Poor British Council; little did it realise the passion it
was about to unleash. “Was there any chance,”the creative director politely
inquired, “that I could attend the inaugural British Literature Today seminar
in Russia? At Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country estate? It would be quite a
commitment. Was there any chance at all?”
I had been waiting for this moment all my life. While other
teenagers experimented with drugs and novelty eyeliner, my teenage frolics were
with Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Gogol, leaving me longing to visit Russia: a land
of ice and silver birches and soulful poets as miserable as I was. Tolstoy was
my favourite; I was beside myself. This trip could only be a terrible
disappointment.
My sole preparation was rereading War and Peace, so
arriving at Domodedovo airport on Tuesday was confusing. Where was the beardy
coachman? The samovar? The snow? The British Council Russia representatives,
female, beardless, led us into Moscow: a dazzle of six-lane boulevards, beaming
men dressed as Stalin, basement supermarkets, Putin T-shirts, red stars and
golden onion domes, headscarves, Olympic tracksuit-shops and extraordinarily
stylish pensioners.
While my fellow authors acclimatised, I ate: Georgian
dumplings and cheesy khachapuri, borscht, miscellaneous meat in aspic, cabbage
pies and slightly too much herring. Then it was time for our first cultural
exchange: in the Duma basement bar my fellow authors and I dazedly discussed
fiction with scores of beautiful young Muscovites, all of whom had read far
more British literature than we had and spoke much better English.
That was nothing: the following morning, the real work
began. A minibus brought us via Chekhov’s house and a roadside café, where we
were presented with two large smoked fish in brown paper, along an endless
wooded motorway into deepest Tula Region. Our hotel, in the grounds of the
estate, was capacious and modern; the food, for nearly 100 visitors, fantastic:
kasha, still-warm baked apples from Tolstoy’s trees, cucumber with garlic and
dill, stews that reminded me of my grandmother’s most dramatically Hungarian
cooking.
But we were there to work: to build bridges at a sticky time
for Anglo-Russian relations with those brave translators and literature
teachers who had travelled unimaginable distances to discuss the (fortunately)
changed face of modern British fiction. My fifth novel stagnated in my unopened
laptop; Pierre and Natasha waited in limbo, utterly ignored. In the rare
moments when we weren’t giving readings, or being befriended by Siberian
delegates over beetroot buns during the coffee breaks, we were on stage, being
asked terrifyingly precise questions: how, exactly, might our regional
variations (Louise Welsh: Scottish; Sunjeev Sahota: Anglo-Sikh; Owen Sheers:
Welsh; Nicola Barker: Barkerland) be evident in our texts? Which literature
would we recommend for teenage readers? Did I think a man could translate my
novels? At one point I tested their English; the only word these
extraordinarily cultured Russians didn’t know was “earwig”.
For respite we were shown round the estate: the house itself
(two grand pianos; a small table for “serious conversation only”; houseplants
tended by Sophia Tolstoya, when not bearing the great man’s 13 children;
Tolstoy’s own miniature desk-chair and paperweights and dumbbells, his picture
of Charles Dickens, his cardigan); 100 acres of orchards; paths on which
Russian brides paraded for photographs and Chinese tourists took selfies; a
discreet grassy mound in an unremarkable clearing, in which we suddenly
realised Tolstoy was buried. Then more talking, more questions, and a visit
with Youlya Vronskaya, head of international projects, to the vegetable garden
and fir woods: so much beauty that I wanted to cry. I arrived late for my
workshop in muddy boots, with small fragments of silver birch bark and apples
concealed in my pockets: permanently changed.
The trip was exhausting, mind-expanding, gloriously
well-organised and a tribute to both the British Council, in London and Moscow,
and the unforgettably fabulous Yasnaya Polyana. The same cannot be said of our
penultimate night, when a splinter-group failed to turn up to the scheduled
screening of Brooklyn and persuaded one of the cooks to let us
go to a banya, an extensive sauna/plunge-pool arrangement in the suburban shed
of a tired-looking man in full camouflage. If you are ever in Russia and banyas
are mentioned, do not flinch. Yes, compulsory seminudity with acquaintances is
not the British way. We dislike extremes of temperature; we rarely round off
our evenings with violently smoked bream, strings of salted Georgian cheese,
vodka, unlabelled beer and a mysterious bacony substance known as
“chickenandchips”. It took almost more courage than I had to get in the taxi;
then to sweat shyly beside my courageous, passionate and terrifyingly
intelligent new best friends before leaping into icy water but, by God, I did.
And it was wonderful.
…
Home, violently sleep-deprived, to my own disappointingly
orchardless garden and the launch of Rhapsody in Green, my memoir
about being a novelist caught in a vegetable-growing obsession.
“Whatever you do,” I’d said to my family, “don’t forget to
water. And pick. Please, don’t forget.”
While I was making friends with cheery intellectuals, hungry
for any scrap of British literature, London experienced the hottest day and
most violent storm in recent history. My tiny garden had become a jungle:
purple Cosse Violette beans and splitting orange tomatoes, Japanese
shiso-leaves and Italian chicory had sprouted and fattened and been left
unpicked. I don’t care. At this very moment, I should be choosing my dress for
the launch; I can’t be bothered. The party begins in two hours but my mind is full
of Tolstoy’s garden, his currant bushes and pumpkins. I seem to be lost,
somewhere among the fir and birch forests, the yellow apples, the bridge over
the bulrushes in bright sunlight. And I don’t know how to come back.
Illustration by Toby Whitebread
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De FINANCIAL TIMES, 24-25/09/2016
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De FINANCIAL TIMES, 24-25/09/2016
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