Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga
15
I the city council, embarrassed by the name, changed it to honor General Sko-belev [a hero of the 1877–78 Turkish wars]. After 1917 the spirit of the times changed its name to Revolution Street.
But as one moved toward the periphery, the city’s glitter became increasingly lusterless. It was initially replaced by the usual provincial ordinariness of buildings and streets. Further on, the ordinariness changed to shabbiness, which came to a low point in the neighborhood of Gorki: primitive huts of the urban poor who made a living by some indeterminate means.
On this general background the recently built center resembled an errant piece of elegant brocade brightly sewn into the worn clothes of a poor person. Of course, the center was the object of special attention by the city council which represented the merchants and property owners while the outlying areas were totally neglected.
A part of this beautiful brocade piece was our boarding school. It seemed that the rest of the city had not yet fully become accustomed to its existence, especially to the glistening buttons of its uniform overcoats which, beneath the dim street lights, resembled those of military officers. The resemblance was further enhanced by the intricate cockades on our hats. As an upper-classman, I had numerous comical incidents because of this confusion. Occasionally in the evening on some out-of-the-way street we would encounter a bunch of soldiers. Their tipsy and loud talk would suddenly go quiet, their figures would straighten, and they would begin to march in step as they readied themselves for a stiff-bodied, snappy salute and to “devour the officers with their eyes.” But suddenly, having seen things clearly, they would roar with laughter and chastise each other for spotting “an officer who was nothing more than boarding school crap.” Sometimes threats would be sent in our direction and sometimes the dark gray overcoats would threaten to take their chagrin out on us with their fists.
In the lower grades street adventures were an everyday occurrence. The mere sight of our school uniforms and cockades with the school’s initials on them provoked the street kids into bloody challenges. The school’s initials, S.G. [Saratov Gimnazium], were stupidly and maliciously decoded [in Russian] as “blue beef.” The reddish-blue hue of rancid beef is familiar to everyone. Therefore, the provocative question, “Hey, you, stinkin’ blue beef, how much a pound?” had the effect that a gauntlet thrown at the feet of a medieval knight would have had. In order to preserve his honor the knight had to pick up the glove and unsheathe his sword. With us the ritual was to roll up one’s sleeves and fight for the honor of the school until one of the combatants was knocked off his feet or himself fell to the ground: the convention was not to hit someone who was down. The younger schoolboys who usually were waylaid by gangs while walking home from school would form groups and fight
16
Chapter One
their way homeward by going “wall against wall.” Both sides had outstanding fighters, their Hectors, Ajaxes and Achilleses.
I also took part in this ancient internecine strife which had been legitimated by tradition. My old Kamyshin habits pulled me to the banks of the Volga where I would go on Sundays or other holidays. I had to slip out of the house unnoticed for this, while everyone was only beginning to rise. It was a great pleasure to get to the water, observe the fishermen, watch the loading and unloading of barges, to mingle with the sawmill workers, to listen to the engaging, boastful tales of the Galakhov boys—hoboes who had received their name from the merchant Galakhov and his flophouse. Among them one occasionally encountered self-made raconteurs who were true masters of the word. When one of them would talk, it was as if he were weaving multicolored silks. After grandmother’s tales and songs, it was here that I found an endless spring of authentic language of the people: fresh, strong, and juicy as an Antonov apple, extraordinarily rich in imagery and laced with maxims, proverbs, and sayings.
But an even greater curiosity was roused in me by two types of people. The first were wayfarers, collectors of funds for church buildings, defrocked priests and deacons, pilgrims who traveled from one place to another and had been to almost all the famous monasteries which preserved the relics of the righteous and had miracle-working icons. Among such people there were also zealous sectarians seeking “the city of God and absolute faith.” The second group consisted of hoboes who maintained their existence by whatever means they could, including petty thievery when times were hard. They turned to thievery, especially in late autumn, to ensure for themselves a winter’s warmth and food in the local jail. Later, when Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths created a public sensation, I remained indifferent to it. All his male types were not new to me. The memory of my teen-age years was filled with them.
Having lost my mother at an early age, I grew up virtually abandoned by my stepmother. And though she came from a clerical family, I received no religious education in the spirit of the Orthodox church. I took a discarded child’s primer on the Old Testament to be a collection of fairy tales about a serpent which spoke the human tongue, of prophetic dreams of pharaohs, of the sea which parted before a procession of fugitives, of the miraculous survival of youths in a lion’s den and in a scorching oven, of a stone from a boy’s sling which brought down the invincible giant Goliath.
Later, when promoted from the elementary grades in school to the middle ones, I had my personal period of mystic-religious enthusiasms and secret, solitary, prayerful ecstasies. But they developed on their own, having ripened in the secret corner of a growing child’s consciousness prematurely intent on
Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga
17
becoming a young man. All this had no connection with the Orthodox church but rather had points of contact with the Tolstoyism of the intelligentsia and the god-seeking of the common folk.
There was not even a hint of a university in Saratov. For higher education, one had to go either to distant Kazan or all the way to “the second capital,” Moscow. There was one gimnazium [a classical high school] for men and one for women, a vocational high school, a finishing school for girls of the nobility, a pedagogical institute, a school for doctors’ assistants [paramedics], and in the nearby countryside, an agricultural school. In all, a smallish number for a city that called itself the capital of the Volga region. However, along with the official institutions of learning where the provincial “fruits of enlightenment” were cultivated there was another place of learning. By some odd quirk it was located in a corner of the Commercial Club, a venue for gatherings of the landed nobility, grand banquets, and balls. Though it had no official standing, it served as a magnet for all the local students. It was a rather substantial library under the supervision of Valerian Aleksandrovich Balmashev, a political exile under government surveillance. His charm and kind attention enabled him to gradually transform the book-loving young people into students of an informal and liberating self-education.