There is mixed news. It must be a long time since the nightingales sang in Berkeley Square. The traffic drowned them out long ago. There are still relics of grace and piquancy, most notably in Maggs Bros bookshop. But the old Mayfair, where the nouveaux riches learned to wear the fauns’ garlands of refinement, had been driven deeper into Georgian houses in quieter streets — until now. There has been a counter-attack. -Earlier this week, even though there were still no nightingales, I heard the music of the spheres.
There was talk of a new wine merchants called Hedonism with an interesting Russian owner; I had meant to obtain further and better particulars. Strolling down Davies Street, I gave an idle sideways glance — and there it was. I had heard tell that Hedonism was where oligarchy encountered oenophilia: that a rich Russian was determined to assemble one of the world’s greatest cellars. Although that is all true, it is not an adequate description. I do not move much in oligarch circles, but I suspect that Yevgeny Chichvarkin is untypical. Hedonism and wine: one might have expected a Bacchic character. Not so: dark and bearded, he has an intense, eager, 19th-century countenance. He is reminiscent of the portraits of liberal intellectuals in the Tretiakov Gallery: the sort of chaps Turgenev would have known. The narrator of the Sportsman’s Notebook might have looked like Yevgeny.
We in the West find it easy to slip on a mask of scepticism and cynicism. Often, the mask becomes the reality. But Russian history does not permit a casual acceptance of the flow of life. Claud Cockburn once wrote that when it came to political awareness, the average Irishman was three double whiskies ahead of the average Englishman.
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