So that is what St Andrew's Hill is like. And it has not changed: there is not one new house in the whole street, it still has its big cobblestones, its wild acacia bushes and occasional gnarled American maples bending right out over the street; it was exactly like that ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and it was like that in the winter of 1918 when 'the City lived a strange unnatural life which is unlikely to be repeated in the twentieth century'.
Whereabouts on St Andrew's Hill did the Turbins live? I don't quite know why, but I convinced myself, and then I also started to convince my friends when I used to take them up on to that hilltop, that the Turbins lived in the little house next door to Richard the Lionheart's Castle. It had a verandah, a charming gateway in a high fence, a little garden and one of those twisted maples in front of the door. Of course they must have lived there! And that, as far as I was concerned, was where they had lived.
It turned out, however, that I was quite, quite wrong.
Now begins the most interesting part. What I have written so far has been, as it were, the prologue: I now come to the story proper.
It was 1965.
I need hardly describe the delight which we all experienced when Bulgakov's Theatrical Novel first appeared in print that year,1 and a year later The Master and Margarita? Twenty-five
1. Published in English translation in 1967 under the title Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel (London: Hodder and Stoughton; New York: Simon and Schuster).
2. Published in English in 1967 (London: Collins/Harvill; New York: Harper and P.ow).
years after the author's death came our first introduction to those hitherto unknown works of Bulgakov. And we were amazed and delighted, though this is not the place to enlarge on it. But I at least was even more amazed and delighted to find The White Guard again. Nothing in it had faded, nothing had aged, as if those forty years had never been. I found it difficult to tear myself away from the novel and I had to force myself to do so, in order to prolong the pleasure. Something like a miracle had happened before our eyes, something which happens very rarely in literature and which by no means every author can pull off - a book had been born again.
With the dramatised version of the story, The Days of the Turbins, this had not happened. No one found the post-war revival of the production at the Stanislavsky Theater particularly thrilling. Perhaps because after such actors as Khmelyov, Dobronravov and Kudryavtsev (to think that not one of them is still alive), after the original Lariosik played by Yanshin when he was young and thin, after Tarasova and Yelanskaya, it would have been extremely hard to mount a revival that said anything new. Perhaps, too, because not all works of art can be copied and it is none too easy to create something original. I await the new M.A.T. production with alarm (with hope, too, but with rather more alarm than hope). Shall I go and see it? I don't know. I'm afraid . . . afraid of so much: youthful memories, comparisons, parallels . . . Yes, I'm afraid for the Turbins, afraid for the play.
But the republished novel has completely disarmed me. It is as fresh and alive as when I first read it - not a wrinkle, not a gray hair. It has survived and conquered.
But I am getting carried away. To return to our topography: where did the Turbins live?
It transpires that the author made no secret of it. The exact address is given, literally on the second page of the noveclass="underline" No. 13 St Alexei's Hill (for 'St Alexei's' read 'St Andrew's').
'For many years before her [their mother's] death, in the house at No. 13 St Alexei's Hill, little Elena, Alexei the eldest and baby Nikolka had grown up in the warmth of the tiled stove that burned in the dining-room.' Clear and precise. How was it that I didn't remember it? Somehow I just didn't.
So, to No. 13 St Andrew's Hill.
The really funny thing is that it turns out I even have a photograph of that house, although when I took it I had no idea of its significance or of its place in Russian literature. I had simply taken a liking to that little corner of Kiev (I used to be keen on photography and was particularly fond of certain parts of Kiev), and the vantage point from which I had taken the photograph, by climbing up to the top of one of Kiev's many hills, was extremely well chosen. St Andrew's Church, Richard the Lionheart's Castle, the hill, the gardens, the Dnieper in the background, and down below - the steep curve of St Andrew's Hill with the Turbins' house slap in the middle. Incidentally from the hill that I have just mentioned, the courtyard behind No. 13 can be clearly seen. It is most attractive, with its dovecot and its little balcony - I must have pointed it out hundreds of times to my friends when proudly showing them the charm and beauty of Kiev.
And of course I have been to that house. Twice, in fact - the first time for a few minutes in passing, mainly to check whether or not this really was the right house, and the second time for longer.
In the novel the house is described with great precision. 'No. 13 was a curious building. On the street the Turbins' apartment was on the second floor, but so steep was the hill behind the house that their back door opened directly on to the sloping yard, where the house was brushed and overhung by the branches of the trees growing in the little garden that clung to the hillside. The backyards filled up with snow and the hill turned white until it became one gigantic sugar-loaf. The house acquired a covering like a White general's winter fur cap; on the lower floor (on the street side it was the first floor, whilst at the back, under the Turbins' verandah, it was the basement) the disagreeable Vasily Lisovich -an engineer, a coward and a bourgeois - lit his flickering little yellow lamps, whilst upstairs the Turbins' windows shone brightly and cheerfully.'
Nothing has changed since those days: the house, the yard, the sheds, the verandah and the stairs under the verandah leading down to the back door of 'Vasilisa's' apartment - Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich. On the street side it is the first floor, whilst in the backyard it is the basement. Only the garden has disappeared - the backyard is now entirely taken up with sheds.
As I have said, my first visit was a short one. I was with my mother and a friend, we had come by car, and we had little time to spare. Having entered by the backyard, I timidly rang the bell on the left-hand one of the two doors giving on to the verandah and asked the fair-haired middle-aged lady who opened it whether some people called Turbin had once lived here. Or rather Bulgakov.
The lady stared at me in some astonishment and said, yes, they did live here once, very long ago, but why should I be interested in them? I said that Bulgakov was a famous Russian writer and that everything connected with him . . .
Her face showed even greater astonishment.
'What? Mishka Bulgakov - a famous writer? That incompetent venereologist - a famous Russian writer?'
With that I became dumb with embarrassment, and it was only later that I realised that the lady was not astonished at the incompetent venereologist becoming a writer (she knew that), but that he had become famous . . .