I stand on the granite paving slabs beneath Dostoevsky. He has his back to the library. This mausoleum of thought looks just like a building from the Third Reich: a suitable resting place for Hitler, an odd place for a statue of Dostoevsky. As Likhachev once said when there was discussion of a monument to Dostoevsky, ‘there are no positive heroes in Dostoevsky’. But Molotov thought that Russia itself was Dostoevsky’s positive hero, and that Russia’s ‘God-bearing’ role in history was one thing about which that difficult writer was correct. That was something Stalin also understood, Molotov said: the ‘great historical destiny and fateful mission of the Russian people – the destiny about which Dostoevsky wrote: the heart of Russia, more than that of any other nation, is destined to be universal, it is the all-embracing humanitarian nation of nations’.
I came down here late one night before the presidential election, and there was a convoy of Icarus coaches coming round the corner under police escort, dirty coaches with the word Deti – ‘Children’ – written in their windscreens. The next morning, the children, who had been bussed into Moscow from schools and institutes in the provinces, appeared wearing identical white baseball jackets with the word ‘nashi’ – ‘ours’ – written on them, waving placards in support of Putin and the United Russia Party. They stood on the square long enough to be filmed for the evening news, and then got back in their buses to be driven away from the city.
Above me, standing high on the balustrade of the building, are the heroic hypertrophied statue bodies, their wonderful heads bent over books, and below them in bas-relief on the library’s granite and black marble side wall are the faces behind which were the greatest minds of humanity: Plato, Darwin, Copernicus, and last of all, the Russians, Dmitri Mendeleev and Ivan Pavlov. This library is so many libraries. The library of Nikolai Fyodorov, who thought that one day we would resurrect every body and every thought out of the vibrations of molecules in the secret depths of matter, beginning with the dust in books. The library of Vladimir Nevsky, who believed that public enlightenment would be the foundation of the great communist future. And then there was the library of the bibliopsychologist Nikolai Rubakin, who pioneered a ‘psychology of reading’, using reading therapy to promote mental health. As I was reading books published in the mid-1930s – Vyshinsky and Otto Shmidt – I kept coming across Rubakin’s ex libris plate, which showed the words ‘Truth and Justice’ at the centre of a book-lined room flooded with sunlight.
Marina Tsvetaeva was proud of the fact that her father, Ivan Tsvetaev, one of the great historians of the city of Moscow, as well as founder-curator of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, had left to the Rumyantsev Museum every last volume of his own vast library. Her mother also ‘gave her library and her father’s library to the museum. So from the Tsvetaevs, Moscow received three libraries.’ ‘I would give my own’, she added, ‘if I had not been forced to sell it during the years of revolution.’ She remembers a bookcase in her childhood home not far from here, up the Arbat off Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane, in a house which is no longer there. ‘In the second cabinet there lived the pathfinder, who led us far off into the very thickets of good and evil, to that place in the thickets where they are inescapably entwined together and, in the intertwining, make the shape of real life.’ Tsvetaeva knew in 1912 that none of the reality of her childhood would last and she wrote delicate short lyrics that the critics found too intimate and domestic, in which she addressed her mother, her sister and her home, and the streets of Moscow. The ‘little houses of old Moscow … disappearing from the modest little lanes … Little houses, like ice palaces, where the mirrors reach up to the painted ceilings … these houses, with their portraits and clavichords are being replaced by six-storey buildings, because it is the “right” of the “house-owners”.’ Tsvetaeva asserts her own right to memorialise them with a nostalgia which, within five years of her writing, would become troubling and potent, forbidden. Her second collection of verse, Magic Lantern, in which these lyrics appeared, was not much liked by critics. She dedicated the book to her husband Sergei Efron, who would fight for the Whites, spy for the NKVD and be driven from the Lubyanka as the Germans approached Moscow in 1941 in a truck marked ‘Meat’ or ‘Bread’ to be shot. ‘Everything will flash by in the space of a minute,’ she writes in the epigraph, ‘the knight and the page, the sorceror and the tsar … Away with cogitation! After all a woman’s book is only a magic lantern!’
I go down the treacherous granite steps into the underpass that leads, in one direction, towards the Alexander Gardens, takes you down to the metro the other way, and by which you can cross under Vozdvizhenka and come up underneath the old Peterhof Hotel, the Fourth House of the Soviets where President Kalinin once had his offices. Now half the building belongs to the Duma, and another part of it is a gleaming office complex for international accountants and lawyers. A low metal door is open inside the underpass just beyond a kneeling man with his books. This is the first time I have noticed that door. Through it I can see into the workings of the metro: walkways, thick wires snaking endlessly, lamps, metal ladders and railings, a whole underground world. The bookseller is here again today. He comes down with his bagful of old books and lays them out on a sheet of dirty plastic among the pigeon droppings and spit globules on the gritty floor of the underpass. What has he got for me today? Something curious. A little pamphlet, yellowing at the edges: Stalin’s discourse ‘On Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, and some even older treasures: a book of Songs of Prison and Exile, published in 1930, songs the Old Bolsheviks used to sing to keep their courage up in the long years in Siberia before they came into their kingdom. And another curiosity: a polemic of 1899, re-covered in brown packing paper, by the great zoologist Timiryazev, called ‘The Feeble Spite of the Antidarwinist’, a polemic against the Slavophile conservative Nikolai Strakhov, author of The Struggle against the West in Russian Literature, associate of Sands’s Apollon Grigoriev, one of Tolstoy’s only close friends, and biographer of Dostoevsky, with whom he had a spite-filled friendship. (It was Strakhov who passed on to Tolstoy in a letter a creepy rumour about Dostoevsky and ‘a little girl in a banya’.) The title of Timiryazev’s pamphlet, felt-tipped in purple on its brown-paper packaging by one of its previous owners, down here in the underpass, is still redolent of the intellectual fury in which it was written. Why am I buying it? I may never read it. Father Men used to say that books found their way to him, like relatives and friends arriving at a birthday celebration. I have far too many weird books, and I would do better to come down here and set them out for sale, but I will not leave Timiryazev here on this plastic sheet among the alcoholics and the impudent teenage buskers. Its fate is to come back to Cambridge in my luggage. Timiryazev lived opposite No. 3 in a small detached house behind the Professors’ House, where, until it was shrouded for remont, his book The Life of the Plant was laid open on the desk at the page on chlorophyll.
As I was on my way across to the library this morning, camera crews were just leaving through the gateway behind the Professors’ House, down from the entrance to the Kremlin Hospital where Polina Zhemchuzhina once lay dying of cancer, visited each day by a loving Molotov. Because it was hot, the windows of the hospital were open, the row of deep windows that were once the windows of the young Count Sergei Sheremetev. A young female doctor in a white coat looked out. The palace is now the tattiest building in the street. I wonder when it will get a renovation? The glass-fronted bookcases in the room behind her will soon be thrown out and and replaced with some new imported storage system in white and chrome. I almost bumped into the court artist, who, according to the nannies in the courtyard, has found another woman, younger still. He was in his summer outfit: crocodile-skin brogues, a red shirt and a Burberry check jacket, his long hair wild, a manic look in his eye. Last week I heard the komendantka call him kotik, which means ‘kitten’. The artist is rich and famous, but he always looks startled and lost.