Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

Even if Malevin was a real person and he had advanced his ideas with some sincerity, it seemed deeply unlikely that he could have believed in their application. In 1946, the memory of war was traumatically fresh. The Soviet Union was rebuilding itself. The country surely couldn’t afford a costly renewal of Fedorov’s flirtation with god-building. My instinct was that the man was a pure research scientist, in love with the elegance of his theories.

*

I met Vera the next day by the statue of Pushkin in Pushkin Square. It’s a traditional spot for romantic assignations, but that wasn’t why Vera had chosen it. There was a political rally taking place in a cordoned-off area inside the square.

‘More crowds,’ she said. ‘It’s better. We can hide in plain sight.’

I told her what I’d felt about the article.

She granted that I was right about Malevin, but she pointed out that from the 1930s onwards, the personality cults around Lenin and Stalin had distorted the priorities of Soviet science. The most famous example of this is Trofim Lysenko, whose ideas about genetics were championed not because they were right, but because they seemed to confirm Marxist theory.

‘And in the case of Malevin,’ she said, as we weaved through the angry pensioners waving placards, ‘his ideas seemed to offer a possibility of increasing the health and effectiveness of our leaders. As a result it suddenly generated huge interest from our top scientific cadres.’

She said that in 1951, Soviet scientists led by Malevin himself had attempted to apply the principles of his theoretical design to human subjects.

‘What happened?’

‘It’s best for you to ask him yourself.’ With a studied casualness, she handed me a small hardback book, a copy of Mandelstam’s poems that she had bought for a couple of hundred roubles in the metro. Inside was a train ticket to Arkhangelsk.

‘Is it safe for me to see him? You’re not worried?’

‘Yurii Olegovich is no longer part of this work.’ The slightly old-fashioned way she referred to him, by his first name and patronymic, suggested a deep residual respect for the man. ‘He’s retired, basically forgotten. Travelling by train there is very little risk.’

‘Will he speak to me?’

‘He’s proud of his work, he’s furious with his son. He loves an audience.’

Looking back on our conversations, I realise I had never been so comprehensively seduced. Vera not only respected and condoned my scepticism, she said that the nature of what she was telling me was so improbable that she would suspect the sanity of anyone who accepted it unquestioningly. And she was tenacious too, in the most inexorable way: apparently soft, apparently reasonable, but unwavering. She made her case as though her life depended on it. I had a half-formed misgiving about spending more time away from home, far from Lucius and Sarah, but my curiosity was such that I never really hesitated about going.

Yaroslavl Station looked seedy in the evening light. Rumpled men were buying cans of beer from the kiosks as pick-me-ups. Pop music blared out of a snack bar. But inside my designated carriage there was a reassuring Soviet calm. The attendant took my ticket and showed me to a spotless two-berth compartment.

Less than an hour out of Moscow, the suburbs gave way to deep countryside. The train rumbled through it for almost twenty-four hours, crawling through forests and nameless wooden settlements whose quaint exteriors belied the hardscrabble lives of the people who lived in them. It was the middle of August, and by midnight, there was still enough light to read by. I fell asleep in the early hours and slept until lunchtime. At six o’clock the next evening the train pulled into Arkhangelsk.

*

There was a flavour of Ronald Harbottle about him: his dingy flat with Caucasian rugs on the floor; the joyless balcony with stacked jars of cabbage and its view of the White Sea.

He was ninety years old, though he looked at least twenty years younger. When I attributed his longevity to his genetic endowment, he dismissed it with a flap of his hand. His shirt sleeves were neatly rolled up, revealing forearms as wiry and brown as tree roots.

‘Fairy tales for children! Mountain people have this reputation, but it’s entirely down to the clean water. Clean water is at the heart of everything. There are two kinds of culture: tea-drinking culture and brewing culture. Why? Water purification!’ He shook his finger at the ceiling. ‘The tragedy of Russia is that it is an Asiatic tea-drinking culture that believes it can drink alcohol!’

He was an exile from his beloved South, estranged from his son and no longer involved in the work that bore his name. He was not even allowed to examine his own research papers. They were still technically classified, along with all those other arcane Soviet studies that have no respectable western parallel: the psychics and remote viewers, the astroarchaeologists and the inheritors of Kozyrev’s woollier dealings with electromagnetism.

‘I was a disciple of Fedorov,’ he said. ‘At that time, no question seemed impossible. We asked, why must we die?’

I remember asking him in Russian if he would consider submitting to the Procedure himself. His reaction reminded me of the old joke about a competition where the first prize is, say, a week’s holiday in Skegness, and the second prize is two weeks’ holiday in Skegness. Two existences, he suggested, would be an appreciably worse deal than one. He was from a time and generation for whom existence was something to be survived.

My ne zhivem, my sushchestvuem — we don’t live, we exist — is a stoic lament so common in Russia as to verge on cliché.

Malevin said his first life had included forced exile from his homeland, the loss of his parents, the Second World War, eight years in the Gulag. Why should he expect the next one to be any better?

He told me that as a young scientist in the 1940s, his expertise lay in the biological origins of consciousness. In 1946, in a closed session of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Malevin had presented the paper which drew him to the attention of the most senior members of the scientific establishment.

‘It was a beautiful and intuitive idea,’ Malevin told me. ‘Consciousness is preceded and constructed by language itself.’

His vigour and optimism only faltered twice during our long conversation. The first time was when I mentioned the break-up of the Soviet Union. ‘A tragedy,’ he said, with the sudden gravity of someone recalling a bereavement. ‘ A coup d’état. The gas and oil industry stepped on the throat of the people. They held the Soviet Union to ransom.’

Earlier, he had proudly showed me his party card and told me he still regarded himself as a Soviet citizen.

The second time was when I asked him if he thought it was possible for his ideas to work in practice.

He fell silent for a while, and sat scratching his forearm. I noticed for the first time that his eyes were different colours: one was blue and the other brown.

When he spoke, there was a note of wistfulness in his voice. ‘Undoubtedly. You may know that we attempted something of this kind ourselves.’

I said Vera had referred to it.

Malevin looked grave. He said the first, doomed and premature attempts to apply his ideas took place in a closed research centre near the Aral Sea.

‘It was too early,’ he said. ‘We weren’t ready. But by then it was already a political question.’ He said that he had argued in his first paper that for the Procedure to be viable, you needed a large quantity of material — he gave the rather arbitrary figure of a hundred thousand words as a minimum. But just as important, he told me, was its range. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together to emphasise the significance of tone and texture. ‘Subtleties,’ he said. ‘Details.’