The Commissariat of Enlightenment (3 page)

THE
elderly writer who lay wheezing in the home of the stationmaster had challenged the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church and, beyond it, the power of the Tsar, whose primacy was derived from the Church. The Count was a dangerous man, even though much at odds with the socialist revolutionary movement that had set Russia on fire five years earlier. He had declared that all religious and governmental institutions claiming divine sanction were bogus. He refuted the doctrines of the Trinity, the Ascension, and the miracles attributed to the saints, as well as the prescribed forms of worship, the hierarchy of priests, and the sacredness of churches. The only religion a man needed, he said, was contained within the Sermon on the Mount. Love thy neighbor. Sin no more. Living as Christ commanded, the Count had attempted to renounce society, wealth, fame, and lust—and had failed in each instance.

The Count was a man beset by enormous, alpine contradictions. A landed aristocrat, with thousands of peasants working on his estates, he believed it was wrong to live off another’s man labor. He wore peasant blouses and very bad self-made shoes, while
the rest of his family went about in European dress. His austere vegetarian meals were served by white-gloved butlers. Although disdaining contemporary civilization, he was fascinated by phonographs and bicycles and built a tennis court at Yasnaya Polyana, whose grounds had been landscaped in the English style.

He had called for sexual abstinence, even within marriage, but he was famous for fathering children. In addition to the thirteen borne by his wife, he had bequeathed a large but unknown number to the peasant girls on his estate—having taken many of the girls on impulse, falling upon them in the kitchen, the dairy, and the barn, and afterward lamenting the impulse in his notebooks, which he then made available to his readily shocked wife. The conflict between his reason and his appetites had already bloomed into a legend that would cling to his figure, embarrassing his family as well as his followers.

The followers themselves were a contradiction. An opponent of religion, the Count wished to disassociate himself from any organized movement based on his teachings. Yet he continued to teach and his tracts and letters welcomed new followers and inevitably brought many of them as pilgrims to Yasnaya Polyana and now to Astapovo. One of these disciples, Vladimir Chertkov, had established himself as the supreme guardian of the Count’s work and thought, even as the writer declared that he needed none. Over the years Chertkov had become the individual to whom the Count was most passionately devoted. The Count had now summoned him to his deathbed.

Gribshin was led to the back of the post-house, to a room with a washstand and a chair. The old woman demanded another ruble for the linen and ten kopecks for a candle. Gribshin fell asleep
right away, not removing anything but his boots. His sleep was as deep and as dreamless as a well and lasted about fifteen minutes. Then he awoke with a start, abruptly aware of everything in the room: its swirling myriad of odors, some morbidly sour and others suspiciously sweet, the creaking noises, the dampness, the men who had been there before him on the gray, stained linen, the desperate run of shadows across the walls and furnishings.

Why had he fled Astapovo? He was revolted to think that he had been intimidated somehow—but it had not been intimidation by those two Grub Street fools. Rather, rather…He considered this, lying on his back in this unobligingly unspringed bed, looking up at a ceiling whose fly-spatterings were visible even in the murk. Rather, it had been a seizure of unreason, like the odd sensation that had visited him on the train from Tula, and a sense of being loosed from the present moment. The walls of the circus tent billowed, as if the structure was inflated. Manhandled by the professor, the head of the dead rat turned and its eyes appraised him. The bare skin of the woman in the darkened press coach was smooth and firm. The present moment did not exist: it was an illusion poised between the tangible realities of past and future.

He’d have to return to Astapovo early, for the morning medical briefing. As he anticipated the day ahead, he absorbed the details of the shadowy objects in the room: the skewed washstand, the door frame, the windowsill. A crude icon had been placed on its traditional triangular shelf in the corner. By some trick of the moonlight, a cold lunar beam sluiced between the slats covering the window and fell upon the painting, which was about the size of an ordinary book. There was, of course, no evidence of an ordinary book on the premises. The icon showed the Mother of God and the Child in an embrace so familiar that Gribshin could receive the entire image in a brief glimpse. Yet it held his gaze for
several minutes. By the ephemeral chance that had placed it in the glare, the lacquered wood shone bright, especially the golden halo around the heads of Mary and Jesus. The gold seemed incandescent, through the obvious intention of the anonymous artist.

He was already familiar with this effect: many of the rooms he had known in his brief life had been so illuminated. His father, a lecturer in philology and an itinerant reformer, had once led him through innumerable icon-graced parlors, peasant hovels, chapels, churches, and monasteries. Early in spring every year, Anton Gribshin journeyed south and east, mainly through the provinces of Tula and Ryazan, to localities with incipient or burgeoning village schools. Books and other teaching materials purchased by philanthropic subscription were conveyed in the philologist’s swift, springy tarantass. His young son had often accompanied him, having been removed from his progressive Moscow gymnasium so that he could be introduced to the country’s primitive social conditions.

The boy Kolya had been disappointed those years in which he had not been allowed to travel with his father, either for reasons of school obligation or finance or mystery vouchsafed only the adults. At home his father was often irritated and withdrawn, diminished by his small household. The boy was aware of the numerous debts and the killing economies. But his father’s demeanor was transformed on the road, almost as soon as they entered the silvery woods at the edge of the city. Anton would warm to his son, allowing himself to ruminate about his life’s turning points (his father’s bankruptcy, a recommendation passed to a rector), his wife’s chronic illness (something feminine, dating from Kolya’s birth), and his single journey abroad (to Berlin). He
would congratulate Kolya on the good fortune that would carry him to manhood in the twentieth century. This, he believed, would be the century in which the race overcame the baser instincts inherited from its animal ancestors. “Nothing will be impossible for science. Think how the telephone or the cinema or the motorcar would have startled a man one hundred years ago; how can we predict the developments of the coming century? We’ll conquer disease and famine and human evil…the world will be turned upside down, I may yet live to see it…The men of science will be the high priests of a new religion. Science will have its own ceremonies and holy relics and holidays in honor of Louis Pasteur and Thomas Edison…”

Anton had once been in correspondence with the late Nikolai Fedorov, a Moscow philosopher who believed that in the future it would be possible, by some yet-undiscovered purely scientific operation, to resurrect all the men who had ever lived—and that the future of civilization depended on this resurrection. Every problem facing mankind derived from the centrality of death. Immortality was the “Common Task” of mankind, the only legitimate purpose of social revolution. “Can you imagine? Forget kings and tsars,” his father said. “In the future every man will be his own king, and not only of his own personal, petty domain, but of all nature…Of death itself…”

At this time of year the landscape was usually still sheathed in ice and the drivers would rush to cover the hard winter roads before they became wet vernal ones. The geese were flying north. Bundled in blankets, Kolya was comforted by the millennial optimism that went unvoiced at home. As for his father’s concrete predictions, Kolya already knew they were nonsense.

The village teachers would await their day of arrival as if for a deliverance greater than a few school supplies. The children would
be washed and the school buildings put in as much repair as possible, given the rural peasants’ poverty. They were mostly single rooms originally built for agricultural purposes. Their stoves smoked and wind shrieked through the cracks in their walls. State-mandated lessons consisted of writing, reading, the rudiments of grammar, the four rules of arithmetic, and Bible history—anything further was discounted by parents wary that their sons and daughters would be ruined for work, or in some other ways corrupted.

With the young schoolmasters Anton was encouraging and enthusiastic. They labored under difficult conditions, their annual salaries less than 200 rubles. Anton brought them books, globes, protractors and compasses, abaci, and, most urgently, writing paper.

The schoolmistresses found him courtly, even gallant; he was refreshingly respectful. The women were typically young and unmarried, making them the villages’ obvious targets of debauchment or the innuendo of debauchment. Even the most lightly educated were desperate for refined conversation and they welcomed Anton and Kolya into their one-room apartments attached to the schools. Tea and meat pastries were served. What were the season’s books and new plays? What was in the papers? Have you been to Europe? And then—and this question would be posed variously, but always with a sigh and an ambiguity as vast as two continents—was there any hope?

As much as Kolya loved touring the countryside with his father, he never believed that their charitable work did tangible good, not for Anton, nor for the teachers, nor least of all for the students, who were almost each and every one a lout or, among the few girls, a slattern. Some were older than he was and could barely read, and once they were able to read they would not be
likely to profit from it, not in these, the Tsar’s unlettered realms. Kolya was repelled by their rough clothes and bad manners, and even by the ruddiness of their complexions. They rocked their benches and shot each other insolent signs while Anton spoke to their classes. The students scorned his father for taking an interest in their education and the vividness and force of their contempt obliged Kolya to share it. The lessons were irrelevant. You couldn’t teach these people to read and expect to “elevate” them; you had to make
new
people, a far more complicated task.

Each school was superintended by the local priest and Anton showed him no less deference than he had demonstrated to the schoolmistress. No matter how refractory the priest had been in the past year in regards to allowing the teaching of geography and science, the reformer always brought a gift to the church, perhaps some honey, cheese, or clothing material. He also made admiring noises around the screen of icons at the head of the chapel—the iconostasis—and other artifacts and inquired about the church’s history. He shook his head as the priest recalled the minor miracles of coincidence connected to this or that icon: an illness cured, a crop yield surpassing all expectations. Sometimes he would be shown the sealed crypt of a local saint, whose body, according to folk tradition, did not decay within it.

“Amazing,” said Anton. “Praise God.”

While his father and the holy man conversed in whispers, Kolya inspected the church, absorbing its commonalities with the other religious institutions on their itinerary. He liked these courtesy calls. He was drawn to the icons, quickly learning to distinguish their differences in artistic style, which usually depended on age and provenance, and the range of variations within their treatment of a restricted number of subjects: Mother and Child, Jesus on the Cross, John the Baptist, the local saint, each figure painstakingly
arranged on the icon screen to suggest his relations with the others and his relative nearness to God. A story was suggested. The pictures provided relief from the often unvaried landscape and—Kolya would not have understood or accepted this then—the dogma of the written word that propelled his father across it.

Father and son traveled together throughout Kolya’s gymnasium years and in one of those last springs before graduation they arrived in a village in the Tambov region, a school that had been added to the itinerary the year before, when he had been left home. Bokino was a particularly backward place, untouched by human initiative. For example, Anton observed, its residents could not take the trouble to dig a community well, content to draw their water from a muddy pond somewhere in the woods. Their roofs buckling, the huts staggered along the unpaved road as if unable to keep up. Only the church stood in good repair and shut out the rain, with rusting brown brickwork at its base. In the ratty, abandoned barn in which lessons were conducted, the students gaped at the citified strangers. After the class, Anton and Kolya went to the schoolmistress’s kitchen, where she served them tea with local herbs that were reputed to cure all ailments.

Masha was somewhat older than the other schoolmistresses, late in her twenties, a small girl with bee-stung lips and bright brown eyes; the right lid drooped, though. She used the formal “you” with both visitors. She had come from a family no less semiprominent than their own, but marred by scandal several years before. Speaking delicately, Anton had told Kolya that the young man involved had been a worker from Moscow’s Presnya district, some kind of baker’s assistant, of all things. Her family, who had entertained hopes of an improving match or at least a fashionable one, had disowned the girl and the consequent infant
had been taken away. Kolya stared now, regarding the ruination vividly implied by her florid cheeks and the abrupt rise of her breasts as she sipped up the steam off the hot tea. They talked about the cinema, which she had never seen. And it seemed to him that her wretchedness, impoverishment, and loneliness were integral to her femaleness, her sex. She caught his stare.

After taking their leave—the girl’s hands were warm and lovely, and Kolya believed there was a certain insistence in their grip—the two visitors stopped at the church, where they were received by a young priest also eager to hear the news from Moscow. Anton asked Kolya to wait in the chapel while he joined the priest for a walk around the grounds. Still thinking about the girl, Kolya barely heard the instructions, but he eventually recognized his father’s absence.