trip to Russia seemed (or seems) complete without a pilgrimage to the home of Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana (Clear Glade). What was then his country estate now seems comparable to a suburban home in any major city in the U.S.; but its setting in a lovely countryside scene promised a glimpse into this artist’s world. I was struck then by, and never forgot, his tall Underwood manual typewriter still sitting in his den, as if awaiting his return to imprint the words of another lasting novel.
I also knew how hard (if not impossible) it would have been to acquire such a fine imported object at the time of our visit in the mid-1960s. But the typewriter was emblematic of another era, of a time before the Bolsheviks had isolated Russia from the rest of the world. Until the Communists took over and sealed the country shut, artists, writers, and businessmen traveled freely to and from the West. Educated Russians read and spoke French and German, and could cross cultural and physical borders with relative ease. Traveling to Tolstoy’s home and tomb brought us one step closer to that previous cosmopolitan age, and to the great author, while leaving the ineffable quality of his art a mystery.
Sojourns into small towns and villages of rural Russia illuminated even more than Moscow the two sides of being a foreigner: the exotic and the privileged. If we stood out—which we always did, even dressed in our plain, well-used clothing—we were also treated as special guests. People exerted touching efforts to please, and to meet what they imagined to be our expectations, but you could see that they felt they could not have succeeded. For all our stays in Russia, the image remains of that fresh little mustard pot set down on our table in a grim, grimy cafeteria, with its sticky tables and chairs, marred floors, and smells of unrefrigerated sausages, cheeses, and buttermilk, stale odors of overcooked onions, cabbages, beef bones, and soups. The contrasts of generous hospitality and warm reception with pungent odors.
Living in Moscow, we, like Russians, took advantage of theatres, museums, music, parks, historic sites, and other entertainment and arts. Tickets were cheap. We saw a memorable performance of the opera Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi, in which Boris was massive and masterful, and the settings monumental; and a theatre performance of Brothers Karamazov staged with the passion of those who became the Karamazovs. We were cheered by shows at the Puppet Theatre, the repertory circus, and the circus on ice with its now famous performing bears. Odd, how quickly the bears seem human, and “reality” shifted. And we witnessed numerous concerts and ballets, including those we would see throughout our stays in Russia: the enduring Swan Lake, Nutcracker, and Romeo and Juliet.
At performances, the intermissions provided an occasion for a spread of special delicacies. In theater lobbies and lounges, lines formed quickly at the “bufyet” (buffet table) to buy flutes of champagne, glasses of coffee, bottles of plain or fruity mineral water; open-face canapes of salami-type sausage, or a dot of red caviar. Chocolates, cookies, or frosted cakes supplemented the other treats—and served for many theater- and concert-goers the supper that could not be scheduled between leaving work at 6:00 p.m. and the performance at 7:00. Later I discovered in Europe the same lovely practice of experiencing the arts interspersed with touches of edibles enjoyed with friends at cafe tables during the intervals. And still more recently in the U.S.
Enter Lev Vlasenko, concert pianist. Well before we left for Moscow for the first time in 1965, Jim had met Lev when the latter visited and performed at Harvard in the late 1950s. During our stays in Moscow in the 1960s and ’70s, we attended any of his performances we saw advertised and visited him briefly backstage. Sadly, he and his wife felt that any unauthorized contact with foreigners—with us—might harm their careers and personal life.
“We hope you understand,” he would say, looking imploringly into our eyes, “we hope you understand why we cannot get together, why we cannot ask you to our home.” He had tears in his eyes. In that moment, all abstract writing about arbitrary, authoritarian or totalitarian government and its repression, became real, focused, and human, in the face of a friend in tears, pleading (through his eyes), “If you’re really a friend, you will keep away from me, and forgive me for having to ask this of you.” Of course we understood and spared them our presence. But each time Lev traveled abroad, to East Europe, Israel, or South America, he sent Jim a little picture postcard, through which we were to track him for the rest of his life.
Living in the former Soviet Union was not just about living isolated and enclosed, sealed from the outside world. To re-imagine that time and place, for Russians and for ourselves, we have to feel again the heavy and pervasive hand of authority, the scrutiny and secrecy, and the arbitrary and oppressive behaviors. Although we often felt spooked by surveillance, we came closest to encountering Soviet police the December 1965 night the university was raided for subversive students. I wrote home:
About 1:30 a.m., Jim and I returned from a late visit with a friend upstairs to find the door to our staircase locked. Locked stairways are not unusual since stairways, like lights and elevators, are used sparingly, apparently to avoid wearing them out. We heeded the sign posted there and went down to the fifth floor and up the only active elevator to discover our own sixth floor in turmoil of swarming people. Somebody said this was a surprise random bed check. All exits to the floor had been locked or guarded while some sort of police were bursting into room after room, banging and opening doors, searching closets and johns for—we knew not what. Someone yelled out to the “inspectors” that we were Americans, and so we passed a most cursory inspection of our room. The authorities demanded everyone’s documents—the university passes and domestic passports that everyone carries. Some of the stowaways that normally took shelter in the dormitory quickly hid on the kitchen balcony, spending the night locked outdoors in the dead of winter.
The raid was probably inspired by more than its rumored purpose, a search for people occupying the dormitory without permission. That day, a large demonstration in Pushkin Square on behalf of the censored writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, impelled the authorities to root out anyone who participated in the event. While the commission proceeded from room to room, forcing all students out into the hallway, they searched for placards, signs, and papers that might implicate people. No search warrants or permission were needed, no reason given. Sleepy, shaken, undressed and confused, people were also afraid. A lot was at stake.
And that’s how we met the student from India who lived down the hall. In the midst of this upsetting scene, Previr came up to us for the first time, hugging his arms around himself in shame at being thrown from his bed into the hall in his pajamas.
“How appalling!” he said, looking a mix of anger and embarrassment. “How undignified to be unclothed in public.”
I was too shaken to care that most people were in underwear or nightclothes, but never forgot the power of commanding officials armed with legal and government authority on their side, and nothing on ours.
We enjoyed coming to know Russian friends. But we also discovered that they often were not forthcoming about their families. Even when we talked about ours, they limited what they said about theirs. Most probably had unremarkable pasts, but some had reason to avoid revealing their roots, as we learned at the end of our stay. If during much of our time in Moscow I felt irritated or insulted by the students whose job it was to spy on us and report back to the authorities what they learned about us, by the end of our stay I was more pained and saddened than irked by their plight.
Right before we left, some friends told us their stories. They revealed their nightmare lives. They knew they lived in the shadows, because their mother or father, grandmother or grandfather had been incarcerated in a prison or labor camp for reasons either known or unclear to them, but without a real trial or possibility of parole. Dark family secrets. The parents, for whose sins they were paying, had been punished not for murder, theft, rape, or fraud, but for political views or expression deemed unacceptable to the authorities; or for simply being in the wrong class or wrong place at the wrong time. The children were marked for life with this disability, the sins of the father visited now not only on the sons but also on the mother and daughters.
As
