M ikhail Ivanych’s house made a horrifying impression. A sloping antenna shone black against the white clouds. Sections of the roof had caved in, revealing dark, uneven beams. The walls were carelessly covered in plywood. The cracked window panes were held together with newspaper. Filthy oakum poked out from the countless gaps.

The stench of rotten food hung in the owner’s room. Over the table I noticed a coloured portrait of General Mao^[42], torn from a magazine. Next to him beamed Gagarin^[43]. Pieces of noodles were swimming in the sink with dark circles of chipped enamel. The wall clock was silent: an old pressing iron, used as weight on the main wheel, rested on the floor.

Two heraldic-looking cats – one charcoal-black, the other pinkish-white – sauntered haughtily about the table, weaving past the plates. The owner shooed them away with a felt boot that came to hand. Glass smashed. The cats fled into a dark corner with a piercing howl.

The room next door was even more disgusting. The middle of the ceiling sagged dangerously low. Two metal beds were hidden under tattered clothes and putrid sheepskins. The surfaces were covered with cigarette butts and eggshells.

To be honest, I was at a bit of a loss^[44]. If only I could have simply said: “I’m afraid this won’t work…” But it appears I am genteel after all. And so I said something lyrical:

“The windows face south?”

“The very, very south,” Tolik affirmed.

Through the window I saw a dilapidated bathhouse.

“The main thing,” I said, “is that there’s a private entrance.”

“The entrance is private,” agreed Mikhail Ivanych, “only it’s nailed shut.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said.

“Ein Moment” said the owner, took a few steps back, and charged the door.

“What’s the rent?”

“Ah, nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” I asked.

“Just that. Bring six bottles of poison and the space is yours.”

“Can we agree on something a little more specific? Say twenty roubles? Would that suit you?”

The owner fell to thought:

“How much is that?”

“I just said – twenty roubles.”

“And converted to brew? At rouble four apiece?”

“Nineteen bottles of ‘Fortified Rosé’. A pack of ‘Belomor’ smokes. Two boxes of matches,” spat out Tolik.

“And two roubles for moving expenses,” concluded Mikhail Ivanych.

I took out the money.

“Do you care to examine the toilet?”

“Another time,” I said. “Then we’ve agreed? Where do you keep the key?”

“There’s no key,” said Mikhail Ivanych. “It got lost. Don’t go, we’ll make a run.”

“I’ve got some business at the tourist centre. Next time…”

“As you wish. I’ll stop by the centre this evening. I gotta give Lizka a kick in the butt.”

“Who’s Lizka?” I asked.

“She’s my woman. Wife, I mean. Works as a housekeeper at the centre. We be broken up.”

“So then why are you going to beat her?”

“Whatsa? Hanging her’s too good, but a mess to get into. They wanted to take away my gun, something about me threatening to shoot ’er. I thought you were here about the gun.”

“A waste of ammo,” threw in Tolik.

“You don’t say,” agreed Mikhail Ivanych. “I can snuff ’er with my bare hands, if need be. Last winter I bump into her, this and that, it’s all friendly, and she screams: ‘Oh, Misha, dearest, I don’t want to, let me go…’ Major Jafarov summons me in and says, ‘Your name?’ And I say, ‘Dick on a stick.’

“I got me fifteen days in the clink, without smokes, without nothing. Like I give a shit. Just kicking back. Lizka wrote to the prosecutor, something about puttin’ me away or I’ll kill ’er… But what’s the point in that?”

“You won’t hear the end of it,” agreed Tolik. And added:

“Let’s get going! Or they’ll close the shop.”

And the friends set off for the housing development, resilient, repulsive and aggressive, like weeds.

I stayed in the library till closing.

It took me three days to prepare for the tour. Galina introduced me to the two guides she thought were the best. I covered the Preserve with them, paying attention and taking a few notes.

The Preserve consisted of three memorial sites: Pushkin’s house and estate in Mikhailovskoye; Trigorskoye, where the poet’s friends lived and where he visited nearly every day; and finally the monastery with the Pushkin-Hannibal burial plot^[45].

The tour of Mikhailovskoye was made up of several parts. The history of the estate. The poet’s second exile. Arina Rodionovna, his nanny. The Pushkin family. Friends who visited the poet in exile. The Decembrist uprising^[46]. And Pushkin’s study, with a brief overview of his work.

I found the curator of the museum and introduced myself. Victoria Albertovna looked about forty. A long flouncy skirt, bleached locks, an intaglio^[47] and an umbrella – a pretentious painting by Benois^[48]. This style of the dwindling provincial nobility was visibly and deliberately cultivated here. Its characteristic details manifested themselves in each of the museum’s local historians. One would wrap herself tightly in a fantastically oversized gypsy shawl. Another had an exquisite straw hat dangling at the back. And the third got stuck with a silly fan made of feathers.

Victoria Albertovna chatted with me, smiling distrustfully. I started to get used to that. Everyone in service of the Pushkin cult was surprisingly begrudging. Pushkin was their collective property, their adored lover, their tenderly revered child. Any encroachment on this personal deity irritated them. They were hasty to prove my ignorance, cynicism and greed.

“Why have you come here?” asked the curator.

“For the rich pickings,” I said.

Victoria Albertovna nearly fainted.

“I’m sorry, I was joking.”

“Your jokes here are entirely inappropriate.”

“I agree. May I ask you one question? Which of the museum’s objects are authentic?”

“Is that important?”

“I think so, yes. After all, it’s a museum, not the theatre.”

“Everything here is authentic. The river, the hills, the trees – they are all Pushkin’s contemporaries, his companions and friends. The wondrous nature of these parts…”

“I was asking about objects in the museum,” I interrupted. “The guidebook is evasive about most of them: ‘China discovered on the estate.’”

“What specifically are you interested in? What would you like to see?”

“I don’t know, personal effects, if such exist…”

“To whom are you addressing your grievances?”

“What grievances?! And certainly not to you! I was only asking.”

“Pushkin’s personal effects? The museum was created decades after his death.”

“And that,” I said, “is how it always happens. First they drive the man into the ground and then begin looking for his personal effects. That’s how it was with Dostoevsky, that’s how it was with Yesenin, and that’s how it’ll be with Pasternak^[49]. When they come to their senses, they’ll start looking for Solzhenitsyn’s^[50] personal effects…”

“But we are trying to recreate the colour, the atmosphere,” said the curator.

“I see. The bookcase, is it real?”

“At the very least it’s from that period.”

“And the portrait of Byron?”

“That’s real,” beamed Victoria Albertovna. “It was given to the Vulfs… There is an inscription. By the by^[51], you’re quite pernickety. Personal effects, personal effects. It strikes me as an unhealthy interest.”

I felt like a burglar, caught in someone else’s apartment.

“Well, what kind of a museum,” I said, “is without it – without the unhealthy interest? A healthy interest is reserved strictly for bacon.”

“Is nature not enough for you? Is it not enough that he wandered around this hillside? Swam in this river? Delighted in these scenic views…”

Why am I bothering her, I thought.

“I see,” I said. “Thank you, Vika.”

Suddenly she bent down, plucked up some weed, pointedly slapped my face with it and let out a short nervous laugh before walking off, gathering her maxiskirt with flounces.

I joined a group headed for Trigorskoye.

To my surprise, I liked the estate curators, a husband and wife. Being married, they could afford the luxury of being friendly. Polina Fyodorovna appeared to be bossy, energetic and a little conceited. Kolya looked like a bemused slouch and kept to the background.

Trigorskoye was in the middle of nowhere^[52] and the management rarely came to visit. The exhibition’s layout was beautiful and logical. Pushkin as a youth, charming young ladies in love, an atmosphere of elegant summer romance.

I walked around the park and then down to the river. It was green with upside-down trees. Delicate clouds floated by.

I had an urge to take a dip^[53], but a tour bus had pulled up just then.

I went to the Svyatogorsky Monastery. Old ladies were selling flowers by the gate. I bought a bunch of tulips and walked up to the grave. Tourists were taking photographs by the barrier. Their smiling faces were repugnant. Two sad saps with easels arranged themselves nearby.

I laid down the flowers at the grave and left. I needed to see the layout of the Uspensky Monastery. An echo rolled through the cool stone alcoves. Pigeons slumbered under the domes. The cathedral was real, substantial and graceful. A cracked bell glimmered from the corner of the central chamber. One tourist drummed noisily on it with a key.

In the southern chapel I saw the famous drawing by Bruni^[54]. Also in there glared Pushkin’s white death mask. Two enormous paintings reproduced the secret removal and funeral. Alexander Turgenev^[55]looked like a matron…

A group of tourists entered. I went to the exit.

I could hear from the back:

“Cultural history knows no other event as tragic… Tsarist rule carried out by the hand of a highsociety rascal.”

And so I settled in at Mikhail Ivanych’s. He drank without pause. He drank to the point of amazement, paralysis and delirium. Moreover, his delirium expressed itself strictly in obscenities. He swore with the same feeling a dignified older man might have while softly humming a tune – in other words, to himself, without any expectation of approval or protest.

I had seen him sober twice. On these paradoxical days, Mikhail Ivanych had the TV and radio going simultaneously. He would lie down on the bed in his trousers, pull out a box marked “Fairy Cake” and read out loud postcards received over the course of his life. He read and expounded:

“Hello Godfather!… Well, hello, hello, you ovine spermatoid… I'd like to wish you success at work. He’d like to wish me success. Well, fuck your mama in the ear! Always yours, Radik. Always yours, always yours. The hell I need you for?”

Mikhail Ivanych was not liked in the village. People envied him. I’d drink, too, they thought. I’d drink and how, my friends! I’d drink myself into a motherfuckin’ grave, I would! But I got a household to run. What’s he got? Mikhail Ivanych had no household. Just the two bony dogs that occasionally disappeared for long stretches of time, a scraggy apple tree and a patch of spring onions.

One rainy evening he and I got talking:

“Misha, did you love your wife?”

“Whatsa?! My wife?! As in my woman?! Lizka, you mean?” Mikhail Ivanych was startled.

“Liza. Yelizaveta Prokhorovna.”

“Why do I need to love ’er? Just grab her by the thing and off you go…”

“But what attracted you to her?”

Mikhail Ivanych fell silent for a long time.

“She slept tidy,” he said. “Quiet as a caterpillar.”

I got my milk from the neighbours, the Nikitins. They lived respectably. A television set, Kramskoy’s Portrait of a Woman on the wall.^[56] The master of the house ran errands^[57] from five o’clock in the morning. He would fix the fence, potter around in the garden. One time I see he’s got a heifer strung up by the legs. Skinning it. The blade gleamed clearest white and was covered in blood.

Mikhail Ivanych held the Nikitins in contempt^[58]. As they did him, naturally.

“Still drinking?” enquired Nadezhda Fyodorovna, mixing chicken feed in the pail.

“I saw him at the centre,” said Nikitin, wielding a jointer plane. “Laced since the morning.”

I didn’t want to encourage them.

“But he is kind.”

“Kind,” agreed Nikitin. “Nearly killed his wife with a knife. Set all ’er dresses ablaze. The little ones running around in canvas shoes in winter… But yes, other than that he’s kind…”

“Misha is a reckless man, I understand, but he is also kind and noble at heart.”

It’s true there was something aristocratic about Mikhail Ivanych. He didn’t return empty bottles, for example; he threw them away.

“I’d feel ashamed,” he’d say. “How could I, like a beggar?”

One day he woke up feeling poorly and complained:

“I’ve got the shakes all over.”

I gave him a rouble. At lunchtime I asked:

“How goes it, feeling any better?”

“Whatsa?”

“Did you have a pick-me-up?^[59]”

“Huh! It went down like water on a hot pan, it sizzled!”

In the evening he was in pain again.

“I’ll go see Nikitin. Maybe he’ll gimme^[60] a rouble or just pour some…”

I stepped onto the porch and was witness to this conversation:

“Hey, neighbour, you scrud, gimme a fiver.”

“You owe me since Intercession^[61].”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“We’ll talk when you do.”

“You’ll get it when I get paid.”

“Get paid?! You got booted for cause ages ago.”

“Fuck ’em and the horse they rode in on! Gimme a fiver anyway. Do it on principle, for Christ’s sake! Show them our Soviet character!”

“Don’t tell me, for vodka?”

“Whatsa? I got business…”

“A parasite like you? What kinda business?”

Mikhail Ivanych found it hard to lie; he was weak.

“I need a drink,” he said.

“I won’t give it to you. Be mad, if you want, but I won’t give it you!”

“But I’ll pay you back, from my wages.”

“No.”

And to end the conversation Nikitin went back into the house, slamming the heavy door with the blue mailbox.

“You just wait, neighbour,” fumed Mikhail Ivanych. “You wait! You’re gonna get yours! That’s right! You’ll remember this conversation!”

There was no sound in response. Chickens maundered about. Golden braids of onions hung above the porch…

“I’ll make your life hell! I’ll.”

Red-faced and dishevelled, Mikhail Ivanych bellowed:

“Have you forgot?! Have you forgot everything, you snake? Clean forgot it?!”

“What’d I forget?” Nikitin leant out.

“If you forgot, we’ll remind you!”

“What’d I forget, eh?”

“We remember everything! We remember 1917! We whatchamacallit… We dispossessed you, you scummy scrud! We’ll dispossess your whole Party lot! We’ll ship you off to the Cheka^[62]. Like Daddy Makhno^[63]. There they’ll show you…”

And after a short pause:

“Hey neighbour, lend me a fiver… All right, a trey. I’m begging you, for the love of Christ. you larder bitch!”

Finally I mustered up the courage to start work. I was assigned a group of tourists from the Baltics. These were reserved, disciplined people who listened contentedly and did not ask questions. I tried to be brief and was not entirely sure I was being understood.

Later I would be given a full overview. Tourists from Riga are the best-mannered. Whatever you say, they smile and nod in agreement. If they do ask questions, then they’re always on the practical side: how many serfs did Pushkin own? What was the revenue from Mikhailovskoye? What was the total cost of renovations to the manor house?