The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya Read Free Book Online Page B

the carriage, the coachman, and the horses. There were rumors that this building was haunted. We’ll never know whether that’s true or not. But what happened in this very building in October 1826—a poet named Venevitinov was living here then—many eyewitnesses confirm: in the main hall of this house, Pushkin read his tragedy Boris Godunov aloud for the first time . There were about forty people present, and almost half of them wrote about the reading in letters to their relatives immediately afterward, or subsequently, in their memoirs. You’ve all read Boris Godunov , haven’t you? Who can summarize the plot for me?”
    Mikha was always ready to be called upon, but this time he had forgotten some parts of the story and didn’t want to embarrass himself.
    For a while, nobody said anything. Finally, Igor Chetverikov said tentatively:
    â€œHe killed Tsarevich False Dmitry.”
    â€œCongratulations, Igor. History is a rather muddled affair. There are in fact two versions of the story. In one, Boris Godunov killed Tsarevich Dmitry. In the other, he didn’t kill him, and was really quite a decent man. Your version, charging him with the murder of another person altogether—False Dmitry—flies in the face of long-held historical beliefs. Don’t worry, though, history isn’t algebra. It’s not an exact science. In some ways, literature is a more exact science than history. What a great writer says can become a historical truth. Military historians have found many discrepancies in Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino, but the whole world imagines the event just as Tolstoy described it in War and Peace. Neither was Pushkin standing in the rear courtyard of the palace of Maria Nagaya, mother of the young Tsarevich, where the murder of Dmitry did—or did not—take place. The same principle applies to his story about Mozart. I suppose you’ve all read The Little Tragedies .”
    â€œYes, of course! Evil and true genius are incompatible,” Mikha said.
    â€œI hold the same view. There is no definitive proof that Salieri poisoned Mozart. This is just historical speculation. Pushkin’s work, however, is what one could call undiluted fact. A great fact of Russian literature. History may find proof that Salieri never poisoned Mozart, but there will still be no gainsaying The Little Tragedies . Pushkin expressed a great idea: a man cannot be both evil and a true genius.”
    It was getting dark. Victor Yulievich said good night to the students, and they all scattered to their homes in various parts of Kitai-Gorod.
    This first literary walking tour led to the foundation of a club, which by the end of the year had settled on a name for itself: LORL, the Lovers of Russian Literature.
    After finding out about the first excursion, Ilya never missed a single one of these “nature walks”—what Victor Yulievich called their Wednesday afternoon literary wanderings. Ilya would compile reports on their meetings; he was the recording secretary, and a conscientious one, at that. He stored the LORL protocols, together with his photographs, in the bookcase of his sacred space, the closet darkroom.
    While they were being initiated into the mysteries of nineteenth-century Russian literature, the LORLs also learned, piece by piece, about the war experiences of their teacher.
    With his nostrils and cheeks twitching (which they now knew was the result of an injury), Victor Yulievich told them about how he and his classmates had reported to the recruitment office the day after war broke out.
    They sent him to a field artillery school in Tula. The boys wanted concrete details—battle, advance, retreat, wounds. What kind of weaponry? What kind of ammunition? What about the Germans, what were they armed with?
    The teacher’s answers were brief and to the point. Remembering was painful for him.
    Training at the Tula program was accelerated, but