We ran ahead too much; we should return to the years immediately preceding the war when Gajto is about ten years old; his high school years and World War I are about to start. There is no information about his earliest school years, up to ca. 1912-13. This is a
-24-period that Gazdanov never mentions in his autobiographical fiction on the other hand, his military school ("kadetskij korpus") and Gymnasium years from 1912-13 to 1918-19, were, by virtue of Gazda- nov's early maturity and the great events of history, of tremendous importance for the young man and the young writer. Nearly every- thing Gazdanov wrote during the first five years of his ״literary life" (about 1926 to 1930) is on, or related to, these experiences.
In addition to the vivid pictures of his school years in his auto- biographical An E v e n i n g wit h C l a i r e he gave a slightly fictional״
ized account of his Gymnasium life in the short story "On the Island" (of which there remains a non-fictionalized "real-name"
draft among his manuscripts) and he even wrote, as late as 1937 (but never published, as far as we could determine) an obituary article on one of his favorite teachers, the director of the Sumen Gymnasium in Bulgaria.
The exact date for the somewhat complicated story of Gazdanov's secondary education are not known but there can be no doubt about the general accuracy of the following picture. He probably
started in the Xar'kov Gymnasium in 1912 and got to the seventh grade there in 1919. He went back to school in Constantinople
in 1922, finishing the eighth and last grade in the Sumen Gymnasium in Bulgaria in 1923. However, to these gymnasium years we have to add his experiences at the military school in Poltava, spending there probably one year before entering Xar'kov Gymnasium.
Because of the child's exceptional maturity, powers of observation and unusally sensitive and impressionable nature; because of the profound impression some of the teachers and classmates made on him; because of the truly extraordinary events and circumstances under which the second half of his secondary education was spent, from 1917 to 1919 and, in the perhaps even more unusual conditions of exile, in 1922 and 1923; and last, but not least, because to his intellectual and emotional precocity was added a premature urge for action and independence leading the thirteen-fourteen year old boy
to "bad company" (to which he was drawn, inexplicably, or forced, less inexplicably, later on in his life) we have to pay particular attention to these years, to the effect they had on the young man.
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We are fortunate in that we can study this period through Gazdanov1 own writings getting thus a picture not only of what happened, to his body and mind, during these years but also of how the writer
later remembered and judged himself and the times.
The first school Gazdanov recalls in An E vening with C l a i r e is the military school of Poltava, or, as he "fictionalizes1' it, of
"Timofeev." He did not like the place; its military character was foreign to him. The only thing he learned there, he says, was walking on hands; and the one thing he learned to hate there was
the Orthodox service and organized religion in general. Perhaps the most disconcerting of his early experiences was this disillu- sionment with religion. We know of his father's anti-clerical attitude. But as if that was not enough he seems to have had a succession of very unsatisfactory divinity teachers and was only in the third grade or merely twelve years old when he learned how easy it was to bribe these priests.
The young boy's typical trait, the inner conflict of diffidence and arrogance develops and strengthens under the pressures of cop- ing with school life. The transition from the secluded, warm and familiar small world of home to the necessity to absorb the impact of a great many foreign lives that come in contact with him now
is not easy. The shy dreamer becomes, for all but his closest, an insolent rowdy. The roughness leads him to unexpected quarters.
His newlyfound friends have the roughness but not much else. This society of suspicious characters includes not only billiards
players, middlemen and speculators; there are also— we should not forget we are in the social whirlwind of 1917 Russia— counterfeit- ers, drug dealers, prostitutes, agents provocateurs, terrorists, robbers, anarchists, informers and plain murderers. Several of Gazdanov's earliest short stories from the late 1920's tell us episodes of his life at this bottom layer of society. One of them, "The Society of the Eight of Spades" is about a very mixed group of people, cocaine traffickers and poets, terrorists and dreamers in which the thirteen-and-a-half, fourteen-year-old
Gazdanov--called, in the story, "realist Molodoj," "realist Young"
and said to be, for the sake of greater credibility, fifteen— gets
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involved and very soon learns the sad truth that "life, if broken down to its basic elements, consists of robbery, trading and love."
3• FIGHTING IN A CIVIL WAR OUT OF CURIOSITY
All this is in 1917, before and after the Revolutions, and in 1918. Gazdanov is in the fifth, sixth and seventh grade of the gymnasium, travelling, every summer, to the Caucasus to visit his still living grandparents; and to Kislovodsk— a watering place he likes for its combination of provincial tranquility with the ap- pearance and customs of the capitals— to visit his favorite uncle, one of the most memorably drawn characters in An Evening with C l air e. It is to him, to this "uncle Vitālij" that the not quite sixteen- year old Gazdanov confesses, in the summer of 1919, his intention to fight in the Civil War on the side of the Whites. This conver- sation is extremely revealing; we learn the reasons for Gazdanov's decision, his attitude toward the Civil War and, although it is mostly uncle Vitālij speaking, some of Gazdanov's own philosophical views.
The stubborn Gajto is driven by the indomitable urge to discover the still unknown realms of life. He decides to join the Army
(leaving the Gymnasium just before graduation) but before he leaves for the front he goes back to Xar'kov to say good-bye to his
mother. They never see each other again. Once, before evacuation, in 1920, in the middle of war, Gajto, standing on his armored train which was slowly moving South, saw a classmate from the Xar'kov Gymnasium on a North-bound train and yelled to him to tell Mother that he was alive and going South. We do not know whether she ever got the message. But the connection was later reestablished.
Gazdanov, already in Paris, could and did correspond with her and she very likely received and read his early fiction, including the novel An E v e n i n g with C l a i r e, of which several copies were sent to the Soviet Union.
Gazdanov was very much attached to his mother. In the 1930's, when he heard that his mother became seriously ill he rushed to the Soviet embassy and begged them to give him a visa. They of
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course refused; fortunately for Gazdanov, who probably would have wound up in the Gulag instead of seeing his mother. She died (we do not know exactly when) a natural death during World War
II-It was at the end of 1919 that Gazdanov left for the front, to join his unit, an armored train, at Sinel1nikovo, in the South of Russia. In the actual fighting his place was on the machine gun platform. The exactly sixteen-year-old boy sees all the horrors of war. No wonder that very soon "his soul is burned out," as he said later about his generation; that he loses all the illusions people live by, that he becomes unable to believe in anything any more. His armored train is constantly traveling and fighting all over the Crimea and the neighboring mainland, but all this stops in November, 1920 when, after several retreats, Vrangel's defeated army has no choice other than to evacuate the Crimea, or, in other words, to leave Russia and go into what was then believed to be a
short exile.
The last third of An E v e n i n g with C l a i r e is the story of this year. It begins in Sinel'nikovo, a city Gazdanov will remember
forever for a certain smell and the bodies of Maxno's soldiers hanging from telegraph poles; Gazdanov draws a number of portraits of the strikingly different human characters who are caught togeth- er in wartime: primitive or shrewd peasants, cowardly or stupid officers, a teacher of literature, youngsters who left school or who had no school to leave, men who changed sides many times without
any scruples, not even understanding what is wrong with that, men without fear, singing and joking in the midst of the most intense
shooting, a muSik so lazy and sleepy that the falling bullets could not make him get up and run, ruffians and murderers, thieves and ruined and embittered middle or even sometimes upper-class people, a polygamist railroadman having a wife in each city his line served before the war and war prostitutes, a type the young boy never met before. But not only were all these desperate characters more com- plex; there were some truly exceptional men among them, too: brave, even heroic, magnanimous, very capable, good at war and good at some form of artistic activity, idealistic in attitude, romantic in
feelings. Although this sounds like the hackneyed prototype of the
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-28-omnipotent positive hero of children's literature, there are such people, not perfect of course, yet truly different from the mass of ordinary people and when one meets such a man in real life one is bound to be impressed. So it was with Gazdanov. Amidst all the horrors of war he met such characters (perhaps lifting them, with his romantic imagination, even higher than they really were) who were strong enough in their spirit to raise themselves above the spectacle and to stand fast, not demoralized when everybody else was. Such real life experiences were very likely another source
for the romantic idealized characters that appear, not infrequently, in the fiction. And there was one more reason why he knew such
people existed: he himself was one of them. Nor did he belong to what is so often misnamed in our century "the people." His efforts to mingle with the peasants of his unit were unsuccessful and he remained, as he aptly puts it, a "Russian foreigner" among them.
Although Gazdanov belonged to his military unit, the armored train, for almost exactly a year, actually he was not constantly on it. There were times for Sebastopol, for cafes and theaters,
functioning, surprisingly, amid the ravaging war. When, in the middle of October, 1920, Gajto tries to return to his train from an assignment to Sebastopol he learns that both the train and its base have been taken by the Reds, the commanding officers are in
flight and only some thirty or forty soldiers and officers are left. Nevertheless he rejoins these but not for long: soon they fall under the attack of Budennyj's cavalry and though they get relieved, their days are numbered. Before long they are in Feo- dosija, a Black Sea port in southeastern Crimea, forced to embark, in November of 1920, on ships that will take them along with the remaining army of Vrangel', to Constantinople.