Ivo Andric won the Nobel Prize for his novel, THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA, about an ornate structure built 400 years ago in Bosnia. It linked  two parts of the town of Visegrad and witnessed the surge and ebb of Turkish authority in the Balkans. Through that bridge readers understand the town and observe generations of its inhabitants: Serbs, Muslims and Austrians. Thus, from one elegant bridge, our minds are led to village, culture, religion and today’s Balkan powder keg.

A recent non-fiction work with similar intent comes from New York TIMES foreign correspondent Serge Schmemann. The subject is his ancestral village, named in various eras Goryainovo, Karovo, Sergiyevskoye and Koltsovo. In 1997 after two extended journalistic tours in the USSR/Russia, Schmemann issued  ECHOES OF A NATIVE LAND: TWO CENTURIES OF A RUSSIAN VILLAGE, (New York,  Alfred  A. Knopf, 350 pages, $27.50).

Of the village Serge Schmemann writes: 

“It lies by the Oka River in the ancient Russian heartland, 90 miles south of Moscow.... It is a village to which I was originally drawn because before the Russian Revolution it had been part of an estate owned by my mother’s family.” 
(p. 3)

A Tale of Two Clans

The Russian monarchy, ripe for change on the eve of the First World War, collapsed too quickly. This gave the Communists an unearned opportunity to annihilate old Russia’s soul: its villages, countryside, rural estates, churches and monasteries. (p. 24)

Today’s dwellers in the ancestral village are likely to call it not Sergiyevskoye but Karovo, from the Kar family. In 1618 Thomas Car (or Carr) and two brothers left Scotland to serve the first Romanov Tsar. “In 1775 Major General Vasily Alexeyevich Kar bought at auction a large estate on the Oka between Kaluga and Aleksin.“ General Kar was the fifth generation of fighting men descended from the original Scottish immigrant. (54f)  In 1843 the General’s son sold Karovo to Mikhail Gerasimovich Osorgin for 600,000 rubles. The estate included more than 600 serfs and over 8,327 acres of land, including eight villages. (pp. 73-75)

ECHOES OF A NATIVE LAND describes the Osorgin family’s manor house (destroyed in 1923), the church (destroyed in 1952, but with bell tower left standing), gardens, paths, barns and industrial buildings. What began in elegance had become a Communist wasteland by the 1980s. But today’s one-time Communist officials, librarians, teachers and even some collective farmers continued to love the farmlands along the Oka as much as the Osorgins had.

The author’s grandfather, Sergei Osorgin, wrote what the estate had meant to him and should to his descendants as well: 
 

“Sergiyevskoye was a spiritual and physical cradle for us. Of course, when I say Sergiyevskoye I presuppose that setting and moral air which surrounded us when our parents taught us to talk, to pray, and to think.” (p. 83)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author roams over Russia’s religion, history, class system and politics.

-- “The myth of the Russians as a people imbued with a special spirituality, was central to the culture, and religion permeated every aspect of daily life.” The Bolsheviks set out “to rip religion out by its roots and replace it with their own ideology.” (p. 120) The author’s ancestors were devoted to the Orthodox Church, with many joining the clergy. The Osorgins, including the David Morgan family of Asheville, NC are proud of their kinswoman, Saint Juliana of Lazarevskoye (d. 1605). Mother of 13, she was renowned for her spiritual depths and generosity to the poor.

--In 1876 the Osorgins moved to Saint Petersburg. In 1903 Mikhail Mikhailovich Osorgin, age 42,  was appointed Governor of Grodno (now divided between Poland and Belarus). One of his duties was to manage the Tsar’s favorite hunting preserve of some 621,000 acres. (pp. 137-145)

--Osorgins lived through serf emancipation in 1861, growing terrorism and assassinations, through the 1905 defeat by Japan, labor uprisings and finally  World War I and the first years of the Bolshevik revolution. 

--Russians often triumphed. But always tsars went too far, attempted too much and lost touch with their people. Communists did not invent social regimentation. Peter the Great had imposed military order on all.  Love of military images carried over to the Communist era. Stalin’s economy was “central command.” Workers were herded into “brigades.” Retirees were  “veterans of labor”. Crops were harvested in “campaigns.” “But in the end, the underlying chaos always reasserted itself.”  (p. 224)

--Once the monarchy collapsed, the first Communists came to Sergiyevskoye. Local peasants protected the Osorgins and saw them safely away when their estate was confiscated. More than seven decades later, some locals still remembered that family with affection.

--In visits during the 1990s, Serge Schmemann found more than one senior citizen having been raised religious in childhood, then become Communist careerists working  for the community, then patriotically engaged against the invading Germans in World War II, finally, after the political thaw, returning to religion. But there was one difference: they never stopped venerating either Lenin or their party cards. (p. 241)

--The author’s research was aided  by the tenacious Russian habit of saving and cataloging everything. Once it became safe, many letters and service records of his ancestors were brought to his attention.

Through dogged research and visits to Sergiyevskoye, Serge Schmemann rekindled in himself  the enduring love of his family and their humble neighbors for the land along the high banks of the Oka River.  “I had claimed my rightful place on this Sergiyevskoye soil, I thought.” (p. 314)

-000-

 for the ASHEVILLE TRIBUNE]