How to begin! Well, first I want to tell you about an old Russian poet who lived in Moscow and wrote these funny words:

Я на мир взираю из-под столика.
Век двадцатый, век необычайный.
Чем он интересней для историка,
Тем для современника печальней.

Well, did you get it? I think you didn’t. So, I’ll translate them from Russian into English:

I look at the world from under a little table.
The twentieth century is an extraordinary century.
The more interesting it is for a historian,
The more sorrowful it is for a contemporary.

These ironical lines belong to the poet Nikolaj Glazkov, the first Soviet hippy, who died in 1979 at the age of sixty. Cinema goers can see him in the world famous film, Andrej Rublëv, by  the film director Таrkovskij. In that film, the poet played the part of a “faddy” aeronaut who back in medieval Russia was trying to fly in a balloon that he had built himself. “I’m flying! I’m flying!” - he cried joyfully, without noticing that he was falling swiftly into a dirty bog.

Nikolaj Glazkov was an unrecognized genius, whose verses were not published for years. But it was Nikolaj Glazkov who coined the word samizdat. This word was borrowed later by many foreign languages, along with such Russian words as sputnik, gulag and perestrojka, but if any of you happen not to know what samizdat means, I can promptly tell you that the literal translation of this word is: “I publish my works by myself”. Rejected by all the official publishing houses, Glazkov compiled his verses in thin little books, printed them himself, and put on their cover that word samizdat, which was also a word that was similar to the name of an official  publishing house. Like a distorting mirror, that word, samizdat, also reflected the idiotic slang of totalitarian abbreviations such as Gosizdat (which means “state-published” and was the name of a state publishing house), or kolchoz (a collective farm). And it was samizdat that saved the Russian literature of the second half of the twentieth-century. It was samizdat that became the symbol of freedom.

The private manufacturing, distribution and consumption of uncensored literature became a mass phenomenon in the Soviet Union, from the sixties up until the beginning of the eighties. It is necessary to refer to the past to understand the reasons for this phenomenon, and we can’t do so without talking a bit about the Russian mentality. The brilliant Canadian thinker of the twentieth century, Marshall McLuhan, has called our world with all its modern means of communication the global village. If that’s true, Russia, in this village, is a detached house, where something is constantly happening: fires, revolutions, genocide, terror and war. And at the same time this house is the birthplace of genius, a hearth of ideas, and the bedroom of unearthly love and tenderness. To live in Russia is always fun; to live in Russia is always dangerous, no matter what time you happen to be born in. Once I mentioned in an essay of mine that if I had been born in 1890, for example, I would have had a chance to be killed in the 1905 Russian-Japanese war, or during the first Russian revolution of the same year. If I had been born ten years later, I would have been caught up in the 1917 October revolution, with its red and white terror, and also the gulag could have taken hold of me. Had I been born in the early 20th century, I would have gotten involved in the Second World War, and so on and so forth. Therefore I am glad that I was born in 1946. I lived under Stalin and other communist leaders who later replaced him, such as Chruščëv, Brežnev, Černenko, Andropov and at last, Gorbačëv. When he was in power, totalitarian communism was done away with in my country, and Russia set out in search of new adventures.

The life in the time of the bolsheviks was very strange and now lots of people including myself think of it as a nightmare, the end of which is not yet in sight. Already within my memory there is the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution by the Soviet army, the persecution of the Nobel prize winner, Boris Pasternak, who had his novel Doctor Zhivago published here, in Italy. What else? Tanks brought into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to do away with the attempt of building socialism “with a human face”, arrests of dissidents, the physicist Andrej Sacharov exiled from Moscow without a trial or investigation, the war in Afghanistan, and many other things.

But I am a professional writer, and my trade is literature. I take more interest in literature than in politics. I feel free when I do writing. It’s another thing if what I write gets published. My works were not published for many years, and when I was finally admitted to the Union of Writers, I was soon expelled. I set an original record, worthy of the Guinness book of records. I remained in the official Union of Soviet Writers for the record time of 7 months and 13 days. After that I became a writer of the underground. But I want to emphasize once again that I was not a political figure. And my relationship with the authorities was reduced to what was described in a popular joke of that time, which goes like this:

A simple-hearted Soviet citizen was called before the KGB and asked: -“Is it true that you have abused Soviet power?
“Me?”, answers the citizen, “Do you expect me to abuse Soviet power? Let it go to the devil! Who gives a shit about abusing your motherfucking Soviet power!”

A lot of people nowadays feel nostalgia for that life. Many people consider that then there was order, and the writer was an important person, even though he was sometimes taken to prison for his books. Many people think so, but I’m the last to be among them. Those times were good for me only for one reason: I was thirty years younger.

So, from my experience, as an old writer, I dare say that all those who talk today about the death of literature in Russia at the beginning of the third millennium are talking nonsense. The Russians will never stop drinking vodka, and they will never stop reading and writing books. For me it is as self-evident as the fact that they in Russia can invent an unimaginable space vehicle, but they can never learn to make a good car. Why not? It is a mystery of the Russian soul. As for its explanation, it has been painfully searched for by all Russian writers during the entire existence of Russian literature.

Meanwhile, Russian literature in its modern sense came into being not so long ago. One could say that it happened in the early 19th-century when the poet Puškin, our national genius, appeared. Puškin is a strange figure for foreigners. His poems, translated into other languages, are frequently perceived as a collection of banalities. They suspect him of imitating Western European poets and writers. Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott, for example. But Аleksandr Puškin was the first to start writing in the language that all of us Russians speak now. It was Puškin who created a system of versification which even today does not seem out-of-date. Unlike the work of his numerous predecessors, Puškin’s work does not grow old. Rather, year after year one could say that his works become more valuable, like antiques or mature wine. The Russian reader finds in his works that esoteric information about their country and about the soul of an individual living in their country which no research or popularizing articles can offer. And there are, probably, translations of Puškin worthy of his genius, in which case it will be easier for you to believe my words.

Russian literature of the 19th century is also represented by the works of four Russian novelists of genius. I mean here: Nikolaj Gogol’, Lev Tolstoj, Fëdor Dostoevskij, and Nikolaj Leskov. Each of them described his own Russia; each of them engaged in polemics with the others, but on the whole, they reflect that Russian cosmos which is impossible to destroy regardless of who rules the country – whether it be some tsar, the communists, or the capitalists. Each of these writers gave rise to a distinguished literary trend. Gogol’ embodied the absurdity of Russian life. Tolstoj offers, though somewhat didactically, a powerful, popular, moral vision. Dostoevskij glanced into the most esoteric corners of human soul where meanness gets along with holiness. When we come to Leskov, however, we have a writer who is less known in the West than the other three. Yet he is second to none in tracing the twists, bends and curves of the Russian national character. One of his characters was a Russian craftsman of genius whose name was Levša (Lefty). The craftsman was so good that he shod a miniature dancing flea. Then he took to drinking and died in a hospital. By the way, he probably would have been able to explain why the Russian automotive industry was dominated by the Italian Fiat cars, produced in Russia under the name “Žiguli”. He would… but at that time there were no cars, either in Russia or anywhere else in the world, and it is revealing that the little toy, dancing flea that Levša had improved so ingeniously didn’t work any longer after his improvement.

Of course a very special place in Russian literature is occupied by the remarkable story-teller and playwright, Аnton Čechov. But the traditional Russian way of life was destroyed by the 1917 October revolution. Now a lot of people call the October revolution the October coup d’etat when a small group of bolsheviks seized power in a huge country. At that time the intelligentsia thought that all that “jazz” was frivolous; they believed that the bolsheviks would collapse shortly, that they could not exist long since it was something against the very logic of life. Alas, history very often does not submit to any logic. The bolshevik power existed in my country practically till 1991, and a lot of people used to share the ideas of a character from a story by Ivan Bunin. Bunin was a brilliant Russian writer, a Nobel-prize winner, an emigrant from the USSR. The character I mentioned hanged himself in his tiny squalid room, with a plate attached to his breast. The plate read: “There will be no end to Lenin’s Empire”.

By the way, the famous American expert on the Soviet Union, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had the same idea. When he learned in 1982 that Brežnev had died, he said in an interview that after Brežnev, Russia will be ruled by another Brežnev. In his opinion Russia was doomed to Brežnevs, no matter what the actual surnames were. He doesn’t seem to have been quite right, but it’s not worth it to go over all that happened.

The period of Russian culture from the early 20th century to the bolshevik coup d’etat has received the name of the “Silver Age”. The label emphasized the difference of the new art from the art of Puškin’s “golden” epoch. The Silver Age gave rise to such literary schools as Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism. The concepts of the Russian avant-garde, Russian Mоdernism, and Decadence, came into being. What nearly all the brilliant representatives of the Silver Age of literature had in common was their rejection of materialism and positivism, and their desire to expand the limits of literature by enlisting the mystical experience, not only from Christianity, but also that which could be found in Oriental religions.

Aleksandr Blok, a poet, and the brightest and most famous of the Russian Symbolists, adopted to some extent the experience of French symbolists such as Rimbaud, and Baudelaire. At the same time, they followed Dostoevskij in their descriptions of the hidden life of the big city. They also created a whole system of symbols to convey by artistic means such feelings as human loneliness, despair, and the foreboding of the approaching Doomsday. I don’t think that you [the audience] will be able to keep in mind all these difficult Russian names of artists belonging to the Silver Age, but I shall list them nevertheless: the religious philosopher and poet Vladimir Solov’ëv, the poet and theorist of Symbolism Dmitrij Merežkovskij, the poets Andrej Belyj, Valerij Brjusov, Fëdor Sologub and Zinaida Gippius. And then too, Маksimilian Vološin and Аleksej Remizov. All those people had fantastic destinies after the revolution. Аleksandr Blok supported the revolutionaries, but soon died by starvation in a famine. Merežkovskij, Gippius and Remizov emigrated from Russia; Valerij Brjusov served the bolsheviks faithfully; and Fëdor Sologub died in abject poverty.

A word too needs to be said about the movement called, “Acmeism”. The word derives from the Greek word “akme”. I do not know Greek, but I think this word stands for “top”, the highest degree of something. Аcmeism came into existence as a counterbalance to Symbolism. Аcmeism was younger; it was more vigorous; it polemicized with Symbolism, And rejected its mystical orientation. The Acmeists’ fortunes, however, were even more tragic when compared with the Symbolists. The leading theorist of Аcmeism, Nikolaj Gumil’ëv, was shot in 1921 for taking part in an antisoviet conspiracy; the poet Osip Mandel’štam perished in a concentration camp in the late ‘30s, and the poet Anna Achmatova lived to a venerable age, but her works were not published for a long time and her son was arrested.

Further on, alas, I’ll have to use the same words when speaking about other outstanding Russian writers of the 20th century: so many arrested, banished, perished, expelled, or badly slandered. That is why I always say to young writers, just starting out, who ask me whether they should continue writing or not: “If you can abstain from writing, do so. Nothing good awaits a writer. Never!”

And as for the Futurists, they proclaimed themselves to be the most revolutionary of all the new artistic trends, and in one of their manifestoes, they demanded that Puškin be “thrown overboard from the steamer of modernity". Though the Russian Futurists had much in common with their Italian counterparts, they failed to establish any close relations with them. The leader of the Italian Futurists, Marinetti, is known to have cooperated with Мussolini, and our Futurists welcomed the October revolution with delight. They probably believed that the new regime would need their anti-bourgeois art. I do not know what happened to Маrinetti later, but the Soviet futurists turned out to be absolutely unnecessary to the bolsheviks. The bolsheviks’ artistic tastes were absolutely conventional, and soon all avant-garde fell into disgrace: the poet Vladimir Majakovskij, the pride of the Futurists, committed suicide, shooting himself with a revolver in 1930; the ОBERIU group (this is the Russian ironic abbreviation for the Union of Real Art) was demolished; “Еlizaveta Bam”, the world’s first play of absurdity, written twenty years before Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, was repressed and its author, Daniil Charms, lost his life in prison; his friends, Aleksandr Vvedenskij and Nikolaj Olejnikov, were killed in prison too; the great poet, Nikolaj Zabolockij, was kept many years in a gulag. I am sorry that I have to repeat myself again and again.

Maksim Gor’kij occupied a special place in the literature of those years. I’ll say a few words about him. For a long time he was considered the founder of Soviet literature. To some extent it is true, but literature cannot be Soviet or anti-Soviet. It is just literature. Or it can be either literature, or not literature.

Maksim Gor’kij was an outstanding writer, but he fell victim to his own popularity. Even before the 1917 revolution he was as popular in the country as a modern pop-star could be. His characters were tramps, anarchists -- lumpen people. He walked about the whole of Russia, and he was a man of experience. He was on familiar terms with many bolshevik leaders before they came to power -- with Lenin and Тrоckij, for example. Gor’kij was a self-made man, and an intellectual. After the revolution, he tried to protect his fellow writers from the red terror, but failed, and he went abroad, practically emigrated. When he grew old and had almost lost all his popularity, he came back to the USSR in 1931, where he became the sacred cow of communists, and was given the banner of the literary trend known as Socialist Realism. Collective farms, schools, public parks, factories and plants were named after him. He had a magnificent private residence in the centre of Moscow and a suburban villa. But nothing comes without a price. It was Gor’kij who coined the cannibalistic aphorism according to which a lot of Russians lost their lives in concentration camps: “He is against us who is not with us”. He, a writer and a humanist, welcomed the totalitarian terror. In 1936, when the bolshevik power had no use for him any longer, he suddenly died in his suburban villa near Moscow under the most mysterious circumstances. There is a convincing story that he was poisoned, following an order by Iosif Stalin.

The point is that Stalin’s communist empire had been created by that time. Stalin’s main opponent, Lev Trockij, was killed in Mexico; other political rivals of Stalin were announced to be enemies of the people and were exterminated. In Russia, winter set in and that winter lasted 20 years. Then came ottepel’, or the “thaw”, which was replaced, however, by another winter, until 1991 when Russia did finally become free with all the positive and negative outcomes of this freedom.

Returning to the mid-30s, we can say that all literary trends ceased to exist then, and the Union of Soviet Writers was set up by the government, or by the totalitarian Ministry of Truth, if I can use the terminology of the English writer George Orwell, the author of the novel 1984. Maksim Gor’kij was elected chairman of that organization two years before his death.

The Union of Soviet Writers supervised all official literary activity in the USSR. According to its rules, members of the Union were obliged to not only be loyal to the existing authorities, but to also be direct assistants in administering Soviet power. Only then were they full and equal members of Soviet society. The world famous writers Мichail Bulgakov, Оsip Mandel’štam, Аnna Achmatovа and Аndrej Platonov were considered outsiders, to say nothing of scores of less popular writers and poets. I’ll give you an example. Once, in the early ’80s, a KGB officer asked me: “What are you? What’s your occupation?”. I thought a little and said honestly: “I am a writer”. He then asked: “Are you a member of the Soviet Writers Union?” I replied, “No, I am not. I have been expelled from it”. “Ah, well”, the KGB officer then said, “and yet you say you are a writer”.

Nonetheless, the part an individual can play in history is huge. When Stalin died in 1953, his colleagues started to divide his inheritance, and for approximately 10 years, till 1964, there was a strange period of time known as the “thaw” -- that short interval of reprieve between freezes.

Immediately following the wave which was dismantling Stalin’s epoch, there appeared in the official literature the bright names of some writers and poets who were called “the sixtiers”: Vasilij Aksënov, Bella Achmadulina, Аndrej Bitov, Аndrej Voznesenskij, Еvgenij Evtušenko, and Bulat Okudžava were some of those writers who became super popular at that time. Their books were printed in a great number of copies, even though they had a complicated relationship with the authorities and censorship.

There were some new, naturalist, peasant writers who described the difficult life of the people under socialism, especially that of the peasants, who were then practically in the position of slaves. For example, the authorities did not give passports to peasants and forbade them autocratically to leave their settlement, even if they were starving. Among these naturalist writers were Vasilij Belov, Vasilij Šukšin, Viktor Astaf’ev, Fëdor Abramov, Valentin Rasputin and Boris Možaev. If the sixtiers gravitated to the West and cosmopolitan culture, the peasant writers considered that no western experience was acceptable for Russia. Between these groups there was an open and sometimes fierce polemic. But I want to emphasize that all the writers I’ve just mentioned are authentic, great Russian writers of our strange epoch of the “thaw”.

Аleksandr Solženicyn occupies a unique place. His book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was the first piece of truth about Soviet penitentiary camps. It was published by the order of Nikita Chruščëv, who was in power then and who hated Stalin. “The Russian man is too wide, it is necessary to limit him”, one of Dostoevskij’s characters said. Nikita Chruščëv opened the gates of the penitentiary camps, and millions of Stalin’s prisoners were set free. Yet he arranged for the persecution of Bоris Pasternak, the author of the novel Doctor Zhivago. Chruščëv stamped his foot and shouted at Vasilij Aksënov, Аndrej Voznesenskij, Еvgenij Evtušenko, accusing them of revisionism and dislike of the Soviet power.

And again, as classical novels say, “time was flying”. In 1964 Leonid Brežnev replaced Tsar Nikita Brežnev ruled my country for almost 20 years and by the end of his life he had become a character of numerous jokes and anecdotes, in which he appeared as a good-natured, lazy fool who liked a dram. He sent the Soviet army into Afghanistan in 1979, which became a real tragedy for my country, compared only to the attempt to subdue Chechnya in the early ‘90s when some general of Boris El’cyn’s promised him to finish it in 3 days. We see the grief we have come to.

Well, here I am, talking about politics again. Sorry. The trouble is that in my country, if literature is not engaged in politics, politics is engaged in literature. In Brežnev’s times, Aleksandr Solženicyn tried to prove to the Soviet leaders that they were driving the country to destruction. Solženicyn became a persona non grata for them and in 1974 he was exiled abroad after his great book, The Gulag Archipelago, was published in the West. This book played the part of a catalyst in the disintegration of the phantom of communism in the USSR. It was read throughout the country, though its being read and distributed could lead to persecution and end in arrests. I remember giving this book to my friend, the Siberian writer Eduard Rusakov, who took it from Moscow to the Siberian city of Krasnojarsk, my birthplace. He went there by plane with the book hidden under his shirt. He gave it to an old artist Аndrej Pozdeev, who read it at night and wearing rubber gloves, because he didn’t want his fingerprints to be left on the pages. Now Eduard Rusakov is one of the best known writers of Siberia, and Аndrej Pozdeev, who in Soviet times was considered an urban madman, has been immortalized with a monument in Krasnojarsk. His pictures are exhibited in the most prestigious Russian and foreign museums and cost a fortune now.

Then the alternative culture became a phenomenon. The other culture, the second culture, the culture of the underground – all these are different names for this phenomenon. It was the culture of the “late youth”, or the “generation of janitors, street-cleaners, and night watchmen”, as the poet Аndrej Voznesenskij called such writers. Almost all of them tried to live and work as if the Soviet power didn’t exist at all. But the Soviet power demanded that everyone should have an official status and job. If you didn’t, you could be accused of parasitism, and be arrested, as happened to the future Nobel prize-winner, Iosif Brodskij. The jobs of street cleaners or watchmen didn’t bring much money, but gave people a lot of free time, which any writer needs, no less than talent. There were some other good jobs, too. For example, unloading bread in shops by night. A poet I know guarded a piece of a gas pipeline ten kilometers long, and far away, in the Arctic tundra. Unfortunately, he ended up being arrested for “аntisovietism,” which manifested itself in his verses, such as:

Brežnev plays the accordion,
Chruščëv hops a Russian dance.
These two idiots
Have ruined all Russia.

In Russian:

Играет Брежнев на гармонии,
Хрущев пляшет гопака.
Погубили всю Россию
Два партийных мудака.

After 1968, the illusions about the construction of "socialism with a human face” finally failed and a new generation of writers tried to restore the cultural links broken by space and time. They rediscovered some of the forgotten names. Circulated by samizdat were not only the verses and prose of these rediscovered writers, but also works by Western and Russian philosophers who were still forbidden in the USSR. The system of samizdat was very simple. Anyone who had something interesting to say typed it in 4 copies using 3 pieces of carbon- paper and the copies multiplied in an exponential progression.

Here is a joke of those years which testifies to the popularity of samizdat. The chief of the KGB political police, Andropov, asks the secretary to type the novel War and Peace by Lev Tolstoj for his daughter. “What for?” asked the secretary in surprise. “She has to read this novel for school, but she doesn't read anything except samizdat”, answers Аndropov.

It is impossible to believe now, but in the totalitarian country of Russia, there were scores of underground, samizdat literary magazines. Sometimes their authors and editors were arrested; sometimes they were compelled to emigrate, but the magazines kept on existing. And now, some of them are still published, but in the open.

Then, the new concept of tamizdat, or there-publishing, appeared. Western publishing houses started printing the works of Russian authors abr oad. Some of them were politically engaged, others were engaged only in art. The Parisian, Christian publishing house, YMCA-Press, published the books by Aleksandr Solženicyn, who as I have mentioned was a staunch fighter of Soviet power. The American publishing house, Аrdis Press, published the apolitical aesthete, Vladimir Nabokov. But all these books got into Russia by secret ways.

The last great literary scandal of the past epoch was an incident concerning the almanac, Меtropol’, which took place in 1979. Twenty-five authors took their literary products, which had been rejected by the official publishing houses, and decided to publish them without censorship in the USSR. Among the authors were the stars of official literature, such as Vasilij Aksënov, Bella Achmadulina, Аndrej Bitov, Аndrej Voznesensky, Fazil' Iskander, the famous actor and bard Vladimir Vysockij, plus the authors of the underground who were “widely known in narrow circles”. I was one of the five editors of the almanac and I can tell you now that its motto could have been the slogan of the 1968 student’s riots in France: BE REALIST, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE! We wanted to publish our literary products not there, not abroad, but here, in our native land; not with a typewriter, but officially, in official printing houses. Unfortunately, this first experience of zdesizdat, or here-publishing, was unsuccessful. The Union of Soviet writers called this almanac “pornography of the spirit”, and it was immediately condemned by numerous literary assemblies. Viktor Erofeev and I were expelled from the Writers’ Union; Vasilij Aksënov, the poetess Inna Lisnjanskaja and her husband, and an old Russian poet, Semën Lipkin, quit the Union of Soviet Writers as a protest against our exclusion. The almanac was then published in the Russian language, by the American publishing house, Аrdis, and was then translated into French, German and English.

However, I wanted more, because I was not used to being hit in the face without striking back. Therefore I was willing to take part in the next experience of here-publishing, with the almanac Catalogue. Alas, the result came immediately. Searches were carried out in our apartments on the same day, all our manuscripts were taken away, and all of us received the official written warnings that if we continued our criminal activity we would be arrested. It is interesting to note, however, that the authors of both Metropol’ and Catalogue have become very well-known, now, and are reputable writers in my country. And not only in mine. The verses and prose by Aksënov, Bitov, Vysockij, Dmitrij Prigov, Fridrich Gorenštein, etc., are translated in many countries, including yours, Italy. And my book of short stories, Strange Coincidence, has been translated into Italian too.

And I am very pleased with it. I am pleased with life in general, God forgive me. I have written in a book of mine, that worldly life is a wonder-work in itself; it is the prize in the global lottery, and the quality of this life is a subsidiary plot of a human tragicomedy.

My first time abroad was in 1990 when I went to Paris. I stayed with a French acquaintance of mine who had hung a portrait of Мichail Gorbačëv in the room before my arrival. She said to me that all of us, the Russians, should adore Gorbačëv. Out of politeness I didn’t say that I had an icon of the Virgin with me for that purpose. However, unlike many of my compatriots I consider Gorbačëv a really great man, whatever my grudges against him are. Thanks to him Russia returned to the civilized world, which she had left over seventy years before. And if now we in Russia have a poor life, we must recall that before, there was no life at all, there was just a strange experimental illusive existence. I have never wanted to emigrate from my country, no matter how hard my life there could be. But it so happened, that my former country, the USSR, emigrated nobody knows where, and all of us are now living in a new reality.

Certainly, its immigration has had its impact on Russian literature. In the late '80s, before censorship was abolished in the country, official newspapers and magazines overflowed with what had been kept back from common readers for ages. I don’t feel like giving the names and titles here. I mentioned them more or less when I was talking about samizdat. The late ‘80s was a strange time when there was practically no censorship but the publishing houses and editorial boards still enjoyed financial support from the Government. The fact is that the Soviet power had been generously financing ideology.

So-called “thick” literary magazines used to come out in millions of copies. And almost every day brought a piece of stunning news. One day, the official who was responsible for ideology in Gorbačëv’s government would solemnly state that by no means would Solženicyn ever be published in Russia. The next day you saw people reading The Gulag Archipelago in the subway, and published in Russia. One day Vasilij Aksënov would be called a servant of American imperialism and the next day a collection of his previously forbidden works came out in 5 volumes. And other things took place, such as the publication of some of these books by a group of swindlers who opened up a subscription, collected huge sums of money, and then disappeared after having printed just a few copies of these books. That was entirely in the spirit of the wild capitalism that was settling in, in Russia. So, a 5-volume collection of works by Aksënov which I have on my bookshelf at home, published by these swindlers, is now a rare collection, indeed.

The euphoria in the country reached its peak after the unsuccessful communist putsch of 1991. That put an end to the communist empire. It fell to pieces, and Gorbačëv lost his job as President of the USSR.

Well, all people who have tried alcoholic drinks know very well that any drinking bout is followed by the morning after. I won’t dwell on the economic or political situation in the country during the 1990s. Before then, all people had been equal; they had equally suffered from shortages of everything, including toilet paper. And in the early ‘90s, some of them rapidly made fantastic fortunes while others plunged into abject poverty and felt on their own back what the seamy side of freedom was when it was not limited by law. For me, it’s more interesting to see what happened in the Russian world of letters at that time. It so happened that the world of letters no longer interested anyone except people of letters. Before, it used to be writers who sent the authorities to the devil; now it was the authorities who were sending writers to the same place. Before, readers used to think of a writer as a source of restricted information for the educated, for lawyers, priests and even doctors specializing in sexual pathology. Under the new conditions, people had to struggle for survival, and they simply did not have time for reading. Besides, there appeared the opportunity to find the answers to the most burning questions in reference books and books of popular literature.

The Union of Soviet Writers lost the financial support of the government. It fell into several pieces that are still constantly at war with one another. The numbers of editions of fiction dropped by hundreds and thousands. The writer stopped being a well-paid and influential person.

It proved to be easier for the writers of the underground to adjust to the new conditions. They were used to getting nothing for their work. Their royalties had been basically subpoenas to appear before the KGB. Now they had a chance to have their works published even if the editions were small. As for making their living, they had always done it doing other jobs.

I don’t find the situation catastrophic. The situation was abnormal when the most mediocre member of the official Union of Writers earned more than a highly qualified engineer, as long as he was loyal to the authorities. Now, a writer in Russia is more or less in the same situation as his counterparts abroad, where very few poets or writers earn their living exclusively by getting fees and royalties. Even the great Iosif Brodskij had to give lectures at a university. While in London in 1992 I asked him why he, a Nobel prize-winner, was doing that, and Brodskij gave me a smile and said, “Dear Evgenij, you ought to know better than me how quickly people run out of money”.

Everything has to be paid for. Everything, including freedom. Daniil Charms, a master of absurdity, once wrote a truly realistic phrase, “Life has won again by a mysterious way”.

And so it has. It is against the logic of real life that not one of the traditional, “thick” literary magazines has ceased to exist in Russia. First they were supported by the American financier George Soros, who paid for that part of their circulation which sent them to local libraries; then the magazines learned how to make some money and to look for patrons who could financially support them. It was at that time that the word sponsor entered the Russian literary language alongside such word as voucher, viagra, computer, killer. Big publishing houses which have made a lot of money on detective novels and pulp-fiction now find it a matter of prestige to publish intellectual books which are unlikely to bring them any profit. A lot of famous writers now work for fashionable glossy magazines, like Cosmopolitan, or Playboy, and try, nonetheless, to preserve their individuality. Another novelty is that Moscow is no longer the literary capital of the empire. Outstanding writers are working now in various parts of Russia without making any special attempts to move to Moscow where life is expensive and chaotic.

Strange as it is, the Internet is very helpful here. To some extent the Internet is the real salvation of Russian Literature, especially helpful to young writers. “New generation” writers who live in distant areas of the country can keep up on modern literature, and are quite aware of literary news, literary trends and disputes. Such writers are no longer “provincial”, if you know what I mean. And at the same time they have preserved their individuality, and remain connected with their place of residence and local way of life.

I’m going to give you an exotic example, of course: the writer Michail Tarkovskij, the nephew of world-famous film director Andrej Tarkovskij, lives somewhere in the north of Russia, in the wild taiga, and spends a lot of time hunting. At the same time he has his works published in the best literary magazines. Last year I came across him at the Frankfurt book-fair and I assure you that he is far from looking like a Siberian tramp.

My friends in my native city of Krasnojarsk have already been publishing a “thick” literary magazine for dozen years. It is a magazine for family reading, called “Day and Night". God knows how they manage. They say that once they were given money to publish the edition of their regular issue by a notorious local gangster – a mafioso. Mafioso is another new borrowing into the modern Russian language. It is revealing that the authors writing for this magazine are of very different trends and ages, and the magazine is known throughout the country. The same people have set up a unique licej (literary school). It is the only one in the country. Some of its former  pupils have become well-known writers, though the people who founded this school, Roman Solncev and Viktor Astaf’ev, keep on saying that its aim is to educate the pupils to be good readers, not writers.

In the city of Kostroma, some very young poets arranged an Internet competition. They set up a jury, and I got an internet invitation to take part in their jury. Poems started “coming” from all over the country and from abroad, again by means of the Internet. The poets organizing the competition were very poor; they could not afford to invite their prize-winners to Kostroma, so it was only natural that they sent the prizes via the Internet. But there is an interesting fact here – the prize-winners of this competition have attracted the attention of publishers, and now their works are being published by important publishing houses.

And there is a much better known contest for the Debut prize. It is open for people of letters who are 25 years old or under. Last year, 40 thousand manuscripts were sent in to the contest. Only 70 were first selected out of this number and only 3 people finally got the prizes. But they are really great. One of them is Vladimir Lorčenkov. He lives in Moldavia which is now separate from Russia. He wrote a remarkable satirical novel about the presidential elections in Moldavia. That novel reminded me of the best pages by Garcia Marquez, or films by Emir Kusturica. Omsk, in Siberia, is the home city of another new writer, Petr Orechovskij, age 40. He describes the life of the nouveau riche, but his characters are not anecdotal, but modest clerks who live and suffer against the background of a quite new bourgeois reality.

I have deliberately avoided talking about the struggle between literary trends, “fathers” and “sons”, cosmopolitans and patriots, the left and the right. All these are very special topics and they are unlikely to be of interest for you. I’d rather emphasize again that to my mind, in Russia they will never stop drinking vodka, and never stop reading books. In this sense Russia is so much lagging behind other countries in the eternal race in a circle that all of sudden Russia has found herself ahead of progress. The problems of the deformation of personality, its dissolution in the unified modern society are not very urgent for us so far. Probably it’s because of our poverty, or perhaps our people have not had enough time to enjoy life without the bolsheviks and are still far from striving in a new round of class struggle. Well… who knows. The latest developments in the UKraine and Kirghizia have proved how unstable the situation can be in post-Soviet lands.

Once more I have to stress that I am not a politician. I’m just a modest man of letters who loves his country and its literature. My first book came out in the American cosmopolitan publishing house, Ardis, that American home of Russian literature free of ideology. At that time the publisher Carl Proffer sent me a present, a T-shirt that carried a caricature. It depicts Lev Tolstoj, looking very strict. He is writing something epochal on a piece of paper, but at the same time he is being distracted from this important activity by very seductive, naked girls. In spite of the distraction, our national genius tells them: “RUSSIAN LITERATURE IS BETTER THAN SEX”!

I hope I have not exhausted you with my story about what is near and dear to me. About modern Russian literature. Much more could have been said. I have said very little about the literature of the Russian emigration, which is associated with some great names – Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Zajcev and Ivan Šmelev. What’s more, there are modern men of letters who live in Paris, Zurich, Hanover, and Rome.

I could have said more about the intrusion of mass culture and pop culture in our life, that line of culture which has been scornfully nicknamed popsa in Russia.

I could have said more about how Russia defends itself from intellectual westernization and panamericanism, and about the Soviet censorship that has been replaced by censorship of money, with the result that a liberal and talkative writer can all of a sudden become deaf and mute when the conversation turns to his rich sponsors; or about the lack of perfection with regard to the relationship between the men of letters and the state, or about the life stories and works of various writers, both living and passed away. Believe me, during some forty years of my moving in literary circles I have been acquainted with many of those. I could have told you more but I’m afraid I have run out of time and my knowledge of English.

My Siberian English is far from fluent but I’ll still try to use it while answering your questions if there are any, and in conclusion, I’ll finish with two curious sayings.

Somewhere in the American Wild West, in a saloon, there was a funny sign that said: “NO SHOOTING AT THE MUSICIAN. HE PLAYS HIS BEST”.

When I was young I got fascinated by a phrase I read in a book by the American writer, Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris: “A ROSE IS ONLY A ROSE IS ONLY A ROSE”…. That is what she wrote.

And I want say in conclusion: “No shooting at writers. They write their best”, and “A writer is only a writer is only a writer is only a writer is only a writer is only a writer. Only”.

6.04.2005, Moscow –13.04.2005, Forlì

Biographical note/Nota biografica by Maria Zalambani

EVGENIJ ANATOL’EVIČ POPOV

Evgenij Anatol’evič Popov is one of the foremost writers of Russia: his books have been translated into English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Finnish, Dutch, and many other languages.

Popov is a master of the short novel, but he has also published novels such as Duša patriota (The Soul of a Patriot, 1983), Prekrasnost’ žizni (The Splendour of Life, 1990), Nakanune nakanune (On the Eve of On the Eve, 1993), Podlinnaja istorija zelenych muzykantov (The True Story of “The Green Musicians”, 1999), Master chaos (Master Chaos, 2002) and many others.

He started to write when he was just sixteen when he was living in Krasnojarsk, in Siberia, where he was born and where from 1968 to 1975 he worked as a geologist. Siberia appears very frequently in his prose, and is often the setting for his short novels (such as, for example, one of his most famous short stories,  Ždu ljubvi neverelomnoj (Awaiting for a True Love). Life in Popov’ Siberia is violent, harsh, criminal, and corrupt, and his description of everyday life there seems to be a counterweight to the rhetorical tones of the official writers who described this region in the Soviet period. Several of these writers portrayed rural life in Siberia as tough, but their heroes were stoic loyal citizens, and above all, patriots. In Popov’s prose, on the contrary, we have anti-heroes, thieves, drop-outs, unemployed alcoholics and drunken journalists. That is to say, we do not have an epic representation of everyday life according to the canon of Socialist Realism, but we do have a depiction of true life. And Popov seems to tell us that Siberians are in fact no different from other Russians. So Siberia becomes a symbolic place, a nowhere (or everywhere) of Soviet life.

Popov made his literary debut in 1976 with two short stories published in the well-known journal Novyj Mir (The New World). They were prefaced  by a note written by the enormously successful writer, Vasilij Šukšin. That was the beginning of his career as a writer, but soon afterwards, in 1979, after having been accepted into the Union of the Soviet Writers, which at the time was a very important acknowledgement on behalf of the official system, his career was suddenly interrupted by the Metropol’ affair.

This was in 1979.

What led to the Metropol’ affair was the following. Throughout 1978, in collaboration with Vasilij Aksënov, Aleksandr Bitov, Fazil’ Iskander, Viktor Erofeev, Popov compiled and edited a large anthology of works by twenty-three writers and produced a print run of twelve copies. The challenge consisted in the fact that the writers requested that the book be published officially without submitting it to Soviet censorship. This unorthodox impudence was punished by the Soviet system. The writers were summoned for questioning: Popov and Erofeev were expelled from the Union of the Soviet Writers (to which Popov had been admitted only eight months previously), and subsequently a series of repressive measures were adopted against them. The book, nonetheless, promptly came out through the publisher, Ardis, in the United States, and this gave rise to an international scandal.

After this episode, Popov became a non-person, surviving on hackwork written under various pseudonyms. We have to wait for the perestrojka years to see Popov’s re-admission to the writers’ union in 1988 and to see a wide circulation of his works.

As far as his writing style is concerned, I will refer to a citation from the Independent: “In contrast to the doom and gloom that overburdens much Russian fiction produced by so-called ‘lost generation’ the prose of Popov reverberates with laughter”[1].

Laughter, parody, satire are in fact the main features of his prose, and each of Popov’s major novels displays a startling formal inventiveness: the epistolary diary in The Soul of a Patriot, the mixture of newspaper collage and fiction in The Splendour of Life, and the mock nineteenth-century narration of On the Eve of on the Eve.

Through these formal means he describes the seamy side of Russian life, both in Soviet and in post-communist Russia. Immoderate drinking, criminality, promiscuity, poverty, ignorance, corruption and incompetence in officialdom are therefore depicted in much of Popov’s fiction.

His short stories owe much to the modernist and absurdist experiments of the 1920s, found notably in the works of Daniil Charms and Michail Zoščenko. Popov may indeed take his cue from Zoščenko’s short stories, with their earthy dialogues and offbeat characters.

His language combines Soviet cliché with Russian vernacular and the result is a sharp parody of contemporary society .

As Robert Porter says in his introduction to the English translation of Veselie na Rusi (Merry-making in Old Russia), in Popov’s short stories:

“Cinderella is likely to get pregnant at the ball, and Prince Charming will in all probability be an alcoholic. And the happy ending? Sometimes it’s no ending at all, just a shift in perspective that questions the validity of all that the reader has perceived so far, sometimes a promise of another story[2]”.