I wrote back immediately. I owed everything to him. I was doing ‘brilliantly’ at school. When the time came for the end-of-term examinations I should impress everyone, as Pushkin was said to have impressed his teachers at the Tsarskoe Selo Lycee. He could expect an appropriate oil painting of me in due course! Naturally I was always at his disposal and would await news of the service I could perform. Mr Green had told me to expect something of the sort. I was looking forward to my first trip abroad. Could he, through Mr Green, let me have some hint of where I would go? In the meantime, I asked him to give my love to Aunt Genia, to Wanda, to Shura and my other friends and relatives in Odessa. I looked forward to seeing them all again. I asked him especially to apologise to Shura. I had become stupidly suspicious of him. This would show Shura, I hoped, that I was extending the hand of friendship.
I wrote a brief letter to Esmé. Things went very well in Petrograd. We made sacrifices with the rest of the country but very soon we should sweep the barbarian back to his lair for good. In the meantime she could help the prisoners by teaching them Russian. It might be the language they would be required to speak after the War! I wrote to my mother. I am ashamed to say I asked no specific questions about her chill. Instead I said I was glad she was ‘basically well’. I was sure she would soon be over her sniffles; besides she had a nurse about the place now. My mother, I should say here, was a woman of fundamentally excellent health. She complained of poor health, like so many of us, when she needed a little extra sympathy. I preferred to give her my love, respect and understanding. This was more dignified, I felt. She understood. She said that as an intellectual, I could not always display the ‘direct emotions’ of ordinary people. In this she showed her usual perspicacity.
If I were to travel abroad, I would have to study harder. I reduced my visits to the Tango and the Reireat. I stopped going to the theatre and the kino with Kolya. I cut down on my visits to the whores. Instead I went more frequently to the flat I called privately ‘the virgins’ nest’. Here I was allowed to read, to write, to remain night and day, if I wished, being fed with relatively wholesome food and with all the tea and coffee I could drink. Marya’s father had been a well-to-do beverage merchant originally situated in Yalta before moving to Moldavia. Lena’s father, she said with some disdain, was a ‘factory-owner’ in Minsk. My interest in Lena increased to the degree that I came close to proposing marriage to Marya. However, neither of these virgins was approached by me. Though they would often purr around me like cats wanting cream, I displayed very little amorous interest in them. I was keeping them for security and tranquillity. Their sexual favours could wait until I was ready for them. When I slept there, I slept on the couch. I rarely let them see either what I read or what I wrote. Not only did they humour me, they became confused if they should accidentally move a book or even glance at a page.
It was only bit by bit I began to realise they considered me a foolish young Bakunin, plotting the downfall of the Tsar (the event which they sometimes toasted in tea, in low voices), and in one sense I was delighted by their misconception. It gave me even less respect for them. I felt no guilt about making use of them. Knowing as much as I did I was able to drop the odd revolutionary’s name. This meant far more to them than it did to me. Here, some of those who had bored me so badly in the cafés were heroes to them. They were merely two typical middle-class Russian girls prepared like so many of them to throw away their careers, their freedom, perhaps their lives, for someone who was not only a worthless troublemaker but who coldly schemed their ruin. Better they should devote themselves to me, who had a genuine cause. The flat came to be full of Iskras and Golos Trudas and inflammatory pamphlets. They kept them about, I believe, to impress me. In the end I had to explain that it was bad to ‘call attention to certain facts’ and that it would be best if they kept their anarchist literature elsewhere. They were full of apologies. The ill-printed, ill-written manifestos and declarations soon disappeared.
My work continued. I visited Kolya, but more frequently at his home (where Hippolyte still resided) than at our old haunts. He was becoming distressed with the progress of the War. He claimed we were as good as done for. I think the Petrograd winter had brought an earlier than usual melancholy. He said the Tsar was doomed. Feeling against Rasputin was high. The Tsar’s running of the War (he had taken personal command of the army) was as inept as his running of the country. Many officers, including some of the ‘old guard’, felt Nicholas should be replaced. ‘The Revolution,’ Kolya said, ‘will not come from an uprising in the streets this time. It will come from within.’
I said that newspapers were full of our triumphs against Germans and Turks alike. Brusilov was a great hero. We should soon occupy ‘both capitals of the Roman Empire’. Brusilov was a new Kutuzov.
Kolya smiled at me. As usual he wore black. His face seemed paler than ever, his hair all but invisible against the white light from the window. ‘What we really need,’ he said, ‘is a new Napoleon. French or Russian. We have no generals of genius. They can’t understand the terms. They have no precedents and that, Dimka my dear friend, is what destroys them. They are so used to relying on precedent.’
‘You mean tradition?’
‘I mean precedent. Precedent is a simple-minded way of imposing apparent order on the world. Yet it robs whoever employs it of his need to reach a personal moral decision. A decision which suits the situation.’
‘You’ve been reading too much Kropotkin, Kolya.’
‘Even Kropotkin calls on “history” as a model. History will destroy every one of us, Dimka. Soon there will be no more history at all! Analysis, that might have saved us. The basis of all modern science, eh? Analysis, Dimka, not projections. You’re prone to project, as you know, when you get excited - ‘
‘What! I’m a pure scientist.’ I realised he was probably joking.
‘Marx, Kropotkin, Engels, Proudhon, Tolstoi - all use precedent and so they are completely unscientific. Kropotkin might be the most scientific. He has the proper training. But the radical young already treat him as some sort of Old Testament prophet, quoting his words rather than applying his methods. Is that all we are to have? Substitutes for past orthodoxies? Is the language of science to replace the language of religion and become a meaningless litany in support of authority?’
‘There are already such narrow-minded scientists,’ I agreed. ‘But there are others, as there will always be, who oppose them, who are constantly, as am I, generating new theories, new analyses.’
‘And they are accepted?’
‘Eventually. I’m staking my life on it.’
‘Eventually? When their words have been incorporated into the litany.’
‘Science is less subject to decadence. It thrives upon change. But is it a better world in which nothing is considered worthwhile if it’s more than a day or two old?’
‘It could not be more boring.’
But I was to live to see such a world during the days of the swinging sixties in Portobello Road, when the very ideas of Science became mere fads discussed for a few days in rubbishy papers and then dropped. At least in Russia people still respect the past. Science itself cannot cure the world’s ills. Did Aristotle manage to stop Alexander the Great laying waste to Persia? Did Voltaire restrain Catherine the Great’s reign of terror? I have done many positive things in my life, but many of my actions have been perverted or misused or at best misinterpreted. This was to be the complaint of another great Russian thinker. Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. He was a celebrity when I met him in Petrograd in the company of his ‘clan’. He was a life-long opponent of Bolshevism. He spent all his years, all his fortune, in an effort to stem the tide of ‘democracy’, ‘republicanism’ and ‘socialism’ sweeping across the world. He argued that Rasputin, for all his faults, gave better advice than many of the Tsar’s ministers. Rasputin at least understood there were higher worlds than the world which was then bent on destroying so much of value. I visited a house in Triotskaya Street, near the Nevski, one evening. Kolya wanted me to meet Gurdjieff’s most devoted follower, the journalist Ouspenski, who was at that time in the army. Gurdjieff, of course, was more concerned with the world of the soul than the world of material reality, but for a while, with a number of other intellectuals, I was impressed by him. Eventually I returned to the Orthodox Faith, which offers much the same as he offered and, if I may say so, asks a rather lower cash price. The price for a series of lectures from Gurdjieff, even then, was about a thousand roubles.