The general was once photographed in a coffin. He stopped by a funeral home, bringing a photographer with him, and requested permission to use a coffin for a short time. They could not refuse him. The general smoothed the fold lines on his creased uniform, lay down in the coffin, crossed his arms on his chest, and closed his eyes. A photographer took several shots amidst the undertakers’ uneasy silence. The most successful shot is almost as renowned as the famous photo on the jetty. It accompanies the majority of publications about the general. Few people know the shot was taken during this prominent person’s life. Without suspecting the level of their own astuteness, some researchers have noted the absence of signs of death in the shot. Moreover, employing a figurativeness traditional for these purposes, they expressed opinions to the effect that it looked as if the general was sleeping. In reality, the general was not sleeping. Looking out from under his squinting eyelids, he was observing the reaction of those gathered and imagining what they might have said about him in the event of his actual death.
It is possible he was sorry that he would not see his own funeral and had thus decided to arrange a sort of rehearsal. It cannot be ruled out that this sort of conduct was an attempt to either deceive death (I died long ago, why bother looking for me?) or to hide from it. The general did not hide from death in his younger years, but people do change in old age…
Another explanation—one originating from the general’s long-standing and almost intimate relationship with death—appears more pertinent. Was what happened a way to flirt with death or—this is entirely possible, too—a manifestation of a particular elderly coquetry? It is impossible to answer these questions accurately now, just as it is impossible to reason in any reliable way about how life and death come together in someone’s fate. All that can be ascertained is that in the end the general met with his death. It found him without any particular effort when the time came.
In pondering the topic of death in General Larionov’s story, Solovyov sought to understand the psychology of a person for whom a preparedness to die is the first and primary requirement of their profession. Solovyov was attempting to get a feel for the state of a person on the eve of battle, when any action, thought, or recollection might be his last. Was it possible to grow accustomed to that? It is known that on the evenings before battle, the general gazed at himself for a long time in a pocket mirror as if he were attempting to memorize himself at the very end. He slowly turned his hand, as if he were imagining it lying in the next trench. The inseparability of the human body’s limbs seemed overstated to him on those evenings.
Did a person have a right to attachments under those circumstances? War-time friendship is piercing, just as war-time love is piercing: everything is as if for the last time. This is grounds for experiencing those attachments with the utmost keenness or, conversely, for renouncing them completely. What did the general choose at the time?
He chose reminiscences. In the event of the possible absence of a future, he extended his life by experiencing his past multiple times. The general sensed, almost physically, a living room with silk wallpaper, along which his shoulder glided when he was escaping the attention of guests after—obviously at his parents’ order—one of the servants had abruptly brought him here, into a kingdom of dozens of candles, clinking dishes, cigars, and huge ceiling-high windows that were recklessly thrown open in Petersburg’s Christmas twilight. The general firmly remembered that the windows were open, against the usual winter rules; he remembered because for a long time he continued considering Christmas the day when warmth set in. Remembering that, he knew he had been mistaken.
But the general had a certain something else to recall on his evenings before battle: his first visit to the Yalta beach. It is described in detail in the portion of the general’s memoirs published by Dupont, which permits stopping at key moments of that event while omitting a series of details. What affected the child more than anything else was the sea’s calm force and the power of a frothy, ragged wave that knocked him from his feet and carried him away during his first approach to the water. Unlike the other members of his household, he was not afraid. As he leapt on shore, he was purposely falling on the very brim of the surf, allowing the elements to roll his small, rosy body. Overcome by all the sensations, he jumped, shouted, and even urinated slightly, observing as a trickle that nobody noticed disappeared into a descending wave, vintage 1887.
The beach occupied a special place in the child’s life from that point on. Even in the 1890s, when circumstances did not always permit him to appear there naked, the joy of the future military commander’s encounter with the beach was not diminished. As before, he encountered the waves with a victorious cry, though he still did not allow those excited behaviors that marked his first meeting with the watery element.
Despite the ceremoniousness of the nineteenth century, this period had its own obvious distractions. In those years, when dresses had just barely risen above the ankle and no one was even dreaming of uncovered knees, fully undressing was, in a certain sense, simpler than now. Nude swimming among peasant men and women and, what is more, the landed gentry, was not something out of the ordinary in the Russian village and was by no means seen as an orgy. This simplicity of values concerned the beach at times, too. Prince Peter Ouroussoff’s Reminiscences of a Vanished Age notes that visitors to private beaches in the early twentieth century could even bathe naked.
Even so, the beach had arrived as a Western European phenomenon, bringing its own series of rules. One needed to dress for the beach, albeit in a particular way: not in usual undergarments but in a special style of tricot that was striped and clung to the figure in an interesting way. The shortcoming of a beach outfit, however, was the same shortcoming of other clothes from that time: it left hardly any parts of the bather’s body uncovered.
When fighting in continental Europe, the general invariably recalled the beach: the damp salinity of the wind, the barely discernible smell of cornel cherry bushes, and the rhythmic swaying of seaweed on oceanside rocks. With the ebb of a wave, the seaweed obediently replicated the stones’ forms, just as a diver’s hair settles on his head like a bathing cap that gleams with the water that flows from it. The general remembered the smell of blistering hot pebbles after the first drops of rain fell on them and heard the special beach sounds: muted and somehow distant, consisting of children’s shouts, kicks at a ball, and the rustling roll of waves on the shore.
For the general, the beach was a place for life’s triumph, perhaps in the same sense that the battlefield is a place for death’s triumph. It is not out of the question that his many years sitting on the jetty were brought on by the possibility of surveying (albeit from afar) the beach, legs crossed, in his trusty folding chair under a quivering cream-colored umbrella. He only looked at the beach from time to time, his body half-turned, but that gave him indescribable pleasure. Only two circumstances clouded the general’s joy.
The first of those was the presentiment of winter, when a beach drifted with snow transformed into the embodiment of orphandom, becoming something contrary to its initial intended designation. The second circumstance was that everyone he had ever happened to be with at the beach was long dead. Hypnotized by the beach’s life-affirming aura at the time, the general had not allowed even the possibility that death would come for those alongside whom he was sitting on a chaise longue, opening a soft drink, or moving chess pieces. To the general’s great disappointment, none of them remained among the living. No, they had not died at the beach (and that partially excused them) but still they had died. The general shook his head, distressed at the thought. Now, after the passage of time, it can be established that he has died, too.