Viktor Shklovskii, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922. Winter 1918
I was living in Chernaia Rechka in the apartment of a gardener.
It was a time of famine. I had little to eat myself, but there was no time to think of that.
The gardener’s family was living on linden leaves and vegetable greens. An old schoolteacher was living in a tiny separate room of the same apartment. I found out about her existence only when they came to take away her body. She had ‘ died of hunger.
A lot of people were dying of hunger then. There’s no reason to think it’s a quick death.
A man can find in his situation all kinds of nuances.
I remember how surprised I was in Persia that the homeless Kurds lived around the walls of the city, picking out places in wall where there was a slight hollow, even if only a few inches.
Evidently it seemed warmer to them there.
And when a man’s starving, he lives that way-continually fretting, wondering which is tastier, boiled greens or linden leaves. He even gets excited about these problems and, gradually becoming immersed in such nuances, he dies.
There was cholera in St. Pete then, but people weren’t being eaten yet.
True, there was talk about some postman who ate his wife, but I don’t know whether that’s true or not.
It was quiet, sunny and hungry-very hungry.
In the morning we drank coffee made out of rye. Sugar was being sold on the street for seventy-five kopeks a chunk.
You could drink a cup of coffee either without milk or without sugar: there wasn’t enough money for both.
Rye cookies were also being sold on the street. We ate soup made of oats. The oats were steamed in a pot, then run through a meat grinder -“through the machine,” as they used to say-several times. It was hard work. Afterwards, they were put through a sieve and you got soup made from oat flour. When it’s being cooked, you have to be careful or it will boil over like milk.
Before the oats were ground, the black specks had to be fished out. I don’t know what they were evidently the seeds of some weed,
For this operation, the oats were spread out on the table and the whole family picked the refuse out of it. So you wound up fussing with oats all day.
Potato peels were used to make a very tasteless gruel, as thin as Persian bread. Everyone was issued anywhere from an eighth- to a quarter-pound of bread a day. Sometimes herring was issued.
Before you ate this herring, you were advised to cut off the’ extremities-the head and tail. They had already spoiled.
Our organization wasn’t setting deadlines anymore. Somewhere in the east, the Czechs were advancing.” Rebellion raged in Yaroslavl.” Where we were, it was quiet.
I still hadn’t disbanded m friends.
It was easy for us to stick together, since we had split into half a dozen detachments of five to ten men each, linked by bonds of friendship and kinship.” There was nothing to do. I remember I was asked to get hold of a car, evidently for purposes of appropriation. Semenov made the request.
I told one of the drivers about it. He went to some nearby garage, picked out a car, cranked it up, got in and drove away.
But the expropriation didn’t take place.
The fate of that driver was strange. He was living in the apartment of an old, completely faded woman. She took care of him and fed him compote. Consequently, he married her.
Marriage to an old woman was the fate of many men who lived adventurously. I saw dozens of examples.
I always felt sorry for them. We even recognized the problem and warned each other-“Don’t eat compote.”
This showed a kind of fatigue or a craving for peace and quiet.
Adventurism generally ends in corruption.
I remember seeing one of my students after I returned from Persia.
“What are you doing now.
“Robbing houses, sir. If you’ll indicate apartments for us to rob, we’ll give you ten per cent.”
Strictly a business proposition.
He was eventually shot.
He’d been a pretty good driver.
Hardly anyone was above a little thing like requisitioning alcohol, that is, petty thievery of various kinds. The laws had been repealed and everything was being revised.
Of course, not everyone indulged in crime.
I knew drivers who stayed with their cars, took nothing except kerosene for their cars and loved Russia deeply; they didn’t sleep nights for thinking about her.
These men were usually married to young women and had children.
And, needless to say, the drivers had no monopoly on corruption.
Source: Viktor Shklovskii, A Sentimental Journey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 152-155.