Traveling on a ship is the best vacation for me. A ship is the best way to see the real Russia, vanishing into the past and desperately trying to survive, impoverished and infinitely rich spiritually, dear and unique. And the best way to travel is not on a special tour ship but on an ordinary route. It stops at small places where the tourists never go.
As soon as you get aboard, a measured life begins that is full of new experiences at the same time. You settle into a comfortable cabin (naturally, you must go first class) and run to take a spot in the restaurant. You have to hurry; otherwise you end up on the second shift and will have to look at dirty dishes from the previous seating before you are served. Then you check out the decks and the passengers, looking for the more decent- looking faces; meeting new people is part of the vacation plea-
sures. Finally you settle in a deck chair, and the most charming part of the trip starts: looking at the shore, the villages and small towns floating by. It’s amazing, you can sit for hours and never get tired.
Every day the ship stops for several hours, sometimes in big cities, sometimes in small godforsaken spots. You wander down unpaved streets, looking at old wooden houses, half- ruined churches, and ancient estates, and your heart winces with love and sadness. What is happening to this great, beautiful country? What curse has befallen it, and for what sins? Russia could be one of the richest countries in the world, but its people are struggling for simple survival.
One of the most horrible aspects of provincial life is drunkenness. People drink from depression, from frustration, and simply out of habit. They drink everything that comes to hand: vodka, wine, moonshine, lab alcohol, lotions, and colognes. I was told about a small town in Siberia where almost all the men had blue faces. The local factory manufactured some kind of technical liquid that was blue and contained alcohol, so they all drank it instead of vodka.
Against this background of total blackout, you have the lovely regional museums with old furniture, paintings, and stories of the local guides about the former cultural life of these cities, about the famous writers and artists who visited. In places like that you can find pure people, who have managed to preserve islands of spirituality in this hopeless atmosphere. These people have marvelous libraries at home since there is a lot of time for reading on the long nights and there’s no place to go anyway. Thanks to these people, tiny threads of Russian culture still extend throughout the land.
It is amusing to see advertisements for American films, local rock groups, punks, and other imitations of Western fashions. It’s a funny, ridiculous parody at times. America seems as far away as the moon or Mars. But what can you do? Young people want to live in the twentieth century. They just don’t know how to adjust to it. There used to be a joke about modern times. Japanese specialists come to the Soviet Union. They inspect a factory and say, “We thought that it would take you twenty years to catch up to us, but it turns out you’ll be behind forever.”
Yes, the Russian provinces live in their own dimension, often contrary to common sense but with mystical attraction and enigmatic power.
I’ve wandered very far from the ship. It’s time to get back on deck. There’s not a lot of space on a ship, so in a day or two everyone knows everyone else by sight, and there are all kinds of gossip and squabbles—someone is talking too loudly under a window, someone has a repulsive face. That adds variety to the trip, too, but on the whole, people are in good spirits, and the ship’s steady motion and the changing views have a wonderful effect on the nervous system.
The big Volga ships take a lot of transient passengers. This is often a sad sight. They don’t have berths booked, and they sleep in the corridors. Many carry lots of luggage, sacks, and bags. They have to be alert at night, so that their things aren’t stolen. These people are used to hard lives, they’ve never seen any other, so they don’t complain. I remember a toothless old man with a peg leg, who slept outside the door of our cabin one night. I felt awful, but what could we have done? In the morning he was in a good mood and joked around as he loaded up the heavy sacks on his back. To a girl who had grown up in a
modern Moscow apartment, this life seemed scary and hard to understand. But that’s exactly how a great part of the country lived.
I also remember Gypsies at the Nizhnevolzhsky landing. I’ve never seen others like them. They were real, free Gypsies of the steppe. The men were tall and handsome with tar black hair and piercing blue eyes. They wore red shirts and wide trousers. The women and children huddled behind them. The Gypsies casually leaned on the railing and studied us. We were exotic for them, too. I thought the handsome men had come out of the pages of nineteenth-century novels. Russian gentlemen might catch a glimpse of Gypsies, get off the ship, and run off to sprees and to burn away their lives. “I’ll go off with a crowd of Gypsies, they know how not to mourn,” claimed a popular song back then.
These voyages by ship allowed me to learn about and love the real Russia. Only now, many years later, do I fully realize that.
FEBRUARY 15. I haven’t written for several days. There was a lot to do at work. I’ve reread what I have written so far and have decided that I have to write some more about one of my trips to the heart of Russia.
One day I decided that I was tired of civilized vacations and I headed out into the countryside. Friends arranged a trip to a tourist base on Lake Seliger. It’s not that far, an overnight trip by train, but it’s very remote and beautiful.
Mama, our friend, and I arrived early in the morning. An
ugly modern building stood on the lake, and it made me feel a little sad. The room was ascetically gloomy and cold, the floor in the bathroom was raw concrete, the sink and toilet were dirty and broken, and none of the electric outlets worked. We cheered ourselves up by saying we had come for the fresh air and we’d only be sleeping in the room. We went to breakfast. It was a huge room of dubious cleanliness, and like most such places, it lacked knives. The food was barely edible. We gave ourselves another counseling session and decided to get on with the vacation immediately.
We went for a walk. The locale was divine: an ancient church on a hill, an abandoned small cemetery, the lake stretching into infinity, and half-ruined village houses. We wandered around half the day and returned to so-called civilization. Pop music blared, men were walking around in jogging suits, and the hotel stank of cheap cafeteria food. Dinner consisted of hamburgers made with spoiled meat, and despite my nonfin- ickiness, I couldn’t eat.
We put up with the joys of the tourist life for three days and then admitted we had to get out of there. We signed up for a week-long canoe trip. At least we’d be out of the hotel, and we’d do our own cooking over a fire and be in the middle of the countryside.
A group of fifteen people got together. We loaded up the boats and cast off. About three hours later we came across a miraculous sight: a large monastery on an island in the middle of the Seliger lake. It had been founded several centuries ago and was famous all over Russia. From afar it looked like a piece of St. Petersburg: granite banks, a large cathedral with several
cupolas in the center, and numerous church buildings. Pilgrims—noblemen and simple folk—traveled to the site and lived here for weeks at a time, for the monastery received and fed everyone. While the monastery looked majestic and beautiful from afar, up close it was a pitiful sight. In the early years of Soviet rule almost all the priests were shot or sent to labor camps. The churches and cathedrals were shut and turned into warehouses. The other buildings were used to house invalids. Later a penal colony for minors was set up on the island. One of the punishments was forcing the boys up a scaffolding high in a cupola to chip away chunks of the ancient frescoes. What a fine way to instill love for Russian culture! They also broke off pieces of stone and brick from the old buildings to use in local construction. Gradually everything fell into total disrepair, and the monastery cells were turned into grim skeletons of once- lovely abodes. The local guides told us about all this with pain and hopelessness. They said that restoration had been under way for many years, but there was almost no money, and the needed repairs would take several decades. We saw no more than three or four workmen on the entire territory, but the local tourist base was doing good business. It was handing out boats, sleeping bags, and canned goods. The tourist camp workers told us proudly that there was a plan to turn the entire island into a major tourist complex. “Once we restore the monastery buildings, we’ll turn them into hotels, open a museum in the main cathedral, and this place will be civilized at last.” It didn’t occur to any of them to return the monastery to the Russian Orthodox Church and to restore its former glory.