Perched on the second floor of a nondescript apartment just a stone’s throw away from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I retreated ever further from the outside world and deeper into my Doukhobor scholarship. In the space of a few months, idle curiosity had clearly given way to something more scary that involved the analysis of hospital registers, census results, and burial records from cemeteries no longer on any map. Cobbling together my sixty-page time line of Doukhobor history was a fun time-waster, but all the nights curled up with tomes such as
Russia’s
Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917
left me longing for more of a human connection with my chosen subject of study. So one day, I wrote to the Doukhobor Discovery Center in Castlegar, British Columbia, and ordered a double album of Doukhobor music on vinyl,
Write it unto thine heart, Herald it with thine lips.
At the same time, I also discovered an extensive library of Doukhobor recordings online, and suddenly I was off, like a delirious child caught in a rainstorm, stomping through the puddles of the Doukhobor song archive. Hits like “We Shall Use Shovels to Work the Land Instead of Taking Up Arms” and “It Was in the Caucasus Mountains That a Great Event Took Place” quickly became the new soundtrack to my morning routine.
I have to say there was a great relief in this. A dozen important music websites were out there, pulsating softly on the internet, promising to give me all the new news and teach me how I might love all the music other people loved. But secretly, they only made me anxious. It was as though a thousand tiny voices were screaming at once: Loud guitars are good! But only if you play them through a bass amp! Never mind, keyboards are good! Or glockenspiels? Have you considered exchanging your drummer for an MC-505? Have you considered dressing exclusively in gold lamé tracksuits? It was exhausting. I felt better here, among this group of matronly women striding across a muddy field on the cover of
Write it unto thine heart, Herald it with thine lips.
Each was dressed in the traditional Doukhobor costume of Georgia and each was carrying a cheap plastic bag—I could even make out the clear outline of a pie tin in one of them. When I looked into their eyes, people who had never heard of a Roland 505 Groovebox looked back at me.
Without quite noticing it, I began to absorb the lilting melodies of the Doukhobors’ mournful music, to unconsciously slip
into Doukhobor song myself. Like one day during a companionable stroll with Josh down Clinton Street in Brooklyn, when I began softly keening:
“Volya dukhobortsev, vooolya deeeeket leeeeeyt.”
“What is
that
?” asked Josh, a distinct note of alarm sounding in his voice.
“What? Oh
that
! That’s the Doukhobor ‘Hymn of Hardship.’ Quite an earworm, isn’t it?” And I started up again.
“Volya dukhobortsev, vooolya deeeeket leeeeeyt.”
“Well, sing the whole song then,” Josh said. “You can’t just go on repeating the same line.”
This was quite a sensible request, but I’d had a hard time making out all the words in the Doukhobor dialect and managed to learn only the beginning of the chorus. So instead I launched into an English number that the Kootenay Doukhobor Youth Choir had presented to the United Nations in 1988.
“Tooooooooooil and peeeeeeeeacefoool liiiiiiiiiiife,” I hollered.
“Oh my God, what is
that
!!!” Josh stopped and stared at me. A woman walking her dog in front of us had turned to look around. Even the brownstones looked dismayed.
“It’s called ‘Toil and Peaceful Life.’”I had to admit the song sounded much worse without the four-part harmony. “That’s the Doukhobor motto!”
“I would settle for toil and peaceful
wife
,” Josh muttered.
And yet, a few weeks later, when he began making arrangements to give a talk in Vancouver, home to the world’s largest Doukhobor research archive, Josh was happy to learn I had a good excuse to come along. I had fondled the holdings of the University of British Columbia Doukhobor Research Collection electronically from afar, downloading soil-classification maps of Doukhobor lands and theses on the generative phonology of
Doukhobor conjugation, and was dying for a chance to peruse primary source materials in person. Then a few weeks later, as I was lounging around one evening, enjoying the Kootenay Men’s Choir’s version of “You Have Fallen as Martyrs in Your Heroic Struggle,” I felt a mental tug, my forgotten dream to hear the Skoptsy sing surfacing like some distant Oz on the horizon. And then came the epiphany: the Skopsty may be gone, but the Doukhobors were still alive.
And they were still singing.
Through the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ website, I dug up contact information for the Kootenay Men’s Choir and fired off a message. A few days later, a friendly reply came from a man named Elmer Verigin, who offered to arrange a meeting with some fellow choir members. Could it be possible that I was actually going to meet a direct descendant of Peter “Lordly” Verigin, the famous Doukhobor leader who’d inspired Tolstoy and helped the Doukhobors reach Canada?
No
, Elmer replied.
My grandfather was the seventh son of Wasyl Slastukin in Georgia. He became an orphan after his father was kicked by a horse and died. My surname is an adopted one.
But by the time I received his reply it didn’t matter—I had already booked my flight.
The UBC archives turned out to be a two-and-a-half-hour walk from my hotel, but I didn’t know that yet when I crossed the Burrard Street Bridge and stopped for a breather at Kitsilano Beach to enjoy the view of the North Shore Mountains, Vancouver shimmering across the bay. I was heading back to the road when an odd little plaque tacked to a wooden pole caught my attention. It featured a black-and-white photograph of a man in a bathing suit, jumping into a swimming pool while clutching what appeared to be a giant propeller. The text below the photo was
taken from an interview with a former lifeguard of Kitsilano Pool, Ted Luckett, who in March of 1944 was offered two dollars by a local inventor to test his latest invention, the Gyrochute. The Gyrochute looked like a desiccated daisy, three long blades jutting from the top of a skinny pole. It was designed to help people jump to safety from the upper floors of burning buildings, because the fire truck ladders of the day couldn’t reach high enough. But as the photograph attested, the experiment failed. Luckett did not miraculously glide across the waves; he fell like a bucket of concrete, Gyrochute in tow.
As I resumed my endless walk to the Doukhobor archive, the story of the Gyrochute weighed heavily upon me. It seemed like a metaphor for so many things, perhaps even life itself. We all have our burning buildings, I mused, and we all create our own Gyrochutes in hopes of escaping them, often only to find ourselves driven downward ever deeper and faster instead. The question kept gnawing at me: Were the Doukhobors my Gyrochute? By clinging to them, what kind of Little Odessa was I hoping to parachute into? Was I hoping to find some piece of home out there in Castlegar, a kind of Russian oasis? Not like the
real
Russia—my grandmother’s Russia with its uneven stairs and gallows humor, its kitchens decked in floral wallpaper reeking of fried meat. Or today’s Russia, with its mirrored everything, throbbing casinos, and bruised self-esteem. But rather some Goldilocks version—a Russia that was “just right.” Perhaps unwittingly, I was imagining Castlegar as a place where the Doukhobors had filtered out all the things I didn’t like about the other, more complicated Russias. Better still, it would be filled with people like me, people who liked to sing. People whose Russian was heavily accented and grammatically creative. People who had absorbed enough North American friendliness to not finger a person’s arm flab upon first being introduced. In Castlegar the Doukhobors would never make soup broth the way my grandmother had, by
boiling a giant chicken leg for hours, then saving the bones to suck out the marrow. No, they had long ago ditched the greasy, starchy, meat-heavy cuisine of the old country and replaced it with light dill-and-mushroom-laced alternatives. Perhaps the Doukhobors themselves would turn out to be light dill-and-mushroom-laced alternatives to the dark, intimidating Russian intellectuals I’d known as a child! Or to my own self, for that matter.
And yet I feared things wouldn’t really turn out that way. More than that, I feared they wouldn’t turn out at all. My plans for meeting up with the Doukhobors had gotten a little sketchy. Before leaving for Vancouver, I’d sent a couple of emails to the members of the Kootenay Men’s Choir, trying to pin down an exact time and place to meet. I’d heard nothing back, so I decided to give Elmer a call. Only I’d caught him at a bad time.
“Is this Elmer?” I’d asked.
“Are you calling to inquire about the show units?” came a clipped voice in reply.
“Um, no, this is Alina Simone calling. I’m interested in the Doukhobors? I wrote to you earlier? About meeting up with some members of the men’s choir?” There was a pause on the other end and suddenly I felt a little ridiculous.
“I’m in the middle of a business meeting right now,” said Elmer. “Try calling back later.”
And that was it. Too embarrassed to call again, I’d heard nothing more from the Doukhobors since. And now, here I was in Canada.
It was nervousness about the fading prospects for my trip to Castlegar that convinced me to let Nate come along. Nate was a graduate student who lived in a trailer park in Spokane, Washington. For the past few years, he’d made a point of driving out to Portland or Seattle to see me play whenever I toured through. Sometimes we would grab a veggie burrito together before the show. Not long before I left for Vancouver, Nate had dropped me a line and I’d
written back mentioning my upcoming trip to Castlegar. Spokane wasn’t too far from Castlegar, Nate replied. Maybe he could come along? He would bring a car so I wouldn’t have to rent one, and he could help with taping interviews. Now, some people might question the wisdom of agreeing to a road trip with a person you’ve spent, tops, three hours with. Yet a week before my visit to Castlegar, the prospect of driving through rural Canada alone in search of imaginary Doukhobors suddenly seemed worse.
I received two messages the night before my flight to Castlegar. The first was from Nate. He was spending the night at his mother’s place in Sandpoint, Idaho, ready to leave for the Canadian border “at first light,” and he wanted to know whether I would like a hand-painted Ukrainian Pysanky egg. The second was from Harold, one of the elusive Doukhobors. He told me that three of them, including Elmer, would meet my flight at the airport tomorrow. I hadn’t given the Doukhobors any flight information, but the Castlegar airport wasn’t exactly JFK. There was only one morning flight from Vancouver.
Early the next day, I boarded an overwing prop plane that resembled a toy, the kind powered by pulling a string in the back. It was a short flight and before long we were puttering out over the Selkirk Mountains and then down into them. The largest remaining Doukhobor settlements were located in the Kootenays, a rural region that stretched above the Washington-Idaho border. Peter Verigin had named this territory Dolina Ooteshenia, the Valley of Consolation, because it resembled the Doukhobors’ lost homeland in the Caucasus. Nonetheless, from 26,000 feet, the laser-cut mountains edged with snow seemed anything but consoling. I could only imagine how they looked to the initial settlers, when this place was little more than a whistle-stop on
the Canadian Pacific Railway. But at least the Doukhobors knew something of the life that awaited them after their hard years of farming untamed land. I knew nothing of what awaited me below, aside from Nate, three Doukhobors, and an egg.
When I arrived in Castlegar, Nate was at the gate. He waved happily at me through the glass-paned wall as I wheeled my bag across tarmac that was once the communal property of the Doukhobors.
“Where’s my egg?” I demanded as soon as I’d passed through the doors.
“Out in the truck,” said Nate, his hand dropping to his side. That’s all we had time for. Over his shoulder I saw them waiting—three men well into middle age with a somewhat weatherbeaten look, anxiously scanning the fast-thinning crowd.
I went over and introduced myself, Nate in tow. The Doukhobors were Elmer, Harold, and Harold. They suggested we take a seat at the airport café for some coffee, so I wheeled my bag about five paces from the gate and we all settled down at a table. I pulled out my notebook, which after three days in the UBC Doukhobor archives had accumulated a lot of questions. In particular, I was nagged by the discrepancy between the anthropologist Mark Mealing’s claim that Doukhobor psalm-singing was related to Jewish musical traditions, and the ethnomusicologist Kenneth Peacock’s description of Doukhobor psalmistry as “a polyphonic development of the znamenny chant.” Which hypothesis was closer to the truth? I opened my mouth to ask the question, but then the Doukhobors began to talk. They were plain-spoken men with practical trades—an engineer, a factory worker, a machinist at the pulp mill. Elmer had grown up on a farmstead in Saskatchewan. His father spoke only Russian, so Elmer would claim his school report cards were surveys from the Department of Statistics requesting information about how many chickens they had. One of
the Harolds had grown up in a village where the Sons of Freedom, the most radical of the Doukhobor sects, had burned schoolhouses and protested against the Canadian government in the nude; the other was the son of a hard-rock miner who had died of silicosis. I quietly shelved my questions about the relationship of Doukhobor folklore to that of the Lusatian Sorbs.