From the issue dated October 8, 2004
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Back in the USSR: Soviet Memories and Russia's Literary Future
At this year's BookExpo America, in Chicago, one news release among hundreds stood out for its chilly remembrance of things past. "Outcry Against Putin's Book Censorship Campaign to Surface in the U.S. on Eve of 2004 Book-Expo," the notice declared. "Books by American and Russian Writers Banned." The release announced a teleconference staged by Ultra.Kultura, a Russian publishing house, protesting the confiscation by Russia's newly formed Federal Anti-Drug Service of eight of its books, among them translations of Inside Terrorism, by Bruce Hoffman, and Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine, by Harvard professors Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar. Ilya Kormiltsev, Ultra.Kultura's chief editor, sought to draw attention to an April raid by the service on Trading House Stolica, a Moscow distributor of books to retailers. The teleconference attracted little press. Like Russia's return march to authoritarianism or totalitarianism in recent years -- it's not yet clear where the march will stop -- Kremlin assaults on freedom of the press have been largely ignored by American media transfixed by the Middle East, and traditionally unwilling to cover much foreign news free of bombs or murder. Only in the past two months, after terrorists simultaneously exploded two Russian planes on domestic flights and brought us the Beslan massacre, have American newspapers found front-page space for the world's geographically largest country, the nation from whom Americans once feared a nuclear holocaust, the nation for which we don't need weapons inspectors to confirm the world's second-largest cache of WMD's, some of them presumably as well protected as those two domestic flights. Beslan's shocking political aftermath -- President Putin's announcement that Russians will no longer be permitted to elect their governors in Russia's 89 substates, and will, in effect, be able to vote directly only for president -- showed that "Back in the USSR." continues to be the Kremlin's current theme song. And the Ultra.Kultura matter formed just one ripple in a wavelike return to the Soviet mentality in publishing. As our own annual Banned Books Week passes this week, American authors, publishers, and news media should resist with raised voices. The last few years in Russia offer multiple examples of literary censorship on the rise after the "anything goes" spirit of the Yeltsin era. A Russian youth organization allied with Putin, Walking Together, has begun propaganda campaigns against freewheeling and critically acclaimed post-perestroika writers like Victor Pelevin (A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories) and Vladimir Sorokin (Blue Lard). In the case of the postmodern Sorokin, Walking Together protesters publicly tore up copies of Blue Lard (which imagines a homosexual relationship between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev) in downtown Moscow and tossed the remains down a mock toilet bowl. The Moscow prosecutor's office subsequently brought charges against Sorokin of pornography, later dropped, under Article 242 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code. Threats have also been made against other writers, such as Bayan Shiryanov for his novel, Lower Aerobatics, accused of being pro-decadence and drugs. While Izvestia at one point labeled Walking Together "silly," the group's high-pressure campaign against oligarch Boris Berezovsky and his properties helped drive him into exile. Then there's the prominent case of avant-garde novelist and radical nationalist Eduard Limonov, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and got his Russian citizenship back only from Gorbachev in 1991. In 2001 the Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB, arrested Limonov, leader of the National Bolshevik Party, in the Russian republic of Altay. It cited his connection with four members of his party arrested for supposedly buying weapons in a plan to invade Kazakhstan and set up an independent state. Limonov rejected the charges against him as politically motivated. He served more than two years in prison before being released, in June 2003. As the Kremlin crackdown against free expression proceeds from the once free national television networks to print, one couldn't ask for a better jolt of reality than Emma Gerstein's Moscow Memoirs. Just published in the United States by Overlook Press, it's the most vibrant and insightful autobiographical achievement by a Russian writer since such classics as Nina Berberova's The Italics Are Mine and Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned (with which Gerstein clashes). Here we learn again of the sorrow and ignominy faced by writers under Soviet rule, and get a taste of what the current government's "ahead to the past" agenda may mean. Gerstein (1903-2002), a peppery nonagenarian when the book appeared in Russia in 1998, became close personal friends in the 1920s with Osip Mandelstam (Russia's supreme 20th-century poet according to Joseph Brodsky) and his wife, Nadezhda. In the decades to follow, Gerstein also grew to be intimate friends with Anna Akhmatova -- Russia's greatest female poet and an artist some consider superior to Mandelstam -- as well as with Akhmatova's son, Lev Gumilyov, and Boris Pasternak. Professionally, Gerstein won praise as a literary scholar of the 19th-century poet Mikhail Lermontov. Composed of multiple essay-length reminiscences, Moscow Memoirs shocked many Russian literati because it recaptured the Mandelstams in a way that left their literary importance intact, but their nobility of character dented. Gerstein remembers Osip Mandelstam, who famously reviled Stalin in a 1933 "Epigram" and apparently died in a Soviet transit camp in 1938 on the way to the Gulag, as a reckless and not-always-courageous martyr to poetry who named names too easily, a man with "a cruel mind but a kind heart." She portrayed Nadezhda, revered by many Soviet literary dissidents as the indomitable widow who saved much of her husband's work for the world through prodigious feats of memorization and determination to survive Stalin's evils, as an untrustworthy reporter of her experiences. She also, to some tastelessly, included reminiscences of Nadezhda's bisexuality and enthusiasm for developing threesomes with her sometimes unbalanced poet. The crucial impact of Moscow Memoirs is profound and cumulative, recalling a time when "the crack of skulls being crushed could be felt in the air." Gerstein's command of distant detail illuminates the Mandelstams' moves from place to place and their many humiliations (as in Osip Mandelstam's wretched time assigned to provincial Voronezh). She re-creates the feeling of pressure to violate one's own integrity. (At different points, both Mandelstam and Akhmatova grimly praised Stalin in poetry in an effort to save one or another's life.) Above all, Gerstein shows us that literary life under totalitarianism rarely comes down to heroism versus cowardice, nobility versus shabbiness, but to a day-by-day struggle to behave the best one can under monstrous circumstances. The thought that Russian writers may be headed back into the abyss can only sicken the soul. Some recent polls indicate that more than 70 percent of Russians regret the collapse of the Soviet Union, and 76 percent back censorship as an integral part of the media. Earlier this year, as he did more recently in his speech after the Beslan massacre, Putin mourned the death of the Soviet Union as a "national tragedy on an enormous scale." In the September 27 New Republic, Masha Gessen, one of Russia's shrewdest observers of her country's nomenklatura and intelligentsia, writes, "To be blunt, Russia is about to turn itself into a dictatorship" -- and a fascist one at that. Gerstein would have recognized the tune. Is anyone else listening? Carlin Romano, critic at large of The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a newly elected fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 7, Page B14 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education