Batyushkov’s name is one of those in the canon of Russian literature which I have often passed in the pages of books without stopping to pay attention. In Mandelstam’s first collection, Stone, there is this defiant little lyric:
No, not the moon but a bright clockface
Gleams for me, and what am I guilty of
If I perceive weak stars as milky?
And I find the arrogance of Batyushkov repellent:
‘What time is it?’ they asked him here,
And he made the curious reply: ‘eternity.’
Stone, which appeared in 1912, in a literary world accustomed to the mystical abstractions of Symbolists, is full of rebellion against all kinds of poetic arrogance. Mandelstam loved time and matter. ‘I have been given a body. What should I do with it?’ He wanted verse to shake off the weight of words like ‘eternity’.
There were several bright clockfaces gleaming in Batyushkov’s semi-circular room: an English grandfather clock with a gleaming face; a gold empire-style timepiece on a glass-fronted bookcase, its face borne on the wings of a cupid, and, under a portrait of Batyushkov as a young man, a clock mounted with urns, columns and babies with gilded wings. I studied a portrait of the poet painted two years before his death. By then, Batyushkov was a relic of his glorious past. He sits in a red velvet chair, arms crossed, with the pout of an angry child, his eyes resentful and confused. In his lapel is a small wilted yellow flower which, the museum attendant told us (as though she had been present at the difficult sitting), he had insisted on wearing. In another painting, set in this room, the poet looks through the window at the Vologda Kremlin, his back to the painter.
The attendant’s voice faltered when she talked of Batyushkov’s madness. She showed us a photograph of her own son and daughter dressed in costumes of the Napoleonic era: bonnet, fan, ringlets, brass buttons and epaulettes. She was grateful for our visit, and told us that once, several years ago, she had received some visitors from Italy. She loved Batyushkov’s room; its curving wall and its large windows gave it a good energetika. When I asked about life in Vologda, she sighed: ‘Yes, everything is changing, getting better, I suppose, now they teach Batyushkov in school. But this is a provincial town,’ she added, looking through the window, ‘nothing really happens here.’
We crossed into a park beside the Vologda Kremlin on paths of broken asphalt, following the sightline in the painting of Batyushkov’s back, towards Shalamov’s house. Now that the last of the snow was gone, Vologda was preparing for summer: men were unloading timber from a truck, old women swept the paths with besoms. Restoration work was under way in the Kremlin, a pleasure boat was advertising disco cruises down the river from a loudspeaker and fairground attractions were being mounted in the park. Opposite a dusty shooting range decorated in camouflage colours, bright balloons in primary colours with mad smiling faces decorated a motionless carousel. Stacked against the brick and faded whitewash of the Kremlin wall were the red and blue carriages of a little train and a set of pedalos, turned on their sides in a rusty rack.
Over the wall we could see the domes of St Sophia, some regilded, some still dull pewter grey, birds wheeling in the air above. The soft silver blue of the aluminium drainpipes was webbed and mottled like a leaf. The English writer Arthur Ransome, who was a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1918, was enraptured by the play of colours in the Vologda sky: ‘white churches against the blue winter sky, churches capped with towers of intricate design, showing the great bronze bells hanging in their airy belfries of gold and green, of plain grey lead and of violent deep blue, thickly sown with gold stars’. In Molotov’s library, with all its pages cut, was a copy of Ransome’s book Six Weeks in Soviet Russia, translated by Karl Radek. The Russian edition was published in 1924 and in the introduction it said that, when the book had come out in 1919, it had ‘played a large role against the Intervention, when Russia was cut off from the rest of the world by a wall of lies and slander’.
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Varlam Shalamov’s family called St Sophia the ‘cold church’. It was gloomy, he said, with no spiritual warmth. We tried to go inside, but its heavy gold doors were closed, and a woman told us crossly to go away, the church was under remont. Legend has it that a piece of stone from the foot of an angel on its ceiling fell on the toe of Ivan the Terrible during the ceremony of its consecration; a sign, the Tsar decided, that he should not move his capital from Moscow to Vologda. Instead we wandered through the regional museum, laid out in an orange-painted side building inside the Kremlin. As always, the exhibits took us through local history, from fossils found in the Devonian layer of the local earth to a mounted quotation from Gorky about the great Soviet task of freeing the people from the past, and a public declaration of 1931 by Molotov on the social benefits of ‘mass singing’.
The Shalamov house museum was, by contrast, a museum of a more contemporary style with passages of text mounted on bare brick walls. In 1918, Shalamov says, everything that had furnished his childhood was lost. He left Vologda in 1924, to throw himself into the new civilisation taking shape in ‘seething Moscow’, and never returned. To evoke the writer’s distant past in Vologda, it is better to read The Fourth Vologda (its title a homage to Mandelstam’s The Fourth Prose), which Shalamov composed in his mid-sixties, in the writing years in Moscow after his return from almost two decades in the labour camps of Kolyma. In The Fourth Vologda, which summons with vivid immediacy the texture of his childhood, the Gulag is a shadow falling back across the past. Shalamov wanted to bring together three times in his memoir – past, present and future – for the sake of the fourth, which is art.
He revisits the ice hills on the riverbank, built by his brother, a wild gymnasium drop-out famous for his hunting skills. He remembers his whole family out on the river on summer fishing expeditions in a pair of boats; the samovar and the kerosene lamp at home; his father’s newspapers and his treasured American watch (which survived the Gulag in Shalamov’s possession); his mother’s poor cookery, her swollen body and her strange belief in the resurrection of the dead through the advance of chemistry, which she was convinced would soon find the way to refine people into pure spirit.