St Vladimir the bogus

Eric Christiansen

Vladimir the Russian Viking Vladimir Volkoff (Honeyglen Publishing £13.95)

It is not every day that a biography of St Vladimir of Russia appears in English. It is not every biography of St Vladimir that can be hailed as a comic masterpiece. It is not every comic masterpiece that can be recommended, even to readers with no sense of humour at all. So let us raise the foaming samovar to our lips, and drink off a true old Russian toast to the genius of Mr Volkoff, by whom the distant events of the tenth century have been brought to ex- uberant life.

Let me explain. The history of Russia has been generally horrible, but many Russians have chosen to believe that once upon a time, things were better. This belief was strong under the last Tsars, when so many felt deprived of the amenities of life. For those unhappy generations, schooled in ser- vility and empire, the notion that their remote ancestors had belonged to a nation of free, brave and Orthodox citizens living by the law under the rule of benevolent princes, was a poignant one. It was suppos- ed to have been like that in the tenth and 11th centuries, when Russia was young and her history was unrecorded, or at least rather uncertain. Stories from those happy times were collected by the monks of the Cave Monastery at Kiev, and put together as the 'Primary Russian Chronicle' by an ingenius anecdotalist in the early 12th century. This work, and some later ballads, were jam to the 19th-century Russian in search of a respectable past.

So the 'Golden Age of Kiev' became an Oblomovka open to all-comers, conser- vative, liberal or radical, and it was regard- ed as peculiarly character-forming for young persons of the Calmuck, Khirgiz, Samoyed and Tartar variety who might otherwise have suffered from rootlessness and non-Russian proclivities. It was a seductive world of strenuous imbecility, from which all the asperities and complica- tions of modern life were absent. Either honesty or dishonesty gleamed or lowered in every countenance, and honour, piety, and truth waged ceaseless war with their ex- act opposites. All refinement was odious: — 'What is this fish, Kostya? Its taste displeases me.' — 'It is no fish, my prince, it is a comb.' On the other hand, wealth was superabundant: `To every one of my re- tainers, I give a Polovtsian slave-girl! To every Polovtsian slave-girl, I give a Polish boyar!' Patriotism was pathological: 'We have crossed the Dniester! Do not scratch, my brothers, for these are Russian bugs!' Most of the difficulties of civil and political existence were solved by a mighty blow or a deep, raucous laugh. Those that remained dissolved under the penetrating glare of a holy man or a sagacious prince.

The myriads of underpaid clerks, half- pay officers, perpetual students, temporary gentlemen and disinherited squires for whom this myth was created seem to have found the stench of bogus history inoffen- sive when it came from Old Kiev. Perhaps this was because every being, every building and every landscape in that impossible prin- cipality exuded the quality which seemed to be evaporating from modern Russia: warmth. At any rate, the belief that every- thing was more or less all right when Vladimir brought the Russians from paganism to Christianity, and created either the state, or the nation, or both, or neither, was a powerful one before 1917, and is more powerful now.

There is hardly a single Old Russian illu- sion about the past which has not been en- dorsed and.rein forced by the Soviets, with a slight adjustment of vocabulary. There are still emigrants and party members who agree in this, if in nothing else: that they belong to a glorious Slav nation expelled from a primitive Eden called Kiev.

It is tempting to speculate on the personal circumstances of Vladimir Volkoff, who is a distinguished novelist living in France. I

trust they are comfortable, since he won the grand prix of the French Academy in 19820 but, whatever they are, he has not forgotten

the old country. He has already published

one Kievan work entitled Vladimir, le soles rouge. Whether The Russian Viking is mere-

ly a translation of that, or an entirely new work, his publishers do not make clear. There is evidently enough of Old Russia in Mr Volkoff to fill several volumes, whether they be devoted to the same or to different subjects. In this one, he has captured with curious accuracy the mood, style and attitudes of a

past age. Almost all of it could have been written by an optimistic and patriotic academician of the 1880s, gazing fiercelY from past to future through the mistY pince-nez of emotion. Yet this triumphant solo on the bassoon of Russian nationalism is by a virtuoso who washes his silk shirts in the waters of the Seine.

Some historians, dismayed by the lack of reliable sources for Vladimir's reign, might

have adopted a hesitant or cautious tone. Not the heroic Volkoff. With a 'MOW blow, he sends the critical scholars about

their business — 'They cannot even agree among themselves, my brothers!' With a raucous laugh he embraces the rich sheaves of anecdote and tradition, and showers the ground with corn.

So immense is his own scholarship that he finds written evidence for almost everything that comes into his head. He makes Vladimir deliver a very moving speech on Christian government which is

actually to be found in the fictitious Testa- ment of Vladimir's grandson, written over a century later. Where the chronicles fail to give entire satisfaction, he brings imagina- tion to the rescue: 'Dressed in dazzling white from head to foot, Svyatoslav jumped down from his horse and ran up the steps into the light brown marble hall, his boots thumping Of_i, the fine brick slabs.' As soon as I hearu those thumping boots, I knew that we were in for a good time. So, in 968, did Svyatoslav's son, the 'shifty, PinIPIY' Yaropolk, who was forthwith presented with a beautiful Greek nun. Even Vladimir, his younger brother, whom Mr Volkhov calculates to have been about eight Years old at the time, was unduly excited by this nun: 'in his heart, a new and deadly fire stirred 'for the first time.' But that was the way in Old Kiev. Nobody could keep his hands to himself, what with the 'lavish par- ties for great and small', and the intox- icating mixture of 'proud men-at-arms and ecstatic chambermaids'. Thanks to this spirited historical method, the full story of Prince Vladimir, who was to acquire over 300 concubines of his own, and then renounce them on becoming a Christian, can now be told. Mr Volkoff sees it as an epic of valour, wisdom and statesmanship, in which one superhuman ruler made it possible for the Russians to become the united, orthodox and civilised nation they remained until 1917. If that is how you see things, this is the book for You'