Евгений Водолазкин - Solovyov and Larionov

He was born by the train station bearing the unprepossessing name Kilometer 715 . The station was not very big, despite the three-digit numeral. There was no movie theater, no post office, not even a school. Nothing but six wooden houses stood along the railroad bed. He left that station shortly after his sixteenth birthday. He went to Petersburg, was accepted at the university, and began studying history. This was to be expected, considering the surname—Solovyov, just like the famous historian—with which he had been born.

Solovyov’s advisor at the university, Professor Nikolsky, called Solovyov a typical self-made man , who had come to the capital with a string of sledges bearing fish, but of course that was a joke. Petersburg had ceased being the capital long before Solovyov’s arrival in 1991, and no fish was ever to be found at Kilometer 715 . To the adolescent Solovyov’s great regret, there was neither a river nor even a pond there. Reading one book after another about maritime journeys, the future historian cursed his landlocked existence and decided to spend the remainder of his days—a rather considerable number at the time—at the place where land and sea met. The attraction of large bodies of water, along with his thirst for knowledge, settled his choice in favor of Petersburg. In other words, the comment about the fish sledges would have remained a joke if not for its emphasis on overcoming one’s initial circumstances; something elegantly stated in the English expression. Say what you will, but the historian Solovyov was a most genuine self-made man .

General Larionov (1882–1976) was another matter. He came into the world in Petersburg, in a family where being a military officer was hereditary. All of his relatives were officers, with the exception of the future general’s father, who served as the director of the railroad department. As a child, Larionov even had the good fortune to know his great-grandfather (there was a penchant for longevity in the family), who was, naturally, a general, too. He was a tall, straight-backed old man who had lost his leg back in the Battle of Borodino.

In the eyes of the young Larionov, every movement his great-grandfather made, even the very knock of his peg leg on the parquet floor, was filled with a special dignity. When nobody was watching, the child loved to lift his right foot up, traverse the room on his left leg, and recline on the sofa with a deep sigh, resting his arms on the back of the sofa like great-grandfather Larionov. Larionov’s grandfather and his lush-mustached uncles were not really any worse than his great-grandfather, but neither their gallant officer’s appearance nor their talent for eloquence (his great-grandfather was not a talker) could even begin to compete with the absence of a leg.

All that reconciled the child to his two-legged relatives was their abundance of medals. He liked a medal one of his uncles had received, For the suppression of the Polish rebellion , more than anything. The melody of the word combination fascinated the boy, who did not have the faintest idea about Poles. In light of the child’s obvious affinity for the medal, his uncle finally gave it to him. The boy wore this medal—along with the medal For the conquest of Shipka , which he received from another uncle—right up until the age of seven. The word Shipka certainly lost out to the word rebellion in terms of sonority but the beauty of the medal itself made up for its phonetic shortcomings. The child’s happiest moments were spent sitting among his officer relatives with the two medals on his chest.

These were still Russian officers of a bygone time. They knew how to use cutlery (including the fish knife, now forgotten), effortlessly kissed ladies’ hands, and performed numerous other courtesies unimaginable for officers of a later epoch. General Larionov had no need to overcome his circumstances. Quite the opposite: he needed only to absorb the qualities of his environs, to brim with them. Which is, in fact, what he did.

His inclination to become a general manifested itself in early childhood, when he began lining up wooden hussars in even rows on the floor before he had fully learned to walk. Seeing him engaged in this pursuit, those present uttered the only possible combination of words, ‘General Larionov.’ Ponder the naturalness of the union of those two words: they were made for one another, they were pronounced without a pause and became a united whole, flowing from one to the other, just as a rider and his horse become a united whole in battle. General Larionov. This was his first and only name among the family, and he became accustomed to it immediately and forever. General Larionov. Whenever the child heard that form of address, he stood and silently saluted. He did not learn to speak until he was three and a half years old.

What, one might ask, unites two such dissimilar individuals as the historian Solovyov and the General Larionov, if of course it is permissible to speak of uniting a budding young researcher and a battle-weary commander who, furthermore, is no longer of this earth? The answer lies at the surface: historian Solovyov was studying General Larionov’s activity. After graduating from St. Petersburg University, Solovyov began his graduate studies at the Institute of Russian History, where General Larionov became his dissertation topic. Based on entries in reference books, there is no reason to doubt that by 1996—that being the time under discussion—General Larionov already belonged wholly to Russian history.

Needless to say, Solovyov was not the first to devote himself to studying the famous general’s biography. Over the years, a couple of dozen scholarly articles had appeared at various times. They were devoted to various stages of Larionov’s life and, above all, the mysteries associated with him that have yet to be unraveled. Although the number of works appears considerable at first glance, it seems completely insufficient if compared to the interest that General Larionov has always inspired, both in Russia and overseas. The fact that the number of scholarly research works is significantly fewer than the number of novels, films, plays, etcetera, in which the general appears—either as a figure or as a prototype for a character—does not appear to be accidental. This state of affairs symbolizes, as it were, the predominance of mythology over positive knowledge in everything concerning the deceased.

Beyond that, critical analysis by French researcher Amélie Dupont has shown that the mythology has even penetrated various scholarly articles about the commander. Which explains why the topic of research becomes a minefield, to a certain extent, for anyone just beginning work on the subject. However, even those articles (and Dupont writes about this, too) in which the truth comes across, thanks to all the splendor of scholarly argumentation, shed light on such narrow problems and episodes, that the significance of the extracted and argued truth is reduced to nearly nothing. It is remarkable that Dupont’s work ( The Enigma of the Russian General , a book published in French and Russian) is still the sole monographic research dedicated to General Larionov. This circumstance emphasizes, yet again, the dearth of sources on the subject. The fact that the French researcher managed to collect material for a monograph is due exclusively to her selflessness and particular treatment of her topic, which she has called the topic of her life.

In reality, it is no exaggeration to say that Dupont was born to research the Russian commander. In her case, this was not a matter of the historian’s external features, something the scholarly community permits itself to mock, due to her height (187 centimeters) and the emergence of a mustache after the age of forty. It is known, after all, that barbs and jokes behind a prominent specialist’s back (Dupont is called mon general in certain narrow circles) are usually nothing more than a form of envy. Consequently, mentioning Dupont’s destiny for her designated topic is, above all, a reference to her unusual persistence, something without which it would essentially have been impossible to discover the tremendously important sources she subsequently published. And, truly, those who surmise that the emergence of the mustache that caused the inappropriate reaction in scholarly circles could be attributed, first and foremost, to the researcher’s fascination with her topic, were not far from the truth. For the sake of objectivity, however, it must be noted that General Larionov himself did not have a mustache.