Solovyov and Larionov Read online

  Needless to say, the aphoristic form of that statement

  was intended, first and foremost, to underscore the necessity of maintaining a certain distance from the material under

  study. Even so, Solovyov’s advisor’s remark made an indel-

  ible impression on Solovyov. He was in a rather dejected

  condition when he entered the graduate program at the

  Institute of Russian History. The marble in the Large

  Conference Room, where he took his entrance exams,

  reminded him of an anatomical theater. Solovyov was able

  to come to terms with the historical figures awaiting his

  study only because they were still alive during the period of their activity.

  Graduate student Kalyuzhny’s departure definitively

  saved Solovyov from a crisis in his worldview. Solovyov

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  inherited from the general’s melancholic admirer not only

  a scholarly topic, but also one single bibliographical card and a fundamental research question: why did the general

  remain alive? The card contained—but of course!—data on

  Dupont’s book. Solovyov read the book and found the topic

  interesting and little-studied. On top of all that, General Larionov was absolutely dead and was, thus, a lawful object for scholarly research. Even under the strictest of historical measures, it was already possible to work with him.

  But the general was not simply dead. Unlike many histor-

  ical figures, even when he was alive, he had considered death to be an unavoidable fact of life.

  ‘Look at them,’ he would say about those figures, ‘they’re acting as if they don’t know that death awaits them.’

  The general knew death awaited him. He was preparing

  for it as he marched in the foothills of the Carpathians and checked posts on the Perekop Isthmus. And afterwards,

  whenever someone knocked on his door late at night, the

  thought flashed through his mind, every time, that it was

  death knocking. And, yes, of course he was expecting death when he was an old man sitting on the jetty in his folding chair. He was surprised that it hadn’t come sooner, though he never regretted that.

  The general was once photographed in a coffin. He

  stopped by a funeral home, bringing a photographer with

  him, and requested permission to use a coffin for a short

  time. They could not refuse him. The general smoothed

  the fold lines on his creased uniform, lay down in the coffin, crossed his arms on his chest, and closed his eyes. A

  photographer took several shots amidst the undertakers’

  uneasy silence. The most successful shot is almost as

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  renowned as the famous photo on the jetty. It accompanies

  the majority of publications about the general. Few people know the shot was taken during this prominent person’s

  life. Without suspecting the level of their own astuteness, some researchers have noted the absence of signs of death

  in the shot. Moreover, employing a figurativeness traditional for these purposes, they expressed opinions to the effect

  that it looked as if the general was sleeping. In reality, the general was not sleeping. Looking out from under his

  squinting eyelids, he was observing the reaction of those

  gathered and imagining what they might have said about

  him in the event of his actual death.

  It is possible he was sorry that he would not see his own

  funeral and had thus decided to arrange a sort of rehearsal.

  It cannot be ruled out that this sort of conduct was an

  attempt to either deceive death (I died long ago, why bother looking for me?) or to hide from it. The general did not

  hide from death in his younger years, but people do change in old age . . .

  Another explanation—one originating from the general’s

  long-standing and almost intimate relationship with death—

  appears more pertinent. Was what happened a way to flirt

  with death or—this is entirely possible, too—a manifestation of a particular elderly coquetry? It is impossible to answer these questions accurately now, just as it is impossible to reason in any reliable way about how life and death come

  together in someone’s fate. All that can be ascertained is that in the end the general met with his death. It found him without any particular effort when the time came.

  In pondering the topic of death in General Larionov’s

  story, Solovyov sought to understand the psychology of a

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  person for whom a preparedness to die is the first and

  primary requirement of their profession. Solovyov was

  attempting to get a feel for the state of a person on the eve of battle, when any action, thought, or recollection might be his last. Was it possible to grow accustomed to that? It is known that on the evenings before battle, the general

  gazed at himself for a long time in a pocket mirror as if he were attempting to memorize himself at the very end. He

  slowly turned his hand, as if he were imagining it lying in the next trench. The inseparability of the human body’s

  limbs seemed overstated to him on those evenings.

  Did a person have a right to attachments under those

  circumstances? War-time friendship is piercing, just as

  war-time love is piercing: everything is as if for the last time.

  This is grounds for experiencing those attachments with the utmost keenness or, conversely, for renouncing them

  completely. What did the general choose at the time?

  He chose reminiscences. In the event of the possible

  absence of a future, he extended his life by experiencing his past multiple times. The general sensed, almost physically, a living room with silk wallpaper, along which his shoulder glided when he was escaping the attention of guests after—

  obviously at his parents’ order—one of the servants had

  abruptly brought him here, into a kingdom of dozens of

  candles, clinking dishes, cigars, and huge ceiling-high

  windows that were recklessly thrown open in Petersburg’s

  Christmas twilight. The general firmly remembered that

  the windows were open, against the usual winter rules; he

  remembered because for a long time he continued consid-

  ering Christmas the day when warmth set in. Remembering

  that, he knew he had been mistaken.

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  But the general had a certain something else to recall on

  his evenings before battle: his first visit to the Yalta beach.

  It is described in detail in the portion of the general’s memoirs published by Dupont, which permits stopping at

  key moments of that event while omitting a series of details.

  What affected the child more than anything else was the

  sea’s calm force and the power of a frothy, ragged wave that knocked him from his feet and carried him away during his

  first approach to the water. Unlike the other members of

  his household, he was not afraid. As he leapt on shore, he was purposely falling on the very brim of the surf, allowing the elements to roll his small, rosy body. Overcome by all the sensations, he jumped, shouted, and even urinated

  slightly, observing as a trickle that nobody no
ticed disappeared into a descending wave, vintage 1887.

  The beach occupied a special place in the child’s life from that point on. Even in the 1890s, when circumstances did

  not always permit him to appear there naked, the joy of

  the future military commander’s encounter with the beach

  was not diminished. As before, he encountered the waves

  with a victorious cry, though he still did not allow those excited behaviors that marked his first meeting with the

  watery element.

  Despite the ceremoniousness of the nineteenth century,

  this period had its own obvious distractions. In those years, when dresses had just barely risen above the ankle and no

  one was even dreaming of uncovered knees, fully undressing was, in a certain sense, simpler than now. Nude swimming

  among peasant men and women and, what is more, the

  landed gentry, was not something out of the ordinary in

  the Russian village and was by no means seen as an orgy.

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  This simplicity of values concerned the beach at times, too.

  Prince Peter Ouroussoff ’s Reminiscences of a Vanished Age notes that visitors to private beaches in the early twentieth century could even bathe naked.

  Even so, the beach had arrived as a Western European

  phenomenon, bringing its own series of rules. One needed

  to dress for the beach, albeit in a particular way: not in usual undergarments but in a special style of tricot that was striped and clung to the figure in an interesting way. The shortcoming of a beach outfit, however, was the same shortcoming of other clothes from that time: it left hardly any parts of the bather’s body uncovered.

  When fighting in continental Europe, the general invariably recalled the beach: the damp salinity of the wind, the barely discernible smell of cornel cherry bushes, and the rhythmic swaying of seaweed on oceanside rocks. With the ebb of a

  wave, the seaweed obediently replicated the stones’ forms, just as a diver’s hair settles on his head like a bathing cap that gleams with the water that flows from it. The general remembered the smell of blistering hot pebbles after the first drops of rain fell on them and heard the special beach sounds:

  muted and somehow distant, consisting of children’s shouts, kicks at a ball, and the rustling roll of waves on the shore.

  For the general, the beach was a place for life’s triumph, perhaps in the same sense that the battlefield is a place for death’s triumph. It is not out of the question that his many years sitting on the jetty were brought on by the possibility of surveying (albeit from afar) the beach, legs crossed, in his trusty folding chair under a quivering cream-colored

  umbrella. He only looked at the beach from time to time,

  his body half-turned, but that gave him indescribable

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  pleasure. Only two circumstances clouded the general’s joy.

  The first of those was the presentiment of winter, when

  a beach drifted with snow transformed into the embodiment

  of orphandom, becoming something contrary to its initial

  intended designation. The second circumstance was that

  everyone he had ever happened to be with at the beach was

  long dead. Hypnotized by the beach’s life-affirming aura at the time, the general had not allowed even the possibility that death would come for those alongside whom he was

  sitting on a chaise longue, opening a soft drink, or moving chess pieces. To the general’s great disappointment, none

  of them remained among the living. No, they had not died

  at the beach (and that partially excused them) but still they had died. The general shook his head, distressed at the

  thought. Now, after the passage of time, it can be established that he has died, too.

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  Historian Solovyov appeared on the Yalta beach twenty

  years after General Larionov’s death. Solovyov’s first

  encounter with the sea did not proceed at all like the future military commander’s. Solovyov came to the sea as an adult, so carefree rolling around in the waves seemed indecorous

  to him. The researcher had also had the chance to familiarize himself with the corresponding part of the general’s

  memoirs before making his appearance at the beach and

  the very fact of that reading would not have permitted him to do—as if for the first time—everything the young

  Larionov had permitted himself. Undoubtedly, contrivance

  and even a certain derivativeness would have shone through any attempt of the sort. As Prof. Nikolsky’s student,

  Solovyov essentially thought that no events whatsoever

  repeat themselves because the totality of conditions that

  led to them in the first instance never repeats. It should come as no surprise that attempts to mechanically copy

  some past action or other usually evoked protestation in

  the researcher and struck him as cheap simulations.

  Solovyov’s behavior differed strikingly from Larionov’s.

  The young historian took a towel from his rucksack and

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  spread it on the warm evening pebbles. After taking off his shorts and T-shirt, he laid them neatly on the towel, stood up straight, and was immediately acutely aware of his own

  undressedness. Each hair on Solovyov’s skin—which was

  untanned and visible to all—sensed a caressing Yalta breeze.

  Solovyov knew this was exactly how people went around

  on the beach but he did not know what to do with himself.

  He pressed his arms instinctively to his torso, his shoulders slouched, and his feet sunk conspicuously into the pebbles.

  Solovyov had not just come to visit the sea for the first time: he had never in his life been on any sort of beach, either.

  Making a concerted effort, he headed stiffly toward the

  water. The pebbles, which the waves had polished to shining, became surprisingly hard and sharp under the soles of

  Solovyov’s bare feet. He tottered, shifting from one half-bent foot to another as he balanced his arms in the air and

  desperately bit his lower lip. This helped him reach the spot where the waves were already rolling in. This sparkling area only seldom remained dry, during the brief instant between ebbing and incoming waves. Even in that instant, though,

  he could see that it was covered with small, fine stones that were turning to sand, which the sea carried away. Standing here was thoroughly enjoyable.

  Solovyov went still when he felt the water’s milk-warm

  touch. This was comparable to his experience the first time Leeza Larionova’s lips touched him. Standing in water up

  to his ankles, Solovyov no longer knew which of those

  touches made a greater impression on him. He felt dizzy

  when he looked at the two light swirls of water by his feet.

  Solovyov took several steps forward so he could stay on his feet. Now he was standing in water up to his knees. The

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  waves around him were no longer seething, they were

  shifting instead with unfathomable motions akin, perhaps,

  to the play of muscles under skin. Here—a few steps from

  the surf where the sea was beating itself into froth and

  spray behind his back—there was not even a trace of that
/>
  hysteria. The sea was greeting Solovyov with a powerful

  rhythm of rising and dropping, and with the calm inquisi-

  tiveness of its depths. Solovyov stopped when the water

  reached his chest. He did not know how to swim.

  As has already been noted, there were no bodies of water

  at Kilometer 715. The adolescent’s imagination was fed by books about nautical adventures and by radio shows (an old wall radio was the only form of mass media in the Solovyov home). Station Kilometer 715’s strictly continental location only stoked that imagination. Why did Solovyov not become

  a sailor? He himself could not have given a precise answer.

  Yes, his love for the sea and everything connected with the sea was infinite, but even so . . . We could approach the

  explanation from another angle. There exist people who

  possess the gift of contemplation. They are not inclined to interfere with the course life takes and do not create new events, because they believe there are already enough events in the world. They see their role as comprehending what

  has already taken place. Might that attitude toward the world be what begets genuine historians?

  Oddly enough, contemplativeness was characteristic of

  General Larionov to a certain degree, too. This manifested itself, perhaps, in a special way, and not all at once, but let us ask ourselves the question: are there many generals who are known to be contemplative? Basically, no, there are not many. In essence, a general’s task is contrary to contempla-580VV_txt.indd 65

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  tion. But seeing the commander’s fogged-over eyes and

  seeing how, in the middle of a seething battle, his gaze

  hardens at the most distant point of the landscape—that

  place where you can no longer track down even the enemy’s

  rear guard—well, anyone seeing a general like that would

  think that he was a contemplative person.

  That is what those who accompanied General Larionov

  on the Crimean campaign in 1920 thought, too. The abrupt

  pensiveness that seized him, both during the breaks between battles and during the course of battles, was noticed not