely bloodless. It resembled a clear-cut forest in which once mighty oaks were reduced to stumps. There remained only legends of “socialists” and “nihilists” who once had gone out to rouse “the people” and who served as examples of how to resist all power and laws whether God’s or man’s by use of the dagger, bomb, and revolver. A romantic mist shrouded these enigmatic and daring people. Everyone spoke of them with Philistine condemnation and also with a kind of inadvertent esteem. And this impressed youthful imaginations.
For me, growing up motherless under the daily and hourly oppression of a classical “stepmother,” escaping from her persecution into the kitchen, the servants’ room, the banks of the Volga, into the company of street kids, it was completely natural to absorb love for the people, especially as it was expressed in the poetry of Nekrasov. I knew almost all his works by heart.
Since I was myself constantly “humiliated and injured,” I was naturally drawn to all those who had been “humiliated and injured” as well. This was my world and in unison with it I set myself against “the reigning injustice.” Nekrasov broadened this world for me. Thanks to him, this world grew from the servants’ room and my restless street buddies to include the world of all common people, peasants, and laborers.
Chapter Two
Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love
Born to a merchant family, Sergei Durylin broke with that world to become a person of enormous erudition. Known for a gentle manner and kindness, traits always mentioned by his friends and colleagues, he was also remembered for his accomplishments in theater, literature, archeology, art criticism, and philology. His memoirs are finely drawn. The selection chosen illustrates a family life in style, habit, and sensibility which disappeared after the 1917 revolution. Taken from S.N. Durylin, V svoem uglu [In One’s Own Corner]. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1991.
Seventeen years after the death of my mother, I opened for the first time a small pile of his [her first husband’s] letters which she had carefully preserved.
There turned out to be very few of his letters. They were her letters to him. Her, the bride’s, letters were full of deep feeling, strong in their clarity and simplicity: “I am all yours.” “All is in you.” “All is with you.” “All is for you.”
And she’s always waiting for his letters, but he never has enough time. He’s handsome, his mother’s darling, the darling of his family. He loves her, but he doesn’t have a thoughtful heart. His love is always “seeking its own” and it doesn’t think, it doesn’t even see its counterpart. It’s a love with eyes open to itself and closed to the loved one. And the love of the loved one “suffers quietly” and won’t raise a hand to open his eyes. Oh, it’s bitter to love a person with closed eyes! And my mother drank up this bitterness to the dregs. And her love was so great that it strangled a
nother feeling, growing in her towards a different person.
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Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love
19
I was sorry that I had untied the scarlet ribbon that had at one time held together this pile of old letters. I felt sorrow, pain, distress. But when I think that everything was covered with love, when I remember that my mother never, to my knowledge, reproached the person who gave her so little happiness and so much suffering—when I once again imagine with how much love she would always remember his love, and how joyful she perceived her first love to be, and how thankful she was to him for this love, I thank my mother for this pile of letters from years long gone. She gave me, an old man, a great lesson of a great love, one which “suffers quietly” and forgives all. And I’m glad that I bear the first name of this unhappy, kind, and noble man, whose burden (and not his fault) was that he lived by “a single law declaring / The passions’ arbitrary cues.”1
After the death of Sergei Sergeevich, my mother remained at her mother’s-in-law. Her life was difficult. Childless, she couldn’t take root in the family, and without those roots she couldn’t become a true member of it. Her mother-in-law respected her, but this imperious woman, fortune’s favorite, harbored neither love nor warm feeling for anyone.
Olga Vasilievna needed my mother. She was bringing up orphans, a boy and a girl, the children of her deceased daughter. She did not entrust their upbringing to their father. My mother raised them. They were difficult children who nonetheless made out well for themselves.
My mother lived on Bolvanovka Street as the widow of the favorite son of Olga Vasilievna, but she never received so much as pocket money from her. And all the while her heart was being torn apart by troubles: her father, Vasily Alekseevich, couldn’t support his family and soon died. My grandmother and my aunt were left without any means. My mother had to make up her mind to do something, so as not to leave her mother without bread. And make up her mind she did: she married my father.
This was a heroic deed in the true sense of the word. She did it for her mother.
My father was a widower, twenty years older than my mother. She didn’t marry him out of love; she only knew that she was marrying an honest and good person. She took upon herself a huge family—by today’s standards, ridiculously huge: my father had eleven children, of which only the eldest daughter was married. All the rest—six daughters and four sons—lived with their father. The older ones could have been my mother’s younger brothers and sisters, and the youngest one was four years old. The heavy burden of raising and managing this enormous family, which took up two floors of a spacious house in Pleteshki, carried with it the no-less-difficult burden of managing a house that was almost the size of an estate. And my mother
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Chapter Two
entered into all of this at the age of thirty, in the bloom of her youth, which was cut off at the root. Here too she carried her burden with honor.
Of my father’s marriageable daughters only one had been given away in marriage, and unsuccessfully at that: the husband drank, leaving her without any means, and she came back to her father’s house, so that all of my father’s eleven children wound up in my mother’s care after all. During my father’s life my mother married off three daughters, all into happy marriages and even wealth. When the children from the first marriage left my father after he went broke, only one of the three remaining marriageable daughters managed to get married. The dowry for the oldest of them had already been prepared by my mother, and her stepdaughter took it with her.
My father’s older sons did not receive an education. The eldest son, Nikolai Nikolaevich, was at business trade school just long enough to get his feet wet, and the second son didn’t even get into the water at some boarding school. I remember my father saying that kids only needed to be taught “readin,’ ‘ritin,’ and ‘rithmetic,” and then—off to business, to trade! My mother vehemently protested this and insisted that the two younger sons, whom she had raised, not only finish high school, but also university. One was an assistant to the famous Plevako [a leading jurist], and the other, an engineer.
Like the older sons, the older daughters attended boarding school only briefly—of the five only two, as I recall, finished school. The two last ones, whose upbringing fell to my mother, finished the public gimnazium for women with honors.
There were no children from my mother’s first marriage. In her second they came one after another—five boys. The births were painful. And so the “toil and suffering” which fell to her were great. Her single reward was the fact that she was able to take care of her mother: my grandmother and my aunt lived quietly and peacefully in a little apartment, on the pennies given to them by my mother. And these pennies were really half-pennies, compared to the work which my mother bore in that alien, endless family. But even these pennies elicited reproaches from the stepsons and stepdaughters! My father, on the other hand, loved and respected his new mother-in-law.
Surveying my mother’s life, I often thought that it would have been hard to come up with two more striking opposites than her first and second husbands.
Sergei Sergeevich was young and handsome, a wit, carelessly trying out all the experiences of easy living, one after another, never thinking about the final end. He loved my mother, and she loved him. There was lot of glamour in him, along with that specific quality which can be designated by the untranslatable French word charme. He loved merrymaking, the theatre, thor-
Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love
21
oughbred horses, wine, and women. He had friends and foes, companions and enemies. He burned his own candle (and those of others) at both ends. My mother had no children with him. And his love in her life was like a dream— at the beginning luminous and happy, like a lilac evening, then, at the end, sorrowful to the point of tears, to the bitterness of wormwood.
My father was the complete opposite of Sergei Sergeevich in everything. He was brought up in the school of hard knocks. The only son of an old merchant family which went bankrupt during his early childhood, he lived as a servant-boy in the home of the miserly and cruel silk merchant Kaptsov, a veritable Scrooge, where he received more than his share of beatings. Sergei Sergeevich would go to the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair riding the train first class, while my father would walk there on foot with the carts carrying Kaptsov’s goods. Sergei Sergeevich was rich, while my father was barely making enough to feed a family of twenty people.
My father never had a drop of wine in his life. He was a homebody; his only treats were red whortleberry preserve and almond spice cake. He visited taverns only with customers, and would take only tea with a bit of sugar. He was not lacking in true, kindhearted folk humor. But the style of the life that he led and that he wanted his children to lead was strict and proper. He didn’t like anything new. My entire childhood and boyhood were spent in candlelight, when houses everywhere already had kerosene lamps, and some even had electricity. Life for him was work and ritual, not chance and play. There was no merrymaking in him—at most, a smile. I don’t remember him ever laughing. “Sinful” was a strict and harsh word coming from him. It hardly needs to be said that he was a proper, irreproachably proper, family man.
And my mother, who had married him, a fifty-year-old, without love, had five sons by him, and knew all the joys and sorrows of motherhood that the one she had loved before didn’t give her.
First she gave birth to a son, named Nikolai in honor of his father. He was one of those children who can be best described in the words of Lermontov:
Of purest ether, in His wisdom The Lord once wove their living strings; The world will never mingle with them, Nor will they mix with worldly things!2
The common folk would call such children “not of this world.” The ones who were “of this world” were those who fit the narrow, crude measure of “base earthly existence.” Fedor Sologub liked to write of those “not of this world”—children with large, pensive eyes which early on showe
d an orphan’s fear of the cold misery of existence. Kolia was not of this world. He
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Chapter Two
was a starry-eyed boy. His big, brown, wide and sorrowfully open eyes were striking, evident even in a Moebius photograph. These were not ordinary eyes, but something more deep and penetrating. The child amazed everyone with his meekness, with his early understanding of people and things, with his glowing abundance of love for everyone. Important and high-ranking clergy of the Church of the Epiphany in Elokhovo called him a “blessed child.” “He is not of this world,” his nanny Pelageia Sergeevna marveled in sad adoration. His half-brothers and half-sisters loved him.
I don’t know what his godfather—“Brother Kolia,” as we called him— gave him on the occasion of the cutting of his first tooth. My mother selected him as the godfather in order to strengthen the connection between the new brother and his half-brother. My miserly grandmother Olga Vasilievna celebrated the first tooth with generosity; my mother kept grandmother’s gifts of heavy golden ten-ruble pieces from the age of Catherine the Great (two or three of them) until times of dire need. My father fell in love with his namesake, his first-born son by his second wife. And my mother just adored him: he was the joy of joys that bloomed for her in a family of strangers. I was the second child after him—and both I and the next brother, Georgii, had it hard: we were expected to measure up to Kolia’s radiance and lovingness, but we were only of this world. For better or worse, we adapted ourselves to this “shadow of our times,” which fell on those of this world but did not darken Kolia’s existence.
The Russian Century Page 4
