We travel, Helsinki to Beijing on the
Trans-Siberian, Helsinki to Moscow with my mom and Harmony.
The schedule runs
Helsinki 6 days
St Petersburg 7 days
Tula 3 days
Moscow 5 days
Yeketarinburg 2 days
Omsk 3 days
Irkutsk 6 days
Ulan-Bator 18 days in Mongolia
Beijing 4 days then a tour down China
At time of writing I am on the
Trans-Siberian between Omsk and Irkutsk, where I landed today.
Tula
So Tula was a stand in for Yasnaya
Polyana, Tolstoy's estate. Though we did have some fun times at the
official samovar museum and the local cathedral and the statue of
Lenin, etc. Partying all around the city in a spare half day/ arrival
day. Our apartment was a little scruffy, a real local haunt, and the
whole town was like really not touristy. There was no way to hail
cabs so we made friends with our first cab driver who became kind of
our private driver. Very little common language but he was super
sweet.
Ok Yasnaya Polyana.
We spent two full days there, the first
walking the estate, the second we got a tour of the house.
So we arrived, and I know a lot about
Tolstoy and his whole life takes place in and around here. And he
writes it into things, writes about it, his biographers talk about
it, and it is just so beautiful, so recognisable. You walk in the
gates and the first thing you see is the birch prospekt. This is not
the same trees that Tolstoy saw, birches only live about 70 years so
they lovingly replant them in stages, some young, some growing old.
They march up the wide and graceful avenue in a double line.
My dream was to walk every path in
Tolstoy's estate and we did, wandering all over it. We went to the
little carriage house all set up with traditional things.
We went to his grave, covered only with
the lush green grass, overlooking the creek where he and his brother
played. On the spot where his brother (died young) wrote the secret
to life happiness and peace, the end to all striving of mankind, on a
green stick and then buried it. Tolstoy always hoped to find it.
You walk a way in the woods to his
grave. A woods that would have always been there.
We walked to the fields and as far as
we walked there were people still before us, having picnics,
gathering wildflowers, and family and a dog, the golden grasses. We
walked to where the peasants would have laboured.
We wandered over the estate proper,
with its fruit trees, the fruit trees the poor would cut down some
times for firewood. It was Sonia's job to punish them, and what did
punishing them mean when Tolstoy got his new understanding of life?
Just on the entrance is the large pond,
the pond to which Sonia would have run in desperation threatening
suicide, when Tolstoy began to say he must abandon the family.
And to the right was the wilder English
garden, natural with a series of cascading ponds, small ones. With a
bridge built of birch sticks we could walk over. This is how we
exited both days. It was Tolstoy's mother's favorite part, where she
would walk every day.
Above the English gardens near the
house were the French gardens, where the formal flower beds were,
where Tolstoy's father preferred to walk, still immaculately
maintained and here are where the mock orange and lilac were.
There was a crooked old pine you could
see from the study window, which must have been there. But his most
long lasting study looked out on the lilac bushes, I didn't expect
that.
We found the well, a spring and I
washed my face, it was on the other side of a silent pine wood, where
you could walk and hear the stillness, past where most people were,
with a floor of moss and birch bark and pine needles. Mushrooms
sprouted.
The house we got an incredibly sweet
English speaking tour guide. She told us so many stories and answered
our numerous questions with grace. We were slow enough she let other
tour groups go past. We toured the school which had limited artifacts
and was a bit story of his lifeish, and the house which had
incredible artifacts.
Busts and statues and sketches his
friends had done of him. His daughter's artwork. Portraits of his
family back three generations. The original portraits done of him,
the famous ones that are on the cover of his books. It was
incredible. The drawing room set up with the furniture, so you could
see how they set up the salons. The piano where people would play
Chopin, Beethoven which would make him weep. Even when he decided
music was sensuous and he wanted it no more. The gymnastic equipment
set up outside where he did gymnastics every day until he was like
70.
Sonia's writing desk next to the door,
between the public drawing room and the family one. It was so tiny,
so modest, where such great work was done, where she copied out Anna
Karenina 7 times. Her tiny desk where she laboured at the estate
accounts, every day, for 50 years, itemising carefully, probably
where she itemised everything after his death. Just a little inkwell,
room for two pages.
And his books in every room his books,
not like Nabokov's scattered to the wind, the whole collection
lovingly preserved. The revolution came to this house, but the
peasants did not want to destroy the great man and they set up a
guard around it. The Nazi's came, I don't know what stayed their
hands, but the Soviets made it a national museum, and his daughter
worked with them, her sacrifice, she turned it over to the state,
gave up her claim, and they preserved it in the public trust,
destroyed nothing after all.
This grand estate and so it still is as
it was, the work of so many people, and so much universal respect.
You could read the titles of many of his books because he read in so
many languages. In the guest room there was a section of books about
him presented by friends, diplomats, the endless string of important
and interesting people who passed through this house, modest for a
lord with 8 children.
And his study. He had three studies,
they showed you all of them and set one up, the last one near his
bed, an old man's bed. His watch he wound every day was next to it,
his comb his razor. The peasant blouses he wore around, called
Tolstoys by the end.
And his desk, his large heavy wooden
desk, with the low stool, made for one of his children but with a
large cushion for him. And the couch, THE couch, the black leather
couch he was born on, that all his children were born on. The black
leather couch that was always in his study, that he kept always by
him, that he would sleep on when he worked too long. It looked just
like itself, its leather only slightly frayed. It was there his desk
was there everything was right there, and I trembled and near wept.
His study he stayed in the longest with
a view of the lilacs had a vaulted plaster roof like a root cellar or
a monk's chamber, but good light, he liked it because the walls were
so thick and he needed silence to work.
And of course for scholars they have so
many manuscripts too. With his insane annotations and reedits
scrawled all over. In his bedroom he kept portraits of some of his
children, and of Sonia when he married her, and in her middle life.
It was so beautiful, so so beautiful
and so like it was, with the birch and pine and fruit trees and
flowers and avenues and paths. It was like the bright space in his
heart, a home.
Trees
Birches rise like slender young girls
their white trunks delicately covered by coruscating leaves, like
eucalypts. The pine is darker, fir trees with tiny cones, dark dark
evergreens. Neither gets big, so they are all slender, all
multitudinous trunks with freefalling branches. Both of them have the
kind of drooping branches, 'dying with a dying fall,' like willows.
The trees are ghosts too, I had heard them written so many times and
when I saw them, I recognised them. There's a prospect of white
birches marching up to Tolstoy's house from the pond, past the
English garden, in which his mother would wander.
On the train, stands of trees
intersperse with farmlands and concrete block apartments and wooden
shacks. It is not as untouched as I thought it would be. There are
many little towns and homesteads and the stands of trees are small
and scattered between the fields strewn with wildflowers and the
hills strewn with birch and pine.
#Trainlife
So the Trans-siberian is going on the
long list of adventures I've had where people worry how you're going
to die, tie your door handles shut at night, watch out for the gangs
and stabbings, you must speak Russian, blahblahblah, also it takes
forever, friendships end, blahblah, that are just not true. Ok we
sprung for first class, but our cabin is lovely two little couchettes
and there's comfy pillows and included slippers, and second class is
just two more people on the top bunk which is more crowded but still,
and the dining cars are pretty with a full menu, some of which I can
eat, there are waitstaff, a selection of 5 beers, people are charging
their electronics in the hallway, we've made two sets of train
friends on three trains. Where is the ruggedness, the intensity, the
danger? Only in war zones I fear, cause those are getting to be the
only places I haven't gone.
I feel like if I'd gotten on this train
with literally nothing to do I would still not be truly bored of
looking at the trees through the window by the end.
Ok so the cabins are lovely and we've
shut down the restaurant car with new train friends twice, the second
time staying out til like 2 in the morning. That's all been fun, and
also feels.
I love being on the train, feeling the
movement, and the first night it rocked me to sleep in the night, the
most rested I'd been for ages, after a long kerfuffle of getting on
the train where we missed our first one and had to pay a bunch of
fees and get on six hours later and argue in a lot of russian and run
with our bags down the platform with tears in our eyes as the train
pulled away, but then it did pull away. And we were free, and I have
felt the soft movement and scrolling scrub forests as a part of my
trip more than a transition, a real part of life I'm not tired of
when I leave it.
I read Tolstoy all at once, but I've
been trickling Dostoevsky through my life, I read the Idiot in
Vietnam, at the leprosy colony. I read house of the dead here, or am
reading.
Yeketarinburg
Yekatarinburg is on the line between
Europe and Asia, and we went to that line. To get here we have
crossed the continent line.
It also has the church where the
Romanovs were killed in the revolution. It was a house at the time
but they built the church on the spot and canonized the Romanovs in
modern times. It was pretty spec, extra gold as you do, and some
monks were on a tour and started a hymn while we were there. Also it
was called the church of the spilled blood like the last one we saw
in petersburg where Alexander II was killed.
And we did a bit of going to bed early
and getting up late, only there a couple of days, there was probably
a little more of this town than we saw though we did like every
sight.
An unusual thing is it was a college
town so a bunch of super friendly semi locals proliferated.
Omsk
Omsk was where Dostoevsky was
imprisoned. The Petrovists were a group that advocated rights to the
serfs and some of them (including D, and maybe) the violent overthrow
of the government but you know the French revolutions so Nicholas I
was pretty sketch, and then he read aloud a letter Belinsky's letter
to Gogol and he got sent to Siberia. The whole group was taken to
Peter and Paul fortress (St Petersburg but I didn't make it there
next time hey) where three of them were mock executed. Dostoevsky was
next in line. The ghost of this follows him through every story.
So he went for 6 years to Siberia, some
time commuted to get it down to that. And lived in a prison colony …
he didn't get back for 9 years, and he published House of the Dead in
the 10th.
But nothing is there anymore. Not the
prison colony or where he was held, we saw the museum but it wasn't
much, but the town was lovely, about to celebrate its 300th
anniversary and redoing parks and avenues. We spent some time
profitably wandering and seeing the cathedral and the streets and
playing pokemon and doing laundry and talking. But in three days we
probably had more time than we needed for the town.
Literature
Petersburg is full of ghosts. Gogol,
Dostoevsky, Nabokov, even Tolstoy write this city. So there are two
things, one is that they write, and then you see, and you recognise
it. And the second way, that the streets you wander are the same
streets, the same names, the same buildings they walked down. You see
the world through their eyes.
My mom and I slipped out one day while
everyone else was still asleep and made it to Haymarket square where
Raskolnikov knelt down and begged for forgiveness, and walked from
there to Dostoevsky's house. Now when I say Dostoevsky's house, he
lived in 10 different places in Petersburg and moved around a ton.
Three of them were on the same road though, and he wrote the Gambler
and Crime and Punishment and so much. And Crime and Punishment was
the key one, the one I understood anew from being here. Because
Raskolnikovs house is around the corner from his, a corner he walked
looking up at the garrets and decided which one he would live in,
which basement the landlady, which first floor his friend. The
plaster was broken on the top corner where he was. And catty corner
to D's house is Sonia's house, like I think you could see her window
from his. As he wrote as he did. And then you can walk past Sonia's
house to where he would commit the murder, along Gribdoyev canal and
we stayed off the same canal, across the bridge where he agonised and
thought of throwing the packet over but then he didn't he hid it
under a stone and further to where he killed the moneylender, and
there's a courtyard, fenced, where the construction would have been
set up that covered his crime, where the workmen would have been
milling. And I imagined all of his wanderings to be much further, but
no they are all there in the few blocks he would have wound himself
around and around. In his neighborhood where he lived. To see it all,
so small so ungrand, changes my reading of the book I think, but I
will have to read it again to know, it's been years.
The day my mom was sick, Jes and
Harmony and I went to another major cathedral and Nabokov's house.
Talk about your ghosts, you know for Nabokov his childhood and this
childhood home loomed so large. And they had things like his chess
problems and books they had reclaimed from his collection and his
butterfly collection. Though you know he never could go back and the
library was seized and sold and the ones that have been recollected
it's years later, he talked about finding one of the books in a used
bookshop in London. How did it get there? What are the chances of
crossing paths with it again? How would it feel to find it and to
find it on the terms that it is not yours? The house itself, so
beautiful, wood inlay on the ceiling and walls, and so detailed, and
again, I recognised it when I saw it, like seeing something you have
seen in a dream.
And you know Nabokov, he drew an
imaginary butterfly on all his books and dedicated it to his wife
vera, and he would give each a genus and species and the imaginary
butterflies fit into the real imagined genus and species.
And of course Yasnaya Polyana.
