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____| E X C E R P T | Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village BY SERGE SCHMEMANN NONFICTION ALFRED A. KNOPF 350 PAGES ______=====> This is the story of a Russian Village, known at different times over its three centuries of recorded history as Goryainovo, Karovo, Sergiyevskoye, and now Koltsovo. It lies by the Oka River in the ancient Russian heartland, 90 miles south of Moscow, near the city of Kaluga. 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. But the Soviet government's long refusal to let me go there turned my curiosity into a mission. I finally reached Koltsovo only when Communist rules began to wane. I came to know the people; I immersed myself in the local lore; I even bought a log house there. Koltsovo became my little corner of Russia -- my entry into the charm, beauty, and romance of that vast northern land, and also its backwardness, cruelty, and suffering. I first arrived in Russia with my family in 1980, but ten years passed before I reached the village. By then the stern ideological taboos of the Soviet era were lifting, and people in the village were starting to lose their fear of talking to foreigners. Gradually, they opened up their memories and their history: how the women fooled the German occupiers who wanted to chop down the stately larches of the Alley of Love, how the old drunk Prokhor Fomichyov took the church apart after the war to trade bricks for vodka. Some went further back and remembered how in the thirties the Bolsheviks sent industrious peasants into exile and herded the rest into collectives. A retired teacher even remembered how before the revolution the peasants would stop to listen to the great "silver bell" at the church, and how village girls would gape at the bows and smocks of the young mistresses on their way to Sunday worship. The people talked about the present, too -- about how youths left the village as soon as they finished school, and only the old people and the drunks stayed on; how the love child of the albino accountant was beaten to death by his son in a drunken brawl; how nobody knew what to make of the new "democracy"; how the collective farm was selling off cattle to pay its mounting debts while the director built himself a big new house. The first person I met in the village was Lev Vasilievich Savitsky, the retired head of an orphanage that had operated there after the war, and a staunch Communist. He told me how a KGB agent had come out there a few years earlier because some foreign correspondent was trying to visit Koltsovo, claiming his ancestors came from there. Lev Vasilievich said the agent and the village leaders concluded that the place was too rundown to show a foreign reporter, that he would only write how things had gotten worse under the Communists. And so I learned at last the real reason I had been barred so long from Koltsovo. When I told Lev Vasilievich that I was that inquisitive reporter, he fell silent, and for a while he eyed me with suspicion and unease. SALON | Jan. 19, 1998 BACK TO THE SALON BOOK AWARDS INTRODUCTION