Later we found out that my father, alarmed by my absence in such a storm, saw our misadventure with the strangers’ sailboat through his binoculars and hurriedly notified the lifeguard station. There we were spotted through a telescope and a longboat with hardy oarsmen was sent to save us. But then they noticed that we, totally unaware of it, were struggling toward a sandy spit, though at a snail’s pace. The promise of deliverance was becoming a reality. That’s how it came out. But finally when it came to jumping into the shallow water and pulling the boat ashore, I discovered that my arms hung loosely at my sides like ropes and, God help me, were totally useless. This was a reaction to what I had just lived through. Apparently for the last couple of dozen minutes I was functioning not on muscle strength, but purely on nerves which made the physically impossible possible. Later we had many other water-borne adventures. We were older, stronger, and more experienced, and when a moriana was not overly violent we would go out and test our skills in struggle
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with it. I owe much to the river, magnificent in its quiet flow and terrible in its violence. Those who were raised by the river gradually developed an acuity of vision, a sureness of gesture, the strength of muscles, cool-headedness, self-confidence, and the habit of not fearing danger but looking it straight in the eye. In the generation of children that grew up on it, the river, in its image and likeness, instilled an elemental sense of stubborn and unsubmissive will. Some of this was bequeathed to me, for which I am eternally grateful. What would have become of me without the river?
But it was not only the river that drew us. It also opened before us the vistas of constantly new adventures on shore.
It was good, having jumped out of a boat, to stretch one’s legs on the meadowy left bank, to wander without a predetermined goal, to go wherever your gaze and imagination took you. There would be thickets of willows where one would rouse all sorts of game; the sudden splash of a fish in a marshy lake grown thick with water lilies; further on, hayfields through which one had to proceed cautiously because they were the domain of proud and irate Ukrainian settlers, whom we called Cossacks, and who did not want their grass trampled. Sometimes there would spread before us a fantastic world: a solid sea of grass stretching as far as the eye could see. It was the tall and silvery feather grass, now slightly rippling and sparkling but suddenly roiled by the wind with gusts moving on it in broad and deep waves as if on a real sea.
And how many unexpected encounters did the steppe hide. Sometimes a herd of swine would rise up, wild and protected by no one except battle-scarred, tusked boars who would turn even our most feisty dogs to immediate and shameful flight. There would also be enormous, heavy steppe birds, bustards, resembling wild turkeys. To become airborne they had to run for a good stretch along the steppe and acquire the inertia of movement much as today’s airplanes. But the steppe’s most magical power was in its sheer vast-ness, the space that caught your breath, and pulled you to itself as sometimes you are pulled, even against your will, by an abyss or a whirlpool. At the same time, these wide-open spaces gave birth to an indescribable and unforgettable sense of free action and a yearning for yet-to-be experienced and boundless opportunities.
Who can describe a spring or summer day in the steppe, heavily soaked with the aroma of wildflowers and grasses, made soft and tender by the hot caresses of the sun. The spring air and the sweet aromas would make us weak and drunk with pleasure. We would stagger and collapse under the shade of bushes in order to replace this dreamy life with the dreams of sleep. The steppe, indeed, is a fervid fairy-tale of nature. Taste once its scented breath and your soul will forever hear its call which will not be silenced or erased by the many years you may spend away from it.
Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga
11
I and the companions of my childhood years were not destiny’s favorites. Rather, we were its stepchildren. My life in my father’s house was no better and generally not much worse than the lives of my peers.
My father was born into a family of serfs and as a boy helped his elders in all the common peasant labors. Even in deep old age he loved to show off his skill at mowing. And he did mow like a master. But his father, my grandfather (whom I, the youngest, had never seen), upon gaining his freedom made a firm decision to free his son from the onerous fate of a peasant. So my father was sent away to a district four-year vocational school. Having successfully finished the course of study, he received grandfather’s blessing to enter the tsar’s service, in an extremely responsible position yet, that of a junior assistant to the clerk of the district treasury. Beginning with that, he slowly, gradually and patiently rose up the ladder of the service hierarchy to clerk, head clerk, aide to the manager, bookkeeper, manager, and finally at the age of forty, district treasurer, the highest pinnacle of his service anthill.
In parallel to his responsibilities he ascended the Table of Ranks. He dreamt of receiving the Order of St. Vladimir, which would have made him a squire of the gentry. And he did achieve it along with the rank of Collegiate Counselor, which upon retirement was reduced to State Counselor and thus kept him from being addressed as “your excellency.”
By all the signs, he married successfully and happily. The only meaningful memories of our mother were preserved only by the eldest of us, Vladimir, who was ten when she died. I was the youngest and last. Some of mother’s favorite books were preserved after her death. They revealed her to be unusually cultivated for our backwater. These books belonged to the vanguard literature of her time, the sixties and early 1870’s. There were also copies The Russian Word, The Cause, The Spark and an occasional issue of Herzen’s The Bell [politically progressive or radical publications].
Once I found an item which our stepmother accidentally left on the table, but I was too young to appreciate it. It was, as I later understood, a traditional old album of the kind common in Pushkin’s time. I was struck by its unusual calligraphy which could have only been produced by a soft goose quill of earlier days, with its exquisite alternation of fine lines and bold strokes, with its dandyish and ornate signatures, some of which were works of art in their own right.
My eldest brother and sister later revealed that they had found evidence of mother’s familiarity with literature in the album. But the album was not in our hands for long. Our stepmother noticed its disappearance and grew very angry when she found us poring over it. She took it away from us and we never saw it again.
My father’s level of education was not very high. However, in a provincial backwater he stood out above the average. In his forties, as I remember him
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best, he was the “soul of society” in the full meaning of that phrase. He was expansive in nature, hospitable and good-natured. He loved to receive and entertain guests, and many people seeing a “light in his window” would drop by, seeking comfort and relief from their cares. He was accomplished and agile with a billiard cue, a hunting rifle, and the fishing rod. He was considered a professor of whist and “preference” [a card game generically similar to whist and bridge].