Byzantium Endures

My mother, although of Polish extraction, was attracted more to the Greek than the Roman in her religious preferences, though I never knew her to attend formal services. She observed all the Orthodox holidays. I do not remember ikons (though she doubtless possessed them). She always had a picture of my father (in his uniform) in an alcove, with candles burning. It was here that my mother prayed. She never criticised my father, but she was anxious to remind me of how he had gone astray. He had denied God. An atheist, he had been involved in the uprisings of 1905. During this period he had almost certainly been killed, though the circumstances were never entirely clear. My mother herself would become vague when the subject was raised. My own memory is a confused one. I recall a sense of terror, of hiding, I think, under some stairs. On the other hand the equation itself was clear enough: God had withdrawn his grace and his protection from my father as a direct punishment. Aside from the fact that my father had been an officer in a Cossack regiment and had thrown away his career, that his family had been well-to-do but had disowned him, I knew very little about him. Out of tact, our relatives never mentioned him. Only Uncle Semyon in Odessa ever made any reference to him and that was always to curse him as ‘A fool, but a fool with a brain. The worst kind.’ At any rate I have no memories of him, for he was rarely at home, even in the Tsaritsyn days, and my memories of Tsaritsyn itself are confined to a few narrow, dusty, nondescript alleys, for we moved in 1907 to Kiev again, where my mother had a sister. Here they both worked as seamstresses. This was a terrible descent for a woman like my mother, who possessed a refined sensibility, spoke several languages, and was conversant in all forms of literature and learning. Later she became the manageress of a steam-laundry and after her sister re-married we moved into the two-room flat near Mother’s job. This was in a part of town with many old trees, little copses, parks and some fields even, very close to the Babi ravine (the ‘Old Woman’ ravine) which, with its grass, rocks and stream, became my main playground.

Here I would defend Kipling’s Khyber Pass and, as Karl May’s ‘Old Shatterhand’, explore the Rocky Mountains. I would fight the Battle of Borodino. I would defend Byzantium against the Turks. On rarer occasions I would go to the Dnieper’s beaches and be Huckleberry Finn, Ahab, Captain Nemo. Even then Kiev had its share of revolutionary troubles. The agitation came mainly from the workers in the industrial suburbs beyond the Botanical Gardens: blocks of flats as featureless and smoky as any you can find today. The authorities had had to clamp down quite heavily, but all I knew of this was when my mother kept me inside or stopped me going to school. On the whole, however, I experienced little of the unpleasant side of life in Kiev. It was a wonderful city in which to grow up. Near us was a road which ran through the gorges. This area was known as the Switzerland of Kiev. Thus I had the best of both worlds - country and city - though we were not rich. Kiev, and the Ukraine in general, inspired art and intellectual activity of every kind. Half Russia’s greatest writers produced their best work there. All Russia’s best engineers came from there. Even the Jews excelled themselves. But they, of course, were never content.