Stories and Prose Poems by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374712150
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Easter Day

10 April 1966

Zakhar-the-Pouch

You asked me to tell you something about my cycling holiday last summer. Well, if it’s not too boring, listen to this one about Kulikovo Field.

We had been meaning to go there for a long time, but it was somehow a difficult place to reach. There are no brightly painted notices or signposts to show you the way, and you won’t find it on a single map, even though this battle cost more Russian lives in the fourteenth century than Borodino did in the nineteenth. There has been only one such encounter for fifteen hundred years, not only in Russia but in all Europe. It was a battle not merely between principalities or nation-states, but between continents.

Perhaps we chose a rather roundabout way to get there: from Epiphania through Kazanovka and Monastirshchina. It was only because there had been no rain till then that we were able to ride instead of pushing our bikes; to cross the Don, which was not yet in full spate, and its tributary, the Nepriadva, we wheeled them over narrow, two-plank footbridges.

After a long trek, we stood on a hill and caught sight of what looked like a needle pointing into the sky from a distant flat-topped rise. We went downhill and lost sight of it. Then we started to climb again, and the grey needle reappeared, this time more distinct, and next to it we saw what looked like a church. There seemed to be something uniquely strange about its design, something never seen except in fairy tales: its domes looked transparent and fluid; they shimmered deceptively in the cascading sunlight of the hot August day—one minute they were there and the next they were gone.

We guessed rightly that we would be able to quench our thirst and fill our water bottles at the well in the valley, which proved to be invaluable later on. But the peasant who handed us the bucket, in reply to our question: “Where’s Kulikovo Field?” just stared at us as if we were idiots.

“You don’t say Kulikóvo, you say Kulíkovo. The village of Kulíkovka is right next to the battefield, but Kulikóvka’s over there, on the other side of the Don.”

After our meeting with this man, we travelled along deserted country lanes, and until we reached the monument several kilometres away, we did not come across a single person. It must have been because no one happened to be around on that particular day, for we could see the wheel of a combine harvester flailing somewhere in the distance. People obviously frequented this place and would do so again, because all the land had been planted with crops as far as the eye could see, and the harvest was almost ready—buckwheat, clover, sugar beet, rye, and peas (we had shelled some of those young peas) ; yet we saw no one that day and we passed through what seemed like the blessed calm of a reservation. Nothing disturbed us from musing on the fate of

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