Read Online Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman - Free Book Online
Authors: Vasily Grossman
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tree trunk with nothing around it but dead, dusty earth.
He wanted to speak about people whom Ivan Grigoryevich did not know. These were the people linked to the real events of his life. Talking about them, he would have been close to talking about what really mattered—close to talking about himself.
Yes, it was at moments like this that he needed to rid himself of that little worm, that sense of guilt that gnaws at every intellectual—that sense of the illegitimacy of all the wonderful things that had happened to him. What he wanted was not to repent but to assert.
And he began to talk of the people who had failed to value or understand him, who had benevolently despised him—and whom he was now doing everything within his power to help.
“Kolenka!” Maria Pavlovna interrupted suddenly. “Tell him about Anya Zamkovskaya.”
Husband and wife at once sensed Ivan Grigoryevich’s excitement.
“She wrote to you, didn’t she?” asked Nikolay Andreyevich.
“My last letter from her was eighteen years ago.”
“Yes, yes, she’s married. Her husband’s a physical chemist...his work has to do with those nuclear matters. They live in Leningrad—yes, in the same apartment where she used to live with her family. Usually we bump into her when we’re on holiday, in the autumn...At first she always used to ask after you, but after the war, to be honest, she stopped.”
Ivan Grigoryevich coughed and said in a hoarse voice, “I thought she must have died. She stopped writing.”
“Well, as I was saying about Mandelstam,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “Remember old Zaozersky? Mandelstam was his favorite student. Zaozersky was destroyed in 1937. The man had traveled abroad a lot; he’d associated freely with émigrés and defectors, with people like Ipatyev and Chichibabin...And as for Mandelstam, well, he got off to a brilliant start, but I’ve told you what happened to him in the end, how he was branded a cosmopolitan, and so on and so forth...All that, to be honest with you, is nonsense, of course—but thanks to Zaozersky he really was hand in glove with all his European and American scientific contacts.”
For a moment Nikolay Andreyevich genuinely thought that he was saying all this not for his own sake but for Ivan’s sake. Ivan, after all, needed to be brought up-to-date: the beliefs he lived by were childish and no longer relevant. And then he found himself thinking, “God, how false I am! Falsity and hypocrisy have eaten right into my soul.”
He looked at Ivan’s brown, calm hands, and began to explain. “You probably don’t have a clear understanding of this new terminology: ‘cosmopolitanism,’ ‘bourgeois nationalism,’ ‘point five in the questionnaire.’ ‘Cosmopolitanism’ means more or less what ‘participation in a monarchist plot’ meant long ago, in the days of the First Congress of the Comintern. Although you must have come across all these people in the camps. Those who took the place of those who were removed—they too were removed. They too must have joined you there in the barracks. But I don’t think we need worry about all that any longer—the process of substitution has been completed. And now there has been a majestic yet simple change in our lives: the national is no longer confined to the realm of form—during these last decades it has taken over the realm of content . But many people are unable to understand this simplicity. After all, if you kick a man out of the house, he’s hardly likely to see it as a consequence of the laws of history; all he sees is an absurd mistake. But the fact remains: our scientists and engineers have created Russian Soviet planes, Russian uranium reactors, Russian electronic computing machines—and our sovereignty in these realms has to be accompanied by political sovereignty. Russianness has entered the realm of content; it has become the basis, the foundation.”
He went on to say how much he hated the Black Hundreds , the
He wanted to speak about people whom Ivan Grigoryevich did not know. These were the people linked to the real events of his life. Talking about them, he would have been close to talking about what really mattered—close to talking about himself.
Yes, it was at moments like this that he needed to rid himself of that little worm, that sense of guilt that gnaws at every intellectual—that sense of the illegitimacy of all the wonderful things that had happened to him. What he wanted was not to repent but to assert.
And he began to talk of the people who had failed to value or understand him, who had benevolently despised him—and whom he was now doing everything within his power to help.
“Kolenka!” Maria Pavlovna interrupted suddenly. “Tell him about Anya Zamkovskaya.”
Husband and wife at once sensed Ivan Grigoryevich’s excitement.
“She wrote to you, didn’t she?” asked Nikolay Andreyevich.
“My last letter from her was eighteen years ago.”
“Yes, yes, she’s married. Her husband’s a physical chemist...his work has to do with those nuclear matters. They live in Leningrad—yes, in the same apartment where she used to live with her family. Usually we bump into her when we’re on holiday, in the autumn...At first she always used to ask after you, but after the war, to be honest, she stopped.”
Ivan Grigoryevich coughed and said in a hoarse voice, “I thought she must have died. She stopped writing.”
“Well, as I was saying about Mandelstam,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “Remember old Zaozersky? Mandelstam was his favorite student. Zaozersky was destroyed in 1937. The man had traveled abroad a lot; he’d associated freely with émigrés and defectors, with people like Ipatyev and Chichibabin...And as for Mandelstam, well, he got off to a brilliant start, but I’ve told you what happened to him in the end, how he was branded a cosmopolitan, and so on and so forth...All that, to be honest with you, is nonsense, of course—but thanks to Zaozersky he really was hand in glove with all his European and American scientific contacts.”
For a moment Nikolay Andreyevich genuinely thought that he was saying all this not for his own sake but for Ivan’s sake. Ivan, after all, needed to be brought up-to-date: the beliefs he lived by were childish and no longer relevant. And then he found himself thinking, “God, how false I am! Falsity and hypocrisy have eaten right into my soul.”
He looked at Ivan’s brown, calm hands, and began to explain. “You probably don’t have a clear understanding of this new terminology: ‘cosmopolitanism,’ ‘bourgeois nationalism,’ ‘point five in the questionnaire.’ ‘Cosmopolitanism’ means more or less what ‘participation in a monarchist plot’ meant long ago, in the days of the First Congress of the Comintern. Although you must have come across all these people in the camps. Those who took the place of those who were removed—they too were removed. They too must have joined you there in the barracks. But I don’t think we need worry about all that any longer—the process of substitution has been completed. And now there has been a majestic yet simple change in our lives: the national is no longer confined to the realm of form—during these last decades it has taken over the realm of content . But many people are unable to understand this simplicity. After all, if you kick a man out of the house, he’s hardly likely to see it as a consequence of the laws of history; all he sees is an absurd mistake. But the fact remains: our scientists and engineers have created Russian Soviet planes, Russian uranium reactors, Russian electronic computing machines—and our sovereignty in these realms has to be accompanied by political sovereignty. Russianness has entered the realm of content; it has become the basis, the foundation.”
He went on to say how much he hated the Black Hundreds , the
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