Calligraphy Lesson (19 page)

In one of her next letters she talks about how the peasants confuse expropriation with looting. “They take away everything bit by bit to
their homes, and the estates look like barbarians had been there. I was on such an estate—everything plundered, the pierced eyes in portraits, piles of excrement everywhere, in the most conceivable and inconceivable places. My God, how come there's so much excrement coming from my people? I see our revolution completely differently.”

More and more she's repelled by the brutality of events. In October of that year she writes, “They slaughtered the landowner's entire family—two kids, a boy and a girl. Not even the doctor who was with them was spared, nor the French governess, who, by the way, came from Switzerland. I try to tell myself that that's the way it must be, that without blood and violence there are no great revolutions. But the whole point is that I must keep convincing myself. It's so hard for me, my beloved! People carry such hatred! And now a firing squad has come from Saratov, killing peasants from the neighboring village, not really caring who's guilty and who isn't. And all around the hatred is growing. And again I need to tell myself we're living in the most wonderful, uplifting times, and that this violence will be the last.”

Her apprehension about the expropriations intensified. “If this violence floods the whole country, it will be hard to stop it. For that you need even more violence. It's horrible!”

Lydia traveled several times to Europe during her three year stay in Saratov province. In 1908, for instance, under the pseudonym Volgina, she cast the deciding vote from the Saratov organization in the Party conference in London, even making a speech there. Each time she made a trip to Switzerland and reunited with her husband, but their meetings were becoming all too brief.

In Fritz's diary of 1908 we read of Lydia's visit to Zurich. “We're growing further and further apart. Again I told her I want to finally be together, that I'm prepared to work in Russia and even study Russian.
After all, the great Swiss doctor Friedrich Erismann went off to claim his wife in Moscow and started a clinic there. I'm not the first or the last. We talked again about a child. The kind of marriage we have can't go on. Her reaction: ‘“Family happiness is not for revolutionaries.'”

The ultimate unmasking of the double agent Azef not only reverberated throughout the whole Socialist Revolutionary Party, but shook Lydia's seemingly indestructible faith in the cause of the revolution itself. Party activity practically stopped. Former comrades began to suspect each other of provocation. For Lydia, working in such circumstances became impossible and futile.

“You can't do something if you don't believe you'll succeed,” she writes in 1909 from Atkarsk to Zurich. “The Party's falling apart. Party work has stalled. Its very heart has been pierced—everyone sees only provocation in everything, no one believes anyone. What am I doing here? There are no cultured people in Atkarsk, just philistines, and you can't really call them people. You can only find the proletariat in the big cities. Here it's all darkness, boredom, poverty, drunkenness, right wing nationalists, filth, in a nutshell, the Russian province, which it seems you have to either blow up or escape. It's impossible to live here. I feel old, look terrible, my hair's getting grey. I'm wrinkled. Life's passing me by. In three years of daily labor I've not brought my dream of my country's and my people's great future even a jot closer, not matter how I've tried. Among my comrades there's constant squabbling, mutual distrust and hatred. They hate their own more than they do strangers. I have to be an arbiter in their tedious Party trials. And I'm horrified that my love for this family, which I believed I finally found, is disappearing. I can't believe these embittered, useless people are my family.”

She lost faith not only in her Party comrades but in the peasants. “It all boils down to the fact that they don't need any revolution. What
they're after is the good life, dull but comfortable. To fire them up for revolution you don't need drunken pillages, but a war. And not with Japan, but something real and big that rocks the government to its very foundations, so that trouble and hatred comes to each home, so that each peasant gets a rifle. Only then can the revolution blow up Russia. But will there be that revolution of which we dreamed, which we prepared, for whose sake we sacrificed ourselves and everyone around?”

Lydia sank into a deep depression.

“I'm still stuck here, waiting for something, but my escape from this hateful town, where nothing happens and will never happen, is long overdue. I'm like Firs who's left behind in Chekhov's
The Cherry Orchard
—everyone's gone, but they forgot me.”

She tried again to go on with her medical practice, but couldn't. “I have no medical books here, and not enough experience. I didn't turn out a revolutionary or a doctor. I'm left with nothing.”

Profoundly distraught, she traveled again to Switzerland in early 1909. “Maybe, it's not at all about the people's happiness or revolution, maybe, I simply wanted to be happy in the one life given me and was ready to sacrifice myself for the sake of personal happiness? So then, how can we call it a ‘sacrifice'? Sometimes it seems I got all knotted up in myself, in my life—in everything. Fritz, my beloved, I'm in a bad way. Really bad. I mean emotionally. As for my body, it doesn't matter to me anymore.”

Lydia Kochetkova went for the last time to Switzerland for treatment and again stayed at the Marbach sanatorium on Lake Boden. But the stay was brief. Flight from herself became a way of life. She couldn't explain to Fritz her decision to return to Russia. Nor, it seems, to herself. After visiting his wife in the sanatorium, Fritz writes, “Lydia can't possibly get back to herself after all that's happened in the last years. She looks terrible.”

In any event, on 1 July, 1909, Lydia Petrovna Kochetkova crossed the border of the Russian empire and was arrested on the spot.

Following a brief imprisonment, she was exiled for three years to Arkhangelsk province, initially to the village of Ustvashka. In her first letters from there one can still detect a note of pride. For the Russian intellectuals, arrest, hard labor or exile traditionally served as a kind of Communion. But all too soon her tone changed.

“I have much time now to reflect on my life,” she writes in September, 1909, from Ustvashka. “Here it's the same as all over Russia—dirt, backwardness, drunkenness, violence. The other day a neighbor stabbed his wife. Each year, in every village, someone gets killed. We worshiped the people, but they're werewolves. Why love them? And the exiles are contentious, hostile, and hate each other. There's not a drop of faith left in me, least of all in the revolution. Actually I feel only dread. What if the revolution really happened? We made the mess and it's for our children and grandchildren to clean it up. Sometimes I think it's just as well I have no child. You see, I'm not in a very good mood. My letters to you are all I can hold on to. I'm drowning.”

In the winter she was transferred to Pinega, where she contracted typhus. Fritz rushed off to her in this remote exile. He traveled through Moscow and Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, and from there six more days by sled.

And again, as so often before, their time together brought no joy. When he left she wrote, “Why do we love each other more when we're apart? Tell me!”

We know from Fritz' diary that for him this visit was a turning point in his relationship to his wife.

On route to Moscow he makes this entry: “I no longer have any illusions. We do not have and cannot have any real closeness—letters are one thing—but life's something completely different. We're close only with
thousands of kilometers between us. Probably Lydia's a certain kind of woman—a woman wired for self destruction and not the continuation of life. All her life she's been destroying herself and dragging down everyone around her. Once she and I read Russian novels about superfluous people. She's one of them. I can't bear it. I'm a part of life and life's a part of me. I must give her up. I've never felt such bitterness and such pain.”

Then and there he sent a letter from Moscow telling her he wanted to break off the relationship. “Lydia, I'm beside myself. I have to let you go and follow my own path. I'm healthy, not old yet. I want a nest, comfort, a family. At night I want to come home. We'll never have this together. We have to let each other go.”

Fritz asked for a divorce. She agreed but kept writing to him because these letters were the last thing left to her. This blow coincided with another blow of fate from which she was unable to recover.

It came out in Pinega that Burstev, whom Lydia had greatly admired, circulated a letter abroad accusing her of being a provocateur and working for the tsarist secret police.

“I can only think of how vile people are,” she tells Fritz in despair. “I would have born everything from my enemies. But to be knocked down by my own kind? I thought I had found a family among my comrades, but instead I found treachery and slander. My whole life is destroyed, everything I held sacred—sullied and debased. As if my very soul were trampled and smeared. I can't go on. I don't want to. I've nothing left to believe in. I do not want to and cannot go on.”

Lydia begged her former husband to contact Burtsev in Paris and clear up this monstrous misunderstanding. Fritz wrote to him, but it's not known if Burstev ever answered.

She felt cornered. “People shun me like a leper. All the exiles turn away from me. Around me there's only contempt and hatred. How can one
live when everyone hates you? But maybe this hatred is a punishment for the hatred I felt for my enemies. So now I'm for my comrades the enemy. What should I do? Should I forgive everyone everything? No, I can't do that. Anyhow, I have no strength left for forgiveness or hate. Should I hang myself? But that won't prove my innocence.”

She resolved to break for good with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had been her faith and truth.

After exile there was no place for her to go. She had no home. No one was waiting for her anywhere. In 1911 she arrived in Moscow from Pinega and stayed at her estranged brother Vyacheslav's, with whom she had once broken all ties. Her mother was living there too.

Lydia continued sending anguished letters to Zurich.

With each letter she seemed to be closing the door on her life.

“Life passes and I still don't know why I came into this world. I gave nothing to anyone. I'm worthless. I lost faith in myself. I don't belong among people. Not even the closest ones. I start the day trading curses with my mother. And my brother. And his wife. With my mother it hurts the most. There's no bridge between us, not even the tiniest sliver. Loneliness. Old age. I'm 40, but I look 60. She's 60 and looks every bit 80. How awful when it suddenly hits you that at least she has me and Vyacheslav, distant and alien, but still her own children. But what and whom do I have? No one. And there'll be no one any more. My one wish is to crawl away as far as possible from people and quietly croak.”

In another letter, sent in the fall of 1913, she tried to make sense of her past, to sort out important moments in her life, and again reminded him of Venice. “My love, I cannot describe to you the state I'm in. I'm the most wretched person on earth. I never thought that one could be that wretched. The only thing I had was you, our love, that gift which I received and spurned. Then, in Venice it was all still possible. I committed an error.
Everything I chose over life with my beloved turned out a lie. Everything is a lie. Lofty ideas are a lie. The revolution is a lie. The people are a lie. All the beautiful words are a lie, a lie, a lie. Yet I blame no one. Only I am responsible for my wasted life. Then, in Venice, it was still possible to change everything. Or was it already impossible? I don't know. I don't know anything more. I no longer exist. The sooner I die, the better. My body still drags around from inertia, but the soul's gone. It's long dead. Do you know what my ideal is now? To disappear quietly, unnoticed, so that I leave nothing, not even my corpse.”

She continued writing to him for some time, but he rarely answered. Most likely these letters are all that is left of her.

Their correspondence broke off during the First World War.

Nothing is known of Lydia Petrovna Kochetkova's death.

This is from the last available letter.

“My darling! Do you know what I regret most of all? I could have given you all the fullness of my love, but I gave you nothing but pain. Forgive me, if you can. And my heart cries out at the thought that my highest calling was just that—to give you my affection and tenderness, but instead I squandered my worthless life on phantoms.”

Translated by Sylvia Maizell

In a Boat Scratched on a Wall

 

Language, as it creates reality, judges: it punishes and pardons. Language is its own verdict. There is nowhere to appeal. All higher courts are nonverbal. Even before writing anything, the writer, like Laocoön, has been pinioned by the language snake. If he is to explain anything, the writer must be freed from language.

It took quite a while after my move from Pushka to the canton of Zurich for the bizarre sensation of irreality, the carnival quality of what was happening to me, to be replaced, little by little, by the tentative and amazed confidence that, indeed, there was no deception here. The trains were not toy trains, the landscape not painted, the people not planted there.