In the nine centuries that have passed since St Sophia was founded, no building was raised higher than this central palladium. St Sophia, Likhachev said, was a meaningful reference point for the identity of the citizen of Novgorod; standing inside it, he would feel himself at the political centre of the powerful city-state. The citizens called it ‘Lord Great Novgorod’, emphasising that the town, rather than any person in it, was head of the state. (This was a piquant historical observation in a state which named its cities after Lenin, Stalin and Molotov.) Looking up into the drum the citizen would see the countenance of the vsederzhitel’, the ‘holder of everything’, holding Novgorod in his closed hand. In The Cultural History of Novgorod from the Eleventh to the Seventeenth Century, written during the three-year Nazi blockade of his own city, Leningrad, Likhachev relates a legend from the Novgorod Chronicle of 1045 about the painting of the image of God in the cupola. The icon painters, whose devotional work was to make sacred the contingent material of the world, painted the image of the Almighty with his hand open in a gesture of blessing. The following morning, the Archbishop noticed that the painted hand was clenched. The painters repainted it, but again and again the open hand closed in the night. On the fourth morning, the icon painters heard a voice coming from the image: ‘Painters, painters, draw me with my hand clenched, for in this hand I am holding Novgorod and when it opens, it will mean the end of the city.’
We spent the morning within the walls of the detinets, the kremlin overlooking the river Volkhov, at the centre of which St Sophia stands. Inside the medieval detinets were streets full of craftsmen: potters, smiths, icon painters, honey-makers. In this museum-sanctuary, everything was now ordered, labelled, in its place. The cathedral was again a place of worship. A lavka near the door sold tiny icons, beeswax candles and the diocesan newspaper (published, it said on the masthead, since 1875, with an interval between 1920 and 1995) with a Christmas message from Archbishop Lev of Novgorod and Staraya Russa, in which he talked of the thousands of newly canonised Orthodox saints, the martyrs of the twentieth century, and how the light of Christ enters a world accustomed to its own disfigurement. On a side wall were Sunday-school drawings in felt-tip pen of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. In medieval Novgorod, churches were the centre of civic life, used for town meetings and elections, as the backdrop to feasts, and as warehouses and shelters for local people whenever there was risk of fire. The set pattern of their interiors depicted the earthly and heavenly Church, the whole of human history in all its populous riot and ultimate order, its highest reaches shining gold with the glory of God. Likhachev detected in the decorations of Novgorod churches an emphasis on social sins. In fresco scenes of the ‘Terrible Judgement’, as it is called in Russian, he found numerous depictions of the torments of the rich and powerful for wounding the poor and dependent. Admiring the free and flowing forms of Novgorod religious art, Likhachev noted that the earliest in St Sophia were very distant from Byzantine prototypes. They have their own distinct style, depicting the human form in peaceful poses, with sharply defined features, reddened cheeks and eyes directed straight at the viewer. He rejoiced in the preservation of a fragment of an eleventh-century fresco of Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena that the workers of the Novgorod Museum had covered with a thick layer of brick before the Nazis occupied the city.
We left the cathedral and wandered through the display of Novgorod decorative and applied arts in the fifteenth-century Palace of Facets. Beyond it was another long stone building. Searching for a few moments’ shelter from the river wind, I pushed open the heavy varnished door, which opened into a warm foyer. Books and papers were arranged on a trestle table. A man in thick plastic spectacles and a worn sheepskin came in after us, with a gust of wind coming through the door behind him which lifted the pages of the books and blew some papers on to the floor. We had coincided with the last day of the annual conference of the Novgorod Archaeological Research Centre. The man in the sheepskin coat went through the double doors into the auditorium. Go on, follow him, take your time, my companion said; she would go outside to watch the birds circling the domes and try to keep her cigarette alight in the wind. Thirty or so people were scattered around the immaculate yellow-painted hall, under a vast crystal chandelier. The man in the sheepskin sat down behind a colleague, picked a piece of lint off the back of his sweater and began to whisper loudly in his ear. I was at once lulled and stimulated by the atmosphere in the hall. On the stage, a man at a lectern was concluding a paper on the discovery, during last summer’s dig, of eleven beads among the thousands of pieces of crystal opposite St Sophia and something I could not follow about the sewage system of ancient Novgorod. An older man took over the lectern, to soft applause. I looked down at the conference programme. It was Academician Yanin, elder of Novgorod archaeology, honorary citizen of the town, come to conclude the three-day proceedings. Yanin talked of the vital importance of the archaeologists’ research, of the ongoing flow of cultural self-discovery, their movement forward into the past, about which there is always more to say, repeating and lingering on the word raskrytie, which means opening, unfolding, detection, exposure, revelation. As a schoolboy in the late 1930s, Yanin buried himself in the study of numismatics while his grandfather died in the Gulag and his father narrowly escaped execution. He graduated from Moscow University in archaeology in 1951, the famed year in which Artsykhovsky’s expedition first discovered the birch-bark documents in the Novgorod clay. Yanin was thrilled by the texts on the bark, which hinted at the rich spiritual worlds of once-living individuals. Here were the voices of people who had been crudely stereotyped, stock figures in the theory of class war: merchant, peasant, feudal lord. The titles of his studies of the birch barks reflect his sense of the beguiling intimacy of these stilo-scratchings: ‘I Sent You a Birch Bark’, ‘Love in the Eleventh Century’.
Yet, for all the warmth of Yanin’s happy science, the story of Novgorod archaeology is no unbroken continuum of collective work, recovery and scholarly trust. In recent years, the work of raskrytie in secret police archives in Russia and museum archives in Germany has revealed collaboration inside Nazi-occupied Novgorod, what Russians call ‘blank spots’ in history, crimes that seemed to have long passed into non-existence.
Likhachev returned to Novgorod in May 1944, one of the first to arrive after its liberation. He recalls the collective wail that went up in his carriage as the train stopped at the empty place on the plain that had once been the city: what have they done to you? In the muddy edges of the melted river he could see the bodies of soldiers who had been blasted into the ice during the last battles of the winter. Church domes and bells lay on their sides among the rushes, stripped and gaping with holes, their lugs blown off. Frescoes had been shot away or defaced with pictures of naked women. Fresh Nazi graves, hung with swastika armbands, had been daubed with excrement. In the overgrown grass, Likhachev picked up the ball that had held the cross from the dome of St Sophia. The walls of the churches in the city were still standing, but the churches encircling the city, which had lain in the battlefield, had been devastated. The Church of the Dormition on the Volotovo field, which contained the finest examples of Russian pre-Renaissance fresco painting, carefully reinforced by restorers from Moscow in the early 1930s, was utterly destroyed by dynamite. (In 1912, the frescoes had been photographed at the behest of Igor Grabar for a book on Russian art, but the negatives, stored at the Jewish-owned Petersburg publishing house I. N. Knebel, were destroyed in 1915 in an anti-Semitic pogrom by the Black Hundreds.)