Seemingly, but only seemingly, nature was such a subject/sanctuary. During Stalin’s lifetime, the master descriptive naturalist was Mikhail Prishvin. During this time, when there was still no television or color photography, Prishvin’s prose had no equal and glistened with all the colors of an autumnal forest, of pebbles at the bottom of a stream, of the crowns of mushrooms and the feathers of birds. I have always thought that these descriptions of dewdrops and of the flower of bird cherry were a kind of escape, a peaceful retreat. I said as much to the Russian poet Gala Kornilova. “But not at all!” she protested. “This was opposition writing! The Kremlin wanted to destroy our language, and Prishvin’s language was rich, magnificent. They wanted everything to be without character, without distinction, gray, and in his writing Russia is so colorful, gorgeous, unique! We read Prishvin during those years so as not to forget our real language, for it was being replaced by newspeak.”
And there is something similar in the prose of Rim Ahmedov. Rim does not write about the achievements of the Russian government — about the chemical industry, about plastic conductors, about faucets and tannins. Rim doesn’t notice this at all. On the contrary, in opposition to the destroyers of his Bashkiria, he describes the natural beauty that still survives — the bream in the Sutoloka River, the trees on the Nurtau Mountain, the country road lined with flowers leading to the Janta-Turmush farm. He travels by boat or wanders around his country with a tent and dog.
Grasses are his favorite plant. Ahmedov is a herbalist; he collects grasses, dries them, mixes them, adds something or other to them, and makes medicines. He tells me that any single medicine meant to treat everyone is bad and cannot be efficacious. Each medicine must be prepared individually, after a conversation with the sick person. Such a conversation is necessary so that one can select just the right type of grass to awaken in that particular individual the strength to combat the disease. Without this, healing is impossible.
The creature that Ahmedov best remembers from his childhood is a small golden-green beetle—Cryptocephalus sericeus. Rim found it on the leaf of dead nettle — dead meaning the kind that does not sting.
And although he is now sixty years old, he has never been able to find such a beetle again.
RUSSIAN MYSTERY PLAY
UFA — IT is the beginning of my Ural-Siberian journey.
The route: Moscow-Ufa-Sverdlovsk-Irkutsk-Yakutsk-Magadan-Norilsk-Moscow. All together (including impromptu local expeditions) around twenty thousand kilometers across a snowy desert. At this time of year (it is April), the local rivers are nothing more than wedges of ice stretching for hundreds of kilometers. And only from time to time does one find cities — like oases in the Gobi or the Sahara — closed in on themselves, living their own life, as though not bound, not connected, to anything.
The world is already accustomed to the fact that the Caucasus is burning, that bloody disorders are erupting continually in the Asiatic republics (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and so on), that battles are being waged on both sides of the Dniester. All these collisions, rebellions, and wars are on the distant peripheries of the former USSR; they are taking place, in a sense, outside of Russia, beyond its body.
But the awakening of the national consciousness of the Bashkirs reveals to us a new kind of conflict gathering strength in the Imperium. All one has to do is look at the map: the Bashkir Republic, with its inhabitants standing in lines for a glass of water to drink, with Dr. Yanguzin and his collection of old swords, with Rim Ahmedov, who can cure you with a mixture of local grasses — this republic lies within the Russian Federation. And now the Bashkirs (and, together with them, other non-Russian people living within the Russian state) are beginning to raise their voice, call for rights, demand independence.
In short, following the disintegration of the USSR, we are now facing the prospect of the disintegration of the Russian Federation, or, to put it differently; after the first phase of decolonization (that of the former Soviet Union) the second phase begins — the decolonization of the Russian Federation.
Several dozen non-Russian nations and tribes live today in the territory of this federation, and they are demonstrating more and more explicitly their opposition to Moscow and stressing more and more emphatically the separateness of their interests. This movement of national emancipation is spreading with growing strength and the speed of an avalanche among the Bashkirs and Buryats, Chechen and Ingush, Chuvash and Koryak, Tatars and Mordovians, Yakuts and Tuvinians.
And it would appear irresistible, if only because these nations and tribes — for centuries persecuted, oppressed, and Russified — are at present rapidly expanding, whereas the percentage of native Russians among the inhabitants of the federation has been falling for years. Russians have a very low birthrate, and one can sense, increasingly, their resultant anxiety, uncertainty, and frustration.
IN IRKUTSK I spot a poster advertising a theatrical production entitled A Word about Russia.
I buy a ticket and go.
The show takes place in a church that was formerly called the Museum of Atheism.
ABOUT THE Orthodox churches:
Paradoxically, the best preserved are the ones that the Bolsheviks turned into centers for the struggle against religion — against the Orthodox rite, against Orthodox priests, against monasteries, against the churches themselves. These museums of atheism became the seats of permanent exhibits that explained that religion is the opiate of the people. Drawings and signs depicted Adam and Eve as characters from fairy tales, priests burning women at the stake, popes with lovers, and homosexuals congregating in monasteries. There were thousands of these exhibitions across the country, all organized, moreover, according to one design ratified at the highest level, and if one traveled to the Imperium in the old days, visiting a museum of atheism was an ironclad, obligatory point of the program.
After visiting such a museum, foreigners sometimes expressed shock and indignation that a place consecrated to the worship of God had been transformed into the headquarters of the struggle against God. But they were wrong to feel that way! Let us assume that a certain church was assigned a role in the struggle against God, that is, that it was turned into a museum of atheism. The wives of local dignitaries would then be employed there, and so they would see to it for the sake of their warmth that there were panes of glass in the windows, the doors shut properly, the little stove was lit. It would also be relatively clean inside — the walls would be whitewashed from time to time, the floor occasionally swept. The fate of churches that were not ordered to struggle against God was entirely different. They were transformed into stables, cow barns, into fuel storerooms, into warehouses. A motorcycle-repair shop was set up in the beautiful Franciscan church in Niesterov, near Lvov. Neither it nor the thousands of churches in which for years oil and artificial fertilizers were kept can be saved. Nor can those churches be saved that fifty, sixty, years ago were robbed, devastated, closed, exposed to the destructive effects of the cold, rain, and wind, abandoned to rats and birds. Perhaps the synagogue in Drohobych can be saved — it has a strong roof and serves as a furniture warehouse, so no chemicals are ruining it. The majority of salvageable churches today are precisely yesterday’s museums of atheism (in recent years frequently renamed “museums of icons”).