Have the smell of Semyonov Square.
The many pages of family correspondence that passed under the eyes of the local police during Dostoevsky’s first Staraya Russa summer are all about illness, domestic disorder, the difficulty of writing, and cold. Anna had a nearly fatal throat abscess; Dostoevsky caught a chill and could not sleep for worry; little Lyuba fractured her hand; baby Fedya had diarrhoea and mosquito bites on his arms and legs. The doctor recommended mud baths, but it was not clear whether they made Fedya’s itching better or worse. It rained endlessly, the windows let in draughts, the linen chest was disordered, and the filth in the courtyard was unbelievable; everything soaked and rotten and wrecked. Work on the novel went badly, their ‘gypsy life’ was a dismal torment. ‘There is nothing more unbearable’, Dostoevsky wrote, ‘than greenery and wooden houses in the rain under this horrible sky.’
And yet, Dostoevsky bought a family home in Staraya Russa and came back every year until his death. The layout and atmosphere of the town seem to work their way into the last chapters of Demons, where a night fire, set by arsonists, consumes the wooden houses in the poorer quarter on the far side of the river, exciting in onlookers those ‘destructive instincts which, alas, lie buried within each and every soul’. His last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is explicitly set in the town, though it loses its resonant name and becomes Skotoprigonevsk, which means Cattlepen. ‘Though our town is small,’ the unnamed narrator says, ‘it is scattered and the houses are far apart.’ ‘Our little town’, ‘our district’, ‘the famous monastery in our neighbourhood’, ‘our town cemetery’, the narrator says again and again as he relates his tale of metaphysical rebellion, murder and mental illness, moving freely in and out of the febrile minds of the Karamazovs and the whispering silence of the town’s most hidden corners. Though Dostoevsky’s characters have so much to say that there is scarce time for authorial descriptions of place, the atmosphere of the provincial town is vivid: its dreary streets and quirky houses, with their shaded gardens, banyas, dilapidated summer houses, courtyards, gates and fences; its squalid taverns and gold-topped churches; its marketplace, monastery, police station, courthouse and prison; its masters and servants, its shopkeepers, priests, landowners, doctors, beauties, widows, buffoons, fallen women, misers, debtors, gossips, gypsies, cripples, rakes, dogs and schoolboys; its smells, sounds and shared memories; its intrigues, crimes and neverending talk.
It was in Staraya Russa, in the summer of 1880, when, as Dostoevsky said, ‘literally all the readers of Russia’ were waiting for the conclusion to The Brothers Karamazov, that he wrote his ‘epoch-making’ speech for the unveiling of a statue of Pushkin in Moscow, which he gave in the building of the Noblemen’s Club. Dostoevsky’s words about the universal mission of the Russian people are saturated with the tribe-and-soil myth of ancient Rus. He found in Pushkin the expression of his nation’s divine calling to unify ‘all people of the tribes of the great Aryan race’. From Pushkin, Dostoevsky proclaimed, Russians could derive faith in their ‘future independent mission in the family of European peoples’. Russia was impoverished, but ‘Christ himself in slavish garb traversed this impoverished land and gave it his blessing’. Pushkin died young, Dostoevsky told the Moscow public, and ‘unquestionably took some great secret with him to the grave. And so we must puzzle out his secret without him.’ ‘You solved it! You solved it!’ voices shouted from the crowd. ‘Prophet! Prophet!’ However, Dostoevsky’s ‘solution’ left latitude for interpretation. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, reactionary chief ideologist to the Tsar, thanked Dostoevsky for having ‘uttered the Russian truth’. But the physiologist Ivan Pavlov heard the speech as politically radical. Unlike the rest of Russia’s study-bound intellectuals, Dostoevsky really knew the people, Pavlov wrote to his fiancée, Seraphima Karchevskaya. His soul accommodated the souls of others. In prison he had lived as an equal with the people, and he stood with them still.
We drove into town on Uprising Street, past the train station, across Klara Tsetkin Street and the bridge over the Polist. Turning down Mineral Street, we passed Engels and Karl Marx, cross-streets that lie parallel on the town’s small grid, and stopped at the entrance to the health spa. We were stiff from the drive, and hungry. The forlorn Stalin-era pomposity of the main gates was a disappointment. Inscribed in granite above an empty urn on one side of the gates was a quotation from Pavlov: ‘Mankind is the highest product of nature, not so that he can just take pleasure in nature’s riches. Mankind must be healthy, strong, and intelligent.’ Pavlov, who had won a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on digestion and the ‘conditioned reflex’, became a reluctant favourite of the Stalin regime. After the murder of Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov in 1934, Pavlov protested to Stalin about the sudden wave of terror, and Molotov twice wrote to the scientist, explaining that the attacks on ‘malicious anti-Soviet elements’ were necessary to counter the capitalist threat. Despite Pavlov’s protests about arrests of intellectuals and the demolition of churches, Stalin tried to suborn him with gifts and favours. On one occasion, he told Molotov, who was organising a World Congress of Physiologists in Pavlov’s honour: ‘You must not think of Ivan Pavlov as just another of your 170 million citizens, but as Pavlov whose home is the whole world. Make sure everything is in the best of taste.’
My own taste is not Stalinist. I preferred the look of the spa as it was in Dostoevsky’s day, when the waters were fashionable. I had seen how it was then in a tinted engraving in a book. It had delicately elaborate wrought-iron gates and looked like a European resort with the oriental touch of a romantic Caucasian watering place. Trellised walkways led to the Muraviev fountain, a soaring plume, set about with ornamental fruit trees and shaded seats, crowned with an octagonal latticework structure like a giant birdcage topped with Moorish spires.
We could see into the dimness of the park, where footpaths in the snow led through spindly trees towards five-storey dormitory buildings, mottled pink-yellow, the colour of the lichened bark on the birches. We asked the guard for directions to the restaurant and he waved us into a building by the gate. We climbed the staircase and found ourselves in the anteroom of the spa director’s office. I asked a woman leaving the room where we would find the restaurant, and she gestured benignly to a sofa by the door, telling us to wait for the nutritional technologist. In three corners stood wide desks scattered with files, cake boxes, telephones and empty tea glasses. The walls were decorated with faded photographs of spa therapies: stout women in white coats draping black mud over well-muscled men laid out in blue-tiled rooms, or adjusting dials on giant tubs of red-brown water.
I was familiar with the way time works in a room like this, suspended between torpor and the eternal possibility of sudden decisive action. The only thing to do was wait. I picked up a book from a side-table: Virgin Soil of Staraya Russa. Published in 1982, the book was a last exhalation of the Soviet Union’s ‘stagnation’, when the Party tried to revive a tired, deprived society with decrees about the joy of communist work. I read of Brezhnev’s decree on medical care at the XXVIth Party Congress, of the Party’s grandiose and unprecedented struggle for the health of the people, of conscientiousness, initiative, drive, socialist competition, mass culture, Soviet duty, the Eleventh Five-Year Plan … Hunger and the grainy hum of the fluorescent lights were making my head ache. Women with large chests and back-combed hair came in and out of the waiting room, heels tapping on the linoleum. The pages of the book gave off a sickly plastic redolence of that medal-mad era of decline. I looked at pictures of heroic ‘shock-workers’ at the spa: Elena Alexandrova, ‘Doctor of the First Category’, a ‘sweet angel, radiant with the joy of healing’, and Nina Markvardt, the dentist with ‘golden hands’, ‘Cavalier of the Order of the Sign of Honour’. No patient would be left without ideological attention, the book promised. There are evenings of patriotic song, visits by heroes of labour, lectures on communist morality. To mould them into Soviet citizens who love work and are ready to defend the Motherland, adolescent patients are given an intensified programme of political enlightenment. There is a Lenin Room, and a library with tens of thousands of alluring titles such as Urgent Problems in the Internal and External Politics of the Communist Party, and Interpreting the Decisions of the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress.