The Dream Life of Sukhanov

on fire! And your medieval wall-painters were nothing but practitioners of applied arts, obedient illustrators of a few stale, commonplace truths about a small man’s eternity. Crushed by the weight of their own credo ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ they never took risks, never overstepped their boundaries, never tried to set vibrating some new, previously untouched chord in our souls—”

He stopped, short of breath, surprised by the sudden passion that had made his voice ring, caught off guard by an overwhelming desire that, awakening all at once, claimed his whole being—a desire to break the silence of so many years, to release his innermost thoughts on the subject once closest to his heart—and to be understood. His cousin, he noticed, was looking at him with something nearing astonishment, a slice of apple forgotten on its way to his beard. A broadening hush slowly ate into the air like a spreading stain into a piece of cloth. Finally Dalevich blinked, put the slice of apple back on the saucer, and clapped with weighty, theatrical cheer.

“Bravo, Tolya!” he exclaimed. “Spoken like an artist, not a critic—and certainly not a critic from Art of the World! Still, for all your eloquence, I could never share your disdain for, what do you call them, ‘boundaries.’ I agree that art should be about striving, but I believe it is precisely by striving within its boundaries that art can achieve its highest peaks. An artist of true genius is not one who wholly dis misses old traditions and plunges us headfirst into an unknown, disorienting, possibly meaningless paradigm, but rather one who, working from within a predetermined framework, subtly manages to push away our blinders an inch or two, to reflect our faces in a mildly distorted mirror, to find a second bottom in the most familiar things or a second meaning in the most exhausted words—in short, to wipe the accumulations of dust from our world—and who by doing so allows us to rise with him to a higher plane of existence. That is why Chagall, with his deceptively simple, childlike universe of flying fiddlers, green-faced lovers, and mysteriously smiling cows, will always be greater than Kandinsky, with his icy swirls of color and elegant abstract compositions, for all the brilliant innovations of the latter.”

“A dubious argument,” said Sukhanov thoughtfully. “Isn’t it paradoxical to argue that artists who make tiny steps are greater than those who make giant strides?”

“Personally, I find paradoxes refreshing, especially when… Heavens, is it really ten o‘clock? I’m afraid, Tolya, we’ll have to continue our discussion some other time—I have to pay a visit to an acquaintance, he’s helping me with my research…. Or better yet, why don’t you come with me? Oleg has a splendid collection of icons. Come, you two can talk about medieval art to your hearts’ content. What do you say, eh?”

Sukhanov had planned to spend all day at his desk, as the ill-fated Dali article was due the next morning and he had written nothing beyond the first sentence.

“Ah, why not,” he said lightly, brushing crumbs off his lap. “I have some time to kill.”

Summer seemed to have tiptoed out of Moscow while no one was looking. In the gray, diffused light of a gloomy autumnal day, the streets of the Zamoskvorechie were drab and unwelcoming. The wind drove along the pavements a procession of yellowing leaves and, mixed in among them, ice cream wrappers and an occasional newspaper page.

Dalevich trotted alongside Sukhanov, talking in his mild, persuasive voice. “One could go even further,” he was saying, “and argue that repression ultimately benefits the arts. By the way, your Dali held precisely that view. Take a man with a mustache, for instance—nothing interesting under ordinary circumstances, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Er… yes,” said Sukhanov, not listening. A stray playbill leapt out of nowhere and flattened itself against his trouser leg. He bent to pick it up, scanned it without curiosity (Dead Souls, at the Malyi Theater—a mangled remnant of someone’s long-past evening from the last theater season), then released it. The bill danced frenziedly across the road.

“Yes, but if some tyrant bans all facial hair, an ingenious person might contrive to grow a secret mustache, say, around his ankle, and that would be interesting, no? So in a way, you see, imposing limits on creativity may actually stimulate the appearance of better, or at least more innovative, art. Of course, in Russia, boundaries and rules—whether set by the Church, the tsar, or the Party—have always been an integral part of any artistic endeavor, and this may account—”

“Are we getting close now?” Sukhanov interrupted. For the past few minutes he had been asking himself with growing befuddlement why on earth he had agreed to visit a total stranger—an icon collector, of all things— on this busy, this extremely busy day.

“Almost there,” said Dalevich brightly. “Just through this gateway and across the yard. Anyway, as I was saying, this may account in part for the astonishing regularity with which our land has given birth to geniuses. Although, to be honest, the last five or six decades—”

A low archway in a nondescript wall led them from the bustle of Bolshaya Ordynka onto a narrow path twittering with invisible birds. A peeling one-story house, almost a shed, stretched on their right; on their left rose a toylike church, half concealed by tall purple-headed wildflowers swaying in the wind. Sukhanov paused in surprise. He had hurried with crowds on the other side of the wall scores of times and yet had never suspected the existence of this quiet little nook, shady, damp, and melancholy like some tenderly heartrending watercolor by Levitan—but of course, Moscow was full of such forgotten, crumbling corners, exiled reminders of a different life.

The church had a single darkened dome with no cross on it.

“How very old it is,” Sukhanov said, looking at the carvings of strange beasts covering the once white walls. “Fourteenth century, perhaps?”

Dalevich gently took his elbow and guided him along the path into an unkempt yard encircled by more low, peeling houses.

“Actually, no, it’s quite new,” he said readily. “Designed in a pseudo-Russian style by one Aleksei Shchusev, at the turn of the century. This used to be a convent, founded by the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna in 1908, if I’m not mistaken. Naturally, soon after the Revolution the convent was closed, the royal benefactress thrown alive down a mineshaft—and then, in a nice twist, Shchusev went on to build the Lenin Mausoleum and the ever- so-charming Hotel Moskva. The history of architecture—like any other history, I suppose—is simply full of these little ironies, don’t you find? Ah, and that over there is Oleg’s house, he rents a… Tolya?”

Sukhanov had stopped a few paces away with a wondering look on his face.

“So peaceful here,” he said with an apologetic half-smile. “I just wanted… Listen for a moment.”

Overcast stillness reigned about them, yet it was not altogether quiet. Dusty sparrows chirruped in the dense undergrowth; a young woman, her head covered with a somber kerchief, walked hurriedly across the yard, raising small, timid sounds in her wake—a pebble rolling, a door creaking on its hinges, a splash when her foot slipped into a pool of rainwater; and if one listened very closely, one could almost hear the purple flowers rustling against the church walls. In the early, aromatic days of summer, there would be many butterflies, yellow, white, and orange, spiraling like sunspots over these weeds, which, Sukhanov somehow knew, were called ivanchai—Ivan’s chai, Ivan’s tea—an odd, lyrical name that came back to him all at once from a remote childhood lesson, bringing with it a host of other soft-hued recollections of his fourteenth, his fifteenth years: the flowers he had pressed patiently between book pages for botany class; the birds calling to one another high in the trees during his solitary runs through the woods, with his head upturned to drink in the sun-dappled colors of the sky; the comforting, sweet, slightly decaying smells of the earth meeting him as he had fallen exhausted and newly rich into the grass…. Yes, this yard smelled a bit like that, of dying flowers and rain and past summers, and it was strange to think that only a stone’s throw away, on the other side of this wall, a monstrous city unfolded its hectic streets, rumbling with buses, crowded with people, littered with ticket stubs and candy wrappers and other chaff of tired, ephemeral enjoyments—for here, all around him, were the sounds and scents and colors not of the capital but of some small provincial town miles and ages away, a town that was dreary, neglected, yet somehow dear… A town, in fact, very much like Inza in the Ulyanovsk region, three crammed, malodorous, frightening train rides from Moscow, where my mother and I spent two years in wartime evacuation.

We lived in a drafty one-story house on the outskirts, taken in by a taciturn aunt of some chance family acquaintance. I shared a corner with the woman’s two sons, and every morning the three of us would stumble together through darkness and snow to a school on the other side of town. And it was there, in the early winter of 1942, that I met Oleg Romanov, a onetime pupil of Chagall and now an unprepossessing teacher of drawing—and in the course of one lesson, while my bored schoolmates passed notes and hand-rolled cigarettes across the