Despite their common view that the West has defiled Russia’s sacred space and led her away from salvation (or her place in the ‘vector of cosmic evolution’), the official Orthodox Church and the Roerich Movement spent their first decade of religious freedom engaged in a crackling row, conducted in books, pamphlets, cyberspace and the national press. In 1994, the Church anathematised the Roerich Movement as a ‘totalitarian, anti-Christian sect’. A Moscow cleric, A. Kuraev, published a thousand-page denunciation of the Movement two years later, entitled Satanism for the Intelligentsia, in which he accuses Roerich of being an NKVD spy, a crypto-Nazi and a bad painter. To this, the ‘well-known culturologist and politologist’ Ksenya Myalo replied with a terrifying screed, rich in omens and pseudo-science, called The Volkhov Star or Christ in the Himalayas, in which she defended Roerich as a saviour of Russian cultural monuments, and, in his life and teachings, bearing wisdom from the ancient East, more Russian and more Orthodox than the Church itself. Now, she said, the Russian people risks being wiped out, becoming an outcast race, even on the territory of its own motherland. Among implacable enemies of the pure ‘Russian soul’ (of which Madame Blavatsky was another great and ‘much-slandered’ example) Myalo named Zbigniew Brzezinski, J. R. R. Tolkein, G. K. Chesterton, the ‘judaic’ media, the ‘perestroika intelligentsia’, Father Alexander Men, the Catholic Church, global capital, the ‘bacchanalia of privatisation’, NATO and the Internet. All of them fear paganism, she declared, and the great geographical space that the undefiled ‘cosmocentric’ Russian peasant, with his primordial race memory, instinctively senses as his natural element. Myalo noted in passing that the sun sets in the west, and that scenes of the Apocalypse always appear on the western walls of Russian churches.
The monk had been restoring the church at Peryn with his hands. The bare iconostasis was newly made in young wood; the stuccoed brick walls, to the very apex of the drum, were white. But soon, eloquent symbols of Russian faith would reappear. Roerich, who loved Novgorod for its ‘buried secrets’, said that if you press close to the earth, you will hear it speak. The voices at Peryn said that in this part of the semiosphere it was Lotman’s ‘scientific modern geography’ that had yet to be discovered.
SEVEN
Staraya Russa
‘After all, an entire nation consists only of certain isolated incidents, does it not?’
DOSTOEVSKY, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
From Novgorod, we took the empty road to Staraya Russa, an hour’s drive down the western shore of Ilmen, the ‘lake of weather’. Ancient and capricious, Ilmen is shaped like a heart. Left behind when the prehistoric ice sheet drew north, its waters ebb and dilate with the seasons. Winters are lighter in this part of Russia, the frost less tenacious. Even so, the cold had erased the lake’s edge. The shore was traceable only from the scattered pattern of snow-dusted rushes. In the grey-white haze of the day, when the many thousand interlinking veins of water that issue from the lake were frozen and invisible, only occasional clusters of low wooden houses on the plain hinted at the streams’ southwesterly meander.
On a bridge (designated a ‘hero bridge’ after some great wartime battle) hung with dirty lamps roughly painted red, signalling roadworks, we crossed the salty Shelon that flows year-round from the lake’s westernmost edge. A flimsy sign pointed to a Kombinat producing lubricants: maslo and smazka, oil and grease. At Korostyn, the road came right up to the shore. This ‘pearl in the princely lands of Staraya Russa’ (quite without lustre as we drove through it) was a wedding gift from Peter the Great to his wife; an agreement was later signed in the village about the creation of a unified Russian state. After Korostyn, we turned south-east and passed Ustreka. ‘Tiens, un lac,’ as the Frenchified fop Stepan Verkhovensky exclaims on awakening from his delirium in a hut in the fishing village, ‘ah, my God, I did not see it before …’
After Dostoevsky had landed at Ustreka on his first steam-paddle voyage across Ilmen, he reimagined the place as ‘Ustevo’, the accidental destination of Verkhovensky’s final wanderings in Demons, the novel he came to Staraya Russa to finish in the dacha season of 1872. Verkhovensky’s deathbed scenes at the lakeside are a comic-serious coda to the murder scenes in Dostoevsky’s horror novel of ideas, his vision of unlimited despotism. The flighty mind of the ‘scrofulous liberal’ scholar (based on Timofei Granovsky, after whom Sheremetev Lane was renamed by the Soviets), father of a tyrannical political killer, finally unravels as he eats buttery peasant pancakes attended by a doctor named Salzfisch. ‘Historical knowledge heals,’ Likhachev said, ‘but laughter heals even more.’ Likhachev considered Dostoevsky a remarkable humorist, and particularly appreciated the comedy in Demons, without which the novel would be ‘unbearable’.
Stepan Verkhovensky is the apotheosis of the ‘idealistic Westerniser’, aimless, weak in his ideas, devoted to the notion that he is persecuted for his way of thinking. Dostoevsky wrote to a friend that benign liberals like Granovsky ‘would not believe it if you told them that they were the direct fathers’ of the radical ‘demons’ who were tearing Russia apart. It was the development of the line of thought ‘from the fathers to the sons’ that Dostoevsky wanted to explore in his political novel. In 1870 he begged his friend Nikolai Strakhov for a new biography of Granovsky by Alexander Stankevich, brother of the poet Nikolai Stankevich, saying that he needed the little book like he needed air, as soon as possible, it was indispensable material for his writing. As he developed the character of Stepan Verkhovensky, he continued to use the name ‘Granovsky’ in his notebooks.
Beset by money worries, ill health and family troubles, Dostoevsky arrived in Staraya Russa in May, hoping for a few months of rest and ordered domesticity. He had been told by a Petersburg professor of the tranquillity of the small spa town, where, for very little, one could rent a furnished house, ‘even with kitchen wares’. He would seclude himself and write, while his two small children flourished in the sunshine and took mud cures. The family travelled by rail to Novgorod on a narrow-gauge track laid the year before, then took the steamer across Ilmen and down the winding Polist under a pale, cloudless sky. Their slow-rhythm journey was one of Anna Grigorievna’s loveliest memories of married life. The domes of St Sophia shone as they pulled away from Novgorod. The lake was as still as a mirror, the scene looked Swiss. Anna absorbed her husband’s tender mood; he loved and understood nature, she said. For the last two hours, as the paddle-wheel splashed down the lime-banked river, the domes of Staraya Russa seemed to come close and recede again.
My journey, on a day without radiance or colour, was at the urging of a friend in Petersburg, a Dostoevsky scholar of Slavophile persuasion, who had come to Staraya Russa one summer for a colloquium at the writer’s house, and had been shown the way by an old local of such unalloyed simplicity and kindness of heart that he had held him in mind ever since as the perfect specimen of the Russian narod, the people. To encounter, in this of all towns, a man who embodied the pure and elusive spirit of the people seemed to my friend no accident. To him, Staraya Russa is a hallowed place. Indeed, Likhachev (who suggested the theme for my friend’s doctoral thesis on Dostoevsky) once said that around Staraya Russa one can still sense the true Russia, breathe the sacred Motherland.