According to Orthodox tradition, the Apostle Andrew, the ‘first called’, came to these parts from Jerusalem in the first century, through Kherson on the Black Sea. The fisherman from Galilee is imagined passing through on his way north to the Volkhov and the island of Valaam, preaching Christ’s gospel to the pagan fishermen of Ilmen. Staraya Russa is the only place to have preserved the name of the ancient Slavonic tribe, the Rusy. The legend of the town’s foundation, a tale of family bonds, was written down at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Russia’s first historian, Nikolai Karamzin. Two Slavic knights, the brothers Sloven and Rus, wandered north to these virgin lands from the shores of the Black Sea, and named the lake after their sister, Ilmen. Sloven founded a town at the north end of the lake, where Novgorod now stands, and Rus founded another at the southern end, naming the two rivers that meet in its centre after his wife and daughter, Polist and Porusya. At the Church of the Resurrection on the headland where the Polist and Porusya merge, Peter the Great remarked on Staraya Russa’s topographical similarity with Jerusalem, where, to the east of the temple, the sun rises over the salt sources of the Dead Sea.
I learned all these things from a creepy book I read in the Lenin Library after my visit. In the shiny pages of The Formation of the Russian Character on the Example of the Historical Fate of the Staraya Russa Region, published in 2003, I discovered that even now a mystique of Staraya Russa is being cultivated to serve Russia’s new era of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. This quiet place has become the symbolic heartland of a mythology of soil and tribe that has seeped from the works of nineteenth-century Russian writers into the sanctuaries of Putin’s secret police. The book, which has multiple authors and advertises itself as a ‘popular scientific publication for students of military academies’, was published under the auspices of the FSB (as the secret police is now named) with a string of presidential and security organisations listed alongside the names of lieutenant generals and academicians on its title page. It is illustrated with colour plates of soldiers, ecclesiastics, tsars, monasteries and moody views of Ilmen, and begins with the announcement that, with the blessing of the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias (reputedly a man of the security services), a new chapel in honour of the miracle-working icon of the Staraya Russa Mother of God has been built on the territory of the Moscow Institute of Border Guards of the FSB. ‘Symbolically’, President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s ‘epistle’ to the nation in the ‘transformative’ year 2003 had been given on the eve of the feast of the miracle-working icon. And so it goes on, page after page, weaving the myth of Russia’s primal supremacy, her God-bearing mission, superior soul, all proved by the presence of salt in the soil of Staraya Russa, the most ancient homeland of the Rus tribes, the ‘salt of the earth’, whose destiny has always been, as Dostoevsky preached, to unite and lead mankind. Like other pseudo-scholarly racial supremacist tracts, the book leans on bizarre epistemological, and even biochemical, assertions, as though language itself were some cryptic guide to transcendent national destiny. Rus, I learn, was a Sanskrit root brought north by the Aryan tribes who settled here on the northern plain, associated with the sacred colour red (‘rush’), ‘the soul of the Russian soil’, the ‘talismanic’ colour of Russian history. Every few pages, the name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would appear, invoked in ever more cultish incantatory tones, each of his speeches, whether to the EU or the Ministry of Culture, a prophecy, his quintessentially Russian ‘modesty’ and ‘humility’ (attributes the media persuaded people to believe in before Putin’s second election to the presidency) the very fulcrum of his patriotism and sincere love for the Motherland. Even Putin’s name is ‘euphonious with a good energetika’ harking back to the roots of the tribe: ‘the majority of Russian surnames with the root “Puti” are formed from the most ancient Slavic name Putislav,’ which of course brings to mind the word put’, ‘the way’, which, in its turn, fans out into a dozen more good words pregnant with national portent. And in Church Slavonic, the authors remind, the word put’ is directly associated with Christ himself … The Formation of the Russian Character ends with the ‘Staraya Russa Theses’, a list of commandments about Russian national memory: ‘Remember that when Dostoevsky writes about the universal responsiveness of Russians, it is not a metaphor … ’; ‘Remember that the epistle of the President was delivered on the eve of the feastday … that his innate modesty and humility help Our President to dedicate himself completely to the disinterested service of People and Fatherland … Remember!’
What did Staraya Russa mean to Dostoevsky? And what does Staraya Russa remember about Dostoevsky, a writer who still looms so heavily over the Russian national imagination? ‘Dostoevsky’s Russia’, Akhmatova’s ‘First Elegy’ begins. Subtitled ‘Prehistory’, the poem conjures the historical landscape of Russia of the 1870s and 1880s, into which Akhmatova’s own generation ‘decided to be born’. Taverns trade, carriages fly, five-storey buildings rise on the streets of Petersburg. In the interiors, skirts rustle, armchairs are upholstered in plush, yellow kerosene lamps illuminate narrow wallpapered corridors, walnut-framed mirrors are ‘amazed by the beauty of Karenina’:
And in Staraya Russa magnificent ditches,
And in the gardens decaying summer houses,
And the windowpanes are as black as an ice-hole,
And one imagines that something has occurred,
That it is better not to peep, let us leave.
It is not possible to reach an understanding with every place,
So that it reveals its secret …
As soon as Dostoevsky arrived in Staraya Russa to write the overdue final instalments of his prophetic anti-revolutionary novel Demons, he was placed under covert police surveillance on orders from the capital. The memory of the tsarist state was obstinate. Though he claimed to have been cured of what he called the ‘psychic illness’ of seditious thinking in Siberia over two decades earlier, as a once-condemned political prisoner, who had faced a firing squad on Semyonov Square, Dostoevsky was still a man to be kept under watch. The police in Staraya Russa, who peeped in at his windows, informed the gendarmerie in Novgorod that the writer lived soberly in his rented house on the banks of the Pererytitsa, avoided society, choosing the quietest streets for his daily walks, and sat at his desk deep into the night. ‘The country shivers, and the Omsk convict understood everything and placed a cross over everything’, Akhmatova wrote in the last verse of ‘Prehistory’:
Look, now he shuffles everything up
And he rises, like some kind of spirit,
Over the primordial disorder. Midnight strikes.
The pen squeaks, and many pages