A Russian Winter Evening at the Poet Theater
"I returned from Moscow through a Christmas postcard or an Andersen story, immaculate fields, muffled forests, a pale, sparkling light..."
This piece was written by my friend, Laurence Guillon, who left her native France and moved to Russia. Then she moved north of Moscow to the rural town of Pereslavl-Zalessky. She keeps an online journal of her adventures at her blog, Chroniques de Pereslavl.
I returned from Moscow through a Christmas postcard or an Andersen story, immaculate fields, muffled forests, a pale, sparkling light. It was minus eleven, minus twenty-five was announced, at night, in a few days.
There is one thing that brings me real consolation, in this cold and polar darkness, and that is taking out of the freezer a soup made with herbs from the garden, parsley whose scent remains intact, and also raspberries, of which I had almost forgotten the taste and which gives me a bit of summer. And now, the garden is beautiful even in winter, the trees and shrubs have grown, I have left many dried flowers in place, now adorned with white caps and shiny lace which underline the impetuous movements of a frozen life for a few months in a sleepy disorder.
In the other direction, I had to drive through a freezing snowstorm at thirty miles an hour. It took me four and a half hours to reach the street of Iouri and Dany, and there, with the paid parking system of the “smart city”, I was obliged to watch my watch, because it is impossible to pay for several hours in a row, a real racket. I also wondered how I was going to get back, if my car wouldn't disappear under the snowdrifts. And I swore to myself never to organize anything again between November 15 and March 15.
Because of the snow, many people could not come to my book presentation, and what's more, it hadn’t occurred to us that all this coincided with important services scheduled the same day at the local churches. It's difficult to reconcile everything, the parties, Iouri's plays, the moments when Dany rehearses or plays. And in summer, people went to their dachas.
Nevertheless, the evening in the magical atmosphere of the “Poet Theater”, with its brick wall and baroque chandeliers, was very warm. Everyone was very happy. I saw Sasha Viguilianskaïa, and his friends from Kourmysh, and also my dear Lyuba... Yuri welcomed me by saying:
“Laurence, you are a great writer, I assure you that by reading your extracts, I had a tear in my eye . And all of this, which is so Russian, and so full of love for Russia, is written by a French woman!”
I was extremely touched, that's the opinion of an expert!
He said all this again to the friends present, before reading extracts and commenting on them.
A lady, a professor of literature at the university, asked me on what I based my optimism towards Russia. I replied:
“My optimism is still quite moderate, because I am well aware that the same dark forces are at work here as in France, but what can I tell you? If your ark takes on water, we don't have another one anyway, as long as it continues to float...”
Liéna, Father Valentin's daughter, paints me a dismaying picture of Moscow, invaded by Central Asia, which I don't feel to that extent, but, she says, it's because I don't live there. Liéna is a bitter patriot. She sees only betrayal, corruption and incompetence everywhere. However, these are phenomena that have always existed in Russia, and Russia is still there. Her father thinks that she is obsessed with a certain type of information site, but Yuri thinks like her, while counting on the people, and, it seems to me, on a mysterious protection, although he doesn't really seem to be a believer.
I met Ukrainian journalist Igor Drouz. He told me that the 2014 Maidan in Ukraine was a filthy coup d'état, that we found the same zombies there as in Repin's painting, where we see people from good society, ladies, gentlemen, students, schoolchildren, galvanized by the Russian revolution, parading with the eyes of maniacs. How many then ended their lives against a wall, in the gulag, or as taxi drivers in European capitals?
I wonder, moreover, in what spirit Repin painted this picture. Did he want to pay homage to this crowd of morons, and did he unintentionally reflect their collective hysteria? Or was he himself beginning to realize where this was all leading?
Igor Druz saw this up close, before joining the resistance in Donbass, and now he is in Moscow. He was very interested in what I told him about May ‘68, its consequences, the universities of the ‘70s, the Trotskyists who were teeming there, the control of all these people over culture, the press, school, and consequently, opinion.
He told me:
“Revolutions — it’s not the bombers or the cutthroats who make them — it's all the useful idiots who let them happen out of snobbery, conformism, self-interest, resentment, envy, self-glorification, boredom, need for thrills, and recognition.”
“To stop the Russian revolution, or the Maidan, it would have been necessary to stop Tolstoy — for example, all the painters of the Wandering movement who were wallowing in miserabilism, many poets, intellectuals and people of the world infected with Westernism and addicted to great ideas who prepared these misfortunes for our people and were often their victims themselves.”
“Were Alexander III and Nicholas II going to repress their entire good society? The same thing happened with you, before the French revolution, and after ‘68. And it was not only these intellectuals and these distinguished nobles who paid, but the population who, as a whole, apart from the scum cities, did not participate in this, and did not understand anything about it.”
Dostoyevsky described the process very well in "The Demons", a book which should be studied in detail in Russian schools, and even French schools. But that's not likely to happen. I often fear that the process started during the Renaissance can no longer really be stopped. Slowed down, maybe, stopped, not sure, let's say that most of the combat happens on a metaphysical level. It saddens me that Russia was the victim, when its history had placed it on the periphery of Europe, which could have protected it, and it did protect it to a certain extent, while concentrating on it the detestation of the forces unleashed on the world by a misguided West.
Igor Drouz confirmed to me that all the satraps who have governed Ukraine since the fall of the USSR, in addition to being rotten, were hallucinatingly stupid, which could be seen in their facial features. As for Zelensky, he is a comedian who only thinks about getting money and coke up his nose. We see the result. I pray that what happens to him does not become the fate of all of Europe, nor of Russia itself.
After Igor Drouz, I met a young singer, Maria Zikhina. She sings in French, she loves French, she dreams of going to France, and she traveled two hours to come meet me in the café downstairs from Father Valentin's building. I found her pretty and friendly; she looked at me with a kind of tender wonder and suddenly said: “You are so nice…”
Having given a concert in Yaroslavl, she saw my year 17 chronicles on sale at Father Mikhail's, and bought them. That's how she got to me. She would like song lyrics, because she is tired of singing Edith Piaf, she would like to have a personal repertoire. I wrote songs, and after all, if she quotes the songwriter, I would gladly let her sing them, she is young, charming and in great shape, she has a lovely voice, and she will probably carry them better than me.
Source: Chroniques de Pereslavl (French)
Fascinating to see how individuals and groups of individuals transcend the failings of their communities as well as the stereotypes of far off places. Godliness with contentment... Godliness is not ignorance; it is very much informed and gives us every reason for discontentment with the world around us (reflecting on the comment re Tolstoy) and yet we are called to contentment.
Thank you, dear father.