Fyodorov was a pioneer in the practice of librarianship. He believed that the keeping of books was sacred work. A library catalogue, he thought, should be arranged by the authors’ dates of death, like a calendar of saints’ days. The book, he believed, is the most exalted among remains of the past, for it represents that past at its most human, the past as thought. For him, only the struggle against the common enemy death, the task of resurrecting the ‘fathers’, would unify mankind. ‘To study’, for Fyodorov, meant ‘not to reproach and not to praise, but to restore life’.
Now the librarians in the Lenin Library are working to restore the names of the dozens of their predecessors who were ‘repressed’ – arrested, shot, lost without trace – in the 1920s and 1930s. In October 1928, the Red Evening Newspaper reported that the library had become ‘a refuge for groups of counter-revolutionary intelligentsia’, and descendants of the nobility. The great librarian, bibliographer and editor Vladimir Nevsky, who was director of the library after the Revolution and laid the first stone of the new library building in 1927, was arrested in 1935, denounced the Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin under interrogation, and was shot in 1937, the bloodiest year of Stalin’s Great Terror. In his later years, Molotov, who was answerable for innumerable similar deaths, often passed his days in Reading Room No. 1. Disgraced by the Party he had served, he pored over the past, building up fortifications around the ideas that had controlled his life, still believing that they could direct the future.
The reading room’s vast side windows look out over Mokhovaya, across the old Comintern headquarters, where in the 1920s communists from abroad like Antonio Gramsci, Béla Kun, Georgy Dimitrov and Ho Chi Minh worked for world revolution, towards the Trinity Gates and the towers and golden domes of the Kremlin on the hill. On the forecourt beneath the library on the Vozdvizhenka side is a giant statue of Dostoevsky, unveiled in the year we arrived in Moscow to replace a statue of Lenin (who hated the novelist). Recently young supporters of Vladimir Putin have sometimes gathered at his feet in made-for-TV manifestations of loyalty. Dostoevsky, now a co-opted prophet of Putin’s ‘new Byzantium’, is sculpted with hunched shoulders and a scoliotic spine, a man who sacrificed the last of his health bent over a desk, barely enduring the torture of his calling to write.
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As Dostoevsky knew, it is the thoughts and desires of real people that give towns their contour and shape. ‘The form of a town changes, alas, more quickly than the human heart,’ wrote Baudelaire; and the form of a town is no less bewildering, or full of secrets and traces of loss. Each place I have explored has beckoned me towards the next, towards some further arrangement of landscape, politics and myth, which I have reassembled in this book of travels. All my expeditions have been half-blind shadowings of the pursuits of others, sometimes tracing lines leading to places of exile, quest or crime, out of the rotting pages of Molotov’s books, sometimes following stories that began or ended in this grand apartment building on Romanov Lane.
I went north by train when the nights were white, in homage to the unsung military and intellectual service of Sands, whom I knew only through his books, a few scraps of leftover paper and a photograph. To the west of Moscow, around Zvenigorod, and further north on the shores of Lake Ilmen, where Christianity first challenged and accommodated the pagan deities of the rivers, the thunder and the trees, I visited ruined places – monasteries, research stations, dachas, sanatoria – where science has tangled with religious belief, where biochemists and nuclear physicists, suffering under ideological tyranny or working deep inside its twisted structures, turned for light and healing to the writings of Chekhov and Dostoevsky, to the powers of sacred water, or the teachings of dissident priests.
On the Siberian steppe, south of Lake Baikal, in the vast expanse of dry grass and earth, of light and cold, space itself has been made into an instrument of political repression. Yet this space has never lost its power to conjure the hope of liberty. State and the individual personality seem at once to dissolve in the vistas of deep time, and simultaneously, outlined against the blank horizon, to become more defined, more real and present, more evidently fated to collide. Men and women sent to the furthest limit of Russian territory in punishment for their defiance of authoritarian rule have created in words a vivid, though often hidden, landscape of ‘inner freedom’.
The magic lantern in Molotov’s apartment has furnished my imagination. Like the magic lantern that the anxious child Marcel is given at the beginning of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, it replaces the ‘opaqueness of the walls’ with an impalpable iridescence, momentary vacillating scenes from legend, reflections of history. In my reading and my travelling, images of distant times and places have flashed into view, illusions leading beyond the limits of understanding into receding interiors of the human mind, into the essences, which we sometimes think we catch, of material things. Russian history and the Russian present have revealed themselves to me in glimpses, through a narrow lens, like the faded images waiting for light in this antique slide projector: moments of my own past, and moments considered worthy of record by people I shall never know, summoned as if by magic out of the surrounding dark.
ONE
Romanov
‘I need some corner … In my memory, I go through the apartments abandoned by the bourgeoisie.’
ISAAC BABEL, ‘An Evening at the Tsarina’s’, 1922
The luxury of this house makes a false promise.
Its windows are set deep among ornate columns, projecting cornices, scrolled and floriate mouldings. From the upper storeys, between wrought-iron balconies and overhanging chambers raised on tendril-wound columns, tiers of sculpted faces wearing Phrygian helmets and animal skins look out over the street, hinting at higher mysteries of domestic comfort contained within. The façade is designed to emphasise the extreme thickness of the outer walls, and the shadowed warmth of their recesses, as though, in the inmost part of this city, in this street of many names, a house could offer a refuge from history.
Ulochki-shkatulochki, ulochki moskovskie: the streets are little caskets, go the words of a love song to old Moscow. Before I lived here, I knew that Romanov Lane was not a little casket but a great chest of secret treasure. The men who lived in No. 3 had metro stations, institutes, cities, battle cruisers, tractors, auto-plants, warhorses, lunar craters and stars named after them. On my walks down to the Lenin Library from our first Moscow apartment on Tverskaya Street, I would choose to come this way, to get closer, I liked to think, to the hidden lives of those men. I was one of those passers-by who walk haltingly along the front of No. 3, pausing to look at the memorial plaques in granite or dark marble fixed at eye level on the earth-pink wall, then gaze up past the wilted carnations laid on top of the plaques to the plaster hammers and sickles that crest the pediments over the doorways, wondering quite what it meant for all those Stalin-era field marshals and Party apparatchiks to ‘live here’, as the inscriptions say they did.