Is there a set of secret maps to be found among a person’s books, a way through the fortifications of the self? There is a scene in Chapter Seven of Eugene Onegin, after Onegin has departed on his wanderings, when Tatyana, who loves him, finds herself alone in his study. Reading avidly beneath the portrait of Byron and the statuette of Napoleon, Tatyana finds herself exploring a different world, trying to decipher the mysterious essence of the man from the traces of his fingernails in the pages of his books, the marks his pencil has made.
Everywhere the soul of Onegin
Involuntarily reveals itself,
Whether by a brief word, by a cross,
Or by a question mark …
Old books are objects of a mysterious and compulsive kind of desire, fed by a stubborn intuition that the past might yield its secrets to the touch, as though some further meaning or spirit dwells in their very matter. Books are the scene, the stage, of their own fate, Walter Benjamin says. As we look at them, we look through them at the distant past they contain. The books I looked at that afternoon in Sands’s rooms formed the architecture of a biography, and though he left no will he had left me a legacy. I laid two books side by side on the carpet, two books with half a century between them: an orange-and-white Penguin paperback of Russian short stories selected by the political exile S. S. Koteliansky (Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kot’), with Sands’s pen ‘Do svidaniya’ – ‘Goodbye’ – on the cover, and a doodled profile, just like one of Pushkin’s marginal scribbles, on the inside leaf, with the word ‘ROSSIYA’ beneath it, and the date 1941. This was the year of the Anglo-Soviet Alliance, when the first aid convoy, code-named ‘Dervish’, reached Archangel. Beside it I placed the most recent book in Sands’s collection, a paperback of about the same size called The Northern Convoys, published in Archangel in 1991, the year the Soviet Union came apart.
For myself I kept a slim book by the dissident writer Lydia Chukovskaya on Alexander Herzen’s philosophical memoir Past and Thoughts; a late Stalin-era anthology of the writings of the anti-tsarist rebel Ivan Yakushkin; a typed lecture on Anton Chekhov; a pamphlet explaining the rules of cricket in Russian; a battered set of Pushkin with one missing volume, inscribed ‘Archangel, 1944’, and a book of Soviet maritime songs about fighting for Stalin on the cliffs over the Barents Sea, into which Sands had slipped a copy of the Soviet anthem: ‘unbreakable union of free republics, pulled together for ever by Great Rus’. Rather than leave them out for the prurient eyes of the college bursar, I buried inside random pages of his books the few love letters that I found in a box of papers, one written in several drafts to a woman in France whom he had seen again for the first time in decades – ‘After all this time, you were just the same …’ Did he ever send it? I also hid a sweetly witty monochrome postcard of Marilyn Monroe in nothing but a pair of Perspex platform heels, diamond earrings and a polka-dot scarf, dated 14 February (no year), from someone who hoped he ‘would not be cross’, and signed herself ‘Dido D.’
I remember how I flushed when I found a passport-size picture, taken in Murmansk in 1942, of Sands in an astrakhan hat. (It was the winter after Molotov’s secret May flight, as Soviet foreign minister, in a four-engine bomber over German-occupied territory, to formalise the Anglo-Soviet Alliance in Downing Street, where, at the garden gate, Winston Churchill gripped his arm and looked at his face, sure that for a moment he had seen the man appear ‘inside the image’.) The photograph of the young Sands, in the brief time of action that came before the long years of contemplation in these rooms, stirred in me a desire to clean the dust of these unwanted lecture notes on Chekhov and Dostoevsky from my hands, and take a ship, without delay, to the Arctic ports.
Three years later, my husband, ever the rootless cosmopolitan, called me on a bad line from a Moscow street on his first visit to the city on legal business. He had not visited Russia since we had lived through the last dark winter of the Soviet system as graduate students in Leningrad.
‘Moscow’s a world city now.’ Through the interference I could hear the excitement in his voice. ‘It’s become a real city.’
Then came the moment of consent to this adventure, in a vaulted windowless restaurant called the Boyars’ Hall, made to look like ancient Rus, deep inside the art nouveau walls of the Metropol Hotel. We had spent an exhausting day making our way through the slush in a borrowed car, looking at strange apartments with bathrooms of black marble and entryways with the familiar Soviet redolence of tomcat pheromones. To an accordion, a chorus in fur-trimmed old-Muscovy gowns sang a folk song about passionate black eyes. How is it that banality can sometimes bring on a decisive kind of rapture? Is it because I watched too much bad Soviet TV on winter nights in Leningrad in 1990 that those minor chords and the yearning timbre of the Slavonic voice immediately summoned pictures of wide Russian rivers in the moonlight, snow-filled forests, grassy steppes in the sunshine of spring? I was on my second glass of wine, back in the fairy tale, and, without hesitation, as I knew I would, I said yes.
After I had packed up my treasured room in college, I left several cardboard boxes of my books and papers in the cellars there, telling myself and the fellowship that I would be back in eighteen months. I planned to spend my time in Moscow working in the great libraries of the city, studying orientalism in Russian poetry. Those eighteen months became ten years.
*
These years have not been spent in ordered study. I quickly strayed. Instead of the scholarly masterpiece on orientalism I had in mind, I have written this book, which recounts my wanderings among the muddle of past time that books and places make. On maps, the Kremlin looks like the round centre of a compass, with roads leading out from it to north, east, south and west into the spreading, never-quite-defined lands it tries to rule. I have travelled out from our home close to the Kremlin Wall whenever I have had the chance, following whims, hunches and bookish romances. I have made other journeys, just as full of random adventure, sitting among old men in grimy ill-fitting suits and thick plastic-rimmed spectacles at the desks in Reading Room No. 1 in the Lenin Library, as the Russian State Library is still familiarly known.
This great library, from which Lenin’s name was removed by presidential decree in 1992, was once called the Rumyantsev Museum. Its most famous keeper, Nikolai Fyodorov, known as the ‘Russian Socrates’, was reputed to be familiar with the contents of all the books in its collections. In one story about the reach of the librarian’s encyclopedic knowledge, a group of engineers working on the Trans-Siberian Railway came to show him maps of the projected route across the steppe, and Fyodorov, who had never been to Siberia, corrected their calculation of the altitude of some of the hills. Fyodorov believed, quite literally, that books were animate beings, because they expressed the thought, the souls, of their authors. At the heart of his library work and his philosophical writings (which were published posthumously in 1903 as The Philosophy of the Common Task) was a refusal to be reconciled with the fact of death. Man’s task on earth was the material resurrection of the dead (‘not as crazy as it sounds’, Lev Tolstoy remarked), who were present, unconstituted in the library dust, souls waiting in books for the systematic returning of past generations to life. (‘There was no man on earth who felt such sorrow at the death of people,’ Berdyaev said.) He spent the last quarter of the nineteenth century living inside the catalogue of the Rumyantsev Museum, hardly eating or sleeping, reluctant even to sit down. Russia’s greatest thinkers came to find him in the library to discuss ideas. Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (who called Fyodorov his ‘teacher and spiritual father’) all regarded him as a philosopher of genius. Boris Pasternak’s father, the artist Leonid Pasternak, who was another devotee, once hid behind the bookstacks in the reading room to make secret sketches of Fyodorov, who was philosophically averse to the idea of his image being taken, believing that the icon, in which the human countenance is sanctified and presented in its transcendent aspect, is the only genre worthy of the human face.