Soviet Literature Goes West

By Patricia Blake

A generation of Russian writers is thriving in exile

Three years after he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Russian Poet Joseph Brodsky compared the emigre writer to a creature who "survives like a fish in the sand: crawls off into the bush, and getting up on crooked legs,/ walks away (his tracks like a line of writing)/ into the heart of the continent."

In the past, that journey was arduous and often tragic for Soviet exiles, particularly for those poets and writers who fled their country after the 1917 Revolution. A few, like Vladimir Nabokov, joined the mainstream of modern literature and enriched it. A handful returned in desperation to the Soviet Union, only to perish hi Stalin's camps, like the eminent critic Dmitri Mirsky, or by suicide, as in the case of the great idiosyncratic poet Marina Tsvetayeva. Many remained stranded on alien shores where their writing disappeared with scarcely a trace.

Now, however, a whole new generation of Soviet exiles is making a happy transition to literary life in the West. Many of the 50 or so writers who emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s are turning out works of originality and uncommon interest. Among the Russian books currently reaching U.S. bookshops in English translation, some were novels banned by Soviet censorship. Others were written or completed abroad, in a surge of fresh vitality.

Pre-eminent among the new emigres is Vasili Aksyonov, 51, who departed from the Soviet Union in 1980 with two major novels in manuscript and a head full of ideas for new work. Since settling in the U.S. he has finished two more novels, both of which are scheduled for American publication. "I've got no time for nostalgia," says Aksyonov in fluent English. He teaches a seminar in Russian literature at Goucher College near Baltimore, and once a week his reviews of new U.S. fiction are broadcast to the Soviet Union over the Voice of America. In addition, Aksyonov and his wife Maya extend nonstop hospitality in their Washington, D.C., apartment to Soviet exiles passing through the capital.

"We've got enough writers here to form a dissident branch of the Soviet Writers' Union," Aksyonov ironically observes. A member of the official union for 18 years and the U.S.S.R.'s most popular living novelist, Aksyonov was pressured to leave the country when he edited an anthology of unorthodox Russian writing that the union deemed subversive. The collection, entitled Metropol, which includes an excerpt of a comic play by Aksyonov, was published in the U.S. by W.W.Norton in 1983.

Aksyonov's first novel to appear in English since his exile is The Island of Crimea, published by Random House last

November. In the author's satiric fantasy, the Black Sea peninsula has become an island off the Soviet mainland, something like capitalist Taiwan in relation to Communist China. In broad strokes Aksyonov contrasts the glittering hedonism of the islanders to the squalid austerity that prevails on the Soviet mainland. In Aksyonov's fancy, Crimea is the hog heaven of the conspicuous consumer. Dom Perignon flows like vodka in the luxury cafes and restaurants. Ferraris and Cadillacs jam the freevays on veekends. (In the original, Aksyonov used the English words transliterated into Russian.) Glass-and-steel houses cling to the island's sheer rock cliffs, in defiance of frequent earthquakes. In short, Crimea resembles nothing so much as Southern California, where, as it happens, Aksyonov spent two months in 1975 as a visiting professor at

U.C.L.A.

Aksyonov's romp through nirvana ends on a cautionary note. Though the is land's 5 million citizens are wallowing in wealth, they still yearn for reunion with the motherland. Their petition is met with a classic Kremlin reply: full-scale invasion. The bewildered Crimeans can only watch the living-room war on TV until their broadcast facilities are crushed by Soviet tanks.

Beneath the satire, Aksyonov seems to be making a point in The Island similar to the one made by Fellow Exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard speech: materialism is softening up the West for the triumph of Communism. By contrast, there are no hidden homilies in Aksyonov's multilevel, 230,000-word novel, The Burn, which Random House will publish later this year. A denser, darker work than The Island, The Burn reflects the author's searing experience as the child of victims of Stalin's great purges. It also powerfully evokes another subject proscribed in Soviet fiction since Stalin's day: sex. It is a fact of life made frightening and moving by Aksyonov.

Novelist Yuz Aleshkovsky, 54, views all forbidden topics as the domain of farce. The comic artist had to support himself in the Soviet Union writing children's books. Now he has returned to adult fiction with gusto. His raunchiest work, Nikolai Nikolayevich, is a Russian Portnoy's Complaint. In Aleshkovsky's book, as in Philip Roth's novel, the hero spends most of his time masturbating. The Russian, however, finds an ingenious way to turn his obsession into a cushy government job when a Soviet laboratory purchases his prodigious production of spermatozoa for the greater glory of Communist science. In Kangaroo the author satirizes the false and often absurd confessions that were made at show trials during the Stalin era. Here an engaging professional crook admits to the rape of the oldest kangaroo in the Moscow zoo.

Kangaroo, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in June, is a masterly example of the Russian mode of skaz, or first-person narrative in the vernacular rather than in literary language. Aleshkovsky, who tells his manic tale in the voice of the crook, displays a phenomenal command of police, prison and underworld slang, as well as Russian obscenity. The writer is currently at work on a novel about a Soviet exile in the U.S. Its hero is a small-time Soviet Casanova who ceaselessly roams the country in a rented car in search of love and lust. He finds both with a succulent female FBI agent who, although she has been sent to investigate him, is enchanted with his line of sexy talk. Aleshkovsky, who teaches a class in conversational Russian at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., says: "I speak foully because the Russian language is being driven to death by Central Committee propagandists, stinking journalists and censors. But they won't kill it."

Unlike Aleshkovsky, Sergei Dovlatov, 42, was a virtual unknown in his homeland. His first work since he emigrated in 1978 is The Invisible Book, published by Ardis Press in Ann Arbor, Mich., a small publishing house that specializes in Russian literature. Currently one of the most visible writers in exile, Dovlatov is a regular contributor of fiction to The New Yorker. Last fall a collection of short pieces, The Compromise, was published by Knopf. The tales are conspicuously devoid of the anger, overt and covert, that characterizes many emigres' writing about their native country; Dovlatov's stories gently ridicule the obtuseness of the Soviet bureaucracy and the mendacity and corruption that invade everyday life. In The Compromise the author comically contrasts the news stories written by a Soviet journalist with what actually occurred. For example, a published report on the funeral of a high Communist Party official ("Above the open grave the solemn words of leave-taking were pronounced") is followed by an account of public consternation at the obsequies after it is discovered that a morgue attendant has put the wrong body in the open coffin.

Some important novels by Soviet exiles still remain inaccessible to U.S. readers. School for Fools (Ardis) by Sasha Sokolov, 40, has not gained adequate recognition because of difficulties in translation. Cast in the form of an internal dialogue between the two personalities of a schizophrenic youth, the novel is rich in exotic images and associations that are largely lost in English, despite Translator Carl Proffer's heroic efforts.

Dvor (The Courtyard) by Arkadi Lvov, 56, has thus far failed to interest American publishers because of its monumental proportions. Still, the two-volume, 800-page novel has already survived a major hazard of emigration. The author managed to smuggle the microfilmed manuscript out of the Soviet Union by concealing it in the handle of a clothesbrush. Now available in Russian in the West, the book is a masterpiece of modern realism. Set in the author's native Odessa, The Courtyard tells the intermingled life stories of ten families that occupy a single tenement house. No other work of Russian fiction has portrayed the everyday life of ordinary Soviet citizens with such compassion and in such mesmerizing detail. Lvov's villain, the local party boss, and tyrant of the tenement, is as lethal to the human spirit as any hound of hell conjured up by Dostoyevsky.

Surprisingly, a poet has proved most successful in breaking through the language barrier. Joseph Brodsky, 43, one of the finest Russian poets of his generation, has been rendered into English by such distinguished American colleagues as Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and Howard Moss. Brodsky has even acted as his own translator for two of the poems included in his latest collection, A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Currently a New York City resident, Brodsky has been covered with honors, prizes and fellowships, including a $208,000 Mac Arthur Foundation award in 1981. Manifestly, he has traveled a vast distance since 1964, when he was convicted as a "social parasite" in Leningrad and forced to serve as a laborer on a state farm for 20 months. Unfortunately, some other greatly talented poets, including Lev Losev, Henri Volokhonsky, Dmitri Bobyshev and Yuri Kublanovsky, have yet to find translators who will help them break out of isolation.

Although women writers have held a conspicuous place in the history of modern Russian literature, they have been slow to find their true voices in exile. But a few, like Playwright Nina Voronel, 51, are beginning to be heard by non-Russian audiences in the West. Voronel, consistently thwarted in her attempts to write for the Soviet theater, has had two one-acters produced off-Broadway. In Israel, where she now lives, two full-scale plays have been performed, and a movie and a TV drama have been based on her scripts. Like most emigre authors, Voronel is still drawing on her experience and observation of her native country. Typically, her dramas have dealt with such grim subjects as a Soviet abortion clinic and an old people's home for Russian writers.

In contrast, Ludmila Shtern's fictional sketches poke fun at some of the gravest problems of everyday Soviet life, including endemic food shortages and epidemic alcoholism. Shtern, 48, who taught geology in Leningrad, has combined her new writing career with selling real estate in Boston. Vastly popular with emigre readers of the Novoye Russkoye Slovo (New Russian Word) and other Russian-language publications, her fiction is beginning to break into the pages of little magazines in the U.S. such as Stories and Pequod. Back in the Soviet Union, Shtern recalls, magazine editors regularly dispensed praise along with the inevitable rejection slips. "Bring me some more stories," one editor told her. "Then we can have another good laugh together."

The two commanding figures of Russian exile literature, Andrei Sinyavsky, 58, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 65, have chosen to remain relatively isolated in the West. Following a six-year sentence in the Gulag for publishing his work abroad, Sinyavsky moved to France in 1973 and quickly became a leader in emigre literary and political life. A Paris resident for more than a decade, Sinyavsky has not felt the need to learn French. Though he has written two remarkable phantasmagorical novels and innumerable articles while in exile, hardly any of Sinyavsky's writings have appeared in English since A Voice from the Chorus (1976), a superb miscellany of meditations and observations on life in Soviet concentration camps.

Solzhenitsyn, meanwhile, rarely strays from the 50-acre estate in rural Vermont that he bought eight years ago because it reminded him of his beloved Russia. How the author of the magisterial The Gulag Archipelago is faring as a creative writer is unknown. All the works he has published since his deportation from the Soviet Union ten years ago have been either books completed before his exile, like the powerful memoir The Oak and the Calf, or speeches and articles of a political nature, like his sententious Warning to the West. In addition, he has revised many of his earlier books and added long historical sections to his novel August 1914.

Recalling the trauma of emerging from obscurity to celebrity in 1962 when his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Oak and the Calf: "For 15 years I had lurked discreetly in the depths -- the camps, exile, underground -- never showing myself, and now I had risen to the surface and sudden fame." He concluded:

"If a deep-sea fish used to a constant pressure of many atmospheres rises to the surface, it perishes because it cannot ad just to excessively low pressures." Only when October 1916, his long-awaited new novel, appears in Russian next fall and in English in 1985, will it be known whether the air of freedom has proved too thin for this great writer. Certainly it has provided the breath of life for many of his compatriots. -- By Patricia Blake