There was no sign of any nutritional technologist. The hour of lunch slipped by. I had misplanned the day. I read aloud about ‘rationalised nutrition’: fruit and vegetables for vitamin cordials and salads from the spa’s own hothouses … dairy products from its own cows … Master chef Zakhar Kistkin’s secret recipe for meat cutlets stuffed with buckwheat kasha … Why had I proposed to my trusting friend that we come here first? The Brezhnev-era delicacies evoked in the book were a tormenting stimulus to ‘psychic secretions’. The nerves in our cerebral cortices were delivering frantic signals to our digestive organs, but there was nothing to eat. Like Pavlov’s laboratory dogs, his ‘gastric juice factories’ as he called them, we were becoming disoriented, anxious and sad.
Staraya Russa was quickly leading me to the view that there is far more in Dostoevsky about food and that powerful demon, hunger, and the intricacies of the relationship between the human stomach and the soul, than there is about Russian national identity. Pavlov was fascinated by Dostoevsky’s questions about where the body ends and the soul begins. Food is central to the theological, political and psychological drama of The Brothers Karamazov. ‘I can walk away from their bread, not needing it at all,’ the crazy ascetic Father Ferapont declares. ‘I can go into the forest and survive there on mushrooms or berries …’ He regards the other monks, who cannot leave their bread, as enslaved by the devil. Ferapont has eaten almost nothing in years. The anorexic monk sees demons in coat pockets, behind doors, hiding in the guts of another monk, ‘right inside his unclean belly’. Dostoevsky does not say whether Ferapont is a mystic or a lunatic, but when Alyosha Karamazov visits the old monk in his cell, he is filled with awe. ‘You don’t live by tea alone, I suppose,’ Ivan Karamazov jokes soon afterwards, when Alyosha, awkward in his novice’s garb, arrives in the bustling Metropolis tavern. It is the first encounter between the brothers. Praising the stinking tavern’s ‘first-rate’ fish soup, Ivan reflects on his own indecent ‘Karamazov thirst for life’. Their discussion over jam and tea dilates into Ivan’s fierce case against a God who allows the torture and murder of children, and his recitation to Alyosha of his prose-poem ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. Ivan’s Inquisitor, who has ‘vanquished freedom to make men happy’, reminds the returned Christ of his three temptations in the wilderness, temptations in which ‘all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature are united’. In the first, in which ‘lies hidden the great secret of the world’, the tempter invites Christ to turn stones into bread. ‘The one infallible banner that will make men bow down is the banner of earthly bread,’ the tempter says, ‘for nothing is more certain. Grateful and obedient, they will lay down their freedom and say, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.”’
As the last instalments of The Brothers Karamazov appeared, the young Pavlov worked on his doctoral thesis on the centrifugal nerves of the heart at a medical clinic in St Petersburg. Pavlov, who suffered from depression, found an emotional kinship with Ivan Karamazov, feeling his mind dominated by logic which seemed to freeze the impulses of his heart. And yet he feared solitude, suffered from terrible anxiety, and longed to think his way to some science of life. Seraphima Karchevskaya, a devoutly religious student at a pedagogical institute, knew Dostoevsky, and turned to the writer with her own spiritual questions. As Pavlov confided in a letter to her, it was through reading Dostoevsky that he learned to appreciate his own melancholia as a form of privileged insight: ‘a person has two opposed sides and is so constructed that at each moment he sees only one. If he is constructed well, he sees only the radiant side, if badly – only the grey. So the complete truth about oneself is presented only by the melancholic state.’
We shared a last stick of chewing gum. Almost an hour passed before the nutritional technologist arrived. A sweet woman with soft blonde hair, she told us that before we would be allowed to eat, we would have to be examined by specialists so that the food prescribed for us would be nutritionally correct. She would require samples for analysis, signed and stamped documents of all kinds. The process would take days, she smiled.
We wandered into the park, light-headed in the ‘ionised oasis’ by the fountain, to look at the brochure the nutritional technologist had given us, listing cures. The oriental birdcage and the trellised walks were gone now, and the mineral spring was clad in tilted slabs of rust-coloured marble, surrounded by broken benches with peeling paint and swing seats with green corrugated plastic canopies that creaked in the breeze. The brochure advertised cures for overwork, endo-ecological rehabilitation, tampons impregnated with Staraya Russa mud, and treatments for the kidneys, the nervous system, psoriasis, venereal disease, infections of the gums, the digestive tract, the gut … A woman in a worn fur coat and hat walked slowly round the fountain, closing her eyes occasionally, and raising her face to the sky.
A convent, dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, once stood on this land, next to the salt works on which the high fortunes of Staraya Russa were founded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Later the salt works moved to the other end of the town, and the cherry orchards and kitchen gardens of the abandoned convent ran wild. Local people had always known of the curative properties of the salt springs, and used them to heal scrofula, backaches, asthma and broken bones. In 1815, the romantic age of the spa, word of ‘miraculous cures’ at Staraya Russa reached Fyodor Haas, a doctor who had published a treatise on the Caucasian springs of Essentuki and Zheleznovodsk. He studied the waters and talked to locals, but the medical establishment in Petersburg, fatigued by his idealistic schemes for improving the health of the Fatherland, met his findings with scepticism. In the mid-1820s, the mining engineer Ilya Tchaikovsky (father of the composer) took an interest in the mineral waters, and a doctor named Rauch came to take notes on the locals bathing in a mud hole. The first spa buildings went up in 1834, and for the next two decades soldiers wounded in Russia’s frontier wars were sent to Staraya Russa to convalesce, while high society travelled to Europe or the Caucasus for cures. In 1858, a government minister named Muraviev ordered the digging of an artesian well, and the first steamboat sailed between Novgorod and Staraya Russa. The spa was imperial property, physicians with German names like Eikhvald and Veltz published learned articles on the mud, and thousands of visitors, from grand dukes to the exhausted anti-tsarist writer Nikolai Dobrolyubov, came for cures. By Dostoevsky’s time, the town had been laid out for rest and pleasure: boating, costume balls in pavilions, theatrical performances, walks in the forest, excursions to nearby monasteries. Though the spa was reputed to be poorly maintained and the management corrupt, guards officers and society belles came for the summer season. One island in the Polist became such a favoured haven for romantic picnics that it was known as the ‘island of love’.