MUSCLE MEMORY
“… and I’d bounce
the
ball two or three times, study the orange rim as if it were,
which
it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing.”
Robert Hass
“I do not make use of my
body, I am my body.”
Gabriel Marcel
Prologue
I am the son of White Russian immigrants who escaped the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and settled in Harbin, China,
where my parents met and I was born on October 26, 1938. When the Second World War broke out on
December 7th 1941 the Japanese took my mother, my older sister Ann
and me to Tokyo (my father had already
immigrated to the United
States two years earlier to find a job and
prepare for us). For the duration of the
war we remained interned for four years in a concentration camp in Tokyo. After the war ended, via the Red Cross, we
were reunited with my father in San
Francisco.
Searching For America
I arrived in this country without language and
culture. It seems to me I have spent
most of my life searching for both.
Words came first, “See Jane run.
Run Jane! See Spot run. Run Spot!” words so far removed from the
Cyrillic alphabet, my mouth ached over the strange syllables. Because there were no special classes for
foreign students back then, I was, as they say, immersed into the English
language, like some kind of verbal baptism, fear and embarrassment my only
ministers. A few years later I surfaced
nearly drowned, but speaking English fluently.
Still, even today I continue to search for language, words in a story
that escape me, an image that remains foreign and distant, some nuance missing
I should understand, but don’t quite.
Culture was not as difficult but far more traumatic. At Saint Dominic’s Elementary school in the
second grade, my class mates avoided the Russian kid, they thought was probably
a Communist. Their parents must have
told them about Senator McCarthy and Americans being threatened from the inside
by the dreaded Commies fluoridating water, infiltrating unions, plotting to
take over the government. The 1950’s were
paranoid and poisonous times. In their
backyards and basements Americans were building atomic bomb shelters, hoarding
canned goods, batteries, water, and buying rifles. Anyone with an “off” at the end of his or her
name instantly became a suspect. Saint
Dominic’s was a Catholic school and I was a Russian Orthodox. I wore short pants. My name was Mescheriakoff…Sounds like someone clearing his throat,
a nun said, laughing. Students chanted, Red, red go to bed! For a year I
suffered, feeling that no matter how hard I tried I could not shake my
foreigner label as if it were tattooed on my forehead for everybody to
see. In the third grade my parents
transferred me to Grant Grammar School, a public elementary, located on Pacific Ave. on the
San Francisco heights, in the heart of the
wealthiest neighborhood in San
Francisco. Our
family was poor and lived in an apartment on Clay Street the furthest border of that
school district, at the base of one of the steepest streets between Pacific and
Jackson and further on two more blocks down to Clay where single homes turned
suddenly into flats and apartments. Another
block down on Sacramento Street
lived black and Asian families, but their children went to another grammar
school. Mrs. Rosen, our third grade teacher,
never let me or all my classmates forget I was Russian. She had a scurrilous nature and a mean
streak. Once when I was standing at the
chalkboard doing my numbers, some of which I got wrong, she grabbed the back of
my head and snapped it forward hard against the board. I remember thinking she wouldn’t have don’t
that to one of her rich American students.
By the next year my father wisely changed our name to Meschery, why the y at the end of our family name is still
a mystery to me. Why not an I? I could have passed myself off as an
Italian. Or an E? as a Frenchman. Maybe my father, whom I found out later was not a very tolerant person, held something against
Italians or French. My fourth grade
teacher, Mrs. Squataquatsa, called me Ma Cheri, tousled
my hair, and praised my drawings, saving me from further harassment and more
importantly from feeling that I was not the equal of my fellow classmates, an
idea that had it stayed with me too much longer might very well have turned
into irreversible insecurity and possibly self hatred. Still, I did not readily assimilate (it is
neither a natural nor an easy process no matter what the sons and daughters of
my generation of immigrants today might want this country to belief), not until
I discovered sports, not until I realized I was a natural athlete, not until I
understood that ll it took was a well aimed ball
flying through a hoop fifteen feet above the ground to complete my
transformation from immigrant to American.
In the seventh grade, our after school playground
director, a varsity basketball star from the University of San Francisco
Cappy Lavin
(his son Steve coached the UCLA basketball team for many years), took me under
his wing and taught me to play the game well.
In the eighth grade Cappy sponsored a school
yard basketball competition and paid for the trophy which I won, a small gold
man standing on a plain wooden pedestal and on its little plaque my name was
engraved. This was more than a statue,
it was citizenship. When I was fifteen
years old, enrolled in Lowell High School and already a starting forward on the
varsity team, I became legally naturalized, pledging my allegiance of my own
free will to the United
States.
The presiding officer at the ceremony couldn’t have known that I had
already pledged my loyalty a long time before, not to God and country but to
the game of basketball—and for a long time to come.
That small gold trophy still remains today in one of a
number of attic boxes filled with other sports memorabilia I received over my
basketball career that has spanned high school, college and ten years as a
professional with the Golden State Warriors and Seattle Sonics. In a safer box under lock and key are my
Russian and Chinese birth certificates and United States naturalization
documents. For the last five years the
NBA has drafted scores of foreign players from all over the world but primarily
from Serbia, Croatia, Russia, Lithuania, and the Baltic States—Slavs mostly,
like me, my country me, my “home boys” and I’m proud of the contribution
they’re making to the league that was my home for so long, but I relish the
idea that I was the first foreigner who played in the NBA forty years before
this 21st century international invasion began. Of course this is not how I wanted to be
recognized in 1961 the year I was drafted in the first round by the
Philadelphia Warriors. I was, so to
speak, a closet foreigner reluctant to have anyone know me as an immigrant and
naturalized citizen. Only decades later after
I had left playing professional basketball and was established in my second
career as a high school English teacher did I begin to fully acknowledge the
foreigner in me. It was an epiphany
Joyce would have been proud of, the kind of bolt lightening stuff that happens
in novels or to tax collectors on the road to Tarsus.
It happened to me in 1987 at my mother’s funeral. After the burial my sister Ann, my mother’s
friends and my own family returned to my Mom’s apartment in San Francisco for the funeral meats. There, I was told that some of my mother’s
dearest friends had not attended the ceremony because they were invalids living
in rest homes. Someone needed to call
them and tell them about the events of the day.
My sister handed me the telephone.
I’m not sure why I thought I could do this because all of my mother’s
friends hardly spoke any English and my Russian was virtually non existent—I
thought. The moment I dialed the first
telephone number and heard the voice on the other end, I began speaking
Russian, without hesitation and fluently.
My Russian remained fluent through three long telephone calls. Afterwards, I could not explain how this
linguistic miracle happened, all I knew was that the Russian language was
there, just as my mother had always promised me—and I never believed—waiting in
my blood for the right moment.
These days, retired from teaching and writing this
memoir, I’m making plans to visit Russia for the first time, this
land of my parents, my roots. It is
March, 2007 and I’ll leave for Saint Petersburg the first of August to take an
intensive six weeks language course at the Derjavin
Institute in Saint Petersburg then off I’ll go to Moscow to visit relatives, do
some sight seeing, and end my trip back in Petersburg to watch the Kandrashin/Belov Basketball Tournament at the beginning of
October as a guest of the Russian Basketball Federation. I’m sixty-eight years old and when I arrive
in Russia
my life will have come full circle. I am
thinking of applying for duel citizenship.
Wouldn’t that be something?
Czars, Nobility, and Other Nabobs
A band was playing some brassy music as my mother, sister
and I stepped off the boat onto the wharf in San Francisco on 1945. A uniformed man waving his hands furiously
directed the dozen or so of us who were stateless to an area marked Displaced
People. Later in my life, my mother told
me the minute she left Russia
she knew she’d always be displaced.
There’s a photograph on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner of
my mother, sister and me on that day dressed in army fatigues too big for us,
wearing arm bands that read D.P. Earlier
from the railing of the ship I remember trying to find my father among the
crowd of people waiting on the dock, though I had only the vaguest notion of
what he looked like. I was even years
older, my sister none. As often as I’ve
looked at that newspaper photograph, I’ve never liked it. The caption below talks about hope, you know
what I mean, all about those tired and hungry masses, but I saw only shame in
those baggy fatigues. My mother looked
exhausted, worn out from caring for us, from keeping us safe from the war, safe
from the Japanese concentration camp where the three of us had been interned
since the day Pearl Harbor was bombed.
The nuns’ headdresses looked like the wings of the real
seagulls flying through the blue air over the wharf above us. Sister Xenobia, a
Canadian nun who’d befriended us early in the Tokyo camp, came over to hug each of us
goodbye. In the camp, she somehow always
managed to find a little hard candy to give us, pulling the sweet surprises out
of the long pockets of her habit,
calling us her petits chou chou, like cabbages.
San Francisco
meant the last of Sister Xenobia’s candies, but also
the last of the hunger, air raid sirens, search lights, bomb shelters,
explosions, and fear. Perhaps with the
war’s end I could finally find a father.
The only face of a father I remember came from a photograph of a dark
haired Russian officer dressed in full uniform, pistol and saber on his belt, my mother would from time to time remove from her
bible to prove to me I had one. I was
uncertain about the nature of fathers and what role they played in families,
but I felt it must be something extremely important. All the missionaries and nuns in the camp
kept insisting that everything in life would be fine once we were reunited with
our father: Wait until, they
promised. Wait until Christmas, Easter, until the Americans come, until the bombs
stop, the war ends, the ship sails. In my mind fathers belonged to that same
pantheon of good fortune. A father that did not turn out to be such good luck.
Children of immigrants arrive in their new country not
knowing what to expect which quickly turns into a state of confusion. Without a clear understanding o fwhy they truly are, they often rush to adopt the culture
of their new country very often without paying much attention to the new person
they’re turning into. One can argue that
in their haste and enthusiasm, to a larger or lesser degree, they become
schizophrenic. Are they Arab, Russian,
Chinese, Mexicans, or are they Americans, or do they become some kind of weird
hybrid like a cross between an orchid and a rutabaga? Their parents, determined to remain true to
their heritage, hold on steadfastly to their origins. No matter how assimilated or well adjusted
they become in the future, they know the core of their being is stabilized by
their history; their children are not so lucky. The less confident immigrant
children feel in their new land, the more they are driven to identify with it
and reject anything that smacks of the old.
This is not the case for today’s immigrant Latino and Arab youngsters,
probably because their parents hold out some vague and distant hope to return to
their homeland, but for many immigrant children of my generation this was not
the case. We were determined to learn
English as quickly as possible. You
could say we were forced to become more American than Americans. (This is both a good and bad thing.) When I was a child, my parents luckily never
demanded that I take Russian language classes taught in the basement of the
Russian Orthodox Church on Fulton Street where we attended services every
Sunday; they didn’t insist on my Russianness.
Early in my childhood, I did attend a few classes, but as I was
determined to escape, I became an obstinate learner. I whined.
I sulked. Finally my mother gave
in and withdrew me. I was
delighted. What red blooded American
would rather be a Cossack than a cowboy. At the same time everything in our house from
language, to food, to the sad icons hanging in the corner walls shimmering
above their candles reminded me of our Slavic past. Every morning I left my Russian house and
entered San Francisco, California, USA
to go to school. Every afternoon I
returned from America,
opened the door to our apartment and stepped back into Mother Russia. As the years passed more and more I stayed
away from our home, choosing to live on the streets and in the gyps of my
adopted land.
The transition years from Russian immigrant boy to a bona
fide American only were lonely years. I
felt trapped between two cultures. I
knew in which direction I was heading, but the Russian in me did not, to say
the least, encourage my departure. This
middle ground, like middle earth, frightened the hell out of me. Not yet fluent in English, I got hung up on
words. I didn’t mind making mistakes
when I spoke—that never embarrassed me—but I hated it when I did not understand
someone, and the people speaking had to repeat what they said as if they were
talking to some old man with a faulty hearing aid or a screw loose. People looked at me funny. After a while I began to understand that some
people simply could not deal with anyone different from themselves. This was my first exposure to prejudice and
should have alerted me even at my young age to a fundamental problem in
American society, one that continues to primarily affect the African American
and Latino communities of today, but it didn’t.
I was too busy playing cowboys and injuns, my
two gun holsters slung low on my waist ready to shoot the bad guys, the
threatening red skins. I wore the white
hat. I was the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gene Autry all rolled up into
one. In our little boys’ battles I
remember always resolutely refusing to play the injun. Consciously or unconsciously, I already knew
nothing would prevent me from becoming one of the All American heroes of my
radio shows and movies. Call it
determination, or call it stubbornness, like the two sides of a Zoroastrian
coin which to this day I carry in my mental pocket.
Some dyed-in-the-wool czarists in San Francisco where I
grew up dreamed in some near future they’d return the royal family, the Romanovs, to the throne, take back their lost estates, and
reclaim their privileges. A friend of my
mother’s, Mrs. Ilyn, nee Princess Galitsin,
believed this and promoted her belief among the Russian community. Mrs. Ilyn was one
of the most interesting women I ever met.
One look at her, ramrod straight, immaculately dressed, hair perfectly
coiffed, always reminded me of the phrase, Noblesse
Oblige. She earned her living
designing and sewing dresses for San
Francisco’s high society women, all of whom fell all
over themselves rushing to buy clothes with her Princess label. Her soirees in her elegant home on Jackson Street in
the lower Pacific heights were peopled by remnants of the Czarist
nobility. Once, one of the heirs to the Romanov throne attended, I don’t remember which one, there
were so many. I was a six foot six 10th
grade teenager. When I shook hands with
him I bore down hard on my grip and his hand went limp, tears welling in his
eyes. So much, I thought, for the power
of the throne. Although I didn’t know
it, I was already leaning politically toward Socialism. At the time I knew I didn’t like all this
little pretending at being special. I
was an American. My mother tried to
avoid as many of Mrs. Ilyn’s invitations as she could
since my father, a white Russian army officer and a commoner, was not fully
accepted. Trying to ingratiate herself
with San Francisco Society, Mrs. Ilyn tried to have
Russian nobility included in the San Francisco Blue Book, a list of the very
best families in the city—the purpose of which I have never been able to figure
out. She wanted to include my mother’s
name, but explained to her that my father could not be similarly
inscribed. My mother said, “We are
living in the United States. There are no princes and counts here.” Later, she said, “The Revolution saved me
from being presented at court.”
The
lady doth protest too much.
No matter what my mother said, I always thought that she
secretly enjoyed being of “blue blood” although she’d deny it to her last
democratic breath. My aunt Princess Krapotkin, (Aunt Maroussa), a
descendant of the original Russian Rurikavich
dynasty, after arriving in the United States
married an American dairy farmer Gene Bilkovich from Tomales
Bay. Always the realist, she vowed she’d clean
shit pots at Mrs. Bilkovich before attending any of
Mrs. Ilyn’s parties.
Aunt Maroussa was a beautiful and sassy old
gal, and I lived her rebelliousness. But
most of the Russian nobility in San
Francisco that our family knew were either living in
denial or crumbling like so many dainty and fragile cookies.
Aunt Maroussia
Irina Ivanovna complains, her
voice
Gone slightly tipsy: the Revolution
Was a dreadful mistake. Given the choice,
Who would have left?
Who leaves
A dinner with a full plate.
A full glass still in the table?
My aunt swears she’d shovel
shit
First before she’d join
those San Francisco
Nouveau riche, so called
blue bloods
From Pacific Heights. Irina Ivanovna
Sews her title, Princess,
into clothes
And makes good money from
women
Dying for
nobility. No one knows
Or cares that I am wide
awake, my bedroom
Door ajar, listening to the
life we lost:
Estates they spent their
girlhood summers in,
Autumn
trips to Paris. They scold my mother
For her unbeluga
tins, champagne unfit to drink
Day old
bread, missing crystal. Oh, caviar,
The princess weeps for lost
elegance
We were not Cinderellas,
For pity’s sake.
Why run from our own fairytale?
Imperial Russia, no farther than ear-shot
Of my
bedroom. My aunt says she’s had enough.
My mother says Tsar
Nicholas, the weakling
And his German wife spoiled
everything.
A rush for coats, kisses
cheek to cheek
All the way to the door, Irina Ivanovna argues
They should join high
society, those commoners
Even if they are beneath
their station,
Are the closest things to
Imperial Russia in America.
In Russia
pre-1917 the nobility was fully in control, at least on the surface. My mother’s father, Vladimir Nicholiavich Lvov, a wealthy noble, married to Maria Alexeevna Tolstoy, in addition to his own lands, inherited
from his wife’s family a huge estate of grassland and forest in Samara, an
eastern province, south east of Moscow which is where they lived and raised
their children. Vladimir Nicholiavich had been elected from the province of Samara
to the Duma, the Russian version of the United States
Senate. Maria Alexeevna
was s direct descendant of Alexei Tolstoy, the poet and cousin of Lo Tolstoy
the novelist. My mother read Alexei
Tolstoy’s poetry to me. She often told
me, “For Russians, writing poetry is as natural as breathing.” She was right. I started writing poetry while I was still
playing in the NBA. Later, after I
retired, I attended the University
of Iowa’s Writer’s
Workshop where I earned my Masters in Fine Arts. My first published book of poems Over the Rim came out in the spring of
1970. My second book, Nothing You Lose Can Be Replaced was
published in 1999. Over the years I have
also published individual poems in various literary magazines. But I do not believe poetry comes as
naturally to me as breathing. Only
basketball came as easy to me. Breathe
in—shoot. Breathe out—the ball backspinning on its way.
Genealogy on both sides of my material family goes back
to the 14th century. They
owned serfs; they employed a great number of servants.
“We’re talking big, big bucks. If the Communists hadn’t won, I would have
been nobility,” I tell my friend Ruth.
She is Jewish. She ways my
relatives probably burned down the village of her relatives. We laugh over our old joke, but the truth is
alive and awful in history.
When the Bolshevik Revolution took place, my mother was
14 years old. When she and her family
finally managed to flee Russia
along with hundreds of thousands of other White Russians into Manchuria
she was 21.
My mother’s diaries and journal are filled with
history—eye witness accounts of a turbulent time. But before it was turbulent, it was insanely
privileged: estates, summer dachas, counts, barons, royalty, imperial guards,
hussars, banquets, grand ball rooms, hunting and boating trips, spending sprees
in Paris or other European capitals—images and ideas I could never quite ignore
growing up, my mother always reminding us.
“You are special, you have noble blood in you,” admonitions that flew in
the face of her democratic beliefs. My
sister, Militsa, (as an adult she changed her name to
Ann.) hated these reminders. I did too,
at least on the surface, but some place deep inside me I collected my mother’s
words and stored them and brought them forth using them as various times in my
life. To accomplish
what? I’m not sure. To buttress my ego? When I became a basketball star in high
school and college and then in the pros, my stardom did not come as a surprise,
it was only logical that in my world of sports I should become one of its
nobles. These days as I look back on my
life, I’m certain my mother didn’t do me any favors. After I retired from playing basketball
professionally, it took me years and lots of pain to figure out how to live in
the real world where the only stardom most people experience happens as they
look up at a clear night sky or scan People
magazine while waiting in the grocery check out line, while nobility exists
only in novels, movies and plays.
Even as Imperial Russia during the First World War was
splintering like old wood, the privileged continued their privileged ways. The following letter was written by Nicolai Tolstoy from the Austrian Front to his cousin,
Maria Vladimirovna Lvov, my mother. I think it is one of the saddest letters I
have ever read.
September 2, 1914
Dear Mashinka,
Arrived on furlough just in
time to attend the ball countess Kleimicheel gave us
for the beau monde of St. Petersburg. Ladies with hair dyed blue waltzed with half
naked cavemen. What buffoons. Sadly, I saw Princess Xenia Alexandrovna among them with her beautiful daughter. Later, women dressed in fish swam on the
floor over blue satin while men with fishnets tried to catch them. Ma chere cousine, this war has turned us into minnows. Remember Lieutenant Chjerniavsky
of the Preobrajensky Guards only three days before, I
saw an Austrian officer run past him as
he lay wounded on the ground and fire a bullet into his neck.
A thousand years of neglect and the stupidities of the
First World War brought down the Russian Czar and his government, replaced by
the Second Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. My grandfather, as part of that government,
moved to St. Petersburg
and rented a house that had been previously owned by the terrible monk
Rasputin. My grandmother would not move
in until a priest came and performed an exorcism. My grandparents brought their own icons,
placed them in the corners of every room.
The priest shook his incense and prayed.
My mother told me that her mother said she felt a great malevolence in
that house as if the air was barely breathable, and she saw images of
Rasputin’s evil like portraits on the walls.
My grandmother dreamt that the Mad Monk was holding the little Tsarevich by his hair in the air and threatening the
Czarina and Czar that he would drop him if they didn’t’ do as he wished. My mother reminded me that the Tsarevich was a hemophiliac and even a small bruise would
result in death, while Rasputin was the only person who could stop the
bleeding. “He was a sex fiend,” my
mother told me. “He raped one of your
grandmother’s best friends and one of the Tsaritsa’s
ladies in waiting. And she wasn’t the
only female he raped.”
Today, some clever Russian nouveau capitalist has divided
that beautiful house into apartments for sale.
My sister who travels often to Russia in her job as executive director
of the Russian American Youth Orchestra tells me one is still for sale, and in
my imagination I hop a jet to Saint Petersburg and snap up that prime piece of
real estate, move in, and live out my life conversing with Rasputin’s
ghost and the spirits of my ancestors.
Petrograd April 21, 1917
My Loved Ones,
Well, my dears, I did not
escape the smell of gunpowder. Papa,
upon his return from Moscow,
went right to our apartment on 34 Liteynaya Street but could not
reach me because the Bolsheviks were firing their machineguns. He almost lost his life. Just as he finally made our house a bullet
hissed and gargled close to his feet.
His aid-de-camp had only time to scream, “machinegun” and Papa leaped
aside while a bullet hit the spot where he had stood and wounded another man
there…Right under our window a Cossack was killed and another was wounded. The wounded one was brought in and his wounds
were bandaged in our house. Bullets were
flying continually in pursuit of the poor Cossacks who galloped away in all
directions trying to save their lives from the regular army units who turned
Bolsheviks. There was nothing the
Cossacks could do since they were armed only with sabers. I was prepared to die, praying God to forgive
me my sins.
Igor Lee our Australian cousins telephoned from down
under. He and his wife, recently
retired, had just returned from Russia
where much to their surprise they discovered a number of Lvov
cousins, all living close to Moscow. I am shocked by this news because our family
story has always been that all of our relations in Russia
were either executed by the Bolsheviks while the few who might have survived in
Russia
were living under assumed names. These new
Lvov cousins have even self published the Lvov family history. A month later I receive a copy in the
mail. It’s fascinating reading. My mother always bragged about her family relatives on her mother’s
side, the illustrious Tolstoys. My mother enjoyed telling me her favorite
tale about my maternal grandmother kicking her cousin, old War and Peace
himself, out of her house when he came to visit because she felt he was an
ungodly atheist and most likely a Mason.
“You must remember, your grandmother loved the Orthodox Church; she was
a saint,” The Lvovs, not to be “out-nobled” or “out sainted,” claim similarly important
personages on their side of the family, Nicolai Alexandrovich Lvov the famous architect for example, and
Alexander Nicolaievich his son one of the most popular song writers and lyricists of
his day who was considered a hero by Russian liberals for having been the only
member of the government to refuse to sign the death warrant against the
“Decembrists” and, of course, my grandfather Vladimir Nicolaievich,
the lay head of the Russian Orthodox Church who in their minds has become their
very special family icon. But from what
I’ve been able to read and from everything my mother told me, I always got the
feeling the Tolstoys believed they were superior to
the Lvovs. In
this Lvov
family history I detect some late one-upmanship going on. Because the book is written in Russian, I
struggle reading it and I’m sure I’m missing important parts. Every page resonates with family pride,
that’s pretty clear. I can’t help
myself; I too find myself becoming proud, from time to time sticking out my
chest, hooking my thumbs into my imaginary suspenders, but then I feel guilty
for turning my back on my Democratic and a socially liberal view of life. If I’d been alive in 1917 I’d have probably
rejected my boyar family and jumped sides to the Bolsheviks, cheered wildly as
the crowd carried Lenin on their shoulders through the streets of Moscow—or I’d
like to think I would have. Recently, I
gave up being a Democrat, seeing no difference between them and Republicans and
joined the Green Party. I can just
imagine both of my dead father, a loyal czarist, and noble relatives in heaven
or in some other less accommodating location weeping over that decision. My sister, a Republican and a fiscal
conservative, calls this simply another example of my knee jerk liberalism,
something I’ll grow out of. I remind her
I am 65 years old and don’t have a lot more time to grow out of anything. What if I die a Socialist, having turned my
back on our ancestors, the privileged, the nabobs, will she still come to my
funeral? Ann sends me an article about Nicolai Alexandrovich Lvov, the
first sapling of the Lvov
tree. OK, I confess I can’t help being
impressed.
Nicolai Alexandrovich
Lvov produced many of the finest pieces of architecture of his time and
actually of all time particularly when examined against the work of native
Russians. As Russia Self-consciously
leaned toward Europe for its architecture and
music, most of the important building projects were assigned to foreigners like
Rastrelli.
Because of this, Lvov
was very under-rated and it is only today that his genius is being
recognized. Lvov was not only an
architect but he also wrote lyrics for opera and collected Russian folk songs
that are gathered in the famous Lvov-Prach Collection
that serves as the foundation for the Russian nationalistic sound in music from
the time of Glinka onward. In Defining
Russia Musically by Richard Turaskin, the whole
first chapter is about Lvov
and sets the stage for all future Russian composition. His contribution to Rissian
music is also discussed in Orlando Figi’s “Natasha’s
Dance,” a history of Russian culture.
The folk songs in the Lvov-Prach collection
serve as the inspiration for much of the later Russian compositions including
the Slava Chorus from the opera, Boris Gudunov and even for Beethoven’s
string quartets written for the Russian patron that are referred to as “The Razumov Quartets”:
My sister adds a post script explaining that Lvov’s wife Maria Alexeievna Diakova’s portrait is hanging in the Tretyakov
Gallery in Moscow. Maria Alexeievna
was considered one of the greatest beauties of her day. Beautiful women always impress me. Ann wants me to understand how privileged I
am to be privileged. She fails to take
into account that as a high school All American, college All American, and a
player in the NBA I have already experienced America’s version of nabobery. Or should
I say snobbery? Given all the fuss made over
me on my road to basketball success, it was not too difficult to see myself as
special.
Over the years my sister and I have had long and
interesting conversations about our heritage, I take a
more cynical view of the family and of our orthodox religion than she
does. History does not treat the nabobs
of the world very kindly nor, I believe, should we, their descendants. I simply can not attach to them any more
importance than I do to my father’s side of the family, the commoners, railroad
engineers and military men. Of course
curiosity prevails and I write the Lvovs that soon
I’ll be in Russia
and we’ll meet. I want to spend time
with my cousins in Russia,
but given my political points of view, I wonder how they will receive me. According to my sister who’s visited with
them a number of times, they are part of the nouveau riche and great fans of
President Putin’s brand of capitalism, an economic
hybrid composed of the overarching greed of the oligarchs, old style Soviet
discipline, and American entrepreneurship, a crazy mixture that have many older
Russians scratching their heads and yearning for the good old Soviet days. A college friend, Jack Dold,
recently told me a story about one of his visits to Russia. Jack wanted to see an Orthodox Church now
that religion was no longer banned. When
they got there, the curch was packed. “Who are these people?” Jack asked his
driver. “They are Communists,” his
driver said, “praying for the return of Communism.” I wonder what my cousins will do or say if I
tell them that I’m so left, that I’ve crossed out the word right from my
personal dictionary?
That I have two left arms and two left feet, and that I never turn right
at an intersection, and, furthermore, do not theoretically find anything wrong
with Communism (not the Stalinist version), a form of government that strikes
me as a more equitable and peaceful way to live. Given different circumstances I could have
survived reasonably well as a Communist basketball player, although as a writer
I would probably have had a problem with Stalin’s idea of freedom of speech and
he would have sent me to play ball for one of the Siberian gulags?
Sometimes I day dream:
The 1917 Communist
Revolution never happens and Russia
evolves into parliamentary monarchy. My
mother and father meet and all the genes fall into place. I inherit a ton of money, become some kind of
modern day boyar, and star for the Moscow
Monarchs of the NBA European League. I
own a summer dacha on the Black Sea and a pied a terre
in Saint Petersburg. After retiring from playing professional
basketball, I take up writing poetry, a national Russian pastime. I meet Bella Akhmudilina,
the great Russian poet. She adores my verse. We marry and travel the world like Sergei Esenin and Isadora Duncan
performing readings and giving lectures.
Unlike theirs, our lives do not end tragically, and we live happily ever
after.
No horror story my mother ever told me about the Soviet Union—and there were plenty—ever frightened
me. In the spring of 1961 in July after
graduating from St. Mary’s College, I made plans to go. After my college season ended, I had played
for the Olympic Club of San Francisco in the AAU tournament in Denver,
Colorado and was selected to its All-American
Team which had scheduled a two week Soviet Union
tour. When my mother heard about my
plans, she crossed her arms over her chest, threw back her shoulders and said,
“Nyet!” as hard as I tried, I could not persuade her
to let me go. “You’ll be arrested the
minute you set foot on Soviet soil and imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain for
the rest of your life. Don’t you realize
you’re a Lvov,”
she said, “Your grandfather served in the Duma and was the Ober Procurator of the
Holy Synod (Minister of Religion). He
was a saint who returned the authority of the church back to the Metropolit.” Ah, a saint—not only do I have noble genes,
I have saintly genes? Not likely. However, I did inherit my grandfather’s
height. At six feet and elevent inches, he was one of the tallest men in Russia. I am only six feet six. Grandpa,
if you’d only passed on a couple of more inches, think of the extra rebounds
your grandson could have snatched—Hall of Fame numbers.
My mother continued explaining more reasons why I must
never go the Soviet Union. “During the revolution your grandfather and
Admiral Kolchak tried to bring the Czar back to the
throne. Do you think the Communists
forget? Later he returned to Russia
and worked to bring down the Stalinist regime.
They’ll put you in the Lybyanka and you’ll
disappear.” When it came to the subject
of the Soviets my mother was a hysteric, especially when the subject was her
father. Definitely a daddy’s girl, her
memory of history was colored by her family love and her aristocratic view of
Russian society. My grandfather Lvov was indeed the Ober Procurator, but I’ve done a little research on him and
he was also, according to most history books of the period, a devious and
manipulative man, and depending on one source, not exceptionally
bright—certainly no saint. In the case
of the Kornilov Plot, it is very possible he was a
double agent working both for General Deniken’s
Czarists as well as for Alexander Kerensky’s
socialist government.
The Russian Revolution is
filled with shadowy figures, meddlers,
Traitors, ignoramuses,
collaborators, liars, hooligans,
Side by
side with visionaries, demons, saints, martyrs, patriots.
Always there was words like episodes, collusions, conspiracies.
Suspicious that the whole Kornilov Affaire was a provocation,
Exhausted and feeling used,
the Ober-Procurator disappears.
Vladimir Nicholiavich’s wife,
her three sons and daughters left Russia along with countless white (anti
Communist) Russians traveling on the trans Siberian railway east across Siberia
finally settling in northern China in the city of Harbin.
A Small Embrace
In Siberia
the snow grows from the ground,
trees of snow, grass of snow, white wheat,
cold rye. Three
thousand miles of snow,
a few villages, some bony dogs, peasants
out to wave the last of us goodbye. Each day
our train plowed through those white fields,
Aunt Moussia
said we left behind a crop of crosses,
“enough
to satisfy the appetite of any Bolshevik.”
Coal stoves centered in each
car
rocked back and forth like drunkards.
All we burned was wood, wet
and green
That smoked so much we kept
the windows open.
Cold stuck anything we
touched;
even within our gloves skin froze.
And
beards. Hair fell like icicles
to the floor and did not melt.
We knelt on the shores of Lake Baikal
and pressed our faces against ice to see
ancient fish we’d read about as children,
a dying species, trapped below the surface,
scales magnified as clear as fingernails.
Aboard the waiting train
missionaries, thinking
we were praying to something heathen in the lake,
threatened us with forests filled with partisans.
No one ever smiled enough
that I remember
Your grandmother gave it up
for good.
Your grandfather’s last
letter, postmarked
Paris, said
God will call him back to Russia.
I couldn’t think of anything
except
the miles and miles of snow on snow,
land like a sheet of white paper,
our train was cutting through like scissors.
Too young, my brothers had
filled
their pockets with their only history:
marbles, colored pencils, tin soldiers,
dreams no bigger than trinkets.
But I had already kissed a
boy
and left him behind to kiss other girls
or to die kissing the cold ground.
Do you understand how such a
small
embrace can be like a country?
The Ober Procurator did in fact
disappear, but was later said to have lived in Paris where he helped his brother publish a
magazine for Russian émigrés called Vosrojdenie. Some
history books have him dying “penniless and a derelict on the streets of Paris.” The Lvov
family vehemently deny this. They have him returning to Russia during Stalin’s thaw of the
1930’s and working for the Soviety Government in some
capacity (given everything my mother said of him, hard for me to believe). But it might be true. My mother always believed he was involved in
some kind of clandestine anti Bolshevik activity. In the end, according to the family history,
the Ober Procurator died under mysterious
circumstances in a prison hospital in Tomsk. This version of my grandfather’s death has
lately been corroborated by a photograph sent to me via email by Valery Diev, an ex professional
basketball player and recent internet acquaintance, showing Alexander Nicholiavich in prison looking thin and physically
exhausted. Only his clear and intense
eyes remind me of the photographs of him on our family album. When people in those Stalinist days died
suddenly without apparent cause in prison hospitals, it generally meant that
they were murdered.
The Tolstoy side of the family living in France and
Belgium claims the Ober Procurator married a common
Russian woman in Paris (Oh, horrors!) even while knowing that this wife was
still alive in China, making him in their eyes a bigamist. (Horrors, again!)
The Lvovs deny this rumor as well and even more
vehemently as it casts doubts on the great Ober-Procurator’s
moral turpitude. Diev’s
research never turned up a new wife, so it looks as if the Tolstoys
were simply spreading rumors. Why, I’m
not sure, except my mother once explained that my grandmother’s family always
believed grandma had married below her station, a second stringer, so to
speak. For most of my growing up years,
my mother believed she was in communication with her father through various
secret messages being delivered by her youngest brother Vanya
(Johnny) who had also returned to Russia during the 1930’s.
True or not, as a young boy, these stories of spies and
intrigues fascinated me, and they are probably the reason why today I am a
voracious reader of mysteries and espionage thrillers. One time when I was eleven my mother came to
me to tell me that she was leaving for Russia that night and that I should
help my father take care of the family because, she explained very carefully,
holding and cupping my face in her two hands, he was not a very competent
man. Terrified, I lay in bed all night
awake listening for our front door to close, for my mother’s departure. In the morning I stumbled into the kitchen to
find her making breakfast as if nothing had ever happened. We never spoke of it. Later that Sunday morning I took my basketball
and went to Bates School down the street, climbed over the fence and played one
on one against myself all day on their small outdoor court. I played hard. I was angry at my mother,
and at me for being such a dope. I took
my anger out on my body, sweating and diving for balls, scraping myself raw on
the asphalt. Over the years I have often
used this tactic to release the pressure of frustrations, or tensions in my
life. I’m sure any number
of psychological/physiological reasons exist to account for my playing
hard core hoop whenever I was down. I’m
sure it helped me to regain my true body and mind, and to resist the inner
violence, with which I struggled—then and even now—often unsuccessfully—earning
during my pro basketball years the sobriquet for the Mad Manchurian.
Unless my grandfather explained his reasons for returning
to Russia in some as yet
undiscovered letter or diary I doubt the family will ever know his true
intentions, but it’s fairly clear that Vanya (Johnny)
could very well have been a spy for the United States. In China
where he was raised, he spent his teen years in a Shanghai boarding school and learned to speak
several Chinese dialects fluently. In
addition he spoke French, German, and English.
My mother recalled being worried that when Johnny visited Harbin on school breaks
during the summers he spent far too much time with one of the diplomats at the
American Consulate, her workplace, whom she suspected of being an American
secret service agent and a homosexual.
When Johnny left China
to return to Russia during
Stalin’s thaw, he inexplicably spent a year in Vladivostok, the Siberian warm water sea port
and center of the soviet Pacific Fleet.
About that same time, a number of cryptic messages arrived from Vladivostock to the consulate that my mother happened to
read as she passed them on to her boss, the Consul General. The Soviets charged Johnny was there spying
for the United States,
and shot him 1934. Because my mother had
virtually raised him, the apple of her eye, her favorite brother, she refused
to believe he was dead. In the United States
she spotted him in every newspaper photograph of Soviet leaders. There’s
your uncle, see, right behind Khrushchev.
Or behind Brezhnev. Or standing next to
Kosygin. See, he must have become
an important man in the government. He
was always the smartest of my brothers.
I would look at the photographs at a grainy figure in the background
that could have been anyone’s uncle.
The only uncle I ever knew for sure was Vasily who took the name Nathaniel
when he went into the clergy. Eventually
he became a bishop in Germany
and lived most of his life there. His
history was not as mysterious as his father’s or his brother Vanya’s, but it was romantic although slightly tawdry. The good Bishop, caught in flagrante delicto
with a German woman, saved himself from being disrobed of his offices only by
denouncing the woman and going into cloister in a monastery. Eventually he earned back his bishop’s ring
through years of penance. The woman, on
the other hand, had to settle for disgrace.
Our family can’t confirm it, but he supposedly had one child by her, so
somewhere in Germany
I have a second cousin I would some day like to find.
Now that mother is dead, my sister has taken over the duties
of family chronicler and historian. She
emails me interesting stories about our uncle, “Sometimes mother and Bishop
Nathaniel went years without speaking to each other. He was particularly upset that
mother belong to the American Orthodox Church and not the Exile Church. Wonder what he would make of me going to the
Patriarchate of Moscow church where all the Russian expats
go? He was not too happy when I changed
from my baptismal name of Militza to Ann but totally
freaked out when Mom’s second marriage took place in the Presbyterian Church in
Canada. They finally made up from that a couple of
years before he died.” According to my
sister Uncle Nathaniel was responsible for saving a great number of people from
Stalin’s gulags. “It is unfortunate,”
she writes, “that he had that illicit affair.
If not for that, I understand there would have been a move to proclaim
his sainthood.” Another Lvov family saint? I can’t take it. I think I’ll have to go out and do a little
sinning. The Orthodox Church has
recently published four of Bishop Nathaniel’s Religious books and one Vaspominania—Remembrances—his memoir, in which I
find a terrific piece about how Grandpa and Grandma used to fight over the
Tsar. Apparently Grandpa was for a more
democratic government while Grandma remained a passionate Monarchist. One morning at breakfast, Grandpa called Tsar
Nicholas II an idiot and a cretin, whereupon Grandma took a soft boiled egg and
threw it a Grandpa. The egg missed him,
smashed against the wall and dripped to the floor. Uncle Nathaniel, then around 7 years old, was
delighted with this exchange. That night
at dinner, when the battle started up again, he ran into the kitchen, grabbed a
container of sour cream and hurled it at his father declaring that he was
helping Mama fight for the Monarchy. He
was sent to bed without his supper.
On the corner of 26th Ave. and Geary Blvd. stands
the magnificent Orthodox Cathedral of The Holy Virgin, its golden cupolas
rising into the fog shrouded sky. This
cathedral belongs to the Russian exiles who, back when I was growing up,
believed they would one day return to Russia after the inevitable
collapse of the soviet Union. They did not pay their tithes to the Metropolit in Moscow
as the congregation considered him a traitor, but to the Bishop of . However, if you did not agree with the
exiles, there were other churches to join, and the Russian community throughout
the Bay Area was fractured principally over political allegiances. Our mother made sure we attended the Russian
American church whose Metropolit
(arch bishop) John Sherovskoi governed from New York City.
As I was growing up, Russian Orthodoxy seemed to me to be
a dark, mysterious and brooding religion whose long bearded, black robed
priests always stunk of garlic. I could
not understand the old Slavonic liturgy while the church itself, filled with
incense and candle smoke, always made me dizzy.
Walk into any Orthodox church, breathe deeply, and very quickly you’ll
be coughing your way back into the 16th century. Everything about the church appeared to be
ancient. Old babushkas kneeling and
every once in a while, for no reason I could ever discern, bowing their
foreheads to the floor—endless signs of the cross, always right shoulder to
left, the opposite of Catholics—those heretics.
The hymns from the choir sounded more like chanting than sinking, voices
rising and falling in long a cappella waves.
My father once sang in the choir, his voice a basso profundo,
the kind one hears in operas such as Boris or Don Carlo. For some reason he stopped soon after we
arrived in the United States, family responsibilities suddenly besetting him
and squeezing the music out of his life.
But there were rumors that during our Japanese internment he had a
relationship with one of the sopranos in the choir, which my mother upon our arrival put a stop
to immediately—that and perhaps his singing.
The Orthodox religion left me with a deep sense of
foreboding about the transitory state of life, its terrible trials, and subsequent
misery, a feeling I still harbor today.
Growing up, it was impossible for me to feel otherwise. Every place I looked the sorrowful icons
stared at me accusingly—what the hell did I do, I
whispered back at them. Candles
flickered, shadows darkened. Even the
younger priests seemed prehistoric to me.
My mother never demanded that we attend church regularly (my father flat
refused), but when we were young she did make us go to confession before
certain church holidays. In the Catholic
Church sinners hide from the priest in little private boxes, in the Orthodox
religion a penitent kneels beside the priest and the priest swings his black
cape over the top of him or her. It’s
like being inside a small black tent, his beard inches from your face, his breath…Did
I mention the garlic? Once under the
robe panic set in. I could hardly
remember my sins, so I reduced them to a few guilty syllables and out I’d burst
coughing for air, deliriously happy I’d made it through another confession
without being asphyxiated, thrilled with myself until I came face to face with my mother’s
stern look and realized I had not spent an appropriate amount of time under the
black priest’s wing to satisfy her idea of contrition.
In college I rejected Orthodoxy and became a Catholic “of
Convenience.” I’d grown up hanging out
mostly with Catholic guys from St. Ignatius High School,
playing pick up games with them at St. Vincent de Paul gym in the Marina District
and at Selision Boys Club in the North Beach. At that time Catholicism seemed far more
sensible than the Russian church and, more importantly, far more American,
while many of the religious traditions and liturgy remained recognizably
orthodox. Later I came to believe that
Catholicism depended too much on scare tactics to keep their folks in line,
especially when it came to sex.
Murderers probably feel easier confessing than a Catholic who
masturbates. In the area of sex the
Orthodox are downright enlightened.
There’s an old saying my mother used to tell me about the Russian
church’s unspoken doctrine, “Sin, sin, it will be easier on your soul.” As she explained it, in some parts of Russia,
particularly in Siberia, among the Old Believers people headed down into
basements to commit all kinds of orgies in order to be able to have the
requisite sins to confess the following day, a practice it’s said was a
favorite of Rasputin’s and not all together unappealing to a sexually active
teen such as myself. About the time I
got into the pros I gave up religion. I
was reading a lot of Marx and the existentialists and agreed with them that
religion was a crutch that had little or nothing to do with moral
behavior. As for a heaven, I figured
when I made it in the NBA I had already walked through the Pearly Gates. What more did I need? After I married I occasionally attended the Methodist Church where my father-in-law was the
minister. A few of the hymns in the
hymnal were written by a Russian relative, N.V. Lvov. How splendid, I thought, standing in the
pews, my wife and I holding our hymnal, our fingers touching, singing together,
praising the lord, then listening to her father up on the pulpit looking a
little like my idea of John Donne or Cotton Mather. Here I thought was a modern democratic
religion based on fellowship, a term I took to mean religious populism. If Catholics seemed more American to me,
Protestants were the heartland, the breadbasket, the sea to shining sea. Often during services we were exhorted to
introduce ourselves to each other (fellowship), to embrace people close by and
give them the ancient kiss of peace.
“Why not the French kiss of peace,” I whispered to Joanne, “right after
service when we get home and put the kids down for a nap?” Joanne must have thought the joke tasteless,
since it never took me in the sexual direction I thought it would. But for all its democracy and fellowship,
finally I realized Christianity, in whatever form, comes down to a belief in
Jesus Christ as the Messiah and the son of god whom I could never accept as a
divinity and still don’t.
It just doesn’t make sense to me. Jesus was a wise man, sure, and by all
accounts he possessed some kind of prophetic powers, but Third Person of the
Trinity, the Godhead? Not a chance. Given all the hoopla over him for the last 2000
or so years, I wonder what he makes of it? For example, would he have condoned the early
Christian bishops’ persecution of the Gnostics as heretics? I have a pretty good idea he wouldn’t have
cared for the crusades and the inquisition on the Protestant/Catholic slaughter
in his name in North Ireland. For someone who in his time seemed to include
every manner of person, sinful or righteous, among his group of followers, he’d
surely be horrified by today’s evangelicals who reject gays or women who have
abortions. I’m ambivalent about
Mohammed, but Christ and Buddha seem like likable fellows. According to the Gnostic Gospels—which I’ve
been reading a lot lately—they were more alike than different. The way human beings have managed to screw
things up throughout history, I don’t find it very surprising that they
misinterpreted the truths Jesus and the Gautama were
preaching. Given the magnitude of the
screw ups, I’d say the odds are heavily in favor of all the various churches
and religious faiths getting it wrong from start to finish. And given the fragility of our little planet,
they’d maybe better start thinking about getting some things right finally
before there’s no time left and they find themselves on the world’s death bed
wishing for just a little more time.
Anyway, I can’t see churches being useful to me right
now, at my age, after so many years as a non believer, and a body man rather
than a soul man particularly since I don’t have a clue as to the nature of a
soul; it’s much too vague, like a last second shot from half court that hits
nothing but net for the game winner. As
coach and player you definitely can’t rely on last second soul shots.
Immigrants arrive hungry in
their new country. They don’t just
appreciate food, they bow down before the comestible
altar. In my case, the Eucharist resided
in the tabernacle of the Harbin deli on the corner of Clement and 11th
Ave., it’s glass counters filled with pirogi (meat
filled pies), piroshki, (meat or cabbage pastries), pelimeny (meat or cheese stuffed dumplings, like little
wontons), whole salmons, dishes of herring and sour cream, bliny
(pancakes) and soups of the day, either beet borsht, schi,
made with cabbage and turnips, or Rassolnik (pickle
and kidney soup).
At home as a boy our dinners never ended without our
mother shaking her finger and warning us to eat every last bite. As she spoke, she pointed beyond our
apartment window where starving children roamed the streets of Nairobi
or New Delhi
this very minute looking for scraps, thrilled with even the tiniest morsel left
behind on our plates. Most of my life I
have eaten enough in one sitting to feed half of the starving in Bangladesh,
never a problem when I was a pro athlete and burning carbs
like a Daytona 500 stock car burns gasoline.
I have talked to enough immigrants about how they approach food and find
that I am not alone in my obsessions.
Back then, how could my mother have known she was creating eating habits
that could finally drive my athletic body away from me?
The phone rings at 4 A.M. and immediately I think of the
worst—Joanne, the kids or one of the grandchildren in trouble. Instead I hear a voice speaking Russian. He is telling me that he recently read an
article about me in the Russian magazine called Sport. His name is Valery Diev and he is an ex
basketball player for the St. Petersburg team, Spartika,
who now lives in Tomsk, coincidentally a city where
my mother’s family spent about tow years as they were escaping the Bolsheviks,
where she worked for the American Red Cross and finished high school. Valery played the
power forward position just as I did and he was considered the best rebounder on his team.
He wants to start a correspondence.
Da, xoposho! Prekprasno! [yes, great! Perfect!].
We exchange addresses and emails.
We manage to keep the conversation going alternating between Russian and
English, both of us speaking enough of each others’ language to make it
work. I hang up and beat myself up for
all those obstinate years when I was young and refused to go to Russian school
because I wanted so badly to be an American.
I curse John Wayne, all his movies, all those James Cagney
tough guy lessons, the clichés, the language of cowboys or marine drill
sergeants or gangsters. I wonder now if
there is even such a thing as an American, if there ever was. No purely American figure comes to mind—no
body type, no personality, no special intellect that
defines the American in the same way we define Italians, Irish, Swedes,
Japanese, or Indonesian. Still, we like
to say there is an American commonality.
There are, of course, cowboys, robber barons, Johnny Appleseeds,
and Amelia Earharts.
None of which really defines an American. We do separate each other within our country
by regional linguistic differences. As
for our British roots, we no longer employ those lilting Irish/English vowels,
or the rolling Anglo Saxon R’s. Perhaps
our verbal homogeneity is the reason the conservatives are going ballistic over
language these days, as they try to hang on to some semblance of American
identity, calling for an English Only amendment, enraged over Mexican
immigrants unwilling to give up their native Spanish, those fear mongers
holding up as an example to the fearful the dreaded word Spanglish.
Sometimes in the fall of 2004, as I began thinking of
retiring from teaching, I started making plans to visit Russia.
It’s March 2007 and my Russian plans are set. First I will spend two months enrolled in a
language immersion school in St. Petersburg,
then a month traveling and visiting my new Lvov relatives. Now that I have retired, I’m thinking of a
one year appointment to teach English at the Derjavin
Institute in St. Petersburg. I think I have agood chance
for the job since Gavril Derjavin, the second
greatest poet in Russian history after Pushkin (sort
of a Milton to
Shakespeare type of literary relationship), was best friends with my first
ancestor Nicholai Alexnadrovich
Lvov. After Nicholai
Alexandrovich and his wife’s untimely illnesses and
deaths, Derjavin raised their son as his own. I have no qualms evoking the names of my
Russian nabobs if they will help me get the job. If I do, I’ll live in Russia for the school year from
September to May of 2008 and take side trips to Samara to visit the family
Tolstoy estate in Krotkovo. In October there is a national basketball
tournament in Saint Petersburg
and Valery and I have made plans to attend. I will also see if I can locate some of my
father’s relatives. I know that his two
twin sisters survived the revolution and that they married. My sister also
found out recently that my father’s youngest brother Vitaly
survived the Bolshevik Revolution, so there might be a reasonable chance of
uncovering a Mescheriakov relative, just plain folks,
not nabobs. What a relief that would be.
Four years ago my sister traveled to Ireland for the Wexford Opera
Festival. One of the sopranos was a
woman by the name of Marina Mescheriakova. Ann met Ms. Mescherikova
and discovered that her relatives came form the same province
of Saratov
on the Volga River as my father’s family. Hardly a coincidence. My sister kept up a c