The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

There was not even a hint of a university in Saratov. For higher education, one had to go either to distant Kazan or all the way to “the second capital,” Moscow. There was one gimnazium [a classical high school] for men and one for women, a vocational high school, a finishing school for girls of the nobility, a pedagogical institute, a school for doctors’ assistants [paramedics], and in the nearby countryside, an agricultural school. In all, a smallish number for a city that called itself the capital of the Volga region. However, along with the official institutions of learning where the provincial “fruits of enlightenment” were cultivated there was another place of learning. By some odd quirk it was located in a corner of the Commercial Club, a venue for gatherings of the landed nobility, grand banquets, and balls. Though it had no official standing, it served as a magnet for all the local students. It was a rather substantial library under the supervision of Valerian Aleksandrovich Balmashev, a political exile under government surveillance. His charm and kind attention enabled him to gradually transform the book-loving young people into students of an informal and liberating self-education.

I grew to self-awareness at the end of the 1880’s. It was an uncommonly dreary time, without a single bright moment of political struggle. In a revolutionary sense, society was completely bloodless. It resembled a clear-cut forest in which once mighty oaks were reduced to stumps. There remained only legends of “socialists” and “nihilists” who once had gone out to rouse “the people” and who served as examples of how to resist all power and laws whether God’s or man’s by use of the dagger, bomb, and revolver. A romantic mist shrouded these enigmatic and daring people. Everyone spoke of them with Philistine condemnation and also with a kind of inadvertent esteem. And this impressed youthful imaginations.

For me, growing up motherless under the daily and hourly oppression of a classical “stepmother,” escaping from her persecution into the kitchen, the servants’ room, the banks of the Volga, into the company of street kids, it was completely natural to absorb love for the people, especially as it was expressed in the poetry of Nekrasov. I knew almost all his works by heart.

Since I was myself constantly “humiliated and injured,” I was naturally drawn to all those who had been “humiliated and injured” as well. This was my world and in unison with it I set myself against “the reigning injustice.” Nekrasov broadened this world for me. Thanks to him, this world grew from the servants’ room and my restless street buddies to include the world of all common people, peasants, and laborers.

Chapter Two

Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love

Born to a merchant family, Sergei Durylin broke with that world to become a person of enormous erudition. Known for a gentle manner and kindness, traits always mentioned by his friends and colleagues, he was also remembered for his accomplishments in theater, literature, archeology, art criticism, and philology. His memoirs are finely drawn. The selection chosen illustrates a family life in style, habit, and sensibility which disappeared after the 1917 revolution. Taken from S.N. Durylin, V svoem uglu [In One’s Own Corner]. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1991.

Seventeen years after the death of my mother, I opened for the first time a small pile of his [her first husband’s] letters which she had carefully preserved.

There turned out to be very few of his letters. They were her letters to him. Her, the bride’s, letters were full of deep feeling, strong in their clarity and simplicity: “I am all yours.” “All is in you.” “All is with you.” “All is for you.”

And she’s always waiting for his letters, but he never has enough time. He’s handsome, his mother’s darling, the darling of his family. He loves her, but he doesn’t have a thoughtful heart. His love is always “seeking its own” and it doesn’t think, it doesn’t even see its counterpart. It’s a love with eyes open to itself and closed to the loved one. And the love of the loved one “suffers quietly” and won’t raise a hand to open his eyes. Oh, it’s bitter to love a person with closed eyes! And my mother drank up this bitterness to the dregs. And her love was so great that it strangled another feeling, growing in her towards a different person.

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Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love

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