A man accompanies me and Arkady Grigorievich on my last day in Tobolsk. He follows in a separate vehicle. We are not introduced. He does not speak. He bears himself with the coiled restraint of a lion, an elite athlete at rest, or a sniper.  He can leap and kill at a moment’s provocation, though he has no desire to do so; he is above all that. He is not concerned with people, places, and events around him.  He is an artist. He observes calmly and waits.  At one point Arkady Grigorievich asks the man a question, addressing him by name, and I learn he is Andrei.

Finally it is time to set off for Tiumen.  Arkady moves to the passenger seat, and Andrei settles in behind the wheel.

Fyodor Pavlovich unharnesses the side horses and entrusts them to me. I cling to the cold, filthy reins and try to hold the horses, but they’re spooked; they keep backing up, the wind is trying to tear my clothes off, rain beats painfully into my face. Maybe we should turn back?

We made it over one bridge, another, then a third. … At one place we got stuck in the mud and nearly capsized; at another the horses balked, and ducks and seagulls soared overhead and seemed to be laughing at us. From Fyodor Pavovich’s face and unhurried movements, from his silence, I can see that this is not his first time he’s had to struggle like this, that he’s seen worse, that long, long ago he got used to impassable mud, water, and freezing rain. Life does not come cheap to him!

–Chekhov, From Siberia, 12 May 1890

In the USA, where every bozo can drive a car, and where you can’t carry out the most basic functions without an automobile, driving is a mundane matter requiring a limited set of rudimentary skills. We take 15-year old hormone-addled children and hand them car keys.  Mostly our automobiles do the brain work, communicating with us through little screens, lights, and beeps. Your car beeps when you approach and unlocks your door. It might even turn on the engine for you. It tells you to fasten your seat belt, to buckle up your kids. It warms your seat, calibrates the air, listens to voice commands, dials your phone, plays music for you. To back up, you don’t look backwards, or into the rear mirror; you stare at a screen in FRONT of you. You push a button and your car maintains a consistent speed, allowing you to rest your gas-pedal foot. It warns you if the highway patrol is near, if someone is passing you, if a car gets too close, if there is a pedestrian nearby.  Shout an address to your dashboard, and a voice tells you how to get where you’re going, instructs you where to turn, calculates how long it will take to get there, and lets you know if there are any issues with traffic. You can carry on just about every imaginable human activity while behind the wheel. You can eat an entire meal, have your coffee, communicate with friends and family, preen, rehearse your speech.  Some cars operate with no driver at all.

Which provokes the question: why do we need human beings at all?

In Russia driving is a proud profession. Athlete, manager, mechanic, your driver is a master of his art.  Like his predecessors, the great Russian coachmen of previous centuries, he knows his vehicle inside and out, its precise limits and capabilities, what it takes to elicit its finest performance. He knows its growls and hums, and if it breaks down, he can make it purr into action using nothing more than a paper clip and  rubber band.

Feel free to skip this part, or flip to Chapter 3 of Dead Souls.

«Хитри, хитри! вот я тебя перехитрю! — говорил Селифан, приподнявшись и хлыснув кнутом ленивца. — Ты знай свое дело, панталонник ты немецкий! Гнедой — почтенный конь, он сполняет свой долг, я ему с охотою дам лишнюю меру, потому что он почтенный конь, и Заседатель тож хороший конь… Ну, ну! что потряхиваешь ушами? Ты, дурак, слушай, коли говорят! я тебя, невежа, не стану дурному учить. Ишь куда ползет!» Здесь он опять хлыснул его кнутом, примолвив: «У, варвар! Бонапарт ты проклятый!» Потом прикрикнул на всех: «Эй вы, любезные!» — и стегнул по всем по трем уже не в виде наказания, но чтобы показать, что был ими доволен…..»

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, Vol. I, Chapter III

The joys of the road are not without their dangers. If your driver is skilled enough, it is the vehicle–or, as the case may be, the horse– that takes the beating as it delivers its passengers to their destination.  The villanous Dolokhov, in War and Peace, employs one of these expert drivers, a daredevil peasant named Balaga.

More than once in their service he had run over pedestrians and upset vehicles in the streets of Moscow and had always been protected from the consequences by “my gentlemen” as he called them. He had ruined more than one horse in their service. More than once they had beaten him, and more than once they had made him drunk on champagne and Madeira, which he loved; and he knew more than one thing about each of them which would long ago have sent an ordinary man to Siberia. They often called Balaga into their orgies and made him drink and dance at the gypsies’, and more than one thousand rubles of their money had passed through his hands. In their service he risked his skin and his life twenty times a year, and in their service had lost more horses than the money he had from them would buy. But he liked them; liked that mad driving at twelve miles an hour, liked upsetting a driver or running down a pedestrian, and flying at full gallop through the Moscow streets. He liked to hear those wild, tipsy shouts behind him: “Get on! Get on!” when it was impossible to go any faster.

“Those were horses!” Balaga continued the tale. “That time I’d harnessed two young side horses with the bay in the shafts,” he went on, turning to Dolokhov. “Will you believe it, Theodore Ivanych, those animals flew forty miles? I couldn’t hold them in, my hands grew numb in the sharp frost so that I threw down the reins—‘Catch hold yourself, your excellency!’ says I, and I just tumbled on the bottom of the sleigh and sprawled there. It wasn’t a case of urging them on, there was no holding them in till we reached the place. The devils took us there in three hours! Only the near one died of it.”

War and Peace, tr. Maudes, Project Guttenberg (War and Peace, II: V, chapter xvi)

You recall this episode of course. If not, now is the time to tear yourself away from your computer screen and curl up with War and Peace. Come back at the end of the winter, and we shall resume our petty little journey across Siberia.

You must trust your driver. You must not talk to him; he is concentrating.  Do not look out the window. This particular highway has two lanes, the right one, where ordinary mortals creep along, and the left one, which belongs to Andrei. (Please note: Russians [are supposed to] drive in the right lane, as in the US.) There may be a speed limit in Russia but this is a matter of no concern. For Andrei to practice his art to its fullest, his only need is the open road, clear pavement ahead. He finds this freedom in his lane. Occasionally he must drive on the right, with the ordinary mortals.  When Andrei encounters an obstacle here (another vehicle going at the speed limit, say) he will to move back into his rightful lane, the one on the left.  This is when you must close your eyes.

Close your eyes and remember your mantra; remember that life comes to an end for everyone, that we do not determine the time or place. You learned this mostly from Russian literature, so reenter that world in your memory.  Remember that you have had a good life, full of rich experiences and joys. What will happen will happen. Live in the moment.

For Andrei this is not a game, not a chance to play chicken, to show off, to display his art. It is simply his job. Do not whimper; Andrei is in the zone. He is calibrating the distance between the front of our vehicle and the rear bumper of the truck six inches ahead, the speed at which we are traveling

(90 miles per hour, say, though it’s not about the numbers, and how would I know? My eyes are closed)

the velocity and weight of the eighteen-wheeler careening toward us in the left lane, the air pressure, humidity level, and particulate content in the atmosphere, the wind speed and direction, our vehicle’s capacities, tire condition, oil pressure, and many other things a layperson cannot identify, much less understand.

All this data feeds Andrei’s complex computational matrix, mixing there with intuition and skill honed from years of experience. At the precise moment he flips the jib and we veer smoothly into the left lane. The truck that was our initial obstacle sweeps to the right. Its great cargo wall momentarily blocks the view out our right-side window as it rushes backwards.

What we now see ahead of us in the windshield is infinitely more terrifying.

With urgent intensity,  Andrei’s right foot hit hits the floor; the engine emits an ecstatic roar–this is what it, and he, were born for. We free-fall into that brief moment between life and death. Then Andrei gently leans himself and the universe rightwards. We reenter the right lane–the one for ordinary mortals–and the other eighteen-wheeler, the homicidal one, whooshes tamely past our left window.

There is a lunch break along the way. We do not speak.

We are grateful to be alive.