To the Hermitage (42 page)
Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
And yet, and yet . . . this too seems a mask, an illusion, disguising something entirely different. Behind every symbol of elegance there’s a traffic in depravity. Bodies are sold cheaply for any purpose: serfdom, labour, sea-faring, sex. For all who stroll or strut, swagger or march, there are the thousands who tout and cringe, beg and grovel. For every grand palace housing this prince there are a thousand wooden apartment sheds, packed with screaming, teeming, fighting humanity: hovels that only the winter freeze prevents tumbling straight into the stewed waters of the canals. Winter has deepened suddenly. Stray cats shudder in their fur as they prowl through sodden streets. A smell of stale brine, like frozen bear-piss, comes unremittingly off the Neva. Snowflakes fall always – sometimes like a constant thin powder that seems to have the power of penetrating human skin, sometimes like a spilled cartload of balled wool that brings movement to a halt. Behind the arcades, each alley and entry is filled with unspeakable things: drunken human bundles, noisily copulating twosomes, maimed beggars, soliciting tots, decaying corpses. As shopkeepers compete for custom, here they compete for sins. In a world where existence itself is criminal, criminality is a serious form of existence.
Most big booming cities are much the same, he knows. The great capital of civilization he’s come from himself is capable of more than its fair share of crimes, horrors, executions. Paris and London famously stink with fetid open sewers. Venice has piss in every canal, excrement in every doorway, Lisbon shivers to its earthquakes as foundations tremble and its buildings topple to the ground. Moscow rots with disease and disorder, its buildings constantly burn or collapse. But Sankt Peterburg is a new city, a new idea. Its people claim to be from everywhere, and see the world afresh. Yet who are the true natives, the Russian people: the ones who are not émigré, Huguenot, Swiss, Prussian? Some claim they all descend from the noble Vikings, others say the Slavs. Yet half are Tartar, Cossack, oriental, speak a strange repertory of languages, write, when they are able to, an alphabet that has wandered up from a Mediterranean monastery, and which he’s already begun to replan and improve. If some are freemen of Europe, hunting an opportunity, many are the slaves off the steppes, brought here by imperial fiat or obligation, herded in off the Siberian wastes. Even nobles and gentlefolk are often brute souls, brought off distant estates by draconian law to serve at court or in the army, before disappearing into war, drunkenness, exile, servitude.
The strangeness reaches the inner sanctums of the court itself. It has its fine stock of learned and judicious men, from all parts. Clever Doctor Rogerson from Scotland, court physician; wise old one-eyed Euler from Switzerland, the greatest mathematician of the age. Yet here too nothing is what it seems. As Euler observes quietly one day at the academy: ‘In this country they hang people who talk too much.’
At court everything proceeds with freedom, levity, frankness, the very rules the Empress has set. Politeness and civility are watchwords; indeed Her Majesty forbids profane speech. Every few days there are polite galas, ballets, plays, where everyone dresses up to the nines, the Empress participates herself, clad from head to foot in silk and diamonds, cheeks unusually rouged. Yet every single thing hides its opposite. Behind curtained doorways, couples copulate freely, and maids of honour have little honour at all. Generals order a supply of nightly bed-companions, adultery is almost a matter of court instruction. All servants are spies, and the Secret Branch exercises a reign of fear and favour, making its own lists of those destined for a trip to Siberia or a cellar in the Peter and Paul.
So what is he doing, why is he here? Her Serene Majesty now really does seem to trust him. She respects his frank manners, takes pleasure in his flights of mental fancy. She accepts his whims, shows no resentment when he disputes with her, when he grows candid, angry, outraged. She bites back like a bright little terrier, throws his words back at him; in fact she makes it all feel like an elegant love match, a fine philosophical flirtation that can go on for hours. Most days now he doesn’t even leave the small library until dinner is about to be served, by which time a posse of angry diplomats and place-seekers stands impatiently beyond the curtains, nibbling titbits, supping the universal vodka, waiting till she lets him loose. Where does he stand? It’s just like a love-match, and she’s both frank and deceptive, sometimes a courtesan, sometimes an uncertain young girl. She’s always tempting him toward her bedchamber, conveniently tucked there just behind the library; then shutting the door with some sudden polite reasons of state as he seems almost there. A small push and . . . Does she want him, does she not? Should he do it, should he not? Is he good, is he bad? Who knows? He doesn’t . . .
Going to court one day, stepping only a little aside from the usual path, he goes inside Saint Isaac’s church, domed and strange-looking, a building that has always been in the process of building, ever since Great Peter dedicated it as his own. His first church in wood has come down, been moved half a block or so, risen again in stone. Yet, even as it’s being renewed, it seems already in a process of dilapidation, and sure enough it will be replaced again, as it says in the great Book of Destiny above. How odd that, wherever he walks here, whatever’s going up is already starting to come down. Now, staring at the images of Byzantium, the gilded altars, the dark-eyed mournful icons, the secret chambers around the shrine, our man sees the signs and symbols of a religion that’s nowhere near his own. How strange the faith is, how odd the building, formlessness aspiring to form, and everything about it bent somehow out of true. Such are the floods and quakes that have already shaped the city that its shapes are already battered and shattered. Window holes gape empty, pillars bend out of line, things that are solid melt into air . . .
Reminding him of an old truth he felt once, in times when he reported Paris art and architecture for the journals of Melchior Grimm. Any true building, any successful structure, is a grand and intimate harmony, all parts and arts linking into each other according to the best rules of proportion and arithmetic. He recalls the greatest example: Michelangelo’s dome for Saint Peter’s, Rome. It’s proof how a master, seeking the strongest shape, instinctively finds the most perfect, using all the lines of least resistance. The dome is the perfect number drawn from all the mathematical combinations. So the power of the building meets the mind of the artist who makes it, art, craft, nature and genius coming into exactness, as does the finest mathematician, the greatest clock-maker, the cleverest cutler, the perfect creator of chairs or tables. As reason rises out of animal being, progress ascends from history, so art looks onward and upward, toward the perfect dome.
Staring now at the cracked Christ Pantokrator in the church’s broken drum, he thinks of Jacques Soufflot in Paris. Soufflot is an architect, maker of churches; now he’s been asked to create Sainte-Geneviève’s, a new church for a reasoning age, soon to be given a fresh Roman name: the Pantheon. The building’s rising over the streets of Paris now, soon to reach its dome. Soufflot is dreaming of it: the lightest, purest, riskiest, most improbable. His enemies are mocking him, telling him the building will surely fall. Before he left Paris he tried to advise him: ‘Think what inspired Michelangelo, the sense of line, the experience of craft. All his life he’s spent trying to shore up tottering things. He’s learned how to make one thing counterbalance another, how to stop a ceiling falling down. The same instinct makes the builder of a windmill find the perfect angle for rotation, the carpenter make a chair of perfect balance, the writer give his sentence perfect shape. The lesson of lessons is here, use it well. Instinct is what makes us reach out of darkness and ascend toward the light.’
Yet even this truth seems different here, as God is different too. For a lifetime he’s known him, quarrelled with him over everything in the world. But in those days God spoke French. Here he speaks odd tongues and manifests himself in the strangest of forms. His saints and apostles are without number, their painted faces iconed everywhere. His priests and vicars – there, kissing the iconostasis, is one of them now – are bearded fanatics, more like Musselman mullahs than the abbés and monks he’s known all his life: cunning hypocritical prelates like his own brother manipulating logic to pursue God, fame, fortune and the court. Here they’re nearer a frank band of brigands, not people you’d care to entrust a prayer to on a dark night. Beyond the surface of reason and Frenchness lie the Old Believers. Beneath enlightenment superstition rages, and ghosts and visions are a matter of course. The late Tzar may well have been felled by the ravening haemorrhoids, but hardly a day passes when he hasn’t been seen again: reborn, presenting himself to monks in strange visions, or interrupting the babushkas who’ve simply stepped out into the forest to gather sticks. There’s hardly a community in the whole great country that hasn’t taken a false Peter the Third to its bosom. And no sooner has one been hunted down than another takes his place . . .
I am here still, in this strangest of cities [he writes home that same day to Sophie Volland, as he sits in the Narishkin Palace, trying to understand]. It is surely a city of quite a new kind, in a nation of quite a new kind. It has a splendid court at the top, blankness and human despair at the bottom, and a small space for hope and illusion set somewhere in between. It is a great and amazing city, but one that lacks the usual tissues, the normal arteries and cartileges of true cities that have been formed out of their own pasts. I am walking up and down in my room, mechanically. Now I go across to the window to look out at the Russian weather. I see the endless torrents of snow, the raging winds and the dark skies, and I subside into despair.
Yet there is everything to make here, everything to do. I study people in the streets, I enquire of all the facts from the many academies our enlightened patron has created. As you know, I believe in a philosophy that endeavours to lift up humanity. To degrade ideas and create false societies is to encourage men to despair and vice. So I myself seek to study the foundations of a fresh human civilization – one that is free of superstition, oppressive custom, bad morals and false tyrants, yet which has not lost its roots in all that’s good from the past. At any rate, I have made sixty-six notebooks, full of thoughts, ideas, my best moral hopes. Every day I improve them, every day I present my notes to her serene empress. Every day she encourages me, despite many in the court, which is good. For I truly think my notes and notebooks are needed here more than any place in the world.’
DAY THIRTY-FIVE
HE and SHE are pleasantly taking tea together on the sofa.
SHE
America. Tell me about it.
HE
Tell you what about it, my lady?
SHE
Come, you must surely have written a book about it. Haven’t you written a book on everything? Surely there’s very little in the world so unlucky as not to have been the subject of a book by you.
HE
I haven’t written it. Yet. Of course I mean to write about it. I’ve been asked to collaborate on a book on the great American empire by my old friend the Abbé Guillaume Reynal.
SHE
Ah, now you are writing books with Abbés?
HE
He’s a former Jesuit, it’s true. But it’s a courtesy title. Now the order is dissolved he’s become quite as much a deist as the rest of us.
SHE
Like me, you mean? Am I a deist, do you think?
HE
It’s hard to tell. But then our discussions have hardly started yet.
SHE
You’ll make me one, you mean. I don’t think so. The Abbé writes books about America?
HE
This is the man who first publicly raised the great question of whether the discovery of America was helpful or harmful to mankind.
SHE
What was his answer?
HE
In the Abbé’s view America is all a great mistake. He thinks animals, nature and even the sexual passions all grow more depraved and distorted the further west you go. But like any honest Frenchman he acknowledges India and Louisiana as the two great empires the French have had. And Louisiana as one of nature’s greatest wonders, where the hope of mankind could be renewed.
SHE
Now lost to the British, I believe?
HE
And that might be why his views are so negative. A paradise ruled by the British hardly seems the perfect playground for the cultivation of the natural instincts.
SHE
But come along, sir, no more Abbés. Give me your own opinion. Chancellor Betskoi’s been telling me that a century from now the world could have only two truly great powers, the Russian and the American. If so I would like to be ready. I want my nation to be far better than theirs.
HE sips his tea.
HE
Very well then. Denis on the Americans. First, imagine a landscape no one has succeeded in describing before. Its lights and shades are new, its colours different. Painters take fright when they see what’s in front of them. The people are strange and unusual, set in geography and nature somewhere a little astray – between the Europeans and the Asians, let’s say, but with no real certainty about being either. The birds are rare and bright-coloured. The vegetables cultivated and eaten are huge and strange. The simplicities of primitive existence compete with great intellectual sophistications, often creating both amazing inventions and the oddest distortions of thought. An excess of land and the process of migration across strange and shifting landscapes inclines the people to Republican sentiments . . .
SHE
I might have known.
HE
It encourages independence of opinion, and that gives them the illusion they are all splendid philosophers.
SHE
Deists, you mean?
HE
Any form of thought thinking can manage seems to flourish there. The landscape nourishes strange and novel religions – which appear, last a year or two, then vanish, leaving only a faint trace in the history of thought. Because there are lands without law, it’s possible for the people to be complete fantasists, imaginary even to themselves. They’re certainly the first people to think they can live without higher law and governance, and that life exists on this planet solely so they can live in a state of perfect self-imposed happiness—
SHE
They’re wrong, of course.
HE
Completely wrong. There is no happiness. But I see no harm in trying.
SHE
So the future, sir, what’s written there? Will your Indian America be French or British?
HE
French, if the French have anything to do with it. British, if the fat Hanoverian Georges have anything to do with it.
SHE
Which would be better? British or French?
HE
Let us try to imagine a British America, dear lady. They’d serve roast beef daily and there’ll be great estates in the country where the hounds bark and the churchbells toll. If French, well, it will be just like Petersburg. Domes and statues, palaces and garnishes, and all the follies of fashion. Of course, if the people themselves, an impatient lot, have anything to do with it, it will be neither.
SHE
Because now they aspire to be a nation?
HE
And a republic. And because the British hate the French and the French hate the British they will be one. Each nation will arm the Americans against the other. The result is they’ll have arms of their own, and they’ll use them.
SHE
A republic? A people’s tyranny, you mean?
HE
I do.
SHE
In fact, exactly like this amazing new Russia you are describing to me every day in your notebooks . . .
HE
No, dear lady. More like Venice. A place where one finds little enlightenment, much repression, almost no morality of the official kind, and quite different vices and virtues from the normal.
SHE
Very well, sir. In that case, do I bother with them or not? Tell me wisely.
HE
Very well, dear lady. I’d say: bother.
END OF DAY THIRTY-FIVE
DAY FORTY
SHE’s in finery, clad in jewels, hung with orders. It has been a day among notables; now she sits embroidering. HE sits by her side, close. No courtiers.
SHE
Atheist!!
HE
No no, please, dear lady. You really must not think I’m not a religious man. In my youth I took the tonsure. If I had listened to my father, you would have seen me in very different vestments, with a very different haircut. You would have had a Jesuit priest. My brother – my tonsured, cloaked, strait-laced jackass of a brother – is one to this very day.
SHE
So why a philosopher?
HE
A philosopher is a priest who’s exhausted the old religion and creates a church and creed of his own.
SHE
And your brother, what does he say?
HE
Naturally he despises me. No quarrel is more terrible than brothers who have fallen out. Mine spends his time trying to restrain knowledge. I spent mine trying to make it spread its thighs ever more freely and fully . . .
SHE
Which is why you have all the arrogance and vanity of the priest – without any of the learning, the self chastisement or the humility. This is a philosopher.
HE
I gather you don’t know priests very well, my dear. Who ever met a humble Jesuit? My brother of course is always in the right. Whereas I, as a philosopher, know my opinion is entirely wrong. As is, of course, everybody else’s.
SHE
So why should I sit here listening to you?
HE
Because human knowledge has scarcely started. It advances, it progresses. It disputes every day with itself.
This
is philosophy.
SHE looks at him thoughtfully.
SHE
What I don’t understand is this. If there really were no God—
HE
Ah yes, well done. Please continue, madame—
SHE
. . . then how could we believe in anything at all? In the existence of the universe, the function of things, the reality of our selves? We would be completely lost in time and space. Nothing would have a cause, a reason, or a destination—
HE
We would all be poor philosophers if we didn’t consider the existence of a world without a divine intention. A world that existed not by purposeful creation but by a random evolution, or was made as a world simply by virtue of our own interpretations and understandings.
SHE
So . . . what would such a world be like?
HE
Imagine you were a pure consciousness, floating in the spaces of the sky. Then take away time, order, and consequence. The universe, the stars, all things living and dead, before us and after, swirl round us. Memory and mind are one, and before is the same as after. But consciousness is self, it has a need to know. It seeks order and relation—
SHE
How?
HE
It has the power to speak, and name things. It has the gift of grammar. At the centre is consciousness, a perceiving person, Moi. For Moi to make sense to himself, he requires something other, a Toi and a Lui.
SHE
Yes, language lets us name and explain things—
HE
But in my cosmos, it
is
only language – a map of things, not the thing itself. A Frenchman names one world, a Russian another. An astronomer can spend thirty years studying a single star. But which of us stops long enough to study himself: the thoughts of his mind, the means of his perception, the nature of his locomotion, the beat of his heart? We need our philosophers, not to explain the universe, but to explain the self who claims to know the universe.
SHE
How? If the world isn’t real?
HE
Let us suppose, my dear, that I am not an invention or product of the world. Let’s suppose, and why not, the world is an invention of mine.
SHE
What then? You just dreamt it, like d’Alembert’s spiders?
HE
It’s possible. The world is simply what I myself know to be the case. No more and no less than that.
SHE
Really? And what about what
I
perceive to be the case?
HE
Considered from the standpoint of Denis the Divinity, what you perceive is simply one more illusion created for
me
to perceive. It would be quite logical for me to assume the world came into being the moment I came to consciousness, is my consciousness, and will cease when I no longer have a consciousness.
SHE
Yes, I’ve heard of madmen before. But why is your dream so superior to mine? Why are you the one for whom the world exists?
HE
Very simple. The world, I observe, is filled with millions of people. Yet of all those million I’s, I am the only one with a me in it.
SHE
So all the rest of us are fakes. Scenery, illusion? Waxworks? You’re telling me I don’t exist at all, but you alone do?
HE
Indeed you exist, and I experience you as entirely real and precious. Just as I do history, geography, nature and the cosmos. Yet why shouldn’t this entire universe – its past, its future, remote peoples, furthest cosmos – be an illusion designed to amuse me?
SHE
But you will admit
I
exist?
HE
Oh yes, you exist. But when I rise in a few minutes, kiss your elegant hand, and walk away down Nevsky Prospekt, thinking so warmly of your eternal kindness and your sweet good humour, where are you then?
SHE
I’m here, sir, believe me. And I have soldiers to prove it.
HE
And when in a few weeks I regretfully leave Russia, and my dear memory weakens and my old mind starts to fail, will you still be so then? Or will you become my life’s most wonderful and greatest illusion? All I can ever know is what I’m conscious of – what happens in the theatre of my mind’s existence. So when I cease to recall, what remains? And when I cease to exist, why shouldn’t everything in this world halt too, since now it will be without its one essential witness . . .
SHE
And what then about your famous Posterity?
HE
It exists too. I’ve already imagined it.
SHE
Sir, do you ever believe one word of the things you say to me?
HE
Not always.
SHE
Of course not. One minute you are telling me there is no self. The next yours is the only self in the world. One minute the world is immaterial, the next the wonderful clockwork universe is the only thing there is.
HE
Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.
SHE
So you keep saying. Denis, you are completely infuriating, you do know that? You call yourself the thinker. Now show me how your argument is wrong.
HE
I will, my dear, and very easily. If I really were free to invent the world, then it has to be obvious I would never have invented this one.
SHE
You wouldn’t?
HE
A vale of misery? I should certainly have invented something that didn’t always defeat and wound and constrain us, tie us down with laws and moralities, deny our pleasures and punish our thoughts. As a free man, I would have invented freedom.
