EVGENIJ ANATOL’EVIČ POPOV
RUSSIAN LITERATURE IS BETTER THAN SEX
How to begin! Well, first I want
to tell you about an old Russian poet who lived in Moscow
and wrote these funny words:
Я на мир взираю из-под столика.
Век двадцатый, век необычайный.
Чем он интересней для историка,
Тем для современника печальней.
Well, did you get it? I think you didn’t.
So, I’ll translate them from Russian into English:
I look at the world from under a little
table.
The twentieth century is an extraordinary century.
The more interesting it is for a historian,
The more sorrowful it is for a contemporary.
These ironical lines belong to the poet
Nikolaj Glazkov, the first Soviet hippy, who died in 1979
at the age of sixty. Cinema goers can see him in the world
famous film, Andrej Rublëv, by the film
director Таrkovskij. In that film, the poet
played the part of a “faddy” aeronaut who back
in medieval Russia was trying to
fly in a balloon that he had built himself. “I’m
flying! I’m flying!” - he cried joyfully, without
noticing that he was falling swiftly into a dirty bog.
Nikolaj Glazkov was an unrecognized genius, whose verses were not published
for years. But it was Nikolaj Glazkov who coined the word samizdat.
This word was borrowed later by many foreign languages,
along with such Russian words as sputnik, gulag and perestrojka, but if any of you happen not to know what samizdat means,
I can promptly tell you that the literal translation of
this word is: “I publish my works by myself”.
Rejected by all the official publishing houses, Glazkov
compiled his verses in thin little books, printed them
himself, and put on their cover that word samizdat,
which was also a word that was similar to the name of an
official publishing house. Like a distorting mirror,
that word, samizdat, also reflected the idiotic
slang of totalitarian abbreviations such as Gosizdat (which
means “state-published” and was the name of
a state publishing house), or kolchoz (a collective
farm). And it was samizdat that saved the Russian
literature of the second half of the twentieth-century.
It was samizdat that became the symbol
of freedom.
The private manufacturing, distribution and consumption of uncensored literature
became a mass phenomenon in the Soviet Union, from the
sixties up until the beginning of the eighties. It is necessary
to refer to the past to understand the reasons for this
phenomenon, and we can’t do so without talking a
bit about the Russian mentality. The brilliant Canadian
thinker of the twentieth century, Marshall McLuhan, has
called our world with all its modern means of communication
the global village. If that’s true, Russia, in this
village, is a detached house, where something is constantly
happening: fires, revolutions, genocide, terror and war.
And at the same time this house is the birthplace of genius,
a hearth of ideas, and the bedroom of unearthly love and
tenderness. To live in Russia
is always fun; to live in Russia is always dangerous, no matter what time
you happen to be born in. Once I mentioned in an essay
of mine that if I had been born in 1890, for example, I
would have had a chance to be killed in the 1905 Russian-Japanese
war, or during the first Russian revolution of the same
year. If I had been born ten years later, I would have
been caught up in the 1917 October revolution, with its
red and white terror, and also the gulag could
have taken hold of me. Had I been born in the early 20th
century, I would have gotten involved in the Second World
War, and so on and so forth. Therefore I am glad that I
was born in 1946. I lived under Stalin and other communist
leaders who later replaced him, such as Chruščëv,
Brežnev, Černenko, Andropov and at last, Gorbačëv.
When he was in power, totalitarian communism was done away
with in my country, and Russia set out in search of new adventures.
The life in the time of the bolsheviks was very strange and now lots of
people including myself think of it as a nightmare, the
end of which is not yet in sight. Already within my memory
there is the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution
by the Soviet army, the persecution of the Nobel prize
winner, Boris Pasternak, who had his novel Doctor Zhivago published
here, in Italy.
What else? Tanks brought into Czechoslovakia in
1968 to do away with the attempt of building socialism “with
a human face”, arrests of dissidents, the physicist
Andrej Sacharov exiled from Moscow without a trial or investigation, the war in Afghanistan, and many other things.
But I am a professional writer, and my trade is literature. I take more
interest in literature than in politics. I feel free when
I do writing. It’s another thing if what I write
gets published. My works were not published for many years,
and when I was finally admitted to the Union of Writers,
I was soon expelled. I set an original record, worthy of
the Guinness book of records. I remained in the
official Union of Soviet Writers for the record time of
7 months and 13 days. After that I became a writer of the
underground. But I want to emphasize once again that I
was not a political figure. And my relationship with the
authorities was reduced to what was described in a popular
joke of that time, which goes like this:
A simple-hearted Soviet citizen was
called before the KGB and asked: -“Is it true that
you have abused Soviet power?
“Me?”, answers the citizen, “Do you expect me to abuse Soviet
power? Let it go to the devil! Who gives a shit about abusing your motherfucking
Soviet power!”
A lot of people nowadays feel nostalgia for that life. Many people consider
that then there was order, and the writer was an important
person, even though he was sometimes taken to prison for
his books. Many people think so, but I’m the last
to be among them. Those times were good for me only for
one reason: I was thirty years younger.
So, from my experience, as an old writer, I dare say that all those who
talk today about the death of literature in Russia at the beginning of the third millennium
are talking nonsense. The Russians will never stop drinking
vodka, and they will never stop reading and writing books.
For me it is as self-evident as the fact that they in Russia
can invent an unimaginable space vehicle, but they can
never learn to make a good car. Why not? It is a mystery
of the Russian soul. As for its explanation, it has been
painfully searched for by all Russian writers during the
entire existence of Russian literature.
Meanwhile, Russian literature in its modern sense came into being not so
long ago. One could say that it happened in the early 19th-century
when the poet Puškin, our national genius, appeared.
Puškin is a strange figure for foreigners. His poems,
translated into other languages, are frequently perceived
as a collection of banalities. They suspect him of imitating
Western European poets and writers. Lord Byron, and Sir
Walter Scott, for example. But Аleksandr Puškin
was the first to start writing in the language that all
of us Russians speak now. It was Puškin who created
a system of versification which even today does not seem
out-of-date. Unlike the work of his numerous predecessors,
Puškin’s work does not grow old. Rather, year
after year one could say that his works become more valuable,
like antiques or mature wine. The Russian reader finds
in his works that esoteric information about their country
and about the soul of an individual living in their country
which no research or popularizing articles can offer. And
there are, probably, translations of Puškin worthy
of his genius, in which case it will be easier for you
to believe my words.
Russian literature of the 19th century is also represented by the works
of four Russian novelists of genius. I mean here: Nikolaj
Gogol’, Lev Tolstoj, Fëdor Dostoevskij, and
Nikolaj Leskov. Each of them described his own Russia; each of them engaged in polemics with the others,
but on the whole, they reflect that Russian cosmos which
is impossible to destroy regardless of who rules the country – whether
it be some tsar, the communists, or the capitalists. Each
of these writers gave rise to a distinguished literary
trend. Gogol’ embodied the absurdity of Russian life.
Tolstoj offers, though somewhat didactically, a powerful,
popular, moral vision. Dostoevskij glanced into the most
esoteric corners of human soul where meanness gets along
with holiness. When we come to Leskov, however, we have
a writer who is less known in the West than the other three.
Yet he is second to none in tracing the twists, bends and
curves of the Russian national character. One of his characters
was a Russian craftsman of genius whose name was Levša
(Lefty). The craftsman was so good that he shod a miniature
dancing flea. Then he took to drinking and died in a hospital.
By the way, he probably would have been able to explain
why the Russian automotive industry was dominated by the
Italian Fiat cars, produced in Russia under the name “Žiguli”. He would… but
at that time there were no cars, either in Russia or anywhere
else in the world, and it is revealing that the little
toy, dancing flea that Levša had improved so ingeniously
didn’t work any longer after his improvement.
Of course a very special place in Russian literature is occupied by the
remarkable story-teller and playwright, Аnton Čechov.
But the traditional Russian way of life was destroyed by
the 1917 October revolution. Now a lot of people call the
October revolution the October coup d’etat when a
small group of bolsheviks seized power in a huge country.
At that time the intelligentsia thought that all that “jazz” was
frivolous; they believed that the bolsheviks would collapse
shortly, that they could not exist long since it was something
against the very logic of life. Alas, history very often
does not submit to any logic. The bolshevik power existed
in my country practically till 1991, and a lot of people
used to share the ideas of a character from a story by
Ivan Bunin. Bunin was a brilliant Russian writer, a Nobel-prize
winner, an emigrant from the USSR. The character I mentioned hanged himself
in his tiny squalid room, with a plate attached to his
breast. The plate read: “There will be no end to
Lenin’s Empire”.
By the way, the famous American expert on the Soviet Union, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had the same idea. When he learned
in 1982 that Brežnev had died,
he said in an interview that after Brežnev, Russia will
be ruled by another Brežnev.
In his opinion Russia
was doomed to Brežnevs, no matter what the actual
surnames were. He doesn’t seem to have been quite
right, but it’s not worth it to go over all that
happened.
The period of Russian culture from the early
20th century to the bolshevik coup d’etat has received
the name of the “Silver Age”. The label emphasized
the difference of the new art from the art of Puškin’s “golden” epoch.
The Silver Age gave rise to such literary schools as Symbolism,
Acmeism, and Futurism. The concepts of the Russian avant-garde,
Russian Mоdernism, and Decadence, came into being.
What nearly all the brilliant representatives of the Silver
Age of literature had in common was their rejection of
materialism and positivism, and their desire to expand
the limits of literature by enlisting the mystical experience,
not only from Christianity, but also that which could be
found in Oriental religions.
Aleksandr Blok, a poet, and the brightest
and most famous of the Russian Symbolists, adopted to some
extent the experience of French symbolists such as Rimbaud,
and Baudelaire. At the same time, they followed Dostoevskij
in their descriptions of the hidden life of the big city.
They also created a whole system of symbols to convey by
artistic means such feelings as human loneliness, despair,
and the foreboding of the approaching Doomsday. I don’t
think that you [the audience] will be able to keep in mind
all these difficult Russian names of artists belonging
to the Silver Age, but I shall list them nevertheless:
the religious philosopher and poet Vladimir Solov’ëv,
the poet and theorist of Symbolism Dmitrij Merežkovskij,
the poets Andrej Belyj, Valerij Brjusov, Fëdor Sologub
and Zinaida Gippius. And then too, Маksimilian
Vološin and Аleksej Remizov. All those people
had fantastic destinies after the revolution. Аleksandr
Blok supported the revolutionaries, but soon died by starvation
in a famine. Merežkovskij, Gippius and Remizov emigrated
from Russia; Valerij Brjusov served
the bolsheviks faithfully; and Fëdor Sologub died
in abject poverty.
A word too needs to be said about the movement
called, “Acmeism”. The word derives from the
Greek word “akme”. I do not know Greek, but
I think this word stands for “top”, the highest
degree of something. Аcmeism came into existence
as a counterbalance to Symbolism. Аcmeism was younger;
it was more vigorous; it polemicized with Symbolism, and
rejected its mystical orientation. The Acmeists’ fortunes,
however, were even more tragic when compared with the Symbolists.
The leading theorist of Аcmeism, Nikolaj Gumil’ëv,
was shot in 1921 for taking part in an antisoviet conspiracy;
the poet Osip Mandel’štam perished in a concentration
camp in the late ‘30s, and the poet Anna Achmatova
lived to a venerable age, but her works were not published
for a long time and her son was arrested.
Further on, alas, I’ll have to use
the same words when speaking about other outstanding Russian
writers of the 20th century: so many arrested, banished,
perished, expelled, or badly slandered. That is why I always
say to young writers, just starting out, who ask me whether
they should continue writing or not: “If you can
abstain from writing, do so. Nothing good awaits a writer.
Never!”
And as for the Futurists, they proclaimed
themselves to be the most revolutionary of all the new
artistic trends, and in one of their manifestoes, they
demanded that Puškin be “thrown overboard from
the steamer of modernity". Though the Russian Futurists
had much in common with their Italian counterparts, they
failed to establish any close relations with them. The
leader of the Italian Futurists, Marinetti, is known to
have cooperated with Мussolini, and our Futurists
welcomed the October revolution with delight. They probably
believed that the new regime would need their anti-bourgeois
art. I do not know what happened to Маrinetti
later, but the Soviet futurists turned out to be absolutely
unnecessary to the bolsheviks. The bolsheviks’ artistic
tastes were absolutely conventional, and soon all avant-garde
fell into disgrace: the poet Vladimir Majakovskij, the
pride of the Futurists, committed suicide, shooting himself
with a revolver in 1930; the ОBERIU group (this is
the Russian ironic abbreviation for the Union of Real Art)
was demolished; “Еlizaveta Bam”, the
world’s first play of absurdity, written twenty years
before Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”,
was repressed and its author, Daniil Charms, lost his life
in prison; his friends, Aleksandr Vvedenskij and Nikolaj
Olejnikov, were killed in prison too; the great poet, Nikolaj
Zabolockij, was kept many years in a gulag. I am sorry
that I have to repeat myself again and again.
Maksim Gor’kij occupied a special
place in the literature of those years. I’ll say
a few words about him. For a long time he was considered
the founder of Soviet literature. To some extent it is
true, but literature cannot be Soviet or anti-Soviet. It
is just literature. Or it can be either literature, or
not literature.
Maksim Gor’kij was an outstanding
writer, but he fell victim to his own popularity. Even
before the 1917 revolution he was as popular in the country
as a modern pop-star could be. His characters were tramps,
anarchists -- lumpen people. He walked about the whole
of Russia, and he was a man of experience.
He was on familiar terms with many bolshevik leaders before
they came to power -- with Lenin and Тrоckij,
for example. Gor’kij was a self-made man, and an intellectual.
After the revolution, he tried to protect his fellow writers
from the red terror, but failed, and he went abroad, practically
emigrated. When he grew old and had almost lost all his
popularity, he came back to the USSR in
1931, where he became the sacred cow of communists, and
was given the banner of the literary trend known as Socialist
Realism. Collective farms, schools, public parks, factories
and plants were named after him. He had a magnificent private
residence in the centre of Moscow and a suburban villa. But nothing comes without a price. It was Gor’kij
who coined the cannibalistic aphorism according to which
a lot of Russians lost their lives in concentration camps: “He
is against us who is not with us”. He, a writer and
a humanist, welcomed the totalitarian terror. In 1936,
when the bolshevik power had no use for him any longer,
he suddenly died in his suburban villa near Moscow
under the most mysterious circumstances. There is a convincing
story that he was poisoned, following an order by Iosif
Stalin.
The point is that Stalin’s
communist empire had been created by that time. Stalin’s
main opponent, Lev Trockij, was killed in Mexico; other political rivals of Stalin were
announced to be enemies of the people and were exterminated.
In Russia, winter
set in and that winter lasted 20 years. Then came ottepel’,
or the “thaw”, which was replaced, however,
by another winter, until 1991 when Russia
did finally become free with all the positive and negative
outcomes of this freedom.
Returning to the mid-30s, we can say that
all literary trends ceased to exist then, and the Union
of Soviet Writers was set up by the government, or by the
totalitarian Ministry of Truth, if I can use the terminology
of the English writer George Orwell, the author of the
novel 1984. Maksim Gor’kij was elected chairman
of that organization two years before his death.
The Union of Soviet Writers supervised all
official literary activity in the USSR.
According to its rules, members of the Union
were obliged to not only be loyal to the existing authorities,
but to also be direct assistants in administering Soviet
power. Only then were they full and equal members of Soviet
society. The world famous writers Мichail Bulgakov, Оsip
Mandel’štam, Аnna Achmatovа and Аndrej Platonov were considered outsiders, to say nothing
of scores of less popular writers and poets. I’ll
give you an example. Once, in the early ’80s, a KGB
officer asked me: “What are you? What’s your
occupation?”. I thought a little and said honestly: “I
am a writer”. He then asked: “Are you a member
of the Soviet Writers Union?” I replied, “No,
I am not. I have been expelled from it”. “Ah,
well”, the KGB officer then said, “and yet
you say you are a writer”.
Nonetheless, the part an individual can
play in history is huge. When Stalin died in 1953, his
colleagues started to divide his inheritance, and for approximately
10 years, till 1964, there was a strange period of time
known as the “thaw” -- that short interval
of reprieve between freezes.
Immediately following the wave which was
dismantling Stalin’s epoch, there appeared in the
official literature the bright names of some writers and
poets who were called “the sixtiers”: Vasilij
Aksënov, Bella Achmadulina, Аndrej Bitov, Аndrej
Voznesenskij, Еvgenij Evtušenko, and Bulat Okudžava
were some of those writers who became super popular at
that time. Their books were printed in a great number of
copies, even though they had a complicated relationship
with the authorities and censorship.
There were some new, naturalist, peasant
writers who described the difficult life of the people
under socialism, especially that of the peasants, who were
then practically in the position of slaves. For example,
the authorities did not give passports to peasants and
forbade them autocratically to leave their settlement,
even if they were starving. Among these naturalist writers
were Vasilij Belov, Vasilij Šukšin,
Viktor Astaf’ev, Fëdor Abramov, Valentin Rasputin
and Boris Možaev. If the sixtiers gravitated to the
West and cosmopolitan culture, the peasant writers considered
that no western experience was acceptable for Russia.
Between these groups there was an open and sometimes fierce
polemic. But I want to emphasize that all the writers I’ve
just mentioned are authentic, great Russian writers of
our strange epoch of the “thaw”.
Аleksandr Solženicyn occupies
a unique place. His book, One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, was the first piece of truth about Soviet
penitentiary camps. It was published by the order of Nikita
Chruščëv, who was in power then and who
hated Stalin. “The Russian man is too wide, it is
necessary to limit him”, one of Dostoevskij’s
characters said. Nikita Chruščëv opened
the gates of the penitentiary camps, and millions of Stalin’s
prisoners were set free. Yet he arranged for the persecution
of Bоris Pasternak, the author of the novel Doctor
Zhivago. Chruščëv stamped his foot and
shouted at Vasilij Aksënov, Аndrej Voznesenskij, Еvgenij
Evtušenko, accusing them of revisionism and dislike
of the Soviet power.
And again, as classical novels say, “time
was flying”. In 1964 Leonid Brežnev replaced
Tsar Nikita Brežnev ruled my country for almost 20 years and
by the end of his life he had become a character of numerous
jokes and anecdotes, in which he appeared as a good-natured,
lazy fool who liked a dram. He sent the Soviet army into Afghanistan in 1979, which became a real tragedy for
my country, compared only to the attempt to subdue Chechnya in
the early ‘90s when some general of Boris El’cyn’s
promised him to finish it in 3 days. We see the grief we
have come to.
Well, here I am, talking about politics
again. Sorry. The trouble is that in my country, if literature
is not engaged in politics, politics is engaged in literature.
In Brežnev’s times, Aleksandr Solenicyn tried to prove to the
Soviet leaders that they were driving the country to destruction.
Solženicyn became a persona non grata for them and in 1974 he was exiled abroad after
his great book, The Gulag Archipelago, was published
in the West. This book played the part of a catalyst in
the disintegration of the phantom of communism in the USSR.
It was read throughout the country, though its being read
and distributed could lead to persecution and end in arrests.
I remember giving this book to my friend, the Siberian
writer Eduard Rusakov, who took it from Moscow
to the Siberian city of Krasnojarsk,
my birthplace. He went there by plane with the book hidden
under his shirt. He gave it to an old artist Аndrej
Pozdeev, who read it at night and wearing rubber gloves,
because he didn’t want his fingerprints to be left
on the pages. Now Eduard Rusakov is one of the best known
writers of Siberia, and Аndrej Pozdeev, who in Soviet times was considered
an urban madman, has been immortalized with a monument
in Krasnojarsk. His pictures are exhibited in the most
prestigious Russian and foreign museums and cost a fortune
now.
Then the alternative culture became
a phenomenon. The other culture, the second culture, the culture of the underground – all these are different names
for this phenomenon. It was the culture of the “late
youth”, or the “generation of janitors, street-cleaners,
and night watchmen”, as the poet Аndrej Voznesenskij
called such writers. Almost all of them tried to live and
work as if the Soviet power didn’t exist at all.
But the Soviet power demanded that everyone should have
an official status and job. If you didn’t, you could
be accused of parasitism, and be arrested, as happened
to the future Nobel prize-winner, Iosif Brodskij. The jobs
of street cleaners or watchmen didn’t bring much
money, but gave people a lot of free time, which any writer
needs, no less than talent. There were some other good
jobs, too. For example, unloading bread in shops by night.
A poet I know guarded a piece of a gas pipeline ten kilometers
long, and far away, in the Arctic tundra. Unfortunately,
he ended up being arrested for “аntisovietism,” which
manifested itself in his verses, such as:
Brežnev plays the accordion,
Chruščëv hops a Russian dance.
These two idiots
Have ruined all Russia.
In Russian:
Играет Брежнев на гармонии,
Хрущев пляшет гопака.
Погубили всю Россию
Два партийных мудака.
After 1968, the illusions about the construction
of "socialism with a human face” finally failed
and a new generation of writers tried to restore the cultural
links broken by space and time. They rediscovered some
of the forgotten names. Circulated by samizdat were
not only the verses and prose of these rediscovered writers,
but also works by Western and Russian philosophers who
were still forbidden in the USSR.
The system of samizdat was very simple. Anyone who had something interesting
to say typed it in 4 copies using 3 pieces of carbon- paper
and the copies multiplied in an exponential progression.
Here is a joke of those years which testifies
to the popularity of samizdat. The chief of the KGB political police, Andropov, asks
the secretary to type the novel War and Peace by
Lev Tolstoj for his daughter. “What for?” asked
the secretary in surprise. “She has to read this
novel for school, but she doesn't read anything except samizdat”,
answers Аndropov.
It is impossible to believe now, but in
the totalitarian country of Russia, there
were scores of underground, samizdat literary
magazines. Sometimes their authors and editors were arrested;
sometimes they were compelled to emigrate, but the magazines
kept on existing. And now, some of them are still published,
but in the open.
Then, the new concept of tamizdat,
or there-publishing, appeared. Western
publishing houses started printing the works of Russian
authors abr oad. Some of them were politically engaged,
others were engaged only in art. The Parisian, Christian
publishing house, YMCA-Press, published the books by Aleksandr
Solženicyn, who as I have mentioned was a staunch
fighter of Soviet power. The American publishing house, Аrdis
Press, published the apolitical aesthete, Vladimir Nabokov.
But all these books got into Russia by secret ways.
The last great literary scandal of the past
epoch was an incident concerning the almanac, Меtropol’,
which took place in 1979. Twenty-five authors took their
literary products, which had been rejected by the official
publishing houses, and decided to publish them without
censorship in the USSR.
Among the authors were the stars of official literature,
such as Vasilij Aksënov, Bella Achmadulina, Аndrej
Bitov, Аndrej Voznesensky, Fazil' Iskander, the famous
actor and bard Vladimir Vysockij, plus the authors of the
underground who were “widely known in narrow circles”.
I was one of the five editors of the almanac and I can
tell you now that its motto could have been the slogan
of the 1968 student’s riots in France:
BE REALIST, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE! We wanted to publish
our literary products not there, not abroad, but here, in our native land; not with a typewriter, but officially,
in official printing houses. Unfortunately, this first
experience of zdesizdat, or here-publishing, was unsuccessful. The Union of Soviet writers
called this almanac “pornography of the spirit”,
and it was immediately condemned by numerous literary assemblies.
Viktor Erofeev and I were expelled from the Writers’ Union;
Vasilij Aksënov, the poetess Inna Lisnjanskaja and
her husband, and an old Russian poet, Semën Lipkin,
quit the Union of Soviet Writers as a protest against our
exclusion. The almanac was then published in the Russian
language, by the American publishing house, Аrdis,
and was then translated into French, German and English.
However, I wanted more, because I was not
used to being hit in the face without striking back. Therefore
I was willing to take part in the next experience of here-publishing, with the almanac Catalogue. Alas, the
result came immediately. Searches were carried out in our
apartments on the same day, all our manuscripts were taken
away, and all of us received the official written warnings
that if we continued our criminal activity we would be
arrested. It is interesting to note, however, that the
authors of both Metropol’ and Catalogue have
become very well-known, now, and are reputable writers
in my country. And not only in mine. The verses and prose
by Aksënov, Bitov, Vysockij, Dmitrij Prigov, Fridrich
Gorenštein, etc., are translated in many countries,
including yours, Italy. And my book of short stories, Strange
Coincidence, has been translated into Italian too.
And I am very pleased with it. I am pleased
with life in general, God forgive me. I have written in
a book of mine, that worldly life is a wonder-work in itself;
it is the prize in the global lottery, and the quality
of this life is a subsidiary plot of a human tragicomedy.
My first time abroad was in 1990 when I
went to Paris. I stayed with a French acquaintance
of mine who had hung a portrait of Мichail Gorbačëv
in the room before my arrival. She said to me that all
of us, the Russians, should adore Gorbačëv. Out
of politeness I didn’t say that I had an icon of
the Virgin with me for that purpose. However, unlike many
of my compatriots I consider Gorbačëv a really
great man, whatever my grudges against him are. Thanks
to him Russia returned to the civilized
world, which she had left over seventy years before. And
if now we in Russia have a poor
life, we must recall that before, there was no life at
all, there was just a strange experimental illusive existence.
I have never wanted to emigrate from my country, no matter
how hard my life there could be. But it so happened, that
my former country, the USSR, emigrated nobody knows where, and all of us are
now living in a new reality.
Certainly, its immigration has had its impact
on Russian literature. In the late '80s, before censorship
was abolished in the country, official newspapers and magazines
overflowed with what had been kept back from common readers
for ages. I don’t feel like giving the names and
titles here. I mentioned them more or less when I was talking
about samizdat. The late ‘80s was
a strange time when there was practically no censorship
but the publishing houses and editorial boards still enjoyed
financial support from the Government. The fact is that
the Soviet power had been generously financing ideology.
So-called “thick” literary magazines
used to come out in millions of copies. And almost every
day brought a piece of stunning news. One day, the official
who was responsible for ideology in Gorbačëv’s
government would solemnly state that by no means would
Solženicyn ever be published in Russia. The next day
you saw people reading The Gulag Archipelago in
the subway, and published in Russia.
One day Vasilij Aksënov would be called a servant
of American imperialism and the next day a collection of
his previously forbidden works came out in 5 volumes. And
other things took place, such as the publication of some
of these books by a group of swindlers who opened up a
subscription, collected huge sums of money, and then disappeared
after having printed just a few copies of these books.
That was entirely in the spirit of the wild capitalism
that was settling in, in Russia.
So, a 5-volume collection of works by Aksënov which
I have on my bookshelf at home, published by these swindlers,
is now a rare collection, indeed.
The euphoria in the country reached its peak after the unsuccessful communist
putsch of 1991. That put an end to the communist empire.
It fell to pieces, and Gorbačëv lost his job
as President of the USSR.
Well, all people who have tried alcoholic drinks know very well that any
drinking bout is followed by the morning after. I won’t
dwell on the economic or political situation in the country
during the 1990s. Before then, all people had been equal;
they had equally suffered from shortages of everything,
including toilet paper. And in the early ‘90s, some
of them rapidly made fantastic fortunes while others plunged
into abject poverty and felt on their own back what the
seamy side of freedom was when it was not limited by law.
For me, it’s more interesting to see what happened
in the Russian world of letters at that time. It so happened
that the world of letters no longer interested anyone except
people of letters. Before, it used to be writers who sent
the authorities to the devil; now it was the authorities
who were sending writers to the same place. Before, readers
used to think of a writer as a source of restricted information
for the educated, for lawyers, priests and even doctors
specializing in sexual pathology. Under the new conditions,
people had to struggle for survival, and they simply did
not have time for reading. Besides, there appeared the
opportunity to find the answers to the most burning questions
in reference books and books of popular literature.
The Union of Soviet Writers lost the financial
support of the government. It fell into several pieces
that are still constantly at war with one another. The
numbers of editions of fiction dropped by hundreds and
thousands. The writer stopped being a well-paid and influential
person.
It proved to be easier for the writers
of the underground to adjust to the new conditions. They
were used to getting nothing for their work. Their royalties
had been basically subpoenas to appear before the KGB.
Now they had a chance to have their works published even
if the editions were small. As for making their living,
they had always done it doing other jobs.
I don’t find the situation catastrophic.
The situation was abnormal when the most mediocre member
of the official Union of Writers earned more than a highly
qualified engineer, as long as he was loyal to the authorities.
Now, a writer in Russia is more or less in the same situation
as his counterparts abroad, where very few poets or writers
earn their living exclusively by getting fees and royalties.
Even the great Iosif Brodskij had to give lectures at a
university. While in London
in 1992 I asked him why he, a Nobel prize-winner, was doing
that, and Brodskij gave me a smile and said, “Dear
Evgenij, you ought to know better than me how quickly people
run out of money”.
Everything has to be paid for. Everything,
including freedom. Daniil Charms, a master of absurdity,
once wrote a truly realistic phrase, “Life has won
again by a mysterious way”.
And so it has. It is against the logic of
real life that not one of the traditional, “thick” literary
magazines has ceased to exist in Russia.
First they were supported by the American financier George
Soros, who paid for that part of their circulation which
sent them to local libraries; then the magazines learned
how to make some money and to look for patrons who could
financially support them. It was at that time that the
word sponsor entered the Russian literary language
alongside such word as voucher, viagra, computer, killer.
Big publishing houses which have made a lot of money on
detective novels and pulp-fiction now find it a matter
of prestige to publish intellectual books which are unlikely
to bring them any profit. A lot of famous writers now
work for fashionable glossy magazines,
like Cosmopolitan, or Playboy, and try, nonetheless,
to preserve their individuality. Another novelty is that Moscow
is no longer the literary capital of the empire. Outstanding
writers are working now in various parts of Russia without
making any special attempts to move to Moscow where life is expensive and chaotic.
Strange as it is, the Internet is very helpful
here. To some extent the Internet is the real salvation
of Russian Literature, especially helpful to young writers. “New
generation” writers who live in distant areas of
the country can keep up on modern literature, and are quite
aware of literary news, literary trends and disputes. Such
writers are no longer “provincial”, if you
know what I mean. And at the same time they have preserved
their individuality, and remain connected with their place
of residence and local way of life.
I’m going to give you an exotic example,
of course: the writer Michail Tarkovskij, the nephew of
world-famous film director Andrej Tarkovskij, lives somewhere
in the north of Russia,
in the wild taiga, and spends a lot of
time hunting. At the same time he has his works published
in the best literary magazines. Last year I came across
him at the Frankfurt book-fair and I assure you that he is far from looking like a Siberian
tramp.
My friends in my native city of Krasnojarsk
have already been publishing a “thick” literary
magazine for dozen years. It is a magazine for family reading,
called “Day and Night". God knows how they manage.
They say that once they were given money to publish the
edition of their regular issue by a notorious local gangster – a mafioso. Mafioso is
another new borrowing into the modern Russian language.
It is revealing that the authors writing for this magazine
are of very different trends and ages, and the magazine
is known throughout the country. The same people have set
up a unique licej (literary school).
It is the only one in the country. Some of its former pupils
have become well-known writers, though the people who founded
this school, Roman Solncev and Viktor Astaf’ev, keep
on saying that its aim is to educate the pupils to be good
readers, not writers.
In the city of Kostroma,
some very young poets arranged an Internet competition.
They set up a jury, and I got an internet invitation to
take part in their jury. Poems started “coming” from
all over the country and from abroad, again by means of
the Internet. The poets organizing the competition were
very poor; they could not afford to invite their prize-winners
to Kostroma, so it was only natural
that they sent the prizes via the Internet. But there is
an interesting fact here – the prize-winners of this
competition have attracted the attention of publishers,
and now their works are being published by important publishing
houses.
And there is a much better known contest for
the Debut prize. It is open for people of letters who are
25 years old or under. Last year, 40 thousand manuscripts
were sent in to the contest. Only 70 were first selected
out of this number and only 3 people finally got the prizes.
But they are really great. One of them is Vladimir Lorčenkov.
He lives in Moldavia which
is now separate from Russia.
He wrote a remarkable satirical novel about the presidential
elections in Moldavia.
That novel reminded me of the best pages by Garcia Marquez,
or films by Emir Kusturica. Omsk,
in Siberia, is the home city of another new writer, Petr Orechovskij, age 40. He
describes the life of the nouveau riche, but his
characters are not anecdotal, but modest clerks who live
and suffer against the background of a quite new bourgeois
reality.
I have deliberately avoided talking about
the struggle between literary trends, “fathers” and “sons”,
cosmopolitans and patriots, the left and the right. All
these are very special topics and they are unlikely to
be of interest for you. I’d rather emphasize again
that to my mind, in Russia they
will never stop drinking vodka, and never stop reading
books. In this sense Russia is
so much lagging behind other countries in the eternal race
in a circle that all of sudden Russia
has found herself ahead of progress. The problems of the
deformation of personality, its dissolution in the unified
modern society are not very urgent for us so far. Probably
it’s because of our poverty, or perhaps our people
have not had enough time to enjoy life without the bolsheviks
and are still far from striving in a new round of class
struggle. Well… who knows. The latest developments
in the UKraine and Kirghizia
have proved how unstable the situation can be in post-Soviet
lands.
Once more I have to stress that I am not
a politician. I’m just a modest man of letters who
loves his country and its literature. My first book came
out in the American cosmopolitan publishing house, Ardis,
that American home of Russian literature free of ideology.
At that time the publisher Carl Proffer sent me a present,
a T-shirt that carried a caricature. It depicts Lev Tolstoj,
looking very strict. He is writing something epochal on
a piece of paper, but at the same time he is being distracted
from this important activity by very seductive, naked girls.
In spite of the distraction, our national genius tells
them: “RUSSIAN LITERATURE IS BETTER THAN SEX”!
I hope I have not exhausted you with my
story about what is near and dear to me. About modern Russian
literature. Much more could have been said. I have said
very little about the literature of the Russian emigration,
which is associated with some great names – Ivan
Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Zajcev and Ivan Šmelev.
What’s more, there are modern men of letters who
live in Paris, Zurich, Hanover,
and Rome.
I could have said more about the intrusion
of mass culture and pop culture in our life, that line
of culture which has been scornfully nicknamed popsa in Russia.
I could have said more about how Russia defends itself from intellectual westernization
and panamericanism, and about the Soviet censorship that
has been replaced by censorship of money, with the result
that a liberal and talkative writer can all of a sudden
become deaf and mute when the conversation turns to his
rich sponsors; or about the lack of perfection with regard
to the relationship between the men of letters and the
state, or about the life stories and works of various writers,
both living and passed away. Believe me, during some forty
years of my moving in literary circles I have been acquainted
with many of those. I could have told you more but I’m
afraid I have run out of time and my knowledge of English.
My Siberian English is far from fluent but
I’ll still try to use it while answering your questions
if there are any, and in conclusion, I’ll finish
with two curious sayings.
Somewhere in the American Wild West, in
a saloon, there was a funny sign that said: “NO SHOOTING
AT THE MUSICIAN. HE PLAYS HIS BEST”.
When I was young I got fascinated by a phrase
I read in a book by the American writer, Gertrude Stein,
who lived in Paris: “A ROSE IS ONLY A ROSE IS ONLY A ROSE”…. That
is what she wrote.
And I want say in conclusion: “No
shooting at writers. They write their best”, and “A
writer is only a writer is only a writer is only a writer
is only a writer is only a writer. Only”.
6.04.2005, Moscow –13.04.2005,
Forlì
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