The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

In the lower grades street adventures were an everyday occurrence. The mere sight of our school uniforms and cockades with the school’s initials on them provoked the street kids into bloody challenges. The school’s initials, S.G. [Saratov Gimnazium], were stupidly and maliciously decoded [in Russian] as “blue beef.” The reddish-blue hue of rancid beef is familiar to everyone. Therefore, the provocative question, “Hey, you, stinkin’ blue beef, how much a pound?” had the effect that a gauntlet thrown at the feet of a medieval knight would have had. In order to preserve his honor the knight had to pick up the glove and unsheathe his sword. With us the ritual was to roll up one’s sleeves and fight for the honor of the school until one of the combatants was knocked off his feet or himself fell to the ground: the convention was not to hit someone who was down. The younger schoolboys who usually were waylaid by gangs while walking home from school would form groups and fight

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Chapter One

their way homeward by going “wall against wall.” Both sides had outstanding fighters, their Hectors, Ajaxes and Achilleses.

I also took part in this ancient internecine strife which had been legitimated by tradition. My old Kamyshin habits pulled me to the banks of the Volga where I would go on Sundays or other holidays. I had to slip out of the house unnoticed for this, while everyone was only beginning to rise. It was a great pleasure to get to the water, observe the fishermen, watch the loading and unloading of barges, to mingle with the sawmill workers, to listen to the engaging, boastful tales of the Galakhov boys—hoboes who had received their name from the merchant Galakhov and his flophouse. Among them one occasionally encountered self-made raconteurs who were true masters of the word. When one of them would talk, it was as if he were weaving multicolored silks. After grandmother’s tales and songs, it was here that I found an endless spring of authentic language of the people: fresh, strong, and juicy as an Antonov apple, extraordinarily rich in imagery and laced with maxims, proverbs, and sayings.

But an even greater curiosity was roused in me by two types of people. The first were wayfarers, collectors of funds for church buildings, defrocked priests and deacons, pilgrims who traveled from one place to another and had been to almost all the famous monasteries which preserved the relics of the righteous and had miracle-working icons. Among such people there were also zealous sectarians seeking “the city of God and absolute faith.” The second group consisted of hoboes who maintained their existence by whatever means they could, including petty thievery when times were hard. They turned to thievery, especially in late autumn, to ensure for themselves a winter’s warmth and food in the local jail. Later, when Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths created a public sensation, I remained indifferent to it. All his male types were not new to me. The memory of my teen-age years was filled with them.

Having lost my mother at an early age, I grew up virtually abandoned by my stepmother. And though she came from a clerical family, I received no religious education in the spirit of the Orthodox church. I took a discarded child’s primer on the Old Testament to be a collection of fairy tales about a serpent which spoke the human tongue, of prophetic dreams of pharaohs, of the sea which parted before a procession of fugitives, of the miraculous survival of youths in a lion’s den and in a scorching oven, of a stone from a boy’s sling which brought down the invincible giant Goliath.

Later, when promoted from the elementary grades in school to the middle ones, I had my personal period of mystic-religious enthusiasms and secret, solitary, prayerful ecstasies. But they developed on their own, having ripened in the secret corner of a growing child’s consciousness prematurely intent on

Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga

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becoming a young man. All this had no connection with the Orthodox church but rather had points of contact with the Tolstoyism of the intelligentsia and the god-seeking of the common folk.