| The 300-mile journey to Anufrievo from Moscow takes twice as long as the journey from New York to Moscow, both in time and psychic adjustment. The
village sits on the edge of a red pine and birch forest, beside a reed-lined
lake, in the northern region of Vologda. It is one of those places you see
across the northern Russian landscape, the clusters of houses huddled
together as if to guard the inhabitants against winds of ill weather and ill
fortune. Each of these clusters is a derevnya, or village, and one
appears every mile or two along the road. Inevitably they lie near the curve of a
river or on the shore of a lake. They can be made up of 10, 20, maybe a
hundred households.
Alexei Gromov (left) and Vasili Semyonov chat on a dirt road in Anufrievo. Vasili is known as the first villager to leave the Communist Party.
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Anufrievo has 33 houses. Dogs, cats and chickens wander the streets;
sheep and cows loll in fenced pastures; horses roam freely in the swampy
lands beyond. There is something odd about the sky here. Its daily blues
are powder pastels, but its sunsets are strong kaleidoscopes of violets,
blues, fire-reds and oranges, even hints of green. My friend Svetlana said once
that it is "as if we were higher up in the sky here -- nearer to the
heavens."
The homes are made of wood, in the style of log cabins. They are
sometimes painted yellow, blue or green, and are often decorated with
simple woodwork designs. Every house is surrounded by its own garden full of
potatoes, beets, carrots, cabbage, squash, onions, berry bushes, apple
trees, herbs for healing and flowers. Either in the family garden or on
the bank of the lake, each household has a bath house where people can wash
themselves and their clothes with water heated by an intense,
long-simmering fire.
Aside from radios and televisions, there are very few signs of modern
technology in Anufrievo. No one in the village owns a car or truck.
Without running water, everything is slowed down: cooking, cleaning, washing
dishes, bathing, feeding the animals. There are telephones, but the lines are
poor and after rain or snow storms they inevitably break down. People have
electricity but it, too, is unreliable. Every November and every March
the roads are impassable for a few weeks. In emergencies, villagers can ride
on the postal truck (it runs three times a week) with the permission of the
driver. Horse-drawn carts and sleighs are the most flexible forms of
transportation.
Now and then a truck or car arrives with guests or goods. Movement of
any kind -- especially such arrivals -- brings the villagers to their windows,
where they watch until the nature of the movement has been categorized. "Rogov
is getting water for the bath." "Feofanov has gone for hay." "The gypsies
have come with goods -- what have they got?"
The first building on the edge of Anufrievo is a large clubhouse, the
center of cultural activities for villages in a five-mile range. In the
back is a small library that includes classics of Russian literature and
poetry (there is Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but no Solzhenitsyn; Pushkin and
Lermontov, but no Akhmatova or Brodsky). There are also classics of
Soviet political literature. The librarian was advised at one point to burn the
collection of Stalin's writings, but he couldn't bear to do so and gave
them away instead. There is still a shelf full of children's books dedicated
to Lenin as a boy -- "Already a hero! Already of a lover of children and a
lover of justice!"
On one wall of the club, a series of posters honor war heroes, and on
another wall is written in chalk: "Russia! Rus! Save yourself!"
I first came to live in Anufrievo in October 1994, to conduct a field
project for a PhD in anthropology. I stayed a little more than a year and
talked with people about the long arcs of their lives. I recorded my
impressions continually in a diary, then edited and reflected on those
entries in the months after I left. A few extracts follow. |
