One day, in the early summer of 1955, Maurice Girodias, the founder of the Parisian publishing house Olympia Press, received a call from literary agent, Russian Dusje Ergaz. "She told me about an old friend of hers, a Russian émigré, now a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University. He wrote a book with a rather dangerous subject, which was rejected by a number of prominent American publishers for that very reason.
The man's name was Vladimir Nabokov, and his book Lolita it dealt with the impossible love story of a middle-aged man and a twelve-year-old girl, who belonged to the seductive species for which Nabokov coined the word 'nympheta'. I asked Madame Ergaz to send me the manuscript, which soon appeared – along with a biography in which I read the following: born 1899 St. Petersburg, Russia. Old Russian nobility…”
THAT WAS IN PARADISE
"I was born on the second floor of a three-story villa made of pink granite with a colorful Polesia mosaic on the upper windows at 47 Bolshoi Morskaya Street in Petrograd, in the last room (if you count in the direction of the square, against the numerical flow) where there was a secret place with my mother's jewelry: the porter Ustin personally led the rebellious people to it through all the rooms in November 1917," wrote Vladimir Nabokov in Russian memoir To other shores.
Nabokov grew up in the shadow of the fame and fortune of the old Russian nobility. Vasily Rukavishnikov, the grandfather of his mother Elena Ivanovna, was the owner of the Siberian gold mines and a millionaire; her second grandfather Nikolai Kozlov was the president of the Medical and Surgical Academy.
Ivan Nabokov, his great-grandfather's brother, was a hero of the battles of Friedland, Borodino, Leipzig and many others, an infantry general, the commander of the St. Petersburg fortress - the one where Dostoevsky was imprisoned. His paternal grandfather, Dmitri Nikolayevich Nabokov, was Minister of Justice under Alexander II. His father, Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov, was one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadet), the largest political party in Imperial Russia before 1917, a deputy in the First Duma, a distinguished lawyer and liberal, a moral role model for his son.
photo: Nabokov family archiveTHE NABOKOV BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN RUSSIA AFTER THE BOLLOWISH COME TO POWER (1919): Vladimir, Kirill, Olga, Sergey and Elena
The firstborn Vladimir, who was called Volodya, his younger brothers Sergei and Kirill and sisters Olga and Yelena were raised by the lazy and melancholic English governess Miss Northcott, and three years after her, the Swiss governess from Louisiana, Rachel Home "Mademoiselle", who stayed in Petrograd until 1912.
In an essay Past perfect Nabokov remembers:
"I see myself climbing the wet black rocks on the shore while Miss Norcott, the lazy and melancholy English governess, walks along the beach with my brother... I keep repeating the English word childhood (childhood)”.
One summer on the family farm, he saw a pale yellow butterfly by the river and groaned with a desire to catch it, stronger than anything he had experienced before. His tutor covered the butterfly with a cap and they left it in the closet expecting it to die in mothballs and be preserved. But, alas, the next morning the maid opened the closet door by mistake and the butterfly flew out through the open window. Chasing butterflies will end his life seven decades later.
photo: Nabokov family archiveCAREFREE CHILDHOOD: Vladimir Nabokov in his boyhood years
Russian, English and French were spoken equally in the Nabokov household, and Volodya began spelling English books before he learned to write in Russian. When the father realized that Vladimir could not read anything in Russian except for the word "cocoa", he hired Vasily Martinovich, a village teacher with a Tolstoy-type face, whose handshake was firm and moist.
"He was, as my aunts used to say, 'red', then hissing like boiling water that burns a man; my father saved him from some political chaos (and then, under Lenin, it was rumored that he was executed for his socialist-revolutionary views)...
In the depths of our forests, gesticulating passionately, he spoke about humanity, freedom, the horrors of war and the dire necessity of blowing up tyrants with dynamite. When he showered me with quotes from Put down your weapons.! well-intentioned but untalented (Austrian pacifist) Bertha Zuttner, I rose ardently in defense of bloodshed, saving my childhood world of spring-loaded pistols and Arthurian knights.”
ABOUT THE NORD EXPRESS AND THE JAPANESE IN THE ABBEY IN 1904.
At that time, the Nabokov family with their children and servants traveled at least five times to Paris, the French Riviera or Biarritz on the magnificent "Nord-Express", which left twice a week and transported passengers from St. Petersburg. The father, wearing a traveling cap and suede gloves, sits with a book in the compartment he shares with Max, the family tutor at the time. Brothers Sergey and Volodya are separated from them by a passing toilet cubicle. The next compartment is occupied by a mother with her elderly maid Natasha and an agitated dachshund. In the fourth compartment, with one foreigner, the French actor Ferodi, sits Osip, his father's valet "whom the Bolsheviks meticulously executed ten years later because he stole our bicycles instead of handing them over to the people..."
That year, Chaliapin sang in Paris, and French aviation pioneer Louis Bleriot flew from Calais to Dover.
Volodya was five years old when they were in Abacija (Opatija) in 1904. The London Journal, received by Miss Norcott, juicyly carried seemingly childish drawings by Japanese war correspondents of Russian trains sinking through the Baikal ice.
"In the cafe near the Fiume (Rijeka) wharf, while they were already bringing us our order, my father noticed two Japanese officers at a nearby table and we immediately left; but I managed to grab an entire tin bomb of ice cream, which I carried in my palate, swollen from pain."
In his memory, Vladimir Nabokov also associates with that Russo-Japanese war the moment when, at the beginning of the same year, he was taken from the children's room downstairs, into his father's office, to show him to General Aleksei Nikolayevich Kuropatkin (1848–1925), with whom his father had close relations. To amuse him, the stocky guest spilled a dozen matches on the ottoman next to him and arranged them in a horizontal line, saying: "Here's the sea for you, in a calm time." Then he quickly pulled each pair of matches diagonally, so that the horizon turned into a broken line, and said: "And here is the sea in a storm." He wanted to show another, perhaps better trick, but the servant introduced the adjutant, who told him something.
On that day, he was appointed as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Far Eastern Army.
When Tsar Nicholas II dissolved the First Duma in 1906, about 180 cadet and labor deputies (representatives of the peasant left, close to the then-banned Socialist-Revolutionaries and the People's Will) retreated to Vyborg, then part of Finland, where on July 17, 1906, they signed a manifesto in which they called on the people not to pay taxes and not join the army until the Tsar convened the Duma again.
All the signatories of the appeal were convicted in 1908. The father spent three months in the Petrograd Kresti prison, in a cell with a collapsible rubber tub, learning Italian, reading books and doing gymnastics according to the recipe of the Danish athlete Jørgen Petre Müller. The illegal correspondence with Vladimir's mother was transmitted on narrow rolls of toilet paper by a loyal family friend. When the father was released, the teacher Vasily Martinovich presided over a ceremonial welcome at the Siverskaya station and decorated the country road with green arches and, writes Nabokov, "to be honest, red ribbons."
DANDY'S HEIR
At the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, where he was enrolled at the age of eleven, a teacher suggested to Vladimir Nabokov, with a grimace of disgust, that he could at least park his car two or three blocks away from the school, so that his schoolmates would not watch the livery driver take off his hat in front of him.
In the family garage of the Nabocs stood a Mercedes-Benz, a Rolls-Royce and the sports hit of the time, the French torpedo.
They also criticized him for not wanting to use dirty, wet towels in the bathroom and for hitting with his outer knuckles instead of the bottom of his fists in fights, "as was common among Russian thugs at the time."
U To other shores Nabokov describes the day in 1911 or 1912 when he found out that his father had challenged the editor of "Novi vremena" Alexei Suvorin to a duel because of a slanderous article by "some scoundrel Snesarev", an unworthy duel. There was a magazine circulating in the class that made fun of his father. He found out that his friend had brought the newspaper and had a fight with him. During the fight, the friend sprained his ankle. Vladimir felt sorry as he watched him being carried down the stairs like a corpse by the good-natured strongman with a shaved head Popov - an eternal repeater, who would have remained so had he not fled to the front in 1914, from where he returned as a hussar.
Since the family driver did not come to pick him up that day, Vladimir, returning home in a taxi-sledge through snowy Petrograd, realized why his mother had not come down for breakfast that morning and why the family fencer, Ternant, had come to the house. In his mind he saw his father fighting, he felt almost physically sick at the sight of "a wild pulsating heart about to be pierced by a sword" and he thought that a more effective weapon in a duel might be the "heavy black browning" from his father's drawer.
The famous duels of Russian literature were lined up before his eyes: "Griboyedov shows his bloody hand to Yakubovich. Pushkin's gun falls with its barrels into the snow. Lermontov smiles at Martynov. Onegin aims at the curly-haired Sobinov..." However, the duel never came.
In the autumn of 1916, in the "San-Mandé" sanatorium near Paris, Uncle Vasiliy Ivanovich Rukavishnikov, who was a homosexual, died in complete solitude from angina pectoris, which was underestimated by everyone in the family. According to the order of inheritance, Vladimir received a great fortune and Rozhdestveno, a building from the time of Alexander II on a hill next to the Oredezh River, among lime trees and oaks, with urns in a romantic park and an entire grove of cherries, glazed to protect against the St. Petersburg climate.
Vladimir Dmitrievich thought that his son was getting such a large inheritance too early.
With the money he inherited from his uncle, Nabokov published his first collection of poems, a copy of which the director of the Tenishev School, the literary historian Vyacheslav Vasilievich Gippius (1878–1942), tore in front of the whole class. And the sister of Vyacheslav Gippius, the poet Zinaida Gippius, told Vladimir's father: "Tell your son that he will never be a writer!" That sentence remained in his memory for thirty years.
At school, Vladimir was accused of "arrogant dandyism", mainly because of the French and English expressions in his written assignments in Russian.
"Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I probably read more fiction and poetry, English, Russian, French, than in any other period of my life. I especially enjoyed the works of Wells, Poe, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Alexander Blok... In other words, I was a completely ordinary trilingual boy in a family with a large library of 10.000 books."
In the beginning, Nabokov wrote poetry under the certain influence of the aesthetics of modernism - Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Nikolai Gumilyov and symbolist Valery Bryusov.
THAT WAS IN PARADISE WITH TAMARA
During the rainy August evenings of the summer of 1915, Nabokov, pushing his bicycle along the embankment on the right side of the road, came from the Vire family estate to his uncle's Rozhdestveno estate and met a girl whose "breath of Tatar or Circassian blood probably explained the characteristic expression of her cheerful black eyes".
She was fifteen and he was sixteen. Her name was Valentina (Lyusya) Shulygina, originally from a family of educated Petrograd clerks; her father was an engineer. In memoirs To other shores he gave her the pseudonym Tamara, and some of the publicists will wonder if this Tamara is actually his Annabelle Lee. In one verse, Vladimir Nabokov says: "Это было в России, это было в раю"; "That was in Russia, that was in paradise."
"All around, as if nothing was happening, the summer flickered and shone. For the second year, a distant war lasted. Two years later, the notorious change in the state order would remove the idyll, and behind the scenes thunder was already rumbling in Alexander Blok's verses..."
"With unforgettable, heart-rending clarity I remember an evening at the beginning of the following summer, 1917, in the last glimmers of a still free Russia. After a long separation, I met Tamara on the train. Only a few minutes we stood together in a tambour between two stations. I spoke nonsense, choked with a mixture of love, shame and pity. She calmly ate chocolate, breaking off neat cubes and talking about the office where she worked. On the other hand the dark smoke of the burning peat merged with the red-orange traces of the sunset. A grasshopper screeched. Tamara looked away and disappeared into the scent of jasmine."
BUTLER TO RED SAILORS ABOUT A BOY WHO WRITE SONG AND TRAINED BOXING
When the time of the coup came, on the night between October 24 and 25 (November 6–7, 1917), the number of soldiers loyal to Kerensky was very small and largely ineffective. Most of the soldiers in Petrograd were either neutral or went over to the side of the Bolsheviks. If in February popular unrest shook the whole city, now the theaters and restaurants were lively, and the well-dressed world walked the illuminated streets. The Bolsheviks occupied strategic points of the city - the railway station, the state bank, the telephone exchange.
At 10 a.m. on October 25 (November 7, 1917), two officers asked Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov to give them his car to drive Kerensky to Luga, where loyal soldiers were, but Nabokov's small Mercedes Benz was useless. By 11 a.m. Kerensky found his car at the American embassy and immediately left the city.
On the afternoon of October 25, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and other members of the Council of the Republic were invited to the Winter Palace, where the ministers of the Provisional Government were holding a session. After two hours, he returned to his apartment not far from the Winter Palace, whose exits were blocked twenty minutes later by the Bolsheviks.
During the night, occasional fighting took place. In house number 47 on Bolshoi Morskaya Street, the young Vladimir Nabokov wrote a poem to his friend Samuil Kyanzhuntsev about blood-soaked streets. "While I was writing, heavy gunfire and the vile barking of machine guns could be heard from the street."
The next day, the butler convinced a group of Kronstadt sailors who broke into Nabokov's home that the young man who was making noise at that moment by punching a boxing punch bag was not an ambush agent after all.
WITH GRANDPA'S CANE ON THE TRAIN TO CRIMEA
On the last day spent in Petrograd on November 2 (15), 1917, Vladimir wrote his last poem in the north of Russia, dedicated to his mother, in which he mourned that perhaps she would no longer walk among the birches of his beloved Vira.
Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov saw off his sons at the Nikolaev railway station, and in order not to waste time waiting for the train in a situation that was becoming increasingly hopeless, he hurriedly wrote an editorial for "Rech" or some appeal. After crossing his sons, he calmly told them that they might never see each other again, turned and soon disappeared in waves of steam and fog, writes Brian Boyd, biographer of Vladimir Nabokov.
Vladimir Nabokov, then eighteen years old, with his brother Sergei, separated from his mother and younger children, traveled to the Crimea in the first-class sleeping car of the Simferopol train, which was very heated, and the moth doll, which had been lying in a box with him for seven years, unexpectedly opened due to the unusual heat.
He had with him a pile of small white books of poetry by Symbolist poets with all the titles of the time, as well as small handwritten albums of his poems, recently completed or unfinished.
Nabokov then passed his final exams, hoped to finish his education in England, and then organize an entomological expedition to the mountains of Western China.
He writes that "in November of the year of the machine gun (which apparently ended Russia forever, just as Athens or Rome did in their time)", after their departure from Petrograd, the father's library fell apart: part of it was used for rolling cigarettes, and "twenty years later, on a street stall in Berlin, a nahoche (najdenysh) appeared with our bookplate and, quite conveniently, it turned out to be Wells's War of the Worlds".
Somewhere in central Russia, the train, including that sleeping car, was full of soldiers returning from some front.
"For some reason, my brother and I thought it amusing to lock ourselves in our compartment and not let anyone in. Continuing the attack, several soldiers climbed onto the roof of the wagon and tried, not without success, to use the fan in our compartment as a toilet. When the lock on the door gave way, Sergei, who had a talent for the stage, feigned typhus and we were left alone."
On the third morning, just before dawn, somewhere near Kharkiv, in order to breathe some fresh air, he made his way through the corridor over the hands, faces and legs of people huddled together in a crowd.
"It is funny to remember that I was wearing a top hat and white gaiters, and holding in my hand a cane from my great-grandfather's collection of light, beautiful, mottled wood, with a round coral handle set in a golden crown-shaped frame. I confess—if I had been one of those tragic vagabonds in a military coat, I would not have resisted the temptation to seize a dandy walking along the platform and destroy him."
When he wanted to return to the carriage from the platform of the nameless station, the train jerked, the stick slipped from his hands and fell under the train. He jumped off the train to get the stick. People watched him mockingly through the windows. He didn't care much for that stick, he would lose it later in Berlin, but the pride of his young, trembling ego made him let the first, second, third, fourth car go by - and when the tracks finally opened, he reached for the stick and, as if in a nightmare, began to chase after the slowly accelerating train.
"The strong proletarian hand, defying the dictates of Marxism, helped me climb onto the platform of the last train."
Vladimir Nabokov and his brother Sergei arrived in the Crimea on November 2, 1917, where they settled in the dacha of Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Panina in Gaspra, near Yalta. Crimea seemed exotic and foreign. "Nothing was Russian, the smells, the sounds, the Potemkin flora in the seaside parks, the sweet smoke in the air of the Tatar villages, the braying of the donkey, the cry of the muezzin, its turquoise tower in the peach-colored sky; it all strongly reminded of Baghdad."
At the end of 1917 in the Crimea, among the soldiers and sailors in the port cities, especially in the base of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, there were influential anarchists who showed no inclination towards Bolshevism until armed Baltic sailors arrived from Petrograd at the end of the year. Then began the conflicts with the local authorities, which, after the February Revolution of 1917, were held there by the Provisional Government and the local soviets. Tatars, who made up a third of the population, declared the Crimean People's Republic in Bakhchisaray during the period of statelessness in December 1917 and formed their own parliament, the Kurultay (Tatar National Assembly). In other parts of Crimea, the situation remained calm as Tatar units controlled the approaches to Simferopol.
Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov, elected to the Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to play an important role in conducting the elections, remained in Petrograd. On the basis of the decree of the Council of People's Commissars declaring the Cadet Party "a party of enemies of the people", on November 28, 1917, the leaders of the Cadets were arrested and sent to the Petropavlovsk Fortress, including Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Panina, in whose villa in the Crimea the Nabokovs had found refuge. Countess Panina was freed by the Revolutionary Court when she agreed to hand over the money of the Ministry of Education hidden abroad in her bank account.
Due to tuberculosis, cadet Fedor Kokoshkin (will be mentioned later) was transferred from the Trubet bastion on January 6, 1918 to the Marijana prison hospital, where they were killed by sailors, which was the beginning of the so-called red terror. The Bolsheviks started an investigation, but after the first assassination of Lenin, they gave up pursuing them.
Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov and about twelve colleagues were detained for five days in a narrow, low and cramped room in Smolny. On the evening of the fifth day, a sailor announced to them "in the name of the people's government" that they were free.
When the Bolsheviks announced on January 21, 1918 that "the Guard is tired" and dispersed the first session of the Constituent Assembly, Vladimir Dmitrievich decided to flee from Petrograd.
PREMATURE DEATH IS CONTINUOUSLY FLOATING ON THE YALTA Wharf...
A few days after their father's arrival in Gaspra, Sergei and Volodya helped the last old servant to carry the heavy sofa from the main house to the guest house. "You see," said Vladimir Dmitrijevic with a smile, "that's how you will carry my coffin to the grave."
The Bolsheviks from Sevastopol (with the help of the Black Sea Fleet and "red sailors") attacked Yalta in January 1918, and their minesweeper bombarded the city from the sea. During those days, he wrote in his diary: "Anxiety, anxiety. An extremely difficult mood... Chess with Volodya in the evening."
After the Soviet Republic was founded on March 19, 1918 in the Crimea and in the Taurid region, a commissioner arrived in Gaspro to nationalize the property, as well as all the surrounding properties, for the Nabokovs it came down to the obligation to pay rent for the house to the local Soviets in the future.
How does Vladimir Nabokov see it?
"The local Tatar government was swept away by the new Soviets, experienced machine-gunners and executioners arrived from Sevastopol, and we found ourselves in the most boring and humiliating position in which human beings can find themselves - one in which idiotic, premature death is constantly hovering around, caused by humanoids who run the show and take offense if something does not go their way. This dull danger followed us until April 1918. On the docks at Yalta, where the Lady with psetancet once lost his lornjon, Bolshevik sailors tied weights to the legs of the arrested inhabitants, placed them with their backs to the sea and shot them; a year later, a diver reported that he found himself at the bottom in a thick pile of dead people standing still."
Armed soldiers searched houses, sometimes six times a day, and anyone found with weapons would be immediately sentenced to death.
Some nights, when rumors of robberies and executions became particularly persistent, Vladimir, his father and brother would for some reason go out to guard the garden...
MINISTER OF THE TARTAR GOVERNOR SULKEVICH
After the Bolsheviks signed the separate Peace of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918, when it became clear that the Germans would soon enter the city, shop and warehouse owners in Yalta declared an anti-Bolshevik strike. There was a shortage of food in Yalta and its surroundings for the whole month, and Vladimir Dmitrievich began to suffer from serious financial difficulties. On April 22, he wrote in his diary: "Something vague was happening. All kinds of rumours."
Trying to distract himself from his worries, he played chess with his son Volodya every evening. "He started playing pretty well."
Vladimir Nabokov, as he writes, "had long been preoccupied with the first butterflies when the Bolsheviks disappeared and the Germans modestly appeared."
"On the path narrowed by scented bushes, which descended from Gaspra (Crimea) towards the sea in the early spring of 1918, some Bolshevik guard, a lame fool with an earring in one ear (!?), wanted to arrest me because, allegedly, I was signaling to English ships with a net."
Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov left for Petrograd on June 8 (21), 1918, but did not get further than Kiev. There, at the cadet congress, Pavel Milyukov, who until then had taken a firm anti-German stance, openly supported the Germans, convinced of their victory in the war.
When Vladimir Dmitrievich returned to Gaspra on July 22 (August 4) 1918, he became Minister of Justice in the Crimean Regional Government of Suleiman Sulkevich.
He often went to Simferopol for meetings of the new government, and the family moved to Livadia.
By the end of September 1918, before withdrawing from the Crimea, the Germans stopped maintaining their unpopular "Tatar" deputy Suleiman Sulkevich, who resigned in November 1918 as president of the Crimean regional government. He fled to Azerbaijan, to Baku, where during the intervention of the British and French he was the chief of general staff and military adviser of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR; which declared independence in 1918). When the Bolsheviks occupied Baku in 1920, Sulkievich was arrested and shot.
The day after the Germans left Crimea, on November 2 (15), 1918, the formation of the new Crimean Provincial Government of Kadet Karaim S. Krim began, in which Vladimir Dmitrievich remained as Minister of Justice.
The commander of the White Volunteer Army, General Anton Denikin, and his generals wanted to rule Crimea from their headquarters in Yekaterinodar (later Krasnodar). They were convinced that the Simferopol government looked patronizingly at Tatar separatism, they did not distinguish the Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Bolsheviks, and as distinct anti-Semites, they also suspected the Jew Maxim Vinaver and Karaim S. Krim of treason against Russia.
In December 1918, Allied forces, predominantly French and British, took control of the port of Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet from the Germans.
The French cooperated with Maxim Winaver's group and other "cadet" politicians, and refused to recognize Denikin's complete authority. Armed skirmishes between different factions broke out around the city.
Nabokov writes that in Yalta, as was somehow common in those years, all kinds of theatrical ventures immediately sprung up, from depressingly vulgar cabarets to film productions by Hadji Murat.
During one of the searches for butterflies, on June 30 (July 13), 1918, on the Ai-Petri mountain pass, a strange horseman in Circassian costume, with his face strangely smeared with yellow paint, shouted when he saw him: "Catch that accursed creature!" He recognized the actor Mozhukhin, who clumsily and furiously pulled the reins of his horse while running away from the film shooting, until, with a bang and a rumble of a landslide, two real Tatars reached him.
On the evening of February 26, 1919, while the mother, a great lover of cards, was playing poker with her sons, and the father was reading, writes Nabokov, "a figure of a robber's appearance crept up to us, and it turned out to be our former chauffeur Tsygankov: he did not hesitate to ride from Petersburg itself on the bumper of the train, across the whole frozen and beastly Russia, just to bring us money sent by friends. Brought and letters arrived at our St. Petersburg address (the indestructibility of mail has always amazed me)".
One of the letters was from Lucy Shulygina, alias Tamara, who was then living in a Ukrainian hutor, a village. Vladimir "read it under a drop of stars".
After about a month, Tsygankov returned the same way "carrying a large bag over his shoulder, full of various objects that we would have gladly given him if we had known that he loved all those nightgowns, waistcoats, sneakers, watches, irons, trouser presses and other small things: we got the complete list from the maid of pale charm whom, it seems, he did not spare... It is interesting that, immediately realizing the secret of toilet talc, he convinced his mother to move the rings and pearls to more traditional place, and he himself dug a hole in the garden for them, where they remained completely safe after his departure".
SEVASTOPOL FAREWELL
CHESS GAME ON A BOAT "HOPE"
In February-March 1919, Bolshevik forces crossed the Dnieper and approached Kherson, Odessa and Crimea. Rebellions of French and Greek sailors begin in Odessa and Sevastopol.
In March–April 1919, the Red Army enters Sevastopol and Simferopol under fighting, Denikin's lines fall apart, and the French organize the evacuation of Sevastopol and Odessa.
"I was completely worn out, just as in 1918 I fantasized that in the winter, when I finished my entomological walks, I would join Denikin's army and reach Tamara's estate. But the winter passed, and I was still planning, and in March the Crimea began to crumble under the onslaught of the Reds, and the evacuation began. On the small Greek ship 'Nadezhda', which was returning to Piraeus with a cargo of dried fruit, we left the port of Sevastopol, and the sound of it, the last sound of Russia, was beginning to fade, but the shore was still glittering, perhaps with the evening sun, or perhaps with distant explosions, and I was trying to concentrate my thoughts on the game of chess I was playing with my father (one of the hunters was missing a poker chip); and I don't know what happened next happened with Tamara."
(to be continued)
