“What a blessing,” said Father Nikolai, stopping and leaning on his long staff. “Back in the courtyard, you said something about trough happiness. It may be the trough kind, but it’s real…. Vegetation is at the root of all creation: the grass, the trees, the beasts of all kinds, the huts, the peasants, the birds, you and I…. Everything you see around you,” he gestured broadly and unhurriedly with his hand, “has been created by vegetation, by trough happiness, as you call it.”
“But vegetation is mindless and elemental,” I objected.
Father Nikolai took off his wide-brimmed hat, ran his hand across his hair, and said:
“Indeed it is…. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.’”86
They go on to argue about whether life is a miracle or a play of “blind and malicious forces,” and whether “the real miracle” is life as we know it or the human desire and ability to subdue and transform it.
Father Nikolai gave it some thought, rolled up the sleeve of his cassock, and said:
… “Man needs to plow, sow, breed cattle, tend gardens, and raise children. That’s the most important thing. Everything else is secondary. You, who are ‘looking for the city that is to come,’ do not know and cannot understand the joy of a farmer when he sees a brood of chickens, or the care with which he prunes and grafts an apple tree. You believe he only thinks of profit, but he doesn’t always think of profit, and sometimes he doesn’t think of profit at alclass="underline" instead, he feels the joy of ‘vegetation,’ sees the fruit of his labor and takes pleasure in life…. Life is huge. It’s like a mountain that can’t be moved.”
“We’ll dig tunnels through it, Uncle.”
“You think life is different on the other side? It’s the same, the same.”87
This dialogue—internal, external, or both—runs through Voronsky’s book and, in one way or another, through most Bolshevik memoirs, from Kon’s story of his grandfather presiding over a transformed Passover prayer to Kuibyshev’s story of his father crying like a child in his son’s prison cell. Could it be that it was inherent in human life?
“Have you ever read Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Brand?” I asked Valentin.
“I have. Why?”
“They represent two types, two psychological models. Peer Gynt lacks integrity; he is scattered and disorganized. All he can be is raw material for something else, but nothing human is alien to him. He lulls, comforts, and deceives his dying mother…. He has no principles, but his heart is open. Brand, on the other hand, is a fighter, he is all of a piece. He desires with his whole being. His motto is “all or nothing,” but his heart is closed to human joys and woes; he is ruthless. He takes from his wife Agnes the little cap, her last memory of her dead child, and refuses to go to his mother’s deathbed to offer a few words of consolation.”88
Every true Bolshevik has a purer, more consistently sectarian doppelgänger—an all-or-nothing Brand to his self-doubting underground man. Ulianov has Lenin, Dzhugashvili has Stalin, Skriabin has Molotov, Arosev has Z, and Voronsky has his Valentin.89
“There are millions of Peer Gynts. They are needed as manure, as fertilizer. But don’t you think, Valentin, that the Brand principle is becoming too dominant among us? We are becoming harder, tougher; we are turning into the revolution’s promoters and apprentices; we are separating ourselves from everything ‘human all too human.’”
Fidgeting under his blanket, Valentin lit a match, drew on his cigarette, and declared:
“That’s the way it should be in our era. We must become more efficient and more resolute, we must give all of ourselves to our ideal. We cannot show weakness and float in the wake of divergent and contradictory emotions. We are warriors.”90
In Voronsky’s world, the real-life one as well as the fictional, there is never an escape from dualism—even in his favorite refuge, a cottage in a pine forest outside Tambov that belongs to Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova, his older friend and socialist mentor. (She—also the child of a priest—is the “mysterious revolutionary” who gave him his very first stack of illegal leaflets when he was a seminarian.) Miagkova has three little daughters. “This girls’ world attracted me. Their pure, innocent eyes, the braids tied with bright ribbons, the ink-stained notebooks, the stickers, dolls, flowers, short colorful dresses, the carefree, inimitable, contagious laughter, loud chatter, games, and all the running around helped me forget my troubles and misfortunes.” Two of the sisters love to listen to the silly stories he makes up, but the third one, “the olive-skinned Tania,” has a “critical frame of mind” and refuses to play along. “You didn’t really buy a parrot, and you didn’t really see a scary man, and he didn’t really run after you—you just made it all up.” Voronsky may, in fact, have been chased by a plainclothes policeman, but Tania isn’t having any of it—she needs proof. “Valentin” is Voronsky’s fictional Brand-like alter ego. Tania was a real all-or-nothing twelve-year-old. She would go on to join the Bolsheviks at the age of twenty.91
■ ■ ■
Voronsky and Arosev may have been more self-consciously literary and programmatically self-reflexive than most Bolsheviks, and their memoirs may have absorbed some of the doubts and discoveries of the 1920s and early 1930s, but it seems clear—and was, for a while, universally accepted—that they were faithful chroniclers, not odd exceptions. Yakov Sverdlov, who never published anything other than articles on party politics and reports on Siberian social conditions, faced the same dilemmas and discussed them endlessly in his letters. What is the relationship between the coming general happiness and the present-day lives of individual believers? Which part of Father Nikolai’s “vegetation” should be renounced as irredeemably philistine? What is to be done about the fact that—as Sverdlov writes apropos of the great mystery of his son’s future life—“we mortals are not granted the ability to lift the veil of individual fate; all we can do is foresee the future of mankind as a whole”?92
The more terrible the trials, the greater the uncertainty and the temptations. “You cannot imagine [wrote Sverdlov to Novgorodtseva in January 1914], how badly I want to see the children. Such a sharp, piercing pain. Adka’s photograph is on the table in front of me. So is yours. I stare and stare, for hours on end, and then I close my eyes and try to imagine little Vera, but I can’t, really. I think until my head hurts. My eyes grow wet, and I am ready to burst out sobbing. My dear, dear, sweet little children…. Oh Kadia, Kadia! My darling, my love…. What will our future bring?”93
Sometimes it seems that their future life will bring nothing but trials: “There’s much, much suffering ahead,” he wrote in August 1914. Voronsky, the former seminarian, quotes the original passage from the confession of the Old Belief martyr, Archpriest Avvakum, who jouneyed to Calvary accompanied by his wife: “I came up, and the poor dear started in on me, saying, ‘Will these sufferings go on for a long time, Archpriest?’ And I said: ‘Markovna, right up to our very death.’ And so she sighed and answered, ‘Good enough, Petrovich, then let’s be getting on.’” (According to Voronsky’s daughter, “let’s be getting on” was his favorite saying.) But of course neither Sverdlov nor Voronsky is an Archpriest Avvakum. Or rather, they are, in the sense of being prepared to endure suffering for the sake of their faith, but they do not relish martyrdom or asceticism as virtues in their own right. As Sverdlov puts it in a letter to a young friend, “I also like Ibsen, but Brand’s ‘all or nothing’ motto is not to my taste, for I consider it rootless and anarchist.”94