As president of the Academy of Sciences, Sergei Vavilov was actively concerned with the preservation of cultural monuments; Peter the Great’s Kunstkamera in St Petersburg and many of the ‘Pushkin places’ were restored at his initiative. Yet there were places (as well as people) that Vavilov was powerless to preserve. In the late 1940s, a friend from Mozzhinka visited the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery. By then, some of its buildings were warehouses, others had fallen into ruin. ‘If you told Academician Vavilov, maybe he would help,’ the guard on duty said. ‘Do you think I don’t know what is happening there?’ Vavilov responded, with a rare show of vexation.
In the summer of 1919, the monastery was used as a home for mentally retarded children. The children lived here like wild animals, scavenging for food. Later it was used as a labour camp, then a sanatorium. The only part of the monastery to be preserved intact after 1918 was its museum, which for many years was cared for by Alexander Maximov, its first curator. A local historian and parishioner, Maximov had been called to Moscow for the proceedings over the ‘uprising’, and sentenced to hard labour for slandering Soviet power. Somehow, he avoided his sentence, and found work with the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment.
In the museum we saw the potsherds and flints of early man, found around Zvenigorod. ‘What kind of people were they?’ Sergei Vavilov asked in the first sentences of his memoir, thinking of his ancestors, ‘here, near Moscow’. ‘Nobody knows anything about them, and indeed they knew nothing about themselves,’ he added. ‘Peace be upon their dust and their souls.’ In another display case, pieces of broken china, glassware, doorknobs and ceramic tiles were arranged on the felt. Mounted in the last room was a pamphlet by Grabar, published in 1919, on ‘Why it is necessary to guard and keep the treasures of art and antiquity’. As we were leaving, the old lady guarding the room insisted that we watch a documentary film. She turned out the lights. In grainy black and white, we saw the cross pulled off the Cathedral of the Nativity, a bonfire, icons in the flames. Children grinned at the camera, and old peasant women looked into the hectic lens in terror, giggling horribly, sobbing into their shawls. It was propaganda, but all its meanings came out backwards now. Darker footage inside the cathedral showed the opening of Savva’s shrine, the quick cutting of the bindings by a hand with a knife, bones in the dust. Then a cartload of dirty orphans arrived at the monastery gates, waving. At the end of the film came scenes of the 1930s sanatorium. Young men, with heroic communist bodies, exercised in perfect synchrony on the riverbank. Then a horde of young women ran on to the sandy shore, stripped naked and skipped into the water, laughing, splashing. Wearing identical white slips and shorts, the young men and women ran together up the hill towards the monastery; transfigured, indestructible, captured as light between the sun and the camera lens.
I looked out over the miles of white land from outside the monastery walls. The days were lengthening, there was warmth in the sun. Claire Clairmont admired the way this hill and its groves sloped in a gentle descent to the river, remarking on the ‘little streams of light which the rays of the sun made through each line of trees’. In The Eye and the Sun, Sergei Vavilov related a story told by Gorky that illustrates how human beings unconsciously materialise light: ‘I saw Chekhov, sitting in his garden, trying to catch a ray of sunlight in his hat and put it on his head.’
SIX
Novgorod
‘Preserve my speech forever for its taste of misfortune and smoke, for the resin of mutual patience, for the honest tar of work. The water in Novgorod wells must be black and sweet so that in it, for Christmas, the seven-finned star is reflected.’
OSIP MANDELSTAM, 1931 (dedicated to Anna Akhmatova)
The night of 3 January 2001 must have been a fine one in the village of Khotyazh. Fine enough, at least, for Nadia and Kolya to have kindled a small fire of birch twigs and broken roof timbers to light their midwinter tryst in the ruins of the Klopsky Monastery near the ancient city of Novgorod. On top of the hillside of rubble that once formed the domes of the Church of St Nicholas, the lovers had left behind them an empty tin of sprats, a scatter of cigarette ends and a written record of their presence scratched in the soft frescoed plaster of the apse wall.
The wooded high ground above the river Veryazhka on which the monastery stands feels like an island, especially in winter, when the freezing air vibrates with the hum of open space. The surrounding expanse might not be a pattern of small winding rivers and collective farmland just three hundred miles north-west of Moscow, but limitless distances of ice. Only the hull of a rowing boat, half sunk in snow, marked the river’s edge as we crossed from Khotyazh to Klopsky on foot, leaving our driver in his battered white Mercedes. He had wanted to drive us across the frozen river, but we left him, sitting disgruntled at the wheel with the engine running, incongruously urban among the green and yellow izbas, the wooden well-heads, rotting hayricks and wandering Alsatians of the village. ‘How can anyone live in villages like that?’ the writer Danil Granin exclaimed as he toured the Novgorod area in a motorboat one summer after the end of the Soviet period; ‘such melancholy’. The Russian word Granin used for the atmosphere of villages like Khotyazh was toska, which, besides melancholy, contains shades of yearning, nostalgia, even anguish. The cultural historian Dmitri Likhachev was in the boat with Granin that day. There was no forest left, he observed. The villages had been destroyed and all that remained of the churches were scattered ruins. In 1937, Likhachev said, the landscape had none of that toska.
Mikhail of Klopsky, the early-fifteenth-century saint to whom the monastery on the hill is dedicated, was a yurodivyi, one of Russia’s ‘holy fools for Christ’. Unlike other holy fools, anarchic spirits who unmasked the falsehood of the world by breaking its rules and mocking the powerful, Mikhail kept, in his own strange way, to the order of life in the monastery, and many of his prophecies had a precisely targeted political import, heralding and endorsing the rise of Moscow. Likhachev described him as ‘a well-known supporter of Moscow’. Mikhail sometimes disappeared, and seldom spoke; when he did, he would often mirror the speech of others. ‘Who are you, a man or a demon? What is your name?’ the monastery superior, Theodosius, asked Mikhail three times when he appeared at its gates out of nowhere, and each time Mikhail simply echoed the abbot’s question.
In the various lives of the saint, written in the late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, Mikhail’s origins are hidden in mystery. V. L. Yanin, the great historian of ancient Novgorod, recently hypothesised that he had been born into one of Moscow’s most powerful princely families. Prince Dmitri Shemyaka, who had vied for supreme power with his cousin, Grand Prince Vasili II of Moscow, once visited the monastery, and Mikhail foretold his imminent death, stroking Shemyaka’s head and saying three times, ‘Prince, the earth cries out!’ He foretold the end of the independent city-state of Novgorod, greeting the birth of Ivan III – the Muscovite Grand Prince who would finally subjugate the once-flourishing republic – in a frenzy of ominous bell-ringing. In the early 1990s, archaeologists working in the monastery uncovered part of his stone tomb in a side chapel of its Church of the Trinity, and chose to leave him undisturbed in the ruin. On the day of our visit, his burial place was piled high with freshly cut branches of pine. Still distinct, twenty feet above him, painted in the place where, according to Orthodox iconographic tradition, the earthly Church must be represented, were the dark outlines and quiet colours of a walled city of onion-domed buildings: Novgorod.