Евгений Водолазкин - Solovyov and Larionov

Solovyov’s fate is known, however, and, according to the unanimous opinion of his colleagues, it was up to him to replace his drop-out associate. Only a few months after entering graduate school, Solovyov delivered a paper at a conference: ‘Studying the Life and Activity of General Larionov: Conclusions and Outlooks.’

The conclusions that Solovyov drew and the outlooks he summarized made a most favorable impression on the scholarly public. The paper testified not only to the young researcher’s well-organized mind but also, in equal measure, to his deep insight into the topic. The climax of the paper, which evoked extraordinary animation in the hall, was his introduction of corrections to data in Dupont’s monograph that had been considered unshakable until that day.

And so, it turned out that there were only 469 soldiers on record in the 34th Infantry Division of the 136th Taganrog Regiment, not the 483 soldiers Dupont asserted. It also emerged that the French researcher had, on the other hand, reduced the number of soldiers in the 2nd Native Division of the Combined Cavalier Brigade to 720 (the true number was 778). Dupont did not shed full light on the role of Colonel Yakov Noga (1878–?) in the Crimean campaign; however, the officer’s level of education had clearly been overstated: the French researcher mistakenly indicated that Noga graduated from the Vladimir and Kiev cadet corps, though he graduated only from the Vladimir (named for Saint Vladimir) Kiev Cadet Corps. Solovyov set forth a series of more minor quibbles with the French monograph, but in this case one must think it permissible to limit discussion to the examples cited above. Even they are enough to characterize the quality of the young scholar’s work and his unwillingness to blindly trust his predecessors’ authority.

This was Solovyov’s finest hour. Dupont hid behind a marble column in the conference hall as she listened to Solovyov’s paper. According to the accounts of those who saw her at that moment, the French historian’s eyes were brimming with tears. A person less dedicated to scholarship might have been offended by all the corrections that Solovyov introduced. That person might have become embittered or, who knows, shrugged their shoulders and snorted with disdain. Or said, let us suppose, that the specified clarifications held an extremely relative value in explaining the Crimean events of 1920. But Dupont was not that sort of person. At Solovyov’s ‘Thank you for your attention,’ she ran out from behind the column and embraced the presenter. Was that ardent scholarly embrace—which combined sobbing and smudged mascara and a prickly mustache—not a triumph of sincere values and evidence of the sanctity of the great international solidarity of researchers?

Standing behind the lectern, her faced streaked with mascara, Dupont recalled everyone who had devoted themselves to researching the post-revolutionary period at various times. She referred, with particular emotion, to Ieronim A. Ratsimor, who had conceived of, but not managed to complete, the monumental Encyclopedia of the Civil War .

‘He died on the letter K ,’ Dupont said of the deceased, ‘but if he could have held on for just one more letter, our level of knowledge about General Larionov would have been different, completely different. But now we see,’ and with these words the researcher once again drew Solovyov to herself, ‘our worthy successor. Now we can feel calm about leaving.’

The polite Solovyov initially wanted to object to what Dupont had said, to ask that henceforth she continue engaging in the work that was so important to everyone, but she would not allow it. With a sweep of her huge hand, she seemed to conjure out of thin air her monograph about the general, which she then forcefully pressed to Solovyov’s chest. After kissing him again in parting, she marched across the conference hall and vanished into the duskiness of a corridor.

She called him from Paris. Positively everything about the young researcher interested her: his views on history overall, his biases in terms of methodology, and even—this was completely unexpected—his material standing. Unlike all the other areas, Solovyov found no intelligible answer to her question about the matter. Dupont herself deduced the reality of the Russian scholar’s material standing: it was simply lacking.

Stunned by that circumstance, Dupont delved into the reasons for such a somber state of affairs. Standing firm on determinist positions, the representative of French historical scholarship lined up a long cause-and-effect chain. There is no point in citing it in full: the events Dupont referred to are well known to any Russian schoolchild, though perhaps it is worth dwelling on several fundamental principles that are characteristic of this chain.

According to Dupont, several factors determined our society’s advancement, with key roles played by an insufficient propensity for labor, an inclination for appropriating another’s property, and a heightened sense of justice. The cause-and-effect chain that had formed within the French researcher’s head finally coiled into a circle that she recognized, on second thought, as vicious.

The state of affairs she depicted did not, in fact, seem rosy: appropriation of another’s property intensified—to an extreme—a sense of justice within society, which in turn sharply reduced the society’s propensity for labor. Needless to say, the latter circumstance could not help but stimulate an inclination for appropriating another’s property and that automatically led to an even more heightened sense of justice and even less propensity for labor. It was within this context that Dupont examined the destructive Russian revolutions, the many-year rule of Communists (no less destructive, according to her assessment), and a whole series of other events.

That combination of factors was combustible on its own (‘ Molotoff cocktail! ’ Dupont sighed), and was aggravated by a personal factor. A series of figures proceeding along Russian history’s teetering stage had managed to push the contradictions to extremes. In the French scholar’s view, president Boris Yeltsin occupied a special place among them and had obviously misused his skills as an orchestra conductor. The success of his Berlin performance made him so giddy that he thought of nothing but the conductor’s baton from then on. Under that baton’s light stroke, the appropriation of another’s property finally reached the point where the sense of justice was no longer intensifying and the propensity for labor was no longer decreasing. As far as Yeltsin’s decisive manner for problem-solving went, Dupont characterized it in her article ‘The Headless Horseman’, published in Sobriety and Culture in 1999, as a typical cavalry charge.

There is no doubt that Dupont became entangled in a whole series of questions while forming her chain of cause-and-effect. For example, she demonstrated an overt exaggeration of the role of the individual in history (it probably comes as no surprise that Dupont’s political views were staunchly de Gaullist), most likely brought on because the history she herself was working on was the history of a general. Beyond that, the dialectic of the necessary and the accidental—which is so important for a correct assessment of historical events—became a stumbling block for her. She simply could not figure that out by using Russian history. At some point, she began to see that necessity was accidental in our country to a certain degree. In other words, she could not manage to distinctly formulate the reason behind Solovyov’s squalid existence. And so Dupont transferred all her irrepressible energy to something more consequential. She replaced her search for answers to Russia’s accursed questions with a search for funds for the young scholar’s needs.