Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar

By Yuri Tynianov

The Plot

Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar tells the story of the last year in the life of Alexander Griboyedov, a diplomat and playwright in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas I. The novel takes him from being feted in St Petersburg in March 1828, as the successful negotiator of a peace treaty with Persia, through his return to Persia as the &

• Language: English
• Publisher: Look Multimedia
• Release date: Jun 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781999981518

Yuri Tynianov

Yuri Tynianov (1894-1943) was a Russian writer and literary theorist, and a central figure among the revolutionary-era scholars who came to be known as the Russian Formalists.

Book preview

THE AUTHOR

Yuri Tynianov (1894-1943) was one of the brave and talented young people of the Russian Revolution, a trailblazer of innovation in literary theory, and also an author, screenwriter, poet and translator. The son of a Jewish doctor, he went up to Saint Petersburg in 1912 and married while still a student, scrambling between jobs to support his family. A hugely popular lecturer and thinker, he taught at several institutions, did a variety of publishing work and wrote screenplays for the Sevzapkino studio.

His literary criticism as a member of the Formalist group is still highly regarded, but Tynianov’s greatest legacy is his meticulously researched fiction. Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar has been described as the most extraordinary historical novel one could read. Lieutenant Kizhé inspired a film and one of Prokoviev’s most-loved scores. Both were written at Tynianov’s literary peak in 1926-28, just as a long-term illness – multiple sclerosis - tightened its grip on him.

By then Stalin was also tightening his grip and time had run out for the Leningrad spring. Tynianov wrote more novellas and a biographical novel Pushkin while earning his living mainly as an editor. Illness increasingly limited him. When war came he was evacuated from the siege of Leningrad and died in Moscow.

THE TRANSLATION

Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar has never been fully translated into English until now. A version by Alec Brown was published in 1938 as Death and Diplomacy in Persia but it omits key parts such as the prologue. Susan Causey, an editor and journalist, who worked extensively on Russian cultural projects in the 1990s and 2000s, saw the need for a good translation. She completed the work over five years as a retirement project but was killed in a road accident before she had the opportunity to publish it. Her husband, Andrew Causey, died shortly afterwards.

Friends of the Causeys worked with their two sons to recover the manuscript and show it to several experienced Russianist translators and academics. Their assessment was very favourable. Tim Johnson, a long-term friend and colleague of the Causeys, took on the task of publishing it. He was able to commission Vera Tsareva-Brauner, Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, to edit the translation from the point of view of a native Russian speaker. This version was completed in December 2017 and is published by Look Multimedia in online and hard-copy formats.

PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In June 2014, my friend Andrew Causey was dying and his wife Susan had brought him home from hospital to care for him in his final weeks. On 10th June the phone rang and I picked it up, thinking it could be news of him, but it was Andrew himself, telling me that Sue had been killed, stepping in front of a bus on Oxford Street.

Andrew was bedridden but he summoned up all his remaining energy to help his sons, Leo and Edgar, to organise Susan’s funeral and make dispositions for the family in the time left to him – he died on 27th June. So my first acknowledgement is to Andrew, not only for the help and encouragement he gave me towards the publication of Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar in the last weeks of his life but also for his unfailing support to Susan over many years which made the translation possible in the first place.

Once Leo had recovered the manuscript from Susan’s papers and the files from her computer it was possible to produce a complete copy of her translation. Rosalind Lavington, a friend of the Causeys, encouraged me to explore publication. Thanks to a key introduction from Anne and Graham Rook I was able to show the translation to several experts in Russian literature and translation, including Nicolas Slater, Antony Wood, Donald Rayfield and Bryan Karetnyk. Their favourable assessments provided further encouragement, and it was clear that the translation should be edited, for example to catch the complexities and colloquialisms which Susan had not had the opportunity to resolve fully.

I wrote to some potential editors and Muireann Maguire kindly promoted my search to the wider BASEES membership. Inna Tigountsova produced test edits which were essential for identifying the issues to be tackled and the scale of the task. Vera Tsareva-Brauner took on the challenge of editing the whole manuscript. I am very grateful for her decision. Her drive, dedication to language and flexibility made her the ideal editor for the circumstances. Her contribution to the finished translation has been invaluable. Meanwhile my wife, family and friends kindly tolerated my obsession and the time it absorbed.

Finally, Leo and Edgar have provided a vital combination of financial and moral support. Always encouraging, never interfering, their approach ensured that preparing Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar for publication has been a pleasure, not a chore. Susan Causey made a major contribution to twentieth century literature by translating this work fully into English for the first time, and her sons generous support has rescued that contribution for the benefit of all.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ON BEHALF OF THE TRANSLATOR

Susan Causey’s own list of acknowledgements would have included several Russian and linguist friends who encouraged her to embark on translating such a difficult document in the first place and on whom she drew to discover obscure meanings –of many Persian as well as Russian words – or construe complex syntax. With apologies to those omitted here, two very valuable to Susan were Elena Korf and Firuza Melville, with their respective Russian and Persian advice and contacts. Antony Wood provided early encouragement on a possible route to publication. Susan would also have thanked her employers, The Prince’s Trust for the marvellous opportunity they provided to engage with Russian culture at a high level over about 15 years. I hope to be able to add to this list once the translation is published.

Susan would also have thanked her sons, Leo and Edgar, her daughter-in-law Jaki and her grandchildren Ella, Jess and Joe who were a vital source of love and cheerfulness for her in the difficult years of Andrew’s illness. Not least she would have thanked Andrew for his unfailing and constructive support over more than 40 years. Andrew and Susan had a very collaborative marriage, not just in their writing – Susan made a major editing contribution to Andrew’s art historical publications – but in all aspects of their life. One example all their friends enjoyed was the beautiful garden they created together at their cottage in Exmoor.

Tim Johnson, Publisher,

Look Multimedia, London, April 2018

DEATH OF THE VAZIR-MUKHTAR

Look upon this face. It’s cold.

All life has drained away.

But traces of the passions spent

Remain alive today.

As a raging torrent, frozen,

Hanging over the crevasse,

Still retains a powerful motion

Though its mighty roar is past.

Yevgeny Baratynsky

The men of the ‘twenties with their springing step ceased to exist on a very cold square in the month of December and the year of 1825. Time suddenly broke down, the crack of breaking bones sounded around St Michael’s Manege - the rebels were fleeing over the bodies of their comrades - the age itself was being tortured, it was ‘one big prison cell’ (as they said in Peter’s day).

Faces of amazing muteness appeared immediately, right there on the square, faces whose cheeks were stretched tight as their elk-skin breeches, ready to burst blood vessels. Veins blue as the northern skies piped the gendarmes’ uniforms, and the Baltic muteness of Benkendorf became the sky of Petersburg.

Then, measurement began as to amount and degree, the trials of the fluttering fathers, the fathers were condemned to execution and inglorious life.

A chance French traveller, struck by the working of the Russian mechanism, wrote that it was ‘an empire of catalogues’, adding that these were ‘brilliant’.

The fathers bent down, the children stirred, then the fathers became intimidated by the children, started to respect them and curry favour with them. At night they had pangs of remorse and sad weeping fits. They called them ‘conscience’ and ‘memories’.

And there were emptinesses.

Beyond the emptinesses, few people noticed that blood flowed out from the fluttering fathers, broken like blades – that the blood of the century pulsed elsewhere.

The children were no more than two or three years younger than the fathers. Using the labour of serfs and of prisoners taken in the wars, bustling with activity and asking extravagant prices (but not springing), they wound up the hollow machine of Benkendorf, ratcheting up the gears with a factory or an industrial plant. In the ‘thirties people sniffed a whiff of America or the East Indies in the air.

Two winds were blowing: to East and West. Both brought with them salt and death for the fathers - and money for the sons.

What did politics mean to the fathers?

‘So what is a secret society? We went to the girls in Paris, here we’ll go to the Bear,’ said the Decembrist Lunin.

He was not light-minded: he teased Nicholas later from Siberia with his letters and proposals written in a mockingly clear hand; he was teasing a bear with a walking stick – he was light-footed.

Rebellion and women were the sensuous pleasure of poetry and even everyday conversations. This was another source of death: rebellion and women.

The people who died before their time were caught unawares by death, suddenly, as if by love, or the rain.

He caught the arm of the frightened doctor and urgently begged for help, insisting loudly and crying out ‘Don’t you understand, my friend: I want to live, to live!’

Thus died Yermolov, the twenties commander confined in a jar by Nicholas.

And the doctor fainted at the squeeze of his hand.

They would recognise each other in a ‘thirties crowd, the men of the ‘twenties – they had a kind of ‘masonic sign’, a special look - and in particular an ironical smile, not understood by other people. The smile was almost child-like.

They heard the new words around them, beat their heads against the wall over ones like ‘kamer-junker’ (‘gentleman of the bedchamber’) or ‘rent’, and did not understand them either. Sometimes they risked their lives through ignorance of the vocabulary of their own children or younger brothers. It was easy to risk death for ‘women’ or ‘a secret society’: more difficult for ‘kamer-junker’.

The death overtaking men of the ‘twenties was hard – because the age died before them.

In the ‘thirties they had a sure feeling when a man should die. Like dogs, they would choose a convenient corner for it. And in the face of death they didn’t call out for love, or friendship.

What was friendship? ? What was love?

They had let friendship drop at some point in the previous decade, and all that remained of it was the habit of writing letters to petition for guilty friends – and there were plenty of guilty ones then. The letters they wrote each other were long and sentimental and they deceived each other as they had once deceived women.

In the ‘twenties they had joked about women and made no secret of love. Sometimes they would simply fight and then die with the kind of look that said, ‘To be with Istomina tomorrow!’ The phrase ‘wounds of the heart’ was much in vogue then. Although it posed no obstacle to a marriage of convenience.

In the ‘thirties poets began writing to silly beauties. Women took to wearing extravagant garters. The dissipation with ‘girls’ in the ‘twenties was seen to be diligent and rather childish; the secret societies appeared no more than ‘a hundred junior officers’.

Happy were those who lay down like dogs in the ‘twenties – proud young dogs, with loud russet whiskers!

How frightening was the life of those who could be transformed, the life of those men of the ‘twenties whose blood was being changed!

They felt themselves to be the subjects of experiments by a stranger, whose fingers will not falter.

The age was fermenting.

The spirit of an age is always fermenting in the blood: and each era has its own type of ferment.

The ‘twenties had a fermentation of wine – with Pushkin.

With Griboyedov ¹ the ferment was vinegary.

And then with Lermontov, a ferment of decay throbs in words and in the blood, like a chord on a guitar.

The scent of the finest perfume intensifies as it decays to its dregs (ambergris is the waste of a marine animal), when the sweetest smell is a hair’s breadth away from a stench.

And now - in our time, poets have even forgotten about perfume and peddle waste itself as a fragrance.

On this day I have batted away the scent of perfumes and of waste. An old Asiatic vinegar lies in my veins, and the blood is pulsing through them slowly, as if across the emptinesses of ruined empires.

A man of moderate height, sallow and punctilious, occupies my imagination.

He is lying immobile, his eyes glistening from sleep.

He has reached out for his spectacles, towards the bedside table.

He doesn’t think, doesn’t speak.

Nothing is decided yet.

CHAPTER

ONE

Sharul’ belo iz kana la sadyk.²

Griboyedov, letter to Bulgarin

1

Nothing was decided yet.

He raised himself and leaned forward, nose and lips extending like a goose.

A peculiar thing! Here in his boyhood bed, past habits came back of their own accord. This was exactly how he’d stretch in the mornings, listening to the sounds of the paternal home: was Mamenka up yet? already nagging Papenka? A wild idea flew into his head: wouldn’t his uncle come in now, leaning on his stick: to wake him, churn up the bed clothes and propose riding out together?

Why the banging with that stick?

And he shut his eyes stealthily, sliding his nose lower under the blankets.

Of course he came to his senses quickly.

He reached his sallow hand to the table and perched the spectacles on his nose.

He’d slept wonderfully: he could only sleep well in unfamiliar places. His family home was today so unfamiliar that he’d passed the kind of excellent night he would have had in a quiet coaching inn, although now in the morning he was affected by the mysterious odour that has good reason to suffuse family homes.

Alexei Fyodorovich Griboyedov, the uncle with the stick, had died five years ago. He was buried here in Moscow.

Therefore, he could not be coming in.

And in due course Papenka died too.

But the familiar sounds lived on.

Clocks were calling to each other from room to room, like roosters, through the wooden walls. In Maman’s boudoir the little pendulum raced as crazily as ever.

Then came a sound of scuffling and somebody spitting.

He could not at once decide what it was.

Then a stifled giggle (certainly female) and the scuffling stopped before starting again with new vigour. There was whispered shushing somewhere close by and the tinny tinkle of a small bell – undoubtedly from Mamenka’s boudoir. And the point of the scuffing and spitting – and also the giggle – became clear: his man Alexander - Sashka - was cleaning his boots, spitting, and tickling the ribs of Mamenka’s maid.

All told, Alexander was showing unusual cheek around the house on this latest visit: he had swooped down on his master’s home like a Persian brigand, taking it by storm, and he spoke using a royal ‘we’ - brows flying up, nostrils flaring, pale eyes growing stupid. He was almost majestic.

In this mode, he had conceived the idea that ‘Alexander Sergeyevich would not allow his clothes to be brushed in the servants’ hall’: he slept upstairs and now he was making up to the maid.

Alexander Sergeyevich just smiled, because he was fond of Sashka. Sashka made him think of a frog.

Mamenka tinkled her little bell again, to keep Sashka from waking him, but in fact - intolerably - waking him herself.

So out of sheer mischief, from a wish to outdo the offensive noise of Maman’s bell, he reached out and jangled his own bell back. The sound was as offensive as Mamenka’s, but louder. He rang again.

Alexander entered stealthily, slithering like a snake, his house-shoes shuffling. His gait was like a dervish in The Martyrdom of Ali. On outstretched arms he was carrying clothing like a sacrifice to the gods; his quiff was already slicked and waved with kvass. A smile of amazing foolishness presented itself to Griboyedov. He watched with pleasure as Alexander placed his thin black suit on a stool, laying the trousers’ foot-straps level with a ritual gesture.

They were usually silent like this, admiring each other.

‘You can bring me some coffee.’

‘Kava sir? In a jiffy,’ as he flaunted the Persian word, Sashka also arranged in a row the long pointed toes of his master’s boots.

(‘The perfect coffee-hawker. So, you idiot, you’ve found somebody to show off to.’)

‘Did you order the cab?’

‘T’s waiting, sir.’

Alexander went off, bobbing his head at each retreating step.

Like a hunted, gloomy animal, Griboyedov examined the black suit.

He noticed a speck of dust on the breast of his frock-coat and flicked it off, blushing. He didn’t want to think about the diamond star that would soon be glittering there – but could not help imagining it vividly, in the very place where he’d brushed off the dust.

Coffee came.

He dressed quickly, took a bold decision and went through to Mamenka’s boudoir, knocking on the wooden door as if his knuckle were wooden too.

‘Entrez?’³

The surprise was feigned and the rising note in the question was a third higher than need be, but on this visit Maman’s voice was sweetly dolce, sweet as honey.

Lowering his long eyelashes submissively, he plunged at once through a succession of smells: wafts of the eau-de-cologne fixing hair-curls … something sulphurous … juniper powders.

Mamenka sat with her hair twisted into thin puffs at the temples, and it was not grey so much as colourless.

Using a lorgnette, she focused her eyes and peered at Alexander. Her gaze was very slightly lustful. Alexander had been promised the rank of State Counsellor.

‘How did you sleep my son? Your Sashka has woken us all up for the second day running now.’

The second morning he’d wanted to flee the house.

But this time he had decided and must evidently make himself clear. He was escaping to Petersburg - actually not even escaping: he was conveying the Peace of Turkmanchai to Petersburg, and had the right to spend no more than a day or two in Moscow en route, though when he told Mamenka yesterday he would leave in the morning she had sulked: he could surely stay one more day in Moscow. And he had delayed. This time she looked at her son in a special way.

Nastasia Fyodorovna was broke.

Was she wasteful? She was stingy. But all the same money just ran through her fingers, poured out like sand – once again the corners began to crack, the house to crumble; the very air breathed ruin – all the furniture was there, but the house was emptying.

Nastasia Fyodorovna was a clever woman, a good housekeeper, his mother – so where did the money go? The air of the Griboyedov house seemed to consume it. The peasants were already sucked dry. Five years ago they’d revolted, raised a rebellion that needed suppressing by force of arms. But victory or no, the provincial governor paid regular visits, drank his tea and warned it would be better to have no more rebellions.

Alexander interpreted the voice and the lorgnette perfectly. The honeyed legato was an invitation to have a little talk. So he began. With a degree of contempt, he heard in his own speech too much expressiveness, as if himself infected by her tone.

All this, of course, was a bad business and bound to end with an unpleasant scene; mother and son, both knowing this, were dragging it out.

The mother did not know what the son wanted. He could remain in Moscow, do government service in Petersburg, or be posted to that self-same Persia. Of course, now he had shown himself such a diplomat, everything was open to him. His mother had already exchanged letters with Alexander’s superior, Paskevich, who was married to her niece. Paskevich, liking to be surrounded by obligated relatives, was promoting Alexander. His advice to Nastasia Fyodorovna was to accept Persia.

So they sorted things out behind his back as if he was a child – worst of all because he knew about it. The mother guessed that she had only to mention Persia for Alexander to oppose it – even though it was quite possible he might want Persia himself.

Persia had the edge in the first place because of money, and rank, and Paskevich’s patronage. In Moscow and even more so in Petersburg both the issues and the work were different. Neither Persia nor Petersburg were clear to Nastasia Fyodorovna: they were places to which Alexander had simply vanished for years; as if he had gone off to work and disappeared not for four hours, but four years. She herself would never say even ‘Alexander is in Persia’ or ‘in the Caucasus’, but ‘Sasha is at the mission’. The mission was an establishment, an institution, and so much more normal, more settled. Moscow was all she knew, but this did not mean she wanted Sasha to stay in Moscow.

‘Will you dine at home today?’

‘No, Maman, I’m invited out.’

In fact, he had no invitation, but he could not force himself to dine at home. There was no escaping the fact that the dinners were vile.

Nastasia Fyodorovna looked mischievously through her lorgnette.

‘Délices de coulisses⁴ again?’

Insulting, for his mother to talk about his women.

‘I have business to do, Matushka. You always think I’m still twenty.’

‘I see you’re in less of a hurry to get to Petersburg.’

‘On the contrary, I must leave tomorrow morning.’

She admired him through the lorgnette.

‘And where then are your Lion and your Sun?’

Alexander smiled guardedly.

‘The Lion and Sun, Mamenka, have long since reposed with the Tiflis pawnbroker. I had a debt to pay. Heaven preserve me from debts to a colleague.’

She laid down the lorgnette.

‘So soon?’

The pawned decoration gave her the advantage. There was no avoiding the discussion.

‘Perhaps your preparations are too hasty?’

She twisted fussily the puff on her left temple.

‘No. I really had no right to stay more than a day. And that’s already past. It’s no joking matter.’

‘Not those preparations – I mean for what you’re to do next.’

He shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his feet:

‘I’ve really not thought yet.’

Looking up, he presented her with a totally strange face, unlike that of her Sasha: no longer young, with hair thinning at the temples and a piercing gaze.

‘It depends on a particular project … ’

She took refuge, startled, behind the transparent ringlets on her brow and lowered her voice completely, like a conspirator:

‘On what kind of project, my son?’

‘ … about which, Maman, it’s still too early to speak … ’

He would seem to have won. But not so soon. She switched now to emotion, and that was worst of all.

‘Alexandre, I implore you,’ she clasped her hands, ‘do remember that we are on the brink …’ Her eyes reddened, her voice was trembling, but she had not done.

She wiped her red eyes with a handkerchief and blew her nose.

‘And Jean,’ she said, speaking quite calmly of Paskevich, ‘wrote to me that it’s got to be Persia. To Persia, and only that.’

She spoke the last words with conviction.

‘But of course who am I to know, perhaps you, Sasha, have even decided to stay here and busy yourself with magazines?’

Very calmly, but my god, what legato!

Jean, and Persia, and everything are utter nonsense: he doesn’t want to go to Persia and will not go to Persia.

‘I told Ivan Fyodorovich that l’d like to be put forward for only a cash reward. I’ve foreseen everything, Mamenka.’

He shot her another glance, a diplomat’s glance, a State Counsellor’s glance, the glance of an oriental princeling.

‘For myself, I’m more inclined to office life. But I’ll think things over …’

He stood up, completely independent:

‘I must be off. I won’t be home till late tonight.’

On the very threshold of salvation Nastasia Fyodorovna held him back, narrowing her eyes:

‘Are you taking the carriage?’

He was ready to go absolutely anyhow: in a droshky with a guitar, in a fancy merchant barouche - anything so long as it wasn’t the family carriage.

‘Stepan Nikitich has sent me his carriage,’ he countered.

‘Ah.’

And he escaped towards the front door through the main drawing room – bright turquoise blue – and a second drawing-room – azure, Nastasia Fyodorovna’s favourite colours. On the walls between the windows were mirrors and little console tables with bronzes and very fine porcelain that was, as a consequence, always dusty; and even the untutored eye could see that the chandeliers were papier-maché, imitating bronze. The tired furniture was covered by dust sheets, which had been there as long as Alexander could remember. He slowed down in the small oriental sitting room. He was pulled up short by the sight of a trellis twined with ivy on both sides of a divan and two china cabinets à la Pompadour.

One could not imagine anything sillier or newer than the most recent acquisitions of the near-bankrupt Nastasia Fyodorovna.

Including an elaborate Karsel oil lamp on one table - made of real bronze.

Next to the corner by the door where he was standing was a column plaited like a braid, a column of mahogany that arched upwards to form a hook and used the hook to support a hanging lantern with engraved glass panels.

Everything spoke of hapless Asia, ruin and deception.

All that was missing was for walls and ceilings to be glued over with multicoloured mirror-glass fragments, as in Persia. That would have been gaudier still.

It was his house, his Heim,⁵ his childhood. And how much he loved it all.

He hurried to the entrance throwing on a cloak, ran out of the house and fell into the carriage.

2

Looking about with some curiosity, he had the impression that the traffic was going round and round in an aimless circle.

The same familiar Russian muzhiks were walking along the road, some one way, some the other.

A dandy sped past in a droshky, coming from Novinskaya Square, and another, looking just the same, passed immediately in the opposite direction. Then he realised what was going on here: both dandies were wearing yerevanki.

Yerevan had barely fallen before the Moscow patriots were displaying their vanity by cramming their heads into these round Armenian hats.

No, it was not worth fighting in Transcaucasia for the sake of Moscow and his amiable homeland: turning the Caucasus into a cemetery and a hotel!

Crossing Tverskaya, the carriage continued along Sadovaya. The backstreets streaming into the main roads looked narrow, dirty and untrustworthy. The carriage turned into one of them. It might have been Tabriz! - where the slime beside the main street is primordial and boys search each other’s heads for lice. Belltowers rose up ahead. They looked like minarets.

He surprised himself making these comparisons with Asia – it was a kind of mental laziness.

All those non-stop days when he had bargained with the Persians in some kind of feverish contest over each patch of land in the treaty, when he had raced here with that treaty, which by now had a name - Turkmanchai - to bring it at once to Petersburg, without delay – he had pursued every byway, lavished kindness and cunning, he’d used guile, dissembled, acted cleverly - and never once thought over properly everything that was actually happening.

And now, so close to Petersburg, he’d ground to a halt: Moscow had swallowed him up carelessly and seemed to forget him. Over these two days he’d started to be afraid, anxious that he’d not get the peace to Petersburg - a childish fear without foundation.

It was the gloomy month of March. Snow in Moscow, a sudden glimpse of the sun but otherwise cloudy; boredom at home – two days of it – but here in the streets it was even worse, stopping him concentrating. All this was like the arabesques he’d pondered in sleepless nights during the negotiations at Abbas Abad, when you follow and follow a line, then run into a stumbling block and everything is confusion. How strongly he was affected by good or bad weather: when the sun shone he was a boy, but in this gloom he felt more like an old man.

Frightening to realise that the distraction and cold even affected his Project. He was no longer confident about it – it was even the reverse, the Project would certainly founder … A passing dandy slipped on the ice and foundered too, staggering a while before looking round to see if people were laughing at him.

And as he drove out now it was with the craving, the secret intention: that somewhere on the city streets he would find a solution.

Little by little, he had frittered his life away on the highways, travelled them non-stop - and now here he was, trying to capture his own youth somewhere in the side-streets.

That’s how Moscow was draining his energy.

On this last day he’d decided to make the rounds of the people he knew. But in the streets he was not finding a single solution. Simply - it was March: now sun, now gloom, with many passing Russian muzhiks, all jostling each other. Their faces were all alike - all the same whether they were going somewhere or coming back. The Russian urchins chased after each other, making a healthy meaningless racket.

And one after another carriages and droshkies plodded along. Taken individually, each might well go fast, even race by, but taken as a whole -they plodded. His horse strained against the harness.

A shameful phrase flashed into his head: ‘The horses here are like black mules’ – the phrase for an Asian Olearius.

Nobody was paying him any attention.

He noted with chagrin that this was precisely what stung him. He knew quite well that his main reception was to be in Petersburg, and his welcome had anyway been grand enough in Moscow. But it was disagreeable that after a month’s journeying, carrying among his papers the glorious, much talked-of Peace of Turkmanchai, on this day in Moscow he was left to his own devices.

Childishness.

The Moscow dandies in their double capes and Armenian caps, airy as butterflies, seemed creatures of another world. Everything here today was infected with lightness and vivacity. Everyone had become so dashing. And unreliable. It seemed that one droshky with its migrating dandy was just about to take off and fly through the air, leaving below a slatternly woman and a muzhik with a barrel of herrings on his head, one arm swinging like a weighty pendulum.

But the dandy’s style was cramped by the horses’ muzzles and that same muzhik, swinging his torso and arm with mechanical grace, kept obstinately emerging from the crowd.

With the barrel on his head he was balancing like a ballerina.

During the two years of his absence even the bear-like clumsiness of Moscow muzhiks had vanished, even slatterns were caught up in movement - they were all going somewhere or coming back.

This is how it seemed to him: he was near-sighted.

A muzhik came floating towards him - slowly, as in a dream, detached, as in a theatre - at the reins of an unseasonable sledge. He was driving along Sadovaya as he would through a village.

He sailed along, mouth open, not thinking or feeling, gazing ahead with vague concentration.

And next to him, in a droshky, rode McNeill!

He took fright at how easily he had noted Dr McNeill side by side with the muzhik.

Simple as it was, it made no sense: a muzhik was driving along the street and almost beside him was the Englishman, McNeill, chief doctor of the Tabriz mission.

He looked again eagerly in that direction, but there was no McNeill: only a fat army colonel with whiskers like a dog’s.

But what was he doing here? If McNeill had left for Russia, he should have known about it. It could be that the doctor had fixed things up directly through Paskevich. But in that case Paskevich should have given him some warning.

But what was so special about it?

And perhaps it wasn’t even McNeill.

He shrugged his shoulders, not best pleased. The Englishman’s face had grown so familiar to him in Tabriz that he’d soon be thinking his mother was the doctor. He took off his spectacles and rubbed them angrily with a lace-edged handkerchief. His eyes slipped out of focus without glasses.

The driver stopped the carriage beside the fire station on Prechistenka Street.

3

The house itself had a somehow striking appearance; it merged with the garden. The building was squat, the windows dark, the front entrance heavy and low. This was where Yermolov lived now he was retired.

The door looked out from under sullen brows, reluctant to yield and ready to drive a guest out again, slamming shut.

Especially him.

That agreeable but exacting Yermolov who had ruled the Caucasus in Alexander’s day, planning the wars, writing instructions to the Emperor, dealing rudely with Nesslerode, no longer existed, or at least he was not supposed to. What then was the present one like, the one living here in this house?

Over the last two years, his own relations with Yermolov had been painful. Or rather, there had been none. They had avoided each other.

When Nicholas took the palace by storm he began to feel isolated, jumped-up - a parvenu. There had followed a raking-over of conversations and indexing of whispers. It turned out, inter alia, that in the Caucasus sat a shaggy monster, the pro-consul of the Caucasus, speaking hoarsely, issuing reprimands, and so on. It appeared that he wanted to detach himself, to secede from the Empire and set up an Eastern kingdom. After December, he had been expected to march on Petersburg. He was surrounded by dubious people. He had his own Eastern agenda and should therefore be removed.

Soon the war started with Persia. The old man tried growling at Petersburg for interfering in his military strategy. But his time had passed, along with his strategy.

The Empire no longer demanded stoutness in its military commanders or wit in its poets.

Paskevich was appointed to keep an eye on him.

Paskevich knew how to toady and he loved those who toadied.

He patiently informed against Yermolov and explained to Nicholas that it would be best of all to appoint himself commander-in-chief and suspend Yermolov from his command.

The Persian troubles carried on and grew worse. The Persians had a fiery commander in Abbas Mirza. Russia’s war leaders were squabbling.

And soon somebody senior to both was sent out. Dibich was of course a shrimp, a ginger-haired, excitable, untidy little figure.

Yermolov glared from under his brows, Paskevich devoured him with his eyes, and Dibich squinted at the ground.

He was afraid they were laughing at him.

Dibich wrote to the Emperor that both the old general and the young Turk needed replacing with somebody middle-aged.

He himself however gained nothing from this and returned home. It was Paskevich who won. Yermolov was discharged, just as the twenties as a whole had already been discharged.

After the war all his staff were also disposed of. A kind of Yermolov party took shape - made up of disgruntled generals.

Rattling their sabres or, if already retired, simply shrugging their shoulders, they wheezed around the toppled monument.

They gathered in Moscow at his house on Prechistenka like Knights Templar drawn to the Temple, like Christians to the catacombs. And the monument gave them his blessing.

Pushed off the path he’d advanced along during his 38-year service, he dropped out of sight. It took him one example of tactics to establish the superiority of Napoleon over Hannibal, and one Russian word to demolish the importance of Nicholas’s swollen-headed upstart. With the braid of their epaulettes trembling gently and their feet dragging, the generals paraded before him, leaning – as retirees do – on their canes.

The war ended. Abbas Mirza, the supreme Asian commander and diplomat, was crushed. The Peace of Turkmanchai was awaited in Petersburg.

The generals knew: no talent had been shown in winning the war, they didn’t even see it as the work of Paskevich – he’d done no more than attach his name to what was achieved by Veliaminov and Madatov. But then he made a report, showed them in a false light and both were fired. In the twentieth century the generals would have been called defeatists.

But what of Griboyedov – why had he attached his own name to Paskevich’s?

Here an unpleasant gap opened and the waters muddied.

It was suspicious the way that Paskevich’s style, up to then more or less illiterate, suddenly became flawless. Even in private correspondence his previously primitive expression took on a decisive beauty and elegance. Somebody was helping him. Surely not Griboyedov?

After all, hadn’t Griboyedov said to the generals on first learning of Paskevich’s appointment:

‘That lackey mine? How can you want this person, whom I know well, to triumph over our man? Believe me, ours will lead. The other may arrive in a hurry but he’ll leave covered in shame.’

Griboyedov was himself the old man’s protégé. But the protégé did not blink an eye when the commander was sacked; he walked away untouched, without a mark, and then rose to these dazzling heights.

And was this really thanks to the trifling circumstance of the family link to Paskevich?

One general sighed and said of him:

‘He’s driven by the demon of ambition. Gentlemen, he’s thirty-two years old. According to Dante that’s the median point of life or thereabouts. It’s the age when a man is driven by one demon or another.’

Yermolov himself looked on, his face impassive.

*

An old servant greeted the new arrival incuriously in the entrance hall and led him upstairs to his master’s study.

The room was small, with dark green furniture. Napoleon hung on the walls in a number of poses: the room was full of scowling brows, folded arms, three-cornered hats, capes and swords.

The servant led Griboyedov to a chair and quietly left the room.

‘His honour’s in the bookbindery, I‘ll tell him.’

Bindery?

He had to wait a long time. There was no affront; the master of the house was busy. Napoleon hung everywhere. The grey colour of the imperial frock-coat was cloudy, like the bad weather in Moscow; his face was of simple construction, like Latin prose.

But Russia was not ready for this kind of prose.

‘Caesar’ was the old man’s nickname, but even this was wrong: rather, he resembled Pompey, in both height and build, as well as his odd indecision. He had no time for Caesar’s prose – or even Napoleon’s jerky rhetoric.

On the master’s chair lay a discarded handkerchief. Probably he should not have come.

He heard the approach of unruffled footsteps, the shuffle of house-shoes, the creak of floorboards.

Yermolov appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a lightweight grey tailcoat of the kind merchants only put on in summer, and a yellowish waistcoat. Yellow-coloured Eastern trousers, tight towards the bottom, ballooned about his knees.

With no sign of his military coat, his sword, or the plain red collar supporting his neck it was an unworthy disguise. The old man had been shamed.

Griboyedov stepped towards him, smiling in embarrassment.

‘Don’t you recognise me Alexei Petrovich?’

‘I do of course,’ Yermolov said simply, and instead of embracing him he extended to Griboyedov his rough red hand. It was damp, recently washed.

Then, equally straightforwardly, he walked past his guest and sat down at his desk, leaning on it and bending forward a little as if to ask: what have you got to say?

Griboyedov sat down and crossed his legs. Gazing at his host over-intently, the way people look at the dead, he began:

‘I’m about to leave, and for a long time. You have shown me so much indulgence, Alexei Petrovich, that I could not refuse my own wish to first come and bid you goodbye.’

Yermolov said nothing.

‘You must think what you wish of me - I’m simply not sure myself. I’m afraid that you will now catch me out in some insinuation I don’t intend – and that I won’t change your view. But believe me, Alexei Petrovich: I’ve just come to say goodbye.’

With three fingers Yermolov took a pinch of yellowish snuff from a little box and poked it roughly into both nostrils. The snuff scattered on his chin, his waistcoat and the desk.

‘To you, Alexander Sergeyevich, I showed no indulgence; I don’t even have the word in my vocabulary; it was somebody else who indulged you. I simply saw that you were glad to serve, that you can’t stand fawning – you even wrote about that in your play, and I liked that kind of person.’

Yermolov spoke freely, there was nothing forced in what he said.

‘Now times have changed and so have the people. And you have changed. But as in the old days you were a different person, and as I love and respect the old days more, so, up to a point, I love and respect you.’

Griboyedov gave a sudden grin.

‘Alexei Petrovich, I’m not worthy of your praise - or at any rate it’s premature. As I valued my own soul I had real affection for you and in this at least I remain unchanged.’

Yermolov was raising his handkerchief to his nose.

‘So apparently you didn’t value your own soul very much.’

He blew his nose loudly.

‘And apparently you gaze into your soul only half way between Paskevich and Nesselrode.’

The old man spoke coarsely, purposely mispronouncing the name as ‘Pashkevich’⁶. He drummed his fingers.

‘How many kuror⁷ are you screwing out of the Persians?’ He spoke with some disdain, but with real curiosity.

‘Fifteen.’

‘Too much. It’s a bad idea to ruin conquered people.’

Griboyedov smiled. ‘But wasn’t it you, Alexei Petrovich, who said we must cut our tracks deeper? After all, you know the Persians – ask them for five kurors and they’ll pay nothing at all.’

‘Tracks are one thing, this is money or war. Your money or your life.’

‘Money or war’ was Paskevich’s phrase.’

Yermolov fell silent.

‘Abbas Mirza is a fool,’ he said. ‘If he’d called on me to be his commander things would have been different. Here, they as much as accuse me of high treason as it is – well, the fool could have taken advantage of that.’

Griboyedov eyed him again as if he were dead.

‘I’m not joking.’ The old man frowned. ‘I’ve worked out the plan for the Russian campaign better than Abbas’s, let alone Pashkevich’s.’

‘Really! and what is it?’ Griboyedov’s voice was barely audible.

The old man opened a folder and took out a map. Its length and breadth were streaked with marks

‘Look there,’ he beckoned Griboyedov with his finger, ‘Persia. You see? Tabriz – just like Moscow - is a big village - only it’s made of clay. And devastated. In the place of Abbas I’d have opened the road to Tabriz and sent people to Pashkevich with a petition saying they were dissatisfied with the government and were afraid, they’d say, of punishment, asking him to hurry up and set them free. You see? Pashkevich would be all ears … Correct? And if I were Abbas’ – he flicked the map with his finger - ‘that’s when I would have attacked the crossing on the Araxes, destroyed that and fallen on the army at the rear …’

Griboyedov looked at the familiar map. The Araxes was slashed through with red ink zig-zags like lightning flashes.

‘… on the army at the rear,’ said Yermolov, chewing his lip, ‘destroying the food transports.’

He ran his rough finger over the map.

‘In Azerbaijan – eliminate all life support, destroy the transports, lead them on and cut them off … ‘

He drew breath. Seated at his desk, he was commanding the Persian army.

Griboyedov didn’t stir.

‘At a stroke Pashkevich becomes Napoleon in Moscow – but without his cleverness. And Dibich would go to Petersburg, while to Nesselrode … ’

His head shrank back into his shoulders and his right hand began stuffing snuff into his nose, scattering it down his front and over the table.

Then he closed his eyes and his whole body suddenly began to quake: nose, lips, shoulders, belly. Yermolov was asleep. Griboyedov cast a horrified glance at the red neck, overgrown with mousey fluff. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes in embarrassment. His lips were trembling.

One minute passed, two …

Never, this had never happened before … Just one year into retirement …

‘ … to Nesselrode, Paskevich would report on him … in his letters,’ Yermolov concluded suddenly, as if nothing had happened, ‘ … in a natural style. But Paskevich’s style is not sufficiently natural. Pashkevich’s acquaintance with literacy is, after all, only limited. It’s said that you, dear kind Griboyedov, correct his style?’

Frontal attack!

Griboyedov sat up straight.

‘Alexei Petrovich.’ he said slowly, ‘having no respect for people, reviling their hypocrisy and pettiness, what the devil does their opinion matter to me? But all the same, if you tell me who said this, I – even though I have no respect for such idiocies, will challenge him. You yourself are to me untouchable – and not just because of your seniority.’

‘Well, many thanks,’ said Yermolov, and smiled discontentedly, ‘I didn’t believe it myself. Very well then,’ he ran his eyes over Griboyedov, ‘God be with you. Be on your way.’

He stood up and extended his hand.

‘In farewell I have two pieces of advice. First – don’t consort with the English. Second – don’t be too devoted to Pashkevich – pas trop de zêle!⁸ He’ll wring you dry and drop you. Remember: only a man with nothing to fear can call himself happy. But farewell. Without animosity - or affection.’

As Griboyedov walked downstairs he