Mother Russia I

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 10^th.

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 300^th 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.