*
A look back at the past is a magic-lantern show. ‘Memory is structured so that, like a projector, it illuminates discrete moments,’ Akhmatova said, ‘leaving unconquerable darkness all around.’ I have a small set of images ready to be summoned at will to my mind’s eye that illuminate moments on my way to the Molotov apartment.
I remember the gold letters on the spine of a black book on the shelves in my father’s study – Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of History – beneath which I slept on a camp bed for a few weeks in my childhood. I did not open the book (in which, as I later dis covered, my grandfather had pencilled his name in Adelaide, South Australia, in the year 1937) but the assertion on its spine – history has a meaning – took root in my mind, conjoined with a Russian name.
I picture Moscow the first time, on a dry day in the spring of 1980, when I walked alone with a fifteen-year-old schoolfriend from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts back to the Hotel Bucharest on the far side of the river. We were unsure of the way. We bought ice creams from a stand. They were called lakomki, white columns of frozen cream wrapped in grainy chocolate paste that we told each other were the most delicious we had ever tasted. We walked through the Alexander Gardens beneath the Kremlin Wall, across Red Square and over the river, and we had a self-consciously intellectual conversation (the first of my life) about cubism and Soviet Communism, which we thought would never end, and found some crucial link between the two. The city was empty and hard and absolutely closed. I felt that Moscow was full of tightly locked mysteries and that we were invisible explorers, untouchable and free.
This was the first of several occasions when I came close to this place as I wandered in neighbouring streets. On our walk, my friend and I would have passed not far from the Romanov building, when its hundreds of apartments were still home to the highest ranks of the Soviet nomenklatura, the privileged elite of the state apparatus and the Red Army. It is as though memory had its own intuition, independent of my thinking mind, of this particular future out of the infinitude of possible futures. As though it carefully stored that image so that I could juxtapose it with my present view of the city, from a front window in the shadowed quiet of the Molotov apartment, looking across the Kremlin Hospital in the old Sheremetev Palace toward Mokhovaya Street (then called Marx Avenue) which we must have crossed that day. From the back windows, I can see the Voentorg, the Military Department Store on Vozdvizhenka Street, on whose bare shelves in the late 1980s I found a recording of Akhmatova reciting Requiem, her poetic cycle about Stalin’s Terror. That was not long after the day in 1986 when Molotov’s funeral party gathered for a wake in this apartment, from which the KGB had already removed all the private papers and photographs deemed important to the state. The vinyl trace of the old woman’s cracked voice in the cavernous department store was a tiny improbable sign that the communist state was near withering, in a dialectic quite unlike the one that Molotov’s tireless study of Marxism– Leninism had led him to expect.
I remember too a moment of bleak conflict with the man who is now my husband. We were standing with friends outside the Lenin Library metro station, below the high pillars of the Pashkov House. It was cold, everyone was hungry (there were no bright cafes in the city then), and we could not even agree on where to cross the street. I love the surprise that the future was holding secret: the home, with children in it, that we would share, just a few hundred yards from our destitution on that windy corner.
There are closer memories. The college rooms of the Russian don who had died a few weeks before I took up my Cambridge fellowship are certainly part of the story. He had learned the language in the armed forces, where he served on the Allied aid convoys to the Soviet Arctic ports, and after the war, when Russian became a degree subject at the university, he had devoted his life to teaching Russian literature, and to his own reading. The old scholar had been known for his great height, his sarcasm, his erudition, and his particular interest in the mid-nineteenth-century conservative thinker Apollon Grigoriev. He had died intestate, having published nothing except an edition of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, with the word stresses marked in. Why should he write, he would ask, when he could read fifty times as much in the time it would have taken him to produce some academic article of little worth?
The college did not know what to do with the chaos of books and papers – ruins of a private civilisation – piled in his rooms among old shoes and half-empty medicine bottles. The bursar asked me to take a look, and I spent several days inefficiently sorting through them, deciding which volumes should be kept for the library. I could take what I wanted from the rest, which were to be given or thrown away. What did it mean to be alone, making free with this dead man’s books? Ask me for my biography and I will tell you the books I have read, Mandelstam said. The library of the Russian don revealed a man of the deepest cultivation, a true lover of books, who had lived half-secluded from the world, as scholars once could. He had acquired these books in many cities, their names – Archangel, Moscow, Helsinki, Paris, London – and the dates of acquisition inscribed in them in a light hand next to his own name: E. Sands. The Jewish Problem, a Penguin paperback, was dated ‘Feb. 1939’. A Russian New Testament in black cloth, published by the Bible Society, was inscribed ‘Cambridge Nov. 1942’. Did he take it with him on the convoys to Stalin’s USSR? In it was a scrap on which he had transcribed, half in French, half in Latin, a line about marriage from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: ‘Mais s’ils manquent de continence … melius est enim nubere … “But if they lack continence [let them marry]; for it is better to marry [than to burn]’. Left in their pages as bookmarks were scraps of ephemera, the outward events of a life slipped into the pages where the real dramas took place: the cards announcing the memorial services of deceased academics that come unbidden into college pigeon-holes each week; booksellers’ invoices; notes from abject undergraduates about late essays and cancelled supervisions; holiday postcards from friends; racy tinted prints from a nineteenth-century satirical series by Gavarni called The Gay Women of Paris. There were the marks of his pencil in many of the books, mostly correcting typos, or noting factual errors; occasionally he would cross-reference, drawing readily from across the breadth of Russian literature and beyond. I imagined him in the dusty afternoon light on the chair by the window, buses grinding in the street below, his book resting on his crossed leg, his pencil vigilant. He had a large collection of French literature and French novels published in Soviet editions. In the late 1980s he had read a Russian translation of Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, critically cross-checking passages, leaving a twisted scrap of an envelope as a bookmark in the page on which the narrator Marcel realises, after eighty pages of obsessional torment, that his jealousy of the various women whom Albertine may have loved has suddenly died. On it Sands had jotted a single phrase from Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin (just three words in Russian): ‘NB: “the science of the tender passion”.’