In school, we had studied American history and, that year, ancient Rome. But to me, Russia was a mysterious place with nuclear missiles pointed at us, a country I knew virtually nothing about. Until Doctor Zhivago. I read Pasternak’s descriptions of the six-mile-long Kologrivov estate with sheaves of wheat and a river gleaming beyond “fields following fields” until they were lost in the distance. “These vast expanses gave him [Yuri] a feeling of freedom and elation. They made him think and dream of the future.” Wasn’t I too seeking that feeling of freedom? My town offered only the opposite; the mills and polluted river seemed to conspire to prevent elation.
We had no grand houses really; the town had streets lined with old mill houses and the triple-deckers the immigrants eventually bought. Even the newer developments, though neat and tree-lined, offered only small split ranches or colonials. To read about the Gromekos’ house, with its top floor of bedrooms and studies and a boudoir—Boudoir! Another word I had to look up!—was intoxicating. My own house was typical of the 1960s makeovers: Formica and paneling, artificial flowers and fruit, avocado and harvest-gold accents. The Gromekos’ curtains were pistachio colored, their upholstery olive green, and their potted plants resembled seaweed “like a green, sleepily swaying seabed.”
The Gromekos hosted chamber music with piano trios, string quartets, and violin sonatas. So unlike the Johnny Cash music my parents played on our stereo, or the folk records I played alone in my room! Even the food Pasternak described, the supper table “white and long as a winter road,” “the frosted bottles of red rowanberry cordial” and “crystal cruets in silver stands” transported me to a different world, a place completely unlike my home, with the tablecloth covered with plastic and the red sauce and meatballs and sausage—delicious and comforting and plentiful, certainly, but served on mismatched platters and bowls. No “picturesque arrangements of game and zakuski [yet another word to look up]” or “baskets of mauve cineraria [and another!] smelling of almonds.” All of it—the golden domes of churches and the girls in white dresses on Whitsun Eve, the green birch saplings hung over the church railings, the potatoes covered with old blankets and hay in the cellar, even the Proclamations posted on doors describing the various rules and punishments under the Red Army—whetted my already big appetite for travel and adventure, for some other place, pointed my compass outward.
But Doctor Zhivago pointed me inward too, toward other Russian novels, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy; nonfiction books about Russia, like The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie; and toward epic novels in general. After I had devoured all of the Russians, I discovered Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and began the same obsession with French literature.
Like Doctor Zhivago, Les Misérables has its critics. At 1,232 pages (arguably the longest novel in European literature), it is described by The Guardian as a novel of “gargantuan length and exaggerated coincidences,” in which “everything seems utterly improbable and every plot twist operates through coincidences: a father doesn’t recognize his son, a criminal doesn’t recognize a man he has pursued for years . . .” Even Hugo himself called Les Misérables “formidable, gigantic, colossal, monstrous.” But these were the very things I loved about epic novels, which by definition center upon a hero and great events narrated in an elevated style. I loved nothing more than to lose myself in these gargantuan novels with their pages and pages of characters and stories and settings and drama.
By the time I read Les Misérables, as a sophomore or junior in high school, I had also fallen in love with American literature of the 1920s (How? I cannot really say except once again I serendipitously discovered Fitzgerald and Hemingway on the library shelves), in particular with Zelda Fitzgerald (I read and reread the Nancy Milford biography that came out the following year) and her life in Paris. Hugo’s novel was described by scholar Kathryn Grossman as “in many ways, a love affair with Paris.” While Hugo was in exile in Britain, Baron Haussmann razed the old Paris that Hugo loved, and that is the setting for Les Misérables; a Paris of narrow streets and alleys and hidden neighborhoods that had existed since medieval times but was replaced with the broad avenues and open plazas we associate with the city today—a plan meant to eliminate the congestion that fostered diseases and to prevent the building of the very revolutionary barricades that Hugo describes.
Of course, Les Misérables led to my reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and The Count of Monte Cristo and to fall in love, as I had with Moscow and the Urals, with Paris, where in the Luxembourg Gardens “the air was warm, the garden was inundated with light and shade . . . the sparrows were giving vent to little twitters in the chestnut trees” and where, at the Saint-Paul- Saint-Louis church in the Marais, “people halted on the Rue Saint-Antoine to gaze through the windows at the orange flowers quivering on Cosette’s head.” Hugo once said, “He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more sublime.” His novel, written more than a century before a teenager in a small town in a small state read it, did just that for me.
During my high-school years, I read my way across oceans and mountains, through history and politics and cultures, into epic tales of love and sorrow and bravery and passion. These stories opened doors that led me out and ultimately away from home, fueled by the hope of glimpsing golden domes and rose windows of cathedrals; labyrinth streets and fields of wheat; of glimpsing this big, beautiful world that I began to imagine on my father’s knee, and then began to almost grasp with a book in my hands.
“He who sees Paris,” Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, “seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.” How similar to what Yuri says in Doctor Zhivago: “The roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off, and we and all the people find ourselves under the open sky.” The sky. Endless and full of possibilities, the door to the past and to the future. Somehow I understood this as I read. And all these years later, if my father were still here beside me, I could tell him, “Look, Daddy, I have seen Paris and Beijing and Istanbul. I have gazed at the Great Pyramid and the Himalayas and Machu Picchu. I have eaten yak and horse and deep-fried crickets. Thank you for showing me the world that books helped me imagine.” If only he and Hugo and Pasternak and everyone who pointed me toward the sky could know I am still looking upward.
Lesson 10: How to Run Away
? Rabbit, Run BY JOHN UPDIKE ?