“With a clear smile nature through the dream greets the morning of the year»
By Kirill Privalov
«Skipping-Rope» was the title of Agniya Barto’s merry poem about a children’s game with a skipping-rope, which puts you in a great mood. Perhaps it is because these lines are about spring.
It’s spring, spring outside,
Spring days!
Like birds, tram bells
Trill out their song…
I memorized this poem in the second form and remembered it for the rest of my life. Spring is my favourite season. Why? It would seem obvious: spring is the awakening of nature; it is sunny, fine days that lengthen with each morning awakening…
In my case everything is much more thisworldly and trivial. The fact is that my birthday is in March! Now, as years have passed, I perceive every such personal holiday as a reminder that merciless time that rules us is flying by too fast. But then, in my childhood, when hours and days seemed to be endless, my birthday was associated not only with presents, but also with sweet dishes, the unconditional queen of which was… kartoshka [the Russian for “potato” and “potatoes”]! No, not usual potatoes that we buy at a vegetable shop, black from the earth sticking to it, which we boil or fry, cook in the form of puree or chips… No! It was sweet kartoshka – a pastry that I adored and that only exists as a distant memory. We didn’t buy cakes and other confectionery delicacies for family holidays – they were too expensive and not always delicious. We preferred to make our own desserts either for educational purposes, or because my mother, a journalist and editor, did not have free time. So she involved me in making sweet dishes. As teachers say, she probably brought me up by her own example. I admit, at first I was reluctant, and then I even began to enjoy culinary exercises in our small kitchen. All the more so since I was charged with such a responsible task as tasting. And now I still remember the unchanging holy order of cooking kartoshka dessert.
First we took vanilla-flavoured dried bread (it was easy to get it in Soviet bakeries) and, together with vanillin, it was put through a mincer with a handle that resembled an instrument of murder. For some reason my mother kept this huge, heavy mincer (as it seemed to me),, cast from the best cast iron, for a whole year in an old pillowcase in a mothballed cabinet in order for it to be solemnly born just in time for my birthday. (A curious detail: one day I went to Oscar Yakovlevich Rabin’s workshop in Paris, near the Pompidou Centre, and noticed a very familiar Soviet mincer screwed to the table; it turned out that the artist used this primitive kitchen tool as a model when doing a painting about the Gulag – people were sent by the regime to the “mincer” of repression).
So, let’s return to home-cooked kartoshka by my grandmother’s recipe. Half a pack of butter, a glass of warm milk, and two or three eggs (depending on their size) were added to the dried bread that had been put through the mincer… Apparently, there was also sugar, and something else appetizing that I can’t recollect now. All this was mixed thoroughly, turned into a homogeneous mass, and – here, please note, the main thing! – a large, full tablespoon of cognac was added (some people, as I was told, sometimes added vodka instead of it, but, I must admit, it is a banal blasphemy). After that the brown mass began to smell divine! All that remained was to wet our palms so that nothing would stick to them and start sculpting kartoshka desserts. As a result we got oblong “stones” (for some reason mine came out in different sizes), which we rolled in cocoa powder at the end of the process. And the homemade delicacy was ready! Next we would put it into the fridge!…
No one at home claimed the right of tasting the delicacy first, except for me, a young boy. And I wasn’t particularly eager to taste it first either: kartoshka was much tastier when cold – frozen and hard. These were not puff pastries for Napoleon cake (the French call this iconic cake mille feuille). Our puff pastries were eaten stealthily as the mother conjured up buttercream for the cake. This wonder of home-made treats was made on her own birthday, which was a week later than mine.
Oh goodness, how sweet the month of March is! Two days before my personal holiday it was my grandfather’s birthday.
Witness to the Truth
I do not remember the day when I first met Konstantin Yaseyevich Andronikov, a diplomat and a scholar, but I do know that it was in the spring. And I firmly remember that it was at St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Rue de Crimee in Paris.
Prince Andronikov used to be the rector of this Institute, and when I came to interview him, he just gave lectures to students from different countries. As he told me himself: «I’m an expert on the Easter rite.» It is prestigious to teach at an amazing educational institution, among whose professors were Fr Sergei Bulgakov and Ivan Ilyin, Vasily Zenkovsky and Vladimir Lossky; where the rector was Anton Kartashev, whose Essays on the History of the Russian Church in two volumes were my reference books; where Mikhail Osorgin conducted the student choir, for which Alexander Glazunov himself composed liturgical works…
My God, what great names! Konstantin Yaseyevich showed me the lecture halls of the Institute, which had been the only Russian theological school in the whole world until 1944, when the Orthodox Theological Institute resumed its work in the Soviet Union and two years later was transformed into the Moscow Theological Academy. He also took me to the hall of residence, which immediately reminded me that at the Moscow State University. And he said, as if by accident, «As I understand it, you are baptised.» I had to lower my eyes and confess: «No, Konstantin Yaseyevich… a sincere believer, but not baptised.» He stretched his head up from his very long neck, looked at me and said in a conciliatory way, «I see… The Soviet legacy…» and I had no idea what to say. That my parents were baptised in childhood by my grandparents’ efforts, but they didn’t go to church? That I, who had studied history with delight since childhood, had always been secretly interested in religion, and during my first trip to France I went to a Russian shop in Paris opposite the church in Rue Daru and bought a pocket Bible on tissue paper? That my grandmother, who raised me (a village woman), once confessed: «There is no God – I know it for sure! My Orenburg headscarf was once stolen in church during Matins…»?
Sensing my confusion, Andronikov said, «Come to Rue de Crimee the day after tomorrow. Easter service will be celebrated at the church… You will be interested.» That’s what I did, and I never regretted it.
It was a warm, summer April day. A wonderful, truly festive service! And then the procession of the cross began. The church (a former German Protestant chapel), rebuilt in the mid-1920s at the request of Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) with the copper money of Russian people, was buried in green. The procession walked round the church to the singing and ringing of bells, and juicy, extremely fragrant, heavy lilac brushes dropped dew onto our faces. There was happiness, unity, and an amazing sense of true Christian fellowship…
My wife and I, in a tight line of like-minded people, carried candles carefully, shielding them with our palms from the breeze. We exchanged glances and realised that we wanted to say to each other, «Let’s get baptised together!»
A few days later I met Konstantin Yaseyevich again. This time at his home, near the Parc Montsouris public park in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. We talked for a long time. Andronikov recalled that he used to be an interpreter for Presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, and how President Valery Giscard d’Estaing sacked him after Konstantin Yaseyevich had refused to lay wreaths at Lenin’s mausoleum as a member of the French delegation…
As a result of that conversation my newspaper article about this remarkable man, Prince Andronikov, was born. At that time I titled the interview in the spirit of the essays on early Christians: «Witness to the Truth.»
We parted as friends. At parting, Andronikov, to whom I had revealed our mutual desire to get baptised, said: «Don’t rush! You’d better prepare for such an important event… I’ll introduce you to my student and colleague at the Institute, Father Nikolaj Cernokrak, a Serb from Krajina who speaks excellent Russian, and his wife is Russian.» And so it happened: for over a year we communicated with Fr Nikolaj and spoke with him about the Bible and Christ’s works. We were preparing for our Baptisms.
We decided to get baptised at the Church of St Seraphim of Sarov in Rue Lecourbe. As I was walking with my little son through the 15th arrondissement of Paris, where «white Russians» had long settled (where, as I remember, in small shops you could find «le cottage cheese», a rare kind of food in France), I spotted the entrance to an arch, next to which there was a sign on the house wall with the service times of an Orthodox church. I went in and saw a small miracle: a wooden church (it was built and consecrated in 1933) with sky-coloured rounded domes and two monumental trees piercing the roof.
Over time we got to know the parishioners. And we made friends with Tatiana Dmitrievna Zhigmanovskaya, a native of Odessa and the churchwarden of the church, who had once been abducted by Romanian invaders. This strong woman, who was rapidly losing her eyesight, but still attended St Seraphim’s Church in Paris, kindly agreed to become our godmother. Naturally, I wanted to invite Andronikov to become our godfather. I kept calling Konstantin Yaseyevich, but no one picked up the phone. I told Fr Nikolaj about it, and he was surprised: «It’s been a month since Konstantin Yaseyevich departed to God…» With my business trips and traveling I had missed that sad event and had not attended his funeral. Such a great pity!
We postponed our Baptisms till April: that’s when they took place. Thanks to this event we understood Victor Hugo’s words in a new way: «If people didn’t love each other, I wouldn’t see any point in spring.»
«Dusmanchik» and «snegogon»
Ah, these early spring holidays! They include International Women’s Day on 8 March, Good Deeds Day on 15 March, World Health Day on 7 April, and Cosmonautics Day (in Russia) on 12 April, to name just a few.
Among this host of spring holidays World Poetry Day, which is marked on 21 March, is the closest to my heart. In the USSR it was the beginning of the spring school holidays, which were timed to coincide with Book Week in the Soviet media. It’s a useful thing! It is not for nothing that Emmanuel Kant stated: «Of all the arts poetry is the highest.»
I recall my interview with the Spaniard Federico Mayor. Director General of UNESCO, he was not the most proud of his high international position, but of the fact that he was a poet: «Poetry is the embodiment of beauty, and if we believe Dostoevsky, beauty will save the world.»
The history of the adoption of Poetry Day is interesting. The initiative came from the American poet Tessa Sweazy Webb. In 1938, at her suggestion and after a long campaign in the American state of Ohio, where she lived and worked, 15 October, the birthday of the remarkable ancient Roman poet Virgil, was declared Poetry Day. At first, it was only in Ohio, but later other American states and other countries followed its example. This went on for many years, until in 1999 UNESCO decided to replace Virgil Day with World Poetry Day. And a beautiful spring day was chosen for this – 21 March. Our contemporaries preferred poetry to the majestic Latin of Virgil with its beautiful Bucolic, Georgics and Aeneid as a means of maintaining linguistic diversity and uniting representatives of different cultures. The 30th UNESCO General Conference in Paris adopted it. And that’s great!
On World Poetry Day literary museums and libraries hold poetry evenings, writers speak on radio and TV, and poetry collections are released specifically for this date… And in general, on this day we reflect on the need to preserve the correct, literate and literary language.
«Our native language is the greatest and most precious national treasure after life,» the academician Alain Decaux, who at one time headed an institution in the Fifth Republic specialising in the dissemination of the speaking of French and in protecting the language of Voltaire and Hugo from Anglo–Americanisms, told me. He was right: this charming sage, writer, popularizer of history, and journalist. When one country was invaded by another, the first thing the invaders did was to destroy the native language of the defeated. «The language is the spirit of the people, and it has its own rules of existence,» Monsieur Decaux argued. «They are unique not only in every country, but even in every big city.» Indeed, there are «batons» [the Russian for “bread stick”]and «bordyurs» [the Russian for “street curb”]in Moscow, and «bulkas» and «porebriks» meaning the same in St Petersburg. Further – more! Many districts of Paris have their own distinct language. For instance, a glass of beer in Montmartre is «un baron», and in Montparnasse it is «un formidable».
True, these remarks are for humour, but language belongs not only to us, but also to the time and place we exist in. Alexandre Dumas Pere believed that belonging to the same neighbourhood with its language was equal to a noble rank and an exquisite education.
I recall my meeting with Nina Nikolaevna Berberova in Rue de Vigne (“Vineyard Street”) of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, in the flat of Alexandra Petrovna Pletneva–Butan. Among other things, we discussed the Russian language with this marvellous author (my material, in which Berberova’s book of memoirs, The Italics Are Mine, was played out, was entitled, Not Only Italics). She gave me an example from her Biancourt Holidays and other stories replete with the slang of numerous former soldiers and officers of the Volunteer Army working at the Renault factories in Boulogne-Billancourt, especially in the foundry: «Just think about it and try to make it out! Imagine an ad right on the window: ‘There is a libernaya [the French for “vacant” is “libre”]room.’ When I tried to convince the author of this announcement that it was easier to write: ‘There is a vacant [“svobodnaya” in Russian] room,’ the person got offended and called on me to ‘talk with dusmanchik’. That is, he asked me to speak gently and tenderly… People adjust a foreign language to themselves, digest it, and choose only what suits them. Imagine: ‘Buabulonsky Forest’! In French it is bois de Boulogne, but our compatriot in Paris had successfully combined the French language with the Nizhny Novgorod dialect!»
On World Poetry Day I would like to reflect on the need to protect and safeguard the Russian language once again. «Once the writer Dovid Knut asked Vladislav Felicianovich for advice,” Berberova recalled her life in France with the wonderful Russian writer Khodasevich. “Khodasevich took the manuscript that the young man had handed him, and a week later he returned it with disgust. He said, ‘Please, no offence, but I’ve corrected a lot of things… Understand, my friend: this is not the way we speak in Russian.’ And Dovid Knut replied: ‘But in Chisinau we speak this way!’ He was a very nice man, but he didn’t understand that you can’t adjust the language to your tastes.»
Indeed, if our ancestors had tried to do it with their language, March and April would have been called quite differently. The names of both months [in Russian as well as in English]take us back to the days of Ancient Rome. The name of April derives from the Latin “aperire” – «to open» (shrubs and flowers blossomed at that time in Ancient Rome), and March derived its name after the Roman god Mars… Meanwhile, our ancestors had names for the first months of spring with deep meaning that were more understandable to posterity. Thus, March was called «zimobor» [he who takes away winter], «sukhoy» [dry]or «protalnik» [a derivative from a word meaning a “thawed patch”]. Indeed, earth, warmed by the sun, welcoming the generous warmth of the god Yarilo, evaporated the snow moisture, and thawed patches appeared. April, when the snow melts in large amounts, was called «snegogon» [he who drives away snow]or «tsveten» [from the verb “to blossom”]: trees stand with a halo of melted snowdrifts at their roots, with the first flowers breaking through their sticky leaves. And in the south-west of Russia, closer to Belarus and the Ukraine, April was called «berezen» [a derivative from the word “birch”]: the sap moves in birches, and people begin to prepare for sowing… April will banish anyone from lying on the stove, as the saying goes.
Let’s get ready for the fruits of spring weather!
