The Tides of Time

Here’s a literary recipe.  Take a big book, an epic.  Cover a slice of national history, several decades for preference.  Introduce a family over three generations.  Combine real historical figures with fictitious characters.  Season the whole mixture with fleeting moments of happiness and liberal amounts of tragedy.  What do you have?  You know, surely you know?  Yes, of course – you have War and Peace! 

Actually on this particular occasion you don’t.  What you have Vassily Aksynov’s Generations of Winter, a book which the Washington Post described as “the great Russian novel, the 20^th century equivalent of War and Peace.”  All I can say is that the Washington Post needs to get out more; it needs to wander down the highways and byways of Russian literature.  There are novels far greater than Generations of Winter.  One immediately comes to mind – Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, the only modern novel, so far as I am concerned, that really does stand up to War and Peace. 

Of course I can’t blame Aksynov for the hyperbole of the Washington Post.  Ah, but just a minute.  That’s not quite true.  I can blame him inasmuch as he offers a challenge to Tolstoy on his own ground.  The knight enters the lists in a wholly self-conscious way, too big for his horse and too big for his armour.  Tolstoy thunders down, upsetting the mount and unseating the rider!  Oh, if only he had been more modest; if only he had challenged Pasternak first.  For Generations of Winter might weigh in better on a first charge with Doctor Zhivago. 

It’s certainly a book conceived on a monumental scale, one which tackles Russian history head on, a slice of the twentieth century, from the tranquil mid-1920s, a period of relative liberalisation, through the dark 1930s, the time of Stalin’s Great Purge, on to the Second World War.  It follows the fortunes of the Gradov family, in happiness and in sorrow; and when it comes to sorrow no other nation quite matches Russia.  It follows the fate of Boris Gradov, a leading Soviet doctor, and his children – Nikita, a soldier, Nina, a poet, and Kirill, an idealist.  It follows, in turn, the fate of their children. 

The author should know whereof he speaks.  Both his parents were arrested at the height of Stalin’s terror when he was not quite five years old.  His mother was Eugenia Ginzburg, herself a writer, who spent years in the concentration camps of Kolyma and in Siberian exile, recording her experiences in Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind.  Aksynov, who did not see her again until he was sixteen, was sent to a state orphanage, another kind of gulag, a death sentence for so many children, from which he was rescued by his uncle. 

Alas, if only he had been a little less contrived in his approach to the subject matter we might be dealing with a superb novel, perhaps even a great one, rather than one which is simply good.  Obviously I can only talk about the English translation but the style, the narrative technique, seems to me to be course and clumsy at points.  The various ‘intermissions’, moreover, are horribly contrived, self-conscious and embarrassing literary artefacts. 

Generations of Winter is also a game of two halves.  Actually – as I subsequently discovered – it really is a game of three parts except the third part is missing!  In large measure this explains why the novel is so uneven.  The first part leading up to the Second World War is assured and focused.  The second part lacks coherence.  In the end, without the sequel, we are simply left hanging, unsure of the fate of the various characters. 

I do not think that Generations of Winter is a great book, but it is an honest one.  It’s an uncompromising picture of what life was like in Stalin’s nightmarish utopia.  It’s a picture of betrayal, of lives all but destroyed by arbitrary whims and political paranoia; it’s a picture of unwholesome people like Stalin and the reptilian Beria, chief of the NKVD, the thuggish and criminal state security apparatus.  It’s a picture, above all, of corruption.  Here the author is direct rather than subtle.  At one point Boris Gradov treats Stalin for extreme constipation.  The dictator, you see, is nothing but a sack of shit. 

I read this book, a surprise gift, over the Christmas holiday and found myself beguiled, my various criticisms notwithstanding.  This is living history, history mediated through the eyes of real people, who when they are not real are fictions!  I followed the Gradovs and their various fates, never wholly losing interest, though from time to time losing sight of some members of the family.

I was irritated, though, by the artificiality which breaks through from time to time.  There are too many contrived encounters, particularly those involving Townsend Reston, an American journalist, and leading members of the Gradov family.  His meeting with Nina Gradov in the Moscow metro during a German bombing raid stretches credulity to the point of absurdity.  Then there is the relationship between Veronika, Nikita Gradov’s wife, and Colonel Kevin Taliaferro, an American military attaché, which takes credulity beyond absurdity.  Here the book descends almost into the comic nonsense of soap opera. 

But, as I say, it’s an honest narrative of dishonest times.  I remember an observation from Doctor Zhivago, where a character says that the personal life was dead in Russia, that it had been killed by history.  There must have been many families like the Gradovs, real people, people who maintained decent standards in the midst of indecency, who did their best to retain something of the personal life; who ensured, even in the most trying of circumstances, that they would not be drowned by the tides of time.  For these generations Generations of Winter stands as a worthy testimony. 

Life and Fate

I first read Anna Karenina when I was in my mid-teens.  I remember being deeply moved by the story of Anna and her doomed love but I missed a lot of Tolstoy’s subtlety.  I say this because I have now reread this magnificent book in the light of the recent film adaptation with Keira Knightley in the role of Anna.

In my review of the movie I described the novel as a War and Peace of the emotions.  But it’s actually much more than that.  Though it is more intimate in an emotional sense than War and Peace Tolstoy also manages to capture the sweep and grandeur of a particular period in Russian history.  It’s an effortless shifting of focus really, from interior feelings at one point to exterior settings at another, inside and outside captured with almost perfect comprehension.

The novel opens with arguably one of the most recognised lines in all of world literature;

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

On my first reading I thought this was a reference to Anna and her own relationships, first with her husband, Alexis Karenin, a man she clearly does not love, a man she never loved, and then with Count Alexis Vronsky, the great passion of her life, a man she loved too much.  But it’s not.  In the immediate sense it’s a reference to the marriage of her philandering brother, Stiva Oblonsky, and Dolly, his much suffering wife.  Beyond that it really touches on a variety of relationships.  It touches, in a deeper sense, on a larger family, that of the Russian aristocracy, on the threshold of a precipitous decline.

The title is deceptive.  Much of the novel does indeed focus on the tragedy of Anna but not in an exclusive sense.  It might just as well have been called Portraits of Marriage; for marriage and relationships is what it’s all about.  Not all unhappy, I should add.  For in counterpoint to the story of Anna, Karenin and Vronsky we have that of Kitty, Dolly’s sister, and Constantine Levin.  This, as it turns out, is the novel’s one happy family, resembling no other. 

The idealistic and occasionally tiresome Levin is an obvious self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.  I say tiresome because the author allows him to become a vehicle for his own economic, political and spiritual obsessions, which buzz at points as annoyingly as the bees Levin keeps on his country estate! 

For me the fascinating thing about Anna Karenina is just how well it captures a particular social milieu and a particular period in Russian history.  I offer another possible title – Decline and Fall.  There is pathology here, something symptomatic almost.  At one extreme we have the insouciant Oblonsky, thoughtless and shallow, a scion of an ancient family in terminal decline.  At the other we have Levin, a country gentleman who dreams of a communion with the peasantry, while always being apart from the peasantry.  In the middle we have Anna, passionate, transient and destructive, a force of nature.  On the outside we have the peasantry, looking on with incomprehension and bemused contempt. 

It’s often said that Anna Karenina is the greatest novel ever written.  Greatness, it seems to me, is such and elusive and uncertain measure.  There are serious flaws in the book which, at least to me, would seem to stop it somewhere short of ‘greatness’, at least understood as perfection.  But there is something greater than greatness; there is brilliance.  Anna Karenina is a brilliant book, one with breathtaking insight, a handling of character and theme that shows one to be in the presence of a true master of the art. 

Tolstoy’s understanding of human nature is as broad as it is deep.  Although the novel has a third person grand narrative style, the focus changes with the mood, moving from a God-like perspective to interior consciousness with equal ease.  Even Laska, Levin’s dog, is allowed a perspective at one point in the narrative!  Tolstoy’s descriptive power is as grand as it is in War and Peace, though the richness of his country scenes stands in sharp contrast to the anonymity of his urban settings. 

Anna Karenina is a novel of consequences.  In some ways it’s similar in handling to War and Peace, in that the author clearly believes that each individual destiny is shaped by forces that cannot be controlled.  Anna is the novel’s boldest character, one who defies convention, choosing love over propriety.  That is the beginning of her tragedy. 

I suppose it is possible to say that Vronsky also places love, the love of another man’s wife, before propriety, but for him the choice does not carry the same burden, a measure of social hypocrisy, perhaps, though the judgements here are our own, not Tolstoy’s.  His task is simply to show the limits of freedom and the penalties of choice. 

The penalties for Anna are high.  Unable to divorce, she grows increasingly uncertain of herself, increasingly insecure in her relationship with Vronsky, who can, after all, discard her in a moment and marry another, as his mother clearly wishes.  Anna’s passionate nature turns in on itself, driven to destruction by recrimination, doubt and paranoia.  Her story resembles no other in its unhappiness.  It ends in a station; it ends in suicide under a train. 

Is there any happiness to be found here?  Well, as I say, to contrast with the dark there is the light of Kitty and Levin.  If Oblonsky represents shallow and cosmopolitan urban values, Levin – Tolstoy himself – seeks roots in the land, roots in ‘the people’, something of an idealised and unreflective giant.  He finds contentment with Kitty and meaning in life, including spiritual meaning…at least up to a point. 

Tolstoy admired the work of Charles Dickens.  But the thing about Dickens’ novels is that they all have one conclusion – the end of history.  One feels that the action is done.  All that remains is an endless summer of happy families, big meals and blessed death.  Not so with Anna Karenina.  Levin is a doubter; his quest is not over, his happiness less than complete.  His is a story that is also destined to end in a station, the story of Tolstoy’s own future.  

Unhappy in its own way

I saw Anna Karenina on the Saturday just before going on vacation.  This is my overdue review! 

All the world is a stage.  Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina is all the world.  Director Joe Wright has reduced it to a stage in his new film adaptation!  If you are looking for the broad canvas and the big sweeps, Russian-style, it’s simply not here.  Instead there is a claustrophobic theatricality for the most part, a movie that seems to represent the triumph of directorial artfulness over emotional substance. 

Generally I don’t read reviews before going to see a film; I would far rather form my own judgements first and take in the views of others later.  But I have read the novel and have a clear idea of what I expect from a retelling of one of the greatest fictional epics, a War and Peace of the emotions.  At the heart is a particular tale of unhappiness, the tragedy of Anna and her imperfect love. 

No sooner had the curtain raised and the action start to unravel I began to feel uneasy.  This has all the style of a comedy rather than a tragedy, of a silly pastiche rather than grand epic.  The scenes in Oblonsky’s office were so risibly choreographed that it was difficult not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all rather than the heavy-handed attempt at puppet-like humour.  The only thing missing was a song. 

I’m not going to like this, I thought to myself, and first impressions with me are almost never corrected.  But I was wrong; I began to thaw, once the theatre-workshop element receded a little into the background and the actors were allowed to inhabit their roles, as actors and not as marionettes.  Keira Knightley was splendid as Anna, just as I imagine her, passionate and self-destructive.  Anna is a woman capable of great love, and great love, certainly with her, is to madness near allied. 

Her madness comes in the shape of Count Vronsky, prettily played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the emphasis here being on pretty.  The best thing I can say about him is that he looked splendid in the white dress uniform of a cavalry officer.  Jude Law, whom I didn’t recognise at first, plays Alexi Karenin, Anna’s husband, more sinned against than sinning.  Actually the emotionally constipated and impeccably correct Karenin is incapable of something as lowly human as sin!  He is virtue incarnate, a counterpoint to Anna’s passion incarnate.  A more temperamentally unsuited couple is impossible to imagine; Juliet, if you can picture such a thing, married to Polonius. 

I also warmed, after some initial distaste, to Mathew Macfadyen as Oblonsky, Anna’s insouciant, philandering and bon viveur brother, married to the much imposed upon Dolly (Kelly Macdonald), perhaps a little more physically attractive than Tolstoy really envisaged. 

Aside from Knightley, the other acting highlight for me was Domhnall Gleeson as the idealistic Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy’s own partial self-portrait.  His on-off romance with Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya (Alicia Vikander), moving from unhappy beginnings to a happy conclusion, contrasts with the evolving tragedy of Anna and Vronsky.  Incidentally, the scene where Kitty finally accepts his proposal of marriage in a private word game was exactly how Tolstoy proposed to his own wife.

Levin is arguably the most authentic character in the whole film, less self-conscious and ensnared, altogether less histrionic.  To begin with, after Kitty’s initial rejection, he escapes from Wright’s theatrical setting into the country, which really is the country! 

There are some visually splendid scenes in Anna Karenina and the cinematography and costume design are luscious.  Tom Stoppard – my, how this man gets around – has done a reasonably proficient job in reducing a big book to a manageable script, losing none of the essentials. 

When the curtain finally fell I found myself admiring the director for his boldness, his idea of the theatre as the world, which is a notion that he apparently grew up with.  Even so I cannot avoid the conclusion that there were points where the medium simply overwhelmed the message. 

The imbalance between Knightley’s first rate performance and Taylor-Johnson’s, well, performance, also weakened the overall effect.  A good effort but it could have been so much better, which is the best thing I can say about Anna Karenina.  Still, if it’s an unhappy film at least it’s unhappy in its own way. 

Tears Flow

Vasily Grossman, as I wrote here quite recently, was a writer of unique genius, a great war correspondent and an even greater novelist. Earlier this year I read Life and Fate, a panoramic novel set in the Second World War. I don’t think I’ve ever been as overwhelmed by a work of fiction, at least not since I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It’s an astonishing tour de force, a description of people and places and events delivered with freshness and stunning insight. Even before I finished I offered the following comment;

As a novel it is also intensely honest, making no allowances for the ideological shibboleths of his day, so honest that the book was ‘arrested’, yes, arrested by the KGB in the early 1960s. Grossman was subsequently summoned to the office of Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologue of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, who told him that the book could not be published for another two or three hundred years, an act of extreme censorship coupled with a paradoxical recognition of its lasting importance. Fortunately, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out to the West, where it was published and hailed as a work of genius.

Sadly Grossman was unable to enjoy his literary triumph: he died of stomach cancer in Moscow in 1964. At the point of his death he had no reason to suppose that Suslov’s prediction was not true, that it would take two centuries for his great work to emerge from the ideological shadows. But he was already working on another novel, a novel that could not have been published in the old Soviet Union in two millennia, never mind two centuries. This is Everything Flows, which I finished today in one feverish sitting, stopping only to top up my tea from the samovar.

Yes, Everything Flows is a novel, unfinished at the time of the author’s death, but it’s also a kind of testament, a political and philosophical indictment not just of the moral corruption of communism but of Russia itself, of that dark place in the Russian soul that forever eschews freedom in favour of slavery.

The criticism is trenchant. Life and Fate could be taken in large part as a demolition of Stalinism, an altogether more honest testament that Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. But Everything Flows goes deeper; it goes so far as Lenin, still sleeping away in Red Square, the supreme icon of national servitude. For a moment, for the briefest of seasons in the spring of 1917, Russia scented freedom. The path lay open. Russia chose Lenin, who came not to liberate the country but to refine and amplify the most regressive features of its history;

And so it was that Lenin’s obsession with revolution, his fanatical faith in the truth of Marxism and the absolute intolerance of any dissent, all led him to advance hugely the development of the Russia he hated with all of his fanatical soul…Did Lenin ever imagine the true consequences of his revolution? Did he ever imagine that it would not simply be a matter of Russia now leading the way – rather than, as had been predicted, following behind a socialist Europe? Did he ever imagine that what his revolution would liberate was Russian slavery itself – that his revolution would enable Russian slavery to spread beyond the confines of Russia, to become a torch lighting a new path for humanity?

Russian history, paradoxically, went into reverse. Stalin quickened the process, taking it as far as it would go, substituting freedom with the most abject forms of state worship, something that had not been seen since the days of Ivan the Terrible. By the 1930s, the time of collectivisation, the time of the Terror Famine, the time when the state deliberately starved millions of its own citizens to death, the Russian peasantry was more completely enslaved than it ever had been under the Tsars. It’s almost as if Alexander II, the Liberator, the man who ended serfdom, had never lived. That was the legacy of the Revolution.

There is a witness here, a man who filters these thoughts through his head. He is Ivan Grigoryevich. His freedom died earlier than most. Sent to the camps as a young man, he returns thirty years later, a ghost from the past, a husk of a ruined life. Stalin is dead but there has been no proper reckoning; there never will be a reckoning. Such reckoning as there is comes only as an act of moral and historical reflection.

There are those that Grigorivich left behind, like his cousin Nikolay, a mediocrity who prospered in a time of mediocrity and bad faith. This ghost is not entirely welcome, neither by Nikolay nor by his wife, both of whom remained ‘free’ insofar as freedom involved all sorts of shabby compromises. This is a theme, this guilt come resentment, that Solzhenitsyn was to take up in Cancer Ward. These are the little people, the beetle people, who prospered at the expense of those far more talented, who died or disappeared.

The novel ranges over some of the tragedy, looked at in simple human as well as grand historical terms. There is the tragedy of the Terror Famine, told by Anna Sergeyevna, Grigorivich’s lover, full of guilt for the part she played;

How the kulaks suffered. In order to kill them, it was necessary to declare that the kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans said that the Yids are not human beings. That’s what Lenin and Stalin said too: The kulaks are not human beings. But that’s a lie. They are people. I can see now that we are all human beings.

There is the tragedy of Vasily Timofeyvich, Ganna, his beloved wife, and Grishenka, their infant son, explored in a brief and incredibly poignant chapter, killed by starvation, lying in their hut over the winter, not separated even by death.

There is the tragedy of Masha, arrested in 1937 at the height of the Great Terror, madness within madness, simply for being married to a man that the state had declared guilty. Separated from her husband and her child, she was sent to the gulags, convinced that it was all a mistake, that her sentence would be revoked, that they would all meet again never to be separated. In the end hope died;

A year later Masha left the camp. Before returning to freedom, she lay for a while on some pine planks in a freezing hut. No one tried to hurry her out to work, and no one abused her. The medical orderlies placed Masha Lyubimova in a rectangular box made from boards that the timber inspectors had rejected for any other use. This was the last time anyone looked on her face. On it was a sweet, childish expression of delight and confusion, the same look as when she had stood by the timber store and listened to the merry music, first with joy then with the realisation that all hope had vanished.

This could have been an angry book, a bitter one; the anger caused by so much betrayal, the anger of history, the anger of an author whose life’s work had been frustrated. But it’s not; it’s a bold, moving and scrupulously honest book, a story told on a number of narrative levels, a story told with simplicity, insight and tremendous clarity. It stands as a noble testament. If you love Russia, if you love the past, if you love the truth, if you love freedom I urge you to read this. If you can do so without descending at points into tears then you have far greater powers of emotional control than I have, than I will ever have. Everything Flows is a great work of literature. It is an even greater tribute to the human spirit.

Reflections on a Great Man

On Mamayev Kurgan, the hill overlooking the Russian city of Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, there stands an enormous statue of a female figure wielding a sword, raised into the sky. This is The Motherland Calls, commemorating the epic struggle for national survival at the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the pivotal moments of the Second World War. On the wall leading to the mausoleum underneath the statue you will find carved in huge letters the following words;

An iron wind hit them in the face, yet still they came on. A superstitious dread must have seized the foe: ‘Were these men really mortal?’

Inside a Russian soldier answers in letters tooled in gold around the base of the dome;

Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia.

Neither outside nor inside the monument will you find out who wrote these words. If you ask the guide they give a general answer or simply pretend not to know. Actually, they are the from In the Direction of the Main Attack, an article by Vasily Grossman, published in Red Star on 20 November, 1942, the day after the Russian counter-offensive at Stalingrad began.

Grossman was one of the greatest of all war correspondents, particularly popular with the soldiers - officers and enlisted ranks - simply because he wrote in honest, straight-forward and gripping terms, free of bombast and the kind of inflated hyperbole usually favoured by the Soviet press. He had that rare talent only granted to the very best journalists – an understanding of the importance of detail, of the small significances overlooked by those who have been mesmerised by the ‘big picture.’

In addition he had a huge amount of personal integrity, a commitment to honesty and a commitment to the truth. It was this that lead to a steady distancing from the Soviet state, from a system based on ugly lies and blatant hypocrisy, moral corruption of the worst kind. That’s why his name is not mentioned on the Stalingrad monument, why he is still a figure that incites a degree of disapproval in Putin’s Russia, a country which, once again, sees virtue in the likes of Stalin and – for the love of God – Lavrenti Beria, the one-time head of the KGB, that jackal of the human race.

Grossman was so much more than a mere reporter. He is a great novelist in a country of great novelists. Last year I read Life and Fate, his master work set during and immediately after the Second World War. I was overwhelmed by the experience, not having previously been acquainted with any of his work, an omission I have since made good. This novel, one of sweeping vision, is now being serialised by BBC Radio in a week-long celebration of Grossman’s work.

During the war Grossman continually sought solace in Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace. The title of his own novel is in deliberate homage to Tolstoy. What Tolstoy did for the Patriotic War against Napoleon Grossman did for the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. Both men created Homeric epics for the age.

But of the two, though it some will consider it sacrilege to say so, I think Life and Fate is the greater, simply because the author is less intrusive, or less obviously intrusive, than Tolstoy, who offers extended and rather tiresome reflections on his own personal philosophy of history, interventions that interfere with the books narrative flow.

Life and Fate seems to me to be just as sweeping but a lot more human at the level of detail. It’s also the most biting indictment of Stalin and Stalinism that I have ever read or am ever likely to read. This was a book so explosive that it was actually ‘arrested’ by the KGB, notwithstanding the fact that it was submitted for publication during the period of Khrushchev’s so-called thaw in the early 1960s. But one copy remained undetected, finally being published in the West after Grossman’s death.

Although the reaction was initially quite muted, the reputation of the novel, and of Grossman as a writer, has grown steadily over the years. Life and Fate is not simply about war or politics or struggle or treachery or disaster or adversity or triumph; it’s a book which celebrates truth and kindness, held up as the greatest standard of all, greater than the smelly littlie orthodoxies, as George Orwell put it, that contended so hard in the last century for the human soul.

Lara’s Dream

I adore Dr Zhivago, both Boris Pasternak’s novel and David Lean’s 1965 movie of the same name. The theme is sombre enough: a tragic and moving account of the way in which history can tear apart the lives of ordinary people, people who simply want to live and love…and write poetry.

Set against the final years of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing Civil War, it tells the story of Yuri Zhivago, a medical doctor and a poet. Married to one woman, Tonya Gromeko, he falls desperately in love with another, Larissa Antipova, simply known as Lara. They originally meet with Zhivago is serving in the Russian army as a medical officer during the First World War and Lara as a nurse.

Their second and more fateful meeting comes during the Civil War, when Zhivago leaves Moscow with his family for the relative safety of the Ural Mountains. He finds Lara in the town of Yuriatin, where she is working as a librarian, there beginning an affair. But the great events of the day ebb and flow around these little lives, consuming and destroying, separating Zhivago and Lara, the first time temporarily, the second time forever.

For me this wonderful story is about love in a time of death. More than that, it’s about the victory of life over death and ideology. There is a point in Lean’s movie where Lara, disturbed by the howling of wolves close to the dacha where they are staying says to Yuri that it is a terrible time to be alive. It’s a time when ordinary happiness was impossible. But before they part Zhivago writes his greatest poems, the Lara Cycle. The whole thing is just impossibly romantic.

I put on my ushanka, my Russian fur hat. I can just see myself in the role of Lara, weeping as the wolves call in the distance.

You it was who shaped my fate,
And then came times of war and ruin.
And for many a long day
There was no word of you, no sign.

Then, after many moons, again
Your rousing voice once more has called me.
All night I read your Testament
And woke as from a swoon next morning.

The Brilliance of Bunin

I recently mentioned the Russian writer Ivan Bunin in another blog. I’d like to say a little bit more about him, about a literary genius who deserves to be far better known and appreciated in the English-speaking world.

I ‘discovered’ Bunin in my late teens in a collection entitled The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories - published some years ago by Penguin Books - tucked away in father’s library among books he had accumulated in his student days. I was immediately captivated by the sharpness of the author’s prose, the economy of his style and the poetic beauty of his imagery.

Here was a writer, it seemed to me, who bore comparison with Chekhov, another great master of the short story. But Bunin was different, more intimate, more Proustian, more poignantly introspective. Above all he seemed to have a more acute sense of the beauty and the fleeting tragedy of life.

Like Tolstoy, Bunin came from a long line of Russian aristocrats and serf-owners. He achieved popular and critical success in his native land with his poetry and early short stories, confirmed by the publication in 1910 of The Village, his first full-length novel. But this world, the prospects opened by his creative genius, came to an end when the Bolsheviks took control of Russia in 1917. Bunin records his experience of the ensuing Civil War, as I mentioned previously, in diaries published as Cursed Days, of which I intend to say a little more.

With the final victory of the communists Bunin left Russia, spending the rest of his life as an émigré, latterly in France, where he lived through the Nazi occupation. He continued to write, producing some of his greatest works, achieving sufficient recognition to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, the first Russian ever to have received this honour.

But as he published in his native language, and as his work was banned in the Soviet Union, where he was condemned as a ‘traitor’ (to be condemned by the communists; how proud he must have been), he was only ever able to reach a relatively small audience, declining with the years. He died in the south of France in 1953, sinking steadily into quiet obscurity.

Coming to Bunin for the first time you are likely to notice that there is none of the grand moralising and philosophising that is such a feature of Russian literature, such a feature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Bunin’s vision, rather, is much more personal and intimate. There is also a sense of the impermanence of all things, of worlds that can close down in an instant, taken away in a moment. The paradox is that this makes passing joys all the greater, all the more intense; joys like human love, at once here and then gone forever, butterflies on a summer’s day. It’s all so futile; it’s all so beautiful.

Sexual love is another of his themes, something he explores in intimate detail in the collection of stories called Dark Avenues. Most of the tales end unhappily, everything in life ends unhappily, but they are not in the least dispiriting. The beauty of the moment is all that counts, all one can ever hope for. Despair may be the price of rapture but it is a price well worth paying; believe me, it is.

Present joys and future regrets is one thread that flows through Bunin’s work, the other is nostalgia, a sense of loss, loss of the past, loss of home and loss of place. His Russia, gone forever, is recreated in memory in the most beautiful, elegiac terms. Even his language, his mode of expression, is of the past, free of the corruptions inflicted on Russian prose by the communists. He escaped and how thankful I am for that. There was no way a man of his background, his sensitivity and his outlook could have survived the contagion that was consuming his land. His frustration and fears are fully expressed in Cursed Days, two extracts from which I have taken at random;

Odessa, May 3, 1919. How fiercely everyone yearns for the Bolsheviks to perish! There’s not the most terrible biblical punishment that we would not wish on them. If the devil himself burst into the city and literally go about with Bolshevik blood up to his neck, half of Odessa would weep with joy.

Odessa, May 5, 1919. Generally speaking as soon as a city becomes “red” the crowd that fills the streets changes suddenly and rapidly…There is nothing simple or ordinary about these faces. They are almost all so extremely and sharply repulsive, so frightening in their evil dullness, that they constitute a threatening, lackeylike challenge to everyone and everything.

If he had stayed he would quite likely have suffered the same fate of Nikolai Gumilev. In which case the world would have lost so much; I would have lost so much

A Voice from the Past

Nikolai Gumilev has a page on Facebook. Only ten people ‘like’ it – eleven, now that I have added myself – but at least he has a page, rather a surprise, really, given that he is now almost unknown in the English-speaking world, almost unknown outside his native Russia.

Who was he, you might ask? He was a poet, far from being the greatest in a land of great poets, one with an almost limitless and playful imagination; one who appeals to my own romantic and political vision. Like Arthur Rimbaud, another of my favourites, he was fascinated by Africa in the way that I am fascinated by Africa.

Gumilev was also a patriot, a lover of Russia, a hater of the Bolsheviks, those sub-human political gangsters who took control of the country in a military coup in late 1917. He did nothing to hide his contempt, nothing to disguise the fact that he was a committed ‘counter-revolutionary.’ In August 1921 he was arrested by Cheka, the Soviet secret police, and subsequently executed for his part in a monarchist conspiracy. His burial place is still unknown.

To the People of the Future

This single link was else respected
By people of the days that gone –
There’s written on its tablet sacred
That Love and Life is one.
But you’re not they, you live like arrows
Of dreams that fly through skies and earth,
And in your flight, unite, my fellows,
The Love and Death.

They said in their pledge eternal
That they are slaves of the bad past,
That they were born in dust infernal,
And will return again to dust.
Your heedless brightness was aroused
By songs of lyre, mad and fine,
Eternity will be your spouse,
The world – a shrine.

All folk were utterly believing
That they must live and love with smiles,
That woman is a child of sinning,
Who’s marked by sins a hundred times.
But different, unearthly sounds
Were brought to you by running years,
And you will take to Snow Crowns
Your gentle friends.

The Man who would be King

I’ve long loved the plays of William Shakespeare. I’ve seen so many good performances, both in London and in Stratford. Good performances bring out all of the nuances of the drama. But I also enjoy reading them for the pleasure of reading, for the pleasure I take in Shakespeare's mastery of words. I love words; I love to play with words in the way that Shakespeare played with words.

I also love the writing of Lev Tolstoy…most of his writing. I read his essay on Shakespeare, published in 1903, not so much criticism as demolition. It irritated all hell out of me, not simply because he seemed to completely miss the point but because – I must confess- I thought it presumptuous for a Russian, a foreigner, to attack a poet who wrote in a language that was not his own.

I assume Tolstoy read English, though I have no information on the point. But no matter how good he was I doubt if he understood the subtleties of seventeenth century speech, or the way in which Shakespeare contributed to the evolution of English. Just imagine how Russians would feel if I, or any other English person, presumed to rubbish Pushkin!

The issue of language and comprehension was bad enough. But even more unsettling was the meanness and smallness of spirit shown by the author, qualities I don’t normally associate with Tolstoy. What I do associate him with, for all his genius, is selfishness and overwhelming egoism. The egoism, something that most writers suffer from, could have been disregarded, disregarded, that is, if he had not presumed to write in such terms about Shakespeare. Egoism here is the key, as George Orwell recognised in Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, his brilliant rebuttal of the Russian master.

In his essay Tolstoy rails against King Lear with particular animus. Here Orwell spotted the psychological clue behind his ranting on the blasted heath: Tolstoy hates King Lear because he is King Lear; he reproduces Lear in life. Lear’s renunciation was Tolstoy’s renunciation: Lear fled; Tolstoy fled. His end also was curiously like Lear’s:

And though Tolstoy could not foresee it when he wrote his essay on Shakespeare, even the ending of his life--the sudden unplanned flight across country, accompanied only by a faithful daughter, the death in a cottage in a strange village--seems to have in it a sort of phantom reminiscence of LEAR.

The simple fact is that the play held a mirror up to Tolstoy, showing back a disturbing reflection. The theme is about renunciation, renunciation of power, renunciation of land, the renunciation of wealth, the very core of Tolstoy’s philosophy. Tolstoy renounced the world because he believed that in this, in serving the will of God, he would achieve happiness.

But his renunciation brought him no more happiness that Lear’s gratuitous act. Like Lear he gave up power…but also like Lear he still wanted to be king. Shakespeare, it might be said, had shown the weakness in Tolstoy’s own thought. Perhaps Tolstoy, too, should have been accompanied like Lear by the Fool, someone to tell him that he deserved to be beaten for being old before his time; that he should not have been old before he was wise.

The Dance of Russia

Tolstoy’s War and Peace for me is remarkable as a set of epic scenes held together by a loose narrative and a somewhat tendentious philosophy of history. Those epic scenes, though, are incomparable, pushing to the heart of national consciousness, pushing to the heart of what it is to be Russian.

There is no better illustration of this idea than that depicting the dance of Countess Natasha Rostova, an aristocrat, French educated, a person who knows, or should know, nothing of deep Russia, not sophisticated, just enduring. Yet after the wolf hunt, when the party is resting in a peasant hut, after her uncle begins a folk tune on his guitar, she dances, a dance she has never been taught. At once all of the cosmopolitan sophistication disappears; at once she reaches by intuition alone into the ancient culture of her people. Tolstoy describes it thus;

Here was a young countess, educated by a French émigré governess. Where, when and how had she imbibed the spirit of that peasant dance along with the Russian air she breathed, and those movements which the French style should have squeezed out of her long ago? But her movements and the spirit of them were truly Russian, inimitable, unteachable.

It’s a sublime moment, beautifully captured in words, beautifully captured in image in Sergei Bondarchuk’s movie made in the days of the old Soviet Union.

Out of Hell

Last year I read Anne Applebaum's excellent Gulag: A History, a subject that began to interest me after I had read biographies of Stalin. The chapter that has remained in my mind most vividly is that dealing with attempted escapes.

There were escapes right from the beginning, though weather and location was a factor in determining their frequency. The proximity of many of the earlier camps to Finland was an important incentive in escape attempts. In 1932 alone over 7000 inmates were recaptured trying to cross into Finland. According to the official camp statistics some 45,575 people escaped over the whole system in 1933 alone, of which 28,370 were recaptured. In Kolyma in the far east of Siberia escapees organised themselves into gangs, stealing weapons and terrorising the local population.

It's worth stressing that the overwhelming numbers of these escapees were not political dissidents at all but hardened criminals. Some of their escape strategies were particularly gruesome. In view of the distances involved, lack of food was one factor working against a successful escape. To overcome this prisoners took to escaping in groups of three, two of the party deciding in advance who the 'meat' was to be; yes; that's right, the meat!

There are some good literary accounts of the gulag experience, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch immediately comes to mind. But for me nothing will surpass Varlam Shalamov's brilliant Kolyma Tales collection, told with the same insight and economy of prose shown by Guy de Maupassant in his short stories. Once a prisoner himself, his emotional detachment makes the experience all the more intense.

In the Grip of the Bear

I suppose most people’s understanding of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 has been shaped by a reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace; I know that mine has. It’s one of the great epics of national consciousness, a true patriotic hymn.

But it only tells a partial story because Tolstoy had little interest in what happened after what was left of the Grande Armée was chased across the Neman in December of that remarkable year. It’s thanks to Russia, thanks to Tsar Alexander, that Europe was liberated from the hands of Napoleon, from the rapacious imperialism of a man who must count as the modern world’s first dictator, the first Little Corporal.

The full story of the War of 1812 to 1814, the story of Russia’s part in this struggle, is ably told in Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace by Dominic Lieven, a wide-ranging, deeply researched and wonderfully written history. This is a book that gives the lie to some of the old myths, notably the French contention that Russia owed her victory not to its national spirit, its determination to resist a foreign invader with all of the means at its disposal, but to the severity of its weather. No, the Russians were superior to the French in so many ways, in the quality of their armed forces, particularly the cavalry. Mention should also be made of the excellence of the intelligence service as well as the skilful way in which the game of international diplomacy was played.

The reason that Napoleon failed so spectacularly during the invasion of 1812 itself is really quite simple: with his usual arrogance and conceit he thought he was the hunter when in reality he was the hunted. He was looking for a quick victory, after which Alexander would be obliged to make peace. But Alexander, under the guidance of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, his war minister, aimed at destroying Napoleon by drawing him ever deeper into Russia, extending ever further his lines of communication, while harassing his army by defensive bites followed by all-out attack.

It’s all here, all the great battles, not just the Borodino of War and Peace, but those of the two year campaign that came after, climaxing in Leipzig, the Battle of the Nations, followed by the advance on Paris itself. Alexander himself, that complex and contradictory man, is depicted in a far more nuanced way as a skilful strategist and diplomat, one who managed to rally Prussia and Austria as the Russian army moved westwards, careful to show that this was an act of liberation, careful to keep his armies under strict control, retaining discipline to the end.

We in the west owe so much to Great Russia. It’s a pity there was not a better understanding of that simple truth.

The Genius of Zamyatin

I love Russian literature almost as much as I love English literature, though the two are as different as is possible to imagine. Writing, either in the form of prose or poetry, goes a long way to defining the character of a nation. Though this is generally true it's perhaps truest of all in relation to Russia and the spirit of the Slav people. I would go so far as to suggest that its impossible to achieve a full understanding of nineteenth century Russia without a reading of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol, particularly Dead Souls, the latter's rollercoaster masterpiece.

But it's someone else I'm thinking of, another writer of more recent vintage. He is the altogether remarkable Vevgeny Zamyatin, a writer of peculiar genius, who died in exile in Paris in 1937. He is best known for We, his dystopian novel that was to have such an influence on George Orwell, one of the streams that led to the creation of Nineteen-Eighty Four. Although written in the early 1920s We was too radical for the Russia of Zamyatin's day, only finally published in his native land in 1988, with the communist dictatorship teetering the threshold of destruction.

I came across We in my late teens, and immediately fell madly in love with the writer! I simply could not believe how remarkable it was for the time and the day. Once I read it I immediately set off on a quest to discover as much as I could about Zamyatin, and there is so much more than We. He wrote some wonderful short stories, stories clearly rooted in the tradition of Russian folklore, rich in imagery, rich in form and rich in the beauty of language. Some are poignant, others tragic.

There was one in particular that I think will stay with me always. It's called Comrade Churyagin has the Floor, a madly funny account of a peasant uprising in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. The landlord’s estate is invaded and the mob immediately threatens to destroy some of the antique statues he has collected. The landlord protests, saying that the semi-naked bearded figure is none other than Mars, the god of war. The peasants mishear this as Marx and then parade around with the thing! Then follows the "dawn of an entirely class conscious day."

Zamyatin, though he had been associated with the Bolsheviks, and imprisoned under the Tsarist regime, was far too individualist to breath within the literary straight-jacket that was pulled ever tighter around Russian literature after the Revolution. He was, by his own definition, a heretic; for without heresy there is no originality, no development and no growth. In the deepest sense of the term he was a revolutionary, understanding revolution to mean a state of constant flux and change.

But in 1917, so far as the communists were concerned, history came to a stop; there were to be no more revolutions beyond theirs. The only acceptable art was the art that slavishly served the state. Zamyatin fell victim to this kind of thinking well before the advent of Stalinist socialist realism. Early on Trotsky described him as an 'internal émigré'. In the press he found himself attacked repeatedly as a 'bourgeois intellectual.


Finally, unable to find any outlets for his work, and subject to a growing campaign of vilification, he wrote to Stalin in the summer of 1931, asking that he be allowed to leave Russia, a request that was granted after the intervention of Maxim Gorky. If he had stayed much longer its certain that he would have shared the same fate as Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, along with so many other creative talents destroyed by the worst forms of expediency, political mediocrity and moral baseness.

Epic Vision

What an astonishing book Life and Fate is; what an astonishing man Vasily Grossman must have been. I’ve already written a partial assessment of this literary masterpiece here in a post I headed The Grand Inquisitor, which focused on the contents of a single chapter, one I had just finished, one that literally winded me, both intellectually and emotionally. Well, now I’ve finished the whole novel and it captivated me from beginning to end; captivated me with its intensity, its range, its breadth and depth of vision; captivated me with it’s simple humanity.

I’ve heard other novels likened to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, most recently The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, a grossly overrated and at points unbelievably dull book. But Life and Fate, with no exaggeration at all, can truly be said to stand in the same literary pantheon as Tolstoy’s panorama; that Grossman found the voice of the Great Patriotic War as Tolstoy found that of the Patriotic War. It’s the kind of novel that I believe only comes once in a generation, perhaps once in a century.


I’m not surprised that it was ‘arrested’ because I do not thank I’ve ever read a more damning expose of the moral corruption at the core of the Stalinist state, at the core of all totalitarianism. Grossman was right- absolute truth is the most beautiful thing of all. And absolute truth was the one thing the whole Soviet system, even after Stalin, could never allow, never admit. I’m truly grateful that the attempt to suppress this wonderful book was a failure.

I love Russian literature and this is a uniquely Russian book. But Life and Fate is more; it’s a work of insight, empathy and understanding, one that transcends all limits, all boundaries and all nationalities.

Marital War and Peace

The Last Station, directed by Michael Hoffman, is a period drama telling of the final stages in the life of Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace. Starring Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Countess Sofya Andreyevna, his wife, and based on the biographical novel of the same name by Jay Parini, the movie itself is a kind of war and peace in the context of a marriage

There are some terrific performances. Plummer is utterly convincing as Tolstoy, loving and yet rigid in principle, but Dame Helen really steals the show as Countess Sofya. If anything her performance is at points a little overripe, and I’ve never before seen her hamming it up with such exuberance. But don’t let that put you off; there is a comic intensity to her Countess Sofya, but there is also an underlying vulnerability; a sadness over a loss of power and influence which she also brings to the fore.


I have to say that while I admire Tolstoy so much as a writer - second only to Dostoevsky in the pantheon of Russian literature in my estimation - I’m far less keen on Tolstoy the man, or the man he became in the final stages of his life. Ghandi before Ghandi, he was an advocate of pacifism, celibacy, neo-anarchism and vegetarianism, while at the same time full of self-will and egoism; a man who was prepared to put vacuous abstractions before living people; a man who was prepared to preach but not always practice. He is the original bleeding heart and limousine liberal, as one review I read rightly says

My sympathies in the movie- and in life- were all with Countess Sofya. She was Tolstoy’s amanuensis and muse. Only she could decipher his handwriting. She copied War and Peace no fewer than six times. More than that, she also made suggestions along the way on the book’s characters, on what was credible and what was not. So she had as much right to the book, it might be thought, as her husband.

Tolstoy thinks otherwise. He is proposing to give away the copyright to all mankind in the shape of the Tolstoy Foundation, headed by Vladimir Chertkov, played by Paul Giamatti, Sofya Andrevena’s principal opponent. The Countess, you see, is a material girl living in an idealist world!

It’s this mix, this tug of love and legacy, comes Valentin Bulgakov, a credible performance by James McAvoy, a naïve and doe-eyed idealist. Employed by Chertkov essentially as a secretary for the author and as a spy against the scheming Countess, he is able to watch the war of the Tolstoys at first hand.

Living in a nearby Tolstoyan commune, dedicated to bloodless ideals, he matures under the guidance, and the love, of Masha, played by Kerry Condon, a free-spirit in every sense. I could not quite work out what she was doing among the self-deniers, the celibates and the abstainers - oh, the looks of disapproval she incurred when doing something as innocent as killing a troublesome mosquito! Anyway, with her advent the movie then takes the shape of a double love story; of Tolstoy and the secretary; of first love and last love; of young lust and old empathy, one nicely played off against the other.

Ah, yes, the Countess does love the man; she just hates those like Chertkov, who would turn him into an icon, a prophet and an ideal. She did not marry Jesus; she married Lev Tolstoy. In the end Tolstoy, unable to live in the cross-fire, and surrendering real life for chimerical ideals, leaves home, going by train and ending in Astapovo, his last station, where he dies. I’m delighted to say that the Countess, and not Chertkov, got the copyright in the end, awarded to her by the Russian Senate in 1914, four years after her husband’s death.

I confess I thought the script a little thin at points, never really getting below the surface. But even so it bubbles along quite nicely. The cinematography is gorgeous, the rural settings beautiful, a touch of life in the old Russia, the Russia of counts and peasants, of authors and icons, destroyed for ever by the communists.

Grand Inquisitor

I’m reading Life and Fate at present, a remarkable book by a remarkable man, Vasily Grossman, best know as a journalist of genius, who reported from the Russian side during the Second World War. I’m only half way through the novel, his magnum opus, so I’m not offering this as a review. Rather I want to draw attention to one particular chapter, half way through the book, a chapter that I have not long just finished reading. I’m just so full of excitement that I simply have to say something.

First, a word or two about the novel and its own fate. During the Battle of Stalingrad Grossman was reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After the war he wrote Life and Fate, whose title invites a comparison with that great Russian novel. For once the comparison is fully justified, as Grossman, in a huge panorama, creates War and Peace for the twentieth century.

As a novel it is also intensely honest, making no allowances for the ideological shibboleths of his day, so honest that the book was ‘arrested’, yes, arrested by the KGB in the early 1960s. Grossman was subsequently summoned to the office of Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologue of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, who told him that the book could not be published for another two or three hundred years, an act of extreme censorship coupled with a paradoxical recognition of its lasting importance. Fortunately, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out to the West, where it was published and hailed as a work of genius.

Now let me give you a taste of why it could never have been published in the old Soviet Union. You will find it in Chapter Fourteen of Book Two, a passage that I now think of as the ‘Grand Inquisitor Chapter’, drawing from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In this Mikhail Mostovsky, an old Bolshevik, incarcerated in a German concentration camp, is taken to be interrogated by a senior Gestapo officer named Liss. Mostovsky is ready to be tortured; has prepared himself mentally for torture. Yes, he is tortured alright, just not in the way he imagined. Liss, you see, greets him, greets the Bolsheviks as pathfinders and teachers, as the first National Socialists of the twentieth century;



‘Do you understand me?’ Liss repeated, already too excited even to see Mostovsky. ‘When we strike a blow against your army, it’s ourselves that we hit. Our tanks didn’t only break through your defences- they broke through our own defences at the same time. The tracks of our tanks are crushing German National Socialism. It’s terrible- it’s like committing suicide in one’s sleep…We’re your deadly enemies. Yes, yes…But our victory will be your victory. Do you understand? And if you should conquer, then we shall perish only to live in your victory. It’s paradoxical: through losing the war we shall win the war- and continue our development in a different form.


Mostovsky is in hell, but not the hell he expected. This devil does not torture; he chips away at long cherished illusions. At once he recognises a terrible truth: the practice of communism in Russia, a system built on lies and terror, is in no essential different from the practice of Nazism. To defeat Liss in this game of mental chess he would have to renounce everything: the camps, the Lubyanka the whole apparatus of the secret police, an organisation that spawned a monster like Nikolai Yezhov. More than that he would have to hate Stalin and his dictatorship, have to condemn Lenin himself, the very edge of the abyss. For Lenin, as Liss asserts, while considering himself to be the builder of internationalism while in fact he was creating the great nationalism of the twentieth century.

It’s true, it’s all true; without Lenin there would have been no Mussolini and no Hitler. They are his bastard children, and fascism as much his creature as communism. If one does not grasp this simple truth one simply cannot understand the history of the last century, from the October Revolution to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Celebrating Chekhov

This month marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Anton Chekhov, a Russian story teller and playwright of genius, perhaps the one foreign writer admired before all others in the English-speaking world. For me he stands comparison with Oscar Wilde as a playwright, though the story they tell is as different as can be imagined, and with Guy de Maupassant as a writer of short stories. His plays are as much admired, and performed, in England as those of Shakespeare in Russia.

While I love Russian literature in general-and Dostoevsky ranks with Dickens as my favourite author-there is something unique about Chekhov, something-dare I say it?-not quite Russian. There is little of the great passion in his work, little of the grandeur and the intense soul-searching that moved people like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Instead there is a detachment, a distrust of certainty and quiet and playful irony. He is at once of his era and his nation and detached from his era and his nation.

I think the best assessment ever of Chekhov was that penned by Vasily Grossman;

He said-let’s put God-and all those grand progressive ideas-to one side. Let’s begin with man. Let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man-whether he is a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual-or we’ll get nowhere.

Beginning this Monday the Hampstead Theatre will mark the anniversary with a week celebrating Chekhov’s work and life, with the intention of raising money to help in the restoration of the White Dacha, the house in Yalta where her wrote The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters, two of his great plays, and The Lady with the Little Dog, so far as I am concerned among the best short stories ever. Chekhov’s final home, the place where he died in 1904, it’s now in serious disrepair after the loss of state support.

I’m particularly looking forward to this Friday, when Penelope Wilton will read The Lady and the Little Dog, after which it will be discussed by Sir David Hare, who featured it in his screenplay for The Reader.

Chekhov’s sister, Masha, maintained the White Dacha until her death in 1957. During the Second World War, when the Crimea was under German occupation, she bravely refused to allow a Nazi officer to sleep in her brother’s bedroom. In Communist days funds were provided for the upkeep, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a dispute over ownership between Russia and the Ukraine. Now it is sadly neglected. It’s important to maintain this link with the past, this link with a great artist and a good man.

Another Anna

I’m continuing to read Robert Conquest’s engrossing The Great Terror, an exhaustive account of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. It’s full of all sorts of tragic detail, about the death of hope and, in relation to the arts, what he calls the ‘holocaust of the spirit.’ I’ve long admired Anna Akhmatova, arguably the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, and that is really a singular accolade in a nation of great poets. She gave a voice to silence, if I can put it like that, to a time of silence. I can’t explain in words how much Requiem moves me. Just cast your eye over the words.

Requiem

Not under foreign skies protection
Or saving wings of alien birth –
I was then there – with whole my nation –
There, where my nation, alas! was.

1961


INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

In the awful days of the Yezhovschina I passed seventeen months in the outer waiting line of the prison visitors in Leningrad. Once, somebody ‘identified’ me there. Then a woman, standing behind me in the line, which, of course, never heard my name, waked up from the torpor, typical for us all there, and asked me, whispering into my ear (all spoke only in a whisper there):
“And can you describe this?”
And I answered:
“Yes, I can.”
Then the weak similarity of a smile glided over that, what had once been her face.

April 1, 1957; Leningrad


DEDICATION

The high crags decline before this woe,
The great river does not flow ahead,
But they’re strong – the locks of a jail, stone,
And behind them – the cells, dark and low,
And the deadly pine is spread.
For some one, somewhere, a fresh wind blows,
For some one, somewhere, wakes up a dawn –
We don’t know, we’re the same here always,
We just hear the key’s squalls, morose,
And the sentry’s heavy step alone;
Got up early, as for Mass by Easter,
Walked the empty capital along
To create the half-dead peoples’ throng.
The sun downed, the Neva got mister,
But our hope sang afar its song.
There’s a sentence… In a trice tears flow…
Now separated, cut from us,
As if they’d pulled out her heart and thrown
Or pushed down her on a street stone –
But she goes… Reels… Alone at once.
Where are now friends unwilling those,
Those friends of my two years, brute?
What they see in the Siberian snows,
In a circle of the moon, exposed?
To them I send my farewell salute.


PROLOGUE

In this time, just a dead could half-manage
A weak smile – with the peaceful state glad.
And, like some heavy, needless appendage,
Mid its prisons swung gray Leningrad.
And, when mad from the tortures’ succession,
Marched the army of those, who’d been doomed,
Sang the engines the last separation
With their whistles through smoking gloom,
And the deathly stars hanged our heads over
And our Russia writhed under the boots –
With the blood of the guiltless full-covered –
And the wheels on Black Maries’ black routes.

1

You were taken away at dawn’s mildness.
I convoyed you, as my dead-born child,
Children cried in the room’s half-grey darkness,
And the lamp by the icon lost light.
On your lips dwells the icon kiss’s cold
On your brow – the cold sweet … Don’t forget!
Like a wife of the rebel of old
On the Red Square, I’ll wail without end.

2

The quiet Don bears quiet flood,
The crescent enters in a hut.

He enters with a cap on head,
He sees a woman like a shade.

This woman’s absolutely ill,
This woman’s absolutely single.

Her man is dead, son – in a jail,
Oh, pray for me – a poor female!

3

No, ‘tis not I, ‘tis someone’s in a suffer –
I was ne’er able to endure such pain.
Let all, that was, be with a black cloth muffled,
And let the lanterns be got out ... and reign
just Night.

4

You should have seen, girl with some mocking manner,
Of all your friends the most beloved pet,
The whole Tsar Village’s a sinner, gayest ever –
What should be later to your years sent.
How, with a parcel, by The Crosses, here,
You stand in line with the ‘Three Hundredth’ brand
And, with your hot from bitterness a tear,
Burn through the ice of the New Year, dread.
The prison’s poplar’s bowing with its brow,
No sound’s heard – But how many, there,
The guiltless ones are loosing their lives now…

5

I’ve cried for seventeen long months,
I’ve called you for your home,
I fell at hangmen’ feet – not once,
My womb and hell you’re from.
All has been mixed up for all times,
And now I can’t define
Who is a beast or man, at last,
And when they’ll kill my son.
There’re left just flowers under dust,
The censer’s squall, the traces, cast
Into the empty mar…
And looks strait into my red eyes
And threads with death, that’s coming fast,
The immense blazing star.

6

The light weeks fly faster here,
What has happened I don’t know,
How, into your prison, stone,
Did white nights look, my son, dear?
How do they stare at you, else,
With their hot eye of a falcon,
Speak of the high cross, you hang on,
Of the slow coming death?

7

THE SENTENCE

The word, like a heavy stone,
Fell on my still living breast.
I was ready. I didn’t moan.
I will try to do my best.

I have much to do my own:
To forget this endless pain,
Force this soul to be stone,
Force this flesh to live again.

Just if not … The rustle of summer
Feasts behind my window sell.
Long before I’ve seen in slumber
This clear day and empty cell.

8

TO DEATH

You’ll come in any case – why not right now, therefore?
I wait for you – my strain is highest.
I have doused the light and left opened the door
For you, so simple and so wondrous.
Please, just take any sight, which you prefer to have:
Thrust in – in the gun shells’ disguises,
Or crawl in with a knife, as an experienced knave,
Or poison me with smoking typhus,
Or quote the fairy tale, grown in the mind of yours
And known to each man to sickness,
In which I’d see, at last, the blue of the hats’ tops,
And the house-manager, ‘still fearless’.
It’s all the same to me. The cold Yenisei lies
In the dense mist, the Northern Star – in brightness,
And a blue shine of the beloved eyes
Is covered by the last fear-darkness.

9

Already madness, with its wing,
Covers a half of my heart, restless,
Gives me the flaming wine to drink
And draws into the vale of blackness.

I understand that just to it
My victory has to be given,
Hearing the ravings of my fit,
Now fitting to the stranger’s living.

And nothing of my own past
It’ll let me take with self from here
(No matter in what pleas I thrust
Or how often they appear):

Not awful eyes of my dear son –
The endless suffering and patience –
Not that black day when thunder gunned,
Not that jail’s hour of visitation,

Not that sweet coolness of his hands,
Not that lime’s shade in agitation,
Not that light sound from distant lands –
Words of the final consolations.

10

CRUCIFIXION
Don’t weep for me, Mother,
seeing me in a grave.

I

The angels’ choir sang fame for the great hour,
And skies were melted in the fire’s rave.
He said to God, “Why did you left me, Father?”
And to his Mother, “Don’t weep o’er my grave…”

II

Magdalena writhed and sobbed in torments,
The best pupil turned into a stone,
But none dared – even for a moment –
To sight Mother, silent and alone.


EPILOGUE

I

I’ve known how, at once, shrink back the faces,
How fear peeps up from under the eyelids,
How suffering creates the scriptural pages
On the pale cheeks its cruel reigning midst,
How the shining raven or fair ringlet
At once is covered by the silver dust,
And a smile slackens on the lips, obedient,
And deathly fear in the dry snicker rustles.
And not just for myself I pray to Lord,
But for them all, who stood in that line, hardest,
In a summer heat and in a winter cold,
Under the wall, so red and so sightless.

II

Again a memorial hour is near,
I can now see you and feel you and hear:

And her, who’d been led to the air in a fit,
And her – who no more touches earth with her feet.

And her – having tossed with her beautiful head –
She says, “I come here as to my homestead.”

I wish all of them with their names to be called;
But how can I do that? I have not the roll.

The wide common cover I’ve wov’n for their lot –
>From many a word, that from them I have caught.

Those words I’ll remember as long as I live,
I’d not forget them in a new awe or grief.

And if will be stopped my long-suffering mouth –
Through which always shout our people’s a mass –

Let them pray for me, like for them I had prayed,
Before my remembrance day, quiet and sad.

And if once, whenever in my native land,
They’d think of the raising up my monument,

I give my permission for such good a feast,
But with one condition – they have to place it

Not near the sea, where I once have been born –
All my warm connections with it had been torn,

Not in the tsar’s garden near that tree-stump, blessed,
Where I am looked for by the doleful shade,

But here, where three hundred long hours I stood for
And where was not opened for me the hard door.

Since e’en in the blessed death, I shouldn’t forget
The deafening roar of Black Maries’ black band,

I shouldn’t forget how flapped that hateful door,
And wailed the old woman, like beast, it before.

And let from the bronze and unmoving eyelids,
Like some melting snow flow down the tears,

And let a jail dove coo in somewhat afar
And let the mute ships sail along the Neva.