The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Though my parents’ natures were different, their family life flowed smoothly, except that my mother’s health was jeopardized by frequent pregnancies. Along with us who had lived, she had given birth to several (either three or four) children who had been carried off by various childhood diseases. Her general health was poor, and she died leaving father five children, the oldest of whom was nine and the youngest, myself, about one. Because of my young age, I could not comprehend the magnitude of our loss. But my older siblings were crushed by our orphaned and neglected state. [In Russian culture the loss of even one parent makes a child an orphan; the loss of both makes one a total, “all-around” orphan, a kruglyi sirota.]

Father totally lost his presence of mind from grief and was almost driven to drink. His lapses at work nearly cost him his job. Close to despair, he finally barely surmounted it. He had to leave the locale where everything reminded him of his irreparable loss, but the children could not be left without a mother’s care. The only thing to do was to remarry. They found him a bride suitable for a man of years and burdened by a brood of children. The bride, an aging virgin, was a thrifty, rather pushy cleric’s daughter. According to my brother and sisters, she was attentive and kind to us early in the marriage until the appearance of her own child.

As more and more of her own children appeared (she had five or six by the time I left home), all girls, she became transformed into the classic stepmother of gloomy Russian songs and fairy-tales. She developed enmity to-

Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga

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ward everything associated with our mother. One by one, mother’s albums began to disappear, including the one which contained her girlhood diary. Then she began to transfer mother’s books to the attic, where they were doomed to become food for mice. Father had no time to read these books, and she herself did not have the habit or interest. Next came the turn of the photographs of the deceased, removed by herself in our presence. This was not a manifestation of jealousy. This was the desire to reign in the household autocratically, rather than be a substitute for the one who had reigned there previously. Everything that reminded her of “that one” filled her heart with a malevolent vexation. And we, “her” children, were also constant, living reminders of “that one.” And we were to pay for it dearly.

Soon she was to deliver a very cruel blow; to turn out of our home our beloved, quiet nurturer and constant intercessor—our grandmother. She was meek and timid, but whenever she saw one of us being unduly punished, she would grab the victim and rush him off into the children’s room. No one could get her to change her behavior. The worst thing was that we could not help but notice the systematic efforts to get grandmother to leave of her own accord. Petty harassment, poisoning every minute of her life, carping, malevolent tricks, constant fault finding, demeaning reproaches, calumnies, mockery—all were used to effect. Grandmother would weep silently with increasing frequency and so would we, huddled around her, understanding each other without speaking a word. We did not weep only because of grandmother’s injuries, but also because we realized, contrary to our young years, that falsehood and evil were stronger than truth and goodness. We wept bitterly, lamenting and not comprehending how father could not see or understand anything. In his distance from us, he was our highest authority. Whenever he came down to us from his invisible but undoubted heights, he was good, kind, joyous and strong, and his smile would warm us like the smile of the sun illuminating the bleakness of our being.

Those of us who were older understood everything in the simplest of terms: a new, relatively young wife was able to twist her middle-aged husband around her finger.

She convinced father that it was in grandmother’s best interest to leave the cramped house which swarmed with kids. And he, with his usual good will and clear conscience, took up the task. He recalled that he had some distant relatives, a quiet, childless couple of modest means. For a small honorarium it cordially took in life’s old veteran. Everything seemed to have worked out for the best. But there was one thing that father overlooked. After grandmother had constantly been told that she was good for nothing, the exile from our home totally crushed her as ultimate evidence of her uselessness. “There now, no one needs me and I’m being sent away to die,” she murmured at our

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Chapter One

farewells, her voice muffled by the lump in her throat. Nor did father notice what she had been for us and what a loss this was. We had been orphaned a second time.