Читаем Byzantium Endures полностью

Built on hills above the river; full of cathedrals and monasteries with glittering onion-domes, green copper, gold and lapis lazuli; full of great public buildings in the soft yellow brick for which Kiev was famous; of carved wooden houses, crowded street markets, statues, monuments, the large stores and theatres of the Kreshchatik, our main street, the University and various institutes, the Botanical Gardens, the Zoo, modern tramways; its squares crammed with electric signs, advertisement hoardings, kiosks, theatre advertisements; its thoroughfares crowded with motor-vehicles and horse-drawn carriages, carts, omnibuses; with trees, parks and green places everywhere, with the great commercial river full of steamers, yachts, barges and rafts (she was founded by the Scandinavian Rus to protect their most important trade-route), Kiev was no provincial city, but the capital of ancient Russia, and well aware of the fact. Once, centuries before, she had been a walled garrison city of grim stone and unpainted wood: ‘Mother City of all the Russias. The Rome of Russia.’ And the infidel had come and the infidel had been forced back, or converted, or accommodated, perhaps temporarily, and Kiev and what she protected had always survived. Now she was Yellow Kiev, warm and hospitable to all. In the summer sunlight it would seem she was made entirely of gold, for her brick glowed while her mosaics and posters, flowers and trees shone like jewels. In the winter, she was a white fairy-tale. In the spring the groaning and cracking of the Dnieper’s ice could be heard throughout the city. In the autumn Kiev’s mellow light and fading leaves blended so that she was a thousand shades of warm brown. By the early twentieth century she had reached the height of her beauty. Now, thanks to the Bolsheviks, she has become a lustreless shell, just another beehive with a few nondescript concrete monuments to pacify tourists. The Germans were blamed for destroying Kiev, but it is well-known that the Chekists blew most of it up in their 1941 retreat. Even the existing statues are copies. Kiev had a history older than most European cities: from her came the culture which civilised the Slavs. From her came our greatest epics. Who has not, for instance, marvelled at the film version of Ilya Mouremetz and the Heroes of Kiev, defenders of Christendom against the Tatar Horde, Bogatyr and the Beast? Ironically, what the Tatar failed to accomplish, the armies of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis succeeded in doing with relentless and unimaginative thoroughness.

We were poor, but there was wealth and beauty all around us. Our suburb, the Kurenvskaya, was rather run-down, though picturesquely countrified, with many wooden buildings and little gardens among the newer apartment houses (which were built around courtyards after the French model). If I wished I could walk down to the main city, or I could take the Number Ten tram past St Kyril’s church to Podol and, if I failed to be seduced by the sights and smells of the Jewish Quarter, could walk up St Andrew’s Hill to that great church, all blue-and-white mosaic on the outside and rich gold on the inside, to stare at the distant Dnieper, at Trukhanov Island where the yacht club was. On a misty autumn evening I would enjoy walking along the wide Kreshchatik boulevard, with its chestnut trees and bright shops and restaurants. But Kreshchatik was best at Christmas, when the lamps were lit and the snow was piled against walls and gutters to make magical pathways from door to door. I remember the smell of pine and ice, of pastries and coffee and that special smell, rather like newly-cut wood with a hint of fresh paint, of Christmas toys. Cabs and troikas rolled through the golden darkness; the breath of horses was whiter than the snow itself; warm, rattling trams radiated orange electric light. It is a ghost in my mind. It no longer exists. The Bolsheviks blew it to pieces as they retreated from the Nazis who, only a few months earlier, had helped them loot Poland.