Wrong Country

PART II

CHAPTER II KOLKHOZ and Seriozha

The main building of St. Petersburg (Leningrad, in my time) University

September First, we all came to our faculty for the lecture on the introduction to our study of Philology. But the unpleasant surprise awaited us: instead of starting our first course at university, we had to go to some kolkhoz (collective farm) to harvest potatoes in the Leningrad district, and for the whole month. “What a joke, I thought; I finished with ‘free harvesting’ in Siberia, but, no, not yet. We, the new proud students of the University, had to help our collective socialist farms harvest potatoes, and I do not remember what else.

BUILDING OF OUR FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY

The next morning, we came to our Faculty’s building, not with notebooks, but with bags and suitcases. Open vans were already waiting for us to take us to a village. I recall a dirty kolkhoz club, one big room, against the walls of which were temporarily put planks on the trestles, covered by dirty mattresses with the sheets and old blankets, perhaps, left by soldiers. Girls slept on these nary (as they called them in prisons) like one after another, in the line; boys, a much smaller group, settled on the stage on the same nary.

One night, I woke up from someone’s breath on my cheek. A young man beside me asked, “May I kiss you?” I took out from a pillow my glasses, put them on, and saw Sergei Dovlatov, a student from the Finnish department. It was bizarre: why did he choose me to lie down next to and kiss me? I turned my back on him, and he left. We never talked about this curious case. (He became a famous writer, by the way.)At that time, all the boys on the stage were indistinguishable to me, neither Sergei nor Seriozha, nor anybody else.

But Seriozha, not Sergei, found me in the potato field and introduced himself. Actually, Sergei was his first name, but nobody called him by his given name because he was a boy, so he was just Seriozha or Serge if you chose to be ironically refined. He was a student in the Swedish department; it meant he went through high competition because only four boys and one girl were accepted in foreign languages, except English, French, and German. We began talking and did not stop until the end of our potato journey- the whole wretched month.

The roads and the fields in Russian villages were awfully muddy; we wallowed in the mud the whole month; food was so bad that we ate all fresh vegetables straight from their beds- carrots, turnips, radishes. City girls were tired out soon; girls from the deep provinces were more prepared because they had been harvesting in their own vegetable gardens.

After that month of potato collecting, Seriozha went to his mom (he was a mama’s boy), and I went to my rented Corner of a Strange Wall, as my father called one of his stories. (I did not care about his story, but loved its title.) I could not afford a room, so I rented a ‘corner,’ as we called this kind of rent, from a young woman, the owner of a room, whose notice I found on the University noticeboard. Her room was in a big communal apartment; she divided it into two parts by a massive wardrobe: the part by the window became mine; the second part, close to the corridor's door, was hers.

One afternoon, I choked while eating my dinner at her kitchen table in the communal kitchen. A man, present in the kitchen (he read Nekrasov’s poems by heart to me in this kitchen), told me, “Somebody hurries to you!” I hardly had time to answer that nobody knew my address, as we heard a doorbell. I opened the door: Seriozha! After that, how could I not believe in Russian superstitions? We had a week's break after the kolkhoz before the start of our lectures, and Seriozha asked for my address in the Dean’s office, as he explained to me.

I did not expect to make such a “grand” impression on the Leningrad boy! From that moment, we spent a lot of time together. After lectures, we went for long walks around Leningrad, stopping in some café for a bite, and Seriozha familiarized me with the city. Sometimes, we visited his school friends, and one vast apartment surprised me with a huge empty room, only with a tennis table in it.

We talked a lot; I had never talked so much before or after Seriozha. But I was not in love with him. He was with me. I needed his company; I felt lonely in this beautiful city. It hadn’t become my city yet, and a corner of a strange wall was not for me. (It is curious how the titles of my father's fiction corresponded to my real life, but he knew nothing of it.) Soon, I moved to the student dormitory, but four girls in one small room were a miserable affair, too.

The longest corridor in Russia is the corridor in the main University Building. At the end of it, the main University Library Reading Hall, where I loved to study.

My first year at university was nothing remarkable- lectures, practical studies in linguistics, and reading literature in the university libraries. The city was most remarkable- the old, splendid St. Petersburg; visits to the Hermitage were frequent, but not enough to see all the exhibitions. The Tsar’s Winter Palace was so close, just a short walk from the University along the Neva, then across Palace Bridge, and here we were - a Fairy tale white and emerald treasure became the Hermitage! A curious historical detail: the beauty of Petersburg is connected with the tragedy of several thousand serfs (enslaved peasants) who died building the capital. Not only Pushkin- 19 c., but later, Merezhkovsky -20 c. prophesied the distraction of Peter’s city. But St. Petersburg had survived even the siege of 1941-44. When you muse on that city, the beauty and tragedy of it are always linked together.

In the second year of our friendship, SERIOZHA had a small birthday party for me at his close friend’s apartment. As always, November 7 was a cold, windy, unpleasant day. We drank a lot of Soviet Champagne (we knew of real French ones only from Pushkin’s Veuve Clicquot and French movies), we danced, we talked, and soon I understood that my dormitory would be closed if I even took a taxi. Seriozha and I stayed in his friend’s apartment for a night. We slept on a sofa, not even undressing. My first night with a boy, not even a man. But a boy so wanted to be a man that I had yielded to his blandishment and persuasion, and we both lost our virginities on that sofa. It was an absolutely unexpected and unexciting experience for me. I felt some sadness of indifference in me and wanted to leave him for good. His reaction was the opposite. He became my enthusiastic slave, crying when I left him two months later.

(Now, in my remembrance of Seriozha, I see a sweet boy and feel my callousness and his pain with some regret. Why could we not part without cruelty when we were young?)

CHAPTER III

LECTURES

Lectures on Higher Education in the USSR, at any university or institute, consisted of obligatory political courses on the History of the Communist Party, Socialist Dialectics, and Scientific Communism.

The lectures on the History of the Communist Party, the pseudo-heroic doctrine of the triumph of the Communists, and their dull congresses, which we had to learn by heart, were the most annoying. After two or three lectures, scornful of the subject, I never entered that auditorium again. Luckily for me (as for other absentees), these lectures were for the whole course, like 150 students. So, the absence of 20 people would not be so noticeable in a vast hall. To pass the exam, you needed to read a textbook that did not even mention Stalin's purges and the Gulag. In 1959, we did not know of the Gulag; nobody talked of it, even people who went through the Gulag and rehabilitation, like my father or Ivan Bursov, our professor of Russian Literature of the 19th century. Bursov, a lonely and sorrowful figure at the faculty, looked older than his age, and only belatedly, we learn that he returned from a hard labor camp. That terrible burden of his time at the camp and his poor health explained his lack of enthusiasm for his lectures. But the other professor of Literature of the 19th century, Makogonenko, was an inspiring lecturer - Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol were absolutely alive for us. After his lectures, we walked about not Leningrad but Petersburg’s streets of our classical writers.

I remember once, in the winter, I relived the Gogolian night on Nevsky Prospekt after enjoying an ice cream in our favorite café Liagushatnik (we called it “Frog place” in our parlance because everything there was some boggy-frogs color). Maybe a glass of Soviet champagne turned my head. I stepped outside and found myself on Gogol’s Nevsky Prospekt. The snow was falling on the buildings, on the branches of trees of the nearby Aleksandrovsky Gardens; snowflakes were whirling in the twinkling of the night street lamps. Everything sparkled and glittered, and it seemed to me that I saw Gogol pass me in his Byronic black wide cloak. I could see his long black hair and long nose. I strived after him. But it is all deceit, all dreams, not what it seems (Dostoevsky), despite a dimly radiant Gogol’s night on Nevsky, in Petersburg! The strange power of 19th-century Russian literature transformed Soviet Leningrad into a beautifully mysterious Petersburg.

How old was Makogonenko in 1959? He was a tall, energetic man, still looking young. He spent three years of the German blockade of Leningrad in the city, working on the radio with the well-known poet Olga Berggolts. In the starving and frozen city, people were dying on the streets. Both of them helped hold the city’s spirit tremendously, giving the people of Leningrad the moral “food” through their radio broadcasts, reciting poetry, and talking of history, arts, and courage, needed to survive the war. They were the spiritual heroes of the city. But after the war, while Makogonenko flourished as an inspiring professor of Russian Literature at the University and married a beautiful young student, his former colleague and lover, Olga, a talented poet, slowly became an alcoholic. My father spent several summers in the Writers’ Retreat under Moscow with Olga Berggolts as his neighbor. Everybody loved her, but nobody could stop her from drinking booze. She always had a friend providing her with a bottle of vodka. She didn’t leave her cottage and stayed inside without food. When her booze was over, Olga would become the kindest, liveliest person at the Retreat.

Compared to literature lectures, our studies of Latin were as dull as our Latin instructor's and as ancient as her subject. We translated three chapters of Julius Caesar’s Wars during six months. It was the only Latin text we had read for our studies, and only one sentence of Latin remains with me: Veni, Vidi, Vici. Oh, not in Latin, but in Russian translation, we often cited Julius Caesar’s quotation when passing the hard exam, The Rubicon was crossed or of a friend’s treachery, Et Tu, Brut! Regrettably, there’s not much knowledge of Latin, and it sounds childish.

It is startling that the Ancient Literature of Rome and Greece didn’t raise any interest in me; it might be because of the monotone reading of our another ancient professor about the ancient gods and goddesses. I only hope today that our professor hadn’t been Pasternak’s cousin, Olga Freidenberg: it’s only here, in New Jersey, by chance, I came across her book (in English) about her teaching at our Faculty of Philology from 1930 to 1960. (Of course, most of her book was devoted to Boris Pasternak, which is why her book was translated in the first case.) Olga Freidenberg wrote of the utterly suspicious atmosphere at the faculty in the 30-40: everybody was afraid, students reported on their professors or each other to the NKVD with false accusations. The professors did the same. The communists in their meetings screamed about loyalty to the party and unmasked everybody who was, from their point of view, not loyal enough.

She wrote of our professor of Folklore, Vladimir Prop, a German Russian from the Volga River region. Peter the Great and then Ekaterina the Great brought a lot of Germans to Russia (as the best craftsmen and workers) and settled them on the Volga. During World War II, thanks to Stalin, the Russian Germans came under suspicion, even if they didn’t know the German Language and had never been to Germany. Their families lived in Russia for two hundred years. Poor young Professor Prop! As O. Freidenberg recalled, he had cried when the inveterate communists castigated him at their meetings. She was a young professor at that time, and she was Jewish, which was also not a good background. Luckily, they both survived. There is some irony in Professor Prop’s specialty: being of German descent, he became a Russian Folklorist and the best one in Russia.

My Jewish friend Rahil Beker, for her love of Russian Folklore, became the best student of old German Prop. She ‘traveled’ (primarily by trucks) all over the Northern villages of Archangelsk and other god-forgotten places in search of the different variations of Russian fairy tales. Having been born in the blockade of Leningrad, she was of poor health, and those villages were hungry, dirty, and sometimes even without electricity. But she loved Professor Prop (as her teacher, of course) and Russian Folklore. She defended her Diploma thesis on the variations of a Russian fairy tale excellently. As for me, I never liked Russian fairy tales and folklore. Hans Christian Anderson was the best for me.

Sometimes, I preferred reading texts at the library instead of listening to boring professors. Our Faculty Reading room needed to be better disposed of for studying. I loved the Reading room in the main University building, which was constructed in the first quarter of the 18th c. on the order of Peter the Great by Italian architect Domenico Trezzini. The building was a complex of twelve similar small buildings under one roof, one long gallery with a four-hundred-meter corridor, and one common wall for all these buildings, on the second floor. From the façade, it is one huge two-story building; from the back, every separate building has its own entrance and staircase to its second floor. The building was supposed to be the Twelve Collegia, but after Peter’s death, it was given to the Pedagogical Institute, which in 1812 was transformed into the Petersburg University.

If you enter the building from the façade and ascend the marble staircase, you find yourself in Russia's longest and oldest corridor. It is an impressive corridor with a well-polished parquet; along the hall's walls are the old redwood bookcases with glass doors, occupied by the oldest folios of Russian Scientific literature. On the opposite side of the corridor, there are a lot of big windows, and between them, you can see the portraits of Russian scientists Dm. Mendeleev, V. Beketov, I. Pirogov, who worked at the university and whose scientific discoveries had glorified the University and Russia. The atmosphere of this corridor imbues such respect and reverence that you never see anybody being frivolous or running.

At the end of this famous corridor, the Main Library and the Reading Room, where I loved to spend time, forgetting myself in the reading. It was my favorite place. You have a comfortable table (for two) and chair, a table lamp, and total silence for your concentration, only the rustle of the turned-over pages.

All I missed at the Lecture Halls, I would read with delight at the Reading Hall. Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses” and Dante Alighieri's “Divine Comedy” with its songs of sinners of Hell and, finally, Heaven, with its angels in the ninth sky - I had a better time going together with Virgil about all twelve rounds of “Divine Comedy,” than listening to lectures on this theme.

Our building of Philology was an unpretentious, relatively small two-story mansion on the Neva River. It was our home. All the corridors, every nook and cranny, became well known to us, but the best place was at the wooden divan on the second-floor landing of the ancient, wide marble staircase.

It was a place for smokers. And I was one of them. I don’t recall when I began smoking, but I liked it from my first inhalation. I loved the ritual of it: to open my portfel’, to find a pack of cigarettes, to get out a cigarette, to put it in the long-vamp style cigarette holder, to get a light from somebody’s cigarette (almost all the girls smoked, there were only a few young men among us), and inhale deeply. The whole procedure carried a feeling that you are so busy. Life seemed full and pleasant then, and our gabbling about nothing usually seemed lively and meaningful.

Oh, how I could neglect to mention again Sergei Dovlatov, our forthcoming famous Russian writer, smoking very often on that landing. I don’t know why he studied the Finnish language; he had no inclination for foreign languages and left the faculty after one year of study. Later, in one of his novels, his hero wanted to escape from Leningrad to Finland through the Finnish (which became Soviet after WWII) woods. We sometimes talked, never mentioning a non-happened kiss, again of nothing serious, smoking our cigarettes. Sergey, actually, was a man of few words, somewhat dark and gloomy... He had married Asia, the most beautiful girl from the English Department (forgot her last name). Still, something burst between them; the marriage was broken rather quickly. Then, suddenly, he disappeared from the Faculty, and we heard that he had voluntarily become a serving soldier in the Red Army. By the way, it gave him the literary material for his famous Zona. I am not even sure whether he graduated from university.

He became a celebrated writer in Russia, living here in New York. Unfortunately, he died young, at 49. One of his friends told me after Sergei's death that one evening, he had begun drinking that was prohibited because of an anti-alcohol patch inside his body. As a result, he became extremely sick, and it was too late to save him when his friends brought him to the hospital. It was a tragic end for such a talented, still young writer. Nevertheless, he continues to be one of the best modern Russian writers; a complete collection of his works was published, two of his novels were made as movies, and a movie was made about his life, though a Bulgarian (?) actor hardly reminds very tall, sturdy figure of Sergei with his small head.