The Perfect Mirror of Seliger

          The yellowing birch trees and dark evergreens are reflected in the perfect mirror of Lake Seliger. Overhead, squadrons of geese fly in triangle formation, heading south for winter. Like life itself, Russia’s summer is painfully short but in autumn the sun still breaks through the gathering clouds, offering a last chance to holiday.

         The characters in Chekhov’s plays languished in the countryside and wished they were in the capital. Muscovites today complain of stress and wish they were in the country. Kostya and Ira, who run a kitchen-design business in Moscow, and their daughter Katya, an art student, have escaped to the village of Beryozovo for one final weekend of relaxation in reasonably mild weather.

         Their country home is three times bigger than the other houses in the village. They bought one of the traditional houses – of stone in this area, not wood – and extended it. They even have a sauna. They are not super-rich, just middle class Russians, who see themselves ploughing their profits into their own land and helping to keep the village alive.

         At the door, they are met by Tamara Vasilievna, Kostya’s mother, who has spent the whole summer at Beryozovo, working in the garden. Many Russian villages these days are populated only in the summer, when city people return to their rural roots for a vacation. A few old people will remain in Beryozovo when the lake freezes over and the snow drifts up to the roofs but Tamara Vasilievna is packing up to return to St. Petersburg until next April.

         They don’t know it yet but for a large brown poodle called Archie and five cats, the freedom of summer is about to come to an end. They will be caged up and carried back variously to Moscow and St. Petersburg to spend the winter in cramped, fuggy apartments.

         After the 400-km drive up from Moscow, Kostya, Ira and Katya tuck into Tamara Vasilievna’s soup and homegrown vegetables before taking a stroll along the lakeside. Most of the boats have been put away but one old pensioner will let them use his rowing boat later on if they wish. That night, they stoke up the sauna. In Russian villages, Saturday is the traditional day for taking a +banya+ or steam bath and all the villagers are invited up to the big new house to take turns at sweating in the 100-degree steam.

         Sunday is a day for a long lie-in and an improving visit to the local museum in the regional centre of Ostashkov. The town has seen more prosperous days. Past the elaborate stucco Post Office, now falling into disrepair, a drunk staggers, a human wreck among the architectural ruins. The museum is housed in what should have been a church but the Communists stripped it of its icons and turned it into a bread factory and now it would require a fortune to restore it to its religious function.

         Still, the exhibition is interesting. It explains the ice-age origin of the landscape and the Finno-Ugric derivation of the name, Lake Seliger. There is a painting of ladies in Tsarist times wearing costumes encrusted with local pearls, evidence that then the lake offered other treasure besides fish. The visitors are fascinated by a pair of high boots in which a fisherman in the old days could have stood in water for 24 hours without spoiling the leather. The recipe for waterproofing the leather has been lost.

         +I think creating a museum is a reasonable way to use a church, + says Kostya. He has in mind all the unholy ways in which churches were used in Soviet times. They were turned into factories and prisons. One in St. Petersburg became the Museum of the Arctic and where the altar should have been, the atheists put a stuffed polar bear!

         The visit to the museum is just a warm-up for the family’s pilgrimage to the island monastery of Nilova Pustyn. In the museum, they learnt that Orthodox St. Nil did not sleep lying down for 40 years but only leaned against the wall while he prayed for all those travelling on water. The monastery named after him was used as a prison in the Soviet period, indeed at the beginning of World War Two, when Stalin was still in alliance with Hitler, Polish officers were executed there.

         +Then it became a holiday camp, + says Tamara Vasilievna.

         +Effectively still a prison, + says Kostya. +Then it became an old peoples’ home. +

         +Effectively still a prison, + jokes Tamara Vasilievna.

         Now it is a functioning monastery, with monks, and its chapels and quadrangles are being restored. It gleams gold in the sunshine while the lake throws back the azure of the sky.

         On the morning before the return to Moscow, there is time for a boat ride across the lake to the sun-dappled forest, which is thick with edible mushrooms and poisonous toadstools. Then the cats that are going to Moscow are caged. Koshka goes into her box meekly but Barsik resists. Kostya decides that the kitten Meloch can sit for the car ride on Katya’s knee.

         Tamara Vasilievna, who will go separately to St. Petersburg in another fortnight, plies the family with bags of potatoes, bottles of pickled beetroot and jars of cranberries. They have had the last of the sunshine and now they also have their vitamins to see them through the long, harsh Russian winter.

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