From Pushkin Square they would pick out some unfamiliar route to explore. They walked through Bogoslovsky Lane to Trekhprudny, to the house where the poet Marina Tsvetaeva had lived. Or they would take Tverskoy and Nikitsky Boulevards to the Arbat, and cross Malaya Molchanovka near the little house where Lermontov had lived. Passing through Sobachya Square they found themselves in front of Scriabin’s last apartment. This was where he played, and people still alive today attended his private recitals at home. The students asked questions, and the names stuck in their memories. They ambled through the city without any preconceived plan, and it was impossible to imagine anything better than these aimless pilgrimages of discovery.
Victor Yulievich spent long hours in the library preparing for these outings, digging through old books and scouting for rare tidbits of information. In the History Library, he discovered rich deposits of handwritten memoirs, photographs, and letters. Some of the materials, judging by the library’s records, had never before been examined. He came across a great deal of valuable and intriguing information. He was surprised to learn that many, if not all, of the notable people of the nineteenth century, while living very disparate lives, were related by blood. Certain far-flung clans were intimately intertwined by birth, like a tree with myriad branches. Letters from before the Revolution constantly witnessed to this remarkable web of kinship, and all these connections, as well as family disputes and quarrels and mésalliances, were transformed in Tolstoy’s novels into something larger, greater, than just a family chronicle. It’s like the Russian Bible, thought Victor Yulievich.
Like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, Victor Yulievich was tied by every strand of hair to the ground of Russian culture, and these ties extended to the boys, who were acquiring the taste, growing accustomed to this dusty, papery, ephemeral nourishment.
With the group of boys he would walk down Gorky Street, past Eliseevsky’s, the finest grocery store in the capital, telling his LORLs about Zinaida Alexandrovna Volkonskaya, who had owned this palatial house before its reconstruction.
“She held a literary salon, famous all over Moscow, and all of Moscow’s high society would gather here. Writers, artists, musicians, and professors would all attend, among them Pushkin. Not long ago I came upon an interesting document in the library—a report from Colonel Bibikov dated 1826, in which it was spelled out in black and white: ‘I keep a close eye on the writer Pushkin, insofar as possible. The homes he visits most frequently are the homes of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, Prince Vyazemsky, former minister Dmitriev, and Prosecutor Zhikharev. Conversations there revolve primarily around literature.’ You understand what this means, don’t you?”
Ilya was the first to respond. “What’s there to understand? They were spying on him.”
“Precisely. Because all through the ages there have been people who want to ‘revolve primarily around literature.’ Like all of us here!” The teacher laughed. “And then there are the Colonel Bibikovs, who are charged with keeping a close eye on them. Yes, such are the times.”
He hadn’t said anything in particular, but hovered just on the brink of it. He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.
“Literature is the only thing that allows us to survive, the only thing that helps us to reconcile ourselves to the time we live in,” Victor Yulievich told his charges.
Everyone agreed eagerly. Only Sanya had his doubts—what about music?
From listening closely to Mozart and Chopin, he had grasped that there was another dimension quite distinct from literature, a dimension into which his grandmother, then Liza and his music teacher, Evgenia Danilovna, had initiated him. This was the place he had escaped to every day after school, when his hand was still whole and intact. But even now, with his mangled fingers, he had not parted ways with music—he listened to it constantly, picked out melodies on occasion. How could he play, without the use of two fingers? He wasn’t going to fool himself.
For Mikha, these literary journeys were also a form of escape—from his dreary aunt Genya, with her trivial concerns—and a flight into a rarified atmosphere inhabited by noble men and beautiful women.
Ilya didn’t miss a single one of these walks through the city, either. He had set his own task—to document all the events and compile reports accompanied by photographs. Some of these reports were stored at Victor Yulievich’s home, and the others in Ilya’s closet.
* * *
More than a decade would pass before the degenerate heir of Colonel Bibikov, Colonel Chibikov (the immortal Gogol grins each time such echoes in nomenclature spring up), would get his hands on the childhood archive, and fifty more years would pass until an Institute for Central and East European Studies, in a small German town with a fairytale name, would register this archive under a seven-digit number with a forward slash, and the archive would pass into the hands of another one of the LORLs, also a student of Victor Yulievich’s, but a year younger, for safekeeping.
Getting to know these Moscow boys after his experience at the village school, Victor Yulievich again returned to his musings about childhood. He lacked knowledge of the subject, so he began reading scholarly works on the matter.
He managed to get access to semiforbidden books on child psychology, from Freud, whose books stood gathering dust on the bookshelves of the major libraries, to Vygotsky, whose books had been withdrawn from circulation and placed in restricted-access collections. Victor found almost all Vygotsky’s published works in the home of one of his friends, whose grandmother had been fired when the subject of “pedology” had come under fire from above. She had learned to knit sweaters to get by, but she guarded all of Vygotsky’s books like rare treasures, only allowing a select few to read them—and that without “borrowing rights.” Victor Yulievich came on Sunday morning and sat until evening, with a few leisurely breaks for traditional Moscow-style tea-drinking.
Everything he read was very intriguing, but put too great an emphasis on “scholarliness.” Matters that were self-evident, like the well-known fact that adolescent boys stop respecting their parents, become irritable and argumentative, experience heightened sexual curiosity, and that all of this is the result of the hormonal storm assaulting the body, were presented as discoveries. The author’s explanations and interpretations sometimes seemed to Victor Yulievich to be purely speculative and unfounded.
He didn’t find what he was seeking. He had come across a very important notion in his reading of Tolstoy, who called this tormented period “the wilderness of adolescence.” Tolstoy came closest of all to describing what he saw in his agitated, disheveled students. There came a moment when they seemed to lose everything that had accumulated in them until that time, and life seemed to start anew. But not all of them were able to find a way out of the wilderness; a significant number of them remained lost in it forever.
Victor Yulievich’s sole interlocutor on this subject was Mishka Kolesnik, his neighborhood friend from childhood. Mishka was a war invalid, a biologist and an intrepid homespun philosopher. He listened attentively, but couldn’t abide long-winded deliberation. He interrupted Victor Yulievich, grumbling, “Yes, go on, go on. I get the point.” He tried to hasten his friend’s train of thought, interjecting strange, at first incomprehensible observations and comments—which were in fact the articulation of a biological perspective.
Victor Yulievich gradually grew accustomed to his interlocutor’s unusual thought processes, and was gripped by the idea of the universalism of knowledge toward which the lame Kolesnik was pushing him. He was the one who introduced Victor, an inveterate man of letters, to the principles of evolution, the one who enlightened him on the conflict between the theories of Lamarck and Darwin, and even elaborated on such technical particulars as metamorphosis, neoteny, and chromosomal heredity.