Odd Jobs (101 page)

Alone Together
was written here and there—Newton, Cape Cod, Miami, New York—and moves back and forth between detailed pleading and terse reminiscence, between glimpses of her blithe momentary surroundings and reflections upon her likely fate of continued ostracism and harassment. As the prose goes along, it seems to gather confidence and
esprit:
“This book wrote itself, without resistance, so easily that these pages probably should not be called a book.” Might we even say it grows more American in style, more breezy and concrete? After all, she was here for five months. One of her last chapters expands upon, in a virtually Thoreauvian manner, the discovery that she wants a house. She has observed that “what Americans want is a house.” Elena Bonner has never had one, always sharing crowded quarters and awkward communal arrangements. “I think that the first time I was mistress of my own place was—it’s hard to believe—in Gorky, in exile. I do not want that. I want a house. My daughter has a house in Newton, Massachusetts. It makes me so happy to think that she has a house.… But it’s time for me to pack my bags.”

Her heart was repaired here, and this testy, plucky document was left behind as testimony. Bonner returned to Gorky early last June and dropped from the news until recently, when the world was told that General Secretary Gorbachev, personally calling Sakharov on a telephone installed in the physicist’s Gorky apartment just the day before, announced that the couple would be allowed to return to Moscow. This is good news, though mixed with that of another dissenter, Anatoly Marchenko, who has died in Chistopol Prison, and of a psychiatrist, Anatoly Koryagin, who has been imprisoned for protesting the use of psychiatry for political purposes. Talking to
The New York Times
on his suddenly permissible telephone, Sakharov said he expects to go back to scientific research while continuing to speak out on human rights. His
wife, he said, “although she has gotten no worse, is generally a very sick person.… She stays at home because she has a heart condition that does not allow her to go out of the house in this kind of weather.” Back in Moscow, they have endured countless interviews, and
Newsweek
quotes her as saying that, “if Gorbachev wants to be consistent, then an amnesty for prisoners of conscience is necessary. I also think it is necessary for him to include human rights in the policy of
glasnost
.” She hoped her husband could visit America, and lamented that “a person with such global thinking has not seen the world, not a single country outside of Russia.”
Alone Together
was published simultaneously in ten Western countries and, besides making Elena Bonner likable and real to its readers, seems to have done her no harm and perhaps some good. The relatively happy aftermath of its publication bears out her husband’s point that the main weapon in the struggle for human rights is publicity.

P
USHKIN
H
OUSE
, by Andrei Bitov, translated from the Russian by Susan Brownsberger. 371 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

C
HILDREN OF THE
A
RBAT
, by Anatoli Rybakov, translated from the Russian by Harold Shukman. 685 pp. Little, Brown, 1988.

Glasnost
, like the sun breaking through, brings shadows. More, clearly, is to be permitted in the Soviet Union, but how much more?
Doctor Zhivago
can now be published, as being not sufficiently injurious to the health of the Revolution, and so can a smattering of formerly scorned émigrés such as Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov. And not only Nabokov’s chess problems, his youthful translation of
Alice in Wonderland
, and his little book on Gogol have been published but two novels with a strong taint of political content—
The Gift
and
Invitation to a Beheading
—have been judged fit to print in the nervous homeland of their language. Who, a few short years ago, would have thought it?

Two ambitious novels by Soviet citizens have been recently translated into English and published here after suffering misadventures on the way to their local printer’s.
Pushkin House
, by Andrei Bitov, was written in the mid-Seventies, circulated in samizdat, was published in Russian by Ardis Publishers, in Michigan, and last year achieved publication in the Soviet Union.
Children of the Arbat
, by Anatoli Rybakov, was suppressed for twenty years before, in “one of the most daring steps of
glasnost
” (to quote the words of Yevgeny Yevtushenko on the back of the jacket), it was published in the U.S.S.R., “where public libraries have a readers’ waiting list for it in the thousands.” The jacket of
Pushkin House
, too, bears an encomium: Vassily Aksyonov writes, “Although
Pushkin House
has not been published in the Soviet Union as of yet, this novel has stood up for ten years as a firm part of the contemporary Russian artistic and intellectual environment. Andrei Bitov belongs to the St. Petersburg–Leningrad School of Prose with its ambitions to inherit the perfection of the Silver Age.” On the other hand, Yevtushenko tells us, “
Children of the Arbat
is written in the tradition of the Russian social novel of the nineteenth century. It is a geological cross section of
terra incognita
revealing all the layers of society of the early 1930s in Moscow.” The symmetry of the blurbists is striking: Yevtushenko is the most internationally conspicuous of those now-middle-aged writers who blossomed during Khrushchev’s brief cultural thaw twenty-five years ago and have since elected to tough it out as Soviet artists; Aksyonov, his former confrere and almost exact contemporary, is the best-known child of the thaw to immigrate to the United States, and now resides, jogs, and gives interviews in Washington, D.C. Their respective endorsements suggest that Rybakov’s novel is that of an insider (“One of Russia’s most successful writers,” the back flap tells us) working close to the edge, and Bitov’s that of an outsider (though five books of his short stories were published in Moscow between 1963 and 1972) who would rather not think about the edge. Suddenly allowed, last year, to appear at a Washington conference on Western literature, Bitov—a tall, rather sedate man with thinning hair and a drooping, graying mustache—said of the new climate under Gorbachev, “Personally, I am tired of all the changes taking place because I no longer have time to sleep.… Change, even for the better, causes discomfort.”

Pushkin House
is a brilliant, restless, impudent novel, reminiscent of
The Gift
in that it refracts a sensitive young man’s moral and aesthetic
progress through a prism of allusions to earlier Russian literature, and of Andrei Bely’s
Petersburg
in that it makes the city now called Leningrad a vivid and symbolically freighted presence and swathes a few hectic domestic events in a giddy whirl of metaphorically packed language. All three of these novels feel, to the American reader, as if they were losing a lot in translation. The Silver Age mentioned by Aksyonov has no exact equivalent in English prose; its peculiar shades of purple and playfulness and its close alliance with Symbolist poetry suggest distinctly minor writers like Ronald Firbank and Edgar Saltus, while there is nothing minor, in Russian, about Bely and Nabokov. Perhaps Nabokov’s English-language novels
Pale Fire
and
Ada
and the more philosophically expansive Saul Bellow works like
Henderson the Rain King
and
Humboldt’s Gift
better suggest the controlled explosions, the high-energy conflux of poetic language and way-out thought, that the Russian tradition generated before Lenin and Stalin shut it down. Pushkin House is a literary institute and museum in Leningrad, and in a broader sense the house of which Pushkin laid the cornerstone—classic Russian literature. Epigraphs from and allusions to (attentively footnoted by the translator) this literature abound in Bitov’s text, whose three sections bear titles taken from four masterpieces: “Fathers and Sons” (Turgenev), “A Hero of Our Time” (Lermontov), and “The Humble Horseman” (combining Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” and Dostoevsky’s
Humble Folk
, a combination reversed in the epilogue as “Bronze Folk”). There is also some pointed, mischievous parallelism with Chernyshevsky’s seminal radical novel
What Is to Be Done?
It would no doubt help us to have read all these works, as even the mildly educated Russian reader has, but perhaps we can get the idea anyway—the idea, that is, of the superfluous man, the gentleman who floats above the depths of Russian society, and whose existence is especially problematical for literature, since in his superfluity he is nevertheless the principal bearer of culture.

Aristocrats in the dashing old style of Pushkin’s Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin no longer exist, but Soviet society has evolved new elites, and Bitov’s hero, Lyova Odoevtsev, belongs to the professorial elite, as well as being a member, through his ancestors, of the nobility. Though Lyova’s sensibility, coupled with the talkative author’s, occupies the entire foreground of this novel, he is not terribly easy to picture, or to love. His face is not described until near the end, and then with cunning indeterminacy:

Vague as he is, Lyova serves as the focus of three extensive, jumbled episodes: the return from exile and scholarly rehabilitation of his grandfather, the oscillating amorous life he splits among three young women, and the disastrous three days he spends as lone caretaker at Pushkin House while the rest of Leningrad is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. The first and last episodes include long scenes of drunkenness, wonderfully rendered in its colorful, fluctuating fog and torrents of mock-profound discourse; “Vodka is the plot’s myrrh-bearer,” we are told at one point. In the plot, things seem to happen and then unhappen; a lively character called Uncle Dickens dies and is revived at a moment when his assistance would be convenient. Alternative plot possibilities are freely discussed, and sometimes several are pursued. The overall movement is that of a “sluggish dream” lurchingly flowing toward a meaningless denouement: “And here at last is the sum, peak, crescendo-mescendo, apogee, climax, denouement—what else?—the
NOTHING;
here at last is that critical
NOTHING
, idol, symbol: a small, smooth, darkly glossy little thing, prolate, fits in the palm of your hands …! now you see it; now you don’t!” The novel not only is difficult but feels to be
about
difficulty, Russian difficulty. In the U.S.S.R., into which Lyova is born in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, and in which he is glimpsed thirty years later, concluding on the banks of the Neva that his life “exists only through error,” nothing is easy or obvious. Family life is difficult, career choices, career politics, love life; what’s more, writing a novel, in this post-Pushkin, post-Stalin, postmodernist world, is difficult, a procedure so tricky and tortuous that the difficulty (I confess) spreads even to writing a review of it.

Within the large and unappetizing inertia of this vodka- and doubt-propelled plot, this “always postponed story,” Bitov contrives a micro-cosmic hyperactivity of phrase, sentence, and image which is, even
through the hazy scrim of translation, engagingly vital. Dip in anywhere; small surprises crystallize. “He kept looking at the watch on Karenina’s arm. The watch impressed him: golden and tiny on her wide puffy wrist, it had drowned in the folds and lay there smiling.” “The swollen Leningrad ceiling hung like a heavy, veined belly. Not rain, not snow—a sort of torn sky-flesh was coming down now, and it plastered the wayfarer in an instant, smothering him like the hateful and nauseating mask of a faint.” The novel opens with a startling swoop of authorial rumination:

The sketch of Lyova’s family is surprisingly prickly:

And yet when Lyova at last meets his grandfather, a linguistics scholar who was imprisoned for thirty years and who should by all liberal and sentimental logic be sympathetic, the old man is repulsive, with an elastic face that seems to be of two halves, and a number of eerie mannerisms: “He drank long, delved deeply, choking, sucking in, soaking in, breathing in, sinking in, withdrawing entirely into the mug, he bumbled over it like a bee over a flower, and when he leaned back with a happy sigh Lyova noted with horror that the beer had not actually diminished in the mug—there was as much left as ever.” Lyova initially has trouble distinguishing his grandfather from the old man’s former labor-camp commandant, Koptelov, who has become, in a grotesque bit of
perestroika
, a crony. Where Lyova expects familial warmth, a young poet, Rudik, has usurped a favorite’s place. As vodka flows, Lyova is roughly teased and mercilessly harangued by his grandfather, who rails against
“this affront of rehabilitation. They’re not afraid of me anymore. I’m slag. They threw me out into retirement—I’ve served my time as a prisoner and I’m no good for anything else. That’s how capitalist countries treat workers in textbooks.” At last, Lyova is dismissed into the bitterly cold “failed space” of outer Leningrad, where his sensations mimic the pace of this novel: “He was oddly aware of time flowing through him. It was uneven and seemingly fitful: it dragged, stretched out, thinned like a droplet, forming a little neck—and suddenly broke.”