The drawings accompanying this conversation are by Andrei Bely (1880–1934), an important symbolist poet, novelist, and theorist. Made during his study with Rudolf Steiner and his involvement in the emerging Anthroposophical movement, they are not direct illustrations of Groys’s memories, but traces of the same symbolist and spiritual world that appears in his recollections of Voloshin, the Goetheanum, and Koktebel.
We thank Stephan Widmer and the Rudolf Steiner Archiv for permission to reproduce the drawings.
—Editors
***
Svetlana Baskova: Do events taking place today change your opinion of people, or of society as a whole?
Boris Groys: My opinion of society was formed on the basis of two or three childhood impressions and has remained unchanged since I was four years old.
SB: In that case, it would be interesting to immerse ourselves in your childhood. We are now in Berlin. This is also the city where you were born, isn’t it?
BG: Yes, I was born in Berlin in 1947. My father worked for the Ministry of Energy and Electrification in Moscow, and in 1946 he was sent to Berlin. He worked on the tripartite Anglo-American-Soviet commission for restoring Berlin’s electricity supply. The political division of Germany had not yet taken place and Berlin was divided into four sectors—the Soviet, American, British, and French—which the Allies administered jointly. I spent the first three years of my life in Germany, but I have no memories of that period. Around 1950 we moved to Leningrad. Why did my parents go there instead of returning to Moscow? The Institute of Direct Current had opened in Leningrad—more precisely, the Scientific Research Institute for the Transmission of High-Voltage Direct Current Electricity—which specialized in what interested my father most, namely, the transmission of energy over long distances.
SB: Tell me more about your father and your family—your mother, grandmothers, grandfathers.
BG: My father came from a Jewish family. He graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and worked for some time in the Donbas as a specialist in power transmission. Incidentally, according to his passport, his name was Khaim Shlyomovich. “Shlyoma” is the Russian version of “Solomon.” Since Jews in the Russian Empire were not allowed to be given biblical names, he was Shlyomovich. But when he started work, his director said, “There can be no such name. We’ll make you Yefim Samoylovich.” And all his documents except his passport were issued to Yefim Samoylovich. That’s why I’m Boris Yefimovich. I didn’t even know he had a different name on his passport until we moved to Germany.
I have German roots on my father’s side. German was my grandfather’s native language. This was quite common—Jewish families with German roots. Since schools in Russia were connected with particular religious institutions, Jews could not attend them without special permission. But later it became possible to open secular schools. And my father’s father was the director of the first such school in Kyiv.
My mother was born in 1915 in Semipalatinsk. Her father was a left-leaning person. An agronomist by training, after the revolution he became Minister of Agriculture of the Turkestan Republic, and as such was captured by White Russian forces during the Civil War in Turkestan. He contracted tuberculosis in prison and died there. Since he had held a position of responsibility, his family—his wife and two children—received special assistance from the state: an apartment in Moscow and a small sum of money to live on, like an allowance. My mother and her brother, my uncle, received technical educations: my mother in a field connected with electricity, while my uncle studied to become an engineer. His name was Gleb, which is why I am Boris. Boris and Gleb.1 After graduating from the institute, he went to work at a factory. Politically, he was a Trotskyist and belonged to the “Left Opposition.”2 He organized some kind of opposition cell at the factory, distributed leaflets, walked around with a revolver. Around 1930 he was arrested and sentenced to ten years without the right of correspondence. But here one has to understand that “ten years without the right of correspondence” meant execution. And my grandmother knew that. Nevertheless, she wrote letters to her son and to all kinds of authorities. I still have two of those letters. They are absolutely astonishing. Some kind of case was opened against her and she was sent to a psychiatric hospital where she died.
So my mother grew up in this kind of left-opposition environment; you might say it was her psychological background. They were all communist-Trotskyist-idealists. And accordingly, anti-Stalinists. My mother worked at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences.
SB: How did your parents meet?
BG: It happened in Kazan, where they both found themselves in 1941 during the evacuation. Neither of them was single. But after they met, they quickly divorced their partners and got together. After the war, they returned to Moscow. Well, and then came Berlin.
SB: Your father was sent to Germany—I suppose they didn’t send just anyone there? Was he a Party member?
BG: No, he was never a Party member. Like my mother, he held non-Soviet views. In fact, as a result of that whole story with her brother, my mother developed a strong misanthropy. She didn’t trust people. She never visited anyone, never invited anyone over, and had little contact with anyone—she said that my father and I were enough for her. My father, unlike my mother, was quite well disposed toward people. He believed in science and technology and had a liberal-tolerant attitude toward all other forms of activity. He understood that people could occupy themselves with things other than science, and though that did not irritate him, he didn’t regard these other pursuits, whatever they might be, as anything of interest.
My father worked all the time. Besides the institute, he also had inventions—all kinds of patents, including foreign ones. Although we received very little from them, some pennies, I think it was thanks to those patents that we survived with a mother who didn’t work. In addition, he earned extra money translating from German—he prepared summaries of Western achievements in the field of power engineering. And when I learned English and French, he entrusted me with writing those summaries for him.
My father had a lot of contact with his Western colleagues, participating in some long-distance transmission planning projects in Sweden, Canada, and elsewhere; people came to visit us from those places, and though he would be invited to visit them, he didn’t want to go out of principle. He was patriotic in his own way. He believed that there were real scientists, real engineers, who knew their work.
SB: You said that your mother didn’t work. Why? Because of her misanthropy, her unwillingness to interact with people?
BG: Not only. I was a very frail child, sickly, and needed constant care. And my mother surrounded me with it; she looked after me all the time. But she liked it. She loved to read and often read aloud to me: Dickens, Hugo, Walter Scott—exclusively foreign literature, mainly English and French.
When I started school, she dropped me off and picked me up—she wouldn’t let me walk the streets alone. There were, however, good reasons for this. Shortly after we returned to the Soviet Union, the anti-Semitic campaign began—the Doctors’ Plot and all that.3 And my first memories are connected precisely with this. I remember our neighbor on the landing—she was Jewish and worked as a doctor in a clinic—who often came to our apartment and sobbed.
My parents were very frightened by what was happening. They wouldn’t let me go outside because children threw stones at me, since I not only looked Jewish but also couldn’t speak Russian. I spoke German. Even later when I learned Russian, I spoke with a German accent for a long time.
But what struck me was the incredible mobilization of popular anger. Everyone, absolutely everyone, was seething. It seemed that everyone had gone mad. Then Stalin died and people were told that the Jews were not guilty of anything. And the very next day it was as if none of it had ever happened; all this popular anger disappeared within twenty-four hours, literally.
SB: And you noticed such details? But you were still a little boy then! You were only six years old.
BG: Exactly. But at that age I was already following everything that was happening in the world. My father brought a radio from Germany and I would listen to the BBC, Voice of America, French radio, and other Western radio stations. When my father came home from work in the evening, at dinner he would ask me, “Well, what’s the international situation today?” And I would recount everything to him in detail. My father would eat his dinner and go to bed informed. In this way, I noticed how people forgot everything in the course of a single day. Anti-Semites, non-anti-Semites—none of it exists. They simply feel whatever they are told to feel. Their entire emotional life, all their deep inner experiences, take place exclusively by order from above. The order from above changes, and their spiritual life changes as well. At the snap of a finger.
So when this whole anti-Semitic nightmare ended, everything seemed to disappear. There were no Jews, there was nothing at all. No problem. This was when I had just started school. My first assignment was to make a portrait of Stalin in a mourning frame. All the children were gluing these frames, yet I didn’t know how to glue anything; I always refused manual labor because I was never any good at it. And it was my poor mother who glued this frame, cursing as she did it. She bought some magazine with a portrait of the leader of all peoples, cut it out and put it in a mourning frame, and I took it to school. Everyone was in mourning over the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, and then suddenly there was no Stalin, no mourning, nothing at all. Not a word “for,” not a word “against,” nothing. This, of course, struck me. So my first impressions, one could say, were political; they lay in the field of social psychology.
SB: A tendency toward reflection, as a rule, leads one to writing. Do you remember your first attempts at writing?
BG: My first composition, which I wrote in the third grade, caused general outrage. It was about how my mother and I walked in the Summer Garden.4 I was then told that the children of various nineteenth-century aristocrats went to the Summer Garden with their mothers while Soviet children collected scrap metal. Well, I didn’t collect scrap metal so I couldn’t write about that. But I learned this lesson, and afterward I avoided any kind of aristocratic associations, writing in such a way that everything was okay. And the school sent all my subsequent compositions to various city competitions, where I won first prizes. Incidentally, I had top marks in all subjects—everything came easily to me, without strain. And this continued until the sixth grade.
SB: What happened in the sixth grade?
BG: I developed very severe pains in my back due to an injury to my spine. After fifth grade I began growing very quickly, and my spine couldn’t withstand the increased load—it simply stopped supporting me. My father took me to various specialists in Leningrad and Moscow, and they all said that an operation was needed to stabilize the spine.
And I was sent to the Turner Center for Pediatric Traumatology and Orthopedics. Imagine: a completely sheltered child who had never seen other children—at school I didn’t leave the classroom during breaks, so I didn’t even know their names—ending up in a fourteen-bed ward with orderlies, doctors, nurses. I was undergoing a very radical socialization. The first thing they did was suspend my bed at a forty-five-degree angle. I would lay either head up, kept from sliding down by a collar, or head down with weights attached to my legs. I spent four months in these two positions. All this time I continued studying by correspondence. The children around me screamed and suffered, the nurses and orderlies shouted at them—it was something completely beyond all limits. Today it is impossible to imagine. I lived this way for four months, waiting for them to put something into me. In the end, some citizen was run over by a car, and they removed his tibia and inserted it along my spine. Since then, my torso has not bent.
SB: So you owe your proud posture to the tibia of a citizen unknown to you?
BG: Exactly. In general, this operation was considered difficult. It was performed rarely because, as a rule, it was unsuccessful. My operation was perhaps the only successful one of its kind, first, thanks to my mother, who got a job as an orderly in order to look after me. Which helped prevent many undesirable situations. Second, I was a person with a great deal of self-control, accustomed to a certain discipline. They put me in a plaster corset for the next four months. Only my hands could move, while everything else was immobilized. I lay reclining and ate while looking in a mirror; I must say this is a more complicated geometrical operation than it may seem. And I read Proust, which, of course, was very well suited to my condition at the time.
Of the fourteen children in the ward, I became friends with only one. He was a Georgian boy. They sent him wine and fruit from Georgia. And my father brought me caviar and chocolate. In short, the two of us regularly held feasts—we drank red wine, ate fruit, chocolate, and caviar. Once he said to me, “You’re a good person, but a cretin. You criticize everyone.”5 This struck me deeply, since I didn’t criticize anyone. I didn’t express opinions about anyone at all. I didn’t even notice anyone. But he sensed in me a critical attitude toward reality that was not expressed outwardly.
Sometimes we invited the nurses to our little feasts. Among them was one trainee who was more educated than the others. She was the first to discover in me an ability that I later practiced as a student. Namely, women very willingly spoke to me about all their emotional experiences and romantic conflicts. When she was on duty, she came to visit me at night, and we spent hours analyzing her emotional vicissitudes, as well as the difficulties of life in general and contemporary life in particular. But this ended with her being accused of having a sexual relationship with me, which was completely absurd because apart from my hands I couldn’t move anything. But the poor girl was fired anyway.
Four months later they put me in another corset. Not such a heavy one. And they told me that for the next five years I had to stay at home. Which I did. Accordingly, I never went to school again. I studied at the Bitsevsk correspondence school. I received textbooks and instructions from them. I studied all of it at home and came in twice a year to take examinations. That’s how I finished school. But for another year I had to wear the corset. For that year my father hired a teacher who prepared me for the mathematics examinations. They took off my corset. And for the first time in six years I left the house to take the university entrance examinations.
SB: Which faculty?
BG: The Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics at Leningrad University. I passed mathematics easily, since I was quite well prepared, but unexpectedly received a four for my composition.6 Two topics were offered. One was connected with Tatyana’s letter.7 But since I preferred foreign literature to Russian literature, I immediately rejected it. The second, a more or less open topic, was: “Life sets problems for science; science illuminates the path of life.” I liked it. At the time I had just read Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Physicists about the emotional torments of nuclear physicists in connection with the creation of the atomic bomb. And I used that as the starting point for my composition. But at the end I wrote that all these problems were characteristic only of bourgeois society. In our socialist society there were no problems of this kind, since our scientists knew that they were making the bomb for the victory of the most progressive social system. And for this I received a four, which surprised me—after all, I wrote without grammatical mistakes. When I asked the admissions committee about it, they replied, “Yes, you didn’t make a single mistake, but you addressed the topic only partially.” Apparently, they meant the last sentence.
SB: Had this play by Dürrenmatt already been translated into Russian?
BG: I read it in Russian, I think in Foreign Literature.8 But in general I preferred to read foreign literature in the original. I studied English and French on my own.
SB: Where did you get these books?
BG: For a time, I had an English teacher, an American communist who had emigrated to the USSR. His relatives in America sent him books, and he gave them to me to read. For the most part it was, broadly speaking, the literature of 1968. My time at university coincided with this period—the Beats, the sexual revolution. And I read these novels of early protest literature with interest. As I said, I had always been interested in politics. And I had always been interested in Marxism. I thought Marx was right, that everything is driven by economics and class interests. But mathematics didn’t interest me at all.
SB: But with such an inclination toward the humanities, why did you enter the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics? Did your father insist?
BG: No, my mother insisted. She reasoned that the more a science is connected with people, the less reason there is to study it. This included all human sciences, as well as biology, chemistry, and so on. Mathematics, on the other hand, is an abstract science, concerning human beings least of all, so some kind of oasis still remains there. And I accepted this argument, so I went into mathematics. But I rather quickly realized that I was interested only in the present.
I felt my mortality very clearly; I distinctly understood that I had been given only this piece of time, and apart from it I had nothing, and that all sorts of ideas about what might exist outside this time were mistaken. Perhaps this was the influence of existentialism, in particular Camus, whom I read in French. Be that as it may, I had a very clear feeling that I had only this time and my relation to it. After entering the university, I actively began getting to know everyone. And quite quickly established contacts with the whole alternative scene in Leningrad.
SB: Why specifically with the alternative scene? Were you in opposition to your surroundings?
BG: I simply wanted to find out in more detail what kind of world I was living in. I didn’t think I could from official sources, so I began looking for unofficial ones. I quickly established contacts with some book dealers who supplied me with banned literature from the black market; among my acquaintances were Russian fascists and Zionists. I had a friend who brought hashish to Leningrad from Central Asia, processed it, and distributed it through a gang of deaf mutes. I quickly mastered the infrastructure of underground Leningrad; it interested me, and it seemed to precisely reflect the period. By my second year I already had a very wide circle of acquaintances. And I became accepted in this circle because, first, I was very well informed about this and that; second, I was completely alternative in my outlook; and third, I was a very polite, well-brought-up boy.
After my second year I met a certain young man—a complete idiot and scoundrel. But, like any scoundrel, he knew how to get places. In particular, he invited me to Koktebel on the Black Sea coast, where he introduced me to Maria Stepanovna Voloshina.9 She had an absolutely astonishing library of French literature from the period of symbolism and early modernism, as well as a wonderful art collection. From time to time I went to Maria Stepanovna’s to read books. She followed the customs of Koktebel—welcoming into the house everyone Voloshin had loved during his lifetime: poets, artists, and simply wanderers like me.10 Voloshin was closely connected with Anthroposophy—he knew Rudolf Steiner and, together with his first wife Margarita Sabashnikova, took part in the construction of the first, still wooden Goetheanum in Dornach, which was conceived as the world center of the Anthroposophical movement.11 And this Anthroposophical, bohemian atmosphere also prevailed in Koktebel. It was a place that attracted all sorts of people. To some they might have seemed strange, but from my point of view they were normal and everyone else was strange.
I remember meeting a woman there who was about eighty. But she had a beautiful figure. And she herself was rather beautiful. She had danced at the Goetheanum—Steiner had developed a system of dance that he called “eurythmy.”12 When the Goetheanum burned down on the night of January 1, 1923, presumably the result of arson, she re-emigrated to Russia and settled in Koktebel. The furnishings of her room were quite ascetic—white walls, a bed, a small table, and a stool. And that was all. She went outside only to do eurythmic exercises. Once I asked her whether she had actually read Steiner. She pulled back the bedspread hanging all the way to the floor, and under the bed I saw the complete collected works of Steiner—in German. “I tried to read him,” she replied, “but I have this principle: if I read something and don’t cry, I think it shouldn’t be read, because I read only what moves me to tears. And I tried many times to read Steiner and never once cried. So I decided not to read him.” I asked whether there was a book that moved her to tears. She said, “Well of course, the Bible! … As soon as I open the Bible, I immediately start crying.” I concluded that she had therefore read the Bible. “Of course not!” she exclaimed. “I start crying immediately!” To which I remarked, “You have invented the best system of reading, the best of all systems of reading ever invented by humanity.” In general, in Koktebel I met people whose way of life and ideas seemed interesting to me.
SB: And where did you yourself live in Koktebel?
BG: Imagine, very soon after arriving, I settled in the house of Maria Nikolayevna Izergina, a pianist and well-known performer of romances. Maria Nikolayevna’s younger sister, Antonina Nikolayevna, an art historian and specialist in German and French art, was married to Academician Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli, director of the Hermitage in the 1930s and ’40s. The house has since been demolished.
I came to live with Izergina thanks to Maria Stepanovna Voloshina. But this was preceded by an amusing incident. Once, one of the girls I knew in Koktebel suggested that I swim with her and her parents to some bay. I agreed, since I seemed to be a fairly good swimmer, and the bay, as it seemed to me, was close. I said, “Okay,” and we started swimming. We swim, swim, swim, and at a certain point I realize that I can’t go on. And I began to drown. It was rather curious—I unexpectedly experienced an incredible sense of relief. I always felt the pressure that one had to do something, had to organize something. I experienced this as a kind of terror. A kind of slavery. Life is slavery, you are a slave to the next day, the next hour. And suddenly liberation—I no longer owe anything to anyone!
But then the girl’s father swims over to me and says, “You’re drowning, young man. And I’m supposed to save you, but I’m not going to do that, since I myself am not a very good swimmer. At least not good enough to save someone else.” I reply, “I understand you very well,” and continue drowning. Then he swims over to me again: “Please forgive me for not saving you, but you must understand.” It was a kind of Dostoevsky situation. But since I had been brought up on Western literature and not Dostoevsky, he began to irritate me. “Why do you keep swimming over to me? I want to drown in peace, I want to think and feel it fully, and you’re disturbing me. Couldn’t you simply swim on and leave me alone?” And I continued drowning.
SB: It’s like something out of Kharms.
BG: As it turned out, he was terribly offended by this. He later said I was such a bastard, that I had wounded his finest feelings. He complained about me to everyone and forbade his daughter to have anything to do with me. In any case, I soon lost consciousness. However, as you can probably guess, I was not destined to drown. His daughter began screaming terribly. Unlike me, she did not have a meditative disposition; it would never have occurred to me to scream. Nevertheless, her screams had an effect, and some professional divers immediately appeared, quickly dived in, and pulled me out. They revived me a little, called an ambulance, and sent me to the hospital in Feodosia. This happened on a Friday. At the hospital the chief physician received me, examined me, and admitted me to the ward for the dying. The thing is that dying people require no care. Besides me there were two other dying people in the ward, though they were soon taken away somewhere. Very soon the entire medical staff of the Feodosia hospital left for the weekend. And there I am, lying alone and bored. Then I noticed a book on one of the bedside tables—it was Shpanov’s novel The Arsonists. I began to read it. I must say, since that time I have been an admirer of Nikolai Shpanov. I finished the novel and thought, what next? With no food anywhere, it wasn’t clear what to do. I got up, left the ward, went upstairs, and saw that all the doors were open. I had noticed that the chief physician had put my money in her desk. I went into her office, opened the desk drawer, and took my money back. I left the hospital, took a taxi, and returned to Koktebel. I approached the place where I had been staying and saw that all my belongings had been thrown out into the street. The rumor had already spread that I had died. I stood there thinking, what should I do? And I went to Maria Stepanovna. She fed me and gave me a bed, informing me that she never let anyone sleep in that bed because Marina Tsvetaeva had slept in it. But since I was in such a situation, she was making an exception. When I woke up, Maria Stepanovna told me that I could spend one more night at her place, and then she would find another arrangement. The other arrangement turned out to be Maria Nikolayevna Izergina.
I then lived with her every summer for eleven or twelve years. Maria Nikolayevna’s house was also a place that attracted the Soviet intelligentsia. She had a large veranda where all sorts of people gathered, many of whom turned out to be quite interesting. For example, Nadezhda Rykova—a translator who knew all of Akhmatova’s and Mandelstam’s poems by heart. She came from the Crimean nobility and had danced her first dance with Baron Wrangel. She herself was lesbian. She organized some kind of lesbian orgies, and was imprisoned for five years for it. She had hung a portrait of Stalin in her bedroom after he dissolved the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (at the time everyone was delighted by this, Mandelstam and Pasternak as well) and was accused of organizing these orgies to insult the Leader.13 Nadezhda Yanuaryevna possessed an absolutely fantastic collection of French and other literature. She gave me many books to read. And these were early French editions—Borges, for example. In Koktebel I met Mikhail Shvartsman and stayed in contact with him, and as a result that period somehow became more understandable to me.14 Tsvetaeva’s sister Anastasia also visited, as did Genrikh Sapgir, Eduard Limonov with his first wife, and Grigory Petnikov—a friend of Khlebnikov’s and one of the chairmen of the Globe.15 He lived in Stary Krym (Old Crimea), not Koktebel. Nina Green, Alexander Grin’s wife, also lived there. In general, remnants of the former splendor still survived in Crimea at that time.
And somehow I settled in there and became friends with all of them. So that drowning and rescue incident unexpectedly expanded my social life considerably. I associated not only with the “black bohemia” and underground Leningrad, but also with these kinds of oppositional social circles.16 Once, in response to some remark of mine, Antonina Izergina-Orbeli said, “I notice that you criticize the Soviet authorities, but how much do you earn a month?” I answered that I earned one hundred rubles. She said, “When you earn five hundred, you’ll be able to criticize.”
SB: Why?
BG: It’s a kind of Stalinist Nietzscheanism. You cannot criticize from below. You can criticize only from above, because criticism from below is dictated by ressentiment or personal circumstances. Only if you have no personal reasons to be dissatisfied can your criticism be objective. Typical Nietzsche. They all had a Nietzschean consciousness. And I found it interesting to be with them.
SB: How did Voloshin’s House and the Writers’ House of Creativity relate to one another? For example, on the level of the official and the unofficial.17
BG: Upon arriving in Koktebel, Voloshin bought a plot of land with the aim of creating an Anthroposophical colony along the lines of the Goetheanum. Together with his mother he built two houses there, and shortly before his death he gave one of them—the stone wing—to the Writers’ Union. Incidentally, he himself called it the “House of the Poet.”
On one hand, there was a great deal of officialdom in everything surrounding the Writers’ House of Creativity—various official people, cultural workers, and so on came there for a month or two on vouchers. Besides this, a lot of people went there who simply formed this community—Moscow poets, artists, filmmakers. In short, Koktebel was a kind of privileged place where only those who were allowed could enter. And these two houses—Voloshin’s and the Writers’ House of Creativity—were, of course, connected with one another.
SB: You were a very young man then, and yet you spent a great deal of time with people of quite advanced age.
BG: I was trying to satisfy my curiosity. As one of my friends said, curiosity is your only human quality. I was interested in talking to people who knew the period well and had been part of it. Nadezhda Rykova, for example. I was an admirer of Bakhtin, Vaginov, the Petersburg people; she had been friends with all of them and knew them all well. I remember one incident. Rykova was staying at the House of Creativity then, and there was a pass system, guests permitted only until a certain hour, and so on. Once I was walking her home—we had stayed late at someone’s place—and we came to the house, with the guard on duty, and it turned out that Nadya didn’t have her pass, having forgotten it or lost it somewhere. Naturally, the guard wouldn’t let us in. She protested: “I’m an elderly woman, I live here.” But he simply refused. And then she shrieked with a sound that pierced you, drilled into your head—it was simply unbearable. The guard stepped aside, and we went in. And she said to me, “You see? Skills from the camps remain.” What I mean is that these were very multilayered people who could act in very different registers. People later grew simpler. Including me, in a certain sense. I myself had only two registers. The polite member of society and—as it were, continuing my mother’s work—the nihilist. I had no experience of life in the 1920s, under Stalin, in the camp, and so on, whether in bohemia or in official life. But these people knew how to move from mode to mode, from register to register, from atmosphere to atmosphere. It was astonishing.
You see, they survived. When deep-sea fish are brought to the surface, something inside them explodes. But these people were brought up, and they survived. They only began to breathe differently. They had somehow learned to live by adapting to another atmosphere, while not changing in essence. This struck me.
Nadya Rykova was a brilliant woman. We tried so hard to persuade her to write memoirs. And she would answer, “Why the hell should I strain myself? Who is going to read all that? I’ve already lived through all of it. I want to rest, I want to have fun.” In a way, many of these people were very private. They didn’t think of themselves in terms of career, success, and so on. None of this existed for them; they had been through too much. They cultivated themselves as people who simply lived, who simply took pleasure in life.
What I mean is that there were many people in Koktebel who had chosen this kind of extra-historical, anti-historical, alternative way of life, something I was not capable of. And I looked at them with admiration because I myself was not capable of it. All these social and political situations, national and other problems, did not affect them. They were in contact with the sea, with the air, with the sand, with something completely different—they lived a cosmic life. This always fascinated me. It is the real alternative: an extra-historical mode of existence. I saw this in my mother, who also devoted herself to me in an extra-historical mode. I was for her what dance was for that girl from the Goetheanum.
Saints Boris and Gleb were eleventh-century princes and among the first saints canonized in the medieval Rus’ tradition. Their names are conventionally paired, giving the coincidence of two brothers named Boris and Gleb an additional comic resonance.
The Left Opposition was a faction within the Soviet Communist Party formed in the 1920s around Leon Trotsky and other critics of the party leadership. Its members opposed the growing power of Joseph Stalin and were subsequently expelled from the party, exiled, imprisoned, or executed.
The Doctors’ Plot was a late Stalin-era campaign launched in 1952–53 against a group of predominantly Jewish Soviet doctors accused of conspiring to murder leading political figures. The accusations were officially declared false shortly after Stalin’s death in March 1953.
The Summer Garden in central Leningrad was traditionally associated with prerevolutionary aristocratic and bourgeois families, whose children were taken there by governesses. In the Soviet period, this association was treated as a relic of prerevolutionary privilege.
The wordplay here depends on the boy’s accented pronunciation of the Russian kretin (“cretin”), which he confuses with kritik (“critic”).
The grade of 4 was below the highest possible mark in the five-point grading scale used by Soviet schools and universities, where 5 (“excellent”) was the highest grade, followed by 4 (“good”), 3 (“satisfactory”), and 2 (“unsatisfactory”).
The letter written by Tatyana Larina to Eugene Onegin in Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin (1825–32) is one of the canonical passages of Russian literature and was a standard subject of literary study in Soviet schools.
Foreign Literature (Иностранная литература) was a Soviet literary journal founded in 1955 that published Russian translations of foreign fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism. It was an important source of access to contemporary international literature for Soviet readers.
Koktebel is a settlement on the Black Sea coast of Crimea that was an important gathering place for writers and artists in the early twentieth century, particularly around the poet and artist Maximilian Voloshin and his house there. During the Soviet period, Koktebel remained closely associated with literary and artistic life.
Maximilian Voloshin (1877–1932) was a Russian poet, critic, and artist associated with symbolism. His house in Koktebel became a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals and continued to function as an important cultural center after his death.
Anthroposophy is a spiritual and philosophical movement founded by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). The Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland was conceived as its international center. The first Goetheanum, built largely of wood, was destroyed by fire on New Year’s Eve 1922–23.
Eurythmy is a system of expressive movement developed by Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers in the early twentieth century in connection with Anthroposophy. Eurythmy sought to render speech and music visible through bodily movement.
The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei), or RAPP, was an influential literary organization that promoted ideologically militant proletarian literature during the 1920s and early ’30s. It was dissolved in 1932 as part of Stalin’s reorganization of Soviet cultural institutions.
Mikhail Shvartsman (1926–97) was a Soviet artist who developed an idiosyncratic form of abstract and spiritual painting that he called “hieratism.” Although largely outside official Soviet art institutions, he became an influential figure among artists and intellectuals associated with unofficial culture.
“Chairmen of the Globe” was a utopian designation created by the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov during the First World War for an imagined international society of artists, writers, scientists, and political figures who would assume moral responsibility for humanity’s future. Grigory Petnikov was among those associated with the group.
“Black bohemia” (черная богема) was a colloquial expression for marginal, unofficial, or socially disreputable bohemian circles outside recognized Soviet cultural institutions, used here to distinguish it from both official cultural life and the more socially established oppositional intelligentsia.
The Writers’ House of Creativity (Дом творчества писателей) was part of a network of Soviet residential institutions where members of official writers’ organizations could live and work for limited periods. Stays were generally allocated through the Writers’ Union by means of subsidized vouchers (putevki), and the houses also served as important sites of professional and social life.
