House in Russian literature

How to organize Russia is a debatable question, but what a home should be like seems to be clear to everyone. The house goes beyond the limit allotted to a person, it contains a separate life, opening its brackets in “before” and “after”, the ideal of the house seems to be imprinted into the human soul, you want to think about it as something a little eternal. But where is it at least to some extent embodied? Not in everyday life – in relation to the ideal it is like a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave – but at least in that segment of the universe that is transformed by culture? Yuri Saprykin looks for it in Russian literary classics, the custodian of our eternal values, but does not find it right away.

“It was a tiny cell, about six paces long, which had the most pitiful appearance with its yellow, dusty wallpaper falling off the wall everywhere, and so low that even a slightly tall person felt terrified in it, and everything seemed to be… You’re about to hit your head on the ceiling.” In the guardian classics, at least in its metropolitan-urban part, the one that was called the “St. Petersburg text,” a human home consists of rooms that look more like a closet, corridors that are completely dark and unclean, black staircases “smeared with slop and permeated through and through with that alcoholic smell that eats the eyes.” There, in fact, there are not houses, but corners – that is, truncated, deformed parts of an ideal house, which flatten a person and distort his proportions. The house is like a tight, musty crevice, a lifetime coffin, where there is no life and never will be, from where you need to escape at the first opportunity – be it to a tavern or to the revolution.

This type of anti-home will only spread in the conditions of the post-revolutionary “new way of life” – Zoshchenko’s communal kitchens, Bulgakov’s tenants who strive to seize wealthy professorial housing: overcrowding and constriction, turning a person into a humiliated, embittered and envious creature. To such a house, to such a way of living, the definition of an unconditional St. Petersburg classic is applicable – dead.

But in the literary tradition there were not only commoners, deportees, dispossessed, experiencing their crooked grief in musty corners. There was a noble culture – cherry orchards, dark alleys, Turgenev women in see-through gazebos. Here is a house that is bright, calm and good – but this goodness, if you look closely, is always undermined or has already been lost. For Turgenev, estate happiness is always fleeting – and all the more fragile because the barely grown children will rush away from this comfort, somewhere where there are passions, progress and barricades, or they will want to dissect it like a frog in order to see only mechanical flickering inside. In Chekhov’s every tea party there sounds a languid note of an unfulfilled, wasted life – or even a premonition of a future catastrophe and disintegration. Bunin writes his best stories twenty years after the estates dear to him were burned and the dark alleys were chopped down for firewood – and in the spicy languor of these texts one can hear both the longing for peace and happiness that was not appreciated, and the whisper of impending death. “We live badly in Grasse, very badly,” says Bunin to the writer Andrei Sedykh in the early 1940s, when “Dark Alleys” was written, “we eat frozen potatoes.” Such an idyll.

Tolstoy stands apart, in whose texts, as in life, a house has meaning only if it is a project for future happiness, the result of conscious efforts to achieve the desired “as it should”; This image of the house appears in the endings of his two main novels – in Pierre and Natasha and in Kitty and Levin. It seems, however, that the author himself doubts that this ideal is achievable – beyond the last page of the novel or in the perspective of his own life.

Probably the best texts about home – where this ideal of home is seen, home as an archetype, an almost sacred place – were written in Russia by people who lost this home. The house from Bulgakov’s “White Guard” with a tiled stove and a lamp under a bronze lampshade, where there are “the best cabinets in the world with books that smell of mysterious ancient chocolate” – this is both a memory of his native professorial house, from where the author was thrown out by the war, and the image of a stopped happy time, which will inevitably be destroyed by the cold wind of history.

Young Nabokov from his memoirs “Memory, Speak” – who composes his first poem while looking at the diamond-shaped projections of colored glass in the gazebo, or follows the hand of his mother, who shows him a lark flying into the sky and “the cuneiform of a bird’s walk in the fresh snow” – as it were already has a presentiment that “the material part of his world must soon perish,” and this harbinger of imminent death gives his vision a special sharpness. All these are memories of a lost home, a world, Russia as such, from where the authors and their heroes were thrown into outer darkness. About a lost paradise, where every little thing seems to be illuminated by happiness that will no longer exist. On the stove in the apartment from “The White Guard” you can see the inscription: “Lenochka, I took a ticket to Hades,” by the end of the novel it will be erased to “Len… I took a ticket to Hades…”

Lost Paradise is also childhood: perhaps the most striking picture of a house as paradise in the Russian tradition is Oblomov’s dream. A land frozen in its eternal bliss, where everything is bathed in a honeyed, gentle glow, where time does not move (as it should be in paradise), where the only possible activity is to love each other and especially little Ilyusha. “Happy people lived, thinking that it shouldn’t and couldn’t be otherwise, confident that everyone else lived exactly the same way and that living differently is a sin.” This world is so clean and bright that it does not require any special care – this is a house “with a gate lopsided to one side, with a wooden roof sagging in the middle and a neglected garden” – nor reasonable meaningfulness: “Life, like a calm river, flowed past them; they could only sit on the shore and observe the inevitable phenomena, which in turn, without calling, appeared before each of them.” The stamp of paradise can be destructive: perhaps that is why Oblomov lies on the sofa, imagining plans for the future estate, because not one of the possible houses, real or imagined, can come close to this ideal imprinted in his memory.

Such is the parental home in Tolstoy’s “Childhood” – for the author it is more of a utopia than a memory; Tolstoy did not remember his mother at all, whose gentle voice sounds every now and then in this story. Such are the family estates in Sergei Aksakov’s “Family Chronicle” – an idyll experienced in childhood, where even the wild old landowner morals are dissolved in a pre-established patriarchal harmony. This is a world without sin, existing before any rationality or reflection, full of warmth, inner joy, affection and peace – in a word, a child’s world.

And it also happens, like in Bitov’s “Pushkin House”: the apartment of Uncle Dickens, who returned from the camp (“it’s not that he “washed himself”, he was always clean”), where the kitchen, corridor and toilet are mixed up, where the stove-stove is heated , the space is cramped and meager – but illuminated by “self-respecting taste”, some kind of authenticity that the owner conveys to everything around him, and despite all the crampedness, this is a house in which it is good to be. Or like Chudakov’s novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” – where the life of a post-war exile settlement, unbearable by all standards, is reorganized by the will and mind of the heroes – strong people who are capable of bringing order and clarity even into the disintegrating fabric of life.

This gives me hope. If the author can build an ideal house in his text, turn the dead into the living, turn hell into heaven – perhaps, with a certain amount of effort, a tenant registered at such and such an address can also do this.

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