Rybkina, the local Party organizer, who was also the head teacher, consulted with the higher-ups on the school board, as well as the regional committee of the Party, about how to deal with a criminal in their midst. The case was clear: the teacher was guilty of the corruption of a minor. On the other hand, the underage girl had come of age in the months that followed, and at the same time the transgressor of the law had made her his legal wife. But could he go unpunished?
The teachers maintained a unanimous tense silence whenever Victor Yulievich entered the room. The school administrators—the holy trinity of principal, Party organizer, and labor union organizer—had initially wanted to convene a faculty meeting to discuss the issue. But Larisa Stepanovna preferred to launch a probe with the authorities first. Reports were sent to the school board and the regional committee of the Party.
* * *
It was during this last winter of school that Victor Yulievich began writing the book he had been mulling over for several years. The title had already suggested itself: Russian Childhood. He wasn’t sure about the genre—whether it would become a collection of essays or a monograph.
He laid no claim to any discoveries. He was distinctly aware that his interests partook of a variety of disciplines: developmental psychology, pedagogy, and anthropology in the broadest sense of the word. At the same time, the logic of his thoughts developed according to the terms deployed by medical doctors and biologists. The influence of his friend Kolesnik was undeniable.
He was at pains to describe the moral awakening of the adolescent, which is as fundamental and necessary as cutting teeth, babbling, and the first steps the baby attempts during the early months of development. In other words, it was the whole thrilling yet routine growth pattern that he was observing in his own child:
Thus it begins. At two or so they rush
From breasts into the dark of melody,
They chirp, they crow, they warble—then words
Appear already by the age of three …
The lyrical model that Pasternak outlined was far more obvious to him than all the tenets and premises of developmental psychology. Moral maturation seemed to be as valid a dimension of human development as the biological processes that unfolded in tandem with it. But moral awakening occurs in different ways, and the framework within which it takes place varies according to the individual cast of mind, and other contingencies. Moral awakening, or “moral initiation,” as he called it, occurs in boys between eleven and fourteen years of age, most often spurred by unfavorable circumstances—an unhappy or difficult family situation, an assault on one’s sense of self-worth and dignity (or the dignity of those one holds dear), or the loss of a loved one. In short, an internal upheaval that calls the soul to life.
Every person has his “sore spots,” and this is where the inner revolution of the personality begins. According to Victor Yulievich’s notions, the presence of a catalyst or “initiator” is almost a sine qua non of this process, whether it be a teacher, a guardian, an older friend, or even a relative (usually a fairly distant one). As in baptism, a child’s parents rarely assume the role of godparents (unless, for example, the child’s life is in some sort of danger). In exceptional circumstances, even a book that falls into a child’s hands at the right moment can serve as an “initiator.”
Following a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the author went on to describe several cases of initiation derived from classical Russian literature, examining the maturation of contemporary adolescents and analyzing the reasons for their tardy development. He also discussed the most alarming phenomenon of alclass="underline" “initiation avoidance.”
It also occurred to Victor Yulievich that at just this age, Lutherans and Anglicans undergo the process of Confirmation, conscious acceptance of the faith; Jewish boys celebrate their bar mitzvahs, in which they are inducted into the adult community; and Muslims are circumcised. Thus, it seems that communities of believers attach particular significance to this transition from childhood to adulthood, whereas the atheist world has completely foregone this crucial mechanism. Becoming a Pioneer or a Komsomol member could hardly be considered a serious replacement for this practice.
The community sinks below the level of a moral minimum when the number of people who have not undergone this process of initiation in early youth exceeds half the population—this was the view that Victor Yulievich held at that time.
He and the late Vygotsky had serious differences of opinion about the formation and displacement of cultural interests, but that hardly mattered, since developmental psychology was a “closed” subject, forbidden, along with genetics and cybernetics. In truth, Victor Yulievich did not hold out any hopes that his future book might be published. But these kinds of pragmatic considerations could gain no toehold amid the heady pace of his life, which gave him every happiness he could ever have wished for—creative work, a marvelous young wife holding up that very diaper with the yellowish stain, a diminutive miracle with wonderful tiny fingers and lips and eyes, a little creature that grew more human by the day, and students whose enthusiasm raised him to heights hitherto unknown. He smiled in his sleep, and he smiled upon waking.
* * *
The country was, meanwhile, in the throes of its own mad existence. After the unseen wrangling at Dzhugashvili’s coffin, the hidden struggle for power, after the return of the first thousands of people from the prison camps and from exile, after the inexplicable, unanticipated Twentieth Party Congress, the uprising in Hungary began and ended.
Victor Yulievich, steeped in the affairs of his own life, was only half-aware of these events. His “inner” life during this period seemed more important than the “outer.”
In September, during the first days of school, Tasya Vorobieva, a pretty student who took night classes at the pedagogical institute and with whom Victor Yulievich was on good terms, slipped him a packet of faded pages with Khrushchev’s address to the Twentieth Party Congress typed on them. Although half a year had already passed since that event, it had still not been published anywhere. This address, full of cautious half-truths, was distributed only among the highest echelons of the Party. Rank and file Party members were informed about it during closed meetings, and only orally. The top of the document was marked “For Official Use Only”—thus, not for ordinary people. This was the run-of-the-mill Soviet phantasmagoria: a secret report for one sector of the populace, which it was required to keep secret from the other. A government with an impaired faculty of reason.
Victor Yulievich also read Khrushchev’s address, which so many people were talking about. It was, indeed, very interesting. History was unfolding before their very eyes. The tyrant had fallen, and three years later the whole pack dared raise its voice against him. Where were you before, all you clever ones? The document, which had momentous consequences, was in equal measure terrifying and revelatory for the Party bosses. This typewritten report, which was continually reproduced and passed from hand to hand, was the first underground samizdat, which in those years had not yet received its name.
While this domestic typing and dissemination of Khrushchev’s report was already under way in Moscow, Doctor Zhivago’s hour had not yet arrived. The poems from the novel, however, had already begun to circulate through these clandestine channels.