Without Bird-Cherry Blossoms

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The following is excerpted from Without Bird-Cherry Blossoms by Pantaleimon Romanov (from Great Soviet Short Stories, Dell Publishing Co., 1962).

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I don’t think there has been a more beautiful spring than this one.

And I’m feeling so sad, dear Vera.

Sad, sick at heart, as if I’ve spoiled forever something unique in my life ...

There’s a broken-necked bottle on my window in the dormitory with a small crumpled branch of bird-cherry blossoms in it. I brought it home yesterday .... And for some reason I feel like crying when I look at this bottle.

I’ll brace myself and tell you everything. Not long ago I met a man who’s in another department of my University. I’m far from being sentimental, as he likes to say; far from any regrets for my lost virginity; and especially from feeling remorse for my first "fall". But there's something eating away at me, dimly, vaguely and relentlessly.

I'll tell you in a minute, completely frankly and "shamelessly", how it all happened. But first I'd like to ask you a few questions.

When you went with Paul for the first time, didn't you want your first love to be something special, didn't you feel that the days of this love should be different, somehow, from other, ordinary days?

And didn't it strike you that it was degrading somehow, in this first special time of the spring of your life, to go around with your shoes unpolished, to wear a dirty or torn blouse?

I'm asking because all of the people of my own age around here look at it quite differently than I. And I don't have enough courage to think and act as I feel.

Surely it takes a great effort to go against what's accepted by the environment you live in.

Around here everyone believes in behaving with some sort of arrogant defiance toward everything beautiful, toward any sort of neatness or grooming or trying to live in pleasant surroundings.

Here in the dormitory, everywhere you look there's dirt and litter, disorder and rumpled beds. Cigarette butts clutter the window sill, torn posters announcing meetings dangle from flimsy plywood partitions, and not one of us even attempts to fix the place up. And the fact that there is a rumor that we are going to be moved to another dormitory has brought out the very worst in everyone, and what's more, has encouraged deliberate damage and destruction.

In general, it's as if we were ashamed to have anyone see us spend any time on such stupidities as trying to make a clean beautiful place to live in, a place of healthy fresh air. And it's not that we haven't a moment of free time left because we have such important things to do; but because we feel obliged to detest any sort of concern for beauty. I don't know why we feel this way.

It's even stranger when you consider that our government, our proletarian government, spends a great amount of money and energy to make everything beautiful: we have beautiful squares with flowerbeds such as we never had under the rule of the capitalists and landlords who boasted about their love for refined, beautiful life. All of Moscow gleams with cleanliness, even the old plaster houses. And our University, once an eyesore under the old system, has turned into the most handsome building in Moscow.

And we feel proud, despite ourselves, that the University is so beautiful. Meanwhile, within these walls made clean and beautiful by our government, our inner lives are governed by dirt and disorder.

All of our young men and women act as if they were afraid they might be suspected of having good manners. They purposely talk in an impertinent, vulgar tone of voice, using the worse gutter slang, the coarsest words they can find for their conversations.

The dirtiest words are given the place of honor in our vocabulary. And if some of our young girls happen to grow indignant of this, it's even worse, because then someone will set about to "teach them their native tongue" in the lowest possible way.

Only a vulgar, cynical, licentious manner is considered acceptable. You might explain it by saying we're poor students, unable to buy beautiful clothes and therefore we pretend that we don't give a damn about such things. Or you might say that children of the revolution such as we are have no business with sentimentality or pretty manners. But after all, if we're children of the revolution, then we should, after all, take example from our government which strives to make life beautiful for its people, not merely for the sake of beauty alone, but also for the sake of health and cleanliness. And so you might think it's about time for us to drop this exaggerated, devil-may-care, uncouth manner.

But do you know that the majority of us like to act this way? And not only the men; the girls like it too because they have more freedom and they don't have to bother with their appearance.

And finally it pervades our most intimate moments, this hatred of anything beautiful or clean or healthy; even at those times you find the same informality and vulgarity and a certain dread of revealing any human gentleness or delicacy or considerateness.

And all of this comes from the fear of not conforming to the unwritten moral code we've set up for ourselves.

Everything's different at your Conservatory. I'm often sorry I transferred to the University. And I often wonder what would happen if my mother, a country midwife who worships me and looks up to me almost as to a superior creature, heard the sort of language we use and saw the filthy way we live — what would she think?

We don't believe in love, only in sex, because we class love contemptuously under the heading of "psychology" and we believe only in physiology.

The girls go off casually with the men, for a week, for a month, or sometimes just for a night. And anyone who looks for something more in love than physiology is laughed at and considered pathetic and rather feeble-minded.

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From here the girl who is speaking goes on to relate how she had just lost her virginity in a rough sex quickie with a crude, bold, profligate fellow in a dirty, filthy, cluttered room (with “unswept cigarette butts, scraps of paper and dirt tracked in from the outside on the floor; telephone numbers and doodles scribbled on all the walls; rumpled, unmade beds, dirty dishes, empty bottles, egg shells, tin teacups on the windowsill”) where he stayed with some other students. She found him attractive, he had invited her, she went to his room. He went right to the point, she resisted, but he insisted and was anxious to get things over with before some of his roommates walked in. After they finished he wanted her to quickly leave saying, “It’s time for you to go, the gang will be here any minute”. After leaving she noticed that a crumpled sprig of bird-cherry blossoms that she had just purchased was still pinned to her blouse.

My interest in this story is the ways, outlooks, and attitudes that characterized the students in the University the speaker was attending. I have no doubt this story is based on observation of a real phenomenon that occurred under Communism. The girl asked a lot of questions. My questions are the same as hers. Why? Explain this kind of behavior. Explain their cynicism, depravity, preoccupation with dirt and filth. What would cause a person to choose to live like a pig in dirt and filth, to descend to the lowest level morally, to reject goodness, to “purposely talk in an impertinent, vulgar tone of voice, using the worse gutter slang, the coarsest words they can find for their conversations.” How is this kind of mind and character created? Does it have something to do with the atheistic beliefs of Marxism? Does denying the existence of any god have anything to do with it? I can’t imagine myself ever living in dirt and filth and using that kind of language. Why not? What makes my natural feelings and attitudes what they are? I am a godfearing, tidy, clean, well-organized person. What makes a person dirty, unkempt, and addicted to vulgar, filthy language? Back in the 1960's we had the hippie movement here in America. The hippies presented themselves as dirty, longhaired, scroungy types living in communes. They were associated with drugs, alcohol, and free love. Is this the same phenomenon?

What is behind all this? Is all of this a reaction to Christianity and its values? A rejection of Christianity and its values of chastity, decency, moral responsibility, and goodness? Is it the mind of Satan? An embracing of evil? It appears to be a deliberate rejection of morality and goodness.

Really, underneath, this issue is all about sex, ones attitude toward it. If one makes the basic assumption that there is no God in Heaven, that there is no absolute moral authority, that man is simply an animal and nothing more, then there is no rational reason for any restraints with regard to sex or any other type of behavior. Man is then simply free to conduct himself as an animal, live as the animals do. There is then no reason at all for this thing we call shame. All conduct is legitimate. And if we are all nothing but simple animals there is no reason for cleanness or tidiness. Pigs just wallow in their filth and are perfectly happy doing it.

Perhaps the following quotations give some insight into this:

The evil implanted in man by nature spreads so imperceptibly, when

the habit of wrong-doing is unchecked, that he himself can set no limit

to his shamelessness. Cicero

When lust, by unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,

but most by lewd and lavish acts of sin, lets in defilement to

the inward parts, the soul grows clotted by contagion, embodies

and imbrutes till she quite lose the divine property of her

first being.

Milton

I regard that man as lost, who has lost his sense of shame.

Plautus

Shame is a great restraint upon sinners at first; but that soon

falls off: and when men have once lost their innocence, their

modesty is not like to be long troublesome to them. For

impudence comes on with vice, and grows up with it. Lesser

vices do not banish all shame and modesty; but great and

abominable crimes harden men's foreheads, and make them

shameless. When men have the heart to do a very bad thing,

they seldom want the face to bear it out.

Tillotson

Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom

and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches,

sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one

continued series of errors. They taste no real or substantial

pleasure; but, resembling so many brutes, with eyes always

fixed on the earth, and intent upon their laden tables, they

pamper themselves in luxury and excess.

Plato

Sordid and infamous sensuality, the most dreaded evil that

issued from the box of Pandora, corrupts the entire heart and

eradicates every virtue.

Fenelon

Capricious, wanton, bold, and brutal lust is meanly selfish;

when resisted, cruel; and, like the blast of pestilential

winds, taints the sweet bloom of nature's fairest forms.

Milton

The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.

Bovee

Uncleanness is the parent of blindness of mind.

His heart cannot be pure whose tongue is not clean.

2 June 2022