Unlike some of Staraya Russa’s public institutions, reborn with all the classical pomp of the late Stalin era, the Polist hotel was a shabby khrushchevka, an angular five-storey brick building from the Khrushchev era, with a cursive metal sign, long gone to rust, pegged on flimsy struts on its roof, that rattled in the breeze. Mounted above the entrance to the hotel was an incongruously beautiful painting, three storeys high, in faded earth-golds, carmines, pinks and pale blues, depicting Sloven and Rus, the veneration of the sacred icon of the Mother of God of Staraya Russa, and other legends of the town’s early history. The broken concrete steps were banked with ice. We stepped inside, leaving a dirty trail of slush on the new tiles. An old woman who had been sleeping near the empty coat pegs pointed angrily at our filthy boots and told us that the restaurant was closed.
We continued down Engels, across Herzen Street, to the Sadko Cafe. Another old woman in slippers and a woollen hat was guarding coats in the vestibule. Yes, the cafe was open, she said, but there was a private banquet taking place. Sounds of singing and clatter came from the dining room. I opened the door. Several pairs of expressionless eyes looked my way through the smoke. On either side of a red-faced man at the end of the table sat two middle-aged women in dresses of purple nylon velour and shimmering gold, each with a fleshy arm draped around his neck. A couple danced heavily in the corner, the woman’s head resting on the man’s shoulder, eyes closed. The table was a mess of half-eaten zakuski, ashtrays and cognac stains. I closed the door on the mournful bacchanal, and we walked out into the grey town.
Modern Staraya Russa came to an abrupt end where Engels Street met the river. Along either embankment of the wide Porusya stood low huts, some painted dull green or brown, others that looked as though their ornamented wooden frames had rotted through and were sinking into the dirty snow. Mitya Karamazov’s run in the darkness to his father’s house on the night of the old man’s murder can still be traced on the street map. From the home of Grushenka, whose ‘infernal curves’ maddened both father and son to a pitch of rivalrous lust, Mitya crossed Cathedral Bridge, took the embankment to Dmitrievsky Street, then ran over the little bridge across a dirty stream called the Malashka, into a deserted alley at the back of Fyodor Pavlovich’s house. Sexuality, as the librarian Nikolai Fyodorov thought, is ‘the force which compels sons to forget their fathers, and which is responsible for the political and civil strife in the world’.
Dmitrievsky is now called Street of the Red Commanders. Almost none of the streets in Staraya Russa has kept its pre-revolutionary name. They signal to each other like some revived underground of bomb-throwing assassins, communist internationalists, victorious proletarians, Chekists and commissars, as though the streets had been renamed after the revolutionary conspirators in Demons. One street is named for Vladimir Dubrovin. An officer in a local regiment with links to revolutionaries in the capital, Dubrovin organised a radical circle of soldiers, merchants and peasants in Staraya Russa in 1878. After he was implicated in the assassination of a chief of police, Dubrovin was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. As he was dragged handcuffed into the streets and across Staraya Russa to the railway station, he cried out that Russia should do like France and rid itself of autocracy. The police investigation concluded that Dubrovin planned to settle in the town ‘with the aim of inciting like-minded members of the peasantry to open insubordination against the ruling power’. He refused to give evidence at his court martial, and was executed in the spring of 1879, still orating inaudibly through a roll of military drums. Even government ministers were grimly impressed by his steadfastness.
When Dostoevsky arrived in Staraya Russa later that month, the town was talking of nothing but the Dubrovin affair, and the ‘moral abscess’ in Russian society. The head of the local gendarmerie noted in his ‘political survey’ that the spirit of the people of Staraya Russa was ‘rebellious’ and could serve as ‘ready material for anti-government ends’. In May, Dostoevsky wrote to Pobedonostsev saying that fanatics like Dubrovin are utterly convinced of their own rightness, they have ‘their own logic, their own learning, their own code’. A few days earlier he had sent the manuscript of Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov to his editor, describing it as a ‘portrayal of the extreme blasphemy and the grain of the idea of destruction in Russia in our time, among young people torn away from reality’. The convictions that Ivan Karamazov expounds to Alyosha in the tavern are a ‘synthesis of contemporary Russian anarchism’. Ivan does not deny God, he denies the meaning of God’s creation. ‘All socialism began with a denial of the meaning of historical reality’, Dostoevsky told his editor, ‘and led to a programme of destruction.’ The Brothers Karamazov reflects the ideas of Nikolai Fyodorov, in whom Dostoevsky became interested as he was conceiving the novel. Fyodorov’s great theme was the ‘fraternity of the sons for the resurrection of dead fathers’; Dostoevsky’s novel depicts the fraternity of sons for the murder of their father.
One street, on the far side of town, is named for Stepan Khalturin, a member of the revolutionary movement People’s Will with no connection to Staraya Russa, who succeeded in detonating a bomb under the Tsar’s dining room in the Winter Palace in February 1880, killing guards and servants, and leading to panic in society and a declaration of martial law. Terrorists could be anywhere. The terrorist destruction that lacerated Russia in the last years of Dostoevsky’s life convinced him that the apocalyptic vision of Demons had been justified; none of its characters had been in the least ‘fantastic’. Revolutionaries were now openly committed to murder. Dostoevsky found their motivations and moral vacillations fascinating, noting the testimony of Vera Zasulich (translator of Marx’s Communist Manifesto) at her trial for the attempted assassination of the governor of St Petersburg: ‘It is terrible to raise one’s hand against a fellow man, but I decided that this is what I had to do.’ He continued to have close friends among materialists and progressives, even among old friends of Karl Marx, like the ‘fine, intelligent woman’ Anna Jaclard, who spent the summer season in Staraya Russa.
Footprints enticed us on to the frozen river. We took the steps down through the bare lime trees and walked towards Dostoevsky’s house on the ice, a watery sky above us, our mood lightened almost to a dream-state by hunger. On the headland, where the Porusya met the Polist, the reaching spire of the cathedral was silhouetted against the darkening sky. Beyond the cathedral, the embankment is named after Dostoevsky. We kept to the river. A group of children had made a sled run where the embankment was steepest. They moved among the trees, calling, laughing. To the east, through a tumbledown fence, over low metal garages and wooden sheds that leaned at odd angles, we could make out St George’s Church, where Dostoevsky worshipped, and where the Mother of God of Staraya Russa, now beloved of the FSB, hung until its disappearance in June 1941. Its single blue dome looked black on its round white tower. We climbed back up the slope and walked along the road past rusting Zhigulis.