Proud of the hero in its saddle.
No one interrupted me; no one asked me to stop. Triumphant, I recited the victorious lines:
He bids the lords beneath his scepters,
Both Swede and Russian, to his tent;
And gaily mingling prey and captors
Lifts high his cup in compliment
To the good health of his “preceptors.”
I stopped. With Pushkin’s powerful help, I had defeated my indifferent examiners.43
Admitted to the life of all the people in the world, they had a whole world to discover. And the world, as Galina Apollonovna’s robe suggested, contained dragons, birds, gnarled trees, and countless other things that Apollonians called “nature.” “What is it that you lack?” asked the copper-shouldered and bronze-legged Efim Nikitich Smolich of Babel’s bewildered little boy, who wrote tragedies and played the violin but did not know how to swim.
“Your youth is not the problem, it will pass with the years . . . What you lack is a feeling for nature.”
He pointed with his stick at a tree with a reddish trunk and a low crown.
“What kind of tree is that?”
I did not know.
“What’s growing on that bush?”
I did not know that, either. We were walking through the little park next to Aleksandrovsky Avenue. The old man poked his stick at every tree; he clutched my shoulder every time a bird flew by and made me listen to the different calls.
“What kind of bird is that singing?”
I was unable to reply. The names of trees and birds, their division into species, the places birds fly to, where the sun rises, when the dew is heaviest—all these things were unknown to me.44
Babel was a city boy. Abraham Cahan’s autobiographical narrator, who was born in a small shtetl in rural Lithuania, did not know the names for daisies or dandelions.
I knew three flowers but not by their names. There was the round, yellow, brushlike blossom that turned into a ball of fuzz that could be blown into the wind. Its stem had a bitter taste. There was the flower that had white petals around a yellow button center. And the flower that looks like a dark red knob. When I grew older I learned their Russian names and, in America, their English names. But in that early time we didn’t even know their Yiddish names. We called all of them “tchatchkalech,” playthings.45
This was not something Zagursky could fix. This called for Efim Nikitich Smolich, the Russian man who had a “feeling for nature” and could not stand the sight of splashing little boys being pulled to the bottom of the sea by “the hydrophobia of their ancestors—Spanish rabbis and Frankfurt money changers.”
In the athletic breast of this man there dwelt compassion for Jewish boys. He presided over throngs of rickety runts. Nikitich would gather them in the bug-filled hovels of the Moldavanka, take them to the sea, bury them in the sand, do exercises with them, dive with them, teach them songs and, roasting in the direct rays of the sun, tell them stories about fishermen and animals. Nikitich used to tell the grown-ups that he was a natural philosopher. The Jewish children would roll with laughter at his tales, squealing and snuggling up to him like puppies. . . . I came to love that man with the love that only a boy who suffers from hysteria and migraines can feel for an athlete.46
Most Pale of Settlement Jews who entered Russian life had their own mentors of things Apollonian, guides into neutral spaces, and discoverers of “divine sparks.” Babel the narrator had Efim Nikitich Smolich; Babel the writer had Maxim Gorky (to whom “The Story of My Dovecot” is dedicated). Abraham Cahan had Vladmir Sokolov, “the model of what man would be like when the world would turn socialist” and the person who introduced him, “on the basis of equality,” to “officers, students, several older persons and even a few ladies, most of them gentiles.” Moreinis-Muratova had her parents’ tenant, a naval officer who gave her Russian books and once took her to the theater to see an Ostrovsky play (which impressed her so much she “thought of nothing else for several months”). And the Yiddish poet Aron Kushnirov, along with so many others, had World War I.
It was so hard, but now it’s very easy,
It’s been so long, but I have not forgotten
The lessons I have learned from you, my tough old rabbi:
My sergeant major, Nikanor Ilyich!
Levitan had Chekhov; Bakst had Diaghilev; Leonid Pasternak had Tolstoy; and Antokolsky and Marshak, among many others, had Vladmir Stasov. Russian high culture was discovering the “powerful harmony” in the souls of Jewish “runts” even as they were discovering Russian high culture—as their first love. For Leonid Pasternak, Tolstoy embodied “the principle of love for one’s neighbor”; for the sculptor Naum Aronson, the commission to make a bust of Tolstoy was tantamount to joining the elect. “I had great hopes and ambitions but would never have aspired to sculpt the gods—for that is what Tolstoy was for me. Even to approach him seemed blasphemous.”47
He did sculpt him, however, carving out his own place in eternity as he did so. Osip Braz painted the likeness of Chekhov that became the icon that every Russian grows up with. Marshak was to his gymnasium teachers what Peter the Great had been to his haughty Swedish “preceptors.” And Isaak Levitan became the official interpreter of the Russian national landscape—and thus a true national divinity in his own right.
Tolstoy was prepared to do his part. When Stasov told him about the young Marshak’s great promise (of “something good, pure, bright, and creative”), Tolstoy seemed doubtfuclass="underline" “Oh, these Wunderkinder!” As Stasov wrote to Marshak:
I feel the same way; I, too, have been disappointed before. But this time I defended and shielded my new arrival, my new joy and consolation! I told him that, to my way of thinking, there was a real golden kernel here. And my LEO seemed to incline his powerful mane and his regal eyes in my direction. And then I told him: “Do this for me, for the sake of everything that is sacred, great, and precious; here, take a look at this little portrait, which I have just received, and let your gaze, by fixing on this young, vibrant little face, be a long-distance blessing for him!” And he did as I asked, and looked for a long time at the tender face of a child / young man who is only beginning to live.48
Not everyone could be anointed by a god, but there was no lack of would-be godfathers and priests, as young Jewish men and women continued to join the faith that most of them (including Abraham Cahan in New York) would profess for the rest of their lives. Babel’s life, like everybody else’s, began on Pushkin Street.
I stood there alone, clutching my watch, and suddenly, with a clarity such as I had never experienced before, I saw the soaring columns of the Duma, the illuminated foliage on the boulevard, and Pushkin’s bronze head touched by a dim reflection of the moon. For the first time in my life, I saw the world around me the way it really was: serene and inexpressibly beautiful.49
Raisa Orlova’s mother, Susanna Averbukh, died in 1975, at the age of eighty-five. As she lay dying, she asked her daughter to read some Pushkin to her. “I read Pushkin. She started reciting along: line by line, stanza by stanza. She knew these poems from her childhood, from her father. . . . Perhaps she had read Pushkin to my father on their honeymoon?”50
Converting to the Pushkin faith meant leaving the parental home. If the Russian world stood for speech, knowledge, freedom, and light, then the Jewish world represented silence, ignorance, bondage, and darkness. In the 1870s and 1880s, the revolution of young Jews against their parents reached Russia—eventually in the form of Marxism but most immediately as Freud’s family romance. The Jews who shared Mandelstam’s reverence for the “clear and pure Russian sounds” tended to share his horror of the “Judean chaos” of their grandmother’s household.