http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1263773/FULLTEXT01.pdf.
17 For an examination of the novel of development, see Lina Steiner, For Humanity’s Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
18 Prilepin, The Monastery, 96. Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 82-94.
19 Lipovetsky, 8.
20 Prilepin, The Monastery, 212.
21 For a discussion of the philosophical novel that emphasize Dostoevskii, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 25.
The Monastery
From the author
People said that in his youth my grandfather was noisy and angry. Where I come from, there’s a good word to describe such a character: vzgal’nyj (crack-brained).
Even in his old age, he had this strange habit. If a single cow separated from the herd walked past our house with a cowbell, he would forget whatever he was doing and run outside, grabbing whatever he had at hand—a crooked rowan walking stick, a boot or an old kettle. From the threshold, swearing horribly, he would throw whatever thing his crooked fingers grabbed at the cow. Sometimes, he would even run after the frightened beast, shouting all manner of retribution on it and its owners.
“Rabid devil!” Grandmother used to call him. She had an odd way of pronouncing this phrase, with the vowels mismatched, and hearing it like that ran shivers down your spine.
The “a” in “rabid” looked like great-grandfather’s possessed, almost triangular, up-hoisted eye that twitched when he was irritated. It didn’t help that his other eye squinted. Why she called him a devil, well, whenever he would cough or sneeze, it sounded like he was saying “devil” in Russian. Not “aaaa… chooo!” but “aaaa… chiort! Chiort! Chiort!” You could just imagine that great-grandfather saw the devil in front of him and was yelling at him, casting him out. Either that, or every time he coughed, he expelled another devil that had gotten inside him.
As I repeated grandmother’s phrase by syllables — “ra-bid-de-vil!” — I listened in on my own whisper. In the familiar words, streams of wind blew in from the past, from a time when he had been completely different — young, black-hearted and insane.
Grandmother recollects that after she married grandfather and lived in his house with his family, great-grandfather used to beat “Mamania” — her mother-in-law, my great-grandmother — severely. Her mother-in-law was tall, strong and severe, a head taller than great-grandfather and broader in the shoulders. But she feared him and listened to him without question.
To properly strike her, great-grandfather had to stand up on a bench. From there, he would demand that she approach. After which he grabbed her by the hair and walloped her ears with his balled fist.
His name was Zahar Petrovich.
“Whose son is that?” — “Zahar Petrovich’s.”
Great-grandfather was bearded. His beard was like a Chechen’s beard, barely curly and still not completely white, although the sparse hairs on his head were whiter than white, insubstantial and fluffy. If a down feather from an old pillow had gotten stuck on his head, you could hardly distinguish it from his hair.
Only we fearless children dared to take off those feathers. Not grandfather, not grandmother, not father — none of them dared touch his head. Also, if they ever made jokes about him, it was only done so in his absence.
He wasn’t tall. By the age of fourteen I had already outgrown him, although, of course, by this time Zahar Petrov slouched, limped badly and seemed to be slightly growing into the earth. He was either eighty-eight or eight-nine at that point. His passport had one year of birth, but he was actually born in another year. But whether it was a year before the passport or after, he himself had forgotten over time.
Grandmother used to say that great-grandfather got kinder after he turned sixty, but only to the kids. He adored his grandkids, fed them, pampered them and washed them. By the standards of village life, this was all a little strange. All of the children took turns napping with him on the stove under his massive, curly, smelly overcoat.
He sometimes visited their house; I think I was six years old when I had a few turns under the overcoat — that rugged, woolen, sleepy overcoat. To this day, I still remember its aura.
The overcoat was like ancient tradition — you honestly believed that seven generations had worn it and couldn’t wear it out. All our kin had warmed themselves under its wool. In winter, newborn calves and piglets were wrapped in it as they were carried into the hut, lest they freeze in the shed. It’s entirely possible that a quiet family of house-mice could live in those huge sleeves for years at a time. If you poked around in the folds and corners of that coat, you could even find the cigarette that great-grandfather’s great-grandfather hadn’t finished smoking a century ago, or a ribbon from the wedding decorations of grandmother’s grandmother, or even a piece of sugar that my father lost. He spent three days of his hungry post-war childhood looking for it, but never found it.
But I found it, and I ate it, although it was mixed up with old tobacco.
When great-grandfather died, my family threw away the overcoat. No matter how much I went on about it, they said it was old garbage and stank terribly.
We celebrated Zahar Petrov’s ninetieth birthday three years in a row, just in case.
Great-grandfather sat, seeming, to a careless eye, to be filled with self-importance, but actually quite cheerful and a little mischievous. It’s like he was saying, “I fooled you all! I lived to be ninety and forced you all to gather in my honor!”
He drank, as did all of us, no worse than the young people, even in his old age. When midnight struck and he felt that maybe it was time to stop (the parties began at noon), he got up slowly from the table and, waving off grandmother who had rushed to help him, walked to his perch on the stove, looking at no one.
While great-grandfather was walking out, everyone sat at the table frozen and silent.
I remember my godfather saying once, “He walks like a generalissimus.” This was my uncle who was killed the next year in a stupid quarrel.
I found out that great-grandfather was imprisoned in a camp at Solovki when I was still a child. For me, it was as though he had walked to Persia to buy a kaftan during the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich or had reached Tmutarakan with a shaved Sviatoslav.
People didn’t talk much about it, but, on the other hand, great-grandfather occasionally remembered Eichmanis or the group leader Krapin or the poet Afanasiev.
For a long time I thought that Mstislav Burtsev and “Curly” were great-grandfather’s war buddies, only later did I realize that they were fellow inmates.
When I stumbled upon some photographs from Solovki, for some strange reason I immediately recognized Eichmanis, Burtsev and Afanasiev.
They felt like my near, though not always dear, relatives.
When I think about that now, I understand how short the path to history is. It’s right next to you. I touched my great-grandfather; he had seen saints and demons with his own eyes.