The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Suddenly one of them, the one manning the second pair of oars, let them slip from his hands. He began to cross himself repeatedly and tell us in a breaking voice that all was lost, and that all we could do was get on our knees and pray to God. At that moment, my “helmsman” began to cry like a child and call for his mother. Aware that I was the oldest and responsible for them, I responded with some furious curse words and for some time desperately rowed for the three of us until they finally came to their senses and began to take part. I did not know how much time had gone by, but it seemed an eternity. To add to our troubles, water kept rushing in over the gunwales and had to be bailed out, but there was no one to do it. Vainly I looked around the horizon—there was no one in sight, no one was coming to help us. It was like being in a death agony.

Later we found out that my father, alarmed by my absence in such a storm, saw our misadventure with the strangers’ sailboat through his binoculars and hurriedly notified the lifeguard station. There we were spotted through a telescope and a longboat with hardy oarsmen was sent to save us. But then they noticed that we, totally unaware of it, were struggling toward a sandy spit, though at a snail’s pace. The promise of deliverance was becoming a reality. That’s how it came out. But finally when it came to jumping into the shallow water and pulling the boat ashore, I discovered that my arms hung loosely at my sides like ropes and, God help me, were totally useless. This was a reaction to what I had just lived through. Apparently for the last couple of dozen minutes I was functioning not on muscle strength, but purely on nerves which made the physically impossible possible. Later we had many other water-borne adventures. We were older, stronger, and more experienced, and when a moriana was not overly violent we would go out and test our skills in struggle

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Chapter One

with it. I owe much to the river, magnificent in its quiet flow and terrible in its violence. Those who were raised by the river gradually developed an acuity of vision, a sureness of gesture, the strength of muscles, cool-headedness, self-confidence, and the habit of not fearing danger but looking it straight in the eye. In the generation of children that grew up on it, the river, in its image and likeness, instilled an elemental sense of stubborn and unsubmissive will. Some of this was bequeathed to me, for which I am eternally grateful. What would have become of me without the river?

But it was not only the river that drew us. It also opened before us the vistas of constantly new adventures on shore.

It was good, having jumped out of a boat, to stretch one’s legs on the meadowy left bank, to wander without a predetermined goal, to go wherever your gaze and imagination took you. There would be thickets of willows where one would rouse all sorts of game; the sudden splash of a fish in a marshy lake grown thick with water lilies; further on, hayfields through which one had to proceed cautiously because they were the domain of proud and irate Ukrainian settlers, whom we called Cossacks, and who did not want their grass trampled. Sometimes there would spread before us a fantastic world: a solid sea of grass stretching as far as the eye could see. It was the tall and silvery feather grass, now slightly rippling and sparkling but suddenly roiled by the wind with gusts moving on it in broad and deep waves as if on a real sea.

And how many unexpected encounters did the steppe hide. Sometimes a herd of swine would rise up, wild and protected by no one except battle-scarred, tusked boars who would turn even our most feisty dogs to immediate and shameful flight. There would also be enormous, heavy steppe birds, bustards, resembling wild turkeys. To become airborne they had to run for a good stretch along the steppe and acquire the inertia of movement much as today’s airplanes. But the steppe’s most magical power was in its sheer vast-ness, the space that caught your breath, and pulled you to itself as sometimes you are pulled, even against your will, by an abyss or a whirlpool. At the same time, these wide-open spaces gave birth to an indescribable and unforgettable sense of free action and a yearning for yet-to-be experienced and boundless opportunities.

Who can describe a spring or summer day in the steppe, heavily soaked with the aroma of wildflowers and grasses, made soft and tender by the hot caresses of the sun. The spring air and the sweet aromas would make us weak and drunk with pleasure. We would stagger and collapse under the shade of bushes in order to replace this dreamy life with the dreams of sleep. The steppe, indeed, is a fervid fairy-tale of nature. Taste once its scented breath and your soul will forever hear its call which will not be silenced or erased by the many years you may spend away from it.

Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga

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