heart’s content. In the Crimea, I saw the sea through his eyes. 48 Much later, she made a pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s grave at Yasnaia Poliana—to “listen to the silence” and to experience the “feeling of being a part of something important, powerful, and pure.” Raisa Orlova had already been there: she and her first husband Leonid Shersher (an ethnic Jew and an IFLI poet) had spent their “honey week” there. 49 In the 1930s, all college-educated Soviets—and especially Hodl’s children— lived with Pushkin, Herzen, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and an assortment of Western classics as much as they lived with industrialization, collectivization, and cultural revolution. Samuil Agursky, a top official in the Party’s Jewish Section and the greatest Soviet enemy of the Hebrew language and Zionism, raised his son Melib (who did not speak Yiddish) on “Heine, Diderot, Shakespeare, Schiller, Plautus, Goethe, Cervantes, Thackeray, Swift, Beranger, and much else. Father also bought a lot of prerevolutionary literature, especially the Niva supplements, which contained Gogol, Andreev, Hamsun, Ibsen, and Goncharov. We also had Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Rabelais, Maupassant, Hugo, Pushkin, Gorky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Lermontov, Chekhov, Belinsky, Derzhavin, Veresaev, and Nadson. As for Soviet literature, we had curiously little of it, except for Mayakovsky, Sholokhov, and Furmanov.” 50 The combination of all of the “great books” (paintings, symphonies, ballets) ever created with faith in Party orthodoxy was known as socialist realism. In the 1930s, “world culture” and its ever growing Russian component informed and molded Soviet socialism the way classical, baroque, and Gothic architecture shaped Soviet cities and dwellings. When Evgenia Ginzburg, a privileged Communist intellectual and the wife of a high Party official, found herself in cattle car no. 7 on the way to a labor camp, she kept up her own spirit and that of her fellow inmates by reciting from memory Griboedov’s Woe from Wit and Nekrasov’s The Russian Women . When the eavesdropping guards accused her of having smuggled in a book, she proved her innocence—and revealed theirs—by reciting the whole text of Eugene Onegin . The head guard sat in judgment. “At first [he] wore a threatening expression: she’d get stuck in a minute, and then he’d show her! This gave way by degrees to astonishment, almost friendly curiosity, and finally ill-concealed delight.” He asked for more. “So I went on. The train had started again, and the wheels kept time to Pushkin’s meter.” 51 Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was to do for the Great Patriotic War what Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace had done for the “Patriotic War of 1812.” The central character is an ethnic Jew who, before the war, “never thought of himself