In societal issues, he had not advanced very far. But he was absolutely firm on one issue: land ultimately was to be turned over to the peasants, for they were the true children of the earth with true filial love. The gentry was on the land for vain and self-indulgent reasons. They defiled the land, making it a means of oppressing the peasant. They stuck out between the peasant and the land as superfluous and useless, and getting rid of them would constitute a venerable act. It was clear that this attitude was deeply seated in his consciousness, ingested with the milk of his mother, showing the imprint of his rural origin. He never covered up the deficiencies of his education nor his lack of good manners and all that which was considered good breeding. He loved to repeat—whether from a sense of self-abasement or from plebeian pride—that he was “a peasant, a peasant born, and would die a peasant.”
Though my parents’ natures were different, their family life flowed smoothly, except that my mother’s health was jeopardized by frequent pregnancies. Along with us who had lived, she had given birth to several (either three or four) children who had been carried off by various childhood diseases. Her general health was poor, and she died leaving father five children, the oldest of whom was nine and the youngest, myself, about one. Because of my young age, I could not comprehend the magnitude of our loss. But my older siblings were crushed by our orphaned and neglected state. [In Russian culture the loss of even one parent makes a child an orphan; the loss of both makes one a total, “all-around” orphan, a kruglyi sirota.]
Father totally lost his presence of mind from grief and was almost driven to drink. His lapses at work nearly cost him his job. Close to despair, he finally barely surmounted it. He had to leave the locale where everything reminded him of his irreparable loss, but the children could not be left without a mother’s care. The only thing to do was to remarry. They found him a bride suitable for a man of years and burdened by a brood of children. The bride, an aging virgin, was a thrifty, rather pushy cleric’s daughter. According to my brother and sisters, she was attentive and kind to us early in the marriage until the appearance of her own child.
As more and more of her own children appeared (she had five or six by the time I left home), all girls, she became transformed into the classic stepmother of gloomy Russian songs and fairy-tales. She developed enmity to-
Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga
13
ward everything associated with our mother. One by one, mother’s albums began to disappear, including the one which contained her girlhood diary. Then she began to transfer mother’s books to the attic, where they were doomed to become food for mice. Father had no time to read these books, and she herself did not have the habit or interest. Next came the turn of the photographs of the deceased, removed by herself in our presence. This was not a manifestation of jealousy. This was the desire to reign in the household autocratically, rather than be a substitute for the one who had reigned there previously. Everything that reminded her of “that one” filled her heart with a malevolent vexation. And we, “her” children, were also constant, living reminders of “that one.” And we were to pay for it dearly.
Soon she was to deliver a very cruel blow; to turn out of our home our beloved, quiet nurturer and constant intercessor—our grandmother. She was meek and timid, but whenever she saw one of us being unduly punished, she would grab the victim and rush him off into the children’s room. No one could get her to change her behavior. The worst thing was that we could not help but notice the systematic efforts to get grandmother to leave of her own accord. Petty harassment, poisoning every minute of her life, carping, malevolent tricks, constant fault finding, demeaning reproaches, calumnies, mockery—all were used to effect. Grandmother would weep silently with increasing frequency and so would we, huddled around her, understanding each other without speaking a word. We did not weep only because of grandmother’s injuries, but also because we realized, contrary to our young years, that falsehood and evil were stronger than truth and goodness. We wept bitterly, lamenting and not comprehending how father could not see or understand anything. In his distance from us, he was our highest authority. Whenever he came down to us from his invisible but undoubted heights, he was good, kind, joyous and strong, and his smile would warm us like the smile of the sun illuminating the bleakness of our being.
Those of us who were older understood everything in the simplest of terms: a new, relatively young wife was able to twist her middle-aged husband around her finger.
She convinced father that it was in grandmother’s best interest to leave the cramped house which swarmed with kids. And he, with his usual good will and clear conscience, took up the task. He recalled that he had some distant relatives, a quiet, childless couple of modest means. For a small honorarium it cordially took in life’s old veteran. Everything seemed to have worked out for the best. But there was one thing that father overlooked. After grandmother had constantly been told that she was good for nothing, the exile from our home totally crushed her as ultimate evidence of her uselessness. “There now, no one needs me and I’m being sent away to die,” she murmured at our
14
Chapter One
farewells, her voice muffled by the lump in her throat. Nor did father notice what she had been for us and what a loss this was. We had been orphaned a second time.
I was the youngest and, without grandmother, the most defenseless. But it did not turn out that way. I was a boy and had certain resources which my sisters did not have. Father’s passion for angling, its peace and quietude, grew with the years. I would easily keep up with him, a can of first-class earthworms on the ready, a landing net for the chance big fish, and a basket for what we caught. Later, gladdening the heart of my sire, I became a skilled angler myself.
Life in our household began to stabilize through an uneasy compromise. The matter was greatly aided by an unexpected inheritance: a two-story wooden house. And so there came into being “the bi-cameral system” as we jokingly referred to it later as adults. The upper chamber comprised father, stepmother, and her children. The lower chamber was us and the servants except for the cook. We rarely came together, almost only for dinner, which was a tense and tedious ritual. Supper for the lower chamber was a separate affair. It was modest and always the same—cold boiled buckwheat and an earthenware tureen of milk (we had our own milking cow). The upper chamber had its guests: the so-called “local intelligentsia.” It was made up of the public notary, a lawyer, the excise tax man, two doctors, the police chief, the district attorney, and later, the head of the district council. They would hold their sessions at card tables and fill their intermissions with hors d’oeuvre and “liquid” refreshment. We stood “in opposition” to such goings on, especially to the head of the district council because he had married a recent graduate of the girl’s high school with whom I imagined myself to be in love, though the very word was for me a pale and bookish abstraction.
The shift from education at home to a boarding school one was an epochal change in the life of the young generation of a middle-class provincial family. And it lay in my life as a new and special geological stratum. The shift threw me from rural and backwater Kamyshin to the regional capital of Saratov [a major city on the Volga]. At that time, Saratov already had a quite decent and presentable city-center built around an excellent boulevard which, due to the predominance of a particular kind of tree, was called The Lindens. When the linden trees were in bloom, the boulevard was suffused with a most tender aroma. The Lindens were intersected by a network of four or five major streets with an abundance of very decent stores. “The kind that Moscow would not be ashamed of,” in the words of one of my landladies. The liveliest of these streets, resembling the German [foreigners] quarter in pre-Petrine Russia was of course called Nemetskaia [German] Street. During World War