Fans left behind heaps of rubbish: beer cans, chip bags, dried fish heads, corn cobs, and newspaper cones, flattened on the asphalt. All this was thickly strewn with sunflower seed hulls. The hulls swirled in light little tornados that blew off the river and rose over the roofs of building No. 11, Zhdanovskaya Embankment, Ofitsersky Lane, and the entire Petrograd side.
Solovyov had arrived on a match day. He was not a fan and he regarded football matches with irritation. At the same time, there was something about how they took place that appealed to him. The roar of many thousands of fans at the stadium excited him: that roar was sometimes indistinct, like a distant waterfall, and sometimes explosive (after a goal). But it was always powerful.
Solovyov sat on the windowsill and watched spectators disperse after the match. They flowed across the wide bridge over the Zhdanovka River like a viscous mass that could not come apart: that bridge was directly under Solovyov’s window. To Solovyov, the slow procession that was devoid of anything personal and the continuous, indistinct rumble seemed to be the embodiment of history’s gait. Majestic and pointless, like any concerted movement.
Looking out the window at the motley crowd, he remembered the black-and-white crowds in revolutionary newsreels. The spasmodic motions of people walking. The comical rocking of those standing; in modern filming, you did not notice that those standing are also moving. Little clouds of steam. They came up suddenly, as if they had been added in. Disappeared suddenly. The same with cigarette smoke. People were now walking that same way past the Second Cadet Corps (now the Military Space Academy), where the general once studied.
Football fans wearing Zenith caps were walking past the Second Cadet Corps. Thousands of dark blue caps. Thousands of dark blue scarves. They irritated Solovyov tremendously. And they did not know that a general had studied here. Solovyov began to feel lonely because of the abundance of people.
This feeling was new for him. He had never yet felt lonely in Petersburg. Even in the absence of friends, this city—with its strange aura and a people unlike in the rest of Russia—had sated him. He had not felt abandoned before when he was all by himself. He felt that now, though. It crossed his mind that Leeza had abandoned him, though in actuality it was the opposite. Solovyov picked up Tolstoy’s Aelita and peered out the window.
Beyond the gate, a wasteland reached to the embankment of the Zhdanovka River. Beyond the river there stood the vague contours of trees on Petrovsky Island. Beyond them, there faded a doleful sunset that could not fade away. Its light touched at the edges of long clouds that seemed like islands reaching into the sky’s green waters. Above them was green sky where a few stars had begun shining. It was quiet on the old Earth. That was the only spot in the book that Solovyov genuinely liked even though it twice referred to the sky’s green color, for no reason. Sometimes it even seemed to him that there was no need to continue.
Solovyov went outside after the sunset had faded. Interesting, where had the wasteland been, anyway? Or was it a fantasy of Tolstoy’s, who wrote his novel while still in Germany? Solovyov’s foot grazed a beer can and it rolled off the sidewalk with a clink. Had Nikolai Chernyshevsky seen that wasteland? If he had seen it, that would affirm that cadet Larionov must have seen it, too.
Solovyov went to the institute the next day. Even as he was approaching the famous building with its columns, he caught a glimpse of academician Temriukovich. Temriukovich was walking along, dressed in a Mackintosh raincoat with a fifties cut: it had roomy sleeves (one of them was smudged with whitewash) and its shoulders, which had once been angular, were now sagging and rumpled. The end of its untied belt dragged along the ground. Solovyov did not want to catch up to Temriukovich. Elementary courtesy would have demanded pointing out the smudged sleeve and dragging belt to the academician, but something hinted to the graduate student that there was no point in doing so. Solovyov slowed his pace and followed the academician.
Solovyov regarded Temriukovich with respect and there was a special reason for that. It was through Temriukovich’s efforts that the complete collected works of Sergei M. Solovyov were published during the Soviet era. Despite not being a relative of Sergei Solovyov, graduate student Solovyov believed in their spiritual kinship and felt favorable toward everyone who was somehow connected to the great man with whom he shared a surname.
As a scholar, Temriukovich was not one to reach for the stars, but there was no need in his case anyway. The necessities for the edition he had conceived were painstakingness and diligence in the task, and, to some extent, fortitude. An edition of Sergei Solovyov was not something that was taken for granted in the Soviet Union. As a reward for successful completion of the work, Temriukovich was nominated to become an academician. Nobody counted on his being elected. Above all, candidate Temriukovich.
‘Neither Bakhtin nor Lotman were academicians,’ he had consoled himself, ‘they weren’t even corresponding members.’
But Temriukovich’s situation turned out differently from Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Yuri Lotman’s. Destiny was favorable to Temriukovich, unlike Bakhtin and Lotman. This manifested itself on one occasion, when the members of the Academy of Sciences had not come to any agreement about a candidacy. The generally foolproof mechanism—which had made academicians out of institute directors, members of the government, oligarchs, and people who were simply respected—went haywire. By not agreeing amongst themselves, the academicians intuitively voted for someone who, to their thinking, had no chance whatsoever of making it. They voted almost unanimously for Temriukovich.
There was widespread surprise at the moderate joy displayed by the newly elected academician. A much more enthusiastic reaction was shown by those who had worked toward this goal, spending years cultivating Academy members and trotting from floor to floor of the Academy’s tall Presidium building with its strange-looking golden top stories that inspired the popular nickname The Cologne Bottle. Yes, Temriukovich accepted congratulations politely and expressed satisfaction with the academicians’ vote but—as noted by corresponding member Pogosyan, who was in attendance when the results were announced—Temriukovich’s thoughts were far away.
And that was the simple truth. The new academician’s colleagues suddenly recalled the overt aloofness that had accompanied Temriukovich for the last few years. If his condition might initially have been described as deep pensiveness, nothing but overt aloofness could describe the current state of affairs. That, however, was still not the worst of it. Temriukovich’s coworkers began noticing that he was talking to himself. The first to take notice was Igor Murat, a candidate of historical sciences.
‘Let’s have a look, see what kind of book this is,’ Temriukovich said one day, as he approached a bookcase, ‘probably rubbish.’
The publication that interested the academician was Igor Murat’s book, The Revolutionary-Democratic Movement in Left-Bank Ukraine During 1861–1891. The author was standing on the other side of the bookcase, unnoticed by Temriukovich. Murat had just plunged an immersion heater into a glass of water and was preparing to have tea. Murat froze when he peered through the shelves and watched the academician pick up The Revolutionary-Democratic Movement in Left-Bank Ukraine During 1861–1891. Murat turned his gaze to the heater. It was now impossible to turn it off soundlessly. Murat listened, speechless, as the academician moistened his index finger and paged through the book.