The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

I was the youngest and, without grandmother, the most defenseless. But it did not turn out that way. I was a boy and had certain resources which my sisters did not have. Father’s passion for angling, its peace and quietude, grew with the years. I would easily keep up with him, a can of first-class earthworms on the ready, a landing net for the chance big fish, and a basket for what we caught. Later, gladdening the heart of my sire, I became a skilled angler myself.

Life in our household began to stabilize through an uneasy compromise. The matter was greatly aided by an unexpected inheritance: a two-story wooden house. And so there came into being “the bi-cameral system” as we jokingly referred to it later as adults. The upper chamber comprised father, stepmother, and her children. The lower chamber was us and the servants except for the cook. We rarely came together, almost only for dinner, which was a tense and tedious ritual. Supper for the lower chamber was a separate affair. It was modest and always the same—cold boiled buckwheat and an earthenware tureen of milk (we had our own milking cow). The upper chamber had its guests: the so-called “local intelligentsia.” It was made up of the public notary, a lawyer, the excise tax man, two doctors, the police chief, the district attorney, and later, the head of the district council. They would hold their sessions at card tables and fill their intermissions with hors d’oeuvre and “liquid” refreshment. We stood “in opposition” to such goings on, especially to the head of the district council because he had married a recent graduate of the girl’s high school with whom I imagined myself to be in love, though the very word was for me a pale and bookish abstraction.

The shift from education at home to a boarding school one was an epochal change in the life of the young generation of a middle-class provincial family. And it lay in my life as a new and special geological stratum. The shift threw me from rural and backwater Kamyshin to the regional capital of Saratov [a major city on the Volga]. At that time, Saratov already had a quite decent and presentable city-center built around an excellent boulevard which, due to the predominance of a particular kind of tree, was called The Lindens. When the linden trees were in bloom, the boulevard was suffused with a most tender aroma. The Lindens were intersected by a network of four or five major streets with an abundance of very decent stores. “The kind that Moscow would not be ashamed of,” in the words of one of my landladies. The liveliest of these streets, resembling the German [foreigners] quarter in pre-Petrine Russia was of course called Nemetskaia [German] Street. During World War

Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga

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I the city council, embarrassed by the name, changed it to honor General Sko-belev [a hero of the 1877–78 Turkish wars]. After 1917 the spirit of the times changed its name to Revolution Street.

But as one moved toward the periphery, the city’s glitter became increasingly lusterless. It was initially replaced by the usual provincial ordinariness of buildings and streets. Further on, the ordinariness changed to shabbiness, which came to a low point in the neighborhood of Gorki: primitive huts of the urban poor who made a living by some indeterminate means.

On this general background the recently built center resembled an errant piece of elegant brocade brightly sewn into the worn clothes of a poor person. Of course, the center was the object of special attention by the city council which represented the merchants and property owners while the outlying areas were totally neglected.

A part of this beautiful brocade piece was our boarding school. It seemed that the rest of the city had not yet fully become accustomed to its existence, especially to the glistening buttons of its uniform overcoats which, beneath the dim street lights, resembled those of military officers. The resemblance was further enhanced by the intricate cockades on our hats. As an upper-classman, I had numerous comical incidents because of this confusion. Occasionally in the evening on some out-of-the-way street we would encounter a bunch of soldiers. Their tipsy and loud talk would suddenly go quiet, their figures would straighten, and they would begin to march in step as they readied themselves for a stiff-bodied, snappy salute and to “devour the officers with their eyes.” But suddenly, having seen things clearly, they would roar with laughter and chastise each other for spotting “an officer who was nothing more than boarding school crap.” Sometimes threats would be sent in our direction and sometimes the dark gray overcoats would threaten to take their chagrin out on us with their fists.