Speak, Memory

He insisted that he had an incurable heart ailment and that, when the seizures came, he could obtain relief only by lying supine on the floor. Nobody took him seriously, and after he did die of angina pectoris, all alone, in Paris, at the end of 1916, aged forty-five, it was with a quite special pang that one recalled those after-dinner incidents in the drawing room—the unprepared footman entering with the Turkish coffee, my father glancing (with quizzical resignation) at my mother, then (with disapproval) at his brother-in-law spread-eagled in the footman’s path, then (with curiosity) at the funny vibration going on among the coffee things on the tray in the seemingly composed servant’s cotton-gloved hands.

From other, stranger torments that beset him in the course of his short life, he sought relief—if I understand these matters rightly—in religion, first in certain Russian sectarian outlets, and eventually in the Roman Catholic Church. His was the kind of colorful neurosis that should have been accompanied by genius but in his case was not, hence the search for a traveling shadow. In his youth he had been intensely disliked by his father, a country gentleman of the old school (bear hunting, a private theatre, a few fine Old Masters among a good deal of trash), whose uncontrollable temper was rumored to have been a threat to the boy’s very life. My mother told me later of the tension in the Vyra household of her girlhood, of the atrocious scenes that took place in Ivan Vasilievich’s study, a gloomy corner room giving on an old well with a rusty pumping wheel under five Lombardy poplars. Nobody used that room except me. I kept my books and spreading boards on its black shelves, and subsequently induced my mother to have some of its furniture transferred into my own sunny little study on the garden side, and therein staggered, one morning, its tremendous desk with nothing upon its waste of dark leather but a huge curved paper knife, a veritable scimitar of yellow ivory carved from a mammoth’s tusk.

When Uncle Ruka died, at the end of 1916, he left me what would amount nowadays to a couple of million dollars and his country estate, with its white-pillared mansion on a green, escarped hill and its two thousand acres of wildwood and peatbog. The house, I am told, still stood there in 1940, nationalized but aloof, a museum piece for any sightseeing traveler who might follow the St. Petersburg-Luga highway running below through the village Rozhestveno and across the branching river. Because of its floating islands of water lilies and algal brocade, the fair Oredezh had a festive air at that spot. Farther down its sinuous course, where the sand martins shot out of their holes in the steep red bank, it was deeply suffused with the reflections of great, romantic firs (the fringe of our Vyra); and still farther downstream, the endless tumultuous flow of a water mill gave the spectator (his elbows on the handrail) the sensation of receding endlessly, as if this were the stern of time itself.

5

The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.

My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who “hates the Reds” because they “stole” his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:

 … Beneath the sky

Of my America to sigh

      For one locality in Russia.

The general reader may now resume.

6