Suddenly in mid-conversation, she would fall silent, signalling with her eyes at the ceiling and walls, to get a scrap of paper and pencil; then she would loudly say something very mundane … cover the paper in hurried handwriting and pass it to me. I would read the poems and having memorised them, hand them back in silence … then she would burn the paper …
Chukovskaya’s studies of the Decembrists (like the Yakushkin book I inherited from Sands) were published when Lev Gumilev, the son of her beloved friend, was back in the Gulag. These books are a kind of secret writing, the writing with a false bottom and secret drawers of the kind that Akhmatova alludes to in Poem without a Hero. To write about Tsar Nicholas I and the Decembrists, even in sentences walled in by pious quotations from Lenin, was to write about tyranny, and the hope for justice and political freedom. If Stalin, Molotov and Vyshinsky could use words like ‘democracy’ and ‘humanism’ as they did, then Chukovskaya could use those words too. Her small book on Herzen’s Past and Thoughts, which appeared fifteen years later, still has the same pathos. She talks of how difficult it was that Herzen’s friend Granovsky had held on to his belief in a life after death, and not become a true materialist. In tightly pencilled exclamations, Sands had pedantically corrected the distance Chukovskaya had given from Primrose Hill to the centre of London, and objected that the service in the Kremlin at which Chukovskaya claimed that Nicholas I and his priests thanked God for the hanging of the five Decembrists was in fact a service of thanksgiving for the preservation of the Tsar’s life. Chukovskaya’s dissidence was still buried then in the 1950s. In his Cambridge rooms, Sands could not have known that when she wrote about the cruelty of the Kremlin she was writing code. There were decoys on every page of her book. Perhaps, though, his pedantry had more love in it than spite. And how Chukovskaya would have loved to know that her little book had travelled so far, that a don in Cambridge was correcting her on the geography of London, a city she would never see.
Chukovskaya tells of how, despite the attentions of the police, Bestuzhev and his fellow-conspirators established peasant schools, compiled dictionaries of Buryat, painted the rare birds and butterflies of the steppe, built forcing-frames for melons and Chinese cucumbers, and sowed potatoes, asparagus and kohlrabi in a land that had only ever known onion and cabbage. They collected specimens, dried plants, insects, flowers and stuffed birds, and sent them back to the botanical gardens and the Moscow Society of Naturalists. Sitting in torn silk dressing gowns, their fingers dry, the Borisov brothers painted orchids and Venus flytraps. In the mid-nineteenth century, just as in the mid-twentieth, historical and geographical knowledge of Siberia was enriched by the attentions of tyrannised intellects. The Decembrists’ letters and memoirs compose a single love poem to Siberia, Chukovskaya writes; under their pens, its wastes become rich and fruitful, full of promise.
*
Lev Gumilev was stirred by the idea that nature ‘waits for the death of things (of the technosphere)’, waiting to recapture the material that has been stolen from her by humankind. This steppe grass, the twitch grass whose Buryat name gives Kyakhta its name, stretching to the horizon in every direction, makes the ‘technosphere’ seem trivial, destined to be overcome. Yet humankind is tenacious in preserving the things it has made. From Siberia, Nikolai Bestuzhev wrote to his family in St Petersburg, asking for paints. He asked for ‘Lake’ and ‘Prussian Blue’ from a particular shop on the corner of Gorokhovaya and Bolshaya Morskaya Streets, remembering precisely how many colours fit into a box. The seventy or more aquarelle portraits of Decembrists that Bestuzhev painted in Chita had been discussed in the Russian press since the 1860s. ‘Ask about the drawings,’ Tolstoy wrote in his notebook when he was contemplating the novel Decembrists, which evolved into War and Peace. In 1921, when the family who had been keeping them left Russia, Bestuzhev’s work disappeared. In 1945, the aquarelles were traced by a scholar named Zilbershtein to the home in Kuntsevo of the Old Believer family servant into whose safekeeping they had been given. Spread out on a velvet cloth under a lamp, not far from the dachas of Stalin and Molotov, were Bestuzhev’s portraits of his friends: Maria Volkonskaya, not long after she had spent the evening with Pushkin in a salon on Tverskaya Street, her cheek resting on her hand, the guard tower and the spiked log walls of the Chita fortress in the window behind her. After his twenty-year search, Zilbershtein called this the happiest day of his life. It was a spiritual moment, he said, when he touched the past.
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The last miles towards Kyakhta led over a sandy hill, through low evergreen woods. The forest floor was festive with dense barguznik, the lambent pink globe-flower that grows beneath the pines. The Bestuzhevs enjoyed driving along this road in the opposite direction. Though they were always honoured guests among the liberal and high-living magnates of this city of stupendous and evanescent wealth, the exiles regarded it as a ‘miniature Babylon’: noisy, chic and exhausting. After champagne and fireworks, charity balls with the bons viveurs at the Merchants’ Club and literary soirées in millionaires’ salons, Mikhail Bestuzhev was relieved to return to ‘blessed Selenginsk’. Nikolai would visit Kyakhta on request: to paint portraits of the tea-barons and their wives, assist on the local paper, restore the Italian icons in the cathedral and join in amateur dramatics on summer nights in the park.
Before the opening of the Suez Canal, much of the tea that Europe had come to desire arrived here on caravans from Kalgan in China to be sold to Russian wholesalers. Kyakhta’s great rival for the tea trade was the East India Company; when England was fighting China in the Opium Wars of the 1830s and 1850s, the city’s fortunes soared. Even the English drank Kyakhta tea then. At first, tea was bartered for lynx and sable furs, or Prussian wool cloth in fancy Russian packaging; then in the 1850s, to the spectacular profit of the Kyakhta merchants, already masters of every kind of contraband and fraud involving promissory notes and paper assignats, the state lifted restrictions on the export of gold and silver coin. Now, carriages marked ‘sables’ no longer crossed the border with secret bottoms stuffed with silver and gold, the dignitaries riding in them wondering why they felt so heavy.
Contraband literature likewise flowed through Kyakhta. Decembrists could smuggle out their writings, and merchants and civil servants coming into Russia through China would bring in copies of Herzen’s anti-autocratic journal The Bell, carried all the way from London. At the end of the century there were still surprises for travellers in Kyakhta’s second-hand bookshops. Finding a copy of Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round during an afternoon’s browsing was George Kennan’s only pleasure in this part of Buryatia where he complained that ‘sleeplessness, insufficient food and constant jolting’ left little capacity for enjoyment of anything.
Crossing the border at Kyakhta, Kennan said, was like a ride on the magic carpet in the Arabian Nights: one moment you were in Russia, then you passed through a screen into the middle of the Chinese empire. In Maimachan, the town just across the border, the tiny houses had dragons and gold balls on the roofs, merchants with long thin beards walked about in robes of embroidered silk, and the air smelled powerfully of garlic and Chinese pipe tobacco. The Russian and Chinese merchants even shared their own strange language of trade, full of English-influenced words like pakgaus, ‘packing house’.