The Hood

Milano

Milan, early nineties. My philosophy exams finished, I went to see Professor Scaramuzza. His course had stayed with me — he specialized in the aesthetics of ugliness, mostly of the Hegelian variety. I didn't know him well, but he seemed a decent man. I knew the books better than the professors, and academic dynamics were entirely foreign to me.

I remember his office: formica, metal chairs, concrete. Set among the Renaissance arches of the Università Statale, the Philosophy Department was an artificial limb grafted onto a mutilated body — the building had taken some bombs in the last war.

Few words. I told him I was bilingual in French and proposed we put it to use. He offered me two texts on La Laideur dans l'Art by an unknown Russian émigré, published in 1947. Her name was Lydie Krestovsky.

I saw him again months later, once I had gathered the material.

Passage de la Main d'Or

I moved to Paris, to the passage de la Main d'Or — a delightfully alchemical name, though it apparently came from a theater long since demolished. I lived in the home of Yvonne Guilloux, who had just become my mother-in-law.

As a child, I later discovered, Yvonne had a friend named Clara Malraux, who was always talking to her about Alix Tardieu. My mother.

Yvonne was a good, generous person. She spoke of her father, Louis Guilloux: how a childhood bone tuberculosis had left his left hand slightly deformed, ruling out the manual trades — he could not become a cobbler; how, back in Brittany, he had taken in the communist volunteers of the Spanish Civil War. She told me that at school, when she spoke Breton, the teachers beat her fingers with a ruler — now that they've eradicated it, they teach it in universities. And she told me of the time, young and beautiful, she had danced with Ignazio Silone at the Venetian receptions that followed the colloquia of the European Society of Culture.

When your father is famous, a young woman is marked forever. Time stops. A cult forms — as I could see in my own home, too.

The Hunt

I began my research with two dull books from 1947 in hand, and perhaps to avoid reading them too closely, I started walking the streets of Paris. It was my salvation.

I found a civil-status document for the author. At the Bibliothèque Tourgueniev — the Greek I had learned in school allowed me to decipher the Cyrillic catalogue cards — I discovered other publications of hers in Russian, a language I did not know. I hunted for clues like a forensic detective, in the hushed apartment that housed the library, with its scent of wood, the creak of the parquet, the curious and respectful gaze of the librarian, who seemed the sacristan of a story — or of History. Through the old site in the Latin Quarter had passed, in successive waves, White Russians and Red Russians; through it had passed the Nazis, whose columns of tanks my mother had watched as a child, not far away. From the new site, near the Mouffetard district behind the Sorbonne, you could trace the streets of the Mensheviks. A Russian world I had never suspected was opening before me. At home I devoured Dostoevsky. When I wasn't reading, I traced the streets.

I frequented the Bibliothèque Nationale de France — the old site on rue de Richelieu, founded by Cardinal Mazarin and later patronized by the young Lenin. On that street the leader of the Revolution had collided with the French proletariat, represented by a concierge he paid every day to leave his bicycle in the courtyard. One day, returning from the BnF, he found the bike stolen: the parking fee, the concierge explained, did not include guardianship.

It was at the BnF that the breakthrough came. I found another French text by Lydie Ratner Krestovsky: a book dedicated to her husband, the young pupil of Bourdelle who had enlisted pour la France and died at the front in 1914. She loved him deeply — it breathes through every line. But between the lines, another story glimmers. The text read like an apocryphal gospel.

Two drawings by Bourdelle opened the volume.

The first: Vassily lying on his back in the grass, arms along his body, face turned to the sky — a Christ taken down from the cross. "Je pris mon outil des tracés," Bourdelle writes, "j'essayais d'y former une jeune figure calme [...] couchée sur la verdeur de l'herbe, le visage tourné et comme offert, face au vaste et paisible azur."¹

The second took my breath away. A Masonic compass dominates the page, its vertex at the top, its arms vertical along the sides. Inside, Vassily is a crucified Christ — but there is no cross. His raised arms touch the compass arms at the exact height where the nails would have been driven. His head is reclined to the right, eyes closed. Behind him, a female figure gazes upward toward the compass hinge. Beneath the hinge, an angel with outspread wings holds the whole structure up with a raised right arm. The woman's hands support Vassily's from below; his palms face the sky. From his palms, like inverted stigmata, rise flames.

"Que ces pages toutes fragiles soient notre mur, Krestovsky, un mur plus frémissant," Bourdelle writes. "Que mes petits cartons de fresque par le mortier divin du souvenir, nous gardent les parfums spiritualisés des tons, d'où s'ouvrira lentement dans les âges la fleur éternisée du cœur."²

I had found something to sink my teeth into.

The Web

A thought was taking shape. Its contours sharpened with every encounter, every walk. By day I crisscrossed the capital with my most precious guide, the Guide des Russes en France by Raymond de Ponfilly — more a compass than a guidebook, in which streets were organized by anecdotes, presences, and improbable encounters of every stripe. Topography mapped the relationships between ideas — relationships otherwise invisible.

By night I delivered couscous. Allô Couscous — that was the name — made use of students with cars to deliver meals across the city. With a street atlas in one hand — the TomTom did not yet exist — and the steering wheel in the other, I traced the boulevards des Maréchaux, named for Napoleon's marshals: Davout, Ney, men who had marched on Moscow. I delivered to the concierges of the various avenues Lénine in the banlieue, to a rich cocaine addict in a bathrobe with a bombshell at his side and a panoramic view of the Arc de Triomphe, to the Caserne des Célestins on the boulevard Henri IV, where cavalrymen in parade uniform greeted you by opening champagne with a saber, to tiny Marais apartments reached by climbing stairs at the top of which an agoraphobic arm would emerge from a door, extend the money, and take the goods.

I followed leads, and each one opened a world. I would discover a name, race to the historic Russian bookshop on rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and acquire every French translation available: Shestov, Berdiaev, Merezhkovsky, Rozanov... An old habit of mine, one that lengthened my studies considerably: back in Milan, when a university course covered thirty pages of a philosopher and three hundred of the professor's parasitic commentary, I read the philosopher's entire work.

Every encounter was real and ideal. Walking the streets was at once thinking and traversing history — including my own, including my family's. I read Berdiaev, and my grandfather told me, laughing, that he remembered a strange tic of his: every so often he would let out the roar of a lion. I read Dostoevsky's Demons and found Boris de Schloezer, its translator, at Pontigny alongside Lydie — the only three Russians ever admitted to the place where my grandfather, then a young poet, had made his debut under the wing of Roger Martin du Gard, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The same Décades de Pontigny were attended by the same André Gide who in 1936 traveled to the USSR — together with Louis Guilloux. On his return, Gide published his Retour de l'U.R.S.S., exposing Stalin's cult of personality and the regime's control of information. Aragon demanded that Guilloux write a public denunciation of Gide in Ce Soir. Guilloux refused. The newspaper fired him. The Breton lost his salary, left Paris, and returned to his Brittany to take in the volunteers of the Spanish Civil War.

Saint-Serge

I began to frequent the Institut Saint-Serge, another historic site of the Russian community. A small church tucked against the almost hilly park of the Buttes-Chaumont in the eighteenth arrondissement. You opened a gate, followed a little country path — in the middle of the city — and came upon a wooden church, filled with carpets and icons. Beside it, the institute of Russian Orthodox theology, with its priests and its books.

I came from the Platonic school, which had formed me in my youth. From the Academy of Athens to Saint-Serge, from Plato to Sergei Bulgakov, the institute's founder — the passage was as natural as from Greek to Cyrillic. A former Protestant chapel built for a German brickyard, the building had been seized by the French authorities at the outbreak of the First World War and given to their Russian allies, becoming the oldest center of Orthodox theology in Western Europe.

I began to visit the honorary dean, Father Boris Bobrinskoy. First within the institute's walls, then at his home nearby. He received me with his pale blue eyes — transparent, patient. We spoke of Lydie, then of Plato, then, as time passed, of matters increasingly personal. Père Boris celebrated the Orthodox liturgy in French, in the crypt of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on rue Daru. I went to attend.

In the half-light, a priest lay stretched out on the carpets among the parishioners. The fabrics muffled the joyful sound of children running about during Mass. The pure, simple singing told of Byzantium. The golden iconostasis re-vealed.

The Hood Opens

Life and study mirrored each other, questioning the very meaning of knowledge. And life answered — again and again — in a register far removed from the Stalinist purges: in the form of warmth, tenderness, simplicity. The Orthodox faith warms; the Western faith illuminates. Entering the crypt, every word yielded to a heartbeat.

I instinctively recoiled from the aesthetics of genius, from the cult of the superman — feeling as mine, and profoundly right, the conception of art that Plato sets out in the Ion: artistic inspiration, the Muse, is like a magnet to which the artist clings — the first ring in a chain that transmits the divine magnetism through him to all who receive the work.

This was the aesthetic I recognized in Jean Tardieu, who was first and foremost the playful, shy, kindly grandfather: already a public figure, he had once come to my primary school class — and later confessed to me that in front of my little classmates he had le trac, a beginner's stage fright.

And if anything unites the Platonic conception and Tardieu's work, it is Mes outils posés sur une table, the poem I love above all others:³

Mes outils d'artisan / sont vieux comme le monde / vous les connaissez / Je les prends devant vous : / verbes adverbes participes / pronoms substantifs adjectifs. / Ils ont su ils savent toujours / peser sur les choses / sur les volontés / éloigner ou rapprocher / réunir séparer / fondre ce qui est pour qu'en transparence / dans cette épaisseur / soient espérés ou redoutés / ce qui n'est pas, ce qui n'est pas encore, / ce qui est tout, ce qui n'est rien. / ce qui n'est plus. / Je les pose sur la table / Ils parlent tout seuls je m'en vais.

From Lydie I learned that the receiver — that hideous term from aesthetics textbooks, meaning the person who reads a book or looks at a painting — is not a mere spectator. Like the metal ring in the Ion, he is traversed by a higher force, and in enjoying the work he retraces within himself the artist's labor, the path from inspiration to the finished piece. The artist in service of the Muse is like one who opens a via ferrata in the mountains. The reader, the viewer, is the one who climbs it after him. Both in service, both ascending.

From père Boris I learned that the meaning of gnôthi seauton, nosce te ipsum, has only one sense: if you know yourself, you can pass on to something else. With that single phrase he opened the hood: pass on to something else... beyond the self. To open to the world, or to verticality, or both at once — because the wonder of creation draws you upward. Everything I had loved, everything I had known, fell into harmony, took on meaning. To the Greek phrase carved on Apollo's temple at Delphi came the answer from The Idiot: now is the moment to face the world.

I asked père Bobrinskoy if he would baptize me. The ceremony took place in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral — where Turgenev's funeral had been held. The library had led me to the cathedral.

Two years later, in Italy, my children were baptized by Father Zelensky, a former pupil of Bobrinskoy. I watched the water, the anointing, the three circles of renunciation of the devil. Two little scraps of five and six dipped into a basin that the small electric water heater had failed to warm, then straight into bathrobes. It was winter. The parish women, moved by pity, rushed to help and slipped gloves onto their bare feet. If it is true, as Rozanov says, that we can offer the Almighty our gaze upon the world — through my eyes, the Good Lord had smiled.

Two lustres later, the name of Alexander Nevsky came to me again. A book from my publishing house, brought out with great difficulty — a study of Dostoevsky's unpublished drawings by the Saint Petersburg scholar Konstantin Barsht — received the Alexander Nevsky Prize, special section Naslednie, Heritage.

Once the hood is open, life speaks in synchronicities.

Written in dialogue with an AI assistant. The life, the memories, and the voice are the author's. Disclosure is the point.