After his arrest in 1940, Nikolai Vavilov was interrogated in an NKVD prison in Moscow, kept standing for twelve hours at a stretch till his legs swelled. Between August 1940 and July 1941, he was interrogated four hundred times. When Hitler’s troops were close to Moscow, Vavilov was sent to a prison in Saratov. Molotov remembered how David Ryazanov, who had been exiled to Saratov, had once quipped that socialism could not be created in one apartment, let alone one town. By all accounts, Nikolai Vavilov created something fine in the way of society in the windowless ‘death cell’ in which he lived, starving, for a year, without bathing or exercise. The narrow overcrowded cell was in a basement, an electric bulb burned night and day, in summer it was very hot. ‘Vavilov brought a measure of discipline into things,’ another inmate recalled. ‘He tried to cheer up his companions … he arranged a series of lectures on history, biology and the timber industry. Each of them delivered a lecture in turn. They had to speak in a very low voice …’ Before he died in 1943, Nikolai Vavilov had delivered more than a hundred hours of lectures to his cellmates.
Decades earlier, at the age of thirty-three, Nikolai Vavilov had written to the woman he loved, ‘I take love too seriously. I really have a profound faith in science, in which I find both purpose and life. And I am quite ready to give my life for the smallest thing in science.’ He continued,
It was my birthday yesterday … for some reason I keep recalling the opening lines of Dante: ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ – ‘Halfway along life’s path … I strayed into a dark forest …’ Now I have got to get out of that forest … It is a difficult forest, but is there any forest which does not have a way out?’
I was learning about the lives of the Vavilov brothers while I was rereading Akhmatova, and, as sometimes happens, the books began to read each other. Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero begins in the year 1913, the year of Sergei Vavilov’s pilgrimage to Italy, and ends on the road ‘to the east’. The poet, a bereaved and silenced survivor, sees a ‘funeral course’ in the ‘solemn, crystalline silence of the Siberian Land’. The road ‘opens’ to her, a road ‘along which so many have gone’. T. S. Eliot’s line ‘In my beginning is my end’ is one of several epigraphs in the Poem. Accordingly, she sees the ‘years of Yezhov and Beria’ foreshadowed in the decadence of 1913, which comes back to her in the darkness of the Stalin era as a harlequinade in an enchanted palace, a ‘midnight Hoffmaniana’. 1913, the year in which Sergei Vavilov chose a ‘new road’, Akhmatova called ‘the apotheosis of the 1910s in all their magnificence and all their flaws’, ‘the final year’ before the onset of the ‘real Twentieth Century’. In the secret world of magical tales, the poet found her own cryptic way of writing about ‘the fate of a generation … about everything that befell us’; a way not to ‘disappear into a state hymn’. Poem without a Hero is full of mirror-writing, hidden drawers, flasks of poison, demons and curses. Towards the end of her life, Akhmatova sometimes saw the poem as ‘completely transparent, emanating an incomprehensible light ( … when everything shines from within)’.
Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery stands on a promontory above the river, just beyond Zvenigorod. I visited with my family in late February, during Maslenitsa, the great feast that precedes the Lenten fast, stopping on the roadside to climb the ice-slicked steps to the Cathedral of the Dormition, a plain single-domed whitewashed square building, which stands apart from the walled monastery. The roadside was busy. People came up and down from the cathedral, watching their feet; others had stopped their cars at the bottom of the hill to fill plastic flagons with spring water from a pipe that protruded from a bank of spattered snow on the roadside.
‘The road is always mounting’, wrote Claire Clairmont, who came to Savvino-Storozhevsky to hear a Te Deum; the monastery is ‘half way up the hill from the road side and hid among the trees … surrounded by four white walls with a tower at each corner’. The monastery is the same now, though a Soviet-era sanatorium for the military is also hidden among the trees, advertising its amenities with large colour photos, mounted on a concrete wall opposite the monastery gates, of shiny-fleshed soldiers in a sauna. Perhaps they are not as out of place here as they look; Savva Storozhevsky, a disciple of St Sergius of Radonezh who founded the monastery at the end of the fourteenth century, took his name from the word storozh, which means ‘guard’ or ‘look-out’. Zvenigorod had been ravaged by the Mongol Khan Tokhtamysh in 1382, and the monastery, with its view over the land around, was a look-out post for the church.
Savva continued to look out for his church in the face of invading armies. In 1812, Napoleon’s stepson, General Jean Beaugarnier, was taking a night’s rest in the monastery with his men, when the door opened and a man in a long black robe came in and said, ‘Do not let your troops sack the monastery or take anything from the church. If you fulfil my request, God will be merciful and you will return to your homeland unharmed.’ The General went into the church next morning and recognised the face of his night-time visitor on an icon of the Venerable Savva. He bowed to the saint’s relics in their silver shrine. In his many campaigns, Beaugarnier came to no harm, and his descendants returned regularly to Zvenigorod to venerate Savva.
The survival of Savva’s relics in the Soviet period is a story of violence and secret deals. The saint’s remains had been disinterred in the late seventeenth century in the presence of Alexei Mikhailovich, the second Romanov tsar, who built a residence in the monastery, surrounded it with high brick and whitewash walls, and added greatly to its power and wealth. Alexei’s son Fyodor III, who lived in the monastery, commissioned a silver shrine for the relics, which, by then, the faithful believed to be imperishable. In April 1918, the Bolsheviks confiscated the monastery’s fields, cattlesheds, stables, workshops, dairies, mills and beehives, its guesthouse and its grand Moscow hostel on Tverskaya. The priest Father Vasili fell on his knees in the Cathedral of the Nativity and begged the congregation to protect its sacred objects. The following month, a group of local Bolsheviks, led by a commissar named Makarov, came up the hill to requisition bread and take an inventory of the monastery’s possessions. Father Vasili rang the bells, and peasants came running from nearby villages. A fight broke out by the walls. Makarov and another Bolshevik were killed and several others wounded. A revolutionary tribunal in Moscow convicted Father Vasili of organising an uprising against Soviet power, and sentenced him to an unlimited prison term with hard labour. The monastery’s remaining property was taken, and most of the monks dispersed. In February 1919 the People’s Commissariat of Justice issued a resolution on the unsealing of relics, and the Zvenigorod Soviet decided to expose the remains of Savva. As the last few monks held a liturgy, over a hundred men entered the monastery. They opened the shrine and cut away Savva’s bindings, revealing a skull and thirty-two bones. Savva had decayed. The Bolsheviks jeered, rearranging the bones to make them look ridiculous. ‘It was the Garden of Gethsemane,’ one of the monks said later. Local people were summoned to look. Some mocked, others wept and venerated the exposed bones. Two months later, a group of armed men from the local Soviet took them out of the shrine, wrapped them in newspaper and tablecloths and drove away. A Moscow professor of ecclasiastical law, Nikolai Kuznetsov, led an appeal against the removal of the relics to the Council of People’s Commissars. An investigation was launched, overseen by Lenin. The proceedings, conducted in the monastery, were led by a specialist in the ‘struggle against religion’ who concluded that the treatment of Savva’s relics had been ‘in conformity with revolutionary discipline’. Soon afterwards, Professor Kuznetsov was arrested in his apartment on Neglinnaya Street and sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal, a sentence later commuted to imprisonment in a concentration camp until the conclusive victory of worker-peasant power over world imperialism. (Kuznetsov was arrested again in 1924, and served a sentence of exile in Kirghizia. He was arrested a third time in 1931. There is no information about the date or place of his death.) The last monks were evicted from their cells, and the monastery was closed.