A purple bird • Fairy-tales • The Knifer • The Red Gates
Yuri Koval
“The Red Gates”
(Novella «Îò Êðàñíûõ âîðîò»)
Published as: Yury Koval. The Red Gates. In: Moscow Tales. Stories translated by Sasha Dugdale;
Edited by Helen Constantine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. P. 83–128.See below:
From the General Introduction, Notes on the Stories, Publisher’s Acknowledgements
My brother Borya, my dear brother Borya, and I, were rowing a boat down the Sestra river.
I was idle. I sat at the back of the boat, dangling my bare feet, kicking gently at the still-moving bream, which we’d baited with semolina. The still-moving bream shifted by my feet in the water, which always collects in any boat worth its salt.
I was idle, kicking at the still-moving bream, but my brother Borya, my dear brother, was leaning on the oars with all his might.
Borya was in a rush, Borya was in a hurry, he was afraid of missing the bus.
At the place where the Sestra passes under the canal—that most remarkable place where the river and the canal cross, and the canal and the bed of the canal, all housed in concrete, pass over the living river—at that very place I saw a small white dog on the riverbank.
The dog was running along the bank, and Borya and I were rowing down the river.
I was idle, Borya was hurrying, and the little dog was running along.
On a whim, for no other reason than that I had nothing to do, I beckoned to the dog with my finger and then pursed my lips and made that special doggy sound, that sound that people always use to call dogs. It would be quite a job to write it down, it’s pretty much like a big smacking kiss. If you were to try and write it down, it might look like this: ptsoo-ptsoo.
So I made this ridiculous ptsoo-ptsoo sound, sitting all the while idly at the back of the boat.
The small white dog heard this indescribable sound, looked at me from the riverbank, and then suddenly jumped into the water.
How could I have known that would happen?
I made that ridiculous ptsoo-ptsoo sound in an ironic way, a humorous sort of way. I called the dog knowing full well that it couldn’t get to me. The very ptsoo-ptsoo of the sound made the difference in our circumstances quite clear: I was in a boat, and the dog was on the bank. We were separated by the abyss—the river water. No ordinary dog would have jumped into the water, not without having been pushed by its owner.
But the little white dog was no ordinary dog. It jumped in at the first invitation and crossed the abyss without a second’s thought. It swam towards me. When it reached the boat I grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and pulled it in. The little white dog stood amongst the half-dead bream and gave itself a mighty shake.
My brother Borya let go of the oars. He knew he had to say something. But he was silent. He didn’t know what to say. My unwarranted ptsoo-ptsoo, the dog’s reaction, the swim, the dragging it out by the scruff of the neck, the mighty shake—it had all happened in an instant.
Borya didn’t know what to say, but he knew he had to say something. An older brother always has to say something in a situation like this. I don’t know what other older brothers would have said in a situation like this, but my genius brother didn’t think for long.
Looking the dog over gravely, he pronounced,
‘Smooth-haired fox terrier.’
My brother Borya was in a rush, Borya was in a hurry.
In an instant we had steered the boat over to where its owner stood on the bank, handed over three roubles, and in another instant we had added a rouble, tied our rods together and thrown our bream into a sack.
And now we were running to catch the bus. The little white dog ran along behind us.
The bus came rushing down the road, we ran along the track. We and the bus would meet at a certain point where a crowd had already gathered. This point was called Karmanovo.
The bus got there before us. It was waiting there and we were still running, but the kindly driver saw us running along, and he was in no hurry to be off.
We ran up, we leaped into the bus, we threw down our rucksacks, we made ourselves comfortable on those very particular springy bus seats, we settled ourselves, and all the other passengers settled themselves, and we were ready to leave.
But the driver was in no hurry. He might have been having a smoke.
I looked through the open doors and saw out there, on the edge of the road, the little white dog Borya had given such precise name to.
It was looking into the bus. The driver was taking his time, or having a smoke. We had already thrown down our rucksacks; we were sitting on those very particular springy bus seats. We were wiping the sudden sweat. Borya was no longer hurrying. He was on the bus. The driver was still smoking. The dog stood looking into the bus at me.
And then for no reason, out of boredom really, I made that same unwarranted and indescribable noise with my lips, that same ptsoo-ptsoo I’ve already mentioned.
The small white dog charged onto the bus and in an instant had hidden itself under the very particular springy bus seat I was sitting on, and had crept close to my legs.
The bus passengers noticed, but pretended not to. The driver lit up again and the doors shut and we were off.
My brother Borya felt the need to say something. He was amazed by my second unwarranted ptsoo-ptsoo, which had led to this state of affairs. He was amazed by the behaviour of the little white dog sitting by my feet under the very particular springy bus seat.
My brother Borya, my only brother, spoke.
‘Smooth-haired fox terriers,’ he said, ‘are not as common as wire-haired fox terriers.’
Borya said nothing more all the while we bumped along in the bus. For a long time he remained the author of these two phrases of genius.
But when we got into the train at Dmitrov, and the little white dog had settled by my feet under one of those very particular wooden train seats, Borya asked a question of lesser genius.
At first I didn’t even hear him, I hoped he wasn’t going to repeat it. I thought he knew that there was no place for questions of lesser genius in his life.
But funny old Borya did repeat it.
‘What will Dad say?’ he asked again.
Everyone knew what Dad would say of course. I knew, and my brother Borya knew. All the inhabitants of our block at Krasniye Vorota knew what Dad would say.
My father, my dear father, who has long since departed this world, did not like pets. He didn’t like any animals, except horses, of course. He adored horses, and his love of horses had occupied all the room in his heart for other animals. He liked no other domestic animal, and he especially hated pigs.
My father in his youth, his far distant rural youth, when he hardly even knew what a town was, back then my father owned horses.
Well of course he didn’t own them himself, his father, my grandfather, owned them. But my father grazed these horses and led them to pasture at night. He would lead them out of the village and into the woods or the meadows to graze, and at dawn he would lead them back to the village. He was not meant to sleep when he did this, he was supposed to be watching over the horses, but he longed to sleep.
So he would tie the horses to a rope, and tie the other end around his wrists and he would go to sleep like this, and the horses would graze, and drag my father about the meadows and pastures. And he slept. He even liked to sleep like that, on the grass, with grazing horses dragging him along on a rope.
But one day he woke and pulled on the rope, and although the horses were surely there, they were standing very stiffly. So he rubbed his eyes, took hold of the rope and followed it, hand over hand, towards the horses. And he saw that the rope had been tied to an oak tree and the horses weren’t there. The horses were gone, stolen by gypsies, and the gypsies had tied the rope to the oak whilst my father slept on the grass.
This episode proved fateful for my father.
The horses were lost, and my father, who was still very young, took fright. Two horses, breadwinners for an enormous family, were gone, and my father was not brave enough to appear before his father, my grandfather. He ran away and after long travels reached Moscow, where he met my Mother.
Later on my father was forgiven, and he tried to help my grandfather from Moscow, but all the same there was no going back. No help from Moscow could ever replace those two horses, breadwinners for an enormous family.
And so my father liked no domestic animals, and he especially hated pigs. He adored horses, but he no longer had the right to adore them from close up, he adored them at a distance. His heart was gladdened by the sight of the mounted police riding through the Moscow streets.
My Father laughed with joy when he saw the mounted police. He was amazed: the police, horses, they just didn’t belong together. But there they were on the Moscow streets, and particularly when CDKA were playing a match against Dinamo. Then there were, for some reason, an awful lot of policemen on horseback.
When Spartak played Torpedo there were never any mounted police. And no one in Moscow knew why this was.
My father adored horses. There was room for no other animal in his heart, and everybody knew what my father would say when he saw the little white dog. The little white dog he hadn’t yet seen, which sat close by my feet on the train from Dmitrov to Moscow.
My father said nothing. It was almost as if he hadn’t noticed the little white dog. He was astonished by the astonishing things that were going on back then in the world. And he was astonished by the things that were going on in our family.
Astonished by all these things my father didn’t even notice the white dog. Or rather no one noticed that he had noticed it, apart from me of course. I could see that he saw the little dog, but he, astonished by so many astonishing things, had no time for noticing dogs.
Everyone was waiting for my father to pronounce on that dog, which should be got right out of his sight, but instead he came over to me and said quietly,
‘By yourself.’
Then he turned his back on me and went into his study.
Expecting my father to pronounce on that dog he wanted out of his sight, no one quite understood what he meant when he said ‘by yourself.’ It wasn’t a phrase we much associated with owning pets.
But I understood everything. I knew that when he said ‘by yourself’ he meant me, my self. I’d never had a self before, and now I had one, and all because of the astonishing things going on in the world and in my family.
Up until now I had been the youngest child, and now I was a ‘self’, and the little white dog was the first sign of my new position. Now I was a self I had the right to own anything, from a little white dog to a stallion, but it was all up to me. I had to feed and water and look after it and be responsible for it myself. Myself.
My father said ‘by yourself’, turned and went into the study and my family wondered what he meant by such a short and simple phrase for a couple of minutes. But by the third minute everyone had forgotten about me, the ‘by yourself’ and the little white dog, which was standing in the corridor, pressing against my leg.
By the third minute we were forgotten. Everyone in our family was occupied by what was happening just then in the world, and in our family. Everyone knows what was going on in the world just then, and in our family Borya was getting married. It was three days until his wedding.
They forgot about us. They sent us to bed, and carried on discussing around the kitchen table what was going to happen in three days’ time.
In the middle of the night Borya came into the room where I was trying to sleep, and where the little white dog lay asleep and snuffling, under my bed.
‘What are you going to call it?’ he asked. ‘What name have you chosen for your little white terrier?’
‘You know what,’ I said. ‘I want to call it Milady.’
‘Milady?’ Borya was surprised.
‘Milady,’ I admitted.
At that point in my life I loved ‘The Three Musketeers’, and I had long since decided that if I had a dog I would call it Milady.
‘Milady,’ said Borya. ‘It’s a nice name. Only I’m afraid, it really doesn’t suit this little dog.’
‘Why?’ I asked, my heart in my mouth.
‘Because it’s clearly a Milord.’
Wondrous things were happening to my brother Borya, my dear brother. He grew paler and paler, he raced about town, and he ran around the flat, he spoke in English on the phone. He barely noticed me, or the dog, and I realized that I would have to be patient, I would just have to wait until his genius wedding was over and Borya came back to normal and back to the little white dog and me.
I looked after the little dog, which had so unexpected acquired the name of Milord.
I had always hated little white dogs. Especially the ones with little pink eyes covered over by their brows.
Little pink eyes, little pink eyes!
I’ve been to the nurse again
She’s bandaged me up
And you’re to blame!I could never understand why anyone would need bandaging over nonsense like that.
I didn’t think that little white dogs with red eyes were dogs at all. To me they were just jumping button mushrooms.
I had a passion for racing dogs, noble setters, Irish Setters and Gordon Setters. I had a lot of respect for Drahthaars, and I paid homage to West Siberian Laikas.
Actually Milord wasn’t so very small and white. You could never have called him a button mushroom. He was quite a size for a fox terrier and his white coat was covered in black and brown spots. One ear was black and a brown patch spread round his eye and then slipped down to his nose in a very amiable way. And definitely no pink eyes. His were intelligent, brown with a dart of gold.
Still, to my sense of all things canine, Milord was on the small side. He fitted the description of ‘doggie’, and that annoyed me. Why a ‘doggie’, when all I’d ever wanted was a ‘dog’?
Borya, my dear brother, was talking in English on the phone for secrecy’s sake. But I knew he was talking to his ethereal bride who also spoke the language, and I would just have to wait. So I waited, wondering all the while how Milord fitted into my sense of all things canine. Was he, after all, a button mushroom? I came to the decision that he might have been called a doggie but he was no button mushroom.
How strange it was that Milord had turned up like that.
My unwarranted ptsoo-ptsoo must have seemed so wonderful to him that he jumped into the water without a second’s thought. Had I perhaps promised something I couldn’t deliver when I produced that indescribable sound?
But what is it a person promises a dog when he makes that ptsoo-ptsoo sound? Nothing at all, except a bit of dry bread and a little scratch behind the ear. And Milord got that straight away in the boat. And then he ran after me to the bus, just in case something else came his way.
And a second ptsoo-ptsoo came his way, the decisive one. And he charged into the bus.
He chose me. He broke with his past. And I accepted him. The sure fingers of fate had flicked us to the same small spot.
But most extraordinary was my father’s ‘by yourself’. This phrase made good fate’s finger flick. Fate’s fingers had flicked us together, to the same spot at the exact moment when Milord needed me and I needed him, and my father could say nothing against it.
The fingers of fate had flicked us both to the same small spot and now this spot needed a little enlarging. My brother Borya was busy talking in English and we were busy enlarging the spot. Not as yet to any huge size. We went walking out by Krasniye Vorota, the Red Gates. Our home was right by the Red Gates—it was a grey six-storey modernist building. But its greyness and its six storeys were of little interest. What was important was that it stood by Krasniye Vorota.
I was proud that I lived by the Red Gates.
When I was younger I even played a game: I would run out to the metro and ask passers-by:
‘Where do you live?’
On Zemlyanoy or on Sadovoy, they would answer.
‘Well I live by the Red Gates.’
That told them!
It was a shame that there weren’t really any gates. They didn’t exist. They must have stood there a long, long time ago, but now a metro station had been built in their place. The station, which had been completed in an age of grey modernism could have passed as a set of gates, but only as underground gates, and no underground gates could ever replace gates above the ground.
There were no Red Gates, none at all, and yet there were. I don’t know where they came from but they had always been there. It was even as if they had grown and grown and now stood high above the metro and our block.
My brother Borya’s genius wedding was no trivial matter.
The table was laden with a hitherto unseen quantity of chicken legs and salads. Fruit shone everywhere.
Lyonechka, guitarist and wild boy, famous in Moscow in those days, strummed Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ on his guitar. The maestro Solomon Mironych played with stern fury on the grand piano.
There were gladioli.
The bride, who had the divine name of Lyalya, looked ethereal.
A roar of ‘kiss the bride’ went up with the regularity of the incoming tide, flowing seamlessly from time to time into the song ‘Slender Rowan’.
Goodness, the whole world was at this gobsmacking wedding. Golub and Litvin were there, of course. The greatest man in our block, and later in the diplomatic world, the brilliant Seryozha Divilkovsky was there. Tanka Menshikova was there, so was Mishka Mednikov and Vovochka Andreev ... No, hang on. I don’t think he was ... So who was it playing the accordion, then?
Boba Morgunov wasn’t there. Boba should have been at my wedding a long time after, but my wedding didn’t happen.
But Vitka was definitely there! Vitka, who went by the name of Old Man, wouldn’t have missed it for the world! He was there for certain!
The bag lady’s whistling came in through the open windows from the yard below. The old bag lady whistled all evening and it was quite beyond a joke! I had already carried out three bottles of fortified wine to her, and some pies and porkfat.
After midnight the shout went up: ‘The Merry Boy! The Merry Boy!’
They were calling me to perform. That meant that they had exhausted ‘Dark Night’ and ‘Besame Mucha’. The ‘Merry Boy’ was being called for and I was thrown into the wedding spotlight. The maestro Solomon Mironych struck up the introduction and the guitarist and wild boy began strumming. Borya smiled fondly at me.
I was always forced to sing this ‘Merry Boy’ song. Everyone said I sang it wonderfully and especially from the bit that went ‘ai-yai-yai’. I hated this song with a fierce hatred, and especially from the bit that went ‘ai-yai-yai’.
But the introduction had been played, Borya had smiled, and I could never have let him down in a million years.
‘My horse’s hooves are ringing out
Jauntily I wear my cap,’I began in a thin voice, in which you could feel a certain oncoming beat of horses’ hooves.
‘Yes I am known hereabouts
As the Merry Boy from Karabakh!’And after that came the ‘ai-yai-yai’, monstrous in its wild, confounding force.
People listened in a dim suspicion, as people mostly listen to performing teenagers, who have passed their performing years. But I knew well that once I reached the penultimate ‘yai’ they would fall about laughing. And the suspicious audience knew this too and wanted, in a dim sort of way, to fall about laughing, if only I could do it. And I did it, and they fell about.
And they were still falling about when I proposed:
‘Drink well, my horses!
Drink well, my horses!’And the fallen were lifted from the floor and given drink. For indeed they themselves wanted to be lifted and given drink, if only I could do it. And I did it, and they got up and drank again, and every second one of them felt himself to be a glossy steed.
There was deafening applause, the horses galloped to their watering place, gladioli flashed before my eyes, and I no longer quite knew what was going on myself. I knew only that it was the morning, dawn, and that Lyonechka, famous in Moscow in those days as a guitarist and wild boy, was clutching a bottle of Madeira and leading me and Milord off to his place to sleep.
Borya, my only brother, left us for good. He went to live at his ethereal bride’s home, where we had been rushing that day with the bream and with Milord. But no one told me that Borya had left forever. I thought he’d gone for a short while, like going to army camp for retraining. And I waited for him every day, because I couldn’t have lived without him in a million years.
Borya sometimes came round and gazed at me lovingly and asked me all about Milord, and about the important things that lay ahead of me, but my parents soon stole my brother away and talked to him for a long time, and then he went.
And everything was quite changed. Everything was changed but I hadn’t yet realized that everything was changed, I carried on telling myself that it was just like when Borya went to army camp for retraining.
But Borya now lived with Lyalya. And that was a long long way away from the Krasniye Vorota. He now lived on the Smolensk Boulevard.
If you were to walk for a long long time, a morning or an afternoon, leftwards along the Garden Ring, then you would get to Smolensk Boulevard. And if you were to walk for a long long time, a morning or an afternoon, rightwards along the Garden Ring then you would also get to Smolensk Boulevard.
I wasn’t allowed in the metro or on a trolleybus with Milord so we walked along the Garden Ring, sometimes leftwards, sometimes rightwards, and we always got to the Smolensk Boulevard.
Strangest of all was that there was no boulevard at Smolensk Boulevard. There, on the Garden Ring, stood only grey and yellow buildings. But all the same it was there, the boulevard was there. There were trees and leaves, only they just weren’t visible, just as our Red Gates weren’t visible.
Borya always greeted me fondly, and Lyalya fed me an ethereal sort of lunch, and then it was time to go home. The afternoon was left for my walk home.
I walked from Smolensk Boulevard around the Garden Ring to Krasniye Vorota and it seemed to me as if I had lost my brother. I hadn’t yet realized that it is impossible to lose a brother.
It was Milord who cheered me up. He was a clever dog, and he had his wits about him. You never had to ask him twice, and he never asked me for anything, or to go anywhere. He just lived with me, like a small shadow by my right shoe.
In the early morning, rising from bed I lowered my bare feet onto the floor, and straightaway Milord climbed out from under the bed and licked my heels. He never rushed madly about the room, delighted that I was awake, he just sat by my bare foot, as it was slowly shod.
After that we moved as one. Me, and Milord by my shoe. Up till then I had been a shadow by my older brother’s shoe, and now, with Borya gone, Milord had appeared by my shoe.
There had been a change-around and I wasn’t yet sure what was better: to shadow another’s shoe, or to move my own shoe and have another shadowing it.
Really I still wanted to be moving alongside Borya’s shoe-and at the same time, Milord might as well shadow mine. But this was not an option and only the thought of retraining at army camp saved me.
After breakfast Milord and I went down to the yard. There were no bag ladies in the yard in the morning, and Milord and I walked by the fountain.
Out of sheer boredom I taught Milord to balance on my head.
It was a tricky thing. Milord couldn’t jump straight onto my head—he couldn’t jump that far, and in the end I would lift him up onto the highest plaster rose on the fountain and Milord climbed from there down onto my head. Back then I wore a tough old cap, which helped in such experiments.
With Milord on my head I walked about by the fountain waiting for something, even the bag lady, to appear.
But then my aunt would begin shouting my name from her second floor window. She would make reference to all those important things which would soon happen to me, and which would draw a distinct future line between me and a bag lady.
My head and my shoe—the two objects I placed at Milord’s disposal, although my head was partly occupied with other matters. I was preparing to go to college.
Everyone in the block saw that there was no way I would ever get into college. I saw it, my brother Borya saw it, my teachers saw it, perhaps only Milord didn’t see. Although even he must have guessed that a person who wore a smooth-haired fox terrier on his head was unlikely to ever get into teacher training college.
But there was a man whose name was Vladimir Nikolaevich Protopopov and he refused to see that I wouldn’t get in to college. He saw that I would and I was uncomfortable with the thought that I would fail and let down Vladimir Nikolaevich Protopopov.
Protopopov was a great teacher. For him turning a failing student into a C-grade student was nothing. The mere sight of Vladimir Protopopov, his furious beard and his piercing gaze turned a failing student into a C-grade student instantaneously.
When Protopopov opened his mouth and relentless rolls of thunder came forth then the recently qualified C-grade student had no other choice but to make a last desperate attempt to become a B-grade student.
‘And the rest is in God’s hands: Protopopov would usually say.
My brother Borya, who had been a hopeless case, would tell of how Vladimir Nokolaevich Protopopov came into their classroom for the first time in late autumn nineteen forty-six.
To start with, the classroom door began to shake of its own accord. It shook in nervous terror. It felt someone approaching, but who it was it didn’t know. Its teeth chattered, a shiver ran down its spine, and at last with a crash it was flung open.
In the doorway appeared a shaggy, shaggy hat pushed right down over a brow, under which glittered steely piercing eyes—Protopopov had arrived.
He was, as I have already stated, in a hat, and a rucksack hung on his right shoulder. That aside, he was wearing a black suit and a tie, but it was the rucksack and hat which were remembered afterwards, and the black suit and tie were quite forgotten.
Protopopov half-stepped, half-leaped to the teacher’s desk with a noble, decisive movement, and spoke a terrible prophecy:
‘The traitorous pupil fell from the bough like a fruit .. .’
Those pupils who had managed to stand to greet their teacher stood stunned by their desks, and those who hadn’t yet managed froze where they were, half-sitting, half-standing.
Protopopov fell into a long silence. His gaze was extremely bright. He was dearly following the fall of the traitorous pupil from the bough and into the abyss.
The abyss was depthless and how long the silence might have lasted, no one knew. It was obvious to everyone that until the falling traitor struck against something that would shatter him into tiny pieces, Protopopov would watch his descent.
And then there was an awful blow. It was Protopopov throwing his rucksack down onto the desk.
And it was clear to everyone that the traitor had struck against that thing and had been shattered into tiny pieces. It was an instantaneous but terrible death.
Protopopov reached up for his hat, to take it off, but changed his mind.
After the death there was an emptiness.
And in this emptiness something slowly began scrabbling about and rustling, but what it was no one knew.
‘The devil flew to him,’ whispered Protopopov, ‘and over his face he stooped.’
And Protopopov turned away from this image, the sight was too unpleasant.
Still he did need to explain what was happening and he did this with impressive and powerful words:
‘Blew life into him, and soared high with his rotten prey
And threw the living corpse into the hungry mouth of hell .. .’
Protopopov rummaged meaningfully in his bag and drew out of it an Austrian double-edged bayonet blade, then a hunk of bread, and then at last he took off his hat. He cut into the bread with the blade and began to eat.
The pupils were completely and utterly stunned. They understood nothing, except for the fact that the familiar word ‘pupil’ had been unhappily coupled with the word ‘traitor’. And some of the children decided right out that if they didn’t learn their lesson then the ‘devil’ would ‘blow life’ into them as well. Protopopov’s beard, into which the piece of bread was disappearing, appeared to all of them without exception to be the gate to the ‘hungry mouth of hell’.
Protopopov, chewing on the bread, glanced craftily at the pupils and muttered, nodding here and there at pupils:
‘Not for those birds, not for the loons, was the excitement of life’s battle ... ‘
The stunned pupils immediately felt themselves to be loons, and many of them had the desperate desire to be allowed the excitement of life’s battle.
Protopopov looked about the class and winked unexpectedly at a few of the pupils. He winked at my brother Borya. And Borya realized that all was not lost, and that he perhaps would be able to drag his way up and out of the species of loon.
Some of the pupils, probably some of those at whom Protopopov had not winked, became annoyed that a teacher was eating in lesson time. So then Protopopov stood and mightily crushed their annoyance:
‘Who are these judges? Since ancient times their hatred of freedom has been implacable.’
Protopopov worked a miracle.
He dragged my brother out of the company of failing loons, and sent him up into the higher feathered orders, more on the level of the woodcocks and swans.
He worked a miracle and then he left the school where dear Borya was a pupil, and then I was.
My parents’ gladness that Borya had dragged himself out of the subspecies of loon was mitigated by the fact that I still hung around with them. It was decided that only Protopopov could set me on the wing, and so he undertook this difficult business.
Late at night, at about eleven o’clock I would leave home, on my way to Protopopov.
I walked along Sadovoy-Chernogryazskoy from Krasniye Vorota, the red gates which stood high above the metro and our block. I walked towards Zemlyanoy Val and then turned off to the left and the school was right there on Gorokhovoy Street. This was where Protopopov broke through the ceiling of my loonacy, and brought me to the flight levels of a woodcock.
He did this by night. He had no time to do it during the day and besides he believed the loons had a weaker hold on me by night. When I got there Protopopov was usually sitting in the empty staffroom marking books.
When he saw me he laughed with joy, a laugh which came right from the heart, and he pummelled my chest with his fist. And I would laugh, turning away from the really quite hard blows with which my teacher greeted me.
Once he had thumped on my chest and in so doing had opened my soul to learning, Protopopov would brew some very, very strong tea and would fill his pipe with a mix of two different types of tobacco, Golden Rune and Naval.
And we began drinking tea.
Vladimir Nikolaevich taught me how to fill a pipe and brew very, very strong tea, and he was pleased with my progress in these sciences of daily life.
Then Protopopov resumed his marking and I helped him as well as I could.
And here was the trick of these nightly lessons: this great teacher would trust me, a potentially failing student and friend to the loons, with the marking of essays by writers who were possibly older and more educated than me.
Protopopov killed many birds with one stone.
He didn’t just stretch to breaking point my paper-thin knowledge, he heightened my attentiveness, my sense of responsibility, awoke my decisiveness and even drove into me some bits of infonnation from the books I marked.
And when I had improved then Protopopov killed another bird: I reduced his pile of marking, even by a little.
He even trusted me to put marks in the books: Ds and Bs. He wouldn’t let me give Cs or As. And this constituted his curious idea.
He knew of course that for me, a companion of loons, a D grade went against the grain. I really did hate Ds, and always tried to stretch to a C grade. It seemed criminal to award Ds to poor loons from another school. And if I was forced to award a D, then it was a tragic, but unavoidable fact of life, and all that was left was to take off my hat to the recipient.
Protopopov checked all my C grades, and as As were a gift from God, Protopopov was obliged to look over those himself.
But Bs I was welcome to. Bs he trusted to me and here our opinions never differed and I was proud of this fact.
Once I had marked the books I would lay them out in piles: Ds, Cs, Bs and As.
‘Teacher,’ teased Protopopov at that and he would pummel me on the chest with his fist. ‘Let me humbly kneel at the sound of your name .. .’
And then he would check over the Cs and As, and if he found some or other instance of my stupidity or confusion he would grumble crossly,
‘Loons .. .’ And he would dig his nail into that place in the exercise book where my stupidity or confusion had been displayed.
My stupidity or ignorance were never accompanied by Protopopov’s fist. His fist was used for joy and gladness and his fingernail came into force at these other moments. He would press down into the exercise book where loonacy had been exhibited and if I didn’t understand, some hard nail-like words would come my way too.
Then I would fall asleep at last on the leather staffroom sofa, and if I sometimes woke up I would see my teacher sitting at the table, drinking tea, smoking his pipe and marking, marking the endless exercise books, and his kind, kind, steely eyes sparkled. Vladimir Nikolaevich Protopopov never slept.
One winter night when a blizzard raged I couldn’t sleep, and in my sleeplessness I knew a sudden glimmering of inspiration and I made up some poetry.
‘The blizzard blew
The blizzard flew
The blizzard whistled
Down so low ...’Protopopov laughed like a child, pummelled me on the chest with his fists and then all of a sudden he jumped up and made his way around the staffroom in a monstrous and precipitate jig, chanting:
‘Fly, blizzard
In your pink tricot!’I was stunned. Protopopov’s sudden dance startled me. And I was surprised too that someone else had already written about a blizzard and so my sudden moment of inspiration couldn’t be counted, and all of this felt like the worse excesses of loonacy.
It was once late May.
Protopopov woke me in the early morning. He led me, half-asleep, to the window. Through the grey-blue school window the poplar branches could be seen, dark in the morning gloom, leaves slippy with dew.
We looked out of the window.
Protopopov was sunk in thought, and had even put his arm around me, something he had never done before. Then he remembered himself and thumped me on the chest with his fist.
‘A morning frost,’ he said. He fell silent. He continued.
‘I clenched my jaw...’I already awaited a blow to my jaw, but received instead another thump on the chest.
‘... And the leaves rustled like a voice in a fever
The dawn glittered beyond the Kama’s shore
Bluer than a mallard’s feather.’Another blow to the chest to mark the end of the stanza.
And that was how Vladimir Protopopov thumped poetry into me.
Anyway, everyone in our block saw I was never ever going to get into college. I saw it, my brother Borya saw it, my school teachers saw it, only Protopopov refused to see it. He saw that I would get in—and I did.
And then I was caught up in a whirlwind. My heart fairly cracked under the family’s joy, my chest hummed with blows from Protopopov’s fist, the lady whistled up at the windows, my brother Borya smiled fondly, the wild boy strummed on his guitar, the Maestro Solomon Mironych was a stem fury at the grand piano, and Milord, who had by this time learnt to fly, kept jumping up onto my head.
I must note here that I had never been particularly bothered by the whole flying pets issue, and when I was preparing for my exams I couldn’t spend any time on the matter at all.
But now and then I’d throw aside my books and go out with Milord to the fountain.
We had been joined by a third party, a thin leather lead, which I fastened on to the dog’s collar. I fastened the lead on at home and took it off at the fountain.
This lead was not necessary. Milord walked by my shoe without any asking. But all good dog owners had leads. A lead was an important link between man and dog, and I owned such a link.
This leather link, thin but tough, was hated by Milord. He couldn’t see the point of it. He thought that something bigger linked us.
As soon as I took the lead off by the fountain Milord would begin to gnaw at it instantly.
This made me cross. I couldn’t afford to buy a new link between us every day. And I would attempt to take the lead away from Milord.
The normally obliging Milord, was on these occasions extremely stubborn. I couldn’t drag the lead from between his teeth. Fox terriers are famous for their death grip and Milord rehearsed this claim to fame with all his might.
It was this death grip that was responsible for Milord’s extraordinary flight.
Once by the fountain he gripped the lead with a particularly deadly death grip. I tried everything I could think of to prize open his teeth and save the lead. Lots of our neighbours popped their heads out of the windows, when they heard the terrible barking and my shouts of: ‘Put it down! Let go!’
The spectators annoyed me. I grasped the lead even more firmly. Milord gripped tighter and bellowed through his clamped teeth.
I stamped on the spot, pulled the lead tight and then began swinging round. Milord was forced to run in a circle around me. I stamped even faster, Milord could hardly keep up, his legs dragged behind and all of a sudden they left the ground.
Low, just above the ground, flew Milord. Round and round me. He growled, but would not let the lead go.
I turned faster and faster and Milord lifted up in the air and was soon at chest height. I was dizzy but I lifted him in the air even higher and there he was flying high on the lead, right above my head.
The spectators froze at their windows. No dog had ever flown around the fountain in the yard before.
At last the overwhelming centrifugal force undid the death grip, Milord let go of the lead and like a shaggy bellowing stone issuing forth from a sling, he sailed over the fountain.
He dashed bottom first against a ground floor window, over which a thick steel anti-football mesh had been placed.
Bouncing off the mesh Milord charged back to me and gripped the hated lead between his teeth again, and I swung him up again around the fountain.
The unusual flying exploits of a smooth-haired fox terrier became the favourite spectator sport of the smaller dwellers in the yard and the vast bag lady. Whenever we went walking by the fountain shadowy creatures would cluster around with incessant requests to ‘spin Milord’. I often gave in to their requests, stupefied as I was by our success.
I would tease Milord with the lead, gave him the chance to grip on tightly enough and began spinning him on the spot like a spinning top, slowly lifting the dog off the ground.
Sometimes I could anticipate the moment when the overwhelming centrifugal forces were just about to overwhelm the death grip and I could slowly lower the dog to the ground. But most of the time I couldn’t see it coming and the overwhelming centrifugal force overwhelmed the death grip and, like a stone from a sling, Milord sailed away over the fountain and crashed bottom-first into the ground floor window covered by steel mesh.
There, behind the metal mesh sat prize student Ellochka, always, even in the summer, doing her homework, and many people thought I aimed deliberately at her window with my flying dog.
But although I did always have a secret interest in Ellochka, I never aimed Milord at her window.
The deep secret interest I had in Ellochka was rather made manifest in the dog’s flight itself, which must have amazed Ellochka, when, as she lifted her eyes from the pale exercise books, she suddenly saw a smooth haired fox terrier flying straight at her window, bottom-first.
The flying Milord did not always fly into this wonderful window. Sometimes he flew off and crashed against some passers-by or knocked over a bin. The sweet dog never once paid any attention to what he had hit. He clearly liked flying, and when he crashed into something he immediately jumped back onto his feet and rushed back at me, ready to exert his death grip against the overwhelming centrifugal force.
September came and I entered college under the vaults of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute.
‘Under the vaults’ is the right expression here. The Institute had a particularly large number of arches, more than any of the other colleges in Moscow. And a central glass dome crowned the enormous main hall. A fivestorey modernist block would have fitted comfortably in the main hall of our college.
Space and coolness, those are the two words which come to mind when I remember the main hall. No ray of sun ever pierced the glass ceiling, there was always a half-light in there, but the half-light was clear and sober. Something Roman, something of Ancient Greece drifted in the very air of this hall and only that particular silvery half-light washing over it told of the northernness of this temple of learning.
And on the galleries wrought with columns and balustrades, the galleries which had something of the colonnade about them, there were even more vaults and under these vaults were... Goodness, what wasn’t there under them—faces bright with inspiration on the galleries, and shining in the lecture halls, free spirits thronging around the columns and crowding around the legs of the most important sculptures of the time. A simple list of all their glorious names would take up a hundred closely-written sheets and I don’t have the energy to draw up a list like that, but it’s so very hard to resist.
Take, for example, Yury Vizbor; or Yuly Kim; or even Pyotr Fomenko, for instance. Or take Yurka Ryashentsev, Leshka Mezinov or Erik Krasnovsky... No I won’t carry on, or I’ll never escape the thrall of these great and so familiar names, I’ll carry on remembering, carry on listing them to the end of my days, and to hell with my duty to children’s literature. And anyway how could I forget those faces, illuminated by that eternal half-light which flowed down from our northern skies and deep into the Main Hall. Alik Nenarokov for instance? And not just him. How about Grisha Feldblyum? Or Valerka Agrikolyansky?
And what about the girls? What about those wonders who ran along the endless galleries and up the endless stairs? Lord, would I not have offered up my life for Rosa Kharitonova at one time. It is impossible, unbearable, to speak such names casually, without tremor cordis, those names which once lit up the silvery half-light under those glass ceilings. And I tremble in my rememberings, and my eyes are genuinely full of tears... There, that’s enough of tears in the eyes. But there is one more name: Marina Katsaurova.
She was the reason why I dragged Milord into college.
Right there in the middle of the Main Hall under our silvery northern glassy ceiling I spun Milord. The overwhelming centrifugal forces overwhelmed the fox terrier death grip and Milord went roaring over the heads of lecturers slap-bang into a notice board over which was written Stalin’s Glorious Academic Eagles.
It looked like expulsion.
About two days later I was asked to come to see the well-known Dean of Studies Fyodor Mikhailovich Golovenchenko. The report file with the record of my behaviour had come to him. Amongst all the many expressions in it was the line:
‘... So this student threw a dog on the board.’
‘So this student,’ read Fyodor Mikhailovich, wrinkling his brows meaningfully, ‘threw a dog on the board.’
And Fyodor Mikhailovich raised his philosopher’s eyebrows at me magnanimously.
‘What on earth is that?’ he said. ‘Threw a dog? What were you doing? Wrestling? So why “threw a dog on the board”? It should be “at the board”. Or was the student lying on the boards himself? What do you say to that?’
I panicked and couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think of an answer worthy of the great professor.
‘Still,’ ruminated Fyodor Mikhailovich, ‘no signs of chewing or any damage to the board itself. The board, thank the Lord, is untouched... But the turn of phrase is remarkable, “So this student threw a dog on the board”. What is that?’
‘Excuse me but I think it could be trochaic,’ I recovered at last.
‘Trochaic? In what way?’
‘Tetrameter.’
‘What do you mean? What trochee are you talking about?’
‘So this student threw a dog on the board. I was suggesting it was a trochaic tetrameter, Fyodor Mikhailovich, but with an anapaest at the end.’
Fyodor Mikhailovich lifted his hands towards the vaults and laughed out loud.
‘A divine trochaic tetrameter!’ he exclaimed. ‘Divine trochaic tetrameter! And here he is telling me about trochees! Be gone with you, you trochaic expert. I’ll hear no more of this dog and its board!’
I stumbled and tripped on an armchair and then hung around by the door wondering whether I’d been forgiven or not.
‘Oh cover your pale legs!’ the dean shouted then, and, pale, I shut the door to his office.
It turned out that I had been forgiven, but more than once I remembered this last phrase of the professor. I couldn’t make out why the great man had, in forgiving me in so terrifying a way, quoted the classic example of a one-line poem: ‘Oh cover your pale legs.’ Possibly my pathetic appearance had not brought to mind any other poem than this.
I didn’t bring Milord to college again, of course. How he sobbed and howled when I went out of the house, and he hid away under the bed and lay there in misery, pressing himself fondly against my old shoe. My heart broke, but I couldn’t do anything—a dog was a dog and a student was a student.
By the end of September Milord was fading away. A profound disappointment had come into his life. He had thought that he had found a shoe beside which he could move his whole life long, and now this shoe moved away every morning to teacher training college.
The first Sunday in October I took Milord out to the forest hunting.
It was a strange autumn.
The gold which should have long since taken hold of the forest was late to come. There were neither flecks of gold on the birches, nor red tips on the aspens. The birch leaves fluttered oddly, awkwardly in the wind. They felt uneasy, so young and green, when they should have been turning gold.
I walked along a swampy stream, slowly gaining the bank.
I was waiting for ducks and they rose up from time to time, the drake first, and then the hen, and only after that, already in the air, did they reorder themselves, hen flying first and behind her the drake. Although it was always hard to work out which was the hen and which the drake in the autumn, the drake’s startlingly green head was hidden and you could only guess by the way they rose up and flew.
It was a strange autumn. The ducks had separated into pairs for some reason, when they should have been gathering themselves into flocks to fly south.
The ducks, separated into pairs, and the leaves with no desire to turn gold, holding on to the summer with all their might.
I fired my gun occasionally. Milord leaped high out of the grass at the sound of the shots and watched the prey fly away. He didn’t understand me, or my firing gun, because in his heart he was no duck hunter. He was drawn to the forest. I wanted to kill a duck of course, just to show Milord once and for all that he was justified in worshipping my boots and shoes.
I was curious: how would he behave when I killed my duck? Would he understand that his job was to fish it out of the water or not? I was positive he would.
At last a drake was slow off the mark. He had only just lifted his wings to pull himself up out of the water when I fired my shot under his wing. The hen, wings creaking, flew away.
The mallard beat its wing on the water only a little way off, it was a mere leap across the stream to reach it. In my excitement I forgot that I had decided to allow Milord this job and I leaped.
I jumped off the boggy bank and the foot I pushed off with caught, the bog clung to the boot, lifted it half from my foot and as I flew from one bank to the other my boot fell from my foot and into the unpleasant rust-coloured swamp.
There on the other side I couldn’t immediately work out what to do: save the boot or make a run for the drake which was still beating on the water with its wing.
Milord worked it out immediately. He rushed into the rust-coloured swamp and seized the boot, dragged it out of the swamp and laid it beside my right foot, where it belonged. Then he ran along the bank and quickly retrieved the duck, laying it beside my booted left foot.
Towards midday we reached the forest, a proper mighty pine forest. The pines grew on little mounds, and there were no other sorts of trees at all—pines, pines and on the sandy slopes of sunlit clearings strange junipers rose to the skies, beaded with frosty blue berries.
I laid a fire. I wanted to feed Milord with duck soup, but whilst I was busying myself round the fire, and blowing it to a flame, Milord disappeared.
This had never happened before. Milord was always circling somewhere near my boot. I was suddenly very frightened, I began whistling, shouting, running in the forest and then, when I came back to the fire, I heard a far off barking.
It was Milord’s bark, and it came from somewhere underground.
And only then I saw a hole in the sand under the roots of a pine. A hole going deep into a mound.
I fell on the pine-needle covered ground, threw down my harvest of Slippery Jacks and Milk Cap’s which were stopping me hearing properly, and pressed my ear to the mound. It was very odd to hear a dog barking from deep underground.
The barking suddenly stopped and there was a growling. It was the same growl as when Milord gripped the lead between his teeth and I guessed that he had engaged his death grip, he was clinging on to something underground and he would not let go for anything, not until the overwhelming centrifugal forces did their bit.
I lay there on the ground a few hours and listened to his growls, but I could do nothing. I had no spade with me of course, and even if I had, well what point would there have been in digging and where would I dig?
‘Milord!’ I shouted from time to time in despair. ‘Stop this nonsense!’
He could hear me of course, but he had no intention of letting go of the badger, for that’s what it most likely was.
‘I’m going! I’m going to get the train!’ I shouted in despair, but he knew that I wouldn’t go anywhere, I would hang around on the badger’s mound until evening, and then all night and all the next day, and at least until the matter was resolved by overwhelming centrifugal forces.
I decided to go. Milord would hear my footsteps from under the ground and he would know then that I really was going. He could choose: me or the death grip.
I stamped the fire out furiously. Stamping loudly I walked towards the stream. And how I stamped and cursed the sand because it resounded less under my heel than I wished.
Milord appeared without warning, quite as if nothing had happened, he just suddenly jumped out of the grass at one side. His ear was ripped, his whole face was covered in blood. But he paid it no attention at all, he was simply delighted to have caught me up.
I dragged him to the stream all the same, washed his face a little and prized open a cartridge to sprinkle gunpowder on his wounds.
The evening was coming on and we walked to the station, straight across the bog. In one very particular green and damp spot Milord suddenly sprung up high. He dropped back to the ground and then jumped again, oddly, to one side. I ran to him and until I reached him he kept jumping on the spot.
It was a snake. A black viper. I fired and broke its neck with my shot.
The next morning as usual I lowered my bare feet onto the ground and Milord immediately licked my heels.
‘Thank goodness,’ I thought. ‘It didn’t manage to bite him’. I went to get washed and Milord set off after me. He pulled himself along the ground using his front paws. His back legs were useless.
From the Red Gates which stood above our block I ran down the ring road towards Zemlyanoy Val. I held Milord in my arms, he licked me on the chin.
‘Hold him tightly,’ said the vet. ‘Hold his muzzle closed.’
I pressed Milord down on the plastic table, squeezed his muzzle with all my might and the vet put a blunt syringe into his belly.
My Mother rang and rang the Veterinary Institute, but could not find anyone who knew how to cure a fox terrier of a snake bite. At last she found someone who recommended manganese baths.
Every morning Milord crawled out from under my bed and went off in search of my mother. He whined piteously, begging her to prepare him his usual bath of manganese solution.
For twenty days I ran with him along the ring road to the vet’s. The injections were awful, the syringe blunt. I could barely hold Milord down.
The baths and the injections worked. His paws slowly began moving. Soon he could shuffle himself along, then he could make limited hops, and finally he was back to normal. Everything seemed to be back how it was more or less. Only one thing had changed: he no longer licked me on the heels in the morning; he had stopped moving alongside my shoe.
I had become just another dog owner, a person who had a fox terrier living with him.
I suffered terribly. I understood that it would pass and one day Milord would forget the appalling pain of the vet’s syringe. But Milord was frightened of me. He thought I might suddenly seize him and run off for another injection.
Yes, it was a strange autumn. The trees in Moscow only lost their leaves at the end of October. Our yard was full of ash leaves, poplar and box elder leaves.
Natasha, the yard-sweeper, swept the leaves with a broom into huge heaps, and Milord liked to climb into these heaps. He thought someone was rustling inside them.
He dug down through the leaves with his paws, snuffling and growling and diving into the ochre depths. But the leaves of course were rustling only with age and they hid no one.
I also pretended there was someone there, and threw myself onto the heaps of leaves beside Milord, digging at them, tossing them in different directions.
Sometimes I hid a sugar cube or a piece of dry bread in the leaves, and we found it again ecstatically.
I don’t know what helped, time, or the leaves, but perhaps the leaves. One day I lowered my heels from the bed onto the ground and felt my heels being licked. I was so pleased that day that I even thought about skipping college, I should have taken Milord and gone out to the countryside somewhere, somewhere on the Moscow River, Ubory perhaps, to dig through all the fallen leaves and sort them out.
But I—stupidly—went to college and when I returned Milord met me in the yard.
We rummaged through all the heaps of leaves and found a couple of pieces of sugar, and I rushed upstairs to the second floor to eat lunch. I left Milord down in yard, walking about. After all everyone in the block knew him and loved him and Milord never went out onto the street without me.
I was still eating when I heard the bag ladies calling my name loudly.
I ran down to the yard.
‘A man!’ a bag lady shouted. ‘A man in grey trousers! He put a lead on him! Put him on a lead and dragged him off!’
‘That way! That way! Along Sadovoy!’
I ran along Sadovoy from the Red Gates which stood high above our block, towards Zemlyanoy Val. The bag ladies ran ahead of me and behind me.
‘There he is! There he is! There he is!’ they shouted.
I kept running, but nowhere did I see Milord or the man in grey trousers. Trolleybuses and cars passed me by, the traffic of an enormous city, a thousand, thousand men in grey trousers flew in different directions.
I realized that it was over and that I would never again see Milord, but still I kept running, and a cold grey dust flew at me and into my eyes, and I hardly realized that it was snowing already. I ran along Sadovoy towards Zemlyanoy Val. From the Red Gates.
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(p. 3) ...Similarly in Koval’s story every child’s need for a place to start from, a place to relate to, is epitomized here in the house by the metro station ‘The Red Gates’ named after the former triumphal arch, which was demolished in 1927 to make way for a station on the city’s justly world-famous metro network.
(p. 14–15) ...and the remarkable ‘The Red Gates’ by the children’s writer Yury Koval is a poetic and rhythmical hymn to Moscow, its eccentrics, its teachers and its bag-ladies, and is a story about growing up with a stray dog. Yury Koval has rarely been translated into English, although his prose, like all great children’s writing, reaches far beyond its young readers.
[NB: The bag-ladies, which are mentioned in the Introduction, appear several times in the translation as an equivalent of the Russian word øïàíà. There is no doubt that the translator misunderstood this word, taking it as a feminine noun referring to a homeless woman. In Russian, øïàíà is a collective noun that refers to a group of young people (teenagers or older) that hang around streets, something like street kids or hoodlums. ‒ Note by Timur Maisak]
(p. 379‒381)
4. The Red Gates by Yury Koval (1938‒1995)
The Red Gates was first published in 1984 as one of a collection of stories for children.
My brother Borya, my dear brother Borya and I, were rowing a boat down the Sestra river:
The Sestra river is in the Moscow Region, about two hours from Moscow on a suburban train. It is still popular with fishermen.All the inhabitants of our block at Krasniye Vorota knew:
Krasniye Vorota, which means ‘Red Gates’ (Metro: Krasniye Vorota) is on the large circular road, the Sadovoye Kol’tso (lit. ‘Garden Ring’) which rings the central part of the city.CDKA were playing a match against Dinamo:
CDKA, Dinamo, Torpedo, and Spartak are all Moscow football teams.Everyone in our family was occupied by what was happening just then in the world:
It seems possible that this refers to the speech Khrushchev made on 25 February 1956 at the 20th Party Congress criticizing Stalin. The speech sent major shock waves through the Soviet Union.If you were to walk for a long, long time:
The narrator is describing the walk around the Garden Ring. Borya’s new home is roughly diametrically opposite the Red Gates. The walk around the ring road is fifteen to sixteen kilometres.‘The traitorous pupil fell from the bough like a fruit ...’:
The first line of a poem by Pushkin. Protopopov continues to quote this poem and then moves on to other classroom favourites, it is less important to know where these are from than to understand that he is using ‘old stalwarts’ to illustrate a point.‘Not for those birds, not for the loons, was the excitement of life’s battle .. .’:
Another school curriculum favourite: Gorky’s ‘Stormy Petrel’ (also know as ‘Storm Herald’). A short revolutionary poem symbolizing the oncoming of the revolution as a storm over Antarctica.‘Who are these judges? Since ancient times / Their hatred of freedom has been implacable’:
From Woe from Wit (also known as Chatsky), Griboyedov’s verse play.‘Teacher’, teased Protopopov at that and he would pummel me on the chest with his fist. ‘Let me humbly kneel at the sound of your name ...’:
A quote from Nekrasov’s drama The Bear Hunt.‘Fly, blizzard / In your pink tricot!’:
Protopopov quotes the twentieth century poet Vladimir Narbut.‘... And the leaves rustled like a voice in a fever / The dawn glittered beyond the Kama’s shore / Bluer than a mallard’s feather’:
A quote from a Pasternak poem (‘On a Steamer’).the vaults of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute:
This important teacher training institute still exists.Like, for example, take Yury Vizbor ... :
A number of the names he quotes here are genuinely famous (some are less famous, and some are friends). Vizbor and Kim were ‘bards’, cult Soviet singer songwriters. Fomenko was a well-known theatre director with a famous Moscow troupe.‘Oh cover your pale legs!’:
Famous Russian monostich by the turn-of-the-century poet Bryusov.
4. The Red Gates by Yury Koval. Taken from Ñîëíå÷íîå ïÿòíî: ðàññêàçû (Moscow: Vagrius, 2002)
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