Among the Russians(55)
I was only forty miles from the campsite at Oryol, ‘the writer’s capital’. In the night, as I drove, the eventless fields and forests of this region needed no imagining. My head was full of remembered literature—of the gaping hours and blank distances around those nineteenth century landowners isolated far from Moscow and one another in a frittering, autumnal boredom. Through the pages of Chekhov and Goncharov and Turgenev they flourish and dissipate unconfined by work or purpose. The hours yawn. Rooted in that ampler, Russian destiny which enfolds and eventually obliterates them, they are, in their way, profoundly collective. Even the wayward peasants and petty bureaucrats of Gogol, so miserably unsuited to factories but obsessed by material things—overcoats, boots, cabbages, anything—are perfectly recognizable queueing outside Oryol’s shops.
Next morning, while I wandered round the little writers’ museum, it was almost painful to witness how piously each artist was enshrined. Bunin, Andreyev, Fet, Leskov—the leaves from their manuscripts were preserved in glass like bible parchment, their desks and inkwells and paper-weights exhibited in perfect working order like reliquaries which could yet hold nothing. As I shuffled from one to the next—I had slept badly and was feeling depressed—I had a fantasy that these literary artefacts were flotsam from an individualistic past which had forever been lost, and that Russia had regressed to a conformity worse than mediaeval.
When I sidled into conversation with a student, the only other person in the museum, I must have voiced my depression crudely, because a fleeting hurt crossed his face.
‘How can you imagine we all think what we’re told to think in this country?’ He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his frayed bomber-jacket and fixed me with the type of wide-spread Russian eyes which I had grown to trust. ‘The government may try to make us think their way, but I don’t know a soul who does. Not a soul! Everybody I know has ideas of his own—even the most bone-headed farmer.’ Of course people were affected by Party propaganda, he said, but they were independent of it too. The system was simply a feature of life. People used it or ignored it or evaded it. They didn’t love or fight it. The private values of Doctor Zhivago, which had agonized the Soviet authorities in 1958, were second nature to his generation. He was engaged instead with writers who had found their voice in the Kruschev era and had weathered the retrenchment of the late sixties and seventies—Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, Aksyonov. (But Moscow intellectuals had long been saying Yevtushenko was a Party hack.)
We stopped before a table displaying novels by modern authors, names unknown to me. Their covers blazed with heroism: industry, war. The student’s gaze drifted over them with an indifference too total even for contempt.
‘That’s all pulp,’ he said. ‘Fairy stories! You can tell they don’t mean a word of it. Sometimes I read them like I read science fiction, if I can’t lay my hands on anything better. But normally I wouldn’t even bother to open them. After a while you develop an instinct just by glancing at the covers.’
Not that these authors were charlatans, he said, merely they were servants of the state. If they perverted truth, it was in the cause of communal morality. They were simply small, superfluous. The gap between their written beliefs and their actual experience had become fatally wide. The student waved them away. ‘You don’t have that in the West.’
No, I said, we had our own printed effluent: not corporate myths, but personal ones—romance, porn. The difference was that in the West our rulers didn’t suppress excellence.
A shadow of insult crossed his face again. ‘Our government may fear it but they can’t suppress it. Not always. Not all of it. He delved deeper into his pockets and pulled out a book wrapped in layers of brown paper. He’d managed to buy it for twenty pounds, more than thirty times the published price. ‘Listen.’
It fell open in his hands. He began to declaim. And the extraordinary thing was that a student in provincial Oryol, who had been surrounded by propaganda from birth, had instinctively sensed its unreality and grown passionate instead about the most bitter poems of Voznesensky.
‘As in delirium, everything falls apart
People disconnect…
‘That’ what I admire! A man who can get such power in a handful of words! That’s what I love about the Japanese poets too. Have you read Issa? Basho?…What do you think of Verlaine?…’
While we thrust through the last rooms of the museum, followed by the sombre gaze of writers’ photographs, their wives, mistresses, children, the names of his cultural heroes evolved into an outlandish archipelago: Kurt Vonnegut, Tarkovsky, The Rolling Stones, Stendhal, Matsuo Basho, Iris Murdoch. He’d recently given fifteen roubles for a paperback of Murdoch’s The Black Prince.
‘Most foreign novels you just can’t buy. A bookseller will charge anything for one in Russian translation. People want them just because it’s the vogue.’ He folded up Voznesensky’s poetry carefully—its pages were falling out, unhinged by constant use—and tucked it back in his pocket. ‘But sometimes you hear of secret places where books are exchanged on the black market. Usually in parks. Luckily the police are pretty uneducated, you know, so they don’t get to hear about it. I got Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five that way—and only eight roubles.’
He was (he said) typical of his generation at university. To them, Revolutionary history was boring. His father, a cab driver, had instilled in him a love of the Russian classics. The Revolution could no more cut the flow of that tradition than a knife could cut a river, he said. In Oryol it was hard to find the works of Mandelshtam, let alone of Solzhenitsyn. But reading Tolstoy was a restitution.