Евгений Водолазкин - Solovyov and Larionov

The paper was written very capably, using abundant factual material attested to by 102 footnotes. Prof. Nikolsky saw the paper’s narrative style—which seemed excessively emotional to him—as a minus. He requested that Solovyov remove rhetorical questions as well as passages that expressed the researcher’s attitude toward the Reds’ actions. From the professor’s point of view, the figures were the most eloquent part of the paper. In the final reckoning, they needed no detailed commentary.

In his fifth year of study, Solovyov wrote his diploma thesis on ‘The Role of Latvian Riflemen in the October Coup and Latvia’s Loss of Independence in 1939’. In his account, the two events reflected in the title turned out to have both a cause-and-effect relationship as well as, even more so, a moral and ethical relationship. According to Solovyov, by fighting on the coup plotters’ side, the Latvian riflemen were supporting a regime that also subsequently devoured Latvia, its independence, and the riflemen themselves. This time, his paper was not accompanied by rhetorical questions. There was minimal commentary.

Despite the young historian’s paradoxical thinking (or perhaps, actually, thanks to it), Prof. Nikolsky published the paper in the journal Past and Present in 1996. Several months later, a brief but forceful review of Solovyov’s article, signed by ‘The Council of Veterans’, appeared in Der Kampf , a popular Riga publication. Its authors saw no connection between the specified events and, for their part, discussed the possibility of an alternative course of history in 1939. They saw Latvia’s hypothetical future in the rosiest of hues.

Prof. Nikolsky considered it essential to stand up for his student under the circumstances and so published his own ‘Response to the Riga Veterans’ in Past and Present . He began with a theoretical introduction that validated the importance of the moral factor in history. In the scholar’s opinion, moral inferiority deprived states of the energy they needed for a trouble-free existence. The professor showed how this ravaged them from within, transforming them into empty shells flattened by the very first wind. Within this context, he examined the fall of the great empires of the ancient world and the modern age.

True to his theory regarding the absence of all-encompassing scholarly truths, the professor also indicated that it is only possible to speak of tendencies, not of rules. By way of exception, he offered the example of the English and Americans, who conducted separate talks with the Bolsheviks behind General Larionov’s back during that same year, 1920, and did not suffer in the least as a result. In the Petersburg professor’s opinion, distance, and the fact that both Anglo-Saxon states were surrounded by water, turned out to be the decisive factors in the matter’s happy outcome. The geographical factor also allowed those states to bide their time entering World War Two, until the circumstances had been clarified to some extent. Water played a deciding role in these cases; Nikolsky met Solovyov halfway here.

In making his conclusions, however, the professor admitted that his view of things might be excessively gloomy and Latvia’s big future really had been taken away from it. From Prof. Nikolsky’s point of view, his skepticism could be explained by the fact that historians deal primarily with the deceased and so are, for the most part, pessimists. The Russian professor concluded his essay unexpectedly, saying history is the science of the dead and there is little room there for the living.

Needless to say, the aphoristic form of that statement was intended, first and foremost, to underscore the necessity of maintaining a certain distance from the material under study. Even so, Solovyov’s advisor’s remark made an indelible impression on Solovyov. He was in a rather dejected condition when he entered the graduate program at the Institute of Russian History. The marble in the Large Conference Room, where he took his entrance exams, reminded him of an anatomical theater. Solovyov was able to come to terms with the historical figures awaiting his study only because they were still alive during the period of their activity.

Graduate student Kalyuzhny’s departure definitively saved Solovyov from a crisis in his worldview. Solovyov inherited from the general’s melancholic admirer not only a scholarly topic, but also one single bibliographical card and a fundamental research question: why did the general remain alive? The card contained—but of course!—data on Dupont’s book. Solovyov read the book and found the topic interesting and little-studied. On top of all that, General Larionov was absolutely dead and was, thus, a lawful object for scholarly research. Even under the strictest of historical measures, it was already possible to work with him.

But the general was not simply dead. Unlike many historical figures, even when he was alive, he had considered death to be an unavoidable fact of life.

‘Look at them,’ he would say about those figures, ‘they’re acting as if they don’t know that death awaits them.’

The general knew death awaited him. He was preparing for it as he marched in the foothills of the Carpathians and checked posts on the Perekop Isthmus. And afterwards, whenever someone knocked on his door late at night, the thought flashed through his mind, every time, that it was death knocking. And, yes, of course he was expecting death when he was an old man sitting on the jetty in his folding chair. He was surprised that it hadn’t come sooner, though he never regretted that.

The general was once photographed in a coffin. He stopped by a funeral home, bringing a photographer with him, and requested permission to use a coffin for a short time. They could not refuse him. The general smoothed the fold lines on his creased uniform, lay down in the coffin, crossed his arms on his chest, and closed his eyes. A photographer took several shots amidst the undertakers’ uneasy silence. The most successful shot is almost as renowned as the famous photo on the jetty. It accompanies the majority of publications about the general. Few people know the shot was taken during this prominent person’s life. Without suspecting the level of their own astuteness, some researchers have noted the absence of signs of death in the shot. Moreover, employing a figurativeness traditional for these purposes, they expressed opinions to the effect that it looked as if the general was sleeping. In reality, the general was not sleeping. Looking out from under his squinting eyelids, he was observing the reaction of those gathered and imagining what they might have said about him in the event of his actual death.

It is possible he was sorry that he would not see his own funeral and had thus decided to arrange a sort of rehearsal. It cannot be ruled out that this sort of conduct was an attempt to either deceive death (I died long ago, why bother looking for me?) or to hide from it. The general did not hide from death in his younger years, but people do change in old age…

Another explanation—one originating from the general’s long-standing and almost intimate relationship with death—appears more pertinent. Was what happened a way to flirt with death or—this is entirely possible, too—a manifestation of a particular elderly coquetry? It is impossible to answer these questions accurately now, just as it is impossible to reason in any reliable way about how life and death come together in someone’s fate. All that can be ascertained is that in the end the general met with his death. It found him without any particular effort when the time came.

In pondering the topic of death in General Larionov’s story, Solovyov sought to understand the psychology of a person for whom a preparedness to die is the first and primary requirement of their profession. Solovyov was attempting to get a feel for the state of a person on the eve of battle, when any action, thought, or recollection might be his last. Was it possible to grow accustomed to that? It is known that on the evenings before battle, the general gazed at himself for a long time in a pocket mirror as if he were attempting to memorize himself at the very end. He slowly turned his hand, as if he were imagining it lying in the next trench. The inseparability of the human body’s limbs seemed overstated to him on those evenings.