The museum workers were also among the first to arrive in Novgorod after the German retreat. They were like doctors, Likhachev said, come to heal the wounded city. He knew that some museum workers had never left, but could not speak of it. In 1994, two articles appeared in the weekly Novgorod, headlined ‘The Wounded Traitor’ and ‘The Name We are Supposed to Forget’. That name is Vasili Ponomarev, first military burgermeister of occupied Novgorod, later curator of St Sophia and valuer of art and antiquities for the Nazis. A native of Novgorod, Likhachev’s contemporary, Ponomarev had studied in Leningrad, and participated in Artsykhovsky’s archaeological digs in Novgorod in 1932, directing an excavation of Decembrists Street which uncovered traces of an ancient road paved with wood. Ponomarev was arrested later the same year in a purge known as the ‘museum affair’, and served five years in the Gulag in Komi in the north. His memoirs, discovered in 2004 in an archive in Marburg after a ten-year hunt by Russian researchers, reveal a man whose devotion to the remains of ancient Novgorod outweighed his loyalty to the Soviet motherland. In his brief tenure as burgermeister, Ponomarev’s only administrative decisions concerned the preservation of antiquities. Everything of value in the city passed through his hands. Objects of great worth became property of the Third Reich. Pieces of lesser value, including many icons and paintings, were handed out to German officers as booty. Ponomarev left Novgorod with the museum collections when the occupiers evacuated, staying with the precious freight until it came into the hands of the Allies. The Russian aesthete spent the rest of his life in Marburg, teaching and working on a catalogue of the antiquities he believed he had saved in the course of the cynical and pragmatic double game he played with the Nazi masters of his city. In Rome in 1955, Ponomarev encountered Artsykhovsky again at an international conference of historians and tried to shake his hand. Artsykhovsky judiciously refused to acknowledge him. The papers given by the Soviet delegation at that conference were published by the Academy of Sciences in 1956 and found their way into Molotov’s library. Artsykhovsky’s paper was called ‘New Discoveries in Novgorod’. The volume also included an essay by Molotov’s son-in-law, the historian (and secret police operative) Alexei Nikonov, on ‘The Origins of the Second World War and the European Pre-War Crisis of 1939’.
The Third Reich had an ideological interest in local archaeology. During the war, immense resources were devoted to the Ahnenerbe, a Society for the Study of Ancestral Heritages founded in 1935, which Heinrich Himmler had turned into an official organisation attached to the SS. The Ahnenerbe, which came into Russia behind Hitler’s army, sought to trace the origins and migrations of the Aryan race, digging for remains of Germanic pagans with blood roots in the soil of the East. The organisation also made several journeys to Tibet in search of Vril, the spiritual energy centre of the earth. At the heart of the Ahnenerbe’s pursuits was the idea of returning Germans to the Asian hinterland from which they had reputedly first come, to give them back their rightful lebensraum.
Several Novgorod intellectuals besides Ponomarev chose to stay in the city in 1941. Tatyana and Natalya Gippius (cousins of the Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius) continued to work in the museum, but refused to help pack the collections to send to Germany. The St Petersburg poet Andrei Egunov (also known as Andrei Nikolev), who had once moved in the same circles as Mandelstam, also suffered arrest and Siberian exile in the 1930s. The Wehrmacht placed him in charge of propaganda and popular education, with a special focus, compliant with Nazi collaboration, on the history of trade between medieval Novgorod and the Hanseatic cities. The darkest story of intelligentsia collaboration concerns a man known as Filistinsky, who worked for the Gestapo, wrote for a collaborationist newspaper named For the Motherland and is said to have murdered hundreds of psychiatric patients in the Novgorod region with lethal injections, earning himself honorary citizenship of the Reich. Filistinsky was otherwise known as the poet Boris Filippov, in later life a distinguished literary scholar at a prestigious American university, who edited the collected works of Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Nikolai Gumilev. There is one small clue to his Novgorod past in his archive in Washington DC: an undated typescript of an article by Vasili Ponomarev entitled ‘Pagan Prayers in the Novgorod Soil’.
Contemplate the ice fisherman, hunched over his line, out on the blank place where the mouths of five rivers meet Lake Ilmen. He has not moved in the hour since we passed him on our way along the line of bulrushes that mark the frozen water’s edge. I imagined that he must be a monk, gone out to catch food for his brothers in the skit, the hermitage; that his stillness in this burning cold was a kind of prayer.
The fish under this deep ice have long been famed: salmon, sterlet and pike; sturgeon so good that in the sixteenth century it was served at the table of the Tsar. Archaeologists have often turned up fossil nets in muddy clumps, and layers of medieval fish-scales packed in the soil. In Soviet times, the skit’s early thirteenth-century church, the last built in stone before the Mongols invaded Rus, was put to use as a storehouse by the local fishery collective. After the Second World War, the Novgorod Archaeological Expedition turned up the earth and found traces of what looked like a shrine to the supreme deity of the ancient Slavs: Perun, god of thunder. In 1991, the hermitage at Peryn was returned to the Orthodox Church and reconsecrated. Within four years, monks had returned to the wooded hill.
On our second day in Novgorod, we had decided to abandon our driver and use the local bus service to get to Yuriev, Peryn’s parent monastery. We came to the monastery through villages and fields, where faded scruff grass brushed through the snow. Likhachev described the way in which the architects of the twelfth century used the river as the axis of their town plan. The watchtowers of Yuriev in one direction and Antoniev in the other create a great symmetry in the landscape, which the churches built over the course of the next five hundred years (some in a single day, many over the course of a single summer) did not disrupt. As though all Novgorod were the work of a single architect, Likhachev marvelled, the city seemed to express a shared intention, a rare rhythmic integrity in space. A lay brother came out of a tin kiosk at the gate, an elderly man with beautiful grey-blue eyes who gave us, in welcome, a small icon of St Seraphim, and took us in to see the brightly restored frescoes in the church. The monastery seemed a busy, cheerful place that morning, resonant with the voices of daily life. A monk called out from the doorway of a low building by the monastery wall, pulling a hat over his long hair, asking for Nina and Tatyana. The lay brother told him that Nina and Tatyana were in the banya.
We left Yuriev on foot, taking the riverbend towards Peryn. Again, suddenly, we were in a landscape that felt desolate. It is the genius of Novgorod’s geography to accommodate wilderness in well-populated space. For a few weeks in spring, when the snow dissolves and floods the road up to the hermitage, Peryn is an island. Despite the short distance from Yuriev, and the city of Novgorod two miles up the Volkhov from here, the place had an atmosphere of timeless calm. But around Peryn, we discovered, the semiosphere was buzzing.