I am working on a couple of projects simultaneously (as often happens), and they all converge in the heartbreaking letter I read yesterday from a poet named Valerii Pereleshin who was living in Shanghai. Illness and discomfort, distance from family, concern about endings whether in literature or in life.
In 1944 Pereleshin's mother was in Harbin--a "Russian city on Chinese territory"--where he had grown up after they fled Russia in 1920. Pereleshin (who became Father German when he took his religious vows in Harbin) had served more or less happily as a priest in Pekin for a number of years. But having been transferred to Shanghai, he wrote to his mother that it was "gray and uninteresting" after Pekin. His discomforts were physical and psychological, exacerbated by broader conditions about in the world.
During the war, the mail service between Shanghai and Harbin was less than ideal. Pereleshin regularly wrote to his mother to tell her he is writing regularly--indeed he tried to write every week. He heard from her less frequently than that, and it caused him some distress. He also sent letters to Pekin to a friend who did not respond at all. Did the letters not find their addressee, or were they simply being ignored?
It's hard to keep your spirits up when you are separated from your loved ones, when months go by with no letters getting through, when you don't get along with your boss but cannot leave your position. When you're living in a place that does not seem to heat the houses in winter, and when winter lasts so very long. When the Russians and Germans are for some reason fighting an endless war, and your brother is incommunicado while fighting for the Americans, or so you believe. When your literary efforts are not encouraged, but you cannot imagine giving up poetry.
Pereleshin was considering leaving the church, though he wavered during the Easter season because he found the liturgy so beautiful. He longed to go to Pekin to see his beloved, and he wished his mother had at least come to Shanghai with him so that he could be sure she was eating well and keeping up her strength.
He wrote: Дорогая моя, береги себя и не падай духом. Ты мне совершенно необходима, ради кого я стал бы иначе держать себя в руках и не поддаваться страшному соблазну другого — уже совсем окончательного ухода? (My dear one, take good care and keep your spirits up. You are absolutely necessary to me, for whom else would I keep hold of myself and not give in to the terrible temptation of another, quite final ending?)
One of the ways Pereleshin kept his own spirits up was by participating in a poetic circle they called "Fridays"--a regular evening gathering of mostly women poets, many of whom had also been part of the "Churaevka" circle back in Harbin. I've been researching Churaevka--both the circle of poets in Harbin and their inspiration, Georgii Grebenshchikov, who founded a kind of utopian village in Connecticut in an effort to keep the Russian spirit alive in diaspora.
More about that later. For me, the connection between Russian Orthodoxy and the free, wide expanses of Siberia in Grebenshchikov's vision is not intiuitive. But for Pereleshin, submitting to the Orthodox hierarchy allowed him a path when he met barriers in his secular life that he could not overcome. This path too had its barriers, though Pereleshin tried to maintain a positive attitude.
In another letter Pereleshin wrote to his mother words that I have sent to a friend in Russia: Всё же не падай духом и жди с возможным спокойствием. Мы еще поживем хорошо и весело. (Don't become dispirited and wait as patiently as you can. We will still have good and happy times.)
Some would say that Russians don't deserve to have fun times anymore. But this war will end, and things will change--without that terrible finale that Valerii feared. At least for most.
Thanks for the information about Pereleshin to Olga Kuznetsova, whose two publications of his letters in 2013 and 2019 have been vital in learning and thinking about him and his fate.
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