The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

We arrived in Zurich groggy, having spent the night in a packed car full of Tyroleans smoking their long ceramic pipes. A beautiful lake and beautiful mountains in the distance. But first we had to find a room for the week. We wandered around the city for a long time. Once, at the entrance of a house, we saw a sign advertising rooms, but we decided to investigate around the block and return. But we never found the house; it seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. We kept wandering and for some reason attracted the attention of a dignified man in civilian clothing who asked us to go with him. We did so with mounting curiosity. It turned out that he was a policeman who brought us to a precinct where we were politely questioned and asked to show our passport and money. Then we were given the “For Rent” page of a newspaper and told how to get to a particular street. The incident struck us as curious—something to tell the folks back home. Later we encountered signs with “Entry to Russians Forbidden” written on them. This was offensive, but it became understandably cautionary when we learned that Zurich was the headquarters of Russian revolutionaries and terrorists. We once even visited a Russian students’ eating house to peek at typical Russian “nihilists” of the sort found in novels. But the prices in the eating house were high and we retreated. I was saving my money for something more productive. I wanted to hike into the mountains and paint. So I bought a box of oil paints which cost almost all of ten rubles. I traversed the nearby mountains, saw the life of this toy-like country, beautiful as a wrapped chocolate, and painted the landscape.

Once on the climb up Etliberg I was passed by a German with a knapsack on his back and a walking stick in hand. He looked at the surroundings with such exultation and hummed the “Toreador” march with such exuberance that I was ashamed of my sluggish indecisiveness.

A week later I left my student friend and was on the way home with the regret that I had no major accomplishments but with an abundance of foreign impressions which were totally unlike our Russian ones. Zurich with its shadowy streets and broad embankments, with its unusual black automobiles working as cabs, its crowded Swiss Guards festivals, was left behind. Once again it was Innsbruck squeezed into a cleft amidst huge cliffs. Once again it was Salzburg, where during a two-hour layover I sketched a view of the city from the river. Passersby stared at me and I was pleased. Let them even send for a policeman. The city was famous for its sausage and I bought some thinly sliced Salami. I ate some and kept the rest for the folks at home to taste.

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Chapter Four

Thoughts of home occupied me more and more and at times it seemed strange to be traveling abroad when I could have spent time with my mother before my departure for St. Petersburg. It was clear to me that I was going to St. Pete. But it was not clear where to—maybe the Academy of Fine Arts.

Once again I was in Vienna, where I got a table in an expensive cafe on the Ring. I ordered tea and picked up a newspaper. There was big news from Russia: Crown Prince Georgii Aleksandrovich, who was being treated for tuberculosis in Abastuman, had died. The newspaper tried to assess this from the point of view of Austrian interests. And I was sorry that Zil’berg, our German teacher, did not give us more work with newspapers.

From Vienna there was the uninspiring trip to the border. I opened my knapsack, the only luggage I had, to pull out the trip-tattered book of Chekhov’s stories. I read them like the Gospel, as revelation, as a true reflection of our Russian life, beautiful, free and untrammeled, so unlike the stale and alien foreign countries.

Across the border at the Russian station you could get an excellent borshch for ten kopeks. Everything here was inexpensive and easily understood. Only in Odessa, on the famous harbor steps, did I have an unpleasant experience. I was in a good mood and decided to support the commercial enterprise of some character and let him shine my boots. But the scoundrel, in response to my good intentions, sneered at the five kopeks I offered him and asked such a high sum that I was flabbergasted. The shoe polish alone cost him a ruble, he said. In order to lighten my mood I recited some Pushkin lines denigrating Odessa. Then once again I was on a ship. The Crimea seen from the sea. A brief stop at Alushka, transfer to a longboat and then I was on shore.