“Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long, there will be good and bad to come, there will be everything. Great is mother Russia,” he said, and looked round on each side of him. “I have been all over Russia, and I have seen everything in her, and you may believe my words, my dear. There will be good and there will be bad. I went as a delegate from my village to Siberia, and I have been to the Amur River and the Altai Mountains and I settled in Siberia; I worked the land there, then I was homesick for mother Russia and I came back to my native village. We came back to Russia on foot; and I remember we went on a steamer, and I was thin as thin, all in rags, barefoot, freezing with cold, and gnawing a crust, and a gentleman who was on the steamer — the kingdom of heaven be his if he is dead — looked at me pitifully, and the tears came into his eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘your bread is black, your days are black…’ And when I got home, as the saying is, there was neither stick nor stall; I had a wife, but I left her behind in Siberia, she was buried there. So I am living as a day labourer. And yet I tell you: since then I have had good as well as bad. Here I do not want to die, my dear, I would be glad to live another twenty years; so there has been more of the good. And great is our mother Russia!” and again he gazed to each side and looked round.25
In a single paragraph he has invoked the greatness of Mother Russia three times! Not only is a Russian susceptible to feeling the pulse of Mother Russia. Rainer Maria Rilke, whom the Russian Lou Andreas-Salomé accompanied for several months as a guide, mother, muse, lover, teacher, writes on July 31, 1900, aboard a steamer down the Volga, “All that I had seen until then was but a picture of country, river, world. Here was the real thing in natural size. I felt as if I had watched the creation; few words for all that is, things made on God the Father’s scale.”26 What about that!
23 Pitol uses Tiflis to allude to the city’s historic name and one that Pushkin would have known, to distinguish it from contemporary Tbilisi. —Trans.
24 Translated by Richard Howard.
25 Translated by Constance Garnett.
26 Translated by Margaret Wettlin.