Living in a fairytale

Is what the citizens of City of the Sun say they want to do. Convinced of the power of optimism and positive thinking, like Voltaire’s doctor Pangloss they want to believe that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

But since they are not fools and cannot deny that in fact this world is not the best one possible, they have fled their misfortunes and retired to their little corner of Siberia to make the best of it, like Candide, by cultivating their gardens.

photo by Stanislav Krupar

They bring up their children like the flowers of the field, theoretically innocent of greedy capitalism, war and conflict, suspicion and fear. No one tells the children never to accept sweets from strangers, because in the single family there are no strangers. At school they study the history of art and culture, not battles and revolutions. Reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace they [pan]gloss over Pierre’s descriptions of legs being blown off, and focus instead on Natasha’s feelings of love, explains Volodya, the Mountain’s de facto PR manager.

Well, wouldn’t we all like our children to experience only peace and harmony? But I don’t think PEACE (and a Tiny Bit of War), by Lev Tolstoy, would be a masterpiece of world literature. And when believers say they want to live in a fairy tale, I can only assume they mean the sanitised, Disney version.

The children of City of the Sun are a joy; open and friendly, interested and interesting. But they are not, in the surrounding villages at least, believers in Vissarion. They seem to be well-rounded, healthy human beings, undamaged by the decline and fall of communism that brought most of their parents here seeking to fill a spiritual void, or by the relentless positivism of the single family.

The first generation has already gone away to study in the nearest towns and cities. Their parents hope and expect they will return to the land of fairy tale.  I think they’re more likely to return (if they return at all) to pleasant, orderly, clean-ish villages, cultured enough, well-off enough (and maybe that’s enough of a miracle in Russia), but no longer isolated from the world’s harmful influences, definitely not the best of all possible worlds.

Meeting Aslan

I adored CS Lewis’ books as a child. It was my dream to live in Narnia like Lucy Pevensey, so much in harmony with nature that I could talk to the animals; I wanted a wise, benign, lovable if occasionally terrifying lion to answer all my questions, to be my inspiration and my final word.

Then I grew up.

And then, a few days ago, I met Aslan.

I was in Obitel Rassveta, Abode of Dawn, more commonly known as City of the Sun, or, to believers living in surrounding villages, The Mountain. This remote community in the deepest taiga is inspired by Vissarion, a former Russian policeman turned spiritual leader who attracted a large following after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and took the most dedicated with him to central Siberia to build a new world.

Vissarion teaches that his followers should never have a negative thought. They should live in absolute harmony with nature and with each other as part of a single family, rejecting any state system or government and relying instead on perfect spiritual understanding and his own absolute authority. Fifteen years on, his united family still lives on The Mountain with their Teacher, still building, still positive, still dreaming.

It’s quite a journey to The Mountain, along the roughest of roads, and then an hour-long climb on foot through thick forest to a plateau ringed by mountains. The entrance to the settlement is a huge wooden gateway hung with new-agey stained-glass lanterns and bearing the legend ‘Take hope, all ye who enter here’.

When Vissarion’s new world settlers arrived, there was nothing but forest. They have replaced the moss-draped Siberian pines and birches with dinky wooden houses, with lawns and marigolds, with a stone bridge that wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban garden and fountains and lanterns straight out of a garden centre. For people who have turned their backs on society as we know it, their taste is surprisingly bourgeois.

Or perhaps it’s not surprising. The members of the single family are former teachers and lawyers, army colonels and dentists. They are, almost exclusively, people who fifteen years ago knew nothing first hand about living off the land.

The names of the streets – a grand name for what are really little more than paths – are a good indicator of their reading matter: Milky Way, Crystal Gate, Eternal Search (the children living on this last one can see the joke when they’re looking for socks and pencil cases in the morning before school). Aesthetically as well as philosophically, Abode of Dawn’s inspiration seems to be not the fairy tales believers tend to go on about, but the lands of early 20th century children’s fantasy literature: Middle Earth, Mooninvalley, Narnia.

“You’re going to meet Aslan,” Adrian said, when my request for a personal meeting with Vissarion was granted. He was so respectfully pleased for me. I’d chatted about children’s literature with Adrian and Anya, the couple I stayed with. They talk about their Teacher with a sort of matter-of-fact awe. According to his followers (I didn’t quite have the courage to ask Vissarion if he also holds this view) Vissarion is the second coming of Christ.

It must be extraordinary to be living alongside your God, to help build his house, to have his telephone number, to teach his children. Terrifying and reassuring at once, I should think. Tanya, my friend who used to live on The Mountain, describes him as a kind of celestial hotline. One that actually answers.

So off I went up the hill. Vissarion lives apart from his followers, half way up the holy mountain (he used to live right at the top but has moved down – for convenience?) in a brick house his followers have built for him. Brick, when there is no road and the only building material for miles and miles around is wood. I was sort of expecting a cave.

I was nervous and excited; the awed delight and faint (but positive!) envy of the believers was catching. I entered the house, I climbed the stairs; I was Lucy Pevensey from Finchley.