What do I really want to tell the people I write to? I am a second generation New Yorker. My grandfather fled from a Polish ghetto after a pogrom. My father used to talk to me about man's dignity under Marxist socialism—until Stalin destroyed his faith and made him a cynical reactionary. Both hate Russia
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for what it did to them and theirs; both begged me not to come. How can I explain to them that the worst of what they believe about this country is here, practiced and suffered every day, and that I love it nevertheless? That when I'm in my gloom or Leonid lowers his eyes at the clique's obscenities, I feel as cursed as the hunchbacks in the corridors, yet grateful for the glimpse of man's tragic essence that has replaced the complacency and false security of my former existence.
For I have begun to sense what Russian writers have long revealed: that this is a place where the human spirit is made to struggle, thereby becoming fuller as well as more repressed. Their nineteenth-century phrases—"the vulgarity of life . . . the meanness of man . . . the tragic nakedness of human existence" —still afford the deepest reportage of the Russian scene and soul. The truths they lay bare uplift as well as demean. My senses are sharpened here; I know that I am me. It's not despite Russia's fated tragedy that warmth and emotion flourish here, but because of it.
"Great God!" wrote Leontiev, "am I a patriot? Do I despise or love my country? It seems to me that I love her as a mother loves, and despise as one despises a drunken thing, a characterless fool."
And Rozanov: "Russian life is dirty, yet so dear."
And an ill Yuli Daniel from his labor camp: "I loved you so much, my Russia—even more, perhaps, than I loved women."
Although depression never fully leaves me, I've somehow come to cherish the spell I'm in. If this is what the great writers knew, a particle of their insight has been given to me. The sense of abandonment and cosmic loss that haunts me simultaneously draws the rest of creation to my side. For the first time, I see I am part of everything. Anastasia and Alyosha are here, who are all to me that my family wasn't. This is why I yearn to escape this room, to flee Russia and never return. And why I know I'll always long to live this year again.
Today it is colder. Rings of rime coat streetcar cables and stunted poplars; the ground is a glacier of soiled ice.
Nightgowned Masha feels her way into my room an hour earlier than usual, a night of love accentuating her usual essence. (She sleeps with Chingiz for fun; with a pallid young physicist from town for a restaurant meal or emergency rubles. When she slept with me, I was intimidated by the warmth of her body and my thoughts of her total availability: too easy, still too sensuous for a boy like me whose mental energy for years went to fantasizing precisely this kind of sex.) She drops a cigarette from her fingers and fumbles for another, then ambles to the window and stares at the numb outdoor expanse. In their gelid states, every substance is alike, fusing into a single mass. All molecules are frozen immobile, and the suspension of icy fog in the air is like iron.
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A growl of protest rises to Masha's throat. "This rotten cold, it makes me sick. What's wrong with these matches?"
I make her a cup of Nescafe with my immersion heater and gather some papers into my briefcase. She closes her eyes to savor her sips.
"Aren't you used to the weather? You've had it all your life."
She turns to me with no expression. "Sometimes, friend, you sound positively patronizing. No visiting-scholar anthropology today. I have a headache; I've got to go out^
Someday, I'll write an essay about Russian winter. Russkaya zima, the great depressant of spirit and waster of life. We live in a no-man's land, enveloped by the seamless, soundless mist. Isolated even from the sky: it's been weeks now since enough sun has forced through to be able to guess its position.
The cold of this country has a freakish quality. Each moment outdoors is a confrontation with a vast antagonistic force. Your cheeks burn and nerves are permanently tensed; not even a dash to a mailbox can be taken for granted. Freezing the tears it has drawn from your eyes, a light wind raises the discomfort to genuine distress. You cover your face with your gloves and hurry for shelter, hearing your child's voice pleading for relief.
Mere temperature is not the crippler; Vermont and Minnesota—even Iowa during severe cold snaps—can produce harder spells. The difference is the immutability: the grip of the Russian freeze—and of its mood—never lets up. Winter lays hands on you in October, takes command of you, throttles you straight through until April. Week after week, a slate-gray cloud bears down on the squat skyline and people are made numb or sullen. Your skin flakes and shoulders ache; in time, your psyche also suffers. Irrationally resentful, you begin to take the punishment personally, and by late February—after the January thaw fails to appear—you recognize traces of persecution anxiety. A snapshot of a friend enjoying the Bois de Boulogne in a mere raincoat and muffler arrives (after its sixteen-day delay by the censor), filling you with envy of everyone "outside." Some days, the resentment snaps your will and turns you passive—as the Russian people are so enduringly passive? Now and then, it blinds you—like them?—to good sense in your urge to rebel. Always, you are
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conscious of living in a land where nature has gone wrong and appeals do not lie to justice or reason.
Seven months of such seige each year; and a total far greater than the sum of its parts. For winter is not a season like other seasons, but a state of mind, saddening even summer—which is too short to soothe the sense of hurt. Russian winter is the song of Russian life: submit, you lost lambs, to your fate of inexplicable hardship. You were born and you will die in a place of aberration—a cruel accident, but also your hope of salvation through suffering.
The inhuman weather and feeble human responses to it; how little I knew about these keys. I was a certified Soviet specialist, qualified to lecture about this society and its politics; yet the thousand books and treatises I've read revealed less than Masha's response to the look of February through my wavy glass. In a sense, all I'd mastered about the structure of the Party, the exercise of power, the channels of absolute authority, took me steadily farther from a native's perspective. For stifling as it constantly is, deceitful and vengeful at the slightest provocation, the dictatorship is but a marginal addition to Russia's older, heavier burdens. Although worse than I had imagined, the brutalization of political life is also less important because it is subsidiary to climate, geography and mood, the chief oppressors of everyday life.
Occasionally there are gifts. A bright day is polished turquoise; the air scrubs your lungs, the sun on the snow's crust makes you squint. Faces flush with bonhomie and the exalted beauty, people talk of the wholesomeness of Russian winter and of the good old days when frosts were really that. But such prizes are as rare as roses in December. Moods sink with the reappearance of the overcast, and the cumulative effect is disastrous.
Winter is a struggle to wage, a cross to bear. Day after day for half the year, half their lives, Russians pay groaning tribute in energy and fuel for the concession of staying alive; their children's swaddling and their own mountain of clothes are never enough to dispel the shock to skin and stiffness of limb. Cautious intellectuals can go months without an encounter with Party or KGB, and millions never think of the Kremlin at all except with