Soloviev and Larionov (Соловьев и Ларионов)
by Evgeny Vodolazkin
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Sample translation by Arch Tait
He was born at a halt with the unexceptional name of Kilometre 715. For all its three digits, the halt was extremely small with neither a cinema, a post office, nor even a school. It consisted of six wooden huts strung along the railway track. On reaching the age of 16, he left, went to St Petersburg, entered the University, and began the study of history. In view of the surname he inherited at birth – Solovyov – this was only to be expected.
Professor Nikolsky, Solovyov’s academic supervisor, called him a typical self-made man who had come to the capital with a fishcart, but this, of course, was a joke because long before Solovyov’s arrival (in 1991) St Petersburg had ceased to be a capital, and there had in any case never been fish at Kilometre 715. To Solovyov’s great regret as a boy it had no river or even a pond. Reading book after book about sea voyages, the future historian deplored his landlocked existence and decided to spend the rest of his days, which at that time were still a great many, on the boundary of land and sea. Along with his thirst for knowledge, it was the lure of that great expanse of water which moved him to choose St Petersburg. The remark about a fishcart would have been no more than a joke but for its hint at the overcoming of adverse circumstances so elegantly present in the expression. The historian Solovyov was in every sense a self-made man.
General Larionov (1882-1976) was quite another matter. He came into the world in St Petersburg, in a family with a long line of military officers. Every man in the family was an officer, with the exception of the future general’s father who was Director of the Department of Railways. As a child Larionov had the good fortune even to see his great-grandfather (the family inclined to longevity) who was, naturally, a general – a tall, upright old man who had lost a leg back at the battle of Borodino.
Every movement his great-grandfather made, even the tapping of his peg leg on the parquet, seemed to the young Larionov to be imbued with a special dignity. Unnoticed by others, the child liked to tuck up his right leg, negotiate the hall on his left leg and, clasping the back of the divan in the manner of old General Larionov, fall back against it with a deep sigh. Larionov’s grandfather and his luxuriantly moustached uncles were, in all truth, no less impressive than his great-grandfather, but neither their dashing military bearing nor their ability to express themselves eloquently (the great-grandfather was taciturn) could rival that missing leg.
The only thing which did impress the child about his bipedal relatives was their abundance of medals. His favourite was a medal awarded to one For Quelling the Polish Revolt. The child, who knew absolutely nothing about Poles, was enchanted by the very melodiousness of the words. Seeing how drawn he was to the medal, his uncle finally gave it to him and he would wear it, along with another, For the Taking of Shipka, which he received from another uncle, right up until he was seven. The word ‘Shipka’ was no match for the sonorousness of ‘Polish Revolt’, but the beauty of the medal itself compensated for its phonetic shortcoming. The child knew no happier moments than when he sat among his military relatives wearing those two medals on his chest.
These were Russian officers of the old school who knew how to use cutlery (even the nowadays all but forgotten fish knife), who debonairly kissed ladies’ hands, and were the masters of all manner of niceties beyond the ken of officers of a later era. General Larionov had no adverse circumstances to overcome. Quite the contrary: he had only to absorb, to imbibe to the full the qualities of his environment, and that is exactly what he did.
The general in him began to show from early childhood when, having barely learned to walk, he lined up his wooden Hussars in orderly ranks. Seeing him thus engaged, those present uttered the only words possible: General Larionov. Hear how naturally the words combine. They are made for each other, pronounced without hesitancy and, flowing into each other, comprise a unity as integral as a horse and rider in battle: General Larionov. That was his first and only name at home, and he took to it immediately and forever. General Larionov. Hearing himself so addressed, the child would stand up and silently salute. He learned to speak only when he was three and a half years old.
What, we may wonder, coupled two such dissimilar individuals as Solovyov, a historian, and General Larionov, if, of course, one may talk of the coupling of a young, flourishing academic with a military commander worn out by battles and, moreover, already dead? The the answer is straightforward: the historian Solovyov was researching the career of General Larionov. Having graduated from St Petersburg University, he became a postgraduate student at the Institute of Russian History, and it was here that he adopted General Larionov as the topic of his dissertation. There can be no doubt that by 1996, the year in question, General Larionov did already wholly belong to Russian history.1
Needless to say, Solovyov was not the first to take an interest in researching the renowned general’s biography. At different times a couple of dozen scholarly articles devoted to his life had been published, and these considered the still unexplained mysteries associated with its various periods. This number of papers, although at first sight considerable, appears entirely inadequate in the light of the interest General Larionov has always aroused, both in Russia and abroad. It is surely significant that the quantity of academic articles is considerably less than the number of novels, films, plays etc in which the general features either as one of the characters or as the prototype of the hero. The situation seems to symbolise the predominance of mythology over positive knowledge in all matters relating to the late general.
Moreover, as was demonstrated in a survey article by Professor Amélie Dupont, a French academic, mythology seeped even into scholarly articles about the military leader. For anyone venturing to approach the subject, then, the field of their research was truly something of a minefield. Even those articles, as Dupont also points out, in which truth is backed up by the full panoply of scholarly argumentation, throw light only on problems and episodes so particular that the significance of the truth established tends to zero. It is worthy of note that to this day Dupont’s work (which has been published both in French and in Russian) remains the only monograph devoted to General Larionov.2 This draws attention to the paucity of relevant sources. If the French scholar succeeded in garnering the material for a monograph, this was purely as the result of her dedication and exceptional attitude towards the topic, which she referred to as the main interest in her life.
Professor Dupont was, without exaggeration, created to research this Russian military commander. We are not here referring to the French historian’s external appearance, which has been the object of considerable unseemly mirth within the scholarly community.3 It is after all well known that jibes and jokes behind the back of a major scholar (Dupont is referred to as “Mon Général” in narrow circles) are usually no more than a manifestation of envy. Accordingly, in referring to Amélie Dupont as preordained to research this topic, we have in mind primarily a rare tenacity without which, in all truth, she would never have succeeded in unearthing the key sources which she subsequently published. Indeed, there may be more than a grain of truth in the surmise that the appearance of the moustache, which provoked such an infantile reaction in scholarly circles, was occasioned by the lady’s single-minded pursuit of her topic. In the interests of objectivity it should be noted that General Larionov did not, in fact, have a moustache.
In all the extant photographs (see the plates in Dupont’s monograph) we encounter a meticulously clean-shaven man with cropped and neatly parted hair. The parting is so straight and the shaving so impeccable that, when looking closely at the photographs, one seems to scent eau de toilette. In this, as in most other instances, General Larionov took the only correct decision. Unlike his fellow officers, he made no attempt to style himself on Alexander III, considering that his ideally symmetrical features had no need of a frame of facial hair. It is worth commenting that, for all its symmetry, his face was not handsome, although in the years of his maturity, and more particularly in old age, it appeared to become enlivened. It not infrequently occurs that, examining the photographs of a person in their youth, one is struck by a glaring infantility, the almost embryo-like nature of their appearance by comparison with what came later. In such instances one regret that the person portrayed even existed at this phase in their life. Needless to say, any such reaction is highly ahistorical. As regards the general, the wrinkles under his eyes and the hook which appeared with age in his nose render his face more expressive. At a particular period in his life, in his late 30s, this hook and the expression on his face (but not his features as a whole) lent him a resemblance to Cardinal Richelieu. It was the period when the general’s achievements, and the mysteries associated with them, were at their peak. His similarity to Richelieu may have been a resemblance between two men with a secret. Be that as it may, with time it too disappeared.
Even a cursory glance through Professor Dupont’s illustrations makes clear that there is an unmistakable preponderance of photographs from the final period of General Larionov’s life. The old man never posed for the camera but neither did he shrink from it: he regarded it with complete indifference. This attitude gave the general’s portraits a naturalness unusual in the genre, which may be the principal explanation of why on two occasions they won international competitions.
Even people wholly unacquainted with the general’s career or who have never heard of him will doubtless recall the black-and-white photograph of an old man sitting in a deck chair on the very edge of the quayside (Yalta, 1964). It is one of the classics of international photography, like the locomotive which has crashed through the window of a Paris terminus, or the lighthouse standing in the midst of a raging sea. Despite the heat of the summer day, the old man is sitting in a white military jacket. He is reclining beneath a semi-transparent sunshade with his legs crossed. The toe of one light-coloured shoe points forward, parallel to the ground and almost merging with the quayside, so that a lighthouse in the middle distance seems to be balanced on the toe of his stylish footwear. The old man is looking into the distance, his gaze filled with the attentiveness of someone with no interest in anything nearer than the line of the horizon. That old man is General Larionov, and it can only be said that next to this photograph all earlier photos fade into insignificance and seem almost unworthy of so outstanding a figure. The fact that this image of him in the fullness of his maturity is the one lodged in posterity’s memory must be accounted very much to the general’s advantage. Perhaps his only stroke of greater good fortune was the fact that he was not shot at the end of the Civil War, something which has always been found inexplicable.
But to the point: this precisely is the riddle that historian Solovyov decided to focus his attention on. We may anticipate doubts as to whether historian Solovyov is the right person to set about disentangling so entangled a history, and whether indeed it is not folly to place reliance on someone who only recently was a student, as well as a self-made man. These objections to not appear well founded. It will suffice to point out something also first established by Dupont,4 that Arkady Gaidar was commanding a regiment when he was sixteen and a half years old. As regards the expression ‘a self-made man’, the term is nowadays generally considered applicable to anybody who has succeeded in achieving anything in life.
As regards Solovyov’s work on himself, let us mention just one detail: he managed to replace his South Russian accent with that of an aristocratic Petersburger. Needless to say, there is nothing discreditable in the South Russian accent as such, or anything that would detract from the dignity of those who speak with it (in just the same way as, let us say, the limping patois of Moscow has no call to discredit the citizens of our capital). Indeed, Mikhail Gorbachev undertook the perestroika of Russia with a wholly South Russian accent. Gorbachev, of course, was not a historian: he made history himself, without concerning himself unduly about the orthoepic aspect of the matter.5
As regards Solovyov, as he whispered Russian tongue twisters in the hostel kitchen he was engaged, in his own mind, in something greater than merely correcting his pronunciation: he was overcoming his provincialism.
An important part in Solovyov’s development was played by his academic supervisor, the famed Professor Nikolsky. Having read his student’s first essay, which was about Russia’s assimilation of the Far East of the country, the professor invited him to his study and, without saying anything, took a long drag on the cardboard filter of a White Sea Canal cigarette (he had become addicted to Russian cigarettes while constructing the eponymous canal).
“My friend,” the professor said when he had lit up, “scholarship is boring. If you don’t get used to that, you will encounter difficulties in getting to grips with it.” Nikolsky asked Solovyov to delete from his essay the words ‘great’, ‘victorious’, and ‘the only possible’. He asked his student whether he was familiar with the theory that Russians squandered such energy as they had been endowed with by attempting to master impossibly extensive territories. The student was not yet acquainted with this theory and, until he was, Professor Nikolsky asked him to delete also the phrase ‘progressive phenomenon’. The attention of the essay writer was particularly drawn to the formatting of bibliographical and explanatory footnotes. Close attention to this aspect of his essay indicated that the only correctly formatted footnote was one reading “Ibid., p. 12”. To be completely frank, most of Professor Nikolsky’s remarks struck Solovyov as nitpicking, yet it was this discussion which laid the foundation for a friendship between the professor and his student. The professor was of an age when his remarks could no longer be taken amiss by the younger man, and Solovyov’s own less than straightforward history caused his supervisor in turn to be lenient with his pupil.
Professor Nikolsky never tired of repeating to his ward that fine phrases in scholarship were as a rule false, and that their fineness was premised on their supposed universality and the absence of exceptions. But, the cigarette in the Professor’s hand described a smoky ellipse, that absence was illusory. There were no comprehensive truths (almost none, the professor corrected himself, bringing his maxim into accord with his own theory). For every A there will always be a B, and C, and something which cannot quite be conveyed by any letter. An honest researcher will bear this in mind, and his statements will be no less fine for it. Thus said Professor Nikolsky.
Solovyov’s blue-eyed romanticism at some point in time was replaced by a pronounced tendency to exactitude, and this was the time when he discovered a particular kind of beauty, the beauty of solidly grounded knowledge. It was a time when the young man’s papers sprouted an immense quantity of exhaustive and irreproachably formatted footnotes.6
He added footnote after footnote and wondered how he had been able to do without them at the beginning of his academic career. When a footnote began to accompany almost every word he uttered, Professor Nikolsky was obliged to stop him and inform him casually that by the end of their careers scholars usually dispense with footnotes. The young researcher was disconcerted.
The Pacific Ocean, towards which Solovyov had been drawn in his first essay, did not, despite his expectations, become his principal topic. Professor Nikolsky succeeded in persuading his student that the most important part of history takes place on continents. Only a sound knowledge of that history conferred the right occasionally to cast off from the land. The outcome of an agonising inner struggle was that Solovyov decided to postpone taking to the seas.
In the course of his five years at University Solovyov became a real Petersburger. He began wearing good quality but unshowy clothes (as one moves towards the South, and this is true not only of Russia, clothing generally becomes more garish), referred curtly to the state authorities as “they”, and became an enthusiast for evening strolls through Vasilievsky Island. Subsequently, when he rented a room in Petrograd District (11 Zhdanov Embankment), he retained his penchant for strolling. When he finished working in the library he would walk home. Garden Street. The Summer Gardens. Trinity Bridge. In the winter when, in accordance with their name, the Summer Gardens were closed and the statues boarded up, Solovyov chose a different route. By Griboyedov Canal he would walk down to the River Neva, then past the Winter Palace (open, unlike the Summer Gardens, all year round), and turn on to Palace Bridge. Back home he would put his sodden shoes on the radiator. Salt spread by the yardkeepers turned them white by morning. Solovyov came to love the special winter cosiness of the Public Library, the figure of Catherine the Great glimpsed through a half-frosted window, the pre-war lamps on the tables, and the barely audible whispering of those sitting behind him. He liked the indescribable aroma of the library. It combined the smell of books, bookcases, and worn carpet runners. All libraries smell the same. It was the smell of the single-storey village library, half-buried in snow, from which the young Solovyov had taken out books. The library was one and a half hours’ walk from Kilometre 715 station. He would go there after school before walking back to the station and home. He sat side on to the desk of the elderly librarian, Nadezhda Nikiforovna, while she looked out books for him somewhere behind the bookshelves. As he waited for her to return he would examine his indelibly purple fingers sunk in the rabbit fur of his hat. From time to time her head would appear from behind the shelves.
“Captain Blood: His Odyssey?”
“Read it.”
He had read everything. The village library was the first amazing shock in his life, and Nadezhda Nikiforovna was his first love. Unlike the houses beside the railway track, it was very quiet in the library and didn’t smell of railway sleepers. To the fairytale library infusion of smells was added the fragrance of Red Moscow perfume. This was Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s perfume. If there was one thing missing from Solovyov’s subsequent life in St Petersburg it was Red Moscow.
“The Children of Captain Grant?”
Her quiet voice made goose-pimples run slowly down Solovyov’s back. Moistening a finger, Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s extracted a form from the drawer and made the requisite entry. Solovyov watched bewitched the movements of her fingers with their large, dull nails. She had a signet ring with a stone on her ring finger. Reshelving books, Nadezhda Nikiforovna would snag the wood with her ring and the cameo would emit a flat, plastic sound. So different from the rasping of the railway carriages, in Solovyov’s ears the sound assumed an amazingly refined, almost aristocratic quality. He later described it as the first timid knocking of world culture at the door of his heart. Most often Solovyov did not come to the library on his own. He was accompanied by a girl called Liza who lived in the house next door. Liza was not allowed to walk home alone and was instructed to wait for Solovyov in the library. She sat some distance away, silently observing the issuance of books. Sometimes she would take something Solovyov had read. As soon as he got home Solovyov forgot all about Liza. He remembered every detail of his visit to the library, and surrendered to dreams of married life with Nadezhda Nikiforovna. It should be emphasised that at the age of eight these dreams were entirely chaste. Being far removed from the hotbeds of civilisation (and simultaneously, in Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s words, from the clinker they precipitated), Solovyov had little idea of the purpose of marriage or how it proceeded. His only link with the outside world was this village library from which not only erotic publications, but even questionable illustrations in the periodical press, were rigorously excluded. Such things were mercilessly cut out by Nadezhda Nikiforovna, who censored new arrivals in her free time. There is nothing surprising in the fact that five years later, with the awakening of their instincts, Solovyov and Liza lacked any guidance whatsoever in these matters and had quite literally to grope their way ahead. However, even when later in adolescence he engaged in sexual activity, Solovyov did not consider himself unfaithful to Nadezhda Nikiforovna. Indeed, the idea of marrying her, which had so warmed him as a child, even then had not lost its attraction. What changed was only his becoming aware that there were certain things he would not be requiring of Nadezhda Nikiforovna. For the present narrative, however, Liza’s surname is not without interest: Larionova. The present narrative is altogether inclined to emphasise a number of similarities and coincidences, because every simile has meaning: revealing another dimension, hinting at a true perspective without which the gaze would surely come up against a brick wall. Embarking on his researches into the life and career of General Larionov, Solovyov was mindful of his earlier encounter with the surname. He saw such matters as significant. Needless to say, the young researcher could not yet explain the part the Larionovs would play in his life, but he already sensed that it would not be a minor role.
As mostly happens with predictable events, Solovyov stumbled upon his research topic by chance. Before him it had been worked on by a graduate called Kalyuzhny, a likeable young fellow if without the least enthusiasm for research, or indeed anything else. His efforts extended only to making his way to the University bar and settling there for the rest of the day. Sympathetically inclined towards the general, and indubitably curious about his destiny, the main thing puzzling him (his finger slid over the glass of his beer mug), was how the general had survived. Over the course of several years Kalyzuhny would paraphrase to anybody who sat down at his table the classic work of Professor Dupont. This endless paraphrasing evidently exhausted him completely because, in all the years of his ceaseless narration, he never wrote a single line. Summoning all his remaining strength, Graduate Kaluzhny unexpectedly did what the general in his lifetime never made up his mind to do: he emigrated. His subsequent fate is unknown.
What is known, however, is Solovyov’s fate who, in the unanimous opinion of his colleagues, was just the person to replace their departed comrade. Only a few months after embarking on his postgraduate career, he read a paper at a conference. It was titled “Researching the Life and Career of General Larionov: Results and Prospects”.
The results presented and the prospects outlined by Solovyov made a highly favourable impression on his academic audience. The young researcher’s paper testified not only to a well organised mind, but equally to profound interest in his topic. The high point of his paper, which caused a great stir in the hall, was his correcting of certain facts in Professor Amélie Dupont’s monograph, which until then had been considered unimpeachable.
Thus, it transpired that in the 34th Infantry Division of 136 Taganrog Regiment there were not 483 soldiers, as asserted by Dupont, but only 469. It was shown also that the number of soldiers in the 2nd Native Division of the Joint Cavalry Brigade had, on the contrary, been understated by the French researcher who had given 720 (whereas the correct number was 778). Professor Dupont had not only failed to fully elucidate the role in the Crimean Campaign of Colonel Y.D. Noga (1878- ?), but had also clearly exaggerated the officer’s educational level: Dupont erroneously stated that Noga had graduated from the Vladimir and Kiev Corps of Cadets when in fact he had graduated only from the Vladimir (i.e., St Vladimir) Kievan Corps of Cadets. Solovyov had a number of more minor complaints about the French monograph, but at this point it may be thought sufficient to limit ourselves to those already enumerated as sufficiently characterising the quality of the young scholar’s work and his unwillingness to blindly defer to the authority of his predecessor.
This was Solovyov’s moment of glory. Inconspicuous behind one of the conference hall’s marble pillars, no less a person than Professor Dupont was listening to his paper. All who observed her at this moment testify that the French historian’s eyes misted over. One less devoted to scholarship might have been offended by all the amendments put forward by Solovyov. They might have turned nasty, possibly even shrugging their shoulders and snorting contemptuously. They might have argued, for example, that in the wider context of explaining events in the Crimea in 1920 the proposed corrections contributed relatively little. Dupont was not such a person. As Solovyov concluded with the traditional, “Thank you for your attention”, she raced from behind her pillar to embrace the young scholar. This ardent academic embrace, which involved a sob of emotion, smudged mascara, and a pricking by moustache – was it not a triumph of true values, testimony to the indestructibility of the great Internationale of research?
As she stood with her running mascara at the lectern, Amélie Dupont recalled all those who over the years had dedicated themselves to study of the post-revolutionary period. She spoke with particular warmth of I.A. Ratsimor who had initiated but was never to complete a monumental Encyclopedia of the Russian Civil War.7 He died at the letter ‘K’, Dupont reminisced, and if he could only have lived to complete one more letter, our knowledge of General Larionov would have been on a quite, quite different level. “But now,” and with these words the professor again drew Solovyov close to herself, “we see his worthy successor. Now we can leave the stage reassured.”
Solovyov wanted courteously to seek to dissuade the Frenchwoman, to urge her to continue her work which was of such importance to everybody, but she was having none of it. With a grand sweep of her great arm she appeared to pluck a copy of her monograph from the air and forcibly pressed it to Solovyov’s breast. Kissing him one final time, Amélie Dupont marched the length of the conference hall and vanished into the semi-darkness of the corridor.
She called him from Paris and wanted to know absolutely everything about the young scholar, his views on history in general, his preferences in methodology and even, entirely unexpectedly, his financial situation. Although he coped with all the other issues, Solovyov was completely unable to think of a coherent reply to her enquiry after his finances. She provided a concise summary herself: Russian scholars don’t have a financial situation.
Shocked by this circumstance, Dupont set about establishing the reasons for such a dismaying state of affairs. Adopting a determinist position, this representative of French historical scholarship elaborated a long causal chain which it would be pointless to give here in full, since the events she mentioned are well known to every Russian schoolchild. We shall dwell only upon certain underlying principles she saw as typical of the chain.
The direction of Russian society was determined by a number of factors of which, in Dupont’s view, the crucial ones were: an insufficient predisposition to hard work, a tendency to misappropriate the property of other people, and an acute sense of justice. In the academic’s mind the chain of causality assumed the form of what, upon mature reflection, she concluded was a vicious circle.
The situation as she saw it was far from rosy: misappropriation of the property of others inflamed the sense of justice to impossible levels, and this in turn greatly diminished society’s predisposition to hard work. This, needless to say, could only further stimulate the tendency to misappropriate the property of others and this automatically led to greater inflammation of the sense of justice and even less predisposition to hard work. Within this context the professor reviewed Russia’s destructive revolutions and the (in her opinion no less destructive) rule over many years of the Communists, and a whole series of other events. The combination of these factors was explosive enough (“a Molotoff Cocktail,” she sighed), but was potentiated by the role of the individual. A succession of individuals had marched across the rickety stage of Russian history who had successfully inflated all the contradictions to extreme levels. These personalities are only too well known and of the list compiled by the professor we shall mention only Yegor Gaidar, and for two reasons. The first is that his government’s actions were, in the academic’s opinion, a happy exception. Despite its unprecedented scale, misappropriation of property for the first time appeared relatively civilised and was far less repulsive than usual. The second and perhaps main reason for mentioning Yegor Gaidar is the close interest our narrative has in mysterious threads running through different periods, events, individuals and so on. Unlike his grandfather, Yegor Gaidar was not acquainted with General Larionov and had not even commanded a regiment at the age of 16.8
He had not galloped over the dusty roads in July, had not drowned peasants under the ice in Khakassia but had, for all that, in his thirties headed a decidedly combative government. Employing military terminology, Dupont called the attempt to reform Russia’s economy a typical cavalry charge.9 Yegor Gaidar was the grandson of Arkady Gaidar and the historical and cultural significance of this fact had a great impact on the French academic’s imagination. The article she published has a pronounced culturological character and surmises that had Yegor Gaidar been the grandson of Maximilian Voloshin, privatisation in Russia would have taken an entirely different course. “No comment,” as a certain well-known Englishman remarked. There is no subjunctive mood in history, and ignoring this fact is a methodological weakness on the part of the French scholar. In the course of constructing her causal chain, Dupont has undoubtedly become confused about a whole range of matters. Thus, she manifestly much exaggerates the role of the personality in history, no doubt because she was herself working on the history of a general.10
Moreover, her stumbling block is the dialectic of the necessary and the random, which is so important for a correct evaluation of historical events. Although working with the material of Russian history she proves unable to make sense of it. At some point she seems even to have come to believe that necessity in our country is to some extent random. To put it another way, she proves unable to formulate coherently the cause of Solovyov’s impoverished existence and then transfers all her boundless energy to working with the consequence. The quest for answers to Russia’s accursed questions she then replaces with a quest for money to provide for the needs of the young scholar.