In the terrible year 1937, Likhachev spent a tranquil summer exploring Novgorod with his wife, Zina, then heavily pregnant with their twin daughters. Preservation and destruction were happening simultaneously around them; some of the churches around the city were deserted, some had become fish factories, others were undergoing careful restoration or excavation, and a few, which they could not visit, were in use as NKVD prisons. Unable to afford a camera for visual record, Likhachev resorted to drawing on a Leningrad Academy of Sciences message pad. The Novgorod Album – his holiday sketches of monasteries, riverbanks, fishing boats and beloved people – was published in 1999, just months after his death. The long pencil strokes with which he caught the sloping profile of his wife’s belly reveal how much the scholar had learned from studying the laconic lines of Novgorod’s medieval icons. Zina’s hands rest earthily on her hips, but the archangels and madonnas of the icon painter Theophanes the Greek are traceable in the poise of her head, the fall of her dress and the rakish halo-swirl of her sunhat.
I remember well the quiet authority of the tall leather-padded door of Likhachev’s office in the dimly lit corridor of the Pushkin House, the Institute of Literature in Leningrad, where I worked in the archives during my graduate studies in 1990. Since then, in documentaries about Likhachev’s life on the old-fashioned television channel Kultura, I have glimpsed the interior of that room: its soaring topography of crammed bookcases, desks piled high, icons and framed portraits of Russian writers. In his last decade, Likhachev, who died in 1999 at the age of ninety-two, was honoured as the embodiment of the best traditions of Russian intellectual life. Despite all the crimes and barbarities he witnessed during his imprisonment in the first Gulag on Solovki Island, he had come to love the place, just as he loved the whole Russian north, studying its ancient cities and monuments, campaigning for their preservation. Against the grain of official Soviet thought, which taught that everything was ultimately knowable with the aid of dialectical materialism, Likhachev saw the world as a riddle, a mystery. ‘What is beyond the world, and can one not look into that part of the mirror world which is hidden beyond the edges of the mirror?’ he wondered as a child.
The son of a Petersburg chemistry teacher, Likhachev came from a milieu which took thought seriously. Most of the boys in his class at school during the cataclysmic years of revolution and civil war shared his urge to work out for themselves a personal philosophy. One called himself a Nietzschean; another dreamed of government by an intellectual aristocracy; a third, who was a sceptic, was recruited by the secret police after leaving school and, at risk to his own freedom, warned Likhachev of his coming arrest. His university days in the 1920s were a time of intellectual exhilaration for Likhachev. Until 1927, Leningrad was a carnival of ‘humorous’ philosophical circles. Likhachev joined the Cosmic Academy of Sciences, whose members greeted each other with the Greek word khaire, ‘rejoice’, presented playful scholarly papers and awarded one another ‘chairs’. Likhachev was ‘professor’ of Melancholy Philology. A profoundly religious friend held the Chair of Elegant Theology, and two ‘principled atheists’ held Chairs in Elegant Psychology and Elegant Chemistry. The Academy proclaimed the principle of ‘happy science’, insisting that ‘the world that science establishes by research into our surroundings should be “interesting” and more complicated than it was before it was studied’. Marxism, to Likhachev, was ‘unhappy science’ which diminished the world, made it dull and grey and monotonous, ‘subordinating it to coarse materialistic laws which kill morality’. He was arrested in 1928 in front of his parents for having publicly criticised the Soviet reform of Russian orthography and, after nine months in prison cells, spent the rest of his sentence in labour camps. For Likhachev, who had seen beloved companions executed and thrown into mass graves, and known the anguish of betrayal by people he trusted, a sense of the relativity of time and the possibility of transcendent justice formed the foundation of a personal philosophy which pacified and consoled him, giving him what he called ‘spiritual poise’. ‘If time is an absolute reality’, he reflected,
then Raskolnikov was right. Everything will be forgotten … and all that will remain will be humanity ‘which has been made happy’ by crimes that have passed into non-existence. What is more important on the scales of time: a future that is actually approaching, or a past which is disappearing more and more, into which, as into the maw of a crucible, good and evil go in equal measure? And what consolation is there for a man who has lost his dear ones?
Dmitri Likhachev wrote a letter to Varlam Shalamov in 1979, when both were old men. They shared a knowledge of the Gulag that they could still not speak of openly. ‘I had a period in my life which I consider to have been the most important,’ he told Shalamov cryptically. He wanted to preserve through his writing the people he had known, and who, once his memory died, would disappear without trace. He paid tribute to Shalamov for having given expression to his own experience, for unearthing the material that lay buried in his memory.
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In the short idyll between imprisonment and war, Likhachev visited Novgorod several times, boating between monasteries with fellow academics from Leningrad, picnicking on riverbanks, making notes. At this time, Russian historians like him who had survived the first wave of purges and the institutional cataclysms of the 1920s and 1930s were quietly finding ways of evading the binds of Marxist–Leninist dialectical materialism, which subsumed the humanities under the heading ‘material culture’ and, in effect, transformed them all into branches of sociology. The State Institute for the History of Material Culture was founded in 1919 to replace the Imperial Archaeological Commission. Bolshevik contempt for leftover traces of the various ‘stages’ of pre-Communist society never succeeded in stifling the cultivated instinct to preserve and restore. In official publications in 1932, icons had been described as ‘unnecessary and socially harmful junk’, and the word ‘archaeology’ condemned as a ‘senile bourgeois term’. At the same time, a commission of scholars and restorers set to work to examine the state of repair of the churches and their decorations in Novgorod and Pskov, neglected since 1917. In 1932, Artemy Artsykhovsky, the great archaeologist of Novgorod, organised the first excavation in the city under the aegis of the Institute for the History of Material Culture. In his free time he led his students around the region on local buses to admire the frescoes.
The day had begun in the dark with our arrival at Novgorod station. It ended in the wilderness beneath Klopsky, the sky darkening as we wedged pieces of the rotting wooden scaffold that held up the ruins under the front wheels of the Mercedes. Our driver, now a sweating wreck, was ready to dismantle what was left of the church in order to free the car which, fearing for us, he had gallantly driven across the river into a deep drift of heavy snow. Throughout that January day Novgorod seemed to stage a series of riddling tableaux about the cross-currents of preservation and loss that run through its own history, winding through human dramas, both public and hidden. As we walked down the straight boulevards towards the town centre in the flinty light and the grit and diesel smell of urban cold, the sun rose behind the five silver and gold domes of St Sophia.