Solovyov and Larionov

From the award-winning author of Laurus

Eugene Vodolazkin, Lisa C. Hayden

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781786070364
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

'THE MOST IMPORTANT LIVING RUSSIAN WRITER' New Yorker

A groundbreaking and gripping literary detective novel set in Soviet-era Russia, from the award-winning author of Laurus and The Aviator

Can we ever really understand the present without first understanding the past?

From the winner of the 2019 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Prize, and the author of the multi-award winning Laurus, comes a sweeping novel that takes readers on a fascinating journey through one of the most momentous periods in Russian history.

What really happened to General Larionov of the Imperial Russian Army, who somehow avoided execution by the Bolsheviks? He lived out his long life in Yalta leaving behind a vast heritage of undiscovered memoirs. In modern day Russia, a young student is determined to find out the truth.

Solovyov and Larionov is a ground-breaking and gripping literary detective novel from one of Russia's greatest contemporary writers.

1

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.

In all the preserved photographs (see the insets in Dupont’s book), there appears before us a carefully shaven person with his hair cut short and parted. The part is so even and the quality of the shaving so flawless that one unwittingly detects the scent of eau du toilette when contemplating the photographs. With regard to his appearance, General Larionov made the only possible valid decision, just as he did in most other situations. Thinking that his ideally proportioned facial features needed no framing, he did not style himself after Alexander III, as did the officers around him. What is interesting is that his face did not look handsome, despite its proportions. His face became livelier at a mature age, particularly in elderliness. It is not uncommon to contemplate a photograph of a person in his youth, marveling at its blatant insufficiencies and almost embryonic look when compared to what came later. In cases of this sort, one experiences regret regarding the existence of that stage in the life of the person portrayed. Needless to say, feelings of this sort are very highly ahistorical. As far as the general goes, his face looked more chiseled thanks to wrinkles that appeared, with age, under his eyes, and the bump that emerged on his nose. During one period of his life, between the ages of thirty-five and forty, his appearance was reminiscent of Cardinal Richelieu because of his facial expression and that bump, though not because of all his features. The peak of the general’s activity—as well as the mysteries connected with him—dates back to this period. Perhaps his resemblance to Richelieu was the resemblance of people possessing mysteries? Whatever the reason, that resemblance departed with time, too.

Even a fleeting glance at Dupont’s illustrative material attests to the undeniable prevalence of photographs from the final period of General Larionov’s life. The old man never made a point of having his picture taken but he also never put on airs by turning away from any cameras that greeted him: he regarded them with utmost indifference. That regard gave portraits of the general a naturalness rare for the genre. Perhaps the triumph of two photographic portraits of the general in international competitions at various times should be ascribed, above all, to that naturalness?

There is no doubt that even those who are not at all familiar with the general’s activity and have not heard his name would recall the black-and-white photograph of the old man sitting on a folding chair at the very edge of a jetty (Yalta, 1964). It became a classic of world photography, rather like the locomotive falling out the window of a Paris train station, rather like the lighthouse among raging waves, etcetera. Despite the summer heat, the old man is dressed in a white service jacket. He is sitting under a partially transparent awning, his legs crossed. The toe of a light-colored shoe is stretched before him, parallel to the ground, and almost blends in with the jetty, making it seem as if the lighthouse standing close by is balanced on the toe of that elegant shoe. The old man’s gaze is directed into the distance and filled with the particular attention of one not interested in anything closer than the horizon. That old man is General Larionov. One cannot deny that all previous photographs pale in comparison with that shot of the general, that they have grown to feel inexpressive and, to some extent, unworthy of this outstanding person. That the general remained in his descendants’ memory in his most, so to speak, mature form, could be considered his indisputable success. However, the biggest success of his life was, most likely, simply that he was not shot at the conclusion of the Civil War. This has always been considered inexplicable.

What is consequential, though, is that historian Solovyov decided to concentrate on that very enigma. Here, one might foresee objections of the sort that question whether historian Solovyov is, say, a figure capable of untangling this very complex historical snarl. And is it even worth placing hope on a very recent graduate who is, moreover, a self-made man? These objections do not seem well founded. It is sufficient to point out—and Dupont was the first to establish this fact—that Arkady Gaidar was commanding a regiment at the age of sixteen and a half. As far as self-made man goes, well, under a broad understanding of the term, anyone who has ever succeeded at accomplishing anything in life should be considered one.

It is sufficient to mention just one detail with regard to Solovyov’s work on self-improvement: he was able to change his Southern Russian pronunciation to aristocratic Petersburg pronunciation. Needless to say, there is nothing about the Southern Russian pronunciation, in and of itself, that is shameful or belittles the dignity of its speakers (just as, say, deficient Moscow speech is incapable of discrediting residents of the capital). Mikhail Gorbachev, after all, led perestroika in Russia using Southern Russian pronunciation. Unlike Solovyov, Gorbachev was not a historian—he himself made history without taking particular care about the orthoepic side of matters, a tendency that continued even after he left his post and retired. As far as Solovyov goes, when he murmured Russian tongue twisters in the dormitory kitchen, he was working on something that went beyond simply training himself in pronunciation: he was, as he characterized it, eliminating the provincialism within himself.

Solovyov’s thesis advisor, the eminent Professor Nikolsky, played an important role in Solovyov’s development. After reading his student’s first important paper, which was devoted to Russia’s conquest of the Far East, the professor invited Solovyov to his office, where he said nothing for a long time, blowing on the paper tube of a Belomorkanal cigarette all the while (he had taken a liking to those cigarettes while working at the forced labor site bearing the same name).

‘My friend,’ said the professor after lighting the cigarette, ‘scholarship is dull. If you don’t get used to that notion, it will not be easy for you to pursue it.’

The professor requested that Solovyov delete from his paper the words great, triumphant, and only possible. He also asked his student if he was familiar with the theory according to which Russians squandered the energy granted to them by conquering expanses of inhuman dimensions. His student was not. Prior to acquainting Solovyov with this theory, Prof. Nikolsky requested that he delete the phrase phenomenon indicating progress, too. The author of the paper was asked to pay special attention to the formatting of bibliographical and persuasive footnotes. A careful look at this aspect of the paper revealed that the only properly formatted footnote was ‘Ibid., 12.’

To be utterly candid, the majority of what Prof. Nikolsky said seemed like nitpicking to Solovyov, yet it was this very discussion that formed the basis of a friendship between professor and student. The professor was at that age when his quibbles could no longer be offensive to the young man and Solovyov’s own history, which was anything but simple, did its part in forcing his advisor to show more leniency toward his student.

Prof. Nikolsky never tired of repeating to his mentee that, as a rule, pretty phrases in scholarship are misguided, and the beauty of those phrases is based on their alleged universality and an absence of exceptions. But—and here the cigarette in the professor’s hand would trace a smoky ellipsis—that absence is spurious. No exhaustive truths exist (hardly any exist, the professor corrected himself, bringing the statement into accord with his own theory). For each a there is always a b and a c to be found, as well as something that no letters can convey. An honest researcher takes all that into account, but his pronouncements cease being beautiful. Thus spoke Prof. Nikolsky.

At some point, Solovyov’s blue-eyed romanticism gave way to a pronounced inclination toward precision, so this was a time when he discovered a particular beauty: the beauty of reliable knowledge. This was a time when the young man’s papers started to be mottled with enormous quantities of exhaustive and meticulously formatted footnotes. Footnotes became for him more than an occasion to express respect for his predecessors. They revealed to him that there was no one realm of knowledge where he, Solovyov, would be first, and that scholarship is, to the highest degree, a process that is bequeathed. They were representatives of great, all-encompassing knowledge. They watched after Solovyov and educated him, forcing him to rid himself of approximate and uncertain assertions. They blew open his smooth school-based exposition, because a text, just like existence itself, cannot exist without conditions.

Solovyov inserted footnote after footnote, marveling that he had managed to get by without them at the beginning of his scholarly career. When footnotes began accompanying nearly every word he wrote, Prof. Nikolsky was forced to stop him. He announced to Solovyov, in passing, that scholars usually get by without footnotes at the end of their careers, too. The young researcher felt disheartened.

Despite Solovyov’s expectations, the Pacific Ocean—to which he fought his way in his first important paper—did not become his primary topic. Prof. Nikolsky was able to convince his student that the most important part of history takes place on a continent. Only a strong familiarity with that part of history gives a researcher the right to leave dry land from time to time. After a wrenching internal struggle, Solovyov decided to postpone setting sail.

Solovyov came to appreciate Petersburg fully during his five university years. He began wearing high-quality but unostentatious clothing (clothing becomes more colorful when advancing south, and not only in Russia), referenced the powers that be with the short word they, and took a liking to evening strolls on Vasilevsky Island. His habit of taking strolls continued later, after renting an apartment on the Petrograd Side (Zhdanovskaya Embankment, No. 11). He would walk home after finishing his work at the library. Sadovaya Street. Summer Garden. Troitsky Bridge. In the winter, when the Summer Garden was clos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright