No, not
Mother Russia, but one of her offshoots: the neighborhood church in the district
of Geneva known as "La Petite Russie," or "Little Russia," where Lenin, Bakunin,
Dostoevsky, and others resided during the great Tsarist diaspora and after,
right up until the Bolshevik uprising of 1917. Joseph Conrad wrote a novel about
the Geneva Russians: Under Western Eyes, which
I still remember as capturing the atmosphere of Geneva's snowy streets in
midwinter and the warmth of the expatriate Russian cafes and salons. A modern
legacy of the Russians is the way Geneva cafes serve hot tea: in a glass, with
sugar in a spoon on the saucer.
The district figures prominently in my forthcoming novel The Adorations, as in this excerpt:
I
had an Italo-Balkan History class at one o’clock and planned to be seated
immediately afterward, or as fast as my bulbous legs could carry me, at a
marble table in the corner next to the newspaper rack at the Café de Rive, with
in front of me hot tea in a glass, Russian style. The Rive district is, or was,
Geneva’s Little Russia, with such accents of the Motherland as said tea in a
glass, and Slatkine’s bookstore, and the gilt-domed Russian church on the Rue
Beauvais, just up the way in a quiet neighborhood of handsome two-story town
houses that has something about it even to this day of Saltykov-Schchedrin’s
Saratov-on-the-Volga, or Tolstoy’s dusty Kazan. All this was Geneva’s legacy
from that doughty bunch of Russian expats (one named Lenin, another Plekhanov,
and a third, Bukharin, who saluted Geneva as “the Holy City of Russian
thought”) when the world’s worst horror seemed to be inequality, and serfdom,
and starvation, and the Tsar’s Cossacks on horseback. Then those who’d fled
returned in ‘17 and got to work on horrors beyond all imagining.
