Pushkin Hills

Afterword

“POLITICAL WORK OUGHT TO BE CONCRETE”: this is one of the rousing Soviet mottos recalled in Sergei Dovlatov’s novel, The Zone. Ironically, it is also what is said about good writing, and can one think of a more concrete contemporary writer than Dovlatov? Sentences compacted to aphoristic ingots: “One is born either poor or rich. Money has almost nothing to do with it.” Paradox, sharp wit, and swift one-liners: “Boris sober and Boris drunk are such different people, they’ve never even met.” Or: “What could I say to him? What do you say to a guard who uses after-shave only internally?” Fierce, precise snapshots, illuminated by absurdist flashes: “Cars streamed past us like submarines holding each other’s tails.” Dialogue almost Waugh-like in its tart comedy:

“You’ve just forgotten. The rudeness, the lies.”

“If people are rude in Moscow, at least it’s in Russian.”

“That’s the horrible part.”

And people, things, clothes, memories, stories – all seized and made instantly vivid:

Indistinct memories came to him.

…A square in winter, tall rectangular buildings. A few school-boys surround Vova Mashbits, the class telltale. Vova’s expression is frightened, he wears a foolish hat, woollen drawers… Koka Dementiyev tears a grey sack out of his hand. Shakes a pair of galoshes out onto the snow. After which, faint with laughter, he urinates into the sack. The schoolboys grab Vova, hold him by the shoulders, shove his head into the darkened sack. The boy stops trying to break loose. It’s not actually painful…

Reading Dovlatov is a joyous, thrilling, usually hilarious experience, in large part because he has such a talent for making stories so concrete: he collects vignettes, loud portraits, bitter jokes, comic tales, absurd episodes, black anecdotes, and then delights in bringing them out of the ether of hearsay or memory and giving them new life in print. He captures, and he frees: his work bursts with this captured, freed life. There is the prisoner Makeyev, in The Zone, who climbs onto the roof of the prison camp to watch the woman he has fallen in love with, a schoolteacher named Isolda Shchukina. [119] He is unable to make out her features or even her age. He knows only that she wears two dresses, a green one and a brown one: “Early in the morning, Makeyev would crawl onto the roof of the barracks. After some time, there would be a thunderous announcement: ‘Brown!’ This meant that Isolda had gone out to visit the toilet facilities.” [119] There is the story, from The Suitcase, of the Lenin statue that went wrong. People gather for the unveiling of the new monument; a band plays, speeches are given. And as a drum rolls, the cloth is lifted – to reveal Lenin in familiar pose, his right arm pointing “the way to the future” and his left in the pocket of his open coat. The music stops, and suddenly someone laughs. “A minute later, the whole crowd was laughing… What had happened? The poor sculptor had given Lenin two caps, one on the leader’s head, the other one clutched in his fist.” [24] In the same book, Dovlatov remembers being asked to play Old Grandfather Frost in a New Year’s show for a school. He is promised three days off and fifteen rubles. On stage, he appears in a beard, a white hat, and bearing a basket of gifts. “Hello, dear children! Do you recognize me?” And the yelled reply comes from the front rows: “Lenin! Lenin!” [115]

There are the sparkling sketches, in A Foreign Woman, of Russian émigrés in New York – like Fima Druker, a famous bibliophile when he lived in Leningrad, now running a publishing company called Russian Book, which struggles to survive in America, and which is eventually renamed Invisible Book (apparently now specializing in erotica); or Zaretsky, a journalist notorious in the Soviet Union for his “voluminous” work published in samizdat, Sex Under Totalitarianism, “which claimed that ninety per cent of Soviet women were frigid.” [8] At one point in the novel, Zaretsky attempts to do some sex research on the novel’s heroine, an émigré named Marusya Tatarovich: one of his questions involves asking her if she lost her virginity “before or after the Hungarian events.” [48]

Sergei Dovlatov was born in 1941, in Ufa, in the Republic of Bashkiria; his family had been evacuated there from Leningrad during the Second World War. His mother was Armenian, his father Jewish and a distinguished theater director. His intensely autobiographical work – warmly and casually mixing fiction and fact; often jocosely combining fiction with what postmodernism calls metafiction (that is, commentary on fiction-making) – offers the reader a vital picture of the usual bald biographical summary. In his writing, including this book, we learn about the many phases of his short life (he died in 1990, in New York City): about his parents and their work in the theater (the wonderful story, “Fernand Léger’s Jacket”); about the time he spent, in the early 1960s, as a prison guard in the Soviet camp system (The Zone); about his work as a journalist, in Leningrad and Estonia (The Suitcase and The Compromise); the summer he spent as an official guide at the Pushkin Preserve, south of Pskov (Pushkin Hills).

Dovlatov was not published in Russia during his lifetime. During the 1970s, he circulated his writing in samizdat and began to be published in European journals, an activity which brought about his expulsion from the Union of Soviet Journalists in 1976. He left the Soviet Union in 1978 and arrived in New York in 1979 to join his wife and daughter, part of the so-called “third wave” of Russian immigration (an anxious transit anticipated in Pushkin Hills and more fully described in A Foreign Woman and the memoir, Ours, which traces the stories of four generations of his family). In New York, Dovlatov quickly became one of the most prominent and popular members of the Russian émigré community. He co-edited The New American, a liberal émigré newspaper, and worked for Radio Liberty. But mainly he wrote: twelve books in the last twelve years of his life. The Compromise appeared in 1981, The Zone a year later, Ours in 1983, A Foreign Woman in 1986, the same year that The Suitcase was published. These books were written in Russian and published by small presses, such as the Hermitage Press in Tenafly, New Jersey, or Russica, in New York. It was only in the mid-1980s, when Dovlatov was beginning to reach a wider audience (partly due to the publication of several of his stories in The New Yorker), that English-language publishers took an interest: The Zone was published in English translation in 1985 (Knopf) and The Suitcase in 1990 (Weidenfeld).

One of those books, Pushkin Hills, appeared in 1983 under the title Zapovednik (“The Preserve”). It has waited thirty years for its publication in English in this brilliant translation by the writer’s daughter, Katherine Dovlatov. Like all of Dovlatov’s work, it has charm, bite, vitality, and a peculiar sweetness. The book is narrated by an authorial alter ego, Boris Alikhanov, a youngish, unpublished writer with a drinking problem, who is spending the summer as a guide at Pushkin’s house and estate near Pskov. In The Zone, his book about his experiences as a prison guard, Dovlatov wrote that he deliberately refrained from writing about “the wildest, bloodiest, most monstrous episodes of camp life” – partly for moral and aesthetic reasons and partly because, he added mordantly, he did not want to be known as a Shalamov or Solzhenitsyn, writers best-known for their chilling descriptions of Gulag life. “I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through hell (however much I may love Shalamov). It’s enough that I worked as a guide on the Pushkin estate.” [163] In that book, Dovlatov argued that a Soviet camp was Soviet society in a microcosm, and one of the teasing pleasures of Pushkin Hills is the jokey way he treats the Pushkin estate as both a benign prison camp and another microcosmic analogue of Soviet reality – complete with ambitious apparatchiks, loyal ideologues, ornery peasants, loathsome snitches, and dissident intellectuals (i.e. Dovlatov himself, in the guise of Boris Alikhanov). Of course, because this is the benign, literary version, the apparatchiks and ideologues are all Pushkin devotees who cannot countenance anything but utter devotion to the literary idol. Marianna Petrovna, whose job at the estate is the daunting-sounding “methodologist,” gives Boris the once-over:

“Do you love Pushkin?”

I felt a muffled irritation.

“I do.”

At this rate, I thought, it won’t be long before I don’t.

“And may I ask you why?”…

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why do you love Pushkin?”

“Let’s stop this idiotic test,” I burst out. [24]

There are the familiar Dovlatov portraits, full of tender comedy: Mitrofanov, for instance, a guide famous for his photographic memory, who has read ten thousand books, but who has become incurably lazy. He suffers, says Dovlatov, from aboulia, or “total atrophy of the will”: “He was a phenomenon that belonged to the vegetable kingdom, a bright, fanciful flower. A chrysanthemum cannot hoe its own soil and water itself.” [48] Strangely, life at the Pushkin preserve suits Mitrofanov, and he delivers fanatically detailed and scholarly lectures to largely ungrateful tourists. Or Guryanov, famous for his extraordinary ignorance, who once confused Pushkin’s Tales of Ivan Belkin with what he absurdly called “The tale of Ivan Onegin”…[124] Or Mikhail Ivanych Sorokin, the rustic alcoholic in whose revoltingly neglected hovel Boris rents a room for the season, and who wants to be paid not in cash but in booze and cigarettes.

Like everything Dovlatov wrote, Pushkin Hills is funny on every page, sparkling with jokes, repartee, and this writer’s special savage levity. But Dovlatov is also expert at what Gogol called “laughter through tears.” In Pushkin Hills, the almost Wodehouse-like escapades in the countryside are constantly menaced by the obligations and difficulties Boris has fled – how to be a writer in the Soviet Union, how to live amicably with his wife and daughter. “Officially, I was a full-fledged creative personality. In reality, I was on the edge of a mental breakdown.” [79] These anxieties present themselves in concentrated form when Boris’s wife, Tanya, begins to force the question of emigration. On a surprise visit to the Pushkin estate, she tells Boris that she has made the decision: she will file emigration papers next week. Boris is fearful, irrational, resistant. He refuses to leave the Soviet Union. He loves his country – “My language, my people, my crazy country…Imagine this, I even love the policemen.” [86] Emigration seems like death to him; he tells Tanya that in a foreign tongue “we lose eighty percent of our personality.” [87] America seems merely fictional, chimerical: “A half-forgotten film starring Akbar the tiger and Charlie Chaplin…” [88]

Boris seems to anticipate the émigré life that Dovlatov would write about three years later in A Foreign Woman, a book which, like Pushkin Hills, is full of jollity and tremulous sadness. In that later book several of the characters struggle to adapt to life in New York – people like Karavayev, for instance, known in the Soviet Union as a brave human rights activist (imprisoned three times and a serial hunger striker). America, writes Dovlatov, had “disappointed” Karavayev: “He missed the Soviet regime, Marxism, and the punitive organs. Karavayev had nothing to protest against.” [10] The heroine of A Foreign Woman, Marusya Tatarovich, decides that she has made a mistake in leaving Russia and applies to return. Dovlatov (who appears as himself in this book) asks her about the prospect of losing her newfound freedom. “To hell with freedom! I want peace!” Raised in relative privilege in the Soviet Union, she has feeble economic prospects in New York: “Wash dishes in a lousy restaurant? Study computers? Sell chestnuts on 108^th Street? I’d rather go back.” [82] At the Soviet embassy, she is told that it is all very well to confess in private to having made a mistake, but if she wants to return she must now “earn forgiveness.” (A political, nicely comic version of Dostoevsky’s idea that the criminal must religiously “accept his suffering.”) Marusya is told she will have to write a newspaper article laying out her errors as public atonement. But she can’t write journalism, she says. Who will pen the piece? “I’ll get Dovlatov to write it.” Needless to say, the article remains unwritten; for better or worse, Marusya stays in America.

In its sly, sidelong, defiantly non-aligned way, Dovlatov’s work is always probing questions of freedom. Boris, in Pushkin Hills, perhaps belongs on a spectrum with Karavayev and Marusya Tatarovich in A Foreign Woman and in The Zone, Chichevanov, a prisoner who escapes from camp just hours before his legitimate release – after twenty years inside, he is so afraid of freedom that he wants only to be recaptured. “Outside the prison gates,” says one of the officers, Chichevanov “would have had nothing to do. He was wildly afraid of freedom, he was gasping for breath like a fish.” And Dovlatov adds: “There’s something similar in what we Russian émigrés experience.” [88]

It’s not simply that freedom might be frightening, novel, unreal; it’s that it might turn out to be not as free as advertised – or not free in exactly the way promised. And if you refuse to risk the potential “disappointment” of freedom by exercising it, you will, at least, avoid that disappointment. It’s why Boris fearfully defends, even to the point of absurdity, his non-existent status as Russian writer: when Tanya reminds him that he hasn’t been (and, seemingly, can’t be) published in the Soviet Union, he replies, “But my readers are here. While over there…Who needs my stories in Chicago?” [87] Better, perhaps, to have always-unrealized potential than lapsed actuality. Shadowing Boris, and indeed all of Dovlatov’s émigrés, is the double sense of freedom, both positive and negative, that V.S. Naipaul beautifully evokes at the end of his story “One out of Many,” from In a Free State. The story is about Santosh, a poor servant from Bombay who accompanies his master, a diplomat, to Washington, D.C. Santosh is utterly lost in America, but he eventually marries an African-American woman and thus gains the right to stay. His new employer, who owns an Indian restaurant, reassures him that in the States no one cares, as they would in India, that Santosh is married to a black woman: “Nobody looks at you when you walk down the street. Nobody cares what you do.” And Santosh comments: “He was right. I was a free man; I could do anything I wanted…It didn’t matter what I did, because I was alone.” It is an enormous privilege to live in a country where “nobody cares what you do”; but when nobody cares what you do, then perhaps it doesn’t matter what you do. Perhaps apprehending something like this, Boris falters and freezes; it is easier to make no decision at all. He lets his wife and daughter go ahead of him.

Freedom is both actual and ideal, both concrete and metaphysical. There are enacted realities, like the rule of law, free speech, economic possibility and limitation, material circumstance – it should go without saying that these actualities are of enormous consequence in immigrants’ lives. But the émigré has also a strange, pure, almost metaphysical liberty: this, as Nabokov knew, is the portable, remembered world he or she brings with him from the old country. Nabokov’s émigré professor, Timofey Pnin, knows this portable, internal, untouchable, undisappointable world to be the cosmos you carry inside you – the stories, the people, the memories, the anecdotes and jokes, even the very dates of one’s national history; in short, the émigré’s entire cultural formation: “a brilliant cosmos that seemed all the fresher for having been abolished by one blow of history,” as Pnin thinks of it. It is why Dovlatov is able to look at the single suitcase he brought with him from the Soviet Union and disdain the things inside it (the hat, the jacket, the shirt, the gloves). The things are not important. What are important are the stories these things drag with them, the very stories Dovlatov made into his book, The Suitcase, the stories that enliven every page of his writing. In this sense, things are not concrete; the impalpable stories are, made so by the great writer when set down brilliantly, vividly in print for generations of future readers. I don’t know if Boris quite understands this, at the end of Pushkin Hills; but we are very fortunate that Sergei Dovlatov did.

—James Wood