1. Beginning in winter
Always, it seems, we are alternately waking and sleeping on some long sea journey. And if we attend to the sight of water, and the everywhere companion sky, where heavenly bodies seem to coast on the edge of the night air, we could perhaps prepare the mind for imagining Russia, the spaces of Russia, and the associated passing of time. We could perhaps get ready above all for the way our feelings would seek out a variety of homelands on a crowded earth.
It was a stormy season. Sometimes during a night storm the sea was black and the sky was black. The whole black region was a fixed ground which anchored the violent grey motion of waves or clouds. At other times the sinking silver from the moon, or the spreading gold from the sun, made the depths of the sea a submerged country in its own spring.
One day, as the sun was setting on a calmer sea, the colours in the shallow light of the sea began to alter. And if the sea was a sort of steppe the colours of all the plants one could or couldn’t remember or which one never knew sank into the depths. Underwater, in such a predetermination of spring, yellow, and even gold, were the most widespread, though fading fast. But also the huge variety of green was there, with still living edges of changing hues. One could try to recognise the different colours of flax – again yellow, an individual, insistent yellow, but also a jewelled blue above its own sea of grey. But as the colours sank, or as they migrated somehow to the heights of the evening sky, many small hills of harvested crops – impossible to imagine such ricks on the surface of the sea – could just be made out among the horizon’s clouds, sometimes impossibly tall, sometimes fragmenting into frayed wisps and fragments, but always erect as the many colours settled around them.
Then we are in Russia, and it is the seasons on the move. In continuing autumn there is, for some, still blue and red drawn up as an ascension. An onlooker gazes upwards, and lilac pools of dissolving water are clearings in the darkening mass of sky. Reducing day is needed for whatever harvest, and colours of ripeness weaken as they spread through moonlight and are stored in reflections. In October, from an empty heavy mood, drenched in dew and in such borrowed light, there would be memories of mown rye, coarse steppe grass, and hemp, and milkwort, tangled with the reddish and the half dead. Leaves become slighter, but also more and more golden. Massing of high clouds continues to slowly lower the sky.
Sunlight dilutes the fogs and adorns the streams. Banks of larger rivers are bound with roots of trees. Light begins to bury itself: mists by day gather yellows from the foliage; there is a descending maze of images in water. The final, buried surface of coloured and disintegrating stone could soon be reached, mainly waste if mined. and the earth opened to caves and other empty depths; saved lapidary images still work in our own mind, as well as on spacious floors – but such used contents of the earth’s crypt are changed and stored for us elsewhere. The first snow will be a relief. Holding on to things in autumn is a state of sadness for the close up scattering of leaves – by chance such and such a colour – by chance such and such a way of falling. Large buildings are now too lasting – desolate or used as hangars for farm machinery; neglected trees and cumbersome fallows still reveal a vanishing past.
To look back on things, autumn flooding had been a plain of water on the Tsar’s estate; it has sunk again to shallows and to ice. Unfrozen lakes mirror a clouded sky; underwater slopes and peaks of vapour make symbolical places which show space and time in an imperial quantity. White monuments of ageing stone on the actual meadows round the lakes show quantities of death. The intricate shapes of stone crumble unrestored on to the grass, and all the sculpted white seems so much older on the green. Autumn itself still needs, it seems, an imperial parkland to frame the immensity of sky, to impose a grandeur on the scale and sameness of the colours.
Storms in colder weather begin the settling down to winter, confused at first with autumn, then made clear. Water, as it freezes over sinking rust, holds the shallows of the beauty of a cold sky. When snow hangs on the bending fir, on its green and gold, the mantles melt slowly, until dark emerald is held in nets of silver. It is impossible with such an abundance of symbolic patterns to ignore a seeming wealth of meaning. Symbols are in the narration, and throughout we are engaged with forests, hills, the empty meadows, and the jewelled surface of the grass.
Other days there seemed to be other seasons, and thoughts hardly made sense as imagining until winter actually lengthened to dominate the year. And the immensity of winter brought a certain calm, as if whatever was partly hidden could be more easily understood, and perhaps eventually revealed: towers of snow; forest eyebrows; glades and clearings for fauna; always, always the lakes and waterways, littoral formations, distant landings and imagined destinations, more insistent as the white expanse became as featureless as the space of sky. And winter somehow stored the past of cities: an empty city – a ruined city – a city in hiding – or a city on show.
Winter so long, so fixed in colour and texture, so cold – animal fears are stored there, preserved and nursed. Past trauma may be comforted. Tolling bells make bare trees vibrate. Perhaps the sky’s blue dome fills with sound, which sinks and gradually fills the city.
Birds die as they fall to earth, freeze even on the wing; to the same frozen day is added the same frozen night. As for meaning, the soul falls, recovers, and falls again; and for so long the soul suffers and recovers – or the soul recovers and falls again. Feelings are locked away for time after time, changing memory.
From first frosts the forest gets used to silence. All rooks will have left the taiga, flying south. Snowed-on firs will have swayed on high in freezing winds. In even colder nights, trees will have burst open with frozen sap.
Away from the rivers, shallow hills which protected isbas from the autumn rains are now precipitous. Marshy tilth and bogs and drainage lakes are safely iced. Skaters may come down gradual slopes to share a common land – the gift of winter.
There is confusion as to the extent of the territory we still think of as Russian – the achieved empire of the Tsars or the socialist succession – or now, during the estrangement from former subordinate relatives and companions – as the Western European mind spills ignorantly across the land mass and the watery routes and mazes…
There was only ever a fractional movement through the slumbering forests, but even this minute perturbation was overwhelming. The mixture of epic landmarks and careless abundant growth was impossible to integrate in one’s mind. There was the conical density of massive oaks. There were ranging, spreading conifers. Untidy growth throughout the forest cast itself haphazardly on a particular year, before each fragment of development hardened and set in the newness of the following spring. Near to movement at ground level, there were mossy boulders, pools, myriad clearings. Black bears. Swarms of bees.
In open country, when there is a glimpse of distant forests, the extent of land or sea is so great that one can make out the curvature of the earth. But we are brought back to a heroic warrior world by a tumultuous sky. On this vast earth and beneath the even vaster cloudland and skies beyond, the shape of the earth itself is imported gradually into one’s vision. And once the sight of it all – and even the ground under one’s feet – is linked in this way to the planet as a heavenly body, then sun, moon and stars are soon accommodated. Such galactic space, with its rooms of light, is so far above our social world that only the single soul can approach it for relief. Stories which give shape and order seem to be taking place. The bright day, particularly when shining with snow or ice could appear as a hero in white garments. The flowing gold of a distant sun would be soothed in the coming night to a red garment for another hero. Blue lakes lapped against the store of green, and, as the wind steadied, forests rose like a wall of towers.
All rivers lead from sea to sea – from open sea to inland sea – from inland, sunken sea to an original ocean. Master rivers start to organise the land and move more deeply into forests, mirroring drinking beasts and ancient willows. Even after nightfall light is so varied over such imagined distances that earth shows itself as an exceptional host, an overwhelming field for whatever is transient. Moon and other heavenly bodies can send no visiting angel. Unvisited birch trees store a rare metallic light.
The only meeting of mind and place in the continuing night is as a bewildered awe, where our history can seem in a continuity with geological time, a scaffolding of numbers bordering on infinity. It is as if time for once is able to pause in a darkness which will restore the first forest of an altering Pangea.
2. As if remembered
We can perhaps learn to adapt the memory of an English childhood to Russian landscapes, and to the Russian calendar. This new imagined past will be mysterious, but no more so than the vanished truth.
Footsteps are just heard.
Social sounds fall back
to a winter deafness.
As birds stutter unseen –
as meadows rest in renewing white –
wind stirs the grove of spring,
watched as it seems
by glazed over sockets
of fallen boughs.
In february we heard the falling ice..
A low sun made the first open wound
in the dark house – always now
a remembered underworld.
The angel’s form is given to memory as it works on the shapes and colours of what took place. The unlined faces of past souls are at peace with presences in house and garden.
And whoever has looked out will see
the large clearing no longer shared –
images now of solid light –
the forest of time’s shadows
collected in a wall of grey.
Then frequent slush time out of mind
yields and freezes in the slow thaw.
In early spring woods the rivulets freeze and thaw. Then time is rushing. Trees beside the water have been fixed and loosened in past springs so that they lean towards the water from both banks. Winds follow water beneath these boughs towards and through the forest. Flow of dark waters is heard beneath the nearby cloak of enlarging mist, and a narrow ribbon of stored light moves out of sight. Ice melts unseen, as snow slips from trees and hills. Rivers swell with the gathering. Waves of forests move more easily to fill the curved world.
Soil and grass burst with food beneath the white geese of spring. Remember the water found for early sowings – we had to move through the bright woods walking on flowers – trampling green shoots to save the finished forms of yellow and blue. Waves of light met the new edges of all we saw as if truth could be seen.
Stories begin, groups briefly
organised in an ice floe park,
or on the iron ground expanse,
or briefly in a tender woodland
for a mourning in birch woods –
horses’ footfall just audible
from distance to distance,
silence to silence.
Sometimes in spring an unknown forest bird lands on velvet moss beside the stream. Sometimes in summer, twilight hides in mist and nightingales hold back the roaring day.
Seasons change the same beloved places.
The same spring hill is disguised in snowfall.
Each brief summer gives way slowly
to lengthening twilights and autumn nights.
Winter dominates and spring renews; otherwise the seasons, as remembered, are confused. The neglected marsh is impassable where the rough field slopes to the stream. There would always have been unforeseen encounters in each season – an orange crystal near each marigold – extending level meadows – some other fragment of the calendared/organised world.
Even now, in summer, the sun is high up, a subdued disc in mist, quelled briefly in the immense space. It is, with some barred cloud, part of our own world, and our light, it seems, is collected in a universal cavern of day; our consolation is lodged briefly in the beauty of such a composed, illusory location. Souls or similar are here in living birds. Miniature Asian tents and other pavilions are spread on the forest floor. The shallow hills extend themselves in summer leaves and summer crops until streams are hidden in green shadows. The sun itself is moon-like, filtered by the forest; as for the clearings we seek, we must remember the reach of this sun’s slanting rays as it brightens the forgotten path.
The first pasture is soon followed by the last pasture in the brief summer of memory. Then high water covers paths and drowns young trees. Lakes and rivers, mirroring images into safety, soon lose them to the past. Present growth in the drowning woodland shows colours of the buried elements and precious deposits of these mining hills. There is a host of former leaves, bright colours and shapes fragmented into petals. Hard needles fade to every buried colour of reds, and greens, and blues – each colour insisting on two or three uncertain variations. The seasonal theme is a yellow collapsing, with autumn waters shallow on the forest floor.
From the Baltic to Siberia
wind reveals new shapes, new blooms
in the general drifts. White wilderness
of buried moss and hidden flowers –
powdered snow bright landings on crystal ground.
Shrinking woods end with the frozen sea.
Winter maze of Arctic light and ice
settles at dusk to a constant sheen –
spring always an abundance waiting,
locked and unlocked in the sloughs of thaw.
Imagining further north, as the earth curves round to the pole, or curves to the north-east, Siberia seems separate, as if in the remote past, as if still on the brink of a cosmos of emptiness, now known as airless landscapes, and now starting, as ever, with a lunar system. And in the moon’s unsteady light there are reindeer shapes and Russian forms blossoming in the snow. Further out, there are white waves disturbed in a stranded wind, or frozen matter which is either present as islands or as winter’s current permanence on even the lowest hills. An enormous settling haze of cloud sheets and air sheets settles us back in the known world. A river (and it could be any number of rivers and streams we see) winds again from West to East over the earth curving to the North. Perhaps the river we see will reach the frozen whiteness before the present horizon, but a vague spreading grey, with remnants of the green and yellow, swallows any distant white there may be. The extending Northern landscape is a nebula heaped up with clouds. Other great rivers flowed if they could towards dark bays. History and landscape are weakened as contexts. Aspects of time make aspects of space into atmospheres which bulk up as the terrestrial nearness is continually lost, and we have to remember the incidents when time and space came together around us – the occasion when forest was a dark church for our sheltering soul, or when a shoal of fish could not escape the shallows of a lake.
3. In Times of War
In a chosen season, and in fear and trembling, the long line of old-fashioned tanks follows the harvesting access routes for miles through the bare woods – potent, enlarged, mindless movement – human creatures shrunk within, or shrunk elsewhere. They are not make-believe tanks. They are not lost in these deciduous woods. Be very afraid. And occasionally a lone straggling tank is dwarfed by an enormous harvester trying to use the widened track. There is fear of flooding – fear of its start and fear of its end: there is the fear of being abandoned, stranded in mud, or there is fear of an enemy, with a mechanised footfall heard on the frozen ground. After years of enmity, there still seems little understanding of the civil aspect of the war. In the east, during the imperial past, estates sprawled with the usual entitlement and varied beauty into the Donets basin. This was not itself an agreed pastoral past – though such a past was somehow preserved and prolonged, despite the confusion of all the mining developments, despite whatever conflict. As the land was re-purposed, the estates were fragmented and transformed. Over time, some minerals, some methods of extraction, came to an end; other minerals, other methods of extraction, became important. Perhaps a rational history will become possible. Meanwhile, because of the current war, loyalties will change, and lifetimes of memory will be unresolved. Further south towards Crimea, the still clouds and their cold grey spread to arrest all space above remembered lakes and the celebrated shapes of inland seas. The Black Sea itself, though unseen, and now unshared, is all around, and fractions of its bright space are transmitted via the stratospheric grey to form a light along the southern horizon. And because the Black Sea is unseen, and there are no specific images to distract us from imagining, the Aegean comes to mind and the light of its more open and various seas. Below this light, as if emanating from the land itself, there is a deeper blue that lays out garments of fractions of joy and peace.
To escape the draft and flee the current war, Russian families head through Greater Russia for the Caucasus Mountains, whose white beauty stores riches within walls of clouds. There is the war-aim sort of wealth, the mineral wealth, yes, but for the deserters there is now the fearful wealth of the image itself. The shape of a particular mountain, or its style of elevation, would blur to a seeming motion in the coming darkness; and then in full night it would again be still. The higher, more distant, hills would rear up in the flowing mist, and then settle back at full light, resting and waiting for the sun to reveal a rich green and the movement of a nearby flock. On their way to an exile, they spend hours beside the Caspian Sea, whose immense unobstructed horizon is everywhere throughout their flight. Such distance is setting and homage for the mountain snows. Georgia. Armenia. Freedom. Homesickness. And loss.
However large the inland sea, however great the accumulation of water upheavals in colliding winds, the eventual subsiding could be envisaged and the water settling back to every shore. It is an ocean sunk in its vastness and surrounded by several countries, though grazing horses belong to the whole Caspian as they find incoming streams. Boulders at the edge of the water are stirred occasionally in winter storms. The highest small clouds contain a rosy measuring light to gauge distances in such a sky. As each day ends, other presences make sense of things – rivers are merged with twilight, or forests are bound into a wall of living, an iconostasis of welcoming green and an inviting dark. A dispersed moonlight, during hidden phases, is kept in clouds, And sometimes, like a story of the founding of a church, such moonlit clouds descend to frame a mountain. The river banks we pass, again in twilight, are lost and found.
Horses love to run. In fields beside rivers – in fields surrounded by low hills – they wait for their riders in the valleys. And run. And run. Waiting together. They pause and separate for each individual rider. And then they run together, unaware of the new purpose. And horsemen, struggling sometimes with oars or sails, or poetry, are hypnotised by the freedom of the movement – hypnotised by love of the memory of movement, and love of the horses and a particular horse. They reach the horses and mount to the belonging.
The earth varies as it stores some warmth, and snow thaws in scattered shapes, each patch diminishing slowly. Older horses, sometimes neglected, though unlikely ever to be forgotten, move snow aside in spring to nibble the cold grass.
4. St Petersburg
In the north towards Finland where our imagined journey keeps beginning the city is wearing out – not fading in story, but rather breaking down in time, scattering and collapsing in a sprawling lubok – except for a sort of Venetian vision, dispersed and aggrandised. Much of this imagined city is a city of the past, like a very grand Trieste. It is a city in story, pausing before it adapts to the great change. The Russian soldiers’ ceremonial postures are still alarming; the eyes of each sentry still follow the leader’s progress with a fixed devotion.
On a further shore – difficult to say which landmass it belongs to – it is twilight. There is an illuminated ruined building. And there are other abandoned buildings into which some generated light spills and begins to spread – they seem to cluster for inspection as our vessel turns in the gulf.
St Petersburg, where the Neva flows, is a created city. It is an intentional city, historically dominated, and perhaps unusually so, by the few who have power or authority. It is an imperial city – towers and palaces gathering and storing the dissolving brightness of a molten light, though often clouds strain and weaken the light, and often eyes are lowered to structures of iron and granite. At times, it will seem a gigantic work of art, or a playground for foreign artists, (Rastrelli, for example), whose grand ambitions were perhaps related to the aspirations of European commonwealths, but whose achievements now often seem uprooted and bordering on some expatriate quest for symbolic grandeur. And how is it to change? For it is difficult to imagine how to memorialise the original intention. The extent of Russia and the reach of its seasons can express and perpetuate symbols. The depth and length of winter and perhaps especially the brief abundance of spring, can be a framework or a setting for images and ideas, but so much else of changing nature is a vessel of ruin and decay that it is difficult to celebrate the afterlife of an autocracy. And at times of conflict we think of this city as an unwise capital, or even as an inevitable monument to folly. It has a glorious and a terrible history, with such sad ambition in each re-naming: it is now a relief that it will keep for some time its original name.
The stories of wonder and gratitude are already written. And now the ants teem round the exiles’ feet.
We start in spring. And we start with the memories of those who were exiled. Mandelstam remembers the ice on the Neva, making a rustling noise as it thaws and moves under the bridges of St Petersburg. This rustling is a pretended vitality, or a hieratic version of vitality. It is an evocative perception – a sound of the underworld – as if a Russian symbolic thought process is to find again a classical anchor. This sound of spring is a created sound, and its visual fellow can be seen as a ship of winter slowly changing to a ship of spring for its journey south. Perhaps the broad wake of the port’s waterway, or perhaps the sail, was the cope of heaven to afford protection. Should one even use the word “cope”? Even now, when the Russian Empire is in the past, and in the changeable history of living memory, there is an awkward apostasy, if one means by “cope” some kind of vestment or posture for an otherworldly, or even divine authority, or for the remoter tradition of an Olympian power. But as this effort is made to imagine Russia, a great many religious ideas, Judaic or otherwise, and also pagan ideas, many irrecoverable, are as yet unexpressed. It is as if with Henry Vaughan’s night sky above the River Usk, we have to reimagine “eternity”, or “endless light”. Perhaps “endless light” and “eternity” and other similar thoughts will be transferred onwards to some new dispensation. Perhaps not. But Russia is so vast, and various in its beauties that such awe must surely be accommodated. Below a distant horizon is an unusual light. The approaching moon is only one possibility. The icon is built from darkness outwards towards light. And when our remembering mind has looked through the “window” of the art of Vaughan, at the night sky, or at the river Usk, it is the world itself we acknowledge and which we are reluctant to leave. And cities are a gathering of a complex store of images made within a living world.
We start in spring. The moon is again above the mast. It was first imagined as a crescent, which the mast seemed to thread in relief when the Neva was first reached. But we can also remember that all other forms of moon spilled light for us, through porous clouds or directly onto the sea. Some of us may have an inkling that this ship is a cosmic ferry, that time is shaped for the voyagers by divine and regular demolitions of the moon. The symbolical heavens themselves may once have seemed to provide an adequate coherence for Eurasian Russia. There will be mentions of forests, of rivers, of steppes, of lakes and inland seas. There will be rooks and bears, and human figures retreating into temples or monasteries, at first in or near small cities, and then increasingly in forest clearings or beside water. And Russia is so abundant that all inventions from past images can exist within it. There will be a seeming, and boundless, romance.
From the Baltic to the Black Sea
reaches of land evoke reaches of time –
where remnants of ice rustle like asphodel
as the Neva melts and moves.
It is impossible to gloss an imagined sound, and asphodel is meant as a symbol. The thawing Neva is presented as a bed of asphodel, and remembered asphodel does involve a rustling, sometimes above a store of green, sometimes by a disappearing stream. But on this broad water, a magnified rustling is the sound of building to find and make a world in spring. The river’s flow makes shallow icy shadows, and light clings to the dissolving slush.
Keening nestlings join the general music.
Faint piping air whistles through
our speech and the noise of birds.
The vastness somehow is confined,
seems land-locked and low lying.
White rafts start their sounding.
The shores of inland seas offer no release.
Lifetimes spent to find a way –
graves and stumps of walls on hills.
Byzantine towers in ruins
welcome the resting clouds.
Head bowed in wind-driven rain from the east –
always the vast space overwhelms,
dulling towards a single colour of sea and sky,
now at gun-metal flickering between night and day.
5. Rastrelli, for example
From a distance many of the more impressive buildings in St Petersburg look like transplanted European palaces, some even the size of those seen in Caserta or in Vienna, though as one gets nearer, the gardens – as well as the pavilions and sculptures designed for their occasional enjoyment – become more important, as if the wealth and self-consequence displayed could remake this Northern climate. The main edifices both advanced and retreated in one’s view as the sense of repetition increased with regard to the stone shapes and the windows they encased. As one neared its mass, each of the larger buildings vied in turn for dominance of the Neva. And each palace was maintained, and renewed, as it had been built – fixed in its original time, or renewed from its ruin. As each building in succession claimed the wide river as its own particular frontage, and as the reach to the opposite bank became its own celebrated distance from ordinary mortals, the forest of stone and its multiplicity of windows was reflected in the moving water. The progress one made through the baroque constructions was not only along the Neva and through the space offered by the city’s solid land, but it seemed also that one could move through reflections. These underwater images were new forms of solidity, created variously according to the forms of water altering in a light wind. And when winter settled each year in its long fixed splendour, it was welcomed by an ambitious garland, as sunlight on ice worked to frame each palace in gold as it rose in the mist or sank hidden in the pastel depths. The mist darkened. The sun was hidden. Another aesthetic choice was made, as the continual restoration of Rastrelli’s art sought to make permanent the remembered forests. Clearings are converted into garden spaces. Dispersed ranges of sky and fragments of cloud are now found below a sunken region of quivering underwater stone.
The restored palaces, refurbished for their latest appearance, seem fully formed, as at the time of their conception. But when the mask slips to show the present day, there is a sort of backstage confusion, particularly on the less important storeys, and glimpses of their interiors show untidy heaps of furnishings and hangings, or in other ways undermine the imperial theme. There are vague Venetian comparisons made, but like some other European comparisons, they break down on examination. In Venice, for example, despite the various Napoleonic framings, the imperial theme is difficult to discern as one admires the compact Venetian palaces, where owners compete, and the vaporetto moves steadily through styles, and epochs, and degrees of perfection, and where the obsequies of the tomb of the republic are now forgotten, and the welcoming ex-republic lies at rest. There are reminders of the past, of course – the sound of driven piles as a shored up basement finally disappears, or as the last sight of an original trading entrance sinks into the water, with its confusion of crumbling brick and stone and fossilising wood. And in Venice, there is also the much longer reach of time: as the vaporetto moves, the repeated sounds and rhythms of landing and departure mimic the underlying routine as the installed past is continually displayed; and the movement of the boat at the bacino, as if it were heading for the open sea, is followed by a slow retreat to the usual display. And in any case the bloom in the rising waters of the lagoon weakens the effect with grey floods and growths and slime – and with other colours than the pale and golden. And the extra shallow storeys, now permitted, and pedestrian walkways blocking the original water gates, as well as Napoleon’s modernising ways, distract us from the proud history of the state.
But in St Petersburg, we are compelled to suspend all disbelief and enjoy the imperial theatre. There is a baroque complexity in the palace architecture which celebrates the former occupants in a grand but still domestic way; rooms with state functions, stairways and assembly rooms, are all somehow given a grandiose personal aspect. Or it could be that when these Russian emperors lived, they altered their sense of themselves to suit the building. There must have been some Russian relief for them: a stone garden building contrasts with the baroque theatrical court; it imitates a wooden pavilion and extends the palace towards a place of retreat. However, despite its relative intimacy, each pavilion is a monument, a temple transported from the Roman Tiber, rather than a touching memento. Positioned elsewhere in the city, religious buildings enclose secluded palaces of liturgy, display the grand traditional elements of a welcoming divinity, sometimes even show themselves as pillared temples of state. But churches, even in this city, are apart from self-consequence, more in touch with the accumulating power of all the passing years. The serene white stone itself yields to a lapsing time. The connection to an original imperial Christianity in no way supersedes the homage still paid to the wooden structures of Russia. With the European imperial secular buildings there is so much secular use, combined with so much geometric grandeur, that it seems the beloved forest has been felled and forgotten, or in some glorious fit of contempt turned into stone.
As in Venice, there are stories of the past, and the baroque in time is increasingly found in reflections. If one half shuts one’s eyes, flaws in the theatrical machinery can be forgotten – the wrong colour on a row of pillars, or the wrong music for a celebration of some past event. Sometimes sky’s softening at dusk makes sense of the scale and repetition of forms, absorbs the ornament in a gradual creation of a larger presence. There are imported classical statues on the roof, almost out of sight because of the palace dimensions. They could be classical gods, or they could be members of whichever imperial family was in residence. Or both. Each cold space is filled to impress, and an open sky welcomes the mounting figures to a blue region which forms and reforms as the mist or the cloud moves past. How are they to be recognised at such a height, and so remembered? No recognition is needed for the abstract pomp of the many urns and vases, again huge and remote – as if classical Greeks have returned to absorb the greatness of Rome and so adorn the might and significance of this northern scene. The art intends glory and the heroic, but the effect is anachronistic, even apocalyptic. The play of light on the excavated windows is quickly lost in shadow. Monumental stone reflects and absorbs: first it absorbs the images of water and sky, then carries the great image of both and leads Emperor or Empress into gardens and pavilions.
If there is a vaporetto on the Neva, or ever will be, it will be a sea-going vessel fit to dock at Peterhof, on the Baltic shoreline. Its landing places will be at distant intervals, especially when speed increases for the longer stages of each voyage, and the heading for the open sea will not be an illusion.
6. Interlude
Imagination fails in times of war, and the mind becomes severely practical, organising subdued rehearsals for the management of fear. Continually.
In this account, and before the present war, Saint Petersburg was imagined as a created and a restored European imperial city. Other choices could have been made. There could have been the revolutionary city of 1917 with its re-purposed imperial buildings and an unpredictable bureaucracy, bewildering and alarming everyone during the original crisis; and whichever eyewitness was chosen would recount violent episodes and somehow carry the burden of history. And suffer. The crisis would in some way determine the life of the chosen eyewitness – the death of a husband, or their own suicide. Or a famous cruelty would provide a fateful punctuation to their lives – the manner of their exile, some petty humiliation, or being on the fringes of some deportation or even a massacre. Chance repetition of some narrative, secretly copied, and widely shared, could make vivid a trivial moment in a life, set it against a known city scene, or in some famous country setting, and this social relic would become for its own century a commemoration of the chaos. A quarter of a century later there was the siege of Saint Petersburg, then called Leningrad, besieged during the colossal crime of the Fatherland War. To have presented Saint Petersburg in this way would have been more in keeping with Russia’s current warlike anxiety – more glorious (an alarming word) than the chaos of 1917: there would have been the facts of sacrifice, the elegiac remembering symphony, and the historic rest before the applause. And during the whole time of Stalin, before and after the war, with his storms of power derived from Tsardom, and pet names beyond irony, there were the colossal crimes of the Fatherland Peace. But an innocent choice has been made – that of an intentional European city, continually restored.
And heading south from St Petersburg, our own intended way was clear. It would have been the European way, rather than the Eurasian. However long ago the birth of the state had been, and however many great changes there had been, there was still an idea that the Dnipro river ran through a founding Russia, an echoing Russia nestled or even problematically absorbed within an imperial state. The rivers as they were from Northern Europe to the Black Sea were immense but perhaps imaginable. Multiplying these waterways and seas to suit Greater or Eurasian Russia seemed impossible. Moving into and through the space of Ukraine could just be thought of; moving further east and doubling the size of Ukraine to accommodate the Volga was too intimidating. And so by lake and river the first great journey from the Baltic was ready to re-imagine via Kiev to the Black Sea. As ever, though still within Europe, there would have been a great struggle with the scale of things. Love of forests would remain immeasurable. One would have needed to manage the current waterways, the arrival at cities, the years of life. How could we ever unravel the movement of the river from the landscape? The forests and skies, as if remembering, would be locked to a positioned scattering of churches, white and glittering gold; uncertain villages would be balanced on the sloping river bank, or would struggle up beyond the hill on the rising side; difficult stretches of the river could even have defeated us. Magenta clouds would rise into darkness. Our own moorings would rock us to sleep. And in dreams of hope, an occasionally remembered full moon would seem to illuminate the entire trading river. Unseen moons would be stranger presences, imagined and sometimes feared as a second or third moon, escaping memory until their vivid aspects could be resolved in the main story. Via Kiev to the Black Sea – Kiev as a founding state of long ago – Kiev as then destroyed and Kiev as later changed and renewed – possibly even Kiev during the revolutionary civil war – though it was hoped that this Varangian route would have been a scholarly, even a neutral guide. We would have found the canals of Kiev, somehow negotiated the famous rapids, and burst at last into the Black Sea. What then? Leave Moscow unvisited? Neglect Levitan’s time in Russia and never find Kandinsky’s homeland? Postpone for ever the glimpse of the many Pagan and Christian places where language and imagery were fixed throughout our shared and remembered time? I suppose we would have probably found Constantia and concocted Ovid’s longed for route via Greece to Ostia.
How could such a route now be possible as a way of imagining Russia? Even leaving aside the current war, it is so long ago, and the history of each part of the way is altered or in the wild. One can only speculate, almost mystically, about the origins of the imagining. In theory, we could seek cities and landscapes in the art of our shared culture, say in Christian illustrations, but it is very difficult for a stranger to recognise Russia in the Russian Christian icons. Such icons are found within the domestic spaces of Russia and illuminate individual symbolic thoughts, but they give little help to the stranger attempting to imagine Russia. Why is this? Venetian painters are much more helpful about Italy. The hill town of Conegliano is vivid in the paintings of Cima. Giovanni Bellini portrays Dolomite flora and the valley paths and caves of familiar mountain scenes. Yet more straightforward is Tiziano da Pieve’s portrayal of his Cadore home as he paints the flight into Egypt. It is much more difficult, certainly for this outsider, to find Russia in their Christian scenes. There are glimpses of eastern cities, usually an entry or an exit, and probably not Russian. There are mountain landscapes in abundance, often with a cave, sometimes with a number of peaks, and occasionally with a fearful opening into some deep pit. But the might and the beauty of Russia is hidden or held in reserve. Instead, the icons record the Christian revelation in ways which re-design imported scenes and landscapes to suggest another world, or to symbolise an undepictable reality.
But that is not the world we wished to visit.
Back on earth, we can somehow position the towns and cities of Russia in a relation to the rivers and lakes found in the forests, and in relation to inland seas, the great plains, and the Western approaches. But there is no agreed remembering. Titian can portray the flight into Egypt as he remembers leaving Pieve for Venice, and he can also make a record of his beloved home. Coincidentally, when Rembrandt made an etching of the flight into Egypt, he scarcely covers a previously etched angel as he depicts the billowing ascent of foliage at the edge of a wood beside the holy family. Perhaps he worked in a tradition where an angel could be routinely encountered, especially when it was in disguise and almost hidden in the high trees.
Via Kiev to the Black Sea? But there is no escape from the present war, and so the choice of a river journey to fit with annals and chronicles of the Russian State has to be abandoned, as yet another great change for Kiev is underway. There is uncertainty, and the idea of a learned or shared memory is undone by fear.
7. Novgorod
We are not part of the war in the South, not trying to escape from Russia because of the war, and not in the shared memorials of Europe. We are stranded in the North, within the boundaries of modern Russia, currently named a federation. Other cities, somehow between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, still seem to be connected to the world of Europe – at a great distance, yes, and seemingly protected only by such distance. And even here, in a less remote part of Russia’s great spaces, there is an aspect of wilderness, and the uncertainty is profound. And as our river journey comes to an end, we now travel with only an inner geometer as guide, and with a navigating context of vast proportions. The astronomer can lose his place and time in the sky. And the traveller must lose his way in this landlocked European expanse.
Between the cities, as we approach the towering forest, it is a wall of foliage, green and grey, with streaks of blue. It is secretive. It is faceless. At this great distance there could be stern boughs of projecting fir, the high beginning of a fearsome protector to watch over us, as our love of forest is altered to a defensive emotion.
Our voyage through the forest is a complicated threading. The green and grey bloom slowly collapses to a vapour, closing and falling behind us in shallow wakes.
Or, when on a flight, there is the usual sleeping and waking, and the glimpse of the same forest, hour after hour, during each brief rousing. It is a teeming hidden world, revealed in stages, and as each mist evaporates. Rivers and canals of air and moisture interrupt the continuity so that, even though the forest is fully knitted together, there are imagined clearings and what seems like a memory of their use. But these imaginings are sourced by intermittent dreaming: the green bank with its small river raises flowers whose drooping suggests a swan or falcon, or an absent prince. Such a serenity soon fades, and at dusk huge clouds are unsteady. On longer flights, moon visits and revisits, manifest or abstruse. And sometimes, filling the entire Northern sky, it seems that only one giant grey wolf is hidden in the clouds: it rests and circles round its growing shape, head and tail seeking the horizon, as the clouds form and re-form in the wind.
Crossing Europe by train in earlier times, during an ever present night, our long train stationary in the dark, a goods train bursts through. There is the rhythmic echoing thunder of immediate track, and the wincing metal as the train takes a bend at speed. Despite the speed, it is just possible to make out the code of destinations in blurred and rusting lettering, mysteriously inscribed on the wagon’s sides.
Memories of the taiga were superficial, though dominating. Usually the sweep of forest, or the glimpse of an outer scattered rim of growth would define the whole landscape. It was a rare privilege to spend time within the forest, and then it was almost always just the outskirts, almost always staying aware of a nearby open sky. There were groups, even large groups, of certain trees growing together. There were also trees becoming more and more individual as time passed. Some individual trees, especially oaks, stayed after death. One old oak, already dead it seemed, was awkward and misshapen, but still a presence from the past – a monument with modern shadows. New life merges readily with the colours of the forest but the oak stands out as a mighty relic, darkening slowly from its white form, the leaves and bark now impossible to remember.
In parkland there would have been a swift, even a reverent, disposal, however precarious the dismantling of boughs, however heavy and unmanageable the bole.
It was a relief to move again among living trees. The conifers, in limitless numbers, seemed to shelter and even hide deciduous trees, though many birches were dressed with a presenting light. With larger birches there was a concentration of light, and therefore a visual connection with and a movement towards the sky. But however small the birch trees, however small the stands, it seemed sometimes that the whole forest existed to serve individual birches as they followed each other and as they kept safe their silhouettes in shapes of light. The forest trees no longer needed protection from wind and sun, and now crowded round their precursors. Birch can hold, can spread light. Birch can mount to the sky, become a sculpture, or even a memorial. Its lower boughs can be a signpost to a series of passageways, as light follows light towards some hidden world. Birch can even demonstrate what is sought. Its highest boughs can spin for our emotion in the pale sky. Wherever it is found, it can be imagined elsewhere, even out of sight. The trunk can be touched and is connected to this larger world through the burrowing roots and the ascending boughs.
We are bewildered as the eye marvels at the extent of water, at the extent of sky, at the multitudinous heavenly bodies. It is easy to lose courage and seek social support. But one can slowly recover as the birches are seen and gathered in memory – in the pyramidal shape of a bare individual tree, as the delicacy of its outer silver limits gives way to light; there is a store of used light, mottled with what seems like the healed bark of dead boughs; the confusion of slender white boughs folds embalmed spaces within the confines of growth; and occasionally, a group of erect figures, faceless shepherds, are anchored in dreaming at the edge of the remembered clearing – even though the flocks are absent, the shepherds show the way. Of course the birches are alive as themselves, but our religious mind struggles to express their beauty. Their host gathers in silence, and their colour, white satin or a mirrored shining, seems to introduce and celebrate light, even creatures of light. Our movement through the taiga yields to familiar friends and guardians, as the distractions of beauty fill the mind, moon-bright grey, and the forest of simplified clouds from the sky. But the most precious colour of this twilight range fades here on earth, as the stain of silver is fixed in a boundless wood.
And after this rapt attention comes the fear – the fear of the destruction of the city, and the loss of what the city means. Even the stranger is overwhelmed by a gathering of reminders, whether some remnant worried to extinction or some grand composition glimpsed briefly from a remembered home. And here on this inland plain near Novgorod some homesickness can never be resolved.
Volkhov river is fast and deep. The lake mirrors sky’s expanse. Stone churches concentrate the fading cloud and mist; multiplied by water and sky, by echoing light, and by unravelling colour, they bring near a pure white distance. Clouds held still in cyclonic winds still seem to oversee a link between Northern and Southern seas, especially the way to Lake Ladoga and along the River Neva to the sea’s imagined blue – the scattered light of Europe. Ancient fortress structures are dark and jagged against the show of winter. Metal dust, they say, rises and falls in the waters of a nearby lake. There is an overhead confusion for any witness, as if snow clouds block some opening into a shrinking fragment of a coloured dome.
We can read that Novgorod’s forests and marshes halted Mongol horsemen, and that Novgorod and Pskov preserved the culture of Kiev. We can read that merchants were massacred in the 16th century during the foundation of the Russian state. Is this commemorated, or is it perhaps overshadowed by Novgorod’s 20th century destruction? There are of course even older stories, now cultural fragments without a context. The armour in the lake has collapsed to rust. It is so long ago. And if we think of merchants and organised republics to guess at the way we should think about the Russian world of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, we can imagine Novgorod’s access to many lakes and seas. And despite the distances to the inland seas, and then to the world seas, the sight of the sky and the scent from the river still alters the inland plain.
Then there is the destruction in World War 2, and the heroic revival. But even now after the restoration and recreation of the city’s achievements, the chronicle is one of sorrow, or even a seemingly endless catharsis. Wandering within remembered scenes, returning inhabitants were insensible. It was a daze, or a trance. Memories were within a protecting bandage, deaf to the sound of bombardment, kept sightless in the presence of devastation. They could not see a town. Overgrown with tall grass, the plain was again under an enormous sky. It is the site of a catastrophe – from within its own fatherland, and from without. How can any polity be renewed after yet another complete land-locked destruction? How can it resurrect itself without safe routes, treaties, and a port – and without help from all those who took part in whatever conquest or defeat.
And so, moving south from Saint Petersburg, the changed journey is still dominated by thoughts of war. The forest is seen in fragments beside rivers and struggles intermittently on the flooded land.
8. Moscow
The great expanse in a sort of complex bowl is formed by a number of hills, as the landscape, in a variety of colours, laps at the foothills or flows through and beyond to an extending plain. And as the plain extends we can not make out, on this occasion, the narrowing of the distant spaces, the confining towards some polar destination. But on days when the air is clear, we can make out in the distance all around us, the slow gathering white of winter.
The great bowl has niches here and there, small clearings in small woods, arcane cubicles in foothills, or slightly inviting places to meet and gather briefly. A rural pond, a more widely shared lake, a variety of eminences, are all places to compose the remembered and imagined estates. The lasting remnants of serfdom, or a genuine social piety, would keep the low walls safe round shady parks. The clashing sounds of frogs and nightingales would at times seem ominous. Repeated histories of devotion, underworlds of mysteries, and starry exhalations above the forests would be changed into art. It may be that hope will survive that the temple of the landscape can somehow return to its own bare perfection, just as in the past, within accumulations of living memory, it had seemed to await and expect the building of the city.
In the various scenes there is a summing up of a range of specialist endeavours, or more intensely a range of friendship groups, with or without greater intimacy, continually seeking the self or the other, continually maintaining movement and purpose. And at the end of summer, and throughout autumn, whenever the journey through this bowl paused to renew its bearings with the landscape, to revisit, if you like, the ideology and purpose of us all, a coherent general scheme would start to become clear; the golden light was filtered through undergrowth, found place in individual trees, and sank to the known depth and intensity of a remembered homeland which the same swallows would have often visited.
Sunlight was spread evenly and then locked into the white searing ripeness of the fields. There was an expectation of serenity from the sky, but the general blue grew dull, even dark, and sank into the horizon of the Moscow River. Surviving fragments of forest continued to give way, and dissolved to an evenness of green, made up of grass and leaves, and even of mirroring water’s alphabet of flowing and falling, freshets and rills. But undistracted by such a pastoral prelude, there accumulated the range of modern harvests – there were rural harvests, with livestock and carriages, horses and carts; and there were industrial harvests, with new factories, crammed with people, and built in a new style, a plain geometric sheltering cover for the hidden host of workers. A nobility still visited, in a regional fancy dress. There were peasant gods updating images of abundance, and as the day ended rituals of joy were absorbed in memory.
Leaves are falling. Black fragments dominate the yellow, the brown, and other remnants of green. In bright sunlight, decay is also golden and the sound of freezing leaves underfoot includes an echoing. September cobwebs. Water is always still at the edge of a small lake, or, in a calm backwater of its feeding river, it trembles at the fall of leaf or twig. There is a cooling and dissolving aquamarine as light is scattered through the mist, whether it is rising or falling.
The dry autumn collapses in weeks of rain. The surface of the Moscow River is upturned, and its foaming furrows show in the mist. Things noticed were at first drenched and then drowned to a cold oblivion. No new image could be shared; no new memory persisted. Out in the prosperous countryside there were newly made remnants of an idealised Russia, usually built of native wood, or partly so. And at regular intervals this ideal Russia was emptied carelessly into Moscow, where the social engine processed every means of contact and exchange – the return home, fulfilled or frustrated, was a tired journey.
There will be many setbacks as we approach the city, and, at such a distance, they will be strained through the emotion of so much recollection. But there is certainly a great plain, through which winds the Moscow River. On each side of the river there are levels of land. Perhaps over time the more permanent city was kept to the highest level; or perhaps the flow of water was controlled. On some maps, there is a preserved historic land mass that has the shape of the Tiber island in Rome, but it is so extensive that one needs a bird’s eye view, or some grand perspective, to see the similarity. And it is with such a perspective, reminiscent and distant. that one can easily see that Moscow, like so many other towns, was originally built in order to rest safely on river journeys.
And perhaps it is true that we imagine we can make out small hills echoing the landscape of Rome. There is a patch of sky at the summit of one of them. There is some sort of arena low down as one climbs – almost out of sight across the river. Then there is a crowd climbing slowly away from a great landmark. But the press of people obliterates any shape of a hill. Are these natural hills, or built hills? How many are there? But whether remembered or not, in whatever season, whether original or artificial, these smaller contours had been confidently ignored as the city was transformed from wood.
In the centre a cluster of small hills seemed to unravel, but one could hardly identify the place one reached as an actual hill, let alone name it, though the first great bend of the river was embanked below. The space used for the embankment had been taken from floodplain gardens and was even now being made inhospitable to beggars and rough sleepers. The almost empty river moved more swiftly past the city’s secure and deserted brim.
New order was continually imposed, and the decisive monumental feeling of a capital city confined and excited the crowds of visitors, as whatever absolute purpose swallowed alleyways and commercial patches. Over time the crowdedness of buildings had disguised the privileged patterns of ownership, and had begun to serve a greater autocracy. Out in the country it was easy to see how a populous village could easily fit into a fraction of a spacious estate, and differences of rank were supreme. Within the city there was a seeming merging of prestige. Any utopian resentment was mollified by the idea that the grand buildings of church and state somehow existed for the glory of everyone. Throughout its time, portions of the city’s intimate space had been continually reorganised as timber structures were replaced, green fields buried, and chance dimensions made geometric. And the tiny central hills, which were in any case probably just ways of remembering the way, were ignorantly destroyed. In true Roman fashion, large regular spaces had also been provided to redefine the monuments which already existed. Only the increasingly steep floodplain was unused.
The older Metro celebrates the utopian vision of the great city, where life itself navigates the solid dark of an actual Russia, moving through unlit pathways and bright clearings. The familiar folk on mosaic murals, their portraits in schematic hosts, show the ochre sumptuary vagueness of gathered garments which simplifies heroic emotion, particularly theatrical in the red tinged faces and the gesturing hands. From a distance, when the faces can’t be seen, it is like a group of muddy awkward shapes of snow gathered by chance and now impossible to understand.
Subdued and spacious the underground dreams are still. The ideology of luxury was served during its construction – never up-to-date – never new. The organised city has been mother to this world, defining the ways. Spacious tunnels lead us all to simple trains which go to famous destinations via heroic chronicles and the past of luxury. There are Western reminiscences – Russian versions of Mediterranean posters, the malachite wakes of luxurious boats, winking back at us as they head for paradise. But even in the shallows of fantasy, it is actual marble we see, rather than any light-weight, and sea-worthy, imitation. And the luxury is felt as a gravitational force, slowing our movement, preventing our escape. The underworld is itself, as if it has designed its own history in sequestered stages, not all of them harmonious or agreed, and within the confused clashing of invention each iteration of control is impressively coherent in engineering terms, whether the mining is deep or shallow. But in the major halls we transit, some of them very deep, it is sometimes granite we see as the material, and the lounge of each ocean liner we encounter, though sunk, for ever upright, in the Moscow depths, extends to ballroom size under high-ceilinged chandeliers. There is no trace of church or palace, no imitation of geometric stone or sculptured wood, no imported scenes of revelation, though somehow there are aisles of power over space, and images of power over time, which welcome our arrival and regulate our departure, out of and into our own darkness. An underground ferry takes us from gate to gate of city access through deep shadows, and collapsing light trails are broken from the past.
Perhaps there are religious scenes in more recent stages of the metro. But it seems unlikely, for saints start and end their earthly lives as princes, while merchants only gather in determined crowds. It could be that the account of the pastoral origins of the city is now locked away in churches above ground, and the imported landscapes found there are in museums apart from the secular state. One of these Kremlin churches is the Annunciation Cathedral, though it seems impossible now to re-entangle its meaning with the exercised power of the modern state. There was direct access to this church from the living rooms of the Tsar’s home. At times it was a place of childhood origins and of childhood memory – a glorious tree house – a private chapel – the approach to a private god, with whom you shared your servants to enact the sacraments. There is the folk or fairy tale dimension: a forest clearing was the shape of the unbuilt church – a clearing for peace, for retreat, for access to one’s own entire meaning. And the wood needed for the original church, whether or not this particular cathedral had ever been of wood, would have filled many clearings when grown as trees; it would have dressed bare valleys and positioned open fields. Such empty spaces could still be imagined as homes for light, with access now through a range of high windows, and brought down through the sloping cavities and the tracery of adorned walls. The whole was recreatsed respectfully in the materials of art, shaped and smoothed for light’s best approaches. The many domes gathered the heavens into a privacy which incorporated the general dome of nature’s sky, and their separate concentrations of gold descended on each clearing when the chosen one paused, and ascended when the chosen one moved on.
And even the children of the Tsar might begin their understanding at the lower, the terrestrial, part of the Creation section, where Adam lies still on a mosaic of interrupted light. He is being roused, perhaps by visiting angels. Animals and birds are apart in a nearby clearing, or it could be that they are separated in a part of the sky lowered to be within reach of the forest; they could be oblivious, or preoccupied; they could be in need of protection.
The same Adam awakes, in the same Eden, his nudity and slumbering posture known throughout Europe. Animals in fear and innocence are on the forest floor. He thinks, or he dreams, of naming, even of protecting the nearby animals, waiting in their zodiacal sky forest. The light shines in fragments through a maze of boughs on the floor of Eden. Even in a continent defined by forests the depicted forests are pastoral imports, whose pageant could not contain the surviving Taiga biome, still less the digital collections and memorials which now overwhelm us. But the few European representative beasts there are seem submissive and are apart from the naked shepherd; even the exotic and the mythical creatures are familiar, though the surrounding forest is much denser, and a bear walks safely along a high bough. This bear will never reach a site of hibernation, never be betrayed.
Throughout the city the hive continues, and if it is a little more crammed than in the past, it seems to make the urge for sweetness more intense. Shoals of fish are teeming in the water network, locked in a Russian world, and ready for competitive delivery, one by one.
And then the high hills – the Swallow hills, if you like – the new name suggesting a seasonal encounter with a homeland. The time of each imagined visit will be bathed in light– and this new name can be allowed for these hills – from whose height we had always looked down on the growing city with excitement and delight. Venetians would say that their ship could steer itself into the Golden Horn. And Moscow will always be a confident haven of memory and desire.
9. Isaak Levitan
Such an imagining of Russia, so affected by the history of wars, and by the current challenge to autocracy, will have its own retreat from Moscow. And on the way the social fact of the many exiles can be confronted. A sweeping bend of the Moscow River, roughly eastwards, must contain the beginning, or at least some trace, of the Vladimirka highway, where the exiled began their journey to Siberia. Actual visitors may find a blue plaque or some other recognition of this aspect of the Tsarist past, but for those who have to rely on satellite observation a modern crowded highway causes much confusion. The Moscow river is out of sight, blocked by new buildings. The Vladimirka highway, if not out of sight, is certainly in disguise within this part of the modern city. There may be a narrow strip of scrubland, an unused remnant of road-building rather than a preserved relic of the prisoners’ way, and this may be the only actual survival of the way itself. We can speak of a definite “thing”, as if remembered, because of Isaak Levitan’s painting of the Vladimirka road, which he made soon after the first stage of the exiled’s journey had been transferred to rail. But there was never much remembering or even acknowledgement of such degradation, even if the punished citizen survived. Can it be known whether Levitan was much concerned with his own social identity, particularly with his Jewishness? When he painted Vladimirka Road he was certainly entangled with imperial security arrangements. But wasn’t everyone? Wasn’t the web of security round the Tsar a governance arrangement that could enmesh anyone? The stretch of the road which Levitan painted would have seemed much wilder, much further out from Moscow than it is now. Indeed, when he came across it, it may have been an unsupervised stretch of land. He may have discovered traces and remains of its actual use, and would not have had to seek any guidance from the social authorities for his attempt at historical painting. Insulted, perhaps even distressed by his own banishment because of his “unprotected characteristic”, there can only ever have been fearful intimations of the jurisprudence, even for Isaak Levitan.
And we rely on his painting of the scene, when this broad rough way out of Moscow was a floodplain in a neglected grand emptiness – sometimes easily passable – sometimes muddy, stranding the wayside shrine. In the painting, the rising expanse of ruined land shows traces of all seasons. The extensive width of the walkway, and the wearing down of the earth, would have accommodated the sodden phases of the year. There is an ambiguous, and innocent, Madonna, ostensibly sorrowing but mainly showing the way; and a pious study of each distance in the painting can seem to show at the same time an empty site for a possible forgetting and a version of some recent ruin among hills.
The digital version of Levitan’s painting is some help, though it is impossible to know what was in his mind. He may have been unwell. Brush strokes can’t be seen. Some layers of the process seem shallow but insistent, certainly rushed, as if he was short of time to prepare the various stages of his plein air procedures. The thickness of paint can’t be measured. The scene portrayed seems flat -– no adding of riches or emotion, no gathering of light. We can’t say which “school” he is – how French or otherwise are his impressions – how Jewish he is. The painting records the social fact of the prisoner transfer in a landscape ready for a new use, but the building site portrayed now memorialises the fear of exclusion, and the lonely silence during this bleak stage. Levitan, as ever, is recording what he imagines as a Russian’s idea, a Russian’s memory – and no doubt later Russians with cameras will have found the site for themselves. And if there are photographs of a recognisable stage in such a journey, is it shown as a relic of a Tsarist past, or as a precursor to the slavery under Stalin? How many of the prisoners would have been thought to merit their punishment? And the Vladimirka painting itself, though it contains no actual living human figures, is full enough of imagined ones and those to be remembered. How would Russian students disentangle human suffering from economic policy, or punishment from cruelty? Would any of this even have been discussed, even in privacy? What is privacy, in such a context? In Levitan’s painting, fading effects are found here and there within a large and empty theatre. The empty stage of this threatening past is shown in a progression of colours, colours of a preserved past, colours of saving, colours of stored and shabby costumes – though there are no human figures to wear them – and colours of flickering light. Much of the painting is not even of the road itself, but of the way the surrounding landscape gradually frees itself from the road. It refers to past events, and also shows them being digested and absorbed. There are no definite blacks – just a host of greys. There are sad colours – including a hopeless stage of green; the only calm colours are high up and beyond towards the dull blue sky, serving an idea of future time with the roadway re-purposed and its use forgotten. Despite such changing the empty scene is still peopled – the shrine a reminder of prayer, the worn away earth a reminder of prisoners’ footsteps. But the road is portrayed in silence. It is a simplified, a visual, lamentation: the Tsar unmentioned, anguish not shown, no assertion of innocence, no pleas for mercy – just silence while past suffering is redacted from the record.
Always a road to the North. Sometimes broad and worn to a great width to accommodate the many minute altars, as freedom and confidence shrink on the journey, and as the world shrinks to another’s voice and another’s tread. Before the trains, before the flights, before the industrial scale of administering exile, there would be slow movement along this wide road. Even food was unsocial, and found its context within the cruelty – it provided energy for an individual to obey, to work, and at this stage of the exile it provided energy for the phase of moving – the noise of barking dogs a readiness to enforce compliance and a private shame. The supervising staff, or some of them, would have the help of carts; the guards, or some of them, on horseback, would change the horses at way stations. The prisoners, or most of them, in chains, would walk. Throughout this prologue there would have been fear of prolonged suffering. “From the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd”, as Nadezhda Mandelstam began her record of the poet. A prisoner has difficulty breathing, as he breaks the ice to wash in the dark. Is he breaking the ice to wash in an imagined moonlit welcome? Is he gasping in cold mist as he lowers his head in a floodlit prison yard? And who knows where? Frequent later fictional versions of such a fate, on a theatre stage, in film, or in television, dramatize the isolation – the boundary of high precipitous walls, the almost inaccessible rolling stock of goods carriages, the gaping back of a departing lorry to transport the malefactors, which will close up and be secured as the lorry moves. For those who survived, their past was stolen, and their inner life was re-invented as an emptied structure. Such accounts, especially from Russians, give a slight idea of colossal crimes and individual fates. Well researched and devoted descriptions, eye-witness accounts, and extensive statistics now provide a historical record that matches the scale of the silent suffering during distorted lives.
There were never many human figures in Levitan’s work, though the occasional muse in his early work is a precise and colourful portrait. Pastoral scenes seem to copy the landscape – there are no dreaming shepherds, no devised sharing in nature’s bounty, exposed to the seasons and posing to dominate the wild. But in the empty landscapes his muse, his wandering muse, is Russia. The mighty Volga is presented in instalments, sometimes in the foreground, often just glimpsed, companion of the changing year, treading through our interrupted days. It slowly moves on from winter, fills with spring. Spring is blue because so much sky is reflected in the prolonged thaw. There are pools of many sizes and eventually the heavens are at our feet, such an expanse embroidered by remaining snow. Ice melts to join the snow, and water. It swells the Volga and the lakeland seas. From another distance flocks return, The time of unnavigable roads is still to come. The river would absorb and express all seasons, would engrave the earth, be worthy of the structured phases of the land. Levitan’s purpose seemed to be to celebrate its shapes, its destinations, all the scenes of its pausing. As for its chance shaping of a social history, the vague anchoring was fluid, relying on the gathering and loosening of individual memories. And the theme of consolation was clear to Levitan, and all the fresh expressions of its aspects could be found in landscape. Whatever the particular scene, the Volga was often glimpsed or imagined nearby. The art could fix each stage, each pausing of the mighty river. Trees, flowers, lichen, grass, and fragments of supposed forests found a place together near the river, an anchorage just out of sight, and the store of memories, incidentally accumulating and emptying as the river served a grand destination, would pause in Levitan’s gardens, or be lost in childhood.
And the prolific oeuvre of Isaac Levitan has celebrated the landscape of Russia. He doesn’t ostensibly portray a promised land, or memories of childhood, or a classical world, or even a visual echo of imperial grandeur. Such themes of landscape painting are familiar in Europe and Asia, including in the shared wooden churches and synagogues of Russia, with their zodiac tiling marking time, and even copies of classical flora and fauna, sometimes in abundance. Perhaps Judaic art takes images more seriously, insisting on portraying matters of historical record in strict time order, and needing to take full advantage of a fixed opportunity to bury the dead. And for Levitan too his litany of work for the river is a matter of record. It is quite enough, indeed it is all in all, that he moves round Russia, in the open air, copying nature, even sometimes recording where artists passed. This “copying” of a secular Russian nature and a materialistic concentration seems for a brief period to be ideologically important after 1917, and Russia seems to pause in its own natural world. Why should Levitan be the conduit for such a record of the landscape of Russia? There is his Moscow education, his visits to various European countries, and no doubt other Petrine influences. There is his own background as a Jewish outsider – whatever was socially untenanted within him, whatever forceful tradition could be revived as he sought to express the earthly beauty of Russia. From time to time, there is evidence that particular paintings overwhelmed his Russian audience. Perhaps they were ready to be reminded of their childhood homes, and to find a chorus of artistry in their boundless context. Perhaps Russian landscape had been so long absent from their religious scenes that Levitan’s work rushed in to combine their earliest beliefs with their earliest memories, and briefly in the secular times, or always for more secular people, no other story was needed than the landscape itself in whatever season.
However impressionistically transformed, Levitan seems driven to copy the beauty of Russia, to create a prolific genre of beautiful fact. Perhaps Russians now find his vision unsatisfactory. But in a European context Levitan’s Russia easily qualifies as a Fatherland of beauty.
The painting of the Vladimirka road in 1892 is a rare example of a social work, though without any actual human figures. Also social is Above Eternal Rest, painted in 1894. The small church for burial services is screened by remains of forest. The graveyard crosses are almost lost in the undergrowth. Its western door is fortified and protected by the cold waves of a heroic Russia. It could be a stubborn symbol of piety – a small familiar Russian church, overwhelmed by the mirroring expanse of water, and the palatial sky. The waves seem to shudder in a confined motion: steadfast virtue in isolation is almost defeated. In no sense is it a copy of an actual scene. It is a composition which combines glorious versions of waterways and sky with a sense of mortality and a vulnerable resting place. It is not done en plein air in the usual sense, but from very high up, though still within an earthly atmosphere. The building could be an actual church – a scholar’s church, if you like. But it is also a proffered history of memory, finally settled in the shared landscape. Everyone can look down on a remembered church of their own, small enough to fit for now on the small island by the flood, and looking down, our mind is made up in this fading sunset, slowly calmed and fixed in these royal clouds: the transported church is shorn of all the familiar trees and ways, and the remembered stream and its seasonal lake are lost in the present flood; the Volga’s shape (if it still is the Volga), its pausing and its destined flow, is drowned in a shapeless sea. And looking from above, aware of an absent flock, even loyal to the dead souls, we are without companionship now, but positioned in invented glory by the album of memories below.
10. Exiles and travellers
There were many ways from the Russian Empire to Italy, and many reasons for such journeys. There was the desire to make sense of it all. Indeed, the extent of Russia’s imperial manifestation was so great, and its internal organisation so fraught and slow of achievement, that travellers would become lodged, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for a lifetime, in the machinery of communication. And apart from the usual impulses and ambitions, it perhaps seemed essential to unlock the distant past of an imperial Constantinople, or to find some model in the Western part of Europe. Various saints are still visited, mostly by air – though some intrepid travellers still visit Bari by sea, and many contrive to include some sort of sea voyage, from Genoa, or Naples, or Civitavecchia – perhaps to enjoy an idea of some shared European destiny. Christianity, lodged in the vastness of Eurasia, has developed so variously and has been re-exported in so many forms and families, that it is perhaps a relief to forget and spend a lifetime as a migrant, though perhaps one must expect finally to remember the beloveds. Minute Byzantine crypts are found in remote parts of the Italian South and in Sicily, and perhaps Russian visitors in their pilgrimage will teach us more about them. Even more mysterious is what we have always shared – the continual surfacing and the continual troubled burial of a multitude of heresies. There could be written here a long and incomprehensible list, but even a slight knowledge of the Paulician variety makes one realise that the underlying ferment still continues, and that the continual wars will never resolve it.
More recent and still fully maintained is the crypt of St Nicholas in Bari whose front garden of death is a very broad affair to welcome so many pilgrims, and whose arrangement of metal railings and low marble walls accommodates the funeral visits of a constant stream of well-wishers and mourners. A small group of Russians was often outside the cathedral, unusual because they were stationary, and waiting, as their fellow worshippers crowded past. They would be noticeable, by the sea, heading for a port administration building, which had a flag, Greek letters set in its brickwork, and a clock tower. It was a narrow jetty by the sea, but they stayed together as they moved along and into the building, perhaps to arrange the landing of large groups on the wider jetties further along the quay.
When the groups were in the church, particularly in the deep crypt, they could remember their ship above in daylight. And when they left the church, joining briefly the other pilgrims in the broad public avenue, there was a sense of release from the intricate Cathedral and the buried past. And they found their ship, and boarded it to return home, together with feeding migratory birds.
“Pilgrims” is not always the right word to use for such visitors to Rome, but there were many such encounters in Rome, and obviously they enjoyed a much more international audience. One day, on a crowded bus, a multitude of small birds were loud along the river Tiber. The multitude arranged itself in myriad flocks sharing the parks and hills. The noise, mostly gathering, mostly resting, contained an incidental music, rehearsing and remembering, rather than singing. It was difficult to decide how big they were. There was such a host, such a giving way to each other in the city dusk. They seemed to shrink together as their numbers increased. The gathering and swirling hosts of uccellini were moving south. And as they migrated they paused beside main roads, populating trees in this warm promontory, resting beside rivers as they found their way. As usual, there were fragments of poems trying to make their way through the supreme order and through the supreme chaos. Travellers followed the steep river down through the city, saw the descending skimmed concrete of the banks. Crossing the river for yet another ceremonial arrival, a group of Russian ambassadors were somehow working as a team, remembering their original place as a Russian city, under a Russian sky. One of them, like a modern Mercury, dominated the pedestrian bridge, seeming to land in a twilight flow of other travellers. And then again, on the other side of the river, the multitude of birds were in the rustling poplars, resting in a crowd of contact mutterings, a continual almost song, as travellers moved on a definite way. The birds, certainly on both banks of the Tiber, perhaps also spread into the wider climbing land towards the blue Alban hills; before now they will have congregated in stages through the whole Tiber valley, and fed further north in the temporary reaches of a broad slow Umbrian stream.
In Florence the Russian group weren’t seen on the tiny buses. Occasionally they boarded or left a major tram, and once, outside S.M.Novella station, they were glimpsed in a large taxi, sitting opposite each other in the back. Acting, as usual, as their own guides, and always with some idea of Russia in their minds, they had searched the Italian landscape for traces of Dante, and their aloof pilgrimage had been rewarded.
The steep woods of the Casentino had seemed miniature when compared to Russian forests, and the watercourses, which in Tuscany had long ago washed away traces of the dead, would in Russia soon be under ice or have already disappeared in a lakeland sea. They didn’t know why they found so much in sights of the Italian landscape. North of Florence, walking with memories of Dante, the Appenine foothills, with their small, sloping fields, now deserted, were like decks of galleys, as Dante might have called them, above the deeps of mists. One or other of the Russian pilgrims might suggest that the poet would by now have left behind him, in a wood below the mist, all the imagined systematic spectacles of justice – left behind the bitterness of judgement, if not the pity – and that his eyes would have opened again to the actual landscape, and that scenes could then be made of an ordinary purgatory where one could live. How was it possible that such medieval treatment of familiar themes could comfort them: a perilous state – traumas of judgement – abounding aesthetic respite and consolation? But even Dante never saw such sights as could be seen in Russia – low hills scarcely helping as forests drowned again, and the scenes of limbo, mainly cold and white, with traces on the snow, offering no retreat from whatever trauma as the souls lived on.
In Venice, they were often in a poorer, more remote part of the city, certainly no match in any sense for how one imagined St. Petersburg. The walkways were intricate, and the canals were remnants of a distant past, just enough of them for one to cross over and back a few times to lose one’s way. There was the smell of hot food, though only one course – probably ragu’ – and there was the sound of the midday bells – a simple restrained tolling, loud or fading, though not all the sounds coinciding. The group of Russians sought respite from the nearby Biennale. This was the year of Apollonian achievements, and smooth unaffordable perfection. Celebrated masters provided for great wealth a modern version of classical fame – in black stone, with or without irony, or in white marble. The back streets just off the now dowdy Napoleonic thoroughfare were relaxing, if not Dionysian.
Also on Burano, during a summer festival, a group sat awkwardly at the wooden tables, among the small lagoon oaks. Then they were gone. Other visitors walked back round the cemetery on Mazzorbo, beside the Artichoke gardens, to the vaporetto stop. They would be conscious of the lagoon islands of the past continually shrinking. At this distance from the press of people, they could see that the slow formation of future land just beneath the surface of the lagoon was, with human help, proceeding at a similar speed. There were one or two stranded cranes.
To the north of Venice, in autonomous regions above the Veneto, the remains of the twentieth century wars were still obvious. Polite visitors from many countries were now visiting a shared jurisdiction. Local stories from the time of war were told in the mountains to climbers and hikers. The digitally organised guide books avoided causing offence, even though the opposing armies obviously on ocasion had their own dedicated church. Sometimes there were stories on notice boards in the open air. An overwhelming emotion was still somehow accessible though without any exact local application or purpose. The very remote high land still seemed pre-war, as if entirely pastoral, though it couldn’t possibly be so. Sculpted memorials had been made socially grand by the great size of the plain and simple gravestone forms, and by the untold numbers of the dead. Beloved mules were thanked in monuments. After the catastrophes and their consequences a migrant worker had been sculpted returning home from a recovering Germany, the bronze copy of his suitcase a memorial to soiled work clothes about to be washed in the waiting stream.
11. Journey to Florence 1439
Focusing on an obviously shared history, before the fall of Constantinople, a large Russian group leaves Moscow and travels through Germany along the trade routes towards Northern Italy: such routes are clear after many lifetimes of use, and lead eventually towards various Italian cities. And the return would be via Venice and all the many Eastern cities, important to a developing Russia, but vulnerable to the Western powers.
They are able to keep moving, almost in all seasons. Paths are easily drained, easily kept in use in a complex and intimate landscape. And as they cross towards Italy they climb above the continuing and gathering sounds of rivers. Even into old age they remembered the distant whispering of pastoral water. The welcoming sound they had left behind, and which still accompanied their climb, was finally still as they reached the green meadow. This interruption of the great ascent is a bower for a sleeping form. There is a cave at the far edge of the meadow where the climb will soon continue, and before its mouth a jagged overhang with various limestone colours; a sort of glaciation, or radiation is blending an imported landscape with a summer sky. The large dark mouth of the cave resembles an opening to a dark sky beyond the present hills. Images of landscape and cities begin to form. They are in Northern Italy but the memory of a recording angel would easily recognise Balkan and Russian spaces, where such images incorporate personal memory into the long history of shared belief.
Near the summit, fragments of path and guardian boulders protect the vantage they never reach. Lower slopes are wooded.
And the steep face of the cliff gives way to hollows and caves, outcrops and promontories. Some of the spaces made are cavernous, and from them, out of the sumptuous dark, a slow procession of past stories emerges as surroundings for miracles. Each figure with a chosen shape and a chosen colour, attended the miracle, believed the miracle, and insisted on its truth. The colours not shared with sky, or the light-visited earth, or with the confirmations of memory, were solid remnants of mountains, darkest purple in a friendly night. There were turquoise and copper blues to fill the outline of an ancient city, to visit in some other time, or vanishing to rescue them from an overwhelming fear. And so the other worldly, the soul’s context, was placed in orderly landscapes made from visions of the past, and then given the overwhelming dimensions of Russia. Obviously, images of moon and stars were present, as presently understood, familiar neighbours in their largest space, or locked in sequential maze, to control and organise the immensity.
The Russian travellers, or those who first decided on this journey to the Council of Florence, would perhaps work out the way from a Venetian map of a trade route from Germany to the North Italian plain. This route would take over from an already known Hanseatic journey. It would lead roughly from Novgorod, to Pskov, and then via the Baltic to Talina, and Riga, and Lubeck. Then they would find the German routes to Venice. And when they eventually reached the Alps and joined the climbing and narrowing tracks, the many stages of the route locked them into the land of warrior saints and remote chapels. There could be peace and rest at staging points, where many traders had already lived and died, at this great distance from both seas on each side of the long peninsula. And remote from the usual world, and protected from any intrusive majesty, one could seek one’s way.
First imagined from the map, far above the North Italian lowlands, the high valleys seemed to lead to a broad eminence and the words PIANI ETERNI spaced out on the map. The capital letters, and the spaces between them, made it difficult at first to make out the first word, and there was a greater delay as the space between the two words made way for the slow traverse of the second word across the depiction of these limestone hills.
We can’t say exactly when the words were first noticed, and it would be silly to choose an occasion, but we know that the record of Venetian mainland territories contains such naming. The young Italian scholars who helped this outsider begin to understand were able to do most of their work near the Alpine crossings, as it were “on site”, but as they traced the beauty of their surroundings into the past, they began to make more use of their academic training. Some of the records they could use were stored in the Venice archives, in the adapted Frari monastery. The records, though repetitive, were sometimes enlightening, but it was a relief to return to the hills; and it was more than a relief to spend time there in the changing world. Although the memory of the re-organised cells and the deserted communal spaces of the former Franciscan monastery persisted, its silent shapes and spaces faded or were filled again with life. The sun, as in the Monti del Sole above Venice, made the limestone pavements shine from within the coniferous woodland and shrubbery, and each of the myriad shinings was an unstable light as the wind disturbed the green and grey foliage. Over time, and long ago, “sunlit hills” became “piani eterni” to fix this aspect of a mountain homeland, and to share it. And whether in Italy or in Russia (or in England), sunlit hills could be a light raised to an eminence found beyond the green of our own day. Re-used caves, or adapted burial places were known to a succession of people by the stream nearby and the sheltered approaches. And there would be river valleys to endow, and broad waterways, and inland seas – some bright stream to remember – some journey to share.
Such an account of past time is bound to collapse in error as the Russian party moved on. The moon’s image always had a history of its changes in their minds, most of them partial, and encouraging. They set off for the eternal uplands, no longer disconcerted by the name. The nearby town, heavenly city by association, stretched its bright roofs on green hills. Further on, sunlit uplands of miniature forests and meadows were the gardens around bright stone.
An owl breathed its cry as interrupted sleeping. Its sound continued to escape, compressed and intermittent. The first melodic shape was lost with later, stranger pauses. And then the pauses made a silence which seemed to fill the morning with presence of owl above the limestone pavements.
Niches between stone with fern, flower, seedling tree, were open versions of many caverns, where each person’s Tom Thumb saint confines an echoing dreaming; and, though unheard, the layers and levels of collapsing light seemed to sound in the moist air.
The few birds who stayed beyond dawn sang also to echoing or to emptiness. Spiders’ lines in sunlight, between the fallen rocks, added fragments of caves to the single mound of cavern, where miner, shepherd, philosopher called severally in the dark organisation of dreaming. They were underground. Birdsong was underground, flowers at times almost in darkness. The underground day hung between shafts of sunlight. Oak, sycamore, elm and hazel made similar shapes as long and delicate saplings reaching to where full light began. River bed for snow melt shone too steep for lingering pools; it was a white gash now above dry leaves and fallen fruit.
Such an account of past time will collapse in error as the Russian party travels through legends and landscapes, meets fragments of stories of past ages, and finds its role intractable in Ferrara and in Florence. We have since gained some idea that Russian heroic deeds were located in different ancient lands, and that their sites of home are hallowed in different ways.
The first sight of a welcoming sea was to the west of this shared land of beauty. And as the Alps narrowed the Russian party divided – the more numerous group, with their sealed missives and important purposes moved down through the sparser greater woods above Milan heading towards the Mediterranean. The other smaller group, in charge of organisation for the return journey, stayed on the main German paths towards Venice. The other sea to the East and to their own promontory was not yet visible, but they knew it was there. They walked with their mules, continual walking, climbing hills above the torrents, descending and pausing in intricate valleys. This smaller, lesser group, was without duties until they reached Venice, and they began to relax more, and think of home. After the absence of trees in the upper world, the hills of taiga began with Juniper and Pine. Then came firs in different colours – named as white and red. Then, though not in any systematic order, they recognised hazelnut and black pear – not out of sight in the forest but sheltered by stone or fallen rock, and each individual tree from its complex adjustment to the filtered light provided canopy for gladioli, or mountain iris or carniola lily. Sometimes the limestone masses of an old river bed would work with a porphyry wall to protect a clearing, and flowers adorned whatever bright cavern in the wood. Even abandoned settlements were welcomed by the passing years – rock walls clothed with ferns and ivy, moss and horsetail mingled with wild sorrel and cyclamen on the forest floor. There were reminders of their Russian home, but the flowers and trees were mingled and shelved in a precipitous woodland garden, and its varied levels softened the homesickness in an unfamiliar edifice. Even the bells they heard, with their soft, occasional mementos of family and home seemed to be paying respects to a companion culture, though the distant deeper bell of a church on the valley floor briefly confused them.
Once the broad Alps had been crossed, and the flora and fauna finally found its place according to altitude in this modest land, the reminders of Russia were folded into the hills, and were encountered as known wonders as they ascended and descended.
The Russian party this story accompanies could provide no saints or martyrs. The Council they attended could not succeed. But just thinking that momentous events could have been otherwise seems to demand a legendary landscape. And by chance the land they moved on slopes often to the edge of precarious meadows, where hunted animals are remembered as they vanish into the deep wood. In higher colder air there were hornbeams as well as “Russian” birches, not in disguised multitudes or on winter show, but surviving in the steeper more vulnerable soils. In lower warmer air, the torrents pause as they rush and broaden by the beeches. And as they sensed the animals and plants on their Italian journey, they found the world a complicated ark, organised and tended over generations. And in the high regions, with their curving enclosures and intricate levels they found that the shape of ark, mostly lodged sideways, stranded in these wooded hills, was an alpine version of their forest homeland. This was no Eastern religious story to help mankind. It was Europe and the actual world. By the time they could see the distant Adriatic and the easily imagined links to Russia, they were too low down to see what would have been the Mediterranean, probably Genova. But they knew it was there, and they thought of the whole Italian archipelago as a Western fellow for the Balkan land above the shared Ionian and Aegean seas.
They had travelled with their mules in an ordinary way, even though they knew that war was happening in the East. Sometimes, as the steep rivers joined the Piave, and when they were using the roads of the main valley, they were overtaken by riders on horseback. The visit by the emperor was mentioned. Even more concerning, as they found out later from the main Florence party (probably via news from Ferrara), parts of an army were gathering where they could, on neglected acres, currently dry, where the Adige joined the Po. Important events were apparently continuing and would eventually be recorded, not every incident, but certainly time after time. In their own lives, as they came down towards Venice, they thought their own voices joined sounds of descending streams, valley after valley, altering the air, and that then there was an even more important commotion, wave after wave, as the great rivers, the achieved rivers, were eventually lost in the shallows of the lagoon. Much later, when they had been joined again by the main party, and when they were on the water, eastward-bound, the same shallows spread the movement of their pilgrim galley beyond the navigation channel, and after all the formal ceremony of their visit, and now of their departure, there was a new gentle connection to the movement of the Adriatic, again wave after wave, as they joined the round ships of the spring muda, and moved without a diga into the open sea.
12. AT HOME
At home in Cambridge, while trying to learn Russian, we occasionally met migrants, sheltering from the Ukraine war. Anna, a Polish friend, usually called Anka, was helping a number of women staying here in England, sometimes with their children. Her long-standing friend, Kalyna, who was retired and came from Mariupol, acted as an internet go-between in East Anglia, especially in Cambridge. Her English was good, and getting better, and we often heard Kalyna and Anka, speaking in a mixture of English and Russian. We avoided questions, partly because we weren’t confident of understanding any reply, but Kalyna often spoke about her early life in Eastern Ukraine, and we learned about her past.
When she was growing up on the outskirts of Mariupol there was no state border. Remains of great estates sprawled throughout the area, increasingly host in the past to mining and industrial developments. Owners were Russian-Ukrainian, Ukrainian-Russian. Some were from elsewhere in Europe, and Kalyna mentioned one or two British owners, and showed us the strange Cyrillic forms of familiar names. Despite the extensive industrial developments, she remembered the fields and woods of the landscape. In such a large area, and during a childhood, rural details were more than a distraction from adult lives, as the shapes and colours of familiar spaces were gradually changed, and then changed again. Fragmentary traces of the original estates could still be seen, even close to the boundaries of mines and factories. Cisterns of water had been taken into store from rivers and lakes, and the polluted colours of the contents changed as the levels rose and fell. Seeds and fruits of the most vigorous common plants gathered and decayed. Colours varied in different shapes and sizes of tank, though the settling out, when it came, was usually to a dirty grey. Numbers of deserted sites of earlier mining, and of older factories, were continually increasing, and sometimes it seemed impossible, in certain parts of the Donbass, that anything but sites would ever remain. But the area her memory continually visited was huge, and could still quench or at least distance the thoughts of war. In England, parkland and National Trust properties in East Anglia often reminded her of her childhood in Ukraine, though they had to be re-imagined as wastelands and as ruins – as if the dilapidated gifts of the original “British” owners had remained neglected in their absence after the great wars. Kalyna was able to recall deserted family estates, disappearing gradually within the industrial areas, fragmentary scenes which she remembered just in Ukraine, or just in Russia. Presumably, when these estates had been intact, they had extended out from Russia with a sort of patriarchal confidence. As children they had often played in Russia without realising that the then current border ran through a deserted overgrown estate. Industrial ventures, which were themselves ageing, then seemed to contain the old estates as remnants of careless forests and overflowing streams and pools.
She knew the war was being fought in the same region – in such a vast area one couldn’t say exactly where – and it wasn’t yet the calamitous glory of her grandparents’ generation. It sometimes seemed like a brief interruption of the life she understood; at other times it seemed like a new, and threatening, and permanent change, though even then, she did think that there would eventually be a forgetting. Meanwhile, and unresolved in memory, there were the lives of people who had worked there. But each of her early memories of estate fragments still survived as a beauty in the landscape; some gold was always near the white. The colour and scent of lilac, and of mignonettes and nicotiana, were still crowded into a brief summer in a clearing beneath the pines. There were the remains of tended meadows near the lake. The ruined gorgeous wayside hedgerows on the slopes were now misshapen, or partly felled, and their reflections drifted in water and in shade. The war continues there, with the aiming of lethal drones and other skilful cruelties. Sometimes, the dead await collection in ritual white state garments, but usually in more familiar dress.
The trips across East Anglia which Kalyna made, usually with Anka, often disturbed her. From Ukraine, this landscape had seemed like a small place on the other side of Europe. It still seemed like the edge of something, but it was now high up and peaceful and sea-protected. There were shortening days and migrating birds and it was the second autumn of the war. And a mourning Kalyna, when she and Anka were visiting other refugees in East Anglia, was often upset by the rural scenes they entered on the smaller roads to and from Cambridge. The remains of Thetford or of Rendlesham forest could even alarm her. There were no mines or factories, and the forests were still shrinking peacefully within large fragments of empty fields.
The border region in Eastern Ukraine had been a favourite place for family visits when Kalyna was a child. Even now, during a long war and after harrowing battles, Kalyna thought of Mariupol as her family home. Her connection to Crimea was less personal in the ordinary intimate way, but it was very close. She had been to Crimea from time to time on special holidays. The Black Sea and the Crimea could always be imagined to the south of her, whether she was in Ukraine or in Russia, and she remembered them as part of an even larger world beyond her enormous homeland, and as she thought of sea journeys from the mainland a memory of night brought gold from darkness. Another memory returned the gold unaltered into darkness. Throughout her life there was a continuing firmament above these childhood journeys, and fixed protecting stars.
Anka and Kalyna were quite often away from Cambridge. In early summer Anka had asked some of the Russian Language group to visit her allotment from time to time to keep the crops weeded and watered. And when Anka had finished her pastoral visits with Kalyna, and finally settled Kalyna herself into her new home, she came back to Cambridge and some of us met at Empty Common where her allotment was. Our teacher had asked us to show some Russian speaking visitors an English allotment. They were professional contacts, three of them, all men. Some of us were not entirely sure of the social status of easy access to a Cambridge allotment, perhaps especially on Empty Common, and we didn’t know enough about the polity of modern Russia to know whether there would be any interest in this aspect of our past – not that we would be able to discuss it in Russian. Anyway, we decided to ignore the subject, treating our rights as a matter of course. On their visit to England the well-known places were being covered pretty thoroughly, and the time with us was a sort of rest before they went back to London. Our teacher would introduce them outside the Botanical Gardens, and then leave them with us.
We met them by a shallow stream which seemed still, acting as a source for the loud water features in the Gardens. The same stream, slightly deeper, and still flowing, was found in narrow woods beside our allotments. And the same stream may somehow have flowed on across the road, at a distance from the May chestnuts and into the River Cam. The Russian guests, as we moved beside the stream, were not sure whether we would go back into the woods, or on towards the river, though they certainly realised that the stream would somehow lead the way. Intent cyclists were moving through meadows by a named stream. Young chestnuts in early summer offered pink and white blossom, held upright among the undamaged leaves. It was an ordinary paradise, disguised by traffic noise, until we withdrew into the shade and quiet of the allotment area.
Our best student, who came from Ely, made a start with the Russian. Did they like Cambridge? Where did they live? The answers were politely slow, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in English. All the speakers were limited to rehearsed statements, or to what the surroundings prompted. The Ely student gave an account of how French and Russian tourists would mangle the initial vowel of Ely in their different ways. One of the visitors noticed the ox-eye daisies, and mentioned the chamomiles of Russia.
Hidden within the city, the allotments by the stream were now also in the lilac woods of early summer. The scene had links beyond the city. Deeper rivers, fens and forests, were also represented in the city of learning. Herons from the countryside Ouse could glimpse the water of this urban stream. Even visiting kingfishers were not a complete surprise. Originally a source of water for the city, a spring now brought a narrow version of woods and fields to protect the sites of nests, and mask the busy road. Even though the smallest of our books were too heavy for them to carry, the birds still gathered for fame in these surviving woods – blackbirds sharing information about different subjects – thrushes perfecting an individual song – unlikely ever to be nightingales. Other nearby trees shared out the choirs – Bentley and Chaucer roadways awoke to the melody, then slept again. It was the time for the return of swallows, and towers were built, in stone and wood, to receive the swifts. The Russians were silent, as we all were, bewildered and engaged by such attentive care. It seemed that the mighty individual Leylandii they passed had been organised recently to present a forest shade on this spring day.
And thinking of a forest clearing, Kalyna was missed. Anka had said that Kalyna was fine to meet the foreign guests, that sharing the Russian language was quite enough reason to meet our teacher’s friends. What was upsetting for her at the moment was the lengthening of the war, and a new calendar unit was forming, measuring out the seasons of the war, and remaking memories well into the past. This account, in this clearing, refers mainly to the first May, and to the second May of the war.
We sat down by Anka’s allotment shed. We could all see what we thought of as her Polish pictures through the open window. There was the print of a woman in white. It was faceless, her identity a mystery. As well as these faceless garments there was a print of coralline flowers Both these framed prints had been chosen from her time at art school in Warsaw, but most of the pictures in the shed were Anka’s own photographs – cities and gardens – England and Poland. They were her own photographs of remembered scenes – pastel choices from her childhood, but sombre because the images were backed by the walls of this allotment shed in a foreign place. We all thought of these pictures as private, like our own English efforts , perhaps, and if they were ever noticed, incidentally contributing to a record of the past – dimensionally, even locationally, misleading, as most records are, but also vivid and disturbing.
The three visitors followed our lead (perhaps thinking that sitting round a shed was an eccentric English custom), and, prompted by our surroundings, we were able to speak haltingly in the two chosen languages. We started together with the already mentioned flowers – chamomile for Russia, and ox-eye daisy for the Cam. We could easily reach the place where the Cam flowed into the Ouse. And it was quite a short train journey from there to the English coast. None of us meant to compare England with Eurasia, but in such a context The Wash was a small and shallow inland sea. But the Russian river they spoke of, whose name we didn’t recognise and is now forgotten, connected them to a vague imagining of days of travel, a maze of inland rivers and global seas. Our small streams could be protected in position, and their certain names were shared. The small streams of Russia were an unpredictable abundance, annually lost and found. Russian politics were unknown, perhaps even to any Russians among us; its small streams could not be organised, and its great rivers moved in and out of Europe. Remembered sights and sounds of May, in England or in Russia, were what we thought of, and what we should. In Kalyna’s absence, none of us, that day, could think of Ukrainian sights and sounds, even though we were becalmed creatures of the lengthening war.
13. More about Anka
The deep blue of the railway seats in the evening train is projected on to scrubland, luminous beside the track at dusk. It shows as flowering mounds, say of heather, in the deeper cuttings, and as the train surfaces to a fading horizon it shows as formations of bluebells in a darkening wood. The small landscape is intricate with rows of lights and hillside roads. A meandering minor stream continuously spills itself and the gentle flood reaches through two small fields, and into the old canal beside new gardens. This way across northern England shows vanishing industry and new retreats.
When her grandmother crossed the Pennines of Anka’s childhood home, snow-masked hills closed in on the highest visible land, and the green valleys she visited narrowed to a tunnel entrance or to a vanishing point of dusk.
Sheep folds and stone walls divided the hill pasture. Shapes of perpetual fields were disguised by the drifted snow. Higher up, snow was lying according to some wild shape of the hills. The reaches of bare trees were gnarled and many-fingered, and the fingers were the length of arms, multi-sectioned, lowered by gravity as they grew, then thrust away from their settling form by storms of wind.
There were family visits through the scattering of settlements and the neighbourhoods of towns. Arrivals were like short-lived birdsong or a glimpse of low mist as it’s warmed away. Departures were in the dark with streetlights and the revving of the bus. The last one to board was her family man. He had shepherded them to and from the trip, watched them climb the stairs or move inside, and lolled on the platform for the take off.
Back on the train, dark windows faced a cloudless sky, and minute stars could be revealed to her dreaming as enormous suns or as the Galilean moons of Jupiter. A silent landscape moved away into the low hills as she sleeps in imagined arms.
Only Anka’s parents could have remembered her grandmother in this way, though the Pennine structures, the watercourses, and other resting places in various seasons were later well known to Anka, and certainly she had a continuing memory of her grandmother. But though this adult life of hers was known to have been in Lancashire, she was in fact born in Warsaw, and Anka’s extended family still lived in Wola, the suburb which now fills the famous section of the plains. Anka, who had visited Wola frequently as a child, now knew more about the plains of Warsaw. Her grandmother, though remembered, almost mythically, in Lancashire, was an inspiration to Anka as a muse to a greater Europe, and Anka absorbed her own history in this larger context.
This immediate family had first arrived in England during World War 2, and as the great event faded over time, the connection with Poland was changed and strengthened. Anna herself, though already happy with her Polish name, had now fully adopted the family name of Anka, and this was to announce, and to demonstrate, the importance of her Polish identity. Anka’s grandparents and her family visits to Warsaw had meant that ideas of a Polish homeland had always been important. Throughout her life, vague beginnings and ancient fears, imagined partitions and actual destructions formed a persistent though uncertain background to her family’s idea of Poland. The churches of her mother’s childhood, now demolished or boarded up near the river Croal, or now adopted by new migrants as the Irish diaspora dispersed, were once the main meeting places, recreated and established in the memory of Anka’s parents. Within their home there were images of fighter pilots, news of English Poles or of Polish English. There was also an admiring portrait of a celebrated Paderewski, whose image joined the recorded sound of the quavering voice if Tennyson as families together shared the fame of the past. Above all there would have been the sound of Polish conversation during intervals in the lengthening late Sunday mass; such masses, reorganised to suit long intervals for conversation, now contained new weekly social cannons at the heart of the service. And sometimes, when they finally left the service, the last gospel of this predictable liturgy would start a new story in the Pennine sunlight.
From such beginnings we will try to help Anka to reach a resurrected Poland, but in the meantime we can show to some extent where she began.
Anka’s father was English, and his first serious adult memory was a long astonished descent through gardens towards the river Thames. At first it seemed like an entry to a beautiful city in a story. In those days an original Paradise Square existed, and only its dilapidated basements and a wasteful use of space led to its destruction. Sad enough, of course. Across the road, Anka’s father saw the English poet who came to die; the etched lines on the old master’s face were clear to see above the opening gate. It seemed that a complex social impulse was shared with many cultures across the city of learning. Even from Russia there would be Gospodin X or Y; Isiah Berlin was thought to be somewhere in the city; and Dimitri Obelensky was definitely there to help the English-speaking scholars and students and to comfort a fellowship of exiles. Perhaps there were even descendants of Gosudar Moy Goldberg, or Rimsky Keyserlingk, if such addresses could ever find them: they would perhaps still be sharing the European cannons, and could even still be refreshed by a continual waking sleep. But when, after another short descent, the main river was eventually reached, uncrowded countryside movement of safe and fortunate people knitted together the places on the floodplain which railway engineers had long since mastered for the regular bursts of train. Each river and water course of the city defined a particular landscape, sometimes insisted on a floodplain or even on a permanent store of water. Anka’s father didn’t know how the rivers and the canal near the city had over time been organised and controlled, but whenever he came across one or other aspect of an original use or a present purpose, the waterways seemed to organise and set the city, as well as to protect its paths and fields. These memories of the Thames, the Cherwell, and other rivers towards the West were in unknown ways available to Anka and eventually used by her to create and absorb new images of Polish rivers, as well as in the process to fix and make more vivid the English places.
And then from there to London her own glimpses of the Thames seemed to memorise themselves in increasingly social, or even royal, ways. This also helped Anka, no doubt in mistaken ways, to provide a style and character for her newly recovered country.
When it came to particular times and places as she constructed a Poland she made many mistakes, no doubt many of them for ever uncorrected. She didn’t know the names of many European rivers: she could distribute the Rhine and the Danube more or less correctly; she could also remember fragments of the courses of French and Italian waterways, but as she tried to generate thoughts of her homeland streams she had to rely on pictures and music: she could see the historic trading Vistula in a Warsaw painting as a broad dowager repeating a gathering of wealth on its slow waters, or beside a dockland with cranes in a Gdansk photograph, though it was the Czech music for the Ultava which seemed to take her to a source. She was helped by music from an enormous central and eastern Europe, particularly German and Russian, but as she listened and imagined in her Cambridge home, the instrument may have been ambitiously tuned to master the Indian Ocean but in the end it was a European river it accomplished and the well tempered and complete imagined voice of its quiet flow. She hardly ever knew which river was in her mind, the names of hills where it began, even which sea would be its destination. There was a stream-shaped lake, a remnant, now still, and now dark, hidden under neglected trees. Its shallows could still renew the submerged moss but the deeper flowing had long ago moved on. And as she followed her purpose, family members within a living memory formed a benign chorus of hints and suggestions; they were her own chorus of history, always in peril, and under her protection. Her whole journey we can now see was from Poland and to Poland, but as she returned gradually to a resurrected country, particularly to a resurrected Warsaw, the contribution made by her own life, mainly spent in England, was decisive. The new homeland was created out of English spaces which were originally domestic. Rooms, stairwells and corridors were waiting to overflow into fields and rivers, forests and small woods, and then to be remembered and framed in fragments. Loved ones dominated a garden, even a roadside or a river bank – and over-large they even walked in the river shallows towards the shade of trees. And near the black water of this woodland stream, and for whatever reason, again unknown, she moved from room to room in a childhood home. Or she could see fields on either side as she reached a churchyard. At first there were many garden scenes, but quite soon the reality of the stone and the varying mystery of the shadows cast and of alternative lives began to make even Anka think of destruction and loss. Cities and small towns furnished an assembly of geometrical masses and saturated colours, cold or warm according to the time or season. They would sometimes easily fall into place for her, and she would enjoy allocating each Polish valley. But there was sometimes an anxious detail, which she found unnerving: she was once told that, as she travelled round from place to place in parts of Poland, she may have to sleep across the corridor from strangers, and that during the night she would be confined to her own side of the building. At such times even the glorious past became problematical: even the crowded royal plains of Wola could seem a confined assembly, a colourful social excess, confined, it seemed to Anka, for some eventual destruction.
After Anka’s move to Cambridge something as seemingly trivial as the nearness to Stansted airport was important because it had a bearing on her frequent flights to the major Polish cities. And it could have been a longing for some idea of Poland which changed Cambridge for her into a place of discovery and hope. This happened especially to the south. Even if there were only one double tower in that area, it was seen so often from so many different angles, on so many levels, and from such Iceni distances of remote and blurred recognitions of pylons and churches, even of a distant cathedral, that the sky seemed full of towers or at least full of Gogs or of Magogs projecting from the reaching eminences which were everywhere above her. Trying to settle her thoughts towards a more recent past, there would always have been happy farms and orchards retreating to the villages or even to the fens, but sooner or later, she thought, there would be the hills and something more. Beyond the city, especially to the north, there were the visiting or the settling migrations from eastern Europe. They were, for Anka, a slowly forming and complex surrounding human gathering, certainly not a society, and more or less hidden away. The sense of fellowship intensified for Anka, and became more personal, after the start of the Ukraine war. She would try to get employment for exiled women, and visit them at work. The friendships she began to make, engaged as she was with her Polish enterprise, promised to become permanent. Ukrainians sheltering from the war, some officially permitted, some not, were scattered in the shops and businesses of the area. Anka herself had often visited the ones she knew and joined in slow conversations (though mainly listening) about their embattled and newly partitioned country. The non-fighters, usually women, were as active as they could be – dedicated to liberation; Polish friends, still working on their own past, began to lead the way; foremen, however recruited, spoke Russian on the fens. Sometimes, it seemed to Anka, it was like rushing past barriers of time.
The Polish pictures we had seen in her allotment shed had been there for years, certainly throughout the nearby major housing and hospital development, when the Empty Common allotment area had diminished, and every component of its traditional landscape had shrunk to a minimum viable area: each robin a noisier example of assertion – each legend of kingfisher now changing to myth. Whenever she visited Wola for a longer stay in Poland she was uncertain how much of her plot would remain when she came back to Cambridge. She knew the plot was safe – that it would endure in some way or other, but when she returned the rented garden seemed somehow controlled, like an example of an allotment, and she was engaged in gardening as a conscious ritual. Early mornings still seemed crammed with birdsong, though it quickly died away. The birds were managing well with fewer trees, though she thought , or she hoped, that they would migrate in time to the secluded parkland of the new estates.
Within the city sometimes churches used unexpected shapes or rose on a hill to demonstrate a competing grandeur, but usually in the centre the churches, though frequent, and ancient, were as expected. On her many visits to Poland, as the traffic built up towards Cambridge railway station, it slowed and frequently stopped beside a huge Gothic church. Anka thought of it, perhaps mistakenly, as an enormous recreated form of Normandy or of Picardy. She would soon be flying over Anglian fields and then in some way over British water, but she didn’t know the flight path from the French coast to the Polish cities. Perhaps she should. But, some travelling anxiety, and perhaps a dark aspect of her Warsaw frame of mind made her think, as the traffic stalled outside the Cambridge church, of huge ruins open to fields and skies. Even though she knew that the church building was not an actual memorial of our great 20th century destructions, the monument beside the Catholic traffic lights, with its accumulating traces of so many funeral celebrations, seemed to provide a subdued version of the catastrophes. For Anka, date order itself seemed threatened by this brush with time,
She remembered various branches of her family near to Cambridge, particularly farmers near to Bishop Stortford, and less prosperous relatives north of Cambridge, still involved with food production but only just, with daily and distant glimpses of the beautiful land, their times of life more connected to factory jobs than to farming itself. The Hertfordshire farming relatives stayed roughly in the same place over the years, and she had visited them occasionally and walked in the elevated fields. There were vague ideas of an England surrounding Cambridge, often revived by a placename on a 1950’s road sign or by the sound of a slow train. On her London trips from Cambridge the Hertfordshire fields especially seemed to resolve themselves into a gathering of lost locations as she remembered her family visits, and how she would walk in the enlarging fields of a changing England. Whenever she passed through the dark station of Bishop Stortford on her way home – now skirting the farmland – or thought she was – and now half asleep in the weekend crowds – she thought the London train was travelling beside this higher land. As she woke she had a vague memory – or an anxious thought – of parts of her family settled, even stranded, in the surrounding countryside – especially now, to the north of Cambridge, where the beautiful farmland served factories for food production, and on Sundays kind but burly curates were needed to supervise orthodox families in the broad aisles.
As Cambridge grew and changed the new inhabitants were welcomed by their predecessors. Those who remembered were still aware of nesting larks and saw herons in artificial pools, even though the by-way origins of gated long roads they moved along could no longer be clearly seen; and while the past shape of the way, and the sight of remaining fields were present reminders, it didn’t even seem necessary to remark or record the destruction of some final rotting gate. It was only later, when it was over, and the idea of change itself had been forgotten, that records were kept and local history leaflets provided interesting walks near the newly built estates. But it was a complex time, and the source of information for new inhabitants, as they began their own new lives, was such a bewildering variety of websites that they stayed for years in a haphazard phase of learning, and it was only their own memory of pastoral surroundings, and of seasonal variation which eventually simplified and dominated their lives. Perhaps all of them thought of themselves as singled out – as destined in some way. Certainly Anka did. And it was the Ukraine war, long foreshadowed if not foreseen, which intensified her own commitment to a wider Europe; Anka’s friendship with Kalyna was so very close because of this, and Anka’s own commitment to Poland increased Kalyna’s loyal resolve during the current war.
There could be much more detail of Anka’s Poland and its new existence, but the Italian paintings whose art assisted the repair of Warsaw after World War 2 could perhaps help to explain what happened to Anka, and the collections of Bernardo Bellotto, called de Canaletto, brought the city and plains into her mind. Before this war, it had been impossible for her to think it normal for landscape painters to be ever needed to help with a post war construction – to provide the traditional images which were otherwise uncertainly available, but the well-known Romance theme of Venetian history chimed with her current preoccupations – the refuge sought – the long halting and uncertain recovery in the lagoon – the confident, though always provisional, return to the mainland. Historians also helped her, including British scholars, helped by expatriate Poles, to explain how Poland would, or could, belong to a modern Europe.
On her visits to Poland, usually Warsaw or Cracow, Anka was conscious of building a record of her newly adopted country. She didn’t know whether she would be a learned Pole, or an ordinary Pole – she hoped to be an English Pole, if there could be such a thing. Images would be gathered, particularly from rebuilt parts of cities. Quite often in Warsaw, she would be provided with descriptions of sites and a general account of their history, and she began to imagine an earlier Warsaw, especially beside the river Vistula. But the more she learned, the more she included the phases of ruin. She began to recognise places of destruction, to calculate, and to feel its varying degrees. Perhaps she should have linked these sites more closely to the academic history, the standard works, but the images were stored in a much more complex personal and innocent way, which was the structure of her own life and family: all the gardens she began to know were brightly coloured and allocated to a belonging – the overwhelming cities were complicated and shared. In Warsaw she began to recognise when a ruin had been restored, and how the restoration had been done – which painting or photograph had been used – what the view was from a ruined building. Gradually, her mind adjusted to the work, and there were many views seemingly remembered from within imagined spaces. So much destruction, even obliteration, had taken place. The oblique artistic records, all forms but particularly painting and music had helped so many to resurrect the damaged past. As a student of painting, Anka thought of herself as part of a Polish community; there was a tradition of painting which provided a supervised and shared memory of the past, and the white garment on her allotment portrait of the faceless woman was an alb of beauty. She was no expert musician but Polish music was clearly specific and important, and melodies seemed to move for her across an imagined Polish landscape. Her new country became a self-renewing lagoon of sights and sounds, and gradually formed a larger space where her mind could move, and where the place of safety ended and new life began. All the time, as this work continued, Cambridge, her other, safer home, was filling itself with new people and with new buildings, avoiding or at least disguising all material destruction: things were compressed – spaces were shared – nothing was obviously lost.
On her visits to Poland, Anka soon realised that there were many different kinds of Polish people in Poland, and that her new country could easily manage without her. The Warsaw suburb where she stayed had a modern careless assurance in its streets and buildings which showed no interest in acting as a framework for her thoughts. She vividly remembered pictures of the Wola elections of the distant past, the national assembly point. There was a wooden building in the foreground which had always seemed to her like some sort of senate house; and the beginnings of such a spacious forum, extensive and colourful on the high land round Warsaw, was a celebration of where rulers made their peace with the fortunate crowds. The background landscape could still be seen, and Anka had several times visited the surrounding plains. As she left the city, substantial things, particularly the leaves of nearby trees, showed light in a variety of colour. The long low hills still seemed eventful to her, submerging slowly beneath her feet in gusts of wind. She now looked back on the level expanse of the original scene, but the palace which had acted as a foreground to the extending plain was now absorbed, and partly hiddden, in the buildings of the modern city. The famous princess will have lost her hillock in some story (though not in this, because Anka was almost sure that she recognised a palace quite near her relatives’ home). The site was certainly no longer wild. Part of a large public garden, the adorned hill was even more beautiful to see beside a lake. The shape of swans was impossible to hide, and the white shone through foliage as it crowded towards the city streets which Anka often used. And at home in Wola, away from the wind and light above the soft turf, and away from the suburban park round the ancient house, there were no pastoral remnants of the monarch’s election. There was now a varied society of families in the park, and only folk stories of the princess in her pastel garments.
14. At Home (concluded)
The village house we eventually used for our music practice was first glimpsed on zoom during a Russian lesson. Our teacher, the husband of a friend, was a student of Russian music, especially opera. After the pandemic, there were many visits to this house of music. As we walked past the keyboard into other, more public rooms, different paper scores were opened for practise, and the shoulders of the keyboard carried a variety of bound scores. There was church music, shared with Anglicans, usually in Peterborough cathedral, but also occasionally in Canterbury. There was also the general music collection of this partly Russian family, sometimes religious, usually not. We gradually found out the names of particular scores. Presumably, the ones we learned to recognise were being studied more often. Four, in particular, were often prominent – three newish-looking ones, and one which was old and faded. Eugene Onegin was there, along with varied assortments of leaflet scores of Tchaikovsky. There was a score of Sadko, by Rimsky Korsakov, together with a Gergiev CD. There was also Khovanshchina by Mussorgsky; several times we heard a baritone voice sing, or rather murmur, its opening music, introducing Moscow and its river; it wasn’t a barcarolle rhythm, but it was repetitive and obsessively lyrical. It was only when we reached his class on Mussorgsky that we began to understand how the teeming light of the Moscow River was connected in the composer’s mind to the terrors of the past. And the past could still not be clearly set apart from the present. The colours of some recent score bindings were strong and clear. The much older score of Rachmaninov’s songs must have been published when the composer was alive, and, while not fragile, was handled with some reverence. It was clearly a family heirloom which had been passed down as a Slav inheritance; its colour had faded at various speeds depending on the composition of the binding; the ink was now drifting from gold to brown, and between the two defining colours we could see into a continuing fading.
At some stage, during the opera class which some of us had attended, the scholar, though born in Leeds, presented himself as an honorary exile from Russia; it was probably during his class on Rimsky Korsakov. For all this composer’s sea-going delight in the sounds of the earth, and his regular transpositions and enhancements of an eventually imagined sound into orchestral music, Rimsky Korsakov worked in the service of Russia. Certainly, he provided this Leeds scholar with a framework for his opera classes, not only for the classes devoted to the folk music background and the oriental assertions, but also for the even wider European context. And it was in the opera classes (usually at the end, before we left) that he first began to speak of Rachmaninov, his fame after 1917, and the relevance of the composer to the Russian diaspora to which the scholar’s past family belonged . He used Rachmaninov’s music as an example when he was giving an explanation of the ways in which Russian music could sound Russian, though he couldn’t explain why Rachmaninov’s own church music sounded like an actual remembered service. And why – we wondered, though didn’t ask – especially during a complicated key change, does melody seem to fit with memory, rather than with a developing thought?
In successive generations of the scholar’s family’s absence from Russia their many shared memories of the homeland were sustained by various mementos. Lubok prints were distinctive and unfamiliar, in the sense that there were no returning rooks, no dreaming farm boy, no heroic women adjusting the kokoshki headdress to be a modern pose of beauty and assurance. Instead, framed black and white photographs were untidy with true history – there were scenes of actual places, of somewhat long ago, almost within living memory. There was an old park, more spacious and neglected than anything in the current English village where they lived. The muddy remnants of a pond blocked the way into a cornfield. Invading trees, except for the deliberately spaced oaks, had long ago outgrown their site. The more we saw this former parkland scene, as we studied together, we learned to remember the oaks themselves, and the encroaching wasteland was ignored.
The opera classes gradually gave way to discussions about Rachmaninov, and about how his music was, for exiles, a reminder of Russia. Their memories of Russia were evoked and worked upon by fragments of melody. The music was played from a score. It was recorded. Traces of it were often inserted into other musical offerings. The memories of Russia which provided a “programme” which “explained” the music would be found by each listener in their own way, and there would be a specific “story” for every exile. They would think of the past more generally as a work of time in the sound of Rachmaninov. There would be a fragmentary social past conveyed in the complete and simple folk tunes, coherent and respectful, seeming in many ways like a faithful rendering rather than a new creation. There would also be the lyrical account of the golden age music (mainly Tchaikovsky?), but where the dances were unperformed or incomplete, and where the marches could only sound back in time. Does it make sense to say that Rachmaninov created in a remembering way? There were silences remaining between fragments. There were silences edited out to combine fragments, and any surviving rest could then readily evoke memories in the mind of the recent exile in Rachmaninov’s audience. Sometimes there was a slow eloquence or a burst of prodigious speed, but when we returned to the considered music no reference was then made to the lost sound. There could also be an unusual prolongation of melody, whether in a breathless singing or in swift and intricate playing. More striking was when a chanting eloquence persisted, in the sensual guise of homesickness and loss. Settled lives were disrupted, and exiles waited throughout Europe, remembering Russia. And Rachmaninov gradually became an Orpheus figure to the immense absent Russia. Perhaps Russia’s Greek inheritance was made acute in exile; the specific society of Russia would fade with great distance and because of Western distractions. The exiles could reach for an oral tradition, more intense memories, and a more significant history. No actual Orphic hymns could ever be found, of course, not even in the underworld of memory. But for many Russian exiles, attending to the music, there were echoes of all aspects of Orpheus’s long career. There were exiles who were happy with a conventional nostalgia, which was easily shared, and the sounds of the well-played folk tunes, exotically fashionable to a Western audience, enhanced in the concert hall, and sometimes recorded, were a proud reminder and a delight. Also a source of pride and peace, and also easily shared, but more consummate, were the sounds of church services. The traditional liturgy of Rachmaninov’s orthodox church music with its chants and remote mysteries, no doubt for some forged symbolic routes to remembered prayer. The exile’s life could in this way be dedicated perhaps to a permanent Russian context where the mysterious mutability would be paused, not just in a prolonged melody but in co-existing keys.
Some exiles focused on the great change in their own lives, and Russia was fixed in the past. Others saw a Russia which could be restored as it had been for their eventual return. Rachmaninov focused on no particular aspect of Orpheus’s fate – no particular personal tragedy – no fateful journey – no repeated loss. It was rather the composer’s singing charms – enchantment, even incantation. Loss was forgotten. Memories of childhood were owned again securely. Then Russia itself, in whatever guise, could again be imagined and described.
In fact, the class we attended sometimes seemed like a first draft of some projected essay, a personal footnote to the crisis, or to the sequence of crises, in his past extended family which had begun so long ago in 1917. Perhaps it was to be illustrated, because various photographs displayed in the house had been taken on a visit to Ivanovka, the Rachmaninov’s former estate. We knew too little to ask questions , but we gradually learned something of the great range in the composer’s work, though the few remarks which now follow may misrepresent the scholar’s thoughts. And of course, all our experiences of the music, whether it was heard in recordings, or actually played, is remembered in very different ways.
At first, we were told, there were lyrical songs and piano pieces associated with his childhood estate near Novgorod. There were vivid descriptions of the flat river and lake country of the Russian north, with its dark winter nights and its white nights of summer. The Volkhov river and Lake Ilmen, despite being actual names of actual places, invoked an even wider fiction. And the triggering of a range of romance fragments, often associated with a poem which became the lyric of a song, and reinforced by a range of individual memories, settled over time to a programmed dream. It was almost as if the swaying accompaniments were chosen for the composer – wind in a stormy sky or wind smothered in the forest – great clouds seeming to sink in the lake at twilight – a nearby moon, hidden but still spilling light. As the child of gambling and artistic stock, Rachmaninov was said to enjoy a blameless, even an innocent privilege – though how could this remain so? The revolution would come. He left Russia. And his composing life was almost ended.
Once the composer was himself in exile, his music reminded other exiles of their life in Russia – the absence of a cloister was easily borne, but not the soft depth of moss where the stone sank. A Russian autumn arrested before its ending would always keep its imperial colour.
Exiles in other countries built new worlds on a Russian foundation. Folk songs, leaving aside the sophisticated skills on display, usually in recordings, was like a true copy of typical scenes. There was a surrounding permanence of particular churches and cloisters ; there were notable country scenes and sights of water. But the main effect was of a confidently shared emotion, and a precise focus on a sight or sound. No-one in particular would move beside the slow stream. Sounds of a settling flock could be heard by all. The crowded wings of daisies rested in fragments of white silk, as if space itself was everywhere in flower. And surrounding each precise colour, or shape of life, would be the expected form of bank or field or hill, and the vast Russian version of this silent architecture of landscape would conceal the place sought, the place almost remembered. White moonlit waves would sink again through heavy silver into darkness. Sometimes, a village roadway lengthened at evening. As each year’s thaw proceeded, the nearby river overflowed into several watercourses, and as they neared the village, one of them moved out of sight among the trees; it could be that this stream at twilight was unable to carry much light as it moved into the shared wood. Another stream had already slowed and sunk to a sandy marsh, serving an ornate though brittle glade of bullrushes and lurid nocturnal flowers. The main river was now at some distance from this exotic sanctum, and flowed generously throughout the year, providing power for the mill’s great wheel of painted elm. Sometimes, within the exiles’ confusing memory, village buildings were decorated with a traditional gothic design or shaped as if hewn from blocks of remembered lives, with earth floor or with board floors and an echoing sound. At night, words would have been overheard outside the izba; the opening gate made the usual sound and left fresh patterns in the snow. A folk artistry had relied on its own skills, but had an occasional official celebration. The past struggled on. The carving and etching wore shallow or even smooth. The first settling of swan-like snowfall was a vanishing into the escaping bird. Later, there was a wreck of varied colours. In colder darkness the fixing ice was a control, though daytime layers of soft snow masked each changing. They learned to know time in this way, as darknesses submerged in gathering fixities of white. The sheltering forest route eventually began with comforting shadows. White stones beside the water were manna in twilight. The river moved out of sight through clustering pillars and darkening aisles. Aspens comforted them, making the most of remaining light. Wind rocked the firs, but fragments of light could hardly reach bright russulas on the ground.
Some music only moved towards an underworld, but melody kept the exiles safe as they visited the past – loved places fallen out of reach, then fallen out of sight. At dawn they would see the combing traces of a bear in the long grass, but now a rustling weaves darkness round their sleep.
The precision of poetry could inspire the music. Then new life was built out of memory. In Rachmaninov‘s song of the death of the linnet an exile would hear the bird’s individual song within the flowing context of the general music, but also could imagine, or even remember, other Russian scenes, the changing colours of the bird, the transient blush on dull original colours, and the host of silhouettes rising and falling. For the exile in England, the song of 1902 would always import a Russian garden. As time in exile passed other linnets from English gardens could also be found in the music. But it was the large flocks of unknown birds, stranded in English high land or in winter fields, which eventually entered the music , surrounding the small bird of artifice, caged in memory. Flocks settled briefly in a loud wind: then the flight of silhouettes began again. The music could begin to make nature live, but while memory could forge for natural history its allocated colours, the precise hues were lost. Memory resumed a harvest of sorrow. The song in the original garden or orchard was repeated in an overgrown waste, and time was in the organisation of music and out of reach.
Also seemingly passed down, but in a more absolute way, was the church music. But it didn’t serve a natural setting. It was abstract in an original way, with a variety of formal structures, though it seemed to carry and to fix echoes of past services and remembered emotion. Perhaps we should have asked for help when the scholar explained the different chants. Mutability was mentioned, yes, but we didn’t ask whether he meant any overt reference to time or change. We found ourselves, not for the first time in his classes, stranded between a concept and an emotion. We never understood how the sustained voices could make church music sound like a homecoming, though it was evident that this homecoming was not now within living memory. At times, it seemed a fresh and perpetual epic . There were mountains and flowing waters, but it was mostly an abstract prayer.
We gradually lost our way in our study of Rachmaninov’s music. Perhaps the music could no longer be heard in this way. The incantation was weakening as a form of record, or was now shrinking to a record of the composer’s own history. Perhaps there was a general history we could vaguely know, but the music itself could no longer express it. Change had taken place and time was now fixed. Anyway, our meetings gradually came to an end. All our various groups separated into their private lives. We had shared simple things, traditional connections to passing time: the learning of Russian, the Slav relationships – including some unspoken tensions, and thoughts of the Ukraine war.
The city had helped us. Some of us even tried to think of Cambridge in the context of its own past conflicts. Cambridge’s “wars”, even the larger wars, were now forgotten, though local historians continued to point out their traces. Older people surely had present memories, but were now using the sight of new buildings in the happy city to finally “move on” from their own World War. As for more ancient battles, we had some vague idea of the importance of the route to York and the military use of Castle mound, but the slighted fortifications were now known to us as providing a view of the colleges and their peaceable use of stone. Similarly vague was our idea of what constituted a just modern access for our own compatriots to the halls of learning, though there was no great anxiety about this at the moment. But there was anxiety, and we were slowly deciding, more or less together, how to help selected victims of foreign wars. We thought the college roofs and the Castle Mound presented an extensive built vision of a historic peace. For some of us it presented itself as an aesthetic choice of value gradually arrived at, continuously corrected. The allotment conifer, we all perhaps agreed, had been left to mature alone in a strategic space, allocated in ceremony because of the many scrappy uses of similar trees, and the careless and even desperate pruning in small gardens. Abandoned nests, whether re-used or not, altered the way the hedgerows seemed to branch. Imposing farm machinery was no longer at ease on its own byway, but still dominated the city road as it swung round after the harvesting, and the now golden field it left behind still hugged the small shapes beside the river, and coated the not quite eternal hills. There are also secluded territories and quiet spaces in the city – secret wards within the public corridors and avenues of the hospital, sombre and spacious churches, recovering burial grounds. The young heroic soldier on his plinth is now further from the railway station – nearer to the changing gardens. There are troubled parts of the fens. Even the allotment land we had shared, the generous clearing by the stream, has had other uses, and still overlooks some cold war windowless building. We would sometimes close our eyes to the museum moon. It had been an uncertain installation of beauty. It was now more of a symbolical window on a history show.