Mud and Stars

Sara Wheeler’s new travel essay book views Russia through the lens of its most famous Golden Age writers. Traveling from one end of the country to the other, she treads in the footsteps of their lives and works, offering not just beautifully crafted descriptions of the country, but intimate portraits of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and others, beginning with Pushkin. The book’s first few pages are excerpted here. The book is out November 5.

The people stay silent. (Narod bezmolvstvuyet.)

Pushkin, Boris Godunov

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a lubricious, bawdy, impetuous, whoring gambler who seldom missed an opportunity to pick a fight. He never had a proper job, even though he was for a while nominally at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a department of the Chancery. He lived mostly off his father. He had a tortured relationship with both the civil service and the authorities. The government of Alexander I, the tsar who had defeated Napoleon and was by European standards a medieval figure, was becoming increasingly reactionary, and an incontinent loudmouth like Pushkin had no chance. One prince, a high-level civil servant, recorded in his diary after a dinner in January 1822, “Listened to Pushkin at table . . . he tries to convince everyone he meets . . . that only a scoundrel would not wish a change of government in Russia. His favorite conversation is based on abuse and sarcasm and even when he tries to be polite there is a sardonic smile on his lips.” Pushkin was opposed to landowners, supported the abolition of serfdom, and indeed when he got going — according to the princely dinner companion — “began to pour abuse on all classes of the population.” He announced “that all noblemen should be hanged, and that he would tighten the noose round their necks with pleasure.” It is a testament to the respect in which literature was held that the government didn’t kill him. Of course, three generations later Pushkin’s dream of an egalitarian world came true in Russia. But they shot writers then.

Pushkin chose to write poems in Russian. Literary Russian had only evolved in the eighteenth century, stimulating a new school of poets from which Pushkin emerged. He turned to prose later. In his short story “The Queen of Spades” (“Pikovaya dama” ), when the countess asks her grandson if he will bring her a novel, he replies with a question: Would she like a Russian one? “Are there any Russian novels?” the countess queries. (As a young woman in the middle of the eighteenth century, she read only in French.) Pushkin produced the first major Russian work in almost every literary genre. Just as Peter the Great, standing on the banks of the Neva, founded St. Petersburg “to open a window onto Europe,” so Pushkin both Russified literary Russian and made his nation’s books into something of Europe. And he is contemporary for all time.

The young Pushkin, “Sasha,” grew up with household serfs and then attended the prestigious Imperial Lycée, where pupils were not permitted to leave during their six-year term. They studied the humanities, following the English public school system, and cultivated the worship of male friendship. (“My friends, this brotherhood of ours will live. | United, like the soul, it cannot perish.”) Parents could visit on Sundays and feast days, but for two years, as a young teenager, Pushkin never saw his mother. While he was a pupil, Napoleon entered Moscow and for four days the city burned. This was the defining trauma of Pushkin’s generation. His uncle was one of many who lost everything. The man fled the city with only the clothes he stood up in.

In the summer of 1824 the tsar dismissed the poet from the civil service (besides his political leanings, Pushkin was having an affair with his boss’s wife, which can’t have helped). Alexander exiled him first to the south, and then to his ancestral estate in the northwest, where he remained under civil and church surveillance in the company of the serf Nikita Timofeyevich Kozlov, who had brought him up. Whenever a friend visited from Petersburg, the pair would hear the sleighbells of the abbot from the local monastery. The old man would shuffle in for a glass of rum, the three would drink and mumble in the candlelit room, and the abbot would ride off again to compose his report.

*

Through an open window, linden boughs traced lines in smalt blue. A branch bent inside the room, jeweled pods trembling, and sunlight glinted off a champagne cooler. Silhouette cutouts were fashionable in the 1820s, and the young women of the house had stuck a dozen to the music room walls, an indoor version of linden branches against the sky. I had gone to find Pushkin in the northwest. When, in 1824 — already the most famous poet in Russia — the tsar exiled him to his mother’s ancestral land for writing anti-royalist verses, the prisoner visited this neighboring house on the Trigorskoye estate (the name means “three hills”) every day, walking or riding from his own, contiguous, land. In a letter to a friend, he referred to Trigorskoye’s owner, a forty-three-year-old widow, as “an elderly lady.” But in exile, elderly ladies have their charms.

Irina, my guide in Pushkin country, was a true apostle, and reluctant to admit that the great man had affairs not only with the widow, but with the five daughters of the house, and with his serfs too. Pushkin was a heroic shagger who had time to write only when he had a sexually transmitted disease. A friend once told a mutual acquaintance, “[Pushkin] is finishing the fourth canto of his poem. Two or three more doses of the clap and it’ll be done.”

Alexander Sergeyevich was short — five-foot-three — with darkish wavy hair. One girlfriend wrote of “dreadful side whiskers, disheveled hair, nails like claws, small stature, affected manners, and an arrogant attitude towards the women he chose to love.” Who could resist? Like many great artists, Pushkin lacked something in the human department. A contemporary described him as “our immortal bard, who in spite of his great talent, is an extremely vain, bad-tempered man, spoilt by the admiration of his contemporaries.” His reputation declined in his last years, and subsided further after his death, historical revisionism being as unavoidable as the grave. It took a generation or two for him to come back, then the Bolsheviks put the boot in; Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, led a special campaign to have the class enemy Pushkin’s books banned from public libraries. But by the centenary of the poet’s death in 1937 the Soviets decided Pushkin was acceptable after all, and might as well be co-opted into the flagging cause. The country went berserk with festivities for this anniversary: plays, films, pilgrimages, factory study groups, carnivals on collective farms, hundreds of streets renamed. Tens of millions subscribed to a new Collected Works. Pravda declared the poet a “semi-divine being,” and the Central Committee claimed he was “the Father of Communism.” Stalin was at that time zealously murdering writers who made the mistake of being alive. Of the 700 authors who attended the First Writers’ Congress in 1934, 650 were dead by the time the second came around. The vaunted Collected Works appeared twelve years late because the institute responsible had repeatedly lost staff to the purges.

Trigorskoye nestles on the western rim of Russia, close to the Estonian border and a couple of hours’ motoring from Pskov, an ancient city on the Velikaya River. That waterway joins the Baltic via a network of lakes and once-navigable channels which formed one of the earliest Russian trade routes. So it’s a kind of border itself: Putin went to Pskov in 2000 and said “Russia starts here,” meaning both geographically and historically. Many people repeated this phrase to me. It gave them a purchase on the nationalism besieging twenty-first-century Russia. The country was too big to be anything but itself — too powerful to need alliances, too badly governed to go to the good, too corrupt to build from the base. Putin was at that time energetically blocking UN resolutions to end the fighting in Syria.

The widow and her five daughters and one stepdaughter had lived in the former flag factory I stood in, a single-story dwelling with rooms off a broad central corridor. A veranda looked over the lake beyond the trees. It was a house of chaste simplicity — champagne cooler notwithstanding — with polished wood floors that still smelled of cedar and ceiling-height stoves whose blue-and-white tiles reflected lacy patterns of light.

When the weather was fine, the occupants danced in an outdoor ballroom next to the teal-green lake. Sometimes the young women of the house — in addition to the daughters, nieces came to visit — sent a serf over to Pushkin’s house with cut flowers, even though roses bloomed around his place too. Pushkin said his heart stayed in Trigorskoye.

The state has preserved the house and opened it to the public. Russians revere the role of the writer — he or she occupies a kind of vatic position — and their record on such matters as the preservation of writers’ houses is commendable. It’s an easy thing to do if you’re controlling all artistic output and locking up harmless pop stars. At Trigorskoye, Irina and I were the only visitors. A female employee sat in each room. Their job was to close the door after me. Irina reckoned these attendants earn about 7,000 rubles a month ($110). They looked at me hatchet-faced. A veil of Soviet suspicion still hung over proceedings, and often I was asked, in some deserted museum, to show my ticket six or seven times.

Looking out on such a serene house and a landscape of dips and rivers, lakes, blooms, and small wooden bridges, I didn’t wonder that Pushkin had loved this place. Yet he was the least serene human being to have lived. I mentioned this to Irina. “But he had a heart,” she said, squeezing her lips together. She had dyed her hair the color of cornflakes, a shade popular with Russian women, but she also had a glass eye. This seemed to suit a Pushkinian guide perfectly. His genius lay in his ability to observe with a sea eagle’s eye, but he refracted what he saw through the medium of formal poetry. As we moved into the bedrooms, Irina broke into a poem — she did this every five minutes.

In alien lands devoutly clinging
To age-old rites of Russian earth,
I let a captive bird go winging
To greet the radiant spring’s rebirth.

Pushkin is part of the Russian national consciousness. Some years ago I was researching in the Far Eastern region of Chukotka, the sepulchral back end of Siberia over 3,700 miles from the lindens that bent through the Trigorskoye windows. The territory was closed to foreigners (I had inveigled myself onto a multinational but small science project). Forbidden zones were familiar to the point of institutionalization in the Soviet system, but more than forty “sensitive” cities remain shut off. I was billeted in the regional capital in a homestay apartment on the fourth floor of a khrushchevka, the Soviet blocks that are as Russian as cucumber. As is often the case in northern Russia, a coal-fired power plant maintained a tropical temperature in the sub-Arctic, and my landlords, Sasha and Marina, a couple in their sixties, patrolled the apartment in shorts and vests. One day we hunched over their small kitchen table extracting eggs from the roe of an unidentified fish by rubbing beige lumps over the strings of a badminton racquet. Conversation drifted along, punctuated by long periods of silence. Suddenly, apparently without thinking, and almost as fluently as cornflake-haired Irina, Sasha began declaiming the opening lines of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman. They describe Peter the Great, six feet eight inches tall, looking out over the Neva on the spot that became St. Petersburg:

On the shore of desolate waves
He stood, full of lofty thoughts,
And gazed afar

Continuing through the poem, skipping verses here and there and not minding about forgotten half-lines — Where swamp and forest stood da da da da — Sasha recounted how an eagle flew over Peter’s head before settling at the top of two birch trees that formed an arch, at which Peter said, “Here shall be a town.” My host’s voice rose and fell like the Neva tide, and the three of us instinctively began rubbing the roe in time with Pushkin’s four-iamb lines (iambic tetrameters), possibly the first time this had ever occurred. There were no books in the flat and we were eight time zones from Petersburg. I had thought about those minutes in the kitchen many times in the intervening years. It was my introduction to the significance of Pushkin. Above all, I wondered, what framework lay beneath his place in the inner life of Russia?

From the book MUD AND STARS by Sara Wheeler, to be published on November 5, 2019 by Pantheon, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Sara Wheeler.