Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

Reaching out from beneath the bedclothes, he picked up the script from the floor. The night before he had read it… how many times? Three? Four? At least three, he recalled. He had read until the flickering light from the oil lamp had made his eyes weary and the words blur on the page. He was not word perfect yet, but he felt he knew his lines well enough to give a convincing rendition at the read through that morning.

Turning onto his back, he stretched, luxuriating in the knowledge that there was no surgery that morning. The memory of Yeliena Tortsova still vibrated like a finely tuned wire through his mind. She had persuaded the Doctor to loan him an extra blanket, saying that it was vital that her leading man did not catch his death of cold before the performance.

My leading man, he thought smugly.

He knew her now to be the first love of his years of manhood; the others had been mere girls. Without her, all the success in the world would count as nothing. And success would come, he was assured of it. He would be an excellent actor, he told himself. An excellent actor and a great doctor. Greater even than Dr. Tortsov, who probably had a larger practice in terms of area than any other medical practitioner in Russia, or Europe or, for that matter, the entire world excepting Africa. Young medical students would cut his photographic portrait out of popular magazines and paste it on the inside covers of their manuscript books; or mount it on the walls of their lodgings behind chipped wooden frames and inscribe below it the legend: “Dr. A. I. CHEVANIN. Father of 20th Century Russian Medicine.” Wealthy magnates, Ministers of State, even members of the Imperial Family itself, would send for him, begging him to attend midnight bedsides. In elegant ante rooms, physicians would stand in huddled groups, saying anxiously to each other: “Thank God he was at home. If anyone can pull her through, it’s Chevanin.” When he was old and in St. Petersburg, people would doff their hats to him as he was driven past in his Benz motor carriage and say to their children: “Look! There goes Dr. Chevanin, the Saviour of Tobolsk.”

In less time than it took to bat an eyelid, his imagination had taken a leap, passing through half a century, and he saw himself sitting in his spacious and well heated drawing room, smiling sadly at the memory of Yeliena Tortsov while his grandchildren played innocently around his feet upon the richly textured carpet. As he watched their aristocratic faces (he had done well!) it seemed to him that every great man had a secret circumstance upon which his greatness depended. What this circumstance was he found hard to describe, even to himself. It was more than genius or talent or hard work. Often it was an irritant that acted on the man, in the same way that a grain of sand became an oyster pearl. All he knew was that he would never tell of their love: not to his wife, his children, or his children’s children. Only when he died, and after a period of mourning, would his executors be instructed to place in the archives of the Imperial College the single clue he would leave. A letter sealed with blue wax perhaps; a golden locket containing a lock of her hair: a faded and creased playbill of a long forgotten comedy. It would be the final piece of the jigsaw, the human piece, that would enhance and not degrade his memory. Smirking up at the ceiling, he thought of how the academics and official biographers would tut-tut. The students would understand: once, long ago, he too had been young and had loved with a passion that only the young can know; in a world no doubt very different from their own.

In fifty years’ time he would be seventy-six; that, he reasoned, would be a good time to die. Things were changing faster and faster. Fifty years before, serfdom had been a way of life for millions; now its oppression had gone. Already there was talk of a railway line linking the Ob estuary to Archangel. Imagine! Even ten years ago such a project would have been inconceivable. It seemed that the new century had dawned as the era of the possible. Try as hard as he would, he could not imagine what kind of country Russia would be in 1957. Richer, more liberal and more advanced, certainly, but the inner Russia, the real Russia, that would remain unchanged; if it changed at all, it could only be for the better. It would be a country where professional merit earned its just rewards and his generation would be the first to benefit from it. And he, Anton Ivanovich Chevanin, would be the first amongst his generation.

But to achieve all that, he chided himself, I would have to start now. Perhaps it’s already too late!