Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (17 page)

Centuries of serfdom had accustomed the peasantry in many areas to stop thinking of their children or even their own bodies as their own. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century many landowners made a harem out of their servants' quarters. The laxity and carelessness of morals, like the venereal disease, persisted for generations to come. Thus Victor and his cousin are held back only by fear of syphilis from copulating with any peasant girl that takes their fancy. More striking, when Victor reflects on the casualness of peasant morality, for example the respected widower who impregnates his own daughter, it never even occurs to him that this depravity might have something to do with social structure as well as sensuality.

In such matters Victor is a little short-sighted. Hypocritical would, perhaps, be too strong a word. The Victorian Englishman who received his sexual education and relief, like Victor, from his family's servant girls would still keep up a puritanical disapproval of such behaviours in others, whether in his own class or among the servants. Victor's milieu was at least sufficiently demoralized to lack the energy to maintain double standards; Victor, like his contemporaries, is just as happy to make love with schoolgirls as with the peasantry.

One factor in Victor's life was certainly the absence of paternal authority. Another is the contradictory nature of the Russian school system of the time. To judge by Chekhov's schoolmasters in his stories and plays or the educational writings of Tolstoy, the Russian lycée or gymnasium - roughly like an English grammar school - was an authoritarian and impoverished environment. In Victor's day, the Minister for Public Enlightenment, Dimitri Tolstoy (no relation to L. N. Tolstoy) regarded the school system as a third arm of the police, in conjunction with the gendarmerie and the church. As Victor says, the school authorities' ambition was to turn every pupil into an informer.

Yet the erudition and competence Victor shows is a testimony to the quality of his education. The Russian lycée moulded Pushkin, Chekhov and Vladimir Nabokov as powerfully as any English public school moulded its boys. Its very rigour was a source of freedom: its curriculum was rigidly imposed by the state and relied heavily on Greek and Latin to instil the right virtues. Teachers were treated as lowly state employees, to be dismissed and hounded for any suspicion of disloyalty. But because the teaching was so circumscribed, this system interfered less with the private life of the pupil than do far more liberal methods today. Left to themselves and a core of dedicated teachers whose abilities the state could not entirely repress, the pupils could associate freely and find in their own extracurricular discussions the intellectual nourishment denied them in the official classroom.

As Victor was to find to his cost, success in the end-of-year examinations was vital if the student was to matriculate and to find a career, for Tsarist Russia, like the Soviet Union was overwhelmingly a nation of state-employed bureaucrats. Thus a rigorous series of examination hurdles kept even the dissident noses to the grindstone. The system survives, slightly fossilised, in the Soviet education system with a few of the same surprising benefits, both academic and personal, to the pupils. Its deficiencies were its strengths: the notorious restrictions on free thought stimulated underground reading among the pupils. Thus it was that Victor and his friends had read a motley bevy of authors from John Stuart Mill to Herbert Spencer and acquired a knowledge of everything from libertarianism to contraception which would be inconceivable for an Etonian or Harrovian of the times. Moreover, Tsarist Russia was more advanced than many European countries in its education of women and parallel system of lycées produced like-minded girls, so that a whole community of free-thinkers emerged by reaction from the state-controlled system.

A lot of one's judgments about sexual morality in Russia then, and perhaps now, will vary according to basic beliefs about sexual behaviour. If you assume that our sexual behaviour is governed by a number of restraints built into our upbringing and culture, then you might conclude that removing those constraints will lead to the free prepubescent sexual activity which makes Victor's Russia seem a Polynesian island. If, as Victor sometimes appears to think, you assume that sexual behaviour is encouraged and stimulated by discussion and education, then removing these adult preoccupations would have restored Victor to a normal childhood world. There are two ways of looking at the unbridled sexual activity of those Ukrainian cities and villages: either as the result of demolishing traditional obstacles, such as Christian attitudes to sex, the importance of establishing legitimacy, separation of the sexes, ignorance of contraception; or as the result of brewing up a ferment of ideas, pseudo-scientific and educational.

To determine the truth about sexual morality in Russia, one needs to generalise less and to be specific about who, when and where. There were areas among the peasantry, among the non-conformist sectarians for instance, where patriarchal values held firm and unmarried girls kept their virginity; just as there were many families where Victor's activity would have been inconceivable. There were certain Russian rulers, such as Alexander III, who set up exemplary models of domestic and sexual regularity. But it is nevertheless broadly true to say that the constraints that created the sexual morality of England, France, Germany or Italy in the nineteenth century were far weaker in Russia. Victor's sexual activity as a child required a certain knowledge, will, freedom of movement, access to contraception, disregard of bastardy which would not have applied in any other European country of the time.

The knowledge came, as it did in Victorian England, from underground, via the servants. But Victor had free access to books, a cardinal Voltairean principle which few Russian parents deny their children; he was spared the inhibiting, frightening warnings that western religious literature gave to children. He had a freedom of movement to friends' homes and rooms, again a freedom that Russian intellectuals accorded their children, simply because it was a political freedom denied them in public life. (Very often the more regimented political life, the more anarchic private life becomes in Russia.) Victor and his girlfriends had access to rudimentary information about contraception that was only fragmentary in the west. From ancient Greece until the middle of this century, contraceptive methods have changed little; what is striking in western Europe was the loss of knowledge about them among all except aristocrats and some peasant communities. The Russian nobility knew about contraceptive sponges as well as condoms (it is striking that Anna Karenina is almost the only heroine of the nineteenth-century novel to use contraception, albeit much to her author's disgust). As Victor tells us, the underground press circulated information. In the countryside those peasant girls who conceived knew how to abort themselves with ergot.

Most striking of all, perhaps, is the casual attitude to bastards in Russia. It was a country in which the laws of inheritance had never been properly exemplified even by the monarchy, and to establish one's legitimacy was never quite so crucial as in the west. Victor gives as an example of the acceptance of illegitimacy the unmarried grammar schoolteacher with four children whose employment in an authoritarian system was nevertheless not in doubt. It is not only in
War and Peace
that bastards compete on an equal footing with the legitimate: in nineteenth-century Russia the thinker Herzen and the poet Fet are just two examples of men whose illegitimacy was of little consequence. So much for the absence of traditional constraints. But before we turn to the attitudes that actively promoted free love in Russia among the intelligentsia, we might bear in mind the question of behaviour by imitation. To a certain extent, a nation's sexual morality is synchronized with that of its leaders. The contrast between regency and Victorian England reflects the difference between the Regent and Queen Victoria, although it is admittedly not easy to be sure what is cause and what is effect. The same applies to the France of Louis-Philippe and the France of Napoleon III. In Russia one is tempted to be more categorical. Most of the Romanov rulers were characterised by a gargantuan sexual appetite, part of the vital energy which kept the dynasty on the throne for three centuries. Peter the Great, whose blood is said to run in the veins of virtually every inhabitant east of the Elbe, and Catherine the Great are legendary; but Alexander I, his brother Nicolas I and son Alexander II shared the same slightly cold-blooded sexual energy. In the absence of any attempts at pretence, they set a model for the aristocracy far more attractive than the bourgeois virtues which were being established in western Europe.

Elsewhere in Russia, quite un-European modes persisted. Among the Cossacks, for instance, as Tolstoy's documentary novella about them records, sexual morality was typically nomad: unmarried girls enjoyed great freedom which they lost only on marriage. Many of the sects which gave the lives of Siberian and Ukrainian peasants its spiritual content treated sex more as a mystical rite of release than as a base force to be repressed.

Given the soullessness of the system, it was impossible for the intellectuals it nurtured to do anything but rebel against it. As Victor sarcastically notes, the rebels muddled Nietzsche and Marx in hopeless confusion: all that was important was that these new gods overthrew the old idols. The Russian revolutionary movement, to which even liberals like Victor's father belonged willy-nilly, found it hard to confine itself to mere politics. In a country where political activity in any real sense barely existed, it was hard to even define the border between political and private behaviour. Rebellion was against morality, even human nature, as much as against the autocratic rule of the Tsars.

Part of this confusion of morality and politics can be seen in the great reforms of the 1860s, a few months of co-operation between the Russian Tsar and the Russian intelligentsia. Hand in hand with the emancipation of the serfs and the establishment of rule of law came essentially moral gestures such as the regulation of prostitution by police licensing and the introduction of civil divorce. Radicals such as the saintly, but naive Chernyshevsky, while remaining disinterestedly ascetic in their own lives, spoke up for a complete abolition of sexual morality as it existed by their vision of a world in which all inhibiting factors such as jealousy vanish to leave the visionary free.

Many revolutionary thinkers in nineteenth century Russia saw no rational purpose to be served by the family in a future society to be built around communes and collectives; together with the family they dismissed traditional sexual patterns of fidelity or chastity. It was not that they rated the sexual instinct very highly; simply because it was to them a reflex of little importance, they did not think it worth regulating in any ideal world. That view of sex as a hygienic exercise which Victor attributes to his girl-friend Nadya, however self-deceiving, was not improbable among the young radical intelligentsia in the 1880s. Thus we get a strange correlation in Russia between the asceticism of the revolutionary movement and its casualness about sex.

Claiming sexual freedom was a part of the powerful movement for female emancipation in Russia. In a country where men enjoyed so few legal and political rights, it was easier to concede women equality. In Russia women became doctors and engineers rather earlier in the century than in most European countries. With the equality and the comradeship it engendered, came an entitlement to the same sexual standards as men: a phenomenon that was not to be found among the women students of England at the time. In any case, women played a prominent role in the radical movement, both as intellectuals and as activists and rarely met with the equivocal reception that the followers of Marx or Proudhon gave to women in western Europe. There was something 'gynocratic' in Russian culture of the nineteenth century. In the novels of Turgenev and Goncharov, in Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
the heroines are endowed with the traditional male attributes of decisiveness, enterprise and moral courage, while the heroes abdicate their role and lapse into inertia. Chekhov's plays and stories often take this inversion to absurd, even comic extremes. It was not merely a literary device but a reflection of the more dominant part played by Russian women in the world of ideas. It was not until Stalin suppressed or isolated the great feminists such as Alexandra Kollontai that Russian women were finally relegated to their mediaeval subordination. In the lists of revolutionary martyrs it was women such as Sofya Perovskaya, Vera Figner, Vera Zasulich who were the leaders. There is no doubt that their prominence among the intelligentsia gave them a sexual self-confidence which was not to be found in western Europe for several generations to come.

One of Victor's repeated judgments is that literature - scientific and fictional - stimulated his sexual urges precociously. We are not used to thinking of Russia as a country where 'explicit' literature is or was freely available. The Soviet Union exhibits an almost ridiculous prudery in every sphere from journalism to medical textbooks and even dictionaries. But this does not hold true for Tsarist Russia. One telling example is Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language: before the revolution the standard edition was widely available in a complete and unexpurgated form - something unparalleled even in Britain until very recently. Under the Soviets a photographic reprint is also widely available, but this is from an earlier, much inferior but thoroughly expurgated edition. Tsarist Russia had an elaborate censorship, but it was not always an intolerant one. On religious and military matters the censors were occasionally oppressive; in literary affairs the censors were sometimes themselves writers. The great Russian novels of the 1860s and 1870s would have been impossible to write had Tsarist censorship been any harsher than the unofficial censorships of France and England. In scientific and medical circles discussion was virtually untramelled: both the authorities and the opposition were proud of Russia's embryonic scientific community. In discussion of foreign affairs and in the publication of translations from foreign languages the Russian censorship was liberal. One example is the regularity with which works by French
naturalistes
such as Zola's
Nana
were published in Russian (1878) before they were passed for publication in France (1879).