In the ex libris plate in Sergei Vavilov’s books, a man stands behind a lamp, his face invisible, his hand reaching out to a bookcase. What value did Vavilov, who wanted to hide his face in books, place on the leather-bound ‘brick’, printed on the finest white paper, which he edited for Stalin’s seventieth birthday? To Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin contains essays by his brother’s killers: ‘scholars’ like Lysenko, who hails Stalin as the ‘incarnation of the people’s wisdom’ and hymns the ‘miracle’ of the transformation, through ‘progressive biology’, of wheat into rye, and Vyshinsky, who describes the conditions for the ‘withering away of the state’, a process which can only occur when there is no further prospect of attack from without (in the meantime, the former prosecutor cautions, the struggle against espionage remains one of the Soviet state’s most important functions). In Vavilov’s own contribution, entitled ‘The Scientific Genius of Stalin’, he makes an ‘ardent, heartfelt greeting to our wise teacher’, the ‘Coryphaeus of Science’, because of whom ‘history does not just happen, but begins to be consciously directed’. He rejoices in the Soviet victory over ‘mechanistic and idealistic theories in the study of living matter’ in the field of biology. With these words, Vavilov was ‘rejoicing’ in the dissolution of the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding that his brother Nikolai had founded soon after the Revolution, and in Nikolai’s arrest and eleven-month torture by the NKVD, and his death sentence, in a minutes-long trial without witnesses or lawyers, for Trotskyite wrecking and espionage.
It was hard to keep up with my companion on the downward incline towards the river. Before the road turned back on its long loop along the bank, he slid on to a narrow path into the forest, and I could not tell where he was going. He had skied this way in the morning and was all momentum and purpose, shouting back to me that we should cut through the forest and ski across the field on the other side, then back to the house for shots of vodka. I stopped to rest and lost him. The path was dim, the wind picked up, the treetops clawed the lilac moonlight.
From my first visit, Mozzhinka had seemed to me a secret place, outside the run of time, made for play: hide-and-seek, treasure hunts, night skiing. Along the Riga highway, which leads west from Moscow towards Zvenigorod, new dacha settlements appeared from week to week among the pylons in muddy fields, their names, full of the ersatz romance of modern Russian marketologia, advertised on billboards at the side of the road – ‘Prince’s Lake’, ‘Sherwood’, ‘Little Italy’, ‘Nest of Gentry’, ‘Europe’ – but the turn-off to Mozzhinka remained unmarked. On our way to Lutsino we would take it sometimes to visit a friend, an English widow with four young children, who lived, under some fragile charm, in a house enclosed by a high wall. Her husband, a brilliant inventor from one of the Mozzhinka scientific dynasties, had just finished building their home when he died a sudden death. She ran a small school in the basement. There were climbing frames among the tall birches in the garden, sheds full of skis and sleds, and a banya. In winter she flooded the driveway to make an ice rink, and at Maslenitsa, the feast before Lent, she hired a horse and sleigh with bells and a driver to ride the children down to the river and back. She had an English governess, a Georgian nanny (who prepared feasts of khachapuri and lobio, cheese bread and stewed beans, fragrant with herbs), and the friendship of the local priest, Father Ion, whose own daughter had been killed by a drunken driver one night on the road through the colony.
I began to read about the place. Spider threads of meaning appeared, as though left by human observers among the trees, waiting for the light to touch them. Everything I read – about childhood, the quietness of bereavement, Italy, romantic poetry, fairy tales, and the physics of light and time – seemed to illuminate the mystery of Sergei Vavilov’s life, the tragedy of his success. By chance, as I was researching an article on the allusions to English poetry in Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero, I discovered that Claire Clairmont, sister-in-law of Shelley and lover of Byron, had found comfort in this landscape in 1825. Mourning the deaths of Shelley and her little daughter Allegra (Byron’s child), Clairmont left Italy and found work as a governess in the tumultuous household of a Moscow lawyer. The family and its retinue of servants and educators summered near Zvenigorod.
Clairmont sat through her first night in an armchair, to escape ‘Bugs, the torment of Russia’. The moon shone from behind thin dark clouds. The next evening, she wrote in her journal that the rainsoaked landscape had delighted her the whole day long. The wind in the trees reminded her of waves breaking on the shores of Lerici, Shelley’s last home. Church bells from far-off villages ‘gave meaning to the scene’ – ‘village replying to village with intelligible language’. Drinking tea in an arbour she watched the sunset beyond the river, lines of golden light piercing through the deep woods so that ‘every opening between each leaf seemed to be filled up by a diamond or a gem radiant with every different hue’. She read Goethe, and took walks with the ‘very sentimental’ German tutor Chrétien-Hermann Gambs. They discussed poetry, philosophy, mathematics and the newest discoveries in astronomy regarding the multitude of solar systems and the immensity of the universe, whose centre, as Pascal said, is ‘everywhere, but its circumference nowhere’. She noted Plato’s remark that, if the colour of the sky had been scarlet instead of blue, the ‘prevalent quality of man had been a sanguinary disposition’. She read Shelley’s revolutionary verse and reflected on his ‘rapid passage over the world’: ‘his whole existence was a striving after virtue and wisdom and he hurried on his course with such rapid eager steps he often over-took them. He tasted the Summer of Life … and took flight ere the arrival of its inevitable winter’.
The Vavilov brothers, the physicist Sergei and the biologist Nikolai, both looked for ‘virtue and wisdom’ in science. Perhaps it was their dispositions, as well as the different destinies of the disciplines of physics and biology under Stalin, that shaped their respective fates, a ‘paradox’, Sakharov says, that was ‘extreme even for those times’, but which, in a way, ‘summed up the whole era’.
At Mozzhinka in 1949, Sergei began a private memoir. Perhaps he knew his own life was ending; his prose is unguarded, negligent of Stalinist pieties about science or the past, full of the spirit of Nikolai. He looks back on himself as a solitary child, a dreamer, a mystic, a coward. ‘For me the world was divine,’ he remembers. ‘I firmly believed everything that Mama and Nanny Aksinya told me about heaven and hell and the white-haired god who lived behind the clouds.’ He dreamed of the faces on icons, of miracles, sorcery, alchemy. Their father was a devout man, politically liberal and patriotic, with a complex inner life. He read Dostoevsky and tried to write poetry. Sergei read everything on his father’s shelves, returning to Pushkin every day, believing everything. Religion and fantasy were one and the same. One year, on his ‘angel day’ in early March, after a Lenten meal and a prayer service for his health, he was given a copy of Alexander Afanasiev’s magical tales, a fort with wind-up cavalry and a book about Aladdin and his magic lamp. At school, he remembers endless discussions about Darwin and God, in which the schoolboys would often outwit the priests. None of these discussions, he thought, had any impact on the boys’ religious development. Sergei had few friends besides his elder brother, who was his opposite in character: outgoing, bold, a fighter. Nikolai often remarked that it was Sergei who had the better brain, but it was Nikolai who led the way in atheism, materialism and revolution.