Like Vassiliev, the Moscow law student in Chekhov’s story ‘A Nervous Breakdown’, I know little of fallen women except from hearsay and books, but when I recognise one in the street by her dress or manners I remember stories I have read, my imagination frets with questions, to which the answers are either jocular and cynical or bleakly tragic. ‘They are alive! My God, those women are alive!’ Vassiliev shudders after his first visit to a Moscow brothel. ‘Doctor, tell me only one thing,’ he demands when the student friends who had introduced him to the brothel take him to be medically treated for his ensuing spiritual agony. ‘Is prostitution an evil or not? And if prostitution is truly an evil, then what?’
I walked with my companion along the embankment. Couples sat on blue wooden benches drinking Baltika beer, staring across the Don at the wild land on the opposite side. The waters flowing past had come over a thousand miles, moving south-east from near Tula where they rise, then south-west towards the Azov Sea. A short way along the riverbank was a row of new homes in smooth brick, bright with painted balustrades, security cameras and satellite dishes on their eaves. Signs on their iron gates warned of ‘evil dogs’. With an electronic murmur, an underground garage opened to take in a silver jeep that had come silently up the road behind us. Commerce, for which Rostov-on-Don was founded in the late eighteenth century, had returned to the city, and its jumble of rich and poor had been quickly restored.
Rhoda Power, an Englishwoman who came to Rostov in 1917 as governess to the wealthy Sabarov family, found the city’s appearance curious. In Under Cossack and Bolshevik, the memoir that she published soon after her escape through Murmansk from revolution and civil war, she describes Rostov’s higgledy-piggledy appearance, in which ‘next to some large and ornate mansion with statues at the door and twisted iron gates there would be a tiny wooden hut, thatched with straw and built half underground’ where chickens, dogs and children crawled on the floor together. The river was fouled with factory waste in those days, and the water stank, but the main streets were paved, and electric trams ran along the Garden Ring, past banks, fashionable shops, clubs, insurance companies, cinemas and belle-époque private residences like the mansion of the Sabarovs. Miss Power noticed that there were more Greeks, Armenians and Jews in the nouveau riche city than Russians and Cossacks. She was shocked by the open displays of anti-Semitic hatred among the local bourgeoisie and peasantry, who would spit at the mention of a Jewish name. Soon though, Beloborodov, Trotsky’s future host at No. 3 Granovsky Street, would be ruling the city with Red Terror, and people like the Sabarovs would be on the run.
A barge passed with a cargo of sand. Trucks rumbled across the wide bridge that leads across the Don from Voroshilov Avenue. Beyond a lonely statue of Gorky, the embankment became a promenade, dressed with fairy lights, a spindly jetty, and pleasure boats in wait for the season, tied to iron bollards cast in the last year of the nineteenth century. The doors of a nightclub named Titanic stood open on the wharf, revealing the morose plush of its empty interior to the light air of the spring evening. A girl in a satin jacket and high boots hurried down to the waterfront from the town.
‘I can accept the street as the multitude,’ Tsvetaeva wrote to Pasternak in 1926, ‘but the street personified in a single person, the multitude presuming to offer itself in the singular with two arms and two legs … oh, no!’ Alone in Moscow in the heat of summer, Pasternak had hinted to Tsvetaeva of his temptations, the ‘terrible truths revealed by the senseless seething of the dammed-up blood’. ‘There is no masculine street, only feminine,’ she told him in a fierce reply; ‘it is the man who, in his lust, creates it. It exists in the countryside, too. Not a single woman would go after a ditchdigger (exceptions only prove the rule), but all men – all poets – go after street girls.’
The long friendship between the two poets, expressed in letters, poetry and dreams rather than actual meetings, began with an exchange of verse about the Don. They sought out in the history of the southern steppe mythical archetypes of companionship between men and women that seemed to answer the free and heroic measure of the soul; forms of relation more powerful and essential than the intimacy of husbands and wives. ‘To the incomparable poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who is “from the Don, fiery and hellish,” from an admirer of her gift’, Pasternak inscribed in a book of his poems in January 1923, quoting a poem he had written in the last year of the Civil War:
We are few. We are perhaps three,
From the Don, fiery and hellish
Under the grey running crust
Of rain, clouds and soldiers’
Soviets, of poems and discussions
About transport and art.
Hungry in Moscow, Tsvetaeva had written verse about the warrior traditions of the Don during the Civil War, in which her husband fought for the Whites. She answered Pasternak’s dedication with ‘Scythian Verses’, a cycle of three poems which take up his image of her as a fellow-warrior. ‘Scythianism’ was a form of self-stylisation for Russian poets in these years. ‘Wide is our Wild Country,’ wrote Tsvetaeva’s poetic mentor Max Voloshin, ‘deep is our Scythian steppe’. Blok’s poem ‘Scythians’, written in the first months after the Revolution, hymned Russia’s ‘barbaric lyre’:
Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asiatics,
With slanting, greedy eyes!
For you centuries, for us a single hour.
We, like obedient underlings
Held the shield between the two enemy races
Of the Mongols and Europe.
Now Tsvetaeva cast herself as an Amazon fighting on the ancient steppe, with an arrow instead of a pen. Scythia is the ultimate darkness: epic, magnificent, hushed. Its men and women live by different, more elemental, rules of conduct. Tsvetaeva invoked Ishtar, Babylonian goddess of fertility, sex and war, calling on the divine prostitute to keep safe from the marauding khan her ‘tent of brothers and sisters’, her cauldron, campfire and quiver.
Known to ancient Greek geography as Tanais, the Don marked the northern boundary of Scythia in the seventh to third centuries BC. According to Herodotus, the Scythians arrived on the northern coast of the Black Sea from some unspecified part of Asia, and had linguistic and cultural similarities with the nomadic Iranian tribes. Indeed, the name of the Don comes from the Scythian word danu, meaning river. The Royal Scythians, the ‘most warlike and numerous’, reached as far as the river Tanais, beyond which was a non-Scythian race called Black-cloaks, and north of them, an undiscovered region of lakes and empty country. A people without towns, the Scythians lived in wagons, herding cattle for food, every one of them accustomed to fighting on horseback with bows and arrows. Herodotus described how the landscape of river and watered plains favoured the Scythian way of life. The Tanais, the river that bounded the Scythian lands, had its source, Herodotus says, ‘far up country in a large lake, and empties itself into a larger one still, Lake Maeotis’, which is the ancient name for the Azov Sea. Herodotus did not admire the Scythians, save for the fact that they managed ‘the most important thing in human affairs better than anyone else on the face of the earth: their own preservation’.
The Amazons, says Herodotus, washed up on Lake Maeotis after they had murdered the Greeks who had taken them prisoner. The warrior women made their way inland into the territory of the free Scythians and stole horses. When the Scythians discovered that the raiders were women, they wanted to get children by them, and soon the Amazons and the Scythians united, every man ‘keeping as his wife the woman whose favours he had first enjoyed’. The women picked up the language of the men, but could never settle down as wives, accustomed as they were to a life of hunting and raiding. The Amazons wanted to venture beyond the Tanais, Herodotus relates, and the Scythians agreed, so they crossed the great river and travelled east for three days, then north for three more from Lake Maeotis. Ever since then, the women have kept to their old ways, he adds, hunting on horseback, sometimes alone, taking part in war, wearing the same clothes as men.