Vakhtang's Tears
Pearls of great price given freely in Russia
As you know if you’ve been following this newsletter since it launched six days ago, I usually send it out late in the evening, after I’ve finished my day job blogging at The American Conservative. Today, though, I expect to be blogging and tweeting about The Thing all night, so I’m sending out this election-free (you’re welcome) newsletter early.
Earlier today I made myself a cup of strong black Russian tea from what’s left of a tin I bought at a famous gourmet shop on the Nevsky Prospekt. The tea reminded me that one year ago this very night, I boarded in Moscow a night train to St. Petersburg.
I was headed there to visit my friend the novelist Evgeny Vodolazkin and his wife Tanya, and to see the great city. What a gift those days were. The Vodolazkins were so kind, and St. Petersburg is simply breathtaking. One evening I stood on a bridge crossing the Neva and stared hard at the pastel-colored Winter Palace as a light snow fell. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever beheld, and I reacted as if by looking at it more intensely, I could burn it into my brain.
I had spent the entire afternoon at the Winter Palace, which is home to the Hermitage Museum, about which there are insufficient superlatives. I only had a few days in the city, but I will return as soon as I have an opportunity. Same with Moscow. An even greater blessing than the churches and museums was the conversations with Russian people. To be fair, I say that about every country I visit, and I mean it. Nothing makes me happier than sharing a meal with people, and talking to them about their lives, and the way they see the world. The Russians really stand out, though: their heavy discussions seem leavened with ironic lightness, and their light conversation has ballast. But what is that ballast? I’m not sure. I would have to spend more time with them to get a better sense of it. It seems to me to be a kind of knowingness, an inability to be surprised by things, but also a passion to penetrate to the heart of matters. I found in Russia that even small talk could be slyly metaphysical — an unusual pleasure for an American.
In one of his best essays, “Stealing From Churches” (found in the collection Gentle Regrets), Roger Scruton writes of his experience teaching in a summer school at a Catholic university in communist Poland:
In Poland, an occupied country with a censored press, there was, comparatively speaking, complete freedom of speech, and the Catholic University of Lublin was the only university I knew where a right-winger could speak openly in defence of his views. In British universities right-wingers risked intimidation from students and ostracism from colleagues. In Poland they were an accepted part of academic life. And, in the company of their Polish peers, British students would change almost overnight, responding not merely to the evident oppression and poverty, but to the gentle, courteous and pious ways of their new companions. Yet more agreeable than bringing modern ideas and scholarship to the Poles was the sight of the old tried ways of Europe, thriving in the face of oppression, and awakening in the. young British visitor the deep-down awareness of the Christian way of life. The Oxford students would come to Poland with left-liberal politics, agnostic beliefs, pleasure-loving ways and a habit of sneering at things old and venerable. All of them would leave in a thoughtful frame of mind, sceptical of political utopias, respectful of religions and with a new appreciation of the orderly soul and its destiny.
For me, last year’s travels among peoples who had lived under the yoke of Communism unsettled me in a way that has taken a while to grasp, and even now I don’t believe I fully get it. The Russians and not like the Poles, who aren’t like the Czechs and the Slovaks, who aren’t like the Hungarians. What all those peoples have — and maybe they possessed this before the Communist experience — is a tragic sense. It’s the most un-American thing, and frankly, it’s liberating. It can manifest as world-weariness, which is not appealing, but at its best, it comes across as a profound cherishing of the world, because they know in their bones how ephemeral it is.
On that Russian journey, I visited an elderly Georgian filmmaker, Vakhtang Mikeladze, in his Moscow flat. Vakhtang is a passionate man, carrying himself like a count from the ancien régime. We sat in his shabby but intimate drawing room drinking Georgian brandy while he told stories of his life. Vakhtang’s father Evgeni was a famous orchestral conductor who ran afoul of Stalin, an easy thing to do in the 1930s. As he was being interrogated by the NKVD, the elder Mikeladze, blindfolded, recognized the voice of Lavrentii Beria, head of the secret police, in the room. He called out Beria’s name. “How did you know it was me?” asked Beria. Evgeni Mikeladze said he might be blindfolded, but he could still hear, couldn’t he?
On Beria’s order, the interrogators pierced Evgeni Mikeladze’s eardrums with an ice pick. Eventually they shot him. The NKVD rousted his children, including teenage Vakhtang, from their apartment and took them off to prison, where they remained for years. He wept telling me the story, which I recount in Live Not By Lies:
“When they arrested my sister and me, we were completely scared,” he says. “They put us in the back of a truck. They put my aunt in the cab, with a soldier. When they went out of the building into the truck, they had this kind of closed courtyard. Everyone was out there watching and weeping.
“As we drove, my sister and I were sitting across from each other looking at one another. There was a soldier on either side of us. As we were driving along, out of nowhere different trucks were joining us on the highway.
We became a long caravan of the arrested. When they realized all these other trucks were full of the arrested, she looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back. We realized that at least we weren’t alone.”
The tears flow freely now. The old man softly mutters, “I’m ashamed that I was glad at that moment.”
Think of it! That event had happened some seven decades earlier, and the very recollection of them set the old man to weeping.
On the Moscow metro heading home after our visit, my translator Matthew asked me if I had noticed that the big window in the drawing room was covered by a blackout curtain. Matt said that those who lived through the Soviet years covered their windows with those curtains so no nosey neighbor could peer in, see what they were doing, and report them to the secret police. Almost thirty years after the end of the USSR, old people like Vakhtang still didn’t feel comfortable enough to take them down.
You can’t see the world the same way after you have spent time with people like Vakhtang Mikeladze, and so many others I met in Russia, and in the former Soviet bloc. You realize how very different it could have gone with us, and yet might. You leave as Roger Scruton’s students did in the 1980s: in a thoughtful frame of mind, sceptical of political utopias, respectful of religions and with a new appreciation of the orderly soul and its destiny. I will never forget seeing the treasures of the Hermitage, the Tretyakov Gallery, and of other museums and churches. Those were rare pearls — but the meetings with unfamous men and women were the real pearls of great price.
My friend Kale Zelden, a Catholic and humanities teacher at Portsmouth Abbey School, has been needling me to do a podcast with him for a long time. I’ve resisted, because I don’t like my voice, and am not sure that I would be any good at podcasting, but Kale finally convinced me to give it a try. He and I are working on it now, trying to figure out the ins and outs, and get ourselves into reasonable shape before launching. We did a trial run this past weekend. Here’s a screenshot (sorry it’s blurry; Kale, who is editing it, said it’s crystal-clear in the version he has):
Not sure when we are going to go public with this thing, but it should be within the next month. Stay tuned. This is going to be a very Crunchy Con/Benedict Option project.
A reader in Oregon writes to comment on yesterday’s post about remembering the dead:
I happen to live in the country, but I'm only a few minutes away from an old Oregon pioneer cemetery in a wooded area, where I take my dog for his favorite walk each morning (favored because of squirrel activity). There are lovely trails just outside its boundaries. But we spend at least half of the time among the headstones, and I've gotten to know quite a few of the "regulars" there, and say a daily good morning to Lucille and Henry and Danny McCoy, since my dog always leads me over their graves in his squirrel quest.
These daily walks have slowly but deeply made me more aware of the people buried here. Some are recognizable local names, owing to their roles in building the little town that the cemetery belongs to. There are quite a few Civil War veterans buried there, along with vets of all the other wars since. I find myself wondering about them, imagining the hardships they endured, what they were like. There are a couple of Purple Star recipients and one who was a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II (and I googled his name and found an old newspaper account of his incredible experiences). There are hundreds of complicated, messy, glorious, wonderful stories lying there which we may never know. Each one is incredibly valuable.
I find myself each day praying for those who need prayers; and ask those who are already unknown Saints to pray for me. It is a real privilege to be there each day. Mostly, I feel a great peace there.
There are volunteers who regularly come to the cemetery to clean headstones, repair the broken ones, tidy the leaf litter, water the grounds in times of drought to prevent wildfires (we had some devastating fires nearby in September). Ive seen entire families with young children come out to rake leaves. These are amazing works of mercy, since it's clear few family members are left to do this work. Families often don't produce children, or they move away. So complete strangers are taking care of the dead who are unrelated to them! The guy who repairs the headstones told me yesterday that it's a real labor of love for him to do this work.
I don't have the great blessing of visiting a cemetery with my ancestors. My beloved grandparents are buried in Central California - too far away for me to drive at this point in my life. And everyone afterward had themselves cremated after they died, with their ashes by now spread everywhere and nowhere. Every one of my immediate relatives lost their Catholic faith in the 60s, and burials were out of fashion and too expensive, apparently. But, having done a lot of genealogy work with an insatiable curiosity about the histories of people and what made them tick, my conclusion is that cremation is generally a bad genealogical idea.
In a strange way, this cemetery represents my own "ancestral" cemetery. Being a Marine brat and having moved every 2 years in my youth, I've lived longer in this area than anywhere else in my life. I'm in the process of buying my own plot in the same cemetery. It's doubtful that any of my family that remains will visit my grave in the years after I die, but it doesn't matter. I will have my "friends" nearby that I've gotten to know a bit during my daily jaunts.
Here’s a letter from a reader in Wisconsin:
It's funny you should write about this today, though I guess it makes sense! Anyway, it touched me, because we did that very thing today--visited and cleaned a grave--not knowing that it was a custom elsewhere. Since we moved back to western Michigan, we are near the cemetery where my husband's grandmother and grandfather are buried. His mother died when he was very young, and is buried in Chicago with her family. His paternal grandparents moved here and made a home for their bereaved son and his little boy, who would grow up to be my husband. I knew and loved his grandmother, a remarkable woman. Yesterday was a chill and windy day, and we drove west and arrived at the cemetery, which was nearly deserted, only one car winding slowly along the drive ahead of us.
We've visited the graves before, but we didn't remember exactly where they were, and wandered for some time, brushing the fallen leaves from grave markers to search for their names. Their markers are very humble--just small brass plates set into the earth. We found them at last: Charles and Mary. They are next to another, larger marker for my husband's step-grandparents, the parents of his father's second wife: Mary and Fred. People had basic names in those days!
Mary's marker was nearly hidden by the earth. I bent and pulled away the grass, and brushed the dirt from it as best I could with the handkerchief I had in my pocket. We had brought the old breviary we use for morning and evening prayers, and we said prayers for the dead from it, for Charles and Fred and the two Marys, and for all our beloved dead. It grieved me not to be able to visit my own parents' grave, but they are far off in southern Illinois.
As we walked through the cemetery back to the car, I saw that many of the artificial bouquets with which people had decorated their gravesites had been blown over by the wind. I picked them up and placed them back in their holders where I could. I felt sorry that we don't come more often. We live here now--there's no excuse. I think we will be more faithful in the future. This year has brought me closer to those who went before. I feel sure that it was in part the prayers of those departed ones that brought us back to the Church, and inside the Church is the only place I now feel I am close to my parents.
On the way home, we saw an orchard stand selling apples. We stopped and bought a bag of Northern Spies. The seller said with some regret that most people don't grow them any more, because they are big trees. What's popular now are smaller varieties that can be planted more densely. I decided we should consider our purchase a gift from the elders. I'm grateful for that, and for your essay, which I'll take as a confirmation of how right it is to visit the dead on this day.