This book made available by the Internet Archive.
Author's Hon
Largely to protect Muscovites I lived with sporadically from 1959 to 1971—including a year as a graduate student—I have altered names, concealed identities and rearranged time sequences in this account. Without these changes, I would have had to depart much further from the literal truth by eliminating politically sensitive material. But in the sense that almost nothing has been invented, what follows is reportage of my Russian friends' lives and of my observations. To modify Christopher Isherwood on his rendering of Berlin forty years ago, it is a record more of what happened than of what might have happened to me abroad.
At the same time, my reminiscences make no attempt to describe "typical" Moscow life—the burden of many easily available books—but only what I saw, heard and felt.
Behind the Byzantine apparatus of state, life went on.
— Vassily 0. Klyuchevsky, nineteenth-century Russian historian
He lies like an eyewitness.
— old Russian proverb
VII/Interlude 346
VIII/A Gold Medal 361
IX/Come Again? 422
MOSm)W FAREWELL
I Notes from My Windo'
From my window, through two panes of wobbly glass, a corner of this University, this city, this brooding country. Kremlin cupolas in the distance, jewels of possessed autocrats, shrouded by an icy fog. The seat of temporal and spiritual authority in its medieval splendor, regilded yearly and equipped with loudspeakers for big-brother Muzak.
Outside its sepia walls, the capital's sprawling center, sullen to match the setting and mood. A city landscape wanting neon and city life, as if square miles of squat buildings had been abandoned at the first November snows. No aircraft or traffic sounds but a northern folk song wailing in the back of my mind. Overwhelming sadness and strength in the subduing hush of Russia's expanse.
A broad artery, one spoke of the city center's wheel, leads in this direction toward the single bridge over the Moscow river; and along its snowy length, four lone construction trucks and five
2^MOSCOW FAREWELL
buses are gliding, past the empty intersections and sagging Glory-to-Lenin signs. The river itself is immobile and resigned, like the boarded-up summer cafes on its bank in Gorky Park; like the old women guarding the park gates, suspended in time and space. Frozen steam rises from ice packs in the water, drifts, darkens, and settles in the snowfield of the deserted Lenin stadium. One of the world's largest, it is lost in this white continent. "There is something in the Russian soul," said Berdyayev, "that corresponds to the immensity, the vagueness, the infinitude of the Russian land." I soar and sink with this understanding.
On this side of the river, everything has changed and remains the same. Flat fields, flimsy red flags, mile after mile of prefabricated apartment houses; and a scattering of furtive figures hunched into fraying collars of ankle-length overcoats. This section of the city is a showplace of postwar Soviet construction, but winter ravages new buildings of brick and cement block as relentlessly as any Volga cabin. Peeling from their dour facades, bricks plop into nets hastily hung to protect pedestrians. Joints sever, sidewalks crumble into the snow. A fortune is spent on repairing the ubiquitous cracking, flaking and cleaving, and much patchwork is abandoned midway when teams are summoned to more urgent emergencies. Even the new Palace of Pioneers, star of a thousand magazine features, has lost the battle to winter, chipping apart before it is fully fitted out. But runny-nosed children, bundled in fur until they're nearly round, are swooping down snow-covered mounds of sand and gravel left by the builders, whooping like Indians on their homemade skis.
Below me, a splendid boulevard perpendicular to the central artery separates the University from its sporting grounds beyond. Straight, broad, Olympian, it belongs to this country's Great Shining Future, for which elaborate plans are regularly remade. But it is empty now and already eroded: mournful for the present and mocking the future. A crew of women wrapped in black shawls is sweeping it clean of the new snow, swinging their witches' besoms in the age-old scything motion. Even the flanking firs and birches are stunted by the climate.
I am high in the Stalinesque tower of Moscow University,
Notes from My Window X 3
looking north at this panorama in the light of the mid-morning dawn. It is gray: a solid plane of heavy cloud presses on earth and shoulders with a relentlessness that groans "Russian winter." And cold: icicles dangle from the skyscraper's ornate cornices, although this is the first day of December, only the beginning of the annual trial. And stilclass="underline" the thump of student shoes striking a lumpish soccer ball reaches me from the courtyard eighteen stories below. (Those shoes! And many must last another winter.) A raw wind sneaks through my dormitory window although it is double, like all in Russia, and workers appeared in October to stuff cotton wadding between the warped frames.
Inside, the lights are on despite the hour, the bulbs emitting a hum. This huge complex of buildings, the pride of Soviet education, is a Socialist Achievement worn in a decade to a provincial sitting room's homey dilapidation. I am Pinocchio unanimated: the weight of everything devitalizes my limbs. The Russian I hear from the corridor is like a language I knew in an earlier life rather than sounds I first heard as a Harvard senior in my typical scramble for the beautiful and true, this time in Russian courses after three prosaic pre-law years. The corridor itself seems closer to the spirit of my inner life—a hall so ordinary that it gives you a headache, but with the expectation of something ennobling at the end—than my own progression from Manhattan to Orange County with my family, then to Cambridge as their white hope. Its threadbare oriental runners discharge a smell of must and dust; in the common room, fat rubber plants compete for space with massive sofas of disintegrating leather. For show, the floors are scrubbed every month—with an acrid liquid that corrodes the once-precious wood.
A mechanic is repairing the elevator again. Arriving grimy and cheerful in early morning, he spent the first three hours flirting with a busty cleaning woman and trying to borrow tools. The elevator will break down again tomorrow, but no one will waste time lodging a complaint. Even on good days, it's shut off" before midnight to save electricity for the current Five-Year Plan.
Anastasia is slipping away from me and I can't stop it unless I somehow become a better man. I'm not going to call her today; and Alyosha is still away, so there is nothing much to do with
4^MOSCOW FAREWELL
myself. It took this moment of musing to tell me how much my life here has come down to just these two people. Maybe I'll go to the library later—or on a book-buying outing into town, my standard excursion to pass time while pretending to be busy at something useful. Meanwhile, I'm going to stay here at my twelfth-floor window, watching the pickup game of soccer and the hearty, sweatsuited girl students taking their morning jogs through the snow. Just sit here, dreaming and resting. I want to merge with the mood of this place: the oilcloth on my tiny table that links me to my grandmother's ghetto kitchen; my pal, the wooden lamp on the desk. With this heaviness, sadness, acceptance of fate.
The room smells of slightly rancid lard. Roommate Viktor is frying potatoes on the old hot plate in his corner. Twice daily, after breakfast and supper, he drains the lard back into a pickle jar, to jell gray on the window ledge and be re-used until fully consumed. His skillet lacks a handle, and Viktor stoically endures every burn to his stubby fingers. My suggestion to purchase a replacement produces only bewilderment: "Ekh, but I can't waste the cooking part, the metal!" The potatoes come from his family vegetable patch, a major treasure of the beloved family plot. Before being sliced into the pan, each dwarfish bulblet is clasped for a tender, proprietary instant.