The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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REFIT.

open up backstories. “I can re-create the

whole from small parts,” he said, con-

tentedly, as the sky outside shifted to a

soft gray. “It gives life a feeling of com-

fort, provides a certain kind of pleasure.

Without that, writing is impossible.”

T

arusa’s history, and Osipov’s con-

nection to the town, are bound up

with the phenomenon known as the “hun-

dred-and-first kilometre”—a phrase that

describes the minimum distance that So-

viet authorities permitted many former

prisoners, especially those considered po-

litically dangerous, to live outside large

cities. In 1933, Osipov’s great-grandfather,

a physician named Mikhail Melentiev,

was falsely charged with plotting to kill

the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky and his

son, and was arrested, along with a dozen

other Soviet doctors. Melentiev spent

three years in a settlement near the Arc-

tic Circle, where convicts were building

the White Sea Canal, the first of Stalin’s

construction projects realized with gulag

labor. He worked in a clinic treating pris-

oners and their guards. In 1946, after the

war, he moved to Tarusa, just beyond the

one-hundred-kilometre line surround-

ing Moscow city limits. At the time, the

town had no central plumbing and only

intermittent electricity, and the roads were

a patchwork of muddy ruts. All the same,

Melentiev felt a sense of harmony that

had previously eluded him, and, as he put

it in his diary, he took “particular delight

in the sensible monotony of village life.”

As the camps emptied out after Sta-

lin’s death, in 1953, Tarusa became in-

creasingly populated with former pris-

oners. In 1955, Konstantin Paustovsky,

a mid-century Soviet Thoreau, who was

an officially recognized writer and was

not a dissident himself, sought to es-

cape the distractions of the capital and

settled in Tarusa. In his small blue house

at the end of a dirt lane, he began host-

ing the kinds of cultural figures who

were treated with varying degrees of

suspicion by the Soviet authorities—

among them Arkady Steinberg, a poet

and a translator who spent eleven years

in the gulag, and Bulat Okudzhava, a

talented folksinger whose parents had

been arrested as “enemies of the peo-

ple,” in the thirties.

Nearby, Nikolai Otten, who had been

a leading film critic until an anti-Semitic

campaign against “cosmopolitanism”

stripped him of regular work, built a

house, which he split into two parts. He

and his wife, Elena Golysheva, lived in

one half; in the other half lived Elena’s

ex-husband, Petr Golyshev, and Petr’s

second wife, Lidia Malli. Otten, too,

opened his home to those who had fallen

out of favor with the state, including, in

1959, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow

of the poet Osip Mandelstam, one of

the great lyricists of the twentieth cen-

tury, who disappeared into the gulag in

the thirties. Nadezhda had spent years

evading arrest, moving from one provin-

cial town to the next. In Tarusa, she found

a place of refuge. “It’s Heaven,” she wrote

in a letter inviting another poet to visit

her. “It’s wonderful here. I live well.”

It was in Tarusa where she began to

work on her memoir, which circulated

in samizdat copies in the Soviet Union

and was first published in the West in

the nineteen-seventies. “I knew she was

writing something,” Viktor Golyshev,

Elena and Petr’s son, who is now in his

eighties, recently recalled. “But at the

time I was honestly far more interested

in lying on the beach by the Oka and

getting a suntan.”

Life was modest. Buckets of water

were delivered each day by a horse and

buggy, and the shelves at the grocery

store were reliably empty. But the town

was intellectually vibrant, and became

known as a Russian version of the Bar-

bizon, the French collective of artists

who, in the nineteenth century, lived in

happy isolation in a village on the edge

of Fontainebleau Forest, outside Paris.

In the summer of 1961, at an afternoon

devoted to discussing literature over

tea in Paustovsky’s garden, an idea for a

new literary almanac, Tarusa Pages, was

born. Steinberg contributed a number

of poems; Okudzhava published his first

piece of prose, a semiautobiographical

tale in which a young man is injured

during the Second World War; and Na-

dezhda Mandelstam wrote a handful of

articles on town life, including one on

Tarusa’s embroidery workshop. The con-

tent was not overtly political, but the

publication was a bold gesture, a dog

whistle of free thinking.

For a time, Tarusa Pages, which was

issued by a regional publishing house in

Kaluga, evaded the censorship of Com-

munist Party ideologues in Moscow.

Thirty thousand copies were printed.

Andrew Field, a Slavicist at Harvard,

who edited the almanac’s English-lan-

guage translation, in 1964, declared it the

most exciting book to come from Rus-

sia since “Doctor Zhivago.” Many peo-

ple in Moscow remember it as the liter-

ary event of its time—an invigorating

retort to the socialist realism that dom-

“My mother warned me about marrying an architect.” inated official culture. On learning about

Fact Yaffa Osipov 05_13_19.L [Print]_9479237.indd 20 5/2/19 10:37 PM