We shall admit that we were not among the lucky few who had an opportunity to leaf through the young historian Kuznetsov’s thesis; rather, we watched from the shadows. We cheered from the sidelines. Kuznetsov’s work (415 pages long!) drew immediate attention from the department’s senior professoriate and, submitted to the contest for student research, rightly won Vladik first place and a special gift: a copy of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was widely available in bookstores at the time. In any case, we are not in a position to judge the merit of Vladik’s work, but we do know for certain, from Vladik’s close friends, that no work of such length, exhaustiveness, and, most importantly, elegance – nothing written in such a vivid, lively, elegant style so uncommon among our homegrown historians – has been produced by a student ever since the department’s founding. People saw a great future for Vladik; the old Latin professor, Dr. Troitsky, recognized Vladik publicly, before the entire class that had so much trouble memorizing Exegi monumentum (The Odes of Horace, book 3), for his virtuosic command of the toothache-inducing but eminently useful Latin. “Ab uno disce omnes” (from one, learn all) Vladik’s classmates said in the hallways, expressing their respect. “Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur” (anything said in Latin seems more profound) Vladik answered, dazzling the class with his erudition and blushing ferociously.
We don’t know whether Vladik’s hero, Marcus Porcius Cato, also possessed the gift of turning his countenance a healthy rosy color at the drop of a hat, but he can be presumed, with a great degree of certainty, to have undergone physical training of the same exacting standards as Vladik’s. The young Kuznetsov, who has been taught that every man is a master of his fate, and that mens sana in corpore sano, followed every prescription of the old Colonel to the letter, and these, rumor had it, included running six miles every day in full combat gear, which in peacetime was replaced by a special set of bricks loaded into a backpack on Vladik’s back. It was clear that Vladik intended to live, like his Ancient Roman hero, to be eighty-five – no more, no less.
Gaining a certain degree of fame among his classmates did nothing to check Vladik’s passionate pursuit of achievement. Even his appearance – his very image as the fans of Western borrowings would call it – dramatically set Kuznetsov apart from the rest of his jeans-wearing, sloppy-looking cohort. Always trim, although not at all tall; always in perfectly ironed grandfather’s trousers and a clean shirt with a narrow officer’s tie, with his hair cropped short, and with a pair of plain, wire-rimmed glasses and his unchanging fake-leather briefcase of immense capacity, even in winter Vladik did not wear anything that was not absolutely necessary. Once, during the ferocious frosts of ‘75, he was seen in a simple gray sport coat with neatly stitched leather elbow patches.
During the annual September trip to the vegetable warehouse, where the students were used as cheap labor to help with the harvest, Vladik always stood post at the packing machine, and while others found countless excuses to go check the fruit room, he spent his shift filling sacks with wet potatoes, the sight of which invariably prompted him to lament the poor storage conditions and, sometimes, express his personal, deeply held belief:
“My grandfather,” he might say to a really close friend, “did not fight the war so that some little thief from Armenia could nickel-and-dime the Empire.”
The warehouse manager, as chance would have it, was a stunningly handsome Armenian who got his start in the History Department in Yerevan, but later traded his humanitarian bona fides for a Moscow degree in Food Technology.
“All my friends are now PhDs,” he would tell the students. “But I’ve no regrets. I’ve been here three years – and I’m driving my third car.”
We must also mention that, back in those archaic times – the mid-70s – even the most critically-minded students who may have been reading The Gulag Archipelago on the sly and occasionally tuned in, for lack of better things to do, to the Voice of America broadcasts, were not nearly as politicized as they are today. Sure, you could easily tell who was opposed to the regime, but things never went beyond a political joke or two. Neither were Moscow’s suburbs as stratified and divided as they have become: Lyubertsy, for example, was yet to produce its famous tribe of body-builders. We do believe – and let it be noted that we are the first to formulate this historical hypothesis – that it was Vladik Kuznetsov himself who planted the seed of this Schwarzenegger movement on one particular occasion, especially when one recalls that, in addition to running, Vladik also lifted weights according to a unique method developed, again, by his legendary grandfather.
The occasion was this. Vladik was always gallant. He was gallant to a fault and without any ulterior motives. One night, he and a friend were going home after classes, and came upon the following unattractive scene next to the Dawn movie theater: A gorilla from among the local thugs who even back then were considered dangerous, stood at the steps to the movie theater next to a person of female gender and, without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, asked, “So what, bitch, are we going or not?”
That is how his question was related to us – verbatim.
Pushing his friend aside, Vladik rushed to the gorilla, and the sidewalk, we should mention, is quite a ways off from the steps of the theater, so the gorilla had plenty of time to consider Vladik’s approach. Vladik’s intentions, however, were so unexpected, that the gorilla felt compelled to move his cigarette from the right corner of his chapped mouth to the left. Vladik slammed on the breaks right before the guy, and, breathing hard, demanded, “Apologize to the lady right this minute!”
The king of thugs – and the gorilla happened to be the notorious Grammar, may he rest in peace – made a step back and said to no one in particular, “I be killing him now.”
The jab followed swiftly and caught Vladik on the bridge of his nose. Awash in blood, Vladik quickly got up and ran up to Grammar again.
“I repeat, you must apologize!” he demanded again, his voice breaking into a single extended sob.
“Naw,” Grammar said, utterly confused. “I be killing him now for real.”
He hit again and knocked Vladik down, but even that did not stop Kuznetsov. After he went down the fourth time, the presumably offended female party saw fit to interfere: she took Grammar by the arm, half-hugging his shoulder to contain his zeal, and said, “Let’s go now, or else you might kill him for real.”
“All right,” Grammar said, and they left.
Vladik shouted after them – he still demanded an apology.
The person who told us this story swore that he remembered the face of a curious boy who happened to be hanging out on the scene, and many years later recognized him in the picture that accompanied a long article about the “Lyuberneggers” in Ogonyok: the protruding ears and the particular shape of the superciliary arch, he said, left no doubt about it.
But let us return to Vladik’s first year at the University. Aside from his general physical stamina, his disdain for luxury, his persistence and motivation, Vladik was known for his humble Stargorodian roots.
“All my ancestors plowed land,” he liked to say.
This insistence on rustic roots, which, admittedly, does not fit very well with the apocryphal narrative of the old man’s split from the stockyard, has become such an integral part of Vladik’s public persona that we feel it is perfectly legitimate to include his illuminating biography in our series of true life stories of the brilliant and ordinary people associated with Stargorod in one way or another.