>[!INFO]+ Meta >Area:: [[Neverland - The Lost Continent of Australia]] >Date:: 2013 >Tags:: #text #Australia #Russia *Everything here is full of light and shining,\ The city, the people ...\ Everything here is timeless and spaceless.\ That is why the spirit is joyful.\ Kitezh is more intimate than a dream.\ The silence had deepened here into a single note ...\ Bow your head down to earth. Press your ears\ To the ground. You will hear the bells of Kitezh\ Down in the depths, making the earth tremble.* Libretto, Rimsky-Korsakov, *The Invisible City of Kitezh* [^97] Australia is the third least densely settled country in the world. Only Mongolia and Namibia have fewer people per kilometre. Theoretically, there are more than 400,000 square metres of space per head of population. The reality, of course, is much tighter. Eighty-three per cent of the population live within fifty kilometres of the coast.[^98] Sixty per cent of Australians huddle around the exit points---Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart and Perth. Australians seem yet to inhabit the land that they claim as their own. The marginality of Australian settlement prompted Bruce Chatwin to consider how it might have been otherwise if a different people had colonised the continent. In *Songlines*, he presents Alice Springs through the eyes of Arkady Volchak, son of a refugee Cossack. Chatwin and Volchak---'a Pom and a Com'--- develop a common antipathy to the local white residents, or *kardiya*. Chatwin contrasts the mysterious tuning of the landscape, the *songline*, with the blind imposition of wire and bitumen that characterises modern Australian settlement. While Aranda people sing about the divinely carved landscapes of the centre, descendents of British gaze longingly out to the sea, almost in fear of the arid expanse looming behind them. This contrast causes Arkady to speculate with Chatwin on how it could have been different: > 'Pity we didn't get here first', he said. > > 'We the Russians?' > > 'Not only Russians,' he shook his head, 'Slavs, Hungarians, Germans > even. Any people who could cope with the wide horizons. Too much of > this country went to islanders. They never understood it. They're > afraid of space. > > 'We', he added, 'could have been proud of it. Loved it for what it > was. I don't think we'd have sold it off so easily.'[^99] The challenge is laid. Unlike Australians, who hug the shores, Russians would have embraced the near-infinite spaces within the continent. Australians are happy to sell the land off to overseas interests so they can buy holiday houses on the beach. By contrast, Russians would love the land, commit themselves to it, and call it their own. Without discrediting Chatwin's informant, there is some room for scepticism about this Russian alternative. Arkady gives little thought as to what might have brought Russians to Australia in the first place. What would have driven Russians to the other end of the world? And what role might they play in Australian society, beyond buyers of cheap real estate? The task of a multiplying Russian fantasy with Australian history is to find a common denominator of utopianism on which they might exchange possibilities. The extraordinary tales of Russians landing on antipodean soils evidence the dramatic consequences when Slavic intensity means Anglo pragmatism. Depth and surface meet like tectonic plates, leading to cultural earthquakes where promised worlds suddenly vanish below the surface. Australia has developed as modern nation in the shadow of the Russian threat. Russians have appeared regularly in paranoid scenarios of invasion. During the Crimean War there were widespread reports of an imminent Russian attack. In the panic resulting from the sound of gunfire in 1854, long-range canons were cast and fortifications built in Victorian harbours. Russian invasion played on a sense of isolation from the home country. Slavo-phobia extended to the Cold War, when there was much suspicion of 'reds under the beds', which came to a head during the 1954 Petrov affair. Meanwhile, among Australian writers, the edifying tradition of nineteenth-century Russian novels, stories and plays has been something many have aspired to. In 1980, the journal *Meanjin* organised a conference in which its editor Jim Davidson posed the alternative 'St Petersburg or Tinsel Town' to represent the choice between Melbourne and Sydney. Davidson claimed that Melbourne and St Petersburg were both 'eclipsed' cities still entertaining values of the *Belle Époque*. This distinction appears the product of Australian dreaming than actual intellectual history. Though Melbourne may seem more intellectual compared to Sydney, there is little to suggest the kind of ideological intensity that marked the great nineteenth century Russian novel. While today Melbourne shares an official connection with St Petersburg as its sister city, the contribution of Russian culture to Melbourne is thin. After the gold rush, there is nothing to match the spiritual vertigo imperial Russia experienced when its agrarian social structure was thrown headlong into the modern era. And despite Chatwin's line, there are very few Russians in the Australian centre. During a recent trip to Alice Springs, no-one I met knew of any Russians in the town, or thereabouts. A much stronger Russian thread of culture exists to the far north, in Queensland. In the early twentieth century, Queensland's immigration laws were the most relaxed in the nation and there was a continuous demand for labour to exploit the new plantations. The 'sunshine state' offered a half-open door to the many refugees fleeing the political upheavals of revolutionary Russia. One significant legacy of this migration was *Meanjin* itself. In 1940, the daughter of one of these refugees, Nina Maximov, encouraged Clem Christesen, of Danish descent, to establish the *Meanjin* journal in Brisbane. Her childhood in St Petersburg gave her a belief in the importance of intellectual life, despite the lack of precedent in Brisbane. This belief and guidance helped Christesen found the journal and bring it eventually to Melbourne, where it became a vehicle for cultural debate in the post-war period. #### **Just a suburban Ukrainian** Nina Christesen is not the only person from Brisbane whose Slavic ideas made an impact. In 1993, the 24-year-old Helen Demidenko, from the Brisbane suburb of Rochedale, emerged with a moral tale apparently able to plumb the depths of human tragedy. In *The Hand that Signed the Paper*, Demidenko told the story of World War 2 atrocities through the eyes of Slavic collaborators. There was nothing else like it being published in Australia; it subsequently won the Vogel Literary Award, the Miles Franklin award, and the Gold Medal from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. The Miles Franklin citation contrasted this kind of literature with 'fiction about the more vapid aspects of Australian life'. In the spate of interviews that followed these accolades, Helen Demidenko provided details of her Ukrainian background---how her father had lived through the famine and her uncle had been conscripted into the SS. Controversy began to spread about the anti-Semitic attitudes professed by the book's characters, and the lack of any authorial judgment---but this only increased the book's publicity. Yet during this intense media attention, no-one made an issue of the invisibility of Demidenko's real-life Ukrainian relatives or friends. It wasn't until 19 August 1995, almost two years after the book's initial award, that the author's true identity became known. The author was revealed as the daughter of north English migrants, Harry and Grace Darville. This otherwise one-dimensional novel now evolved into a biography of Dostoevksian complexity.[^100] What possessed this strange English girl to enter Brisbane's Ukrainian Club, join in the folk dancing, and disown her 'vapid' Anglo roots for a wild, passionate culture? Helen Darville's daredevil escape into her Ukrainian persona seemed testimony to the tragic emptiness of a placid suburban lifestyle. Unfortunately, Darville was unable to live up to this greater work of fiction. She turned out to be yet another author with a chip on her shoulder---using her literary success to score points against those who had snubbed her. Like the Ern Malley poems, her book was aimed at the pretensions of a literary class that privileges the 'other'. A look at Darville's website today reveals a string of articles that promote this resentment against liberalism. Cultural criticism turned cannibalistic. Just as Max Harris was duped because 'he was keen to find evidence of native Australian modernism', those who initially heralded *The Hand that Signed the Paper* 'wanted to be seduced by the siren voices of multiculturalism'.[^101] Richard Glover argues that Darville herself fell victim to this suburban cringe, by assuming that 'real excitement and passion come from elsewhere'.[^102] This, it seems, is one of the questions left begging after the Demidenko affair. Is there nothing in Australian culture to give expression to the 'Russian-ness' of life---the tragic circumstances of people who are powerless to resist authority, yet must win honour for themselves in defeat? Is there nowhere in the smoothly paved footpaths and groomed nature strips some crevice in which we can glimpse the abyss of existence? Does this myopia lead to terminally superficial culture, where ball sports are the national religion and Abba is the main source of collective identity? #### **Our Tatiana** There are occasional glimpses of this other, more sombre, culture. While waiting for the broadcast of Cathy Freeman's 400-metre final at the Sydney Olympics, the television audience saw an unknown Australian athlete take silver in a new sport, female pole-vault. For a moment, the Russian-born Tatiana Grigorieva offered a startling alternative to the cheerful demeanour typical of Australian competitors. Grigorieva stared down her aerial challenge, exhibiting a kind of emotional intensity characteristic of eastern bloc athletes. But this challenge was quickly diverted to her more conventional sex appeal---in her dyed blonde hair, pert nose, blue eyes and svelte body. Within two weeks Tatiana had been processed by the popular media into an Australian girl, with her image on the cover of *New Idea*. From the taut, focused young Amazon of the Olympics, she became a made-up doll dressed entirely in pink. Rather than close-ups of her grim determination, the article featured a succession of cheesy grins. In contrasting her gloomy life in Russia with the bright prospects in Australia, *New Idea* transformed the intense Russian Grigorieva into 'our Tatiana'. #### **The Ottoman Curse** If we were to transplant a Tolstoy to Australia, he would need to find an epic stage on which his characters could work out their lives. The story of the first Australians, decimated by a well-meaning genocide, would be a natural candidate. There is one Slavic writer who has approached this subject, if only by the back door. His identity is even stranger than Demidenko's. B. Wongar is the Aboriginal persona of a Serbian-born anthropologist, Streten Bozic (Serbian for 'Happy Christmas'), who was brought back to life by an Aboriginal tribe after being lost in the desert. He was given the name 'Wongar' meaning 'messenger from the spirit world'. Bozic sent a manuscript of his first work to the USA under his Aboriginal name. While relatively little known in Australia, Wongar's novels were much praised overseas by critics such as Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag. They are remarkable works, reflecting the misery of black settlements under white control. But like Demidenko, Wongar's vision is tainted by resentment. His prime objective does not seem to be a close understanding of Aboriginal culture---Wongar uses the indigenous cause to draw sympathy for the victimisation of Serbs at the hand of Muslim invaders. His violent novel *Raki* draws a parallel between police brutalisation of native Australians and Ottoman oppression of the Serbian nation. It is as much a blind imposition of a foreign paradigm as the importation of the English garden to Australia. In mainstream Australian culture, there is nothing that engages in dialogue with the rich tradition of Russian ideas. Yet for most twentieth-century Australian thinkers, the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov have laid the foundations of their literary imaginations and worldviews. We need something like a Rosetta Stone to translate the metaphysics of the Russian imagination into an Australian idiom. One such device lies in the mythical Russian village, submerged under a lake. Look carefully in the Australian bush, and you might find an overgrown trail leading to this invisible city of Kitezh. Let me tell you about one that I found in Queensland. #### **The Guerassimoffs** While many new Russians reside in bayside suburbs like St Kilda and Bondi, old Russians settled in remote areas such as the small town of Yarwun, a few kilometres inland from Gladstone, a harbour servicing Queensland's aluminium industry. In 1995, I went to Gladstone to set up a craft exhibition. I first discovered the Russian presence in this area walking through Gladstone cemetery. While most Australian towns now tend to look much the same ---the same KFC, the same 24-hour Coles supermarket and the same Australia Post shop---their cemeteries remain unique. Gladstone has one of the most unusual I have seen. Many graves are tiled in bright colours, making the cemetery look like an outdoor bathroom display. There must have been a time when the town's tiler moonlighted as a monumental mason. Besides their surreal surfaces, the graves bear the usual poignant epitaphs and symbols. The exception was a strange cross on top of the hill that caught my eye. It had the three horizontals of the Christian Orthodox church. I walked through the uncut grass to read the inscription: > In Loving Memory of\ > MY DEAR HUSBAND OUR SON AND BROTHER\ > Gordon John Guerassimoff\ > ACCIDENTALLY KILLED AUG. 1. 1974\ > AGED 21 YEARS\ > IN GOD'S CARE I didn't expect to find Russians in Queensland. Queensland seemed too relaxed---a part of Australia reserved for lying on the beach and soaking up the sun, rather than holding candles and chanting archaic liturgy. I asked around. It seems most of the people I spoke with in Gladstone were as mystified by the Russians as I was. They came to the supermarket on Thursdays---the women in headscarves and the men in black cassocks. They were an exotic form of life that seemed to fascinate residents; it was their only direct contact with a foreign culture. Many had tales of visiting their remote fibro-cement Russian church for the atmospheric midnight Easter service. Though I had only two hours before the exhibition opening, I was determined to visit this mythical Russian Queensland village. I borrowed a car and drove through icy rain. Things soon began to look mysteriously Russian. The paddocks were filled with Brahmin cattle looking heavy and Slavic. A sign on the road read 'Wanted, the person who stole the wire from my fence.' I rolled into Yarwun half expecting to find domed churches and gaily painted houses. But it was an ordinary small town with a solitary general store. I struck up a conversation with the woman behind the counter---'You're from Melbourne eh? Looks like you brought the weather with you then.' When I inquired about the Guerassimoffs she told me that I'd just missed young Alec, but he might be up near the railway station working on his ute. I quickly crossed the road to the station, where I spied a man tending his vehicle. Alec was a plucky bloke in his late forties with a roguish bottom lip. I'd caught him in a reflective mood. After a long sigh, he told me that the railway shed had just been closed for good. His family had used it to dispatch fruit from their pawpaw plantation. So where did the Guerassimoffs come from? His reply was reasonably terse. They came from Manchuria, but were forced to flee after World War 2. Did they have any objects? Yes, there was a family bible, but it was in Brisbane. So, I'd met my Guerassimoff. I could happily go home now, with my Gladstone adventure---meeting a descendent of old believers who came to Queensland all the way from Russian via Manchuria. But there was something about Alec's story that wouldn't rest. These humble pawpaw farmers had a precious book kept safe in a city church. Perhaps it contained a glimpse of the beliefs that steered their course to Australia. I was determined to call his older brother Jules and find out more. It was almost two years before I managed to catch up with Jules. He seemed to be out of town whenever I was in Brisbane. We finally made an arrangement to meet in a hotel lobby on Brunswick Street. I knew he was a Guerassimoff as soon as he walked through the door. Though he was wearing a sports jacket and a few more years than Alec, the man coming towards me had the same round face and jocular engagement with the world. As he firmly shook my hand, I noticed his face was crosshatched with tiny scars. Unfortunately, he couldn't lay his hands on the family bible, but he'd brought along some old photographs. Disappointed, I asked him about the book. It was a tradition among Old Believers to write out their bibles by hand rather than buying a printed version. This bible had been handwritten by his father in Queensland. 'Couldn't get my hands on it. Thought you might like to look at some photographs.' On the left was a tight-lipped family portrait from Harbin. On the right was a casual snapshot of short-sleeved blokes strumming guitars in the Queensland bush. They were a classic 'before and after' image of assimilation---from tragedy to comedy. I pressed Jules on his family life. He recounted an austere childhood, where indulgences like underwear were forbidden. And before that, how did they come to Australia? With some gentle prodding, he unravelled the Guerassimoff exodus. As the Guerassimoffs fled the Russian revolution, they negotiated their way through dangerous borders. Their fate rested on a number of snap decisions. They passed through the Eastern checkpoint under the pretence of making a short-term visit to a Manchurian spa. When their boat docked on the island of Sakhalin, they bribed guards to let them escape to Japan. But there was a major problem. The boat was filled with their religious paraphernalia---dozens of icons, chalices, costume and other precious objects of their faith. There was far more than they could carry in their hands. Escaping to freedom thus meant consigning their sacred tradition to a watery oblivion---an unbearable fate. Dutifully, the eldest son Emelian offered to stay on the boat and turn back to Russia with the sacred objects. There was no time for prolonged farewells. Emelian was never heard of again. His nephew sits opposite me, born a few days after the Guerassimoff family arrived in Queensland. The epic tale of escape from Russia seems a world away from the easeful life on the other side of the world. Perhaps due to the sunny climate, Jules has little of that heavy orthodox manner we associate with long beards and hair shirts. He recounts his family's tragic story with an easeful familiarity. How can we connect the two worlds? Jules' religious upbringing was strict: from three years of age he was forced to stand up for long prayer vigils. Guerassimoff pride was focused on their icon of the Virgin Mary. Where is that icon now? Jules tells me its fate: > During one particularly severe drought, my grandmother insisted on > accompanying us boys out on a fishing trip. She wrapped the icon in > cloth and took it with her. When we stopped in our spot, she started > mumbling and praying in a weird way. Then she got out the icon and > threw it into the water. That was it. It just sunk with all that metal > on it. No way anyone would find it now. It didn't stop the drought, > though. Somewhere off the Gladstone coast, resting on the bottom of the Coral Sea, is a once revered Russian icon. Why would a believer throw such a sacred object away? Sitting in this anonymous hotel foyer, I'm a little overawed by this drama of tragic exile. Jules steps back again to Harbin. As is the custom before a long journey, the family consulted a fortune-teller. She warned of a great tragedy with water, which Jules locates in a freak flood when his father was drowned. I gasp for a bit of everyday life and drop into conversation that my next appointment for the day is a visit to the painter Lennard Brown. Jules tells me that he has one of Lennard's early abstract paintings---an aesthetic indulgence that I find hard to match with his tough persona. Perhaps a childhood of icon-watching left him a lover of paintings. I invite Jules along to the meeting. Lennard Brown is a distinguished abstract painter whose canvases aim for transcendence through the colour blue. He had recently converted to Orthodox Christianity and turned his Brisbane flat into a private church, equipped with candles and a self-painted iconostasis. On arrival, Lennard anoints us with oils. At first it seems a kitsch gesture, but the impression of this pungent thumbprint on our foreheads casts a spell over proceedings. Jules and I have contrasting attitudes. While I feel drawn to this spectacle, his body language is set in grim defence. During the course of conversation, one corner of his mouth has hitched itself up as though in protective irony. In response to Lennard's probe, Jules rehearses what is probably his standard pub talk about the bizarre asceticism of an Old Believer childhood. Lennard pauses a moment, then says in a sombre voice, 'You have been very lucky.' I doubt anyone has ever responded like this to Jules' tale and he looks slightly lost, for a moment. On leaving, Lennard invites Jules to come again for a service, but it's clear that he has put that reverence well and truly in the past. Jules and I walk together to the station. Along the way I notice that passing strangers acknowledge his presence, either with a little wave of the hand or nod of the head. As this isn't his regular territory, I can't work out why they do this. Only much later do I find out that he is a legendary rugby player and had captained the Queensland state team. Missing pieces fall into place. His frequent absences were due to international business contacts established during overseas sporting trips. I understand now why his face has so many little scars. Jules had submerged himself in the scrum of another world. The Guerassimoff story represents a negative encounter between Russians and Australia---a dramatic loss of tradition and assimilation into the sacred Queensland code. But what did the original Guerassimoffs expect to find here, and why did the grandmother throw the prize family possession, preserved at great cost during the journey south, into the blue depths of the Pacific Ocean? Did she wish they had thrown their religious clutter into the Japanese sea rather than lose a son? Or was there another darker reason, buried in the Old Believer psyche? The answer to this question may contain something important about the fate of Russian culture on Australian soil. #### **Vladimir Kabo and Elena Govor find a little Siberia** Relatively few Russians have documented the history of their fate in Australia. One immigrant couple has made it a lifelong vocation. Elena Govor is the granddaughter of Russian writer Atsion Vsyoli, who was executed in 1938 for anti-Stalinist activities. Her husband, Vladimir Kabo, was an anthropologist sent to a Siberian labour camp after publicly questioning Soviet dogma. Both in their own way developed a fascination for all things Australian. In 1995, Govor and Kabo succeeded in their quest to migrate to their beloved continent. When I first met them in Canberra, they were still gazing in wonder at the features they had previously only read about---gum trees, Mount Ainsley and Parliament House. Since arriving, Govor and Kabo have published their own books on the Russian experience in Australia---Govor's comprehensive survey of early Russian impressions, *Australia in the Russian Mirror*, and Kabo's autobiographical account of his spiritual journey south, in *The Road to Australia*. Like the oriental correspondents in Charles Montesquieu's *Persian Letters,* their conversations reveal a life that might be otherwise hidden from native inhabitants. For Govor, the main source of Russian fascination for Australia is its remoteness. Govor quotes Chekhov describing life in his Melikhovo estate: > A day lasts an eternity. You live as in Australia, at the end of the > world, your mood is calm, contemplative ... there are moments when I > am so happy that I superstitiously pull myself up and remember my > creditors, who one day will banish me from my lawfully acquired > Australia.[^103] Australia seems about as far as one could be from Russia. For many writers, such remoteness provides a symbolic haven for ideas of a better life, prompting many utopian calls to colonise this South Pacific island. While conducting her research, Govor uncovered one remarkable instance where a Russian did attempt to turn his imaginary utopia into reality. Govor's highly embroidered history, *My Dark Brother*, provides a detailed account of how an incarnation of the Russian nineteenth century ideal managed to take root in Australian soil. In this life of a Tolstoyan in Queensland, there lies a clue to why the Guerassimoffs cast their family heritage into the sea. Nicholas Illin poured his restless socialism into publications, including the poems of *Song of the Earth* and a novel, *In a New Land*. Scorned by contemporaries like Leo Tolstoy, Illin took his family to Patagonia in 1897. Deprived of land by a corrupt Argentinean regime, the Illins then moved to Australia, which advertised itself as a land of 'justice and abundant fertile land'. With a few other Russian settlers, Nicholas acquired property in a region of the Atherton Tablelands subsequently known as Little Siberia. After the Russian Revolution, with the threat of internment and despair at their harsh life in Queensland, Nicholas took his two youngest children back to Latin America, where they hoped to start up a colony of Russian refugees in the virgin lands of Honduras. The elder brother, Leandro, had taken in a single mother, Kitty Clark, of the local Ngadjon tribe. When her family was threatened with deportation to Palm Island, he formalised their relationship in a marriage. Unfortunately, the paternalist state government then prohibited Leandro and Kitty leaving Australia with their mixed family. Leandro was left to stay in Queensland, where he battled against both natural and cultural hazards, including catastrophic floods and deep-rooted racism. His ceaseless political agitation ranged over issues such as racism against migrants and local municipal matters, including provision of water fountains and cinemas in Ingham. Today, the Illin grandchildren are active in Aboriginal rights---Govor credits Leandro's son-in-law with inspiring Eddie Mabo to take up the land rights for his island people, which overturned the principle of Terra Nullius and acknowledged prior ownership of Australia. Govor's book has an interest of its own that goes beyond its subject. Literary pretences are threaded through *My Dark Brother*. Govor transposes Chekhov's *The* *Cherry Orchard* to the tropical bush of central Queensland. She embroiders the scene with Chekhovian wistfulness: 'Something tore at his heart---how was he to accept this alien world, how might he find a place for his Russian soul in it; and this ideal Russian "cherry orchard" ...'[^104] The Chekhovian longing for a boundless world of possibility is realised on the other side of the world, though without the wider community of Chekhovians to cherish it. Thus a peculiarly Russian equilibrium is maintained and happiness is kept at a safe distance (recalling the Russian proverb that there is only one thing worse than not getting what you want---that is getting what you want). One of the remarkable qualities of *My Dark Brother* is the extension of Govor's Russian imagination into an antipodean context. During one particularly wet season the children plead with their father to stop the rain, which leads to meteorological absurdity: '"Let\'s try", he said, and they recited in chorus in Russian: "If you want to stop the rain think of forty bold-headed men."' This kind of writing invites a fantasy about the excessive theatre of Russian daily life in the Australian bush, surrounded by a world of stoic Dads and Daves. *My Dark Brother* ends with intimations of a spirituality shared between Aboriginal and Russian cultures. Yet Govor's universalism is more literary than New Age. Illin's life is examined as a series of archetypes, as though it were a work of fiction. One of the Illin family stories concerns a goblet that was supposedly given to ancestors by Catherine the Great. According to the story, as it was told across generations of Illins, this precious goblet sinks to the bottom of the ocean when a ship is struck by enemy fire. However, Govor finds firm evidence that the goblet actually exists. This enables her to analyse its submersion as a literary device rather than an accident of fate. She links it to other instances of inversion in Illin lore, such as when a drunken ancestor vomits over Catherine the Great's shoes while accepting a medal. The only lasting effect of the Illin colony is the place named Illin's Gully, a creek that disappears mysteriously under the earth. While the theme of being 'lost down under' has an obvious connotation with the journey to Australia, it seems to have its origins in a Russian worldview. The potential sequel to the story of a submerged past is its possible recovery. Govor's husband, Vladimir Kabo, shares her romance for the distant shores of Australia. Kabo writes about his time studying in Leningrad---'How I loved those evenings alone in the Australia and Oceania room.'[^105] For Kabo, the connection with the past that has been lost to modern Russians can be recovered in Australia. He sees Australian Aborigines as precious remnants of the great hunter-gatherer peoples whose domain once stretched 'from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the cliffs of Tierra del Fuego'.[^106] Kabo finds in these cultures an enduring structure of community that is the 'universal nucleus of society'.[^107] While primitive myths endure, the modern mind lacks the syncretic consciousness of the primitive. But it retains some trace memory. During his first look at Australia, on the bus ride to Canberra, Kabo recounts his feeling of déjà vu: 'All the way we were haunted by a mystical feeling of recognition, of returning to a land we had long known, a land we had dreamt of as of a long-lost homeland.'[^108] This recognition was not entirely foreign. Aboriginal Australians reminded Kabo of Russian peasants with 'wavy hair and full beards'. Kabo makes a great deal of his initial contact with Australian Aborigines: > Here in Australia I have become convinced that the religion of the > Aborigines has not died out. Rather, in those places where it seems to > have disappeared, it has temporarily descended into the hidden > recesses of the spirit, below the surface, like an underground spring, > to break the surface again at some future time. The religion of their > ancestors remains for them just such an underground spring, nurturing > them and helping them to build their lives in a new reality, even > though that religion was never unchanging, and it continues to change, > revealing the potential it carries within it.[^109] Here is a telling allusion to the Russian context for the primitivism that drew Kabo to Australia. Like the Old Believers, Australian Aborigines are seen to possess a dormant spiritual power that harkens back to the origins of our current beliefs. Like Illin's Gully, this power is a hidden source of water that may appear sometime in the future, to cleanse our world. In describing the mythical potency of Australian culture, Kabo touches on one of the most significant fables of Russian identity---the invisible city of Kitezh. #### **The invisible city of Kitezh** By most accounts, Kievan Rus was a sparkling part of the world. Freshly inspired by Byzantine Christianity, the new city sought to colour the world with divine images. The first native metropolitan, Ilarion of Kiev, described it as: > a city glistening with the light of holy icons,\ > fragrant with incense,\ > ringing with praise and glory, heavenly songs[^110] In the mid thirteenth century, the grandson of Genghis Khan led the Mongol troops in a campaign to the west. With military cunning and well-trained troops, Batu sacked and burnt the city of Kiev. Batu's army had soon conquered all of Russia and controlled Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and the Danube Valley. If not for the death of the empire's leader, Ögödei, Batu would have rolled on and subdued more of Europe. Batu left in his wake the state of the Kipchak Khanate, or Golden Horde, which controlled southern Russia until the late fourteenth century. However, there is one town that miraculously escaped Mongol destruction. Near the lake of Svelty Yar, in the Volga region, is the holy city of Kitezh. The city was the quintessence of Kievan Rus, the pre-Muscovite Russian kingdom, containing magnificent church bells and the best of village crafts---all under the benign rule of the kindly Prince Vsevolod. Eager to claim this city as their own, the invading Tartars captured the maiden Fevronia, the prince's fiancée, while she was collecting mushrooms in a nearby forest. Discovering from her the city's location, the Tartars moved onwards to wreak destruction. Meanwhile, Fevronia fervently prayed that God would hide Kitezh from the eyes of the infidel. When the Tartars arrived at their destination, there was no city to be seen. Mystified, they searched the surrounding area. Indeed, they found Kitezh not on solid ground but submerged in a nearby lake. Standing on the shore and looking through the waters, they could see the city in all its glory, resting on the lake's bed. Terrified by this apparition, the Tartars fled the area and left Kitezh in peace. The myth of the invisible city of Kitezh embodies an innocent Russia that was tragically lost to the authoritarian rule of the invaders. It began as a *byliny*, or epic tale, glorifying acts of Russian defiance against invaders. During the nineteenth century, Old Believers revived the story as a symbol of their quest to restore the original beliefs of Kievan Rus. Each summer they would make a pilgrimage to the lake. In 1898, the librettist Vladimir Belsky approached Rimsky-Korsakov to write an opera on this subject. *The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh* celebrates the pantheist beliefs of medieval Russia, dwelling on Fevronia's Edenic harmony with forest life. In the Parsifal-like finale, Fevronia dies and ascends to the glorious city of Kitezh accompanied by ringing bells and divine light.[^111] The myth of Kitezh taps the symbolic foundations of Russian faith. Water is a significant medium in Orthodox belief. The basic structure of the Kitezh story concerns a lost golden age that is preserved under the waters. One of the most sacred days in the Orthodox calendar is the epiphany, known as the Feast of Lights, when the priest casts a crucifix into the waters, from where young boys retrieve it.[^112] Like the rite of baptism, this event demonstrates the ritual power of submersion as a form of spiritual cleansing. Beyond its Christian resonance, it is possible to find roots for the myth of Kitezh in pagan Rus. In the pagan cosmology that existed prior to the imposition of Christianity, the world was understood to have been created by a devil who dived into the waters to retrieve mud that becomes the substance of an habitable world. This 'earth-diver' myth is common throughout most Slavic cultures and is also found in the Hindu myth of Varaha, the boar avatar of Visnu. Rather than searching for an underlying universal 'mono-myth', however, it is worth retaining focus on the uniquely Russian context by considering the political uses of Kitezh. The Kitezh myth supports a story of Russia as a country whose potential has been repressed by its period of subjugation to the Khan. Known as the 'Tartar Yoke', this period is seen as imbuing the Russian spirit with subservience to authority and acquiescence to power. Reflected in the habit of swaddling infants, this oppression sewed the seed of successive autocracies to follow---from the Tsardom, to Soviet nomenclature, to today's mafia oligarchy. Certainly, much Russian culture was destroyed by successive waves of destruction at the hands of invading nomads. The Khan dragooned Russia's finest artisans to their eastern centres. As a result, certain crafts, such as cloisonné and filigree, were lost forever. The Mongols destroyed native democratic institutions such as the *veche* and elevated boyars to an undemocratic oligarchy. Much of what became the monolithic Russian state owes its structure directly to the Tartar Yoke. The word 'tsar' was applied to the Mongol Khan before it was used to describe a Russian monarch. In the Muscovite regime that followed the defeat of the horde, the Russians adopted the Chingisid principle of hereditary rule to legitimise the new line of tsars. After the Mongol withdrawal, the Russians took over their centralising technologies, such as their tax system, military draft and superb courier system, known as the *yam*. But there is comfort in blaming outsiders for a perceived warp in Russian political culture. The myth of a submerged city imagines a fabulous Kievan past, with kind rulers, pure maidens, noble artisans, gaily decorated houses and collective harmony. As we know from the break-up of Yugoslavia, nostalgic nationalisms demand a scapegoat---the foreigners who disrupted the cosy communities of the past. Life was good, before the gypsies, Albanians, Serbs, communists ... Tartars.[^113] With its florid sentimentality, the story of this invisible city seems to belong more to fairy tales than committee rooms. It appears to be a symptom of the 'Russian idea',[^114] in which a radiant future promises to miraculously erase the problems of this world---a dangerous eschatology that eventually leads to despair and revolutionary terror. While nostalgic in nature, Kitezh offers an other-worldly myth of transcendence. But to condemn the story of Kitezh as escapist is pre-emptive. Today this mythical village helps provide a space in Russian culture for a certain freedom of imagination. As political themes have been so restricted in public life, it is reasonable that writers are drawn to fantastic narratives in order to think beyond the current hegemony. In today's Russia, the myth of Kitezh survives in various ways. Svetly Yar now attracts growing crowds, particularly around the pagan festival of Ivan Kupala during mid-summer. Around its shores gather an unlikely mix of neo-pagans and Old Believers. Recovery of pre-Christian traditions is an important feature of post-Soviet Russia. The Terem Quartet, for instance, has revived the Skomorokh performances that combine acting, dancing, storytelling, clowning and musical performance in one ensemble.[^115] There is also a practical extension of Kitezh in the real world. The Kitezh eco-village uses the invisible city myth to support its quest to provide old-fashioned Russian care to the dispossessed of capitalist Russian society. Three hundred kilometres south of Moscow a community has been established by Dmitry Morozov for the care of young orphans. In the spirit of Kitezh, it has revived traditional forms of Russian architecture, such as the Izba, to give children pride in their ancient culture. With the aid of international charities, the eco-village foundation hopes to establish fifty other 'Kitezhes' throughout Russia. In a less practical but more contemporary fashion, the Russian Internet site Kitezh features a particular kind of paradoxical postmodern thinking that seeks to find a ground for itself. Virtual Kitezh is a world for seeing clearly, beyond the distractions of competing theories. The struggle between ancient and modern is compared to patches of bright and dark on the water that prevent us from seeing what lies below---a mystical apprehension of things in their clarity. While the end vision may be intangible, the process of reaching it requires a more definite personal ascesis. Kitezh server chief Vadim Shtepa writes of the symbolist poet Max Voloshin, who evoked the inner Kitezh 'at the bed of soul': > To materialize a dream means to wake up. But before dealing with such > subtle psychological matters we must give a piece of good advice to > those who got used to the superficial maxims, heavy as sand and > obsessive as nightmares.[^116] This kind of romanticism seems far from the 'take it as it comes' mentality in Australian life. Within the Kitezh scheme, what Russians offer is not so much a way of populating the empty centre but of giving meaning to what lies beneath the surface. The history of Russians in Australia reveals the fraught consequences of such a venture. #### **Preserved down under** The Soviet fantasy *Amphibian Man* (1961) tells the story of a Russian scientist forced to pursue his research in a Spanish seaside town. His son, Ichthyander, suffered a lung complaint which his father cured by transplanting the gills of a shark. Forced to live below water for long periods, the professor consoles his son with dreams of an impending underwater utopia, where there are no class distinctions. Eventually, the world catches up with the pair and the son is forced to escape. He assures his father that he will survive far away in the south seas---in the land of Australia. One can imagine a sequel to *Amphibian Man*. As he nears the Queensland coast, Ichthyander uncovers an old Russian icon, the Guerassimoff heirloom, lying at the bottom of the ocean. It is surrounded by other sacred objects, jettisoned by Russian migrants over the years. Indeed, there are enough precious things lying in the sands for Ichthyander to re-construct an entire Russian village---an underwater arcadia of splendour and joy. I doubt the Guerassimoff grandmother had this scene in mind when she threw the family icon overboard. Nonetheless, it is possible that she was not entirely reckless in her action. Given the structure of Russian belief, she could have been securing her family heritage from the threat posed by the harsh life in Australia. It may indeed have been an act of preservation---to deposit her icon in the great underwater vault of the Russian spirit. In Australia, Kitezh is more a cruel mirage than a sustaining myth. Like the inland sea, it lures dreamers siren-like to their doom. For the English, the Australian colony provided a chance to see how British character would develop when freed from the class system. Yet beyond the token theatre of mateship, the corridors of power still echo with the colonial system of privilege. In media, politics and business are mostly still family affairs. Would it have been different if Russians had attempted to recover their own lost Eden in Australia? Could they have slipped out from under the Tartar-Soviet-Mafia yoke? This question can never be answered. Like the submerged city of Kitezh, freedom will always lie just beyond reach. We grasp at the alluring image below the water's surface. But this does not mean we should dispense with an imaginary world. While the horizon of freedom is unreachable, it does offer a depth of field to our present vision. Such a world may help Australians turn away from the coast and look inwards, to the dormant mysteries of the land. #### **Sources** The Russian colonisation was originally discussed in the Queensland town of Gladstone. Special thanks to Marguerita Dobrinin, Grisha Dolgoporov, Elena Govor, Jules Guerassimoff and Alexandr Voiskounsky for their contributions. James H. Billington, *The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture*, New York: Vintage, 1970. Bruce Chatwin, *Songlines*, London: Picador, 1987. Helen Demidenko, *The Hand that Signed the Paper*, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Elena Govor, *Australia in the Russian Mirror: Changing Perspectives* *1770--1919*, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997. Elena Govor, *My Dark Brother: The Story of the Illins, A Russian-aboriginal Family*, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000. Vladimir Kabo, *The Road to Australia: Memoirs,* Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1998. Edward L. Keenan, 'An Iranian Culture Term on the Upper Volga: Kantha-, Kitez\^, Kites\^, Kideks\^a, and Kitaj-gorod', *Folia Slavica* vol. 2, nos 1--3 (1978), pp. 154--178. ## **Constantin File, Doc # B616** My dear people of Australia, Listen for the bells. One day, you will hear them again. Believe it, if you have a heart in you to believe in anything. Listen quietly and you will one day find the sound of distant chimes rippling through the desert. On a still morning, after you shake yourself from the astral frost, by the time the sun has burnt off those lonely drops of water the stars have bequeathed, and you raise your eyes to the fathomless blue of the southern sky, as you turn full circle to embrace the horizon surrounding you, a resonating note will emerge from the far reaches of the world. Come to God. When that day comes and you hear the brass chorus, you will walk up the mound with a slow step. With the faint chimes stirring your heart, you will ascend to the kholm, whose sand has not felt human feet for a thousand sunsets. You will stand on the kholm, extend your arms, arch your back, close your eyes, and feel the golden rays of mother sun gild your eyelids. Come to God. A distant tinkle grows. The burden of the past begins to disintegrate. Your awakened pulse loosens the silence that has sedimented over the dark years. The kangaroo climbs out of its pouch and the platypus lays a blue egg. Our tortured nation can finally begin to recover its path to the ancient mysteries, from whence the word first arose. Your wan heart emerges from its cave. Come to God. On that day, that wondrous day, you will raise your sun-blessed eyelids. Before you is the zvonar, glinting in the sun, resurrected from the burning sands and polished by oblivion. The time has come at last. Come to God. With your right hand, you take up the yazyk by the rope. Holding your hands above your head like a diver, you plunge into the rhapsody of resurrection. Above your head, the sound of metal on metal brings the heavens to life. The chime unfurls along the red sands. This is the echo of likovaniye, heard only once in the brief history of the world, when joy knows no bounds, and the earth becomes a celestial instrument on which God plays his music of love. The motherless emu crosses the yellow creek. Come to God. The chimes radiate out from the kholm like floodwaters in the desert. The black eyes of the red peas open in rapture. Sounds penetrate deep into the sand, purifying the aquifers. The ancients awaken to the clarion of sonvremya and know that the force which shaped their land is among them again. And there, in the distance, is another zvonar like you, whose millennial slumber has been stirred. The cicadas awaken. Then another, then another, then another, then another ... A chain of deliverance. Come to God. ... until the entire nation is resonating with the sublime likovaniye of liberation and divine grace. Then, you can throw off the yoke of mammon, be free of the cheque book and the pistol. Then you can return to the tree books of the ancients, in which your destiny is written. Come to God. On that sonorous day, on that radiant morning, let us pause for a sombre task. Let us consider my dear brother, the leader of the beloved Australian people, and his grim legacy. How could he have fallen so? What led him to stray from the noble path built by his forebears and ordained by his teachers? And even to cast his own flesh and blood out into the desert, to be hunted by dogs. What evil worm stole into his heart and devoured his humanity, so that he should betray the very forces that granted him life? Oh that this tender land should be ravaged by demons. Such is the price of deliverance. Today is our resurrection. All that remains in my ebbing spirit is the forlorn candle of forgiveness and a guttering flame of hope. I pray to the God who rules Australia that Constantin might find somewhere to repose his weary heart. And my people will not give up hope that there lies a world beyond this. A better world that awaits everyone. Come to God. I take a handful of red sand and let it strain through my fingers. Soon, my flesh will become sand. I will rest inside this fathomless desert. I will wait patiently for as long as it takes, through floods and scorching summers, until I can hear finally the bells resound through the land again. My bones will arise. Come to God. Your devoted servant Mikhail #### **Note** This letter was uncovered inside a wooden box, buried beside a tree 330 kilometres north-west of Petrovich. Also inside the box was a wooden disc inscribed with a cross, likely to be the sacred turinga of the Cathedral of the Desert Virgin in Petrovich, removed from the cathedral before it was burned to the ground, just after the letter was written. While it is possible that the letter has been forged by agents of the Patriarch, its contents are consistent with evidence now coming to light about the secret operation of Tsar Constantin's business empire. Though the religious language is wildly overblown, this letter offers a salutary lesson concerning the anti-patriotic nature of the capitalist regime that took control of Australia in 1917, thus confirming the current communist policies designed to recover our dignity as a nation. It demands an inquiry into the fate of Prince Mikhail. However, given current sensibilities, I recommend we gain approval from the Council of the Ancients before making it available to the public. Semyon Arkady Chief Information Officer CPA