The Russian Jerusalem E-Book

Elaine Feinstein

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Fiction
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 210

Beschreibung

Beginning in present-day St Petersburg, The Russian Jerusalem explores the landscape of twentieth century Russian literature. In this evocative autobiographical novel, distinguished poet, translator, novelist and biographer Elaine Feinstein moves among the dead poets of Stalin's Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva as her Virgil, mingling with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. These imaginary encounters are interspersed with new poems by Feinstein. The author, herself of Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing them at the heart of the European tradition.

Leseprobe

ELAINE FEINSTEIN

The Russian Jerusalem

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Arts Council England, whose generosity made this book possible. She thanks Judith Willson for the care she has taken throughout the production.

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Epigraph

1 ‘They were almost unaware of the poetry they moved in.’

2 St Petersburg 2005

3 The Underworld Opens

4 The Stray Dog

5 The River Station, Moscow 1941

6 Rivers

7 Moscow 1934

8 Ilya Ehrenburg in Gehinnom

9 Moscow, December 1937

10 Pasternak on the cinder slopes

11 Peredelkino 1937

12 Nashchokin Lane, Moscow

13 Voronezh

14 The innocence of Isaac Babel

15 Peredelkino, May 1939

16 Cherry brandy, May 1938

17 Barracks No. 11, Vladivostok 1938

18 Strangers

19 Stetl

20 Golden Kiev

21 A Change in the Climate, 1953

22 The fortunate spirit

23 Prizes

24 Joseph

25 Arkangelskoye 1964

26 Farewell

27 St Petersburg 2005

28 Pasternak’s Grave

29 Odessa 2005

30 Brodsky

31 Heaven

Notes

Timeline

Also by Elaine Feinstein from Carcanet Press

About the Author

Copyright

‘All poets are Jews.’

1

They were almost unaware of the poetry they moved in.

    It was like birdsong in a garden:

– ash tree clarity, sycamore vision –

and St Petersburg itself an elegant mirage,

    a festival of peace time soldiers,

ball dresses and marble palaces.

Among so many Russians, one was an upstart,

    inwardly awkward, writing as he walked,

a white-knobbed stick his Jewish crosier, but

sometimes unfortunate people are very happy.

    He dreamed of the South with a copper moon,

blue-eyed dragonflies, and an Easter foolery

of sugared almonds and fallen tamarisk leaves

    while in Kiev a hundred old men

in striped talisim sat at benches in grief.

All that is left now of that Silver Age

    is space and stars and a few singers

who have learnt the sad language of goodbyes.

2  St Petersburg 2005

That September, St Petersburg was a city of freezing rain, blown horizontally into the eyes of anyone walking the streets in the direction of the sea. And St Petersburg is a landscape of sea and sky. When it rains, the brown skies and wet streets are continuous.

I’d rented a flat just off Sadovaya Square in a poor area of the inner city. The Square itself was filled with cranes and boarded up with planks. Taxis brought me through an archway into a dark courtyard with unexpected holes going down to the plumbing. There might be sable coats and French haute couture in the glass-fronted shops on Nevsky Prospekt, but the streets just behind were still open to the sewerage.

The flat, on the ground floor of a stucco building pitted by weather, was owned by a molecular biologist. He had a PhD from a university in the States, and a research job in an Institute of Biochemistry, but his pay was sporadic and he lived on the rent from the flat and his wife’s classes in psychotherapy. These last were eagerly sought in post-Communist Russia. She used one of the rooms by arrangement three times a week, and there were tapes of sixties American folk music, and a sense of alternative hippy culture.

Handing over the keys to me, he insisted the flat had to be locked and chained even when I was inside it. Burglaries are understandably commonplace, though I’d been assured by a laconic friend as I set out for St Petersburg, ‘There’s much less street crime. The Mafia has got its act together.’

It was a spacious flat, but very cold because central heating remains under the control of the municipal authorities, who turn it on every year at the appointed date, regardless of the weather. The flat’s only other form of heating was a single bar electric heater. In 1998, when my husband was still alive and travelling with me, he lit the flames of the gas cooker in the kitchen to save us from hypothermia. Now he lies buried in Willesden Green cemetery.

For the most part, the tenants round the courtyard were Korean. At the end of the street, wooden booths sold bread, and milk. Old women in bulky clothes with their hands in mittens weighed and sliced sausages. They also sold drinking water in unlabelled polystyrene containers the size of petrol cans. This I did not trust and found it worth walking round the square to a small supermarket to buy bottled water, which was necessary even for brushing my teeth. The liquid which comes out of St Petersburg taps has a nasty bug, even if residents have become immune to it.

Once, on an overnight train to Moscow, two rumbustious, vodka-drinking industrial chemists explained the presence of the famous bug. The source of St Petersburg water remains as clear and pure as a Highland spring. It is the filtering mechanism that is infected: a telling image for that network of hands – Joint Enterprise, old apparatchik or opportunist – whose greed has polluted the Russian dream of a Western free society.

This remains Peter’s city, built on the tears and the corpses of his slave workers, who dragged earth on old sacks and bark matting so that the grand Rastrelli palaces could glow in the water of the River Neva. It’s also the city of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, where poor Herman stood looking up at the Countess’s window while large flakes of wet snow fell on his greatcoat; Akhmatova’s city of granite and disaster; the Petropolis of Mandelstam’s dreams, where the streetlights look as yellow as drops of cod liver oil in the sleety mist.

It was never my city, though I had visited many times. My family never lived here. They moved from the stetls of Belorus in the last decades of the nineteenth century to find homes in Britain, Canada or Latin America or went south to Odessa, a city of acacia trees and street cafes, dumplings and seed bread where half the population were Jews, many with a Russian education.

So what draws me to this city where only wealthy Jews were allowed to live under the Tsar, and where they suffered like everyone through civil war, Stalin’s Terror and Hitler’s siege? Not the glories of the Hermitage, though no visitor could reach the end of the European art collected there: the Matisses, the Impressionists, the paintings stolen from German collectors. Not the dark green painted stucco of the Winter Palace either, nor the golden curlicues on the staircases within, the marble columns, the jewel box ceilings. Not the great statue of Peter the Great on the Embankment, not the golden dome of St Isaac’s.

I am here for ghosts.

Below street level on Mikhailovskoye Square, the legendary cellar of The Stray Dog has opened once again, though for tourists now, not the great spirits of the Silver Age who once gathered there after the theatres closed and often stayed talking until dawn. To reach The Stray Dog, you still have to descend a narrow stone staircase, and enter a low doorway. The windows of the café are blocked even now, as if to keep out the everyday world, but these days the walls and ceilings of low, curving plaster are no longer painted with flowers and birds in brilliant colours.

A blink, and Osip Mandelstam, barely twenty years old is there, with his long lashes, and a lily of the valley in his buttonhole, sitting at a side table with Akhmatova, a melancholy young beauty with a black agate necklace. Princess Salomea Andronikova, his Solominka, sits at the same table. They are drinking chilled Chablis and eating white bulka rather than black Russian khleb.

Thirty years ago I was ensnared by the dangerous glamour of those ghosts, a glamour much to be wished for if you come from a town in the English Midlands. My own roots always drew nourishment from elsewhere, and I grew up passionately aware of it.

My parents came from very different families, but both of my grandfathers were Russian Jews. My mother’s father Solomon was a glass merchant; small, sandy haired and clean shaven, with starched triangles to his white collars, and a single rose-cut stone in his tiepin. He was a crabby man, but an able one; his sons went to Cambridge, and changed the family name to Compton as they entered the English establishment.

It is my other grandfather I remember, however. Among my earliest memories of our little house in Groby Road, Leicester, is a large ginger-bearded man seen through the slats of my cot. He had blue eyes with deep laughter lines, and I never saw him anything but cheerful. I thought of Menachem Mendl as my Russian grandfather.

He was not a fastidious man. Perhaps he wore a suit when he went to the synagogue, but I don’t remember him doing so. His cardigans sagged at the back and he smelled of peppermint and snuff. His large yellow handkerchiefs were chosen to disguise that habit. He left his cigars half-smokedin ashtrays all round the house. My mother folded her lips tightly as she collected them up. When he drank lemon tea from a glass in a metal holder, holding a lump of sugar in his mouth the while, he said it was always drunk so in der heim. I was not sure then what country he came from, but he was old, had a strong accent and his gestures were not English. I was taught to call him Zaida, not Grandpa.

And I liked his stories. When I sat on his knee, he told me about scholars and dreamers, and young men and women dancing together in the forests. He had lost the top joint of one of his fingers, and showed me the stump of his smooth, unmarked knuckle which had healed perfectly. He was a dreamer, too absent-minded to be left in charge of a circular saw.

About his own childhood Zaida spoke little, but he had lived for a time in Odessa, and that he described with love: the bustle in the wide streets, the music everywhere, and the liveliness of the Jews.

When I was eight, my father bought a plot of land in Elmsleigh Avenue and built a big house on it. It was a leafy bit of Leicester, a suburb in the south of the city, where neighbours dressed quietly. He was proud of the oak floors and doors of solid wood. Each room had its own colours. The dining room had russet tones, picked up in the huge stone fireplace. Zaida lived in the large front room with a bay window and delicate lilac colouring, sleeping in a wide put-u-up bed, opened out for him by my father at night and covered with a rug of patchwork squares of thick velvet during the day.

Sometimes Zaida lamented the absence of Jews in Leicester. Certainly there were few living nearby, though the war brought Jewish refugees, market traders from London, and Jewish servicemen from America, and my father invited them to our home for meals.

The adventures of my forebears are not my only connection to Russia, however. For nearly forty years I have been infatuated with their poets, their very being as much as their genius. It is something to do with the love between friends that I first understood reading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope. Poetry underpinned that friendship, and I found it enviable. There is an intensity to Russian friendship which is stronger than the passion of sexual love.

Long before I put a foot on Russian soil, I had close Russian friends, first among them Masha Enzensberger, a white-skinned beauty with high Tatar cheekbones and blue eyes glittering like frozen sea, recently separated from the poet Hans Magnus. We met in the bar of the University of Essex, and talked through my version of Tsvetaeva’s ‘Attempt At Jealousy’, a poem we both had reason to treasure. Masha was unhappy in England, homesick for Russia, yet unwilling to spend the rest of her life in the Soviet Union. She resembled her father, the novelist Fadeev, whom she had met only rarely; her mother was the poet Margarita Aliger, then well-placed in Moscow. Masha travelled between Moscow and Cambridge, where for a time she had a Fellowship at King’s College. There she entertained lavishly, striking a glass to command Russian-style toasts from sheepish Cambridge dons. For me, she was the voice of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry, which she read – while keeping her name out of the Radio Times – in a series of radio programmes I put together in the 1970s. We often shared our troubles, but she was more deeply troubled than I knew. I saw her last in a Moscow of brown streets, puddles and people still shaking with euphoria after defeating the military coup in 1991. She had been among the women who held hands to confront the tanks. The victory excited her so much she was unable to sleep. A few days after she returned to London, she took her own life.

Through Masha, I met many Russians, including Princess Salomea Andronikova, Mandelstam’s Solominka, herself at that time living with Anna Kallin in a Chelsea flat. The princess was still beautiful, and I admired her poise. I remember only that the china was pretty and that Salomea, even in her seventies, still looked exquisite. I imagined it was her husband, the banker Halpern, who had left her so well provided for, but it turned out the flat was the gift of Sir Isaiah Berlin. I was far closer to Vera Traill, whose rackety life had stranded her in Cambridge in her sixties. She was the daughter of Guchkov, a great industrialist, who was a member of Russia’s short-lived Duma in 1917. In her childhood, she remembered being driven around in one of the few cars Moscow could boast before the First World War.

Masha disapproved of Vera profoundly. Rumour had it that she had been, and perhaps still was, an agent of the NKVD. I was more intrigued than disapproving. Vera had been in Spain; she had escaped from a German prison camp. I admired her Marlene Dietrich bones and bold manner, and knew that in France she had been married to Peter Suvchinsky, one of the founders of the Eurasian movement, and so a close friend of Tsvetaeva’s husband, Sergei Efron.

It was this last which brought me to visit her for the first time in the Cambridge hospital where she had been taken after a fall.

‘I hope you haven’t brought flowers,’ she greeted me without preamble. ‘What I need is a bottle of good red wine.’

Fortunately, I had been alerted this was the case, and poured red wine into a cup which should have held Ribena. After her first mouthfuls, she was eager to tell me about an encounter with T.S. Eliot some twenty years earlier. He had agreed to see her, but they had not hit it off. Somehow she managed to convert that snub into a criticism of Eliot’s prudery. I was impatient. I wanted her to talk about Tsvetaeva, but she seemed reluctant to do so and even when she began I could hear that, although she admired Tsvetaeva’s poetry, she did not like the woman. She chose to condemn her slovenliness but I guessed what she found most offensive was an arrogance founded on talent rather than beauty. Of Sergei, however, she spoke warmly.

‘He was handsome, genial, friendly,’ she said. ‘Of course I liked him more than her. When I was in hospital, having a child with great difficulty – I had to lie with my legs up in the air so as not to lose it – he came to see me every day.’

She deplored his fidelity to Tsvetaeva: ‘There was another woman, you know. She was Swiss, and her father a millionaire. Sergei could have gone off with her, but he refused. He decided she was not the right one for him and stayed in Meudon with Marina. And do you know the reason he gave? He said he couldn’t leave such an important poet.’

Over the years Vera told me many stories, in her low, cigarette-husky voice. To some I listened with polite incredulity. Most have since turned out to be true. One day, when she was entertaining me in her shabby bedsitter on the far side of Jesus Green, she described her return to Russia in 1937, the year the Russians call the Yezhovchina, when Yezhov, then boss of the NKVD, organised the most murderous of Stalin’s great purges. When she visited Yezhov, he stood up without preamble to warn her in agitation: ‘Go now. See no one. Go straight to the airport and leave. If you stay here, I cannot protect you.’

She obeyed, and reached Paris safely. I failed to ask what she was doing, calling on Yezhov in the first place. I know now that she had gone to plead for the release of her lover, once a prince, then a dedicated Communist. It was with him she had returned to Russia two years earlier. His arrest and disappearance had been unexpected. I did not enquire what her relationship had been to Yezhov.

Her beauty had brought her little happiness. She had been married three times, but when I knew her she was alone. And poor, though sometimes she had grand visitors. Solzhenitzyn, for instance, came to see her when he was writing August1914. He wanted to investigate the memories she had of her father’s study. She was more interested in the waifs and strays, for whom she always had house room. A handsome young layabout slept on her floor for six months. When I asked her why she allowed herself to be ripped off so blatantly, she shrugged and told me she was bored.

‘You know, I think I was only happy for three months out of my whole life and the only thing that makes my living bearable now is knowing I can always end it.’

I have never felt like that, even in the wasteland of widowhood. There was something a little puritanical, however, in my insistence on activity. Why else would I have arranged to meet Daniel?

Daniel was the son of an old Cambridge friend, working for a year as a professor at the University of St Petersburg, and he collected me one evening to take me out to supper. I barely recognised him. He was pale, with fair hair, but now there was a stubble of darker beard pushing up through his skin, and when he spoke he kept his voice low; it was hard to catch his words. He seemed to be strung too tight, as if under some intolerable strain. I recognised something of myself in him.

‘What are you doing here this time?’ he asked.

‘Working,’ I said shortly.

Once on the street, Daniel put up his hand to hail a passing car, though the restaurant was not far away. It is a commonplace, inexpensive way to get round Russian cities.

I was already sorry I had agreed to meet him. He was a distinguished economist, who understood the New Russia far better than I did, but we had little in common. We stood at the kerbside, in the freezing sleet, and perhaps to amuse himself, he began to tease me. He believed material prosperity would transform the Russian spirit, and mocked my attachment to the literature of the past century. Indeed, even as he thanked me for sending him a copy of my recent biography, he could not resist adding, ‘People here say your Akhmatova is the other face of Stalin.’ I rose to the bait hotly even as we clambered into a green Volkswagen, and he replied with malicious glee: ‘In Putin’s Russia, print runs for poetry are no bigger than ours in the West, and this is how it should be: people love poetry as they love God, when life has nothing else to offer. And, in any case, these Russian writers you love so much, they all hated Jews.’

I knew he was right about the ancient Russian loathing of Jews, but found myself arguing: ‘Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva took Jewish lovers, Marina’s husband was a Jew. And where would Russian literature of the twentieth century be without Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel and Boris Pasternak?’

At this, the driver turned his head and observed in fluent English, ‘She is right, you know.’ He had a dark, Italianate face and brilliant eyes.

‘There are many other drivers willing to take passengers,’ Daniel observed uneasily.

Seeing his uncertainty, the driver swiftly offered a card neatly printed in roman script. He was an actor, at the moment unemployed.

‘I remember now,’ said Daniel suddenly. ‘You played the devil Woland in the Taganka production of The Master and Margarita. Isn’t that so?’

Our driver nodded and, as he turned to smile, I thought he truly resembled the Devil, with his glittering eyes and narrow face. I was a little troubled. If the Devil ever appeared in contemporary St Petersburg, he would surely have the same alarming confidence, and the citizens of this city would no doubt behave with the same greed as those of Bulgakov’s Soviet Moscow.

‘You see that police station?’ our driver remarked. ‘That is where Raskolnikov confessed his crimes to the Inspector.’

Ghosts everywhere, I thought. A city of ghosts. Even the characters in a novel have an afterlife here.

The restaurant was out of the tourist way, and not particularly grand, but to my irritation I had to let Daniel pay for the meal, since I discovered I had no money. I don’t know where my wallet was stolen from me. I may have been robbed in the few moments taking shelter from the rain in a coffee shop near the Hermitage where I talked to a couple of friendly Tazhiks. As if to confirm his control of the situation, Daniel changed my English cheque for £200.

As I lay in bed that night – suddenly far too hot since the heating had come on and water was boiling in the radiators – I knew I had to report the loss at a police station because my insurance required it. The police would be wearily indifferent but they would give me a piece of paper. As I dropped into sleep, I wondered whether I would meet some image of Dostoevsky’s Inspector Porfiry, and if he would be an old KGB apparatchik.

3  The Underworld Opens

In Raskolnikov’s police station a screen saver swirled on the iMac, but the desk was littered with heaps of paper, wire trays, staplers and a Sellotape tin of cigarette butts. The man behind the desk was not dressed as a policeman. He wore a blue trilby hat, slanted to a thirties gangster angle, and his thick neck protruded from an open shirt.

‘Passport. Tickets. Visa,’ he said.

I gave him my documents and told my story.

He did not hand over the Form of Complaint I expected. He seemed to have something quite else on his mind as he stared at me.

‘Your business in St Petersburg?’

‘A tourist,’ I said.

‘It says here WRITER. What do you write?’

I hesitated.

‘Poems, mainly.’

‘So you like Russian poetry?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then perhaps I can interest you. Follow me.’

I was intrigued, if puzzled, and obeyed him.

‘Forget Putin’s Russia,’ he said. ‘The pastries with cloudberry jam in the Astoria Hotel. The oligarchs, the store windows of sable coats, the caviar, the tourist tat. Put Nevsky Prospekt out of your mind. We are going back through the many names of the city, each one with its own ghosts. Are you ready? I want to show you my city. Not the Rastrelli staircases, the palaces, the golden domes, but the shabby rooms where I learnt to love poetry. Don’t be surprised. In Russia even policemen love poetry.’

‘Who are these people? With heavy overcoats?’

‘The hoods and pimps of the inner city. Now they are Mafia, then they were KGB. To go back is like opening a wooden doll. Look around you. The advertisements for Big Macs and Coca-Cola are fading. There on the wall is Lenin wearing his worker’s cap with a carnation in his lapel. Now we are in brilliant sunlight on the quay beside the Aurora.’

‘To hear the shot that fired the Revolution?’

‘Please don’t be foolish. Look at the clothes.’

‘Then what is the euphoria in the streets?’

‘A coup has been defeated. People on the pavements are trying to sell carrots and bunches of herbs, and a brass band of youngsters is playing Deutschland über alles.’

‘I can hear that, but why?’

‘This is the day Leningrad took back its old name of St Petersburg. For these children, Germans are only tourists.’

‘Don’t they know about the siege?’

‘For them, that is all grandmothers’ tales. Hold on. We are going back through the seasons. Now it is hot summer, with the asphalt melting. The shops are empty. Look at the faces of those who come to buy.’

‘Their faces are closed to me.’