Still, in the end Neoplatonism triumphed in art, didn't it? We know where our icons are from, we know the same about our onion-domed churches. We also know that there is nothing easier for a state than to adapt to its own ends
Plotinus' maxim that an artist's task must be the interpretation of ideas rather than the imitation of nature. As for ideas, in what way does the late M. Suslov, or whoever is now scraping the ideological dish, differ from the Grand Mufti? What distinguishes the General Secretary from the Padishah—or, indeed, the Emperor? And who appoints the Patriarch, the Grand Vizier, the Mufti, or the Caliph? What distinguishes the Politburo from the Great Divan? And isn't it only one step from a divan to an ottoman?
Isn't my native realm an Ottoman Empire now—in extent, in military might, in its threat to the Western world? Aren't we now by the walls of Vienna? And is not its threat the greater in that it proceeds from the Easternized, to the point of unrecognizability—no, recognizability!—Christianity? Is it not greater because it is more seductive? And what do we hear in that howl of the late Milyukov under the cupola of the short-lived Duma: "The Dardenelles will be ours!" An echo of Cato? The yearning of a Christian for his holy place? Or still the voice of Bajazet, Tamerlane, Selim, Muhammad? And if it comes to this, if we are quoting and interpreting, what do we discern in that falsetto of Konstantin Leontiev, the falsetto that pierced the air precisely in Istanbul, where he served in the Czarist embassy: "Russia must rule shamelessly"? \Vhat do we hear in this putrid, prophetic exclamation? The spirit of the age? The spirit of the nation? Or the spirit of the place?
40
God forbid we delve any further into the Turkish-Russian dictionary. Let us take the word "fay," meaning "tea" in both languages, whatever its origins. The tea in Turkey is wonderful—better than the coffee—and, like the shoeshin- ing, costs almost nothing in any known currency. It's strong, the color of transparent brick, but it has no overstimulating effect, because it is served in a bardak, a fifty-gram glass, no more. Of all things I came across in this mixture of Astrakhan and Stalinabad, it's the best item. Tea—and the sight of Constantine's wall, which I would not have seen if I hadn't struck it lucky and got a rogue taxi driver who, instead of going straight to Topkapi, bowled around the whole city.
You can judge the seriousness of the builder's intent by the wall's height and width and the quality of the masonry. Constantine was thus extremely serious: the ruins where gypsies, goats, and young people trading in their tender parts may be found could withstand even today any army, given a positional war. On the other hand, if civilizations are granted vegetative—in other words, ideological—character, the erection of the wall was a sheer waste of time. Against anti-individualism, to say the least, against the spirit of relativism and obedience, neither waU nor sea offers a protection.
When I finally reached Topkapi and, having surveyed a good part of its contents—predominantly the caftans of the Sultans, which correspond linguistically and visually to the wardrobe of the Muscovite rulers—headed toward the object of my pilgrimage, the seraglio, I was greeted, sadly, at the door of this most important establishment in the world by a notice in Turkish and English: CLOSED for RESTORATION. "Oh, if only!" I exclaimed inwardly, trying to control my disappointment.
41
The quality of reality always leads to a search for a culprit— more accurately, for a scapegoat. Whose flocks graze in the mental fields of history. Yet, a son of a geographer, I believe that Urania is older than Clio; among Mnemosyne's daughters, I think, she is the oldest. So, born by the Baltic, in the place regarded as a window on Europe, I always felt something like a vested interest in this window on Asia with which we shared a meridian. On grounds perhaps less than sufficient, we regarded ourselves as Europeans. By the same token, I thought of the dwellers of Constantinople as Asians. Of these two assumptions, it's only the first that proved to be arguable. I should also admit, perhaps, that East and West vaguely corresponded in my mind to the past and the future.
Unless one is born by the water—and at the edge of an empire at that—one is seldom bothered by this sort of distinction. Of all people, somebody like me should be the first to regard Constantine as the carrier of the West to the East, as someone on a par with Peter the Great: the way he is regarded by the Church itself. If I had stayed longer at that meridian, I would. Yet I didn't, and I don't.
To me, Constantine's endeavor is but an episode in the general pull of the East westward, a pull motivated neither by the attraction of one part of the world for another nor by the desire of the past to absorb the future—although at times and in some places, of which Istanbul is one, it seems that way. This pull, I am afraid, is magnetic, evolutionary; it has to do, presumably, with the direction in which this planet rotates on its axis. It takes the forms of an attraction to a creed, of nomadic thrusts, wars, migration, and the flow of money. The Galata Bridge is not the first to be built over the Bosporus, as your guidebook would claim; the first one was built by Darius. A nomad always rides into a sunset.
Or else he swims. The strait is about a mile wide, and what could be done by a ''blond cow" escaping the wrath of Jupiter's spouse could surely have been managed by the dusky son of the steppes. Or by lovesick Leander or by sick-of-love Lord Byron splashing across the Dardanelles. Bosporus! Well-worn strip of water, the only cloth that is properly Urania's, no matter how hard Clio tries to put it on. It stayswrinkled, and on gray days, especially, no one would say that it has been stained by history. Its surface current washes itself off Constantinople in the north—and that's why, perhaps, that sea is called Black. Then it somersaults to the bottom and, in the form of a deep current, escapes back into Marmara—the Marble Sea—presumably to get itself bleached. The net result is that dusted-bottle-green color: the color of time itself. The child of the Baltic can't fail to recognize it, can't rid himself of the old sensation that this rolling, non-stop, lapping substance itself is time, or that this is what time would look like had it been condensed or photographed. This is what, he thinks, separates Europe and Asia. And the patriot in him wishes the stretch were wider.
42
Time to wrap it up. As I said, there were no steamers from Istanbul or Smyrna. I boarded a plane and, after less than two hours' flight over the Aegean, through air that at one time was no less inhabited than the archipelago down below, landed in Athens.
Forty miles from Athens, in Sounion, at the top of a cliff plummeting to the sea, stands a temple to Poseidon, built almost simultaneously—a difference of some fifty years— with the Parthenon in Athens. It has stood here for two and a half thousand years.
It is ten times smaller than the Parthenon. How many times more beautiful it is would be hard to say; it is not clear what should be considered the unit of perfection. It has no roof.