A heart-to-heart conversations with the Tsesarevich Alexei. Oleg Filatov
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playing chess, what he became famous for, and at which championships he headed the list. He spoke especially warmly of Alekhin, who was an excellent chess player and played 265 games blind – folded and won. My father used to demonstrate this method of play for us, but he said it was harmful because it sapped so much energy. He himself played chess when he was laid low by pain. He said that he played instead of taking medicine. It distracted you and made you forget about the pain. He subscribed to chess magazines, analyzing and taking notes. He would tell that Alekhin drank and when it was necessary to take part in the world championships, he would stop drinking, go to the mountains, buy a cow or a she-goat, and drink milk to recover his strength. It was when he lived in Switzerland. Analyzing the games of recent world championships, father arranged the pieces as they had been arranged at the beginning of the game, for instance between Tal’ and Botvinnik. Starting to move the pieces, he would say: “Well, Botvinnik moved the bishop from G1 to F3. Let’s see what Tal’ will do. Tal’ moved a pawn let.” And all this information, the manner in which it was told and the conclusions, how one ought to have moved and what was the result, and where this or that chess-player had made a mistake, – everything settled in our minds. Father did so for us to acquire a passion for this game. It helped him live, his whole life he used to play with an imaginary partner.
He collected hooks and gear for fishing, ah kinds of screws and nuts. He had fitted out several boxes for this, in each of which he kept something. We used to laugh at this weakness of his, but whenever we needed something, we would immediately go to him and he would locate what we needed.
My father loved photography and started teaching it to us when we were children. He bought us “Smena – 8” cameras and books for amateur photographers. When there was time, we did photography from morning till night. Lessons with my father were very interesting for us. My parents provided everything we needed for all this. And he would talk about his own childhood a little. He said that he had liked to play cops and robbers. That was a fashionable game at the time. He used to tell us that he was very mischievous and never gave the adults a moment s peace. For instance, once at a lesson in divine law he played a joke on the priest, nailing his boots down. He was punished for that.
Two of us, his children, are absolute blonds, and two are dark. He was quite dark, too, but he said that as a child he had fair, curly hair. “Every – one loved me. They called me fluff and cut my hair very simply, bowl fashion. It was later that life changed me.” His hair was jet black and only beginning to show gray just before his death.
He often used to say that one needed to know how to speak well and cogently and how to declaim. It is interesting that as an example of eloquence he cited not only Horace and Socrates but Trotsky as well. He used to tell us that during the civil war, when the Red Army units were retreating, Trotsky could talk for hours. The soldiers who heard his speech would attack the enemy and fight to the death. He used to tell us that a person must know how to do that, inasmuch as God has given him the ability to speak. You must construct sentences and set forth your ideas correctly. Each word must be substantive and in no way ostentatious.
He dreamed that I would become a lawyer. When I would ask him why he wanted that so much, he would reply: “Well, why, then you could sort matters out. You would know what to do.” He also made me study foreign languages. I would ask him why he did not speak to me in German, which he knew well, or teach it. He replied that this language had grown hateful to him ever since the war with the Germans.
In childhood, I had no trouble remembering all this. There is no barrier, nothing to fear, especially when it is your parents teaching you. I never felt fear when I was with my father. I felt as though I was living in clover with him. He was an exemplary family man, spending a lot of time with his children and teaching us nearly everything. For example, to write with our left hand in order to develop both hemispheres of the brain. He said that the nobleman could fence with both hands and switch his sword from his injured arm to his healthy one. He made embroidery stand himself and made me learn how to embroider on it – cross stitch, satin stitch, and other ways. When I would ask him why I needed this, he would reply: “What do you mean? This is simply something one must know how to do.” Then he would check my work when I embroidered handkerchiefs for Mama and my sisters for their birthdays. He taught us how to draw. First how to hold the pencil, then how to draw with it, and then he gave us colored pencils. He showed us how to draw on a grid in order to observe symmetry and, later, from memory. Only after that did we move on to watercolors, and later to oils. My father wanted me to show my work in art contests, so I did. He did sculpture with us – using plasticine and clay. He taught us to write compositions, selecting the material we needed from books, examining pages along the diagonal, and selecting what we needed to develop our theme. So that we would know how to express our thoughts figuratively, he would have us write, for example, how the birds fly in spring. He himself made starling houses and taught us to love and study nature. Generally speaking, he loved the spring and always became despondent when autumn arrived. We did not have a church in our settlement, so his soul refreshed itself in nature. By the way, he was very knowledgeable about medicinal herbs.
He did not try to impose his knowledge and abilities on us. A flock of birds or geese would fly overhead and he would suddenly ask, “How many?” If you saw it once, you had to remember it instantly – that was his system of childrearing. I was supposed to remember after one time the names of streets, buildings, people, transportation, and even which way the wind was blowing when they took me to Orenburg. Leaving an unfamiliar building, I was supposed to describe to him what objects were there and how they were laid out. He himself was very observant. When you walked with him in a crowd, he would say, “Did you see that man who passed? He has a peculiar gait. Do you see this one? He keeps looking around, searching for something.” He noticed all kinds of insignificant details and made me remember everything.
Now it seems unusual to me that from my very childhood, somewhere around nine years old, he taught me to remember everything he said the first time. He used to say, “Remember what I say the first time because it not going to repeat it for you. You have to know this in order not to repeat mistakes and not to tell anyone, or there will be trouble.” Even then I realized that he was concerned not only for us but for other people as well. He used to tell us about them and show us their photographs, saying: “I`m showing you one time. I`m not going to show you again. Remember these people.” But whether or not they were alive at the time, we didn’t know.
Sometimes certain people from some unspecified place would pay him very brief visits. He would go out with them and discuss something with them. We never saw them before or after. We could not get him to tell us who they were or why they had come. He smiled and said nothing. Probably he didn’t want us to know his former life and didn’t want us to expose ourselves or those people to danger. In. the 1960s, my father would write postcards to someone and give them to my younger sisters, who could not read yet, to drop in the mailbox. If we asked him whom the postcards were for and what was written there, he only smiled and said nothing.
He had amazing friends. For example, there was the old man Yavorsky, who lived in our village. Once my father took me along to see him, when I was about nine. There was an old man wearing a belted white peasant shirt lying on the stove. My father suddenly said to him: “Tell me, grandpa, how did Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov die?” The old man raised up onto one elbow and looked at me: “And who’s this with you?” “This is my son; you can talk in front of him.” And then the old man told us about waiting for Kuznetsov with Strutinsky. That was their assignment. He was in the Signal Corps in Poland. They were waiting for him outside Lvov, but he never did come. Then they received the news that Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov had died – he had blown himself up when he fell wounded into the hands of the nationalists. For me what was most interesting is where my father met him. He himself said it was at Uralmash [Urals Machine – Building Factory], where he had been trying to get a job.
Often in our childhood years we would see how lonely he was, despite the fact that he had a wife, our mama, who slaved away indefatigably to raise us. All those years, especially in the 1960s,