FEATS OF MEMORY
“Some twenty years later, I undertook a journey to Lausanne, in order to find the old Swiss Lady who had been first Sebastian’s governess, then mine. She must have been about fifty when she left us in 1914; correspondence between us had long ceased, so I was not at all sure of finding her still alive, in 1936. But I did. There existed, as I discovered, a union of old Swiss women who had been governesses in Russia before the revolution. They ‘lived in their past,’ as the very kind gentleman who guided me there explained, spending their last years — and most of these ladies were decrepit and dotty — comparing notes, having petty feuds with one another and reviling the state of affairs in the Switzerland they had discovered after their many years of life in Russia. Their tragedy lay in the fact that during all those years spent in a foreign country they had kept absolutely immune to its influence (even to the extent of not learning the simplest Russian words); somewhat hostile to their surroundings — how often have I heard Mademoiselle bemoan an exile, complain of being slighted and misunderstood, and yearn for her fair native land; but when these poor wandering souls came home, they found themselves complete strangers in a changed country, so that by queer trick of sentiment — Russia (which to them had really been an unknown abyss, remotely rumbling beyond a lamplit corner of a stuffy backroom with family photographs in mother-of-pearl frames and a water-colour view of Chillon castle), unknown Russia now took on the aspect of a lost paradise, a vast, vague but retrospectively friendly place, peopled with wistful fancies. I found Mademoiselle very deaf and gray, but as voluble as ever, and after the first effusive embraces she started to recall little facts of my childhood which were either hopelessly distorted, or so foreign to my memory that I doubted their past reality.”
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
New Directions Publishers, New York, 1941
3 JUNE
Tuesday, my last day in the USSR. I don’t know whether it’s a holiday, at least for the schools; I seem to be seeing more young people in the street than the day before yesterday, Sunday. Before breakfast I packed my luggage; all that’s left is to go back later and pack my medicines, some books, the notebooks I’ve written in these past days. I walked a little, and visited secondhand bookshops. The one in the lobby of the Hotel Metropol is still wonderful. I love casual encounters, sitting on the bench of a boulevard or in a square, starting up conversations with gossipy old women whom I barely manage to understand, with young people, smoking a cigarette with them, and then, getting up, leaving them dumbfounded at having met a Mexican for the first time. I arranged a meeting with Kyrim in the bar inside the Metropol, the one that looks like an American film noir set, where the mix of visitors never seems to jibe with the hotel or with Moscow. From the first day I went there, years ago, I was fascinated. Who were those Russians and the eccentric foreigners who landed there? These are the questions that never interest political scientists or Kremlinologists, which is why it always bored me to read them or listen to them while dining with them at an embassy. Of course, years later I can think of some very remarkable exceptions: some extremely brilliant Italians and, above all, two Poles without equaclass="underline" Ryszard Kapuściński, the most educated, intelligent, and penetrating chronicler of the Soviet world; and K.S. Karol, both extraordinarily talented at musing on the wide range of elements and details, without becoming prisoners to the naked facts, those which, by themselves, very rarely constitute the truth. When I worked at the embassy I had the opportunity to hear correspondents from foreign newspapers talk about Soviet society, as if it were equal to the Stalinist era. Kapuściński and Karol know how to read other signs and therefore propose richer and much more pertinent accounts. It was impossible to convince any “specialist” that beneath the surface they were examining there were different currents fighting among themselves, even in the Kremlin itself, like there were throughout the socialist world, except perhaps in Albania and Romania. Now perestroika has shown them a different storyline and again they understand nothing. Buried beneath a deceptively homogeneous surface were varied interests, alliances that were difficult perceive and phobias and brutal hatreds that assumed a monolithic unit. Kapuściński recently stated in an interview that “people, even before perestroika, were accustomed to expressing themselves with silence, not with words, the places they frequented and those they avoided, the way they looked at something, the neutral words in a commentary had their meaning. Despite the contempt and arrogance towards society, power continued to pay attention to the kind of silence that they practiced.”33